CONTENTS

1

AINSLEE’S

YOUNG CARRINGTON’S
CAREER
BY
Beatrice Hanscom

CHAPTER I.

THE studio in Numero
— rue Boissonade had
on its holiday togs:
model stand covered
with rugs, tea table
much in evidence,
framed picture on the
easel, and lilacs
enough in the great brass bowl in the
corner to serve as sweetly affirmative
witnesses that the heart of Paris and
the heart of spring had renewed their
yearly alliance.

To judge from the blitheness of Carrington,
he, too, had spring in his heart
and a festal day in prospect.

Life, already lavish in good gifts, was
on the point of giving him the one he
most desired to grasp.

At twenty-one he had health, plenty
of money, and a talent to which he considered
health and money merely subservient—a
talent which lured him to
work indefatigably.

The portrait on which he had lavished
himself hung on the line in the spring
salon; and Velantour, the master for
whom he had toiled tirelessly for the
last three years—Velantour, the sternest
critic in France, most sparing in
praise—Velantour, whose painting expeditions
in the far East were always
solitary save for his trusted courier—Velantour
had invited Carrington to go
with him to the Vale of Cashmere and
the Himalayas! To paint with him and
by his side for three long, delicious
months.

“It is not enough to put people’s souls
on canvas, mon cher, if you can’t put
nature’s heart back of them,” he had
told him, hand on his shoulder. Velantour,
whose caustic criticisms usually
confined themselves to technique, and
took small account of souls!

Carrington tingled to his finger tips
in the desire to be off. Life was good—was
“bully,” as Carrington phrased it.
And he whistled softly, rapturous as a
thrush, as he crossed the studio to lift a
corner of the rug which covered a trunk
masquerading as a seat, a trunk locked
and strapped; packed with an infinite
forethought for any possible contingency
that might arise during the trip;
with enough paint tubes and brushes to
set up a small dealer; packed, too, with
hopes and aspiration, which luckily take
up no room, and do not increase the excess
baggage rate. Had they weighed
the smallest fraction of an ounce apiece,
modern hydraulics could not have lifted
that trunk a single inch.

2

“And we start to-night! Jove, it’s unbelievable!”
he said, exultantly, as he
dropped the rug corner and stood up,
straight and slender and tall, a handsome
boy with his black hair a trifle
long, his blue eyes aglow, his delicate
features alight with enthusiasm as he
drew in a long breath of satisfaction.

There was a touch of the romantic in
his attire—in the loosely hanging, dark
gray velveteen suit that was almost
black, and the soft cravat that had the
color of pigeon’s blood.

He was young enough to like that
sort of thing, dandy enough to order
those dull gray suits by the half dozen,
with long, crimson lined cloaks and
marvelous soft felt hats; and handsome
enough to make Velantour vow he
would immortalize him in them. “Le
nouveau Van Dyck,” he whispered to
himself, for he loved the boy as much as
he believed in his future, and he believed
in that with the intensity and concentrated
fervor of a man who permits
himself few beliefs.

“To have a son like that!” he would
murmur—little, squat, short-legged,
gray-headed, lonely old, famous Velantour;
and the words wrenched his lips
into the dry twist of an old grief.

For Velantour’s scapegrace son had
rested many years in Père-la-Chaise.

Velantour was coming this afternoon
to the informal little reunion of the half
dozen friends whom Carrington had
summoned to wish him God-speed.

With the warning swish of the curtains
Carrington turned to see if it was
he even now. But he saw instead a
young fellow of his own age, a youth
whose brown hair curled obstinately,
whose mouth was wide and mobile, and
who had the kind of snub nose one inevitably
associates with jollity.

“My dear Ned, you’re most disappointing,”
the newcomer stated, with
burlesque complaint and a gesture that
sent his hands far apart. “You ought
to be putting the last touch to a tuft of
grass in the foreground. It’s a poor
foreground that won’t stand a few extra
tufts here and there, and it’s an immensely
effective proceeding. Or else
you ought to be on your knees to the
gods. You’re neither posing piously to
please Providence, nor patently to please
Paris. I’m afraid we’ve overrated your
genius. You’ll never make a Whistler.”

He laughed good-humoredly as he
grasped Carrington’s outstretched hand.
Robert Parker, yclept Bobbins, took
life easily.

“I’m so happy, Bobbins,” Carrington
confided in him, “that I can’t even think.
Isn’t it ripping—going east with Velantour?”

“It is for you, Rising Genius,” Bobbins
assured him, “but so far as I am
concerned, though I might manage to
sit under a Kashmirian cedar with a fan,
standing on an icy peak with a pot of
paint strapped to my waistband, and a
fault-finding old gentleman to tell me
how badly I was using it, isn’t my ideal
of bliss. No Himalayas for me.”

“Bless you, Bobbins, we’re not contracting
to paint them by the yard, the
way you do a fence,” expostulated Carrington,
laughingly. “We’re going to
make pictures, not advertise breakfast
foods.”

“What is your sister going to do?”
queried Bobbins.

“Elenore is going to Brittany to-morrow
with the Waldens,” Carrington told
him promptly.

“And Hastings, I presume, has always
wanted to go to Brittany,” Bobbins
laughed.

“Well, Hastings has certainly developed
a sudden enthusiasm in that direction,”
Carrington acknowledged.

“Do you suppose Elenore——” Bobbins
began mysteriously.

“I know enough to know that I don’t
know anything about girls,” Elenore’s
brother announced, promptly. “Do you
suppose Hastings——”

“I certainly do,” said Bobbins, fervently.
“And he has a bad case of it.
Wouldn’t go to the Bal Bullier the other
night; thinks cafés chantants are vulgar;
doesn’t hear what you are saying
half the time, and has taken to humming
‘Home-keeping hearts are happiest.’
You don’t have to take him to the hospital
to see what’s the matter with him.”

“I told him distinctly by the hour,”3
a high-pitched, patrician voice floated in
from the hall, “and if he doesn’t stop
swearing he’ll have to put his pourboire
in troches.” Coincident with the remark
a fluent outburst of Parisian profanity
came wafting in the open windows.

“My dear Ned,” said Mrs. Van Velt,
the owner of the patrician voice, appearing
in the doorway; “would you mind
sending some one to chloroform my
cabby? The more Carol argues with
him, the more vocal he becomes. He
seems to think that they also swear
who only sit and wait.”

Mrs. Van Velt was a dowager unmistakably
American.

She appeared to have been poured
into her black satin gown at some abnormally
high temperature and at a
calculation perilously close. Her gray
pompadour strained back from her high
forehead in an apparent endeavor to
oust her bonnet as an insolent trespasser
on its private domain, but the bonnet,
a black octopus with an intelligent jetty
eye, wound two narrow black velvet tentacles
firmly beneath Mrs. Van Velt’s
double chin, and triumphed calmly.

“You go, Bobbins,” said Carrington,
gayly. “Mrs. Van Velt, may I present
Mr. Parker? Chloroforming cabbies is
one of his specialties. You may be sure
that it will be painless and thorough.”

“And bring back my daughter, Mr.
Parker,” said Mrs. Van Velt, as placidly
as though she had said spectacles or
handkerchief. The obliging young
knight was already half way to the
door. “Carol thought she ought to
argue it out with him; and as she
couldn’t understand his French, and he
couldn’t understand hers, it seemed perfectly
safe.”

She laughed good-humoredly.

“That’s a nice-looking boy, Ned,” she
said, as the subject of her remark disappeared.
“Who is he, and how did he
get such a remarkable name?”

“Bobbins?” said Carrington. “Oh,
he’s a trump. His father is the inventor—no,
his grandfather—of Parker’s
Peerless Sewing Machine. You know
all the advertisements say: ‘Observe the
bobbin. So simple, a child can work it.’
And Robert the Third is such a generous
chap, he’s an awfully easy mark.
So—Bobbins.”

His hands turned palms upward in
an explanatory gesture.

Mrs. Van Velt laughed again. Then
she put a hand on Carrington’s shoulder
with a touch that was almost motherly.

“Ned,” she said, affectionately, “I
wish your father could be here to-day to
see you before you go east. He’d be so
proud of you. How long is it since he
has seen you and Elenore?”

“Six years,” said Carrington. “Dear
old dad! Not since he sent us over here
in Aunt Sarah’s care, six years ago,
when mother died. He’s intended to
come every year, but there’s always been
something at the mine to prevent it.
Dad loves the struggle of business, you
know.”

“He loves his children, too,” said
Mrs. Van Velt, seriously. “It must be
lonely for him. And the mine is in such
a forlorn little, out-of-the-way place,
’way up there in northern Michigan.”

“The mines situated right in the heart
of Manhattan are pretty well worked
out,” Ned expostulated, humorously.

“Yellow Dog! Did you ever hear such
a ghastly name?” Mrs. Van Velt went
on. “Half the people thought your
mother was crazy when she married him
and went out there to live. They said
he was harnessing Psyche to his mine
machinery for motive power. And the
other half said that when he was tired
and wanted sympathy she’d write him a
sonnet. Everybody agreed that they
would be unhappy. And they were the
happiest people I ever knew.”

“They certainly were,” said Carrington,
emphatically. “How do you account
for it?”

“Modern prophets have a horror of
the country,” said Mrs. Van Velt, sententiously,
“unless it’s in easy motoring
distance of Sherry’s. And they overlooked
the vital fact that when you’re
making two human beings one, duplicate
good qualities are quite as useless
as duplicate wedding presents.

“It’s curious,” she continued, “about
you twins: that Elenore has all her4
father’s love of adventure and his executive
ability, for all her girlishness; and
you have your mother’s talent and her
tastes. You couldn’t be more different,
and yet you look as much alike as you
did when you were tots. I remember
the first time your mother brought you
east. Your Uncle Dick—well, your
Uncle Dick thought rock-and-rye a
splendid tonic for other people, but
personally he took it without the rock,
which he thought might be indigestible—and
he looked at you both as you
stood there side by side. And he said:
‘Bring on your blue ribbons. I can see
two of them.’”

“Why, Mrs. Van Velt, and so early in
the day, too!” said a gay voice behind
her, a voice so like Carrington’s that it
seemed his echo; and Elenore Carrington
came forward to kiss the dowager
on both cheeks.

As Mrs. Van Velt had said, the resemblance
between the twins was remarkable.

They had the same height, the same
coloring, the same blue eyes that had a
trick of turning violet under emotion;
the same delicate arch to the eyebrows;
the same wavy line of hair upon the
forehead; the same buoyant poise of
body. Even a certain quick suppleness
of motion belonged to them both; and,
stranger still, their hands were wonderfully
like.

The artistic impulse that gave to Ned’s
a certain femininity in slenderness and
taper fingers was curiously balanced by
a strain of resourcefulness which lent to
Elenore’s well-shaped white palms so
strong a resemblance to her twin’s that
it was only by putting them side by side
and noting that hers were a bit smaller,
a shade more femininely modeled, a trifle
more delicately cushioned, that they
were distinguishable.

The black locks that Carrington permitted
to wave back just enough for
picturesqueness, with no trace of the
bizarre or of unkemptness, gave to his
face a boyishness that carried a suggestion
of eternal youth.

But Elenore’s dark hair was coiled low
in the nape of her neck, and her
manner was as feminine as was her distinctly
smart and frilly pale blue chiffon
frock.

“I’m glad,” Elenore went on, chaffingly,
“that Aunt Sarah is safely on
her way to the North Cape and cannot
hear you describe your shocking condition.”

“Bless you, child,” said Mrs. Van
Velt, promptly. “You’re altogether too
good-looking. You ought to wear a
veil. That’s what young Hastings
thinks, I hear. He’s confided in Carol.
And anyone who would confide in Carol
must be laboring under strong mental
excitement. And so your Aunt Sarah
has really started for the North Cape!
Women as plain as Sarah Moore are always
pretending to be absorbed in the
beauties of nature, but they are really
trying to get their own minds and yours
away from such sensitive subjects as
snub noses.”

“Where is Carol?” demanded Elenore,
laughingly. “Isn’t she coming to
say good-by to Ned and me?”

“Carol seems to be putting in a stitch
in time with that young sewing machine,”
said Mrs. Van Velt, unperturbed.
“She’s like her father. He
never could bear to see machinery idle.”

Elenore looked up at her smilingly
from the place she had taken at the tea
table. The samovar was steaming gayly,
and the girl’s white hands moved with
housewifely deftness as she prepared to
make tea. They were firm, capable
hands, that it was a pleasure to watch.

The portières swung back with a
decided flourish to admit a short, bright-eyed,
gray-headed, animated old gentleman,
who came forward with the buoyancy
of a boy.

“Here I am, cher Edouard,” cried
Velantour, gayly. “Mademoiselle, mes
hommages, I come exprès to assure you
that I shall take the bes’ of care of this
brother of yours.”

“Mrs. Van Velt,” said Carrington,
putting his hand affectionately on old
Velantour’s arm, “I present to you
Monsieur Velantour, the master of
painting in France.”

“Madame,” said Velantour, courtly
in turn, “I presen’ to you Monsieur
Edouard Carrington, a nouveau maître5
of whom America will one day be very
proud.

“You have a daughter, madame?” he
added, gravely.

“Somewhere,” said Mrs. Van Velt,
calmly.

“C’est ça!” said Velantour. “I fall
over two young peopl’ in the hall as I
enter—young Monsieur Parker and a
young lady—and the young lady say:
‘Oh, Monsieur Velantour, will you tell
mother I’ll be in in a minute?’ And
Monsieur Parker say: ‘So soon as she
have finish’ winding the bobbin.’”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Van Velt,” said
Carrington, amusedly. “Bobbins is decidedly
an eligible.”

“What is that, an eligible?” demanded
Velantour, puzzled to know what could
justify such calm.

“Well, in America, Monsieur Velantour,”
Mrs. Van Velt informed him, “an
eligible is an attractive man entirely surrounded
by daughters—other people’s
daughters.”

“When mother begins to talk about
other people’s daughters it’s always time
for me to appear,” announced Miss
Carol Van Velt, entering gayly.

Bobbins, radiant, was just back of
her; and a tall, serious, thoroughbred
young fellow followed them.

Carol Van Velt was a remarkably
pretty blonde, who looked delightfully
ingénue, but was entirely capable of
managing most masculinity. She accepted
admiration as nonchalantly as
she did bonbons, and considered that
the sources of supply of both were unlimited.
Experience seemed to prove
that this theory was correct.

“We saw, anyway, that we were just
being used as stepping-stones to higher
things,” she went on; “so we thought
we might as well come in with Mr.
Hastings.”

She sank gracefully down on one end
of a large divan, and drew her skirts
aside with a gesture that assumed matter-of-factly
that Bobbins would occupy
the other half of the seat. He justified
the conclusion with a promptness which
left no doubt that he regarded it as a
heaven-sent opportunity.

“Not that we minded being an angels’
ladder,” he asserted, cheerfully, “but I
thought from Hastings’ cast of countenance
that he might be going to give
you a few scenes from ‘Hamlet,’ and I
didn’t think it was safe to be sitting behind
a curtain when he got to that part
about Polonius.”

Velantour regarded them with that
awe which a Frenchman must feel for
the rollicking frivolity of the American
young and the placid inefficiency
of the American parent.

Meantime Hastings had made his
way to Elenore and slipped into a vacant
chair by the tea table, as a matter
of course.

She smiled at him very charmingly.

“You’re late,” she said, “and you
were coming early, you know. Do you
think you deserve caravan tea with a
dash of burgundy in it?”

“I think I deserve all the good things
I can get to-day,” he said, and though
his tone was light, there was an undertone
that suggested that he meant it.

“It tastes to me more like burgundy
with a dash of caravan tea,” said Mrs.
Van Velt. “After a while they will forget
to put in the tea at all.”

“And then, Monsieur Velantour?”
said Carrington, amusedly; for the old
Frenchman was sipping the mixture
cautiously.

“Then it will not need mademoiselle’s
hands to make it perfection,” said Velantour,
with a humorous twist of his
keen old lips.

His gray eyes gleamed as they applauded
him laughingly. Age had intensified
in him the love of appreciation
which is innate in the Gallic heart.

“While we have tea, let us have
toast,” said Bobbins, promptly. “I propose
a toast to Monsieur Velantour.
Turn it into rhyme, Ned. You’re a
crack improvisatore.”

Carrington stood up, with the easy
grace of an Italian. He had the temperament
of a troubadour, and he loved
in turn a compliment.

He had the improvisatore’s trick of6
lingering on the final syllable until it
brought its own suggestion.

“Bravo!” they applauded him; while
Velantour enjoyed the adulation with
the frankness of a child.

They drank it in hilarious mood.

Velantour was on his feet the next
instant.

“If I could but make one littl’ Americain
verse,” he implored, expansively.
“But I speak so poorly. You mus’ help
me a littl’.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Van Velt, practically,
“you have to begin with the street
he lives on, or something like that. Rue
Boissonade——” she began, and halted.

“Shall have its Claude,” suggested
Bobbins.

“Bon!” cried Velantour. “Now I
have it.

His naïf delight was contagious.

He patted Carrington’s arm affectionately.

“But we shall paint, cher Edouard!”
he said, fondly. “And you are quite
ready?”

“More than ready,” laughed Carrington.

He glanced at the little clock on the
mantel.

“And our train goes in just two
hours,” he whispered, triumphantly.

“Till then,” said Velantour, gayly.
Then he crossed over to Elenore. “Mademoiselle,
I will guard your brother
as though he was—what is mos’ perishable
in English—a bubbl’, is it not?
Madame”—he bowed to Mrs. Van
Velt. “Mademoiselle”—he inclined to
Carol. “In two littl’ hours,” he called
to Carrington from the doorway, and
was gone.

“Isn’t he the dearest thing?” Carol
demanded, frankly, of Bobbins.

“He’s an old brick, but not my idea
of the dearest thing,” that discriminating
individual replied, promptly. “I
don’t suppose you could guess what my
idea would be,” he insinuated.

“Oh, that’s too much of an antique,”
said Miss Van Velt, with crushing
promptness.

“Antique! I bought it this year,”
said Bobbins, tacking, unharmed.

“Then some one is selling you back
numbers,” Miss Van Velt assured him.
“Try to get your money back. It’s been
taking candy from children, and it
ought to be stopped.”

“The police won’t give it back,” said
Bobbins, mysteriously.

“The police!” said Miss Van Velt,
startled. “What have they to do——”

“With my Mercedes?” said Bobbins,
cheerfully. “That’s just the attitude
I’ve tried to take with them. But it has
cost me five hundred francs this week,
and this is only Wednesday. The dearest
thing on earth to me is Mercedes,
my Mercedes,” he hummed, pathetically.

“You naturally would lavish your
young affection on machines,” Miss
Van Velt remarked, cruelly, but she
gave him a look of decided favor.

“So long as you think I am in the
running,” said Bobbins, placidly.

The maid had brought in a letter
with an American postmark. Carrington
held it in his hand as he crossed
over to join the group around the tea
table.

Mrs. Van Velt was enjoying her
usual volubility, and Hastings was paying
her the flattery of an apparent attention
and a comprehendingly amused
smile, while his eyes gave the deeper
homage of frequent and involuntary
glances to Elenore.

For him, at least, Elenore was the
central figure. Nor was it only for him.
Things were quite apt to gravitate
around Elenore. Ned himself did not
overshadow his twin. If there is any
truth in theosophic theories, she had an
unusually powerful aura; if we discard
the esoteric for the exoteric, beauty and
wit and reserve force, cast in the mold
of an alluring femininity, are quite as
attractive as the same buoyant youth,7
plus tremendous talent, in masculine
fiber.

Elenore had, too, a certain firm, keen
grasp on the realities of life which Carrington,
with all his localized talent,
lacked. One felt that she would not
fail in any qualm, that she would not be
daunted by any obstacle, that in crises
she would think not of surrender or
sacrifice, but of resource and expedient.

Mrs. Van Velt was concluding her
story of a recent tea given for a famous
woman novelist.

“Did she talk about her work?” she
exclaimed. “She never got away from
her books, and she drenched us with
her successes until our ardor was more
than dampened. It was soaked. She
gave us to understand that she had
Browning beaten on obscurity, Ibsen on
subtlety, and Maeterlinck on imagination.
And when she left there was a
heavy silence for a minute, and then
Alec Carter said: ‘Now let’s talk nursery
rhymes for a while. We might
begin on “Little bas bleu, come blow
your horn.”’”

She made her adieux on the strength
of that, collecting her purse, her feather
boa and her daughter from different
parts of the room, with surprising
promptitude.

It was her practice to save her best
rocket for the last, and disappear in
the glory of its swish.

Bobbins accompanied the Van Velts
to their carriage, and, to misquote long-suffering
Omar, once departed, he returned
no more.

Carrington turned to Hastings the
moment they were out of the door.

“You’ll excuse me if I read dad’s letter,
won’t you? My time is getting so
short,” he said, apologetically; and went
over to one of the long windows to get
the benefit of its light.

Elenore turned to Hastings with the
question that had been hovering on her
lips for the last half-hour.

“Tell me why you are so serious,”
she said. “Has anything gone wrong?
It doesn’t mean that you are not coming
to Brittany to see the Waldens and—me—this
summer, does it?”

“It means a great deal more than
that,” said Hastings, soberly. “Yesterday
I thought I was on my way to being
a rising architect. To-day I am simply
cast into outer darkness. The shears
of fate have clipped this piece of my
life short, and I can’t see what the next
is going to be like.”

“Tell me,” said Elenore, quietly.

“It’s grotesquely simple,” said Hastings,
and there was an involuntary tinge
of bitterness in the tone he tried to keep
even. “My uncle, who has given me my
start in life—the only relative I have—has
written me to come back to New
York at once. I’m to give up being an
architect. When it’s the only thing I
am fitted for! He has something else
for me. He doesn’t explain what. He
does vouchsafe the information that the
place is quite impossible, but, he says,
what are a few years out of a young
man’s life?” His voice was a trifle unsteady.
Years seemed eternity to him
just then.

“I must go, of course, unquestioningly,”
he went on, holding himself in
check. “Considering that I owe him
everything, it’s a military command.
And I have no right to say anything
but good-by to—to any woman. I’m
out of things, that’s all.”

So much, at least, he vowed he would
tell her; but he was determined that he
would not be so weak as to ask her to
wait for him.

The years of his uncle’s bounty fettered
him hopelessly. When he knew
where he stood, when he had something
definite to offer her, then—but
not till then. But it was bitter. He
had supposed, of course, that he would
go back in the autumn, open an office,
be self-supporting, and then——

It was a few seconds before Elenore
spoke. When she did her voice was
cheerful and friendly.

“There is always something interesting
in the most impossible places,” she
said. “It may be rather fun. And we
shall expect you to make it as picturesque
as possible in your letters, if we
tell you all the gossip here in exchange.”

He said to himself that she understood,8
at least. He thanked Heaven for
that, as youth is prone to thank Heaven
when Heaven lives up to its expectations.
And if the place was not so very
impossible—if—and perhaps——

So hope began to whisper. And then
because If and Perhaps were all he
could take with him, because she was
so winsome and dear and so desirably
human, because she was so daintily
proud, and because the things he was
not to tell her refused to be held back,
he caught her hands in his, whispered:
“God bless you! I shall write you everything—that
I can,” and, wrapping
his New England conscience round him,
went without a backward glance.

Elenore stood quite still for a moment.
The shadows were beginning to
thicken in the long room, and she felt a
certain restfulness in the half-light.

Then she turned resolutely toward
her brother. Something in the dejection
of his poise quickened her instantly.

“Ned! What is it?” she demanded.

“It’s the deluge—without an ark,”
said Carrington, without stirring.

“Well?” said Elenore, tersely.

“I’m not going east with Velantour.
I’m going home,” he said, mechanically.

“Not dad?” she said, breathlessly.

“No.” He answered the unfinished
question. “But he’s broken his leg, poor
old dad! And other things are wrong,
and he wants me.”

“And me?” she questioned, quickly.
“Doesn’t he want me?”

“No,” said Carrington, impatiently.
“He wants his son, he says, and he shall
have me. And he shan’t know I ever
whimpered about coming. I’m not cad
enough for that. But going east with
Velantour is the chance of a lifetime,
and it takes a minute or two to get
heroic about giving it up, that’s all. All
except that it’s bitter to think how little
use I shall be to him when I get there,
for it’s partly business, and I haven’t a
particle of business ability. That will
be his disappointment, which is bitterer
still.”

“Do you mean to say that he doesn’t
want me?” Elenore demanded. “Where
is the letter?”

Carrington held it out to her without
a word.

Dear Ned (it read), I’m sorry to call
you home, but I must. I’m laid up with
a broken leg—compound fracture. Don’t be
alarmed. I’m in no danger of dying. But
there are business complications I want to
talk over with you—things it’s only fair to
you to let you help decide. It may be only
for a few weeks. Then you can go back.
Let Elenore stay in Paris. It’s all man’s
work to be done here. Just responsibilities
to be met.

Your father,
John Carrington.

Ned Carrington was turning over the
pages of the morning Herald.

“I can catch the train for London in
an hour, and sail from Liverpool tomorrow,
or—no, here it is—I can leave
here in the morning and get a boat at
Boulogne. That will be better,” he
planned.

“And Velantour?” Elenore questioned.

He threw out his hands despairingly.

“I’ll drive to the station and tell him,”
he said. “Then I’ll come back and unpack—and
pack.”

“Why can’t I go to dad instead of
you?” Elenore demanded.

“Because it’s man’s work to be
done,” said Carrington, impatiently.
“Don’t argue it. I wish I had your
brains for it, though. But it’s me that
dad wants, and what he wants he shall
have.”

“Two people are going to America
who don’t want to go in the least. But
they are men, and so, presumably, useful,”
she said, spiritedly. “And the one
person who would really like to go
can’t; because she is a woman, and so,
presumably, useless.” She flung her
head backward a bit impatiently as
she looked at her twin. He was fumbling
among the papers on his desk;
and the long mirror above it showed
his face flushed and perturbed and boyish.
Then she caught sight of her own
in the glass, and started.

“There isn’t a pen here,” Ned said,
irritably. “I must send dad a cable.”

“There’s one in my room,” she said,
and her tone was full of energy and
spirit. “Get it, while I tell Berthe to
run for a cab, and you can take the9
message to the office on your way to
tell Velantour.”

Her hand was on the bell as he disappeared.
She had snatched up paper
and pencil the next second, and was
dashing off a note.

“Berthe,” she said, as the little maid
hurried in, “you are to go for a cab,
and see that it gets here in just fifteen
minutes precisely; not before, mind.
Tell the cocher that he shall have five
francs pourboire if he is exact.”

“Bien, mademoiselle,” said the little
maid.

“Post this note to Mrs. Walden, and
come back with a second cab in twenty-five
minutes, without fail. Either my
brother or myself will give you your
last instructions for the summer.”

“Bien, mademoiselle,” said the little
maid—as she would have said it to any
command short of murder.

She sped out, pleasingly stimulated
by the silver coin in her palm.

“Has she gone?” demanded Ned, feverishly,
as he reappeared with the pen.

“Yes,” said Elenore. “Write your
message and read it off to me when
you’ve done it, will you? I want to
tuck some things into the bag that’s
going to America.”

She nodded, smilingly, as she sped
into his room.

Carrington sat down with a stifled
groan. The sweetness had gone out of
life. It was duty now. Say what you
will, six years’ absence loosens ties of
blood; and though he was ashamed to
confess it himself, it was with a lagging
loyalty that he thought of going home.

His whole life had been bent in one
direction, and this abrupt break demanded
a heroism which he resolved to
simulate, at least. But he need not begin
yet.

He could make his little moan to
himself for this instant when he was
alone.

He dipped the pen in the ink.

The first sheet of paper blotted hopelessly.
And the second. The fingers
that held a brush with unfaltering and
delicate touch were clumsily nervous
now.

John Carrington, Yellow Dog, Mich, (he
got down). Am coming first boat.

“What was the boat?” he demanded
of himself, and helplessly turned back
to the Herald for information.

Kaiser Wilhelm sailing Cherbourg tomorrow.

Ned.

Then he dropped his face in his
hands.

The written words seemed to make
the thing so irrevocable.

He pulled himself together and
walked nervously over to the window.
Where on earth was the cab? It was a
comfort to vent irritability on something.

Then he roved over to the trunk he
had packed with such forethought.

He laughed a little bitterly.

“Poor old Velantour! He will be
disappointed, too,” he whispered. “But
of the two old men who love me, one
has to go to the wall. And it shan’t be
dad.”

He tramped up and down restlessly
until he heard the sound of wheels.

Then he called to Elenore.

“I am going now.”

“Not in this cab, you are not,” her
voice answered him. “This is mine.
Yours will be here in ten minutes, and
you will have lots of time then.”

“What?” he called, halfway to the
door, and not believing his ears.

The door swung open, and in it he
saw—himself.

Clad in loosely hanging dull gray
velveteens, with a soft cravat the color
of pigeon blood. Over his arm a long
crimson-lined cape hung, half-concealing
a suit case. The face, which was
his, laughed at him triumphantly, and
shook its dark hair, worn a trifle long,
back from the forehead.

In the disencumbered hand a soft felt
hat waved him back with a dash of bravado.

“Tell Berthe what you please when
she comes with your cab,” his own
voice cried gayly. “I’ve just time to
catch the London train. You are for
the east, I believe.” Then, as he stood10
thunderstruck, his double laughed exultantly.

“There’s a letter, with copious details,
on your dresser,” the apparition
stated, with a lilt of pure joy of escapade.
“Considering the shortness of
the time, I think I’ve been marvelous in
thinking out all possible exigencies.”

And to his gesture of protest, of incredulity:
“Don’t argue! You are to
live the life you care for, for your
three wonderful months, and so shall I.
It’s not sacrifice. It’s selfishness. I
want to go desperately. And I’ll write
you here—volumes. You’ll find them
when you get back.”

Then that voice which was his, and
was not his, chanted saucily:

The doorway was empty. He heard
a cocher crack his whip, and a cab-horse
evidently making record time. Five
francs, mon Dieu, ça vaut la peine!

Ned Carrington stood bewildered.
What should he do? He might follow
her—might make a scene—but he was
always worsted when Elenore became
daintily willful. She was quite capable
of carrying it off, too. And it was a
lark!

A cab came clattering up the little
street. The call of the East came to
him with an overpowering lure. A
wave of joy swept over him that he
could go, after all. He felt a fury of
impatience to be off. He grudged the
time to give Berthe her instructions, to
snatch Elenore’s letter from the dresser,
to catch up his hat and coat. The mere
thought to do these things should be
enough. But Berthe’s willing feet were
speeding up the stairway. He flung the
rug from his more-than-ready trunk,
and laughed as he touched the strap caressingly
with his fingers.

“I’m going!” he whispered; and the
words sung themselves to the rhythm
of rapture unalloyed.

“Et puis, m’sieu?” said Berthe,
breathlessly, from the doorway.

CHAPTER II.

The case of the old-fashioned watch
snapped together for the fortieth time
in John Carrington’s restless hands, and
he sighed impatiently.

Not since those days of dread loneliness
after his wife’s death, when he
had first sent the children abroad, had
time dragged so rackingly.

His leonine, iron-gray head moved irritably
among the pillows of the bed
where he had been “caged,” as he called
it, for three interminable weeks.

Mrs. Kipley, tidying up the room
with an accentuation of her usual briskness,
gave him as indulgent a look as
the formation of her rigid cast of countenance
would permit.

“Wearin’ out your watch case won’t
hurry up that train none,” she observed,
as she straightened a china cat on the
mantel into an expectant attitude.

It had been her gift the previous
Christmas to John Carrington, and her
admiration of it extended to the hope
that it would pleasingly impress the returning
traveler.

“Miss Elenore was fondest of animals,
though,” she murmured, absently.

John Carrington’s eyes twinkled appreciatively.
He did not share Mrs.
Kipley’s admiration for her feline gift.

“Ned will appreciate that cat, though,
Mrs. Kipley,” he said, genially. “You
know he’s been studying art;” but with
the word a shadow came over his face.

“It’s hard on the lad, bringing him
back,” he said. “Yellow Dog will look
pretty crude to him, I expect.”

He moved his head restlessly, and the
leg in its swinging splint became more
exasperatingly painful.

Of course it would be only natural
for Ned to have grown away from
home ties. It was an unspoken thought
against which he had braced himself
for all these ten days. If the boy came
back half-heartedly, contemptuous of
the place, indifferent to the mine, alienated
from his father—that was the
touch of the thumbscrew.

And yet, he told himself wearily, six
years was a long time. The boy was talented,
cultured, used to all the refinements11
of an older civilization. What
wonder if—— And if he, through love
for his son, and carrying out his mother’s
wishes for his future, had been responsible
for the separation which
might mean all this?

Ah, well, he was not the first father,
nor the last, to think out these same
things, and try to see them dispassionately.

“He was real spry about starting,”
said Mrs. Kipley.

John Carrington’s face relaxed.

“Caught the first boat,” he said.
Then “Is his room ready and comfortable?”
he demanded, as he had demanded
many times.

“I wouldn’t worry about that room
none, if I was you,” said Mrs. Kipley,
serenely.

“Did you remember about the cigars
and a decanter of whisky?” he asked.

Mrs. Kipley looked at him in a patient
exasperation.

“They’s two kinds of cigars, every
brand of cigarettes Kipley could lay
hands on in Yellow Dog, the biggest
decanter full of whisky, the motto ‘Love
One Another,’ that my Sunday-school
class worked for me last winter; red-white-and-blue
soap in the soap dish,
and two pincushions with a French
motto worked on each of ’em. Hemmy
did ’em in black and white pins. She
thought’t would make it seem more like
Paris to him. One says ‘Vive Napoleon,’
and the other says ‘Veuve Cliquot.’
Kind of twins, you see.”

John Carrington’s mouth twitched.
Then he frowned slightly. For would
the boy understand? If he were not
amused—if he were merely contemptuous!

“Hemmy’s picking some flowers for
the house now,” Mrs. Kipley went on,
serenely. “And Kipley’s took a saddle
horse besides the road wagon, so’s if
Mr. Ned wanted to ride over, he could.”

The case of John Carrington’s watch
came open once more. If the train was
on time, and Ned did choose the saddle
horse, another ten minutes—— But
would he? The lad was a bit of a
dandy. Carrington had smiled indulgently
over some of his tailor’s bills.
Probably you couldn’t coax him on a
horse, even in Yellow Dog, unless he
was arrayed in all the proper paraphernalia.

But what was that clatter of horse’s
hoofs—fast and furious—faster and
more furious than any Yellow Dog had
heard since the day three weeks ago
when the Carrington team, terrorized
by a small boy’s premature bunch of
firecrackers, had run away, and John
Carrington, thrown from the wreckage
of his light buggy, had been brought
home with a badly fractured leg?

Mrs. Kipley looked out of the window.

“Merciful sakes!” she ejaculated,
startled.

Not an accident to Ned, John Carrington
prayed, with stiff, dry lips and
apprehensive eyes.

“Of all things!” Mrs. Kipley murmured;
and her tone indicated that she
was now past surprise, and merely
numbered with the numb.

Some one was running up the veranda
steps; the door was flung open,
and a tall, dark, slender boy in a marvelous
suit of dull gray velveteens stood
on the threshold.

A long, crimson-lined cape was flung
over his arm. He tossed it from him.
And “Dad!” he cried, exultantly, and
was across the room, with his arms
around his father’s neck, and had
kissed him on both cheeks.

“French fashion, dad!” he laughed,
flushing suddenly.

“Now we’ll do it the Anglo-Saxon
way;” and he caught both his father’s
hands in his own and wrung them
heartily. “It’s great to be home again,”
he said, buoyantly.

And the joyful light in his eyes was
unmistakably genuine.

John Carrington’s face softened
amazingly. Happiness such as he had not
known for six years gripped him. The
warm ardor of his son’s embrace, the
touch of the soft, boyish lips, unnerved
him, but he liked it astonishingly. It
was so naïf, so unspoiled, so reassuring
against that dread of alienation he had
endured, that he felt submerged in the
warm, comfortable certitude of his12
son’s affection. He gripped the lad’s
hands strongly, and surveyed him with
a proud, fatherly interest.

The blue eyes that looked frankly
into his own were like the lad’s mother’s,
like Althea’s; the face that smiled
gayly at him was alight with youthful
energy, and the mouth, though the lips
were a trifle full, had firm and resolute
lines.

It was no dawdling dreamer that he
saw, but an action-lover.

He nodded satisfiedly.

“You’ll do, lad,” he said, briefly.

Then he smiled as he caught sight of
Mrs. Kipley, standing with the rigidity
of an automaton, dust cloth in hand.

“You remember Mrs. Kipley,” he
said, significantly. The boy wheeled instantly.

“Don’t I!” he said, laughingly, and
something in his advance galvanized
Mrs. Kipley into life again.

“None of your French fashions with
me,” she said, severely, extending her
right hand to him, less in greeting than
as a rampart.

He swept a wonderful bow over it.
Bent to it as a courtier might have done,
and kissed its wrinkled, work-hardened
back lightly. Then he straightened up
to look her full in the eyes, and laughed
his bubbling laugh once more.

“Do you still make those wonderful
twisted doughnuts, Mrs. Kipley?” he
asked, gayly. “I’ve bragged about them
in Paris till they’re famous.”

Mrs. Kipley was scrutinizing the
back of her hand minutely, to see if it
was still intact. Finding it apparently
uninjured, she drew breath and looked
the surprising apparition in the face.
Her own relaxed to his handsome, dashing
youth and to his praise.

“I guess they’re about the same,” she
said, dryly. But John Carrington
chuckled to himself. He recognized the
subjugation of Mrs. Kipley.

“What will he be with the young
women!” he commented, to himself,
amusedly.

Then he asked the question that was
consuming Mrs. Kipley:

“Ned, are those clothes the style in
Paris?”

The boy swung himself lightly into
the big armchair beside the bed.

“They’re the badge of my craft, sir,”
he said, good-humoredly, settling the
soft cravat with deft fingers. “Don’t
you like them?”

“Oh, I like them,” said John Carrington.
(“Handsome lad!” he was whispering
to himself, proudly.) “But I
was wondering how they would strike
Yellow Dog, that’s all.”

“There did seem to be some little interest
in my arrival,” the lad admitted,
gleefully.

“Sakes alive! They beat anything I
ever see in all my life!” Mrs. Kipley
communed with herself.

“And Elenore?” said John Carrington.
“How did you leave Elenore?”

The boy stirred slightly in his chair.

“Elenore is well, dad. She wanted to
come. I think she was a little disappointed
that you didn’t want your
daughter instead of your son.”

John Carrington shook his head.

“Yellow Dog is no place for a young
lady, Ned,” he said. “It was better for
her to stay with her friends. I should
have liked to see her, though. She’s
quite a woman, from her picture. Time
for sweethearts, eh? Your Aunt Sarah
wrote a good deal about a young Hastings.
She seemed to think it might
be serious.”

The boy flushed annoyedly.

“Aunt Sarah loves to fuss and exaggerate,”
he said, and there was a slight
coolness in his voice. “Maiden aunts
are apt to, you know,” he went on, more
naturally. He smiled his attractive
smile once more. Whatever had perturbed
him for the instant was past.

Miss Hematite Kipley, ætat seventeen,
coming into the room with a fragrant
bowl of syringa blossoms, compared
it favorably with any picture her
beloved romancers had been able to
conjure up.

From the moment when she had seen
the picturesque figure dismount and
make a rapid way into the house, she
had been perishing to make this entrance,
but she had restrained herself
in accordance with her ideas of propriety
and gentility. Miss Kipley strove13
to be “elegant,” aided by certain open
columns in respected periodicals, after
which she patterned her conduct and
her clothes.

The meeting between father and son
she characterized as “a sacred moment,”
and she regretted her mother’s continued
intrusion upon it with the resigned
exasperation of one who had often and
fruitlessly pointed out to a primitive
parent the proper forms of procedure.

Miss Kipley was rather pretty in a
wholesome, buxom, blond way, and
the “open columns” had stimulated her
to a crisp freshness of attire, and partially
reconciled her to the maternal
regulations of its enforced simplicity.

She came into the room with her
eyelids so demurely lowered that she
might have been taken for a sleepwalker.

“Good-morning, Hemmy,” said John
Carrington, with an outward courtesy
which marked an inward amusement.
In spite of her physical bulk, Miss Hematite
was mentally transparent.

“Why, Hemmy!” said young Carrington,
gayly, “how awfully pretty you
have grown!”

Miss Kipley felt an inward commotion
which threatened suffocation. Her
fingers tightened on the blue bowl in a
way which tested its enduring qualities.
Mrs. Kipley’s maternal eye became vigilant.

There was a suggestion of a wrinkle
on John Carrington’s brow. He hoped
the boy would remember that this was
not Paris; that the Kipleys represented
the survival of a good many New England
traits.

But neither parent could find anything
to criticise in the way the lad relieved
the blushing Hemmy of the bowl,
shook her hand in a cordial, unaffected
way, and turned to set the white blossoms
on the square ledge of the open
window, where the breeze converted
them into a spicy censer.

As for Hematite, though visibly she
stood in a deep pink embarrassment, in
fancy she trod the sunny slopes of romance.
This was the way things happened
in the books over which she
pored, palpitant. She sought vainly for
some appropriate expression of welcome.

“I guess Hemmy and me will let you
have a chance to get acquainted. I
can finish dusting by and by,” said Mrs.
Kipley, tersely. “Your old room’s all
ready for you, Mr. Ned. Come, Hemmy.”

That young person followed her
mother mechanically from the room.

“Cat got your tongue?” inquired Mrs.
Kipley, severely, in the hall. “For all
you are forever reading about the proper
way to do things, you can’t even say
‘Glad to see you back.’”

Miss Kipley looked down from the
happy heights to which she had mentally
withdrawn herself, to the prosaic
parent treading the valley of plain realities.

“There are moments beyond words,”
she vouchsafed. Then she sped down
the garden path to the now sacred syringa.

Mrs. Kipley watched her from the
doorway with an anxious air.

“I hope she ain’t caught anything,”
she murmured. “That was a terrible
fool remark. I don’t know what there
is around just now for her to catch.”

But it is characteristic of the disorder
which Miss Hematite had so recently
acquired that no one save the person
afflicted knows it’s around till the case
has taken.

The lad had slipped his fingers in
his father’s, and they sat a little while
in silence. So Althea and John Carrington
had often sat, in that silent
communion which is the bond of the
finest fellowship.

Mr. Abner Kipley, entering suddenly,
with Ned’s suit case in hand and a
desire to expatiate on recent events
oozing from every pore, viewed this singular
proceeding as one further extraordinary
manifestation emanating from
the same remarkable cause.

“Seems you can teach an old dog
new tricks,” he communed with himself.
“Probably by to-morrow I’ll be
holding hands myself.” He chuckled
grimly to himself over the impossible
thought. But the glance he gave the14
lad from under his shaggy eyebrows
was unwillingly admiring.

Yet Mr. Kipley prided himself on
his unerring attitude of judicial criticism.

The boy swung round in his chair to
greet him smilingly.

“You walked over, Mr. Kipley, I assume,”
he said, mischievously.

“I didn’t try to kill a horse ’n’ get
my neck broke,” responded Mr. Kipley,
defensively.

“You picked up thet baby nice,
though,” he added, with the air of a
man willing to be just.

John Carrington looked at him with
an air of sudden inquiry.

“It was lucky,” said the lad, languidly;
and he lounged over to the
open window, as though the subject
was finished.

“I’m goin’ to,” said Mr. Kipley, impatiently,
to the growing insistence of
John Carrington’s look.

He objected to being hurried in the
narration of a story which he rejoiced
was his to tell.

“When he,” he began, jerking his
head in the lad’s direction, “’lected to
ride the Colonel home, he threw that
red-backed garmint”—no mere black-and-white
could reproduce the patronage
of Mr. Kipley’s tone—“’cross the
saddle in front of him. ’N’ the Colonel,
not being used to the fashions in Paris,
bolted. They went up the road’s though
they was goin’ to glory, ’n’ didn’t have
but one chance to ketch the limited.
’N’ I threw his grip in the wagon ’n’
started after ’em.

“It was good ridin’,” said Mr. Kipley,
approvingly, “’n’ everybody thet could
turned out to see it. It was interestin’
and free.

“Thet curve by Trevanion’s cottage
is a mean place,” Mr. Kipley continued,
reflectively. “I’ve run the team into
several things there myself, includin’ a
dog fight, which c’ncluded about the
time we run over the principal fighter’s
tail.” He switched himself back on
the main track. “Thet baby of Trevanion’s
was tryin’ to ketch a hen just as
the exhibition come along.”

“Well?” said John Carrington, and
his voice whistled like a pistol shot.

“Down with his arm, ’n’ half out of
the saddle—grab—’n’ yank up—’n’
’bout face—hand the baby to a long-legged
girl—’n’ off he goes, leaving me
to destroy my c’nstitution, breathin’
dust all the way home. Thet’s your
son’s idea of gettin’ here,” he concluded,
dryly.

John Carrington drew a breath of relief.

“If anything had happened to that
baby, we should have had the devil’s
own time,” he said. “Trevanion has
been sullen ugly ever since his wife
died—took his trouble that way—and
the baby is the only thing in the world
he cares for. If—well, we might have
lost the best shift boss in the country.”

Young Carrington stood very still,
looking out of the window. If the incident
had shaken him a bit, there was
at least no outward sign of it.

Mr. Kipley drew nearer to the bed.

“There’s good stuff in him,” he said,
semi-confidentially, as though recent
residence in a foreign land unfitted one
to hear undertone, “’n’ grit. But, for
the sake of Moses, get those clo’s offen
him.”

Upon which advice, he retired hastily
from the room.

John Carrington looked across the
room at his son with a smile that was
at once quizzical and affectionate.

“Yellow Dog finds you a trifle too
picturesque, boy,” he said, and his tone
suggested that he at any rate was satisfied.
“How about you? Pretty big
trial to come back?”

“I should have come, whether you
sent for me or not, when I knew you
were hurt,” said the boy, and there was
a defiant little ring in his voice. “Where
should I be, or want to be, but at home
and with you?”

John Carrington’s heart beat proudly.
This was the kind of son to have. He
said “home” as though he meant it. He
was loyal. Now he, John Carrington,
had an heir to show to some people——

“I needed you,” he said, quietly. “Not
on account of this confounded leg;
though it’s been hard to be shut up15
for the first time in my life—hung up
to mend, like a china plate. But it
made me think I was just mortal, after
all. And of your future and Elenore’s.
And it’s only fair to you to let you decide
how you’d rather have things.”

The look the boy gave him now was
a quiet, concentrated attention.

“Without going into details about
our mine, that no one but a mining man
could understand,” Carrington went on,
with a restful security engendered by
that look, “I want to tell you the
straight facts. It’s characteristic of this
region that in sinking every now and
then you strike a big hole filled with
water—a vug, they call it. Now, we
can take care of what we strike ourselves,
but the Tray-Spot, which is
newer and shallower, is letting us take
care of theirs. Instead of pumping it
up, they let the water seep through to
the Star, and we lift it. It cuts off profits,
and makes our mine dangerous.
The two mines ought to be under the
same management, anyway. Expenses
could be cut almost in two. So I wrote
the owner of the Tray-Spot—an Easterner—never
comes out here—to ask
him what he’d sell for. Richards, the superintendent,
is a good deal of a scoundrel,
and responsible for all the trouble.
Of course mining is just a business
proposition to those Easterners. They
haven’t fought things out here in the
early days, as some of us have. And
this man had never even been on the
ground. Bought the mine from Riley
when he went to smash. And he’s childless.
No second generation to take it
up.

“That’s practically what I wrote
him,” Carrington went on, doggedly,
“and why it should have struck him
just wrong, and turned him pig-head
and ugly is beyond me. But he wrote
back that if he had never been here, he
wasn’t too old to come now. And that
if he didn’t have a son, he had a
nephew, who was a first-class business
man and smart as a steel trap, whom
he proposed to bring out here, and to
keep on the ground. And that, as he
understood from his superintendent
that the one son I had was spending his
time in Paris studying art, the mines
would be better off with his heir than
mine. And would I put a selling price
on the Star? The Star, that I’ve put
my lifeblood into! And that letter”—there
was the rage of a wounded lion
now—“was the first thing they read me
after I came out from the ether to find
myself tied up like—like this——” he
finished, at a loss for any adequate comparison.

“We’ve got to fight or to sell,” he
finished, “and if anything happened to
me, what would you children know
about disposing of it? That’s what I’ve
thought as I’ve lain here. Hadn’t I better
leave things safe for you, if I do
have to kill time for a few years myself?”

His eyes looked worn. How many
times he had gone over it! How many
times affection for his children had
warred against his pride in the mine he
had discovered, developed, managed,
owned! It all seemed a part of long,
restless nights, of narcotics and anodynes
that brought nightmares as often
as oblivion; nights in which the young
mine doctor seemed mixed up with the
obstinate Easterner who owned the
Tray-Spot, and the pain throbs and the
pumping apparatus at the mine seemed
to have some curious relationship.

“Sell! Never!” the fresh young
voice flung back instantly, and the timbre
of it was a battle-cry. “We’ll fight,
dad—for our rights first, and then—then
we’ll buy!”

He stood erect, every curve of fine
youthfulness buoyant with victories to
come, his head flung a trifle back and
his mouth resolute.

Fatherly pride, exultation, triumph,
swung John Carrington up on his elbow
from his pillows in a certain fierce
joy, and something glistened on his
cheek—something that pain and fatigue
and loneliness had never crystaled there.

“I have a son to stand by me,” he
said, and it was the dignity of a king
to the crown prince.

The leonine old head was lifted
proudly, and the hand that he stretched
out might have held a scepter.

Then reaction of the strain came16
swiftly, and the lad leaped to him, as
he dropped back limp and white against
the pillows, with a sudden film drawn
over the eyes so lately keen of sight, and
the rushing of many waters in the ears
that had heard so happily.

CHAPTER III.

Yellow Dog was having the time of
its life.

It was, to use a local idiom, passing
out a new line of talk every day.

What this sudden access of interest
meant to an isolated small town which
existed solely on account of its two
mines one would have to live in Yellow
Dog to understand.

The Tray-Spot and the Star were at
opposite ends of the town’s main street,
each a local fetish in its way to the
miners.

Underfoot everywhere the soft red
hematite ore stained everything that it
touched.

Beyond, hills after hills covered with
scraggy pine. Half a mile to the south
was the railway station, and a spur ran
to both mines.

Since the loungers around that station
had witnessed the home-coming of
young Carrington, conversation had
flourished in dialects Cornish and Irish
and Swedish and “Dago,” as well as
that tongue to which its users alluded
proudly as “United States.”

The first comment of all this polyglot
assemblage had inclined toward the
critical, with emphasis which ran the
gamut from the humorous to the snarl,
laid on what Mr. Kipley had characterized
as “those dum clothes.”

Trevanion, shift boss, coming to the
surface that first night, to learn of the
child’s peril, heard it in silence and
with smoldering eyes; heard it sullenly
as he held the child in his arms, and
with a surly nod went back to his cottage.

And the long-legged girl who told
him resented his silence as a lack of interest
not only in the event, but in her
narrative.

It was not often that anything so exciting
happened. Events were usually
underground casualties in Yellow Dog.
“’E could ’a’ said ’e was glad the child
wasna killed,” she complained to her
father.

“’E’d na say what you maun know,
onyway,” she got for comfort; for the
men admired Trevanion, and trusted
him blindly.

They comprehended, too, the way he
had taken his trouble, and they left him
to himself, since he wished it. It was
his way; just as it was his way to read,
to study, to get some beginnings of the
patiently dug-out education of a dully
persistent man.

If he had lost his Cornish accent,
save in excitement or in his orders to
them, he had not lost his Cornish patience,
nor that curious Cornish affinity
between man and mine.

What they did not understand was
the measure of his fierce love for his
child; the child that was to have a
chance. This was the mainspring of
his life.

Trevanion was seated on his doorstep,
with the child on his knee, when
young Carrington rode down the street
once more, leisurely this time; looking
at everything with interested eyes that
recognized the old and familiar, and
saw the new and changed, with a buoyant
alertness which seemed to match
the careless grace of the way he sat his
horse.

The boy Trevanion had used to see at
play had grown up to this lordliness,
had he? To ride recklessly, careless of
whom he ran down, trusting to luck to
snatch children from under his horse’s
feet. Trevanion hated him.

He saw him rein in the Colonel to
ask some question of a woman who was
leaning her elbows interestedly on her
gatepost. Then young Carrington came
on to stop opposite him.

“You’re just the man I’m looking for,
Trevanion,” he said, and his tone was
clear and crisp.

Trevanion got on his feet and looked
at him loweringly. The child smiled
at him.

“One of these days, Trevanion, I’m
going to let you give me a few lessons
in practical mining,” he said, pleasantly.17
“I may decide to become a mining man,
after all. But that will have to go for
the present, and you may be thankful
for it. I’m inclined to think you’d find
it harder work than being shift boss.”

Trevanion looked at him unsmilingly.

“However,” young Carrington went
on, “they tell me you’ve never failed in
anything you’ve tried yet, and I’m sure
you wouldn’t begin with me. I’m no
record-breaker,” he laughed, and there
was something so pleasant in its sound
that Trevanion was furious to find that
he liked it.

“No, soberly, Trevanion,” he said, and
his voice dropped to a seriousness that
was sweeter toned than even his laughter,
“father isn’t quite so well to-day.
We’ve got to keep him pretty quiet for
a few days, free from worry as much as
possible; but we don’t want the men to
know that. When he is up again we’ll
get after those Tray-Spot people and
put a stop to those free baths they’ve
been good enough to give us. But we’ve
got to pull him up carefully for a while.
It’ll mean extra work and responsibility
for you.”

Then a new note came in the musical
voice.

“It means everything to the mine just
now, Trevanion, that you are just where
you are, a man to be trusted.”

The words were spoken with a grace
which made them seem like a decoration
conferred. The eyes that Trevanion
raised met deep blue eyes with a
mysterious something in them that conquered
him. Fealty was suddenly strong
in him, loyalty to the lad through thick
and thin. Every fiber of his big burliness
thrilled with a proud protectiveness.
The child on his arm was holding
out his arms to young Carrington.
Three minutes before, his father would
have resented it. Now he saw the firm,
sure, tender grasp with which Carrington
took him up before him on the
saddle; he exulted in the child’s laugh
as the Colonel walked off daintily, then
took a bit of a canter down the street,
and finally young Carrington brought
a reluctant two-year-old back to the
fatherly arms.

It was then that he said what he had
had in his mind since morning—said it
with a tenderness that rang perfectly
true:

“All I was thinking of this morning,
Trevanion, was to get to my father as
soon as possible. But if my impatience
had resulted in accident I should never
have gotten over it.”

And Dick Trevanion, holding the little,
warm, happy figure close in his
great arms, said what half an hour ago
he had never thought to say:

“I believe you, Mr. Ned.”

“Quiet!” said Mr. Kipley, to young
Carrington’s comment, as he sat on the
veranda steps that evening after dinner,
looking with growing approval at
that young gentleman as he lounged in
a big wicker chair. “Well, of course, it
tain’t the Boo-lee-vards”—for Mr. Kipley
had consulted the encyclopedia
painstakingly in order to converse comfortably
with the returning traveler.
“It tain’t the Boo-lee-vards,” he repeated,
with an air of erudition, “but
there are times when Yellow Dog can
have as big a pack of firecrackers tied
to its tail as you’d see anywhere.”

“Yes?” said the boy, and it was a yes
that coaxed. He was enjoying Mr. Kipley
hugely.

“Yes,” said Kipley, placidly. “Day
after pay-day occasionally, or when the
lumber-jacks come down from Raegan
camp at Christmas time to get their
money and blow it in before New
Year’s.” Then he chuckled reminiscently.

“They’re queer cusses,” he said.
“One of ’em came in last Christmas that
was a walkin’ woolen store, ’n’ when
he tried to sell mittens and stockin’s by
the hundred pair, they just naturally
locked him up. But he come by ’em
honest, after all. You know,” he explained,
kindly, “these lumber-jacks
can’t get any money while they are in
the woods, but they can trade at the
company’s store there, ’n’ have it
checked against their time. ’N’ they
will play poker. So they used mittens
’n’ stockings for chips. ’N’ this fellow
had got most of ’em. He told me,”
said Mr. Kipley, with intense enjoyment,18
“that he won eleven hundred pair
of mittens on three aces. The other
fellow had kings. ’N’ he bluffed forty
pair of stockings outen a greenhorn on
ace high.

“You play poker?” he inquired, for
young Carrington’s laugh had been deliciously
prompt.

The boy nodded.

“Enough to appreciate a good poker
story, anyway,” he said. “That’s a
corker.”

Mr. Kipley wiped his mouth with his
handkerchief to hide a pleased smile.

“D’you know,” he said, “Mis’ Kipley
can’t see a thing in that story?” His
tone suggested a puzzled commiseration.

“Oh, well,” the boy said, gayly, “it’s
hardly a woman’s story, you know.”
And he showed his white teeth in so
gleeful a smile that it warmed Mr. Kipley’s
heart.

It resulted in his making some inquiries
on a subject that had roused his interest
earlier in the day.

“Paris is gettin’ kind of run down,
ain’t it?” he asked, cautiously.

“Why, no,” said the boy; “it’s getting
built up. What made you think
so?”

“They’s a picture in the encyclopedia,”
said Mr. Kipley, “that I come
acrost to-day. What a lot a person would
know who’d read ’em all through!” he
commented. “It was a cathedral—Catholic,
I s’pose, ’n’ they’re usually willin’
to give liberal to keep up their buildin’s,
too. It was pretty well timbered up
the back, ’s though they was expecting
a cave-out.”

Young Carrington recognized the description
with an inward joy.

“That’s one of the most famous
churches of Paris,” he said, soberly.
“Notre Dame. And it was built that
way on purpose.”

“Do they believe that?” Mr. Kipley
inquired.

“Yes,” said young Carrington.

“Who give it its name?” Kipley demanded.

“I really couldn’t say,” the boy
laughed.

“It would be interestin’ to know,” reflected
Mr. Kipley. “Of course he wa’n’t
no kind of an architect, or he wouldn’t
have had to brace his walls like that;
but whether he had the gall to name it
because he didn’t care a damn, or they
named it because it wasn’t worth a
damn——”

“Your pa’s waked up and wanted to
know where you was,” said Mrs. Kipley,
appearing in the door, just as young
Carrington was trying to decide whether
to enlighten an ignorance which was
such bliss to the listener.

“Thank you,” he said, and sped into
the house at once.

Mr. Kipley turned a philosopher’s eye
upon the wife of his bosom.

“He’s got good principles, M’r’,” he
said, with conviction; “’n’ a very entertainin’
way of puttin’ things. He’s
good company.”

“What was he talkin’ about?” asked
Mrs. Kipley, interestedly.

Mr. Kipley’s cough was extremely
apologetic.

“Come to think of it, I guess I did
most of the talkin’,” he said, with some
embarrassment.

“I should say ’t was likely,” said Mrs.
Kipley, dryly; and she disappeared in
the house. She reappeared for a parting
shot. “I s’pose his principles was
good because he agreed with you,” she
observed, sarcastically. Mr. Kipley
gazed at the evening star confidentially.

“Beats all about women!” he mused.
“They act’s if all the principles was
theirs, ’n’ kind of exasperated if you’ve
got any. ’N’ more if you ain’t,” he
murmured.

He had refilled his pipe, and was
looking placidly across the lights of the
town to the hills beyond.

Hemmy came up the walk with the
light of a new and lovely romantic suggestion
in her eyes.

She sat down beside her father and
slipped a warm, plump hand in his.

“Pa,” she said, sweetly, “am I really
your child and ma’s?”

Mr. Kipley recoiled sharply.

“Well, of all things!” he ejaculated.

Miss Hematite Kipley experienced a
pang of disappointment.

She had just been reading a “perfectly19
lovely romance,” where an
adopted child turned out to be the
daughter of a duke. While she did not
insist on a dukedom, she had had an
ecstatic feeling that she might be a millionairess.

“You never brought me home in your
arms and told ma that a beautiful
young gypsy girl——” she began, falteringly.

“No,” said Mr. Kipley, with precision;
“I never did, and that’s the reason
I’m alive to-day. If I’d come home
with a baby, talking about beautiful
young gypsies, there’d have been a funeral,
and no mourners. An ’t would
have served me right, too.”

Then he softened parentally toward
this young woman of his own flesh and
blood.

“It don’t seem so very long ago,
Hemmy, since you was born. Born in
the regular, genu-wine way. Why, we
named you Hematite because they
struck the big find of ore in the mine
that same morning. It was my idea,
too, for your aunt, who lived in the
copper country, had just named her little
girl Amygdoloid—Amy, for short—and
she was plum offensive about having
the most elegant name out. ‘What’s
the matter with Hematite?’ says I!”

Miss Hematite kissed her undoubted
parent forgivingly, and rose from the
ashes of her air castle like an undiscouraged
young phœnix.

Already she had another in process
of construction, and she pillowed her
cheek against the battered volume containing
the encounter between Cophetua
and the beggar maid, though he was
not a king, and she was not pauperized.
“I think, perhaps, it’s even sweeter,”
she whispered, as she fell asleep.

Down in the village of Yellow Dog,
the club which the Star had built for
its miners was ablaze not only with
lights, but with excitement.

There was a circle of miners around
the room.

In the center of the floor lay a man
who had been shaken into a little heap
of clothes; a heap that stirred with
caution even in catching breath, lest
more punishment should follow.

Over it towered Dick Trevanion’s
sturdy figure, made brawnier still by
rage.

“Any more remarks about Mr. Ned
and his clothes?” he demanded, sweeping
that quiet group with furious eyes.

There was not a breath from them.
Trevanion’s reputation as an athlete
and a boxer was a matter of local pride.

He walked across the room to the
door and flung it open.

Then he turned his flushed face to
them.

“You can all have as much and more,
if you like,” he said. “I stand for him.”

He struck the side of the door a blow
with his closed fist, a blow that seemed
to shake the entire side of the room.
“Remember that when your tongues
start,” he emphasized, and was gone in
the darkness.

There was no danger that they would
forget.

In a quiet bedroom, the lad whom he
had championed had fallen asleep in
a big chair beside his father’s bed.

He had sat there till John Carrington
had slept, and then, too drowsy to
move, had slept himself—that youthful
sleep of healthy exhaustion.

John Carrington, waking in the night,
looked at the boy as he rested his head
in the corner of the high-backed chair.
The long, dark lashes lay lightly on
cheeks rounded daintily enough for a
girl, but the lines of the firm young chin
had a quiet decision even now.

Far into the night John Carrington
lay with open eyes resting on his son,
and in the depths of those eyes was
content immeasurable.

The days stretched into weeks, weeks
to months. It was September now.

John Carrington was almost convalescent.

He could walk now with a crutch
from his bedroom to the veranda couch.
The bone had knit, but the flesh was
slow to heal.

And what a comfort his son had been
to him through those months!

20

Sunny. Tireless. Capable. Ready
to read if he wanted to be read to; to
write letters when they had to be written;
to amuse him with tales of his life
and Elenore’s in Paris, when the pain
was bad and time dragged.

And outside there was not a miner
who did not speak boastingly of Mr.
Ned. Even Yellow Dog, noncommittal
Yellow Dog, sang his praises.

Only the miners at the Tray-Spot
sneered. Only their wives flung a contemptuous
laugh when young Carrington
and the Colonel sped by out on long
rides through the country.

These rides, in whose solitude one
might think one’s own mind freely; and
certain letters that went overseas addressed
to one E. Carrington, to be held
in Paris till called for, were the only
relaxations in which young Carrington
permitted himself an entire honesty of
thought.

One morning Mr. Kipley came home
jubilant.

“Strangers in town,” he announced.
“Owner of the Tray-Spot, I guess, and
a young fellow. Saw them driving with
Richards.”

John Carrington rapped his crutch
sharply against a chair.

“Now there’s going to be something
doing,” he said, defiantly; and all the
repressed activity of months rang in
the words.

Young Carrington waved a hand airily
in the direction of the other mine.

“The Tray-Spot shall cease from
troubling,” he said, gayly, “and we’ll
just gather you gently in.”

If anything stirred the stillness, it
was the mocking laughter of the goddess
of fate.

CHAPTER IV.

The brownstone house on Madison
Avenue suggested the solid and respectable
affluence of its owner, Mr.
Livingstone Wade, in that quieter old
New York way which preceded Millionaire’s
Row, and which, on account
of that precedence, Mr. Livingstone
Wade considered immeasurably superior.

Nor was this suggestion a mere exterior
effect.

The somber elegance of its interior
furnishings showed in every detail that
Mr. Wade’s conservatism to earlier
ideals was unfaltering.

The ormolu clock on the drawing-room
mantel was flanked by a pair of
tall vases, Sèvres, as a matter of course,
standing equidistant with the precision
of sentinels.

His pictures included a Landseer, a
Meissonier, a Bouguereau, and some
excellent copies of Raphael. He was
fond of calling your attention to the
fact that all of these gentlemen could
draw, and that their figures “stood
out.”

The books in his library showed a
strong tendency to run in sets, with
modern fiction conspicuously absent.
And as for his dinner services, they
were complete, and he considered odd
sets of plates as a fad which had its
origin in economy or inefficient housekeeping.

He rated l’art nouveau with nouveaux
riches, considered impressionism as a
cloak for defective draughtsmanship,
declined to admit anything made as far
west as Rookwood to the companionship
of the Capodamonte and Meissen
in his cabinets, and would have banished
to his stables the most priceless
Indian basket ever made.

West of New York he considered
that the wilderness howled, impelled to
such mournful vocalization by a dawning
sense of its own abnormal crudities.

In business, however, Mr. Wade consented
to compromise with the spirit of
the times. No out-of-date methods
characterized the bank of which he was
president, nor, on the other hand, did
any up-to-date crook contrive to outwit
the keen-eyed, white-haired, thin-lipped
old gentleman, who held himself as
erect ethically as he did physically.

His wife, born a Van Dorn, christened
in Grace Church and married in
the same, had died at fifty-seven, childless—a
course of conduct which Mr.
Wade, while he preserved a high silence,
felt as deeply as a European
monarch might have done. It was not21
a mere personal question, but the continuation
of the Wade line would have
been for the good of the country at
large.

As for his only nephew, he had done
his duty by him. Not extravagantly, to
spoil the young man, or delude him with
unfounded hopes of heirship; but by
a college course, Columbia bien entendu!
and when he determined to become
an architect, the Beaux Arts was
naturally the only correct place.

When he read John Carrington’s letter,
with its phrase “since you have no
direct heir,” Mr. Livingstone Wade experienced
a very primitive bitterness,
which resolved itself into a determination
to make his nephew heir to that
particular piece of property at least;
to recall him from Paris, and to insist
upon his going out to Michigan and becoming
thoroughly conversant with the
mine as soon as possible.

Having begun the accomplishment
of this design, Mr. Livingstone Wade
began to feel a consciousness of benevolence
in acting so generously toward
the young man, which resulted, very
naturally, in his regarding his nephew
with more affection than even Mr.
Wade himself would have thought possible.

As they sat together in the well-ordered
library, Mr. Wade said to himself
that he had done well.

“When the mine came to us with that
tangle of collateral from the Riley failure,
I found that it was paying dividends
regularly; and Richards, the
manager, wrote me that they could be
doubled easily if he was allowed a free
hand to cut down expenses and exercise
his own judgment. He has done it,
too, and the mine is a splendid property.
And it is yours, my boy, when you
have made yourself thoroughly conversant
with it.” Mr. Wade’s tone was
complacently benevolent.

“Do you mean that you want me to
take a course in mining engineering?”
said Hastings, and his voice was carefully
expressionless.

“No,” said his uncle; “I want you
to go out to the mine itself, put yourself
in Richards’ hands, and get a good
working knowledge of the proposition,
so that Richards will know you are master.
He wouldn’t try any tricks with
me, because it is pretty well known that
men who have tried have repented it;
but with a young fellow like you, it’s
different, of course. I shall not expect
you to spend all your time there. Perhaps
for a year or so you’d better stay
on the ground. Then come East, open
your architect’s office, and go West
once a year on a tour of inspection.”

Hastings’ face cleared.

“It is more than good of you, sir.
I’ll try to deserve it,” he said, frankly.

“There is only one condition,” Mr.
Wade went on, “and your word is
sufficient for that. You are not to sell
the mine without my consent. The
very fact that John Carrington is so
anxious to get hold of it is one of the
best points in its favor.”

“Carrington?” said Hastings, mechanically,
wondering if the name so
constantly in his thoughts had begun
to repeat itself audibly.

“He is a—a boor—who owns the adjoining
mine,” Mr. Wade classified him.
“He offered to buy the Tray-Spot. Of
course I declined. And he had the insolence
to charge Richards with flooding
his mine with water from ours, instead
of pumping it to the surface.
Threatened us with a lawsuit if we
didn’t put in additional pumps. He said
his men were not educated to the luxury
of free baths as yet, and that swimming
was an unpopular sport on the
eleventh level.”

“But if it was true?” said Hastings.

“Of course it wasn’t,” said Mr.
Wade, testily. “I wrote Richards, and
he said Carrington was just trying to
get hold of the mine, and wouldn’t stop
at anything to do it, because his, the
Star, is down so deep it is about
worked out. Do you know,” Mr. Wade
went on, “this John Carrington had the
audacity to say that, since I’d never
been West, he didn’t suppose I’d care
to begin such trips at my age, and that,
as I had no son, he should think a reasonable
proposition to sell ought to interest
me.”

Mr. Wade intended to suggest only22
John Carrington’s breach of good manners,
but in spite of himself his voice
showed where the taunt stung. And
Hastings had a sudden comprehension
of his uncle’s sudden benevolence,
which in its very humanness quickened
him from his heavy sense of indebtedness
for benefits received, into
that warmer loyalty of the ties of blood,
into that sense of inter-dependence
which this was the first emergency to
rouse.

He began to feel ashamed of the
sense of injury he had had in the
abrupt summons to quit Paris, to put
away his chosen profession for a time.
He began to feel ashamed of the lagging
gratitude with which he had received
a gift which would make him a
rich man; of that involuntary wish that
his uncle’s generosity had taken another
form.

A realization of the loneliness of age
bound him to the older man with bonds
of sentiment stronger far, with warmhearted,
generous youth, than all those
the government has seen fit to issue.

But Carrington? Though there
might be dozens of Carringtons who
owned mines in the West.

“We’ll take Holliday’s car—he’s offered
it to me time and again—and go
out there. We can live on the car the
few days I am here, and you’re young
and can manage to make yourself comfortable
afterward. I shall be proud to
introduce you as my nephew, Laurence.”
Mr. Wade was tasting victory
in prospect, and the taste was palatable.
“Carrington has only one son, and he’s
daubing canvas in Paris.”

Then this was Elenore’s father.
Hastings foresaw complications to
come.

“Ned Carrington and his sister were
two of my best friends in Paris, sir,”
he said, firmly. “I knew their father
was a mine owner somewhere in the
West.”

“Has this young Carrington any business
ability?” demanded Mr. Wade.
His tone was quick and keen. He was
getting at an important factor.

Hastings smiled in spite of himself.

“Not a scrap,” he said, amusedly,
“but he’s a genius. He’ll be a new ‘old
master’ one of these days.”

Mr. Wade’s countenance relaxed
amiably.

“These erratic young fellows are always
going to do wonders,” he said,
indulgently. “For all the help he’ll
be to his father, he might as well be a
girl. One of these days you will be
buying out John Carrington on your
own terms.”

Nor did he dream that in the silence
that followed, as he sat comfortably
certain of the discomfiture of the man
who had flung at him the two-edged
taunt of age and childlessness, his
nephew was saying to himself that surely
Elenore’s father must be a reasonable
man, that there must be some rational
basis on which he and John Carrington
could meet as friends. More, he saw
himself with an assured income.
Then could he not, by virtue of that
future friendship, gain a remarkably
valuable ally in that siege of the marvelous
citadel—invulnerable, indeed,
save to a certain small sportsman who
bends his bow to no man’s dictation,
and yet for love of valor, or from mere
caprice, ranges himself at the unlikeliest
moment with the besieging force,
and wins with a single well-sped shaft?

Whatever emotions the arrival of
Mr. Wade and his nephew at Yellow
Dog excited in Richards, his outward
attitude was one of bluff heartiness.

“You can’t stay on your car, though,
Mr. Wade,” he said, decisively, looking
over its comfortable appointments with
an appraising eye. “The miners at the
Star are too lawless. You’ll have to
put up with the hotel.” (“About
twenty-four hours of the Raegan
House will start them for New York,”
he thought, with grim humor.)

“Do you mean to tell me that they
would dare attack a private car?” Mr.
Wade demanded, aghast.

Richards shrugged his shoulders.

“There isn’t much they wouldn’t
dare,” he said, coolly, wondering how
thick it would be safe to pile it on, “but
they’re more interested in people than
property. The car’s safe enough as
long as you aren’t in it, but if a stick of23
dynamite happened to drop under it
some night when you were——”

“What has made such bad feeling
between the mines?” Hastings asked,
quietly.

Richards’ eyes narrowed slightly.

“Miners take the tone of their manager,”
he said, significantly.

Simple as question and answer were,
antipathy quickened in that instant between
the two men.

Richards resented a certain something
in Hastings’ tone, and Hastings
made up his mind that Richards was
overplaying.

Mr. Wade was regretting with exceeding
heartiness that he had come at
all. Being blown to bits in this desolate-looking
hole was furthest from his
desire.

Trusting himself to the horrors of a
wilderness hotel seemed about as hazardous
an alternative. As for leaving
his nephew in such a place, was it not
virtually condemning him to a more or
less lingering death? And Mr. Wade had
grown amazingly fond of him during
the last few months, in the companionship
which had resulted from their
many-times delayed expedition westward.

He was half inclined to make a
formal tour of inspection, announcing
Hastings as the future owner, and then
take him back and let him open his
architect’s office at once. But Mr.
Wade hated retreat.

“Then I am sure that you have men
equally vigilant in repelling any attacks
upon property or persons,” Hastings
said, smoothly. “However, it doesn’t
matter to me. I should have to come
to the hotel, anyway, later, when you
have gone back, sir.”

“Going to stay with us a while?”
Richards asked him.

“Permanently,” said Hastings, pleasantly.

Richards swung a questioning face
toward Mr. Wade.

“The mine would have been my
nephew’s at my death, naturally, Richards,”
Mr. Wade explained, with some
dignity. “He is coming into his own
a little sooner, that is all. And if he
chooses to remain——”

“As he does,” Hastings laughed, genially,
“and to learn all about his mine
from its competent manager.”

Mr. Richards’ face did not express
any extreme joy.

“If you’ll take my advice, you’ll go
home with your uncle and leave your
mine in my hands, Mr. Hastings,” he
said, bluffly. “It’s a rough country, and
hard, dangerous work—work that you
don’t know anything about, and that it
will take you years to learn. And—I
beg your pardon, but I’ll speak plainly—while
you are learning you’ll want to
give orders, and you’ll make bad mistakes—expensive
mistakes. They’re
easy to make and hard to right. Not
that it will be your fault. I should if
I tried to run Mr. Wade’s bank. If you
want your mine to keep on being a good
paying proposition, leave it in the
hands of men who made it one. Isn’t
that business, Mr. Wade? I’ve satisfied
you, haven’t I?” His manner had
a certain brusque appeal.

“Perfectly,” said Mr. Wade, suavely.

Then he looked at Hastings. He was
standing by the table heaped with books
and magazines, and there was something
in the alertness of his virile figure,
well poised enough for a soldier;
something in the lines of his well-cut
features, something in the steadiness
and frankness of the cool gray eyes,
that suggested not only the strength of
youth, but the strength of the spirit.
It came to Mr. Wade suddenly that he
was going to miss him, that the young
fellow ought to have a chance to live
with his own class.

“And my nephew may suit himself,”
Mr. Wade went on, steadily. “The
mine is his without condition”—he
spoke the words slowly—“and if he
chooses to leave it in your hands, and
return East with me, he is quite at liberty
to do so.”

Hastings smiled at him cheerfully.

“I shall stay, of course,” he said, decidedly.
“But I’ll try not to make my
mining education too expensive.”

“I’ve got a carriage outside,” said
Mr. Richards, rising abruptly. “I24
s’pose you’d like to drive around town
and out to the mine, to look around a
little. Then if you’ll take dinner with
me at the Raegan House, you’ll have
quite an idea what it’s like out here.”

Mr. Livingstone Wade surveyed the
landau into which he stepped with scant
favor; and the look which he gave to
the ragged darky who held the reins
was only equaled by the one he bestowed
on the two battered equines who
were to serve as their means of locomotion.

As they swung into the main street
of the little town, Hastings laughed with
a perfectly genuine amusement.

“I might open an architect’s office
here, on the side,” he said. “They certainly
need it.”

Mr. Wade’s eyes were upon an up-to-date
trap, drawn by a well-matched,
high-stepping pair. The middle-aged
man who was driving turned on them
a look of amused curiosity as they
passed.

“Whom do those horses belong to?”
demanded Mr. Wade, sharply.

“Belong to Carrington,” said Richards,
shortly. “That was his man.
That’s his house at the other end of the
street—that big one on the hill.” He
jerked his head to indicate that it was
back of them, and they turned to see it.
It had a large, comfortable, hospitable
look, more suggestive of the South
than of the North.

“The hotel’s good enough for me,”
said Richards, dryly.

Mr. Wade wondered why this sentiment,
which had seemed so admirable
to him in New York, lost its flavor here
on the ground.

As they passed a blacksmith’s shop,
the smith was shoeing a Kentucky thoroughbred,
who looked at them with an
airy unconcern.

“Carrington’s,” said Richards to Mr.
Wade’s uplifted eyebrows.

The expression on Mr. Wade’s face
was a curious one. Your tourist in Europe
now and then wears its twin, on
discovering that the United States is
renting a second-rate building for an
embassy, when other governments own
pretentious ones.

“Tell you what,” said Hastings, suddenly.
“I think I shall buy a neat little
touring car to run around here. Pretty
bad grades, but there are half a dozen
makes that could take them easily.”

Mr. Wade looked at him with the
ever-growing conviction that he was
the kind of nephew to have. In spite
of his conservatism, he had adopted the
auto as he had the telephone.

“Quite right, Laurence,” he said,
complacently. “When you order the
one you prefer, have the bill sent to me.”

“Going to import a show-fure?”
queried Richards, with ironic pleasantry.

Hastings shook his head.

“Never saw one I couldn’t run yet,”
he said, cheerfully, “and when I do I’ll
send it back to the factory as defective.”

“If he’ll just put in his time running
it, it’s all I’ll ask of him,” communed
Richards with himself.

At two o’clock of that day Mr. Wade
had concluded that all he had ever
heard of the enormities of the West
was far below the actual fact.

His first grievance had been the
dilapidated conveyance; his second the
fact that Richards, who for reasons of
his own had not tried to make the expedition
a bed of roses, had insisted
on his getting out a dozen times to see
certain offices, the shaft house, and a
number of other buildings, about whose
use he was extremely hazy. And these
pilgrimages had necessitated his walking
through fine red dust, which not
only reduced his immaculate footgear
to its lowest terms, but bordered the
bottom of his pale gray trouser legs
with a deep red band, which Richards
assured him was indelible.

But the crowning enormity came
with the dinner at Raegan’s Hotel,
which invitation Mr. Wade had felt he
could hardly refuse in courtesy.

At the moment they entered the dining
room Richards was called to the
phone.

“Take these gentlemen down to my
table, Maggie,” he said to the head
waitress as he turned away.

25

Mr. Wade regarded this young woman
disapprovingly. The curve of her
pompadour and the curves of her figure
were too aggressively spherical.
That her overgenerous bulk could be
compressed to the dimensions of her
waist seemed to indicate that whalebone
had been unduly overlooked in modern
mechanics. It hinted, too, though not
to Mr. Wade, of a forcefulness of
spirit which, seeing in a handkerchief-sized,
knife-pleated white apron a legitimate
adornment, adjusted the physical,
Spartan-like, to its requirements. But
Mr. Wade’s mere passive and impersonal
dislike quickened to an active rage
in that awful moment when she tucked
her arm comfortably in his, and promenaded
him the length of the dining room
to an untidy looking table already occupied
by a portly Hibernian, who was
engaged in extensive molar exploration
with a diminutive wooden pick.

“Friends of Mr. Richards, Mr.
O’Shaughnessy,” she said, glibly, and
Mr. Wade felt himself released from
her muscular arm only to feel the front
of a chair pressed with energetic purpose
against the back of his knees.

As certain muscles automatically relaxed
to enable him to be seated, his
stunned sense of propriety recovered
consciousness enough to enable him to
decide that of all outrages ever perpetrated
on a gentleman, this last was the
worst.

“Mr. Richards’ friends are my
friends,” responded Mr. O’Shaughnessy,
cordially.

Mr. Wade looked at Hastings, who
was seating himself with outer sobriety
and inward hilarity. He comforted
himself by taking that sobriety for disgust.

“I suppose you are not out here for
your health?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy
opined, genially.

“No,” said Mr. Wade, icily.

“What line ar-re you in?” Mr.
O’Shaughnessy pursued.

“I fail to understand you,” said Mr.
Wade, stiffly.

“What house are you thravelin’ for?
What are you selling?” Mr. O’Shaughnessy
explained.

That he, Mr. Livingstone Wade,
should be taken for a traveling salesman!

“I am a banker,” said Mr. Wade. He
felt it due to himself to say as much as
that.

“Faro and that face of yours ar-re
twins the world over,” said Mr.
O’Shaughnessy, genially, closing one
eye and looking intelligently at Hastings
through the other. Then he cast
the toothpick on the floor. “Have a
cigar?” he said, hospitably, throwing a
couple carelessly on the table as he rose
to depart. “Drop in and see me if you
get thirsty while you’re here. The palm
garden. Two doors up. The house is
good for a few yet.”

He stopped to joke with the head
waitress a moment on his way out.

Richards, returning, decided that Mr.
Wade was pretty well fagged. He had
become monosyllabic.

The catsup bottle in the middle of
the table, the greasy, lukewarm soup in
stone-china bowls, the tasteless profusion
of canned vegetables, the dubious-looking
water, and the muddy mixture,
bitter from long boiling, which the
Raegan House called coffee, were only
additional affronts to a man already at
the limit of his endurance.

His announcement of his intention to
spend the rest of the day in the car, and
to make it his headquarters during his
stay, was delivered with a decision
which left no possibility for protest.

What was mere dynamite to such indignities
as these!

He stepped into the landau, which
Richards had ordered round again, with
a sensation of relief, heightened by that
gentleman’s statement that he shouldn’t
be able to see them again until morning.
Richards found Mr. Wade rather
exhausting, on his side.

“If you see a fellow in freak clothes
on your way back, you can know it’s
that son of Carrington’s,” he observed,
as he stood on the sidewalk.

Hastings had his foot on the step of
the landau, but he wheeled.

“Is Ned Carrington here?” he demanded.

“Been here all summer. Father26
broke his leg in a runaway and sent
for him,” Richards growled.

“Then I think I’ll walk over and see
him,” Hastings said promptly, “if you’ll
excuse me, sir.”

He smiled confidently at his uncle.

“You shan’t go near him,” said
Richards, fiercely, “with that shark of a
father of his trying to swindle us every
way he can.”

“Whatever his father is, Ned Carrington
is a gentleman and my friend,”
said Hastings, quietly.

“Tell him he can’t go,” Richards demanded
of Mr. Wade. And his insistence
was fatal. Mr. Wade would
not have influenced his nephew at Richards’
dictation just now if Hastings had
announced his intention of going to perdition.

Moreover, he trusted Hastings. And—this
is an awful anti-climax—he
wanted a nap.

“I hope you will find your friend
home, Laurence,” he said, suavely.
“Business quarrels can safely be ignored
between gentlemen.”

Richards, watching the erect old figure
disappearing in the landau toward
the station, and the athletic young one
striding off in the direction of the Star
mine, hated them with an equal intensity.

John Carrington, dozing away on the
great wicker divan on his broad veranda,
in the warmth of a September
afternoon, opened his eyes at the click
of the gate.

The young man coming rapidly up
the graveled walk was a stranger.

“Mr. Carrington?” he said, pleasantly.

“Yes, sir,” Carrington replied.

“Your son and I were friends in
Paris, Mr. Carrington,” he went on.
“My name is Hastings. I hope he is at
home.”

Hastings! Paris! This was the young
fellow whom Sarah had written about—who
was so attentive to Elenore.

Carrington looked at him critically,
and was pleased.

“Sit down, Mr. Hastings,” he said,
cordially. “Ned just went in to order
the horses for a little later. He will be
out presently, and will be glad to see
you.”

“I was surprised to hear that Ned
was here, Mr. Carrington,” Hastings
went on, seating himself. “He was to
start for the East with Velantour the
day I left Paris, and I supposed he was
painting away for dear life somewhere
in the Vale of Cashmere.”

“I didn’t even know he intended to
go,” said Carrington, quietly.

“What!” said Hastings. “He hasn’t
told you that Velantour asked him to
go? It was the greatest opportunity he
could ever have!” Then he thought.
“Of course your illness was first with
him,” he said. “I hope I haven’t been
telling tales out of school.” He smiled
frankly. Then “He’s a genius,
though.” The praise burst out spontaneously.
“They expect great things of
him in Paris, Mr. Carrington.”

John Carrington did some rapid
thinking. So the boy had put aside the
biggest opportunity in his life to come
back to him. Put it aside cheerfully. To
gratify—John Carrington was hard on
himself now—his father’s selfish pride.
The need had not been imperative. He
could have written him all the questions
it was advisable to ask him. But he had
been in pain, and harassed, and he had
sacrificed the boy to it. Well, he should
go back soon. He, John Carrington,
was not so near senility that he couldn’t
manage his own affairs. His jaw set
squarely.

“I’m glad you told me, Mr. Hastings,”
he said, calmly. Quick steps were
coming through the hall. “Before he
had a chance to head you off,” he concluded,
smilingly. The eyes he turned
toward the door were very proud.
“Here’s a friend you’ll be glad to see,”
he said, cheerily. Yet it seemed to him,
and to Hastings, that the lad’s first impulse
was toward recoil.

He certainly paled a little. And Hastings
said to himself that Ned had, in
some subtle way, changed indefinably,
but certainly. His eyes did not carry
out the comfortable familiarity of his
attire. It appeared to Hastings that
they were making some demand upon27
him—a demand that he could not understand.

But the next second young Carrington
came forward with at least a surface
cordiality.

“How did you find me out—Hastings?”
he said, with a slight hesitation
before the name, as perplexing as the
characteristic grasp of his hand, familiar
and unfamiliar at once, and the
tinge of formality that obtruded itself
unmistakably.

“I had no idea you were here until I
heard it just now from Richards,” said
Hastings, struggling with a vague sense
of rebuff.

The name might have been the Medusa
head.

Then “Richards?” John Carrington
queried. Hastings flushed.

“My uncle, Mr. Wade, has given me
the Tray-Spot mine,” he said, and his
voice became formal in turn. “We
lunched with our manager to-day.”

In spite of his annoyance, his lips
twitched at the memory of it.

“It seems that there is war between
the two mines, Mr. Carrington;” he
turned to the older man. “I don’t know
anything of mining, but there must be
some way out of it which would be just
both to your interests and to ours.”

For John Carrington had impressed
him indelibly as an honest man.

Hastings’ tone was both dignified and
frank. John Carrington liked it. But
could good come out of anything connected
with the Tray-Spot? It had always
been a thorn in the flesh.

Ned had crossed the veranda quickly,
to seat himself behind a book-laden table.
Once so ensconced, he drew a long
breath of relief. Then he began to look
amused.

“We have suggested a way, but it did
not meet with your uncle’s approval,”
said John Carrington, quietly.

“I quite agree with my uncle that we
do not care to sell,” said Hastings,
calmly.

“Nor, I assume, do you care to discharge
your manager,” John Carrington
went on.

“No,” said Hastings, frankly again;
“my uncle has always considered Richards
an invaluable man.”

“He certainly has been,” Carrington
commented, ironically. “Then, I think
we can cut out mining as a topic of conversation,
Mr. Hastings. You and Ned
can gossip about Paris.”

“That’s where I differ with you, dad,”
Ned broke in, spiritedly.

Hastings, stung, started to rise, but
“Don’t be silly,” the lad said, impatiently,
but with more friendliness than
he had yet shown. “We may have a
thousand pleasant things to say about
Paris, but this is the important thing,
and we had better keep at it.

“Laurence”—Hastings gave a little
start; Ned had never called him Laurence—“is
quite as much of a greenhorn
about mines as I was a few months ago.
It’s only fair to tell him just what our
position is. He will at least hear a story
of our grievances that hasn’t been garbled.”
His tone was spirited.

“I should like that,” said Hastings,
quietly.

Ned leaned forward eagerly. Then
he settled his cravat with a peculiar
twist, which Hastings recognized as
Ned’s characteristic preliminary to discourse.
He and Elenore had laughed
over it many times together.

“Ours is the older and deeper mine,”
Ned began. “That’s the first thing.
And all the mines here strike the big
bodies of water in sinking. That’s the
second. Your manager has hit on the
economical plan of doing without large
pumps; and when you strike water, he
lets it seep through to us, and we raise
it for you. It increases our dangers
and expenses and your dividends. How
would you like it in our place?”

John Carrington watched him with a
look of mingled pride and amusement.

“In the case you have stated, I
shouldn’t like it at all,” Hastings stated,
coolly. “But Richards has assured my
uncle that this grievance of yours is imaginary;
that the water you get comes
from your own sinking. Isn’t there a
possibility that may be so?”

“No,” said Ned, positively; “there
isn’t.”

Hastings hesitated. That Ned believed28
what he was saying was obvious;
but, after all, what did he know about
it? Wasn’t he, save in his art, the most
impractical soul living? Why shouldn’t
it be quite as likely that Carrington’s
men deceived him as that Richards deceived
his uncle?

“There ought to be the simplest of
ways of settling that,” he said, slowly.
“Let a couple of your men go down our
mine and satisfy themselves that we’re
doing what’s right.”

John Carrington’s laugh was ironically
amused.

“You might suggest that to Richards,”
he said. Then his tone changed.
“He won’t even give us a map of your
workings,” he said, sharply. “As for
letting anyone from the Star underground,
he has announced pretty clearly
that the man who tried it wouldn’t come
up again. And though Richards’ word
hasn’t any par value, I am willing to believe
that for once he meant what he
said.”

“Aren’t you painting Richards in
rather too black a color?” Hastings protested.
“Aren’t you unduly prejudiced
against him? Premeditated murder,
now?”

“Accident, my dear sir,” John Carrington
said, ironically, “and underground
accidents are almost too easy.”

Hastings hesitated. He looked at Ned.

The lad made a Gallic gesture that
sent his hands far apart. “What would
you?” it signified.

There was a tinge of mockery in his
friendly smile. Yet something of confidence,
too.

“My dear Hastings,” he said; “it is
decidedly up to you. Our word or Richards’.”

Hastings flushed.

“My dear Ned,” he said, steadily,
“that I should doubt your good faith is
impossible. Nor,” he flared, “do I
think you doubt mine. I have been
thrust suddenly, through the great generosity
of an uncle to whom I am as
loyal as you are to your father, into a
situation that I know nothing about. I
have a manager in whom my uncle, a
cautious man, has believed implicitly.
You tell me this man is a rogue. But
you may be wrong. I can’t condemn
him unheard. One thing is certain,”
he went on. “I shall find out. And if
there has been anything crooked about
our management, it shall be righted.”
The line of his lips straightened. The
muscles of his jaw grew tense. It was
impossible to doubt that he meant what
he said.

Both listeners believed him. Both admired
him. But John Carrington looked
his admiration frankly, and young Carrington
dropped his eyelids satisfiedly
over his.

“That is all we could ask,” said John
Carrington, approvingly. “Now let me
hear you youngsters chat about Paris.”

But Hastings was impatient to be off
now.

“I must get back to my uncle,” he
said, lightly. “It has been a hard day
for him, and I suggested that I would
serve as secretary for once.”

“Then, order the horses round for
Mr. Hastings, Ned,” said John Carrington,
and as the lad disappeared, and
Hastings protested: “They are standing
harnessed in the stable,” he said, decisively.
“You mustn’t insist on our being
too inhospitable.”

And as Hastings capitulated, John
Carrington followed out a sudden impulse.

“You will explain to your uncle that
this half-mended leg of mine will prevent
my calling on him,” he stated, feeling
suddenly that Hastings’ uncle must
have some good points, “but I shall be
glad to put my horses at his disposal
while he is here. Ned will come over to
your car in the morning, and say so
gracefully.”

He smiled confidently at the returning
lad.

There was a queer, contented look
lurking in the lad’s eyes. “As gracefully
as he can,” he laughed, lightly.
“I’ll walk down to the gate with you,”
he added.

It was on the way to the gate that
Hastings asked the question which was
really the mainspring of his call.

“Where is your sister now? Did she
go to Brittany?”

29

Young Carrington seemed amused.

“Elenore’s plans were rather upset
this summer,” he said, lightly, “as well
as mine. She’s far from Brittany, in a
curious little place you never heard of
in France.” He was rather proud of
the way that sentence was turned.
“She’s with a friend, and enjoying herself,
though she says it’s all queer.”

Hastings had a mental vision of Elenore
in some far-off corner of France,
making gay over all its out-of-the-way
absurdities in that companionable way
of hers.

“I wish she were here,” he said, suddenly.

“Oh, well, I dare say she’d rather be
where she is than anywhere else,” Ned
rejoined, carelessly.

Which was cold comfort to Hastings.

“By the way,” he said, turning, as he
was about to step into the trap, “I suppose
we’re perfectly safe to make our
headquarters in the car here?”

“Safe as the Waldorf, if you’re on a
siding,” Ned laughed. “If you stay on
the main track the cars will hit you.”

Hastings mentally swore at himself.
The question had sounded idiotic.

“See you in the morning,” Ned
called, as Hastings drove off. But he
walked back to the house rather slowly.

“Pretty tired, dad?” he asked, cheerfully.

“Ned,” said John Carrington, slowly,
“when you children were little I’m
afraid I loved Elenore best. But no
daughter can be to a man what his son
is.”

There was a little silence. John Carrington
lay with his eyes closed. He
was tired.

“Do you think Elenore was interested
in that young fellow?” he asked, finally.

“If she was, she never said so,” young
Carrington replied. He was looking off
in the direction of the Tray-Spot.

“If I were a girl, I’m inclined to
think he could have me,” John Carrington
announced.

Young Carrington’s laugh was lightly
amused.

“If I were a girl, I’d lead him on a
bit, myself,” he announced.

CHAPTER V.

When Hastings had returned to the
car the afternoon before, he told his uncle
the story of his interview with the
Carringtons quite simply. He was too
wise to urge action upon a tired, out-of-temper
man; nor did he wait for Mr.
Wade’s comment. He shifted conversation
to pleasanter things, and by the
time Joseph had served them a nice little
dinner Mr. Wade’s outer man bore
the visible signs of gastronomic peace.
A few games of cribbage, which he
won, yet not too easily, were also a
soothing influence. When Hastings said
good-night, Mr. Wade opened the subject
of his own accord.

“How did this claim of Carrington’s
strike you, Laurence?”

“It struck me that we must satisfy
ourselves about it as a matter of personal
honor,” said Hastings, firmly. “Of
course you will know better than I
how and when to take the initiative.”

There was nothing that urged or insisted
in his tone. It was quietly assured.

“Good-night, sir,” he smiled, and disappeared.
Disappeared to dream that
the car was a balloon, and that he was
sailing swiftly through sunny skies to
Elenore.

Mr. Livingstone Wade, over-fatigued,
was jolted through dreamland by that
unbridled nocturnal equine who bolts
from one disaster to another.

The horror-stricken Mr. Wade found
himself lunching at Sherry’s with the
head waitress from Raegan’s. She had
tied that knife-pleated apron around her
neck, like a bib; and she told him things
were “elegunt,” and he could call her
Maggie.

She insisted on his drinking catsup
instead of claret, and ordered the salad
compounded with soft hematite instead
of paprika.

All the directors of the bank were
seated at a table near them; and they
looked quite as appalled as Mr. Wade
felt he would, had he seen any one of
them in his place.

How he came to be in this awful predicament,
he had no idea. He only knew30
that he was riveted to his chair, and that
his face, in spite of his inward horror,
would wear a pleased smile. And speech,
though he strove desperately to articulate,
was an impossibility.

Then Hastings appeared, and said seriously:
“This, sir, is a matter that affects
your personal honor.”

It was in a grim determination to escape
from this purgatory at all hazards
that Mr. Wade finally jumped himself
awake; and though every muscle in his
body ached throbbingly, he gave a sigh
of contentment as he stirred his face on
his pillow.

Trevanion, coming up to the house on
a summons from John Carrington,
found young Carrington coming down
the steps, looking a bit more of a
swashbuckling dandy than ever.

“Morning, Trevanion,” he greeted
him, buoyantly.

Then he nodded toward the waiting
trap.

“I’m going to pay a morning call on
the owners of the Tray-Spot,” he announced,
genially.

“Confound ’em!” muttered Trevanion.

The lad looked him straight in the
eyes, in the way Trevanion found so remarkable.

“Oh, I think they’re square,” he said,
lightly, “and that Richards’ day is about
done. It will decide itself in a few
days now, anyway.”

Trevanion watched him with a curious
expression as he drove off.

Mr. Wade had wakened not only refreshed
but in a mood which a certain
irreverent clerk had once characterized
as his “dusting off the earth day” and a
good time to lie low. Hastings greeted
the morning sun joyfully, because it
shone on the little town where Elenore
had spent her childhood.

Richards came in just as they were
enjoying their after-breakfast cigars.

“Well,” he said, dropping into a chair
without preliminary greetings, or waiting
for Mr. Wade to request him to do
so, “what’s the program for to-day?”

Then his eyes fell on Mr. Wade’s
trouser legs.

“Told you it wouldn’t come off, didn’t
I?” he laughed, boisterously.

Mr. Wade resented Richards’ unceremonious
entrance, and resented still
more this direct allusion to his sartorial
disfigurement, which had resisted the
most zealous efforts of Joseph. He considered
that, under present circumstances,
the legs should be considered as
analogous to those of the Queen of
Spain.

And that phrase of Hastings, “a matter
of personal honor,” had hit the
bull’s-eye.

Mr. Wade prided himself first that
the family fortune had been made honestly,
by the rise in Manhattan real estate;
and last, that the Wade name
stood in the business world to-day as a
symbol of integrity that erred, if it erred
at all, on the side of over-scrupulousness.

“Mr. Richards,” he said, a trifle
stiffly, “when I inquired into the matter,
you wrote me that Mr. Carrington’s
grievance had no foundation in fact, did
you not?”

The bluffness faded out of Richards’
face and left ugliness disclosed.

“He brought that old yarn back with
him from Carrington’s yesterday, I suppose,”
he sneered, jerking his head toward
Hastings.

Hastings had that rare faculty of
knowing when to let the game play itself.

“Very naturally, Mr. Richards,” said
Mr. Wade, with dangerous smoothness;
“but that is not the question.”

Richards’ face darkened.

“I’ll tell you what the question is, Mr.
Wade, and you can settle it right now,”
he snarled. “It’s whether you are going
to take the word of the man who has
made the mine, or the word of the man
who’s trying to blackmail it, so’s he can
buy it cheap.”

It was a good issue, so good that
Richards himself was proud of it. He
leaned back in his chair with something
of a swagger.

“That you are still in charge of the
Tray-Spot is the best proof of my confidence31
in you,” Mr. Wade said, in a
more gracious tone, “but I propose to
place the Carringtons in a position
where they will have to admit that they
are in the wrong, as you say they are.
We will tell them that they may send a
representative through our mine at any
time, and that he will be accorded every
courtesy.”

“Not on your life, we won’t!” said
Richards, fiercely.

“That,” said Mr. Wade, serenely, “is
a matter where we differ.”

“Do you suppose,” Richards went on,
working himself into a rage, “that anyone
they sent down would come up and
tell the truth? He’d say just what he
was paid to say, and he’d find just what
he was paid to find.”

Joseph entered with two cards, and
thereby effected a diversion.

One of the cards bore the name of
Mr. John Carrington and the other that
of Mr. Edward Carrington.

The gods fought on the Carrington
side.

“Show him in,” said Mr. Wade,
suavely.

Young Carrington, debonair as a
certain Monsieur Beaucaire, made his
entrance with an easy grace. The delicate
deference of his manner toward
Mr. Wade, the pleasant camaraderie
which he showed to Hastings, the impersonal
politeness with which he recognized
Richards’ existence, were all
points in his favor.

So, too, were his punctiliousness in
making his father’s excuses, and the
quiet courtesy with which he placed his
horses at Mr. Wade’s disposal.

His manner was so free from embarrassment
or assertiveness, so evidently
inspired by a nice sense of proprieties,
that he might have been the ambassador
of one king to another.

Richards, retiring to one of the car
windows, his back toward them all, his
fingers beating a nerve-racking tattoo
upon the glass, was his direct antithesis.

“My nephew tells me you have distinct
ability as an artist,” Mr. Wade
said, when, the preliminary interchange
of courtesies over, the three were comfortably
seated. Mr. Wade thought it
was likely, too.

“Then, I may tell you that we expect
him to be one of our best architects,”
young Carrington returned, gracefully.

“The rising architect of Yellow Dog,”
Hastings said, with a wave of his hands.
“I think I shall begin by building a little
bungalow here for myself.”

“A very good idea,” said Mr. Wade,
decisively.

Hastings’ first phrase had smitten him
with a sudden contrition. He felt, too,
that if he was going to come out to Yellow
Dog himself, and if his nephew
stayed there he should, of course, come
out once a year, at least, a cozily built
bungalow, where he might be made
comfortable, was in the line of a necessity.
“I should get about it at once,”
he declared.

“Perhaps you would like to drive about
this morning, and select your site for
‘A Bungalow for One,’” said young
Carrington, laughingly. There was a
slightly mocking emphasis on the last
word.

“I shouldn’t have it too small,” said
Mr. Wade, firmly.

Richards was whistling between his
teeth now, a performance which always
enraged Mr. Wade.

“But we will have to let the site go
for this morning, at least;” and there
was a precise distinctness about Mr.
Wade’s words now. “Mr. Richards has
just been arranging to take us down
the mine this morning.”

Richards wheeled round, surprised.

Young Carrington rose with an unhurried
ease.

“Then, I must not detain you,” he
said, calmly.

“And why would it not be a good
idea for you to send one of your men,
in whom you have full confidence, down
with us?”—Mr. Wade’s tone was entirely
urbane. “He would, perhaps, be
able not only to assure himself of actual
conditions, but to explain your contention
to us in the workings under discussion.”

Richards held himself tense.

“I should like to send our shift boss,
with your permission,” said young Carrington,32
quietly, though inwardly he exulted.
“I will have him meet you at
your shaft house whenever you say.”

“Mr. Wade,” said Richards, and the
effort he made to control himself made
the veins in his face distend purplingly,
“when Mr. John Carrington is well
enough to go down our mine, I shall be
glad”—how the word choked him—“to
take him down myself; but Trevanion,
their shift boss, is at the bottom of the
trouble. He’s tricky and dishonest. I’d
rather resign than take him down the
mine.”

For in the time that would elapse before
John Carrington was able to take
such a jaunt much could be done.

There was a moment’s pause, in which
Richards’ claim and Carrington’s were
equi-balanced. The very fact of Hastings’
personal bias held him inactive.

Then young Carrington spoke.

“I will answer for Trevanion’s honesty
with my own,” he said. There was
an emotional note in the voice he tried to
hold steady.

“Off the same piece, I guess,” sneered
Richards, nastily.

The scales swayed down on the Carrington
side.

Mr. Wade’s code did not permit his
guests to be insulted by his subordinates.

“My dear Mr. Carrington, you leave
us no option when you take that stand,”
he said, suavely. “Whenever your man
is ready, then.”

“I think he is still at the house with
my father,” said young Carrington, unsteadily.
“I can telephone from the station
here.”

Mr. Wade looked out of the window.
Beside Carrington’s trap stood the landau
of yesterday. “If you will drive
home and bring your man over, we will
go directly to the mine with Mr. Richards,”
he said.

Young Carrington, bursting in upon
his father and Trevanion, told it all in
a breath.

Trevanion rose with the last word.

“The sooner I’m there the better,” he
said, phlegmatically.

“It’s queer business,” said John Carrington,
frowning. “Keep your eyes
open. What do you think of it?”

“I’ll tell you when I come up,” said
Trevanion. “If I don’t come up, you’ll
look after my boy?”

John Carrington nodded.

“Keep close to young Hastings,” he
said, tersely. “Don’t let Richards get
behind you alone. I’m inclined to think,
though, that the whole thing will be a
farce. He’ll take you into a few levels
where there couldn’t be any question,
and that will be all. Wade and his
nephew won’t know. And that will be
all there is to it.”

“I’ll drive you over,” said Ned. His
eyes were bright with excitement.

Trevanion grinned as he settled himself
in the trap.

“I’m going to get my swell ride before
I go down,” he said. “Mostly they
take ’em when they come up—in a box.”

The others were waiting, garbed in
oilskins, candles in their caps—precautionary
measures which inclined Mr.
Wade to feel that there was something
wrong in the management of a mine
that was neither lighted nor heated.

Hastings was struggling not to chafe
under his rôle of masterly inactivity; he
comforted himself with the thought that
it was causing things to move in the
right direction, at any rate.

Richards’ expression was sardonic.
As Carrington had surmised, he proposed
to tire out the greenhorns by an
exhaustive progress through workings
which would be of no possible interest
to Trevanion.

He calculated shrewdly about how
long it would take before they would be
glad to come up. If Trevanion remained
behind them, or if he went
down without them later—Richards
shrugged his shoulders. It was easy for
a man to fall down an uncovered winze
in a strange mine. And the fall would
explain any bruises.

As they started for the cage, he
turned to young Carrington. His smile
was distinctly disagreeable.

“Sorry you don’t feel like coming,
too,” he said, “but you might catch cold
or get your clothes dirty.”

33

Whatever faults there were to young
Carrington’s credit, cowardice was not
one of them. Not that foolhardiness is
not almost as reprehensible.

“If you’ll lend me a cap and a pair of
boots, I shall be delighted,” he answered
instantly.

“No, Mr. Ned. You’re not in this,”
Trevanion remonstrated.

Young Carrington was pulling on his
cap composedly now.

“You’ve never been down the Star,
even. You won’t be of any use,” Trevanion
insisted. Young Carrington was
getting into an oilskin coat. Richards
had not thought he would.

“I’ll telephone your father,” Trevanion
declared.

“Then I’ll go down without you while
you’re doing it,” young Carrington declared,
willfully.

Trevanion followed him into the cage
without more ado. But he didn’t like it.

As the cage dropped into the blackness
of the shaft, Richards thought with
malicious pleasure that he would outwit
them all. Trevanion, holding it everyday
work for himself, was uneasy over
the boy; Hastings was impatient at his
own ignorance—he hated to feel so out
of his sphere; Mr. Wade, reviewing
each successive stage of the proceedings
which had placed him in his present situation,
called himself what he would
have slain any fellow man for thinking,
a silly old fool; and Carrington—ah, a
curious tangle of thoughts was young
Carrington’s brain, with a curious after-vision
of a bright blue sky.

Up in the big house on the hill, John
Carrington was wondering if it was not
time for Ned to come home.

It is a curious experience—this going
underground for the first time.

The chill and the dampness, the
change in the air pressure, and the darkness—that
vague, depressing darkness,
on which the candle in your cap makes
so vague and flickering an impression
that it seems nervous and palpitant at
its own temerity in attempting so gigantic
a task.

Above all, and above you, as you
clearly realize, for an eighth of a mile,
perhaps, the huge impending weight of
earth and rock, against whose menace
timbering a foot and a half thick seems
like trying to bolster the basement of a
tottering St. Paul’s with matches.

It is like finding oneself in some gigantic
letter press, the screw of which
the hand of fate may choose to turn—perhaps
now; pressing downward with
pitiless, relentless, inanimate mechanism
until the Parchment of the World bears
the dull red mark of these unwilling witnesses
to its deed.

These are all terrors unconfessed.
Farthest of real menaces you find—whose
vague terror is made dormant
by the real necessities of the moment,
the constant strain of the eye to distinguish—now
to avoid the direct peril of
an uncovered winze underfoot, now to
notice how closely the “lagging” roofs
in the drift, this indefinitely long hole,
seven and a half feet square, in which
you find yourself.

Then comes the strain of the novice
brain to comprehend the reasons and the
logic of it all.

Richards showed his native shrewdness
in the way he managed the expedition.
The humor of its personnel was
quite within his comprehension. Three
men, ignorant of every detail of mining,
Trevanion of the Star, and himself.

It was grotesque enough for comedy.

And, too, Richards had at last taken
Mr. Wade’s measure—or thought he
had.

“You have to sling softsoap to suit
the pig-headed old sissy,” he phrased it.

And he assumed a bluff heartiness
which actually became genuine at times,
as he explained carefully and clearly the
A B C’s of things.

For Richards loved the mine he had
made, loved it after the fashion of his
nature, with an intensity of possession.

Fought for it fairly when fairness
served best, and trickily when trickiness
seemed more profitable. Took a man’s
genuine pride when he had forced it to
obey him. Abused its future for the
present good if he felt like it. Slaved
for it fiercely in reprisal. It was the
only way Richards knew how to love
anything.

34

That these two men whom the accident
of fortune had placed in actual
ownership of the mine should interfere
with him had roused first his rage, and
now his determination to placate them,
to hoodwink them. He showed a good-natured
tolerance of their ignorance,
and an indefatigable patience in explanation.

“That’s it; now you’re catching on
fine,” he encouraged them, as they
grasped some elemental principle of
mining. He led them over a good deal
of ground during these explanations.
He piloted them with a rough carefulness
which even included young Carrington.
The boy’s being there at all
amused him rather than otherwise. But
Trevanion was guarding young Carrington
with as wary an eye as he was
watching Richards.

Mr. Wade decided that for the first
time Richards was appearing to advantage.

Aboveground his crudities of manner
might be repellent; here he was in his
native element, shrewd, practical and
zealous.

Mr. Wade began to feel that Trevanion
the Taciturn was quite as likely
to prove the villain of the piece.

To be sure, it appeared that they had
embarked on a tremendous undertaking.
Mr. Wade felt that the mine was larger
than he had supposed, but, as Richards
said, they might as well understand it
thoroughly. On this Mr. Wade, with
legs that threatened to drop from his
hip sockets, plodded on.

Young Carrington turned white more
than once, but shut his teeth and went
on defiantly; and Hastings owned to
himself that he was desperately tired.
Trevanion was as unwearied as Cornish
patience, but Richards was not trying to
tired out Trevanion—physically.

It lacked five minutes of the noon
hour when they saw the cage ahead of
them, waiting at this, the seventh and
lowest, working level of the mine.

Below, as Richard told them, was the
development level, to which the cage did
not descend.

“We can’t go down now,” he said,
looking at his watch. “They’re just going
to blast, and it will take an hour
afterward for the smoke to clear. We’ll
go up and have our dinner, and come
down again this afternoon to finish up,
eh?”

Lunch, up on the earth’s surface, with
sunshine and first grade air. The words
were as welcome to Mr. Wade as
though an archangel had spoken them.

Young Carrington, too, shared his
feeling; shared, too, though unknowingly,
Mr. Wade’s calculation that his
legs would just about carry him to the
cage.

Richards, with an inward grin, assured
himself that those two, at least,
would attempt no afternoon expedition.

This farce of investigation would
soon be ended. It would be quite safe
to urge them to come down again. They
had had quite enough. He looked forward
with amused anticipation to making
the suggestion after lunch.

Trevanion hesitated about declaring
an intention to remain without the others
through the noon hour. No, he
would see young Carrington safely out
of it first; then——

They were almost at the cage now.

Richards was showing them the bell
at the side of the shaft, the signal to
the engineer to hoist the cage.

“All the men but one get in,” he explained.
“He touches the bell and races
across to get in the cage. The engineer
allows him so many seconds to make it.
No, you can’t stop it after it starts.”

Mr. Wade, who had arrived at that
stage when he recked not how the cage
went up, as long as it went, continued
an unlistening way to that haven.

There was a detonation from the development
level.

“Blast,” said Richards, to young Carrington’s
look. “They’re in rather dangerous
ground, and so we have them
leave it until just before the noon hour,
in case——”

A man shot up from the ladder-way.
Another. And another. The ladder-hole
spouted them out like a volcano.

They ran toward the cage panic-stricken,
sweeping Mr. Wade into it before
them. With an instant comprehension
of the disaster that placed them all35
in a common peril, Richards turned
swiftly to the others.

“Get in!” he shouted. “They’ve
struck water!”

He caught Hastings by the arm, and
rammed his way through the press like
a great machine.

“You —— fools! There’s plenty of
time!” he railed at his men.

Trevanion, guarding young Carrington
with his right arm, thrust his mighty
bulk through the struggling mass just
behind Richards.

They were almost at the cage door
when a terrorized Finn fought his way
past them, striking out blindly at everything
in reach.

One elbow thrust sent young Carrington
spinning from Trevanion’s protecting
arm to the ground, and the next
instant the Finn dropped his full weight
between Richards and Hastings, and
leaped past them into the cage.

He shouted triumphantly to his fellows.
It was jargon to Mr. Wade. But
Richards knew, and raged, and the other
miners knew, and rejoiced, that he had
given the signal to hoist. Trevanion was
lifting young Carrington in his arms.

Richards stepped into the cage, with
an oath.

“Come!” he said, fiercely, to Hastings,
jamming a few inches of space free in
the cage with his bulk. “Room for one.
You haven’t a second to lose!” he
shouted.

Hastings put his hands in his pockets,
coolly.

“I stay with my guests,” he said. And
with his first word, the cage started upward.

As he turned toward the others, Trevanion,
one arm round young Carrington,
caught hold of his sleeve.

“We maun run for it!” he shouted.

For out of the great black hole beneath
them rose the water, spreading
across the bottom of the shaft.

From above, and suddenly faint,
they could hear Mr. Wade calling that
they must stop, that they must go back
for his nephew, and his voice was the
voice of a very old man. Trevanion instinctively
led them running back into
the drift. Young Carrington wrenched
himself free. “I’m all right,” he said.
“Took the breath out of me for a minute.
I won’t hinder.”

Back of them the water followed silently,
gaining gradually up the grade
of the drift.

“Not time to make that first rise—the
one we came down,” Trevanion said, as
they sped along. “Ought to be another—here
it is!”

He swerved into a black air shaft, but
swept them back into the drift the next
instant.

“No ladder. Stripped!” he said, laconically,
and on they hurried again.

The water was a thin encroaching line
thirty feet back now. Now the rise in
the level hid it from sight.

And finally another rise. Stripped.

And on again.

Young Carrington was getting tired.
Even peril was losing its spur. He
stumbled a little.

Trevanion caught him round the
waist, lifting him along with a strong
gentleness; looking at him with curiously
wondering eyes, but eyes that
never lost their look of fealty.

“Why are the ladders gone?” young
Carrington asked, and he kept his voice
resolutely free from fear.

“Economy,” said Trevanion, briefly.
“Wanted to use them somewhere else.
We’ll find one after a bit.” Which
might or might not be so.

“And if we don’t?” said Hastings,
swinging alongside.

“They’ll send the cage to the level
above, and your men will be hallooing
all over the place for us,” Trevanion
told him. He thought with a certain
grim humor that Richards would not
make any wild exertion to save him.
Hastings’ presence was their best hope,
if the ladders failed.

“If it should take them a long time
to find us?” It was young Carrington
now.

“Water may stop altogether,” Trevanion
stated. “Depends on the size of the
vug. Anyway, it rises slower the more
ground it covers. We’ll have time
enough.” But no one could tell that.

Disappointment. Hope. Then the
end of the drift stared them in the face—rock36
and dirt as a final blast had left
it.

But “Here’s our raise,” said Trevanion,
bluffly, turning off.

And the raise was ladderless: a vertical
opening, whose hard rock walls
were too slippery for even a Cornishman
to climb. Trapped!

They looked at the place where the
ladder should have been, as though it
must, perforce, appear. Young Carrington
ran a finger rapidly round inside
his collar, as though it had grown
suddenly tight. The air seemed close.
Then he pulled himself together sharply.
Say what you will, blood will tell.

“And now what?” he asked Trevanion,
cheerfully.

Hastings’ eyes were looking the same
question.

“Wait,” said Trevanion, stoically.

To wait, inactive: it is the real test of
courage.

With any kind of activity, hope plays
an obligato; but when there is no struggle
to be made, fears tries a tremolo
first on one heartstring and then another.

“You should have gone with the others,”
said young Carrington to Hastings,
reproachfully.

“Never!” said Hastings, decidedly.
“There’s that drop of comfort in the
whole thing, anyway.

“How do you suppose I should feel,”
he flashed, “if I were safe on the surface,
and you were here? I should feel
as though I had decoyed you into it.”
He turned to Trevanion. “Can’t the
pumps get the water under control?” he
demanded.

“If you had enough of ’em,” said Trevanion.
“That’s another place where
Richards economized. The Star’ll pump
it out for you after a while.”

“Richards will have his day of reckoning
if I get out of this,” said Hastings,
furiously.

“Does he know that?” asked Trevanion,
dryly.

And Hastings saw the point. So did
young Carrington. The cards were
Richards’ now, to play as he chose.
Hastings turned to his friends.

“Ned,” he said, “I’m mighty sorry.
Sorry I interfered at all. I’d give my
life to have you and Trevanion safe on
the surface.”

“Don’t worry about me,” said the lad,
quickly.

Trevanion’s eyes watched him curiously.

“I want to talk with you about Elenore,”
Hastings went on, quietly. “I
suppose you know that I love Elenore,
Ned?”

Trevanion stepped back a few paces,
but he listened intently.

“Do you?” said the lad, simply.

“Do I?” said Hastings, impetuously.
“The hardest thing I ever did was to
leave her without telling her I loved her.
But you can’t ask a girl like that to wait
indefinitely, you know. Then, when I
found out where I was coming, it
seemed as though it might have been
meant, after all. And I wanted to patch
up the trouble between the mines, so
that I’d have at least a fair chance.”

“And then?” said young Carrington,
softly.

“Then,” said Hastings, recklessly, “I
hoped—I was daft enough to dream—that
she might not think it a hardship to
come back to the little place where she
was born—to her father—to me. To
me! And when I talked of building a
bungalow, I thought what it would
mean to bring my wife home to it.”

There was silence. Then Hastings
shrugged his shoulders.

“I may not have the chance to tell Elenore,”
he said, bruskly, half-ashamed
of the emotion he had displayed. “It’s
not quite the same thing to tell you,
old man. I’m afraid there’s small
chance of our ever being brothers-in-law,
but you wouldn’t have objected to
me as a brother, would you?”

“Whatever Elenore wished, I should
have wished,” the lad said, calmly.

Hastings laughed a short, impatient
laugh.

“I suppose we’re all egoists,” he said.
“But I don’t mind confessing to you
that it would be easier to face the music
if I knew what Elenore did wish—whether
she cared.”

There was silence again. Trevanion’s37
figure in the background grew tense.
Then the lad laughed lightly.

“You hadn’t asked her, you know,”
he said, “and Elenore isn’t the kind of a
girl to wear her heart on her sleeve. But
I know Elenore pretty well, and I think
she cared—really.”

Hastings flung his arm in front of his
face with a gesture that was almost boyish.

“Elenore!” he whispered to the cold
comfort of his coat sleeve. For virile
youth loves strongly, humanly.

Young Carrington’s eyes watched
him with a wonderful light. Even the
flickering candlelight showed Trevanion
that.

Then Hastings rammed his hands in
his pockets and drew a deep breath.

“Thank Heaven, she’s on the other
side of the ocean! It will be easier for
her, after all. Harder to realize,” he
said, fervently.

Young Carrington drew a quick
breath, a breath of relief. “I thought
you’d feel that way,” he said, quietly.

Trevanion stepped out into the drift.

“I want to speak with you a bit,” he
nodded to young Carrington.

The lad followed him. Hastings, left
alone, gave himself up to thoughts of
Elenore. The other side of the rock
wall, young Carrington faced Trevanion,
and knew that he knew. Every
detail of their surroundings stood out
in the light of that, with sudden distinctness.
The great timbers that walled in
the drift, the flickering light of the candles
in their caps—all seemed but the
setting for Trevanion’s eyes. The hand
he laid on young Carrington’s arm was
almost reverential in its touch.

“I’ve held you in my arms to-day
twice,” he said, hurriedly. “I don’t understand
why it’s you, but it’s all right.”
He looked at young Carrington as one
of Jeanne d’Arc’s soldiers might have
looked.

Young Carrington faced him very
quietly.

“I thought ’twas queer, the way you
held the child that time,” Trevanion
went on. “And you ride just as you
did as a youngster. Will he come back
now if——” he demanded.

Young Carrington nodded gently.
“Yes, and he’s a splendid fellow.” If
the young voice broke for a second, that
was all. “He’ll help dad to bear it. It
was best for me to come. Best, above
all, if this was to happen.” The voice
was steady now. “I’m sorry you know,
but it would have been safe with you,
anyway.”

It was that same confident charm that
had conquered Trevanion at the outset.

“You won’t tell him?” he questioned,
jerking his head toward the raise.

Young Carrington’s head shook a
slow negative.

“Not unless at the very last I turn
weak and womanish;” and there was a
whimsical touch in the last word.

Then the young figure straightened
up with a quick decision.

“And I really think, Trevanion”—young
Carrington’s voice was light now—“that
I shall make a nice, plucky,
manly finish.”

Trevanion, following back into the
raise, would have cut his heart out to
save that buoyant young life, but his
devotion was the pure fealty of a serf
for his sovereign.

They played at bravery after that,
each abetting the other.

Young Carrington coaxed Trevanion
into telling them mining stories, wheedled
Hastings into all kinds of reminiscences
of his boyhood, assumed their
ultimate escape so confidently that Hastings
thought it a genuine hopefulness.

Not so Trevanion. He knew what
the spring was that moved young Carrington
to play up to a buoyant part.
And he helped, with anecdotes of wonderful
rescues, of escapes just in the
nick of time.

He was in the midst of one of the
best of these when a little lapping sound
stopped him.

A thin little line of water pulsed
gently into the entrance of the raise.

CHAPTER VI.

Mr. Wade had shouted his fruitless
commands, in the ascending cage, all
the way to the surface, raging at Richards
and his management, and unconvinced,38
in spite of a united and profane
assurance, of his inability to stop the
cage and go back; furious at him for
having installed such a defective system,
and threatening him with dismissal
at the earliest possible moment.

His nephew and his nephew’s friend
left to danger, while these brutes were
being brought to the surface! He had
never suffered such helpless frenzy in
all his neatly adjusted life.

At the surface the cage cleared with
magical suddenness. Mr. Wade, breathless
with rage, was fairly dragged out
by Richards, and in so short a time as a
signal may be given and obeyed, the
cage had again started downward.

Mr. Wade leaned back against the
timbers of the shaft house, with the exhaustion
of relief.

But it was a relief that Richards did
not share. This particular kind of disaster
was so frequently recurrent that he
knew its possibilities all too well. And
he raged that it should have come just
now. It was such a routine danger that
he had not thought of it as a special
menace in taking them down. Casualty,
with Mr. Wade involved or witnessing,
had been furthest from his thoughts or
desires.

“How long before they will be up?”’
Mr. Wade asked, faintly.

Richards, tensely alert, made no answer.
The cage had reached the bottom
of the shaft now. He waited a minute—two—three.
There was no sign from
below. He himself gave the signal to
hoist.

“Are they coming?” demanded Mr.
Wade.

Richards shook his head. “I can’t
say, sir,” he said, “but they’ve had plenty
of time. Either they got in the cage and
forgot to give the signal”—and with
Trevanion below this was an unlikely
contingency—“or——” he hesitated.

“Or?” said Mr. Wade, sharply.

“Or the water has cut them off,”
Richards finished.

“Then——” said Mr. Wade, faintly.

“Reach ’em from the level above,”
Richards answered. But he thought of
certain contingencies—thought of a
good many important things.

There was a crowd of miners now,
watching for the cage to appear. The
jargon of Finnish comment sounded to
Mr. Wade like the buzzing of bees.
Then the cage came in sight. Empty
and dripping wet.

The next second everything was action,
and Richards its mainspring. His
orders pelted down like hailstones. Men,
tools, paraphernalia, filled the cage.
Other men went racing off on surface
errands.

Mr. Wade, paralyzed by his complete
ignorance of conditions or remedies,
seemed crushed under the consciousness
of casualty. Richards caught him by the
arm and shook him into attention.

“We’ll bring them up, if they are
alive,” he shouted to him, as though
he were deaf.

Then he stepped into the cage, and
down it went again. Mr. Wade leaned
back against the wall, motionless, his
eyes fixed on the hole where it had disappeared.

But over all the little town the news
was spreading like wildfire.

John Carrington had spent a horrible
morning. When the trap came back,
and the stable boy Ike, who was driving,
announced that Mr. Ned had sent
him home, John Carrington promptly
demanded why.

“I dunno,” said the boy. “He said,
‘That’s all,’ so I come.”

It couldn’t be possible that Ned had
gone down the Tray-Spot! Ned, who
had never shown the slightest eagerness
to go down the Star. But what—— And
why——

John Carrington fumed, fretted and
finally telephoned—to find to his consternation
that Ned was underground.
What under heavens had Trevanion
been thinking of, to let him go? John
Carrington raged at him. And what
was Ned thinking of? He knew absolutely
nothing of underground conditions.
Had Richards decoyed him into
it for some reason? Any reason of
Richards was not a good one.

John Carrington hobbled along on his
crutch from the divan on the veranda to
the couch in his bedroom, and back39
again, in a nervous unrest which made
all places equally distasteful to him.

He raged at his own stupidity in letting
Ned drive Trevanion over. He
raged at this miserable leg of his that
had held him prisoner so long. He
raged at the strength which came back
so slowly.

He sent Mrs. Kipley, who came up to
remonstrate with him on this exhausting
promenade, back to her kitchen in
short order.

“He’s fairly beside himself, worrying
over Mr. Ned, who ought to have had
more sense than to do such a thing, anyway,”
she scolded to Hemmy, feeling
that she must vent her own nervousness
in wrath upon some one. “Now what’s
the matter with you?” she demanded,
exasperatedly, for Hemmy’s face was
assuming a chalk color.

“To think that he may be in danger!”
said Hemmy, with a gulp.

“The only danger you need to worry
about is spoiling those doughnuts,” said
Mrs. Kipley, severely.

And Hemmy, condemned for the next
half hour to drop little doughy circles
in boiling lard, wondered, as she choked
back a sob, why even the luxury of
grief was denied her.

Carrington found solitude fast becoming
unbearable.

He sent for Mrs. Kipley. He ordered
her to tell Kipley to have the trap over
at the Tray-Spot, and when Ned came
up at the noon hour, to tell him he was
needed at home at once.

Kipley had no sooner started than
Carrington thought of the lad’s dignity.
He would not make a baby of him. He
dispatched Ike on Ned’s saddle horse, to
tell Kipley to place himself at Mr.
Wade’s disposal, to tell Ned to bring
Hastings and Mr. Wade back to luncheon,
if he chose; but to telephone him
at once from the mine in any case.

He hobbled out on the veranda to
wait for noon. He told himself that he
was getting to be an old woman; that
Ned was young and strong, and able to
take care of himself anywhere; that
Trevanion would keep his eyes open for
any deviltry on Richards’ part; that
Richards would look after any party
which contained Mr. Wade and Hastings.

Then the sound of galloping hoofs
came ominously. Ike, fairly hanging on
the Colonel’s neck, came flying homeward.

Disaster was stamped on his terrorized
face.

Carrington swung up on his crutch
as the boy ran stumblingly up the walk.

The clatter brought Mrs. Kipley and
Hemmy to the door.

“What is it?” Carrington called,
sharply.

“Water!” the boy choked. “The
Tray-Spot is flooded, and they’re down
there.”

“Who’s down there?” Carrington’s
words cut.

“The young fellow—Trevanion—and
Mr. Ned,” Ike sobbed.

Carrington’s ashy face worked curiously.

“And Richards?” he demanded.

“Come up and left ’em,” moaned the
boy.

John Carrington wheeled, strode limpingly,
and for the first time without a
crutch, into the house, snatched something
that glistened from the drawer of
his desk, and came running rapidly in
that uneven, limping way toward the
saddled horse.

“For pity’s sake, what are you going
to do?” Mrs. Kipley called out, as he
managed, by the aid of the horse block,
to get into the saddle.

The face that turned toward her was
distorted with fury, but the twisting lips
spoke only two words in a hoarsely guttural
cry: “My boy!” But in them was
anguish and revenge.

The Colonel shot forward like a shell
from a gun.

Kipley, mingling with the crowd
around the shaft house, picking up every
shred of information heavy-heartedly,
saw with consternation the bulky figure
pounding toward them on the Colonel.
He was beside the horse’s head when
John Carrington drew rein.

“They’ve gone down for ’em,” he
said, swiftly, and his voice was weighted40
with pity: “They’re going to get ’em
on the level above.”

John Carrington gave no sign of hearing
him. He was trying to dismount.

“Give me your shoulder,” he said,
sharply. “This cursed leg——” He
groaned as he came awkwardly and
heavily to the ground. Then, steadying
himself by Kipley’s shoulder, he hurried
in that lunging, uneven way to the
shaft.

He had flung the bridle automatically
over the Colonel’s head, and that sagacious
animal, well trained as a cavalry
horse, stood motionless, waiting.

Kipley told all he had learned of the
story, tersely, as he steadied him along.

Mr. Wade, waiting numbly by the
shaft, found himself confronted by two
men.

“You,” said a deep voice, strangling
with rage, “came up and left my son.”

Mr. Wade raised his tired eyes to
meet John Carrington’s bloodshot ones.

“They,” said Mr. Wade, mechanically,
“came up and left my nephew.”

Then the consciousness of who this
man was, and what Hastings had done,
awoke in him a sense of pride of blood
which restored him in voice and bearing
to some semblance of himself.

“My nephew,” he repeated, with a
touch of arrogance, “who refused to
save himself and leave your son and
your workman.” He straightened himself
up with a dignity whose assumed
calm hardly covered its pathos.

“As he would, naturally,” he finished.

John Carrington’s eyes softened.

“I thought he was that kind,” he said.
“I like him.”

Mr. Wade’s heart warmed to a man
who appreciated his nephew.

“Then my son would have done the
same thing for him, in his place,” John
Carrington added, proudly.

Young Carrington was a splendid
young fellow, Mr. Wade thought. His
sympathy swept out to his father.

“I’m sure of it,” he said. And the
two men’s hands met.

When Mr. Wade spoke again, it was
with a feeling of placing reliance in
John Carrington.

“Are they doing all they can?” he
said, simply. “You ought to know.”

Carrington’s mind swept like a microscope
over the details of the rescuers’
plans, as Kipley had given them to him.
“Tell me your side of it,” he said.

Mr. Wade told him mechanically.

Carrington pondered it.

“I’m inclined to think they are,” he
said, at last.

For the conviction forced itself upon
him that Richards would do his best to
rescue Hastings. And if there was
safety underground, Trevanion would
find it. Time was the uncertain factor.
If there was time!

Kipley brought a rough bench, and
the two men sat down.

If there was silence between them,
there was also the bond of a common
anxiety.

From the moment Richards had seen
the three men left on the seventh level
he had seen several other things clearly.

One was that it would be no longer
possible to parry the question of pumping
apparatus with Mr. Wade.

Another was that the only thing
which could make the possibility of his
continuing as manager of the Tray-Spot
worth a straw was the quick, well-planned
rescue of the three men. In the
reaction of relief from casualty, resourcefulness
now might plead for him.

And the last was that if Trevanion
did not have time to get them up the
first raise, they were caught in some
one of those other raises, from which
he had had the ladders removed only the
week before.

Everything depended on the progress
the three had been able to make, and
the rapidity with which the water was
coming.

When the cage dropped to the sixth
level, Richards knew from its solitude
that they had not been able to make the
first raise, and Richards’ men understood
that they were to do their best.

They ran to the second, calling down
as they uncovered it: no answer. And
the third: to hear only the hollow reverberation
of their own voices; to see by
the light of a falling candle the glint of41
water in the bottom. And the fourth:
Richards himself, hurrying along in advance
of his men toward the final raise
to the south, acknowledged that this was
a last and very slender hope.

As he hallooed down the raise the answering
cry came back as swiftly to his
ears as the sight of the three twinkling
lights to his eyes. If the candle in his
cap was a star of safety to them, those
three lights were relief to him.

With swift brevity he ordered the ladders,
then called down: “We’ll have
you up, all right.”

And up the blackness came Hastings’
voice: “Hurry, for God’s sake; it’s ankle
deep!”

The first ladder dropped swiftly to
the position, to be nailed in place by the
fastest man the Tray-Spot had. Three
minutes. The second one sped down
after it. Men stood by with ropes, if
ladders should prove too slow.

Seven minutes, and the third ladder
started down. This was rapid work, but
the ropes slid down, as well. The fourth
ladder touched the bottom of the hole.

The water was at their knees when
they saw it come. Trevanion had begun
to knot a rope around young Carrington’s
waist. He flung it off now, to
swing the slight young figure to his
shoulders, to set the stiff feet firmly on
the ladder. “I maun take him! ’E
can’t do it alone!” he said to Hastings,
as he swung himself up after the lad,
supporting him.

And it was, in truth, fidelity to young
Carrington, not hurry to save himself
before Hastings. Nor did Hastings misunderstand.
He would have gone last,
anyway.

But it seemed a long way to the top.
He was terribly stiff and wet and chilled,
grateful to the strong hands that lifted
him out at last.

He saw Trevanion ahead, half carrying
Ned, refusing to let anyone else
touch the lad.

It seemed to him that he followed
more because he was led along than because
of any will of his own. They
were in the cage now, going up, and the
cheers of the miners with them rose before
them.

It would mean but one thing to those
on the surface; a thing that made two
haggard-faced, gray-headed men stand
shaken with emotion as the cage came
in sight.

To Mr. Wade the other faces were
but a blur around Hastings; to Carrington
nothing was clear but his son’s
face, chilled blue-white, as the lad
leaned in utter weariness against Trevanion.

Neither man saw Richards, nor heard
his bluff “All safe!” But the waiting
crowd, heedless of old animosities for
the moment, took up the cheer. It
served as chorus when John Carrington,
catching Ned’s icy hands in his,
said, hoarsely: “Thank God!”—when
the lad, striving to smile his wonted
brave smile, answered: “I do, dad;”
when Trevanion, crying: “’E must
keep movin’!” swept young Carrington
along to where the Colonel stood patiently
waiting, and, lifting him into the
saddle, held him with one hand as he
ran alongside, urging the animal into a
gentle trot; when John Carrington, impatient
to follow, and turning for Kipley’s
shoulder to steady him, saw Mr.
Wade, his face pinched with suspense
and fatigue, resting rather heavily on
Hastings’ arm, saw Hastings, gray-drab
with fag, looking about for a vehicle of
some sort.

If John Carrington’s heartstrings
pulled tenaciously toward home, it was
not visible in the cordial insistence with
which he drove Hastings and Mr. Wade
to their car.

“I count on you both for lunch tomorrow,”
he called, as he left them at
that haven of refuge.

Then he gripped Kipley’s arm.

“Drive like the devil!” he whispered,
hoarsely.

The ride had shaken the chill from
young Carrington’s blood, but Trevanion
refused to leave him until he saw
him safely in the house.

At the door young Carrington turned
and laid his hand lightly and firmly on
Trevanion’s arm.

“You’re splendid, Trevanion,” he
said, gently; “I shan’t forget.”

42

And Trevanion, turning away, would
have given his heart’s blood for just
that.

Mrs. Kipley bore down upon them,
bustlingly energetic, a glass of whisky
in one hand and a telegram in the other.
Hemmy, red-eyed, lingered in the offing.

Young Carrington tossed off the
whisky, tore open the envelope, and,
calling to Trevanion, who was halfway
down the steps, sped to him and spoke
low and rapidly.

Trevanion nodded. Young Carrington,
coming back, was smiling rather
tremulously.

“Not a thing, thanks,” he said, to
Mrs. Kipley’s offer of assistance. “All
I need is a bath and a rest. In the
morning I shall be quite—myself.”

He laughed an odd, gay little laugh.

“You don’t feel any bone ache?” said
Mrs. Kipley, anxiously, as he went up
the stairs.

Young Carrington looked down gleefully.

“I feel—relieved,” he said.

“I don’t wonder,” said Mrs. Kipley,
to Hemmy, who was altering a determination
to enter a convent into a desire
to be a trained nurse.

But Mrs. Kipley and young Carrington
were not thinking of the same predicament.

For the telegram read:

Shall arrive Yellow Dog nine to-night;
your trunk with me.

E. Carrington.

John Carrington, his abused leg
stretched out on a chair in front of him,
was smoking a final cigar for the night,
in the big downstairs bedroom.

He was resting one elbow on his
desk; and the head that leaned upon his
hand was full of plans for his son’s future.
He was safe upstairs, thank God!
He was snug in bed and sleeping when
his father got home. And he left him
to sleep off his fatigue, though he was
impatient to talk with him.

The clock over the fireplace chimed
the half hour after nine. There was
the sound of quick steps on the veranda,
then in the hall. A murmur of
voices. One was Trevanion’s. “The
room at the head of the hall,” he heard
his undertone. Some one ran up the
stairs, and some one closed the hall door
gently and went down the steps.

John Carrington was out in the hall
the next instant. He heard the door of
Ned’s room open. He stumped up the
stairs.

Light came through a half-opened
door. A murmur of voices and laughing
greeting came to him.

Ned, fully dressed, as though he were
the newcomer, had his arms around
some one who was sitting up in bed.

“Dear old girl! What a brick you
are!” Carrington heard Ned say. “Trevanion
told me.”

“Ned!” he cried, uncomprehendingly.

The boy swung round joyously.

“Dad!” he shouted, and there was
glad greeting in his tone. “You bully
old dad!”

He caught his father by the hand and
shoulder with both his hands, but John
Carrington held him off mechanically.

For the figure sitting up in bed,
flushed, mischievous and laughing at his
bewilderment, was Ned!

The hands that grasped John Carrington’s
arm and shoulder gripped
him, shook him slightly.

“She’s been ripping, perfectly ripping,
dad, and I’m four months late, but be a
little glad to see me,” this Ned’s laughing
voice went on.

“She——” John Carrington stammered.

Ned waved a genial hand toward the
figure in the bed.

“Miss Elenore Carrington, the most
successful self-made man in history!”
he announced, with a flourish.

CHAPTER VII.

When Miss Elenore Carrington
opened her eyes the following morning,
it was to gaze contentedly from her bed
at a large, square, hotel-placarded object
in the center of her room.

Objectively, it was merely an uncommonly
good-sized trunk, but subjectively,
it stood for Femininity, sweetly
personal and newly reincarnated.

“But what do you suppose he put in?”43
murmured Miss Carrington. And uncertainty
became unbearable.

She shook her fist gayly at a masculine-looking
bathrobe hanging over the
back of a chair. “I won’t put you on
again, even to look!” she announced,
with a gayly menacing flourish.

She caught the coverings of the bed
around her, and was out in a great
white splash on the floor, fumbling
with the key in the lock.

The trunk lid flew open, and she
knelt, looking like a boyish little novice,
in the plain white night garment, with
the big splash of white spreading all
over the floor about her.

She had that floor strewn with her
treasures. Lovely frilly feminine garments,
dainty slippers all buckle and
heel, dear little everyday frocks and
lingerie blouses, and gowns for occasions
in the big trays beneath. She
laughed and blessed Ned as she delved
down.

And hats—actually all her hats! But
alack-a-day! She clutched her shorn
locks with a grimace. And that square
package—toilet things; useless hairpins
and unusable jeweled shell combs;
and here, in tissue paper—oh, the forethought
of Ned!—the very locks of
hair of which she had shorn herself so
recklessly, bound together by the hairdresser’s
skill into a lustrous coil that
had distinct possibilities.

She looked at it with an admiration
such as she had never felt when it was
growing on her own head.

She swathed herself in the laciest and
swirliest of pale blue silk negligées, and
sped to the mirror to experiment.

An hour later. Miss Elenore Carrington,
daintily fresh as a morning-glory,
brown hair coiled closely at the back of
her head and pompadoured loosely
around a face worthy of its best efforts;
garbed in a fetching little morning
frock of white linen elaborately
embroidered, and short enough to permit
the eye of man to rejoice over the
well-shaped chaussure which supported
a high-arched instep in a deliciously
restful way—Miss Carrington, in short,
not only in her right mind but in her
right clothes, stood looking out of her
window at a world glowing with the
glory of the September sun.

Her lips curved smilingly as she
thought of many things: of her father’s
surprise the night before, of the long,
long talk and the flood of explanations
which had lasted far into the night,
and brought them into a completeness
of understanding which had meant
happiness to them all.

Ned had told them what those
months in the East had done for him,
not only in technique but in inspiration;
how, returning to Paris, he
found that his salon portrait had
brought him a commission to paint a
certain crown prince that coming winter;
how Velantour, pleased as he was
himself, had shouted “Déjà!”—a much
prettier “déjà” than the famous one—and
had added: “Now you will paint
his soul in his face, his responsibilities
in his clothes, and his destiny in the
background.”

How, too, returning to Paris, he had
found Elenore’s letters, telling him that
things were going on successfully in her
imposture; and how, getting her things
together as hastily as possible, he had
come to relieve her on the fastest greyhound
afloat, determining remorsefully
to give up even the crown prince if his
father needed him.

Needed him! John Carrington was
so proud of his talent that he would
have cut off his right hand before he
would have kept him.

Then they had discussed the exigencies
of the present; how the thing was
to be played out. Elenore insisted that
no one should know; Ned that everyone
should; he wanted no more credit
that didn’t belong to him. John Carrington,
considering it the cleverest
thing that had ever happened, would
have blazoned it on the stars.

They compromised: first, that the
Kipleys should be told, a plan which
had everything in its favor; second, that
Hastings and Mr. Wade should know.
This was the battleground.

Even when Elenore had yielded the
question of Hastings, she objected
strenuously to Mr. Wade’s enlightenment.44
He wouldn’t understand. But
easygoing Ned turned dogged.

“If you had only seen him, you’d
know how appalling he’d think it,” Elenore
had defended.

“When I see him to-morrow, I’ll
meditate on the best way to break it
to him,” Ned had retorted.

“But you’ll wait a little,” she coaxed.

“Oh, I’ll give you time to get in a
bit of work,” he conceded.

Miss Elenore Carrington, looking out
of the window, grew suddenly dreamy-eyed.

Over on the far hill, a branch of hard
maple had turned brilliantly scarlet.
But it could hardly have been its reflection
that brought the delicate stain
into Miss Carrington’s cheeks. Oddly
enough, it was on that particular hill
that Hastings had planned to build his
bungalow.

It was a morning of merriment, of
buoyancy, of stupefactions.

Mr. Kipley was fairly swamped by
the last emotion. He sat on the steps
of the side porch, and only a medical
expert could have told that his condition
was not merely comatose.

All that saved Mrs. Kipley was the
urgency of preparing a suitable lunch
for “those New York folks.”

Even then she discovered herself doing
the most remarkable things. “I’ll
bake the ice cream next,” she remarked
to Hemmy. Hemmy, used to the startling
changes of romance, adjusted herself
to the situation with apparent ease—and
a new dream of bliss.

For had not Mr. Ned said, jubilantly:
“Jove, this air is pure ozone! I
want to paint everything in sight. You,
too, Hemmy, in that pink-checked
gown.”

Painters fell in love with their models
sometimes.

John Carrington fairly basked in
happiness. Only one thing troubled
him, and when he caught Elenore alone
for a moment that came out. He took
her hands in his and looked into her
blue eyes lovingly.

“I told you once,” he said, gently,
“that no daughter could be so dear to a
man as his son.”

“Yes, dad,” she said, frankly.

He bent and kissed her forehead.

“I was wrong,” he said.

Then they spoke of other things.

“How is young Mr. Carrington this
morning?” said Mr. Wade, stepping
into the trap, to Mr. Kipley, driving.
“None the worse for yesterday, I
hope?”

Mr. Kipley’s face contorted, as
though he were about to sneeze.

“He’s lookin’ about the same,” he
replied, and his voice sounded muffled.
He seemed to derive such inward satisfaction
from the phrase that he repeated
it: “He’s lookin’ about the
same. I don’t think it hurt him none.”
And immediately gave his attention to
his horses.

John Carrington was on the veranda
to receive them.

“This is a gala day,” he told them, as
he grasped their hands in warm welcome.
“My other child came home last
night.”

Hastings’ heart leaped.

“Your daughter?” said Mr. Wade,
politely. And with his words Elenore
came forward to meet them.

She had doffed the linen gown of the
morning for the delicately elaborate one
she had last worn at that farewell tea
in Paris.

There was the faintest suggestion of
shyness in the gracefully smiling welcome
she gave Mr. Wade, which suited
that particular old gentleman to a T.

“You have every reason to be proud
of both your children,” he said, affably,
to John Carrington.

“I am,” John Carrington replied, and
he meant it.

Hastings, wordlessly happy to feel
Elenore’s hand resting lightly in his,
pressed it tenderly as he tried to look
into the eyes he had so longed to see.

Her long lashes veiled them distractingly.

Then she raised them to his with a
certain laughing mockery which was
delicious but baffling.

45

“Have I changed much?” she demanded,
lightly.

“I shall have to look a long time to
find out,” said Hastings. His voice
shook a little.

She laughed with sweet spontaneity.

“I shall not waste myself on anyone
with such a disgracefully bad memory,”
she said, with mock reproach. “I shall
devote myself to your uncle.”

She turned to Mr. Wade and proceeded
to make her word good.

Mr. Wade found himself sitting on a
broad, shady veranda, talking to as
pretty a girl as he had seen in years;
talking, as he felt with a commendable
thrill of pride, his very best. What a
listener she was! How graceful! How
super-feminine! How ready-witted!

She agreed with him, and Mr. Wade
felt even more agreeably conscious than
usual of his own good judgment. She
disagreed daintily. It was exhilarating
to show her where she was wrong.

“If I were twenty years younger!”
said Mr. Wade to himself, which was
a little more than half the number he
should have stated, but what elderly
gentleman is exactly accurate in such
statements!

He looked sharply at Hastings, and
something in the divided attention his
nephew was giving John Carrington
seemed to please him.

There was a flutter of Hemmy’s
apron in the doorway.

“Ned will join us in the dining
room,” said John Carrington, genially.

Ned was, in fact, standing on its
threshold.

He greeted them with gay good fellowship.

“I’m glad to see you looking so well
after yesterday,” Mr. Wade assured
him.

Ned flashed a frank, bright smile at
him.

“I’m as fresh as though yesterday
had never happened,” he said, gayly,
“and we’re going to keep conversation
on pleasanter things through luncheon,
on Elenore’s account.”

Mr. Wade nodded. “Of course,” he
said, “we must not alarm the young
lady with what might have been.”

And the chatter that ensued was, in
truth, gay and bright and full of reminiscences
of the life the three young
people had enjoyed in Paris.

If Mr. Wade had ever tasted better
fried chicken, he had forgotten where,
and he praised it with an emphasis
that turned Mrs. Kipley, who was helping
Hemmy wait on table, a deep magenta
with suppressed pride.

He approved highly, too, of the
champagne cup, and when Elenore
confessed its concoction, declared gallantly
that that explained its excellence.

“Indeed, I imagine that you succeed
in whatever you do,” he added, as the
string to his floral bouquet.

They were at the coffee-and-cordial
stage of proceedings now, and Mrs.
Kipley and Hemmy had disappeared on
their laurels.

“She does, Mr. Wade,” said Ned,
gayly, “and she attempts appallingly
difficult things at that. Would you like
to hear about her star performance?”

“I would, indeed,” said Mr. Wade,
heartily.

And Elenore, with a look at her
brother, knew that the moment had
come.

“Then I shall leave you to your
cigars,” she said, lightly, pushing back
her chair, in the instinct to escape.

For back of the lightness, excitement,
altogether too insecurely barred, was
making a dash for liberty.

But Ned was on his feet as well, and
caught her firmly but lightly around the
waist as she tried to pass him.

“You’ll have to stay and help me
out,” he said, with mock reproach.
“How do you expect a man who only
arrived last night to tell it straight?”

Even then they thought he must have
mis-spoken himself.

But Elenore turned with her hand on
his shoulder and faced them buoyantly.

“There was once a Rising Genius,
who had one great, glorious opportunity,”
she began. “He had, too, a sister
whom the gods hadn’t dowered with
talent of any kind; and a father——”

“Who not only fractured his leg,”
John Carrington broke in, “but got
fractious in other ways as well. And,46
not knowing of the opportunity, insisted
on his son’s coming home.”

“So the sister, who was perfectly
bully, and the pluckiest girl——” Ned
began.

But Elenore interposed.

“He was perfectly willing to come,”
she insisted to them. “Don’t forget
that.” She slipped from his arm and
swept them the daintiest of courtesies.

She touched the elaborate chiffon
quillings of her skirt with daintily approving
fingers. “I never knew the
sustaining and soothing influence of
feminine attire until I was bereft of it,”
she assured them, laughingly. “I shall
be distractingly fond of frills all the
rest of my life. Wasn’t it horrid underground!”
she flashed; and they
heard the swish of her retreating skirts.

Hastings gripped Ned suddenly by
the arm.

“You weren’t down the mine with
me yesterday?” he demanded.

“Pullman, Lower 8, from Chicago,”
said that young gentleman, serenely.

“Then I shall be your brother-in-law,”
he ejaculated, and vanished like
a shot.

Mr. Wade’s expression approached
imbecility.

“Do you mean to tell me——” he began,
numbly.

“That I only came last night, but my
sister has been here all summer,” said
Ned, concisely.

The air came in refreshingly through
the opened windows. Elenore was
standing, one arm on the back of a
chair. She smiled slightly as Hastings
came toward her impetuously.

“It was quite a composite speech,
wasn’t it?” she said.

He covered the hand on the back of
the chair with his own.

“I can’t realize it,” he said. “You—all
that time.”

“It seemed quite a long time, too,”
she confessed.

“You underground!” he went on. “I
should have died of anxiety if I had
suspected it.”

“I wanted to tell you dreadfully,”
she murmured. “There’s no harm in
owning now that I was afraid.”

The hand that held hers closed over
it more tightly.

“There’s no harm now,” he said,
tensely, “in telling me if you meant
what you said: that you thought Elenore
cared for me.”

“There’s no particular harm now,”
she parodied, daringly, with downcast
eyes, “in your telling Elenore now what
you told her then.”

He swept her into his arms with a
tender forcefulness. “That I love her.
Elenore! Elenore!”

The full red lips that his own found,
breathlessly, were mysteriously, maddeningly
sweet. And those deep blue
eyes—what marvelous things they confessed
to him!

“The dear little bungalow!” he whispered.
“But we needn’t wait for it,
Elenore. Marry me soon, and we’ll
build it afterward.”

She laughed deliciously.

The sound of steps in the hall came
to them, and Hastings drew her to the
vantage ground of a corner as Mr.
Wade and the Carringtons, père et fils,
came in view outside the windows to
seat themselves comfortably in the big
veranda chairs.

“And,” said Mr. Wade, in high good
humor, and evidently continuing a conversation
begun at the table, “it
shouldn’t be difficult for you and your
son-in-law to arrange the management
of the two mines amicably between
you.”

“Aren’t you getting on rather rapidly?”
John Carrington demanded, with
a twinkle in his eye.

“Not as rapidly as Laurence would
like to, I’ll wager,” Mr. Wade said, with
confidence.

Then he polished his eyeglasses with
his handkerchief. “I have always had
a great admiration for the heroines of
Shakespeare—Rosalind, in particular,”
he said, with a hint of pedantic precision;
“but I consider Miss Elenore
more charming still.”

“My idea, exactly,” murmured Hastings.

“As long as you’ve settled it all for47
them, you two,” said Ned, with confidential
raillery, “perhaps you’d better
hurry up the great event, so it can take
place before I go back to Paris. Everything
has to be sacrificed to my career,
you know.”

He spoke with light mockery.

Hastings’ arm tightened around Elenore,
and his pleading lost none of its
force because it was silent.

The head on his shoulder gave a sudden
gay, bewitching little nod.

“We consent to sacrifice ourselves,”
Hastings called, jubilantly.

And the sound of applause drifted
in through the open windows.

THE SONG

48

MRS. MASSINGBYRD
INTERFERES
By Mary H. Vorse

WHAT makes the boom
go sheering up in the
air in that silly way?”
Mrs. Massingbyrd
asked me.

“It’s trying to
gooseneck,” I told
her. “And if you
would like me to take the tiller——”
Now, how foolish this suggestion was, I
ought to have known.

“Not at all,” Mrs. Massingbyrd
briskly cut me short, pulling the tiller
smartly toward her to emphasize her refusal.

The boat jibed, and the next thing
we were both in the water. Mrs.
Massingbyrd’s shining head came to the
surface a few feet from mine. She
shook the water from her eyes, gasped
for breath once or twice, and then with
a magnificent affectation of composure:

“Something told me I ought to wear
my bathing suit,” she remarked, reflectively.

“It was vanity told you,” I replied
with irritation. Nothing had told me I
ought to wear mine. It was just like
Lydia Massingbyrd to wear a bathing
suit to get capsized in. I’ve never
known a woman who so infallibly
landed on her feet.

“I think,” she continued, complacently,
as we struck out for the shore,
not far distant, “I chose a very nice
place for spilling us. I know women
who would have been capable of doing
it in the middle of Long Island
Sound!”

“It would have been still more considerate
if you’d chosen a spot near the
mainland to show your seamanship,”
I suggested, with polite sarcasm.

“I thought that all wrecks always
took place near Huckleberry Island. I
thought that was one of the things one
did.” Her voice was a trifle aggrieved,
she smiled at me, a smile like a
little flickering flame.

“She needn’t,” I thought, “try to put
the comether on me.” Suspenders are
in the way when swimming, and my
heavy, rubber-soled shoes helped to
spoil my temper.

“Of course,” I gloomily returned,
“our lunch is now at the bottom of the
Sound.” I knew that would fetch her.
I have never seen a woman who has so
retained a child’s unimpaired appetite.
Mrs. Massingbyrd turned an uneasy
eye on the catboat, which, buoyed by its
sail, was floating on its side like some
great, awkward, wounded bird.

Mrs. Massingbyrd’s feet struck the
sandy beach off Huckleberry Island.

“But we can’t sit here all day, you
know, on a desert island, with nothing
to eat,” she remonstrated, as she made
her way to the shore. “You must do
something about it, Bobby. I call it
tragic, simply tragic, to think of all that
good lunch put out of our reach.”

She was by now quite on dry land,
and with great expedition pulled the
shell pins from her lovely and extraordinary
hair.

The jealous say that Mrs. Massingbyrd’s
strength, like Samson’s, rests
in her hair. It is that meek, silvery
gold color that usually has neither kink
nor curl, but in her case it curled riotously,
broke out at the nape of her neck
in absurd babyish ringlets and at her
temples.

49

“So that was why you upset us?” I
asked, irritably. “I would have taken
your word for it that it did.”

“Did what?” she queried, rising
promptly to the bait.

“Come down to your knees, I mean.”

“You might know that not for anything
in the world, with hair as thick
and as hard to dry as mine, would I
wet it unnecessarily!” she flashed.

“It’s a mercy it’s so fine,” I quoth,
maliciously, “or you would never get
it up at all.” Mrs. Massingbyrd is notoriously
vain of her wonderful hair.

“You might have spared yourself all
the trouble,” I continued, cuttingly, as
I took off my collar, and began on my
shoes. “It’s not nearly as nice a color
all soaked and wet; in fact, it’s rather
unpleasant and seaweedy!”

“Wait until it’s dry,” she triumphed,
radiantly. “You may in the end be
glad you came. But I won’t!” she
continued. “There’s nothing in it for
me! You’re not going to present a
sight for sore eyes now or at any other
portion of the day! And there’s nothing
to eat!”

“You’re a vain and greedy woman,
Lydia Massingbyrd,” I said, severely.
“And it would serve you right if the
lockers of Mason’s boat were empty instead
of being garnished with cans of
soup and meat, as I suspect them to be.”
And I started forth to rescue the capsized
boat, but the tide had carried it on
the reef, the mast caught between two
rocks, and, already strained as it was, it
cracked and broke.

And I was due to meet my wife and
some other friends off Rye in a couple
of hours. That’s what comes of going
off on a lady’s sailing party, each man
to be sailed down by a girl. A foolish
idea, and hatched out, you may be sure,
in the crazy pates of Felicia and her
friend, Lydia Massingbyrd.

I did what I could for the poor boat.
It’s a light little thing, an eighteen-foot
cat, and, as I’ve often told Mason,
heavily oversparred. I got her on the
beach without much trouble, while my
companion inquired anxiously, from
time to time, as to the state of the
larder.

I found I was right. There was
soup, and shortly I was warming it by
means of a wire cleverly slung around
it and a wooden handle. For, luckily,
my match case was watertight.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,”
said I, taking my companion into
favor again.

“Necessity is the mother of indigestion!”
she retorted, and I saw her mind
was back with our shipwrecked flesh-pots.
“I can’t bear canned things!”

She spread her long, wet hair around
her like a mantle; the corners of her
mouth drooped with a pathetic quiver,
changed their mind and flickered out
into a radiant little smile, which in its
turn gave way to a long chuckle.

“I never quite understood about jibing,”
she remarked. “But now I understand
perfectly. It’s about the
suddenest thing I know. I’ve a very
objective mind. A thing has to be put
before me actually, in the flesh, for me
to comprehend it. That’s what I shall
tell the reporters.”

“Reporters?” I wondered.

“Reporters, of course,” she repeated.
“And the longer we’re out here, the
more there’ll be! They won’t begin to
hunt for us until to-night. It’s a good
thing Felicia is my lifelong friend;” and
Mrs. Massingbyrd laughed again. The
situation had none of the serious aspects
to her that it had to me. Of course
Felicia was Lydia Massingbyrd’s friend,
but no woman cares to have her husband
absent and missing with another
woman, and what with the anxiety and
reporters and all—no, I didn’t look forward
to the next two or three days.

Mrs. Massingbyrd’s spirits rose during
lunch.

“After a swim canned things aren’t
really so awful,” she conceded. “I suppose
they’ll tell the police and get out
searchlights. I’ve had most things
happen to me, but this is quite brand
new.”

“One would think you were a popular
actress,” I complained.

“Well, so, in a way, I am,” she philosophized.

Her hair was drying fast, and hung
about her a dress of living gold. Her50
black silk bathing suit fitted her closely
in all the places it ought not to. I
marveled that so slender a little creature
could be at the same time so deliciously
rounded. Her face, ever so
slightly tanned, had all sorts of delicious
golden tones, her eyes were surprisingly
blue and as candidly innocent as those
of a delightful child. In her short skirt
and her golden hair, so meek in its
color, so wayward in its curls, she
looked like a little girl.

“Lydia Massingbyrd,” I found myself
saying spontaneously, “I forgive you
everything! And it’s a lucky thing for
me I’m deeply in love with Felicia.”

“I told you you’d be glad you came,”
she said, joyously.

“It was worth the price,” I generously
conceded. “Your lovely mane is all
you have pretended it was. ‘It’s all
wool’!”

“A sail!” cried Mrs. Massingbyrd,
pointing to a yawl that even as she
spoke had rounded the island.

“It’s the Phillips’ yawl,” I agreed.

“Conscientiously, I don’t suppose we
can stay shipwrecked any longer than
we can help. We’ll have to give up the
reporters!” There was a note of disappointment
in her voice. “Shout, Bobby!”

I shouted.

“They don’t hear us. What we need
is a flag of distress. Wave, wave your
coat!” Then catching her long hair in
both her hands, she held it far above
her head and waved it like a golden
banner. The wind caught it and played
with it; in her eager abandon she
looked like some Mænad, some fire
spirit—choose your own simile for her,
but in that moment out there in the full
sunlight she had I know not what touch
of the superterrestrial.

I believe at that moment it was given
to me to see her at the highest point of
her somewhat amazing beauty. As she
stood there her hand was holding her
wonderful hair above her head; she was
for a moment outside the pale of
everyday womanhood. She was, I tell
you, something to commit follies for.

They saw us. The boat put about.
Mrs. Massingbyrd let fall the most original
and the most beautiful flag that
ever waved distress.

“They’ve recognized me,” she remarked
with satisfaction. She held a
strand of hair high above her head and
let it fall. “There isn’t anyone who
could have done that.”

“Or who would have done it if they
could,” I added, severely.

“Or who would have done it if they
could,” she agreed. “Not all women
are so conscientious as to what they owe
mankind.”

“Indeed they are not,” I put in, sarcastically.

She was on her knees, gathering her
hairpins and combs.

“Let your light so shine before men,”
said she, cheerfully. “A city that’s
built on a hill cannot be hid. Don’t put
your candle under a bushel.”

I was putting on my shoes—now
fairly well dried—and my ruined collar,
just to show I had one.

“I suppose you’re the vainest woman
on the seacoast,” I scolded. I am the
only man in all Lydia Massingbyrd’s
acquaintance who never flatters her, and
who from time to time gives her the
great benefit of hearing the whole
truth about herself.

“I suppose I am, and good reason,
too;” and there was some heat in her
voice. Her back was toward me; all I
could see of her was a mass of silvery
gold.

“Now, what shall I do?” she asked.
“There’s plenty of time to put up my
hair any which way—it would look
horrid—I look so nice like this—now,
what would you do?”

“You ought to put it up,” I conclusively
told her. “It’s an indecent exposure.
One would think, to look at
you, that you were playing tableaux of
Lady Godiva.”

“I shall never get such another
chance,” she implored.

“Put up your hair, Lydia Massingbyrd,”
I commanded.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” she
moaned. “And now just as there’s going
to be any good in it you bully me.”
Her mouth dropped again, she looked
at me with appealingly candid eyes.

51

“Oh, have it your way,” I growled.
“Show off before Phillips, and Almington,
and little Cecilia Bennett, and Mrs.
Day, and the Drake boys!”

“Almington!” exclaimed Mrs. Massingbyrd.
“That settles it!” and she
resolutely shook out her hair again.

“Almington!” I exclaimed, in amazement.
“Why does Almington settle
it?”

“I can’t bear the man!” cried she,
stamping her foot.

“Oh, well, if this is by way of punishment——”

“Cecilia Bennett’s sister is one of my
dearest friends.” Apparently she
thought this was an explanation.

“And so you want Cecilia to see you
with your hair down,” I sneered.

“Men are too dense!” was all she
vouchsafed me. “He’s a popinjay of a
professional heart-breaker.”

“I suppose you’ll know what they’ll
say about you?” I tried another tack.

“I know what they’ll think,” she told
me, with her inimitable calm.

“If you have the nerve, it’s no business
of mine,” I conceded.

“Felicia’ll be so busy scolding me
that she’ll forget all about you,” she
suggested, naïvely.

“There’s something in that,” I was
manly enough to confess.

The boat now lay-to in the shallow
water. Phillips hailed us.

“You’ll have to put your hair up,” I
told her. “They’ve got no dinghy.
We’ll have to swim for it.”

“And wet myself all over again? No,
indeed; you’ll have to carry me,” she
calmly announced. “They can come
inshore as far as that.”

“You’ll have to square me with Felicia,”
I muttered.

Laughingly Lydia Massingbyrd made
a rope of her hair, to keep it safe from
the water, that she might the better
blind the poor wretches in the boat with
its radiance. So carry her I did. As
we were well out in the water I heard
the snap of Almington’s camera.

“Won’t Felicia be in a wax?” the
incorrigible woman giggled in my ear.

“It’s lucky for you it’s me,” I said
to her, critically. “Even as it is, it’s
most imprudent!”

She looked at me, an impudent gleam
in her eye.

“I’m mighty careful in choosing my
company when I’m cast away on a
desert island,” said she.

II.

“I don’t understand women at all,”
I rather rashly confessed to Felicia.

“That’s all the better for us—I mean
for me,” she threw back at me.

“But I do understand you’re all a
matchmaking lot,” I continued, severely.

“Oh, we’re a matchmaking lot, are
we?” Felicia’s tone was one of flattering
interest. She was arranging a bit
of vine that had somehow gotten torn
down. She now turned toward me, the
picture of innocent surprise.

“You like matchmaking for the fun
of the thing—just as a man likes shooting,”
I went on. “You’d marry any
person to any other person, regardless
of age, position or——”

“Sex?” suggested Felicia, politely.

“Suitability,” I amended; “just for
the sake of having a wedding.”

“You’re talking now in the manner
and tone of a husband,” Felicia accusingly
told me. “Anyone who heard
your voice afar off would know you
were one.” I paid no attention to Felicia’s
interruption.

“If I’m not right, kindly tell me if
Lydia Massingbyrd wasn’t matchmaking
when she got you to ask Almington
and little Cecilia Bennett down here;
and if you weren’t matchmaking when
you consented to ask them.”

“Undoubtedly it’s because Lydia is
anxious to arrange a marriage between
them she wanted them here.” Felicia’s
tone was so guilelessly axiomatic that it
made me uncomfortable.

“Has she told you?”

“She’s told me nothing,” Felicia assured
me. “If she’d told me her reasons
I couldn’t, as she very well knows,
have asked them.”

“And that’s why I say,” I concluded,
“that I don’t understand women. First52
Lydia Massingbyrd told me she couldn’t
bear Almington. Then she did her little
Venus-rising-from-the-sea act for his
benefit. And then, I tell you, Felicia, if
ever a mortal woman flirted, it was your
little golden-locked friend. And, Jove,
she was pretty!”

“What Lydia Massingbyrd needs is a
husband,” Felicia declared, “who would
keep her from tampering with other
people’s! You’ve been utterly ruined
ever since you went around that day
carrying Lydia all over the place. You
talk about her hair in your sleep.”

Again I ignored Felicia and her unjust
accusations. “Poor little Cecilia
Bennett! Between admiration and fear
she was almost frightened to death.”

“Cecilia is a nice, upstanding, decent
little girl,” Felicia asserted, aggressively.

“So she is, so she is,” I hastened to
agree. “And that is why—she being
only two months out of Farmington—you
want to marry her to a man like
Almington!”

“What’s wrong with Almington?”
asked Felicia, still in her most guileless
manner, which I have learned to know
is the most finished form of impertinence.

“What’s the matter with Almington?”
I exclaimed. “Oh, nothing at all! He’s
the stuff perfect husbands are made of.
He’s ripe, is Almington, for a little, innocent
flower of a girl like Cecilia.”

“Almington’s lots of money,” said
Felicia, reflectively; “and Cecilia’s
mother’s keen for it. You know there’s
no end to the Bennett girls, and they’re
poor as anything.”

I maintained a disgusted silence, for
I had an inkling that Felicia would have
been charmed with an outbreak from
me about the iniquity of sacrificing
young girls on the altar of Mammon.
I therefore resolved to commit myself
no further.

It was at this moment that Mrs. Massingbyrd
arrived.

The two ladies embraced. Then Felicia
held her friend at arms’ length.

“Remember,” she warned, “no Croquemitaine!
I’ve done two things for
you—what you wanted me to—and
I’ve asked no questions. So go ahead,
but no Lady Godiva here under my roof-tree.
No, nor any coming out shrieking
burglars at two with your hair down,
Lydia Massingbyrd!” And Felicia
gave her friend an affectionate shake.

I had the sense that there had passed
between the two women intelligences far
beyond what appeared on the surface;
a feeling that there were in the air all
kinds of things—and that these things
had passed over my head. In fact, I
felt hopelessly at a disadvantage, as a
man so often does in the presence of
his wife and his wife’s intimate friend;
in a word, I suppose I felt like a husband,
and I was glad enough to join
young Drake, who had come up in the
same train with little Cecilia Bennett.

As we strolled off together—

“There’s something awfully nice
about a really fresh young girl, when
one’s been knocking around with older
women a bit,” he confided to me.

“There’s nothing as charming as an
unspoiled girl,” I agreed. “And Cecilia
is that.”

“I don’t know but the French way is
the best. I hate a young girl who’s
too darned knowing.”

Now, I knew that Ellery Drake had
made calf love to Felicia when Felicia
herself had been a young girl of the
kind he so eloquently described as “too
darned knowing”; and that he had in
vain followed the fascinating wake of
Mrs. Massingbyrd. So it was not
without malice I replied:

“Oh, the less a little, young girl
knows the better; give me a tabula rara
any time.”

Ellery Drake looked at me sharply.
“I shouldn’t go as far as that,” he said.
“But I like them like Cecilia—so awfully
interested in things you know, and a
little bit shy, and all that. Gee! Did
you see her stare when you toted Mrs.
Massingbyrd into the boat the other
day?”

“No wonder,” I said. “You don’t see
things like that every day.”

“She’s a wonder, Mrs. Massingbyrd”—Drake
was full of enthusiasm—“but
almost too spectacular for a quiet man.53
I think Cecilia was really a little
shocked.”

I had noted poor little Cecilia’s what-have-we-here-and-whatever-is-the-world-coming-to
expression.

There’s nothing quite as conventional
as your properly-brought-up young person;
and Cecilia was as perfectly turned
out a specimen as a wise mother and a
good school could accomplish. She
was, in fact, the beau ideal of the young
person for whom we keep our magazines
spotlessly pure, and in whose behalf
we cry aloud when a play is not
better than it should be.

“She said afterward,” Drake told me,
“that she felt as if she’d been reading
one of those society papers that haven’t
the best reputation in the world.”

“I didn’t know she was up to that,” I
remarked.

“Oh, you don’t know Cecilia. She’s
really very funny when you get her
alone,” Drake protested. “I’ve known
her ever since I was knee-high, so, you
see, she’s not a bit shy with me. When
she was a little kid, I’d no idea she’d
turn out so pretty. The trouble is, they
get spoiled so soon,” Drake gloomily
went on—“spoiled and knowing and
worldly.”

“You can’t expect a flower to keep
in bud forever.”

“But you can train it to be a nice,
sweet, modest, homekeeping plant, or
an exotic thing trained for the flower
show.”

He puffed at his cigarette. I saw he
thought he’d gotten off a good thing.
When I’m with Drake I understand
only too well the kind of amusement I
so frequently afford Felicia. He enhanced
the resemblance by now saying:

“I don’t understand women at all!”

“No?” I encouraged him.

“What the devil is a sweet little thing
like Cecilia Bennett doing messing
around with a fellow like Almington?”

“He’ll soon take off the bloom,” I
said.

If the women were going to match-make,
it occurred to me I could do a
little work of the kind off my own bat,
and I was pleased with my dexterity
when Drake enthusiastically snatched
at the bait.

“You bet he will,” he said. “He’s
not the man for a young girl like Cecilia;
nothing more than a baby, you
know, who doesn’t know how to take
care of herself. Though I’ve nothing
against Almington. He’s all right for
married women.”

“A perfect companion for Felicia and
Mrs. Massingbyrd,” I sarcastically
threw in, but my sarcasm didn’t touch
Ellery Drake, for he said, simply:

“Oh, he’s all right for them!”

“So,” I said, magnanimously, “let
them take care of him. He’s coming
down to-night, and you keep Cecilia out
of his clutches.”

Roars of mirth, in which I distinguished
the voices of my wife, Mrs.
Massingbyrd and Cecilia, now interrupted
us, and they all came running
across the lawn like a troop of charming,
grown-up children.

Indeed, Felicia and Mrs. Massingbyrd
seemed younger than their little
companion. I’ve told you that Lydia
Massingbyrd has the youngest, most
candid eyes I’ve ever seen; and she and
Felicia ran down the lawn with the
abandon of those who know their
world.

Spontaneity is one of civilization’s
most perfect flowers, and Cecilia wasn’t
as yet civilized enough to have acquired
it. She followed the others with a certain
dry rigidity that I found perfectly
charming for her age and the time she
had been in the world.

“No, no; you can’t come,” said Mrs.
Massingbyrd, waving us back. “You’ll
know soon enough. Don’t tell, Cecilia;”
and she caught the child by the arm and
carried her along, as they made for the
stable.

There was something preposterous in
the air. I have known Felicia long
enough to recognize a certain irresponsible
little laugh as a danger signal.
Presently the children came back, Mrs.
Massingbyrd with Cecilia still tucked
under her wing.

“Yes, it’s the strangest thing,” she
was chattering, “the impression I produce
on strangers! First they always54
call me Miss Massingbyrd, then, later,
they always ask where Massingbyrd is!
Not one person in a thousand will believe
I’m a real, bona-fide, dyed-in-the-wool
widow!”

Cecilia’s eyes were open wide. I
could see in her attitude that she didn’t
think it good taste to joke about being
taken for a divorcée. Nor did I, and
I wondered what my friend was up to,
for generally Mrs. Massingbyrd adapts
herself to her company with all the flexibility
in the world.

I followed them into the house, and I
was in time to see as pretty a little tableau
as ever was presented on the stage.

Discovered on the piazza was Almington,
and at sight of him my little
ingénue, Cecilia, hesitated, and was lost
in a sea of blushes.

Mrs. Massingbyrd ran forward and
greeted him gayly and gladly. Mamma’s
training came to Cecilia’s aid; she
gathered herself together and, in spite
of burning cheeks and very bright eyes,
advanced to meet Almington in good
order.

He greeted her pleasantly but indifferently,
and turned eagerly to Mrs.
Massingbyrd.

“You’re none the worse for your shipwreck,
I hope,” he asked.

“I never had a pleasanter day,” Mrs.
Massingbyrd assured him. “It’s not
often I get a chance to display my only
beauty free and unrebuked.”

“Your pictures came out well,” said
Almington. “I couldn’t wait for the
film to be through. I had it developed
at once;” and he felt in his pocket.

Mrs. Massingbyrd held out her rosy
palm, then drew it back.

“No, not here,” she decided. “Come
down to the rose garden and show them
to me there. After all, they’re just for
you and me.” And it was with a self-satisfied
air, the air of a conqueror, that
Almington unfolded his long legs and
followed Mrs. Massingbyrd.

I looked at my companions. Cecilia’s
cheeks were still hot. I saw she was a
little bewildered, but she acted like a
little thoroughbred, and made pretty,
perfunctory, young-girl talk with Felicia,
whose face told me nothing; and
with Drake, who looked profoundly
pleased.

Mrs. Massingbyrd and her cavalier
were strolling up and down in the rose
garden at the foot of the terrace. Coquetry
was in every movement of her
little blond head. Conquest was written
large on Almington.

In pursuance of my own little policy,
“There goes a lost man,” I remarked.

“He’s been lost so often and won so
often that it doesn’t matter much, does
it?” said Felicia, lightly. “So if it’s only
he that’s lost, we won’t have far to look
for him.”

“I thought Mrs. Mass. had turned
him down,” remarked Ellery Drake.

“It hasn’t apparently prevented his
turning up again,” Felicia replied, pertly.

I looked at Cecilia. Mamma’s training
held good; there was a visible strain
about her attitude, but she did her best
to seem natural. It was Cecilia’s first
time under fire, and she did her superior
officers credit. But there was that about
the still babyish lines of her mouth
which showed me that she longed to be
away by herself and have a good cry.
Drake couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Come on, Cecilia, let us go for a
walk, too,” he suggested. And while
I blessed him for his kindness I thought
the “too” unfortunate.

When they were out of earshot I
turned severely to Felicia.

“I don’t consider the Torture of the
Innocents a pretty game,” I told her.

“Tell that to Lydia,” was all I got
out of my wife.

“I thought Cecilia’s sister was a
great friend of Lydia’s,” I asked.

“Exactly,” Felicia assented, dryly.

III.

“For a spotless child of heaven, Cecilia’s
playing the game pretty well,” I
mused, as I watched her at dinner.
During the hour of dressing she had
pulled herself wonderfully together.
She held her little round chin high in
the air and devoted herself to Drake
with all the aplomb of a Felicia.

The cup of bitterness held its touch55
of sweet to her. Even if one must suffer,
one was out in the world, one was
living, was what I read in her attitude.
But as I have said, I don’t pretend to
understand women; still, I’m much
mistaken if, during dinner, at least, she
didn’t have a good time.

She ignored Almington as much as
she could in a general conversation.

“Mrs. Massingbyrd can have you,”
her attitude seemed to say. “I fight for
no man.”

I looked at Drake. If he wanted to
keep his rose in the bud, he had better
carry her away quickly to a fresher atmosphere.

At the end of dinner the ladies exchanged
nods and smiles. I saw that
an explanation was forthcoming for the
mysterious visit to the stable.

They had been preparing what to me
seemed not unlike a little amateur Walpurgisnacht.

It was, of course, Lydia Massingbyrd’s
idea. Nobody else, not even Felicia,
could have been wrong-minded
enough to want to slide downhill in
summer. My coachman’s children
have a species of roller sled on which
they daily endanger their lives by coasting
down the steep macadamized road
which leads from my house.

“I saw them on my way from the
station,” proclaimed Mrs. Massingbyrd,
triumphantly; “and saw at once their
possibilities.”

“Will you steer me, Mr. Curtis?”
asked Cecilia, turning her back on Almington,
and giving poor Drake a killing
glance; and I thought I surprised a
glance of malicious intelligence pass between
Mrs. Massingbyrd and my wife.

Now, I know that, told in plain
words the morning after, most of our
maddest fun seems flat and puerile
enough. I know that a decent married
man of my age and a lady killer of
Almington’s ought to have poohpoohed
this childish sport, and sat with our
cigars and our whiskies and sodas on
the piazza.

I suppose you think that’s what you
would have done. But I can tell you, if
you had dined with Felicia and Mrs.
Massingbyrd, you’d have been caught
up in the fire of their folly. It’s contagious,
more than anything I know.
In the glamour of their lovely nonsense
sliding downhill on the coachman’s
children’s roller sled would have seemed
an appropriate and delightful thing—or
sliding down the banister or the cellar
door, if it had been their mad whim to
do that.

Haven’t you ever been a kid since
you were grown up? Did all your fooling
stop before you were out of college?
I’m sorry for you if it’s so. I
hope, for my part, that Felicia and Mrs.
Massingbyrd and their like will make
me forget my years for a long time to
come. And I hope often to wake up in
the sober light of the next day wondering
just what magic it was that had
turned back the hand of time for me,
that I could find merriment in sliding
down a macadamized hill on a roller
sled.

The night was cold, with a bit of a
breeze; there was a moon, and the glow
from Felicia’s gayety and Lydia Massingbyrd
lasted my little companion on
our first swift, delirious slides.

It wasn’t coasting, but it was exciting
enough, as one went very fast. And
coming up we piled into a cart to be
drawn up the hill. But after a few
slides the flame of my little friend’s gayety
flickered out, and as the others were
piling into the cart, “Let’s walk,” Cecilia
suggested. Youth is ever selfish
in its distress, and what did Cecilia care
whether my legs were tired or not
climbing that hill? Her little flock of
conventions had come fluttering back
to her. Her doll was sawdust, and there
was a bad taste in her mouth.

Now, of course, you know that
there’s nothing more revolting than the
folly of others when you yourself are
serious. Haven’t you been annoyed
time and again by the senseless and
meaningless good spirits of the people
next door? I’m sure you have. And
just as often you’ve felt a certain compassion
for the people who give you
sour looks and grim glances when
you’re having the time of your life.

So it was with ever-increasing disapproval
of my wife’s merriment and56
Mrs. Massingbyrd’s abandon that Cecilia
walked up the hill with me.

“I think,” she confided to me, sadly,
“I was born old!”

“There are some people who stay
babies forever,” I encouraged her.

“They are the fortunate ones,” Cecilia
said, gloomily. “I never have been
able to enjoy things long at a time.
Even our good times at school used to
seem childish to me. And I thought
when I came out and was among grown
people——”

“That things would be different,” I
supplemented. “And you find it’s just
the same.”

“Just the same,” she agreed, in a
gratified tone. “I feel as old as I did
at school!”

“Some people are born with a realization
of the futility of pleasure,” I went
on, trying to voice Cecilia’s mood.

“I suppose it’s that,” she sighed.
“When I was at school I thought of the
world as a playground where I could
amuse myself with the others.”

“And instead, you find that you’re
only learning a different kind of lesson,
and play is as uninteresting as ever?”

“Yes, it’s just like another kind of
school, and the lessons harder to learn—and
of less use when you’ve learned
them!” There was a pathetic note in
her voice.

“You’re very different from other
girls, Miss Bennett,” I felt was an appropriate
and comforting thing to say.

“I know I am, and it’s a great misfortune
to be so,” she acknowledged,
with becoming modesty.

“But it has its compensations.”

“It’s very lonely,” she said. “No one
has ever understood all I think and feel.
Mamma never has, nor the girls.”

“And since you’ve been out?”

“Since I’ve been out I met some one—once”—the
once threw the time of
meeting in the remote past—“some one
I thought understood me—but I was
disappointed.”

I murmured something sympathetic.

“Because I’m young in years people
think I can’t see things,” she cried, with
a little rising temper.

“You have the best possible vantage,
then, to observe the world as it really
is.”

“And I do see things as they really
are, and many things!” and she clinched
her little fists under cover of the darkness.
Things were getting somewhat
strenuous for me, so I brought our conversational
boat to smoother waters.

“You make me think a little of Ellery
Drake,” I said. (Machiavelli to
the front!) “Because he seems so simple
and direct; shallow people don’t
take the trouble to understand him. But
you’ve seen, of course——”

“Yes,” she assented; and I saw she
was interested.

“What a lonely time he has of it,
and under his apparent simplicity how
much depth there is.”

“I’ve known him all my life—but I’ve
never really known him—that is, what
I call knowing a person.” There was
a great deal of intensity in Cecilia’s
voice. “Ah, how hard it is to really
know any—and so few realize it.” The
atmosphere was getting a little rarefied,
so I was glad of the diversion caused
by the two roller sleds whiffling by us.

“We’re racing,” called Mrs. Massingbyrd.
“If we win, I’m to grant a boon
to Jack Almington.”

“He’ll probably ask her to take down
her hair,” said Machiavelli. “Men always
do.”

“Oh, if that sort of thing amuses
him”—contempt spoke in Cecilia’s tone—“let
him have—his hank of hair!”

“There’s a remarkably happy man,” I
said. “No still waters in his; a perfectly
delightful fellow, only spoiled by
women!”

“Is he?” asked Cecilia, indifferently.

“He’s been so immensely liked, you
know, that what he really needs is a
snub. He thinks he’s only to look at a
woman for him to like her.”

“Wouldn’t one call that just a trifle
conceited?” Cecilia’s voice dripped
sarcasm.

“Not in his case,” I returned, cruelly.
“For, you see, it’s generally so.
I’ve never known a more fatal man than
Almington.”

“He’s not always fatal,” Cecilia gave
out, dryly; and she shut her little mouth57
with a firmness that even in the dim
moonlight made itself visible.

We stood at the top of the hill in silence
for a moment, waiting for the
cart with the others in it. They came
up laughing. How vain and empty
their laughter was, I was sure Cecilia
was thinking. Her deep knowledge of
the world and its iniquity were fairly
bowing down her young shoulders.

IV.

The laughter and nonsense grew
louder, and I descried, standing upright
in the cart, a vision, spirit or woman I
couldn’t tell.

My companion stared a moment and
then remarked:

“Mrs. Massingbyrd’s hair has come
down!” Into these simple words was
packed all the quintessence of disapproval
that Cecilia had learned from her
various advisers. There were echoes of
her mother’s shocked tones, haunting
accents of her offended teacher, all
welded together by the cool disapproval
that was Cecilia’s own.

I am sure that if my delightful little
guest could have heard the awful, the
chilling, contempt of “Mrs. Massingbyrd’s
hair has come down,” she would
have veiled her face with it in abject
shame.

I gathered by her attitude and that
of Felicia and Almington that these silly
creatures were playing at tableaux, the
cart serving as a Mi-carême char.

Mrs. Massingbyrd’s hair, more miraculous
than ever in the moonlight, fell
down to her knees. Her eyes looked seraphically
heavenward. Almington held
her hand, kneeling before her, while
Felicia, a little shawl disposed as drapery
about her, was pointing dramatically
out into the night, giving an admirable
impersonation of those statuesque young
ladies who, in tableaux, have no raison
d’être save to round out the composition
and look pretty.

Later I learned that the name of this
impressive tableau was: “The Triumph
of Virtue.”

At that moment I was too occupied
with the attitude of my little companion
to pay attention to Mrs. Massingbyrd’s
foolery.

Cecilia had just caught sight of Almington
as he knelt, holding the hand
of Virtue, his lean legs bent like the
blade of a knife. Almington generally
cuts a fine figure, through a certain
sense of the fitness of things. His air
of secret melancholy wins half his battles
for him, and he is one of those men
who must at any cost hang on to the last
shred of dignity, as they are nothing
without it. In his present situation I
have no hesitation in saying he looked
fatuous and grotesque.

How he came to lend himself to the
crazy whim of the two girls I can’t tell.
I suppose he was carried away by the
flood of their high spirits, as many a
wiser man has been before him and will
be after him.

But if I had excuses for him, Cecilia
had none.

It may be heartbreaking to have your
first “serious young man” leave you at
the smiles of a pretty widow with blond
hair; but, after all, by showing how
truly noble you are, you may some day
crush your rival and bring your suitor
to your knees, crying, “Peccavi!” It’s
bad to learn he’s a heartbreaker, but,
after all, then there’s all the more incentive
to break his heart. You can, whatever
happens, bear your suffering nobly,
and at the worst you have lots of
things, heaps simply, to tell the girls.

But to have your first hero of romance
make himself ridiculous—that is
the end of all things. Sorrow has then
no dignity. A broken heart for a man
like that is out of the question. Oh, it’s
a bitter thing to think the drama of
one’s life a tragedy and have it turn out
a low comedy!

Cecilia saw her hero exactly as he
was, at that moment, stripped of all
adornment.

Glamour died, romance withered
away; in the clear fire of her uncompromising
young scorn.

She was proving again that man’s
only unpardonable crime toward the
woman who loves him is to make himself
ridiculous.

It was really quite a dramatic little58
moment. The late hero, now turned
mountebank, descended and helped out
Felicia and Lydia, radiant in her white
and gold attire—and it was only then I
saw Drake, who had been sitting stiffly
in the back of the cart.

He had taken no part in the pageant.
If his temper was impaired, his dignity
wasn’t. Sliding downhill was all right,
his rigidity seemed to say, but no play
acting in his. His mood and Cecilia’s
jumped together. Her eyes met his. “I
know you now,” her grateful glance
seemed to say.

Meantime Mrs. Massingbyrd, lovely
as an angel, drifted along the white
road.

“It’s breaking the rules of the
game,” Felicia said to her, “for you to
have taken down your hair.”

“It fell down itself,” answered Lydia
the unashamed.

“But you looked so entirely lovely,”
my wife went on, “that I forgive you.
It’s worth the price.”

And I guiltily hoped that Mrs. Massingbyrd
would refrain from saying,
“That’s exactly what Bobby said.”

She stood pensive a moment in the
moonlight. Drake and Cecilia, drawn
together by the feeling of superiority
they shared in common—and which I
had helped to point out—wandered off
together. Almington was absorbed in
an open and impertinent admiration
of Mrs. Massingbyrd’s beauty, and Felicia
and I gazed at her, and again Felicia
said, approvingly: “It’s an unfair
advantage to take—but it’s really worth
it!”

Then the dreamy look in lovely Mrs.
Massingbyrd’s eyes deepened, and she
opened her lovely lips and said:

“Felicia, I’m so desperately hungry
that I wouldn’t coast down that hill
again—not for anything! Did you say
you had something good for supper?”

“And at supper I shall ask my boon,”
Almington answered.

“Boon?” said Mrs. Massingbyrd, as
she watched Cecilia and Drake vanish
together in the moonlight among the
flowers. “Boon? You greedy person!
Isn’t it boon enough to have seen me
with my hair down by moonlight! I
wonder at your graspingness, Jack
Almington!”

After we had said good-night to our
guests, after Cecilia and Drake had at
last come in from an interminable talk
on the piazza, after Mrs. Massingbyrd
had stuffed herself—in the face of her
ethereal loveliness I hate to use such a
word, but I know no other; indeed, she
applied herself to supper with such a
fair, frank and honest appetite that she
had neither eyes nor ears for Almington’s
compliments—after all this was
over, Felicia turned to me with a look
of satisfaction.

“You played up nobly that time, Robert,”
she said. “I’ve never known you
to catch on so quickly and without a
word from anyone.”

I gained time with remarking, pathetically,
“You’ve always underrated
my intelligence.”

“I call it a thoroughly artistic performance,”
my wife said; “and the
beauty of it is that there was no talk,
no nothing, but each one doing his
work.”

I looked at Felicia, to see if by any
chance she was making a pitfall for me,
but there was no danger signal. I
thought it safe to give out, “I’m glad
you liked my little share in it.”

“You were splendid,” she cried, cordially.
“And if Miss Bennett only
knew it, we deserve a vote of thanks
from her.”

“Yes, don’t we?” I took care not
to commit myself.

“It isn’t as if we hadn’t provided Cecilia
with another suitor, and I’m sure
Ellery Drake, from any point of view,
is far more desirable than Almington.”

“I should say he was,” I cordially
assented.

“And then, who can tell if Almington
was really serious? And for a
young girl to be affichée with Almington
her first season is nothing short
of tarnishing,” Felicia went on, virtuously.

“That’s what I’ve said from the beginning,”
I put in.

“And you certainly played up nobly.
We couldn’t have put it through so59
quickly without you,” my wife was generous
enough to confess. “But did you
ever see anything as splendid and self-sacrificing
as Lydia?”

“Self-sacrificing?” I wondered, feeling
my way.

“Why, she made herself odious—simply
odious—in Cecilia’s eyes, so Cecilia
would feel furious at having Almington
like her.” Sometimes Felicia
is anything but lucid.

“Like whom?” I naturally wanted to
know.

“Like Lydia,” replied my wife, impatiently.
“A girl can stand anything but
having a man she likes fall in love with
a woman she doesn’t. It’s queer,” she
said, suspiciously, “clever as you are
sometimes, how dense you are others.
Did you understand——”

But at this late date I wasn’t going
to have my laurels snatched from me.
So I hastened to assure her. “Of
course,” I said, loftily, “I understood
Mrs. Massingbyrd intended to interfere!”

AUTUMN

60

THE WARRENERS
By MARIE
VAN
VORST

CHAPTER I.

GERTRUDE Warrener
was twenty-five
years old on
the day she went into
the back library and,
seated in a rocking
chair, a newspaper and a box of candy-kitchen
chocolates in her lap—began to
live.

Hitherto the boundaries of her lifeline
had been limited by a wooden fence
circling a few feet of coarse grass and
two frame houses like her own. To the
rear, in the yard, four poles formed a
square with peculiar precision, and on
washdays the level lines of a cord,
stretching cat’s-cradle-wise, supported
the household laundry.

She had taken for eight years the
front rooms of the house for her point
of vantage, and when she had mentally
stated “Mrs. Felter’s just gone into the
Perches’,” or “Pearl Exeter does her
marketing in the afternoons instead of
the mornings,” she had nothing further
to say. One day she caught herself in
the middle of some such banal reflection,
and, going to the back of the
house, took her place in the window of
a microscopic library.

Gertrude Warrener did not remotely
dream that she on this day passed the
Rubicon lying between existence and
life.

When the mind is sensible of inertia—the
eyes catch sight of living forms,
and the soul yearns toward something
which it has not—it may be taken for
granted that a life-breath has blown
over the valley of dead bones.

In the case of Gertrude Warrener,
it was indeed a tomb in which she
awakened, and she did not know that
she had been immured.

In her seventeenth year, George Warrener,
just received into a
subordinate position in a
New York banking and
broking firm, began to pay
her his bashful attentions.
With no spoken words on
his part that she could remember—nor
could he for the life of him have
recalled the formula—there was an engagement.
She married him before her
eighteenth birthday.

As she sat in the library, all image
of the youthful lover was completely effaced
from her mind. He was now like
hundreds and dozens of other middle-rank
business men. Of medium height,
stocky, his hair and short, stubby mustache
nondescript, his eyes blue, wide
apart and rather small, he was a successful
type and entirely sacrificed as
an individual. He often said:

“I look like a prosperous Wall Street
man, and that is as near as I shall ever
come to it—to look like it.”

But in spite of his dapper appearance,
Warrener was an overworked drudge.
He worked so hard and so long, his
daily trips on unhealthy ferries and hot
cars sapped his vitality to such an extent,
that all his life had been spent and
lived by the time he crossed at night the
threshold of his home.

Gertrude in the little library opened
the pages of the Slocum Daily slowly.
She read the town gossip, a local
weather prediction, an account of the
hospital fair; and as she rocked and ate
one after the other the chocolate marshmallows
she had a feeling of freedom,
whose cause was due simply to the fact
that she had changed her point of view—due
to the humble novelty of her
transposition.

George’s library smelled of stale tobacco.
She had sensitive nostrils, and
was beginning to find the dead odor
unpleasant, when at this point she fell
upon an item in the Slocum Daily which
held her attention:

61

We are glad to learn that the McAllister
homestead has been opened. After the long
absence in Europe of the family, Mr. and
Mrs. Bellamy have returned, and Slocum
welcomes them back with much pleasure.

“Slocum!” She spoke aloud, and
there was scorn in her tone. “Well, I
guess they’ll laugh at that. I don’t believe
they care for the Daily!”

Old Mrs. McAllister at once took
form for her. She had come to their
wedding, and Gertrude remembered her
as tall, and that her dress and hat became
her. The young, light-minded
bride had remarked the difference between
this guest and other Slocumites.

Kept in state on the buffet downstairs
was a silver pitcher, the sole real
silver in the house. Mrs. McAllister
had sent it to the Warreners as a wedding
present.

Gertrude got up and went out in the
hall. “Eliza!”

“Yes, ma’am.” The maid of all work
appeared at the foot of the back stairs.

“Say—just go and get that silver
pitcher off the dining-room buffet and
clean it. I guess it hasn’t been cleaned
for three years.”

The maid looked at her in astonishment.
“Why, we haven’t got a mite of
cleaning powder in the house, Mrs.
Warrener!”

Mrs. Warrener came slowly down
the stairs herself, and, going to the dining-room
buffet, looked at her wedding
gift—or what she could see of it
through a thick layer of dirt and discoloration.
Then she carried it to the
bathroom, and, with nail brush and
tooth powder, shone it up as well as she
could. It was a tribute of welcome to
the return of the Bellamys.

CHAPTER II.

After a week or so of the new atmosphere
of the tiny library she
summed up her life as follows, and was
able to state that the routine of her days
never varied: She rose at seven and
dressed. George’s train went at eight,
and she sat with him at table through a
breakfast of hot bread, meat, potatoes
and coffee. Then her husband put on
his coat and hat and took his leave without
even bidding her good-by. She felt
lonely when the butcher and the grocer
had gone. When she had given her directions
to Eliza, it was never more
than ten o’clock. In days past she had
been used to walk out to the library and
get a book, or wander into a neighbor’s
“and sit a while,” but of late there commenced
from the early morning a
period of rocking and reading in the
library. In the evening George returned
from New York only in time to
come to the table without the formality
of washing his hands.

These were her interests. Too timid
to go to Town Club meetings, too simple-minded
to be of any great importance
in the different Slocum circles,
she kept to herself. Her sole interest
would naturally be her husband; him
she saw from seven P. M. to seven
A. M.; or, rather, she slept beside him
during these hours—for directly after
dinner he would throw himself down on
the lounge in his library and smoke and
read till at nine o’clock she roused him
and sent him to bed in their common
bedroom, in their common bed.

George, tired and devitalized by his
strenuous life, absorbed by his own and
his employer’s affairs, fell asleep at
once. But his companion, more alive
than she knew, would lie awake until
long past midnight, her body unfatigued,
her mind restless, her wakeful
eyes staring into the dark which had
for her no emotion and no mystery.

One afternoon she found she had
read through a whole book without
stopping, and for the first time in her
life had been absorbed. She got up and
turned off the steam heat and opened
the window.

“It must be ninety here with these
radiators! You either freeze or stew.”

The air came in bluffly, its unfriendly
edges met her cheeks; before they
could be refreshed she was cold in her
thin muslin shirt-waist.

She had risen in expression of a sudden
need of air, a sudden sense of
suffocation, but she thought only that
she was “nervous,” and would go out
and take a walk. A little later, a golf62
cape over a short coat of material
known as “covert”—short-skirted, a
gray felt hat on her head—Mrs. George
Warrener was seen by her neighbors to
be going “uptown.”

Not until she had left the village,
keeping steady pace up the hill toward
the Golf Club, did she feel that she
had “let off steam.” The quick motion
set free the tension of her nerves, and
she almost forgot the acute sensation
that drove her from the house. At the
golf links she approached the course
and stood by the fence, near to one of
the last bunkers.

The field was sparsely dotted with the
golfers. A red dash in the distance,
a green dash, indicated the players who
bent in bright sweaters over their sticks.
Two men came across the ground close
to her—strangers—she saw that instantly,
and regarded them with the
curiosity of a resident. The man who
was playing, his club swung over his
shoulder, his driver in his hand, was
short and stout, with smooth, red
cheeks and bright eyes under shaggy
brows. His shoes were large and
heavy, his golf stockings thick, and his
fustian clothes rough and well made.
His companion, a younger man in a
loose-sleeved overcoat, had a soft felt
hat on his head and a lighted cigar in
his hand. The older man said to him,
laughing:

“There you are, old man! If you’re
really caddying for me, you’ll have to
ferret the ball out of that ditch by the
fence. I saw it roll down.”

The other lazily nodded, took a puff
at his cigar and came over in the direction
indicated. Mrs. Warrener
leaned on the fence watching the gentleman,
who poked about in the grass
with his cane.

“Let me give you a fresh ball out of
my pocket; I’ve got three left,” he
called.

The older man laughed. “Oh, go on,
look for it; it’s right under your nose.
You’ve given me a ‘fresh ball out of
your pocket’ every time one has rolled
fifteen yards!”

Mrs. Warrener stooped down; she
saw the golf ball on the other side of
the fence. She put her hand under
through the railing and picked it up;
she handed it to the gentleman.

“I think this is your ball.”

He took it with a swift, quick look
at her, lifted his hat with cane and
cigar in the same hand and thanked her.
Taking the ball, he returned to his
friend.

Mrs. Warrener watched the older
gentleman prepare to drive—then the
two men follow the direction indicated
by the sharp, momentary flight of the
little white ball, the golfer tripping
briskly along, the other dark figure following
slowly. She had never seen
either of them before; who were they?
The distant rattle of an incoming
train—the one before her husband’s—warned
her of the time. She would
barely reach home before George came
in. “Although,” she reflected, “I may
just as well be late, for all he will notice,
he is so tired, anyway.”

She walked, nevertheless, mechanically
toward home, so slowly that when
she reached the village street George’s
train had been in some time.

At this time of night a little crowd
was gathered, as a rule, for the trolley,
and Mrs. Warrener decided to take the
car and anticipate her husband’s arrival
by several minutes.

While she stood with the others who
waited, the strangers of the Golf Club
joined the crowd. As the car appeared
the gentleman in the black coat helped
her in and sat opposite her. When he
threw back his coat to get out his fare
from his pocket, she observed that he
wore a gray waistcoat of soft material—it
looked as though it were “knit,” she
thought, or “worked”—a bright red tie
and—unusual elegance among the men
of Slocum—gloves—gray gloves, as
soft in color as his waistcoat. Very
much struck by his dress, she ventured,
with a certain timidity, to look him in
the face. The vivid color of his cravat
made him seem very dark; all she could
observe was a dark face, dark mustache
and eyes, for he was looking at her,
and she met his eyes directly. Their
interested curiosity rendered her uncomfortable,
and she removed her63
glance, which traveled down the line of
colorless passengers, tired men in dusty,
careless dress; unbrushed derbys, linen
far from immaculate, gloveless hands.
Each man had his bunch of evening papers,
some carried parcels from the city
for suburban use. A woman she knew,
an inveterate shopper, nodded brightly
to her.

“Been in New York all day. Just
too tired. Never saw such a crowd in
the stores; why, I thought I never
would get waited on. Say——” There
was a vacant seat by Mrs. Warrener,
and the lady came over and took it, continuing
a description of bargains, and a
tirade against crowds. “Been up this
week, Gert?”

“No, I hardly ever go in.”

“Well, it’s a change, but I always say
when we get to Slocum I’m glad I don’t
live in New York, it’s so wearing.
Been up to the Golf Club?”

“Yes, but not to play.”

The conversationalist was conscious
of a change in her well-known neighbor’s
tone, an accent, just what it was
she could not imagine, but it was sufficiently
marked to give her food for
thought.

As Mrs. Warrener left the car at her
corner, Mrs. Turnbull puzzled over her.
Perhaps she was offended with her?
But she had no reason for such an idea!
Perhaps George Warrener was losing
money? As money to the unsentimental,
commercial American mind is
the source of all bliss and the cause of
all unhappiness, the slide down which
all spirits fall and the height to which
they rise, she reached a sad conclusion
in this, and dropped her wonderings.

Warrener and his wife arrived at the
same moment on the steps of their two-story
frame house.

“Well!” he said. He took out his
latchkey and entered the door. The
hall was hot and full of the smell of
roasting meat and soup herbs. The
dinner puffed out to meet the diners
with damp, pungent warmth. George
put his batch of papers down on the
hall stand.

“Well,” he repeated, absently, took
off his dusty derby, hung it up and got
out of his overcoat.

He looked for no response to his
greeting. Mrs. Warrener understood
this, and made none.

Warrener went upstairs to his study.

“Gracious, Gert, some one’s left the
window open in my den! It’s like ice
here!”

“It’ll get hot enough. Turn on the
steam.”

Mrs. Warrener followed her husband
upstairs into the cold little room. The
smell of stale smoke seemed to have
frozen on the air, but over it the smell
of the cigar the gentleman had smoked,
a peculiar aroma, as new to her, as delicious,
as would have been a priceless
perfume, came to her nostrils. She
went to her chair where she had sat
for hours reading, and picked up her
book, which she kept in her hand.

“What have you been doing all day,
Gert?” he asked at dinner, after he had
eaten his tepid soup and drunk an entire
glass of ice water.

“Oh, I don’t know—nothing much.”

“Nothin’ doin’? Well, you are in
luck! I feel as if something was doin’
in every inch of my body. I’m tired
out. Harkweather kept the clerks
down to-night—they won’t get out before
nine o’clock; but I said ‘not tonight
for me. I’m goin’ home.’ And
I’m goin’ right to bed. I guess I’ll
sleep twelve hours, all right!”

As they went upstairs, he first and
she slowly following, she suggested:

“How would you like me to sleep in
the spare room, if you’re so tired?”

“Why?” he asked, jocularly. “Do I
snore so?”

“Yes, but that’s not it. It may feel
good to have the whole bed to yourself.”

“Well, I believe it would.”

In the spare room, close to the
springs, on a narrow, single bed, Mrs.
Warrener crept alone. She drew the
adjusting electric light close to her and
took her book up again to re-read, her
elbow in the pillow and her cheek on
her hand. She followed the printed
lines with dawning interest on her face,64
and a growing intelligence, until all
of a sudden the dead stillness of the
hour and time struck her. The fireless
room—for there was no steam heat in
it—gave her a chill. She put out the
light and drew the coverlet about her
and settled down to sleep.

CHAPTER III.

The business interest of which George
Warrener formed a humble part had no
picturesque traditions. Like everything
else in New York, the corporation had
even during Warrener’s time boasted
several different addresses. When especial
advantages presented themselves
in the shape of higher buildings and
higher rent, Harkweather & Fulsome
moved. The unstableness, the constant
transition, had an effect upon him which
he did not appreciate. Warrener, with
his firm, was restless; and restless with
his eighty million fellow Americans.

Harkweather & Fulsome’s last move
had been to a twenty-two-floored steel
structure, from whose tenth story were
visible the roofs of the buildings not
yet razed to make room for other giant
office honeycombs. Money, at Harkweather
& Fulsome’s, superseded everything
else in the world, extinguished
the lights of pleasure, destroyed even
the capacity to enjoy. Everything else
was crowded out of the question. Harkweather
& Fulsome were “strictly business,”
strictly getters of wealth; and
they squeezed dry every sponge that
came to their hands.

Warrener, in the office, had drifted
into the position of confidential clerk,
very much used when wanted, and
shifted off into a little, stuffy room,
where he had a desk and typewriter,
when his services were not in active demand.
Here he copied, filed and noted;
added, opened and docketed mail; and
read the financial news in every available
sheet in the city. To his own thinking,
he was an authority on stocks and
bonds. He heard innumerable tips
thrown out; saw them acted upon, and
prove either valuable or worthless; followed
the rise and fall of fortunes near
and far; assisted at failures and successes;
and during the hours of his
routine in the office had the sensation
of being himself a millionaire! But
when he left the ferry, the bondholders
and “big men” hurried to their more
important trains and more important
stations, and Warrener hustled himself,
with his evening papers, into the short
train of the Slocum local, he then distinctly
felt the difference between his
bank balance and his chief’s! He lived
in the atmosphere of money, but he had
never been ambitious. Of average intelligence,
common school education,
steady-going and trustworthy, he had
no intentions further than to pay his
bills, earn his salary and keep at the
business.

Were he asked what part of his life
he recalled with most pleasure he would
have unhesitatingly answered: “Getting
engaged and going on our honeymoon.”
The sentimental period—which
had come into his unimaginative
life with the imperiousness of that passion
which at least once during a man’s
life changes his existence for a time,
short or long—had for Warrener left
behind it a memory which the cares of
the world, the moth and rust of vulgar
routine, trains and ferries, quick
lunches and elevators, common surroundings
and abasing ideals, overlaid
but never destroyed.

Eight years before he had asked the
prettiest girl he knew to marry him, and
she had said yes. His vacation falling
at this time, they had spent two weeks
in August at Far Rockaway, and from
there went directly into the rented
house on Grand Street, and the newly
married man began his bi-daily pilgrimages
on the train.

He would have been ashamed to have
anyone, above all his wife, know that as
he crossed the ferry, one of a thick-packed
crowd on the front part of the
boat, standing there close to the running
waters, near the bow, he often
gave himself a mental holiday; then the
image of Gertrude in a pinkish dress
and picture hat came to his mind as he
had seen her on the boardwalk at Rockaway
eight years ago. It was a species
of revel for him to recall those days.65
He was not unhappy or even discontented;
he was too commonplace to be
capable of either sensation. He was
numbed, pinched hard by life.

“I am indispensable to Mr. Harkweather,”
he repeated, with pride, and
passed the time with his hand on other
people’s grindstones, all the gold dust
flying into other people’s bags.

CHAPTER IV.

One especial Sunday he awakened after
a refreshing sleep, stretched his
arms and yawned aloud, then lay pleasantly
conscious of the well-being of his
condition—half asleep still, and it was
far into the morning! Belowstairs he
could hear the heavy footsteps of Eliza,
and fancied the early presage of dinner.
Warrener listened, knowing he should
soon hear another footstep lighter than
that of the maid-of-all-work.

“Gert!”

Mrs. Warrener came in.

“It’s twelve o’clock,” she said, “and
you’ll just about have time to get up,
take your bath and dress for dinner.”

“All right,” he responded, cheerfully,
but did not move. Instead, putting his
hands up behind his head, he watched
his wife as she fetched out his clean
clothes and laid them with his Sunday
suit over a chair. As she moved quietly
about the room, the man’s feeling of
content grew, added to by the feminine
presence and the evidence of care
and wifely attention. The little room
was bright with the sunshine of a mild
November day. The chromos, the glaring
wall paper, the cheap oak bedroom
set, the thin lace curtains touched with
the light, appeared lovely in their master’s
eyes. Before him was the prospect
of a long day of repose, spent in
perfect, tranquil laziness, a day in the
fresh country air. There would be no
office or telegraph calls, no duties, no
sounds to disturb the hard-earned
hours. His relaxed nerves and body
rejoiced in the holiday. He was as
happy as he could ever be—did he know
it, would ever be. Years afterward
Warrener looked back at that especial
Sunday with something of the same affection
he bestowed upon his marriage
memories, and with keener regret.

As Mrs. Warrener went out of the
room, he called her:

“Say, Gert!”

She paused at the door, clean towels
in her hand. She was going to get his
bath ready.

“Well, what?”

He wanted to call: “Give me a kiss.”
But her manner rather distanced him.
So he said: “What’ll you give me if
I guess what we’re going to have for
dinner?”

“Nothing,” she laughed. “I should
think anybody with a nose would know.
Eliza leaves the kitchen door open all
the time.”

“It smells good,” he sniffed. “And
it’s away ahead of sandwiches and a
glass of beer; that’s my noon meal, as a
rule.”

She warned him he wouldn’t get any
dinner at all if he didn’t hurry up, and
in a few moments he heard the running
of his bath; the sound, to his good
humor and contented frame of mind,
was one more pleasant, luxurious,
agreeable part of the day.

Later, shaved and washed, dressed
with great precision and care, he sat in
the parlor, the multitudinous sheets of
the New York daily papers around him.

Gertrude rocked idly in the window,
her eyes on the deserted street. Eliza
washed the dinner dishes and put them
rattling away, then tramped up the front
stairs, and in gorgeous magnificence
went out the back way, emerging into
Grand Street. At the sight of her Mrs.
Warrener said: “I’m going to give
you a cold supper, George, some salad
and tea—she’s made biscuits, I guess.”

“Oh, that’s all right. It seems as if
we only just got up from dinner.” He
threw his paper down. “Want to take
a walk, Gert? It’s nice out, and I don’t
think it’s cold.”

“Well,” she said, indifferently, “I’ll
get my hat and coat.”

When she came down Warrener had
been walking about his tiny parlor and
dining room, and was still under the
spell of householder and in love with
his possessions.

66

“You’ve got the McAllister wedding
present cleaned up fine.”

“It’s the only real silver we’ve got; it
makes the other things look common.”

Mrs. Warrener regarded the display
on her buffet with some discontent.

“Oh, I don’t know,” returned the
husband. “It’s as good as you can get
anywhere for the money.”

“The McAllisters have come back to
Slocum,” his wife mentioned.

“Yes,” he nodded. “Mrs. McAllister
used to go to Uncle Samson’s church.
I don’t see why you shouldn’t go up
there to call some day.”

Mrs. Warrener had opened the front
door and gone out on the stoop; George,
getting into his overcoat, followed her.
Side by side they went slowly down the
front steps of the little wooden stoop.

“I shouldn’t know what to say.”

“Oh, she’ll say it all; besides, perhaps
she’ll be out—leave a card—got one of
mine?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Well.”

As they turned into Grand Street and
hesitated a moment as to their direction,
Warrener suggested:

“Might as well walk along up toward
the McAllister place; it’s as good a
walk as any.”

As they started off in the fresh, crisp
air, refreshing and sweet to the man’s
nostrils, stimulating and revivifying after
his close confined days, a sudden
impulse to have the woman by his side
nearer him overcame him; he drew her
arm through his.

“Let’s walk arm in arm, like old
married couples.”

But Mrs. Warrener held back and
took her arm away.

“No,” she demurred; “I think it’s
common.”

In the following days Mrs. Warrener
took up her life, or, more accurately,
began it, standing on the threshold
of an abyss—the flight of steps before
her that led to the new. As she had
never been particularly interested in
anything, she did not know that she
was an invalid with a fatal malady, a
malady whose term is too commonly
employed by people whose reason for
the state is less apparent than this
woman’s in a country town. She had
never heard the word “boredom” used.

There were half a dozen village
friends of Mrs. Warrener’s whose
status was on a higher plane than hers,
whose houses had more square feet of
land around them, whose “help” was
more efficient. In their parlors now and
then she took an inadequate hand at
euchre, and of late she had been trying
to learn bridge. These ladies made the
town library and the little hospital, the
Children’s Home and the church interests,
run more or less smoothly; they
had a hundred busy, useful interests.
They were good wives and good mothers
and good citizens. She had never
heard any of them use the verb “to be
bored,” and if she had, she would not
have known what it meant! She suffered
under a complaint which, like
many maladies, is less fatal so long as it
has no name; but the disease was too
acute to be ignored. It had engendered
too many complications.

At the town library the librarian from
among the rows of school books one day
handed down to Mrs. Warrener a
French dictionary. From the novel
she had read a few days before she
had copied out this phrase:

Ennui is like the unseen worm in the
wood, that slowly gnaws the good, clean
substance until his parasite presence is declared
by innumerable interstices that finally
destroy the wood and proclaim it rotten to
the fiber—ennui had eaten into her, devoured
her. There was not one inch of her
that did not ache from desuetude, from
moral inertia.

Gertrude found the word “ennui”
in the dictionary, and the following definition:
“Listlessness, languor, tedium,
lassitude, tiresomeness,” compared it
with her scrap of paper, puzzled her
pretty brows until their lines looked like
pain. As she put up the book and left
the library, she said to herself: “Well,
I guess that’s what’s the matter with
me.”

CHAPTER V.

When Slocum was scarcely a village
Edward McAllister, after his retirement
from the Supreme Court, purchased67
sufficient land in the State to establish
a model farm. Here his children,
Paul and Agnes, were born, and
before they had time to know they were
Americans McAllister accepted a foreign
embassy and lived with his family
abroad until his death. His daughter,
Agnes, had married in Rome, and after
a few years of wandering and continental
life, with her husband, Mr. John
Bellamy, and her brother, Mr. Paul
McAllister, she returned to Slocum.

They had come back in order that
Mrs. Bellamy should see just how much
she could stand of American life and
manners; in order that their children
might have enough of their native soil
on their hands as they played, and
enough of its education in their heads,
to entitle them to the self-sufficiency of
American citizens.

Little Bellamy was immured in Groton,
hard at the American part of it,
and Mrs. Bellamy sat this morning in a
charming room furnished in Colonial
style: continental taste and the accessories
that make living a luxury
and pleasure combined to make her a
charming environment. Mrs. Bellamy
was teaching her little daughter the
gentle art of making a long rope of
useless wool by means of a spool and a
row of pins.

The mother’s head bent close to the
little girl’s was as golden as the child’s.
Her hands, with their flashing rings,
played in and out among the pins with
a skill nothing short of miraculous in
the eyes of the little girl, who took up
the spool between her own tiny fingers,
the worsted twisted hard around her
thumb.

By the table, in a luxurious leather
chair, the other occupant of the room
was almost lost to sight. His presence
was, however, indicated by the film of
cigarette smoke that rose curlingly
around his head. The yellow cover of
a French novel was just visible above
the table.

“Paul,” his sister asked him, “how
do you like America?”

“America?” he repeated, and, although
he said no more, she knew by
his quizzical drawl what he meant.

“Well, Slocum, then, and the old
place?”

“Immensely!”

“Absurd,” she laughed. “You have
only been here a week, and except for
ridiculously caddying a couple of times
for John at the Golf Club, you have not
been out of the house.”

“In which case, how could I fail to
like it?” he said, with mock politeness.
“You’ve kept me company! You don’t
seem to be tempted to explore the old
scenes any more than I do! Perhaps,
like me, you’re afraid of the shock. You
know how luxurious I am. If it were
not for the extremely swell gentleman
and lady servants, I should feel very
much at ease.” He had not put down
his book; he still smoked and appeared
to be reading what he said from it. “I
was most amused the other day as I
stood on the piazza; did John tell you?
I saw going around the road two very
attractive-looking girls—they recalled
the Gibson pictures as much as anything
else. They wore, of course, short
skirts and those bodices that you see
everywhere. They had a bicycle, each
of them, and they were walking along,
their arms around each other’s waists.
I said to John: ‘By Jove, what a stunning
pair of girls! I should like to
know them.’ And he said: ‘They are
living in the same house with you, my
dear fellow—they are my cook and my
laundress.’”

Mrs. Bellamy laughed appreciatively.
“Tell me, Paul, how does America
strike you?”

McAllister reluctantly laid his book
down, crossed his legs and prepared to
answer.

“I’ve been out more often than you
think. I took a turtle view of the
town; I mean I sauntered up and down
it and out of it, and it gave me as complete
a sensation as I have had in
twenty-four years. A better sensation,
ma chère, and I am not likely to have
another.”

Mrs. Bellamy listened, as she always
did when her brother gave himself the
trouble to speak more than one sentence
at a time to any woman with
whom he was not in love.

68

“It is all new-born, honorable, progressive
and decent. Everybody seems
to have a certain disdain for me. I believe
it is because, if you will permit me
to say so, I dress so well.”

His sister laughed.

“Not that they do not dress well!
They do—astoundingly well; but they
all dress alike, and you cannot tell, as
in the case of your own servant, a lady
from her cook, or a butcher boy on a
holiday from the millionaire’s son, if he
happens to come through town on foot
or in a motor. Let’s agree, then, that
I do look different. ‘The drug-store
man’—that’s what you call him, isn’t
it?—looked at me as if he hated me and
my clothes when he gave me some calisaya.
He thought I was a foreigner;
they don’t like foreigners. If anything
could put me on the same footing with
my country people, this town street did,
as far as it was able. By the time I got
to the grocery I had forgotten that I
had not seen America for thirty years,
and that I was so different. Nothing
remained but that country school feeling,
that boy feeling. If you ask what
I mean: There was a barrel of apples
outside of the grocer’s door. I wanted
to sneak one! I would have given fifty
dollars for a glass of cider—for anything,
in short, to keep up the game. I
went in and asked him if he had such a
thing as ‘sarsaparilla.’ He had it, and,
in spite of my ‘difference,’ he pulled his
cork and I drank the whole glass of that
stuff. Pah! don’t ask me about it! It
was all right, I don’t doubt; but when I
left the corner and started up the hill,
that wonderful sentimental feeling had
entirely left me! There was only a
wretched nausea—a complete sense of
how far away I had gone from the simplicity
of the whole thing, and I don’t
say that I congratulated myself. Now,
will you let me read, Agnes?”

But Mrs. Bellamy had turned to a
servant who entered with a card—with
two cards. “‘Mr. and Mrs. Warrener,’”
she read aloud. “Oh, dear me,
have you let them in?”

It appeared there was only a lady:
“Mrs. George Warrener.”

“Heavens! I suppose that a lot of
these people will call, and I must be
more or less civil. Show Mrs. Warrener
in—there is time to escape for
you, Paul, by way of the dining room.”

CHAPTER VI.

The brightness of the room, the effect
produced by the brilliant color of the
decorations, and the atmosphere of livableness
and charm did not dazzle the
guest who entered—because she simply
could not see! Her excitement was
such that it caused a sort of blindness
to fall on her, although she had never
thought herself bashful or shy.

A lady, younger than herself, rose
and welcomed her in a soft, quick voice,
with a difference so marked in speech
to any Mrs. Warrener had ever heard
that she thought it was a foreign accent.

“How do you do? This is very good
of you; won’t you sit here? We feel
very much like strangers, coming back
to Slocum after so many years. Fanny,
darling, take your spools and wool and
go to nurse. There—first say: ‘How
do you do?’ to Mrs. Warrener.”

Gertrude had a vision of a small
creature with a head like a chrysanthemum
flower and the wide, round eyes
of a child. The little hand that met her
glove with frank politeness gave her
a pretty greeting. Mrs. Warrener was
obliged to break the hard tension of
nervous fright that clutched her throat,
and to speak to her hostess, who, in a
chair near her, represented a world of
civilization and education so unlike her
own that a bird of paradise and a barnyard
hen might have had more points
in common.

She breathed out: “I used to know
Mrs. McAllister; she used to go to my
husband’s uncle’s church.” There was
no elder lady present, and Mrs. Warrener
looked for one.

“Oh, yes,” her hostess answered. “I
am very sorry my mother is not here.
She is at Cannes; she never comes north
before spring. It is nearly twelve years
since she’s been in America.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Warrener was forced to69
speak. “I guess it was just at the
time of my wedding. That was eight
years ago. I remember they said she
was going to Europe then. She came
to my wedding; she was at the
church.”

Mrs. Bellamy, who keenly, although
with perfect politeness, was studying
the village lady before her, wondered
very much for what reason her mother
had attended the Warrener wedding.

“Slocum must seem small after
Rome,” Mrs. Warrener ventured into
the conversation with more ease.

Her hostess laughed. “Slocum!
Why, I haven’t seen it yet, do you
know! I came at night—we drove up
from the train in a storm. But”—she
raised her eyes to the other part of the
room—“my brother can tell you how it
seems; he has lots of ideas about it!
My brother, Mr. McAllister—Mrs.
Warrener.”

Paul McAllister had returned, to his
sister’s great surprise.

“Mrs. Warrener thinks Slocum must
seem ‘small’ after Rome.” She did not
italicize the repetition which she carefully
made, sure that it would appeal to
her brother’s humor as it was.

Mrs. Warrener gracefully, if unnecessarily,
rose to the presentation, and
found her hand in that of the gentleman
of the long black overcoat, who
bowed, meeting her eyes with a smile
very like one of recognition and friendliness.

“Slocum is not small to me. I was
born and brought up here. The place
one comes from always seems the most
important in the world. Of course it
may strike me as small before I get
through with it, but I have not found
it so yet.”

Entirely unable to cope with the conversation,
ordinary as it was, carried
on by the quick, soft voices in
enunciation so new to her that the language
seemed scarcely English—Mrs.
Warrener looked at the speaker with
less embarrassment because he put her
at her ease. Dark, brilliant and distinguished,
he did not, nevertheless, awe
her as did Mrs. Bellamy’s beauty and
pose. McAllister took a chair and sat
down directly in front of the guest.

“I have seen Mrs. Warrener already—at
golf. You were there yesterday?
Didn’t you give me my ball?”

“Yes, I just walked up for a little exercise.
It’s nice playing there in the
afternoon now, since the snow has
gone.”

“I don’t play, myself,” McAllister
said, “but, as you say, it’s a nice walk.”

Mrs. Bellamy, after a word or two,
leaned back in her chair with relief,
and left to her brother the amenities,
watching him and the guest.

After Mrs. Warrener had gone—and
McAllister had seen her to the door and
returned with his indolent step—as he
stopped to light a fresh cigarette, his
sister said:

“Well, had you any recollection about
a village beauty such as your boyhood
and sarsaparilla memories? And did
Mrs. Warrener recall it—and is the result
the same?”

McAllister turned his handsome,
careless face to his sister.

“You think her a stupid little provincial,
don’t you, Agnes?”

“I? Why, I asked you your opinion.”

“You don’t deny that you think that.”

“Her boots are frightful, and her
hat was appalling.”

“Oh, come,” laughed her brother;
“be fair!”

Mrs. McAllister gathered up her
work—a piece of tapestry.

“You are unable,” she said, with
some asperity, “to see any landscape
without a woman in it, even for five
days.”

“It’s a great compliment that you pay
your sex. Let my weakness pass.
Won’t you confess that this little village
nobody has more good looks than we
have seen in Rome for two winters?”

“Beauty—Paul!”

McAllister shrugged: “Decidedly. A
face like a Greuze, perfect eyebrows—so
perfect as to be almost suspicious;
that inimitable droop of the eyes and
the corners of the mouth—at once
childlike and mature; and her coloring!”

70

“You are always finding the most
impossible women, and telling me how
paintable they are. Do you want to
paint this little bore?”

“Somebody has painted her, and to
perfection,” he said, with authority. “I
will show you her likeness in the
Louvre when we get back.”

He had thrust his hands in his pockets
and begun to stroll up and down
the room. As she watched him a shade
crossed his sister’s face. The worsted
ball Fanny had let fall her mother
picked up and turned over in her hands.

“As you sat and talked to the poor
little woman I watched you; she was
fascinated by you—no, really! Her entire
expression altered! She has never
seen anyone like you before.” (“That’s
what the drug-store man thought,”
murmured McAllister.) “And I hope
she won’t take to frequenting the Golf
Club and other local festive places
where she can see you.”

“Thanks, Agnes.”

McAllister laughed, and, taking from
her hands the red worsted ball, idly
unwound it.

“Don’t be foolish! If we are here for
any purpose under heaven, let’s amuse
ourselves and some of these people, too!
I don’t intend to shut myself up like
Noah in the ark, with only the passengers
I took on board at Rome. Let’s
have Mrs. Warrener to lunch; she’s a
nice little creature; she’s immured in
this hole, and she’s probably bored to
death.”

“If she is immured,” murmured Mrs.
Bellamy, “don’t let’s bring her out.”

McAllister had almost unwound the
ball as he talked, and what was left of
it rolled down under the table.

Here Bellamy came in, and McAllister
took his indolent self away. “What
have you been doing?” Mr. Bellamy
asked his wife. She gathered up the
worsted and said, impatiently: “I’ve
been talking to my idle and destructive
brother.”

CHAPTER VII.

It was six by the time Mrs. Warrener
reached her own door. The aspect of
Grand Street had changed. In the early
twilight of the November afternoon the
wooden houses bordering her street
stood out clear-cut and fearlessly ugly.
All the Felter children were playing in
the yard, their piercing screams over
their games of pleasure welcomed her
ears. The little things, with red tam-o’-shanters
on their heads, tore about
hither and thither, calling in loud, penetrating
voices.

Fanny Bellamy had said, “How do
you do, Mrs. Wawenner,” in a voice
like an angel bird’s. As Gertrude went
up her steps she saw the Slocum Daily
on the mat. Usually she seized upon
the paper eagerly, but to-night she did
not even lift it from the stoop.

In answer to the bell, the maid-of-all-work,
Eliza, ran to the door. It was
washday, and she exuded soapsuds.
In her uncombed and dusty hair, little
flakes of soapsuds still clung; she wore
a gingham apron, with which she wiped
her steaming face as she let her mistress
in. For the first time Mrs. Warrener
saw Eliza with eyes from which
the scales of custom had fallen, and the
cordial smile extended by one maid’s
mistress who is conscious that she is
just so little better because she has as
much to spend a week as the maid has
a month, did not this evening light the
lady’s face.

“Eliza, never go to the door again
without a white apron.”

The woman stared blankly, and her
silent astonishment further aggravated
the mistress.

“And fix your hair,” she said, severely,
“and keep the kitchen door shut.”

Dinner smells which for years unremarked
had greeted Mrs. Warrener’s
nostrils, odors of kitchen and soapsuds,
sickened her to-night; but before she
could turn to go upstairs her attention
was forcibly called to account by Eliza,
who, with arms akimbo, cried to her:

“If you ain’t satisfied with me, Mrs.
Warrener, you can get another girl.
I ain’t no common, ordinary servant to
be spoke to like that.”

Mrs. Warrener turned about at the
lower stair. “What are you, then?”
she asked, sharply.

The woman drew a breath of rage.71
“What am I?” she shrieked. “Why,
I’m help, that’s what I am! And I’ve
got better clothes than you have upstairs.”