Title: The Hundred, and Other Stories
Author: Brownell, Gertrude Hall
Language: English
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  [Illustration:

                                           Page 140
  "SHE LOOKED AT HIM A LONG MOMENT WITH FIXED EYES"]
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                              The Hundred
                           and Other Stories


                          _By GERTRUDE HALL_


                          WITH ILLUSTRATIONS


                            [Illustration]


                          NEW YORK AND LONDON
                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
                                 1898
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                Copyright, 1898, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

                        _All rights reserved._
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                                  TO

                               MY MOTHER
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CONTENTS


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                                            PAGE

  THE HUNDRED                                  1

  THE PASSING OF SPRING                       59

  PAULA IN ITALY                             104

  DORASTUS                                   142

  CHLOE, CHLORIS, AND CYTHEREA               204
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ILLUSTRATIONS


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  "SHE LOOKED AT HIM A LONG MOMENT
   WITH FIXED EYES"                                 _Frontispiece_

  "SHE LET BONNET HAVE ONE OF HER
   ARMS"                                   _Facing page_         6

  "AT LAST THEY WERE GONE"                       "              10

  "PAULA HERSELF SAT BY THE WINDOW"              "             130
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                              THE HUNDRED
                           AND OTHER STORIES
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THE HUNDRED


Mrs. Darling was dining from home, and every heart in her little
establishment rejoiced over the circumstance, for it meant less work
for everybody, with an opportunity to enjoy Christmas Eve on his own
account.

Mrs. Bonnet, the lady's-maid, with the plans she had in mind for the
evening, was scarcely annoyed at all when her mistress scolded because
the corset-lace had got itself in a knot.

The chamber was full of a delicate odor of iris. The gas-globes at the
ends of their jointed gold arms looked like splendid yellow pearls; on
the dressing-table under them glittered a quantity of highly embossed
silverware, out of all reasonable proportion with the little person
owning it, who sat before the mirror beautifying her finger-nails
while Mrs. Bonnet did her hair.

"Mind what you are about," the mistress murmured, diligently polishing.

Mrs. Bonnet instantly removed the hot tongs from the tress she was
twisting, and caught it again with greater precaution.

"Mind what you are about," warned Mrs. Darling, somewhat louder, a
beginning of acid in her voice.

Mrs. Bonnet again disengaged the hair from the tongs, and after a
little pause, during which to make firm her nerve, with infinite
solicitude took hold again of the golden strand, and would have waved
it, but--

"Mind what you are about!" almost screamed little Mrs. Darling. "Didn't
I _tell_ you to be careful? You have been pulling right along at the
same hair! _Do_ consider that it is a human scalp, and not a _wig_ you
are dealing with! Bonny, you are not a bad woman, but you will wear me
out. Come, go on with it; it is getting late."

Before the hair-dressing was accomplished Mrs. Darling rolled up her
eyes--her blue eyes, round and angelic as they could sometimes be--at
the reflection of Mrs. Bonnet's face in the mirror, and said, meekly:
"Bonny, do you think that black moiré of mine would make over nicely
for you? I am going to give it to you. No, don't thank me--it makes me
look old. Now my slippers."

While Bonnet was forcing the shoe on her fat little foot, Mrs.
Darling's glance rested, perhaps by chance, on a photograph that leaned
against the clock over the mantelpiece. It was that of a still young,
well-looking man, whose face wore an unmistakable look of goodness, of
the kind that made it what one expected to read under it in print--the
Rev. Dorel Goodhue. There was another more conspicuous man-photograph
in the room, on the dressing-table, in a massive frame that matched the
toilet accessories. It stood there always, airing a photographic smile
among the brushes and hand-glasses and pin-boxes.

"I suppose," said Mrs. Darling, while she braced herself against Bonnet
to help get the small shoe on--"I suppose I have a very bad temper!"
and she laughed in such a sensible, natural, good-natured way any
one must have felt that her exhibition of a moment before had been a
sort of joke. "Tell the truth, Bonny: if every mistress had to have a
certificate from her maid, you would give me a pretty bad one, wouldn't
you? But I was abominably brought up. I used to slap my governesses.
And I have had all sorts of illnesses; trouble, too. And I mostly
don't mean anything by it. It is just nerves. Poor Bonny! I treat you
shamefully, don't I?"

"Oh, ma'am," said the lady's-maid, expanding in the light of this
uncommon familiarity, "I would give you a character as would make it
no difficulty in you getting a first-class situation right away; you
may depend upon it, ma'am, I would. Don't this shoe seem a bit tight,
ma'am?"

"Not at all. It is a whole size larger than I wear. If you would just
be so good as to hold the shoe-horn properly. There, that is it."

She stood before the bed, on which were spread two long evening
dresses. A little King Charles spaniel had made himself comfortable
in the softest of one. His mistress pounced on him with a cry, first
cuffed, then kissed and put him down. "Which shall I wear?" she asked.

Bonnet drew back for a critical view, but dared not suggest unprompted.

"The black and white is more becoming, but the violet crape is
prettier. Oh, Bonny, decide quickly for me, like a tossed-up penny!"

"Well, I think now I should say the violet, ma'am."

"Should you?" Mrs. Darling mused, with a finger against her lip. "But
I look less well in it. Surely I had rather look pretty myself than
have my dress look pretty, hadn't I? Give me the black and white, and
hurry. Mr. Goodhue will be here in a second. Bonnet!" she burst forth,
in quite another tone. "You trying creature! Didn't I _tell_ you to put
a draw-string through that lace? Didn't I _tell_ you? _Where_ are your
ears? _Where_ are your senses? What on _earth_ do you spend your time
thinking about, I should like to know, anyway? I wouldn't wear that
thing as it _is_, not for--not for--Oh, I am tired of living surrounded
by fools! Take it away--take it away! Bring the violet!"

At last she was encased in the fluffy violet crape, and at sight of the
sweet picture she made in the mirror her brow cleared a little; she
looked baby-eyed and angelic again, with her wavy hair meekly parted in
the middle. While she looked at herself she let Bonnet have one of her
arms to button the long glove.

"Ouch! Go softly; you pinch!" she murmured.

Bonnet changed her method with the silver hook, adjusted it anew, and
pulled at it ever so softly.

"Ouch! You pinch me!" said Mrs. Darling, a little louder.

Bonnet stopped short, and looked helplessly at the glove, that could
not be made to meet without strain over the plump white wrist. After
a breathing-while, with stealthy gentleness, again she fitted the
silver loop over the button, and, with a devout inward appeal to
Heaven, tried to induce it through the button-hole. She had almost
succeeded when Mrs. Darling screamed, "Ouch, ouch, ouch! You pinch like
_anything_! I am black and blue!" And tearing her arm from the quaking
servant, began fidgeting with the button herself, soon pulling it off.

[Illustration: "SHE LET BONNET HAVE ONE OF HER ARMS"]

"Bonnet, how many times must I tell you to sew the buttons fast on my
gloves before you give them me to put on?" she asked, severely. "No,
they were not!" she stormed, and peeled off the glove, throwing it far
from her, inside out.

There was a knock, and a respectful voice saying, outside the door,
"Mr. Goodhue is below, ma'am."

"Get a needle," Mrs. Darling said, humbly, like a child reminded of its
promise to behave, and waited patiently while the button was sewed on,
and held out her arm again, letting Bonnet pinch without a murmur.

A final bunch of violets was tucked in the bosom of her gown, and she
was leaving the bedroom, when, as if at a sudden thought, she turned
back, went to the door of a little room leading from it, and stood
looking in.

"Aren't they lovely, the hundred of them?" she gushed. "Did you ever
see such a sight? One prettier than the other! I almost wish I were one
of the little girls myself!"

"Them that gets them will be made happy, sure, ma'am. I suppose it's
for some Christmas-tree?"

"They are for my cousin Dorel's orphans. Pick up, Bonny. Open the
windows. Mind you keep Jetty with you. Don't let him go into the
kitchen. I am sure they feed him. I shall not be very late--not later
than twelve."

Mrs. Darling went down the stairs, followed by Bonnet with her mantle
and fan, and Jetty, who leaped and yapped in the delusion that he was
going to be taken for a walk.

The gentleman waiting below came forward to take Mrs. Darling's hand.

Mrs. Bonnet listened to the exchange of polite expressions between
them with no small degree of impatience; it seemed to her they might
just as well have made these communications later, in the carriage.

At last and at last they were gone. With the clap of the door behind
them the whole atmosphere of the house changed as by enchantment. A
door slammed somewhere; a voice burst out singing below-stairs; the
man in livery who had held the door for Mrs. Darling and her reverend
cousin leaned over the banisters and shouted, heartily, "Catherine!
I say, Catherine!" Mrs. Bonnet fairly scampered up-stairs, with the
mistaken Jetty, who thought this was the beginning of a romp, hard
after her, trying to catch her by the heels.

She entered Mrs. Darling's room with no affectation of soft-stepping,
threw up the window--the sharp outer air cut into the scented warmth
like a silver axe--and began pushing things briskly into their places.
She digressed from her labors a moment to get from the closet a black
moiré, which she examined, then replaced.

Now came a rap at the door, and a voice only a shade less respectful
than before, saying, "Miss Pittock is waiting below, ma'am."

"Very well, I will be down directly," said Mrs. Bonnet. "Come here,
Jetty!"

Jetty, instead of coming, ran round and round among the chair legs,
waving his tail in a graceful circle, eluding Mrs. Bonnet's hand not by
swiftness, but craft.

"Come here, you little fool," muttered Bonnet; and as her bidding,
however severe, availed nothing, she cast Mrs. Darling's wrapper over
the little beast, and got him entangled like a black-and-tan butterfly
in a pocket-handkerchief. She snatched him up squirming a little,
tucked him tightly under her arm, and ran up-stairs to her own chamber
on the third floor. There she dropped him; and when she had donned her
black coat and bonnet, gloves and galoshes, during which preparations
Jetty was leaping and yapping like crazy, in the supposition again that
they were going for a walk together, she turned out the light and shut
the door against his wet, black nose. His reproachful barks followed
her down the passage. "It's good for 'is lungs," she said, grimly,
hurrying over the stairs.

[Illustration: "AT LAST THEY WERE GONE"]

And here at the foot was Miss Pittock, looking quite more than the lady
in her mistress's last year's cape.

"I hope I haven't kept you waiting, Miss Pittock."

"Quite the contrary; don't mention it, Mrs. Bonnet. Oh, the shops is a
sight to behold, Mrs. Bonnet! I never seen anything like this year. It
do seem as if people made more to-do than they used about Christmas,
don't it? Are we ready, Mrs. Bonnet?"

"I am if you are, Miss Pittock."

"Now, what kind of shops do you fancy most, so we'll go and look into
their show-windows first?"

"I'm sure I don't know. What do you prefer yourself, Miss Pittock?
We've time to see most everything of any account, anyhow. She's not
coming home before twelve."

"No more is mine. Suppose we go first to the Grand Bazar. They've
always got the most amazing show there. That you, Mr. Jackson? A merry
Christmas to you, Mr. Jackson, and a happy New Year!"

For just as they reached the door they found the butler letting himself
out too. He did not sleep in the house, and was taking the opportunity
to-night to leave early. For a second he could not return Miss
Pittock's salutation, his mouth being crowded with a last bite snatched
in haste. When he had swallowed, he grinned and excused his hurry,
holding the door for the ladies.

"Sorry I ain't going your way, ladies," he said, amiably, and the door
closed behind the three.

In the kitchen the cook, with a face like a pleasant copper saucepan,
rosy and shining and round, was moving about leisurely, giving this and
that a final unhurried wipe. She wore a face of contentment; it was her
legitimate night out; with a good conscience presently she was going up
to make a change, and off to her family.

A young woman in a light gingham and frilled cap sat watching her
sulkily, her hands idle on her embroidered muslin apron. A girl of
perhaps eighteen, capless, in a dark calico that made not the first
pretension to elegance, was washing her face at one of the shiny copper
faucets. She vanished a moment, and came back with her damp hair
streaked all over by the comb. The cook was gone.

"You going, too, I suppose?" said the sullen parlor-maid.

"Why, yes. 'Ain't I done everything? There's no need of my staying, is
there?" The kitchen-maid went home for the night, too.

"No, I don't suppose there is. I just thought you might happen to be,
that's all."

The kitchen-maid sat down a minute, in a tired, ungirt position, and
looked over at the parlor-maid with good-natured young eyes grown a
trifle speculative. The latter let her glance wander over the day's
newspaper, brought down-stairs until inquired for.

"Tell you what I'd like to do!" exclaimed the kitchen-maid.

"What'd you like to do, Sally?"

"That's to come back again after I've been home for just a minute."

The parlor-maid looked up, unable altogether to conceal her interest.
The house was very quiet. Through the clock-ticks, at perfectly regular
intervals, came the muffled sound of Jetty's disconsolate yaps. Neither
of the girls appeared to hear them.

"You don't mean just to oblige, do you, Sally?"

"Well, I'd do it in a minute for nothing else beside, but that ain't
quite all I was thinking of just this once. Miss Catherine"--she
hesitated, then, enthusiastically--"have you seen 'em up-stairs? the
whole hundred of 'em laid out off Mrs. Darling's bedroom? I saw 'em
when Mrs. Bonnet she sent me up for the lamps to clean. Law! Wouldn't
any child like to see a sight like that! There's a little girl in my
tenement, she'd just go crazy. Do you think there'd be any harm in it
if I was to bring her over and let her get one peep? She's as clean a
child as ever you saw. She comes of dreadful poor folks, but just as
respectable! She never seen anything like it in her life. Law, what
would I have done when I was a young one if I'd seen that? I'd thought
I was dead and gone to heaven. I say, Miss Catherine, d' you think any
one would mind?"

"How'll they know?" said Miss Catherine, callously. "Look here, Sally;
you go along just as fast as you can and fetch your young one. And when
you've got back, perhaps I'll step out a minute, two or three doors up
street, and you can answer the bell while I'm gone. Now hurry into your
things. I'll give you your car fare."

"Miss Catherine, you're just as good as you can be, and I'll do
something to oblige you, too, some time," said Sally, her face aglow
with delight; and having hurried into her jacket and tied up her head
in a worsted muffler, was off.

She almost ran over the packed snow down the street. She had soon left
the quiet rows of private dwelling-houses and come where hundreds of
lights glittered across the rose-tinged snow. At every few rods a
street band tootled and blared, covering the scraping of snow-shovels
and jingle of bells. "How gay it is!" she thought; "won't it be a
treat!"

She plunged into a mean, small street, leading off a mean but tawdry
larger one, where things hung outside the shops with their prices,
written large, pinned on them, and had soon come to the house where her
family lived.

She went in like a great gust of fresh air. In less than five minutes
she came out, leading by the hand a little girl who, from being very
much bundled up about the shoulders, and having brief petticoats
above thin black legs, looked top-heavy. She was obliged to nearly
run to keep up with Sally, and was trying to get out words through
the breathlessness occasioned by hurrying and laughing and coming so
suddenly into the frosty air.

"Oh, lemme guess, Sal, and tell me when I'm hot. Is it made of sugar?"

"No, it ain't."

"But you said it was a treat, didn't you, Sally?"

"I did that. But ain't there all sorts of treats? There's going to the
circus, for instance. That hasn't any sugar."

"Is it a circus, Sally? Is it a circus?"

"No, it ain't a circus, but it's every bit as nice."

"Is it freaks, Sally? oh, tell me if it's freaks? It isn't? Are you
sure I shall like it very much? It's nothing to eat, and it's nothing
I can have to keep, and it's not a circus. What color is it? You'll
answer straight, won't you?"

"Oh, it's every color in the world, and striped and polka-dotted and
crinkled and smooth. There's a hundred of it."

The child would have stopped short on the sidewalk the better to centre
her mind on guessing, but Sally dragged her briskly along. At the top
of the street they came to a standstill.

"What is it?" asked the child.

"We're going to take the car," said Sally, grandly.

"O--h!" breathed the child.

"I guess you never stepped on to one of these before. This, Tibbie, is
nothing but the beginning. Hi! Hi!"

The swiftly gliding, fiery, formidable car stopped, and the hoarse
buzz died out in a grinding of brakes; the light was dimmed a minute,
then flared out again, as if the monster had winked. Sally and Tibbie
climbed on; it moved, banging and whirring on its farther way. They had
to stand, of course, but what of that? Tibbie looked all about with her
shining, intelligent brown eyes, and felt a flush of gratified pride
to see Sally, when the conductor had squeezed himself near, pay like
the others; it had seemed impossible that some compromise should not
have to be made with him. She slipped her hand in Sally's, and was too
occupied with the people and the colored advertisements to talk.

"Did you get anything for Christmas yet, Tibbie?"

She moved her head up and down, bestowing all her attention on a
parcel-laden woman bound to drop something the next time she stirred.

"What did you get?"

"A doll's flat-iron and a muslin bag of candy. I put the iron on to
heat, and it melted. I gave what was left to Jimmy."

"Who gave them to you?"

"Off the Sunday-school tree. But there were no lights on it, because it
was daytime. Sally, I know something that has a hundred--"

"What's that? Let's see if you've got it now?"

Tibbie looked a little shamefaced, then said, "A dollar--is a hundred
cents."

"Well, and would I be bringing you so far just to show you a dollar?
This is worth as much as a dollar, every individual one of them.
Tibbie, it's just the grandest sight you ever seen--pink and blue and
yellow and striped--"

Tibbie, who was looking Sally fixedly in the face, as if to see if her
secret anywhere transpired, now almost shouted, "It's marbles!"

"Aw, but you're downright stupid, Tibbie. I don't mind telling you I'm
disappointed. You're just a common, every-day sort of young one, with
no idear of grandness in your idears at all. And you don't seem to keep
a hold on more than one notion at a time. First it's a dollar. Is that
pink and blue? And next it's marbles. Is marbles worth a dollar apiece?
Now tell me what's the grandest, prettiest thing that ever you saw--"

"... Angels."

"D' you ever see any?"

"In the church window, painted."

"Well, this is as handsome as a hundred angels, less than a foot tall,
all in new clothes, with little hats on."

"Sally, I think I know now. Only it couldn't be that. There couldn't
likely be a hundred of them all together, for, oh, Sally, it isn't a
store we are going to! You didn't tell me it was a store."

"No more it is. We're going straight to Mrs. Darling's house, and no
place but there. Here's where we get off."

The big girl, with the small one, alighted and turned into the quieter
streets, Tibbie, as before, almost running to keep up with her
long-legged friend.

They went into Mrs. Darling's by the back door. In the kitchen stood
Miss Catherine in a coat with jet spangles and a hat with nodding
plumes, pulling on a pair of tight kid gloves.

Tibbie at sight of her hung back, murmuring to Sally, "You didn't tell
me! You didn't tell me!"

"Now, you'll be sure she don't touch anything, Sally," said Miss
Catherine, looking Tibbie over.

"Naw! She won't hurt anything. I've told her I'll skin her if she does."

"Are her hands clean? You'd better give them a wash, anyhow."

Tibbie dropped her eyes, a little mortified.

"All right! I'll wash 'em," said Sally.

"She'd better scrape her boots thoroughly on the mat, too, before going
up."

"I'll look after all that, Miss Catherine. Just you go long with an
easy mind."

"Well, I'm off. I won't be long. Why don't you give her a piece of that
cake? It's cut. But make her eat it down here. Good-night, little
girl. I guess you never was in a house like this before. Good-night,
Sal. Is my hat on straight?"

She was gone, and the whole house now belonged to Sally and Tibbie.
They looked at each other in silence a moment; the glee they felt came
shining to the surface of their faces and made them grin broadly at
each other.

"She's particular, ain't she?" said Sally.

"I just as soon wash them again, but they're clean. I thought you said
she was gone off to a party and going to be gone till real late."

"Law!" roared Sally, and plumped down to contort herself in comfort.
"She thought it was Mrs. Darling herself! Law! law!"

Tibbie laughed, too, but not so heartily, and the great time began.

Sally went for the cake-box, and Tibbie made a thoughtful selection;
and "Who'll ever find a few crumbs?" said Sally. "Come along!"

The great child and the little, full of a sense of play, went up the
stairs hand in hand. Tibbie could scarcely take account of what was
happening to her, such was the pure delight of the adventure.

"This is the dining-room; this is the sitting-room; this is the
receiving-room; this, now prepare--this is Mrs. Darling's own room!"

Up went the light; the rose-paper walls, the rose-chintz dumpy chairs,
the silver-laden dressing-table, the pink and white draped bed, leaped
into sight. Tibbie stood still, open-lipped.

"Ain't it handsome?" asked Sally, with the pride of indirectly
belonging to such things. "Come along, I'm going to wash your hands in
Mrs. Darling's basin."

She drew Tibbie, who gazed backward over her shoulder, into the little
alcove where the marble wash-stand was, and turned on stiff jets of hot
and cold water together. At the sweet odor of the soap tablet pushed
under her nose, Tibbie's attention was won to the operations of washing
and wiping.

"But where is there a hundred of anything?" she asked, faintly,
looking all about.

"Oh, this ain't it yet! This is only like the outside entry. Now, Miss
Tibbs, what kind of scent will you have on your hands?"

"Oh, Sal!"

"Shall it be Violet, or Russian Empress, or--what's this other--Lilass
Blank? or the anatomizer played over them like the garden-hose?"


They unstopped the bottles in turn, and drew up out of them great,
noisy, luxurious breaths. "This, Sally, this," said Tibbie at the one
with the double name like a person. Sally poured a drop in her little
rough, red hands, and she danced as she rubbed them together.

"Why are the little scissors crooked?" she asked, busily picking
up and putting down things one after the other. "What for is the
fluting-irons? What for is the butter in the little chiny jar? What's
the flour for in the silver box? Oh, what's this? Oh, Sal, what's that?"

Sally picked up the powder-puff and gave her little friend, who drew
back startled and coughing, a dusty dab with it on each cheek. "It's to
make you pale," she said. "It ain't fashionable to be red." She applied
the puff to her own cheeks as well. The two stood gazing in silent
interest at themselves in the mirror, and gradually broke into smiles
at the incongruous reflection. Sally suddenly bent one cheek, hitched
up one shoulder, and brushed half her face clean; then did the same by
the other cheek with her other shoulder. Tibbie, who had watched her,
aped her movement faithfully. They looked at themselves again, and
Tibbie remarked, "But I ain't red, anyhow."

"Law! that you ain't! When are you going to begin to get some fat on
your bones, Tibbie, or to grow?"

"I don't know. Who's the gentleman, Sal, in the pretty frame?"

"That's Mrs.'s husband. He ain't been living some time."

"Oh, he isn't living. Listen, listen, Sally! What's that noise I keep
hearing? I've heard it ever since we came."

Sally listened. "That? That's Jetty. It's a little bit of a dog, up at
the top of the house."

"Oh, a little bit of a dog! Why does he bark all the time?"

"I guess Mrs. Bonnet shut him up there alone in the dark till she came
back from gadding with Miss Pittock."

"Couldn't we get him, Sally? I hate to hear him. I want to see him
awfully."

"All right. You wait here. But don't you hurt anything, or I'll skin
you, sure, like I told Miss Catherine. And whatever you do, don't you
go into the little room till I come back."

"Is the hundred there?"

"Yes, it's there."

Tibbie, left alone, looked at the half-open door a minute, then turned
away from it: all was so interesting, anyhow, she could wait with
grace. With the palm of her hand, which she frequently stopped to
smell, she stroked the fine linen pillows on the bed, and the white
bear rugs on the floor, and the curtains: everything felt so soft. She
examined the features of the Rev. Dorel Goodhue with approbation,
proposing to ask Sally whether she knew him.

The bark came nearer and nearer; when the door opened, in tumbled a
small silky ball of black dog, who almost turned himself inside out in
his delight at being in human company again. He ran floppily about and
about the floor, in his conscious, cringing, graceful way, waving his
tail round and round, tossing back his long silk ears to bark and bark.

At last the girls between them had him caught. He was squeezed tight in
Tibbie's arms, where he wriggled and twitched, covering her cheeks and
ears with rapid dog-kisses, interspersed still with rapturous barks.
"Oh, oh!" cried Tibbie, trying vainly to hold him still long enough to
get a good kiss at him. "Isn't he soft? Isn't he sweet? And he has a
yellow ribbon. Oh, do keep quiet, doggie dear--you tickle!"

"I don't think we will bother any more about seeing the hundred," said
Sally, a feigned coldness in her tone, and stood aloof watching child
and dog.

"I had forgotten, honest, Sally."

"Put him down and come on, then."

"Mayn't I hold him and come too?"

"No; for when you see 'em, you'll drop him so quick you'll like as not
break his legs."

"All right. Down, Jetty! Down, sir! Come along, Jetty; come right
along, dear!"

"Wait a minute. I'll go in first and turn up the light. When I sing
out, you come on."

She went ahead, and Jetty precipitated himself at her heels. Tibbie
stooped with anxious inducing noises, and "Come back, sir! Come back!"

"Ready!" shouted Sally.

Tibbie made a bound for the door, but at a step's distance was overcome
by a curious timidity, and instead of bolting in, pulled the door
towards her tremulously, and pushed aside the lace hanging with a cold
hand.

There lay the hundred, all on a couch under the gas-light, arranged as
in a show-window, propped by means of silk cushions so as to form a
solid sloping bank--the hundred beautiful dolls.

"Well, ma'am?" asked Sally, expectantly.

Tibbie said nothing, but looked at them vaguely, full of constraint.

"Well, I never!" said Sally. "Don't you like 'em? What on earth did you
expect, child? Well, I never! Well, if it don't beat all! Why, when I
was a young one--Why, Tibbie girl--don't you think they are _lovely_?"

"Yes," she whispered, moving her head slowly up and down, then letting
it hang.

"Aw, come out of that," said Sally, understanding. "Come, let's look at
'em one by one, taking all our time. Come to Sally, darling, and don't
feel bad. We'll have lots of fun."

She took the not unwilling Tibbie by the hand, and led her nearer the
banked splendor.

The dolls were all of a size, and, undressed, would with difficulty
have been told apart, except, perhaps, by their little mothers. All
were very blond and wide-eyed and bow-lipped; all, though dressed like
little ladies, had the chubby hands of infants; and their boots were
painted trimly on with black, and their garters with blue. But how to
render the coquettish fashionableness with which these wax-complexioned
darlings were tricked out! all equally in silks and satins and velvets
and lace, so that there could be no jealousies; all with hats of like
beauty and stylishness.

Sally seated herself on the floor beside the low couch, and pulled
Tibbie down into her lap, who drew up Jetty into hers. Tibbie had
recovered the power to speak, but was still unduly sober and husky.

"I had almost guessed it, you know," she said, "when you said like
angels with hats on. But I couldn't think there would be a hundred
unless it was a store. What has the lady so many for?"

"Bless your heart! They ain't for herself! They are for orphans in a
school that a minister-cousin of hers is superintendent of. She has
been over a month making these clothes. Every Wednesday she would give
a tea party, and a lot of ladies come and sit stitching and snipping
and buzzing over the dolls' clothes the blessed afternoon. And I washed
the tea things after them all!"

"They are for the orphans. Are there a hundred orphans?"

"I guess likely."

"Suppose, Sally--suppose there were only ninety-nine, and some girl got
two!"

"Well, we two have got a hundred for to-night, Tibbie, so let's play,
and glad enough we've got our mothers. Look, this is the way you must
hold them to be sure of not crumpling anything."

She slipped her hand deftly under a doll's petticoats, and they peeped
discreetly at the dainty under-clothes, crisp and snowy, more lace than
linen.

"My soul and body! Did you ever see the like!" exclaimed Sally,
spurring on Tibbie's enthusiasm by the tone of her voice, making the
wonder more, to fill her little friend's soul to intoxication. Tibbie
easily responded. She fairly rocked herself to and fro with delight.

"And not a pin among 'em," sighed Sally. "All pearl buttons and silk
tying-strings and silver hooks and eyes; and, mercy on my soul! a
little bit of a pocket in every dress, with its little bit of a lace
pocket-handkerchief inside. D'you see that, Tibbie? And not two alike!"

"Oh, but there are some _'most_ alike!" said the quick-eyed Tibbie;
"only, scattered far apart. There are three with the little rose-bud
silk, and here's more than one with the speckled muslin. Perhaps those
will be given to sisters."

"Come on, Tibbie; let's choose the one we would choose to get, if we
was to get one given us. Now, I would like that one in red velvet. It's
just so dressy, ain't it, with the gold braid sewed down in a pattern
round the bottom. Which would you take?"

"I should like the one all in white. She must be a bride; see, she has
a wreath and veil and necklace. I should like her the very best. But
right after that, if I could have two, I should like this other in the
shade-hat with the forget-me-nots, and forget-me-nots dotted all over
her dress. And, see! the sky-blue hair-ribbon. If I could just have
three of them, then I would take this one too, with the black lace
shawl over her head fastened with roses instead of a hat. She has such
a lovely face! And after her I would choose this one in green--or this
one in pink; no, this one here, Sally, just look--this one in green and
pink. And you, if you could have more than one, which would you choose,
after the red one?"

"Well, I guess I'd choose this one in white."

"Oh no, Sally; don't you remember? That is the bride, the one I said
the very first. You can have all the others, Sally dear, except the
bride. But let's see, perhaps there are two brides. Yes!--no!--that is
just a little girl in white, without a wreath. Should you like her as
well? I was the first to say the bride, you know."

"Law! I wouldn't have wanted her if I had known she was a bride! I
take this one, Tibbie--this one with the feathers in her hat. Ain't she
the gay girl, in red and green plaid! And this purple silk one, and
this red and white stripe, and this--"

"Wait! That's enough, Sally; that makes four for you. It's my turn
now. If I could have five, I should take one of the rose-bud ones--no,
two of them, so's to play I had twins. Say, Sally, let's choose one
apiece--first you one, then me one, till we've chosen them all up, and
got fifty apiece. Your turn."

They chose and chose, pointing each time, and detailing the costume of
the chosen one aloud with the greatest enjoyment.

Jetty had laid himself down beside them, stretched his silky length,
his nose between his paws. He was very tired. Perhaps among the things
his great moist eyes were wondering about was the reason of this
fatigue in his vocal chords.

"For my forty-fifth one," said Sally, placing her forefinger pensively
against the side of her nose, "I choose her--her with the little black
velvets run all through."

"Taken already," said Tibbie, promptly.

"Then her over there, with the short puffy sleeves."

"Taken!"

"She taken too? Well, then, her in the pink Mother Hubbard with the
little knitting-bag on her arm."

"Taken, Sally! Can't you remember anything? Those belong to me; I chose
them long ago. These are the only not taken ones; here and here and
here and here and here and here and--"

"Aw, you're a great girl!" cried Sally, suddenly throwing her arms
around Tibbie and casting herself backward on the floor with her, where
they tumbled and rolled, laughing, Jetty jumping about on top of them,
barking hoarsely in a frenzy of fun.

"Oh, Tibbie, ain't we having a time of it?"

And Tibbie almost shouted, "Yes!--ain't we having a time of it!"

"Ain't this a night?"

"Oh yes!--ain't it a night!"

Sally tickled and poked her affectionately; and she tried to tickle
Sally, and laughed till she was almost hysterical, and never
remembered who she was, or thought of anything outside this little
room, but was filled with a sense of the crazy deliciousness of the
moment.

At last, weak with laughter, she disentangled herself from the still
panting and laughing Sally on the floor, and insisted on returning
to the business of the distribution. She felt in the mood to be very
funny. She jerked herself up and down and all about in a senseless sort
of way.

"Here, Sally, now stop laughing and let's finish. It was your turn.
You'd best take that one; she looks more as if she might be a little
girl of yours, her cheeks are so red--red as a great big cabbage!" This
remark seemed to Tibbie so inexpressibly humorous that she laughed
again till she nearly cried.

"Well, it's sure none of 'em has legs to make 'em look like children
of yours," retorted Sally; and that seemed a greater joke still. With
a foal's action, Tibbie flung out the thin black legs with the awkward
boots at the ends of them, and dropped to the floor squirming and
laughing. Sally caught her suddenly again, and cast herself backward
with her as before, in a gale of mirth.

There they were frolicking, when the peal of a bell rang brightly
across their giggles.

Sally sat up instantly, and all in Mrs. Darling's house was for a long
moment still as the very grave, for Sally had instinctively clapped her
hand over Jetty's ready muzzle.

"Murder!" whispered Sally, solemnly, at last.

"What is it?" breathed Tibbie in her ear.

"Was it the front door or the back door?" asked Sally.

"I dun'no', Sally."

Sally had picked herself up, and was stroking down her things.

Tibbie stood beside her, looking up in her face, her own a trifle pale.

Sally's irresolution lasted only a second. She cast an eye on the
dolls, saw that they were very nearly as she had found them, and turned
down the light. She looked about Mrs. Darling's room to see that all
was as usual, and turned down the lights there too, after glancing at
the clock.

"It ain't late," she murmured. "It ain't a bit later than I supposed.
It can't be her! It might be Mrs. Bonnet, though, getting home before
Catherine, who's got the key. I shouldn't want her to catch you here
for the whole world. Look here, Tibbie. You stand in here till I find
out who it is, and if it's Mrs. Bonnet, you'll have to stay hidden till
I find a good chance to come and smuggle you down."

Tibbie waited in the farthest corner of the hall closet, holding her
breath, conscious of nothing at first but excitement and fear of she
did not know quite what. After a little, the thought drifted across her
fervent hope for present safety, that though she got well out of this
scrape, she would probably never see those radiant dollies again, her
own half or Sally's.

She heard a whiffling and scratching at the closet door. Here was
Jetty, dear Jetty, whose actions would surely betray her to Mrs. Bonnet
when she came that way. Tibbie whispered: "Go right away, Jetty.
There's no one in this closet; go right away!" and pressed backward to
the wall, among the water-proofs, feeling like a little criminal with
the police on her track.

"Tibbie!" came Sally's voice from the foot of the stairs: it sounded
perfectly calm, and pleasant with a sort of company pleasantness.
"It's all right. It's just a friend dropped in for a moment. You can
go in again and play a little longer. Turn up the light carefully. But
remember what I told you."

Tibbie instantly forgot all her fears. She came out and picked up
Jetty; she kissed him, explaining why she had told him to go away. The
doggie seemed to bear no malice.

Tibbie tiptoed into the doll-room, and established herself on her knees
before the dolls, happier than before, with a profounder happiness, in
a stiller, almost devotional mood. It was so different being alone with
them, having them quite to herself, to play with in her own way. She
took up the bride with a reverent hand, and after long contemplating
her, very seriously, tenderly kissed her. Then, touching them as if
they had been snow-flakes almost, she moved the impressive little
persons about, until her fifty were on one side and Sally's on the
other.

"I can't play they're a family," she reflected; "they are too many
all the same age, and all girls. I will play they are a hundred girls
in an orphan asylum--a very rich orphan asylum--and that I am the
superintendent. To-morrow I am going to give each a beautiful doll
for a Christmas present. This little girl's name is Rosa. That one
is Nelly. That one is Katy. That one is Sue." She named every one,
passing through the list of such names as Golden-locks, Cherrylips,
Diamondeyes, to end with such invented ones as Kirry, Mirry, Dirry,
Birry. They seemed so much completer with names. Tibbie would say,
"Miss Snowdrop!" And Miss Snowdrop, with Tibbie's assistance, would
rise, answering, "Yes, ma'am." "Spell knot." "N--O--T!" "Not at all,
my dear. Sit down again, my dear. Miss Lily; stand up, miss, and see if
you can do any better this morning."

Suddenly, after having taken the asylum through a day's exercises,
Tibbie tired of being the superintendent. She craved a relation more
intimate, more affectionate, with the dollies. She did not believe a
superintendent would have kissed and fondled them as she longed to do.
She selected a dozen or so, to play they were her children. She gave
them their supper; she washed them and made them say their prayers. She
told them it was bedtime, and she would now rock them to sleep. She
turned down the light, to make all very real, and drawing out a low
rocking-chair that seemed made for her purpose, seated herself in it
with two dolls on each arm, the rest made as comfortable as possible
on her lap; for not one of them, after being included in the family,
could, of course, be left out of the rocking. She rocked gently, now
hushing, now singing "Bye-low-low-baby," her maternal heart swollen
very large. In time, one of the daughters became fractious and
restless; she had to have medicine, and the rocking for her sake had
to become almost violent. Nothing would soothe her but that the chair
should rock backward and forward to the very tip ends of its rockers.
This had its good effect at last; all the dolls were fast asleep, and
the mother, her duty done, composed herself to take a well-earned rest
too. This thought was no doubt suggested to Tibbie by the fact that she
was really getting sleepy. It was long past her bedtime.

She was not far from napping when she became aware of Sally saying:
"Lively, Tibbie! Miss Catherine has got back. We must be packing off
home. I declare I lost sight of the time. There's just no one like a
fireman to be entertaining, I declare. Mrs. Bonnet won't be long coming
now."

She turned up the light, and saw the dolls so disarranged.

Tibbie was rubbing her eyes.

"Law!" said Sally, a little blankly. "Do you suppose we can get them to
look as they did? I hope t' Heaven she didn't know which went next to
which. Do you remember, Tibbie, where each belonged?"

"Yes. The bride went here. The rose-buds here. The purple and gray
here. I can put them all back, every one."

"Oh, we're all right!" said Sally, cheerfully again. "No one'll ever
know in the world they've been disturbed."

She had drawn off to get the general effect, and compare it with the
earlier image in her brain, when she made a dive for one of the dolls,
the last one, that the sleepy Tibbie had handed her up off the floor.

"Tibbie!" she said, in a ghastly whisper, "look at its head!"

Something had happened to it, certainly. Its pink-and-white face was
pushed in; it looked very much as if a chair-rocker had gone over it.
Tibbie looked at it, not understanding at all.

"Oh, Tibbie!" groaned Sally, "now what'll we do!"

"I didn't do it," said Tibbie, lifting a pale face with perfectly
truthful eyes. "I was just as careful! She was one of my daughters; I
had her in my lap rocking her to sleep with the others; she must have
slipped off my lap--there were too many for one lap, I guess--but I
didn't step on her. Sure, Sally--sure as I live, I didn't step on her!"

"Oh, law! You must have rocked on her. Oh, Tibbie, what'll I do!"

She picked up the doll to examine it, but saw at once that the little
face could not be made right again.

Tibbie watched her without a word; her voice seemed to have sunk far
below reach.

Sally moved the dolls about tentatively, so that ninety-nine should
cover the same space as a hundred. Certainly at first glance the
one she held would never be missed. "But what's the good?" she
said, throwing it down. "They'll count them, and there'll be the
mischief of a fuss. Oh, Tibbie"--and she had reached the end of her
good-nature--"why did I ever think of bringing you here? Now look
at all the trouble you've brought on me, when I thought you'd be so
careful! And I told you and told you till I was hoarse. And here
you've ruined all!"

Tibbie's eyes could not bear to meet Sally's. She stood with her hands
behind her, speechless and motionless, in the middle of the floor.

"I declare I don't know what to do!" Sally exclaimed, dropping her arms
and sitting down before the wreck. "I wish I'd never seen 'em! I wish
there'd never been any Christmas! Oh, it's a great job, this! Tibbie,
you've done for me this time!"

At this moment Miss Catherine came in to hurry them.

"She's broken one of them!" blurted out Sally.

"You don't mean it!"

"Yes, she has!"

"Let me see it. Oh, you wicked child! She's smashed its face right in!
Now who ever heard of such naughtiness?"

Tibbie twisted about ever so little, to get her back turned towards the
two.

"She didn't do it out of naughtiness at all, Miss Catherine. She's as
good a child as ever lived!" At that Tibbie's shoulders gave a little
convulsive heave. "It was an accident entirely. But that's just as bad
for me. I suppose I shall have to say it was me did it."

"And then they'll say what was I doing while the kitchen help was
poking about in the Mrs.'s chamber. No; you don't get me into trouble,
Sally Bean! You'd much better say how it was--how that you asked me if
you just might bring a little girl to look, and I said you might, out
of pure good-nature, being Christmas is rightly for children, and I've
a softness for them. And while we was both in the kitchen, she slipped
away from us and came here and done it before we knew. And the child
herself will say that it was so. You'll be packed off dead sure out of
this place if you let on you meddled with them yourself. She won't have
her things meddled with--There goes the bell. There comes that old cat
Bonnet."

She hurried off to open.

"What's the matter?" said Mrs. Bonnet, elevating her eyebrows as she
appeared at the door and looked into the room she had expected to find
dark and still. She held a paper bag; she spoke with an impediment and
a breath of peppermint. Her cheek-bones and the end of her nose were
brilliant pink with the cold. "What child is that?"

Miss Catherine was behind Mrs. Bonnet. "It happened this way, Mrs.
Bonnet," she began, and told the story with a little tactful adaptation
to the intelligence of her audience, ending, "And now, Mrs. Bonnet,
what's to be done?"

"Oh, you wicked little brat!" said Mrs. Bonnet. "I just want to get
hold of you and shake you!"

She made a snatch at Tibbie, who instinctively got beyond her clutch,
and turning scared eyes towards Sally, said, just audibly, "I want to
go home; I want to go home."

"It don't seem possible," said Mrs. Bonnet, bitterly, "that I can't run
out a minute just to do an errand for Mrs. Darling herself--to get a
spool of feather-stitching silk--but things like this has to happen.
Catherine, I thought you, at least, was a responsible person, and here
you has to go and--"

"Mrs. Bonnet," Catherine interrupted, "you just let that alone! Don't
you try none of that with me! I went out of an errand every bit as much
as you did. I went out to make sure the ice-cream would be sent in good
season for Christmas dinner, I did. Now I don't get dragged into this
mess one bit more than you do!"

Mrs. Bonnet looked at her with a poison-green eye. She seemed to be
repressing what was a trifle difficult to keep the upper hand of.

"Well," she exclaimed at last, "Mrs. Darling will be here in a
minute, and then we shall all see what we shall see. Lord, ain't that
woman been cross to-day, and fussy! 'Tain't as if she was like other
people--a little bit sensible, and could take some little few things
into consideration, and remember we are all human flesh and blood.
Not much! She don't consider nothing, nor nobody, nor feelings, nor
circumstances! She just makes things fly! Things has to go her way,
every time!"

"I want to go home," cried Tibbie, pathetically, and looked towards
Sally now with a trembling face.

"No, you sha'n't go home," said Bonnet, uglily. "You shall stay right
here and take the blame you deserve, after spoiling the face of that
handsome doll. What do you mean by it, you little brat, you little
gutter imp?"

"You let her alone, Mrs. Bonnet," said Sally, with a boldness that had
never before characterized her relations with that lady. "Don't you
talk to her like that! Any one can see she's as sorry as sorry can be
for what she's done, and all the trouble she's got us into--"

"And what does that help, I'd like to know? The doll is broke, ain't
it? And some one of us is going to catch it, however things go. You're
a lucky girl, I say, if you don't lose your place. Some one of us is
going to, I can easy foretell."

"I ain't going to lose my place," said Miss Catherine, firmly; and
with a lifted chin was leaving to lay off her things, when the cook's
nice copper-saucepan face was pushed a little inside the door.

"What's the matter?" she asked, cheerily, and stepped in. Her
high-colored shawl was pinned on her breast with a big brooch; her
bonnet-strings were nearly lost in her fat chin. "What's it all about?
Whose nice little girl is this?"

Gradually she got the whole story, and going straight to Tibbie lifted
her miserable little face, saying: "Don't you feel bad one bit,
darlin'! It was all an accident, and it's no good crying over spilt
milk. And if Mrs. Darling gets mad at you, she ain't the real lady I
take her for. Why, I gave my Clary a new doll to-night, and it's ready
for a new head this minute. And did I stop to rear and tear about it?
Not a bit of it. Why, bless you, she didn't go for to do it! What child
smashes a doll a purpose? You're a pretty set, the whole gang of you,
to pitch into a mite like this!"

Tibbie by this time was freely weeping, and Sally and the cook
together were trying to comfort and silence her.

"I've a great mind to stay here myself and stand up for her, yer pack
of old maids, the lot of yer!" said the cook, looking hard at Mrs.
Bonnet, who had reappeared without her hat and coat.

"You will oblige me, Mrs. MacGrath, by doing nothing of the sort,"
said Mrs. Bonnet. "We've no need to have a whole scene from the drama.
You've no business on this floor anyhow, and I must insist on your
keeping yourself in your own quarters."

"And I'll take my own time, yer born Britisher," said Mrs. MacGrath.
Then putting her arm around Tibbie: "Well, Tibbie dear, you can be
sure of this: however bad this seems, it'll soon be over. And if Mrs.
Darling does scold, it'll soon be over too. It'll all be looking
different to you in the morning. However things goes, you'll soon be
forgetting all about it. And to-morrow is Christmas Day, that our own
dear Lord was born on, and I'll bake you a little cake and send it to
you by Sally."

"But Sally's going to be sent away," sobbed Tibbie.

"So she might be, but I feel it in my little toe that she ain't going
to be."

"Well, and if I am, I am, and there an end," said Sally, bravely. "But
I don't see why she can't take the price of the doll out of my wages
and let me stay."

"I think you'll find," said Mrs. Bonnet, "that it ain't most
particularly the cost of the doll gets you into trouble--There she
comes this minute!"

The door-bell had rung. Profound silence reigned above, while all
listened. Tibbie stopped crying.

"Good-night," came Mrs. Darling's sweet voice, presently, floating up
from the foot of the stairs.

"Good-night," came the Rev. Dorel Goodhue's.

There was a rustle of silken skirts.

"Oh, Cousin Cynthia!"

"Yes?"

"At ten, did you say--or half past?"

"I said ten--_or_ half past. Good-night."

More rustling of skirts; then,

"Oh, Cousin Dorel--"

"Yes?" from the foot of the stairs.

"It doesn't matter--what we spoke about, you know, unless perfectly
convenient."

"Oh, but it will be convenient, perfectly. Good-night. Sleep well."

"You too. Pleasant dreams. Good-night."

"Good-night."

The rustling drew nearer, and Mrs. Darling stood in the doorway,
looking with a sort of absent-minded astonishment at the assemblage in
her room.

The violets were quite dead on her white bosom; her hair was beginning
to come loose, and stood out in golden wisps about her flushed face.
She looked very sweet and soft and shiny-eyed and pleasant altogether.

"What is it?" she asked; and as Jetty was evoluting and clamoring about
her feet she picked him up and kissed him like a mother. "Has anything
happened? What is everybody doing up here? Whose little girl is this
sitting up so late? They used to tell me I should never grow, my dear,
if I sat up so late--"

"This is what it is, ma'am," began Mrs. Bonnet; and she told her
arrangement of the story, uttering her words as a mowing-machine cuts
weeds.

Mrs. Darling abstractedly took the rocking-chair; as she listened, the
pleasant, happy look forsook her face.

"Oh, cut it short!" she interrupted, sharply. "What you have to tell is
that the child there has broken one of the dolls, isn't it?"

There was an assenting mutter from Mrs. Bonnet.

"And you've kept her here, when she ought to have been in bed these
hours, to bear the first beauty of my displeasure--"

Mrs. Darling had said so much in a hard voice, with an appearance of
cold anger; here her voice suddenly died, and she burst out crying
like a vexed, injured child. "I _declare_ it is too bad!" she sobbed,
quite reckless of making a spectacle of herself, while all looked on
and listened in consternation--"I declare it is too bad! It's no use!
It doesn't matter _what_ I do--it is always the same! It is _always_
taken for granted I will conduct myself like a beast. Who can wonder,
after that, if I do? Here I find them, pale as sheets, the five of
them, shaking in their boots because a forlorn little child has broken
a miserable doll. And _what_ is it supposed I shall do about it? Didn't
I dress the hundred of them for children, and little poor children
too? And I must have known they would get broken, of course. _Why_
did I dress them? _What_ did I spend months dressing them for? Solely
for _show_, they think--not for any charity, any kindness, any love
of children, or anything in the _world_ but to make an effect on an
occasion, I suppose--to make myself a merit with the parson, perhaps!"
Here her crying seemed to become less of anger and nervousness, and
more of sorrow; one would have thought her heart-broken. "Oh, it is too
bad! One would imagine I never said a decent thing, or did a kind act,
to any one. And Heaven knows it is not for lack of trying to change.
But no one sees the difference! I am treated like a vixen and a terror.
All the people about me hate and fear and deceive me! A proof of it
to-night! Oh, the _lesson_! Oh, I wasn't _meant_ for this! I wasn't
meant for it! When I remember last Sunday's sermon, and how straight to
my heart it went--oh, I am a fool to cry! Come here to me, dear child.
What is your name? What? A little louder! What did you say? Tibbie!
Oh, what a nice, funny name!" Mrs. Darling smiled through her tears,
pathetically hiccoughing and sighing while she spoke. "_You_ didn't
think I was going to scold you, did you, dear? Of _course_ not! It was
an accident; I understand all about it. I used to break my dolls' heads
frequently, I remember very well--"

Mrs. Darling had put her arm endearingly around Tibbie, and tried to
make the child's head easy on her shoulder. But poor Tibbie's muscles
could not relax; her stiff little face rested uncomfortably, without
pressing, upon its warm alabaster prop. "Let us see, dear, now, what
we can do to make us both feel happier. I dressed all those dolls for
little children I am not acquainted with at all. Which of them should
you like the very best? Which should you like for your very own?"

Tibbie could neither make herself move nor speak; but the tail of her
eye travelled towards the dolls.

"The bride!" Sally took the liberty of saying, beaming as she came to
Tibbie's aid.

"The bride? Which one is that? That one? Of course!" Mrs. Darling
reached for the resplendent favorite and placed her in Tibbie's hands.
"There, my dear."

Tibbie took the doll loosely, without breath of thanks; but while Mrs.
Darling reviewed the dolls, her hand went out involuntarily towards the
broken one. Mrs. Darling saw it. "Of course," she said--"of course, you
would want that poor dollie to nurse back to health. Now, dear, isn't
there _one more_ you would like?"

At this Tibbie's confusion seemed likely to overwhelm and swamp her.
"I'll choose one for you," said Mrs. Darling, "and you shall call her
Cynthia, after me. How would you like that? Suppose we say this one,
with the forget-me-nots? She looks a little like me, doesn't she, with
her hair parted in the middle? Her frock is made of a piece of one of
my own, and that blue is my favorite color. There, Tibbie, now you have
two whole dollies and part of another. You must run right home to bed.
A Merry Christmas to you, dear child. I am very happy to have made your
acquaintance."

The exuberant Sally talked like a clock gone mad all the way home
through the clear wintry night; and since she felt inclined to
conversation, it was well she could keep one up alone, for Tibbie, who
trotted beside her, holding fast her dolls, did not utter a single
word.



THE PASSING OF SPRING


In the crowded, unbeautiful part of the city were two streets forming
as if the two long legs of the A we knew as children, the A with feet
wide apart, that stood for Ape. A third street went from one to the
other, as the little bar does across the A, but crooked, as a child's
hand would draw it. This street was narrow, gloomy, and relatively
quiet. The tide of traffic kept to the larger streets; the small street
knew, beyond the occupants of its own houses and visitors to these, few
but hurried foot-travellers who used it as a short cut, and people of
inferior pretensions coming there to trade. The ground-story of almost
every house was a shop; a person might have spent a life without real
necessity for leaving the street. Here boots were made and mended; in
the next door, clothes were sold (the dim show-windows were full of
decent dresses, very good still for what you paid; you could be fitted
even with a ball-dress, all beads and satin bows), yonder you could
get money on deposit of your watch, or your flute, or your ear-drops;
farther you could have yourself shaved. There was a window full of
tarts and loaves; another window in which a roast fowl set its gold
note, as some would say, between the pink note of half a ham and the
coral note of a lobster.

Across a certain one of the windows in that street for a long time had
hung from a line, as from the belt of a savage, tails of hair--black,
brown, blond. Below these, two featureless wax faces presented their
sallow blankness to the passer, one wreathed with yellow curls, the
other capped with brown waves of a regular pattern. Ordered around the
twin turned-ebony stands were hairpins, sticks of cosmetic wrapped
in silver paper, slabs of chalk laid on pink cotton, china pots with
pictures of flowers or beauties and pleasing inscriptions in French,
fuzzy white balls of down, combs, gilt-brass ornaments, kid-capped
phials containing amber and ruby liquids. On the inside of the heavy
shutter, caught back against the street-wall by day, was pasted a
large print. This told you in what a prodigious way Madame Finibald's
Gold Elixir would make your hair grow, and showed you the picture of a
lady who doubtless had used it--her hair was extraordinary, it nearly
reached to her feet.

Perhaps it had been found that the neighborhood was become hardened to
the sight of the luxuriant pictured hair; perhaps some who had provided
themselves with the small copy of it, to be obtained inside on a bottle
full of brown stuff, had grown inclined to treat of it lightly: "Ah,
Madame Finibald!" perhaps one irritated customer had said to the old
proprietress, coming to have made clear to her why after three bottles
of Gold Elixir her locks were still not thick, still not glossy and
splendid as the announcement promised they should be, "it's easy to
cork up herb tea. It's easy to make hair long in a picture, and it's
easy to make it thick. I don't believe there ever was any such person
as that young woman on the label!" One morning saw a change in Madame
Finibald's window. All the accustomed things were crowded to the sides
to make room for a chair; on this sat a girl with brown-gold hair that
reached in very truth to the floor.

On every morning and every afternoon, through a long winter, first one
end and then the other of the little street was crossed by a youth who
kept to the larger thoroughfares with the stream. He carried books; he
went rapidly, granting small attention to the things he passed. It is
not from that to be supposed that he was profoundly thinking. His face,
agreeable in feature and color, was rather wanting in expression; no
more interesting than it was interested. He passed at precisely the
same hour every morning, and the time of his passing in the afternoon
varied but little. This, from October unto April. But when April set
its gold stamp on the weather, had there been any wise person observing
this well--constructed blond machine, applauding its regularity,
holding it up perhaps as an example to other young frequenters of
schools and lecture-rooms--that wise person would have been troubled,
he would have had misgivings, he would have been at last full of grief.

A change had come over the young man's mood. His eye was acquiring a
roving habit. If his step had before been bent on duty, it was now
less directly bent; if before he had been on time at his appointments,
he must now have been always more or less late. He walked leisurely,
swinging his books by a strap. He loitered before shop-windows, he
turned to look after a face. The sky smiled down between the rows of
buildings on the occasion of the first balmy day; little clouds floated
in it, shimmering like dissolving pearls. He returned the soft sky's
compliment; he looked up at it, the winter sternness melting from his
eyes. At every street corner he was seen to stop, foolishly smiling
upward; and, yes, positively, he was seen there, forgetful of all the
people, to sigh and stretch! On that very day he lost three books out
of his strap, and did not for some time notice it; when he did, he
cared nothing! From a scrawl on the fly-leaf the finder of these books
learned their rightful owner to be of the house of Fraisier.

He had come hundreds of miles from an obscure town to study in this
great city; he had been a serious, mechanical plodder for months,
feeling that he owed it to himself and to his distant family to fill
his head full, full with precious notions. He had formed no friendships
with his fellow-students, fearing that they would divert him, or
perhaps, fearing the young fellows themselves, among whom he felt
singularly green. He lived alone in one little room at the end of the
world, took no holidays, had no fun, went to bed early so as to be
fresh for his book in the morning. And now, suddenly, he had completely
lost the point of view from which it had seemed necessary that he
should get dizzily high marks, that he should conquer field after field
in the realm of learning, and return to his home exuding glory. He
could not persuade himself any more but that it befitted him perfectly
to spend many hours strolling through the streets with his hands in
his pockets, amusing his eyes with sights of every sort. He could find
no argument that satisfied him why he should not lounge on a garden
seat warm with sun, smoking cigarettes half the day, thinking nothing
profitable. The wretched boy had lost all sober sense of the duty of
man.

If he had limited himself to sitting idle in the garden, watching the
year develop in that narrow, charming enclosure, one might have found
an excuse for him, the same as for the scientist who studies a specimen
under a glass; or, one might have said he had been overworking, his new
circumstances on coming to the city had induced in him a false sort
of fervor for work--a reaction was to be expected. But the mood whose
first stage had been simple disinclination for study and a taste for
pointless wanderings, by the time that in the march of the year the
crocuses had gone, took on developments. It was not so often before a
many-colored flower-bed he stopped, as before a window full of hats and
bonnets.

If, again, he had limited himself to staring in at milliners' fronts!
The wares there do somewhat resemble fantastic flowers, and might
explain the interest of a botanist. But he halted in the same way
before shops that offered no excuse for the same attention; windows in
which were only idle feminine frocks displayed, flippant fans, frills
of fluted lace, feathery things for the neck.

One might have imagined from his wonder and interest that all these
things had just been invented, that they were a strange spring-crop;
that new, too, was the race of smiling, chatting, shopping beings
crowding the street on sunny days, new and in fashion only since this
spring, such unaccustomed pleasure spoke in his eye that shyly followed
them in their prettiest representatives. What exquisite sense shown, O
ever-young Creator, in making the lip red, and the neck white, and the
temperate cheek between white and red!

The boy had moments of being drunk in a glorified way even as is the
innocent bee, with nothing but wandering among flowers. Owing to a
confusion in the ideas attendant on that mysterious soft travailing
among the atoms of the heart warmed through by spring, all sorts of
things to him were as flowers! His imagination was so increased in
power, that with nothing but a pair of little shoes in a show-case to
start from he could build up the most astonishing, dreamy stories:
he could set feet in the shoes and rear a palatial flesh-and-blood
structure over them, as easy as sigh; fit the whole with graces,
laces, circumstances and adventures--contrive even to tangle its fate
pleasingly with his own.

Which may make supposed that he was a youth of some boldness. Far from
it. He scarcely knew what a woman's eyes were like, except in profile
or fugitive three-quarters; on the other hand, he was well acquainted
with her back hair. Hair, in which he could pursue long studies
unconfounded, seemed to him the most beautiful thing in all the world.

One day, with a view to lengthening the way by taking a road that
though shorter must from novelty be richer in diversion than his
daily track, he turned into the little street that cut off the
triangle of the A. He paused before the window of the worn watches and
sleeve-links; he took his time over the faded finery of the second-hand
clothes shop; he examined certain yellowed wood-cuts and stained books
he found in a narrow open stall. As he seemed coming to the end of the
street's resources, he looked over the way and thoughtfully felt his
cheek: he could not find there what would have justified a refreshing
station at the barber's. He continued his way slowly, to make it last.
Now, he stopped where several others were likewise stopping--he had
come to Madame Finibald's.

The girl sat amid her hair, either unconscious or disdainful of the
eyes watching her beyond the glass. She looked in a book open on her
lap; now and then she turned over a leaf, sometimes revealing a picture
on the page. Her chair was low, perhaps so that her hair should amply
trail; its lowness made an excuse for the listlessness of her posture;
her feet were outstretched and crossed, the passers might know that
one of her shoes was laced with pink twine. If she moved her eyes from
her book a moment, it was only to sweep them past the faces, unseeing,
and lift them to the strip of sky between the houses--so blue this day,
the little bit there was of it.

Her face one scarcely noticed for the first moment more than any rosy
apple; for oh! her hair!--her hair claimed all the attention a man had
to give, did her shining hair falling stately along her cheeks, all
over her shoulders, below her waist, beyond her garment--richer, of
course, than any possible queen's cloak. The light rippled over it,
changing on it all the time, when nothing else in the window appeared
to live.

Within the shadow of the shop was discerned a watchful, wrinkled old
face, chiefly differing from a parrot's in the slyness of its eyes.
Fraisier catching sight of it thought of a witch on guard over a
princess enchanted and imprisoned in a glass-case.

The little group in front of Madame Finibald's dispersed, formed anew
with other faces many times in the hour; Fraisier remained, his eyes
climbing up, sliding down the golden ropes of hair.

At last, though the girl gave no sign, he was made uncomfortable by
the sense that she must, even without looking, have seen how long he
stood. He inquired timidly of her face. It was informed with a gentle
brazenness, fortified to be stared at all the day. Yet there was a
suggestion of childishness in its abstracted expression; she wore the
sort of look one has seen on the face of a little girl playing at being
somebody else far more splendid than herself. A close observer might
have suspected that she really thought it rather grand to sit there in
the gorgeousness of her hair, and was amused with pretending not to
know that a soul looked on.

Fraisier, because her eyes were lowered, found hardihood to stare his
fill at her face. He surrendered without struggle before the round
cheeks, the short little nose, the good-natured mouth and chin, which,
in truth, took more than their just space in the face. But most--oh,
still most! delighted him the brown-gold hair that tumbled over her
forehead and ears in little curls.

He was realizing from the mutterings of what was left him of a
conscience how late it must be getting--he must be taking himself
off; he was making long the one minute more he allowed himself, when
her pupils slid between the lashes in his direction. He had lost all
presence of mind, he could not withdraw his glance. After a second's
pause upon his, her eyes slid back to her book and were hidden. Then,
without another thought towards duty, he crossed the street to the
barber's, from whose window he could see Madame Finibald's; and,
coming forth with a smoother face than the rose, entered the little
eating-shop next door, from which likewise he could command Madame
Finibald's.

He went through the little street every day. He took many atrocious
meals in the shop, on the table nearest the window.

On such days as brought perfect weather, the girl in Madame Finibald's
would turn very often to the sky a look easily interpreted as longing.
Then would Fraisier look up too and sigh. It seemed such a pity, this
wasted blue weather.

It seemed such a pity, all this wasted sweetness, he thought in
crossing a public garden on his occasional unwilling way to a lecture.
The quince-tree blossomed in red; under the cherry were little drifts
of scented snow; up out of the vigorous, rested earth were flowers
springing in mad, gay multitudes. The air was silver made air in the
morning; and in the afternoon it was gold made air. Birds, busily
building, busily twittered. These things did nothing to him, but the
more they were lovely and penetrated the heart, the more to make him
lonesome.

He took himself away from their radiance without one regret for them,
to spend his time in preference in an ugly little street where one
could scarcely have known what season it was, where there was nothing
to see that was beautiful but certain long, long hair. In thought,
though, let it be said in vindication of spring's power of enthralling,
having done up the hair in braids, and extinguished it with a hat, he
was always, always guiding it to the contemned garden. When once it was
in the garden, May there had become perfect.

He wondered whether it could be she had become aware of his persistent
presence. He feared she had, and as often that she had not. He imagined
sometimes that when he looked her face was quivering with a conquered
desire to smile. That disconcerted him a shade. Sometimes he thought
she looked suspiciously rosy for a girl unconscious of all the world.
Sometimes he looked away, with the idea that if he turned suddenly
he should find her stealing a glance at him. But he dared not look
very quickly, lest the action should be too marked; and turning with
discreet alacrity, he could never feel sure.

One day, at last, having settled in his mind that this tame conduct was
unworthy of a man, refusing himself a second in which to think better
of any matter, he crossed the street and charged the shop. A bell
snapped sharply as he opened the door. It startled him to the point of
gasping. He grew crimson, finding himself opposed in truth, as many
a night before in dream, by Madame Finibald's sly and lowly smile,
breathing the same faintly drug-perfumed air as the princess breathed,
no glass screen between himself and the hair. He could have touched it,
had he been so bold.

He stammered a request for soap--scented soap. He wished himself tens
of ten miles away, or time out of mind dead, when--wonderful! The
maiden in the window looked frankly over her shoulder. Was it that her
eyes brimmed with friendly laughter, or did it seem so to him because
his head had become incapable of a true notion? His heart, so to speak,
found its feet; he made a muddle of every sentence he launched upon,
but his words had a voice behind them. So much he contrived to convey:
he was very hard to please in the matter of soap. He sniffed at a
variety of proffered tablets, whose virtues Madame Finibald, in very
truth like a witch with a philter to sell, assiduously set forth; each
cake he examined seemed to hold in her estimation just a little higher
place than the foregoing. At the end of ten minutes, without positively
losing her good-humor, she declared that he had seen all in the shop,
she was sorry and surprised they could not suit him, they might have a
fresh stock in on the morrow. He was leaving in clumsy embarrassment,
empty handed, with a promise to return, when the princess lightly
jumped from the window-place, and, sweeping the hair off her face,
said: "There is one more sort, ma'am. I saw it up there, high, when I
dusted. Let me get it."

She fetched the steps, and in a moment had climbed and lifted down a
box. She set it on the counter; she opened it herself and held towards
him, with a direct glance, a packet with a red rose printed on the
wrapper.

Madame Finibald, with an exclamation, snatched it from the girl's hand,
and began, as if here had been a little grandchild recovered to her
old age, to speak with tenderness of its merits. The girl stood near,
twining and untwining a lock around her finger, while she unaffectedly
looked at the customer. Her hair came below her knees; every moment
she had to toss it back out of her face.

"Go back to your window, wicked child!" cried the old witch, suddenly,
as if catching at a piece of gold as it was being taken out of her
pocket. "Go back!"

"I am tired of sitting!" said the little princess, twisting her
shoulders in her frock with the prettiest peevishness. "I have sat and
sat and sat! I have finished my story. Let me go out and get a bun. You
know you said I could when it was noon."

She caught at her hair, and, to the infinite wonder of one looking
on, began twisting, twisting, twisting, coiling, coiling, coiling,
driving in great skewers--while he filled his blissful pockets with
rose-scented soap.

The bell snapped in fretful reprehension for her passing out. Less than
a minute after, it exclaimed in annoyed surprise for his.

Now was he no longer made lonesome by every coquettish touch the more
that the year put to her toilet. For the girl of the regal hair
smiled to him, surreptitiously with her lips, but unguardedly with her
eyes, when he came by her glass-case; while he dawdled in the window
opposite, she communicated with him by signs no other eye could have
perceived. Even before their acquaintance had become very old, she
slipped out to walk in the garden, and they sat on the green seats and
had long, foolish, youthful talks--delightful, foolish, youthful times.

Her conversation took an amusing interest from the peculiarities of
her education. She had seen and heard much in her short life in a hard
world, where it was no one's affair to keep anything from her young
ken--much of dark, and petty, and unpicturesque--preserving through
all a sort of hardy innocence; and she had borrowed from a cheap
circulating library a vast lot of fiction dealing with the supremely
grand. Her preference in literature, however, had remained for fairy
tales, a taste formed when it had been one of her duties to read aloud
to certain little children of the rich. She knew them by the score. It
was to this, perhaps, some of her remarks owed the fanciful touch that
redeemed them from the commonness of her general conversation--a genial
commonness, condoned to such young lips. She had a childish way of
lending a personality to everything, that amused him more than epigram
would have done. She ascribed intention to the wind that blew off her
hat, and stopped to express her mind to it. She assumed consciousness
in the bench they sat on; she wanted to take the same one, lest it
should think they slighted it because it was rickety, for which it
was not to blame. Every flower was to her a person. "Hush! They are
listening!" she said, looking from the corner of her eye at a bank of
knowing pansies. She scolded a button for coming off, as if the want
of principle shown by it had been a thing to revolt her. She stood in
a one-sided relation of good-fellowship with the brown birds hopping
among the gravel, and the fishes in the pond; she spared them many
crumbs. With homely good-heartedness she took into an amused regard all
the family of spring--buds, blades, insects--addressing speech to them
as if she had been a giant and they a very little people.

Never can spring return without Fraisier's remembering that spring.
It was bright; by it all the springs following have been cast in the
shadow.

The long hair was woven through and through his thoughts; but not as
a disturbing, upheaving element. The girl made him waste a great deal
of time, but nothing else--not the life of his heart. Because of her
good-nature, her entire want of coquetry or perverseness, his feeling
for her complicated itself in nowise; rather it grew simpler as it
insensibly changed. His wonder and fine dread at feminine appurtenances
had worn away a little with increased familiarity; he reposed on that
fact as if it had been such an one as becoming accustomed to the noise
of guns. He felt under delicate obligations to her for having routed
his shyness, and not at all tormented him in any of the thousand ways
he apprehended a feminine being would have at her command.

As he was less and less in awe of her and that suspected arsenal,
though a charming, fearful element went out of his sentiment, his
affection perhaps grew more. She made such a good little comrade!
Insidiously, she connected herself in his mind with future days--she
who cared only for the day and the pleasure thereof. When he spoke of a
thing it would be pleasant to do, a place pleasant to visit, he said,
always unreflectingly, yet from a sincere heart: "Some day we must go
there. Let us do such a thing some time." When he described the hills
and ponds of home, he said what they might have done had she been
there last summer or the years before, how they might have rowed and
rambled. He painted the good time they might have together, in some not
impossible, but not specified time, place, and circumstances.

So the green from tender grew brilliant--grew deep--became void of
interest to the accustomed eye, and more or less dust settled over it.
It was manifest to all that spring was past.

Then began an anxious time. Those lectures, those miserable lectures!
Those courses, those wretched courses, which he had neglected! That
blessed information he had spared to cull when the time was for it!
These things seemed likely to get their revenge. When he awoke to a
sense of his danger--very late! only when the bloom was off the year,
when lily and early rose had gone where they could divert no mortal
more--he could not believe that he should not, by fitting exertion,
catch up in time at the appointed goal. He worked rabidly, with a wet
cloth around his head. He thought not of girls in those days, I promise
you; he recked not of bronze-gold hair!

It was written that he should not be saved. He closed his school term
pitiably conditioned.

When the worst was known, at least was time to breathe, however sore
the lungs, then his mind reverted to her. He had been man enough to
harbor no spite towards her, accuse her of nothing. He sent her a
message and waited at the appointed place, wondering a little, while
he waited, at his follies of the spring. They seemed so unnecessary,
looked back upon now. Why, in a very real, practical world like
this one, where a man's failure to pass his exams was sure to call
forth from his progenitor letters such as his pocket at this moment
contained, conduct one's self as if existing in a world of lambs and
purling streams and shepherdesses? He was one with the actual world in
looking with astonishment and condemnation upon his own works. The sky
above was hard, barren blue; it seemed so easy, looking back, to have
stuck to the approved road. What had possessed him?

Then she appeared. At sight of her his heart dropped its armor. She
brought back a whiff of the sweetness of a past atmosphere. Was it
possible he had ever been the happy boy he seemed to remember! He
smiled up in her face with cheek-muscles stiffened by disuse, and eyes
ringed with studious shadows. She had on a flimsy frock, printed all
over with little flowers that seemed to him to smell good; her hair,
where the great wad projected beyond the straw brim, was touched with
a warm, peculiar glory. He had meant to keep himself well hardened
against her, tell her the various things necessary in a matter-of-fact
way, and bid her good-bye indefinitely. He felt more like crying with
his disgraced head in her lap.

He conquered his weakness.... A pretty man he made!

He got out with sufficient composure and dignity what he had to say.
He told her all that had happened, the change it made in the coming
months. He was not going home for the holidays; he could not endure to
see the folks. He was going into the country to spend the summer in
hard study, to make sure of "passing" next term. He was going to the
particular place he mentioned because he had a friend there, a fellow
he had taken up with in the last weeks, one that had had the same bad
luck as himself. This man's family lived there; it would not be quite
so dreary as being alone.

She chaffed and consoled him in turns. Now that the world had gone
all wrong with him, her eyes seemed to him sweeter and softer than
he had ever observed. What a good, kind little friend! Lord! what
a good, crazy, light-hearted time they had had, and how pretty she
looked to-day! What wonderful, thrice wonderful hair it was, waving and
ringletting about her glowing summer face, coiling massively on the
back of her head! No woman on earth had such hair!

He did wish for a moment that Green, his new friend, might see her--he
was proud of her. One night, when they had sat grinding together for
mutual assistance, the oil giving out, Green had told him of a cousin
of his. Fraisier had said nothing of any girl. He only wished that
Green might see the hair of this girl whose name he had foreborne to
speak.

Good-bye, Minnie! He should be working like a slave all through the
burning golden days--let her think of him a little. He should be very
lonesome. When he had studied until his eyes smarted and his head
swam, there would be nothing pleasant to do, no one pleasant to talk
with--she might spare a moment to be sorry for him now and then. He
should be back in the fall. Bless the beautiful and beautiful and
beautiful hair! Good-bye, Minnie!

She so little perished from his mind after their parting that
whenever--as Green and he lay under the trees, withdrawn from the world
and devoted to arduous studies, keeping off the insects by smoke--Green
began talking about that cousin of his, Fraisier became half sick with
reminiscence. He could not resist replying by talking--with the finest,
shyest reverence always--of Minnie. There was a dreamy solace in
talking of her to some one. She described so well, too; so unusually.
He had a proud secret assurance that as an incident in a man's life she
altogether eclipsed a cousin in interest.

"How long is your cousin's hair?" he asked, with assumed casualness,
once. Green stared a little, and confessed not having the slightest
idea. Fraisier opened his arms as wide as they could go, and said,
vaguely blushing, "The young lady I spoke of has hair as long as this!"

"Come! I should like to see it!" spoke Green, in such a tone that
Fraisier turned a deep, vexed red.

He said nothing, but on the next day took his books to a different
place, choosing to keep to himself so long as Green did not seek him
with a suitable apology.

The spot selected by the young men as a meeting ground lay at an equal
distance between Green's home and the cottage in which Fraisier had
taken up his summer quarters. It was on the skirts of a wood, and, by
some accident of the land, often cool when other places were hot. The
rolling pasture it commanded was dotted with scrubby evergreens, and
crossed by a small brook the cow's hoofs had in some places trodden
broad and shallow. It was colored in patches with the frequent pink of
clover-heads, surprised here and there with the white of a long-necked,
belated daisy.

Fraisier took himself to a spot just not so far from the usual haunt
but that Green when he came might see him.

It was a fair, soft, simmering morning, promising a scorching day.
He stretched himself under the trees and lighted a pipe--he had taken
to a pipe in place of cigarettes since coming into the wilderness.
He composed himself for a serious forenoon's work, deciding that it
was much more profitable, after all, to study alone--Green was always
digressing.

The spot he had chosen was not so good, it proved, as the one he had
left clear for Green. A path ran through the woods, just within the
trees; there was a frequent patter of bare feet on the dust, children
with pails passed looking for things. He waited to proceed with his
theorem till their high piping, scattered voices had died away. It was
not so cool, either; as a fact, it was hotter than most places. He did
not crave the exertion of seeking a better; this was at least shady. He
turned over on his back and closed his eyes, yielding gracefully to the
force of circumstances.

A light blow in the face, from an acorn, perhaps, roused him.
He thought of Green, and, instantly broad awake, looked for the
development of some practical joke.

It was not Green--he saw it with a sort of disappointment. It was one
of the berry-seeking children that had caught sight of him snoozing,
and followed its natural instinct. A boy's grinning head was seen
bobbing above one of the neighboring bushes. He turned from it in
disgust and felt surlily about the grass for his pipe, about his person
for a match--

Gracious powers! what sort did the young one take him for, with this
free persecution? Another acorn had hit him smartly on the head.

"Look out, there!" he called, making a feint of rising to give chase.

"Come on!" shouted the boy, gayly, from behind the bush. There was a
burst of laughter, a flash and flutter of pink, and the boy, who turned
out to be a girl, came precipitately towards him. She stopped just
short of a collision, and dropped in the grass panting with laughter.
He stared at her blankly. Every time she looked up and caught sight of
his expression she doubled herself and fairly writhed.

"He doesn't know me!--he doesn't know me!" she brought forth amid her
convulsive giggling.

"Minnie! My God! What--what have you done to yourself?" he exclaimed,
and had no breath left.

She moderated her laughter, and presented her smiling face a moment for
him to see well what had happened. She ran her fingers over her cropped
head, ruffling it absurdly, making the short locks stand on end.

"Isn't it funny? Doesn't a person look funny at first? The rest of
it is hanging, like a fairy horse's tail, in the window, across the
picture of the Elixir lady. (Bad old woman! Cheat! She didn't give
me much for it! But, Natty Fraisier, I would have taken even less,
I did want to come so!) You poor, lonesome boy! I can stay a whole
week--perhaps more. I have found a place in the village, just near you.
The first child I met told me all I wanted to know. I thought it would
have been harder. Mercy! isn't it heavenly still and sweet here, with
hills and cows? I was never in the true country before. Mercy! isn't
it good? Look out, you flower there--over there, you, miss! That is
called a bee; he has a terrible stinger--oh, he is an old acquaintance?
Go ahead, then, and give him a nice swing, and honey for his tea. Oh,
Natty, I am so glad! Aren't you glad?"

He choked and cleared his throat. No, without that voice, never in
the world would he have known her. Before him seemed to be a common
little street-boy who had run off in a girl's new pink dress and shiny
shoes--an unknown boy whose features had something painfully familiar.
Strange! He remembered Minnie's face as possessing a certain harmony
in its lines, however childish and trivial they were; this terrible
little impostor, though not ill favored, was broad of jaw and narrow
of forehead; his eyes even were not the same, but smaller and nearer
together, while the mouth was larger--its very proneness to laughter
increased its commonness. And that ridiculous hair--literally chopped
off by an unskilled hand and twisted here and there with unpractised
tongs! It was so thick, it had no more light or lustre than a
hearth-brush.

Her face sobered ever so little as she looked at him. "What is the
matter? Poor dear! you haven't got over those exams. But I won't
bother, you know, and take up all your time; I have learned better.
I won't interfere with any work, I promise, Natty. See me swear? On
this algebra! Only, before you begin and when you have done each day,
we will go for walks and rows. I saw a boat on the pond. We will have
lunch on the grass, and make a fire with sticks we pick up. Look! you
put three long sticks like that and hang the kettle in the middle. We
will do all those things we used to plan when we never much thought
there would be a chance. You poor, lonesome boy, have you been having
a horrid time? We will make up for it now. Natty, you don't care about
the _hair_, do you? You needn't. You know, I had got mortally sick of
sitting in that window. I could not have stood it a day longer. When
a fly buzzed on the pane I wanted to scream. Again and again I have
come near putting my foot through the glass at one of the gaping
faces, then jumping down and catching the old woman while she told lies
about my having used her Elixir faithfully--never touched a drop!--and
dancing her up and down all around the room until she dropped. I
shall go back to taking care of little children now, as I did before
she found me. I do love children! And in that business, I don't mind
telling you, I shall do better without all that hair. No matter how
tight I did it up, some one was always grumbling that it made too
much show. You mustn't care a bit about the hair, Natty; I gave it up
without a twinge. I cut it off with my own hands. You have no idea how
much comfortabler this is in hot weather. My head feels so light! I can
dip it in the water any minute. I do love it like this!"

She ran her hands through her hair again, ruffling it still more
fantastically. Fraisier winced. He was sick beyond calculating the
degree. "Oh, my poor girl!" he contrived at last to say.

She looked at him more closely than before in her overrunning joy,
and her face fell a little. No doubt she had seen herself in mirrors
since her alteration, but not in a real mirror until she saw herself
reflected in his very pale face. She smiled still, but a little
foolishly; then no more, and stopped chatting. It was as if a stone
had been set to seal up a spring--a large stone laid upon her bubbling
heart. There was a silence.

He saw that she must be seeing what he could not keep out of his face.
He could not help it; he could get no control over his feelings, over
his expression. He was not sure he cared to--he did not try. He was at
sea: he did not know what he felt, what he did not feel. The bottom
seemed to have dropped out of his heart, out of the world--out of
something, everything. He knew not! He only knew he was sick--sick, and
incapable of speech, of action, of reflection.

"You can't stay here, child," he heard some one saying, in a
matter-of-fact, superficial voice. "Don't you see, yourself, that you
can't? For your own sake, I mean. It would never do, Minnie. You must
understand that. You don't know what a thing a small country village
like this is, for gossip and slanderous tongues. I couldn't let you
injure yourself so, don't you see?"

"It wouldn't be proper?" she inquired, faintly.

"No, Minnie; no, it wouldn't--at all. Don't you see it?"

She got to her feet, full as pale as he now.

"All right," she said, and after a few mechanical steps, paused a
moment, looking down, biting her finger--lost in thought, or waiting
for something to happen, for him to say something further.

He could not speak--he could not make himself speak.

"All right," she said again, very distinctly, and turned to go without
another word.

"Minnie! Minnie!" he faltered, and had instinctively cast himself
after her. His outstretched hand almost touched her pink draperies.
She turned on him fiercely, whisking herself out of reach. He was
confronted for a second by a little angry street-boy face, but with
the gathered experience and woe of half a race in the eyes. "Let me
alone! Don't dare to touch me! Nathaniel Fraisier, I hate you!"

She began desperately to run. He saw her clutch her poor little ruined
head, and heard her cry out, breaking into sobs: "Oh, my hair! Oh, my
hair!"

He dropped in the grass, face downward, and pressed his hands over his
ears, trembling. It all seemed so strange, so out of proportion.

In the late afternoon of that same hot day the crabbed little bell on
Madame Finibald's door snapped to let in a tired, dusty youth, whose
dejected face was so flushed, one's thought at sight of him turned
at once on sunstroke. He leaned wearily over the counter and asked a
few questions, at which madame's liver seemed so shaken she could not
keep a hold on her good manners. At the height of her voice she began
berating all the world, and one absent person. Fraisier tried to calm
her, with vague, soothing motions of his hands patting down the air.
When she subsided enough for him to be heard, he pointed to a long
tail of shining hair in the window, and spoke again, growing redder,
if possible, than before--so red that his eyes watered, and he had to
shade them a moment, leaning his elbows on the counter. She unhitched
the hair, shaking it brutally. He put out his hands in remonstrance.
She flung it down before him with a forbidding proposition and a deep
snort of malice. Meekly he emptied his purse on the counter, unfolding
the bills, spreading out the silver and lucky pieces to count,
reserving only for himself a crumpled ticket.

She watched him with gleeful, avaricious eyes. After computation, he
rose without breath of argument and went down the street to pawn his
watch and studs and cigarette-case, returning solvent.

He left with a rather unsightly parcel in his hand; the cover was burst
in more than one place. Madame Finibald had not been so particular
as she sometimes was in the selection of her wrapping-paper. He had
no overcoat and no pocket large enough to put his prize in; he was
forced to hold it, conscious how it was heavy and soft and its contents
gleamed through the holes.

He got home at dark, reporting to his landlady with his back to the
light. He wanted nothing to eat: there were lamps and voices in the
dining-room. He could not go to bed, worn out as he was: on the porch
below his window was singing and picking of strings.

He went forth into the fields. At last, beyond all sounds but the
summer's own, he sank on the grass. He did not look up once at the
stars, but lay sprawling with his forehead on his crossed arms, and
let his heart torture itself at its own good leisure. He drank deeper
and deeper of its dark bitterness, forcing himself recklessly to it,
reaching a sort of desperate drunkenness. It seemed to his inexperience
there could be nothing worse at any time in this life to taste.

He woke long hours afterwards, wondering a little at first, feeling
somewhat stiff. The air was warm and still, tremulous with
crickets--thrilled through with the shaken baubles of the summer's
myriad little jesters. In his sleep he had rolled over; his face was
to heaven. The sky was faint with starlight; the Milky Way was a road
of diamond sand; the great constellations had hung themselves with
solemn jewels; down near the rim of the world watched far-spaced large
earnest beacon-lights--but above, the tiniest irresponsible stars
twinkled in and out, like shining ants in ant-hills. He looked, almost
wondering why his eyes felt so queer--sore besides heavy; why his
breast felt so heavy. He rose sitting; he was on a hillock. Like an
opaque reproduction of the transparent, lightsome sky looked the ground
about him, which the scythe had this season respected; it was dark
dotted with daisies. He rubbed his aching head a little, then lay back
again, the grass shooting coolly up along his cheeks. After the sound,
dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion from which he had waked, because he
had drained it to satisfaction, his head was numbed, but, the little
it worked, clear in its working; his heart was sore, but quieted.
Something had changed; all wore another aspect; all seemed farther
removed. Hours had gone by already, a month would go--a year--fifteen
years. This would be lived out of memory. If it is realized that a
thing must cease, has it not begun to die already? At the first one
must be patient, and take suffering as a matter of course. He stretched
his limbs wearily, not entirely deceived by himself, nor unaware of
depths of heartache under this film of philosophy that had scummed them
over in sleep. He drew his hot palms over the grass; his hand came upon
the parcel that he had not dared to leave behind nor to open, that he
never would have the strength to open--and his philosophy was severely
shaken. His heart was near bursting out afresh; he laid his face on the
wretched, soft, dead little bundle, and agonized.

Then he revolted against this suffering that seemed to him undeserved,
disproportionate. He was not a bad fellow; looking into his heart,
he could declare truthfully that it was not in him to willingly harm
anything--give any one pain. Why should he feel so endlessly mean, so
endlessly miserable? He appealed to Minnie, his reasonable Minnie of
old, against this state of things. He defended himself to her; she
defended him to himself. When all was said, he had at no time done
anything to blame, had that day said nothing that was not wise and for
the best, that he would not in like case be forced to say over again.
He had been taken unawares; he had not expressed himself with tact--he
had been fatally slow. The fact remained that the girl could not have
stayed by him, setting the whole country-side agog. But if his heart
still refused to be at peace about this matter, let it be assured he
meant to seek till he found the girl; it must be easy enough to find
her, though he had failed that day. Alas! poor little forlorn head,
shorn of its great gleaming beauty--poor little discrowned head, at
this hour full of what thoughts, God knew! He would make all things
right to her; he was extravagantly ready to pay any price; he was
lavish of his future, free of all the gods gave him to give. At the
same time that he made these protestations to himself and to her, and
he was sincere in making them, he knew that Minnie would never look at
him again--he knew that she had understood how he was changed with the
change in her; it was beyond his governing, but she must be forgiven
for not forgiving it. And looking into his man's heart, he wondered at
the mystery of it.

In that hour of being honest, after revolting at it, reasoning about
it, trying to sophisticate it away, he came back always to a hopeless
contemplation of it as a simple fact, not to be done away with. In
the face of it he might clear himself of all blame, perhaps, but he
remained humiliated and full of a vague pity. As he lay in the grass
so, plucking heedlessly in the dark at the little tufts, emptied of all
pride under the lofty stars, a dreamy mood followed upon what degree
of success he had in suppressing feelings he was determined not to
endure, so did they hurt! His thoughts in search of soothing travelled
back to days before last spring, when he could hardly have conceived
what he had this night been suffering. Peaceful period, but without
great charm, he decided, loyal to his altered taste. He thought of
the past spring, the soft awakening all without and within a man--the
tender, vast burgeoning, fluttering, shimmering, outreaching! He judged
it sadly from a midsummer night. Not all were flowers that put forth in
that mad amenity of nature; no, not all flowers.

And in connection with all that freshness and fragrance and beauty of
spring, he thought unavoidably of what had seemed to his new-quickened
heart its very expression, its chiefest adornment--the gentle order
he loved in so general and devoted a way. His conjuring head filled
with charming phantoms, pathetic to his sense at this juncture; they
passed, exquisite pageant, leaving as if a perfume of themselves
through the halls of his mind, not one little grace, one foolish trick,
one dainty manner of being, lost on his worshipping sensibility:
silver laughter--odors of violets--sunny loose hairs and white
hand tucking them behind the ear--pretty feet tiptoeing across the
street in bad weather--pouted lips cooing to a baby, or quaintly
attempting its own language to a bird--languid attitudes--belts
of a span--caprices--teasing humors--tenderness--pity for small
creatures--long lashes blinking a tear--queenly bearing--rods of
lily held over bowing heads with such assurance of power as never a
sceptre--aye, power greater than any emperor's, founded, dear God--upon
what? at the mercy--of what? And he yearned and grieved over them, poor
youth, as if he had been their maker.



PAULA IN ITALY


On his way down-stairs Prospero came upon the _padrona di casa_.

She stood at the door of the first floor, which he had supposed
untenanted, the windows on the street being always dark. She looked
pleased, anxious, and full of business.

"Just step in for a moment, signorino," she said, "and tell me what it
seems to you."

The young man followed her. The windows of the apartment were wide
open--most likely to let in the heat, for to lean forth beyond the
chill boundary of the stone walls was like dipping into a warm bath.
The long, old, neatly darned lace curtains waved gently in the April
air. The stone floors had been sprinkled; a pleasant freshness arose
from them. Everything had an air of having just been gone over with a
damp dust-cloth; everything that could be furbished shone to the utmost
of its capacity.

The little woman led Prospero into the large _sala_, from which,
through several open doors, one got glimpses of other airy chambers.
The great height of the ceiling--increased to illusion by the cunning
of the fresco, which professed to open into the sky itself, and show
a flight of rosy cupids tumbling among the clouds--had the effect of
dwarfing the furniture, even the gigantic vases under their shining
bells. The seats were placed about in social groups; in the embrasure
of the balcony window stood a small table supporting a coral-colored
coffee service, lately placed between two low chairs, with a view to
spreading about suggestions of cosiness--the joys of intimate life.

"I see that you are expecting a tenant," said Prospero.

"So it is indeed; a great lady--a foreigner," replied the _padrona_,
under her breath. "Just see, signorino, what you make of this name."
While she felt in her pocket she went on: "It is Dottor Segati sends
her to me. Oh, he has sent me families before when there was a patient
among them; and this apartment has always given satisfaction; that I
can say with my hand upon my conscience. There--can you read it? I can
tell the letters, but I can't make the sound. One ought to have another
tongue on purpose for these foreign names."

Prospero studied a second, then pronounced, clearly, "Gräfin Paula von
Schattenort."

"_Gräfin_ means Countess," said the landlady. "The doctor told me that
she is a Countess; but whether Danish or Swedish or Hollandish I don't
remember. For me all those countries are the same. Schattenort, you
call it? What would that be in Italian?"

Prospero laughed. "It stays as it is, dear lady. Is this Countess
young, do you know?" he went on, looking again at the name on the
paper he still held. "Is she coming here for her health?"

"I don't know anything beyond the fact that the doctor engages the
rooms for her, and I can rely upon him. Oh, he has sent me families
before, you know, who have always been perfectly satisfied with me, and
I with them. You can see yourself that the quarters are such that even
a Countess might find herself well in them--"

"Yes, truly," replied Prospero, agreeably. "She would be hard to please
if she were not content. Well, if you allow me now, I go. Have you
perhaps a commission of any sort for me? I shall do myself a pleasure
in serving you."

"Too good--much too good. If you would just say the name over--"

"Von Schattenort."

"What it is to have a memory! What a thing is education! Not but
that also I can make myself understood in the French tongue.
Schattenort--Schattenort. I should not like to _scomparire_, you will
understand, at the very first meeting. But if I forget, I will simply
say _Signora Contessa_. Only one likes to be able to tell friends whom
one has got in the house."

Prospero, late already, was hurrying down the stairs, his music under
his arm; at the foot he was forced to stop. He took off his hat, and
leaned against the wall to let the ladies pass.

The gray-haired gentleman talking unpractised French he knew to be
Dottor Segati. He fixed upon Paula von Schattenort without a second's
hesitation; of the two ladies, only the one in the hat and feather
could, in his conception of possibility, be she. He was half-conscious
as she passed him on her upward way of a faint pang of disappointment.
The name had suggested to his imagination something tall and frail,
delicate yet imposing, exceedingly, luminously blond, with eyes of a
corn-flower blue. The magic of the name was defeated.

He bethought him how late he would be, and without turning his head for
a second look, or giving another thought to the arrivals, slipped past
the two maids, who stood in the doorway talking in a language unknown
to him, while the Countess's man handed them bundles from the carriages
drawn up to the door.

Paula, on entering the apartment, let her little gloved hands drop at
her sides, and looking around with wide, quick eyes, gave a long sigh
of pleasure.

"Here I can breathe--here I can breathe indeed!" she said to her
companion, in their Northern tongue; then turning to the doctor, she
assured him in French that she found it charming, as she had found
everything in Italy--that she thanked him for his goodness. The doctor
and the landlady both watched her with a half smile and slightly raised
eyebrows as she walked quickly through the rooms, exclaiming at every
window with delight at sight of the fawn-colored, warm-looking river
flowing below and flashing back the sunshine, and the low hills clothed
in their early green.

Her companion followed her with an unusual solemn dignity of manner,
intended to counterbalance Paula's unaccustomed vivacity, and give the
people of the house, if possible, an adequate impression of the two as
a whole.

"Oh, look--look, Cousin Veronika!" exclaimed the younger woman from the
balcony, over the parapet of which she had been leaning venturously
far--"look at that dear old bridge; it is the Jeweller's Bridge; I
recognize it. _N'est-ce pas, cher docteur?_ Oh, what a sky! But have
you any patients at all in this city, doctor? Is it possible to be ill
here? Do persons die? Of what? I will never believe it!"

"My dear lady," said the gray doctor, his kindly face lighting as if
with the reflection of her childish excitement, "will you be advised by
me? Will you sit down on this commodious divan and rest a little, while
you take what the signora has brought for you--this little glass of our
white _vin santo_? It will do you good. You must be tired, very tired."

"Oh no! no, doctor! It is like magic. I do not understand it. I feel
like another. I shall not be tired here, ever. You must come and see
me every day indeed, but not as a doctor--as my good, good friend.
Tell me, is it still standing, the house where Dante lived? Have you a
book--I mean, could you advise me a book--in which there is everything
of the story about him and Beatrice? It must be sweet to think of when
one is in their city."

"I will do myself the pleasure of sending you the _Vita Nova_," he
said; then, solicitously, "but accommodate yourself, my dearest lady,
and drink this--"

"_Vita Nova?_ Does that mean new life? New life!" she said, as if to
herself, suddenly half stretching her arms up in the air and smiling in
indeterminate happiness at the ceiling, whereon the shining river cast
a restless, quivering brightness. "Yes, send it me; I want to read it.
I will drink this to please you, signor, but not that I am tired. Here
is to New Life!"

She touched her glass to the doctor's and Veronika's, and emptied it
at an eager draught. Veronika watched her in surprised displeasure,
sipping her own wine staidly and decorously. It warmed her very heart
to see Paula merry, only she thought it unbecoming to behave in the
presence of strangers as if one were a person of no importance.

Her good-humor returned as soon as the doctor and the _padrona_
had excused themselves. When they were alone she seized Paula
unceremoniously by the wrists and forced her back into an arm-chair;
then lifted her feet, and with much decision placed them upon a
footstool. "Now you don't stir," she said, shaking her finger in
Paula's face.

"But, cousin, it is so different," pleaded Paula. "I feel no more
as I do at home, than this mild, heavenly air is like our joyless
atmosphere. Are your eyes open, Cousin Veronika? Do you perceive the
things about you--or is it all a dream of my own? It seemed to me as we
drove from the station that we had arrived in an enchanted place."

"It's just a city," murmured Veronika.

"Those sombre palaces we passed, how they make the spring-time in the
sky above them more lightsome, more warm! And those flowers banked up
for sale against that black stone wall, could you see what they were?
They seemed to me all new sorts--marvellous. Have you noticed how happy
every one looks in Italy, even the beggars sitting in the sun? And what
beautiful faces one sees--"

She stopped and mused, gazing ahead in silence for a few moments; then
went on aloud: "Yes--beautiful faces, like pictures. Did you see the
young man whom we met on the stairs? Not? Veronika, for what have you
eyes? The light just there was a little dim, but I saw him perfectly.
I passed him slowly on purpose--he leaned against the wall to let us
go by him. He had wavy hair, longer than is usual, falling over his
forehead, and soft brown eyes like an animal's. I am sure one sees such
eyes only in Italy, half asleep, yet deeply intelligent, that when you
look in them you think a thousand things--"

"You certainly took in a great deal at a glance," said Veronika.

"Oh, I could tell you much else," laughed Paula; "beside that he wore a
pink in his button-hole and carried a roll of music."

"Veronika," she said, after a pause, jumping up from her chair and
walking about excitedly as before, "we must be very happy here. We must
begin at once. Think how much time we have lost--all our years up to
this day. Now we must really enjoy ourselves, live--love!" she added,
recklessly, with light in her eyes.

Veronika, kneeling over an open satchel, paused in her task to look
over her spectacles with a vaguely shocked air, as if something immoral
had been said.

"This seems like the opening chapter in a lovely story-book that
becomes more interesting with every page," said Paula, dropping
on her knees and crushing her cheek to Veronika's gray hair, with
an expansiveness that took this lady aback. "I have the happiest
presentiments! Ah, Veronika, there was once a woman who said that
happiness is to be young, beloved, and in Italy!"

"Unless you keep quiet and rest," said Veronika, "you will be ill, and
that is as far as _you_ will get--"

Paula stared a second in wonder at Veronika's impatience; then she
reflected that her cousin was old and could not understand. "Poor
Veronika!" she thought, with a sympathetic shake of the head, "_she_
can never have but Italy!"

Like a good child, she went back to her chair, but before settling down
in it she pushed it to the balcony window; then she sat with her eyes
fixed upon San Miniato.

Dr. Segati came the next day, early. He found Paula pale and infinitely
tired, but wearing a contented face. She sat in the balcony window,
closed to-day, with a cushion behind her shoulders; flowers stood in
the water near her--a delight to the eyes, wonderful wind-flowers,
white and pink, purple, scarlet, pale violet. She rose to meet the
doctor, and gave him the childish smile that had won his heart to her
the day before.

She pointed to the book she held. "It came last night. I thank you. I
am trying to read it, you see. But I do not know enough. I can make
only just a little sense here and there, where it resembles French. Oh,
I like it all the same--very much. The title is beautiful--_Vita Nova_!"

"Tell her she must not read, doctor," said Veronika. "It is bad for
her. She has been tiring herself over the book."

The doctor listened politely, an intelligent eye fixed on Veronika's,
and made no objection to what she said. She had always after that half
an idea that he understood her.

"I had the cook sent in," said Paula, with a brightening face. "The
native cook whom the _padrona_ was so good as to engage for me. I asked
her about some passages. She could read them easily--how I envied
her!--but she could not make them clear to me, though she seemed to do
her best."

The doctor laughed amusedly, and took a seat beside her. "What an eager
little lady! Certainly that is the way to learn. But why this hurry?
The great object first is to become robust. Oh, this air will do it! I
have no fear. And how did you sleep?"

Paula blushed as if caught in fault. "I don't know why it should
be I lay awake so much. My old doctor at home (I bless him for his
inspiration of sending me here!) has written you about me, I suppose. I
dare say you know I cough sometimes in the night. Doctor," she asked,
abruptly, "who lives above us?"

He looked interrogatively at the ceiling, and shook his head.

"Oh, I am so sorry you do not happen to know. It is a great musician,
and I feel much gratitude towards him. I was becoming nervous with
lying awake--I was on the point of calling my poor cousin--when some
one began playing on the piano in the room above me. Sweetly, very
sweetly. I could hear it just distinctly enough. It was a joy. I lay
awake, but it soothed me more than sleep."

"I seem to remember that there is a music-master living in the house,"
said the doctor. "I will beg the _padrona_ to speak to him. He should
not play in the night."

"Not at all," exclaimed Paula, with a warmth he could not expect.
"Please, I want him to play. I shall be grieved if you say anything to
prevent him. It does not keep me awake. If I were sleepy I could not
hear it."

The doctor prolonged his visit far into the forenoon. At the first
movement he made to go, Paula said, pleadingly: "Oh, not yet. I
entertain myself so willingly with you!" And he stayed.

He was interested, in the woman as well as in the case. She was
different from his other aristocratic patients. She was of a type new
to him; without appearing to, he studied her face as she spoke, and
from it, and from frequent allusions she dropped, he built up a theory
of her past.

He divined that she was older than she looked. It was, he resolved,
the childlike glance and smile, the voice as of shyness overcome, her
artlessness, her continually outcropping ignorance of the world, her
immature mind perhaps, that gave the impression of youthfulness one at
first received from her. If one looked well, she had even already a
sad little beginning of faded appearance. Her face was a trifle broad,
and the high cheek-bones were commencing slightly to accuse themselves,
as they say in French. The charm of her countenance, to such as felt
it, lay in her eyes: they were unsophisticated, hopeful, interested,
idealizing eyes. Vanity, it must be pityingly related, had taught her
nothing. Her blond hair, dull and fine and soft--a large treasure
that would have made the boast of many another woman--was drawn away
rigorously from her forehead, braided, and wound compactly against the
back of her head, like a school-girl's.

He noticed with amused wonder how unpretending--nay, provincial,
homely, for persons of rank and fortune--was the _mise_ of the two
women. Fashion by them was misconstrued, or else despised. He did
not incline to the latter interpretation of their plainness; he
rather laid to a touching innocence of the mode's dictates Mamsell
Veronika's pelerine and the black lace tabs on the sides of her head;
the antiquated cut of Paula's deep violet gown, the little black silk
mitts that covered her pale pretty hands to the point where her rings
began. These were numerous rather than rich, and gave the impression
of being heirlooms--things worn for a memory: brilliants mounted in
darkening silver, enamels, carnelians; one showed a pale gleam of human
hair.

Paula had never spoken so much about herself to any one as she did to
the doctor. Her loquacity was an effect of her unreasoning instinct
that in this new place everything was good to her, every influence
favorable. She let herself go in a way that would have seemed out of
her nature at home.

All she had ever read in the long, melancholy winter evenings at
Schattenort, of poetry or romance, came back to her mind in essence,
drawn to the surface by an inexplicable magic. Her conversation in this
mental excitement teemed with allusions and modest flowers of speech
that almost surprised herself, and gave her a strange delight. She felt
as she were some one she had some time read of.

"Oh, we will make you well, quite well, soon," said the doctor,
cheerily, on taking his leave. "But you must promise to be very good,
very prudent."

He gave his directions with a light air, but as he turned from the door
a shadow settled upon his kindly old face.

In his breast-pocket lay folded the letter his colleague, Paula's
former doctor, had written him. The consciousness of what was said in
it gave rise in his heart to a tender, grateful thought of his own
children--grown-up daughters, fair and healthy, happily established in
life.

Paula had hoped to go for a drive that day, but a light rain fell, and
she could only watch the turbid stream outside through the glistening
window-pane. She sat with her forehead leaning against it, her book in
her lap. Now and then she opened this and let her eyes wander over the
lines, without trying to understand, just for a pleasure she found in
its being Italian too.

She had prevailed upon Veronika to go out for a walk, so that she might
amuse her with an account of what there was to see.

Towards evening the clouds broke. She saw the red reflection of the
sunset on the river. Tempted, she opened the balcony door; a smell of
damp stone came gratefully to her nostrils. She slipped out and leaned
over the cool balusters, and looked up and down the empty gleaming
street. The hills were as if washed with wine; the air was sparkling.
She heard a footstep; she hoped it might be Veronika's. She looked. But
it was not a woman. She recognized the young man who had been on the
stairs when she arrived. He did not look up. She leaned over to see
him disappear in the _portone_ below. Then, swiftly, she came in-doors
and stopped in the middle of the floor. She listened intently. In a
few moments she thought to hear, faintly, faintly, footsteps in the
room above. She clasped her hands silently, saying to herself with
unaccountable excitement: "I knew it already. I knew it well."

Late in the night again she heard music. She had been listening for
it a long time. Night to her was often tediously long. Often she spent
many hours staring at the square of paler darkness, star-bestrewn, the
window made. At a certain pitch of nervousness, soon reached when the
city had become quiet and the stillness of the bedroom was full of
mysterious sounds, she always thought of a dear sister she had lost,
rehearsing old sad scenes vivid in her brain as if they had been lived
through but yesterday. Her own physical discomfort increased as she
thought of that other girl's long-drawn-out suffering. It seemed to her
that already she could not breathe; her body was damp with sweat of
fear. "It is all useless!" she groaned, tossing wretchedly. "I too--I
too am going that way!" Then she prayed diligently, and looked out up
at the stars with a return of tranquillity, hoping steadfastly in a
beautiful world beyond them.

But on the night in question she lay patiently and happily watchful.
And late in the night again she heard music. No very definite melody
was played; it was as if skilful hands were dreamily straying over
the keys, unravelling a little tangled skein of musical impression,
thinking aloud. The tune wandered and flitted like a butterfly over
a summer garden. Paula's thought climbed upward and entered the
musician's chamber. She saw him clearly, leaning back, looking upward,
swaying slightly. She took joy in the symmetry of his dark Italian
face. She pictured him intensely, and held her breath gazing. Then she
tried to build up his surroundings; she adorned his room poetically.

Satisfied at last, her imagination folded its wings and dropped back
into its nest. She merely listened, and let herself be comforted;
accepted passively what dreams the music imposed. It was as if she and
another were walking in a moonless starry night along a quiet village
road; and the dewy flowers in the stilly little gardens skirting the
way were giving forth perfume in the warm dark. Then it was as if
another and she were in a boat with drooping sail, becalmed, drifting
slowly. The moon was behind a great cloud wonderfully silvered on the
ravelled edges; the sea at the horizon was a streak of pure light. The
other had laid her on velvet cushions and covered her with a cloak, was
playing and singing softly to her. They hoped the wind would not rise.
Drifting--drifting. And she slept.

In the gayest mood next day she showed the doctor a little package of
letters to different persons in the city, but said that she was not
ready yet to let these distinguished ones know of her arrival; she must
first attend to various important things. He derived from her words
that she wished to make her establishment more elegant, and became
gruff and severe when she asked him to procure for her the address of
the most fashionable mantua--maker. She almost cried when he forbade
the expense of any precious energy on worldly vanities, but was half
consoled by his promise soon to make her well enough to employ a master
in the art of playing the guitar.

He prescribed a daily drive in the sunniest hour. Paula came back from
her first excursion with flushed cheeks. Veronika grumbled: "I will
tell the doctor, and he will forbid your going out at all. It is not to
kneel in damp churches will help you. You might as well take up your
abode in the cellar."

"Don't scold me," said Paula, gently. "I had to thank God."

Towards sunset she seated herself on the balcony wrapped in fleecy
white, and looked down the street towards the Jeweller's Bridge. She
saw Prospero come. But he did not look up. That night again she heard
him play.

Many times she sat on the balcony and saw Prospero coming. Sometimes he
looked up, but oftener he passed into the house unaware of a Countess
gazing after him from above.

Some nights he did not play; those were restless, disappointed nights
for her.

Once or twice she met him on the stairs as she was going to her
carriage; he glanced at her with an unimpressed eye, then looked
elsewhere, standing against the wall, hat in hand.

Occasionally she saw him in the street, but he seemed never to see her.
A vague heartache grew out of those occasions.

The Italian spring deepened in warmth and color; the air had a
fragrance, some days, as of lilacs; other days, more penetrating, as of
hyacinths. The little hills in the midst of which Florence lies took
on dewy morning hues of the opal, changing evening tints of the dark
dove's neck. The pure noon light made the statues in the King's Garden,
where Paula walked sometimes, look dazzlingly white against the sombre
walls of clipped laurel. The open country now was full of blossoming
fruit trees; Paula often begged Veronika to alight from the carriage
and gather for her the flowers she saw shining in the grass--primroses
and violets, tulips, narcissi, fleurs-de-lis. She brought home immense
nosegays, which she spent long minutes breathing; this perfume of Italy
went to her brain.

At sunset once a red flower lay by chance on the rail of the balcony,
just where a movement of her arm would brush it off; it would drop in
the street. A bold thought crossed her mind. But that evening Prospero
did not come at the usual hour. She sat outside, trembling slightly as
the dusk closed around her and the dew fell; then Veronika, with shrill
cries of surprise and blame, came to fetch her in. She felt guilty and
ashamed, and did not protest. She spent the evening on the divan, with
her face to the wall, crying softly with a vast invincible melancholy,
a sense of forlornness and failure, giving no explanation of her humor.

She was kept in-doors for many days after that. Only she insisted upon
being folded in a fur and seated on the balcony at a certain hour
every afternoon. The beggar-woman stationed at the street corner with
a basket on her knees got used to seeing the sick _forestiera_ appear,
who always threw her a bit of silver, and gave her a faint little
smile.

Veronika suffered from Paula's silence and depression. She went about
with two deep lines constantly between her updrawn brows. Her heart
misgave her; her inability to communicate with the doctor and those
around her became a gnawing despair. She formed a habit, which never
left her after, of talking audibly to herself. She gave up the effort
to hold cheerful conversation with Paula, and simply tried to preserve
in her presence an unconcerned attitude. She secretly yearned to be at
home. She felt an unappeasable animosity towards this Italy, that had
seemed to do her Paula so much good, only to make her worse. She began
to hate everything Italian.

Paula herself sat by the window watching the hills opposite with an
absent face. Now and then she rose to take a few desultory steps about
the large room, touching the things, passing her hand over the flowers,
making the guitar-strings give forth a murmur as she brushed them; she
went back to her chair and closed her eyes, tired out.

Once a friend was walking at Prospero's side. They were talking. As
they approached, the friend looked up, and evidently asked a question
of Prospero, who looked up too: she thought his lips framed her name.
Her heart leaped; she drew back, faint, and felt foolish at feeling
such pleasure. She waited more eagerly than usual that night to
hear him; it seemed the music must have a special message for her.
Silence--utter, atrocious. The night seemed unending.

The doctor wondered next day what spring had broken within her. She
showed so little interest in anything; she was fretful as he had never
seen her before. He scarcely knew how to conduct himself to avoid
irritating her. At a loss, he picked up the little tome of _Vita Nova_,
that always lay on the table at her side, and inquired of her progress
in it.

"Oh, put it away!" she said, tears springing to her eyes. "Put it away!
I cannot suffer it. That title exasperates me; it works upon my nerves.
Doctor, doctor, I shall never be well again!" and she poured forth a
long complaint.

[Illustration: "PAULA HERSELF SAT BY THE WINDOW"]

He feigned to make light of her fears; he comforted her. Casting about
in his mind for things to say that should divert, interest her in her
gray mood, he found this, which brought the sudden color to her face:

"Did you not once ask me who lived in the apartment above? I know now.
I will not take the credit of having applied myself to discover just on
that hint of curiosity from you; I confess hearing it by chance. Your
neighbor is the young _maestro_ Prospero C----, celebrated in his way.
He has written an opera, to be produced for the first time precisely
to-night. Those who know promise great things for it--"

She had leaned forward, listening thirstily. The doctor could
congratulate himself.

When Veronika went to the door with him, he turned upon her suddenly,
and asked, almost violently: "Why did you wait so long? Why did you not
bring her to this climate before?"

She looked at him in a puzzled way, and in her turn said something he
could not understand.

He appeared for a moment as if he meant to shake her, but shrugged his
shoulders and brusquely left.

Some who were present at the first night of "Parisina" remember well
how when the curtain dropped on the first act and they looked about to
discover whom they should salute, their attention was arrested by the
strange apparition in one of the second-tier boxes. There, in a crimson
velvet chair, sat very upright an unknown lady in a gown such as no
one nowadays wears--a gown of cloth of gold, that might have figured
at a court ball perhaps a century earlier. An ermine-lined mantle half
covered her arms and neck, dainty thin and white as wax, and half
extinguished the gleam of her heavy jewels. A wreath of roses was
twined in her pale hair, that might have made one laugh in its _démodé_
pretentiousness but that one divined the lady to be a foreigner from
some Northern country, where perhaps it is still customary to adorn
the hair with a garland. She held her fan like a sceptre, her fingers
stiffly closed on the pearl sticks. A mass of roses lay in her lap.
She turned a colorless face upon the stage; her eyes were wide and
glassy, and fixed as a somnambulist's.

On the opposite side of the box, less clearly defined against the
darkness, sat an elderly, soberly clad lady, whose face expressed
a degree of uneasiness, misery, and fear almost pitiful--if not
comical--to behold. She made no pretence of interest in the stage or
the gleaming galleries, but watched her golden-haired companion with an
unswerving, frightened eye.

No one knew who these were, though many took pains to discover.

Through the second act the lady in gold listened breathlessly, as if
life itself were suspended. It seemed to her that the soul left her
body, and went floating up, up, on the strains of the music. She was
praying, praying with all her strength, for the success of this work,
that the people might feel just as she felt how it was beautiful!

When a crash of applause came and a call for the composer, it seemed
but an answer to her prayer. She rose to her feet, radiant.

Prospero C---- came to the foot-lights below, looking a slight thing,
the acclaimed great man, in his close black evening dress, and bowed
his thanks. Then, as the applause continued, he lingered a moment, and
let his eye pass along the friendly faces in the boxes, a grateful
emotion expressed in his smile.

The lady in gold leaned over the velvet parapet, breathing short,
tremulously smiling, her flowers in her hands. His eye passed her
unrecognizing. She wanted to shout: "It is I, Paula! Nothing could keep
me away!" The clamor subsided. Panting, she leaned back in the shade.

The third act ended in triumph. Again the composer was called. Paula
laughed and cried at the same time, clapping her little hands like mad,
forgetting herself.

Then, when it was all over and she sat in the dark carriage rolling
homeward, she felt a chill seizing upon her very heart; she began to
shiver. But her physical condition scarcely interested her; a sense of
the sad things of life weighed heavily upon her: the vanity of earthly
hopes, the evanescence of happy things, the inequality in the measure
of pain and pleasure to God's children, the fugitiveness of illusions,
the foolishness of dreams. She thought of the beggar sitting at the
corner in sun and rain through years: she felt disgust for a world
where such things could be. She said, "It is a good thing to have done
with it. It is a deliverance. I will not give it one regret; no, not
one." She felt suddenly that she did not love Italy: it had betrayed
her. "It is you, you who are to blame," she said, full of helpless
resentment, shaking a pale small hand vaguely from the window out
at the balmy moonlit world; "you, soft air! you, flower smell! you,
velvety firmament with the many-colored stars! I was a simple soul: my
common life was enough for me; you sowed in my unguarded heart all the
seeds of vain dreams, and fostered them. And they bear no fruit; they
wither on their shallow roots--they are weeds!--But I will not curse
you, for God made you lovely."

She closed her eyes; her thoughts turned to remote Schattenort;
she wished she were there again, in the dull, quiet, big, cold,
familiar country house where she had been born and bred. A mist of
bitter longing rose in her eyes. The moon was shining clamorously,
obtrusively; it cast a green light, a light almost warm, on the pale
pavement. She hated its fervent beauty. "Would God I were home!" she
sighed.

Veronika, mistaking her meaning, said, "You are almost there."

Paula suffered Veronika and her maid to put her to bed. She seemed not
to notice them. She was thinking--far away. Out of habit she listened a
moment for the piano above. But all was silent. "He is happy," she said
to herself; "he has gone with his friends. Or perhaps he is up there
living it all over again." And her imagination, touched anew with the
old obstinate insanity, took the road up to his never-seen chamber,
bent over him, and rejoiced with him. "Oh, if I could--" she said; "if
I could! But he will never know how a dying noble lady used to listen
to his playing in the dead of night, and loved him, and left him her
blessing--"

Veronika had no sleep that night. Before day the doctor was summoned.
He remained several hours. At going he drew Veronika aside, and by
signs succeeded at last in procuring from her the package of letters
the Countess had once shown him. He looked at the superscriptions, and
took from among them one "To the Abbé S----."

That evening he brought with him a white-haired old man in priestly
garb, whom Veronika was relieved to hear address her in her native
tongue.

Presently, with muffled footsteps and a frightened, solemn mien, she
led him into the Countess's bedroom, dimly lighted by shaded candles,
and left them long alone together.

Prospero, returning home that night, opened the window wide and stood a
moment looking out at the stars, at peace with life, every desire for
the moment hushed, satisfied. Then he lighted the candles on the piano,
and the faint yellow illumination brought out a hint of color in the
objects around. It showed an ordinary, rather bare room; he lived in
it very little. The littering music and the piano formed its chief
adornment.

He sat down, but for a moment did not touch the keys. He removed the
flower from his coat and smelt it, thinking of Rosina, who had given
it him at the theatre door--Rosina with the broad velvet-faced hat,
the tight silk dress, the diamonds in her ears, and the small basket
of flowers on her arm. She was pretty--oh, pretty! Having thought how
pretty she was, he wisely tossed away her faded favor, determining to
remain cold and prudent. He shook back his hair, as if thereby to free
his mind of her, spread his hands over the ivory keys, and began, as
he loved to do before sleeping, to let his fancies and emotions make
themselves sound.

He played long, losing himself, finding a melodious vesture for his
half-formed dream. The night was very quiet; it came to be very
late without his perceiving it. Suddenly he felt a cool air on his
forehead--he looked up, and paused in his playing, his hands motionless
above the keys, his lips open. He felt that he ought to speak, but
his voice failed to answer his will. He was asking himself in the dim
background of his consciousness how the Countess Paula von Schattenort
had entered his dwelling so noiselessly, and what she might be seeking
there. More clearly he was wondering at her face, strangely still and
white, vaguely woe-begone, astonished, pathetic. He recognized her,
yet she seemed to him altered from the one he sometimes saw on the
balcony and met on the stairs--that object without interest, a woman
not pretty. Perhaps it was the wonderful hair that, shining along her
cheeks like a pale gilded mist, transfigured her. The firm fine braids
that heretofore he had seen always wound in austere simplicity about
her head were undone; the narrowly waved hair floated to her knees;
her face peered wistfully between two shimmering bands of it. She was
clothed in a white garment bordered with dark fur; a heavy rosary hung
about her neck.

She looked at him a long moment with fixed eyes, an expression of
plaintive disillusion, and said nothing.

He tried to ask in what manner he might serve her, but his tongue was
numb.

She turned and looked all about the room, very slowly, as a person
seeking something. Then she looked again at him, silently, with that
same face of disappointment; and her hands, that had been tightly shut
on the golden crucifix appended to her rosary, opened and slipped
softly to her sides. She turned to the door. He rose from his seat, and
without taking his eyes from her, fumbled to lift the candle from its
socket, to light her way; he was awkward in his amazement. He saw her
pass the threshold. In a second he followed her. She was not in the
next room. He passed through the two rooms that separated him from the
door leading to the common stairway. He came to the door; it was as he
had left it, secured for the night. Seized with dismay, in spite of the
thought that she must have lingered behind in the shady embrasure of
a window, he undid the chain and bolt and came out on the landing and
looked, expecting inconsistently to see a white figure vanishing down
the steps. He saw nothing but a faint light cast upon the wall at the
turn of the stairs. He stood hesitating.

In a moment he heard below a sound of weeping; he went down with a
trembling of the knees. On the landing of the _piano nobile_ was the
landlady. She had set her little brass lamp on the last step, and was
crying. The door to the Countess's apartment was wide open, and the
draught from there made the tiny flame flicker and smoke.

"What is it?" said Prospero, in a husky whisper.

"She is dead, the poor lady!" sobbed the _padrona_.

He felt his hair softly rising.



DORASTUS


She had large violet eyes, of a melancholy effect, and fine
honey-colored hair, flowing smoothly over her ears. She looked
excessively meek and always a little apprehensive, as if accustomed to
reproaches, yet never quite hardened to them. One easily supposed her
to be an orphan.

She lived with an aunt, her mother's half-sister, considerably older
and less pleasing than her mother in that charming woman's brief day.
Her cousins were all older than she; the girls were so perfect in every
respect that intimacy between her and them was out of the question;
the son, a big, blunt young man, was mostly away, and, when at home,
too much taken up with other interests to be more than just aware of
the violet eyes. So, life was very dull for Emmeline--"Emmie" she was
familiarly called.

She went often of an evening to her mother's grave, and, sitting beside
it, reflected how it was in keeping with the general sadness of things
that there should be no prospect of any change for her in all the
years of her life, no change from the present weary round of aunt and
cousins, of sterile duties and insipid pleasures.

And there, by her mother's grave, came the very change she was sighing
for. She sat on the sward, musingly watching the square tower of the
church grow gray against the delicate, flushed sky, when she became
aware of a stranger going from stone to stone in the fading light,
examining the inscriptions. At first she was afraid. While she debated
whether to hide or flee, the stranger approached, and in a foreign
voice and accent asked some common question about the place. She could
not answer readily for a foolish shame mixed with terror. She got to
her feet, blushing, then turning pale. It could be none other than
the astonishing fiddler who had played the night before in the hall
at Colthorpe, and who could, they said, make your hair rise on end
by the power of weird, unearthly music, or your eyes dissolve with
tenderness--as he chose. She stared without speech into his dark,
peculiar face. And he, seeing that she was discomfited, instead of
apologizing and withdrawing, undertook, in a tone as persuasive as his
violin's, to set her at ease. And when a few days later he disappeared
from that part of the world, the violet eyes disappeared too.

Aunt Lucretia in time received a letter, asking her forgiveness and
announcing Emmie's marriage.

She did not grant her forgiveness until several years later, after due
savoring of sad, black-bordered letters from Emmie, imploring kindness.
Her husband, after a brief illness, was dead; her little boy and she
were left alone, without anything in the world. She acknowledged
her fault so humbly; she owned so freely that her marriage had been
excessively--deservedly--wretched; she longed so desperately to be
taken back into her old home, that Lucretia found herself relenting.
Her daughters were now married and lived at a distance; she felt daily
more and more the need of a female companion. Her son, after reading
the young widow's pitiful appeals, protested that it would be inhuman
to refuse her a shelter. It was decided that she should be allowed to
come, and in time the big, blunt Gregory, of whom she had been afraid
in old days, went a long stretch of the journey to meet her, for that
had seemed to him requisite, though to his mother superfluous. He even
crossed the arm of sea that she must presently be crossing, with no
apparent purpose but to cross it again with her.

When the boat was well out at sea and the passengers had disposed
themselves in patience about the deck, he marched up and down, as did
several of the others, and, while avoiding to look like one in search,
sought diligently the remembered face of his cousin.

It was a cheerless gray day. The sea was quiet; the boat pitched but
slightly. He was not long unsuccessful; when he had satisfied himself
that she was not in the crowd on the windside, he went to lee and saw
her sitting almost alone. She might have gone there for warmth. She did
not seem to notice that cinders and fine soot were raining down upon
her. He found himself disinclined to accost her at once; he went to
lean where he could watch her without pointed appearance of curiosity.

She looked mournful in her black things--not the new, crisp crape
of well-to-do bereavement, but a poor gentlewoman's ordinary shabby
black. Her cheeks had lost their pretty roundness; the effect of her
eyes was more than ever melancholy. The pale little face, set in its
faint-colored hair, framed in its black bonnet, might pass a hundred
times unnoticed: it had little to arrest the attention; but attention,
by whatever chance once secured, must be followed by a gentle,
compassionate interest in the breast of the beholder. This emotion felt
Gregory.

She sat on one of the ship's benches, hugging her black wrap about her,
hiding in it her little gloveless hands. A bundle was on her lap, at
her feet a large bag. She looked wearily off over the crumpled leaden
plain, and now and then called: "Dorastus! Dorastus!"

At that, a toddling bundle came towards her, never near enough to be
caught, and toddled off again, coming and going busily, with muttered
baby soliloquy. He was a comical little figure, clumsily muffled
against the cold, with a pointed knit cap drawn well down over his
ears. If he ignored her call, she rose and fetched him, shaking his
little hand and bidding him not to go again so far from mother. He
dragged at his arm, squealing the while she exhorted, and almost
tumbled over when she let him loose. Then he resumed his interrupted
play.

After a time he seemed to tire of it. He came to his mother and,
touching the bag at her feet, unintelligibly demanded something.
She shook her head. He seemed to repeat his demand. "No, no,
Dorastus--mother can't!" she said, fretfully. Then this dot of humanity
made himself formidable. Gregory watched in surprise the little
imperious face become disquietingly like an angry man's. He hammered
with both small fists on his mother's knee, and stamped and loudly
sputtered. She caught his arms for a moment and held them quiet; mother
and child looked each other in the face, his strange, unbabyish,
heavy-browed eyes flaming, hers lit with a low smouldering resentment.
He struggled from her grasp, and at last, as his conduct was beginning
to attract attention, she stooped, vanquished, and, bruising her
fingers on the awkward buckles, undid the bag.

Gregory at this point approached and spoke to her by name. She lifted
her face, her eyes full of helpless tears. She reddened faintly on
recognizing him. She handed the boy a diminutive toy-fiddle from the
bag. Pacified, he retired at a little distance and, while his mamma and
the gentleman entered into conversation, scraped seriously, the tassel
on the tip of his cap bobbing with his funny little _airs de tête_.

"How good of you, how good of you--how comforting to me!" she said, her
forlorn face softly brightening; "I was getting so tired of taking
care of myself! I have never travelled alone, and--and I am so timid--"

How different seemed the old house to Emmie returning! She settled
down in it with the sense of passionate contentment. I can imagine in
a dove restored to the cote after escaping the fowler's snare and the
rage of wintry storms. How shut it was against the cold! how safe from
arrogant men demanding money! Life in it now seemed to her one round
of luxurious pleasures: one could sleep undisturbed, tea and buttered
bread came as regularly as the desire for them; flowers bloomed at
every season on mantel-shelf and table; the grate glowed as if to glow
were no more than a grate's nature. There was undeniably the domestic
tyrant still; but what a mild one by comparison! Aunt Lucretia might
be peremptory and critical and contradictory: to Emmie in these days
she personated a benevolent Providence. It is possible that the lady's
disposition had softened towards her niece: her superior daughters
were removed, and the little widow with her manifold experiences was
unquestionably a person more interesting to have about than the moping
girl of yore.

The two ladies, sitting together with their wools, in undertones talked
over Emmie's married miseries. She was as ready with her confidences as
Aunt Lucretia with her listening ear. There seemed no end to what she
had to tell or the number of times she might relate the same incident
and be heard out with tolerance. She was glad of some one to whom to
unburden her heart of its accumulated grievance; she could not but be a
little glad, too, now it was well over, that so much that was unusual
had happened to her, since it lent her this importance. Aunt Lucretia
gave a great deal of good advice--said what she would have done in
like case; Emmie accepted it with as much humble gratitude as if it
had still been of service. She concurred with all her heart in her
aunt's unqualified condemnation of her first lapse from the respectable
path--her elopement; she declared with perfect sincerity that she was
puzzled to explain how it all happened--certainly before a week had
been over the folly of it had stared her in the face.

The young widow, when she had taken her aunt through scenes of rage
and jealousy that made that matron's nostrils open as a war-horse's,
and had shown up the petty tyrannies and meannesses of a bad-tempered,
vindictive, vain man, afflicted with a set of morbidly tense nerves,
would sometimes inconsistently betray a sort of pride in the fact that
she had been adored by this erratic being, whose ill-treatment of her
came partly from that fact; also a certain pride in the assurance she
had had on every side, of his being a great artist who might have risen
to fortune had he been blessed with a different constitution. A prince
had once, in token of his appreciation, bestowed on him a jewelled
order; Emmie wished she had not been forced to sell it when he was
ill. She herself could not judge of his playing--she could not abide
the sound of a violin--but the star might be accounted a proof of his
ability.

"You were too meek, my dear," said Lucretia, conclusively, after a
tale of oppression; "I should have taken a stand."

"Dear aunt," said Emmie, pensively considering her relative's size
and the cast of her features, "I think you would. He would have been
afraid of you. If I displeased him, he said I was rebellious because I
felt myself bolstered up by the admiration of whoever in the inn had
happened to give me a passing glance, and he would torment me until I
swore I loved him with every thought of my life. Sometimes, when he had
made me cry, he would cry, too--I hate that in a man, aunt!--and go on
tormenting me until I said I forgave him--"

"Ah, I should have taught him a lesson!"

"Yes, aunt, you would. But I swore whatever he pleased. If I was sulky,
he was as likely as not to sit up all night, wailing on his violin when
I wanted to sleep. He always took remote chambers at inns, for the
privilege of playing at night, if he pleased. If I complained, he said
that if I had liked the music it would have soothed me to sleep, and
if I did not like it, it was well I should be kept awake. He was very
sore on the point of my not being in love with his music."

"I should like to see a man play the fiddle in my bedroom!" said Aunt
Lucretia, with a face of danger.

And Emmie, from this lady's example and counsel, got a retrospective
courage that enabled her in memory, now that she was well-fed,
well-dressed, and possessed of the assurance that goes with those
conditions, to bring the stormy scenes with her husband to an end more
honorable to herself. She could imagine herself even braving him--when,
perhaps, would come in sight Dorastus. Then her heart would sink in
consciousness of its folly. There was no contending for her with a
nature like that. That baby could bend her to his will even as the
father had done. He was so little now that she could not strive with
him to any enduring advantage; and when he would be bigger, she felt
it already, no revolt of hers would be of use. The tyranny was handed
down from father to son, with the sensitiveness and the jealousy. She
looked over at the little, intrepid face sometimes with a sort of
slave's aversion: every day he would be more like that other; he kept
him disagreeably alive now in her memory with the tricks of his face,
the difficulties of his temper. She only hoped, in an unformed way as
yet, that before he grew to make himself heavily felt something might
have arisen for her protection.

She made him pretty things with a mother's full indulgence, caressed
him in due measure, and gave dutiful attention to his every request;
but deep in her heart and in her eye was a reservation. And in him,
though he could hardly frame speech, seemed an inherited suspicion of
this want of loyalty in her, a consciousness of her appeal to something
outside, against him. In his baby rages he seemed aware, by an instinct
beyond his understanding, that she did not care for them, except that
they made her uncomfortable, and he beat her with all his fierce little
strength for it. She belonged strictly to him, and there was always
treachery in the air; so he must be foes with all surrounding her, and
most severe with herself, whom he idolatrously loved.

Often, if they were alone and she did nothing to cross him, but treated
respectfully his every whim, he rewarded her gravely with such tokens
of his devotion as he could devise. If they were out under the trees,
he would make a hundred little voyages and from each bring back some
treasure, flower or pebble, that he dropped in her lap, watching her
face to see if she were appropriately pleased. If she were busy with
her stitching and after a time forgot to acknowledge his gift, he would
make known his disgust by taking everything from her and stamping it
under foot; but if she wisely kept her whole mind on him, and gave him
praise and smiles, and admired his offerings, he would multiply his
efforts to please her, get her things the most difficult and perilous
to obtain, stones that were heavy, insects that were frightful, parade
before her every little accomplishment, be débonnaire and royal, and
expose his true worshipping heart to his servant.

Woe if in such moments of expansion Gregory came out on the lawn
and took the empty seat on the rustic bench beside Emmie! The child
would know nothing of a divided allegiance, and showed his sense of
outrage by a prompt attack on both, whom he seemed to think equally
conspirators against his peace. They stood his babbled vituperation
and baby blows with smiling patience for a little, trying to converse
coherently under them; then, when he burst into angry tears, with a
sigh the mother bore him off to be lectured and calmed, resuming her
conversation with Gregory at a more opportune moment. Before Gregory
she never spoke of her husband.

With the passing months her cheek got back its freshness, her eye
its clear brightness. Now a haunting fear awoke in her breast: Aunt
Lucretia was wearying of her presence. She had heard all of her
injuries till the story was stale. She was beginning to find fault with
her just as of old, to set her back in her place now and then with the
former terrible abruptness, and that place a very low one. The poor
little woman accepted all abjectly, shuddering at the possibility
of being again cast on the world with her child. She went about with
reddened eyelids and a look of pathetic nervousness, hushing Dorastus
whenever he lifted his voice, doing her pitiful best that neither
should give offence. Gregory could not look on in patience: he laid the
gentle afflicted creature's tremors forever by asking her to become his
wife.

His mother left the house and went to abide with her daughters. But in
time she became reconciled to what was unalterable and returned to her
ancient seat of government, allowing her age to be cheered by the sight
of her favorite child's happiness. Little sons and daughters, his wife
gave him four, among whom prevailed straw-colored hair and eyes of the
admired flower tint. The old house was gay as at early dawn a tree full
of gossiping birds.

So to Emmie was raised a mighty salvation; against Dorastus arrayed
themselves innocent yellow heads, like so many insuperable golden
lances.

When the children were called into the drawing-room to be shown to
the company, a visitor was sure to ask, "And who is this little
man?" meaning Dorastus; so unlikely did it appear that he could be
of his mother's kindred. To the golden hen, her golden brood. How in
seriousness call a chick the little black creature with the large beak
and the piercing eyes?

And as unlike his brothers as he was physically, so unlike he remained
in disposition. By all the children as by Dorastus himself the
difference in kind was felt. He remained solitary among them and at
odds with all. They set him down a domineering, bad-tempered thing,
and he summed them up scornfully as a pack of pudding-heads. It was
not plain to any one why he thought himself superior: his actual
accomplishments were somewhat less than ordinary. Bullet-headed,
downright Hector, his brother nearest in age, could beat him at any
sport, and when their differences brought them to blows was rather more
than half sure of victory over his senior, inferior to him in size
and art; Martin was cleverer than he at his books; the little girls
even could give him points in conduct--yet his attitude of every minute
insisted upon it that he was better than any of them, and that his
mother was more particularly his mother than she was theirs. Emmie, it
is true, did not reprove him quite as she did Hector; he was allowed
more than the others the full swing of his temperament. His step-father
punctiliously refrained from meddling with him, and if he made trouble
with his temper and his pride Emmie warned her nice-natured children
not to irritate him, to make allowances for him. Insensibly that
qualified the relation between Dorastus and his mother. That negative
indulgence he felt, however dimly, did not prove him a favorite: it
made him a sort of alien. He became more reserved in his demands upon
his mother. There were too many yellow heads for one boy to contend
with successfully by ordinary means. He still held to it bravely in
his attitude towards his brothers and sisters that he was better than
they, and that his mother belonged exclusively to him, but herself
he troubled less and less with his jealousy and his claims. It might
have seemed at last almost as if she were become indifferent to him.
Absorbed by her domestic cares, she had scarcely perceived the change.

The cares were many, but pleasant in their nature. Gregory was
steadily, lazily kind, the children were healthy, she herself was in
the beautiful full bloom of life--she found it good. She had almost
forgotten the bitter taste of her beginnings, when one night, startled
from a deep sleep, she lay in the dark awhile and wondered that she
should dream so clearly of hearing the long, low wail of a violin.
It had recreated about her in an instant the atmosphere of old days.
She lay as she had lain often enough, with lead upon her heart, a
dead sense of there being no escape in view from this slavery, this
poverty, this succession of weary travel and third-rate inns, this
nerve-racking sound of the violin penetrating through the brain as a
red-hot needle--no release from this unrelenting master, this terrible
added burden of baby. She shook herself free from what she thought the
remaining effect of a nightmare; she had seemed for a moment to smell
the very essence her first husband used on his hair, mixed with the
flat odor of the small Dutch inn-chamber in which Dorastus was born.
She turned over on her side to sleep again, when she became assured
that she heard a violin. She listened through her thick heart-beats,
a thrill of superstitious horror stiffening her skin. She knew it
unreasonable, but could not dispel her fear. She rose sitting in bed,
becoming at last fully awake. Still she heard the violin, sounding
faintly, as if from some distant part of the house. Then she thought.
It had been these long years in the garret, the treasured Amati he had
made her swear to keep for his child. The child had found it.

She could not fall to sleep again, she must satisfy herself.

She slipped her feet into their shoes, got her dressing-gown about her,
and crept through the shadowy corridor, up the stair, to where Dorastus
slept. Since he would be the master, whoever shared his room, which
was obviously unfair to his room-mate, he had been allotted a little
chamber by himself in a somewhat remote part of the house.

As she approached it, the sound of the violin came more and more clear
to her. She stopped and leaned against the balusters, yielding to a
soul-sickness that had its rise in she scarce knew which, memory or
foreboding. She listened curiously. It was strange playing, though
simple, subdued to not wound the night silence; unordinary as it was,
there was nothing tentative about it, the hands seemed going to it
with a fine boldness, a delicate natural skill. The mother felt not a
moment's joy.

She came to the door, opened it noiselessly, and stood in the doorway
with her candle shining upward in her wide eyes, her solemn face.

Dorastus stopped playing, and said, with a gleeful, short laugh, "I
knew it would make you come!"

As Emmie had expected, he held the Amati. He had thrown off his jacket
and tie and stood in his shirt-sleeves, with his neck bare. His dark
eyes were burning and dancing; his black hair was ruffled and pushed
up on end; his face was hotly flushed. His whole attitude had in it
something new, finely expressive of conscious power.

"I knew it would make you come!" he said, with a triumphant nod.

She entered and set down her light on the little chest of drawers. "You
ought not to play at night," she said, faintly. "It disturbs people's
sleep."

"It wouldn't wake _them_!" he exclaimed, scornfully, "and if it did I
shouldn't care, as long as they didn't come and bother. I wanted to
call you, to make you come to me. I was sure I could. Are you cold,
little mother dear? Get into my bed."

He laid down his instrument; he came where she stood, with her silken
hair tumbling over her shoulders, and felt her chilled hands.

"No, no," she said, irritably, taking them from him, "it is unheard
of, playing at this hour of the night. I must go." But she went
mechanically to sit on the edge of his bed, that had not been lain in
that night, and still kept towards him that wondering, dismayed face.

"How did it sound?" asked the boy, whose excitement seemed to dull his
perception, so that he remained unchilled by her want of warmth. "Did
it say plainly, Arise, wrap your sky-blue gown about you, never mind
tying up your gold hair, light your light, and come gliding through
the shadow of the sleeping house, to your dear son, the only one who
loves you, in his solitary room, far from all the others? That is what
I meant it should say, but towards the end I meant it to say something
else, towards the end it was explaining. Did you understand that part?"

"How did you find it?" asked Emmie, still in her faint voice. "Why did
you take it without asking our permission? Who taught you to play on
it?"

The boy laughed again his gleeful laugh. He got on to the bed beside
her and sat with his chin in his hand, his glowing face full of pride
in himself. "Ah, how I found it, when it was up in the garret? It was
like that story of the Greek fellow--what's his name?--dressed like a
girl. When the peddler brought shawls and ribbons and things, and a
sword hidden among them, he took the sword, and the peddler knew by
that sign that he was a man. In the garret there were old hoop-skirts,
and broken mousetraps, and bird-cages, and boxes full of religious
books and things--but my hand went straight to the violin!"

"Tell me the truth, Dorastus," spoke his mother, wearily.

"Well, then, after talking with a certain person, I concluded that it
must be there. I looked for it and found it, months and months ago. I
took it and learned to play, to give you a surprise. Do you think I can
ever play as my father did?"

"Whom have you heard speak of your fathers playing, Dorastus?"

"Aha! There is some one who remembers him at this very place--who
heard him just once and never forgot it. I might as well tell you:
it is the brother of the inn-keeper's wife at Colthorpe; he used to
be the hostler, but is too old now. He plays the violin himself, at
weddings, sometimes, and dances--but not much, dear. He taught me, but
I have gone far ahead--oh, far ahead of him now! He knows when it is
good, however, and you should hear what he says of me and my playing.
You must see him and ask him. He had climbed up from outside into the
window when once my father played at Colthorpe, and he can speak of
it as if it had happened yesterday. (He says that I am very like my
father, that any one would know me who had seen him. He knew, before
asking, whose son I was. Only, my father wore his hair long; well, I
will wear my hair long!) He says that, as he played, every trouble he
had ever had came back to him, even the death of a dog, and he could
not help crying--but he liked it; he enjoyed feeling bad. And he says
that it made him see plain before him, but not very plain either, a
lot of things he had only heard folks talk about--the shepherds in
the East, for instance, with the angels singing good-will in a hole in
the clouds. And he knew for sure, he says, how it would have felt if
the girl he wanted hadn't married some one else and gone to live away,
but had taken him. I asked him, the other day, if I could make him
feel those things. He said, 'Not yet, not quite yet;' but he thought I
was beginning. He has a number of music sheets; I can read the notes
much quicker than he already, though he taught me. But I don't care
for those; there must be others much better than those! Those are
nothing! I like better what I make up myself than I do those. Did you
notice?--but no, you must have been too far--how quickly I can play
some passages? My left fingers go like a spider, and it is so easy for
them! Giles says my hand is like my father's--he remembers it--a true
violinist's hand. I feel that it can do anything, dear--anything! And
I mean that it shall do such things! Look at it, mother!" and he held
up the thin, unboyishly delicate, angular hand, stronger in appearance
than the rest of his body. "Is it like my father's? You are the one, of
course, that remembers best. Is it like my father's?"

"Oh, yes--yes!" she almost moaned.

He did not seem to perceive her impatience, but contemplated his own
hand a little while, calmly sure that he must be an object of pride to
her now. "It is quite unlike Hector's, at least. I should like to see
him try to play with his pink paws!"

"He might not be able to play," said Emmie, "but he will, I dare say,
do something quite as useful."

"There is nothing quite so useful!" cried the boy superbly, and
laughed again in his perverse glee. "It is more useful than anything
you can invent to say that Hector is going to do. Hector! Hector will
be a rabbit-raiser; he likes rabbits better than anything. But I will
come with my violin and make the rabbits stand up on their hind-legs
and stare; I will play softly, wheedlingly, going slowly backwards
towards the woods, and they will all come after me, without stopping
for a nibble. I will lead them away, away, all the flock of little,
round-backed, skipping things--just as I made you get out of bed and
come up here."

"I came to tell you to stop, foolish boy. I didn't want you to wake the
others. It was very inconsiderate in you--very inconsiderate. And I am
not sure that I am pleased with you for taking a thing so valuable--it
is worth a great deal of money--unknown to me, or for doing things in
secret, or for having dealings with people I know nothing of--hostlers
and inn-keepers' wives. You certainly play nicely--"

"Ah, did you truly think I did, mother?" he asked, eagerly. "You ought
to know; you used to hear himself. Now, tell me, dear--"

"But I am not at all sure"--she interrupted him, lamely
querulous--"that the violin--You have been so underhanded, and I see
now how you waste your time--it explains your being so bad with your
lessons. I am not at all sure that the violin ought not to be taken
from you."

"I shall not give it up!" Dorastus said instantly, and it might be
perfectly understood that he would struggle with his last breath to
keep it, doing as much damage as in him lay to his opposers.

Emmie, quite pale, looked into his face, that had fully returned from
its mood of happy pride, and he looked into hers, as they had looked
already when he was but a baby. Then, seeing what she had always seen,
she tossed up her hands with a little helpless, womanish motion, and
complained: "Oh, I am so cold, and I feel so ill! It is like a horrid
dream--and I am miserable." She rose and pulled her things about her to
go, tears shining on her cheek.

Dorastus, who had leaped up and laid his hand resolutely on his violin
and bow, if they should be in any immediate danger, watched her with
a strange face. His jaw was iron. When, as she reached the door,
he unclinched his teeth to speak, his face worked in spite of him
and tears gushed from his eyes. "You never understand anything!" he
exploded, in a harsh, angry voice all his pride could not keep from
breaking. Then, with the indignant scorn of a child for a grown-up
person who seems to him out of all nature dull--"Go!" he said, beating
his arms violently about, "Go! Go!"

So Dorastus retained the violin, and defiantly played on it, in and out
of season. His mother's failure to be pleased with his playing seemed
to have cut her off, in his estimation, from all right to an opinion.
It is true that after the first night she armed herself with patience
towards a situation she could not change. She did not cross the boy
more than her conscience positively enjoined; he might play since he
pleased, but must not neglect his studies in pursuit of a vain pastime.

In spite of her, his studies suffered. He felt no humiliation now
that Hector or any should be ahead of him with books; he could have
been far ahead of them if he had chosen, but they could under no
circumstance have done what he did. Of these things he was proudly
convinced, and he declared them without hesitation. His almost
untutored playing took on a strange audacity, a fantastical quality
that made it pleasing to none in the household. That did not disturb
him; he pursued triumphantly in the direction repugnant to them, taking
their disapproval to naturally point to its excellence. Sometimes,
half in scorn, he would play for the little girls the simple melodies
they knew, to show them that he could do that, too, if he chose; full
tenderly could he play them and delight their gentle hearts, but he
preferred, if he could catch an unprejudiced soul for audience, a
housemaid for instance, to set her opposite to him and play to her from
his head, then question her as to what the music had made her think of,
helping her to detail her impressions, expressing his contempt freely
if the music had not had on her the desired effect, but hugging her if
she happened to answer as he wanted.

Whenever he had a holiday, or took one, he disappeared with his
instrument, returning with a conqueror's mien, out of place in a boy
with whom every one is displeased, and who has had nothing to eat. It
was felt by all how he was in these days not friends with anybody,
nor anybody friends with him. It suited his pride to carry off the
situation as if he had been a king among boors.

Her eldest child's conduct began at last to be something of a grievance
to Emmie. She appealed to no one for help to reduce him to obedience.
She would not have dared do that; an intimate sense forbade it, a
scruple which would have had no voice, perhaps, had she loved him
more. She excused and up-held him in her little wars with Lucretia,
and respected Gregory's reluctance to interfere with him, founded in
justice on the consciousness of a deep-seated, invincible dislike; but
she fretted under his undutifulness and only refrained from satisfying
the desire to attempt asserting her power over him, though it should
be futile as ever, in the idea that, at the worst, he would soon be
leaving home, with Hector, for school, when the detested violin must
be given up and stronger hands than her own find a way to bend his
obstinate spirit. At the same time, in a corner of her heart, she felt
unreasonably, unaccountably hurt, as perhaps she would have felt if
Dorastus's father had suddenly ceased from his persecutions and she had
known by that sign that, worm as he was, he had ceased to care for her.

"This is all very well; but when you get to school--" Phrases begun on
that line became frequent in Dorastus's ear as the time approached. He
heard them with a singularly bright eye.

The two boys set out for school together, under the guardianship of the
tutor. Consternation fell on the family when it was known that Dorastus
had been missed on the way. The boy was traced to London; there he was
easily lost among the millions of its inhabitants.

While the question was in discussion whether it behooved Gregory
himself to travel to London and institute a search for the runaway,
came a letter from the boy, making it easily decent for his step-father
to leave the stinging weed to get its growth where it might without
being a nuisance, and reconciling his mother to letting him take his
chances as he pleased, since he was so sure they were brilliant--very
brilliant, those chances.

His certainty of himself, his enthusiasm, were such that gradually they
communicated themselves in a degree to her. Why not? After all, his
father, they had said, was a great man; princes had honored him. An
involuntary respect crept through her for Dorastus's daring. It seemed
advisable at least to give him the opportunity he wanted; the more that
the process of finding him, bringing him back in what to him would seem
ignominy, and thereafter keeping watch over him, was uncomfortable to
think of.

His letter was to his mother, a mixture of boyishness and manliness,
more frank than any speech she had had from him in a long time. It
vaguely stirred her heart; for it seemed to restore to her something
that possessing she had not prized, but, careful economist, did not
like to think lost.

"You must promise that I shall not be troubled by any attempt to get
me back. I will do anything terrible if I am trapped. Don't you see
that I couldn't go to school with Hector, who is younger? We should
be put in classes together, for a while at least, and I couldn't stand
it. Besides, I haven't the time, I have so much to do! Besides, I
couldn't go on living with _those people_ forever. I don't mean that
you shall, either. I won't tell you all now, but after a time you may
know that there is to be a house much better than theirs for you to
live in, with me. You shall have everything much better. But I will
not tell you more. Only, you can be perfectly sure of it. You will not
think that I came away without caring about leaving you. I was afraid
you would guess something if I hugged you before them as I wanted to,
but I had been to your room in the night, and any of your gowns you
put on is full of your son's kisses. If I thought you would show this
letter, I think that I should never in my life write you again. If you
should send me any money, I should return it at once or destroy it, so
please don't do it, it would make me angry. I know that we had nothing
when we came to their house, except the violin. One of the servants
told me how we came. What do you suppose keeping me all these years
has cost? When I can, I mean to give them double; you can tell him so,
if you choose. I can't now, but what I can do is to take nothing more
from them. You need not be anxious about me. I am prepared, because I
have long known what I meant to do, and I can take care of myself. I
have met several persons already who know of my father; it seems to be
something here to be his son, though not at home, except to one man,
and he a hostler. Well, I will show them--you, too, dear mother. I
don't mean to vex or grieve you, mother, dear. If I have vexed you, I
know I shall make you forgive me some day, before long, perhaps, when I
shall have made you understand. You can write me at the Tartar's Head,
but if you hunted me there, or information concerning me, you would
never find me, I vow."

Other letters came from time to time, written in fine spirits always,
referring, but mysteriously, to fine successes. Emmie felt a certain
modesty about these letters. She communicated what was in them with
reserve, and adopted towards inquirers the tone of discretion that the
letters had with herself. But she found herself often brooding over the
contents. They charmed the imagination; they sounded like things one
read. It was so remarkable, this circumstance of a poor boy, a boy of
her own, arriving in a great city, with little but his violin, and by
sounds merely forcing the things one values to come to him, as he had
spoken fancifully once, she remembered, of making a flock of rabbits
follow him into the woods. He wrote little very definite, but dropped
telling hints of how he had played before this great man and that man
of importance, and this one had said--the other had promised. He had
been called upon to perform at a certain levee, and out of his fee had
bought the things he was sending; he had money to spare. And there came
a parcel of presents for Emmie and the little girls, by which all were
greatly impressed. Dorastus's rank in the memory of his family rose a
degree. Now, on looking back, each knew that he had always foreseen
how, with that powerful will, Dorastus must be able to hew his way
through difficulties and compel circumstances to serve him. He was
looked on rather as a man than a boy, even as he looked on himself. His
mother was grateful to him for seeming to efface the weak foolishness
out of her first marriage: she was justified in her latter days, and
proved a virgin full of good sense. She wrote Dorastus encouraging
letters. Her good words got glowing answers: surely it would not be
long; he was working with all his might. But they must be patient,
for success as a material recompense was slow; and he hinted with the
effect of a sigh at rivalries, at the density of the public mind. Yet
talent must inevitably triumph in the end and manly effort meet its
reward.

When Hector came home for his holidays he found it just a little
stupid to have been a good boy. The personage in the general mind
seemed to be his undisciplined half-brother. He contrived, however,
in the course of weeks, to fix a good deal of attention on himself.
He restored the balance to his mother's mind. Dorastus sank into his
natural place in relation to her other children. She waited in serene
patience--sometimes with a passing touch of scepticism, the reflection
of some outsider's attitude, oftener with childish perfection of
faith--for the developments he announced in letters somewhat decreasing
in frequency, but preserving their early tone of hopefulness.

So time passed. The unusual became the usual and lost consideration,
according to its habit.

Then the sisters-in-law, those perfect daughters, mothers, and wives,
came to visit the head of the house in the home of their girlhood. They
brought maids and children and chattels manifold.

Now these ladies had been in London, and Emmie heard much from them of
the glories and greatness of that city; she had long opportunity to
learn respect for their manners and gowns, which alike came from there.
They had not happened upon Dorastus; they could not remember hearing of
him, and as that seemed to make it plain to Emmie they had not been in
the most polite places, they explained that the city was so large and
populous you might not come across a person in a lifetime.

They left on a rainy autumn morning. Emmie, with her forehead against
the glass, watched their carriages dwindling, dwindling. Gone, with all
their patterns for gowns, with the last sweet thing in worsted-work;
gone, with their fashionable conversation, the art of which she had not
had quite time yet to master. But even if she had become perfect in
all, as they, of what use could it have been to her here? she asked,
turning from the dripping window-pane.

She moved with an air of being the moon by day. The sickness of the
decaying year seemed to have got into her blood; she felt as if she
herself were the perishing summer, which had somehow been wasted. She
said over her children's ages with a sort of terror, a sense of time
having stolen a march on her; she was vaguely panic-stricken to think
there was so little of the good time of life left before her. She
sought the mirror to divert her mind with trying on again the bonnet
the sisters had bestowed on her, pronouncing it so becoming. Under the
severe gray light the face she saw reflected held more than ever to her
discontented eyes a forecast of the cheerless coming days when the rose
should be withered, the gold gone. The deadly quiet of the country, the
silence of the well-regulated house, suddenly seemed to her an outrage,
a roof incontrovertible that no one cared what happened to her. Gregory
in particular did not care. Else would he not have comprehended that
movement and novelty and gayety alone could at this pass save her from
the insidious oncreeping evil that encouraged hard lines between the
pale cheek and the drooping mouth? Clearly he did not care. He cared
for nothing but not to be disturbed after dinner. In this connection
she thought over many a subtle wrong she had been putting up with for
years. She thought of Dorastus, from whom this husband, with his royal
indifference, allowed her to be so long separated; Dorastus, who as she
looked to him, turning from the lukewarm, apathetic tribe surrounding
her, seemed an embodiment of swiftness and strength, a tempered steel
blade to rely on, a flame at which to warm the numb hands of the heart.
Ah, well, he was making a home for her with him, yonder in the living
city. She lost sight of the mirror into which she was staring; she
saw that home. Suddenly it seemed to her she could not live longer
without seeing her boy. She rose with the energy of true inspiration.
It was such an obviously legitimate desire, this desire to behold again
her own flesh and blood, that she need not be at pains to fabricate
palliation or excuse for it. She sought Gregory directly. She was weary
and ill, she had dreams at night, he did not know how hard her life had
become. She wanted to see Dorastus.

Gregory yielded.

They came to London. They took rooms at a quiet hotel known to him of
old.

The novelty of all, the anticipation, made Emmie feel young again. Her
violet eyes were still childishly clear, her hair was pretty still;
little was missed of the beauty of her youth but its slender lightness.

"No, no; you must leave it all to me," she said, when Gregory would
have accompanied her in her search for Dorastus. "I have a clue which
I will not betray. He has shown, dear fellow, that he might be trusted
to take care of himself. I will bring him home to dine with us. You may
take seats for the pantomime."

So the good Gregory put her in the care of a trusted driver, and saw
her started on her adventure.

Now she was driven--it seemed to her they were hours on the way--to the
Tartar's Head, a coffee-house of not very imposing appearance, in a
crowded part.

Before reaching her destination she almost wished she had let Gregory
come: it was so noisy; the air was so dingy it deadened one's spirits
despite wealth of delightful prospects; and she must face various
unknown, perhaps unfriendly, faces before finding his face--after which
all would be well.

She descended from the carriage with a little flutter, then with the
haste of rout got into it again, and requested the driver to bring some
one to her, as if she had been a great person.

A young man came out to take her commands, a well-oiled young man in
side-whiskers and a broad shirt-front.

Had not letters been received there addressed to so-and-so?

The young man was more than polite. Inquiries were made. Such letters
had been received. The person to whom they were addressed called for
them.

"I am his mother," said Emmie, lamely, for she had prepared another
course than this simple one, a course involving strategy. "Does he not
live here? Where does he live?"

The young man continued very obliging. He made further inquiries and
came back looking a little blank. The person came himself and left no
direction for forwarding his letters; a letter had once been waiting
several weeks.

"Does no one here know him?" asked his mother, nearly in tears. Of a
sudden this city seemed to her terribly large, and terribly full of
people who cared nothing for any distress of hers. "He plays on the
violin--he plays very beautifully on the violin."

A possibility of intelligence dawned in the obliging young man's face,
and he ran in-doors again. He came back with a hopeful air. "Yes, your
ladyship. There is an old man belonging to the place knows him. He took
him a letter once when he couldn't come himself, being laid up. He
didn't want to tell at first, saying how he'd sworn. But I let him know
your ladyship was the young man's mother, and he told. It's a bit far."

The waiter stepped up to the coachman and gave him instructions. Emmie
rewarded his obligingness with bounty in proportion to her relief at
all proving so easy. Of course some one knew him. It was part of his
boyishness to suppose he could hide, after his light had begun shining
through the bushel, too.

She looked out through the misty pane at the bright passing
shop-windows; there seemed to her thousands in a row, and hundreds of
carriages rolling along with her. She liked the city again exceedingly,
and was glad to hope she might be there often after a time; it was so
various, it put life into one. If only the murky cloud would lift that
rested on the chimney-tops, and the rain stop making more the gray
slime on the flags.

It was a long distance. She looked out until she was tired and
confused; then leaned back and meditated pleasantly for a time, then
looked out again, with a little shock of disappointment at seeing no
more bright windows.

They were going more slowly; the streets here were narrow, the air
seemed dingier, the houses and people looked miserable.

She watched with a saddened interest these that she fixed upon as
the poor city-people in their poor quarters. She was sorry for them,
but she would be relieved when they were left behind for the gayer
thoroughfares, or the roomier, more cheerful suburbs.

Now at the entrance of a narrow court the carriage stopped. She
wondered what could be hindering its progress, and fidgeted while the
coachman left his box and came to the door. He opened it with a stolid
face and held his finger to his hat, waiting for her to alight.

"But--but"--she stammered, eying the poverty-stricken appearance of the
place, "this cannot be it!"

"The directions were clear, ma'am; I've followed them," said the man,
with respectful firmness. "This is as near as I can get to the house;
there's no room to turn around in the court."

Emmie leaned back a moment, determined not to stir from her
cushions--the mistake was on the face of it too stupid.

The coachman stood waiting, a man of patience carved in wood. Emmie
eyed him helplessly; then, seeing that the imposing creature would be
satisfied with no less from her, with the abruptness of impatience
she alighted, and rustled into the dark court, peering upward for the
number.

There it was. She knocked, and listened, with a heart in which strange
things seemed to be happening. To the capless woman who opened she
stammered a name, looking for the relief of being told instantly that
none of that name lived there.

"Three pair back, ma'am," said the woman, who appeared like a cook,
actual, past, or potential. "But he's not in. There's no telling how
soon he will come. What name did you say? Drastus what? Sibbie-mole?
Oh no, ma'am. Beg pardon. I listened as far as Drastus, and answered
because it's such a curious name. Ours name is Fenton. But, let's see.
What manner of young man might yours be? Like a foreigner, with a large
nose and black eyes, and plays the fiddle, and wears his hair long?
Dear me, ma'am, the very same! His room's three pair back. You wish to
wait for him? This way, then, ma'am."

Emmie, in whom all processes of thought had stopped in amazement,
followed the landlady as best she could up three flights of dark
stairs, and entered through the door flung open for her.

They stood in a little room that received the day through a sky-light.
Emmie dropped, sitting on the edge of the narrow bed and knotted her
little gloved fingers together in silence. She was so pale that the
landlady felt alarmed and asked if she were feeling ill. She shook her
head, and continued looking about fearfully and in wonder.

There was little to see, nothing that might not have belonged to any
one in the wide world as well as to that boy; not one of these sordid
appurtenances reminded her of him, except the music on the table--but
any fiddler might have just such music.

She rose to her feet as if jerked by a hidden string, and walked
stiffly towards the door, saying, "It is evidently not the one. This
one's name is Drastus Fenton, you say. The one I seek is Dorastus
Sibbemol. Good-morning, ma'am."

But near the door she stopped, her eyes widening upon an object set
upright in the corner--a black wooden box, very old, scarred and
worm-eaten, mournfully resembling a child's coffin.

She went back to the bed, and limply leaned against the wall. She
stared over at the box, with its peculiar wrought-iron hinges and
handle.

"Has he been here long?" she asked, faintly, at last, of the blowzy
woman who was looking at her with some concern, and at the same time,
in view of the lady's respectability, trying to smooth down her untidy
hair.

She thought a moment and judged he might have been there half a year.

Emmie wrung her hands in an aimless way. She felt little of pain as
yet, or indignation; only vague throes and convulsions of change, a
working of all the atoms in heart and brain trying to adjust themselves
to something new.

"And he is poor!" she murmured.

"Well," said the landlady, exculpatingly, "we are all poor folks here,
ma'am. He mostly pays his rent--I don't ask much, but when he's behind
I'm not hard on him. He's a good lad," she went on, and as she was a
sizable woman, after a gesture of deferential apology she took a seat,
to support her in her view of lingering to angle with information
until she caught a little enlightenment. "A good lad, but that proud!
He thinks he'll be as rich as a dook some day, with his little fiddle!"
She shook her head in compassion and chuckled fatly over a household
joke of long standing. "He's all right in his head, ma'am, except on
that point. A poor lad that plays in the streets is none so likely to
pick up a fortune. And such tunes as he plays! I've always been told
I'd an uncommon ear for a catch, but to catch head or tail of them is
beyond me!"

"He plays in the streets!"

"Yes, poor Dook--come rain, come shine. Sometimes he has a good day,
sometimes a bad one; but times is hard--it's not very good at best.
He's not one of them pretty-impudent Italian boys with wheedling brown
velvet eyes. He looks too scornful, and despises folks more than is for
his own good. I have felt hurt at it myself, ma'am, and I may say I'm
not touchy. When I've known that he was a bit hard up and he looked
hollow, and I've asked him in neighborly to have a bite with us, he
has answered me almost as if he hated me for it--and gone hollow."

His mother drew in her breath sharply.

"Might you be a friend of his?" asked the landlady. "Once when he was
sick abed, and I came up to say a good word, he got sociabler than
usual, and spoke of a lady, a lady of quality, who'd heard him play--I
thought likely it was before he came here with his coat so seedy--a
lady who thought he was very fine. Perhaps I don't understand about
fiddle-playing, and he is all he says. Might you be the lady?"

"Yes, yes, yes!" said Emmie, scarcely knowing what she said.

The landlady looked much interested. "Well, now, I thought as much,
for I don't think he's any one in the world belonging to him. He's a
good lad, ma'am," she said again, with a good-natured impulse to make
hay for a fellow-creature while this, possibly a sun, was shining.
"He deserves better than he gets, if I do say it. He works at them
music-books for hours sometimes, at night, till the man below is fit
to go mad. But I tell him I can't put out a lodger that pays more
frequent than he, and when I speak to Drastus he says he'll leave,
though he should have to sleep on the pavement--he must play when he
pleases. He says that it's because he can't play as other fiddle-men
do, from a book and in a particular way, that he can't get nothing to
do but play in the streets. So he must learn, and learn he will, and
he scrapes away like a meeting of cats on the roof. I'm sorry he's
out, ma'am. What did you want with him, now? Couldn't I give your
message--or must you wait yourself?"

"I will wait--I will wait."

"He may not be home till night. He sometimes even--"

"Oh, leave me, my good woman!" moaned Emmie. "What else can I do but
wait?"

And the landlady, taking pity on what seemed to her an inordinate
perturbation of spirit, left the visitor to herself, returning now and
then to listen, and bringing up once an inquiry from the coachman.

Emmie remained sitting on the edge of the bed. After a time she rose
and looked with pointless minuteness at everything in the room, opening
every drawer and reading every paper. She found all her letters tied in
a bundle and wrapped in a silk neckerchief of her own, old, and that
she had never missed. He had few possessions, and they made the heart
sick to pore over.

The light faded off the dull glass overhead. With chilled fingers
she felt for the candle and lighted it. The landlady, coming up at
dark, insisted on bringing her a cup of tea. The good creature had
so disciplined her curiosity concerning the history implied in this
gentlewoman's presence here that her delicacy now in endeavoring to
discover was touching. Yet it went unrewarded. She stayed for the
satisfaction of seeing the lady, who she thought looked fairly ill,
refresh herself; and when it was delayed, tried by example to institute
in the atmosphere that cheerfulness which is conducive to a better
appetite--until asked again, with an imploring glance from eyes like a
shot dove's, to go, for the sake of pity to go.

Emmie now took down the few clothes she had seen on the hooks, with a
vague idea that they required mending. She spread them out over her lap
one by one, and passed her hand mechanically over the threadbare places
where the black was green, over certain fringes about the holes, her
heart feeling extraordinarily large and empty and silent. The rings on
her cold hand glittered in the stroking movement, four rich rings with
various stones, Gregory's gifts. Four--but she had five children.

She stretched herself suddenly on the bed with her face in the old
coat, the chill of the room slowly seizing upon her as she lay. She
prayed in a distant, half-conscious way, without the least illusion
that such words could persuade any one, for God to unmake everything
that had happened to her, to let her have died, and Dorastus too, at
his very birth; for them to have both been lying in the remote Dutch
God's-acre these many years. For one fleeting moment memory gave back
to her perfect an impression never before recalled. She seemed to have
been roused from a stupor deeper than sleep; her eyes dwelt without
wonder on what she thought to be a cathedral, with colored windows
ablaze--it dwindled, until it was a mere night-light glimmering. Then
shadowy people placed a little bundle in her arms. She tingled as an
instrument whose every string is touched, a coolness rippled from her
head to her feet, she knew a state never known before or since, a sense
of unlimited wealth, a tenderness ineffable, a trembling outgoing of
all her being to this handful of life. She heaved a great, faint sigh,
and with effort unspeakable bent till her lips were pressed as to a
warm rose-leaf. She sank to sleep, weak unto death, but blissfully
happy--waking stronger and in a different mood.

She wished she might not have waked, but been buried with her poor
first baby in her arms, having ceased to be in the single moment
wherein she completely loved it. Nothing that had happened to her since
then seemed to her sweet; all was sicklied through by the consciousness
of a crime gone before and daily confirmed, a woman's most monstrous,
miserable crime--not loving enough. Nothing could make her withered,
yellowed, cheapened life right now--she should have died at that
moment. She said this over and over again to the powers that hear us,
until all meaning had faded from it. She started, with a sense of
something going out--she thought it must be the candle and she should
be left in the dark. She sat up, frightened and freezing.

The candle was burning quietly. Then, as she scrutinized the shadows
ahead, loath to stir, she became aware of her rings having grown loose,
they were in danger of dropping off; of her clothes having grown loose,
they let the cold in under them; she felt a prickling at the temples,
as if it were the gray creeping through her hair; she felt her features
becoming pinched and old, beauty dropping from them like a husk. She
wanted to cry then with a childish self-pity, but no tears would come;
she did not know how to start the flood that she longed for to relieve
her. She felt that she could only have screamed.

She got up to rid herself of this congealment, and paced the room from
corner to corner with sweeping black gown that told of the dusty things
it had that day brushed.

Company had come to the man below; they were making a great deal of
very jolly noise. The candle guttered drearily; a reek of warm cabbage
climbed up the stairway to her nostrils. She looked up on hearing a
soft tapping--the black sky-light was spattered with silver tears, like
a pall.

She walked up and down, waiting and listening, everything taking more
and more the quality of a dream wherein the most unnatural things grow
ordinary. She had felt with a numbed sort of cowardly loathing that
every moment brought her nearer to a black stream of realizing grief
and remorse into which willy-nilly she must descend; but now it seemed
in accordance with every known law that she should be here, destined to
go on walking so forever, never arriving, nor anything ever changing.
She heard herself say aloud in a light, indifferent tone, "He will
never come. He will never come."

For a moment she remembered Gregory, whose image seemed to rise out of
the dim past: Gregory in the warm light of the hotel coffee-room, where
dinner was set on a little table for three, dinner with wine-glasses of
two shapes, and fruit and confectionery in crystal dishes. The thought
worked upon her as a sweet smell in sea-sickness. All that had to do
with Gregory seemed of negative importance; let him wait and wonder and
worry. She felt hard-hearted towards him and all prosperous things.

A burst of voices reached her through the floor; they were rough
and hoarse, their mirth had turned to wrangling. It was so horribly
lonely here! If they were suddenly possessed to climb the stairs, to
burst in upon her! There was a crash of glass--she screamed; then a
laugh--she shuddered--and the noise grew less. She breathed again, but,
feeling her knees weaken, went back to the bed, and sat listening in
fascination for the murmuring sounds to develop again into a quarrel.

Suddenly, without the warning of gradually approaching sounds she had
prepared herself for, she heard footsteps just outside.

She knew them. An impulse to flee seized her. She looked about for a
place to hide in, a place to get through, to jump from. She could not
bear to see him, she felt as a murderess whose victim's ghost is upon
her. His image flashed before her, pinched with hunger and cold, worn,
embittered with disappointment, terrible with its long unrequited love
turned to hatred--gray, with glassy eyes.

She looked wildly, but she could not move. Besides, it was too late, a
hand was on the door.

As it opened, a deep stillness fell upon her, a suspension of all.

A spell seemed to snap with his coming into the range of the
candle-light; it was as to a child locked all night in a graveyard the
cock-crow that lays the ghosts and heralds the day. She took a feeble
breath and her heart gave a warm little throb. The very face! only, a
young man's face rather than a boy's, thinner and bolder than ever,
but, thank Heaven! not pathetic, not heart-breaking--but with red where
red should be, with living light in the eyes.

He held his violin; he was meanly clad, and his woollen muffler was of
a cheap and dismal tint no mother would have chosen for him.

He looked in surprise at the lighted candle, and quickly cast his eyes
about, frowning to see who had taken this liberty. He caught sight of
her, blinked and narrowed his eyes, to distinguish.

She could not make a sound, or bring a vestige of expression to her
face, or lift the pale little hands from her black lap--but sat
transfixed under his questioning stare.

He took a few steps, uttered a jubilant shout, and dashed towards her
with outstretched arms--But he stopped before reaching her. He gave a
glance around the horrible little room, a glance at her face with the
eyes full of stern sadness, of reproach for the many, many lies he
had told her. Abruptly he turned his back to her and dropped on his
knees beside the table, saying furiously in disjointed syllables as he
pressed his working face against his arms. "You won't understand! You
never understand anything! I think sometimes that you are a fool!"

But he felt her soft icy hands tremble about his head, he felt her
fluttering breath in his neck. She was kneeling beside him, saying in
choked whispers in the intervals of lifting her poor lips from his wet
face, "Don't speak!--Don't speak!"

She was straining him to her with a passionate tenderness never shown
another being, raining on him the sweetest kisses.

Both fell to crying as if their hearts would break.



CHLOE, CHLORIS, AND CYTHEREA


To make you acquainted by sight with young Chloris: she was a tall
girl, a trifle meagre in outline, but not disagreeably so; she had
light reddish-brown hair, and a sprinkling of freckles on a peachy
skin, and those eyes with dead-leaf spots in them; altogether an air
of openness and intelligent goodness that had quickly thrown the newly
introduced off the question--was she pretty? But she was pretty, too,
at her hours.

On this day she had shut out the sun by means of the green Venetian
blinds, and her room, like a submerged crystal chamber, was full of a
watery light; she herself, white clothed, made a fair green-shadowy
nymph in the dim green atmosphere.

This was her first hour of complete conscious content. So rich was she
in content that she had set herself to perusing a volume of the driest
essays, a present for a diligent girl graduate.

This sense of life unfolding like a normal flower and becoming the
perfection of a rose was too much for the grateful heart to contemplate
at its ease; some great demonstration towards God must follow on
such contemplation. And Chloris in her security putting it off until
bedtime, sat reading about the discipline of the will, the happy blood
all the while keeping up in her veins a pleasant undercurrent babbling
of other matters. Two hours more and the summer sun would be reaching
its glorious haven, the cool flow in with the darkness, and time take
up again that sweet scanning of the lines of her idyl....

After reading the same passage some seven times, Chloris let her book
lie a moment in her lap. How marvellous, how simple, how natural,
how exquisite! Truly like the coming up of a flower. First, they
were children together, fair-dealing, unquarrelsome playmates;
then, schoolboy and schoolgirl, always good unsentimental friends;
and finally, time, passing over them, slowly turned them to lovers;
for this, no question, was whither they were tending: quiet,
undemonstrative, unjealous, faithful, devoted lovers, presently married
people, and by and by, God pleasing, tenants of one same grave. And
this sweetness in the heart, this best of all earthly goods, God
granted it to the humblest of his creatures! Why, then, were so many
dissatisfied with this dear earth? Why were some on it interested in
the discipline of the will? Ah, this summer, so endearingly begun, to
be ended so--and Chloris, in a confusion of bliss, almost as if to give
herself a countenance towards herself, took up her book again, finding
moonlight and wild azaleas and whippoorwills between the lines, a
dappled, singing shingle, a golden beach, velvet winds from over sea.

The sunshine crept off the window-square; a sadness instantly invaded
the room; Chloris jumped up to open the blinds. Time to dress! Then
she did her hair as painstakingly as ably, put on a just-ironed white
gown with a violet figure, and stood at the glass weighing the question
of a velvet band around the neck. A fateful sound already was dawning
on the distance outside, but she did not as yet hear it. Too hot! She
tossed the velvet ribbon in the top bureau-drawer so unconcernedly
as if not, at that moment, the Parcæ had been tangling the skein of
her life, and wondered idly if any one describing her would call her
pretty. She thought, in conscience, not; but of a charming appearance,
she hoped any one would.

At this point penetrated to her brain a sound of voices out on the road
beyond the lawn and the hedge. She looked between the curtains.

Two ladies, unknown to her, were slowly sauntering past in the
direction of the beach; one, near middle age, in a darkish gown; the
other, young, in light colors of a distinctly fashionable tone; this
latter carried over her shoulder a very large, fluffy, and, as it
showed even at this distance, inexpressibly costly parasol. She turned
her face a moment on the ancient vine-overclambered country-house, from
one window of which peeped Chloris, looked it up and down and across,
and turned away, making, Chloris supposed, some comment upon it to her
companion.

When they had disappeared from sight, Chloris, still at the window,
musing on that face seen a moment, heard a leisurely jingling, and saw
pass at a walking pace an empty shining carriage, drawn by two superb
bays, driven by a man in livery.

"It must be their turn-out," she concluded her wondering. "Who can they
be but the people that were to move into the Beauregard cottage?"

Then, as there was time to spare before tea, she sat down in the
window. Shortly, was a lively jingling, a trampling, and the shining
carriage bowled swiftly by on its way back from the beach; on its
cushions, two ladies under a broad lacy parasol; a mighty cloud of dust
running after it, never to over-take.

Almost at the same moment Chloris saw Him, half the subject of her
idyl, coming across the lawn.

She went to meet him.

"Who are the arrivals?" she asked at once.

And here was pronounced, for the first time before Chloris, the name of
Cytherea.

"Cytherea, Damon? Who is Cytherea? Where does she come from? Do you
know her?"

"Very slightly," answered the young man; "I have met her in town. She
had told me she thought of coming here for the summer, but I supposed
it was conversation. I had completely forgotten, until I saw her this
afternoon. She is entranced with everything! You can never see our poky
little old place in its true light: you must get a description of it
from her, Chloris. She will find it deadly dull before the end of a
week; but for the moment she imagines quiet to be all she wants. She
has been working like a slave at doing the proper thing in town."

"She has brought her style with her, I see."

"They are inseparable. She arrived yesterday on the late train, and you
should see the change already in the Beauregard."

"You have been there, then?"

"Just a moment. They called to me from the veranda. They were having
tea. Fancy their bringing down a grand-piano!"

"Does she play much?"

"I don't know. Very probably. She looks as if she might."

"Oh, no, Damon! There you mistake. She looks as if she mightn't. She is
very pretty, but I will vouch for it she can't play--"

"Perhaps the cousin is the pianist. We shall see. I said you would call
on them this evening."

"I, Damon? The instant they arrive? Why did you say that? Why should I
call before they have had time to breathe?"

"Do you mind? I am so sorry. They asked me to come, and I half
promised. It is likely to be somewhat slow for them here if we stand on
ceremony. You will like them, I am sure."

"You are sure? No doubt I shall. But to-night seems
rather--instantaneous, if you don't mind. You will excuse me to them,
and I will wait till they get a little more settled."

"Settled! They have brought down an army of servants. The house looks
as if they had lived in it for a month."

"Make what excuse for me you please, then."

"You won't come, Chloris?"

"I think not. Not this evening. Go by yourself, and tell me all the
great changes to-morrow. She will be much better pleased to see you
than me, anyway."

"Why do you say that?"

"Her face, my dear boy! She can't play the piano, to speak of, and she
greatly prefers men to women."

"Perhaps you do her an injustice--"

"Have I said anything disparaging? I signalled two virtues, I think.
You don't really mind my not going, Damon? I had intended to write
letters this evening, and mend table-cloths and read to father."

When, shortly after tea, Damon had gone, Chloris tried to return
herself into a truthful person by reading an hour to her father,
and adding a dozen stitches to a delicate darn, and writing a note,
which, when finished, she tore up. In order, as far as possible, with
her conscience, she seated herself at the piano, a poor, tin-voiced
instrument, tired of the sea-air. No one so well as Chloris, accustomed
to its senile vagaries, could make the worn thing discourse music; her
greatest successes on it were old-time compositions written in the day
of spinet and harpsichord, minuets with a sprinkling of grace-notes,
things not sonorous or profound. To-night, playing for no one's praise,
she plunged haphazard into the melodies most sympathetic at the
moment, stormy and subtle, melancholy and intricate and modern. It was
Chloris's one proud gift, this effectiveness at the piano.

Her father and his elderly sisters took themselves off to bed on the
stroke of ten. Chloris remained on the adjustable stool, relieved at
their going. She took up her playing again, without trying now to keep
her eyes dry.

The sweet, hot air of the day, cooling, was turned to dew outside;
something of the same kind seemed taking place within herself--and
the dew was tears. Why had she been so curiously uplifted that day,
so at rest concerning every point in life, so sure of one thing at
least? Nothing was changed, yet she saw no reason now for blessing
this summer, golden hour for hour, and looking to it for the greatest,
serenest happiness. Damon? What was Damon to her, or she to Damon? He
had never in so many words made love to her, and she had never felt
the first pang of wonder or disappointment at this. They had walked,
rowed, ridden together. What of it? They should do these things again
a hundred times, probably. What of that? What had she been dreaming,
erewhile? Or was this the dream, this bad one? Something splendid and
shining and purple had gone gray.

While continuing mechanically to play, she looked through the open
window into the summer night. It was rightfully her moon, that honeyed
bright moon outside; her balm-breathing night; it was her silver sea
yonder out of sight; they were her odorous pine-needle paths in the
sighing grove--and she was robbed of them. And the sense of it gave
her a seething in the heart, the like of which sensation she had never
dreamed existed: as if a painful separation of all the atoms in it one
from the other, as well as the stern conviction of being--oh, the novel
idea!--a fool.

"I won't have it!" she muttered, emphatically, without knowing
definitely what she meant, and struck an angry discord.

Through her playing reached her suddenly that merry harness-jingle of
the afternoon, approaching, passing, fading away.

"There they go--to the beach for the second time to-day--to look at the
ocean by light of the moon."

When in little less than an hour she heard the breaking again, on the
quiet air, of the fatuous silvery jingle, she let her playing fall to a
mere musical murmur, and listened, acutely, burning all the while with
shame.

"Go slowly, Humphrey," she caught, in a rich, sweet voice; "I want to
listen to the music."

"She plays really wonderfully. I have never heard playing I preferred
to hers," came in a well-known deeper voice, at which Chloris's cheeks
waxed hotter still. She pressed her foot on the pedal and shut herself
within a wall of dinning, buzzing sound.

When she had lifted it, and risen, the road was empty, the night
silent, but for the crickets and the distant surf, as the grave.

       *       *       *       *       *

Several days passed, each bringing Chloris its very natural request
from Damon that she would go with him to pay her respects to the new
neighbors; but with a perversity that surprised herself more livelily
than him, she daily found a bad reason for putting off the duty. This
hindered the progress of the idyl; for Damon had a delicate conscience
where these strangers were concerned; he would not see them bored in a
latitude whose honor, as an earlier inhabitant, he appeared to have at
heart.

And presently the atmosphere of the whole country-side seemed qualified
by the presence of this Cytherea. It seemed to Chloris one could not
escape the effect of her, without taking to the deepest of the woods.
She was like an unstopped jar of some powerful essence; the little
country world was redolent of her.

Before the time Chloris had at last rigidly fixed for a formal visit
came a message from Cytherea inviting her. Hard as she sought to
discover a reason for misliking the dainty note, she could find none;
it was irreproachable, and Chloris dressed herself for the occasion
with a divided mind, the preponderant part of which was finally
comfort: she should at least grapple now with a reality.

She came to Cytherea's house at evening under Damon's escort. As one
approached it among the trees it looked rather more like one's idea of
an Eastern temple than a sea-coast cottage. The veranda was behung
with colored paper moons, glowing subduedly among the vines; soft light
streamed through lace from the changed interior.

Excitement took Chloris from herself. Now the great adversary was
welcoming her; and Chloris, at the touch of a warm, soft hand, said
to herself, "What bugbear have I been frightening myself with?" and
found ease and ability to converse, and release from that sense of
disadvantage that had ridden her helpless heart like a nightmare.

This atmosphere of the great world that went with Cytherea, how
awakening, how satisfying after all, to the mind! Not the smallness
of envy, thought Chloris, should keep her from giving it its due, or
getting her benefit from it. In the distance and abstract she had hated
it; but entered into, seen close, how unconscious, how inoffensive,
nay, genial, it proved! What a great good, too, this wealth that
permitted such distinction in luxury! Country girl as she was, it
seemed to Chloris she was breathing her native air.

At Cytherea's prayer she sat down at the piano, and to her own surprise
played better than usual. When she had done, she begged the hostess to
play. She forgot how she had declared that Cytherea's face showed no
soul for music.

She was surprised to hear the lady say, "I play hardly at all." She
sincerely now could not believe it.

"Ah, well!" laughed Cytherea; and good-naturedly she pushed a chair to
the piano, and appeared preparing to begin.

Chloris looked on in some wonder. Cytherea seated herself half away
from the keyboard, one nonchalant arm over the back of her chair,
her curly forehead on her hand; and, the first to smile at her own
affectation, played an elaborate waltz, very languidly, with her left
hand.

Impossible for the eyes to leave her a moment while she performed
her pretty trick; and ably enough she performed it, with an adorable
cream-white hand.

Chloris seemed to be slowly returning to consciousness. What perfection
was here! Nature had given this creature everything. Criticism of her
could only pass current under the stamp of envy. That gracious dark
beauty, that warm radiance! And sparkle, and charm--with winningness,
dignity, rarity, variousness!

Chloris looked over at Damon; and the image of his fascinated face, as,
a fond forgotten smile on his lips, he followed with his dark dog-eyes
each movement of Cytherea's, affected her as a drop of poison let into
her blood. She seemed to herself growing aged and haggard, even as she
sat there, the dancing measure beating on her ear. Her hands lay cold
in the lap of her best gown--modest made-over gown of pale purplish
silk that she wore with a lace bertha of past fashion, once her poor
mother's. "What is the use of trying to contend with a thing like
that?" her heart asked, dully.

An acuter pain pierced it when, the waltz played out, the laugh
following it laughed out, and conversation resumed, she realized the
faintest possible shade of disregard in Cytherea for the observations
made by Damon. Cytherea prized her, Chloris's, utterances distinctly
more; her, she seemed, from all her manner, to be honoring; him, for
some reason, she held a trifle cheap. This seemed to Chloris just a
little more unendurable than all the rest. And the dear boy, who,
totally ignorant of the effect he produced, was in such high spirits,
was so anxious to please, so cheerfully making a mantle in the mud of
himself for the beauty to tread upon.

At last it was over; Chloris lay in her own bed in the pale summer
darkness, and felt she was the heart of the created world, and this
pain man's old inheritance; it seemed the very essence of her being
which was distilled slowly from her eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the day following, Chloris punctually sought Cytherea, for
appreciation must be shown the cordiality of the beauty. That was a
question apart from others: one is just and polite before anything
else. A person overhearing the chatting and laughing of that afternoon
in Cytherea's room would have thought certainly he listened to a pair
of heart friends. The greater expense of admiration between the two
women seemed of a truth to be borne by Cytherea. Chloris must look
herself mentally over in astonishment at this value set on her by so
great a judge. After the examination she felt foolish and humble. She
felt profoundly how, all being different, she too could have worshipped
Cytherea.

And now she must be concerned in every sort of rural festivity
organized by Damon for Cytherea's amusement; she must see the rival's
first effect of being mildly bored by Damon's whole-souled dedication
turn into an effect of indulgence, daily tinged with increased liking;
for who in nature could fail to do final justice to one so simple, so
sincere as Damon--Damon, with his dear, clear, curiously gentle Roman
face and curly hair?

"The heat does not seem to agree with you this summer, child," one of
the aunts concluded her kindly meant scrutiny of Chloris's face; and
the girl's heart tightened with affright.

She stood that day before the glass, and, leaning her elbows on the
bureau, seriously examined the tinted shadow. "All is of no use,"
she said. "The more I care, the more I must look like that. Does it
not seem a little strange that the more one loves the less lovely
one should become? And a little hard, too, perhaps, oh, you, my God,
with all respect, who have arranged these little matters?" And tired,
discouraged Chloris began weakly to laugh aloud, though she was alone;
and watched the grimacing of her own reflection with a sort of brutal
contemptuousness. "Oh, you sickening object!" she exclaimed, and hid
the delicate, nervous, tell-tale face in her hands. "This cannot go
on!" she raved. "Human flesh cannot endure it--and I cannot alter it.
All must soon see how it is with me. I can barely keep a hold on my
temper now. I must get away. Damon shall court her; she shall bloom
and smile at her ease for him. Welcome to each other--both! I shall be
where I cannot see it. I refused to visit Fidele in her mountain home.
I had a use already--God help me!--for every hour of the summer. I
will write to say I repent. Then Damon, Cytherea, sing duets out in
the canoe by moonlight; find clover-leaves for each other. I shall be
scouring the mountain in search of healing herbs, and I do not doubt
but, God helping, I shall find them. It is not in nature that a torture
like this should last!"

And Chloris, when next she appeared before the public eye, looked
almost triumphant. And when her leave had been taken of all, and the
swift air of change was blowing against her brow, her heart felt so
strangely sound and quiet that she almost laughed, asking herself, "Why
am I going away? I am recovered merely at the notion of it. Had I but
known, I could have remained like a little heroine, and stood it out."

But the hours passing broke down and carried off more and more all
the gallant props of pride and resolution, and at last Chloris sat
in the galloping car, a drooping runaway, who looked steadily out of
the window, and saw the flying scene through tears. Contemptible,
countrified Chloris, with her freckles and inferior clothes, and so
ordinary notions of conduct and taste, running away from comparison
with the peerless Cytherea; taking her envy and weakness out of sight
till she got strength to disguise them.

Now the scenery, which she had not been seeing, became more lonely and
wild; the first low hills, heavy and slow in the general nimbleness of
things, shifted themselves with an amiable clumsiness till they had
closed in Chloris with her train; waking her suddenly, with a faintly
happy sense of diversion from immediate suffering, to the feeling
of being a child again visiting strange countries. Then wheeled and
tumbled themselves about and came to meet her the little hills' big
brothers, the mountains, with velvety sides, and rocky, rosy summits.
A weight for no reason seemed to melt away from Chloris's chest as
she looked up at them, and thought of living among them now for many
a day--the distinguished, sage, cool, sturdily benevolent ones, so
high above, so far from, the world she knew, down on the hot-colored,
populous plain.

Here she was at last, where she must alight; in a high, pure,
crystal-clear atmosphere, at a little lost place, wildly green to eyes
used to the sun-burned shore, forgotten of all the world but this train
that remembered it for a second twice a day.

And here was Fidele! It seemed to Chloris she had not half known, until
this moment, how fond she was of Fidele. Tears sprang to her eyes on
meeting the familiar eyes, and she embraced her old school friend with
an impulse of overflowing gratitude. She felt like a storm-beaten lamb
come to some sort of shelter at last.

After the first moment's frantic clutch the two friends stood apart,
holding hands, and looking each other fondly and frankly over, with
wide, moved smiles. Fidele, seeing Chloris's eyes, wondered why tears
had not come to her, too; and compared her own nature unfavorably
with her friend's rich nature; and at this thought of her friend's
deep, sweet nature, behold! tears were come in her affectionate eyes,
too. Then both girls fell to giggling like schoolgirls, from mere
association of this meeting with other meetings; and in a moment were
talking lightly and inconsecutively, in an involuntary imitation of
old days; and Fidele had taken her friend's arm tightly under her own,
intertwined their fingers, and was dragging her along at a hop-and-skip
pace.

"What a godsend you are to me!" she exclaimed, rapturously. "There
is not a soul in this forsaken place to whom one can talk like a
Christian. Oh, but we are slow! Oh, but we are primitive! Oh, but we
are simple!--"

"What air it is!" Chloris breathed, profoundly. "How sweet! I never
dreamed such green!--My dear, this is Paradise!"

"The air is good enough. The grass is certainly green. But oh, the
people are green too! But now you are here, we will change all this,
dear. What a holiday! You will inspire us. We will rise up, and look
into our closets, and fetch out wherewith to make a good impression
on the stranger. You bring the very air of civilization with you in
your clothes and hair. Where did you get it, Chlo--the general air, you
know? How ravishingly you do your hair! And that little hat! Now, who
in the world but you would have a hat like that? Oh, you rare darling!
Do you know you are greatly improved? You are thinner, but it suits
you. You always were a beauty, you know. Yes, you were! But you have
acquired so much besides--such an interesting air--yes, you have!--so
much expression. No one could see you without--gospel truth, Chlo! But,
yes--I will--I will hold my tongue. Did you bring your music at least,
for there is a piano, such as it is. Thank Heaven! You shall make their
capture with song. They shall grovel. You know, dear, I am not really
so silly as I seem; your arriving has turned my head. I always did
adore you, but it is even better than I remembered."

Chloris that night, alone at last, tried to readjust herself, to get
back through this new experience her self of yesterday. The morning
of her starting from home, but sixteen hours removed, seemed withdrawn
into a much remoter past; a screen of glittering, crumbling, changing
color was arisen between herself and it. She interrogated her breast
curiously for that pain lately grown so familiar, forgotten for the
first time only in these last hours; her breast did not answer by at
once producing it. She goaded it tentatively with a sharp memory or
two; it responded sluggishly--a divinely restful torpor was possessing
it. She knelt by the window, and looked out at the still, strong, black
mountains; instinctively she wafted profound thanks to their rude
majesties. Far, far away in her dream at this moment, in an infinitely
small, sun-warmed, murmuring plain, moved two tiny figures: the great
Damon, who erewhile filled the entire horizon of her life, and the
great Cytherea, who interposed her fair shape between her and the sun,
shutting off the light of life--two tiny black figures, in a far-off,
sunshiny place it fatigued her to think of. Only the mountains were
big and important; and this cool, rough bedchamber was fifteen by
twelve; only Fidele and herself and the people seen for the first time
this evening were life-size and real.

Stretching her tired limbs in the bed, that had nothing to-night in
common with the rack, feeling natural sleep creep over her as it had
long not done, she remembered with a vague joy that she was young; she
divined a time ahead--perhaps not so far ahead either--when life would
become possible again.

She felt as if cosily tucked in and kept warm by the sense of Fidele's
affectionate appreciation, and the evident admiration of her friends,
called in even on this first evening to greet her. It was good. It
restored one's lost self-confidence.

The last thought Chloris was conscious of was not for Damon this
once, but Demetrius. (Demetrius, I said. The reader here revolts.
Chloris, Cytherea, a Chloe apparently still to come, and Fidele, Damon,
Demetrius! Are these names to pass off on the discriminating reader in
a tale that has nothing to do with the times of Theocritus or Addison?
I confess it, I would have deceived. The persons in this story knew
themselves by none of the names I have set down. They had been given
at the font, and had by chance and inheritance come into, names that
represented them far less well. Who can assume to fitly name a babe in
arms? With a pure purpose I rechristened them. If you could know what,
for instance, was the real name of Cytherea--But enough.)

On the next morning arises Chloris, constating with thankfulness that
no more than the night before is her heart bleeding at every pore.
Filled with a venerable feminine desire to still increase the favorable
impression she is sure she has made on the inhabitants of this high
hamlet, she does her hair more than ever engagingly, puts on her
crispest white gown with the lavender ribbons, and her broad straw hat
with roses--the hat Damon had praised in the early part of the season.
Something stirs in her sleeping bosom at the remembrance; she pauses
in her task of pinning it on; the green-gray eyes with the brown spots
grow fixed upon a vision, small as if seen through the wrong end of
the opera-glass: On a shining shore, two little figures setting out
in a sail-boat--only two, for the cousin has pleaded the disagreeable
effect on her of the motion of the sea. Chloris sits down discouraged,
feeling the blood drop from her face, and her heart present her with
as finished a pain as ever. "It really matters so very little," she
murmurs, firmly restraining from wringing her hands; "I only--only
should like to know how long this kind of thing may be supposed to
last!"

Chloris and Fidele loiter about the garden full of morning sunshine,
snipping off wet sweet-peas and roses, and reminding each other of
things. Then, to please Chloris, they go for a stroll. Chloris is eager
for a little climb. Heated and pleasantly tired, they come to the top
of an eminence and sit down under the only clump of trees, in company
of the unbudging horned cows, who know their claim is good, for they
got there first. Fidele, leaning against a tree-trunk, fans herself
more and more fitfully with her hat, and presently slumbers. Chloris,
with her head in Fidele's lap, can never weary of looking off over the
faint-hued valley which the shadows of clouds softly overstray. In this
delicious bodily relaxation after hill-climbing in the sun, strange
peace inundates her soul, and she entertains a superstition that it is
flowing out to her from the mountains, and lies luxuriously, letting
herself be done good to. "They know the secret of peace," she muses
in her manner of a girl. "They cannot speak, but the effect of their
knowledge radiates from them, and reaches us. The end of all--of all is
peace. All works towards it incessantly, as one sees nature do towards
harmony. Through these battles, to peace. Why can one not remember it
down on the plain?" Now a cloud obscures the sun that gropes through
it with long golden fingers; Chloris, dreaming, ponders half wistfully
what it would be to remain here always, begin life anew, never return
where one had suffered so much, and was surely so little missed!

On their way home the girls meet Demetrius in his chaise, on his
rounds. He reins in, and leans out of the leathern hood; with arms
alink the girls stand in the white road below, in a great bath of
light. They converse a moment; Chloris's lifted face, with the stamp on
it still of her high thinking on the hill-top, is like a flushed pearl
under her rose-laden hat.

"You must let me show you the country," says Demetrius, before driving
on.

When he is gone, Chloris and Fidele naturally fall to talking of him.

"How is it," says Chloris, "that a man so superior has attained his age
and is merely a doctor in a place like this?"

"My dear, we have our ailments like the rest. You don't grudge us a
good doctor? He was born here, and after a good number of years down
in the haunts of men came back in a natural sort of way. His father
left him property up here. He is not ambitious; he has an abundance of
money. He practises more or less for the love of it, and something to
do. He is our most presentable man, and I want you to appreciate our
good points in him. He adores music; the piano I spoke of is his. He
has invited us up there; as soon as you feel inclined we will go."

When, in a few days, Chloris consented to go, one-half the curious
population went with her, to hear her play.

The stiff farm-house parlor, closed nine-tenths of the year, had
been made to breathe out its musty ice-house atmosphere; lighted and
garnished and filled with guests, it scarcely recognized itself.

Demetrius leaned on the instrument while Chloris played, his untrimmed
head dreamily drooping, his eyes half closed, like a lazy cat's in
the sunshine, when a hand is stroking it the right way. When she had
finished, and all lifted their hands and praised and questioned her,
he turned away with a sigh, saying nothing; and yet both knew that the
truest music-lover of all was he; and when she played again it was
chiefly with the thought of him as an audience.

"What an air of intelligence your hands have when you play," he said,
later. "But it is the same when you are crocheting, or just drumming on
the chair-arm. They look as if they could talk, and utter such wise and
witty things."

A very friendly understanding was almost at once established between
them; after which, he being such a sensible, direct, humorous man, well
on towards middle age, and Fidele urging it, it seemed but proper to
accept the offered seat in his chaise and see the country to the best
advantage.

They travelled many leagues behind his mare; they reached many points
of vantage from which to look off at the view. Their conversation was
half laughter; yet Chloris felt a serene security in the awe she knew
she inspired.

In the country doctor's company, such was his effect on her and hers
on him, Chloris felt always sweetly young, and unusually well-dressed,
unusually beautiful and brilliant--as well as experienced in the ways
of the world, and possessed of a strong and complicated character.
With all this, something of an impostor.

After many rides, many conversations, the light about Demetrius was
insensibly changed, and offered him under a different aspect. What
genuine kindliness in his rather heavy yet well-featured face! what a
good, sane, comprehensive intelligence under his shaggy hair! and under
his country-made waistcoat a heart suspected to be tender and faithful!
If he had done little, risen little, circumstances were more to blame
than will; and it pierced through his mockery of himself sometimes that
he was not all satisfied now with his condition; ambition that had
slumbered gave signs of waking. And he was still young enough to mould
his fate to a different shape.

Chloris, regarding him, as she told herself, merely in the light of a
specimen in which to study human nature, concluded that the woman who
intrusted her happiness to Demetrius, at least in the event of her
being a superior creature, would be in the main a very fortunate one.
Nothing to fear in this man from inconstancy; no account to make with
the inflammable imagination of youth; the gracious, condescending woman
would get unbounded gratitude from his humility for every little favor
shown. Her life would be so peaceful, so guarded from all trouble that
care can keep at bay, so surrounded with delicate consideration.

So the herds-grass purpled and was mown; the mustard yellowed, and its
yellow vanished; and the apple began to redden. Then Demetrius, with a
little help from everybody, gave a party--a party the like of which had
not been given in the sleepy place since his sister's marriage a dozen
years before; but this Chloris from afar, as Fidele had foretold, was
inspiring the natives.

And undoubtedly she was the queen of the party. To see her was to know
as much. She wore a grand gown of pale purplish silk, with a real lace
bertha (the talk of the place for nine days after), and white flowers
pricked into the shiny structure of her hair.

There was hired music, and dancing on the waxed kitchen-floor, and an
opportunity never surpassed in the annals of the neighborhood to get
enough of good things to eat.

Towards the end, when one-half the simple revellers were gone, and the
musicians were silenced with feeding, and the night air breathed in at
the open windows with a feel of great lateness in it, came a petition
to Chloris to play a piece on the piano.

After various laughing negatives, yielding, Chloris, whose eyes
were lightsome and dancing to-night, pushed away the stool, and,
substituting for it a chair, sat a little sideways in this, with one
arm over the back; and, a curious little smile playing on her lips,
propped her ruffled head with its wilted flowers on her right hand;
and, while the country innocents exchanged wondering glances, with her
nimble left hand, amply sufficient to the task alone, began playing a
waltz--a sweet, dreamy waltz.

When they were at last home, and Fidele, half undressed, had come in
to chat a moment with her friend, she asked, "Did you enjoy yourself,
dearie?"

"Immensely!" said Chloris. "How nice they all are to me! What dear,
kind things they are! By the way, though, there was something I wanted
to ask. Who is that dark-haired, plump young woman, with black bugle
eyes, and a skin like red-and-white paper--quite passable-looking, if
she did not look so sulky?"

"What did she wear?"

"Something pretentious but unbecoming. It had a lot of bead-trimming.
Now, speaking of how nice every one and everything was, I except that
girl's manner. _She_ was positively rude. I did not know how to take
it. I have met her before, with all the others, and passed her on the
road, bowing my best; but we have never more than exchanged a word or
two, so I can have done nothing to offend her."

Fidele was laughing.

"Who is she?" asked Chloris.

"That is Chloe," replied Fidele.

"Chloe?"

"You mustn't mind her rudeness, dearie. She is really a good sort of
creature. But she is no doubt sorely tried."

"What tries her? Why do you laugh?"

"Demetrius! He was a shade partial to her before you came--not enough
to cause comment in any place but this. And, even here, not enough to
lay himself open to blame. It is a pity, though, that she can't keep
her feelings hidden, and must vent her spite on you. Silly thing! I
have no patience with that kind of girl."

Chloris's fingers became absent among the hair they were braiding. She
looked into the lamp-flame with a vacant expression.

Fidele plied the brush in her tangled locks, and went on chatting.

Suddenly Chloris, who for some time had not spoken, laughed.

"What is it, dear?" asked Fidele, looking up at her friend, where she
stood still staring in the lamp-flame. "Have I said anything funny?"

"No, it was nothing you said. I was thinking--my mind travelled from
one thing to another--you know how it jumps about--and I had to laugh,
before I knew, at a stupid old circumstance--"

"What circumstance?"

"Oh, nothing, dear--a thing we learned in school, in French, a
fable--never mind!"

"A fable! My dear Chloris, how interesting! What fable?"

"I can't quote it. I have forgotten my French. It was about a hare--a
hare who ran away in terror of a bull, and in his flight came to a
swamp where the frogs were just as much afraid of him. Wouldn't it be
interesting to know the rest? What the hare did, whether he put on his
fiercest outside, and tried to make the frogs quake in their little wet
boots?"

"What nonsense, you dear idiot! Ask Demetrius! He will give his
best consideration to the frog question, and be impressed with its
profoundness, while Chloe wears bead trimming and grows sage-color.
Good-night, dear. I am dreadfully sleepy."

"I mean you shall take me to call on Chloe some day soon. Now that I
see her face with a different idea of her, it is a nice face! Poor
child! I could never settle down contentedly under the notion that
some one disliked me; could you? Even a dog! I have had such a happy,
peaceful time here, in this dear little place, I want every one to feel
kindly towards me when I leave."

"You speak as if I were going to let you go, Chloris."

"Oh, my dearest, I don't want to talk of it. I have put off talking of
it, day after day, yet you must know that I can only stay a very little
longer. Think of it! I came for a month, and I have stayed--how long is
it? And father must be getting lonesome; and he so seldom writes, and
then tells me little or nothing. And everything must be needing me--"

"You extraordinary girl!" exclaimed Fidele, now very wide awake; "I
swear I absolutely do not understand you! What do you mean? First you
seem--you seem--and then--and then suddenly--"

Fidele could not get out her words, for Chloris's hand was across her
lips.

"Hush!" she pleaded, quite earnestly. "Say nothing about it! When a
thing has been spoken it seems to exist! You don't understand--I don't
understand either. Who is consistent? Who knows what he wants? Who
knows ever what he is doing? How many creatures we crush just walking
across the grass! A path opens ahead, we take it blindly, not knowing
whither it leads. With good reason we say we grope in the dark. Let us
have the grace, then, when a moment's illumination is granted us, to
go by its light. You don't know what I mean; I scarcely know myself.
But don't try to keep me, dear! Remain at my side every minute that
is left of my stay here; see me to the train without the shadow of an
adventure--and I will love you all my life!"

And a few days later the train that had brought Chloris picked her
up again, all flushed with Fidele's last kisses, and flew with her
homeward.

She looked out of the window with other eyes than those she had first
turned upon the mountains. Yet tears were in them, too, as she said,
"Good-bye, dears! Your little sister leaves you, made quite well again.
But never will she cease to love you. You shall be always in her
dreams. And she will come back one day. When God sends her sorrows she
will take refuge again with you."

All through the first hours of being rushed along across the brilliant
fading land, that she looked at, scarcely seeing, she retained a sense
of exaltation. She seemed to herself as a sword after the proofs
of furnace and ice-brook. She could have laughed to think of the
philosopher that was going home in place of the pallid victim of an
almost pathological sensibility.

The mountains were dwindling to little hills; the latter-year sun was
too barely bright: a crude earth-color and a sombre green took place
of the angelic vague green and blue and pink of the dewier, earlier
period. The plain was opening with its more trivial detail. Chloris's
mind descended to its level, and projected itself with a limited
emotion into the circumstances of the approaching home-coming. She felt
prepared to endure whatever awaited her with grace and dignity; she
felt sure, indeed, that she should feel very little. "I have learned
the secret of life," she said to herself; "I have weighed and measured
everything."

At this same moment an elderly gentleman who had a daughter was
thinking how touchingly young and inexperienced his fellow-traveller
looked; in his old heart he felt sorry for her, somehow, for being so
young.

"I have weighed and measured everything," she said. "God is real, God
lasts, and the love of Him. Human passion passes away. One might almost
say that it does not exist. It is like a physical pain: it tortures,
you try to locate it, you fix your mind upon the presumed seat of
it--it is not there, there is no pain; and presently, when you are
well, you cannot call up a remembrance of the sensation. I feel fitted
to write a book on this subject. I thought I could never endure my life
without Damon--dear, dear Damon! Yet I live and am improved in health.
And, blinded by I shall never be able to explain what mist, I was
beginning to adapt my mind to the thought of life with Demetrius, whom
I pictured out of all proportion happy and grateful to me. Why more
grateful than another? Thank God I was delivered from committing such
a blunder! Ah, if I could teach Chloe all that I have learned! But she
does not need it; she gets what she wants, for beyond a doubt Demetrius
in time goes back to her. I--I am armed now at every point. I have a
defence against every circumstance. The secret is: Nothing matters, but
God above. And, knowing this, I mean to be very sweet to all at home,
more thoughtful of every one, more generous of all myself--"

She was running between familiar orchards and fields; the image of
reaching home became very present, and a sweetness pervaded her rising
excitement at the thought of touching so soon the home-hands. The
mountains were thrown back to the horizon of her mind. Between the
sandy hummocks, beyond the level salt meadows which she had left green
and found russet, she caught glimpses of a great sapphire line. She
began looking eagerly for the farm-house that meant she was within
a minute of her journey's end. It flashed past. She gathered up her
things; she came out on the platform, and with a joyous heart looked
for her father's gray face and his hand extended to help her down.

He was not there, and she got off the train alone, half-conscious of a
dog-cart not far, with a horse behaving as a horse should not at the
locomotive. The superbly indifferent iron monster puffed off, dragging
after it its train; the indignant horse quieted down. She heard her
name called; the voice was the man's in the dog-cart, it was Damon's.
The philosopher hurried towards him with an insanely beating heart, an
uplifted, greeting, beaming face.

He helped her in, and his trickle of answers met her stream of
questions, and her stream of answers his trickle of questions, as they
jogged, tilting along between the dusty roadsides. The warm flood of
her home-coming sensations subsided a little, and she turned to look at
him, to take a fond inventory of his face--dear old faithful friend, so
kind to fetch her himself! Her heart tightened. What was gone wrong
with Damon?--Damon, whom she had been picturing so happy, and was just
rousing her spirit to question casually concerning Cytherea. Even at
that moment they were approaching her dwelling, when the question,
if she could make her voice right, not too indifferent, nor yet too
interested, would seem so in place.

The grass on the lawn was long and uneven, constellated with twinkling
autumn dandelions; the windows were shuttered, the veranda was empty,
the chimney smokeless; a forgotten hammock rope, blackened and twisted
by the rain, swung from a branch in front of the deserted house,
thumping faintly against the tree-trunk. Chloris turned her lengthened
face towards Damon; he lifted to hers a pair of very miserable eyes,
and said, in an unresonant voice, "You should have got back in time for
the cattle-fair. It was better than usual this year. Cookson's little
mare took a prize."

"You don't mean it!" faltered Chloris, and looking straight ahead set
her lips hard, to keep down an impetuous flood of hatred for Cytherea.

She saw the propriety of continuing to talk; but she could not keep her
mind on it. Damon's powers of conversation, too, had failed him. He
kept a stolid face to the horse's head; and they drove in silence to
her door, where, alighting, she was swallowed in a sea of affectionate
fatherly and auntly embraces.

"I may stay to tea, mayn't I?" asked Damon, dully, from his corner,
where he seemed sitting in the cold.

Chloris gave him a place beside herself, and treated him like a sick,
beloved child; but so tactfully, he could know only that it soothed.

She let him lie on the sofa, afterwards, while she played, and the
others slept in the upper chambers.

She played with upturned face, pale and gentle and full of
understanding; her eyebrows lifted, her eyes very large and kind. She
would have thought that Damon slept, but that now and again he sighed.

When at last she stopped to look for something among her music, to go
on with, he got up and came to the piano-side. "I am so glad you have
got back," he said, from all his heart; "you are such a brick. Good
Lord, how I have missed you--"

He turned away and went aimlessly to the window, and stood looking out.
"I suppose it is time I went," he said. "But I hate to go home! I don't
know what is come to me, I can't sleep these nights."

Chloris had gone to the window, too, and stood beside him, her
indulgent young face, that wore a world-old expression, turned on the
dimly glimmering white petunia-beds outside.

"Would you--won't you come out for a little stroll, Chloris? Run for
your shawl, there is a dear girl, and let us go over to the beach. It
isn't really late, and I am so restless, and I don't want to go alone,
and it is so stuffy in my room at home."

Chloris, without a word of demur, took her wrap and followed him. They
walked side by side in silence; the sense they must have in common
of the beauty of the night might at first take lieu of conversation;
when that sense must be outworn, they still thought their thoughts in
silence. Chloris knew the relief it is not to pretend; Damon thought
only of himself in this hour.

It was she, after a while, that led--tall, slender figure a step ahead
of him, walking swiftly, with a sort of intrepidity. With his head a
little bowed, his hands behind him, he followed.

She led him to the beach, and without regard for time or fitness of
things, farther and farther along the smooth sands, away from home;
then, by a long loop, back to the homeward road, as if with the
determination to tire him out. She herself was conscious of no fatigue.
She felt like a spirit; her uplifted eyes seemed so expanded that they
could take in all the radiant firmament.

At last, as if awaking, he stopped and vaguely looked about, saying, "I
am ready to drop! Good Lord, how far have you been taking me? Let us
sit down a moment and rest."

They were not far from home, on the edge of a familiar pine-grove that
ran down to the lapping inland sea. She sank on the dry pine-needles;
he dropped beside her, and, tearing off his cap, unquestioningly laid
his head in her lap.

"Does it ache?" she asked, softly.

"Yes," he murmured. "Rub it."

She passed her hand with a measured motion across his forehead, pushing
up the heavy hair. She felt his face for an instant press closer to her
knees; volumes of gratitude seemed expressed in the impulsive movement.
She continued her stroking with a quiet, sisterly hand, her swelling
heart suddenly choking her. She had him back, that she knew beyond a
doubt. Broken, disillusioned, his heart seared by the image of another,
he was hers, as he lay there thinking of that other. Hers to help, to
heal, to make love her as much as she loved him. And a flood of human
passion, the sensation she had decided--God forgive her!--disposed of
forever, surged in her. Her eyes brimmed over with happy tears. Why
should there be any feeling of bitterness mixed in a feeling so sweet?
Why should the hurt to one's vanity be remembered in such a situation?
Why not be finally glad to give more than one received, offer something
whole for something broken, bless beyond all desert? No--no--that other
could never have loved him so! Fate had meant well by him in putting
her out of reach; this sorrow of his should pass away and be as if it
had never been. Chloris felt in herself such inexhaustible wells of
tenderness and patience, she knew hers was the good title; she knew she
could be sufficient--make Damon forget. Her heart sang a song of praise
and victory, while her hand smoothed his forehead with the fancy that
it brushed away the image of Cytherea, fatal line by line.

Ineffable fatigue drew her down from high serene thoughts to thoughts
nearer earth. She ached; waves of unnatural sensation swept through
her, but she would not move. The weight of his dear head was better
than ease.

While she took patience till he should be ready to rise and go sensibly
home to bed, a whimsical image formed in her brain: Herself, and
to one side of her, a little higher, Cytherea, and to the other, a
little lower, Chloe--and beyond Chloe, in the descending line, some
poor woman, not pretty or winning at all, to whom Chloe must appear
a half-divinity; and above Cytherea, in the ascending line, another
fairer than she, for, when all was said, there must be in this world
women even fairer than the great Cytherea, of whom she, perchance,
lying awake in her queenly bed, would think with anguish, confessing
herself helpless to struggle. Poor Cytherea, then, in her turn! Chloris
framed a sincere wish for her continued happiness, and that in the
event of despised love God should grant her to become a philosopher.
And her imagination went on feebly, whimsically, weaving. Still another
fairer still creature above Cytherea's victress--still another at the
other end, to whom the envier of Chloe should be an object of envy--and
so on, till the chain seemed to extend from the seraphs down to the
last of the most degraded race, and take a slightly humorous aspect.
"It pleases the powers to be merry," thought Chloris, and was conscious
of no irreverence in the conceit.

"Wake up, Chloris!" came Damon's voice, sounding more as it had used to
sound, before he was so grown-up, and had untoward things happen to him
in his sentiments.

"I have not been asleep!" she said, sheepishly, "except below my knees."

"I won't contradict you, but when I struck a light you were nodding and
smiling away to yourself like a little China mandarin. Have you any
idea of the time it is? Well, I won't enlighten you. What a crazy thing
we have been doing! Come, dear, let me help you up. I hope to Heaven
you haven't taken cold. Hello, can't you walk straight? What a brute I
am! Take my arm--"

And laughing weakly and wearily, they set out staggering across the dim
stubble-field that separated them from home.

"Dear old Chloris!" Damon murmured, pressing her arm to his side.
"Best girl in the universe! You can never think what a comfort it is to
have you home again. I feel more like myself. I think that to-night I
shall sleep."


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                                THE END
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