← catalogue

The Shoulders of Atlas: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman · English · Gutenberg #17566 · 443,697 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Shoulders of Atlas: A Novel
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Shoulders of Atlas: A Novel

Author: Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman


        
Release date: January 21, 2006 [eBook #17566]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17566

Credits: Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHOULDERS OF ATLAS: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly






The Shoulders of Atlas

A Novel

By
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Author of
"By the Light of the Soul" "The Debtor"
"Jerome" "A New England Nun" etc.

New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
MCMVIII

Copyright, 1908, by the New York Herald Co.
All rights reserved.
Published June, 1908.



Chapter I


Henry Whitman was walking home from the shop in the April afternoon.
The spring was very early that year. The meadows were quite green,
and in the damp hollows the green assumed a violet tinge--sometimes
from violets themselves, sometimes from the shadows. The trees
already showed shadows as of a multitude of bird wings; the
peach-trees stood aloof in rosy nimbuses, and the cherry-trees were
faintly a-flutter with white through an intense gloss of gold-green.

Henry realized all the glory of it, but it filled him with a renewal
of the sad and bitter resentment, which was his usual mood, instead
of joy. He was past middle-age. He worked in a shoe-shop. He had
worked in a shoe-shop since he was a young man. There was nothing
else in store for him until he was turned out because of old age.
Then the future looked like a lurid sunset of misery. He earned
reasonably good wages for a man of his years, but prices were so high
that he was not able to save a cent. There had been unusual expenses
during the past ten years, too. His wife Sylvia had not been well,
and once he himself had been laid up six weeks with rheumatism. The
doctor charged two dollars for every visit, and the bill was not
quite settled yet.

Then the little house which had come to him from his father,
encumbered with a mortgage as is usual, had all at once seemed to
need repairs at every point. The roof had leaked like a sieve, two
windows had been blown in, the paint had turned a gray-black, the
gutters had been out of order. He had not quite settled the bill for
these repairs. He realized it always as an actual physical incubus
upon his slender, bowed shoulders. He came of a race who were
impatient of debt, and who regarded with proud disdain all gratuitous
benefits from their fellow-men. Henry always walked a long route from
the shop in order to avoid passing the houses of the doctor and the
carpenter whom he owed.

Once he had saved a little money; that was twenty-odd years before;
but he had invested it foolishly, and lost every cent. That
transaction he regarded with hatred, both of himself and of the
people who had advised him to risk and lose his hard-earned dollars.
The small sum which he had lost had come to assume colossal
proportions in his mind. He used, in his bitterest moments, to reckon
up on a scrap of paper what it might have amounted to, if it had been
put out at interest, by this time. He always came out a rich man, by
his calculations, if it had not been for that unwise investment. He
often told his wife Sylvia that they might have been rich people if
it had not been for that; that he would not have been tied to a
shoe-shop, nor she have been obliged to work so hard.

Sylvia took a boarder--the high-school principal, Horace Allen--and
she also made jellies and cakes, and baked bread for those in East
Westland who could afford to pay for such instead of doing the work
themselves. She was a delicate woman, and Henry knew that she worked
beyond her strength, and the knowledge filled him with impotent fury.
Since the union had come into play he did not have to work so many
hours in the shop, and he got the same pay, but he worked as hard,
because he himself cultivated his bit of land. He raised vegetables
for the table. He also made the place gay with flowers to please
Sylvia and himself. He had a stunted thirst for beauty.

In the winter he found plenty to do in the extra hours. He sawed wood
in his shed by the light of a lantern hung on a peg. He also did what
odd jobs he could for neighbors. He picked up a little extra money in
that way, but he worked very hard. Sometimes he told Sylvia that he
didn't know but he worked harder than he had done when the shop time
was longer. However, he had been one of the first to go, heart and
soul, with the union, and he had paid his dues ungrudgingly, even
with a fierce satisfaction, as if in some way the transaction made
him even with his millionaire employers. There were two of them, and
they owned houses which appeared like palaces in the eyes of Henry
and his kind. They owned automobiles, and Henry was aware of a
cursing sentiment when one whirred past him, trudging along, and
covered him with dust.

Sometimes it seemed to Henry as if an automobile was the last straw
for the poor man's back: those enormous cars, representing fortunes,
tyrannizing over the whole highway, frightening the poor old country
horses, and endangering the lives of all before them. Henry read with
delight every account of an automobile accident. "Served them right;
served them just right," he would say, with fairly a smack of his
lips.

Sylvia, who had caught a little of his rebellion, but was gentler,
would regard him with horror. "Why, Henry Whitman, that is a dreadful
wicked spirit!" she would say, and he would retort stubbornly that he
didn't care; that he had to pay a road tax for these people who would
just as soon run him down as not, if it wouldn't tip their old
machines over; for these maniacs who had gone speed-mad, and were
appropriating even the highways of the common people.

Henry had missed the high-school principal, who was away on his
spring vacation. He liked to talk with him, because he always had a
feeling that he had the best of the argument. Horace would take the
other side for a while, then leave the field, and light another
cigar, and let Henry have the last word, which, although it had a
bitter taste in his mouth, filled him with the satisfaction of
triumph. He loved Horace like a son, although he realized that the
young man properly belonged to the class which he hated, and that,
too, although he was manifestly poor and obliged to work for his
living. Henry was, in his heart of hearts, convinced that Horace
Allen, had he been rich, would have owned automobiles and spent hours
in the profitless work-play of the golf links. As it was, he played a
little after school-hours. How Henry hated golf! "I wish they had to
work," he would say, savagely, to Horace.

Horace would laugh, and say that he did work. "I know you do," Henry
would say, grudgingly, "and I suppose maybe a little exercise is good
for you; but those fellers from Alford who come over here don't have
to work, and as for Guy Lawson, the boss's son, he's a fool! He
couldn't earn his bread and butter to save his life, except on the
road digging like a common laborer. Playing golf! Playing! H'm!" Then
was the time for Horace's fresh cigar.

When Henry came in sight of the cottage where he lived he thought
with regret that Horace was not there. Being in a more pessimistic
mood than usual, he wished ardently for somebody to whom he could
pour out his heart. Sylvia was no satisfaction at such a time. If she
echoed him for a while, when she was more than usually worn with her
own work, she finally became alarmed, and took refuge in Scripture
quotations, and Henry was convinced that she offered up prayer for
him afterward, and that enraged him.

He struck into the narrow foot-path leading to the side door, the
foot-path which his unwilling and weary feet had helped to trace more
definitely for nearly forty years. The house was a small cottage of
the humblest New England type. It had a little cobbler's-shop, or
what had formerly been a cobbler's-shop, for an ell. Besides that,
there were three rooms on the ground-floor--the kitchen, the
sitting-room, and a little bedroom which Henry and Sylvia occupied.
Sylvia had cooking-stoves in both the old shop and the kitchen. The
kitchen stove was kept well polished, and seldom used for cooking,
except in cold weather. In warm weather the old shop served as
kitchen, and Sylvia, in deference to the high-school teacher, used to
set the table in the house.

When Henry neared the house he smelled cooking in the shop. He also
had a glimpse of a snowy table-cloth in the kitchen. He wondered,
with a throb of joy, if possibly Horace might have returned before
his vacation was over and Sylvia were setting the table in the other
room in his honor. He opened the door which led directly into the
shop. Sylvia, a pathetic, slim, elderly figure in rusty black, was
bending over the stove, frying flapjacks. "Has he come home?"
whispered Henry.

"No, it's Mr. Meeks. I asked him to stay to supper. I told him I
would make some flapjacks, and he acted tickled to death. He doesn't
get a decent thing to eat once in a dog's age. Hurry and get washed.
The flapjacks are about done, and I don't want them to get cold."

Henry's face, which had fallen a little when he learned that Horace
had not returned, still looked brighter than before. While Sidney
Meeks never let him have the last word, yet he was much better than
Sylvia as a safety-valve for pessimism. Meeks was as pessimistic in
his way as Henry, although he handled his pessimism, as he did
everything else, with diplomacy, and the other man had a secret
conviction that when he seemed to be on the opposite side yet he was
in reality pulling with the lawyer.

Sidney Meeks was older than Henry, and as unsuccessful as a country
lawyer can well be. He lived by himself; he had never married; and
the world, although he smiled at it facetiously, was not a pleasant
place in his eyes.

Henry, after he had washed himself at the sink in the shop, entered
the kitchen, where the table was set, and passed through to the
sitting-room, where the lawyer was. Sidney Meeks did not rise. He
extended one large, white hand affably. "How are you Henry?" said he,
giving the other man's lean, brown fingers a hard shake. "I dropped
in here on my way home from the post-office, and your wife tempted me
with flapjacks in a lordly dish, and I am about to eat."

"Glad to see you," returned Henry.

"You get home early, or it seems early, now the days are getting so
long," said Meeks, as Henry sat down opposite.

"Yes, it's early enough, but I don't get any more pay."

Meeks laughed. "Henry, you are the direct outcome of your day and
generation," said he. "Less time, and more pay for less time, is our
slogan."

"Well, why not?" returned Henry, surlily, still with a dawn of
delighted opposition in his thin, intelligent face. "Why not? Look at
the money that's spent all around us on other things that correspond.
What's an automobile but less time and more money, eh?"

Meeks laughed. "Give it up until after supper, Henry," he said, as
Sylvia's thin, sweet voice was heard from the next room.

"If you men don't stop talking and come right out, these flapjacks
will be spoiled!" she cried. The men arose and obeyed her call.
"There are compensations for everything," said Meeks, laughing, as he
settled down heavily into his chair. He was a large man. "Flapjacks
are compensations. Let us eat our compensations and be thankful.
That's my way of saying grace. You ought always to say grace, Henry,
when you have such a good cook as your wife is to get meals for you.
If you had to shift for yourself, the way I do, you'd feel that it
was a simple act of decency."

"I don't see much to say grace for," said Henry, with a disagreeable
sneer.

"Oh, Henry!" said Sylvia.

"For compensations in the form of flapjacks, with plenty of butter
and sugar and nutmeg," said Meeks. "These are fine, Mrs. Whitman."

"A good thick beefsteak at twenty-eight cents a pound, regulated by
the beef trust, would be more to my liking after a hard day's work,"
said Henry.

Sylvia exclaimed again, but she was not in reality disturbed. She was
quite well aware that her husband was enjoying himself after his own
peculiar fashion, and that, if he spoke the truth, the flapjacks were
more to his New England taste for supper than thick beefsteak.

"Well, wait until after supper, and maybe you will change your mind
about having something to say grace for," Meeks said, mysteriously.

The husband and wife stared at him. "What do you mean, Mr. Meeks?"
asked Sylvia, a little nervously. Something in the lawyer's manner
agitated her. She was not accustomed to mysteries. Life had not held
many for her, especially of late years.

Henry took another mouthful of flapjacks. "Well, if you can give me
any good reason for saying grace you will do more than the parson
ever has," he said.

"Oh, Henry!" said Sylvia.

"It's the truth," said Henry. "I've gone to meeting and heard how
thankful I ought to be for things I haven't got, and things I have
got that other folks haven't, and for forgiveness for breaking
commandments, when, so far as I can tell, commandments are about the
only things I've been able to keep without taxes--till I'm tired of
it."

"Wait till after supper," repeated the lawyer again, with smiling
mystery. He had a large, smooth face, with gray hair on the sides of
his head and none on top. He had good, placid features, and an easy
expression. He ate two platefuls of the flapjacks, then two pieces of
cake, and a large slice of custard pie! He was very fond of sweets.

After supper was over Henry and Meeks returned to the sitting-room,
and sat down beside the two front windows. It was a small, square
room furnished with Sylvia's chief household treasures. There was a
hair-cloth sofa, which she and Henry had always regarded as an
extravagance and had always viewed with awe. There were two rockers,
besides one easy-chair, covered with old-gold plush--also an
extravagance. There was a really beautiful old mahogany table with
carved base, of which neither Henry nor Sylvia thought much. Sylvia
meditated selling enough Calkin's soap to buy a new one, and stow
that away in Mr. Allen's room. Mr. Allen professed great admiration
for it, to her wonderment. There was also a fine, old, gold-framed
mirror, and some china vases on the mantel-shelf. Sylvia was rather
ashamed of them. Mrs. Jim Jones had a mirror which she had earned by
selling Calkin's soap, which Sylvia considered much handsomer. She
would have had ambitions in that direction also, but Henry was firm
in his resolve not to have the mirror displaced, nor the vases,
although Sylvia descanted upon the superior merits of some vases with
gilded pedestals which Mrs. Sam Elliot had in her parlor.

Meeks regarded the superb old table with appreciation as he sat in
the sitting-room after supper. "Fine old piece," he said.

Henry looked at it doubtfully. It had been in a woodshed of his
grandfather's house, when he was a boy, and he was not as confident
about that as he was about the mirror and vases, which had always
maintained their parlor estate.

"Sylvia don't think much of it," he said. "She's crazy to have one of
carved oak like one Mrs. Jim Jones has."

"Carved oak fiddlestick!" said Sidney Meeks. "It's a queer thing that
so much virtue and real fineness of character can exist in a woman
without the slightest trace of taste for art."

Henry looked resentful. "Sylvia has taste, as much taste as most
women," he said. "She simply doesn't like to see the same old things
around all the time, and I don't know as I blame her. The world has
grown since that table was made, there's no doubt about that. It
stands to reason furniture has improved, too."

"Glad there's something you see in a bright light, Henry."

"I must say that I like this new mission furniture, myself, pretty
well," said Henry, somewhat importantly.

"That's as old as the everlasting hills; but the old that's new is
the newest thing in all creation," said Meeks. "Sylvia is a foolish
woman if she parts with this magnificent old piece for any
reproduction made in job lots."

"Oh, she isn't going to part with it. Mr. Allen will like it in his
room. He thinks as much of it as you do."

"He's right, too," said Meeks. "There's carving for you; there's a
fine grain of wood."

"It's very hard to keep clean," said Sylvia, as she came in rubbing
her moist hands. "Now, that new Flemish oak is nothing at all to take
care of, Mrs. Jones says."

"This is worth taking care of," said Meeks. "Now, Sylvia, sit down. I
have something to tell you and Henry."

Sylvia sat down. Something in the lawyer's manner aroused hers and
her husband's keenest attention. They looked at him and waited. Both
were slightly pale. Sylvia was a delicate little woman, and Henry was
large-framed and tall, but a similar experience had worn similar
lines in both faces. They looked singularly alike.

Sidney Meeks had the dramatic instinct. He waited for the silence to
gather to its utmost intensity before he spoke. "I had something to
tell you when I came in," he said, "but I thought I had better wait
till after supper."

He paused. There was another silence. Henry's and Sylvia's eyes
seemed to wax luminous.

Sidney Meeks spoke again. He was enjoying himself immensely. "What
relation is Abrahama White to you?" he said.

"She is second cousin to Sylvia. Her mother was Sylvia's mother's
cousin," said Henry. "What of it?"

"Nothing, except--" Meeks waited again. He wished to make a coup. He
had an instinct for climaxes. "Abrahama had a shock this morning," he
said, suddenly.

"A shock?" said Henry.

Sylvia echoed him. "A shock!" she gasped.

"Yes, I thought you hadn't heard of it."

"I've been in the house all day," said Sylvia. "I hadn't seen a soul
before you came in." She rose. "Who's taking care of her?" she asked.
"She ain't all alone?"

"Sit down," said Sidney. "She's well cared for. Miss Babcock is
there. She happened to be out of a place, and Dr. Wallace got her
right away."

"Is she going to get over it?" asked Sylvia, anxiously. "I must go
over there, anyway, this evening. I always thought a good deal of
Abrahama."

"You might as well go over there," said the lawyer. "It isn't quite
the thing for me to tell you, but I'm going to. If Henry here can eat
flapjacks like those you make, Sylvia, and not say grace, his state
of mind is dangerous. I am going to tell you. Dr. Wallace says
Abrahama can't live more than a day or two, and--she has made a will
and left you all her property."



Chapter II


There was another silence. The husband and wife were pale, with
mouths agape like fishes. So little prosperity had come into their
lives that they were rendered almost idiotic by its approach.

"Us?" said Sylvia, at length, with a gasp.

"Us?" said Henry.

"Yes, you," said Sidney Meeks.

"What about Rose Fletcher, Abrahama's sister Susy's daughter?" asked
Sylvia, presently. "She is her own niece."

"You know Abrahama never had anything to do with Susy after she
married John Fletcher," replied the lawyer. "She made her will soon
afterward, and cut her off."

"I remember what they said at the time," returned Sylvia. "They all
thought John Fletcher was going to marry Abrahama instead of Susy.
She was enough sight more suitable age for him. He was too old for
Susy, and Abrahama, even if she wasn't young, was a beautiful woman,
and smarter than Susy ever thought of being."

"Susy had the kind of smartness that catches men," said the lawyer,
with a slight laugh.

"I always wondered if John Fletcher hadn't really done a good deal to
make Abrahama think he did want her," said Sylvia. "He was just that
kind of man. I never did think much of him. He was handsome and glib,
but he was all surface. I guess poor Abrahama had some reason to cut
off Susy. I guess there was some double-dealing. I thought so at the
time, and now this will makes me think so even more."

Again there was a silence, and again that expression of bewilderment,
almost amounting to idiocy, reigned in the faces of the husband and
wife.

"I never thought old Abraham White should have made the will he did,"
said Henry, articulating with difficulty. "Susy had just as much
right to the property, and there she was cut off with five hundred
dollars, to be paid when she came of age."

"I guess she spent that five hundred on her wedding fix," said Sylvia.

"It was a queer will," stammered Henry.

"I think the old man always looked at Abrahama as his son and heir,"
said the lawyer. "She was named for him, and his father before him,
you know. I always thought the poor old girl deserved the lion's
share for being saddled with such a name, anyhow."

"It was a dreadful name, and she was such a beautiful girl and
woman," said Sylvia. She already spoke of Abrahama in the past tense.
"I wonder where the niece is," she added.

"The last I heard of her she was living with some rich people in New
York," replied Meeks. "I think they took her in some capacity after
her father and mother died."

"I hope she didn't go out to work as hired girl," said Sylvia. "It
would have been awful for a granddaughter of Abraham White's to do
that. I wonder if Abrahama never wrote to her, nor did anything for
her."

"I don't think she ever had the slightest communication with Susy
after she married, or her husband, or the daughter," replied Meeks.
"In fact, I practically know she did not."

"If the poor girl didn't do well, Abrahama had a good deal to answer
for," said Sylvia, thoughtfully. She looked worried. Then again that
expression of almost idiotic joy overspread her face. "That old White
homestead is beautiful--the best house in town," she said.

"There's fifty acres of land with it, too," said Meeks.

Sylvia and Henry looked at each other. Both hesitated. Then Henry
spoke, stammeringly:

"I--never knew--just how much of an income Abrahama had," he said.

"Well," replied the lawyer, "I must say not much--not as much as I
wish, for your sakes. You see, old Abraham had a lot of that railroad
stock that went to smash ten years ago, and Abrahama lost a good
deal. She was a smart woman; she could work and save; but she didn't
know any more about business than other women. There's an income of
about--well, about six hundred dollars and some odd cents after the
taxes and insurance are paid. And she has enough extra in the Alford
Bank to pay for her last expenses without touching the principal. And
the house is in good repair. She has kept it up well. There won't be
any need to spend a cent on repairs for some years."

"Six hundred a year after the taxes and insurance are paid!" said
Sylvia. She gaped horribly. Her expression of delight was at once
mean and infantile.

"Six hundred a year after the taxes and insurance are paid, and all
that land, and that great house!" repeated Henry, with precisely the
same expression.

"Not much, but enough to keep things going if you're careful," said
Meeks. He spoke deprecatingly, but in reality the sum seemed large to
him also. "You know there's an income besides from that fine
grass-land," said he. "There's more than enough hay for a cow and
horse, if you keep one. You can count on something besides in good
hay-years."

Henry looked reflective. Then his face seemed to expand with an
enormous idea. "I wonder--" he began.

"You wonder what?" asked Sylvia.

"I wonder--if it wouldn't be cheaper in the end to keep
an--automobile and sell all the hay."

Sylvia gasped, and Meeks burst into a roar of laughter.

"I rather guess you don't get me into one of those things, butting
into stone walls, and running over children, and scaring horses, with
you underneath most of the time, either getting blown up with
gasolene or covering your clothes with mud and grease for me to clean
off," said Sylvia.

"I thought automobiles were against your principles," said Meeks,
still chuckling.

"So they be, the way other folks run 'em," said Henry; "but not the
way I'd run 'em."

"We'll have a good, steady horse that won't shy at one, if we have
anything," said Sylvia, and her voice had weight.

"There's a good buggy in Abrahama's barn," said Meeks.

Sylvia made an unexpected start. "I think we are wicked as we can
be!" she declared, violently. "Here we are talking about that poor
woman's things before she's done with them. I'm going right over
there to see if I can't be of some use."

"Sit down, Sylvia," said Henry, soothingly, but he, too, looked both
angry and ashamed.

"You had better keep still where you are to-night," said Meeks. "Miss
Babcock is doing all that anybody can. There isn't much to be done,
Dr. Wallace says. To-morrow you can go over there and sit with her,
and let Miss Babcock take a nap." Meeks rose as he spoke. "I must be
going," he said. "I needn't charge you again not to let anybody know
what I've told you before the will is read. It is irregular, but I
thought I'd cheer up Henry here a bit."

"No, we won't speak of it," declared the husband and wife, almost in
unison.

After Meeks had gone they looked at each other. Both looked
disagreeable to the other. Both felt an unworthy suspicion of the
other.

"I hope she will get well," Sylvia said, defiantly. "Maybe she will.
This is her first shock."

"God knows I hope she will," returned Henry, with equal defiance.

Each of the two was perfectly good and ungrasping, but each accused
themselves and each other unjustly because of the possibilities of
wrong feeling which they realized. Sylvia did not understand how, in
the face of such prosperity, she could wish Abrahama to get well, and
she did not understand how her husband could, and Henry's mental
attitude was the same.

Sylvia sat down and took some mending. Henry seated himself opposite,
and stared at her with gloomy eyes, which yet held latent sparks of
joy. "I wish Meeks hadn't told us," he said, angrily.

"So do I," said Sylvia. "I keep telling myself I don't want that poor
old woman to die, and I keep telling myself that you don't; but I'm
dreadful suspicious of us both. It means so much."

"Just the way I feel," said Henry. "I wish he'd kept his news to
himself. It wasn't legal, anyhow."

"You don't suppose it will make the will not stand!" cried Sylvia,
with involuntary eagerness. Then she quailed before her husband's
stern gaze. "Of course I know it won't make any difference," she
said, feebly, and drew her darning-needle through the sock she was
mending.

Henry took up a copy of the East Westland Gazette. The first thing he
saw was the list of deaths, and he seemed to see, quite plainly,
Abrahama White's among them, although she was still quick, and he
loathed himself. He turned the paper with a rattling jerk to an
account of a crime in New York, and the difficulty the police had
experienced in taking the guilty man in safety to the police station.
He read the account aloud.

"Seems to me the principal thing the New York police protect is the
criminals," he said, bitterly. "If they would turn a little of their
attention to protecting the helpless women and children, seems to me
it would be more to the purpose. They're awful careful of the
criminals."

Sylvia did not hear. She assented absently. She thought, in spite of
herself, of the good-fortune which was to befall them. She imagined
herself mistress of the old White homestead. They would, of course,
rent their own little cottage and go to live in the big house. She
imagined herself looking through the treasures which Abrahama would
leave behind her--then a monstrous loathing of herself seized her.
She resolved that the very next morning she would go over and help
Miss Babcock, that she would put all consideration of material
benefits from her mind. She brought her thoughts with an effort to
the article which Henry had just read. She could recall his last
words.

"Yes, I think you are right," said she. "I think criminals ought not
to be protected. You are right, Henry. I think myself we ought to
have a doctor called from Alford to-morrow, if she is no better, and
have a consultation. Dr. Wallace is good, but he is only one, and
sometimes another doctor has different ideas, and she may get help."

"Yes, I think there ought to be a consultation," said Henry. "I will
see about it to-morrow. I will go over there with you myself
to-morrow morning. I think the police ought not to protect the
criminals, but the people who are injured by them."

"Then there would be no criminals. They would have no chance," said
Sylvia, sagely. "Yes, I agree with you, Henry, there ought to be a
consultation."

She looked at Henry and he at her, and each saw in the other's face
that same ignoble joy, and that same resentment and denial of it.

Neither slept that night. They were up early the next morning. Sylvia
was getting breakfast and Henry was splitting wood out in the yard.
Presently he came stumbling in. "Come out here," he said. Sylvia
followed him to the door. They stepped out in the dewy yard and stood
listening. Beneath their feet was soft, green grass strewn with tiny
spheres which reflected rainbows. Over their heads was a wonderful
sky of the clearest angelic blue. This sky seemed to sing with
bell-notes.

"The bell is tolling," whispered Henry. They counted from that
instant. When the bell stopped they looked at each other.

"That's her age," said Sylvia.

"Yes," said Henry.



Chapter III


The weather was wonderful on Abrahama White's funeral day. The air
had at once the keen zest of winter and the languor of summer. One
moment one perceived warm breaths of softly undulating pines, the
next it was as if the wind blew over snow. The air at once stimulated
and soothed. One breathing it realized youth and an endless vista of
dreams ahead, and also the peace of age, and of work well done and
deserving the reward of rest. There was something in this air which
gave the inhaler the certainty of victory, the courage of battle and
of unassailable youth. Even old people, pausing to notice the
streamer of crape on Abrahama White's door, felt triumphant and
undaunted. It did not seem conceivable, upon such a day, that that
streamer would soon flaunt for them.

The streamer was rusty. It had served for many such occasions, and
suns and rains had damaged it. People said that Martin Barnes, the
undertaker, ought to buy some new crape. Martin was a very old man
himself, but he had no imagination for his own funeral. It seemed to
him grotesque and impossible that an undertaker should ever be in
need of his own ministrations. His solemn wagon stood before the door
of the great colonial house, and he and his son-in-law and his
daughter, who were his assistants, were engaged at their solemn tasks
within.

The daughter, Flora Barnes, was arraying the dead woman in her last
robe of state, while her father and brother-in-law waited in the
south room across the wide hall. When her task was performed she
entered the south room with a gentle pride evident in her thin,
florid face.

"She makes a beautiful corpse," she said, in a hissing whisper.

Henry Whitman and his wife were in the room, with Martin Barnes and
Simeon Capen, his son-in-law. Barnes and Capen rose at once with
pleased interest, Henry and Sylvia more slowly; yet they also had
expressions of pleasure, albeit restrained. Both strove to draw their
faces down, yet that expression of pleasure reigned triumphant,
overcoming the play of the facial muscles. They glanced at each
other, and each saw an angry shame in the other's eyes because of
this joy.

But when they followed Martin Barnes and his assistants into the
parlor, where Abrahama White was laid in state, all the shameful joy
passed from their faces. The old woman in her last bed was majestic.
The dead face was grand, compelling to other than earthly
considerations. Henry and Sylvia forgot the dead woman's little store
which she had left behind her. Sylvia leaned over her and wept;
Henry's face worked. Nobody except himself had ever known it, but he,
although much younger, had had his dreams about the beautiful
Abrahama White. He remembered them as he looked at her, old and dead
and majestic, with something like the light of her lost beauty in her
still face. It was like a rose which has fallen in such a windless
atmosphere that its petals retain the places which they have held
around its heart.

Henry loved his wife, but this before him was associated with
something beyond love, which tended to increase rather than diminish
it. When at last they left the room he did what was very unusual with
him. He was reticent, like the ordinary middle-aged New-Englander. He
took his wife's little, thin, veinous hand and clasped it tenderly.
Her bony fingers clung gratefully to his.

When they were all out in the south room Flora Barnes spoke again. "I
have never seen a more beautiful corpse," said she, in exactly the
same voice which she had used before. She began taking off her large,
white apron. Something peculiar in her motion arrested Sylvia's
attention. She made a wiry spring at her.

"Let me see that apron," said she, in a voice which corresponded with
her action.

Flora recoiled. She turned pale, then she flushed. "What for?"

"Because I want to."

"It's just my apron. I--"

But Sylvia had the apron. Out of its folds dropped a thin roll of
black silk. Flora stood before Sylvia. Beads of sweat showed on her
flat forehead. She twitched like one about to have convulsions. She
was very tall, but Sylvia seemed to fairly loom over her. She held
the black silk out stiffly, like a bayonet.

"What is this?" she demanded, in her tense voice.

Flora twitched.

"What is it? I want to know."

"The back breadth," replied Flora in a small, scared voice, like the
squeak of a mouse.

"Whose back breadth?"

"Her back breadth."

"_Her_ back breadth?"

"Yes."

"Robbing the dead!" said Sylvia, pitilessly. Her tense voice was
terrible.

Flora tried to make a stand. "She hadn't any use for it," she
squeaked, plaintively.

"Robbing the dead! Its bad enough to rob the living."

"She couldn't have worn that dress without any back breadth while she
was living," argued Flora, "but now it don't make any odds. It don't
show."

"What were you going to do with it?"

Flora was scared into a storm of injured confession. "You 'ain't any
call to talk to me so, Mrs. Whitman," she said. "I've worked hard,
and I 'ain't had a decent black silk dress for ten years."

"How can you have a dress made out of a back breadth, I'd like to
know?"

"It's just the same quality that Mrs. Hiram Adams's was, and--" Flora
hesitated.

"Flora Barnes, you don't mean to say that you're robbing the dead of
back breadths till you get enough to make you a whole dress?"

Flora whimpered. "Business has been awful poor lately," she said.
"It's been so healthy here we've hardly been able to earn the salt to
our porridge. Father won't join the trust, either, and lots of times
the undertaker from Alford has got our jobs."

"Business!" cried Sylvia, in horror.

"I can't help it if you do look at it that way," Flora replied, and
now she was almost defiant. "Our business is to get our living out of
folks' dying. There's no use mincing matters. It's our business, just
as working in a shoe-shop is your husband's business. Folks have to
have shoes and walk when they're alive, and be laid out nice and
buried when they're dead. Our business has been poor. Either Dr.
Wallace gives awful strong medicine or East Westland is too healthy.
We haven't earned but precious little lately, and I need a whole
black silk dress and they don't."

Sylvia eyed her in withering scorn. "Need or not," said she, "the one
that owns this back breadth is going to have it. I rather think she
ain't going to be laid away without a back breadth to her dress."

With that Sylvia crossed the room and the hall, and entered the
parlor. She closed the door behind her. When she came out a few
minutes later she was pale but triumphant. "There," said she, "it's
back with her, and I've got just this much to say, and no more, Flora
Barnes. When you get home you gather up all the back breadths you've
got, and you do them up in a bundle, and you put them in that barrel
the Ladies' Sewing Society is going to send to the missionaries next
week, and don't you ever touch a back breadth again, or I'll tell it
right and left, and you'll see how much business you'll have left
here, I don't care how sickly it gets."

"If father would--only have joined the trust I never would have
thought of such a thing, anyway," muttered Flora. She was vanquished.

"You do it, Flora Barnes."

"Yes, I will. Don't speak so, Mrs. Whitman."

"You had better."

The undertaker and his son-in-law and Henry had remained quite
silent. Now they moved toward the door, and Flora followed, red and
perspiring. Sylvia heard her say something to her father about the
trust on the way to the gate, between the tall borders of box, and
heard Martin's surly growl in response.

"Laying it onto the trust," Sylvia said to Henry--"such an awful
thing as that!"

Henry assented. He looked aghast at the whole affair. He seemed to
catch a glimpse of dreadful depths of feminity which daunted his
masculine mind. "To think of women caring enough about dress to do
such a thing as that!" he said to himself. He glanced at Sylvia, and
she, as a woman, seemed entirely beyond his comprehension.

The whole great house was sweet with flowers. Neighbors had sent the
early spring flowers from their door-yards, and Henry and Sylvia had
bought a magnificent wreath of white roses and carnations and smilax.
They had ordered it from a florist in Alford, and it seemed to them
something stupendous--as if in some way it must please even the dead
woman herself to have her casket so graced.

"When folks know, they won't think we didn't do all we could," Sylvia
whispered to Henry, significantly. He nodded. Both were very busy,
even with assistance from the neighbors, and a woman who worked out
by the day, in preparing the house for the funeral. Everything had to
be swept and cleaned and dusted.

When the hour came, and the people began to gather, the house was
veritably set in order and burnished. Sylvia, in the parlor with the
chief mourners, glanced about, and eyed the smooth lap of her new
black gown with a certain complacency which she could not control.
After the funeral was over, and the distant relatives and neighbors
who had assisted had eaten a cold supper and departed, and she and
Henry were alone in the great house, she said, and he agreed, that
everything had gone off beautifully. "Just as she would have wished
it if she could have been here and ordered it herself," said Sylvia.

They were both hesitating whether to remain in the house that night
or go home. Finally they went home. There was an awe and strangeness
over them; besides, they began to wonder if people might not think it
odd for them to stay there before the will was read, since they could
not be supposed to know it all belonged to them.

It was about two weeks before they were regularly established in the
great house, and Horace Allen, the high-school teacher, was expected
the next day but one. Henry had pottered about the place, and
attended to some ploughing on the famous White grass-land, which was
supposed to produce more hay than any piece of land of its size in
the county. Henry had been fired with ambition to produce more than
ever before, but that day his spirit had seemed to fail him. He sat
about gloomily all the afternoon; then he went down for the evening
mail, and brought home no letters, but the local paper. Sylvia was
preparing supper in the large, clean kitchen. She had been looking
over her new treasures all day, and she was radiant. She chattered to
her husband like a school-girl.

"Oh, Henry," said she, "you don't know what we've got! I never
dreamed poor Abrahama had such beautiful things. I have been up in
the garret looking over things, and there's one chest up there packed
with the most elegant clothes. I never saw such dresses in my life."

Henry looked at his wife with eyes which loved her face, yet saw it
as it was, elderly and plain, with all its youthful bloom faded.

"I don't suppose there is anything that will suit you to have made
over," he said. "I suppose they are dresses she had when she was
young."

Sylvia colored. She tossed her head and threw back her round
shoulders. Feminine vanity dies hard; perhaps it never dies at all.

"I don't know," she said, defiantly. "Three are colors I used to
wear. I have had to wear black of late years, because it was more
economical, but you know how much I used to wear pink. It was real
becoming to me."

Henry continued to regard his wife's face with perfect love and a
perfect cognizance of facts. "You couldn't wear it now," he said.

"I don't know," retorted Sylvia. "I dare say I don't look now as if I
could. I have been working hard all day, and my hair is all out of
crimp. I ain't so sure but if I did up my hair nice, and wasn't all
tuckered out, that I couldn't wear a pink silk dress that's there if
I tone it down with black."

"I don't believe you would feel that you could go to meeting dressed
in pink silk at your time of life," said Henry.

"Lots of women older than I be wear bright colors," retorted Sylvia,
"in places where they are dressy. You don't know anything about
dress, Henry."

"I suppose I don't," replied Henry, indifferently.

"I think that pink silk would be perfectly suitable and real becoming
if I crimped my hair and had a black lace bonnet to wear with it."

"I dare say."

Henry took his place at the supper-table. It was set in the kitchen.
Sylvia was saving herself all the steps possible until Horace Allen
returned.

Henry did not seem to have much appetite that night. His face was
overcast. Along with his scarcely confessed exultation over his
good-fortune he was conscious of an odd indignation. For years he had
cherished a sense of injury at his treatment at the hands of
Providence; now he felt like a child who, pushing hard against
opposition to his desires, has that opposition suddenly removed, and
tumbles over backward. Henry had an odd sensation of having
ignominiously tumbled over backward, and he missed, with ridiculous
rancor, his sense of injury which he had cherished for so many years.
After kicking against the pricks for so long, he had come to feel a
certain self-righteous pleasure in it which he was now forced to
forego.

Sylvia regarded her husband uneasily. Her state of mind had formerly
been the female complement of his, but the sense of possession
swerved her more easily. "What on earth ails you, Henry Whitman?" she
said. "You look awful down-in-the-mouth. Only to think of our having
enough to be comfortable for life. I should think you'd be real
thankful and pleased."

"I don't know whether I'm thankful and pleased or not," rejoined
Henry, morosely.

"Why, Henry Whitman!"

"If it had only come earlier, when we had time and strength to enjoy
it," said Henry, with sudden relish. He felt that he had discovered a
new and legitimate ground of injury which might console him for the
loss of the old.

"We may live a good many years to enjoy it now," said Sylvia.

"I sha'n't; maybe you will," returned Henry, with malignant joy.

Sylvia regarded him with swift anxiety. "Why, Henry, don't you feel
well?" she gasped.

"No, I don't, and I haven't for some time."

"Oh, Henry, and you never told me! What is the matter? Hadn't you
better see the doctor?"

"Doctor!" retorted Henry, scornfully.

"Maybe he could give you something to help you. Whereabouts do you
feel bad, Henry?"

"All over," replied Henry, comprehensively, and he smiled like a
satirical martyr.

"All over?"

"Yes, all over--body and soul and spirit. I know just as well as any
doctor can tell me that I haven't many years to enjoy anything. When
a man has worked as long as I have in a shoe-shop, and worried as
much and as long as I have, good-luck finds him with his earthworks
about worn out and his wings hitched on."

"Oh, Henry, maybe Dr. Wallace--"

"Maybe he can unhitch the wings?" inquired Henry, with grotesque
irony. "No, Sylvia, no doctor living can give medicine strong enough
to cure a man of a lifetime of worry."

"But the worry's all over now, Henry."

"What the worry's done ain't over."

Sylvia began whimpering softly. "Oh, Henry, if you talk that way it
will take away all my comfort! What do you suppose the property would
mean to me without you?"

Then Henry felt ashamed. "Lord, don't worry," he said, roughly. "A
man can't say anything to you without upsetting you. I can't tell how
long I'll live. Sometimes a man lives through everything. All I meant
was, sometimes when good-luck comes to a man it comes so darned late
it might just as well not come at all."

"Henry, you don't mean to be wicked and ungrateful?"

"If I am I can't help it. I ain't a hypocrite, anyway. We've got some
good-fortune, and I'm glad of it, but I'd been enough sight gladder
if it had come sooner, before bad fortune had taken away my rightful
taste for it."

"You won't have to work in the shop any longer, Henry."

"I don't know whether I shall or not. What in creation do you suppose
I'm going to do all day--sit still and suck my thumbs?"

"You can work around the place."

"Of course I can; but there'll be lots of time when there won't be
any work to be done--then what? To tell you the truth of it, Sylvia,
I've had my nose held to the grindstone so long I don't know as it's
in me to keep away from it and live, now."

Henry had not been at work since Abrahama White's death. He had been
often in Sidney Meeks's office; only Sidney Meeks saw through Henry
Whitman. One day he laughed in his face, as the two men sat in his
office, and Henry had been complaining of the lateness of his
good-fortune.

"If your property has come too late, Henry," said he, "what's the use
in keeping it? What's the sense of keeping property that only
aggravates you because it didn't come in your time instead of the
Lord's? I'll draw up a deed of gift on the spot, and Sylvia can sign
it when you go home, and you can give the whole biling thing to
foreign missions. The Lord knows there's no need for any mortal man
to keep anything he doesn't want--unless it's taxes, or a quick
consumption, or a wife and children. And as for those last, there
doesn't seem to be much need of that lately. I have never seen the
time since I came into the world when it was quite so hard to get
things, or quite so easy to get rid of them, as it is now. Say the
word, Henry, and I'll draw up the deed of gift."

Henry looked confused. His eyes fell before the lawyer's sarcastic
glance. "You are talking tomfool nonsense," he said, scowling. "The
property isn't mine; it's my wife's."

"Sylvia never crossed you in anything. She'd give it up fast enough
if she got it through her head how downright miserable it was making
you," returned the lawyer, maliciously. Then Sidney relented. There
was something pathetic, even tragic, about Henry Whitman's sheer
inability to enjoy as he might once have done the good things of
life, and his desperate clutch of them in flat contradiction to his
words. "Let's drop it," said the lawyer. "I'm glad you have the
property and can have a little ease, even if it doesn't mean to you
what it once would. Let's have a glass of that grape wine."

Sidney Meeks had his own small amusement in the world. He was one of
those who cannot exist without one, and in lieu of anything else he
had turned early in life toward making wines from many things which
his native soil produced. He had become reasonably sure, at an early
age, that he should achieve no great success in his profession.
Indeed, he was lazily conscious that he had no fierce ambition to do
so. Sidney Meeks was not an ambitious man in large matters. But he
had taken immense comfort in toiling in a little vineyard behind his
house, and also in making curious wines and cordials from many
unusual ingredients. Sidney had stored in his cellar wines from elder
flowers, from elderberries, from daisies, from rhubarb, from clover,
and currants, and many other fruits and flowers, besides grapes. He
was wont to dispense these curious brews to his callers with great
pride. But he took especial pride in a grape wine which he had made
from selected grapes thirty years ago. This wine had a peculiar
bouquet due to something which Sidney had added to the grape-juice,
the secret of which he would never divulge.

It was some of this golden wine which Sidney now produced. Henry
drank two glasses, and the tense muscles around his mouth relaxed.
Sidney smiled. "Don't know what gives it that scent and taste, do
you?" asked Sidney. "Well, I know. It's simple enough, but nobody
except Sidney Meeks has ever found it out. I tell you, Henry, if a
man hasn't set the river on fire, realized his youthful dreams, and
all that, it is something to have found out something that nobody
else has, no matter how little it is, if you have got nerve enough to
keep it to yourself."

Henry fairly laughed. His long, hollow cheeks were slightly flushed.
When he got home that night he looked pleasantly at Sylvia, preparing
supper. But Sylvia did not look as radiant as she had done since her
good-fortune. She said nothing ailed her, in response to his inquiry
as to whether she felt well or not, but she continued gloomy and
taciturn, which was most unusual with her, especially of late.

"What in the world is the matter with you, Sylvia?" Henry asked. The
influence of Sidney Meeks's wine had not yet departed from him. His
cheeks were still flushed, his eyes brilliant.

Then Sylvia roused herself. "Nothing is the matter," she replied,
irritably, and immediately she became so gay that had Henry himself
been in his usual mood he would have been as much astonished as by
her depression. Sylvia began talking and laughing, relating long
stories of new discoveries which she had made in the house, planning
for Horace Allen's return.

"He's going to have that big southwest room and the little one out of
it," Sylvia said. "To-morrow you must get the bed moved into the
little one, and I'll get the big room fixed up for a study. He'll be
tickled to pieces. There's beautiful furniture in the room now. I
suppose he'll think it's beautiful. It's terrible old-fashioned. I'd
rather have a nice new set of bird's-eye maple to my taste, and a
brass bedstead, but I know he'll like this better. It's solid old
mahogany."

"Yes, he'll be sure to like it," assented Henry.

After supper, although Sylvia did not relapse into her taciturn mood,
Henry went and sat by himself on the square colonial porch on the
west side of the house. He sat gazing at the sky and the broad acres
of grass-land. Presently he heard feminine voices in the house, and
knew that two of the neighbors, Mrs. Jim Jones and Mrs. Sam Elliot,
had called to see Sylvia. He resolved that he would stay where he was
until they were gone. He loved Sylvia, but women in the aggregate
disturbed and irritated him; and for him three women were sufficient
to constitute an aggregate.

Henry sat on the fine old porch with its symmetrical pillars. He had
an arm-chair which he tilted back against the house wall, and he was
exceedingly comfortable. The air was neither warm nor cold. There was
a clear red in the west and only one rose-tinged cloud the shape of a
bird's wing. He could hear the sunset calls of birds and the laughter
of children. Once a cow lowed. A moist sense of growing things, the
breath of spring, came into his nostrils. Henry realized that he was
very happy. He realized for the first time, with peaceful content,
not with joy so turbulent that it was painful and rebellious, that he
and his wife owned this grand old house and all those fair acres. He
was filled with that great peace of possession which causes a man to
feel that he is safe from the ills of life. Henry felt fenced in and
guarded. Then suddenly the sense of possession upon earth filled his
whole soul with the hope of possession after death. Henry felt, for
the first time in his life, as if he had a firm standing-ground for
faith. For the first time he looked at the sunset sky, he listened to
the birds and children, he smelled the perfume of the earth, and
there was no bitterness in his soul. He smiled a smile of utter peace
which harmonized with it all, and the conviction of endless happiness
and a hereafter seemed to expand all his consciousness.



Chapter IV


The dining-room in the White homestead was a large, low room whose
southward windows were shaded at this season with a cloud of
gold-green young grape leaves. The paper was a nondescript pattern, a
large satin scroll on white. The room was wainscoted in white, and
the panel-work around the great chimney was beautiful. A Franklin
stove with a pattern of grape-vines was built into the chimney under
the high mantel. Sylvia regarded this dubiously.

"I don't think much of that old-fashioned Franklin stove," she told
Henry. "Why Abrahama had it left in, after she had her nice furnace,
beats me. Seems to me we had better have it taken out, and have a
nice board, covered with paper to match this on the room, put there
instead. There's a big roll of the paper up garret, and it ain't
faded a mite."

"Mr. Allen will like it just the way it is," said Henry, regarding
the old stove with a sneaking admiration of which he was ashamed. It
had always seemed to him that Sylvia's taste must be better than his.
He had always thought vaguely of women as creatures of taste.

"I think maybe he'll like a fire in it sometimes," he said, timidly.

"A fire, when there's a furnace?"

"I mean chilly days in the fall, before we start the furnace."

"Then we could have that nice air-tight that we had in the other
house put up. If we had a fire in this old thing the heat would all
go up chimney."

"But it would look kind of pretty."

"I was brought up to think a fire was for warmth, not for looks,"
said Sylvia, tartly. She had lost the odd expression which Henry had
dimly perceived several days before, or she was able to successfully
keep it in abeyance; still, there was no doubt that a strange and
subtle change had occurred within the woman. Henry was constantly
looking at her when she spoke, because he vaguely detected unwonted
tones in her familiar voice; that voice which had come to seem almost
as his own. He was constantly surprised at a look in the familiar
eyes, which had seemed heretofore to gaze at life in entire unison
with his own.

He often turned upon Sylvia and asked her abruptly if she did not
feel well, and what was the matter; and when she replied, as she
always did, that nothing whatever was the matter, continued to regard
her with a frown of perplexity, from which she turned with a switch
of her skirts and a hitch of her slender shoulders. Sylvia, while she
still evinced exultation over her new possessions, seemed to do so
fiercely and defiantly.

When Horace Allen arrived she greeted him, and ushered him into her
new domain with a pride which had in it something almost repellent.
At supper-time she led him into the dining-room and glanced around,
then at him.

"Well," said she, "don't you think it was about time we had something
nice like this, after we had pulled and tugged for nothing all our
lives? Don't you think we deserve it if anybody does?"

"I certainly do," replied Horace Allen, warmly; yet he regarded her
with somewhat the same look of astonishment as Henry. It did not seem
to him that it could be Sylvia Whitman who was speaking. The thought
crossed his mind, as he took his place at the table, that possibly
coming late in life, after so many deprivations, good-fortune had
disturbed temporarily the even balance of her good New England sense.

Then he looked about him with delight. "I say, this is great!" he
cried, boyishly. There was something incurably boyish about Horace
Allen, although he was long past thirty. "By George, that Chippendale
sideboard is a beauty," he said, gazing across at a fine old piece
full of dull high lights across its graceful surfaces.

Sylvia colored with pleasure, but she had been brought up to disclaim
her possessions to others than her own family. "Mrs. Jim Jones has
got a beautiful one she bought selling Calkin's soap," she said. "She
thinks it's prettier than this, and I must say it's real handsome.
It's solid oak and has a looking-glass on it. This hasn't got any
glass."

Horace laughed. He gazed at a corner-closet with diamond-paned doors.

"That is a perfectly jolly closet, too," he said; "and those are
perfect treasures of old dishes."

"I think they are rather pretty," said Henry. He was conscious of an
admiration for the old blue-and-white ware with its graceful shapes
and quaint decorations savoring of mystery and the Far East, but he
realized that his view was directly opposed to his wife's. This time
Sylvia spoke quite in earnest. As far as the Indian china was
concerned, she had her convictions. She was a cheap realist to the
bone.

She sniffed. "I suppose there's those that likes it," said she, "but
as for me, I can't see how anybody with eyes in their heads can look
twice at old, cloudy, blue stuff like that when they can have nice,
clear, white ware, with flowers on it that _are_ flowers, like this
Calkin's soap set. There ain't a thing on the china in that closet
that's natural. Whoever saw a prospect all in blue, the trees and
plants, and heathen houses, and the heathen, all blue? I like things
to be natural, myself."

Horace laughed, and extended his plate for another piece of pie.

"It's an acquired taste," he said.

"I never had any time to acquire tastes. I kept what the Lord gave
me," said Sylvia, but she smiled. She was delighted because Horace
had taken a second piece of pie.

"I didn't know as you'd relish our fare after living in a Boston
hotel all your vacation," said she.

"People can talk about hotel tables all they want to," declared
Horace. "Give me home cooking like yours every time. I haven't eaten
a blessed thing that tasted good since I went away."

Henry and Sylvia looked lovingly at Horace. He was a large man,
blond, with a thick shock of fair hair, and he wore gray tweeds
rather loose for him, which had always distressed Sylvia. She had
often told Henry that it seemed to her if he would wear a nice suit
of black broadcloth it would be more in keeping with his position as
high-school principal. He wore a red tie, too, and Sylvia had an
inborn conviction that red was not to be worn by fair people, male or
female.

However, she loved and admired Horace in spite of these minor
drawbacks, and had a fiercely maternal impulse of protection towards
him. She was convinced that every mother in East Westland, with a
marriageable daughter, and every daughter, had matrimonial designs
upon him; and she considered that none of them were good enough for
him. She did not wish him to marry in any case. She had suspicions
about young women whom he might have met while on his vacation.

After supper, when the dishes had been cleared away, and they sat in
the large south room, and Horace had admired that and its
furnishings, Sylvia led up to the subject.

"I suppose you know a good many people in Boston," she remarked.

"Yes," replied Horace. "You know, I was born and brought up and
educated there, and lived there until my people died."

"I suppose you know a good many young ladies."

"Thousands," said Horace; "but none of them will look at me."

"You didn't ask them?"

"Not all, only a few, but they wouldn't."

"I'd like to know why not?"

Then Henry spoke. "Sylvia," he said, "Mr. Allen is only joking."

"I hope he is," Sylvia said, severely. "He's too young to think of
getting married. It makes me sick, though, to see the way girls chase
any man, and their mothers, too, for that matter. Mrs. Jim Jones and
Mrs. Sam Elliot both came while you were gone, Mr. Allen. They said
they thought maybe we wouldn't take a boarder now we have come into
property, and maybe you would like to go there, and I knew just as
well as if they had spoken what they had in their minds. There's
Minnie Jones as homely as a broom, and there's Carrie Elliot getting
older, and--"

"Sylvia!" said Henry.

"I don't care. Mr. Allen knows what's going on just as well as I do.
Neither of those women can cook fit for a cat to eat, let alone
anything else. Lucy Ayres came here twice on errands, too, and--"

But Horace colored, and spoke suddenly. "I didn't know that you would
take me back," he said. "I was afraid--"

"We don't need to, as far as money goes," said Sylvia, "but Mr.
Whitman and I like to have the company, and you never make a mite of
trouble. That's what I told Mrs. Jim Jones and Mrs. Sam Elliot."

"I'm glad he's got back," Henry said, after Horace had gone up-stairs
for the night and the couple were in their own room, a large one out
of the sitting-room.

"So am I," assented Sylvia. "It seems real good to have him here
again, and he's dreadful tickled with his new rooms. I guess he's
glad he wasn't shoved off onto Mrs. Jim Jones or Mrs. Sam Elliot. I
don't believe he has an idea of getting married to any girl alive. He
ain't a mite silly over the girls, if they are all setting their caps
at him. I'm sort of sorry for Lucy Ayres. She's a pretty girl, and
real ladylike, and I believe she'd give all her old shoes to get him."

"Look out, he'll hear you," charged Henry. Their room was directly
under the one occupied by Horace.

Presently the odor of a cigar floated into their open window.

"I should know he'd got home. Smoking is an awful habit," Sylvia
said, with a happy chuckle.

"He'd do better if he smoked a pipe," said Henry. Henry smoked a pipe.

"If a man is going to smoke at all, I think he had better smoke
something besides a smelly old pipe," said Sylvia. "It seems to me,
with all our means, you might smoke cigars now, Henry. I saw real
nice ones advertised two for five cents the other day, and you
needn't smoke more than two a day."

Henry sniffed slightly.

"I suppose you think women don't know anything about cigars," said
Sylvia; "but I can smell, anyhow, and I know Mr. Allen is smoking a
real good cigar."

"Yes, he is," assented Henry.

"And I don't believe he pays more than a cent apiece. His cigars have
gilt papers around them, and I know as well as I want to they're
cheap; I know a cent apiece is a much as he pays. He smokes so many
he can't pay more than that."

Henry sniffed again, but Sylvia did not hear. She had one deaf ear,
and she was lying on her sound one. Then they fell asleep, and it was
some time before both woke suddenly. A sound had wakened Henry, an
odor Sylvia. Henry had heard a door open, forcing him into
wakefulness; Sylvia had smelled the cigar again. She nudged her
husband. Just then the tall clock in the sitting-room struck ten
deliberately.

"It's late, and he's awake, smoking, now," whispered Sylvia.

Henry said nothing. He only grunted.

"Don't you think it's queer?"

"Oh no. I guess he's only reading," replied Henry. He had a strong
masculine loyalty towards Horace, as another man. He waited until he
heard Sylvia's heavy, regular breathing again. Then he slipped out of
bed and stole to the window. It was a strange night, very foggy, but
the fog was shot through with shafts of full moonlight. The air was
heavy and damp and sweet. Henry listened a moment at the bedroom
window, then he tiptoed out into the sitting-room. He stole across
the hall into the best parlor. He raised a window in there
noiselessly, looked out, and listened. There was a grove of pines and
spruces on that side of the house. There was a bench under a pine.
Upon this bench Henry gradually perceived a whiteness more opaque
than that of the fog. He heard a voice, then a responsive murmur.
Then the fragrant smoke of a cigar came directly in his face. Henry
shook his head. He remained motionless a moment. Then he left the
room, and going into the hall stole up-stairs. The door of the
southwest chamber stood wide open. Henry entered. He was trembling
like a woman. He loved the young man, and suspicions, like dreadful,
misshapen monsters, filled his fancy. He peeped into the little room
which he and Sylvia had fitted up as a bedroom for Horace, and it was
vacant.

Henry went noiselessly back down-stairs and into his own room. He lay
down without disturbing his wife, but he did not fall asleep. After
what seemed to him a long time he heard a stealthy footstep on the
stair, and again smelled the aroma of a cigar which floated down from
overhead.

That awoke Sylvia. "I declare, he's smoking again," she murmured,
sleepily. "It's a dreadful habit."

Henry made no reply. He breathed evenly, pretending to be asleep.



Chapter V


Although it was easy for a man, especially for a young marriageable
man, to obtain board in East Westland, it was not so easy for a
woman; and the facts of her youth and good looks, and presumably
marriageable estate, rendered it still more difficult. There was in
the little village a hotel, so-called, which had formerly been the
tavern. It was now the East Westland House. Once it had been the Sign
of the Horse. The old sign-board upon which a steed in flaming red,
rampant upon a crude green field against a crude blue sky, had been
painted by some local artist, all unknown to fame, and long since at
rest in the village graveyard, still remained in the hotel attic,
tilted under the dusty eaves.

The Sign of the Horse had been in former days a flourishing hostelry,
before which, twice a day, the Boston and the Alford stages had drawn
up with mighty flourishes of horns and gallant rearings of jaded
steeds. Scarcely a night but it had been crowded by travellers who
stayed overnight for the sake of the good beds and the good table and
good bar. Now there was no bar. East Westland was a strictly
temperance village, and all the liquor to be obtained was exceedingly
bad, and some declared diluted by the waters of the village pond.

There was a very small stock of rum, gin, and whiskey, and very young
and morbid California wines, kept at the village drug store, and
dispensed by Albion Bennet. Albion required a deal of red-tape before
he would sell even these doubtful beverages for strictly medicinal
purposes. He was in mortal terror of being arrested and taken to the
county-seat at Newholm for violation of the liquor law. Albion,
although a young and sturdy man not past his youth, was exceedingly
afraid of everything. He was unmarried, and boarded at the hotel.
There he was divided between fear of burglars, if he slept on the
first floor, and of fire if he slept on the second. He compromised by
sleeping on the second, with a sufficient length of stout, knotted
muslin stowed away in his trunk, to be attached to the bed-post and
reach the ground in case of a conflagration.

There was no bank in East Westland, none nearer than Alford, six
miles away, and poor Albion was at his wit's end to keep his daily
receipts with safety to them and himself. He had finally hit upon the
expedient of leaving them every night with Sidney Meeks, who was
afraid of nothing. "If anything happens to your money, Albion," said
Sidney, "I'll make it good, even if I have to sell my wine-cellar."
Albion was afraid even to keep a revolver. His state of terror was
pitiable, and the more so because he had a fear of betraying it,
which was to some extent the most cruel fear of all. Sidney Meeks was
probably the only person in East Westland who understood how it was
with him, and he kept his knowledge to himself. Sidney was astute on
a diagnosis of his fellow-men's mentalities, and he had an almost
womanly compassion even for those weaknesses of which he himself was
incapable.

"Good; I'll keep what you have in your till every night for you, and
welcome, Albion," he had said. "I understand how you feel, living in
the hotel the way you do."

"Nobody knows who is coming and going," said Albion, blinking
violently.

"Of course one doesn't, and nobody would dream of coming to my house.
Everybody knows I am as poor as Job's off ox. You might get a
revolver, but I wouldn't recommend it. You look to me as if you might
sleep too sound to make it altogether safe."

"I do sleep pretty sound," admitted Albion, although he did not quite
see the force of the other man's argument.

"Just so. Any man who sleeps very sound has no right to keep a loaded
revolver by him. He seldom, if ever, wakes up thoroughly if he hears
a noise, and he's mighty apt to blaze away at the first one he sees,
even if it's his best friend. No, it is not safe."

"I don't think it's very safe myself," said Albion, in a relieved
tone. "Miss Hart is always prowling around the house. She doesn't
sleep very well, and she's always smelling smoke or hearing burglars.
She's timid, like most women. I might shoot her if I was only half
awake and she came opposite my door."

"Exactly," said Sidney Meeks. When Albion went away he stared after
his bulky, retreating back with a puzzled expression. He shook his
head. Fear was the hardest thing in the world for him to understand.
"That great, able-bodied man must feel mighty queer," he muttered, as
he stowed away the pile of greasy bank-notes and the nickels
collected at the soda-fountain in a pile of disordered linen in a
bureau drawer. He chuckled to himself at the eagerness with which
Albion had seized upon the fancy of his shooting Miss Hart.

Lucinda Hart kept the hotel. She had succeeded to its proprietorship
when her father died. She was a middle-aged woman who had been pretty
in a tense, nervous fashion. Now the prettiness had disappeared under
the strain of her daily life. It was a hard struggle to keep the East
Westland House and make both ends meet. She had very few regular
boarders, and transients were not as numerous as they had been in the
days of the stage-coaches. Now commercial travellers and business men
went to Alford overnight instead of remaining at East Westland. Miss
Hart used the same feather-beds which had once been esteemed so
luxurious. She kept them clean, well aired, and shaken, and she would
not have a spring-bed or a hair mattress in the house. She was
conservatism itself. She could no more change and be correct to her
own understanding than the multiplication table.

"Feather-beds are good enough for anybody who stays in this hotel, I
don't care who it is," she said. She would not make an exception,
even for Miss Eliza Farrel, the assistant teacher in the high school,
although she had, with a distrust of the teacher's personality, a
great respect for her position. She was inexorable even when the
teacher proposed furnishing a spring-bed and mattress at her own
expense. "I'd be willing to accommodate, and buy them myself, but it
is a bad example," she said, firmly. "Things that were good enough
for our fathers and mothers are good enough for us. Good land! people
ain't any different from what they used to be. We haven't any
different flesh nor any different bones."

Miss Hart had a theory that many of the modern diseases might be
traced directly to the eschewing of feather-beds. "Never heard of
appendicitis in my father's time, when folks slept on good, soft
feather-beds, and got their bones and in'ards rested," she said.

Miss Hart was as timid in her way as Albion Bennet. She never got
enough control of her nervous fears to secure many hours of sound
sleep. She never was able to wholly rid herself of the conviction
that her own wakefulness and watchfulness was essential to the right
running of all the wheels of the universe, although she would have
been shocked had she fairly known her own attitude. She patrolled the
house by night, moving about the low, uneven corridors with a
flickering candle--for she was afraid to carry a kerosene lamp--like
a wandering spirit.

She was suspicious, too. She never lodged a stranger overnight but
she had grave doubts of his moral status. She imagined him a murderer
escaped from justice, and compared his face with the pictures of
criminals in the newspapers, or she was reasonably sure that he was
dishonest, although she had little to tempt him. She employed one
chambermaid and a stable-boy, and did the cooking herself. Miss Hart
was not a good cook. She used her thin, tense hands too quickly. She
was prone to over-measures of saleratus, to under-measures of sugar
and coffee. She erred both from economy and from the haste which
makes waste. Miss Eliza Farrel often turned from the scanty, poorly
cooked food which was place before her with disgust, but she never
seemed to lose an ounce of her firm, fair flesh, nor a shade of her
sweet color.

Miss Eliza Farrel was an anomaly. She was so beautiful that her
beauty detracted from her charm for both sexes. It was so perfect as
to awaken suspicion in a world where nothing is perfect from the hand
of nature. Then, too, she was manifestly, in spite of her beauty, not
in the first flush of youth, and had, it seemed, no right to such
perfection of body. Also her beauty was of a type which people
invariably associate with things which are undesirable to the rigidly
particular, and East Westland was largely inhabited by the rigidly
particular.

East Westland was not ignorant. It read of the crimes and follies of
the times, but it read of them with a distinct and complacent sense
of superiority. It was as if East Westland said: "It is desirable to
read of these things, of these doings among the vicious and the
worldly, that we may understand what _we_ are." East Westland looked
upon itself in its day and generation as a lot among the cities of
the plain.

It seemed inconceivable that East Westland people should have
recognized the fact that Miss Farrel's beauty was of a suspicious
type, but they must have had an instinctive knowledge of it. From the
moment that Miss Farrel appeared in the village, although she had the
best of references, not a woman would admit her into her house as a
boarder, and the hotel, with its feather-beds and poor table, was her
only resource. Women said of her that she was made up, that no woman
of her age ever looked as she did and had a perfectly irreproachable
moral character.

As for the men, they admired her timidly, sheepishly, and also a
trifle contemptuously. They did not admit openly the same opinion as
the women with regard to the legitimacy of her charms, but they did
maintain it secretly. It did not seem possible to many of them that a
woman could look just as Eliza Farrel did and be altogether natural.
As for her character, they also agreed with the feminine element
secretly, although they openly declared the women were jealous of
such beauty. It did not seem that such a type could be anything
except a dangerous one.

Miss Eliza Farrel was a pure blonde, as blond as a baby. There was
not a line nor blemish in her pure, fine skin. The flush on her
rounded cheeks and her full lips was like a baby's. Her dimples were
like a baby's. Her blond hair was thick and soft with a pristine
softness and thickness which is always associated with the hair of a
child. Her eyebrows were pencilled by nature, as if nature had been
art. Her smile was as fixedly radiant as a painted cherub's. Her
figure had that exuberance and slenderness at various portions which
no woman really believes in. She looked like a beautiful doll, with
an unvarying loveliness of manner and disposition under all
vicissitudes of life, but she was undoubtedly something more than a
doll.

Even the women listened dubiously and incredulously when she talked.
They had never heard a woman talk about such things in the way she
did. She had a fine education, being a graduate of one of the women's
colleges. She was an accomplished musician and a very successful
teacher. Her pupils undoubtedly progressed, although they did not
have the blind love and admiration which pupils usually have for a
beautiful teacher. To this there was one exception.

Miss Farrel always smiled, never frowned or reprimanded. It was said
that Miss Farrel had better government than Miss Florence Dean, the
other assistant. Miss Dean was plain and saturnine, and had no
difficulty in obtaining a good boarding-place, even with the mother
of a marriageable daughter, who had taken her in with far-sighted
alacrity. She dreamed of business calls concerning school matters,
which Mr. Horace Allen, the principal, might be obliged to make, and
she planned to have her daughter, who was a very pretty girl, in
evidence. But poor Miss Farrel was thrown back upon the mercies of
Miss Hart and the feather-beds and the hotel.

There were other considerations besides the feather-beds and the poor
fare which conspired to render the hotel an undesirable
boarding-place. Miss Farrel might as well have been under the
espionage of a private detective as with Miss Hart. If Miss Hart was
suspicious of dire mischief in the cases of her other boarders, she
was certain in the case of Eliza Farrel. She would not have admitted
her under her roof at all had she not been forced thereto by the
necessity for money. Miss Hart herself took care of Miss Farrel's
room sometimes. She had no hesitation whatever in looking through her
bureau drawers; indeed, she considered it a duty which she owed
herself and the character of her house. She had taken away the keys
on purpose, and had told miss Farrel, without the slightest
compunction, that they were lost. The trunks were locked, and she had
never been able to possess herself of the keys, but she felt sure
that they contained, if not entire skeletons, at least scattered
bones.

She discovered once, quite in open evidence on Miss Farrel's
wash-stand, a little porcelain box of pink-tinted salve, and she did
not hesitate about telling Hannah, her chambermaid, the daughter of a
farmer in the vicinity, and a girl who was quite in her confidence.
She called Hannah into the room and displayed the box. "This is what
she uses," she said, solemnly.

Hannah, who was young, but had a thick, colorless skin, nodded with
an inscrutable expression.

"I have always thought she used something on her face," said Miss
Hart. "You can't cheat _me_."

Hannah took up a little, ivory-backed nail-polisher which was also on
the wash-stand. "What do you suppose this is?" she asked, timidly, in
an awed whisper.

"How do I know? I never use such things myself, and I never knew
women who did before," said Miss Hart, severely. "I dare say, after
she puts the paint on, she has to use something to smooth it down
where the natural color of the skin begins. How do I know?"

Hannah laid the nail-polisher beside the box of salve. She was very
much in love with the son of the farmer who lived next to her
father's. The next Thursday afternoon was her afternoon off. She
watched her chance, and stole into Miss Farrel's room, applied with
trembling fingers a little of the nail-salve to her cheeks, then
carefully rubbed it all off with the polisher. She then went to her
own room, put on a hat and thick veil, and succeeded in getting out
of the hotel without meeting Miss Hart. She was firmly convinced that
she was painted, and that her cheeks had the lovely peach-bloom of
Miss Farrel's.

It seems sometimes as if one's own conviction concerning one's self
goes a long way towards establishing that of other people. Hannah,
that evening, when she met the young man whom she loved, felt that
she was a beauty like Miss Eliza Farrel, and before she went home he
had told her how pretty she was and asked her to marry him, and
Hannah had consented, reserving the right to work enough longer to
earn a little more money. She wished to be married in a white lace
gown like one in Miss Farrel's closet. Miss Hart had called Hannah in
to look at it one morning when Miss Farrel was at school.

"What do you suppose a school-teacher can want of a dress like this
here in East Westland?" Miss Hart had asked, severely. "She can't
wear it to meeting, or a Sunday-school picnic, or a church sociable,
or even to a wedding in this place. Look at it. It's cut low-neck."

Hannah had looked. That night she had, in the secrecy of her own
room, examined her own shoulders, and decided that although they
might not be as white as Miss Farrel's, they were presumably as well
shaped. She had resolved then and there to be married in a dress like
that. Along with her love-raptures came the fairy dream of the lace
gown. For once in her life she would be dressed like a princess.

When she told Miss Hart she was going to be married, her mistress
sniffed. "You can do just as you like, and you will do just as you
like, whether or no," she said; "but you are a poor fool. Here you
are getting good wages, and having it all to spend on yourself; and
you ain't overworked, and you'll find out you'll be overworked and
have a whole raft of young ones, and not a cent of wages, except
enough to keep soul and body together, and just enough to wear so you
won't be took up for going round indecent. I've seen enough of such
kind of work."

"Amos will make a real good husband; everybody says he's the best
match anywhere around," replied Hannah, crimson with blushes and half
crying.

Miss Hart sniffed again. "Jump into the fire if you want to," said
she. "I hope you ain't going before fall, and leave me in the lurch
in hot weather, and preserves to be put up."

Hannah said she would not think of getting married before November.
She did not say a word about the white lace gown, but that evening
the desire to look at it again waxed so strong within her that she
could not resist it. She was sitting in her own room, after lighting
the kerosene lamp in the corridor opposite Miss Farrel's room, which
was No. 20, and she was thinking hard about the lace gown, and
wondering how much it cost, when she started suddenly. As she sat
beside her window, her own lamp not yet lit, she had seen a figure
flit past in the misty moonlight, and she was sure it was Miss
Farrel. She reflected quickly that it was Thursday evening, when Miss
Hart always went to prayer-meeting. Hannah had a cold and had stayed
at home, although it was her day off. Miss Hart cherished the belief
that her voice was necessary to sustain the singing at any church
meeting. She had, in her youth, possessed a fine contralto voice. She
possessed only the remnant of one now, but she still sang in the
choir, because nobody had the strength of mind to request her to
resign. Sunday after Sunday she stood in her place and raised her
voice, which was horribly hoarse and hollow, in the sacred tunes, and
people shivered and endured. Miss Hart never missed a Sunday service,
a choir rehearsal, or a Thursday prayer-meeting, and she did not on
that Thursday evening.

Hannah went to her door and listened. She heard laughter down in the
room which had been the bar but was now the office. A cloud of
tobacco smoke floated from there through the corridor. Hannah drew it
in with a sense of delicious peace. Her lover smoked, and somehow the
odor seemed to typify to her domestic happiness and mystery. She
listened long, looking often at the clock on the wall. "She must be
gone," she thought, meaning Miss Hart. She was almost sure that the
figure which she had seen flitting under her window in the moonlight
was that of the school-teacher. Finally she could not resist the
temptation any longer. She hurried down the corridor until she
reached No. 20. She tapped and waited, then she tapped and waited
again. There was no response. Hannah tried the door. It was locked.
She took her chambermaid's key and unlocked the door, looking around
her fearfully. Then she opened the door and slid in. She locked the
door behind her. Then straight to the closet she went, and that
beautiful lace robe seemed to float out towards her. Hannah slipped
off her own gown, and in a few moments she stood before the
looking-glass, transformed.

She was so radiant, so pleased, that a flush came out on her thick
skin; her eyes gleamed blue. The lace gown fitted her very well. She
turned this way and that. After all, her neck was not bad, not as
white, perhaps, as Miss Farrel's, but quite lovely in shape. She
walked glidingly across the room, looking over her shoulder at the
trail of lace. She was unspeakably happy. She had a lover, and she
was a woman in a fine gown for the first time in her life. The gown
was not her own, but she would have one like it. She did not realize
that this gown was not hers. She was fairly radiant with the
possession of her woman's birthright, this poor farmer's daughter, in
whom the instincts of her kind were strong. She glided across the
room many times. She surveyed herself in the glass. Every time she
looked she seemed to herself more beautiful, and there was something
good and touching in this estimation of herself, for she seemed to
see herself with her lover's eyes as well as her own.

Finally she sat down in Miss Farrel's rocker; she crossed her knees
and viewed with delight the fleecy fall of lace to the floor. Then
she fell to dreaming, and her dreams were good. In that gown of
fashion she dreamed the dreams of the life to which the women of her
race were born. She dreamed of her good housewifery; she dreamed of
the butter she would make; she dreamed of her husband coming home to
meals all ready and well cooked. She dreamed, underneath the other
dreams, of children coming home. She had no realization of the time
she sat there. At last she started and turned white. She had heard a
key turn in the lock. Then Miss Farrel entered the room--Miss Eliza
Farrel, magnificent in pale gray, with a hat trimmed with roses
crowning her blond head. Hannah cowered. She tried to speak, but only
succeeded in making a sound as if she were deaf and dumb.

Then Miss Farrel spoke. There was a weary astonishment and amusement
in her tone, but nothing whatever disturbed or harsh. "Oh, is it you,
Hannah?" she said.

Hannah murmured something unintelligible.

Miss Farrel went on, sweetly: "So you thought you would try on my
lace gown, Hannah?" she said. "It fits you very well. I see your
hands are clean. I am glad of that. Now please take it off and put on
your own dress."

Hannah stood up. She was abject.

"There is nothing for you to be afraid of," said Miss Farrel. "Only
take off the gown and put on your own, or I am afraid Miss Hart--"

Miss Hart's name acted like a terrible stimulus. Hannah unfastened
the lace gown with fingers trembling with haste. She stepped out of
the shimmering circle which it made; she was in her own costume in an
incredibly short space of time, and the lace gown was in its
accustomed place in the closet. Then suddenly Miss Hart opened the
door.

"I thought I saw a light," said she. She looked from one to the
other. "It is after eleven o'clock," she said, further.

"Yes," said Miss Farrel, sweetly. "I have been working. I had to look
over some exercises. I think I am not quite well. Have you any
digitalis in the house, Miss Hart? Hannah here does not know. I was
sorry to disturb her, and she does not know. I have an irritable
heart, and digitalis helps it."

"No, I have not got any digitalis," replied Miss Hart, shortly. She
gave the hard sound to the _g_, and she looked suspiciously at both
women. However, Miss Farrel was undoubtedly pale, and Miss Hart's
face relaxed.

"Go back to your room," she said to Hannah. "You won't be fit for a
thing to-morrow." Then she said to Miss Farrel: "I don't know what
you mean by digitalis. I haven't got any, but I'll mix you up some
hot essence of peppermint, and that's the best thing I know of for
anything."

"Thank you," said Miss Farrel. She had sank into a chair, and had her
hand over her heart.

"I'll have it here in a minute," said Miss Hart. She went out, and
Hannah followed her, but not before she and Miss Eliza Farrel had
exchanged looks which meant that each had a secret of the other to
keep as a precious stolen jewel.



Chapter VI


The next morning Henry was very quiet at the breakfast-table. He said
good-morning to Horace in almost a surly manner, and Sylvia glanced
from one to the other of the two men. After Horace had gone to school
she went out in the front yard to interview Henry, who was pottering
about the shrubs which grew on either side of the gravel walk.

"What on earth ailed you and Mr. Allen this morning?" she began,
abruptly.

Henry continued digging around the roots of a peony. "I don't know as
anything ailed us. I don't know what you are driving at," he replied,
lying unhesitatingly.

"Something did ail you. You can't cheat me."

"I don't know what you are driving at."

"Something did ail you. You'll spoil that peony. You've got all the
weeds out. What on earth are you digging round it that way for? What
ailed you?"

"I don't know what you are driving at."

"You can't cheat me. Something is to pay. For the land's sake, leave
that peony alone, and get the weeds out from around that syringa
bush. You act as if you were possessed. What ailed you and Mr. Allen
this morning? I want to know."

"I don't know what you are driving at," Henry said again, but he
obediently turned his attention to the syringa bush. He always obeyed
a woman in small matters, and reserved his masculine prerogatives for
large ones.

Sylvia returned to the house. Her mouth was set hard. Nobody knew how
on occasions Sylvia longed for another woman to whom to speak her
mind. She loved her husband, but no man was capable of entirely
satisfying all her moods. She started to go to the attic on another
exploring expedition; then she stopped suddenly, reflecting. The end
of her reflection was that she took off her gingham apron, tied on a
nice white one trimmed with knitted lace, and went down the street to
Mrs. Thomas P. Ayres's. Thomas P. Ayres had been dead for the last
ten years, but everybody called his widow Mrs. T. P. Ayres. Mrs.
Ayres kept no maid. She had barely enough income to support herself
and her daughter. She came to the door herself. She was a small,
delicate, pretty woman, and her little thin hands were red with
dish-water.

"Good-morning," she said, in a weary, gentle fashion. "Come in, Mrs.
Whitman, won't you?" As she spoke she wrinkled her forehead between
her curves of gray hair. She had always wrinkled her forehead, but in
some inscrutable fashion the wrinkles had always smoothed out. Her
forehead was smooth as a girl's. She smiled, and the smile was
exactly in accord with her voice; it was weary and gentle. There was
not the slightest joy in it, only a submission and patience which
might evince a slight hope of joy to come.

"I've got so much to do I ought not to stop long," said Sylvia, "but
I thought I'd run in a minute."

"Walk right in," said Mrs. Ayres, and Sylvia followed her into the
sitting-room, which was quite charming, with a delicate flowered
paper and a net-work of green vines growing in bracket-pots, which
stood all about. There were also palms and ferns. The small room
looked like a bower, although it was very humbly furnished. Sylvia
sat down.

"You always look so cool in here," she said, "and it's a warm morning
for so early in the season."

"It's the plants and vines, I guess," replied Mrs. Ayres, sitting
down opposite Mrs. Whitman. "Lucy has real good luck with them."

"How is Lucy this morning?"

Mrs. Ayres wrinkled her forehead again. "She's in bed with a sick
headache," she said. "She has an awful lot of them lately. I'm afraid
she's kind of run down."

"Why don't you get a tonic?"

"Well, I have been thinking of it, but Dr. Wallace gives such
dreadful strong medicines, and Lucy is so delicate, that I have
hesitated. I don't know but I ought to take her to Alford to Dr.
Gilbert, but she doesn't want to go. She says it is too expensive,
and she says there's nothing the matter with her; but she has these
terrible headaches almost every other day, and she doesn't eat enough
to keep a sparrow alive, and I can't help being worried about her."

"It doesn't seem right," agreed Mrs. Whitman. "Last time I was here I
thought she didn't look real well. She's got color, a real pretty
color, but it isn't the right kind."

"That's just it," said Mrs. Ayres, wrinkling her forehead. "The
color's pretty, but you can see too plain where the red leaves off
and where the white begins."

"Speaking about color," said Mrs. Whitman, "I am going to ask you
something."

"What?"

"Do you really think Miss Farrel's color is natural?"

"I don't know. It looks so."

"I know it does, but I had it real straight that she keeps some pink
stuff that she uses in a box as bold as can be, right in sight on her
wash-stand."

"I don't know anything about it," said Mrs. Ayres, in her weary,
gentle fashion. "I have heard, of course, that some women do use such
things, but none of my folks ever did, and I never knew anybody else
who did."

Then Sylvia opened upon the subject which had brought her there. She
had reached it by a process as natural as nature itself.

"I know one thing," said she: "I have no opinion of that woman. I
can't have. When I hear a woman saying such things as I have heard of
her saying about a girl, when I know it isn't true, I make up my mind
those things are true about the woman herself, and she's talking
about herself, because she's got to let it out, and she makes believe
it's somebody else."

Mrs. Ayres's face took on a strange expression. Her sweet eyes
hardened and narrowed. "What do you mean?" she asked, sharply.

"I guess I had better not tell you what I mean. Miss Farrel gives
herself clean away just by her looks. No living woman was ever made
so there wasn't a flaw in her face but that there was a flaw in her
soul. We're none of us perfect. If there ain't a flaw outside,
there's a flaw inside; you mark my words."

"What was it she said?" asked Mrs. Ayres.

"I don't mean to make trouble. I never did, and I ain't going to
begin now," said Sylvia. Her face took on a sweet, hypocritical
expression.

"What did she say?"

Sylvia fidgeted. She was in reality afraid to speak, and yet her very
soul itched to do so. She answered, evasively. "When a woman talks
about a girl running after a man, I think myself she lives in a glass
house and can't afford to throw stones," said she. She nodded her
head unpleasantly.

Mrs. Ayres reddened. "I suppose you mean she has been talking about
my Lucy," said she. "Well, I can tell you one thing, and I can tell
Miss Farrel, too. Lucy has never run after Mr. Allen or any man. When
she went on those errands to your house I had to fairly make her go.
She said that folks would think she was running after Mr. Allen, even
if he wasn't there, and she has never been, to my knowledge, more
than three times when he was there, and then I made her. I told her
folks wouldn't be so silly as to think such things of a girl like
her."

"Folks are silly enough for anything. Of course, I knew better; you
know that, Mrs. Ayres."

"I don't know what I know," replied Mrs. Ayres, with that forceful
indignation of which a gentle nature is capable when aroused.

Mrs. Whitman looked frightened. She opened her lips to speak, when a
boy came running into the yard. "Why, who is that?" she cried,
nervously.

"It's Tommy Smith from Gray & Snow's with some groceries I ordered,"
said Mrs. Ayres, tersely. She left the room to admit the boy at the
side door. Then Sylvia Whitman heard voices in excited conversation.
At the same time she began to notice that the road was filled with
children running and exclaiming. She herself hurried to the kitchen
door, and Mrs. Ayres turned an ashy face in her direction. At the
same time Lucy Ayres, with her fair hair dishevelled, appeared at the
top of the back stairs listening. "Oh, it is awful!" gasped Mrs.
Ayres. "It is awful! Miss Eliza Farrel is dead, and--"

Sylvia grasped the other woman nervously by the arm. "And what?" she
cried.

Lucy gave an hysterical sob and sank down in a slender huddle on the
stairs. The grocer's boy looked at them. He had a happy, important
expression. "They say--" he began, but Mrs. Ayres forestalled him.

"They say Lucinda Hart murdered her," she screamed out.

"Good land!" said Sylvia. Lucy sobbed again.

The boy gazed at them with intense relish. He realized the joy of a
coup. He had never been very important in his own estimation nor that
of others. Now he knew what it was to be important. "Yes," he said,
gayly; "they say she give her rat poison. They've sent for the
sheriff from Alford."

"She never did it in the world. Why, I went to school with her,"
gasped Mrs. Ayres.

Sylvia had the same conviction, but she backed it with logic. "What
should she do it for?" she demanded. "Miss Farrel was a steady
boarder, and Lucinda ain't had many steady boarders lately, and she
needed the money. Folks don't commit murder without reason. What
reason was there?"

"School ain't going to keep to-day," remarked the boy, with glee.

"Of course it ain't," said Sylvia, angrily. "What reason do they
give?"

"I 'ain't heard of none," said the boy. "S'pose that will come out at
the trial. Hannah Simmons is going to be arrested, too. They think
she knowed something about it."

"Hannah Simmons wouldn't hurt a fly," said Sylvia. "What makes them
think she knew anything about it?"

"Johnny Soule, that works at the hotel stable, says she did," said
the boy. "They think he knows a good deal."

Sylvia sniffed contemptuously. "That Johnny Soule!" said she. "He's
half Canadian. Father was French. I wouldn't take any stock in what
he said."

"Lucinda never did it," said Mrs. Ayres. "I went to school with her."

Lucy sobbed again wildly, then she laughed loudly. Her mother turned
and looked at her. "Lucy," said she, "you go straight back up-stairs
and put this out of your mind, or you'll be down sick. Go straight
up-stairs and lie down, and I'll bring you up some of that nerve
medicine Dr. Wallace put up for you. Maybe you can get to sleep."

Lucy sobbed and laughed again. "Stop right where you are," said her
mother, with a wonderful, firm gentleness--"right where you are. Put
this thing right out of your mind. It's nothing you can help."

Lucy sobbed and laughed again, and this time her laugh rang so wildly
that the grocer's boy looked at her with rising alarm. He admired
Lucy. "I say," he said. "Maybe she ain't dead, after all. I heard all
this, but you never can tell anything by what folks say. You had
better mind your ma and put it all out of your head." The grocer's
boy and Lucy had been in the same class at school. She had never
noticed him, but he had loved her as from an immeasurable distance.
Both were very young.

Lucy lifted a beautiful, frightened face, and stared at him. "Isn't
it so?" she cried.

"I dare say it ain't. You had better mind your ma."

"I dare say it's all a rumor," said Sylvia, soothingly.

Mrs. Ayres echoed her. "All a made-up story, I think," said she. "Go
right up-stairs, Lucy, and put it out of your head."

Lucy crept up-stairs with soft sobs, and they heard a door close.
Then the boy spoke again. "It's so, fast enough," he said, in a
whisper, "but there ain't any need for her to know it yet."

"No, there isn't, poor child," said Sylvia.

"She's dreadful nervous," said Mrs. Ayres, "and she thought a lot of
Miss Farrel--more, I guess, than most. The poor woman never was a
favorite here. I never knew why, and I guess nobody else ever did. I
don't care what she may have intimated--I mean what you were talking
about, Sylvia. That's all over. Lucy always seemed to like her, and
the poor child is so sensitive and nervous."

"Yes, she is dreadful nervous," said Sylvia.

"And I think she ate too much candy yesterday, too," said Mrs. Ayres.
"She made some candy from a recipe she found in the paper. I think
her stomach is sort of upset, too. I mean to make her think it's all
talk about Miss Farrel until she's more herself."

"I would," said Sylvia. "Poor child."

The grocer's boy made a motion to go. "I wonder if they'll hang her,"
he said, cheerfully.

"Hang her!" gasped Mrs. Ayres. "She never did it any more than I did.
I went to school with Lucinda Hart."

"Why should she kill a steady boarder, when the hotel has run down so
and she's been so hard up for money?" demanded Sylvia. "Hang her!
You'd better run along, sonny; the other customers will be waiting;
and you had better not talk too much till you are sure what you are
talking about."

The boy went out and closed the door, and they heard his merry
whistle as he raced out of the yard.



Chapter VII


Sylvia Whitman, walking home along the familiar village street, felt
like a stranger exploring it for the first time. She had never before
seen it under the glare of tragedy which her own consciousness threw
before her eyes. No tragedy had ever been known in East Westland
since she could remember. It had been a peaceful little community,
with every day much like the one before and after, except for the
happenings of birth and death, which are the most common happenings
of nature.

But now came death by violence, and even the wayside weeds seemed to
wave in a lurid light. Now and then Sylvia unconsciously brushed her
eyes, as if to sweep away a cobweb which obstructed her vision. When
she reached home, that also looked strange to her, and even her
husband's face in the window had an expression which she had never
seen before. So also had Horace Allen's. Both men were in the south
room. There was in their faces no expression which seemed to denote a
cessation of conversation. In fact, nothing had passed between the
two men except the simple statement to each other of the news which
both had heard. Henry had made no comment, neither had Horace. Both
had set, with gloomy, shocked faces, entirely still. But Sylvia, when
she entered, forced the situation.

"Why should she kill a steady boarder, much as she needed one?" she
queried.

And Horace responded at once. "There is no possible motive," he said.
"The arrest is a mere farce. It will surely prove so."

Then Henry spoke. "I don't understand, for my part, why she is
arrested at all," he said, grimly.

Horace laughed as grimly. "Because there is no one else to arrest,
and the situation seems to call for some action," he replied.

"But they must have some reason."

"All the reason was the girl's (Hannah Simmons, I believe her name
is) seeming to be keeping something back, and saying that Miss Hart
gave Miss Farrel some essence of peppermint last night, and the fact
that the stable-boy seems to be in love with Hannah, and jealous and
eager to do her mistress some mischief, and has hinted at knowing
something, which I don't believe, for my part, he does."

"It is all nonsense," said Sylvia. "Whatever Hannah Simmons is
keeping to herself, it isn't killing another woman, or knowing that
Lucinda Hart did it. There was no reason for either of those women to
kill Miss Farrel, and folks don't do such awful things without
reason, unless they're crazy, and it isn't likely that Lucinda and
Hannah have both come down crazy together, and I know it ain't in the
Hart family, or the Simmons. What if poor Lucinda did give Miss
Farrel some essence of peppermint? I gave some to Henry night before
last, when he had gas in his stomach, and it didn't kill him."

"What they claim is that arsenic was in the peppermint," said Horace,
in an odd, almost indifferent voice.

"Arsenic in the peppermint!" repeated Sylvia. "You needn't tell me
Lucinda Hart put arsenic in the peppermint, though I dare say she had
some in the house to kill rats. It's likely that old tavern was
overrun with them, and I know she lost her cat a few weeks ago. She
told me herself. He was shot when he was out hunting. Lucinda thought
somebody mistook him for a skunk. She felt real bad about it. I feel
kind of guilty myself. I can't help thinking if I'd just looked round
then and hunted up a kitten for poor Lucinda, she never would have
had any need to keep rat poison, and nobody would have suspected her
of such an awful thing. I suppose Albion Bennet right up and told
she'd bought it, first thing. I think he might have kept still, as
long as he'd boarded with Lucinda, and as many favors as she'd showed
him. He knew as well as anybody that she never gave it to Miss
Farrel."

"Now, Sylvia, he had to tell if he was asked," Henry said,
soothingly, for Sylvia was beginning to show signs of hysterical
excitement. "He couldn't do anything else."

"He could have forgot," Sylvia returned, shrilly. "Men ain't so awful
conscientious about forgetting. He could have forgot."

"He had to tell," repeated Henry. "Don't get all wrought up over it,
Sylvia."

"I can't help it. I begin to feel guilty myself. I know I might have
found a kitten. I had a lot on my mind, with moving and everything,
but I might have done it. Albion Bennet never had the spunk to do
anything but tell all he knew. I suppose he was afraid of his own
precious neck."

"Ain't it most time to see about dinner?" asked Henry.

Then Sylvia went out of the room with a little hysterical twitter
like a scared bird, and the two men were left alone. Silence came
over them again. Both men looked moodily at nothing. Finally Henry
spoke.

"One of the worst features of any terrible thing like this is that
burdens innumerable are either heaped upon the shoulders of the
innocent, or they assume them. There's my poor wife actually trying
to make out that she is in some way to blame."

"Women are a queer lot," said Horace, in a miserable tone.

Then the door opened suddenly, and Sylvia's think, excited face
appeared.

"You don't suppose they'll send them to prison?" she said.

"They'll both be acquitted," said Horace. "Don't worry, Mrs. Whitman."

"I've got to worry. How can I help worrying? Even if poor Lucinda is
acquitted, lots of folks will always believe it, and her boarders
will drop away, and as for Hannah Simmons, I shouldn't be a mite
surprised if it broke her match off."

"It's a dreadful thing," said Henry; "but don't you fret too much
over it, Sylvia. Maybe she killed herself, and if they think that
Lucinda won't have any trouble afterwards."

"I think some have that opinion now," said Horace.

Sylvia sniffed. "A woman don't kill herself as long as she's got
spirit enough to fix herself up," she said. "I saw her only yesterday
in a brand-new dress, and her hair was crimped tight enough to last a
week, and her cheeks--"

"Come, Sylvia," said Henry, admonishingly.

"You needn't be afraid. I ain't going to talk about them that's dead
and gone, and especially when they've gone in such a dreadful way;
and maybe it wasn't true," said Sylvia. "But it's just as I say: when
a woman is fixed up the way Miss Eliza Farrel was yesterday, she
ain't within a week of making way with herself. Seems as if I might
have had forethought enough to have got that kitten for poor Lucinda."

Sylvia went out again. The men heard the rattle of dishes. Horace
rose with a heavy sigh, which was almost a sob, and went out by the
hall door, and Henry heard his retreating steps on the stair. He
frowned deeply as he sat by the window. He, too, was bearing in some
measure the burden of which he had spoken. It seemed to him very
strange that under the circumstances Horace had not explained his
mysterious meeting with the woman in the grove north of the house the
night before. Henry had a certainty as to her identity--a certainty
which he could not explain to himself, but which was none the less
fixed.

No suspicion of Horace, as far as the murder was concerned--if murder
it was--was in his mind, but he did entertain a suspicion of another
sort: of some possibly guilty secret which might have led to the
tragedy. "I couldn't feel worse if he was my own son," he thought. He
wished desperately that he had gone out in the grove and interrupted
the interview. "I'm old enough to be his father," he told himself,
"and I know what young men are. I'm to blame myself."

When he heard Horace's approaching footsteps on the stair he turned
his face stiffly towards the window, and did not look up when the
young man entered the room. But Horace sat down opposite and began
speaking rapidly in a low voice.

"I don't know but I ought to go to Mr. Meeks with this instead of
you," he said; "and I don't know that I ought to go to anybody, but,
hang it, I can't keep the little I know to myself any longer--that
is, I can't keep the whole of it. Some I never will tell. Mr.
Whitman, I don't know the exact minute Miss Hart gave her that
confounded peppermint, and Miss Hart seems rather misty about it, and
if the girl knows she won't tell; but I suspect I may be the last
person who saw that poor woman alive. I found a note waiting for me
from her when I arrived yesterday, and--well, she wanted to see me
alone about something very particular, and she--" Horace paused and
reddened. "Well, you know what women are, and of course there was
really no place at the hotel where I could have been sure of a
private interview with her. I couldn't go to her room, and one might
as well talk in a trolley-car as that hotel parlor; and she didn't
want to come here to the house and be closeted with me, and she
didn't want to linger after school, for those school-girls are the
very devil when it comes to seeing anything; and though I will admit
it does sound ridiculous and romantic, I don't see myself what else
she could have done. She asked me in her note to step out in the
grove about ten o'clock, when the house was quiet. She wrote she had
something very important to say to me. So I felt like a fool, but I
didn't go to bed, and I stole down the front stairs, and she was out
there in the grove waiting for me, and we sat down on the bench there
and she told me some things."

Henry nodded gravely. He now looked at Horace, and there was relief
in his frowning face.

"I can tell you some of the things that she said to me," continued
Horace, "and I am going to. You are connected with it--that is, you
are through your wife. Miss Farrel wasn't Miss at all. She was a
married woman." Henry nodded again. "She had not lived with her
husband long, however, and she had been married some twenty years
ago. She was older than she looked. For some reason she did not get
on with him, and he left her. I don't myself feel that I know what
the reason was, although she pretended to tell me. She seemed to have
a feeling, poor soul, that, beautiful as she was, she excited
repulsion rather than affection in everybody with whom she came in
contact. 'I might as well be a snake as a woman.' Those were just her
words, and, God help her, I do believe there was something true about
them, although for the life of me I don't know why it was."

Henry looked at Horace with the eyes of a philosopher. "Maybe it was
because she wanted to charm," he said.

Horace shot a surprised glance at him. He had not expected anything
like that from Henry, even though he had long said to himself that
there were depths below the commonplace surface.

"Perhaps you are right," he said, reflectively. "I don't know but you
are. She was a great beauty, and possibly the knowledge of it made
her demand too much, long for too much, so that people dimly realized
it and were repelled instead of being attracted. I think she loved
her husband for a long time after he left her. I think she loved many
others, men and women. I think she loved women better than a woman
usually does, and women could not abide her. That I know; even the
school-girls fought shy of her."

"I have seen the Ayres girl with her," said Henry.

Horace changed color. "She is not one of the school-girls," he
replied, hastily.

"I think I have heard Sylvia say that Mrs. Ayres had asked her there
to tea."

"Yes, I believe she has. I think perhaps the Ayres family have paid
some attention to her," Horace said, constrainedly.

"I have seen the Ayres girl with her a good deal, I know," said Henry.

"Very possibly, I dare say. Well, Miss Farrel did not think she or
any one else cared about her very much. She told me that none of her
pupils did, and I could not gainsay her, and then she told me what I
feel that I must tell you." Horace paused. Henry waited.

Then Horace resumed. He spoke briefly and to the purpose.

"Miss Abrahama White, who left her property to your wife, had a
sister," he said. "The sister went away and married, and there was a
daughter. First the father died, then the mother. The daughter, a
mere child at the time, was left entirely destitute. Miss Farrel took
charge of her. She did not tell her the truth. She wished to
establish if possible some claim upon her affection. She considered
that to claim a relationship would be the best way to further her
purpose. The girl was told that Miss Farrel was her mother's cousin.
She was further told that she had inherited a very considerable
property from her mother, whereas she had not inherited one cent.
Miss Farrel gave up her entire fortune to the child. She then, with
the nervous dread of awakening dislike instead of love which filled
her very soul, managed to have the child, in her character of an
heiress, established in a family moving in the best circles, but
sadly in need of money. Then she left her, and began supporting
herself by teaching. The girl is now grown to be a young woman, and
Miss Farrel has not dared see her more than twice since she heaped
such benefits upon her. It has been her dream that some day she might
reveal the truth, and that gratitude might induce love, but she has
never dared put it to the test. Lately she has not been very well,
and the thought has evidently come to her more than once that she
might die and never accomplish her purpose. I almost think the poor
woman had a premonition. She gave me last night the girl's address,
and she made me promise that in case of her death she should be sent
for. 'I can't bear to think that nobody will come,' she said. Of
course I laughed at her. I thought her very morbid, but--well, I have
telegraphed to the girl to come in time for the funeral. She is in
New York. She and the people with whom she lives have just returned
from the South."

"She must come here," Henry said.

"I could think of no other place," said Horace. "You think Mrs.
Whitman--"

"Of course," Henry said. He started up to speak to Sylvia, but Horace
stopped him.

"I forgot," he said, quickly. "Miss Farrel asked me to promise that I
should not tell the girl, in case of her death before she had an
opportunity of doing so, of what she had done for her. 'Let her come
just because she thinks I am her relative,' she said, 'and because
she may possibly feel kindly towards me. If I can have no comfort
from it while I am alive, there is no need for her to know her
obligation.'"

"It sounds like a mighty queer story to tell Sylvia," Henry said.
Then he opened the door and called, and Mrs. Whitman immediately
responded. Her hands were white with flour. She had been making
biscuits. She still looked nervous and excited.

"What is to pay now?" said she.

Henry told her in few words.

"You mean that Abrahama's niece was taken care of by Miss Farrel when
her mother died, and Miss Farrel got a place for her to live with
some New York folks, and you mean Miss Farrel was related to her
mother?" said Sylvia. She looked sharply at Henry.

"Yes," he replied, feebly. Horace stood looking out of the window.

"She wa'n't," said Sylvia.

"Now, Sylvia."

"If that poor woman that's gone wanted the girl to think she was her
relation enough to lie about it I sha'n't tell her, you can depend on
that; but it's a lie," said Sylvia. "Miss Farrel wa'n't no relation
at all to Susy White. She couldn't have been unless she was related
to me, too, on my mother's side, and she wa'n't. I know all about my
mother's family. But I sha'n't tell her. I'm glad Miss Farrel got a
home for her. It was awful that the child was left without a cent. Of
course she must come here, and stay, too. She ought to live with her
folks. We've got enough to take care of her. If we can't do as much
as rich folks, I guess it will be full as well for the girl."

Henry opened his lips to speak, but a glance from Horace checked him.
Sylvia went on talking nervously. The odd manner and tone which Henry
had noticed lately in everything she said and did seemed intensified.
She talked about what room she should make ready for the girl. She
made plan after plan. She was very pale, then she flushed. She walked
aimlessly about gesturing with her floury hands.

Finally Henry took her firmly by the shoulder. "Come, Sylvia," he
said, "she won't be here until night. Now you had better get dinner.
It's past twelve." Sylvia gave a quick, frightened glance at him.
Then she went silently out of the room.

"Mrs. Whitman does not seem well," Horace said, softly.

"I think her nerves are all out of order with what she has gone
through with lately," said Henry. "It has been a great change that
has come to us both, Mr. Allen. When a man and woman have lived past
their youth, and made up their minds to bread and butter, and nothing
else, and be thankful if you get that much, it seems more like a slap
than a gift of Providence to have mince-pie thrust into their mouths.
It has been too much for Sylvia, and now, of course, this awful thing
that has happened has upset her, and--"

He stopped, for Sylvia opened the door suddenly. "If she wa'n't dead
and gone, I wouldn't believe one word of such a tomfool story," said
she, with vicious energy. Then she shut the door again.

At dinner Sylvia ate nothing, and did not talk. Neither Henry nor
Horace said much. In the afternoon Horace went out to make some
arrangements which he had taken upon himself with regard to the dead
woman, and presently Henry followed him. Sylvia worked with feverish
energy all the afternoon setting a room in order for her expected
guest. It was a pretty room, with an old-fashioned paper--a sprawling
rose pattern on a tarnished satin ground. The room overlooked the
grove, and green branches pressed close against two windows. There
was a pretty, old-fashioned dressing-table between the front windows,
and Sylvia picked a bunch of flowers and put them in a china vase,
and set it under the glass, and thought of the girl's face which it
would presently reflect.

"I wonder if she looks like her mother," she thought. She stood
gazing at the glass, and shivered as though with cold. Then she
started at a sound of wheels outside. In front of the house was
Leander Willard, who kept the livery-stable of East Westland. He was
descending in shambling fashion over the front wheels, steadying at
the same time a trunk on the front seat; and Horace Allen sprang out
of the back of the carriage and assisted a girl in a flutter of
dark-blue skirts and veil. "She's come!" said Sylvia.



Chapter VIII


Sylvia gave a hurried glance at her hair in the glass. It shone like
satin with a gray-gold lustre, folded back smoothly from her temples.
She eyed with a little surprise the red spots of excitement which
still remained on her cheeks. The changelessness of her elderly
visage had been evident to her so long that she was startled to see
anything else. "I look as if I had been pulled through a knot-hole,"
she muttered.

She took off her gingham apron, thrust it hastily into a bureau
drawer in the next room, and tied on a clean white one with a
hemstitched border. Then she went down-stairs, the starched white bow
of the apron-strings covering her slim back like a Japanese sash. She
heard voices in the south room, and entered with a little cough.
Horace and the new-comer were standing there talking. The moment
Sylvia entered, Horace stepped forward. "I hardly know how to
introduce you," he said; "I hardly know the relationship. But, Mrs.
Whitman, here is Miss Fletcher--Miss Rose Fletcher."

"Who accepts your hospitality with the utmost gratitude," said Miss
Rose Fletcher, extending a little hand in a wonderful loose gray
travelling glove. Mrs. Whitman took the offered hand and let it drop.
She was rigid and prim. She smiled, but the smile was merely a
widening of her thin, pale, compressed lips. She looked at the girl
with gray eyes, which had a curious blank sharpness in them. Rose
Fletcher was so very well dressed, so very redolent of good breeding
and style, that it was difficult at first to comprehend if that was
all. Finally one perceived that she was a very pretty girl, of a
sweet, childish type, in spite of her finished manners and her very
sophisticated clothes. Sylvia at first saw nothing except the
clothes, and realized nothing except the finished manner. She
immediately called to the front her own manners, which were as
finished as the girl's, albeit of a provincial type. Extreme manners
in East Westland required a wholly artificial voice and an expression
wholly foreign to the usual one. Horace had never before seen Sylvia
when all her manners were in evidence, and he gazed at her now in
astonishment and some dismay.

"Her mother was own sister to Miss Abrahama White, and Abrahama
White's mother and my mother were own cousins on the mother's side.
My mother was a White," she said. The voice came like a slender,
reedy whistle from between her moveless, widened lips. She stood as
if encased in armor. Her apron-strings stood out fiercely and were
quite evident over each hip. She held her head very high, and the
cords on her long, thin neck stood out.

Poor Rose Fletcher looked a little scared and a little amused. She
cast a glance at Horace, as if for help. He did not know what to say,
but tried manfully to say it. "I have never fully known, in such a
case," he remarked, "whether the relationship is second cousin or
first cousin once removed." It really seemed to him that he had never
known. He looked up with relief as Henry entered the room, and Sylvia
turned to him, still with her manners fully in evidence.

"Mr. Whitman, this is Miss Abrahama White's niece," said she.

She bowed stiffly herself as Henry bowed. He was accustomed to
Sylvia's company manners, but still he was not himself. He had never
seen a girl like this, and he was secretly both angry and alarmed to
note the difference between her and Sylvia, and all women to which he
had been used. However, his expression changed directly before the
quick look of pretty, childish appeal which the girl gave him. It was
Rose's first advance to all men whom she met, her little feeler put
out to determine their dispositions towards her. It was quite
involuntary. She was unconscious of it, but it was as if she said in
so many words, "Do you mean to be kind to me? Don't you like the look
of me? I mean entirely well. There is no harm in me. Please don't
dislike me."

Sylvia saw the glance and interpreted it. "She looks like her
mother," she announced, harshly. It was part of Sylvia's extreme
manners to address a guest in the third person. However, in this
case, it was in reality the clothes which had occasioned so much
formality. She immediately, after she had spoken and Henry had
awkwardly murmured his assent to her opinion, noticed how tired the
girl looked. She was a slender little thing, and looked delicate in
spite of a babyish roundness of face, which was due to bone-formation
rather than flesh.

Sylvia gave an impression of shoving the men aside as she approached
the girl. "You look tired to death," said she, and there was a sweet
tone in her force voice.

Rose brightened, and smiled at her like a pleased child. "Oh, I am
very tired!" she cried. "I must confess to being very tired, indeed.
The train was so fast. I came on the limited from New York, you know,
and the soft-coal smoke made me ill, and I couldn't eat anything,
even if there had been anything to eat which wasn't all full of
cinders. I shall be so very glad of a bath and an opportunity to
change my gown. I shall have to beg you to allow your maid to assist
me a little. My own maid got married last week, unexpectedly, and I
have not yet replaced her."

"I don't keep a hired girl," said Sylvia. She looked, as Henry had,
both angry and abashed. "I will fasten up your dress in the neck if
that is what you want," said she.

"Oh, that is all," Rose assured her, and she looked abashed, too.
Even sophistication is capable of being daunted before utterly
unknown conditions. She followed Sylvia meekly up-stairs, and Henry
and Horace carried the trunk, which had been left on the front walk,
up after them.

Leander Willard was a man of exceeding dignity. He was never willing
to carry a trunk even into a house. "If the folks that the trunk
belongs to can't heft it in after I've brought it up from the depot,
let it set out," he said. "I drive a carriage to accommodate, but I
ain't no porter."

Therefore, Henry and Horace carried up the trunk and unstrapped it.
Rose looked around her with delight. "Oh, what a lovely room!" she
cried.

"It gets the morning sun," said Sylvia. "The paper is a little mite
faded, but otherwise it's just as good as it ever was."

"It is perfectly charming," said Rose. She tugged at the jewelled
pins in her hat. Sylvia stood watching her. When she had succeeded in
removing the hat, she thrust her slender fingers through her fluff of
blond hair and looked in the glass. Her face appeared over the bunch
of flowers, as Sylvia had thought of its doing. Rose began to laugh.
"Good gracious!" she said. "For all I took such pains to wash my face
in the lavatory, there is a great black streak on my left cheek.
Sometimes I think the Pullmans are dirtier than the common
coaches--that more soft-coal smoke comes in those large windows;
don't you think so?"

Sylvia colored, but her honesty was fearless. "I don't know what a
Pullman is," she said.

Rose stared for a second. "Oh, a parlor-car," she said. "A great many
people always say parlor-car." Rose was almost apologetic.

"Did you come in a parlor-car?" asked Sylvia. Rose wondered why her
voice was so amazed, even aggressive.

"Why, of course; I always do," said Rose.

"I've seen them go through here," said Sylvia.

"Do you mind telling me where my bath-room is?" asked Rose, looking
vaguely at the doors. She opened one. "Oh, this is a closet!" she
cried. "What a lovely large one!"

"There ain't such a thing as a bath-room in this house," replied
Sylvia. "Abrahama White, your aunt, had means, but she always thought
she had better ways for her money than putting in bath-rooms to
freeze up in winter and run up plumbers' bills. There ain't any
bath-room, but there's plenty of good, soft rain-water from the
cistern in your pitcher on the wash-stand there, and there's a new
cake of soap and plenty of clean towels."

Rose reddened. Again sophistication felt abashed before dauntless
ignorance. She ran to the wash-stand. "Oh, I beg your pardon!" she
cried. "Of course this will do beautifully. What a charming old
wash-stand!--and the water is delightfully soft." Rose began
splashing water over her face. She had taken off her blue
travelling-gown and flung it in a heap over a chair. Sylvia
straightened it out carefully, noting with a little awe the rustle of
its silk linings; then she hung it in the closet. "I'll hang it here,
where it won't get all of a muss," said she. Already she began to
feel a pleasure which she had never known--the pleasure of chiding a
young creature from the heights of her own experience. She began
harshly, but before she had finished her voice had a tender cadence.

"Oh, thank you," said the girl, still bending over the wash-basin. "I
know I am careless with my things. You see, I have always been so
dependent upon my maid to straighten out everything for me. You will
do me good. You will teach me to be careful."

She turned around, wiping her face, and smiling at Sylvia, who felt
her very soul melt within her, although she still remained rigidly
prim, with her stiff apron-strings standing out at right angles. She
looked at the girl's slender arms and thin neck, which was pretty
though thin. "You don't weigh much, do you?" she said.

"A little over a hundred, I think."

"You must eat lots of fresh vegetables and eggs, and drink milk, and
get more flesh on your bones," said Sylvia, and her voice was full of
delight, although now--as always, lately--a vague uneasiness lurked
in her eyes. Rose, regarding her, thought, with a simple shrewdness
which was inborn, that her new cousin must have something on her
mind. She wondered if it was her aunt's death. "I suppose you thought
a good deal of my aunt who died," she ventured, timidly.

Sylvia regarded her with quick suspicion. She paled a little. "I
thought enough of her," she replied. "She had always lived here. We
were distant-related, and we never had any words, but I didn't see
much of her. She kept herself to herself, especially of late years.
Of course, I thought enough of her, and it makes me feel real bad
sometimes--although I own I can't help being glad to have so many
nice things--to think she had to go away and leave them."

"I know you must feel so," said Rose. "I suppose you feel sometimes
as if they weren't yours at all."

Sylvia turned so pale that Rose started. "Why, what is the matter?
Are you ill?" she cried, running to her. "Let me get some water for
you. You are so white."

Sylvia pushed her away. "There's nothing the matter with me," she
said. "Folks can't always be the same color unless they're painted."
She gave her head a shake as if to set herself right, and turned
resolutely towards Rose's trunk. "Can you unpack, yourself, or do you
want me to help you?" she asked.

Rose eyed the trunk helplessly, then she looked doubtfully at Sylvia.
A woman who was a relative of hers, and who lived in a really grand
old house, and was presumably well-to-do, and had no maids at
command, but volunteered to do the service herself, was an anomaly to
her.

"I'm afraid it will be too much trouble," she said, hesitatingly.
"Marie always unpacked my trunk, but you have no--"

"I guess if I had a girl I wouldn't set her to unpacking your trunk,"
said Sylvia, vigorously. "Where is your key?"

"In my bag," replied Rose, and she searched for the key in her
dark-blue, gold-trimmed bag. "Mrs. Wilton's maid, Anne, packed my
trunk for me," she said. "Anne packs very nicely. Mr. Wilton and her
sister, Miss Pamela Mack, did not know whether I ought to put on
mourning or not for Cousin Eliza, but they said it would be only
proper for me to wear black to the funeral. So I have a ready-made
black gown and hat in the trunk. I hardly knew how much to bring. I
did not know--" She stopped. She had intended to say--"how long I
should stay," but she was afraid.

Sylvia finished for her. "You can stay just as long as you are a mind
to," said she. "You can live here all the rest of your life, as far
as that is concerned. You are welcome. It would suit me, and it would
suit Mr. Whitman."

Rose looked at Sylvia in amazement as she knelt stiffly on the floor
unlocking her trunk. "Thank you, you are very kind," she said,
feebly. She had a slight sensation of fear at such a wealth of
hospitality offered her from a stranger, although she was a distant
relative.

"You know this was your own aunt's house and your own aunt's things,"
said Sylvia, beginning to remove articles from the trunk, "and I want
you to feel at home here--just as if you had a right here." The words
were cordial, but there was a curious effect as if she were repeating
a well-rehearsed lesson.

"Thank you," Rose said again, more feebly than before. She watched
Sylvia lifting out gingerly a fluffy white gown, which trailed over
her lean arm to the floor. "That is a tea-gown; I think I will put it
on now," said Rose. "It will be so comfortable, and you are not
formal here, are you?"

"Eh?"

"You are not formal here in East Westland, are you?"

"No," replied Sylvia, "we ain't formal. So you want to put on--this?"

"Yes, I think I will."

Sylvia laid the tea-gown on the bed, and turned to the trunk again.

"You know, of course, that Aunt Abrahama and mamma were estranged for
years before mamma died," said Rose. She sat before the white
dressing-table watching Sylvia, and the lovely turn of her neck and
her blond head were reflected in the glass above the vase of flowers.

"Yes, I knew something about it."

"I never did know much, except that Aunt Abrahama did not approve of
mamma's marriage, and we never saw her nor heard of her. Wasn't it
strange," she went on, confidentially, "how soon after poor mamma's
death all my money came to me?"

Sylvia turned on her. "Have you got money?" said she. "I thought you
were poor."

"Yes, I think I have a great deal of money. I don't know how much. My
lawyers take care of it, and there is a trustee, who is very kind. He
is a lawyer, too. He was a friend of poor Cousin Eliza's. His name is
McAllister. He lives in Chicago, but he comes to New York quite
often. He is quite an old gentleman, but very nice indeed. Oh yes, I
have plenty of money. I always have had ever since mamma died--at
least, since a short time after. But we were very poor, I think,
after papa died. I think we must have been. I was only a little girl
when mamma died, but I seem to remember living in a very little,
shabby place in New York--very little and shabby--and I seem to
remember a great deal of noise. Sometimes I wonder if we could have
lived beside the elevated road. It does not seem possible that we
could have been as poor as that, but sometimes I do wonder. And I
seem to remember a close smell about our rooms, and that they were
very hot, and I remember when poor mamma died, although I was so
young. I remember a great many people, who seemed very kind, came in,
and after that I was in a place with a good many other little girls.
I suppose it was a school. And then--" Rose stopped and turned white,
and a look of horror came over her face.

"What then?" asked Sylvia. "Don't you feel well, child?"

"Yes, I feel well--as well as I ever feel when I almost remember
something terrible and never quite do. Oh, I hope I never shall quite
remember. I think I should die if I did."

Sylvia stared at her. Rose's face was fairly convulsed. Sylvia rose
and hesitated a moment, then she stepped close to the girl and pulled
the fair head to her lean shoulder. "Don't; you mustn't take on so,"
she said. "Don't try to remember anything if it makes you feel like
that. You'll be down sick."

"I am trying not to remember, and always the awful dread lest I shall
comes over me," sobbed the girl. "Mr. McAllister says not to try to
remember, too, but I am so horribly afraid that I shall try in spite
of me. Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela don't know anything about it. I
never said anything about it to them. I did once to Mr. McAllister,
and I did to Cousin Eliza, and she said not to try, and now I am
telling you, I suppose because you are related to me. It came over me
all of a sudden."

Rose sobbed again. Sylvia smoothed her hair, then she shook her by
the slender, soft shoulders, and again that overpowering delight
seized her. "Come, now," she said, "don't you cry another minute. You
get up and lay your underclothes away in the bureau drawers. It's
almost time to get supper, and I can't spend much more time here."

Rose obeyed. She packed away piles of laced and embroidered things in
the bureau drawers, and under Sylvia's directions hung up her gowns
in the closet. As she did this she volunteered further information.

"I do remember one thing," she said, with a shudder, "and I always
know if I could remember back of that the dreadful thing would come
to me." She paused for a moment, then she said, in a shocked voice:
"Mrs. Whitman."

"What is it?"

"I really do remember that I was in a hospital once when I was
little. I remember the nurses and the little white beds. That was not
dreadful at all. Everybody petted me, but that was when the trying
not to remember began."

"Don't you think of it another minute," Sylvia said, sternly.

"I won't; I won't, really. I--"

"For goodness' sake, child, don't hang that heavy coat over that lace
waist--you'll ruin it!" cried Sylvia.

Rose removed the coat hurriedly, and resumed, as Sylvia took it out
of her hand: "It was right after that Cousin Eliza Farrel came, and
then all that money was left to me by a cousin of father's, who died.
Then I went to live with Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela, and I went to
school, and I went abroad, and I always had plenty, and never any
trouble, except once in a while being afraid I should remember
something dreadful. Poor Cousin Eliza Farrel taught school all the
time. I never saw her but twice after the first time. When I grew
older I tried to have her come and live with me. Mrs. Wilton and Miss
Pamela have always been very nice to me, but I have never loved them.
I could never seem to get at enough of them to love."

"You had better put on that now," said Sylvia, indicating the fluffy
mass on the bed. "I'll help you."

"I don't like to trouble you," Rose said, almost pitifully, but she
stood still while Sylvia, again with that odd sensation of delight,
slipped over the young head a lace-trimmed petticoat, and fastened
it, and then the tea-gown. The older woman dressed the girl with
exactly the same sensations that she might have experienced in
dressing her own baby for the first time. When the toilet was
completed she viewed the result, however, with something that savored
of disapproval.

Rose, after looking in the glass at her young beauty in its setting
of lace and silk, looked into Sylvia's face for the admiration which
she felt sure of seeing there, and shrank. "What is the matter? Don't
I look nice?" she faltered.

Sylvia looked critically at the sleeves of the tea-gown, which were
mere puffs of snowy lace, streaming with narrow ribbons, reaching to
the elbow. "Do they wear sleeves like that now in New York?" asked
she.

"Why, yes!" replied Rose. "This tea-gown came home only last week
from Madame Felix."

"They wear sleeves puffed at the bottom instead of the top, and a
good deal longer, in East Westland," said Sylvia.

"Why, this was made from a Paris model," said Rose, meekly. Again
sophistication was abashed before the confidence of conservatism.

"I don't know anything about Paris models," said Sylvia. "Mrs.
Greenaway gets all her patterns right from Boston."

"I hardly think madame would have made the sleeves this way unless it
was the latest," said Rose.

"I don't know anything about the latest," said Sylvia. "We folks here
in East Westland try to get the _best_." Sylvia felt as if she were
chiding her own daughter. She spoke sternly, but her eyes beamed with
pleasure. The young girl's discomfiture seemed to sweeten her very
soul.

"For mercy's sake, hold up your dress going down-stairs," she
admonished. "I swept the stairs this morning, but the dust gathers
before you can say boo, and that dress won't do up."

Rose gathered up the tail of her gown obediently, and she also
experienced a certain odd pleasure. New England blood was in her
veins. It was something new and precious to be admonished as a New
England girl might be admonished by a fond mother.

When she went into the south room, still clinging timidly to her lace
train, Horace rose. Henry sat still. He looked at her with pleased
interest, but it did not occur to him to rise. Horace always rose
when Sylvia entered a room, and Henry always rather resented it.
"Putting on society airs," he thought to himself, with a sneer.

However, he smiled involuntarily; the girl was so very pretty and so
very unlike anything which he had ever seen. "Dressed up as if she
were going to a ball, in a dress made like a night-gown," he thought,
but he smiled. As for Horace, he felt dazzled. He had scarcely
realized how pretty Rose was under the dark-blue mist of her veil. He
placed a chair for her, and began talking about the journey and the
weather while Sylvia got supper. Henry was reading the local paper.
Rose's eyes kept wandering to that. Suddenly she sprang to her feet,
was across the room in a white swirl, and snatched the paper from
Henry's hands.

"What is this, oh, what is this?" she cried out.

She had read before Horace could stop her. She turned upon him, then
upon Henry. Her face was very pale and working with emotion.

"Oh," she cried, "you only telegraphed me that poor Cousin Eliza was
dead! You did not either of you tell me she was murdered. I loved
her, although I had not seen her for years, because I have so few to
whom my love seemed to belong. I was sorry because she was dead, but
murdered!"

Rose threw herself on a chair, and sobbed and sobbed.

"I loved her; I did love her," she kept repeating, like a distressed
child. "I did love her, poor Cousin Eliza, and she was murdered. I
did love her."



Chapter IX


Horace was right in his assumption that the case against Lucinda Hart
and Hannah Simmons would never be pressed. Although it was proved
beyond a doubt that Eliza Farrel had swallowed arsenic in a
sufficiently large quantity to cause death, the utter absence of
motive was in the favor of the accused, and then the suspicion that
the poison might have been self-administered, if not with suicidal
intent, with another, steadily gained ground. Many thought Miss
Farrel's wonderful complexion might easily have been induced by the
use of arsenic.

At all events, the evidence against Lucinda and Hannah, when sifted,
was so exceedingly flimsy, and the lack of motive grew so evident,
that there was no further question of bringing them to trial. Still
the suspicion, once raised, grew like a weed, as suspicion does grow
in the ready soil of the human heart. For a month after the tragedy
it seemed as if Sylvia Whitman's prophecy concerning the falling off
of the hotel guests was destined to fail. The old hostelry was
crowded. Newspaper men and women from all parts of the country
flocked there, and also many not connected with the press, who were
morbidly curious and revelled in the sickly excitement of thinking
they might be living in the house of a poisoner. Lucinda Hart sent in
her resignation from the church choir. Her experience, the first time
she had sung after Eliza Farrel's death, did not exactly daunt her;
she was not easily daunted. But she had raised her husky contralto,
and lifted her elderly head in its flowered bonnet before that
watchful audience of old friends and neighbors, and had gone home and
written her stiffly worded note of resignation.

She attended church the following Sunday. She said to herself that
her absence might lead people to think there was some ground for the
awful charge which had been brought against her. She bought a smart
new bonnet and sat among the audience, and heard Lucy Ayres, who had
a beautiful contralto, sing in her place. Lucy sang well, and looked
very pretty in her lace blouse and white hat, but she was so pale
that people commented on it. Sylvia, who showed a fairly antagonistic
partisanship for Lucinda, spoke to her as she came out of church, and
walked with her until their roads divided. Sylvia left Henry to
follow with Rose Fletcher, who was still staying in East Westland,
and pressed close to Lucinda.

"How are you?" she said.

"Well enough; why shouldn't I be?" retorted Lucinda.

It was impossible to tell from her manner whether she was grateful
for, or resented, friendly advances. She held her head very high.
There was a stiff, jetted ornament on her new bonnet, and it stood up
like a crest. She shot a suspicious glance at Sylvia. Lucinda in
those days entertained that suspicion of suspicion which poisons the
very soul.

"I don't know why you shouldn't be," replied Sylvia. She herself cast
an angry glance at the people around them, and that angry glance was
like honey to Lucinda. "You were a fool to give up your place in the
choir," said Sylvia, still with that angry, wandering gaze. "I'd
sung. I'd shown 'em; and I'd sung out of tune if I'd wanted to."

"You don't know what it was like last Sunday," said Lucinda then. She
did not speak complainingly or piteously. There was proud strength in
her voice, but it was emphatic.

"I guess I do know," said Sylvia. "I saw everybody craning their
necks, and all them strangers. You've got a lot of strangers at the
hotel, haven't you, Lucinda?"

"Yes," said Lucinda, and there was an echo in her monosyllable like
an expletive.

Sylvia nodded sympathizingly. "Some of them write for the papers, I
suppose?" said she.

"Some of them. I know it's my bread-and-butter to have them, but I
never saw such a parcel of folks. Talk about eyes in the backs of
heads, they're all eyes and all ears. Sometimes I think they ain't
nothing except eyes and ears and tongue. But there's a lot besides
who like to think maybe they're eating poison. I know I'm watched
every time I stir up a mite of cake, but I stir away."

"You must have your hands full."

"Yes; I had to get Abby Smith to come in and help."

"She ain't good for much."

"No, she ain't. She's thinkin' all the time of how she looks, instead
of what she's doing. She waits on table, though, and helps wash
dishes. She generally forgets to pass the vegetables till the meat is
all et up, and they're lucky if they get any butter; but I can't help
it. They only pay five dollars a week, and get a lot of enjoyment out
of watching me and Hannah, and they can't expect everything."

The two women walked along the country road. There were many other
people besides the church-going throng in their Sunday best, but they
seemed isolated, although closely watched. Presently, however, a
young man, well dressed in light gray, with a white waistcoat,
approached them.

"Why, good-day, Miss Hart!" he said, raising his hat.

Lucinda nodded stiffly and walked on. She did not speak to him, but
to Sylvia. "He is staying at the hotel. He writes for a New York
paper," she informed Sylvia, distinctly.

The young man laughed. "And Miss Hart is going to write for it, too,"
he said, pleasantly and insinuatingly. "She is going to write an
article upon how it feels to be suspected of a crime when one is
innocent, and it will be the leading feature in next Sunday's paper.
She is to have her picture appear with it, too, and photographs of
her famous hotel and the room in which the murder was said to have
been committed, aren't you, Miss Hart?"

"Yes," replied Lucinda, with stolidity.

Sylvia stared with amazement. "Why, Lucinda!" she gasped.

"When I find out folks won't take no, I give 'em yes," said Lucinda,
grimly.

"I knew I could finally persuade Miss Hart," said the young man,
affably. He was really very much of a gentleman. He touched his hat,
striking into a pleasant by-path across a field to a wood beyond.

"He's crazy over the country," remarked Lucinda; and then she was
accosted again, by another gentleman. This time he was older and
stouter, and somewhat tired in his aspect, but every whit as genially
persuasive.

"He writes for a New York paper," said Lucinda to Sylvia, in exactly
the same tone which she had used previously. "He wants me to write a
piece for his paper on my first twenty-four hours under suspicion of
crime."

"And you are going to write it, aren't you, Miss Hart?" asked the
gentleman.

"Yes," replied Lucinda, with alacrity.

This time the gentleman looked a trifle suspicious. He pressed his
inquiry. "Can you let us have the copy by Wednesday?" he asked.

"Yes," said Lucinda. Her "yes" had the effect of a snap.

The gentleman talked a little more at length with regard to his
article, and Lucinda never failed with her ready "yes."

They were almost at the turn of the road, where Sylvia would leave
Lucinda, when a woman appeared. She was young, but she looked old,
and her expression was one of spiritual hunger.

"This lady writes for a Boston paper," said Lucinda. "She came
yesterday. She wants me to write a piece for her paper upon women's
unfairness to women."

"Based upon the late unfortunate occurrence at Miss Hart's hotel,"
said the woman.

"Yes," said Lucinda, "of course; everything is based on that. She
wants me to write a piece upon how ready women are to accuse other
women of doing things they didn't do."

"And you are going to write it?" said the woman, eagerly.

"Yes," said Lucinda.

"Oh, thank you! you are a perfect dear," said the woman. "I am so
much pleased, and so will Mr. Evans be when he hears the news. Now I
must ask you to excuse me if I hurry past, for I ought to wire him at
once. I can get back to Boston to-night."

The woman had left them, with a swish of a frilled silk petticoat
under a tailored skirt, when Sylvia looked at Lucinda. "You ain't
goin' to?" said she.

"No."

"But you said so."

"You'd say anything to get rid of them. I've said no till I found out
they wouldn't take it, so then I began to say yes. I guess I've said
yes, in all, to about seventeen."

"And you don't mean to write a thing?"

"I guess I ain't going to begin writing for the papers at my time of
life."

"But what will they do?"

"They won't get the pieces."

"Can't they sue you, or anything?"

"Let them sue if they want to. After what I've been through lately I
guess I sha'n't mind that."

"And you are telling every one of them you'll write a piece?"

"Of course I am. It's the only thing they'll let me tell them. I want
to get rid of them somehow."

Sylvia looked at Lucinda anxiously. "Is it true that Albion Bennet
has left?" she said.

"Yes; he was afraid of getting poisoned. Mrs. Jim Jones has taken
him. I reckon I sha'n't have many steady boarders after this has
quieted down."

"But how are you going to get along, Lucinda?"

"I shall get along. Everybody gets along. What's heaped on you you
have to get along with. I own the hotel, and I shall keep more hens
and raise more garden truck, and let Hannah go if I can't pay her. I
shall have some business, enough to keep me alive, I guess."

"Is it true that Amos Quimby has jilted Hannah on account of--?"

"Guess so. He hasn't been near her since."

"Ain't it a shame?"

"Hannah's got to live with what's heaped on her shoulders, too," said
Lucinda. "Folks had ought to be thankful when the loads come from
other people's hands, instead of their own, and make the best of it.
Hannah has got a good appetite. It ain't going to kill her. She can
go away from East Westland by-and-by if she wants to, and get another
beau. Folks didn't suspect her much, anyway. I've got the brunt of
it."

"Lucinda," said Sylvia, earnestly. "Folks can't really believe you'd
go and do such a thing."

"It's like flies after molasses," said Lucinda. "I never felt I was
so sweet before in my life."

"What can they think you'd go and poison a good, steady boarder like
that for?"

"She paid a dollar a day," said Lucinda.

"I know she did."

"And I liked her," said Lucinda. "I know lots of folks didn't, but I
did. I know what folks said, and I'll own I found things in her room,
but I don't care what folks do to their outsides as long as their
insides are right. Miss Farrel was a real good woman, and she had a
kind of hard time, too."

"Why, I thought she had a real good place in the high-school; and
teachers earn their money dreadful easy."

"It wasn't that."

"What was it?"

Lucinda hesitated. "Well," she said, finally, "it can't do her any
harm, now she's dead and gone, and I don't know as it was anything
against her, anyway. She just set her eyes by your boarder."

"Not Mr. Allen? You don't mean Mr. Allen, Lucinda?"

"What other boarder have you had? I've known about it for a long
time. Hannah and me both have known, but we never opened our lips,
and I don't want it to go any further now."

"How did you find out?"

"By keeping my eyes and ears open. How does anybody find out
anything?"

"I don't believe Mr. Allen ever once thought of her," said Sylvia,
and there was resentment in her voice.

"Of course he didn't. Maybe he'll take a shine to that girl you've
got with you now."

"Neither one of them has even thought of such a thing," declared
Sylvia, and her voice was almost violent.

"Well, I don't know," Lucinda said, indifferently. "I have had too
much to look out for of my own affairs since the girl came to know
anything about that. I only thought of their being in the same house.
I always had sort of an idea myself that maybe Lucy Ayres would be
the one."

"I hadn't," said Sylvia. "Not but she--well, she looked real sick
to-day. She didn't look fit to stand up there and sing. I should
think her mother would be worried about her. And she don't sing half
as well as you do."

"Yes, she does," replied Lucinda. "She sings enough sight better than
I do."

"Well, I don't know much about music," admitted Sylvia. "I can't tell
if anybody gets off the key."

"I can," said Lucinda, firmly. "She sings enough sight better than I
can, but I sang plenty well enough for them, and if I hadn't been so
mad at the way I've been treated I'd kept on. Now they can get on
without me. Lucy Ayres does look miserable. There's consumption in
her family, too. Well, it's good for her lungs to sing, if she don't
overdo it. Good-bye, Sylvia."

"Good-bye," said Sylvia. She hesitated a moment, then she said:
"Don't you mind, Lucinda. Henry and I think just the same of you as
we've always thought, and there's a good many besides us. You haven't
any call to feel bad."

"I don't feel bad," said Lucinda. "I've got spunk enough and grit
enough to bear any load that I 'ain't heaped on my own shoulders, and
the Lord knows I 'ain't heaped this. Don't you worry about me,
Sylvia. Good-bye."

Lucinda went her way. She held her nice black skirt high, but her
plodding feet raised quite a cloud of dust. Her shoulders were thrown
back, her head was very erect, the jetted ornament on her bonnet
shone like a warrior's crest. She stepped evenly out of sight, as
evenly as if she had been a soldier walking in line and saying to
himself, "Left, right; left, right."



Chapter X


When Sylvia reached home she found Rose Fletcher and Horace Allen
sitting on the bench under the oak-trees of the grove north of the
house. She marched out there and stood before them, holding her
fringed parasol in such a way that it made a concave frame for her
stern, elderly face and thin shoulders. "Rose," said she, "you had
better go into the house and lay down till dinner-time. You have been
walking in the sun, and it is warm, and you look tired."

She spoke at once affectionately and severely. It seemed almost
inconceivable that this elderly country woman could speak in such
wise to the city-bred girl in her fashionable attire, with her air of
self-possession.

But the girl looked up at her as if she loved her, and answered, in
just the way in which Sylvia liked her to answer, with a sort of
pretty, childish petulance, defiant, yet yielding. "I am not in the
least tired," said she, "and it did not hurt me to walk in the sun,
and I like to sit here under the trees."

Rose was charming that morning. Her thick, fair hair was rolled back
from her temples, which had at once something noble and childlike
about them. Her face was as clear as a cameo. She was dressed in
mourning for her aunt, but her black robe was thin and the fine
curves of her shoulders and arms were revealed, and the black lace of
her wide hat threw her fairness into relief like a setting of onyx.

"You had better go into the house," said Sylvia, her eyes stern, her
mouth smiling. A maternal instinct which dominated her had awakened
suddenly in the older woman's heart. She adored the girl to such an
extent that the adoration fairly pained her. Rose herself might
easily have found this exacting affection, this constant
watchfulness, irritating, but she found it sweet. She could scarcely
remember her mother, but the memory had always been as one of lost
love. Now she seemed to have found it again. She fairly coquetted
with this older woman who loved her, and whom she loved, with that
charming coquettishness sometimes seen in a daughter towards her
mother. She presumed upon this affection which she felt to be so
staple. She affronted Sylvia with a delicious sense of her own power
over her and an underlying affection, which had in it the protective
instinct of youth which dovetailed with the protective instinct of
age.

It had been planned that she was to return to New York immediately
after Miss Farrel's funeral. In fact, her ticket had been bought and
her trunk packed, when a telegram arrived rather late at night. Rose
had gone to bed when Sylvia brought it up to her room. "Don't be
scared," she said, holding the yellow envelope behind her. Rose
stared at her, round-eyed, from her white nest. She turned pale.

"What is it?" she said, tremulously.

"There's no need for you to go and think anything has happened until
you read it," Sylvia said. "You must be calm."

"Oh, what is it?"

"A telegram," replied Sylvia, solemnly. "You must be calm."

Rose laughed. "Oh, Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela are forever sending
telegrams," she said. "Very likely it is only to say somebody will
meet me at the Grand Central."

Sylvia looked at the girl in amazement, as she coolly opened and read
the telegram. Rose's face changed expression. She regarded the yellow
paper thoughtfully a moment before she spoke.

"If anything has happened, you must be calm," said Sylvia, looking at
her anxiously. "Of course you have lived with those people so many
years you have learned to think a good deal of them; that is only
natural; but, after all, they ain't your own."

Rose laughed again, but in rather a perplexed fashion. "Nothing has
happened," she said--"at least, nothing that you are thinking
of--but--"

"But what?"

"Why, Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela are going to sail for Genoa
to-morrow, and that puts an end to my going to New York to them."

A great brightness overspread Sylvia's face. "Well, you ain't left
stranded," she said. "You've got your home here."

Rose looked gratefully at her. "You do make me feel as if I had, and
I don't know what I should do if you did not, but"--she frowned
perplexedly--"all the same, one would not have thought they would
have gone off in this way without giving me a moment's notice," she
said, in rather an injured fashion, "after I have lived with them so
long. I never thought they really cared much about me. Mrs. Wilton
and Miss Pamela look too hard at their own tracks to get much
interest in anybody or anything outside; but starting off in this
way! They might have thought that I would like to go--at least they
might have told me."

Suddenly her frown of perplexity cleared away. "I know what has
happened," she said, with a nod to Sylvia. "I know exactly what has
happened."

"What?"

"Mrs. Wilton's and Miss Pamela's aunt Susan has died, and they've got
the money. They have been waiting for it ever since I have been with
them. Their aunt was over ninety, and it did begin to seem as if she
would never die."

"Was she very rich?"

"Oh, very; millions; and she never gave a cent to Mrs. Wilton and
Miss Pamela. She has died, and they have just made up their minds to
go away. They have always said they should live abroad as soon as
they were able." Rose looked a little troubled for a moment, then she
laughed. "They kept me as long as they needed me," said she, with a
pleasant cynicism, "and I don't know but I had lived with them long
enough to suit myself. Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela were always nice
to me, but sometimes--well, sometimes I felt so outside them that I
was awfully lonesome. And Mrs. Wilton always did just what you knew
she would, and so did Miss Pamela, and it was a little like living
with machines that were wound up to do the right thing by you, but
didn't do it of their own accord. Now they have run down, just like
machines. I know as well as I want to that Aunt Susan has died and
left them her money. I shall get a letter to-morrow telling me about
it. I think myself that Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela will get married
now. They never gave up, you know. Mrs. Wilton's husband died ages
ago, and she was as much of an old maid as Miss Pamela, and neither
of them would give up. They will be countesses or duchesses or
something within a year."

Rose laughed, and Sylvia beamed upon her. "If you feel that you can
stay here," she said, timidly.

"_If_ I feel that I can," said Rose. She stretched out her slender
arms, from which the lace-trimmed sleeves of her night-gown fell away
to the shoulder, and Sylvia let them close around her thin neck and
felt the young cheek upon her own with a rapture like a lover's.

"Those folks she lived with in New York are going to Europe
to-morrow," she told Henry, when she was down-stairs again, "and they
have treated that poor child mean. They have never told her a word
about it until now. She says she thinks their rich aunt has died and
left them her money, and they have just cleared out and left her."

"Well, she can stay with us as long as she is contented," said Henry.

"I rather guess she can," said Sylvia.

Henry regarded her with the wondering expression which was often on
his face nowadays. He had glimpses of the maternal depths of his
wife's heart, which, while not understanding, he acquiesced in; but
there was something else which baffled him.

But now for Sylvia came a time of contentment, apparently beyond
anything which had ever come into her life. She fairly revelled in
her possession of Rose, and the girl in her turn seemed to
reciprocate. Although the life in East Westland was utterly at
variance with the life she had known, she settled down in it, of
course with sundry hitches of adjustment. For instance, she could not
rid herself at first of the conviction that she must have, as she had
always had, a maid.

"I don't know how to go to work," she said to Sylvia one day. "Of
course I must have a maid, but I wonder if I had better advertise or
write some of my friends. Betty Morrison may know of some one, or
Sally Maclean. Betty and Sally always seem to be able to find ways
out of difficulties. Perhaps I had better write them. Maybe it would
be safer than to advertise."

Sylvia and Rose were sitting together in the south room that
afternoon. Sylvia looked pathetically and wistfully at the girl.
"What do you want a maid for?" she asked, timidly.

Rose stared. "What for? Why, what I always want a maid for: to attend
to my wardrobe and assist me in dressing, to brush my hair,
and--everything," ended Rose, comprehensively.

Sylvia continued to regard her with that wistful, pathetic look.

"I can sew braid on your dresses, and darn your stockings, and button
up your dresses, and brush your hair, too, just as well as anybody,"
she said.

Rose ran over to her and went down on her knees beside her. "You
dear," she said, "as if you didn't have enough to do now!"

"This is a very convenient house to do work in," said Sylvia, "and
now I have my washing and ironing done, I've got time on my hands. I
like to sew braid on and darn stockings, and always did, and it's
nothing at all to fasten up your waists in the back; you know that."

"You dear," said Rose again. She nestled her fair head against
Sylvia's slim knees. Sylvia thrilled. She touched the soft puff of
blond hair timidly with her bony fingers. "But I have always had a
maid," Rose persisted, in a somewhat puzzled way. Rose could hardly
conceive of continued existence without a maid. She had managed very
well for a few days, but to contemplate life without one altogether
seemed like contemplating the possibility of living without a comb
and hair-brush. Sylvia's face took on a crafty expression.

"Well," said she, "if you must have a maid, write your friends, and I
will have another leaf put in the dining-table."

Rose raised her head and stared at her. "Another leaf in the
dining-table?" said she, vaguely.

"Yes. I don't think there's room for more than four without another
leaf."

"But--my maid would not eat at the table with us."

"Would she be willing to eat in the kitchen--cold victuals--after we
had finished?"

Rose looked exceedingly puzzled. "No, she would not; at least, no
maid I ever had would have," she admitted.

"Where is she going to eat, then? Would she wait till after we were
through and eat in the dining-room?"

"I don't believe she would like that, either."

"Where is she going to eat?" demanded Sylvia, inexorably.

Rose gazed at her.

"She could have a little table in here, or in the parlor," said
Sylvia.

Rose laughed. "Oh, that would never do!" said she. "Of course there
was a servants' dining-room at Mrs. Wilton's, and there always is in
a hotel, you know. I never thought of that."

"She has got to eat somewhere. Where is she going to eat?" asked
Sylvia, pressing the question.

Rose got up and kissed her. "Oh, well, I won't bother about it for a
while, anyway," said she. "Now I think of it, Betty is sure to be off
to Newport by now, and Sally must be about to sail for Paris to buy
her trousseau. She is going to marry Dicky van Snyde in the autumn
(whatever she sees in him)! So I doubt if either of them could do
anything about a maid for me. I won't bother at all now, but I am not
going to let you wait upon me. I am going to help you."

Sylvia took one of Rose's little hands and looked at it. "I guess you
can't do much with hands like yours," said she, admiringly, and with
an odd tone of resentment, as if she were indignant at the mere
suggestion of life's demanding service from this dainty little
creature, for whom she was ready to immolate herself.

However, Rose had in her a vein of persistency. She insisted upon
wiping the dishes and dusting. She did it all very badly, but Sylvia
found the oddest amusement in chiding her for her mistakes and in
setting them right herself. She would not have been nearly as well
pleased had Rose been handy about the house. One evening Henry caught
Sylvia wiping over all the dishes which Rose had wiped, and which
were still damp, the while she was fairly doubled up with suppressed
mirth.

"What in creation ails you, Sylvia?" asked Henry.

She extended towards him a plate on which the water stood in drops.
"Just see this plate that dear child thinks she has wiped," she
chuckled.

"You women do beat the Dutch," said Henry.

However, Rose did prove herself an adept in one respect. She had
never sewed much, but she had an inventive genius in dress, and, when
she once took up her needle, used it deftly.

When Sylvia confided to her her aspiration concerning the pink silk
which she had found among Abrahama's possessions, Rose did not laugh
at all, but she looked at her thoughtfully.

"Don't you think it would be suitable if I had it made with some
black lace?" asked Sylvia, wistfully. "Henry thinks it is too young
for me, but--"

"Not black," Rose said, decisively. The two were up in the attic
beside the old chest of finery. Rose took out an old barege of an
ashes-of-roses color. She laid a fold of the barege over the pink
silk, then she looked radiantly at Sylvia.

"It will make a perfectly lovely gown for you if you use the pink for
a petticoat," said she, "and have the gown made of this delicious old
stuff."

"The pink for a petticoat?" gasped Sylvia.

"It is the only way," said Rose; "and you must have gray gloves, and
a bonnet of gray with just one pale-pink rose in it. Don't you
understand? Then you will harmonize with your dress. Your hair is
gray, and there is pink in your cheeks. You will be lovely in it.
There must be a very high collar and some soft creamy lace, because
there is still some yellow left in your hair."

Rose nodded delightedly at Sylvia, and the dressmaker came and made
the gown according to Rose's directions. Sylvia wore it for the first
time when she walked from church with Lucinda Hart and found Rose and
Horace sitting in the grove. After Rose had replied to Sylvia's
advice that she should go into the house, she looked at her with the
pride of proprietorship. "Doesn't she look simply lovely?" she asked
Horace.

"She certainly does," replied the young man. He really gazed
admiringly at the older woman, who made, under the glimmering shadows
of the oaks, a charming nocturne of elderly womanhood. The faint pink
on her cheeks seemed enhanced by the pink seen dimly through the
ashen shimmer of her gown; the creamy lace harmonized with her
yellow-gray hair. She was in her own way as charming as Rose in hers.

Sylvia actually blushed, and hung her head with a graceful sidewise
motion. "I'm too old to be made a fool of," said she, "and I've got a
good looking-glass." But she smiled the smile of a pretty woman
conscious of her own prettiness. Then all three laughed, although
Horace but a moment before had looked very grave, and now he was
quite white. Sylvia noticed it. "Why, what ails you, Mr. Allen?" she
said. "Don't you feel well?"

"Perfectly well."

"You look pale."

"It is the shadow of the oaks."

Sylvia noticed a dainty little white box in Rose's lap. "What is
that?" she asked.

"It is a box of candy that dear, sweet Lucy Ayres who sang to-day
made her own self and gave to me," replied Rose. "She came up to me
on the way home from church and slipped it into my hand, and I hardly
know her at all. I do think it is too dear of her for anything. She
is such a lovely girl, and her voice is beautiful." Rose looked
defiantly at Horace. "Mr. Allen has been trying to make me promise
not to eat this nice candy," she said.

"I don't think candy is good for anybody, and girls eat altogether
too much of it," said Horace, with a strange fervor which the
occasion hardly seemed to warrant.

"Wouldn't I know he was a school-teacher when I heard him speak like
that, even if nobody had ever told me?" said Rose. "Of course I am
going to eat this candy that dear Lucy made her own self and gave me.
I should be very ungrateful not to, and I love candy, too."

"I will send for some to Boston to-morrow," cried Horace, eagerly.

Rose regarded him with amazement. "Why, Mr. Allen, you just said you
did not approve of candy at all, and here you are proposing to send
for some for me," she said, "when I have this nice home-made candy, a
great deal purer, because one knows exactly what is in it, and you
say I must not eat this."

Rose took up a sugared almond daintily and put it to her lips, but
Horace was too quick for her. Before she knew what he was about he
had dashed it from her hand, and in the tumult the whole box of candy
was scattered. Horace trampled on it, it was impossible to say
whether purposely or accidentally, in the struggle.

Both Rose and Sylvia regarded him with amazement, mixed with
indignation.

"Why, Mr. Allen!" said Rose. Then she added, haughtily: "Mr. Allen,
you take altogether too much upon yourself. You have spoiled my
candy, and you forget that you have not the least right to dictate to
me what I shall or shall not eat."

Sylvia also turned upon Horace. "Home-made candy wouldn't hurt her,"
she said. "Why, Mr. Allen, what do you mean?"

"Nothing. I am very sorry," said Horace. Then he walked away without
another word, and entered the house. The girl and the woman stood
looking at each other.

"What did he do such a thing for?" asked Rose.

"Goodness knows," said Sylvia.

Rose was quite pale. She began to look alarmed. "You don't suppose
he's taken suddenly insane or anything?" said she.

"My land! no," said Sylvia. "Men do act queer sometimes."

"I should think so, if this is a sample of it," said Rose, eying the
trampled candy. "Why, he ground his heel into it! What right had he
to tell me I should or should not eat it?" she said, indignantly,
again.

"None at all. Men are queer. Even Mr. Whitman is queer sometimes."

"If he is as queer as that, I don't see how you have lived with him
so long. Did he ever make you drop a nice box of candy somebody had
given you, and trample on it, and then walk off?"

"No, I don't know as he ever did; but men do queer things."

"I don't like Mr. Allen at all," said Rose, walking beside Sylvia
towards the house. "Not at all. I don't like him as well as Mr. James
Duncan."

Sylvia looked at her with quick alarm. "The man who wrote you last
week?"

"Yes, and wanted to know if there was a hotel here so he could come."

"I thought--" began Sylvia.

"Yes, I had begun the letter, telling him the hotel wasn't any good,
because I knew he would know what that meant--that there was no use
in his asking me to marry him again, because I never would; but now I
think I shall tell him the hotel is not so bad, after all," said Rose.

"But you don't mean--"

"I don't know what I do mean," said Rose, nervously. "Yes, I do know
what I mean. I always know what I mean, but I don't know what men
mean making me drop candy I have had given me, and trampling on it,
and men don't know that I know what I mean." Rose was almost crying.

"Go up-stairs and lay down a little while before dinner," said
Sylvia, anxiously.

"No," replied Rose; "I am going to help you. Don't, please, think I
am crying because I feel badly. It is because I am angry. I am going
to set the table."

But Rose did not set the table. She forgot all about it when she had
entered the south room and found Henry Whitman sitting there with the
Sunday paper. She sat down opposite and looked at him with her clear,
blue, childlike eyes. She had come to call him Uncle Henry.

"Uncle Henry?" said she, interrogatively, and waited.

Henry looked across at her and smiled with the somewhat abashed
tenderness which he always felt for this girl, whose environment had
been so very different from his and his wife's. "Well?" he said.

"Uncle Henry, do you think a man can tell another man's reasons for
doing a queer thing better than a woman can?"

"Perhaps."

"I almost know a woman could tell why a woman did a queer thing,
better than a man could," said Rose, reflectively. She hesitated a
little.

Henry waited, his worn, pleasant face staring at her over a vividly
colored page of the paper.

"Suppose," said Rose, "another woman had given Aunt Sylvia a box of
candy which she had made herself, real nice candy, and suppose the
woman who had given it to her was lovely, and you had knocked a piece
of candy from Aunt Sylvia's mouth just as she was going to taste it,
and had startled her so you made her drop the whole box, and then set
your heel hard on the pieces; what would you have done it for?"

The girl's face wore an expression of the keenest inquiry. Henry
looked at her, wrinkling his forehead. "If another woman had given
Sylvia a box of candy she had made, and I knocked a piece from her
hand just as she was going to taste it, and made her drop the whole
box, and had trampled all the rest of the candy underfoot, what
should I have done it for?" he repeated.

"Yes."

Henry looked at her. He heard a door shut up-stairs. "I shouldn't
have done it," he said.

"But suppose you had done it?"

"I shouldn't have."

Rose shrugged her shoulders. "You are horrid, Uncle Henry," she said.

"But I shouldn't have done it," repeated Henry. He heard Horace's
step on the stair. Rose got up and ran out of the room by another
door from that which Horace entered. Horace sat down in the chair
which Rose had just vacated. He looked pale and worried. The eyes of
the two men met. Henry's eyes asked a question. Horace answered it.

"I am in such a devil of a mess as never man was yet, I believe," he
said.

Henry nodded gravely.

"The worst of it is I can't tell a living mortal," Horace said, in a
whisper. "I am afraid even to think it."

At dinner Rose sat with her face averted from Horace. She never spoke
once to him. As they rose from the table she made an announcement. "I
am going to run over and see Lucy Ayres," she said. "I am going to
tell her an accident happened to my candy, and maybe she will give me
some more."

Henry saw Horace's face change. "Candy is not good for girls; it
spoils their complexion. I have just been reading about it in the
Sunday paper," said Henry. Sylvia unexpectedly proved his ally. Rose
had not eaten much dinner, although it had been an especially nice
one, and she felt anxious about her.

"I don't think you ought to eat candy when you have so little
appetite for good, wholesome meat and vegetables," she said.

"I want to see Lucy, too," said Rose. "I am going over there. It is a
lovely afternoon. I have nothing I want to read and nothing to do. I
am going over there."

Henry's eyes questioned Horace's, which said, plainly, to the other
man, "For God's sake, don't let her go; don't let her go!"

Rose had run up-stairs for her parasol. Horace turned away. He
understood that Henry would help him. "Don't let her go over there
this afternoon," said Henry to Sylvia, who looked at him in the
blankest amazement.

"Why not, I'd like to know?" asked Sylvia.

"Don't let her go," repeated Henry.

Sylvia looked suspiciously from one man to the other. The only
solution which a woman could put upon such a request immediately
occurred to her. She said to herself, "Hm! Mr. Allen wants Rose to
stay at home so he can see her himself, and Henry knows it."

She stiffened her neck. Down deep in her heart was a feeling more
seldom in women's hearts than in men's. She would not have owned that
she did not wish to part with this new darling of her heart--who had
awakened within it emotions of whose strength the childless woman had
never dreamed. There was also another reason, which she would not
admit even to herself. Had Rose been, indeed, her daughter, and she
had possessed her from the cradle to womanhood, she would probably
have been as other mothers, but now Rose was to her as the infant she
had never borne. She felt the intense jealousy of ownership which the
mother feels over the baby in her arms. She wished to snatch Rose
from every clasp except her own.

She decided at once that it was easy to see through the plans of
Horace and her husband, and she determined to thwart them. "I don't
see why she shouldn't go," she said. "It is a lovely afternoon. The
walk will do her good. Lucy Ayres is a real nice girl, and of course
Rose wants to see girls of her own age now and then."

"It is Sunday," said Henry. He felt and looked like a hypocrite as he
spoke, but the distress in Horace's gaze was too much for him.

Sylvia sniffed. "Sunday," said she. "Good land! what has come over
you, Henry Whitman? It has been as much as I could do to get you to
go to meeting the last ten years, and now all of a sudden you turn
around and think it's wicked for a young girl to run in and see
another young girl Sunday afternoon." Sylvia sniffed again very
distinctly, and then Rose entered the room.

Her clear, fair face looked from one to another from under her black
hat. "What is the matter?" she asked.

Sylvia patted her on the shoulder. "Nothing is the matter," said she.
"Run along and have a good time, but you had better be home by five
o'clock. There is a praise meeting to-night, and I guess we'll all
want to go, and I am going to have supper early."

After Rose had gone and Sylvia had left the room, the two men looked
at each other. Horace was ashy pale. Henry's face showed alarm and
astonishment. "What is it?" he whispered.

"Come out in the grove and have a smoke," said Horace, with a look
towards the door through which Sylvia had gone.

Henry nodded. He gathered up his pipe and tobacco from the table, and
the two men sauntered out of the house into the grove. But even there
not much was said. Both smoked in silence, sitting on the bench,
before Horace opened his lips in response to Henry's inquiry.

"I don't know what it is, and I don't know that it is anything, and
that is the worst of it," he said, gloomily; "and I can't see my way
to telling any mortal what little I do know that leads me to fear
that it is something, although I would if I were sure and actually
knew beyond doubt that there was--" He stopped abruptly and blew a
ring of smoke from his cigar.

"Something is queer about my wife lately," said Henry, in a low voice.

"What?"

"That's just it. I feel something as you do. It may be nothing at
all. I tell you what, young man, when women talk, as women are
intended by an overruling Providence to talk, men know where they are
at, but when a woman doesn't talk men know where they ain't."

"In my case there has been so much talk that I seem to be in a fog of
it, and can't see a blessed thing sufficiently straight to know
whether it is big enough to bother about or little enough to let
alone; but I can't repeat the talk--no man could," said Horace.

"In my case there ain't talk enough," said Henry. "I ain't in a fog;
I'm in pitch darkness."



Chapter XI


The two men sat for some time out in the grove. It was very pleasant
there. The air was unusually still, and only the tops of the trees
whitened occasionally in a light puff of wind like a sigh. Now and
then a carriage or an automobile passed on the road beyond, but not
many of them. It was not a main thoroughfare. The calls and quick
carols of the birds, punctuated with sharp trills of insects, were
almost the only sounds heard. Now and then Sylvia's face glanced at
them from a house window, but it was quickly withdrawn. She never
liked men to be in close conclave without a woman to superintend, yet
she could not have told why. She had a hazy impression, as she might
have had if they had been children, that some mischief was afoot.

"Sitting out there all this time, and smoking, and never seeming to
speak a word," she said to herself, as she returned to her seat
beside a front window in the south room and took up her book. She was
reading with a mild and patronizing interest a book in which the
heroine did nothing which she would possibly have done under given
circumstances, and said nothing which she would have said, and was,
moreover, a distinctly different personality from one chapter to
another, yet the whole had a charm for the average woman reader.
Henry had flung it aside in contempt. Sylvia thought it beautiful,
possibly for the reason that her own hard sense was sometimes a
strenuous burden, and in reading this she was forced to put it behind
her. However, the book did not prevent her from returning every now
and then to her own life and the happenings in it. Hence her stealthy
journeys across the house and peeps at the men in the grove. If they
were nettled by a sense of feminine mystery, she reciprocated. "What
on earth did they want to stop Rose from going to see Lucy for?"
seemed to stare at her in blacker type than the characters of the
book.

Presently, when she saw Horace pass the window and disappear down the
road, she laid the book on the table, with a slip of paper to keep
the place, and hurried out to the grove. She found Henry leisurely
coming towards the house. "Where has he gone?" she inquired, with a
jerk of her shoulder towards the road.

"Mr. Allen?"

"Yes."

"How should I know?"

"Don't you know?"

"Maybe I do," said Henry, smiling at Sylvia with his smile of
affection and remembrance that she was a woman.

"Why don't you tell?"

"Now, Sylvia," said Henry, "you must remember that Mr. Allen is not a
child. He is a grown man, and if he takes it into his head to go
anywhere you can't say anything."

Sylvia looked at Henry with a baffled expression. "I think he might
spend his time a good deal more profitably Sunday afternoon than
sitting under the trees and smoking, or going walking," said she,
rashly and inconsequentially. "If he would only sit down and read
some good book."

"You can't dictate to Mr. Allen what he shall or shall not do," Henry
repeated.

"Why didn't you want Rose to go to Lucy's?" asked Sylvia, making a
charge in an entirely different quarter.

Henry scorned to lie. "I don't know," he replied, which was the
perfect truth as far as it went. It did not go quite far enough, for
he did not add that he did not know why Horace Allen did not want her
to go, and that was his own reason.

However, Sylvia could not possibly fathom that. She sniffed with her
delicate nostrils, as if she actually smelled some questionable odor
of character. "You men have mighty queer streaks, that's all I've got
to say," she returned.

When they were in the house again she resumed her book, reading every
word carefully, and Henry took up the Sunday paper, which he had not
finished. The thoughts of both, however, turned from time to time
towards Horace. Sylvia did not know where he had gone. She did not
suspect. Henry knew, but he did not know why. Horace had sprung
suddenly to his feet and caught up his hat as the two men had been
sitting under the trees. Henry had emitted a long puff of tobacco
smoke and looked inquiringly at him through the filmy blue of it.

"I can't stand it another minute," said Horace, almost with violence.
"I've got to know what is going on. I am going to the Ayres's myself.
I don't care what they think. I don't care what she thinks. I don't
care what anybody thinks." With that he was gone.

Henry took another puff at his pipe. It showed the difference between
the masculine and the feminine point of view that Henry did not for
one moment attach a sentimental reason to Horace's going. He realized
Rose's attractions. The very probable supposition that she and Horace
might fall in love with and marry each other had occurred to him, but
this he knew at once had nothing to do with that. He turned the whole
over and over in his mind, with no result. He lacked enough premises
to arrive at conclusions. He had started for the house and his Sunday
paper when he met Sylvia, and had resolved to put it all out of his
mind. But he was not quite able. There is a masculine curiosity as
well as a feminine, and one is about as persistent as the other.

Meantime Horace was walking down the road towards the Ayres house. It
was a pretty, much-ornamented white cottage, with a carefully kept
lawn and shade trees. At one side was an old-fashioned garden with an
arbor. In this arbor, as Horace drew near, he saw the sweep of
feminine draperies. It seemed to him that the arbor was full of
women. In reality there were only three--Lucy, her mother, and Rose.

When Rose had rung the door-bell she had been surprised by what
sounded like a mad rush to answer her ring. Mrs. Ayres opened the
door. She looked white and perturbed, and behind her showed Lucy's
face, flushed and angry.

"I knew it was Miss Fletcher; I told you so, mother," said Lucy, and
her low, sweet voice rang out like an angry bird's with a sudden
break for the high notes.

Mrs. Ayres kept her self-possession of manner, although her
face showed not only nervousness but something like terror.
"Good-afternoon, Miss Fletcher," she said. "Please walk in."

"She said for me to call her Rose," cried Lucy. "Please come in,
Rose. I am glad to see you."

In spite of the cordial words the girl's voice was strange. Rose
stared from daughter to mother and back again. "If you were engaged,"
she said, rather coldly, "if you would prefer that I come some other
time--"

"No, indeed," cried Lucy, "no other time. Yes, every other time. What
am I saying? But I want you now, too. Come right up to my room, Rose.
I know you will excuse my wrapper and my bed's being tumbled. I have
been lying down. Come right up."

Rose followed Lucy, and to her astonishment became aware that Lucy's
mother was following her. Mrs. Ayres entered the room with the two
girls. Lucy looked impatiently at her, and spoke as Rose wondered any
daughter could speak. "Rose and I have some things to talk over,
mother," she said.

"Nothing, I guess, that your mother cannot hear," returned Mrs.
Ayres, with forced pleasantry. She sat down, and Lucy flung herself
petulantly upon the bed, where she had evidently been lying, but
seemingly not reposing, for it was much rumpled, and the pillows gave
evidence of the restless tossing of a weary head. Lucy herself had a
curiously rumpled aspect, though she was not exactly untidy. Her
soft, white, lace-trimmed wrapper carelessly tied with blue ribbons
was wrinkled, her little slippers were unbuttoned. Her mass of soft
hair was half over her shoulders. There were red spots on the cheeks
which had been so white in the morning, and her eyes shone. She kept
tying and untying two blue ribbons at the neck of her wrapper as she
lay on the bed and talked rapidly.

"I look like a fright, I know," she said. "I was tired after church,
and slipped off my dress and lay down. My hair is all in a muss."

"It is such lovely hair that it looks pretty anyway," said Rose.

Lucy drew a strand of her hair violently over her shoulder. It almost
seemed as if she meant to tear it out by the roots.

"Lucy!" said her mother.

"Oh, mother, do let me alone!" cried the girl. Then she said, looking
angrily at her tress of hair, then at Rose: "It is not nearly as
pretty as yours. You know it isn't. All men are simply crazy over
hair your color. I hate my hair. I just hate it."

"Lucy!" said her mother again, in the same startled but admonitory
tone.

Lucy made an impatient face at her. She threw back the tress of hair.
"I hate it," said she.

Rose began to feel awkward. She noticed Mrs. Ayres's anxious regard
of her daughter, and she thought with disgust that Lucy Ayres was not
so sweet a girl as she had seemed. However, she felt an odd kind of
sympathy and pity for her. Lucy's pretty face and her white wrapper
seemed alike awry with nervous suffering, which the other girl dimly
understood, although it was the understanding of a normal character
with regard to an abnormal one.

Rose resolved to change the subject. "I did enjoy your singing so
much this morning," she said.

"Thank you," replied Lucy, but a look of alarm instead of pleasure
appeared upon her face, which Rose was astonished to see in the
mother's likewise.

"I feel so sorry for poor Miss Hart, because I cannot think for a
moment that she was guilty of what they accused her of," said Rose,
"that I don't like to say anything about her singing. But I will say
this much: I did enjoy yours."

"Thank you," said Lucy again. Her look of mortal terror deepened.
From being aggressively nervous, she looked on the verge of a
collapse.

Mrs. Ayres rose, went to Lucy's closet, and returned with a bottle of
wine and a glass. "Here," she said, as she poured out the red liquor.
"You had better drink this, dear. You know Dr. Wallace said you must
drink port wine, and you are all tired out with your singing this
morning."

Lucy seized the glass and drank the wine eagerly.

"It must be a nervous strain," said Rose, "to stand up there, before
such a crowded audience as there was this morning, and sing."

"Yes, it is," agreed Mrs. Ayres, in a harsh voice, "and especially
when anybody isn't used to it. Lucy is not at all strong."

"I hope it won't be too much for her," said Rose; "but it is such a
delight to listen to her after--"

"Oh, I am tired and sick of hearing Miss Hart's name!" cried Lucy,
unpleasantly.

"Lucy!" said Mrs. Ayres.

"Well, I am," said Lucy, defiantly. "It has been nothing but Miss
Hart, Miss Hart, from morning until night lately. Nobody thinks she
poisoned Miss Farrel, of course. It was perfect nonsense to accuse
her of it, and when that is said, I think myself that is enough. I
see no need of this eternal harping upon it. I have heard nothing
except 'poor Miss Hart' until I am nearly wild. Come, Rose, I'll get
dressed and we'll go out in the arbor. It is too pleasant to stay
in-doors. This room is awfully close."

"I think perhaps I had better not stay," Rose replied, doubtfully. It
seemed to her that she was having a very strange call, and she began
to be indignant as well as astonished.

"Of course you are going to stay," Lucy said, and her voice was sweet
again. "We'll let Miss Hart alone and I'll get dressed, and we'll go
in the arbor. It is lovely out there to-day."

With that Lucy sprang from the bed and let her wrapper slip from her
shoulders. She stood before her old-fashioned black-walnut bureau and
began brushing her hair. Her white arms and shoulders gleamed through
it as she brushed with what seemed a cruel violence.

Rose laughed in a forced way. "Why, dear, you brush your hair as if
it had offended you," she said.

"Don't brush so hard, Lucy," said Mrs. Ayres.

"I just hate my old hair, anyway," said Lucy, with a vicious stroke
of the brush. She bent her head over, and swept the whole dark mass
downward until it concealed her face and nearly touched her knees.
Then she gave it a deft twist, righted herself, and pinned the coil
in place.

"How beautifully you do up your hair," said Rose.

Lucy cast an appreciative glance at herself in the glass. The wine
had deepened the glow on her cheeks. Her eyes were more brilliant.
She pulled her hair a little over one temple, and looked at herself
with entire satisfaction. Lucy had beautiful neck and arms,
unexpectedly plump for a girl so apparently slender. Her skin was
full of rosy color, too. She gazed at the superb curve of her
shoulders rising above the dainty lace of her corset-cover, and
smiled undisguisedly.

"I wish my neck was as plump as yours," said Rose.

"Yes, she has a nice, plump neck," said Mrs. Ayres. While the words
showed maternal pride, the tone never relaxed from its nervous
anxiety.

Lucy's smile vanished suddenly. "Well, what if it is plump?" said
she. "What is the use of it? A girl living here in East Westland can
never wear a dress to show her neck. People would think she had gone
out of her mind."

Rose laughed. "I have some low-neck gowns," said she, "but I can't
wear them, either. Maybe that is fortunate for me, my neck is so
thin."

"You will wear them in other places," said Lucy. "You won't stay here
all your days. You will have plenty of chances to wear your low-neck
gowns." She spoke again in her unnaturally high voice. She turned
towards her closet to get her dress.

"Lucy!" said Mrs. Ayres.

"Well, it is the truth," said Lucy. "Don't preach, mother. If you
were a girl, and somebody told you your neck was pretty, and you knew
other girls had chances to wear low-neck dresses, you wouldn't be
above feeling it a little."

"My neck was as pretty as yours when I was a girl, and I never wore a
low-neck dress in my life," said Mrs. Ayres.

"Oh, well, you got married when you were eighteen," said Lucy. There
was something almost coarse in her remark. Rose felt herself flush.
She was sophisticated, and had seen the world, although she had been
closely if not lovingly guarded; but she shrank from some things as
though she had never come from under a country mother's wing in her
life.

Lucy got a pale-blue muslin gown from the closet and slipped it over
her shoulders. Then she stood for her mother to fasten it in the
back. Lucy was lovely in this cloud of blue, with edgings of lace on
the ruffles and knots of black velvet. She fastened her black velvet
girdle, and turned herself sidewise with a charming feminine motion,
to get the effect of her slender waist between the curves of her
small hips and bust. Again she looked pleased.

"You are dear in that blue gown," said Rose.

Lucy smiled. Then she scowled as suddenly. She could see Rose over
her shoulder in the glass. "It is awful countrified," said she. "Look
at the sleeves and look at yours. Where was yours made?"

"My dressmaker in New York made it," faltered Rose. She felt guilty
because her gown was undeniably in better style.

"There's no use trying to have anything in East Westland," said Lucy.

While she was fastening a little gold brooch at her throat, Rose
again tried to change the subject. "That candy of yours looked
perfectly delicious," said she. "You must teach me how you make it."

Mrs. Ayres went dead white in a moment. She looked at Lucy with a
look of horror which the girl did not meet. She went on fastening her
brooch. "Did you like it?" she asked, carelessly.

"An accident happened to it, I am sorry to say," explained Rose. "Mr.
Allen and I were out in the grove, and somehow he jostled me, and the
candy got scattered on the ground, and he stepped on it."

"Were you and he alone out there?" asked Lucy, in a very quiet voice.

Rose looked at her amazedly. "Why, no, not when that happened!" she
replied. "Aunt Sylvia was there, too." She spoke a little
resentfully. "What if Mr. Allen and I had been alone; what is that to
her?" she thought.

"There is some more candy," said Lucy, calmly. "I will get it, and
then we will go out in the arbor. I will teach you to make the candy
any day. It is very simple. Come, Rose dear. Mother, we are going out
in the arbor."

Mrs. Ayres rose immediately. She preceded the two girls down-stairs,
and came through the sitting-room door with a dish of candy in her
hand just as they reached it. "Here is the candy, dear," she said to
Lucy, and there was something commanding in her voice.

Lucy took the dish, a pretty little decorated affair, with what
seemed to Rose an air of suspicion and a grudging "thank you, mother."

"Come, Rose," she said. She led the way and Rose followed. Mrs. Ayres
returned to the sitting-room. The girls went through the
old-fashioned garden with its flower-beds outlined with box, in which
the earlier flowers were at their prime, to the arbor. It was a
pretty old structure, covered with the shaggy arms of an old
grape-vine whose gold-green leaves were just uncurling. Lucy placed
the bowl of candy on the end of the bench which ran round the
interior, and, to Rose's surprise, seated herself at a distance from
it, and motioned Rose to sit beside her, without offering her any
candy. Lucy leaned against Rose and looked up at her. She looked
young and piteous and confiding. Rose felt again that she was sweet
and that she loved her. She put her arm around Lucy.

"You are a dear," said she.

Lucy nestled closer. "I know you must have thought me perfectly
horrid to speak as I did to mother," said she, "but you don't
understand."

Lucy hesitated. Rose waited.

"You see, the trouble is," Lucy went on, "I love mother dearly, of
course. She is the best mother that ever a girl had, but she is
always so anxious about me, and she follows me about so, and I get
nervous, and I know I don't always speak as I should. I am often
ashamed of myself. You see--"

Lucy hesitated again for a longer period. Rose waited.

"Mother has times of being very nervous," Lucy said, in a whisper. "I
sometimes think, when she follows me about so, that she is not for
the time being quite herself."

Rose started and looked at the other girl in horror. "Why don't you
have a doctor?" said she.

"Oh, I don't mean that she--I don't mean that there is anything
serious, only she has always been over-anxious about me, and at times
I fancy she is nervous, and then the anxiety grows beyond limit. She
always gets over it. I don't mean that--"

"Oh, I didn't know," said Rose.

"I never mean to be impatient," Lucy went on, "but to-day I was very
tired, and I wanted to see you especially. I wanted to ask you
something."

"What?"

Lucy looked away from Rose. She seemed to shrink within herself. The
color faded from her face. "I heard something," she said, faintly,
"but I said I wouldn't believe it until I had asked you."

"What is it?"

"I heard that you were engaged to marry Mr. Allen."

Rose flushed and moved away a little from Lucy. "You can contradict
the rumor whenever you hear it again," said she.

"Then it isn't true?"

"No, it isn't."

Lucy nestled against Rose, in spite of a sudden coldness which had
come over the other girl. "You are so dear," said she.

Rose looked straight ahead, and sat stiffly.

"I am thoroughly angry at such rumors, merely because a girl happens
to be living in the same house with a marriageable man," said she.

"Yes, that is so," said Lucy. She remained quiet for

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/17566