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Country Neighbors

by Alice Brown · English · Gutenberg #24540 · 451,646 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Country Neighbors

Author: Alice Brown


        
Release date: February 7, 2008 [eBook #24540]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24540

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Jacqueline Jeremy, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COUNTRY NEIGHBORS ***


E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Jacqueline Jeremy, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



COUNTRY NEIGHBORS

by

ALICE BROWN







Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge 1910

Copyright, 1910, by Alice Brown
All Rights Reserved
Published April 1910




CONTENTS


  THE PLAY HOUSE                     1

  HIS FIRST WIFE                    20

  A FLOWER OF APRIL                 42

  THE AUCTION                       53

  SATURDAY NIGHT                    76

  A GRIEF DEFERRED                  96

  THE CHALLENGE                    122

  PARTNERS                         150

  FLOWERS OF PARADISE              171

  GARDENER JIM                     192

  THE SILVER TEA-SET               215

  THE OTHER MRS. DILL              237

  THE ADVOCATE                     265

  THE MASQUERADE                   285

  A POETESS IN SPRING              314

  THE MASTER MINDS OF HISTORY      341




THE PLAY HOUSE


Amelia Maxwell sat by the front-chamber window of the great house
overlooking the road, and her own "story-an'-a-half" farther toward the
west. Every day she was alone under her own roof, save at the times when
old lady Knowles of the great house summoned her for work at fine sewing
or braiding rags. All Amelia's kin were dead. Now she was used to their
solemn absence, and sufficiently at one with her own humble way of life,
letting her few acres at the halves, and earning a dollar here and there
with her clever fingers. She was but little over forty, yet she was
aware that her life, in its keener phases, was already done. She had had
her romance and striven to forget it; but out of that time pathetic
voices now and then called to her, and old longings awoke, to breathe
for a moment and then sleep again.

Amelia seemed, even to old lady Knowles, who knew her best, a cheerful,
humorous body; but only Amelia saw the road by which her serenity had
come. Chiefly it was through an inexplicable devotion to the great
house. She could not remember a time when it was not wonderful to her.
While she was a little girl, living alone with her mother, she used to
sit on the doorstone with her bread and milk at bedtime, and think of
the great house, how grand it was and large. There was a wonderful way
the sun had of falling, at twilight, across the pillars of its porch
where the elm drooped sweetly, and in the moonlight it was like a fairy
city. But the morning was perhaps the best moment of all. The great
house was painted a pale yellow, and when Amelia awoke with the sun in
her little unshaded chamber, she thought how dark the blinds were there,
with such a solemn richness in their green. The flower-beds in front
were beautiful to her; but the back garden, lying alongside the orchard,
and stretching through tangles of sweet-william and rose, was an
enchanted spot to play in. The child that was, used to wander there and
feel very rich. Now, a woman, she sat in the great house sewing, and
felt rich again. As it happened, for one of the many times it came to
her, she was thinking what the great house had done for her. Old lady
Knowles had, in her stately way, been a kind of patron saint, and in
that summer, years ago, when Amelia's romance died and she had drooped
like a starving plant, Rufus, the old lady's son, had seemed to see her
trouble and stood by her. He did not speak of it. He only took her for
long drives, and made his cheerful presence evident in many ways, and
when he died, with a tragic suddenness, Amelia used selfishly to feel
that he had lived at least long enough to keep her from failing of that
inner blight.

On this day when old lady Knowles had gone with Ann, her faithful help,
to see the cousin to whom she made pilgrimage once a year, Amelia
resolved to enjoy herself to the full. She laid down her sewing, from
time to time, to look about her at the poppy-strewn paper, the four-post
bed and flowered tester, the great fireplace with its shining dogs, and
the Venus and Cupid mirror. Over and over again she had played that the
house was hers, and to-day, through some heralding excitement in the
air, it seemed doubly so. She sat in a dream of housewifely possession,
conning idly over the pleasant things she might do before the day was
over. There was cold tongue for her dinner, Ann had told her, and a
clear soup, if she liked to heat it. She might cook vegetables if she
chose. And there was the best of tea to be made out of the china caddy,
and rich cake in the parlor crock. After one such glad deliberation, she
caught her sewing guiltily up from her lap and began to set compensating
stitches. But even then her conscience slept unstirred. Old lady Knowles
was in no hurry for the work, she knew, and she would make up for her
dreaming in the account of her day.

There was a sound without. The gate swung softly shut and a man came up
the path. Amelia, at the glance, rose quickly, dropped her sewing, and
hurried out and down the stairs. The front door was open, she knew, and
though there was never anything to be afraid of, still the house was in
her charge. At the door she met him, just lifting his hand to touch the
knocker. He was a tall, weedy fellow of something more than her own age,
with light hair and blue eyes and a strangely arrested look, as if he
obstinately, and against his own advantage, continued to keep young.

Amelia knew him at once, as he did her, though it was twenty years since
they had met.

"Why, Jared Beale!" she faltered.

He was much moved. The flush came quickly to his face in a way she had
known, and his eyes softened.

"I should ha' recognized ye anywheres, Milly," he asserted.

She still stood looking at him, unable to ask him in or to make apology
for the lack.

"I went straight to your house from the train," he said. "'Twas all shut
up. Don't anybody live there now?"

"Yes," answered Amelia, "somebody lives there." The red had come into
her cheeks, and her eyes burned brightly. Then as he looked at her
hesitatingly, in the way he used to look, she trembled a little.

"Come in, Jared," she said, retreating a hospitable space. "Come right
in."

She stood aside, and then, when he stepped over the sill, led the way
into the dining-room, where there was a cool green light from the
darkened blinds, and the only window open to the sun disclosed a
trembling grapevine and a vista down the garden path. Amelia drew
forward a chair, with a decided motion.

"Sit down," she said, and busied herself with opening a blind.

When she took her own chair opposite him, she found that he had laid his
hat beside him on the floor, and, with the tips of his fingers together,
was bending forward in an attitude belonging to his youth. He was
regarding her with the slightly blurred look of his near-sighted eyes,
and she began hastily to speak.

"You stayin' round these parts?"

"No," said Jared, "no. I had to come east on business. There was some
property to be settled up in Beulah, so I thought I'd jest step down
here an' see how things were."

"Beulah!" she repeated. "Why, that's fifty miles from here!"

"Yes," returned Jared. "It's a matter o' fifty mile. Fact is," he said
uneasily, "I didn't know how you was fixed. It's kinder worried me."

A flush ran into her face, to the roots of her pretty hair; yet her
frank eyes never left him. Then her evasive speech belied her look.

"I get along real well. I s'pose you knew mother wa'n't with me now?"

"I ain't heard a word from here for seventeen year," he said, half
bitterly, as if the silence had been hard to bear. "There's no way for
me to hear now. The last was from Tom Merrick. He said you'd begun to
go with Rufus Knowles."

Amelia trembled over her whole body.

"That was a good while ago," she ventured.

"Yes, 'twas. A good many things have come an' gone. An' now Rufus is
dead--I see his death in an old paper--an' here you be, his widder,
livin' in the old house."

"Why!" breathed Amelia, "why!" She choked upon the word, but before she
could deny it he had begun again, in gentle reminiscence.

"'Twon't harm nobody to talk over old times a mite, Amelia. Mebbe that's
what I come on for, though I thought 'twas to see how you was fixed. I
thought mebbe I should find you livin' kinder near the wind, an' mebbe
you'd let me look out for you a mite."

The tears came into Amelia's eyes. She looked about her as if she owned
the room, the old china, and the house.

"That's real good of you, Jared," she said movingly. "I sha'n't ever
forget it. But you see for yourself. I don't want for nothin'."

"I guess we should ha' thought 'twas queer, when you went trottin' by to
school," he said irrelevantly, "if anybody'd told you you'd reign over
the old Knowles house."

"Yes," said Amelia softly, again looking about her, this time with love
and thankfulness, "I guess they would. You leave your wife well?" she
asked suddenly, perhaps to suggest the reality of his own house of life.

Jared shook his head.

"She ain't stepped a step for seven year."

"Oh, my!" grieved Amelia. "Won't she ever be any better?"

"No. We've had all the doctors, eclectic an' herb besides, an' they
don't give her no hope. She was a great driver. We laid up money steady
them years before she was took down. She knew how to make an' she knew
how to save."

His face settled into lines of brooding recollection. Immediately Amelia
was aware that those years had been bitter to him, and that the fruit of
them was stale and dry. She cut by instinct into a pleasant by-path.

"You play your fiddle any now?"

He started out of his maze at life.

"No," he owned, "no!" as if he hardly remembered such a thing had been.
"I dropped that more'n fifteen year ago."

"Seems if my feet never could keep still when you played 'Money Musk,'"
avowed Amelia, her eyes shining. "'The Road to Boston,' too! My! wa'n't
that grand!"

"'Twas mostly dance-music I knew," said Jared. "She never liked it," he
added, in a burst of weary confidence.

"Your wife?"

"She was a church member, old-fashioned kind. Didn't believe in dancin'.
'The devil's tunes,' she called 'em. Well, mebbe they were; but I kinder
liked 'em myself."

"Well," said Amelia, in a safe commonplace, "I guess there's some harm
in 'most everything. It's 'cordin' to the way you take it." Then one of
her quick changes came upon her. The self that played at life when real
life failed her, and so kept youth alive, awoke to shine in her eyes and
flush her pretty cheek. She looked about the room, as if to seek
concurrence from the hearthside gods. "Jared," she said, "you goin' to
stay round here long?"

He made an involuntary motion toward his hat.

"No, oh, no," he answered. "I'm goin' 'cross lots to the Junction. I
come round the road. I guess 'tain't more'n four mile along by the pine
woods an' the b'ilin' spring," he added, smiling at her. "Leastways it
didn't use to be. I thought if I could get the seven-o'clock, 'twould
take me back to Boston so 's I could ketch my train to-night. She's
kinder dull, out there alone," he ended, wearily. "'Twas some o' her
property I come to settle up. She'll want to hear about it. I never was
no kind of a letter-writer."

Amelia rose.

"I'll tell you what, then," she said, with a sweet decision, "you stay
right here an' have dinner. I'm all alone to-day."

"Ain't old lady Knowles--" He paused decorously, and Amelia laughed. It
seemed to her as if old lady Knowles and the house would always be
beneficently there because they always had been.

"Law, yes," she said. "She's alive. So's old Ann. They've gone to
Wareham, to spend the day."

Jared threw back his head and laughed.

"If that don't make time stand still," he said, "nothin' ever did. Why,
when we was in the Third Reader old lady Knowles an' Ann harnessed up
one day in the year an' drove over to Wareham to spend the day."

"Yes," Amelia sparkled back at him, "'tis so. They look pretty much the
same, both of 'em."

"They must be well along in years?"

Amelia had begun putting up the leaves of the mahogany dining-table. She
laughed, a pretty ripple.

"Well, anyway," she qualified, "old Pomp ain't gone with 'em. He's
buried out under the August sweet. They've got an old white now. 'Twas
the colt long after you left here." She had gone to the dresser and
pulled open a drawer. Those were the every-day tablecloths, fine and
good; but in the drawer above, she knew, was the best damask, snowdrops
and other patterns more wonderful, with birds and butterflies. She
debated but a moment, and then pulled out a lovely piece that shone with
ironing. "I'll tell you what it is, Jared," she said, returning to
spread it on the table with deft touches, "it's we that change, as well
as other folks. Ever think o' that? Ever occur to you old lady Knowles
wa'n't much over sixty them days when we used to call her old? 'Twas
because we were so young ourselves. She don't seem much different to me
now from what she did then."

"There's a good deal in that," said Jared, rising. "Want I should draw
you up some water out o' the old well?"

"Yes. I shall want some in a minute. I'll make us a cup o' coffee. You
like that."

Jared drew the water, and after he had brought it to her he went out
into the back garden; and, while she moved back and forth from pantry to
table, she caught glimpses of him through the window as he went about
from the bees to the flower-beds, in a reminiscent wandering. Once he
halted under the sweet-bough and gave one branch a shake, and then, with
an unerring remembrance, he crossed the sward to the "sopsy-vine" by the
wall.

Amelia could not get over the wonder of having him there. Strangely, he
had not changed. Even his speech had the old neighborly tang. Whether he
had returned to it as to a never-forgotten tune, she could not know; but
it was in her ears, awakening touches of old harmony. Yet these things
she dared not dwell upon. She put them aside in haste to live with after
he should be gone.

Her preparations were swiftly made, lest she should lose a moment of his
stay, and presently she went to the door and summoned him.

"Dinner's ready, Jared!"

It sounded as if she had said it every day, and she knew why; the words
and others like them, sweet and commonplace, were inwoven with the
texture of her dreams.

Jared came in, an eager look upon his face, as if he also were in a
maze, and they sat down at the table, where the viands were arranged in
a beautiful order. Jared laid down his knife and fork.

"Well," said he, "old Ann ain't lost her faculty. This tastes for all
the world just as old lady Knowles's things used to when I come over
here to weed the garden an' stayed to dinner."

Amelia lifted a thankful look.

"I'm proper glad you've come back, Jared," she said simply. "I never had
any expectation of seein' you again, leastways not in this world."

Jared spoke irrelevantly:--

"There's a good many things I've wanted to talk over with you, 'Melia,
from time to time. Now there's Arthur."

Amelia nodded.

"He ain't done very well, has he?" she inquired. "I never knew much
about him after he moved away; but seems if I heard he'd took to drink."

"That's it. Arthur was as good a boy as ever stepped, but he got led
away when he wa'n't old enough to know t'other from which. Well, I've
always stood by him, 'Melia. Folks say he's only an adopted brother.
'What you want to hang on to him for, an' send good money after bad?'
That's what they say. Well, what if he is an adopted brother? Father
an' mother set by him, an' I set by him, too."

He had a worried look, and his tone rang fretfully, as if it continued a
line of dreary argument.

"Of course you set by him, Jared," said Amelia, almost indignantly. "I
shouldn't feel the same towards you if you didn't."

Jared was deep in the relief of his pathetic confidences.

"Arthur married young, an' folks said he'd no business to, nothin' to
live on, an' his habits bein' what they were. Well, I couldn't dispute
that. But when he got that fall, so 't he laid there paralyzed, I wanted
to take the cars an' go right on to York State an' see him. I didn't. I
couldn't get away; but I sent him all I could afford to, an' I'm goin'
to keep on sendin' jest as long as I'm above ground. An' I've made my
will an' provided for him."

His voice had a fractious tone, as if he combated an unseen tyrant.
Amelia dared not speak. At a word, she felt, he might say too much. Now
Jared was looking at her in a bright appeal, as if, sure as he was of
her sympathy, he besought the expression of it.

"There ain't a soul but you knows I've made my will, 'Melia," he said.
"There's suthin' in it for you, too."

Amelia shrank, and her eyes betrayed her terror; it was as if she could
carry on their relation together quite happily, but as soon as the
judgment of the world were challenged she must hide it away, like a
treasure in a box.

"No, Jared!" she breathed. "No, oh, no! Don't you do such a thing as
that."

Jared laughed a little, but half sadly.

"Seems kinder queer to me now," he owned, "now I see you settin' here,
only to put out your hand an' take a thing if you want it. Did Rufus
leave a will?"

Amelia shrank still smaller.

"No," she trembled; "no, he didn't leave a will."

"Well, I sha'n't change mine, 'Melia." He spoke with an ostentatious
lightness, but Amelia was aware that his mind labored in heavy seas of
old regret, buoyed by the futile hope of compensating her age for the
joys her youth had lacked. "I guess I'll let it stand as 'tis, an', long
as you don't need what I've left ye, why, you can put it into some kind
o' folderol an' enjoy it. You was always one to enjoy things."

They sat a long time at the table, and Jared took, as he said, more
coffee than was good for him, and praised the making of it. Then he
followed her about as she cleared away, and helped her a little with an
awkward hand. Amelia left the dishes in the sink.

"I won't clear up till night," she said. "We ain't talked out yet."

She led the way into the garden, and under the grape-trellis, where the
tall lilac-hedge shut them from the sight of passers-by, she gave him
old lady Knowles's great armchair, and took the little one that was hers
when she came over to sit a while with her old friend. The talk went
wandering back as if it sought the very sources of youth and life; but
somehow it touched commonplaces only. Yet Amelia had the sense, and she
was sure he had, too, of wandering there hand in hand, of finding no
surprises, but only the old things grown more dear, the old loyalties
the more abiding.

Suddenly he spoke, haltingly, voicing her own conviction.

"Don't seem but a minute, 'Melia, sence we set talkin' things over, much
as we do now. Seems if we hadn't been so fur separated all these years."

"No," said Amelia, with her beautiful sincerity, "I don't believe we
have been, Jared. Maybe that's how it is when folks die. We can't see
'em nor speak to 'em, but maybe they go right along bein' what we like
best. I know 'tis so with mother. Seems if, if she walked in here this
minute, we shouldn't have so very many stitches to take up. Sometimes
I've thought all I should say would be, 'Well, mother, you've got back,
ain't you?' Kinder like that."

The beautiful afternoon light lay on the grass and turned the grapevine
to a tender green. Jared looked upon the land as if he were treasuring
it in his heart for a day of loss. When the sun was low, and green and
red were flaming in the west, he rose.

"Well, 'Melia," he said, "I've seen you. Now I'll go."

Amelia stirred, too, recalled to service.

"I want to make you a cup o' tea," she said. "You get me a pail o' fresh
water, Jared. 'Twon't take but a minute."

He followed her about, this time, while she set the table; and again
they broke bread together. When he rose from his chair now, it was for
good.

"Well, 'Melia," he said; and she gave him her hand.

She went with him to the door, and stood there as he started down the
path. Half-way he hesitated, and then came back to her. His eyes were
soft and kindly.

"'Melia," he said, "I ain't told you the half, an' I dunno 's I can tell
it now. I never knew how things were with you. I've laid awake nights,
wonderin'. You never was very strong. 'Why,' says I to myself many a
night when I'd hear the wind blowin' ag'inst the winder, 'mebbe she's
had to go out to work. Mebbe she ain't got a place to lay her head.'"

He was rushing on in a full tide of confidence, and she recalled him.
She leaned forward to him, out of the doorway of her beautiful house,
and spoke in an assuring tone.

"Don't you worry no more, Jared. I'm safe an' well content, an' you
ain't got nothin' to regret. An' when we meet again,--I guess 'twon't be
here, dear, it'll be t'other side,--why, we'll sit down an' have another
dish o' talk."

Then they shook hands again, and Jared walked away. When he looked back
from the top of Schoolma'am Hill, she was still in the doorway, and she
waved her hand to him.

After that last glimpse of him, Amelia went soberly about the house,
setting it in order. When her dishes were washed and she had fed old
Trot, the cat, forgotten all day, she rolled up the fine tablecloth and
left it behind the porch-door, where she could take it on her way home.
Then she sat down on the front steps and waited for old lady Knowles.
Amelia did not think very much about her day. It was still a possession
to be laid aside and pondered over all the hours and days until she
died. For there would be no other day like it.

The dusk fell and the sounds of night began to rise in their poignant
summoning of memory and hope. The past and the present seemed one to her
in a beautiful dream; yet it was not so much a dream as life itself, a
warm reality. Presently there came the slow thud of horse's feet, and
the chaise turned in at the yard. Old lady Knowles was in it, sitting
prettily erect, as she had driven away, and Ann was peering forward, as
she always did, to see if the house had burned down in their absence.
John Trueman, who lived "down the road," was lounging along behind. They
had called him as they passed, and bade him come to "tend the horse."
Amelia rose and shook herself free from the web of her dream. She
hurried forward and at the horse-block offered old lady Knowles her
hand.

"Anything happened?" asked old Ann, making her way past to the kitchen.

Amelia only smiled at her, but she followed old lady Knowles in at the
porch-door.

"We've had a very enjoyable day, Amelia," said the old lady, untying her
bonnet-strings. "Suppose you lay this on the table. Ann must brush it
before it's put away. What is it? Child, child, what is it?"

Amelia had taken a fold of her old friend's skirt. It would have seemed
to her a liberty to touch her hand.

"Mis' Knowles," she said, "I've had company. 'Twas somebody to see me,
an' I got dinner here, an' supper, too, an' I used your best tablecloth,
an' I'm goin' to do it up so 't Ann won't know. An' I acted for all the
world as if 'twas my own house."

Old lady Knowles laughed a little. She had never been a woman to whom
small things seemed large, and now very few things were of any size at
all.

"Who was it, Amelia?" she asked. "Who was your company?"

There was a moment's silence, and Amelia heard her own heart beat. But
she answered quietly,--

"'Twas Jared Beale."

There was silence again while old lady Knowles thought back over the
years. When she spoke, her voice was very soft and kindly.

"You are a good girl, Amelia. You've always been a good girl. Run home,
child, now, and come to-morrow. Good-night."

Amelia, out in the path a moment afterwards, the tablecloth under her
arm, could hardly believe in what had surely happened to her. Old lady
Knowles had bent forward to her; her soft lips had touched Amelia's
cheek.




HIS FIRST WIFE


It seemed to Lydia Gale that from the moment she met Eben Jakes she
understood what fun it was to laugh. She and her mother and three
sisters lived together in a comfortable way, and Lydia, although she was
the youngest, had come to feel that she was declining into those middle
years when beauty wanes, and though the desire to charm may raise an
eager hand, no one will stay to look. She was a delicate blonde, and
when she began to recognize these bounds of life she faded a little into
a still neutrality that might soon have made an old woman of her. The
sisters were dark, wholesome wenches, known as trainers at the
gatherings they were always summoned to enliven; but Lydia seldom found
their mirth exhilarating. Only when Eben Jakes appeared at the door,
that spring twilight, a droll look peering from his blue eyes, and a
long forefinger smoothing out the smile from the two lines in his lean
cheeks, and asked, as if there were some richness of humor in the
supposition, "Anybody heard anything of anybody named Eunice Eliot round
here?" she found her own face creasing responsively. Eunice Eliot had
been her mother's maiden name, and it proved that she and Eben's mother
had been schoolmates. Eben's mother had died some years before; and now,
taking a little trip with his own horse and buggy to peddle essences and
see the country, he had included his mother's friend within the circle
of his wandering.

Mrs. Gale had a welcome ready for him and for the treasured
reminiscences of his mother's past, and the three older sisters trained
with him to their limit. Lydia sat by and listened, smiling all the
time. She thought Eben's long, lank, broad-shouldered figure very manly,
and it shocked her beyond speech to hear one of the trainers avow that,
for her part, she thought his thin, Yankee face, with its big features
and keen eyes, as homely as a hedge-fence. Lydia said nothing, but she
wondered what people could expect. She was a greedy novel-reader, and
she had shy thoughts of her own. It seemed to her that Eben, who also
had passed his first youth, must have been a great favorite in his day.
Every commonplace betrayal in those intimate talks with her mother
served to show her how good he had been, how simple and true. He had
taken care of his mother through a long illness, and then, after her
death, lived what must have been a dull life, but one still dutiful
toward established bonds, with old Betty, the "help" of many years. Now
Betty had died, and before beginning another chapter with some domestic
expedient, he had allowed himself this limited trip, to breathe another
air and see the world. Lydia felt that he had deserved his vacation. All
the weary steps to it, she knew, could scarcely have been climbed so
robustly save by a hero.

Eben had stayed a week, and on the morning set for his leaving, Mrs.
Gale and the three trainers harnessed in haste to drive over to Fairfax
to see the circus come in. Lydia had refused to go, because, for some
reason, she felt a little dull that morning, and Eben had soberly
declared his peddling would take him another way. He meant to be off
before the middle of the forenoon; and while he was in the barn,
foddering his horse and greasing the wheels, Lydia bethought her how he
had praised the doughnuts several nights before, and, with an aching
impulse to do something for him before he should go, hastily made up a
batch, judging that a dozen or so would please him upon the road. But
she was left-handed that morning, and as she began to fry, the fat
caught fire. Then Eben, seeing the blaze and smoke, dashed in, set the
kettle safely in the sink, and took Lydia into his arms.

"Say," he whispered to her hidden face, "what if you an' me should get
married an' go round some peddlin', an' make our way home towards fall?"

Lydia felt that this was the most beautiful invitation that could
possibly have been given her, and she answered accordingly:--

"I'd like it ever so much."

Within the next week they were married, and set out on their enchanted
progress, stopping at doors when they liked, and offering bottles
whereof the labels sounded delicious and sweet; or if a house looked
poor or stingy, passing it by. Sometimes, when Lydia felt very daring,
she went to the door herself to show her wares, and Eben stayed in the
carriage and laughed. He said she offered a bottle of vanilla as if it
were poison and she wanted to get rid of it, or as if it were water, and
of no use to anybody. Once, when she had been denied by a sour-faced
woman, he stopped under the shade of a tree farther on, and left Lydia
there while he went back and, by force of his smile and persuasive
tongue, sold the same bottle to the same woman, and came back chuckling
in a merry triumph.

This was the day that Lydia's summer happiness felt the touch of blight.
She remembered always just the moment when the wind of trouble touched
her. They were driving through a long stretch of maple woods with a
ravine below, where ferns grew darkly and water hurried over rocks.
Lydia was lying back in the carriage, swaying with its motion, and
jubilant to her finger-tips. It was young summer now, and she answered
back every pulse of the stirring earth with heart-beats of her own. Eben
was laughing.

"That's the way to do it," he was saying, in an exaggerated triumph.
"Why, you've got to talk to 'em till they think that bottle o' vanilla's
the water o' life, an' they'll have to knife ye if they can't git it no
other way."

"You're a born peddler," smiled Lydia. Then she asked, "How'd you happen
to start out?" She had heard the simple reason many times; but she loved
his talk, and her idle mind preferred old tales to new.

Eben fell in with her mood, as one begins an accustomed story to a
child.

"Well," he said, and he sobered a little, as memory recalled him, "you
know, when mother died, old Betty stayed an' kep' house for me. An' when
she died, this last spring, I kinder thought I'd git over it sooner if I
traveled round a mite to see the sights. I didn't want to git too fur
for fear I'd be sick on 't, like the feller that started off to go round
the world, an' run home to spend the first night. You sleepy now?"

He had shrewdly learned that she liked long, dull stories to lull her
into the swing of a nap.

"No," said Lydia drowsily. "You go on. Then what?"

"Well, so I got Jim Ross to take over the stock an' run the farm to the
halves. I took along a few essences to give me suthin' to think about,
an' when I got tired o' rovin' I expected to turn back home an' begin
bachin' on 't same's I'd got to end. An' then I stopped at your mother's
to kinder talk over old times when my mother was little; an' you come to
the door an' let me in."

"Eben," said Lydia, out of her dream and with all her story-book
knowledge at hand, "don't you s'pose 'twas ordered?"

"What?"

"Don't you s'pose 'twas just put into your head to start out that way so
't you could come an' find--me?"

She spoke timidly, but Eben answered with the bluff certainty he had in
readiness for such speculations:--

"Ain't a doubt of it. Sleepy now?"

He turned and looked at her as she lay back against the little pillow he
had bought for her on the way. The sun and wind had overlaid the
delicate bloom of her cheek with rose. The morning damp had curled her
hair into rings. Something known as happiness, for want of a better
word, hovered about the curves of her mouth and looked shyly out from
under her lids. Eben felt his heart stir wonderfully. He bent toward her
and spoke half breathlessly.

"Say, Lyddy, I don't know 's I knew half how pretty you were." Then he
laughed a little, as if he were ashamed. He was not a man of words, save
only when he was joking. Thus far his fondness for her had found
expression in an unfailing service and in mute caresses. He spoke
bluntly now, chirruping to the horse: "I dunno 's ever I see any eyes
quite so blue--unless 'twas my first wife's."

It was as if a sponge had passed over the quivering beauty of the earth
and wiped it out. For the moment Lydia felt as if she were not his wife
at all. At her silence, Eben turned and glanced at her; but her eyes
were closed.

"Tired?" he asked fondly, and she faltered:--

"I guess so."

Then, according to a tender custom, he put his arm about her and drew
her to him, and while he thought she slept, she lay there, her eyes
closed against his breast, and the hard certainty upon her of something
to think about. Blankness had seized upon her, not because he had
married a woman before her, but because he had not told. Possibly he had
told her mother in some of their desultory talks and had forgotten to
say more. The chill wonder of it sprang from her learning it too late.
She had to adapt herself to a new man. Until now she had believed that
it was spring with them, and that he had waited for her with an
involuntary fealty, as she had done for him. They had every guerdon of
young love, except that there were not so many years before them. But
even that paled beside the triumphant sense that no boy or girl could
possibly be as happy as they, with their ripened patience and sense of
fun. A phrase came into her mind as she lay there against his heart and
knew he was driving slowly to let her rest: "the wife of his youth." It
hurt her keenly, and she caught a breath so sharp and sudden that he
drew her closer, as one stirs a child to let it fall into an easier
pose.

That day they stopped at an old-fashioned tavern in a drowsy town, and
Lydia, after dinner, where she talked quite gayly about the house and
the garden and the farther hills, said she thought she would go upstairs
and lie down a spell. Eben looked at her with concern. She was always as
ready as he for "poking about" new places.

"Ain't you feelin' well?" he asked her.

"Oh, yes," said Lydia, "I'm all right. Only I'm kinder sleepy. I guess
this air makes me. It's higher up here than 'tis a few miles back."

"Yes," said Eben, "we've been kinder climbin' up for some days. Well,
you go an' sleep it off. Do you good. I'll have my pipe, an' then I'll
mog round an' see 'f I can't work off a few bottles on the unsuspectin'
populace."

When Eben came home from his successful sales, he found a changeling.
His wife was not so different in looks or words as in a subtle something
he could not define. She laughed at his jokes, and even, in a gentle
way, ventured pleasantries of her own; but a strange languor hung about
her. It might have been called patience, an acceptance of a situation
rather than her eager cheer in it.

"You tired?" he asked her over and over again that day, and she always
answered:--

"Mebbe I am, a mite."

So they settled down in the little tavern, and while Eben took
excursions round about to place his "trade," she stayed behind, and
either shut herself upstairs or sat meditatively in the garden. What
moved her now was an overwhelming curiosity. She wondered what the first
wife had been like, whether she could make doughnuts, and, above all, if
she had been pretty. Sometimes she remembered, with a wild impulse to
tell him because it seemed so desperately funny to her, the unhappy
couple that had formed a part of her childhood's memories, who used to
quarrel violently whenever the husband drank too much, and his wife, in
his helplessness, used to go through his pockets.

"Anybody can bear 'most anything," he used to declare, as he steadied
himself by the gate, in drunken majesty, and addressed the
school-children in a ring, "but goin' through anybody's pockets. That's
more'n anybody ought to be called upon to bear."

Lydia smiled sorrowfully upon herself in the midst of her daze, at the
wonder whether she also should be tempted to go through her husband's
pockets, not thriftily, to save his purse, but to discover the portrait
of his first wife. Yet she had resolved to ask him nothing; and then, in
the way of womankind, she opened her lips one day and said the thing she
would not.

They were sitting in the garden under the pear tree, with beautiful old
borders, all a lovely neglect, on both sides. Lydia had been talking
about flowers, and getting up now and then to pull a weed,--an
ineffectual service where weeds were so plentiful,--and stopping to
speak a word to a late sweet-william, as if it were a child. Eben was
smoking his pipe contentedly and watching her.

"You like 'em, don't you?" he said fondly, as she came back and took her
chair again.

"I guess I do," said Lydia. That day she felt particularly well and
freed from the assaults of memory. The sun was on her face and she
welcomed it, and a light breeze stirred her hair. "Mother always said I
was bewitched over gardens."

"You shall have all the land you can take care of," he avowed, "an' you
shall have a hired man of your own. I can foretell his name. It's Eben
Jakes."

Lydia laughed, and he went on: "We used to have a few beds, but when
mother was taken away I kinder let it slip."

Suddenly Lydia felt her heart beating hard. Something choked her, and
her voice stuck in her throat.

"Eben, how'd your mother look?"

"What say?" asked Eben. He was shaking the ashes from his pipe, and the
tapping of the bowl against his chair had drowned her mild attempt.

"How did your mother look?"

He pursed his lips and gazed off into the distance of the orchard. Then
he laughed a little at his own incompetence.

"I dunno 's I can tell. I ain't much of a hand at that. She was just
kinder old an' pindlin' to other folks. But she looked pretty nice to
me."

"Ain't you got a photograph of her here with you?"

He shook his head.

"I thought mebbe you'd carry one round."

"Mother never had any real good picture," said Eben meditatively. "I
dunno 's she ever set for a photograph. She had an ambrotype taken when
she was young, with kinder full sleeves an' her hair brought down over
her ears. No, mother never had a picture that was any comfort to me."

Then Lydia dared her first approach.

"Ain't you got any photographs here with you, any of your other folks?
I'd like to know how they look."

He shook his head.

"No. They're all to home. You'll find 'em in the album on the
centre-table. Gee! I hope the house won't be all full o' dust. I never
thought, when I set out, I should bring the quality back with me."

But she could not answer by a lifted eyelash the veiled fondness of his
tone. All his emotion had this way of taking little by-paths, as if he
skirted courtship without often finding the courage to enter boldly in.
It was delightful to her, but at this moment she could not even listen.
She was too busy with her own familiar quest. Now she spoke timidly, yet
with a hidden purpose.

"I think pictures of folks are a good deal of a comfort, don't
you--after death?"

Eben made no answer for a moment. He still gazed reflectively outward,
but whether it was into the future or his hidden past she could not
tell.

"It's queer about dyin'," he said at last.

She answered him tumultuously:--

"What is?"

"Why--" then he paused, as if to set his thought in order. "I can't tell
jest what I mean. Only folks can be here to-day an' there to-morrer. An'
they can be all of a bloom of health, or handsome as a pictur'--an' lo
ye! they're changed!"

A cold certainty settled upon her heart. The first wife had, then, been
handsome. Lydia did not know whether acquired knowledge was a boon or
not. Eben had risen, and was standing with his hands in his pockets,
still looking into space. It seemed to her that he was miles away.

"An' I dunno which is the worst," he was saying, "to have 'em come down
with a long sickness, or drop off sudden. I do, too. It's worse to see
'em suffer. But when they give right up afore your face an' eyes--"

He stopped, and Lydia thought he shuddered. Again she knew. The first
wife had died suddenly, and the memory of the shock was too keen upon
him to admit of speech. But he shook off reflection as if it had been
the dust of the hour. Now he turned to her, and the sweet recognition
of his glance was warming her anew. "Don't you go an' play me any such
trick," he said, with the whimsical creases deepening in his cheeks.

Yet she thought his eyes were wet.

"What?"

"Dyin'."

A new tenderness was born in her at the moment, seeing what he had
endured.

"No," she wanted to say, "I hope you won't have to go through that
twice." But she only shook her head brightly at him. "Come," said she,
"it's time to harness up."

"I'll drive down through that cross-road," said Eben, "an' then I've
finished up all them little byways. Byme-by, when we feel like settin'
out for good, we can pike right along the old Boston road, an' that'll
take us to aunt Phebe's, an' so on home. But we won't start out till
we're good an' ready. I guess you got kinder tired afore."

"I'm ready now," said Lydia. The color was in her cheeks. She felt
dauntless. At once, born somehow from this sober talk, she felt a
melting championship of him, as if life had hurt him too keenly and she
was there to make it up to him. Henceforth she meant to be first and
second wife in one.

"Hooray!" called Eben. He tossed up his hat; and the tavern-keeper's
wife, making pies by the kitchen window, smiled at him and shook her
rolling-pin. "Then we'll start off to-morrer, bright an' early. I don't
know how you feel, Mis' Jakes, but I'm possessed to git home."

Lydia, for her part, was soberly glad, yet there was a part of her
anticipation that was incredible to her. For even after her spiritual
uplift of the moment before, the first thought that throbbed into her
mind, like a temptation, was that of the album on the centre-table.

They drove off in the morning brightness, and Eben declared he had a
good mind to give away his remaining essences and put for home as hard
as he could pelt.

"We might cut right across country," he tempted himself. "No matter 'f
we planned suthin' different. But then we couldn't see aunt Phebe."

"You're real fond of her, ain't you?" asked Lydia absently. She was
wondering if aunt Phebe would speak of his first wife.

"She was mother's only sister," said Eben, in the deeper tone attendant
on his mother's name. "She took care of mother in her last days. I guess
we never had a mite o' family trouble but aunt Phebe was there about as
soon as she could board the train."

"Eben," said his wife, in her timid way of stealing on his confidence.
It seemed now like a shy fashion of convincing him that she was worthy,
if he would but let her, to know his heart.

"What is it?"

"Don't you think some things--some troubles--are too hard to be talked
about?"

"I guess they be," assented Eben.

"We keep thinkin' an' thinkin' 'em over, but we can't speak. Mebbe
'twould be better for us if we could."

"Mebbe 'twould." Then he pulled out his pipe, as he did when the chariot
of his affections neared an emotional pass. Eben was willing to graze a
wheel by that abyss, but he skillfully avoided falling over.

They were climbing a long hill; and the horse, head down, sagged
sleepily along, pulling faithfully. But at the top he halted, as if it
seemed he knew what was below, and waited for their wonder. Lydia's eyes
were closed, and Eben had drawn the first puff at his pipe.

"There," said he, "what think o' that?"

Lydia opened her eyes and gave a little cry. They seemed to be at the
top of everything,--winding roads, like ribbons, patches of green that
were ample woods, three dotted villages, and, full flare in their faces,
the sunset sky. The red and gold of it had spread and lavished until
the eye, to rest itself, was almost forced, for a calming glimpse, back
again to the cold blue east. Lydia looked and could not speak. Eben knew
too much even to glance at her. He felt all the wonder of it, and the
pride, for it seemed to him that it was, in a way, his sky, because it
was so much nearer home. They stayed there in silence while the beauty
changed but never faded, and the horse dropped his head, to rest.

"Well," said Eben at last, dryly, "I dunno 's ever I see such a sky as
that, unless 'twas some I used to see with my first wife."

For the first time he seemed cruel. A bitter thought shot up in Lydia's
heart that at every feast there was to be the unbidden guest. She closed
her eyes, and when she opened them again, the sky had faded and the air
was chill.

"I guess you're gittin' tired again," said Eben tenderly. "Well, we'll
be to aunt Phebe's by eight, an' she'll put you straight to bed."

The tears had wet her cheeks. They were the first she had shown him, and
he looked at them with dismay. "Hullo!" he cried, "hullo!" It was actual
terror in his voice. "'Tain't so bad as that!"

Lydia straightened herself in the buggy and wiped away the tears with an
impatient hand.

"I guess 'twas the sunset," she said tremulously. "I never see such a
sky."

"That all?" Eben was much relieved. Then he touched up the horse, and
told him what a lot of oats were waiting in aunt Phebe's barn. "If
that's all," he said, giving his mind to Lydia again, "you'll have to
spend most o' your time in salt water. That's the kind o' sunsets we're
goin' to have every night arter we get home. The doctor's ordered 'em."

Lydia made herself laugh, and they talked no more until they drove up to
a prosperous white house on the outskirts of the first village, and aunt
Phebe came to meet them. It was all a joyous tumult that night, and
Lydia went to bed early, with a confused sense that aunt Phebe was very
kind and that she had gold-bowed glasses and shook the floor when she
walked, and that the supper was a product of expert cooking. Eben was
uproariously gay, in the degree of approaching home, and took aunt Phebe
about the waist to waltz with her, whereupon she cuffed him with a
futile hand, remarking:--

"Eben Jakes, I'd be ashamed!"

Lydia had a sense of being in a homely paradise where everything was
pleasantly at one, yet that she, companioned by the unclassified memory
of a woman whose place she held, had no part in the general harmony.
Next morning she overslept, and found herself alone. She heard Eben's
whistle from the barn and the guffaw of the hired men, to whom he was
telling pleasant tales, and there were women's voices from the kitchen,
and the fragrance of frying ham. She dressed in haste, and when she went
down the breakfast-table was ready, in great abundance, and everybody
waiting by their plates: Eben, aunt Phebe and her mild, soft-spoken
husband, and Sarah, the spectacled spinster daughter, who looked
benevolently dignified enough to be her mother's mother.

"Late? I guess not," said aunt Phebe, sinking into the chair behind the
coffee-pot. "Folks get up here when they're a mind to, an' when it comes
to Eben's wife--well, you can't say no more'n that in this house."

Lydia took her place rather shyly, but when Eben had found her hand
under the tablecloth and given it a welcoming squeeze, she felt more
than half at home. Aunt Phebe passed coffee, and beamed, and forgot to
serve herself in pressing food upon the others; but when the first pause
came, she leaned back and smiled at her new niece. Lydia looked up. She
met the smile and liked it. Aunt Phebe seemed a good deal more than a
mother to the nice spinster daughter. She looked as if there were
mother-stuff enough in her to pass around and nourish and bless the
world. Aunt Phebe was speaking.

"Now," said she, "I didn't have more'n half a glimpse at you last
night, Lyddy, such a surprise an' all, an' I had this mornin' to look
for'ard to. An' now I'm goin' to take my time an' see for myself what
kind of a wife Eben's be'n an' picked out."

She was laughing richly all through the words, and Lydia, though she was
blushing, liked the sound of it. She felt quite equal to the scrutiny.
She knew the days of driving had given her a color, and she was not
unconscious of her new blue waist. Then, too, Eben's hand was again on
hers under the friendly cloth. Aunt Phebe looked, took off her glasses,
pretended to wipe them, and looked again.

"Well, Eben," said she judicially, "I'll say this for ye, you've done
well."

"Pretty good-lookin' old lady, I think myself," said Eben, with a proud
carelessness. "Course she's nothin' to what my first wife was at her
age; but then, nobody'd expect that kind o' luck twice. Aunt Phebe,
here's my cup. You make it jest like the first, or you'll hear from me."

Lydia drooped over her plate. If Eben had sought her hand then, she
would have snatched it away from him. All the delicate instincts within
her felt suddenly outraged. At last she acknowledged to herself, in a
flash, how coarse-minded he must be to mingle the present with his
sacred past. But she started and involuntarily looked up. The spinster
cousin was giggling like a girl.

"Now you've got back," she was saying to Eben. "Now I know it's you,
sure enough. He took that up when he wa'n't hardly out o' pinafores,"
she said to Lydia.

"What?" Lydia managed, through her anger at him.

"Comparin' everything with his first wife. Where'd he get it, mother?"

"Why," said aunt Phebe, "there was that old Simeon Spence that used to
come round clock-mendin'. He was forever tellin' what his first wife
used to do, an' Eben he ketched it up, an' then, when we laughed at him,
he done it the more. Land o' love, Lyddy, you chokin'?"

Lydia was sobbing and laughing together, and Eben turned in a panic from
his talk with uncle Sim, to pound her back.

"No, no," she kept saying. "I'm all right. No! no!"

"Suthin' went the wrong way," commiserated aunt Phebe, when they were
all in their places again and Lydia had wiped her eyes.

"Yes," said Lydia joyously, as if choking were a very happy matter. "It
went the wrong way. Eben, you pass aunt Phebe my cup."

And while the coffee was coming she sought out Eben's hand again and
turned to gaze at him with such tell-tale eyes that the spinster cousin,
blushing a little, looked at once away, and wondered how it would seem
to be so foolish and so fond.




A FLOWER OF APRIL


Ellen Withington and her mother lived in a garden. There was a house
behind it, with great white pillars like a temple, but it played a
secondary part to that sweet inclosure--all bees and blossoms. Ellen and
her mother duly slept in the house, and through the barren months it did
very well for shelter while they talked of slips and bulbs and thirsted
over the seed-catalogue come by mail. But from the true birth of the
year to the next frost they were steadily out-of-doors, weeding,
tending, transplanting, with an untiring passion. All the blossoms New
England counts her dearest grew from that ancient mould, enriched with
every spring. Ladies'-delights forgathered underneath the hedge, and
lilies-of-the-valley were rank with chill sweetness in their time. The
flowering currant breathed like fruitage from the East, and there were
never such peonies, such poppies, and such dahlias in all the town.

Ellen herself had an apple-bloom face, and violet eyes down-dropped;
some one said their lashes were long enough to braid. Fine gold hair
flew about her temples, and her innocent chin sank chastely like a
nun's. She and her mother never had a minute for thinking about clothes,
and so they wore soft sad-colored stuffs rather like the earth; but
these quite satisfied Ellen, because they were warm or cool to suit the
weather, and beauty, she thought, grew only from the ground.

One spring twilight Mrs. Withington was putting out her geraniums, while
Ellen leaned over the gate and talked with Susan Long. The frogs were
peeping down by the mill, and a breath of dampness came from the
upturned soil. Susan Long was the only one of the old schoolgirls with
whom Ellen had kept any semblance of intimacy; the rest of them thought
her oddly unsuited to their grown-up pastimes. She was like a bud, all
close and green, while they flared their petals to the sun and begged
for cherishing.

"Just think," said Ellen in her reedy voice, never loud enough to be
heard at "teacher's desk" in school, "while we've been standing here
three couples have gone by. I never saw so much pairing off."

Susan laughed exuberantly. She was a big girl, with a mariner's walk and
hard red cheeks.

"Anybody but you'd seen 'em a good many times," she remarked. "If you
ain't the queerest! Why, they're fellers and girls!"

"Yes, I know it," said Ellen innocently. "One was John Davis and Maria
Orne, one was--"

"Oh, I don't mean that! I mean they're goin' together. Ain't you heard
what old uncle Zephaniah said down to the Ridge? He told father this
year'd be known as the time o' the flood, all creation walkin' two and
two. Why, everybody in Countisbury's gettin' married. Courtin' begun in
the fall, with singin'-school, and this is the upshot. What do you
s'pose I'm waitin' here for, 'sides talkin' with you? Just hold on a
minute and you'll see Milt Richardson pokin' along this way. Then
there'll be four couples instead o' three."

"O Sue!" said Ellen, in a little bruised tone. She felt disturbed, as if
the spring twilight had in some manner turned to a much-revealing day.
Sue leaned over the gate and whispered rapidly:

"I'll tell you somethin' else, only don't you let it go no further.
Mother says might as well not count your chickens till they're hatched,
and aunt Templeton was left at the meetin'-house door. He asked me seven
weeks ago come Wednesday, and I've got lots of my sewin' done. Some of
my trimmin' 's real pretty. You come over'n' see it. Good-by. Don't you
tell."

She walked carelessly away down the road, not casting a glance behind.
But Milton was coming, a tall fellow, like his sweetheart heavy and
honest of face. They might have been brother and sister for the likeness
between them.

Ellen withdrew from the gate and hurried back to her mother. "Come," she
urged hastily, "let's go in."

Mrs. Withington was bent almost double, pressing the earth about the
cramped geranium roots. She felt the delight of their freedom, with all
the world to spread in.

"I ain't got quite through," she said, without looking up. "You cold?
Run right along. I'll come."

But Ellen only flitted round the house into a deeper shade and waited.
She hardly knew why, except that she was disinclined to see any more
people walking two and two, with that significant and terrifying future
before them.

The next morning, drawn by some subtle power, she went over to Susan's,
and after sitting awhile on the doorstep, they slipped upstairs into the
front chamber, and opened drawer after drawer of fine white clothing,
wonderfully trimmed.

"Long-cloth!" said Susan, in a whisper. "Here's some unbleached. We had
it on the grass last year; seemed as if it never'd whiten out. That's
for every day."

Ellen looked, in the short-breathed wonder which sometimes beset her
over a new blossom. She touched the fabric delicately and lifted an edge
of crocheted lace.

"Let's go over to Maria's," said Susan. "I'll make her show you hers."

They took the short round of the village homes where there were
daughters young and still unwed. Everywhere white cloth, serpentine
braid, and crocheted lace! Truly it was a marrying year. Ellen said very
little, and the girls, talking among themselves, forgot to notice her
any more than a flower in a vase.

But that late afternoon was very warm, and when she and her mother sat
together on the steps considering rose-bugs, she suddenly broke off to
say,--

"Mother, should you just as soon I'd have some new things, trimmed like
the girls'?"

Mrs. Withington regarded her in wonder. Ellen did not lift her eyes, but
a blush rose delicately in her cheeks.

"Well, I don't know but what 'twould be a good plan," said her mother,
after a pause. "You ain't got an individual thing that's trimmed."

So next day they walked the two miles to town, and for weeks thereafter
stayed indoors, setting stitches in snowy cloth, with piles of it
drifted near. For a time that spring, the garden almost ran to weeds.
Then, because a long dormant consciousness stirred in Mrs. Withington,
she went into the attic and brought down woven treasures; and one
Sunday, Ellen, her cheeks scarlet with the excitement of it, walked to
church in a shot silk, all blue and pink, and a hat with a long white
feather over her golden hair. There were pink roses under the brim, and
they paled beside her face.

"God sakes!" whispered Milton Richardson, in the singing-seats, "Ellen
Withington's a beauty!"

The girls rustled their starched petticoats and nudged one another.

"Ain't she come out!" said one; and another answered,--

"My stars! she's the cutest thing I ever see in all _my_ life!"

Even the minister, who was then accounted an old man, being between
forty-five and fifty, stopped on his way down the aisle where Ellen
waited for her mother, busy in matronly conclave, and shook hands with
her.

"I am very glad to see you out, my dear Ellen," said he. "You have been
absent quite a while."

She looked up at him, her blue eyes full of wonder; everybody knew she
had been regularly to church ever since she was a little girl. But the
minister smiled warmly at her and went on.

The next Sunday she came to church in a foam of white like a pear tree.
That day Henry Fox, who lingered still unmated, strode up to her and
remarked, while a cordial circle stood about to hear, "Pretty warm
to-day." This was equivalent to "See you home?" at evening meeting.

"Yes," said she, desperately, "real warm." Then she caught her mother's
hand and clung to it; and though Henry kept a dogged step beside them to
their gate, it was only Mrs. Withington who spoke.

When the two women were inside the great cool sitting-room, Ellen was
holding still by that hard, faithful hand. "Mother," she entreated
breathlessly, "I needn't ever be with anybody but you, need I?"

Jealous arms were about her even before the words had time to come.

"No! no! you're mother's own girl."

The very next Wednesday Ellen went alone to match some trimming; her
maiden outfit neared completion, and she was in haste to finish it. The
garden needed her. When she had struck into the pine woods on her way
home a wagon rattled up behind, and Milton Richardson called out,
"Ride?"

She was too timid to say, "No," and so she took his hand and climbed up
to the seat beside him. The horse fell into a walk, and Ellen blushed
more and more because she could not think of anything to say. Midway of
the pines the horse stood still.

"Le's wait a minute in the shade," said Milton; and Ellen, glancing
swiftly at him, wondered why he seemed so strange. He sought her eyes
again, but she was gazing at the pines. Her cheek was rosy red.

"You been shoppin'?" he asked desperately.

"Yes," said Ellen, grateful to him for speech, wherein she was so poor.
"I went to get some braid."

"You makin' up pretty things, same 's all the girls?"

"I've made some."

Milton caught his breath.

"O Ellen!" he burst forth, "I wish you'd let me kiss you!"

Suddenly she was gone out of the wagon, like a bird let loose from an
imprisoning hand. He saw her running like a swift sweet sprite along the
darkening road.

"Ellen, you hold on!" he cried, whipping up to follow. "I didn't mean
nothin'! Oh, you let me jest speak one word."

But at the noise of his pursuit she fled over the low stone wall, and
without a look behind, dipped into the hollow on her homeward way.
Milton swore miserably and drove on. He saw Mrs. Withington gathering
cowslip greens in a marsh sufficiently removed from home, and that
heartened him to draw rein before the still white house. Ellen would be
alone. When he strode into the sitting-room she sprang up from the
lounge where she had cast herself. The tears still hung in her long
lashes, and her cheeks were white.

"My Lord! Ellen Withington!" he cried, in a shamed and rough remorse.
"Couldn't you give me a chance to speak? I don't know what under the
light o' the sun made me say that. Only you looked so terrible pretty.
But you needn't ha' took it so."

She stood staring at him, fascinated, one brown hand trembling on her
heart. Her eyes shot a glance at the door behind him, and he was enraged
anew with pity of her.

"You don't know what it is to see a girl as pretty as you be," he went
on, as if he scolded her, "and all dressed up to the nines."

She was still looking at him dumbly. She saw beyond him the vista of
Sue's broken life.

"Well, then, won't you be friends?" he urged. "Great king! you couldn't
be any more offish if I'd done it. You needn't think anything's altered.
You're the prettiest creatur' that ever stepped, but I wouldn't give up
Sue for the Queen of England. Now will you say it's square?"

So nothing was changed. She could not understand it, but she nodded at
him and smiled a little. Her trembling did not cease until he was far
upon the road.

When Mrs. Withington came home with her basket of greens, Ellen had
supper all ready, and she ran forward and held a corner of her mother's
apron while they walked together toward the house.

"You look kind o' peaked," said Mrs. Withington tenderly. "What you got
on that old brown thing for?"

"I'm going to weed after supper," Ellen answered. "The garden looks real
bad."

Mrs. Withington gazed at her keenly.

"Henry Fox asked if we were goin' to be home this evenin'," she said,
with much indifference. "I told him I guessed so."

Ellen held the apron hard.

"O mother!" she whispered; "you see him. I haven't got to, have I?"

"Law! no, child," said the other woman. "I guess you ain't. You're
mother's own girl."

So when the dusk came Mrs. Withington sat in the parlor and talked of
crops with Henry, wan beside her, while Ellen, safe at the back of the
house, weeded a bed of pansies purpling there. A soft after-glow lighted
all the windows to flame, and fell full upon the face of one dark
flower, quite human in its sombre wistfulness. Ellen knelt and kissed
it tremulously.

"You darling one!" she murmured under her breath; and somehow she knew
that this was the only sort of kiss she should ever want to give.




THE AUCTION


Miss Letitia Lamson sat by the open fire, at a point where she could
easily reach the tongs for the adjusting of any vagabond stick, and
Cap'n Oliver Drown, in the opposite angle, held dominion over the poker.
No one else would Miss Letitia have admitted to partnership in the
managing of her fire; but Cap'n Oliver wielded an undisputed privilege.
The poker suited him because he had a way, in the heat of friendly
dissension, of smashing a stick much before it was ready to drop apart
of its own charring; and that Miss Letitia never resented. She herself
was gentle and persuasive with a fire; but the cap'n's more impetuous
method seemed to belong to him, and she understood, without much
thinking about it, that when he blustered a little, even over a
hard-working blaze, it was because he must. He was a tempestuously
organized creature, of a martial front and a baby heart, most fortunate
in his breadth of shoulder, his height, and the readiness of the
choleric blood to come into his cheeks, the eagerness of his husky voice
to bluster.

These outward tokens of an untrammeled spirit helped him to hold his own
among his kind, though his oldest friend, Miss Letty, prized him for
different reasons. In her soul she had always regarded him as "real
cunning," and had even, when she passed to bring up the dish of apples
from the cellar, or a mug of cider, longed to touch the queer lock that
would straggle down from his sparsely covered poll in absurd travesty of
a baby's tended curl.

Probably no one, and certainly not the captain himself, knew exactly how
Miss Letty regarded him. Miss Letty had been forty-seven years old the
last November that ever was, as she had just told him, in talking over
her forthcoming departure from the house where she had lived all the
forty-seven years; and he knew, she added, just how she felt about the
place and all that was in it. The cap'n nodded gravely, thinking, if it
paid to say so, that he knew how the town looked upon her. She was good
as gold, the neighbors said, and at that moment she especially looked
it, in a still, serious way. She was a wholesome woman, with nothing
showy to commend her and little to remark except the extreme earnestness
of her upward glance. From her unconscious humility she seemed to be
always gazing up at people, even when their eyes were on a level with
hers. It might have indicated a habit of mind.

It was only to-night that the rumor of her going had reached Cap'n
Oliver, and he had come in to talk it over. Miss Letty's heart quieted
as she saw him take her father's capacious armchair and settle on the
applique cushion, so sacred to him that whenever the cat stole a nap out
of it, stray hairs had to be brushed scrupulously off, lest Cap'n Oliver
should appear for an evening's gossip.

Miss Letty's house was at the end of a narrow way, bordered by
cinnamon-roses and stragglers from old gardens; and some of the
neighbors said it would make them as nervous as a witch to be so far
from the road. But it did not make Miss Letty nervous. For some reason,
perhaps because of long usage, it helped her feel secure.

"Well," she was saying mildly to Cap'n Oliver, "I'm gettin' along in
years. What's the use of denyin' it? That's what Ellery said in his
letter. 'You're 'most fifty, Aunt Letty,' says he. 'Time to quit livin'
alone an' come out here an' let us take care o' you.'"

Cap'n Oliver scowled at the fire as if he found the freshly burning
sticks too strong to be smashed, and resented it.

"Well," said he, "I'm fifty-four. Let 'em come to me."

"Now, be you really?" asked Miss Letty, in a pretty surprise, though she
knew all the calendar of his life from the day she went to school for
the first time and heard him, in the second reader, profusely
interpreting a martial declaration to the Romans. "Well, who'd have
thought it!"

"I don't know," said Cap'n Oliver, staring into the fire, "as I'm any
less of a man because I'm fifty-four years old. S'pose anybody should
come to me an' say: 'Now you're fifty-four, cap'n. You better shut up
shop an' go an' live in Washington Territory.'"

"It ain't Washington Territory," said Miss Letty, setting him right with
a becoming air of humility. "It's Chicago they live to, Ellery an'
Mary."

"Be that as it may," said the cap'n, "I've eat off my own plates an'
drinked out o' my own cups a good many year, an' if anybody should try
to give me a home, I'll bet ye, Letty, I'd be as mad as a hornet. I
wisht you'd be mad, too. I'd think more of ye if ye was."

"You've been blest in a good housekeeper," said Miss Letty, in a gentle
recall. "It ain't many men left alone as you be that's got anybody
strong an' willin' like Sarah Ann Douglas to heft the burden an' lug it
right along."

"It ain't Sarah Ann Douglas," said the cap'n. "Sarah Ann's a good girl,
worth her weight in gold, an' growin' more valuable every day, but it
ain't she that's kep' a roof over my head. I've kep' it myself because
I would have it. So there ye be."

"Well, I dunno how 'tis," said Miss Letty. She was staring placidly into
the fire. "But I don't seem to have so much spirit as you have, Oliver.
Seems to me, if Ellery an' Mary are goin' to feel worried havin' me
livin' on here alone, mebbe I'd better sell off an' go back with 'em.
That's the way I look at it."

"You never had any way of your own," said the cap'n.

Miss Letty put out a firm, plump hand and presented him with the poker.

"That stick's 'most fell apart," she said pacifically. "Mebbe you better
give it a kind of a knock."

The cap'n did it absently and was soothed by the process. Then Miss
Letty laid the shortened pieces together in a workmanlike way, and they
blazed afresh.

"What you goin' to do with your things?" asked the cap'n, pointing a
broad and expressive thumb about the place.

"Sell 'em off. That's what Ellery wrote. He says I could have an auction
mebbe a week 'fore Thanksgivin',--that's about now,--an' then when he
an' Mary come we could all go over to cousin Liza's to stay, an' start
for Chicago from there. Seems if 'twas all complete."

The cap'n was staring at her.

"You ain't goin' to sell off your things without ay or no?" he inquired.
"Don't ye prize 'em--the table you've eat off of an' chairs you've set
in sence you were little?"

Miss Letty winced, and then recovered herself.

"Yes," she said, "I do prize 'em. But it seems if they'd got to go."

"Why don't ye take 'em with ye?"

"I couldn't do that, Oliver. Ellery has got his home furnished all
complete--oak chamber sets an' I dunno what all. There wouldn't be no
room for my old sticks."

The cap'n meditated.

"Letty," said he at length, "if there was anybody you ever set by after
your own father an' mother, 'twas my wife Mary."

"Yes," said Letty, with one of her warmly earnest looks. "Mary an' I was
always a good deal to one another."

"Well, do you know what she said to me once? 'Twas in her last sickness.
She was tracin' back over old times, that year you an' I was together so
much, goin' to singin'-school an' all. You had a good voice,
Letty--voice like a bird. You recollect that year, don't ye?"

"Yes," said Letty. Her voice trembled a little. "I recollect."

"That was the spring Mary kinder broke down an' went into a decline,
an' you journeyed off to Dill River, an' made that long visit. An' when
you come back, Mary an' I was engaged. Well, I'm gettin' ahead of my
story. What Mary said was, 'Oliver,' says she, 'you don't know half how
good Letty is. Nobody knows but me. It's her own fault,' says she. 'She
gives up too much, an' it makes the rest of us selfish.'"

"Did she say that?" asked Letty. She was awakened to a vivid recognition
of something beyond the outer significance of the words. Then she seemed
to lay her momentary emotion aside, as if it were something she could
cover out of sight. She laughed a little. "Well," she said, "I guess I
don't give up much nowadays. I ain't got so very much to give."

Cap'n Oliver rose and carefully arranged the fire as if there would be
no one to do it after he was gone. Miss Letty loved that little custom.
It seemed a kind of special service, and often, after he had done it and
taken his leave, she went to bed earlier than she had intended because,
when his fire had burned out, she could not bear to rearrange it.

"Well," said he, "you bear it in mind, what Mary said. Sometimes you
give up too much. You've gi'n up all your life, an' now you're goin' to
give up to Ellery an' Mary. You think twice, Letty, that's all I say.
Think twice."

He shook hands with her gravely, according to their habit, and she
heard his steps along the frozen lane. Then she opened the door softly a
crack--this was old custom, too--that she might hear them farther. This
time she was sure she actually knew when he turned into the road. She
went back to the room and stood for a moment, her hand resting on the
table, looking at the orderly fire and then at the chair which seemed to
belong more to him than to her father. The cat got up from the lounge
where, as she knew perfectly well, she had to content herself when Cap'n
Oliver came, stretched, and walked over to the chair as if to assert her
ownership. She was gathering her muscles for the easy leap when Miss
Letty pounced upon her, gently yet with an involuntary decision.

"Don't you get up there, puss," she said jealously. "Do you think you've
got to have a share in everything that's goin'?"

Then she laughed at herself in a gentle shame, lifted puss into the seat
of desire, and stroked her ruffled dignity, and still laughing, in that
indulgent way, sat down to see the fire out before she went to bed.

The next day Miss Letty set about cleaning her house, the actual first
step toward leaving it; and suddenly, as she worked, at a moment she
could never identify, it came over her that things which had been hers
by such long usage that they were as unconsidered as her hand that
wrought upon them, were to be hers no more. Then, as she dusted and
rubbed, she stopped from time to time, to regard the rooms and their
furnishings musingly and wonder if she should remember every smallest
touch of their homely charm. She hoped she should at least remember.

All the week she did not see Cap'n Oliver. He was over at the Pinelands,
she understood, making his married sister a little visit, as he always
did in the fall of the year. If she thought it a little hard that he
should be away the last week her home was to wear its accustomed face,
she did not say so, even to herself. It seemed to her a poor habit to
wish for what was obviously not to be, and all by herself she set upon
the day for the sale of her goods and sent for the auctioneer to come.

An auction was a great event throughout the countryside. It ordinarily
happened in the spring, as if people had taken all winter to get used to
parting with their possessions; and then wagons of every sort came from
whatever region the county paper had reached, and families brought their
lunches in butter-boxes and went about scrutinizing the household gear
that was to come under the hammer, glad at last to know what the house
walls had really held; or they visited with their neighbors in little
groups. But this was a day of fall sunshine and drifting leaves. Miss
Letty, standing at an upper window looking out on her pear tree, the
leaves leathery brown, felt a twitching of the lips. She gazed farther
over her domain, and it seemed to her that it had never been so pleasant
before, so mellowed and softened by the last light of the year. She knew
there were neighbors in the yard below, and could not bring herself to
glance at them. A line of horses stood there, and, she was sure, all the
way up the lane, and she remembered that was the way they had stood when
her mother was buried.

Then some one laughed out, in a way she knew, and she looked down and
saw Cap'n Oliver. He was staring up at her window, as he answered a
neighbor's greeting, and he gave a little oblique nod at her, and
stumped along up the path. At once she recalled herself to the day, and
went downstairs to meet him. It seemed very simple and plain now he had
come.

The neighbors standing in the entry stood aside to let her pass, but she
could scarcely notice them. It began to seem as if she must reach Cap'n
Oliver, and then all would be well. The cap'n was in vigorous condition.
His face looked ruddier, and he was shaking her hand and saying, as if
she had endowed him with her state of mind:--

"Soon be over, Letty, soon be over. Don't you give it a thought."

"No," said Miss Letty, choking, "I won't. I won't give it a thought."

But at that moment Hiram Jackson, who knew everything and was fervidly
anxious to be the earliest herald, came stammering out his eagerness to
tell.

"Say, Miss Letty. Say! you can't have no auction. You won't have no
auctioneer. Old Blaisdell's wife's sister's dead, down to East Branch,
an' he's gone."

Miss Letty, breathless, looked at the cap'n. "Well, there!" she said. It
was in her mind that now she might not need to have the auction at all;
and again she wondered, since she must have it, how she could ever make
up her mind to it again.

"Oh, dear!" she breathed. "I'm sorry."

The cap'n was frowning at her, only because he was so deep in thought.
He threw up his head a little, then, bluffly, as if he had reached a
clearer decision he meant to follow out.

"Not a word, Letty," said he. "Now don't you speak a word. I'm goin' to
auction 'em off myself."

She stared at him, her lips apart, in protest.

"Why, Oliver," she said, "you ain't an auctioneer."

"Well, I shall be after this bout. Now you come straight into the
sittin'-room an' set down in the corner underneath the ostrich egg,
where I can see you good an' plain. An' if I come to anything you want
to bid in, you hold up your finger, an' I'll knock it down to you. You
understand, don't ye, Letty?"

It was hard to realize that she did, she looked so like a frightened
little animal, turning her head this way and that, as if she longed for
leaves to cover her.

"You understand, Letty, don't ye?" the cap'n was asking with great
gentleness; and because she saw at last some sign of distress in his
face also, she quieted, in a dutiful fashion, and nodded at him.

"Yes," she said, "I'll be where you can see me. But I sha'n't bid
nothin' in. I don't prize 'em 'specially more'n I prize everything
together. If I can give up an' go out West, I guess I can get along
without my furniture. Shouldn't you think so?"

She went hurrying away across the hall and into the sitting-room, and
Cap'n Oliver, his head bent a little, stroked his chin and watched her.
Then he followed, making his way through the friendly crowd in hall and
sitting-room, and mounted the dry-goods box prepared for the auctioneer.
He looked about him and smiled a little, partly because people were
gazing at him sympathetically, and partly over his own embarrassing
plight. For he was a shy man. Nobody knew it but himself, and he was
afraid that after to-day everybody would know.

"Well, neighbors," said he, "I feel as if I was runnin' for President or
hog-reeve or somethin', or goin' to speak in meetin'. But I ain't. I'm
goin' to auction off Letty Lamson's things, an' I ain't been to an
auction myself sence I was seventeen an' set on the fence an' chewed gum
an' played 'twas tobacker while old Dan'el Cummings's farm was auctioned
off down to the last stick o' timber. Well, I don't know 's I could say
how 'twas done, nor how it's commonly done now, but I can take a try at
it. Now, here's some books Miss Letty's brought down out o' the attic. I
don't know what they be, but they look to me as if they might ha' come
out of her gran'ther's lib'ry--old Parson Lamson, ye know."

"Yes," said Miss Letty, from the low rocking-chair a neighbor had
insisted on giving up to her, "they did. Many's the time I've watched
him porin' over 'em winter nights with two candles."

"There, you see! they're Parson Lamson's books. Many a good word he got
out of 'em for his sermons, I'll bet ye a dollar. Why, ye recollect how
much Parson Lamson done for this town, how he got up sewin'-circles in
war-time an' set everybody to scrapin' lint, an' climbed out of his bed
after he couldn't hardly stand with rheumatism to say good-by to the
boys when they enlisted, an' how he wrote to 'em an' prayed for
'em--why, them books are wuth their weight in gold. How much am I
offered for Parson Lamson's books? A dollar-seventy--Why, bless you, Tim
Fry, there ain't a book there but's wuth a dollar-seventy taken by
itself! Why, I'll start it myself at thirteen--"

"Oh, don't you do it, Cap'n, don't you do it!" called Miss Letty
piercingly. "I don't want 'em to bid on gran'ther's books. I want them
books myself, if I have to work my fingers to the bone."

The cap'n took out his beautiful colored handkerchief with Joseph and
his brethren on it, and wiped his face.

"Gone!" said he, "to Miss Letty Lamson. Now, ladies an' gentlemen,
here's a little chair. I know that chair, an' so do you. It's the chair
little Letty Lamson used to set in when she wa'n't more'n three year
old, an' her mother used to keep her out under the sweet-bough tree in
that little rocker whilst she was washin' or churnin'! What?"

He paused, for Miss Letty had waved a frantic hand. The tears were
running down her cheeks. The others had before them the picture of
little Letty Lamson swaying and singing to herself, but she saw the
brown apple-stems over her head and smelled the bitter-sweetness of the
blooms. She saw her mother's plump bare arms as they went up and down
with the churn-dasher or in and out of the suds, and felt again the pang
of love that used to tell her that mother was the most beautiful
creature in the world.

"Why," said she, regardless of her listeners, "I wouldn't part with that
chair for a hundred dollars. How ever come you to think I'd part with my
little chair?"

The cap'n was looking at her in a frank perplexity.

"The chair," said he, "remains the property of our friend and neighbor,
Miss Letty Lamson. Now, ladies an' gentlemen, here's a fire-set--tongs,
shovel, an' andirons. That fire-set has been in this very settin'-room
as long as I can remember. Summer-times the andirons have been trimmed
up with sparrergrass an' the like o' that, an' winter-times they've been
shined up complete an' the fire snappin' behind 'em. What am I
offered--"

Miss Letty was standing.

"Oh," she cried, "I never meant to put that fire-set in. Why, don't you
remember--"

She was facing the cap'n, and the appeal of her voice and look ran
straight to him over the heads of the others, like a message. It bade
him recall how he and she had sat together and talked of sad things and
happy ones, night after night, for many years. The talks had been mostly
cheerful, for the cap'n would have it so, and whenever she felt poorly
she had taken pains to put on a lively front, because she reasoned that
menfolks hated squally weather. Now, with the passing of the andirons
and all they stood for, it looked to her as if a door had shut on that
pleasant seclusion where they two had communed together, and there would
be no more laughter in the world. "Oliver!" she said, and stopped,
because the coming words had choked her.

The cap'n was looking at her over his glasses with extreme benevolence.

"Letty," said he, "I guess you better go upstairs an' sort out some o'
the bed-linen an' coverlets. I understood they wa'n't quite ready, an'
we shall get to 'em before long. If I come to anything down here I think
you set by particularly an' that you can pack up as well as not, I'll
bid it in for ye."

The neighbors were nodding in a kindly confirmation, and Miss Letty also
understood it to be for the best. She made her way through the friendly
aisle cleared for her, and Cap'n Oliver waited until he heard her on
the stairs above. He drew a heavy breath.

"Now," said he, "I guess we can poke along. It ain't to be wondered at
anybody should want to bid in their own things, but it's kind of
distressin' to an auctioneer that wants to earn his money. Now here's
this high-boy. I'll rattle it off before Miss Letty gets time to have a
change of heart an' come down again. What am I offered for old Parson
Lamson's high-boy, bonnet-top an' old brasses all complete?"

Timothy Fry, a bright-eyed youth in the background, started it at
fifteen dollars. Timothy had hitherto, in his twenty years, shown no
sign of enthusiasm more sophisticated than that of shooting birds in
their season and roaming the woods in a happy vagabondage while the law
was on. When he made his bid there was a great turning of heads. Some
looked at him, but others fixed the cap'n with a challenging glance,
because he and the cap'n were great cronies, and it had been jocosely
said they were thick as thieves, and if one lied t'other would swear to
it. But Timothy, in his Sunday suit, with a blue tie and an elaborate
scarf-pin, looked the picture of innocence, and it was concluded that,
although no one had suspected it, he was thinking of setting up
housekeeping for himself. The cap'n's face had an earnest absorption.
He was evidently occupied only in being auctioneer.

"Pshaw!" he said, with a conversational ruthlessness. "Fifteen dollars!
Why, I'd give that myself an' set it up out there at the cross-roads for
autos to bid on while they run. Its wuth--well, I wouldn't say what
'twas wuth. Maybe you'd laugh, an' I ain't goin' to be laughed at, if I
be an auctioneer."

"Twenty-five," piped up Deacon Eli King, won by the lure of city
rivalry.

"Twenty-six," Timothy offered quietly.

"Twenty-eight," trembled Hannah Bond, who lived alone and braided mats
for the city trade. She had always wanted a high-boy, but the sound of
her own voice made it seem as if bidding might be almost too steep a
price to pay for one.

"Twenty-nine," said Timothy.

After that there was very little competition. Nobody wanted a high-boy
except for commercial possibilities, and about the time the bidding
reached thirty-five dollars a foreshadowing timidity began to overspread
the assembly. An autumn wind came up and set the bare woodbine sprays to
beating on the window, to the tune of nearing snow. Summer buyers seemed
far away. When one considered the drifted leaves and the cold sky, it
looked as if full purses and credulous minds were a midsummer dream,
never to come again. So the high-boy, in this moment of commercial
panic, was knocked down to Timothy Fry. Five or six chairs followed, and
these also became his.

Then the crowd pressed into the west sitting-room, where there was
richer treasure. Here, too, Timothy's unmoved voice beat steadily on,
raising every bid, and here, too, he came out victor. In the next room
also he swept the field, and now at last the crowd murmurously compared
certainties, one woman darkly prophesying he never'd pay for them,
because he hadn't a cent--not a cent--laid up, and a man returning that
nobody need worry. 'Twas only a joke of Tim's; but Miss Letty'd be the
one to suffer. Timothy's eyes and ears were closed to comment. His
commercial onslaught continued, and when, in the early dusk, horses were
unhitched and there was time for comment at the gate, it was clearly
understood that, save for what Miss Letty had bid in at the start,
Timothy Fry was the possessor of every stick of furniture, every cup and
bowl even, and all the ornaments and articles of common usage in the
house. Timothy himself had gone. The men had looked about for him, to
rally him on his approaching nuptials, the women for the ruthless
cross-questioning his madness had invited; but he had slipped away
softly, like the wood-creatures he hunted. Even Cap'n Oliver, who might
be supposed to know his inner mind, had betaken himself to the porch,
and stood there, hat in hand, wiping his heated brow.

"Don't ask me," he returned to queries and conclusions in the mass. "I'm
nothin' in the world but an auctioneer. Now I've learned the road, I
dunno but I shall go right along auctionin' off everything I come
acrost. You better be gettin' along home. Mebbe I'll sell your teams
right off under your noses, if the fit comes over me."

"Timothy ain't goin' to be married, is he?" inquired aunt Belinda Soule,
who sent items to the "County Star."

"S'pose so, sometime," concurred the cap'n jovially. "It's the end o'
mortals here below. Dunno but I shall be married myself, if it comes to
that."

"When's he goin' to take his furniture away?" continued aunt Belinda,
with the persistence of her kind.

"Don't know. Mebbe he ain't goin' to take it. Mebbe he's goin' to marry
Letty. 'Pears to me I heard a kind of a rumor she was goin' to marry
'fore long."

Aunt Belinda shook her head at him.

"Don't talk so about a nice respectable woman," said she. "An' she goin'
to move away from us an' live nobody knows where. It's a shame."

The cap'n burst into a laugh that aunt Belinda privately thought
coarse, and turned back into the house, while she joined a group of
matrons and went away home, discoursing volubly.

Cap'n Oliver stopped for a minute at the window in the empty parlor,
watching their departing bulk, and then went into the hall, where the
tread of many invading feet had left the moist autumn soil, with bits of
grass and now and then a yellowed leaf.

"Letty!" he called roundly.

There was a light step above, and then Miss Letty's voice, a very little
voice suited to the dusk and stillness, came down the stairs.

"Be they gone?" she faltered.

"Yes," said the cap'n, "they're gone, every confounded one of 'em."

"Did they take the things with 'em?" inquired Miss Letty. "I didn't dast
to look. I knew I couldn't help feelin' it if I see 'em all loaded up
with things I knew."

"You come down here, Letty," said the cap'n. "I want to say a word to
you."

She did come, wondering, her face sodden with tears, and a miserable
little ball of a wet handkerchief in her grasp. The cap'n met her at the
foot of the stairs and, without warning, took her by the shoulders and
shook her slightly, why, he did not know, except perhaps as a warning to
put a prettier face on the matter. Then he drew her into his arms with
a conclusiveness it would have been difficult to resist, and kissed her
soft wet cheeks. He kissed them a good many times, and ended by touching
her trembling mouth.

"There," said the cap'n, "I don't know 's I ever kissed you before,
Letty, but I expect to a good many times again, off 'n' on."

"Oh, yes, you did once," said Miss Letty, with unexpected frankness and
simplicity. "'Twas the eighteenth of November, thirty years ago this
very fall."

The cap'n looked at her and broke into a wondering laugh.

"Letty," said he, "you're the beateree, an' I'm a nat'ral-born fool.
You're goin' to marry me right off as soon as I can get the license."

"An' live over to your house an' not go to Chicago?" inquired Miss Letty
beatifically.

"Course you won't go to Chicago, unless we go together some spring or
fall an' make 'em a visit an' show 'em we've got suthin' to live for as
well as they have."

"Then I needn't have sold my furniture," said she, with a happy turn of
logic.

"Sold your furniture? You ain't sold it. I had Tim Fry bid it all in for
me, an' I was goin' to have it crated up an' tell Ellery, when he come,
he'd got to let me pay it on to Chicago, whether or no. An' then when I
stood up there like a rooster on a fence, auctionin' of it off, it all
come over me 'twa'n't the furniture an' the house I should miss. 'Twas
you. I made up my mind then an' there I'd keep ye if I had to hopple ye
by the ankle like Tolman's jumpin' steer."

Miss Letty withdrew from him and took a timid step to the west-room
door, where, though the dusk was gathering, she could find the familiar
shapes of her beloved possessions.

"I don't see how in the world I ever made up my mind I could," she said,
a happy tremor in her voice.

It sounded to Cap'n Oliver strangely like a voice out of his past,
unquelled by fears and abnegations. It was the voice that used to greet
him when, in his splendid blue suit and shining satin tie, he had called
for Letty Lamson, some thirty years ago, to take her in his sleigh to
singing-school.

"Could what?" he inquired hilariously, out of his dream where the
present made the fire on the hearth and the past lent him figures to sit
by it.

"Why, get along without my old things."

"I s'pose you never so much as thought you couldn't get along without
me," suggested the cap'n, in a kindly rallying.

"Yes," said Miss Letty soberly, "I did think that. I knew I couldn't."




SATURDAY NIGHT


Jerry Norton stopped for a moment swinging his axe and crashing it into
the grain of the tree, and took off his cap to cool his wet forehead. He
looked very strong, standing there, equipped with great shoulders, a
back as straight as the tree its might was smashing, and the vigor
bespoken by red-brown eyes, a sanguine skin, and thick bright hair. He
seemed to be regarding the pine trunks against the snow of the hill
beyond, and again the tiny tracks nearer by, where a winter animal had
flurried; but really all the beauties of the woods were sealed to him.

He was going back five days to his quarrel with Stella Joyce, and
scowling as he thought how hateful she had been in her injustice. It was
all about the ten-foot strip of land the city man had claimed from
Jerry's new building lot through a newly found flaw in the title. Jerry,
Stella mourned, had relinquished the land without question.

"I'd have hung on to it and fought him through every court in the
country," she had declared, in a passion of reproach. "You're so numb,
Jerry! You just go pokin' along from day to day, lettin' folks walk
over you--and never a word!"

Jerry had been unable, out of his numbness, to explain that he gave up
the land because the other man's title to it, he had seen at once, was a
valid one; nor could she, on her side, tell him how her wounded feeling
was intensified because old aunt Bray, come from the West for a visit,
had settled down upon him and his mother, in all likelihood to remain
and go into the new house when it was built. But there was no time for
either of them to reach pacific reasons when every swift word of hers
begot a sullen look from him; and before they knew it they had parted.

Now, while he was retracing the path of their disagreement, lighted by
the flaming lamps of her upbraiding, he heard a movement, light enough
for a furry creature on its way to covert, and Stella stood before him.
She did not look either obstinate or likely to continue any quarrel,
however well begun. She was a round little person, complete in her
miniature beauties, and now her blue eyes sought him with an extremity
of emotion very honest and also timid. She had wrapped herself in a
little red shawl, and her hands, holding it tight about her, gave a
fantastic impression of being clasped in mute appeal. Jerry looked at
her in wonder. For an instant they both stood as still as two
wood-creatures surprisingly met and, so far, undetermined upon the
degree of hostility it would be wise to show.

Stella broke the silence. She retreated a little, in doing it, as if
words would bring her nearer and she repudiated that degree of intimacy.

"I just want a favor," she said humbly.

Jerry advanced a step as she withdrew, and the interval between them
stayed unchanged. Now the trouble in her face had its effect on him, and
he forgot for a moment how he hated her.

"Ain't anything the matter, is there?" he asked, in quick concern.

Stella shook her head, but her eyes brimmed over. That evidently annoyed
her, and she released the little shawl to lift a hand and brush the
tears away.

"Aunt Hill has come," she said.

He had an impulse to tell her, as a piece of news that would once have
concerned them both, that his own aunt was making her plans to go West
again, and that she had furnished the money for him to buy back the
precious strip of land. The city man, seeing how much he prized it, had
sold it to him. But while he reflected that now Stella cared nothing
about his intimate concerns, she was rushing on.

"And mother's sick," she ended.

"Sho!" said Jerry, in a sympathizing blur. "Real sick?"

"No, nothin' but her rheumatism. But it's in her back this time. She
can't move hand nor foot."

"Why, yes," said Jerry, leaning his axe against the trunk of the wounded
tree. "Course! you want I should go over 'n' help lift her."

Stella shook her head in definite finality.

"No, I don't either. Aunt Hill 'n' I can manage well enough. I guess
mother'd be provoked 'most to death if I run round callin' the menfolks
in."

"Well, what is it then?" asked Jerry, in palpable disappointment. "What
is 't you want me to do?"

He thought he had never seen her cheeks so red. They made him think of
the partridge-berries under the snow. She began her tale, looking
indifferently at him as she proceeded, as if to convince them both that
there was nothing peculiar in it all.

"Aunt Hill's an awful trial to mother."

Jerry took up his axe in one hand, and began absently chopping off a
circle of bark about the tree. Stella was near saying, "Don't you cut
your foot!" but she closed her lips upon the friendly caution and
continued:--

"There's nothin' she don't get her nose into, and it just wears mother
out."

"She's a great talker, seems if I remembered," said Jerry absently,
wishing Stella would keep her hands under the shawl and not get them
frozen to death. He was about to add that most women did talk too much,
but somehow that seemed an unfortunate implication from one as unpopular
as he, and he caught himself up in time. Stella was dashing on now, in
the course of her obnoxious task.

"If anything's queer, she just goes at mother hard as she can pelt and
keeps at her till she finds it out. And mother hates it enough when
she's well, but when she's sick it's just awful. And now she's flat on
her back."

"Course," said Jerry, in a comprehending sympathy. "Want I should carry
your aunt Hill off to the Junction?"

"Why, you can't! She wouldn't go. You couldn't pry her out with a
crowbar. She's made up her mind to stay till a week from to-morrow, and
till a week from to-morrow she'll stay."

Jerry looked gloomily into the distance. He was feeling his own
limitations as a seer.

"Well," he said, venturing a remark likely to involve him in no way, "I
s'pose she will."

"Now, see here," said Stella. She spoke with a defiant hardness, the
measure of her hatred for what she had to do. "There's one way you could
help us out. She asked about you right away, and of course she thought
we were--goin' together, same 's we had been."

Here her voice failed her, and he knew the swift color on her cheek was
the miserable sign of her shame in such remembrance. It became his task
to hearten her.

"Course," said he. "Anybody would."

"Well, I can't tell her. I ain't even told mother yet, and I don't want
to till she's on her feet again. And if aunt Hill gets the leastest wind
of it she'll hound mother every minute, and mother'll give up,
and--well, I just can't do it, that's all."

Jerry was advancing eagerly now, his lips parted for speech; but her
task once begun was easier, and she continued:--

"Now, don't you see? I should think you could."

"Yes," said Jerry, in great hopefulness. "Course I do."

"No, you don't either. It's only, she's goin' to be here not quite a
week, and it's only one Saturday night."

"Yes," said Jerry, "that's to-morrer night."

"Well, don't you see? If you don't come over, she'll wonder why, and
mother'll wonder why, and mother'll ask me, and, oh, dear! dear!"

Jerry thought she really was going to cry, this time, and it seemed to
him that these domestic whirlwinds furnished ample reason for it.

"Course!" he said, in whole-hearted misery for her. "It's a bad place.
A man wouldn't think anything of it, but womenfolks are different.
They'd mind it terribly. Anybody could see they would."

Stella looked at him as if personal chastisement would be too light for
him.

"Don't you see?" she insisted in a tone of enforced patience. "If you'd
only dress up and come over."

Light broke in on him.

"Course I will, Stella," he called, so loudly that she looked over her
shoulder to see if perhaps some neighbor, crossing the wood-lot, might
have heard. "You just bet I will!"

Then, to his wonderment, she had vanished as softly as she came. Jerry
was disappointed. He had thought they were going on talking about the
domestic frenzies wrought by aunt Hill, but it seemed that further
sociability was to be denied him until to-morrow night. He took up his
axe, and went on paying into the heart of the tree. But he whistled now,
and omitted to think how much he hated Stella. He was debating whether
her scarlet shawl was redder than her cheeks. But Jerry never voiced
such wonders. They seemed to him like a pain, or satisfaction over one's
dinner, an ultimate part of individual experience.

The next night, early after supper, he took his way "down along" to the
Joyce homestead lying darkly under leafless elms. There was a light in
the parlor, as there had been every night since he began to go with
Stella, and his heart beat in recognition, knowing it was for him. He
tried the front door to walk in, neighbor-fashion, but it resisted him,
and then he let the knocker fall. Immediately a window opened above, and
Stella's voice came down to him.

"O Jerry, mother's back is worse, and I feel as if I'd ought to be
rubbin' her. You come over another time."

Jerry stood staring up at her, a choking in his throat, and something
burning hotly into his eyes. But he found his voice just as the window
was sliding down.

"Don't you want I should do somethin'? I should think she'd have to be
lifted."

"No," said Stella, quite blithely, "I can do all there is to do.
Good-night."

The window closed and he went away. Stella ran downstairs to the bedroom
where aunt Hill sat beside her mother, fanning the invalid with a
palm-leaf fan. Mrs. Joyce hated to be fanned in wintry weather, but aunt
Hill acted upon the theory that sick folks needed air. Aunt Hill was
very large, and she creaked as she breathed, because, when she was
visiting, even in the country, she put on her black silk of an
afternoon. She had thick black hair, smooth under a fictitious gloss,
and done in a way to be seen now only in daguerreotypes of long ago, and
her dull black eyes were masterful. Mrs. Joyce, gazing miserably up at
her daughter, was a shred of a thing in contrast, and Stella at once
felt a passionate pity for her.

"There, aunt Hill," she said daringly, "I wouldn't fan mother any more
if I's you. Let me see if I can get at you, mother. I'm goin' to rub
your back."

Aunt Hill, with a quiver of professional pride wounded to the quick, did
lay down the fan on a stand at her elbow. She was listening.

"Where's Jerry?" she demanded. "I don't hear nobody in the fore-room."

Stella was manipulating her mother with a brisk yet tender touch.

"Oh," she said, "I told him he'd have to poke along back to-night. I
wanted to rub mother 'fore she got sleepy."

"Now you needn't ha' done that," said Mrs. Joyce from a deep seclusion,
her face turned downward into the pillow. "He must be awful
disappointed, dressin' himself up an' all, an' 'pearin' out for
nothin'."

"Well," said Stella, "there's more Saturday nights comin'."

"I wanted to see Jerry," complained aunt Hill. "I could ha' set with
your mother. Well, I'll go in an' put out the fore-room lamp."

Stella was always being irritated by aunt Hill's officious services in
the domestic field, but now she was glad to watch her portly back
diminishing through the doorway.

"You needn't ha' done that," her mother was murmuring again. "I feel
real tried over it."

"Jerry wanted to know how you were," said Stella speciously. "He's awful
sorry you're laid up."

"Well, I knew he'd be," said Mrs. Joyce. "Jerry's a good boy."

The week went by and her back was better; but when Saturday night came,
aunt Hill had not gone home. She had, instead, slipped on a round stick
in the shed while she was picking up chips nobody wanted, and sprained
her ankle slightly. And now she sat by the kitchen fire in a state of
deepest gloom, the foot on a chair, and her active mind careering about
the house, seeking out conditions to be bettered. She wore her black
silk no more, lest in her sedentary durance she should "set it out," and
her delaine wrapper with palm-leaves seemed to Stella like the
archipelagoes they used to define at school, and inspired her to nervous
laughter. It was the early evening, and Mrs. Joyce, not entirely free
from her muscular fetters, went back and forth from table to sink,
doing the dishes, while Stella moulded bread.

There was a step on the icy walk. Stella stopped an instant, her hands
on the cushion of dough, the red creeping into her face. Then she dusted
her palms together and went ever so softly but quickly to the front
entry, closing the door behind her. Aunt Hill, pricking up her ears,
heard the outer door open and the note of a man's voice.

"You see 'f you can tell who that is," she counseled Mrs. Joyce, who
presently approached the door and laid a hand on the latch. But it
stuck, she thought with wonder. Stella was holding it from the other
side.

Jerry, in his Sunday clothes, stood out there on the step, and Stella
was facing him. There was a note of concern in her voice when she
spoke--of mirth, too, left there by aunt Hill's archipelagoes.

"O Jerry," she said, "I'm awful sorry. You needn't ha' come over
to-night."

"She ain't gone, has she?" inquired Jerry, in a voice of perilous
distinctness.

"Don't speak so loud. She's got ears like a fox. No, but I could ha' put
her off somehow. I never thought of your comin' over to-night."

"Well, I thought of it," said Jerry. "I ain't seen your mother for quite
a spell."

"Oh, she's all right now. There! I feel awfully not to ask you in, but
aunt Hill's ankle an' all--good-night."

He turned away after a look at the bright knocker that, jumping out at
him from the dusk, almost made it seem as if the door had been shut in
his face. But he went crunching down the path, and Stella returned, to
wash her hands at the sink and resume her moulding.

"Law!" said aunt Hill, "your cheeks are 's red as fire. Who was it out
there?"

"Jerry Norton." Stella's voice sank, in spite of her. That unswerving
gaze on her cheeks made her feel out in the world, in a strong light,
for curiosity to jeer at.

"Jerry Norton?" aunt Hill was repeating in a loud voice. "Well, I'll be
whipped if it ain't Saturday night an' you've turned him away ag'in.
What's got into you, Stella? I never thought you was one to blow hot an'
blow cold when it come to a fellow like Jerry Norton. Good as gold, your
mother says he is, good to his mother an' good to his sister, an' now
he's took his aunt home to live with 'em."

"I can't 'tend to callers when there's sickness in the house," Stella
plucked up spirit to say, and her mother returned wonderingly,--

"Why, it ain't sickness exactly, aunt Hill's ankle ain't. I wish I
could ha' got out there. I'd have asked him in."

Before the next Saturday aunt Hill's ankle had knit itself up and she
was gone. When Stella and her mother sat down to supper in their wonted
seclusion, Stella began her deferred task. She was inwardly excited over
it, and even a little breathless. It seemed incredible to her, still,
that Jerry and she had parted, and it would, she knew, seem so to her
mother when she should be told. She sat eating cup-cake delicately, but
with an ostentatious relish, to prove the robustness of her state.

"Mother," she began.

"Little more tea?" asked Mrs. Joyce, holding the teapot poised.

"No. I want to tell you somethin'."

"I guess I'll have me a drop more," said Mrs. Joyce. "Nobody need to
tell me it keeps me awake. I lay awake anyway."

Stella took another cup-cake in bravado.

"Mother," she said, "Jerry 'n' I've concluded to give it up."

"Give what up?" asked Mrs. Joyce, finding she had the brew too sweet and
pouring herself another drop.

"Oh, everything! We've changed our minds."

Mrs. Joyce set down her cup.

"You ain't broke off with Jerry Norton?"

"Yes. We broke it off together."

"You needn't tell me 'twas Jerry Norton's fault." Mrs. Joyce pushed her
cup from her and winked rapidly. "He's as good a boy as ever stepped,
an' he sets by you as he does his life."

Stella was regarding her in wonder, a gentle little creature who omitted
to say her soul was her own on ordinary days, yet rousing herself, with
ruffled feathers, to defend, not her young, but the alien outside the
nest.

"If he had give you the mitten, I shouldn't blame him a mite, turnin'
him away from the door as you have two Saturday nights runnin'. But he
ain't done it. I know Jerry too well for that. His word's as good 's his
bond, an' you'll go through the woods an' get a crooked stick at last."

Then she looked across at Stella, as if in amazement over her own fury;
but Stella, liking her for it and thrilled by its fervor, laughed out
because that was the way emotion took her.

"You can laugh," said her mother, nodding her head, as she rose and
began to set away the dishes. "But 'fore you git through with this
you'll laugh out o' t'other side o' your mouth, an' so I tell ye."

Upon her words there was a step at the door, and Stella knew the step
was Jerry's. Her mother, with the prescience born of ire, knew it too.

"There he is," she said. "Now you go to cuttin' up any didos, things
gone as fur as they have, an' you'll repent this night's work the
longest day you live. You be a good girl an' go 'n' let him in!"

She had returned to her placidity, a quiet domestic fowl whose feathers
were only to be ruffled when some terrifying shadow flitted overhead.

Stella flew to the door and opened it on her lover, standing still and
calm, like a figure set there by destiny to conquer her.

"Jerry," she burst forth out of the nervous thrill her mother had
awakened in her, "you're botherin' me 'most to death. It's awful not to
ask you in when you come to the door, and you a neighbor so. But I
can't. You know I can't. It ain't as if you'd come in the day-time. But
Saturday night--it's just as if--why, you know what Saturday night is.
It's just as if we were goin' together."

Jerry stood there immovable, looking at her. He had shaved and he wore
the red tie she had given him. Perhaps it was not so much that she saw
him clearly through the early dusk as that she knew from memory how kind
his eyes were and what a healthy color flushed his face. It seemed to
her at this moment as if Jerry was the nicest person in the world, if
only he wouldn't plague her so. But he was speaking out of his
persistent quiet.

"I might as well tell you, Stella, an' you might as well make up your
mind to it. It ain't to-night only. I'm comin' here every Saturday
night."

She was near crying with the vexation of it.

"But you can't, Jerry," she said. "I don't want you to."

"You used to want me to," said he composedly.

"Well, that was when we were--"

"When we were goin' together." He nodded in acceptance of the quibble.
"Well, if you wanted me once, a girl like you, you'll want me ag'in. An'
anyways, I'm comin'."

Stella felt a curious thrill of pride in him.

"Why, Jerry," she faltered, "I didn't know you took things that way."

He was answering quite simply, as if he had hardly guessed it either.

"Well, I don't know myself how I'm goin' to take things till I've
thought 'em out. That's the only way. Then, after ye've made up your
mind, ye can stick to it."

Stella fancied there was a great deal in this to think over, but she
creaked the door insinuatingly.

"Well," she said, "I'm awful sorry--"

"I won't keep you stan'in' here in the cold. I'll be over ag'in next
Saturday night."

Stella went in and sat down by the hearth and crossed her feet on the
head of one of the fire-dogs. She was frowning, and yet she was laughing
too. Her mother, moving back and forth, cast inquiring looks at her.

"Well," she ventured at last, "you made it up betwixt ye?"

Stella put down her feet and rose to help.

"Don't you ask me another question," she commanded, rather airily. "It's
all over and done with, and I told you so before. Le's pop us some corn
by 'n' by."

Before the next Saturday something had happened. Stella walked over to
the Street to buy some thread, and Matt Pillsbury brought her home in
his new sleigh with the glossy red back and the scrolls of gilt at the
corners. Matt was a lithe, animated youth who could do many unexpected
and serviceable things: a little singing, a little violin-playing, and
tricks with cards. He was younger than Stella, but he reflected, as he
drove with her over the smooth road, nobody would ever know it because
he was dark and she was fair, and he resolved to let his mustache grow a
little longer and curl it more at the ends. Mrs. Joyce was away when
this happened, quilting at Deacon White's; but all the next day, which
was Saturday, she remained perfectly aware that Stella was making plans,
and when at seven o'clock the girl came down in her green plaid with
her gold beads on, Mrs. Joyce drew the breath of peace.

"Well, there," she said, "if you behave as well as you look, you'll do
well, an' if Jerry don't say so I'll miss my guess."

Stella was gazing at her, trembling a little, but defiant also.

"Mother," she said, "if Jerry comes, you go to the door and you tell
him--oh, my soul! I believe there he is now."

But in the next instant it seemed to her just as well. She could tell
him herself. She flew to the door in a whirl. But she got no further
than his name. Jerry took her with a hand on either side of her waist
and set her back into the entry. Then he shut the door behind him and
laid his palms upon her shoulders. She could hear his breath, and it
occurred to her to wonder if he had been running, the blood must be
pumping so through his heart. He was speaking in a tone she had never
heard from any man.

"What's this about your goin' to the sociable with Matt Pillsbury?"

She stiffened and flung back defiance.

"I'm goin', that's all. How'd you know it?"

"I was over to the store an' Lottie Pillsbury come in an' I heard her
tell Jane Hunt: 'Brother Matt asked her, an' she says she's goin'.'"

"Well, it's true enough. I expect him along in three-quarters of an
hour."

"Well, he won't come." That strange savage thrill in his voice
frightened her, and before she could remember they were not going
together, she was clinging to his arm.

"O Jerry," she breathed, "you ain't done him any mischief?" But his arms
were about her and she was locked to his heart.

"No," he said, "I ain't--yet." He laughed a little. "I stood out in the
road till I heard him go into the barn to harness. Then he went back
into the house to change his clo'es. An' I walked into the barn an'
unblanketed the horse an' slung away the bells an' druv the horse down
to the meetin'-house, an' left him there in the sheds."

Stella laughed with the delight of it. She felt wild and happy, and it
came to her that a man who could behave like this when he had made up
his mind, might be allowed a long time in coming to it. But she tried
reproving him.

"O Jerry, the horse'll freeze to death!"

"No, he won't. He's all blanketed. Besides, little Jim Pillsbury's there
tendin' the fire for the sociable, an' he'll find him. Now--" his voice
took on an added depth of that strange new quality she shivered
under--"Matt'll be over here in a minute to tell you he's lost his horse
an' can't go. You want me to harness up an' take him an' you in the old
pung, or you want to stay here with me?"

Stella touched his cheek with her finger in a way she had, and he
remembered and bent and kissed her.

"All right," he said. "That suits me. We'll stay here. Only, I don't
want to put ye to no shame before Matt. That's why I played a trick on
him instid o' breakin' his bones."

"O Jerry!" She had not meant to tell him, but it seemed she must. "I
wasn't goin' with him alone. Lottie was goin', too. I told him I
wouldn't any other way."




A GRIEF DEFERRED


When Clelia May set forth, as she did three and four times in the week,
to hurry through the half-mile of pine woods between her house and
Sabrina Thorne's, the family usually asked her, with the tolerant smile
accorded to old jokes, whether she was going to see her intimate friend.
Clelia always answered from a good-natured acceptance of the pleasantry,
and went on, not in the least puzzled by the certainty that although she
was but twenty-three and Sabrina was sixty, they were in all ways
companionable. It had begun when Clelia, a child of ten, had had a
temper-fit at home, and started out to join the Shakers. She had met a
turkey-gobbler at Sabrina's gate, and, ashamed to cry but too obstinate
to run, had stood in blank horror until Sabrina came out and routed the
foe. Then Sabrina had taken her in to eat honey and spend an enchanted
afternoon. After that Sabrina's house was the delectable land, and
Clelia fled to it when she was happy or when the world was against her.

To-day she walked swiftly through the warm incense of the pines. It was
hot weather, and insects vexed the ear with an unwearied trill. But the
heat of despair was greater in the girl than any such assault. Her
cheeks had each a deep red spot. Her eyes were dark with feeling, and on
the long black lashes hung fringing drops. She walked lightly, with
springing strides. Beyond the pine woods, in the patch of sunny road
bordered by dust-covered hardhack and elder, she paused for a moment, to
dash the tears from her eyes. There in the open day she felt as if some
prying glance might read her grief. The woods were kinder to it.

Sabrina's house was at the first turning, a gray, weather-beaten
dwelling of mellow tones, set within a generous sweep of green. It had a
garden in front. Sabrina herself was in the garden now, weeding the
balm-bed. Sometimes Clelia thought the garden was almost too sweet after
Sabrina had been there stirring up the scents. At least a third of it
was given to herbs, and even the touch of a skirt in passing would brush
out fragrance from it. There were things there that strangely seemed to
have no smell at all; but grown in such rank masses, they contributed
mysteriously to the alembic of the year.

Sabrina, risen to her feet now, had a look of youth touched by something
that was not so much age as difference. She was slender, and still with
a girl's symmetry, the light-footed way of moving, the little sinuous
graces of a body unspoiled and delighting in its own uses. Her face had
a rounded plumpness, and her cheeks were pink. People said now, as they
had in her youth, that Sabrina Thorne had the skin of a baby. One old
woman, chiefly engaged in marking down human commodities, always added
that it was because of that heart trouble Sabrina had; but nobody
listened. Sabrina seemed to have made no concession to time, save that
her waving hair was white. In its beauty and abundance, it was a marvel.
It sprang thickly up on each side of her parting, and the soft mass of
it was wound round and round on the top of her head. She was a beautiful
being, neither old nor young.

She stood there smiling at Clelia's approach.

"How do?" she said softly; but when the girl was near enough to betray
the trouble of her face, she added, "Whatever is the matter?"

"Come into the house, Sabrina," said Clelia, in a muffled voice. "I
can't tell it out here."

Sabrina dropped her trowel on a heap of weeds, and cast her gardening
gloves on the top. She led the way to the house, and when they were in
the coolness of the big sitting-room with its air of inherited repose,
she turned about and spoke again in her round, low voice. "Well?" There
was anxiety in the tone.

Clelia, facing her, began to speak with a hard composure.

"Richmond--Richmond Blake--" and her voice broke. She threw herself
forward upon Sabrina's shoulder and clasped her with shaking hands. "He
has given me up, Sabrina," she moaned, between her sobs. "It is over. He
has given me up."

Sabrina led her to the great chair by the window, and forced her into
it. Then she knelt beside her and drew the girl's head again to her
shoulder. She patted her cheek with little regular beats that had a
rhythmic soothing.

"There, there, dear," she kept saying. "There, there!"

Presently Clelia choked down her sobs, and raised her face, tempestuous
in its marks of grief.

"I'd just as soon tell you," she said, with a broken hardness, a
composure struggled for and then lost. "I'd just as soon anybody would
know it. I don't feel as if I'd any use for myself, now he don't prize
me. Well, Sabrina, he don't want me any more."

"You sure, dear?" asked Sabrina. "You better be sure."

"We got talking about the land," said Clelia, in a high voice.

"The ten-acre lot?"

"Yes. I said to him: 'There's that man from New York. He's offered you
two hundred dollars for it. Why don't you take it?'"

"What's the man from New York want it for?" asked Sabrina, with what
seemed a trifling irrelevance.

Clelia answered impatiently.

"I don't know. To build a summer cottage, I suppose. That's what
Richmond asked me, and I said I didn't know. Then he said he wasn't
going to sell till he knew what he was selling for."

"Well, I call that kinder long-headed, myself," said Sabrina.

"So you might; but the New York man went away that afternoon. 'Well,'
says he, before he went, 'that's my offer. Take it or leave it.'"

"But that's nothing to be mad about."

"We didn't stop there. I reminded Rich how far that money would go
towards building, and his jaw got set, and he said he couldn't help it.
Then I told him I'd be switched if ever I lived with his folks--"

"Oh, dear, dear!" lamented Sabrina. "You didn't say that, did you? Now
you mustn't, dear. You mustn't say things folks can't forget."

A gush of tears flooded the girl's cheeks.

"Oh, I didn't mean to!" she cried, in the bitterness of remembering a
battle lost. "He knew I didn't mean to. But I got sort of crazy,
Sabrina. I did. And I told him at last--" Her eyelids dropped under
their weight of tears.

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him he could choose between his folks and me."

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'I'll choose now. It's over.' He got up and walked out of the
room. He turned at the door. 'It's over, Clelia,' says he. 'Don't you
ever call me back, for I sha'n't come.' And he won't. He ain't that
kind."

"Oh, me! oh, me!" moaned Sabrina. She, too, knew he was not that kind.

They sat in silence for a moment, the girl looking straight before her
in a dull acquiescence, and Sabrina's pink face settled into aging
lines. Suddenly the girl spoke sharply.

"But I can't bear it, Sabrina, I can't bear it. It will kill me--if I
don't kill myself."

Sabrina rose slowly, and took a chair at the other window.

"Yes," said she, "you can bear it. Other folks have gone through it
before you, an' other folks will again. It's a kind of a sickness
there's goin' to be as long as the earth turns round. You've got to bear
it."

Her voice struck sharply, and Clelia, called momentarily out of herself,
glanced at her with a sudden interest. For the first time since their
intimacy, Sabrina looked her age.

Little fine lines seemed to have started out upon her cheeks and
forehead. Her eyes had the look of grief. But Clelia's thoughts went
back at once to her own trouble. She spoke gravely now, like an older
woman.

"It's not because we've quarreled, Sabrina. I'd say I was sorry this
minute. But he wouldn't take me back. It shows he don't care. If he'd
cared about me, he'd have thought 'twas a little thing; but he's chosen
between us, and he won't go back."

"Well," said Sabrina conclusively, "however it turns out, it's here an'
you've got to face it. Clelia, I've a good mind to tell you somethin' I
ain't ever told anybody."

"Yes," said Clelia indifferently, her mind upon herself. "Yes, tell me."

Sabrina folded her hands upon her lap and set her gaze straight forward,
and yet with a removed look, as if she had withdrawn into the past.

"I don't know as you ever knew, Clelia," she said, and Clelia at once
thought that it was as if she were reading from a book, "but when I was
about your age, I come near bein' married."

"Father said you were much sought after," said Clelia, with a prim
shyness not like her own stormy confession. Sabrina, with her white
hair and her young face seemed somehow set apart from love and the sweet
uses of it.

"I guess he never knew about that particular one. Nobody knew that. I
had as good a time as you've had, Clelia. I liked him the same way. I've
thought of it, day in, day out, when I've seen you with Richmond Blake.
I've never been so near livin' since as I have when I've seen you an'
Richmond together out in that gardin, laughin' an' jokin' in amongst the
flowers. Well, he give me up, dear. He give me up."

Her hands took a firmer hold on each other. Her face convulsed into a
deeper grief; and Clelia, who had never seen her moved with any emotion
that concerned herself alone, gazed at her in awe, with her own passion
quieting as she confronted that of one so old, yet living still.

"Did you--have words?" she ventured.

"No, dear, no. I guess we couldn't have had, I felt so humble towards
him. I never forgot a minute how good it was to have him like me. No.
There was somebody else. You see he was terrible smart. He put himself
through college, an' then he met her, an' she was just as smart as he
was. Lively, too, I guess. I never see her. But I hadn't anything but my
good looks--I was real pretty then. I had that an' a kind of a way of
keepin' house an' makin' folks comfortable. Well, I found out he didn't
prize me; so I give him his freedom. An' he was glad, dear, he was
glad."

She rocked back and forth for a moment, in forgetfulness of any save the
long-past moment when she was alive.

"O Sabrina!" breathed the girl.

It recalled her. She straightened, and resumed the habit of an ordered
life.

"Now this is what I was comin' to," she said, "the way to bear it. It
ain't a light thing. It's a heavy one. A lot o' folks go through with
it, an' they take it different ways. Sometimes their minds give out.
Folks say they're love-cracked. Sometimes they die. Yes, Clelia, often
I've thought that would be the easiest. But there's other ways."

Clelia's tears were dried. She sat upright and looked at the woman
opposite. It suddenly seemed to her that she had never known Sabrina.
She had seen her nursing the sick or in the garden, smiling over her
gentle tasks; but she had not known her. Sabrina spoke now with
authority, as if she were passing along the laws of life into hands
outstretched for them.

"When it happened to me, mother was sick. She had creepin' paralysis,
an' I had to be with her 'most every minute. When I got my letter, I was
in the gardin, right there by the spearmint bed. You see I'd written
him, dear, to offer him his freedom; but I found out afterwards I must
have thought, in the bottom of my heart, he wouldn't take it. Well, I
opened the letter. 'Twas a hot summer day like this. He took what I
offered him, dear,--he never knew I cared,--an' he was pleased. The
letter showed it. I spoke out loud. 'O God,' I says, 'I don't believe
it!' Then I heard mother's voice callin' me. She wanted a drink o'
water. I begun steppin' in kind o' blinded, to get it for her. Seemed as
if 'twas miles across the balm-bed. 'I mustn't fall,' I says to myself.
'I mustn't die till mother does.' And then somethin' put it into my head
I needn't believe it nor I needn't give up to it, not till mother died.
Then 'twould be time enough to know I'd got a broken heart."

It almost seemed as if she had never faced her grief before. She
abandoned herself to the savor of it, the girl forgotten.

"Well, mother died, an' that night after the funeral I set down by the
window where I'm settin' now an' says, 'Now I can think it over.' But I
knew as well as anything ever was that when I faced it 'twould take away
my reason. So I says, 'Mother's things have got to be put away. I'll
wait till then.' So I packed up her things, an' sent 'em to her sister
out West. Some o' her common ones 't I'd seen her wear, I burnt up, so
't nobody shouldn't have 'em. I put her old bunnit into the kitchen
stove, an' I can see the cover goin' down on it now. 'Twas thirty-eight
year ago this very summer. Then says I, 'I'll face it.' But old Abner
Lake had a shock, an' there wa'n't nobody to take care of him less'n
they sent him to the town farm, an' folks said he cried night an' day,
knowin' what was before him. So I had him moved over here, an' I tended
him till he died. An' so 'twas with one an' another. It begun to seem as
if folks needed somebody that hadn't anything of her own to keep her;
an' then, spells between their wantin' me, I'd say, 'I won't face it
till I've cleaned the house,' or 'till I've got the gardin made.' An',
Clelia, that was the grief that was goin' to conquer me, if I'd faced
it; an' I ain't faced it yet! I ain't believed it!"

A sense of her own youth and her sharp sorrow came at once upon the
girl, and she cried out:

"I've got to face it. It won't let me do anything else. It's here,
Sabrina. I couldn't help feeling it, if I killed myself trying."

Sabrina's face softened exquisitely.

"I guess 'tis here," she said tenderly. "I guess you do feel it. But,
dearie, there's lots of folks walkin' round doin' their work with their
hearts droppin' blood all the time. Only you mustn't listen to it. You
just say, 'I'll do the things I've got to do, an' I'll fix my mind on
'em. I won't cry till to-morrow.' An' when to-morrow comes, you say the
same."

Clelia set her mouth in a piteous conformity. But it quivered back.

"I guess you think I'm a coward, Sabrina," she said. "Well, I'll do the
best I can. Maybe if 'twas fall I could get a school, and set my mind on
that. I can help mother, but she'd rather manage things herself."

Sabrina bent forward, with an eager gesture.

"Dear, there's lots o' things," she said. "The earth's real pretty. You
concern yourself with that. You say, 'I won't give up till I've seen the
apple-blows once more. I won't give up till I've got the rose-bugs off'n
the vines.' An' every night says you to yourself, 'I won't cry till
to-morrow.'"

Clelia rose heavily.

"You're real good, Sabrina," she said. Then she added, in a shy whisper,
"And I--I won't ever tell."

"You sit right down," returned Sabrina vigorously, rising as she said
it. "I'll bring you the peas to shell. They're late ones, an' they're
good. You stay, an' this afternoon we'll go out an' pick the
elderberries down on the cross-road. I've got to have some wine."

That week and the next Clelia made herself listlessly busy, and Sabrina
was away, nursing a child who was sick of a fever. Clelia was pondering
now on her own hurt, now on the story her friend had told her. It seemed
like a soothing alternation of grief, sometimes in the pitiless
sun-glare of her own loss, and again walking in a darkened yet fragrant
valley where the other woman had lived for many years. But on an evening
of the third week, she had news that sent her speeding through the
Half-Mile Road and in at the door where Sabrina sat resting after a hard
day. Clelia was breathless.

"Sabrina," she cried, "Sabrina, Richmond's mother's sick and he's away.
He's gone to New York, and she's left all alone with aunt Lucindy."

"What's the matter with her?" asked Sabrina, coming to her feet and
beginning to smooth her hair.

"She's feverish, and aunt Lucindy says she's been shaking with the
cold."

"You sent for the doctor?"

Sabrina was doing up a little bundle of her night-clothes that had lain
on the chair beside her while she rested.

"No."

"Well, you do that, straight off. An' when he comes, he'll tell you what
to do an' you do it."

"Can't you go, Sabrina? Can't you go? Aunt Lucindy wanted you."

"No," said Sabrina, tying on her hat, and taking up her bundle. "I only
come to pick me up a few things. That little creatur' may not live the
night out. But I'll walk along with you, an' step in an' see how things
seem."

Once only in the Half-Mile walk did they speak, and then Clelia broke
forth throbbingly to the accompaniment of a sudden color in her cheeks.

"I don't know as I want to go into Richmond's house when he's away, now
we're not the same."

"Don't make any difference whether it's Richmond's house or whether it
ain't, if there's sickness," returned Sabrina briefly. But at the
doorstone she paused a moment, to add with some recurrence of the
intensity the girl had seen in her that other day: "Ain't you glad you
got somethin' to do for him? Ain't you _glad_? You go ahead an' do what
you can, an' call yourself lucky you've got it to do."

And Clelia very humbly did it. Then it was another week, and the two
friends had not met; but again at twilight Clelia took her walk, and
this time she found Sabrina stretched out on the lounge of the
sitting-room. There was a change in her. Pallor had settled upon her
face, and her dark eyebrows and lashes stood out startlingly upon the
ashen mask. Clelia hurried up to her and knelt beside the couch.

"What is it, Sabrina?" she whispered. "What is it?"

Sabrina opened her eyes. She smiled languidly, and the girl, noting the
patience of her face, was thrilled with fear.

"How's Richmond's mother?" asked Sabrina.

"Better. She's sitting up. I sha'n't be there any more. He's coming home
to-night."

"Richmond?"

"Yes. The doctor said there wasn't any need of sending for him, and I'm
glad we didn't, now. Sabrina, what's the matter?"

"I had one of my heart-spells, that's all," said Sabrina gently. "There,
don't you go to lookin' like that."

"What made you, Sabrina? What made you?"

Sabrina hesitated.

"Well," she said, at length, "I guess I got kinder startled. Deacon
Tolman run in an' told what kind of doin's there was goin' to be
to-morrow. He was full of it, an' he blurted it all out to once."

"About Senator Gilman coming?"

"Yes."

"And their trimming up the hall for him to speak in, and his writing on
it was his boyhood's home and he shouldn't die happy unless he'd come
back and seen it once more?"

"Yes. That's about it."

"Well," said Clelia, in slow wonder, "I don't see what there was about
that to give anybody a heart-spell."

Sabrina looked at her for a moment in sharp questioning, followed by
relief.

"No," she said softly, "no. But I guess I got kinder startled."

"I'm going to stay with you," said Clelia tenderly. "I'll stay all
night."

"There's a good girl. Now there's somebody round, I guess maybe I could
drop off to sleep."

At first Clelia was not much alarmed; for though Sabrina was known to
have heart-spells, she always came out of them and went on her way with
the same gentle impregnability. But in the middle of the night, she
suddenly woke Clelia sleeping on the lounge beside her, by saying in a
clear tone:--

"Wouldn't it be strange, Clelia?"

"Wouldn't what be strange?" asked the girl, instantly alert.

"Wouldn't it be strange if anybody put off their sorrow all their lives
long, an' then died before they got a chance to give way to it?"

"Sabrina, you thinking about those things?"

"Never mind," answered Sabrina soothingly. "I guess I waked up kinder
quick."

But again, after she had had a sinking spell, and Clelia had given her
some warming drops, she said half-shyly, "Clelia, maybe you'll think I'm
a terrible fool; but if I should pass away, there's somethin' I should
like to have you do."

Clelia knelt beside her, and put her wet cheek down on the little
roughened hand.

"There was that city boarder I took care of, the summer she gi'n out
down here," went on Sabrina dreamily. "I liked her an' I liked her
clo'es. They were real pretty. She see I liked 'em, an' what should she
do when she went back home, but send me a blue silk wrapper all lace and
ribbins, just like hers, only nicer. It's in that chist. I never've wore
it. But if I should be taken away--I 'most think I'd like to have it put
on me."

The cool summer dawn was flowing in at the window. The solemnity of the
hour moved Clelia like the strangeness of the time. It hushed her to
composure.

"I will," she promised. "If you should go before me, I'll do everything
you want. Now you get some sleep."

But after Sabrina had shut her eyes and seemed to be drowsing off, she
opened them to say, this time with an imperative strength:--

"But don't you let it spile their good time."

"Whose, Sabrina?"

"The doin's they're goin' to have in the hall. If I should go in the
midst of it, don't you tell no more'n you can help. But I guess I can
live through one day anyways."

That forenoon she was a little brighter, as one may be with the mounting
sun, and Clelia, disregarding all entreaties to see the "doings" at the
hall, took faithful care of her. But in the late afternoon while she sat
beside the bed and Sabrina drowsed, there was a clear whistle very near.
It sounded like a quail outside the window. Clelia flushed red. The sick
woman, opening her eyes, saw how she was shaking.

"What is it, dear?" she asked.

"It's Richmond," said Clelia, in a full, moved voice. "It's his
whistle."

"You go out to him, dear," urged Sabrina, as if she could not say it
fast enough. "You hurry."

And Clelia went, trembling.

When she came back, half an hour later, she walked like a goddess
breathing happiness and pride.

"O Sabrina!" She sank down by the bedside and put her head beside
Sabrina's cheek. "He was there in the garden. He kissed me right in
sight of the road. If 't had been in the face and eyes of everybody, it
couldn't have made any difference. 'You took care of mother,' he said.
'I like your mother,' I said. 'I'd like to live with her--and aunt
Lucindy.' And he said then, Sabrina, he said then, 'We sha'n't have to.'
And Sabrina, he's been on to New York to see if he could find out
anything about the railroad that's going through to save stopping at the
Junction; and he saw Senator Gilman, and that's how the senator came
down here. He got talking with Richmond, old times and all, and he just
wanted to come. And the railroad's going through the ten-acre pasture,
and Richmond'll get a lot of money."

Sabrina's hand rested on the girl's head.

"There, dear," she said movingly. "Didn't I tell you? Don't cry till
to-morrow, an' maybe you won't have to then."

Clelia sat up, wiping her eyes and laughing.

"That isn't all," she said. "Senator Gilman wants to see you."

"Me!"

Sabrina rose and sat upright in bed. The color flooded her pale cheeks.
Her eyes dilated.

"Yes. He told Richmond you used to go to school together, and he's
coming down here on his way to the train. And sick or well, he said,
you'd got to see him."

Sabrina had put one shaking hand to her hair. "It's turned white," she
whispered.

But Clelia did not hear her. She had opened the chest at the foot of
the bed, and taken out a soft package delicately wrapped. She pulled out
a score of pins and shook the shimmering folds of the blue dress. Then
she glanced at Sabrina still sitting there, the color flooding her
cheeks again with their old pinkness.

"Oh!" breathed Clelia, in rapture at the dress, and again at the sweet
rose-bloom in Sabrina's face. Then she calmed herself, remembering this
was a sick chamber, though every moment the airs of life seemed
entering. She brought the dress to the bedside. "You put your arm in,
Sabrina," she coaxed.

Sabrina did it. She moved in a daze, and presently she was lying in her
bed clothed in blue and white, her soft hair piled above her head, and
her eyes wide with some unconfessed emotion. But to Clelia, she was
accustomed to look vivid; life was her portion always. The girl sped out
of the room, and came back presently, her arms full of summer flowers,
tiger-lilies, larkspur, monkshood, and herbs that, being bruised, gave
out odors. Sabrina's eyes questioned her. Clelia tossed the flowers in a
heap on the table.

"What you doin' that for?" asked Sabrina.

"I don't know," answered the girl, in a whisper. "There's no time to put
'em in water. I want to have things pretty, that's all. You take your
drops, dear. They've come."

But Sabrina lay there, an image of beauty in a sea of calm.

"I don't want any drops," she said. "I shouldn't think o' dyin' now."

Clelia went out, and presently Sabrina heard her young voice with its
note of happiness.

"In this way, sir," she was saying. "Yes, Rich, you stay in the garden.
I'll be there."

Senator Gilman, bowing his head under the low lintel, was coming in. He
walked up to the bedside, and Sabrina's eyes appraised him. He was a
remarkable-looking man, with the flowing profile of a selected type, and
thick gray hair tossed back from his fine forehead. He sat down by her.

"Well, Bina," said he.

This was not the voice that had filled the hall that morning or jovially
greeted townsmen all the afternoon. It was gently adapted to her state,
and Sabrina quieted under its friendliness.

"Couldn't go away without seeing you," said Senator Gilman. "They told
me you were sick. I said to myself, 'She'll see me. She'll know 'twould
spoil my visit, if I had to go away without it.'"

Sabrina was looking him sweetly in the face, and smiling at him.

"How much time you got?" she asked, like a child.

He took out his watch.

"My train is at five forty-five," he said.

"Then you talk fast."

"What you want to know?" asked her friend.

He had fallen into homely ways of speech, to fit the time.

"You've done real well, ain't you?" asked Sabrina eagerly.

The senator nodded.

"I have, Bina," said he. "I have. I've made money, and I own a grown-up
son. He's got all the best of me and the best of all of us, as far back
as I can remember--and none of the worst. I'll send him down here to see
you."

"He must be smart," said Sabrina. "I've read his book."

"You have? Didn't know there was a copy in town. Nobody else here has
heard of it."

"I see it noticed in the paper. I sent for it. I never spoke of it to
anybody. I guess I was pretty mean. Folks borrow books, an' then they
don't keep 'em nice."

"Bina, you're a dear. They've been telling me how you take care of the
whole town. Richmond Blake--he's a likely fellow; he'll get on--he said
you were the prettiest woman in the township. Said his father told him
you were the prettiest girl."

Sabrina's little capable right hand went out and drew the sheet over her
blue draperies up to her chin.

"You're not cold?" asked the senator solicitously; but she shook her
head and answered:--

"You've seen foreign countries, ain't you?"

"Yes. I've seen India and I've seen the Pyramids. I thought about you
those times, Bina--how we recited together in geography; and I was the
one that went and you were the one to stay at home. But near as I can
make out, you've carried the world on your shoulders down here, while
I've tried to do the same thing somewhere else--and not so well,
Bina--not so well."

Her sweet face clouded. She was jealous of even a hint of failure for
him.

"But you've come out pretty fair?" she hesitated anxiously.

"Pretty fair, Bina. It's been a good old world. I've enjoyed it, and I
don't know as I shall want to leave it. But now I feel as if I were
working for the next generation. The little I've done I can pass over to
my son, and I hope he'll do more."

He laid his hand on the garnered sweets beside him. The herbs were
uppermost. "Spearmint!" he said. Sabrina nodded, and he ate a leaf.
Then one after another he took up the herbs, southernwood and all, and
bruised them to get their separate fragrance. It was a keen pleasure to
him, and Sabrina saw it and blessed Clelia in her heart. Presently he
sat back in his chair and regarded her musingly. A softened look came
into his eyes. A smile, all sweetness, overspread his face. It gave him
his boyhood's mien.

"I'll tell you what, Bina," he said, "in that first rough-and-tumble
before I made my way, you did me a lot of good."

Sabrina lay and looked at him. Even her eyes had a still solemnity.

"You wrote me a little note."

More color surged into her face, but she did not stir.

"I was pretty ambitious then," he went on musingly. "My wife was
ambitious, too. That was before we were engaged, you understand. We got
kind of carried away by people and money and honors--that kind of thing,
you know. Well, that little note, Bina. There wasn't anything particular
in it, except at the end you said, 'I sha'n't ever forget to hope you
will be good.' It was queer, but it made me feel kind of responsible to
you. I thought of you down here in your garden, and--well, I don't know,
Bina. I showed that note to my wife, and she said, 'Bina must be a
dear.'"

Sabrina's eyes questioned him.

"Yes," he said frankly. "She's a dear, too--only different. It's been
all right, Bina."

"Ain't that good!" she whispered happily. "I'm glad."

He had pulled out his watch, and at that moment Richmond's voice sounded
clearer, as the two out there in the garden came to summon him.

"By George!" said Greenleaf Gilman, "I've got to go."

He rose, and took her hand. He stood there for a moment, holding it, and
they looked at each other in a faithful trust.

"You take some southernwood," counseled Sabrina, and he laid her hand
gently down, to select his posy.

"I wish your wife could have some," Sabrina went on, in a wistful
eagerness, "I don't seem to have a thing to send her."

"I'll tell her all about it," said her friend. "I'll tell her you're a
dear still, only more so. She'll understand. Good-by, Bina."

When his carriage had left the gate, and Clelia came in with that last
look of her lover still mirrored in her eyes, Sabrina lay there floating
in her sea of happiness.

"Why, dear," said the girl, drawing the sheet down from the hidden
finery. "You cold?"

"I guess not," said Sabrina, smiling up at her.

"Did you keep that pretty lace all covered up? What made you, Sabrina?"

"I don't know 's I could tell exactly," said Sabrina, in her gentle
voice. "Now, dear, I'm goin' to get this off an' have my clo'es. I'm
better."

"You do feel better, don't you?" assented Clelia joyously, helping her.

That night they supped together at the table, and when the dusk had
fallen and Sabrina sat by the window breathing in the evening cool, she
said shyly, like a bride:--

"Don't you see, dear, sometimes we put off grief an' we don't need to
have it after all."

"I see about me," said the girl tenderly, "but I don't see as anything
pleasant has happened to you."

"Why," said Sabrina, in a voice so full and sweet that for the moment it
seemed not to be her own hesitating note, "I've had more happiness than
most folks have in their whole life. I've had all there is."




THE CHALLENGE


Mariana Blake, on her way home from Jake Preble's in the autumn
twilight, heard women's voices sounding clearly at a distance,
increasing in volume as they neared. She knew the turn of the road would
hide her from them for a minute or two to come, and depending on that
security she stepped over the wall and crouched behind the undergrowth
at the foot of a wild cherry. They were only her neighbors, Sophronia
Jackson and Lizzie Ann West, with whom she was on the kindliest terms;
but for some reason she felt sensitive to the social eye whenever she
was carrying Jake a basket of her excellent cookery or returning with
the empty dishes. Other neighbors, it was true, contributed delicacies
to his rudimentary housekeeping, though chiefly at festal times like
Thanksgiving and Christmas; but Mariana was conscious that she had kept
an especial charge over him since his sister died and left him alone.
Yet this she was never willing to confess, and though she treasured what
she had elected as her responsibility, it was with an exceptional
shyness.

The voices came nearer at a steady pace, accompanied at length by the
steady tread of Sophronia's low-heeled shoes and the pattering of Lizzie
Ann on the harder side of the road. When they were nearly opposite the
old cherry-tree, Sophronia spoke.

"Mercy! I stepped into a hole."

"Can't you remember that hole?" Lizzie Ann inquired, with her
inconsequent titter. "I've had that in mind ever since I went to school.
I always thought if I was one of the board o' selectmen, I guess I could
manage to fill up that hole."

"I guess I shall have to set down here and shake the gravel out o' my
shoe," said Sophronia. "You have this nice flat place, and I'll set
where I can get my foot up easy."

There was the softest accompanying rustle, and they had both sat down.
Mariana, over the wall, gripped her basket with a tenser hand, as if the
dishes, of their own accord, might clink. She held her breath, too,
smiling because she knew the need of caution would be brief. The instant
they were settled, she told herself, they would talk down any such
trifling sound as an unconsidered breath. She could foretell exactly
what they would say, once they had exhausted the topic of gravel in the
shoe. It would be either the new church cushions, or mock mince-pies for
the sociable, or the minister's daughter's old canary that had ceased
to sing or to echo the chirping of others, and yet was regarded with a
devotion the parishioners could not indorse. Mariana had seen both her
friends that day, and each of them had been more keenly alive to these
topics than any.

"I don't see what makes you so sure," said Sophronia, in a jerky
fashion, accompanying the attempt to draw her foot into the position
indicated for unlacing.

"Because I am," said Lizzie Ann. "So you are, too. Mariana Blake
never'll marry in the world. She ain't that kind."

"I don't know why she ain't," said her friend, in an argumentative tone
of the sort adopted to carry on brilliantly a conversation of which both
participants know the familiar moves. "Mariana's a real pretty woman,
prettier by far than she was when she's a girl. I know she's gettin'
along. She was forty-three last April, but age ain't everything. Look at
aunt Grinnell. She married when she's fifty-three, and she was homely 's
a hedge fence and hadn't any faculty. Nor she didn't bring him a cent,
either."

"Well, nobody'd say Mariana was homely. But she won't marry. Nor she
wouldn't if she was eighteen. She ain't that kind."

"There, I've got it laced up," said Sophronia. She seemed to settle into
an easier attitude, and Mariana could hear the scratch of the heel as
she thrust the rehabilitated foot afar from her on the lichened rock.
"Well, I guess you're right, but I don't know why it's so, after all. If
I was a man, seems if I should think Jake Preble, now, was a real likely
fellow to marry."

"Jake Preble!" Such distaste animated the tone of that response that
Mariana involuntarily raised herself from her listening posture, and the
dishes clinked. "What's that? Didn't you hear suthin'? Why, Jake
Preble's a kind of a hind wheel. He goes rollin' along after t'others,
never askin' why nor wherefore, and he thinks it's his own free will. He
never so much as dreams 'tis the horse that's haulin' him."

"Well, what is 't he thinks 'tis that's haulin' him?" asked Sophronia,
who was not imaginative.

"Why, all I mean is, he don't take things for what they're wuth. He
believes every goose's a swan till it up and honks, and he's jest as
likely to think a swan's a goose."

"You don't mean he ain't suited with Mariana?"

"No, no. I mean Mariana's cosseted him and swep' his path afore him,
carryin' his victuals and cleanin' up the house when he's out hayin' or
cuttin' wood, till he thinks it ain't so bad to bach it after all. If
she'd just let him alone after Hattie died, and starved him out, he'd
ha'nted her place oftener'n she's been over to his, and 'twouldn't ha'
been long before he learnt the taste of her apple-pies and where they
ought to be made. Now he knows they're to be picked mostly off'n his
kitchen table when he comes in from work."

"Mercy, you don't mean to say you think it's all victuals, do you?"
inquired Sophronia, with her unctuous laugh. "You never had much opinion
o' menfolks, anyways, Lizzie Ann."

"Well, they've got to eat, ain't they?" inquired Lizzie Ann. "That's all
I say. Come, ain't you got your shoe on yet? Why, yes, you have. Come
along. There's a kind of chill in the air, if 'tis September."

Mariana heard them rising, Sophronia contributing soft thuds of a
good-sized middle-aged body and Lizzie with a light scramble suited to
her weight.

"Mercy!" said Sophronia, "ain't you stiff?"

Then they went on together, and Mariana heard in the near distance the
familiar patter dealing with Sophronia's proficiency in mock mince-pies.
They were safely away, but she did not move. The cool September breeze
rustled the blackberry-vines on her side of the wall, but it did not
chill her. She was hot with some emotion she could not name,--anger,
perhaps, though it hardly seemed like that, resentment that her friends
could talk her over; and some hurt in the very centre of feeling because
the shyness of her soul had been invaded. It seemed so simple to carry
Jake Preble a pie of her own baking, as natural as for him to cut her
wood and shovel paths for her in the worst winter weather. When it was a
beautiful clearing-off day after a storm, she loved to sweep her paths
herself, and Jake knew it; but he was always near to rescue her when the
drifts piled too high. But then Cap'n Hanscom came, too, and he was a
widower, and once Sophronia's own husband had taken a hand at the snowy
citadel. Angry maidenhood in her kept hurling questions into the
deepening dusk. Mariana was learning that in a world of giving in
marriage, no woman and no man who have not accorded hostages to fortune
can live unchallenged.

When her ireful mood had worn itself away, she got up with the stiffness
of the mind's depression intensifying the body's chill, and made her way
swiftly toward home. She walked fast, because it seemed to her she could
not possibly bear to meet a neighbor. Even through the dusk her
tell-tale basket would be visible, the dishes in it clinking to the tune
that Mariana was no sort of a woman to marry.

When she reached home, she fled up the path to the door, feeling at
every step the friendliness of the way. The late fall flowers nodded
kindly to her through the dark, and underfoot were the stones and
hollows of the pathway familiar to her from a life's acquaintanceship.

"My sakes," breathed Mariana.

A man was sitting on her steps, and because Jake was so vividly present
to her mind, she almost spoke his name. But it was only Cap'n Hanscom,
rising as she neared him, and opening the door gallantly.

"I says to myself, she'll be along in a minute or two," he told her.

The cap'n had a soft voice touched here and there with whimsical tones.
When he was absent, Mariana often thought how much she liked his voice;
but whenever she saw him she consumed her friendly interest in wishing
he wouldn't wear a beard. She was a fastidious woman, and a beard seemed
to her untidy.

"You stay here in the settin'-room," said she. "I'll get the lamp."

She slipped through the kitchen into the pantry and put her basket
softly down, lest he should hear that shameful clink. Even Cap'n Hanscom
could not be allowed, she thought, to know she had been carrying pies to
a man who would not marry her because she was not the kind of woman to
marry. When she came back, bearing the shining lamp, the cap'n looked
at her in a frank approval.

Mariana was a round, pleasant body with pink cheeks, kindly eyes, and,
bearing witness to her character, a determined mouth; but now she seemed
to be enveloped by some transforming aura. Her auburn hair, touched with
gray, had blown about her head in an unusual abandon, her cheeks were
flaming, and her eyes had pin-points of light. She set the lamp down on
the table with a steady hand and drew the shades. Then she became aware
that the cap'n was looking at her. He had a fatherly gaze for everybody,
the index of his extreme kindliness, but it had apparently been startled
into some keener interest.

"Well," said Mariana, and found that she was speaking irritably. "What's
the matter? You look as if you never see anybody before."

She and the cap'n had been schoolfellows, though he was older, and often
she treated him with scanty ceremony; now, after she had tossed him that
aged formula of banter, she laughed to soften it. But she was still
unaccountably angry.

"Well," said the cap'n slowly, "I dunno 's I ever did see just such a
kind of a body before."

The words seemed to be echoing from the stolen conversation too warmly
alive in her memory. He, too, she thought, was probably considering her
a nice proper-looking woman, but one no man would think of marrying.

"Take a chair," she said, and the cap'n went over to the hearth where a
careful fire was laid.

"Goin' to touch it off?" he inquired.

Mariana, with a jealous eye, noted that he was looking at the fire, not
at her. She wondered if Lizzie Ann West would say a man had to be warmed
as well as fed.

"Touch it off," she said, with a disproportioned recklessness. "There's
the matches on the mantel-tree."

The cap'n did it, kneeling to adjust the sticks more nicely; and when
one fell forward with the burning of the kindling, lifted it and laid it
back solicitously. Then with a turkey-wing he swept up the hearth, its
specklessness invaded by a rolling bit of coal, put the wing in place,
and stood looking down at what seemed to be his own handiwork.

"There!" said he.

He took the big armchair by the hearth, and Mariana drew her little
rocker to the other corner. She seated herself in it, her hands rather
tensely folded, and the cap'n regarded her mildly.

"Ain't you goin' to sew?" he inquired.

"Why, no," said Mariana, "I dunno 's I be. I dunno 's I feel like
sewin' all the time."

"Well, I dunno 's there's any law to make a woman set an' sew," the
cap'n ruminated. "Sewin' or knittin', either. Only, I've got so used to
seein' you with a piece o' work in your hands, didn't look hardly
nat'ral not to." He regarded her again with his kindly stare. "Mariana,"
said he, "you look like a different creatur'. What is 't's got hold of
you?"

"Nothin', I guess," said Mariana. "Maybe I'm mad."

"Mad? What ye mad about?"

"Oh, I dunno. I guess I'm just mad in general. Nothin' particular, as I
see."

"Well, if anybody's goin' to be mad it ought to be me," said the cap'n,
lifting his brows with that droll look he wore when he intended to
indicate that he was fooling. "I guess I've got to wash my own dishes
an' bake my own johnny-cake for a spell. Mandy's goin' to leave."

"Mandy goin' to leave! Well, you will be put to 't. What's she leavin'
for?"

"Goin' to be married."

"For mercy sakes! Who's Mandy Hill goin' to marry?"

"Goin' to marry the peddler."

"The one from the Pines?"

Cap'n Hanscom nodded.

"He's been round consid'able this fall, but I never so much as thought
he'd got anything but carpet-rags in his head. Well, seems he had. Now
't I know it, I realize Mandy's been stockin' up with tin for quite a
spell. Seems to me I never see a woman that needed so much tinware, nor
took so long to pick it out. I never got it through my noddle she an'
the peddler was makin' on 't up between 'em."

"Well, suz," said Mariana. "I never so much as thought Mandy Hill'd ever
marry."

"I never did, either," said the cap'n. "But come to that, it'd be queer
'f she didn't sooner or later. Mandy Hill's just the sort of a woman
nine men out o' ten'd be possessed to marry. Wonder to me she ain't done
it afore."

Mariana shot a glance at him. There was fire in it, kindled of what fuel
she knew not; but the flame of it seemed to scorch her. The cap'n was
staring at the andirons and did not see it.

"I'd give a good deal," he said musingly, "if I thought I could ever
come acrost such a housekeeper as you be, Mariana. But there! that's
snarin' a white blackbird."

"Cap'n," said Mariana.

Her tone seemed to leap at him, and he had to look at her.

"Why, Mariana!" he returned. Her face amazed him. It was full of light,
but a light that glittered. "By George," said he, "you looked that
minute for all the world jest as your brother Elmer did when Si Thomson
struck him in town meetin'. Si was drunk an' Elmer never laid up a thing
after the blow was over an' done; but that first minute he looked as if
he was goin' to jump. What is it, Mariana?"

"Cap'n," said Mariana. She was used to calling him by his first name in
their school-day fashion, but her new knowledge of life seemed for the
moment to have made all the world alien to her. "Cap'n, if anybody said
you couldn't do a thing, wouldn't you say to yourself you'd be--wouldn't
you say you'd do it?"

"Why, I dunno," said the cap'n, wondering. "Mebbe I would if 'twas
somethin' I thought best to do."

"No, no. If 'twas somethin'--well, s'pose somebody said you was a
Chinyman, wouldn't you prove you wa'n't?"

"Why," said the cap'n mildly, "anybody'd see I wa'n't, minute they
looked into my face. Nobody'd say anybody was a Chinyman if they
wa'n't."

Mariana was able to laugh a little here, though a tear did run over her
cheek in a hateful, betraying way. She wiped it off, but the cap'n saw
it.

"See here, Mariana," said he stoutly, "who's been rilin' you up?
Somebody has. You tell me, an' I'll kick 'em from here to the state o'
Maine."

"Oh, it's nothin'," said Mariana. "Here, you lay on another stick. I was
only thinkin' when you spoke of Mandy, what a fool she was to tie
herself up to the best man in the world if she could get good wages,
nice easy place same as yours is. Well, there, Eben! I do get kind o'
blue when the winter comes on and I sit here by the fire watchin' my
hair turn gray. If anybody was to offer me a job, I'd take it."

"You would?" said Cap'n Hanscom.

She saw a thought run into his eyes, and hated it. She liked Eben
Hanscom, but all the decorous reserves were at once awake in her,
bidding him remember that she was not going to scale the trim, tight
fence of maidenly tradition. He began rather breathlessly, and she cut
him short.

"I'd come and be your housekeeper," said Mariana, hurriedly in her turn,
"for three dollars a week, same as you give Mandy, and be glad and
thankful. Only I'd want somebody else in the family. I dunno why, but
seems if folks would laugh if you and me settled down there together
like two old folks--"

"I dunno why they'd laugh," said the cap'n stoutly. His eyes were
glowing with the surprise of it and the happy anticipation of Mariana's
tidy ways. "Nobody laughed at me an' Mandy; leastways if they did, I
never got hold on 't."

"Well, you see, Mandy's day begun pretty soon after your wife was taken,
and folks were kinder softened down. Anyways, I couldn't do it. 'Tain't
that I'm young and 'tain't that I'm a fool, but I'd just like to have
one more in the family."

"Aunt Elkins might think she could make a home with us," said the cap'n,
pondering. "No, she wouldn't, either, come to think. Her son's sent her
her fare to go out to them this winter. Ain't you got some friend,
Mariana?"

"No," said Mariana. She was watching him with a steady gaze, as if she
had planted a magic seed and looked for its uprising. "If there was only
somebody else that's left alone as you and I be," she offered
speciously.

The cap'n felt a quick delight over his own cleverness.

"Why," said he, "there's Jake Preble."

"He never'd do it," said Mariana. She shook her head conclusively.
"Never 'n the world."

"I bet ye forty dollars," said the cap'n. "He could go over 'n' take
care of his stock an' do his choppin', an' come back to a warm house.
I'm goin' to ask him. I'm goin' this minute. You set up, an' I'll be
back an' tell ye."

"You take it from me," Mariana was calling after him. "He won't do it
and it's noways right he should. You tell him so from me."

"I bet ye forty dollars," cried the cap'n.

The door clanged behind him and he was gone. Mariana had never heard him
in such demented haste since the days when one squad of the boys
besieged another in the schoolhouse, and Eben Hanscom was deputed to run
for reinforcements of those that went home at noon. But she settled down
there by the fire and held herself quiet until he should come. She
seemed to have shut a gate behind her; but whether she had opened
another to lead into the unknown country where women are like their
sisters, triumphant over things, she could not tell. At the moment she
found herself in a little inclosure where everybody could see her and
laugh at her, and she could not answer back.

Before the forestick had burned in two, she heard him coming, but he was
not alone. She knew that other step, marking out a longer stride, and
the steady inarticulate responses when the cap'n talked. The cap'n
opened the door and they walked in. Jake Preble was ahead, a tall,
powerful creature in his working-clothes, his thin face with the bright
brown eyes interrogating her, his mouth, in spite of him, moving
nervously under the mustache.

"What's all this?" said he roughly, approaching her as if, Mariana
thought, he owned her.

That air of his had pleased her once: it gave her a curious little
thrill of acquiescent loyalty; but now it simply hurt, and the instinct
of resentment rose in her. What right had he to own her, she asked
herself, when it only made other women scornful of her? She lifted her
head and faced him. What he saw in her eyes he could not perhaps have
told, but it suddenly quieted him to a surprised humility.

"You goin' over to keep house for him?" he asked, with a motion of his
head toward the cap'n, who seemed to be petitioning the god of
domesticity lest his new hopes be confounded.

"Yes," said Mariana, "but I ain't goin' unless he can get one or two
more. I'm tired to death of settin' down to the table alone. One more
wouldn't be no better. Three's the kind of a crowd I like. Two's no
company. Don't you say so, cap'n?"

"I prefer to choose my company, that's all I say," the cap'n answered
gallantly.

Jake looked from one to the other and then back again. What he saw
scarcely pleased him, but it had to be accepted.

"All right," said he. "If you want a boarder, no reason why you
shouldn't have one. I'll shut up my place to-morrer."

The red surged up into Mariana's cheeks. She had not known it was easy
to cause such gates to open.

"When's Mandy goin'?" she asked indifferently.

"Week from Wednesday," said the cap'n. He was suffused with joy, and
Mariana, in one of those queer ways she had of thinking of inapposite
things, remembered him as she saw him once when, at the age of fourteen,
he sat before a plate of griddle-cakes and saw the syrup-pitcher coming.

"Thursday, then," she said. "I'll be along bright and early."

She rose and set her chair against the wall. That seemed as if they were
to go.

"You'd better by half stay where you be in your own home," she called
after Jake, shutting the door behind him. "You won't like settin' at
other folks' tables. You've set too long at your own."

He came back, and left the cap'n waiting for him in the path. There he
stood before her, the gaunt, big shape she had watched and brooded over
so many years. Something seemed to be moving in his brain, and he gave
it difficult expression.

"Depends on who else's settin' at the table," he remarked, and vanished
into the night.

Mariana, moved and wondering, wanted to call after him and ask him what
he meant; but she reflected that the women who inspired such speeches
probably refrained from insisting too crudely on their value. Then she
flew to the bedroom and began to sort her things for packing.

In two weeks she was settled at the cap'n's, and Jake Preble had come to
board, doggedly, even sulkily, at first, and then suddenly armed with
that quiet acceptance he had ready for all the changes in his life. But
Mariana smoothed his path to a pleasant familiarity with the big house
and its ways, and he began to look about the room, from his place at the
table with his book or paper, wonderingly and even pathetically, as she
thought, recalling the time before his sister died when his own house
had been full of the warm intimacies of an ordered life. The captain
reveled in the comfort of his state. He brought in wood until Mariana
had to bid him cease. He built fires and drew water, and his ruddy face
shone with contentment. She made his favorite dishes and seemed not to
notice when Jake, too, in his shy way, awoke to praise them. She even
read aloud to the cap'n on a Sunday night from the life of women who,
the title declared, debatably, had "Made India what It is." On such
nights of intellectual stress Jake betook himself to the kitchen and
ostentatiously pored over the "Scout in Early New England." The cap'n,
who was hospitality itself, trudged out there one night, in the midst of
a panegyric on Mrs. Judson, and besought him to come in.

"If you don't like that kind o' readin', Jake, we'll try suthin' else,"
he conceded generously. "I jest as soon play fox an' geese Sunday nights
if anybody wants to. I ain't one to tie up the cat's tail Sunday mornin'
so 's she won't play."

"I'll be in byme-by," said Jake, frowningly intent upon his page. "You
go on with your readin', cap'n. I'll be in."

But, instead, he walked out and down the road to his own lonely house,
and Mariana, though her brain followed him every step of the way, went
on reading in the clearest voice, minding her stops as she had been
taught when she was accounted the best reader in the class. But in those
days of reading-classes her heart had not ached. It ached all the time
now. She had shut the gate behind her, and the one she opened led into
an unfamiliar country. Mariana had been born to live ingenuously,
simply, like the child she was. Woman's wiles were not for her, and the
fruit they brought her had a bitter tang. But whether her campaign was a
righteous one or not, it was brilliantly successful. She could hardly
think that any women, looking on, were laughing at her, even in a
kindly way. She had taken her own stand and the world had patently
respected it. Immediately on her moving to the cap'n's she had gone out
in her best cashmere and made a series of calls, and far and wide she
had gayly announced herself as keeping house because she wanted the
money; in the spring, she told the neighborhood, she meant to take what
she had earned and make a journey to Canada to see cousin Liddy, who had
married into a nice family there, and over and over again had written
for her to come.

"I guess Eben Hanscom never'll let you step your foot out of his house
now he's tolled you into it," Lizzie Ann West remarked incisively one
afternoon, when Mariana, after a pleasant call on her, stood in the
doorway, saying the last words the visit had not left room for. "He
ain't goin' to bite into such pie-crust as yours, day in, day out, and
go back to baker's trade."

"I don't make no better pie-crust'n you do," said Mariana innocently.

"Mebbe you don't, but you're on the spot, and there's where you've got
the whip-hand. Eben Hanscom ain't goin' to let you go. He's no such
fool."

"Well," flashed Mariana, "I'd like to see anybody keep me when I've got
ready to go." She was on the doorstep now, and the spring wind was
bringing her faint, elusive odors. She felt like putting her head up in
the air like a lost four-footed creature and snuffing for her home.

"Oh, I guess you'll be glad enough to stay," said Lizzie Ann, with a
shrewdness Mariana hated. "The cap'n's takin' to clippin' his beard.
He's a nice-lookin' man, younger by ten years than he was when she's
alive, and neat 's a pin."

Mariana chose her way back along the muddy road, choking a temptation to
turn the corner to her own little house, build a fire there, and let
single men fight the domestic battle for themselves. But that night when
the spring wind was still moving and she stood on Cap'n Hanscom's
doorstone and looked at the dark lilac buds at her hand, the tears came,
and the cap'n, bearing in his last armful of wood for the night, saw
them and was undone. He went in speechlessly and piled the wood with
absent care. He stood a moment in thought, and then he called her.

"Mariana, you come here."

She went obediently.

"You ain't homesick, be you?" the cap'n inquired.

She nodded, like a child.

"I guess so," she responded. "Leastways, if 'tain't that I don't know
what 'tis."

The cap'n was looking at her pleadingly, all warm benevolence and
anxious care.

"I know how 'tis," he burst forth. "You've give up your home to come
here, an' you feel as if you hadn't anything of your own left. Ain't
that so, Mariana?"

"I guess so," Mariana returned at random. "Mebbe I'll go down and open
my winders to-morrow. I want to look over some o' my things."

The cap'n seemed to be breathing with difficulty. Mariana had heard him
speak in meeting, and thus stertorously was he accustomed to announce
his faith.

"Mariana," said he, "it's all yours, everything I got. It's your home.
You stay here an' enjoy it."

"Oh, no, it ain't," cried Mariana, in a fright. "I've got my own place
same 's you have. I'm contented enough, Eben. I just got kinder
thinkin'; I often do, come spring o' the year."

"Well, I ain't contented, if you be," said the cap'n valiantly. "I never
shall be till you an' me are man an' wife."

"O my soul!" Mariana cried out. "O my soul!"

"What's the matter?" said Jake Preble. He had just come over from his
own house with a spray of lilac that was really out, whereas the
cap'n's had only budded. Jake had felt a strange thrill of triumph at
the haste his bush had made. He thought Mariana ought to see it.

"There's nothin' the matter," she told him in a high, excited voice,
"except I've got to go home. I've told Cap'n Hanscom so, and I'll tell
you. I ain't goin' to eat another meal in this house. There's plenty
cooked," she continued, turning to the cap'n in a wistful haste, "and
I'll stop on the way down the road and tell Lizzie Ann West you want she
should come and see you through. Don't you stop me, either of you. I'm
goin' home."

She ran up the stairs to her room, and tossed her belongings into her
trunk. Over the first layer she cried, but then it suddenly came upon
her that she was having her own way and that it led into her dear spring
garden, and she laughed forthwith. Downstairs the cap'n stood pondering,
his eyes on the floor, and Jake regarded him at first keenly and in
anger, and then with a slow smile.

"Well," said Jake presently, "I guess I might 's well pack up, too."

"Don't ye do it, Jake," the cap'n besought him hoarsely. "I guess, think
it over, she'll make up her mind to stay."

"Guess not," said Jake. It was more cheerfully than he had spoken that
winter, the cap'n wonderingly thought. "I'll heave my things together
an' go back to the old place."

In a day or two it was all different. They had moved the pieces as if it
were some sober game, and now Mariana was in her own little house,
warming it to take out the winter chill, and treating it with a tender
haste, as if she had somehow done it wrong, and Lizzie Ann had gone to
Cap'n Hanscom's. Mariana had hesitated on the doorstone, at her leaving,
and there the cap'n bade her good-by, rather piteously and with
finality, though they were to be neighbors still.

"Well, Eben," she hesitated. There was something she had meant to say.
In spite of decency, in spite of feminine decorum, she had intended to
give him a little shove into the path that should lead him, still
innocently, to her own blazonment as a woman who could have her little
triumphs like the rest. "If you should ever feel to tell Lizzie Ann I
was a good housekeeper," she meant to say, "I should be obliged to you."
He would do it, she knew, and from that prologue more would follow. The
cap'n would go on to say he had besought her to marry him, never
guessing, under Lizzie Ann's superior system of investigation, that he
had disclosed himself at all. But as she mused absently on his face,
another spirit took possession of her, the one that had presided over
her humble hearth and welcomed the two men there in the neighborly
visits that seemed so pleasant in remembrance. What did it avail that
this or that woman should declare she was unsought? She was ashamed of
waging that unworthy war. She found herself speaking without
premeditation.

"You know what Lizzie Ann West says about you?"

"She ain't said she won't come?" He was dismayed and frankly terrified.

"She says you're dreadful spruce-lookin' and you're younger'n ever you
was."

The cap'n laughed.

"That all?" he inquired. "Well, she must be cross-eyed."

"No," said Mariana, "she ain't cross-eyed; only she thinks you're a
terrible likely man."

Then she walked away, and the cap'n watched her, blinking a little with
the sun in his eyes and the memory of her Indian pudding.

Mariana did not find her house just as she had left it. It seemed to her
a warmer, lighter, cleaner place than she had ever thought it, and, in
spite of the winter's closing, as sweet as spring. She went about
opening cupboard doors and looking at her china as if each piece were
friendly to her, from long association, and moving the mantel ornaments
to occupy the old places more exactly. Certain eccentricities of the
place had been faults; now they were beauties wherein she found no
blemish. The worn hollows in the kitchen floor, so hard to wash on a
Monday, seemed exactly to fit her feet. And while she stood with her
elbows on the window-sash, looking out and planning her garden, Jake
Preble came. Mariana was not conscious that she had expected him, but
his coming seemed the one note needed to complete recaptured harmony.
What she might have prepared to say to him if she had paused to remember
Lizzie Ann's ideal of woman's behavior, she did not think. She turned to
him, her face running over with pure delight, and put the comprehensive
question:--

"Ain't this elegant?"

"You bet it is," said Jake. He did not seem the same man, neither the
sombre dullard of the winter, nor the Jake of former years who had
fulfilled the routine of his life with no comment on its rigor or its
ease. His face was warmly flushed and his eyes shone upon her. "I don't
know 's I ever see a nicer place," said he, "except it's mine. Say,
Mariana, what you goin' to do?"

"When?" Mariana inquired innocently.

"Now. Right off, to-morrer, next day."

She laughed.

"I'm goin' to start my garden and wash my dishes and hang out clo'es,
and then I'm goin' to begin all over again and do the same things; but
it'll be my garden and my dishes and my clo'es. And I'm goin' to be as
happy as the day is long."

"Say," said Jake, "you don't s'pose you could come over to my house an'
do it?"

"Work out some more? Why, I ain't but just over one job. You expect me
to take another?"

Mariana was not in the least embarrassed. Lizzie Ann was right, she
thought. Men-folks studied their own comfort, and Jake, even, having had
a cosy nest all winter, had learned the way of making one of his own.
Suddenly she trembled. He was looking at her in a way she wondered at,
not as if he were Jake at all, but another like him, from warm,
beseeching eyes.

"You shouldn't do a hand's turn if you didn't want to," he was assuring
her, with that entreating look. "We'd keep a girl, an' Mondays I'd stay
home an' turn the wringer. Mariana, I know you set everything by your
house, but you could fix mine over any way you liked. You could throw
out a bay-winder if you wanted, or build a cupelow."

"Why," said Mariana, so softly that he bent to hear, "what's set you out
to want a housekeeper?"

"It ain't a housekeeper," said Jake. "I've had enough o' housekeepin'
long as I live, seein' you fetch an' carry for Eb Hanscom. Why, Mariana,
I just love you. I want a wife."

Mariana walked away from him to the window and stood looking out again,
only that, instead of the wet garden with the clumps of larkspur
feathering up, she seemed to see long beds of flowers in bloom. She even
heard the bees humming over them and the tumult of nesting birds. And
all the time Jake Preble waited, looking at her back and wondering if
after all the losses of his life he was to forfeit Mariana, who, he
knew, was life itself.

"Well," said he, in deep despondency, "I s'pose it's no use. I see how
you feel about it. Any woman would feel the same."

Mariana turned suddenly, and, seeing she was smiling, he took a hurried
step to meet her.

"I 'most forgot you," she said, with a whimsical lilt in her voice. "I
was thinkin' how elegant it is when we get home at last."

"Yes," said Jake dejectedly. "I s'pose you're considerin' your own house
an' your own gardin-spot's the best there is in the world."

"Why, no," said Mariana, with a little movement toward him. "I wa'n't
thinkin' o' my house nor my gardin particular. I guess I was thinkin' o'
yours. Leastways, I was thinkin' o' _you_."




PARTNERS


"I guess I shall fetch it," said Newell Bond.

He was sitting on the doorstep, in the summer dusk, with Dorcas Lee. She
knew just how his gaunt, large-featured face looked, with its hawk-like
glance, and the color, as he spoke, mounting to his forehead. There were
two kinds of Bonds, the red and the black. The red Bonds had the name of
carrying out their will in all undertakings, and Newell was one. Dorcas
was on the step above him, her splendid shoulders disdaining the support
of the casing, and her head, with its heavy braids, poised with an
unconscious pride, no more spirited by daylight than here in the dark
where no one saw. She answered in her full, rich voice:--

"Of course you will, if you want to bad enough."

"If I want to?" repeated Newell. "Ain't I acted as if 'twas the one
thing I did want?"

Over and over they had dwelt upon the great purpose of his life,
sometimes to touch it here and there with delicate implication, and
often to sit down, by an unspoken consent, for long, serious talks.
To-night Newell spoke from a reminiscent mood. There were times when,
in an ingenuous egoism, he had to take down the book of his romance and
read a page. But only to Dorcas. She was his one confidant; she
understood.

"I don't know 's Alida's to blame," he meditated. "She's made that way."

Immediately Dorcas, in her sympathetic mind, was regarding a picture of
Alida Roe as she saw her without illusion of passion or prejudice--a
delicate, pale girl with a sweet complexion, and slender hands that were
ever trembling upon fine work for her own adornment. She had known Alida
at school and at home, in dull times and bright, and she had a vision,
when her name was mentioned, of something as frail as cobwebs, with all
their beauty. Whenever Newell Bond had begun to sound the praises of his
chosen maid, she had set her mind seriously to considering what he could
see in Alida. But it was never of any use. Alida always remained to her
impalpable and vain. Now she answered patiently, according to her
wont:--

"Of course she's made that way."

It was like a touch to keep the machinery going, and he responded:--

"You see, I hadn't asked her to set the day. It was kind of understood
between us. An' then Clayton Rand come along an' begun to shine up to
her, spendin' money like water, an' her mother was bewitched by it. So
she orders Alida to throw me over an' take up with t'other man. I don't
know 's Alida's to blame."

"Do you s'pose they're engaged?" asked Dorcas, for the hundredth time.

He was silent for a moment, brooding. Then he answered, as he always
did:--

"That's more'n I can make out. But if they are, I'll break it. Give me
time enough, an' I'll do it when they're walkin' into the meetin'-house,
if I don't afore."

Dorcas felt old and tired. All her buoyant life seemed to settle to a
level where she must foster the youth of others and starve her own.

"Well," she said gently, "you've done pretty well this year, sellin'
house-lots an' all."

"I've done well this year an' I'm goin' to keep on," said Newell, in
that dogged way he had. Often it heartened her, but never when it
touched upon his weary chase. Then it seemed to her like some rushing
force that should be used to turn a mill, wandering away into poor
meadows, to be dried and lost. But he was ending as he always did:
"Clayton Rand won't marry so long 's his mother's alive, no matter how
much money he's got. An' while Alida's waitin' for him, I'll lay up what
I can, an' I bet you I get her yet."

"You goin' to pick peas in the mornin'?" asked Dorcas.

She had heard the clock striking, and it counseled her to remember how
early their days began.

Newell came out of his dream. "Yes," he said, "that patch down the river
road. I guess we can get off ten bushels or more by the afternoon
train."

"All right," said Dorcas. "I'll be there."

"You mustn't walk down. I'm goin' t'other way myself, but I'll hitch up
Jim, an' you can leave him in the old barn till you come home."

"No," said Dorcas, rising. "I'll walk. I'd rather by half than have the
care of him. Maybe I'll catch a ride, too."

They said good-night, and Newell was walking down the path where
clove-pinks were at their sweetest, when he turned to speak again.
Dorcas, forgetful of him, had stretched her arms upward in a yawn that
seemed to envelop the whole of her. As she stood there in the moonlight,
her tall figure loomed like that of a priestess offering worship. She
might have been chanting an invocation to the night. The man, regarding
her, was startled, he did not know why. In that instant she seemed to
him something mysterious and grand, something belonging to the night
itself, and he went away with his question unasked. Dorcas, her yawn
finished, went in to think of him, as she always did, in the few
luxurious moments before she slept. But her nights were always
dreamless. She had the laborer's tired muscles and acquiescent nerves.

It was two years now since she and Newell had become, in a sense,
partners. An affliction had fallen upon each of them at about the same
time, and, through what seemed chance, they had stretched out a hand
each to steady the other, and gone on together. It was then that
Dorcas's mother had had her first paralytic stroke, and Dorcas had given
up the district school to be at home. But she was poor, and when it
became apparent that her mother might live in helpless misery, it was
also evident that Dorcas must have something to do. At that time Newell,
under the first cloud of disappointed love, had launched into
market-gardening, and he gave Dorcas little tasks, here and there,
picking fruit and vegetables, even weeding and hoeing, because that
would leave her within call of home, where a little girl sat daily on
guard. Newell lived alone, with old Kate to do his work, and soon it
became an established custom for Dorcas to cook savory dishes for him,
on the days when Kate's aching joints kept her smoking and grumbling by
the fire. In a thousand ways she unconsciously slipped into his life,
with his accounts, his house purchases, and the work of his fields; and
the small sums he paid her kept bread in her mother's mouth.

And now her mother had died, but Dorcas still kept on. She had no school
yet, she told herself excusingly; but a self she would not hear knew how
intently she was fighting Newell's own particular battle with him, how
she watched here and there lest a penny be spilled and his road be made
the longer to the goal he fixed. She was quite willing to consider
breaking up Alida's intimacy with the other man, because, to her
dispassionate mind, Alida was of no account in the world of feeling. She
might have her mild preferences, but if Newell could give her muslin
dresses and plated pins, he would suit her excellently. And Newell
wanted her. As for Clayton Rand, he would be none the poorer, lacking
her. She had thought it all out, and she was sure she knew.

The next morning, dressed in brown, the color of the earth she worked
in, Dorcas stepped out into the dewy world and closed her door behind
her. It was a long walk to the field. For some unguessed reason she had
been heavy-hearted at rising; but now the pure look of the early day
refreshed her and she went on cheerfully. Since her mother's death life
had seemed to her all a maze where she could find few certainties. She
had no ties, no duties, save the general ones to neighborhood and
church, and her loneliness now and then rose before her like something
inexorable and vast, and would be looked at. Perhaps that was why she
had thrown herself whole-souled into Newell's willful quest, though at
moments she longed to strangle it with passion fiercer than its own; and
why she wondered just what she could do after the desire of his heart
had flowered and Alida was his wife.

As she walked along, she held her head very high, and carried her hat in
her hand, leaving the sun to strike upon her shining braids and light
them to a gloss. For the moment she was unreasonably happy, forgetful of
the past, and aware only of the sunlight on green fields. Then suddenly
she found that a light wagon had drawn up and Clayton Rand was asking
her to ride. She looked at him one quick instant before she answered.
She had known him when they were both children and he came to spend the
summer a mile away, and sometimes, for fun, went to the district school.
Since then they had kept up a recognized acquaintance, but this was the
first time in years that they had spoken together. He was a heavy-faced
young man, with rough-looking clothes of a correct cut, and a suggested
taste in dogs and horses.

"Ride?" he asked again, and Dorcas smiled at him out of many thoughts.
She could not have whispered them to herself perhaps; but they all
concerned Newell and his daily lack. Clayton saw the pretty lifting of
her red lip above her small white teeth, and, being a young man ready to
leap at desired conclusions, instantly thought of kissing.

"I can't be mistaken," he said elaborately. "This is Miss Dorcas Lee."

Dorcas put her foot on the step and seated herself beside him. Then,
surprised at his success, because she had looked to him like a proud
person, though in a working-gown, he began a wandering apology for
having failed to help her in. Meantime he touched up the beautiful
sorrel, and when they began to fly along the road, and the sorrel's
golden mane was tossing, Dorcas had a brief smiling concurrence with
Alida. To speed like that was perhaps worth the company of Clayton Rand.
He was talking to her, and she answered him demurely, with a dignity not
reassuring from one of her large type and regal air. But presently he
began, by some inner cleverness (for he had a way with him), to tell her
stories about horses, and Dorcas listened, wide-eyed with pleasure. The
way to the knoll was very short, and there she had to stop in the midst
of a racing story that had the movement of the race itself, and bid him
leave her. This time he remembered his manners, and leaped out to help
her gallantly.

"Miss Dorcas," he called her back after her pretty thanks, "I suppose--I
don't half dare to ask you--but you like horses. Just let me take you
over to the Country Club to-morrow, and we can see the racing."

For the space of a second, Dorcas gazed at the toe of her patched
working-boots. She was thinking, in a confused tangle, of Alida and
Newell, and wondering if she had any clothes to wear. Then she lifted
her head quickly in a resolution that looked like triumph.

"Thank you," she said, with a shyness very charming in one of her large
type; "I should be happy to."

"Thank _you_," said Clayton, jumping into the wagon. "I'll be along
about half-past one."

All that day Dorcas bent over the pea-vines and listened to her
thoughts. There were other pickers, but she had no words for them, even
when they sat down together for their luncheon, nor for Newell himself,
coming at night to take her home.

"You're real tired, I guess," he said, as he left her at the gate.

Dorcas flashed a sudden smile at him. It was all mirth and mischief.

"No," she said soberly, "I don't believe I'm tired."

"I'm goin' to Fairfax to see about sellin' the colt to-morrow," said
Newell, from the wagon.

Dorcas nodded.

"Maybe I'll take a day off myself," she said. "I'll be on hand next-day
mornin', if you want anything picked. Good-night."

That evening at ten Newell was driving home from the village, and he
marked her light in the kitchen. He stopped, vaguely uneasy, and walked
up the path to the side door, and as he came he saw the shades go down.

"Dorcas!" he called, at the door, "it's me, Newell."

Then he heard her hurrying steps. But instead of opening the door to him
she pushed the bolt softly, and he heard her voice in an inexplicable
mixture of laughter and confusion.

"I'm real sorry, Newell, but I can't let you in. I'm awful sorry."

"All right," he said bluffly, turning away, yet conscious of a tiny hurt
of pained surprise. "Nothin' wrong, is there?"

"No," came the laughing voice again, "there's nothin' wrong."

"That's all I wanted to know," he explained, as he went down the path.
"Seein' the light so late--"

And again the voice followed him.

"Yes, Newell, I'm all right."

Dorcas, an hour after, at her table ironing the dotted muslin she had
washed and dried before the fire, laughed out again. She had a new sense
of triumph, like a bloom upon the purpose of her life. At last she saw
before her a path quite distinct from the dull duties of every day.

When Clayton Rand drove up with his pair of sleek horses and the shining
rig that was admired by all the town, she went out and down the path
very shyly, and with a blushing sedateness becoming to her. Clayton saw
it, and his heart leaped with the vanity of knowing she was moved
because of him. But the cause was otherwise. Dorcas knew her hair was
beautiful, and that her skin, in spite of its tan, was sweetly pink; but
she also knew that the fashion of her sleeves was two years old, and
that no earthly power could bring the gloss of youth to her worn shoes
again. So she blushed and shrank a little, like a bride, and Clayton,
who saw only that her skirts fluttered airily and her hat was trimmed
with something soft and white, straightway forgot all the girls he had
ever seen, and wondered if his mother could fail to approve such worth
as this. And then again he began to talk about horses, and Dorcas began,
in her rapt way, to listen, and put in a keen word here and there.
Alida, she knew, had one idea of horses: that they were four-legged
creatures likely to run away, or to bite your fingers if you gave them
grass. It was easy to compete with her there, and also because Dorcas
really did love animals and need not pretend.

It was a beautiful day at the races. There were all sorts of magnificent
turnouts, and ladies dressed in raiment such as Dorcas had never even
imagined. She innocently fancied Clayton must know any number of them,
and grew very humbly grateful to him for troubling himself about her.
When she suggested that he must have many friends among them, he laughed
with an amused candor, and told her they were gentry, a cut above. Yet
Dorcas continued to believe he might have consorted with them, if he
chose, and her manner to him had a softer friendliness because he was so
kind. And when she could forget her old-fashioned gown, she was quite
childishly content. At the gate that night he thanked her profusely for
the pleasure of her company, and added, boldly:--

"Won't you go to ride a little ways to-morrow night?"

A sudden shyness made her retreat a step, as if in definite withdrawal.
It was like a flower's closing.

"Maybe not to-morrow," she hesitated. It seemed to her the events she
had moved were rushing, of themselves, too fast.

"Next day, then," he called. "I'll be along about seven. Good-night."

And Dorcas went in to think over her day and dream again, not so much of
that as of the desire she was fulfilling for another man.

At that time Newell was very busy over questions of real estate. He had
bought, two years before, the whole slope of Sunset Hill, overlooking
three townships and the sea, and now city residents had found out the
spot and were trying to secure it. That prospect of immediate riches
drew his mind away from his gardening. He forgot the patient things that
were growing silently to earn him his desire, and only gave orders in
the morning to his two men before he drove away to talk about land. Even
Dorcas he forgot, save as a man remembers his accustomed staff leaning
against the wall till he shall need it. But he has no anxiety about it,
for he knows it will be there.

Dorcas hardly missed him, for she, too, had new ways to walk. Clayton
Rand came often now. He seemed to be fascinated, perhaps by her beauty
and the simplicity of her mien, and perhaps by the dignity of her
undefended state. She never asked him into her house, though she would
drive and walk with him. Her strength, that summer, seemed to her
boundless. She could work all day and sit up half the night sewing old
finery or washing and ironing it, and then she could sleep dreamlessly
for two or three hours, and wake to work again and drive with Clayton
Rand in the evening. It seemed to her at times as if that life would go
on breathlessly forever, and then again she knew it would not go on; for
she had planned the end toward which it was tending, and the end was
almost there.

One afternoon, as she came home from her work flushed and covered with
dust, yet looking like an earth-queen in her triumphant health, she had
to pass Alida's house, and Alida's mother was waiting for her by the
gate. As Dorcas came on swiftly, she had a thought that Alida was not
very wise, or she would keep her lovers away from Mrs. Roe. The mother
and daughter were too much alike. The older woman was a terrible
prophecy. The fairness of youth had faded in her into a soft ivory, her
hair was a yellow wisp tightly coiled, and her mouth drooped in a meagre
discontent. She regarded Dorcas frowningly from sharp eyes, and Dorcas
stepped more proudly. She had fancied this onslaught might await her.

"Dorcas Lee!" called the woman sharply. "Dorcas Lee!"

Then, as Dorcas stopped, in a calm inquiry, the woman went on
rushingly, all the words she had not meant to say tumbling forth as she
had thought them.

"Dorcas Lee, what are you carryin' on for, the way you be, with Clayton
Rand? There ain't a decent girl in town would step in an' ketch anybody
up like that. You'll get yourself talked about, if you ain't now. I was
a friend to your mother an' I'm a friend to you, an' now I've gone out
o' my way to give you warnin'."

Dorcas looked past her up the garden walk and at the porch where Alida
sat rocking back and forth, her hands busy as ever with her delicate
work.

"Alida!" she called softly. "'Lida, you come here a minute. I want to
speak to you."

Alida laid down her work with care and placed her thimble in the basket.
Then she came along the garden path, swaying and floating as she always
walked, her pretty head moving rhythmically.

"'Lida, you come a step or two with me," said Dorcas gently, when the
girl was at the gate. "I want to speak to you."

Alida opened the gate and, without a glance at her mother, stepped out
upon the dusty path. People said Mrs. Roe talked so much that everybody
had long ago done listening to her, and perhaps she had done expecting
it.

"You'd ought to have suthin' over your head," she called to Alida.
"You'll be 's black as an Injun."

Dorcas took a long stride into the roadside tangle and broke off a
branch of thick-leaved elder. She gave it to Alida, and the girl gravely
shaded herself with it from the defacing sun. They walked along together
in silence for a moment, and Dorcas frankly studied Alida's face. There
was no sign of grief upon it, of loneliness, of discontent. The skin was
like a rose, a fainter, pinker rose than Dorcas had ever seen. The soft
lips kept their lovely curve.

"'Lida," she breathed, "what you goin' to do to-night?"

"I don't know," said Alida, in her even voice. "Sometimes I sew, when it
ain't too hot. I'm makin' me a dotted muslin."

Dorcas found her own heart beating fast. The excitement of it all, of
life itself, the bliss, the pain and loss, came keenly on her. She
thought of the days that had gone to buying this thing of prettiness,
the strained muscles, the racing blood and thrilling brain, the sweat
and toil of it, and something choked her to think that now the pretty
thing was almost won. Newell would have it, his heart's desire, and in
thirty years perhaps it would look like Alida's mother with that shallow
mouth. Yet her simple faithfulness was a part of her own blood, and she
could not deny him what was his.

"Alida," she said, in an eloquent throb, "do you--do you like him?"

"Who?" asked Alida calmly, turning clear eyes upon her.

Dorcas laughed shamefacedly.

"I don't know hardly what I'm talkin' about," she said. "I've worked
pretty hard to-day. 'Lida, if there was anybody you liked, anybody you
want to tal

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