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Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901

by L. M. Montgomery · English · Gutenberg #24873 · 364,961 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901

Author: L. M. Montgomery


        
Release date: March 19, 2008 [eBook #24873]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24873

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY SHORT STORIES, 1896 TO 1901 ***




Produced by Alicia Williams, Jeannie Howse and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net







Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901


Lucy Maud Montgomery was born at Clifton (now New London), Prince
Edward Island, Canada, on November 30, 1874. She achieved
international fame in her lifetime, putting Prince Edward Island and
Canada on the world literary map. Best known for her "Anne of Green
Gables" books, she was also a prolific writer of short stories and
poetry. She published some 500 short stories and poems and twenty
novels before her death in 1942. The Project Gutenberg collection of
her short stories was gathered from numerous sources and is presented
in chronological publishing order:

Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901
Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903
Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904
Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906
Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908
Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922


       *       *       *       *       *




Short Stories 1896 to 1901

    A Case of Trespass                                       1897
    A Christmas Inspiration                                  1901
    A Christmas Mistake                                      1899
    A Strayed Allegiance                                     1897
    An Invitation Given on Impulse                           1900
    Detected by the Camera                                   1897
    In Spite of Myself                                       1896
    Kismet                                                   1899
    Lillian's Business Venture                               1900
    Miriam's Lover                                           1901
    Miss Calista's Peppermint Bottle                         1900
    The Jest that Failed                                     1901
    The Pennington's Girl                                    1900
    The Red Room                                             1898
    The Setness of Theodosia                                 1901
    The Story of An Invitation                               1901
    The Touch of Fate                                        1899
    The Waking of Helen                                      1901
    The Way of Winning Anne                                  1899
    Young Si                                                 1901




A Case of Trespass


It was the forenoon of a hazy, breathless day, and Dan Phillips was
trouting up one of the back creeks of the Carleton pond. It was
somewhat cooler up the creek than out on the main body of water, for
the tall birches and willows, crowding down to the brim, threw cool,
green shadows across it and shut out the scorching glare, while a
stray breeze now and then rippled down the wooded slopes, rustling the
beech leaves with an airy, pleasant sound.

Out in the pond the glassy water creamed and shimmered in the hot sun,
unrippled by the faintest breath of air. Across the soft, pearly tints
of the horizon blurred the smoke of the big factory chimneys that were
owned by Mr. Walters, to whom the pond and adjacent property also
belonged.

Mr. Walters was a comparative stranger in Carleton, having but
recently purchased the factories from the heirs of the previous owner;
but he had been in charge long enough to establish a reputation for
sternness and inflexibility in all his business dealings.

One or two of his employees, who had been discharged by him on what
they deemed insufficient grounds, helped to deepen the impression that
he was an unjust and arbitrary man, merciless to all offenders, and
intolerant of the slightest infringement of his cast-iron rules.

Dan Phillips had been on the pond ever since sunrise. The trout had
risen well in the early morning, but as the day wore on, growing
hotter and hotter, they refused to bite, and for half an hour Dan had
not caught one.

He had a goodly string of them already, however, and he surveyed them
with satisfaction as he rowed his leaky little skiff to the shore of
the creek.

"Pretty good catch," he soliloquized. "Best I've had this summer, so
far. That big spotted one must weigh near a pound. He's a beauty.
They're a good price over at the hotels now, too. I'll go home and
get my dinner and go straight over with them. That'll leave me time
for another try at them about sunset. Whew, how hot it is! I must take
Ella May home a bunch of them blue flags. They're real handsome!"

He tied his skiff under the crowding alders, gathered a big bunch of
the purple flag lilies with their silky petals, and started homeward,
whistling cheerily as he stepped briskly along the fern-carpeted wood
path that wound up the hill under the beeches and firs.

He was a freckled, sunburned lad of thirteen years. His neighbours all
said that Danny was "as smart as a steel trap," and immediately added
that they wondered where he got his smartness from--certainly not from
his father!

The elder Phillips had been denominated "shiftless and slack-twisted"
by all who ever had any dealings with him in his unlucky, aimless
life--one of those improvident, easygoing souls who sit contentedly
down to breakfast with a very faint idea where their dinner is to come
from.

When he had died, no one had missed him, unless it were his patient,
sad-eyed wife, who bravely faced her hard lot, and toiled
unremittingly to keep a home for her two children--Dan and a girl two
years younger, who was a helpless cripple, suffering from some form of
spinal disease.

Dan, who was old and steady for his years, had gone manfully to work
to assist his mother. Though he had been disappointed in all his
efforts to obtain steady employment, he was active and obliging, and
earned many a small amount by odd jobs around the village, and by
helping the Carleton farmers in planting and harvest.

For the last two years, however, his most profitable source of summer
income had been the trout pond. The former owner had allowed anyone
who wished to fish in his pond, and Dan made a regular business of it,
selling his trout at the big hotels over at Mosquito Lake. This, in
spite of its unattractive name, was a popular summer resort, and Dan
always found a ready market for his catch.

When Mr. Walters purchased the property it somehow never occurred to
Dan that the new owner might not be so complaisant as his predecessor
in the matter of the best trouting pond in the country.

To be sure, Dan often wondered why it was the pond was so deserted
this summer. He could not recall having seen a single person on it
save himself. Still, it did not cross his mind that there could be any
particular reason for this.

He always fished up in the cool, dim creeks, which long experience had
taught him were best for trout, and came and went by a convenient wood
path; but he had no thought of concealment in so doing. He would not
have cared had all Carleton seen him.

He had done very well with his fish so far, and prices for trout at
the Lake went up every day. Dan was an enterprising boy, and a general
favourite with the hotel owners. They knew that he could always be
depended on.

Mrs. Phillips met him at the door when he reached home.

"See, Mother," said Dan exultantly, as he held up his fish. "Just look
at that fellow, will you? A pound if he's an ounce! I ought to get a
good price for these, I can tell you. Let me have my dinner now, and
I'll go right over to the Lake with them."

"It's a long walk for you, Danny," replied his mother pityingly, "and
it's too hot to go so far. I'm afraid you'll get sun-struck or
something. You'd better wait till the cool of the evening. You're
looking real pale and thin this while back."

"Oh, I'm all right, Mother," assured Dan cheerfully. "I don't mind the
heat a bit. A fellow must put up with some inconveniences. Wait till I
bring home the money for these fish. And I mean to have another catch
tonight. It's you that's looking tired. I wish you didn't have to work
so hard, Mother. If I could only get a good place you could take it
easier. Sam French says that Mr. Walters wants a boy up there at the
factory, but I know I wouldn't do. I ain't big enough. Perhaps
something will turn up soon though. When our ship comes in, Mother,
we'll have our good times."

He picked up his flags and went into the little room where his sister
lay.

"See what I've brought you, Ella May!" he said, as he thrust the cool,
moist clusters into her thin, eager hands. "Did you ever see such
beauties?"

"Oh, Dan, how lovely they are! Thank you ever so much! If you are
going over to the Lake this afternoon, will you please call at Mrs.
Henny's and get those nutmeg geranium slips she promised me? Just look
how nice my others are growing. The pink one is going to bloom."

"I'll bring you all the geranium slips at the Lake, if you like. When
I get rich, Ella May, I'll build you a big conservatory, and I'll get
every flower in the world in it for you. You shall just live and sleep
among posies. Is dinner ready, Mother? Trouting's hungry work, I tell
you. What paper is this?"

He picked up a folded newspaper from the table.

"Oh, that's only an old Lake _Advertiser_," answered Mrs. Phillips, as
she placed the potatoes on the table and wiped her moist, hot face
with the corner of her gingham apron. "Letty Mills brought it in
around a parcel this morning. It's four weeks old, but I kept it to
read if I ever get time. It's so seldom we see a paper of any kind
nowadays. But I haven't looked at it yet. Why, Danny, what on earth is
the matter?"

For Dan, who had opened the paper and glanced over the first page,
suddenly gave a choked exclamation and turned pale, staring stupidly
at the sheet before him.

"See, Mother," he gasped, as she came up in alarm and looked over his
shoulder. This is what they read:

    Notice

    Anyone found fishing on my pond at Carleton after date will be
    prosecuted according to law, without respect of persons.

    June First.                                H.C. Walters.

"Oh, Danny, what does it mean?"

Dan went and carefully closed the door of Ella May's room before he
replied. His face was pale and his voice shaky.

"Mean? Well, Mother, it just means that I've been stealing Mr.
Walters's trout all summer--_stealing_ them. That's what it means."

"Oh, Danny! But you didn't know."

"No, but I ought to have remembered that he was the new owner, and
have asked him. I never thought. Mother, what does 'prosecuted
according to law' mean?"

"I don't know, I'm sure, Danny. But if this is so, there's only one
thing to be done. You must go straight to Mr. Walters and tell him all
about it."

"Mother, I don't dare to. He is a dreadfully hard man. Sam French's
father says--"

"I wouldn't believe a word Sam French's father says about Mr.
Walters!" said Mrs. Phillips firmly. "He's got a spite against him
because he was dismissed. Besides, Danny, it's the only right thing to
do. You know that. We're poor, but we have never done anything
underhand yet."

"Yes, Mother, I know," said Dan, gulping his fear bravely down. "I'll
go, of course, right after dinner. I was only scared at first. I'll
tell you what I'll do. I'll clean these trout nicely and take them to
Mr. Walters, and tell him that, if he'll only give me time, I'll pay
him back every cent of money I got for all I sold this summer. Then
maybe he'll let me off, seeing as I didn't know about the notice."

"I'll go with you, Danny."

"No, I'll go alone, Mother. You needn't go with me," said Dan
heroically. To himself he said that his mother had troubles enough. He
would never subject her to the added ordeal of an interview with the
stern factory owner. He would beard the lion in his den himself, if it
had to be done.

"Don't tell Ella May anything about it. It would worry her. And don't
cry, Mother, I guess it'll be all right. Let me have my dinner now and
I'll go straight off."

Dan ate his dinner rapidly; then he carefully cleaned his trout, put
them in a long basket, with rhubarb leaves over them, and started with
an assumed cheerfulness very far from his real feelings.

He had barely passed the gate when another boy came shuffling along--a
tall, raw-boned lad, with an insinuating smile and shifty, cunning
eyes. The newcomer nodded familiarly to Dan.

"Hello, sonny. Going over to the Lake with your catch, are you? You'll
fry up before you get there. There'll be nothing left of you but a
crisp."

"No, I'm not going to the Lake. I'm going up to the factory to see Mr.
Walters."

Sam French gave a long whistle of surprise.

"Why, Dan, what's taking you there? You surely ain't thinking of
trying for that place, are you? Walters wouldn't look at you. Why, he
wouldn't take _me_! You haven't the ghost of a chance."

"No, I'm not going for that. Sam, did you know that Mr. Walters had a
notice in the Lake _Advertiser_ that nobody could fish in his pond
this summer?"

"Course I did--the old skinflint! He's too mean to live, that's what.
He never goes near the pond himself. Regular dog in the manger, he is.
Dad says--"

"Sam, why didn't you tell me about that notice?"

"Gracious, didn't you know? I s'posed everybody did, and here I've
been taking you for the cutest chap this side of sunset--fishing away
up in that creek where no one could see you, and cutting home through
the woods on the sly. You don't mean to tell me you never saw that
notice?"

"No, I didn't. Do you think I'd have gone near the pond if I had? I
never saw it till today, and I'm going straight to Mr. Walters now to
tell him about it."

Sam French stopped short in the dusty road and stared at Dan in
undisguised amazement.

"Dan Phillips," he ejaculated, "have you plum gone out of your mind?
Boy alive, you needn't be afraid that I'd peach on you. I'm too blamed
glad to see anyone get the better of that old Walters, smart as he
thinks himself. Gee! To dream of going to him and telling him you've
been fishing in his pond! Why, he'll put you in jail. You don't know
what sort of a man he is. Dad says--"

"Never mind what your dad says, Sam. My mind's made up."

"Dan, you chump, listen to me. That notice says 'prosecuted according
to law.' Why, Danny, he'll put you in prison, or fine you, or
something dreadful."

"I can't help it if he does," said Danny stoutly. "You get out of
here, Sam French, and don't be trying to scare me. I mean to be
honest, and how can I be if I don't own up to Mr. Walters that I've
been stealing his trout all summer?"

"Stealing, fiddlesticks! Dan, I used to think you were a chap with
some sense, but I see I was mistaken. You ain't done no harm. Walters
will never miss them trout. If you're so dreadful squeamish that you
won't fish no more, why, you needn't. But just let the matter drop and
hold your tongue about it. That's _my_ advice."

"Well, it isn't my mother's, then. I mean to go by _hers_. You needn't
argue no more, Sam. I'm going."

"Go, then!" said Sam, stopping short in disgust. "You're a big fool,
Dan, and serve you right if Walters lands you off to jail; but I don't
wish you no ill. If I can do anything for your family after you're
gone, I will, and I'll try and give your remains Christian burial--if
there are any remains. So long, Danny! Give my love to old Walters!"

Dan was not greatly encouraged by this interview. He shrank more than
ever from the thought of facing the stern factory owner. His courage
had almost evaporated when he entered the office at the factory and
asked shakily for Mr. Walters.

"He's in his office there," replied the clerk, "but he's very busy.
Better leave your message with me."

"I must see Mr. Walters himself, please," said Dan firmly, but with
inward trepidation.

The clerk swung himself impatiently from his stool and ushered Dan
into Mr. Walters's private office.

"Boy to see you, sir," he said briefly, as he closed the ground-glass
door behind him.

Dan, dizzy and trembling, stood in the dreaded presence. Mr. Walters
was writing at a table covered with a businesslike litter of papers.
He laid down his pen and looked up with a frown as the clerk vanished.
He was a stern-looking man with deep-set grey eyes and a square,
clean-shaven chin. There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his
frame, and his voice and manner were those of the decided, resolute,
masterful man of business.

He pointed to a capacious leather chair and said concisely, "What is
your business with me, boy?"

Dan had carefully thought out a statement of facts beforehand, but
every word had vanished from his memory. He had only a confused,
desperate consciousness that he had a theft to confess and that it
must be done as soon as possible. He did not sit down.

"Please, Mr. Walters," he began desperately, "I came to tell you--your
notice--I never saw it before--and I've been fishing on your pond all
summer--but I didn't know--honest--I've brought you all I caught
today--and I'll pay back for them all--some time."

An amused, puzzled expression crossed Mr. Walters's noncommittal face.
He pushed the leather chair forward.

"Sit down, my boy," he said kindly. "I don't quite understand this
somewhat mixed-up statement of yours. You've been fishing on my pond,
you say. Didn't you see my notice in the _Advertiser_?"

Dan sat down more composedly. The revelation was over and he was still
alive.

"No, sir. We hardly ever see an _Advertiser_, and nobody told me. I'd
always been used to fishing there, and I never thought but what it was
all right to keep on. I know I ought to have remembered and asked you,
but truly, sir, I didn't mean to steal your fish. I used to sell them
over at the hotels. We saw the notice today, Mother and me, and I came
right up. I've brought you the trout I caught this morning, and--if
only you won't prosecute me, sir, I'll pay back every cent I got for
the others--every cent, sir--if you'll give me time."

Mr. Walters passed his hand across his mouth to conceal something like
a smile.

"Your name is Dan Phillips, isn't it?" he said irrelevantly, "and you
live with your mother, the Widow Phillips, down there at Carleton
Corners, I understand."

"Yes, sir," said Dan, wondering how Mr. Walters knew so much about
him, and if these were the preliminaries of prosecution.

Mr. Walters took up his pen and drew a blank sheet towards him.

"Well, Dan, I put that notice in because I found that many people who
used to fish on my pond, irrespective of leave or licence, were
accustomed to lunch or camp on my property, and did not a little
damage. I don't care for trouting myself; I've no time for it.
However, I hardly think you'll do much damage. You can keep on
fishing there. I'll give you a written permission, so that if any of
my men see you they won't interfere with you. As for these trout here,
I'll buy them from you at Mosquito Lake prices, and will say no more
about the matter. How will that do?"

"Thank you, sir," stammered Dan. He could hardly believe his ears. He
took the slip of paper Mr. Walters handed to him and rose to his feet.

"Wait a minute, Dan. How was it you came to tell me this? You might
have stopped your depredations, and I should not have been any the
wiser."

"That wouldn't have been honest, sir," said Dan, looking squarely at
him.

There was a brief silence. Mr. Walters thrummed meditatively on the
table. Dan waited wonderingly.

Finally the factory owner said abruptly, "There's a vacant place for a
boy down here. I want it filled as soon as possible. Will you take
it?"

"Mr. Walters! _Me!_" Dan thought the world must be turning upside
down.

"Yes, you. You are rather young, but the duties are not hard or
difficult to learn. I think you'll do. I was resolved not to fill that
place until I could find a perfectly honest and trustworthy boy for
it. I believe I have found him. I discharged the last boy because he
lied to me about some trifling offence for which I would have forgiven
him if he had told the truth. I can bear with incompetency, but
falsehood and deceit I cannot and will not tolerate," he said, so
sternly that Dan's face paled. "I am convinced that you are incapable
of either. Will you take the place, Dan?"

"I will if you think I can fill it, sir. I will do my best."

"Yes, I believe you will. Perhaps I know more about you than you
think. Businessmen must keep their eyes open. We'll regard this matter
as settled then. Come up tomorrow at eight o'clock. And one word more,
Dan. You have perhaps heard that I am an unjust and hard master. I am
not the former, and you will never have occasion to find me the latter
if you are always as truthful and straightforward as you have been
today. You might easily have deceived me in this matter. That you did
not do so is the best and only recommendation I require. Take those
trout up to my house and leave them. That will do. Good afternoon."

Dan somehow got his dazed self through the glass door and out of the
building. The whole interview had been such a surprise to him that he
was hardly sure whether or not he had dreamed it all.

"I feel as if I were some person else," he said to himself, as he
started down the hot white road. "But Mother was right. I'll stick to
her motto. I wonder what Sam will say to this."




A Christmas Inspiration


"Well, I really think Santa Claus has been very good to us all," said
Jean Lawrence, pulling the pins out of her heavy coil of fair hair and
letting it ripple over her shoulders.

"So do I," said Nellie Preston as well as she could with a mouthful of
chocolates. "Those blessed home folks of mine seem to have divined by
instinct the very things I most wanted."

It was the dusk of Christmas Eve and they were all in Jean Lawrence's
room at No. 16 Chestnut Terrace. No. 16 was a boarding-house, and
boarding-houses are not proverbially cheerful places in which to spend
Christmas, but Jean's room, at least, was a pleasant spot, and all the
girls had brought their Christmas presents in to show each other.
Christmas came on Sunday that year and the Saturday evening mail at
Chestnut Terrace had been an exciting one.

Jean had lighted the pink-globed lamp on her table and the mellow
light fell over merry faces as the girls chatted about their gifts. On
the table was a big white box heaped with roses that betokened a bit
of Christmas extravagance on somebody's part. Jean's brother had sent
them to her from Montreal, and all the girls were enjoying them in
common.

No. 16 Chestnut Terrace was overrun with girls generally. But just now
only five were left; all the others had gone home for Christmas, but
these five could not go and were bent on making the best of it.

Belle and Olive Reynolds, who were sitting on the bed--Jean could
never keep them off it--were High School girls; they were said to be
always laughing, and even the fact that they could not go home for
Christmas because a young brother had measles did not dampen their
spirits.

Beth Hamilton, who was hovering over the roses, and Nellie Preston,
who was eating candy, were art students, and their homes were too far
away to visit. As for Jean Lawrence, she was an orphan, and had no
home of her own. She worked on the staff of one of the big city
newspapers and the other girls were a little in awe of her
cleverness, but her nature was a "chummy" one and her room was a
favourite rendezvous. Everybody liked frank, open-handed and hearted
Jean.

"It was so funny to see the postman when he came this evening," said
Olive. "He just bulged with parcels. They were sticking out in every
direction."

"We all got our share of them," said Jean with a sigh of content.

"Even the cook got six--I counted."

"Miss Allen didn't get a thing--not even a letter," said Beth quickly.
Beth had a trick of seeing things that other girls didn't.

"I forgot Miss Allen. No, I don't believe she did," answered Jean
thoughtfully as she twisted up her pretty hair. "How dismal it must be
to be so forlorn as that on Christmas Eve of all times. Ugh! I'm glad
I have friends."

"I saw Miss Allen watching us as we opened our parcels and letters,"
Beth went on. "I happened to look up once, and such an expression as
was on her face, girls! It was pathetic and sad and envious all at
once. It really made me feel bad--for five minutes," she concluded
honestly.

"Hasn't Miss Allen any friends at all?" asked Beth.

"No, I don't think she has," answered Jean. "She has lived here for
fourteen years, so Mrs. Pickrell says. Think of that, girls! Fourteen
years at Chestnut Terrace! Is it any wonder that she is thin and
dried-up and snappy?"

"Nobody ever comes to see her and she never goes anywhere," said Beth.
"Dear me! She must feel lonely now when everybody else is being
remembered by their friends. I can't forget her face tonight; it
actually haunts me. Girls, how would you feel if you hadn't anyone
belonging to you, and if nobody thought about you at Christmas?"

"Ow!" said Olive, as if the mere idea made her shiver.

A little silence followed. To tell the truth, none of them liked Miss
Allen. They knew that she did not like them either, but considered
them frivolous and pert, and complained when they made a racket.

"The skeleton at the feast," Jean called her, and certainly the
presence of the pale, silent, discontented-looking woman at the No. 16
table did not tend to heighten its festivity.

Presently Jean said with a dramatic flourish, "Girls, I have an
inspiration--a Christmas inspiration!"

"What is it?" cried four voices.

"Just this. Let us give Miss Allen a Christmas surprise. She has not
received a single present and I'm sure she feels lonely. Just think
how we would feel if we were in her place."

"That is true," said Olive thoughtfully. "Do you know, girls, this
evening I went to her room with a message from Mrs. Pickrell, and I do
believe she had been crying. Her room looked dreadfully bare and
cheerless, too. I think she is very poor. What are we to do, Jean?"

"Let us each give her something nice. We can put the things just
outside of her door so that she will see them whenever she opens it.
I'll give her some of Fred's roses too, and I'll write a Christmassy
letter in my very best style to go with them," said Jean, warming up
to her ideas as she talked.

The other girls caught her spirit and entered into the plan with
enthusiasm.

"Splendid!" cried Beth. "Jean, it is an inspiration, sure enough.
Haven't we been horribly selfish--thinking of nothing but our own
gifts and fun and pleasure? I really feel ashamed."

"Let us do the thing up the very best way we can," said Nellie,
forgetting even her beloved chocolates in her eagerness. "The shops
are open yet. Let us go up town and invest."

Five minutes later five capped and jacketed figures were scurrying up
the street in the frosty, starlit December dusk. Miss Allen in her
cold little room heard their gay voices and sighed. She was crying by
herself in the dark. It was Christmas for everybody but her, she
thought drearily.

In an hour the girls came back with their purchases.

"Now, let's hold a council of war," said Jean jubilantly. "I hadn't
the faintest idea what Miss Allen would like so I just guessed wildly.
I got her a lace handkerchief and a big bottle of perfume and a
painted photograph frame--and I'll stick my own photo in it for fun.
That was really all I could afford. Christmas purchases have left my
purse dreadfully lean."

"I got her a glove-box and a pin tray," said Belle, "and Olive got her
a calendar and Whittier's poems. And besides we are going to give her
half of that big plummy fruit cake Mother sent us from home. I'm sure
she hasn't tasted anything so delicious for years, for fruit cakes
don't grow on Chestnut Terrace and she never goes anywhere else for a
meal."

Beth had bought a pretty cup and saucer and said she meant to give one
of her pretty water-colours too. Nellie, true to her reputation, had
invested in a big box of chocolate creams, a gorgeously striped candy
cane, a bag of oranges, and a brilliant lampshade of rose-coloured
crepe paper to top off with.

"It makes such a lot of show for the money," she explained. "I am
bankrupt, like Jean."

"Well, we've got a lot of pretty things," said Jean in a tone of
satisfaction. "Now we must do them up nicely. Will you wrap them in
tissue paper, girls, and tie them with baby ribbon--here's a box of
it--while I write that letter?"

While the others chatted over their parcels Jean wrote her letter, and
Jean could write delightful letters. She had a decided talent in that
respect, and her correspondents all declared her letters to be things
of beauty and joy forever. She put her best into Miss Allen's
Christmas letter. Since then she has written many bright and clever
things, but I do not believe she ever in her life wrote anything more
genuinely original and delightful than that letter. Besides, it
breathed the very spirit of Christmas, and all the girls declared that
it was splendid.

"You must all sign it now," said Jean, "and I'll put it in one of
those big envelopes; and, Nellie, won't you write her name on it in
fancy letters?"

Which Nellie proceeded to do, and furthermore embellished the envelope
by a border of chubby cherubs, dancing hand in hand around it and a
sketch of No. 16 Chestnut Terrace in the corner in lieu of a stamp.
Not content with this she hunted out a huge sheet of drawing paper and
drew upon it an original pen-and-ink design after her own heart. A
dudish cat--Miss Allen was fond of the No. 16 cat if she could be said
to be fond of anything--was portrayed seated on a rocker arrayed in
smoking jacket and cap with a cigar waved airily aloft in one paw
while the other held out a placard bearing the legend "Merry
Christmas." A second cat in full street costume bowed politely, hat in
paw, and waved a banner inscribed with "Happy New Year," while faintly
suggested kittens gambolled around the border. The girls laughed until
they cried over it and voted it to be the best thing Nellie had yet
done in original work.

All this had taken time and it was past eleven o'clock. Miss Allen had
cried herself to sleep long ago and everybody else in Chestnut Terrace
was abed when five figures cautiously crept down the hall, headed by
Jean with a dim lamp. Outside of Miss Allen's door the procession
halted and the girls silently arranged their gifts on the floor.

"That's done," whispered Jean in a tone of satisfaction as they
tiptoed back. "And now let us go to bed or Mrs. Pickrell, bless her
heart, will be down on us for burning so much midnight oil. Oil has
gone up, you know, girls."

It was in the early morning that Miss Allen opened her door. But early
as it was, another door down the hall was half open too and five rosy
faces were peering cautiously out. The girls had been up for an hour
for fear they would miss the sight and were all in Nellie's room,
which commanded a view of Miss Allen's door.

That lady's face was a study. Amazement, incredulity, wonder, chased
each other over it, succeeded by a glow of pleasure. On the floor
before her was a snug little pyramid of parcels topped by Jean's
letter. On a chair behind it was a bowl of delicious hot-house roses
and Nellie's placard.

Miss Allen looked down the hall but saw nothing, for Jean had slammed
the door just in time. Half an hour later when they were going down to
breakfast Miss Allen came along the hall with outstretched hands to
meet them. She had been crying again, but I think her tears were happy
ones; and she was smiling now. A cluster of Jean's roses were pinned
on her breast.

"Oh, girls, girls," she said, with a little tremble in her voice, "I
can never thank you enough. It was so kind and sweet of you. You don't
know how much good you have done me."

Breakfast was an unusually cheerful affair at No. 16 that morning.
There was no skeleton at the feast and everybody was beaming. Miss
Allen laughed and talked like a girl herself.

"Oh, how surprised I was!" she said. "The roses were like a bit of
summer, and those cats of Nellie's were so funny and delightful. And
your letter too, Jean! I cried and laughed over it. I shall read it
every day for a year."

After breakfast everyone went to Christmas service. The girls went
uptown to the church they attended. The city was very beautiful in the
morning sunshine. There had been a white frost in the night and the
tree-lined avenues and public squares seemed like glimpses of
fairyland.

"How lovely the world is," said Jean.

"This is really the very happiest Christmas morning I have ever
known," declared Nellie. "I never felt so really Christmassy in my
inmost soul before."

"I suppose," said Beth thoughtfully, "that it is because we have
discovered for ourselves the old truth that it is more blessed to give
than to receive. I've always known it, in a way, but I never realized
it before."

"Blessing on Jean's Christmas inspiration," said Nellie. "But, girls,
let us try to make it an all-the-year-round inspiration, I say. We can
bring a little of our own sunshine into Miss Allen's life as long as
we live with her."

"Amen to that!" said Jean heartily. "Oh, listen, girls--the Christmas
chimes!"

And over all the beautiful city was wafted the grand old message of
peace on earth and good will to all the world.




A Christmas Mistake


"Tomorrow is Christmas," announced Teddy Grant exultantly, as he sat
on the floor struggling manfully with a refractory bootlace that was
knotted and tagless and stubbornly refused to go into the eyelets of
Teddy's patched boots. "Ain't I glad, though. Hurrah!"

His mother was washing the breakfast dishes in a dreary, listless sort
of way. She looked tired and broken-spirited. Ted's enthusiasm seemed
to grate on her, for she answered sharply:

"Christmas, indeed. I can't see that it is anything for us to rejoice
over. Other people may be glad enough, but what with winter coming on
I'd sooner it was spring than Christmas. Mary Alice, do lift that
child out of the ashes and put its shoes and stockings on. Everything
seems to be at sixes and sevens here this morning."

Keith, the oldest boy, was coiled up on the sofa calmly working out
some algebra problems, quite oblivious to the noise around him. But he
looked up from his slate, with his pencil suspended above an obstinate
equation, to declaim with a flourish:

    "Christmas comes but once a year,
    And then Mother wishes it wasn't here."

"I don't, then," said Gordon, son number two, who was preparing his
own noon lunch of bread and molasses at the table, and making an
atrocious mess of crumbs and sugary syrup over everything. "I know one
thing to be thankful for, and that is that there'll be no school.
We'll have a whole week of holidays."

Gordon was noted for his aversion to school and his affection for
holidays.

"And we're going to have turkey for dinner," declared Teddy, getting
up off the floor and rushing to secure his share of bread and
molasses, "and cranb'ry sauce and--and--pound cake! Ain't we, Ma?"

"No, you are not," said Mrs. Grant desperately, dropping the dishcloth
and snatching the baby on her knee to wipe the crust of cinders and
molasses from the chubby pink-and-white face. "You may as well know it
now, children, I've kept it from you so far in hopes that something
would turn up, but nothing has. We can't have any Christmas dinner
tomorrow--we can't afford it. I've pinched and saved every way I could
for the last month, hoping that I'd be able to get a turkey for you
anyhow, but you'll have to do without it. There's that doctor's bill
to pay and a dozen other bills coming in--and people say they can't
wait. I suppose they can't, but it's kind of hard, I must say."

The little Grants stood with open mouths and horrified eyes. No turkey
for Christmas! Was the world coming to an end? Wouldn't the government
interfere if anyone ventured to dispense with a Christmas celebration?

The gluttonous Teddy stuffed his fists into his eyes and lifted up his
voice. Keith, who understood better than the others the look on his
mother's face, took his blubbering young brother by the collar and
marched him into the porch. The twins, seeing the summary proceeding,
swallowed the outcries they had intended to make, although they
couldn't keep a few big tears from running down their fat cheeks.

Mrs. Grant looked pityingly at the disappointed faces about her.

"Don't cry, children, you make me feel worse. We are not the only ones
who will have to do without a Christmas turkey. We ought to be very
thankful that we have anything to eat at all. I hate to disappoint
you, but it can't be helped."

"Never mind, Mother," said Keith, comfortingly, relaxing his hold
upon the porch door, whereupon it suddenly flew open and precipitated
Teddy, who had been tugging at the handle, heels over head backwards.
"We know you've done your best. It's been a hard year for you. Just
wait, though. I'll soon be grown up, and then you and these greedy
youngsters shall feast on turkey every day of the year. Hello, Teddy,
have you got on your feet again? Mind, sir, no more blubbering!"

"When I'm a man," announced Teddy with dignity, "I'd just like to see
you put me in the porch. And I mean to have turkey all the time and I
won't give you any, either."

"All right, you greedy small boy. Only take yourself off to school
now, and let us hear no more squeaks out of you. Tramp, all of you,
and give Mother a chance to get her work done."

Mrs. Grant got up and fell to work at her dishes with a brighter face.

"Well, we mustn't give in; perhaps things will be better after a
while. I'll make a famous bread pudding, and you can boil some
molasses taffy and ask those little Smithsons next door to help you
pull it. They won't whine for turkey, I'll be bound. I don't suppose
they ever tasted such a thing in all their lives. If I could afford
it, I'd have had them all in to dinner with us. That sermon Mr. Evans
preached last Sunday kind of stirred me up. He said we ought always
to try and share our Christmas joy with some poor souls who had never
learned the meaning of the word. I can't do as much as I'd like to. It
was different when your father was alive."

The noisy group grew silent as they always did when their father was
spoken of. He had died the year before, and since his death the little
family had had a hard time. Keith, to hide his feelings, began to
hector the rest.

"Mary Alice, do hurry up. Here, you twin nuisances, get off to school.
If you don't you'll be late and then the master will give you a
whipping."

"He won't," answered the irrepressible Teddy. "He never whips us, he
doesn't. He stands us on the floor sometimes, though," he added,
remembering the many times his own chubby legs had been seen to better
advantage on the school platform.

"That man," said Mrs. Grant, alluding to the teacher, "makes me
nervous. He is the most abstracted creature I ever saw in my life. It
is a wonder to me he doesn't walk straight into the river some day.
You'll meet him meandering along the street, gazing into vacancy, and
he'll never see you nor hear a word you say half the time."

"Yesterday," said Gordon, chuckling over the remembrance, "he came in
with a big piece of paper he'd picked up on the entry floor in one
hand and his hat in the other--and he stuffed his hat into the
coal-scuttle and hung up the paper on a nail as grave as you please.
Never knew the difference till Ned Slocum went and told him. He's
always doing things like that."

Keith had collected his books and now marched his brothers and sisters
off to school. Left alone with the baby, Mrs. Grant betook herself to
her work with a heavy heart. But a second interruption broke the
progress of her dish-washing.

"I declare," she said, with a surprised glance through the window, "if
there isn't that absent-minded schoolteacher coming through the yard!
What can he want? Dear me, I do hope Teddy hasn't been cutting capers
in school again."

For the teacher's last call had been in October and had been
occasioned by the fact that the irrepressible Teddy would persist in
going to school with his pockets filled with live crickets and in
driving them harnessed to strings up and down the aisle when the
teacher's back was turned. All mild methods of punishment having
failed, the teacher had called to talk it over with Mrs. Grant, with
the happy result that Teddy's behaviour had improved--in the matter of
crickets at least.

But it was about time for another outbreak. Teddy had been unnaturally
good for too long a time. Poor Mrs. Grant feared that it was the calm
before a storm, and it was with nervous haste that she went to the
door and greeted the young teacher.

He was a slight, pale, boyish-looking fellow, with an abstracted,
musing look in his large dark eyes. Mrs. Grant noticed with amusement
that he wore a white straw hat in spite of the season. His eyes were
directed to her face with his usual unseeing gaze.

"Just as though he was looking through me at something a thousand
miles away," said Mrs. Grant afterwards. "I believe he was, too. His
body was right there on the step before me, but where his soul was is
more than you or I or anybody can tell."

"Good morning," he said absently. "I have just called on my way to
school with a message from Miss Millar. She wants you all to come up
and have Christmas dinner with her tomorrow."

"For the land's sake!" said Mrs. Grant blankly. "I don't understand."
To herself she thought, "I wish I dared take him and shake him to find
if he's walking in his sleep or not."

"You and all the children--every one," went on the teacher dreamily,
as if he were reciting a lesson learned beforehand. "She told me to
tell you to be sure and come. Shall I say that you will?"

"Oh, yes, that is--I suppose--I don't know," said Mrs. Grant
incoherently. "I never expected--yes, you may tell her we'll come,"
she concluded abruptly.

"Thank you," said the abstracted messenger, gravely lifting his hat
and looking squarely through Mrs. Grant into unknown regions. When he
had gone Mrs. Grant went in and sat down, laughing in a sort of
hysterical way.

"I wonder if it is all right. Could Cornelia really have told him? She
must, I suppose, but it is enough to take one's breath."

Mrs. Grant and Cornelia Millar were cousins, and had once been the
closest of friends, but that was years ago, before some spiteful
reports and ill-natured gossip had come between them, making only a
little rift at first that soon widened into a chasm of coldness and
alienation. Therefore this invitation surprised Mrs. Grant greatly.

Miss Cornelia was a maiden lady of certain years, with a comfortable
bank account and a handsome, old-fashioned house on the hill behind
the village. She always boarded the schoolteachers and looked after
them maternally; she was an active church worker and a tower of
strength to struggling ministers and their families.

"If Cornelia has seen fit at last to hold out the hand of
reconciliation I'm glad enough to take it. Dear knows, I've wanted to
make up often enough, but I didn't think she ever would. We've both
of us got too much pride and stubbornness. It's the Turner blood in us
that does it. The Turners were all so set. But I mean to do my part
now she has done hers."

And Mrs. Grant made a final attack on the dishes with a beaming face.

When the little Grants came home and heard the news, Teddy stood on
his head to express his delight, the twins kissed each other, and Mary
Alice and Gordon danced around the kitchen.

Keith thought himself too big to betray any joy over a Christmas
dinner, but he whistled while doing the chores until the bare welkin
in the yard rang, and Teddy, in spite of unheard of misdemeanours, was
not collared off into the porch once.

When the young teacher got home from school that evening he found the
yellow house full of all sorts of delectable odours. Miss Cornelia
herself was concocting mince pies after the famous family recipe,
while her ancient and faithful handmaiden, Hannah, was straining into
moulds the cranberry jelly. The open pantry door revealed a tempting
array of Christmas delicacies.

"Did you call and invite the Smithsons up to dinner as I told you?"
asked Miss Cornelia anxiously.

"Yes," was the dreamy response as he glided through the kitchen and
vanished into the hall.

Miss Cornelia crimped the edges of her pies delicately with a relieved
air. "I made certain he'd forget it," she said. "You just have to
watch him as if he were a mere child. Didn't I catch him yesterday
starting off to school in his carpet slippers? And in spite of me he
got away today in that ridiculous summer hat. You'd better set that
jelly in the out-pantry to cool, Hannah; it looks good. We'll give
those poor little Smithsons a feast for once in their lives if they
never get another."

At this juncture the hall door flew open and Mr. Palmer appeared on
the threshold. He seemed considerably agitated and for once his eyes
had lost their look of space-searching.

"Miss Millar, I am afraid I did make a mistake this morning--it has
just dawned on me. I am almost sure that I called at Mrs. Grant's and
invited her and her family instead of the Smithsons. And she said they
would come."

Miss Cornelia's face was a study.

"Mr. Palmer," she said, flourishing her crimping fork tragically, "do
you mean to say you went and invited Linda Grant here tomorrow? Linda
Grant, of all women in this world!"

"I did," said the teacher with penitent wretchedness. "It was very
careless of me--I am very sorry. What can I do? I'll go down and tell
them I made a mistake if you like."

"You can't do that," groaned Miss Cornelia, sitting down and wrinkling
up her forehead in dire perplexity. "It would never do in the world.
For pity's sake, let me think for a minute."

Miss Cornelia did think--to good purpose evidently, for her forehead
smoothed out as her meditations proceeded and her face brightened.
Then she got up briskly. "Well, you've done it and no mistake. I don't
know that I'm sorry, either. Anyhow, we'll leave it as it is. But you
must go straight down now and invite the Smithsons too. And for pity's
sake, don't make any more mistakes."

When he had gone Miss Cornelia opened her heart to Hannah. "I never
could have done it myself--never; the Turner is too strong in me. But
I'm glad it is done. I've been wanting for years to make up with
Linda. And now the chance has come, thanks to that blessed blundering
boy, I mean to make the most of it. Mind, Hannah, you never whisper a
word about its being a mistake. Linda must never know. Poor Linda!
She's had a hard time. Hannah, we must make some more pies, and I must
go straight down to the store and get some more Santa Claus stuff;
I've only got enough to go around the Smithsons."

When Mrs. Grant and her family arrived at the yellow house next
morning Miss Cornelia herself ran out bareheaded to meet them. The two
women shook hands a little stiffly and then a rill of long-repressed
affection trickled out from some secret spring in Miss Cornelia's
heart and she kissed her new-found old friend tenderly. Linda returned
the kiss warmly, and both felt that the old-time friendship was theirs
again.

The little Smithsons all came and they and the little Grants sat down
on the long bright dining room to a dinner that made history in their
small lives, and was eaten over again in happy dreams for months.

How those children did eat! And how beaming Miss Cornelia and
grim-faced, soft-hearted Hannah and even the absent-minded teacher
himself enjoyed watching them!

After dinner Miss Cornelia distributed among the delighted little
souls the presents she had bought for them, and then turned them loose
in the big shining kitchen to have a taffy pull--and they had it to
their hearts' content! And as for the shocking, taffyfied state into
which they got their own rosy faces and that once immaculate
domain--well, as Miss Cornelia and Hannah never said one word about
it, neither will I.

The four women enjoyed the afternoon in their own way, and the
schoolteacher buried himself in algebra to his own great satisfaction.

When her guests went home in the starlit December dusk, Miss Cornelia
walked part of the way with them and had a long confidential talk with
Mrs. Grant. When she returned it was to find Hannah groaning in and
over the kitchen and the schoolteacher dreamily trying to clean some
molasses off his boots with the kitchen hairbrush. Long-suffering Miss
Cornelia rescued her property and despatched Mr. Palmer into the
woodshed to find the shoe-brush. Then she sat down and laughed.

"Hannah, what will become of that boy yet? There's no counting on what
he'll do next. I don't know how he'll ever get through the world, I'm
sure, but I'll look after him while he's here at least. I owe him a
huge debt of gratitude for this Christmas blunder. What an awful mess
this place is in! But, Hannah, did you ever in the world see anything
so delightful as that little Tommy Smithson stuffing himself with plum
cake, not to mention Teddy Grant? It did me good just to see them."




A Strayed Allegiance


"Will you go to the Cove with me this afternoon?"

It was Marian Lesley who asked the question.

Esterbrook Elliott unpinned with a masterful touch the delicate
cluster of Noisette rosebuds she wore at her throat and transferred
them to his buttonhole as he answered courteously: "Certainly. My
time, as you know, is entirely at your disposal."

They were standing in the garden under the creamy bloom of drooping
acacia trees. One long plume of blossoms touched lightly the soft,
golden-brown coils of the girl's hair and cast a wavering shadow over
the beautiful, flower-like face beneath it.

Esterbrook Elliott, standing before her, thought proudly that he had
never seen a woman who might compare with her. In every detail she
satisfied his critical, fastidious taste. There was not a discordant
touch about her.

Esterbrook Elliott had always loved Marian Lesley--or thought he had.
They had grown up together from childhood. He was an only son and she
an only daughter. It had always been an understood thing between the
two families that the boy and girl should marry. But Marian's father
had decreed that no positive pledge should pass between them until
Marian was twenty-one.

Esterbrook accepted his mapped-out destiny and selected bride with the
conviction that he was an exceptionally lucky fellow. Out of all the
women in the world Marian was the very one whom he would have chosen
as mistress of his fine, old home. She had been his boyhood's ideal.
He believed that he loved her sincerely, but he was not too much in
love to be blind to the worldly advantages of his marriage with his
cousin.

His father had died two years previously, leaving him wealthy and
independent. Marian had lost her mother in childhood; her father died
when she was eighteen. Since then she had lived alone with her aunt.
Her life was quiet and lonely. Esterbrook's companionship was all that
brightened it, but it was enough. Marian lavished on him all the rich,
womanly love of her heart. On her twenty-first birthday they were
formally betrothed. They were to be married in the following autumn.

No shadow had drifted across the heaven of her happiness. She believed
herself secure in her lover's unfaltering devotion. True, at times she
thought his manner lacked a lover's passionate ardour. He was always
attentive and courteous. She had only to utter a wish to find that it
had been anticipated; he spent every spare minute at her side.

Yet sometimes she half wished he would betray more lover-like
impatience and intensity. Were all lovers as calm and undemonstrative?

She reproached herself for this incipient disloyalty as often as it
vexingly intruded its unwelcome presence across her inner
consciousness. Surely Esterbrook was fond and devoted enough to
satisfy the most exacting demands of affection. Marian herself was
somewhat undemonstrative and reserved. Passing acquaintances called
her cold and proud. Only the privileged few knew the rich depths of
womanly tenderness in her nature.

Esterbrook thought that he fully appreciated her. As he had walked
homeward the night of their betrothal, he had reviewed with
unconscious criticism his mental catalogue of Marian's graces and good
qualities, admitting, with supreme satisfaction, that there was not
one thing about her that he could wish changed.

This afternoon, under the acacias, they had been planning about their
wedding. There was no one to consult but themselves.

They were to be married early in September and then go abroad.
Esterbrook mapped out the details of their bridal tour with careful
thoughtfulness. They would visit all the old-world places that Marian
wished to see. Afterwards they would come back home. He discussed
certain changes he wished to make in the old Elliott mansion to fit it
for a young and beautiful mistress.

He did most of the planning. Marian was content to listen in happy
silence. Afterwards she had proposed this walk to the Cove.

"What particular object of charity have you found at the Cove now?"
asked Esterbrook, with lazy interest, as they walked along.

"Mrs. Barrett's little Bessie is very ill with fever," answered
Marian. Then, catching his anxious look, she hastened to add, "It is
nothing infectious--some kind of a slow, sapping variety. There is no
danger, Esterbrook."

"I was not afraid for myself," he replied quietly. "My alarm was for
you. You are too precious to me, Marian, for me to permit you to risk
health and life, if it were dangerous. What a Lady Bountiful you are
to those people at the Cove. When we are married you must take me in
hand and teach me your creed of charity. I'm afraid I've lived a
rather selfish life. You will change all that, dear. You will make a
good man of me."

"You are that now, Esterbrook," she said softly. "If you were not, I
could not love you."

"It is a negative sort of goodness, I fear. I have never been tried or
tempted severely. Perhaps I should fail under the test."

"I am sure you would not," answered Marian proudly.

Esterbrook laughed; her faith in him was pleasant. He had no thought
but that he would prove worthy of it.

The Cove, so-called, was a little fishing hamlet situated on the low,
sandy shore of a small bay. The houses, clustered in one spot, seemed
like nothing so much as larger shells washed up by the sea, so grey
and bleached were they from long exposure to sea winds and spray.

Dozens of ragged children were playing about them, mingled with
several disreputable yellow curs that yapped noisily at the strangers.

Down on the sandy strip of beach below the houses groups of men were
lounging about. The mackerel, season had not yet set in; the spring
herring netting was past. It was holiday time among the sea folks.
They were enjoying it to the full, a happy, ragged colony, careless of
what the morrows might bring forth.

Out beyond, the boats were at anchor, floating as gracefully on the
twinkling water as sea birds, their tall masts bowing landward on the
swell. A lazy, dreamful calm had fallen over the distant seas; the
horizon blues were pale and dim; faint purple hazes blurred the
outlines of far-off headlands and cliffs; the yellow sands sparkled in
the sunshine as if powdered with jewels.

A murmurous babble of life buzzed about the hamlet, pierced through by
the shrill undertones of the wrangling children, most of whom had
paused in their play to scan the visitors with covert curiosity.

Marian led the way to a house apart from the others at the very edge
of the shelving rock. The dooryard was scrupulously clean and
unlittered; the little footpath through it was neatly bordered by
white clam shells; several thrifty geraniums in bloom looked out from
the muslin-curtained windows.

A weary-faced woman came forward to meet them.

"Bessie's much the same, Miss Lesley," she said, in answer to Marian's
inquiry. "The doctor you sent was here today and did all he could for
her. He seemed quite hopeful. She don't complain or nothing--just lies
there and moans. Sometimes she gets restless. It's very kind of you to
come so often, Miss Lesley. Here, Magdalen, will you put this basket
the lady's brought up there on the shelf?"

A girl, who had been sitting unnoticed with her back to the visitors,
at the head of the child's cot in one corner of the room, stood up and
slowly turned around. Marian and Esterbrook Elliott both started with
involuntary surprise. Esterbrook caught his breath like a man suddenly
awakened from sleep. In the name of all that was wonderful, who or
what could this girl be, so little in harmony with her surroundings?

Standing in the crepuscular light of the corner, her marvellous beauty
shone out with the vivid richness of some rare painting. She was tall,
and the magnificent proportions of her figure were enhanced rather
than marred by the severely plain dress of dark print that she wore.
The heavy masses of her hair, a shining auburn dashed with golden
foam, were coiled in a rich, glossy knot at the back of the
classically modelled head and rippled back from a low brow whose waxen
fairness even the breezes of the ocean had spared.

The girl's face was a full, perfect oval, with features of faultless
regularity, and the large, full eyes were of tawny hazel, darkened
into inscrutable gloom in the dimness of the corner.

Not even Marian Lesley's face was more delicately tinted, but not a
trace of colour appeared in the smooth, marble-like cheeks; yet the
waxen pallor bore no trace of disease or weakness, and the large,
curving mouth was of an intense crimson.

She stood quite motionless. There was no trace of embarrassment or
self-consciousness in her pose. When Mrs. Barrett said, "This is my
niece, Magdalen Crawford," she merely inclined her head in grave,
silent acknowledgement. As she moved forward to take Marian's basket,
she seemed oddly out of place in the low, crowded room. Her presence
seemed to throw a strange restraint over the group.

Marian rose and went over to the cot, laying her slender hand on the
hot forehead of the little sufferer. The child opened its brown eyes
questioningly.

"How are you today, Bessie?"

"Mad'len--I want Mad'len," moaned the little plaintive voice.

Magdalen came over and stood beside Marian Lesley.

"She wants me," she said in a low, thrilling voice; free from all
harsh accent or intonation. "I am the only one she seems to know
always. Yes, darling, Mad'len is here--right beside you. She will not
leave you."

She knelt by the little cot and passed her arm under the child's neck,
drawing the curly head close to her throat with a tender, soothing
motion.

Esterbrook Elliott watched the two women intently--the one standing by
the cot, arrayed in simple yet costly apparel, with her beautiful,
high-bred face, and the other, kneeling on the bare, sanded floor in
her print dress, with her splendid head bent low over the child and
the long fringe of burnished lashes sweeping the cold pallor of the
oval cheek.

From the moment that Magdalen Crawford's haunting eyes had looked
straight into his for one fleeting second, an unnamable thrill of pain
and pleasure stirred his heart, a thrill so strong and sudden and
passionate that his face paled with emotion; the room seemed to swim
before his eyes in a mist out of which gleamed that wonderful face
with its mesmeric, darkly radiant eyes, burning their way into deeps
and abysses of his soul hitherto unknown to him.

When the mist cleared away and his head grew steadier, he wondered at
himself. Yet he trembled in every limb and the only clear idea that
struggled out of his confused thoughts was an overmastering desire to
take that cold face between his hands and kiss it until its
passionless marble glowed into warm and throbbing life.

"Who is that girl?" he said abruptly, when they had left the cottage.
"She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen--present company
always excepted," he concluded, with a depreciatory laugh.

The delicate bloom on Marian's face deepened slightly.

"You had much better to have omitted that last sentence," she said
quietly, "it was so palpably an afterthought. Yes, she is wonderfully
lovely--a strange beauty, I fancied. There seemed something odd and
uncanny about it to me. She must be Mrs. Barrett's niece. I remember
that when I was down here about a month ago Mrs. Barrett told me she
expected a niece of hers to live with her--for a time at least. Her
parents were both dead, the father having died recently. Mrs. Barrett
seemed troubled about her. She said that the girl had been well
brought up and used to better things than the Cove could give her, and
she feared that she would be very discontented and unhappy. I had
forgotten all about it until I saw the girl today. She certainly seems
to be a very superior person; she will find the Cove very lonely, I am
sure. It is not probable she will stay there long. I must see what I
can do for her, but her manner seemed rather repellent, don't you
think?"

"Hardly," responded Esterbrook curtly. "She seemed surprisingly
dignified and self-possessed, I fancied, for a girl in her position. A
princess could not have looked and bowed more royally. There was not a
shadow of embarrassment in her manner, in spite of the incongruity of
her surroundings. You had much better leave her alone, Marian. In all
probability she would resent any condescension on your part. What
wonderful, deep, lovely eyes she has."

Again the sensitive colour flushed Marian's cheek as his voice lapsed
unconsciously into a dreamy, retrospective tone, and a slight
restraint came over her manner, which did not depart. Esterbrook went
away at sunset. Marian asked him to remain for the evening, but he
pleaded some excuse.

"I shall come tomorrow afternoon," he said, as he stooped to drop a
careless good-bye kiss on her face.

Marian watched him wistfully as he rode away, with an unaccountable
pain in her heart. She felt more acutely than ever that there were
depths in her lover's nature that she was powerless to stir into
responsive life.

Had any other that power? She thought of the girl at the Cove, with
her deep eyes and wonderful face. A chill of premonitory fear seized
upon her.

"I feel exactly as if Esterbrook had gone away from me forever," she
said slowly to herself, stooping to brush her cheek against a
dew-cold, milk-white acacia bloom, "and would never come back to me
again. If that could happen, I wonder what there would be left to live
for?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Esterbrook Elliott meant, or honestly thought he meant, to go home
when he left Marian. Nevertheless, when he reached the road branching
off to the Cove he turned his horse down it with a flush on his dark
cheek. He realized that the motive of the action was disloyal to
Marian and he felt ashamed of his weakness.

But the desire to see Magdalen Crawford once more and to look into the
depths of her eyes was stronger than all else, and overpowered every
throb of duty and resistance.

He saw nothing of her when he reached the Cove. He could think of no
excuse for calling at the Barrett cottage, so he rode slowly past the
hamlet and along the shore.

The sun, red as a smouldering ember, was half buried in the silken
violet rim of the sea; the west was a vast lake of saffron and rose
and ethereal green, through which floated the curved shallop of a thin
new moon, slowly deepening from lustreless white, through gleaming
silver, into burnished gold, and attended by one solitary, pearl-white
star. The vast concave of sky above was of violet, infinite and
flawless. Far out dusky amethystine islets clustered like gems on the
shining breast of the bay. The little pools of water along the low
shores glowed like mirrors of polished jacinth. The small,
pine-fringed headlands ran out into the water, cutting its lustrous
blue expanse like purple wedges.

As Esterbrook turned one of them he saw Magdalen standing out on the
point of the next, a short distance away. Her back was towards him,
and her splendid figure was outlined darkly against the vivid sky.

Esterbrook sprang from his horse and left the animal standing by
itself while he walked swiftly out to her. His heart throbbed
suffocatingly. He was conscious of no direct purpose save merely to
see her.

She turned when he reached her with a slight start of surprise. His
footsteps had made no sound on the tide-rippled sand.

For a few moments they faced each other so, eyes burning into eyes
with mute soul-probing and questioning. The sun had disappeared,
leaving a stain of fiery red to mark his grave; the weird, radiant
light was startlingly vivid and clear. Little crisp puffs and flakes
of foam scurried over the point like elfin things. The fresh wind,
blowing up the bay, tossed the lustrous rings of hair about Magdalen's
pale face; all the routed shadows of the hour had found refuge in her
eyes.

Not a trace of colour appeared in her face under Esterbrook Elliott's
burning gaze. But when he said "Magdalen!" a single, hot scorch of
crimson flamed up into her cheeks protestingly. She lifted her hand
with a splendid gesture, but no word passed her lips.

"Magdalen, have you nothing to say to me?" he asked, coming closer to
her with an imploring passion in his face never seen by Marian
Lesley's eyes. He reached out his hand, but she stepped back from his
touch.

"What should I have to say to you?"

"Say that you are glad to see me."

"I am not glad to see you. You have no right to come here. But I knew
you would come."

"You knew it? How?"

"Your eyes told me so today. I am not blind--I can see further than
those dull fisher folks. Yes, I knew you would come. That is why I
came here tonight--so that you would find me alone and I could tell
you that you were not to come again."

"Why must you tell me that, Magdalen?"

"Because, as I have told you, you have no right to come."

"But if I will not obey you? If I will come in defiance of your
prohibition?"

She turned her steady luminous eyes on his pale, set face.

"You would stamp yourself as a madman, then," she said coldly. "I know
that you are Miss Lesley's promised husband. Therefore, you are either
false to her or insulting to me. In either case the companionship of
Magdalen Crawford is not what you must seek. Go!"

She turned away from him with an imperious gesture of dismissal.
Esterbrook Elliott stepped forward and caught one firm, white wrist.

"I shall not obey you," he said in a low, intense tone; his fine eyes
burned into hers. "You may send me away, but I will come back, again
and yet again until you have learned to welcome me. Why should you
meet me like an enemy? Why can we not be friends?"

The girl faced him once more.

"Because," she said proudly, "I am not your equal. There can be no
friendship between us. There ought not to be. Magdalen Crawford, the
fisherman's niece, is no companion for you. You will be foolish, as
well as disloyal, if you ever try to see me again. Go back to the
beautiful, high-bred woman you love and forget me. Perhaps you think I
am talking strangely. Perhaps you think me bold and unwomanly to speak
so plainly to you, a stranger. But there are some circumstances in
life when plain-speaking is best. I do not want to see you again. Now,
go back to your own world."

Esterbrook Elliott slowly turned from her and walked in silence back
to the shore. In the shadows of the point he stopped to look back at
her, standing out like some inspired prophetess against the fiery
background of the sunset sky and silver-blue water. The sky overhead
was thick-sown with stars; the night breeze was blowing up from its
lair in distant, echoing sea caves. On his right the lights of the
Cove twinkled out through the dusk.

"I feel like a coward and a traitor," he said slowly. "Good God, what
is this madness that has come over me? Is this my boasted strength of
manhood?"

A moment later the hoof beats of his horse died away up the shore.

Magdalen Crawford lingered on the point until the last dull red faded
out into the violet gloom of the June sea dusk, than which nothing can
be rarer or diviner, and listened to the moan and murmur of the sea
far out over the bay with sorrowful eyes and sternly set lips.

The next day, when the afternoon sun hung hot and heavy over the
water, Esterbrook Elliott came again to the Cove. He found it
deserted. A rumour of mackerel had come, and every boat had sailed
out in the rose-red dawn to the fishing grounds. But down on a strip
of sparkling yellow sand he saw Magdalen Crawford standing, her hand
on the rope that fastened a small white dory to the fragment of a
half-embedded wreck.

She was watching a huddle of gulls clustered on the tip of a narrow,
sandy spit running out to the left. She turned at the sound of his
hurried foot-fall behind her. Her face paled slightly, and into the
depths of her eyes leapt a passionate, mesmeric glow that faded as
quickly as it came.

"You see I have come back in spite of your command, Magdalen."

"I do see it," she answered in a gravely troubled voice. "You are a
madman who refuses to be warned."

"Where are you going, Magdalen?" She had loosened the rope from the
wreck.

"I am going to row over to Chapel Point for salt. They think the boats
will come in tonight loaded with mackerel--look at them away out there
by the score--and salt will be needed."

"Can you row so far alone?"

"Easily. I learned to row long ago--for a pastime then. Since coming
here I find it of great service to me."

She stepped lightly into the tiny shallop and picked up an oar. The
brilliant sunshine streamed about her, burnishing the rich tints of
her hair into ruddy gold. She balanced herself to the swaying of the
dory with the grace of a sea bird. The man looking at her felt his
brain reel.

"Good-bye, Mr. Elliott."

For answer he sprang into the dory and, snatching an oar, pushed
against the old wreck with such energy that the dory shot out from the
shore like a foam bell. His sudden spring had set it rocking
violently. Magdalen almost lost her footing and caught blindly at his
arm. As her fingers closed on his wrist a thrill as of fire shot
through his every vein.

"Why have you done this, Mr. Elliott? You must go back."

"But I will not," he said masterfully, looking straight into her eyes
with an imperiousness that sat well upon him. "I am going to row you
over to Chapel Point. I have the oars--I will be master this once, at
least."

For an instant her eyes flashed defiant protest, then drooped before
his. A sudden, hot blush crimsoned her pale face. His will had
mastered hers; the girl trembled from head to foot, and the proud,
sensitive, mouth quivered.

Into the face of the man watching her breathlessly flashed a
triumphant, passionate joy. He put out his hand and gently pushed her
down into the seat. Sitting opposite, he took up the oars and pulled
out over the sheet of sparkling blue water, through which at first the
bottom of white sand glimmered wavily but afterwards deepened to
translucent, dim depths of greenness.

His heart throbbed tumultuously. Once the thought of Marian drifted
across his mind like a chill breath of wind, but it was forgotten when
his eyes met Magdalen's.

"Tell me about yourself, Magdalen," he said at last, breaking the
tremulous, charmed, sparkling silence.

"There is nothing to tell," she answered with characteristic
straightforwardness. "My life has been a very uneventful one. I have
never been rich, or very well educated, but--it used to be different
from now. I had some chance before--before Father died."

"You must have found it very lonely and strange when you came here
first."

"Yes. At first I thought I should die--but I do not mind it now. I
have made friends with the sea; it has taught me a great deal. There
is a kind of inspiration in the sea. When one listens to its
never-ceasing murmur afar out there, always sounding at midnight and
midday, one's soul goes out to meet Eternity. Sometimes it gives me so
much pleasure that it is almost pain."

She stopped abruptly.

"I don't know why I am talking to you like this."

"You are a strange girl, Magdalen. Have you no other companion than
the sea?"

"No. Why should I wish to have? I shall not be here long."

Elliott's face contracted with a spasm of pain.

"You are not going away, Magdalen?"

"Yes--in the fall. I have my own living to earn, you know. I am very
poor. Uncle and Aunt are very kind, but I cannot consent to burden
them any longer than I can help."

A sigh that was almost a moan broke from Esterbrook Elliott's lips.

"You must not go away, Magdalen. You must stay here--with me!"

"You forget yourself," she said proudly. "How dare you speak to me so?
Have you forgotten Miss Lesley? Or are you a traitor to us both?"

Esterbrook made no answer. He bowed his pale, miserable face before
her, self-condemned.

The breast of the bay sparkled with its countless gems like the breast
of a fair woman. The shores were purple and amethystine in the
distance. Far out, bluish, phantom-like sails clustered against the
pallid horizon. The dory danced like a feather over the ripples. They
were close under the shadow of Chapel Point.

       *       *       *       *       *

Marian Lesley waited in vain for her lover that afternoon. When he
came at last in the odorous dusk of the June night she met him on the
acacia-shadowed verandah with cold sweetness. Perhaps some subtle
woman-instinct whispered to her where and how he had spent the
afternoon, for she offered him no kiss, nor did she ask him why he had
failed to come sooner.

His eyes lingered on her in the dim light, taking in every detail of
her sweet womanly refinement and loveliness, and with difficulty he
choked back a groan. Again he asked himself what madness had come over
him, and again for an answer rose up the vision of Magdalen Crawford's
face as he had seen it that day, crimsoning beneath his gaze.

It was late when he left. Marian watched him out of sight, standing
under the acacias. She shivered as with a sudden chill. "I feel as I
think Vashti must have felt," she murmured aloud, "when, discrowned
and unqueened, she crept out of the gates of Shushan to hide her
broken heart. I wonder if Esther has already usurped my sceptre. Has
that girl at the Cove, with her pale, priestess-like face and
mysterious eyes, stolen his heart from me? Perhaps not, for it may
never have been mine. I know that Esterbrook Elliott will be true to
the letter of his vows to me, no matter what it may cost him. But I
want no pallid shadow of the love that belongs to another. The hour of
abdication is at hand, I fear. And what will be left for throneless
Vashti then?"

Esterbrook Elliott, walking home through the mocking calm of the
night, fought a hard battle with himself.

He was face to face with the truth at last--the bitter knowledge that
he had never loved Marian Lesley, save with a fond, brotherly
affection, and that he did love Magdalen Crawford with a passion that
threatened to sweep before it every vestige of his honour and
loyalty.

He had seen her but three times--and his throbbing heart lay in the
hollow of her cold white hand.

He shut his eyes and groaned. What madness. What unutterable folly! He
was not free--he was bound to another by every cord of honour and
self-respect. And, even were he free, Magdalen Crawford would be no
fit wife for him--in the eyes of the world, at least. A girl from the
Cove--a girl with little education and no social standing--aye! but he
loved her.

He groaned again and again in his misery. Afar down the slope the bay
waters lay like an inky strip and the distant, murmurous plaint of the
sea came out of the stillness of the night; the lights at the Cove
glimmered faintly.

In the week that followed he went to the Cove every day. Sometimes he
did not see Magdalen; at other times he did. But at the end of the
week he had conquered in the bitter, heart-crushing struggle with
himself. If he had weakly given way to the first mad sweep of a new
passion, the strength of his manhood reasserted itself at last.
Faltering and wavering were over, though there was passionate pain in
his voice when he said at last, "I am not coming back again,
Magdalen."

They were standing in the shadow of the pine-fringed point that ran
out to the left of the Cove. They had been walking together along the
shore, watching the splendour of the sea sunset that flamed and glowed
in the west, where there was a sea of mackerel clouds, crimson and
amber tinted, with long, ribbon-like strips of apple-green sky
between. They had walked in silence, hand in hand, as children might
have done, yet with the stir and throb of a mighty passion seething in
their hearts.

Magdalen turned as Esterbrook spoke, and looked at him in a long
silence. The bay stretched out before them, tranced and shimmering; a
few stars shone down through the gloom of dusk. Right across the
translucent greens and roses and blues of the west hung a dark,
unsightly cloud, like the blurred outline of a monstrous bat. In the
dim, reflected light the girl's mournful face took on a weird,
unearthly beauty. She turned her eyes from Esterbrook Elliott's set
white face to the radiant gloom of the sea.

"That is best," she answered at last, slowly.

"Best--yes! Better that we had never met! I love you--you know
it--words are idle between us. I never loved before--I thought I did.
I made a mistake and I must pay the penalty of that mistake. You
understand me?"

"I understand," she answered simply.

"I do not excuse myself--I have been weak and cowardly and disloyal.
But I have conquered myself--I will be true to the woman to whom I am
pledged. You and I must not meet again. I will crush this madness to
death. I think I have been delirious ever since that day I saw you
first, Magdalen. My brain is clearer now. I see my duty and I mean to
do it at any cost. I dare not trust myself to say more. Magdalen, I
have much for which to ask your forgiveness."

"There is nothing to forgive," she said steadily. "I have been as much
to blame as you. If I had been as resolute as I ought to have been--if
I had sent you away the second time as I did the first--this would not
have come to pass. I have been weak too, and I deserve to atone for my
weakness by suffering. There is only one path open to us. Esterbrook,
good-bye." Her voice quivered with an uncontrollable spasm of pain,
but the misty, mournful eyes did not swerve from his. The man stepped
forward and caught her in his arms.

"Magdalen, good-bye, my darling. Kiss me once--only once--before I
go."

She loosened his arms and stepped back proudly.

"No! No man kisses my lips unless he is to be my husband. Good-bye,
dear."

He bowed his head silently and went away, looking back not once, else
he might have seen her kneeling on the damp sand weeping noiselessly
and passionately.

       *       *       *       *       *

Marian Lesley looked at his pale, determined face the next evening and
read it like an open book.

She had grown paler herself; there were purple shadows under the sweet
violet eyes that might have hinted of her own sleepless nights.

She greeted him calmly, holding out a steady, white hand of welcome.
She saw the traces of the struggle through which he had passed and
knew that he had come off victor.

The knowledge made her task a little harder. It would have been easier
to let slip the straining cable than to cast it from her when it lay
unresistingly in her hand.

For an instant her heart thrilled with an unutterably sweet hope.
Might he not forget in time? Need she snap in twain the weakened bond
between them after all? Perhaps she might win back her lost sceptre,
yet if--

Womanly pride throttled the struggling hope. No divided allegiance, no
hollow semblance of queenship for her!

Her opportunity came when Esterbrook asked with grave earnestness if
their marriage might not be hastened a little--could he not have his
bride in August? For a fleeting second Marian closed her eyes and the
slender hands, lying among the laces in her lap, clasped each other
convulsively.

Then she said quietly, "Sometimes I have thought, Esterbrook, that it
might be better--if we were never married at all."

Esterbrook turned a startled face upon her.

"Not married at all! Marian, what do you mean?"

"Just what I say. I do not think we are as well suited to each other
after all as we have fancied. We have loved each other as brother and
sister might--that is all. I think it will be best to be brother and
sister forever--nothing more."

Esterbrook sprang to his feet.

"Marian, do you know what you are saying? You surely cannot have
heard--no one could have told you--"

"I have heard nothing," she interrupted hurriedly. "No one has told me
anything. I have only said what I have been thinking of late. I am
sure we have made a mistake. It is not too late to remedy it. You will
not refuse my request, Esterbrook? You will set me free?"

"Good heavens, Marian!" he said hoarsely. "I cannot realize that you
are in earnest. Have you ceased to care for me?" The rigidly locked
hands were clasped a little tighter.

"No--I shall always care for you as my friend if you will let me. But
I know we could not make each other happy--the time for that has gone
by. I would never be satisfied, nor would you. Esterbrook, will you
release me from a promise which has become an irksome fetter?"

He looked down on her upturned face mistily. A great joy was surging
up in his heart--yet it was mingled with great regret.

He knew--none better--what was passing out of his life, what he was
losing when he lost that pure, womanly nature.

"If you really mean this, Marian," he said slowly, "if you really have
come to feel that your truest love is not and never can be mine--that
I cannot make you happy--then there is nothing for me to do but to
grant your request. You are free."

"Thank you, dear," she said gently, as she stood up.

She slipped his ring from her finger and held it out to him. He took
it mechanically. He still felt dazed and unreal.

Marian held out her hand.

"Good-night, Esterbrook," she said, a little wearily. "I feel tired. I
am glad you see it all in the same light as I do."

"Marian," he said earnestly, clasping the outstretched hand, "are you
sure that you will be happy--are you sure that you are doing a wise
thing?"

"Quite sure," she answered, with a faint smile. "I am not acting
rashly. I have thought it all over carefully. Things are much better
so, dear. We will always be friends. Your joys and sorrows will be to
me as my own. When another love comes to bless your life, Esterbrook,
I will be glad. And now, good-night. I want to be alone now."

At the doorway he turned to look back at her, standing in all her
sweet stateliness in the twilight duskness, and the keen realization
of all he had lost made him bow his head with a quick pang of regret.

Then he went out into the darkness of the summer night.

An hour later he stood alone on the little point where he had parted
with Magdalen the night before. A restless night wind was moaning
through the pines that fringed the bank behind him; the moon shone
down radiantly, turning the calm expanse of the bay into a milk-white
sheen.

He took Marian's ring from his pocket and kissed it reverently. Then
he threw it from him far out over the water. For a second the diamond
flashed in the moonlight; then, with a tiny splash, it fell among the
ripples.

Esterbrook turned his face to the Cove, lying dark and silent in the
curve between the crescent headlands. A solitary light glimmered from
the low eaves of the Barrett cottage.

Tomorrow, was his unspoken thought, I will be free; to go back to
Magdalen.




An Invitation Given on Impulse


It was a gloomy Saturday morning. The trees in the Oaklawn grounds
were tossing wildly in the gusts of wind, and sodden brown leaves were
blown up against the windows of the library, where a score of girls
were waiting for the principal to bring the mail in.

The big room echoed with the pleasant sound of girlish voices and low
laughter, for in a fortnight school would close for the holidays, and
they were all talking about their plans and anticipations.

Only Ruth Mannering was, as usual, sitting by herself near one of the
windows, looking out on the misty lawn. She was a pale, slender girl,
with a sad face, and was dressed in rather shabby black. She had no
special friend at Oaklawn, and the other girls did not know much about
her. If they had thought about it at all, they would probably have
decided that they did not like her; but for the most part they simply
overlooked her.

This was not altogether their fault. Ruth was poor and apparently
friendless, but it was not her poverty that was against her. Lou
Scott, who was "as poor as a church mouse," to quote her own frank
admission, was the most popular girl in the seminary, the boon
companion of the richest girls, and in demand with everybody. But Lou
was jolly and frank and offhanded, while Ruth was painfully shy and
reserved, and that was the secret of the whole matter.

There was "no fun in her," the girls said, and so it came about that
she was left out of their social life, and was almost as solitary at
Oaklawn as if she had been the only girl there. She was there for the
special purpose of studying music, and expected to earn her own living
by teaching it when she left. She believed that the girls looked down
on her on this account; this was unjust, of course, but Ruth had no
idea how much her own coldness and reserve had worked against her.

Across the room Carol Golden was, as usual, the centre of an animated
group; Golden Carol as her particular friends sometimes called her,
partly because of her beautiful voice, and partly because of her
wonderful fleece of golden hair. Carol was one of the seminary pets,
and seemed to Ruth Mannering to have everything that she had not.

Presently the mail was brought in, and there was a rush to the table,
followed by exclamations of satisfaction or disappointment. In a few
minutes the room was almost deserted. Only two girls remained: Carol
Golden, who had dropped into a big chair to read her many letters; and
Ruth Mannering, who had not received any and had gone silently back to
her part of the window.

Presently Carol gave a little cry of delight. Her mother had written
that she might invite any friend she wished home with her to spend the
holidays. Carol had asked for this permission, and now that it had
come was ready to dance for joy. As to whom she would ask, there could
be only one answer to that. Of course it must be her particular
friend, Maud Russell, who was the cleverest and prettiest girl at
Oaklawn, at least so her admirers said. She was undoubtedly the
richest, and was the acknowledged "leader." The girls affectionately
called her "Princess," and Carol adored her with that romantic
affection that is found only among school girls. She knew, too, that
Maud would surely accept her invitation because she did not intend to
go home. Her parents were travelling in Europe, and she expected to
spend her holidays with some cousins, who were almost strangers to
her.

Carol was so much pleased that she felt as if she must talk to
somebody, so she turned to Ruth.

"Isn't it delightful to think that we'll all be going home in a
fortnight?"

"Yes, very--for those that have homes to go to," said Ruth drearily.

Carol felt a quick pang of pity and self-reproach. "Haven't you?" she
asked.

Ruth shook her head. In spite of herself, the kindness of Carol's tone
brought the tears to her eyes.

"My mother died a year ago," she said in a trembling voice, "and since
then I have had no real home. We were quite alone in the world, Mother
and I, and now I have nobody."

"Oh, I'm so sorry for you," cried Carol impulsively. She leaned
forward and took Ruth's hand in a gentle way. "And do you mean to say
that you'll have to stay here all through the holidays? Why, it will
be horrid."

"Oh, I shall not mind it much," said Ruth quickly, "with study and
practice most of the time. Only now, when everyone is talking about
it, it makes me wish that I had some place to go."

Carol dropped Ruth's hand suddenly in the shock of a sudden idea that
darted into her mind.

A stray girl passing through the hall called out, "Ruth, Miss Siviter
wishes to see you about something in Room C."

Ruth got up quickly. She was glad to get away, for it seemed to her
that in another minute she would break down altogether.

Carol Golden hardly noticed her departure. She gathered up her letters
and went abstractedly to her room, unheeding a gay call for "Golden
Carol" from a group of girls in the corridor. Maud Russell was not in
and Carol was glad. She wanted to be alone and fight down that sudden
idea.

"It is ridiculous to think of it," she said aloud, with a petulance
very unusual in Golden Carol, whose disposition was as sunny as her
looks. "Why, I simply cannot. I have always been longing to ask Maud
to visit me, and now that the chance has come I am not going to throw
it away. I am very sorry for Ruth, of course. It must be dreadful to
be all alone like that. But it isn't my fault. And she is so fearfully
quiet and dowdy--what would they all think of her at home? Frank and
Jack would make such fun of her. I shall ask Maud just as soon as she
comes in."

Maud did come in presently, but Carol did not give her the invitation.
Instead, she was almost snappish to her idol, and the Princess soon
went out again in something of a huff.

"Oh, dear," cried Carol, "now I've offended her. What has got into me?
What a disagreeable thing a conscience is, although I'm sure I don't
know why mine should be prodding me so! I don't want to invite Ruth
Mannering home with me for the holidays, but I feel exactly as if I
should not have a minute's peace of mind all the time if I didn't.
Mother would think it all right, of course. She would not mind if Ruth
dressed in calico and never said anything but yes and no. But how the
boys would laugh! I simply won't do it, conscience or no conscience."

In view of this decision it was rather strange that the next morning,
Carol Golden went down to Ruth Mannering's lonely little room on
Corridor Two and said, "Ruth, will you go home with me for the
holidays? Mother wrote me to invite anyone I wished to. Don't say you
can't come, dear, because you must."

Carol never, as long as she lived, forgot Ruth's face at that moment.

"It was absolutely transfigured," she said afterwards. "I never saw
anyone look so happy in my life."

       *       *       *       *       *

A fortnight later unwonted silence reigned at Oaklawn. The girls were
scattered far and wide, and Ruth Mannering and Carol Golden were at
the latter's home.

Carol was a very much surprised girl. Under the influence of kindness
and pleasure Ruth seemed transformed into a different person. Her
shyness and reserve melted away in the sunny atmosphere of the Golden
home. Mrs. Golden took her into her motherly heart at once; and as for
Frank and Jack, whose verdict Carol had so dreaded, they voted Ruth
"splendid." She certainly got along very well with them; and if she
did not make the social sensation that pretty Maud Russell might have
made, the Goldens all liked her and Carol was content.

"Just four days more," sighed Carol one afternoon, "and then we must
go back to Oaklawn. Can you realize it, Ruth?"

Ruth looked up from her book with a smile. Even in appearance she had
changed. There was a faint pink in her cheeks and a merry light in her
eyes.

"I shall not be sorry to go back to work," she said. "I feel just like
it because I have had so pleasant a time here that it has heartened me
up for next term. I think it will be very different from last. I begin
to see that I kept to myself too much and brooded over fancied
slights."

"And then you are to room with me since Maud is not coming back," said
Carol. "What fun we shall have. Did you ever toast marshmallows over
the gas? Why, I declare, there is Mr. Swift coming up the walk. Look,
Ruth! He is the richest man in Westleigh."

Ruth peeped out of the window over Carol's shoulder.

"He reminds me of somebody," she said absently, "but I can't think who
it is. Of course, I have never seen him before. What a good face he
has!"

"He is as good as he looks," said Carol, enthusiastically. "Next to
Father, Mr. Swift is the nicest man in the world. I have always been
quite a pet of his. His wife is dead, and so is his only daughter. She
was a lovely girl and died only two years ago. It nearly broke Mr.
Swift's heart. And he has lived alone ever since in that great big
house up at the head of Warner Street, the one you admired so, Ruth,
the last time we were uptown. There's the bell for the second time,
Mary can't have heard it. I'll go myself."

As Carol showed the caller into the room, Ruth rose to leave and thus
came face to face with him. Mr. Swift started perceptibly.

"Mr. Swift, this is my school friend, Miss Mannering," said Carol.

Mr. Swift seemed strangely agitated as he took Ruth's timidly offered
hand.

"My dear young lady," he said hurriedly, "I am going to ask you what
may seem a very strange question. What was your mother's name?"

"Agnes Hastings," answered Ruth in surprise. And then Carol really
thought that Mr. Swift had gone crazy, for he drew Ruth into his arms
and kissed her.

"I knew it," he said. "I was sure you were Agnes' daughter, for you
are the living image of what she was when I last saw her. Child, you
don't know me, but I am your Uncle Robert. Your mother was my
half-sister."

"Oh, Mr. Swift!" cried Carol, and then she ran for her mother.

Ruth turned pale and dropped into a chair, and Mr. Swift sat down
beside her.

"To think that I have found you at last, child. How puzzled you look.
Did your mother never speak of me? How is she? Where is she?"

"Mother died last year," said Ruth.

"Poor Agnes! And I never knew! Don't cry, little girl. I want you to
tell me all about it. She was much younger than I was, and when our
mother died my stepfather went away and took her with him. I remained
with my father's people and eventually lost all trace of my sister. I
was a poor boy then, but things have looked up with me and I have
often tried to find her."

By this time Carol had returned with her father and mother, and there
was a scene--laughing, crying, explaining--and I don't really know
which of the two girls was the more excited, Carol or Ruth. As for Mr.
Swift, he was overjoyed to find his niece and wanted to carry her off
with him then and there, but Mrs. Golden insisted on her finishing her
visit. When the question of returning to Oaklawn came up, Mr. Swift
would not hear of it at first, but finally yielded to Carol's
entreaties and Ruth's own desire.

"I shall graduate next year, Uncle, and then I can come back to you
for good."

That evening when Ruth was alone in her room, trying to collect her
thoughts and realize that the home and love that she had so craved
were really to be hers at last, Golden Carol was with her mother in
the room below, talking it all over.

"Just think, Mother, if I had not asked Ruth to come here, this would
not have happened. And I didn't want to, I wanted to ask Maud so much,
and I was dreadfully disappointed when I couldn't--for I really
couldn't. I could not help remembering the look in Ruth's eyes when
she said that she had no home to go to, and so I asked her instead of
Maud. How dreadful it would have been if I hadn't."




Detected by the Camera


One summer I was attacked by the craze for amateur photography. It
became chronic afterwards, and I and my camera have never since been
parted. We have had some odd adventures together, and one of the most
novel of our experiences was that in which we played the part of chief
witness against Ned Brooke.

I may say that my name is Amy Clarke, and that I believe I am
considered the best amateur photographer in our part of the country.
That is all I need tell you about myself.

Mr. Carroll had asked me to photograph his place for him when the
apple orchards were in bloom. He has a picturesque old-fashioned
country house behind a lawn of the most delightful old trees and
flanked on each side by the orchards. So I went one June afternoon,
with all my accoutrements, prepared to "take" the Carroll
establishment in my best style.

Mr. Carroll was away but was expected home soon, so we waited for him,
as all the family wished to be photographed under the big maple at the
front door. I prowled around among the shrubbery at the lower end of
the lawn and, after a great deal of squinting from various angles, I
at last fixed upon the spot from which I thought the best view of the
house might be obtained. Then Gertie and Lilian Carroll and I got into
the hammocks and swung at our leisure, enjoying the cool breeze
sweeping through the maples.

Ned Brooke was hanging around as usual, watching us furtively. Ned was
one of the hopeful members of a family that lived in a tumble-down
shanty just across the road from the Carrolls. They were wretchedly
poor, and old Brooke, as he was called, and Ned were employed a good
deal by Mr. Carroll--more out of charity than anything else, I fancy.

The Brookes had a rather shady reputation. They were notoriously lazy,
and it was suspected that their line of distinction between their own
and their neighbours' goods was not very clearly drawn. Many people
censured Mr. Carroll for encouraging them at all, but he was too
kind-hearted to let them suffer actual want and, as a consequence, one
or the other of them was always dodging about his place.

Ned was a lank, tow-headed youth of about fourteen, with shifty,
twinkling eyes that could never look you straight in the face. His
appearance was anything but prepossessing, and I always felt, when I
looked at him, that if anyone wanted to do a piece of shady work by
proxy, Ned Brooke would be the very lad for the business.

Mr. Carroll came at last, and we all went down to meet him at the
gate. Ned Brooke also came shuffling along to take the horse, and Mr.
Carroll tossed the reins to him and at the same time handed a
pocketbook to his wife.

"Just as well to be careful where you put that," he said laughingly.
"There's a sum in it not to be picked up on every gooseberry bush.
Gilman Harris paid me this morning for that bit of woodland I sold him
last fall--five hundred dollars. I promised that you and the girls
should have it to get a new piano, so there it is for you."

"Thank you," said Mrs. Carroll delightedly. "However, you'd better put
it back in your pocket till we go in. Amy is in a hurry."

Mr. Carroll took back the pocketbook and dropped it carelessly into
the inside pocket of the light overcoat that he wore.

I happened to glance at Ned Brooke just then, and I could not help
noticing the sudden crafty, eager expression that flashed over his
face. He eyed the pocketbook in Mr. Carroll's hands furtively, after
which he went off with the horse in a great hurry.

The girls were exclaiming and thanking their father, and nobody
noticed Ned Brooke's behaviour but myself, and it soon passed out of
my mind.

"Come to take the place, are you, Amy?" said Mr. Carroll. "Well,
everything is ready, I think. I suppose we'd better proceed. Where
shall we stand? You had better group us as you think best."

Whereupon I proceeded to arrange them in due order under the maple.
Mrs. Carroll sat in a chair, while her husband stood behind her.
Gertie stood on the steps with a basket of flowers in her hand, and
Lilian was at one side. The two little boys, Teddy and Jack, climbed
up into the maple, and little Dora, the dimpled six-year-old, stood
gravely in the foreground with an enormous grey cat hugged in her
chubby arms.

It was a pretty group in a pretty setting, and I thrilled with
professional pride as I stepped back for a final, knowing squint at it
all. Then I went to my camera, slipped in the plate, gave them due
warning and took off the cap.

I took two plates to make sure and then the thing was over, but as I
had another plate left I thought I might as well take a view of the
house by itself, so I carried my camera to a new place and had just
got everything ready to lift the cap when Mr. Carroll came down and
said:

"If you girls want to see something pretty, come to the back field
with me. That will wait till you come back, won't it, Amy?"

So we all betook ourselves to the back field, a short distance away,
where Mr. Carroll proudly displayed two of the prettiest little Jersey
cows I had ever seen.

We returned to the house by way of the back lane and, as we came in
sight of the main road, my brother Cecil drove up and said that if I
were ready, I had better go home with him and save myself a hot, dusty
walk.

The Carrolls all went down to the fence to speak to Cecil, but I
dashed hurriedly down through the orchard, leaped over the fence into
the lawn and ran to the somewhat remote corner where I had left my
camera. I was in a desperate hurry, for I knew Cecil's horse did not
like to be kept waiting, so I never even glanced at the house, but
snatched off the cap, counted two and replaced it.

Then I took out my plate, put it in the holder and gathered up my
traps. I suppose I was about five minutes at it all and I had my back
to the house the whole time, and when I laid all my things ready and
emerged from my retreat, there was nobody to be seen about the place.

As I hurried up through the lawn, I noticed Ned Brooke walking at a
smart pace down the lane, but the fact did not make any particular
impression on me at the time, and was not recalled until afterwards.

Cecil was waiting for me, so I got in the buggy and we drove off. On
arriving home I shut myself up in my dark room and proceeded to
develop the first two negatives of the Carroll housestead. They were
both excellent, the first one being a trifle the better, so that I
decided to finish from it. I intended also to develop the third, but
just as I finished the others, a half-dozen city cousins swooped down
upon us and I had to put away my paraphernalia, emerge from my dark
retreat and fly around to entertain them.

The next day Cecil came in and said:

"Did you hear, Amy, that Mr. Carroll has lost a pocketbook with five
hundred dollars in it?"

"No!" I exclaimed. "How? When? Where?"

"Don't overwhelm a fellow. I can answer only one question--last night.
As to the 'how,' they don't know, and as to the 'where'--well, if they
knew that, there might be some hope of finding it. The girls are in a
bad way. The money was to get them their longed-for piano, it seems,
and now it's gone."

"But how did it happen, Cecil?"

"Well, Mr. Carroll says that Mrs. Carroll handed the pocketbook back
to him at the gate yesterday, and he dropped it in the inside pocket
of his over-coat--"

"I saw him do it," I cried.

"Yes, and then, before he went to be photographed, he hung his coat up
in the hall. It hung there until the evening, and nobody seems to have
thought about the money, each supposing that someone else had put it
carefully away. After tea Mr. Carroll put on the coat and went to see
somebody over at Netherby. He says the thought of the pocketbook never
crossed his mind; he had forgotten all about putting it in that coat
pocket. He came home across the fields about eleven o'clock and found
that the cows had broken into the clover hay, and he had a great chase
before he got them out. When he went in, just as he entered the door,
the remembrance of the money flashed over him. He felt in his pocket,
but there was no pocketbook there; he asked his wife if she had taken
it out. She had not, and nobody else had. There was a hole in the
pocket, but Mr. Carroll says it was too small for the pocketbook to
have worked through. However, it must have done so--unless someone
took it out of his pocket at Netherby, and that is not possible,
because he never had his coat off, and it was in an inside pocket.
It's not likely that they will ever see it again. Someone may pick it
up, of course, but the chances are slim. Mr. Carroll doesn't know his
exact path across the fields, and if he lost it while he was after the
cows, it's a bluer show still. They've been searching all day, of
course. The girls are awfully disappointed."

A sudden recollection came to me of Ned Brooke's face as I had seen it
the day before at the gate, coupled with the remembrance of seeing him
walking down the lane at a quick pace, so unlike his usual shambling
gait, while I ran through the lawn.

"How do they know it was lost?" I said. "Perhaps it was stolen before
Mr. Carroll went to Netherby."

"They think not," said Cecil. "Who would have stolen it?"

"Ned Brooke. I saw him hanging around. And you never saw such a look
as came over his face when he heard Mr. Carroll say there was five
hundred dollars in that pocketbook."

"Well, I did suggest to them that Ned might know something about it,
for I remembered having seen him go down the lane while I was waiting
for you, but they won't hear of such a thing. The Brookes are kind of
proteges of theirs, you know, and they won't believe anything bad of
them. If Ned did take it, however, there's not a shadow of evidence
against him."

"No, I suppose not," I answered thoughtfully, "but the more I think it
over, the more I'm convinced that he took it. You know, we all went to
the back field to look at the Jerseys, and all that time the coat was
hanging there in the hall, and not a soul in the house. And it was
just after we came back that I saw Ned scuttling down the lane so
fast."

I mentioned my suspicions to the Carrolls a few days afterwards, when
I went down with the photographs, and found that they had discovered
no trace of the lost pocketbook. But they seemed positively angry when
I hinted that Ned Brooke might know more about its whereabouts than
anyone else. They declared that they would as soon think of suspecting
one of themselves as Ned, and altogether they seemed so offended at my
suggestion that I held my peace and didn't irritate them by any more
suppositions.

Afterwards, in the excitement of our cousins' visit, the matter passed
out of my mind completely. They stayed two weeks, and I was so busy
the whole time that I never got a chance to develop that third plate
and, in fact, I had forgotten all about it.

One morning soon after they went away, I remembered the plate and
decided to go and develop it. Cecil went with me, and we shut
ourselves up in our den, lit our ruby lantern and began operations. I
did not expect much of the plate, because it had been exposed and
handled carelessly, and I thought that it might prove to be
underexposed or light-struck. So I left Cecil to develop it while I
prepared the fixing bath. Cecil was whistling away when suddenly he
gave a tremendous "whew" of astonishment and sprang to his feet.

"Amy, Amy, look here!" he cried.

I rushed to his side and looked at the plate as he held it up in the
rosy light. It was a splendid one, and the Carroll house came out
clear, with the front door and the steps in full view.

And there, just in the act of stepping from the threshold, was the
figure of a boy with an old straw hat on his head and--in his
hand--the pocketbook!

He was standing with his head turned towards the corner of the house
as if listening, with one hand holding his ragged coat open and the
other poised in mid-air with the pocketbook, as if he were just going
to put it in his inside pocket. The whole scene was as clear as
noonday, and nobody with eyes in his head could have failed to
recognize Ned Brooke.

"Goodness!" I gasped. "In with it--quick!"

And we doused the thing into the fixing bath and then sat down
breathlessly and looked at each other.

"I say, Amy," said Cecil, "what a sell this will be on the Carrolls!
Ned Brooke couldn't do such a thing--oh, no! The poor injured boy at
whom everyone has such an unlawful pick! I wonder if this will
convince them."

"Do you think they can get it all back?" I asked. "It's not likely he
would have dared to use any of it yet."

"I don't know. We'll have a try, anyhow. How long before this plate
will be dry enough to carry down to the Carrolls as circumstantial
evidence?"

"Three hours or thereabouts," I answered, "but perhaps sooner. I'll
take two prints off when it is ready. I wonder what the Carrolls will
say."

"It's a piece of pure luck that the plate should have turned out so
well after the slap-dash way in which it was taken and used. I say,
Amy, isn't this quite an adventure?"

At last the plate was dry, and I printed two proofs. We wrapped them
up carefully and marched down to Mr. Carroll's.

You never saw people so overcome with astonishment as the Carrolls
were when Cecil, with the air of a statesman unfolding the evidence of
some dreadful conspiracy against the peace and welfare of the nation,
produced the plate and the proofs, and held them out before them.

Mr. Carroll and Cecil took the proofs and went over to the Brooke
shanty. They found only Ned and his mother at home. At first Ned, when
taxed with his guilt, denied it, but when Mr. Carroll confronted him
with the proofs, he broke down in a spasm of terror and confessed all.
His mother produced the pocketbook and the money--they had not dared
to spend a single cent of it--and Mr. Carroll went home in triumph.

Perhaps Ned Brooke ought not to have been let off so easily as he was,
but his mother cried and pleaded, and Mr. Carroll was too kind-hearted
to resist. So he did not punish them at all, save by utterly
discarding the whole family and their concerns. The place got too hot
for them after the story came out, and in less than a month all moved
away--much to the benefit of Mapleton.




In Spite of Myself


My trunk was packed and I had arranged with my senior partner--I was
the junior member of a law firm--for a month's vacation. Aunt Lucy had
written that her husband had gone on a sea trip and she wished me to
superintend the business of his farm and mills in his absence, if I
could arrange to do so. She added that "Gussie" thought it was a pity
to trouble me, and wanted to do the overseeing herself, but that
she--Aunt Lucy--preferred to have a man at the head of affairs.

I had never seen my step-cousin, Augusta Ashley, but I knew, from Aunt
Lucy's remarks concerning her, pretty much what sort of person she
was--just the precise kind I disliked immeasurably. I had no idea what
her age was, but doubtless she was over thirty, tall, determined,
aggressive, with a "faculty" for managing, a sharp, probing nose, and
a y-formation between her eyebrows. I knew the type, and I was assured
that the period of sojourn with my respected aunt would be one of
strife between Miss Ashley and myself.

I wrote to Aunt Lucy to expect me, made all necessary arrangements,
and went to bid Nellie goodbye. I had made up my mind to marry Nellie.
I had never openly avowed myself her suitor, but we were cousins, and
had grown up together, so that I knew her well enough to be sure of my
ground. I liked her so well that it was easy to persuade myself that I
was in love with her. She more nearly fulfilled the requirements of my
ideal wife than anyone I knew. She was pleasant to look upon, without
being distractingly pretty; small and fair and womanly. She dressed
nicely, sang and played agreeably, danced well, and had a cheerful,
affectionate disposition. She was not alarmingly clever, had no
"hobbies," and looked up to me as heir to all the wisdom of the
ages--what man does not like to be thought clever and brilliant? I had
no formidable rival, and our families were anxious for the match. I
considered myself a lucky fellow. I felt that I would be very lonely
without Nellie when I was away, and she admitted frankly that she
would miss me awfully. She looked so sweet that I was on the point of
asking her then and there to marry me. Well, fate interfered in the
guise of a small brother, so I said goodbye and left, mentally
comparing her to my idea of Miss Augusta Ashley, much to the latter's
disadvantage.

When I stepped from the train at a sleepy country station next day I
was promptly waylaid by a black-eyed urchin who informed me that Mrs.
Ashley had sent him with an express wagon for my luggage, and that
"Miss Gussie" was waiting with the carriage at the store, pointing
down to a small building before whose door a girl was trying to soothe
her frightened horse.

As I went down the slope towards her I noticed she was tall--quite too
tall for my taste. I dislike women who can look into my eyes on a
level--but I had to admit that her form was remarkably symmetrical and
graceful. She put out her hand--it was ungloved and large, but white
and firm, with a cool, pleasant touch--and said, with a composure akin
to indifference, "Mr. Carslake, I presume. Mother could not come to
meet you, so she sent me. Will you be kind enough to hold my horse for
a few minutes? I want to get something in the store." Whereupon she
calmly transferred the reins to me and disappeared.

At the time she certainly did not impress me as pretty, yet neither
could I call her plain. Taken separately, her features were good. Her
nose was large and straight, the mouth also a trifle large but firm
and red, the brow wide and white, shadowed by a straying dash of brown
curl or two. She had a certain cool, statuesque paleness, accentuated
by straight, fine, black brows, and her eyes were a bluish grey; but
the pupils, as I afterward found out, had a trick of dilating into
wells of blackness which, added to a long fringe of very dark lashes,
made her eyes quite the most striking feature of her face. Her
expression was open and frank, and her voice clear and musical without
being sweet. She looked about twenty-two.

At the time I did not fancy her appearance and made a mental note to
the effect that I would never like Miss Ashley. I had no use for cool,
businesslike women--women should have no concern with business. Nellie
would never have troubled her dear, curly head over it.

Miss Ashley came out with her arms full of packages, stowed them away
in the carriage, got in, told me which road to take, and did not again
speak till we were out of the village and driving along a pretty
country lane, arched over with crimson maples and golden-brown
beeches. The purplish haze of a sunny autumn day mellowed over the
fields, and the bunch of golden rod at my companion's belt was akin to
the plumed ranks along the fences. I hazarded the remark that it was a
fine day; Miss Ashley gravely admitted that it was. Then a deep smile
seemed to rise somewhere in her eyes and creep over her face,
discovering a dimple here and there as it proceeded.

"Don't let's talk about the weather--the subject is rather stale," she
said. "I suppose you are wondering why on earth Mother had to drag you
away out here. I tried to show her how foolish it was, but I didn't
succeed. Mother thinks there must be a man at the head of affairs or
they'll never go right. I could have taken full charge easily enough;
I haven't been Father's 'boy' all my life for nothing. There was no
need to take you away from your business."

I protested. I said I was going to take a vacation anyway, and
business was not pressing just then. I also hinted that, while I had
no doubt of her capacity, she might have found the duties of
superintendent rather arduous.

"Not at all," she said, with a serenity that made me groan inwardly.
"I like it. Father always said I was a born business manager. You'll
find Ashley's Mills very quiet, I'm afraid. It's a sort of charmed
Sleepy Hollow. See, there's home," as we turned a maple-blazoned
corner and looked from the crest of one hill across to that of
another. "Home" was a big, white, green-shuttered house buried amid a
riot of autumn colour, with a big grove of dark green spruces at the
back. Below them was a glimpse of a dark blue mill pond and beyond it
long sweeps of golden-brown meadow land, sloping up till they dimmed
in horizon mists of pearl and purple.

"How pretty," I exclaimed admiringly.

"Isn't it?" said Gussie proudly. "I love it." Her pupils dilated into
dark pools, and I rather unwillingly admitted that Miss Ashley was a
fine-looking girl.

As we drove up Aunt Lucy was standing on the steps of the verandah,
over whose white roof trailed a luxuriant creeper, its leaves tinged
by October frosts into lovely wine reds and tawny yellows. Gussie
sprang out, barely touching my offered hand with her fingertips.

"There's Mother waiting to pounce on you and hear all the family
news," she said, "so go and greet her like a dutiful nephew."

"I must take out your horse for you first," I said politely.

"Not at all," said Miss Ashley, taking the reins from my hands in a
way not to be disputed. "I always unharness Charley myself. No one
understands him half so well. Besides, I'm used to it. Didn't I tell
you I'd always been Father's boy?"

"I well believe it," I thought in disgust, as she led the horse over
to the well and I went up to Aunt Lucy. Through the sitting-room
windows I kept a watchful eye on Miss Ashley as she watered and deftly
unharnessed Charley and led him into his stable with sundry pats on
his nose. Then I saw no more of her till she came in to tell us tea
was ready, and led the way out to the dining room.

It was evident Miss Gussie held the reins of household government, and
no doubt worthily. Those firm, capable white hands of hers looked as
though they might be equal to a good many emergencies. She talked
little, leaving the conversation to Aunt Lucy and myself, though she
occasionally dropped in an apt word. Toward the end of the meal,
however, she caught hold of an unfortunate opinion I had incautiously
advanced and tore it into tatters. The result was a spirited argument,
in which Miss Gussie held her own with such ability that I was utterly
routed and found another grievance against her. It was very
humiliating to be worsted by a girl--a country girl at that, who had
passed most of her life on a farm! No doubt she was strong-minded and
wanted to vote. I was quite prepared to believe anything of her.

After tea Miss Ashley proposed a walk around the premises, in order to
initiate me into my duties. Apart from his farm, Mr. Ashley owned
large grist-and saw-mills and did a flourishing business, with the
details of which Miss Gussie seemed so conversant that I lost all
doubt of her ability to run the whole thing as she had claimed. I felt
quite ignorant in the light of her superior knowledge, and our walk
was enlivened by some rather too lively discussions between us. We
walked about together, however, till the shadows of the firs by the
mills stretched nearly across the pond and the white moon began to put
on a silvery burnish. Then we wound up by a bitter dispute, during
which Gussie's eyes were very black and each cheek had a round, red
stain on it. She had a little air of triumph at having defeated me.

"I have to go now and see about putting away the milk, and I dare say
you're not sorry to be rid of me," she said, with a demureness I had
not credited her with, "but if you come to the verandah in half an
hour I'll bring you out a glass of new milk and some pound cake I made
today by a recipe that's been in the family for one hundred years, and
I hope it will choke you for all the snubs you've been giving me." She
walked away after this amiable wish, and I stood by the pond till the
salmon tints faded from its waters and stars began to mirror
themselves brokenly in its ripples. The mellow air was full of sweet,
mingled eventide sounds as I walked back to the house. Aunt Lucy was
knitting on the verandah. Gussie brought out cake and milk and chatted
to us while we ate, in an inconsequent girlish way, or fed bits of
cake to a green-eyed goblin in the likeness of a black cat.

She appeared in such an amiable light that I was half inclined to
reconsider my opinion of her. When I went to my room the vase full of
crimson leaves on my table suggested Gussie, and I repented of my
unfriendliness for a moment--and only for a moment. Gussie and her
mother passed through the hall below, and Aunt Lucy's soft voice
floated up through my half-open door.

"Well, how do you like your cousin, my dear?"

Whereat that decided young lady promptly answered, "I think he is the
most conceited youth I've met for some time."

Pleasant, wasn't it? I thought of Nellie's meek admiration of all my
words and ways, and got her photo out to soothe my vanity. For the
first time it struck me that her features were somewhat insipid. The
thought seemed like disloyalty, so I banished it and went to bed.

I expected to dream of that disagreeable Gussie, but I did not, and I
slept so soundly that it was ten o'clock the next morning before I
woke. I sprang out of bed in dismay, dressed hastily, and ran down,
not a little provoked at myself. Through the window I saw Gussie in
the garden digging up some geraniums. She was enveloped in a
clay-stained brown apron, a big flapping straw hat half hid her face,
and she wore a pair of muddy old kid gloves. Her whole appearance was
disreputable, and the face she turned to me as I said "Good morning"
had a diagonal streak of clay across it. I added slovenliness to my
already long list of her demerits.

"Good afternoon, rather. Don't you know what time it is? The men were
here three hours ago for their orders. I thought it a pity to disturb
your peaceful dreams, so I gave them myself and sent them off."

I was angrier than ever. A nice beginning I had made. And was that
girl laughing at me?

"I expected to be called in time, certainly," I said stiffly. "I am
not accustomed to oversleep myself. I promise it will not occur
again."

My dignity was quite lost on Gussie. She peeled off her gloves
cheerfully and said, "I suppose you'd like some breakfast. Just wait
till I wash my hands and I'll get you some. Then if you're pining to
be useful you can help me take up these geraniums."

There was no help for it. After I had breakfasted I went, with many
misgivings. We got on fairly well, however. Gussie was particularly
lively and kept me too busy for argument. I quite enjoyed the time and
we did not quarrel until nearly the last, when we fell out bitterly
over some horticultural problem and went in to dinner in sulky
silence. Gussie disappeared after dinner and I saw no more of her. I
was glad of this, but after a time I began to find it a little dull.
Even a dispute would have been livelier. I visited the mills, looked
over the farm, and then carelessly asked Aunt Lucy where Miss Ashley
was. Aunt Lucy replied that she had gone to visit a friend and would
not be back till the next day.

This was satisfactory, of course, highly so. What a relief it was to
be rid of that girl with her self-assertiveness and independence. I
said to myself that I hoped her friend would keep her for a week. I
forgot to be disappointed that she had not when, next afternoon, I saw
Gussie coming in at the gate with a tolerably large satchel and an
armful of golden rod. I sauntered down to relieve her, and we had a
sharp argument under way before we were halfway up the lane. As usual
Gussie refused to give in that she was wrong.

Her walk had brought a faint, clear tint to her cheeks and her
rippling dusky hair had half slipped down on her neck. She said she
had to make some cookies for tea and if I had nothing better to do I
might go and talk to her while she mixed them. It was not a gracious
invitation but I went, rather than be left to my own company.

By the end of the week I was as much at home at Ashley Mills as if I
had lived there all my life. Gussie and I were thrown together a good
deal, for lack of other companions, and I saw no reason to change my
opinion of her. She could be lively and entertaining when she chose,
and at times she might be called beautiful. Still, I did not approve
of her--at least I thought so, most of the time. Once in a while came
a state of feeling which I did not quite understand.

One evening I went to prayer meeting with Aunt Lucy and Gussie. I had
not seen the minister of Ashley Mills before, though Gussie and her
mother seemed to know him intimately. I had an idea that he was old
and silvery-haired and benevolent-looking. So I was rather surprised
to find him as young as myself--a tall, pale, intellectual-looking
man, with a high, white brow and dark, earnest eyes--decidedly
attractive.

I was still more surprised when, after the service, he joined Gussie
at the door and went down the steps with her. I felt distinctly
ill-treated as I fell back with Aunt Lucy. There was no reason why I
should--none; it ought to have been a relief. Rev. Carroll Martin had
every right to see Miss Ashley home if he chose. Doubtless a girl who
knew all there was to be known about business, farming, and milling,
to say nothing of housekeeping and gardening, could discuss theology
also. It was none of my business.

I don't know what kept me awake so late that night. As a consequence I
overslept myself. I had managed to redeem my reputation on this point,
but here it was lost again. I felt cross and foolish and cantankerous
when I went out.

There was some unusual commotion at the well. It was an old-fashioned
open one, with a chain and windlass. Aunt Lucy was peering anxiously
down its mouth, from which a ladder was sticking. Just as I got there
Gussie emerged from its depths with a triumphant face. Her skirt was
muddy and draggled, her hair had tumbled down, and she held a dripping
black cat.

"Coco must have fallen into the well last night," she explained, as I
helped her to the ground. "I missed him at milking-time, and when I
came to the well this morning I heard the most ear-splitting yowls
coming up from it. I couldn't think where he could possibly be, for
the water was quite calm, until I saw he had crept into a little
crevice in the stones on the side. So I got a ladder and went down
after him."

"You should have called me," I said sourly. "You might have killed
yourself, going down there."

"And Coco might have tumbled in and drowned while you were getting
up," retorted Gussie. "Besides, what was the need? I could go down as
well as you."

"No doubt," I said, more sharply than I had any business to. "I don't
dream of disputing your ability to do anything you may take it into
your head to do. Most young ladies are not in the habit of going down
wells, however."

"Perhaps not," she rejoined, with freezing calmness. "But, as you may
have discovered, I am not 'most young ladies.' I am myself, Augusta
Ashley, and accountable to nobody but myself if I choose to go down
the well every day for pure love of it."

She walked off in her wet dress with her muddy cat. Gussie Ashley was
the only girl I ever saw who could be dignified under such
circumstances.

I was in a very bad humour with myself as I went off to see about
having the well cleaned out. I had offended Gussie and I knew she
would not be easily appeased. Nor was she. For a week she kept me
politely, studiously, at a distance, in spite of my most humble
advances. Rev. Carroll was a frequent caller, ostensibly to make
arrangements about a Sunday school they were organizing in a poor part
of the community. Gussie and he held long conversations on this
enthralling subject. Then Gussie went on another visit to her friend,
and when she came back so did Rev. Carroll.

One calm, hazy afternoon I was coming slowly up from the mills.
Happening to glance at the kitchen roof, I gasped. It was on fire in
one place. Evidently the dry shingles had caught fire from a spark.
There was not a soul about save Gussie, Aunt Lucy, and myself. I
dashed wildly into the kitchen, where Gussie was peeling apples.

"The house is on fire," I exclaimed. Gussie dropped her knife and
turned pale.

"Don't wake Mother," was all she said, as she snatched a bucket of
water from the table. The ladder was still lying by the well. In a
second I had raised it to the roof and, while Gussie went up it like a
squirrel and dashed the water on the flames, I had two more buckets
ready for her.

Fortunately the fire had made little headway, though a few minutes
more would have given it a dangerous start. The flames hissed and died
out as Gussie threw on the water, and in a few seconds only a small
black hole in the shingles remained. Gussie slid down the ladder. She
trembled in every limb, but she put out her wet hand to me with a
faint, triumphant smile. We shook hands across the ladder with a
cordiality never before expressed.

For the next week, in spite of Rev. Carroll, I was happy when I
thought of Gussie and miserable when I thought of Nellie. I held
myself in some way bound to her and--was she not my ideal?
Undoubtedly!

One day I got a letter from my sister. It was long and newsy, and the
eighth page was most interesting.

"If you don't come home and look after Nellie," wrote Kate, "you'll
soon not have her to look after. You remember that old lover of hers,
Rod Allen? Well, he's home from the west now, immensely rich, they
say, and his attentions to Nellie are the town talk. I think she likes
him too. If you bury yourself any longer at Ashley Mills I won't be
responsible for the consequences."

This lifted an immense weight from my mind, but the ninth page hurled
it back again.

"You never say anything of Miss Ashley in your letters. What is she
like--young or old, ugly or pretty, clever or dull? I met a lady
recently who knows her and thinks she is charming. She also said Miss
Ashley was to be married soon to Rev. Something-or-Other. Is it true?"

Aye, was it? Quite likely. Kate's letter made a very miserable man of
me. Gussie found me a dull companion that day. After several vain
attempts to rouse me to interest she gave it up.

"There's no use talking to you," she said impatiently. "I believe you
are homesick. That letter you got this morning looked suspicious.
Anyhow, I hope you'll get over it before I get back."

"Are you going away again?" I asked.

"Yes. I am going to stay a few days with Flossie." Flossie was that
inseparable chum of hers.

"You seem to spend a good deal of your time with her," I remarked
discontentedly.

Gussie opened her eyes at my tone.

"Why, of course," she said. "Flossie and I have always been chums. And
she needs me more than ever just now, for she is awfully busy. She is
to be married next month."

"Oh, I see--and you--"

"I'm to be bridesmaid, of course, and we've heaps to do. Flossie
wanted to wait until Christmas, but Mr. Martin is in a--"

"Mr. Martin," I interrupted. "Is Mr. Martin going to marry your
friend?"

"Why, yes. Didn't you know? They just suit each other. There he comes
now. He's going to drive me over, and I'm not ready. Talk to him, for
pity's sake, while I go and dress."

I never enjoyed a conversation more. Rev. Carroll Martin was a
remarkably interesting man.

Nellie married Rod Allen at Christmas and I was best man. Nellie made
a charming little bride, and Rod fairly worshipped her. My own wedding
did not come off until spring, as Gussie said she could not get ready
before that.




Kismet


The fifth heat in the free-for-all was just over. "Lu-Lu" had won, and
the crowd on the grand stand and the hangers-on around the track were
cheering themselves hoarse. Clear through the noisy clamour shrilled a
woman's cry.

"Ah--I have dropped my scorecard."

A man in front of her turned.

"I have an extra one, madame. Will you accept it?"

Her small, modishly-gloved hand closed eagerly on it before she lifted
her eyes to his face. Both started convulsively. The man turned very
pale, but the woman's ripe-tinted face coloured darkly.

"You?" she faltered.

His lips parted in the coldly-grave smile she remembered and hated.

"You are not glad to see me," he said calmly, "but that, I suppose,
was not to be expected. I did not come here to annoy you. This meeting
is as unexpected to me as to you. I had no suspicion that for the last
half-hour I had been standing next to my--"

She interrupted him by an imperious gesture. Still clutching the
scorecard she half-turned from him. Again he smiled, this time with a
tinge of scorn, and shifted his eyes to the track.

None of the people around them had noticed the little by-play. All
eyes were on the track, which was being cleared for the first heat of
another race. The free-for-all horses were being led away blanketed.
The crowd cheered "Lu-Lu" as she went past, a shapeless oddity. The
backers of "Mascot", the rival favourite, looked gloomy.

The woman noticed nothing of all this. She was small, very pretty,
still young, and gowned in a quite unmistakable way. She studied the
man's profile furtively. He looked older than when she had seen him
last--there were some silver threads gleaming in his close-clipped
dark hair and short, pointed beard. Otherwise there was little change
in the quiet features and somewhat stern grey eyes. She wondered if he
had cared at all.

They had not met for five years. She shut her eyes and looked in on
her past. It all came back very vividly. She had been eighteen when
they were married--a gay, high-spirited girl and the season's beauty.
He was much older and a quiet, serious student. Her friends had
wondered why she married him--sometimes she wondered herself, but she
had loved him, or thought so.

The marriage had been an unhappy one. She was fond of society and
gaiety, he wanted quiet and seclusion. She Was impulsive and
impatient, he deliberate and grave. The strong wills clashed. After
two years of an unbearable sort of life they had separated--quietly,
and without scandal of any sort. She had wanted a divorce, but he
would not agree to that, so she had taken her own independent fortune
and gone back to her own way of life. In the following five years she
had succeeded in burying all remembrance well out of sight. No one
knew if she were satisfied or not; her world was charitable to her and
she lived a gay and quite irreproachable life. She wished that she had
not come to the races. It was such an irritating encounter. She opened
her eyes wearily; the dusty track, the flying horses, the gay dresses
of the women on the grandstand, the cloudless blue sky, the brilliant
September sunshine, the purple distances all commingled in a glare
that made her head ache. Before it all she saw the tall figure by her
side, his face turned from her, watching the track intently.

She wondered with a vague curiosity what induced him to come to the
races. Such things were not greatly in his line. Evidently their
chance meeting had not disturbed him. It was a sign that he did not
care. She sighed a little wearily and closed her eyes. When the heat
was over he turned to her.

"May I ask how you have been since--since we met last? You are looking
extremely well. Has Vanity Fair palled in any degree?"

She was angry at herself and him. Where had her careless society
manner and well-bred composure gone? She felt weak and hysterical.
What if she should burst into tears before the whole crowd--before
those coldly critical grey eyes? She almost hated him.

"No--why should it? I have found it very pleasant--and I have been
well--very well. And you?"

He jotted down the score carefully before he replied.

"I? Oh, a book-worm and recluse always leads a placid life. I never
cared for excitement, you know. I came down here to attend a sale of
some rare editions, and a well-meaning friend dragged me out to see
the races. I find it rather interesting, I must confess, much more so
than I should have fancied. Sorry I can't stay until the end. I must
go as soon as the free-for-all is over, if not before. I have backed
'Mascot'; you?"

"'Lu-Lu'" she answered quickly--it almost seemed defiantly. How
horribly unreal it was--this carrying on of small talk, as if they
were the merest of chance-met acquaintances! "She belongs to a friend
of mine, so I am naturally interested."

"She and 'Mascot' are ties now--both have won two heats. One more for
either will decide it. This is a good day for the races. Excuse me."

He leaned over and brushed a scrap of paper from her grey cloak. She
shivered slightly.

"You are cold! This stand is draughty."

"I am not at all cold, thank you. What race is this?--oh! the
three-minute one."

She bent forward with assumed interest to watch the scoring. She was
breathing heavily. There were tears in her eyes--she bit her lips
savagely and glared at the track until they were gone.

Presently he spoke again, in the low, even tone demanded by
circumstances.

"This is a curious meeting, is it not?--quite a flavor of romance!
By-the-way, do you read as many novels as ever?"

She fancied there was mockery in his tone. She remembered how very
frivolous he used to consider her novel-reading. Besides, she resented
the personal tinge. What right had he?

"Almost as many," she answered carelessly.

"I was very intolerant, wasn't I?" he said after a pause. "You thought
so--you were right. You have been happier since you--left me?"

"Yes," she said defiantly, looking straight into his eyes.

"And you do not regret it?"

He bent down a little. His sleeve brushed against her shoulder.
Something in his face arrested the answer she meant to make.

"I--I--did not say that," she murmured faintly.

There was a burst of cheering. The free-for-all horses were being
brought out for the sixth heat. She turned away to watch them. The
scoring began, and seemed likely to have no end. She was tired of it
all. It didn't matter a pin to her whether "Lu-Lu" or "Mascot" won.
What _did_ matter! Had Vanity Fair after all been a satisfying
exchange for love? He _had_ loved her once, and they had been happy at
first. She had never before said, even in her own heart: "I am sorry,"
but--suddenly, she felt his hand on her shoulder, and looked up. Their
eyes met. He stooped and said almost in a whisper:

"Will you come back to me?"

"I don't know," she whispered breathlessly, as one half-fascinated.

"We were both to blame--but I the most. I was too hard on you--I ought
to have made more allowance. We are wiser now both of us. Come back
to me--my wife."

His tone was cold and his face expressionless. It was on her lips to
cry out "No," passionately.

But the slender, scholarly hand on her shoulder was trembling with the
intensity of his repressed emotion. He _did_ care, then. A wild
caprice flashed into her brain. She sprang up.

"See," she cried, "they're off now. This heat will probably decide the
race. If 'Lu-Lu' wins I will not go back to you, if 'Mascot' does I
will. That is my decision."

He turned paler, but bowed in assent. He knew by bitter experience how
unchangeable her whims were, how obstinately she clung to even the
most absurd.

She leaned forward breathlessly. The crowd hung silently on the track.
"Lu-Lu" and "Mascot" were neck and neck, getting in splendid work.
Half-way round the course "Lu-Lu" forged half a neck ahead, and her
backers went mad. But one woman dropped her head in her hands and
dared look no more. One man with white face and set lips watched the
track unswervingly.

Again "Mascot" crawled up, inch by inch. They were on the home
stretch, they were equal, the cheering broke out, then silence, then
another terrific burst, shouts, yells and clappings--"Mascot" had won
the free-for-all. In the front row a woman stood up, swayed and shaken
as a leaf in the wind. She straightened her scarlet hat and readjusted
her veil unsteadily. There was a smile on her lips and tears in her
eyes. No one noticed her. A man beside her drew her hand through his
arm in a quiet proprietary fashion. They left the grand stand
together.




Lilian's Business Venture


Lilian Mitchell turned into the dry-goods store on Randall Street,
just as Esther Miller and Ella Taylor came out. They responded coldly
to her greeting and exchanged significant glances as they walked away.

Lilian's pale face crimsoned. She was a tall, slender girl of about
seventeen, and dressed in mourning. These girls had been her close
friends once. But that was before the Mitchells had lost their money.
Since then Lilian had been cut by many of her old chums and she felt
it keenly.

The clerks in the store were busy and Lilian sat down to wait her
turn. Near to her two ladies were also waiting and chatting.

"Helen wants me to let her have a birthday party," Mrs. Saunders was
saying wearily. "She has been promised it so long and I hate to
disappoint the child, but our girl left last week, and I cannot
possibly make all the cakes and things myself. I haven't the time or
strength, so Helen must do without her party."

"Talking of girls," said Mrs. Reeves impatiently, "I am almost
discouraged. It is so hard to get a good all-round one. The last one I
had was so saucy I had to discharge her, and the one I have now cannot
make decent bread. I never had good luck with bread myself either."

"That is Mrs. Porter's great grievance too. It is no light task to
bake bread for all those boarders. Have you made your jelly yet?"

"No. Maria cannot make it, she says, and I detest messing with jelly.
But I really must see to it soon."

At this point a saleswoman came up to Lilian, who made her small
purchases and went out.

"There goes Lilian Mitchell," said Mrs. Reeves in an undertone. "She
looks very pale. They say they are dreadfully poor since Henry
Mitchell died. His affairs were in a bad condition, I am told."

"I am sorry for Mrs. Mitchell," responded Mrs. Saunders. "She is such
a sweet woman. Lilian will have to do something, I suppose, and there
is so little chance for a girl here."

Lilian, walking down the street, was wearily turning over in her mind
the problems of her young existence. Her father had died the preceding
spring. He had been a supposedly prosperous merchant; the Mitchells
had always lived well, and Lilian was a petted and only child. Then
came the shock of Henry Mitchell's sudden death and of financial ruin.
His affairs were found to be hopelessly involved; when all the debts
were paid there was left only the merest pittance--barely enough for
house-rent--for Lilian and her mother to live upon. They had moved
into a tiny cottage in an unfashionable locality, and during the
summer Lilian had tried hard to think of something to do. Mrs.
Mitchell was a delicate woman, and the burden of their situation fell
on Lilian's young shoulders.

There seemed to be no place for her. She could not teach and had no
particular talent in any line. There was no opening for her in
Willington, which was a rather sleepy little place, and Lilian was
almost in despair.

"There really doesn't seem to be any real place in the world for me,
Mother," she said rather dolefully at the supper table. "I've no
talent at all; it is dreadful to have been born without one. And yet I
_must_ do something, and do it soon."

And Lilian, after she had washed up the tea dishes, went upstairs and
had a good cry.

But the darkest hour, so the proverb goes, is just before the dawn,
and after Lilian had had her cry out and was sitting at her window in
the dusk, watching a thin new moon shining over the trees down the
street, her inspiration came to her. A minute later she whirled into
the tiny sitting-room where her mother was sewing.

"Mother, our fortune is made! I have an idea!"

"Don't lose it, then," said Mrs. Mitchell with a smile. "What is it,
my dear?"

Lilian sobered herself, sat down by her mother's side, and proceeded
to recount the conversation she had heard in the store that afternoon.

"Now, Mother, this is where my brilliant idea comes in. You have often
told me I am a born cook and I always have good luck. Now, tomorrow
morning I shall go to Mrs. Saunders and offer to furnish all the good
things for Helen's birthday party, and then I'll ask Mrs. Reeves and
Mrs. Porter if I may make their bread for them. That will do for a
beginning, I like cooking, you know, and I believe that in time I can
work up a good business."

"It seems to be a good idea," said Mrs. Mitchell thoughtfully, "and I
am willing that you should try. But have you thought it all out
carefully? There will be many difficulties."

"I know. I don't expect smooth sailing right along, and perhaps I'll
fail altogether; but somehow I don't believe I will."

"A great many of your old friends will think--"

"Oh, yes; I know _that_ too, but I am not going to mind it, Mother. I
don't think there is any disgrace in working for my living. I'm going
to do my best and not care what people say."

Early next morning Lilian started out. She had carefully thought over
the details of her small venture, considered ways and means, and
decided on the most advisable course. She would not attempt too much,
and she felt sure of success.

To secure competent servants was one of the problems of Willington
people. At Drayton, a large neighbouring town, were several factories,
and into these all the working girls from Willington had crowded,
leaving very few who were willing to go out to service. Many of those
who did were poor cooks, and Lilian shrewdly suspected that many a
harassed housekeeper in the village would be glad to avail herself of
the new enterprise.

Lilian was, as she had said of herself, "a born cook." This was her
capital, and she meant to make the most of it. Mrs. Saunders listened
to her businesslike details with surprise and delight.

"It is the very thing," she said. "Helen is so eager for that party,
but I could not undertake it myself. Her birthday is Friday. Can you
have everything ready by then?"

"Yes, I think so," said Lilian briskly, producing her notebook.
"Please give me the list of what you want and I will do my best."

From Mrs. Saunders she went to Mrs. Reeves and found a customer as
soon as she had told the reason of her call. "I'll furnish all the
bread and rolls you need," she said, "and they will be good, too. Now,
about your jelly. I can make good jelly, and I'll be very glad to make
yours."

When she left, Lilian had an order for two dozen glasses of apple
jelly, as well as a standing one for bread and rolls. Mrs. Porter was
next visited and grasped eagerly at the opportunity.

"I know your bread will be good," she said, "and you may count on me
as a regular customer."

Lilian thought she had enough on hand for a first attempt and went
home satisfied. On her way she called at the grocery store with an
order that surprised Mr. Hooper. When she told him of her plan he
opened his eyes.

"I must tell my wife about that. She isn't strong and she doesn't like
cooking."

After dinner Lilian went to work, enveloped in a big apron, and
whipped eggs, stoned raisins, stirred, concocted, and baked until
dark. When bedtime came she was so tired that she could hardly crawl
upstairs; but she felt happy too, for the day had been a successful
one.

And so also were the days and weeks and months that followed. It was
hard and constant work, but it brought its reward. Lilian had not
promised more than she could perform, and her customers were
satisfied. In a short time she found herself with a regular and
growing business on her hands, for new customers were gradually added
and always came to stay.

People who gave parties found it very convenient to follow Mrs.
Saunders's example and order their supplies from Lilian. She had a
very busy winter and, of course, it was not all plain sailing. She had
many difficulties to contend with. Sometimes days came on which
everything seemed to go wrong--when the stove smoked or the oven
wouldn't heat properly, when cakes fell flat and bread was sour and
pies behaved as only totally depraved pies can, when she burned her
fingers and felt like giving up in despair.

Then, again, she found herself cut by several of her old
acquaintances. But she was too sensible to worry much over this. The
friends really worth having were still hers, her mother's face had
lost its look of care, and her business was prospering. She was
hopeful and wide awake, kept her wits about her and looked out for
hints, and learned to laugh over her failures.

During the winter she and her mother had managed to do most of the
work themselves, hiring little Mary Robinson next door on especially
busy days, and now and then calling in the assistance of Jimmy Bowen
and his hand sled to carry orders to customers. But when spring came
Lilian prepared to open up her summer campaign on a much larger scale.
Mary Robinson was hired for the season, and John Perkins was engaged
to act as carrier with his express wagon. A summer kitchen was boarded
in in the backyard, and a new range bought; Lilian began operations
with a striking advertisement in the Willington _News_ and an
attractive circular sent around to all her patrons. Picnics and summer
weddings were frequent. In bread and rolls her trade was brisk and
constant. She also took orders for pickles, preserves, and jellies,
and this became such a flourishing branch that a second assistant had
to be hired.

It was a cardinal rule with Lilian never to send out any article that
was not up to her standard. She bore the loss of her failures, and
sometimes stayed up half of the night to fill an order on time.
"Prompt and perfect" was her motto.

The long hot summer days were very trying, and sometimes she got very
tired of it all. But when on the anniversary of her first venture she
made up her accounts she was well pleased. To be sure, she had not
made a fortune; but she had paid all their expenses, had a hundred
dollars clear, and had laid the solid foundations of a profitable
business.

"Mother," she said jubilantly, as she wiped a dab of flour from her
nose and proceeded to concoct the icing for Blanche Remington's
wedding cake, "don't you think my business venture has been a decided
success?"

Mrs. Mitchell surveyed her busy daughter with a motherly smile. "Yes,
I think it has," she said.




Miriam's Lover


I had been reading a ghost story to Mrs. Sefton, and I laid it down at
the end with a little shrug of contempt.

"What utter nonsense!" I said.

Mrs. Sefton nodded abstractedly above her fancywork.

"That is. It is a very commonplace story indeed. I don't believe the
spirits of the departed trouble themselves to revisit the glimpses of
the moon for the purpose of frightening honest mortals--or even for
the sake of hanging around the favourite haunts of their existence in
the flesh. If they ever appear, it must be for a better reason than
that."

"You don't surely think that they ever do appear?" I said
incredulously.

"We have no proof that they do not, my dear."

"Surely, Mary," I exclaimed, "you don't mean to say that you believe
people ever do or can see spirits--ghosts, as the word goes?"

"I didn't say I believed it. I never saw anything of the sort. I
neither believe nor disbelieve. But you know queer things do happen at
times--things you can't account for. At least, people who you know
wouldn't lie say so. Of course, they may be mistaken. And I don't
think that everybody can see spirits either, provided they are to be
seen. It requires people of a certain organization--with a spiritual
eye, as it were. We haven't all got that--in fact, I think very few of
us have. I dare say you think I'm talking nonsense."

"Well, yes, I think you are. You really surprise me, Mary. I always
thought you the least likely person in the world to take up with such
ideas. Something must have come under your observation to develop such
theories in your practical head. Tell me what it was."

"To what purpose? You would remain as sceptical as ever."

"Possibly not. Try me; I may be convinced."

"No," returned Mrs. Sefton calmly. "Nobody ever is convinced by
hearsay. When a person has once seen a spirit--or thinks he has--he
thenceforth believes it. And when somebody else is intimately
associated with that person and knows all the circumstances--well, he
admits the possibility, at least. That is my position. But by the time
it gets to the third person--the outsider--it loses power. Besides, in
this particular instance the story isn't very exciting. But then--it's
true."

"You have excited my curiosity. You must tell me the story."

"Well, first tell me what you think of this. Suppose two people, both
sensitively organized individuals, loved each other with a love
stronger than life. If they were apart, do you think it might be
possible for their souls to communicate with each other in some
inexplicable way? And if anything happened to one, don't you think
that that one could and would let the spirit of the other know?"

"You're getting into too deep waters for me, Mary," I said, shaking my
head. "I'm not an authority on telepathy, or whatever you call it. But
I've no belief in such theories. In fact, I think they are all
nonsense. I'm sure you must think so too in your rational moments."

"I dare say it is all nonsense," said Mrs. Sefton slowly, "but if you
had lived a whole year in the same house with Miriam Gordon, you would
have been tainted too. Not that she had 'theories'--at least, she
never aired them if she had. But there was simply something about the
girl herself that gave a person strange impressions. When I first met
her I had the most uncanny feeling that she was all spirit--soul--what
you will! no flesh, anyhow. That feeling wore off after a while, but
she never seemed like other people to me.

"She was Mr. Sefton's niece. Her father had died when she was a child.
When Miriam was twenty her mother had married a second time and went
to Europe with her husband. Miriam came to live with us while they
were away. Upon their return she was herself to be married.

"I had never seen Miriam before. Her arrival was unexpected, and I was
absent from home when she came. I returned in the evening, and when I
saw her first she was standing under the chandelier in the drawing
room. Talk about spirits! For five seconds I thought I had seen one.

"Miriam was a beauty. I had known that before, though I think I
hardly expected to see such wonderful loveliness. She was tall and
extremely graceful, dark--at least her hair was dark, but her skin was
wonderfully fair and clear. Her hair was gathered away from her face,
and she had a high, pure, white forehead, and the straightest, finest,
blackest brows. Her face was oval, with very large and dark eyes.

"I soon realized that Miriam was in some mysterious fashion different
from other people. I think everyone who met her felt the same way. Yet
it was a feeling hard to define. For my own part I simply felt as if
she belonged to another world, and that part of the time she--her
soul, you know--was back there again.

"You must not suppose that Miriam was a disagreeable person to have in
the house. On the contrary, it was the very reverse. Everybody liked
her. She was one of the sweetest, most winsome girls I ever knew, and
I soon grew to love her dearly. As for what Dick called her 'little
queernesses'--well, we got used to them in time.

"Miriam was engaged, as I have told you, to a young Harvard man named
Sidney Claxton. I knew she loved him very deeply. When she showed me
his photograph, I liked his appearance and said so. Then I made some
teasing remark about her love-letters--just for a joke, you know.
Miriam looked at me with an odd little smile and said quickly:

"'Sidney and I never write to each other.'

"'Why, Miriam!' I exclaimed in astonishment. 'Do you mean to tell me
you never hear from him at all?'

"'No, I did not say that. I hear from him every day--every hour. We
do not need to write letters. There are better means of communication
between two souls that are in perfect accord with each other.'

"'Miriam, you uncanny creature, what do you mean?' I asked.

"But Miriam only gave another queer smile and made no answer at all.
Whatever her beliefs or theories were, she would never discuss them.

"She had a habit of dropping into abstracted reveries at any time or
place. No matter where she was, this, whatever it was, would come over
her. She would sit there, perhaps in the centre of a gay crowd, and
gaze right out into space, not hearing or seeing a single thing that
went on around her.

"I remember one day in particular; we were sewing in my room. I looked
up and saw that Miriam's work had dropped on her knee and she was
leaning forward, her lips apart, her eyes gazing upward with an
unearthly expression.

"'Don't look like that, Miriam!' I said, with a little shiver. 'You
seem to be looking at something a thousand miles away!'

"Miriam came out of her trance or reverie and said, with a little
laugh:

"'How do you know but that I was?'

"She bent her head for a minute or two. Then she lifted it again and
looked at me with a sudden contraction of her level brows that
betokened vexation.

"'I wish you hadn't spoken to me just then,' she said. 'You
interrupted the message I was receiving. I shall not get it at all
now.'

"'Miriam,' I implored. 'I so wish my dear girl, that you wouldn't talk
so. It makes people think there is something queer about you. Who in
the world was sending you a message, as you call it?'

"'Sidney,' said Miriam simply.

"'Nonsense!'

"'You think it is nonsense because you don't understand it,' was her
calm response.

"I recall another event was when some caller dropped in and we had
drifted into a discussion about ghosts and the like--and I've no doubt
we all talked some delicious nonsense. Miriam said nothing at the
time, but when we were alone I asked her what she thought of it.

"'I thought you were all merely talking against time,' she retorted
evasively.

"'But, Miriam, do you really think it is possible for ghosts--'

"'I detest that word!'

"'Well, spirits then--to return after death, or to appear to anyone
apart from the flesh?'

"'I will tell you what I know. If anything were to happen to
Sidney--if he were to die or be killed--he would come to me himself
and tell me.'

"One day Miriam came down to lunch looking pale and worried. After
Dick went out, I asked her if anything were wrong.

"'Something has happened to Sidney,' she replied, 'some painful
accident--I don't know what.'

"'How do you know?' I cried. Then, as she looked at me strangely, I
added hastily, 'You haven't been receiving any more unearthly
messages, have you? Surely, Miriam, you are not so foolish as to
really believe in that!'

"'I know,' she answered quickly. 'Belief or disbelief has nothing to
do with it. Yes, I have had a message. I know that some accident has
happened to Sidney--painful and inconvenient but not particularly
dangerous. I do not know what it is. Sidney will write me that. He
writes when it is absolutely necessary.'

"'Aerial communication isn't perfected yet then?' I said
mischievously. But, observing how really worried she seemed, I added,
'Don't fret, Miriam. You may be mistaken.'

"Well, two days afterwards she got a note from her lover--the first I
had ever known her to receive--in which he said he had been thrown
from his horse and had broken his left arm. It had happened the very
morning Miriam received her message.

"Miriam had been with us about eight months when one day she came into
my room hurriedly. She was very pale.

"'Sidney is ill--dangerously ill. What shall I do?'

"I knew she must have had another of those abominable messages--or
thought she had--and really, remembering the incident of the broken
arm, I couldn't feel as sceptical as I pretended to. I tried to cheer
her, but did not succeed. Two hours later she had a telegram from her
lover's college chum, saying that Mr. Claxton was dangerously ill with
typhoid fever.

"I was quite alarmed about Miriam in the days that followed. She
grieved and fretted continually. One of her troubles was that she
received no more messages; she said it was because Sidney was too ill
to send them. Anyhow, she had to content herself with the means of
communication used by ordinary mortals.

"Sidney's mother, who had gone to nurse him, wrote every day, and at
last good news came. The crisis was over and the doctor in attendance
thought Sidney would recover. Miriam seemed like a new creature then,
and rapidly recovered her spirits.

"For a week reports continued favourable. One night we went to the
opera to hear a celebrated prima donna. When we returned home Miriam
and I were sitting in her room, chatting over the events of the
evening.

"Suddenly she sat straight up with a sort of convulsive shudder, and
at the same time--you may laugh if you like--the most horrible feeling
came over me. I didn't see anything, but I just felt that there was
something or someone in the room besides ourselves.

"Miriam was gazing straight before her. She rose to her feet and held
out her hands.

"'Sidney!' she said.

"Then she fell to the floor in a dead faint.

"I screamed for Dick, rang the bell and rushed to her.

"In a few minutes the whole household was aroused, and Dick was off
posthaste for the doctor, for we could not revive Miriam from her
death-like swoon. She seemed as one dead. We worked over her for
hours. She would come out of her faint for a moment, give us an
unknowing stare and go shudderingly off again.

"The doctor talked of some fearful shock, but I kept my own counsel.
At dawn Miriam came back to life at last. When she and I were left
alone, she turned to me.

"'Sidney is dead,' she said quietly. 'I saw him--just before I
fainted. I looked up, and he was standing between me and you. He had
come to say farewell.'

"What could I say? Almost while we were talking a telegram came. He
was dead--he had died at the very hour at which Miriam had seen him."

Mrs. Sefton paused, and the lunch bell rang.

"What do you think of it?" she queried as we rose.

"Honestly, I don't know what I think of it," I answered frankly.




Miss Calista's Peppermint Bottle


Miss Calista was perplexed. Her nephew, Caleb Cramp, who had been her
right-hand man for years and whom she had got well broken into her
ways, had gone to the Klondike, leaving her to fill his place with the
next best man; but the next best man was slow to appear, and meanwhile
Miss Calista was looking about her warily. She could afford to wait a
while, for the crop was all in and the fall ploughing done, so that
the need of a successor to Caleb was not as pressing as it might
otherwise have been. There was no lack of applicants, such as they
were. Miss Calista was known to be a kind and generous mistress,
although she had her "ways," and insisted calmly and immovably upon
wholehearted compliance with them. She had a small, well-cultivated
farm and a comfortable house, and her hired men lived in clover. Caleb
Cramp had been perfection after his kind, and Miss Calista did not
expect to find his equal. Nevertheless, she set up a certain standard
of requirements; and although three weeks, during which Miss Calista
had been obliged to put up with the immature services of a neighbour's
boy, had elapsed since Caleb's departure, no one had as yet stepped
into his vacant and coveted shoes.

Certainly Miss Calista was somewhat hard to please, but she was not
thinking of herself as she sat by her front window in the chilly
November twilight. Instead, she was musing on the degeneration of
hired men, and reflecting that it was high time the wheat was
thrashed, the house banked, and sundry other duties attended to.

Ches Maybin had been up that afternoon to negotiate for the vacant
place, and had offered to give satisfaction for smaller wages than
Miss Calista had ever paid. But he had met with a brusque refusal,
scarcely as civil as Miss Calista had bestowed on drunken Jake Stinson
from the Morrisvale Road.

Not that Miss Calista had any particular prejudice against Ches
Maybin, or knew anything positively to his discredit. She was simply
unconsciously following the example of a world that exerts itself to
keep a man down when he is down and prevent all chance of his rising.
Nothing succeeds like success, and the converse of this is likewise
true--that nothing fails like failure. There was not a person in
Cooperstown who would not have heartily endorsed Miss Calista's
refusal.

Ches Maybin was only eighteen, although he looked several years older,
and although no flagrant misdoing had ever been proved against him,
suspicion of such was not wanting. He came of a bad stock, people said
sagely, adding that what was bred in the bone was bound to come out
in the flesh. His father, old Sam Maybin, had been a shiftless and
tricky rascal, as everybody knew, and had ended his days in the
poorhouse. Ches's mother had died when he was a baby, and he had come
up somehow, in a hand-to-mouth fashion, with all the cloud of heredity
hanging over him. He was always looked at askance, and when any
mischief came to light in the village, it was generally fastened on
him as a convenient and handy scapegoat. He was considered sulky and
lazy, and the local prophets united in predicting a bad end for him
sooner or later; and, moreover, diligently endeavoured by their
general treatment of him to put him in a fair way to fulfil their
predictions. Miss Calista, when she had shut Chester Maybin out into
the chill gloom of the November dusk, dismissed him from her thoughts.
There were other things of more moment to her just then than old Sam
Maybin's hopeful son.

There was nobody in the house but herself, and although this was
neither alarming nor unusual, it was unusual--and Miss Calista
considered it alarming--that the sum of five hundred dollars should at
that very moment be in the upper right-hand drawer of the sideboard,
which sum had been up to the previous day safe in the coffers of the
Millageville bank. But certain unfavourable rumours were in course of
circulation about that same institution, and Miss Calista, who was
nothing if not prudent, had gone to the bank that very morning and
withdrawn her deposit. She intended to go over to Kerrytown the very
next day and deposit it in the Savings Bank there. Not another day
would she keep it in the house, and, indeed, it worried her to think
she must keep it even for the night, as she had told Mrs. Galloway
that afternoon during a neighbourly back-yard chat.

"Not but what it's safe enough," she said, "for not a soul but you
knows I've got it. But I'm not used to have so much by me, and there
are always tramps going round. It worries me somehow. I wouldn't give
it a thought if Caleb was here. I s'pose being all alone makes me
nervous."

Miss Calista was still rather nervous when she went to bed that night,
but she was a woman of sound sense and was determined not to give way
to foolish fears. She locked doors and windows carefully, as was her
habit, and saw that the fastenings were good and secure. The one on
the dining-room window, looking out on the back yard, wasn't; in fact,
it was broken altogether; but, as Miss Calista told herself, it had
been broken just so for the last six years, and nobody had ever tried
to get in at it yet, and it wasn't likely anyone would begin tonight.

Miss Calista went to bed and, despite her worry, slept soon and
soundly. It was well on past midnight when she suddenly wakened and
sat bolt upright in bed. She was not accustomed to waken in the night,
and she had the impression of having been awakened by some noise. She
listened breathlessly. Her room was directly over the dining-room, and
an empty stovepipe hole opened up through the ceiling of the latter at
the head of her bed.

There was no mistake about it. Something or some person was moving
about stealthily in the room below. It wasn't the cat--Miss Calista
had shut him in the woodshed before she went to bed, and he couldn't
possibly get out. It must certainly be a beggar or tramp of some
description.

Miss Calista might be given over to nervousness in regard to imaginary
thieves, but in the presence of real danger she was cool and
self-reliant. As noiselessly and swiftly as any burglar himself, Miss
Calista slipped out of bed and into her clothes. Then she tip-toed out
into the hall. The late moonlight, streaming in through the hall
windows, was quite enough illumination for her purpose, and she got
downstairs and was fairly in the open doorway of the dining-room
before a sound betrayed her presence.

Standing at the sideboard, hastily ransacking the neat contents of an
open drawer, stood a man's figure, dimly visible in the moonlight
gloom. As Miss Calista's grim form appeared in the doorway, the
midnight marauder turned with a start and then, with an inarticulate
cry, sprang, not at the courageous lady, but at the open window behind
him.

Miss Calista, realizing with a flash of comprehension that he was
escaping her, had a woman-like impulse to get a blow in anyhow; she
grasped and hurled at her unceremonious caller the first thing that
came to hand--a bottle of peppermint essence that was standing on the
sideboard.

The missile hit the escaping thief squarely on the shoulder as he
sprang out of the window, and the fragments of glass came clattering
down on the sill. The next moment Miss Calista found herself alone,
standing by the sideboard in a half-dazed fashion, for the whole thing
had passed with such lightning-like rapidity that it almost seemed as
if it were the dissolving end of a bad dream. But the open drawer and
the window, where the bits of glass were glistening in the moonlight,
were no dream. Miss Calista recovered herself speedily, closed the
window, lit the lamp, gathered up the broken glass, and set up the
chairs which the would-be thief had upset in his exit. An examination
of the sideboard showed the precious five hundred safe and sound in an
undisturbed drawer.

Miss Calista kept grim watch and ward there until morning, and thought
the matter over exhaustively. In the end she resolved to keep her own
counsel. She had no clue whatever to the thief's whereabouts or
identity, and no good would come of making a fuss, which might only
end in throwing suspicion on someone who might be quite innocent.

When the morning came Miss Calista lost no time in setting out for
Kerrytown, where the money was soon safely deposited in the bank. She
heaved a sigh of relief when she left the building.

I feel as if I could enjoy life once more, she said to herself.
Goodness me, if I'd had to keep that money by me for a week itself,
I'd have been a raving lunatic by the end of it.

Miss Calista had shopping to do and friends to visit in town, so that
the dull autumn day was well nigh spent when she finally got back to
Cooperstown and paused at the corner store to get a bundle of matches.

The store was full of men, smoking and chatting around the fire, and
Miss Calista, whose pet abomination was tobacco smoke, was not at all
minded to wait any longer than she could help. But Abiram Fell was
attending to a previous customer, and Miss Calista sat grimly down by
the counter to wait her turn.

The door opened, letting in a swirl of raw November evening wind and
Ches Maybin. He nodded sullenly to Mr. Fell and passed down the store
to mutter a message to a man at the further end.

Miss Calista lifted her head as he passed and sniffed the air as a
charger who scents battle. The smell of tobacco was strong, and so was
that of the open boxes of dried herring on the counter, but plainly,
above all the commingled odours of a country grocery, Miss Calista
caught a whiff of peppermint, so strong as to leave no doubt of its
origin. There had been no hint of it before Ches Maybin's entrance.

The latter did not wait long. He was out and striding along the
shadowy road when Miss Calista left the store and drove smartly after
him. It never took Miss Calista long to make up her mind about
anything, and she had weighed and passed judgement on Ches Maybin's
case while Mr. Fell was doing up her matches.

The lad glanced up furtively as she checked her fat grey pony beside
him.

"Good evening, Chester," she said with brisk kindness. "I can give you
a lift, if you are going my way. Jump in, quick--Dapple is a little
restless."

A wave of crimson, duskily perceptible under his sunburned skin,
surged over Ches Maybin's face. It almost seemed as if he were going
to blurt out a blunt refusal. But Miss Calista's face was so guileless
and her tone so friendly, that he thought better of it and sprang in
beside her, and Dapple broke into an impatient trot down the long
hill lined with its bare, wind-writhen maples.

After a few minutes' silence Miss Calista turned to her moody
companion.

"Chester," she said, as tranquilly as if about to ask him the most
ordinary question in the world, "why did you climb into my house last
night and try to steal my money?"

Ches Maybin started convulsively, as if he meant to spring from the
buggy at once, but Miss Calista's hand was on his arm in a grasp none
the less firm because of its gentleness, and there was a warning gleam
in her grey eyes.

"It won't mend matters trying to get clear of me, Chester. I know it
was you and I want an answer--a truthful one, mind you--to my
question. I am your friend, and I am not going to harm you if you tell
me the truth."

Her clear and incisive gaze met and held irresistibly the boy's
wavering one. The sullen obstinacy of his face relaxed.

"Well," he muttered finally, "I was just desperate, that's why. I've
never done anything real bad in my life before, but people have always
been down on me. I'm blamed for everything, and nobody wants anything
to do with me. I'm willing to work, but I can't get a thing to do. I'm
in rags and I haven't a cent, and winter's coming on. I heard you
telling Mrs. Galloway yesterday about the money. I was behind the fir
hedge and you didn't see me. I went away and planned it all out. I'd
get in some way--and I meant to use the money to get away out west as
far from here as I could, and begin life there, where nobody knew me,
and where I'd have some sort of a chance. I've never had any here.
You can put me in jail now, if you like--they'll feed and clothe me
there, anyhow, and I'll be on a level with the rest."

The boy had blurted it all out sullenly and half-chokingly. A world of
rebellion and protest against the fate that had always dragged him
down was couched in his voice.

Miss Calista drew Dapple to a standstill before her gate.

"I'm not going to send you to jail, Chester. I believe you've told me
the truth. Yesterday you wanted me to give you Caleb's place and I
refused. Well, I offer it to you now. If you'll come, I'll hire you,
and give you as good wages as I gave him."

Ches Maybin looked incredulous.

"Miss Calista, you can't mean it."

"I do mean it, every word. You say you have never had a chance. Well,
I am going to give you one--a chance to get on the right road and make
a man of yourself. Nobody shall ever know about last night's doings
from me, and I'll make it my business to forget them if you deserve
it. What do you say?"

Ches lifted his head and looked her squarely in the face.

"I'll come," he said huskily. "It ain't no use to try and thank you,
Miss Calista. But I'll live my thanks."

And he did. The good people of Cooperstown held up their hands in
horror when they heard that Miss Calista had hired Ches Maybin, and
prophesied that the deluded woman would live to repent her rash step.
But not all prophecies come true. Miss Calista smiled serenely and
kept on her own misguided way. And Ches Maybin proved so efficient
and steady that the arrangement was continued, and in due time people
outlived their old suspicions and came to regard him as a thoroughly
smart and trustworthy young man.

"Miss Calista has made a man of Ches Maybin," said the oracles. "He
ought to be very grateful to her."

And he was. But only he and Miss Calista and the peppermint bottle
ever knew the precise extent of his gratitude, and they never told.




The Jest That Failed


"I think it is simply a disgrace to have a person like that in our
class," said Edna Hayden in an injured tone.

"And she doesn't seem a bit ashamed of it, either," said Agnes
Walters.

"Rather proud of it, I should say," returned her roommate, spitefully.
"It seems to me that if I were so poor that I had to 'room' myself and
dress as dowdily as she does that I really couldn't look anybody in
the face. What must the boys think of her? And if it wasn't for her
being in it, our class would be the smartest and dressiest in the
college--even those top-lofty senior girls admit that."

"It's a shame," said Agnes, conclusively. "But she needn't expect to
associate with our set. I, for one, won't have anything to do with
her."

"Nor I. I think it is time she should be taught her place. If we could
only manage to inflict some decided snub on her, she might take the
hint and give up trying to poke herself in where she doesn't belong.
The idea of her consenting to be elected on the freshmen executive!
But she seems impervious to snubs."

"Edna, let's play a joke on her. It will serve her right. Let us send
an invitation in somebody's name to the senior 'prom.'"

"The very thing! And sign Sidney Hill's name to it. He's the
handsomest and richest fellows at Payzant, and belongs to one of the
best families in town, and he's awfully fastidious besides. No doubt
she will feel immensely flattered and, of course, she'll accept. Just
think how silly she'll feel when she finds out he never sent it. Let's
write it now, and send it at once. There is no time to lose, for the
'prom' is on Thursday night."

The freshmen co-eds at Payzant College did not like Grace Seeley--that
is to say, the majority of them. They were a decidedly snobbish class
that year. No one could deny that Grace was clever, but she was poor,
dressed very plainly--"dowdily," the girls said--and "roomed" herself,
that phrase meaning that she rented a little unfurnished room and
cooked her own meals over an oil stove.

The "senior prom," as it was called, was the annual reception which
the senior class gave in the middle of every autumn term. It was the
smartest and gayest of all the college functions, and a Payzant co-ed
who received an invitation to it counted herself fortunate. The senior
girls were included as a matter of course, but a junior, soph, or
freshie could not go unless one of the senior boys invited her.

Grace Seeley was studying Greek in her tiny room that afternoon when
the invitation was brought to her. It was scrupulously orthodox in
appearance and form, and Grace never doubted that it was genuine,
although she felt much surprised that Sidney Hill, the leader of his
class and the foremost figure in all college sports and societies,
should have asked her to go with him to the senior prom.

But she was girlishly pleased at the prospect. She was as fond of a
good time as any other girl, and she had secretly wished very much
that she could go to the brilliant and much talked about senior prom.

Grace was quite unaware of her own unpopularity among her class
co-eds, although she thought it was very hard to get acquainted with
them. Without any false pride herself, and of a frank, independent
nature, it never occurred to her that the other Payzant freshies could
look down on her because she was poor, or resent her presence among
them because she dressed plainly.

She straightway wrote a note of acceptance to Sidney Hill, and that
young man naturally felt much mystified when he opened and read it in
the college library next morning.

"Grace Seeley," he pondered. "That's the jolly girl with the brown
eyes that I met at the philomathic the other night. She thanks me for
my invitation to the senior prom, and accepts with pleasure. Why, I
certainly never invited her or anyone else to go with me to the senior
prom. There must be some mistake."

Grace passed him at this moment on her way to the Latin classroom. She
bowed and smiled in a friendly fashion and Sidney Hill felt decidedly
uncomfortable. What was he to do? He did not like to think of putting
Miss Seeley in a false position because somebody had sent her an
invitation in his name.

"I suppose it is some cad who has a spite at me that has done it," he
reflected, "but if so I'll spoil his game. I'll take Miss Seeley to
the prom as if I had never intended doing anything else. She shan't be
humiliated just because there is someone at Payzant who would stoop to
that sort of thing."

So he walked up the hall with Grace and expressed his pleasure at her
acceptance, and on the evening of the prom he sent her a bouquet of
white carnations, whose spicy fragrance reminded her of her own little
garden at home. Grace thought it extremely nice of him, and dressed in
a flutter of pleasant anticipation.

Her gown was a very simple one of sheer white organdie, and was the
only evening dress she had. She knew there would be many smarter
dresses at the reception, but the knowledge did not disturb her
sensible head in the least.

She fingered the dainty white frills lovingly as she remembered the
sunny summer days at home in the little sewing-room, where cherry
boughs poked their blossoms in at the window, when her mother and
sisters had helped her to make it, with laughing prophesies and
speculations as to its first appearance. Into seam and puff and frill
many girlish hopes and dreams had been sewn, and they all came back to
Grace as she put it on, and helped to surround her with an atmosphere
of happiness.

When she was ready she picked up her bouquet and looked herself over
in the mirror, from the top of her curly head to the tips of her
white shoes, with a little nod of satisfaction. Grace was not exactly
pretty, but she had such a bright, happy face and such merry brown
eyes and such a friendly smile that she was very pleasant to look
upon, and a great many people thought so that night.

Grace had never in all her life before had so good a time as she had
at that senior prom. The seniors were quick to discover her unaffected
originality and charm, and everywhere she went she was the centre of a
merry group. In short, Grace, as much to her own surprise as anyone's,
found herself a social success.

Presently Sidney brought his brother up to be introduced, and the
latter said:

"Miss Seeley, will you excuse my asking if you have a brother or any
relative named Max Seeley?"

Grace nodded. "Oh, yes, my brother Max. He is a doctor out west."

"I was sure of it," said Murray Hill triumphantly. "You resemble him
so strongly. Please don't consider me as a stranger a minute longer,
for Max and I are like brothers. Indeed, I owe my life to him. Last
summer I was out there on a surveying expedition, and I took typhoid
in a little out-of-the-way place where good nursing was not to be had
for love or money. Your brother attended me and he managed to pull me
through. He never left me day or night until I was out of danger, and
he worked like a Trojan for me."

"Dear old Max," said Grace, her brown eyes shining with pride and
pleasure. "That is so like him. He is such a dear brother and I
haven't seen him for four years. To see somebody who knows him so well
is next best thing to seeing himself."

"He is an awfully fine fellow," said Mr. Hill heartily, "and I'm
delighted to have met the 'little sister' he used to talk so much
about. I want you to come ever and meet my mother and sister. They
have heard me talk so much about Max that they think almost as much
of him as I do, and they will be glad to meet his sister."

Mrs. Hill, a handsome, dignified lady who was one of the chaperones of
the prom, received Grace warmly, while Beatrice Hill, an extremely
pretty, smartly gowned girl, made her feel at home immediately.

"You came with Sid, didn't you?" she whispered. "Sid is so sly--he
never tells us whom he is going to take anywhere. But when I saw you
come in with him I knew I was going to like you, you looked so jolly.
And you're really the sister of that splendid Dr. Seeley who saved
Murray's life last summer? And to think you've been at Payzant nearly
a whole term and we never knew it!"

"Well, how have you enjoyed our prom, Miss Seeley?" asked Sid, as they
walked home together under the arching elms of the college campus.

"Oh! it was splendid," said Grace enthusiastically. "Everybody was so
nice. And then to meet someone who could tell me so much about Max! I
must write them home all about it before I sleep, just to calm my head
a bit. Mother and the girls will be so interested, and I must send Lou
and Mab a carnation apiece for their scrapbooks."

"Give me one back, please," said Sid. And Grace with a little blush,
did so.

That night, while Grace was slipping the stems of her carnations and
putting them into water, three little bits of conversation were being
carried on which it is necessary to report in order to round up this
story neatly and properly, as all stories should be rounded up.

In the first place, Beatrice Hill was saying to Sidney, "Oh, Sid, that
Miss Seeley you had at the prom is a lovely girl. I don't know when
I've met anyone I liked so much. She was so jolly and friendly and she
didn't put on learned airs at all, as so many of those Payzant girls
do. I asked her all about herself and she told me, and all about her
mother and sisters and home and the lovely times they had together,
and how hard they worked to send her to college too, and how she
taught school in vacations and 'roomed' herself to help along. Isn't
it so brave and plucky of her! I know we are going to be great
friends."

"I hope so," said Sidney briefly, "because I have an idea that she and
I are going to be very good friends too."

And Sidney went upstairs and put away a single white carnation very
carefully.

In the second place, Mrs. Hill was saying to her eldest son, "I liked
that Miss Seeley very much. She seemed a very sweet girl."

And, finally, Agnes Walters and Edna Hayden were discussing the matter
in great mystification in their room.

"I can't understand it at all," said Agnes slowly. "Sid Hill took her
to the prom and he must have sent her those carnations too. She could
never have afforded them herself. And did you see the fuss his people
made over her? I heard Beatrice telling her that she was coming to
call on her tomorrow, and Mrs. Hill said she must look upon
'Beechlawn' as her second home while she was at Payzant. If the Hills
are going to take her up we'll have to be nice to her."

"I suppose," said Edna conclusively, "the truth of the matter is that
Sid Hill meant to ask her anyway. I dare say he asked her long ago,
and she would know our invitation was a fraud. So the joke is on
ourselves, after all."

But, as you and I know, that, with the exception of the last sentence,
was not the truth of the matter at all.




The Penningtons' Girl


Winslow had been fishing--or pretending to--all the morning, and he
was desperately thirsty. He boarded with the Beckwiths on the
Riverside East Shore, but he was nearer Riverside West, and he knew
the Penningtons well. He had often been there for bait and milk and
had listened times out of mind to Mrs. Pennington's dismal tales of
her tribulations with hired girls. She never could get along with
them, and they left, on an average, after a fortnight's trial. She was
on the lookout for one now, he knew, and would likely be cross, but he
thought she would give him a drink.

He rowed his skiff into the shore and tied it to a fir that hung out
from the bank. A winding little footpath led up to the Pennington
farmhouse, which crested the hill about three hundred yards from the
shore. Winslow made for the kitchen door and came face to face with a
girl carrying a pail of water--Mrs. Pennington's latest thing in hired
girls, of course.

Winslow's first bewildered thought was "What a goddess!" and he
wondered, as he politely asked for a drink, where on earth Mrs.
Pennington had picked her up. She handed him a shining dipper half
full and stood, pail in hand, while he drank it.

She was rather tall, and wore a somewhat limp, faded print gown, and a
big sunhat, beneath which a glossy knot of chestnut showed itself. Her
skin was very fair, somewhat freckled, and her mouth was delicious. As
for her eyes, they were grey, but beyond that simply defied
description.

"Will you have some more?" she asked in a soft, drawling voice.

"No, thank you. That was delicious. Is Mrs. Pennington home?"

"No. She has gone away for the day."

"Well, I suppose I can sit down here and rest a while. You've no
serious objections, have you?"

"Oh, no."

She carried her pail into the kitchen and came out again presently
with a knife and a pan of apples. Sitting down on a bench under the
poplars she proceeded to peel them with a disregard of his presence
that piqued Winslow, who was not used to being ignored in this
fashion. Besides, as a general rule, he had been quite good friends
with Mrs. Pennington's hired girls. She had had three strapping
damsels during his sojourn in Riverside, and he used to sit on this
very doorstep and chaff them. They had all been saucy and talkative.
This girl was evidently a new species.

"Do you think you'll get along with Mrs. Pennington?" he asked
finally. "As a rule she fights with her help, although she is a most
estimable woman."

The girl smiled quite broadly.

"I guess p'r'aps she's rather hard to suit," was the answer, "but I
like her pretty well so far. I think we'll get along with each other.
If we don't I can leave--like the others did."

"What is your name?"

"Nelly Ray."

"Well, Nelly, I hope you'll be able to keep your place. Let me give
you a bit of friendly advice. Don't let the cats get into the pantry.
That is what Mrs. Pennington has quarrelled with nearly every one of
her girls about."

"It is quite a bother to keep them out, ain't it?" said Nelly calmly.
"There's dozens of cats about the place. What on earth makes them keep
so many?"

"Mr. Pennington has a mania for cats. He and Mrs. Pennington have a
standing disagreement about it. The last girl left here because she
couldn't stand the cats; they affected her nerves, she said. I hope
you don't mind them."

"Oh, no; I kind of like cats. I've been tryin' to count them. Has
anyone ever done that?"

"Not that I know of. I tried but I had to give up in despair--never
could tell when I was counting the same cat over again. Look at that
black goblin sunning himself on the woodpile. I say, Nelly, you're not
going, are you?"

"I must. It's time to get dinner. Mr. Pennington will be in from the
fields soon."

The next minute he heard her stepping briskly about the kitchen,
shooing out intruding cats, and humming a darky air to herself. He
went reluctantly back to the shore and rowed across the river in a
brown study.

I don't know whether Winslow was afflicted with chronic thirst or not,
or whether the East side water wasn't so good as that of the West
side; but I do know that he fairly haunted the Pennington farmhouse
after that. Mrs. Pennington was home the next time he went, and he
asked her about her new girl. To his surprise the good lady was
unusually reticent. She couldn't really say very much about Nelly. No,
she didn't belong anywhere near Riverside. In fact, she--Mrs.
Pennington--didn't think she had any settled home at present. Her
father was travelling over the country somewhere. Nelly was a good
little girl, and very obliging. Beyond this Winslow could get no more
information, so he went around and talked to Nelly, who was sitting on
the bench under the poplars and seemed absorbed in watching the
sunset.

She dropped her g's badly and made some grammatical errors that caused
Winslow's flesh to creep on his bones. But any man could have forgiven
mistakes from such dimpled lips in such a sweet voice.

He asked her to go for a row up the river in the twilight and she
assented; she handled an oar very well, he found out, and the exercise
became her. Winslow tried to get her to talk about herself, but failed
signally and had to content himself with Mrs. Pennington's meagre
information. He told her about himself frankly enough--how he had had
fever in the spring and had been ordered to spend the summer in the
country and do nothing useful until his health was fully restored, and
how lonesome it was in Riverside in general and at the Beckwith farm
in particular. He made out quite a dismal case for himself and if
Nelly wasn't sorry for him, she should have been.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the end of a fortnight Riverside folks began to talk about Winslow
and the Penningtons' hired girl. He was reported to be "dead gone" on
her; he took her out rowing every evening, drove her to preaching up
the Bend on Sunday nights, and haunted the Pennington farmhouse. Wise
folks shook their heads over it and wondered that Mrs. Pennington
allowed it. Winslow was a gentleman, and that Nelly Ray, whom nobody
knew anything about, not even where she came from, was only a common
hired girl, and he had no business to be hanging about her. She was
pretty, to be sure; but she was absurdly stuck-up and wouldn't
associate with other Riverside "help" at all. Well, pride must have a
fall; there must be something queer about her when she was so awful
sly as to her past life.

Winslow and Nelly did not trouble themselves in the least over all
this gossip; in fact, they never even heard it. Winslow was hopelessly
in love, when he found this out he was aghast. He thought of his
father, the ambitious railroad magnate; of his mother, the brilliant
society leader; of his sisters, the beautiful and proud; he was
honestly frightened. It would never do; he must not go to see Nelly
again. He kept this prudent resolution for twenty-four hours and then
rowed over to the West shore. He found Nelly sitting on the bank in
her old faded print dress and he straightway forgot everything he
ought to have remembered.

Nelly herself never seemed to be conscious of the social gulf between
them. At least she never alluded to it in any way, and accepted
Winslow's attentions as if she had a perfect right to them. She had
broken the record by staying with Mrs. Pennington four weeks, and
even the cats were in subjection.

Winslow was well enough to have gone back to the city and, in fact,
his father was writing for him. But he couldn't leave Beckwiths',
apparently. At any rate he stayed on and met Nelly every day and
cursed himself for a cad and a cur and a weak-brained idiot.

One day he took Nelly for a row up the river. They went further than
usual around the Bend. Winslow didn't want to go too far, for he knew
that a party of his city friends, chaperoned by Mrs. Keyton-Wells,
were having a picnic somewhere up along the river shore that day. But
Nelly insisted on going on and on, and of course she had her way. When
they reached a little pine-fringed headland they came upon the
picnickers, within a stone's throw. Everybody recognized Winslow.
"Why, there is Burton!" he heard Mrs. Keyton-Wells exclaim, and he
knew she was putting up her glasses. Will Evans, who was an especial
chum of his, ran down to the water's edge. "Bless me, Win, where did
you come from? Come right in. We haven't had tea yet. Bring your
friend too," he added, becoming conscious that Winslow's friend was a
mighty pretty girl. Winslow's face was crimson. He avoided Nelly's
eye.

"Are them people friends of yours?" she asked in a low tone.

"Yes," he muttered.

"Well, let us go ashore if they want us to," she said calmly. "I don't
mind."

For three seconds Winslow hesitated. Then he pulled ashore and helped
Nelly to alight on a jutting rock. There was a curious, set expression
about his fine mouth as he marched Nelly up to Mrs. Keyton-Wells and
introduced her. Mrs. Keyton-Wells's greeting was slightly cool, but
very polite. She supposed Miss Ray was some little country girl with
whom Burton Winslow was carrying on a summer flirtation; respectable
enough, no doubt, and must be treated civilly, but of course wouldn't
expect to be made an equal of exactly. The other women took their cue
from her, but the men were more cordial. Miss Ray might be shabby, but
she was distinctly fetching, and Winslow looked savage.

Nelly was not a whit abashed, seemingly, by the fashionable circle in
which she found herself, and she talked away to Will Evans and the
others in her soft drawl as if she had known them all her life. All
might have gone passably well, had not a little Riverside imp, by name
of Rufus Hent, who had been picked up by the picnickers to run their
errands, come up just then with a pail of water.

"Golly!" he ejaculated in very audible tones. "If there ain't Mrs.
Pennington's hired girl!"

Mrs. Keyton-Wells stiffened with horror. Winslow darted a furious
glance at the tell-tale that would have annihilated anything except a
small boy. Will Evans grinned and went on talking to Nelly, who had
failed to hear, or at least to heed, the exclamation.

The mischief was done, the social thermometer went down to zero in
Nelly's neighbourhood. The women ignored her altogether. Winslow set
his teeth together and registered a mental vow to wring Rufus Hent's
sunburned neck at the first opportunity. He escorted Nelly to the
table and waited on her with ostentatious deference, while Mrs.
Keyton-Wells glanced at him stonily and made up her mind to tell his
mother when she went home.

Nelly's social ostracism did not affect her appetite. But after lunch
was over, she walked down to the skiff. Winslow followed her.

"Do you want to go home?" he asked.

"Yes, it's time I went, for the cats may be raidin' the pantry. But
you must not come; your friends here want you."

"Nonsense!" said Winslow sulkily. "If you are going I am too."

But Nelly was too quick for him; she sprang into the skiff, unwound
the rope, and pushed off before he guessed her intention.

"I can row myself home and I mean to," she announced, taking up the
oars defiantly.

"Nelly," he implored.

Nelly looked at him wickedly.

"You'd better go back to your friends. That old woman with the
eyeglasses is watchin' you."

Winslow said something strong under his breath as he went back to the
others. Will Evans and his chums began to chaff him about Nelly, but
he looked so dangerous that they concluded to stop. There is no
denying that Winslow was in a fearful temper just then with Mrs.
Keyton-Wells, Evans, himself, Nelly--in fact, with all the world.

His friends drove him home in the evening on their way to the station
and dropped him at the Beckwith farm. At dusk he went moodily down to
the shore. Far up the Bend was dim and shadowy and stars were shining
above the wooded shores. Over the river the Pennington farmhouse
lights twinkled out alluringly. Winslow watched them until he could
stand it no longer. Nelly had made off with his skiff, but Perry
Beckwith's dory was ready to hand. In five minutes, Winslow was
grounding her on the West shore. Nelly was sitting on a rock at the
landing place. He went over and sat down silently beside her. A full
moon was rising above the dark hills up the Bend and

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