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The Lightning Conductor Discovers America

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Title: The Lightning Conductor Discovers America

Author: C. N. Williamson
        A. M. Williamson


        
Release date: June 9, 2009 [eBook #29083]

Language: English

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THE LIGHTNING CONDUCTOR DISCOVERS AMERICA

by

C. N. & A. M. WILLIAMSON

Illustrated







[Illustration: Patricia Moore]



Published by
Doubleday Page & Company
Garden City         New York

Copyright, 1916, by
C. N. And A. M. Williamson

All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian


[Illustration: page decoration]*



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

   Patricia Moore                              _Frontispiece_


                                                         PAGE

   Long Island

     "There's absolutely nothing like it on the other
     side of the water, not even in Devonshire or
     Dorset"                                               87

   Easthampton

     "You enter beside the Great Pond, which is so
     charming in itself and in its flat frame of village
     green"                                                95

   Long Island--South shore

     "Artists would find a paradise of queer, cozy
     gables, and corners of gardens crowded with
     old-fashioned flowers"                               102

     "Southampton's soul is very, very old, full of
     memories of Indians"                                 122

   Sunnyside

     "Washington Irving's dear old Dutch house is
     like a beautiful living body with his memory
     for its soul"                                        190

     "The old Dutch Church at Tarrytown"                  197

   The Hudson River

     "When we came into sudden sight of the river
     there was a magical effect"                          207

   Delaware Water Gap
     "Winding and wonderful it was in beauty"             213

     "The mountains seem cleft in twain. It's a
     marvellous effect--startling"                        216

   York
     A bit of the rock-bound Maine coast                  303

   "The air is spiced with the fragrance of balsam
     fir...on the way to Crawford Notch"                  310

   "The young, slender birches of the mountain
     wayside"                                             319

   Crawford's Notch, White Mountains                      324

   "I shall always think of Vermont as the State
     of wild lawns and gardens"                           330

   "We found the Green Mountains particularly
     lovable"                                             336

   Captain Winston's maps pages 90, 114, 132, 209,
     216, 239, 258, 295, 311, 325, 331, and 339



THE LIGHTNING CONDUCTOR DISCOVERS AMERICA




I

THE HONBLE MRS. WINSTON (NEE MOLLY
RANDOLPH) TO HER FRIEND, THE
COUNTESS OF LANE

                                       _On Board SS. Evangeline,_
                                                        _March 15th._

DEAREST MERCEDES:

It will be days, also nights (worse luck, for my cabin chirps like a
cricket, sings like a canary, and does a separate realistic imitation of
each animal in the Zoo!), before we get to New York. But I have crochet
cramp and worsted wrist from finishing a million scarfs since we sailed,
so I feel it will ease the strain to begin a letter to you. I dare say,
anyhow, I shan't close it till the last minute, with a P. S. to say
we're arriving safely--_if_ we do! One never knows nowadays. And we have
on board a man who's been torpedoed twice. I hope he isn't the kind to
whom everything happens in threes. By the way, he's the Ship's Mystery,
and this letter can't be a complete record of the voyage unless I tell
you about him. _Place aux dames_, however. There's a girl I want to tell
you about first. Or had I better polish off our own family history and
make a clean sweep of ourselves before beginning on anybody else? On
second thoughts, I will!

Jack's getting better splendidly. I can't say he's getting _well_, for
that will take a long time yet, I'm sorry to--but no, to be an Honest
Injun, I'm _not_ sorry. I'm glad--_glad_! He's done his "bit"--quite a
large bit--for his country, and if his bones and muscles were knitting
as rapidly as I knit socks for soldiers, he would insist on rushing back
to do another bit. Of course he wouldn't have consented to come over
here, even for the three months I've made him (figuratively speaking)
"sign on for," if the doctors hadn't all said he'd be a crock for
months. Even he has to admit that he may as well crock in America as
anywhere else; and I've persuaded him that I can't possibly decide what
to do with the place Cousin John Randolph Payton left me on Long Island
without his expert advice. It may be the first time I was ever unable to
decide a thing by myself, but there _must_ be a first time, you know.
And I'm simply purring with joy to have Jack at my mercy like this,
after all I went through with him at the front. We shall celebrate a
wedding day presently. Ten years married, and I adore Jack just ten
times more than I did the day I exchanged a Lightning Conductor for a
husband.

He does look _too_ interesting since he was wounded! All the girls gaze
at him as if he were a matinee idol or a moving-picture star, and
naturally they don't think I'm worthy of him in the least--an opinion in
which I agree. Luckily, _he_ doesn't. I believe he admires me as much as
I do him. And really, I'm not so bad to look at, I notice, now I've
begun to live again and don't need to worry over Jack every instant. I
had feared it might be necessary to own up to twenty-nine, only two
years short of my real age, which would be so wasteful. But thank
goodness, I see now I can safely retreat in good order back to
twenty-five, and stay there for some time to come. I always did feel
that if girl or woman found a nice, suitable age, she ought to stick to
it!

That's all about us, I think. So, speaking of girls, I'll tell you about
the one I mentioned. I want to tell you, because Jack and I are both
passionately interested and perhaps a little curious. Consequently I
expect her fate and ours, as the palmists say, will be mixed together
while we live on Long Island. In that case, she's sure to be served up
to you toasted, iced, sugared, and spiced, in future letters, so she may
as well be introduced to you now: "The Countess of Lane--Miss Patricia
Moore." Nice name, isn't it? Almost as nice as yours before you were
married to Monty. She has informed me, however, that she hates the
Patricia part because it sounds as if she turned up her nose in pride of
birth, whereas God turned it up when He made her--or else her nurse let
her lie on it when she was asleep. Anyhow, it's tilted just right, to
make her look like one of those wonderful girls on American magazine
covers, with darling little profiles that show the long curve of lashes
on their off, as well as their near, eyelid. You know that engaging
effect?

I have been invited to call her "Patty," or "Pat," both of which names
were in use at the French convent school she has lately left. But I
think she will have to be "Patsey" for me, as to my mind it's more
endearing. And "endearing" is a particularly suitable adjective for her.
Constantly, when looking at the creature, I find myself wanting to hum,
"Believe me, if all those endearing young charms," etc. There are simply
_crowds_ of them--charms, I mean. Big blue eyes under those eyelashes,
and above them, too, for the under lashes are a special feature; clouds
of black wavy hair; and milky-white skin such as true Irish beauties
have in poems, where it's not so difficult as in real life. This girl is
American, not Irish, but she's certainly the Beauty of the ship.

She is the _happiest_ thing you ever saw: and apparently she's coming
home (she calls it "home," though she hasn't seen America since she was
ten) as a conquering hero comes marching into a blaze of glory. All the
same, I'm sorry for her. I have a sort of impression--but why be a
croaking raven? I really don't see why! Every prospect pleases, and
there's no reason man should be particularly vile. When I allude thus
flippantly to "man," I refer to Papa Moore. I suppose when one comes to
analyze that "sort of an impression" the danger-note is sounded to my
heart by the girl's description of her father.

Not that she calls him "father," or even "papa," or "dad." She calls him
"Larry," his name being Laurence. She worships the ground he walks on,
she says, which is sweet of her, as very little of it has been walked on
in her neighbourhood for the last nine years.

It seems that Mamma and Larry made a runaway match, when he was twenty
and a half and Mamma seventeen and a quarter. He ran from college and
she ran from boarding-school. Mamma was an heiress; Larry was poor.
However, he had a lovely old house on Long Island (or rather his people
had it) and he came into it later when the others had kindly died: a
very historic old house, according to Miss Pat. She's intensely proud of
her parents' romance, and the fact that Larry is at this present time
only forty-one. "Of course forty-one is _old_," she explained to Jack
and me, "but not for the father of a grown-up girl, is it? It couldn't
be _done_ younger! And when you meet him, you'll see--why, you'll see
that I look old enough to be his _mother_!"

(She had her nineteenth birthday with a present of a motor car to
celebrate it, just before leaving France, and she looks sixteen. So
naturally Jack and I are curious to behold Larry. If her description
fits, he must be rather like the father in Anstey's "Vice Versa.")

When Pat was ten, Mamma twenty-eight, and Father thirty-one, the trio
went to Europe, which I think mostly meant Paris. Mamma was taken with
pneumonia after an Embassy ball, at which she was the prettiest woman,
and died of her triumph. Larry didn't know what to do with the child.
But some sympathetic soul who wanted to save the dear boy trouble
advised him to plant his little flower in the soil of France, where he
could come once in a while to see how she grew. He took the advice, and
Patty was planted in a convent school, where she has stayed till now, as
he never seemed ready to dig her up.

Just what Larry has done with himself meanwhile is not explained in this
first chapter of the romance, which is as far as we have got. All Patty
knows is that he left "_important business_" to dash over twice and see
her: once when she was thirteen, once again three years later. He was
"too handsome for words," and "the girls were all wild about him." Since
then, nothing doing--except letters and cheques. Apparently Larry was
under the impression that once a schoolgirl, always a schoolgirl.
Anyhow, he put off indefinitely the happy day when he could take his
fair young daughter to reign over his home. The Mother Superior wrote
when Pat was going to be eighteen, and Larry said he would come, but
didn't. Patty is sure he couldn't, because "he _adores_ her just as she
adores him," and is dying for the time when they can be together. At
last, owing to the war, all the older girls were leaving the school
except Patricia Moore; so Larry's memory had to be jogged, and this time
he opened his heart and sent for Pat. Dreadfully sorry he couldn't fetch
her himself, but gave _carte blanche_ for everything a girl could
possibly want in travelling, except a father.

I told you about the high-powered French motor car. Well, there's an
even higher powered French maid. She's the kind that you could describe
as "and suite," without the slightest snobbishness or exaggeration, when
registering your name in the visitors' book at a hotel. The car, which
Larry told Pat to buy for herself as a birthday present from him, is
forty horsepower, I believe; whereas I'm much mistaken if Angele isn't
about a hundred demon-power. She's geared terribly high, can "crank"
herself I should imagine, and has the smartest new type of body, all
glittering paint and varnish. Isn't it _nice_ that her name should be
Angele? It wasn't the Mother Superior who engaged this guardian angel
for Miss Moore, but the dear old Paris friend of Larry's who advised the
convent in the first place. Angele was _her_ maid, taken over from a
princess--an Albanian one, or something Balkanic or volcanic. The old
friend is a Marquise, and my opinion is that her genius lies in finding
safe harbours for incubuses (_is_ there such a word, or should it be
"incubi?"). Heaven knows what explosive thing may happen if the
high-powered Angele doesn't fancy her new garage and petrol.

Besides the car and the maid, Mademoiselle Patsey is bringing with her
to America a regular trousseau for her debut, which is to take place in
the grand manner. She won't let me see Larry's photograph because it
doesn't do him justice, and because she wants him to burst upon me as a
brilliant surprise; but she has shown me as much of the trousseau as her
stateroom and Angele's can contain. The rest's in the hold, and forms
quite a respectable cargo. If everything comes off as Patsey expects it
to do (and after all, as I said, why shouldn't it?) I do think that she
and her charm and her clothes are likely to dazzle New York. Nothing
prettier can have happened there or anywhere for a long time.

By the way, did _you_ ever hear of a Laurence Moore of Long Island,
whose place is called Kidd's Pines? There may be half a directory
bursting with Laurence Moores, but there can be only one with an address
like Kidd's Pines. It's named after a clump of pines supposed to be a
kind of landmark for treasure buried by Captain Kidd. Either the
treasure is buried under the trees, somewhere between their roots and
China, or the pines point to it. Can pines point? I don't see how they
can, any more than a pumpkin can point; but perhaps nobody else being
able to see is the reason why the treasure's never been found.

We haven't many young men on board. Most of the young men who travel are
going the other way just now; and that makes our Ship's Mystery more
conspicuous. One reason he's so conspicuous is because he's travelling
third class. (We used to call it steerage!) Maybe you'll say that
travelling third class doesn't usually make people mysterious: it makes
them smell of disinfectants. Also it puts them Beyond the Pale. Not
that I or any other nice woman can tell precisely what a Pale is. But
anyhow, if you go third class you have to show your tongue if the least
important person demands a sight of it. And if that doesn't put you
beyond Pales and everything else, I don't know what does.

That's why this man deserves such extraordinary credit for being
interesting and mysterious. Even if caught in the act of displaying his
tongue to the doctor, I believe you'd say, should you see a snapshot:
"Who _is_ that man?"

Now, haven't I worked up to him well? Don't you want to hear the rest?
Well, so do _we_. For we don't know anything at all, except that if we
go and gaze over the rail of the first-class part of this old-fashioned
tub of a ship, into the third-class part, we can generally observe a
young man who looks like an Italian prince (I mean, the way an Italian
prince _ought_ to look) telling the steerage children stories or
teaching them games. I'm not sure if he's exactly handsome, but there
must be something remarkable about him, or all the first-class
passengers wouldn't have begun asking each other or the ship's officers
or even the deck stewards on the first day out, the question I
suggested: "Who _is_ that man?"

I believe, by the by, it was a deck steward _I_ asked. I've always found
that they know everything. Or what they don't know they cook up more
excitingly than if bound to dull facts.

I added to the question aforesaid--"Who _is_ that man?"--another: "And
how _does_ he come to be in the steerage?"

It was the second question which got answered first. "I suppose, my
lady"--(Whiffitts will anticipate the far future by calling me "my
lady")--"that all his money was torpedoed."

This explanation raised such a _weird_ picture (can't you see the thing
happening?) that Whiffitts was obliged to begin at the beginning, and
not stop till he came to the end, my eager look a prophesied mine of
half-crowns.

Whiffitts simply loved telling me. It _is_ nice knowing something
somebody else doesn't know and is dying to! The name of the Ship's
Mystery is supposed to be Storm, Peter Storm. I say "supposed,"
advisedly. Because it may be _anything_. They don't worry with passenger
lists for third-class people; they're just a seething, nameless mass,
apparently. But anything remarkable bubbles up to the top, as in the
case of the alleged Peter Storm. Naturally, his fellow-passengers have
nicknamed him "The Stormy Petrel."

What is he really? we wonder. A jewel shines more brightly at night, and
perhaps it's the contrast between the Stormy Petrel and those
"fellow-passengers" of his which makes him look so very great a
gentleman, despite the fact that his clothes might have been bought at a
second hand--no, a fourth or fifth hand--shop. The creature wears
flannel shirts (he seems, thank heaven, to have several to change with,
of different colours) and they have low, turn-over collars. Apparently
all his neckties were torpedoed with his money, for he never sports one.
Instead, he ties himself up in red or black silk handkerchiefs, very
ancient and faded; and if you will believe me, my dear girl, the effect
is most _distinguished_!

I told you that he looks as an Italian prince ought to look and seldom
does; but he claims American citizenship. He sailed from New York in the
_Lusitania_, and was among those saved. Far from advertising this
adventure, the hero of it would apparently have kept silence if he
could; but it leaked out somehow in Ireland, Whiffits doesn't quite know
how. In any case, at the time of taking passage on the _Arabic_ back to
America, months later, paragraphs about the man's _Lusitania_ experience
appeared in the papers. He was catechized at the consulate when trying
to get a passport for the United States, and it came out then that there
was no Peter Storm on board the _Lusitania_. Our Mystery explained,
however, that in the third class there was a passenger registered as
"Peter Sturm." The name, according to him, was spelled wrongly at the
time. Nobody has since contradicted this statement, so it has been given
the benefit of the doubt. Once more the man's luck bobbed up on board
the _Arabic_, where he was saved again, and behaved well, rescuing a lot
of people. What he did in that way on the _Lusitania_ isn't known; but
the searchlight of fame was turned full upon him after the _Arabic_, and
has never ceased to play around his head. By the by, the said head was
wounded in the _Arabic_ affair, and bears a scar which runs down over
the left temple and is rather becoming. Also he got pneumonia from
exposure, and lay dangerously ill for some time. Several persons whose
lives he saved wanted to give him money, but he refused to accept. He
was nursed at a hospital in Ireland, and when he grew strong enough he
found work, in order to pay his own way to America. What he is going to
turn his hand to over there he doesn't seem to know, or won't tell.

We have a real live millionairess on the _Evangeline_ an American
millionairess from the West somewhere, a Mrs. Shuster. She's a widow,
about forty-five, common but kind. For "two twos" I believe she would
adopt the Stormy Petrel. She's been in Switzerland, where people used to
go to eat chocolate and see mountains, and where they now go to make
proposals of peace. I believe she made some, but nobody listened much,
so she came away disappointed and fiercely determined to do good
somewhere or know the reason why! She's a stout, wildly untidy woman
whose mouse-coloured hair is always coming down, though it's freely
dotted with irrelevant tortoise-shell combs; and whose elaborate clothes
look somehow insecure, the way scree does on the side of a mountain. Her
ideas leap out of her brain like rabbits out of holes, and then go
scuttling away again, to be followed ineffectively by others: and her
latest is benefiting the Ship's Mystery. She's sure he can't be
American, because Americans don't have eyes like wells of ink, and
short, close black beards like those of English or Italian naval
officers. Her theory is that he's a subject of some belligerent country,
who has conscientious scruples against fighting. The fact that he sailed
from New York on the _Lusitania_ last spring can't convince the lady
that she is wrong in her "deductions," as Sherlock Holmes would say. It
only complicates the mystery a little and adds ramifications.

To my mind, Mr. Storm hasn't at all the look of a man opposed to
fighting. I believe he would love it. The odd thing to me is, where
there's such wide opportunity on one side or the other, that he isn't
doing it. And Jack thinks so, too. I do hope he isn't a spy or an
anarchist, or a person who takes passage on ships to blow them up or
signal to submarines or something.

Of course I haven't suggested such horrors to Mrs. Shuster; and
yesterday she made up an exploring party for the steerage, so as to open
communications with the desired protege. The first officer had promised
to take her, and she asked me to join them. I happened to be talking to
Patsey Moore at the time, and saw by the way her eyes lighted that she
was dying to go, too. So I got her included in the invitation.

It was a lovely calm day, the long level lines of the sea punctuated
with porpoises, dear things like giant commas. A good many of the
third-class passengers were writing letters on their knees, and the
_quaintest_ paper. Among these was the Man of Mystery; and Mrs. Shuster
sailed up to him, billowing out in the breeze of her own enthusiasm.

"We've all heard of you," she said. "And the splendid things you did on
the _Arabic_."

Actually the man blushed! He rose up politely; and as he is very tall
and straight, rather thin, and extremely dark, he reminded me of a cedar
towering beside one of those squat Dutch trees cut into the shape of
some domestic animal.

"I really did nothing," he protested, with that guilty redness spreading
over his olive face, and making him more mysterious than ever. _Because
he had the air of being found out in something._ And the blush began
before Mrs. Shuster got as far as mentioning the _Arabic_. It was more
as if he were afraid she had met him before and recognized him.

"Well, other people are better judges of that than yourself," the dear
lady contradicted him. "I, and a lot more first-class passengers, feel
it's a shame you should be here. We want you to be up with _us_ and--and
telling us all about your adventures. The favour wouldn't be from us to
you, but the other way round, if you accepted the price of a cabin.
We're sure you're a gentleman----"

At that it was Patsey's and my turn to blush! It was such an awful thing
to say to the man, though the poor woman meant so blunderingly well. P.
and I were in the background--an easy place to be, because there's so
much of Mrs. Shuster. We weren't even a chorus, because we hadn't made a
sound or a gesture, and didn't intend to make one. But the colour effect
was unrehearsed and unavoidable. I felt a regular blush of red to the
head, as I used to say when I was small, and Pat grew scarlet as if
she'd been suddenly slapped. I expected to see the forked lightning of
scorn dart from those immense dark eyes of Storm's: but instead they
crinkled up in an engaging smile. One glance the man gave Pat and me,
against his own will I think: but it was a spontaneous combustion of his
sense of humour. It struck a spark to ours, and I dared to smile also.
Pat didn't quite dare, but looked relieved, though still evidently
scared about what might come next, and intensely, painfully interested.

"Thank you very much," said Mr. Storm. "I'm afraid you flatter me,
madam. I make no such pretension. It's kind of you to think of promoting
me, but this is my place. I shouldn't feel at home going first class, I
assure you. I haven't either the manners or the clothes to make me
comfortable there."

"Why, I think your manners are _beautiful_," that miserable
millionairess assured him, while my mouth felt dry, and I'm sure
Patsey's became arid as the Libyan Desert.

"We'll all risk that, if you'll come and entertain us with stories of
your adventures. As for clothes, I can take up a collection for you from
among the gentlemen of the first class. A shirt here, a coat there.
They'd be delighted."

"Thank you again," responded the victim, still smiling. "But I should
be--a misfit. And I haven't a story worth telling. I'm no Scherezade.
I'm very grateful for your interest, madam, but my best way of showing
it is to stay where I am--and where I belong."

"You're ever so much too modest," the unfortunate lady persisted. "Isn't
he, Mrs. Winston?"

I prickled all over like a cactus. "I think Mr. Petrel--I mean Mr.
Storm--can decide for himself better than we can," I stammered.

He looked at me, and then beyond me at Pat. "I'm _really_ grateful," he
repeated.

Even Mrs. Shuster understood that the rare plant preferred to remain in
the kitchen garden with the vegetables, and that she could not uproot
it.

"Well," she said reluctantly, "I'm sorry you feel that way. But do let
me do _something_ to--to show my appreciation of your gallant conduct on
the _Arabic_. You're evidently a man of education. I see that, in spite
of all you say. It isn't true, is it, that you're an American?"

"Quite true, madam," he answered coolly. "Do I speak like a foreigner?"

"Not like a _foreigner_, exactly. But--well, I don't know. I must take
your word for it. I guess, though, you've spent a good deal of time in
other countries?"

"I've been here and there," he admitted. "I had the craze for travel in
my blood as a boy." As he spoke, he smiled again, as if at some odd
memory.

"I dare say you know several languages?" suggested Mrs. Shuster.

"Oh, I've picked up Russian--and a little French, and Italian, and
Spanish."

"You ought to get quite a good position, then."

"I intend to try."

"But they say it's almost impossible to find work anywhere now, without
influence," she went on. "Have _you_ got influence?"

"None whatever, madam."

Her face brightened. She'd have been bitterly disappointed if he had
answered differently! "Well, we'll see what I can do for you on land,
since you won't accept anybody's assistance on water," chirped the
benefactress. "With your knowledge of languages, you might help me in my
Propaganda." (The way she spoke that word spelt it with a capital.)

The Stormy Petrel flushed up again, whether with annoyance or
embarrassment or a mad desire to laugh, I couldn't decide. He murmured
that she was very kind, but that he wouldn't trouble her. She must have
many people to look after, and he would be all right in one way or
another. He wasn't afraid.

"No, indeed, I'm sure you're never afraid of _anything_!" protested Mrs.
Shuster, breathless with enthusiasm. But at this moment the officer who
was our guide felt that the limit had been reached, even for a
millionairess. He hinted that there was more to see of third-class life,
and moved us on when our leading lady had offered a royal handshake to
the steerage hero. She would no doubt have pinned a V. C. on his breast
if she had had one handy, but was obliged to content herself with
screaming out reassurances as we were torn away: "I won't forget you. I
shall see you again, and suggest something _definite_."

Of course we didn't want to see more third-class life but we had to
pretend to. We saw where the poor dears (Mrs. Shuster called them poor
dears) slept and bathed (if at all) and ate. After a boring ten or
fifteen minutes we were returning by the way we had come, when a sheet
of paper blew along the deck. It made straight for me as if asking to be
saved, and I saved it; otherwise it would have fluttered into the sea.

Somebody had just begun writing on the paper with one of those blue
indelible pencils such as soldiers use in the trenches. There were two
or three lines along the top of the page, and they jumped right at my
eyes, though of course I didn't mean to read them--"in case you don't
get the wireless. You must see him and make him understand that this
can't go on. Men rose from the dead in old days. What has been done
before can be done again. Warn him that----"

There the sentence broke off.

I was thrilled. It was as if a door suddenly flew open in front of a
dull house in a slummy street, to show for an instant a scene of
splendour, and then slammed shut on your prying nose.

Of course I _knew_ the paper was Storm's, and the handwriting his (a
strong, educated hand) because there simply wasn't anybody else in that
crowd capable of it. But, as I told you, several of the steerage
passengers were taking advantage of the smooth weather to write letters;
and, as it happened, our Mystery was no longer engaged in writing. He'd
stuffed his pad and pencil into a pocket of his awful coat when the good
ship Shuster first bore down on him under full sail. Now, on our return,
he was standing at some distance pointing out porpoises to passengers
and rather conspicuously not seeing us. I couldn't yell, "Mr. Storm,
you've lost part of a letter you were writing!" But I thought it was the
sort of letter he wouldn't want knocking about, so I said in a loud
voice to our attendant officer, "Oh, somebody has dropped a sheet of
paper with writing on it!"

I expected Storm to start dramatically, feel in his pocket, and perhaps
claim his property with a keen glance at my face to see whether I had
read anything. I intended of course to put on what Jack calls my "rag
doll expression," one which I find most useful in social intercourse.
But the man didn't start. He could not have helped hearing my siren
hoot, but he never turned a hair or anything else. He went on pointing
out perfectly irrelevant porpoises. I had to admire his nerve! For
instantly I seemed to read the inner workings of his mind, and
understood that he'd deliberately decided not to claim the paper. He
guessed that I'd read the exciting words, and his mental message to me
was: "Do what you like, my dear madam, and be d----."

I called out again for whom it might concern, "Somebody's lost part of a
letter!" but no one took any interest in the announcement, so I added,
with an eye on the back of the Mystery's neck, "Well, I suppose there's
no use keeping it." I crumpled the paper into a ball, and tossed it over
the rail where it couldn't be missed by the eye of Mr. Storm.

"He'll be glad to know I'm not showing it about, or brooding over it
like a bit of a jigsaw puzzle," I thought. But the eye I wished to catch
remained glued to the porpoises, and only they could tell whether it
darkened with dread or twinkled with suppressed laughter. Even Mrs.
Shuster hadn't the "cheek" to try and attract the man's attention, and
we returned to our own class thanking our conductor for "all the
interesting things he had shown us." I wondered if he knew that while we
spoke in plural we thought in singular!

"The _dreadful_ old lady will never let go of that poor fellow till
she's ruined all the romance, and made him a respectable paid propaganda
or something!" sighed Patsey Moore when we were tucked into our deck
chairs once more.

I laughed, but saw that she was quite serious, almost tragic. One of her
charms is her funny English. She's lived in France and talked French so
long that she has to translate herself into English, so to speak; and
sometimes she has the quaintest conception of how to do it. Also she
rolls her "rs"; and if the Mystery had heard himself alluded to by her
as a "pr-r-opoganda" he would never have forgotten it. As for Mrs.
Shuster--she mightn't have minded the Maxim gun of that long-drawn
"d-r-r-_read_ful!" but her very vitals would have melted over the "old
lady." Despite her largeness and oddness of appearance generally, she
considers herself a _young_ widow, with a personal fascination beyond
that of her banking account. I, with the mellow leniency of--let me
see?--twenty-six, find this pathetic. But Patsey on the sunny slope of
nineteen can't even envisage my viewpoint. For her, a woman over thirty
is middle-aged. When she's forty she is old, and there's an end of it.
How much the poor baby has to learn! I hope she won't do it in being
outrivalled with her best young man some day, by a dazzling siren of
forty-five who knows all the tricks of the trade and looks younger than
any respectable woman ought to look at half that age!

_March 19th_.

I was interrupted there, and I seem to have done nothing else but be
interrupted ever since, either by big bumpy Mrs. Shuster, or some one,
or else by big bumpy waves which make me want not to write letters. At
this moment Patsey is calling "Oh, _do_ come and look at the Statue of
Liberty! I thought I remembered her twice that size and twice as
handsome!"

Dearest Mercedes, I must go at once and browbeat Jack (who's never seen
the lady you know) into admiring her at pain of losing my love.

                      Ever your affectionate

                                                              MOLLY.




II

THE HONBLE MRS. WINSTON TO HER FRIEND THE COUNTESS OF LANE


                                     _Awepesha_, _Long Island_,
                                                      _March 21st._

You dear, to send us such a nice expensive cablegram! We found it
waiting when we arrived. Of course the name of the place limped out of
England hopelessly mutilated. But how could a British telegraph operator
be expected to spell Awepesha? The name is more American than the United
States, being Indian; and meaning "it calms." Belonging to Long Island,
it is Algonquian of course. Don't you think that rather a nice name for
a place on a shady shore by quiet waters, where fierce winds never blow,
and soft mists often make you look at the world as through an opal? It's
an appropriate name, too, because poor Cousin John Randolph Payton, who
died and left Awepesha to me, built it after separating from a Xantippe
wife who made his life a Nell.

Everything is sweet; and the large white house has the calmest face you
ever saw: wide-apart eyes, and a high, broad forehead, under drooping
green hair--elm hair. Jack loves it. He says I mustn't dream of selling,
as he rather thought it would be wise to do, before he saw my legacy.
Now his feeling is that even if we don't spend more than two months out
of twenty-four at the place, we simply _must_ keep it for ours. You
know we were married abroad, and this is Jack's first sight of anything
Colonial. When I used to talk about a house being "Colonial," it left
him cold. He had an idea that to the trained eye of a true Englishman
"Colonial" would mean debased Georgian. But now he admits--he's a
darling about admitting things, which I hear is a rare virtue in
husbands!--that there's a delicious uniqueness about an American
Colonial house not to be found anywhere or in anything else the world
over. It is, he thinks, as if America had spiritualized the Georgian era
and expressed it in terms of airy lightness unknown to the solid Georges
themselves. Of course, our home isn't _quite_ the real thing, but a
copy. It's forty years old, whereas Kidd's Pines--but oh, my dear, that
_reminds_ me! You'd never believe what has happened to that poor child,
Patricia Moore, whom I "starred" in my ship's letter to you. When I
wrote, she seemed on the topmost crest of the wave. "Poor" was the
_last_ adjective I should have selected to describe her position in
life.

Compared with her, _nothing_ has happened to Jack and me. All we've done
since I posted that letter on the dock (waiting for the kindest pet of a
custom-house man) can be expressed in three words, _veni_, _vidi_,
_vici_. We came, we saw, we conquered--or anyhow took possession. It's
much the same thing. But Patsey! Her world has turned upside down, and
Jack and I are trying with all our wills and wits to turn it right side
up again. The Mystery Man is entangled in the scheme, too, in a weird
way. But I must begin at the beginning, or I shall get tangled myself.

Pat put on a smart Paris frock to land in, and meet "Larry": also hat.
She looked a dream, and felt one. Every woman did her best in the
clothes line (I don't mean a pun), but Mrs. Shuster transcended us all.
You can't _think_ what she was like in one of the new-fashioned dresses,
and a close-winged hat with a long stick-out thing behind exactly the
shape and size of a setting hen. You may imagine a description of Mrs.
Shuster irrelevant to Patsey Moore's fate and the entangling of the
Mystery Man: but you'll see in a few minutes that this is not so. Our
dear millionairess had been "making up" to Pat as well as to Jack and me
a good deal, for several days before landing; and you know how Jack and
I just _can't_ be rude to fellow human beings and take steps to shed
them, no matter how we are bored. I inherited this lack of _shaden
freude_ from dear father, and Jack has inherited it from me. At least,
he says he didn't mind how much he hurt pushing people until I softened
his heart beyond repair, and turned it into a sort of cushion for any
creature needing sanctuary.

When we saw the Dove of Peace (her nickname on board) preening herself
in clothes which would have made the Queen of Sheba "look like thirty
cents," I was weak enough to breathe the desired words of admiration.
"Gorgeous" was, I think, my adjective; and it was no fib.

The poor dear was pleased, and volunteered the information that she'd
"dressed up to kill" for a particular purpose.

"It's really for my protege's sake," she explained. "I marconied my
friend Mr. Caspian to meet me. You know, _the_ Caspian--Ed Caspian,
who's come into the Stanislaws' fortune. I think I've told you I know
him _very_ well?"

(She had indeed. If she'd told us once she'd told us a dozen times. I
longed to say so. But one doesn't say to Mrs. Shuster the things one
longs to say. She would go to bed and die if one did.)

"I've wired him to meet me at the boat, because I thought I'd interest
him in brave Peter Storm," she went on. "That poor fellow's so quixotic
he won't take favours from a woman. But he can't refuse a helping hand
from a man like Ed Caspian."

"Have you told Mr. Storm what you're going to do for him?" I ventured to
inquire.

"Not yet," said Mrs. Shuster, slowly and conspicuously covering with
gloves a pair of hands more ringed than Saturn. "I thought I'd surprise
him. You see, he's persuaded the authorities that he's an American
(though you know what _I_ think!), so he's no emigrant, but a returning
citizen of the United States. That's what his passport makes him out to
be. I've seen it. I asked to. He'll be getting off the ship with the
rest of us, and I shall just say, 'Mr. Storm, I want you to have a
little talk with Mr. Caspian, the great social philanthropist.'"

"I see!" I responded inadequately. "But I thought, judging from the
newspapers, that Mr. Caspian had--er--turned over a new leaf since he
tumbled into all that money."

(You've read, I suppose, Mercedes mia, about the change in the White
Hope of the socialists when suddenly he found himself the tenth richest
man in America? I'd never met him myself, till the day of our landing:
I've been on the other side of the water so much since Jack and I were
married and father died. But one has often heard of Ed Caspian, the
"gentleman socialist," the shining light of settlement workers. And
since this money came to him several friends have written that it was
sad--or funny, according to the point of view--to see how he'd altered.)

"It's only the gutter papers that print those horrid stories," Mrs.
Shuster reproached me. "Why, they say things against _Me_ sometimes!
They say all I do is for self-advertisement. Did you ever hear such a
wicked lie? But we Public Characters have to put up with a lot. It's our
martyrdom. _I_ know Ed Caspian through and through. At one time--" (she
blushed and bridled as only a fat woman with two or three chins can
bridle, and I understood what she wished me to understand, though Ed
Caspian can't be more than thirty-two, and she's perhaps
forty-five)--"at one time--oh, well, he was a poor young man with noble
principles, and I'm always interested in such. My poor husband left me
free to do as I liked at his death, and I was able to help several
institutions Mr. Caspian was working for. I've been in Europe since he
got his money; but I have perfect faith in him. He's richer than I am
now, by a long shot, but he used to say he'd do anything to prove his
gratitude. It's up to him to prove it to-day. I sent him a long telegram
from Sandy Hook, and, by the by, mentioned you and the Honble Captain
Winston."

Jack is attacked with acute goosefleshitis whenever she calls him that,
but I think it's pathetic, she relishes the word "Honourable" so much,
and makes it sound round and fat in her mouth like a big chocolate
cream. Of course, Jack and I are quite _nobodies_; but it did occur to
me when in the same breath she said, "Ed would do anything," etc., and
"I mentioned you," that Mr. Caspian might know about Jack's father; and
that he might find it better worth while bothering to meet Lord
Brighthelmston's son than merely to prove his gratitude to a
benefactress no longer needed.

Well, anyhow, the not very good ship _Evangeline_ steamed slowly to her
wharf at an early hour of the morning, and Patsey Moore and Mrs. Shuster
were two of the most excited people on board. Jack and I expected no one
to meet us, because purposely we had let no one know. So we were not
desperately emotional for our own sakes. But we were for Pat's.

"In a minute we'll see Larry!" she kept exclaiming. And her cheeks were
like roses and her eyes like sapphires--literally, sapphires.

We all gazed at the welcoming, waving crowd; but as the mass
individualized into faces, male and female, there was nothing admirable
enough for Larry. Pat gave up hope almost as willingly as a lioness in
the Zoo would give up her food at half-past feeding time. But at last
she had to bow to the inevitable. Larry had not materialized. She was in
"M" and we were in "W," so we couldn't do as much for her as we should
have liked, and for a while had to leave her to the tender mercies of
her maid. It was a relief to my mind, therefore, when I saw Mrs. Shuster
introducing a man--Mr. Caspian I had no doubt--to the girl. Hurrying
back to "S," she saw me peering out from "W" and flew to me,
breathless.

"He came, you see!" she panted. "Dear fellow! He's just the same. Not
one bit spoilt. But oh, what _do_ you think he's told me--about Miss
Moore's father?"

"Not dead?" I breathed.

"Worse!" She stopped to pant some more. I could have shaken her.

"Don't keep me in suspense," I begged. But the lady's eyes had lit upon
her protege. "There's Peter Storm!" she exclaimed. "I've been watching
for him. I was afraid he might get away without seeing me."

He certainly was in the act of getting away, though I wasn't so sure
about the rest. "Mr. Storm!" she cried. "Mr. Storm!"

He was forced to turn. Mrs. Shuster beckoned. He came toward us, though
not with the long strides which had been leading him in another
direction. He took off his cap, bowed gravely, and murmured something
about having a man to meet.

(Jack was absent on leave, searching for some one to look at our
trunks.)

"Oh, Mr. Storm," said his guardian angel, "I wouldn't have missed you
for anything. But I was afraid you might have misunderstood my message.
I've sent for a very important man, a great friend of mine, to introduce
you to--Mr. Ed Caspian. He won't be long now. But when I mentioned Miss
Moore, the young lady on the ship, and pointed her out to him, he told
me the most dreadful news about her father. The poor man is absolutely
ruined and bankrupt and everything else that's bad; and here's this dear
child with trunkfuls of clothes and a motor car to pay duty on. Mr.
Caspian was _so_ interested when he saw her (that shows he's as
good-hearted as ever in spite of the newspapers!), and he's ready to do
anything to help, even to paying all the duties."

Half-forgotten gossip hopped into my mind like a toad. Somebody had
shown me a paragraph in a scandal-loving American paper about the
"change of heart" Ed Caspian had undergone with his change of purse.
"Oh, he can't be allowed to do anything of that sort for Miss Moore," I
said quickly. "Her father must have heaps of friends who--and anyhow,
_we_ shall look after her. I do hope Mr. Caspian isn't telling the poor
child about her father's troubles?"

"Well, he offered to break the news to her gently," confessed Mrs.
Shuster, looking guilty. "I told him she was so worried about Mr. Moore
not coming to the boat. I'm sure Mr. Caspian wouldn't say a word to
frighten her. He's as gentle as a fawn. I always found him so. And we'll
_all_ do things to help dear little Miss Moore. We'll club together; I'd
love to."

I hardly heard. Without a thought of answering I dashed off to the
rescue of Pat. But I was conscious, as I dashed, that the Ship's Mystery
had given me a look. Not a word had he spoken since Mrs. Shuster began
on the subject of Patsey Moore (not that he'd had a chance), but the
look was one which nobody, no matter how preoccupied, could _help_ being
conscious of--it was so brilliant and so strange.

On the way to Patsey I caught sight of Jack in the distance and diverged
to him. "I'll get hold of a man in a minute," he said, thinking I'd
grown impatient.

"Never mind a man!" I snapped. "Never mind anything!"

"Not even your hats?" he laughed.

"_Hang_ my hats! Oh, Jack, Pat's father's ruined, and that Caspian
creature is telling her--unless we can stop him. Do come!"

Jack came. But we were too late. The roses on Pat's cheeks were already
snowed under when we hurled ourselves at "M." They both turned as we
came up, she and he together. I wasted only one glance on Mr.
Caspian--just enough to see that he was a small man perfectly turned out
by his tailor and fairly well by his Maker: all the upper part of a
blond head and face rather beautiful and idealistic, the lower part not
so good, might even be a rude contradiction. Then my eyes went to Pat's,
which were more sapphire-like than ever, because they glittered behind
tears that she'd have died rather than let fall. By not winking she had
induced the tear-vessels to take back a few, and the process would go on
satisfactorily, I was sure, if nothing untoward intervened.

"Have you and Mr. Winston met Mr. Caspian?" she asked, as formally as at
a school reception for teaching young girls How to Succeed in Society.
Her lips were white and moved stiffly, as lips do when they are cold,
though the day was mild as milk. "Mr. Caspian says he knows Larry
slightly, and--and--that he's in great trouble."

"I'm awfully sorry to be a bearer of ill tidings," Ed Caspian defended
himself to Jack and me, "but Miss Moore was worrying--when Mrs. Shuster
introduced us--because her father hadn't come to meet her, and I thought
it would perhaps be best----"

Well, I won't bother you, Mercedes, dear, with all the "we saids" and
"he saids." We--that is, Jack and I--soon realized that Caspian knew
what he knew about "Larry's" affairs by hearsay, or from the newspapers.
He was scarcely acquainted with Larry himself: had only met him at
houses of mutual friends. Laurence Moore had come a regular cropper, it
seemed. Things had been faring badly with him for some time "because he
was no business man, and fellows were always persuading him to go into
rotten things." "But we'll see him through, Miss Moore, we'll see him
through," Mr. Caspian finished up. "Don't be unhappy. And I see in the
papers that the fine old house is yours and can't be sold. Your father
made it over to you legally, years ago. So that's all right, isn't it?"

"Have--have things been in the papers about us?" asked Pat. The tears
had been put neatly back where they belonged, without one dropping out,
and she looked pitifully brave--ready for anything, no matter what. She
didn't know enough about the world to resent anything Caspian had said.
On the contrary, she was probably thinking he meant to be kind--showing
himself a good friend of Larry's and all that. Of course I realized from
the first that the instant he saw Pat the man simply snapped at her. If
indeed he had the intention of helping Larry it had been born in his
mind within the last fifteen minutes, and whatever he might do would be
for value received. Not that it was quite fair to blame him for that.
With another type of man I might have thought it thrillingly romantic
that he should fall in love at first sight and resolve to save the
girl's father. But with Ed Caspian it was different--somehow. You see,
he used to pose as a saint, a sort of third-rate St. George, with
Society for the Dragon: he was all for the poor and oppressed. I
remember reading speeches of his, in rather prim language. He was
supposed to live like an anchorite. Now, here was St. George turned into
his own Dragon. What an unnatural transformation! He, who had said
luxury was hurrying the civilized world to destruction, wore a pearl in
his scarf-pin worth thousands of dollars if it was worth a cent. He had
all the latest slang of a Bond Street Nut. (By the way, over here when
one talks of a "nut" it doesn't mean a swell, but a youth who is what
they'd call "dotty" or "bunny on the 'umph" in a London music hall.) And
though his eyebrows still had that heavenly arch which must have made
his early reputation, the rest of him didn't look heavenly at all.

If I'd been a sensible matchmaker, I ought to have said to myself,
perhaps, "Never mind, my dear Molly, beggars mustn't be choosers. Pat
is, it seems, a beggar maid. You shouldn't look a gift Cophetua in the
mouth. Here he is, to be had for the taking. Encourage her to take him."

But I just _couldn't_! I wanted her by and by to marry some one tall and
handsome and altogether splendid. In fact, a _Man_. And if a man were a
Man, it didn't matter whether he were a Cophetua or not. So I listened
quite disgustedly as Mr. Ed Caspian answered Pat's piteous question
about the newspapers, and criticised his affected accent. I think he
fancied it English.

"Oh, it happens to lots of the best men," he set out to console her, "to
be in the papers that way. There's nothing in it! I shouldn't have
noticed, had it been some chap I'd never heard of. And then, Kidd's
Pines, don't you know! That's a famous place. There was a picture of it
in the Sunday _Times_, and something about its history. I've always
wanted to see the house. May I come down, Miss Moore? There might be
ways I could help you--your father, I mean--if I could look around and
study the situation. For instance, it might pay me--actually _pay_ me
(no question of obligations)--to lend money on the place enough to set
Mr. Moore right with his creditors and enough over to begin again."

"I don't understand," said Pat.

"Oh, you _spider_!" said I, in my mind, also perhaps with my eyes. I
refrained from saying it with my lips, however, because after all, you
see, I was a new friend of Pat's and mustn't stick my fingers into the
mechanism of her fate without being sure I could improve its working.
Jack and I aren't millionaires, especially since the war broke out and
all our pet investments slumped. That convalescent home for soldiers
we're financing at Folkestone eats up piles of money, to say nothing of
the Belgian refugees to whom we've given up Edencourt. There are
fourteen families, and not less than seven children in the smallest, the
largest has sixteen--the average is ten. Is your brain equal to the
calculation? Mine isn't, but our purse _has_ to be; for we've guaranteed
to clothe as well as feed the lot for the duration of the war, and I
hear we're keeping a shoe factory working double time. I felt that the
most we could do in a financial way for dear Pat would be to pay duty on
her car and clothes, and see that, personally, she lacked for nothing.
Whatever Mr. Caspian's motives might be, I dared not choke him off on
my own responsibility, and Jack said not a word. So I swallowed that
"spider," but just as I was choking it down and Caspian was beginning to
explain his noble, disinterested scheme, Mrs. Shuster and the S. M. (for
that in future please read Ship's Mystery) bore down upon the letter
"M."

For an instant I supposed that Pirate Shuster had captured Storm as a
reluctant prize, but his expression told me that this was not the case.
He came willingly, had even the air of leading the expedition; and his
look of interested curiosity Caspian-ward was only equalled by mine at
him. Remembering vividly the strange, brilliant, and puzzling glance he
had thrown to me as I left him with Mrs. Shuster, I threw him one which
I hoped was as brilliant and at the same time more intelligible. What I
put into it was: "You're a _man_, even if you are a mystery, so do hurry
up and interrupt this conversation, which has got beyond me."

Of course, I didn't dream that he could help by word or deed, but I
thought if he just hurled himself blindly into the breach it would be
something. By the time Mr. Caspian could renew his offer, Larry Moore
might be at hand to look after his own interests and Pat's.

Mr. Peter Storm (perhaps I've mentioned this?) is tall and has therefore
very long legs--soldier legs--that is, they can take prodigious strides
as if they had a redoubt or something to carry in record time. Whether
my glance had lassoed him, or whether he _wanted_ to be introduced to
Mrs. Shuster's rich friend, I couldn't tell. Anyhow, he landed among us
like an arrow shot from an unseen bow, and "Jill came tumbling after."
(By the way, "Jill" would be a lovely name for Mrs. S. I believe her
real one is _Lily_.)

Mr. Caspian had to stop talking and turn to the newcomers; but before he
stopped his explanation had got as far as "a perfectly businesslike
arrangement: a mortgage on the place could be----"

I wondered if Peter Storm's ears were as quick of hearing as they were
well shaped; and if so whether he would guess what was up, and take
enough impersonal interest in a pretty girl far removed from his sphere
to be sorry for her.

Mrs. Shuster's first words went far to answer that question. "Oh, my
dear Captain and Mrs. Winston, Mr. Storm suggests the most wonderful
plan. I was telling him more about poor Miss Moore's troubles--all I'd
heard from Mr. Caspian--and it seems he knows about Kidd's Pines, dear
Miss Patty's beautiful place which is her own in spite of all
misfortunes." She stopped and giggled a little; then went on in a coy
tone, with an arch glance at her tall protege. "I had to confess that I
could never believe he was an American. But now I have to. He knows too
much about America not to have lived here. He says he used to keep a
winter hotel in Florida, and he knows all about the business. He thinks
Miss Moore might make a fortune turning Kidd's Pines into a hotel--the
right kind of hotel. Isn't it a _wonderful_ idea, to help her poor
father? Oh, I forgot! Mr. Caspian, Mr. Storm! I was telling you about
him, Eddy."

The two men acknowledged the introduction, inapropos as it was. They
were the most extraordinary contrast to one another: the important
Caspian in his pluperfect clothes, looking insignificant; the
unimportant Storm in his junk-shop get-up, looking extraordinarily
significant. _He_, an ex-hotel-keeper! It was a blow to mystery. Yet I
didn't lose interest. Somehow I felt more.

"I shouldn't know how to keep a hotel, should I?" faltered Patsey, in
her childlike voice.

"You'd have to get expert assistance," said the S. M.

"I asked Mr. Storm if he would be free to give advice, and--and perhaps
do _more_," broke in Mrs. Shuster. "I've persuaded him to reconsider his
first decision. He's now promised to begin over here as my secretary
till he gets something better to do. And, dear Miss Patty, I'll be just
_delighted_ to come as your first guest, to bring you _luck_, if you
approve of the idea. I haven't any home. I intended to live at the
Waldorf and look around. But from what I hear, nobody need ever look
farther than Kidd's Pines, if things there are managed the right way."

"I don't think Miss Moore will need to turn her wonderful old historic
place into an inn," said Ed Caspian acidly. "I, too, have a plan,
haven't I, Miss Moore? And with all respect to our friend Mrs. Shuster,
it's just as practical and a good deal pleasanter than hers."

"Not mine, Eddy: Mr. Storm's," the lady hastened to disclaim
responsibility at the first buffet.

"Ah, Mr. Storm's," amended Eddy, trying to look down on the S. M. (Have
you ever seen a pet fox terrier or a dachshund with a bone, try to look
down on a wandering collie unprovided with bone? Well!...)

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Caspian," I ventured, "but I don't see how your
plan is quite as 'practical' as the other. Interest has to be paid on a
mortgage, and if it can't be paid, why it's foreclosed, both in real
life and Irish melodramas where the lovely heroine has the most
agonizing alternatives offered her. Suppose, anyhow, we just let Mr.
Storm tell us--since he's an expert--what he means by the 'right way' of
turning Kidd's Pines into a hotel. Maybe he means something very
special."

"I do," replied the S. M. "I mean what is called an 'exclusive'
hotel--especially exclusive in its prices. If people think it difficult
to get in, they'll all fight to do so." He looked at Pat. "I hope you
won't think I'm pushing," he said, "I remember Kidd's Pines when I was a
boy. I thought it was the most beautiful place I ever saw. I've seen a
good many since then; but I still think the same."

A little colour crept back to Pat's cheeks. "Why!" she exclaimed,
evidently forgetting her troubles for an instant, as Atlas might if some
one lifted up the world to ease his shoulders. "Why, do you know when I
first met you, I had a feeling as if I'd seen you before somewhere--a
long time ago. Did we ever meet when I was a little girl? I seem to
associate you with--with my father, as if you'd been a friend of his?"

"No, I was never a friend of his," said the S. M., quietly. "He wouldn't
know the name of Storm from the name of Adam."

My brain worked wildly as he made this answer. I thought--perhaps I
imagined it--that he looked suddenly as stormy as his name. I remembered
the sheet of paper that had fluttered to me, the day we went to visit
the third class--part of a letter which, rightly or wrongly, I had
attributed to Peter Storm. Could it be possible that he had known about
Larry Moore's wild speculations and other foolishnesses?--that he had
some hold over Moore?--that he had wanted to send him a warning which
would now be too late?

There was nothing to put such wild ideas into my head, except the
sudden, really _very_ odd look in the man's expressive dark eyes--a look
I couldn't help associating with the talk about Laurence Moore.

"But I'm a friend of the house," Mr. Storm was going on to explain.
"There was a story I read once--almost the first after I learned to read
and could enjoy myself with a book. It was called 'Cade of Kidd's
Pines': a great tale for boys."

"Oh, and for girls, too!" cried Pat. "An uncle of mine wrote that book.
It was dedicated to----"

"I've read it!" chipped in Ed Caspian, not to be outdone by any Storm.
"What fellow hasn't? I've given it away for prizes to boys in mission
schools. To my mind it would be a shame to make a common hotel out of
such a place as Kidd's Pines."

"I don't suggest making a common hotel," said the S. M. The two gazed at
each other, the S. M. with a resolutely impersonal look, Caspian with as
rude a stare as his sainted eyebrows would permit. "A good thing,"
thought I, "that you've reconsidered and taken Mrs. Shuster's offer, for
you'd never squeeze one out of Caspian even if you'd accept it--which
you wouldn't!"

While I was thinking, Jack spoke. "Shall we hold a council of war?" he
proposed. "You're all interested in finding some way for Miss Moore and
her father out of their troubles. We're interested, too, but we must
consult Mr. Moore himself before we can decide anything definite. For
some reason he hasn't been able to come to the ship: a business reason
probably. My wife and I are going to be neighbours of Miss Moore. We'll
take her to Kidd's Pines, and if it's better for her to stay with us for
a while we shall only be too happy. Anyhow, we invite you to Awepesha
this afternoon; you, Mrs. Shuster----"

"And Mr. Storm, my new secretary?" she broke in coyly.

"Of course. We hope Mr. Storm will come and elaborate this interesting
hotel scheme of his. I shouldn't wonder if there were something in it."

"Do I share the invitation?" asked Caspian. "Don't forget that I have a
scheme, too!"

"Delighted!" said Jack, making no allusion to the latter "scheme."

When he got me alone, under pretext of going back to "W" for the
examination of our luggage, we hastily counted up what money we had
between us, in order to regulate Pat's affairs at the custom house
without delay and without mortification to her. Even before the blow
fell, she had given Jack the bills for the Paris purchases, so that he
might help her calculate the sums which must be paid. "Larry always
writes that he has no head for figures," she had said, "so if Captain
Winston and I know what's to be done it will save time and gray matter.
All poor Larry will have to do is to hand over the right change."

She spoke lightly of "change," having been brought up to know little
difference between pounds and pence. Even now when the blow had fallen,
and fallen hard, happiness was so much more natural to her than
unhappiness that she was already cheered by our suggestions. It seemed
to her that everything must soon "come right." I believe she was more
anxious to comfort Larry and show him what a tower of strength she could
be to him than anything else. The first thought in many girls' heads
would have been: "Here's an end of my good times before they've begun!"
but I'm sure there was no place in Pat's mind for her own grievances. I
fancied that she'd even forgotten those dresses for the debutante who
might now never "debut," and the birthday car which might appropriately
be named the "White Elephant." Indeed I hoped she would forget, so that
Jack might pay the duty and escape protests or gratitude. But the girl
had a more practical side to her nature than I'd supposed. Just as Jack
and I had finished our calculations by discovering that we hadn't enough
ready money to settle up with the customs for ourselves and Pat, the
Stormy Petrel "hovered in the offing."

"Miss Moore asked me to find you," he said, "and ask you not to pay duty
for her things, as she thinks they'd better be sold for what they'll
fetch, so the Paris trades-people may be paid without worrying her
father."

"My gracious!" I exclaimed. "I never thought of that! She gave my
husband the bills. I took it for granted _they'd_ been paid, at least!"

"It seems not," said the S. M. "I suppose the trades-folk considered Mr.
Moore's name a good one. The French have an almost pathetic faith in
Americans." (I wondered how he knew that!) "But," he went on more
slowly, "I should have liked to suggest to Miss Moore, if I'd dared,
that she ought to stick to her car if she's going to keep a hotel. It
might be useful."

"Of course she must stick to it," Jack agreed, "and to her poor little
bits of finery. We'll see to all that, and the Paris people shan't
suffer. I'm afraid these custom-house chaps won't be keen on taking my
cheque, as they don't know me, but later will do, perhaps. They won't
make a fuss----"

"I can let you have a thousand dollars if it would be any good," said
the surprising Storm, taking from a breast pocket of his cheap
ready-made coat an ancient leather wallet, which looked as if it might
have belonged to Cain or Abel.

"Oh, then all your money _wasn't_ torpedoed!" I blurted out before I
knew that I was thinking aloud. Then I blushed furiously and wished that
the most top-heavy skyscraper in New York would fall on my head. But the
S. M. only laughed. "It was not," he replied. "When a man hasn't much he
sticks to what he's got a good deal closer than a brother. My savings
and I escaped together."

This made him seem to me even more mysterious than before, if possible.
A man travelling steerage, _plastered_ with bank-notes! But, I reminded
myself, he had a right to be Spartan if he liked: there was no crime in
that, and if he'd _stolen_ the money he wouldn't be likely to mention
its existence, even for the sake of as pretty a girl as Patricia Moore.

I hardly expected Jack to accept the loan, but he promptly did, and when
I saw how pleased, almost grateful, Peter Storm looked, a flash of
intuition made clear Jack's tactics. Just because the S. M. was what he
was, and wore what he wore, the dear boy treated him as man to man. I
_do_ think men are nice, don't you?... All the same, for a minute I came
near doing Mr. Storm an injustice. I suspected him of wanting Pat to
hear what he had done: but no, on the contrary. He asked us both to
promise that the matter shouldn't be mentioned to her.

"I've done nothing," he said. "I shall get my money back from you in a
day or two." And he handed over to Jack ten one-hundred-dollar bills
which I suppose went down with him in the _Lusitania_ and the _Arabic_,
and bobbed up again. I couldn't help seeing that when they came out they
left his wallet as empty as the whale after it had disgorged Jonah. I
did hope he had pennies in other pockets, or that his salary from Mrs.
Shuster was going to begin in advance.

After my cousin died and left Awepesha to me, Jack and I decided to keep
all the servants on, anyhow until we'd made our visit to America. That
being the case, we'd wired to the house the day and probable time of our
arrival in New York, and the chauffeur had come for us with a
respectable elderly automobile which (as the estate agents say) "went
with the place." The chauffeur was (is) elderly and respectable, too,
evidently transferred by the fairy wand of Circumstance from the
box-seat of a carriage to the wheel of a car. We took poor forlorn
little Pat and pouting Angele to Awepesha with us, instead of carrying
them a mile farther on; and then, without waiting for half a glance at
his new domain, Jack nobly undertook a voyage of discovery to Kidd's
Pines.

What he found out there and the decision of the war council I must wait
to tell you till my next letter. I do want this to catch the first ship
bound for England, home, and beauty, otherwise you'll think me
ungrateful for that ten-dollar telegram. And I'm not--I'm not!

We both send love to you and dear old Monty.

Ever your
                                                                 M.




III

THE HONBLE MRS. WINSTON TO THE COUNTESS OF LANE


                                            _Awepesha, Long Island,_
                                                         _March 25th._

DEAREST MERCEDES:

I don't know whether or not I ought to take it for granted that you and
Monty are hanging breathlessly on the fate of Patricia Moore; but I
suppose I'm subconsciously judging you by Jack and myself. We think,
talk, dream, eat, drink, nothing except her business in one form or
other!

I meant to write you (about the one absorbing subject, of course) a day
or two after I closed my last letter, which was a sort of "to be
continued in my next" affair. But it was a case of deeds, not words.
Things had to be done and done quickly. It's all rather tragic and
wildly funny.

You should have seen Jack's face when he came back to Awepesha after
motoring over to spy out the nakedness of the land at Kidd's Pines. It
takes a lot to flabbergast Jack, as I learned when he was my "Lightning
Conductor"; but he certainly did look flabbergasted this time. You know
the look as well as the "feel," don't you? It makes the eyes seem wider
apart and dropped down at the outer corners.

He glanced hastily about to see if I were alone. I was still in the
library where he'd left me, because I didn't want to go over the house
till he could go, too: and luckily I'd found enough piled-up letters and
telegrams to keep me occupied.

"It's all right," I said. "Patsey's taking a walk in the garden. She's
too restless to sit still. Besides, I dare say she hoped to head you
off. A wonder she didn't! But perhaps she's gone down to the water to
try and catch a distant glimpse of Kidd's Pines. What _has_ become of
the adored Larry? Did you find him?"

"I did not," said Jack. "I didn't find anybody--at least at the house."

"You didn't expect to find anybody but Larry, did you?" I asked.

"I expected to find servants."

"Good heavens! aren't there any?" I gasped.

"No. Wait till I tell you what happened. There's a porter's lodge, of
course, but the gate was closed when we got there and nobody came to
open it. Fortunately it was only shut, not locked. We drove in. It's a
ripping place, my child. This can't be compared with it. Yet there's an
air of neglect over everything. That didn't surprise me much. But when I
rang the bell a dozen times without getting an answer it began to seem
like a bad dream. I got tired of admiring the doorway, though it's a
beauty, and you'll be mad about it; so I decided to investigate
elsewhere. I tried my luck at two side entrances and then at the back.
Not a sound. Not even the mew of a cat. Palace of the Sleeping Beauty!
Not to be discouraged, I wandered along till I found the stables--fine
big ones, and a huge garage. Locked up and silent as the grave. Farther
on I discovered a gardener's house: door fastened, blinds down. I went
back and told our chauffeur: Jekyll, his name is. He knew no more about
Mr. Moore's affairs than we--only what he'd read in the papers; but he
proposed running on to the village, and making an errand at the
post-office: thought they'd be sure to be up in everything there. He
bought stamps, and asked questions while he waited for change. It seems
that Moore hasn't been at Kidd's Pines for a week, and yesterday there
was a servants' strike. They stampeded in a body; hadn't been paid for
months, but hung on hoping for the best till after the bankruptcy. Then
as Moore lay low they decided the game was up."

"What a homecoming for Patsey!" I moaned. "How _are_ we to tell her?"

"You won't have to, dear," she said. Which paid us out for talking at
the tops of our voices in front of a long French window which I had
opened. She was standing in it.

My bones turned to water, and Jack looked as if he'd been shot for
treason. But there it was. She knew! And she behaved like a heroine. She
wasn't even pale, as she had been when Ed Caspian broke things gently to
her.

"Please don't mind," she went on, turning from me to Jack. "I didn't
mean to eavesdrop at first, but when I heard what you were talking about
I thought it would be no harm to listen. It would save your telling me
afterward. I don't feel one bit worse than I did. Rats leave sinking
ships, don't they? I always thought it stupid of them, because they
might have to swim miles with waves mountains high. _I_ shan't desert
the ship! You've both been angels to me, but now I know that Larry isn't
at Kidd's Pines just oversleeping himself. I want to go there at once to
wait for him. Think, if he came home sad and tired after all his
troubles, to find the house shut up like _you_ found it, Captain
Winston! Would you be so very kind as to let your chauffeur drive me
home at once?"

"We can all three go over directly after luncheon," I suggested.

Can you picture to yourself, Mercedes, an American beauty rose suddenly
transforming itself into an obstinate mule? You'd say it couldn't be
done. But it can. I realized on the instant that unless I sent for wild
horses to tear her to pieces, Patsey would start for Kidd's Pines within
the next ten minutes, chauffeur or no chauffeur. To ask her mildly how
she expected to get in would have been a waste of breath. The frail
young creature was quite capable of breaking the beautiful door down
with a mallet if no easier way offered!

My eyes and Jack's met. Without a word he rang, and sent word to Jekyll
that he must be ready to start out again immediately. Doubtless poor
Cousin John's well-regulated clockwork servants thought we'd lost our
heads, for luncheon had already been put back for Jack's return, and now
here we were proposing to go off without it! Yet no, not exactly without
it. What could be taken with us we took in a basket: for man must eat
and woman must at least nibble.

While I'd been giving hasty but apologetic orders, Pat had darted away
in search of Angele, who might, she imagined, be useful in a
servantless house. I don't know how much Angele had heard or understood,
but when she appeared with fire in her eye and crumbs on her lip, I
thought she looked dangerous.

We didn't say much on the way to Kidd's Pines; but inside the gates,
though my heart was oppressed, I broke into admiring exclamations. My
dear, there's nothing lovelier in Italy or in England! I group those two
countries together in my comparison because Kidd's Pines has salient
features which suggest both. The general effect of the lawns and gardens
round the exquisite old house is English, or would be, if they were
better kept. The tall drooping elm trees and occasional willows are
vaguely English, too: but the grove of umbrella pine trees crowding
darkly together on a promontory like a band of conspirators might be
etched against the sky at some seaside chateau of Posilippo. I'm
beginning to find out that this combined English-ness and Italian-ness
is characteristic of Long Island, where I am even a greater stranger
than Patricia Moore. And yet the most winning charm, the charm which
seems to link all other charms together, is the American-ness of
everything--oh, an utterly different American-ness from what most people
mean when they say "how American that is!" I do wish I could explain
clearly; but to explain a thing so delicate, so illusive, would be like
taking a soap-bubble in your hand to demonstrate that it was round. It's
an effect of imagination and climate: imagination which gave graceful
lightness and simplicity to Georgian models; climate which has played
Puck-tricks with elms and other stately trees of England, turning them
into fairy trees while leaving the family resemblance. Why, there's
something different even about the paint on those dear old frame houses
in the country over here! In no other part of the world, not even in
Italy, where colour is so important, could there be a yellow like the
yellow paint on the ancient shingled house-front at Kidd's Pines. I
suppose the white window-facings and doorway and pillars, and the green
blinds, and the frame of cathedral elms, partly account for the
indescribable sweetness of that yellow. I can't liken it to anything but
primroses in a forest, seen in the level, secret light of sunrise.

My ecstasies cheered Patsey a little, and I emitted some of them in
French, for the benefit of Angele, who looked about as appreciative as a
Mexican horned toad.

We got into the house easily enough, by sacrificing a window-pane in the
kitchen and then undoing the catch. A sweet kitchen it was, or ought to
have been if the servants hadn't avenged their wrongs by leaving a lot
of dishes and dish towels unwashed. We wandered about, Patsey pretending
to remember this or that, and really half paralyzed with fright lest she
should find that Larry had committed suicide in one of the beautiful
shut-up rooms. No such horror awaited us, however, and greatly relieved
in our inmost minds, we came to rest in the dining-room, where Angele
was unpacking our luncheon with her hands and poisoning it with her
glances.

There were chicken salad and heavenly rolls, pickles which made me feel
a child again (a thoroughly American child), chocolate layer-cake, and
various other things that thrilled me with pride of the United States.
While Jack and I (starved) were trying not to eat too much for
sympathetic friendship, and Pat was trying to eat enough to please us,
we heard a door slam in the distance. We started like burglars caught at
a stolen feast. It couldn't be Angele, because she was darkening the
room with her presence. It couldn't be--but it _was_!

"Larry!" cried Pat, springing up, and making a dash for the door which
she happened to face. We others turned to face it also, and saw coming
in a delightful boy as happy as Pan--much happier than Pan would be in
modern clothes.

"She must be mistaken," I thought. "This can't be a grown girl's father.
It can't be a father of anything! Impossible it should be a ruined
bankrupt. It must be some younger brother of Larry's who looks like
him."

But no! "_Hello_, girlie!" the tall lad exclaimed, and held out his
arms. Patsey rushed into them, and was clasped. She buried her head on
the boy's shoulder, and he looked at us over the top of her head,
smiling. I assure you I never saw a more engaging smile, not even Pat's
own--or Peter Storm's. Theirs are quite different. Pat's is childlike
and winningly ignorant of life; the Stormy Petrel's is full of
unexpected gleams of humour, which lighten those mysterious eyes of an
Italian prince. This youth's smile at us over his weeping daughter's hat
was pagan--the joyous, carefree smile of Pan.

He patted the girl's back. "Awfully sorry I couldn't meet you," he said,
in a gay and charming voice, which contradicted a statement that he
could be sorry about anything: the sort of voice which you know means a
light singing tenor. "I've been busy," he went on, explaining himself
to us as much as to Pat, "busy winning back the family fortunes."

Pat drew herself from him to look him in the face, and beam through a
few tears. "You darling!" she gasped. "I might have known it! You _have_
won them back?"

"I've made a start," he modestly replied. "I'll tell you all about it.
Jove! You've grown up a dashed pretty girl. We shan't make a bad-looking
pair trotting around together--what? But introduce me to your friends."

Patsey did so. When the young god Pan had met us halfway and was warmly
shaking hands, one saw that he wasn't quite such an ambrosial youth as
he had seemed at a distance. Instead of looking twenty, he appeared at
the outside twenty-eight, wavy bronze-brown hair; big, wide-open eyes of
yellow-brown like cigarette tobacco; low, straight brows and lashes of
the same light shade; a clever, impudent nose and a wide, laughing
mouth; a pointed, prominent chin with a cleft in it. Now, can you
imagine this as the description of a nineteen-year-old girl's recreant
parent, a ruined bankrupt returning to a house deserted by his unpaid
servants?

After his failure to meet Pat, leaving her to arrive alone and
friendless (so far as he could know), with huge duties to pay and
nothing to pay them with, I'd been prepared to loathe Larry. But to
loathe Pan would be a physical impossibility for any one who loves the
brightness of Nature. I fell a victim to the creature's charm at first
glance, and I think even Jack more or less melted at the second or
third.

Larry had come in hat in hand, and had burst upon us as such a surprise
that we didn't notice his costume till after we'd calmed down. When Pat
had pranced round him a little in a kind of votive dance, his eyes fell
upon our luncheon, and he said in French that he had the hunger of
seventy-seven wolves. He then approached the table to examine the food
with interest, and put down his hat. It dawned upon me only at this
instant that the hat was a shiny "topper"; and as he unbuttoned a smart
black overcoat and threw back a white silk muffler, lo! he was revealed
in full evening dress. This at two-thirty in the afternoon!...
"Curiouser and curiouser," as Alice remarked when she fell down the
Rabbit Hole.

"I'm clothed like this," explained Larry, "because the house where I
went last night to restore our lost fortunes was raided by the police,
and I escaped by the skin of my teeth. Most of the other chaps were
arrested, I saw in the papers this morning, but my usual luck was with
me. I happened to hide in a place where they happened not to look--or,
rather, there was a fellow who looked, but he was the right sort. A
hundred-dollar-bill fixed up a get-away for me, but not till a couple of
hours ago. Eyes turned the other way till I'd passed the danger zone.
Then I taxied down here without waiting to eat, for I thought the poor
girlie would be sure to come home to roost. All's well that ends well!
Am I or am I not the 'smart guy?' I pulled a thousand dollars out of
roulette last night at poor old Jimmie Follette's. Had only seventy-five
to start with. The wheel gave me all the rest. I backed zero and she
kept repeating. Raised my stakes whenever I won. See here, I've got the
spoils on me--all but the hundred I had to shed--and twenty-five for the
taxi. Let's gloat."

Chuckling, he emptied his pockets of gold and greenbacks. He was in his
own eyes and in Patty's the hero of a great adventure. "What did I tell
you about Larry?" she challenged us.

When he heard about the servants, he threw back his curly head and
laughed. He'd been living in town, it seemed, for more than a week.
"There's such a lot of red tape they tie you up in if you go bankrupt,"
he explained to Jack. "Never was so bored in my life! But I kept
consoling myself with the thought, 'I'm sure to bob up serenely in the
end. I always have and I always shall.' Now here's this money for
instance. If I can make a thousand out of seventy-five, what can't I
make out of a thousand? I wish I'd gone _seriously_ in for roulette
before. I might have known I'd win. We'll get some more servants and
begin again, for this house is our castle. 'God's in His heaven, all's
well with the world.'"

"But--but, Larry dear, we owe Captain Winston heaps of money for customs
duty," Pat ventured, wistfully reluctant to dash his high spirits, yet
goaded by conscience. "Of course I can sell the things, but
meanwhile----"

"Sell nothing!" exclaimed Larry. "Now you've come home and can sign
papers, we'll mortgage the place, and then we'll be on velvet."

My heart sank, because I saw Pat in her last ditch, and presently turned
out of it with nowhere else to go unless she married for money. She was
in such a state of rapture at recovering Larry after all her fears, that
I thought she would cheerfully consent to anything he advised, but there
must have been a sensible ancestor behind the girl somewhere. "Oh, I
wish we needn't mortgage Kidd's Pines!" she sighed. "It is such a dear
place. I'd almost forgotten--but such a rush of love has come over me
for it to-day. I'd hate to risk losing it--and we might, you know.
There's another plan that some kind friends from the ship thought of
this morning, when--when we heard the news--about our trouble. They're
coming to Awepesha to talk it over, at four o'clock this afternoon."

She turned an imploring glance on Jack, who thereupon felt forced to
help her out with explanations. He stumbled a little, for fear of
hurting Mr. Moore's pride; but he needn't have worried. Larry regarded
the idea as the joke of the century.

"Great Scott, what a lark!" he shouted. "I can see the advertisements!
'Hiding place of Captain Kidd's Treasure in the Grounds.' What do you
know about _that_? Jove, we'll have digging parties, with me for the
leader!"

"You must make them _pay_ for the privilege of digging," I suggested.

"Yes! We'll call it the 'Only Extra.' I like the idea of that
man--Storm, did you say his name is?--of charging some high, almost
prohibitive price which limits the scope of operation to millionaires,
then letting them have everything they want, as if they were guests:
champagne or water, the same charge. We ought to get some fun out of
this--what?"

I thanked Billiken, the God of Things as They Ought to Be, that he took
it that way, for, if only Larry didn't insist on managing the business
himself, I saw hope of Pat's being saved.

Our chauffeur, looking more like Hyde than Jekyll after his long wait,
took us all back to Awepesha in the car, after Larry had changed his
telltale clothes to tweeds, and the ruined bankrupt was the life of the
party. His remarks about the expression of Angele's back (she sat in
front) and his friend the Marquise's taste in female beauty were most
witty and amusing, if not in the best of taste.

I forgot to tell you that Ed Caspian brought his car down to the docks
to take Mrs. Shuster wherever she wanted to go--a resplendent car of the
most expensive make in the world, such a car as he would have called
"Moloch" in the days when his hand was against Capital. Before we'd been
back very long at Awepesha it arrived, bearing the lady and her host,
but not Mr. Storm. He had preferred to travel independently, it seemed,
and I rather liked him for it. No sooner were the introductions and
first politenesses over between the newcomers and Larry, however, than
Storm appeared. I had rather expected that he would "doll himself
up"--as they say in this dear land of ours--for the visit in high
society; but he had made no change, not even a tall collar.

Mrs. Shuster, enraptured with Larry and in an ecstasy between these
three men she could think of as "in her train," presented "Mr. Peter
Storm to Mr. Moore." "A hero of the _Lusitania_ and _Arabic_," she
added, "and going to be my secretary."

Larry held out his hand, and, as he shook the Stormy Petrel's, stared at
him. "I seem to know your face," he said. "And yet--I can't place it. Do
you know mine?"

"I think if I'd ever seen it I shouldn't have forgotten," returned our
Ship's Mystery. I noticed that he did not say he hadn't seen it or that
he had forgotten. And I vividly recalled how Pat, too, had had the
impression that Storm's eyes were familiar--associated with some memory
of long ago. Neither she nor her father, however, appeared to find any
double meaning in his reply.

Well, to make a long story less long, Mrs. Shuster and Mr. Caspian had
put their heads together over the hotel idea. Both had taken advantage
of Peter Storm's brief absence to forget that it had originated in his
brain. They spoke of "our plan," and for the moment he claimed no
credit, as I should have been tempted to do. It was only when they began
to develop the said plan upon lines evidently different from those
agreed upon with him that he roused himself.

"In thinking it over," Ed Caspian explained to Larry, "Mrs. Shuster and
I have decided that the simplest thing would be for me to advance any
capital necessary to start the hotel enterprise: advertising and a lot
of things like that. All in a business way of course. Miss Moore can
give me a mortgage----"

"I beg your pardon," the S. M. cut him off in a voice quite low but keen
as a knife. "The hotel suggestion was mine, wasn't it, Miss Moore?"

"Yes," Pat assented, "it certainly was." She looked from one man to the
other, puzzled and interested.

"I shouldn't have made the suggestion if I weren't more or less of an
expert in such matters." Storm said this with almost aggressive
self-confidence. One had to believe that he knew what he was talking
about; that his apparently mysterious past included the management of
hotels, and this instinctive if reluctant credence was a tribute to the
man's magnetic power. He did look the last person on earth to be a
hotel-keeper! Believing that he might have been one ought to have
destroyed the romance attached to him, but somehow it made the flame of
curiosity burn brighter.

"Don't you all think," he went on, "that the suggestor ought to have a
voice in the working out of the scheme--that is, if he has anything to
say worth hearing?"

"Seems to me this is a case for acts, not arguments," remarked Caspian.
"It isn't good advice but money that's needed at this stage."

"Exactly," said Storm. "The question is, how is it to be obtained? I
think it would be more advantageous to Mr. Moore and his daughter for a
small syndicate to be formed than for them to get the capital on a
mortgage. They are amateurs. They don't know how to run a hotel. They
might make a failure, and the mortgage could be called in----"

"I wouldn't do such a thing!" Caspian angrily cut him short. "That's why
I came forward--so they could have a friend rather than a business
man----"

"It turns out awkwardly sometimes, doing business with friends," said
Storm, giving the other a level look straight from eye to eye. So may a
cat look at a king. So may a steerage passenger look at a millionaire if
he isn't afraid. And apparently this one wasn't afraid, having only
other people's axes to grind, not his own. "Forming a company or
syndicate, Mr. and Miss Moore would have shares in the business, given
them for what they could put into it: their historic place and beautiful
house. Mrs. Shuster would take up a large group of shares, and would, I
understand, become one of the first guests of the hotel, to show her
confidence in the scheme. Isn't that the case, Mrs. Shuster?"

"Oh, _yes_!" she agreed. All the man's magnetic influence--temporarily
dimmed by her old friend Ed in the motor car--seemed to rush over her
again in a warm wave.

"Mr. Caspian is of course free to join the syndicate," continued the S.
M. "But he, too, is an amateur. He may know how to live well in hotels,
he doesn't know how to run them well."

"I'm not a hotel-keeper, thank heaven, if that's what you mean!" said
Caspian. "But I happen to have money."

"Yes, you happen to have money," thoughtfully repeated Storm.

"Which--I suppose we may take for granted--you haven't."

"You may take that for granted, Mr. Caspian."

It was now quite evidently a duel between the two men, strangers to each
other and as far apart as one pole from another, yet for some reason
(perhaps unknown, only _felt_, by themselves) instinctively
antagonistic. Jack and I were lost in joy of the encounter, and a glance
at Pat showed me that, schoolgirl as she is, she caught the electric
thrill in the atmosphere. Larry, too, was visibly interested. He'd
opened a box of games on the table where rested his elbow, and taking
out some packs of cards he had mechanically begun to play "Patience"--a
characteristic protest of the spirit against dull discussions of
business, even his own. He would like things to be nicely arranged for
him, I suspected, but he couldn't be bothered with petty details. He
seemed just to take it happily for granted that people ought to be
_glad_ to straighten matters out for a charming "play-boy" like him. The
tone of the two men, however, had suddenly snatched his attention from
the intricacies of Patience (a fascinating new Patience, I noticed). He
was captured, but not, I felt, because of any personal concern he had in
the battle. I did wonder what was passing behind the bright hazel eyes
which moved from Storm's face to Caspian's, and back again.

"Well, then, if I'm to take it for granted that you've no money, where
do you come in?" the late socialist was sharply demanding while my
thoughts wandered.

"I don't come in," said Storm. "I act as Mrs. Shuster's secretary, and
her spokesman. It seems she has no business manager, so my duties may
carry me occasionally in that direction, I begin to see. If she's to
have interests in this affair, I must protect them according to my
judgment. My judgment tells me that they could best be protected by
having an expert for a large shareholder--perhaps the largest. Such a
man would have every incentive to work for the scheme's success. And I
know the right man."

"You do?" Contemptuous incredulity rang in Caspian's emphasis. "Name
him!" This was a challenge.

"Marcel Moncourt."

Ed Caspian laughed a short, hard laugh.

"Marcel Moncourt! Why, that man wouldn't give up his ease to manage a
gilt-edged boarding-house in the country--no, not to please an emperor!"

"Maybe not," said Storm coolly. "There aren't many emperors just now a
Frenchman wants to please."

"You think he'd give the preference to you!"

"Not to me. But to Mr. and Miss Moore. And"--the man glanced at his
employer--"Mrs. Shuster." She flushed at the immense, the inconceivable
compliment, for Marcel Moncourt, I suppose (don't you?), is as grand a
_chef_ as there is in the world, almost a classic figure of his kind,
and a gentleman by birth, they say. Even Mrs. Shuster, who doesn't know
much outside her own immediate circle of interests, had managed to catch
some vague echo of the great Moncourt's fame. As for Larry, he became
suddenly alert as a schoolboy who learns that the best "tuck box" ever
packed is destined for him.

"Good lord!" he exclaimed. "You don't mean you can get the one and only
Marcel to take charge at Kidd's Pines?"

"I know--or used to know--a person who can certainly persuade him to do
so, and on very short notice," said the S. M.

"That _settles_ it, then!" cried Larry. "Can you guess what I was doing?
'Ruling passion strong in death'--and that sort of thing! I was betting
with myself which of you two would come out ahead in the argument and
gain his point over the other. I thought--I must say--the odds were with
Mr. Caspian, for gold weighs down the scales. But Marcel is worth his
weight in gold. Put him in the balance, and the argument's ended. I
didn't mean to take a hand in the game! I felt so confident it would
work out all right either way. But with Marcel and Mr. Storm on one
side, and Mr. Caspian with a gold-mine on the other, we choose
Marcel--don't we, girlie?"

"Who is Marcel?" inquired girlie, thus appealed to.

Larry laughed. "She's just out of a convent," he apologized for his
child's abysmal ignorance. "Marcel Moncourt, my dear," he enlightened
her, "was the _making_ of a millionaire, who would never have been
anybody without him. Once upon a time there was an old man named
Stanislaws, not particularly interesting nor intelligent except as a
money grubber--oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Caspian, I forgot he was
related to you!--but he was lucky, and the best bit of luck he ever had
was getting hold of this Marcel as _chef_ and general manager of his
establishment. No one had bothered about Mr. Stanislaws before, rich as
he was, but with Marcel at the helm, he could have any one he liked as
his guest, from a foreign prince or an American President to a Pierpont
Morgan. Of course they all tried to get Marcel away; but he was like
iron to the magnet--none of us could ever understand why. It looked
almost like a mystery! When there were no more Stanislaws on earth,
then, and not till then, Marcel considered himself free. He had the
world to choose from; and he chose to rest. He is now a gentleman of
leisure. Any one starting a hotel who could secure Marcel would be
made--made! But I should have said no hope, short of a Fifth Avenue
palace, if that. No more hope for us than of getting the Angel Gabriel
to stand blowing his trumpet in front of the door."

"There is no hope. I'd stake my life on that," said Caspian
emphatically. "When I came into my cousin's money, after the poor old
man's murder and all the other tragedies, I offered Marcel a salary of
fifteen thousand dollars a year to come to me. By Jove, I'd have built a
house to fit him. But he wouldn't listen. Tired of work was his only
excuse."

"Tired of making millionaires popular, perhaps," murmured Mr. Storm to a
picture of Cousin John Randolph Payton on the wall.

Caspian's heavenly blue eyes snapped with another kind of blue fire. "I
should say that no power except that of _blackmail_ could induce Marcel
Moncourt to take any interest, active or financial, in our scheme down
here. Perhaps that is your secret?"

If I hadn't seen the steerage passenger smile when Mrs. Shuster accused
him of being a gentleman and offered him cast-off clothes, I should have
expected violence. He smiled much in the same way now, to Pat's relief
and Larry's disappointment. "Perhaps it is," he said. "I've always
thought it must be exciting to be a blackmailer. Anyhow, it _is_ my
secret. If I can get--or, rather, if my friend can get--Marcel to put
money and gray matter into Kidd's Pines as a hotel, Mr. Moore--Miss
Moore, will you have him--and the Syndicate?"

"We would have him and the devil!" cried Larry.

Ed Caspian looked as if he suspected that having Marcel and Peter Storm
might turn out much the same thing. But he was the only "No," and the
"Ayes" had it.

Afterward Mrs. Shuster told me that Ed Caspian vowed to find out all
about our Ship's Mystery if it took his last penny. So we may "see some
fun," as Larry says.

But perhaps you've had enough of our scheme and schemers for the moment,
Mercedes mia!

Ever your loving                                         MOLLY.

P. S. I suppose he _can't_ be a blackmailer? He might be _anything_!




IV

PATRICIA MOORE TO ADRIENNE DE MONCOURT, HER BEST FRIEND IN THE CONVENT
SCHOOL AT NEUILLY


                                       _Kidd's Pines, Long Island,_
                                                            _April 3d._

MA CHERIE:

_J'ai beaucoup de choses a dire_--oh no, I forgot--you asked me to write
in English, because it would help your spelling. That was a large
compliment, _mon petit choux_, but _do_ look up the most difficult words
in the dictionary. It would be more safe. I am trying to think in
English, but I find I think faster in French still; and I need to think
extremely fast now, as fast as heat lightning. _Aussi_ I dream in
French, about American people, which mixes me up; and one laughs when I
don't get my sentences right. You must not take me for a model, though I
will do all my possible, and improve as the time passes on.

As I promised, I begin a letter to you on the ship, but I cannot finish,
for too many things happening and the times--I mean the weather--being
so bad. Perhaps it is better I did not, for everything is different now
from what we thought. Darling Larry has lost all his money, and we are
in the soup. But it is a superb soup, because we have a _chef_ the most
famous of the world. I have almost fear to tell you his name! It is the
same as yours, only that naturally he has not the "de," though he has
the grand air and is richer than we when we were rich. It will look
strange to you, this, that we should have an employe so wonderful when
we are in ruins. But he is not an employe like others. We are as his
servants. And we have him because he helps us make our house a hotel for
the high world. He is not alone in helping us, my father and me. There
is, besides, a band who helps. Not a band that plays music, you
comprehend, but a ring--a circle of people. I have made their
acquaintance on the ship, all but one who came on the _quai_ when we
arrived, and broke the truth of Larry. I did not cry, though I saw all
my happy days we have talked of so much, you and me, fly away in smoke.
I thought not of them, but of Larry, which was worse, for I had a cold
fear in my heart like the lumps of raspberry ice we sometimes swallowed
too large and fast on the fete days. I feared he might have suffered too
much and made himself die. I can speak of that now when I know he is
saved. But he did not even wish to be dead. He is brave and wonderful
and has earned some of the money back at roulette. I hoped he would earn
more like that, it was so easy, beginning only with a few dollars and
waiting till they mounted up, and he hoped so, too. But he has had to
put himself in the hands of the band who advise us, and they do not
approve the roulette. It is too often raided by the police; and then you
do not win quite always.

Larry is too much the charmer for a good man of affairs, and I do not
know what would have become of us two if it had not been for this band.
It was they who thought of the hotel. At least, it was one--a man. I
cannot tell you all about him now, it would take too long a time. And,
besides, what can you tell of a man when you know nothing of him unless
that he makes every one march as he chooses either with some word or
some look of the eyes, though he is the poorest of all and has taken
work as secretary? He is named Storm. For a man he is young, though for
you and me it would be an age--thirty or thirty-two, Mrs. Winston
thinks. Captain and Mrs. Winston are of the band. He is Captain the
Honourable. That is the way the English put their titles with the
soldier part in the front. They spell it "Honble" on letters or the
lists of passengers, but you do not call them by it at all, which is
odd; because if not, what is its use? Mrs. Shuster (that is another of
the band) says Captain Winston will be a lord some day. He is wounded
and very handsome, and his wife is a beauty and a darling. I have to
call her Molly and she has made of me a "Patsey." What do you think she
has done, when it burst out that Larry and I were poor as the mice of
churches? She paid the _douane_ for my dresses, those sweet things
Madame la Marquise, your dear mother, troubled herself to choose for me.
Then Molly bought them as I believed for herself, as we are much of the
same form, though she is grander by some centimetres in front and at the
waist. It was only on my birthday that I find they are for me! I said,
"But, dear, dear cabbage, I can never wear all these when I am keeping a
hotel!" She said: "Yes, you can, my cabbagette, for this hotel will be
different. You and Larry are high swells and it will be a favour that
people are let into your beautiful home. They will be glad of the luck
to know you and they will pay for the privilege. The better you dress
and the more proud you act the more will they be content and think they
have the money's worth. Only the richest ones can afford to come."

That is well, perhaps, because we have not enough rooms for a grand
crowd. We have twenty-five _chambres_, counting great with small, and
with haste two beds are being installed in some. Each person, if you
will believe me, is forced to pay at the least thirty dollars (a hundred
and fifty francs) a day. It is crushing! I have thought no one would
come. But they do already, though we are not yet in a state of
reception. The first day when the announcement showed in the journals of
New York and all other grand cities the rush began. That same night we
had what Molly Winston calls sholes (or is it shoals?) of telegrams. I
thought shoals were of fish only. I will copy a little of the _avis au
public_. _Le voila!_

"Monsieur Marcel Moncourt has the honour to announce that from April 1st
the historic mansion of Kidd's Pines, near Huntersford, Long Island,
will open under his direction as a hotel de luxe."

There was quite a lot more, explaining how Lafayette and Jerome
Bonaparte, and King Edward VII when Prince of Wales had been entertained
by ancestors of the present owner, Mr. Laurence Moore, who would now act
as host; and that there were baths to all but five of the bed chambers.
Was it not good chance that Larry had them put in? They are not paid for
yet, and the plumber, with some others, has been very unkind, making
Larry a bankroot--no, a bankrupt. We shall soon be rich again with all
these thirties and forties and fifties and hundreds of dollars a day (we
can take forty people to say nothing of servants if some of them will
sleep _ensemble_), and then we can pay every one. _Aussi_ the
announcement spoke of the pines which have given to our place its name.
There was a pirate captain named Kidd who buried gold under these trees
or near, and though each of our generations since has dug hard whenever
it felt poor, nobody has ever found anything, so the treasure is still
there--wherever it is. Larry wanted to advertise that all might dig,
male or female. Monsieur Moncourt would not permit, however. He said his
name was enough, and further advertising would waste the money of the
_syndicat_. He is part of the _syndicat_, and has more in it than the
others. He would not come if it could not be that way, Mr. Storm told
Larry. Mr. Storm has a friend who is a friend of Monsieur Moncourt's, a
great friend he must be, because Monsieur M. will do anything to please
him. Monsieur M. takes his salary of manager in shares. Mr. Storm does
not have shares, because he, too, like us, is poor as mice who go to
church--which it seems they are allowed to do in America, though I do
not think we should let them in much in France. Mrs. Shuster, who has
Mr. Storm for her secretary, is of the _syndicat_, and so is Mr. Edward
Caspian, the man who broke the bad news for me. He is about as young as
Mr. Storm, yet looks more young on account of being small and blond,
with curly hair like Larry's. But he is not like Larry in other ways.
Molly says he looks a combination of Lord Fauntleroy and Don Juan. I
have read Lord Fauntleroy when I was a child, but not Don Juan, so I
cannot judge. Do you know, _cherie_, I think he is in love with me, and
Angele thinks the same. She says it will be a good work to marry him,
as he has one of the most gross fortunes of America, besides being
rather _beau_, and _bon garcon_. Angele was not nice for a time when we
had no servants at Kidd's Pines, and I asked her to wash a dish. She had
the air of one ready to burst. But we stayed a few days at the Winstons'
place, which has been left in a will to them, and Angele became more
happy. She says Madame la Marquise often took counsel with her and
sacrificed her to me that I might have some one of experience to advise
me in things of life greater than the dressing of hair. She has fallen
into a devotion for Larry, and it is for his sake she wishes me to say
yes if I am asked by Mr. Caspian. Well! I have not to decide till by and
by, because he has not asked. For the moment I do not like him so very
strongly, I cannot know why. Every one else seems to, except Mr. Storm,
and a darling dog we have here, a golden collie, belonging to Larry, but
like the baths, not paid for. It jumped against Mr. Caspian and
frightened him so much that he wished it to be tied in a chain. We did
not do it, though. I don't love men to have fear of dogs.

Mr. Caspian has come to live with us--in our hotel, I mean. Though he
has the shares, if you will believe me he pays three hundred and fifty
francs a day. So does Mrs. Shuster. She has a suite of bedroom and
sitting-room. A good many of our rooms are like that, with curtains
between. It was Larry's idea when Mamma and he were married and invited
many guests.

Mr. Storm would not come to stay, though Mrs. S. wished to pay for him.
She is a very rich _bourgeoise_ who drops something off herself whenever
she moves, if it is only a hairpin; but many time it is a worse thing.
And she composes tracts about peace. She asked Mr. Storm to help her
write some, but he said he knew nothing of peace, he had never had any.
So you see he does what he likes, though a secretary. He has the most
wonderful eyes ever seen. They haunt you as if they had looked deep into
strange, sad things. You think of them at night before you go to sleep,
and wonder about them, whether you have seen them long ago--and what
they mean--for everybody thinks something different of him and his past,
some good, some bad. He is not afraid of the collie, but pats it when he
passes. And he lights up when he laughs! He has taken a room in the
village near, in a little house, which he considers more suitable to him
than this. Mr. Caspian, who was a socialist once, but is not now, says
Mr. Storm dresses like an anarchist. He does not wish Mrs. Shuster to
employ Mr. Storm, and this pleases her, because she thinks Mr. Caspian
is "jealous." But figure to yourself! An old woman of forty and more!

I forgot to tell you the rest about Monsieur Moncourt. He directs the
kitchen as well as the whole house, but you would not have to be ashamed
of him even if you were _parents_. He does not come to our dining-room
to eat, but has a little one of his own. He has gray hair, a sorrowful,
dreamy face like a great artist who has lost an idea; but I suppose it
is only that he is always thinking of some marvellous new _plat_ to
invent. He spends five days a week on Long Island and two in New York,
for he has a house there of his own. I should love to go one day and see
what it is like! Perhaps I shall go, with Molly.

I forgot _aussi_ to tell you of the automobile you said you so much
envied me. Captain Winston attended to the _douane_, and it is settled
for us to keep the car as an "investment." I do not quite know who
arranged this, because it was like the baths and the collie, not paid.
But some one did arrange, and will be paid of course when we are making
profits. I know it was Mr. Storm who said, in the _conseil de guerre_ we
had about the hotel, that there must be _at least_ one motor to take
guests on tour, and the smarter the car the better. But he could not
have been the one to pay as he is the poorest of us all. Oh, I am so
glad it is my _duty_ to keep this darling car which was to have been my
birthday present from Larry! I shall learn to drive it myself. Captain
Winston will teach me. He knows how to drive all cars of every breed.
Molly calls him her "Lightning Conductor." I could not wait till the
chauffeur arrives.

By the way, we have a Russian count and his wife, an Austrian count and
his, already all old, here. Mrs. Shuster is thrilled, and says their
titles are a "draw." The trouble is the counts quarrel on politics and
make snorty sounds at each other, so they have to be kept from
colliding. It is I who must do this the most often, and it tears my
nerves.

My pigeon, I will write again one of these days soon, when I have
settled. Now I am still on my head!

      Your upside down friend,
                                                            PATRICE.

P. S. Larry has read this letter and says it is very bad
English--shocking! But I cannot write it all over again. You will see, I
shall do better next time.




V

PETER STORM TO JAMES STRICKLAND, A NEW YORK LAWYER CELEBRATED FOR HIS
BRILLIANT DEFENCE OF CERTAIN FAMOUS CRIMINALS


                                     _Huntersford, Long Island_,
                                        _April Something or Other._
                                            (Why be a slave to dates?)

DEAR STRICKLAND:

Yours full of reproaches for changing my plans and upsetting yours is
"duly to hand," as you'd probably phrase it yourself. What are you
_for_, my dear man, except to take trouble off the shoulders of others
on to your own? I ask you that! You like it. You thrive on it. With your
uncanny talent for character reading, you should never have expected
anything of me but the unexpected. And the whole embroglio is your
fault, if you come to look at it between the eyes. I ought never to have
come back from Siberia four years ago. You hauled me back. What did I do
in the West and in the South? You know only too well. Yet here I am
again, at your call.

You'll say you didn't call me to do what I'm doing now, but something
widely different. I meant to answer the call in your way, it's true (if
at all), but for reasons which have cropped up I prefer to do it in my
own. You ought to be pleased at this, because I've now _definitely
determined to answer the call_. I hadn't at first. I'd made up my mind
no farther than to come and look into the matter you spoke of. I'm
looking into it all right where I am, I assure you, though from a
different angle than that proposed by you.

I don't know why you "deduce" that there's a woman in the case, for
there never has been one before. There were sometimes several, I admit.
But never One. Trust you to see the distinction! Have you been pumping
Marcel? You may as well admit it if you have, for I shall ask him when I
see him next at one of our secret meetings, and he will confess. There's
nothing he can refuse me, as you have cause to know--and you know why.

I inquire as to this more from curiosity than anxiety, because I should
rather like to know what is in Marcel's mind about me. I never knew he
had the qualities of a detective among his many gifts. He has plenty of
others! But what does it matter what he thinks, or you screw out of him?
I don't mind telling you frankly that your suspicions are justified--to
a certain extent. It's not a woman who is in the case. It's a girl. Is
that worse or better, think you?

I'm not in love with her, but Edward Caspian is, and I am dog in the
manger enough not to want him to get her. My future fate--as I expect it
to be--lies thousands of hard miles away from this exquisite American
child, just unfolded from the pink cotton of a French convent. I am
human, however. I'm not a stone, but a man. I saw the girl on the ship,
and before I heard her name something stirred in my memory. You know
already what the name is, if you know anything from Marcel, or if
you've put two and two together--a favourite occupation of yours, and
then skilfully demonstrating that they're five!

She didn't remember me--how could she?--though she did once say
something about my eyes "looking familiar." Naturally I was interested
in her. And though I thoroughly enjoyed the patronage of Mrs. Shuster
and some others who condescended to visit us third-class animals, I
could but appreciate the delicate discrimination of Miss Moore and her
friend Mrs. Winston.

I've never thought of myself as a chivalrous person. On the contrary,
I'm what my life has made of me, something of the brute. But such dregs
of chivalry as had settled at the bottom of my soul's cup were stirred
by the news of Laurence Moore's trouble and its immediate effect upon
his daughter. I heard on the dock, and the child heard on the dock--from
Caspian, who had come to meet my present employer, Mrs. Shuster. It was
easy to see (knowing what we know of him now) that Caspian had decided
at first sight to go for the girl, who has grown astonishingly pretty
and attractive. I'm here to block his game. That's why I took on this
idiotic job with Madam Shuster. It's enough to make a Libyan lion laugh!
But I saw no other way of keeping near, to do the watchdog act--not
being a gentleman or a millionaire like Caspian, able to live at leisure
anywhere preferred.

This blooming hotel business was started to prevent Caspian getting his
entering wedge into the crack of the family fortunes. He was all
generosity. Wanted to lend money on a mortgage, just the sort of thing a
lazy, happy-go-lucky chap like Moore would snap at. And the child
couldn't be expected to look farther ahead than her father looked.
Marcel was my next inspiration--a bait to decide Moore that I was not to
be despised as an adviser. Now, I am the power behind the throne--very
_much_ behind, it's true, not in the palace of the king at all, but
prodding at the throne with a thin stick through an all but invisible
hole in the wall. If it's visible to any one, that one is Caspian
himself, who probably realized in the hour of battle between us that I'd
guessed what he was up to.

I am a type he would dislike and distrust in any case, as I think small
men are apt to dislike bigger ones capable of reducing them by superior
brute force if necessary. As it is, he hates me. I suppose he thinks I
have designs on Miss Moore myself: "the pauper adventurer who has
already taken advantage of his influence over an older woman to gain
access to the heroine." Sounds like a moving picture "cut in," doesn't
it? Not only does he (the self-cast hero of the picture) intend to
punish the villain's impudent interference with him, but to unmask the
wretch in order to thwart his designs upon the heroine. To do this, the
said hero has put a detective agency on to me.

I can hear you ask sharply, "How do you know this?"

The answer is, "I _don't_ know. I feel it." And the life I've led has
taught me to trust my feelings. I have been like a stag in the forest
who scents the unseen hunters when still very far off. If the villain,
Peter Storm, is "unmasked"--well, so much the worse for him, but others
will fall with his fall, we know. And the danger for me (it is a danger,
I admit) only adds to the--fun.

Probably you'll mention the word "damn" or some other analogous one when
you read that. "_Fun!_" you'll sneer. But my dear fellow, it expresses
my point of view. I _am_ having fun. I'm having the time of my life.
Afterward--"let come what come may, I shall have had my day." And I'm
going to fight it out on these lines if it takes all summer--unless
Caspian undermines me and blows up my trenches.

The latter, by the way, are of a homely character. I lurk in lodgings at
the village dressmaker's. I have one room at the back of the house, its
dormer window looking over a grass plot and a chicken coop. Fortunately
the cock is as morose and reserved an individual as I am myself, without
my sense of humour--or else he's henpecked. He never opens his head till
it's necessary to salute the sunrise; and the hens consider it bad form
to boast loudly because a mere egg has been given to the world. For this
accommodation I pay four dollars a week, and ten cents a day for having
a rubber bath filled. Breakfast of bread, butter, and coffee is brought
to my room by a timid fawn of a dressmaker's daughter who does me the
honour of fearing and admiring me, I surmise. I pay twenty cents for her
attendance and admiration. Mine is the simple life, but luxurious
compared with many of my experiences. As to clothes, I am always Hyde,
never Jekyll. It's safer. My hat is the worst thing in hats you ever
beheld, though I have at times surpassed it.

You would think I ought to have plenty of leisure on my hands for the
work I brought from Siberia, but I confess the girl has got between me
and it. Don't waste a smile. No girl born could tempt me to what I
should have to give up for her. Besides, there are a thousand other
obstacles between me and love. If she wastes a few thoughts on me--as
perhaps she does sometimes--it's only curiosity concerning the "Ship's
Mystery." That's what they all called me on board, I heard. But there is
the past, a faded yet beautiful background of early youth--one of the
few really beautiful things in my life. And there is the girl, a radiant
figure in the foreground.

I'm in the house at Kidd's Pines often enough, doing my secretarial work
(a howl of laughter here, please!), to see pretty well all that goes on,
and the demoniac joy I feel in acting as _deus ex machina_ I can't
express to you, because I don't entirely understand it myself. But I
wouldn't be out of this for anything.

Miss Moore has been learning to drive her car. (You know about that
car!) Captain Winston began to give her lessons, but cracked up, as his
wounds aren't thoroughly mended yet. I had half a mind to offer my
services, but thought it would add too much fuel to the fire of
curiosity, so held my peace until--well, several things happened first.
Among them was the coming of Castnet, the chauffeur engaged by Marcel
himself--a Frenchman, too young to be mobilized, but supposed to
understand a Grayles-Grice. He looked a smart fellow, and a lesson or
two went off well, according to what I heard in Mrs. Shuster's room.
Miss Moore sometimes comes in when I am there, with news from the front,
so to speak: what new guests have arrived, what they are like, how they
get on together--or don't get on; for Kidd's Pines as a hotel is already
a going concern.

Three days after Castnet's arrival Miss Moore gave up having her lesson
in order to give Count von Falm and his wife a spin. They happened to be
the only guests--except my boss--without a car of their own, and von
Falm pointedly alluded to an advertisement promising an automobile for
the service of visitors. Thereupon the bomb exploded. Young Castnet,
like a sprat defying a sturgeon, refused to drive an enemy of his
country. The sturgeon demanded the sprat's discharge. Miss Moore sought
her father. "Larry" was teaching the Russian Countess tennis, and gaily
gave his daughter _carte blanche_. She, overwhelmed by responsibility,
temporized. France, you see, is her second home! The Austrian was in no
mood to stand half measures, and gave notice of departure. Meanwhile,
Castnet departed without this ceremony, unaware that Providence was at
work in his behalf. Behold Kidd's Pines with its best room empty and
minus a chauffeur! But Miss Moore was undaunted. At any moment somebody
else might clamour for the car. She determined to be her own chauffeur,
and on the strength of her half-dozen lessons, set out alone to
experiment with the forty horsepower Grayles-Grice.

That was when I met her on her second excursion, I think. I was taking a
walk, and she was stranded in the middle of the "king's highway," about
two miles from Huntersford. Another car equally large and powerful was
drawn up almost nose to nose with the Grayles-Grice, and the road was
becoming congested with vehicles of various sorts. The Grayles-Grice
blocked the way. It was impossible for anything else wider than a
bicycle or a skeleton to proceed in either direction; consequently you
would have supposed that a big reception or an automobile race was
taking place in the neighbourhood.

You can imagine what language would ordinarily, in such circumstances,
have belched from the serried ranks of fiery Pierce Arrows, dashing
Cadillacs, and even from peace-loving Fords; but what should you say was
happening in the present instance? If you refuse to commit yourself to
an opinion, it's only because you've never seen Miss Patricia Moore.

I will tell you what was happening!

All the men were out of all the cars, either helping, advising, or
trying to get near enough to do one or both. The chauffeuse herself was
sitting behind her wheel with the manner of a youthful queen on a throne
receiving homage from courtiers. The Grayles-Grice is gray, and she was
dressed in gray to match, a light pearl gray I should say it would be
called. She has a complexion also like pearl, but not gray pearl.
Excitement had given her a bright rosy colour. Her black hair--I don't
know whether excitement makes a girl's hair curl--but anyhow hers was
doing it, in little rings and spirals which fluttered in the breeze and
blew across her cheeks and eyes. By the way, she has the bluest eyes I
ever saw in human head. She was thanking her courtiers charmingly
whenever they came within speaking distance, rolling her "r's" in a
fascinating French fashion she has, and whenever a heated red man would
lift his head from the open bonnet or pop up from under the car she
would remark how _kind_ he was, or how sad she felt that he should be
having all this trouble for _her_! Then other men for whom there was not
room at the bonnet or under the capacious Grayles-Grice envied the hot
red ones, and intimated (in order to get hot and red and awake sympathy
themselves) that they and they alone could find out what was the matter.
I should estimate that at least a dozen men had enlisted under the
voluntary system, while others on the outer ring only waited their turn.

As for the stranded autos (whose number increased as the minutes went
on), ladies young and old who sat desiring the return of their cavaliers
looked as pleased as the wives of Circe's admirers must have looked
while their male belongings were transformed into beasts.

"Why doesn't somebody roll the old thing out of the way and let us go
on?" shrieked one of a carful of school teachers deserted by their
chauffeur. He, from a distance, explained not too patiently that the
trouble was, the thing _wouldn't_ roll. I am pretty sure that not one of
the men engaged was in a hurry for it to budge; for you know as well as
I that all men are deeply romantic at heart, the oldest boys as well as
the youngest boys--or more so. This girl looked like Romance
incarnate--the face that we see in the sunrise and in our dreams--and it
couldn't be often that most of these good commonplace chaps came in for
such an adventure.

"Oh, Mr. Storm!" exclaimed Miss Moore when I added myself to the rank of
recruits. Everybody stared at me. I felt I was not liked. "You see I've
br-roken down!" she explained with the smile of a child. "The poor car
won't move without ter-r-rible danger, and no one can find out what the
mystery is--though they're _so good_ to me!"

Perhaps she wildly hoped there might be a bond between the man of
mystery and all other mysteries. It didn't seem likely that where so
many men had failed I should succeed; still, I'd driven a Grayles-Grice
(you remember, don't you?) and perhaps they hadn't.

"I suppose you don't know things about cars?" she questioned anxiously,
as I drew nearer.

"I know some things," I admitted with due modesty. And suddenly I wanted
to succeed where these others had failed. Because, though I had done
some small favours for her, she hadn't known about them, so she had
never thanked me except in the most casual way. I thought it would be
rather nice to be thanked by her. I gazed at the Grayles-Grice, which
also gazed at me from under her bonnet, and seemed to wink with her
carburetor.

"How do you know she won't move?" I inquired of every one in general and
no one in particular.

"The young lady begged us not to try, as it had been tried already by
two gentlemen on motor bikes, who had to go on before this lot came,"
the school teachers' chauffeur defended the crowd's intelligence and his
own. "I thought it might be a ball broken in the bearings had jammed a
rear wheel, but it ain't that; so we took a squint at the differential,
but it ain't that either."

"Shall we try again to give her a shove?" I suggested. "The traffic
can't be held up here all night. Pretty soon it will be solid between
here and New York."

"Oh, _don't_ try till you find out what's the matter!" cried Miss Moore.
"There was the most hor-r-r-rible noise when those two other men tried.
We might be killed!"

I made her get down, and then, with a couple of bold volunteers, risked
the mystic peril that lurked behind the "hor-r-rible noise," by
attempting to push the car to the edge of the road.

If you will believe me, the Grayles-Grice rolled silently and smoothly
as if she were on skates. In a moment she was out of the way, and the
coast clear for the crowd. But no man near enough to have seen Miss
Moore stirred until I had made a further discovery. The deep-rooted
trouble which had defied the gray matter of all explorers proved to be
nothing more or less than complete lack of gasoline. No one had thought
of that, because the search had been for something serious and esoteric.

"Gas" was offered on all hands, and the G.-G., having drunk long and
deep, was once more refreshed as a giant to run her course.

"Shall I drive, or will you?" I mildly asked Miss Moore.

"_Can_ you?" she inquired.

"I don't think I've forgotten how. I drove a Grayles-Grice once for a
year when I was down on my luck."

(You'll let that statement go unchallenged, won't you? It was the most
beastly year of my life.)

We were about to start on a return journey to Kidd's Pines, with me at
the helm, and quite an audience looking on, when two policemen came
bumping along in a short-nosed car. They bawled out a question: Had any
of us "folks" seen two fellows on motor bikes?

Miss Moore was the only one of the "folks" who had. "Do tell them I saw
the men," she appealed to me. And then before I could open my lips she
had (characteristically of woman) plunged into the recital herself. Her
car had come to a standstill, she explained, in the middle of the road.
She couldn't make it start. Two motor bicycle riders had appeared and
would have passed, but she signalled them to stop. She begged the pair
to push her car out of the way. At first she thought they meant to hurry
on. They went past her, one on each side. But they muttered something to
each other, stopped suddenly, and jumped off their machines. They were
laughing together as they came running back. They said, "All right,
Miss," and took hold of the Grayles-Grice as if to wheel her to the edge
of the road. But then there followed a fear-r-ful bang, like a pistol
shot, and Miss Moore noticed a queer smell--a little like the Fourth of
July when you were a child. She was frightened, and so were the men. One
of them cried out, "Something wrong here! This'll take an expert!" And
the other warned her, _whatever_ she did, not to let anybody who didn't
understand that make of motor try to budge the wheels an inch. Then the
two were obliged to go in haste because they had a ferryboat to catch.
Not long after autos and autos began to stream along from both
directions, and were held up because she warned every one not to move
the car.

Clever dodge, wasn't it? The pair had robbed a jewellery shop window,
and bagged a whole trayful of suburban engagement rings. As it happened,
the police had taken up a wrong scent before they got on the right one.
But had the watchdogs come along a few minutes earlier they would have
found their way blocked effectively. One of the thieves had fired a
torpedo in the road just behind the G.-G. to scare the chauffeuse (one
of those big, fat torpedoes motorists and bicyclists sometimes use to
frighten dogs) and so had secured a clear road to the nearest ferry.
The policemen found the fragments of the torpedo in the dust--after I
had suggested their looking for it.

That is the way I entered Miss Moore's service as temporary chauffeur,
combining the duties as best I may with secretarial work for Mrs.
Shuster. I'm not sure yet how the two parts are to be doubled
successfully, but I'm sure of one thing: I don't mean to throw either
part up at present, so there's no use in your grumbling or preaching.

Some new people have come to stay in the hotel, a jolly family of boys
and girls, and a few days' motor trip is suggested, with me at the helm.
The party will consist of the jolly Family, about whom more later; Miss
Moore as conductress; and Captain and Mrs. Winston accompanying in their
own car, as chaperons. For some extraordinary reason, which puzzles me,
Mrs. S. is not going. Apropos of this excursion, I warn you, my dear
friend, that you needn't fash yourself to answer my letter in a hurry.
You may take time to think. Mrs. Shuster is not only willing, but
anxious, for me to drive for the party. I can't imagine why. But I shall
certainly _know_ why, and perhaps to my sorrow, when I get back. If I
hadn't taken on the job, Caspian would. He spent two days away from
Kidd's Pines, and Moncourt (just back from a trip to town as I finish
writing) saw him in N. Y. in a Grayles-Grice, apparently taking a lesson
how to drive. (His own car is a Wilmot.) When he returned, it was
without the Wilmot. Said he'd had an accident, and his auto would be
laid up for a week; he hoped Miss Moore would let him avail himself of
her G.-G. when necessary. He was too late, however, for this particular
occasion. All arrangements had been made in his absence. I've nobly
refused an extra salary; but I expect to have heaven knows how much
extra fun. I bet Caspian's car will be mended unexpectedly soon, as
another is booked to drive the G.-G. this time.

                                       Yours,                   P. S.

The Wilmot has arrived from New York, and doubtless will follow us like
a tame dog. If my hand has not forgotten its cunning, the said dog will
find itself often outdistanced.




VI

THE HONBLE MRS. WINSTON TO THE COUNTESS OF LANE


                                      _Easthampton, Long Island._
                                  _The loveliest moonlight April night._

DEAREST MERCEDES:

We're just beginning a short motor trip, pausing here all night because
it's beautiful, and because there's a dance which Pat and a large family
of girls, appropriately named Goodrich, wish to sample. To tell the
truth, I shouldn't mind dancing, myself! They're going to have a quaint
new thing dedicated by its inventor to Long Island. It's called the Gull
Glide. But Jack did too much last week, teaching Patsey to drive her
giant Grayles-Grice, and he says if he danced anything it would have to
be the Shamblers' Shake. I wouldn't put my nose inside the ballroom
without him; vowed I'd be bored stiff. The Goodrich girls' mother is
chaperoning her brood and Pat. I made Jack "seek his bed," as the French
say, but I'm on the balcony of our private sitting-room, in the
moonlight, writing by an electric lamp whose shade looks like an
illuminated red rose seen through silver mist. The music, which throbs
up to me like heart-beats, mingles with the undertone of the sea and
makes me thankful that Jack's so nice and loves me so much. Not to be
loved in such music and such moonlight would make one feel one wasn't a
woman!

The dance has just begun and will last hours. I've no intention of
trying to sleep till it's over, because I'm sure Pat will have things to
tell which really _can't_ wait till morning. Things like that never can!
Meanwhile I shall have time for a long letter to you--the kind you say
you like to get.

This is really for Monty also, since you are now with him, helping him
to get well, "Somewhere in France." Jack wanted to write a few lines
to-night, to put with mine, but his arm is very lame. He said, "Tell
Monty this is like old times, when he was recuperating in Davos, and I
was 'Lightning Conductor' for Molly Randolph."

Good gracious, what a lot of water has run past mills and under wheels
of motors since then! But luckily (since you ask us to chronicle our
adventures, as Jack did for Monty in those days) we can still mix the
honey of love with the lubricating oil of the machine. It will most
likely be Pat's and somebody else's love, not ours, although our stock
never runs dry. But you're interested in Pat's affairs, and really they
_do_ get more complicated and exciting every day. I shan't tell you much
about them just now, but will save that part of the narrative for by and
by, in case there's anything to add at half-past midnight. There
generally is news from the front about that time.

Meanwhile, Monty (who is as ignorant of this country as Jack was only
the other day) clamours for J.'s "impressions of America." Since Jack
can't put them on paper, I will. I know all his most topographical
thoughts, because he's trying them--not "on a dog" but on me, while I
drive the car to save his good right arm. "The Lightning Conductor
Discovering America" I call him, as everything surprises and interests
him so hugely, you would think he was an "O Pioneer!" Long Island isn't
your "pitch," Mercedes dear, and you don't know much about it from the
inside, so to speak. You may imagine, therefore, that it's a small,
sophisticated spot on the map for us to _discover_. But there's where
you're wrong, my dear! It's not small and it's not sophisticated. It may
look tiny on paper, but it feels far from tiny when you set forth to
motor over it. It feels about the size I used to picture England before
I went abroad.

[Illustration: LONG ISLAND "There's absolutely nothing like it on the
other side of the water, not even in Devonshire or Dorset"]

Jack fancied (he dared not say so to me till he could add "I made a big
mistake") that America was new and indigestible, like freshly baked
bread. As for Long Island, he visioned it as a seaside suburb of New
York. Now, he's so fascinated with Awepesha and its environment that
he's simply bolting history by the yard! You know, he always was keen on
that sort of thing when he travelled; but like most Britishers he
flattered himself that he had been _born_ knowing all that was worth
knowing in the history of the United States: a little about the
Revolution and the Civil War, and "--er--well really, what else _was_
there, you know, if you'd read Cooper and 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' when you
were a boy?"

Now, he browses in Cousin John Randolph Payton's respectable library,
where every book is bound like every other book in "half calf," and he
sees that things began to wake up over here several hundreds of years
ago. He has even discovered that an ancestor of his was one of the first
important settlers of Long Island, apparently a perfect pig of a man who
was horrid to innocent Indians--charming Indians who believed that
Europeans meant what they said. I can't reconcile it with Jack to have
had a pig for an ancestor, but he certainly had, at least one. Luckily
the tendency has run out in the family ages ago.

But to turn from ancestral pigs to our Island!

Jack says the history of Long Island is the history of the whole country
in miniature, like "the world seen through the little eye of a sparrow,"
as Emerson would have said. In fact, it's _Some_ island, as Emerson
would _not_ have said; and of course we think our part the loveliest and
historicalest of all. There's more variety in history as well as scenery
on this island than in many entire _states_. You simply take your
choice. You say to yourself, "Do I prefer Indian history and names? Or
do I prefer the Dutch? Or does my taste run in the direction of the
English? Do I want to visit the sites of Indian massacres or
Revolutionary battles? Does pirate treasure lure me? Am I thrilled by
the adventures of whaling-ships and their brave captains?" When you've
chosen, you point your auto's nose in the direction desired. The only
thing you _couldn't_ find in the Island's thousand miles of glorious
roads--(yes, my child, a thousand miles, to say nothing of the not so
glorious ones!)--the only thing, I repeat, would be something completely
modern.

That proud statement doesn't sound true, but it is. You could find
plenty of new houses, the newest of the new: palaces of millionaires,
middle-sized houses of middle-class people who are happier than the
happiest millionaires; fantastic cottages for summer folk; cozy cottages
of "commuters"; queer colonies of Italians, and even of darkies; but
there isn't a foot of Long Island ground on which these palaces and
houses and cottages and colonies have sprung up that isn't as historic
as European soil. It's enthralling to see how intimately and neatly
history here links itself with history on the other side: history of
England, France, and Holland; noble names and great events. That's what
delights Jack, picking up these links, and fitting them together like
bits of jigsaw puzzles. He's absolutely _thrilled_, and wants to stop
the car whenever we come to one of the curiously deformed old trees
which still, on country roads, mark the direction of ancient Indian
trails. This fad of Jack's leads to awkwardness during our present
excursion, as we're part of a weird cavalcade which I'll describe to you
later. But just now I _can't_ let you off those trees!

The Indians of different tribes had a way of bending one of the lower
boughs of a young oak chosen for the sacrifice, bending it so that it
grew horizontally, pointing the way along the trail for the initiated.
They would have trees done like that at regular intervals; but if you
were a silly European you wouldn't know without being told what the
trees meant by sticking out their elbows in that significant way; and so
you would stupidly proceed to get yourself lost.

Think what those old trees could tell, if by laying your ear against
their trunks you could understand the murmurous whisper inside, like
secret voices behind a thick closed door! They look extraordinarily
intelligent, thrusting out their long arms and crooking up their elbows,
as I said. It's just as if you asked them, "How do I get to the sea?"
and they, with Indian reticence, answered with a gesture instead of
speech. Some of these arms have grown to such a length and thickness
that they look like the bodies of animals. You can imagine little girls
and boys riding on them, playing they are on horses. Or you can picture
a fair maid and a man sitting side by side on one of those big,
low-growing branches, as if it were a comfortable sofa. It would be a
_lovely_ place to be proposed to on a summer's day!

Does your respect for Long Island begin to grow? I haven't told you yet
a quarter of the things that give it interest.

Our part of the Island, the eastern part, used to be harassed by British
cruisers in the Revolution. Also it is the Captain Kidd part. I suppose
even Monty knows about Captain Kidd? It seems that he used to be Jack's
favourite pirate. When I was at the pirate-loving age I didn't care for
Kidd as much as for others, because he had such respectable beginnings.
Think, a Scotsman from Greenock of all places! And then he became a
pirate not for the fun of flying the black flag like storybook pirates,
or because he was disappointed in love, but because he cannily decided
that he could gain more by turning pirate than by chasing pirates, which
Lord Bellomont, the Governor of New York, had sent him out to do. Worst
of all, when he was caught Kidd put the blame on his crew, and vowed
that they'd forced him into evil courses. Now that we've a house on Long
Island, however, I've taken Captain Kidd to my heart. He belongs more to
the Moores of Kidd's Pines than to us, of course, but I value and vaunt
him as a neighbouring ghost of distinction.

[Illustration: map]*

Both our place and Kidd's Pines are not a great distance from Shelter
Island, where one lovely umbrella pine exists, under which the pirate is
said to have buried his treasure in 1669. He may have emptied his
pockets there one day, but that's _nothing_ to what he seems to have
done at Kidd's Pines. Gardiner's Island--very aristocratic and
historic--isn't far off, and it was from there Captain Kidd sent word of
his arrival to Lord Bellomont, whose famous syndicate he'd betrayed and
made a laughing-stock by turning pirate. He had his six-gunned sloop
_Antonio_ in harbour there, hoping to "make good" with the authorities;
but he must have guessed that there wasn't much chance for him. He must
have expected the very thing to happen that did happen: to be arrested
with his whole pirate crew, and sent to England in a man-o'-war. If he
foresaw that event, he'd not have been silly enough to bury his treasure
on Gardiner's Island, where everybody would rush to search for it the
minute his back was turned, would he? No, he'd take a few of his most
trusty men and make secret night expeditions in boats from Gardiner's
Island to some part of the shore far enough away not to come under
suspicion. Then he would have to mark the place where the treasure was
buried (oh, but a treasure rich and rare, for he'd brought everything
away with him when he left his stolen ship, _The Quedah Merchant_, at
San Domingo!), mark it in a way not too conspicuous, but permanent, in
case he had the luck ever to get free and come back. No good marking
with stones, because some one might build; but what a smart idea to
plant trees so valuable that nobody to whom that land was granted would
want to destroy them! This is what the canny man of Greenock is supposed
to have done. He'd brought the tree-slips from the south when he risked
his spying expedition into northern waters. He meant to make a present
of them to Lord Bellomont if the Governor were lenient: but the
Governor's heart was flinty, and Captain Kidd found softer soil for the
planting of his trees.

It makes a nice story anyhow, doesn't it? And Kidd's Pines as a hotel
can put on five dollars a day extra at least because of the romance and
glamour of that hidden hoard. By the way, it's "going some," that hotel
inspiration of ours. What with history in general, buried treasure in
particular, Marcel Moncourt's fame, Larry's charm and connections, and
Pat's fatal fascinations, people flock to lay their money on the shrine.
They're not all the right sort of people yet, but their money's
good--and you can't think how amusing some of the poor pets are!

This Goodrich family I mentioned--a father, a mother, and three girls
(who look as if they ought to be what I used to call "thrins")--are real
darlings. They're so rich they can have everything they want, but they
don't know what to want. They've always lived in Colorado close to the
Garden of the Gods, and the only trips they ever took before were to the
Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canyon. Consequently the scenery of the
East looks to their eyes the height of miniature Japanese landscapes
where you can step over the tops of the highest trees. They are built on
the Garden of the Gods scale themselves, and take up so much room in a
motor car that they ought to pay extra. (I _do_ hope the girls may find
men tall enough and brave enough to dance with them to-night!) When
Peter Storm first saw the family, he quoted the blind man in the Bible
who received his sight by a miracle: "I see men as trees, walking!"

The Goodrichs aren't, however, the latest addition to the circle at
Kidd's Pines. Two days before we were due to start on this little jaunt
three youths we'd met on the ship turned up. They'd been "doing" the
battlefields of France they told us then, seeing the "backs of the
fronts"--nice boys, just out of college--and they'd hardly the price of
a meal left among them, they joyously said, when we landed. Of course
they were in love with Pat in a nice, young, hopeless way. They bade her
good-bye forever; but when they heard of the family crash, and read that
the previously Unattainable One had become chatelaine of a hotel, they
begged, borrowed, or stole (or more likely pawned) things which enabled
them to rally round her as clients. They could "run" only to one room
for the trio, and that the cheapest in the house; but you never saw
three such radiant faces, till this motor expedition happened to be
mentioned.

Fancy their feelings! Boats and bridges burnt at vast expense, and
nothing to show for the holocaust! The adored one gliding away from
under three disconsolate noses next day in an automobile full of Other
People! Tom, Dick, and Harry (according to us; Jim, Charlie, and Frank
according to their sponsors in baptism) simply couldn't bear it. They
went out; and four hours later came back with a car (Lord made it, so
let it pass for a car!) which they had bought somewhere, second or third
hand, for a song. Even a song of sixpence would be dear for the
great-grandmother of the whole progeny of Lords! The thing must be eight
years old if it's a day, but the boys are as pleased as Punch with
their bargain. The oldest of them (Tom) thinks he has learned to manage
the poor old lady; and on the strength of his knowledge and cheek they
have hitched themselves to us as the tail end of our procession. They
announce their intention of going also to the Hudson River country, New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England with us later, when we make those
trips according to plan. My heart bleeds for the poor lambs, but Jack
says they're perfectly happy, and those who don't fall by the wayside
will draw lots in the end who is to propose to Pat.

They have no money, and no hats (at least I've never seen them wear
any), and every one ignores their real names; but in their way they are
unique, and it will add to the gaiety of nations to have them along if
they're not killed before our eyes.

Speaking of the cavalcade, which I may as well describe since I'm on the
subject, Peter Storm is driving Pat's Grayles-Grice, as Papa Goodrich
says he would "as soon hire a canary bird to tame a mad bull as let that
little slim Miss Moore pilot his family in a man-sized motor car." It
seems that our soldier of fortune, P. S., was a chauffeur once for a
year. He seems to have been most things, and I'm less than ever able to
classify him. But whatever he is or may have been, if I hadn't fallen in
love with Jack once and for all, I _might_ have fallen in love with
Peter Storm. There's something _very_ queer about his past, that's
evident; and only his conscience or bump of prudence prevents him from
letting himself go on the tide of love for Pat. I see him looking at her
now and then--an extraordinary look! But all his looks are
extraordinary. I'd give anything almost if he'd confide in me.
Perhaps he will. Lots of people do.

[Illustration: EASTHAMPTON "You enter beside the Great Pond, which is so
charming in itself and in its flat frame of village green"]

Meanwhile, Pat sits by him in the seat next the chauffeur's seat, and
watches what he does and asks questions. He has persuaded Papa Goodrich
to consent to her driving in easy places. But there are few easy places,
because there are too many people enjoying this beautiful island, and
just missing you by a miracle at corners. So I suppose it will be the
same on future trips, and if Mrs. Shuster doesn't "kick," her secretary
will continue to fill the bill as chauffeur till a professional one is
engaged--a _Neutral_ one, who neither yearns for the blood of Britishers
nor the eyes of Austrians. Strange that Mrs. Shuster didn't want to come
with us! The back of the Grayles-Grice is fairly full of Goodriches, but
there's generous capacity for two more fattish passengers.

Mrs. S. said she would stop at home and help Mr. Moore receive guests,
in case others came in his daughter's absence. But there's nothing in
_that_ excuse, really. Even Larry could have come away if he liked.
Marcel Moncourt is equal to every emergency.

In our car we have offered to take a honeymoon couple named Morley with
whom we feel sympathetic; and Mr. Caspian, the ex-socialist, in a roomy
Wilmot, takes--_himself_.

Please look carefully at the map of Long Island which I send, and agree
with me that though graceful in shape it's a long-bodied, short-legged
island. Jack says it isn't. He says that I ought to see it's a lobster,
and that what I call its legs are its claws. We live on the southern
edge of its top, or northeast leg--or claw. If leg, it is kicking
Shelter Island, the biggest of the baby islands swimming gaily about
within reach. If claw, it is engaged with the aid of its southern mate
in trying to grab the morsel. And a dainty morsel, too!--as I have seen
for myself to-day by crossing over to the little island for the first
time. I've been so busy getting settled I couldn't do any sight-seeing
even in the neighbourhood, unless one counts running back and forth
between Awepesha and Kidd's Pines.

We started out to-day on one of those pale opal mornings for which it
seems Long Island is famous in spring and autumn. Literally, sky and
water were one vast cream-white opal, shot with pink, and that wonderful
flaming blue which rum has when it's set on fire. Our two places aren't
very far from Greenport, as I've mentioned on postcards; and it's at
Greenport that you take the nice red ferryboat across lovely, lakelike
Peconic Bay, going to Shelter Island.

Things and thoughts are on such a large scale in America, even in the
East (though the Goodriches don't see it!), that nobody seems astonished
at the bigness of the said nice red ferryboat. To my British Jack,
however, it loomed enormous for the smallness of its "job"--just running
between the mother island and her baby islet! But when he realized just
what the job in question was, he changed his mind about its being a
small one. Our cavalcade was only an insignificant unit (as they say in
war) among the force of motors which mobilized as the moment for the
boat's departure came. There was a regular regiment at last; also lots
of horses drawing old-fashioned gigs and quite smart "buggies," and
capacious carts; crowds of passengers on foot, women and children,
young men and girls--so _pretty_, some of the shopgirls on holiday
pointed out to us by the man we bought tickets of. They might have been
princesses by their exactly right clothes (right at first glance,
anyhow) and their proud air, if you hadn't seen them chewing gum and
heard them saying "Huh?" to their young men. By the way, that ticket man
was the _dearest_ old thing, who very likely had never seen New York. He
grew his beard under his chin like a kind of muffler, and said
broad-mindedly while we were waiting that he didn't care "_what_
people's religion was, so long as they went to their church twice every
Sunday, rain or shine." We tried to look as if _we_ did, because we
liked him so much. He'd been a sailor in his day, and was proud of
Greenport for its past--a fascinating, whaling past.

In spite of the crowd (bigger I'm sure than aboard the Ark, packed
though it was to supply a new world with living creatures) there was
room for us all, and there was room in the bay for our hugeness, among
the flight of snow-white butterflies pretending to be sailboats.

Six minutes getting across; and then we touched at a gay little
landing-place as different from that of serious, serene Greenport as the
ex-sailor's own church would be from a _the dansant_. I suppose when
other sea-going men of old made money and grew just a little, _little_
bit frivolous, they thought no more of whales, but moved across that
bright stretch of water and spent their riches building pretty houses
for their children to enjoy. "Shelter Island" is a charming name for a
place to rest in after a strenuous life, don't you think? And the homes
to forget whales in are peaceful as days of Indian Summer after storms.
The finest, and perhaps the newest ones, which have nothing to do with
memories of adventure with grand old monsters of the deep, are on
Shelter Island Heights. But I should rather live lower down in some
house yellow as a pat of butter, under great drooping trees. By the way,
Shelter Island's maiden name was _Ahaquatuwamuck_. No wonder she changed
it. She _had_ to! Incidentally an Indian chief, Yokee, delivered "unto
Capitanie Nathaniel Sylvester and Ensigne John Booth one turfe with a
twige in their hands," which meant giving the English possession
according to a custom very cannily established by the British. Then poor
dear "Yokee and all his Indians did freely and willingly depart." I
don't believe a _word_ of the willingly! They were just hypnotized!

We meant to have only a look round, and go on by another ferry to Sag
Harbor, thence to arrive at Easthampton. But what do you think happened?
Tom, Dick, and Harry's preposterous Hippopotamus broke out in an
eruption of flame at the very moment when our procession was passing in
review before a large beflagged hotel which faces the Bay. Of course it
had never occurred to the boys to bring one of those patent
extinguishers which all thoughtful automobiles wear now as a matter of
course. And I suppose that (at best) they would have done the Shadrach,
Meschach, and Abednego act if Peter Storm hadn't heard yells and dashed
back with paraphernalia from Pat's car. Jack dashed also, but Peter (I
call him so behind his back) was nearer, and hadn't been wounded. In
three minutes the Hippopotamus was grinning with her mouth wide open,
and the fire out, but looking exactly like one of those uncouth beasts
you see in frescoes of the Inferno, in ancient monasteries abroad.

All the people in the world were on the wide veranda of that immense
hotel, gazing at the free show, and we'd have sold ourselves bag and
baggage for about thirty cents. It is a gray-shingled hotel trimmed with
white, and battalions of rocking-chairs, mobilized in soldierly ranks,
were all left rocking wildly at the top of their voices, their occupants
had sprung up so suddenly. It did give a ghostly effect, as if the
spirits of vanished guests had seized the chairs and begun visibly to
use them the instant their rivals in the flesh were out!

If you fancy that we were able to escape from the eyes and the
rocking-chairs without further pain, that shows how little you know the
Hippopotamus. Being on fire had given it heart-failure or something.
There it stood in front of the hotel, preventing any one else from
driving up, till the animal's blushing keepers had pushed it to one
side, and we were too noble to pretend we weren't acquainted with it, or
even to go on and let it follow. We'd started in the morning, though we
had practically no run to make, because we wanted nearly all of one day
to potter about Easthampton, seeing sights. But it ended in our having
lunch at Shelter Island. The dining-room of that hotel was big enough to
hold nearly every one in New York, and most of the inhabitants of that
and other large cities seemed to be there. I never saw so many "types"
in my life, as one haughtily says in the Casino at Monte Carlo. Most of
the girls were pretty, but there were people of all sorts of shapes and
sizes; and you can't conceive how the pretty, just right ones, back in
rocking-chairs on the veranda after luncheon, looked at the plain, just
wrong ones who ventured to amble past them in humble quest of other
chairs. Good gracious _me_! I wouldn't have run that gauntlet for any
prize less than winning Jack's love, unless I simply _adored_ my own
clothes and features!

Toward two o'clock we got away, still feeling as if we'd been pawed over
and rejected in a bargain sale. But though eyes stared coldly, flags
waved over the hotel as if in our honour, music played, and breezes
blew. All the same we were quite glad to get to a peaceful, countrylike
ferry which would take us from the island of humiliation to a harbour
where no one would know what had happened--namely, Sag Harbor on the
right or lower claw, according to Jack, or the left leg, according to
me.

There's a perfect flotilla of miniature islands in between the claws,
and people live on them or spend summers on them. I should like to buy
them all, because I couldn't be sure which I should like best, and
whichever I had, I should know the ones I hadn't were nicer.

This was a wee ferryboat, almost as wee as the things you cross lochs
in, in the Highlands of Scotland, but it hadn't so much the air of that
being its day to tip over--which was a comfort. As for Sag Harbor, don't
make the mistake of supposing that it sagged in any untidy way at the
edges, or anything dull like that. Could you call a place dull which was
first heard of historically in connection with a reward for killing
wolves? There's a dear old town not far from the ferry. In its sedate
middle-age it was a great whaling place, and is still crammed full of
sea captains' descendants who are, in their turn, crammed full of
fascinating stories of old days of great adventure, just as their
serene-looking, aged houses are crammed full of shells and coral and
other ocean-borne treasures from the far corners of the world. Any of
these people (we met some) can tell you that "Sagg" Harbor or the
"Harbor of Sagg" (it's dropped the "g," as lots of smart people do in
England!) came from the word Sagma, or chief. Jack likes to believe
that, just as he likes to find a romantic connection between Sagma,
chief, or great man, and saga, or great song. But there are other less
picturesque suggestions. If you'd seen what a fine old place Sag Harbor
is, you'd hate to think it owed its name to a mere ground-nut the
Indians called "Sagabon," or, still worse, "sagga," "thick-growing,"
which these ground-nuts were: "tubers big as eggs and good as potatoes,
40 on a string, not two inches underground."

Poor Jack simply stubbed his brain against the hardest of these Indian
words at first, but now he has developed an almost inconvenient passion
for them. When he looks at me steadily, and I think he is about to
exclaim a sonnet to my eyebrow, he bursts out: "Tomahawk comes from
'tumetah-who-uf,' he who cuts off with a blow"; or, "Syosset _sounds_
Indian, but is Dutch in origin. It came from 'Schouts'--'sheriff'"; and
so on. I never know when I'm safe, but I'm as pleased as he is with the
old Long Island place-names, English as well as Indian. Lots of them
seem to tell as much about their meanings in a few syllables as an
intimate chapter of history; Forge River, Sachem's House, Canoe Place,
Baiting Hollow, Execution Rocks, Harbor Hill, South Manor, Bethpage,
and a whole pink and green mapful of others. Of course Jamesport was
named after horrid old King James the Second, when the Island was under
English rule; and every governor and grandee must have a place named
after himself! But those names I've jotted down do call up pictures of
life in the first settlers' days, don't they?

I suppose while people are alive, they never realize how romantic their
own times are! They always look back. What kind of creature will sigh
for the far-off quaintness of _our_ days and make fun of our spelling?
Those colonists who came in droves from France and Holland and England,
to chase away Indians as dawn chases away the shadows of night, would
have been surprised if they'd heard their times called romantic, yet how
thrilling they seem to Jack and me, as we repeat the old names they
gave, and see the "havens" which welcomed them in the New World!

If we hadn't felt already that Long Island was one big haven, we should
have begun to feel it at Easthampton. When I say "haven," I mean a sort
of hearth and home for weary voyagers, you know, for this Island _does_
give you the impression of having more heart than most places. Perhaps
this is because (despite all the Indian fighting and battles of the
Revolution) it was from the beginning of its civilization the bourne of
homemakers. And, anyhow, when people did horrid things here in the past
they prayed about them devoutly; they didn't build their dining-halls
over the dungeons, and comfortably feast while their prisoners starved!

[Illustration: LONG ISLAND--SOUTH SHORE "Artists would find a paradise
of queer, cozy gables, and corners of gardens crowded with old-fashioned
flowers"]

But about Easthampton. There's absolutely nothing like it on the
other side of the water, not even in Devonshire or Dorset, where the
seashore villages are so lovely. Perhaps he will change his mind
to-morrow, but to-day Jack says Easthampton is the prettiest place he
ever saw.

I wonder if I can make _you_ see what it's like? Perhaps you may see
with your mind's eye, but I'm afraid for Monty it's hopeless, as he's
never been to America, where everything is so completely different from
other countries. Easthampton could be described in several ways by
several people, and they would all be right. A history lover would see
dignified ghosts of Indian chiefs treating with prim Puritans driven
from New England by grim religious dissensions. He would see the best
whaling-boats of the New World being made. He would people the oldest
shingled houses with families whose possessions are now stored in the
picturesque museum. "This place of dreams belongs to the past," he would
say, feeling pleasantly sad as he stood by the Great Pond, gazing at
irresponsible, intensely modern ducks. Artists would find a paradise of
queer, cozy gables, and corners of gardens crowded with old-fashioned
flowers that matter more than all the ancient books in the museum
library. They would remember Easthampton for the green velvet moss and
golden lichen on its ancient roofs, the faint rainbow tints in the old,
old glass of its tiny window-panes; for the pink hollyhocks painted
against backgrounds of dove-gray shingles; for its sky of peculiar
hyacinth blue like a vast cup inverted over wide-stretching golden
sands. They would remember gray windmills striding along those sands
like a procession of tall monks with arms lifted in benediction;
whereas the summer girls and their summer young men would think of the
charming, glorified cottages with their awnings and verandas and lovely
lawns and masses of blue and pink hydrangeas; also of the big and jolly
hotel where we are staying to-night. (The Hamptons wouldn't have done
for _them_ in old days when men and maids--"persons of the younger
sort"--were hauled up before the courts if they were out after nine
o'clock!) While the picture for children would be of a shining beach
smooth as silk, and immense lengths of white waves, marching rank after
rank in an endless army, with deep rolling music of unseen drums.

You may take your choice of these Hamptons, or like me you may say,
"I'll have them all, please!"

Anyhow, you enter beside the Great Pond I told you of, which is so
charming in itself and in its flat frame of village green that it
deserves the capital G and P it's always spelt with. I do believe if you
dared begin it with little letters you'd be driven out of town, and not
with "'Fruites,' and corn, and coates," as the Indians were invited to
leave in their day. _They_ had a nice well, in a green plain, perhaps
where the Great Pond is now, for all I know. There's an old Indian Bible
which tells about it, when the Montauks--a fine brave tribe who sold out
_dirt_ cheap to the Puritans--lived in their village, which is still
commemorated by the name Amagansett. (By the way, I promised Jack to
tell Monty that "sett" means meeting-place, which explains why "sett" is
the tag end of so many village names here.)

As I said, you come to the Great Pond, and you feel ashamed of being in
a motor car, though hundreds of other people are equally guilty. It's
all so green and sweet and peaceful, that speed seems a crime. The
street, if you can call it a street, is as broad as a generous mind.
Never was an English village-green as perfect as this, I suppose because
the self-banished English folk who created it worked from an idealized
picture treasured in their hearts. And there are old gray and white
houses as beautiful as houses in dreams, and pretty new houses which
carefully contrive not to look out of keeping with the old ones. Also
there are windmills, sketched on clear open backgrounds--windmills which
the English settlers didn't mind copying from the Dutch on the other
side of the Island.

Now can you fancy what Easthampton is like? But even if you can, you'll
never, never smell (unless you pack up and come here) the wonderful
fragrance of salt sea and sweet flowers which I shall always have in my
mind's nostrils (why can't one have nostrils as well as eyes in one's
mind?) when I think of this place. And oh, I nearly forgot to tell you
about that _great_ feature, the museum and library, though we spent two
hours browsing in it, and "musing" (appropriate word for Easthampton!)
by the fountain in its garden. They've made the building look as
Elizabethan as though it had been shipped from Surrey; and its books and
pictures and relics are _fascinating_. So are the girls who are the
guardians of the place. They are the only young things there.

Luckily it was the one day of the week when people are allowed to go
inside the quaintest of the houses in the village (I _hate_ calling it a
_town_, though perhaps I ought to), the wee bit hoosie where John Howard
Payne lived. If you don't know that he wrote "Home, Sweet Home," you
ought to. It's the dearest little gray nest you can imagine, and I envy
the people who own it. No wonder J. H. P. was able to write such a song!
But how surprised he'd have been, all the same, if any one had told him
that a hundred years or so later crowds of pilgrims would come to
worship at that humble shrine!

We had time, after the Payne house, to undertake an adventure. Not that
we knew it was going to be an adventure when we started. Jack was
responsible for it, he having inflamed his mind by reading overmuch
about Montauk Indians and their virtues. Their great stronghold used to
be at Montauk Point, a kind of peninsula at the far eastern end of the
Island, and Jack wanted to see it. The people at the hotel told us we
should find a bad road for motors, but what was that to us, who call
ourselves pioneers in the motor world? Bad roads were not in the bright
lexicon of our youth, and of course the rest of the party wouldn't back
out when that was our attitude. Besides, Mr. Goodrich, the Garden of the
Gods giant, put money in an enterprise which expects that ocean liners
will some day dock at Montauk Point and so save many hours. He was as
keen in his way as Jack was in _his_, though he cared not that brave
Montauk Indians had built their places of refuge there in palisaded
inclosures.

Well, we set forth gaily, none of us knowing what we were in for, unless
it was Peter Storm. I began to think, after certain events, that he must
have pushed his inquiries farther than we did, or else, in that lurid
past of his, one of the purplest patches was a secret expedition to the
end of Montauk Point. I thought at first it was remarkable of him not
only to consent but to applaud the idea that Ed Caspian should lead the
way. Earlier, he had seemed to do all he could to spurn and outdistance
the Wilmot with the Grayles-Grice. Mr. Caspian is very proud of the
Wilmot (though I hear a rumour that he's been taking mysterious lessons
how to drive a G.-G.), so proud that he suspected nothing when, without
dissent from any quarter, he was allowed to head our procession.

At the start everything was beautiful. Jack was quite entertaining and
instructive to the honeymooners and me about the meaning and derivation
of the word Montauk which used to be spelled in any old way you liked,
from Meantauket (which meant "fortified town") to Muttaag (pillar or
ensign), or Manatuck (high land). It seemed that one of the Indians'
inclosures, called the New Fort, was still standing in 1662, when Long
Island was beginning to think itself quite smart and civilized. That was
nice to learn, practically on the spot. We were chatting about the few
Indians who exist to this day on Long Island (rather mixed up with
negroes) and admiring the gorgeous golden dunes, and gorgeouser goldener
gorse when suddenly bump! bump! The moderately bad road became
immoderately awful. At this spot some disillusioned motorist had
revengefully printed on a proud sign-post the classic words: "Damn Bad
Road." We were forced to believe him. And at that instant, as if to
emphasize the description, millions of mosquitoes the size of
humming-birds attacked us. How the Indians stood them, goodness knows,
but perhaps they put up with the pests because they helped keep off the
enemy.

All the females of our party uttered uncensored cries, demanding retreat
at any price; but Ed Caspian, hearing these wails, turned upon us with
taunts. Close behind him came the Grayles-Grice, Peter Storm at the
wheel. "Let the ladies come into my car, Mr. Storm," said he, "and they
won't notice the jolts."

"Certainly, if they like," Peter consented.

"We _don't_ like, thanks!" replied all the Goodrich giantesses as one.
Pat didn't answer, but had the air of a captain intending to sink with
the ship.

"Oh, very well, _I_ shall see this through," remarked our noble leader.
"One can go anywhere with a Wilmot, even to--the devil!"

That wasn't the way he meant to end his sentence, _bien entendu_. But
just then he plumped into a rut like the back door to China or--to the
home of that over-painted gentleman inadvertently mentioned.

We've all learned in Latin how easy is the descent to the _second_
abode, but if we hadn't had it sufficiently impressed on our young minds
how difficult it is to get out again, we should have had an object
lesson watching the Wilmot. Will-_not_ would have been a better name, if
you don't mind a pun, for it simply wouldn't and--_didn't_. There it
was, stuck in ruts of sand worse than Jack and I ever said bad words
about in the Sahara. Ed Caspian and his chauffeur did what the German
Kaiser used to say he'd do to win a Cowes yacht race--his damnedest. The
engine groaned and snorted. You could almost see sweat starting from
every valve. Nothing doing but noise! Naturally we were all delighted,
because pride and falls go so well together when they're other
people's; while as for the poor Hippopotamus, it looked _weeks_
younger, in a minute!

Finally, in the midst of a roar that would have turned an elephant green
with envy, the Wilmot's teeth were torn from their sockets--I mean the
gears were stripped. That was the end; and all our men, looking
hypercritically helpful, ran to the rescue. But there wasn't any rescue.
When everything good had been tried and everything bad said, we had to
leave. The Wilmot was left to the mercy of the mosquitoes. Ed Caspian
was taken aboard the good ship Grayles-Grice, and Jack and I adopted the
chauffeur. Our cars backed out of the worst ruts, and it was a long time
before we could turn. There, on the way to Montauk Point, the Wilmot
remains to this hour, for it was too late to do anything when we got
home to the hotel. I wouldn't "put it past" those mosquitoes to suck off
all the paint in the night!

Just here in my budget I was interrupted. Pat tiptoed into the
sitting-room, spying my rose-light on the balcony, and whispering my
name like a password.

I told you, didn't I, that there was pretty sure to be news at half-past
midnight? There _is_--such funny news, entirely different from what I
expected!

Peter Storm and Ed Caspian both got telegrams. Peter Storm couldn't
understand his. It said, "Can't recall him immediately, but will day
after to-morrow. Most inconvenient to have him here now. This will give
you one clear day to try your hand on other car."

The mysterious message was signed "L. Shuster," and it was given to
Peter as he was about to dance with Pat (it seems he can dance), and
seeing him look puzzled she asked politely if anything were wrong. He
said he didn't know, and showed her the telegram. She could make no more
of it than he could. Then Mr. Caspian appeared with a telegram in his
hand. "Have you a wire from Mrs. Shuster?" he wanted to know. Peter
didn't deny the soft impeachment. "I'm just wondering," blundered Ed,
"if by any chance the lady was absent-minded and mixed the messages?
Some one talking to her while she wrote, perhaps. Will you let me have a
look at yours?"

Peter let him have a look; in fact, they exchanged; and Peter read in
the one apparently intended for Ed: "Please come home day after
to-morrow. Find I need you. L. Shuster."

"I think this _is_ mine," said Ed.

"And probably this is intended for me," said Peter. "Was it the
Grayles-Grice you thought of trying your hand on?"

"I told Mrs. Shuster I could drive it for Miss Moore, rather than break
up the party if she needed you. She was to let us know--when her plans
were settled," explained Ed. And Patsey says he stammered.

"After that affair of the Wilmot this afternoon I shouldn't like to
advise Miss Moore to exchange chauffeurs, even for one day," said Peter.
"Mrs. Shuster's very good-natured. I expect she'll wait. If not, she can
fill my place with some one else, permanently."

Pat was amused, though I'm not sure she understood the little play of
cross-purposes as well as I understand it. And she doesn't seem to
attach any importance to that part of the telegram which is the most
exciting, to _my_ idea. _Why_ would it be inconvenient for our fair
Lily to have her secretary return to-morrow? Something is _up_ at
Kidd's Pines! I vaguely suspected as much when she let us come away
without her. When Jack wakes I shall ask him what he thinks. Love.

       Your affectionate                                       MOLLY.

P. S. Jack thinks something so wild and woolly that I _daren't_ tell you
what it is till I know, for fear he's wrong. Much less will I tell Pat.
And we can't know for two or three days unless we abbreviate the trip
which all of us would hate to do.




VII


EDWARD CASPIAN TO MRS. L. SHUSTER


                                                  _Easthampton,_
                                                  _Wednesday morning._

MY DEAR FRIEND:

I know you mean well, and I don't like to scold, but really, _really_ I
have a big bone to pick with you! I didn't ask you to _telegraph_. I
said _telephone_. I wonder if you ought to consult an aurist, dear lady?
And even if you did misunderstand, you might have concentrated on what
you were doing for _five_ minutes, don't you think? I don't wish to be
disagreeable, but what you have done has given me a sleepless night.
Several other things have gone wrong, too, but this is the worst,
because I'm not sure what the consequences may be. Add to not sleeping
the fact that I'm up at an unearthly hour in order to write to you, and
to hear news of my Wilmot (which had an accident yesterday), and you
will excuse me if I don't trim my sentiments with roses.

Almost the last words you said to me were, "One good turn deserves
another." I did you a good turn in speaking of you in a _certain_ way to
a _certain_ person, as you asked me to do. It was a pleasure to serve
you, because of the gratitude owing you for many past kindnesses when
life was something of a struggle for me. Still, you seemed to think the
other day that I had paid a good part of the debt, and that it was up
to _you_ now. I don't think I should have asked the favour I did ask, if
you hadn't offered. We were both pretty frank about what we wanted, and
after what passed I felt I could count on you, as you could count on me.

All the evening after I'd come in from a disgusting and pointless
expedition I expected to be called to the telephone. There was a dance
at the hotel which I was unable to enjoy, as I have never learned any of
the new dances, and some girls seem to have little appreciation of the
higher pleasure of sitting out with a partner of intelligence, not to
mention money. By the way, not only did I owe an exceedingly unpleasant
adventure with my car to Captain Winston's obstinate determination to
see Montauk Point (where there's nothing to see), but I owe him another
grudge for upsetting my plans for the night. At dinner, casting his eye
round the dining-room, he happened to remark that none of the young men
present looked tall enough to act as partners for those beanpole
Goodrich girls. "Beanpole" is _my_ expression, not his. "Storm is the
right size," he went on meddlesomely, in that calm British way he has of
taking it for granted that whatever _he_ says must be right. "I wonder
if Storm dances?"

Your errant secretary was dining at another table, by himself, and at
some distance from the tables of the rest of the party, who were grouped
together in order to talk across. Miss Moore was with the Winstons, and
chairs had been reserved for the Morleys; but Mrs. Morley was tired and
didn't come down; of course the bridegroom kept her company upstairs;
and I was just in time to ask if I might have one of the vacant places,
before two of those dreadful boys made a rush for the table. When Miss
Moore heard Winston's question about Storm she looked up, apparently in
surprise; for though you have made him your secretary and he has been a
good deal spoiled by every one at Kidd's Pines and those Awepesha
people, _she_ first saw him, you must remember, in his own class of life
as a steerage passenger. It must have seemed queer that Winston should
expect the man to dance with girls like her and the Goodriches.
Naturally she didn't put her surprise into words. She is too
kind-hearted.

If Storm had any conception of what his sphere in society ought to be,
he would, when asked, have answered, "I _don't_ dance." He need not have
lied and said, "I can't." His conceit is such, however, that he hadn't
the grace to keep out of the limelight when it suited his purpose to
pose in it. He did dance, not only with the Goodrich girls, but with
Miss Moore. Perhaps you can understand why I told you that his being
along would spoil this trip for me, and why I asked you as a particular
favour to recall him on the excuse of urgent business. I can now drive a
Grayles-Grice very well, certainly as well as he can; and my chauffeur
could have run him back to you at Kidd's Pines in the Wilmot.

[Illustration: map]*

While I was momentarily expecting a 'phone call, a telegram was brought
to me in the ballroom, where I was sitting out some new-fangled thing
everybody seemed idiotically wild over. The envelope was addressed to me
all right, but I couldn't make head or tail of what was inside until
suddenly it popped into my head that you'd been absent-minded and mixed
Storm and me. It seemed almost too bad to be true. And worse than
all, Storm was in the act of studying his message with the assistance of
Miss Moore. Of course he'd got on to the guiding idea, and probably put
her on to it also. The fat is thoroughly in the fire now. Even though I
still expect to get news about the man which will queer his pitch
considerably (as I prophesied to you), there may be a lingering
resentment in Miss Moore's mind against me. She is apt to think, from
what Storm will have put into her head, that I might have minded my own
business. Little difference is it likely to make with her that I have
been and am acting for her good! In that connection, _you_ were more
sensible! You refused to discharge the man without proof, but you did
pay my judgment the compliment of changing your attitude toward him.
Now, however, it seems to me you have a perfectly good excuse to get rid
of him permanently, without regard to my possible discoveries.
Apparently he doesn't intend to obey your order to return, but is
determined at any cost to go on to the end, playing the gentleman of
leisure who can drive a high-powered motor car while he's being paid for
addressing envelopes! A bitter end may it be for him! I shouldn't wonder
if it would be. I shall do my best to make it so. It will come at the
Piping Rock Club, where _I_ have got an invitation for the members of
this party for a dance. If Storm has the cheek to go, his blood be on
his own head! The dance is, as Miss Moore says, the "climax" of our
tour. I hope it may be so for Storm in _one_ sense of the word, though
not in hers.

I have told you before that I can get you a better secretary than he is,
at a day's notice; and perhaps you will presently be willing to let me
try, now his "eyes alone" don't seem worth the money, as you once
thought them. Other eyes are of more importance to you in these days.
Apropos of the latter eyes, I understand why it may have been
inconvenient to let Storm come back, but certainly he couldn't have been
as much in your way in a big house as he is in mine in a motor car.

I shall travel in the Grayles-Grice in spite of him, as the Wilmot is
out of the running for days. But the trip is spoilt.

I felt I must let you know how your mistake has affected me. But I have
not ceased to be

                    Sincerely your friend,
                                                            E. CASPIAN.

P.S. I am wiring you to send him on the proofs of the new peace tract to
correct on the way. That may keep him out of the car a few hours.




VIII

PATRICIA MOORE TO ADRIENNE DE MONCOURT


                                                 _Long Island._
                                               _At a Beautiful House_
                                                  _Where We Are Guests._

MIGNONNE:

You cannot figure to yourself how the life is wonderful, just after one
has thought, "Crack! the sky tumbles!" But yes, you can figure it,
because of your adventure at Easter.

I am almost too happy. I live in a story of fairies, and I ask myself,
is it too good to last?

You know, cherie, how I loved always to read the books of romance, when
we could hide them from our kind Sisters, who think it wrong for the
young girls to fill their heads with such thoughts till after the
marriage. Since I have left the dear convent, I have read earnestly in
journals the writings of critics who live by having opinions about other
people. I see by them that romance is not truth. It is only the dull
things which are real. Yet for you and me, life is now running like the
stories at which these critics laugh the most. That is why I ask myself,
"Can such things go on?" For it seems that critics must know better than
me (or should I say "I?"). Perhaps they have reason. Perhaps we shall
end in a monotony of grayness like the books these wise men and women
praise for "the realism." Or we shall fall down, down, in tragedy?--for
that, it seems, can also be true to life; only just the _happy_ things
are not true. Yet at present let us live joyously for a little while as
in one of those dear books we read in secret at school: books of romance
and even of mystery.

For instance, look at what you write me of your family, which mixes
itself so strangely with my experience. But no, surely it _cannot_ be
that the handsome new American cousin with much money, who visited your
mother's chateau in your vacance of Easter, is anything to _our_
Monsieur Moncourt. It is only a coincidence that his name shall be
Marcel, and that Marcel is a name existing with the de Moncourt men
since the centuries. I regret almost that I have written you of our
Marcel Moncourt just at the moment when this marvellous cousin has
jumped into your life; but, even if there is a connection, you must not
comprehend it badly. Do not for an instant picture that our Monsieur
Moncourt is a _cook_. But, what a _word_ for him! He is a real
Personage. He is a Celebrity. All the world is proud to speak with him,
and he can have as much money as he wants. That is why it is so curious
he should come to _us_ for a little nothing at all, just through the
influence of Mr. Storm, which also I do not understand. But, as I tell
you, if there is a cousinhood or an unclehood, it is not a thing for
shame. The young Marcel will of course tell Madame la Marquise
everything the moment he passes so far as to ask for you. And then, if
he is so rich and so beau, and has the blood of the de Moncourts in his
veins, what does the rest matter? If I were in your place, dear
Adrienne, I would not worry on the idea that _our_ Moncourt may be this
_mauvais sujet_ of a Paul Jean Honore Marcel de Moncourt you mention,
who vanished in his youth, and has so long been counted as dead.
Probably that one is quite altogether dead, and our Moncourt has no
lines with the de Moncourts of France. He perhaps took the name because
it has a noble sound. That is one of the things one doesn't ask a man,
is it not? But if it is important for your happiness, my Adrienne, I can
perhaps arrive at it through Mr. Storm, who must know all, and learn,
too, if there is a son of our Moncourt we have not heard of yet.

And now for myself again!

It is so gay and such an amusement to have a whole band of young men
paying attentions to me, little _me_, who but the other day did not even
raise the eyes to a man in taking promenades, without a bad mark on my
conduct! Larry does not object at all. He laughs. Girls are born to love
the flirt, he says, and indeed, dear Adrienne, he loves it himself! He
makes it with all the ladies, even the fat Mrs. Shuster of whom I have
written. But that is his manner. I do not inquiet myself for him, not
more than he does for me.

At present he is at home, because, though he is a great boy, he has you
can't think what a sense of duty. It is for this he stays at Kidd's
Pines to welcome new visitors while I am away _en automobile_ with some
of our guests, and chaperoned by dear Molly Winston.

Apropos, it is Molly Winston who gives me courage that life can after
all be full of pleasant things and good endings, for she and Jack go on
having romance and grand adventures. She believes that if "_you want
things enough_," they come to you sooner or later. She is a very nice
chaperon to have.

Three dear boys are in love with me, not enough to hurt them, but enough
to make me pleasure and themselves, too, all fighting together and
pretending to be angry if I am more kind to one than another. Also there
is always Mr. Caspian. He has now asked me what we used to call "_The_
question"; and in America it is done to the girl herself, as we so often
read, not to the father or mother. But, it seems, he spoke first to
Larry, almost in the French way. When I have answered no, I was too
young (that is the best to say when you are caught by surprise and wish
not to offend). He told me that Larry wished me to think of him, because
they had made up a big friendship, they two, and there were deep reasons
why I should engage myself. I went to Larry to inquire of this, and he
said he did not go so far as Mr. Caspian thought. However, it would be
good for me to be nice to Mr. C. and not make him sorrow, for a time,
until some things were settled. So I am being nice, but sometimes it is
difficult, because Mr. Caspian and Mr. Storm are not sympathetic. Still,
don't you find the little difficulties in the life are like the cloves
and cinnamon in the rice pudding which we at school asked for in a
"Round Robin?" (Oh, that nice word! We found it, you remember, in an
English book!)

Mr. Storm drives my darling car, with which we make many dollars from
our visitors who love to go on tour. I am considered too small, though I
can do it quite well and have no fear. In smooth places without turns
Mr. Storm lets me take the wheel. I cannot talk when I drive. I am too
happy and have a thousand emotions, like a beehive filled with bees that
keep flying home with honey. But he can talk, no matter what happens,
and he says things I remember. They seem to paint my brain with pictures
which he gives me to keep. So his words are like his eyes, not to be
forgotten. You know in our garden at the convent there were flowers
which would not be banished, though the gardener pulled them up by the
roots again and still again: poppies for instance. Some thoughts which
come to one from other people's minds are like these. They persist, and
they plant their seeds in a deep place where they cannot be pulled out.

Mr. Caspian is like the gardener at the convent. He tries to stamp out
these thoughts, to plant others in me. But the roots have gone down
where he cannot find them.

He has come into our automobile, because his own is broken and being
mended at Easthampton, where we stayed a night, and I danced with Peter
Storm. I let Mr. Caspian come, instead of saying he had better go with
the boys in their car, the Hippopotamus, because of Larry asking me to
be nice. But I do not let him drive ever--except to-day when I am not in
the car, as you shall hear. It is too pleasant having Peter by me when I
have to cry, "Oh, what a lovely place!" or, "See the wonderful view!"
or, "Here is a funny sight!" He has a mood which matches mine, and it
would not be so with Mr. Caspian. I do not know why, but Mr. Caspian
reminds me of an iron fence. You could drape him with pretty flowers,
but underneath there would always be the iron fence. Perhaps Peter Storm
may be a stone wall under the ivy and blossoming things. But stone is
part of nature, and has beautiful colours deep in it, soaked in from
sunsets and sunrises and rainbows through thousands of centuries.

All the things I see as we travel in the car--fast as a glorious strong
wind which blows past the beauties of earth--all the things I see are
more _emphasized_ when I have Peter sitting by me, seeing them, too.
That is why life is so wonderful. I feel things in _double_, as with two
souls. Yet of course I am not in love. Do not think that, or you will be
wrong. It is my intellect which is waking up, after it was kept in pink
cotton by the Sisters; for you know learning school lessons does not
wake up our intellect. It only puts on a bright polish, so by and by it
can reflect the world when it's out of the cotton. And, oh, it is a
sweet world, here in the country that is my home!

By and by I will tell you about the house where we are now, and a kind
of mystery which gives the fairy-story effect. But you would not know
what these days have been if I left out the tale of our travelling. I
sent you a fat envelope of postcards, as I promised, with pictures of
Easthampton: the windmills and the old houses, and the big waves. You
will like the one of the long fierce wave like a white cat's paw. They
call it the "sea puss." I hoped it meant that really: a giant cat that
seized bathers, and people far up the beach as if they were mice running
away. But Captain Winston, who loves the history as we love the bonbons,
says no, they have only _stolen_ that name for a great tidal wave which
sweeps in from the sea on this side of our island. It was in Indian days
but a meek little word: "seepus," small river.

[Illustration: "Southampton's soul is very, very old, full of memories
of Indians"]

The postcards of Southampton are all pictures of beautiful new houses
which rich people have built among the dunes. I could not get old
ones, though Southampton's soul is very, very old, full of memories of
Indians and early English settlers who were jealous of the Dutch. Now it
is a colony of "cottages" bigger than many of our French chateaux, and
of the most unexpected, charming shapes, covered with flowers. Girls and
boys who like to dance and have fun all summer like it better than
Easthampton, so their mothers have to like it better, too. You will not
believe when you look at the pictures that not three hundred years ago,
if there had been postcards then, you would have seen only forty rough
log-houses built behind palisades for fear of Indians; maybe the
watch-house was where the Country Club is now! Instead of dances and
parties the only pleasure was to go to church, where you were called by
the roll of a drum. A stern man named Thomas Sayres beat on the drum and
you had to go whether you liked or not, because Abraham Pierson, the
first minister, governed the state as well as church.

I am not sure even the Indians weren't nicer to live with, because they
liked beads and bright things, as we do, especially mirrors. Why, they
sold anything they _had_ for mirrors! And they were kind and pleasant
till the Dutch and English spoilt their dispositions. _Their_
parties--yes, they _had_ parties!--were in their cornfields--oh, miles
of beautiful cornfields that are covered with dark mysterious cedars
now, like sad thoughts of the sunny past. The Indian families came to
help each other in the cornfields, and the young men fell in love with
the maidens and proposed as they do at our dances. If you said "no,"
perhaps they knocked you hard on your head, and took you anyhow! I am
pleased it is not so now. I should not like Mr. Caspian to do it.

He was very nice, though, at Southampton, and asked to have the
Grayles-Grice stop at one of the shops (the most _fascinating_ shops,
like at Vichy and Aix where your dear mother took us the summer before
the war). There he bought wonderful bonbons--candies. I ate only one,
and the Goodrich girls the rest.

You will like the picture I send of the cottage which has been built on
to a windmill. I should love to have that. There are lots more
windmills, soft and gray and fluffy-looking, like Persian pussy cats
sitting up in the dunes; so maybe I shall have one some of these days.

We saw some lovely roads in France when we motored with Madame la
Marquise, but we were never on any road quite so sweet (I have to say
sweet, it is a right word!) as the road of the Shinnecock Hills. We
curved so much among the dunes, I was not allowed to drive, though it
was easy as flying in a dream; and the dunes were the colour dunes would
be in dreams: gold and silver mingled with warm blue shadows. They had a
look of gold and blue flame in fires made of driftwood, because the sun
was so bright on them that day, and if you screwed up your eyes to peer
through your eyelashes, there was a rose tint with the gold and purple
splashes in the sea, like tails of drowned peacocks. You know it is like
putting on magic spectacles to peep at the world that way. Peter Storm
told me how to do it.

He tells me many things, queer little things and queer big ones, because
he has "knocked about the world" and learned them for himself. He does
not think he will ever settle down to be happy in one place; but he
likes Long Island to rest in while he takes a long breath. He says what
I call its "sweetness" comes from having two Ice Ages that have given it
a "legacy" of small soft hills and harbours made before men were born or
thought of.

I suppose the Ice Ages made the Shinnecock Hills, though they look as
young as I do, and as happy. Captain Winston, who loves Indian names,
says "Shinnecock" really means "plain, or flat place." But never mind,
there has been time enough since the hills were named to mix things up!
And most people care more about talking "golf" in this part of the world
than of Indian times; for there is a wonderful golf club close by. Mr.
Storm will teach me to play, and already we begin; but I have not come
to that part of my news yet.

I cannot think the Ice Ages had much to do with one of the things most
charming which make the character of Long Island: I mean duck ponds. Oh,
but the most enchanting duck ponds you could sit for days to watch! And
the ducks are not looking like the dull ducks of every day, in other
places of the world. They are most elaborate ducks, and their ponds are
full of sky and clouds you'd think they would stumble over when they
swim: bright, laughing ponds like eyes in the landscape.

Now, would you believe a village called "Quogue" could be pretty? It is
as if croaked by a frog. But there was a fairy story I remember, where
every time the frog croaked (he was a prince cursed into a frog's skin
by a bad godmother) jewels fell out of his mouth. So one could imagine
it had been with Quogue: and the jewels turned into beautiful houses.
The houses are very old now; that is, old for America, which makes them
more beautiful. It is only the middle-aged houses that are not beautiful
here, and that is true all over the world perhaps; for people had a
terrible cramp in their sense of beauty fifty years ago.

Quogue is on one of those lovely inlets the Ice Ages kindly made.
Quantock Bay has not a sound of romance, but when you know that it means
"long tidal stream" you hear it differently ever after. And it is fun to
find out that "Quogue" is all the years haven't nibbled off the word
"quohaug," a name the Indians gave to a great, round, purple-shelled
clam they loved.

It makes me sad to think of the poor Indians chased from the places and
the things they loved on this island. Even when you motor over these
velvet smooth roads, and pass fine modern places as at Southampton and
dreamy old ones at Quogue, and cottages pretty and modest as violets, on
the way through the woods to Westhampton, you can't put out of your head
the thought of Indians and their trails through the forests. It is a
thought like a dim background of ghosts in a picture where the
foreground is bright and gay.

I almost cried at _dejeuner_ yesterday when Captain Winston told about
Henry Hudson and the happy, kin

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