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The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon

by Josephine Daskam Bacon · English · Gutenberg #31202 · 484,938 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon

Author: Josephine Daskam Bacon


        
Release date: February 6, 2010 [eBook #31202]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31202

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STRANGE CASES OF DR. STANCHON ***




Produced by Al Haines









[Frontispiece: "He had a sudden flashing sense of being in a net that
was softly tightening."]




THE

STRANGE CASES OF

DR. STANCHON


BY

JOSEPHINE DASKAM BACON


AUTHOR OF

"THE INHERITANCE," "THE MEMOIRS OF A BABY,"

"THE MADNESS OF PHILIP," ETC.




NEW YORK AND LONDON

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1913




COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY

JOSEPHINE DASKAM BACON

  Copyright, 1908, by Charles Scribner's Sons.
  Copyright, 1909, 1910, by Harper and Brothers.
  Copyright, 1911, 1913, by the Crowell Publishing Company.
  Copyright, 1911, by the Curtis Publishing Company.


Printed in the United States of America




TO

M. A. T.

WHO WATCHED MANY OF

THESE STORIES IN THE MAKING

               J. D. B.




CONTENTS


  THE KEY
  THE CHILDREN
  THE CRYSTAL
  THE GOSPEL
  THE GYPSY
  THE WARNING
  THE LEGACY
  THE MIRACLE
  THE UNBURIED
  THE ORACLES




THE KEY

The young doctor stamped vehemently up the marble steps, to warm his
feet, and once in the warm, flower-scented halls, let a little shiver
escape him.  The butler was new--he was always new, the doctor
thought--and actually didn't know him.

"Mrs. Allen is at bridge, sir, with a party: she asks to be excused,"
he began mechanically.

(_"That's good!" Stanchon felt tempted to say, "and I hope the girls
are out, too!"_)  As if in answer to this indiscretion, the new butler
droned on:

"Miss Alida is at her riding-lesson and Miss Suzanne is--is engaged----"

(_"Now, what particular infernal idiocy is Suzanne at, I wonder?"
Stanchon pondered, still smiling lightly at the butler and warming
himself at every breath._)

"Mr. Edmund is--I think he could be found, sir," the voice went on.

(_"I don't doubt it," Stanchon agreed mentally, "at the side board, no
doubt; a nice time of day for a lad of twenty to be hanging about the
house!"_)

But all he said was:

"I am the doctor.  I called to see Miss Mary."

"Oh!"  Even this new butler assumed a look of burdened intelligence; he
leaned toward the visitor, "Oh, yes, sir--Miss Mary.  I understood that
it wouldn't be possible for Miss Mary to see anybody, sir, but I
suppose, the doctor----"

"Certainly," said Stanchon curtly.  "Please send word to her nurse that
I am here."

"Yes, sir," but the man hesitated, even as he took the hat held out to
him, "yes, sir, but--but ... it isn't Dr. Jarvyse, is it, sir?"

A slow, dark red spread over Stanchon's forehead.

(_"So they've sent for Jarvyse--well, I might have known.  Nice,
tactful crowd, aren't they!"_)

He scowled slightly and set his jaw.

"No, I'm Dr. Stanchon," he said.  "Dr. Jarvyse is coming later, I
suppose.  Kindly let Miss Jessop know that I am here, will you?  I
haven't much time."

The man sped swiftly down the hall, after depositing his hatless charge
in a blue satin reception-room, and Stanchon stared, unseeing, at the
old Chinese panels and ivory figures that dotted its walls and tables.
The strong odour of freesias and paper-narcissus hung heavy in the
room; the roar of the great, dirty, cold city was utterly shut away and
a scented silence, costly and blue and drowsy, held everything.

Presently the nurse stood before him, smiling, and he saw that her
usual modish house dress was changed for the regulation white duck and
peaked cap of her profession.

"What's all this?" he asked, and she shrugged her broad shoulders.

"She told me to put it on to-day.  'You're really a nurse, you know,
Miss Jessop,' she said, 'and if I require one, it might as well be
known.'  Of course, I had it here, so I got it right out.  Poor Miss
Mary!"

"I see they've sent for Jarvyse?"

She nodded uncomfortably.

"Then it's all over but the shouting, I suppose?"  Again she shrugged.
The fatalism of her training spoke in that shrug, and the necessity for
taking everything as it comes--since everything is bound to come!

"H'm..." he meditated deeply, and all the youth went out of his face,
suddenly: he might have been forty-five or fifty.  At such times the
nurses and the other doctors always watched him eagerly; it was
supposed that it was then that those uncanny intuitions came to him,
that almost clairvoyant penetration of the diseased minds that were his
chosen study.

"How is she?" he asked abruptly.

"Oh, very much the same, doctor.  I can't see much difference."

"But you see a little?"

She moved uncomfortably.

"I don't say that ... it's nothing she says or does--but--sometimes I
think she's a little more--a little less..."

"A little less normal?"

She rested, relieved.

"Yes, just that."

Across the broad halls came a wave of sudden sound: movement of
drapery, faint clashes of metallic substances and glass, broken
feminine cries and light, breathy laughter.  A difference in the air
became noticeable, new perfumes floated in to the little blue room,
perfumes and the odour of expensive, warm fur.

--"You don't mean to say that you discard from a strong suit--always?"

"My dear, I had nothing but that queen--nothing!"

--"And that's why, as Elwell says...."

--"And so he absolutely refuses to play with women!"

Evidently a door had been opened, somewhere.  The next moment brought a
new whiff of cold, fresh air and the sound of a motor, then silence
again, sudden and profound, from the street-side.  A deep, almost
dramatic voice silenced the confused babble.

"My dear, I'm frightfully sorry, but I simply could _not_ manage to get
here before!  Why weren't any of you at the lecture?  _Moyen Age_
house-furniture and decoration--terribly interesting.  It's a shame to
miss a thing like that.  Is my table all made up?  Never mind, I can
cut in any time.  Yes, Mrs. Allen, I know, but really, you ought not to
neglect the intellectual side, entirely, you know!"

The door closed instantly, and again they stood alone in the heavy
silence.  It was as if a curtain had been lifted swiftly on some
bustling, high-lighted scene and dropped as swiftly.  Only a strong,
heady scent floated in on them, troubling, suggestive, complicated.

"What is that?" Stanchon asked, sniffing.

"Oh, one of those new Russian perfumes," the nurse said.  "I hate them."

"Russian?" he looked puzzled.

"Don't you know it's a Russian season?" she instructed him.  "Dancers
and music and hats--those high fur ones--and perfumes?  And all that
Byzantine embroidery?  You must have noticed!"

"Oh!"  He considered thoughtfully.  "I _had_ noticed the perfumes.  But
I didn't know why it was....  Well, am I to see Miss Mary?"

"I don't know why not, doctor," she said.  "She always likes to see
you.  And I suppose you'll consult with Dr. Jarvyse, won't you?"

"I suppose so," he agreed, "though, of course, nobody's asked me.  Is
she going out, this weather?"

"No: I wish she would.  She says it tires her too much.  It's a pity
she hates the South so."

They walked to the tiny tapestried lift, beyond the curve of the great
stairs, and she pressed the ivory button that sent them up.  At the
fourth floor the car settled lightly and they stepped out.

"She's not speaking much," the nurse warned him, "but of course she
may, for you.  Very gloomy, for two days, she's been."

She knocked lightly at a door and entered without waiting.  The room
was very light, with bowls of cut flowers everywhere and a pair of
green love-birds billing eternally on a brass standard: they chirped
softly now and then.  A miniature grand piano filled one corner, and
the light fell richly on the tooled leather of low book-cases, and
slipped into reflected pools of violet, green and blood-red on the
polished floor.  A great tiger skin stretched in front of a massive,
claw-legged davenport, and in the corner of it, away from the cheerful,
crackling fire, a black-haired woman sat, tense and silent, her eyes
fixed in a brooding stare.  She was all in delicate, cunningly mingled
tints of mauve, violet and lavender; near her neck tiny diamond points
winked; magnificent emeralds edged with diamonds lay like green stains
on her long white hands.  In her dark immobility, among the rich, clear
objects scattered so artfully about the sun-lighted chamber, she had a
marvellous effect of being the chief figure in some modern French
artist's impressionistic "interior."  She gave a distinct sense of
having been bathed and dried, scented and curled, dressed--and
abandoned there, between the love-birds and the polished piano: a large
gold frame about the room would have supplied the one note lacking.

"Well, Miss Mary, and how goes it?" Dr. Stanchon said, sitting beside
her and taking her hand easily, since she failed to notice his own
outstretched.

She lifted her eyes slightly to his, moved her lips, then sighed a
little and dropped her lids.  She might have been a young-looking woman
of forty, or a girl of twenty-five who had been long ill or distressed.

"Come, now, Miss Mary, I hear you've given me up--wasn't I high priced
enough for you?  Because I can always accommodate, you know, in that
direction," Stanchon went on persuasively.

Again she raised her eyes, swallowed, appeared to overcome an almost
unconquerable lethargy of spirit, and spoke.

"It's no use, doctor, all that.  I've given up.  It's all one to me,
now.  Don't bother about me."

Stanchon looked genuinely concerned.  He had worked hard over this
case, and it cut his pride to have the great specialist, with his
monotonous inflexible system, summoned against his express wish.  That
meant they were all tired, disgusted, sick of the whole business.  They
were determined to be rid of her.

"I wish you wouldn't look at it that way, Miss Mary," he said gently.
"I don't believe you need give up--if you'll only make an effort.  But
it's fatal to give 'way: I've always told you that."

"Yes.  You always told me that.  You were always open and fair," she
said wearily, "but now you see it is fatal, for I _have_ given 'way.
Please go," she added nervously.  "I feel more like crying.  Ask him to
go, Miss Jessop..."

Her voice grew peevish and uncontrolled, and he bowed slightly and left
her.  It was too bad, but there was nothing to do.  Once or twice in
his brilliant career he had felt that same heavy hopelessness,
realized, to his disgust, that the patient's dull misery was creeping
over him, too, and that he had no power to help.

"Oh, well, you can't win out all the time," he said to himself
philosophically, "and it isn't as if she wouldn't have every comfort.
Old Jarvyse looks after them well: I'll say that for him."

The new butler met him as the lift reached the drawing-room floor.

"Mr. Edmund would like to see you a moment, sir," he murmured.
"He's--he's in the dining-room, doctor."

Stanchon turned abruptly and plunged into the great, dim leather-hung
apartment.  He always felt as if he were entering into some vast cave
under the sea, when he crossed the threshold of this room, and the
peculiar odour of the leather always caught at his breath and choked
him for a moment.  Edmund looked sulkier and more futile than usual,
even, and the cigarette that dropped from his trimmed and polished hand
had a positively insolent angle.

"Oh!  How do!" he said discontentedly.  "Been upstairs, I hear?"

"Yes," Stanchon answered briefly.

"Well, ... how about it?"

"I'm sorry to say your aunt is a little worse to-day; it may be,
probably is, nothing but a passing phase----"

"Ah, go on!" Edmund burst out.  "Phase, nothing!  She's as dippy as
they make 'em, Stanchon, and I'm through with it!"

The older man looked his disgust, but Edmund scowled and went on.

"After day before yesterday afternoon, I told Suzanne I'd come to the
end of my rope, and I meant it.  I suppose you heard about it?"

"No."

"Oh, Miss Jessop knows.  Upsetting a whole luncheon, and one the girls
had worked over, too, I can tell you!  Why, they had three reporters on
their knees to hear about that luncheon!"

"Really?" Stanchon inquired politely.

"Yes.  But Alida wouldn't let mother say a word.  And that was all
right, too.  And then what does Aunt Mary do but say she's coming?  And
mother weakened and said we'd have to let her, because either she is
all right or she isn't, and according to you, we're not to admit she
isn't--yet.  So she comes, and what does she do but insult two of the
biggest swells there, right to their face!  And when Suzanne tried to
carry it off, she just turns stubborn and never opens her mouth again.
Queered the whole thing.  Broke the women all up.  Suzanne says, never
again!  And I'm with her.  I had Jarvyse called in and he's going to
make his final decision today.  Of course, if he wants to consult,
we'll be glad----"

"Dr. Jarvyse and I will settle all that, thanks," Stanchon interrupted
coldly.  "I regret that your sisters should have been annoyed, but as I
explained to your mother, inconveniences of this sort would be bound to
occur, and the only question was----"

"The only question is," Edmund blustered, "are we to be queered in New
York for good by a woman who ought to have been shut up long ago!  It's
up to me, now, as the man of the house, and I say, no."

He dabbed his cigarette viciously into a wet ring on the silver tray
beside him and filled a tiny glass from a decanter; his hand shook.

Stanchon's mounting wrath subsided.  The boy became pathetic to him;
behind his dapper morning clothes, his intricate studs and fobs and
rings, his reedy self-confidence, the physician saw the faint, grisly
shadow of a sickly middle-age, a warped and wasted maturity.

"I'm sorry for you all," he said kindly.  "Don't think I don't
appreciate the strain ... your mother has tried her best, I'm sure.
And--and go slow on those cigarettes, Allen, why don't you?  They won't
help that cough, you know.  And you told me you'd cut out the Scotch."

"Oh, that's all right," Edmund assured him.  "I was seasoned in the
cradle, doc!  Remember the old man's cigars?"

Stanchon put on his gloves.

"Your father was a very strong man," he said quietly, "and a hard
worker.  And I've already reminded you that he didn't inhale.  And for
more years than you've lived, Allen, he worked out of doors.  I don't
want to nag at you, but just give it a thought now and then.  And let
me know if I can do anything for you, ever.  My regards to your
sisters."

As he paused at the curb, a short man in heavy motoring furs stumbled
out of a luxurious landaulet and would have gone down on the
treacherous pavement without Stanchon's quick arm.

"All right, doctor, all right," he smiled, as he braced himself for the
little man's weight.  "Glad I was here.  I've just left Mary--she's
getting a little unmanageable, I hear."

"Yes, yes," the little man panted, "she'll do better out of the family.
Yes, yes.  They often do, you know.  Position's perfectly anomalous
here, you know--constant friction."

"I see," said Stanchon.  "Let me walk up to the door with you--I've
practiced on the steps, once today.  You make it ..."

"Oh, clear paranoia," Jarvyse finished the sentence promptly.  "They go
right along, you know.  Perfectly typical.  Good days--yes.  Of course.
Everybody encouraged.  Come to a ladies' luncheon--fat in the fire
directly.  No keeping servants, you know.  All that sort of thing.
Ever show you my card-catalogue of women between thirty-eight and
thirty-nine?  No?  Ask me some day."

The younger man pressed the electric button and turned the bronze knob
of the outer door, wrought and decorated like some great public tomb.

"Thanks, I'd be interested," he said.

"You knew the brother, didn't you?" Jarvyse went on, breathing easier
in the warmth of the vestibule.  "Nothing out of the way there?"

"Absolutely not.  He had the constitution of a bull.  But I fear he's
not handed it on to his son."

"Ugh, no!  Nasty little cub.  Those families don't last.  Daughters
always stronger.  I give him fifteen ... eighteen years," the alienist
said placidly.

The inner door opened and Stanchon turned to go.

"Come up and see the patient," Jarvyse suggested, over his shoulder,
one glove already off.  "Pleased to have you, and so would she, of
course.  You'll find her much happier."

      *      *      *      *      *

But Miss Mary was not happier.  Freed of the contemptuous _brusquerie_
of Edmund, the thinly-veiled dislike of the girls, the
conscience-stricken attempts of her sister-in-law, she had felt for a
time the relief of a strain abandoned, the comfort of a definite
position.  They had come to see her, too, and their timid overtures of
interest, their obvious surprise at the ease with which this great
change had been effected, their frank amazement at the luxury and
silken routine in which they found her, had almost established
relations long since fallen out of use.  But the novelty had faded, the
visits grew fewer and shorter, the very telephone messages languished;
and as she sat brooding alone, in the few unoccupied half-hours that
the omniscient System left her, a slow, sure conviction dropped like an
acid on the clouded surface of her mind: she was alone.  She was no
longer a part of life as it was ordinarily lived.  She and the others
who shared that rich, tended seclusion were apart from the usages and
responsibilities of the World that was counterfeited there.  They were
unreal.  Through all the exercise and repose, the baths and
manipulations, the music and the silences, the courtesies and the
deprecations, the flowers and the birds that brought an artificial
summer within the thick walls, one idea clanged like a bell through her
weary mind: _This is not real_.

To Dr. Stanchon, who came in the intervals allowed by his work, she
seemed sadly changed.  It was not that her face looked heavier and more
fretfully lined; not that her voice grew more monotonous; not that she
seemed sunk in the selfish stupor that her type of suffering invariably
produces.  He had seen all this in others and seen it change for a
better state.  No; in Miss Mary the settled pessimism of a deep
conviction had an almost uncanny power of communicating itself to those
about her.

"She's in bad, that one," one of the gardeners said to him, on a windy
March day when he had hunted for her over half-a-dozen guarded acres,
and found her sitting in one of her heavy silences under a sunny ledge
of rock.

"She's quiet and easy, but she's one of the worst of 'em, in my
opinion."

And when she turned to him a moment later and said quietly: "Tell me,
once for all, Dr. Stanchon, do you consider me insane?" his voice
expressed all the simple sincerity of his eyes.

"Miss Mary, I tell you the truth--I don't know."

"But you know they'll never let me out?"

He braced himself.  "How can they, Miss Mary, when you won't
promise----"

"Why should I promise anything, if I'm not insane?  Would you promise
never to state your opinion in your own house?"

He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

"You see!" he said gently.

Beyond them the gardener struggled with a refractory horse that refused
to draw his load of brush and dead leaves.  She stared at the group
dully: six months ago she would have flinched at the great clambering
hoofs and the man's danger.

"And even if I did give up and promise everything, do you believe I'd
get out, doctor?"

"I see no reason----"

"You don't need to lie to me," she interrupted.  "When I signed that
paper, they fooled me: it was for good.  It said six months--but it was
for good."

He felt a great sympathy for her.  It was hard, very hard.  And yet,
what they had been through with her!

"If only you hadn't refused to travel," he began.

"But I agreed to--I agreed to, last month," she cried, "even though I'm
never well travelling, I agreed to--and what happened?  Dr. Jarvyse
said it wouldn't be best for me!  And you did nothing..."

"How could I, Miss Mary?" he urged.  "You know the only reason I see
you so often is that I acquiesce and don't interfere.  The moment I
thought it would do any good----"

"You mean you're not sure, yourself!" she said keenly.

He sighed.

"You know I'm your friend," he said simply.

Her whole face changed.  An almost disconcerting brightness flashed
over it.  Through all the heaviness and fatigue and despair that had
yellowed her skin, dulled her eyes, and taken, it seemed, the very
sheen from her black hair, her lost girlhood flared a moment.  With the
inconstant emotion of a child she smiled at him.

"I know you are," she murmured confidingly, "and I'll tell you
something, because you are."

"What is it, Miss Mary?" he said, but he sighed as he said it.

"Do you see how I'm dressed?" she half whispered.  He looked,
uncomprehending, at the long light ulster she wore.

"Underneath, I'm in black," she said softly, "a whole suit.  I have a
little bag packed right under this rock, and I have ninety dollars in
my bag, here."  She tapped her waist, where a small shopping bag
dangled.  "And I have an umbrella.  I always sit near this gate."

"Why do you do such things, dear Miss Mary?" he said sadly.  "It does
you no good--please try to believe me!"

"I never did, until I had the dream," she answered calmly.  "This is
the third night I've had it.  I dreamed I was near some gate, and I
looked down, and right before me on the path I saw a key--a great,
brown key!  So I started to pick it up, and then I realised that I
wasn't prepared, that I had no money, and that I'd just be caught and
brought back.  Then I woke.  But I dreamed it over again the next
night, so I packed the bag and got it out here under this steamer-rug,
and asked for some money to buy presents when that embroidery woman
came from Lakewood.  And I got it, of course, and bought some.  She
said she was coming again.  So I got more.  Last night I dreamed it
again, and it looked like this gate, in the dream.  That's three times.
Suzanne has those dreams, you know--she's like me, Suzanne--and they
always happen.  So perhaps mine will.  I tell you, because you're my
friend.  And you would never have put me here."

Stanchon bit his lip.  A sudden disgust of everything seized him.

"No, I wouldn't have put you here--once," he said slowly, then rose
abruptly.

"Hi, there, hold him! hold him, you fool!" he shouted.  "Sit on his
head!"

The gardener's horse, beyond all control, now, was rolling furiously,
neighing and snapping.  The man clung to the reins, keeping his
distance, but as the animal gained his feet with a lurch, his finger
slipped and he, too, rolled over and over down the little slope to the
gravelled path.  Stanchon was after the horse before the attendant had
picked himself up and was calling him angrily.

"Don't be alarmed, miss," the man panted.  "The doctor and I can settle
him!" and staggering to his feet made off to the rescue.  As he ran,
something clinked and rattled about his boots, and a bunch of keys lay
quiet on the gravel.

Miss Mary rose instantly, walked to them and put her foot over them,
but the man was several yards away and Stanchon and the horse were
struggling towards the wagon.  Miss Mary stooped down and lifted the
keys; all had metal tags and the one in her hand read, _East Gate, by
shrubbery_.  She stepped to the ledge, drew out a fair sized black
hand-bag, tucked her umbrella under her arm and looked about her.  The
nearest gate, set in dense shrubbery, lay in a direct line with the
ledge, and as she slipped behind it the two men and the horse were
wiped out of her vision.  With her usual quiet, long step she reached
the gate, fitted the key, turned it and opened the gate.  She closed it
behind her, considered a moment, then tossed the keys back among the
thick, glossy rhododendrons.

"Just as I dreamed," she muttered, "but where is the carriage?"

She stood on the edge of a road she had never seen, a quarter of a mile
from the great wrought-iron entrance that had closed behind her half a
year ago, and looked vaguely about her, at the mercy of Fate.  And
Fate, that quaint old lady who holds you and me and Miss Mary in the
hollow of her hand, smiled and gave a tiny pat and a push to the shiny
little electric run-about of Miss Winifred Jarvyse, a handsome young
Diana, who had never seen the inside of the great walled estate next
her father's private grounds, so that she waved her hand cordially,
stopped out of pure good feeling for the absent-minded stranger in the
beautiful coat, and asked if she could drop her at the station!

"Why, yes, thank you," said Miss Mary, still vaguely.

"It's going to rain and I've no cover on," said Winifred.  "It's a pity
about your coat."

"I can turn it," said Miss Mary, and standing up for a moment she
slipped the sleeves of the ulster, shook herself slightly and sat down
a totally different woman.  So that when (such was the perfection of
the System) a quick call to the ticket office set the agent searching
twenty minutes later for a tall woman in a light tan coat, alone,
without luggage, he replied very truly that no such person had entered
his station.  Only a friend of Miss Jarvyse had come to the 2:15, a
lady in a dark plaid ulster with bag and umbrella, in Miss Jarvyse's
car.

"I hope you found your friends--er--doing well?" said Miss Jarvyse
delicately.

"Thank you, they were very well," said Miss Mary gravely.  And she took
the 2:15 for New York.

Nothing further than the immediate moment was in her mind.  To her
thought, long confused and fleeting, the dreamlike character of this
sudden change seemed natural and simple.  She had no plan of campaign,
no route of escape, no future.  Her mind, relaxed from the quick
decision that had cleared its mists in the moment of action, began to
dull and settle and fall into its old rut of mechanical despair, when
suddenly the voices of two women in the seat behind her grew louder and
rose above the jar of the train.

"And so she decided to get it over while he was in the hospital.  She
thought the dye would have to wear off gradually, but there's a place
on West Twenty-eighth Street--near Sixth Avenue, I think--where a
French woman guarantees to remove any dye, perfectly harmlessly, in two
hours.  So she had it done, and he was delighted.  My dear, she was
fifty, and the grey hair really was more becoming to her.  Everybody
thinks so.  But nobody knew her--I never saw such a change, at first.
If you know anybody who wants it done, just send them there.  Some
French name."

And just as Miss Mary was drifting off to that dull world of grievances
in which she dwelt habitually, a new idea, as strong and definite as
that which took her through the gate caught and held her, and she wrote
in a little leather book in her bag, "28th St. west, near Sixth."  Some
primitive instinct of caution directed her to a street car in
preference to a hansom or taxi-cab, and she found the French woman's
small, musty establishment with an ease that surprised her.  Her coat,
obviously "imported," the elegance of her bag and umbrella, the air of
custom with which she submitted to others' ministrations, brought her
quick service, and in less than the guaranteed two hours she left
Madame, whose very considerable fee she paid with gloved hands, thus,
through sheer inadvertence, concealing the one trace of her
identity--her massive and beautiful rings.  For no one of Dr. Jarvyse's
detectives could be expected to look at an iron-grey woman in black,
when searching for a black-haired woman in blue plaid.  And none of
them, not the great Jarvyse, nor her maid even, knew that Miss Mary had
dyed her hair for ten years!

As she stood by a little optician's, on one of the great avenues,
later, gazing fascinated at her strange reflection in a large glass
there, terrified at her daring, doubtful if her freedom could endure,
two errand-girls, peering in with her in the imitative New York
fashion, held her with an idle sentence.

"Did you know Miss Mahoney with those glasses?  I nearly fell over when
I seen her, honest!  She was awful cross--the boss himself cut her
dead!"

"Say, what do you think of that now?"

"An' they're only window-glass, too!  She told one o' the fitters.  She
can stare at the ladies better she says, when they try to beat her
down."

They moved on, but Miss Mary entered the shop.

"Can I get a pair of eye-glasses made of window-glass?" she asked him
simply.

"Certainly, madam," and one would have supposed that leaders of fashion
generally were wearing these articles, so swiftly and unsmilingly did
he produce them and adjust them to her strong, dark eyes.

"Wonderful how they change a person, though," he admitted.  "You
wouldn't believe it."

The price seemed very small to Miss Mary, whose last purchase in that
line had been a tortoise-shell lorgnette for her sister-in-law.

She had eaten very lightly at luncheon, for food was tasteless to her,
of late, and she had been so followed, tended and directed in all the
operations of life that she actually failed to recognise her sensations
as those of hunger.  But her unwonted exertions, the strain on her
flagging brain, the stimulus of this unprecedented day, all combined to
flush her cheek feverishly and she felt strangely weak.  For the first
time it flashed over her cleared faculties that she must go somewhere
and at once.  New York was too dangerous for her; she must leave it.

A very panic of terror seized her and she half expected to hear Dr.
Jarvyse's soft voice at her shoulder.  She started from the shop like
one pursued, and hurried foolishly on and on in an ecstasy of flight.
The streets were now dark, and Miss Mary, who had begun life in New
York with her own private hansom, felt singularly out of place in the
jostling crowd.

She stopped at the foot of an elevated railway station, and more
because she was pushed up the steps by the hurrying mass of humanity
that scurried like ants up and down, than for any other reason, climbed
wearily up.  As she sat pressed against a dirty man with a bundle, a
sudden inconsequent thought struck her, and she removed her gloves in a
leisurely way, took off her rings, dropped them into a roll of
chamois-skin in the large bag, added to them a diamond cross and
pendant from the lace at her neck and put on her gloves again.  The
dirty man stared at her.

Then she lifted her eyes to a large sign above the car-windows and the
sign read:

_Avoid the biting March winds.  You will find quiet, an even
temperature and perfect seclusion among the pines at restful Lakewood.
Take the ferry at 23d St._

So that when the guard announced Twenty-third Street, Miss Mary got up,
went down the stairs, tumbled with surprising facility upon a
cross-town car and made for the ferry.  And the dirty man went down the
stairs with her.

Fate put Miss Mary on just the right boat for a Lakewood Special, and
hunger cleared her mind to the extent of throwing her card-case over
the rail on the way across.  Her umbrella and ulster she had left
behind on the elevated train, not being accustomed to carry such
things, and they were found by a thrifty old lady in the
second-hand-clothing line, who annexed them silently and forever.  So
that when she arrived at the Lakewood Station and fell among the
cabbies and hotel touts she was the perfect type of the no-longer-young
spinster, unaccompanied, awkward and light of luggage, presumably light
of purse.  The cabbies left her therefore, unchallenged, to a lad as
shy and awkward as herself, who mumbled something about quiet,
reasonable rooms, and received her yielded bag with a surprise as great
as her own.

Miss Mary was by now almost light-headed from hunger and excitement.
At the slightest pressure she would have told her story to the first
interested stranger, and thus ended her adventure, most surely.  But
Fate led her to the door of one too full of trouble to heed Miss
Mary's.  To Mrs. Meeker she was a lodger certainly, a boarder
possibly--in any event, a source of income.  So long had she been
waiting for Miss Mary that she fairly snatched her bag from her and
pushed her up the faded, decent stairs into the faded, decent bedroom
with the cracked china toilet-set.  Any one, _any one_ would have been
welcome to Mrs. Meeker, and Miss Mary's quiet elegance and handsome
travelling-bag were far beyond her hopes.

"A real lady," she whispered to her nephew.  "Ask if she'd like a
little something on a tray, Georgie.  I could poach that egg, and
there's tea.  I won't say anything about a week in advance.  She looks
tired to death."

Miss Mary's famishing senses cried out loudly at sight of the meagre
tray, and as the egg and tea passed her lips a strange, eager sensation
was hers, a delicious, gratified climax of emotion: Miss Mary was glad
she was alive!  She savoured each morsel of the pitiful meal; she could
have wished it doubled; the cheap tea filled her nostrils with a balmy
odour; she was hungry.

And hardly had the food satisfied her when her eyelids fell, her head
dropped forward.  Approaching oblivion drugged her ere it reached her
and she dozed in her chair.  But some instinct forced her to her feet
as the landlady appeared, and fumbling in her bag for her card-case and
pocketbook, she held herself awake.

"I'd like to pay," she murmured, "and then I'll--I'll go to bed.  Will
you send some one, please?"

She meant some one to undress her, but Mrs. Meeker did not know this.

"It's--it's twelve a week, with board," she said, her eyes lighting at
the yellow bills in her lodger's hand, "and--oh, dear, yes, two weeks
is ample, Miss--Miss----"

"My cards are lost," said Miss Mary fretfully.  "I can't think where I
left them.  The man or somebody will know.  Ask----"

She started to say, "Ask the doctor," for her memory was swallowed,
nearly, by sleepiness, and a curious woman would have had her secret in
a twinkle.  But Mrs. Meeker was too thankful to be curious.

"Certainly, Miss--Miss----"

"Miss Mary," said the other, yawning, and the landlady repeated, "Yes,
Miss Merry.  Can't I help you, you being so tired and all?"

"And she stuck out her feet for her shoes, just like a baby," she
confided to Georgie, later.  "She went off before I got her undressed,
really; her folks ought to 've sent some one with her, worn out as she
was!  You go 'round the first thing in the morning and tell the agent
I've got a fine boarder, and more expected.  I feel real encouraged."

And all that night and all the next day Miss Mary slept dreamlessly,
for the first time in years without a drug to help her.

It did not seem unusual that Mrs. Meeker should have unpacked her few
things and laid them in the drawer of the battered bureau: some one
always unpacked her things.  And when, strangely weak and relaxed, she
lay for three days more and ate dutifully from the tray, dozing between
whiles, nobody questioned her.

On the fourth day she woke into a grey, despondent world again.  The
old angry, purposeless tears beset her and she felt that terrible
dumbness settling over her.  She had long ceased to fight it, now; she
only wondered what Mrs. Meeker would do with her.  But she never knew
what Mrs. Meeker would have done, for when the tired, drudging little
woman brought her breakfast tray she held it in dingily gloved hands;
she was dressed for a journey.

"My brother's down with a stroke," she said abruptly, "Georgie's
father, and wants to see me.  I'll have to nurse him, prob'ly, and I
s'pose his sending means he's friendly again.  It may just be I won't
need to come back, and I'm glad, of course, for I'm worth my keep to
him any day, and he'd ought to have took Georgie long ago.  I'll soon
know, and I'll write you, and what I wanted to ask was, would you be
willin' to wait till I find out?  It might be only temp'ry, and then
I'd be sorry to lose a boarder.  Will you stay till you hear, anyway?"

Miss Mary nodded dumbly.  She could not speak and she was ashamed that
she could not; _she had never been ashamed before_.

"That's good," said Mrs. Meeker quickly, "and the lady next door'll
give you meals.  I'll settle with her--Mrs. Palmer.  Her board's good,
and I'll only charge you five for the room.  That makes a month you've
paid for.  D'you see?"

Again, Miss Mary nodded.

"Then I'll get right off.  It's Philadelphia I'm going to, and I'll
write you as soon's I know.  But I count on you to stay."

"Yes, I'll stay."

Miss Mary forced the words harshly and it seemed that they would tear
her lips, so hard they came.  But they came, and they sufficed for Mrs.
Meeker, who went out of her solitary lodger's life as quickly as she
had come into it, for Miss Mary never saw her again.

On that day she dressed herself slowly, and with a certain clumsiness,
took her little shopping bag and bought, with economy and taste, a very
fair outfit of simple clothing for the seventy dollars she had gained
on the strength of the peddler of embroideries; she passed the
peddler's very shop on her way.  Underwear, a black dress, rubber
overshoes and a plain umbrella--nothing was forgotten.

"When my money is all gone, I will begin to sell the jewelry," she
thought, for she knew that she could live comfortably for the rest of
her life on less than the value of the emeralds and diamonds.  She did
her shopping in a public victoria and brought the parcels home in it:
it was her only extravagance that day.

As she got out at the door of the little faded house and paid the
driver, it occurred to her that she had left it unlocked during her
absence, and in her remorse over this and the bustle of going to the
strange dining-room for luncheon, whither she was summoned by a
slatternly waitress, she forgot completely that on this day she had
sworn to stay alone in her room, to conceal from strangers her malady
of melancholy dumbness.

"But I'm _not_ that way--I'm _not_!" she whispered to herself in
amazement, "why, I talked to the clerks all the morning!" And so she
had, and none of the dozen at Mrs. Palmer's table that noon remarked
anything further than that Miss Merry seemed a quiet, shy sort of
person with a tendency to vagueness and little idea of passing the
butter dish.

She sorted and arranged her purchases all the afternoon; the little
roll of chamois-skin she kept carefully in the wrist-bag which never
left her arm.

At dinner Mrs. Palmer took her aside and with the touch on her arm Miss
Mary's blood turned to water.  "She knows about me!" she thought and
nearly fell to the ground from weakness.

"I'm sorry I startled you," said Mrs. Palmer, "Mrs. Meeker said you
weren't any too strong, I remember.  I only wanted to say that I've
sent three more roomers over to your house--she'll be only too glad, I
know.  You don't mind, Miss Merry?"

"No.  I don't mind," she answered, and her heart gave a great pump of
relief.

"It'll be more comfortable at night, too," said Mrs. Palmer.  "That
makes the four rooms full, now, and I'll see that your room gets done
up every day with the others.  I presume we'll hear from her soon."

The next day she approached Miss Mary with an open letter in her hand.

"Mrs. Meeker's to live with her brother, now, he's paralysed," she
announced.  "She's sent me a check for the rent and you've paid
twenty-four dollars, I see.  I'm going over to pack up her stuff and
she'll sell me the rest reasonable enough.  I'm going to take her
house, too.  There's a new roomer comes to-day--I think I'll put him in
her old room.  Or if you," with a shrewd glance at Miss Mary, "wanted
to economise at all.  I'd rent you hers for four dollars and give this
gentleman yours.  And I'm usually paid in advance, so if you could make
it convenient----"

"I'll attend to it," said Miss Mary, "but I'll keep the room, I think.
I don't like change."

She went up to her room, and Dr. Jarvyse would have been amazed at the
easy quickness of her gait.  She had it all planned, now--the diamonds
should go first, and then she would buy some fruit and a plant for her
room.  She liked her room very much; she did as she pleased in it and
no one spied on her or suggested ways of passing the time.  Was it some
faint memory of her room as a girl, before her brother made his great
fortune, that found this dull, half-worn chamber so home-like and
soothing?  Every afternoon she dusted it, as the chambermaid suggested
most ladies expected to, and once she had turned the mattress and made
the bed, when the girl felt ill.  It gave her a sense of competence and
executive ability.

Now she went to the little chamois skin roll, unpicked the tight knots
carefully, opened it--and dropped on her knees.  The roll was empty.
On the compartment where the diamond cross had fitted, stretched a
soiled, streaked thumb mark; mechanically she sniffed it--it smelled of
tar.  The dirty fellow with the bundle who had followed her down the
elevated steps had smelled of tar, too, had Miss Mary remembered it.

Well, it was over.  She never had a moment's doubt.  She had no means,
she could not starve, nobody would keep her, and she must go back to
Dr. Jarvyse.  She groaned in anguish as she looked about her dear, safe
room and thought of the horrible luxury of that guarded prison, the
birds and the flowers and cruel kindness of those strangers who knew
every corner of her bureau, every word of her letters.  Still, it must
be.  The Allens would never take her back, and after this, she would be
watched as never before.  It must be.

She met Mrs. Palmer on the threshold of what she had begun to call her
home.  Mrs. Palmer looked worried and spoke sharply to the untidy
cleaning-woman behind her.

"Now, I do hope I can trust you," she said, "for I can't stay here to
watch.  Three new gentlemen for meals, and I have no table for them!
And this whole house to be cleaned!  And not a girl to be hired in the
town!  I wish I had another room--I could rent it this afternoon."

"You can have mine," said Miss Mary quietly.  "I have no money and I
must go."

Mrs. Palmer looked shrewdly at her.

"What made you think you had, before?" she said.

"I had some valuable jewelry--I expected to sell it.  It must have been
stolen before I got here.  I have nothing here to pay with, but I can
send it back to you from New York."

"Folks rich?" asked Mrs. Palmer.

Miss Mary nodded carelessly.  That people should be rich was nothing to
her, and the practiced landlady saw this in a twinkling: no
protestations could have proved so much.

"But you don't get on well, I s'pose," she suggested.

"No.  We don't get on well," Miss Mary repeated dully.

"I guess it's often so," said the other.  Her placid acceptance of
these facts was very comforting to Miss Mary.  She did not realise how
different she herself was from the vague, scared woman of a week ago;
nor how her quiet, well-dressed taciturnity impressed Mrs. Palmer.

"You find this agrees with you here, don't you?" the landlady asked,
tapping her teeth with a key, thoughtfully.

"Oh, yes, I like it here.  I would have liked to stay."

"Well, Miss Merry, how'd you like to stay and help me?" said the
landlady.  "To tell the truth, I've bit off more than I can chew, as
they say.  I never had such a run of boarders, and it's all the girl
can do to look after the other house.  What keeps my people is the
cooking, you see, and that I do mostly myself.  I'm not fit to talk to
the ladies and gentlemen, with my hair all stringy, and smelling of
cooking.  I know it well enough.  I had some thought of asking Mrs.
Meeker to go in with me and look after this house and take the head of
the table, and keep the books.  But you could do it, if you wanted, and
you'd look more--more--not that Mrs. Meeker wasn't a lady, of course,
but--well, some people look the part better than others."

Miss Mary's brain whirled.  The head of the table!  The books!  It was
impossible.  Why, the woman didn't realise that she was talking to
a--a--Patient, then!  (They were never called anything but Patients at
Dr. Jarvyse's.)

"I--I'm afraid I haven't the experience," she began tremulously.
"I--sometimes my head--I can't always talk to people----"

"Oh, you talk enough," Mrs. Palmer interrupted, kindly.  "That's just
what it is: some talk too much.  Mr. Swartout (that's the literary
gentleman in brown--the one with the grey moustache) said you were so
quiet and dignified.  You know you sat at the end, today, for
breakfast, and he said to me it would be pleasant if you kept that
place.  That's what put it into my head, really.  And I guess you've
had experience enough.  Miss Jenny, that went with you through the
store when you bought those clothes (I know her, you see) said she'd
never seen seventy dollars used with more judgment nor made to go
further.  I noticed what she said."  She nodded shrewdly, as one who
knew the world.

"Well, I don't want to urge, but will you or won't you?  I'd give board
and lodging and, say, twenty-five a month, till I could do better.  The
Palmer House has just got to the point where there'll have to be a
change, or it'll get second-class."

"Very well, I will try," said Miss Mary huskily, and in a moment she
was alone, for Mrs. Palmer was half across the side-yard.

"Just boss that woman, then, and see if she can get the house clean by
evening," she called over her shoulder.  "I leave her to you, Miss
Merry, and it's a weight off me, I can tell you!"

If Miss Mary had paused to think, she would have collapsed into tears
and sent for the doctor, but she could not stop, for the cleaning-woman
addressed her briskly.

"I suppose everything better come right out and get a good beating?"
she said, shouldering her mop; and Miss Mary controlled her quivering
lips, pressed her hands to her head, which must not, _could not_ fail
her now, and agreed.

Late in the afternoon Mrs. Palmer dashed over, her hair flying, her
dress untidy.

"Well, how'd you get along?" she began, but paused in the doorway of
the fresh, aired house, taking in, at one eagle glance, the white
curtains behind shining panes, the polished woodwork, the re-arranged
furniture.

"I guess that cleaning-woman met her match," she announced dryly.  "You
must be nearly dead, Miss Merry!  And all ready for dinner, too!  I've
had a clean table cloth put on, and what do you think that Delia said?
'I'll just rub out me apron an' press it off,' she said, 'for if
_she's_ to head the table, I can see she'll be particular!'"

Nothing could have kept Miss Mary up but the fact that her own room was
yet uncleaned.  The lust of soap and water had entered into her, and
she ate and answered and passed the butter dish like one in a dream,
looking forward with the last of her strength to sleeping in an
immaculate chamber.  And at half-past one in the morning, she did so.
The warm bath in the painted tin tub was a luxury she had never
imagined; as the sheets received her tired body, aching in every joint,
she tasted for the one moment before sleep blotted out consciousness
the ecstasy of earned rest after steady, worried toil, and it was very
sweet.  Privilege of the clumsiest hod-carrier, it was utterly new to
Miss Mary, and she in her innocence, thought it due to delight at the
prospect of board and lodging and, say, twenty-five dollars a month!

She did not know that she had hummed, unconsciously, during the
afternoon, a song of her early girlhood; nor that the blood, long
stagnant, that had raced through every vein as she stooped and beat and
lifted and cleansed, was driving the crawling vapours from that
mysterious grey tissue in her skull that had so long plagued and
confused her.

Nor did she know that the flowers on the table, the fresh chintz covers
for the worn lodging-house furniture, so recklessly provided by her,
the quick neatness of an apotheosised Delia and the gentle, reserved
welcome of the new housekeeper herself, were lifting the commonplace
boarding-house to a higher and still higher level.  She only knew that
she worked harder and harder and never wept nor shuddered nor looked
out of black apathy into a cruel tantalizing world, whose inhabitants
had evil thoughts of her and wished and worked her ill.

"It's just as I always say," Mrs. Palmer observed, one afternoon in
May, as, resting in frank gingham and enveloping apron, she permitted
herself the luxury of a cup of tea in Miss Mary's own room.  "What's
bred in the bones comes out in the blood.  I had a gift for cooking
since I was ten, and there's little I'll thank a French chef to tell
me, Miss Merry.  But I can't impress the boarders.  I never could.  And
I can't get the work out of servant-girls without screaming at
'em--never could.  And look at you!  Every man of 'em--that we
wanted--coming up two dollars a week, like gentlemen.  And all for the
privilege of having this house bachelor.  I thought they would.  And
every man Jack of 'em booked for November first again.  I tell you
what, Miss Merry, we'll paint both houses this fall, and I wouldn't
wonder, what with this spring being so backward and the season so long,
if we could paint and paper inside, right through, would you?"

"No," said the housekeeper, rocking gently, luxuriating in the
half-hour rest after a hard day on her feet with one servant gone.
"No, I wouldn't.  That would be nice.  I have something saved.  You can
take that."

"Look at you!" cried Mrs. Palmer.  "Saving on thirty a month!  We'll
pretty near go halves, Miss Merry, from next November.  What's bred in
the bone, as I said--you were born for the business!"

And the sister of Hiram Z. Allen, late Captain of Finance, blushed with
pleasure.

      *      *      *      *      *

It was in March of the next year, as she sat at her neat desk in the
little room they had made into an office when they created a sun
parlour out of the side verandah, that Delia, responsible head of three
maids now, ushered a gentleman in to her.

"The doctor, Miss Merry, that came yesterday about the rooms for his
patient in the cottage," said Delia softly.  "I can't seem to get the
name, ma'am."

"Very well," said Miss Mary and rose, plumper by eight or ten pounds
than she had been, dignified in black broadcloth, only enough of
reserve and weighing of her words about her to mark her off slightly
from the most of her sex and business.

"Miss Merry?  I am Dr. Stanchon, I have been recommended most
strongly----"

She swayed before him, then sank into her chair, grasping the arms.  He
looked courteously alarmed, stared, stared again, then snatched her
hand.

"It's not--it can't be--why, Miss Mary!"  She gasped and trembled.  The
year dropped off from her like a loosened cloak.

"Oh, Dr. Stanchon, don't, _don't_ tell him!" she moaned.

"Him? him?" he repeated.  "Why, Miss Mary, were you here all the time?
And your hair--you were ill?"

"It used to be coloured--you never knew," she murmured.  "I mean
Dr.--Dr. Jarvyse."

"But you are the one Swartout described to me--the one he's in love
with?  Miss Mary, it was wrong of you--I looked for months.  It was
cruel.  And when they found the emeralds and the cross----"

"Did they find them?"

"Why, certainly--the stones were all listed, you know.  Didn't you read
it in the papers?"

"I never see them," she said quietly.  She had gathered herself
together for what must be the struggle of her life.

"Will you tell him?  I can't go back.  I'd die first!" she cried.

"But why should you go back?" he asked in amazement.  "Surely you'll
let them know?  They gave up hope long ago.  You needn't go back to
them, if you're happy here, of course, and indeed, I wouldn't, Miss
Mary----"

"I don't mean go back _there_," she interrupted gently, "I mean to
the--to--Dr.----"

He stared.

"You know, of course, what's the matter," she said quietly, "but nobody
here does.  They think I'm--I'm like anybody else.  I don't mind any
more, since I've been so busy.  I haven't had time to worry over it.
But still, I know it.--And so I told Mr. Swartout it would be
impossible.  It wouldn't be right."

Stanchon seized both of her hands.

"For heaven's sake, Miss Mary, what do you think's the matter with
you?" he cried, his voice breaking in spite of himself.

"Isn't it so?" she queried wistfully.  "Do you really mean it?--But who
cured me, then?"

"If you are the wonderful person I've been hearing about all this time
from Swartout," Stanchon said, trying to speak lightly, his grey eyes
firm on her anxious brown ones, "I should say that working for your
living did it, Miss Mary!"

And it may be he was right: as a diagnostician he has been widely
commended.




THE CHILDREN

It all came over me, as you might say, when I began to tell the new
housemaid about the work.  Not that I hadn't known before, of course,
what a queer sort of life was led in that house; it was hard enough the
first months, goodness knows.  But then, a body can get used to
anything.  And there was no harm in it--I'll swear that to my dying
day!  Although a lie's a lie, any way you put it, and if all I've
told--but I'll let you judge for yourself.

As I say, it was when I began to break Margaret in, that it all came
over me, and I looked about me, in a way of speaking, for how I should
put it to her.  She'd been house-parlor-maid in a big establishment in
the country and knew what was expected of her well enough, and I saw
from the first she'd fit in nicely with us; a steady, quiet girl, like
the best of the Scotch, looking to save her wages, and get to be
housekeeper herself, some day, perhaps.

But when Hodges brought the tray with the porringers on it and the
silver mug, for me to see, and said, "I suppose this young lady'll take
these up, Miss Umbleby?" and when Margaret looked surprised and said,
"I didn't know there were children in the family--am I supposed to wait
on them, too?"--then, as I say, it all came over me, and for the first
time in five years I really saw where I stood, like.

I stared at Hodges and then at the girl, and the tray nearly went down
amongst us.

"Do you mean to say you haven't told her, Sarah?" says Hodges (and that
was the first time that ever he called me by my given name).

"She's told me nothing," Margaret answers rather short, "and if it's
invalid children or feeble-minded, I take it most unkind, Miss Umbleby,
for I've never cared for that sort of thing, and could have had my
twenty-five dollars a month this long time, if I'd wanted to go out as
nurse."

"Take the tray up this time, yourself, Mr. Hodges, please," I said,
"and I'll have a little talk with Margaret," and I sat down and
smoothed my black silk skirt (I always wore black silk of an afternoon)
nervously enough, I'll be bound.

The five years rolled away like yesterday--as they do now--as they do
now----

I saw myself, in my mind's eye, new to the place, and inclined to feel
strange, as I always did when I made a change, though I was twenty-five
and no chicken, but rather more settled than most, having had my
troubles early and got over them.  I'd just left my place--chambermaid
and seamstress--in a big city house, and though it was September, I was
looking out for the country, for I was mortal tired of the noise and
late hours and excitement that I saw ahead of me.  It was parties and
balls every night and me sitting up to undress the young ladies, for
they kept no maid, like so many rich Americans, and yet some one must
do for them.  There was no housekeeper either, and the mistress was not
very strong and we had to use our own responsibility more than I
liked--for I wasn't paid for that, do you see, and that's what they
forget in this country.

"I think I've got you suited at last, Sarah," the head of the office
had said to me, "a nice, quiet place in the country, good pay and light
work, but everything as it should be, you understand.  Four in help
besides the housekeeper and only one in family.  Church within a mile
and every other Sunday for yourself."

That was just what I wanted, and I packed my box thankfully and left
New York for good, I hoped, and I got my wish, for I've never seen the
inside of it since.

A middle-aged coachman in good, quiet country livery, met me at the
little station, and though he was a still-mouthed fellow and rather
reserved, I made out quite a little idea of the place on the way.  The
mistress, Mrs. Childress, was a young widow, deep in her mourning, so
there was no company.  The housekeeper was her old nurse, who had
brought her up.  John, who drove me, was coachman-gardener, and the
cook was his wife--both Catholics.  Everything went on very quiet and
regular and it was hoped that the new upstairs maid wouldn't be one for
excitement and gaiety.  The inside man had been valet to Mr. Childress
and was much trusted and liked by the family.  I could see that old
John was a bit jealous in that direction.

We drove in through a black iron gate with cut stone posts and old
black iron lanterns on top, and the moment we were inside the gates I
began to take a fancy to the place.  It wasn't kept up like the places
at home, but it was neat enough to show that things were taken thought
for, and the beds of asters and dahlias and marigolds as we got near
the house seemed so home-like and bright to me, I could have cried for
comfort.  Childerstone was the name of the place; it was carved on a
big boulder by the side of the entrance, and just as we drove up to the
door John stopped to pick some dahlias for the house (being only me in
the wagon) and I took my first good look at my home for twenty years
afterward.

There was something about it that went to my heart.  It was built of
grey cut stone in good-sized blocks, square, with two windows each side
the hall door.  To some it might have seemed cold-looking, but not to
me, for one side was all over ivy, and the thickness of the walls and
the deep sills looked solid and comfortable after those nasty
brown-stone things all glued to each other in the city.  It looked old
and respectable and settled, like, and the sun, just at going down,
struck the windows like fire and the clean panes shone.  There was that
yellow light over everything and that stillness, with now and then a
leaf or so dropping quietly down, that makes the fall of the year so
pleasant, to my mind.

The house stood in beeches and the trunks of them were grey like the
house and the leaves all light lemon-coloured, like the sky, and that's
the way I always think of Childerstone--grey and yellow and clean and
still.  Just a few rooks (you call them crows here), went over the
house, and except for their cry as they flew, there wasn't a sound
about the place.  I can see how others might have found it sad, but it
never seemed so to me.

John set me down at the servants' entrance and there, before ever I'd
got properly into the hall, the strangeness began.  The cook in her
check apron was kneeling on the floor in front of the big French range
with the tears streaming down her face, working over her rosary beads
and gabbling to drive you crazy.  Over her stood a youngish but
severe-appearing man in a white linen coat like a ship's steward,
trying to get her up.

"Come, Katey," he was saying, "come, woman, up with you and
help--she'll do no harm, the poor soul!  Look after her, now, and I'll
send for the doctor and see to madam--it's only a fit, most like!"

Then he saw me and ran forward to give a hand to my box.

"You're the chambermaid, Miss, I'm sure," he said.  "I'm sorry to say
you'll find us a bit upset.  The housekeeper's down with a stroke of
some sort and the madam's none too strong herself.  Are you much of a
hand to look after the sick?"

"I'm not so clumsy as some," I said.  "Let me see her," and so we left
the cook to her prayers and he carried my box to my room.

I got into a print dress and apron and went to the housekeeper's room.
She was an elderly person and it looked to me as if she was in her last
sickness.  She didn't know any one and so I was as good as another, and
I had her tidy and comfortable in bed by the time the doctor came.  He
said she would need watching through the night and left some medicine,
but I could see he had little hope for her.  I made up a bed in the
room and all that night she chattered and muttered and took me for
different ones, according as her fever went and came.  Towards morning
she got quiet, and as I thought, sensible again.

"Are you a nurse?" she says to me.

"Yes, Mrs. Shipman, be still and rest," I told her, to soothe her.

"I'm glad the children are sent away," she went on, after a bit.
"'Twould break their mother's heart if they got the fever.  Are the
toys packed?"

"Yes, yes," I answered, "all packed and sent."

"Be sure there's enough frocks for Master Robertson," she begged me.
"He's so hard on them and his aunties are so particular.  And my baby
must have her woolly rabbit at night or her darling heart will be just
broken!"

"The rabbit is packed," I said, "and I saw to the frocks myself."

There's but one way with the sick when they're like that, and that's to
humour them, you see.  So she slept and I got a little nap for myself.
I was glad the children were away by next morning, for she was worse,
the cook lost her head, and managed to break the range so that the
water-back leaked and John and Hodges were mopping and mending all day.
The madam herself had a bad turn and the doctor (a New York doctor for
madam, you may be sure!) brought out a handsome, dark woman, the
trained hospital nurse, with him.  Madam wasn't allowed to know how bad
her old nurse was.

So it turned out that I'd been a week in the house without ever seeing
my mistress.  The nurse and I would meet on the stairs and chat a
little, evenings, and once I took a turn in the grounds with her.  She
was a sensible sort of girl, not a bit above herself, as our English
nursing-sisters are, sometimes, but very businesslike, as they say, and
a good, brisk way with her.  She saw a lot more than she spoke of, Miss
Jessop did, I'll warrant!

"It's a good thing the children are sent away," I said.  "They always
add to the bother when there's sickness."

"Why, are there children?" says she.  "Oh, yes, a boy and a girl," I
answered, "poor old Mrs. Shipman is forever talking about them.  She
thinks she's their nurse, it seems, as she was their mother's."

"I wish they were here, then," says she, "for I don't like the looks of
my patient at all.  She doesn't speak seven words a day, and there's
really little or nothing the matter with her, that I can see.  She's
nervous and she's low and she wants cheering, that's all.  I wonder the
doctor doesn't see it."

That night, after both patients were settled, she came up to my room
and took a glance at the old lady, who was going fast.

"Mrs. Childress will soon have to know about this," she said and then,
suddenly, "Are you sure about the children, Sarah?"

"Sure about them?" I repeated after her.  "In what way, Miss Jessop?"

"That there are any," says she.

"Why, of course," I answered, "Mrs. Shipman talks of nothing else.
They're with their aunty, in New Jersey, somewhere.  It's a good thing
there are some, for from what she says when she's rambling, the house
and all the property would go out of the family otherwise.  It's been
five generations in the Childress family, but the nearest now is a
cousin who married a Jew, and the family hate her for it.  But Master
Robertson makes it all safe, Mrs. Shipman says."

"That's a queer thing," said she.  "I took in a dear little picture of
the boy and girl this afternoon, to cheer her up a bit, and told her to
try to think they were the real ones, who'd soon be with her, for that
matter, and so happy to see their dear mamma, and she went white as a
sheet and fainted in my arms.  Of course, I didn't refer to it again.
She's quiet now, holding the picture, but I feared they were dead and
you hadn't known."

"Oh, no," said I.  "I'm sure not," and then I remembered that I'd been
told there was but one in family.  However, that's often said when
there's a nurse to take care of small children (though it's not quite
fair, perhaps), and I was certain of the children, anyway, for there
were toys all about Mrs. Shipman's room and some seed-cookies and
"animal-crackers," as they call those odd little biscuits, in a tin on
her mantel.

However, we were soon to learn something that made me, at least, all
the more curious.  The doctor came that morning and told Miss Jessop
that her services would be no longer required, after he had seen her
patient.

"Mrs. Childress is perfectly recovered," he said, "and she has
unfortunately conceived a grudge against you, my dear girl.  I need
you, anyway, in town.  Poor old Shipman can't last the night now, and I
want all that business disposed of very quietly.  I have decided not to
tell Mrs. Childress until it is all over and the funeral done with.
She is in a very morbid state, and as I knew her husband well I have
taken this step on my own responsibility.  Hodges seems perfectly able
to run things, and to tell the truth, it would do your mistress far
more good to attend to that herself," he said, turning to me.

"It would be a good thing for the poor woman to have some one about
her, Dr. Stanchon," the nurse put in quietly.  "If there were children
in the house, now----"

"Children!" he cried, pulling himself up and staring at her.  "Did you
speak to her about them?  Then that accounts for it!  I should have
warned you."

"Then they did die?" she asked him.  "That's what I thought."

"I'm afraid not," he said, shaking his head with a queer sort of sad
little smile.  "I forgot you were strange here.  Why, Miss Jessop,
didn't you know that----"

"Excuse me, sir, but there's no sign of your mare about--did you tie
her?" says Hodges, coming in in a great hurry, and the doctor swore and
ran off and I never heard the end of the sentence.

Well, I'm running on too long with these little odds and ends, as I'm
sure Margaret felt when I started telling her all about it.  The truth
is I dreaded then, just as I dread now, to get at the real story and
look our conduct straight in the face.  But I'll get on more quickly
now.

Old Mrs. Shipman died very quiet in her sleep and madam wasn't told,
which I didn't half like.  The doctor was called out of those parts to
attend on his father, very suddenly, and Hodges managed the funeral and
all.  It was plain to see he was a very trusty, silent fellow, devoted
to the family.  I took as much off him as I could, and I was dusting
the drawing-room the day of the funeral, when I happened to pick up a
photograph in a silver frame of the same little fellow in the picture
the nurse had shown me--a dear little boy in short kilts.

"That's Master Robertson, isn't it?" I said, very carelessly, not
looking at him--I will own I was curious.  He gave a start.

"Yes--yes, certainly, that's Master Robertson--if you choose to put it
that way," he said, and I saw him put his hand up to his eyes and his
mouth twitched and he left the room.

I didn't question him again, naturally; he was a hard man to cross and
very haughty, was William Hodges, and no one in the house but respected
him.

That day I saw Mrs. Childress for the first time.  She was a sweet,
pretty thing, about my own age, but younger looking, fair, with grey
eyes.  She was in heavy crêpe and her face all fallen and saddened
like, with grief and hopelessness--I felt for her from the moment I saw
her.  And all the more that I'd made up my mind what her trouble was: I
thought that the children were idiots, maybe, or feeble-minded, anyhow,
and so the property would go to the Jew in the end and that his family
were hating her for it!  Folly, of course, but women will have fancies,
and that seemed to fit in with all I'd heard.

She'd been told that Shipman was away with some light, infectious
fever, and she took it very mildly, and said there was no need to get
any one in her place, at present.

"Hodges will attend to everything," she said, in her pretty, tired way;
"not that there's much to do--for one poor woman."

"Things may mend, ma'am, and you'll feel more like having some friends
about you, most likely, later on," I said, to cheer her a bit.

She shook her head sadly.

"No, no, Sarah--if I can't have my own about me, I'll have no others,"
she said, and I thought I saw what she meant and said no more.

That night the doctor and the legal gentleman that looked after the
family affairs were with us and my mistress kept them for dinner.  I
helped Hodges with the serving and was in the butler's pantry after
Mrs. Childress had left them with their coffee and cigars, and as
Hodges had left the door ajar I couldn't help catching a bit of the
talk now and then.

"The worst of it is this trouble about the children," said the doctor.
"She will grieve herself into a decline, I'm afraid."

"I suppose there's no hope?" said the other gentleman.

"No hope?" the doctor burst out.  "Why, man, Robertson's been dead six
months!"

"To be sure--I'd forgotten it was so long.  Well, well, it's too bad,
too bad," and Hodges came back and closed the door.

I must say I was thoroughly put out with the doctor.  Why should he
have told me a lie?  And it was mostly from that that I deliberately
disobeyed him that night, for I knew from the way he had spoken to the
nurse that he didn't wish the children mentioned.  But I couldn't help
it, for when I came to her room to see if I could help her, she was
sitting in her black bedroom gown with her long hair in two braids,
crying over the children's picture.  "Hush, hush, ma'am," I said,
kneeling by her and soothing her head, "if they were here, you may be
sure they wouldn't wish it."

"Who?  Who?" she answers me, quite wild, but not angry at all.  I saw
this and spoke it out boldly, for it was plain that she liked me.

"Your children, ma'am," I said, softly but very firm, "and you should
control yourself and be cheerful and act as if they _were_ here--as if
it had pleased God to let you have them and not _Himself_!"

Such a look as she gave me!  But soon she seemed to melt, like, and put
out her arm over my shoulders.

"What a beautiful way to put it, Sarah!" says she, in a dreamy kind of
way.  "Do you really think God has them--somewhere?"

"Why, of course, ma'am," said I, shocked in good earnest.  "Who else?"

"Then you think I might love them, just as if--just as if----" here she
began to sob.

"Why, Mrs. Childress," I said, "where is your belief?  That's all
that's left to mothers.  I know, for I've lost two, and their father to
blame for it, which you need never say," I told her.

She patted my shoulder very kindly.  "But oh, Sarah, if only they
_were_ here!" she cried, "really, really here!"

"I know, I know," I said, "it's very hard.  But try to think it,
ma'am--it helped me for weeks.  Think they're in the room next you,
here, and you'll sleep better for it."

"Shall I?" she whispered, gripping my hand hard.  "I believe I
would--how well you understand me, Sarah!  And will you help me to
believe it?"

I saw she was feverish and I knew what it means to get one good
refreshing night without crying, and so I said, "Of course I will,
ma'am; see, I'll open the door into the next room and you can fancy
them in their cribs, and I'll sleep in there as if it was to look after
them, like."

Well, she was naught but a child herself, the poor dear, and she let me
get her into bed like a lamb and put her cheek into her hand and went
off like a baby.  It almost scared me, to see how easy she was to
manage, if one did but get hold of the right way.  She looked brighter
in the morning and as Hodges had told me that Shipman used to do for
her, I went in and dressed her--not that I was ever a lady's maid, mind
you, but I've always been one to turn my hand easily to anything I had
a mind to, and I was growing very fond of my poor lady--and then, I was
a little proud, I'll own, of being able to do more for her than her own
medical man, who couldn't trust a sensible woman with the truth!

She clung to me all the morning, and after my work was done, I
persuaded her to come out for the air.  The doctor had ordered it long
ago, but she was obstinate, and would scarcely go at all.  That day,
however, she took a good stroll with me and it brought a bit of colour
into her cheeks.  Just as we turned toward the house she sat down on a
big rock to rest herself, and I saw her lip quiver and her eyes begin
to fill.  I followed her look and there was a child's swing, hung from
two ropes to a low bough.  It must have been rotted with the rains, for
it looked very old and the board seat was cracked and worn.  All
around--it hung in a sort of little glade--were small piles of stones
and bits of oddments that only children get together, like the little
magpies they are.

There's no use to expect any one but a mother or one who's had the
constant care of little ones to understand the tears that come to your
eyes at a sight like that.  What they leave behind is worse than what
they take with them; their curls and their fat legs and the kisses they
gave you are all shut into the grave, but what they used to play with
stays there and mourns them with you.

I saw a wild look come into her eyes, and I determined to quiet her at
any cost.

"There, there, ma'am," I said quickly, "'tis only their playthings.
Supposing they were there, now, and enjoying them!  You go in and take
your nap, as the doctor ordered, and leave me behind..."

She saw what I meant in a twinkling and the colour jumped into her face
again.  She turned and hurried in and just as she went out of sight she
looked over her shoulder, timid like, and waved her hand--only a bit of
a wave, but I saw it.

Under a big stone in front of me, for that part of the grounds was left
wild, like a little grove, I saw a rusty tin biscuit box, and as I
opened it, curiously, to pass the time, I found it full of little tin
platters and cups.  Hardly thinking what I did, I arranged them as if
laid out for tea, on a flat stone, and left them there.  When I went to
awaken her for lunch, I started, for some more of those platters were
on the table by her bed and a white woolly rabbit and a picture book!
She blushed, but I took no notice, and after her luncheon I spied her
going quickly back to the little grove.

"Madam's taking a turn for the better, surely," Hodges said to me that
afternoon.  "She's eating like a Christian now.  What have you done to
her, Miss Umbleby?"  (I went as "Miss" for it's much easier to get a
place so.)

"Mr. Hodges," I said, facing him squarely, "the doctors don't know
everything.  You know as well as I that it's out of nature not to
mention children, where they're missed every hour of the day and every
day of the month.  It's easing the heart that's wanted--not smothering
it."

"What d'you mean?" he says, staring at me.

"I mean toys and such like," I answered him, very firm, "and talk of
them that's not here to use them, and even pretending that they are, if
that will bring peace of mind, Mr. Hodges."

He rubbed his clean shaven chin with his hand.

"Well, well!" he said at last.  "Well, well, well!  You're a good girl,
Miss Umbleby, and a kind one, that's certain.  I never thought o' such
a thing.  Maybe it's all right, though.  But who could understand a
woman, anyway?"

"That's not much to understand," said I, shortly, and left him staring
at me.

She came in late in the afternoon with the rabbit under her arm and
there was Mr. Hodges in the drawing-room laying out the tea--we always
had everything done as if the master was there, and guests, for the
matter of that; she insisted on it.  He knew his place as well as any
man, but his eye fell on the rabbit and he looked very queer and nearly
dropped a cup.  She saw it and began to tremble and go white, and it
came over me then that now or never was the time to clinch matters or
she'd nearly die from shame and I couldn't soothe her any more.

"Perhaps Hodges had better go out and bring in the rest of the toys,
ma'am," I says, very careless, not looking at her.  "It's coming on for
rain.  And he can take an umbrella ... shall he?"

She stiffened up and gave a sort of nod to him.

"Yes, Hodges, go," she said, half in a whisper, and he bit his lip, and
swallowed hard and said, "Very good, madam," and went.

Well, after that, you can see how it would be, can't you?  One thing
led to another, and one time when she was not well for a few days and
rather low, I actually got the two little cribs down from the garret
and ran up some white draperies for them.  She'd hardly let me leave
her, and indeed there was not so much work that I couldn't manage very
well.  She gave all her orders through me and I was well pleased to do
for her and let Mr. Hodges manage things, which he did better than poor
old Shipman, I'll be bound.  By the time we told her about Shipman's
death, she took it very easy--indeed, I think, she'd have minded
nothing by that time, she had grown so calm and almost healthy.

Mr. Hodges would never catch my eye and I never talked private any more
with him, but that was the only sign he didn't approve, and he never
spoke for about a month, but joined in with me by little and little and
never said a word but to shrug his shoulders when I ordered up a tray
with porringers on it for the nursery (she had a bad cold and got
restless and grieving).  I left her in the nursery with the tray and
went out to him, for I saw he wished to speak to me at last.

"Dr. Stanchon would think well of this, if he was here.  Is that your
idea, Miss Umbleby?" he said to me, very dry.  (The doctor had never
come back, but gone to be head of a big asylum out in the west.)

"I'm sure I don't know, Mr. Hodges," I answered.  "I think any doctor
couldn't but be glad to see her gaining every day, and when she feels
up to it and guests begin to come again, she'll get willing to see them
and forget the loss of the poor little things."

"The loss of _what_?" says he, frowning at me.

"Why, the children," I answered.

"What children?"

"Master Robertson, of course, and Miss Winifred," I said, quite vexed
with his obstinacy.  (I had asked her once if the baby was named after
her and she nodded and went away quickly.)

"See here, my girl," says he, "there's no good keeping this up for my
benefit.  _I'm_ not going into a decline, you know.  I know as well as
you do that she couldn't lose what she never had!"

"Never had!" I gasped.  "She never had any children?"

"Of course not," he said, steadying me, for my knees got weak all of a
sudden.  "That's what's made all the trouble--that's what's so
unfortunate!  D'you mean to say you didn't know?"

I sank right down on the stairs.  "But the pictures!" I burst out.

"If you mean that picture of Mr. Robertson Childress when he was a
little lad and the other one of him and his sister that died when a
baby, and chose to fancy they was _hers_," says he, pointing upstairs,
"it's no fault of mine, Miss Umbleby."

And no more it was.  What with poor old Shipman's ramblings and the
doctor's words that I had twisted into what they never meant, I had got
myself into a fine pickle.

"But what shall I do, Mr. Hodges?" I said, stupid-like, with the
surprise and the shock of it.  "It'd kill her, if I stopped now."

"That's for you to decide," said he, in his reserved, cold way, "I have
my silver to do."

Well, I did decide.  I lay awake all night at it, and maybe I did
wrong, but I hadn't the heart to see the red go out of her cheek and
the little shy smile off her pretty mouth.  It hurt no one, and the
mischief was done, anyway--there'd be no heir to Childerstone, now.
For five generations it had been the same--a son and a daughter to
every pair, and the old place about as dear to each son, as I made out,
as ever his wife or child could be.  General Washington had stopped the
night there, and some great French general that helped the Americans
had come there for making plans to attack the British, and Colonel
Robertson Childress that then was had helped him.  They had plenty of
English kin and some in the Southern States, but no friends near them,
on account of my mistress's husband having to live in Switzerland for
his health and his father dying young (as he did) so that his mother
couldn't bear the old place.  But as soon as Mr. Robertson was told he
was cured and could live where he liked, he made for Childerstone and
brought his bride there--a stranger from an American family in
Switzerland--and lived but three months.  If anybody was ever alone, it
was that poor lady, I'm sure.  There was no big house like theirs
anywhere about--no county families, as you might say--and those that
had called from the village she wouldn't see, in her mourning.  And yet
out of that house she would not go, because he had loved it so; it was
pitiful.

There's no good argle-bargling over it, as my mother used to say, I'd
do the same again!  For I began it with the best of motives, and as
innocent as a babe, myself, of the real truth, you see.

I can shut my eyes, now, and it all comes back to me as it was in the
old garden, of autumn afternoons--I always think of Childerstone in the
autumn, somehow.  There was an old box hedge there, trimmed into balls
and squares, and beds laid out in patterns, with asters and marigolds
and those little rusty chrysanthemums that stand the early frosts so
well.  A wind-break of great evergreens all along two sides kept it
warm and close, and from the south and west the sun streamed in onto
the stone dial that the Childress of General Washington's time had had
brought over from home.  It was set for Surrey, Hodges told me once,
and no manner of use, consequently, but very settled and home-like to
see, if you understand me.  In the middle was an old stone basin, all
mottled and chipped, and the water ran out from a lion's mouth in some
kind of brown metal, and trickled down its mane and jaws and splashed
away.  We cleaned it out, she and I, one day, _pretending we had help_,
and Hodges went to town and got us some gold fish for it.  They looked
very handsome there.  Old John kept the turf clipped and clean and
routed out some rustic seats for us--all grey they were and tottery,
but he strengthened them, and I smartened them up with yellow chintz
cushions I found in the garret--and I myself brought out two tiny
arm-chairs, painted wood, from the loft in the coach house.  We'd sit
there all the afternoon in September, talking a little, me mending and
my mistress embroidering on some little frocks I cut out for her.  We
talked about the children, of course.  They got to be as real to me as
to her, almost.  Of course at first it was all what they _would_ have
been (for she was no fool, Mrs. Childress, though you may be thinking
so) but by little and little it got to be what they _were_.  It
couldn't be helped.

Hodges would bring her tea out there and she'd eat heartily, for she
never was much of a one for a late dinner, me sewing all the time, for
I always knew my place, though I believe in her kind heart she'd have
been willing for me to eat with her, bless her!  Then she'd look at me
so wistful-like, and say, "I'll leave you now, Sarah--eat your tea and
don't keep out too late.  Good-bye--good-bye..."  Ah, dear me!

I'd sit and think, with the leaves dropping quiet and yellow around me
and the water dripping from the lion's mouth and sometimes I'd close my
eyes and--I'll swear I could hear them playing quietly beyond me!  They
were never noisy children.  I'll say now something I never mentioned,
even to her, and I'd say it if my life hung by it.  More than once I've
left the metal tea-set shut in the biscuit box and found it spread out
of mornings.  My mistress slept in the room next me with the door open,
and am I to think that William Hodges, or Katey, crippled with
rheumatism, or that lazy old John came down and set them out?  I've
taken a hasty run down to that garden (we called it the children's
garden, after a while) because she took an idea, and seen the swing
just dying down, and not a breath stirring.  That's the plain gospel of
it.  And I've lain in my bed, just off the two cribs, and held my
breath at what I felt and heard.  She knew it, too.  But never heard so
much as I, and often cried for it.  I never knew why that should be,
nor Hodges, either.

There was one rainy day I went up in the garret and pulled the old
rocking-horse out and dusted it and put it out in the middle and set
the doors open and went away.  It was directly over our heads as we sat
sewing, and--ah, well, it's many years ago now, a many and a many, and
it's no good raking over too much what's past and gone, I know.  And as
Hodges said, afterward, the rain on the roof was loud and steady....

I don't know why I should have thought of the rocking-horse, and she
not that was always thinking and planning for them.  Hodges said it was
because I had had children.  But I could never have afforded them any
such toy as that.  Still, perhaps he was right.  It was odd his saying
that (he knew the facts about me, of course, by that time) being such a
dry man, with no fancy about him, you might say, and disliking the
whole subject, as he always did, but so it was.  Men will often come
out with something like that, and quite astonish one.

He never made a hint of objection when I was made housekeeper, and that
was like him, too, though I was, to say so, put over him.  But he knew
my respect for him, black silk afternoons or no black silk, and how we
all leaned on him, really.

And then Margaret came, as I said, and it was all to tell, and a fine
mess I made of it and William Hodges that settled it, after all.

For Margaret wanted to pack her box directly and get off, and said
she'd never heard of such doings and had no liking for people that
weren't right.

"Not right?" says Hodges, "not right?  Don't you make any such mistake,
my girl.  Madam attends to all her law business and is at church
regularly, and if she's not for much company--why, all the easier for
us.  Her cheques are as sensible as any one's, I don't care who the man
is, and a lady has a right to her fancies.  I've lived with very high
families at home, and if I'm suited, you may depend upon it the place
is a good one.  Go or stop, as you like, but don't set up above your
elders, young woman."

So she thought it over and the end of it all was that she was with us
till the last.  And gave me many a black hour, too, poor child, meaning
no harm, but she admired Hodges, it was plain, and being younger than I
and far handsomer in a dark, Scotch way, it went hard with me, for he
made no sign, and I was proud and wouldn't have showed my feelings for
my life twice over.

Well, it went on three years more.  I made my little frocks longer and
the gold fish grew bigger and we set out new marigolds every year, that
was all.  It was like some quiet dream, when I've gone back and seemed
a girl again in the green lanes at home, with mother clear-starching
and the rector's daughter hearing my catechism and Master Lawrence sent
off to school for bringing me his first partridge.  Those dreams seem
long and short at one and the same time, and I wake years older, and
yet it has not been years that passed but only minutes.  So it was at
Childerstone.  The years went by like the hours went in the children's
garden, all hedged in, like, and quiet and leaving no mark.  We all
seemed the same to each other and one day was like another, full,
somehow, and busy and happy, too, in a quiet, gentle way.

When old Katey lay dying she spoke of these days for the first time to
me.  She'd sent up the porringers and set out glasses of milk and made
cookies in heart shapes with her mouth tight shut for all that time,
and we never knowing if she sensed it rightly or not.  But on her
deathbed she told me that she felt the Blessed Mary (as she called her)
had given those days to my poor mistress to make up to her for all
she'd lost and all she'd never had, and that she'd confessed her part
in it and been cleared, long ago.  I never loved any time better,
looking back, nor Hodges either.  One season the Christmas greens would
be up, and then before we knew it the ice would be out of the brooks
and there would be crocuses and daffodils for Mr. Childress's grave.

She and I took all the care of it and the key to the iron gate of it
lay out on her low work table, and one or other of us always passing
through, but one afternoon in summer when I went with a basket of June
roses, she being not quite up to it that day, there on the flat stone I
saw with my own eyes a little crumpled bunch of daisies--all nipped off
short, such as children pick, and crushed and wilted in their hot
little hands!  And on no other tomb but his.  But I was used to such as
that, by then....

Margaret was handy with her needle, and I remember well the day she
made the linen garden hat with a knot of rose-colour under the brim.

"You don't think this will be too old, do you, ma'am?" she said when
she showed it to my mistress, and the dear lady was that pleased!

"Not a bit, Margaret," she said and I carried it off to Miss Winifred's
closet.  Many's the time I missed it after that, and knew too much to
hunt.  It was hunting that spoiled all, for we tried it....

And yet we didn't half believe.  Heaven help us, we knew, but we didn't
believe: St. Thomas was nothing to us!

Margaret was with us three years when the new family came.  Hodges told
us that Hudson River property was looking up and land was worth more
every year.  Anyway, in one year two families built big houses within a
mile of us and we went to call, of course, as in duty bound.  John
grumbled at getting out the good harness and having the carriage
re-lined, but my mistress knew what was right, and he had no choice.  I
dressed her very carefully, and we watched her off from the door, a
thought too pale in her black, but sweet as a flower, and every inch
full of breeding, as Hodges said.

I never knew what took place at that visit, but she came back with a
bright red circle in each cheek and her head very high, and spent all
the evening in the nursery.  Alone, of course, for I heard little quick
sounds on the piano in the drawing-room, and the fairy books were gone
from the children's book-shelves, and Margaret found them in front of
the fire and brought them to me....

It was only three days before the new family called on us (a pair of
ponies to a basket phaeton--very neat and a nice little groom) and my
heart jumped into my mouth when I saw there were two children in with
the lady: little girls of eight and twelve, I should say.  'Twas the
first carriage callers that ever I'd seen in the place, and Hodges says
to me as he goes toward the hall,

"This is something like, eh, Miss Umbleby?"

But I felt odd and uncertain, and when from behind the library door I
heard the lady say, "You see I've kept my word and brought my babies,
Mrs. Childress--my son is hardly old enough for yours--only four--but
Helena and Lou can't wait--they are so impatient to see your little
girl!"--when I heard that, I saw what my poor mistress had been at, and
the terrible situation we were in (and had been in for years) flashed
over me and my hands got cold as ice.

"Where is she?" the lady went on.

At that I went boldly into the library and stood by my mistress's
chair--I couldn't desert her then, after all those years.

"Where?  where?" my poor lady repeated, vague-like and turning her eyes
so piteous at me that I looked the visitor straight in the face and
getting between her and my mistress I said very calmly,

"I think Miss Winifred is in the children's garden, madam; shall I take
the young ladies there?"

For my thought was to get the children out of the way, before it all
came out, you see.

Oh, the look of gratitude she gave me!  And yet it was a mad thing to
do.  But I couldn't desert her--I couldn't.

"There, you see, mamma!" cried the youngest, and the older one said,

"We can find our way, thank you," very civil, to me.

"Children have sharp eyes," said the lady, laughing.  "One can't hide
them from each other--haven't you found it so?"

"Now what the devil does she mean by that?" Hodges muttered to me as he
passed by me with the tray.  He always kept the silver perfect, and it
did one's heart good to see his tray: urn and sugar and cream just
twinkling and the toast in a covered dish--old Chelsea it was--and new
cakes and jam and fresh butter, just as they have at home.

I don't know what they talked of, for I couldn't find any excuse to
stop in the room, and she wouldn't have had it, anyway.  I went around
to the front to catch the children when they should come back, and
quiet them, but they didn't come, and I was too thankful to think much
about it.

After about half an hour I saw the oldest one coming slowly along by
herself, looking very sulky.

"Where's your sister, dear?" I said, all in a tremble, for I dreaded
how she might put it.

"She's too naughty--I can't get her to leave," she said pettishly, and
burst into the library ahead of me.  My mistress's face was scarlet and
her eyes like two big stars--for the first time I saw that she was a
beauty.  Her breath came very quick and I knew as well as if I'd been
there all the time that she'd been letting herself go, as they say, and
talked to her heart's content about what she'd never have a chance to
talk again to any guest.  She was much excited and the other woman knew
it and was puzzled, I could see, from the way she looked at her.

Now the girl burst into the talk.

"Mamma, Lou is so naughty!" she cried.  "I saw the ponies coming up the
drive, and I told her it was time, but she won't come!"

"Gently, daughter, gently," said the lady, and put her arm around her
and smoothed her hair.  "Why won't Lou come?"

I can see that room now, as plain as any picture in a frame: the
setting sun all yellow on the gilt of the rows of books, the streak of
light on the waxed oak floor, the urn shining in the last rays.  There
was the mother patting the big girl, there was Hodges with his hand on
the tray, and there was me standing behind my mistress, with her red
cheeks and her poor heaving bosom.

"Why won't Lou come?" she asked the girl again.

"Because," she says, still fretful, and very loud and clear, "because
she is taking a pattern of the little girl's hat and trying to twist
hers into that shape!  I told her you wouldn't like it."

My mistress sprang up and the chair fell down with a crash behind her.
I turned (Hodges says) as white as a sheet and moved nearer her.

"Hat!" she gasped.  "What hat? _whose hat_?"

There seemed to be a jingling, like sleighbells, all through the air,
and I thought I was going crazy till I saw that it came from the tray,
where Hodges's hand was shaking so, and yet he couldn't take it off.

"The hat with the rose-coloured ribbon on it," said the girl, "the one
we saw as we drove in, you know, mamma.  It's so becoming."

"Sarah!  Sarah! did you hear?  Did you hear?" shrieked my mistress.
"She saw, Sarah, _she saw_!"

Then the colour went out of her like when you blow out a candle, and
she put her hand to her heart.

"Oh, oh, what pain!" she said very quickly, and Hodges cried, "My God,
she's gone!" and I caught her as she fell and we went down together,
for my knees were shaking.

When I opened my eyes there was only Margaret there, wetting my
forehead, for William had gone for a doctor.  Not that it was of any
use, for she never breathed.  But the smile on her face was lovely.

We got her on her bed and the sight of her there brought the tears to
me and I cried out, "Oh, dear, oh, dear! she was all I had in the
world, and now----"

"Now you've got me, my girl, and isn't that worth anything to you,
Sarah?"

That was William Hodges, and he put his arm over my shoulder, right
before Margaret, and looked so kind at me, so kind--I saw in a moment
that no one else was anything to him and that he had always cared for
me.  And that, coming so sudden, when I had given up all hope of it,
was too much for me, weak as I was, and I fainted off again and woke up
raving hot with fever and half out of my mind, but not quite, for I
kept begging them to put off the funeral till I should be able to be up.

But this, of course, was not done, and by the time I was out of
hospital the turf was all in place on her dear grave.

William had managed everything and had picked out all the little
keepsakes I should have chosen--the heirs were most kind, though Jews.
Indeed, I've felt different to that sort of people ever since, for they
not caring for the house on account of its being lonely, to their way
of thinking, made it into a children's home for those of their belief
as were poor and orphaned, and whatever may have been, the old place
will never lack for children now.

I never stepped foot in the grounds again, for William Hodges, though
the gentlest and fairest of men, never thwarted me but once, and it was
in just that direction.  Moreover, he forbade me to speak of what only
he and I knew for a certainty, and he was one of that sort that when a
command is laid, it's best kept.

We've two fine children--girl and boy--and he never murmured at the
names I chose for them.  Indeed, considering what my mistress's will
left me and what his master had done for him, he was as pleased as I.

"They're named after our two best friends, Sarah," he said, looking
hard at me, once.

And I nodded my head, but if she saw me, in heaven, she knew who were
in my heart when I named them!




THE CRYSTAL

In reviewing the matter dispassionately, it seems difficult to find
anybody (anybody, that is to say, to whom her career was or is of the
slightest interest) who omits to pronounce Molly Dickett's life an
egregious and shameful failure.  I should be sorry for any one, for
instance, who had the hardihood to address her mother on the subject,
for Mrs. Dickett's power of tongue is well known in and beyond local
circles; and since Eleanor married young Farwell, who stands in line
for cashier of the bank forty or fifty years from now, if all goes well
and a series of providential deaths occurs--indeed, ever since Kathryn
became assistant-principal at the high-school (because, as her mother
points out, a mere teacher's position, even in a high-school, may not
be much, but an assistant-principal may be called to consult with the
trustees any day and Kathryn has twice refused a college professorship)
since these family adjustments, I repeat, Mrs. Dickett's tongue has
grown steadily more incisive and her attempts at scaling the fortress
of Mr. Dickett's wardrobe more encouraging.

I believe it to be the simple truth to say that she literally never
mentions her second daughter, and that Molly sends her letters direct
to the factory to be sure that her father gets them--for Mrs. Dickett
is Napoleonic in her methods and would really, I am afraid, stop at
nothing.  Any woman who has borne three children and will learn to
drive an electric runabout at the age of forty-five, for the purpose of
taking her husband home from his office in it, is to be reckoned with,
you will agree.

The last time she is known to have referred to the girl definitely was
when she announced the theory that her unfortunate name lay at the
bottom of it all.

"Molly," she is reported to have said, "was named by her father--a
mistake always, I think.  The fact that Eleanor was baptised Ella has
little or nothing to do with it; there was never any 'Nellie' or
'Lelie' about it, and at sixteen she began of her own accord to write
it Eleanor.  Kathryn I named entirely myself--and after all, what can
Aunt Ella be said to have done for Eleanor?  A silver ring and a
bracelet when she graduated!  But it was always 'Molly Dickett' all
over the town!"

And it must be confessed that this was so, if, indeed, the confession
proves anything.  Nevertheless Mrs. Dickett cannot deny that for a long
time, up to the period of her plunge into outer darkness, Molly was
confessedly the flower of the family.  Eleanor was rather soggy, a
creature of inertia, chocolate caramels and a tendency to ritualism
which her mother could not have foreseen when she encouraged her
entering the Episcopal communion ("I don't mind candles so much," said
Mrs. Dickett, "but I must say I think it's very bad taste to call
yourself an American Catholic, when you can't help but feel that
Catholics should be foreigners").

Kathryn her mother pronounced "a very ordinary girl, very ordinary
indeed," up to the day when she was graduated, head of her class, at
the State normal-school.  She showed every sign, even after that, of
snapping at the bait of a middle-aged widower with three children,
simply because his hook was labelled _New York_; but when it became
known, as a result of herculean detective efforts on Mrs. Dickett's
part, that he employed but one servant, insisted upon the payment of
what he termed "spot cash" for every article purchased in his
establishment, and disapproved of the theatre, Kathryn yielded to
reason and henceforth consulted her mother at each successive stage of
her growing career until such consultation was frankly deprecated by
the fountain-head itself.

But Molly was neither soggy nor ordinary, being distinctly handsome in
a grey-eyed, black-haired, white-skinned way, a clever student, an
original conversationalist--in short, a personality.  Unlike the usual
victim to an older and a younger sister, she managed to get quite her
fair share of the family dignities and finances--was in fact accused by
her sisters of using undue influence in persuading her father to send
her to a woman's college.  It is most characteristic of her that at
this accusation she refused the favour, interested her teachers in her
cause so that they procured her a full scholarship at the college of
her choice, and actually completed a four years' course there with no
other means than her share of the twenty-five dollars yearly placed to
his daughters' bank accounts by their father since the birth of each.
On this slender sum, plus the accruing interest, eked out by college
journalism, which began to be mentionable in those years--the early
90's--strengthened further in the last terms by tutoring, did Molly
Dickett triumphantly assert her independence,  and I tell it of her at
this length so that none may throw "rolling stones" at her, in what
followed.  A young woman of eighteen who can set her course in solitude
and steer it alone, friendless, except for what friends her qualities
can make her, absolutely unaided but for her own exertions, for four
years, is not to be called lacking in application, I submit.  She got
out of that business just what there was in it, _and so_, she insists,
_she did at every stage of her subsequent history_.  Note this, for it
is important.

Here you see her, then, at twenty-two; handsome, accomplished,
independent, well-rated on her particular 'Change--one fairly hears
Dick Whittington's bells in the air!  Her mother, when Molly wrote home
the news of her appointment as under-reader in the office of one of the
new cheap magazines that began to appear with such frequency at about
that time, spoke of her with the typical respect of the dependent woman
for the wage-earner, and never dropped that note till the crash came.
Mr. Dickett was head clerk by now, with an appreciable advance in
salary; and Eleanor's wedding (it was in dressing the Roodscreen at
Christmas that young Farwell met his fate), with her sisters as
bridemaids, marked a distinct stage in the family's social career.  Old
Mr. Farwell, who had long been nursing his only son's bank position,
did the handsome thing for the young couple, and stomached, very
decently, what must have been his regret at the boy's choice--for we
all like our children to "look up and not down," as the motto suggests,
in these matters.  And he was paid for it, for Eleanor made a man of
the boy and a vestryman to boot, and quite won the old man's heart,
though he never loved Mrs. Dickett.

By the time Molly had been for two years at her post in _Slater's
Monthly_, Kathryn had moved back to her normal-school as
instructor--"and they paid well to get her, too," as Mr. Dickett
informed his stenographer confidentially.  She had been invited to
supper more than once, had the stenographer, in the old days, and there
had even been a little talk of Kathryn's acquiring this accomplishment,
once, but Mr. Dickett was far too wise to suggest her presence at the
half-past six dinner now-a-days.  He was far too wise, indeed, to do
anything that seemed likely to ruffle the increasingly easy currents
into which his bark had drifted of late.  In a vague way he had always
counted on supporting four women until three of them--or two, say, for
Kathryn was plain and rather managing--should marry; and lo and behold,
all three were off his hands in a twinkle, and there was a pretty
little nest-egg growing for little Henry (for Eleanor had been very
discreet about the first baby).

So now we arrive at the day when Molly left her desk in the ante-room
of Slater's, walked through the book department and the art offices and
encountered Miss Spinner, the little dried and spectacled reader of
forty-odd years, and centuries (or their equivalent) of magazine
experience.

"Miss Spinner," said Molly, "do you mind telling me what they pay you a
week?"

"Twenty-five," Miss Spinner replied promptly.  "Not at all.  Of course
I'd been fifteen years at Franklin Square, and it was all that
experience that made them offer me the three dollars raise.  So I left.
But, of course, there are five magazines now where there used to be
one.  In ten years I think there'll be ten.  So does Mr. Slater.  That
means competition, and that means that experience will always be worth
something to the new ones.  You started at fifteen, you see, and of
course I only got ten ...  Gracious, isn't that Mrs. Julia Carter
Sykes's voice?  Perhaps you'd better step out, my dear--Mr. Slater's
talking with that English prison man and said that he wasn't to be
disturbed if the Twelve Apostles came!"

Molly went with her swift, unhasty step (she had long legs) and
received Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes urbanely, as befitted the best paid
woman novelist of her country.  Occasionally she had the fancy to "trot
around to the office" as she called it: it was believed that she
"picked up types" there.  And Molly knew how to keep her waiting
without offending her, just as she knew how to dispose of the
illustrators, from the Great Moguls who came in cabs to scold about the
defects in half-tone processes, to the just discovered young genius who
waited an hour in the outside hall, his great pasteboard square between
his knees.

"You're much too pretty to be here, my child--do you like it?" Mrs.
Julia Carter Sykes remarked impertinently (she was supposed to believe
that her manner was that of the English Aristocracy, and asked the most
embarrassing questions of everybody with an income of less than fifteen
thousand a year).

"Not very much," Molly replied placidly.  "It's a little dull.  I'm
thinking of going into journalism.  Couldn't you give me some letters
to some of the editors?  I could do good special article stuff, I'm
sure."

"But certainly!" the novelist cried.  "You are too delicious!  I'll
write you a card to Hecht himself this moment--I'm dining with him
to-night--and I'll speak of you.  I'll tell him to send you to
interview me at 'Bonnybraeside.'"

"Thanks," said Molly laconically and rose to show the celebrity to Mr.
Slater's sanctum.  The English prison man, emerging, took in the
contrasted couple at a single glance, supposed them to be the whirlwind
editor's wife and daughter, from his greeting ("Come in, come in, my
dears, both of you!") and inquired of his wife, eight days later, how
she explained a woman of that type, "strung with sapphires, literally,"
and a daughter like a young duchess, with Irish eyes and a walk like
Diana's.  His wife could not explain it at all, and said as much.

Molly left Mr. Slater somewhat puzzled.  He raised her salary three
dollars, might have been pushed to five, but she merely smiled
deprecatingly.

"It isn't exactly that," she said, "but there seems no outlook,
somehow.  I don't think it's a very reasonable profession--if it is a
profession."

He exploded into the name of a great English novelist who held
precisely that position.

"Yes.  But I am not a great novelist, you see," said Molly, and cleared
out her desk with the swift thoroughness that characterized her.  She
put a clean sheet of green blotting paper on it before she left, and
washed out the inkwell herself.

"That stenographer spells worse and worse, remember," she remarked.
"I'll look in for any mail."

"Why, aren't you going to stay at a hundred-and-three any more?"

Miss Pinner spoke with concern: she knew that the boarding-house
recommended highly by Eleanor's rector (his sister had stayed there
while studying singing) was very tautly managed, in an unobtrusive way,
and that the sisters who directed it had a shrewd idea of the goings
and comings of their "guests."

"No," said Molly.  "I'll be out at all hours, maybe, and they wouldn't
like it.  Don't be worried--I'll look in now and then."

And so, for a year, she did, and they were all delighted to see her,
for few people likely to enter such offices can talk more amusingly
than Molly Dickett.  She had always used her material well, when it was
limited, and now, when it bumped into the Himalayas at one end  (her
famous Rajah of Bhutpore interview)  and rounded the hitherto
speechless promontories of Spud Connors' career, the champion
heavyweight of the world (she actually drew vivid metaphors from him
and he gave her a tintype of himself at eight years) the entire staff
gathered 'round her when she came, and Mr. Slater, under a temporary
financial cloud, wept literal tears because he could not afford to buy
her back to them.  It was, of course, the "Bonnybraeside" interview
that did it.  So cleverly was this column-and-a-half of chatty
sharp-shooting manoeuvred that Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes sent hundreds of
copies to her friends, while her fellow celebrities giggled among
themselves, and the publishers wondered exactly what the Public really
wanted, anyhow.  You couldn't tell, any more, they complained.

Just here began the little cloud on Mrs. Dickett's happiness.  For two
years the family were very proud of Molly, and Eleanor gave a tea for
her on one of her infrequent visits to them and got some people she
could never have hoped for otherwise on the strength of her sister's
celebrityship, for her Sunday morning column-and-a-half got to
two-thirds of the town's breakfast tables, and her picture was at the
head of it, now.  At twenty-five she was called (and probably
correctly) the second highest paid woman journalist in the country, and
she spoke familiarly of names that are head-lines to most of us and
bought evening gowns at "little shops" on Fifth Avenue.  She lived with
a red-haired friend, a clever illustrator of rising vogue, in a pretty
little apartment, and Mrs. Dickett dined there one night with a really
great novelist, a tenor from the Metropolitan Opera House and a young
Englishman whose brother was a baronet.  They had four glasses at their
plates and the maid's cap and apron were tremendously interesting to
Mrs. Dickett.  But when she learned the rental of the apartment, the
wages of the maid, the cost of Molly's black evening-frock and the
average monthly bill for Molly's hansoms, she no longer wondered that
her daughter was always poor.  She had never spent seventy-five dollars
for a single garment in her life, barring a fur-lined cloak, a
Christmas gift from her husband, and to drink crême-de-menthe at a roof
garden gave her a very odd sensation.  However, there was the baronet's
brother...

But at one of the songs at the roof-garden Mrs. Dickett drew the line,
and the entire British Peerage, embattled, could not have persuaded her
that it could possibly be the duty--not to suggest the pleasure--of any
respectable woman to listen to it.  As she put it later to the
red-haired girl and Molly, no unmarried woman could understand it and
no married woman would want to, a simple statement which they persisted
in treating as an epigram, to her annoyance.

"But nobody minded it but you, dear Mrs. Dickett," the red-haired girl
soothed her, "and it's all in how you take those things, don't you
think?  Of course, if you find it wrong, why then it is wrong--for you.
But really, I assure you, I simply paid no attention to it..."

"Then you must allow me to say that I think you should have!" Mrs.
Dickett snapped out.

"Oh, come, mother, a woman of twenty-five is to all intents and
purposes as capable of hearing--anything--as a married woman," said
Molly lazily.  "I'm not a school girl, you know."

"I know that," her mother replied shortly, and might have added that
Molly looked Kathryn's age--which she did, and Kathryn was twenty-eight.

She was, however, if anything, handsomer than when her cheek had its
fuller curve, for her eyes looked larger and her mouth had more
mobility: there was a stimulation in her tenseness.  Mrs. Dickett felt
a little troubled.

"Although, of course, Molly admitted that the creature had no character
and sang that sort of song purposely," she confided to her husband.

Imagine, then, her feelings when Molly's interview with the singer was
printed!  She began a severe letter to her--and ceased midway of the
first paragraph.  What possible hold had she over her daughter?  What
did she know of her friends and associates, and what, had she known and
disapproved, would it have mattered to Molly?  Since the day she won
her college scholarship at eighteen she had been independent,
financially speaking, and, though financial independence is not, of
course, everything ... but it would almost seem that it is!  There must
be some mistake here.  Mrs. Dickett chewed the end of her pen and
thought as hard as she had ever thought in her life.  Nonsense!  What
finally settles the thing is public opinion--Society.  If one's world
turns the cold shoulder, one retracts, capitulates, acknowledges that
the conventions are in the right of it.  Well; but Molly's world was
not the suburban circle of the Dicketts and her world applauded her;
she stood high in it; her interview with the unspeakable one was "a
great hit," in their jargon.  Molly, in short, applied different
standards, was in another class--was it, could it be, a Lower Class?
And yet, the baronet!

Mrs. Dickett tore her letter through.

It is quite true that they didn't see her for a year, after
that--eighteen months, if you except Kathryn's flying luncheon with her
at the time of the Convention of Associated Normal Schools.  Kathryn
then informed them that the red-haired girl had married her teacher and
left the apartment and that Molly lived alone there.

"I'm very glad," said her mother.  "I never liked that girl."

"She seems to have been a bad influence," Kathryn agreed
conservatively, and there, good, simple people as they were at heart,
it would have ended.

But here comes Eleanor upon the scene, Eleanor, with two boys, a
probable Warden for husband, and a father-in-law who has become very
respectably wealthy from long ago, almost forgotten investments in
Southern Railroads.  And George is the only son.  Eleanor wonders that
people can send their children to the public schools, and wishes that
Kathryn had married that college professor, even though his salary did
barely equal hers.

"Every woman ought to settle, you know--it's nonsense to discuss it."

"But I am settled, my dear," said Kathryn blandly, "and I'm not fond of
housekeeping.  You don't get any time for anything else."

"!!!" said Eleanor.

Mrs. Dickett here intervened with news of Molly, and Eleanor's eyebrows
lifted.

"You don't mean to say she's living alone there?"

Mrs. Dickett nodded uncertainly.

"Really, mother, I must say!  She must be crazy.  It's not right at
all, and I'm sure George wouldn't like it."

"She's nearly twenty-seven," Kathryn put in coldly.

"As if that had anything to do with it!  I'm going down to see her."

It was certainly unfortunate that she should have gone unheralded.  The
first wave of classical dancing had begun to lap the shores of New York
society, and Molly's paper had got the first amazing pictures, the
first technical chit-chat of "plastique" and "masque" and "flowing
line."  Behold Mrs. Eleanor then, tired and mussed with shopping,
dyspeptic from unassimilated restaurant-lunching (and a little nervous
at her task, when actually confronted with it), staring petrified at
Molly's darkened dining-room, where, on a platform, against dull velvet
backgrounds, an ivory, loose-haired, barely draped intaglio-woman,
swayed and whirled and beckoned.  A slender spiral of smoke rose from
the incense bowl before her: the odour hung heavy in the room.  Three
or four women (much better gowned than Eleanor) and a dozen men
applauded from the drawing-room; a strange-looking youth with a shock
of auburn hair drew from a violin sounds which it required no knowledge
of technique to feel extraordinarily poignant and moving.  All but the
dancer were smoking, and Molly sat on the floor (in copper-coloured
chiffon, too!) her hands clasped about her knees, a cigarette in an
amber holder between her lips and enunciated clearly,

"Bully!"

In describing matters afterward Eleanor referred to Molly's reception
of her as brazen.  There is no reason to believe that this word has any
relation to Molly's state of mind: she saw nothing to be brazen about.
When she said, "How lucky you dropped in today, sis!" she unaffectedly
meant it.

"Well, rather!" one of the young men replied.  "Won't you have
something, Mrs. Er--Oh, yes--Farwell?  Rhine wine cup, what?"

"No, I thank you," said Eleanor frigidly.  "May I have a few minutes'
conversation with you, Mary?"

"Not just now, I hope," said some one, "for she's going to dance again."

"In that case I will not trouble you," said Eleanor, rather
dramatically, one fears, and backed out to avoid the smoking violinist.
It was a little trying, and Eleanor should have had tact enough to let
the matter rest, but she was rather inelastic in her methods, and she
had come to New York with a Purpose.  So Molly disappeared with her
into the bedroom, and they had it out, with what result it is
unnecessary to say.

It was from that moment that a doubt as to whether Molly were an asset
or a liability slipped into the Dickett family.  It is improbable that
knowledge of the fact that "the disgusting foreign dancing woman" was
born and bred in Bangor, Maine, and had never been farther than a
stage-length from a vigilant mother, would have greatly affected their
judgment.  And almost certainly the fact that the baronet's brother had
asked her to marry him would only have irritated them the more--and
perhaps with reason.  Had he ever wanted to marry Molly?  Maybe; she
never said so.

And here one must pause, to consider the interesting subject of Molly's
Relations with Men.  It proved singularly lacking in richness.  To
state that she had lived four years (as she did, ultimately) on the
staff of the largest New York daily newspaper, hanging personally over
the "forms" many a time, among the printers, from 10 P.M. until 3 A.M.,
walking home with the milk-carts in the lead-blue morning; sitting in
the outer office of one of the greatest city editors for three of these
years; studying every "first night," every picturesque slum, every
visiting or indigenous notoriety at close range--to catalogue a life
like this, add that it was the life of a handsome, well-dressed,
high-spirited girl, and pretend that it was an existence unqualified by
male adjectives, would be the merest absurdity.

I hear that from the tiniest, most impudent printer's devil up to the
Dean of College Presidents, who became so interested in her during his
famous interview of "_After Democracy--What?_" that his wife asked her
to luncheon and she spent the day with them, every man she encountered
"swore by her," as they say.  In a novel, the editor-in-chief would
have married her and Eleanor would have been delighted; but in a novel
the editors-in-chief are handsome, athletic young bachelors (which
rarely occurs, as a matter of fact) or magnificent widowers whose first
marriages were tragic mistakes, so the emotional field is really clear.
Now Molly's editor-in-chief was, so far as is known, quite happy with
his wife, and his four daughters were not so much younger than Molly
herself.  It is true, the art editor of the Sunday edition was supposed
to be pretty far gone, but he was married, too, and even his
stenographer, who was furiously jealous, admitted that Molly never gave
him the slightest encouragement.  Such reporters as were free to do so
are generally credited with proposals in strict order of income (there
had to be some working system), but nothing but continued good feeling
ever came of it; and the French portrait-painter who spent three days
at the Metropolitan Art Museum with her out of the ten he vouchsafed
America, declared openly that she was perfectly cold, a charming,
clever boy in temperament--"absolutely insulated."  And perhaps she
was.  She always said that she knew too many men to take them too
seriously.  And yet when Kathryn remarked once that it was encouraging
to observe how women were gradually growing independent of men, Molly
laughed consumedly.  So there, as the great Anglo-American novelist
says, you are!

Living, as she did, alone, utterly unrestricted in her goings,
uncensored except by her own common-sense, one readily imagines that
there may have been scenes ... how could they have been avoided,
mankind being as it is?  But if her house was of glass, it was, by its
very nature transparent, and I do not see how any one who didn't
deserve it could have kept the consistent respect of the entire force
of _The Day_.

On her twenty-eighth birthday she came home from a very gay supper at a
very gay restaurant with a hard pain at the back of her neck and a deep
wrinkle from it between her eyebrows.  They had been harder of late,
these headaches, and lasted longer, and this one not only failed to
yield to the practised massage of her kindly housemaid, but baffled the
nearest doctor and left her, finally, a pallid, shaken creature, who
saw written on every wall in the little apartment, as she dragged
herself about it:

_I must not take any coal-tar preparation because my heart simply won't
stand it!_

"And let me tell you this, Miss Molly Dickett," said the great
specialist she had consulted as a matter of course (he ordered Trust
Magnates to Egypt and consulted at Presidents' bed-sides, and if Mrs.
Dickett had known that he never accepted a cent from Molly, what would
she have said?) "let me tell you this.  You think you're a very
remarkable young woman, don't you?"

"Don't you, Dr. Stanchon?" Molly retorted placidly.

He patted her shoulder and capitulated.  "But you ought to be spanked,
you know," he said.  "Now, listen.  For what was all this vitality and
endurance given you, my child?"

"If you mean twins," said Molly curtly, "I won't.  There are plenty of
women to have twins, doctor."

"But there are not plenty of women to have _your_ twins," said he.

She grimaced and blew a saucy kiss to him.

"I see why they all want you!" she told him.  "But, honestly, do
married women never have headaches?"

"There's no good being clever with me, child," he went on, a little
wearily (he seemed middle-aged beyond words to her).  "You are making a
great mistake and when you find it out, it will in all probability be
too late to remedy it, worse luck!  _That's_ the real harm of all this
Advanced Woman stuff: if you could only get it over before twenty-five!
But when you wake up, you're nearer forty, and then--what's the
difference?"

"I'll marry, then, maybe!"

"Dear child, it doesn't matter a continental what you do, then," he
said simply.

She gave a little shudder, in spite of herself.  He sounded so final,
and his eyes were so bright and deep.  She stared into them and,
somehow, lost herself--the eyes turned to bright points in space, and
Time seemed to stop, with a sort of whir like a clock that runs down...

"There, there!" his voice came roughly.  "None of that, my girl, none
of that!  You _are_ in a nice state!  Now, you march off on a vacation,
and take it on a boat of some sort--do you hear?  And, listen to me--if
I find a nice woman to go with you----"

"Oh!" she interrupted mockingly, "the famous Miss Jessop!  Now I _know_
you think I'm pretty bad!  You forget, doctor, that I've interviewed
Miss Jessop--or tried to."

"That's better," he retorted grimly.  "You hadn't much of a success,
had you, missy?  And would you like to know what the famous Miss Jessop
said about you?"

"Me?"

"Yes, you.  There are two sides to every interview, you know.  She
said, 'If you don't see Miss Molly Dickett in your office before a
year, doctor, I miss my guess.  She's a neurasthenic for you, all
right.'  So what do you think of that, eh?"

"I think she was impertinent," said Molly, weakly, "and you can tell
her so."

"Bosh.  Now go and lie down," he commanded shortly, and the interview
closed.

A vacation seemed a simple remedy, and she started out, bent on one,
with the kindest orders to make it long, accompanied by large credit;
but the promised renewal of vitality did not come, and the taste seemed
gone from everything.  The quaint and tiny little fishing hamlet she
had fixed upon as a good place for gathering "material" by the way,
proved all and more than she had been led to hope for, and when the
greatest north-easter that had blown for fifty years bruised and tore
the rugged little coast, she "wrote it up" as a matter of course--as a
bird-dog points or a carrier pigeon wheels for home.  And then Molly
Dickett received what was literally her first setback in ten years: the
City Editor sent her copy back to her!

"You're too tired, my dear girl," he wrote.  "Why not wait a bit?  Or
pad this out and point it up a little in the middle and send it to one
of the magazines.  Peterson covered it for us, anyway, at
Kennebunkport.  The cubs send you an officeful of affection, and we are
all yours truly."

But the "cubs" never hung over her desk again, for Molly never returned
to it.

"You see," as she explained to them gently, "I lost my nerve--that's
all.  If I hadn't sent the stuff, it would have been all right, later,
I suppose.  But I did send it, and I thought it was O.K., and if it was
as rotten as you said, why, how could I ever tell, again?  Anyway, I'm
tired."

They protested, but the City Editor shook his head.

"Let her alone," he said shortly.  "It's straight enough.  I've seen it
happen before.  She's gone too far without a check: I don't believe
women can stand it.  Let her alone."

And when the most talented of the cubs went next to interview Mrs.
Julia Carter Sykes as to her recently dramatized novel, he was referred
to her secretary--and it was Molly.

"For heaven's sake!" he said angrily.  "Are you insane?  Wasn't it true
that Slater offered----"

"Oh, yes," said Molly negligently, "but I'm tired of offices."

"I suppose you get time for writing your own stuff--on the side?" he
suggested awkwardly, but Molly shook her head.

"Writing seems bad for the back of the neck," she said, with a grey
flash out of the tail of her eye for the cub.

"We're getting ready for the sanitarium this morning--sun-baths and
Swedish Movement Cure and grape diet.  Of course you won't mention it,"
she said.  "She can't possibly see you--I do all the interviews
now--but if you come around to-morrow, after I get the house closed,
I'll give you a good one."

A solemn butler entered.

"If you will be so kind as to cast your eye over the table for the
ladies' luncheon, Miss Dickett?" he said weightily.

"There's two orchids short and no time for getting more.  And the salt
got into the mousse, I'm told by the cook--she wished to know if you
could suggest anything.  And one of the ladies has been detained and
cannot come--by telephone message.  Will you take her place, Miss
Dickett?"

"Yes," said Molly.  "Tell Mrs. Carter not to worry about the orchids,
Halsey; I'll arrange something.  I must go and dress, now--come
to-morrow," she added hastily.

"By George!" the cub gasped, and left, to electrify the office later.

"It's a darned shame," he ended, and the other cubs nodded sagely over
their pipes.

"With her talent, too!" they said...

You will have understood, of course, why Eleanor dropped Molly after
the unfortunate Greek dancer, but you may be surprised to learn of
Kathryn's attitude when she learned of the secretaryship.  It wasn't
dignified, she said, and she was greatly disappointed in Molly.

Kathryn was Dean of Women, now, in a co-educational college in the
middle west, and was spoken of as Dean Dickett in the college journal.
Of all her children Mrs. Dickett was proudest of Kathryn, because Molly
frightened her and Eleanor patronized her.  Eleanor was getting up in
the world a little too fast for her mother, nowadays, and knew people
Mrs. Dickett would never have dreamed of meeting in the old
days--people that she had grown used to the idea of never meeting, even
now that Mr. Dickett was in the Firm.  Eleanor's little girl went to
school with all the little girls on the Hill and was asked to attend
their parties.  Her name was Penelope, after George's mother, who had
never expected it--the name being so old-fashioned--and was
correspondingly delighted and had given her much jewelry already.

Eleanor, in so far as she mentioned Molly at all, had expressed her
opinion that to live with Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes was the most
respectable thing Molly had yet done, and added that there were
exceptional opportunities in more ways than one for the woman who held
that position--would perhaps even have called on her there, but Molly
never asked her to.  Kathryn, to her parents' surprise, developed a
stodgy but unblinking antagonism to her sister, for what she called
Molly's lowering of her sense of what was due to herself, and said
coldly that she had no doubt her sister's life was easier now, but that
it was un-American.

Un-American it may have been, but easier it assuredly was not.  Unlike
the factory-girls and clerks for whose benefit Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes
gave readings from her unpublished works, Molly's hours were not
limited, and her responsibility grew as her executive ability became
increasingly manifest.  The thousands of women to whom the celebrity's
manifold occupations, publicities, hospitalities and charities were an
endless wonder and discussion might have marvelled less had they been
able to follow Molly's crowded days and nights and peep through the
littered desk and scribbled calendar of her study.

To amusement and interest, succeeded fatigue and interest, and to
these, fatigue alone.  Each hurried, various day became a space of time
to be got through, merely, and Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes's heavy sigh as
she curled into her wicker-inset Circassian-walnut bed was no more
heartfelt than her secretary's.  If Molly had ever envied Mrs. Julia,
she had long ceased to, and indeed, on that final afternoon when she
laid her dark, braided head on her arms and cried on her desk, she felt
as sorry for the authoress as for herself.

Mr. Julia Carter Sykes (as many of his friends called him) sat opposite
her, biting his nails.  He was well dressed, fond of auction-bridge,
and travelled abroad in the interests of some vaguely comprehended firm.

"This will just about kill the madam," he said despondently.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Sykes, but I really must--I must," Molly gulped.

"It isn't money, is it?" he asked.  "Because though I'm not a popular
authoress or anything like that, I could----"

"Oh, goodness, no!" said Molly.  "It's not money at all.  Only I must
get away."

"We've never got on so well with any of the others," he went on
jerkily, "and she's certainly awfully fond of you--the madam is.  She's
taken you everywhere, I know, and all the dinners, and the car whenever
you----"

"Mrs. Sykes has been very kind," Molly broke in dully, "but--oh, it's
no use, Mr. Sykes.  It's got to be done, and putting it off only makes
her worse.  So I'm going to-morrow.  She'll feel better about it later."

"I hope so, I'm sure," Mr. Sykes responded doubtfully.  "She was pretty
bad when I left her.  That brain of hers, you know--it's a great
strain, they tell me.  Hard on us all, in a way."

Molly always smiled and sighed when she remembered him and the hunched
shoulders that leaned drearily over the tonneau.

"Where'll I tell him?" he asked, and she drew tighter the tight line
between her brows, sighed, tried to speak, and found her mind quite
utterly a blank.

"Where'll I tell him?" Mr. Sykes repeated, looking curiously at her.

To save her life Molly could not have remembered where she had arranged
to go!  A real horror caught her: was this the beginning of all the
dreadful symptoms that few of Julia Carter Sykes's admirers suspected
in their idol?  She must say something, and there flashed suddenly into
her mind, otherwise blank of any image or phrase, an odd occurrence of
the afternoon before, an occurrence she had been too tired to try,
even, to explain.

"Drive to the docks!" she cried sharply, and the chauffeur touched his
visor, and her life poised for twenty minutes on its watershed,
although she did not know it.

In the motor it came back to her, that twilight not eighteen hours
back, when in clearing out her desk ("the last desk I shall ever clear,
I swear!") she had happened on the little transparent glass ball, a
paper-weight, she supposed, and fingered it idly, void of thought or
feeling, after the last emotional storm with her celebrity.

As she looked into it, staring, her tired mind seemed to sink and sink
and submerge in the little clear white sphere till it drowned utterly,
and only a rigid body, its eyes turned into its lap, sat in the still,
dim room.

Presently, after what might have been hours or seconds, she seemed to
gather into herself again, but could not wrench her eyes from the
crystal ball, which looked opalescent now, and filmy, so that she
shaded her eyes mechanically with the black scarf of her dinner-dress,
to shut out the reflections of the room.  But they were not
reflections, for there was bright blue in the ball, blue and white, and
nothing of that sort was in the room.

She peered into the ball, and saw in it, clear and sharp and bright as
the little coloured prints that are pasted to the bottom of such
things, a tossing sapphire sea with little white-caps on it, a boat
with a funnel, and little boats lashed to the side, a white rail, a
tilted deck, and herself, Molly Dickett, in a striped blue and white
frock and bare head, leaning over the rail on her elbows beside a
broad-shouldered man with a cap such as officers on a boat wear.  The
waves actually danced and glittered in the sun.  _But the room was
nearly dark_, something whispered in her brain, and just then she had
dropped the shielding scarf, and gasped back to a sense of reality and
the ball was suddenly empty.

There had been no picture in the bottom of it, after all.

But on the bow of the little boat lashed to the side she had seen,
written in tiny, tiny letters just as the Lord's Prayer is written in
carved ivory toys of incredible smallness, the letters E-L-L-A, and
these letters had fixed themselves in her mind, they had seemed so
absurdly real and she had felt so absurdly sure of them.

"Which steamer, Miss Dickett?" the chauffeur inquired respectfully; all
the employees of the Julia Carter Sykes establishment respected Molly,
as well they might.  A sudden, happy irresponsibility flooded Molly's
tired mind, and she smiled into the man's face--the old,
not-to-be-resisted Molly Dickett smile.

"The name of the boat is _Ella_, Pierce," she said cheerfully, "and
it's a small boat, not a liner.  Look it up."

And as he disappeared she laughed aloud.

She was still laughing softly when he returned, looking worried.

"I think you must have told me wrong, Miss Dickett, didn't you?" he
began hurriedly, lifting out her small, flat trunk.  "It's the _Stella_
you mean, isn't it?  There seems to be a misunderstanding; they said
the stateroom was countermanded at the last minute, but the party's
name was Richards.  It's all right now, but we nearly lost it--they're
holding her for you.  There don't seem to be any more passengers--are
you sure there's no mistake?"

"Perfectly sure," said Molly, sober enough now.  "I'm very much
indebted to you, Pierce."

She gave him a tip that caught his breath, walked up the gang-plank of
the _Stella_, nodded easily to a severe official, and followed a pale,
neat stewardess to her state-room.

"Where is this boat going?" she asked of the pale stewardess, who
gasped and replied,

"South America, ma'am.  Didn't you know?"

"I may have forgotten," said Molly, and then sleep overcame her and the
days and nights were one for a long time.

The _Stella_ carried hides and fruit and lumber, and, occasionally, two
or three passengers, for whose convenience the company had fitted up a
stateroom or two, since the demand for these proved steady.  People, as
Molly learned from the stewardess (whose sole charge she was) for whom
a sea-voyage had been recommended for various reasons.  There had never
been more than five at a time and two was the average; one, very common.

The long, blue days slipped by, she ate and slept and lay in the
deck-chair that had been sent by the party named Richards, and spoke to
the stewardess alone, who was used to tired and silent charges, and
served her meals on a tray.

She was a quiet, refined woman with a hand often at her heart.  Molly
found her gasping in the companionway once, fed her quickly from the
little flask she pointed at in her pocket, and helped her to her berth,
as clean and comfortable as Molly's own.  This produced confidences,
and she learned that Mrs. Cope (every one called her that, she said,
and treated her most respectfully) had made her first voyage as
children's nurse to an English family bound for Rio, who had turned her
off on arriving at that port.  The stewardess on that trip proved
inclined to drink and sauciness, and at Mrs. Cope's suggestion they had
given her the post in her stead and she had kept it for five years.  An
easy berth, she said, good pay, good board, little to do and pleasant
people.  She ate alone, was practically her own mistress, and the
sea-air had saved her life, she knew.

This Molly could well believe, for she had come to count the days of
her ignorance of salt water for days of loss and emptiness.  The
mornings of wind, the nights of stars and foam, the hot blue moons,
sang in her blood and tinted her cheeks: she felt herself born again,
the crowded past an ugly nightmare.  She says that she had never, till
then, been alone with herself for ten years and that she had never had
time to find out what she really liked best in the world.  We must
suppose that she did at last find out, but it cannot be denied that the
discovery was unusual.

Mrs. Cope died at Buenos Ayres, suddenly, as she was serving Molly's
supper, and Molly, piloted by the first mate, for she knew no Spanish,
buried her there and put up a neat headstone over her grave: the
possible lack of one had been the poor woman's one terror, and she had
sent every cent of her wages to some worthless, mysterious husband
whose whereabouts nobody knew.  This took all Molly's money but so much
as was needed for her return trip, for it has to be confessed of her
that she never saved a penny in her extravagant life.

And now we see her speaking, for the first time beyond perfunctory
salutations, with the captain, a taciturn recluse of a man, furious
just now at some unexpected litigation connected with his cargo and
horribly inconvenienced by the loss of his stewardess.  Two ladies
waiting, literally, on the wharf, have been promised accommodation in
the _Stella_ by the owners, and there is not a decent, respectable
woman to be found on the whole coast of South America, to look after
them.

"Suppose you give me the job?" says Molly, quietly.

He looks her up, down and across, with an eye like a gimlet; she takes
the scrutiny cheerfully, as her duty and his due, offers him her clear,
grey eyes (her only reference for character) and her capable, trim,
broad-shouldered figure as security for fitness.

"I suppose you know your own business best," he says brusquely.
"You're engaged.  What name do you wish to go by?"

"My own," says she, "Molly Dickett."

So now, you see!  The secret is out, and you may observe her again
piloted by the first mate, scouting through the shops of Buenos Ayres
for a blue-and-white striped cotton frock, broad enough through the
shoulders.  Aprons she purchased and caps (larger caps than Mrs.
Cope's, who compromised on white lawn bow-knots) and high-laced,
rubber-soled, white canvas boots, only to be procured in English shops
for sporting-goods.  Their price caused the first mate to whistle.

"What's the idea of all this?" he demanded suddenly.  "Of course, you
know, you must be up to some game.  Your kind doesn't ship as
stewardess."

"What game were _you_ up to?" Molly replied quickly.  "Your kind
doesn't ship as first mate, does it?"

"What kind?" he said gruffly.

"The 'Dicky' kind," she answered.

He blurted out some amazed incoherence, and,

"Oh, I've seen Harvard men, before," she assured him pleasantly.

Molly took the best of care of her two ladies and accepted their
gratuities with a grave courtesy.  They confided to the captain, at New
York, that she seemed unusually refined for her position, and he
replied that for all he knew, she might be.

"We'll never see _her_ again," the first mate grumbled sourly, when she
stepped off the gangplank, and the captain shrugged his shoulders
non-committally.

They did, nevertheless, but her mother never did.  After that one
dreadful interview in the Dickett library (it had used to be the
sitting-room in her college days) when Eleanor had cried, and Kathryn's
letter had been read aloud, and Mr. Dickett had vainly displayed his
bank-book, and her mother had literally trembled with rage, there was
nothing for it but oblivion--oblivion, and silence.

"A stewardess!  My daughter a stewardess!  I believe we could put you
in an asylum--you're not decent!"

Mrs. Dickett's cheeks were greyish and mottled.

"Come, come, mother!  Come, come!" said Mr. Dickett.  "There's some
mistake, I'm sure.  If you'd only come and live with us, Molly--we're
all alone, now, you know, and Lord knows there's plenty for all.  It
doesn't seem quite the thing, I must say, though.  It--it hurts your
mother's pride, you see."

"I'm sorry," said Molly, sadly.  It is incredible, but she had never
anticipated it!  She was really very simple and direct, and life seemed
so clear and good to her, now.

"To compare yourself with that Englishman is ridiculous, and you know
it," sobbed Eleanor.  "What if he _was_ a cow-boy?  He didn't wear a
cap and apron--and it was for his health--and George is too angry to
come over, even!"

"It's for my health, too," Molly urged, trying to keep her temper.  "I
never was the same after I went on that vacation to Maine--I told you
before.  Life isn't worth living, unless you're well."

"But you could have the south chamber for your own sitting-room, as
George suggested, and do your writing at your own time," Mr. Dickett
began.

"I've told you I'm not a writer," she interrupted shortly.

"George would rather have paid out of his own pocket----"

"We'll leave George out of this, I think," said Molly, her foot tapping
dangerously.

"Then you may leave me out, too!" cried George's wife.  "I have my
children to think of.  If you are determined to go and be a
chambermaid, this ends it.  Come, mother!"

Mrs. Dickett avoided her husband's grasp and went to the door with
Eleanor.  It is hard to see how these things can be, but the cave-woman
and her whelpish brood are far behind us now, and Molly's mother was
cut to the dividing of the bone and the marrow.  The two women went out
of the room and Molly stood alone with her father.

"I'm sorry, father," she said quietly.  "I can't see that I should
change my way of life when it is perfectly honourable and proper, just
to gratify their silly pride.  You must realise that I have to be
independent--I'm thirty years old and I haven't had a cent that I
didn't earn for more than ten years.  I have never been so well and
so--so contented since I left college, really."

"Really?" Mr. Dickett echoed in dim amazement.

"Really.  And mother never liked me--never.  Oh, it's no use, father,
she never has.  I can't waste any more of my life.  I've found what
suits me--if I ever change, I'll let you know.  I'll write you, anyway,
now and then.  Good-bye, father.  Shake hands."

And so it was over, and she jumped into the waiting "hack" ("it was
some comfort," Eleanor said, "that she wore that handsome broadcloth
and the feather-boa") and left them.

Perhaps you had rather leave her, yourself?  Remember, she had dined
the brother of a baronet (and dined him well, too)!  And George Farwell
had never earned her salary on _The Day_.  Still, if you will stick by
her a little longer, you may feel a little more tolerant of her, and
that is much, in this critical civilisation of ours.

She leaned over the rail in her striped blue-and-white, and the first
mate leaned beside her.  The sapphire sea raced along and the milky
froth flew off from their bow.  The sun beat down on her dark head, and
there was a song in her heart--oh, there's no doubt of it, the girl was
disgracefully happy!

"A fine trip, won't it be?" she said contentedly, and drew a deep
breath, and washed her lungs clean of all the murk and cobwebs left
behind.

"Yes," said the first mate.  "My last, by the way."

"Your last?" she repeated vaguely.  "Your last?"

He nodded and swallowed in his throat.  "Shall I tell you why?"

"Yes, tell me why," she said, and stared at the ship's boat, lashed to
the side.

"I've told you about myself," he blurted out roughly, "and my family,
and all that.  It can't be helped--now.  We look at things differently.
A man either wants to be an attaché fooling around Baden, or he
doesn't.  I don't, that's all.  And I go bad in offices.  And I won't
take money from them--or anybody.  This suits me well enough.  Probably
I'm not ambitious."

"Then if it suits you," Molly began, but he put his hand over hers.

"It doesn't suit me to love any woman as much as I've loved you since
Buenos Ayres," he said, "and feel that to get her I must give up this
and settle down into a smelly office.  It doesn't suit me to find that
life is just hell without her, but to know that if I know anything
about myself I couldn't live any other way but this, and that no decent
man could ask a woman to lead the rolling-stone life that I lead--she
wouldn't, anyhow."

Molly's eyes were fastened on the bow of the ship's boat; her heart
pounded against the rail; she had never felt so frightened in her life.

And suddenly she became aware that she was staring at the letters
E-L-L-A, and they looked very tiny, like the letters of the Lord's
Prayer written in carved ivory toys, and something she had not thought
of since she first left New York flashed into her mind, and she
trembled slightly.  Then all the vexed and broken, many-coloured
fragments of her life clicked and settled into place, quietly and
inevitably, as they do in a child's kaleidoscope, and the final pattern
stood out, finished.  She smiled slightly and thinks that perhaps she
prayed.  Then,

"Why don't you give the woman a chance?" said Molly Dickett.

      *      *      *      *      *

Mr. Dickett pushed little Penelope gently off his knee and stroked a
whitening whisker.

"Molly's baby was a boy, mother--I know you'd want to hear," he said.

Mrs. Dickett was silent.

"Her husband's bought a third interest in the boat," he went on firmly,
"and she says he'll probably be captain some day."

"Indeed," said Mrs. Dickett.

"They've stopped carrying passengers and the rooms are fitted up for
them, quite private, she writes, and the boy weighed nine pounds.  I'm
thinking of going down to see them, when they get in to this country
again, mother.  Would you care to see her husband's picture?  He's a
fine looking chap--six feet, she writes."

"I don't care about it," said Mrs. Dickett, through thin lips.  "It is
a relief, however, to learn that she is no longer a chambermaid."

"Come, come, mother, the ship's boy did all the emptying, you know,"
Mr. Dickett urged tolerantly.  "It seems a roving sort of life, to us,
I know, and unsettled, but if they like it, why I can't see any real
harm..."

"Tastes differ," said his wife grimly--and so, God knows, they do!




THE GOSPEL

For the first few days of her stay there, she thought little enough of
the strangeness of the situation.  To think of it, to marvel at the
neat stillness, the quiet precision of all the domestic arrangements,
would have been to let her mind dwell on just what she had to avoid.
She was sick to her very soul of all that the words "domestic
arrangements" implied; sick with an actual spiritual nausea.  It was
honestly no exaggeration to say that she would gladly have died rather
than take the trouble to arrange the details of living.

So every morning she woke when her dreams ended and lay staring idly,
through the cross-bars of the primitive window-netting, at the swaying,
sinking, tree-tops, and the floating white above them, so white between
the blue and green; and then her breakfast came, fresh and chill and
shining, with a flaming nasturtium on the snowy linen; and then a
dreamy time, when thought ranged among stray lines of poetry and
memories of childhood; and then some one rubbed and kneaded and ironed
out her tired muscles and she slept again.  Sometimes foaming milk came
in a beaded brown pitcher that smelt of dairies; sometimes luscious,
quartered fruits, smothered in clotting cream, tempted a palate nearly
dulled beyond recall; sometimes rich, salted broth steamed in a dim,
blue bowl till she regretted to see the bottom of it.

And just at that time she was lifted into a long, basket chair and,
propped in lavendered pillows, looked dreamily into the hills and
pastures rolling out in front of her.  Cows wandered here and there,
birds swooped lazily through the June blue, the faintest scent of
grapevines hung on the wind.  But no human figures blotted the
landscape; only the faint, musical clash of distant scythes (a sound as
natural as the cawing and lowing and interminable twittering of the
busy animal world all around) spoke of men.

Then one day (it might have been a week's time) she caught herself
listening for sounds of household labour.  Where was the breaking, the
slamming, the whistling, the quarrelling, the brushing and the rattling
that these thin partitions ought to filter through?  Simply, it was
not.  A little faint, suspicious worry came to her: the house was a
tomb, then?  Did it have to be?  Was she as bad as that?

And when her tray came next, some kind of savoury stew, by now, with
fresh picked strawberries on a sea-green grape leaf, she looked
directly at the woman who brought it to the bed.

"How still this house is!" she said, and flushed with weakness, for it
was her first real sentence, and it occurred to her that only little
sighs of fatigue or groans of relief and halting exclamations of, "That
feels good," or "No more, thanks," had passed her lips.

The woman smiled.  She wore a straight gown of some cool stripe of
white and grey and her eyes were grey.

"We live in a quiet place," she said, and lifted the pillows higher.

But it seemed that after that--perhaps it was because she listened--she
began to hear faint sounds.  The clear falling of poured out water, and
the tinkling of dish on dish, now and then, and later, the soft murmur
of exchanging women's voices.

Another day she spoke of the freshness of her morning egg, and that
afternoon she leaned nearer the casement to catch the cluck of a
motherly hen with her brood, and smiled at the scurry of wing and feet
as grain was scattered somewhere.

It must have been at that time that the doctor came up to see her, a
big brown man, whose beard hid his smile when he chose, but nothing
could cover the keen, reading beam of the eye.

"I see you are doing well," he said.

"It is wonderful," she answered him, "but I am sure it is not the
world."

"The world is very large," he said, and went away.

"And I never asked about--about anybody," she murmured, her eyes
filling, "but I am sure they are all right, or he would have said!"

She was ashamed, afterward, to remember for how long she had thought
the woman who attended on her a servant.  And yet she did think her so
until the morning when it suddenly occurred to her that it was not
possible any ordinary servant should be so deft and self-contained at
once: servants were not so calm--that was it, so calm.  Even the best
of them were hurried and anxious, and if they were old and valued, they
got on one's nerves the more: one had to consider them.  Of course,
this was a trained nurse.  She had decided suddenly that she felt equal
to rising for her bath, and congratulated herself on discerning the
nurse in time, for now she could ask for help, if she needed it.

"If you will show me the bathroom," she said, "and will be there to
help me over the edge of the tub, in case I feel weak----"

"I will be there," said the woman, "but I must get it ready: the tub is
not high."

And when she stepped into the next room she realised, with a little
smile, how far she was from white porcelain and tiled walls.  On the
scrubbed deal floor there stood a white deal tub, clean as new milk,
round and copper bound.  Towels and soaps and sponges were there in
plenty, and great metal ewers full of hot and cold water, and nothing
else but one chair in all the scrubbed cleanliness.  The woman poured
the water over her as she crouched in the fragrant wooden pool and
dried her gently and quickly in towels pressed away in lavender, with
the deft, sure movements of one well practised in her business; but
when she lay, just happily tired from the new exertion, among the
fragrant sheets, a tiny shadow seemed about to haunt her sleep.  She
placed the little discomfort with difficulty, but at length expressed
it.

"That tub is very heavy, now," she said drowsily.  "Is there a man to
lift it?"

For the first time the woman smiled.  Till then she had been hands and
feet merely, tireless and tactful, but impersonal: now she smiled, and
her face was very sweet.

"I shall empty it," she said.  "I am quite strong.  Go to sleep, now."

Very soon again the doctor came, and at her quiet request gave her news
of husband, children and home; all well, it seemed, and smoothly
ordered.  Days of absolute stillness had broken the habit of insistent
speech, and many things that once would have said themselves before she
thought, now halted behind her lips and seemed not worth the muscular
effort.  But one thing she did mention.

"Ought not the nurses here to have more help?" she asked.  "Mine lifts
out my bath-water every day.  Are there not servants enough?  I could
pay for it..."

"There are no servants here at all," he said, "and there is nobody you
could pay more than you are already paying."

"Then they are all nurses?"

"There are no trained nurses here, if you mean that," he said.

"Then who--what is the woman who takes care of me?" she asked, vaguely
displeased.

"She is one of the daughters of the house," he said.  "She is no more a
nurse than her mother is a cook or her sister a laundress.  They do
what is to be done, that is all.  Each has done and can do the others'
tasks."

She felt in some way corrected, yet it was hard to say in what she had
offended.  But Dr. Stanchon was an odd man in many ways.  "All the
same," she persisted, "I think I had better have a nurse, now.  I shall
feel more comfortable.  Ask Miss Jessop if she could come out to me.  I
believe I could get along with her, now.  I'm afraid I was childish,
before."

But he only shook his head.  "The time for Miss Jessop has passed, dear
friend," he said quietly.  "No nurse ever comes here."

"Then this is a private house," she began again, "their own home.  And
I do not even know their names!"

"It is private because it is their own home--just that," he said.
"That is what a home is.  It is a simple fact, but one that seems not
to have been included in your education."

"Why, Dr. Stanchon, what can you mean?" she cried.  "My mother's
hospitality----"

"I mean that I do not consider an art museum a home, no matter how
highly the chef is paid," he said shortly.

"But there is the place on the Hudson----"

"That is a country club, nothing more," he interrupted.  "Your mother
dismissed a butler once, because, though he offered eight liqueurs to a
guest, the guest asked for a ninth and the butler had neglected to
order it.  I have attended her there for a really painful attack of
sciatica when none of her visitors knew that anything ailed her, though
she had been away from them for forty-eight hours."

"But that is mother's house, not mine," she protested, "and I do not
pretend to keep up----"

"You do not pretend to, because you could not do it," he interrupted
again.  "Your father is a multi-millionaire and your husband is not.
But it is your constant ideal, nevertheless, and your failures to
realise it, even in the degree to which you have tried, have sapped
your vitality to a point which even you can understand now, I should
suppose."

She looked doubtingly at him.

"Do you really mean, Dr. Stanchon," she began, "that this dreadful
attack----"

"'Attack'!" he muttered brusquely, "'attack'!  One would imagine I had
pulled you through pneumonia or peritonitis!  If, after constant
sapping and mining and starving-out the garrison, it gives way and
falls defeated, you choose to call the day of surrender a yielding to
an attack, then you have had an attack."

And again he left her abruptly, a prey to creeping, ugly doubts.  For
she had been very sorry for herself and the fatality that had stranded
her on the dreary coast where so many of her friends had met mysterious
wreckage.

"Has the doctor sent patients here before?" she asked her attendant the
next morning, when she sat, fresh and fragrant in her invalid ruffles,
at the window, watching the poultry yard, which somehow she had not
noticed before, and the cow browsing beside the brook where the white
ducks paddled, gossiping.

"Oh, yes, often," said the busy sister (she was Hester; the other was
Ann).  "We are never without some one.  So many people are ill in the
city.  Now I am going to clean your room, and perhaps you will feel
like stepping out on the balcony?"

Surprised, for she had not seen any such addition to the simple frame
house, she stepped through a window cut down somewhat clumsily, but
efficiently enough, and hinged to swing outward, onto a shallow, roofed
_loggia_ with vines grown from boxes on the sides and two long, low
chairs faced to the view of the hills.  In one of these sat a woman,
slender and motionless, whose glistening white wrapper seemed to melt
in the strong sun into the white of the painted wooden balustrade that
protected the balcony.  Flushed with an invalid's quick irritation and
resentful of any other occupant, for her raw nerves were not yet
healed, she was about to turn back hastily into the room when a second
glance assured her that it was only one of her own white wrappers
draped along the chair.  The face and hands that her vexed irritation
must have supplied amazed her, in retrospect, with their distinctness
of outline, and she trembled at her weak nerves.

From inside the room came the swishing of water and the sound of
scrubbing; soon the strong clean flavour of soapy boards floated out,
and the flick of the drops into the pail; from where she sat she could
see out of the corner of her eye the fluff of snowy suds that foamed
over the shining bucket as Hester rubbed the milky cake of soap with
the bristles.  Her strong strokes had a definite rhythm and set the
time for the stern old hymn-tune she crooned.  The listener on the
balcony obeyed her growing interest and turned her chair to face into
the room.  The kilted Hester, on her knees, her brow bound with a
glistening towel, threw her body forward with the regularity of a
rower, her strong, muscled arms shot out in a measured curve; on her
little island of dry boards she sang amid her clean, damp sea,
high-priestess of a lustral service as old as the oldest temple of man,
and the odour of her incense, the keen, sweet freshness of her
cleansing soap, rose to the heaven of her hymn.

"You sing as if you liked it," said the watcher.

"And so I do," said Hester.  "Things must be clean, and I like to make
them so."

"Why, you are doing just what we did in the gymnasium the year I went
there," cried the invalid, with the first real interest she had felt in
anything outside herself.  "We kneeled on the floor and swept our arms
out just like that!"

"If there were many of you, it must soon have been clean," said Hester,
moving the rug she knelt on deftly.  "Oh, we were not cleaning it,"
said the invalid smiling.  "It was only the same motion."

"Indeed?  Then why were you doing it?" Hester asked, turning her
flushed face in surprise toward the ruffled whiteness in the window.

She stared at the worker, but even as she stared she frowned
uncomfortably.

"Why, for--for exercise--for strength," she said slowly, and coloured
under Hester's smile....

Later in the day she moved out again upon the balcony, regretful for
the first time that no one of her own world could be there to talk with
her.  Hester, wiping bed, chair and mirror with the white cloth that
never seemed to soil, whipping the braided rag rugs below her on the
green with strong, firm strokes that recalled the scheduled blows she
had practised at a swinging leather ball, vexed her, somehow, and she
was conscious of a whimsical wish that her delusion of the white
wrapper stretched along the reclining chair had proved a reality.  The
soft grey shadows of early evening covered the little balcony, the
chairs were plunged in it, and it was with a cry of apology that she
stepped into a grey gown, so soft and thin that she had taken it for a
deeper shadow, merely, and had actually started to seat herself in the
long chair where the slender woman lay.  Her own body appeared so
robust beside this delicate creature's that pity smothered the surprise
at her quiet presence there, and the swift feeling that she herself was
by no means the frailest of the doctor's patients added to her
composure as she begged pardon for her clumsiness.

"I thought I was the only patient here," she explained.  "Miss Hester
and Miss Ann have a wonderful way of getting quiet and privacy in their
little house, haven't they?"

"Is it so little?" the stranger asked.  She felt embarrassed, suddenly,
and tactless, for she had taken it for granted that they were both of
the class to which the modest cottage must seem small.

"I only meant," she added hastily, for it seemed that at any cost this
gentle, pale creature must not be hurt, "I only meant that to take in
strangers, in this way, and to keep the family life entirely separate
requires, usually, much more space."

"But do they keep it separate--the family life!"

("Evidently," she thought, "they have not been able to give her a
private room, like mine, or perhaps she eats with them.")

"I think that is how they do it," the stranger went on, "by not having
any separate life, really.  It is all one life, with them."

"All one life..." the other repeated, vaguely, recalling, for some
reason, the doctor's words, "but, of course, in a larger establishment
that would not be possible.  With servants..."

"I suppose that is why they have no servants," said the stranger.

There was a soft assurance in the tone, soft, but undoubtedly there.
And yet what assurance should a woman have who did not find this house
small?  She discovered that she was still a little irritable, for she
spoke brusquely.

"People do not employ servants, I imagine, for the very simple reason
that they cannot afford to."

"Not always," said the other quietly.  "I have known Ann and Hester
many years, and there has never been a time when they could not have
afforded at the least one servant."

"Tastes differ, I suppose," she answered shortly.  "I should have
supposed that every woman would take the first opportunity of relieving
herself from the strain of household drudgery, which any ignorant
person can accomplish."

"Have you found so many of them to accomplish it for you?"

She flushed angrily.

"Dr. Stanchon has been talking about me!" she cried with hot memories
of her interminable domestic woes.

"Indeed not," said the grey lady.  "I knew nothing....  I only asked if
ignorant persons really accomplished their drudgery to any one's
satisfaction nowadays?  They used not to when--when I employed them...."

So she had been wrecked beyond repair, this shadowy, large-eyed thing!
She spoke as of a day long over.  The other woman felt ashamed of her
suspicion.

"No, indeed," she answered wearily, "that was an exaggeration,
naturally.  But they might, if they would take pains.  They are paid
enough for it, heaven knows."

"Ann and Hester are not paid," said the voice from the dim chair.
"Perhaps that is why they take pains."

The woman nodded fretfully.

"That is all very well," she said, "and sounds very poetic, but it
would be rather impractical for us all to do, on that account."

"Impractical?  _Impractical?_"

A hint of gentle laughter from the long chair.  "But it seems to me
that Ann and Hester are the least impractical of people--are they not?
They are surely less harassed than you were?"

("I must have been very sleepy: I don't remember telling her all about
it," thought the woman, "but she seems to know.")

"Yes," she said aloud, "I was harassed.  Nearly to death, it seems.  I
am hardly myself yet.  I suppose you have been through it all?"

"I have been through a great deal, yes."

The shadows deepened and a thin, new moon sank lower and lower.  The
grey figure grew less and less distinct to her, and before she knew it,
she slept.  When she woke, she was alone on the balcony, and the
sunlight lay in blue-white pools upon the floor.  For the first time in
her life she had slept alone under the stars, with no one to settle her
into her dreams or to attend on her when she woke from them, and
suspicion and displeasure darkened for a moment the freshest awakening
she could remember.  Had they really forgotten her?  No one seemed to
be coming, and after a quarter of an hour's impatient waiting she left
the long, couch-like chair, opened the door of her room and went with
quick determined steps down the narrow hall, down the stairs, straight
to the sounds of women's voices in the distance.  They led her through
a shining kitchen, where a patient, old clock presided, through a cool,
dim buttery into a primitive laundry, or washing shed, with deal tubs
and big copper cauldrons and a swept stone floor.  But no odour of the
keen cleanliness she had learned to connect with Hester's soap ruled
the wash-house this morning: a breeze from Araby the blest blew through
the piles of dewy crimson strawberries that heaped themselves in yellow
bowls, in silver-tinted pans, in leaf-lined wicker baskets, and brought
all the gardens of June into the bare, stone room.  Hester's quick
fingers twisted the delicate hulls from the scarlet, scented globes,
and near her, measuring mounds of glittering sugar, stood a broader,
squarer woman with greying hair, who smiled gravely at her, facing her.

"Here she is, now," said this woman, whom she guessed to be Ann, and
Hester, turning to her, added, as one who finishes a sentence, merely,

"And I was just getting ready a dish of strawberries for you.  Mother
has stepped out for your egg: the brown hen has just laid.  The rolls
are in the oven and mother has the chocolate ready.  I thought you
would be early this morning, you were sleeping so soundly."

"Early? early?" she repeated, taken aback by their easy greeting of
her.  "Why, what do you mean?"  And just then the clock struck seven,
deliberately.

"Why--why, I thought--then you did not forget--" she began, uncertainly.

"There is nothing like the open air for sleeping, when one is ready for
it," said Hester.  "Did you not notice the cover I threw over you?  You
must have gone off before it grew dark, quite."

"Oh, no, because I was with--" then she stopped abruptly.  For it
dawned on her that the other woman must have been a dream, since she
perceived that she was unwilling to ask about her, so faintly did that
conversation recall itself to her, so uncertain her memory proved as to
how that other came and went, or when.

"It was a dream, of course," she thought, and said, a shade resentful
still,

"I never slept--that way--before."

"It seems to suit you," said Ann briskly, "for you have never left your
room till now."

Then it dawned on her suddenly.

"Why, I am well!" she said.

"Very nearly, I think," Hester answered her.  "Will you have your
breakfast under the tree, while sister picks the berries?"

To this she agreed gladly and found herself, still wondering at the new
strength that filled her, under a pear-tree, in a pleasant patch of
shadow, eating with relish from Hester's morning tray.  Ann knelt not
far from her in the sun, not too hot at this hour for a hardy worker,
and soon her low humming rose like a bee's note from under her broad
hat.

"The wash is all ready for you, sister, on the landing," she called.
"Tell mother her new towels bleached to a marvel: they are on the
currant-bushes now.  I'll wet them down and iron them off while the
syrup is cooking, I think--I know she's anxious to handle them."

"Are you always busy, Miss Ann?" her guest inquired, for Ann's fingers
never stopped even while she looked toward the house-door.

"Always in the morning, of course," she answered, directly.  "Every one
must be, if things are to get done."

"But in the afternoon you are ironing, and Miss Hester tells me you do
a great deal in the garden.  When do you rest?"

"In my bed," said Ann briefly.

She was less sweetly grave than her sister, and it was easy to see that
her tongue was sharper.  She would not have been so soothing to an
invalid, but the woman under the pear-tree had her nerves better in
hand by now, and felt, somehow, upon her mettle to prove to this broad,
curt Ann that there were tasks in the world beyond her sturdy
rule-of-thumb.

"But surely every one needs time to think--to consider," she began
gently.  "Don't you find it so?"

"To plan out the day, do you mean?" said Ann, moving to a new patch.
"I generally do that at night before I go to sleep."

"No, no," she explained, "not the day's work--that must be done, of
course--but the whole Scheme, life, and one's relation to it..."

"I don't feel any call to study that out," said Ann.  "I haven't the
headpiece for it."

"No, but some people have, and so----"

"Have you?" said Ann.

She bit her lip.

"It is surely every woman's duty to cultivate herself as far as she
can," she began.  "Nobody denies that nowadays."

Ann was silent.

"Don't you agree with me?" the woman persisted.  "You surely know what
I mean?"

"Oh, yes, I know what you mean, well enough," Ann said at last.  "I
know you have to cultivate strawberries, if you want to get more of
'em--and bigger.  The question is, what do you get out of it?"

A flood of explanations pressed to her lips, but just as they brimmed
over, some quick surmise of Ann's shrewd replies choked them back.
After all, what had she got out of it?  What that she could show?  She
rose slowly and walked back to her room, where the bath, fresh,
uncreased clothes, and Hester's deft ministry waited ready for her.
Later, she lay again in the balcony chair, not so soothed by her little
pile of books as she had looked to be.  Beautiful, pellucid thought,
deep-flowing philosophies, knife-edged epigrams and measured verse lay
to her hand, but they seemed unreal, somehow, and their music echoed
like meaningless words shouted, for the echo merely, in empty halls.
She drowsed discontentedly and woke from a dream of the grey lady to
see her stretched in the companion chair, herself asleep, it seemed,
for it was only after a long doubtful stare from the other that she
opened her great dark eyes.

"And I almost thought I had dreamed of meeting you before!  Wasn't it
absurd?  I am only now realising how ill I have been--things were all
so confused...  I find that I can't even reply to Miss Ann as I ought
to be able to, when she scorns the effects of culture!"

"Does Ann scorn culture?" the grey lady asked in mild surprise.  "I
never knew that."

"She scorns the leisure that goes to produce it, anyway."

"Did you give her a concrete instance of any special culture?"

She moved uneasily in her chair.

"Oh--concrete, _concrete_!" she repeated deprecatingly.  "Must I be as
concrete with you as with her?  Surely culture, and all that it
implies, need not be forced to defend itself with concrete examples?"

"I'm afraid that I agree with Ann," said the soft voice in the shadow.
"I'm afraid that so far as I am concerned, culture needs just that
defence."

She tried to smile the superior smile she had mustered for Ann,
kneeling in her checked sunbonnet, but this was difficult, with a woman
so obviously of her own class and kind.  Still the woman was clearly
unreasonable, and she was able, at least, to speak forcibly as she
replied,

"Aren't you rather severe on the enormous majority of us, in that case?
We can't all be great philosophers or productive artists, you know, and
yet between us and Ann's preserved strawberries and Hester's scrubbing
there's a wide gulf--you must admit that!"

The stranger rose lightly from her chair and walked, with a swaying
motion like a long-stemmed wild flower, toward the home-made
window-door.  At the sill she paused and fixed her great eyes on the
stronger woman--stronger, plainly, for the frail white hand on the
china knob supported her while she stood, and she seemed to cling to
the woodwork and press against it as she sank into the shadow of the
eaves.

"A wide gulf, indeed," she said slowly, in her soft, breathless voice,
with an intonation almost like a foreigner's, her listener decided
suddenly, "a gulf so wide that unless you can cross it with some bridge
of honest accomplishment, it will swallow you all very soon--you women
of culture!"

She slipped across the sill and presently Hester's clear, firm voice
was heard in the narrow hall,

"Yes, yes, I'm coming!" and the balcony was drowned in the dusk, and
the woman on it yielded consciously to the great desire for sleep that
possessed her.  But before she drifted off, not afraid, this time, of
night under the sky, it occurred to her dimly that Hester's other
patient must come through her own room whenever she used the little
_loggia_.

"What is she--an anarchist? a socialist?" she thought.  "I must surely
ask Hester about her.  'You women of culture,' indeed!  What does she
call herself, I wonder?"

That next morning as she waited idly for bath and breakfast, the
stranger possessed her thoughts more and more.  Only in such an
absolutely unconventional place, she told herself, could a completely
unknown woman appear (in her own apartments, really) and discuss with
her so nonchalantly such strange questions.  In many ways this delicate
creature's words seemed to echo Dr. Stanchon's, and this seemed all the
more natural, now, since she was so obviously still his patient.
Hester had said that he sent many there--this one was perhaps too frail
ever to leave them, and felt so much at home that no one thought to
speak of her.

A healthy hunger checked these musings, and more amused than irritated
at such unusual desertion, she bathed and dressed unaided and went down
to the kitchen.

"They will soon see by the way I keep my temper, now," she thought,
"and my strength, that I am quite able to go back.  I really must see
how the children are getting on."

Following the ways of her last journey through the house she found the
kitchen, where an oven-door ajar and a half-dozen small, fragrant
loaves in the opening showed her that though empty, the room was
deserted only for a housewife's rapid moment.  She sat down therefore
beneath the patient old clock, and waited.  Soon she heard a quick,
bustling step, unlike Hester's lithe quietness or the heavier stride of
Ann, and knew that the little old lady who entered, fresh and tidy as a
clean withered apple, was their mother.  She had a pan of new-picked
peas in one arm and a saucer of milk balanced in the other hand,
plainly the breakfast for the sleek black cat that bounded in beside
her.  This she set carefully on a flagstone corner before she noticed
her visitor, it seemed, and yet she did not appear startled at company,
and showed all of the younger women's untroubled ease as she explained
that a message from Dr. Stanchon had called them both away suddenly,
very early.

"It was perhaps some other patient in the house?" the guest suggested
curiously, with a vivid memory of the grey lady's frail white hand and
breathless voice.

"Perhaps," said the old woman equably, and tied a checked apron over
the white one, the better to attack the peas.

From the shining pan she tossed the fairy green globes into the rich
yellow bowl of earthenware at her side, with the quick ease of those
veined, old hands that outwork the young ones, and her guest watched
her in silence for a few minutes, hypnotised, almost, by the steady
pit-pat of the little green balls against the bowl.

"And when do you expect them back?" she asked finally.

"I don't know," said the old lady, "but they'll be back as soon as the
work is over, you may depend--they don't lag, my girls, neither of 'em."

"I am sure of that," she assented quickly.  "They are the hardest
workers I ever saw: I wonder that they never rest, and tell them so."

"Time enough for resting when all's done," said the old lady briskly.
"That was my mother's word before me and I've handed it down to Ann and
Hester."

"But then, at that rate, none of us would ever rest, would we?" she
protested humourously.

"This side o' green grave?" the old lady shot out.  "Maybe so.  But
podding peas is a kind of rest--after picking 'em!"

"And have you really picked all these--and in the sun, too?" she said,
surprised.  "I trust not for me--I could get along perfectly..."

The old lady jumped briskly after her loaves, tapped the bottoms
knowingly, then stood each one on its inverted pan in a fragrant row on
the dresser.

"Peas or beans or corn--it makes no odds, my dear," she cried
cheerfully.  "It's all to be done, one way or another, you see."

An inspiration came to the idler by the window, and before she had
quite caught at the humour of it, she spoke.

"Why should you get my breakfast--for I am sure you are going to?" she
said.  "Why shouldn't I--if you think I could--for I don't like to sit
here and have you do it all!"

"Why not, indeed?" the old woman replied, with a shrewd smile at her.
"Hester judged you might offer, and left the tray ready set."

"Hester judged?" she repeated wonderingly.  "Why, how could she,
possibly?  How could she know I would come down, even?"

"She judged so," the mother nodded imperturbably.  "The kettle's on the
boil, now, and I've two of the rusks you relished yesterday on the
pantry shelf.  Just dip 'em in that bowl of milk in the window and slip
'em in the oven--it makes a tasty crust.  She keeps some chocolate
grated in a little blue dish in the corner and the butter's in a crock
in the well.  The brown hen will show you her own egg, I'll warrant
that."

Amused, she followed all these directions, and poured herself a cup of
steaming chocolate, the first meal of her own preparing since childish
banquets filched from an indulgent cook.  And then, the breakfast over,
she would have left the kitchen, empty just then, for the mistress of
it had pottered out on one of her endless little errands, had not a
sudden thought sent a flush to her forehead, so that she turned
abruptly at the threshold and walking swiftly to the water spigot, sent
a stream into a tiny brass-bound tub she took from the deep window
seats, frothed it with Hester's herb-scented soap, and rinsed and
dipped and dried each dish and cup of her own using before the old
woman returned.

"It is surprising how--how _satisfactory_ it makes one feel, really,"
she began hastily at the housewife's friendly returning nod, "to deal
with this sort of work.  One seems to have accomplished something
that--that had to be done...  I don't know whether you see what I mean,
exactly...."

"Bless you, my dear, and why shouldn't I see?" cried the other,
scrubbing the coats of a lapful of brown jacketed potatoes at the
spigot.  "Every woman knows that feeling, surely?"

"I never did," she said, simply.  "I thought it was greasy, thankless
work, and felt very sorry for those who did it."

"Did they look sad?" asked the old worker.

In a flash of memory they passed before her, those white-aproned,
bare-elbowed girls she had watched idly in many countries and at many
seasons; from the nurse that bathed and combed her own children,
singing, to the laundry-maids whose laughter and ringing talk had waked
her from more than one uneasy afternoon sleep.

"Why, no, I can't say that they did," she answered slowly, "but to do
it steadily, I should think..."

"It's the steady work that puts the taste into the holiday, my mother
used to say," said the old woman shortly.  "Where's the change, else?"

"But of course there are many different forms of work," she began,
slowly, as though she were once for all making the matter clear to
herself, and not at all explaining obvious distinctions to an
uneducated old woman, "and brain workers need rest and change as much,
yes, more, than mere labourers."

"So they tell me," said Hester's mother respectfully, "though of course
I know next to nothing of it myself.  Ann says it's that makes it so
dangerous for women folks to worry at their brains too much, for she's
taken notice, she says, that mostly they're sickly or cranky that works
too much that way.  Hard to get on with, she says they are, the best of
'em."

"Indeed!" she cried indignantly, "and I suppose to be 'easy to get on
with' is the main business of women, then!"

"Why, Lord above us, child!" answered the old woman briskly, dropping
her white potatoes into a brown dish of fresh-drawn water, "if the
women are not to be easy got on with, who's to be looked to for it,
then; the children--or the men?"

She gathered up the brown peelings and bagged them carefully with the
pea pods.

"For the blacksmith's pig," she said.  "We don't keep one and he gives
us a ham every year....  Not that it's not a different matter with you,
of course," she added politely.  "There's some, of course, that's
needed by the world, for books and music and the like o' that--I don't
need Hester to tell me so.  There's never an evening in winter, when
all's swept and the lamp trimmed and a bowl of apples out, and Ann and
I sit with our bit of sewing, that I don't thank God for the books
Hester reads out to us.  One was written by a woman writer that the
doctor sent us here for a long, long time--poor dear, but she was
feeble!

"She worked with the girls at everything they did, that she could, by
doctor's orders, and it put a little peace into her, she told me.
You've a look in the eyes like her--there were thousands read her
books."

The guest rose abruptly.

"I never wrote a book--or did anything," she said briefly, and turned
to the door.

"You don't tell me!" the old mother stammered.  "Why, I made sure by
your look--what made ye so mortal tired, then, deary?"

"I must find that out," she said, slowly, her hand on the knob.
"I--must--find--that--out!"

And on the balcony she paced and thought for an hour, but there was no
calmness in her forehead till the afternoon, when alone with Hester's
mother, for the daughters did not return all that day, she worked with
pressed lips at their tasks, picking Ann's evening salad, sprinkling
cool drops over Hester's fresh-dried linen, brought in by armfuls from
the currant-bushes, spreading the supper-table, pressing out the
ivory-moulded cottage cheese and ringing its dish with grape-leaves
gathered from the well-house.

So intent was she at these tasks, that she heard no footsteps along the
grass, and only as she put the fifth chair at the white-spread table
(for the old mother had been mysteriously firm in her certainty that
they should need it) did she turn to look into the keen brown eyes of
the wise physician who had left her weeks ago in the bed above them.
He gave her a long, piercing look.  Then,

"I thought so," he said quietly.  "We will go back to-morrow, you and
I--I need your bedroom."

Through the open door she caught a quick glimpse of Ann and Hester half
supporting, half carrying up the stairs a woman heavily veiled in black
crêpe; Hester did not join them till late in the meal, and went through
the room with a glass of milk afterward.  No one spoke further of her
presence among them; no one thanked her for her services; all was
assumed and she blessed them for it.

The doctor passed the evening with his new patient, and when she
mounted the stairs for her last night she found her simple luggage in
the room next hers: there was no question of helping her to bed, and
she undressed thoughtfully alone.  The house was very still.

Her window was a deep dormer, and as she leaned out of it, for a breath
of the stars, she saw Dr. Stanchon stretched in her chair on the
balcony, his face white and tired in the moonlight.  In the chair near
her, so near that she could touch it, lay the frail creature in the
grey dress, black now at night.

"It is his old patient!" she thought contentedly, remembering with
vexation that she had absolutely forgotten to ask the house-mother
about her and why she had not appeared; and she began to speak, when
the other raised her hand warningly, and she saw that Dr. Stanchon
slept.

Why she began to whisper she did not know, but she remembered afterward
that their conversation, below breath as it was, was the longest they
had yet had, though she could recall only the veriest scraps of it.
For instance:

"But Mary and Martha?" she had urged, "surely there is a deep meaning
in that, too?  It was Martha who was reproved...."

"One would imagine that every woman to-day judged herself a Mary--and
that is a dangerous judgment to form, one's self," the other whispered.

"But to deliberately assume these tasks--simple because they clear my
life and keep me balanced--when I have no need to do them, seems to me
an affectation, absurd!"

"How can a thing be absurd if it brings you ease?"

"But I don't need to do them, really, for myself."

"For some one else, then?"

It was then that another veil dropped from before her.

"Then is that why, do you think, people devote themselves to those low,
common things--great saints and those that give up their own lives?"

 "I think so, yes."

"It is a real relief to them?"

"Why not? ..."

She fell asleep on the broad window-seat, her head on her arms, and
when she woke and groped for her bed in the dark, the balcony was empty.

There was no bustle of departure: a grave hand-shaking from the
daughters, a kiss on the mother's withered, rosy cheek.

"Come back again, do," said the old woman and the doctor commented upon
this as they sat in the train.

"That is a great compliment," he said.  "I never knew her to say that
except to a long-time patient of mine that stayed a long time (more's
the pity!) with them.  'Come back,' said Mother to her.  'Come soon,
deary, for the house will miss your grey dress so soft on the floor.'
They would have cured her if anybody could."

"Then you don't consider her cured?" she said with a shock of
disappointment.  "I am so sorry.  But it is surely a wonderful
place--one can't talk about it, but I see you know."

"Oh, yes, I know," he said briefly.  "I saw you would pull through in
great shape there.  This patient I spoke of used to tell me that the
duty of her life, here and through Eternity, ought by rights to be the
preaching of the gospel she learned there.  Well--maybe it is, for all
we know.  If I could have cured her, she would have been a great--a
really great novelist, I think."

"If you could have--" she gasped, seizing his arm, "you mean----"

"I mean that I couldn't," he answered simply.  "She died there.  I
dreamed of her last night."




THE GYPSY

Very early in the last century, while Napoleon still reigned over
Europe and the people went journeys in post-chaises through England,
John Appleyard, the only son of a thriving Sussex farmer, met, while
walking across one of his father's fields, a troup of gypsies camping
under a hedge.  Among them was a dark young woman, very lovely, with
straight, heavy brows and a yard of thick blue-black hair, which she
was drying in the wind at the moment, having washed it in the brook.
John looked at her hard, walked by, turned, looked again, and stood
staring so long that a surly gypsy father slipped a fowling-piece into
his elbow and approached him menacingly.

"My daughter, young sir," he said shortly, "may sleep in a wagon and
not eat off chayny plates as the like o' you do, but I'll have none
eying her like that, be who he may, for she's a good girl, she is, and
the best man that walks is none too good to be her husband!"

"Am I good enough?" says John Appleyard, quietly.

And as a matter of fact he married her in the parish church in three
weeks' time, and his mother cried herself sick.

It was no use trying to live at the farm, after that, for the
neighbours smiled and pointed, and the old farmer was scandalised at
his new relatives, and though he had nothing against his handsome
daughter-in-law personally, felt himself a marked man and counted the
spoons every night.  So John, who had never loved farming, compounded
for half the outlying land, which he sold very shrewdly, left his only
sister the farm, shook hands all 'round and sailed with Lilda, his
wife, for the United States of America.

On the voyage he made friends with the captain, who took a great liking
to him (and had no dislike, the passengers said, for Mistress Lilda),
and put him in the way of business with a thriving grain-merchant of
Boston, Massachusetts, whom, after twenty prosperous years, he bought
out, and founded the house of Appleyard.  He had fondly hoped that this
house should outlast the century, but his only son was no merchant, and
all for the sea and its constant change and chance, and John was too
sensible to blame the lad's roving soul to any one but Nature.  So with
a sigh and a thrill of how his old father must have felt, he bought a
fine trading-packet for young John and established his daughter's
husband (she was a steady, prudent girl) as his partner and heir.

John II did wonderfully well and found himself at fifty the owner of
the most flourishing packet line in the States, with his only son
prize-man at Harvard University and a daughter who nearly whitened his
hair by her mad plan for acting in public on the stage.  The son went
early into buying and selling on 'Change, and was a weighty bank
president by the time his daughter had finished her schooling.

This was a trifle more elaborate and thorough-going than most girls of
twenty could boast at that time, and for three reasons.  First, because
she had a brilliant mind and great powers of concentration; next,
because John III was not a little vain, in a quiet way, of all his
Greek and Latin and historical research; and had plenty of leisure for
imparting them; last, because his son--and only other child--had been a
disappointment to him in that line, not only failing to repeat his
father's brilliant college record, but proving actually slow at his
books and decidedly averse to study, though a steady, competent
accountant and investor.

So Lilda, named for her great-grandmother by John III's lady (who,
being of Knickerbocker descent, laid great stress on family names),
added to the somewhat doubtful accomplishments of a fashionable
finishing school a great part of what her own daughter, years later,
learned at the then popular woman's college.  Nor was other and more
practical lore neglected, for her maternal grandmother, a notable
_hausfrau_ of the old school, taught her, in two long summers at her
great country estate on the Hudson River, all the household arts and
duties that girls of her own age were beginning to despise.  So that
when, after a brilliant début in New York and a winter season there in
which her wit and beauty, to say nothing of her horsemanship and
exquisite dancing had made her the belle of that critical metropolis
(not too large, then, for one reigning toast), she married one of the
country's most prominent young lawyers, already suggested for high
posts abroad, it was felt that America would honour both herself and
whatever Court should receive these two young fortunates from her hands.

There is a picture of her in the Court dress in which she made her bow
to Queen Victoria, standing at the foot of a Roman stairway of
yellowish marble, near a fountain, her baby boy clinging to her hand.
Under the blue-black of her heavy hair, her cheeks are tinted like
wall-ripened peaches; her strong, curved figure is just the Flora and
Juno of the ancient city's statuary.

There is still whispered, in a few old New York houses that have kept
their white marble and black walnut, the audacious story of Lilda
Appleyard's falling-in-love.  It was at the Philadelphia Centennial of
'76, whither her father had taken her for a long visit, for its
educational influences.  He used to say that women had little chance of
acquiring practical information of the large and comprehensive order,
and that no one would ever know without a trial what of all that sort
their brains could or could not take in.  The progress of the world, he
said, was no greater than the progress of its homes, "and that," he
used to wind up, "is no more nor less than the progress of their women."

So Miss Lilda studied the progress of all three at the Centennial, and
took sage notes in a little red morocco book, and the proud banker read
them in private for years afterward to his friends.  But she was not
engaged in this interesting occupation by night as well as day, you may
rest assured.  Many a ball and high tea did Philadelphia's ladies offer
their visiting friends, and there was not one of any consequence that
failed to beg the honour of Miss Lilda Appleyard's company.  And her
luggage was by no means limited to the little red morocco book!

A party from New York had come in a special train to Philadelphia for
three days at the Centennial, and the occasion was seized by the wife
of an army officer to give a large ball in her great house in
Germantown.  All visiting Knickerbockers who might expect to be asked
anywhere were asked to attend this ball, and Lilda's maid assured the
hotel chambermaid that she never had known her young lady so hard to
suit.  And finally, after three different trials, to pick out that
strange black mousseline-de-soie!  She looked like pictures of
foreigners, to tell you the truth, her young lady did!  Of course, her
grandmamma's pearls would make anything dressy, and there's no denying
the black made her arms and neck look like ivory--but to snatch up that
flame-coloured scarf her grandpapa had brought from India, and knot it
over her shoulder at the last minute!  It was downright outlandish.
Mrs. Appleyard would never have liked it.

She had a high, staglike carriage of the head, and as she was rather
tall, she looked over most of her girl companions.  Halfway through the
dance she raised this dark head a little higher and stared.

"Who is that man?" she asked abruptly.

"Elliot Lestrange," the girls told her, "but he doesn't care for women.
He's very proud."

"I should like to meet him," she said simply.

They tittered and teased her, but after all, she was a belle, and Mr.
Lestrange was sent for.  The young dancing man who undertook the
message told freely how Lestrange had said,

"Oh, hang it all, I'm not dancing to-night!"

"But she's Miss Appleyard, of Boston and New York--she's a beauty!"

"Then she must have plenty of beaux, Clarke, without me!"

So young Mr. Clarke took his little revenge (for after all, he had used
his dance with the dark beauty for this stupid errand and resented it),
and in presenting the chilly hero, said maliciously,

"Here is Mr. Lestrange, Miss Appleyard--but he says you must have
plenty of beaux without him!"

"That is just it," returned the calm Lilda, looking straight at the
grey eyes that faced her under the thick honey-coloured hair
(Lestrange, though of Huguenot descent, was curiously blonde).  "I have
_not_ enough beaux--without Mr. Lestrange!  Will you have the next
waltz, Mr. Lestrange--Mr. Clarke's, I believe it is?"

"Thank you, yes, and this schottische, too, if I may," says Lestrange.
The young people standing about said that they never took their eyes
off each other from the moment she spoke to him, and that they swung
into the dance like automatons, leaving her lawful squire, a young
Philadelphian, irate and ridiculous.

"These may be New York manners," he said sourly, "but they would never
do in a _civilized city_!"

His opinion was a matter of indifference to the couple.

They are supposed to have talked very little, but danced frequently
together.  As the young ladies were putting on their capes and cloaks,
just before the dawn, one among them shrieked suddenly across the room.

"Why, Lilda! where is your flame-coloured scarf!  You've lost it!"

"I gave it away," she said briefly.

They gasped.

"Good heavens!" said another.  "He'll be proposing before you know it!"

"He proposed at twelve," Miss Appleyard said placidly, "and I accepted
him.  Will you be maid-of-honour, Evelyn?"

No one had ever told her of John I and his gypsy.

They had a wonderful wedding-tour among the Italian lakes and came back
after a three months' honeymoon to the solid "brown stone front" of the
period, which, furnished from cellar to attic, had been John's wedding
gift to his daughter.

"Well!" some gossip had cried, "it's big enough, in all conscience!
But I suppose Mr. Appleyard was thinking of the size of Elliot's
family."  (He was one of eight children and had nine uncles and aunts.)

"None of us has ever had but two," said Lilda calmly, "and the
Appleyards don't change, papa says."

And as a matter of fact little Elliot Lestrange never had but one
contestant for nursery rights--h

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