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The Iron Woman

by Margaret Wade Campbell Deland · English · Gutenberg #6474 · 854,243 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Iron Woman

Author: Margaret Wade Campbell Deland


        
Release date: September 1, 2004 [eBook #6474]
                Most recently updated: June 1, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6474

Credits: Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IRON WOMAN ***




Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Charles Aldarondo and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.











THE IRON WOMAN

BY

MARGARET DELAND

"_This was the iniquity ... fulness of bread, and abundance of
idleness...._"--EZEKIEL, xvi., 49



TO MY

PATIENT, RUTHLESS, INSPIRING CRITIC LORIN DELAND

August 12, 1911



ILLUSTRATIONS

   "LOOK!"
   "BLAIR IS IN LOVE WITH ME!"
   "I THINK YOU ARE REASONABLE ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US"
   "ELIZABETH, MARRY ME!"
   "OF COURSE YOU KNOW MY OPINION OF YOU"
   SHE WHEELED ABOUT, AND STOOD, SWAYING WITH FRIGHT
   "WILL YOU LIVE? WILL YOU GIVE ME LIFE?"
   CLUTCHING HER SHOULDER, SHE LOOKED HARD INTO THE YOUNGER
        WOMAN'S FACE



THE IRON WOMAN




CHAPTER I

"Climb up in this tree, and play house!" Elizabeth Ferguson commanded.
She herself had climbed to the lowest branch of an apple-tree in the
Maitland orchard, and sat there, swinging her white-stockinged legs so
recklessly that the three children whom she had summoned to her side,
backed away for safety. "If you don't," she said, looking down at them,
"I'm afraid, perhaps, maybe, I'll get mad."

Her foreboding was tempered by a giggle and by the deepening dimple in
her cheek, but all the same she sighed with a sort of impersonal regret
at the prospect of any unpleasantness. "It would be too bad if I got
mad, wouldn't it?" she said thoughtfully. The others looked at one
another in consternation. They knew so well what it meant to have
Elizabeth "mad," that Nannie Maitland, the oldest of the little group,
said at once, helplessly, "Well."

Nannie was always helpless with Elizabeth, just as she was helpless
with her half-brother, Blair, though she was ten and Elizabeth and
Blair were only eight; but how could a little girl like Nannie be
anything but helpless before a brother whom she adored, and a wonderful
being like Elizabeth?--Elizabeth! who always knew exactly what she
wanted to do, and who instantly "got mad," if you wouldn't say you'd do
it, too; got mad, and then repented, and hugged you and kissed you, and
actually cried (or got mad again), if you refused to accept as a sign
of your forgiveness her new slate-pencil, decorated with strips of
red-and-white paper just like a little barber's pole! No wonder Nannie,
timid and good-natured, was helpless before such a sweet, furious
little creature! Blair had more backbone than his sister, but even he
felt Elizabeth's heel upon his neck. David Richie, a silent, candid,
very stubborn small boy, was, after a momentary struggle, as meek as
the rest of them. Now, when she commanded them all to climb, it was
David who demurred, because, he said, he spoke first for Indians
tomahawking you in the back parlor.

"Very well!" said the despot; "play your old Indians! I'll never speak
to any of you again as long as I live!"

"I've got on my new pants," David objected.

"Take 'em off!" said Elizabeth. And there is no knowing what might have
happened if the decorous Nannie had not come to the rescue.

"That's not proper to do out-of-doors; and Miss White says not to say
'pants.'"

Elizabeth looked thoughtful. "Maybe it isn't proper," she admitted;
"but David, honest, I took a hate to being tommy-hocked the last time
we played it; so please, _dear_ David! If you'll play house in the
tree, I'll give you a piece of my taffy." She took a little sticky
package out of her pocket and licked her lips to indicate its
contents;--David yielded, shinning up the trunk of the tree,
indifferent to the trousers, which had been on his mind ever since he
had put them on his legs.

Blair followed him, but Nannie squatted on the ground content to merely
look at the courageous three.

"Come on up," said Elizabeth. Nannie shook her little blond head. At
which the others burst into a shrill chorus: "'Fraid-cat! 'fraid-cat!
'fraid-cat!" Nannie smiled placidly; it never occurred to her to deny
such an obviously truthful title. "Blair," she said, continuing a
conversation interrupted by Elizabeth's determination to climb, "Blair,
_why_ do you say things that make Mamma mad? What's the sense? If it
makes her mad for you to say things are ugly, why do you?"

"'Cause," Blair said briefly. Even at eight Blair disliked both
explanations and decisions, and his slave and half-sister rarely
pressed for either. With the exception of his mother, whose absorption
in business had never given her time to get acquainted with him, most
of the people about Blair were his slaves. Elizabeth's governess, Miss
White--called by Elizabeth, for reasons of her own, "Cherry-pie"--had
completely surrendered to his brown eyes; the men in the Maitland Works
toadied to him; David Richie blustered, perhaps, but always gave in to
him; in his own home, Harris, who was a cross between a butler and a
maid-of-all-work, adored him to the point of letting him make candy on
the kitchen stove--probably the greatest expression of affection
possible to the kitchen; in fact, little Elizabeth Ferguson was the
only person in his world who did not knuckle down to this pleasant and
lovable child. But then, Elizabeth never knuckled down to anybody!
Certainly not to kind old Cherry-pie, whose timid upper lip quivered
like a rabbit's when she was obliged to repeat to her darling some new
rule of Robert Ferguson's for his niece's upbringing; nor did she
knuckle down to her uncle;--she even declared she was not at all afraid
of him! This was almost unbelievable to the others, who scattered like
robins if they heard his step. And she had greater courage than this;
she had, in fact, audacity! for she said she was willing--this the
others told each other in awed tones--she said she had "just as lieves"
walk right up and speak to Mrs. Maitland herself, and ask her for
twenty cents so she could treat the whole crowd to ice-cream! That is,
she would just as lieves, _if she should happen to want to_. Now, as
she sat in the apple-tree swinging her legs and sharing her taffy, it
occurred to her to mention, apropos of nothing, her opinion of Mrs.
Maitland's looks:

"I like Blair's mother best; but David's mother is prettier than
Blair's mother."

"It isn't polite to brag on mothers," said David, surveying his new
trousers complacently, "but I know what I think."

Blair, jouncing up and down on his branch, agreed with unoffended
candor. "'Course she's prettier. Anybody is. Mother's ugly."

"It isn't right to say things like that out of the family," Nannie
observed.

"This _is_ the family. You're going to marry David, and I'm going to
marry Elizabeth. And I'm going to be awfully rich; and I'll give all
you children a lot of money. Jimmy Sullivan--he's a friend of mine; I
got acquainted with him yesterday, and he's the biggest puddler in our
Works. Jimmie said, 'You're the only son,' he said, 'you'll get it
all.' 'Course I told him I'd give him some," said Blair.

At this moment Elizabeth was moved to catch David round the neck, and
give him a loud kiss on his left ear. David sighed. "You may kiss me,"
he said patiently; "but I'd rather you'd tell me when you want to. You
knocked off my cap."

"Say, David," Nannie said, flinging his cap up to him, "Blair can stand
on his head and count five. You can't."

At this David's usual admiration for Blair suffered an eclipse; he grew
very red, then exploded: "I--I--I've had mumps, and I have two warts,
and Blair hasn't. And I have a real dining-room at my house, and Blair
hasn't!"

Nannie flew to the rescue: "You haven't got a real mother. You are only
an adopted."

"Well, what are you?" David said, angrily; "you're nothing but a Step."

"I haven't got any kind of a mother," Elizabeth said, with complacent
melancholy.

"Stop fighting," Blair commanded amiably; "David is right; we have a
pigsty of a dining-room at our house." He paused to bend over and touch
with an ecstatic finger a flake of lichen covering with its serpent
green the damp, black bark in the crotch of the old tree. "Isn't that
pretty?" he said.

"You ought not to say things about our house," Nannie reproved him. As
Blair used to say when he grew up, "Nannie was born proper."

"Why not?" said Blair. "They know everything is ugly at our house.
They've got real dining-rooms at their houses; they don't have old
desks round, the way we do."

It was in the late sixties that these children played in the apple-tree
and arranged their conjugal future; at that time the Maitland house was
indeed, as poor little Blair said, "ugly." Twenty years before, its
gardens and meadows had stretched over to the river; but the estate had
long ago come down in size and gone up in dollars. Now, there was
scarcely an acre of sooty green left, and it was pressed upon by the
yards of the Maitland Works, and almost islanded by railroad tracks.
Grading had left the stately and dilapidated old house somewhat above
the level of a street noisy with incessant teaming, and generally
fetlock-deep in black mud. The house stood a little back from the badly
paved sidewalk; its meager dooryard was inclosed by an iron fence--a
row of black and rusted spears, spotted under their tines with
innumerable gray cocoons. (Blair and David made constant and furtive
attempts to lift these spears, socketed in crumbling lead in the
granite base, for of course there could be nothing better for fighting
Indians than a real iron spear.) The orchard behind the house had been
cut in two by a spur track, which brought jolting gondola cars piled
with red ore down to the furnace. The half dozen apple-trees that were
left stretched gaunt arms over sour, grassless earth; they put out
faint flakes of blossoms in the early spring, and then a fleeting show
of greenness, which in a fortnight shriveled and blackened out of all
semblance of foliage. But all the same the children found it a
delightful place to play, although Blair sometimes said sullenly that
it was "ugly." Blair hated ugly things, and, poor child! he was
assailed by ugliness on every side. The queer, disorderly dining-room,
in which for reasons of her own Mrs. Maitland transacted so much of her
business that it had become for all practical purposes an office of her
Works, was perhaps the "ugliest" thing in the world to the little boy.

"Why don't we have a real dining-room?" he said once; "why do we have
to eat in a office?"

"We'll eat in the kitchen, if I find it convenient," his mother told
him, looking at him over her newspaper, which was propped against a
silver coffee-urn that had found a clear space on a breakfast table
cluttered with papers and ledgers.

"They have a bunch of flowers on the table up at David's house," the
little boy complained; "I don't see why we can't."

"I don't eat flowers," Mrs. Maitland said grimly.

"I don't eat papers," Blair said, under his breath; and his mother
looked at him helplessly. How is one to reply to a child of eight who
makes remarks of this kind? Mrs. Maitland did not know; it was one of
the many things she did not know in relation to her son; for at that
time she loved him with her mind rather than her body, so she had none
of those soft intuitions and persuasions of the flesh which instruct
most mothers. In her perplexity she expressed the sarcastic anger one
might vent upon an equal under the same circumstances:

"You'd eat nothing at all, young man, let me tell you, if it wasn't for
the 'papers,' as you call 'em, in this house!" But it was no wonder
that Blair called it ugly--the house, the orchard, the Works--even his
mother, in her rusty black alpaca dress, sitting at her desk in the
big, dingy dining-room, driving her body and soul, and the bodies and
souls of her workmen--all for the sake of the little, shrinking boy,
who wanted a bunch of flowers on the table. Poor mother! Poor son! And
poor little proper, perplexed half-sister, looking on, and trying to
make peace. Nannie's perplexities had begun very far back. Of course
she was too young when her father married his second wife to puzzle
over that; but if she did not, other people did. Why a mild, vague
young widower who painted pictures nobody bought, and was as
unpractical as a man could be whose partnership in an iron-works was a
matter of inheritance--why such a man wanted to marry Miss Sarah Blair
was beyond anybody's wisdom. It is conceivable, indeed, that he did not
want to.

There were rumors that after the death of Nannie's mother, Herbert
Maitland had been inclined to look for consolation to a certain Miss
Molly Wharton (she that afterward married another widower, Henry
Knight); and everybody thought Miss Molly was willing to smile upon
him. Be that as it may, he suddenly found himself the husband of his
late partner's daughter, a woman eight years older than he, and at
least four inches taller; a silent, plain woman, of devastating common
sense, who contradicted all those femininities and soft lovelinesses so
characteristic, not only of his first wife but of pretty Molly Wharton
also.

John Blair, the father of the second Mrs. Maitland, an uneducated,
extremely intelligent man, had risen from puddling to partnership in
the Maitland Works. There had been no social relations between Mr.
Maitland, Sr., and this new member of the firm, but the older man had a
very intimate respect, and even admiration for John Blair. When he came
to die he confided his son's interests to his partner with absolute
confidence that they would be safe. "Herbert has no gumption, John," he
said; "he wants to be an 'artist.' You've got to look after him." "I
will, Mr. Maitland, I will," said John Blair, snuffling and blowing his
nose on a big red pocket-handkerchief. He did look after him. He put
Herbert's affairs ahead of his own, and he made it clear to his
daughter, who in business matters was, curiously enough, his right-hand
man, that "Maitland's boy" was always, as he expressed it, "to have the
inside track."

"I ain't bothering about you, Sally; I'll leave you enough. And if I
didn't, you could scratch gravel for yourself. But Maitland's boy ain't
our kind. He must be taken care of."

When John Blair died, perhaps a sort of faithfulness to his wishes made
his Sally "take care" of Herbert Maitland by marrying him. "His child
certainly does need a mother," she thought;--"an intelligent mother,
not a goose." By and by she told Herbert of his child's need; or at any
rate helped him to infer it. And somehow, before he knew it, he married
her. By inheritance they owned the Works between them; so really their
marriage was, as the bride expressed it, "a very sensible arrangement";
and any sensible arrangement appealed to John Blair's daughter. But
after a breathless six months of partnership--in business if in nothing
else--Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little two-year-old
Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he was ignorant,
got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could take him.
Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and dazed him that
there was nothing for him to do but die--so that there might be room
for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; nobody who saw her in
those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she loved him. Her
pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical prostration,
but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under
like circumstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as
Mrs. Maitland's religion had never been more than church-going and
contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help under the
strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate the other means
of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself numb; very
likely she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not
feel anything else. Not even her baby's little clinging hands, or his
milky lips at her breast. She did her duty by him; she hired a reliable
woman to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at regular
hours to nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the
naive conviction of her day that church-going and religion were
synonymous, she began, when he was four years old, to take him to
church. In her shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday
costume ever since it had been purchased as part of her curiously
limited trousseau she sat in a front pew, between the two children, and
felt that she was doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty
without maternal instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as
maternal instinct without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in
the first few years of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed
to have nothing but duty to offer to her child. Nannie's puzzles began
then. "Why don't Mamma hug my baby brother?" she used to ask the nurse,
who had no explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to
hug Nannie, and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed
her to his service while he was still in petticoats. Blair was three
years old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland's
maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by the
boy's shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was chilled, too,
by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous candor of
childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first expressions of
opinion had been contained in the single word "uggy," accompanied by a
finger pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed--and she was one of
those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a sneeze--Blair had a
nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected sound, then burst
into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head down upon her
scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, "No, no! No, no!"
at which she would push him roughly from her knee, and fall into hurt
silence. Once, when he was five years old, she came in to dinner hot
from a morning in the Works, her moist forehead grimy with dust, and
bent over to kiss him; at which the little boy wrinkled up his nose and
turned his face aside.

"What's the matter?" his mother said; and called sharply to the nurse:
"I won't have any highfalutin' business in this boy! Get it out of
him." Then resolutely she took Blair's little chin in her hand--a big,
beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails--and turning
his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. "Get over
your airs!" she said, and sat down and ate her dinner without another
word to Blair or any one else. But the next day, as if to purchase the
kiss he would not give, she told him he was to have an "allowance." The
word had no meaning to the little fellow, until she showed him two
bright new dollars and said he could buy candy with them; then his
brown eyes smiled, and he held up his lips to her. It was at that
moment that money began to mean something to him. He bought the candy,
which he divided with Nannie, and he bought also a present for his
mother,--a bottle of cologne, with a tiny calendar tied around its neck
by a red ribbon. "The ribbon is pretty," he explained shyly. She was so
pleased that she instantly gave him another dollar, and then put the
long green bottle on her painted pine bureau, between two of his
photographs.

In the days when the four children played in the orchard, and had
lessons with Miss White, in the school-room in Mr. Ferguson's garret,
and were "treated" by Blair to candy or pink ice-cream--even in those
days Mercer was showing signs of what it was ultimately to become: the
apotheosis of materialism and vulgarity. Iron was entering into its
soul. It thought extremely well of itself; when a new mill was built,
or a new furnace blown in, it thought still better of itself. It prided
itself upon its growth; in fact, its complacency, its ugliness and its
size kept pace with one another.

"Look at our output," Sarah Maitland used to brag to her general
manager, Mr. Robert Ferguson; "and look at our churches! We have more
churches for our size than any town west of the Alleghanies."

"We need more jails than any town, east or west," Mr. Ferguson
retorted, grimly.

Mrs. Maitland avoided the deduction. Her face was full of pride. "You
just wait! We'll be the most important city in this country yet,
because we will hold the commerce of the world right here in our
mills!" She put out her great open palm, and slowly closed the strong,
beautiful fingers into a gripping fist. "The commerce of the world,
right _here_!" she said, thrusting the clenched hand, that quivered a
little, almost into his face.

Robert Ferguson snorted. He was a melancholy man, with thin, bitterly
sensitive lips, and kind eyes that were curiously magnified by
gold-rimmed eyeglasses, which he had a way of knocking off with
disconcerting suddenness. He did not, he declared, trust anybody.
"What's the use?" he said; "you only get your face slapped!" For his
part, he believed the Eleventh Commandment was, "Blessed is he that
expecteth nothing, because he'll get it."

"Read your Bible!" Mrs. Maitland retorted; "then you'll know enough to
call it a Beatitude, not a Commandment."

Mr. Ferguson snorted again. "Bible? It's all I can do to get time to
read my paper. I'm worked to death," he reproached her. But in spite of
being worked to death he always found time on summer evenings to weed
the garden in his back yard, or on winter mornings to feed a flock of
Mercer's sooty pigeons; and he had been known to walk all over town to
find a particular remedy for a sick child of one of his molders. To be
sure he alleged, when Mrs. Maitland accused him of kindness, that, as
far as the child was concerned, he was a fool for his pains, because
human critters ("I'm one of 'em myself,") were a bad lot and it would
be a good thing if they all died young!

"Oh, you have a fine bark, friend Ferguson," she said, "but when it
comes to a bite, I guess most folks get a kiss from you."

"Kiss?" said Robert Ferguson, horrified; "not much!"

They were very good friends, these two, each growling at, disapproving
of, and completely trusting the other. Mrs. Maitland's chief
disapproval of her superintendent--for her reproaches about his bark
were really expressions of admiration--her serious disapproval was
based on the fact that, when the season permitted, he broke the Sabbath
by grubbing in his garden, instead of going to church. A grape-arbor
ran the length of this garden, and in August the Isabellas, filmed with
soot, had a flavor, Robert Ferguson thought, finer than could be found
in any of the vineyards lying in the hot sunshine on the banks of the
river, far out of reach of Mercer's smoke. There was a flagstone path
around the arbor, and then borders of perennials against brick walls
thick with ivy or hidden by trellised peach-trees. All summer long bees
came to murmur among the flowers, and every breeze that blew over them
carried some sweetness to the hot and tired streets outside. It was a
spot of perfume and peace, and it was no wonder that the hard-working,
sad-eyed man liked to spend his Sundays in it. But "remembering the
Sabbath" was his employer's strong point. Mrs. Maitland kept the Fourth
Commandment with passion. Her Sundays, dividing each six days of
extraordinary activity, were arid stretches of the unspeakable dullness
of idleness. When Blair grew up he used to look back at those Sundays
and shudder. There was church and Sunday-school in the morning, then a
cold dinner, for cold roast beef was Mrs. Maitland's symbol of
Sabbatical holiness. Then an endless, vacant afternoon, spent always
indoors. Certain small, pious books were permitted the two
children--_Little Henry and His Bearer, The Ministering Children_, and
like moral food; but no games, no walks, no playing in the orchard.
Silence and weary idleness and Little Henry's holy arrogances. Though
the day must have been as dreary to Mrs. Maitland as it was to her son
and daughter, she never winced. She sat in the parlor, dressed in black
silk, and read _The Presbyterian_ and the Bible. She never allowed
herself to look at her desk in the dining-room, or even at her
knitting, which on week-days when she had no work to do was a great
resource; she looked at the clock a good deal, and sometimes she
sighed, then applied herself to _The Presbyterian_. She went to bed at
half-past seven as against eleven or twelve on other nights, first
reading, with extraordinary rapidity, her "Chapter." Mrs. Maitland had
a "system" by which she was able to read the Bible through once a year.
She frequently recommended it to her superintendent; to her way of
thinking such reading was accounted to her as righteousness.

Refreshed by a somnolent Sunday, she would rush furiously into business
on Monday morning, and Mr. Robert Ferguson, who never went to church,
followed in her wake, doing her bidding with grim and admiring
thoroughness. If not "worked to death," he was, at any rate, absorbed
in her affairs. Even when he went home at night, and, on summer
evenings, fell to grubbing in his narrow back yard, where his niece
"helped" him by pushing a little wheelbarrow over the mossy
flagstones,--even then he did not dismiss Mrs. Maitland's business from
his mind. He was scrupulous to say, as he picked up the weeds scattered
from the wheelbarrow, "Have you been a good little girl to-day,
Elizabeth?" but all the while, in his own thoughts he was going over
matters at the Works. On Sundays he managed to get far enough away from
business to interrogate Miss White about his niece:

"I hope Elizabeth is behaving herself, Miss White?"

"Oh yes; she is a dear, good child."

"Well, you never can tell about children,--or anybody else. Keep a
sharp eye on her, Miss White. And be careful, please, about vanity. I
thought I saw her looking in the mirror in the hall this morning.
Please discourage any signs of vanity."

"She hasn't a particle of vanity!" Miss White said warmly.

But in spite of such assurances, Mr. Ferguson was always falling into
bleakly apprehensive thoughts of his little girl, obstinately denying
his pride in her, and allowing himself only the meager hope that she
would "turn out fairly decently." Vanity was his especial concern, and
he was more than once afraid he had discovered it: Elizabeth was not
allowed to go to dancing-school--dancing and vanity were somehow
related in her uncle's mind; so the vital, vivid little creature
expressed the rhythm that was in her by dancing without instruction,
keeping time with loud, elemental cadences of her own composing, not
always melodious, but always in time. Sometimes she danced thus in the
school-room; sometimes in Mrs. Todd's "ice-cream parlor" at the farther
end of Mercer's old wooden bridge; once--and this was one of the
occasions when Mr. Ferguson thought he had detected the vice he
dreaded--once she danced in his very own library! Up and down she went,
back and forth, before a long mirror that stood between the windows.
She had put a daffodowndilly behind each ear, and twisted a dandelion
chain around her neck. She looked, as she came and went, smiling and
dimpling at herself in the shadowy depths of the mirror, like a
flower--a flower in the wind!--bending and turning and swaying, and
singing as she danced: "Oh, isn't it joyful--joyful--joyful!"

It was then that her uncle came upon her; for just a moment he stood
still in involuntary delight, then remembered his theories; there was
certainly vanity in her primitive adornment! He knocked his glasses off
with a fierce gesture, and did his duty by barking at her,--as Mrs.
Maitland would have expressed it. He told her in an angry voice that
she must go to bed for the rest of the day! at least, if she ever did
it again, she must go to bed for the rest of the day.

Another time he felt even surer of the feminine failing: Elizabeth
said, in his presence, that she wished she had some rings like those of
a certain Mrs. Richie, who had lately come to live next door; at which
Mr. Ferguson barked at Miss White, barked so harshly that Elizabeth
flew at him like a little enraged cat. "Stop scolding Cherry-pie! You
hurt her feelings; you are a wicked man!" she screamed, and beating him
with her right hand, she fastened her small, sharp teeth into her left
arm just above the wrist--then screamed again with self-inflicted pain.
But when Miss White, dismayed at such a loss of self-control,
apologized for her, Mr. Ferguson shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't mind temper," he said; "I used to have a temper myself; but I
will _not_ have her vain! Better put some plaster on her arm.
Elizabeth, you must not call Miss White by that ridiculous name."

The remark about Mrs. Richie's rings really disturbed him; it made him
deplore to himself the advent as a neighbor of a foolish woman. "She'll
put ideas into Elizabeth's head," he told himself. In regard to the
rings, he had not needed Elizabeth to instruct him. He had noticed them
himself, and they had convinced him that this Mrs. Richie, who at first
sight seemed a shy, sad woman with no nonsense about her, was really no
exception to her sex. "Vain and lazy, like the rest of them," he said
cynically. Having passed the age when he cared to sport with Amaryllis,
he did not, he said, like women. When he was quite a young man, he had
added, "except Mrs. Maitland." Which remark, being repeated to Molly
Wharton, had moved that young lady to retort that the reason that Sarah
Maitland was the only woman he liked, was that Sarah Maitland was not a
woman! "The only feminine thing about her is her petticoats," said Miss
Wharton, daintily. For which _mot_, Robert Ferguson never forgave her.
He certainly did not expect to like this new-comer in Mercer, this Mrs.
Richie, but he had gone to see her. He had been obliged to, because she
wished to rent a house he owned next door to the one in which he lived.
So, being her landlord, he had to see her, if for nothing else, to
discourage requests for inside repairs. He saw her, and promised to put
up a little glass house at the end of the back parlor for a plant-room.
"If she'd asked me for a 'conservatory,'" he said to himself, "I
wouldn't have considered it for a moment; but just a few sashes--I
suppose I might as well give in on that? Besides, if she likes flowers,
there must be something to her." All the same, he was conscious of
having given in, and to a woman who wore rings; so he was quite gruff
with Mrs. Richie's little boy, whom he found listening to an harangue
from Elizabeth. The two children had scraped acquaintance through the
iron fence that separated the piazzas of the two houses. "I," Elizabeth
had announced, "have a mosquito-bite on my leg; I'll show it to you,"
she said, generously; and when the bite on her little thigh was
displayed, she tried to think of other personal matters. "My mother's
dead. And my father's dead."

"So's mine," David matched her, proudly. "I'm an adopted child."

"I have a pair of red shoes with white buttons," she said. David,
unable to think of any possession of his own to cap either bite or
boots, was smitten into gloomy silence.

In spite of the landlord's disapproval of his tenant's rings, the
acquaintance of the two families grew. Mr. Ferguson had to see Mrs.
Richie again about those "sashes," or what not. His calls were always
on business--but though he talked of greenhouses, and she talked of
knocking out an extra window in the nursery so that her little boy
could have more sunshine, they slipped after a while into
personalities: Mrs. Richie had no immediate family; her--her husband
had died nearly three years before. Since then she had been living in
St. Louis. She had come now to Mercer because she wanted to be nearer
to a friend, an old clergyman, who lived in a place called Old Chester.

"I think it's about twenty miles up the river," she said. "That's where
I found David. I--I had lost a little boy, and David had lost his
mother, so we belonged together. It doesn't make any difference to us,
that he isn't my own, does it, David?"

"Yes'm," said David,

"David! Why won't you _ever_ say what is expected of you? We don't know
anybody in Mercer," she went on, with a shy, melancholy smile, "except
Elizabeth." And at her kind look the little girl, who had tagged along
behind her uncle, snuggled up to the maternal presence, and rubbed her
cheek against the white hand which had the pretty rings on it. "I am so
glad to have somebody for David to play with," Mrs. Richie said,
looking down at the little nestling thing, who at that moment stopped
nestling, and dropping down on toes and finger-tips, loped up--on very
long hind-legs, to the confusion of her elders, who endeavored not to
see her peculiar attitude--and, putting a paw into David's pocket,
abstracted a marble. There was an instant explosion, in which David,
after securing his property through violent exertions, sought, as a
matter of pure justice, to pull the bear's hair. But when Mrs. Richie
interfered, separating the combatants with horrified apologies for her
young man's conduct, Elizabeth's squeals stopped abruptly. She stood
panting, her eyes still watering with David's tug at her hair; the
dimple in her right cheek began to lengthen into a hard line.

"You are very naughty, David," said Mrs. Richie, sternly; "you must beg
Elizabeth's pardon at once!" At which Elizabeth burst out:

"Stop! Don't scold him. It was my fault. I did it--taking his marble.
I'll--I'll bite my arm if you scold David!"

"Elizabeth!" protested her uncle; "I'm ashamed of you!"

But Elizabeth was indifferent to his shame; she was hugging David
frantically. "I hate, I hate, I _hate_ your mother--if she does have
rings!" Her face was so convulsed with rage that Mrs. Richie actually
recoiled before it; Elizabeth, still clamoring, saw that involuntary
start of horror. Instantly she was calm; but she shrank away almost out
of the room. It seemed as if at that moment some veil, cold and
impenetrable, fell between the gentle woman and the fierce, pathetic
child--a veil that was not to be lifted until, in some mysterious way,
life should make them change places.

The two elders looked at each other, Robert Ferguson with meager
amusement; Mrs. Richie still grave at the remembrance of that furious
little face. "What did she mean about 'biting her arm'?" she asked,
after Elizabeth had been sent home, the bewildered David being told to
accompany her to the door.

"I believe she bites herself when she gets angry," Elizabeth's uncle
said; "Miss White said she had quite a sore place on her arm last
winter, because she bit it so often. It's of no consequence," he added,
knocking his glasses off fiercely. Again Mrs. Richie looked shocked.
"She is my brother's child," he said, briefly; "he died some years ago.
He left her to me." And Mrs. Richie knew instinctively that the bequest
had not been welcome. "Miss White looks after her," he said, putting
his glasses on again, carefully, with both hands; "she calls her her
'Lamb,' though a more unlamblike person than Elizabeth I never met. She
has a little school for her and the two Maitland youngsters in the top
of my house. Miss White is otherwise known as Cherry-pie. Elizabeth, I
am informed, loves cherry-pie; also, she loves Miss White: ergo!" he
ended, with his snort of a laugh. Then he had a sudden thought: "Why
don't you let David come to Miss White for lessons? I've no doubt she
could look after another pupil."

"I'd be delighted to," Mrs. Richie said, gratefully. So, through the
good offices of Mr. Ferguson, the arrangement was made. Mr. Ferguson
did not approve of Mrs. Richie's rings, but he had no objection to
helping her about David.

And that was how it happened that these four little lives were thrown
together--four threads that were to be woven into the great fabric of
Life.




CHAPTER II

On the other side of the street, opposite the Maitland house, was a
huddle of wooden tenements. Some of them were built on piles, and
seemed to stand on stilts, holding their draggled skirts out of the mud
of their untidy yards: some sagged on rotting sills, leaning shoulder
to shoulder as if to prop one another up. From each front door a shaky
flight of steps ran down to the unpaved sidewalk, where pigs and
children and hens, and the daily tramp of feet to and from the Maitland
Works, had beaten the earth into a hard, black surface--or a soft,
black surface, when it rained. These little huddling houses called
themselves Maitland's Shantytown, and they looked up at the Big House,
standing in melancholy isolation behind its fence of iron spears, with
the pride that is common to us all when we find ourselves in the
company of our betters. Back of the little houses was a strip of waste
land, used for a dump; and beyond it, bristling against the sky, the
long line of Mercer's stacks and chimneys.

In spite of such surroundings, the Big House, even as late as the early
seventies, was impressive. It was square, with four great chimneys, and
long windows that ran from floor to ceiling. Its stately entrance and
its two curving flights of steps were of white marble, and so were the
lintels of the windows; but the stone was so stained and darkened with
smoky years of rains and river fogs, that its only beauty lay in the
noble lines that grime and time had not been able to destroy. A gnarled
and twisted old wistaria roped the doorway, and, crawling almost to the
roof, looped along the eaves, in May it broke into a froth of exquisite
purple and faint green, and for a week the garland of blossoms,
murmurous with bees, lay clean and lovely against the narrow, old
bricks which had once been painted yellow. Outside, the house had a
distinction which no superficial dilapidation could mar; but inside
distinction was almost lost in the commonplace, if not in actual
ugliness. The double parlors on the right of the wide hall had been
furnished in the complete vulgarity of the sixties; on the left was the
library, which had long ago been taken by Mrs. Maitland as a bedroom,
for the practical reason that it opened into the dining-room, so her
desk was easily accessible at any time of night, should her passion for
toil seize her after working-hours were over. The walls of this room
were still covered with books, that no one ever read. Mrs. Maitland had
no time to waste on reading; "I _live_," she used to say; "I don't read
about living!" Except the imprisoned books, the only interesting things
in the room were some _cartes-de-visite_ of Blair, which stood in a
dusty row on the bureau, one of them propped against her son's first
present to her--the unopened bottle of Johann Maria Farina. When Blair
was a man, that bottle still stood there, the kid cap over the cork
split and yellow, the ribbons of the little calendar hanging from its
green neck, faded to streaky white.

The office dining-room, about which Blair had begun to be impertinent
when he was eight years old, was of noble proportions and in its day
must have had great dignity; but in Blair's childhood its day was over.
Above the dingy white wainscoting the landscape paper his grandfather
had brought from France in the thirties had faded into a blur of blues
and buffs. The floor was uncarpeted save for a Persian rug, whose
colors had long since dulled to an even grime. At one end of the room
was Mrs. Maitland's desk; at the other, filing cases, and two smaller
desks where clerks worked at ledgers or drafting. The four French
windows were uncurtained, and the inside shutters folded back, so that
the silent clerks might have the benefit of every ray of daylight
filtering wanly through Mercer's murky air. A long table stood in the
middle of the room; generally it was covered with blue-prints, or the
usual impedimenta of an office. But it was not an office table; it was
of mahogany, scratched and dim to be sure, but matching the ancient
claw-footed sideboard whose top was littered with letter files, silver
teapots and sugar-bowls, and stacks of newspapers. Three times a day
one end of this table was cleared, and the early breakfast, or the noon
dinner, or the rather heavy supper eaten rapidly and for the most part
in silence. Mrs. Maitland was silent because she was absorbed in
thought; Nannie and Blair were silent because they were afraid to talk.
But the two children gave a touch of humanness to the ruthless room,
which, indeed, poor little Blair had some excuse for calling a "pigsty."

"When I'm big," Blair announced one afternoon after school, "I'll have
a bunch of flowers on the table, like your mother does; you see if I
don't! I like your mother, David."

"_I_ don't; _very_ much," Elizabeth volunteered. "She looks out of her
eyes at me when I get mad."

"I don't like to live at my house," Blair said, sighing.

"Why don't you run away?" demanded Elizabeth; "I'm going to some day
when I get time."

"Where would you run to?" David said, practically. David was always
disconcertingly practical.

But Elizabeth would not be pinned down to details. "I will decide that
when I get started."

"I believe," Blair meditated, "I will run away."

"I'll tell you what let's do," Elizabeth said, and paused to pick up
her right ankle and hop an ecstatic yard or two on one foot; "I tell
you what let's do: let's all run away, _and get married!_"

The other three stared at her dumfounded. Elizabeth, whirling about on
her toes, dropped down on all--fours to turn a somersault of joy; when
she was on her feet she said, "Oh, _let's_ get married!" But it took
Blair, who always found it difficult to make up his mind, a few moments
to accept the project.

They had planned to devote that afternoon to playing bury-you-alive
under the yellow sofa in Mrs. Richie's parlor, but this idea of
Elizabeth's made it necessary to hide in the "cave"--a shadowy spot
behind the palmtub in the greenhouse--for reflection. Once settled
there, jostling one another like young pigeons, it was David who, as
usual, made the practical objections:

"We haven't any money."

"I suppose we could get all the money we want out of my mother's
cash-box," Blair admitted, wavering.

"That's stealing," Elizabeth said.

"You can't steal from your mother," Nannie defended her brother.

"I'll marry you, Elizabeth," Blair said, with sudden enthusiastic
decision.

But David demurred: "I think _I'd_ like Elizabeth. I'm not sure I want
to marry Nannie."

"You said Nannie's hair was the longest, only yesterday!" Blair said,
angrily.

"But I like Elizabeth's color of hair. Nannie, do you think I'd like
you to marry best, or Elizabeth?"

"I don't believe the color of hair makes any difference in being
married," Nannie said, kindly. "And anyway, you'll have to marry me,
David, 'cause Blair can't. He's my brother."

"He's only your half-brother," David pointed out.

"You can have Nannie," said Blair, "or you can stay out of the play."

"Well, I'll marry Nannie," David said, sadly; and Blair proceeded to
elaborate the scheme. It was very simple: the money in Mrs. Maitland's
cash-box would pay their fare to--"Oh, anywhere," Blair said, then
hesitated: "The only thing is, how'll we get it?"

"I'll get it for you," Nannie said, shuddering.

"Wouldn't you be scared?" Blair asked doubtfully. Everybody knew poor
Nannie was a 'fraid-cat.

"Little people," somebody called from the parlor, "what are you
chattering about?"

The children looked at one another in a panic, but Blair called back
courageously, "Oh, nothing."

"Perhaps," said Mrs. Richie, smiling at Mr. Robert Ferguson, who had
dropped in to find Elizabeth--"perhaps you didn't know that my
conservatory was a Pirates' Cave?"

There was a sort of hesitant intimacy now between these two people, but
it had never got so far as friendship. Mrs. Richie's retreating shyness
was courteous, but never cordial; Robert Ferguson's somber egotism was
kind, but never generous. Yet, owing no doubt to their two children,
and to the fact that Mr. Ferguson was continually bringing things over
from his garden borders, to transplant into hers--it improves the
property, he told her briefly--owing to the children and the flowers,
the landlord and the tenant saw each other rather frequently. On this
especial afternoon, though Mr. Ferguson had found Elizabeth, he still
lingered, perhaps to tell the story of some extraordinary thing Mrs.
Maitland had done that day at the Works. "She's been the only man in
the family since old John died," he ended; "and, judging from Blair, I
guess she'll continue to be."

"She is wonderful!" Mrs. Richie agreed; "but she's lovable, too, which
is more important."

"I should as soon say a locomotive was lovable," he said; "not that
that's against her. Quite the contrary."

The pretty woman on the yellow damask sofa by the fireside flushed with
offense. The fact was, this dry, dogmatic man, old at thirty-six, lean,
and in a time of beards clean-shaven, with gray hair that stood
fiercely up from a deeply furrowed brow, and kind, unhappy eyes
blinking behind the magnifying lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses, this
really friendly neighbor, was always offending her--though he was
rather nice about inside repairs. "Why do I endure him?" Mrs. Richie
said to herself sometimes. Perhaps it was because, in spite of his
manners, and his sneer that the world was a mighty mean place to live
in, and his joyless way of doing his duty to his little niece, he
certainly did see how good and sweet her David was. She reminded
herself of this to check her offense at his snub about Mrs. Maitland;
and all the while the good, sweet David was plotting behind the green
tub of the palm-tree in the conservatory. But when Mr. Ferguson called
to Elizabeth to come home with him, and then bent over and fussed about
the buttons on her jacket, and said, anxiously, "Are you warm enough,
Pussy?" Mrs. Richie said to herself: "He _is_ good! It's only his
manners that are bad."

Robert Ferguson went out into the brown November dusk with his little
girl clinging to his hand, for so he understood his duty to his niece;
and on their own doorstep Elizabeth asked a question:

"Uncle, if you get married, do you have to stay married?"

He looked down at her with a start. "_What?_" he said.

"If you don't like being married, do you have to stay?"

"Don't ask foolish questions!" he said; "of course you have to."

Elizabeth sighed. As for her uncle, he was disturbed to the point of
irritation. He dropped her hand with a gesture almost of disgust, and
the lines in his forehead deepened into painful folds. After supper he
called Elizabeth's governess into the library, and shut the door.

"Miss White," he said, knocking his glasses off, "Elizabeth is getting
to be a big girl; will you kindly make a point of teaching her--things?"

"I will do so immejetly, sir," said Miss White. "What things?"

"Why," said Robert Ferguson, helplessly, "why--general morals." He put
his glasses on carefully, with both hands. "Elizabeth asked me a very
improper question; she asked me about divorce, and--"

"_Divorce_!" exclaimed Miss White, astounded; "I have been at my post
for eight years, sir, and I am positive that that word has never been
used in Elizabeth's presence!"

He did not explain. "Teach her," he said, harshly, "that a woman has
got to behave herself."

Blair having once decided upon it, clung to his purpose of running
away, with a persistency which was his mother's large determination in
little; but the double elopement was delayed for two days because of
the difficulty of securing the necessary funds. The dining-room, where
Mrs. Maitland "kept all her money," was rarely entirely deserted. In
those brief intervals when the two clerks were not on hand, Harris
seemed to be possessed of a clean devil, and spent an unusual amount of
time "redding up"; or when Harris was in the kitchen, and Blair,
dragging the reluctant Nannie, had peered into the room, he had been
confronted by his mother. She never saw him--sometimes she was writing;
sometimes talking to a foreman; sometimes knitting, for when Sarah
Maitland had nothing else to do, she made baby socks for the missionary
barrel; once when Blair came to the door, she was walking up and down
knitting rapidly, thinking out some project; her ball of zephyr had
fallen on the floor, and dragging along behind her, unwinding and
unwinding, had involved her hurrying tramp in a grimy, pink tangle.

Each time Blair had looked into the room it was policed by this
absorbed presence. "We'll _never_ get married!" he said in despair. The
delay had a disastrous effect upon romance, for David, with the
melancholy candor of a reasoning temperament, was continually saying
that he doubted the desirability of Nannie as a wife; and Elizabeth was
just as hesitant about Blair.

"Suppose I took a hate to you for a husband? Uncle Robert says if you
don't like being married, you can't stop."

"You won't want to stop. Married people don't have to go to school!"

Elizabeth sighed. "But I don't know but what maybe I'd like David for a
husband?"

"He doesn't have but ten cents a week allowance, and I have a dollar,"
Blair reminded her.

"Well, I don't believe I like being married, anyway," she fretted; "I
like going out to the toll-house for ice-cream better."

Her uncertainty made Blair still more impatient to finance his journey;
and that day, just after dinner, he and Nannie stood quaking at the
dining-room door. "I-I-I'll do it," Blair gasped, with trembling valor.
He was very little, and his eyes were dilating with fright. "I'll do
it," he said, chattering. Nannie rushed into the breach; Nannie never
pretended to be anything but a 'fraid-cat except in things that
concerned Blair; she said now, boldly:

"I'm the oldest, so I ought to."

She crept across the floor, stopping at every step to listen
breathlessly; nothing stirred, except her own little shadow crouching
at her heels.

"Grab in the top drawer," Blair hissed after her; and she put a
shrinking hand into the japanned box, and "grabbed" all the bills she
could hold; then, not waiting to close the drawer, she fled back to
Blair. Up-stairs in her room, they counted the money.

"We can travel all round the world!" Blair whispered, thrilled at the
amount of their loot. But at the last moment there was a
defection--Elizabeth backed out. "I'd rather go out to the toll-house
for ice-cream," she said; "ice-cream at Mrs. Todd's is nicer than being
married. David, don't you go, either. Let Blair and Nannie go. You stay
with me."

But David was not to be moved. "I like traveling; I've traveled a good
deal all my life; and I want to go round the world with Blair."

Elizabeth gave him a black look. "You like Blair better 'an me," she
said, the tears hot in her amber eyes. A minute later she slipped away
to hide under the bed in her own room, peering out from under a lifted
valance for a hoped-for pursuer. But no one came; the other three were
so excited that her absence was hardly noticed.

How they started, the adventurous ones, late that afternoon--later, in
fact, than they planned, because Blair insisted upon running back to
give Harris a parting gift of a dollar; "'Cause, poor Harris! _he_
can't go traveling"--how they waited in the big, barn-like, foggy
station for what Blair called the "next train," how they boarded it for
"any place"--all seemed very funny when they were old enough to look
back upon it. It even seemed funny, a day or two afterward, to their
alarmed elders. But at the time it was not amusing to anybody. David
was gloomy at being obliged to marry Nannie; "I pretty near wish I'd
stayed with Elizabeth," he said, crossly. Nannie was frightened,
because, she declared, "Mamma'll be mad;--now I tell you, Blair, she'll
be mad!" And Blair was sulky because he had no wife. Yet, in spite of
these varying emotions, pushed by Blair's resolution, they really did
venture forth to "travel all around the world!"

As for the grown people's feelings about the elopement, they ran the
gamut from panic to amusement.... At a little after five o'clock, Miss
White heard sobbing in Elizabeth's room, and going in, found the little
girl blacking her boots and crying furiously. "Elizabeth! my lamb! What
is the matter?"

"I have a great many sorrows," said Elizabeth, with a hiccup of despair.

"But what _are_ you doing?"

"I am blacking my red shoes," Elizabeth wailed; and so she was, the
blacking-sponge on its shaky wire dripping all over the carpet. "My
beautiful red shoes; I am blacking them; and now they are spoiled
forever."

"But why do you want to spoil them?" gasped Miss White, struggling to
take the blacking-bottle away from her. "Elizabeth, tell me immejetly!
What has happened?"

"I didn't go on the journey," said Elizabeth; "and David wouldn't stay
at home with me; he liked Blair and Nannie better 'an me. He hurt my
feelings; so pretty soon right away I got mad--mad--mad--to think he
wouldn't stay with me. I always get mad if my feelings are hurt, and
David Richie is always hurting 'em. I despise him for making me mad! I
despise him for treating me so--_hideous_! And so I took a hate to my
shoes." The ensuing explanation sent Miss White, breathless, to tell
Mrs. Richie; but Mrs. Richie was not at home.

When David did not appear that afternoon after school, Mrs. Richie was
disturbed. By three o'clock she was uneasy; but it was nearly five
before the quiver of apprehension grew into positive fright; then she
put on her things and walked down to the Maitland house.

"Is David here?" she demanded when Harris answered her ring; "please go
up-stairs and look, Harris; they may be playing in the nursery. I am
worried."

Harris shuffled off, and Mrs. Richie, following him to the foot of the
stairs, stood there gripping the newel-post.

"They ain't here," Harris announced from the top landing.

Mrs. Richie sank down on the lowest step.

"Harris!" some one called peremptorily, and she turned to see Robert
Ferguson coming out of the dining-room: "Oh, you're here, Mrs. Richie?
I suppose you are on David's track. I thought Harris might have some
clue. I came down to tell Mrs. Maitland all we could wring from
Elizabeth."

Before she could ask what he meant, Blair's mother joined them. "I
haven't a doubt they are playing in the orchard," she said.

"No, they're not," her superintendent contradicted; "Elizabeth says
they were going to 'travel'; but that's all we could get out of her."

"'Travel'! Oh, what does she mean?" Mrs. Richie said; "I'm so
frightened!"

"What's the use of being frightened?" Mrs. Maitland asked, curiously;
"it won't bring them back if they are lost, will it?"

Robert Ferguson knocked his glasses off fiercely. "They couldn't be
lost in Mercer," he reassured David's mother.

"Well, whether they've run away or not, come into my room and talk
about it like a sensible woman," said Mrs. Maitland; "what's the use of
sitting on the stairs? Women have such a way of sitting on stairs when
things go wrong! Suppose they are lost. What harm's done? They'll turn
up. Come!" Mrs. Richie came. Everybody "came" or went, or stood still,
when Mrs. Maitland said the word! And though not commanded, Mr.
Ferguson came too.

In the dining-room Mrs. Maitland took no part in the perplexed
discussion that followed. At her desk, in her revolving chair, she had
instinctively taken up her pen; there was a perceptible instant in
which she got her mind off her own affairs and put it on this matter of
the children. Then she laid the pen down, and turned around to face the
other two; but idleness irritated her, and she reached for a ball of
pink worsted skewered by bone needles. She asked no questions and made
no comments, but knitting rapidly, listened, until apparently her
patience came to an end; then with a grunt she whirled round to her
desk and again picked up her pen. But as she did so she paused, pen in
air; threw it down, and pounding the flat of her hand on her desk,
laughed loudly:

"I know! I know!" And revolving back again in leisurely relief to face
them, she said, with open amusement: "When I came home this afternoon,
I found this drawer half open and the bills in my cash-box disturbed.
They've"--her voice was suddenly drowned in the rumble of a train on
the spur track; the house shook slightly, and a gust of black smoke was
vomited against the windows;--"they've helped themselves and gone off
to enjoy it! We'll get on their trail at the railroad station. That's
what Elizabeth meant by 'traveling.'"

Mrs. Richie turned terrified eyes toward Mr. Ferguson.

"Why, of course!" he said, "the monkeys!"

But Mrs. Richie seemed more frightened than ever. "The
railroad!--_Oh_--"

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Maitland; "they're all right. The ticket-agent
will remember them. Mr. Ferguson, telegraph to their destination,
wherever it is, and have them shipped back. No police help at this end
yet, if you please."

Robert Ferguson nodded. "Of course everything is all right," he said.
"I'll let you know the minute I find traces of them, Mrs. Richie." When
he reached the door, he came back. "Now don't you worry; I could thrash
those boys for bothering you!" At which she tried to smile, but there
was a quiver in her chin.

"Harris!" Mrs. Maitland broke in, "supper! Mrs. Richie, you are going
to have something to eat."

"Oh, I can't--"

"What? You are not saying _can't?_ 'Can't' is a 'bad word,' you know."
She got up--a big, heavy woman, in a gray bag of a dress that only
reached to the top of her boots--and stood with her hands on her hips;
her gray hair was twisted into a small, tight knot at the back of her
head, and her face looked like iron that had once been molten and had
cooled into roughened immobility. It was not an unamiable face; as she
stood there looking down at Mrs. Richie she even smiled the half-amused
smile one might bestow on a puppy, and she put a kindly hand on the
other mother's shoulder. "Don't be so scared, woman! They'll be found."

"You don't think anything could have happened to him?" Mrs. Richie
said, trembling; "you don't think he could have been run over, or--or
anything?" She clutched at the big hand and clung to it.

"No," Mrs. Maitland said, dryly; "I don't think anything has happened
to him."

Mrs. Richie had the grace to blush. "Of course I meant Blair and
Nannie, too," she murmured.

"You never thought of 'em!" Mrs. Maitland said, chuckling; "now you
must have some supper."

They were in the midst of it when a note came from Mr. Ferguson to say
that he was on the track of the runaways. He had sent a despatch that
would insure their being returned by the next train, and he was himself
going half-way up the road to meet them. Then a postscript: "Tell Mrs.
Richie not to worry."

"Doesn't seem much disturbed about my worry," said Mrs. Maitland,
jocosely significant; then with loud cheerfulness she tried to rally
her guest: "It's all right; what did I tell you? Where's my knitting?
Come; I'll go over to the parlor with you; we'll sit there."

Mrs. Maitland's parlor was not calculated to cheer a panic-stricken
mother. It was a vast room, rather chilly on this foggy November
evening, and smelling of soot. On its remote ceiling was a design in
delicate relief of garlands and wreaths, which the dingy years had not
been able to rob of its austere beauty. Two veined black-marble columns
supported an arch that divided the desert of the large room into two
smaller rooms, each of which had the center-table of the period, its
bleak white-marble top covered with elaborately gilded books that no
one ever opened. Each room had, too, a great cut-glass chandelier,
swathed in brown paper-muslin and looking like a gigantic withered
pear. Each had its fireplace, with a mantelpiece of funereal marble to
match the pillars. Mrs. Maitland had refurnished this parlor when she
came to the old house as a bride; she banished to the lumber-room, or
even to the auctioneer's stand, the heavy, stately mahogany of the
early part of the century, and purchased according to the fashion of
the day, glittering rosewood, carved and gilded and as costly as could
be found. Between the windows at each end of the long room were mirrors
in enormous gilt frames; the windows themselves, topped with cornices
and heavy lambrequins, were hung with crimson brocade; a grand piano,
very bare and shining, sprawled sidewise between the black columns of
the arch, and on the wall opposite the fireplaces were four large
landscapes in oil, of exactly the same size. "Herbert likes pictures,"
the bride said to herself when she purchased them. "That goose Molly
Wharton wouldn't have been able to buy 'em for him!" The only pleasant
thing in the meaningless room was Nannie's drawing-board, which
displayed the little girl's painstaking and surprisingly exact copy in
lead-pencil, of some chromo--"Evangeline" perhaps, or some popular
sentimentality of the sixties. In the ten years which had elapsed since
Mrs. Maitland had plunged into her debauch of furnishing--her one
extravagance!--of course the parlors had softened; the enormous roses
of the carpets had faded, the glitter of varnish had dimmed; but the
change was not sufficient to blur in Mrs. Maitland's eyes, all the
costly and ugly glory of the room. She cast a complacent glance about
her as she motioned her nervous and preoccupied guest to a chair. "How
do you like Mercer?" she said, beginning to knit rapidly.

"Oh, very well; it is a little--smoky," Mrs. Richie said, glancing at
the clock.

Mrs. Maitland grunted. "Mercer would be in a bad way without its smoke.
You ought to learn to like it, as I do! I like the smell of it, I like
the taste of it, I like the feel of it!"

"Really?" Mrs. Richie murmured; she was watching the clock.

"That smoke, let me tell you Mrs. Richie is the pillar of cloud, to
this country! (If you read your Bible, you'll know what that means.) I
think of it whenever I look at my stacks."

Mrs. Maitland's resentment at her guest's mild criticism was obvious;
but Mrs. Richie did not notice it. "I think I'll go down to the station
and meet the children," she said, rising.

"I'm afraid you are a very foolish woman," Sarah Maitland said;--and
Mrs. Richie sat down. "Mr. Ferguson will bring 'em here. Anyway, this
clock is half an hour slow. They'll be here before you could get to the
station." She chuckled, slyly. Her sense of humor was entirely
rudimentary, and never got beyond the practical joke. "I've been
watching you look at that clock," she said; then she looked at it
herself and frowned. She was wasting a good deal of time over this
business of the children. But in spite of herself, glancing at the
graceful figure sitting in tense waiting at the fireside, she smiled.
"You are a pretty creature," she said; and Mrs. Richie started and
blushed like a girl. "If Robert Ferguson had any sense!" she went on,
and paused to pick up a dropped stitch. "Queer fellow, isn't he?" Mrs.
Richie had nothing to say. "Something went wrong with him when he was
young, just after he left college. Some kind of a crash. Woman scrape,
I suppose. Have you ever noticed that women make all the trouble in the
world? Well, he never got over it. He told me once that Life wouldn't
play but one trick on him. 'We're always going to sit down on a
chair--and Life pulls it from under us,' he said. 'It won't do that to
me twice.' He's not given to being confidential, but that put me on the
track. And now he's got Elizabeth on his hands."

"She's a dear little thing," Mrs. Richie said, smiling; "though I
confess she always fights shy of me; she doesn't like me, I'm afraid."

Mrs. Maitland lifted an eyebrow. "She's a corked-up volcano. Robert
Ferguson ought to get married, and give her an aunt to look after her."
She glanced at Mrs. Richie again, with appraising eyes; "pity he hasn't
more sense."

"I think I hear a carriage," Mrs. Richie said, coldly. Then she forgot
Mrs. Maitland, and stood waiting and trembling. A minute later Mr.
Ferguson ushered the three sleepy, whimpering children into the room,
and Mrs. Richie caught her grimy, crying little boy in her arms and
cried with him. "Oh, David, oh, David--my darling! How could you
frighten mother so!"

She was on her knees before him, and while her tears and kisses fell on
his tousled thatch of yellow hair, he burrowed his dirty little face
among the laces around her white throat and bawled louder than ever.
Mrs. Maitland, her back to the fireplace, her hands on her hips, stood
looking on; she was very much interested. Blair, hungry and sleepy and
evidently frightened, was nuzzling up against Mrs. Richie, catching at
her hand and trying to hide behind her skirts; he looked furtively at
his mother, but he would not meet her eye.

"Blair," she said, "go to bed."

"Nannie and me want some supper," said Blair in a whisper.

"You won't get any. Boys that go traveling at supper-time can get their
own suppers or go hungry."

"It's my fault, Mamma," Nannie panted.

"No, it ain't!" Blair said quickly, emerging from behind Mrs. Richie;
"it was me made her do it."

"Well, clear out, clear out! Go to bed, both of you," Mrs. Maitland
said. But when the two children had scuttled out of the room she struck
her knee with her fist and laughed immoderately.

The next morning, when the two children skulked palely into the
dining-room, they were still frightened. Mrs. Maitland, however, did
not notice them. She was absorbed in trying in the murky light to read
the morning paper, propped against the silver urn in front of her.

"Sit down," she said; "I don't like children who are late for
breakfast. Bless, O Lord, we beseech Thee, these things to our use, and
us to Thy service and glory. Amen!--Harris! Light the gas."

Mercer's daylight was always more or less wan; but in the autumn the
yellow fogs seemed to press the low-hanging smoke down into the great
bowl of the hills at the bottom of which the town lay, and the wanness
scarcely lightened, even at high noon. On such days the gas in the
dining-room--or office, if one prefers to call it so--flared from
breakfast until dinner time. It flared now on two scared little faces.
Once Blair lifted questioning eyebrows at Harris, and managed when the
man brought his plate of porridge to whisper, "mad?" At which the
sympathetic Harris rolled his eyes speechlessly, and the two children
grew perceptibly paler. But when, abruptly, Mrs. Maitland crumpled her
newspaper together and threw it on the floor, her absorbed face showed
no displeasure. The fact was, she had forgotten the affair of the night
before; it was the children's obvious alarm which reminded her that the
business of scolding and punishing must be attended to. She got up from
the table and stood behind them, with her back to the fire; she began
to nibble the upper joint of her forefinger, wondering just how to
begin. This silent inspection of their shoulders made the little
creatures quiver. Nannie crumbled her bread into a heap, and Blair
carried an empty spoon to his mouth with automatic regularity; Harris,
in the pantry, in a paroxysm of sympathy, stretched his lean neck to
the crack of the half-open door.

"Children!"

"Yes, ma'am," Nannie quavered.

"Turn round."

They turned. Nannie began to cry. Blair twisted a button on his coat
with a grip that made his fingers white.

"Come into my room."

The children gasped with dismay. Mrs. Maitland's bedroom was a
nightmare of a place to them both. It was generally dark, for the lower
halves of the inside shutters were apt to be closed; but, worse than
that, the glimmering glass doors of the bookcases that lined the walls
held a suggestion of mystery that was curiously terrifying. Whenever
they entered the room, the brother and sister always kept a frightened
eye on those doors. This dull winter morning, when they came quaking
along behind their mother into this grim place, it was still in the
squalor of morning confusion. Later, Harris would open the shutters and
tidy things up; he would dust the painted pine bureau and Blair's
photographs and the slender green bottle of German cologne on which the
red ribbons of the calendar were beginning to fade; now everything was
dark and bleak and covered with dust. Mrs. Maitland sat down; the
culprits stood hand in hand in front of her.

"Blair, don't you know it's wrong to take what doesn't belong to you?"

"I took it," said the 'fraid-cat, faintly; she moved in front of her
brother as though to protect him.

"Blair told you to," his mother said.

"Yes," Blair blurted out, "it was me told her to."

"People that take things that don't belong to them go to hell," Mrs.
Maitland said; "haven't you learned that in Sunday-school?"

Silence.

"You ought to be punished very severely, Blair--and Nannie, too. But I
am very busy this morning, so I shall only say"--she hesitated; what on
earth should she say! "that--that you shall lose your allowance for
this week, both of you."

One of them muttered, "Yes'm."

Mrs. Maitland looked as uncomfortable as they did. She wondered what to
do next. How much simpler a furnace was than a child! "Well," she said,
"that's all--at present"; it had suddenly occurred to her that
apprehension was a good thing; "_at present_," she repeated darkly;
"and Blair, remember; thieves go to hell." She watched them with
perplexed eyes as they hurried out of the room; just as they reached
the door she called: "Blair!"

The child stopped short in his tracks and quivered.

"Come here." He came, slowly, his very feet showing his reluctance.
"Blair," she said--in her effort to speak gently her voice grated; she
put out her hand as if to draw him to her, but the child shivered and
moved aside. Mrs. Maitland looked at him dumbly; then bent toward him,
and her hands, hanging between her knees, opened and closed, and even
half stretched out as if in inarticulate entreaty. Nannie, in the
doorway, sobbing under her breath, watched with frightened,
uncomprehending eyes. "My son," Sarah Maitland said, with as much
mildness as her loud voice could express, "what did you mean to do when
you ran away?" She smiled, but he would not meet her eyes. "Tell me, my
boy, why did you run away?"

Blair tried to speak, cleared his throat, and blurted out four husky
words: "Don't like it here."

"Don't like what? Your home?"

Blair nodded.

"Why not?" she asked, astonished.

"Ugly," Blair said, faintly.

"Ugly! What is ugly?"

Blair, without looking up, made a little, swift gesture with his hand.
"This," he said; then suddenly he lifted his head, gave her a sidewise,
shrinking look, and dropped his eyes. The color flew into Mrs.
Maitland's face; with an ejaculation of anger, she got on her feet.
"You are a very foolish and very bad little boy," she said; "you don't
know what you are talking about. I had meant to increase your
allowance, but now I won't do it. Listen to me; it is no matter whether
a house, or a--a person, is what you call 'ugly.' What matters is
whether they are useful. Everything in the world ought to be
useful--like our Works. If I ever hear you saying you don't like a
thing because it's ugly, I shall--I shall not give you any money at
all. Money!" she burst out, suddenly fluent, "money isn't _pretty_!
Dirty scraps of paper, bits of silver that look like lead--perhaps you
call money 'ugly,' too?"

Her vehemence was a sort of self-defense; it was a subtle confession
that she felt in this little repelling personality the challenge of an
equal; but Blair only gaped at her in childish confusion; and instantly
his mother was herself again. "Clear out, now; and be a good boy." When
she was alone, she sat at her desk in the dining-room for several
minutes without taking up her pen. Her face burned from the slap of the
child's words; but below the scorch of anger and mortification her
heart was bruised. He did not like her to put her arm about him! She
drew a long breath and began to read her letters; but all the while she
was thinking of that scene in the parlor the night before: Blair
crouching against Mrs. Richie, clinging to her white hand;--voluntarily
Sarah Maitland looked at her own hand; "I suppose," she said to
herself, "he thinks hers is 'pretty'! Where does he get such notions? I
wonder what kind of a woman she is, anyway; she never says anything
about her husband."




CHAPTER III

There came a day when Miss White's little school in the garret was
broken up. Mr. Ferguson declared that David and Blair needed a boot
instead of a petticoat to teach them their Latin--and a few other
things, too! He had found Mrs. Richie in tears because, under the big
hawthorn in her own back yard, David had blacked Blair's eye, and had
himself achieved a bloody nose. Mrs. Richie was for putting on her
things to go and apologize to Mrs. Maitland, and was hardly restrained
by her landlord's snort of laughter.

"Next time I hope he'll give him two black eyes, and Blair will loosen
one of his front teeth!" said Mr. Ferguson.

David's mother was speechless with horror.

"That's the worst of trusting a boy to a good woman," he barked,
knocking off his glasses angrily; "but I'll do what I can to thwart
you! I'll make sure there isn't any young-eyed cherubin business about
David. He has got to go to boarding-school, and learn something besides
his prayers. If somebody doesn't rescue him from apron-strings, he'll
be a 'very, very good young man'--and then may the Lord have mercy on
his soul!"

"I didn't know anybody could be too good," Mrs. Richie ventured.

"A woman can't be too good, but a man oughtn't to be," her landlord
instructed her.

David's mother was too bewildered by such sentiments to
protest--although, indeed, Mr. Ferguson need not have been quite so
concerned about David's "goodness." This freckled, clear-eyed
youngster, with straight yellow hair and good red cheeks, was just an
honest, growly boy, who dropped his clothes about on the floor of his
room, and whined over his lessons, and blustered largely when out of
his mother's hearing; furthermore, he had already experienced his first
stogie--with a consequent pallor about the gills that scared Mrs.
Richie nearly to death. But Robert Ferguson's jeering reference to
apron-strings resulted in his being sent to boarding school. Blair went
with him, "rescued" from the goodwoman regime of Cherry-pie's
instruction by Mr. Ferguson's advice to Mrs. Maitland; "although,"
Robert Ferguson admitted, candidly, "he doesn't need it as poor David
does; his mother wouldn't know how to make a Miss Nancy of him, even if
she wanted to!" Then, with a sardonic guess at Mrs. Richie's unspoken
thought, he added that Mrs. Maitland would not dream of going to live
in the town where her son was at school. "She has sense enough to know
that Blair, or any other boy worth his salt, would hate his mother if
she tagged on behind," said Mr. Ferguson; "of course you would never
think of doing such a thing, either," he ended, ironically.

"Of course not," said Mrs. Richie, faintly. So it was that, assisted by
her landlord, David's mother thrust her one chicken out into the world
unprotected by her hovering wing. About the time Miss White lost her
two masculine pupils, the girls began to go to a day-school in Mercer,
Cherry-pie's entire deposition as a teacher being brought about
because, poor lady! she fumbled badly when it came to a critical moment
with Elizabeth. It all grew out of one of the child's innumerable
squabbles with David--she got along fairly peaceably with Blair. She
and Nannie had been comparing pigtails, and David had asserted that
Elizabeth's hair was "the nicest"; which so gratified her that she
first hugged him violently, and then invited him to take her out rowing.

"I'll pay for the boat!" she said, and pirouetted around the room,
keeping time with:

  "'Oh, that will be joyful, joyful, joyful!
  Oh, that will be--'

"Uncle gave me a dollar yesterday," she interrupted herself,
breathlessly.

To this David, patiently straightening his collar after that ecstatic
embrace, objected; but his magnanimity was lessened by his explanation
that he wasn't going to have any _girl_ pay for him! This ruffled
Elizabeth's pride for a moment; however, she was not averse to saving
her dollar, so everything was arranged. David was to row her to
Willis's, a country tavern two miles down the river, where, as all
middle-aged Mercer will remember, the best jumbles in the world could
be purchased at the agreeable price of two for a cent. Elizabeth, who
was still congratulating herself on having "nicer hair than Nannie,"
and who loved the river (and the jumbles), was as punctual as a clock
in arriving at the covered bridge where at the toll-house wharf they
were to meet and embark. She had even been so forehanded as to bargain
with Mrs. Todd for the hire of the skiff, in which she immediately
seated herself, the tiller-ropes in her hands, all ready for David to
take the oars. "And I've waited, and waited, and waited!" she told
herself angrily, as she sat there in the faintly rocking skiff. And
after an hour of waiting, what should she see but David Richie racing
on the bridge with Blair Maitland! He had just simply forgotten his
engagement! (Elizabeth was so nearly a young lady that she said
"engagement.")

"I'll never forgive him," she said, and the dimple hardened in her
cheek. Sitting in the boat, she looked up at the two boys, David in
advance, a young, lithe figure, in cotton small-clothes and jersey,
leaping in great, beautiful strides, on and on and on, his face
glowing, his eyes like stars; then, alas, he gave a downward glance and
there was Elizabeth, waiting fiercely in the skiff! His "engagement"
came back to him; there was just one astonished, faltering instant; and
in it, of course, Blair shot ahead! It must be confessed that in his
rage at being beaten David promptly forgot Elizabeth again, for though
she waited still a little longer for him and his apology, no David
appeared, he and Blair being occupied in wrangling over their race. She
went home in a slowly gathering passion. _David had forgotten her!_ "He
likes Blair better than me; he'd rather race with another boy than go
out in a boat with me; and I said I'd pay for it--and I've only got one
dollar in the whole world!" At that stab of self-pity a tear ran down
the side of her nose (and she was still a whole block away from home!);
when it reached her lip, she was obliged to put her tongue out
furtively and lick it away. But repression made the outbreak, when it
came, doubly furious. She burst in upon Miss White, her dry eyes
blazing with rage.

"He made me wait; he didn't come; I hate him. I'll never speak to him
again. He hurt my feelings. He is a beast."

"Elizabeth! You mustn't use such unladylike words! When I was a young
lady I never even heard such words. Oh, my lamb, if you don't control
your temper, something dreadful will happen to you some day!"

"I hope something dreadful will happen to him some day," said
Elizabeth. And with that came the tears--a torrential rain, through
which the lightning played and the thunder crashed. Miss White in real
terror, left her, to get some smelling-salts, and the instant she was
alone Elizabeth ran across the room and stood before her mirror; then
she took a pair of scissors in her shaking hand and hacked off lock
after lock, strand after strand, of her shining hair. When it was done,
she looked at the russet stubble that was left with triumphant rage.
"There, now! I guess he won't think my hair is nicer than Nannie's any
more. I _hate_ him!" she said, and laughed out loud, her vivid face wet
and quivering.

Miss White, hurrying in, heard the laugh, and stood transfixed:
"Elizabeth!" The poor, ugly, shorn head, the pile of gleaming hair on
the bureau, the wicked, tear-stained, laughing face brought the poor
lady's heart into her throat. "Elizabeth!" she faltered again; and
Elizabeth ran and flung her arms about her neck.

"David forgot all about me," she sobbed. "He is always hurting my
feelings! And I can't _bear_ to have my feelings hurt. Oh, Cherry-pie,
kiss me! Kiss me!"

That was the end of the outburst; the ensuing penitence was unbridled
and temporary. The next morning she waylaid David to offer him some
candy, which he took with serene unconsciousness of any bad behavior on
his part.

"Awfully sorry I forgot about Willis's," he said casually; and took a
hearty handful of candy.

Elizabeth, looking into the nearly empty box, winced; then said,
bravely, "Take some more." He took a good deal more.

"David, I--I'm sorry I cut my hair."

"Why, I didn't notice," David said, wrinkling up his freckled nose and
glancing at her with some interest. "It looks awfully, doesn't it?"

"David, don't tell your mother, will you? She looks so sort of
horrified when I've been provoked. It almost makes me mad again,"
Elizabeth said, candidly.

"Materna thinks it's dreadful in you."

"Do you mind about my hair?" Elizabeth asked.

David laughed uproariously. "Why on earth should _I_ mind? If I were a
girl, you bet I'd keep my hair cut."

"Do you forgive me?" she said, in a whisper; "if you don't forgive me,
I shall die."

"Forgive you?" said David, astonished, his mouth full of candy; "why,
it's nothing to me if you cut off your hair. Only I shouldn't think
you'd want to look so like 'Sam Hill.' But I tell you what, Elizabeth;
you're too thin-skinned. What's the use of getting mad over every
little thing?"

"It wasn't so very little, to be forgotten."

"Well, yes; I suppose you were disappointed, but--"

Elizabeth's color began to rise. "Oh, I wasn't so terribly
disappointed. You needn't flatter yourself. I simply don't like to be
insulted."

"Ah, now, Elizabeth," he coaxed, "there you go again!"

"No, I don't. I'm _not_ angry. Only--you went with Blair; you didn't
want--" she choked, and flew back into the house, deaf to his clumsy
and troubled explanations.

In Miss White's room, Elizabeth announced her intention of entering a
convent, and it was then that Cherry-pie fumbled: she took the convent
seriously! The next morning she broke the awful news to Elizabeth's
uncle. It was before breakfast, and Mr. Ferguson--who had not time to
read his Bible for pressure of business--had gone out into the
grape-arbor in his narrow garden to feed the pigeons. There was a crowd
of them about his feet, their rimpling, iridescent necks and soft gray
bosoms pushing and jostling against one another, and their pink feet
actually touching his boots. When Miss White burst out at him, the
pigeons rose in startled flight, and Mr. Ferguson frowned.

"And she says," Miss White ended, almost in tears--"she says she is
going to enter a convent immejetly!"

"My dear Miss White," said Elizabeth's uncle, grimly, "there's no such
luck."

Miss White positively reeled. Then he explained, and Cherry-pie came
nearer to her employer in those ten minutes than in the ten years in
which she had looked after his niece. "I don't care about Elizabeth's
temper; she'll get over that. And I don't care a continental about her
hair or her religion; she can wear a wig or be a Mohammedan if it keeps
her straight. She has a bad inheritance, Miss White; I would be only
too pleased to know that she was shut up in a convent, safe and sound.
But this whim isn't worth talking about."

Miss White retired, nibbling with horror, and that night Robert
Ferguson went in to tell his neighbor his worries.

"What _am_ I to do with her?" he groaned. "She cut off her hair?" Mrs.
Richie repeated, astounded; "but why? How perfectly irrational!"

"Don't say 'how irrational'; say 'how Elizabeth.'"

"I wish she would try to control her temper," Mrs. Richie said,
anxiously.

But Mr. Ferguson was not troubled about that. "She's vain; that's what
worries me. She cried all afternoon about her hair."

"She needs a stronger hand than kind Miss White's," Mrs. Richie said;
"why not send her to school?" And the harassed uncle sighed with relief
at the idea, which was put into immediate execution.

With growing hair and the wholesome companionship of other girls, of
course the ascetic impulse died a natural death; but the temper did not
die. It only hid itself under that sense of propriety which is
responsible for so much of our good behavior. When it did break loose,
the child suffered afterward from the consciousness of having made a
fool of herself--which is a wholesome consciousness so far as it
goes--but it did not go very far with Elizabeth; she never suffered in
any deeper way. She took her temper for granted; she was not complacent
about it; she did not credit it to "temperament," she was merely matter
of fact; she said she "couldn't help it." "I don't want to get mad,"
she used to say to Nannie; "and of course I never mean any of the
horrid things I say. I'd like to be good, like you; but I can't help
being wicked." Between those dark moments of being "wicked" she was a
joyous, unself-conscious girl of generous loves, which she expressed as
primitively as she did her angers; indeed, in the expression of
affection Elizabeth had the exquisite and sometimes embarrassing
innocence of a child who has been brought up by a sad old bachelor and
a timid old maid. As for her angers, they were followed by irrational
efforts to "make up" with any one she felt she had wronged. She spent
her little pocket-money in buying presents for her maleficiaries, she
invented punishments for herself; and generally she confessed her sin
with humiliating fullness. Once she confessed to her uncle, thereby
greatly embarrassing him:

"Uncle, I want you to know I am a great sinner; probably the chief of
sinners," she said, breathing hard. She had come into his library after
supper, and was standing with a hand on the back of his chair; her eyes
were bright with unshed tears.

"Good gracious!" said Robert Ferguson, looking at her blankly over his
glasses, "what on earth have you been doing now?"

"I got mad, and I chopped up the feather in Cherry-pie's new bonnet,
and I told her she was a hideous, monstrous old donkey-hag."

"Elizabeth!"

"I did."

"Have you apologized?"

"Yes," said Elizabeth; "but what's the good of 'pologizing? _I said
it._ 'Course I 'pologized; and I kissed her muddy rubbers when she
wasn't looking; and I gave her all my money for a new feather"--she
stopped, and sighed deeply; "and here is the money you gave me to go to
the theater. So now I haven't any money at all, in the world."

Poor Robert Ferguson, with a despairing jerk at the black ribbon of his
glasses, leaned back in his chair, helpless with perplexity. Why on
earth did she give him back his money? He could not follow her mental
processes. He said as much to Mrs. Richie the next time he went to see
her. He went to see her quite often in those days. For the convenience
of David and Elizabeth, a doorway had been cut in the brick wall
between the two gardens, and Mr. Ferguson used it frequently. In their
five or six years of living next door to each other the acquaintance of
these two neighbors had deepened into a sort of tentative intimacy,
which they never quite thought of as friendship, but which permitted
many confidences about their two children.

And when they talked about their children, they spoke, of course, of
the other two, for one could not think of David without remembering
Blair, or talk of Elizabeth without contrasting her with Nannie. Nannie
had none of that caroling vitality which made the younger girl an acute
anxiety and a perpetual delight. She was like a little plant growing in
the shade--a gently good child, who never gave anybody any trouble; she
continued to be a 'fraid-cat, and looked under the bed every night for
a burglar. With Blair at boarding-school her life was very solitary,
for of course there was no intimacy between her and her stepmother.
Mrs. Maitland was invariably kind to her, and astonishingly patient
with the rather dull little mind--one of those minds that are like
softly tangled skeins of single zephyr; if you try to unwind the mild,
elusive thoughts, they only knot tightly upon themselves, and the
result is a half-frightened and very obstinate silence. But Mrs.
Maitland never tried to unwind Nannie's thoughts; she used to look at
her sometimes in kindly amusement, as one might look at a kitten or a
canary; and sometimes she said to Robert Ferguson that Nannie was like
her own mother;--"but Blair has brains!" she would say, complacently.
School did not give the girl the usual intense friendships, and except
for Elizabeth, she had no companions; her one interest was Blair, and
her only occupation out of school hours was her drawing--which was
nothing more than endless, meaningless copying. It was Nannie's
essential child-likeness that kept her elders, and indeed David and
Blair too, from understanding that she and Elizabeth were no longer
little girls. Perhaps the boys first realized Elizabeth's age when they
simultaneously discovered that she was pretty....

Elizabeth's long braids had been always attractive to the masculine
eye; they had suggested jokes about pigtails, and much of that peculiar
humor so pleasing to the young male; but the summer that she "put up
her hair," the puppies, so to speak, got their eyes open. When the boys
saw those soft plaits, no longer hanging within easy reach of a rude
and teasing hand, but folded around her head behind her little ears;
when they saw the small curls breaking over and through the brown
braids that were flecked with gilt, and the stray locks, like feathers
of spun silk, clustering in the nape of her neck; when David and Blair
saw these things--it was about the time their voices were showing
amazing and ludicrous register--something below the artless brutalities
of the boys' sense of humor was touched. They took abruptly their first
perilous step out of boyhood. Of course they did not know it.... The
significant moment came one afternoon when they all went out to the
toll-house for ice-cream. There was a little delay at the gate, while
the boys wrangled as to who should stand treat. "I'll pull straws with
you," said Blair; Blair's pleasant, indolent mind found the appeal to
chance the easiest way to settle things, but he was always good-natured
when, as now, the verdict was against him. "Come on," he commanded,
gayly, "I'll shell out!" Mrs. Todd, who had begun to dispense pink and
brown ice-cream, for them when they were very little children, winked
and nodded as they all came in together, and made a jocose remark about
"handsome couples"; then she trundled off to get the ice-cream, leaving
them in the saloon. This "saloon" was an ell of the toll-house; it
opened on a little garden, from which a flight of rickety steps led
down to a float where half a dozen skiffs were tied up, waiting to be
hired. In warm weather, when the garden was blazing with fragrant
color, Mrs. Todd would permit favored patrons to put their small tables
out among the marigolds and zinnias and sit and eat and talk. The
saloon itself had Nottingham-lace window-curtains, and crewel texts
enjoining remembrance of the Creator, and calling upon Him to "bless
our home." The tables, with marble tops translucent from years of
spilled ice cream, had each a worsted mat, on which was a glass vase
full of blue paper roses; on the ceiling there was a wonderful star of
scalloped blue tissue-paper--ostensibly to allure flies, but hanging
there winter and summer, year in and year out. Between the windows that
looked out on the river stood a piano, draped with a festooning scarf
of bandanna handkerchiefs. These things seemed to Blair, at this stage
of his esthetic development, very satisfying, and part of his pleasure
in "treating" came from his surroundings; he used to look about him
enviously, thinking of the terrible dining-room at home; and on sunny
days he used to look, with even keener pleasure, at the reflected
ripple of light, striking up from the river below, and moving endlessly
across the fly-specked ceiling. Watching the play of moving light, he
would put his tin spoon into his tumbler of ice-cream and taste the
snowy mixture with a slow prolongation of pleasure, while the two girls
chattered like sparrows, and David listened, saying very little and
always ready to let Elizabeth finish his ice-cream after she had
devoured her own.

It was on one of these occasions that Blair, watching that long ripple
on the ceiling, suddenly saw the sunshine sparkle on Elizabeth's hair,
and his spoon paused midway to his lips. "Oh, say, isn't Elizabeth's
hair nice?" he said.

David turned and looked at it. "I've seen lots of girls with hair like
that," he said; but he sighed, and scratched his left ankle with his
right foot. Blair, smiling to himself, put out a hesitating finger and
touched a shimmering curl; upon which Elizabeth ducked and laughed, and
dancing over to the old tin pan of a piano pounded out "Shoo Fly" with
one finger. Blair, watching the lovely color in her cheek, said in
honest delight: "When your face gets red like that, you are awfully
good-looking, Elizabeth."

"Good-looking"; that was a new idea to the four friends. Nannie gaped;
Elizabeth giggled; David "got red" on his own account, and muttered
under his breath, "Tell that to the marines!" But into Blair's face had
come, suddenly, a new expression; his eyes smiled vaguely; he came
sidling over to Elizabeth and stood beside her, sighing deeply:
"Elizabeth, you are an awful nice girl."

Elizabeth shrieked with laughter. "Listen to Blair--he's spoony!"

Instantly Blair was angry; "spooniness" vanished in a flash; he did not
speak for fully five minutes. Just as they started home, however, he
came out of his glumness to remember Miss White. "I'm going to take
Cherry-pie some ice-cream," he said; and all the way back he was so
absorbed in trying--unsuccessfully--to keep the pallid pink contents of
the mussy paper box from dripping on his clothes that he was able to
forget Elizabeth's rudeness. But childhood, for all four of them, ended
that afternoon.

When vacation was over, and they were back in the harness again, both
boys forgot that first tremulous clutch at the garments of life; in
fact, like all wholesome boys of fifteen or sixteen, they thought
"girls" a bore. It was not until the next long vacation that the old,
happy, squabbling relationship began to be tinged with a new
consciousness. It was the elemental instinct, the everlasting human
impulse. The boys, hobbledehoys, both of them, grew shy and turned red
at unexpected moments. The girls developed a certain condescension of
manner, which was very confusing and irritating to the boys. Elizabeth,
as unaware of herself as the bud that has not opened to the bee, sighed
a good deal, and repeated poetry to any one who would listen to her.
She said boys were awfully rough, and their boots had a disagreeable
smell, "I shall never get married," said Elizabeth; "I hate boys."
Nannie did not hate anybody, but she thought she would rather be a
missionary than marry;--"though I'm afraid I'd be afraid of the
savages," she confessed, timorously.

David and Blair were confidential to each other about girls in general,
and Elizabeth in particular; they said she was terribly stand-offish.
"Oh, well, she's a girl," said David; "what can you expect?"

"She's darned good-looking," Blair blurted out. And David said, with
some annoyance, "What's that amount to?" He said that, for his part, he
didn't mean to fool around after girls. "But I'm older than you, Blair;
you'll feel that way when you get to be my age; it's only when a man is
very young that he bothers with 'em."

"That's so," said Blair, gloomily. "Well, I never expect to marry."
Blair was very gloomy just then; he had come home from school the
embodiment of discontent. He was old enough now to suffer agonies of
mortification because of his mother's occupation. "The idea of a lady
running an Iron Works!" he said to David, who tried rather
half-heartedly to comfort him; David was complacently sure that _his_
mother wouldn't run an Iron Works! "I hate the whole caboodle," Blair
said, angrily. It was his old shrinking from "ugliness." And everything
at home was ugly;--the great old house in the midst of Maitland's
Shantytown; the darkness and grime of it; the smell of soot in the
halls; Harris's slatternly ways; his mother's big, beautiful, dirty
fingers. "When she sneezes," Blair said, grinding his teeth, "I
could--swear! She takes the roof off." He grew hot with shame when Mrs.
Richie, whom he admired profoundly, came to take supper with his mother
at the office table with its odds and ends of china. (As the old Canton
dinner service had broken and fire-cracked, Harris had replenished the
shelves of the china-closet according to his own taste limited by Mrs.
Maitland's economic orders.) Blair found everything hideous, or vulgar,
or uncomfortable, and he said so to Nannie with a violence that
betrayed real suffering. For it is suffering when the young creature
finds itself ashamed of father or mother. Instinctively the child is
proud of the parent, and if youth is wounded in its tenderest point,
its sense of conventionality--for nothing is as conventional as
adolescence--that natural instinct is headed off, and of course there
is suffering. Mrs. Maitland, living in her mixture of squalor and
dignity, had no time to consider such abstractions. As for there being
anything unwomanly in her occupation, such an idea never entered her
head. To Sarah Maitland, no work which it was a woman's duty to do
could be unwomanly; she was incapable of consciously aping masculinity,
but to earn her living and heap up a fortune for her son, was, to her
way of thinking, just the plain common sense of duty. But more than
that, the heart in her bosom would have proved her sex to her; how she
loved to knit the pink socks for dimpled little feet! how she winced
when her son seemed to shrink from her; how jealous she was still of
that goose Molly,--who had been another man's wife for as many years as
Herbert Maitland had been in his grave. But Blair saw none of these
things that might have told him that his mother was a very woman.
Instead, his conventionality was insulted at every turn; his love of
beauty was outraged. As a result a wall was slowly built between the
mother and son, a wall whose foundations had been laid when the little
boy had pointed his finger at her and said "uggy."

Mrs. Maitland was, of course, perfectly unconscious of her son's hot
misery; she was so happy at having him at home again that she could not
see that he was unhappy at being at home. She was pathetically eager to
please him. Her theory--if in her absorbed life she could be said to
have a theory--was that Blair should have everything he wanted, so that
he should the sooner be a man. Money, she thought, would give him
everything. She herself wanted nothing money could give, except food
and shelter; the only use she had for money was to make more money; but
she realized that other people, especially young men, like the things
it would buy. Twice during that particular vacation, for no cause
except to gratify herself, she gave her son a wickedly large check; and
once, when Nannie told her that he wanted to pay for some painting
lessons, though she demurred just for a moment, she paid the bill so
that his own spending-money should not be diminished.

"What on earth does a man who is going to run an Iron Works want with
painting lessons?" she said to the entreating sister. But even while
she made her grumbling protest, she wrote a check.

As for Blair, he took the money, as he took everything else that she
gave him of opportunity and happiness, and said, "Thank you, mother;
you are awfully good"; but he shut his eyes when he kissed her. He was
blind to the love, the yearning, the outstretched hands of
motherhood,--not because he was cruel, or hard, or mean; but because he
was young, and delighted in beauty.

Of course his wretchedness lessened after a fortnight or so--habit does
much to reconcile us to unpleasantness; besides that, his painting was
an interest, and his voice began to be a delight to him; he used to
sing a good deal, making Nannie play his accompaniments, and sometimes
his mother, working in the dining-room, would pause a moment, with
lifted head, and listen and half smile--then fall to work again
furiously.

But the real solace to his misery and irritation came to him--a boy
still in years--in the sudden realization of _Elizabeth!_




CHAPTER IV

"I am going to have a party," Blair told Nannie; "I've invited David
and Elizabeth, and four fellows; and you can ask four girls."

Nannie quaked. "Do you mean to have them come to supper?"

"You can call it 'supper'; I call it dinner."

"I'm afraid Mamma won't like it; it will disturb the table."

"I'm not going to have it in that hole of a dining-room; I'm going to
have it in the parlor. Harris says he can manage perfectly well. We'll
hang a curtain across the arch and have the table in the back parlor."

"But Harris can't wait on us in there, and on Mamma in the
dining-room," Nannie objected.

"We shall have our dinner at seven, after Harris has given mother her
supper on that beautiful table of hers."

"But--" said Nannie.

"You tell her about it," Blair coaxed; "she'll take anything from you."

Nannie yielded. Instructed by Blair, she hinted his purpose to Mrs.
Maitland, who to her surprise consented amiably enough.

"I've no objections. And the back parlor is a very sensible
arrangement. It would be a nuisance to have you in here; I don't like
to have things moved. Now clear out! Clear out! I must go to work." A
week later she issued her orders: "Mr. Ferguson, I'll be obliged if
you'll come to supper to-morrow night. Blair has some kind of a bee in
his bonnet about having a party. Of course it's nonsense, but I suppose
that's to be expected at his age."

Robert Ferguson demurred. "The boy doesn't want me; he has asked a
dozen young people."

Mrs. Maitland lifted one eyebrow. "I didn't hear about the dozen young
people; I thought it was only two or three besides David and Elizabeth;
however, I don't mind. I'll go the whole hog. He can have a dozen, if
he wants to. As for his not wanting you, what has that got to do with
it? I want you. It's my house, and my table; and I'll ask who I please.
I've asked Mrs. Richie," she ended, and gave him a quick look.

"Well," her superintendent said, indifferently, "I'll come; but it's
hard on Blair." When he went home that night, he summoned Miss White.
"I hope you have arranged to have Elizabeth look properly for Blair's
party? Don't let her be vain about it, but have her look right." And on
the night of the great occasion, just before they started for Mrs.
Maitland's, he called his niece into his library, and knocking off his
glasses, looked her over with grudging eyes: "Don't get your head
turned, Elizabeth. Remember, it isn't fine feathers that make fine
birds," he said; and never knew that he was proud of her!

Elizabeth, bubbling with laughter, holding her skirt out in small,
white-gloved hands, made three dancing steps, dipped him a great
courtesy, then ran to him, and before he knew it, caught him round the
neck and kissed him. "You dear, darling, _precious_ uncle!" she said.

Mr. Ferguson, breathless, put his hand up to his cheek, as if the
unwonted touch had left some soft, fresh warmth behind it.

Elizabeth did not wait to see the pleased and startled gesture she
gathered up her fluffy tarlatan skirt, dashed out into the garden,
through the green gate in the wall, and bursting into the house next
door, stood in the hall and called up-stairs: "David! Come! Hurry!
Quick!" She was stamping her foot with excitement.

David, who had had a perspiring and angry quarter of an hour with his
first white tie, came out of his room and looked over the banisters,
both hands at his throat. "Hello! What on earth is the matter?"

"David--see!" she said, and stood, quivering and radiant, all her
whiteness billowing about her.

"See what?" David said, patiently.

"A long dress!"

"A _what_?" said David; then looking down at her, turning and twisting
and preening herself in the dark hall like some shining white bird, he
burst into a shout of laughter.

Elizabeth's face reddened. "I don't see anything to laugh at."

"You look like a little girl dressed up!"

"Little girl? I don't see much 'little girl' about it; I'm nearly
sixteen." She gathered her skirt over her arm again, and retreated with
angry dignity.

As for David, he went back to try a new tie; but his eyes were dreamy.
"George! she's a daisy," he said to himself.

When, the day before, Mrs. Richie had told her son that she had been
invited to Blair's party, he was delighted. David had learned several
things at school besides his prayers, some of which caused Mrs. Richie,
like most mothers of boys, to give much time to her prayers. But as a
result, perhaps of prayers as well as of education, and in spite of Mr.
Ferguson's misgivings as to the wisdom of trusting a boy to a "good
woman," he was turning out an honest young cub, of few words, defective
sense of humor, and rather clumsy manners. But under his speechlessness
and awkwardness, David was sufficiently sophisticated to be immensely
proud of his pretty mother; only a laborious sense of propriety and the
shyness of his sex and years kept him from, as he expressed it,
"blowing about her." He blew now, however, a little, when she said she
was going to the party: "Blair'll be awfully set up to have you come.
You know he's terribly mashed on you. He thinks you are about the best
thing going. Materna, now you dress up awfully, won't you? I want you
to take the shine out of everybody else. I'm going to wear my dress
suit," he encouraged her. "Why, say!" he interrupted himself, "that's
funny--Blair didn't tell me he had asked you."

"Mrs. Maitland asked me."

"Mrs. Maitland!" David said, aghast; "Materna, you don't suppose
_she's_ coming, do you?"

"I'm sure I hope so, considering she invited me."

"Great Casar's ghost!" said David, thoughtfully; and added, under his
breath, "I'm betting on his not expecting her. Poor Blair!"

Blair had need of sympathy. His plan for a "dinner" had encountered
difficulties, and he had had moments of racking indecision; but when,
on the toss of a penny, 'heads' declared for carrying the thing
through, he held to his purpose with a perseverance that was amusingly
like his mother's large and unshakable obstinacies. He had endless
talks with Harris as to food; and with painstaking regard for artistic
effect and as far as he understood it, for convention, he worked out
every detail of service and arrangement. His first effort was to make
the room beautiful; so the crimson curtains were drawn across the
windows, and the cut-glass chandeliers in both rooms emerged glittering
from their brown paper-muslin bags. The table was rather overloaded
with large pieces of silver which Blair had found in the big
silver-chest in the garret; among them was a huge center ornament,
called in those days an epergne--an extraordinary arrangement of
prickly silver leaves and red glass cups which were supposed to be
flowers. It was black with disuse, and Blair made Harris work over it
until the poor fellow protested that he had rubbed the skin off his
thumb--but the pointed leaves of the great silver thistle sparkled like
diamonds. Blair was charmingly considerate of old Harris so long as it
required no sacrifice on his own part, but he did not relinquish a
single piece of silver because of that thumb. With his large allowance,
it was easy to put flowers everywhere--the most expensive that the
season afforded. When he ordered them, he bought at the same time a
great bunch of orchids for Miss White. "I can't invite her," he
decided, reluctantly; "but her feelings won't be hurt if I send her
some flowers." As for the menu, he charged the things he wanted to his
mother's meager account at the grocery-store. When he produced his list
of delicacies, things unknown on that office-dining-room table, the
amazed grocer said to himself, "Well, _at last_ I guess that trade is
going to amount to something! Why, damn it," he confided to his
bookkeeper afterward, "I been sendin' things up to that there house for
seventeen years, and the whole bill ain't amounted to shucks. That
woman could buy and sell me twenty times over. Twenty times? A hundred
times! And I give you my word she eats like a day-laborer. Listen to
this"--and he rattled off Blair's order. "She'll fall down dead when
she sees them things; she don't even know how to spell 'em!"

Blair had never seen a table properly appointed for a dinner-party; but
Harris had recollections of more elaborate and elegant days, a
recollection, indeed, of one occasion when he had waited at a
policemen's ball; and he laid down the law so dogmatically that Blair
assented to every suggestion. The result was a humorous compound of
Harris's standards and Blair's aspirations; but the boy, coming in to
look at the table before the arrival of his guests, was perfectly
satisfied.

"It's fine, Harris, isn't it?" he said. "Now, light up all the burners
on both chandeliers. Harris, give a rub to that thistle leaf, will you?
It's sort of dull." Harris looked at his swollen thumb. "Aw', now, Mr.
Blair," he began. "Did you hear what I said?" Blair said, icily--and
the leaf was polished! Blair looked at it critically, then laughed and
tossed the old man a dollar. "There's some sticking-plaster for you.
And Harris, look here: those things--the finger-bowls; don't go and get
mixed up on 'em, will you? They come last." Harris put his thumb in his
mouth; "I never seen dishes like that," he mumbled doubtfully; "the
police didn't have 'em."

"It's the fashion," Blair explained; "Mrs. Richie has them, and I've
seen them at swell hotels. Most people don't eat in an office," he
ended, with a curl of his handsome lip.

It was while he was fussing about, whistling or singing, altering the
angle of a spoon here or the position of a wine-glass there, that his
mother came in. She had put on her Sunday black silk, and she had even
added a lace collar and a shell cameo pin; she was knitting busily, the
ball of pink worsted tucked under one arm. There was a sort of grim
amusement, tempered by patience, in her face. To have supper at seven
o'clock, and call it "dinner"; to load the table with more food than
anybody could eat, and much of it stuff that didn't give the stomach
any honest work to do--"like that truck," she said, pointing an amused
knitting-needle at the olives--was nonsense. But Blair was young; he
would get over his foolishness when he got into business. Meantime, let
him be foolish! "I suppose he thinks he's the grand high cockalorum!"
she told herself, chuckling. Aloud she said, with rough jocosity:

"What in the world is the good of all those flowers? A supper table is
a place for food, not fiddle-faddle!"

Blair reddened sharply. "There are people," he began, in that voice of
restrained irritation which is veiled by sarcastic politeness--"there
are people, my dear mother, who think of something else than filling
their stomachs." Mrs. Maitland's eye had left the dinner table, and was
raking her son from head to foot. He was very handsome, this
sixteen-year-old boy, standing tall and graceful in his new clothes,
which, indeed, he wore easily, in spite of his excitement at their
newness.

"Well!" she said, sweeping him with a glance. Her face glowed; "I wish
his father could have lived to see him," she thought; she put out her
hand and touched his shoulder. "Turn round here till I look at you!
Well, well! I suppose you're enjoying those togs you've got on?" Her
voice was suddenly raucous with pride; if she had known how, she would
have kissed him. Instead she said, with loud cheerfulness: "Well, my
son, which is the head of the table? Where am I to sit?"

"_Mother!_" Blair said. He turned quite white. He went over to the
improvised serving-table, and picked up a fork with a trembling hand;
put it down again, and turned to look at her. Yes; she was all dressed
up! He groaned under his breath. The tears actually stood in his eyes.
"I thought," he said, and stopped to clear his voice, "I didn't know--"

"What's the matter with you?" Mrs. Maitland asked, looking at him over
her spectacles.

"I didn't suppose you would be willing to come," Blair said, miserably.

"Oh, I don't mind," she said, kindly; "I'll stick it out for an hour."

Blair ground his teeth. Harris, pulling on a very large pair of white
cotton gloves--thus did he live up to the standards of the policemen's
ball--came shuffling across the hall, and his aghast expression when he
caught sight of Mrs. Maitland was a faint consolation to the despairing
boy.

"Here! Harris! have you got places enough?" Mrs. Maitland said. "Blair,
have you counted noses? Mrs. Richie's coming, and Mr. Ferguson."

"Mrs. Richie!" In spite of his despair, Blair had an elated moment. He
was devoted to David's mother, and there was some consolation in the
fact that she would see that he knew how to do things decently! Then
his anger burst out. "I didn't ask Mrs. Richie," he said, his voice
trembling.

"What time is supper?" his mother interrupted, "I'm getting hungry!"
She took her place at the head of the table, sitting a little sidewise,
with one foot round the leg of her chair; she looked about impatiently,
striking the table softly with her open hand--a hand always beautiful,
and to-night clean. "What nonsense to have it so late!"

"It isn't supper," Blair said; "it's dinner; and--" But at that moment
the door-bell saved the situation. Harris, stumbling with agitation,
had retreated to his pantry, so Mrs. Maitland motioned to Blair. "Run
and open the door for your friends," she said, kindly.

Blair did not "run," but he went; and if he could have killed those
first-comers with a glance, he would have done so. As for Mrs.
Maitland, still glowing with this new experience of taking part in her
son's pleasure, she tramped into the front room to say how do you do
and shake hands with two very shy young men, who were plainly awed by
her presence. As the others came in, it was she who received them,
standing on the hearth-rug, her back to the empty fireplace which Blair
had filled with roses, all ready to welcome the timid youngsters, who
in reply to her loud greetings stammered the commonplaces of the
occasion.

"How are you, Elizabeth? What! a long dress? Well, well, you _are_
getting to be a big girl! How are you, David? And so you have a
swallowtail, too? Glad to see you, Mrs. Richie. Who's this? Harry
Knight? Well, Harry, you are quite a big boy. I knew your stepmother
when she was Molly Wharton, and not half your age."

Harry, who had a sense of humor, was able to laugh, but David was red
with wrath, and Elizabeth tossed her head. As for Blair, he grew paler
and paler.

Yet the dreadful dinner went off fairly smoothly. Mrs. Maitland sat
down before anybody else. "Come, good people, come!" she said, and
began her rapid "Bless, O Lord," while the rest of the company were
still drawing up their chairs. "Amen, soup, Mrs. Richie?" she said,
heartily. The ladling out of the soup was an outlet for her energy; and
as Harris's ideals put all the dishes on the table at once, she was
kept busy carving or helping, or, with the hospitable insistence of her
generation, urging her guests to eat. Blair sat at the other end of the
table in black silence. Once he looked at Mrs. Richie with an agonized
gratitude in his beautiful eyes, like the gratitude of a hurt puppy
lapping a friendly and helping hand; for Mrs. Richie, with the gentlest
tact, tried to help him by ignoring him and talking to the young people
about her. Elizabeth, too, endeavored to do her part by assuming (with
furtive glances at David) a languid, young-lady-like manner, which
would have made Blair chuckle at any less terrible moment. Even Mr.
Ferguson, although still a little dazed by that encounter with his
niece, came to the rescue--for the situation was, of course,
patent--and talked to Mrs. Maitland; which, poor Blair thought, "at
least shut her up"!

Mrs. Maitland was, of course perfectly unconscious that any one could
wish to shut her up; she did not feel anything unusual in the
atmosphere, and she was astonishingly patient with all the stuff and
nonsense. Once she did strike the call-bell, which she had bidden
Harris to bring from the office table, and say, loudly: "Make haste,
Harris! Make haste! What is all this delay?" The delay was Harris's
agitated endeavor to refresh his memory about "them basins."

"Is it _now_?" he whispered to Blair, furtively rubbing his thumb on
the shiny seam of his trousers. Blair, looking a little sick, whispered
back:

"Oh, throw 'em out of the window."

"Aw', now, Mr. Blair," poor Harris protested, "I clean forgot; is it
with these here tomatoes, or with the dessert?"

"Go to the devil!" Blair said, under his breath. And the finger-bowls
appeared with the salad.

"What's this nonsense?" Mrs. Maitland demanded; then, realizing Blair's
effort, she picked up a finger-bowl and looked at it, cocking an amused
eyebrow. "Well, Blair," she said, with loud good nature, "we are
putting on airs!"

Blair pretended not to hear. For the whole of that appalling experience
he had nothing to say--even to Elizabeth, sitting beside him in the new
white dress, the spun silk of her brown hair shimmering in the amazing
glitter of the great cut-glass chandelier. The other young people,
glancing with alarmed eyes now at Blair, and now at his mother,
followed their host's example of silence. Mrs. Maitland, however, did
her duty as she saw it; she asked condescending questions as to "how
you children amuse yourselves," and she made her crude jokes at
everybody's expense, with side remarks to Robert Ferguson about their
families: "That Knight boy is Molly Wharton's stepson; he looks like
his father. Old Knight is an elder in The First Church; he hands round
the hat for other people to put their money in--never gives anything
himself. I always call his wife 'goose Molly.' ... Is that young
Clayton, Tom Clayton's son? He looks as if he had some gumption; Tom
was always Mr. Doestick's friend. ... I suppose you know that that West
boy's grandmother wasn't sure who his grandfather was? ... Mrs.
Richie's a pretty woman, Friend Ferguson; where are your eyes!" ...

When it was over, that terrible thirty minutes--for Mrs. Maitland drove
Harris at full speed through all Blair's elaborations--it was Mrs.
Richie who came to the rescue.

"Mrs. Maitland," she said, "sha'n't you and I and Mr. Ferguson go and
talk in your room, and leave the young people to amuse themselves?" And
Mrs. Maitland's quick agreement showed how relieved she was to get
through with all the "nonsense."

When their elders had left them, the "young people" drew a long breath
and looked at one another. Nannie, almost in tears, tried to make some
whispered explanation to Blair, but he turned his back on her. David,
with a carefully blase air, said, "Bully dinner, old man." Blair gave
him a look, and David subsided. When the guests began a chatter of
relief, Blair still stood apart in burning silence. He wished he need
never see or speak to any of them again. He hated them all; he
hated--But he did not finish this, even in his thoughts.

When the others had recovered their spirits, and Nannie had begun to
play on the piano, and somebody had suggested that they should all
sing--"And then let's dance!" cried Elizabeth--Blair disappeared. Out
in the hall, standing with clenched hands in the dim light, he said to
himself he wished they would all clear out! "I am sick of the whole
darned business; I wish they'd clear out!"

It was there that Elizabeth found him. She had forgotten her
displeasure at David, and was wildly happy; but she had missed Blair,
and had come, in a dancing whirl of excitement, to find him. "What are
you doing? Come right back to the parlor!"

Blair, turning, saw the smooth cheek, pink as the curve of a shell, the
soft hair's bronze sheen, the amber darkness of the happy eyes. "Oh,
Elizabeth!" he said, and actually sobbed.

"Blair! What _is_ the matter?"

"It was disgusting, the whole thing."

"What was disgusting?"

"That awful dinner--"

"Awful? You are perfectly crazy! It was lovely! What are you talking
about?" In her dismayed defense of her first social function, she put
her hands on his arm and shook it. "Why! It is the first dinner I ever
went to in all my life; and look: six-button gloves! What do you think
of that? Uncle told Cherry-pie I could have whatever was proper, and I
got these lovely gloves. They are awfully fashionable!" She pulled one
glove up, not only to get its utmost length, but also to cover that
scar which her fierce little teeth had made so long ago. "Oh, Blair, it
really was a perfectly _beautiful_ dinner," she said, earnestly.

She was so close to him that it seemed as if the color on her cheek
burned against his, and he could smell the rose in her brown hair. "Oh,
Elizabeth," he said, panting, "you are an angel!"

"It was simply lovely!" she declared. In her excitement she did not
notice that new word. Blair trembled; he could not speak. "Come right
straight back!" Elizabeth said; "please! Everybody will have a
perfectly splendid time, if you'll just come back. We want you to sing.
Please!" The long, sweet corners of her eyes implored him.

"Elizabeth," Blair whispered, "I--I love you."

Elizabeth caught her breath; then the exquisite color streamed over her
face. "Oh!" she said faintly, and swerved away from him. Blair came a
step nearer. They were both silent. Elizabeth put her hand over her
lips, and stared at him with half-frightened eyes. Then Blair:

"Do you care, a little, Elizabeth?"

"We must go back to the parlor," she said, breathing quickly.

"Elizabeth, _do_ you?"

"Oh--Blair!"

"Please, Elizabeth," Blair said; and putting his arms round her very
gently, he kissed her cheek.

Elizabeth looked at him speechlessly; then, with a lovely movement,
came nestling against him. A minute later they drew apart; the girl's
face was quivering with light and mystery, the young man's face was
amazed. Then amazement changed to triumph, and triumph to power, and
power to something else, something that made Elizabeth shrink and utter
a little cry. In an instant he caught her violently to him and kissed
her--kissed the scar on her upraised, fending arm, then her neck, her
eyes, her mouth, holding her so that she cried out and struggled; and
as he let her go, she burst out crying. "Oh--oh--_oh_--" she said; and
darting from him, ran up-stairs, stumbling on the unaccustomed length
of her skirt and catching at the banisters to keep from falling. But at
the head of the stairs she paused; the tears had burned off in flashing
excitement. She hesitated; it seemed as if she would turn and come back
to him. But when he made a motion to bound up after her, she smiled and
fled, and he heard the door of Nannie's room bang and the key turn in
the lock.

Blair Maitland stood looking after her; in that one hot instant
boyishness had been swept out of his face.




CHAPTER V

"They have all suddenly grown up!" Mrs. Richie said, disconsolately.
She had left the "party" early, without waiting for her carriage,
because Mrs. Maitland's impatient glances at her desk had been an
unmistakable dismissal.

"I will walk home with you," Robert Ferguson said.

"Aren't you going to wait for Elizabeth?"

"David will bring her home."

"He'll be only too glad of the chance; how pretty she was to-night! You
must have been very proud of her."

"Not in the least. Beauty isn't a thing to be proud of. Quite the
contrary."

Mrs. Richie laughed: "You are hopeless, Mr. Ferguson! What is a girl
for, if not to be sweet and pretty and charming? And Elizabeth is all
three."

"I would rather have her good."

"But prettiness doesn't interfere with goodness! And Elizabeth is a
dear, good child."

"I hope she is," he said

"You _know_ she is," she declared.

"Well, she has her good points," he admitted; and put his hand up to
his lean cheek as if he still felt the flower-like touch of Elizabeth's
lips.

"But they have all grown up," Mrs. Richie said. "Mr. Ferguson, David
wants to smoke! What shall I do?"

"Good heavens! hasn't he smoked by this time?" said Robert Ferguson,
horrified. "You'll ruin that boy yet!"

"Oh, when he was a little boy, there was one awful day, when--" Mrs.
Richie shuddered at the remembrance; "but now he wants to really smoke,
you know."

"He's seventeen," Mr. Ferguson said, severely. "I should think you
might cut the apron-strings by this time."

"You seem very anxious about apron-strings for David," she retorted
with some spirit. "I notice you never show any anxiety about Blair."

At which her landlord laughed loudly: "I should say not! He's been
brought up by a man--practically." Then he added with some generosity,
"But I'm not sure that an apron-string or two might not have been a
good thing for Blair."

Mrs. Richie accepted the amend good-naturedly. "My tall David is very
nice, even if he does want to smoke. But I've lost my boy."

"He'll be a boy," Robert Ferguson said, "until he makes an ass of
himself by falling in love. Then, in one minute, he'll turn into a man.
I--" he paused, and laughed: "I was twenty, just out of college, when I
made an ass of myself over a girl who was as vain as a peacock. Well,
she was beautiful; I admit that."

"You were very young," Mrs. Richie said gravely; the emotion behind his
careless words was obvious. They walked along in silence for several
minutes. Then he said, contemptuously:

"She threw me over. Good riddance, of course."

"If she was capable of treating you badly, of course it was well to
have her do so--in time," she agreed; "but I suppose those things cut
deep with a boy," she added gently. She had a maternal instinct to put
out a comforting hand, and say "never mind." Poor man! because, when he
was twenty a girl had jilted him, he was still, at over forty,
defending a sensitive heart by an armor of surliness. "Won't you come
in?" she said, when they reached her door; she smiled at him, with her
pleasant leaf-brown eyes,--eyes which were less sad, he thought, than
when she first came to Mercer. ("Getting over her husband's death, I
suppose," he said to himself. "Well, she has looked mournful longer
than most widows!")

He followed her into the house silently, and, sitting down on her
little sofa, took a cigar out of his pocket. He began to bite off the
end absently, then remembered to say, "May I smoke?"

The room was cool and full of the fragrance of white lilies. Mr.
Ferguson had planted a whole row of lilies against the southern wall of
Mrs. Richie's garden. "Such things are attractive to tenants; I find it
improves my property," he had explained to her, when she found him
grubbing, unasked, in her back yard. He looked now, approvingly at the
jug of lilies that had replaced the grate in the fireplace; but Mrs.
Richie looked at the clock. She was tired, and sometimes her good
neighbor stayed very late.

"Poor Blair!" she said. "I'm afraid his dinner was rather a
disappointment. What charming manners he has," she added, meditatively;
"I think it is very remarkable, considering--"

Mr. Ferguson knocked off his glasses. "Mrs. Maitland's manners may not
be as--as fine-ladyish as some people's, I grant you," he said, "but I
can tell you, she has more brains in her little finger than--"

"Than I have in my whole body?" Mrs. Richie interrupted gaily; "I know
just what you were going to say."

"No, I wasn't," he defended himself; but he laughed and stopped barking.

"It is what you thought," she said; "but let me tell you, I admire Mrs.
Maitland just as much as you do."

"No, you don't, because you can't," he said crossly; but he smiled. He
could not help forgiving Mrs. Richie, even when she did not seem to
appreciate Mrs. Maitland--the one subject on which the two neighbors
fell out. But after the smile he sighed, and apparently forgot Mrs.
Maitland. He scratched a match, held it absently until it scorched his
fingers; blew it out, and tossed it into the lilies; Mrs. Richie
winced, but Mr. Ferguson did not notice her; he leaned forward, his
hands between his knees, the unlighted cigar in his fingers: "Yes; she
threw me over."

For a wild moment Mrs. Richie thought he meant Mrs. Maitland; then she
remembered. "It was very hard for you," she said vaguely.

"And Elizabeth's mother," he went on, "my brother Arthur's wife, left
him. He never got over the despair of it. He--killed himself."

Mrs. Richie's vagueness was all gone. "Mr. Ferguson!"

"She was bad--all through."

"Oh, _no_!" Helena Richie said faintly.

"She left him, for another man. Just as the girl I believed in left me.
I would have doubted my God, Mrs. Richie, before I could have doubted
that girl. And when she jilted me, I suppose I did doubt Him for a
while. At any rate, I doubted everybody else. I do still, more or less."

Mrs. Richie was silent.

"We two brothers--the same thing happened to both of us! It was worse
for him than for me; I escaped, as you might say, and I learned a
valuable lesson; I have never built on anybody. Life doesn't play the
same trick on me twice. But Arthur was different. He was of softer
stuff. You'd have liked my brother Arthur. Yes; he was too good to
her--that was the trouble. If he had beaten her once or twice, I don't
believe she would have behaved as she did. Imagine leaving a good
husband, a devoted husband--"

"What I can't imagine," Helena Richie said, in a low voice, "is leaving
a living child. _That_ seems to me impossible."

"The man married her after Arthur--died," he went on; "I guess she paid
the piper in her life with him! I hope she did. Oh, well; she's dead
now; I mustn't talk about her. But Elizabeth has her blood in her; and
she is pretty, just as she was. She looks like her, sometimes.
There--now you know. Now you understand why I worry so about her. I
used to wish she would die before she grew up. I tried to do my duty to
her, but I hoped she would die. Yet she seems to be a good little
thing. Yes, I'm pretty sure she is a good little thing. To-night,
before we went to the dinner, she--she behaved very prettily. But if I
saw her mother in her, I would--God knows what I would do! But except
for this fussing about clothes, she seems all right. You know she
wanted a locket once? But you think that is only natural to a girl? Not
a vanity that I need to be anxious about? Her mother was vain--a
shallow, selfish theatrical creature!" He looked at her with worried
eyes. "I am dreadfully anxious, sometimes," he said simply.

"There's nothing to be anxious about," she said, in a smothered voice,
"nothing at all."

"Of course I'm fond of her," he confessed, "but I am never sure of her."

"You ought to be sure of her," Mrs. Richie said; "her little
vanities--why, it is just natural for a girl to want pretty dresses!
But to think--Poor little Elizabeth!" She hid her face in her hands;
"and poor bad mother," she said, in a whisper.

"Don't pity _her_! She was not the one to pity. It was Arthur who--" He
left the sentence unfinished; his face quivered.

"Oh," she cried, "you are all wrong. She is the one to pity, I don't
care how selfish and shallow she was! As for your brother, he just
died. What was dying, compared to living? Oh, you don't understand.
Poor bad women! You might at least be sorry for them. How can you be so
hard?"

"I suppose I am hard," he said, half wonderingly, but very meekly;
"when a good woman can pity Dora--that was her name; who am I to judge
her? I'll try not to be so hard," he promised.

He had risen. Mrs. Richie tried to speak, but stopped and caught her
breath at the bang of the front door.

"It's David!" she said, in a terrified voice. Her face was very pale,
so pale that David, coming abruptly into the room, stood still in his
tracks, aghast.

"Why, Materna! What's up? Mother, something is the matter!"

"It's my fault, David," Robert Ferguson said, abashed. "I was telling
your mother a--a sad story. Mrs. Richie, I didn't realize it would pain
you. Your mother is a very kind woman, David; she's been sympathizing
with other people's troubles."

David, looking at him resentfully, came and stood beside her, with an
aggressively protecting manner. "I don't see why she need bother about
other people's troubles. Say, Materna, I--I wouldn't feel badly. Mr.
Ferguson, I--you--" he blustered; he was very much perturbed.

The fact was David was not in an amiable humor; Elizabeth had been very
queer all the way home. "High and mighty!" David said to himself;
treating him as if he were a little boy, and she a young lady! "And I'm
seventeen--the idea of her putting on such airs!" And now here was her
uncle making his mother low-spirited. "Materna, I wouldn't bother," he
comforted her.

Mrs. Richie put a soothing hand on his arm. "Never mind," she said; she
was still pale, "Yes, it was a sad story. But I thank you for telling
me, Mr. Ferguson."

He tried awkwardly to apologize for having distressed her, and then
took himself off. When he opened his own door, even before he closed it
again, he called out, "Miss White!"

"Yes, sir?" said the little governess, peering rabbit-like from the
parlor.

"Miss White, I've been thinking; I'm going to buy Elizabeth a piece of
jewelry; a locket, I think. You can tell her so. Mrs. Richie says she's
quite sure she isn't really vain in wanting such things."

"I have been at my post, sir, since Elizabeth was three years old,"
Miss White said with spirit, "and I have frequently told you that she
was not vain. I'll go and tell her what you say, immejetly!"

But when Cherry-pie went to carry the great news she found Elizabeth's
door locked.

"What? Uncle is going to give me a locket?" Elizabeth called out in
answer to her knock. "Oh, joy! Splendid!"

"Let me in, and I'll tell you what he said," Miss White called back.

"No! I can't!" cried the joyous young voice. "I'm busy!"

She was busy; she was holding a lamp above her head, and looking at
herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Her hair was down, tumbling
in a shining mass over her shoulders, her eyes were like stars, her
cheeks rose-red. She was turning her white neck from side to side,
throwing her head backward, looking at herself through half-shut eyes;
her mouth was scarlet. "Blair is in love with me!" she said to herself.
She felt his last kiss still on her mouth; she felt it until it seemed
as if her lip bled.

"David Richie needn't talk about 'little girls' any more. _I'm
engaged!_" She put the lamp down on the mantelpiece, shook her mane of
hair back over her bare shoulders, and then, her hands on her hips, her
short petticoat ruffling about her knees, she began to dance. "Somebody
is in love with me!

    "'Oh, isn't it joyful, joyful, joyful--'"

[Illustration: "BLAIR IS IN LOVE WITH ME!"]




CHAPTER VI

When the company had gone,--"I thought they never _would_ go!" Nannie
said--she rushed at her brother. "Blair!"

The boy flung up his head proudly. "She told you, did she?"

"You're engaged!" cried Nannie, ecstatically.

Blair started. "Why!" he said. "So I am! I never thought of it." And
when he got his breath, the radiant darkness of his eyes sparkled into
laughter. "Yes, _I'm engaged!_" He put his hands into his pockets and
strutted the length of the room; a minute later he stopped beside the
piano and struck a triumphant chord; then he sat down and began to play
uproariously, singing to a crashing accompaniment:

  "'... lived a miner, a forty-niner,
  With his daughter Clementine!
  Oh my darling, oh my _darling_--'"

--the riotous, beautiful voice rang on, the sound overflowing through
the long rooms, across the hall, even into the dining-room. Harris,
wiping dishes in the pantry, stopped, tea-towel in hand, and listened;
Sarah Maitland, at her desk, lifted her head, and the pen slipped from
her fingers. Blair, spinning around on the piano-stool, caught his
sister about her waist in a hug that made her squeak. Then they both
shrieked with laughter.

"But Blair!" Nannie said, getting her breath; "shall you tell Mamma
to-night?"

Blair's face dropped. "I guess I won't tell anybody yet," he faltered;
"oh, that awful dinner!"

As the mortification of an hour ago surged back upon him, he added to
the fear of telling his mother a resentment that would retaliate by
secrecy. "I won't tell her at all," he decided; "and don't you, either."

"I!" said Nannie. "Well, I should think not. Gracious!"

But though Blair did not tell his mother, he could not keep the great
news to himself; he saw David the next afternoon, and overflowed.

David took it with a gasp of silence, as if he had been suddenly hit
below the belt; then in a low voice he said, "You--_kissed_ her. Did
she kiss you?"

Blair nodded. He held his head high, balancing it a little from side to
side; his lips were thrust out, his eyes shone. He was standing with
his feet well apart, his hands deep in his pockets; he laughed,
reddening to his forehead, but he was not embarrassed. For once David's
old look of silent, friendly admiration did not answer him; instead
there was half-bewildered dismay. David wanted to protest that it
wasn't--well, it wasn't _fair_. He did not say it; and in not saying it
he ceased to be a boy.

"I suppose it was when you and she went off after dinner? You needn't
have been so darned quiet about it! What's the good of being so--mum
about everything? Why didn't you come back and tell? You're not ashamed
of it, are you?"

"A man doesn't tell a thing like that," Blair said scornfully.

"Well!" David snorted, "I suppose some time you'll be married?"

Blair nodded again. "Right off."

"Huh!" said David; "your mother won't let you. You are only sixteen.
Don't be an ass."

"I'll be seventeen next May."

"Seventeen! What's seventeen? I'm pretty near eighteen, and I haven't
thought of being married;--at least to anybody in particular."

"You couldn't," Blair said coldly; "you haven't got the cash."

David chewed this bitter fact in silence; then he said, "I thought you
and Elizabeth were kind of off at dinner. You didn't talk to each other
at all. I thought you were both huffy; and instead of that--" David
paused.

"That damned dinner!" Blair said, dropping his love-affair for his
grievance. Blair's toga virilis, assumed in that hot moment in the
hall, was profanity of sorts. "David, I'm going to clear out. I can't
stand this sort of thing. I'll go and live at a hotel till I go to
college; I'll--"

"Thought you were going to get married?" David interrupted him
viciously.

Blair looked at him, and suddenly understood,--David was jealous!
"Gorry!" he said blankly. He was honestly dismayed. "Look here," he
began, "I didn't know that _you_--"

"I don't know what you're talking about," David broke in
contemptuously; "if you think _I_ care, one way or the other, you're
mistaken. It's nothing to me. 'By"; and he turned on his heel.

It was a hot July afternoon; the sun-baked street along which they had
been walking was deep with black dust and full of the clamor of
traffic. Four big gray Flemish horses, straining against their
breastplates, were hauling a dray loaded with clattering iron rods; the
sound, familiar enough to any Mercer boy, seemed to David at that
moment intolerable. "I'll get out of this cursed noise," he said to
himself, and turned down a narrow street toward the river. It occurred
to him that he would go over the covered bridge, and maybe stop and get
a tumbler of ice-cream at Mrs. Todd's. Then he would strike out into
the country and take a walk; he had nothing else to do. This vacation
business wasn't all it was cracked up to be; a man had better fun at
school; he was sick of Mercer, anyhow.

He had reached Mrs. Todd's saloon by that time, and through the white
palings of the fence he had glimpses of happy couples sitting at
marble-topped tables among the marigolds and coreopsis, taking slow,
delicious spoonfuls of ice-cream, and gazing at each other with
languishing eyes. David felt a qualm of disgust; for the first time in
his life he had no desire for ice-cream. A boy like Blair might find it
pleasant to eat ice-cream with a lot of fellows and girls out in the
garden of a toll-house, with people looking in through the palings; but
he had outgrown such things. The idea of Blair, at his age, talking
about being in love! Blair didn't know what _love_ meant. And as for
Elizabeth, how could she fall in love with Blair? He was two months
younger than she, to begin with. "No woman ought to marry a man younger
than she is," David said; he himself, he reflected, was much older than
Elizabeth. That was how it ought to be. The girl should always be
younger than the fellow. And anyway, Blair wasn't the kind of man for a
girl like Elizabeth to marry. "He wouldn't understand her. Elizabeth
goes off at half-cock sometimes, and Blair wouldn't know how to handle
her. I understand her, perfectly. Besides that, he's too selfish. A
woman ought not to marry a selfish man," said David. However, it made
no difference to him whom she married. If Elizabeth liked that sort of
thing, if she found Blair--who was only a baby anyhow--the kind of man
she could love, why then he was disappointed in Elizabeth. That was
all. He was not jealous, or anything like that; he was just
disappointed; he was sorry that Elizabeth was that kind of girl. "Very,
very sorry," David said to himself; and his eyes stung.... (Ah, well;
one may smile; but the pangs are real enough to the calf! The trouble
with us is we have forgotten our own pangs, so we doubt his.) ... Yes,
David was sorry; but the whole darned business was nothing to him,
because, unlike Blair, he was not a boy, and he could not waste time
over women; he had his future to think of. In fact, he felt that to
make the most of himself he must never marry.

Then suddenly these bitter forecastings ceased. He had come upon some
boys who were throwing stones at the dust-grimed windows of an unused
foundry shed. Along the roof of the big, gaunt building, dilapidated
and deserted, was a vast line of lights that had long been a target for
every boy who could pick up a pebble. Glass lay in splinters on the
slope of sheet-iron below the sashes, and one could look in through
yawning holes at silent, shadowy spaces that had once roared with light
from swinging ladles and flowing cupolas; but there were a few whole
panes left yet. At the sound of crashing glass, David, being a human
boy, stopped and looked on, at first with his hands in his pockets;
then he picked up a stone himself. A minute later he was yelling and
smashing with the rest of them; but when he had broken a couple of
lights, curiously enough, desire failed; he felt a sudden distaste for
breaking windows,--and for everything else! It was a sort of spiritual
nausea, and life was black and bitter on his tongue. He was conscious
of an actual sinking below his breast-bone. "I'm probably coming down
with brain fever," he told himself; and he had a happy moment of
thinking how wretched everybody would be when he died. Elizabeth would
be _very_ wretched! David felt a wave of comfort, and on the impulse of
expected death, he turned toward home again.... However, if he should
by any chance recover, marriage was not for him. It occurred to him
that this would be a bitter surprise to Elizabeth, whose engagement
would of course be broken as soon as she heard of his illness; and
again he felt happier. No, he would never marry. He would give his life
to his profession--it had long ago been decided that David was to be a
doctor. But it would be a lonely life. He looked ahead and saw himself
a great physician--no common doctor, like that old Doctor King who came
sometimes to see his mother; but a great man, dying nobly in some awful
epidemic. When Elizabeth heard of his magnificent courage, she'd feel
pretty badly. Rather different from Blair. How much finer than to be
merely looking forward to a lot of money that somebody else had made!
But perhaps that was why Elizabeth liked Blair; because he was going to
have money? And yet, how could she compare Blair with,--well, _any_
fellow who meant to work his own way? Here David touched bottom
abruptly. "How can a fellow take money he hasn't earned?" he said to
himself. David's feeling about independence was unusual in a boy of his
years, and it was not altogether admirable; it was, in fact, one of
those qualities that is a virtue, unless it becomes a vice.

When he was half-way across the bridge, he stopped to look down at the
slow, turbid river rolling below him. He stood there a long time,
leaning on the hand-rail. On the dun surface a sheen of oil gathered,
and spread, and gathered again. He could hear the wash of the current,
and in the railing under his hand he felt the old wooden structure
thrill and quiver in the constant surge of water against the pier below
him. The sun, a blood-red disk, was slipping into the deepening haze,
and on either side of the river the city was darkening into dusk. All
along the shore lights were pricking out of the twilight and sending
wavering shafts down into the water. The coiling smoke from furnace
chimneys lay level and almost motionless in the still air; sometimes it
was shot with sparks, or showed, on its bellying black curves, red
gleams from hidden fires below.

David, staring at the river with absent, angry eyes, stopped his
miserable thoughts to watch a steamboat coming down the current. Its
smoke-stacks were folded back for passing under the bridge, and its
great paddlewheel scarcely moved except to get steerageway. It was
pushing a dozen rafts, all lashed together into a spreading sheet. The
smell of the fresh planks pierced the acrid odor of soot that was
settling down with the night mists. On one of the rafts was a shanty of
newly sawed pine boards; it had no windows, but it was evidently a
home, for a stove-pipe came through its roof, and there was a woman
sitting in its little doorway, nursing her baby. David, looking down,
saw the downy head, and a little crumpled fist lying on the white, bare
breast. The woman, looking up as they floated below him, caught his
eye, and drew her blue cotton dress across her bosom. David suddenly
put his hand over his lips to hide their quiver. The abrupt tears were
on his cheeks. "Oh--_Elizabeth_!" he said. The revolt, the anger, the
jealousy, were all gone. He sobbed under his breath. He had forgotten
that he had said it made no difference to him,--"not the slightest
difference." It did make a difference! All the difference in the
world.... "Oh, Elizabeth!"... The barges had slid farther and farther
under the bridge; the woman and the child were out of sight; the
steamboat with its folded smoke-stacks slid after them, leaving a wake
of rocking, yellow foam; the water splashed loudly against the piers.
It was nearly dark there on the footpath, and quite deserted. David put
his head down on his arms on the railing and stood motionless for a
long moment.

When he reached home, he found his mother in the twilight, in the
little garden behind the house. David, standing behind her, said
carelessly, "I have some news for you, Materna."

"Yes?" she said, absorbed in pinching back her lemon verbena.

"Blair is--is spoony over Elizabeth. Here, I'll snip that thing for
you."

Mrs. Richie faced him in amazement. "What! Why, but they are both
children, and--" she stopped, and looked at him. "Oh--_David!_" she
said.

And the boy, forgetting the spying windows of the opposite houses,
dropped his head on her shoulder. "Materna--Materna," he said, in a
stifled voice.




CHAPTER VII

Nobody except David took the childish love-affair very seriously, not
even the principals--especially not Elizabeth. . . .

David did not see her for a day or two, except out of the corner of his
eye when, during the new and still secret rite of shaving--for David
was willing to shed his blood to prove that he was a man--he looked out
of his bedroom window and saw her down in the garden helping her uncle
feed his pigeons. He did not want to see her. He was younger than his
years, this honest-eyed, inexpressive fellow of seventeen, but for all
his youth he was hard hit. He grew abruptly older that first week; he
didn't sleep well; he even looked a little pale under his freckles, and
his mother worried over his appetite. When she asked him what was the
matter, he said, listlessly, "Nothing." They were very intimate friends
these two, but that moment on the bridge marked the beginning of the
period--known to all mothers of sons--of the boy's temporary retreat
into himself. . . . When a day or two later David saw Elizabeth, or
rather when she, picking a bunch of heliotrope in her garden, saw him
through the open door in the wall, and called to him to come "right
over! as fast as your legs can carry you!"--he was, she thought, "very
queer." He came in answer to the summons, but he had nothing to say.
She, however, was bubbling over with talk. She took his hand, and,
running with him into the arbor, pulled him down on the seat beside her.

"David! Where on earth have you been all this time? David, _have you
heard?_"

"I suppose you mean--about you and Blair?" he said. He did not look at
her, but he watched a pencil of sunshine, piercing the leaves overhead,
faintly gilding the bunches of green grapes that had a film of soot on
their greenness, and then creeping down to rest on the heliotrope in
her lap.

"Yes!" said Elizabeth. "Isn't it the most exciting thing you ever
heard? David, I want to show you something." She peered out through the
leaves to make sure that they were unobserved. "It's a terrific
secret!" she said, her eyes dancing. Her fingers were at her throat,
fumbling with the fastening of her dress, which caught, and had to be
pulled open with a jerk; then she drew half-way from her young bosom a
ring hanging on a black silk thread. She bent forward a little, so that
he might see it. "I keep it down in there so Cherry-pie won't know,"
she whispered. "_Look!_"

David looked--and looked away.

Elizabeth, with a blissful sigh, dropped the ring back again into the
warm whiteness of that secret place. "Isn't it perfectly lovely? It's
my engagement ring! I'm so excited!"

David was silent.

"Why, David Richie! You don't care a bit!"

"Why, yes, I do," he said. He took a grape from a bunch beside him,
rubbed the soot off on his trousers, and ate it; then blinked wryly.
"Gorry, that's sour."

"You--don't--like--my engagement!" Elizabeth declared slowly.
Reproachful tears stood in her eyes; she fastened her dress with
indignant fingers. "I think you are perfectly horrid not to be
sympathetic. It's very important to a girl to get engaged and have a
ring."

"It's very pretty," David managed to say.

"Pretty? I should say it was pretty! It cost fifty dollars! Blair said
so. David, what on earth is the matter! Don't you like me being
engaged?"

"Oh, it's all right," he evaded. He shut his eyes, which were still
watering from that sour grape, but even with closed eyes he saw again
that soft place where Blair's ring hung, warm and secret; the pain
below his own breast-bone was very bad for a minute, and the hot
fragrance of the heliotrope seemed overpowering. He swallowed hard,
then looked at one of Mr. Ferguson's pigeons, walking almost into the
arbor. The pigeon stopped, hesitated, cocked a ruby eye on the two
humans on the wooden seat, and fluttered back into the sunny garden.

"Why, you _mind_!" Elizabeth said, aghast.

"Oh, it's nothing to me," David managed to say; "course, I don't care.
Only I didn't know you liked Blair so much; so it was a--a surprise,"
he said miserably.

Elizabeth's consternation was beyond words. There was a perceptible
moment before she could find anything to say. "Why, I never dreamed
you'd mind! David, truly, I like you best of any boy I know;--only, of
course now, being engaged to Blair, I have to like him best?"

"Yes that's so," David admitted.

"Truly, I like you dreadfully, David. If I'd supposed you'd mind--But,
oh, David, it's so interesting to be engaged. I really can't stop. I'd
have to give him back my ring!" she said in an agonized voice. She
pressed her hand against her breast, and poor David's eyes followed the
ardent gesture.

"It's all right," he said with a gulp.

Elizabeth was ready to cry; she dropped her head on his shoulder and
began to bemoan herself. "Why on earth didn't you _say_ something? How
could I know? How stupid you are, David! If I'd known you minded, I'd
just as lief have been engaged to--" Elizabeth stopped short. She sat
up very straight, and put her hand to the neck of her dress to make
sure it was fastened. At that moment a new sense was born in her; for
the first time since they had known each other, her straightforward
eyes--the sexless eyes of a child--faltered, and refused to meet
David's. "I think maybe Cherry-pie wants me now," she said shyly, and
slipped away, leaving David mournfully eating green grapes in the
arbor. This was the last time that Elizabeth, uninvited, put her head
on a boy's shoulder.

A week later she confided to Miss White the great fact of her
engagement; but she was not so excited about it by that time. For one
thing, she had received her uncle's present of a locket, so the ring
was not her only piece of jewelry; and besides that, since her talk
with David, being "engaged" had seemed less interesting. However, Miss
White felt it her duty to drop a hint of what had happened to Mr.
Ferguson: had it struck him that perhaps Blair Maitland was--was
thinking about Elizabeth?

"Thinking what about her?" Mr. Ferguson said, lifting his head from his
papers with a fretted look.

"Why," said Miss White, "as I am always at my post, sir, I have
opportunities for observing; in fact, I shouldn't wonder if they
were--attached." Cherry-pie would have felt that a more definite word
was indelicate. "Of course I don't exactly _know_ it," said Miss White,
faithful to Elizabeth's confidence, "but I recall that when I was a
young lady, young gentlemen did become attached--to other young ladies."

"Love-making? At her age? I won't have it!" said Robert Ferguson. The
old, apprehensive look darkened in his face; his feeling for the child
was so strangely shadowed by his fear that "Life would play another
trick on him," and Elizabeth would disappoint him some way, that he
could not take Cherry-pie's information with any appreciation of its
humor. "Send her to me," he said.

"Mr. Ferguson," poor old Miss White ventured, "if I might suggest, it
would be well to be very kind, because--"

"Kind?" said Robert Ferguson, astonished; he gave an angry thrust at
the black ribbon of his glasses that brought them tumbling from his
nose. "Was I unkind? I will see her in the library after supper."

Miss White nibbled at him speechlessly. "If he is severe with her, I
don't know what she _won't_ do," she said to herself.

But Mr. Ferguson did not mean to be severe. When Elizabeth presented
herself in his library, the interview began calmly enough. Her uncle
was brief and to the point, but he was not unkind. She and Blair were
too young to be engaged,--"Don't think of it again," he commanded.

Elizabeth looked tearful, but she did not resent his dictum;--David's
lack of sympathy had been very dampening to romance. It was just at the
end that the gunpowder flared.

"Now, remember, I don't want you to be foolish Elizabeth."

"I don't think being in love is foolish, Uncle."

"Love! What do you know about love? You are nothing but a silly little
girl."

"I don't think I'm very little; and Blair is in love with me."

"Blair is as young and as foolish as you are. Even if you were older, I
wouldn't allow it. He is selfish and irresponsible, and--"

"I think," interrupted Elizabeth, "that you are very mean to abuse
Blair behind his back. It isn't fair." Her uncle was perfectly
dumfounded; then he went into harsh reproof. Elizabeth grew whiter and
whiter and the dimple in her cheek lengthened into a long, hairline. "I
wish I didn't live with you. I wish my mother were alive. _She_ would
be good to me!"

"Your mother?" said Robert Ferguson; his involuntary grunt of cynical
amusement touched the child like a whip. Her fury was appalling. She
screamed at him that she hated him! She loved her mother! She was going
to marry Blair the minute she was grown up! Then she whirled out of the
room, almost knocking over poor old Miss White, whose "post" had been
anxiously near the key-hole.

Up-stairs, her rage scared her governess nearly to death: "My lamb!
You'll get overheated, and take cold. When I was a young lady, it was
thought unrefined to speak so--emphatically. And your dear uncle didn't
mean to be severe; he--"

'"Dear uncle'?" said Elizabeth, "dear devil! He hurt my feelings. He
made fun of my mother!" As she spoke, she leaped at a photograph of
Robert Ferguson which stood on her bureau, and, doubling her hand,
struck the thin glass with all her force. It splintered, and the blood
spurted from her cut knuckles on to her uncle's face.

Miss White began to cry. "Oh, my dear, my dear, try to control
yourself, or you'll do something dreadful some day!" Cherry-pie's
efforts to check Elizabeth's temper were like the protesting
twitterings of a sparrow in a thunder-storm. When she reproved her now,
the furious little creature, wincing and trying to check the bleeding
with her handkerchief, did not even take the trouble to reply. Later,
of course, the inevitable moment of penitence came; but it was not
because she had lost her temper; loss of temper was always a trifling
matter to Elizabeth; it was because she had been disrespectful to her
uncle's picture. That night, when all the household was in bed, she
slipped down-stairs, candle in hand, to the library. On the mantelpiece
was a photograph of herself; she took it out of the frame, tore it into
little bits, stamped on it, grinding her heel down on her own young
face; then she took off the locket Mr. Ferguson had given her,--a most
simple affair of pearls and turquoise; kissed it with passion, and
looked about her: where should it be offered up? The ashes in the
fireplace? No; the house-maid would find it there. Then she had an
inspiration--the deep well of her uncle's battered old inkstand! Oh, to
blacken the pearls, to stain the heavenly blue of the turquoise! It was
almost too frightful. But it was right. She had hurt his feelings by
saying she wished she didn't have to live with him, and she had
insulted his dear, dear, _dear_ picture! So, with a tearful hiccup, she
dropped the locket into the ink-pot that stood between the feet of a
spattered bronze Socrates, and watched it sink into a black and
terrible grave. "I'm glad not to have it," she said, and felt that she
had squared matters with her conscience.

As for Robert Ferguson, he did not notice that the photograph had
disappeared, nor did he plunge his pen deep enough to find a pearl, nor
understand the significance of the bound-up hand, but the old worry
about her came back again. Her mother had defended her own wicked
love-affair, with all the violence of a selfish woman; and in his panic
of apprehension, poor little Elizabeth's defense of Blair seemed to be
of the same nature. He was so worried over it that he was moved to do a
very unwise thing. He would, he said to himself, put Mrs. Maitland on
her guard about this nonsense between the two children.

The next morning when he went into her office at the Works, he found
the place humming with business. As he entered he met a foreman, just
taking his departure with, so to speak, his tail between his legs. The
man was scarlet to his forehead under the lash of his employer's
tongue. It had been administered in the inner room; but the door was
open into the large office, and as Mrs. Maitland had not seen fit to
modulate her voice, the clerks and some messenger-boys and a couple of
traveling-men had had the benefit of it. Ferguson, reporting at that
open door, was bidden curtly to come in and sit down. "I'll see you
presently," she said, and burst out into the large office. Instantly
the roomful of people, lounging about waiting their turn, came to
attention. She rushed in among them like a gale, whirling away the
straws and chaff before her, and leaving only the things that were
worth while. She snapped a yellow envelope from a boy's hand, and even
while she was ripping it open with a big forefinger, she was reading
the card of an astonished traveling-man: "No, sir; no, sir; your bid
was one-half of one per cent, over Heintz. Your people been customers
so long that they thought that I--? I never mix business and
friendship!" She stood still long enough to run her eye over the
drawing of a patent, and toss it back to the would-be inventor. "No, I
don't care to take it up with you. Cast it for you? Certainly. I'll
cast anything for anybody"; and the man found his blueprint in his hand
before he could begin his explanation. "What? Johnson wants to know
where to get the new housing to replace the one that broke yesterday?
Tell Johnson that's what I pay him to decide. I have no time to do his
business for him--my own is all I can attend to! Mr. Ferguson!" she
called out, as she came banging back into the private office, "what
about that ore that came in yesterday?" She sat down at her desk and
listened intently to a somewhat intricate statement involving
manufacturing matters dependent upon the quality of certain shipments
of ore. Then, abruptly she gave her orders.

Robert Ferguson, making notes as rapidly as he could, smiled with
satisfaction at the power of it all. It was as ruthless and as
admirable as a force of nature. She would not pause, this woman, for
flesh and blood; she was as impersonal as one of her own great shears
that would bite off a "bloom" or a man's head with equal precision, and
in doing so would be fulfilling the law of its being. Assuredly she
would stop Blair's puppy-love in short order!

Business over, Sarah Maitland leaned back in her chair and laughed.
"Did you hear me blowing Dale up? I guess he'll stay put for a while
now! But I'm afraid I was angry," she confessed sheepishly; "and there
is nothing on earth so foolish as to be angry at a fool."

"There is nothing on earth so irritating as a fool," he said.

"Yes, but it's absurd to waste your temper on 'em. I always say to
myself, 'Sarah Maitland, if he had your brains, he'd have your job.'
That generally keeps me cool; but I'm afraid I shall never learn to
suffer Mr. Doestick's friends, gladly. Read your Bible, and you'll know
where that comes from! I tell you, friend Ferguson, you ought to thank
God every day that you weren't born a fool; and so ought I. Well what
can I do for you?"

"I am bothered about Elizabeth and Blair."

She looked at him blankly for a moment. "Elizabeth? Blair? What about
Elizabeth and Blair?"

"It appears," Robert Ferguson said, and shoved the door shut with his
foot, "it appears that there has been some love-making."

"Love-making?" she repeated, bewildered.

"Blair has been talking to Elizabeth," he explained. "I believe they
call themselves engaged."

Mrs. Maitland flung her head back with a loud laugh. At the shock of
such a sound in such a place, one of the clerks in the other room spun
round on his stool, and Mrs. Maitland, catching sight of him through
the glass partition, broke the laugh off in the middle. "Well, upon my
word!" she said.

"Of course it's all nonsense, but it must be stopped."

"Why?" said Mrs. Maitland. And her superintendent felt a jar of
astonishment.

"They are children."

"Blair is sixteen," his mother said thoughtfully; "if he thinks he is
in love with Elizabeth, it will help to make a man of him. Furthermore,
I'd rather have him make love than make pictures;--that is his last
fancy," she said, frowning. "I don't know how he comes by it. Of
course, my husband did paint sometimes, I admit; but he never wanted to
make a business of it. He was no fool, I can tell you, if he did make
pictures!"

Robert Ferguson said dryly that he didn't think she need worry about
Blair. "He has neither industry nor humility," he said, "and you can't
be an artist without both of 'em. But as for this love business, they
are children!"

Mrs. Maitland was not listening. "To be in love will be steadying him
while he's at college. If he sticks to Elizabeth till he graduates, I
sha'n't object."

"I shall object."

But she did not notice his protest.

"She has more temper than is quite comfortable," she ruminated; "but,
after all, to a young man being engaged is like having a dog; one dog
does as well as another; one girl does as well as another. And it isn't
as if Blair had to consider whether his wife would be a 'good manager,'
as they say; he'll have enough to waste, if he wants to. He'll have
more than he knows what to do with!" There was a little proud bridling
of her head. She, who had never wasted a cent in her life, had made it
possible for her boy to be as wasteful as he pleased. "Yes," she said,
with the quick decision which was so characteristic of her, "yes, he
can have her."

"No, he can't," said Elizabeth's uncle.

"What?" she said, in frank surprise.

"Blair will have too much money. Inherited wealth is the biggest
handicap a man can have."

"Too much money?" she chuckled; "your bearings are getting hot, ain't
they? Come, come! I'm not so sure you need thank God. How can a man
have too much money? That's nonsense!" She banged her hand down on the
call-bell on her desk. "Evans! Bring me the drawings for those
channels."

"I tell you I won't have it," Robert Ferguson repeated.

"I mean the blue-prints!" Mrs. Maitland commanded loudly; "you have no
sense, Evans!" Ferguson got up; she had a way of not hearing when she
was spoken to that made a man hot along his backbone. Robert Ferguson
was hot, but he meant to have the last word; he paused at the door and
looked back.

"I shall not allow it."

"Good-day, Mr. Ferguson," said his employer, deep in the blue-prints.




CHAPTER VIII

Elizabeth's uncle need not have concerned himself so seriously about
the affairs of Elizabeth's heart. The very next day the rift between
the lovers began:

"What on earth have you done to your hand?" asked Blair.

"I cut it. I was angry at Uncle, and broke his picture, and--"

Blair shouted with laughter. "Oh, Elizabeth, what a goose you are!
That's just the way you used to bite your arm when you were mad. You
always did cut off your nose to spite your face! Where is your locket?"

"None of your business!" said Elizabeth savagely. It was easy to be
savage with Blair, because David's lack of interest in her affairs had
taken the zest out of "being engaged" in the most surprising way. But
she had no intention of not being engaged! Romance was too flattering
to self-love to be relinquished; nevertheless, after the first week or
two she lapsed easily, in moments of forgetfulness, into the old
matter-of-fact squabbling and the healthy unreasonableness natural to
lifelong acquaintance. The only difference was that now, when she and
Blair squabbled, they made up again in new ways; Blair, with gusts of
what Elizabeth, annoyed and a little disgusted, called "silliness";
Elizabeth, with strange, half-scared, wholly joyous moments of
conscious power. But the "making-up" was far less personal than the
fallings-out; these, at least, meant individual antagonisms, whereas
the reconciliations were something larger than the girl and
boy--something which bore them on its current as a river bears straws
upon its breast. But they played with that mighty current as
thoughtlessly as all young creatures play with it. Elizabeth used to
take her engagement ring from the silk thread about her neck, and,
putting it on her finger, dance up and down her room, her right hand on
her hip, her left stretched out before her so that she could see the
sparkle of the tiny diamond on her third finger. "I'm engaged!" she
would sing to herself.

"'Oh, isn't it joyful, joyful, joyful!'

"Blair's in love with me!" The words were so glorious that she rarely
remembered to add, "I'm in love with Blair." The fact was, Blair was
merely a necessary appendage to the joy of being engaged. When he
irritated her by what she called "silliness," she was often frankly
disagreeable to him.

As for Blair, he, too, had his ups and downs. He swaggered, and threw
his shoulders back, and cast appraising eyes on women generally, and
thought deeply on marriage. But of Elizabeth he thought very little.
Because she was a girl, she bored him quite as often as he bored her.
It was because she was a woman that there came those moments when he
offended her; and in those moments she had but little personality to
him. In fact, their love-affair, so far as they understood it, apart
from its elemental impulses which they did not understand, was as much
of a play to them as the apple-tree housekeeping had been.

So Mr. Ferguson might have spared himself the unpleasant interview with
Blair's mother. He recognized this himself before long, and was even
able to relax into a difficult smile when Mrs. Richie ventured a mild
pleasantry on the subject. For Mrs. Richie had spoken to Blair, and
understood the situation so well that she could venture a pleasantry.
She had sounded him one evening in the darkness of her narrow garden.

David was not at home, and Blair was glad of the chance to wait for
him--so long as Mrs. Richie let him lounge on the grass at her feet.
His adoration of David's mother, begun in his childhood, had
strengthened with his years; perhaps because she was all that his own
mother was not.

"Blair," she said, "of course you and I both realize that Elizabeth is
only a child, and you are entirely too wise to talk seriously about
being engaged to her. She is far too young for that sort of thing. Of
course _you_ understand that?"

And Blair, feeling as though the sword of manhood had been laid on his
shoulder, and instantly forgetting the smaller pride of being
"engaged," said in a very mature voice, "Oh, certainly _I_ understand."

If, in the dusk of stars and fireflies, with the fragrance of white
stocks blossoming near the stone bench that circled the old
hawthorn-tree in the middle of the garden--if at that moment Mrs.
Richie had demanded Elizabeth's head upon a charger, Blair would have
rejoiced to offer it. But this serene and gentle woman was far too wise
to wring any promise from the boy, although, indeed, she had no
opportunity, for at that moment Mr. Ferguson knocked on the green door
between the two gardens and asked if he might come in and smoke his
cigar in his neighbor's garden. "I'll smoke the aphids off your
rose-bushes," he offered. "You are very careless about your roses!"

"A 'bad tenant'?" said Mrs. Richie, smiling. And poor Blair picked
himself up, and went sulkily off.

But Mrs. Richie's flattering assumption that Blair and she looked at
things in the same way, and David's apparent indifference to
Elizabeth's emotions, made the childish love-affair wholesomely
commonplace on both sides. By mid-September it was obvious that the
prospect of college was attractive to Blair, and that the moment of
parting would not be tragic to Elizabeth. The romance did not come to a
recognized end, however, until a day or two before Blair started East.
The four friends, and Miss White, had gone out to Mrs. Todd's, where
David had stood treat, and after their tumblers of pink and brown and
white ice-cream had been emptied, and Mrs. Todd had made her usual joke
about "good-looking couples," they had taken two skiffs for a slow
drift down the river to Willis's.

When they were rowing home again, the skiffs at first kept abreast, but
gradually, in spite of Miss White's desire to be "at her post," and
David's entire willingness to hold back, Blair and Elizabeth
appropriately fell behind, with only a little shaggy dog, which
Elizabeth had lately acquired, to play propriety. In the yellow
September afternoon the river ran placidly between the hills and
low-lying meadows; here and there, high on a wooded hillside, a maple
flamed among the greenness of the walnuts and locusts, or the chestnuts
showed the bronze beginnings of autumn. Ahead of them the sunshine had
melted into an umber haze, which in the direction of Mercer deepened
into a smudge of black. Elizabeth was twisting her left hand about to
get different lights on her ring, which she had managed to slip on her
finger when Cherry-pie was not looking. Blair, with absent eyes, was
singing under his breath:

   "'Oh! I came to a river, an' I couldn't get across;
    Sing "Polly-wolly-doodle" all the day!
   An' I jumped upon a nigger, an' I thought he was a hoss;
    Sing Polly-wolly--'

"Horrid old hole, Mercer," he broke off, resting on his oars and
letting the boat slip back on the current.

"I like Mercer!" Elizabeth said, ceasing to admire the ring. "Since
you've come home from boarding-school you don't like anything but the
East." She began to stroke her puppy's head violently. Blair was
silent; he was looking at a willow dipping its swaying finger-tips in
the water.

"Blair! why don't you answer me?"

Blair, plainly bored, said, "Well, I don't like hideousness and dirt."

"David likes Mercer."

"I bet Mrs. Richie doesn't," Blair murmured, and began to row lazily.

"Oh, Mrs. Richie!" cried Elizabeth; "you think whatever she thinks is
about perfect."

"Well, isn't it?"

Elizabeth's lip hardened. "I suppose you think she's perfect too?"

"I do," Blair said.

"She thinks I'm dreadful because, sometimes, I--get provoked,"
Elizabeth said angrily.

"Well, you are," Blair agreed calmly.

"If I am so wicked, I wonder you want to be engaged to me!"

"Can't I like anybody but you?" Blair said, and yawned.

"You can like everybody, for all I care," she retorted. Blair whistled,
upon which Elizabeth became absorbed in petting her dog, kissing him
ardently between his eyes.

"I hate to see a girl kiss a dog," Blair observed;

"'Sing Polly-wolly-doo--'"

"Don't look, then," said Elizabeth, and kissed Bobby again.

Blair sighed, and gave up his song. Bobby, obviously uncomfortable,
scrambled out of Elizabeth's lap and began to stretch himself on the
uncertain floor of the skiff.

"Lie down!" Blair commanded, and poked the little creature, not
ungently, with his foot. Bobby yelped, gave a flying nip at his ankle,
and retreated to the shelter of his mistress's skirts. "Confound that
dog!" cried Blair.

"You are a horrid boy!" she said, consoling her puppy with frantic
caresses. "I'm glad he bit you!"

Blair, rubbing his ankle, said he'd like to throw the little wretch
overboard.

Well, of course, Elizabeth being Elizabeth, the result was inevitable.
The next instant the ring lay sparkling in the bottom of the boat. "I
break my engagement! Take your old ring! You are a cruel, wicked boy,
and I hate you--so there!" "I must say I don't see why you should
expect me to enjoy being bitten," Blair said hotly. "Well, all right;
throw me over, if you want to. I shall never trust a woman again as
long as I live!" He began to row fiercely. "I only hope that darned pup
isn't going mad."

"I hope he _is_ going mad," said Elizabeth, trembling all over, "and I
hope you'll go mad, too. Put me on shore this instant!"

"Considering the current, I fear you will have to endure my society for
several instants," Blair said.

"I'd rather be drowned!" she cried furiously, and as she spoke, even
before he could raise his hand to stop her, with Bobby in her arms she
sprang lightly over the side of the boat into the water. There was a
terrific splash--but, alas! Elizabeth, in preferring death to Blair's
society, had not calculated upon the September shallows, and even
before the horrified boy could drop his oars and spring to her
assistance, she was on her feet, standing knee-deep in the muddy
current.

The water completely extinguished the fires of wrath. In the hubbub
that followed, the ejaculations and outcries, Nannie's tears, Miss
White's terrified scolding, Blair's protestations to David that it
wasn't his fault--through it all, Elizabeth, wading ashore, was silent.
Only at the landing of the toll-house, when poor distracted Cherry-pie
bade the boys get a carriage, did she speak:

"I won't go in a carriage. I am going to walk home."

"My lamb! you'll take cold! You mustn't!"

"You look like the deuce," Blair told her anxiously; and David blurted
out, "Elizabeth, you can't walk home; you're a perfect object!"
Elizabeth, through the mud trickling over her eyes, flashed a look at
him:

"_That's_ why I'm going to walk!" And walk she did--across the bridge,
along the street, a dripping little figure stared at by passers-by, and
followed by the faithful but embarrassed four--by five, indeed, for
Blair had fished Bobby out of the water, and even stopped, once in a
while when no one was looking, to give the maker of all this trouble a
furtive and apologetic pat. At Elizabeth's door, in a very scared frame
of mind lest Mr. Ferguson should come out and catch him, Blair
attempted to apologize.

"Don't be silly," Elizabeth said, muddy and shivering, but just; "it
wasn't your fault. But we're not engaged any more." And that was the
end of the love-story!

Elizabeth told Cherry-pie that she had "broken with Blair Maitland
_forever!_" Miss White, when she went to make her report of the
dreadful event to Mr. Ferguson, added that she felt assured the young
people had got over their foolishness. Elizabeth's uncle, telling the
story of the ducking to David's horrified mother, said that he was
greatly relieved to know that Elizabeth had come to her senses.

But with all the "tellings" that buzzed between the three households,
nobody thought of telling Mrs. Maitland. Why should they? Who would
connect this woman of iron and toil and sweat, of noise and motion,
with the sentimentalities of two children? She had to find it out for
herself.

At breakfast on the morning of the day Blair was to start East, his
mother, looking over the top of her newspaper at him, said abruptly:

"Blair, I have something to say to you before you go. Be at my office
at the Works at ten-fifteen." She looked at him amiably, then pushed
back her chair. "Nannie! Get my bonnet. Come! Hurry! I'm late!"

Nannie, running, brought the bonnet, a bunch of rusty black crepe, with
strings frayed with many tyings. "Oh, Mamma," she said softly, "do let
me get you a new bonnet?"

But Mrs. Maitland was not listening. "Harris!" she called loudly, "tell
Watson to have those roller figures for me at eleven. And I want the
linen tracing--Bates will know what I mean--at noon without fail.
Nannie, see that there's boiled cabbage for dinner."

A moment later the door banged behind her. The abrupt silence was like
a blow. Nannie and Harris caught their breaths; it was as if the oxygen
had been sucked out of the air; there was a minute before any one
breathed freely. Then Blair flung up his arms in a wordless protest; he
actually winced with pain. He glanced around the unlovely room; at the
table, with its ledgers and clutter of unmatched china--old Canton, and
heavy white earthenware, and odd cups and saucers with splashing
decorations which had pleased Harris's eye; at the files of newspapers
on the sideboard, the grimy walls, the untidy fireplace. "Thank Heaven!
I'm going off to-day. I wish I need never come back," he said.

"Oh, Blair, that is a dreadful thing to say!"

"It may be dreadful, but that's the way I feel. I can't help my
feelings, can I? The further mother and I are apart, the better we love
each other. Well! I suppose I've got to go and see her bossing a lot of
men, instead of sitting at home, like a lady;--and I'll get a dreadful
blowing up. Of course she knows about the engagement now, thanks to
Elizabeth's craziness."

"I don't believe she knows anything about it," Nannie tried to
encourage him.

"Oh, you bet old Ferguson has told her," Blair said, gloomily. "Say,
Nannie, if Elizabeth doesn't look out she'll get into awful hot water
one of these days with her devil of a temper--and she'll get other
people into it, too," he ended resentfully. Blair hated hot water, as
he hated everything that was unbeautiful. "Mother is going to take my
head off, of course," he said.

But Sarah Maitland, entirely ignorant of what had happened, had no such
intention; she had gone over to her office in a glow of personal
pleasure that warmed up the details of business. She intended to take
Blair that morning through the Works,--not as he had often gone before,
tagging after her, a frightened child, a reluctant boy--but as the
prince, formally looking over the kingdom into which he was so soon to
come! He was in love: therefore he would wish to be married; therefore
he would be impatient to get to work! It was all a matter of logical
and satisfactory deduction. How many times in this hot summer, when
very literally she was earning her son's bread by the sweat of her
brow, had she looked at Elizabeth and Blair, and found enjoyment in
these deductions! Nobody would have imagined it, but the big, ungainly
woman _dreamed!_ Dreamed of her boy, of his business success, of his
love, of his wife,--and, who knows? perhaps those grimy pink baby socks
began to mean something more personal than the missionary barrel. It
was her purpose, on this particular morning, to tell him, after they
had gone through the Works, just where, when he graduated, he was to
begin. Not at the bottom!--that was Ferguson's idea. "He ought to start
at the bottom, if he is ever to get to the top," Ferguson had barked.
No, Blair need not start at the bottom; he could begin pretty well up
at the top; and he should have a salary. What an incentive that would
be! First she would tell him that now, when he was going to college,
she meant to increase his allowance; then she would tell him about the
salary he would have when he got to work. How happy he would be! For a
boy to be in love, and have all the pocket-money he wanted, and a great
business to look forward to; to have work--work! the finest thing in
the world!--all ready to his hand,--what more could a human being
desire? At the office, she swept through the morning business with a
speed that took her people off their feet. Once or twice she glanced at
the clock; Blair was always unpunctual. "He'll get _that_ knocked out
of him when he gets into business," she thought, grimly.

It was eleven before he came loitering across the Yards. His mother,
lifting her head for a moment from her desk, and glancing impatiently
out of the dirt-begrimed office window, saw him coming, and caught the
gleam of his patent-leather shoes as he skirted a puddle just outside
the door. "Well, Master Blair," she said to herself, flinging down her
pen, "you'll forget those pretty boots when you get to walking around
your Works!"

Blair, dawdling through the outer office, found his way to her sanctum,
and sat down in a chair beside her desk. He glanced at her shrinkingly,
and looked away. Her bonnet was crooked; her hair was hanging in wisps
at the back of her neck; her short skirt showed the big, broad-soled
foot twisted round the leg of her chair. Blair saw the muddy sole of
that shoe, and half closed his eyes. Then remembering Elizabeth, he
felt a little sick; "she's going to row about it!" he thought, and
quailed.

"You're late," she said; then, without stopping for his excuses, she
proceeded with the business in hand. "I'm going to increase your
allowance."

Blair sat up in astonishment.

"I mean while you're at college. After that I shall stop the allowance
entirely, and you will go to work. You will go on a salary, like any
other man." Her mouth clicked shut in a tight line of satisfaction.

The color flew into Blair's face. "Why!" he said. "You are awfully
good, Mother. Really, I--"

"I know all about this business of your engagement to Elizabeth," Mrs.
Maitland broke in, "though you didn't see fit to tell me about it
yourself." There was something in her voice that would have betrayed
her to any other hearer; but Blair, who was sensitive to Mrs. Richie's
slightest wish, and careful of old Cherry-pie's comfort, and generously
thoughtful even of Harris--Blair, absorbed in his own apprehensions,
heard no pain in his mother's voice. "I know all about it," Mrs.
Maitland went on. "I won't have you call yourselves engaged until you
are out of college, of course. But I have no objection to your looking
forward to being engaged, and married, too. It's a good thing for a
young man to expect to be married; keeps him clean."

Blair was struck dumb. Evidently, though she did not know what had
happened, she did know that he had been engaged. Yet she was not going
to take his head off! Instead she was going to increase his allowance
because, apparently, she approved of him!

"So I want to tell you," she went on, "though you have not seen fit to
tell me anything, that I'm willing you should marry Elizabeth, as soon
as you can support her. And you can do that as soon as you graduate,
because, as I say, when you are in the Works, I shall pay you"--her
iron face lighted--"I shall pay you _a salary!_ a good salary."

More money! Blair laughed with satisfaction; the prospect soothed the
sting of Elizabeth's "meanness"--which was what he called it, when he
did not remember to name it, darkly, "faithlessness." He was so
comforted that he had, for the first time in his life, an impulse to
confide in his mother; "Elizabeth got provoked at me"--there was a
boyish demand for sympathy in his tone; "and--"

But Mrs. Maitland interrupted him. "Come along," she said, chuckling.
She got up, pulled her bonnet straight, and gave her son a jocose
thrust in the ribs that made him jump. "I can't waste time over lovers'
quarrels. Patch it up! patch it up! You can afford to, you know, before
you get married. You'll get your innings later, my boy!" Still
chuckling at her own joke, she slammed down the top of her desk and
tramped into the outer office.

Blair turned scarlet with anger. The personal familiarity extinguished
his little friendly impulse to blurt out his trouble with Elizabeth, as
completely as a gust of wind puts out a scarcely lighted candle. He got
up, his teeth set, his hands clenched in his pockets, and followed his
mother through the Yards--vast, hideous wastes, scorching in the
September heats, full of endless rows of pig, piles of scrap, acres, it
seemed to Blair, of slag. The screeching clamor of the place reeked
with the smell of rust and rubbish and sour earth, and the air was
vibrant with the clatter of the "buggies" on the narrow-gauge tracks
that ran in a tangled network from one furnace to another. Blair,
trudging along behind his mother, cringing at the ugliness of
everything about him, did not dare to speak; he still felt that dig in
the ribs, and was so angry he could not have controlled his voice.

Mrs. Maitland walked through her Iron Works as some women walk through
a garden:--lovingly. She talked to her son rapidly; this was so and so;
there was such and such a department; in that new shed she meant to put
the draftsmen; over there the timekeeper;--she paused. Blair had left
her, and was standing in an open doorway of the foundry, watching,
breathlessly, a jibcrane bearing a great ladle full of tons of liquid
metal that shimmered above its white-hot expanse with the shifting blue
flames of escaping gas. Seething and bubbling, the molten iron slopped
in a flashing film over the side of the caldron, every drop, as it
struck the black earth, rebounding in a thousand exploding points of
fire. Above the swaying ladle, far up in the glooms under the roof, the
shadows were pierced by the lurching dazzle of arc-lamps; but when the
ladle tipped, and with a crackling roar the stream of metal flowed into
a mold, the sizzling violet gleam of the lamps was abruptly
extinguished by the intolerable glare of light.

"Oh," Blair said breathlessly, "how wonderful!"

"It _is_ wonderful," his mother said. "Thomas, here, can move the lever
that tips the ladle with his two fingers--and out comes the iron as
neatly as cream out of a jug!"

Blair was so entirely absorbed in the fierce magnificence of light, and
in the glowing torsos of the molders, planted as they were against the
profound shadows of the foundry, that when she said, "Come on!" he did
not hear her. Mrs. Maitland, standing with her hands on her hips, her
feet well apart, held her head high; she was intensely gratified by his
interest. "If his father had only lived to see him!" she said to
herself. In her pride, she almost swaggered; she nodded, chuckling, to
the molder at her elbow:

"He takes to it like a duck to water, doesn't he, Jim?" "And," said
Jim, telling the story afterward, "I allowed I'd never seen a young
feller as knowing about castings as him. She took it down straight. You
can't pile it on too thick for a woman, about her young 'un."

"Somebody ought to paint it," Blair said, under his breath.

Mrs. Maitland's face glowed; she came and stood beside him a moment in
silence, resting her big, dirty hand on his shoulder. Then she said,
half sheepishly, "I call that ladle the 'cradle of civilization.' Think
what's inside of it! There are rails, that will hold New York and San
Francisco together, and engines and machines for the whole world; there
are telegraph wires that will bring--think of all the kinds of news
they will bring, Blair,--wars, and births of babies! There are bridges
in it, and pens that may write--well, maybe love-letters," she said,
with sly and clumsy humor, "or even write, perhaps, the liberty of a
race, as Lincoln's pen wrote it. Yes!" she said, her face full of
luminous abstraction, "the cradle of civilization!"

He could hardly hear her voice in the giant tumult of exploding metal
and the hammering and crashing in the adjacent mill; but when she said
that, he looked round at her with the astonishment of one who sees a
familiar face where he has supposed he would see a stranger. He forgot
his shame in having a mother who ran an iron-mill; he even forgot that
impudent thrust in the ribs; a spark of sympathy leaped between them as
real in its invisibility as the white glitter of the molten iron
sputtering over their heads. "Yes," he said, "it's all that, and it is
magnificent, too!"

"Come on!" she said, with a proud look. Over her shoulder she flung
back at him figures and statistics; she told him of the tons of bridge
materials on the books; the rail contract she had just taken was a big
thing, very big! "We've never handled such an order, but we can do it!"

They were walking rapidly from the foundry to the furnaces; Sarah
Maitland was inspecting piles of pig, talking to puddlers, all the
while bending and twisting between her strong fingers, with their
blackened nails, a curl of borings, perhaps biting on it, thoughtfully,
while she considered some piece of work, then blowing the crumbs of
iron out from between her lips and bursting into quick directions or
fault-finding. She stood among her men, in her short skirt, her gray
hair straggling out over her forehead from under her shabby bonnet, and
gave her orders; but for the first time in her life she was
self-conscious--Blair was looking on! listening! thinking, no doubt,
that one of these days he would be doing just what she was doing! For
the moment she was as vain as a girl; then, abruptly, her happy
excitement paused. She stood still, flinching and wincing, and putting
a hand up to her eye.

"Ach!" she said; "a filing!" she looked with the other sympathetically
watering eye at her son. "Here, take this thing out."

"_I_?" Blair said, dismayed. "Oh, I might hurt you." Then, in his
helplessness and concern--for, ignorant as he was, he knew enough of
the Works to know that an iron filing in your eye is no joke--he
turned, with a flurried gesture, to one of the molders. "Get a doctor,
can't you? Don't stand there staring!"

"Doctor?" said Mrs. Maitland. She gave her son a look, and laughed.
"He's afraid he'll hurt me!" she said, with a warm joyousness in her
voice; "Jim, got a jack-knife? Just dig this thing out." Jim came,
dirty and hesitating, but prepared for a very common emergency of the
Works. With a black thumb and forefinger he raised the wincing lid, and
with the pointed blade of the jack-knife lifted, with delicacy and
precision, the irritating iron speck from the eyeball. "'Bliged," Mrs.
Maitland said. She clapped a rather grimy handkerchief over the poor
red eye, and turned to Blair. "Come on!" she said, and struck him on
the shoulder so heartily that he stumbled. Her cheek was blackened by
the molder's greasy fingers, and so smeared with tears from the still
watering eye that he could not bear to look at it. He hesitated, then
offered her his handkerchief, which at least had the advantage of being
clean. She took it, glanced at its elaborate monogram, and laughed;
then she dabbed her eye with it. "I guess I'll have to put some of that
cologne of yours on this fancy thing. Remember that green bottle with
the calendar and the red ribbons on it, that you gave me when you were
a little fellow? I've never had anything of my own fine enough to use
the stuff on!"

When they got back to the office again she was very brief and
business-like with him. She had had a fine morning, but she couldn't
waste any more time! "You can keep all this that you have seen in your
mind. I don't know just where I shall put you. If you have a
preference, express it." Then she told him what his salary would be
when he got to work, and what allowance he was to have for the present.

"Now, clear out, clear out!" she said; "good-by"; and turned her cheek
toward him for their semi-annual parting. Blair, with his eyes shut,
kissed her.

"Good-by, Mother. It has been awfully interesting. And I am awfully
obliged to you about the allowance." On the threshold of the office he
halted. "Mother," he said,--and his voice was generous even to
wistfulness; "Mother, that cradle thing was stunning."

Mrs. Maitland nodded proudly; when he had gone, she folded his
handkerchief up, and with a queer, shy gesture, slipped it into the
bosom of her dress. Then she rang her bell. "Ask Mr. Ferguson to step
here." When her superintendent took the chair beside her desk, she was
all business; but when business was over and he got up, she stopped
him: "Tell the bookkeeper to double Blair's allowance, beginning
to-day."

Ferguson made a memorandum.

"And Mr. Ferguson, I have told Blair that I consent to his engagement
with Elizabeth, and I shall make it possible for them to be married as
soon as he graduates--"

"But--"

"I do this," she went on, her satisfaction warm in her voice, "because
I think he needs the incentive that comes to a young man when he wants
to get married. It is natural and proper. And I will see that things
are right for them."

"In the first place," said Robert Ferguson, "I would not permit
Elizabeth to marry Blair; but fortunately we need not discuss that.
They have quarreled, and there is no longer any question of such a
thing."

"Quarreled! but only this morning, not an hour ago, he let me
suppose--" She paused. "Well, I'm sorry." She paused again, and made
aimless marks with her pen on the blotter. "That's all this morning,
Mr. Ferguson." And though he lingered to tell her, with grim amusement,
of Elizabeth's angry bath, she made no further comment.

When he had left the office she got up and shut the door. Then she went
back to her chair, and leaning an elbow on her desk, covered her lips
with her hand. After she had sat thus for nearly ten minutes, she
suddenly rang for an office-boy. "Take this handkerchief up to the
house to my son," she said; "he forgot it."




CHAPTER IX

For the next five or six years Blair was not often at home. At the end
of his freshman year he was conditioned, and found a tutor and the
seashore and his sketching--for he painted with some enthusiasm just at
that time--much more attractive than his mother and Mercer. After that
he went to Europe in the long vacations.

"How much vacation have I had since I began to run his business for
him?" his mother said once in answer to Nannie's intercession that he
might be allowed to travel. But she let him go. She did not know how to
do anything else; she always let him do what he pleased, and have what
he wanted; she gave him everything, and she exacted no equivalent,
either in scholarship or conduct. It never occurred to her to make him
appreciate his privileges by paying for them, and so, of course, she
pauperized him.

"Blair likes Europe," she said one Sunday afternoon to David Richie,
who had come in to see Nannie, "but as for me, I wouldn't take an hour
of my good time, or spend a dollar of my good money, to see the best of
their cathedrals and statues and things. Do you mean to say there is a
cathedral in the world as handsome as my new foundry?"

"Well," David said modestly, "I haven't seen any cathedrals, you know,
Mrs. Maitland."

"It's small loss to you, David," she said kindly. "But I wish I'd
thought to invite you to go along with Blair last summer. You might
have liked it, though you are a pretty sensible fellow in most things."
"Oh, I can't go to Europe till I can earn enough to pay my own way,"
David replied, and added with a quick look at Nannie, "besides, I like
being in Mercer."

"Blair has no need to earn money," said Mrs. Maitland carelessly; then
she blew out her lips in a bubbling sigh. "And he would rather see a
cathedral than his mother."

The pathos of that pricked even the pleasant egotism of youth; David
winced, and Nannie tried to murmur something of her brother's needing
the rest.

Mrs. Maitland gave her grunt of amusement. "Rest! What's he ever done
to tire him? Well! Clear out, clear out, you two,--if you're going to
take a walk. I'm glad _you_ came back for your vacation, David, at any
rate. Nannie needs shaking up. She sticks at home here with me, and a
girl ought to see people once in a while." She glanced at the two young
creatures shrewdly. "Why not?" she reflected. She had never thought of
it before, but "why not?" It would be a very sensible arrangement. The
next moment she had decided that it should be! Nannie's money would be
a help to the boy, and he needn't depend on his doctoring business. "I
must put it through," she said to herself, just as she might have said
that she should put through a piece of work in the office.

This match-making purpose made her invite David to supper very
frequently, and every time he came she was apt, after he had taken his
departure, to tramp into Nannie's parlor in the hope of being told that
the "sensible arrangement" had been made. When she found them together,
and caught a word or two about Elizabeth, she had no flash of insight.
But, except to her, the situation as regarded David and Elizabeth was
perfectly clear.

When, seven years before, the two boys had gone off together to
college, Blair had confided to his friend that his

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