THE NOISE OF THE WORLD

By ADRIANA SPADONI

AUTHOR OF "THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM"

BONI AND LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

... but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

—WORDSWORTH

CONTENTS

THE NOISE OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER ONE

"Well, what do you propose? Come down to facts. It's all very interesting and ethical, this harangue of yours; I wouldn't ask any better if I were the defendants' counsel, but, as the opposition, it is not in line. Are you seriously suggesting that this firm refuse the case?"

"Exactly. I thought I made that plain at the beginning of my 'harangue.'"

John Lowell drew in his upper lip, frowned and swayed slowly back and forth, as was his habit when thinking out some intricate point of law. But, by the nervous tapping of the fingers upon the desk, Roger Barton knew that the other was not analyzing a point of law. He was angry and would continue to sway thoughtfully and tap with long, slim fingers until he had fashioned a verbal sword with which to slash Roger's repression to bits; then, smiling, would watch Roger flounder from abstraction to personality, and drown in the sea of his own anger. Roger Barton's wide mouth closed in a firm line.

At her stenographer's desk by the window, Anne Mitchell leaned across her machine, her eyes on the younger man. In the year of her secretaryship she had seen few men defy John Lowell and none emerge with dignity from the interval of his silent tapping.

"Well?"

Still Roger did not speak. Neither did he knit his brows nor make any outward sign of searching for a more cogent argument than the one he had already advanced. His blue eyes summed up the man in the chair and held his deduction quietly for the other to read. Against that look John Lowell's pretense of calmness finally splintered.

"If we don't, some one else will; and it's eight thousand a year for whoever gets the Morgan work."

Anne Mitchell rose and came round her desk. There she stopped, as Lowell reached the end of his sentence, and stood leaning against the edge. Standing so, she was slighter even than one would expect, almost frail but for a kind of compactness, a perfection of bodily finish that allowed no such waste of material as physical weakness. If Anne had been a few inches taller, or twenty pounds heavier; if she had been more sharply defined instead of being a small portion of space cased in a body for the convenience of physical motion; if she had obstructed attention instead of being almost fluid in the unobtrusiveness of her movements, she would long ago have doubled her twenty dollars a week. As it was, on the few occasions when John Lowell lent her to other members of the firm, they always looked puzzled for a moment: "Mitchell? Oh, sure, send her along. Good." And gave Anne twice the amount of work they had intended.

"Well?" John Lowell drew out his watch, murmured "four twenty-seven!" as if he were noting the amount to be charged later, and slipped his watch back. "You don't seem to have anything very constructive to offer, do you, Barton? Our not taking the case won't save your friends on the hill."

"No. Neither did your refusing that railroad franchise case save the public."

The older man smiled at the reference. "Too sticky. That would have smelled to high Heaven."

"Not a bit stickier or smellier than this." Roger now took a step forward, as if to insure the aim of his words through the unexpected aperture of the other's momentary honesty. "The only difference is, that you can put this over without publicity. The smell would never get beyond the office. No one would whiff the rotten legal juggling that's going to take away those poor beggars' homes. The Morgan Gravel Company has literally blasted away dozens of laborers' homes, of foreigners mostly, in the last ten years, and now that they've come up against a few fighting Irish, the last stand on the Hill, they're going to daub over their proceedings with a coat of white-wash."

"Goldwash," Lowell corrected with a grin. "You seem to forget that these people are going to be paid for their property—whatever the judge decides is fair."

"His imagination may reach to one hundred. McLaughlin may prod him to one hundred and fifty."

"They'll take it."

"Of course they will, because Morgan will take the land out from under them whether they accept the money or not."

"They can appeal. There's always more law."

Roger Barton's shoulders hunched. His thick, dry, blond hair seemed to rise like an angry dog's. Without his moving, Anne felt that he had crossed the space between himself and the other. Her small hands clenched, and she nibbled her lower lip as she always did in moments of forced repression.

"Yes," Roger said quietly, "there is always the law, more law, for the rich, the crooked, the morally rotten. There is always the perversion of justice, the farce of an appeal, the hypocrisy of a judge, the pitiful sight of the 'twelve good men and true.' There is always more law to quibble and distort the truth."

"No doubt." The smile deepened at Roger's vehemence. "Only we lawyers don't usually express it so frankly."

"No, we don't. As long as we stay in the shameful business."

John Lowell's smile vanished. He looked at Roger with a sudden, new penetration, as if he had only just come to the realization of the seriousness of Roger's objection. After all, it might be well to temporize a little with this hectic young idealist. The firm needed Roger in many ways, and, in time, might need him more. With all this popular truckling to labor and democracy, this preposterous inversion of common sense and accepted order that seemed settling on the world, Lowell & Morrison might come to need a signpost in the murk.

John Lowell frowned thoughtfully. In the six months of Roger's connection with Lowell & Morrison, John Lowell had, more than once, admitted to old Morrison that Roger Barton had "principle-itis in an acute form." But as he had never seen, in the long course of his legal life, this disease withstand the treatment of personal success, he had kept his faith in Roger's final malleability—and many cases from Roger's knowledge. This Morgan matter had escaped his vigilance, and he was almost as angry with old Morrison as with Roger.

"Well," he finally conceded and rose to indicate the interview at an end. "I don't want you to do anything you don't believe in, Barton. I'll give the briefs to Daniels. You need have nothing to do with it."

"I never intended to have anything to do with it, nor with any other case from now on. I'm through."

For a moment John Lowell looked at the younger man with a look of hatred, scorn, and a shade of envy so faint that it was gone before Roger could be sure it had been. Then he shrugged his acceptance.

"That, of course, is for you to decide. I would not want to try to influence you in either direction. If you feel there is a purer field for your talents, why, go to it. The law has existed for several thousands of years and will probably go on." With a cold smile that never touched his eyes, he turned to Anne.

"Miss Mitchell, could you take some letters right away? I must get them off before five."

But Anne was coming slowly across the room toward him, as if drawn against her consciousness. Now, at the direct address her face flushed to realization; she hesitated, and then completed the distance with so genuine an effort that Roger Barton felt her courage, and without knowing that he moved, took a step toward her, as if answering the call of her slight frailness for physical support.

"Do you really mean that those people are going to be maneuvered out of their homes? That the legal action is only a sham? That it's all settled before we begin?"

Always physical torture for Anne to assert her beliefs against opposition, the flush flamed to a brick-red burning, her eyes grew smaller, she looked hot and swollen. When Anne blushed like this she was ugly.

John Lowell moved impatiently.

"Really, Miss Mitchell, a law office is not a church. It is a business. Here is a big firm needing rock and gravel, easy to get and close to shipping facilities. Years ago, when the city was not much more than a village, a few people built some dilapidated shacks on Telegraph Hill. The Lord knows what they paid for the land, or whom they paid. Soon the growth of the city will force down these shacks. Morgan offers to buy them now, and unless you value them by the 'home and fireside, and baby's cradle' standard of every sentimental tenant, the price is a fairly just one. The people themselves, if not interfered with, will be glad to take what they can get. On the whole, they're a canny lot. They know that it's only a question of a short time before they'd have to go. A city growing like this has no room to waste so near its water-front in rotting cottages and little gardens. The place for small houses like those is in Ocean View, or the Portrero, or the Mission outskirts."

"But it would take the men hours to get to their work from those places and"—Anne shivered—"they're so dismal and bleak. Gray hills, and wind and dust. The Hill has the Bay and the islands and the ferryboats at night."

John Lowell stared in astonishment and then laughed.

"Really, Miss Mitchell, you alarm me. I'm afraid you'll be turning my dictation into poetry, and sending out letters in blank verse."

The laugh cut Anne's last grip from the hope that John Lowell had not really meant what he said. He was, then, deliberately doing this thing that he knew was wrong, for the money in it. He was going to tear away from these people perhaps the only external beauty their lives held. Safe in his own well-appointed home, with all the glory of Bay and hills spread out before him, he was going to condemn these to the gray, thick dust of the Portrero, the bleak and windswept hills, the dull, depressing streets of the Mission outskirts. All her life Anne had lived on such a street and hated it with the whole force of her nature.

He had the power to do this thing and he was going to do it. Under the suave kindliness of his slim, perfectly groomed figure, he was like an animal snapping at every morsel that came his way. The law suddenly appeared to Anne as a trick surface upon which one walked, ignorant of the complicated mechanism below.

Standing before John Lowell, not reaching above his elbow, she looked straight into the eyes smiling down at her with a new, appraising gleam.

"Well?" he said, "do you feel that you will be able to get them out in plain prose?"

Anne rose on her toes, because the look in the full, brown eyes above her forced her to throw her scorn straight into them.

"No. I shall not be able to get them out in prose—nor—in any other way—after to-night. I—I—sha'n't be taking any more at all."

"No?" he said softly, the look changing to a touch that passed hotly all over the surface of her body. "I'm extremely sorry."

"I—I—couldn't work here another day," Anne squeaked, furious at the ridiculous picture she must make, poised upon her toes, like a silly little bantam pecking in a rage.

"You needn't explain, Miss Mitchell, I understand—perfectly." And, without moving his eyes, Anne felt them now include Roger Barton. "I beg your pardon for suggesting it. Of course you couldn't—under the circumstances. I assure you—I understand."

"Oh," Anne gasped in a cracking whisper that reached only to John Lowell and deepened his touch-like look, "you are—rotten."

Then, feeling the tears rushing to her eyes, she dropped to her heels and walked back to her desk.

The telephone summoned John Lowell. Roger Barton hesitated as if he were coming to her, but she put a sheet of paper quickly into the machine and he left the room. The office routine closed over the incident.

From long practice Anne's fingers worked with accurate independence, but, beyond their flying movement, her brain tried to put in order the chaos of her thoughts. She had given up her job, the best job she had had in the five years of her working life. In another half hour she would go out of the office, never to return. She would go home and tell her people. Into the heat of her mood, this need to tell her people fell like a small, cold lump of lead. Something within herself would drive her to try to make them understand, and only one fact would emerge clearly to them—she had lost her job.

At five-thirty, Anne laid the last letter on John Lowell's desk. As she put on her things, she knew that he was aware of every motion without directly looking at her.

"Good night, Mr. Lowell."

"Good night, Miss Mitchell." He looked up. Anne was the best stenographer he had ever had. In her close-fitting blue tailor suit, with a small blue velvet toque framing the wonderful fairness of her skin, and the smooth, cool gold of her hair, she was exceedingly pretty—prettier than John Lowell had ever noticed. With Roger Barton out of the way——

"If you reconsider your decision by morning, I won't remember it," he said with a smile that she alone among his stenographers had escaped so long.

"I shall not reconsider, Mr. Lowell." Anne spoke with a stiff primness that instantly dispelled his new interest.

"Very well. Your check will be sent you at the end of the week, as usual."

"This is only Wednesday."

"That's all right. You've often given overtime."

"Until Wednesday, if you please," Anne said quietly and wanted to cry. Four days would mean nothing to John Lowell; much to her.

"Very well." He picked up his pen and Anne went out.

She heard Roger Barton's voice as she passed his door and hurried on to the elevator. Down in the street, the home-going crowds flowed by. Anne's eyes filled with tears and she nibbled her lip to keep them back. Then she joined the northward current and walked quickly away.

CHAPTER TWO

The Mitchells lived in an old-fashioned upper flat on a street that, before the great fire of 1906, had been a street of two-story wooden houses and small cottages set back in pleasant gardens. But the fire, sweeping the City's poorer quarters, had driven the inhabitants to the safety of the Mission hills; the little cottages had been converted into flats, the houses raised and small, congested shops inserted below. For the first two years, until the new city settled to permanent lines, there had been a bustle and cheap glitter through these streets, a cosmopolitan mingling of many different types and nationalities, that had touched the district faintly with romance. But now the better shops had gone, and only a few frowsy Italian immigrants continued in their untidy vegetable stands; disheartened widows managed small notion stores and bewailed to the wives of the petty clerks, also nailed to the district by low rents, the mythical comforts they had enjoyed "before the Fire."

The wooden houses were all dulled to the same sad gray by wind and sun and rain. The once pleasant gardens had shrunk to occasional slabs of hard brown earth railed off with rusty iron pickets. The front doors of the flats, raised three steps from the sidewalk, were all exactly alike, warped and dust-grimed, with oblong insets of glass two-thirds of the way up. Behind these insets, in brilliant curtains of silkoline, or conscientious Battenburg or negligent Nottingham, the tenants expressed their individuality against the engulfing monotony. The Mitchells had plain white scrim, of thick quality and tightly drawn on a brass rod. The doors of the upper flats worked by an uncertain mechanism managed from within. When this mechanism broke, if one lived in the top flat, one descended the endless stairs and worked the latch by hand. As a child, Anne had dreaded calling on friends and ascending, watched suspiciously from the heights above, until her identity was disclosed. There were ghastly stories of unsuspecting women who had so opened to burglars and been at their mercy.

As Anne unlocked the door the smell of pot-roast instantly enveloped her, shutting away the problem of her own immediate future and the broad shoulders of Roger Barton, hunched forward in defiance of John Lowell. Anne's lip quivered.

"To-night—of all nights!"

Slowly she began the long ascent, enclosed by the thickening odor as by the walls of a narrow corridor.

Anne hated pot-roast, not because of itself, but for its associations. Pot-roast was a pretense. It had not the open honesty of stew. Pot-roast was Mrs. Mitchell's final compromise in a line of preference that had started with prime ribs of beef. It meant that James Mitchell had bet away more than the usual portion of his monthly pay check; the meager remnant had stung Hilda's patience to rebellion; her imagination had leaped from the invariable shoulder chops of Wednesday evening to prime roast; but, before it could safely land upon that pinnacle of rebellion, had tripped and clutched at pot-roast. Anne sighed and went slowly on. At the stair-head, the gas jet, stuffed with cotton wool to keep it from ever being extravagantly turned to its full capacity, shed a sickly light through an amber globe. She turned the cock ferociously as far as it would go and then went on down the hall to the curtained niche just outside her own hall bedroom.

Long ago this niche had been formed to hold the overflow from the hall closet. Into it Mrs. Mitchell had since crowded broken and worn-out pieces of household furniture, hideous bisque ornaments of the '90's which Anne and Belle had refused to have about, oil lamps, in case "something happens to the gas"; a sewing-machine that would cost more to fix than to replace; dresses and bits of carpet, some day to be made into new rugs; and the week's accumulation of laundry from which she snatched and ironed pieces as she needed them. Years ago Anne had tried to eliminate this niche, but when her mother had demanded where she should put the things and Anne had suggested burning them, Hilda had looked so grieved at the implication of her bad management in ever letting them accumulate, and had asked Anne in so hurt a tone to pick out "one single thing that might not be needed some day," that Anne relented. Now the niche was like a malignant growth, too late to operate upon, to which one submits. But even yet Anne never let the portière quite fall to behind her and enclose her in this cemetery of odds and ends.

When she had hung up her things she went down the hall, past the dining-room where her father sat in the rocker under the hard, white, incandescent light, staring at the unlit gas log in the grate, the evening paper spread on his knees. In the kitchen her mother was making gravy from the fat in the baking-pan.

"Hello, dear. You're late. I was just going to begin without you."

Mrs. Mitchell wiped the perspiration from her face with the corner of a very soiled apron and kissed her daughter. She was taller and broader than Anne, but she had the same long-lashed, deeply-blue eyes, and her skin had once been even fairer. It was remarkably white and soft yet at the base of her throat, although there were tiny lines about her ears and at the corners of her mouth. Her hair had been dark, however, like Belle's, and now was a fluffy mass of gray curls.

Anne always felt older than her mother and loved her, on the whole, with a passionate, protective tenderness. There were times, however, when Hilda's persistent cheerfulness and muddled thinking annoyed her, and at long intervals Hilda disgusted her. These were the moments of confidence in which her mother, under the pretense of "warning the girls," confided to them, in general terms, "some of the things married women have to put up with." Belle and Anne both knew that these confidences were the result of her relations with the small, gray man, their father. Years ago it had deepened Belle's indifference and Anne's dislike to him.

"What is it now?" Anne took the spoon and tried to beat the lumpy gravy to smoothness. "He's just staring into the grate."

Hilda shrugged. "That oil well, I suppose. I wish to goodness they'd stop discovering gushers and copper and all those things. I thought when the Chinese lottery was put out of business we might get a little ahead."

Anne smashed at the lumps and frowned. "You ought to have put your foot down years ago, that's all there is to it. If you'd made a real row every time instead of just—just spluttering sometimes—he would have had to sit up and behave."

Hilda bridled. "It's one thing to talk and another to do. When you're married yourself, you'll understand. By the time you get 'round to see how you could do it better, it's too late. They've got you saddled with a baby and——"

Feeling a confidence about to descend upon her, Anne snatched the first weapon to hand.

"I've quit the office, mamma."

Hilda's mouth remained open, her eyes held the "if-you-only-understood" look that always accompanied such a confidence.

"You needn't look like that, moms; the world is really rotating just as usual."

"Quit!" Hilda echoed in a whisper. "Quit!"

Anne nodded. "But I'll get another place in a day or two, don't worry, dear."

"Quit!" Hilda echoed more faintly, and emerged into the reality of the situation. "What for? I thought you liked the place. Did Mr. Lowell—did he—anything——?"

Anne stamped her foot. "No. Of course he didn't. I did like it as far the general atmosphere of the office went, although I've had doubts of him lately. But to-day he came out into the open. He's a—crook."

"Good gracious! What did he want you to do?"

"Nothing special. But I can't work in a place where I know things are being done that he's doing. I just can't."

Hilda went back to the gravy. She did not want Anne to work in a dishonest office, but she did wish Anne had not discovered the delinquency of John Lowell for a few days.

"No, dear, of course you can't. But—suppose you don't tell papa to-night. It's gloomy enough as it is."

"Why on earth he should create all the gloom is beyond me. Why shouldn't he be annoyed? It might do him good."

"Please, dear."

"Well, I'll see, moms. I won't promise."

Hilda sighed and dished up the potatoes. For all her slim, frail fairness, Anne was very difficult to manage. As Belle said, "You never know when you're going to strike one of Anne's principles. They're like deep sea mines, unsuspected till they go off under you." Hilda carried the roast into the dining-room, Anne followed with the potatoes, and they sat down to dinner. In silence they began to eat.

Through the glass of the mantel above the gas log, wreathed in asbestos moss, Anne watched her father. He was a small man with thin, gray hair and brown eyes, faded from long years of figuring in bad lights. He bent low over his plate, but ate slowly, through habit acquired in an attack of nervous indigestion when Anne and Belle were children. There was little general conversation at the Mitchell meals, although, when James Mitchell was in a good humor, he was inclined to deliver monologues, chiefly against Radicalism and the Catholic Church. Any newspaper mention of the possibility of a strike precipitated the first, which before its finish, by some complicated process of logic, always included the second.

In the office of the Coast Electric Company, where he had been an assistant bookkeeper for thirty years, James Mitchell was known as one of the most faithful men they had. He never took a vacation nor objected to overtime. He had a tremendous respect for every one in authority above him, and the only temper the office had ever seen him display was when one of the younger clerks had tried to organize a clerks' union. James Mitchell had thrown down his pencil, whirled upon the astonished organizer, and demanded to know "where the city would have been if it hadn't been for the men who started this company?" Apparently he considered that the city would still have been using candles. For this act of faith he had been raised five dollars shortly after.

He disliked open conflict and in the early days of his marriage had once left the house to escape the first real discussion between himself and Hilda on the subject of money. This astonishing act had for years hung over the home, and the fear that "papa would take his hat and go out" had been held as an extinguisher over the children's quarrels and suffocated any tendency Anne or Belle might have had to appeal to him.

Anne could never remember an age when either she or Belle had talked to him of their own accord, although there had been periods when her mother, driven by some hidden impulse, had insisted that they "go and talk to papa. Tell him about school; he likes to hear it." At thirteen Belle had refused, and Anne, three years younger, had managed to slip from the obligation at the same time.

They finished the meat and vegetables in safe silence and Hilda gathered up the dishes, hopeful of peace to the end. But the heavy stillness had weighted Anne's already taut nerves, and when her mother returned with brown betty and hard sauce, and her father came suddenly to consciousness of the elaborate nature of this week-day dinner with a remark on the price of butter and sugar, Anne's hands went cold and her face flamed.

"Well, we don't have it often," Hilda propitiated, "but sometimes it gives one a headache trying to think of changes, everything's so high."

"And going higher." He helped himself sparingly to the hard sauce and pushed it across to Anne, who smothered her pudding in it. "And it'll keep on going up, too, unless people stop buying. Women could bring down the prices in a minute if they had the sense. Nobody needs hard sauce."

"They do," Anne spoke quietly without looking up. Her mother tried to touch her foot under the table, but Anne moved just beyond reach. Hilda began to eat her betty.

"They do, do they?" James Mitchell pounced upon Anne's remark like a small and hungry terrier on a bone. "They do? Well, it would take more than any argument you, or anybody else your age, could put up, to show me."

"I don't doubt that," Anne shot at him, still busy with her dessert; "nothing would convince you because you don't want to see, or else you really can't understand."

"I can't understand, can't I? Oh, no, I suppose nobody can understand anything these days when they're past twenty-five. I've been out bucking the world for more years than you've lived in it, but of course I've had my eyes shut all the time. Now see here, let me tell you this, young lady," he leaned toward Anne and thumped the table, "you've got what this whole country's got—a dose of blind staggers. You can't see what's coming and you won't till it's hit you. You go ranting along about people needing hard sauce and luxuries and you kick like steers when the prices go up. Of course they'll go up. Why shouldn't they? It's the law of supply and demand. When dairymen find out people 'have to have hard sauce' they're going to run up butter and eggs. A fool can see that."

"Only a fool can see that," Anne's voice shook in spite of herself. "Why shouldn't people have hard sauce?"

"Don't you get off any of that Socialistic jargon in this house. I won't have it. If I'd had any say in the bringing up of you girls——"

"Now, papa, please. The girls——"

"If you'd had anything to say, Belle would never have been a trained nurse, nor I a special stenographer. We'd both have been wrapping packages in some department store basement." Anne rolled her napkin and rose in an icy quiet.

"A lot of good either Belle's nursing or your stenography does," he darted now down the personal opening Anne had made him. "We never see Belle except when she has a few moments she doesn't know what to do with, and she wouldn't help out with a dollar if she was asked. And as for you—where could you get the board your mother puts up for what you pay?"

"Now, papa! Anne——"

"Well, I've quit my job, so you'll have to board me for nothing until I get another one."

"Quit!" James Mitchell stared as his wife had stared. "Quit! What for?"

"Because John Lowell is dishonest and I won't work for a dishonest firm."

"How many firms do you suppose are honest? You haven't risen to the management of a firm yet."

"Nor have I sunk to conniving with a thief, either."

James Mitchell opened his lips and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, leaned back. He looked shrunken and grayer, and he stared as if he saw something unseen by the others.

"I've had—the same job—for—thirty—years," he said slowly. "Thirty—years—at the same desk."

Anne softened.

"You ought to have quit long ago. They've used you because you let them. You could have done better. You could do better now. Do you want to quit? I'll get another place to-morrow and stake the house till you get a job."

"No, no, I don't want to quit. No." He seemed fleeing before the suggestion. The strangeness of the new road terrified him and he scuttled back to the familiar. "Used me? Of course they've used me. A man with a family has to get used to being used. A married man has to put up with things. Where would you kids have been if I'd have been getting on my ear all the time you were little?"

"Papa has been faithful," Hilda began, but the sudden tears that filled Anne's eyes astonished her to silence.

Without a word, Anne picked up the plates and went into the kitchen. Hilda followed.

"If he only wouldn't get down behind that pretense of having done it all for us, I might respect him, moms. But he just burrows into that hole like a gopher and you can't get him out."

"Well, after all, dear, I don't suppose he would have stuck if it hadn't been for us. He'd have gotten into some kind of a gambling scheme long ago. After all, he brings home most of his salary most of the time."

And Anne saw herself a small girl watching her mother dividing the contents of the pay envelope, counting and recounting and finally tying up each little package in tissue paper, as if to keep the tiny allotments from spending themselves in another department. They had hurt to tears, those thin little allotments, and her mother's sigh as she gathered them up and went humming about the housework. Anne did not answer and they did the dishes in silence until the phone rang. Hilda came from answering it with such a look of relief that Anne smiled.

"Belle?"

"Yes. She's got an hour off and is coming up."

Anne wiped the last glass and put it away.

"Well, I'm all in and I'm going to bed. The autopsy will have to take place without the corpse." The smile deepened as she kissed her mother. "All nice and safe again, moms?"

"I don't care what you say, Belle has a practical mind. She always seems to know what to do."

"As if we had a fever or a dose of colic."

"I'd a lot rather we had things like that. What with you and papa, sometimes I feel as if I were living in a cloud of feathers."

"You dear thing," Anne patted her shoulder. "Well, Belle will be along with her spray in a minute and wet us all down nice and flat. I don't suppose I'll go right to sleep——"

"She'll look in for a minute, I guess."

Anne laughed. "She sure will."

CHAPTER THREE

Belle Mitchell was much taller than Anne or Hilda, with straight, very heavy brown hair and brown eyes. She had a jolly, even disposition, was rarely hurt herself, never knew when she hurt others, and felt competent to manage any situation in which she found herself. Her favorite expression was "look facts in the face." She loved Anne with the same protecting tenderness that Anne felt for Hilda, and never understood the chain of "highfalutin" reasoning by which Anne finally exploded into one of her rare rages. James Mitchell had always been a little afraid of Belle, but he agreed with Hilda that she "had a practical streak." This was supposed to have descended to her intact, like an heirloom, from James' Scotch grandmother.

At seventeen, Belle had looked over the possibilities of the future, left high-school and gone into hospital training. Four years later she was earning twenty-five dollars a week. She had then left the family and taken an apartment with two other nurses. As she explained to Anne:

"The only way to go on caring for your family is to get away from them."

She had paid for Anne's course in a good business college and supplemented the family income with five dollars a week, until Anne was making enough to pay her own board. Then she stopped.

"In some silly streak she'll call 'being honest with papa,' mamma will tell him, and some race-track tout will get that extra five. Or she'll have a fit of rebellion and go off at a tangent in another washing machine or bread mixer or aluminum contraption for getting a whole dinner under one lid, and nobody will have the benefit. But kidlets," and here Belle had put her arms about Anne in a way that always melted any hardness Anne felt for Belle's practicality, "this rule is not for you. If you want any extras—please, sisterkin, ask, won't you?"

Anne had promised, her amazement at Belle's ability to do these firm, decided things, mingling with a sense of disloyalty to her mother in recognizing their truth. She herself could never have left the house, nor stopped a contribution, unless she had done it as the final step against pricks that Belle would never have felt at all.

But now, as Anne sat in the cool darkness of her own little room, looking out into the fog-wrapped silence of the empty street, she was not thinking of Belle, nor of Belle's management of "her case." She was thinking again, in spite of her effort not to, of Roger Barton. He had passed out of her life, and yet, in some inexplicable way, he seemed to have suddenly entered it very intimately.

In the six months of his connection with Lowell & Morrison, Anne had seen more of him than of any man in any of the three offices in which she had worked. They had never talked of personal things, but of business details and the generalities into which these seemed inevitably to lead them; discussions, scarcely ever more than a few moments long, of plays and books and Life.

Anne envied Roger his university education and Roger envied Anne the courage which carried her, after a hard day's work, to extension lectures at night. From these she extracted a kind of sensory conviction of the complex and interesting world beyond her experience. A world of clear thinking, in contrast to the muddled and confused mental processes of her own family and of all the people whom she had ever known; of aims higher than the daily grubbing for food and shelter that they called living. In Roger Barton, Anne had encountered the first person who, born into an environment like her own, had forced his way through to this interesting and complex world. Anne often wondered how he had done it, but as he seemed to take his own progress for granted, and had never commented on the achievement, Anne had been too shy to ask him. And now she would probably never see him again. Through the monotony of the working day there would be no moment to look forward to; no memory with which to contrast the dullness of evenings at home.

Out in the great world open to men, Roger Barton would make another place for himself. Before his ability, his courage and his masculinity, everything was possible. He could leave to-morrow for distant countries and the far strange places he expected some day so confidently to see. He could seek beauty and romance, limited only by his own powers of physical endurance. He could work his way in ships about the world, or tramp alone across deserts. He was strong and free.

And she? In a few days she would begin again to look for another place. Perhaps she would better her salary a little, but she would come and go at fixed hours. For the greater part of the waking day she would sell her intelligence and strength to strangers. They would know nothing of the reality beneath, nor would she touch their lives at any vital spot. Her father would get over this spell of depression at his losses and his annoyance with her contradiction, and the house would run smoothly, like a narrow gauge train along a dusty, uninteresting depression between high hills; beyond these she would never see. It was all so flat, so gray, so dead. Anne shivered:

"Anything as ugly as this house and the way we live is WICKED."

Through the silence of the lonely street, Belle's firm step echoed clearly. The signal ring, three quick peals, brought Hilda running to the stair-head. The lever on the landing clicked, far below the door opened and closed with a slam, and Belle came gayly up the stairs, filling every cranny of the house with the force of her cheerful efficiency, just as if a strong breeze had been suddenly admitted.

"Hello, moms. Her Royal Highness decided she was well enough to let me off for an hour, and so I——"

All sound suddenly ceased. Then Belle, with a brisk "Hello, papa," followed her mother down the hall, past the dining-room, and the kitchen door closed behind them.

Anne shrugged impatiently. No smallest change was ever accomplished in the Mitchell household without this background of tragedy. The news of her action in leaving Lowell & Morrison was now being "broken" to Belle and advice asked, exactly as if Anne had absconded with the funds or tried to commit suicide. There were no degrees of tragedy among the Mitchells.

"I don't care, let them talk it over until there isn't a shred of it left. I'm not going to explain. They wouldn't understand if I talked all night."

Anne closed the window, turned on the softly shaded lamp and chose a book from the small bookcase at the foot of the white enameled bed. Settled in the chintz-covered Morris chair, she opened the book and forced herself to follow the lines to the end of the first page. But Roger Barton's angry gray eyes moved between the words and Anne did not even turn the leaf. The book slowly slid to her lap. Across it Anne stared into the future.

The sound of Belle's step coming firmly along the hall drew her back to the present with a physical reaction of having been literally lifted from one spot and deposited in another. And before she had quite achieved equilibrium in the moment, Belle was tapping at the door. This tap of Belle's was not a motion of the fingers, but a denunciation of any pretense of absence you might be intending. It not only declared Belle's certainty that you were there but her knowledge of exactly what you were doing.

"It's me, kidlets; may I come in?"

Anne opened the door and Belle instantly filled the entire room. Closing the door, she smiled down upon Anne, flushed and a little stiff with the force of her decision not to be led into any apologetic explanation of her act.

"Well, you certainly have done it this time. I never saw such gloom, and that's going some. You'd think the sheriff was in the parlor and the morgue wagon at the door. Tell me the whole sad tale."

From an ivory cigarette case, "a remembrance from an officer patient," Belle drew a cigarette and lighted it.

"Come on, 'fess up."

"You've been out there half an hour and have heard the whole thing, more no doubt."

"From A to Z, and inside out and I haven't got it straight yet. Why did you do it? That's what has upset them, but they don't seem to know what it was. Why did you?"

"That's what they both asked."

"Their intelligence must be looking up. I gather that you were asked to do something your conscience didn't approve and that you up and quit."

"I wasn't asked to do anything. But John Lowell isn't straight and I won't work for him."

Through her cigarette smoke, Belle stared as Hilda and James had done.

"But, kiddie, you'll never find a business man that is straight, or an office or any place where you approve of everything. How long do you think I'd be a nurse if I had to approve of everything I see in an operating room; people cut up when there's no need; often carelessness that would make your hair stand on end. My relation to the surgeon is like yours to Lowell. I hand the instruments, and keep mum."

"And I quit."

"So I hear," Belle laughed. "But what are you going to do? Ask for a certificate of conscience from your next employer? I say, sisterkin, what do you think business life is?"

"That depends on what you want to make it."

"Rot. It's compromise from dawn till dark; from the cradle to the grave. When you start out you think you're going to do wonderful things, reorganize everything and everybody, because your own pet ideals are the very finest ideals in captivity. And—in the end you're lucky if you remember what they were. Why, even I, and nobody would accuse me of being sentimental, had all kinds of ideas about what a nurse's vocation might be, a kind of etherealized Florence Nightingale in a perpetual ecstasy; but when I came up against real patients, whining nervous women and men—well, Belle Nightingale gives her pills and powders now strictly according to the doctor's orders and forgets most of her patients with the last pay check. The whole thing's like Mom's pot-roast—a good solid makeshift for something better."

Anne shrugged. "If Moms had never fallen for that first pot-roast——"

"If Eve had never picked the apple."

"Well? You don't know what the world might have been like if she hadn't, do you?"

"I can make a guess. It would have been just about as it is—if not a little worse. She would have found a pear or a cranberry or a walnut, any old thing." Belle leaned slightly forward and peered with genuine concern through the thickening film of tobacco smoke at the small blonde figure, sitting stiffly now on the bed-edge. "Anne, do you know that I worry a lot about you sometimes? I know you're a good stenographer and as economically independent as any woman, but it always seems to me as if you were out of step with the world in some way. You don't plunk, plunk along with the rest of us. You—you——"

"Sit down on the curb-stone."

"No. You mince along reluctantly. I wish to Heaven you'd get married."

Anne flushed, but Belle was grinding her cigarette stub into Anne's lacquered pin tray and did not notice. She ground it into the polished surface as if the tray were the problem of Anne's future and the stub her own power of settling the difficulty. When she had burned the delicate surface to a black spot, she went on. "But I can't for the life of me picture the kind of man you would marry, not with your opportunities for meeting them. An ordinary business man would drive you as crazy as you would drive him. A professional man—well, there's not much difference. An up-to-date doctor, even an up-to-date minister, has just as keen an eye for the main chance as John Lowell—and that's what seems to upset you. And even if you found one straight in business—men are rotten morally, most of them, and you're so—I don't know just what it is, Anne, but you're like a cool drink in a very clean glass, and men want beer in an earthen mug when it comes right down to everyday diet. They want it in women just as much as they do in business."

"I don't believe it." Anne spoke with such vehement assurance that Belle looked at her sharply.

"You don't? Why not?"

Anne wished now that she had not spoken, but the quickest way to escape from that gimlet-like boring of Belle's eyes was to go on. "It isn't true of all men in business and I don't see why it should be true of all men morally."

"Did you ever know an absolutely honest business man?"

"Yes." Anne felt her face beginning to burn, and to escape the look creeping into her sister's eyes she rose quickly and began doing something unnecessary to the window curtain. She felt Belle's eyes between her shoulder blades and knew that even the back of her neck was flaming. At Belle's low chuckle she bit her lip, dragged about herself the fast vanishing wrap of impersonal interest, and turned to her sister with an assumption of surprise that Belle's look shattered in a moment.

"Come on, sisterkin, this is getting interesting. Who is he?"

"I wasn't thinking of any special individual. I—there must be——"

"Cut it out, Anne, anyhow with sister Belle. When a working girl keeps her faith in men for five years, there is always an individual."

"Shut up, Belle. I loathe that cheap talk."

"And I loathe dodging round and pretending. Who is this torch-bearer in the darkness of the legal world?"

"He isn't a torch-bearer, but he's honest. Roger Barton." It was the easiest way, because Belle would prod until she got it.

"That good-looking young blond? Well, how does he compromise with his honesty and John Lowell?"

"He doesn't. He quit, too."

"Well—I'll—be darned. You both rode out of the office on the same white palfrey! When's the wedding?"

"Will you please get out of this room?"

"Not on your life. Not till I hear the whole thrilling tale. Are you engaged, Anne?"

"No. Will you stop?"

"What'll you bet that you won't be inside a month?"

Anne did not answer.

"All right. It would be a shame to take the money. Why, if dad had tips like that we'd have been rich long ago. What'll you bet, then, that he doesn't ask you?"

Anne's lips trembled. "Belle, please stop joking like that."

"But, kiddie, the most wily flirt in the world couldn't have done better. Any man would be flattered to death. You don't suppose he's going to let a kindred soul—and a pretty one—slip out of his life, do you? He'll look you up, anyhow."

"No, he won't. I won't be here. I'm—I'm going to take a vacation," Anne added in a sudden decision that startled herself.

Belle grinned, and then, at the tears that filled Anne's eyes, relented.

"Fine idea. You never did have a real one. Where are you going?"

"Quincy."

"Heavens! That's not a vacation. That's a penance."

"I never hated it the way you do. I don't mind Aunt Het, and I'm fond of Janet and Bab."

"If it's money, Anne, I'll be tickled to death—Tahoe or Yosemite—or any other real place."

"I loathe them."

"You don't know anything about them. Please. Don't be so highfalutin'. I can do it easily. Make it a birthday present if you like."

"No, thanks just the same. I don't mean to be highfalutin', but I love the bluff, really I do. And I am rather tired. I just want to lie out there on the dunes and think."

Belle's eyes twinkled. "Of course——"

"Belle Mitchell, if you go back to that I'll walk straight out of this room."

"Go back to what?" Belle rose and took the rigid little body in her arms. "Oh, come on, Anne, relax inside and out. Run along and have a grand time feeding the chickens and listening to Aunt Het reminisce and thank the Lord for your simple tastes. When are you going?"

"To-morrow."

"Moms know it?"

"Not yet."

The sisters smiled at each other. Then Belle drew Anne into her arms and held her close, her own cheek on the cool blonde hair, her eyes very soft and tender.

"You dear little thing," she whispered, "you dear—breakable—little thing."

Released, Anne tried to laugh, but she was too queerly excited about something that, as soon as she was alone, was going to slip out from behind the wall to which Belle's presence relegated it. The laugh stopped at her lips in a wistful little smile.

"Remember, Anne, if you change your mind you only have to phone me. I always have some cash on hand. You will, won't you?"

"Yes, I will."

"Honest?"

"Cross my heart to die. And—thanks—awfully——"

"Nonsense."

Belle opened the door and went briskly down the hall. Anne closed it softly, turned out the light, undressed and threw the window as wide as she could. Between the smooth, fresh sheets she lay waiting tensely for silence to settle on the house and leave her quite alone with her own thoughts.

At last Belle and her mother went downstairs, her father wound the cuckoo clock, the door below slammed and Hilda came slowly up. The hall light went out. Silence had come.

In the soft, black stillness, Roger Barton stood out clearly, his crisp blond hair electric with vitality, his wide mouth now tight with repressed anger, now whimsical with mirth.

Would he really look her up?

CHAPTER FOUR

For two days Roger Barton luxuriated in his escape from the law. At twenty-eight all experience had to him the nature of a material thing. It was to be grasped, used to his need, and when it failed him, dropped. He absorbed what his mind needed at the time and went on, as an animal leaves a food supply, its wants satisfied. University and law school had been the road to an education offered by a distant, childless relative with an ambition to have a profession in the family. Roger now wrote and told this relative he had given up the law, but the old man's irate answer did not disturb him in the least. He did not feel that he had been ungrateful or that he owed anything beyond the power of his own conscience to pay.

He had no definite plans for the future, except a general feeling that he was about to enter a real and interesting world. In this world there were fine, high things to do, and he would probably be poor, for John Lowell's office had convinced Roger that ideals do not pay and that nothing else is worth while. He took long tramps through the Marin hills, or lay on the sand at Land's End listening to the waves, and dreamed. In these dreams he thought often of Anne, standing on tiptoes before John Lowell. Now that he would probably never see her again he wished that he knew her better.

There could not be many women like Anne. She gave so fully of her time and interest, and yet there were unstirred depths beneath. Roger had always felt them in sudden, sad looks that passed across Anne's eyes, in the catching of the breath that marked an almost painfully keen interest, in small, quick motions and physical responses that he had accepted as mannerisms, but now saw as revelations of that courage and ideality that was Anne.

"It wasn't easy for her to confront that rotter, but she did it, the slip of a beauty-loving thing! How she must hate an office!"

And she would probably go into just such another in a few days, perhaps a worse one. She might already have found a place. While he lay on the sand, facing the full future, she might be bent above a machine, her fine enthusiasm leashed to the narrow demands of price lists, her physical rarity the object of some cad's coarse admiration. The thought sickened Roger when it first came to him clearly, an employer trying to touch Anne's hand, pressing her knee as he forced her to needless proximity for dictation; Anne, the hurt and quivering object of those advances he had seen other girls welcome with feigned annoyance and sidelong glances. He rose quickly to escape it, although he had come to his favorite cove with a book for the whole afternoon, and began walking again across the dunes. But the picture moved beside him.

"By Jove, it isn't right. A man has a hard enough time hanging to his principles, but a girl, a worth-while girl like that who has something beyond the idea of attracting men—it's a shame."

And he could do nothing to prevent it. He could not even call Anne a friend. He did not know where she lived.

"What a simp!" He stopped and kicked the sand viciously and marveled at his own stupidity. For six months he had worked with Anne and had never asked her to go anywhere with him, or tried to know her better. He knew now that he had looked forward in the mornings to seeing her, soft and small and silvery fair at her desk. He had snatched every opportunity to talk with her. And had made none! Seen so, now, from the outside, it was incredible but true. He knew nothing of Anne whatever. Nothing. She might even be engaged to some man, no better, under the veneer with which men, physically desirous, deceive girls, than John Lowell. Perhaps worse.

Roger strode on, his shoulders hunched now as they always hunched against obstruction and defeat. He would do something to prevent the waste of Anne. He would find Anne a place where that rare fineness would not be quite wasted in the mechanical routine of mercenary ambition. At least he could do that.

Anne quivering with hurt of ugliness, seeing the bay at night, the jewel-like islands, the stately white ferry boats, clinging to them for people she had never known! He would find a place for Anne and see her in it before he went out into the fullness of the future waiting for him. The possibility of Anne's engagement to a worthless man, Roger had finally to push aside, with reluctant concession to his own ideal of her. If Anne were engaged, the man would have to be worth while.

For a day and a half Roger sought a place for Anne. His own mail remained unopened, telephone messages unanswered. About twelve o'clock on the morning of the second day he found what he wanted. It was with a publishing firm and the duties involved a wider scope than the usual stenography. The surroundings were as pleasant as any office could offer, the hours easy, the firm established, conservative to a degree that had always rasped Roger's youthful enthusiasm, but satisfied him when he visioned the two white-haired, old-fashioned gentlemen as Anne's employers. At the end of half an hour he had forced the salary up five dollars a month and secured an option on the opening for two days.

From old Morrison he got Anne's address, and ten minutes later so astonished Hilda by his insistence that he must know Anne's whereabouts, that she forgot the definite orders to tell no one and described the Saunders home at Quincy so minutely that Roger could have found it blindfolded in the dark.

Three hours later Roger got off the train, the sole passenger for the windswept little wooden box upon the dunes. To the north and east the dun sand swelled to mounds and rounded hummocks, held from their eternal drifting by bunches of coarse, gray grass. Across the narrow bay, low hills, dense and black with chaparral, each guarding at its base a tiny white beach, ran westward to the sea, beating on the rocky coast in long, sobbing protest against the lashing wind.

In the vast, clean loneliness of sand and wind and sky, a fear that had touched him on the way up that Anne might think it strange for him to appear suddenly like this, dissolved. The silent emptiness absorbed the misunderstanding of motive, and Roger knew that if Anne did not wish the position she would not think him intrusive. He easily found the half-obliterated wagon-road Hilda had described and took it across the dunes.

As the front gate creaked on its sagging hinges, Barbara Saunders rose from the floor, where she and Anne had been trying to force a faded blue dimity to contain a yard more material than it had ever had.

"I simply will not wear the thing as it is. Janet can say what she likes—she doesn't care what she wears—but I've been to six Quarterlies in it—and I've reached my limit."

The gate slammed and Barbara turned to the window.

"Anne! It's a man!"

Anne looked up, still puzzling over the impossibilities of the faded dimity. "Do you know, Bab, I believe if we ripped the whole thing and turned the top to the bottom and gored it, we could take all the scraps left over and——"

"Come here," Bab whispered as if the person below could hear through the glass. "He doesn't look like an agent. Who on earth——"

Anne came and stood beside her. With nose pressed to the glass she could just see the top of Roger's hat. A loud knock echoed through the house.

"In a hurry, rather, isn't he? Who——" Bab turned. "Why! Anne! Do you know him?"

Before the burning self-consciousness in Anne's eyes, Bab stepped back.

"Will—will—you open the door? Yes, I know him. It's Mr. Barton. He—used to be in the same office."

Barbara's sallow cheeks flushed and her eyes scorned Anne's insincerity. For five nights Anne had let her go on, in the dark intimacy of the same room, piling up the mass of her small perplexities, the annoying efforts at adjustment between herself and Janet and her mother. And all the time Anne had harbored a romance. Anne was not the small, shy cousin, so different from Belle, so like themselves in spite of her daily contact with the great world of business. Anne knew men. When deprived for a few days of her society they came long distances to see her.

"Very well, I'll open the door. But don't be long, please. Janet's cleaning out the chicken house and looks like a fright. My other waist isn't ironed and mother's asleep."

She went. Anne heard her open the door and lead Roger down the creaking hall to the dining-room, a bare, dilapidated room, with sagging floor beyond the skill of the manless household to repair, and woodwork painted streakily by Bab and Janet.

Anne tried to hurry, but her cold fingers fumbled. And even when, at last, the hooks were hooked, the hairpins all in place, and Anne stood with her hand on the knob, it seemed impossible to turn it.

Why had he come?

Was Belle right? How had she known?

Roger Barton looked up as the rear door unexpectedly opened and Anne came toward him, with just the degree of welcome to express her surprise, and the exact amount of pleasure at the sight of a friend. Her greeting angered and disappointed him. Anne thought she did it very well.

"Hunting?" She tossed the word off lightly, as if she had many male friends all deeply interested in the sport.

"No," Roger snapped, annoyed at this assumption of social manner in the stark, unfriendly room, with its stained walls and broken floor. "No. I didn't bring a gun. Besides, it's not duck season yet. I never heard of any other game on the marshes, did you?"

"No. I don't think I have." Anne flushed.

Her embarrassment at discovery did not soften Roger; he had been too hurt by her greeting.

"No. I have no excuse except one you may think presumptuous. I heard, accidentally, of a place I thought might suit you. But you'll have to let them know by Tuesday, to-morrow if possible. It's with Wilmot & Brown—twenty-five a week."

Anne tried to look as if she were seriously considering, but she had scarcely heard. She had not thought of this and now she saw so clearly it could have been the only reason for his coming. He had a deep, human kindliness for all misfortune, and she had been unfortunate. She, a working girl, had given up her place. He had found her another almost instantly.

"Thank you. It was very kind of you. But I'm not sure I'm going back to town directly. My cousins," the word contained the broken floor, the scratched wall, the worn furniture, "want me to stay for the rest of the month. I may do it."

Through the window she saw Janet wheeling a refuse-filled barrow from the chicken run. Bent against the wind, she moved, almost doubled above the vile load. Bab followed with a pitchfork. They disappeared behind the barn. Anne looked straight at Roger:

"There are no men on the place and the school vacations are the only time my Cousin Janet gets enough leisure to do anything. We have been talking about fixing the fences and mending this floor. If you'd come to-morrow instead of to-day you'd have found us calcimining."

Roger's eyes came back to Anne, flushed, defiant, so unmistakably proud and hurt.

"I didn't mean it intrusively," he said quietly. "I just couldn't stand the thought of you taking any old thing—another rotter like Lowell, perhaps—where anything but a machine is wasted. Please believe——"

A sound from beyond the thin partition struck him to silence. It was a high, querulous voice calling, "B—a—b."

Anne started. In another moment Aunt Harriet would come trailing in, her frail hands moving gracefully to insure safety, her sightless blue eyes staring before her. It was years since Harriet Saunders had talked to a city man, a professional man, a man worthy of her own Harrington culture, a culture guarded through long years with Hilda Mitchell's brother, kept undimmed to hand down to "the girls." In another moment she would be there, winding about him the snake-like coils of her selfish monopolization.

"Would you mind if we went outside?" Anne whispered, partly because she could so convey the need for instant action, partly to bear out the quickly invented reason. "Aunt Het is rather an invalid and she has been asleep. If no one answers she'll drop off again, but if she hears us——"

"Certainly," Roger whispered back, and they tiptoed from the room together, out through the nearer kitchen to the yard. And there Anne paused. Where could she take him? There was no spot on that windblown dryness, no garden nook. For a moment she thought of the barn, a favorite place of her own. But it was so overtoned; herself and Roger Barton, who had come to tell her of a position, sitting in the hay!

"It does seem inhospitable to drag you out on a day like this," she began, but Roger cut her short.

"I like gray days, and it may be an extraordinary taste but I love the wind—in the open. Not city wind filled with dust, like the dead hopes of people blowing in your face, but clean, open wind like this."

Anne's face lighted with the pleasure of a shared sensation.

"So do I. It seems to blow all the tangles out of the world and give every one a chance to begin again—simply."

"I guess—maybe—that is it—only I hadn't thought of it as a beginning again. It always makes me feel courageous, like plowing straight on through everything, just as it is."

Anne did not look toward him instantly, but she felt him very sharply, so much taller than herself, broad, with that courageous, crisp hair, and his clear blue eyes that could look so different according to his mood. They would be wide and blue now, with a light in them as if Roger were turning it upon this "everything" through which the wind gave him the courage to plunge. He would be looking straight ahead, his chin up, ready. Anne turned a little, and he was looking exactly like that. She felt that she knew him very well, and then, that he was rushing into the wind, away from her, leaving her behind.