HE TURNED TOWARD HER AND LOOKED LONG UPON THE
FACE THAT HAD BECOME HIS STAR

UNDER THE LAW

UNDER THE
LAW
BY
EDWINA STANTON BABCOCK
Frontispiece by
RALPH P. COLEMAN
THE PENN PUBLISHING
COMPANY PHILADELPHIA
1923

COPYRIGHT
1922 BY
THE PENN
PUBLISHING
COMPANY

Contents

Under the Law

CHAPTER I

ACTION

The streets between Willow Roads and the little town of Morris on the Hudson were still corrugated with March thaw. But the sun shone warmly and there was the wet smell of oncoming spring in the air. Women flung open their coats at the neck; children skipped lightly to school. The river took on an ethereal light that to the shadmen meant the time when their soggy boats would be moored to the long lines of stakes near the channel. The country highways were less hopeless with mud, and the spring tramp began appearing at back doors.

A girl, driving her car rather absently through the unimaginative streets of Morris, stopped suddenly at sight of a ring of loafers gathered by the curb in a side street, jeering mildly and apparently baiting a tumbled heap of something in the gutter. What was it? A dog? A child? Sard Bogart, her brown eyes alert, sprang from her car and went over to see.

As the girl approached the group, one or two of the older and better dressed townspeople edged rather shamefacedly away. The village postman, hailing the girl loquaciously, explained, "Just one of them Gloomy Guses. They come out like turtles this time of the year. This feller has likely stole a ride on a freight car and been dumped off at West Morris. Seems he's trying to pertend he don't know who he is. That ain't hard for a tramp; ain't nobody anyhow." The postman scratched his head, wishing to cover all aspects of the matter. "Ef he's drunk, it's a new kind of drunk. Vanilla extract, they tell me, is what this kind boozes on nowadays." To the girl's indignant question, "Oh, they ain't doing him no harm; just worrying him a little to see him act funny. The authorities?" the postman looked a little vague. "Well, I should say, it being about noon, that the authorities has gone home to their dinners."

The young figure crossed the street and approached the jeering loafers absorbed in prodding the helpless bundle of humanity in the gutter. They shoved it from side to side as they demanded, "Say, where's yer wife? Where'd ye come from? We'll tell yer where to get off! Say, Jack, where do you keep the stuff? You tell me, I won't let anybody know."

More comments of a humorous nature were made for the benefit of the girl approaching. "He ain't so handsome when ye come close up." One wag hushed the others elaborately. "No, mebbe it's some friend of this young lady's. Say, take him for a ride, Miss. I'll bet he ain't never had one."

"Give him a shave first," urged one gum-chewing youth. There was violent nudging from a rather stout woman in the group. "Shut up! Ain't you got no sense? That's Judge Bogart's daughter." Then to railing unbelief, "Sure it is. Ain't I washed down to her house a hundred times? Hullo, Miss Bogart, ain't it terrible how these fellers is treating that poor drunk?"

At the voice, the girl lifted her concerned gaze from the sight of the wretched figure sitting now on the curbstone, both bleeding shoe-wrecked feet in the gutter.

"Mrs. Croyder, this is pitiful. Why doesn't someone do something? Why do the authorities permit people to be tormented like this?"

Mrs. Croyder, as one not accustomed to question the vagaries of the authorities, was a little vague.

"Well, now, Mr. Snowgen, that's the policeman, wouldn't never hear to anything like it, but he's gone home to his dinner."

"Then the traffic police?" The girl looked about her eagerly.

"They've gone home to their dinners,"

"But surely——" With an impatient exclamation the girl bent down in the middle of the awed circle and looked keenly into the face of the vagabond on the curb. She examined the bleeding feet and pale, distraught face and spoke very gently. "Can I help you?"

The soft girlish tones seemed hardly to penetrate to the consciousness of the tramp. He did not look up nor try to answer. At last, in response to the prodding toe of a village gamin and his challenge, "Say, ain't you got no manners? The lady is speakin' to yer," the head, sunk between the shivering shoulders, was raised with a sodden, uncomprehending look. Then the man, ragged, unshaven, with an unspeakable look of abandoned misery, did a strange thing. He struggled, shaking as with palsy, to his feet. There was a week's reddish growth of beard on his white face; his voice, very feeble, stammered and was lost in places, but he replied slowly, "Can—can you read that name in my hat? Perhaps there is an address there, I don't know. I can't remember." With a hand like a claw, the tramp pointed to a wrinkled cap lying in the gutter.

Sard, seeing him sway as though he would pitch forward, put out an arm to steady him. At this, a passer-by came up to her and, without a word, supported the collapsing man on the other side. This youth smiled sympathetically.

"Is there anything I can do, Miss Bogart?"

The girl turned sharply. "Mr. Lowden," then with a little air of relief, "this man seems dazed, sick. Oughtn't we get help? Oughtn't we to do something?"

"Wait till Snowgen gets back from his dinner," bawled the chorus of loafers. A dozen voices advised, "Snowgen will put him in the lock-up, and if he can't prove anything, they'll send him up for vagrancy. Here's his hat. No, ma'am, I wouldn't touch it if I was you; that ain't no hat fer a lady to hold." One of the group, with effects of delicate shrinking, held the wretched headgear so that the girl could read a name written with ink on a piece of tape stitched inside on the lining. There were two initials smutted beyond recognition, but she could distinguish the surname "Colter." With a curious little gesture of courtesy, she bent to the pitiful figure she was helping support, asking gravely and distinctly, "Mr. Colter, you are in trouble. Can we help you? Is there anything we can do for you?"

This courtesy to the forlorn scarecrow the crowd found vastly amusing. The thing brought laughter and the inevitable double entente of small-town comprehension. At last someone said wrathfully, "Shut up! Don't you know nothing? That there's the Judge's daughter. She ain't no fool!" The crowd, now avid for more sensation, watched to see how the wastrel tottering there would take this thing.

The shaking hand was held out for the cap. Some bystander with rough hand jammed it on the tumbled head of thick auburn hair, but the tramp feebly removed it. He turned slowly, staring into the girl's face. His eyes, of a very intense blue, were large and unnaturally bright, as from fever.

"Thank you," he said weakly. Then with a swift glance full of unnameable shame, "Please don't worry about me. I am only going to find work—somewhere," The man closed his eyes, muttering,

"When I can forget—when I can remember——"

Sard Bogart turned to the youth who was helping her. "Will you come with me?" she appealed. He nodded.

"I am going to drive this poor thing to that little boarding-house on Norman Street. I know the woman who keeps it. It is quiet and clean."

The circle of loafers tittered. "Say, lady, wait till Snowgen gets back from his dinner. Snowgen can take the feller to the right boarding-house, all right."

The girl, for answer, smiled good-humoredly. "Mr. Snowgen can interview this man after he has been fed and can speak for himself. Just at present, Mr. Lowden and I will take charge."

Lowden, the young assistant of the Morris Bank, frowned on any more suggestions, and together the man and girl supported the wretched figure to the car. Together they somehow got it to a seat. Then the young fellow watched Sard with admiration as she calmly drove with her rather dubious-looking passenger through the staring streets of Morris.

The girl was silent, and the young banker made but one observation. "Small town life breeds a thirst for sensation, doesn't it? It never gets mentally to the economic questions lying back of the sensation."

"It is still the Binet Test, fourteen-year-old mind," laughed the girl.

As the car halted before the little boarding-house on Norman Street, Lowden begged, "I wish you'd let me handle all the rest."

The girl turned her eyes on him. "You think I may meet with awkward things?"

The young banker was evasive. "Let's remember we are rather a mean little town," he said simply. "Please leave it all to me. I'll do exactly as you say."

The girl's grave look rested on the wreck of a man sitting in a heap beside her, his head sunk on his chest, his ragged coat open and showing his bare, famished-looking chest, his white lips muttering feebly.

"I want him put to bed and fed—very lightly at first. I want him bathed and shaved, after a doctor has seen him. I want him either sent to the hospital here at my expense or, when he is strong enough, to come to my father for work. I want him to be sure, sure, he has friends. I want him," the quick tears came into her young eyes, "to feel that he has another chance."

The youth nodded, his eyes on hers. This was Sard Bogart, the Judge's daughter, who had been back from college only a few months. It was understood in the villages of Morris and Willow Roads that Miss Bogart was a "queer," lonely girl, impatient of many things, apt to be impulsive and to do impolitic and "unpopular" things. This was one of the things—pulling a muddy gutter-snipe out of the gutter. Yet the light in the girl's clear brown eyes was a new and grateful thing to the young bank officer. Somehow he felt as if he had never looked into a fine woman's eyes before. He took his orders gladly and with sober admiration. "And keep me in touch, won't you?" The girl leaned from the car, laying her commands on him. He lifted his hat gravely.

Lowden alighted and helped down the ragged vagrant. His gentleness was like Sard's own. The girl, watching this gentleness, saw the broken figure of the man try to turn once—try to look back at her. "Yes?" said the girl "Yes?" Then her eyes, warm with pity, "Wait a moment, please, Mr. Lowden. Yes, Colter, what is it you want to say?"

But she could not understand. She saw only a shaken, shivering man muttering, "I can't remember," and again the stammering sentence, "I can't remember."

CHAPTER II

UNDER THE LAW

The house faced on the river. The massive hills that turned bronze in the setting sun were irregular background for the white castle-like buildings on the eastern banks. But the western shore of the Hudson had set between small mountains little, hilly-looking villages; among them were the Dutch towns, Morris and Willow Roads, whose old roofs, slowly giving way to factories and churches of one period, were at last disappearing before the real estate man's idea of a suburban development. At the edge of this development were the far-apart homes of the well-to-do and the long lines of green lawns; the rich trees and tinted shrubberies were illumined and laced with a thousand lovely colors of massed iris and waving tulips set, like the gardens on the river, against royal purple of opposite shores.

Sard's room was in the square tower of the house her father had built in his more grandiloquent days. If the Judge's wife had lived, they might have lengthened and strengthened the home into something like a practical sunny house of our day, but as it was, the curious construction of red sandstone and black and white Tudor retained its perplexed conglomerate air, only saved from freakishness by the soft mantle of vines that ruffled the chimney and girdled its windows. All around to the sloping banks of the river were the trees that the Judge's father had planted and tended into maturity. It was a League of Nations in Trees! English maples, Norway spruces, lindens, horse-chestnuts from Versailles, Japanese maples and Greek planes and orange trees from along the Mediterranean. To Sard, since her very first party dress, those trees had seemed a sort of litany; the noble forms of every clime and country raised their mysterious crests, sought with yearning roots, were full of the first murmur of June-bee days; waved like women the soft undulations of their shapes, bathed in blue morning or loomed in formless grandeur on the night.

It was a puzzle to Sard that these trees kept to the laws of their growth in one soil.

The windows of Sard's room opened to the four winds and gave on the tree-fringed expanse of water. At night those tower panes were literally dashed with stars. As a little girl she had lain watching their fairy dance like fire-flies; later her clear brown eyes became fixed thoughtfully on what seemed strings of jasmine-like blossoms. Coming home from boarding-school, the stars half thrilled her with mystical trailing blossoms of a home-sky, but now of late, after college and a new sense of values, these stars had suddenly ceased throwing their soft lights across the panes. East, west, north and south, they now stood in an awful order like knights leaning on spears. They were challenging in their geometry, severe in their puzzling fixity; they seemed to say—"Well, Sard, you are grown up now; you make your own choices; what is your law? We have our law—have you discovered yours?"

During two years at college Sard had thought little about "law." The stars there had asked few questions. They had seemed companionable, dashing confidently, shining over the campus with capricious groups of girls; they had shone on bright camp-fires and twinkled at the saucy songs shouted into their very eyes. The college stars had seemed to vibrate like sleigh-bells to such defiant songs as "Where, oh death, is thy stingalingaling?" and they thrilled to a thousand funny whistles and calls of a rather self-consciously emphasized youth. But here they were back with their spell and their question. Knights with spears, they rode softly past the window-panes, keeping their geometric order, saying, insistently—"This is our law; we obey always. What is your law?"

At first the thing had awed Sard, then saddened her. So after all, the world physical went on this grand orderly, terrible sort of way, and so did the spiritual world seem to, no matter how much one wanted to change things; but the world of people and purpose? how about that?

What should be the laws of one's life? The books on Sard's shelves gleamed in the moonlight. Here and there they had helped and suggested and one or two men or women Sard had met seemed to have an idea. Then this thing they called "Love"—Sard, lying in bed, pondered; did love do what people said it did, sweeten, make deeper, wiser? Well, Sard had seen girls at college who became engaged, said they were in love, certainly were changed and made queer by a force bigger than themselves; and yet it all seemed to end trivially. One or two children, a little house not very well kept, a tired husband, not "enough" money ... and there were other girls who mocked at love and played with it and coquetted until their faces became cynical, hard and horrible.... If there were things that swept people so they rose bigger and finer than they had ever dreamed themselves to be, that might count some way, but how did they start becoming bigger and finer? One couldn't go down-stairs and announce to one's family—"From now on I am going to be bigger and finer." So, tossing away from the star inquiry, turning penitently back to it, the young form fought out the thing. A sense of awful loneliness and youth came to Sard, an awful sense of not knowing herself, not working from the most inward of her. She stretched out appealing arms—"What are my laws?" she asked softly. "Oh, what are my laws?" For Sard knew, and knew with feelings of awe that for every life that counted there must be laws.

CHAPTER III

BY-LAWS

The Judge opened the door and propelled himself into the room in a finicking, faultfinding way, peculiarly inappropriate to his massive shoulders and head. He grunted something to Sard's "Good-morning, Dad," picked up his paper and flapped it into a fold. His slow eyes, seeming like ground glass set in front of the remorseless deliberations of his mind, paused at the coffee-urn, as he made inquiry:

"Dunstan not down yet?"

For answer Dunstan Bogart shuffled down the broad stairs and, slipping on a rug, entered the dining-room with an operatic air of being in extreme haste. Half tumbling into the room, he halted, dramatically, appearing to remind himself that the breakfast-room was holy ground. "Greeting to thee, fellow sufferers," he announced cheerfully. He made passes at his father's back, stared his aunt solemnly in the face, ruffled Sard's hair and finally took his seat.

"Frogs in the finger-bowls again?" he questioned sepulchrally. "Else why all this gloom?"

The Judge, unnoticing, motioned his finished grapefruit away. No one appearing to effect this transfer, he indicated the butler's pantry back of him and Sard felt anew for the electric bell.

"I wonder if this thing works—it doesn't seem to ring in the kitchen."

"It is at present ringing in the chicken-coop and the garage," announced Dunstan; "I heard it as I dressed—it is ringing in the furnace and in the fountain; it is ringing in Heaven, it is ringing—in—excuse me."

The Judge, twitching the paper, looked at his son. "She ought to hear it," he growled; "ring it again."

Dunstan suddenly dived under the table, feeling for the button.

"Blame not the damsel," came the lad's voice, this time near Sard's feet.

"Cuss the battery if you must cuss." He emerged from under the table and catapulted into the kitchen, where he nearly upset the cook, entering with a tray of smoking Sally Lunn. His father followed him with a cold eye of disgust.

"Does he think that sort of thing amusing?" he inquired. The sacks under the Judge's dull eyes had a slightly swelled, feverish look. The eyes themselves were leaden gooseberry and boiled hard in the pupil. The Judge's nose, aristocratic and sharp, held a fearful look of pride, and the grizzled hair, scant on his head, was heavy on ears and eyebrows. Sard had often thought that the men and women brought before her father must have had dread long before the slightly nasal voice deliberately twanged out the sentence. But as a little girl she remembered her mother always said to her, "Baby, we love Foddie, don't we? Foddie won't send us with the naughty pwisoners to pwison. Foddie won't take away all our nice toys and put us in dungeons." There was invariably a smell of cologne and little soft tickles of curls that went with this, and a rustle of spreading ruffled silks and laces. With these things, part of their pretty feminine play, Sard could hear the whisper, that strange mother whisper, the whisper which is back of the building of the whole world, the whisper which is responsible for the best men and the best women, for all greatness and heroism and sometimes for the weakness and foolishness and decadence—The Mother-whisper.

"We love Foddie, little Sard, don't we? We aren't afraid of him—he won't send us to pwison." Then over their own clasping had come the man's bear hug and little laughs and screams from her pretty mother. Then Sard had always gone gravely and happily away to play.

Dunstan returned from the kitchen with the air of news. "Cook hath secured the main part of the breakfast booty, but thy maiden hath left—she answers not to her name in the scullery."

Miss Aurelia Bogart, the Judge's sister, sighed deeply. "Poor Dora, she never came in at all last night—she—I—you—well, she is taking this thing very hard—I suppose," with another sigh, "it is natural."

Dunstan grinned. "You are right, Aunt Reely; right, delicate nun! It is not unnatural to be sad when your only brother is indicted for murder. So the fair nymph never came in at all last night? Queer about these women." Dunstan winked at his sister, then stared blankly into his father's equally blank face.

"I say, Pop, are you really going to jug him for life, meaning the tow-headed murderer brother of our esteemed waitress?"

The Judge turned. It might have been a veritable mask of implacability that met the young brown faun-like gaze turned toward it, except that plaster is tenderer and softer than the human face devoid of the emotions of the human heart. A human face controlled by machine action is a terrible thing to see. The Judge had for years been a machine.

Dunstan's own face reddened and turned away. Sticking out his cup in the direction of the breakfast urn, the Judge remarked curtly, "More sugar." Then to his son, "I rather fancy your sort of levity is not as amusing as you seem to think. It is merely underbred and oafish, a sort of nigger minstrel's buffoonery." The Judge paused a moment and then added coolly, "As for what you wish to know, I am always ready to talk with you on any subject that is not pure meddling on your part."

"Ah——" remarked Dunstan, with reverent aplomb. "I heard the kitchen door bang; she's back. 'Tis well; ring for hot muffins." With a curious glint of the brown eyes, Dunstan looked back into the cold gaze fixed upon him. But pure animal joy cannot long survive the mortal ice of the glacial human spirit. The dark eyes fell and the youth murmured thoughtfully, "and be hanged by the neck till you are dead".

Then the Judge rose and after they had heard the whine of his car swinging out of the drive, Sard and her brother looked at each other. Together they had noted the red eyes of the maid who, high-heeled of shoe and extravagant of dark hair, had replenished the muffins and brought back the coffee-urn.

"I don't envy you your job, Sard," Dunstan rose, went to the glass and settled his tie. "You were a gump not to go on with college and get a 'kayrear' like the other flappers. 'Father needs you'—poof! He needs nothing but that ice-box he calls himself. By heck!" Dunstan turned suddenly. "Do you know I believe it is sentencing people to death and the Can that makes him like that? It—it does something to him, don't you see?" But from his interest in the idea Dunstan went to concern for his sister. "Aunt Reely could run this joint. You go in for a career, Sard, and get out from under."

His sister laughed. "After all, he's the only father we've got, Dunce. Maybe after I've been around home a bit—it seemed dreadful when Father wanted me here not to come—for him to have nothing that belonged to him." Sard frowned a little. "Don't you think parents do an awful lot for us, and what do we do for them? Look at poor little mother. I used to visit for months at a time and leave her. She must have been lonely—she never said so—and then those two years at college and then—she went——" Sard's eyes widened with the sense of what those lonely months had been—of the companionship she herself had lost.

"Well," Dunstan loomed over her gloomily, "you'll turn into an old maid, a wall flower, a sort of solemn crow." He stood on his heels, hands in his pockets, surveying her. "It's all of a piece," he said fretfully. "You took down those bally chromos of Paw's and you got pretty chintz for the chairs and put around bright candles—and he hated it. You begged him to let you cut windows into the hall and he squashed you. You can't get sun and joy into this house, and you can't get sun and human warmth into that jellyfish." With a sudden squirm Dunstan struck a match. "Oh, he's so plaguy sure," he growled. "Law? law?—a lot of stuff in books brought down from the funny old bigwigs in England—all scared of their king; all hanging on to rotten things they called 'precedents' for fear somebody would get something away from them; charters, burning of witches, dungeons, strait-jackets, ducking-stools; Father belongs to those days! Well," the young fellow turned upon his sister fiercely, "they know no better, but you and I do know better. We belong to a different age, and we sit here comfortable and happy while our smug parent does for a young fellow, a young blood-and-bone man, full of grit and sap and dreams, a fellow that could sail a boat and cut down a tree! We send him to a filthy, smelly hell of a prison with a lot of awful men!" Dunstan stopped. "I went through State prison once, and the smell of it alone would rot a man's soul—keep him hating good forever—you realize it? A curly-headed fellow, a man younger than I!"

The girl sitting soberly behind the silver coffee-urn looked wistfully at her brother. Dunstan's brown face was long, and his ears just a trifle pointed like a faun's; his voice was young and crackling, like a tongue of young flame trying to push up through heaped-up brush. He smoked silently, staring down at his sister. "It's good-bye for him," he said slowly, "good-bye to green trees and swimming in the pools and climbing mountains and hearing a girl's voice. Oh! to just being a man! Good-bye forever to everything but smells and rats and the minds of decayed men and we—you, Sard, and my father are doing this thing."

Dunstan suddenly pushed back a chair. "Drat parents!" he said fiercely, "drat law, drat the system," then he laughed. "Aunt Reely, don't shudder; if a man on the stage talked that way, you'd think it was lovely. Did you see my tennis racket?" demanded Dunstan in his usual voice. "Oh, I guess I jammed it in the rack of the car. Well, so long; don't grieve for me if I don't turn up for lunch. I guess I'll mess with Prudy Anterp and her bunch."

Sard and her aunt watched the light reedy figure swing around the little footpath to the garage, and in a few minutes Dunstan's car had glided out of sight.

CHAPTER IV

OTHER LAWS

Two years of college had done little to affect Sard Bogart's life. True, those two years she had trodden the athletic-social paths of the American academic experience gaily, then the death of her mother called her home. Her father's appeal made on the stark, lonely night after the funeral had created circumstances she had met four-square. From that time on, Sard, with youthful heroism, had seen her life cut out for her. She was to run the home and "keep things bright" for her father.

There was also the Judge's sister, Miss Aurelia, of the age always in conjecture, and of a curious beauty that made poetry of an otherwise ineffective personality. Miss Aurelia's small head was covered with swathes of vital auburn hair, her delicate skin had porcelain pinks and whites, and her soft eyes and slim frame were of a curious suggestive quality that only needed force and will to make her a vibrant, seductive human creature. But this force and will were lacking. Miss Aurelia had been reared altogether on the "ladylike" plan. So while there was no look of wear and tear on her, no wrinkles on her face, no gray in her hair, and while her teeth were even, with the effect of crowding her pursy mouth, yet all these signs and colors of her spoke of untried, untested things; there was an eternal insecurity in her rabbity chin, her soft apologetic voice, the tentatives of her conversational method.

It was said in the village that Miss Aurelia "presided" over her brother's house, and that Sard "ran" it. However, there was no friction between the two. Sard accepted Miss Aurelia with the same devotion that she tended her mother's giant fuchsia, an unnecessary trellised crime of thousands of purple and red flowers, and refrained from sending away the chromos that her father loved.

"The—er—telephone, my dear," Miss Aurelia came softly up to Sard's tower room, "sorry to call you but the—er—person—long distance—don't you ever find it confusing?—I—they—she—the operator."

"Did you get the name?" asked Sard. "Is it Minga Gerould?"

Miss Aurelia wondered if it was, paused, hesitated, then, "Your curtains certainly do need freshening. I never noticed it before. Yes, I think it may be Minga. She—it—sounded husky, long distance, perhaps, I—they seldom speak distinctly; the—er—operator was extraordinarily uncivil,"—Miss Reely pursed her rabbity mouth, "She—I——"

"Thanks, Aunt Reely, yes, the curtains do need laundering." Sard was out of the room and down the stairs, the receiver at her ear. "Minga! you rascal! Well, I am glad! Why didn't you write me, you little trimmer—— No, ma'am, I did not—did you? Was it nice? No, but I saw Cynthia and Gertrude, they're back, bobbed hair and golf-sticks, bloom of youth is their line this year. What are you laughing at? No—is he?—to Cora Bland? Wasn't that like Cora—she's going to finish? I wish I were—why? Oh, that'll keep! Well, Cora is a good all 'round sport, don't you think? She'll make Alpha, you see if she doesn't—— What? Oh, Minga, don't ring off! That's so, of course you have to pack; all right then—see you to-night—so glad you are coming, don't forget to sit on the right-hand side of the train coming up, the river's wonderful as you come over the hill. Bye-bye."

Sard, smiling, hung up the receiver. Not until this, the first visit of a college pal since her mother's death, had she felt her hunger for real companionship. Now as she had done the first day she had left off her simple mourning, she looked up at the portrait of her mother hanging in the hall. She kissed her hand to that curly, ear-ringed little lady. "Dear little dead Mother," said Sard tenderly. "Dear little dead Mother!" Instinctively she thought about the mothers of the other girls of the town. Mrs. Bradon, Cynthia's mother, fat, stupid and conventional. Gertrude's mother, a hard practical woman with ambitions, the other mothers as Sard knew them seemed too girlish, crude, trivial, beside the little soft, curly, ear-ringed lady that Sard had only just begun to look at with woman eyes. "Would we have gotten on, Mother dear, would we?" whispered Sard, wistfully. "The other girls don't with their mothers."

Often Sard had been troubled by the guilty feeling that had her mother lived—well, there might not have been so much comradeship between them. Sard, clad in her crisp, clean linen, with white low-cut shoes and the plain little pin at her trim collar, remembered with a sense of tender wonder all her mother's little fripperies and gewgaws, the chains, the laces, and little sets of jewelry and pins and dewdabs—how quickly two years of camp and college had taught one of how small account were these things!

It needed tenderness and humor, even that of a very young girl, to get any real human life into a home like the Bogart home. It had a stodgy gloom of its own, a solemn, gloomy importance like the Judge's step, his way of entering a room. The hall was dark, the wainscoting was dark, the ceilings were gummy with queer medallions and heavy, gemmy Georgian ornaments. Of late years there had been extra electric lights put in the hall and a fireplace added to the living-room. These things gave a little cheer, as did the brass candlesticks with the soft tawny or mellow colored candles of Sard's own choosing. There was distinguished silver in the dining-room and rows of heavenly blue and pink willow plates in the cupboards, just as there were graceful pieces of Majolica that burned their hot color into the dull respectability of the living and tea rooms, but these didn't help much. Sard often shook her head over it all. She would turn away from her mother's portrait to that of her father when a young man. The then unbearded face had a cold kind of virtue and strength, the uncovered mouth was prim and uncompromising. Could it be that Sard's home had somehow taken its color from that prim mouth, those hard gooseberry colored eyes? The girl went slowly to a mirror over the large fireplace in the living-room. She pushed into the sunlight a vase full of daffodils, the better to see her own face.

"Funny! Where did you come from?" she asked the girl in the mirror, then softly, as if it were almost shameful to ask this question, "What are your laws?"

The dark brown eyes looked wistfully at Sard; the forehead, a little high but square and harmonious, was swept with a wave of golden brown hair that crisped with vitality. The face seemed not interesting to the girl who questioned it. "If I had more of Mother I could do things with Father," she thought; "if I had little curls and earrings that shook, and dimples and queer little pudgy, patting hands. These do things to men—and women, too. I've seen it happen."

Sard thought of girls she knew, girls grown up with the new law, girls who finished at college, graduated into doctors, lawyers, landscape gardeners, statisticians, economists. She looked at her own hands, long, thin, strong in the wrists, broadened and browned from tennis, boating and golf and driving of machines. Sard, however, did not see in the mirror the thing that held the mystery of her life, the gift that would bring all that was rightfully hers to her. Do people ever think of this one gift of personality—for instance, the mouth that your pirate uncle sent down to you, that brought you the husband whom you had to leave to save your children; there is the shrug of your shoulders that came from your father's side—they did that, those people back of your father, and thus were able to throw off whole loads of care; that curved little finger goes with the sensitiveness of your mother's family. You will be hurt and raw from things all your life with that finger! Yes, but you will be also exultant, drunken, wild with the quintessence of beauty, of the mystery and wonder that is all through the dull, daily grind. Sard's unique gift was the poise of her head. Here was an imperious quality like that of a princess, here a curve of chin and backset of the shoulders which was at the same time elastic and defiant and challenging. A girl like this, of indomitable pride, curious nerve, wonders at some of the insults she receives from the thing this pride and nerve bring to life in others; also she is sometimes touched and wondering to find how others believe in and trust her.

Oh! our ancestors!—brave, struggling, dreaming, pathetic ancestors! How you struggled, how you prayed and agonized, or were wild and wanton to send your strange gifts down to us! Here's to you, Ancestors, all of you! May we send you the best and bravest of you on and as far as we can, we will do the best we can with your gifts!

CHAPTER V

FOR LIFE

The kitchen of the Bogart House was a pleasant room whose two doors opened out into a tidy latticed vegetable garden and whose outer arrangement of entry and drying yard were of the "save steps" description. Sard and her mother had worked these things out together, for at college, under one of the few strong souls and true brains that are still left unmartyred in American colleges, the girl had learned practical ideals of what should be the attitude of the employer to those who toil for his comfort. It was Sard who had the kitchen walls painted a sunshiny yellow, selected pretty rag rugs and placed bookshelves and good reading lights in the room; it was she who had insisted upon the lattices and ladyslippers and morning-glory vines. All with the sense of her own pleasure in them, though none of the people the Bogarts employed seemed to care much for these things. The young daughter of the house soon began to realize that any bright sport-hat she herself wore, the set of her skirts, the make of her shoes, interested Dora and Maggie better than the books she tried to discuss with them. The name of Edith Cavell did not thrill them as did the name of the most recent screen actress. They cared only, it seemed, to catch up with the joy and pleasure of the life ahead of them. They seemed always to feel that the very stuff of life was arrayed against them—and sometimes they had reason.

Now as the girl pushed aside the swinging door of the old-fashioned "butler's pantry," she was half prepared for the interrupted Irish sentences, the hot questions and answers.

"Is it justice, I ask you; is it justice? To take him now—only nineteen. When he's sort of wild and notional by nature and traps set for him? Maybe he dunnit—maybe he dunnit, but he keeps saying he ain't done it. Oh, my God, my God, I don't know."

The girl stood before the two women in the kitchen, the cook who, like Sard, wiped her hands and silently handed her the ordering list.

"Thank you, Maggie," said Sard; then, her forehead drawing together, "Dora, is there anything new?"

The waitress with a gesture of dumb inability to answer, turned away, and Sard, no asperity in her voice, saw that it was to a resolutely turned back that she was speaking.

"She blames me, somehow," the girl sighed, "as if I could help it!"

"Please put the north room to air. Miss Gerould arrives late in the afternoon—I think there isn't a waste-paper basket in the room, so, Dora, will you hunt one up, and see to all the electric bulbs, won't you? And towels, the little embroidered ones——" Sard waited, half contemplating, thinking of reproof for the back turned so rudely and obstinately toward her direction, then she looked at the slight, slender figure in its gray gown, the apron tied so carefully and delicately, the capless, pretty hair, and was conscious suddenly of someone young like herself. Through this veil of youth she saw what kind of sorrow it was that bowed the head of the woman standing there; something that she did not know was the most glorious passion in the world beat up through Sard's heart into her brain; it was the passion for humanity, for justice and fairness for all. "Why should I be giving orders to her when she is suffering? Supposing Dunstan were in trouble and—and shame, and I had to take orders from the very people that——Dora—Dora," the girl persisted, "is there nothing I can do?"

There was no answer, only dry coughing sobs. The cook turned. "Ah, don't bother your head with it all, dear. It ain't nothing to you—only, Gawd help the poor thing! Er course," said the cook somewhat bitterly, "we're all under this law; the boy done wrong; he done awful, and they'll be able to prove it against him, and your papa—well," the cook sighed, "only he's young, a rill smart curly-headed young feller and his chanst is gorn."

Then cook, with a curious rising howl, turned away herself.

Wiping her eyes, the young waitress stonily piling up the silver on the tray, let drop a fork. The girl stood there looking at it. Sard tried to comfort her.

"It—it is Human Sorrow," she said awkwardly. "I think we—we don't understand sorrow as well as we ought to and I am quite powerless but Miss Aurelia and I care, Dora."

The girl said it tremulously; already she was feeling the awful gulf between a person who suffers tragedy and that other who stands by longing to help. Also Sard knew a kind of shame—for it seemed treachery to her father and the equity he maintained, to say more. What could words do? It was Sard's first experience of the great naked fact of human sorrow and shame; she knew that the only person who could help Dora would be someone who had been through a wave of tragedy like hers.

"Words," thought Sard hotly, "are disgusting. We bandy them about and pile them up like money. We exchange them like coin of the realm." The young girl, clean and defiant of emotion as a young animal, had no mature power, that amazing power borne through sorrow and sympathy, the strange power of the healing touch, else she would have touched Dora's bowed head, put a comforting hand on the heaving shoulder. She stood silent, then once more said, helplessly, "Dora, don't you believe me, that I do truly care?"

Suddenly there was a curious half shriek, the terrible leap of human emotion through the breaking discipline of lips and eyes—"Oh, I know you care——Oh, Miss Sard—but they'll jug him just the same—for life—for life! His chanst is gorn."

Dora's voice then sank to a kind of moaning soliloquy. "Oh, yes, that's what they all tell me; he's killed a man, or they say he has "—the woman shot a haggard look into the girl's face. "I've thought and thought and I know from reading the papers and all that almost any rich man's son would get off," she said it bitterly, "but that isn't it—it's something else, it's that he's only done wrong once, and now he's got to live and die with the worst—oh," moaned Dora passionately, "they'd ought to be laws to save them that's got wrong into them, not to smash 'em. For life, for life!"

No great poet could have crammed into one sentence the thing that the weeping girl crammed into these words—"for life." Gently Sard closed the door and, hardly knowing what she did, tiptoed back toward the front of the house. She looked out on the late spring foliage, on the tulips and Japanese maples a-quiver with June, on the purple fleur de lis and peonies, dewy with color against the long sparkling ribbon of the morning river ... against all that virginal clean growth with its rapturous aspiration toward the sky that feeds it, the girl heard the poor human cry, "For life—for life!"

So this was actually happening! Life, a smooth velvet delicious thing was going on in the front of Sard's home—music, pleasure, ease and beauty, while in the back part of it life was labor and anguish and shame! This was the law under which Sard's parents and their friends had lived contentedly, it was the law under which she was expected to live contentedly. "I never will," whispered the girl fiercely, "I never, never will; these are not my laws, I am not 'under' the law."

Sard, slowly leaving the kitchen, came upon her aunt. Miss Aurelia, with the finest and lightest of dusters, was performing various rituals with the legs of table and chairs; now she moved one thin hand in swirls over the piano top. "A piano collects dust so strangely," she explained, as if the piano were a sentient thing that made dust-collecting its object. "I've always been so glad to do the dusting," remarked Miss Aurelia for the hundredth time, "he—your father, of course, never notices but she—we—not that I want to criticise your mother, that would be impossible, only she-we—at that time—that is to say—in any emergency I would naturally; of course, some servants were careful and others not. I had once," said Miss Aurelia, with the air of beginning a new subject, "I had an—an aunt," she whispered the thing mysteriously, "she—er—hated dust —— Sard, you're twisting your ring—you look—is anything wrong?"

Sard, motioning toward the kitchen, spoke in a low voice. "Aunt Reely, that boy, Terence O'Brien, is Dora's only brother; she helped educate him; there isn't anyone but those two —— Isn't it too terrible?"

Miss Aurelia lifted a lamp off the table, dusted where it had been and put it back again; in doing so the silk shade toppled and fell. Miss Aurelia, frowning and gasping, treated the incident like a catastrophe, something to be met with firmness and an intake of breath. When she had solemnly adjusted all as it had been again, she took up the subject of dust. "It's the open fires," she remarked gloomily; "sometimes I think we should never have—a land where there is no dust, that is how I always think of Heaven! Yes, Sard, I know that—er—she—he, of course, it was a regular murder, such as you read about, he is, you see, a criminal, my dear, and that, of course, makes you—me—us feel a natural revulsion." Miss Aurelia stood up; the sunlight fell upon her gown of a rather sentimental blue with white ruffles, her fair white skin was noticeable even in the bald morning light, her rabbity mouth somehow too full of teeth, paused unctuously, with drama on the subject in hand.

Sard, strumming a few chords on the piano, looked thoughtfully at her aunt. "Shall I bring in some of those big Japanese iris?" she asked. "Minga's coming to-night, did I tell you? I want things to look jolly. The old dear hasn't been here since that holiday week before Mother" —Sard never could finish the sentence— "Mother died. Do you suppose Father will let us have the small sedan altogether? Minga is used to her own car; she fusses with any machine they've got."

Something that had been hanging on Miss Aurelia's mind hung there still; this slangy sort of talk, the planning for Minga Gerould's visit Aunt Aurelia hailed with delight. This was more as it should be, better than Sard's behavior since she had remained home from college after her mother's death. It was the kind of thing, some of it, that Miss Aurelia had grown to believe in while she deprecated it. American young girls, of course, came of a nobly material race, everyone avowed that America was very great and the fact of the young people having no manners and no respect for age and no morals and no loyalty to life—well, Miss Aurelia thought it was only the other countries who were jealous who said such things. American young girls came of a nobly material race. Americans were so practical, so anxious to get ahead—everyone seemed so anxious that the young people shouldn't be high-brow. But then Sard had a queer, Miss Aurelia thought almost common, way of noticing servants and poor people, their troubles and all that. It wasn't good or even religious to think too much. For instance, the new man on the place. Miss Aurelia didn't think it quite nice or "young" to be interested in him. Miss Aurelia had often spoken to a fat, calm friend, Mrs. Spoyd, about these things, and Mrs. Spoyd had sighed, "I know what you mean, dear. Did you hear about the little Gringlon girl? Well, of course, it may not be true. I heard it from their dressmaker, but it seems she noticed everything and—er—was crazy for all kinds of information. No, dear, of course, Sard ought not to be noticing anything but a good time at her age. Girls should only be interested in a good time. They shouldn't be interested in—er—unpleasant things."

So Miss Aurelia overlooked the slang. It was all right for Sard to be a little slangy; so much better than sitting up in that tower room and thinking about murderers. It would make her more "popular" to have Minga Gerould go to dances and such things with her. "America is a wonderful country," said Miss Aurelia to herself, "and I think it is our 'popularity.' Have you ever noticed," to Mrs. Spoyd, "how awful it is for an American girl or man not to be popular? Don't you think that our great men like Theodore Roosevelt and—er—Barnum, are just as popular in Heaven as here?

"I think God meant us to be—er—popular, don't you? Just see," added Miss Aurelia with a flash of insight, "how unpopular all of our statesmen have been who have been in any way unique or—er—unusual. Americans, the good, patriotic kind, have always been very popular."

"Yes, I always feel so sorry for a young girl who isn't popular," purred Mrs. Spoyd.

"I wouldn't worry about that boy, dear, now," advised Miss Aurelia, with all the mature effects of voice and manner of the person who is not truly grown up. "We do all we can to make the prisoners what they should be, and I have heard that many tramps—er—like to go to prison." She stood up, sighing. "There—this room at last looks respectable;" her narrow, rather smoky-dull eyes roved over Sard. "Why don't you put on your turquoise sweater and tam, the pretty one with the blue pompom? I will look after everything. No, dear, I don't think you'd better use the car without asking Brother."

"Will you ask him?" said Sard shyly.

"I ask?" Miss Aurelia said nervously. "Why—you—he—I—don't you think, Sard,"—with a kind of reproachful righteousness—"don't you think it ought to come from you, his daughter? Now I must see about the laundry."

Sard was accustomed to these cheerful little exits made with the bustling manner of one with much business on hand. When Miss Aurelia wanted to evade anything——Suddenly it flashed over the girl, "Why, she's always like that, she—she—never meets anything; she wouldn't discuss it with me that morning I tried to talk with her about Colter. She has pretended all along she didn't know about Colter, and now, with Dora crying there, red-eyed while she serves the meals, she tried not to know that—why," Sard's eyes opened, "I'm old, she's young."

"I ought to be her aunt," said the young girl to herself. "I ought to be sending her in a picture hat with an organdy dress and blue sash to meet Minga."

The girl stood motionless in the center of the floor, thinking. When youth begins to think and to think clearly and hard with its brave young mind, it is time for the world to take notice—Sard frowning at the floor, spoke aloud:

"Yes—that's living Under the Law," she said slowly, "I see what Dora meant; we live under a made law, we don't build up on it, away from it, to a better law; we just live, cramped, confined, ignorant, stupid, under it—Under the Law, that's it!!!" Sard laughed a little wonderingly. "I shall meet Minga this afternoon and we will go motoring and laughing over the country roads and Dunce will come home and we'll all eat fudge and dance to the Victrola to-night, and one or two of the bunch will come in and we'll play Rookie and Cheat and Toddle Top, and then at nine o'clock Minga will want a nut sundae, and we'll all pile into a machine and slew around to Dingman's and eat sundaes and then hoot along the roads until a tire pops and we think it time to go to bed, because under the law that is our privilege.

"But in that little top room Dora will wake up and think about her brother, who, she says, is Under the Law——" Sard looked out of the open house door toward the fleur de lis and the peonies, massed purple and crimson against the silver sparkle of the river. She stood gazing at the wealth and the shimmer of spring leaves. "Why," said Sard slowly, "those laws were only made for people who haven't grown up; surely," said the girl to herself, "surely we were meant to bring out of them other, better laws; why," said Sard, a deep light came into her long eyes with their straight clear brown, "surely there are other Laws! We can build above the Law, we don't need to stay Under the Law."

CHAPTER VI

MINGA'S LAWS

Minga arrived in a spasm of long thin legs, short skimpy skirt, a fluff of bobbed curls, a rather unnatural whiteness of face, lugging a suitcase, golf sticks and tennis racket with the independent gestures of an experienced baggagesmasher. It was an effect calculated to impress a girl's camp or a parcel of immigrants, but as that of the arrival of a maiden of eighteen summers at a quiet house in the little center of Willow Roads, it was hardly distinguished.

The meeting of the two girls was a curious clinched clasp done technically and punctuated by gasps, long, over-emphasized kisses and such half-shrieked protests as: "Oh, you dear brute, you're squeezing the life out of me—You silly old darned duck—Oh, Honey, isn't this great?" Then they fell apart, and with mutual cool glance of appraisement took each other in. As they turned talking and went up the long stairs, Sard's look was laughingly interrogative.

"Minga, you've bobbed your hair."

"Yes, you like it? The Mede and Persian don't! I had an awful row with the Mede, meaning Dad, but he came around, of course."

Sard looked lovingly at the little curly head; she felt of the thick knot at the back of her own young head and felt somehow old; she tossed it like an impatient colt.

"It must feel nice."

"It feels like October wind blowing over the pink heather," Minga laughed; she passed an arm around the older girl. "Let's go up town and get yours done right away. What do you want with hammocks of long hair? Why, if Absalom had only had his hair bobbed, the whole Bible would have been changed."

The voices of the girls had a curious cadence of indolence, also a rising sense of potential shriek, yet they were not raucous.

This was, however, merely cultivation that was unconscious; other girls of their age who copied their ways of wearing their sport-hats and "rolled" stockings had not attained to the cool middle register of these young tones, the pleasantly insistent quality of the aimless dialogue. Yet all their movements, restless and ungainly with curiously athletic emphasis, seemed to correspond to their sentences, over-stressed yet indifferent, while their young eyes, particularly Minga's, under long-lashed, artificially penciled brows, had hardness and clearness under which lay an everlasting watchfulness.

It is with this watchfulness that the youth of to-day betrays itself. Free from restrictions, from cares and responsibilities, it yet has within it the potentialities of these things. It unconsciously needs standards, longs for them and has them not; therefore, it unconsciously is seeking these standards, if only in the wearing of clothes, in the foot work of a tennis match, in new swimming strokes, in the use of new words. Poor little youth of to-day longing for values, saying with its strange wistful little face: "Does she bob her hair?—then, I'll bob my hair. Does she drink?—well then, I'll drink; does she sprawl over and maul her young men friends?—well, then I'll sprawl and maul."—Poor babies, not one of them strong enough to carve a path of his or her own, all led by the nose, trotting around after each other, all with hats, neckties, turned-down stockings, bathing suits, conventional stencils, voices and ignorance exactly alike. Pathetic, wistful, funny, hungry little American youth.

At the head of the stairs stood Miss Bogart. "My dear!" she held out two hands to Minga, who resolutely seized them and with calm effect of masculinity, gripped them until the lady's mouth twitched with pain.

"This is nice," almost shrieked Miss Reely—she also tried to put her arms around the young form, but she might as well have tried to embrace the string of a toy balloon. Minga, wafting along, recited some sentences, with the rather easy-going cadence which for a better name might be called "the chewing-gum accent."

"Awfully nice to see you, Miss Bogart; Mother and Father sent love. Isn't this great, though? You and Sard were ducks to ask me. My faith, what a jolly room." Minga peered into the adjacent bathroom. "Swell mirror, some towels; do I use these embroidered ones for cold cream?"

"Did you notice the view, dear, coming over the hill—the river—the dogwoods?" asked Sard's aunt complacently.

"The—er—view——? Oh, yes, I remember now, Sard said something; was it where they built that new garage? Say, Sard, did you know that garage is a big thing, the nippiest thing along the Hudson River—this shore anyway? A lot of money went into it. I know, because Father coughed up a few shekels, to help the man out, you know, and he says they are piling up coin already. He'll realize, all right!"

Miss Reely, rather ignored by the two girls, fussed about the room, settling a pillow sham, plumping up a cushion. She turned back to the new arrival, who, tossing her small provocative hat on the bed, turned with an anxious frown to the mirror. "Girls," announced Minga, unfastening her wrist-watch, "I'm pale." From a small leather case in her pocketbook she produced a tiny golden box of color, dabbed a bit of it on each young cheek and as she stood talking to her hostess calmly smoothed it in. Minga's eyes, wide open, cool as purple morning-glories, surveyed them. She stood, a trim, insignificant little figure of modernity, suggesting nothing, giving promise of nothing, dreaming of nothing, but curiously capable of anything and everything.

Miss Aurelia, primming her mouth, turned to the door; she paused with the immemorial formula of the hostess,

"Dinner is announced at a quarter of seven, dear; will you let us know if you want anything?" Irresolutely she drifted away; they heard the soft pat of her low-heeled slippers, the swish of her starched skirt, looked at each other and smiled.

"Exactly the same! What?" Minga giggled. "Does she still think it's awful to say 'Darn'?" Then, conscious of Sard's restraint, "Well, she's a sweet old sport. I'd like to take her up in an airplane. Now," apologetically, "you know very well I think she's a perfect dearrrrrr, so sort of picturesque and everything—where do you keep your hairpins?"

It was part of the enigmatic expression of Minga that with bobbed hair she should demand hairpins with as anguished an intonation as a woman with long tresses. When Sard produced the box, she deftly pinned a pretty lock nearer to her cool deep-set eyes. "It's this rotten high forehead of mine," she explained to her friend now perched in the window-seat watching her. "I'm determined I won't be high-brow if I have to cut my head off to avoid it. Don't you dread, somehow, becoming high-brow? It's so unpopular—the men have always hated it, and now the women do. Do you remember Sara Findlay at college?"

"Sara Findlay," they breathed the name through gusts of laughter—"Sara Findlay; do you remember her room, books everywhere, and her awful spectacles, and the way she haunted the library and the solemn look she turned on you when you asked her anything? I remember one question we doped out, 'Sara, how do you define the infinite?'"

"Sara's engaged," said Sard, "married, for all I know; did you hear about it?"

Minga turned a face of incredulous horror. Marriage as she viewed it was the device of screen actresses and various feature fans to change horizons; when things got a little monotonous or there was a chance of improving finance, one married. "That high-brow wench, not a bit of pep, not a rag of style—to who?"

"To whom, did you say?" said Sard mischievously. The other girl, falling heavily upon the divan, now buried her curly head in Sard's lap.

"To who," she repeated carelessly—"I won't say it right; why should I? If the Prince of Wales or Charlie Chaplin said 'to who' for a few weeks, we'd all follow suit. Who invented grammar, anyway?" Minga stretched herself, laughing up into her friend's face.

"Ouf! Isn't this like the old times? You, the stuck-up grammarian—me, the gypsy vagabond. Woof, what an awful thing it must be to be 'the Judge's daughter' in a little place like 'Willows-on-the-Hudson'."

Sard laughed a little; her face grew grave. "It's lots of troublous things to be the Judge's daughter, I know that," then swiftly, as if something occurred to her, "Minga, will you do something for me?"

"Yep," yawned the recumbent Minga; "all right; anything that doesn't interfere with my present position. Sard, do you think my nails are nicer this year?" she held up a very delicately tinted row of little curved shelly fingers. "In spite of golf," said Minga, "I think that's a sweet attractive little hand, don't you?" The fact that Sard had asked her to do something seemed to her unimportant, and she went on—"Notice anything?" She waved a very pretty ring on the slender finger.

"Minga—you're not," now it was Sard who was really breathless, her brown eyes shimmered with light.

"Engaged, darrrrrling," drawled Minga. "Yep, to the most idiotic little Willy you can imagine. A perfect lady, Tawny Troop, you know Troop, the big moving-picture man? We're all crazy about Tawny, he's such a fool—and dance—he dances like a bubble on the fountain. Papa Troop is worth oodles, so they say. Mother, the Persian, doesn't know it—yet; Father, the Mede—well, I guess we'd better postpone that!"

Something careless and contemptuous in Minga's voice kept Sard from asking any of the questions that flew to her lips. She caught the little hand and examined the ring. "Why, it's exquisite," she breathed. "These are brown diamonds, aren't they, and pearls? Oh!" The fairy beauty of the thing moved her.

"You see, Ducky, another girl picked it out—my predecessor." Minga threw out the word with a curiously mature drawl. She yawned, raised up her head, reached out for a handglass and examined her pretty teeth in the mirror. Suddenly she rose, her figure, slender and reedy, bent backward and did a few striding, strutting steps of a modern dance, humming the while with curious catlike nasal tremolo a popular air.

"Do you know this step—to the Paradise whistle and ukulele and that new instrument, the Shiverskin, it's just great." Around the room strode Minga, solemnly expounding the simple steps. "You like my ring," hummed Minga, "well, Tawny's first girl picked it out. I saw it on her aristocratic hand and I had to have it; also, you see, I needed Tawny to dance with—he goes my gait—she hated to let him go; Sard, that girl is a Moth, she eats men, eats 'em alive, but I snitched this one," Minga giggled. "Tawny's coming out for your first spring dance at the Club while I'm here, but it's not announced," warned Minga, "so don't talk bassinets."

It was the old Minga, only, Sard could not keep herself from admitting this; more so, and well, there really need not have been any more of the original Minga. Sard, who was exactly a year older than her friend, felt somehow centuries older. Also she had to confess again as she had confessed to herself before, there was something in Minga that both shamed and hurt, while it fascinated. However, with all the hunger of a lonely girl for a chum, Sard readily overlooked jarring things. She reached out and drew Minga to her, hanging an arm over the thin little shoulder. Minga took it all coolly. "Are you letting yourself get fat, Sard?" she criticised. Then added caressingly, "Poor solemn Sard, we've got to whoop things up for you now I'm here. What? I mean it! Can't we run up a few men and some jazz and stuff on the telephone for to-night? Would Judgie and Aunt Reely care? Who does your jazz this year? We've got an angel band home, three cornets, a paradise whistle and a drum, it's divine—well? Wait till I get hold of that old Dunce," said Minga, "I'll choke all the news out of him. My hat—there comes your father's car around the drive, and I haven't got on evening duds! What do you wear for night-eats? Will Judgie care if I go down as I am?"

This was Sard's chance. She kept her arm around the restless, pacing little figure. "Minga, will you do something for me? Put on your prettiest dress, that rose-colored one, talk music to Father, let him play his new records for you." Minga made a face, but Sard was insistent. "Get him to tell you about Terence O'Brien—only don't you start the subject, Minga—and—and—and ask him if he is pleased with the new man on the place."

Then Sard, at a loss just how to drill her impulsive guest, stared at Minga thoughtfully, frowning. "No, don't ask him that," she said. "I've changed my mind, don't ask him that."

Then said Minga, "I'm to ask him about Terence O'Brien without his knowing it?"

"Yes, his sister works here."

"Terence O'Brien," repeated Minga, "who—oh, yes, that fellow that killed the old man, ran away with the money, did it all just like a movie—awfully exciting! My gracious!" Minga was awed.

Sard nodded. "Hush, his sister is our waitress, and she—oh, it's pretty dreadful to see her. Father thinks he's just a criminal, but don't you see, Minga, he's only a boy, only eighteen."

Minga looked very cold and decided. The two spots of color stood out high on her little sobered face.

"But a murderer," said she solemnly. "He must pay the penalty." Minga pronounced the word "peenulty," but her dignity was superb. She was very sure about justice as she was very sure about patriotism. If you did wrong you must not be found out, if you cared for your country you must say so very loudly with strong dramatic effects; the idea of caring for one's country to the extent of having a better kind of women and men live in it had not occurred to Minga. It does not occur to the men and women Mingas of this world. But they are very sure of their "patriotism." They have quite a little patriotic strut and they imagine patriotism to consist in a long hate of some other nation. And that it is based forever and ever on the machinery of killing.

"Minga," said Sard passionately, "do you and I always do right? Isn't it our ease and good fortune that keep continually pulling us back from very wrong things? How about that time on the bacon-bat up at Divens Lake when we stole the firewood and the corn, did we pay any fines—did the county follow us up? Just a private letter to the faculty and old Pressy and the Dean talking to us and that was all—yet," Sard looked thoughtfully out of the window, "that was crime, stealing and trespassing, but we are so pampered and petted and taken care of that we—well, we don't need to murder."

"Oh, don't we need to murder? Well, I can tell you, Sard Bogart, that I need to murder Marjorie Atboon every time I look at her." Minga's face was injured. "Her father gave her a new car if she'd stop smoking. Well, Marjorie has the car." Minga paused and remarked drily, "Her bedroom smells queerly—she says she likes lots of air, she burns a good deal of incense, but you ought to see the car, lovely long thing, eight-cylinder, blue, cooooooooly—oilllly—olly. Oh! how a good machine turns your dark little world to white velvet!"

Sard giggled. "Minga, you always make me laugh," she protested, "when I'm most in earnest you're crazy and dreadful, but you're an everlasting dear."

Minga whirled them both about the pretty cretonned room.

"You know you love it," she chanted, "you know you love it, you've been having too much Aunt Aurelley." Minga putting her arms akimbo swayed neatly pumped feet back and forth. "Did you see Auntie stare at my rouge?" she whispered. "She knows the worst now, doesn't she, Sard? She knows I know there ain't no Santa Claus." With a burst of laughter, Minga released her friend. "Wait till I get a bath." She ripped off her little frilled blouse, her short skirt fell to the floor. Minga stood a pretty figure in dark knickers and white chemise. "For the tub!" she chanted, and dove into the bathroom.

Amid the gushing of the faucet, Sard saw the little figure stripped and dancing in the white porcelain bath.

"Stop in on your way to the dining-car," called Minga.

CHAPTER VII

THE ORGAN BUILDER'S HOUSE

The Hudson River has not only the opulence that Washington Irving portrayed, not only the swelling of soft hills and majesty of toppling mountains and slopes that spell fecundity of farmland but it has, along palisade and headland, another opulence. Under those mountains that throw down thunder-storms, and along the rocky walls climbed by winding roads magnificent homes testify to the imperialism that has not yet been cleansed from the heart of man. The instinct for choosing imposing sites for impressive homes would be difficult to trace to its beginning. Robber barons built their castles inaccessibly for very good reasons; the prelates' palaces were on the hills that all might see and be reminded of Mother Church. The Roman Roads, unlike the furtive sunken roads of the cavemen, were built high because of fearlessness and pride. But the American who builds his home, or one of his homes, on the Hudson does not do so just because he longs to feast his eyes on sumptuous natural terrace and broad natural waterway; he does so because in his instinctive choice of surroundings, he selects an expressive background for his own dignity and his own importance.

All night long the great steamers of the Hudson River glide majestically up and down, the long white fingers of their search-lights pointing to this and that lordly residence. The Oil King, the Copper King, the Pill King, and the Shoe King, whose white palaces and miles of stocked and fruited domain are gated and avenued away from the public, are silently indicated to such humble travelers as care to look. One can hardly travel the Hudson River nowadays and worship the great Creator, for the great Creator is a little overshadowed by the aforesaid King of Commerce, the great Producer. But in spite of the sleepiness and lethargic atmosphere that the Dutch traditions have strangely imparted to the strings of villages, there are in certain moods superb freedoms and freshnesses along the Hudson. There are still spiritual emphasis and quests along red sandstone shores, where the green hemlocks gather. The sunrises in the Westchester Hills are like black tents with banners streaming. The waters of the Tappan Zee are then a great glittering field of cloth of gold, and at sunset when the houses on the Irvington Hills are all ablaze with sunstruck window glass, the bold, black breasts of Palisades and Hook Mountain front the river like African slaves guarding some inner mystery of valley, some clean, unspoiled fastness of forest and field and stream.

To a man who sat at his table in a bleak old wooden house high up on the western range, these night and morning scenes spelled only two things, the Human Will, as yet absorbed only in the passions of an aggressive aggrandizement, and the proud subservience of nature to the little schemes of men. Nature, lying down like a great beast of destiny, to let the little shapes and enterprises swarm and crowd over her! "Only," thought Watts Shipman, "only when the great beast starts to rise and take new positions, look out then, little shapes. Either you will be raised on some great mountain of Nature's mysterious changes or you will slip into some new uncharted sea or who knows, you may spill altogether out of the world!"

It was this wistful attitude toward nature, the great mystery, the great Book of Worship and Wonder that had taken Watts Shipman from his clubs and cliques and corporations, away from success and "putting it over" and their accompanying shiftiness and meanness, and had taken him for the season of a summer into the country, to think.

Yes, just that—"to think," was what he replied to complaining letters and telegrams—"Watts, what are you doing, stuck up there on the rim of nowhere?" His confrères laughed at the curt answer "Thinking." For a lawyer so able, so successful, there could be no comment of "queer" or "crazy"; Watts' partners shrugged their shoulders and went on with the business which, as he had denied them telephone access, they had sometimes to refer to him by long night letters. "Drat your thinking," writes the senior partner, "don't I think?" To which came the teasing telegram by code, "You don't think, you calculate."

Watts' house, planted high on the spur of the mountain a few miles above Willow Roads, the little Dutch village where Sard lived, had been owned by an organ builder about whom the Willow Roaders liked to say "nobody knew anything." The Willow Roaders, complacent in the usual village life where everyone thinks he knows "everything about everyone" disdained knowing anything about a mere organ builder. The house, surrounded as it was by hanging boulders and pine trees, looked gravely down on the big field of river and on all the little steeples and turrets and gingerbread conservativeness of Willow Roads. Watts liked to commune with the spirit of the man who had once lived here.

"I'll bet he stole some notes out of the Dawn," the man thought, "and think of nights here—like last evening, with the hermit thrush and the sky gold through the trees. 'The Organ Builder'—I can just see him, a seedy chap, possibly with too many children, probably half starving, working up here with the village below curious and gossiping, thinking maybe an organ builder was immoral."

It was a soft yet cool spring night. The little frogs in mountain rain pools kept up a croaking like rusty wheels; the pungent smells of earth and leaf mould came through the window. Fire burned quietly and soft lamplight fell on books and rugs and flickered over the cast of the Winged Victory, over the dingy chimneypiece. Watts' eyes, through the smoke of his pipe, went to this. "Nice girl," he grunted in approval, "nice girl—afraid of nothing—ready for anything, yet somehow all woman, true to type but not crystallized by type." The man, rising, walked up and down the rather bare room where one or two fine rugs caught the warm fire colors. "I can say this for the Greeks, they, themselves, fastened nothing upon civilization but healthy ideals for men and women; harvest making, home keeping, child bearing, strong bodies, imaginative minds, it wasn't until their æsthetics and the Roman plutocrats got hold of all they gave the world that their philosophies were debased." The lawyer's eyes, sombre in strength and depth, looked fixedly at the gracious woman figure; he compared it with the figures on Fifth Avenue, tripping in affected coquettishness or striding in callous mannishness. "Not clever of you, ladies, to find no middle path," he considered. "Who made you as you are to-day, Paris—the war? That's what you and the newspapers and magazines say, but come now, didn't you make yourselves? You wanted to be 'popular,' you want to be 'in' things, behold the result." Watts' mouth curled with slow mockery on his pipe.

"The Winged Victory didn't want to be popular," he decided. "She didn't want to be in things.

"She wanted to live. Who fastened the modern woman on us, anyway?" Watts demanded sternly of his dog. "Why have we got to stand for her?" The silken-haired, electric-muscled beast came over to him softly. Friar Tuck, with tail tossing, laid a devoted head on the brown golf-trousered knee. Watts tousled the long ears. "Always the henchman, aren't you, you old brute—why do you play that game?" The lawyer looked long and questioningly into his dog's eyes. "Why don't you get up and give me an order; how do you know I'm superior to you? You are probably equal to me."

He considered the bowl of his pipe then rubbed it on Friar Tuck's head.

"Just as I suppose, if men only knew it, they could be equal to Christ and the angels. Say, look here." Watts lifted the dog by his forefeet. He put the two forepaws against his breast. "How do you know I'm superior to you? Why do you play this game—do you just want to be 'popular' with me?"

Not to accept dogma—to be ready for the new light, to trim one's mental sails for the breeze from a fresh quarter, it had given the great criminal lawyer a profound insight into the human heart, an almost awful power over the souls of men. Wastrel after wastrel had tried to look Watts Shipman in the eye, and had known that some strange God of Equity sat watchful in this man—that only in proportion to their actual guilt would they be dealt with. Men and women had broken down and told him all, only because of the unendurable patience and remorseless gravity of his uncondemning gaze. He had fathered many a boy and stood many a woman on her own feet, and yet Life, the Great Mother, had held back from him what he, as human, knew must be the ultimate and only gift. Women had angled for Watts Shipman because of his fame; they had tried to use him politically; they had trusted him, feared him and been penitent before him. No woman had ever loved him.

Staring at the Victory, the man smoked silently. Half ruefully he passed his hand over the russet head on his knee, he threw back his own great black-haired head with its dapple of white spots; he stretched his long limbs and his deep-lined humorous face saddened. "Women want to play," he said softly, "uncertain, funny little things, they want to play"—tenderly, "and, not necessarily, to play fair—and I'm no plaything, although," he waved his pipe toward the bas-relief over the fire piece, "I could play with you, Miss Victory."

The word play made him think of something; pushing away the dog, Watts rose and went to a table drawer, taking out, with a smile, a little envelope with "Pudge" scrawled on it. The lawyer, still smiling, slid out the contents, two Indian arrow-heads, one white, the other gray flint. Thoughtfully he turned them over in his large palm. "Poor good little Indians," he murmured, "we're still teaching our children that you were devils, aren't we? Aren't we funny? We rather owe you an apology, you strange, mysterious men who never knew fulfilment—who ranged these Hudson River shores and thronged New Jersey and New England and were mighty hunters and happy until you came up against the white man and gunpowder and tobacco and whiskey! Well"—Watts chuckled, "Pudgy shan't be prejudiced. I'll write you a good character for him."

Knocking his pipe out, laying it tenderly on the mantel, the big man sprawled like a schoolboy over the table writing in long hand the letter that was to accompany the arrow-heads.

"Dear Pudge—How are you? What are you doing, helping Mother or raising the roof with noise and destruction. How are the guinea pigs? I often think of them. Well, Pudge, I rather hope you are helping Mother a lot, because she's such a good friend of yours and mine and she looks so pretty and seems so wise, though perhaps you and I are sometimes wiser. I'm sending you two arrow-heads I found in a field up North in Rockland County. I was fishing up near the Ramapo Mountains where the stone walls run like great serpents up and down the hills. There's a lot of history lying around loose near here, Major André and Washington and the Dutch and the Indians. I'll show you these places some day. The Indians, to my way of thinking, were fine fellows. They took long steps when they walked and knew how to set traps and hunt and fish, and they were for the most part real religious men. But men who knew how to make war just to get more money, came and took their land away from them, and then the Indians turned naughty the way you and I do sometimes, Pudge. My! my! how they tore around and howled and took scalps, which were not nice to keep. No gentleman would ever scalp a lady, it is so uncomfortable, and yet these Indians scalped many ladies!

"It's a pity the Indians were bad and forgot their manners, for if they could have remembered to be polite and gentlemanly they could have stayed here and they would have been the real Americans and you and I would have probably tried to imitate them and never used anything but wampum, which means shells; same as money to buy ice-cream cones with. I think it would have been a heap more sensible if the white man had made lasting friends of the Indians and learned a lot of things that the Indians knew but which the white men have since been too stupid to learn. But you see, the white men had a new machine called a 'gun,' and there was nothing to do with it but shoot it at somebody, and that made trouble. And the Indians, eager to learn, got guns too, and thought it was funny to point them at people. And their guns went off all right and there was the dickens to pay. Machines are nice things, Pudgy, but the men who make the machines must be sure to have their minds go ahead of the machines, or some day the machines will just get up and smash the world.

"Good-night, Pudgy, old chap—I wish you could hear all the funny sounds up on this mountain. Friar Tuck smells, besides hearing; he reads the night with his nose, the same way we would read a book—and he smells out such stories! Here are the arrow-heads; I'm sending them to you as if you were my own little boy, for see, Pudge—big man as I am, I have no little boy of my own—and that sometimes happens to big men ..."

Suddenly the man's head dropped. The pen rolled to the floor, and Friar Tuck nosed at it a moment then tucked his head into his folded paws. Watts Shipman sat at the table, his own face buried in his arms.

CHAPTER VIII

TRAITS

The first evening at the Bogarts' was a trying one for Minga. Her life, the restless, high-strung, half-bred and wholly careless life of her age, had kept her taut as a little bowstring for sensation. It was a life formed, not so much on its own desires, as on highly colored superficial presentments in the moving pictures and theatre posters, also on those remarkably insinuating sheets, the "Society" Fashion Magazines, where the cut of one's coat and the number of one's pockets are prophesied between photographs of the important Mrs. So-and-So, or the gossiping and not too scrupulous Madame X.

The rather uninspired family dinner ended amid the soft perfunctory observances of Miss Aurelia, punctuating the indifferent curt ejaculations of the young people and the moody silence of the Judge; then Minga took a hand. She sat at the table humming a little air. "Know that?" she inquired of Dunstan; "that's 'Don't take off another thing, Polly, my dear.' Piggy Purse-proud sings it in 'The Other Pair of Stockings.'"

These statements were received in silence. Sard and Dunstan, mindful of the Judge's preferences in dinner conversation, looked askance at each other, but Minga glanced brightly around the table. To this young person there were no inhibitions, no reserves; above all, she was no respecter of persons. A man who had just completed a new up-to-date garage or aeroplane would win her casual interest, but a mere upholder of the laws of the country seemed to her hardly to have outline. Curiously enough, however, her insouciance and matter-of-fact pertness sometimes reached to that buried stream of human sensation that underlay the granite of Bogart's surface. As he looked at the little figure, now rising from the table, he noted the color of her dress and spoke of it.

"Let me see, that's rose color, isn't it?" remarked the Judge, stiffly. His wrinkled square-nailed hand was on the back of the chair, and his eyes, gooseberry and hard, yet had the sort of deference a man gives some charming face and figure that refreshes him. Minga's head, bent back, looked coolly up into his face.

"That color, Judgie"—it was her absurd intimate title for him—"that color is called 'Sauce Box.'"

"Well named." The Judge had for a second a glint in his eyes.

"Isn't it?" asked Minga. She turned her bobbed head with the lively shake of a young animal and asked suavely: "Now what, for instance, is the name of the cloth of your coat?"

"Ha!" ... Dunstan, prowling about, looking for cigarettes, upset a pile of books and arrested a plundering hand. He winked at Sard over Minga's unconscious head, saying meanwhile plaintively, "Why can't I find any matches? This family sinks lower every day!" Dunstan watched to see how his father was taking Minga's innocent question.

"What kind of cloth does a Chief Justice wear, anyhow; something impenetrable, I suppose, calculated to endure, impervious to shouts and howls and woman's tears," he ventured.

Miss Aurelia, waving the maid with the coffee service out on the western veranda, looked at her nephew approvingly. "That's a very interesting idea of yours, Dunstan." The timid lady, intent on keeping the conversation in a calm backwater, went on to supply that as nearly as she could remember there was no mention of "the cloth" judicially, but only for the clergy, and when one thought of it, went on the rising muffled voice, serenely unconscious—"The coats of the clergy were blacker and smoother and—er—more dignified than anyone's else—I've often been struck by it at weddings—and—er—funerals," said Miss Aurelia.

"I shall look for it at the next—er—execution," said Dunstan as he rolled his eyes at Minga.

"Now Bishop Cravanette while dining here wore a velvet Oxford coat, I remember," Miss Aurelia thrilled to her topic, "he dined here—it was at the time of the laying of the corner-stone of the—er—church—they—he——"

Dunstan, winding a long arm around Sard's neck, another around Minga's shoulders, reeled the two girls out of the room. "She's off, Bishop Cravanette!" he murmured. "That means the rest of the evening; all on your account, Minga, unless somebody chokes her. Bishop Cravanette," Dunstan's mouth modeled on Miss Aurelia's pursy one, too full of its white teeth. "Seems to me the most ideal man for his—er—very high calling. His wife less so. The qualifications of a bishop's wife should be—er—she—he, I remember they—er—I had an aunt——"

Sard put her hand over his mouth, but the boy murmured through his sister's punishing fingers, "Minga, get Aunt Reely to tell the story of Sard's name to-night. Then that will be over!"

Sard took his cigarette case out of his pocket. "That will do for you," she lovingly tweaked his ear; "now light up, put up, shut up; you're getting facetious at your own vulgarity, as Father says."

But Dunstan, imitating Miss Aurelia's fussy ways, was dusting off his chair preparatory to sitting down. In spite of his long, awkward, muscular form this imitation of soft settling and sighing was ludicrously exact. Dora, bringing in the coffee tray, put an end to it, however, and the Judge and Miss Reely joined the young people. Sard rose till her aunt and father were seated, but Minga and Dunstan coolly sat, the former smoking until the waitress disappeared. Then Minga, behind her curved hand, grew confidential. She leaned toward Judge Bogart like a woman of the world.

"Tell me about that new murderer of yours," she begged. She had forgotten Sard's instructions "don't you start the subject."

Miss Aurelia interrupted nervously. She waved the sugar tongs.

"Two lumps, Minga, dear?"

"I don't take coffee, thank you," returned Minga imperturbably. She put her hand on the august knee of Sard's father. "Tell me all about that murderer, Dora's brother."

It was an unwritten law in the Bogarts' household that the affairs of his judicial calling should never be mentioned to the Judge. He took his cigar from his mouth and slowly turned his head; the hard old eyes, the mouth set in two gray lines under the crisply trimmed mustache, revealed the iron rigors of the human face set to the inexorable, for it was through the inexorable power of decision that the Judge had risen to his fame locally and abroad. These things suddenly confronted with that most amazing audacity, that marvelous magnet, the unwitting bold, clear-eyed face of woman-youth, softened perceptibly. The two gray lines of lip moved slightly. Minga's little pink cheeks, curly hair, her rosy dress, the little inconsequent hand on the Judge's knee, these things had a flavor and power, the depth of which the girl could not possibly guess. Yet Minga did most things very deliberately. Now she naughtily twisted her mouth at Sard.

"Ah, come on now, Judgie," turning her quizzical head to one side. "You can't have all the fun of jugging bad boys. After all, you only represent the people—that's us—let us in on it!"

Dunstan, blowing smoke in the air, almost held his breath. Sard, staring, put down her coffee cup. They both saw the queer gleam come into the concentrated eyes. A big hand steely with golf came down hard on Minga's indolent little fist. "Young lady!" said Judge Bogart, slowly and decisively, "you ought to be spanked."

"Oh, brother," purred Miss Reely, "I don't think—it doesn't seem——" Then to Minga, "Why, I am sure you didn't mean—why, George—I don't think you ever said a thing like that. I feel that Minga was only asking for information." Sard and Dunstan quivered with silent laughter; but the Judge rose in quick displeasure. Minga passed her hand slowly down his sleeve. "Ah, Judgie, dear," she pouted, "I didn't mean anything. I didn't know that judges took the Hippocratic oath and everything." One would have thought that there were tears of vexation and embarrassment in the girl's voice, but she turned a naughty stare on Dunstan. "Well, your father is a crab, a perfect crab!" Minga's tone somehow had nothing that could be modernly recognized as rudeness. It was merely spoiled privilege that made her snap her fingers decisively and look revengefully at the retreating judicial back—perhaps Judge Bogart felt what is true of the Mingas of this world, that they have an amazing power of removing the solemn humbug of prestige from its intrenchment and are therefore dangerous. The Judge heard the petulant, "I'll get even with you," but he did not smile or turn the disapproving back, so the little guest turned rather drearily to Miss Aurelia. This sort of evening for Minga was incredibly dull; it must be enlivened in some way. Stifling a yawn, not too cleverly, Minga remarked: "Dunstan says maybe you'll tell us how Sard got her queer name."

Sard, herself, had followed her father into the library to put records on his talking machine. The Judge's favorite way of spending a spring evening was to deny all callers and to sit by the window in front of the square refrigerator-looking instrument while Sard, like a slave, drew forth and deposited the records of his choice. Through the windows of the unlighted room showed squares of black sky with one or two stars hanging. A young vine tapped against the wire netting or beckoned with leaf fingers. The Judge never looked at his daughter standing straight and ready for his signal of approval or displeasure. She chose the more sentimental and romantic of airs and sometimes when they pleased him, he softened; his eyes closed at the finale of La Sonnambula or Donna e Mobile; he would sometimes snort, clear his throat and say, "Very pretty, very pretty." Sard would smile a little, looking rather wistfully at him. Perhaps when her father heard this music he wandered down the paths of youth, paths of wistfulness and wanting to do right, paths such as hers must be: what had been his laws? What had at last made him this curt, severe, unapproachable man? "What were your laws, Father?" the girl almost whispered. "Did you always live under the law?"

"Very pretty—very pretty," snapped the Judge. "The best machines are accurate, that's the idea, accurate; no banging, tinpanning; accuracy, that's the test of music."

The girl, gravely obedient to him, listened to those comments. At college Sard had heard all the New Testament in modern music, the superb ranges, the exquisite far countries of sound and rhythm. For her the Russian compositions had spelled the awful darkness of a dark land, through which in splendid bursts came the hope of full golden wheat fields, the piteous tragic faces of a people longing to rise and walk from the shackles of years into their own souls' birthright. The Spanish gravity and witchery as of dancing lights in the mountains, the French stringing of water pearls and culling of moonlit flowers; the exquisite question of modern unresolved chords, or the striding rhythms and deep chests of the masculine Bach fugues. Frolicking rural joy of the old gigues and morrices and the sombre human pathos of old folk songs—the girl harking back over those rich immemorial afternoons and evenings of the music at college, wondered at herself, putting on the records, setting the needles, half shrinking from the automatic preliminary whir. "The heart bowed down with weight of woe," she looked at the grizzled head of the man whose name she bore. Was his heart "bowed down with weight of woe," was there some sore spot in his heart where, if she might win, she might see him as he was in the old days of youth and his love; had he ever agonized, cared about the tragic injustices of life? Or, did he just coddle a sense of personal loss and woe?

"We love Foddie, don't we, little Sard, we aren't afraid of him? He won't put us in prison," the curious little sweet-smelling whispers came back to Sard; she felt the soft touch of curls on her face, all the flummery and subtle trappings of the lacy little mother. These people were Sard's parents and yet they were lost to her, as remote as if they had both died! Over and over the longing had come to Sard to put her arms around her father's neck and say, "Are you thinking of her too—these days?" but she could as soon have put her arms around the kitchen chimney.

On the east veranda as the moon rose the soft voice of Miss Aurelia was placidly relating:

"Yes, Sard's name is strange. Her father, however, has allowed her to keep it—we—your mother, Dunstan—they, well, it was thought that your father preferred a boy, but afterward you—er—came, Dunstan, and that, of course——"

"Yes, of course," drawled Minga. "You—er—came, Dunstan." The girl was delicately smoking, enjoying Miss Aurelia's horror and considering the diamond on her engagement finger. It flickered in the moonlight like a wicked eye. Miss Aurelia somewhat stiffly continued:

"Sardonyx was your mother's favorite stone—she—er—wore the Sardonyx signet ring of an ancestor."

"By Jove! you don't say," ejaculated Dunstan. He stuck his heels higher on the rail and struck a match; he leaned over the terrace to flick some ashes into a jardinière. "And so I suppose—at that time—because of that—she—he—I—er——"

"Stop it, you demon, stop it," murmured Minga; "you'll spoil the whole thing; it's wonderful, it's like knitting, knit two, purl two, turn——"

"So that Mrs. Bogart," recommenced Miss Aurelia with dignity, but being plunged into the enormous detail of her story, she floundered, helpless. "So that after little Sard, the—er—baby, you know—er—came—Mrs. Bogart believing—that is—or rather having been told—er—no—well, having expected a boy—got the idea of not being able to choose an appropriate name for a girl—and in consequence—afterward you understand."

Dunstan and Minga helpfully nodded—"afterward" they prompted!

"That is, when Sard was three days old, Mrs. Bogart suddenly said, that is, I have always understood that she said it suddenly—my brother would know accurately—she said, 'She's to be called Sardonyx'—'Sardonyx' like that."

"Really," drawled Minga.

"But Sardonyx was—er—quite masculine, as you see," continued Miss Aurelia with zest; the narrator turned her face somewhat eagerly and the pursy mouth, too full of teeth, continued: "This feminization of it was Mrs. Bogart's own—quite original, we thought. She made it Sardonice, very clever, everyone said—there was no opposition. I remember," added Miss Aurelia, "that at that time, for certain reasons, they were anxious not to have the—er—brain—too active—and we—er—tried in every way to distract her thought—but that is how Sard got her name 'Sardonice'—most unusual," concluded Miss Aurelia a trifle apologetically.

"Why, she could have been named Jezebel, under the circumstances," remarked Dunstan. "But—er—as it is—we—er—call her 'Sardine' for short." The lad, lazily smoking, rolled one eye 'round on Minga.

"Dunstan——" reproved Miss Aurelia.

"Really?" Minga drawled the easy little word again, then with some recollection of the archaic thing called "manners," "Thanks ever so much, Miss Aurelia—I'm sure it was awfully clever of Mrs. Bogart; I always wondered how Sard got her name. Wouldn't it be fun to have a lot of girls with names like that—Emerald, Diamond, Sapphire, Jade—I could have been the Jade," remarked Minga with a demure chuckle.

"You've got your wish," observed Dunstan with emphasis. "A little red Jade, what?" He finished his cigarette, lingeringly pinned down the butt, extinguished it, then rose, stretching. "Well," with a look of sweet seriousness, "I'm off to have a whack at those old conditions."

"You mean you're off to bed because you're bored," said Minga scornfully. "You mean you're going to work out poker hands."

"Good-night, Polly Prunella," the lad bent over and kissed the top fluff of curls. The girl reached out a punishing hand and he drew back, chuckling. "You used to let me last year," he explained.

"Say," Minga demanded, boyishly, "what do you think I am? You do that again and see what will happen." "Bing" with a heavy slap, the little rose-frocked figure pushed him backward. "My jiu jitsu," explained Minga modestly to the horrified Miss Aurelia. "I took Self-Defense all last year—I could tackle any New York gunman with that special undercut."

"Dunstan!" said Miss Aurelia, severely, to her nephew—"how ungentlemanly. Never—never let me see you do such a thing again."

"I won't," said Dunstan, penitently. He was looking at Minga with liking, friendly boyish eyes. "I shan't want to do it again, not just there. Hey, Minga, I'll kiss you better next time, what?"

"Go to bed, you big Swede," retorted that lady, but the little figure in rose-color now leaned over and patted Miss Aurelia's hand. "Do I seem awful?" she asked anxiously. "Mother says I do; I don't want you to dislike me—you don't like my smoking? The Persian hates it!"

"Oh, my dear," breathed kind Miss Aurelia, "I dislike you? But aren't the girls nowadays very lacking in manners, smoking and all?"

Minga consoled her. "We have to act like this nowadays, you know; that's why we don't need chaperones but, of course, there is a good deal of rough stuff if a boy doesn't know you're nice, and of course some girls aren't. Now you take any stag line at any dance; sometimes the fellows get silly and, well, they drink sometimes and, believe me, that needs some handling." Minga, head down, considered her slippers gravely.

Miss Aurelia stared...."The—er—stag line—why, Sard never——"

"Oh—well," Minga leaned her head back against the wall, her little feet beating time to the music within, "Sard doesn't go in so much for that kind of thing, all the boys really want to dance with her and she knows it and doesn't hit it up and she won't allow cut-ins and that kind of thing—but most of us like the excitement, the being grabbed, you know, and so the boys like to show each other what cavemen they are, and, well, they do get silly and rough-house and you have to handle them like a mother—I've grown old," said Minga, in a burst of confidence, "I've grown old just keeping some of these lads where they belong." The girl rose and pecked at Miss Aurelia's sagging cheek. "Isn't your hair lovely," she observed, "and what pretty feet you've got. Why don't you get married?"

"My—dear"—Miss Aurelia kept hold of the little brown hand and gasped, her eyes were wide with astonishment—"at—er—my age?"