ELLEN LEVIS
A NOVEL

BY
ELSIE SINGMASTER
Author of "Katy Gaumer," "Basil Everman," etc.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY ELSIE SINGMASTER LEWARS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

CONTENTS

ELLEN LEVIS

CHAPTER I
A FRIEND IN NEED

On a dismal day in March, four years before Ellen Levis was born or dreamed of, the slight acquaintance of Stephen Lanfair and Edward Levis was quickened by an unpleasant incident into friendship. Both attended the University Medical School in Philadelphia and both were ambitious, but there the resemblance between them ended. Stephen, an underclassman, the only son of a physician, had been started early and well in his career, and was the youngest student; Levis, a Senior, had fended for himself and was almost the oldest. Stephen had an allowance which was not large, but which sufficed for all necessities and some luxuries; Levis had only that which he earned by tutoring, and by acting as substitute instructor, laboratory assistant, and editor of the Students' Quarterly. Their acquaintance began when Stephen, wishing to win a place on the editorial board of the Quarterly, and conferring with Levis, had been invited by him to become a contributor to the next issue.

On the morning of that dismal March day Stephen sat, far from Philadelphia, in the room which had been his father's office in Chestnut Ridge, a coal-mining town above Wilkes-Barre, waiting until it was time for the train which should take him back to the Medical School which he had left to attend his father in his last illness.

He looked drearily and absent-mindedly out into the thick mist which hid all but the immediate neighborhood, a dirty, unpaved street, a stretch of sidewalk made of powdery black culm, and the front of a large dim building, the "company store." He saw not only what the mist revealed, but what it hid, a continuation of the dreary street, running between a black hill and a blacker culm bank, and terminating in a towering breaker, shapeless and hideous in design. There was no color in the landscape; all was a dense black or a soft, woolly gray. The company store had once been painted red, but the red had long ago been overlaid by black.

With him sat the superintendent of the mine, Harry Kinter, a plump, friendly young man with a pendent under lip and easy manners. He slouched, cigarette in hand, in what had been Dr. Lanfair's office chair, looking with dull, kindly eyes at his companion. He was sorry for the distressed youth and was doing his best to comfort him in a practical way.

"Now I can get the old fellow from Hazelton to come up for a couple of years, Stephen. He'll be good for that long, I'm sure, and perhaps longer. But we must have your word to settle here when you're through school; otherwise we'll try to get a permanent man. The advantage to you would be a salary from the beginning, which is what most young fellows don't get. Wouldn't you like the place for the sake of your father? Perhaps the company would be willing to pay you something to help you along if they could have your promise."

Stephen glanced toward the superintendent and then away, unable to command his voice. He was tall and thin and the looseness of his clothing and the length of his hair which he refused to have trimmed by the Chestnut Ridge barber, as well as his expression of fatigue, made him look forlorn. The offer of a position indicated a willingness of the mining company to take doubtful risks, since other lives could hardly be of much importance to one who valued his own so little.

His pale cheeks and swollen eyelids indicated not only the weariness of nights spent in watching, but a copious shedding of tears and also an acute present anxiety. Alas! it might be that he would have no other place to go, that this dreary settlement would be his sole refuge, a gravelike refuge, but a refuge none the less. If, as he anticipated, disgrace awaited him at the University, he might be only too happy to return to this inaccessible spot whither it was not likely that a rumor of his misdeed would ever penetrate, or where, if it did penetrate, it would be vaguely understood and condoned. Physicians willing to bury themselves in Chestnut Ridge were not so easily found that the mining company could afford to be fastidious.

It was not that Chestnut Ridge offered no opportunities to a physician. One could not look casually out of the window at this hour without seeing opportunities, even on a morning when most of the world was hidden from view. Four out of the ten women who stood gossiping in strange tongues before the company store—Austrian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Lithuanian—would need in a short time the attention of a physician. The children tugging at their skirts were under-nourished. It was still too early for the men of the night shift to have had their rest and be on the street, but when they appeared their faces would show the effect of the long hours spent away from the sunlight and of the liquor with which they enlivened their periods of idleness. There was no doubt that Chestnut Ridge needed a physician.

But such work would be done by Stephen only under compulsion. Here his father had wasted his life; he had been at the call of every foreigner, had spent day after day at the squalid bedsides of suffering women, waiting upon uncleanness, and had died at the age of fifty of blood poison, contracted in an emergency operation performed hastily and without gloves, to save two lives far less valuable than his own. He had apparently not regretted his course; he had accepted his fate quietly and without complaint and had been anxious only that Stephen should understand exactly about his small inheritance. Afterwards he lay low in his bed, his hands clasped across his breast, repeating the poetry he loved, a little, lean, bearded man, with eager eyes and a heartening smile, wholly unconscious of the loftiness of his own soul.

Presently he became confused and tried to remember a formula which he frequently recited at the bedsides of dying patients, sometimes in English for Protestants, but more often in Latin for Catholics who could not be reached in time by the busy head of a wide parish. It was a formula which for him explained the world, made sacrifice easy, and a solution of all life's difficulties certain.

"I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," he said faintly and could go no further.

He had looked at his son earnestly and Stephen had prompted him, not without embarrassment. Stephen had been trained in the principles of the Christian faith and he had believed them, but they were now with him wholly a matter of rote; religion was not, he believed, a necessity of his life.

Stephen meant to be not a general practitioner like his father, but a specialist in the diseases of the eye like Professor Mayne of the Medical School, and his ambition aimed not only at such skill as Professor Mayne possessed and such fame as he had won, but also at a similar accumulation of wealth. He did not expect to attain his end without hard labor. He was a diligent student, and he was willing to devote himself night and day to his task.

His hopes of success were not unfounded, and his unusual ability was appreciated not only by himself, but by his teachers. He had won the First Year prize, and Professor Mayne had intimated to him that of all the candidates for the position of interne at the Ophthalmic Hospital he was most likely to be appointed. Such a position as that at Chestnut Ridge should be given to a man like his acquaintance, Levis, who had worked his way through school and who had endured so much hardship that a regular salary would be desirable, even with all the accompanying disadvantages. He might even describe the place to Levis and suggest that he apply for it, or he might mention his name to the superintendent as a possible employee. He pitied men like Levis with all his heart.

But he might need the Chestnut Ridge practice for himself—let him not forget that! He rose and walked up and down the room, still without answering Kinter, who seemed half asleep.

If only he had not imperiled his future by a piece of madness! Having signified his willingness to contribute to the Quarterly, and being immensely pleased and flattered by this opportunity to shine, he was visited by the sterility of mind common to youth which has a creative task set for it. When he was summoned to his father's bedside, his article was not yet begun; indeed, he had not yet selected a subject—and he had expected to make with this contribution an impression upon the whole of the Medical School and the Faculty as well!

During an unoccupied hour when the fatal termination of his father's illness was still in doubt, he had found in an old yellowed medical journal in the drawer of the office desk, an article proposing an ingenious and at the same time unfounded and actually ludicrous theory of the origin of cancer. The magazine was published in England—he did not know how it had come into his father's possession.

The theory seemed to him novel and ingenious, though possibly mistaken; he did not realize that it was ludicrous. In one of those moments of madness which are part of youth, he condensed the article, copied it, and sent it to Levis. The act was like the occasional thefts of children who take pennies in order to buy candy and who repent bitterly and are forever after honest. He was ambitious as children are hungry; the desire for fame was his strongest impulse and he could not let pass even so small an opportunity to shine.

As he sat by his father's bedside, where stupor had at last succeeded paroxysm and the end had become the matter of a day, he realized suddenly what he had done. It may have been that the principles in which he had been trained reasserted their power over him; it may have been that his father's face, which looked in its sunken condition like the face of a tortured saint, recalled him to himself; at any rate, he saw as by a lightning flash the foolishness of his act.

Having realized his mistake, he tried to remedy it. Calling from his window to a passing miner, he sent a telegram to Levis, "Do not publish my article." In a few hours he received word that the magazine had gone to press. Levis had added a sentence at which he groaned aloud, "Article all right."

If the college officials detected his plagiarism, it would mean the end of all his hopes. Professor Mayne would no longer distinguish him by his commendation and friendly attentions; he would have no chance of becoming an interne at the Ophthalmic Hospital and thus of pursuing immediately his longed-for work; he would have to accept the position at Chestnut Ridge and bid good-bye to his proud hopes.

It might be that he would have to suffer actual punishment. The prize, which was to add a hundred dollars to his income, might be taken from him and public mention might be made of his disgrace. It would not be greatly to be wondered at if the Faculty chose to assume that all his carefully wrought papers, all his well-prepared examinations, were accompanied by a similar dishonesty.

In the midst of his distress, he realized that the superintendent had waited a long time for an answer.

"I'll have to think it over, Harry. It's time for me to start now."

Kinter rose lazily and lifted Stephen's satchel.

"You let me hear from you in the course of the next few weeks; and in the meantime we'll engage the old man for a year at least. You won't find it so dreadfully dull here, believe me. It's possible to get down to Wilkes-Barre on the evening train and back in the caboose of the freight; gives you a nice long evening. I know some girls and I'll introduce you to them. They have dances once in a while. You'll get accustomed to it. I have. I guess diseases are pretty much the same as mines, alike everywhere."

In the train Stephen sat close to the window, a forbidding shoulder turned toward a possibly loquacious seat-mate. His very heart was sick, but he fancied that it was his body, made so by the motion of the car. Usually he enjoyed the ride, first through the region of breakers and culm banks which took on a weird picturesqueness on a bright day, then along the upper reaches of the Susquehanna and the narrow defile through which the Lehigh passes at Mauch Chunk, and into the farm lands farther down. He liked also to note the changing speech, the foreign tongues in his own neighborhood, the broad Pennsylvania German at Allentown, the less accented speech near Philadelphia. But to-day nothing engaged his attention but his own misery.

On the news-stand in the station in Philadelphia he saw the Students' Quarterly. He was tempted at first to pass quickly by and thus put off for a while the final realization of his shame, but he bought a copy and walked through the station to a bench so placed that he could turn his back to all the world. When he sat down he found that he was holding his breath, though suspense was not exactly his condition of mind, since suspense implied some hope, and he believed that there was none for Stephen Lanfair.

Then his lips parted and his eyes dilated and a deadly paleness spread over a countenance already white. The day of miracles was not past; God did not mean him to be destroyed.

He found the article, "A New Theory," and his name "Stephen Lanfair." He found under his name a note: "This article is not original, but is an abstract of a mistaken and amusing but ingenious treatise by John Dalling, a famous London physician. It was first published in England in 1837." The note, a reader would have said, was placed there by the contributor himself.

Saint Elizabeth, finding in the fifteenth century the loaves in her apron turned to roses in answer to her prayer, may have been surprised. Stephen Lanfair, finding a similar benison in the nineteenth, was stupefied.

When the machinery of his brain began to operate, he tried to fathom the mystery. He had not written the note himself, that was certain—some good angel in the guise of a critic had saved him, and the only person through whose hands the manuscript had passed was Edward Levis.

Having crossed the city he knew not how, he found Levis in his poor room. He was as thin as Lanfair and looked, with his black beard, twenty years older. He took off a pair of large spectacles and bade his guest sit down. Stephen remembered having heard that he had been a foundling, brought up at Girard College.

He did not answer Levis's greeting, he simply held out the magazine.

"Did you put that note in, Levis?"

Levis flushed. His nature was one of intense reserve and he anticipated and deplored the unpleasantness of a confession. He believed that he understood the boyish rashness which was to blame for Lanfair's mistake, and he had added the note for his sake as well as for the sake of the magazine.

"I saw you had forgotten it," said he lightly.

"Did you know the real author?"

"Yes. I saw this article alluded to humorously long ago in Thurber's textbook and I looked it up. The old magazine is on file here."

"It is commonly known, then?"

"Yes, I should say so, as a sort of absurdity. You see, of course, that it is an absurdity."

To this Stephen made no answer. He would have proved himself a fool, then, as well as a knave!

"Do you think many persons beside yourself would have recognized it?"

"I think it likely, and of course one would have been enough. It was all right for you to send it in, though; it has roused a great deal of interest; it shows we have a sense of humor. I was very sorry to hear that you lost your father, Lanfair."

Stephen would have liked to lay his head on Levis's shoulder; instead he laid it on Levis's desk.

"I didn't mean to add a note," said he in a thick voice. "I meant to pass it off as my own. I have been a dishonest fool."

Levis stirred uneasily.

"We all have to learn lessons."

Stephen was crying like a child.

"Don't, my dear fellow," said Levis.

Stephen lifted his head.

"I promise you that never in my life will I do anything of this kind again. It's nearly killed me. If my father had known—I don't know what he would have felt or done or said. He would have been heart-broken. When I'm tempted to do anything wrong, anything of any kind, I'll think of you. I promise you faithfully!"

Levis smiled.

"Promise yourself, Lanfair!"

Stephen remembered at the end of the week to write his decision to Kinter. He would not need, thank God, to go to Chestnut Ridge and fix his eyes for the rest of his life upon the dirty street and the dismal breaker and the ignorant, unclean women who were so often and so direly in need of waiting upon! He thought of his father with an almost intolerable tenderness of heart. His father had suffered everything, cold and weariness and loneliness and hunger of mind, separation from all that was interesting and profitable, and finally martyrdom itself in a ghastly form. His father was a saint; he would always remember him and love him, but he would not need to follow exactly in his footsteps. He would have a career of which his father would have been unspeakably proud; he would establish principles by which the whole race of eye specialists would be governed; he would have an immensely wide influence, and it would all be his father's doing.

He told Levis about the position, feeling a little ashamed, and was relieved when Levis explained that he had agreed to take a country practice in Lancaster County.

He was given the next day new reason to expect success. Professor Mayne summoned him to his desk at the end of his last class and congratulated him upon his answers in a recent examination. Mayne was as large in body as he was in estate and his manner expressed his opulence. He had a full round voice, he used long words deliberately and with perfect correctness, and spoke with an old-fashioned rhythm, which accented now important, now unimportant words, as though he obeyed some queer quantitative law. He seemed to be health of body and mind incarnate, but an inherited susceptibility to mental disorder had forbidden his continuing his race. Life, he believed, was on the whole hideous if one stopped to consider it; but clever men did not contemplate it, they simply secured for themselves all the pleasures of the eye and the mind and the body that it was possible to get without transgressing the laws of health and common sense.

Sitting at his desk, dressed in broadcloth, he looked pleasantly at his pupil. Stephen's appearance had improved; his hair had been trimmed after a homely bang-like fashion then prevailing, sleep had refreshed him, and only the black band on his sleeve distinguished him as one afflicted. His eyelids were no longer swollen and his eyes had resumed a natural brilliancy which drew attention away from his somewhat attenuated features.

"I was interested in your contribution to the Quarterly, Lanfair. Where did you discover that antediluvian absurdity?"

"In an old magazine of my father's." Stephen could not suppress the tears which burned his eyes. His relief from anxiety softened his heart and the least expression of sympathy made him almost hysterical. "He had evidently kept it because it was a curiosity. He was a great reader. I didn't know that attention had been called to it in Thurber's textbook until Levis told me."

"We cannot be reminded of a good joke too often. I had forgotten it entirely. Continue your general reading; it will eventually prove profitable to you, no matter what department of medicine you select."

Then, remembering that Lanfair's father had just died, Professor Mayne invited him to dinner. His niece was to go with him to the theater and they would dine at six o'clock at the New Windham Hotel. His carriage was outside the building. Lanfair might just as well accompany him now. Stephen followed down the hall, his heart thumping.

His heart beat still more rapidly when he was seated opposite to Mayne and next to his niece in the hotel dining-room. The girl, Hilda Fell, was a little creature in exquisite clothes who looked up from under a pair of brows which almost met and which gave to her face a willful and imperious expression. She was very young and light as thistledown and was already spoiled by wealth and idleness. The men whom she had known hitherto were familiar with her type, but Stephen was not; he thought of her as a charming princess, and when her bright eyes met his, he looked back into them smiling, and not recognizing the intense and somewhat unwholesome curiosity about life which animated them. He had frequently heard of her as an orphan with a large estate of which a great stone house on the river front in Harrisburg near the governor's mansion was only a small part. She was an object of interest to the students who knew her by sight and who discussed endlessly her wealth and her fashionable clothes and admired her free manners. There was a current rumor that she smoked cigarettes, a habit then almost unknown among women.

Professor Mayne teased her and she answered saucily. He deplored his own ill fortune, and still more that of this little creature in whom the taint of insanity was darker than in himself. He believed that his sister, Hilda's mother, would have developed, if she had lived, a serious melancholia ending possibly in suicide for which the family history furnished abundant precedent. He was convinced of the present soundness of Hilda's mind, but with him and Hilda the family must end.

He looked at her and young Lanfair earnestly. Lanfair was ambitious; he would improve and develop, and to him certain matters could be explained. Before they parted he had invited Stephen to his house.

Stephen went from the hotel table to Levis's room. He asked merely to sit there with his book before the fire, which was the only means of heating here where living was cheap. He was like a child who finds assuagement for hurt in the silent company of an older person.

Levis smiled and went on with his work. It was not often that students sought him out merely for the pleasure of his company and he was touched by this youthful devotion.

Nor was it often, at least during his occupancy, that a girl's figure and a pair of dark eyes were visualized against the background of the old mantelpiece. Levis himself did not give one hour's thought in a year to women; he believed that he was growing too old for love-making and that hardship had made him immune to love. Certainly there was no profit in thinking of a state of matrimony into which one was too poor to enter!

Stephen contrasted his fearful anticipations with what had actually occurred. He had expected to be by this time disgraced and despairing. Instead he was at peace. He had been more honored than he had dreamed of being, and now a new and wilder possibility dazzled him.

His thoughts recurred to his father, and he dwelt with gratitude upon the self-sacrificing care which had always been his. If his father had been willing to provide less generously for his education, to stint his pocket-money, or to leave a smaller inheritance, he might have had a larger library with which to make Chestnut Ridge tolerable and an occasional journey for diversion or improvement. He might even—Stephen flushed a little as this notion came into his mind—he might even have contracted a second marriage, his first having ended tragically with Stephen's birth.

Stephen avoided thinking of the piety which was after all his father's distinguishing characteristic, even though he was aware that his father would rather have bequeathed to him faith than money, and that his effort to recite the Creed was not a last reassurance to himself as it had seemed, but a final reminder of the faith without which he believed his son would perish. Stephen saw him clearly as he lay in his bed and heard his voice reciting the treasured verses which he had memorized in dreary journeys over the bleak hills. The lines which he repeated most often acknowledged with what was to his son a ghastly frankness his dire plight:

"In the hour of death, after this life's whim,
When the heart beats low, and the eyes grow dim,
And pain has exhausted every limb—
The lover of the Lord shall trust in Him."

He resisted not only this memory, but others, a tiny, dismal schoolhouse, half filled by a little flock of mourning women and children bereft of husbands and fathers by a cruel death; he saw weeping eyes and sad faces in which apathy had followed tears. He hated all sorrow and trouble and he connected religion with them. Religion was for the old, the dying, the afflicted, the needy, and he was none of these.

He looked from time to time gratefully at Levis bending over his books. Whatever good fortune should be his, Levis should share. Levis had saved his honor, had saved him from pitfalls for the rest of his life. He would never, never forget him.

For the most part, however, he thought of himself, of his excellent marks, of his grasp of the subjects which he studied, of admirable Professor Mayne, and especially of Professor Mayne's niece. He had, he was sure, the ordering of his life in his hands; he could make it what he chose.

CHAPTER II
ELLEN REFUSES TO HEAR A CALL

Outside the Saal or meeting-room of the old Kloster all was hot and bright in the sunshine. The thick grass in the enclosure which surrounded the group of strangely fashioned buildings was ready for cutting, the foliage was at its greenest. Ellen Levis could see between the two wings of a bowed shutter the sloping plot and half of a willow tree whose plumy branches hung motionless in the still air. She could see also sheep feeding in the fields across Cocalico Creek and in imagination she played with them and with herself a childish game, making a silly wager that a certain black lamb would come again into sight before Grandfather Milhausen had finished his lengthy exposition of trine immersion. It was Saturday morning when most children were, like the lambs, at play, all but the children of the Seventh-Day Baptists.

Presently, when her eyes grew tired of the glare of sunshine, she turned them upon the scene nearer at hand.

In the meeting-house all was cool and dim. A soft golden light fell upon the worn benches, the long tables running the length of the room, the pulpit covered with a white homespun cloth, the ancient stove. All was old and strange and brown with the stain of time. Hung upon the wall, close to the heavy beams of the ceiling, were crumbling paper charts with intricate and graceful lettering which had been made in 1740—it was natural that now, after almost two centuries, the inscriptions should be faded and dull.

The congregation sitting motionless in the shadowy place had an unearthly aspect. There were three young mothers, with heads bent in somnolent maternity above the infants in their arms; there were a few older women whose heads were likewise bent; there were half a dozen men; and last of all, a few children, dressed like their fathers and mothers in clothes which betokened indifference to changing styles.

Only Ellen Levis and her brother were clad in any modern fashion. Their mother, long dead, had been a Seventh-Day Baptist and their father, who was not a church member, not even a worldly Lutheran, sent them to the meeting at the Kloster because of a promise made to her.

The two children, Matthew, a sturdy, blond boy of sixteen, and Ellen, who was almost two years younger, sat a little apart from the others, Matthew with his arms folded like the brethren, and Ellen close beside him. Sometimes she laid her head for a moment on his shoulder. She was a child of intense affections to whom the sight and touch of the beloved object gave unspeakable satisfaction. Matthew was to go to school in the fall to study medicine and at the thought of separation from him tears came into her brown eyes.

The meeting seemed interminable. It was not always possible for the little flock to gather together on the Seventh Day, and once assembled they communed long together. This evening after the solemn ceremony of Foot-washing, the Lord's Supper would be celebrated, as was proper, as an evening feast.

The attendance was comparatively large, all that remained of the Ephrata flock having gathered, as well as a few members from Franklin and Bedford Counties; and Grandfather Milhausen, feeling the occasion to be important, was delivering himself of the fruits of a lifetime of meditation. He proved the necessity of baptism; he proved that baptism by sprinkling had no warrant in Scripture; he dwelt in conclusion with passionate outpouring of words upon the efficacy and comfort of trine immersion.

His voice, now loud, now soft, kept throughout a monotone. His hearers grew drowsy, slept, woke again, changed their positions, and slept once more. The little black lamb came again and again into the field of Ellen's vision, fifty accurately counted automobile horns sounded from a curve near by, and each member of the congregation was in turn gazed at and meditated upon.

"I like Sister König because she is so very fat and when she is not in meeting she smiles pleasantly.... I pity Brother Reith because they had to take his wife to the asylum, but I do not like him.... I pity Sister Herman because she had to be baptized in the cold creek last winter. I should choose the summer. I should"—there was a slight admonitory motion of the shoulder against which she leaned. But she was disturbed only for a second; then she settled her plump body still more closely against her brother's arm. He was tired, she was sure, and she was very, very tired. Grandfather's eyes, lifted a moment ago toward the ceiling, were bent now upon his congregation. He must see that they were tired, that they longed to go, but he took no heed of their misery.

Once more Ellen returned to her musing. She journeyed through the strange old building, passing from the meeting-room into a kitchen where, long ago, meals were prepared for visiting brethren, and climbing up into large empty lofts which had been their dormitories.

Then she sped in imagination out the door of the meeting-room and across the angle between the Saal and Saron. In Saron had lived a conventual sisterhood, young women who had left their fathers' houses, and older women who had left their own homes and their husbands and children, to pray, to spin and weave, to letter the old charts, and to sing morning, noon and midnight, strange, attenuated music from a latticed gallery.

The old building was an enchanting place—if only one were sometimes allowed there alone, so that one might dream without the guiding admonitions of Grandfather, to whom these women were all saints. Here were old spinning-wheels and a curious tower clock which struck the hours, and pieces of pottery and old books and still other elaborate charts. Climbing a narrow, winding stairway, one came to tiny cells where the sisters had slept on narrow benches fastened to the wall, with blocks of wood for pillows. Ellen pictured them lying stiffly; sometimes she imagined them falling with a crash from their narrow couches; sometimes she fancied herself pursued by them, and taking refuge with Matthew or her father. They wore, she seemed to remember, thick white dresses, tied about with ropes. The poor things lay now, dead and done for, in the little cemetery between the meeting-house and the road.

After a long time she resumed her meditations upon the subject of immersion.

"I would not like to be baptized when the water was high, either. I would do like Millie König"—her eyes turned toward one of the youngest of the sisters, a girl about Matthew's age, with a meaningless, saintlike beauty. "I would take a nice day like Millie." She looked again at the downcast eyes and the crossed hands. "I hate Millie," said she calmly. Then her weariness became acute. It was dreadful to have to sit here while the world went on, dreadful, dreadful. She began to pity herself and saw her whole life wasted.

Suddenly she was acutely disturbed. It was not alone the admonitory motion of Matthew's shoulder; it was the preacher's eyes, bent directly upon Matthew and upon her. She sat upright. Something was going to happen after all—she anticipated that it was something more trying than the monotony.

"There are those in our midst who should be of us," said Grandfather, with jealous passion. "The children of a good mother who was a Seventh-Day Baptist should follow in her footsteps, should go down into the cleansing flood and there wash themselves clean of sin, should make a fresh start in the world, should put upon themselves the badge of separation. They have heard the call many times; they must be no longer disobedient to the heavenly vision. Brother Matthew, Sister Ellen, is it well that you should postpone what is right for you to do, that you should longer reject the peace of God?"

Ellen's head turned sharply, her eyes seeking her brother's. A shaft of sunshine fell upon his thick, light hair and across his smooth cheek. For a long time he did not answer and an awful fear began to take shape in her heart. Was he not going to answer, to get somehow between her and the dreadful eyes, the deathlike beard of Grandfather? Still he sat motionless.

Grandfather lifted his arms in supplication.

"Father in Heaven, Thou that takest care of the least of Thy children, Thou who rejoicest over each lamb brought into the fold, help us in this hour!"

Ellen leaned forward and grasped the edge of the seat with both hands. Was not Matthew angry, would he not be angry, would he not take her and himself away from this glittering, searching eye? She thought with sick longing of her father, so comfortable at home, or riding to see a patient. No one would dare, she was certain, to talk to him about his soul, or to suggest that he should take off his clothes and put on a long black robe and kneel in Cocalico Creek and let Grandfather dip him back and forth! Neither would Matthew submit to such indignity. Outraged and insulted, she tried to find his hand to assure him of her sympathy.

But her hand was not taken. Matthew sat motionless staring at the floor. Her eyes sought the watching faces. Mothers had lifted their heads, the few fathers in Israel bent forward. Sister Herman was crying. Sister Millie's eyes were different from the rest; their expression was sharper and more eager; they were hungry eyes, bent upon Matthew's thick, light curls. Without understanding, Ellen hated her even more vehemently. Her hand, creeping into Matthew's, would not be withstood.

"Oh, Matthew, let us go home!"

Holding her hand, Matthew rose. It seemed that only the blood of his mother filled his veins. The love of the soil was in him and of the heavy, unthinking, comfortable life which his mother's people had lived for generation upon generation, life founded upon a conviction that in the next world all would be well. He could not remember his mother, but he had thought much about her.

He took now the most important step of his life. Inclination, inherited tendencies, and a piety, deep and authentic, though narrow, indicated his path.

"I have thought about these matters for a long time," he said slowly. "I believe that we should be baptized by trine immersion, that there is no salvation outside it. I believe that we should observe the ordinance of Foot-washing because our Lord commanded it. I believe in the holy kiss and in the communion. I believe we should be a separated people and that we should keep the peace, not going to law, and not making or engaging in war, and observing temperance and charity. I am ready to be immersed when it seems best. I am—"

But he could say no more. Even so well thought out a declaration proved difficult to deliver. Sister Herman began to sing, a high, shrill song, not the strange part singing of a century and a half ago, which had become merely a tradition, but a modern revival hymn,

"The Lord's my strength,
In Him I'll trust,
A Shelter in the time of storm."

Sister König joined and the tenor of Brother Amos fell in. Brother Amos, a nephew of Grandfather Milhausen, was only twenty-one, but he was a school-teacher and had already been appointed a preacher.

The music caught Ellen by the throat; it seemed to drown her in thick, overpowering emotion. An inner voice admonished her to yield; that it was easier to yield, better to yield, to give up one's own desires, one's own will, to walk in an appointed path. Matthew grasped her hand closely and then laid his other hand upon it. He was undemonstrative and his unwonted gesture softened her heart still more. For him she had fetched and carried all their short lives; he believed that she would obey now as she had always obeyed, and he would bring her into the kingdom.

Grandfather had not finished his appeal. He looked down at Ellen and it seemed that his bright eyes burned her through. She thought of a dreadful picture of God and the judgment, she thought of every wrong she had done; of disobedience, of impertinence to the housekeeper, of excursions into forbidden books, of wandering thoughts in meeting. She heard him plead, she felt Matthew's hand clasp hers still more closely. Like Matthew she was compelled suddenly to decide, but unlike Matthew she had not thought on these things, and except in amused speculation the possibility of being immersed or of baring her feet before the women had not occurred to her.

Then Ellen made the choice by which she was to abide. The blood which flowed in her veins was different from that in her brother's; the paternal inheritance was paramount, the choice was, after all, made for her. Though Matthew's caress thrilled her with delight, she rose unsteadily. She saw in all eyes a pleased conviction that she was about to imitate him; she noticed for the first time that Amos's eyes could gleam like her grandfather's, and she trembled. Standing for a moment she was a pleasant picture, a round and still childish figure whose future appearance was not to be certainly prophesied, but possessing two features whose beauty would be for years to come certain, thick, curly, brown hair, now braided primly, and dark eyes shaded by lashes so black that they seemed immeasurably deep and tender.

Suddenly she felt wings given her. Out of the brown shadows, across the shaft of light which illuminated the bent, blond head of her brother with a symbolism marked by the congregation, she fled. The sunlight, the green grass, the trees, now waving in a gentle breeze, and most wonderful of all, the unlimited blue sky, seemed to hold out welcoming arms. She began to cry and to run as she cried. She feared that she might be pursued. Though she was not afraid to drive Matthew's young horse, she did not think of taking him, but sped on foot up Mount Zion toward the bounds of the enclosure, across the site of a more ancient church to the hill-top. There she usually looked down through a thick bit of virgin woods toward the smoothly flowing Cocalico, and beyond to pleasant Ephrata. But now she opened the rude fastening of an old gate, and ran across a field past a tall monument, toward a pair of arms of whose welcome she was certain. There was peace, and not in the dim cavern from which she fled!

CHAPTER III
TWO VERSIONS OF THE SAME STORY

After Ellen had beaten her way with gasps for breath up the slope beyond the meeting-house, she slackened her pace. She began to doubt pursuit, and besides she could now trust to her power of swift locomotion. For a while she kept inside the fences on the grass borders from which a dash into the wheat would have been easy, but after she had gone half a mile she wormed her plump body between two spreading rails and took to the road.

The sense of escape from prison was not new; many times when church was over she had looked up and round at the arching sky and the waving trees and had danced her way out to Matthew's buggy, and sometimes, from behind the safe shelter of its curtain, she had made atrocious faces at the back of Millie König's sleek head.

Presently, her joy at having escaped was tempered. She did not like to have the brethren consider her wicked. But penitence weakened and finally faded entirely away, its departure hastened by reflections of a nature common to mankind. Millie had copied her sentences in school—it did not make much difference what Millie thought of her. Brother Herman was notorious for his keenness in trade and he had cheated her father when he sold him a horse. As for Grandfather—she was sorry to hurt his feelings, but Grandfather was old. It is very easy to be good, Ellen believed, when you are old.

Suddenly the full import of the morning's events was clear to her. She was free, but Matthew was in prison! As she walked on she began to cry again. Perhaps he would let his beard grow until he looked like Grandfather and Amos and like the pictures of Father Friedsam and Brother Jabez and all the worthies of the past. He would not belong to her; he would belong to all those grim and pious people. Most dreadful of all, he would belong to Millie. At this, she stopped short in the road, remembering Millie's possessing eyes.

Again she began to run, dashing through the little hollow made by the creek, where the odors of fresh earth and the intense sweetness of elder blossoms would at any other moment have made her loiter. The creek bounded her father's farm and, taking a short cut, she left the road and crossed a meadow and then ran along the edge of a field of corn until she came to a gate which let her into the yard.

The Levis house was one of the large, many-windowed brick houses common to the neighborhood. It was built solidly and its correctness of proportion gave it a comfortable beauty. The porch was not a part of the original structure, but had been added, as running water and other conveniences had been added within. Behind the house stood a large barn. The place had not the trim look of adjacent farms; there was a good deal of brush along the fences, the fences themselves needed rebuilding and the woodwork of the house needed paint. After looking carefully at the premises an observant person would have made up his mind that the owner was neither by taste nor by inclination a farmer.

The property had one glorious beauty, the thick and lofty grove of oak trees which stood behind and above the house and barn. They were a landmark for miles. In them hundreds of birds nested and squirrels played and scores of little creatures had their homes. In spring anemones and hepaticas were to be found beneath them and nowhere else in the immediate neighborhood; in summer they spread a thick canopy of shade, and in autumn they burned with a glowing red. In them in all seasons the wind spoke continuously, now in a whisper, now in thunderous diapason.

Dr. Levis sat on the porch of his house, his pipe in his hand, his tall, thin figure comfortably disposed in an old rocking-chair. He had long since got rid of his black beard, and he looked, if not younger in body, at least younger in spirit, than in the days of his friendship with Stephen Lanfair. This morning he had seen a few office patients and had paid the two visits which were all that were needed by his healthy clientèle, and he was now waiting comfortably until the rural mail carrier should leave his newspaper.

He received little mail besides his papers and magazines and an occasional printed notice from the University. A connection with one's Alma Mater soon lapses when one has formed no close friendships, and he had formed but one. He looked very sober when he thought of Stephen, not chiefly because Stephen had forgotten him—he was a boy with a boy's short-lived enthusiasms—but because Stephen had succeeded so well and he had succeeded so little. The possession of a fair practice, a productive farm and two fine children might be thought to represent a sufficient attainment, but there was in his heart a bitter sense of dissatisfaction and disappointment. He had been tricked, bewitched; forgetting his superiority and immunity to love he had married soon after leaving the University, and had thus fettered himself for life.

He heard the first thump of Ellen's small but heavy shoes on the porch steps and moving with the physician's swift response to sounds heard during sleep, he sat upright, his pipe slipping from his hand. Then, seeing that it was only Ellen come from church, he sank back and closed his eyes.

"Are you back? Come pick up Father's pipe and tell him about the sermon."

Rendered speechless by the consciousness of her misery and of her tear-streaked face, Ellen moved no farther, and hearing no advancing step and feeling no warm creature against his knee, Levis opened his eyes.

"Why, Ellen, dear, what's the matter? Why are you home so early? Where's Matthew? Come here quickly!"

Blinded afresh by tears, Ellen started toward her accustomed sanctuary.

"What a heavy Ellen it is! Is there anything the matter with Matthew?"

Ellen shook her head. There was nothing the matter with Matthew in the sense in which her father spoke, yet there was everything the matter with him.

Suddenly tears seemed an inadequate expression of her trouble. Her father's face, seen above hers, was pitying, yet a little amused. The woes of childhood were so small—he wondered whether it was a sick kitten or a lame horse that had stirred Ellen's tender heart.

"Now, Ellen, tell me what is the matter."

Ellen sat up and dried her eyes on her father's large, smooth handkerchief. She remembered—oh, blessed relief!—that of course her father could stop Matthew. Matthew was to go away to learn to be a physician; he could not be a Seventh-Day Baptist!

"I ran away from meeting," she confessed, feeling the first doubt of her course.

Levis's face was grave, but his eyes twinkled.

"Why?"

"It was so long and I got so tired looking at half a tree and a little grass, and at the brothers and sisters and Grandfather's white beard."

"Why, Ellen!" Levis frowned, not in anger, but so that he might concentrate both physical and mental vision upon his daughter.

Now Ellen revealed the heart of the trouble.

"Grandfather preached at Matthew and me!"

"Oh, he did!"

"Yes, and Matthew made a speech about believing in everything. He's going to be immersed, Father, and he will be at the Foot-washing. They wanted me to, but I ran away. I couldn't stand it."

"Why couldn't you stand it?"

Ellen laid her hands across her plump body.

"It makes me feel all tight here. And I couldn't bear to take off my shoes and stockings."

"No," answered Levis. "I should think you couldn't! Can you remember just what was said to you and Matthew?"

"Grandfather said we ought to come to the meeting and get into the cleansing flood. It was very dark and uncomfortable."

"And what did Matthew say?"

"He said he'd been thinking about these things for a long, long time and he thought it was all right. Then they sang about a shelter and they prayed over us. Grandfather said we were the children of a good sister."

Levis put Ellen off his knee and began to walk up and down the porch. He knew his own origin as little as he knew the origin of his unusual name, which the neighborhood turned into Lewis, but he believed himself to be entirely Anglo-Saxon and he hoped that his children were Anglo-Saxon rather than Teutonic. Left alone, Ellen ran after him and took his hand and walked with him, a quaint imitator of his step and carriage.

"Can't you stop him, Father?"

"We shall see."

"If you told me to stop it—that is, if I were doing it—you know I'd stop, don't you?"

"Yes, Ellen."

Ellen tightened her hand on the three fingers which it held.

"I'll never do what you don't want me to do."

Levis made no answer, but exchanged the three fingers for a whole hand. After a while he stopped walking long enough to light his pipe. At that moment a buggy turned into the lane, not the well-painted, swiftly moving rig of Matthew, but an older vehicle in which the housekeeper had driven to town to do her Saturday shopping. Levis provided ample transportation for all his family.

"She's coming, Father," said Ellen in a whisper.

Levis stepped off the porch, calling, "Home so soon, Manda?" and received a solemn nod from a large, white, and somewhat reproachful face. He went round the house and down to the spring house and up a slope into the woodland which was his pride. There he sat down on a fallen tree and bade Ellen sit on a stump opposite him. She smiled and blinked her reddened eyes. It was her favorite spot and she liked to have her father here with her.

Suddenly Levis leaned forward. Ellen's news shocked him into the recollection of important plans, sometimes dreamed of and smoked over, sometimes forgotten for long periods, sometimes recalled with a pang of self-reproach, and again forgotten. It was his fault that Matthew had impulsively committed himself to this foolishness—the separation from Grandfather Milhausen, which would be complete in the fall when Matthew went to school, should have been brought about long ago. Ellen showed more common sense, but he had neglected her also, and for all her protests she might hold some of these foolish ideas. He had meant long since to take her education in hand. Amos Milhausen's instruction was good as far as it went, but it was now inadequate. He began to her astonishment to ask queer questions.

"How many bones are there in the human body?"

"I don't know. I think Matthew knows."

"What is the shape of the earth?"

"Round like a ball and flattened at the poles."

"What are the poles?"

"I don't know."

"Why are the days shorter in winter?"

"I don't know. Matthew knows."

"Are you going to let Matthew do all your knowing?"

Tears came again into Ellen's eyes. Matthew had abandoned her.

"I'm at the head of my class," she boasted in feeble self-defense. "I can write good compositions and do any kind of examples and I'm excellent in geography."

"I should think it would be a very simple matter to stand at the head of your class!"

"It is," confessed Ellen. "I don't work hard at all."

But now Ellen worked very hard. In the next half-hour her father drew from her small head all the knowledge which it contained and tried to find a great deal more than had been put there. A few times, for sheer nervousness and shame, she cried. The amount of her knowledge seemed infinitesimal, the abyss of her ignorance unfathomable. It was all the more humiliating because when the catechization was over, her father started to the house without reproving her for her dullness. It was hard on one who had prided herself on her brains!

Matthew returned, driving slowly, a grave expression on his handsome face. Having unhitched his horse he came round to the porch where the flutter of a short skirt vanishing indoors did not escape him. He was deeply angry with the anger of a superior toward an inferior or an elder toward a child. He could not understand Ellen. For the first time in her life she had not been willing to go his way, and she had marred what would otherwise have been a perfect experience.

Hitherto he had not thought much about his father or his father's convictions, his father's neglect of church having been a condition with which he had always been familiar, but now it seemed unnecessary and wrong. Realizing in his new devotion that it was his duty to admonish his careless parent, he prayed for opportunity and strength.

The three Levises ate their dinner silently, the housekeeper sitting with them. She had, seen close at hand, an air of patient endurance under affliction. She had expected, according to custom, that the man of whose house and children she had taken such good care for so many years would marry her, though she had already been married twice and was somewhat older than he. She had even, being hopeful of Dr. Levis, discouraged the advances of a neighboring farmer. The short lives of her two husbands and the oaklike hardness of Levis made her lot a very disappointing one. Having just heard of the marriage of a friend, she was more than usually depressed, a condition which did not escape her master, to whom her mournful disposition and her extraordinary combinations of English and German were sources of deep and silent amusement. He could not always remember her expressions, but Ellen could repeat them at length. "Unsere number iss 1 long and 2 short and sis very hart zu's distinguishe," she would say into the telephone and be perfectly understood by the person at the other end. Or, "I sink it will give rain," or, "Ach, Ellen, what do you make, then!"

At another time, with amused recollection of Mrs. Gummidge, Levis would have rallied her back into cheerfulness, and, unconsciously, into some hope, but to-day his thoughts were upon his own affairs. He did not hear when she invited him to a second helping of potatoes, a piece of absent-mindedness which seemed insulting and which would furnish her material upon which to brood through the long afternoon.

When dinner was over, Matthew followed his father to the porch. Levis looked at him curiously. He had something to say to Matthew, but it seemed also that Matthew had something to say to him! Matthew took his seat in a rocking-chair, and another prayer for strength concluded, spoke.

"Father, Ellen behaved very badly in church."

"Ellen told me about it," said Levis.

"She ought to be punished."

"That is, she told me her side of it. Perhaps you'd better tell me yours."

"Well, Grandfather made a fine address about immersion. Then he said that since we children had such a good Christian mother, we, too, should be immersed and come into church. I said that I would. Then he spoke kindly to Ellen and she got up and ran out in a senseless way."

"Ellen was frightened."

"She's old enough not to be frightened. She has an immortal soul. She should have obeyed me. And you have an immortal soul, Father," said handsome Matthew. "Would you not become converted and be immersed? It is a very blessed condition."

In delivering this quotation from Grandfather, Matthew's voice had a slightly hollow ring, as though even he were aware that the situation had unusual aspects.

Levis rose and knocked the ashes from his pipe.

"Suppose you come into the office, Matthew," said he crisply. "It will be easier to talk there."

Within doors Levis walked up and down. He did not seem to belong here in this country office, with its simple fittings, its serviceable but unmodern appliances, its outlook on farmland; he belonged in a city where he could attend fifty instead of five patients in a day.

"Matthew," said he frowning, "until this morning, it never occurred to me that it would be necessary to speak to you as I am going to speak. But I've been overreached and deceived. I don't blame you; you too have been a victim. If you're old enough to take the stand which you took this morning, to describe the convictions of your heart before strangers, you're old enough to hear what I have to say.

"You have always had smooth sailing; you can't understand what it means to be without living kin, to be bound out, to suffer intentional or unintentional slights, to have always to overcome difficulties, to deny yourself a little more when you've already next to nothing, to be cold and hungry and miserable. I wouldn't wish you to know; I want never to think of the miseries of my youth. I've done my best to shield you from all hardships; but it won't hurt you to know that such hardships exist.

"Through it all, I was determined to be a physician, and that is what I succeeded in becoming—older than most men when I graduated, but eternally grateful.

"I came into this neighborhood to begin a practice, or rather to take a practice temporarily. I didn't expect to stay beyond a year, but I married here and your mother would not leave."

For a moment Levis paused and looked out at the fields and the woodland and the empty sky. Old conflicts in which he had lost, old miseries, old thwartings came back to him, and especially, painted against the woodland, a face, exquisite in line, delicate in coloring. The face before him resembled it in outline and in expression.

"After she died, I couldn't go away because of you and Ellen. I couldn't take you, neither could I leave you; so I stayed here. I've brought you up according to my best judgment, and I've made you good children.

"Before your mother died, I gave her a promise. She was concerned that you should be 'saved'"—Levis's voice laid a lightly scornful emphasis on the "saved." "She held the strict notions of the Seventh-Day Baptists, and I promised I'd do nothing to alienate you from her father and would let you go to church. It was foolish, but your grandfather promised to exact no religious vows from you. I felt that his promise was unnecessary. I didn't dream that children brought up in a household where English was spoken, with books at hand, would return to the fifteenth century!"

"The Gospel is the same now," said Matthew neatly.

"I agree with you. Everything is the same as it has been, always." Levis spoke with sarcasm. Then he went on—"You can have no deep conviction of sin. You have committed no great sin."

"You don't know my heart, Father!"

"I know you and your heart. I've had you under my eyes ever since you were born, and I know you're neither gross nor wicked. You can't be repentant except in a sentimental, superficial way; neither can you know that the doctrines of the Seventh-Day Baptists are right and others wrong. You know no others."

"I—" began Matthew.

"You're under my control, you're supported by me. You'll go to college in September as we planned and then to the Medical School, and when you're through you shall decide about the Seventh-Day Baptists. If your religion is what you think it is, delay will make no difference; it will rather strengthen you. This will be a test which you should welcome."

"I do welcome it, Father."

A slight contraction of the muscles changed the expression of Levis's face. Meekness—that was one of the weapons of Abraham Milhausen's daughter!

He felt an almost irresistible desire to pour out upon his boy all the heretical beliefs, all the unorthodox speculations which had for years filled his hours of meditation, to fortify him with skepticism against the foolish hopes built up by the Christian religion. He believed he had, like the Stoics, the possession of his own soul. Once he had expounded his convictions to the boy's mother and she had withdrawn herself physically and mentally until she died. But the world would take care of Matthew!

"You don't suppose that all wisdom is incarnate in Grandfather, do you, Matthew?"

"He's only a human being," answered Matthew, with the same trying neatness of response. "But even children can understand all that is necessary to be saved."

Levis rose.

"Well, my boy, when things begin to seem puzzling to you, your father may be able to help."

Matthew rose also. He was tired and he had many things to think of. He looked at his father with strong disapproval; he thought of Grandfather's saintliness and the pretty face of Millie König. His father lit a cigarette; it was as alienating an act as could have been committed.

"I think Ellen should be punished for disturbing the meeting," said he. "It shamed me for her."

"I'll attend to Ellen," promised Levis with a satisfying grimness.

But, having reached the doorway, Matthew suffered misgivings.

"You don't mean that I'm not to go to church at all?"

"Not to the Seventh-Day Baptist church."

"Not this evening!"

"Not at all," was the decisive answer.

Having opened his lips and closed them, Matthew withdrew, backwards, and went upstairs.

CHAPTER IV
A SLUMBERING TERROR

It was not because of ingratitude or altogether because of forgetfulness that Stephen Lanfair had neglected his friend. Their association had continued as long as circumstances made the seeing of one another possible. When the longed-for interneship was won, Levis had been for two years out of the Medical School and Stephen was preoccupied with the straight, dark gaze and free and saucy manners of Hilda Fell. After Hilda had seen him, she had, for reasons as yet unexplained by psychologists, forsworn all other company. He was awkward, he knew none of the lively give-and-take of her set, he was grave in manner and thought; but she would have no other. Her passion for him assumed an ominous intensity; she was happy only when she had before her a definite prospect of meeting him, she was unhappy when the character of the meeting was such that she must share his attention with others.

Mayne related frankly the history of his family, but Stephen found in that no impediment to marriage. The insanity appeared—at least he received that mistaken impression—invariably in early youth. Apparently Hilda's mind was sound. Her education had not been of a very solid quality; in fact, she could do little more than write a presentable note and she did that as seldom as possible, and of general information she had none. But Stephen believed that association with him would largely supplement her knowledge. He believed that Mayne had not given her the proper sort of education and that she would learn from him with delight. He could not know or dream that the slightest opposition, even the thwarting of her whims, would reveal her fundamental instability. Until now life had brought everything to her; it had demanded no adaptations on her part.

He explained to her new and interesting cases which came under his eye, entirely unaware that all her enthusiasm for his profession had its origin in his arm across her shoulders. It was when he was discussing his work that Stephen was at his best.

His marriage, consummated at the end of his course, seemed to him an incredible piece of good fortune. A poor man from a little coal region town, he had none of the wealth or influence which he had always supposed must, even in America, be the contribution of the bridegroom to an alliance with a name so important. He visited before his graduation the gray house in Harrisburg and saw in the city the solid business block, and outside the city some of the farms which poured their revenues into Hilda's lap. He believed himself to be lifted by fortune high above the average of mankind; not only above the great level mass at the bottom of the social pyramid and the dull, superimposed layer which he had learned to call bourgeois, but also above the stratum of educated men and women who lacked comfortable wealth, and above the stratum of rich men and women who had no intellectual pleasures. He had, he believed for a month after he was married, everything.

He began then dimly to discern the chasm which divided him from Hilda. His keen mind, delivered from its first blindness, could no longer fail to see that her ignorance was not the result of a poor education, but of natural inability to learn. She failed to grasp the simplest of scientific principles; she could not understand the structure of the eye or remember its chief parts; she made Stephen ridiculous by misquoting him.

He dwelt a little longer in the paradise which he had created for himself. It was absurd to require in an exquisite creature like Hilda the interests natural to an older woman or to a student. Compared with the young women whom he had known in the University, she was immeasurably attractive and she could not be expected to possess every perfection.

It was not long, however, before he understood clearly that her dullness to the passion of his life, his profession, was due not only to ignorance but to indifference. Their first quarrel was precipitated by his announcement of his plans for the future.

"New York is the place for us to live. Each country has one center; England has London, France has Paris, and the United States has New York." Stephen often spoke in this sententious fashion in his youth. "There the world currents—"

"But we are not going to live in New York," said Hilda quickly.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't want to. I'll go there for a few weeks as often as you like in the winter, but I'm going to live in my own house. In New York you're nobody unless you're worth millions and millions; in Harrisburg you can be somebody for a good deal less than that."

"In Harrisburg!" Stephen was not aware of his absurdity until Hilda pointed it out to him.

"I should think that any one who had lived in Chestnut Ridge with a breaker before the door would find Harrisburg heaven!"

Stephen flushed. He had poured out to her in a moment of unique confidence a description of Chestnut Ridge. With it he had told her not only about his father's life, but about his death, and it was unfeeling to recall the conversation in this scornful fashion.

"I have my living to earn!"

"Your living!" repeated Hilda. She uttered a delicate and good-natured pleasantry. "I thought you married me for that!"

Stephen made no answer. After a while, when he could go without seeming to be angry, he left her on the porch of the hotel where they were spending their honeymoon and went to walk alone. He was shocked, amazed, even appalled.

Once more and only once he broached the subject.

"I am exceedingly anxious to do well in my profession, Hilda," he said earnestly. "New York is the only place where a man can really have a brilliant success."

Hilda shook her head.

"I've made my plans."

In the end, after six months abroad, Stephen hung out his sign upon the Manning Street wing of Hilda's house and there practiced his profession for seven or eight months in the year. The other months he spent in her train, journeying from one fashionable American and European resort to the other. During these excursions he was idle except for stolen visits to clinics and lectures, and he was constantly unhappy. He still had faith in his own powers and he realized that his best years were passing and that other men and even younger men were winning honors which should have been his. He knew that Hilda believed that she had made generous concessions in allowing him to practice at all. He knew that her friends—though her associates could scarcely be called friends, so light were the ties that bound them—thought him exceedingly lucky, but he believed that his colleagues held him to be a fashionable quack. He held himself to be the most unhappy of men.

Further opposition to his wife's decisions was impossible. He learned before the second month of his married life had come to a close that a woman given to hysteria could not be argued with, could not be made to see reason. His ambition was, he knew now, stronger than his affection and he would never be able to gratify it. He came to envy quiet, poor men like Edward Levis, especially those who remained unmarried, who could live their lives in freedom.

He had one or two grossly unpleasant quarrels with Hilda. Once, after she had laughed at his awkwardness in the presence of an acquaintance, he took her to task for a habit which he found more and more odious.

"The boys at the University used to say that you smoked cigarettes, but I never believed them."

They were alone in his bedroom—whose bare floors and almost blank walls acted as sounding-boards for Hilda's shrill denunciation of his prudishness. Terrified, he closed the door quickly.

Within a year her malady took a not uncommon form. He had been, he realized when the ugly scene was over, very stupid not to have recognized earlier the obsessive jealousy and rage which she must have felt for some time, but he had not dreamed that the young nurse in his office, who was pretty, but ignorant of everything outside her profession, could have attracted more than a casual glance. When Hilda began to accuse him, he listened dumfounded, on his cheek a gray paleness which added ten years to his age.

As he listened to her coarse tirade, the shrill accents seemed to ring like an unpleasant soprano aria against a clearly accented rhythmic bass, the voice of Professor Mayne. He had received the impression from Mayne that the family malady never appeared after early youth, but had he understood him aright? Horrified he looked into an abyss to whose precipitous wall he had come blindly, but with the blindness of a madman or a fool.

"But, Hilda," he said slowly, "I am married to you."

Hilda uttered a laugh which expressed hideously a variety of emotions—mollification, for his dismay was disarming; amusement, for his innocence was laughable, and even a little shame. Stephen's mind was clean; he looked at her as his good father might have looked.

For a short time she seemed a little disturbed; she regarded him with uneasy inquiry as though she suspected his horror and his inability to forget her outbreak. But he found presently that she watched the coming and going of his patients and that she interrogated his employees with such clever slyness that they did not know they were being questioned. Her jealousy noted only the women with whom he was connected professionally, especially those who were alone with him in his office, and between them, young, middle-aged, or old, she did not distinguish. His dismay at her ignorance had not escaped her; it was the center of her consciousness, the idée fixe of her madness. She misinterpreted the present and falsified the past, ascribing to Stephen infidelities in the days of their courtship. Her obsession was hideous, but by no means unprecedented; frequently the newspapers rejoiced in the airing of similar or more sordid cases. Recently an innocent patient waiting in a doctor's office had been shot dead by a suspicious wife.

Mayne, hearing his story from a terrified Stephen, grew white, then shook his head. He laid the case before his intimate friend Dr. Good, who was an alienist and brought him once or twice to Harrisburg to spend the night. It might be necessary eventually to have Hilda go—Dr. Good always put his prescriptions as delicately as possible—to a sanatorium, but there was no immediate danger. Mayne breathed more freely, and only Stephen knew by what eternal vigilance over himself and her the peace was kept, or apprehended the unpleasant and even perilous results which might follow upon its breaking.

His life was not entirely without pleasures, unhappy as it appeared to him. After the first rush of Hilda's fashionable acquaintances, who came filled with curiosity and went away baffled and irritated by his gravity and silence, there applied a more desirable clientèle. He treated the poor in the city hospital, serving them with a pleasure which he did not analyze, but which had its source partly in the satisfaction of returning some of the service which hundreds of working men and women poured out upon Hilda and her kind, and partly in a deep and unrecognized discontent with his own life. He thought often of his father with a childish turning to the one human being who had loved him deeply and unselfishly. He believed that he still regarded his father's devotion to others with impatience, his life, based upon a simple and childlike sense of duty, as wasted. He did not know that unhappiness had begun to alter the opinions which were the product of youth and good health and material prosperity.

He performed cures which astonished himself. A Mrs. Fetzer, a plain little Pennsylvania German woman, suffered at the hands of a drunken husband a gunshot wound in her face, and he was called to the hospital when it seemed that the sight of both eyes was lost. A nurse, Miss Knowlton, who had frequently attended his patients, faced him one day with defiance and told him that she was going blind and that according to half a dozen doctors there was no help for her. A Miss MacVane came to his office and laid her case before him—she was a private secretary with no other means of support than her own earnings, and her eyes were failing.

He saved one of Mrs. Fetzer's eyes and found for her a place in his house, of which she gradually took entire charge in a manner which suggested now a guardian angel, now a watchful dragon. He cured Miss Knowlton and she replaced a younger nurse in his office. Miss MacVane became his secretary; she could not be entirely cured, but with expert treatment and unremitting watchfulness she might retain a measure of vision for a long time.

He thought, grimly contemplating his assistants, that Hilda could find no fault with these ladies. Fetzer, as Hilda called her after an English fashion, was irremediably disfigured; the insertion of an artificial eye was out of the question and she wore a black patch. Miss Knowlton was tall, her features were large, her red hair was no Titian glory, but was thin and pale, and she had pale blue eyes and skin without color. Miss MacVane was short and heavy and her dim vision increased her natural awkwardness. All three women were of the type by which the world's tasks are accomplished, who take little or no recreation, who do without all luxuries, who desire apparently but one reward, the consciousness of duty done.

Stephen's sense of safety, however, was founded upon a mistaken analysis of Hilda's jealousy. He did not realize that she attributed to him no lust of the eyes, that she believed that it was intellect only which attracted him. She hated Miss Knowlton and Miss MacVane and every one with whom he talked about his profession. She hated even Fetzer, though she could not do without her.

He had begun, not without a chastening recollection of his first contribution, to send articles to medical magazines, and he believed that if he could have a year uninterrupted by idle journeying he could produce a valuable work on infectious diseases of the eye. When his first article was finished he thought of sending a copy to Edward Levis, but Levis seemed as far away as his father, and he could not renew the acquaintance in so informal a way. He would some day—no, soon—look him up.

Life had still other satisfactions. A sense of his own ignorance and lack of early opportunity kept him constantly seeking for education. He was interested in art and music and in sciences other than his own and he tried constantly to increase his information about them. During his early married life he had bought a small original painting and Hilda had expressed her approval—it was, she said, a more becoming fad for a gentleman than diseases. He had then ceased to buy pictures until his own income warranted it.

He might have found congenial friends—the city was not inhabited entirely by men and women of Hilda's type—but he knew that his friends could not be hers. It was better to avoid all social connections than to rouse groundless but hideous suspicion.

As the years passed it seemed likely that Hilda's malady would grow no worse. Her uncle felt no more anxiety, and Stephen relaxed into a certain peace of mind. He became thirty-five, then forty. He believed that the course of his life was laid out, and that, unsatisfying as it was, it was still happier than that of the mass of mankind. There were moments when he said to himself that there was no reason for his existence or that of any one else, that human life was ephemeral and purposeless; but he put aside quickly all metaphysical speculation because it recalled his father's last hours and the deep concern in his sunken eyes.

CHAPTER V
LEVIS SPEAKS HIS MIND

Levis was the only member of his family who had a great deal to say on the Sunday following Matthew's declaration of faith. At meals Matthew ate with his eyes fixed upon his plate, and Ellen wiped away an occasional tear. Several times since the sad events of yesterday she had tried to open the door of Matthew's room, to tell him that she was sorry she had made him ashamed and to lay before him the reasons for her conduct, but the door was locked. Lying in wait outside had been productive of no better results, for, appearing at last, he had quietly brushed her aside. Manda was more mournful than the young people. She did not weep, but the tip of her nose showed that she had wept in the recent past.

When supper was over, Levis addressed his family, one after the other.

"Matthew, what are you going to do this evening?"

"I'm going to bed," answered Matthew in a low tone. "I promised to help with the wheat in the morning. Soon it will be a loss."