Ariel Dances

by
Ethel Cook
Eliot

Boston
Little, Brown,
and Company
1931

Copyright, 1931,
BY ETHEL COOK ELIOT

All rights reserved

Published February, 1931
Reprinted February, 1931 (three times)

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOR
MY MOTHER

Ariel Dances

Chapter I

Ariel, quiet but alert, lay in her steamer chair, one of the most inconspicuous of the several hundred passengers the Bermuda was bringing to New York. No one would be likely to look at her twice or give her a second thought, as she crouched away from the March wind, insufficiently protected from the cold by her nondescript tweed coat, and carelessly, casually bare-headed. All about her on the deck were people of outstanding, vivid types. The thing that had impressed Ariel about these fellow passengers during the two days of the voyage was their apparent self-sufficiency,—a gay, bright assurance of their own significance, and the reasonableness, even the inevitableness, of their being what and where they were. The very children appeared to take it quite as a matter of course that they should come skimming over the Atlantic in a mammoth boat-hotel while they played their games, read their books and ate their meals,—just like that.

Ariel took nothing as a matter of course, and she never had from the minute of earliest memory. Her proclivity to wonder and to delight was as organic as her proclivity to breathe. But now it was neither delight nor wonder but an aching suspense that quivered at the back of her mind. She thought, “If Father were here! If it weren’t alone, this adventure! New York Harbor at last! I—Ariel! But it isn’t real. There’s no substance. It was to have happened and been wonderful, but this is paler than our imagining of it. The shadow of our imagining. Oh, it’s I who have died and not Father. Where he is, whatever he is doing, it’s still real with him. With Father it would be always real,—alive.”

A steward came up the deck, carrying rugs and a book for the woman who had occupied the chair next to Ariel’s during the two days’ voyage. Two children with their nurse trailed behind. Ariel’s glance barely touched the group and returned to New York’s terraced, dream-world sky line. But she was glad that these people had come up on deck and would be near her during the little while left of ship life. It did not matter that they would remain unaware of her until the very end. It was more interesting, being interested in them, than having them interested in her. And there was no reason on earth why they should be interested in her. It never entered Ariel’s head that there was.

Joan Nevin, the woman, was tall, copper haired and eyelashed, and graceful with a lithe, body-conscious kind of gracefulness, of fashion, perhaps, more than of nature. Her sleek fur coat, her high-heeled, elegant pumps—even the close dark hat, flaring back from her copper eyebrows—these seemed to motivate her gait and her postures. She was, perhaps, more pliable to them than they to her. But Ariel did not mind this, although she realized it. It was wonderful, in its way, fascinating by strangeness.

To tell the truth, Mrs. Nevin interested her more at the moment than the unknown, beautiful harbor at which she appeared to be gazing. And no aching longing for her father’s sharing of this interest could turn it dreamlike, for her father could never share it, alive or dead. Fashionable women, even at a distance, bored him. But how did a woman like that feel, Ariel wondered, about her so finished and catered-to beauty, and her easy self-sufficiency? And how did it feel to have two burnished, curled children that were one’s very own, to love, to live for, to play with? How wonderful if Ariel herself had had children of her own to play with and dance with on their beach, while her father was alive and she could still have gloried in them, before the sense of unreality had settled like a thin dust over unshared happiness!

The Nevins and the nurse had come the length of the deck now, and were standing near her, but not taking their chairs, and oddly silent. Still, she would not look directly at them to discover the reason. If she looked into their faces she might become visible to them. So far, these two past days, Ariel had kept herself wrapped in a cloud of invisibility, she felt, merely by not meeting other eyes. She was shy of contacts, ever since her father’s death; and the aching, hurting suspense at the back of her mind, which was caused by dread of the near approaching meeting with her father’s friend, had only intensified her desire for invisibility.

As for Mrs. Nevin, until this instant she had been nearly as unaware of Ariel as Ariel supposed her to be. She had looked at her once or twice in the beginning, to wonder whether it was a child, a girl or a woman who occupied the neighboring chair, but quickly decided that such speculation was waste of time since the one thing certain was that Ariel’s age didn’t matter, since she was obviously—nobody. From that decision she had returned to social obliviousness, lying back for hours at a time, wrapped up preciously by her eager cabin steward in two fur-lined rugs, which could not have been hired for the passage but must be her own expensive property, following with absorption the fine print of a thick novel by some one named Aldous Huxley. Now and then she would lift languid but brilliant eyes and gaze for a while at the flying sea. That was all, for after the first half hour on board she had not thought it worth her while to waste that brilliant languid gaze on any other fellow-passenger more than on Ariel.

But now she remained standing by Ariel’s chair, as though with some intention, and Ariel had finally to look up and meet, for the first time, in a direct exchange of glance, those brilliant, mahogany-colored eyes set wide apart under their strongly arched coppery brows, and it was, without doubt, a breathtaking moment. But it was the steward who was speaking, and his tone was seriously accusatory. “You are occupying the lady’s chair.”

He was right. In the excitement of at last being almost in, so near the landing, Ariel had neglected to make sure of her own name—Ariel Clare—on the slip of pink cardboard stuck into the holder on the chair’s back. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, rose and was off like a bird. The steward’s eyelids just flickered as she brushed past him in exquisite, smooth flight. But the flicker was not because the steward had recognized that the nondescript, pale, young girl had turned exquisite with motion. He blinked merely because her decision to depart and the departure had been so strangely, almost weirdly, simultaneous.

“Tuck it in at the foot more, please. Very well. That will do. Thank you.” Ariel, out by the deck rail, heard Mrs. Nevin’s low, but carrying voice directing and dismissing her eager slave. “It was unkind and perfectly needless,” she thought. “Any chair would have done her just as well for the next few minutes until we land. It doesn’t matter, though. I won’t care.”

But she decided to go for a last time up to the sun deck. She could watch the boat docking from there just as well—better than from here—and discover her father’s friend among the crowds on the dock just as easily. She was through with deck chairs and pink cards and haughty neighbors, for this voyage, anyway. But she wished she could wipe out from her memory forever those brilliant, indifferent eyes.

She found the sun deck surprisingly clear of passengers. The deck chairs there had been almost all gathered up and were now being stacked into corners to wait for the return voyage and new voyagers. Ariel crossed to the rail and began to search, eyes narrowed against the cold sunlight glinting from cold waves, for her father’s friend in the dark mass at the edge of the pier over there, which only now was beginning to show itself as separate individuals waiting for the docking of the Bermuda.

“When I care so much that just a stranger scorns me and finds me in the way, how am I going to help caring terribly if the Weymans don’t like me?” she asked herself, baffled that by no act of will could she slow the beating of her excited heart or cool the fire she felt in her cheeks. “Hugh’s so tall I must soon make him out, if he’s really come to meet me. I’ll wave when he catches sight of me.... Forget myself.... Wave for Father.... Pretend it’s Father seeing Hugh after all these years, and not I. I will not be strange and shy.”

She imagined her father in her place, leaning on the rail,—blond, blue-eyed, chuckling softly and searching with anticipatory eagerness for the high-held dark head of his friend which would stand out any minute now above the crowd of people. And Gregory Clare was so living, so vibrant with life and joy in life, that when the people on the pier, looking up, first caught sight of him, not a soul of them but would ask himself “Who’s that rather wonderful-looking person?” and an involuntary light, a contagion of life, would ripple answeringly in the lifted faces.

The wind whipped a strand of Ariel’s hair smartingly across her eyes. She shut them against the pain for an instant, and when she opened them again her father had gone. She was alone. She was only herself now, shy, trivial, pale,—a worm that wondered about the impression she was going to make on her father’s friend and his family. And all the time there was New York’s sky line to glory in.

Well, even though she was so mean a person, so little and mean in her hidden self, perhaps she could do something to improve the outward girl. She could at least put on her hat, stand straight—not flattened against the rail like a weak piece of straw in the wind,—hold her chin up—her chin that was like her father’s, pointed, but firm. She pulled out the hat from one of the pockets of the tweed coat, pushed her blown hair up under its brim and pulled it well down on her head. It was a notable hat, once well on, and whatever it did for the inner girl, it certainly changed the whole air of the outer, visible girl. It was French felt of an exceptionally fine quality, and green, the shade of Bermuda waters when they are stillest. Her father had bought it for her one day in St. George’s. He said he had got it for a song at a stupid sale. It was one of the very few hats of her life, as it happened, because her father thought hats in general ridiculous and more suitable for monkeys than for men and women. But this hat was different. He realized that, when he caught it from the corner of his eye, passing the shop window. It sang Ariel. And he had got it for a “song.” But not the feather that was tacked to the brim, ruffling jewel notes in the wind. That had dropped from a song, not been bought at all. He had picked it up on the beach almost at their door as he came back one afternoon, not many weeks ago, from what was to prove his last swim. No bird from which this feather could have dropped had ever been seen on the island, so far as any ornithologist knew. But here was the feather, in spite of that. It was magic, then. And it magic’d the hat. It pointed the fact that Ariel’s eyes, rather narrow, but nice friendly eyes, and free as the day from the malice that one sometimes detects even in the pleasantest children’s eyes, were as green as itself,—as green as Bermuda waters.

Now those eyes had discerned one head that did top all the other heads on the approaching pier, and it very probably was Hugh’s. But she had decided last night, or early this morning—she had slept very little—that she would begin, at least, by calling him “Mr. Weyman.” For it was five years and a few months over since they had seen each other. His father too had died, since that far-away time, and he had left law school to become the support of his mother and younger brother and sister. At twenty-five, still a student without responsibilities, when they had entertained him at the studio, he had seemed a boy. But at thirty now, and having, as she had, encountered death, could he be the same at all, any more than she was the same fourteen-year-old girl that he must be remembering? She thought not; and whether she was shaking with chill from the March wind or from apprehension of change in her father’s friend, she did not know. But she was shaking, miserably, and a strand of hair had escaped again and was stinging her eyes.

Chapter II

He had been in Bermuda that time for part of his Christmas holidays, along with his mother and young sister. But the mother and sister had never appeared on the Clares’ beach, never come with Hugh to the studio. Hugh’s own arrival there was the merest accident. One mid-morning he came pushing his rented bicycle across the fields to their beach, which he had glimpsed from a high spot on the road to St. George’s, intending a solitary swim in the shadow of their rocks. Only he did not know that they were their rocks or that there was a house at all, hidden away on the slope of purple cedars. He passed within a few yards of the studio, without sensing its presence, and went coolly down to the beach with the intention of undressing for his swim in the very seclusion where Gregory Clare was at the moment in the middle of painting a picture.

The artist, hearing the careless approach to the sacred privacy of his working place, rose wrathfully to drive the intruder away. But it turned out that he did not resume his brushes and his palette again until he had joined the young man in a noon-hour swim in the emerald waters. For Hugh had succeeded in doing more that morning than blunder on to private property and interrupt the creation of a picture; he had blundered into a friendship with Gregory Clare, the artist, Ariel’s father.

The sudden friend knew next to nothing about painting. That was evidenced by his awkward silences once he had come into the studio and stood looking with unconcealed bewilderment at the dozens of canvases stacked around the walls and against the chairs and tables. But the young man’s ignorance did not hinder Gregory Clare from talking art to him. He dragged forward the canvases, one after another, making rapid and brilliant criticisms of them himself in the face of Hugh’s blank silences, propounding exactly what it was that made each picture’s strength or weakness in its stab at beauty. And all the while Hugh looked from the artist to his paintings and listened, dark head slightly bent, but with a hawklike alertness in its poise that gave Clare, and even Ariel, watching, a sense of balanced keenness.

Ariel and her father prepared the studio meals by turns, and this day of Hugh’s appearance happened to be Ariel’s day as cook. Hugh was more articulate about food, it soon transpired, than about art, and had intelligent praise for pungent soup and crisp salad. But though that was what he was at ease about and could speak of, his real interest was, Ariel saw, all in Gregory Clare and his rushing passionate talk concerning the paintings. He seemed scarcely conscious of Ariel, the lanky young girl in a faded green smock, with hair a pale wave on her shoulders, who had cooked the luncheon and soon so quietly cleared the table and then disappeared, dissolving, so far as he was concerned, perhaps, into the white, hot Bermuda afternoon. She knew that he was glad to be left alone with her wonderful father.

After that, for the remaining days of his vacation on the island, Hugh was constantly at the studio. He must have entirely deserted his mother and sister, and he never bothered to speak of them again, after his first mention of the fact that there were such persons with him at the hotel in Hamilton. Even the morning that his boat was to sail he appeared at the studio, inviting himself to breakfast with the Clares, in spite of having had a farewell dinner with them the night before. And that morning, at last, he commented on Gregory Clare’s work, or at least on one of his canvases. It was time for him to go, they had told him, if he was to make his boat; but he delayed. And suddenly, in an embarrassed manner he turned back from the door, when they really thought he was off, and standing in front of an easel with a just finished painting on it blurted, “I really like this one, ‘Noon,’ the best of the lot, Clare, if you don’t mind my saying so. It’s the light that makes it so extraordinary, isn’t it? It beats out on you. Makes you squint. It’s the first time I ever saw light, or even felt it; I’m sure of that. Your picture has taught me what the sun hasn’t!” He laughed, self-depreciatively, and added almost defiantly, “It’s great stuff, I think!”

Ariel’s father said nothing. He stood by the table in the wide window where they had just breakfasted, jingling some coin in the pockets of his white duck trousers, and kept a smiling silence. Ariel wanted to cry, “Oh, do go; hurry, Hugh, now, or you’ll miss your boat!” But Hugh seemed to be waiting for something, wanting to say more, and she kept still. After a minute he got it out, “I’d like awfully to take this picture home with me, Clare. Now. I’ve written out a check for a thousand dollars—did it last night—just on the chance you’d sell. I don’t know anything, of course, about the prices you put on your stuff. But this is exactly one quarter of my year’s allowance, and all the actual cash I can put my hands on now. If you will sell, and the price is higher—and you can wait for the rest—”

Hugh was not looking at the artist or at Ariel or even at the picture by this time. His abashed gaze was toward the sea, while he waited for Gregory Clare to answer.

The painting was the one that Hugh’s intrusion on their beach had interrupted. It was a bit of a corner of the beach seen at high noon. Everything was sun-stilled, even the water, except for the figure of Ariel herself, who was dancing in the violet heat-glow above the rocks. But although it was Clare’s daughter, the artist had not seen her as human, since he placed her dancing feet on air, not earth. And the faded smock—the smock she was wearing the day Hugh had first come to the studio—in the painting had found its vanished color at the same time that the hot sunlight struck all color from her partly averted face. Gregory Clare might have called this painting “Ariel Dances,” but instead he called it “Noon.” And it was Noon, actually. Ariel was only the heart-pulse at the center of the otherwise still, white light.

But one thousand dollars! The listening girl was stunned, strangely taken aback. Her father, however, did not show even surprise. He merely chuckled and jingled the coins in his pockets like music.

“I congratulate you, Hugh,” he murmured, after a minute. “You show your taste. ‘Noon’ is my best, quite easily my best, so far. I’m awfully glad that you see it. I’ve felt all along, though, that you were seeing an awful lot, really. And to sacrifice one fourth of your year’s income to beauty won’t hurt you. Indeed, it might very well happen to save your soul. Even so, I advise you to take more time. Think it over. Write me. I can always ship you the thing. I won’t part with it for less than the thousand, though.”

But the fledgling art connoisseur was not to be put off. Until now he had been in regard to the studio, the people in it, and the paintings, the soaring, silent hawk. This, however, was his instant of darting and seizing. He had carried ‘Noon’ off with him, under his arm, unwrapped, and made the boat without a second to lose. And amazingly soon thereafter Gregory Clare and his daughter had got themselves to Europe, which meant Paris; and once in Paris, Gregory swept Ariel straight to the Louvre, where she sat or promenaded with him as long as Hugh’s thousand dollars lasted, gazing on cold, dim old pictures, but with her father’s warm, vibrant artist’s hand often on hers. It had been Ariel’s one adventure beyond Bermuda, until this present adventure: alone, and her father dead.

Hugh had never come back to Bermuda and his letters were infrequent. Gregory Clare’s own letters were, from the beginning, almost non-existent, because that was his casual way with friends. One of Hugh’s first letters told them of the sudden death of his father, and that Hugh’s plan for making himself a lawyer was frustrated by the necessity of getting as quickly as was possible into his father’s niche in the business world. But Hugh did not use the term “frustration,” and there was, indeed, no touch of bitterness in the communication. The hint of a real grief was there, and a suggestion, somehow, that his father could not have been so exceptional in business capacity as in personality and character, since at the time of his death he had pretty well gone through his inheritance and was leaving his family little but a name. The name, however, was not clouded by his purely financial inability and was now of invaluable assistance to Hugh, who was being quite spoiled—according to his own account—by Wall Street associates of his father who had taken him into a big bond house on a floor several stories removed from the bottom.

After that the studio heard from Hugh Weyman, bond salesman, at longer and longer intervals. Clare was afraid that his friend was absorbed by business, a dire calamity to befall a young man who had once been rejoiced to spend one fourth of his year’s income on the pigment splashed on a four foot by three foot bit of canvas. And now, for a year past, no word of any sort had come from Hugh, until the morning of the artist’s death. And although her father seemed actually to have held his death at bay those last few days, merely in the hope of that last letter, he did not show it to Ariel. But he explained to her, faintly and with an odd, smiling satisfaction, after he had read it to himself, and she had carefully burned it under his direction in the studio fireplace, that it was an answer to a letter from himself written within the week.

His letter had told Hugh that he was near death, and asked him to invite Ariel to visit the Weymans for the latter part of the winter, while Charlie Frye, a young disciple of Clare’s, who had spent the last few months in Bermuda working with him, was arranging for an exhibition and sale of Clare’s paintings in New York. Ariel was being left only a very few hundred dollars, but the sale of the pictures ought to carry her through any number of farther years, until, in any case, she should either have married or have prepared herself for some profession. Their doctor, here in Bermuda, would be Ariel’s actual guardian in law. Charlie Frye would be her business manager in a practical sense. Would Hugh make himself her host and friend for the coming difficult period? Neither the kindly doctor, nor the young and enthusiastic Frye seemed to Clare quite the man to do precisely this for his girl.

That was the substance of the artist’s letter as told to Ariel, and Hugh’s reply had been an instant promise to receive Ariel and with his mother’s help do anything for her that was in his power. Gregory could rely on his friend. Only, the doctor must keep him informed of his patient’s health, and it had better be the doctor who should arrange for Ariel’s coming to New York if the end that Clare had prophesied did transpire.

That was the substance of Hugh’s letter. And Gregory Clare had finished explaining it all to Ariel as she stood watching the last scraps of it curl into charred blackness in the grate.

“You mustn’t worry, darling,” he gasped, when her silence had become prolonged, “for when you remember that the only picture I ever even thought of selling brought us one thousand dollars ... and now there are two hundred of them soon to be up for sale in New York ... where there’s so much wealth ... I’ve marked those Charlie’s to drown out beyond the reef to-morrow—the ones that aren’t really good enough, you know—and it leaves, even at that, two hundred pictures. Suppose they only bring half the price of the first one each.... Why, even that is wealth, my dear....”

“Oh, don’t, Father! What does it matter?” She was dismayed that his last strength was being given to such trivialities.

But he struggled on, with harshly drawn breaths. “Funny why I’m trusting you to Hugh, beyond every one else! I suppose it’s because he saw that ‘Noon’ was the best of the lot.... He did see, remember? And he sacrificed something for that seeing. A quarter of his income, wise boy! He understood ‘Noon’—so he’ll understand you, Ariel, darling, my dearest—sweetest. He may have changed, but hardly so much—for

‘... Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then far away,

Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.’

Beauty’s sandal, that was. Do you remember the sonnet? Well—Hugh’s one of those Fortunate.... I’ve never seen in any one else’s face what I saw in his that morning when he stood, looking at ‘Noon’ and saying it showed him what the sun hadn’t....”

“Oh, Father! Hush! Don’t try to speak any more. Rest!” Ariel was kneeling by his bed, pressing his hands, hot with her tears for all their waning life, against her cheeks. “Everything will be all right. There is nothing, nothing at all to worry about. Only never forget me. Don’t go so far that you forget me. Don’t go far. Not far....”

He understood all that she meant, all that was beyond saying, and he promised with a gesture never to let death’s freedom intrigue him into adventure that would leave the memory and the love of his girl out. But he looked over her head at the doctor who had been standing all these minutes in the window, and the doctor nodded. The nod seemed a signal for something the two men had previously agreed on, as it was. And Gregory Clare, acting on the signal, which had come finally and at last, said to Ariel in the voice of authority which he so seldom had used during their life together, “Now, beloved, it is time you went away. Go down to the beach, please. Give my love and my farewell to the light, to earth light, and to our beach. I shall be gone when you come back, and you are not to see me die.”

Ariel rose to obey. There was no question about obedience for it was the voice of Death itself which had commanded her. But at the door her father spoke again, and she had thought never to hear him speak again, and it was the voice of Life.

“No— No. I was wrong. We made a mistake, Doctor. A woman is bound to have plenty to do with pain—before she’s through. I think, Ariel, we’ll have this pain together.... If you like—darling. I won’t send you out of it. Doctor, I want to be with my girl when she bears her first anguish—which will be my agony, as it happens. It’s yourself, Friend, I want away. No more need of you till it’s over. Ariel will help me. Your arm under my shoulder, dear. That’s—that’s—right....” But he had not sent the doctor with his love and his farewell to their beach and the earth light, for not every one can take such a message, and Ariel would do it later.

The doctor sat down in the loggia, within hearing if Ariel should cry out for him. He smoked cigarettes for an hour, throwing their stubs angrily one after another out into the roses, and did not approve; for Ariel seemed only a child to him, and this was terrible. Perhaps she had been a child when he, the doctor, had been made to leave her face to face with physical agony and final death in the studio. But when, at last, he saw her coming out into the strong white sunlight and knew that she brought with her the stark word he waited, she was a woman. The doctor would have been blind not to have recognized the mark of that maturity on her face. And this forced and sudden growth had happened to the girl because of her father’s colossal selfishness, he believed, stumbling forward to his feet and reaching both his hands for hers. But when they were close in his, those young, live hands, the doctor knew nothing for certain any more about the business; it might be imagination in Clare—colossal imagination—that had made him act so, not a grain of selfishness in it. For to his amazed relief the slight hands he held were steadier, stronger, at the moment, than his own.

Chapter III

She would certainly call him Mr. Weyman, not Hugh. And the first thing she would say would be a “thank you” for his invitation to visit him; for she had not written the note of acceptance herself but left it to Doctor Hazzard. And now she thought that if only she had written herself, it would somehow have prepared the way better for the instant, almost reached now, when the boat would be close enough to the pier for the tall man to discern her, to meet her eyes, and for her to wave a greeting.

And then, suddenly, she woke to the fact that that was not Hugh at all. The sun on the water had dazzled her. It was an older man, heavily bearded, foreign looking. He was taller, and certainly much broader than Hugh would ever be. She had never seen any one, except perhaps her father, stand out from a crowd as this man was standing out from it. Even from a distance his personality had reached her, impressed itself, and this had nothing to do with his unusual bulk and height. No, it was personality, bodiless, that reached across the water, and absorbed her attention.

The big man had pushed his way through the crowd and soon stood right out at the edge of the pier, his head thrown back, eagerly scanning the Bermuda’s decks. Then, as the ship sidled a few yards nearer, he raised his big, long arms straight above his head in sudden cyclonic greeting, and laughed up a big laugh of gleaming white teeth almost into Ariel’s face. But it couldn’t be herself he was so ardently saluting, and she turned quickly to see who was near her, here on the sun deck.

It was Mrs. Nevin again. She was there, with her children, almost at Ariel’s shoulder. And she was smiling down at the bearded man. But the children were looking at Ariel. She had so plainly refrained from inviting their acquaintance during the voyage that they had not once tried to force a contact. She had seemed to their sensitive child perceptions to be out with the flying fish and the dip of the waves, more than in her steamer chair beside their mother, for that was where her gaze had lived. But the small green feather, which fluttered its down incessantly against the brim of her hat, had all the while had a life, they felt, quite apart from its wearer’s. It had been a veritable fairy flag, waving recognition and good will to them whenever their play brought them near. And now Ariel had turned so quickly that she had caught the children’s glances of camaraderie with the feather. And suddenly she took in their magic, realized it, as they had from the very first recognized and taken in the magic of the feather her father had found and given her. She was aware of the children—really aware—at last.

That was all that it needed. They saw her face lose its abstraction, come as alive as the wind-dancing feather. Ariel’s eyes and lips smiled. Everything went golden. The children’s hearts fluttered as though they were magic feathers.

But even now when Ariel’s smile had taught them all that there was to know about her the children did not rush upon her. They came slowly, with sensitive delicacy, as children will,—but for all the delicacy, with an air of deep, almost frightening assurance. Each child, taking one of Ariel’s cold, ungloved hands, pressed close.

“We’ll be in, in another minute,” Ariel faltered, tremulously and almost beneath her breath, as if to warn them of the unreasonableness of this sudden, overwhelming intimacy which must be lost almost as soon as consummated. “Look. There goes the gangplank. And there’s some one—some one I know.” Suddenly, and when she had really forgotten his very existence, she had seen Hugh.

To her relief this first sight assured her that he had not changed in the five years. He was the same Hugh, her father’s eager, quiet friend of the hawklike dark head, poised, alert, on shoulders that for all their breadth had an indefinable air of elegance about them. In his darkness and poise he was in direct contrast to the blond-bearded person gesticulating to Mrs. Nevin. Hugh stood beside this giant, looking up at the decks of the Bermuda as he was looking up, but with a difference. Without excitement, but rapidly, his eyes were traveling along the tiers of decks and the bending faces. In another minute he would get to the last deck and find what he sought, Ariel. Their eyes would meet and in the meeting remember everything of that sunlit week of five years ago. Under one arm she saw that he was carrying, tucked there as though it might be any ordinary parcel, a big bunch of English violets. They were for her, of course. So why had she ever been shy, afraid? She had forgotten the children and was bending forward over the rail, waiting with genuine gayety now the moment of his recognition.

But just before his glance, in its methodical journey, came to her deck, she had her first sense of change in him. After all, he was different, a little, from the Bermuda days. There was a moody hunger in his eyes, and something gaunt, unfed, in the face that she had remembered only as keen, without shadows. But his face would light up in the old way when he discovered her. This might be his look when alone and unaware of friends near.

The light, however, when it came, was not for Ariel. It was Mrs. Nevin his searching glance was halted by, and the glory that transfigured the dark, uplifted face took away Ariel’s breath.

Mrs. Nevin laughed down a greeting, and murmured above her breath, so that Ariel caught the words, “Now how’d he know I was coming?”

It flashed through Ariel’s mind that much reading of Aldous Huxley during the voyage, if that was the author’s name, must have dulled Mrs. Nevin’s perceptions, if she did not see that it had needed surprise as well as joy, so to shatter Hugh’s reserve.

Mrs. Nevin called to her children, who still pressed against Ariel, holding her hands, “There’s Uncle Hugh, darlings. Wave to him. See, he has found us. Isn’t it nice of him to meet our boat!”

Hugh returned the children’s obedient salutes, but the light was gone. Was it merely habitual reserve returning to duty, or had the sudden delight really as suddenly died? Ariel knew instantly and intuitively that these children were not related to Hugh, although Mrs. Nevin had called him uncle. Now he had to see herself, wedged in between the children. She tried to smile down at him, to help him to his recognition, but her lips were as cold as the wind in her face. She could not smile. His glance was passing her by as casually as it had passed a hundred other bending faces above the deck rails. After a little farther search it returned to Mrs. Nevin who bent forward, held out her gloved hands, and called down, “Toss, Hugh! Toss! I can catch!”—laughing.

For just an instant Hugh appeared puzzled. Then he remembered the violets jammed under his arm, and tossed them up to the waiting hands. It was an expert toss, and Ariel remembered how her father had once drawn her attention to the fact that all Hugh’s motions were expert, effective. The smell of the violets, so near now, was dizzying her with nostalgia. She wanted to cry out, “They are mine, not yours. He brought them for me. He never even knew you were on the boat!” But instead, she loosened the children’s hands from hers and turned her back to the pier. Through the darkness of tears she moved away toward the stairs, with the intention of making sure that her baggage had left her stateroom. It would be time enough to identify herself to Hugh, who had forgotten her, when she came off the ship.

She was almost the last person down the gangway. Hugh was there at the foot, looking anxious, for he had begun to be afraid he had missed Ariel Clare in the disembarking crowd. But even when she stopped by him and with head back, so that he might see her face plainly under the brim of her green hat, said, “I’m Ariel, Mr. Weyman. It’s kind of you to have me and to meet me,” he looked doubtful.

“You!” he murmured, obviously taken aback and surprised. “Why, I thought you were the twins’ nurse!” But even as he spoke he saw that it was indeed Ariel, standing with the look that she used to wear sometimes before vanishing away into hot, white sunlight, years and years ago when he was young and she was an unreal fairy creature, hovering almost unnoticed somewhere on the edges of his first deep experience of friendship. Of course this was she; how hadn’t he known? “But the twins were clinging to you like burrs, weren’t they!” he insisted, explaining his stupidity. “It looked, you know, as if you belonged, body and soul, to Persis and Nicky. But of course it’s you.”

Yet even now when he was at last shaking hands with her Hugh was looking over her head at a group of people a few yards away, with Mrs. Nevin at its center. The big man, the foreign-looking, bearded personage who had come to meet Mrs. Nevin, was beside her, his hand on her arm. He was possessive in his bearing, and openly exuberant that the lady had landed and was for the moment, at least, under his protection. And now a great sheaf of yellow roses in Mrs. Nevin’s arms quite obscured the violets, if, indeed, she still had them. Ariel was conscious that Hugh returned his attention to herself with an almost painful effort.

“Your luggage will be under C,” he unnecessarily informed her, and then added with a sudden access of responsibility, “This is the way. We’ll do our best to speed things up in spite of the unlucky popularity of your letter. We’ll grab tea somewhere then, and get right along to Wild Acres, where Mother and Anne are waiting for us. They would have come in to meet you with me—Anne would, anyway—but we’ve got another visitor with us—Prescott Enderly, the novelist. Know his stuff?” And all the while he was skillfully guiding her through a milling crowd of over-anxious people.

Chapter IV

The younger Weymans had been skiing most of that afternoon with their guest, Prescott Enderly. Although Enderly was Glenn Weyman’s intimate at Yale and only a year or so older, he was a novelist of some notoriety. He had written only one novel, it is true, but during the past summer—the book was published in the spring—it had skyrocketed to fame. Its publishers described it in their advertising as an honest and fearless description of the private life of almost any averagely intelligent college man. Its author was now—except for the necessity of doing some classwork if he were to graduate this year, and taking time out for being a lion—working on a second novel.

It was late in the afternoon when they returned home from their skiing in the snowy country around the Weymans’ estate on the Hudson. Glenn went up to his room to lounge and read until dinner time, but Anne staggered with an exaggerated air of fatigue into the library, and Enderly followed her. A fire, recently lighted, blazed its invitation from the far end of the long room, and although it was not yet quite dark outside, the heavy velvet curtains had already been drawn across the windows and several table lamps were glowing through rich, soft-colored shades. Enderly, without asking Anne’s leave, went the round of the lamps, turning off their lights. But even without the lamps the freshly lighted fire kept the room alive and awake. Anne threw herself into the exact center of the deep divan which was drawn up before the fireplace, and Enderly, without hesitation or a word, settled himself close at her side. She leaned her head against the back of the divan, shut her eyes, and murmured “Hello. Where’d you come from?” as though already half asleep. Her voice was oddly, boyishly deep, but with a slight catch in it which turned it thrillingly feminine. Enderly liked Anne’s voice: it was the thing that had attracted him to her in the beginning, when he had met her at a house party in New Haven.

“Why, I’ve been tobogganing, darling.”

“So’ve I. Funny. There was a creature along with us,—name of Prescott Enderly. Thinks he’s a novelist and quite important, you know. Perhaps he can write, but he’s not so good in the snow.”

“Really? Well, darling, you are magnificent in the snow, so it doesn’t matter about me. You were a gorgeous red bird, always flying somewhere ahead in the face of a dead, white world. Beautiful!”

Anne opened her eyes and glanced down at her flannel skirt, ruby in the firelight. “But yesterday, Pressy, you insisted I was a flame. I’d really rather be a flame than a bird. Aren’t I more a flame? Say, ‘yes’!”

He laid his hand over her two hands which were clasped on her crossed knees. But he laid it casually, looking into the fire. Her eyelids flickered at the contact, but her hands did not stir or tremble. “You’re a flame in the house—now. Close like this.... But a bird in the open. How’s that? Satisfied?” His cheek just brushed hers.

“No, not satisfied,” she insisted huskily,—and then pretended to yawn, because huskiness was a symptom of feeling with her, and Prescott knew it. “They all say ‘flame.’ It isn’t because it’s original with you that I like it. Think it was?”

His hand pressed harder on her clasped hands. “Why do you want to remind me there are others?” he asked. “One takes that for granted with a—flame, you know. It’s been some time, darling, though, since there were others for me. Perhaps I’d better look around. If there were a little competition you might be nicer. How about Ariel Clare?”

Anne threw off his hand, sat bolt upright and cried “Ariel Clare! Good Heavens! I’d forgotten all about the creature. Hugh was bringing her out after lunch. Where’s she now, do you s’pose?”

“I heard your mother telling some one on the telephone, I think, that the Bermuda was several hours late. But I wonder whether she’ll have any—flaming qualities!”

“Nobody knows anything about that in this household, except Hugh, and he’s been persistently uncommunicative ever since Mother hit the ceiling the morning he informed us that such a person was about to descend upon us to be a second daughter of the house for an indefinite period. Mother came down—from the ceiling, you know—almost at once, but she’d said enough to shut Hugh’s mouth. He merely says we’ll see for ourselves when Ariel gets here what she’s like. But he’s justified in his high-handedness. It’s he who runs the house—his money, I mean. So if he wants to have a guest, he’s a perfect right. Any kind of a guest, even the awfullest.”

“But she may be all right. Why not? I don’t see—”

The click of a lamp being turned on startled them. Mrs. Weyman, home from her Shakespeare Club meeting in Tarrytown, had come into the room unnoticed. Enderly sprang to his feet and in a second was slipping his hostess’ coat from her shoulders, taking her gloves. “We didn’t hear you,” he said needlessly and added, “We were discussing the expected guest. Anne and I are wondering what she’ll be like.” He carried the coat, hat and gloves swiftly out to the hall, deposited them in good order there on a chair, and came back. Mrs. Weyman had sat down beside her daughter and was leaning forward, holding chilled hands to the blaze, rubbing them slightly. They were long, essentially aristocratic hands, Enderly noted, like Anne’s.

Mrs. Weyman glanced up. “Hugh has invited her to visit us because of his friendship for her father,” she explained. “She was only a little girl when he knew her. We shall have to wait to see what she is like now.”

“Clare was an artist, wasn’t he? Didn’t Glenn tell me?”

“He called himself one. But no one has ever heard of him. Or have you, perhaps?” There was a sudden access of hope in Mrs. Weyman’s modulated voice.

But Enderly shook his head. “Not I. But that doesn’t signify. What I don’t know about art—”

Mrs. Weyman stopped him. “You’d have at least heard the name. No. Hugh’s the only one who ever did hear about this particular artist, I suspect. But they were great friends. And it’s that that matters.”

“Of course. But I didn’t realize that Hugh cared so much about art, that he was interested—”

Anne laughed, a laugh throaty and hesitant as her speaking voice. “He isn’t,” she exclaimed, snatching Enderly’s attention from her mother. “Joan Nevin squashed all that promptly on its first appearance. You see, Joan does know a thing or two about art, and artists too. They swarm at her house, Holly, and she’s a patroness of exhibitions and a godmother in general to the aspiring. She knows all the big painters, the important fellows, here and abroad, and she has a collection of her own that’s A1,—but you know all about her, of course. Hugh’s always been in love with her. His devotion is almost as famous as her private collection. So when, all on his own, he discovered this artist in Bermuda, he proudly bought and lugged home one of his paintings to her. But she—”

Mrs. Weyman touched her daughter’s arm warningly. This was an Anne who distressed and embarrassed her. But Enderly, for the minute too genuinely interested to be tactful, said, “Oh! So Mrs. Nevin has a painting by this unheard-of artist. I’d like to see it.”

“No, Mrs. Nevin hasn’t it,” Mrs. Weyman corrected him, her fingers by now firmly pressing Anne’s arm. “I don’t know how Anne knows that Hugh even intended it as a present for her. He never said so. He merely got her over here to see it, as I remember, and she wasn’t very much impressed.”

“So it’s here?” Enderly was looking about as though actually expecting to find the picture on one of the library walls.

“In the attic. Hugh lost no time in stowing it way after Joan had laughed at it. He knew that she knew, you see. But Hugh is loyal to his friends. He doesn’t count the cost of friendship. And Ariel Clare may be charming, no matter how much a failure her father was as an artist.”

Mrs. Weyman got up, snapped on another light or two and started out to dress for dinner. But Enderly, clinging to his tactlessness, detained her by inquiring, “Where’d she go to school? Do you know? England?”

Mrs. Weyman turned in the doorway to answer but Anne, released from the restraining pressure of the maternal fingers, got ahead of her with: “We have no evidence of any education whatever having happened to Ariel. It’s one thing Hugh doesn’t try to claim. What she’s really been doing all these years is being a model—her father’s model, of course—and that may have taken all her time, poor thing. Hugh tells us that he never painted a picture without putting her in. Where most artists put their signature he put his daughter, do you see. Not the subject of the picture, just a sort of afterthought, off at the side, or in the air or in the water,—a kind of sprite or accompanying angel. Sweet idea. And—”

Mrs. Weyman interposed. “I wouldn’t go on embroidering, Anne. It’s time to dress for dinner, and Ariel is to be our guest. I mean to remember that, and you must, too. By the way, Joan’s back. Came on the Bermuda to-day, with Ariel Clare, but didn’t notice any one she thought would be she. I saw Holly lighted up and stopped in to say ‘Hello.’ She’s coming over after dinner—”

“Oh, that’s a shame!” Anne cried, persisting in clashing with her mother. “She’s been gone so long Hugh’s almost begun to take an interest in other things. And here she’s back to spoil it all. Why can’t she leave him alone?”

Enderly followed Mrs. Weyman into the hall. “Frankly, I’ve been palpitating to meet your Mrs. Joan Nevin for a long while,” he was saying. “In New York every one has promised it. Party after party they are almost sure of her, and then, for some reason or other, she isn’t there. I shall think myself in luck to-night, if she actually does come here, and isn’t, as I’d begun to suspect, a lady of fable merely,—an intriguing legend. Wild Acres is really a delicious place to visit!”

Enderly was working into Mrs. Weyman’s hands at last. She paused, turned back to him, and replied, “So nice of you to think so. And Mrs. Nevin is very worth meeting, of course. But one forgets her fame as a collector and all that. At least, I do. To me she’s just a very dear girl whom I’ve known practically all her life. A lovely person. She’s been away most of the winter, and I’ve missed her. All of us have.”

Anne, already at the foot of the stairs, put in, “Huh! I’d be willing to miss her permanently, for Hugh’s sake. But come along, Mum. Let’s not be caught downstairs by Hugh and his incuba. Better to take her first along with dinner. Food may sustain us over the first shocks.”

“I’ll go up too, and write a paragraph, perhaps,” Enderly said, behind Mrs. Weyman and her daughter on the stairs. “My publishers are tiresomely inconsiderate, keeping at me about the new book. They’re following me even here with urgent telegrams. They don’t hope for miracles—they expect ’em.”

“Is the lamp in your room right for writing, and is it warm enough there?” Mrs. Weyman asked, her hand on the knob of her bedroom door. Genuine concern for his comfort was mingled with the satisfaction in her mind that Glenn had such a worth-while friend at college and had succeeded in bringing him home for the holidays.

Enderly assured his hostess of the complete comfort of her arrangements for him. “They’ve laid a very handsome fire for me ready to light. I’ll start it now and be most particularly luxurious,” he said. “You’re very good to me.”

Then the bedroom doors were closed, and quiet reigned upstairs and down in the big, rambling house.

Chapter V

Hugh and Ariel, arriving, were met by the stillness. Hugh passed Ariel and looked in at the library. He surveyed the unoccupied room with some disconcertion. He hadn’t asked his mother to be on hand to greet Ariel, and Anne was probably off somewhere with Glenn and Prescott Enderly. There was no actual cause for complaint, but he was concerned for the impression the absence of welcome might make on the girl standing there at his back, pale and wordless under the brilliant impersonal light of the hall chandeliers.

“Mother’s probably dressing for dinner.” He spoke with assumed assurance and liveliness. “I’ll show you your room. I’m pretty sure I know which ’tis. And Anne will come straight there the minute she gets in. She’s off somewhere skylarking, or—” he looked at his watch and amended, “probably dressing for dinner too. I’ll look her up in her room.”

He went ahead, carrying the suitcases up the stairs. As he passed his mother’s and Anne’s doors he said something more, it didn’t matter what, in the hope that one of the doors would open and some one appear to make Ariel feel at home. But nothing so fortuitous happened. His resentment became actual when he had to feel for the electric-light switch in the guest room allotted to Ariel and was conscious that she had followed him in and was standing there in the dark as aware of the chill in the room as was he. They might at least have told Rose, the second maid, to have the lights turned on, and a fire blazing in the little marble fireplace. “Now I’ll go and hunt up my kid sister,” he promised, when he had found the switch. “She’ll be along right away to help you unpack and settle. Dinner’s very soon. You mustn’t dress for it unless you want to particularly. All right?”

Ariel assured him that she was all right. And then, when the door closed on his back she breathed one deep breath of satisfaction. It was good to be alone, and to have, if only for a few minutes, a reprieve from the ultimately unavoidable meeting with Hugh’s family. It seemed days and days ago, not a mere few hours, since Hugh had taken her arm and hurried her through the jam of people and luggage surging under the great swinging letter C in the customs shed.

As they had stood with the customs official whom Hugh had captured with what had every appearance of special secret powers—since although Ariel was almost the last person off the Bermuda, she was certainly the very first person to have her baggage passed on—Hugh had turned and looked down at her with his first concentrated attention.

“Are you warm?” he had asked almost sharply.

“No, of course not. It’s very col—d in the States,” she shivered out, taken unaware.

“Yes. But you keep out the cold, you know, with warm clothes,” he said. “You don’t look at all warmly enough dressed. Is there another coat, a big overcoat, anywhere in your baggage? We’ll get it out.”

“But there isn’t,” Ariel told him. “I didn’t realize how cold it would be the beginning of March. I thought March was almost spring here. I was stupid.” She shivered again,—not with cold this time, but from sheer nervousness at the intent way Hugh was looking down at what she guessed were her blue lips and pinched nose.

“Look here,” he was saying. “We’re driving out to Wild Acres, after a good hot tea, in my open roadster. That means a fur coat for you if we can pick one up along the way to the ‘Carnation.’ That’s the tearoom. You’ll need a fur coat in this climate, anyway, and you might as well get it to-day as to-morrow. I ought to have borrowed Anne’s. My stupidity. They’re expecting me to bring a live, real girl home this evening, you know, not an imported icicle. An icicle from Bermuda would be too surprising!”

But Ariel did not laugh. The tone of his humor surprised and confused her. Sometimes thus she had heard adults banter a child. But she wasn’t a child, and even if she had been, would have been put off by such banter. Children are.

“But it is almost spring,” she protested. “And I don’t think I’d better get a coat now. I’d rather buy a spring coat, you see, a little later. It would be more—practical.”

Hugh, however, proved domineering. “This isn’t your affair, it’s mine, since I neglected to bring something warm for you. Besides, I’d rather, much, buy a pretty fur coat for you this afternoon than a handsome coffin for you day after to-morrow.”

Ariel said nothing farther. That word “coffin” which Hugh had uttered so lightly had shut her throat tight like fingers around it. Three weeks ago she had watched a coffin lowered into the ground.... So she went with Hugh dumbly, numbed by the noise and the crowds of the city as much as by the unaccustomed cold, a walk of several blocks to the place where his roadster stood parked.

“We’ll cut out to Fifth Avenue,” he told her, opening the car door, “cruise down it until we see a fur sale in some window or other, bundle you up in the best-looking one, and be at the ‘Carnation’ in time for four o’clock tea.”

The seat of the roadster was swung so low and the wind-shield stood so high that Ariel felt protected from both wind and hurrying crowds the minute she was in. Hugh did not speak again while he picked his way out through jostling traffic over bumpy pavements to Ariel’s first sight and experience of Fifth Avenue. She sensed that Hugh’s silence had nothing to do with the difficulties of driving. Glancing up at his profile, she felt that he had forgotten her, and that his skillful maneuvering of the car was automatic. He was deep in thoughts of his own, in his own inner life.

But as they turned into the Avenue he came out of his abstraction to say, “Watch out for fur coats now, will you, and shout the first window you see.”

“There’s one there, across the street, a whole window of fur coats,” Ariel told him.

He parked as soon as he could find a place. And when he came around the car to open the door on Ariel’s side he stood a moment, aware of her again as he had been in the customs shed. He said, “It’s going to be fun picking out this coat for a welcoming present.” He smiled to himself, for he had resisted the pun “a warm welcome.” He had noticed that she did not like that sort of fun when he had tried to be humorous before, and went on seriously, “It will be very sweet of you, Ariel, if you let me please myself about this.”

Ariel knew in that instant how utterly he was changed. That first sight of him from the deck had been strangely deceiving. She was sorry for him, without knowing why. Of course he should please himself about buying a fur coat for her. She wanted him to be pleased and happy, as he had been all those days in Bermuda.

Inside the shop door Hugh paused and stood looking about, while salesmen and salesgirls hovered, watching him with eager curiosity. Then, when he had come to his decision, he swooped, a clean swoop, seizing on the proprietor of the shop—how he guessed he was the proprietor and would so save time and words for them, Ariel did not know—and pointed out a soft white coat, hanging at the end of a near rack.

“Good afternoon,” he said, with a quick nod. “Will you please try this on the lady? Thank you.”

In an instant Ariel was turning herself about at the center of a fan of long mirrors, in the beautiful coat. Its collar rolled away softly at her neck, its girlishness offsetting the luxuriousness. The garment was cut straight from shoulder to hem, and its cuffs, narrow and young, like the collar, rolled softly back at the wrists. It was flexible and light. It was like being wrapped in swansdown, not fur. Then Hugh stood behind her and folded it back for her to take in the scarlet silk lining.

“Do you like it?” he asked, meeting her eyes in the mirror. It was plain, in the mirror, that already the new coat was giving him pleasure, just as he had promised her it would.

“Of course I like it! I love it,” she cried, poising on her toes, almost as tall as Hugh now, smiling at his reflected eyes, feeling as if the coat were wings folded down her body from her shoulders,—soft, lovely wings, making her tall, light, swift. But then suddenly she forgot the coat, forgot her pleasure and Hugh’s pleasure. She turned on Hugh Weyman and threw her head back, meeting his eyes squarely. “But I’d much rather have had the violets. Much, much rather!” she exclaimed.

He could not think what she meant at first. Then he remembered. Joan Nevin had held out her hands for the violets, and he had tossed them up to her. But they were really Ariel’s violets. He had taken them to the boat for her. They were to have been his welcoming present. He slowly flushed.

Ariel was sorry and dropped her eyes. After a second Hugh said, “My dear girl, in a few weeks the woods at Wild Acres will be purple with violets, banks and banks of them. Yellow violets too, and white. You shall have your heart’s full. I promise. But this is rather nice just now. Isn’t it?”

He was teasing her. But he was as sincere as was she. She jammed her hands into the deep, soft pockets, while her fingers clenched. She had made a fool of herself. But she didn’t mind much. He was sweet, and dear, this Hugh she had never known.

Then he moved a little away with the shopman. Ariel surmised that the price of the coat was now under discussion. The little Jew rubbed his hands, hesitated, smiled up almost affectionately, and named it. Ariel did not hear his words, but she saw Hugh come very near to starting, while his shoulders stiffened. So it was some outrageous price, and Hugh was surprised and would not think of paying it. But he ought to have known he was picking out the most expensive thing in the shop. It was obviously a coat for a princess, a Russian princess in old Petersburg when the world was kind to princesses. This scarlet lining!... The deftly rolling, beautiful collar and cuffs! Hugh said something then, and the shopkeeper raised his voice in replying. “But it is a most wonderful bargain. Wonderful! And I named you my bottom price on account of the season. I saw at once that you would buy or leave a thing. So I did not bother to bargain by naming a price of unreasonableness. If you do not care for the coat enough—I am sorry.”

The little man was vigorously shrugging his sincerity and his sorrow. For an instant more Ariel saw Hugh hesitate. Then his eyes narrowed ever so slightly and he too shrugged—a whimsical submission.

He came toward Ariel. “Better keep it on,” he suggested. “We’ll carry the tweed one. Excuse me a minute, please, while I go to the office and establish my credit over their telephone.” He placed a chair for her with as much manner as if she were indeed the princess the coat made her out to be, and went down the shop where there was a glass-encased office booth.

First Hugh spoke into the telephone, then the bookkeeper, and finally the shopkeeper himself. Ariel watched all that went on behind the glass with interest but without hearing a word. It took only a very few minutes for Hugh to prove his financial soundness and then he was back with her. At the door which he was holding obsequiously and happily open for them, the shopkeeper murmured, “If madam would like a hat, my brother next door has some marvelous Parisian models. The finest in New York. There is an artist there who makes them to one’s head, while one waits.”

But Hugh shook his head, smiling at the “madam.” Did the man think this young girl was his wife?

In the car, on their way to the “Carnation,” Ariel said, “I’m afraid, Mr. Weyman, this cost a great deal. More than it ought. I am sorry.”

“What?” He had forgotten already about the coat. “Oh! Why, yes, more than I had expected, but I don’t believe more than it’s worth. The only difficulty was that I thought I had enough with me, but I hadn’t, and so it meant bothering the people at my office. But it doesn’t matter. And now, Ariel, I can begin to enjoy your company, without worry.” At the end of another half block he added, “And you will call me Hugh, please, or I shall have to Miss-Clare you.”

It was not yet four o’clock when they got to the “Carnation,” so they had the place almost to themselves. Ariel poured out the tea from a chubby carnation-painted pot, and felt, almost, that it was five years ago and she was offering the studio’s hospitality to a hawklike, rather silent new friend of her father’s. But she had only to look across the little table at him to remember that it was not so,—to see that all was different, really. She was noticing how Hugh’s vigorous, close-cropped hair, which had been black in Bermuda, was now hoar-frosted at temples and ears. It startled her and made her shy again. This premature grayness, taken together with an austere tightening of the corners of his lips, and two deep lines rising from them, frightened Ariel a little. She felt breathless, almost awe-struck. So much must have happened to a person to change him like that! Where she had counted on finding her father’s friend, to-day she had not found him. Everything had been, from the minute of their meeting on the pier, just between this man and herself alone, as it had used to be between him and her father. Was her father, she wondered, hovering on the edge of her present contact with Hugh as she had hovered on the edge of theirs five years ago? This was too poignant an idea, and she shut it out.

Hugh was smiling at her across the bouquet of carnations which decorated the center of their table. He was exclaiming: “Imagine Mr. Schimpler suggesting a new hat for you from his brother’s shop, with a hat like that to flaunt in his face! It’s a real hat, Ariel, but I suppose you know it. And the feather! There are no words for the feather! It has an insistent personality all its own.”

Ariel lifted her fingers searchingly, up to find the feather. She started to say, “Father found—” and got no farther than opened lips. But she tried her best to smile. He must be the one first to name her father. The next piece of toast that she swallowed, forcing herself, tasted salt.

Wild Acres, the Weymans’ estate, is on the Hudson near Tarrytown—a drive, from Forty-Second Street and the “Carnation” tearoom, of something over an hour and a half. Ariel, snuggled back in her coat for a princess against the cushions of the roadster’s low seat, observed alternately the flying white landscape and Hugh’s intent profile. How he dared push the car along like this over the icy, snowy road she did not know, but since he did dare she had not even a quiver of doubt of their safety, for all her instinct shouted confidence in the judgment of this stranger with the incised lines at the corners of his mouth. He might not be her father’s friend, have long forgotten that, and there had not yet been time for him to become hers, but he was a person—of this she was calmly aware—to trust one’s life to.

They had sailed along for miles before he spoke at all. Then he asked, “Were you ever in an automobile before, Ariel? They aren’t allowed in Bermuda yet, are they?”

“No. Only government trucks. There are a few of those. But in France, of course, Fa—we taxied quite a lot, just for the fun of it. That was our—my first motoring. This is the first time I’ve seen snow, though. But I don’t feel that it is. I’ve imagined it so concretely, I suppose, and then it’s in so many books, of course. If I picked up a handful now, or began walking in it, the sensation wouldn’t be a new sensation,—because of imagination. Do you see?”

“Yes. I know. It was like that when I went West years ago with my father,” Hugh responded, with sympathetic understanding. “The prairie we found there was no more real than the prairie I’d lived on and played over with the gang in Tarrytown the year I was ten, though we’d made that prairie for ourselves out of reading and imagination. The very earth had the same feel beneath my feet that it had had under my moccasined feet when I was ‘Wild Eagle,’ bravest of chiefs. The moccasins were imagined too, although the headdress was real. There’s something of a thrill in catching up with these places in our imagination, isn’t there? By the way, have you got it straight in your mind, Ariel, about us Weymans, how many and who we all are at Wild Acres?”

“I think so. There’s your mother. And your sister and brother. Doctor Hazzard said that your sister and brother would be at home for the Easter vacation now. But, of course, I don’t know them with my imagination the way you knew the prairie and I knew the snow.”

They both laughed. He said, “Well, I can’t give you a whole literary and imaginative background for our household. But you’ve left out the first and most interesting member. Perhaps I didn’t mention her in my letter to Doctor Hazzard. It’s my Grandmother Weyman. She lives above us, literally as well as figuratively, in the attic which she had fixed over into an exclusive apartment for herself when she returned from her last winter in Egypt, several years ago. You may or you may not get to know her really. Perhaps you’ll hardly ever see her. She’s rather disconcertingly invisible and exclusive. I mean, she’s exclusive even toward us, the family. Her contacts are with Silence and the Angels,—that kind of exclusiveness. She’s got it down to a science, how to be alone when she wants to be alone. You may think her—odd. People do.”

Ariel was catching a rich, almost secret note of tenderness in Hugh’s voice. “He adores his grandmother,” she thought. “And he doesn’t think she’s odd. He thinks she’s perfect.”

“Well, after Grandam, there’s my mother, of course. She’s perfectly visible, from all sides. And she’ll help you a lot, Ariel, in the—in the adjustments to a new life you’re in for now, I’m afraid. She’s just the sort of person to do that,—practical, sensible. Then there’s my kid sister Anne. Only she won’t seem kid-sisterish to you. She’s a month or two older than you are, in fact, and you may get to be great friends. Doctor Hazzard wrote that that was something you’d missed so far, contemporaries. She is a sophomore at Smith.

“Glenn’s the student of the family. Got it from Grandfather Weyman, perhaps. He’s older than Anne—a year—and a junior at Yale. But he seems younger, you’ll see, in spite of reading Spengler and writing Greek sonnets that have made quite a stir—in the heart of a Greek professor or two, the only people who can read ’em. He’ll probably be rude to you. But you mustn’t mind him. He’s rude to us all just now. He’s got an idea that rudeness has some sort of affinity with intelligence. He drops the pose only for his friend, Prescott Enderly. Ever heard of him?”

Ariel hadn’t. So Hugh explained about the young man’s fame and that he was to be Ariel’s fellow-guest for the present at Wild Acres. “When college opens again, there’ll be just you and mother and I at Wild Acres, unless you count Grandam, my grandmother, which you probably won’t. We’re not going to make it before dark, I’m afraid.” The time had come to switch on the headlights. Gray, cobwebby dusk was settling over the snowy world.

Ariel, comforted by Hugh’s friendly explanations, warm and at home in her fur coat, was relaxed and confident at last. She asked, “And those children, Nicky and Persis? They aren’t related? ‘Uncle’ was only a manner of speaking?”

The car picked up speed appallingly and Ariel’s confidence in Hugh as a safe keeper for any life was shattered. The road was icy under the snow and he was not slowing even for the curves. But when he answered her, his words came evenly and a little drawled, a strange tempo to speak in when one is driving at fifty miles an hour on a precarious winter road. “Yes. If they called me ‘uncle’ that was only a manner of speaking. Mrs. Nevin’s manner of speaking. Most of her men friends are ‘uncle’ to the children. Did you gather exactly who she was, on the ship, Ariel? Her husband was Nevin, the producer,—‘dramaturg,’ he called himself. Your father would have known.”

It was really a dangerous speed. Never had she realized that bodies could move so fast through space. Her breath came almost in a sob. It was only after a mile or more of this agony that Hugh became aware of her fear, but he slowed down then at once. “Do excuse me,” he muttered contritely. “You’re right. It isn’t safe. I forgot I wasn’t alone. An idiocy I won’t repeat.”

“It’s only that I’m not used—” Ariel murmured. Her knees began to tremble, now that she had no cause for fear and the danger was past. She hoped he would not feel how she was shaking from head to feet, as with a chill. If he did, he said nothing about it but asked, “Was Mrs. Nevin entertaining? Did you enjoy her?”

“Entertaining?” Ariel sounded amazed.

“Well, yes. She can be, you know. She’s rather famous for wit and charm and brilliance. Didn’t you guess that?”

“But I wouldn’t. We never even spoke to each other, you see. I happened to have a chair beside hers on deck, but we didn’t speak. Even the children didn’t. They just happened to stand by me while we were docking. That was the way it was. Perhaps she’s like your grandmother—Mrs. Nevin. Keeps her company with silence and the angels....”

“No. Hers is another sort of exclusiveness altogether,” Hugh answered. “But I can’t imagine two days, and not a word....”

“There was Aldous Huxley. I think that was the name.”

“Well, I suppose he might have more for her at this stage in her life than you, Ariel.” His tone was dry. The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened. But it was too dark for Ariel to see that now. “There’s Mrs. Nevin’s house,” he said suddenly. “All lighted up. So she’s at home before us. Ours is the next place.”

Ariel saw a great house, as magnificent as Government House, crowning a low hill above them with dozens of windows blazing through the dusk. “That’s Holly. Her husband, Nevin, built it. It’s palatial, isn’t it! Wild Acres is much humbler. You’ll see in a minute. Or rather in a few minutes, because there’s a long, very twisty avenue up to our portico and you don’t really know there’s a house until you practically come, bump, into the front door. Here’s the entrance.”

The car had turned in through a dark, rather low, stone archway, and the headlights were cutting a golden shaft up through snow-enchanted, stilly woods.

Chapter VI

Ariel was in no hurry for Anne to come. She pulled the shades at the two windows, shutting out the dark-white woods whose tree boughs came right up against the panes. Then she slipped out of her coat and dropped it on the white counterpane of the bed, scarlet lining upwards. The room was not warm, for here on the second floor, and more particularly in the wing where the guest rooms were situated, one needed a fire in the grate in winter weather. But Ariel had come too freshly in from the cold air in her face, and was too recently out of the warmth of the fur coat, to mind the cold yet. She threw herself on the bed beside the coat and lifting one soft sleeve rubbed it against her face. Silly girl! Her eyelashes were soaked with tears. The fur grew slowly wet, against her face.

An odd clumsy noise was coming down the hall outside her door. Some one walking on stilts? Ariel sprang up from the bed in time for the knock on the door. The sight of the girl who answered Ariel’s invitation to enter was more startling than the sound had been. It was Anne, wrapped in a black silk kimono embossed from shoulder to hem in huge geometrical figures gone wrong in color and form,—a witch’s dream of color and design. Her legs were bare, and it was the high heels of the mules slipped onto her bare feet—green mules decorated with inordinate purple puffs of feather—which had made the stilt-walking noises in the hall and still made them in the room. Ariel, who had been promised a meeting with Hugh’s sister, was taken aback and left wordless at this meeting with a kimono and mules instead.

It was hard to believe that Anne was real, a girl, and not a doll, walking. Ariel remembered the hateful dolls which had for some time now been an offense to her sensibilities and her father’s in gift-shop windows in Hamilton and St. George’s. This girl brought them vividly to mind: dangling yard-long legs that could be tied in knots after they were crossed at the knees, black hair parted in a seam down the exact middle of the head and whirled into tight sleek buttons over the ears, crazy outstanding wirelike eyelashes, dead-white cheeks, magenta mouths warped by the paint brush into an eternal leer. But from these horrid images you were shielded by the glass of shop windows. Never had Ariel dreamed that she would become involved with a living one.

The magenta lips opened. Words fell out. “Well, hello, Ariel Clare. Were you seasick?”

The deep throaty voice with the catch in it only heightened the doll effect.

Ariel shook her head negatively, and stepping backward, crouched down on the side of the bed as Anne clumped a step or two nearer. “Congratulations,” the magenta lips husked on. “It’s almost time for the dinner gong. Where’s your bag? Oh, there!”

The mules clumpety-clumped to the suitcases which Hugh had unstrapped for Ariel before he left her, and throwing back their covers Anne began tossing the things inside about as roughly as the inspector on the pier had done. “Dinner dress?” she inquired. “You’ve just time to change.”

“There it is. The green!” Ariel spoke hurriedly, to stop the useless mauling of her delicate possessions.

Anne jerked out the green frock. “Rather nice,” she approved. “Clever.” As she tossed it to Ariel she caught sight of the coat. “My word! But you are a gorgeous baby—! What a duck, what a lamb of a coat! You lucky, lucky girl!” She snatched it up from the bed and held it ecstatically before her person, and turned to look at it in the mirror of the door. Ariel did not know what to do. She wanted to tell Anne that it was a gift from her brother. But she couldn’t. For suddenly, and for the first time, the gift rather troubled her. It was too much. Hugh should never have done it.

While Ariel hesitated, Anne had dropped the coat and turned to sit in front of Ariel’s dressing table. Delicately, with the tips of first the jewel-nailed little finger of one hand, then the other, she began to work at the contours of her painted lips, pointing up the cynical expression. The color was so recently applied that it was still malleable. As she worked at this delicate bit of art she talked, a steady flow of words, but thrown out all in that halting, throaty manner that made it seem not so much real speech from a real person as goblin talk.

“I don’t envy you, Ariel, being thrown into the middle of our dinner table for the first time to-night. No wonder Hugh’s worried you’ll feel ‘strange.’ He’s been in my room, begging me tearfully to make you feel cozy. I love to please Hugh. It’s so easy—like tickling a baby.”

Ariel was slipping the green frock over her head. Anne whirled suddenly around on her and two brown eyes, for the moment open and even naïve in their expression, looked her over. What they saw was a thin face with rather narrow, rather light eyes and coral-faint lips just then emerging from the green cloud of the dinner frock.

“Hello, Mermaid,” she smiled. “You look just like one. What do I look like? Don’t be afraid to say.” But, Ariel, looking into the friendly face, had already forgotten the ugly dolls.

Far away, deep at the heart of the house, three musical notes sounded. “That’s the dinner gong. And we’re both of us late. You must think it up and tell me later, what I look like. Appease my mummy. That’s a duck. She hates unpunctuality. Tell her we got so interested in each other we forgot the time.”

She was gone. Ariel stooped and found her own reflection in the mirror. She pushed at her hair with shaking fingers. No time now to look for her brush in the chaos that Anne had made of the suitcases. She was glad Anne had liked the frock. Of course it was lovely, for her father had planned it. It was his creation, like his pictures.

She was standing in the library door, aware of every one at once and of no one in particular, until a sudden hush fell as they became conscious of her. Mrs. Weyman—it must be she—came forward down the room and took Ariel’s hands in hers.

“My dear,” she said, “I am Hugh’s mother. But where’s Anne? Hugh said she was taking care of you.”

Ariel explained about Anne while she was being led forward toward the group around the fire. Mrs. Weyman was a surprise to Ariel. How could any one so young and slight be Hugh’s mother? She looked like a girl, a very dignified, socially competent girl, but so young! It was not from her that Hugh and Anne got their soft dark coloring and their clear-cut features. She was blond, small, and pretty.

“This is Glenn,” Mrs. Weyman introduced her younger son, who tossed a cigarette into the fire and took Ariel’s hand. He was a long-legged boy, with a mop of tousled black hair, clever eyes, and an ambiguous, crooked smile. Very white teeth. His tie, a brilliant orange ribbon, and his teeth wavered before Ariel’s shaky vision, and then she was turned to face Prescott Enderly.

The young celebrity was quickly effervescent. In the instant of introduction he gave everything to Ariel Clare, all the color and sparkle of his personality. He had liked the back of her green frock and the way her hair—pale hair, of no color at all by lamplight—curled in at the back of her neck, before she was turned to him. But the thin cheeks and the narrow eyes were a disappointment. Even more of a disappointment was the sense that this girl, even in the instant of being introduced to himself, was looking past him as if in search of something of more interest. He was correct; she was looking for “Noon,” and confidently expecting to find it here on these walls. She was looking for it with her heart in her eyes. No wonder she disappointed the eager artistic soul of the young man from whom she had turned away before his glance released her.

“Noon” was not there. No white sunlight shattered the somber spaces of the paneled walls. There were only black-and-white etchings, and over the fireplace a portrait of some ancient Weyman.

“We’re only waiting for Anne now,” Mrs. Weyman murmured. “And here she is. Grandam’s not coming down.”

Anne had exchanged her kimono for a black velvet, very tight frock, relieved by a string of scarlet beads, dangling scarlet earrings, and high-heeled red pumps. They went now, informally, down the hall to the dining room.

The pictures in the dining room appeared to be all family portraits, some of them earlier than the Revolution. But Ariel was neither disappointed nor surprised not to find “Noon” here. For she had come to the conclusion by this time that it was hung in the drawing-room which she had glimpsed across the hall from the library, as they came out. That, after all, would be the appropriate place for it.

Mrs. Weyman took the head of the table, Hugh the foot. The places were laid rather far apart on the glimmering white damask, and the one little maid who flitted, a white-and-black moth, in velvety silence from shoulder to shoulder and back and forth through the ghostly, swinging pantry door, never seemed to come to rest.

Ariel had a talent: the gift of a graceful, even a gracious silence. And this night she sat during the long dinner hour at the board of strangers, scarcely uttering a word, and yet not seeming bored, and certainly not boring. The talk seemed to flow over her, around her, even through her, while her silence bent with it but did not dissolve—like forget-me-nots in a brook.

So thought Glenn, who, sitting next to her, was almost as silent as herself, but with the thick silence of moodiness and self-centeredness. To-night, however, he was a little less self-centered than usual, for he was giving thought to Ariel. And even when his mind turned to something far away and long ago, Ariel had impelled it in that direction. He was remembering when he was a little boy, ten—or was it nine?—years old. His mother was abroad with his father, vacationing, and Grandam had returned to oversee things at Wild Acres. He, the boy Glenn, had taken the occasion to come down with scarlet fever. Grandam straightway moved her things into Hugh’s room, which opened out of Glenn’s, and Hugh’s things away somewhere into one of the spare rooms. Then had followed magic,—long days of it. Forget-me-nots flowing with a brook, under water, yet never away from their roots. But where did forget-me-nots come in, when he was merely shut away in two rooms with Grandam? And the crystal water running, running? Wings in the air too? How had all this got into those shut-away rooms and days? But they had. He remembered them more vividly than the fever and the headache. Yet why did he connect the two experiences,—Ariel silent beside him at the commonplace rite of dinner at Wild Acres, and Grandam sitting beside his bed in the night, years and years ago? It was two silences he was connecting,—clear silences, crystal silences, through which at any moment one might hear the footsteps of beauty coming—coming.... Wasn’t there a poem somewhere—?

Old Pres was talking. Something about Spengler—no—Walter Lippmann. Glenn had been missing, had skipped whole gobs of what his brilliant friend was saying. An important contribution to civilized thinking? Walter Lippmann’s book? Oh, yes, Glenn agreed with that. Prescott, meeting his glance, caught the full force of the agreement and regained in a twinkling the complacency he had been in danger of losing since Glenn had gone obviously wool-gathering and stopped listening. For Glenn was the only one here really interested in this sort of thing. The others were merely polite, pretending agreement and interest. Prescott and Glenn understood each other, valued each other. The others didn’t count—except in quite a different way. Anne counted—rather—of course. But it was Glenn he really addressed himself to.

And Glenn was saying to himself, “I’m following old Pres now—what he’s saying. I like this dessert, almond flavoring it’s got. And yet it still holds. There’s magic here—in this silence—something wonderful here.... Like when I was a kid....”

The moth was directed to bring coffee into the drawing-room later, for Mrs. Nevin was coming to have it with them. A fire was blazing on the hearth there. The moth had been sent to apply the match during dinner.

The drawing-room contrasted sharply with the hall, the dining room, and the library. They were dim, big apartments, lighted by richly shaded but subdued lamps. The drawing-room had creamy walls, spindly gilt furniture, and turquois blue rugs. An Italian chandelier, a cluster of glittering bulbs and crystals, outdid the fire and the lamps and made the room brighter than day.

Anne and Enderly quickly appropriated the little blue and gilt sofa near the library door, sat uneasily there and looked prepared, at the flick of an eye, to escape into the romantic, shadowy library. Glenn got a book, and with the air of being a martyr to his mother’s desires, settled himself with it in a distant chair, a straight-backed, fragile piece of furniture which looked as though it had never before in its history been read on. Hugh, his mother and Ariel were together around the low table, a little back from the fire, which soon was to hold the coffee things. Mrs. Weyman, in the glaring white light cast down by the chandelier, looked more a possible mother of Hugh than she had when Ariel first saw her, but she was still very pretty.

There was only one picture on the creamy walls of this room. That was a big panel framed in ebony, which reached from ceiling to floor of the wall opposite the door from the hall,—a conventionalized, brilliant shower of garden flowers.

It was beautiful, Ariel thought. But where was “Noon”? Hugh might want it for his own room of course, but even wanting it, he would never deny others the satisfaction of living with it too. Ariel couldn’t believe him so selfish. It might be loaned to some exhibition. But surely Hugh would explain about it now, any minute. He must know that she was wondering and longing to see it. She remembered, however, his strange silence on this matter of the picture in his letters to her father. Her father had refused to ask when Hugh was silent. His pride was now Ariel’s. She would not violate it. And Mrs. Weyman was speaking to her, directly.

“Hugh has told us really very little about you, Ariel. We’d hardly heard your name a month ago. I’m afraid I don’t even know where you lived, your family, I mean, originally. And your mother. Have you been long without her?”

“My family? It was my father. I’ve always lived in Bermuda. Father lived in Chicago. Was born there. But he went to Bermuda and took me with him when I was only a few weeks old.”

“Yes? And your mother, then?” Mrs. Weyman prompted. Under the brilliant glare from the chandelier, Ariel felt how everything ultimately must come to light. Mrs. Weyman was preparing to see Ariel’s past history as plainly as Ariel was seeing the big, glittering coffee machine which the maid, Rose, at this moment, was setting up on the table among them.

“My mother died,—two, three years ago. I’m not certain.”

Mrs. Weyman looked her perplexity and surprise at her son, but he offered no help. She could not catch his eye. He merely leaned forward to adjust the alcohol burner under the coffee urn.

“You see, it was like this,” Ariel explained after a minute when the silence seemed to demand more of her. “My mother didn’t want a baby. She wanted to marry but she didn’t want babies. But Father didn’t know that. Not until I was going to be born. They were both teachers in a school near Chicago. And my mother wanted to go on teaching. She was the principal of the school, in fact,—made more money than my father and was above him, although she was so young. She cared more about education than anything in the world. She read whole libraries of books on education, gave lectures, and she wrote for magazines about it all the while. It was a great bother to have a baby.”

Ariel hesitated and the silence closed in on her again. Hugh was opening a cigarette case, selecting a cigarette, frowning slightly. Mrs. Weyman was looking at Ariel, smiling, but oddly.

“You can see how it was a great bother. She, my mother, was so much more important than my father, had a lot more to do really. Worked harder. And they needed the money she could make. Besides, she loved education, and—she didn’t love me. But Father did. From the very first. Even from before I was born.... He loved me....”

Was she going to go down in a storm of weeping? She felt it raging toward her, a storm of terrible weeping. It did not threaten from her heart or from herself at all,—from the outside somehow, an impersonal, objective storm racing toward her. She clutched her fingers into her palms. She had never cried before anybody in her life. And now of all times to choose for such a performance! If Hugh would only look at her! Only steady her! But he did not look up from his cigarette case. He was feeling its cold silver surfaces. There was no help from him.

At her back Mr. Enderly was laughing. Anne had made him laugh by something she had been murmuring. They had not heard anything of what Ariel had said. And then Ariel heard a book close sharply. So Glenn was listening. He was not reading. She turned to him and went on. She did not know how but his shutting the book had shut out the storm of weeping. Like a door closed against a whirlwind.

“So my mother gave me to Father. As soon as she was able to go back to her work again, she gave me right to him. I was five weeks old. I was all his, every bit his. Not hers any more. I was as easy as a kitten to take care of, so tiny, so healthy. I could fit into such small places, almost into his pocket. He took me to Bermuda. He’d always wanted to paint. And there, in Bermuda, he began to paint with all his soul. But the way he supported us was by writing Western stories for Western magazines. He’d already sold a few while he was still teaching. But in Bermuda he had much more time. The stories didn’t bring much money. But we didn’t mind. There was nothing we really wanted that we didn’t have.—Even Paris.”

Ariel was looking at Hugh now. He would understand about Paris. But he was regarding her gravely and did not seem able to smile his understanding of Paris.

“But one has relatives. Aunts? Uncles? Grandmothers? You and your father,—you weren’t cut quite adrift from your family, were you?” Mrs. Weyman asked with sympathy.

“Mother and Father were the end of their families. There were no relatives to be cut adrift from.”

Mrs. Weyman asked one more question. The expression of her face and voice robbed it of impertinence. “And the paintings? Didn’t that, in time, take the place of the stories for magazines? Didn’t they pay your father?”

“Oh, no. Never. He didn’t want them to, didn’t even think about the possibilities until Hugh—” But again Hugh was frowning to himself, not coming to her aid with look or word. And she blundered on, “Father did have an exhibition once in a hotel in Hamilton. But only stupid people came and nobody bought. So he didn’t bother with that again. He only thought of it at all because Hugh had put it into his head. But sometimes other artists who had come to Bermuda to paint, and one or two artists who lived there, came to the studio and saw the pictures. They knew how wonderful they were, of course. But most artists are poor—nearly all artists, I guess—and if they couldn’t sell their own pictures, how could they buy Father’s? They couldn’t, of course. But Father was of immense help to them. Because his work was original and he gave them ideas. Showed them their mistakes. Some of them were really quite talented. But Father was different. Father is—was—is a genius....”

Mrs. Weyman was looking surprised at something. At what Ariel had said last, perhaps. So Ariel added, “But I don’t have to tell you about that. There’s ‘Noon,’ you see, to prove Father’s genius. Father thought it was the best thing he ever did. Many of his other pictures were important, he knew, very important. But ‘Noon,’ Hugh’s picture, is the best. It satisfied him.”

Mrs. Weyman, not she, had brought up the subject of her father’s paintings. Now at last Hugh must tell her what he had done with “Noon”—take her to where it was hung, if it were here in the house and not loaned to an exhibition. They would get up and go to it together. Mrs. Weyman might excuse them, or come too. It didn’t matter. When she stood before it, Ariel would be at home. Her face would be warmed by the noon sun. Now she was chilly. Cold! She turned to Hugh, pale with anticipation.

She saw his face suddenly glorified. She had seen it so once before to-day. But now, as then, it was not for her. Mrs. Nevin had come in unannounced and stood there under the white radiance of the chandelier, waiting, with an amused little smile on her lips, for them to become aware of her.

On the ship Joan Nevin had been muffled in furs. Even then she had seemed to Ariel the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. But now, in an orchid-colored dinner gown, her coppery hair uncovered, arms, neck and bosom bare, she was startlingly beautiful. “Why, it’s she, who has ‘Noon,’” leapt to Ariel’s mind. “That’s where it is. Hugh bought it for her. Ugh! Is this hate? It hurts.” Indeed it did hurt. “God, don’t let me hate. It hurts!”

Prescott Enderly came forward almost with diffidence to be presented. He was thinking, “I may get to know even Michael Schwankovsky now, if I only manage at all intelligently. God! This is luck!” But God was Enderly’s expletive, not his Creator.

And Hugh, after his first glorified look, when first he saw Joan, had returned to his reserve and silence. He looked at Joan less than at any one else, and he took almost no part in the quickening of the social atmosphere which followed her arrival. But Ariel perceived that he could be well aware of Mrs. Nevin without looking at her, aware of every rise and fall of her coppery eyelashes. Why, if he had a thousand eyes and ears he could not have known more of all she said and did, even if he didn’t look at her.

“Miss Clare? But you were on the Bermuda! Your chair was next to mine. Isn’t that so?”

Ariel remembered the way Mrs. Nevin had let her steward speak to her and had not offered a word to undo it. And Mrs. Nevin had the violets. But she, Ariel, should now have revenge. Strange to want revenge! She had never experienced this dark stab of evil desire before. But all the world was different lately,—without her father. In the old world, the world they had had together, revenge and hate had been nothing but words. Forever remote. But her father was dead, and this was another world, and she was alone. Besides, revenge would be strangely easy of attainment. For at dinner Ariel had learned that Mrs. Nevin was a connoisseur of paintings, and a close friend of Michael Schwankovsky—of whom Ariel had heard her father speak often; she had not needed the Weymans to tell her that he was a fabulously wealthy Russian, naturalized as an American, who not only had a sound taste in the arts, but expressed it in books and articles in which real artists, like her father, took delight. Well, since Ariel now took it for granted that both Mrs. Nevin and her friend, Michael Schwankovsky, knew “Noon,” it would naturally be something of a shock to her to learn that she had sat beside the artist’s daughter for two days, ignoring her, except for that one horrid rudeness. Telling her was to be Ariel’s revenge.

“Yes, it was I,” Ariel responded in her clear, flat voice. “We were just speaking of ‘Noon’ when you came in. I am Gregory Clare’s daughter.”

“Yes?”

Mrs. Weyman murmured quickly, “Joan dear, you remember I wrote you about it? Last week. Ariel is the—one I was telling you about, that she was coming to visit us.”

“Oh, of course! Only I didn’t put two and two together for a minute. Stupid of me. Yes, indeed, I do know all about you—Ariel? And do you know, I consider it rather clever of you to have picked Mr. Weyman for a guardian.” She just glanced at Hugh. “On the boat I thought you were only a little girl, truly. You practiced some witchcraft on my babies, did you know? They were gabbling about you when I tucked them in to-night.”

But Ariel said again, insisting on her revenge, “I’m Gregory Clare’s daughter. ‘Noon,’ you know.”

Joan was suddenly impressed by the somberness of Ariel’s tone, and her intent gaze,—almost disconcerted by it. “Gregory Clare?” she asked tentatively.

“The artist.”

Prescott Enderly laughed aloud, a nervous, meaningless laugh. And simultaneous with the young novelist’s laugh, Mrs. Nevin did remember—something, almost everything in fact. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Weyman’s letter mentioned that your father was an artist. Do you paint too, Ariel?” But she had remembered more. Wasn’t “Noon” that weird painting Hugh had brought home with him from Bermuda years ago, and produced for her inspection, so confident that he’d found, all by himself, a rare masterpiece? Of course. That picture and this girl, and Hugh’s having been imposed on by the futile, beach-combing artist of a father! It was all getting connected. “Have you inherited your father’s—er—talent?” she asked.

Ariel was baffled. Of course now she saw she had been wrong. Mrs. Nevin was not in possession of “Noon” and could never even have seen it. But this was too unreasonable, ununderstandable. Wasn’t she a friend of the family’s? They had said so, at dinner,—an intimate and old friend, as well as the next-door neighbor. Then what had Hugh done with “Noon”? If it were at Wild Acres, Mrs. Nevin would be familiar with it? What had become of it? What was the mystery?

Hugh also was doing some rapid thinking. “The poor child expects Joan to know all about her father, and particularly about ‘Noon’! In a minute she’ll ask me where it is. She must have been looking around for it ever since she came. What in Heaven’s name did I do with it after—after Joan laughed at it?”

The hurt of that careless laugh at his mistaken taste in art throbbed freshly, as if it had never healed. But it had healed, and he had forgotten it, forgotten and hidden it away with the picture which had caused the catastrophe to his vanity years and years ago. He’d look the thing up when he got back from his office to-morrow and give it to Ariel for her room. But what he would say to explain its whereabouts to-night, if she should ask, he hadn’t an idea. His selfish stupidity in not having foreseen this situation shamed him.

Mrs. Weyman was pouring the pungent coffee into an array of little cups on the silver tray, while Prescott Enderly stood at attention, ready to pass them.

Glenn came and stood before Ariel.

“You don’t care about coffee, do you?” he asked. “Come along into the library with me and play chess? Hugh, where’d we leave the men?”

Ariel was glad to escape with Glenn into the library and feel the familiar, friendly shapes of chessmen under her fingers. She had played this game endlessly with her father from almost the time of earliest remembrance. But could one escape from the hurt of hating merely by leaving the room where the hated person sat?

Chapter VII

Ariel stood at her window, that first morning at Wild Acres, for some time before dressing, and looked out into the black branches of the snow-floored woods. The trees pressed up to the window panes. So Wild Acres was really wild. She was curious to look from all the windows and to explore the big, rambling house from top to bottom. After nine hours of dreamless sleep, her body warm between sheets and light blankets, her face deliciously cool in the cold, woodsy air of the little guest room, Ariel had waked with a sense of happiness. The carpet of snow in the woods below her was a thin veil, ever so thin, drawn over the spring-to-come: green leaves, moss, butterflies, birds, hot sunshine, cool shade and myriads and myriads of violets. Hugh had promised her violets. At any moment the veil might tremble, blow to one side, and that world of wings and scent and color rise to the window and envelop her with joy. But meanwhile the white, clear-smelling snow (she had seen snow before in imagination, as she had told Hugh, but she had never smelled it), the ebony black of bare tree boles, roots and limbs and twigs, were all just pictures on a veil over Spring’s face. Ariel was glad she had come to Wild Acres before the veil blew off. She was so happy, standing there at the window, still in her nightgown, that she was frightened of it. It was like too piercingly beautiful a note in music.

She felt besieged by happiness from every side. Involuntarily she looked into the actualities of her life for escape. There were avenues enough there, leading back into loneliness, self-distrusts and that wide, wide avenue ending at a grave and her grief. But strangely, they closed and shut her out when she would have entered them. The black trees, the clear-smelling snow, and all those hidden wings and joys of spring were opening to her, and grief was shut.

As she bathed and dressed, she remembered with wonder the mood in which she had gone to bed. She had been lonely and dazed. Too heartsick even to cry, she had said her prayers lying on her face in bed, without caring enough to kneel. And then, her mind blunted by misery, she had fallen on sleep,—as Samurai in Japanese prints fall on their swords.

She brushed at her hair until it glimmered to silver and every curl had a separate life. She knew that her hair was lovely. Her father had never tired of praising it and painting it. Ash-colored in some lights, it was silvery in others, palest gold in others. Sometimes it seemed the absorption of light itself. And it curled in close, soft curls at her neck. That blond hair, and her grace of movement, were her claims to beauty. But at the minute she was seeing her narrow green eyes in the mirror, and her thin, pale mouth with its pointed corners. She knew that the Weymans must think her plain, but to-day she would not be bothered even to care.

The house was very still. Not a sound. Hugh was at his place at the dining table, reading the Tribune while he waited for Rose to bring his coffee.

He looked his surprise. “Hello, Ariel! But we should have told you. The family doesn’t breakfast until eight-thirty. It isn’t eight yet. I’m catching the eight-fifteen express to town, and I usually do grab breakfast like this alone. It’s a twenty minutes’ walk to the station.”

He was holding out her chair. She took it quickly so that he might begin the breakfast which Rose was arranging at his place. “I thought you drove to New York,” she said. “Don’t you usually?”

“Often, but not usually. Not when Glenn and Anne are at home. It’s convenient for them to have the car. Well, Rose, what are you going to scare up for Miss Clare? She mustn’t wait for the others.”

“May I just have some coffee, and one of those rolls, and walk to the station with you? I should like that so much, if you don’t mind. I won’t talk and disturb the morning. But I want to get out into the snow and the woods.”

“Of course you do. But why not talk? You won’t ‘disturb the morning’ any more than the sunshine or the snow does. You’re that kind of a person.” He did not feel that he was talking nonsense. The Bermuda Ariel was here this morning, back after five years.

But in spite of Hugh’s reassurance, Ariel stuck to her bargain and did not talk, during all their long walk out the path which Hugh’s previous solitary morning walks had made in the snow through the woods and across wide fields, and finally down to the big road and the little station. She was so silent, and her feet went so stilly before or behind his, just as it happened, that she actually intruded no more on his consciousness, after the first two or three minutes, than the March sunshine, which was wreathing the landscape in golden scarfs of light. Nor was he thinking of the coming busy day in his Wall Street office. The unexpectedness of Joan Nevin’s return yesterday from her winter months on the Riviera and in Bermuda had broken down his recently so carefully built up resistance to her obsession of his mind. She had swarmed back into possession, as it were, and taken him captive. The same old tune was on again, jangling his nerves and partially stupefying his intellect.

“When I get to the office,” he promised himself, “I’ll cut this out, stop thinking about her. The minute I sit down at my desk I’ll shut her out. And after this not even her unexpected appearance, or the sudden hearing her name spoken, will jolt me out of control of my mind again. I promise myself. I promise myself....”

From the platform of the little station the roofs of Wild Acres could just be discerned through bare tree branches at the top of a long upward slope of country. Ariel stood, her hands deep in the pockets of her wonderful coat, her chin lifted, looking back over the way they had come. Hugh, suddenly remembering her, followed her eyes, and said, “That’s Wild Acres roof. Did you think we’d come so far? And those windows in the attic are Grandam’s. If I were going to be at home this morning, I’d take you up to her, whether she invited us or not, first thing. Probably, as it is, you won’t see her till dinner to-night,—if then. But if Grandam does appear before I get back don’t let her scare you. She’s not really mysterious and awesome. Quite an ordinary human being. Remember that. And you might tell Mother that I’ll try to get out rather early this afternoon. Good-by, Ariel, and thanks for your company. It’s very pleasant being seen off like this!”

From the steps of the moving train he looked back at her. It was pleasant, in all conscience—now that he had at the last minute possible waked up to it,—having a friendly girl, with a friendly, sympathetic light in her green eyes, smiling from under a green hat, waving him off. And the green feather on the hat, as the train rushed away, seemed as smiling and friendly as the eyes. Ariel and her green feather! There was something sympathetic among the three of them, Ariel, the green feather, and Hugh himself. Something living and vital. And how glad he was that he had hit on that particular coat for her! It went with the fairy-tale hat, the fairy-tale eyes. He took joy in his gift.

After the train had rushed out of the landscape, Ariel stood on the platform for a moment longer, the only visible sentient thing in the whole morning world,—a morning world that cried, “Come, Come, Come. Dive, swim, run through me, come into my heart! I love you as your beach at home loves you, as the sea loves you. Come quickly. Every step since you left Wild Acres’ door you have been getting nearer. Come all the way now. Into my heart. Into the heart within my heart. Into its beat!”—Oh, Ariel was happy!

She had made her bed and arranged her possessions in closets and drawers before going downstairs. She saw no reason now why she should return to the house. The moth, no doubt, would tell Mrs. Weyman that she had accompanied Hugh to the station, and when she did not come back, they would understand that she had gone for a walk, and not bother about her. She started down the stairs from the train platform slowly, and then, more quickly, walked away into March sunlight.

Chapter VIII

“The children and their guest are still sleeping. Hugh’s guest got up early, and went to the station with him. She hasn’t come back yet, and it’s nearly eleven. But that’s all right, I suppose. It’s a difficult position Hugh’s put us in.”

Mrs. Weyman was paying her daily visit to Grandam in the attic apartment. Usually she went up soon after lunch, because Grandam liked her mornings clear. Clear for what, no one in the family, except Grandam herself, could have said; not even Miss Peters, her nurse-attendant, who might, if any one, be supposed to know how she spent the solitude she so highly prized. But Miss Peters herself was banished for hours every morning and she was neither prying nor curious.

“You don’t mind my coming up so early, do you?” Mrs. Weyman inquired belatedly. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” It was obvious that she wasn’t. She had found Grandam lying on her daybed, exquisitely costumed for the day, as usual, looking down across the woods to the Hudson. She hadn’t even a book in her hand. “I felt suddenly in need of sympathy.”

She said it charmingly, and settled down in a low chair, which she had drawn close to the daybed. “It’s the girl I want to talk about, of course. Hugh’s Ariel Clare.”

“And I’m interested, of course. What’s she like?”

“Not bad. Well bred. Better bred than Anne, in fact. But that’s not putting it strongly enough, for Anne’s manners these days are barbarous. It’s nothing about Ariel herself that bothers me. It’s what we are to do with her! The only gauche thing about her is a seeming obsession about her father. She takes it for granted he was a great artist and that this exhibition of his paintings, when it comes off, will edify the entire art world. But Joan assures us it’s all nonsense. The exhibition, if it comes through, will be a farce. And what are we to do then? I don’t believe Ariel has enough actual cash to take her back to Bermuda when it’s all over. And even if she has, she probably won’t want to go. So far as one can discover she hasn’t a relative and hardly a friend in the world,—and no education, no training for anything in particular. That’s what’s so appalling, my dear.”

“But Hugh means to help her to something, doesn’t he? Her father surely expected—”

“Hugh! That’s just it! Oh, Mother Weyman! Why should Hugh have this absurd sense of responsibility toward a stranger! Hasn’t he enough on his shoulders, poor dear! And what can he do for her, anyway? He’s not wealthy. We spend pretty well what he makes each month. It’s dreadful.”

“But he might manage to send her to business school for a year or two. He spoke of that, I believe, if the exhibition should be a disappointment.”

“And where would she live? Here? And go in on the early train with Hugh, I suppose! But I won’t let such an absurdity happen. She can’t live here. And Hugh mustn’t finance her. Why should he? It’s too unfair!”

Grandam looked at her daughter-in-law with some surprise. Hortense was rarely so intense or emphatic about anything, even big things. And the present problem, if it was a problem, seemed so far, at least, not really serious.

“You’re rather crossing bridges, aren’t you?” she asked, but not without sympathy. “The exhibition has yet to prove itself a failure, no matter what Joan has said. How can she be so sure? She hasn’t anything to do with it, has she? It’s some one else entirely. One of the young Frye’s. I knew his father and his uncle, by the way.”

“Did you? But Joan says that he, this boy, doesn’t amount to anything. That Ariel can’t count on him. He’s a lightweight.”

“Oh? Well, Joan herself is in a position to do something, isn’t she? Why doesn’t she take the exhibition in hand? Make it a success? Or is she diffident about putting her influence to the actual test?”

The last few words were spoken not without malice, but Mrs. Weyman passed that over. “Joan wouldn’t touch it, of course. The only work of this man Clare’s she ever saw was a picture Hugh brought home, years ago. It wasn’t any good. Freakish as well as amateurish, if I remember what she said then. She laughed at it, anyway, and Hugh gave up being a collector on the spot and hid the thing away in the attic. Every spring cleaning since, I’ve been in two minds whether to send it off to the dump or give it to some rummage sale or other. I haven’t liked to do either without speaking to Hugh, and it happens he’s never around at the time. So there it stands against the chimney,—an æsthetic treat to the spiders, no doubt. And that’s that for Ariel’s father as an artist, I’m afraid.”

Grandam wasn’t deeply impressed. “Perhaps it’s one of his poorer things,” she suggested. “Or he may have improved during the years. Or Joan might have been wrong. So far, I don’t see that it’s at all final.”

“Oh, my dear! I do wish you had been down last night! Ariel solemnly informed us that the hour her father died he was still proclaiming Hugh’s sample of her father’s work his masterpiece. The other paintings are wonderful, of course, but not quite so wonderful. Even so, they are to bring in several hundreds of dollars a canvas, and Ariel confidently expects to have a fortune from them. It isn’t the child’s fault, of course. It’s the father’s. He must have been an extraordinarily conceited and stupid person.”

Grandam at this outburst of strong feeling withdrew her gaze—reluctantly, it seemed—from the sun-spangled, snowy world beyond her windows, and gave her more concentrated attention to her daughter-in-law. “How does Hugh himself feel about the situation?” she asked.

“Hugh’s in no position to judge,” Hortense responded impatiently. “It’s Joan’s opinion I trust. She’s just home from six weeks at St. George’s, and among all her artist friends staying there she never even heard the name of Gregory Clare once. That in itself is enough, isn’t it? Joan says that impossible would-be artists and writers and people like that often do think themselves geniuses, no matter what the world tells them to the contrary; but it’s seldom their families are tainted with the same megalomania. And this Ariel’s not just tainted. She’s poisoned. Why, she’s not sane on the subject.”

“Is all of that Joan? She hasn’t spared Hugh’s friend or the friend’s daughter, has she!”

Mrs. Weyman regained her poise. “Oh, of course you don’t like Joan. I keep forgetting that. You even hope she won’t marry Hugh. After all these years of his devotion, and their truly wonderful friendship! But even feeling as you do, it isn’t like you to be so prejudiced. Joan does know about painting and painters. She’d see this Ariel Clare business and the problems involved more clearly than anybody else we happen to know. Besides, she’s ready to help Hugh with it, if only he’ll be a little tactful. I can see that. She has interested herself in working girls and their problems for years. She would, with a little encouragement from us, get Ariel into a good working girls’ home or club, I know, and find a way for her to earn money at the same time that she was learning a trade. But there has to be all this time wasted waiting for the exhibition, and Hugh’s absurd heroics about Gregory Clare’s having been his great friend, and having entrusted Ariel to him. It’s too tiresome. And not exactly fair to the family—this family—do you think?”

“It’s Joan who constitutes a problem, to my mind. My dear Hortense, really, why do you want Hugh to marry a stupid woman like that?”

Mrs. Weyman did not wince. She even replied in a humoring voice, because her mother-in-law, wonderful as she was in some ways, was peculiar enough in others, every one knew. “Joan stupid!” she laughed. “She’s absolutely brilliant!”

“Brilliant, yes, and stupid, yes. But why do you want Hugh to marry a brilliant-stupid woman, then, like Mrs. Nevin? Hugh’s not brilliant, and neither is he stupid. So both ways he’d be embarrassed with her. He’s much too simple and ordinary for Joan. He’d be miserable.”

Mrs. Weyman’s humoring of her mother-in-law turned almost into merriment. “Hugh’s as far from ordinary as dear Joan herself,” she affirmed. “But it’s not because of either of their gifts or brains or anything of the sort that I want him to get her, if he can. It’s because he happens to be in love with her. He’s been that way ever since she was fourteen and he fifteen, when she came to Tarrytown with her parents, and they bought the Manor from the Careys. You were in India and China those years? It was charming, that boy and girl romance. We thought—we took it for granted—they’d marry the minute they were old enough, and Hugh had a profession. Till Nevin appeared. What girl wouldn’t have her head turned by the attentions of a man like that! Untold wealth, world-famous, and looking like a Greek God. Even being Hugh’s mother didn’t make me blame Joan. It was infatuation, not love, though. She has always loved Hugh. Not been in love with him. Perhaps never that. But loved him. Something deeper than infatuation or mere passion. I have seen it. I know more about Joan than she knows about herself. Hugh’s the first person she always turns to, thinks of. Yesterday, for instance, Michael Schwankovsky met her at the docks and brought her out to Holly. He and two or three other people, almost as important and interesting, are at Holly over the week-end. But just the same, last night she came to us after dinner and stayed an hour or more. She didn’t leave her guests to see me, I assure you. It was Hugh. It’s rather wonderful, watching it.”

Grandam stirred restlessly among her pillows. “You’ve never spoken quite so plainly before. My dear Hortense, do you seriously want Joan Nevin, after having married some one else, had two children by him, and inherited his wealth, to marry Hugh now? If she’d taken him the year after Nevin died or even the second year, they might have made something of it. But certainly the time for that has passed. She’s picked him up and thrown him down too many times. It amuses her, of course. No, it’s much deeper than amusement. It feeds her. She’s gorged her vanity on it for years. That’s what she loves in Hugh, his food-value! His romantic, silent, dark devotion. Other people are always falling in love with her, of course. But there’s no one quite like Hugh. There wouldn’t be in the twentieth century. His unchanging passion is the pièce de résistance of her gluttonous vanity. And Joan’s vanity, I’ve noticed, has become herself. It’s absorbed the soul she was born with. I don’t know which is more stupid: to think you’re a great painter when you aren’t even a little artist—or to think you are a real person, a worthy human being, when you are nothing but a mass of festering vanity. If you really want Hugh to marry that, and wake up too late, or never wake up at all, and so prove himself an imbecile—”

But Hortense would not listen to more. She had pushed back her chair and was at the door. “You’re almost horrifying, Mother Weyman! Joan is a friend of mine. I admire her and I’m deeply fond of her. You know that very well. I’m sorry I interrupted your morning retreat. It would have been much better if I hadn’t.”

She smiled, but wholly artificially, into the glare of March sunshine with the blur, somewhere at the center of it, which was Grandam, before shutting the door with careful softness between them.

Ariel was enjoying her solitary explorations in Wild Acres’ woods. The snow was not deep, and by following paths part of the time, and keeping to ridges the rest of the time, she avoided going too often over her rubbers. Woods in March! The stillness of them! The mystery! Beauty dumb. But not Beauty inarticulate. A girl had leapt a brook whose summer loveliness was stilled to ice, and stood on the other side, circled by beauty that was making itself articulate in her very veins—no need for sight, touch or smell. Winter woods have communications that can overleap the senses altogether on their avenues to the soul.

Whenever Ariel came to a rise of ground she looked for the house, in order to keep her bearings, and because the attic windows, which Hugh had pointed out from the station platform, fascinated her. She noticed that although they were dormer windows they were of an unusual height and width. After a while she had almost a sense of the windows being eyes that followed her, knew and cared about her adventures with the woods.

Twice Hugh had warned her, once on the drive out from New York, and again this morning at the station, that his grandmother was not mysterious. But why emphasize it so? Ariel would never have thought of mystery in connection with the old lady up there if it hadn’t been for these protests. Some hint of mysteriousness had showed even in Mrs. Weyman’s face last night, when she said in answer to a question from Joan that the shawl she was knitting was for Grandam, and even more in the faces of the others. At the words, a ripple of incredulity had gone over the room. Why, if Mrs. Weyman had said “This shawl? Oh, it’s for Spring. I thought she might be chilly, if she gets here early, dear Spring,”—they wouldn’t have looked more incredulous for just that instant. And then, when any one had spoken of the likelihood or unlikelihood of Grandam’s coming downstairs to join them after dinner, they might as well have been asking, “Will the wind blow? Will it rain? Do you think a bird may fly across the window?” It was like that.

And as Ariel went on, stealing, running, walking, and jumping across brooks and over hollows, she began, almost, to hope to come upon this mysterious person, this elusive house fairy of a grandmother, out here at some turn in the lovely stillness. She might discover her standing, leaning an arm against the other side of that dark tree bole just beyond,—or lying asleep among these feathery snowy plumes of bush which she had been about to pass with too careless a glance.—Will it snow? Will a bird start from this thicket if I make a noise? When shall I see Grandam?

Then she heard laughter. But it was sudden, human laughter. Not for an instant did she think that it might be Grandam, mysteriously laughing. For she knew that it was children’s voices, and children she had heard laughing before on the Bermuda. Nicky and Persis must be somewhere not far away, playing in these woods. Perhaps, she, Ariel, was a trespasser and had got over into the grounds of Holly without realizing it.

Around the next tree she saw them. They were beneath her, in an open hollow at the foot of what might be a rock garden when spring came. And yes, up beyond the garden there were rolling stretches of white lawn and hedges marking off other gardens. But the house was not in sight. Perhaps that grove of fir trees stood at just the angle to conceal it. At any rate, there were the children, in navy blue coats with brass buttons, scarlet sashes around their waists, and scarlet tam-o’-shanters on their heads, pushing at a big snowball, higher than themselves, which they had rolled up in the hollow.