The Project Gutenberg eBook, Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

PATIENCE SPARHAWK

AND HER TIMES

BY

GERTRUDE ATHERTON

AUTHOR OF “A WHIRL ASUNDER,” “THE DOOMSWOMAN,”

“BEFORE THE GRINGO CAME,” ETC.

JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD

LONDON AND NEW YORK

1897

Copyright, 1895,

By Gertrude Atherton.

Copyright, 1897,

By John Lane.

All rights reserved.

University Press:

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

CONTENTS

TO

M. PAUL BOURGET,

Who alone, of all foreigners, has detected, in its full significance, that the motive power, the cohering force, the ultimate religion of that strange composite known as “The American,” is Individual Will. Leaving the ultra-religious element out of the question, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the man, the woman of this section of the Western world, each, consciously or unconsciously, believes in, relies on himself primarily. In the higher civilisation this amounts to intellectual anarchy, and its tendency is to make Americans, or, more exactly, United Statesians, a New Race in a sense far more portentous than in any which has yet been recognised. As M. Bourget prophesies, destruction, chaos, may eventuate. On the other hand, the final result may be a race of harder fibre and larger faculties than any in the history of civilisation. That this extraordinary self-dependence and independence of certain traditions that govern older nations make the quintessential part of the women as of the men of this race I have endeavoured to illustrate in the following pages.

G. A.

Patience Sparhawk and Her Times

BOOK I

I

“Oh, git up! Git up! Did you ever see such an old slug? Billy! Will you git up?”

“What’s the use of talking to him?” drawled a soft, inactive voice. “You know he never goes one bit faster. What’s the difference anyhow?”

“Difference is my mother wants these groceries for supper. We’re all out of sugar ’n flour ’n beans, and the men’s got to eat.”

“Well, as long as he won’t go, just be comfortable and don’t bother.”

“I wish I could be as easy-going as you are, Rosita, but I can’t: I suppose it’s because I’m not Spanish. Guess I’ve got some Yankee in me, if I am a Californian.” The little girl leaned over the dash-board of the rickety buggy, thumping with her whip-stump the back of the aged nag. Billy was blind, uncertain in the knees, and as languid as any caballero that once had sighed at doña’s feet in these dim pine woods. As far back as Patience could remember he had never broken his record, and his record was two miles an hour. In a few moments she set the whip in the socket with an irritable thump, wound the reins about it, and sat down on the floor beside her companion. For some reason best known to themselves, the girls preferred this method of disposition when Billy led the way,—perhaps because he had an errant fondness for the roughest spots of the rough road, making the high seat as uneasy and precarious as thrones are still; perhaps because Patience rebelled at habit, and in all her divagations was blindly followed by her Spanish friend.

Billy ambled up and down the steep roads of the fragrant pine woods on the hills behind Monterey, and the girls gave him no further heed. Patience’s long plait having been shaken loose in her wild lurches over the dash-board, she swung about, dangled her legs out of the buggy, and commanded Rosita to braid her hair. The legs she kicked recklessly against the wheel were not pretty. They were long and thin, clothed with woollen stockings darned and wrinkled, and angled off with copper-toed boots. She wore a frock of faded gingham, and chewed the strings of a sunbonnet.

“Don’t pull so, and do hurry,” she exclaimed as the Spanish girl’s deft slow fingers moved in and out of the scanty wisps.

“I’m not pulling, Patita, dear, and you know I can’t hurry. And I’m just thinking that your hair is the colour of ashes.”

“I know it,” said Patience, gloomily, “but maybe it’ll be yellow when I grow up. Do you remember Polly Collins? When she graduated she had hair the colour of a wharf rat, and when she came back from San Francisco the next year it was as yellow as the hills in summer.”

“I don’t care for yellow hair,” and Rosita moved her dark head with the slow rotary motion which was hers by divine right.

“Oh, you’re pretty,” said Patience, sarcastically. “You want to be told so, I suppose—There! you pulled my hair on purpose, you know you did, Rosita Thrailkill.”

“I didn’t, Patita. Don’t fire up so.” And Rosita, who was the most amiable of children, tied the end of the braid with a piece of tape, rubbed her blooming cheek against the pale one, and was forgiven.

Patience drew herself into the buggy and braced her back against the seat. Her face had little more beauty than her legs. It was colourless and freckled. The mouth was firm, almost dogged, as if the contest with life had already begun. Her brows and lashes were several shades darker than her hair, but her eyes, wide apart and very bright, were a light, rather cold grey. The nose alone was a beautiful feature, straight and fine; and the hands, although rough and sunburned, were tapering and slender, and very flexible.

In her red frock, the highly-coloured little Spanish girl glowed like a cactus blossom beside a neglected weed. Her plump face was full of blood; her large dark eyes were indolent and soft. Patience’s eyes comprehended everything within their radius in one flashing glance; Rosita’s, even at the tender age of fifteen, looked unswerving disapproval of all exertion, mental or physical.

“I wonder if your mother is drunk?” she asked in her slow delicious voice.

“Likely,” said Patience, with frowning resignation. “But let’s talk of something more agreeable. Isn’t this perfume heavenly?”

The dark solemn woods were ravishing with the perfumes of spring, the perfume of wild violet and lilac and lily, and the faint sweet odour the damp earth gives up as the sun goes down. From above came the strong bracing scent of the pines. Now and again the wind brought a salt whiff from the ocean. No birds carolled, but the pines sang their eternal dirge.

“What’s your ideal?” demanded Patience.

“Ideal? What ideal?”

“Why, of man, of course.”

“Oh, man!” contemptuously. “I haven’t thought much about men. I don’t read novels like you do. I wish somebody would die and leave me a thousand dollars so I could live in San Francisco and have a new dress every day and go to the theatre every night. Miss Galpin says we mustn’t think about boys, and I don’t—perhaps because the boys in Monterey are so horrid.”

“Boys? Who said anything about boys?” The chrysalis elevated her patrician nose. “I mean men.”

“Well, you’re mean to turn up your nose at boys. They like you a good deal better than they do me, and a good many of the other girls.”

“That’s funny, isn’t it? and I not pretty. But I suppose it’s because I talk. You just sit still and look pretty, and that’s not very entertaining. I read in a novel that men like that; but boys have got to be entertained. Goodness gracious! Don’t I know it? When I was at Manuela’s party the other night in my old washed muslin frock and plaid sash, didn’t I talk my throat sore to make them forget that I was the worst dressed girl in the room and had the most freckles? Of course the girls didn’t forget—nor some other things—” with a bitter lowering of the lids—“but the boys did. Somehow I feel as if men would always be my friends, if I’m not pretty.”

“What do you know about men, anyhow? You’re only fifteen, and you’ve never met any but old Mr. Foord, and the farm hands and store keepers, who,” aristocratically, “don’t count.”

“Haven’t I read novels? Haven’t I read Thackeray and Dickens and Scott and ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ and Shakespeare and Plutarch’s Lives, and the life of Napoleon and Macaulay’s ‘History of England’ and Essays—those all ain’t novels, but they write about men, real men, too. I’ve made my ideal out of a lot of them put together, and I’ll never marry till I find him.”

“Well, I’d like to know where you’ll find him in Monterey,” said the practical Rosita. “Miss Galpin says you’re too romantic, and that it’s a pity, because you’re the brightest girl in the school.”

“Did Miss Galpin say that?” Patience took a brass pin out of her frock and extracted a splinter from her thumb with a fine air of indifference; but the pink flooded her cheek. “She’s always reading Howells and James, and says they’d keep anybody from being romantic. But that’s about all I’ve got, so I think I’ll hold on to it.”

The sun dropped below the horizon as they jolted out of the woods and down the steep road toward Carmel Valley. They reached a ledge, and Patience, forgetful of hungry men and an irascible parent, called: “Whoa!” to which Billy responded with an alacrity reserved for such occasions only.

“I never get tired of this,” she said. “Do you?”

“It’s pretty,” said Rosita, indifferently. “Why are you so fond of scenery—nature, as Miss Galpin calls it—I wonder?”

“I don’t know,” said Patience, and at that age she did not. She was responsive but dumb. She gazed down and out and upward with a pleasure that never grew old. A great bleak mountain loomed on the other side of the valley. It was as steep as if the ocean had gnawed it flat, but only the peaceful valley lay under; out in the ocean it tapered to an immense irregular mass of rock over which the breakers leapt and fought. Carmel River sparkled peacefully beneath its moving willows. The blue bay murmured to the white sands with the peace of evening. Close to the little beach the old Mission hung its dilapidated head. Through its yawning arches dark objects flitted; mould was on the yellow walls; from yawning crevice the rank grass grew. Only the tower still defied elements and vandals, although the wind whistled through its gaping windows and the silver bells were no more. The huts about the church had collapsed like old muscles, but in their ruin still whispered the story of the past.

“Isn’t it splendid to think that we have a ruin!” exclaimed Patience.

“It’s a ruin sure enough; but there’s uncle Jim. He must think we’re dead.”

A prolonged “Halloa!” came from the valley, and Patience, with a sigh, bade Billy “Git up,” which he did in the course of a moment.

“Halloa, you youngsters, why don’t you hurry?” cried a nasal voice. “I’ve been waiting here an hour.”

“Coming,” said Patience. “It’s too bad he had to wait.”

“Oh, he smoked and swore, so he’s all right,” said Rosita, who had not taken the trouble to reply. None of the girls was allowed to visit Patience at her house; but Mrs. Thrailkill, who was fond of her daughter’s chosen friend, and pitiful in her indolent way, often allowed Patience to drive Rosita as far as the branching of the roads, where the Kentucky uncle met his niece and took her to his farm.

In the dusk below a wagon and two horses could be seen, and a big man under a wide straw hat, sitting on the upper rail of a fence, his heels hooked to the rail below. Patience inferred that he was chewing tobacco and expectorating upon the poppies.

“Well, I reckon!” he exclaimed as the buggy reached the foot of the hill. “You two do beat all. Do you s’pose I’ve got nothing better to do than moon round pikes waiting on kids like you? How’s your ma, Rosita? Well, Patience, I won’t keep you—much obliged for giving my lazy Spanish niece a lift. Come on now; supper’s ready ’n after.”

The two little girls kissed each other affectionately. Mr. Thrailkill lifted Rosita down, and Patience turned Billy in the direction of a fiery eye and a dim column of smoke under the mountain. The evening seemed very quiet after the rattle of Mr. Thrailkill’s team had become a part of the distance. Only the roar of the surf, the moaning of the pines, the harsh music of the frogs, the thousand vocal mysteries of night—not a sound of man. Patience, after her fashion, rehabilitated the Mission and peopled the valley with padres and Indians; but when Billy came to a sudden halt, she sprang prosaically to the ground and let down the bars of her mother’s ranch. After she had replaced them she took hold of Billy’s bridle, and endeavoured, by jerks and expostulation, to induce him to move more rapidly. The road now lay through a ploughed field stretching gloomily on the east to the horizon, where the stars seemed dropping into the dark. Cows roamed at will, or lay heavily in their first sleep. Here and there an oak thrust out its twisted arms, its trunk bent backward by ocean winds. The house soon became plainly outlined, a long unpainted wooden story-and-a-half structure, the type of ranch house of the second era. Castilian roses clambered up the unpainted front. Clumps of gladiolus, pinks, and fuschias struggled with weeds in the front garden. Beyond was a number of out-buildings.

When Patience reached the porch she dropped Billy’s bridle, lifted out the sugar, and stepping to the kitchen window, looked through it for a moment before opening the door. Her mother was very drunk.

II

The room into which Patience frowned was a large rough kitchen of the old familiar type. The rafters were festooned with cobwebs, through which tin cans and aged pails were visible, and an occasional bundle of rags. The board walls were unplastered and unpainted. Out of the uneven floor, knots had dropped to the cellar below. The door of a cupboard, built against the wall with primitive simplicity, stood open, revealing a motley collection of cans, bottles, and cracked dishes. Pots and pans were heaped on a shelf traversing two sides of the room. A table was loaded with odds and ends, in the midst of which place had been made for a lamp.

Over a large stove a woman was frying bacon and eggs. She wore a brown calico garment, torn and smudged. Her fine black hair, sprinkled with ashes, hung raggedly above magnificent dark eyes, blinking in a crimson face. The thin nostrils and full mouth were twitching. In her ruin she was still a beautiful woman, and she moved her tall bloated form with the pride of race, despite the alcohol in her veins.

On a broken chair by the stove sat a young man in the overalls and flannel shirt of a farm hand. His hair was clipped to his skull with colourless result; his large red under lip curved down into a yellow beard. In a long low room adjoining the kitchen a half dozen other men were seated on benches about a table covered with white oilcloth and chipped crockery. They also wore overalls and flannel shirts; and they were bearded and seamed and brown. The Californian sun soon burns the juices out of the flesh that defies it.

Patience flung open the kitchen door and threw the sugar on the table.

“Oscar,” she said peremptorily to the man by the stove, “take Billy round to the barn and put him up, and bring in the flour and the beans. They’re under the seat.” The man went out, muttering angrily, and she turned to her mother, who had begun a tirade of abuse. “Keep quiet,” she said. “So you’re drunk again? I thought you promised me that you wouldn’t drink again for a week. Where did you get it?”

“Couldn’t help it,” muttered the woman, cowed by the bitter contempt in her small daughter’s eyes, and thrusting a long fork into the sputtering fat.

“Where did you get it?”

“Couldn’t help it.”

Patience opened the package of sugar with a jerk, and filling two bowls with the coarse brown stuff carried them into the next room and set them at opposite ends of the table. The men ceased talking as she entered, and saluted her respectfully. They felt vaguely sorry for her; but they were afraid of her, and she was not a favourite with them. Her mother, “Madge,” as they called her to a man, they worshipped, despite or because of her peccability. They went down before her deathless magnetism, her coarse good nature, her spurious kind-heartedness. It was only when very drunk that she became violent and vituperative, and even then she fascinated them. Patience told herself proudly that she had no attraction for “common men”—that she repelled them. Not being a seer, she was saved the foreknowledge of a fatal gift in operation.

She took the large coffee-pot from the back of the stove and filled the men’s cups with its thick fluid. Her mother’s rolling eyes followed her with a malignant sparkle. She was afraid of her daughter, and resentment had eaten deep into her perverted nature. Patience filled a plate with bread and apple sauce, and went into the parlour to eat her supper in solitude. She took all her meals in this room, which with little difficulty she appropriated to her exclusive use: it was very small. She kept it in fairly good order: she was not the tidiest of children. But the old brussels carpet was clean, barring the corners, and the horsehair furniture had been mended here and there with shoe thread. As it still prickled, however, Patience had made a cushion for the clumsy rocker out of an elderly gown which she had found in a trunk in the garret with other relics of finery. She occupied the rocker impartially whether eating or reading. The marble-topped table also served for dining and study.

In a forlorn old bookcase were her only treasures, the few books, mostly classics, which John Sparhawk had reserved when a succession of failures had forced him to sell his library to Mr. Foord. In one corner was a large family Bible on a small table. It was old and worn. Its gilt edges shone dimly through a cobweb of infinite pains.

On the papered walls were two large coloured photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Sparhawk, taken apparently when each was close on thirty years. The woman’s face bore traces of dissipation even then, and the red mouth was very sensual. But the cheeks were still delicate and there were no bags under the large flaming eyes. The bare neck and arms and half revealed bust were superb; the poise of the head, the curve of the short upper lip, the fine arched nostril, were the delicate insignia of race; the pride stamped on every feature was that of birth, not of defiance. The man had a slender upright figure and a finely modelled head and face. The deeply set eyes were cold and piercing, but between the stern curves of the mouth there was much passion. Patience had studied these faces, but she was as innocent as if she had been bred in a cloister, and their mystery baffled while it allured her.

She ate her supper with a hearty appetite. Her mother’s lapses, being accepted as part of the routine of existence, rarely depressed her spirits. Nevertheless she frowned heavily as turbulent sounds pierced the thin partition, not so much at her mother’s iniquity, as at the prospect of being obliged to wash the supper dishes. The expected crash came, and she ran into the kitchen. Her mother lay prone. Two of the men lifted her immediately and carried her up the narrow stair. Patience sullenly attacked the dishes. She dumped them into a large pan of hot water, stirred them gingerly with a cloth fastened to a stick, drained the water off, poured in a fresh pailful, and dried them hastily. She filled the frying-pan with water and set it on the hottest part of the stove to cook itself clean. Occasionally she coughed with angry significance: the men in the next room were invisible behind a grey fog of their own puffing. She spattered her clean pinafore, blackened her hands, and devoutly wished herself alone on a desert island where she could live on cocoanuts and bananas. At such times she forgot the few compensations of her unfortunate life and felt herself only the poverty-stricken drudge, the daughter of Madge Sparhawk.

III

Who Madge Sparhawk was before she married the Yankee rancher had at one time been an absorbing topic for dispute in Monterey. One gossip averred that she had been the dashing leader of the lower ten thousand of San Francisco, another that she had come from the Eastern States as the mistress of a wealthy man who had wearied and cast her off; a third confidently affirmed that she had been a brilliant New York woman of fashion who had gone wrong through love of drink, and been sent under an assumed name to California by her afflicted family; a fourth swore that she had been an actress, a fifth that she had been the high-tempered queen of a gambling house. On one point all agreed: she was disreputable, and John Sparhawk was a fool to marry her. However, they were somewhat disappointed that they saw so little of her. They were not called upon to snub nor tolerate her. She rarely came into the town; never excepting on horseback with her husband, when her splendid beauty drew masculine Monterey from its perch on the fence tops,—where it sat and smoked and murmured the hours away,—and gathered it about her, stirring the diluted rill of caballero blood.

As far as the little world of Monterey could learn through the gossip of servants, she was a helpful wife to a devoted husband who patiently strove with the fiend that possessed her. When he was killed by the accidental discharge of a gun her grief was so violent that only a prolonged carouse could assuage it. Subsequently she recovered, and with occasional advice from Mr. Foord attempted to run the farm. As John Sparhawk had made no will, she was her child’s legal guardian, the absolute mistress for eight years of what property her husband had left. There was a little ready money, the dairy was remunerative, and the ranch well stocked. But that was five years ago. Her habits had grown upon her; the ranch was mortgaged and run down, the stock decreased by half.

Patience had rebelled heavily at her father’s death, and wondered, with childish logic, why, if one parent had to die, it could not have been her mother. Her father’s manner had been cold, repellent, like her own; but that his nature was deep and passionate even her young mind had never doubted. She felt it in the close clasp of his arms as he held her before him on his horse when galloping about the ranch; in his sudden infrequent caress; in the strong pressure of his hand as they wandered through the woods or along the shore at night, not a word spoken between them.

It was not until after his death that she made acquaintance with her social separateness. He had begun her education himself. Her only girl companion was Rosita Thrailkill, the niece of a neighbour, whom her father would not permit her to visit in Monterey. John Sparhawk’s only friends were the Thrailkill brothers and Mr. Foord, an elderly gentleman, who had lived in Monterey under the old régime, lost his fortune in the great Bonanza time, and returned to the somnolent town to end his days with his library, the memory of his dead Spanish wife, and a few old friends, world-forgotten like himself. He lived in the dilapidated Custom House on the rocks at the edge of the town, and Patience had ruled his establishment since her baby days. It was the only house in Monterey she was permitted to enter, and she entered it as often as she could. A hundred times she had sat with the old gentleman on the upper corridor and listened to the story of the capture of Monterey by the United States fleet in 1846; stared breathlessly at the crumbling fort—the castillo—on the hill above Junipero Serra’s cross, as Mr. Foord verbally restored its former impregnability.

He told her tales of the days of light and life and joy when Monterey was the capital of the Californians, and the Americans were not yet come,—stories of love and revenge and the great free play of the primitive passions, unpared by modern civilisation. For her those old adobe houses in the town were alive once more with dark-eyed doñas and magnificently attired caballeros. Behind the high walls of the old gardens fans fluttered among the Castilian roses and dueñas stealthily prowled. The twisted streets were gay again with the court life of the olden time, the grand parades of the governors, the triumphant returns from the race on the restless silver-trapped steeds.

Every house had its history, and Patience knew them all. She wandered with Mr. Foord along the dusty streets, lingered before the garden walls, over which she could see and smell the nasturtiums and the sweet Castilian roses. But gone were the caballeros and the doñas. They lay in the little cemetery of the padres on the hill, over beyond the yellow church which marked a corner of the old presidio, and well on the road to a great hotel whose typical life was vastly different from that old romantic time. They lay under their stones, forgotten. The thistles and wild oats rioted under the gnarled old oaks. The new-comer never paused to glance at the worn carvings on the thick rough slabs.

Behind the garden walls a few brown old women lived alone, too practical to brood upon an enchanted past. Cows nibbled in the plaza where once the bull and the bear had fought while the gay jewelled people screamed with delight. Gone was the tinkle of the guitar, the flutter of fan, the graceful woman hastening down the street half hidden in her mantilla, the lovely face behind the grating. The screaming of the sea-gulls, the moaning of the pines, the roar of the surf, alone remained the same, careless of change or decay. Wooden houses crowded between the old adobes. Most of the Spanish families were half American: their women had preferred the enterprising intruder to the indolent caballero. Arcadia was no more. The old had kissed the hand of the new, and spawned a hybrid.

After John Sparhawk’s death, Mr. Foord persuaded his widow to send Patience to the public school. The little girl was delighted. She had looked with envious longing at the stone building, painted a beautiful pink, which stood well up on the hill at the right of the town and was still known by the imposing name of Colton Hall; it had been built by the first American alcalde, and was a court house for a brief while.

But it was not long before Patience learned the bitter lesson that she was not as other girls, despite the fact that at that time she was well dressed and that she drifted naturally to the head of her classes. School girls are coarse and cruel. Children are the periodical relapse of civilisation into savagery. These girls of Monterey excluded Patience from their games and recess conversations, and intimated broadly that her mother was not respectable.

At first Patience gave them little heed. She loved study, and was of a wild happy nature beneath her prim exterior. Moreover, Rosita was her loyal friend; and one of the older girls, Manuela Peralta, who had a kind and independent heart, sheltered her as much as she could. But Patience was too bright and observing to remain long in ignorance of her hostile environment. When the awakening came her young soul was filled with rage and bitterness. The full meaning of their innuendoes she was too ignorant to understand, but that she was regarded as a pariah was sufficiently evident.

Little as she loved her mother, a natural impulse sent her to her only remaining parent with the story of her wrongs. Mrs. Sparhawk became violently indignant and shortly after very drunk. The subject was never mentioned between them again; nor did Patience speak of it with any one but Rosita, whom she regarded as a second, beloved, and somewhat inferior self. But her soul cried out for the strength that only a man’s strong soul can give to woman at any age; and the man that had prayed to live and defend her lay with the forgotten Californians on the hill.

Mr. Foord divined her trouble, and did what he could to make her life endurable, although her shy reserve forbade any intimacy beyond the old friendship. Miss Galpin, her teacher, made no secret of the fact that Patience was her favourite scholar, and encouraged her to study and read and forget.

Patience indulged in no further outbreak, even to herself. She cultivated a cold and impassive exterior, an air of rigid indifference, and studied until her small head ached. She was not old enough to analyse; it was instinct only that made her assume callousness; but in her young vague way she grappled with the social problem. She did not approve of Mrs. Sparhawk any more than others did; but Mrs. Sparhawk’s daughter behaved herself, and stood at the head of her classes, and had been assured again and again that she “looked like a little lady:” therefore she was at a loss to comprehend why Patience Sparhawk was not as good as other girls. There was Panchita McPherson, who lied profusely and whose mother sat in the sun all day and baked herself like an old crocodile, while her husband sat on the fence by the Post Office and smoked a pipe from the first of January until the thirty-first of December. Yet Panchita was of the haute noblesse, and treated Patience as she would a rag-picker. Francesca Montez never knew a lesson and was so vulgar that she brought the blush to Patience’s cheek; but she lived in an adobe mansion which once had been the scene of princely splendour, and gave two parties a year. The American girls had not even the prestige of the past; they could not reckon up a great-grandfather between them, much less peeling portraits of caballeros and trunks of splendid finery; but they were bright and aggressive, and made themselves a power in the school.

As Patience grew older she compelled the respect of her mates, and they ceased to annoy her. The consciousness of social supremacy never faded, not for an instant; but even tying a tin can to a dog’s tail becomes monotonous in time, and they had numberless little interests to absorb them. If Patience had been a rollicking emotional child she would doubtless have kissed herself into popularity and been treated to much good-natured patronage; but she scorned placation, and grew more reserved as the years went by. She accepted her fate, and discovered that there were times and hours when her mother, schoolmates, and social problems could be forgotten. Her spirits were naturally buoyant, and her mind grew philosophical; but as Mr. Foord once observed to Miss Galpin, “her start in life had been all wrong, and it would matter more with her than with some others.”

IV

After Patience had put the kitchen in order she went up to her room. She slept at one end of the house, her mother at the opposite. Several of the hired men occupied a dormitory between; the rest slept over the dairy.

She lit her candle and began to undress, then extinguished the flame suddenly and went down stairs and out of the house. She felt sullen and heavy and depressed, and knew the remedy.

The moon was at the full; the great ploughed fields were a sea of silver; the dark pines on the hills opened their aisles to cataracts of crystal, splashing through the green uplifted arms. Strange shadows moved amidst the showers of cold light, twisting rhythmically under the touch of the night wind.

Patience loved nature too passionately to fear her in any mood or hour. She sped over the rough field, climbed the fence, and walked hastily toward the Mission, pausing now and again to inhale the rich perfumes of Spring. The ruin looked like the skeleton of a mammoth caught in a phantom iceberg. Even the dark things that haunted it were touched to beauty by the silver light pouring through the storm-beaten rose window over the massive doors, into the abysms between the arches.

Patience skirted the long body of the church with haste; mouldering skeletons lay under the floor, and like all imaginative minds she had a lively horror of the dead. She entered the open doorway and ascended the steep spiral stair in the tower. The steps were cut from solid stone and were worn by the trampling of many feet. As she neared the top she called,—

“Tu wit! Tu woo!” and was promptly answered.

As her chin appeared above the floor of the little room, where the moonlight came through hollow casements, an old grey owl, a large wise solemn owl, advanced from the wall with slow and stately step; and despite his massive dignity there was expectancy in his mien.

“Poor Solomon,” said Patience, contritely. “I forgot your supper.” She climbed into the room and attempted to pat his head; but when he saw that the hand was empty, he flapped his wings, and turning his back upon her, retired to the wall, blinking indignantly.

Patience laughed, then sighed, and sank on her knees before the low window overlooking the ocean. The blue bay still whispered to the white sands sparkling like diamond dust in the moonlight, the yellow stars winking in its clear depths. But the ocean was uneasy, and hurtled reiterantly in great deep-throated waves at the rocky shore as if its giant soul were in final rebellion against this conventional war with a passive foe. About Point Lobos its voice waxed trumpet-toned. It shouldered itself into mighty waves and tossed the spray into writhing shapes. Everything else was at rest. The great forces of nature were the angry prisoners of the tides. The moon grinned in his superior way. The little stars seemed to say: “Up here we are quite composed, and as vain as pretty women. If you would only keep quiet you would make such a fine large looking-glass.”

As Patience gazed out upon the beautiful scene, her young mind shifted its impressions. She forgot her life, and began to dream in a vague sweet way. Not of a lover. Despite the fact that she had manufactured a composite which occupied a pedestal in her imagination, she thought little about love. Her reveries were a wandering of her ego through the books she had read, environed by the nature whom she knew only in lovely profile. Had she lived her fifteen years on the sterile plains of Soledad, she might perhaps have been as harsh and bitter as its sands, her soul as grey, so susceptible was she to the subtle influence of great externals. But Monterey had saved her, and on nights like this she felt as if she too were flooded with crystal light, now and again clouded by something which perturbed, yet vibrated like the music of the pines.

When in a particularly romantic mood, she imagined herself Mariana in the “Moated Grange,” or hummed “The Long Long Weary Day,” and tried to feel sad, but could not. She never felt sad in her tower, with the owl on guard and the slighted dead in the church below. Sometimes she took herself to task for not having a proper amount of sentiment, but concluded that no one could be unhappy when so high above the world and all its hateful details. Occasionally she looked longingly at the perpendicular mountain: it was many times higher than her tower; but she was a lazy little thing, and would not climb.

As she knelt, gazing out on the ocean, or up at the spangled night, she was a very different-looking being from the sharp practical child that had exhorted old Billy and berated her mother. The loosened hair clung softly about her pale face, whose freckles the kind moon with his white brush painted out. Her mouth had relaxed its stern lines. Her eyes were full of the moon’s shimmer, and of something else,—the struggling light of a developing soul.

Patience’s soul had taken care of itself and showed virility in spite of the forces at war against it. What the little battling spark strove for, puzzled Patience even at that unanalytical age. Religion—Christianity, to be more exact—said nothing to her; it appealed to no want in her; even the instinct was lacking. John Sparhawk had clung to the rigid faith of his fathers with a desperation which Patience, child as she was, had half divined. He had had prayers night and morning, and compelled his daughter to learn her catechism and many chapters of the Bible. After his death Mr. Foord took her to church on Sunday mornings and occasionally read her a little lecture. She listened respectfully, but felt no interest.

Nevertheless, when alone in her tower at night, when she had set her foot on its lowest step with deliberate intent to get as high above the earth as she could, she was conscious of an upreaching of the spiritual entity within her, a wordless demand for the something higher and holier of which the supreme beauty of the Universe is symbolical.

V

The next morning, Patience, after helping her convalescent parent to get breakfast, stood on the porch debating whether she should go over to Mr. Thrailkill’s ranch and see Rosita or spend the day in Mr. Foord’s library.

The scholars of Colton Hall had a week’s vacation, and how to make the most of seven long days of freedom in exquisite spring weather was a serious question.

As she hesitated she bethought herself of Solomon. She ran to the safe, and gingerly extracting a piece of raw meat wrapped it in a newspaper, and went over to the Mission. The owl had not moved, apparently, from the spot where he had taken his indignant stand the night before. When he scented the meat, however, he walked majestically forward, and taking no notice whatever of Patience, began at once upon the meal she spread at his feet.

Patience had decided in favour of the library, and started leisurely for Monterey. The ocean rested heavily after its labour of the night, swinging forward at long intervals with deep murmur, or throwing an occasional iridescent cloud of spray about Point Lobos. The keen air sparkled under a flood of golden light. The earth was green with the deep rich green of spring. Great bunches of it sprang from even the ragged mountain side, and long blades struggled to life between the broken tiles of the old Mission. Patience crossed the valley through beds of golden poppies and pale blue baby-eyes struggling with infantile pertinacity to raise themselves above the waving grass. She plucked a poppy and held her nose in the great cup that covered half her face. She liked the slight languor its heavy perfume induced.

She climbed the hill, and the woods shut out the world. Patience forgot her destination and wandered happily and aimlessly in the dim fragrance. She plucked some pine needles, and rubbing their juices free pressed her hands about her face. On the whole she preferred their pungent freshness to the poppy.

After a time she began to skip over the carpet of yellow violets and to sing in a high childish treble. She was only a happy little girl with her lungs full of oxygen, her veins warmed by the sun, her heart exhilarated with the surpassing beauty of the morning. She threw pebbles at the squirrels and laughed loudly when they scampered up the stately trees. Spiritual problems did not trouble her, and social trials were forgotten.

She dawdled away the earlier hours of the morning in the woods, then descending the hill on the town side, regained her severe and elderly demeanour. The ocean was not visible here, but a bay bluer than sapphire curved into sands whiter than marble dust. The sun shone down on the red-tiled white adobes, on the high garden walls pink with Castilian roses, as gaily as in the old Arcadian time. But alas! it shone also on cheap wooden cottages and shops which had invaded even the hill on the right, where once a few stately mansions stood alone.

The town was very quiet. It was always quiet. Some holy unheard voice seemed ever saying “Hush!” As Patience walked down Alvarado Street to the Custom House, she saw a slender brown woman watering the roses behind her garden wall. She had been the belle of Monterey in her time, “La Tulita,” and tradition had it that she still watered a rose-bush which General Sherman had planted.

On the next block several dark lads sat on a fence in the approved Montereño style, smoking cigaritos. As Patience passed they lifted their caps as gallantly as ever caballero had done, although they did not fling them at her feet.

She saw no one else until she reached the Custom House. Mr. Foord stood on the corridor that overhung the rocks. He was a large round-shouldered man, with a benign face the colour of aging marble and a brow of the old time intellectual type. The eyes behind his spectacles were dim and kind. The lower part of his face was humorous and stern. He wore a silk hat, a well-brushed suit of broadcloth, and carried a gold-headed cane.

“You’re going to town!” cried Patience.

“I am,” he said smiling, “and I suppose you are going to read your eyes out in the library. Well, I’ll not be back until to-morrow, so you’ll have things all your own way. Tell Lola to cook you some dinner. I must be off.”

“Bring me a box of candy,” she commanded, as she stood on tiptoe to give him the little peck she called a kiss. It was her mark of supreme consideration.

He promised, and she went into the library, a large room opening on the corridor, where many a great ball had been given in the days before and after the Americans came. A half dozen old-fashioned bookcases, crowded with books, stood against the walls of the low room. The books were bound in spotted calf or faded cloth, black cloth with peeling gilt letters. One large case contained John Sparhawk’s library, and Patience knew that it was practically hers. The floor was covered with a thick red carpet. A large easy-chair was drawn before the deep fire-place, in which a huge log crackled: it was still winter within adobe walls.

“Altogether,” thought the philosopher of fifteen, as she flung her sunbonnet on the floor, “I guess that so long as I’ve got my tower and the woods and this room, I’m not so badly off as some.”

She roamed about the room, opening the doors of the bookcases in turn. One case had been filled with books selected for her especial use, but Mr. Foord had not forbidden her the freedom of the others, being wiser than many guardians. Nevertheless, certain books were placed on top shelves, their titles concealed beneath the moulding of the case, and Patience had looked speculatively at them more than once. To-day they exerted a peculiar fascination. And it was rarely that she was alone in the library.

She possessed an investigating and tentative mind, and this forbidden territory appealed eloquently to her unruly will. But to get them out was not an easy task. They were tightly packed, and the moulding was like unto a prison bar. But Patience was a person of resource. She gave one of the books a smart thump, and it slanted inward. She inserted her thumb under its lifted edge and worried it out. It was a small volume bound in black, its lettering worn away. She opened it and glanced curiously at the titlepage. “Boccaccio’s Decameron” winked invitingly. The pages were spotted with yellow. The drawings looked as if the stories might be reasonably interesting.

Patience curled herself in the deep window-seat, quite sure that she had found a treasure. The book had a furtive and apologetic air. “I have grown old, at least,” it seemed to say. “I am but an elderly rake, and can only mumble of the past.”

She read a few stories, then put the book back in its place with a resentful shove. Being wholly without the knowledge for which Eve pined, the stories were stupid and meaningless to her. She took down a thick volume bound in ragged calf. On the back was one large word, “Byron.” The leaves of this book were spotted too, but on the leaves were poems, and she loved poetry. Even when it was uninteresting she enjoyed the rhythm. She returned to the window-seat, and child-like, looked at the pictures first. The portrait of Byron she fell in love with immediately, and knocking her composite off its pedestal, lifted that proud passionate face to the station of honour.

There was an immense-eyed picture of the Bride of Abydos which she thought looked like Rosita, and one of the Corsair dashing in upon his segregated love:—

“My own Medora, sure thy song is sad!”

Francesca and Paola gazed at each other across a table:—

“That day no further leaf we did uncover.”

A castle which looked older than the book loomed massively from the page:—

“Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls.”

Never having heard of Byron, she was unable to enlarge her knowledge at once with his most celebrated creations; but she liked the looks of Conrad and Medora, and plunged into their fortunes. She read every line of the poem, and when she had finished she read it over again. Then she stared at the breakers booming to the rocks on the opposite horn of the crescent, her eyes expanded and filled with a wholly new light. She might be unlettered in woman’s wisdom, but the transcendent passion, the pounding vitality of the poet, carried straight to intuition. The insidious elixir drifted into the crystal stream. That incomparable objectivity sang the song of songs as distinctly into her brain as had it gathered the sounds of life for twenty years. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were bright. She felt as if she were a musical instrument upon which some divine unknown music were vibrating; and as she was wont to feel in the tower—but with a substratum of something quite different. She was filled with a soft tumult which she did not in the least comprehend, and happy. She looked almost beautiful.

After a time she read “The Bride of Abydos,” and dreamed over that until she discovered that she was hungry. She had forgotten to order dinner, and went to the kitchen to beg a crust.

Lola, large, unwhaleboned, vibrating porcinely with every motion, her brown coarsely moulded face beaming with good nature, her little black eyes full of temper and kindness, her black hair in a neat small knot, an unspotted brown and yellow calico garment secluding her person, stood at a sink in a kitchen as brilliantly clean as a varnished boot. Even the corners shone like glass, Patience often observed with a sigh. The two tables were scrubbed daily. The stove was black, the windows white. Not a pan nor a dish save those in the sink was in sight.

Patience made a sudden dash, a leap, and alighted on Lola’s back, encircling the yielding waist with her supple legs. The woman emitted a hoarse shriek, then laughed and pinched the legs. Patience plunged her cold hands into the creases of Lola’s neck, gathering a quantity into the palms. She was unrebuked. There were a few persons that loved Patience, and Lola was of them.

“Pobrecita!” she exclaimed. “You are cold, no?”

“Mucho frizo,” murmured Patience, sliding the back of her hands down the mountainous surface of Lola’s. “And hungry, madre de dios.”

“Hungry? You no have the dinner? When you coming?”

“Hours ago, Lola. How cruel of you not to call me to dinner! How mean and piggish to eat it all yourself!”

“Ay, no call me the names. How I can know you are here si you no tell? Why you no coming here straight before going to the librario?”

“I forgot, Lola mia; and then I became—interested. But do give me something to eat.”

“Si.” And with Patience still on her back Lola waddled to the cupboard and lifted down the remains of a corn cake rolled about olives and cheese and peppers.

“An enchilada!” said Patience. “Good.”

Lola warmed the compound, and spread a napkin on a corner of one of the tables; then, suddenly unloosening Patience’s arms and legs, tumbled her headlong into a chair, laughing sluggishly as she ambled off. Patience ate the steaming enchilada as heartily as had Byron never been. In a moment she begged for a cup of chocolate.

“Si,” said Lola, “I have some scrape already;” and she brewed chocolate in a little earthen pot, then beat it to froth with her molinillo. Patience kicked her heels together with delight, and sipped it daintily while Lola stood by with fat hands on fat hips in reflex enjoyment.

“Like it, niña?”

“You bet.” Then after a moment she asked dreamily: “Lola, were you ever in love?”

“Que! Sure. Was I not marry? Poor my Pedro! How he lika the enchilada and the chocolaty; and the lard cakes and the little pig cooking with onions. And now the worms eating him. Ay, yi!” and Lola sat herself upon a chair and wept.

VI

As Patience walked home through the woods subsequently to a long afternoon with Byron, she was hazily sensible that she had stepped from one phase of girlhood into another. She had an odd consciousness of gazing through a veil of gauze upon an exquisite but unfamiliar landscape over which was a dazzle of sunlight. She by no means understood the mystery of her nature as yet; she was technically too ignorant; but instinct was awake, and she felt somewhat as when she had drained the poppy cup for long. She was in that transition state when for the first and last time passion is poetry.

She arrived home in time to get supper. Mrs. Sparhawk was unexpectedly sober, and very cross.

“My land, Patience Sparhawk!” she exclaimed, as her daughter opened the door and untied her sunbonnet, “seems to me you might help cook dinner in vacation instead of being off all day reading books or playing with that Spanish girl.”

“Seems to me,” said Patience, restored to her practical self, “that as you’re twice as big as I am and twice as strong, you’re pretty well able to get it yourself. And as it’s your fault there ain’t any servant in this house, I don’t see why I should make one of myself for you. Seems to me you’re fixed up.”

Mrs. Sparhawk blushed, and smoothed her hair consciously. The hair had been washed, and was decorated with a red bow. She wore a garment of turkey red calico with a bit of cheap lace at the throat and wrists. Her face was plastered with a whitewash much in vogue. She looked handsome, but evil, and Patience stared at her with an uneasiness she was not able to analyse. She turned away after a moment.

“I’d put on an apron,” she remarked drily. “You might get spots on that gorgeous window curtain dress of yours.”

At that moment the man Oscar entered the room. He uttered a note of admiration which made Patience turn about sharply. He was gazing upon Mrs. Sparhawk’s enhanced charms with an expression which Patience did not understand, but which filled her with sudden fury.

“Here!” she exclaimed roughly, “go into the dining room until supper’s ready. This kitchen ain’t big enough for three.”

The man moved his eyes and regarded her angrily.

“Who’s boss here?” he demanded.

“It’s not your place to ask questions. You’re hired to work outside, and when you come into this house there’s only one place for you. Now go into the other room.” Her eyes were flashing, and she had drawn up her shoulders. The man backed away from her much as dogs do when cats give warning.

“That girl gives me a chill. I hate her,” he muttered to his mistress.

Mrs. Sparhawk gave a loud laugh which covered her embarrassment, and slapped him heartily on the shoulder. “Go in, go in,” she said. “What’s the use of family quarrels?”

The man slunk away, and Patience went about her work with vicious energy. She fried liver and baked biscuits while her mother stirred the steaming cherries and brewed tea. When supper was ready she filled Oscar’s plate first and served him last, not hating herself in the least for her spite and spleen. After Mrs. Sparhawk had taken her place at the head of the table even her exuberant beauty could not dispel the frown on the hired man’s brow, until, to Patience’s disgust, she divined the cause of his surliness, and deftly exchanged her plate for his.

VII

That night Patience did not go to her tower, but wandered over the dark fields, a drooping forlorn little figure in the crawling shadows. She felt dull and tired and disheartened. By nine o’clock she was asleep. She awoke as fresh as the morning. When Mr. Foord returned from San Francisco in the afternoon he found her curled in the easy-chair by his fire. She started guiltily as he entered, then tossed her head defiantly, let Byron slide to the floor, and went forward to kiss him.

As he was about to take the chair she had occupied he espied the fallen volume. He lifted it hastily.

“What is this?” he demanded.

Patience blushed furiously, but set her lips with an expression he understood.

“It’s Byron, and I’m going to read it all. I’ve read a lot.”

He shifted the book from one hand to the other for a moment, his face much perturbed. Finally he laid it on the table, merely remarking: “Sooner or later, sooner or later.”

Patience offered him a piece of the candy he had brought her; but he preferred his pipe, and she perched herself on the arm of his chair and ate half the contents of her box without pause. She had not yet learned the subtle delights of the epicure, and to enjoy until capacity was exhausted was typical of her enthusiastic temperament. When she could no longer look upon the candy without a shudder she climbed to the old gentleman’s shoulder and scratched his bald pate with her ragged nails. It was her emphatic way of expressing gratitude, and beloved by Mr. Foord above pipe and enchilada.

Patience took Byron home with her that evening, Mr. Foord merely shrugging his shoulders. After supper she read until dark, then hid the book under the bed and went over to the tower. She ran up the twisted stair, and astonished the owl by clasping him in her arms and kissing him passionately. He manifested his disapproval by biting at her shoulder fiercely. She shrieked and boxed his ears smartly. He flapped his large wings wildly. A battle royal was imminent in that sacred tower where once the silver bells had called the holy men to prayer. But Patience suddenly broke into a laugh and sank on her knees by the window, while Solomon retreated to the wall, and regarded her with a round unwinking stare, brooding over problems which he did not in the least understand.

Patience brooded also, but her lids drooped, and she barely saw the beauty of ocean and rock and spray. The moon was not yet up, and the half revealed intoning sea was full of mystery.

She was conscious that her mood was not quite what it had been during her last visit. All of that was there—but more. She felt higher above the earth than ever before, but more conscious of its magnetism. Something hummed along her nerves and stirred in her veins. Her musings shaped to definite form, inasmuch as they assumed the semblance of man. Inevitably Byron was exhumed for duty; and if his restless soul were prowling space and Carmel Valley, his famous humour, desuetous in Eternity, must have echoed in the dull ears of roaming shapes.

Beside the white face of the child was the solemn and hebraic visage of the owl. Some outworn chord of Solomon’s youth may have been stirred by his friend’s tumultuous greeting, for he had stepped, with the dignity of his years, to her side, and stood regarding, with introspective stare, the reflection of the rising moon.

Patience did not see him. She was gazing upon Byron, whose moody passionate face was distinctly visible among the stars. Alas! her vision was suddenly obscured by a hideous black object. A bat flew straight at Carmel tower. Patience sprang to her feet, tossed her skirt over her head, and fled down the stair. The owl stepped to the stair’s head and gazed into the winding darkness, his eyes full of unutterable nothing.

VIII

On Monday school re-opened, and Patience was late as usual. She loitered through the woods, conning her lessons, having been too much occupied with her poet to give them attention before. As she ascended the steps of the schoolhouse the drone of the Lord’s Prayer came through the open window, and she paused for a moment on the landing, swinging her bag in one hand and her tin lunch-pail in the other.

She was not a picturesque figure. Her sunbonnet was of faded blue calico dotted with white. The meagre braid projecting beneath the cape was tied with a shoe string. The calico frock was faded and mended and much too short, although the hem and tucks had been let out. The copper-toed boots were of a greyish-green hue, and the coarse stockings wrinkled above them. The nails of her pretty brown hands looked as if they had been sawed off. But the eyes under the old sunbonnet were dreamy and happy. The brain behind was full of new sensations. In the sparkling atmosphere was an electric thrill. The day was as still as only the days of Monterey can be. The pines, and the breakers had never intoned more sweetly.

A voluminous A—men! startled Patience from her reverie. She went hastily within, hung her bonnet and pail on a peg, and entered the schoolroom, smiling half deprecatingly half confidently, at Miss Galpin. The young teacher’s stern nod did not discompose her. As she passed Rosita she received a friendly pinch, and Manuela looked up and smiled; but while traversing the width of the room to her desk she became aware of something unfriendly in the atmosphere. As she took her seat she glanced about and met the malevolent eyes of a dozen turned heads. One girl’s lip was curled; another’s brows were raised significantly, as would their owner query: “What could you expect?”

Patience blushed until her face glowed like one of the Castilian roses on the garden wall opposite the window. “They’ve found out about Byron,” she thought. “Horrors, how they’ll tease me!”

School girls have a traditional habit of “willing” each other to “miss” when in aggressive mood. To-day some twenty of the girls appeared to have concerted to will that Patience should forget what little lore she had gathered on her way to school. Patience, always sensitive to impressions, was as taut as the strings of an Æolian harp from her experience of the past week. Such natures are responsive to the core to the psychological power of the environment, and once or twice this morning Patience felt as if she must jump to her feet and scream. But even at that early age she divined that the sweetest revenge is success, and she strove as she had never striven before to acquit herself with credit.

All morning the silent battle went on. Miss Galpin, who was beloved of her pupils because she was pretty and dressed well, was a graduate of the San Francisco High School, and an excellent teacher. Frankly as she liked Patience she had never shown her any partiality in the schoolroom; but to-day, noting the antagonism that was brought to bear on the girl, she exerted all her cleverness to assist her in such subtle fashion that Patience alone should appreciate her effort. In consequence, when the morning session closed, Patience wore the doubtful laurels and the bad blood was black.

As the girls trooped down into the yard Rosita laid her arm about Patience and endeavoured to lead her away. Manuela conferred in a low tone with the foe, voice and gestures remonstrant. But there was blood in the air, and Patience squared her shoulders and awaited the onslaught. Incidentally she inspected her nails and copper toes.

Several of the girls walked rapidly up to her. They were smiling disagreeably.

“Can’t you keep her at home?” asked one of them.

“Think she’ll marry him?” demanded another.

Patience, completely taken aback, glanced helplessly from one to the other.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Come, Patita,” murmured Rosita, on the verge of tears.

Manuela exclaimed: “You are fiends, fiends!” and walked away.

“Mean? Do you mean to say she got off without you knowing it?”

“Knowing what?” A horrible presentiment assailed Patience. Her fingers jerked and her breath came fast.

“Why,” said Panchita McPherson, brutally, “your mother was in here Saturday night with her young man and regularly turned the town upside down. They were thrown out of three saloons. Can’t you keep her at home?”

Patience stared dully at the girls, her dry lips parted. She knew that they had spoken the truth. She had gone to bed early on Saturday night. Shortly afterward she had heard the sound of buggy wheels and Billy’s uncertain gait. Many hours later she had been awakened by the sound of her mother stumbling upstairs; but she had thought nothing of either incident at the time.

Panchita continued relentlessly, memories of many class defeats rushing forward to lash her spleen: “You’ll please understand after this that we don’t care to have you talk to us, for we don’t think you’re respectable.” Whereupon the other girls, nodding sarcastically at Patience, entwined their arms and walked away, led by the haughty Miss McPherson.

For a few moments Patience hardly realised how she felt. She stood impassive; but a cyclone raged within. All the blood in her body seemed to have rushed to her head, to scorch her face and pound in her ears. She wondered why her hands and feet were cold.

“Come, Patita, don’t mind them,” said Rosita, putting her arm round her comrade. “The mean hateful nasty—pigs!” Never before had the indolent little Californian been so vehement; but Patience slipped from her hold, and running through a gate at the back of the yard crouched down on a box. Rosita’s words had broken the spell. She was filled with a volcano of hate. She hated the girls, she hated Monterey, she hated life; but above all she hated her mother.

After a time all the hate in her concentrated on the woman who had made her young life so bitter. She had never liked her, but not until the dreadful moments just past had she realised the full measure of her inheritance. The innuendoes she had not understood, but it was enough to know that her mother had disgraced her publicly and insulted her father’s memory. Her schoolmates she dismissed from her mind with a scornful jerk of the shoulders. She had beaten them too easily and often in the schoolroom not to despise them consummately. They could prick but not stab her.

The bell rang; but she had an account to settle, and bonnetless she started for home.

Mrs. Sparhawk was sitting on the porch reading a novel when Patience walked up to her, snatched the book from her hand, and flung it into a rose-tree. The woman was sober, and quailed as she met her daughter’s eyes. Patience had walked rapidly under a hot sun. Her face was scarlet, and she was trembling.

“I hate you!” she sobbed. “I hate you! It doesn’t do any good to tell you so, but it does me good to say it.”

The girl looked the incarnation of evil passions. She was elemental Hate, a young Cain.

“I wish you were dead,” she continued. “You’ve ruined every bit of my life.”

“Why—what—what—” mumbled the woman. But the colour was coming to her face, and her eyes were beginning to glitter unpleasantly.

“You know well enough what. You were in town drunk on Saturday night, and were in saloons with a farm hand. To make a brute of yourself was bad enough—but to go about with a common man! Are you going to marry him?”

Mrs. Sparhawk laughed. “Well, I guess not.”

Patience drew a quick breath of relief. “Well, that’s what they’re saying—that you’re going to marry him—a man that can’t read nor write. Now look here, I want one thing understood—unless you swear to me you’ll not set foot in that town again I’ll have you put in the Home of the Inebriates—There! I’ll not be disgraced again; I’ll do it.”

Mrs. Sparhawk sprang to her feet, her face blazing with rage. “You will, will you?” she cried. She caught the girl by the shoulders, and shaking her violently, boxed first one ear, then the other, with her strong rough hands. For an instant Patience was stunned, then the blood boiled back to her brain. She screamed harshly, and springing at her mother clutched her about the throat. The lust to kill possessed her. A red curtain blotted even the hated face from sight. Instinctively she tripped her mother and went down on top of her. The crash of the body brought two men to the rescue, and Patience was dragged off and flung aside.

“My land!” exclaimed one of the men, his face white with horror. “Was you going to kill your ma?”

“Yes, that she was,” spluttered Mrs. Sparhawk, sitting up and pulling vaguely at the loose flesh of her throat. “She’d have murdered me in another minute.”

Patience by this time was white and limp. She crawled upstairs to her room and locked the door. She sank on the floor and thought on herself with horror.

“I never knew,” she reiterated, “that I was so bad. Why, I’m fifteen, and I never wanted to kill even a bird before. I wouldn’t learn to shoot. I’d never drown a kitten. When the Chinaman stuck a red-hot poker through the bars of the trap and burnt ridges in the live rat I screamed and screamed. And now I’ve nearly killed my mother, and wanted to. Who, who would have thought it?”

When she was wearied with the futile effort to solve the new problem, she became suddenly conscious that she felt no repentance, no remorse. She was horrified at the sight of the black veins in her soul; but she felt a certain satisfaction at having unbottled the wrath that consumed her, at having given her mother the physical equivalent of her own mental agony. Over this last cognisance of her capacity for sin she sighed and shook her head.

“I may as well give myself up,” she thought with young philosophy. “I am what I am, and I suppose I’ll do what I’m going to do.”

She went downstairs and out of the house. She passed a group of men; they stared at her in horror. Then another little seed from the vast garden of human nature shot up to flower in Patience’s puzzled brain. She lifted her head with an odd feeling of elation: she was the sensation of the hour.

She went out on Point Lobos and listened to the hungry roar of the waves, watched the tossing spray. Nature took her to her heart as ever, and when the day was done she was normal once more. She returned to the house and helped to get supper, although she refused to speak to her equally sullen parent.

IX

It was several days before the story reached Monterey. When it did, the girls treated Patience to invective and contumely, but delivered their remarks at long range. The mother of Manuela said peremptorily that Patience Sparhawk should never darken the doors of the Peralta mansion again, and even Mrs. Thrailkill told the weeping Rosita that the intimacy must end.

Miss Galpin was horrified. When school was over she took Patience firmly by the hand and led her up the hill to her boarding-place, the widow Thrailkill’s ancestral home. The long low adobe house was traversed from end to end by a pillared corridor. It was whitewashed every year, and its red tiles were renewed at intervals, but otherwise the march of civilisation had passed it by. Mrs. Thrailkill, large and brown, with a wart between her kind black eyes, and a handsome beard, was rocking herself on the corridor. When she recognised the teacher’s companion she arose with great dignity and swung herself into the house.

Miss Galpin led Patience down the corridor to a room at the end, and motioned her to a chair. Several magazines lay on a table, and Patience reached her hand to them involuntarily; but Miss Galpin took the hand and drew the girl toward her. The young teacher’s brown eyes wore a very puzzled expression. Even her carefully regulated bang had been pushed upward with a sudden dash of the hand. She was only twenty-two, and her experience of human nature was limited. Her ideas of life were accumulated largely from the novels of Mr. Howells and Mr. James, whom she revered; and neither of these gentlemen photographed such characters as Patience. It had probably never occurred to them that Patiences existed. She experienced a sudden thrill of superiority, then craved pardon of her idols.

“Patience, dear,” she said gently, “is this terrible story true?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Patience, standing passively at Miss Galpin’s knee.

“You actually tried to kill your mother?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Miss Galpin gasped. She waited a moment for a torrent of excuse and explanation; but Patience was mute.

“And you are not sorry?” she faltered.

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh, Patience!”

“I’m sorry you feel so badly, ma’am. Please don’t cry,” for the estimable young woman was in tears, and mentally reviling her preceptors.

“How can I help feeling terribly, Patience? You break my heart.”

“I’m sorry, dear Miss Galpin.”

“Patience, don’t you love God?”

“No, ma’am, not particularly. Leastways, I’ve never thought much about it.”

“You little heathen!”

“No, ma’am, I’m not. My father was very religious. But please don’t talk religion to me.”

“Patience, I don’t know what to make of you. I am in despair. You’re not a bad girl. You give me little trouble, and I’ve always said that you had finer impulses than any girl I’ve ever known, and the best brain. You ought to realise better than any girl of your age the difference between right and wrong. And yet you have done what not another girl in the school would do, inferior as they are—”

“How do you know, ma’am? I never thought I would. Neither did you think I would. You can’t tell what you’ll do till you do it.”

Miss Galpin was distracted. She resumed hurriedly:

“I want you to be a good woman, Patience,—a good as well as a clever woman. And how can you be good if you don’t love God?”

“Are all people good the same way?”

“Well, it all comes to the same thing in the end.” Miss Galpin blessed the evolution of verbiage.

“Are all religious people good?”

“Certainly.”

“These girls are religious, especially the Spanish ones, and they’ve behaved to me like devils. So have their mothers, and some of them go to five o’clock mass.”

“Girls are undisciplined, and mothers often have a mistaken sense of duty.”

“You are good, and Mr. Foord is good,” pursued the terrible child. “But you’d be just as good if you weren’t religious. It’s born in you, and you’re refined and kind-hearted. Those people are just naturally vulgar, and religion won’t make them any better.”

Miss Galpin drew the girl suddenly to her lap and kissed her. “I’m terribly sorry for you, dear,” she said. “I wish I understood you better, and could help you, but I don’t. I never knew any one in the least like you. I worry so about your future. People that are not like other people don’t get along nicely in this world. And you have such impulses! But I love you, Patience, and I’ll always be your friend. Will you remember this?”

Patience was undemonstrative, but she kissed Miss Galpin warmly and arranged her bang.

“Now, let’s talk about something else,” she said. “Are you going to get up those private theatricals for the night that school closes?”

Miss Galpin sighed and gave up the engagement. “Yes,” she said. Then, hesitatingly: “Do you wish to take part?”

“No, of course I don’t. I’ll have nothing more to do with those girls than I can help. You can bet your life on that. But I can help drill Rosita. What’s the play?”

“I’ll read it to you.” Miss Galpin took a pamphlet from a drawer and read aloud the average amateur concoction. Rosita was to take the part of an indolent girl with the habit of arousing herself unexpectedly. In one act she would have to dash to the front of the stage and dance a parlour breakdown.

“I am afraid Rosita cannot act,” said Miss Galpin, in conclusion, “but she is so pretty I couldn’t leave her out.”

“Rosita can act,” said Patience, emphatically. “I’ve seen her imitate every actress that has been here, and take off pretty nearly every crank in Monterey. And Mrs. Thrailkill can teach her one of the old Californian dances—and a song. Rosita has a lovely voice, almost as pretty as a lark’s.”

“Really? Well, I’ll talk to Mrs. Thrailkill and persuade her to forgive you, and then you can come here every afternoon and drill Rosita. And now will you promise me to be a good little girl?”

“Yes, ma’am—leastways I’ll try. Good-bye,” and Patience gave her a little peck, seized her sunbonnet, and went hurriedly out.

“I suppose,” she thought as she sauntered down the hill, “I’d better go and have it out with Mr. Foord. It’s got to come, and the sooner it’s over the better. Poor man, I’ll make it as easy for him as I can. It’ll be harder on him than on me, for I’m used to it now.”

The old gentleman was walking up and down the corridor as she turned the corner of the custom house. He looked very yellow and feeble, and supported himself with a stick.

“Oh, Patience!” he exclaimed.

For the first time Patience felt inclined to cry, but her aversion to display feeling controlled her. She merely approached and stood before him, swinging her sunbonnet.

“Don’t let us talk about it,” he said hastily. “I have something else to say to you. Sit down.”

They sat down side by side on a bench.

“You know,” the old gentleman continued, “I have a half-sister in the east—Harriet Tremont, her name is—in Mariaville-on-Hudson, New York. She is the best woman in the world, the most sinless creature I ever knew, yet full of human nature and never dull. She is very religious, has given up her life to doing good, and has some eccentric notions of her own. She writes me dutifully twice a year, although we have not met for thirty, and in her last letter she told me she intended to adopt a child, rescue a soul as she called it, and furthermore that she should adopt the child of the most worthless parents she could discover in her work among the worthless. Since—lately—I have been thinking strongly of sending you to her. You must get away from here. You must have a chance in life. If you remain here you will grow up bitter and hard, and the result with your brain and temperament may be terrible. You are capable of becoming a very bad or a very good woman. You are still young—but there is no time to lose. Should you care to go?”

“Of course I should,” cried Patience, enchanted with the idea of an excursion into unknown worlds. Then her face fell. “But I shouldn’t like to be adopted. That is too much like charity.”

“Is the ranch entirely mortgaged?”

Patience nodded.

“Well, let us look at it as a business proposition. You will be little expense to her—she is fairly well off; and one more in the household makes no appreciable difference. You will attend the public schools with the view to become a teacher, and when you are earning a salary you can repay her for what little outlay she may have made. Do you see?”

“Yes. I don’t mind if you look at it that way.”

“I’ll see your mother in a day or two. You don’t think she’ll object, do you?”

“Object? What has she got to say about it?”

“A great deal, unfortunately. She is your legal guardian. But she doesn’t love you, and I think can be persuaded. I shall miss you, my dear. What shall I do without my bright little girl?”

Patience nestled up to him, and the two strangely assorted companions remained silent for a time watching the seagulls sweep over the blue bay. Then Mr. Foord drifted naturally into the past, and Patience grew romantic once more.

X

That night Patience felt no inclination for either bed or tower. She wandered over the field, entered the pine forest, and walked to the coast. The tall straight trees grew close together; their aisles were very gloomy. From the ground arose the ominous voices of the night, and the wind in the treetops moaned heavily. But Patience was not afraid. She revelled in the vast dark silence, and felt that the world was all her own.

As she left the forest she saw great clouds of spray tossed high into the starry dark, heard the ocean rush at the outlying rocks, breaking into mist or leaping to the shore. The sea lions were talking loudly; the seagulls, huddled on the high points of the coast, scolded hoarsely.

On the edge of the forest was a cabin. Patience walked toward it. She knew the old man that lived there. He was evidently awake, for the open window was yellow with light. As she passed it on her way to the door she glanced within. Her skin turned cold; her hair stiffened. A sheeted corpse lay on the bed. Candles burned at head and foot. Patience, brave as she was, abjectly feared the corpse. She believed that she could survive a ghost, but she knew that if shut up with a dead body for ten minutes she should go mad. To-night she would have fled shrieking were it not that the room had a living occupant.

In a chair beside the bed sat a man gazing at the floor, his chin dropped to his chest. He wore rough clothes, but they were the affectations of the gentleman, not the garb of the dead man and his friends. Nor had Patience ever seen so noble a head. The profile was beautiful, the expression mild and intellectual, and most melancholy.

Patience forgot her terror as she wondered who the stranger could be; but in a moment it was renewed tenfold. Down the ocean road from Monterey came a wild hideous yell. The man by the corpse raised his head apprehensively, rose as if to flee, then sank wearily to his chair again. The clatter of hoofs on the hard road mounted above the thunder of the waves. Patience staring into the dark suddenly saw the leaping fire of torches, and a moment later tall figures riding recklessly. The yelling was incessant and demoniac.

“The man murdered Jim and they’re lynchers,” thought Patience. She glanced about wildly. A small tree stood near. She scampered up the trunk like a squirrel, and hid in the branches. None too soon. In another moment those terrible figures were screaming and gesticulating before the hut.

The smoky flames revealed an extraordinary sight to Patience’s distended eyes. These men were bearded like the men of modern civilisation, even their hair was properly cut; but they wore the garments of Greece and Japan, flowing robes of white and red; one dark sinister-looking being upheld a glittering helmet.

Patience rubbed her eyes. Did she dream over her Byron? But no mortal, none but the sheeted dead, could have slept and dreamed in that infernal clamour. Only the man by the bed sat immobile. He did not raise his head. Out of the pandemonium of sound Patience at last distinguished one word: “Charley! Charley!” If “Charley” were the man within the hut he gave no sign; nor when they threw back their heads and as from one throat gave forth a rattling volume of ribald laughter.

Suddenly Patience, who, seeing no rope, began to recover her courage, noticed that one of the men had ridden beneath her tree, taking no part in this singular drama. Once he turned his head, and an aquiline profile, fine and strong, with black hair falling above it, was sharply revealed against the red glare. Impulsively Patience leaned down and touched his shoulder. He looked up with a start, and saw a small white face among the leaves.

“What on earth is this?” he asked. “Is it a child?” His voice was rich and deep, with a gentle hint of brogue.

“What are they?” asked Patience. “Are they real devils, or only men? And are they going to kill him?”

The man laughed. “I certainly should ask the same question if I had not happened to come with them. Oh, they won’t do any murder, unless they happen to frighten some one to death. They’re members of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco—newspaper men and artists—who are down here on a lark.”

“Who’s the man in there by him, and why do they yell at him so?”

“Oh, he is a solitary spirit, a man of genius. He got tired of them and gave them the slip to-night. This is revenge.”

“They have the Estrada house on Alvarado Street,” said Patience. “I heard they were here.” Then she noticed that her companion wore the common garb of American civilisation. “Why aren’t you rigged up, too?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m hardly one of them. I’m only an Eastern man—a New Yorker—and am staying at Del Monte for a day or two. I rode over to see them this afternoon, and they insisted upon my staying for dinner. What on earth are you doing here by yourself at this time of night?”

Patience explained. Then she added wistfully, “I shall be frightened to death going home through those woods alone. I’ll imagine that that corpse and those dreadful-looking men are behind me at every step.”

“Just drop onto my horse and I’ll take you home. I’m pretty tired of all this.” He raised his arms and lifted her down, placing her in front of him. “Lucky I had an English saddle,” he said, and as he bent his head Patience could see that he was smiling. “Oh!” he added abruptly, “I have seen you before. Now—tell me where to go.”

Patience directed him, and they cantered away unobserved.

“Where did you see me?” she asked, “and how odd that you should remember me!”

“You have wonderful eyes. Although I’m an Irishman I won’t go so far as to say they are pretty, but they look as if they had been born to see so much. It would be difficult to forget them. Upon me soul you are actually trembling. Did you never have a compliment before?”

“Never! And I guess I’ll remember it longer than you remember my eyes. Where did you see me?”

“I was standing at the window of the house in Alvarado Street when you came along from school with a dozen or more of the girls. You all stopped to gaze at a passing circus troupe, and—I noticed you first because you stood a little apart from the others.”

“I usually do,” said Patience, drily.

He did not add that, attracted by the eagerness of her gaze and her rapid changes of expression, he had asked who she was, and that a Montereño present had related the family history and her own notable performances in no measured terms. “She’s got bad blood in her and the temper of Old Nick himself. She’ll come to no good, homely as she is,” the man had concluded. “Curious enough, the boys all like her and would spark her if they got a show; but she’s hell-set on gettin’ an education at present and doesn’t notice them much.”

Patience made him talk on for the pleasure of hearing his voice. “Are you a real Irishman?” she asked.

“Well, I’ve been an American for twenty years, but there’s a good deal of Irish left in me yet, especially in me tongue.”

“I’d keep it, if I were you. It’s nicer even than the Spanish. Do you think our voices are horrid?”

“I think that if you’d pitch yours a little lower it would be an improvement,” he said, smiling. And Patience registered a vow which she kept. In after years when great changes had come upon her, her voice was envied and emulated.

As they left the forest and entered Carmel Valley Patience pointed to her home, then suddenly took the reins from his hand and directed the horse toward the Mission. The waning moon hung over the ocean, and the Mission stood out boldly.

“Come up to my tower,” said Patience; “the view is something! That will be your reward. I never took any one there before.”

“All right,” he said, “I may as well make a night of it.” He tethered his horse and followed her up the spiral stair.

“Solomon is not here,” she said regretfully. “He’s out foraging. Now!”

The young man walked to the window and inspected the view. Patience regarded him with rapt admiration. He was tall and strong and well dressed. She had never dreamed that anything romantic could really happen to her; and as she was sure that it would be her last experience as well as her first, she suddenly felt depressed and miserable, her imagination leaping to the finish.

He turned and met her eyes. “What are you thinking of?” he asked.

But Patience was too shy to tell him, and asked him if he liked the view.

“It’s a jolly view and no mistake. You’re not a happy child, are you?” he added, abruptly. With the enthusiasm and spontaneous kindness of his Irish blood he had conceived the idea of dropping a seed in this plastic soil, and was feeling his way toward the right spot.

“I don’t know that I am,” said Patience, haughtily. “I suppose some of those people told you things.”

“Well, they did, that’s a fact. But you mustn’t get angry with me, please, for upon me word I like you better than any one I’ve met in California.”

“Don’t you live here?”

“My home is in New York, and I return to-morrow.”

“Oh! Well, I don’t see how I should interest you.”

“You do, though, and that’s all there is to it. I’m neither as cautious as an Englishman nor as practical as an American—though God rest the two of them; I mean nothing to their detriment. But there’s a force in you, and force doesn’t go to waste, although it’s more often than not misdirected. I can feel yours myself; and I’m told that you’re the cleverest girl in the town as well as the proudest and most ambitious. Now, what do you intend to do with yourself?”

“I suppose I’ll be a teacher; and if Mrs. Sparhawk has no objections I may go East soon and live with a religious old lady.”

“Well, that’s not so bad; only I doubt if that life will suit you any better than this.” He put his finger under her chin and turned her face to the light. “I am a lawyer, you know,” he added, “and features and lines and curves mean a good deal to me. You’ve got a good will, begad, and like all first-class American women, you’ll keep your head up until you drop. And you have all her faculty of beginning life over again several times, if necessary. You’ll never rust nor mould, nor write polemical novels if things don’t go your way. You’ve got a good strong brain behind those eyes, and although you’ll make mistakes of various sorts, you’ll kick them behind you when you’re done with them, begin over and be none the worse. Remember that no mistake is irrevocable; that there are as many to-morrows as yesterdays; that only the incapable has a past. It is all a matter of will as far as the world is concerned, and ideals as far as your own soul goes. No matter how often circumstances and your own weakness compel you to let go your own private ideals, deliberately put them back on their pedestal the moment you have recovered balance, and make for their attainment as if nothing had happened. Then you’ll never acquire an aged soul and never lose your grip. Can you remember all that?”

“You bet I can.”

He laughed. “I believe you. I might add: Don’t love the wrong man, but I’ll not throw away good advice. You’ll not be wholly guided by reason in those matters. I will merely say, Rub the first experience in hard and let a long while elapse before your second, or it will be the greater mistake of the two. Your reactions will be very violent, I should say. Well, I’ll be going now.”

“I’d rather you’d stay and talk.”

“Would you? Well, being a lawyer, I know where to stop. Besides, I’ll have all those fellows after me if I stay too long. We’ll doubtless meet again. The world is small these days.”

Patience followed him reluctantly down the stair, and he walked beside her across the valley, leading his horse. When they reached the farmhouse he shook hands with her warmly, wished her good luck, and rode away. She ran up to her room, and, lighting a candle, transcribed his words into an old copybook.

XI

Miss Galpin expostulated with Mrs. Thrailkill to such effect that Patience spent two hours each afternoon in the family garret rehearsing Rosita while the astonished rats took refuge in the chimney. Patience could not act, but she had dramatic appreciation and an intellectual conception of any part not beyond her years. Rosita was not intellectual, but, as Patience had discerned, the spirit of Thalia was in her. She quickly became enamoured of her unsuspected resources and at the prospect of exhibiting herself on a platform. Not only did she rouse herself to something like exertion, but she faithfully followed the instructions of her strenuous teacher and discovered a talent for posing and little tricks of manner all her own. Her mother taught her the song and dance, which were to be the sensation of the evening.

It was on the fourth day that Patience, returning home late in the afternoon, met Mr. Foord in the woods. The old gentleman looked sad and perplexed, and Patience sprang upon the step of his buggy and demanded to know what was the matter.

“It’s very odd,” he said, “but she won’t let you go.”

“Won’t let me go?” cried Patience, furiously. “Well, I’ll go anyhow.”

“You can’t, my dear. The law won’t let you.”

“Do you mean to say that the law won’t protect me from that woman?”

“I am afraid she has the best of it.” He recalled the woman’s angry cunning face, as he had pleaded with her, and shook his head. “You see she was never in the town in that condition before. The men out there are so devoted to her that—so she has informed me—they would swear to a man that they had never seen her drunk. And, you see, she’s never abused you—the only time she struck you she had provocation—you must admit that. You are under her control until you are eighteen, and I don’t see that we can do anything. I’m very sorry. I never felt so defeated in my life.”

“But for gracious goodness sake why won’t she let me go? I’m no good to speak of about the place, and she certainly isn’t keeping me for love.”

“Well—I think it’s revenge. She remarked that she had a chance to pay up and she’d do it.”

“I’ll just run away, that’s all.”

“The law would bring you back, and arrest me for abduction.”

“I hate the law,” said Patience, gloomily. “Seems to me I’m always finding something new to hate.”

“You must not hate, my child,” and he quoted the Bible dutifully, although in entire sympathy with her. “That is what I am so afraid of—that you will become hard and bitter. I want to save you from that. Well, perhaps she’ll relent. I shall see her again and again. I must go on, Patience.”

She kissed him and walked sullenly homeward. As she entered the kitchen her mother looked up and laughed. Her face was triumphant and malignant.

“You don’t go,” she said. “Not much. I’ve got the whip hand this time and I’ll keep it. Here you’ll stay until you’re eighteen—”

Patience turned abruptly and ran upstairs. As she locked her door she thought with some satisfaction: “Now that I know myself I can control myself. If I’d jumped on her then she’d have fallen in the stove.”

As her imagination had not dwelt at great length upon the proposed change the disappointment was not as keen as it might have been, much as she desired to leave Monterey. Moreover, she was occupied with Rosita and the coming examinations. And did she not have her Byron? She rose at dawn and read him. In the evening she went over to the tower and declaimed him to the grey ocean whose passions were eternal. The owl, who regarded Byron as a great bore, closed his eyes when she began and went to sleep. Sometimes—when the sun rode high—she sat upon the rubbish over Junipero Serra’s bones, and with one eye out for rats and snakes and tarantulas, conned a new poem. She liked the contrast between the desolation and death in the old ruin and the warm atmosphere of the poetry. As often Byron was unheeded, and she dreamed of the mysterious stranger who had so magnetised her that she had forgotten to ask his name. She had only to close her eyes to hear his voice, to recall the words which seemed forever moving in one or other chamber of her mind, to see the profile which she admired quite as much as Byron’s. As for the voice, it had a possessing quality which made her understand the wherefore of the thrilling notes of the male bird in spring-time. She invested her ambitious young lawyer with all the dark sardonic melancholic fascinations of Lara, Conrad, Manfred, and Don Juan. The wild sweet sting of spring was in her veins. Her mind was full of vague illusions, very lovely and very strange, shifting of outline and wholly inexplicable.

XII

On the afternoon of the last day of school several of the girls decorated the hall with garlands and flags. Carpenters erected a stage, and Patience arranged the “properties.” When the great night arrived and Monterey in its best attire crowded the room, no curtain in the sleepy town had ever been regarded with more complacent expectation. The Montereñas were thoroughly satisfied with their offspring, and performances of any sort were few.

The programme was opened by Manuela, who wore an old pink satin frock of her mother’s cut short and trimmed with a flounce of Spanish lace. Her brown shining face looked good will upon all the world as she recited “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” Then came a dialogue in which all the little participants wore white frocks and crimped hair.

Meanwhile, in the dressing-room, Rosita was limp in Patience’s arms.

“Oh, Patita!” she gasped, “I can’t! I can’t! I’m frightened to death! What shall I do?”

“Do?” cried Patience, angrily, who was so excited herself that she pumped Rosita’s arms up and down as if the unfledged Thespian had just been rescued from the bay. “Do? You must brace up. When you get there you’ll be all right. And you must not get stage fright. Rosita, you must make a success. Remember you’ve got the star part. Don’t, don’t make a fool of yourself.”

“Oh, if you could only hold my hand,” wailed Rosita.

“Well, I can’t, and that’s the end of it. Now! brace up quick.” The prompter was calling in a loud whisper,—

“Miss Thrailkill, be ready when I say, ‘Life.’”

“Ay, dios de mi alma,” almost sobbed Rosita.

Patience dragged her to the wings and held her there. When the cue was spoken she gave her a hard pinch, then a shove. Rosita gasped and disappeared.

Patience slipped round into the audience, her heart in her throat, her eyes black with excitement. If Rosita broke down she felt that she should have hysterics.

At first Rosita had nothing to say. Upon entering she had merely to fling herself upon a divan in an indolent attitude whilst the others carried on a spirited dialogue. Patience saw that she had managed to get to the sofa without falling prone, but also observed that her bosom was heaving. Nevertheless, when her time came she managed to drawl her lines, although with as little expression as she told her rosary. Patience stamped her foot audibly.

But as the play progressed it was evident that Rosita was recovering her poise. When she finally had to come forward she moved with all the indolent grace of her blood, and delivered her little speech with such piquant fire that the audience applauded loudly. And with that clatter of feet and hands a new light sprang into the Spanish girl’s eyes, an expression half of surprise, half of transport. From that time on she acted in a manner which astonished even her instructor.

She looked exquisitely pretty. Her white rounded neck and arms were bare. Her black soft hair hung to her knees, unbound, caught back above one little ear with a pink rose. Her dress was of black Spanish lace covered with natural roses. On her tiny feet she wore a pair of black satin slippers which had belonged to her grandmother and twinkled many a time to the music of El Son.

When, upon being twitted with her indolence, she suddenly sprang to the front of the stage, and after singing an old Spanish love-song to the music of her own guitar, danced El Son with all the rhythmic grace of the beautiful women of the old gay time, she was no longer an actress but an impersonator. The more the delighted audience applauded the more poetically she danced, the more significantly her long eyes flamed. Once when the applause deafened she swayed as if intoxicated. As the dance finished, her red lips were parted. She was panting slightly.

When the curtain fell Patience rushed into the dressing-room and embraced her rapturously. “Rosita!” she cried, “you were simply, mag-nif-icent.”

Rosita, who was trembling violently, hung about Patience’s neck.

“Oh, Patita!” she gasped. “I was in heaven. I never was so happy. You don’t know what it is to have a hundred people thinking of nothing but you and applauding as if they were mad. Oh, I’m going to act, act, act forever! I never want to do anything else. And isn’t my skin white? I wish I had two necks and four arms.”

XIII

The next morning prizes were distributed. Patience took most of them, but Rosita was still the sensation of the hour, although she had not passed an examination. At noon she had a luncheon party. She sat at the head of her table in a white dotted Swiss frock and Roman sash, and talked faster than she had ever talked in her life before. Altogether she was by no means the Rosita of twenty-four hours ago.

Mrs. Thrailkill had prepared a luncheon of old time Spanish dishes, and hovered, large and brown and placid, about a table loaded with chickens under mounds of yellow rice, tamales, and dulces. Patience, between Manuela and a young cousin of Rosita’s, was not unhappy. Her prizes lay on the window seat, she liked good things, and was infected with the gaiety of the hour. True, she wore her old muslin frock and a plaid sash made from an ancient gown of her mother’s, and the rest of the girls looked like a bed of newly blossomed flowers; but at fifteen the spirits rise high above trifles.

When she started for home she was as light of heart as her more favoured mates; but in the wood a dire affliction smote her. One of her teeth began to ache. She had seen her mother many times with head tied up and distorted face, and had wondered scornfully how any one could make a fuss about a mere tooth. Now, however, when her own suddenly felt as if impaled on a needle, she uttered a loud wail, and ran toward home as fast as her legs could carry her. She found her mother similarly afflicted, and a bottle of drops on the kitchen table. Mrs. Sparhawk condescended to apply the remedy, and the agony left as suddenly as it had come.

After supper Patience went over to her tower, and as ever floated between Carmel Valley and the stars, enveloped with warm ether, which swirled to towers and turrets inhabited by a projection of herself which she saw only as a lover. Unfortunately all this rapture was enacted in a strong draught. Even Solomon uttered a sound once or twice which resembled a sneeze. Again Patience’s tooth was punctured by a red-hot needle. Her castles vanished. She caught her cheek with her hand, stumbled down the winding stair, and flew across the valley, the needle developing into a screw.

The house was quiet, the kitchen dark. She lit a candle and searched frantically for the drops. They were not to be found. Then it occurred to her that her mother must have taken them to her room, and she ran up the stair.

XIV

At dawn next morning Patience found herself on the summit of the mountain behind the house. Her progress thither had skimmed the surface of memory and left no trace.

The sea was grey, the sky was grey. A grey mist moved in the valley. Beyond, the wood on the hill loomed in faint black outline. The birds in the trees, the seagulls on the rocks, the very ocean itself, were locked in the heavy sleep of early morning. Once, from the tower of the Mission, came the plaintive hooting of the owl.

After a time Patience plucked a number of stickers from her stockings, and wiped blood from her torn hands with a large leaf wet with dew. She clasped her hands inertly about her knees and stared down upon the ocean. Horror was in her sunken eyes. The skin of her face looked faded and old. Her nose and chin were as pinched as the features of the dead. She did not look like the same child. Nor was she.

Her eyes closed heavily, her head dropped. She roused herself. She felt that she had no right to do anything again so natural as to sleep. But suddenly she toppled over and lay motionless; until the sun sent its slanting rays under her eyelids. Then she stretched herself lazily, rubbing her eyes, and smiling as children do when waking. But the smile froze to a ghastly grin.

She raised herself stiffly and descended the mountain, clinging to the brush, the stones rolling from beneath her feet. She ran across the valley and plunged into the pine woods, but did not linger in those fragrant aisles.

When she reached the edge of the town she paused and half turned back; but there was one thing she dreaded more than to meet the people of Monterey, and she went on.

She skirted the town and made her way toward the Custom House by a roundabout path. She passed a group of boys, and averted her head with a gesture of loathing. One boy, a gallant admirer, ran after her.

“Patience!” he cried, “wait a minute.” But Patience took to her heels and never paused until she reached the Custom House. The perplexed knight stood still and whistled.

“Well,” he exclaimed to his jeering comrades, “I always knew Patience Sparhawk was a crank, but this lets me out.”

Patience stood for a few moments on the rocks, then went slowly to the library and opened the door. Mr. Foord sat by the fire. He looked up with a smile.

“Ah, it’s you,” he said. “I’m very proud of you.—Why, what’s the matter?”

Patience, her eyes fixed on the floor, took a chair opposite him.

“What is it, Patience?”

She did not look up. She could not. Finally she moved her face from him and stared at the mantel.

“I’ve left home,” she said. “I’d like to stay here for a while.”

“Why, of course you can stay here. I’ll tell Lola to put a cot in her room. But what is the matter? Has your mother been drinking again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has she struck you again?”

“No.”

“Well, what is it, my dear child? You know that you are always more than welcome here; but you must have some excuse for leaving home.”

“I have an excuse. I can’t tell it. Please don’t say anything more about it. I don’t think she’ll send for me.”

“Well, well, perhaps you’ll tell me after a time. Meanwhile make yourself at home.”

He was much puzzled, but reflected that Patience was not like other children; and he knew Mrs. Sparhawk’s commanding talent for making herself disagreeable. Still, he was shocked at her appearance; and as the day wore on and she would not meet his eye, but sat staring at the floor, his uneasy mind glimpsed ugly possibilities. At dinner she ate little and did not raise her eyes from her plate, although she made a few commonplace remarks.

At four o’clock Billy, the buggy, and a farm hand stopped before the Custom House. The man handed a note to Lola, asking her to give it to Patience.

The note read:

You come home—hear? If you don’t, I’ll see that you do.

M. Sparhawk.

Patience went out to the man, who still sat in the buggy. “Tell her,” she said, looking at Billy, “that I’m not going home,—not now nor at any other time. Just make her understand that I mean it.”

The man stared, but nodded and drove off.

XV

At midnight Patience was awakened by a frantic clamour in the street. “Those dreadful Bohemians,” she thought sleepily, then sat up with thumping heart.

“They say your name, niña, no?” said Lola, whose sonorous slumbers had also been disturbed.

Patience slipped to the floor and looked through the window. The moon flooded the old town. The ruined fort on the hill had never looked more picturesque, the pines above more calm. In the hollow near the blue waters the white arms of Junipero Serra’s cross seemed extended in benediction. The old adobes were young for the hour. One might fancy Isabel Herrara walking down from the long house on the hill, her reboso fluttering in the night wind, old Pio Pico, glittering with jewels, beside her.

And in the wide street before the Custom House, surrounded by a hooting mob, the refuse of the saloons, was a cursing gesticulating woman. Her black hair was unbound, her garment torn. She flung her fists in the face of those that sought to hold her.

“Patience Sparhawk!” she shrieked. “Patience Sparhawk! Come down here to your mother. Come down here this minute. Come, I say,” and a volley of oaths followed, greeted with a loud cackling laugh by the rabble.

Patience saw Mr. Foord, clad in his dressing-gown, go forth. She flung on her clothes hastily and ran down the stair. Her mother and Mr. Foord were in the kitchen.

“Oh, she’ll come back,” Mrs. Sparhawk was saying. “I’ll see to that. How do you like a row under your windows? Well, I’ll come here every night unless she comes home. You’ll put me in the Home of the Inebriates, will you? Think she’ll like to have that said of her mother when she’s grown up? Not Patience Sparhawk. I know her weak point. She’s as proud as hell, and I’m not afraid of going to any Home of the Inebriates.”

Patience pushed open the door. “I’m going with you,” she said. “Now get out of this house as fast as you can.”

“Oh, Patience,” exclaimed Mr. Foord. His old cheeks were splashed with tears.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” said Patience, her hands clenching and quivering. “I didn’t think she’d do this, or I wouldn’t have stayed. What a return for all your kindness!”

“Patience,” said the old gentleman, “promise me that you will come to see me to-morrow. Promise, or I shall not let you go. She can do her worst.”

“Well, I’ll come.”

She ordered her mother to follow her out of the back door that they might avoid the expectant mob. Mrs. Sparhawk walked unsteadily, but received no assistance from her daughter. If she had fallen, Patience could not have forced herself to touch her. Had the woman been a reeling mass of physical corruption, a leper, a small-pox scab, the girl could not have shrunken farther from her.

They did not speak until they ascended the hill behind the town and entered the woods. Patience never recalled that night without inhaling the balsamic odour of the pines, the heavy perfume of forest lilies, without seeing the great yellow stars through the uplifted arms of the trees. It was a night for love, and its guest was hate.

No more terrible conversation ever took place between mother and daughter. After that night they never spoke again.

XVI

The next morning Patience, after breakfast, carried a pair of tongs and a newspaper up to her room. She spread the newspaper on the table, then with the tongs extracted Byron from beneath the bed and laid it on the paper. She wrapped it up and tied it securely without letting her hands come in contact with the cover. That same afternoon she carried the book to the Custom House and threw it behind a row of tall volumes in one of the cases. Long after, Mr. Foord found it there and wondered. He was not at home when she arrived. When he returned she was deep in his arm-chair, reading Gibbon’s “Rome.” He was not without tact, and determined at once to ignore the events of the previous day and night.

“What!” he exclaimed, “are you really giving poor old Gibbon a trial at last? And after all your abuse? But perhaps you won’t find him so dry, after all.”

“I wish to read what is dry,” said Patience. “I’m going to take a course in ancient history.”

“No more poetry and novels?”

“Not a line.” She spoke harshly, and compelled herself to meet Mr. Foord’s eyes. Her own were as hard and as cold as steel. All the soft dreaming light of the past two months had gone out of them. They were the eyes neither of a girl nor of a woman. They looked the eyes of a sexless intellect.

Patience had done the one thing which a girl of fifteen can do when crushed with problems; she had twitched her shoulders and flung them off. She comprehended that her intellect was her best friend, and plunged her racked head into the hard facts which required utmost concentration of mind. The sweet vague dreams of the past were turned from in loathing. If she thought of them at all it was with fierce resentment that she had become conscious of her womanhood. The stranger was thrust out of memory. She went no more to the tower. The owl hooted in his loneliness, and she drew the bed-clothes over her ears. When she walked through the woods, to and from the town, she recited Gibbon in synopsis. She spent the day in Mr. Foord’s library, returning home in time to get supper. She did her household duties mechanically, and the eyes of mother and daughter never met. The man Oscar kept out of her way.

Miss Galpin had gone to San Francisco and would return no more: she was to marry. Rosita was visiting in Santa Barbara. Manuela, now a young lady, was devoting the greater part of her time to the Hotel Del Monte, where the flower and vegetables of San Francisco gather in summer. She went up to the tanks in the morning and to the dances in the evening; and informed Patience, one day as they met on the street, that she was having a perfectly gorgeous time, and had met a man who was too lovely for words.

The long hot days and the foggy nights wore slowly away. Patience grew thinner, her face harder. Mr. Foord did his best to divert her, but his resources were limited. She peremptorily forbade him to allude to the romance of Monterey, and he took her out in his old buggy and talked of Gibbon’s “Rome.”

Once they drove through the grounds of Del Monte,—the trim artificial grounds that are such an anomaly in that valley of memories. On the long veranda of the great hotel of airy architecture people sat in the bright attire of summer. Matrons rocked and gossiped; girls talked eagerly to languid youths that sat on the railing. It was all as unreal to Patience as the fairy-land of her childhood, when she had hunted for fays and elves in the wood. She stared at the scene angrily, for the first time feeling the sting of the social bee.

“A vain frivolous life those people lead,” remarked Mr. Foord, who disapproved of The World. “A waste of time and God’s best gifts, which makes them selfish and heartless. Empty heads and hollow hearts.”

But Patience, gazing at those girls in their gay dainty attire, the like of which she had never seen before, experienced a sudden violent wish to be of them, empty head, hollow heart, and all. They looked happy and free of care. The very atmosphere of the veranda seemed full of colour and music. Above all, they were utterly different from Patience Sparhawk, blessed and enviable beings. Even the frivolity of the scene appealed to her, so sick unto death of serious things.

XVII

One day, late in September, Patience, as usual, left Monterey at half past four in order to reach home in time to cook the supper. Nature had smiled for so many successive days that she wondered if the lips so persistently set must not soon strain back and reveal the teeth. The sun, poised behind the pine woods, flooded them with yellow light. As Patience walked through the soft radiance she set her teeth and recalled the chapters of Thiers’ “French Revolution,” through which she had that day plodded. But her head felt dull. She realised with a quiver of terror that she was beginning to feel less like an intellect and more like a very helpless little girl. Once she discovered her curved arm creeping to her eyes. She flung it down and shook her head angrily. Was she like other people?

Mingling with the fragrance of the pines it seemed to her that she smelt smoke. She hoped that her woods were not on fire. She walked slowly, indisposed as ever to return home, the more so to-day as she felt herself breaking.

“I wish the sun would not grin so,” she thought. “I’ll be glad when winter comes.”

The smell of smoke grew stronger. She left the woods. A moment later she stood, white and trembling, looking down upon Carmel Valley. The Sparhawk farmhouse was a blazing mass of timbers. A volume of smoke, as straight and full as a waterspout, stood directly above it. Men were running about. Their shouts came faintly to her.

Patience pressed her hands convulsively to her eyes. She clutched her head as if to tear out the terrible hope clattering in her brain, then ran down the hill and across the valley, feeling all the while as if possessed by ten thousand devils.

“Oh, I’m bad, bad, bad!” she sobbed in terror. “I don’t, I don’t!”

As she reached the scene the roof fell in. She glanced hastily about. The men, withdrawn to a safe distance, were gathered round the man Oscar. One was binding his hands and face. As they saw Patience they turned as if to run, then stood doggedly.

“Where is she?” Patience asked.

There was an instant’s pause. The crackling of the flames grew louder, as if it would answer. Then one of the men blurted out: “Burnt up in her bed. She was drunk. We was all in the field when the fire broke out. When we got here Oscar tried to get at her room with a ladder, but it was no go. Poor old Madge.”

Patience without another word turned and ran back to the woods. She ran until she was exhausted, more horrified at herself than she had been at any of her unhappy experiences. After a time she fell among the dry pine needles, her good, as she expressed it, still trying to fight down her bad. She felt that the demon possessing her would have sung aloud had she not held it by the throat. She conjured up all the horrible details of her mother’s death and ordered her soul to pity; but her brain remarked coldly that her mother had probably felt nothing. She imagined the charred corpse, but it only offended her artistic sense.

Finally she fell asleep. The day was far gone when she awoke. She lay for a time staring at the dim arches above her, listening to the night voices she had once loved so passionately. At last she drew a deep sigh.

“I might just as well face the truth,” she said aloud. “I’m glad, and that’s the end of it. It’s wicked and I’m sorry; but what is, is, and I can’t help it. We’re not all made alike.”

XVIII

Patience was once more installed in Lola’s room. Mr. Foord applied for letters of guardianship, which were granted at once. But as he had feared, she was left without a penny. He wrote to his half-sister, asking her if she would take charge of his ward. Miss Tremont replied in enthusiastic affirmation. Miss Galpin invited Patience to spend two weeks with her in San Francisco, offering to replenish the girl’s wardrobe with several of her own old frocks made over.

Those two weeks seemed to Patience the mad whirl of excitement of which she had read in novels. She had never seen a city before, and the very cable cars fascinated her. To glide up and down the hills was to her the poetry of science. The straggling city on its hundred hills, the crowded streets and gay shop windows, the theatres, the restaurants, China Town, the beautiful bay with its bare colorous hills, surprised her into admitting that life appeared to be quite well worth living after all. When she returned to Monterey she talked so fast that Mr. Foord clapped his hands to his ears, and Rosita listened with expanded eyes.

“Ay, if I could live in San Francisco!” she said, plaintively. “I acted all summer, Patita, but I got tired of the same people, and I want to go to the big theatres and see the real ones do it. I’d like to hear a great big house applauding, only I’d be so jealous of the leading lady.”

Patience was to start, immediately after Christmas, by steamer for New York. Mr. Foord spent the last days giving her much good advice. He said little of his own sorrow to part from her. Once he had been tempted to keep her for the short time that remained to him, but had put the temptation aside with the sad resignation of old age. He knew Patience’s imperative need of new impressions in these her plastic years.

The day before she left she went over to Carmel to say good-bye to Solomon. He flapped his wings with delight, although he could not see her, and nestled close to her side in a manner quite unlike his haughty habit. Patience thought he looked older and greyer, and his wings had a dejected droop. She took him in her arms with an impulse of tenderness, and this time he did not repulse her.

“Poor old Solomon,” she said, “I suppose you are lonely and forlorn in your old age, but this old tower wouldn’t be what it is without you. It’s too bad I can’t write to you as I can to my two or three other friends, and you’ll never know I haven’t forgotten you, poor old Solomon. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I wonder if owls do suffer too. You look so wise and venerable, perhaps you are thinking that lonely old age is terrible—as I know Mr. Foord does.”

Solomon pecked at her mildly. Her gaze wandered out over the ocean. She wondered if a thousand years had passed since she had dreamed her dreams. Their very echoes came from the mountains of space.

When she went away Solomon followed her to the head of the stair. She looked upward once and saw him standing there, with drooping wings and head a little bent. The darkness of the stair gave him vision, and he fluttered his wings expectantly, as she paused and lifted her face to him. But when she did not return he walked with great dignity to his accustomed place against the wall, nor even lifted up his voice in protest.

The next morning Rosita accompanied her to the station and wept loudly as the train approached. But Patience did not cry until she stood in her stateroom with Mr. Foord.

BOOK II

I

Patience watched the dusty hills of San Francisco, the sparkling bay alive with sail and spar, the pink mountains of the far coast range, the brown hills opposite the grey city, willowed and gulched and bare, the forts on rock and points, until the wild lurching of the steamer over the bar directed her attention to the unhappy passengers. In a short while she had not even these to amuse her, nothing but a grey plain and empty decks. At first she felt a waif in space; but soon a delightful sense of independence stole over her, of freedom from all the ills and responsibilities of life. The land world might have collapsed upon its fiery heart, so little could it affect her while that waste of waters slid under the horizon.

The few passengers came forth restored in a day or two. A husband and wife and several children did not interest Patience; neither did the captain’s wife, in whose charge she was. A young girl with a tangle of yellow hair under a sailor hat was more inviting, but she flirted industriously with the purser and took not the slightest notice of Patience. Her invalid mother reclined languidly in a steamer chair and read the novels of E. P. Roe.

The only other passenger was an elderly gentleman who read books in white covers neatly lettered with black which fascinated Patience. She was beginning to long for books. The invalid lent her a Roe, but she returned it half unread. As the old gentleman had never addressed her, did not seem to be aware of her existence, she could hardly expect a similar courtesy from him.

She was glowering upon universal stupidity one morning when he appeared on deck with a carpet bag, from which, after comfortably establishing himself in his steamer chair, he took little white volume after little white volume. Patience’s curiosity overcame her. She went forward slowly and stood before him. He looked up sharply. His black eyes, piercing from their shaggy arches, made her twitch her head as if to fling aside some penetrative force. His very beard, silver though it was, had a fierce sidewise twist. His nose was full nostrilled and drooped scornfully. The spectacles he wore served as a sort of lens for the fire of his extraordinary eyes.

“Well?” he said gruffly.

“Please, sir,” said Patience, humbly, “will you lend me a book?”

“Book? I don’t carry children’s literature round with me.”

“I don’t read children’s literature.”

“Oh, you don’t? Well, not ‘The Chatterbox,’ I suppose; but I have nothing of Pansy’s nor yet of The Duchess.”

“I wouldn’t read them if you had,” cried Patience, angrily. “Perhaps I’ve read a good many books that you haven’t re-read so long ago yourself. I’ve read Dickens and Thackeray and Scott, and,” with a shudder, “Gibbon’s ‘Rome’ and Thiers’ ‘French Revolution.’”

“Oh, you have? Well, I beg your pardon. Sit down, and I’ll see if I can find something for a young lady of your surprising attainments.”

Patience, too pleased to resent sarcasm, applied herself to his elbow.

“Why are they all bound alike?” she asked.

“This is the Tauchnitz edition of notable English and American books. How is this?” He handed her a volume of Grace Aguilar.

“No, sir! I’ve tried her, and she’s a greater bore than Jane Austen.”

“Oh, you want a love story, I suppose?” His accentuation was fairly sardonic.

“No, I don’t,” she said with an intonation which made him turn and regard her with interest. Then once more he explored his bag.

“Will this suit you?” He held out a copy of Carlyle’s “French Revolution.”

Patience groaned. “Didn’t I tell you I’d just read Thiers’?”

“This isn’t Thiers’. Try it.” And he took no further notice of her.

Patience opened the volume, and in a few moments was absorbed. There was something in the storm and blare of the style which struck a responsive chord. She did not raise her head until dinner time. She scarcely spoke until she had finished the volume, and then only to ask for the second. For several days she felt as if the atmosphere was charged with dynamite, and jumped when any one addressed her. The owner of the Tauchnitz watched her curiously. When she had finished the second volume she told him that she did not care for anything more at present. She leaned over the railing most of the day, watching the waves. Toward sunset the gentleman called peremptorily,—

“Come here.”

Patience stood before his chair.

“Well, what do you think of it?” he demanded. “Tell me exactly what your impressions are.”

“I feel as if there was an earthquake in my skull and all sorts of pictures flying about, and exploded pieces of drums and trumpets, and kings and queens. I think Carlyle must have been made on purpose to write the French Revolution. It was—as if—there was a great picture of it made on the atmosphere, and when he was born it passed into him.”

“Upon my word,” he said, “you are a degree or two removed from the letters of bread and milk. You are a very remarkable kid. Sit down.”

Patience took the chair beside him. “He made my head ache,” she added. “I feel as if it had been hammered.”

“I don’t wonder. Older heads have felt the same way. What’s your name?”

“Patience Sparhawk.”

“Tell me all about yourself.”

“Oh, there isn’t much to tell,” and she frowned heavily.

“Don’t look so tragic—you alarm me. I’m convinced there is a great deal. Come, I want to know.”

Patience gave a few inane particulars. The old gentleman snorted. “It’s evident you’ve never been interviewed,” he said grimly. “Now, I’ll tell you who I am, and then you won’t mind talking about yourself. There’s nothing so catching as egotism. My name is James E. Field. I own one of the great newspapers of New York, of which I am also editor-in-chief. Do you know what that means? Well, if you don’t, let me tell you. It is to be a man more powerful than the President of the United States, for he can make presidents, which is something the president himself can’t do. He knows more about people’s private affairs than any of intimate relationship; he has his finger on the barometer of his readers’ brain; he can make them sensational or sober, intellectually careless or exacting; he can keep them in ignorance of all that is best worth knowing of the world’s affairs, by snubbing the great events and tendencies of the day and vitiating their brain with local crimes and scandals, or he can illumine their minds and widen their brain cells by not only enlarging upon what every intelligent person should wish to know, but by making such matter of profound interest; he can ignore science, or enlighten several hundred thousand people; he can add to the happiness of the human race by exposing abuses and hidden crime, or he can accept hush money and let the sore fester; he can lash the unrest of the lower classes, or chloroform it; he can use the sledge hammer, the rapier, and the vitriol, or give over his editorial page to windy nothings; he can demolish political bosses, or prolong their career. In short, his power is greater than Alexander’s was, for he is a general of minds instead of brute force.”

“My goodness gracious!” exclaimed Patience. “What sort of a paper have you got?”

He laughed. “Wait until you’ve lived in New York awhile and you’ll find out. Its name is the ‘Day,’ and it has made a president or two, and made one or two others wish they’d never been born. By the way, I didn’t tell you much about myself, did I? The auxiliary subject carried me away. I’m married, and have several sons and daughters, and am off for a rest—not from the family but from the ‘Day.’ I’ve been round the world. That will do for the present. Tell me all about Monterey.”

With consummate skill he extracted the history of her sixteen years. On some points she fought him so obstinately that he inferred what she would not tell. He ended by becoming profoundly interested. He was a man of enthusiasms, which sometimes wrote themselves in vitriol, at others in the milk of human kindness. His keen unerring brain, which Patience fancied flashed electric search lights, comprehended that it had stumbled upon a character waging perpetual war with the pitiless Law of Circumstance, and that the issue might serve as a plot for one of the mental dramas of the day.

“Your experience and the bad blood in you, taken in connection with your bright and essentially modern mind, will make a sort of intellectual anarchist of you,” he said. “I doubt if you take kindly to the domestic life. You will probably go in for the social problems, and ride some polemical hobby for eight or ten years, at the end of which time you will be inclined to look upon your sex as the soubrettes of history. Your enthusiasm may make you a faddist, but your common sense may aid you in the perception of several eternal truths which the women of to-day in their blind bolt have overlooked.”

A moment later he repented his generalisations, for Patience had demanded full particulars. Nevertheless, he gave her many a graphic outline of the various phases of current history, and was the most potent educational force that she had yet encountered. She preferred him to books and admired him without reserve, trotting at his heels like a small dog. His unique and virile personality, his brilliant and imperious mind, magnetised the modern essence of which she was made. There was nothing of the old-fashioned intellectual type about him. He might have induced the coining of the word “brainy,”—he certainly typed it. Although he had the white hair and the accumulated wisdom of his years, he had the eyes of youth and the fist of vigour at any age. One day when two natives looked too long upon Patience’s blondinity, as she and Mr. Field were exploring a banana grove during one of their brief excursions on shore, he cracked their skulls together as if they had been two cocoanuts.

Patience laughed as the blacks dropped sullenly behind. “How funny that they should admire me,” she said. “I’m not pretty.”

“Well, you’re white. Besides, there is one thing more fascinating than beauty, and that is a strong individuality. It radiates and magnetises.”

“Have I all that?” Patience blushed with delight.

He laughed good-naturedly. “Yes, I’ll stake a good deal that you have. You may even be pretty some day; that is, if you ever get those freckles off.”

Inherent as was her passion for nature, she enjoyed the rich beauty of the tropics the more for the companionship of a mind skilled in observation and interpretation. It was her first mental comprehension of the law of duality.

As they approached New York harbour Mr. Field said to her: “I think I’ll have to make a newspaper woman of you. When you have finished your education, don’t think of settling down to any such humdrum career as that of the school-teacher. Come to me, and I’ll put you through your paces. If I’m not more mistaken than I’ve been yet, I’ll turn out a newspaper woman that will induce a mightier blast of woman’s horn. Think you’d like it?”

“I’d like to be with you,” said Patience, on the verge of tears. “Sha’n’t I see you again till I’m eighteen?”

“No, I don’t want to see or hear from you again until you’ve kneaded that brain of yours into some sort of shape by three years of hard study. Then I’ll go to work on a good foundation. You haven’t told me if you’ll take a try at it.”

“Of course I will. Do you think I want to be a school-teacher? I should think it would be lovely to be a newspaper woman.”

“Well, it isn’t exactly lovely, but it is a good training in the art of getting along without adjectives. Now look round you and I’ll explain this harbour; and don’t you brag any more about your San Francisco harbour.”

They entered through The Narrows, between the two toy forts. A few lone sentries paced the crisp snow on the heights of Staten Island, and looked in imminent danger of tumbling down the perpendicular lawns. The little stone windows of the earthen redoubts seemed to wink confidently at each other across the water, and loomed superciliously above the forts on the water’s edge. Long Island, had the repose of a giant that had stretched his limbs in sleep, unmindful of the temporary hamlets on his swelling front. Staten Island curved and uplifted herself coquettishly under her glittering garb and crystal woods. Far away the faint line of the New Jersey shore, looking like one unbroken city on a hundred altitudes, hovered faintly under its mist. The river at its base was a silver ribbon between a mirage and a stupendous castle of seven different architectures surmounted by a golden dome—which same was New York and the dome of a newspaper. Then a faint fairy-like bridge, delicate as a cobweb, sprang lightly across another river to a city of walls with windows in them—which same was Brooklyn. Under the shadow of the arches was a baby island fortified with what appeared to be a large Dutch cheese out of which the mice had gnawed their way with much regularity. The great bay, blue as liquid sapphire, was alive with craft of every design: rowboats scuttled away from the big outgoing steamers; sails, white as the snow on the heights, bellied in the sharp wind; yellow and red ferry boats gave back long symmetrical curves of white smoke; gaunt ships with naked spars lay at rest. On Liberty Island the big girl pointed solemnly upward as if reminding the city on the waters of the many mansions in the invisible stars. Snow clouds were scudding upward from the east, but overhead there was plentiful gold and blue.

Patience gazed through Mr. Field’s glass, enraptured, and promised not to brag. As they swung toward the dock he laid his hand kindly on hers.

“Now don’t think I’m callous,” he said, “because I part from you without any apparent regret. You are going to be in good hands during the rest of your early girlhood, and I could be of no assistance to you; and I am a very busy man. Let me tell you that you have made this month a good deal shorter than it would otherwise have been; and when we meet again you won’t have to introduce yourself. There are my folks, and there goes the gang-plank. Good-bye, and God bless you.”

II

Patience leaned over the upper railing, looking at the expectant crowd on the wharf, wondering when the captain would remember her. She felt a strong inclination to run after Mr. Field. As he receded up the wharf, surrounded by his family, he turned and waved his hand to her.

“Why couldn’t he have been Mr. Foord’s brother or something?” she thought resentfully. “I think he might have adopted me.”

As the crowd thinned she noticed two elderly women standing a few feet from the vessel, alternately inspecting the landed passengers and the decks. One was a very tall slender and graceful woman, possessed of that subtle quality called style, despite her unfashionable attire. In her dark regular face were the remains of beauty, and although nervous and anxious, it wore the seal of gentle blood. Her large black eyes expressed a curious commingling of the spiritual and the human. She was probably sixty years old. At her side was a woman some ten years younger, of stouter and less elastic figure, with a strong dark kind intelligent face and an utter disregard of dress. She carried several bundles.

“Oh, hasn’t she come?” cried the elder woman. “Can she have died at sea? I am sure the dear Lord wouldn’t let anything happen to her. Dear sister, do you see her?”

The other woman, who was also looking everywhere except at Patience, replied in a round cheerful voice: “No, not yet, but I feel sure she is there. The captain hasn’t had time to bring her on shore. The Lord tells me that it is all right.”

“One of those is Miss Tremont,” thought Patience, “I may as well go down. They appear to be frightfully religious, but they have nice faces.”

She ran down to the lower deck, then across the gang-plank.

“I’m Patience Sparhawk,” she said; “are you—” The older woman uttered a little cry, caught her in her arms, and kissed her. “Oh, you dear little thing!” she exclaimed, and kissed her again. “How I’ve prayed the dear Lord to bring you safely, and He has, praise His holy name. Oh, I am so glad to see you. I do love children so. We’ll be so happy together—you and I and Him—and, oh, I’m so glad to see you.”

Patience, breathless, but much gratified, kissed her warmly.

“Don’t forget me,” exclaimed the other lady. She had a singularly hearty voice and a brilliant smile. Patience turned to her dutifully, and received an emphatic kiss.

“This is my dear friend, my dear sister in the Lord, Miss Beale, Patience,” said Miss Tremont, flurriedly, “and she wanted to see you almost as much as I did.”

“Indeed I did,” said Miss Beale, breezily. “I too love little girls.”

“I’m sure you’re both very kind,” said Patience, helplessly. She hardly knew how to meet so much effusion. But something cold and old within her seemed to warm and thaw.

“You dear little thing,” continued Miss Tremont. “Are you cold? That is a very light coat you have on.”

Patience was not dressed for an eastern winter, but her young blood and curiosity kept her warm.

“Here comes the captain,” she said. “Oh, no, I’m all right. I like the cold.”

The captain, satisfying himself that his charge was in the proper hands, offered to send her trunk to Mariaville by express, and Patience, wedged closely between the two ladies, boarded a street car.

“You know,” exclaimed Miss Tremont, “I knew the Lord would bring you to me safely in spite of the perils of the ocean. Every night and every morning I prayed: Dear Lord, don’t let anything happen to her,—and I knew He wouldn’t.”

“Does He always do what you tell Him?” asked Patience.

“Almost everything I ask Him,—that is to say, when He thinks best. Dear Patience, if you knew how He looks out for me—and it is well He sees fit, for dear knows I have a time taking care of myself. Why, He even takes care of my purse. I’m always leaving it round, and He always sends it back to me—from counters and trains and restaurants and everywhere. And when I start in the wrong direction He always whispers in my ear in time. Why, once I had to catch a certain train to Philadelphia, where I was to preside at a convention, and I’d taken the wrong street car, and when I jumped off and took the right one, the driver said I couldn’t possibly get to the ferry in time. So I just shut my eyes and prayed; and then I told the driver that it would be all right, as I had asked the Lord to see that I got there in time. The driver laughed, and said: ‘W-a-a-l, I guess the Lord’ll go back on you this time.’ But I caught that ferry-boat. He—the Lord—made it five minutes late. And it’s always the same. He takes care of me, praised be His name.”

“You must feel as if He were your husband,” said Patience, too gravely to be suspected of irreverence.

“Why, He is. Doesn’t the Bible say—” But the car began to rattle over the badly paved streets, and the quotation was lost.

Patience looked eagerly through the windows at purlieus of indescribable ugliness; but it was New York, a city greater than San Francisco, and she found even its youthful old age picturesque. The dense throng of people in Sixth Avenue and the immense shop windows induced expressions of rapture.

“You don’t live here, do you?” she said with a sigh.

“Oh, Mariaville is much nicer than New York,” replied Miss Beale, in her enthusiastic way. “I hate a great crowded city. It baffles you so when you try to do good.”

“Still they do say that reform work is more systematised here, dear sister.”

“Forty-second Street,” shouted the conductor, and they changed cars. A few moments later they were pulling out of the Grand Central Station for Mariaville.

Miss Beale had asked the conductor to turn a seat, and Patience faced her new friends. As they left the tunnel she caught sight of a tiny bow of white ribbon each wore on her coat.

“Why do you wear that?” she asked.

“Why, we’re W. C. T. U’s,” replied Miss Beale.

“Wctus?”

“Temperance cranks,” said Miss Tremont, smiling.

“Temperance cranks?”

“Why, have you never heard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union?” asked Miss Beale, a chill breathing over her cordial voice. “The movement has reason to feel encouraged all through the West.”

“I’ve never heard of it. They don’t have it in Monterey, and I’ve not been much in San Francisco.”

“She’s such a child,” said Miss Tremont. “How could she know of it out there? But now I know she is going to be one of our very best Y’s.”

“Y’s?” asked Patience, helplessly. She wondered if this was the “fad” Mr. Field had predicted for her, then recalled that he had alluded once to the “Temperance movement,” but could not remember his explanation, if he had made any. Doubtless she had evaded a disagreeable topic. But now that it was evidently to be a part of her new life she made no attempt to stem Miss Tremont’s enthusiasm.

“The Y’s are the young women of the Union; we are the W’s. It is our lifework, Patience, and I am sure you will become as much interested in it as we are, and be proud to wear the white ribbon. We have done so much good, and expect to do much more, with the dear Lord’s help. It is slow work, but we shall conquer in the end, for He is with us.”

“What do you do,—forbid people to sell liquor?”

Both ladies laughed. They were not without humour, and their experience had developed it. “No,” said Miss Tremont, “we don’t waste our time like that.” She gave an enthusiastic account of what the Union had accomplished. Her face glowed; her fine head was thrown back; her dark eyes sparkled. Patience thought she must have been a beautiful girl. She had a full voice with odd notes of protest and imperious demand which puzzled her young charge. One would have supposed that she was constantly imploring favours, and yet her air suggested natural hauteur, unexterminated by cultivated humility.

“I should think it was a good idea,” said Patience, with perfect sincerity.

“Oh, there’s dear Sister Watt,” cried Miss Tremont, and she rose precipitately, and crossing the aisle sat down beside a careworn anxious-eyed woman who also wore the white ribbon.

“Come over by me until Miss Tremont comes back,” said Miss Beale, with her brilliant smile. “Tell me, don’t you love her already? Oh, you have no idea how good she is. She is heart and soul in her work, and just lives for the Lord. She sometimes visits twenty poor families a week, besides her Temperance class, her sewing school, her Bible Readings, her Bible class, and all the religious societies, of which she is the most active worker. She is also the Mariaville agent for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and trustee of the Bible Society. You should hear her pray. I have heard all the great revivalists, but I have never heard anything like Miss Tremont’s prayers. How I envy you living with her! You’ll hear her twice a day, and sometimes oftener. She has a nice house on the outskirts of Mariaville. Her father left it to her twenty years ago, and she dedicated it to the Lord at once. It is headquarters for church meetings of all sorts. She has a Bible reading one afternoon a week. Any one can go, even a servant, for Miss Tremont, like all true followers of the Lord, is humble.”

Patience reflected that she had never seen any one look less humble than Miss Beale. In spite of her old frock she conveyed with unmistakable if unconscious emphasis that she possessed wealth and full knowledge of its power.

“You look so happy,” Patience said, her curiosity regarding Miss Tremont blunted for the present. “Are you?”

“Happy? Of course I am. I’ve never known an unhappy moment in my life. When my dear parents died, I only envied them. And have I not perfect health? Is not every moment of my time occupied?—why, I only sleep six hours out of the twenty-four. And Him. Do I not work for Him, and is He not always with me?”

“They are so funny about God,” thought Patience. “She talks as if He were her beau; and Miss Tremont as if He were her old man she’d been jogging along with for forty years or so.—Do you live alone?” she asked.

“Yes—that is, I board.”

“And don’t you ever feel lonesome?”

“Never. Is not He always with me?” Her strong brown face was suddenly illuminated. “Is He not my lover? Is He not always at my side, encouraging me and whispering of His love, night and day? Why, I can almost hear His voice, feel His hand. How could I be lonesome even on a desert island with no work to do?”

Patience gasped. The extraordinary simplicity of this woman of fifty fascinated her whom life and heredity had made so complex. But she moved restlessly, and felt an impulse to thrust out her legs and arms. She had a sensation of being swamped in religion.

“I shouldn’t think you’d like boarding,” she said irrelevantly.

“I don’t like it particularly, but it gives me more time for my work. I make myself comfortable, I can tell you, for I have my own bed with two splendid mattresses,—my landlady’s are the hardest things you ever felt,—and all my own furniture and knick-knacks. And I have my own tub, and every morning even in dead of winter, I take a cold bath. And I don’t wear corsets—”

“Mariaville,” called the conductor.

“Oh, here we are,” cried Miss Tremont. She made a wild dive for her umbrella and bag, seized Patience by the hand, and rushed up the aisle, followed leisurely by Miss Beale.

The snow was falling heavily. Patience had watched it drift and swirl over the Hudson, and should have liked to give it her undivided attention.

As they left the station they were greeted by a chorus of shrieks: “Have a sleigh? Have a sleigh?”

“What do you think, sister?” asked Miss Tremont, dubiously. “Do you think Patience can walk two miles in this snow? I don’t like to spend money on luxuries that I should give to the Lord.”

“Perhaps the sleigh man needs it,” said Patience, who had no desire to walk two miles in a driving storm.

“We’d better have a sleigh,” said Miss Beale, decidedly. “We will each pay half.”

“But why should you pay half,” said Miss Tremont, in her protesting voice, “when there are three of us?”

“I will pay for myself,” said Patience. “Mr. Foord gave me a twenty dollar gold piece, and I haven’t spent it.”

“Oh, dear child!” exclaimed Miss Tremont. “As if I’d let you.”

“Come, get in,” said Miss Beale; “we’ll be snowed under, here.”

And a few minutes later Patience, on the front seat, was enjoying her first sleigh-ride. She slid down under the fur robe, and winking the snow stars from her lashes, looked out eagerly upon Mariaville. The town rose from the Hudson in a succession of irregular precipitous terraces. The trees were skeletons, the houses old, but the effect was very picturesque; and the dancing crystals, the faint music of bells from far and near, the wide steep streets, delighted a mind magnetic for novelty.

They left Miss Beale before a pretty house, standing in a frozen garden, then climbed to the top of a hill, slid away to the edge of the town, and drew rein before an old-fashioned white one-winged house, which stood well back in a neglected yard behind walnut-trees and hemlocks. Beyond, closing the town, were the stark woods. Opposite was a prim little grove in which the snow stars were dancing.

“Here we are,” said Miss Tremont, climbing out. “Welcome home, Patience dear.” She paid the man, and hurried down the path. The door was opened by an elderly square-faced woman, who looked sharply at Patience, then smiled graciously.

“Patience, this is Ellen. She takes good care of me. Come in. Come in.”

The narrow hall ran through the main building, and was unfurnished but for a table and the stair. Miss Tremont led the way into a large double room of comfortable temperature, although no fire was visible. Bright red curtains covered the windows, a neat black carpet sprinkled with flowers the floor. The chairs were stiffly arranged, but upholstered cheerfully, the tables and mantels crowded with an odd assortment of cheap and handsome ornaments. The papered walls were a mosaic of family portraits. In the back parlour were a bookcase, a piano piled high with hymn-books, and a dozen or so queer little pulpit chairs. A door opened from the front parlour into a faded but hospitable dining-room.

Patience for the first time in her life experienced the enfolding of the home atmosphere, an experience denied to many for ever and ever. She turned impulsively, and throwing her arms about Miss Tremont, kissed and hugged her.

“Somehow I feel all made over,” she said apologetically, and getting very red. “But it is so nice—and you are so nice—and oh, it is all so different!”

And Miss Tremont, enraptured, first wished that this forlorn homely little waif was her very own, then vowed that neither should ever remember that she was not, and half carried her up to the bedroom prepared for her, a white fresh little room overlooking the shelving town.

III

The next afternoon a sewing woman came and cut down an old-fashioned but handsome fur-lined cloak of Miss Tremont’s to Patience’s diminutive needs. When Miss Tremont returned home, after a hard day’s work, she brought with her a hood, a pair of woollen gloves, and a pair of arctics; and Patience felt that she could weather a New York winter.

But Patience gave little attention to her clothes. When she was not watching the snow she was studying the steady stream of people who called at all hours, and invariably talked “church” and “temperance.” The atmosphere was so charged with religion that she was haunted by an uneasy prescience of a violent explosion during which Miss Tremont and her friends would sail upward, leaving her among the débris.

Her coat finished, she went in town with Miss Tremont to Temperance Hall. The snow had ceased to fall. The sun rode solitary on a cold blue sky, the ground was white and hard. The bare trees glittered in their crystal garb, icicles jewelled the eaves of the houses. The telegraph wires, studded with pendent spheres, looked like a vast diamond necklace of many strings which only Nature was mighty enough to wear. The hills were snowdrifts. The Hudson, far below, moved sluggishly under great blocks of ice. The Palisades were black and white. Miss Tremont and Patience walked rapidly, their frozen breath waving before them in fantastic shapes. It was all very delightful to Patience, who thrust her hands into her deep pockets and would have scorned to ride. At times she danced; new blood, charged with electricity, seemed shooting through her veins. Miss Tremont’s older teeth clattered occasionally. She bent forward slightly, her brow contracted over eyes which seemed ever seeking something, her long legs carrying her swiftly and with surprising grace. Patience had solved the enigma of her voice after hearing her pray, and she supposed that her eyes were on loyal watch for the miseries of the world.

After a time they descended an almost perpendicular hill to the business part of the town. Beyond a few level streets the ground rose again, wooded and thickly built upon. On the left was another hill, which, Miss Tremont informed her, was Hog Heights, the quarter of the poor.

The streets in the valley twisted and doubled like the curves of an angry python. In the centre was a square which might have been called Rome, since all ways led to it.

Temperance Hall, a building of Christian-like humility, stood on a back street flanked by many low-browed shops. On the first floor were the parlour, reading-room, and refectory, on the second a large hall, on the third bedrooms. The hall was already half full of boys and girls, kept in order by the matron, Mrs. Blair, a middle-aged woman with the expression of one who stands no nonsense.

“Now, Patience,” said Miss Tremont, “you listen attentively, and next time you can take Mrs. Blair’s place.”

The occasion was the weekly assemblage of the Loyal Legion children, who were being educated in the ways of temperance. Miss Tremont opened with the Lord’s Prayer, which she invested with all its meaning; then the children sang from a temperance hymn-book, and the lesson began. Miss Tremont read a series of questions appurtenant to the inevitable results of unholy indulgence, to which Mrs. Blair read the answers, which in turn were repeated by the children. Then they sang “Down with King Alcohol,” a minister came in and made a dramatic address, and the children, some of whom were attentive and some extremely naughty, filed out.

“I only come on alternate Fridays,” said Miss Tremont, as they went downstairs; “Sister Beale takes the other. Come and see our reading-room. These are our boarders,” indicating several prim old maids that sat in the front room by the window.

In the dining-room a half dozen tramps were imbibing free soup. The reading-room was empty.

IV

Before a week had passed Patience was so busy that her old life slept as heavily as a bear in winter. She passed her difficult examinations and entered the High School, selecting the three years course, which included French, German, mathematics, the sciences, literature, and rhetoric.

The recesses and evenings were spent in study, the afternoons in assisting Miss Tremont; occasionally she snatched an hour to write to her friends in California. Besides the temperance work, she had a class in the church sewing school, kept the books of various societies, and occasionally visited the poor on Hog Heights. The work did not interest her, but she was glad to satisfactorily repay Miss Tremont’s hospitality. But had she wished to protest she would have realised its uselessness: she was carried with the tide. It might be said that Miss Tremont was the tide. Her enthusiasm had no reflex action, and tore through obstacles like a mill-race. When night came she was so weary that more than once Patience offered to put her to bed; but the offer was declined with a curious mixture of religious fervour and hauteur. Miss Tremont had none of the ordinary vanity of woman, but she resented the imputation that she could not work for the Lord as ardently at sixty as she had at forty.

When she prayed Patience listened with bated breath. A torrent of eloquence boiled from her lips. All the shortcomings and needs of unregenerate Mariaville, individual and collective, were laid down with a vehement precision which could leave the Lord little doubt of His obligations. The Temperance Cause was rehearsed with a passion which would have thrilled the devil. Sounding through all was a wholly unselfconscious note of command, as when one pleads with the pocket of an intimate friend for some worthy cause.

Patience saw so many disreputable people at this time that her mother’s pre-eminence was extinguished. They had a habit of commanding the hospitalities of Miss Tremont’s barn, sure of two meals and a night’s lodging. Miss Tremont insisted upon their attendance at evening prayers, and Patience assumed the task of persuading them to clean up. Her methods were less gentle than Miss Tremont’s: when they refused to wash she turned the hose on them.

Projected suddenly into the dry bracing cold of an eastern winter she quickly became robust. Before spring had come, her back was straight and a faint colour was in her rounding cheeks. If there had been time to think about it, or any one to tell her, she would have discovered that she was growing pretty. But at this time, despite the distant advances of the High School boys, Patience found no leisure for vanity. Sometimes she paused long enough to wonder if she had any individuality left; if environment was not stronger than heredity after all; if immediate impressions could not ever efface those of the past, no matter how deeply the latter may have been etched into the plastic mind. But she was quite conscious that she was happy, despite the vague restlessness and longings of youth. She loved Miss Tremont with all the sudden expansion of a long repressed temperament endowed with a tragic capacity for passionate affection. In Monterey the iron mould of reserve into which circumstance had forced her nature, had cramped and warped what love she had felt for Mr. Foord and Rosita; but in this novel atmosphere, where love enfolded her, where everybody respected her, and knew nothing of her past, where there was not a word nor an occurrence to remind her of the ugly experiences of her young life, she quickly became a normal being, living, belatedly, along the large and generous lines of her nature.

She had no friends of her own age with whom to discuss the problems dear to the heart of developing woman. The girls at the High School rarely talked during recess, and she left hurriedly the moment the scholars were dismissed for the day. The “Y’s” she persistently refused to join, as well as the young people’s societies of Miss Tremont’s church.

“I’ll be your helper in everything,” she said to her perplexed guardian; “but those girls bore me, and, you know, I really haven’t time for them.”

And Miss Tremont, despite the fact that Patience gave no sign of spiritual thaw, was the most doting of old maid parents. After the first few weeks she ceased to dig in Patience’s soul for the stunted seeds of Christianity, finding that she only irritated her, and trusting to the daily sprinkling of habit and example to promote their ultimate growth.

V

With summer came a cessation of school, Loyal Legion, and sewing school duties; but the Poor took no vacation and gave none. Nevertheless, Patience had far more leisure, and borrowed many books from the town library. She read much of Hugo and Balzac and Goethe, and in the new intellectual delight forgot herself more completely than in her work.

Moreover, the town was very beautiful in summer, and she spent many hours rambling along the shadowy streets whose venerable trees shut the sunlight from the narrow side ways. The gardens too were full of trees; and the town from a distance looked like a densely wooded hillside, a riot of green, out of which housetops showed like eggs in a nest. Over some of the steep old streets the maples met, growing denser and denser down in the perspective, until closed by the flash of water.

The woods on the slope of the Hudson were thick with great trees dropping a leafy curtain before the brilliant river, and full of isolated nooks where a girl could read and dream, unsuspected of the chance pedestrian.

After one long drowsy afternoon by a brook in a hollow of the woods, Patience returned home to find a carriage standing before the door. It was a turnout of extreme elegance. The grey horses were thoroughbreds; a coachman in livery sat on the box; a footman stood on the sidewalk. She looked in wonder. Miss Tremont had no time for the fine people of Mariaville, and they had ceased to call on her long since. Moreover, Patience knew every carriage in the town, and this was not of them.

She went rapidly into the house, youthfully eager for a new experience. Miss Tremont was seated on the sofa in the front parlour, holding the hand of a tall handsomely gowned woman. Patience thought, as she stood for a moment unobserved, that she had never seen so cold a face. It was the face of a woman of fifty, oval and almost regular. The mouth was a straight line. The clear pale eyes looked like the reflection of the blue atmosphere on icicles. The skin was as smooth as a girl’s, the brown hair parted and waved, the tall figure slender and superbly carried. She was smiling and patting Miss Tremont’s hand, but there was little light in her eyes.

As Patience entered, she turned her head and regarded her without surprise; she had evidently heard of her. Miss Tremont’s face illumined, and she held out her hand.

“This is Patience,” she said triumphantly. “I haven’t told you half about the dear child. Patience, this is my cousin, Mrs. Gardiner Peele.”

Mrs. Gardiner Peele bent her head patronisingly, and Patience hated her violently.

“I am glad you have a companion,” said the lady, coldly. “But how is it you haven’t the white ribbon on her?”

Miss Tremont blushed. “Oh, I can’t control Patience in all things,” she said, in half angry deprecation. “She just won’t wear the ribbon.”

Mrs. Peele smiled upon Patience for the first time. It was a wintry light, but it bespoke approval. “I wish she could make you take it off,” she said to her relative. “That dreadful, dreadful badge. How can you wear it?—you—”

“Now, cousin,” said Miss Tremont, laughing good-naturedly, “we won’t go over all that again. You know I’m a hopeless crank. All I can do is to pray for you.”

“Thank you. I don’t doubt I need it, although I attend church quite as regularly as you could wish.”

“I know you are good,” said Miss Tremont, with enthusiasm, “and of course I don’t expect everybody to be as interested in Temperance as I am. But I do wish you loved the world less and the Lord more.”

Mrs. Peele gave a low, well modulated laugh. “Now, Harriet, I want you to be worldly for a few minutes. I have brought you back two new gowns from Paris, and I want you, when you come to visit me next week, to wear them. I have had them trimmed with white ribbon bows so that no one will notice one more or less—”

“I’m not ashamed of my white ribbon,” flashed out Miss Tremont, then relented. “You dear good Honora. Yes, I’ll wear them if they’re not too fashionable.”

“Oh, I studied your style. And let me tell you, Harriet Tremont, that fashionable gowns are what you should be wearing. It does provoke me so to see you—”

But Miss Tremont leaned over and kissed her short. “Now what’s the use of talking to an old crank like me? I’m a humble servant of my dear Lord, and I couldn’t be anything else if I had a million. But you dear thing, I’m so glad to see you once more. You do look so well. Tell me all about the children.”

Patience, quite forgotten, listened to the conversation with deep interest. There was a vague promise of variety in this new advent. As she watched the woman, who seemed to have brought with her something of the atmosphere of all that splendid existence of which she had longingly read, she was stirred with a certain dissatisfaction: some dormant chord was struck—as on the day she drove by Del Monte. When Mrs. Peele arose to go, she thought that not Balzac himself had ever looked upon a more elegant woman. Even Patience’s untrained eye recognised that those long simple folds, those so quiet textures, were of French woof and make. And the woman’s carriage was like unto that of the fictional queen. She nodded carelessly to Patience, and swept out. When Miss Tremont returned after watching her guest drive away, Patience pounced upon her.

“Who is she?” she demanded. “And why didn’t you tell me you had such a swell for a cousin?”

“Did I never tell you?” asked Miss Tremont, wonderingly. “Why, I was sure I had often talked of Honora. But I’m so busy I suppose I forgot.”

She sat down and fanned herself, smiling. “Honora Tremont is my first cousin. We used to be great friends until she married a rich man and became so dreadfully fashionable. The Lord be praised, she has always loved me; but she lives a great deal abroad, and spends her winters, when she is here, in New York. They have a beautiful place on the Hudson, Peele Manor, that has been in the family for nearly three hundred years. Mr. Peele is an eminent lawyer. I don’t know him very well. He doesn’t talk much; I suppose he has to talk so much in Court. I’ve not seen the children for a year. I always thought them pretty badly spoiled, particularly Beverly. May isn’t very bright. But I always liked Hal—short for Harriet, after me—better than any of them. She is about nineteen now. May is eighteen and Beverly twenty-four.

“Then there is Honora, cousin Honora’s sister Mary’s child, and the tallest woman I ever saw. Her parents died when she was a little thing and left her without a dollar. Honora took her, and has treated her like her own children. Sometimes I think she is very much under her influence. I don’t know why, but I never liked her. She is Beverly’s age. Oh!” she burst out, “just think! I have got to go to Peele Manor for a week. I promised. I couldn’t help it. And oh, I do dread it. They are all so different, and they don’t sympathise with my work. Much as I love them I’m always glad to get away. Wasn’t it kind and good of her to bring me two dresses from Paris?”

Patience shrewdly interpreted the prompting of Mrs. Peele’s generosity, but made no comment.

Miss Tremont drew a great sigh: “My temperance work—my poor—what will they do without me? Maria Twist gets so mad when I don’t read the Bible to her twice a week. Patience, you will have to stay in Temperance Hall. I shouldn’t like to think of you here alone. I do wish Honora had asked you too—”

“I wouldn’t go for worlds. When do you think your dresses will come? I do so want to see a real Paris dress.”

“She said they’d come to-morrow. Oh, to think of wearing stiff tight things. Well, if they are uncomfortable or too stylish I just won’t wear them, that’s all.”

“You just will, auntie dear. You’ll not look any less fine than those people, or I’ll not go near Hog Heights.”

Miss Tremont kissed her, grateful for the fondness displayed. “Well, well, we’ll see,” she said.

But the next day, when the two handsome black gowns lay on the bed of the spare room, she shook her head with flashing eyes.

“I won’t wear those things,” she cried. “Why, they were made for a society woman, not for an humble follower of the Lord. I should be miserable in them.”

Patience, who had been hovering over the gowns,—one of silk grenadine trimmed with long loops of black and white ribbon, the other of satin with a soft knot of white ribbon on the shoulder and another at the back of the high collar,—came forward and firmly divested Miss Tremont of her alpaca. She lifted the heavy satin gown with reverent hands and slipped it over Miss Tremont’s head, then hooked it with deft fingers.

“There!” she exclaimed. “You look like a swell at last. Just what you ought to look like.”

Miss Tremont glanced at the mirror with a brief spasm of youthful vanity. The rich fashionable gown became her long slender figure, her unconscious pride of carriage, far better than did her old alpaca and merino frocks. But she shook her head immediately, her eyes flashing under a quick frown.

“The idea of perching a white bow like a butterfly on my shoulder and another at the back of my neck, as if I had a scar. It’s an insult to the white ribbon. And this collar would choke me. I can’t breathe. Take it off! Take it off!”

“Not until I have admired you some more. You look just grand. If the collar is too high, I’ll send for Mrs. Best, and we’ll cut it off and sew some soft black stuff in the neck—although I just hate to. Auntie dear, don’t you think you could stand it?”

Miss Tremont shook her head with decision. “I couldn’t. It hurts my old throat. And how could I ever bend my head to get at my soup? And these bows make me feel actually cross. If the dress can be made comfortable I’ll wear it, for I’ve no right to disgrace Honora, nor would I hurt her feelings by scorning her gowns; but I’ll not stand any such mockery as these flaunting white things.”

Patience exchanged the satin for the grenadine gown. This met with more tolerance at first, as the throat was finished with soft folds, and the white ribbon was less demonstrative.

“It floats so,” said Patience, ecstatically. “Oh, auntie, you are a beauty.”

“I a beauty with my ugly scowling old face? But this thing is like a ball dress, Patience—this thin stuff! I prefer the satin.”

“You will wear this on the hot evenings. All thin things are not made for the ball-room. You needn’t look at yourself like that. I only wish I’d ever be half as pretty. Auntie, why didn’t you ever marry?”

Miss Tremont’s face worked after all the years. Memories could not die in so uniform a nature.

“My youth was very sad,” she said, turning away abruptly. “I only talk about it with the dear Lord.” And Patience asked no more questions.

VI

The dressmaker was sent for, and the satin gown divested of its collar. Miss Tremont ruthlessly clipped off the beautiful French bows and sewed a tiny one of narrow white ribbon in a conspicuous place on the left chest. The grenadine was decorated in like manner. Patience wailed, and then laughed as she thought of Mrs. Gardiner Peele. She wished she might be there to see that lady’s face.

Miss Tremont changed her mind four times as to the possibility of leaving Mariaville for a week of sinful idleness, before she was finally assisted into the train by Patience’s firm hand. Even then she abruptly left her seat and started for the door. But the train was moving. Patience saw her resume her seat with an impatient twitch of her shoulders.

“Poor auntie,” she thought, as she walked up the street; “but on the whole I think I pity Mrs. Peele more.”

Her bag had been sent to Temperance Hall, and she went directly there, and to her own room. As the day was very warm, she exchanged her frock for a print wrapper, then extended herself on the bed with “’93.” It was her duty to assuage the wrath of Maria Twist, but she made up her mind that for twenty-four hours she would shirk every duty on her calendar.

But she had failed to make allowance for the net of circumstance. She had not turned ten pages when she heard the sound of agitated footsteps in the hall. A moment later Mrs. Blair opened the door unceremoniously. Her usually placid face was much perturbed.

“Oh, Miss Patience,” she said, “I’m in such a way. Late last night a poor man fell at the door, and I took him in as there was no policeman around. I thought he was only ill, but it seems he was drunk. He’s been awake now for two hours, and is awful bad—not drunk, but suffering.”

“Why don’t you send for the doctor?” asked Patience, lazily.

“I have, but he’s gone to New York and won’t be back till night. The man says he can doctor himself—that all he wants is whisky; but of course I can’t give him that. Do come over and talk to him. Miss Beale is over at White Plains, and I don’t know what to do.”

Patience rose reluctantly and followed the matron to the side of the house reserved for men. As she went down the hall she heard groans and sharp spasmodic cries. Mrs. Blair opened a door, and Patience saw an elderly man lying in the bed. His grey hair and beard were ragged, his eyes dim and bleared, his long, well-cut but ignoble face was greenishly pale. He was very weak, and lay clutching at the bed clothes with limp hairy hands. As he saw the matron his eyes lit up with resentment.

“I didn’t come here to be murdered,” he ejaculated. “It’s the last place I’d have come to if I’d known what I was doing. But I tell you that if I don’t have a drink of whisky I’ll be a dead man in an hour.”

“I can’t give you that,” said Mrs. Blair, desperately. “And you know you only think you need it, anyhow. We try to make men overcome their terrible weakness; we don’t encourage them.”

“That’s all right, but you can’t reform a man when his inside is on fire and feels as if it were dropping out—but my God! I can’t argue with you, damn you. Give it to me.”

“I’m of the opinion that he ought to have it,” said Patience.

The man turned to her eagerly. “Bless you,” he said. “It’s not the taste of it I’m craving, miss; it’s relief from this awful agony. If you give it to me, I swear I’ll try never to touch a drop again after I get over this spree. It’ll be bad enough to break off then, but it’s death now.”

Mrs. Blair looked at him with pity, but shook her head.

“I’ve been here seven years,” she said to Patience, “and the ladies have yet to find one fault with me. I don’t dare give it to him. Besides, I don’t believe in it. How can what’s killing him cure him? And it’s a sin. Even if the ladies excused me—which they wouldn’t—I’d never forgive myself.”

“I’ll take the responsibility,” said Patience. “I believe that man will die if he doesn’t have whisky.”

The man groaned and tossed his arms. “Oh, my God!” he cried.

Mrs. Blair shuddered. “Oh, I don’t know, miss. If you will take the responsibility—I can’t give it to him—where could you get it?”

“At a drug store.”

“They won’t sell it to you—we’ve got a law passed, you know.”

“Then I’ll go to a saloon.”

“Oh, my! my!” cried Mrs. Blair, “you’d never do that?”

“The man is in agony. Can’t you see? I’m going this minute.”

The door opened, and Miss Beale entered. She looked warm and tired, but came forward with active step, and stood beside the bed. A spasm of disgust crossed her face. “What is the matter, my man?” she asked. “I am sorry to see you here.”

“Give me whisky,” groaned the man.

Miss Beale turned away with twitching mouth.

“The man is dying. Nothing but whisky can save him,” said Patience. “If you called a doctor he would tell you the same thing.”

“What?” said Miss Beale, coldly, “do you suppose that he can have whisky in Temperance Hall? Is that what we are here for? You must be crazy.”

“But you don’t want him to die on your hands, do you?” exclaimed Patience, who was losing her temper.

“My God!” screeched the man, “I am in Hell.”

“My good man,” said Miss Beale, gently, “it is for us to save you from Hell, not to send you there.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.” His voice died to an inarticulate murmur; but he writhed, and doubled, and twisted, as men may have done when fanatics tortured in the name of religion.

“Good heavens, Miss Beale,” cried Patience, excitedly, “you can’t set yourself up in opposition to nature. That man must have whisky. If he were younger and stronger it wouldn’t matter so much; but can’t you see he hasn’t strength to resist the terrible strain? The torture is killing him, eating out his life—”

“Oh, it is terrible!” exclaimed the matron. “Perhaps it is best—”

“Mrs. Blair!” Miss Beale turned upon her in consternation. Then she bent over the man.

“You can’t have whisky,” she said gently; “not if I thought you were really dying would I give it to you. If it is the Lord’s will that you are to die here you must abide by it. I shall not permit you to further imperil your soul. Nor could that which has not the blessing of God on it be of benefit to you. Alcohol is a destroyer, both of soul and of body—not a medicine.”

The man’s knees suddenly shot up to his chest; but he raised his head and darted at her a glance of implacable hate.

“Damn you,” he stuttered. “Murderer—” Then he extended rigid arms and clutched the bed clothes, his body twitching uncontrollably.

Miss Beale looked upon him with deep compassion. “Poor thing,” she exclaimed, “is not this enough to warn all men from that fiend?” She laid her hand on the man’s head, but he shook it off with an oath.

“Whisky,” he cried. “O my God! Have these women—women!—no pity?”

“I’m going for whisky—” said Patience.

Miss Beale stepped swiftly to the door, locked it, and slipped the key into her pocket.

“You will buy no whisky,” she said sternly. “I will save you from that sin.” Suddenly her face lit up. “I will pray,” she said solemnly, “I will pray that this poor lost creature may recover, and lead a better life—”

“I swear I’ll never touch another drop after I’m out of this if you’ll give it to me now—”

“If it be the Lord’s will that you shall live you will not die,” said Miss Beale. “I will pray, and in His mercy He may let you live to repent.”

She fell upon her knees by the bed, and clasping her hands, prayed aloud; while the man reared and plunged and groaned and cursed, his voice and body momentarily weaker. Miss Beale’s prayers were always very long and very fervid. She was not eloquent, but her deep tear-voiced earnestness was most impressive; and never more so than to-day, when she flung herself before the throne of Grace with a lost soul in her hand. A light like a halo played upon her spiritualised face, her voice became ineffably sweet. Gradually, in her ecstatic communion with, her intimate nearness to her God, she forgot the man on the bed, forgot the flesh which prisoned her soaring soul, was conscious only of the divine light pouring through her, the almost palpable touch of her lover’s hand.

Suddenly Patience exclaimed brutally: “The man is dead.”

Miss Beale arose with a start. She drew the sheet gently over the distorted face. “It is the Lord’s will,” she said.

After Patience was in her own room and had relieved her feelings by slamming the door, she sat for a long time staring at the pattern of the carpet and pondering upon the problem of Miss Beale.

“Well,” she thought finally, “she’s happy, so I suppose it’s all right. No wonder she’s satisfied with herself when she lives up to her ideals as consistently as that. I think I’ll label all the different forms of selfishness I come across. There seems to be a large variety, but all put together don’t seem to be a patch to having fun with your ideals. Miss Beale would be the most wretched woman in Westchester county if she’d given that man whisky and saved his life.”

VII

The man was buried with Christian service at Miss Beale’s expense, and her serene face wore no shadow. The following day she said to Patience: “I spent nearly all of the last two nights in prayer, and I almost heard the Lord’s voice as He told me I did right.”

“You ought to write a novel,” said Patience, drily, but the sarcasm was lost. In a moment Patience forgot Miss Beale: the postman handed her two letters, and she went up to her room to read them.

The first she opened was from Miss Tremont.

Peele Manor, Friday.

Oh my dear darling little girl, how I wish, how I wish I were with you and my work once more. I ought to be happy because they are all so kind, but I’m not. I feel as if I were throwing away one of the few precious weeks I have left to give to the Lord (arrange for a prayer meeting on Wednesday, the day of my return, and we’ll have a regular feast of manna). Do you miss me? I think of you every moment. You should have seen dear Cousin Honora’s face when I came down to dinner in the black satin. She didn’t say anything, she just looked at the bow, and I felt sorry for her. But I know I am right. Hal giggled and winked at me. (I do love Hal!) Honora Mairs said so sweetly after Cousin Honora had left the room: “Dear Cousin Harriet, I think you are so brave and consistent to wear the little white bow of your cause. It is so like you.” Was not that sweet of her? Beverly has very heavy eyebrows, and he raised them at my ribbon, and turned away his head as if it hurt his eyes. He is a very elegant young gentleman, and his mother says he is a great stickler for form, whatever that may mean. (They speak a different language here anyway. I don’t understand half what they say. Hal talks slang all the time.) I don’t like Beverly as much as I did, although he’s quite the handsomest young man I ever saw and very polite; but he smokes cigarettes all the time and big black cigars. When I told him that five hundred million dollars were spent annually on tobacco, he got up and went off in a huff. May is just a talkative child—I never heard any one talk so much in my life,—and about nothing but gowns and young men and balls and the opera. Beverly talks about horses all the time, and Hal thinks a great deal of society, although she listens to me very sweetly when I talk to her about my work. Yesterday she said: “Why, Cousin Harriet, you’re a regular steam engine. It must be jolly good fun to carry a lot of sinners to heaven on an express train.” I told her it was a freight train, and it certainly is, as you know, Patience dear. She replied: “Well, if you get there all the same, a century more or less doesn’t make any difference. You must be right in it with the Lord.” That was the only time I’d heard the dear Lord’s name mentioned since I arrived, so I didn’t scold her. But Patience, dear, I hope you’ll never use slang. I’ve talked to Hal about you, and she says she’s coming to see you.

Honora doesn’t use slang. She is very stately and dignified, and Cousin Honora (it’s very awkward when you’re writing for two people to have the same name, isn’t it?) holds her up as a model for the girls. Hal and she fight. I can’t call it anything else, although Honora doesn’t lose her temper and Hal does. Hal said to me (of Honora) yesterday (I use her own words, although they’re awful; but if I didn’t I couldn’t give you the same idea of her): “She’s a d—— hypocrite: and she wants to marry Beverly, but she won’t,—not if I have to turn matchmaker and marry him to a variety actress. She makes me wild. I wish she’d elope with the priest, but she’s too confoundedly clever.” Isn’t it dreadful—Honora is a Catholic. She became converted last year. Perhaps that’s the reason I can’t like her. But even the Catholic religion teaches charity, for she said to me this morning: “Poor Hal is really a good-hearted child, but she’s worldly and just a little superficial.”

They haven’t any company this week—how kind of Cousin Honora to ask me when they are alone! I wish you were here to enjoy the library. It is a great big room overlooking the river, and the walls are covered with books—three or four generations of them. Mr. Peele is intellectual, and so is Honora; but the others don’t read much, except Hal, who reads dreadful-looking yellow paper books written in the French language which she says are “corkers,” whatever that may mean. I do wish the dear child would read her Bible. I asked her if I gave her a copy if she’d promise me to read a little every day, and she said she would, as some of the stories were as good as a French novel. So I shall buy her one.

We sit in the library every evening. In the morning we sit in the Tea House on the slope and Honora embroiders Catholic Church things, Cousin Honora knits (she says it’s all the fashion), May talks, and Hal reads her yellow books and tells May to “let up.” I sew for my poor, and they don’t seem to mind that as much as the white ribbon. They say that they always sew for the poor in Lent. Hal says it is the “swagger thing.” In the afternoon we drive, and I do think it such a waste of time to be going, going nowhere for two hours.

Well, Patience, I shall be with you on Wednesday, praise the Lord. Come to the train and meet me, and be sure to write me about everything. How is Polly Jones, and old Mrs. Murphy, and Belinda Greggs? Have you read to Maria Twist, and taken the broth to old Jonas Hobb? Give my love to dear sister Beale, and tell her I pray for her. With a kiss from your old auntie, God bless you,

Harriet Tremont.

“Dear old soul,” thought Patience. “I think I know them better than she does, already. She is worth the whole selfish crowd; but I should like to know Hal. Beverly must be a chump.”

VIII

The other letter was from Rosita. Patience had not heard from her for a long while. Three months previously, Mr. Foord had written of Mrs. Thrailkill’s death, and mentioned that Rosita had gone to Sacramento to visit Miss Galpin—now Mrs. Trent—until her uncle, who had returned to Kentucky, should send for her.

Oh, Patita! Patita! [the letter began], what do you think? I am on the stage. I had been crazy to go on ever since that night. A theatrical man was in Monterey just before mamma’s death, and he told me they were always wanting pretty corus girls at the Tivoli; so after the funeral I told everybody I was going to stay with Miss Galpin until Uncle Jim sent for me—I hated to lie, but I had to—and I went up to San Francisco and went right to the Tivoli. He took me because he said I was pretty and had a fresh voice. I had to ware tights. You should have seen me. At first I felt all the time like stooping over to cover up my legs with my arms. But after a while I got used to it, and one night we had to dance, and everybody said I was the most graceful. The manager said I was a born dancer and actress. The other day what do you think happened? A New York manager was here and heard me sing,—I had a little part by that time,—and he told me that if I took lessons I could be a prima donna in comic opera. He said I not only was going to have a lovely voice, but that I had a new style (Spanish) and would take in New York. He offered to send me to Paris for a year and then bring me out in New York if I’d give him my word—I’m too young to sign a contract—that I wouldn’t go with any other manager. At first my manager, who is a good old sole (I didn’t tell you that I live with him and his wife, and that their awful good to me and stand the fellers off), wouldn’t have it; but after a while he gave in—said I’d have to go the pace sooner or later (whatever that means), and I might as well go it in first class style. His wife, the good old sole, cried. She said I was the first corus girl she’d ever taken an interest in, but somehow it would be on her conscience if I went wrong. But I’m not going wrong. I don’t care a bit for men. There was a bald-headed old fool who used to come and sit in the front row every night and throw kisses to me, and one night he threw me a bouquet with a bracelet in it. I wore the bracelet, for it was a beauty with a big diamond in it; but I never looked at him or answered any of his notes, and Mr. Bell—the manager—wrote him he’d punch his head if he came near the stage door. No, all I want is to act, act, act, and sing, sing, sing, and dance, dance, dance, and have beautiful cloths and jewels and a carriage and two horses. Mr. Soper has told me ten times since I’ve met him that “virtue in an actress pays,” and he’s going to send a horrid old woman with me to Paris, as if I’d bother with the fools anyhow. I’m sure I can’t see what Mrs. Bell cries about if I’m going to be famous and make a lot of money. Anyhow, I’m going. I do so want to see you, Patita dear. Maybe you can come up to the steamer and see me off. I wonder if you have changed. I’m not so very tall; but they all say my figure is good. Mr. Soper says it will be divine in a year or two, but that I may be a cow at thirty, so I’d better not lose any time. Good-bye. Good-bye. I want to give you a hundred kisses. How different our lives are! Isn’t yours dreadfully stupid with that old temprance work? And just think it was you who taught me to act first! Mr. Soper says I must cultivate the Spanish racket for all it’s worth, and that he expects me to be more Spanish in New York than I was in Monterey. He is going to get an opera written for me with the part of a Spanish girl in it so I can wear the costume. He says if I study and do everything he tells me I’ll make a furore. Hasta luego—Patita mia.

Rosita Elvira Francesca Thrailkill.

P. S.—I’m to have a Spanish stage name, “La Rosita,” I guess. Mr. Soper says that Thrailkill is an “anti-climax,” and would never “go down.”

IX

Patience read this letter with some alarm. All that she had heard and read of the stage made her apprehensive. She feared that Rosita would become fast, would drink and smoke, and not maintain a proper reserve with men. Then the natural independence of her character asserted itself, and she felt pride in Rosita’s courage and promptness of action. She even envied her a little: her life would be so full of variety.

“And after all it’s fate,” she thought philosophically. “She was cut out for the stage if ever a girl was. You might as well try to keep a bird from using its wings, or Miss Beale and auntie from being Temperance. I wonder what my fate is. It’s not the stage, but it’s not this, neither—not much. Shouldn’t wonder if I made a break for Mr. Field some day. But I couldn’t leave auntie. She’s the kind that gets a hold on you.”

She did her duty by Hog Heights during Miss Tremont’s brief holiday, but did it as concisely as was practicable. She found it impossible to sympathise with people that were content to let others support them, giving nothing in return. Her strong independent nature despised voluntary weakness. It was her private opinion that these useless creatures with only the animal instinct to live, and not an ounce of grey matter in their skulls, encumbered the earth, and should be quietly chloroformed.

Despite her love for Miss Tremont, she breathed more freely in her absence. She was surfeited with religion, and at times possessed with a very flood of revolt and the desire to let it loose upon every church worker in Mariaville. But affection and gratitude restrained her.

X

Miss Tremont returned on Wednesday morning. She stepped off the train with a bag under one arm, a bundle under the other, and both arms full of flowers.

“Oh, you darling, you darling!” she cried as she fell upon Patience. “How it does my heart good to see you! These are for you. Hal picked them, and sent her love. Aren’t they sweet?”

“Lovely,” said Patience, crushing the flowers as she hugged and kissed Miss Tremont. “Here, give me the bag.”

Miss Tremont would go to Temperance Hall first, then to call upon Miss Beale, but was finally guided to her home. The trunk had preceded them. Patience unpacked the despised gowns, while listening to a passionate dissertation upon the heavy trial they had been to their owner.

“I think you had a good time all the same,” she said. “You look as if you’d had, at any rate. You’ve not looked so well since I came. That sort of thing agrees with you better than tramping over Hog Heights—”

“It does not!” cried Miss Tremont. “And I am so glad to get back to my work and my little girl.”

“And the Lord,” supplemented Patience.

“Oh, He was with me even there. Only He didn’t feel so near.” She sighed reminiscently. “But I’ve brought pictures of the children to show you. Let us go down to the parlour where it’s cooler, and then we’ll stand them in a row on the mantel. They’re the first pictures I’ve had of them in years.” She caught a package from the tray of her trunk, in her usual abrupt fashion, and hurried downstairs, Patience at her heels.

Miss Tremont seated herself in her favourite upright chair, put on her spectacles, and opened the package. “This is Hal,” she said, handing one of the photographs to Patience. “I must show you her first, for she’s my pet.”

Patience examined the photograph eagerly. It was a half length of a girl with a straight tilted nose, a small mouth with a downward droop at the corners, large rather prominent eyes, and sleek hair which was in keeping with her generally well-groomed appearance. She wore a tailor frock. Her slender erect figure was beautifully poised. In one hand she carried a lorgnette. She was not pretty, but her expression was frank and graceful, and she had much distinction.

“I like her. Any one could see she was a swell. What colour hair has she?”

“Oh, a kind of brown. Her eyes are a sort of grey. Here is May. She always has her photographs coloured.”

“Oh, she’s a beauty!” The girl even in photograph showed an exquisite bit of flesh and blood. The large blue eyes were young and appealing under soft fall of lash. The mouth was small and red, the nose small and straight. Chestnut hair curled about the small head and oval face. The skin was like tinted jade. It was the face of the American aftermath. She wore a ball gown revealing a slender girlish neck and a throat of tender curves.

“She is a real beauty,” said Miss Tremont. “Poor Hal says, ‘she can’t wear her neck because she hasn’t got any.’ Did you ever hear such an expression?”

“Hal looks as if she had a good figure.”

Miss Tremont shook her head. “I don’t approve of all Hal does—she pads. She doesn’t seem to care much who knows it, for when the weather’s very warm she takes them out, right before your eyes, so it isn’t so bad as if she were deceitful about it. Here is Beverly.”

Patience looked long at the young man’s face. This face too was oval, with a high intellectual forehead, broad black brows, and very regular features. The mouth appeared to pout beneath the drooping moustache. The expression of the eyes was very sweet. It was a strong handsome face, high-bred like the others, but with a certain nobility lacking in the women.

“He is said to be the handsomest young man in Westchester County, and he’s quite dark,” said Miss Tremont. “What do you think of him?”

“He is rather handsome. Where is Honora?”

“She never has pictures taken. But, dear me, I must go out and see Ellen.”

Patience disposed the photographs on the mantel, then, leaning on her elbows, gazed upon Beverly Peele. The Composite, Byron, the Stranger, rattled their bones unheard. She concluded that no knight of olden time could ever have been so wholly satisfactory as this young man. Romance, who had been boxed about the ears, and sent to sleep, crept to her old throne with a sly and meaning smile. Patience began at once to imagine her meeting with Beverly Peele. She would be in a runaway carriage, and he would rescue her. She would be skating and fall in a hole, and he would pull her out. He would be riding to hounds in his beautiful pink coat (which was red) and run over her.

She pictured his face with a variety of expressions. She was sure that he had the courage of a lion and the tenderness of some women. Unquestionably he had read his ancestors’ entire library—“with that forehead,”—and he probably had the high and mighty air of her favourite heroes of fiction. In one of her letters Miss Tremont had remarked that he loved children and animals; therefore he had a beautiful character and a kind heart. And she was glad to have heard that he also had a temper: it saved him from being a prig. Altogether, Patience, with the wisdom of sixteen and three quarters, was quite convinced that she had found her ideal, and overlooked its extreme unlikeness to the Composite, which was the only ideal she had ever created. A woman’s ideal is the man she is in love with for the time being.

She went up to her room, and for the first time in her life critically examined herself in the mirror. With May Peele and one or two beauties of the High School in mind, she decided with a sigh that she was no beauty.

“But who knows,” she thought with true insight, “what I’d be with clothes? Who could be pretty in a calico dress? My nose is as straight as May’s, anyhow, and my upper lip as short. But to be a real beauty you’ve got to have blue eyes and golden or chestnut hair and a little mouth, or else black eyes and hair like Rosita’s. My eyes are only grey, and my hair’s the colour of ashes, as Rosita once remarked. There’s no getting over that, although it certainly has grown a lot since I came here.”

Then she remembered that Rosita had once decorated her with red ribbons and assured her that they were becoming. She ran down to the best spare room, and, divesting a tidy of its scarlet bows, pinned them upon herself before the mirror, which she discovered was more becoming than her own. The brilliant colour was undoubtedly improving—“And, my goodness!” she exclaimed suddenly, “I do believe I haven’t got a freckle left. It must be the climate.”

“What on earth are you doing?” said an abrupt voice from the doorway.

Patience started guiltily, and restored the bows to the tidy.

“Oh, you see,” she stammered, “May is so pretty I wanted to see if I could be a little less homely.” Patience was truthful by nature, but the woman does not live that will not lie under purely feminine provocation. Otherwise she would not be worthy to bear the hallowed name of woman.

“Nonsense,” said Miss Tremont, crossly, “I thought you were above that kind of foolishness. You, must remember that you are as the Lord made you, and be thankful that you were not born a negro or a Chinaman.”

“Oh, I am,” said Patience.

XI

Thereafter, Patience roamed the woods munching chestnuts and dreaming of Beverly Peele. Hugo and Balzac and Goethe were neglected. Her brain wove thrilling romances of its own, especially in the night to the sound of rain. She never emerged from the woods without a shortening of the breath; but even Hal did not pay the promised call; nor did Beverly dash through the streets in a pink coat, a charger clasped between his knees.

“Well, it’s fun to be in love, anyhow,” she thought. “I’ll meet him some time, I know.”

Much to her regret she was not permitted to go to New York to see Rosita off. Miss Tremont had a morbid horror of the stage, and after Patience’s exhibition of vanity was convinced that “actress creatures” would exert a pernicious influence.

And, shortly after, Patience received news which made her forget Rosita and even Beverly Peele for a while. Mr. Foord was dead. Patience had hoarded his twenty dollar gold piece because he had given it to her. She bought a black hat and frock with it, and felt as sad as she could at that age of shifting impressions. A later mail brought word that he had left her John Sparhawk’s library, which could stay in the Custom House until she was able to send for it, and a few hundred dollars which would remain in a savings bank until she was eighteen. He had nothing else to leave except his books, which went to found a town library. All but those few hundreds had been sunken in an annuity. Miss Tremont was quite content to be overlooked in the girl’s favour.

By the time Patience was ready to return to Beverly Peele the new term opened, and the uncompromising methods of the High School left no time for romance. Once more her ambition to excel became paramount, and she studied night and day. She had no temptation to dissipate, for she was not popular with the young people of Mariaville. The Y’s disapproved of her because she would not don the white ribbon; and the church girls, generally, felt that except when perfunctorily assisting Miss Tremont she held herself aloof, even at the frequent sociables. And they were scandalised because she did not join the church, nor the King’s Daughters, nor the Christian Endeavor.

The High School scholars liked her because she was “square,” and cordially admired her cleverness; but there were no recesses in the ordinary sense, and after school Miss Tremont claimed her. Even the boys “had no show,” as they phrased it. Occasionally they lent her a hand on the ice; but like all Californians, she bitterly felt the cold of her second winter, and in her few leisure hours preferred the fire.

Sometimes she looked at Beverly Peele’s picture with a sigh and some resentment. “But never mind,” she would think philosophically, “I can fall in love with him over again next summer.” When vacation came she did in a measure take up the broken threads of her romance, but they had somewhat rotted from disuse.

Rosita wrote every few weeks, reporting hard work and unbounded hope. “The dueña,” as she called her companion, “was an old devil,” and never let her go out alone, nor receive a man; but she “didn’t care,” she had no time for nonsense, anyhow. She was learning her part in the Spanish opera, which had been written for her, and it was “lovely.”

“It must be a delightful sensation to have your future assured at seventeen,” thought Patience. “Mine is as problematical as the outcome of the Temperance cause. I have had one unexpected change, and may have more. If it were not for Rosita’s letters I should almost forget those sixteen years in California. I certainly am not the same person. I haven’t lost my temper for a year and a half, and I don’t seem to be disturbed any more by vague yearnings. Life is too practical, I suppose.”

Miss Tremont did not visit the Gardiner Peeles this summer: they spent the season in travel. Late in the fall Rosita returned to America. She wrote the day before she sailed. That was the last letter Patience received from her. Later she sent a large envelope full of clippings descriptive of her triumphal début; thereafter nothing whatever. Patience, supposing herself forgotten, anathematised her old friend wrathfully, but pride forbade her to write and demand an explanation.

She noticed with spasms of terror that Miss Tremont was failing. The rush and worry of a lifetime had worn the blood white, and the nerve-force down like an old wharf pile. But Miss Tremont would not admit that she had lost an ounce of strength. She arose at the same hour and toiled until late. When Patience begged her to take care of herself, she became almost querulous, and all Patience could do was to anticipate her in every possible way. But when school reopened she had little time for anything but study. She was to finish in June, and the last year’s course was very difficult.

She graduated with flying colours, and Miss Tremont was so proud and excited that she took a day’s vacation. A week later Patience hinted that she thought she should be earning her own living; but Miss Tremont would not even discuss the subject. She fell into a rage every time it was broached, and Patience, who would have rebelled, had Miss Tremont been younger and stronger, submitted: she knew it would not be for long.

XII

Patience was languid all summer, and lay about in the woods, when she could, reading little and thinking much. Her school books put away forever, she felt for the first time that she was a woman, but did not take as much interest in herself as she had thought she should. She speculated a good deal upon her future career as a newspaper woman, and expended two cents every morning upon the New York “Day.” But she forgot to study it in the new interest it created: she had just the order of mind to succumb to the fascination of the newspaper, and she read the “Day’s” report of current history with a keener pleasure than even the great records of the past had induced. She longed for a companion with whom to talk over the significant tendencies of the age, and gazed upon Beverly Peele’s dome-like brow with a sigh.

Once, in the Sunday issue, she came upon a column and a half devoted to Rosita, “The Sweetheart of the Public,” “The Princess Royal of Opera Bouffe.” The description of the young prima donna’s home life, personal characteristics, and footlight triumphs, was further embellished by a painfully décolleté portrait, a lace night gown, a pair of wonderfully embroidered stockings, and a rosary.

Patience read the article twice, wondering why fame realised looked so different from the abstract quality of her imagination.

“Somehow it seems a sort of tin halo,” she thought. Then her thoughts drifted back to Monterey, and recalled it with startling vividness. “Still even if I haven’t forgotten it, it is like the memory of another life. Its only lasting effect has been to make me hate what is coarse and sinful; and dear auntie, even if she hasn’t converted me, has developed all my good.

“I wonder if Rosita has been in love, and if that is the reason she has forgotten me. But she hasn’t married, so perhaps it’s only adulation that has driven everything else out of her head.” And then with her eyes on the river, which under the heavy sky looked like a stream of wrinkling lead from which a coating of silver had worn off in places, she fell to dreaming of Beverly Peele and an ideal existence in which they travelled and read and assured each other of respectful and rarefied affection.

Early in the winter the influenza descended upon America. Mr. Peele, his wife wrote, was one of the first victims, and the entire family took him to Florida. One night, a month later, Miss Tremont returned from Hog Heights and staggered through her door.

“Oh,” she moaned, as Patience rushed forward and caught her in her arms, “I feel so strangely. I have pains all over me, and the queerest feeling in my knees.”

“It’s the grippe,” said Patience, who had read its history in the “Day.” She put Miss Tremont to bed, and sent for the doctor. The old lady was too weak to protest, and swallowed the medicines submissively. She recovered in due course, and one day slipped out and plodded through the snow to Hog Heights. She was brought home unconscious, and that night was gasping with pneumonia.

There was no lack of nurses. Miss Beale and Mrs. Watt, who had helped to care for her during the less serious attack, returned at once, and many others called at intervals during the day and night.

Patience sat constantly by the bed, staring at the face so soon to be covered from all sight. She wanted to cry and scream, but could not. Her heart was like lead in her breast.

At one o’clock on the second night, she and Miss Beale were alone in the sick room. Mrs. Watt was walking softly up and down the hall without.

Miss Tremont was breathing irregularly, and Patience bent over her with white face. Miss Beale began to sob.

“Is it not terrible, terrible,” she ejaculated, “that she should die like this, she whose deathbed should have been so beautiful,—unconscious, drugged—morphine, which is as accursed as whisky—”

“I am glad of it. It would be more horrible to see her suffer.”

“I don’t want to see her suffer—dear, dear Miss Tremont. But she should have died in the full knowledge that she was going to God. Oh! Oh!” she burst out afresh. “How I envy her! It’s my only, only sin, but I can’t help envying those who are going to heaven. I can’t wait. I do so want to see the beautiful green pastures and the still waters—and oh, how I want to talk with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob!”

Patience flung her head into her lap and burst into a fit of laughter.

XIII

An hour later she went downstairs and turned up all the lights. Mrs. Watt had gone to the next house to telephone for the undertakers. When she returned she went upstairs to Miss Beale. Patience could hear the two women praying. That was the only sound in the terrible stillness. She paced up and down, wringing her hands and gasping occasionally. Her sense of desolation was appalling, although as yet she but half realised her bereavement.

Suddenly she heard the sound of runners on the crisp snow. They stopped before the gate. She ran shuddering to the window. The moon flooded the white earth. Two tall black shadows came down the path. They trod as if on velvet. Even on the steps and porch they made no sound. They knocked as death may knock on a human soul, lightly, meaningly. Patience dragged herself to the door and opened it. The long narrow black men entered and bent their heads solemnly. Patience raised her shaking hand, and pointed to the floor above. The men of death bowed again, and stole upward like black ghosts. In a few moments they stole down again and out and away. Patience rushed frantically through the rooms to the kitchen, where she fell upon Ellen, dozing by the fire, and screamed and laughed until the terrified woman flung a pitcher of water on her, then carried her upstairs and put her to bed.

XIV

A week later Patience wandered restlessly about the lonely house. The hundreds of people that had thronged it had gone at last, even Miss Beale and Mrs. Watt.

She had cried until she had no tears left, and rebelled until reason would hear no more. Her nerves felt blunt and worn down.

Yesterday Miss Tremont’s lawyer had told her that after a few unimportant bequests she was to have the income of the dead woman’s small estate until she married, after which she would have nothing and the Temperance cause all. She was therefore exempt from the pettiest and severest of life’s trials. Miss Tremont had also left a letter, begging her to devote herself to a life of charity and reform. But Patience had at last revolted. She realised how empty had been her part, how torrential the impulsion of Miss Tremont.

The great world outside of Mariaville pressed upon her imagination, gigantic, rainbow-hued, alluring. It beckoned with a thousand fingers, and all her complex being responded. She longed for a talent with which to add to its beauty, and thought no ill of it.

She had sat up half the night thinking, and this morning she felt doubly restless and lonely. She wanted to go away at once, but as yet she had made no plans; and plans were necessary. She was too tired to go to Mr. Field and apply for work; and she knew that her delicate appearance would not commend itself to his approval. She went to the mirror in the best spare bedroom and regarded herself anxiously. Her black-robed figure seemed very tall and thin, her face white and sharp.

“Even red bows—” she began; then her memory tossed up Rosita. “Oh,” she thought, “if I could only see her,—see some one I care a little for. I believe I’ll go—there may have been some reason—her letters may have miscarried—I must see somebody.”

She ran upstairs, put on her outing things, and walked rapidly to the station. The sharp air electrified her blood. The world was full of youth and hope once more. She forgot her bereavement for the hour. She hoped Rosita would ask her to visit her: the popular young prima donna must have drawn many brilliant people about her.

When she reached New York she inquired her way to “Soper’s Opera House,” obtained Rosita’s address, and took the elevated train up town. She found the great apartment house with little difficulty, and was enraptured with its marble floors and pillars, its liveried servants and luxurious elevator.

“I certainly had rich ancestors,” she thought, “and I am sure they were swells. I have a natural affinity for all this sort of thing.”

She was landed at the very top of the house. The elevator boy directed her attention to a button, then slid down and out of sight, leaving Patience with the delightful sensation of having stepped upon a new stratum, high and away from the vast terrestrial cellar.

A trim French maid opened the door. She stared at Patience, and looked disinclined to admit her. But Patience pushed the door back with determined hand.

“I wish to see La Rosita,” she said in French.

“But madame is not receiving to-day.”

“She will see me, I am sure. Tell her that Miss Sparhawk is here.”

The woman admitted her reluctantly, and left her standing in an anteroom, passing between heavy portières. Patience followed, and entered a large drawing-room furnished with amber satin and ebony: a magnificent room, heavy with the perfume of great baskets of flowers, and filled with costly articles of decoration. The carpet was of amber velvet. Not a sound of street penetrated the heavy satin curtains.

An indefinable sensation stole over Patience’s mind, a ghost whose lineaments were blurred, yet familiar. She felt an impulse to turn and run, then twitched her shoulders impatiently, and approaching other portières, parted them and glanced into the room beyond.

It was evidently a boudoir, a fragrant fairy-like thing of rose and lace.

In a deep chair, clad in a robe de chambre of rose-coloured silk, flowing open over a lace smock and petticoat, lay Rosita. Her dense black hair was twisted carelessly on top of her head and confined with a jewelled dagger. One tiny foot, shod in a high-heeled slipper of rose-coloured silk, was conspicuous on a low pouf. The flush of youth was in her cheek, its scarlet in her mouth. The large white lids lay heavily on the languorous eyes. In one hand she held a pink cigarette in a jewelled holder. She spoke in a low tantalising voice to a man who sat before her, leaning eagerly forward.

The maid had evidently not succeeded in gaining her attention. Patience, conquering another impulse to run, pushed the hangings aside and entered. Rosita sprang to her feet, the blood flashing to her hair; but her eyes expanded with pleasure.

“Patita! Patita!” she stammered, then caught Patience in her arms. As both girls looked as if about to weep, the man hurriedly departed.

The girls hugged each other as of old; then Rosita divested Patience of her wraps and told the astonished maid to take them out of sight.

“Now that you are here, you shall stay,” she said, “stay a long, long while. Have you had luncheon?”

“No—but I’m not—yes, I am, though, come to think of it. Get me something to eat. Rosita, how good it is to see you again! Why, why didn’t you write to me?”

“O—h; I will tell you, perhaps; but you must have luncheon first. I take a late breakfast, just after rising, so it will be a few minutes before yours is ready.” She rang a bell and gave an order to the maid, then pushed Patience into the deepest and softest chair in the room.

“Now,” she said, smiling affectionately, “lie back and be comfortable; you look tired. Oh, Patita, I am so glad to see you. Isn’t it like old times?”

With a grace which long practice had made a fine art, she sank upon one end of a divan, and back among a mass of cushions. Her white arms lay along the pillows in such careless wise as to best exhibit their perfection; her head dropped backward slightly, revealing the round throat. The attitude was so natural as to suggest that she had ceased to pose.

Patience stared at her, wondering if it could be the same Rosita. All the freshness of youth was in that beautiful face and round voluptuous form, but she looked years and years and years older than the Rosita of Monterey. Patience suddenly felt young and foolish and green. The world that had been so great and wonderful to her imagination seemed to have shrunken to a ball, to be tossed from one to the other of those white idle hands.

“What has changed you so?” she asked abruptly.

Rosita gave the low delicious laugh of which Patience had read in the New York “Day.” She relit her cigarette and blew a soft cloud.

“I will tell you after luncheon. You are the only person I would never fib to. I believe those grey eyes of yours are the only honest eyes in the world. Why are you in black?”

Patience told her, and was drawn on to speak of herself and her life. Rosita shuddered once or twice, an adorable little French shudder, and cast upward her glittering hands, whose nails Patience admired even more than their jewels.

“Dios de mi alma!” she cried finally. “What an existence!—I cannot call it life. I should have jumped into the river. That life would drive me mad, and I do not believe that it suits you either.”

She spoke with a Spanish accent, and with the affected precision of a foreigner that has carefully learned the English language. Her monotony of inflection was more effective than animation.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Patience, “and I have no intention of pursuing it. I’m going to be a newspaper woman.”

Rosita gave forth a sound that from any other throat would have been a shriek.

“A newspaper woman! And then you will come and interview me. How droll! I shall have to become eccentric, so that I can furnish you with ‘stories,’ as they call them. I have been pumped dry. When the newspaper women have run out of everything else they come to me, and they love me because I am good-natured, and turn my things upside down for them. I never refuse to see them, so they have never written anything horrid about me. Oh, I can tell you I have learned a great many lessons since I left Monterey. But here is your luncheon. While you are eating it I will do something for you that I have never done for any one else off the stage: I will sing to you.”

The maid placed a silver tray on a little table, and while Patience ate of creamed oysters and broiled partridge, Rosita sang as the larks of paradise may sing when angels awake with the dawn. Once Patience glanced hastily upward, half expecting to see the notes falling in a golden shower. When she expressed her admiration, Rosita’s red lips smiled slowly away from the white sharp little teeth.

“Do you like it, Patita mia?” she asked with bewitching graciousness. “Yes, I can sing. I have the world at my feet.”

She resumed her languid attitude on the divan. “Bueno,” she said, “now I am going to tell you all about it. People are always a little heavy after eating; I waited on purpose. But you must promise not to move until I get through. Will you?”

“Yes,” said Patience, uncomfortably. “I hope it is nothing very dreadful.”

“That all depends upon the way you look at things. It will seem odd to tell it to you. You used to be the one to do what you felt like and tell other people that if they did not like it they could do the other thing; but I suppose you are W. C. T. U’d.”

“No, I’m not. Go on.”

“Well, I will.” She paused and laughed lightly. “Funny world. We do not usually tell this sort of story to a woman, but you and I are different. Bueno.

“I went to Paris and studied hard. Yes, I am lazy yet, but I had made up my mind to be a great, great, great success. I had what in insane people is called the fixed idea, and the American in me conquered the Spanish. Everybody praised my voice. No one said it was the greatest voice in the world, nor even better than two or three others over there; but I had no discouragement. I attracted a great deal of attention from men, but the dueña never let them get a word with me, and I did not care. I used to wonder at the stories told about some of the other girls, and did not half understand. Two sold themselves; but why? with a fortune in one’s throat. Others fell in love, and talked about the temperament of the artist, but I could not understand that nonsense either.

“Bueno, at the end of the time Soper came over and bought me eight trunks full of the most beautiful clothes you ever saw,—mostly for the stage, but lots for the house and street. He said I was a first-class investment, and worth the outlay. When he heard me sing he shook all over. I ought to tell you that I had been kept on short allowance, and had had very dowdy clothes, which broke my heart.

“Bueno, we came home. On the steamer, Soper treated me like a father, but never let me talk to a man. Either he or the dueña was at my heels all the time. He is a coarse-looking man, but I really liked him because he had been so good to me, and there was something very attractive about him. When we reached New York the dueña left us. She said she was going straight to Philadelphia to her home. Soper and I got in another cab and drove to an apartment on Broadway. I did not know until the next day that it was his apartment. That was in the evening. The next morning, while I was at a late breakfast, he sent me a note, saying that he would call in an hour and have a business talk with me. I was practising my scales when he came in, and he clapped his hands and offered me a chair. He drew one up for himself, and then said in a perfectly business-like voice:—

“‘When I ran across you I knew that you only needed training to become a queen of opera bouffe, and to make a fortune for some one besides yourself. I also saw that you were going to become a beautiful woman. I made up my mind that I would own both the woman and the artist. Don’t look like a little tigress—still, I’m glad you can look that way,—you may be able to do Carmen yet. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not a villain, merely a practical man with an eye to beauty. I have no idea of letting you get under the influence of any other man,—not even if you weren’t so pretty. Let me console you by telling you that for the sort of woman you are there is no escape. You were made to drive men mad, and for the comic opera stage. That sort of combination might as well get down to business as early in the game as possible: it saves time.

“‘Had I never discovered you, you would have drifted from company to company, gone the pace with nothing to show for it, and worn out your youth at one-night stands. I saved you from a terrible fate. You know the rest. You know what you owe me. You have developed even beyond my hopes, but—mark you this—I have not advertised you in any way. You are as unknown as on the day you left California. If you mount the high horse and say: ”Sir, you are a villain. Go to, go to!“ I shall merely turn you loose without your trunks. You may imagine that with your voice and beauty you could get an engagement anywhere. So you could—without advertising, without an opera, and without a theatre of your own. Every existing troupe has its own prima donna; you would have to take a second or third rate part,—and unquestionably in a travelling troupe. There is no place for you in New York but the one I propose to create. Lillian Russell practically owns the Casino, and will, unless all signs fail, for many years. She would not tolerate you on the same stage five minutes; neither would any prima donna who had any influence with her manager,—and they mostly have. Your career would be exactly what it would have been if I had not met you,—full of hardships and change and racing about the country; arriving at six in the evening, singing at eight, leave the next morning at four, get what sleep you could on the train. That’s about the size of it. You’d be painting inside of a year, if not wearing plumpers. And what you’re mad at now, you’d be looking upon as a matter of course then, and grateful for the admiration.

“‘Moreover, no success is worth a tinker’s dam that ain’t made in New York,—I think I wrote you that on an average of once a month. If you show that you have horse sense, and will sign a contract with me for five years, I’ll make you the rage in New York inside of two months. Now it is success or failure: you can take your choice. I’ll be here to-morrow at ten.’ And he was gone before I could speak.

“Bueno, after I had gotten over being fearfully mad I sat down and thought it all over. I knew that all he said was true. I had heard too much in Paris. He had kept writing me that virtue paid in an actress to keep me straight, but I had heard the opposite about nine hundred times. Bueno, I was in a trap. I had made up my mind to succeed. I had even worked for it,—and you know how much that meant with me. I made up my mind that succeed I would, no matter what the price. It is one of two things in this world,—success or failure,—and if you fail nobody cares a hang about your virtue.

“You know I never was sentimental nor romantic. Soper had made a plain business proposition in a practical way that I liked. If he had gone on like a stage lover it would have been much harder. And after all I would be no worse than a society girl who sells herself to a rich husband. So, after turning it over for twenty-four hours—or all the time I was awake—I concluded not to be a fool, but La Rosita, Queen of Opera Bouffe. When he called I merely shrugged my shoulders and said ‘Bueno.’ He laughed, and said I would certainly succeed in this world; that the beautiful woman with the cool calculating brain always got there. So—here I am. What do you think of it?”

During this recital her voice had not for one instant broken nor hardened. She told her story in the soft sweet languid voice of Spain; she might have been relating an idyl of which she was the Juliet and Soper the Romeo.

Patience stared at her with wide eyes and dry lips.

“And you have never regretted it?” she asked; “you don’t care?”

Rosita raised her beautiful brows. “Regret? Well, no, I should say not. Have I not realised my dreams and ambition? Am I not rich and famous and happy instead of a scrambling nobody? Regret?—No—rather. What is more, I know how to save. A good many of us have learned that lesson. When I have lost voice and youth I shall be rich,—rich. We do not end in a garret, like in the old days. And I do not drink, and I rest a great deal—it will be a long time before I go off. Besides, there are the beauty doctors—Oh, no, I am not regretting. And Soper is getting tired of me, I am happy to say.”

Patience rose and went into the room where the maid had carried her hat and jacket. It was a bedroom, a white nest of lace and velvet. When she returned she said: “I should like to go home and think it over. I feel queer and stunned. You have taken me so completely by surprise that I can hardly think.”

Rosita coloured angrily.

“You are shocked, I suppose,” she said with a sneer. “I should think—” She paused abruptly. She was still an amiable little soul.

Patience understood perfectly, and turned a shade paler. “I told you that I did not understand how I felt. In fact, I hardly ever know just how I feel about anything. I suppose it is because I have the sort of mind that is made to analyse, and I haven’t had experience enough to know how. And I never judge any one. Why should I? Why should we judge anybody? We are not all made alike. I couldn’t do what you have done, but that is no reason why I should condemn you. That would be absurd. If any one else had told me this story I should only have been interested—I am so curious about everything. But you see you are the only girl friend I ever had, and that is what makes me feel so strangely. Good-bye;” and she hurriedly left the room.

XV

When she reached home she forgot her horror of death chambers, and went to Miss Tremont’s room and flung herself on the bed. She did not cry—her tears had all been spent; but she felt something of the profound misery of the last year in Monterey. During the intervening years she had seen little of the cloven hoof of human nature; the occasional sin over on Hog Heights hardly counted; creatures of the lower conditions had no high lights to make the shadows startling. But to-day the horror of old experiences rushed over her; she was filled with a profound loathing of life, of human nature.

So far, of love, in its higher sense—if it possessed such a part—she had seen nothing; of sensuality, too much. True, she had spent two weeks with Miss Galpin, during that estimable young woman’s engagement; but Miss Galpin took love as a sort of front-parlour, evening-dress affair, and Patience had not deigned to be interested. She had speculated somewhat over Miss Tremont’s early romance, but could only conclude that it was one of those undeveloped little histories that so many old maids cherish.

She recalled all the love stories she had read. Even the masters were insipid when they attempted to portray spiritual love. It was only when they got down to the congenial substratum of passion that they wrote of love with colour and fire. Was she to believe that it did not exist,—this union of soul and mind? Her dreams receded, and refused to cohere. She wondered, with natural egoism, if any girl of her age had ever received so many shocks. She was on the threshold of life, with a mass of gross material out of which to shape her mental attitude to existing things. True, she had met only women of relative sinlessness during these last years, but their purity was uninteresting because it was that of people mentally limited, and possessed of the fad of the unintellectual. Moreover, they had their erotism, the oddest, most unreal, and harmless erotism the world has known in the last two thousand years; and after all quite incidental: her keen eyes had long since observed that the old maids were far more religious than the married women, that the girls cooled perceptibly to the great abstraction as soon as a concrete candidate was approved.

She longed passionately for Miss Tremont. All her old restlessness and doubt had returned with the flight of that ardent absorbing personality. She wished that she could have been remodelled; for, after all, the dear old lady, whatever her delusions, had been happy. But she was still Patience Sparhawk; she could only be thankful that Miss Tremont had cemented her hatred of evil.

She rose abruptly, worn out by conjectures and analysis that led nowhere, and went out into the woods.

“Oh,” she said, lifting her arms, “this at least is beautiful.”

The ground was hard and white and sparkling. The trees were crystal, down to the tiniest twig. They glittered iridescently under the level rays of the sun descending upon the Palisades on the far side of the Hudson. The river was grey under great floating blocks of ice. Groves of slender trees in the hollows of the Palisades looked like fine bunches of feathers. On the long slopes the white snow lay deep; above, the dark steeps were merely powdered, here and there; on the high crest the woods looked black.

She walked rapidly up and down, calmed, as of old, by the beauty of nature, but dreading the morrow and the recurring to-morrows. Suddenly through those glittering aisles pealed the rich sonorous music of the organ. The keys were under the hands of a master, and the great notes throbbed and swelled and rolled through the winter stillness in the divine harmonies of “The Messiah.” Patience stood still, shaking a little. On a hill above the wood a large house had been built recently; the organ must be there.

The diamond radiance of the woods was living melody. The very trees looked to bow their crystal heads. The great waves of harmony seemed rolling down from an infinite height, down from some cathedral of light and stars.

The ugly impressions of the day vanished. The sweet intangible longing she had been used to know in Carmel tower flashed back to her. What was it? She recalled the words of the Stranger. It was long since she had thought of him. She closed her eyes and stood with him in the tower. His voice was as distinct as the notes of the organ. She felt again the tumult of her young half-comprehending mind. Was not life all a matter of ideals? Were not the bad and the good happy only if consistent to a fixed idea? Did she make of herself such a woman as the Stranger had evoked out of the great mass of small feminity, could she not be supremely happy with such a man? Where was he? Was he married? He seemed so close—it was incredible that he existed for another woman. Who more surely than she could realise the purest ideal of her imaginings,—she with her black experience and hatred of all that was coarse and evil? She closed her eyes to her womanhood no longer. It thrilled and shook her. If he would come—She trembled a little.

All men were henceforth possible lovers. Unless the Stranger appeared speedily his memory must give way to the definite. The imperious demands of a woman’s nature cannot be satisfied with abstractions. The ideal which he stood for would lend a measure of itself to each engaging man with whom she exchanged greeting.

XVI

“Miss Patience!” cried a strident voice.

Patience turned with a violent start. Ellen was a large blotch on the white beauty of the wood.

“There’s a young lady to see you. She didn’t give her name as I remember.”

Patience followed the servant resentfully. The world was cold and dull again. But when she recognised the Peele coachman and footman on the handsome sleigh before the door she forgot her dreams, and went eagerly into the house.

A girl was standing before the mantel, regarding through a lorgnette a row of photographs. She turned as she heard footsteps, and came forward with a cordial smile on her plain charming face. She wore a black cloth frock and turban which made Patience feel dowdy as Rosita’s magnificence had not.

“I am Hal,” she said, “and you are Patience, of course. I hope you have heard as much of me as I have of you. Dear old girl, I was awfully fond of her. You look so tired—are you?”

“A little. It is so good of you to come. Yes, I’ve heard a very great deal of you.”

“I’ll sit down, thank you. Let’s try this sofa. I’ve already tried the chairs, and they’re awful. But I suppose dear old Harriet never sat down at all. I wonder if she’ll be happy in heaven with nothing to do.”

Patience smiled sympathetically. “She ought to be glad of a rest, but I don’t believe she is.”

“She thought we were all heathens—dear old soul; but I did love her. What was the trouble? We only had one short letter from Miss Beale. Do tell me all about it.”

Miss Peele had an air of reposeful alertness. She leaned forward slightly, her eyes fixed on Patience’s with flattering attention. She looked a youthful worldling, a captivating type to a country girl. Her voice was very sweet, and exquisitely modulated. Occasionally it went down into a minor key.

“What shall you do with yourself, now?” she asked anxiously, when Patience had finished the brief story. “I am so interested in you. I don’t know why I haven’t called before, except that I never find time to do the things I most care for; but I have wanted to come a dozen times, and when we returned yesterday and heard of the dear old girl’s death I made up my mind to come at once. And I’m coming often. I know we shall be such good friends. I’m so glad she left you her money so you won’t have to work. It must be so horrid to work. I’m going to ask mamma to ask you to visit us. She’s feeling rather soft now over Cousin Harriet’s death, so I’ll strike before she gets the icebergs on. She isn’t pleasant then. I’ll tell her you don’t wear the white ribbon yet—” She broke into a light peal of laughter. “Poor mamma! how she used to suffer. Cousin Harriet’s white bow was the great cross of her life. It will go far toward reconciling her—Don’t think that my parent is heartless. She merely insists upon everything belonging to her to be sans reproche. That’s the reason we don’t always get along. What lovely hair you have—a real blonde cendrée. It’s all the rage in Paris. And that great coil is beautiful. Tell me, didn’t you find that Temperance work a hideous bore?”

“Oh, yes, but no one could resist Miss Tremont.”

“Indeed one couldn’t. I believe she’d have roped me in if I’d lived with her; but I’m a frivolous good-for-nothing thing. You look so serious. Do you always feel that way?”

Patience smiled broadly. “Oh, no. I often feel that I would be very frivolous indeed if circumstances would permit. It must be very interesting.”

“You get tired of yourself sometimes—I mean I do. Are you very religious?”

“I am not religious at all.”

“Oh, how awfully jolly. I do the regulation business, but it is really tragic to carry so much religion round all the time. I wonder how Cousin Harriet and the Lord hit it off, or if they liked each other better at a distance? I corresponded once with the brother of a school friend for a year, and when I met him I couldn’t endure him. Those things are very trying. I am going to call you Patience. May I? And if ever you call me Miss Peele you’ll be sorry. How awfully smart you’d look in gowns. My colouring is so commonplace. If I didn’t know how to dress, and hadn’t been taught to carry myself with an air, I’d be just nothing—no more and no less. But you have such a lovely nose and white skin—and that hair! You are aristocratic looking without being swagger. I’m the other way. You can acquire the one, but you can’t the other. When you have both you’ll be out of sight.

“What fun it would be,” she rambled on in her bright inconsequential way, “if Bev should fall in love with you and you’d marry him. Then I’d have such fun dressing you, and we’d get ahead of my cousin Honora Mairs, whom I hate, and who, I’m afraid, will get him. Propinquity and flattery will bring down any man—they’re such peacocks. But I’ll bring him to see you. You ought to have a violet velvet frock. I’d bet on Bev then. But, of course, you can’t wear colours yet, and that dead black is wonderfully becoming. Can I bring him up in a day or two?”

“Oh, yes,” said Patience, smiling as she recalled her brief periods of spiritual matrimony with Beverly Peele; “by all means. I’ll be so glad to meet all of you. And you are certainly good to take so much interest in me.”

“I am the angel of the family. Well, I must be off, or I’ll have to dine all by me lonely. None of the rest of the family uses slang: that is the reason I do. May is a grown-up baby, and never disobeyed her mamma in her life. Honora is a classic, and only swears in the privacy of her closet when her schemes fail. Mother—well, you’ve seen mother. As you may imagine, she doesn’t use slang. Papa doesn’t talk at all, and Bev is a prig where decent women are concerned. So, you see, I have to let off steam somehow, and as I haven’t the courage to be larky, I read French novels and use bad words.”

She rose and moved toward a heavy coat that lay on a chair. “Well, Patience—what a funny lovely old-fashioned name you have—I’m going to bring Bev to see you as a last resource. I’ve tried him on a dozen other girls, but it was no go. I’ll talk you up to him meanwhile—I’ll tell him that you are one of the cold haughty indifferent sort, and yet withal a village maiden. He admires blondes, and you’re such a natural one. We’ll come up Sunday on horseback. Now be sure to make him think you don’t care a hang whether he likes you or not—he’s been so run after. Isn’t it too funny? I did not come here on matchmaking thoughts intent, but I do like you, and we could have such jolly good fun together. I’ll teach you how to smoke cigarettes—”

“But Miss Peele—Hal—you know—I don’t want to marry your brother—I have never even seen him—much as I should like to live with you—I’d even smoke cigarettes to please you—but really—”

“Oh, I know, of course. I can only hope for the best, and Bev certainly is fascinating. At least he appears to be,” and she smiled oddly; “but being a man’s sister is much like being his valet, you know. Would you mind helping me into this coat?

“I hate these heavy fur things,” she said petulantly. “Oh, thanks—they don’t suit my light and airy architecture, and I can’t get up any dignity in them at all. I need fluffy graceful French things. You’d look superb in velvet and furs and all that sort of thing. Well, bye-bye,—no,—au revoir.”

She took Patience’s face between her hands and lightly kissed her on either cheek.

“Don’t be lonesome,” she said. “I’d go frantic in this house. Can’t I send you some books? I’ve a lot of naughty French ones—”

“No!” said Patience, abruptly, “I don’t want them. Don’t think I’m a prig,” she added, hastily, as a look of apprehension crossed Miss Peele’s face; “but I had a hideous shock to-day, and I don’t want to read anything similar at present—”

“Oh, tell me about it. How could you have a shock in Mariaville?”

“I didn’t. It was in New York—”

“Oh, was it real wicked? Did you have an adventure? Do tell me—Well, don’t, of course, if you don’t want to, only I’m so interested in you. Well, I must, must go;” and despite the furs she moved down the walk with exceeding grace. As she drove off she leaned out of the sleigh and waved her hand.

“Oh!” thought Patience, “I’m so glad she came. It was like fresh air after a corpse covered with sachet bags.” And then she went to the mantel and gazed upon Beverly Peele.

XVII

When Sunday came Patience dressed herself with unusual care. It did not occur to her that people in different spheres of life arose at different hours, and she expected her guests any time after eight o’clock.

Of course she must wear unrelieved black, but after prolonged regard in the becoming mirror of the best spare room, she decided that it rather enhanced her charms, now that a week’s rest had banished the circles from her eyes and cleared her skin.

She had coiled her soft ashen hair loosely on the top of her head, pulling it out a little about her face—she wore no bangs. Her restless eyes were dark and clear and sparkling, her mouth pink. She carried her slender figure with a free graceful poise. The carriage of her head was almost haughty. Her hips had a generous swell. Her hands and teeth were very white.

“I certainly have a look of race,” she thought, “if I’m not a beauty. I’d give a good deal to know that my ancestors really did have good blood in their veins. I don’t care so much for money, but I’d like to be sure of that.”

After breakfast she wandered about restlessly. She had known few moments of peace since Miss Peele’s visit. The train had been fired, and her being was in a tumult. Beverly Peele, the Stranger, and the vague ideals of her earlier girlhood were inextricably mixed. The result was a being before whom she trembled with mingled rapture and terror. Her vivid imagination had evoked a distinct entity, and the love scenes that had been enacted between the girl and this wholly satisfactory eidolon were such as have time out of mind made life as it is seem a singularly defective composition to the wondering mind of woman.

At times she was terrified at the rich possibilities of her nature, so little suspected. The revelation gave her vivid comprehension of woman’s tremendous power for sacrifice and surrender, possibilities of which she had read with much curiosity, but little sympathy. For those women she felt a warm honour, a fierce desire to espouse their cause. For Rosita she had only loathing and contempt.

It was not only passion that was awake. Sentiment, that finer child of the brain, and the sweet faint feeling which assuredly lingers about the region of the heart, whatever its physical cause may be, were there in full measure to lend their potent lashings to that primeval force which is as mighty in some women as in some men. It is doubtful if a woman ever loves a man when in his arms with the same exaltation of soul and passion which she feels for that creation of her brain that he little more than suggests, and that is only wholly hers when the man himself is absent. Imagination in woman is as arbitrary as desire in man, and she is beaten down and crushed by this imperious and capricious brain-imp so many times in her life that the wonder is she is not driven to the hopes and illusions of religion, or to humour, long before the skin has yellowed and the eye paled.

And when the imagination has full sway, when the man has not been beheld, when he has been invested with every quality dear to the heart of the generously endowed woman, when, indeed, all eidola blend, and she has a confused vision of an immense and mighty force bearing down upon her which shall sweep every tradition out of existence and annihilate the material world, then assuredly man himself would do well to retire into obscurity and curse his shortcomings.

It was four o’clock, and she had been through the successive stages of hope, despair, hope, melancholia, hope, and resignation, before she heard the sharp clatter of hoofs on the road. She ran to the dining-room window, her heart thumping, and peered through the blind. They were coming! Hal sat her horse like a swaying reed, but the young man on the large chestnut rode in the agonised fashion of the day. He was of medium height, she saw, compactly and elegantly built, and the beauty of his face had defied the photographer’s art.

Patience ran to the kitchen and told Ellen to answer the bell immediately, then sat down by the stove to compose herself. She was still trembling, and wished to appear cold and stately, as Hal had recommended. When Ellen returned and announced the visitors, she sprang up, patted her hair, pulled down the bodice of her gown, and then, with what dignity she could muster, went forth to meet her fate. She did wish she had a train. It was so difficult to be stately in a skirt that cleared the ground.

As she entered the parlour Mr. Peele was standing by the opposite door. His riding gear was very becoming. Patience noted swiftly that his eyes were a spotted brown and that his mouth pouted under the dark moustache.

Hal came forward with both hands extended. “We have come, you see,” she said, “and we had to make a wild break to do it—had a lot of company; but I was bound to come. Patience, this is Beverly. He’s quite frantic to meet you. It was all I could do to keep him away until to-day.”

The young man bowed in anything but a frantic manner, and stood gracefully until the girls were seated. Then he took a chair and caressed his moustache, regarding Patience attentively.

“Would you mind if Bev smoked?” asked Hal. “He is just wild for a cigar. We had to ride so hard to keep warm that he didn’t have a chance, and he’s a slave to the weed.”

Patience glanced swiftly at the door, half-expecting to see the indignant wraith of Miss Tremont, then, almost reluctantly, gave the required permission. Mr. Peele promptly lit a cigar. Patience wondered if he would ever speak. Perhaps he did not think it worth his while. He looked very haughty.

“We had a perfectly beautiful ride,” said Hal, in her plaintive voice. “I’d rather be on a horse than on an ocean steamer, and I do love to travel. You look ever so much better than you did, Patience. You must have needed a rest.”

Mr. Peele removed his cigar. “Perhaps that was what she had been impatiently waiting for,” he remarked.

Patience stared at him. Her eyes expanded. Something seemed crumbling within her.

“Oh, Bev, you do make me so tired,” said his sister. “I tell him eighteen times a day that punning is the lowest form of wit, but he’s incorrigible. I suppose it’s in the blood, and I’m glad it broke out in him instead of in me. It is well to be philosophical in this life—”

“When you can’t help yourself—” interrupted Mr. Peele, easily.

Patience felt it incumbent upon her to make conversation, although her thoughts were dancing a jig.

“You have a beautiful horse,” she said to the young man.

His eyes lit up with enthusiasm. “Isn’t she a beauty?” he exclaimed. “She’s taken two prizes and won a race. She’s the daughter—”

“Patience doesn’t know anything about horses,” interrupted Hal. “What does she care whose daughter Firefly is?”

“Oh, I’m very much interested,” faltered Patience.

“Are you really?” cried Mr. Peele, with a smile so beautiful that Patience caught her breath. “I’ve got the rarest book in the country on horses—beautiful pictures—coloured—I’ll bring it up and explain it to you. Tell you a lot of stories about famous horses.”

“I shall be delighted.”

“Do you ride?”

“I used to ride a pony, but I haven’t been on a horse for so long I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like.”

“That’s too bad. There’s nothing like it. Makes you feel so good. When I have dyspepsia I just jump on Firefly, and I’m all right in less than no time. I take a canter for dyspepsia—although I can’t—er—always feel at home that way. Ahem!”

Patience wanted to tear her hair. It was with an effort that she kept her face from convulsing with disgust. She caught sight of the young man’s intellectual brow, and, without any premonitory consciousness, laughed aloud. Mr. Peele smiled back with the pleasure of appreciated wit, and resumed his cigar.

“Bev isn’t such a fool as he looks,” remarked Hal, airily. “Just have patience with him. We all have our little failings.”

Patience sat as if turned to clay. She could not talk. All her natural animation had deserted her. She wished they would go and leave her alone. But Hal pulled off her riding gloves, and made herself comfortable on the sofa. As she rattled on, Patience noticed how beautiful her nails were. She turned her own hands over so that the palms lay upward.

“Never mind,” said young Peele, in a low tone. “They’re much prettier.”

“What’s that?” cried Hal. “What are you blushing about, Patience? How lovely it is to blush like that. I’ve forgotten how—and I’m only twenty-two. There’s tragedy for you. It’s not that I’ve had so many compliments about my beauty, nor yet about my winning ways,—which are my strong point,—but I found so much to blush about when I was first launched upon this wicked world that I exhausted my capacity. And Bev always did tell such naughty stories—” She paused abruptly. “Dear me! perhaps I’ve made a bad break, and prejudiced you against my brother; and I want you to be good friends so that we can have jolly times together. Perhaps you have an ideal man—a sort of Sir Galahad. I haven’t sounded you yet.”

“Sir Galahad is not my ideal,” said Patience, with the quick scorn of the woman who is born with intuitive knowledge of man. “I could not find anything interesting in an elongated male infant.”

“Oh, how lovely!” cried Hal. “Give me the man of the world every time. I tell you, you appreciate the difference when you have to entertain ’em. And the elongated infant, as you put it, never understands a woman, and she has no use for that species whatever. He doesn’t even want to understand her, and a woman resents that as a personal insult. The bad ones hurt sometimes, but they’re interesting; and when you learn how to manage them it’s plain sailing enough. Mrs. Laurence Gibbs—a friend of mamma’s, awfully good, goes in for charity and all that sort of thing—said the other day that at the rate women were developing and advancing, the standard of men morally would have to be raised. But I said ‘Not much!’ that the development of woman meant that women were becoming more clever, not merely bright and intellectual, and that clever women would demand cleverness and fascination in man above all else; and that Sir Galahads were not that sort. It’s experience that makes a man interesting to us women,—they represent all we’d like to be and don’t dare. If they were like ourselves—if they didn’t excite our imaginations—we wouldn’t care a hang for them. Mrs. Gibbs was horrified, of course, and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. But I said I guessed it was the other way. I’m not clever—not by a long sight,—and if I can’t stand a prig I know a clever woman can’t and won’t.”

“I’m so glad I’m not a prig,” murmured Mr. Peele.

“Oh, you’re a real devil. If you were clever now, you’d have to be shut up to protect society; but as it is, you just go on your good looks, so you’re not as dangerous as some.”

She rattled on, not giving the others a chance for more than a stray remark. Patience, listening with deep curiosity to this new philosophy, became aware of an increasing desire to turn her eyes to the man that had so bitterly disappointed her. A direct potent force seemed to emanate from him. It was her first experience of man’s magnetism, but she knew that he possessed it to a remarkable degree. When he finally shot out an insignificant remark she felt, in the excuse it gave her to turn to him, a sensation of positive relief. He was leaning back in his chair, in the easy attitude of a man that has been too accustomed to luxury all his life to look uncomfortable in any circumstances. With his picturesque garb, his noble, beautiful face, his subtle air of elegance and distinction, he looked the ideal hero of girlhood’s dreams. Patience wondered what Nature had been about, then recalled the many tricks of that capricious dame made famous in history, the round innocent faces of the worst boys in the Loyal Legion class, the saintly physiognomy of a Mariaville minister who had recently fallen from grace.

Peele was watching her out of his half-closed eyes, and as she met them he smiled almost affectionately. Patience averted her head quickly, angry that she had felt an impulse to respond, and fixed her attention on Hal. “Dear old Cousin Harriet,” that young woman was remarking, “how I do wish that I were even sorrier than I am that she is dead. I try to think it’s because I saw so little of her; but I know it’s just because I’m so beastly selfish. I don’t care a hang for anything that doesn’t affect my own happiness—”

“You’re not selfish,” interrupted Patience, indignantly.

“Oh, but I am,” said Miss Peele, with a comical little air of disgust which sat as gracefully upon her as all her varying moods and manners. “I get up thinking what I can get out of the day, and I go to bed glad or mad according to what the day has done for me. I don’t go in for Church work like Honora—dear Honora!—nor am I always doing some pretty little thing for people like May. I suppose you think I’m an angel because I came to see you. I assured myself at great length that it was my duty—but it was plain curiosity, no more nor less; and now I like you awfully, better than any woman I ever met—and I do so want you to come and visit us, but—”

“Couldn’t you come and stay with me?” asked Patience, hurriedly. She had no desire to visit Mrs. Gardiner Peele. “You know you have more or less company, and I should be very quiet for a while. And oh! I should so like to have you.”

“Oh, I’d love to! I’ll come and stay a week. I’m so sick of the whole family, Bev included. We won’t be going anywhere for three months out of respect for Cousin Harriet—mamma is very particular about those things—and I can get away as well as not. I’ll come on Tuesday,—can I? Bev will come up occasionally and see how I’m getting on—won’t you, Bevvy, dear?”

“I’d much rather you would not be here,” said Mr. Peele, calmly.

“Oh—really—well, we’re all young yet. I’m coming all the same. I suppose we must be going. We have to get home to dress for dinner, you know.”

She rose, and drew on her gloves. Her brother stood up immediately and helped her into her covert coat. “Well, Patience,” she said, kissing her lightly, “you’ll see me on Tuesday. I’ll come by train, and wire you beforehand. Mamma’ll raise Cain, but I’ll manage it. It’s only occasionally she’s too much for me. The cold glare of those blue eyes of hers freezes my marrow at times and takes all the starch out of me. It’s awful to have been brought up under that sort of eye. When Honora marries it’s the sort of eye she’ll have. She cultivates the angelic at present. Have I talked you to death, Patience? So good of you to ask me to come.”

Peele held out his hand, and Patience could do no less than lay hers within it. As it closed she resisted an impulse to nestle her own more closely into that warm grasp. He held her hand longer than was altogether necessary, and she felt indignantly that she had no desire to draw it away.

“That’ll do for one day,” said Hal, drily. “Come along, Beverly Peele. We won’t get home for coffee at this rate.”

When they had gone Patience threw herself on the sofa and burst into tears, then laughed suddenly. “I feel like the heroine of a tragedy,” she thought. “And the tragedy is a pun!”

XVIII

Hal arrived on Tuesday afternoon. Patience for twenty-four hours after Beverly Peele’s visit looked upon life through grey spectacles. She had an impression of being a solitary figure on a sandy waste, illimitable in extent. Life was ugly practical reality. It frightened her, and she cowered before it, hating the future, her blood chilled, her nerves blunt, her brain stagnant.

But by Tuesday morning, being young and buoyant, she revived, and roamed through the woods, entirely loyal to the Stranger. She made up her mind that she would find him, that he could not be married. He must have waited for her. “Oh!” she thought, “if I could not believe that something existed in this world as I have imagined it, some man good enough to love and look up to, I believe I’d jump into the river. At least I have heard Him talk. He could not be a disappointment, like that hollow bronze. If there are many men in the world like Beverly Peele I don’t wonder women are in revolt. Women start out in life with big ideals of man, and if they are disappointed I suppose they unconsciously strive to make themselves what they should have found in man. But it is unnatural. It seems to me that man must be able to give woman the best she can find in life, whether he does or not. Something in civilisation has gone wrong.”

“I’ve been so restless,” she said to Hal, as the girls sat on the edge of the bed in the spare room, holding each other’s hand. “If you had not been coming I’d have gone to New York before this and seen Mr. Field, the editor of the ‘Day’—He promised me once he’d make a newspaper woman of me—”

“A what?” cried Hal. “What on earth do you want to be a newspaper woman for?”

“Well, I must be something. I couldn’t live out of Mariaville on my income, and the few hundred dollars Mr. Foord left me, and I don’t know of anything else I want to be.”

“You are going to be Mrs. Beverly Peele,” said Hal, definitely. “Beverly has the worst attack of my recollection. He has simply raved about you. Tell me, don’t you like him?”

Patience said nothing.

Hal leaned forward and turned Patience’s face about. “Don’t you like him?” she asked in a disappointed tone. “Tell me. Please be frank. I hate people who are not.”

“Well, I’ll confess it—I was disappointed in him. You see, I’d thought about him a good deal—several years, if you want to know the truth—and I was sure he was an intellectual man—”

Hal threw back her head and gave a clear ringing laugh. “Bev intellectual! That’s too funny. I don’t believe he ever read anything but a newspaper and horse literature in his life. But we all think he’s bright. I think it my duty to tell you that he has a fearful temper. He’s always been mamma’s pet, and she never would cross him, so he flies into regular tantrums when things don’t go to suit him; but on the whole he’s pretty good sort. Don’t you think he’s good-looking?”

“Oh, wonderfully,” said Patience, glad to be enthusiastic.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll like him when you’ve forgotten the ideal and got used to the real. Do please try to like him, for I’m bent on having you for a sister-in-law.”

“Well, I’ll try,” said Patience, laughing.

“You have no idea,” continued the astute Miss Peele, “how many girls have been in love with him. I’ve known girls that looked like marble statues—the marble statue with the snub nose; that’s our swagger New York type, you know,—well, I’ve seen them make perfect idiots of themselves about him. But so far he’s rather preferred the ladies that don’t visit at Peele Manor. I’ve brought some cigarettes. Can I smoke?”

“You can just do anything you like.”

“Thanks. Well, I think I’ll begin by lying down on this soft bed. It’s way ahead of the chairs and sofa in the parlour.”

She exchanged her frock for a peignoir, and extended herself on the bed. Patience sat beside her in a rocking chair, her troubles forgotten.

“By the way,” said Hal, suddenly removing her cigarette, “what was the shock you had the other day? Tell me.”

“Well, I will,” and Patience told the story of Rosita from beginning to end. Hal listened with deep interest.

“That’s a stunner,” she said, “and worth coming to Mariaville for. The little rip. She didn’t tell you half. I’ll bet my hopes of a tiara on that. But she does dance and sing like an angel. And so you were children together? How perfectly funny! Now tell me your history, every bit of it.”

Patience hesitated, then impulsively told the story, omitting few particulars.

Miss Peele’s cigarette was allowed to go out. “Well, well,” she said, when Patience had finished. “Fate did play the devil with you, didn’t she? I’m so glad you’ve told me. I’ll tell the family what I like, and you keep quiet. I have the inestimable gift of selection. You poor child! I’m so glad you fell in with Cousin Harriet; and now you are going to be happy for the rest of your life. Oh, it’s so good to be here in this quiet place. I’m so tired of everybody. Sometimes I get a fearful disgust. The same old grind, year after year. If I could only fall in love; but when I do I know it’ll be with a poor man. I never did have any luck.”

“Wouldn’t you marry him?”

Hal shook her wise young head. “I don’t know. You never can tell what you’ll do when you get that disease; but I do know that I’d be miserable if I did. Money, and plenty of it, is necessary to my happiness. You see we’re not so horribly rich. Papa gives mamma and May and me two thousand dollars each a year, and his income comes mostly from his practice. We haven’t anything else but a little house in town, and Peele Manor—which of course we’ll never sell—and a big farm adjoining. Bev runs that, and has the income from it—about three thousand dollars a year. When he wants more mamma gets it for him, and when he’s married of course he’ll have a lot more. Two thousand stands me in very well now, but as a married woman I want nothing under thirty thousand a year—and that’s a modest ambition enough. You can’t be anybody in New York on less. Oh, dear—life is a burden.”

“Your woes are not very terrible,” said Patience, drily.

“Oh, you’d think so if you were me. We suffer according to our capacities and point of view. What is comedy to one is tragedy to another. If I had to wear the same clothes for two seasons I’d be as miserable as a defeated candidate for the Presidency. Beer makes one man drunk and champagne another. Bev, by the way, never drinks. He’s rather straight than otherwise. What’s your ideal of a man, by the way? Of course you have an ideal.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Patience, vaguely. “A man with a big brain and a big heart and a big arm.”

Miss Peele laughed heartily. “You are not exacting in your combinations, not in the least.”

The week passed delightfully to Patience, although Hal became rather restless toward the end. She arranged Patience’s hair in six different fashions, then decided that the large soft coil suited her best. Patience’s nails were manicured, she was taught how to smoke cigarettes, and select extracts from French novels were read to her. Hal was an accomplished gossip, and regaled her hostess with all the whispered scandals of New York society. She was a liberal education.

Beverly did not call, nor did he write, and Hal anathematised him freely.

“But I have my ideas on the subject,” she said darkly. “Just you wait.”

XIX

On the evening of Hal’s departure, as Patience was braiding her hair for the night, there was a sharp ring at the bell, and a few moments later Ellen came upstairs with a card inscribed “Mr. Beverly Peele.” Patience felt disposed to send word that she had retired, so thoroughly had she lost interest in the young man; but reflecting that he had probably ridden ten miles on a cold night to see her, told Ellen to light all the burners in the parlour, and twisted up her hair.

As she went downstairs she saw a heavy overcoat on the hall table.

“If it had occurred to me that he had come by train,” she thought, “I’d have let him go home again.”

He came forward with his charming smile, looking remarkably handsome in his evening clothes.

“It was kind of you to come,” she said, too unsophisticated to feel embarrassed at receiving a man at night in a house where she lived alone with a servant. “Of course you knew how lonely I must be.”

“Hal is good company, isn’t she?” he asked, holding her hand and staring hard at her. “But I should think she’d miss you more than you’d miss her.”

Patience withdrew her hand abruptly. Her face wore its accustomed cold gravity, contradicted by the eager eyes of youth. “Won’t you sit down? I hope Hal has missed me, but she has hardly had time to tell you so.”

“Hasn’t she? She has had several hours, and I suppose you know by this time how fast she can talk. She’s awfully bright, don’t you think so?”

“Indeed she is.”

“She isn’t a beauty like May, nor intellectual like Honora, but you can’t have everything—that is, everybody can’t.”

“Does any one?” asked Patience, indifferently.

“Hal says you are the cleverest woman she has ever met,—and—”

“I’m afraid Hal is carried away by the enthusiasms of the moment,” said Patience, as he paused. She was highly gratified, nevertheless.

“—you are the prettiest woman I ever saw,” he continued, as if she had not spoken.

“Oh, nonsense!” exclaimed Patience, angrily, but the colour flew to her face.

“I mean it,” and indisputably his eyes spoke admiration. “I’ve thought of no one else since I was here. I haven’t come before, because there’s nothing in calling on your sister, and that’s what it would have amounted to. But, you see, I’m here the very night she left.”