AT THE SIGN OF THE FOX

AT THE SIGN OF
THE FOX

A Romance

BY
BARBARA

AUTHOR OF “THE GARDEN OF A COMMUTER’S WIFE,”
“PEOPLE OF THE WHIRLPOOL,” AND
“THE WOMAN ERRANT”

NEW YORK
HURST & CO.
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1905,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1905.
Reprinted August, September, December, 1905;
March, 1912.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

This Book is for the Brave

PRATE NOT TO ME OF WEAKLINGS, WHO

LAMENT THIS LIFE AND NOUGHT ACHIEVE,

I HYMN THE VAST AND VALIANT CREW

OF THOSE WHO HAVE SCANT TIME TO GRIEVE,

FIRM SET THEIR FORTUNES TO RETRIEVE,

THEY SING FOR LUCK A LUSTY STAVE,

THE WORLD’S STANCH WORKERS, BY YOUR LEAVE—

THIS IS THE BALLADE OF THE BRAVE!

—RICHARD BURTON.

CONTENTS

THE PEOPLE

The Usual Critic’s Chorus, composed of Citizens, Villagers, Male and Female, Commonplace, Eccentric, or Otherwise.

Time

The Present Century.

Place

Manhattan and the Hill Country of the Moosatuk.

AT THE SIGN OF THE FOX

CHAPTER I
THE RIVER KINGDOM

Robert Stead and Dr. Russell, clad for hunting, tramped down a pent road through the woodland and halted at the bars that separated it from the highway.

Like careful woodsmen, they made sure that their guns were at half-cock before resting them against the tumble-down wall; pulling out pipe and tobacco pouch, they filled and fingered the smooth bowls with the deliberation that is akin to restfulness. Then, face to windward, they applied the match and drew the few rapid puffs that kindle the charmed fire, and leaning on the top rail, looked down the slope to where the river, broad and tranquil as it passed, narrowed and grew more elusive as the eye traced it toward its starting-point in the north country many miles away.

For more than a hundred miles between its throne in the hill country and the sea travels the Moosatuk, and all the land through which it passes is its kingdom. What its stern mood was in the ancient days when as an ice-floe, maybe, it tore a pathway through the granite hills, fortressing them with splintered slabs and tossing huge boulders from its course, man may but guess; but to-day a wild thing, half tamed, it obeys while it still compels. Above, below, confined by dams, it does the will of man; and yet, flow where it will, man follows, with his mills, his factories, his railways, until, by spreading into shallows, it half eludes his greed. For twenty sinuous miles it follows a free, sunlit course, now running swift and lapping the banks of little islands wooded with hemlocks, now stretching itself on the smooth pebbles until it tempts the unwary to the crossing on a bridge of stepping-stones. For all this space the ferns and wood flowers stoop from the slanting banks to snatch its lingering kisses, the wood folk drink from it, the wild fowl sleep on it, and its waters bear no heavier responsibility or weight than driftwood or the duck boat, that steals silently forth, a shadow in the morning twilight, like the Mohican canoes that a mere century ago plied the selfsame waters.

Such is the Moosatuk where it passes Gilead, a peaceful village halfway between Stonebridge and Gordon, with its farmsteads filling the fertile river valley and climbing up the hillside as if to shun railways, until from below the topmost are lost in the trees, like the aeries of some furtive hawk or owl of the woods. This was the scene which lay below the hunters as they paused to rest in the October noon glow before returning to Stead’s lodge on top of Windy Hill.

For a little space neither man spoke. In fact, the last mile of their walk had passed in silence save for the occasional smothered exclamation of the younger hunter, when he came upon a snare, now and then, and broke it. Even the dry leaves lay untouched in their tracks, for the foot of a woodsman seems instinctively to avoid the dead twig and leaf-filled rut.

The dogs, two brown-eyed, mobile Gordon setters, well understanding that the signal of stacked arms and the smell of tobacco meant that the day’s work was over, started unchidden on a private hunting-trip, nosing about through the ground-pine and frost-bleached lady-ferns, and paused with tails swinging in wide circles before a great patch of glossy wintergreen, where a ruffed grouse or shy Bob-white had doubtless made his breakfast on the pungent scarlet berries. Out in the little-used highway, October, herself an Indian in her colour schemes, had set her loom in the grass-divided wheel tracks, a loom of many strands, wherein she wove a careful tapestry of russet, bronze, crimson, gold, and ruby from leaf of beech, sumach, oak, pepperidge, chestnut, birch, and purpling dogwood, only to drop it as a rug for hoof tracks or fling it aloft at random, a bit of gracious drapery for the too stern granite.

Between these two men, neither young, as often happens between close friends of either sex, silence did not come from lack of mutual understanding. It is only the machine-made or undeveloped brain that mistakes garrulity for companionship and casts the blight of motiveless chatter upon the precious gift of silent hours, wherein the soul may learn to know itself.

More than fifteen years divided their ages, and their temperaments were wider still apart; you could judge this even from trifles, as the shape of their pipes and the way in which they held and smoked them.

Robert Stead, turning fifty, tall and well knit, had heavy, matted brown hair, beard cut close, and impenetrable eyes, whose colour no one could tell offhand, any more than he might read the meaning of the mustache-hid mouth. His firm walk and clear skin told of strength and present outdoor life; his slightly rounded shoulders spoke either of past indoor hours or the resistless, flinching attitude where a man ceases to face the storms of life with chest thrown out and head erect as if to say to warring elements—“See, I am ready; come and do your worst!” “Silent Stead” people hereabout called him from his taciturnity, and he either held his short brier close against his lips and puffed between tightly clinched teeth, as if pulling against time, or in the revulsion let the flame die out until, forgotten, the pipe hung cold, bitter, and noisome between his lips.

Dr. Russell’s pipe, a plain meerschaum of moderate length, held with light firmness, was smoked deliberately as something that soothed yet held in no thrall, and when its first sweetness passed, with a sharp, cleansing rap, he returned the pipe to his pocket. Though in the later sixties, the doctor radiated all the hope of youth. One realized that his was a face to trust, even before compassing its details; the easy turn of his shapely, well-poised head, with its closely cut hair blended of steel and silver, every glance of his searching gray eyes, that looked frankly from under eyebrows that were still black, conveyed both comprehension and sympathy. His nose was straight and not too long, and the thin nostrils quivered with all the sensitiveness of a highly strung horse, while the mouth was saved from the sternness to which the firm chin seemed to pledge it by a drooping of the corners that told of a keen sense of humour. In stature he was of medium height, but his shoulders were still squared to the burdens of life, and his erect carriage made him appear tall; but, after all, the secret of his youth lay in a quality of mind, the very quality that the younger man lacked—his steadfast faith and confidence in his fellow-men; this had lasted undaunted by disappointment during the forty years and more that he had held to them the closest, wisest, and most blessed of human ministries—that of the good physician.

The doctor’s pipe grew cold, and placing it in one of the deep pockets of his jacket, he fumbled in the other as he turned to his companion, saying: “Was I not right, Rob? Give the city boys, with their automobiles and pretty clothes, and the trolley-car hunters, the first two weeks of October in which to moult their fine feathers, ruin their firearms and dispositions, and decide that the Moosatuk has been overhunted, and we may have the rest of open season to ourselves without danger when crossing a brush lot in broad daylight of being mistaken for wild turkeys or what not. It is the eighteenth to-day. We’ve tramped good twenty miles since daybreak, and whom have we met? A woman looking for cows, two men stacking slab sides, and some school children on the cross-road, while we’ve had our fill of air unpeppered by small shot, this glorious view at every curve and through every gap, and,” freeing his pocket, “a brace of grouse, another of quail, and three woodcock as an excuse for our outing, in the eyes of those who insist that excuses, aside from the desire, must be made for every act.

“Strange, perhaps, that the killing and hunting lust should be an excuse. I often feel like begging pardon of these little hunched-up feathered things; but in spite of humanitarian principles, I somehow fear that we are growing too nice, and when the hunting fever dies out wholly, something vital is lacking in a man.”

“Hunting fever or not,” replied Stead, kicking a decaying log at his feet into dust, “I’d rather the woods were full of visible men with guns than invisible snares. Do you know that I have broken thirty or more this morning? Some day these setters of snares and I shall meet, and there will be trouble; it seems that I am destined always to war with the intangible.” Then he spread his game on the fence, and though it outranked the doctor’s spoils, he seemed to take no pleasure in it, but still looked moodily across the river.

“Ah, Rob, Rob,” said the doctor, throwing his arm affectionately about the shoulder of the taller man, who leaned heavily on the fence-top, “will your mood never change? Can you not forgive and at least play bravely at forgetting?

“It is ten years—no, eleven—since your child whom I tended died and Helen left you, or you her, whichever way you choose to put it. The why of it all you have never deemed best to tell, and I have never asked, trusting your manhood. She led her own life then for the four years she lived. I have managed to see you every year since, in spite of the drifting life your profession forced upon you. And since the railway’s completion, when you settled here, I’ve spent a week of my holiday each autumn with you, hoping to see a change, believing you would waken and live your life out instead of moping it away. But no! Your work and old comrades need you, and you still refuse. What is it, Rob? Life seems so good to me with the threescore and ten in plain sight that I cannot bear to see it playing through your fingers at fifty.

“Love may be gone, or clouded, let us say, but there is always work, and work is glorious! Get out of your own shadow, man, and let the sun pass. It is with you as The Allegorist says:—

“‘One looked into the cup of life,

And let his shadow fall athwart;

The wine gleamed darkly in the cup—

It surely was of bitter sort.’”

Stead withdrew his gaze from the river and turned it on the face of his companion.

“I know it all, doctor, and much more than you can say. I know you’ve clung to me when no one else would trouble, and that you drive all those forty miles from home every autumn, rain or shine, to tramp the woods with me, to sit beside my fire and give me comfort, and yet—— Do you remember the old adage, that ‘Life without work is water in a sieve’? but in the antiphon lies the sting, ‘Work without motive cannot live.’ It is motive that is dead in me. I think I have forgiven, I delude myself if I say I have forgotten, but, good God, doctor, can you imagine sitting and feeling yourself as useless as water in a sieve and not caring? That is my misery. If I could only really care, heart and soul, for anything for one short month, I would give the rest of my life for it.

“I have not even the primal motive of hunger that sets the wolf a-prowling. The few yearly thousands my father left me have put that chance away, and my contempt for that form of cowardice precludes suicide. So I have actually come to be what passes current for content, with every one but you. Here I am, located for life on the hillside, with only half-breed José left of what was, with my books, which can neither dissemble nor betray, for company, and so long as I have food I shall have dog friends to follow me by day and sleep by me at night. Then, as long as eyesight lasts, there is my River Kingdom,” and Stead stretched his arms, half to relax their tension, toward the silver fillet shimmering in the valley below, in which at that moment some white gulls, with black-tipped wings, hanging in the skylike clouds, were mirrored.

Then, giving a nervous, mirthless laugh, he whistled to the dogs, and as if led to speak of himself too much, he turned to action, and vaulting over the bars with but a hand touch, trailed his feet through rifts of glowing leaves, and reaching backward for his gun, said lightly, “Who was it, by the way, that christened this region The River Kingdom? Was it your daughter?”

“No, it was not Barbara,” said the doctor, crossing the bars, but more sedately, his cheery temper relieved at the change of theme. “It was Brooke Lawton, a cousin or niece or some such kin of Miss Keith West—a lovable child, full of both romance and common sense. Her father, Adam Lawton, whom you must have met in your capacity as a civil engineer, for he has floated many railway schemes, was born here in Gilead in the West homestead, his mother being of that family. Though he never comes here, and all the kin but Keith, a first cousin, are dead, some slight sentiment binds him to the past, and he has kept the little farm abreast of all improvements and leaves Keith in charge. A few years ago Brooke, his elder child and only daughter, recovering from an illness, came up and spent the autumn; and I, being here for the shooting and knowing Keith well, for she and my sister Lot were schoolmates at Mt. Holyoke long ago, was called to see her several times.

“But there was little that I could do for her,—indomitable pluck and dauntless spirits were her best medicine. Well I remember one gray, cold day, the last of her stay, I found Miss Keith in some alarm about her, as the child had gone out on foot over two hours before.

“As we stood consulting in the porch, a slim, gray-coated figure, with soft brown hair flying like a gypsy’s, arms full of autumn leaves and berries, came swiftly down the lane between house and wood, and throwing her load on the steps, gazed at it in a sort of ecstasy, from which she waked only at Miss Keith’s words of chiding.

“‘I—lost?’ she queried, straightening her thick eyebrows into an expression of incredulity, ‘why, Cousin Keith, I’ve only been to my River Kingdom collecting tribute, but when I’m grown up and do as I please, I’m coming back here to reign and have the wild flowers bow to me when I pass and the little wood beasts follow me in procession.’

“I must have told you of it at the time, for I was stopping with you. Yes, it was Brooke Lawton who christened the River Kingdom,—but she never returned, and I heard indirectly that she had gone abroad to study art. Come to think of it, she must be a grown woman now, at the rate time goes. All of which reminds me that I sent word that I would go to Miss Keith’s to-day; she wants counsel of some sort, about what I could not even surmise from her letter. As she is one of the good middle-aged women who always wish excuses made for every act, I will take her these grouse as an apology and tangible explanation as to my clothes and gun, and as she always insists that I should take a meal with her, you will not see me until supper-time. If you will tell José to dress and split the quail, I myself will broil them over the wood coals in your den, spitted on hickory forks. Metal should never touch wild fowl, but you of the younger generation do so grudge trouble and seem to have no capacity for detail,” and, half chiding, half laughing, Dr. Russell shouldered his beloved gun, picked up the grouse, smoothed the rumpled ruff of the cock bird, and started on the mile walk downhill to the West homestead, whistling.

Robert Stead looked after him a moment, and then, calling the dogs to heel, started up the hillside in an opposite direction. Before him for a single instant stood the form of the young girl of the River Kingdom, as Dr. Russell had portrayed her, with arms full of gay leaves and vines that she had stripped from the hedges as she went, but as he reached her she vanished, and turning toward the river itself, he was half surprised to find it still moving as ceaselessly as ever. Love had mocked him long ago and motive eluded him, but the dog at his side touched his fingers with caressing tongue, and the River Kingdom still remained.

CHAPTER II
A BELATED FIRST CAUSE

The West farm was on the upper of the two roads between Stonebridge and Gordon, at the point where a steep uphill grade paused, on a plateau of several hundred feet in length, as if to rest and take breath and allow those who travelled upon it to drink in the splendour of the river view before attempting the still steeper ascent beyond.

Three generations of Wests had lived from this farm until, some forty years before, its hundred acres being all too small for the needs of modern push and life, the last young male of the family, a man of twenty odd, of tenacious mixed Scotch and New England stock, had gone to New York to follow a quicker game of dollars.

In due course, when Adam Lawton’s parents died, his mother having been a West and the homestead her portion, he found himself absorbed in the beginnings of money-making, yet somewhere in him was a deep-buried sentiment for his boyhood’s home, stern though the life and discipline had been, and even though he found no leisure to revisit it. He therefore had installed his maternal cousin Keith in it as guardian, paying the taxes and for such improvements and repairs as kept it apace with the times. Then he promptly forgot it, except on pay days, when he justified himself to himself, the Scotch thrift in him insisting on justification, for the comparatively slight outlay, by saying half aloud to his private secretary, who did the forwarding, “A snug little place, and always worth a price; my daughter fancies it, and perhaps some day, who knows, I may like to go back there for a rest.”

Thus it followed that Miss Keith and the farm had lived together for twenty years a life of almost wedded devotion. The sheep had disappeared from the hills, it is true, and four cows, a fat horse, and countless chickens and ducks represented the live stock. The cultivated ground had been reduced to a great corn-field, a potato patch, and vegetable garden, on whose borders grew fruits of all seasons, the rest of the land being sown down to rye or hay, while the woodland that protected the house on the north and east, being only required to yield kindlings, had returned to the beauty of a forest primeval, with a dense growth of oak, white pine, and hemlock, underspread with untrodden ferns, amid which, following the seasons’ call, blossomed arbutus, anemones, moccasin flowers, snow crystal Indian pipe, and partridge vine.

Now, for the first time in all these years, Miss Keith was faltering in her single-hearted allegiance, and this upheaval coming on her fiftieth birthday, too, gave it a double significance. At fifty one’s ideas and person are supposed to be settled for life, but with Miss Keith her semi-centennial was the first occasion upon which she ever remembered to have felt thoroughly unsettled, and as she stood in front of the parlour mantel-shelf, arms akimbo, gazing at the First Cause, that rested against the wall between the fat clock and a blue china vase filled with quaking grass, she alternately frowned and smiled.

This First Cause was the highly finished cabinet photograph of a man, coupled with a suggestion of marriage contained in a letter, the edge of the pale blue envelope containing which peeped from under the garrulous little clock that ticked vociferously the twenty-four hours through, and gave an alarming whir-r, suggestive of asthma in the depths of its chest, before striking every quarter and half, and mumbled a long grace before the hours.

The photograph was of a man past fifty, with a good head, large, wide-open eyes, and a broad nose that might mean either stupidity or a sense of humour, according as to how the nostrils moved in life. Very little else could be said of the face, for mustache and beard covered it closely, running up before the ears to meet a curly mop of hair that roofed the head. It was an attractive face at first glance, and the low, turned-over collar, flowing tie that was barely hinted at beneath the beard, and loose sack-coat carried out the suggestion of strength, that was continued to where a pair of powerful hands, whose fingers rested together easily tip to tip, completed the picture.

Picture and letter had arrived three days before, and yet the answer to the latter lay in process of construction upon the flap of the old-fashioned bookcase in the window corner. Perhaps the cause for the delay was more in the fact that both picture and letter, though relating to the First Cause, had not come directly from him, but from his sister. She had been a school friend of Miss Keith’s, who occasionally came to visit her and who was now living in Boston, having become the third wife of some one connected in a humble capacity with a free library in the city where the State-house dome seeks to rival Minerva’s helmet, and whose streets ever coil in and out as if in classic emulation of Medusa’s locks.

Taking the letter from under the clock, Miss Keith went to the window and re-read it for the twentieth time.

“October 10, 19—.

“My dear Friend:

“It is only during the past year, since I have been living within reach and under the privilege and influence of all that is inspiring to one of my aspirations, that I have realized how lonely your life must be upon that farm, where your only intimate associates are animals, feathered and otherwise, and evening, instead of becoming as it is with me the period of self-culture in the society of a loyal male companion, is too often a period of premature somnolence and apathy.

“Until now I have seen no method of escape to offer you, and so have held my peace. Two weeks ago, however, fortune smiled through a letter from my brother, James White, out in Wisconsin. You must remember James—the handsome man with curly hair who waited on Jane Tilley when we were at Mt. Holyoke, until she jilted him for William Parsons. He got over it nobly, though, and brought us paper flower bouquets the day we graduated. Mine was of red and white roses, and yours was all white. Surely you will remember—he said you looked ‘quite smart enough for a bride.’

“Well, you were pretty in those days, Keith, with your white skin and light brown hair, before you took on freckles; but, after all, dark complexions like mine wear the best.

“Now, to come to time—James is a widower. He has sweet children and needs a wife and mother for them. Though there are plenty of western women, and some that have hoards of money, out in Corntown, where his canning business is, he was always particular and peckish, preferring a refined eastern woman to influence his family. Knowing that I am living in Boston in the midst of opportunities, so to speak, our home being halfway between Bunker Hill Monument and Harvard University, he has intrusted me to select him a wife. Your face appeared to me. Putting aside more pressing claimants, I wrote to him of the girl he once declared fit to be ‘a bride,’ and sent him your last picture—at least it’s the last I’ve seen. He answered by return post. He has not forgotten, and he will, if you consent, come here the first of May to meet you and be married.

“Now, dear Keith, why not put your place on the market, and when winter sets in come here to me in Boston and see the world, spend a season of relaxation, hear lectures and music, and be thus attuned for matrimony in the sweet spring, when the horse-chestnut buds yield to the sun and drop their glossy shields in the Public Gardens?

“Your friend and sister-in-law to be,

“Judith W. Dow.”

Straightway Miss Keith, the strong of body and heretofore of mind, the adviser of both men and women for miles around, Miss Keith, the capable, who, with help “on shares,” made the little farm pay and lived a life of bustling content that was the opposite of somnolent vegetation, began mentally to chafe and rebel against the confinement and loneliness of her lot, and yearn for change,—she who had always preached and practised that one’s work is that which lies nearest to hand.

She ignored the freckle thrust and the phrase taking for granted that the farm was hers to sell. The words music and lectures seemed italicized, yet the strongest appeal in the crafty letter was its promise of human companionship, for she had often yearned for kin.

Miss Keith was of no common type, even among the many intelligent women reared on New England farms. She had struggled her way through Mt. Holyoke and fitted herself to teach in the Gilead school, where she had remained ten years, until, at the death of her Aunt Lawton, her cousin had offered to install her at the farm, where the active life indoors and out proved a strong attraction. During these years her clear, strong voice had led in singing-school and in the village choir, where it still held sway,—the fact that it was slightly “weathered” increasing rather than diminishing its power. Though pale of hair and face, at no time in her life had she been wholly unattractive, and her speech, sometimes lapsing into provincialisms when she was either excited or constrained, was wholly free of either Yankee dialect or nasal twang. She had met many people of all grades in due course,—farmers, manufacturers, prospectors, and the leisurely class of cottagers from Stonebridge and Gordon; but no man had ever said, “I love you.”

Seating herself at the desk with an unaccustomed drooping of the head, she finished the letter begun the day before, filling each of the four pages with rapid strokes, folded it without once re-reading, sealed it with a bit of crumby red wax that had not seen light probably since her Aunt Lawton had used it for the sealing of her will, and affixed the stamp with slow exactness precisely in the proper corner. Then with folded hands she leaned back and gazed at the missive, saying, as she did so, “That decides it. I will go to Boston the first of the year, when everything is closed up and settled for the winter. Farrish, below, can tend the stock. I’ve saved a little money to enjoy myself with, and when May comes, if James White turns up and we hold to the same mind, I shall marry him; if not—I suppose Cousin Adam will be glad for me to come back, that is, unless he makes other arrangements.”

The alternative to the matrimonial scheme seemed just then of such slight moment that she hardly pronounced the words, but turned to leave the desk, when a sharp, compelling bark from the rug before the hearth made her start and brought a red spot to each cheek.

There before her sat a shaggy brown dog, setter in build, but with a collie cross showing in eccentricities of hair that formed a ruff about his neck and gave the tail a strange bushiness. A pair of great, soft, brown eyes were fixed on Miss Keith’s face, and the expression in them was accentuated by the slight raising of the long, mobile, silky ears, which seemed to ask a question. Meeting no response, the dog barked once more and raised one paw pleadingly.

Miss Keith, who had risen, seated herself again suddenly. “Why, Tatters, old man, I’ve forgotten your breakfast, and it is almost dinner-time. Where have you been since yesterday? Hunting by the river? You know you should not come in here with a wet coat and muddy paws. Down! Down!” she cried, as the dog, never moving his gaze from her face, crossed the room and, sitting on his haunches before her, rested his fringy wet paws on her lap.

“What is the matter? Thorns or burs in your feet?”

The dog continued to look at her steadfastly, giving a little whine meantime, but never a wag of his tail.

“Tatters!” she exclaimed at last, moistening her lips, which seemed to be unaccountably dry, “I believe you know what is on my mind, and what I’ve been wrestling with in the spirit these three days,—but it’s all settled now, and my mind is free. Come, and I’ll get your dinner bone.”

“Settled!” and then the thought struck her, “What would become of Tatters?” A new caretaker might easily be found for the place and cattle, who would also understand the pruning of the cherished vines and fruit trees, but would he understand Tatters, and would Tatters understand or tolerate any one not born of the family? As long as people of the West stock had lived in Gilead, with them had been a sturdy breed of collies and setters, whose sagacity and nosing power were famed throughout the country-side. Now, through chance and short-sightedness, the two breeds had merged in one, and Tatters, of middle age, wise beyond the dog wisdom of his ancestors, was its only representative.

Ever since his year of puppyhood, when Miss Keith with New England firmness had completed his house-breaking education, he had been the house man, guarding the picket gate by day, the door by night. In his responsibility of combining double natures, he herded young calves in a poorly fenced pasture, or tracked the turkey hens (those most brainless of feathered things) when they recklessly led their broods into the dark woodland in May storms. As setter, he ran free by the wagon when Miss Keith took eggs, butter, or berries to her various customers, dashing in among the hordes of English sparrows by the roadside, or going afield with cautious tread and circling tail to flush the flocks of meadowlarks with eager sporting fervour. As collie, with Scotch traditions in his blood, he followed her to meeting or singing-school, and slept under the pew seat or sat sentinel in the vestibule, according to season and weather. Then by the winter hearth fire he was Miss Keith’s counsellor, for in spite of the stoves that her Cousin Adam had supplied, her practicality of mind, and the labour it entailed, she had a primeval streak in her that yearned to see the heat that warms one. Tatters was the silent partner, it is true, in their discussions, and merely looked assent as he listened to the oft-repeated tale of short weight in feed, and the sloth of hired men as opposed to the thrift of those who work on shares, with perfect composure, yet let one of these hired men but raise his voice in unamiable argument with Miss Keith, and Tatters crouched to heel, upper lip cleared from his glistening teeth, ready for action, and no one ever braved the warning.

Then, too, he took the responsibility of beginning the day’s work upon his shaggy shoulders. At six o’clock in winter, changing to five on May day, he left his rug in the outer kitchen, and going to Miss Keith’s bedroom, nosed open the door, wedged from jarring by a mat, and after lifting her stout slippers to the bed edge, carefully, one by one, with many false starts and droppings, if she did not waken, he would sit down, and with thrown back head give quick, short barks until he had response.

How did he know hours and dates? How do we know that of which we are most sure, yet cannot prove by mathematical problems? He did know—that was sufficient.

As all these things surged through Miss Keith’s brain, the First Cause on the mantel-shelf grew more remote, and folding her strong lean arms about the pleading dog, she rested her face against his head and began to cry softly, a thing unheard of.

CHAPTER III
THE DECISION OF MISS KEITH

It was while mistress and dog were thus absorbed that Dr. Russell, gun on shoulder, and grouse dangling from his fingers, came up the side road on the south that separated house and garden plot from the barn and outbuildings, that stood close to the lane edge, facing it, like a row of precise soldiers drawn up to give salute.

He expected that at his first footfall on the side porch his coming would be heralded by short, percussive barks,—Tatters’ greeting to his friends. He knocked twice, then tried the yielding door-knob, and entered the kitchen, where various saucepans, boiling over madly and deluging the polished stove with an impromptu pottage, told of some sort of domestic lapse. Crossing the hallway, guided by a light streak toward the first open door, he entered the sitting room at the moment that Miss Keith had raised her wet eyes from Tatters’ head, and was alternately rubbing them with her handkerchief, held in one hand, and looking at her answer to the disturbing letter, held in the other.

“Why, what is the matter, Miss Keith,—bad news or a love letter?” the doctor asked with the easy cheerfulness that showed how little real anxiety lay beneath the question. “The carrier said that you wished to see me to-day, and so I’ve come down, but I’d no idea that it was about a tearful matter, and one in which Tatters was too much involved to ‘watch out’ as usual.”

Taken thus unawares, an aggressive expression crossed Miss Keith’s face for an instant, but immediately disappeared under the influence of the doctor’s smile, and, quickly recovering, she answered, as she gave her hands into his hearty grasp: “It is both bad news and a letter. To-day is my fiftieth birthday,—you see I do not believe in belying the Lord’s work and concealing one’s age as some do,—and I’ve had a letter that I want man’s counsel upon.” Then, as a sound of liquid hissing on a hot stove and the smell of burning food came from the hallway, she remembered the time of day, the dinner in peril, and her duties as housekeeper, at the same moment, and mumbling a hasty apology, fled to the kitchen, followed by the doctor, who, after making the grouse serve as a birthday offering, wisely retired to the sitting room until dinner should be ready.

Once there, he made a few rapid but direct observations, beginning with the First Cause on the mantel-shelf.

Then, as he saw the two letters on the desk, one envelope hastily torn open and bearing the signs of much handling, the other carefully sealed and lying face downward, he chuckled to himself. “Woman all through, Miss Keith, in spite of everything. Ten to one she has made up her mind and answered her letter while she was waiting for me to come and advise with her about it. At the same time, when the dinner is off her mind, she will tell me the whole story, and discuss it from the very beginning, for the mere pleasure of it; but no matter what I may say, she will post the letter already written.” Then, going over to the bookcase that topped the desk, he unlocked the diamond-paned door, and pulling out a book at random, which proved to be a dingy copy of Hogg’s “Shepherd’s Calendar,” he resigned himself to the inevitable drowsiness born of the volume and his long walk, and stretching himself on the wide haircloth sofa, was soon taking the “forty winks” that should sharpen his wits for the coming interview.

Fortunately he awoke before Miss Keith came to call him, for she had scant respect for either man or woman who was caught napping in broad daylight; and together they went out to the wide kitchen that served also as a cheerful dining room, with its long double window filled with plants and beau-pot of gay chrysanthemums on the table, the doctor meanwhile offering Miss Keith his arm, half with natural, courtly deference, half in mischief, a frequent mood of his that old friends understood and loved.

At first Miss Keith, speaking clearly for the sake of breaking silence, appeared nervous. The talk ran lightly in general channels,—the glorious season, the shooting, the way in which the trolley line had turned the horse traffic from the turnpike to the upper road, and how much more life passed the West farm, Miss Keith telling that sometimes of an afternoon a dozen pleasure vehicles on the way from Stonebridge to Gordon, or the reverse, would stop on the plateau under the pines, combining a resting spell for horses with their drivers’ enjoyment of the view.

Next Silent Stead and his bachelor housekeeping on Windy Hill followed in natural sequence. Did the doctor know the real story about Stead’s dead wife, or if it were true that he was going away, back to his work as civil engineer again? Many visitors, men of weight from Gordon, had called on him that season, and the letter carrier said he had many thick letters with great red seals, and it was whispered that he was wanted to direct some new railway enterprise in the far West.

No, Dr. Russell could not answer, other than to wish the gossip that sent his friend back to the world’s work might foreshadow the truth.

Then the doctor took the lead, asking home questions about Mr. Lawton and the other kin, saying, “I met your Cousin Adam last winter in New York one evening at the Century, where Martin Cortright introduced us. His is a keen and interesting face, though rather nerve-worn. As he stood among a group of financiers, that also deal liberally by the various arts, his eyes roved about, dilating and contracting strangely, as if they followed the workings of a dozen thoughts each minute, though otherwise his face remained unchanged and he never moved a muscle.

“Did I like him? He is not easy to approach, and it was only when I told him that, though living at Oaklands, I go inland every autumn for the hunting, and know Gilead well, also his Cousin Keith and West farm, where I had once seen his daughter Brooke, that his eye brightened and he showed any interest, while at the same moment some one whom he had evidently been watching broke away from a distant group, and, your cousin darting off to join him, our talk ceased.”

“If Adam cares for anything but money-making, which I’ve sometimes doubted, it is for Brooke,” said Miss Keith, quite at her ease again, the coffee that she was pouring being fully up to its reputation. “In fact, he deeded this farm to her on her twenty-first birthday, all on the strength of her girlish whim and talk long ago about the River Kingdom. This also makes me feel uncertain about my stay here. What if Brooke should marry and he should wish her to sell the place? Not that Adam has ever said a word to me about the transfer, and he pays the taxes and what not just the same, but Job Farrish was looking up his boundaries last spring and saw the deed recorded in the Town House. In fact, Adam himself never writes nowadays, his secretary does it all; and even Brooke has only written once this year, and that was when I said the gutter having leaked, the north room needed new paper, and she sent it—pretty it is, too, wild roses running through a rustic lattice—she’s always had an open eye for colour.”

“What! is that gypsy child twenty-one?” exclaimed the doctor in surprise, pushing back his chair so as to pull Tatters’ head between his knees and stroke his ears, at the same time that he drew his coffee cup toward him, sniffing the subtle aroma, only second in his nostrils to that of the fresh earth in spring and his beloved pipe. “It seems but a year or so since she was roving about the lane with her hair flying and Tatters after her,—the two were inseparable.”

“Twenty-one! Why, Dr. Russell, that time was eight years ago, the second autumn you came up to hunt with Silent Stead. She’s turned twenty-four, and that Tatters was this one’s uncle; they say there has been a dog of the name in the family this hundred years and more.

“Yes, Brooke was twenty-four last May, and it seems now that they should call her by her rightful Christian name, Pamela, instead of that absurd one that might as well be stick or stone. You did not know she had any other? Oh, it is her middle name to be sure—Pamela Brooke Lawton. Her mother was one of the proud old Virginia Brookes, and they say, failing of male heirs in the South, they often call a daughter by her mother’s maiden name. Mannish and affected though, I call it, still I must own it did suit her eight years ago, for she had as many ways and turns and deep and shallow places as that little stream on Windy Hill that begins in only a thread that wouldn’t move a fern, and then widens to the Glen Mill-pond, and saws all the wood hereabouts and grinds the flour for Gilead.

“Yes, she has been here several times, though never to stay long; mostly she came with her great friend, Lucy Dean, when they were at school at Farmington. I never liked her though, she had a way of asking point-blank questions and calling a spade a spade that sent a chill through you.”

“And what has Brooke been doing since she’s been a woman grown? What, for the last four years?” asked the doctor, returning to the present with new interest at sound of Brooke’s name.

“Let me see,” and Miss Keith began counting on her fingers; “after Brooke left school, she and her mother and father, with the Dean girl and the Cub, spent one summer travelling in the West,—Adam was nosing out some scheme or other. Then the women folks went to Europe for a year or more, leaving young Adam, the Cub,—that’s what they call the boy, and I must say, poor lad, he does seem a misfit and hard to manage,—at a military boarding-school somewhere.

“The Dean girl had a voice that her people thought worth the training, though I never heard what became of it after, and Brooke wanted to go on with her painting. Oh, yes, she does really paint—doesn’t just dabble colours together like a marble cake, such as most pictures are, and call it Art. Why, she got a prize, they say, in a New York exhibition for a picture of some children eating cherries. I’ve got a photograph of it, that she sent me, on my bureau. It’s fine work, good judges say; all the same, to my eye it lacks one thing—it doesn’t look just quite alive. If she was poor and had to work and kept on, I guess she’d get somewhere; but now she’s at home again, and in society, and not being in need of money, I suppose she’ll let the painting slip, except maybe to make candy boxes for charity fairs and such.

“Adam’s always been too busy ever to have much of a settled home. They travelled about mostly of summers, and since they left the house down town two years ago, where the children were born, they’ve lived in a big sort of apartment arrangement, half flat, half hotel, as near as I can make it out—‘It gives mamma no responsibility,’ Brooke wrote in telling of it. But without some responsibility you can’t get much home comfort, to my thinking.

“Now that Brooke is educated and at home, I hear her father is building a big city house and another down by the sea somewhere, and so perhaps—when he has money enough—he will slow up and take a rest. The Lawtons and Wests are both long-lived, and Adam never drank or dissipated, I guess; but I should think at the pace he’s trotted these thirty years he’d be footsore by this, and like a back-stairs sitting room out of reach, and a loose pair of slippers.”

Miss Keith grew more careless of her speech as she warmed to her subject, and Dr. Russell laughed outright at the idea of the Adam Lawton whom he had met, tall and distinguished, a bundle of steel nerves bound by will power, sitting to rest anywhere, much less in loose slippers out of the sound of the Whirlpool’s eddying.

The fussy little clock in the sitting room, after making many futile remarks, like a choking do-re-mi, landed fairly on do, and struck four! Then Miss Keith, saying casually that she must skim the milk at five, began to unfold her plan matrimonial.

She did not read Mrs. Dow’s letter to the doctor, but spoke from memory, with which an unexpected quality of imagination blended with dangerous frequency.

Alack a day! How often are the overworked three graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, pushed into the place of Truth, Experience, and Common Sense, and forced to bear responsibility not theirs!

When Miss Keith had finished, the good doctor naturally supposed that she had received a direct proposal from an old-time lover who, once rejected, had married some one else in pique. Also that the making of the sister’s home the meeting place was her own idea, born of her maidenly regard of the proprieties, which regard he well knew usually strengthens in inverse proportion to the need for it!

Finally, as he arose to go, she said, hovering tremulously between kitchen and sitting room, “Now that I know that you agree with me, I will ask one favour more. I have a letter that I would like to have posted in Gilead by your hand; these outdoor letter boxes sometimes leak, you know. Then I shall sleep content.”

“Most certainly,” said the doctor, turning back, a smile crossing his face and lurking at his mouth corners at this latest of many vocations given him—that of Cupid’s postman, though he could not but admit that his age made him a peculiarly suitable assistant in such a belated wooing.

As he took the letter, he involuntarily turned it face upward, and glanced at the address, saying in a dubious tone, his eyebrows raised: “Mrs. Dow? Why not James White himself?” Then adding, with a touch of irony in his voice that Miss Keith missed, “Is his sister acting the kindly part of go-between? Ah, so! Well, Miss Keith, no one but yourself can settle so delicate a matter finally, but one thing promise me: go to Boston, if you will; jig and jostle, hear reform lectures and eat health food, and see life if you must; but for God’s sake, woman, don’t commit yourself until you have seen the ‘sweet children’ and the man! Photographs can lie, as well as tongues!” Then, fearing he had been too harsh, he added kindly, “If you find that Tatters can’t transfer himself, as you call it, let me know,—there is always room for one more dog at Oaklands, and Barbara will pamper him.”

That night Miss Keith, buoyed by the doctor’s talk and a man’s recent presence in the house, albeit it was temporary, was in an exalted mood and trod on air. Already she saw visions of the future, and kept saying to herself, “I will do and see so and so when I go to Boston.”

When she lit her candle and went upstairs, she took the First Cause from the mantel and bore him with her. Where should she put him? Her dresser seemed too intimate a place; the spare room album, too remote. Finally she placed the photograph against the puffs and quills of the pillow-shams of the best room bed and then fled to her own chamber, where she blew out the candle and undressed in the dark, or, rather, by the half moonlight, saying aloud, as she got into bed, “Thank fortune for one thing, I’ve kept my own hair and teeth, and such as I am there is nothing of me that takes off.” And though the remark was apropos of nothing in particular, a wave of hot colour covered her face at the words, and she buried her head in her pillow and tried to sleep. This she didn’t do, for Tatters, whom she had utterly forgotten for the first time, and shut out when she closed the door, resented being forced to sleep out on the porch at such a frosty time, and at intervals throughout the night bayed dismally at the moon, thereby calling to her mind an old ballad of chilling and ominous portent.

CHAPTER IV
INTERLUDE

On a bright afternoon in early December a number of carriages and motor cars that usually entered Central Park via the Plaza promptly at four, continued to the right instead, and in impromptu procession slowed down before the entrance of a new house in the Park Lane section of the avenue.

The house belonged to Senator Parks, and on this day it was to be thrown open to that portion of the public selected by the social sponsors of his new wife. This wife, being a rather handsome California widow on the agreeable side of thirty-five, had acquired enough knowledge of the world during a three years’ residence abroad to bend the knee gracefully, if not quite sincerely, to the powers that make or mar the fate of newcomers, at the same time always, so to speak, carelessly twisting in plain sight between her slender fingers the strings of a full purse.

The conventional “At Home from 4 to 7 o’clock,” therefore, had more than the usual significance, for it was known to imply a concert in the superbly appointed music hall, by singers from the opera, and an exhibition of paintings in the new gallery, so spacious that it ran from block to block, such a one as had never before been seen in any private dwelling in Manhattan. Then, too, there had been whispers of a chef of Gallic renown who had served two emperors and a prince, and altogether society, whose appetite is rather keen at the beginning of the season, expecting novelty or at least to be amused, was beginning to sally forth. It did not commit itself by so doing, and it assumed no responsibility other than leaving a card, by footman or otherwise, at the door, in due course; it merely gave itself the opportunity to pass judgment. But as the new hostess understood this perfectly well, and only desired the chance of playing her trump card to win the lead, it was a beautifully frank arrangement on both sides, in which no one was deceived.

As the hour passed the stream of carriages became continuous, the cavernous awning that swallowed the people as soon as they alighted being the centre of that strange mob, usually composed of fairly well-dressed women, who appear spontaneously wherever the carpet-covered steps and striped awning tell of an entertainment to be. No buzzard hovering in air drops to his prey more quickly than does the average idle woman catch sight of this emblem of hospitality.

Two young women, walking with easy, rapid gait up the avenue, paused on the outskirts of the throng, uncertain as to the best point for breaking through. At least the shorter of the two hesitated, while the taller, after a swift survey, put her white-gloved hands firmly on the shoulders of a gaping dressmaker’s apprentice, turned her about, saying, as she did so, “Let us pass, please,” and instantly a way was opened.

These young women were simply dressed for the street, with no obtrusive fuss and feathers, yet each had an unmistakable air of individuality and distinction. They were both of the same age, twenty-four, yet the difference in colouring and poise made the taller appear fully two years older. She had glossy black hair, tucked up under a three-cornered hat, heavy eyebrows, from under which she looked one straight in the face with a half-defiant look in the steel-gray eyes. Her nose was aquiline, and her lips rather thin, but curled in a humorous way when she spoke. She was broad of shoulder and small of waist and hips; and it was only a shy curve of neck and bust that, judging from poise alone, prevented one from thinking Lucy Dean a young athlete masquerading in his sister’s black velvet fur-trimmed frock with its scarlet-slashed sleeves.

Brooke Lawton, her companion, looked little more than twenty, was formed in a more feminine mould, and though half a head shorter, was still of medium height. Her hair, of the peculiar shade of ash brown with chestnut glints that artists love, was worn rather loose at the sides and gathered into a curly knot at the back of the neck, under a wide brown beaver hat that was tied below the chin with a large bow and ends after the fashion of our grandmothers. Her eyes were dark brown, and yet a shade lighter than the brows and lashes. Her nose was not of classic proportions, being rather too broad at the base and inclined to be tip-tilted, but her mouth had a generous fulness that softened a resolute chin, albeit it was cleft by a dimple. Her long coat was of brown, so that the only bright colour about her was the vivid glow that the crisp air and walking had brought to her cheeks.

She also looked one straight in the eyes when she spoke, but with an entire lack of self-consciousness wholly at variance with the attitude of her friend. Brooke might be typified as a joyous yet shy thrush; Lucy, as a splendid but vociferous red-winged blackbird!

“Is your mother coming?” asked Lucy, as they went up the steps together.

“Later, perhaps; she has not been feeling very festive these few days past. In fact, she has been strangely spiritless of late; living in a hotel disagrees with her ideas of home hospitality. Father seems worried and has not been sleeping,—has a bit of a cough, and anything like that always upsets dear little Mummy; she doesn’t realize that he is made of steel springs just as I am. I’m sure she will try to come, if only for a minute, for Mrs. Parks asked her to receive with her. She didn’t care to do that because, though we met the Parkses very often in Paris, they were never more than acquaintances, not real friends; but to stay away might hurt her feelings, and of course that must not be.”

“Oh, no, a Brooke of Virginia would never do that; she would be hospitable to a burglar, even while waiting for the police to come for him, and when he left, handcuffed, regret that uncontrollable circumstances prevented his spending the night!” said Lucy, mimicking the tone and manner of an old great-aunt of Brooke’s so thoroughly that she was forced to laugh.

“But thou, O most transparent of all the Brookes, even if you have Scotch granite and American steel concealed in your depths, you very well know that Madame Parks would have given many shekels of gold to have had your mother standing on her right this afternoon. Do you realize that she even asked me to sing to-day? Of course I wouldn’t.”

“That surely was a compliment to your voice that you can hardly find fault with,” said Brooke, pausing on the threshold to gather together the requisite number of cards.

“My voice! That had nothing whatever to do with it My voice might be like a jay’s with its crop full of popcorn, for all she knows about it. No, it was all on account of daddy; this affair has been well thought out. She has been careful to have a representative bidden from every department of the society trust,—clergy, laity, art, music, science. Daddy represents up-to-date financiering,—there is no Mrs. Dean, hence me! She wandered a bit, though, in asking me to sing on the same afternoon with paid professionals. If it had been a very select and spirituelle affair, with Maud Knowles at the harp and Dick Fenton with his Boulevard imitations and songs, followed by bouquets of orchids concealing bijouterie for the performers, I might have yielded.

“Yes,” Lucy chattered on, “let us go upstairs; we had better drop our wraps, as we expect to make an afternoon of it. What an apartment! Madame’s, of course. Look at that bed on the dais and a boudoir and breakfast room beyond! Eight maids! Why didn’t she have four and twenty to match the pie blackbirds? Look at the way in which their skirts stay in place behind when they wiggle them. Never saw such a thing off the stage; one straight line from belt to hem, just the stunning way Hilda Spong wears hers in ‘Lady Huntworth’s Experiment’! What is the exhibit in that room across the hall, with the walls draped with white over sky-blue? Everybody is going that way; let us also flock!

“As I live, it’s the baby lying in state—no, holding a levée, I mean. What an odd-shaped cradle! Isn’t he a fright, but look at his robe—Irish point all made in one piece—and his gold toilet things on that tray! Well, after all, there must be something novel to the Parkses about this. Papa has been married three times and mamma twice, and this Chinese Joss is all there is to show for it! I wonder if her craze for collecting bric-a-brac can possibly account for his looks? If there isn’t the Senator himself, hovering around to show off his little son. I wonder if Madame knows papa is on the premises? Gracious, he’s taking the baby out of the Easter egg! Hear the lace tear, and that monumental English head nurse doesn’t move a muscle!

“Don’t look distressed and blush so, Brooke; facts are facts, and then besides, nobody can hear me in this babel. Now, let’s agree where we shall meet, for we shall be duly torn asunder directly we go downstairs. Come in here a second, my head feathers are awry. What a mercy it is to have hair like yours, that the more it is let alone, the better it behaves!

“No, don’t touch the strings of your poke, and leave your bodice alone. That creamy lace simply looks confidential and clinging, and not a bit mussy like mine.”

“I think I will go to the picture gallery as soon as we have made our bows to Mrs. Parks, and settle there,” said Brooke, “so that I can see everything before the concert is over. Then you will know where to find me. To-day I feel more like looking than listening,” she added, when Lucy was silenced a moment by holding half a dozen jewelled stick pins between her lips, as she rearranged the folds of an expensive draped lace bodice that, in spite of the beauty of the fabric, seemed out of key and mussy, the severe and tailor-made being better adapted to her.

For a few moments the two lingered in one of the alcoves of the dressing room, looking for familiar faces among the arrivals.

“By the way, I suppose Mr. Fenton is coming in later with the other down-town men?” said Brooke. “If so, you needn’t look me up at all.”

“Dick may be coming, though I doubt it, but it will not be to meet me. See here, goosie,” said Lucy, half avoiding her friend’s eyes, “I might as well tell you now as any other time. Dick and I have agreed to disagree. It happened last Sunday, and I’d have told you before, only you take all such things so seriously.”

“What is the matter; has he changed?”

“No, he has not, that is half the trouble. He has stayed quite too much the same; I only wonder that I could have endured it for the eight months it has lasted. You see, he was perfectly satisfied with himself as he was, and that leaves no room for improvement. Of course everybody knows, at the pace the world’s rolling along, if you don’t go ahead, you slide back! I tend to balk and jump the traces enough myself when it comes to hills, Heaven knows, and if my mate in harness can’t pull true on an up grade, where shall we be at? Dick kept along on the level good naturedly, I’ll say that for him, yet it was because I was my father’s daughter, not because I’m myself. Being a young broker, he thought it a good thing to have a father-in-law with unlimited ‘pointers’ in every wag of his chin (poor chap, he hasn’t yet realized that these things mostly point both ways), and he was serenely content! As for me, I felt as if I should go wild,—no conversation except the eternal money market. I said so,—and more besides!

“He was very nice about it,—daddy really seemed relieved,—and—well, it’s all over, though his mother did glower at me at first when I met her on the avenue yesterday, but she decided to bow.”

“Oh, Lucy, why are you so impetuous? When you told me of the engagement, you said—”

“Now listen, Brooke Lawton, and hear me swear one thing: money in one’s pocket is a blessing, but continually dinned into one’s ears it’s the other thing. If ever I marry any one, he must not be in this sickening money business; he must do something different, if it’s only drawing pictures on the sidewalk with chalk held between his toes, like the armless sailor in Union Square, though, come to think of it, I’d rather he’d have arms!

“By the way, why don’t you ’phone your mother to come? It’s going to be an awfully smart party. There’s a ’phone in the writing room or somewhere near—there always is one now at swell functions for the use of guests, and a young man (not a woman—too dangerous) from central to work it; they say the society reporters fight and bribe to get the job, they hear so much ‘inwardness.’ Your mother needn’t worry and stay at home. I don’t think your father’s sick. I heard daddy say last night that he is in another big deal, with trump cards enough to fill both hands, and he’s holding them so close for fear of dropping any that he’s bound to be preoccupied.”

“It’s time for us to go; I hear the music,” said Brooke, who had been set thinking by her friend’s talk.

“Why not come into the music room for a few numbers and then escape if you wish?” said Lucy, navigating the crowded stairs easily, and pausing on a landing to continue her chatter and glance into the room below. “What, all the chairs taken already? Just look at those orchids, by the dozen, not single, the whole plant hung by gilt chains from the ceiling!

“You won’t come? Well, so be it, if you have the ‘picture hunger’ as badly as you did in Paris. Do you remember the big hybrid French-English-Dutchman who gave that name to the moonstruck turns you used to have over painted ‘masterpieces’ and unpainted landscapes outdoors? Yes, I see you do. Well, I thought at one time he was painfully smitten and would probably lay himself down humbly at your feet, like an inconveniently thick bear rug that, failing to be able to step over, one must tread on, though often to one’s downfall. Still, of course, with artists the meaning of their looks and actions are usually either exaggerated or vague, much like their talk of values and colour schemes and atmosphere. I heard this same Marte Lorenz in a group of ravers standing before a canvas one day at the Mirlitons’ when I called for you, and I rubbered and peeped over their shoulders, expecting to see the portrait of a delicious woman at the very least; and what was the whole row about but an onion on a wooden plate, and they were saying that it was genuine and showed insight!

“It would be such fun to tease you, Brooke, if only you were teasable. Suppose, after all, there should be a real live man behind all this ‘picture hunger.’ I think that there must be from the way you have turned slack and dropped your brush in seeming disdain at your work, even after you won that Baumgarten prize, with the picture of your cousin Helen’s Mellin’s food babies sitting on the ground au naturel, eating cherries (pits and all), bless their poor fat tummies!

“However, there can’t be a man concealed in your mind, you are too transparent,—I should have known it, and helped matters nicely to a focus for you. Yet the copy-books used to say ‘still waters run deep’; who knows, innocent-looking mountain Brooke, but there is a great, deep, still swimming pool somewhere in your mind!”

“Bless me, she is teasable after all!” ejaculated Lucy, for, while she was still gabbling, Brooke had left her, slipped through the portières, held apart by two footmen, given her name to a third, shaken her hostess cordially by the hand, and after carefully giving her mother’s message of regret, melted away in the crowd.

“Charming girl, that Miss Lawton,” was Mrs. Parks’s mental comment. “I guess, after all, there is something in having a well-bred-to-the-bone mother. Three hundred people have squeezed my fingers already this afternoon and murmured all sorts of things, while they either gazed over my head or at my gown. She is the first one that looked at me and as if she meant what she said, or would really do me a good turn if she could.” And the Senator’s ambitious wife gazed after Brooke rather wistfully.

CHAPTER V
A PICTURE

Escaping from the ballroom, where, in spite of all possible care, the hothouse heat and heavy odour of flowers, together with the mild afternoon, made the air stifling, Brooke was guided by instinct toward the picture gallery. In the reception hall back of the stairs, concealed by a rose-covered screen, a Russian orchestra, the latest novelty, was playing; but as the first strains of the concert floated from the music room, the intended effect was lost and became wholly discordant and bewildering.

Once inside the doors, for the picture gallery was separated from the house itself not only by a short passageway, curtained at both ends, but by doors of richly carved antique oak, Brooke found herself in another world, in which two more of the liveried regiment and she herself were the only inhabitants. One of the men took from a Japanese stand of bronze, by which he was stationed, a long satin-covered book, that proved to be a catalogue of the paintings in the gallery. A photogravure of each one filled the left-hand page, a few words relating to the artist facing it.

Mind and body were at once refreshed. The air itself was pure and invigorating in the gallery, for the only floral decorations were conventionally trimmed bushes of box, European laurel in pots, and some pointed holly trees red with their Christmas offering of berries. Whatever there was of lavish overdisplay in the other parts of this new palace stopped outside of these doors. Ceiling and panelled wainscoting that ran below the picture line were of the same carved oak, the inlaid floor matching it in tone, while all else, wall hangings, divans, and rugs, were blended of soft greens, as harmonious and restful to the senses as the vines, ferns, and moss that drape and floor the forest. The lights adjusted above the paintings, with due regard to individual effect, were hidden from the eye by screens of coloured glass, in which design of flowers and leaf were so well mingled that they formed a part of the general whole.

As to the pictures themselves—not too many, all in a way masterpieces carefully hung—they seemed vistas opening through the greenery, carrying the vision at once into the scene or among the people represented. Only art could so feel for art, and the fact that the seeming simplicity was the result of much detailed thought and expense was nowhere apparent.

Brooke walked slowly to the upper end of the room, and seated herself in one of the recesses of an oddly divided settee, high of back and arm, that gave to each occupant complete seclusion. For a few minutes she leaned back against the soft velvet, letting the quiet atmosphere envelop her, and then raised her eyes to the two pictures that chanced to face her, peering at them in her seclusion, from under her wide hat, with a sidewise expression of eyes and lips slightly parted that reminded one of Mme. le Brun’s portrait of the charming Mme. Crussal.

The nearer picture was a marine, in which the Irish coast and waters of the Channel were revealed by light of the full moon, and between the headland and the foreground the white gulls were bedding themselves so closely that they made a second moon path on the water. Back flew Brooke’s thoughts across the sea,—England and Holland held her for a moment, then she slipped on to France, to Paris, where for a year she had worked in Ridgeway’s studio in the Rue Malesherbes and out at Passy, had been oftentimes elated and finally cast down. How a past mood can dominate the present as well as all surroundings! The next painting was of a stretch of low country threaded by a canal, cattle in the distance, and shivering poplars bending to the wind that scudded across the sky in threatening clouds, while in the foreground a flock of geese were looking about and pluming themselves against the coming storm.

Where had that scene passed before her? “The Coming Storm near The Hague—E. Oliver (Salon, 1900),” said the catalogue.

“Ah!” Brooke exclaimed, half aloud. She remembered her first visit to the Salon, of standing before this same picture with Marte Lorenz, “the big hybrid English-Dutch-French artist,” Lucy Dean called him, and laughing at the solemn, stupid geese, while he had told her in his perfect, slow English that he had often driven flocks of geese to pasture in his boyhood, also that sometimes he had found them to be no laughing matter,—a trifling incident at the time, but now a sort of landmark in the receding journey.

She had met this Lorenz (Marte his intimates called him) often that winter and spring on the easy impersonal footing that prevails between the well-bred American woman and the art students of all countries. He had been presented to her mother most regularly at a fête in Ridgeway’s garden the autumn of their arrival, and from that moment until their parting, a year later, one thing had set him apart from all the score of men with whom she had come in close contact, men who blindly flattered, evaded, or temporized. He had always told her the truth about her work. If she had not realized it at the time, the conviction had always come to her sooner or later.

As to Lorenz himself, once a pupil of the Beaux Arts, his nationality prevented his striving for the Prix-de-Rome, and he had turned his work toward less classic lines; landscapes were his forte, the figure coming second, and yet he oftenest worked at figure-painting and conventional portraiture also, for he must have money for the pot-boiling, much as he disliked the necessity.

Farther away slipt the Whirlpool city and its surroundings. Once more was Brooke sketching in oils, with some friends who often went to the Carlo Rossi garden to pose for each other. Her subject was a girl of the Boulevards, nominally a flower seller. Successful in the drawing and colour, try as she might Brooke could not give the touch that should bring the lifelike expression to the face. With knit brows she looked up to see whose was the shadow cast on the grass before her. It was Lorenz, big, honest fellow, his hands clasped upon the back of the garden seat, his thatch of dark hair sticking out over his deep-set blue eyes, while a questioning expression involved in its uncertainty his straight nose, his deeply cleft chin, and the sensitive yet strong mouth that separated them. Even his short-cut mustache, which accentuated rather than concealed his lips, expressed doubt.

“What is it, M. Lorenz?” Brooke had asked, smiling at his serious air; “no one ever tells me anything definite but you. The master says, ‘Good! keep on!’ One friend only grunts; some one else says ‘Pas mal.’ I know that I must work, work, work, but what do I most lack?”

Lowering his eyes almost to the grass itself, he spoke rapidly, as if the telling was a pain to him: “You have not yet had the awakening; for it you must wait; it is the same with me, but I may not dry my brushes to wait for the day, only work, and destroy, and work again, come good, come ill. It is not enough to block the form and lay on the colours truly. Unless you can interpret your vision and see its shadow on the canvas, watch it draw breath, move, and speak to you, you can never create. But first of all you must know and feel, even if you suffer. How can you interpret this woman before you? Never could you paint for what she stands. Try children, animals, anything else—or better, dry your brush and wait!”

Brooke had flushed angrily and answered curtly; even now the memory brought colour to her cheeks. Only once again had she seen Lorenz before leaving, and now two years had passed. What had become of him? There were depths in this woman’s nature that her parents, all devotion in their different ways, had never fathomed, of which her friends of every day had never dreamed; and in one of these secret places, all unconscious to herself, this man had gained sufficient place at least to bar all others.

While she was thus dreaming away the afternoon, the concert being ended, the throng pressed toward the gallery, and the confusion of voices, high in key and surging on, brought Brooke quickly to herself. Rising, she turned over the pages of the catalogue, reading the artists’ names, and sauntered down the line to where the numbers began, nodding occasionally, or saying a few words to friends that came up; some of whom were stopping to see the pictures, others merely noting the scenic effect of the whole. Suddenly she halted so abruptly, her fingers gripping the page between them with noticeable tension, that a man behind nearly fell over her, while her eyes fastened on the letters that said, “24: Eucharistia. M. Lorenz. 1901.” Before she could read the details opposite, the man whom she had stopped, Charlie Ashton (now Carolus, cousin to Lucy Dean and a courtesy artist possessed of a popular studio for concerts) looked over her shoulder and said:—

“Ah, Miss Lawton, looking for the picture the Senator’s gone daft about, because he thinks the woman in it looks like his wife when he first saw her as a girl out in the California wine country? It’s over this way, that one with the long palm over the frame. I’ve just come from there; everybody’s crowding round, guessing what the name means. I suggested making up a guessing pool on it at five a head, and letting the winner choose the charity; the Bishop is having a shy at it now.”

Brooke steadied herself, and crossing the room joined the group, catching at first but a partial glimpse of the picture.

“Step back here by this holly tree; this distance is needed to preserve the atmosphere,” said Ashton, guiding her by the sleeve into an alcove formed of holly and laurel bushes arranged to shelter an exquisite ivory statuette of Diana, the crescent, fillet, and bow being of rich gold.

“I have never before seen pictures so well hung,” said Brooke, glancing about as they waited for the crowd to move on, as it soon inevitably would, toward the banquet hall.

“A well-placed remark, Miss Brooke, sent straight home,” gurgled Ashton, plucking at his collar, which was too tight for his short neck. “I may say that I virtually hung these pictures, for I sent the Senator the man who did, you know. Before I forget it, the Bagby girls and the rest asked me to see you about arranging a benefit concert for that pretty little Julia Garth,—used to give such stunning musicales a year ago,—now old Garth is dead, and they’ve gone to no-put-together smash! Yes, not a cent! I’ve offered my studio for it, and they thought perhaps you’d give a picture to raffle,—just any little thing you’ve thrown off in a hurry will do.”

His words passed almost unheard, for while he was speaking the crowd parted and the entire painting became visible. Brooke, leaning forward, at first flushed, then grew white to the lips. The scene set before her was a bit in the depths of the park at Fontainebleau. A grassy path melted away in the distance between great sombre oaks that strengthened as they reached the foreground. At the foot of one of these sat a man, an artist, who had been sketching, for his implements lay on the sward before him. His whole position was of dejection, except the head, which was raised in a startled attitude. A little behind him stood a young woman, clad in the dainty summer dress of every day, ash-brown hair loosely caught up beneath a simple hat, paint box and luncheon basket slung from her shoulder. One hand rested on the gnarled oak trunk, the other, reaching across his shoulder, dropped into the man’s idle, listless hands a bunch of golden grapes, that in their ripeness carried sunlight with them. Graceful and charming as was the composition, it was the handling of the light wherein the magic lay. Sifting down between the leaves, the glow of early afternoon hovered about the girl’s bent head like a halo, and passing behind, fell upon the man’s upturned face, transfiguring it with a sort of holy joy, then focussed and was swallowed in the bunch of grapes.

A voice seemed calling in Brooke’s ears: “The last afternoon, when you all went sketching with the master, and after lunching in the woods you overtook the brotherhood of Clichy (as Lorenz’s coterie was called). Farther on and apart you found him alone, with head bent. You thought he was asleep and dropped the cool grapes in his hands, half as a trick, darting away again. Then good Madame Druz, the chaperon of the day, coming up, scolded you for ‘American imprudence,’ and finally that night you cried, half at her vulgar interpretation of a harmless act, and half because Lorenz never gave word or sign before your leaving. And because not a single flower of the mass that filled your railway carriage was from him, you let Lucy amuse herself all the way to Cherbourg by pelting officials with them at each station passed. He has painted you as you were!” cried the voice; “his face is as he might wish it to be.”

It required an effort on Brooke’s part not to cry out, “Hush! speak lower!” so real did the words seem.

“Good work, isn’t it?—though half a dozen of us here at home could do as well, if we had the atmosphere, you know,” said Ashton’s voice, sounding through the rush of waters that filled her ears. “The Senator boasts that he was the first to recognize the artist whom every one now applauds, and he paid a cool ten thousand for it, the man’s first important picture at that! The old man saw it in the new Salon, but it wasn’t for sale. ‘No, no, no,’ said the artist,—‘he had a superstition, a sentiment, a desire to keep it,’—but the Senator thought ‘Yes, yes, yes, the desire will decrease with time and—money,’ and so it did, for this fall, just as the Parkses were on the verge of leaving, the Senator doubled the first offer and Lorenz capitulated. Then, before the ‘brotherhood’ could borrow his ‘luck penny’ he disappeared somewhere in Normandy, they say, to study, out of the depressing sound of the pot-boiling of the Quarter. Half his friends were glad, Ridgeway wrote me, and the other half, being jealous, shrugged their shoulders and raised their eyes, groaning, ‘Another mad American!’

“I have it all down fine, you see, for the papers to-morrow,—great scheme! I had a Harvard chum that was, Tom Brownell, who won’t go the respectable pace his father set for him in finance, and has turned reporter, work it up. He wants news, and, plague it, it must be true or he won’t touch it. Of course I don’t appear in it, but all the credit is socially mine, you see.

“Why, come to think of it, Miss Brooke, I believe the girl looks a bit like you! Did you ever chance to see this man? But then, of course, so many charming women look alike in those stunning shirt-waist things, you know. What do you make of the name?”

Brooke wished that he might babble on as long as possible, that she might learn the painting by heart and try to fathom the peculiarity of the shaft of light, but as he stopped she said, almost without thought, “Eucharistia! why may it not be the girl’s name?”

“By Jove! of course, we never thought of it!” said Ashton. “You’re growing quite pale from standing so long. You must have some punch. Do let me take you to the banquet hall; it’s jolly nice there—all small tables and souvenir menus in silver frames. I planned them, too, though Tiffany’s name is on them. There’s Cousin Lucy, and the Bagby girls are waving to you now.” (“Yes, we’re under way, hold a table,” he signalled.) “We can cook up the concert while we feed,” and offering his arm, upon which Brooke laid her hand gratefully, for she felt a sudden weariness, he led her through the maze of skirts and furniture as skilfully and rapidly as if he had been her partner in the cotillon, and seated her at one of the little tables amid a bevy of her friends, who were discussing the house, the hostess, the flowers, the menus, and the fallen fortunes of poor Julia Garth in a most impartial way, and at the top of their voices.

“Of course it’s awful to suddenly drop from having your gowns from Paris, a maid, a private turnout, and keeping open house—or rather houses—and all that, to a flat somewhere in Brooklyn, with a sick mother, and trying to work off your music for a living,” said one shrill voice; “but then it is an awful bore, too, for us to have her on our minds. This concert is only the beginning, I suppose.”

“Julia plays delightfully, and we all have more or less chamber music during the winter, and one of us might take her to Lenox or Newport this summer,” said another, in a reproving tone; “and then among us all there are plenty of children for her to teach.”

“If she plays and sings for us all winter, that is sufficient reason why we shall be sick of her next summer,” said the first voice. “You know how it was with Mrs. Darcey Binks and her Creole songs. We thought we could not get enough of her. She thought she was settled here for life, and biff! the Spanish mandolin players knocked her out the second season. As for lessons, if you take up some one half out of charity, and then go South in the middle of a term, they will always whine about it, and you feel mean; a professional can take care of herself and always gets even, but doesn’t let you know it.”

“I wish we could think of something newer than a concert, that would make a hit and a pot of money,” said Lucy Dean, not bragging of the fact that she had already asked Julia Garth to come and live with her, and been refused kindly but firmly. “What can you suggest, Brooke? you are always overflowing with ideas, even if some of them are too good for this world.”

Brooke, thus challenged, half rose in her chair so that she faced both tables, and said: “I do not believe in offering Julia what she would accept as work and you consider as charity; it is false pretence on both sides! We can easily make up a Christmas purse for her among ourselves, without giving her the pain of the advertising of a benefit concert, and all the talk of it. Then when she has a chance to know where she stands,—her father only died a month ago, poor child,—I will get my father or yours” (motioning to Lucy) “to give her real work for real pay, and with no charitable tag hanging to it. She has kept household accounts and sometimes been her father’s private secretary. I saw her last week, and what she wants and is able to do is real work and plenty of it to make her forget, not charity coddling to make her remember.”

“Mercy on me! don’t cut us up like cheese sandwiches, with your sarcasm!” ejaculated Lucy, “and clutch that chair so, as if you had claws. Your eyes remind me of a hawk that perches in a cage over in the park opposite my window, and glares all day long at the silly sparrows outside!”

Brooke laughed, and the dangerous flash in her eyes dying out again, she turned to her plate of salad and the general gossip of the day, but a red spot still glowed in the middle of each cheek. A few minutes later she might have been seen driving down the avenue in her mother’s brougham, trying to decipher, by the light of the electric street lamps, some printing in the silk-covered catalogue.

This is what she read: “Marte Lorenz, born at his uncle’s tulip farm near Haarlem, in 1872. Educated in England, where his father had been a merchant. Studied at the Amsterdam Art School, going afterward to Paris, where his countryman, Israels, befriended him. A hard student, but the picture ‘Eucharistia’ is his first important work, while European critics and his masters believe it is the beginning of a great career. At present he is living in seclusion in Normandy, following his art.”

Ashton, the useful, had patched up the biographies in the little book, helter-skelter, but Brooke did not know it, and tucking the catalogue carefully into her great muff, she leaned back and closed her eyes.

It was her portrait that Lorenz had painted, together with his own, whatever the mystic word “Eucharistia” might mean. He had not forgotten her, then, and he was loath to part with the picture. She did not formulate the pleasure the thought gave her,—it was enough in itself.

Then the brougham stopped before the blazing lights of the St. Hilaire, where the Lawtons were making a temporary home, a sort of bridge, that both mother and daughter had long wearied of, between the simpler past and the long-delayed, complex future, when in the new house, now building, her father promised once and for all to drop the reins of tape and wire, cease from hurrying, and take rest.

CHAPTER VI
THE LAWTONS

With Mrs. Lawton the afternoon of the Park musical had been a time of irresolution. When the man of a family is noted for swift arbitrary decisions and often unexplained action in all domestic affairs, in important matters and petty details alike, his wife is apt, simply by force of reaction, to be driven to the opposite extreme in those things that concern herself alone. Not that Adam Lawton’s wife had ever been lacking in spirit, and when, as Pamela Brooke, a girl of twenty, he had taken her from her southern plantation home, then crippled and impoverished by war, yet where she still held absolute sway, many nodded their heads, and said that the calculating, keen-eyed Yankee would some day be startled by the fire of southern blood.

Not but what his coming, seeing, and conquering had been as swift as the most romantic could desire, one short month compassing it all, for there was a certain magnetism about Adam Lawton that, when he chose to exert it, was irresistible, while to those outside its influence he was doubly a bit of chilling steel.

Nor had his wife ever faltered in her loyalty to him; she would have given much more than he would take, for in the beginning hers had been a nature that sought happiness in pouring out her love freely and enveloping its object in it, at the same time giving the man she had chosen, through imagination, every noble and winning attribute that would increase her passion.

Two sons had been born to her before she had awakened from this ecstatic period and was perforce obliged to separate the real from the ideal. Not that Adam Lawton loved her a degree less strongly than when, calling upon her father on purely business matters, he had first seen her riding up the unkempt avenue of her home, her beauty and bearing lending distinction to the faded habit that she wore. His love was of a strange quality, a sort of transmutation of metals by sudden fire that, having once taken place, must of necessity be welded for all time. In reality an egotist, from his own point of view he was wholly unselfish, for he asked little for what he gave, and would allow none of the little daily services that nourish love, whose best food must have the flavour of mutual dependence.

The two boys died of scarlet fever almost together, before they were well out of babyhood, and after a lapse of many years a daughter, Brooke, had come, then another lapse, and another son, called Adam, now about sixteen; and like many a son of a father who has planned a boy’s career to the minutest detail, he seemed not only bound not to go in the desired way, but to lack the bump of direction, which turns a boy from being merely driftwood and guides him in any sort of way whatsoever.

From habitual restraint of emotions learned in those first ten years, Mrs. Lawton had come to pass for a perfectly bred, though somewhat unsympathetic, woman.

Brooke, whose own heart naturally beat as tumultuously as ever did her mother’s, had learned to feel something of this even in her early childhood, when at her father’s footstep she had been hushed in some wild exhibition of childish enthusiasm; and though she and her mother were the very best of friends, there was a certain quality missing in their intercourse. Perhaps missing is not the word,—a quality not yet developed expresses it more exactly, and this, too, came through the peculiar temperament of Adam Lawton himself. Outside of his business he had but one thought, his family, and to supply their needs as he read them, his selfishness lying in the fact that he asked so little of them, beyond their presence in his house, that it was impossible for him to judge, by intimate contact, what those needs really were, or to realize that confidence and sympathy are better coin than dollars.

Brooke alone had been able to break through this crust of self-sufficiency that he had used as a barrier against the world in his early days of struggle, until it now shut him off from the luxury of everything natural, uncalculated, and spontaneous. Brooke had enough of the enthusiasm of youth not to be chilled by it. She looked forward hopefully to the promised time when he should take a long holiday, and be with them, and, as she explained it, only “think foolishness.” He had never refused her anything that she asked of him, not that her wishes had ever been extravagant. Many a time, as some clever whim of hers brought a rare smile to his keen, thin face, intelligent and alive, if somewhat harshly fined and worn, he almost clinched the hand that he always kept in his left pocket in despair that this child was not the boy who should keep his name alive, instead of that other who now bore it. But in the fact that Brooke was a daughter lay all the charm, for there is no other born relationship so subtle, so potent of good for each, as that between father and daughter.

For many years the Lawtons lived in an ample old-fashioned house in one of the streets converging at Washington Square, where Brooke and young Adam had been born. Here Mrs. Lawton had passed many days of quiet content and social comfort, entertaining in the open-hearted southern way that does not admit of push or hurry. True, the neighbourhood was changing, and others more ambitious were moving away; in fact, Adam Lawton had one day said the time had come when he was ready to build a modern house, in a part of the city where a home more suited to his position and a good investment could be combined, for with him the two propositions always went together.

Mrs. Lawton had sighed, but said nothing. She loved the wide, sunny house, with its colonial mantels and irregular staircase, and secretly she hoped that no one would buy it. Faint hope, for in a week from the day the matter was broached, Adam Lawton announced that the house was sold. A business building had purchased the adjoining property and virtually gave him his price. They could live in an apartment hotel pending the building of the new house. It would give his wife a rest, for he was beginning to notice that she was looking rather worn, and did not attribute it to the real cause or the flight of years, but to some extraneous reason that that most dubious of all acts, “a change,” might overcome. So Mrs. Lawton was spending her second winter at the St. Hilaire, living apart from her own life, as it were. True, she had been listless and not very well of late, but it was more from inertia than any constitutional weakness. No one could expect to keep for thirty years the radiant type of blonde beauty with which Pamela Brooke had glowed at twenty. Mrs. Lawton was still in a sense a beautiful woman, but the vivacity that often outlives freshness of tint and distinctiveness of feature had died first of all. Her charm lay in a certain refinement of outline; colour and features had grown dim as the reflection of a face in a mirror blurred by dust, and her mass of waving golden brown hair, that in its lights and shades had once surpassed even Brooke’s, was of a clear white, as of the days of powder, and gave the delicate features an almost dramatic setting.

As Adam Lawton grew more and more absorbed in finance, he was the more exacting of her presence during the evening hours, when, too absorbed to either go out or bid friends come to him, he sat in his simply furnished den, for all luxury stopped at his door, and pored over papers, letters, and maps, scarcely glancing up or speaking to his wife twice in the evening, yet expecting her presence and conscious if she left him for a moment.

When Brooke had started on this particular winter afternoon for the Parkses’ musicale, in company with her friend, Lucy Dean, Mrs. Lawton had quite decided not to go. Her husband had been unusually silent for the few days past, and had said something about possibly coming home in time to drive up to the new house, which was yet uncompleted, owing to the building strike of the past summer.

But as the early twilight came on and he did not appear, she grew restless, and knowing that it was too late for the proposed drive, quickly determined to go to the Parkses’ for a little while and return with Brooke. Going to her lounging room to call the carriage by telephone, for she had an entirely separate wire from the private service at her husband’s desk, she found several letters lying upon the table. Exclaiming at the carelessness of the maids, of whom two were kept for service of meals, etc., in the apartment, she looked at the addresses, and the handwriting on the last put the thought of going out from her mind.

Four were in the handwriting of private secretaries, and promised social invitations; the fifth, addressed in the shaded pin-point writing of the seminary of thirty years ago, was postmarked Gilead; while the sixth was in the rough and painfully unformed hand of Adam, “the Cub,” as his friends called him, her only living son, now at a military school some sixty miles away.

It was impossible to deny that the Cub was behind-hand in his work, and that, instead of being within two years of college, according to his father’s schedule, he was little more than in sight of it; but her mother’s heart told her that the rigidity of his father’s methods was quite as much to blame as her son’s stupidity. Coming of ancestors whose training on both sides had been for and of the out-of-door life, the forcing system of surveillance under which he had lived, summer and winter alike, since his eleventh year, had developed only the evil in him.

Vainly she had suggested, nay almost fought, to have him sent to a famous ranch school, where the sons of several of her friends had learned self-reliance and books at one and the same time. Adam Lawton would not hear of it, saying the dangers of the life and the distance were too great.

In Brooke his measure of fatherly affection was complete and satisfied, and that she should never put her hand in an empty pocket his chief desire; but still all his hopes of the future of his race theoretically centred in this only son, as in an asset of both flesh and money, and every hair of his tawny head and freckle on his face was more precious than his own life-blood; yet he had the narrowness of the self-made man, the financier in particular, and he could see honour and success in one path only—that in which he himself had trodden.

Adam Lawton senior, now halfway between sixty and seventy, though he did not allow it even to himself, often felt the lack of academic knowledge, and therefore Adam junior must undergo a certain polishing system perforce, even if the substance to be polished lost its identity and crumbled to chalk in the process. For only two things had Adam evinced any liking,—for out-of-door life and a horse, while his backwardness with his lessons had cut off these outlets by keeping him at school or under tutelage the entire season through.

If Adam Lawton loved his son as a matter of heredity, Pamela Lawton loved him as a human being, as her baby, and her maternal passion gained fierceness by repression. The letter was an appeal for permission to go home, and contained a doctor’s certificate saying that the boy had, in his opinion, outgrown his strength, and needed several months of outdoor life, etc., etc. Mrs. Lawton crushed the paper in her hand. The last time such a missive had been received it had resulted in the Cub’s being sent to travel with a tutor. One human being the boy did love, and that was herself,—he must have her care now or never!

Without realizing that the hotel was no place for the boy, or what the result might be, she went to her desk, wrote a few emphatic words, enclosed a ten-dollar bill in the envelope (it chanced to be the last money in her purse), and, quickly putting on coat and bonnet, took it herself to the post-box on the street corner, not trusting it to the hotel box; then she returned to her room with flushed cheeks, feeling as guilty as a girl slipping out with a love-letter instead of a mother daring to tell her own son to come home. At that moment she fairly hated the motiveless comfort by which she was surrounded; passivity had become almost a disease, she must shake it off; she would speak that night, and have an understanding about the Cub, no matter how busy her husband might be.

When she had laid aside her things, no maid yet appearing, the Gilead letter claimed her attention, and she was soon absorbed in it. It told of Keith’s resolution to go to Boston, and gave an inventory of the property on the farm that had been bought with Adam Lawton’s money.

She had also, she said, written for instructions as to its future care; would he take charge, or should she look for some suitable person in the neighbourhood? Receiving no answer, and judging that the letter had either been lost, or else that her cousin had been too busy to consider it, Miss Keith had made a second careful copy and enclosed it in a letter to Mrs. Lawton, saying that time pressed, and she must rely upon her to “jog” Cousin Adam’s memory, or perhaps, as the farm at least stood in Brooke’s name, that she might have some wishes in the matter.

Mrs. Lawton had almost finished reading the inventory of simple furnishings, etc., when Brooke entered. Her mother at once noticed a strange expression in her always candid features, and a new light in her wide-open eyes; but the letters in her lap caught Brooke’s attention, and after she had given a brief history of the doings of the afternoon, the two women, seated side by side, bent their heads over the Cub’s epistle, though the elder already knew it by heart, word for word.

“The poor, poor Cub!” ejaculated Brooke at last, half laughing, and then stopping short, for looking up, she saw tears trembling on her mother’s lashes. “If it were only long ago, we would buy him a horse, and spear, and shield, and smuggle him outside the castle walls at night, and let him gallop away to seek his own fortunes. Do you know, little mother, that, in spite of all the liberty I have, and money in my pocket without the asking, I sometimes feel choked and tied down like this bad boy of ours? It was only an hour ago, when I was sitting in that beautiful picture gallery, that it came over me how so many of the things we do every day seem unreal and like a useless dream. We ourselves arrange or else blindly submit to customs that keep us apart instead of bringing those who love each other together, until life gets to be like those stupid gas fire-logs yonder, all for show—a little feverish heat and unwholesomeness as a result instead of the true thing, though to be sure real logs are more trouble and a greater responsibility to tend.

“I want to be something more than furniture in our new home, if it is ever finished, and we succeed in getting out of what Lucy Dean calls this ‘elaborated parlour-car method of living.’ Yes, mother, I’m getting what you call a restless streak again. I think I’m going to pick up my brushes”—and then a serious, almost sad expression crossed her face as she added, “if they will let me.”

“So Cousin Keith’s going away,—going to be married! I wish she could have done the second without the first. I like to think of her at the farm just as she used to be. You know it’s my farm now, and I’ve always planned to go back there some summer, and really work, for if anything could put life in my brush, it would be to live in my ‘River Kingdom.’ I’d much rather do that than have a large country place, such as father plans, though of course Gilead is too quiet and out of touch with things for him, and the farm is too small a bit for his energy to work upon. Cousin Keith has been very thrifty,—‘five cows, a farm horse, chickens, ducks, seed potatoes, cordwood, etc.,’ (all mine, too, because the deed says ‘inclusive of all live stock, and furnishings’). Last of all she lists ‘Tatters, the family dog, whose race has been on the soil as long as we ourselves; if he can’t transfer himself to the newcomers not of the name, Dr. Russell has promised to take him down to Oaklands. Please understand, Cousin Pamela, that Tatters doesn’t rank with live stock,—he is a person, and must be treated as such!’”

“Tatters!” repeated Brooke, looking involuntarily at the artificial fire, so surely does visible heat draw the outward eye when the mind’s eye is a-roving. “That was the name of one of the dogs they had that autumn when I spent that lovely month there, and played at gypsy every day. But he must be very, very old now. Yes, you shall be well treated, old fellow, and not ‘transferred’ to anything or anybody against your will.

“Mother, do you know I think that if only Cousin Keith were not going away, it would be a fine thing to send the Cub to Gilead for a while, until he pulled himself together, and then some not overzealous tutor with a fondness for walking might be found for him.

“What is it?” asked Brooke, reading the confusion in her mother’s face. “You have answered him already and told him that he may come? Good! now we will act together. You take father quite too seriously; if he really understood just what we both wish to do and be, I’m sure that he would be the last one to hinder either, but we haven’t let him see. How can a man who has lived his own life so long possibly understand women unless they give him the clew, and whisper ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ when he gets off the track?

“No one, since ever I can remember, has been allowed to let father even think that he can make a mistake; consequently he really believes he cannot err, and I don’t think that he is wholly to blame for it. I’m going to beg for the Cub’s liberty the minute father comes home, and more than that, I’m going to tell him that we four have been groping round in opposite directions, and that he simply must come into our lives, and let us do for him, or take us into his—that the ‘some day’ when he will have time to listen must begin this very night!”

“Dinner is served!” said the reproving accents of the waiting-maid, letting drop the portière as she spoke, and both women glanced in surprise at the clock that was striking eight.

“Eight o’clock already, and I’m in my street gown,” said Brooke, gathering up her possessions, and making sure that the silk-bound catalogue was in her muff.

“Eight o’clock, and your father has not yet come home!”

“Perhaps he has stopped at the club, and talked longer than usual. I heard to-day through Lucy, to whom her father seems to speak as freely about his business as if she were his partner, that our parents are engaged in some important ‘deal’ together!

“He is probably late for our special benefit,” said Brooke, cheerfully, “so that we may make ourselves just a wee bit pretty,” and putting her arm about her mother, she led her down the corridor to their rooms, which adjoined, and five minutes sufficed for each to slip on the tasteful, yet simple, dinner gown that the lady’s-maid, now at her post, had laid in readiness.

“Ask the page in the outer hall if any note has come for mother,” said Brooke to the woman, as they went to the dining room. “It was only yesterday that I found that two personal notes had been travelling up and down in the elevator for half the morning, in spite of two men at the door, and one posted every ten feet the rest of the way.”

“There is no note come, ma’am,” replied the waiting-maid, a couple of minutes later, “but he says that Mr. Lawton’s been over an hour at home,—at least he came in then, and he’s not seen him go out, that is, not by the lift. He must have let himself in with a key, then, for neither Sellers nor I opened for him.”

“Perhaps he went to the den, thinking we were all out, and does not realize how late it is,” said Brooke, moving swiftly down the hall, followed by her mother. Turning the corner, for her father had located his den, for the sake of quiet, as far as possible from the rest of the apartment, she saw the light that shone above and below the portière, for the door was not wholly closed.

“Yes, he is here after all!” and she threw open the door without knocking, as she alone dared, and entered with some playful words upon her lips, quite prepared to rumple the iron-gray hair, a little thin on top, that partially capped the figure seated at his desk, with his left hand, as usual, in his pocket.

The next moment she stopped, as an undefined feeling of dread held her fast,—the right hand was stiffly extended, as if it had just let go its hold of the movable ’phone that stood on the desk, and knocked it over. The usually alert figure had settled in the chair, the head dropping backward, while, after a single breath, that resounded like a snore, there was no sound.

Brooke touched him quickly; there was still the warmth of life, and the left side of the face twitched frightfully, but no words came; his face, flushed at first, was growing rapidly livid. Instantly she wound her strong young arms about him, and, laying him on the thick rug, his head slightly turned and raised, she motioned to her mother and the maid, who had come at her unconscious call, to loosen collar and clothing, while she sped back to the telephone in her mother’s sitting room to call a doctor who was resident in the hotel, and he was at hand almost before she realized that the call had gone forth.

“Cerebral hemorrhage; has he had bad news or some sudden shock?” was what the physician said a moment after he entered the room where Adam Lawton lay, and saw the litter of papers and the overthrown instrument. But there was no letter or telegram among them that could indicate, and the ominous telephone receiver was mute.

As the men from the house helped move him to his room, Mrs. Lawton and Brooke following silent with the first calmness of a shock, her own words rang in her ears. “He must come into our lives and let us do for him or take us into his life; the ‘some day’ when he will have time to listen must begin to-night!”

The first hour passed, that period of rapid action following a calamity that intervenes before the clutch of the tension of continued strain is felt.

The family physician came and called an expert in counsel, and then Brooke was directed to send for a nurse,—more than one her mother would not have, and as she was intelligently calm, no objection was made to her insistence that she should share both the care and responsibility of the night.

Adam Lawton was unconscious, and life itself must hang in the balance for many hours at best, and the physicians insisted upon the most perfect quiet.

Who can say where the mind is when its physical registry is interrupted? The physician cannot tell you, but at the same time he is very careful to keep injurious impression beyond the range of the seemingly deaf ears. Brooke went to her father’s den and touched the instrument that had so recently fallen from his hand, almost with a shudder. If only it would repeat to her what it had said to him, some light would be shed upon the mystery.

After arranging for the nurse, a desire for companionship during this night of suspense seized her, and she called the number that meant Lucy Dean, thinking as she did so, “I must tell her as quickly as I can, for I cannot bear her usual telephone joking now.”

“Lucy? It is I, Brooke Lawton; can you come down and spend the night with me? Please listen until I finish. Something awful has happened—father—”

Lucy (breaking in with a torrent of words): “Yes, you poor dear, I know all about it; heard it just as soon as I got home, before dinner—dad told me. We would have been down by now, only dad thought, as your father had gone against his advice through all this matter, it might seem pushing in me. Cheer up, it may come out all right yet.”

Brooke: “I don’t understand; how could you have heard before dinner?—it was eight o’clock before we knew ourselves.”