HAGAR

HAGAR

BY
MARY JOHNSTON

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1913

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY MARY JOHNSTON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October 1913

CONTENTS

HAGAR

HAGAR

CHAPTER I
THE PACKET-BOAT

"Low Braidge!"

The people on deck bent over, some until heads touched knees, others, more exactly calculating, just sufficiently to clear the beams. The canal-boat passed beneath the bridge, and all straightened themselves on their camp-stools. The gentlemen who were smoking put their cigars again between their lips. The two or three ladies resumed book or knitting. The sun was low, and the sycamores and willows fringing the banks cast long shadows across the canal. The northern bank was not so clothed with foliage, and one saw an expanse of bottom land, meadows and cornfields, and beyond, low mountains, purple in the evening light. The boat slipped from a stripe of gold into a stripe of shadow, and from a stripe of shadow into a stripe of gold. The negro and the mule on the towpath were now but a bit of dusk in motion, and now were lit and, so to speak, powdered with gold-dust. Now the rope between boat and towpath showed an arm-thick golden serpent, and now it did not show at all. Now a little cloud of gnats and flies, accompanying the boat, shone in burnished armour and now they put on a mantle of shade.

A dark little girl, of twelve years, dark and thin, sitting aft on the deck floor, her long, white-stockinged legs folded decorously under her, her blue gingham skirt spread out, and her Leghorn hat upon her knees, appealed to one of the reading ladies. "Aunt Serena, what is 'evolution'?"

Miss Serena Ashendyne laid down her book. "'Evolution,'" she said blankly, "'what is evolution?'"

"I heard grandfather say it just now. He said, 'That man Darwin and his evolution'—"

"Oh!" said Miss Serena. "He meant a very wicked and irreligious Englishman who wrote a dreadful book."

"Was it named 'Evolution'?"

"No. I forget just what it is called. 'Beginning'—No! 'Origin of Species.' That was it."

"Have we got it in the library at Gilead Balm?"

"Heavens! No!"

"Why?"

"Your grandfather wouldn't let it come into the house. No lady would read it."

"Oh!"

Miss Serena returned to her novel. She sat very elegantly on the camp-stool, a graceful, long-lined, drooping form in a greenish-grey delaine picked out with tiny daisies. It was made polonaise. Miss Serena, alone of the people at Gilead Balm, kept up with the fashions.

At the other end of the long, narrow deck a knot of country gentlemen were telling war stories. All had fought in the war—the war that had been over now for twenty years and more. There were an empty sleeve and a wooden leg in the group and other marks of bullet and sabre. They told good stories, the country gentlemen, and they indulged in mellow laughter. Blue rings of tobacco-smoke rose and mingled and made a haze about that end of the boat.

"How the gentlemen are enjoying themselves!" said placidly one of the knitting ladies.

The dark little girl continued to ponder the omission from the library. "Aunt Serena—"

"Yes, Hagar."

"Is it like 'Tom Jones'?"

"'Tom Jones'! What do you know about 'Tom Jones'?"

"Grandfather was reading it one day and laughing, and after he had done with it I got it down from the top shelf and asked him if I might read it, and he said, 'No, certainly not! it isn't a book for ladies.'"

"Your grandfather was quite right. You read entirely too much anyway. Dr. Bude told your mother so."

The little girl turned large, alarmed eyes upon her. "I don't read half as much as I used to. I don't read except just a little time in the morning and evening and after supper. It would kill me if I couldn't read—"

"Well, well," said Miss Serena, "I suppose we shall continue to spoil you!"

She said it in a very sweet voice, and she patted the child's arm and then she went back to "The Wooing O't." She was fond of reading novels herself, though she liked better to do macramé work and to paint porcelain placques.

The packet-boat glided on. It was almost the last packet-boat in the state and upon almost its last journey. Presently there would go away forever the long, musical winding of the packet-boat horn. It would never echo any more among the purple hills, but the locomotive would shriek here as it shrieked elsewhere. Beyond the willows and sycamores, across the river whose reaches were seen at intervals, gangs of convicts with keepers and guards and overseers were at work upon the railroad.

The boat passing through a lock, the dark little girl stared, fascinated, at one of these convicts, a "trusty," a young white man who was there at the lock-keeper's on some errand and who now stood speaking to the stout old man on the coping of masonry. As the water in the lock fell and the boat was steadily lowered and the stone walls on either hand grew higher and higher, the figure of the convict came to stand far above all on deck. Dressed hideously, in broad stripes of black and white, it stood against the calm evening sky, with a sense of something withdrawn and yet gigantic. The face was only once turned toward the boat with its freight of people who dressed as they pleased. It was not at all a bad face, and it was boyishly young. The boat slipped from the lock and went on down the canal, between green banks. The negro on the towpath was singing and his rich voice floated across—

"For everywhere I went ter pray,
I met all hell right on my way."

The country gentlemen were laughing again, wrapped in the blue and fragrant smoke. The captain of the packet-boat came up the companionway and passed from group to group like a benevolent patriarch. Down below, supper was cooking; one smelled the coffee. The sun was slipping lower, in the green bottoms the frogs were choiring. Standing in the prow of the boat a negro winded the long packet-boat horn. It echoed and echoed from the purple hills.

The dark little girl was still staring at the dwindling lock. The black-and-white figure, striped like a zebra, was there yet, though it had come down out of the sky and had now only the green of the country about and behind it. It grew smaller and smaller until it was no larger than a black-and-white woodpecker—it was gone.

She appealed again to Miss Serena. "Aunt Serena, what do you suppose he did?"

Miss Serena, who prided herself upon her patience, put down her book for the tenth time. "Of whom are you speaking, Hagar?"

"That man back there—the convict."

"I didn't notice him. But if he is a convict, he probably did something very wicked."

Hagar sighed. "I don't think anybody ought to be made to dress like that. It—it smudged my soul just to look at it."

"Convicts," said Miss Serena, "are not usually people of fine feelings. And you ought to take warning by him never to do anything wicked."

A silence while the trees and the flowering blackberry bushes went by; then, "Aunt Serena—"

"Yes?"

"The woman over there with the baby—she says her husband got hurt in an accident—and she's got to get to him—and she hasn't got any money. The stout man gave her something, and I think the captain wouldn't let her pay. Can't I—wouldn't you—can't I—give her just a little?"

"The trouble is," said Miss Serena, "that you never know whether or not those people are telling the truth. And we aren't rich, as you know, Hagar. But if you want to, you can go ask your grandfather if he will give you something to give."

The dark little girl undoubled her white-stockinged legs, got up, smoothed down her blue gingham dress, and went forward until the tobacco-smoke wrapped her in a fragrant fog. Out of it came, genially, the Colonel's voice, rich as old madeira, shot like shot silk with curious electric tensions and strains and agreements, a voice at once mellifluous and capable of revealments demanding other adjectives, a voice that was the Colonel's and spoke the Colonel from head to heel. It went with his beauty, intact yet at fifty-eight, with the greying amber of his hair, mustache, and imperial; with his eyes, not large but finely shaped and coloured; with his slightly aquiline nose; with the height and easy swing of his body that was neither too spare nor too full. It went with him from head to foot, and, though it was certainly not a loud voice nor a too-much-used one, it quite usually dominated whatever group for the moment enclosed the Colonel. He was speaking now in a kind of energetic, golden drawl. "So he came up to me and said, 'Dash it, Ashendyne! if gentlemen can't be allowed in this degenerate age to rule their own households and arrange their own duels—'" He became aware of the child standing by him, and put out a well-formed, nervous hand. "Yes, Gipsy? What is it you want now?"

Hagar explained sedately.

"Her husband hurt and can't get to him to nurse him?" said the Colonel. "Well, well! That's pretty bad! I suppose we must take up a collection. Pass the hat, Gipsy!"

Hagar went to each of the country gentlemen, not with the suggested hat, but with her small palm held out, cupped. One by one they dropped into it quarter or dime, and each, as his coin tinkled down, had for the collector of bounty a drawling, caressing, humorous word. She thanked each gentleman as his bit of silver touched her hand and thanked with a sedate little manner of perfection. Manners at Gilead Balm were notoriously of a perfection.

Hagar took the money to the woman with the baby and gave it to her shyly, with a red spot in each cheek. She was careful to explain, when the woman began to stammer thanks, that it was from her grandfather and the other gentlemen and that they were anxious to help. She was a very honest little girl, with an honest wish to place credit where it belonged.

Back beside Miss Serena she sat and studied the moving green banks. The sun was almost down; there were wonderful golden clouds above the mountains. Willow and sycamore, on the river side of the canal, fell away. Across an emerald, marshy strip, you saw the bright, larger stream, mirror for the bright sky, and across it in turn you saw limestone cliffs topped with shaggy woods, and you heard the sound of picks against rock and saw another band of convicts, white and black, making the railroad. The packet-boat horn was blown again,—long, musical, somewhat mournfully echoing. The negro on the towpath, riding sideways on his mule, was singing still.

"Aunt Serena—"

"Yes, Hagar."

"Why is it that women don't have any money?"

Miss Serena closed her book. She glanced at the fields and the sky-line. "We shall be at Gilead Balm in ten minutes.—You ask too many questions, Hagar! It is a very bad habit to be always interrogating. It is quite distinctly unladylike."

CHAPTER II
GILEAD BALM

At the Gilead Balm landing waited Captain Bob with a negro man to carry up to the house the Colonel's portmanteau and Miss Serena's small leather trunk. The packet-boat came in sight, white and slow as a deliberate swan, drew reflectively down the shining reach of water, and sidled to the landing. The Colonel shook hands with all the country gentlemen and bowed to the ladies, and the country gentlemen bowed to Miss Serena, who in turn bent her head and smiled, and the captain said good-bye, and the Colonel gave the attendant darky a quarter, and the woman with the baby came to that side of the boat and held for a moment the hand of the dark little girl, and then the gangplank was placed and the three Ashendynes passed over to the Colonel's land. The horn blew again, long, melodious; the negro on the towpath said, "Get up!" to the mule. Amid a waving of hands and a chorus of slow, agreeable voices the packet-boat glided from the landing and proceeded down the pink water between the willows and sycamores.

Captain Bob, with his hound Luna at his heels, greeted the returning members of the family: "Well, Serena, did you have a pleasant visit? Hey, Gipsy, you've grown a week! Well, Colonel?"

The Colonel shook hands with his brother. "Very pleasant time, Bob! Good old-time people, too good for this damned new-fangled world! But—" he breathed deep. "I am glad to get home. I am always glad to get home. Well? Everything all right?"

"Right as a trivet! The Bishop's here, and Mrs. LeGrand. Came on the stage yesterday."

"That's good news," said the Colonel. "The Bishop's always welcome, and Mrs. LeGrand is most welcome."

The four began to walk toward the house, half a mile away, just visible among great trees. The dark little girl walked beside the hound, but the hound kept her nose in Captain Bob's palm. She was fond of Hagar, but Captain Bob was her god. As for Captain Bob himself, he walked like a curious, unfinished, somewhat flawed and shortened suggestion of his brother. He was shorter than the Colonel and broader; hair, nose, eyes, mouth were nothing like so fine; carriage and port were quite different; he lacked the cachet, he lacked the grand air. For all that, the fact that they were brothers was evident enough. Captain Bob loved dogs and hunting, and read the county newspaper and the sporting almanac. He was not complex. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he acted from instinct and habit, and the puzzling hundredth time he beat about for tradition and precedent. He was good-natured and spendthrift, with brains enough for not too distant purposes. Emotionally, he was strongest in family affection. "Missed you all!" he now observed cheerfully. "Gilead Balm's been like a graveyard."

"How is mother?" asked Miss Serena. She was picking her way delicately through the green lane, between the evening primroses, the grey-green delaine held just right. "She wrote me that she burned her hand trying the strawberry preserves."

"It's all right now. Never saw Old Miss looking better!"

The dark little girl turned her dark eyes on Captain Bob. "How is my mother?"

"Maria? Well, I should say that she was all right, too. I haven't heard her complain."

"Gad! I wish she would complain," ejaculated the Colonel. "Then one could tell her there was nothing to complain about. I hate these women who go through life with a smile on their lips and an indictment in their eyes—when there's only the usual up and down of living to indict. I had rather they would whine—though I hate them to whine, too. But women are all cowards. No woman knows how to take the world."

The dark little girl, who had been walking between the Colonel and Captain Bob, began to tremble. "Whoever else's a coward, my mother's not—"

"I don't think, father, you ought—"

Captain Bob was stronger yet. He was fond of Gipsy, and he thought that sometimes the family bore too hardly on Maria. Now and then he did a small bit of cloudy thinking, and when he did it he always brought forth the result with a certain curious clearing of the throat and nodding of the head, as though the birth of an idea was attended with considerable physical strain. "No, Colonel," now he said, "you oughtn't! Damn it, where'd we be but for women anyhow? As for Maria—I think you're too hard on Maria. The chief trouble with Maria is that she isn't herself an Ashendyne. Of course, she can't help that, but I think it is a pity. Always did think that men ought to marry at least fifth or sixth cousins. Bring women in without blood and traditions of people they've got to live with—of course, there's trouble adapting. Seen it a score of times. Maria's just like the rest when they're not cousins. Ought somehow to be cousins."

"Bob, you are a perfect fool," remarked the Colonel.

He walked on, between the primroses, his hands behind him, tall and easy in his black, wide-skirted coat and his soft black hat. The earth was in shadow, but the sky glowed carnation. Against it stood out the long, low red-brick house of Gilead Balm. At either gable end rose pyramidal cedars, high and dark against the vivid sky. In the lane there was the smell of dewy grass, and on either hand, back from the vine-draped rail fences, rolled the violet fields. Somewhere in the distance sounded the tinkling of cow bells. The ardent sky began to pale; the swallows were circling above the chimneys of Gilead Balm, and now the silver Venus came out clear.

The little girl named Hagar lagged a little going up the low hill on which the house stood. She was growing fast, and all journeys were exciting, and she was taking iron because she wasn't very strong, and she had had a week of change and had been thinking hard and was tired. She wanted to see her mother, and indeed she wanted to see all at Gilead Balm, for, unlike her mother, she loved Gilead Balm, but going up the hill she lagged a little. Partly it was to look at the star and to listen to the distant bells. She was not aware that she observed that which we call Nature with a deep passion and curiosity, that beauty was the breath of her nostrils, and that she hungered and thirsted after the righteousness of knowledge. She only came slowly, after many years, into that much knowledge of herself. To-day she was but an undeveloped child, her mind a nebula just beginning to spiral. In conversation she would have applied the word "pretty" indiscriminately to the flushed sky, the star, the wheeling swallows, the yellow primroses. But within, already, the primroses struck one note, and the wheeling swallows another, and the sky another, and the star another, and, combined, they made a chord that was like no other chord. Already her moments were distinguished, and each time she saw Gilead Balm she saw, and dimly knew that she saw, a different Gilead Balm.

She climbed the hill a little stumblingly, a dark, thin child with braided, dusky hair. She was so tired that things went into a kind of mist—the house and the packet-boat and the lock and the convict and the piping frogs and the cat-tails in a marsh and the word "evolution."... And then, up on the low hilltop, Dilsey and Plutus lit the lamps, and the house had a row of topaz eyes;—and here was the cedar at the little gate, and the smell of box—box smell was always of a very especial character, dark in hue, cool in temperature, and quite unfathomably old. The four passed through the house gate and went up the winding path between the box and the old, old blush roses—and here was the old house dog Roger fawning on the Colonel—and the topaz eyes were growing bigger, bigger....

"I am glad to get home," said Miss Serena, in front. "It's curious how, every time you go from home, something happens to cure you of a roving disposition."

Captain Bob laughed. "Never knew you had a roving disposition, Serena! Luna here, now,—Luna's got a roving disposition—haven't you, old girl?"

"Luna," replied Miss Serena with some asperity, "Luna makes no effort to alter her disposition. I do. Everybody's got tendencies and notions that it is their bounden duty to suppress. If they don't, it leads to all kind of changes and upheavals.—And that is what I criticize in Maria. She makes no effort, either. It's most unfortunate."

The Colonel, in front of them all, moved on with a fine serenity. He had taken off his hat, and in the yet warm glow the grey-amber of his hair seemed fairly luminous. As he walked he looked appreciatively up at the evening star. He read poetry with a fine, discriminating, masculine taste, and now, with a gesture toward the star, he repeated a line of Byron. Maria and her idiosyncrasies troubled him only when they stood actually athwart his path; certainly he had never brooded upon them, nor turned them over in his hand and looked at them. She was his son's wife—more, he was inclined to think, the pity! She was, therefore, Ashendyne, and she was housed at Gilead Balm. He was inclined to be fond of the child Hagar. As for his son—the Colonel, in his cooler moments, supposed, damn it! that he and Medway were too much alike to get on together. At any rate, whatever the reason, they did not get on together. Gilead Balm had not seen the younger Ashendyne for some years. He was in Europe, whence he wrote, at very long intervals, an amiable traveller's letter. Neither had he and Maria gotten on well together.

The house grew large, filling all the foreground. The topaz eyes changed to a wide, soft, diffused light, pouring from windows and the open hall door. In it now appeared the figures of the elder Mrs. Ashendyne, of the Bishop, and Mrs. LeGrand, coming out upon the porch to welcome the travellers.

Hagar took her grandmother's kiss and Mrs. LeGrand's kiss and the Bishop's kiss, and then, after a few moments of standing still in the hall while the agreeable, southern voices rose and fell, she stole away, went up the shallow, worn stairway, turned to the left, and opened the door of her mother's room. She opened it softly. "Uncle Plutus says you've got a headache."

Maria's voice came from the sofa in the window. "Yes, I have. Shut the door softly, and don't let us have any light. But I don't mind your sitting by me."

The couch was deep and heaped with pillows. Maria's slight, small form was drawn up in a corner, her head high, her hands twisted and locked about her knees. She wore a soft white wrapper, tied beneath her breast with a purple ribbon. She had beautiful hair. Thick and long and dusky, it was now loosened and spread until it made a covering for the pillows. Out from its waves looked her small face, still and exhausted. The headache, after having lasted all day, was going away now at twilight. She just turned her dark eyes upon her daughter. "I don't mind your lying down beside me," she said. "There's room. Only don't jar my head—" Hagar lay carefully down upon the couch, her head in the hollow of her mother's arm. "Did you have a good time?"

"Yes.... Pretty good."

"What did you do?"

"There was another little girl named Sylvie. We played in the hayloft, and we made willow baskets, and we cut paper dolls out of a 'Godey's Lady's Book.' I named mine Lucy Ashton and Diana Vernon and Rebecca, and she didn't know any good names, so I named hers for her. We named them Rosalind and Cordelia and Vashti. Then there was a lady who played backgammon with me, and I read two books."

"What were they?"

"One was 'Gulliver's Travels.' I didn't like it altogether, though I liked some of it. The other was Shelley's 'Shorter Poems.' Oh"—Hagar rose to a sitting posture—"I liked that better than anything I've ever read—"

"You are young to be reading Shelley," said her mother. She spoke with her lips only, her young, pain-stilled face high upon the pillows. "What did you like best?"

Hagar pondered it. "I liked the 'Cloud,' and I liked the 'West Wind,' and I liked the 'Spirit of Night'—"

Some one tapped at the door, and then without waiting for an answer opened it. The elder Mrs. Ashendyne entered. Hagar slipped from the sofa and Maria changed her position, though very slightly. "Come in," she said, though Mrs. Ashendyne was already in.

"Old Miss," as the major part of Gilead Balm called her, Old Miss crossed the room with a stately tread and took the winged chair. She intended tarrying but a moment, but she was a woman who never stood to talk. She always sat down like a regent, and the standing was done by others. She was a large woman, tall rather than otherwise, of a distinct comeliness, and authoritative—oh, authoritative from her black lace cap on her still brown, smoothly parted hair, to her low-heeled list shoes, black against her white stockings! Now she folded her hands upon her black stuff skirt and regarded Maria. "Are you better?"

"Yes, thank you."

"If you would take my advice," said Mrs. Ashendyne, "and put horseradish leaves steeped in hot water to your forehead and the back of your neck, you would find it a great relief."

"I had some lavender water," said Maria.

"The horseradish would have been far better. Are you coming to supper?"

"No, I think not. I do not care for anything. I am not hungry."

"I will have Phœbe fetch you a little thin chipped beef and a beaten biscuit and a cup of coffee. You must eat.—If you gave way less it would be better for you."

Maria looked at her with sombre eyes. At once the fingers slipped to other and deeper notes. "If I gave way less.... Well, yes, I do give way. I have never seen how not to. I suppose if I were cleverer and braver, I should see—"

"What I mean," said Old Miss with dignity, "is that the Lord, for his own good purposes,—and it is sinful to question his purposes,—regulated society as it is regulated, and placed women where they are placed. No one claims—certainly I don't claim—that women as women do not see a great deal of hardship. The Bible gives us to understand that it is their punishment. Then I say take your punishment with meekness. It is possible that by doing so you may help earn remission for all."

"There was always," said Maria, "something frightful to me in the old notion of whipping-boys for kings and princes. How very bad to be the whipping-boy, and how infinitely worse to be the king or prince whose whipping-boy you were!"

A red came into Mrs. Ashendyne's face. "You are at times positively blasphemous!" she said. "I do not at all see of what, personally, you have to complain. If Medway is estranged from you, you have probably only yourself to thank—"

"I never wish," said Maria, "to see Medway again."

Medway's mother rose with stateliness from the winged chair. "When it comes to statements like that from a wife, it is time for old-fashioned people like myself to take our leave.—Phœbe shall bring you your supper. Hagar, you had better come with me."

"Leave Hagar here," said the other.

"The bell will ring in ten minutes. Come, child!"

"Stay where you are, Hagar. When the bell rings, she shall come."

The elder Mrs. Ashendyne's voice deepened. "It is hard for me to see the mind of my son's child perverted, filled with all manner of foolish queries and rebellions."

"Your son's child," answered Maria from among her pillows, "happens to be also my child. His family has just had her for a solid week. Now, pray let me have her for an hour." Her eyes, dark and large in her thin, young face, narrowed until the lashes met. "I am perfectly aware of how deplorable is the whole situation. If I were wiser and stronger and more heroic, I suppose I should break through it. I suppose I should go away with Hagar. I suppose I should learn to work. I suppose I should somehow keep us both. I suppose I might live again. I suppose I might ... even ... get a divorce—"

Her mother-in-law towered. "The Bishop shall talk to you the first thing in the morning—"

CHAPTER III
THE DESCENT OF MAN

A pool of June sunlight lay on the library floor. It made a veritable Pool of Siloam, with all around a brown, bank-like duskiness. The room was by no means book-lined, but there were four tall mahogany cases, one against each wall, well filled for the most part with mellow calf. Flanking each case hung Ashendyne portraits, in oval, very old gilt frames. Beneath three of these were fixed silhouettes of Revolutionary Ashendynes; beneath the others, war photographs, cartes de visite, a dozen in one frame. There was a mahogany escritoire and mahogany chairs and a mahogany table, and, before the fireplace, a fire-screen done in cross-stitch by a colonial Ashendyne. The curtains were down for the summer, and the dark, polished floor was bare. The room was large, and there presided a pleasant sense of unencumbered space and coolness.

In the parlour, across the hall, Miss Serena had been allowed full power. Here there was a crocheted macramé lambrequin across the mantel-shelf, and a plush table-scarf worked with chenille, and fine thread tidies for the chairs, and a green-and-white worsted "water-lily" mat for the lamp, and embroidery on the piano cover. Here were pelargoniums and azaleas painted on porcelain placques, and a painted screen—gladioli and calla lilies,—and autumn leaves mounted on the top of a small table, and a gilded milking stool, and gilded cat-tails in decalcomania jars. But the Colonel had barred off the library. "Embroider petticoat-world to the top of your bent—but don't embroider books!"

The Colonel was not in the library. He had mounted his horse and ridden off down the river to see a brother-in-law about some piece of business. Ashendynes and Coltsworths fairly divided the county between them. Blood kin and marriage connections,—all counted to the seventeenth degree,—traditional old friendships, old acquaintances, clients, tenants, neighbours, the coloured people sometime their servants, folk generally, from Judge to blacksmith,—the two families and their allies ramified over several hundred square miles, and when you said "the county," what you saw were Ashendynes and Coltsworths. They lived in brick houses set among green acres and in frame houses facing village streets. None were in the least rich, a frightful, impoverishing war being no great time behind them, and many were poor—but one and all they had "quality."

The Colonel was gone down the river to Hawk Nest. Captain Bob was in the stable yard. Muffled, from the parlour, the doors being carefully closed, came the notes of "Silvery Waves." Miss Serena was practising. It was raspberry-jam time of year. In the brick kitchen out in the yard Old Miss spent the morning with her knitting, superintending operations. A great copper kettle sat on the stove. Between it and the window had been placed a barrel and here perched a half-grown negro boy, in his hands a pole with a paddle-like cross-piece at the further end. With this he slowly stirred, round and round, the bubbling, viscous mass in the copper kettle. Kitchen doors and windows were wide, and in came the hum of bees and the fresh June air, and out floated delectable odours of raspberry jam. Old Miss sat in an ample low chair in the doorway, knitting white cotton socks for the Colonel.

The Bishop—who was a bishop from another state—was writing letters. Mrs. LeGrand had taken her novel out to the hammock beneath the cedars. Upstairs, in her own room, in a big four-poster bed, lay Maria, ill with a low fever. Dr. Bude came every other day, and he said that he hoped it was nothing much but that he couldn't tell yet: Mrs. Ashendyne must lie quiet and take the draught he left, and her room must be kept still and cool, and he would suggest that Phœbe, whom she seemed to like to have about her, should nurse her, and he would suggest, too, that there be no disturbing conversation, and that, indeed, she be left in the greatest quiet. It seemed nervous largely—"Yes, yes, that's true! We all ought to fight more than we do. But the nervous system isn't the imaginary thing people think! She isn't very strong, and—wrongly, of course—she dashes herself against conditions and environment like a bird against glass. I don't suppose," said Dr. Bude, "that it would be possible for her to travel?"

Maria lay in the four-poster bed, making images of the light and shadow in the room. Sometimes she asked for Hagar, and sometimes for hours she seemed to forget that Hagar existed. Old Miss, coming into the room at one of these times, and seeing her push the child from her with a frightened air and a stammering "I don't know you"—Old Miss, later in the day, took Hagar into her own room, set her in a chair beside her, taught her a new knitting-stitch, and explained that it would be kinder to remain out of her mother's room, seeing that her presence there evidently troubled her mother.

"It troubles her sometimes," said Hagar, "but it doesn't trouble her most times. Most times she likes me there."

"I do not think you can judge of that," said her grandmother. "At any rate, I think it best that you should stay out of the room. You can, of course, go in to say good-morning and good-night.—Throw the thread over your finger like that. Mimy is making sugar-cakes this morning, and if you want to you can help her cut them out."

"Grandmother, please let me go four times a day—"

"No. I do not consider it best for either of you. You heard the doctor say that your mother must not be agitated, and you saw yourself, a while ago, that she did not seem to want you. I will tell Phœbe. Be a good, obedient child!—Bring me the bag yonder, and let's see if we can't find enough pink worsted for a doll's afghan."

That had been two days ago. Hagar went, morning and evening, to her mother's room, and sometimes Maria knew her and held her hands and played with her hair, and sometimes she did not seem to know her and ignored her or talked to her as a stranger. Her grandmother told her to pray for her mother's recovery. She did not need the telling; she loved her mother, and her petitions were frequent. Sometimes she got down on her knees to make them; sometimes she just made them walking around. "O God, save my mother. For Jesus' sake. Amen."—"O God, let my mother get well. For Jesus' sake. Amen."—She had finished the pink afghan, and she had done the dusting and errands her grandmother appointed her. This morning they had let her arrange the flowers in the bowls and vases. She always liked to do that, and she had been happy for almost an hour—but then the feeling came back....

The bright pool on the library floor did not reach to the bookcases. They were all in the gold-dust powdered umber of the rest of the room. Hagar standing before one of them, first on a hassock, and then, for the upper shelves, on a chair, hunted something to read. "Ministering Children"—she had read it. "Stepping Heavenward"—she had read it. "Home Influence" and "Mother's Recompense"—she had read them. Mrs. Sherwood—she had read Mrs. Sherwood—many volumes of Mrs. Sherwood. In after life it was only by a violent effort that she dismissed, in favour of any other India, the spectre of Mrs. Sherwood's India. "Parent's Assistant and Moral Tales"—she knew Simple Susan and Rosamond and all of them by heart. "Rasselas"—she had read it. "Scottish Chiefs"—she had read it. The forms of Wallace and Helen and Murray and Edwin flitted through her mind—she half put out her hand to the book, then withdrew it. She wasn't at all happy, and she wanted novelty. Miss Mühlbach—"Prince Eugene and His Times"—"Napoleon and Marie Louise"—she had read those, too. "The Draytons and the Davenants"—she half thought she would read about Olive and Roger again, but at last she passed them by also. There wasn't anything on that shelf she wanted. She called it the blue and green and red shelf, because the books were bound in those colours. Miss Serena's name was in most of these volumes.

The shelf that she undertook next had another air. To Hagar each case had its own air, and each shelf its own air, and each book its own air. "Blair's Rhetoric"—she had read some of that, but she didn't want it to-day. "Pilgrim's Progress"—she knew that by heart. "Burke's Speeches"—"Junius"—she had read "Junius," as she had read many another thing simply because it was there, and a book was a book. She had read it without much understanding, but she liked the language. Milton—she knew a great part of Milton, but to-day she didn't want poetry. Poetry was for when you were happy. Scott—on another day Scott might have sufficed, but to-day she wanted something new—so new and so interesting that it would make the hard, unhappy feeling go away. She stepped from the hassock upon the chair and began to study the titles of the books on almost the top shelf.... There was one in the corner, quite out of sight unless you were on a chair, right up here, face to face with the shelf. The book was even pushed back as though it had retired—or had been retired—behind its fellows so as to be out of danger, or, perhaps, out of the way of being dangerous. Hagar put in her slender, sun-browned hand and drew it forward until she could read the legend on the back—"The Descent of Man." She drew it quite forth, and bringing both hands into play opened it. "By Charles Darwin." She turned the leaves. There were woodcuts—cuts that exercised a fascination. She glanced at the first page: "He who wishes to decide whether man is the modified descendant of some preëxisting form—"

Hagar turned upon the chair and looked about her. The room was a desert for solitude and balmy quiet. Distantly, through the closed parlour doors, came Miss Serena's rendering of "Monastery Bells." She knew that her grandfather was down the river, and that her grandmother was making raspberry jam. She knew that the Bishop was in his room, and that Mrs. LeGrand was out under the cedars. Uncle Bob did not count anyway—he rarely asked embarrassing questions. She may have hesitated one moment, but no more. She got down from the chair, put it back against the wall, closed the bookcase door, and taking the "Descent of Man" with her went over to the old, worn horsehair sofa and curled herself up at the end in a cool and slippery hollow. A gold-dust shaft, slipping through the window, lit her hair, the printed page, and the slim, long-fingered hand that clasped it.

Hagar knew quite well what she was doing. She was going to read a book which, if her course were known, she would be forbidden to read. It had happened before now that she had read books under the ban of Gilead Balm. But heretofore she had always been able to say that she had not known that they were so, had not known she was doing wrong. That could not be said in this case. Aunt Serena had distinctly told her that Charles Darwin was a wicked and irreligious man, and that no lady would read his books.... But then Aunt Serena had unsparingly condemned other books which Hagar's mind yet refused to condemn. She had condemned "The Scarlet Letter." When Gilead Balm discovered Hagar at the last page of that book, there had ensued a family discussion. Miss Serena said that she blushed when she thought of the things that Hagar was learning. The Colonel had not blushed, but he said that such books unsettled all received notions, and while he supported her he wasn't going to have Medway's child imbibing damned anarchical sentiments of any type. Old Miss said a number of things, most of which tended toward Maria. The latter had defended her daughter, but afterwards she told Hagar that in this world, even if you didn't think you were doing wrong, it made for all the happiness there seemed to be not to do what other people thought you ought not to do.... But Hagar didn't believe yet that there was anything wrong in reading "The Scarlet Letter." She had been passionately sorry for Hester, and she had felt—she did not know why—a kind of terrified pity for Mr. Dimmesdale, and she had loved little Pearl. She had intended asking her mother what the red-cloth letter that Hester Prynne wore meant, but it had gone out of her mind. The chapter she liked best was the one with little Pearl playing in the wood.... Perhaps Aunt Serena, having been mistaken about that book, was mistaken, too, about Charles Darwin.

Neither now nor later did she in any wise love the feel of wrong-doing. Forbidden fruit did not appeal to her merely because it was forbidden. But if there was no inner forbidding, if she truly doubted the justice or authority or abstract rightness of the restraining hand, she was capable of attaining the fruit whether forbidden or no. There was always the check of great native kindliness. If what she wanted to do was going—no matter how senselessly—to trouble or hurt other people's feelings, on the whole she wouldn't do it. In the case of this June day and the "Descent of Man" the library was empty. She only wanted to look at the pictures and to run over the reading enough to see what it was about—then she would put it back on the top shelf. She was not by nature indirect or secretive. She preferred to go straightforwardly, to act in the open. But if the wall of not-agreed-in objection stood too high and thick before her, she was capable of stealing forth in the dusk and seeking a way around it. Coiled now in the cool hollow of the sofa, half in and half out of the shaft of sunshine, she began to read.

The broad band of gold-dust shifted place. Miss Serena, arrived at the last ten minutes of her hour and a half at the piano, began to play "Pearls and Roses." Out in the brick kitchen Old Miss dropped a tablespoonful of raspberry jam into a saucer, let it cool, tasted, and pronounced it done. The negro boy and Mimy between them lifted the copper kettle from the stove. Upstairs in Gilead Balm's best room the Bishop folded and slipped into an addressed envelope the last letter he was going to write that morning. Out under the cedars Mrs. LeGrand came to a dull stretch in her novel. She yawned, closed the book, and leaned back against the pillows in the hammock.

Mrs. LeGrand was fair and forty, but only pleasantly plump. She had a creamy skin, moderately large, hazel eyes, moderately far apart, a small, straight nose, a yielding mouth, and a chin that indubitably would presently be double. She was a widow and an orphan. Married at nineteen, her husband, the stars of a brigadier-general upon his grey collar, had within the year fallen upon some one of the blood-soaked battle-grounds of the state. Her father, the important bearer of an old, important name, had served the Confederacy well in a high civil capacity. When the long horror of the war was over, and the longer, miserable torture of the Reconstruction was passing, and a comparative ease and pale dawn of prosperity rose over the state, Mrs. LeGrand looked about her from the remnant of an old plantation on the edge of a tidewater town. The house was dilapidated, but large. The grounds had Old Neglect for gardener, but they, too, were large, and only needed Good-Care-at-Last for complete rehabilitation. Mrs. LeGrand had a kind of smooth, continuous, low-pressure energy, but no money. "A girls' school," she murmured to herself.

When she wrote, here and there over the state, it was at once seen by her correspondents that this was just the thing for the daughter of a public man and the widow of a gallant officer. It was both ladylike and possible.... That was some years ago. Mrs. LeGrand's School for Young Ladies was now an established fact. The house was repaired, the grounds were trim, there was a corps of six teachers, with prospects of expansion, there were day pupils and boarding pupils. Mrs LeGrand saw in her mind's eye long wing-like extensions to the main house where more boarding pupils might be accommodated.... She was successful, and success agreed with her. The coat grew sleek, the cream rose to the top, every angle disappeared; she was warmly optimistic, and smooth, indolent good company. In the summer-time she left Eglantine and from late June to September shared her time between the Springs and the country homes of kindred, family connections, or girlhood friends. She nearly always came for a fortnight or more to Gilead Balm.

Now, leaning back in the hammock, the novel shut, her eyes closed, she was going pleasantly over to herself the additions and improvements to be carried out at Eglantine. From this her mind slipped to her correspondence with a French teacher who promised well, and thence to certain letters received that week from patrons with daughters. One of these, from a state farther south, spoke in highest praise of Mrs. LeGrand's guardianship of the young female mind, of the safe and elegant paths into which she guided it, and of her gift generally for preserving dew and bloom and ignorance of evil in her interesting charges. Every one likes praise and no one is so churlish as to refuse a proffered bouquet or to doubt the judgment of the donor. Mrs. LeGrand experienced from head to foot a soft and amiable glow.

For ten minutes longer she lay in an atmosphere of balm, then she opened her eyes, drew her watch from her white-ribbon belt, and glancing at it surmised that by now the Bishop might have finished his letters. Upon this thought she rose, and paced across the bright June grass to the house. "Pearls and Roses" floated from the parlour. Her hand on the doorknob, Mrs. LeGrand paused irresolutely for a moment, then lightly took it away and crossed the hall to the library. A minute later the Bishop, portly and fine, letters in his hand, came down the stairs, and turned toward this room. The mail-bag always hung, he remembered, by the library escritoire. Though he was a large man, he moved with great lightness; he was at once ponderous and easy. Miss Serena at the piano could hardly have heard him pass the door, so something occult, perhaps, made her ignore the da capo over the bar of "Pearls and Roses" which she had now reached. She struck a final chord, rose, closed the piano, and left the parlour.

CHAPTER IV
THE CONVICT

"My dear Bishop!" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand; "won't you come here and talk to this little girl?"

"To Hagar?" answered the Bishop. "What is the trouble with Hagar? Have you broken your doll, poor dear?" He came easily across to the horsehair sofa, a good man, by definition, as ever was. "What's grieving you, little girl?"

"I think that it is Hagar who may come to grieve others," said Mrs. LeGrand. "I do not suppose it is my business to interfere,—as I should interfere were she in my charge at Eglantine,—but I cannot but see in my daily task how difficult it is to eradicate from a youthful mind the stain that has been left by an improper book—"

"An improper book! What are you doing, Hagar, with an improper book?"

The Bishop put out his hand and took it. He looked at the title and at the author's name beneath, turned over a dozen pages, closed the book, and put it from him on the cold, bare mahogany table. "It was not for this that I christened you," he said.

Miss Serena joined the group.

"Serena," appealed Mrs. LeGrand, "do you think Hagar ought to be allowed to contaminate her mind by a book like that?"

Miss Serena looked. "That child!—She's been reading Darwin!"

A slow colour came into her cheeks. The book was shocking, but the truly shocking thing was how absolutely Hagar had disobeyed. Miss Serena's soul was soft as wax, pliant as a reed to the authorities her world ranged before her. By an inevitable reaction stiffness showed in the few cases where she herself held the orb of authority. To be disobeyed was very grievous to her. Where it was only negligence in regard to some command of her own,—direction to a servant, commands in her Sunday-School class,—she had often to put up with it, though always with a swelling sense of injury. But when things combined, when disobedience to Serena Ashendyne was also disobedience to the constituted authorities, Miss Serena became adamant.

Now she looked at Hagar with a little gasp, and then, seeing through the open door the elder Mrs. Ashendyne entering from the kitchen, she called to her. "Mother, come here a moment!"...

"If she had said that she was sorry," pronounced the Bishop, "you might forgive her, I think, this time. But if she is going to harden her heart like that, you had best let her see that all sin, in whatever degree, brings suffering. And I should suit, I think, the punishment to the offence. Hagar told me only yesterday that she had rather read a book than gather cherries or play with dolls, or go visiting, or anything. I think I should forbid her to open any book at all for a week."

Behind Gilead Balm, beyond the orchard and a strip of meadow, sprang a ridge of earth, something more than a hill, something less than a low mountain. It was safe, dry, warm, and sandy, too cut-over and traversed to be popular with snakes, too within a stone's throw of the overseer's house and the overseer's dogs to be subject to tramps or squirrel-hunting boys, just wooded enough and furrowed with shallow ravines to make it to children a romantic, sprite-inhabited region. When children came to Gilead Balm, as sometimes, in the slow, continuous procession through the houses of a people who traditionally kept "open house," they did come, Hagar and they always played freely and alone on the home-ward-facing side of the ridge. When the overseer's grandchildren, too, came to visit him, they and Hagar played here, and sometimes Mary Magazine, Isham and Car'line's ten-year-old at the Ferry, was allowed to spend the day, and she and Hagar played together on the ridge. Hagar was very fond of Mary Magazine.

One day, having completed her circle of flower dolls before her companion's was done, she leaned back against the apple tree beneath which the two were seated and thoughtfully regarded the other's down-bent brown face and "wrapped" hair. "Mary Magazine, you couldn't have been named 'Mary Magazine.' You were named Mary Magdalene."

"No'm," said Mary Magazine, a pink morning-glory in one hand and a blue one in the other. "No'm. I'm named Mary Magazine. My mammy done named me for de lady what took her cologne bottle somebody give her Christmas, an' poured it on her han' an' rubbed Jesus' feet."

When Mary Magazine didn't come to Gilead Balm and no children were staying in the house, and the overseer's grandchildren were at their home on the other side of the county, Hagar might—provided always she let some one know where she was going—Hagar might play alone on the ridge. To-day, having asked the Colonel if she might, she was playing there alone.

"Playing" was the accepted word. They always talked of her as "playing," and she herself repeated the word.

"May I go play awhile on the ridge?"

"I reckon so, Gipsy. Wear your sunbonnet and don't get into any mischief."

At the overseer's house she stopped to talk with Mrs. Green, picking pease in the garden. "Mahnin', Hagar," said Mrs. Green. "How's yo' ma this mahnin'?"

"I think she's better, Mrs. Green. She laughed a little this morning. Grandmother let me stay a whole half-hour, and mother talked about her grandmother, and about picking up shells on the beach, and about a little boat that she used to go out to sea in. She said that all last night she felt that boat beneath her. She laughed and said it felt like going home.—Only"—Hagar looked at Mrs. Green with large, wistful eyes—"only home's really Gilead Balm."

"Of course it is," said Mrs. Green cheerfully. She sat down on an overturned bucket between the green rows of pease, and pushed back her sunbonnet from her kind, old wrinkled face. "I remember when yo' ma came here jest as well. She was jest the loveliest thing!—But of course all her own people were a good long way off, and she was a seafarer herself, and she couldn't somehow get used to the hills. I've heard her say they jest shut her in like a prison.... But then, after a while, you came, an' I reckon, though she says things sometimes, wherever you are she feels to be home. When it comes to being a woman, the good Lord has to get in com-pensation somewhere, or I don't reckon none of us could stand it.—I'm glad she's better."

"I'm glad," said Hagar. "Can I help you pick the pease, Mrs. Green?"

"Thank you, child, but I've about picked the mess. You goin' to play on the ridge? I wish Thomasine and Maggie and Corker were here to play with you."

"I wish they were," said Hagar. Her eyes filled. "It's a very lonesome day. Yesterday was lonesome and to-morrow's going to be lonesome—"

"Haven't you got a good book? I never see such a child for books."

Two tears came out of Hagar's eyes. "I was reading a book Aunt Serena told me not to read.—And now I'm not to read anything for a whole week."

"Sho!" exclaimed Mrs. Green. "What did you do that for? Don't you know that little girls ought to mind?"

Hagar sighed. "Yes, I suppose they ought.... I wish I had now.... It's so lonesome not to read when your mother's sick and grandmother won't let me go into the room only just a little while morning and evening."

"Haven't you got any pretty patchwork nor nothin'?"

Hagar standing among the blush roses, looked at her with sombre eyes. "Mrs. Green, I hate to sew."

"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Green. "That's an awful thing to say!"

She sat on the overturned bucket, between the pale-green, shiny-podded peavines, her friendly old face, knobbed and wrinkled like a Japanese carving, gleaming from between the faded blue slats of her sunbonnet, and she regarded the child before her with real concern. "I wonder now," she said, "if you're goin' to grow up a rebel? Look-a-here, honey, there ain't a mite of ease and comfort on that road."

"That's what the Yankees called us all," said Hagar. 'Rebels.'"

"Ah, I don't mean 'rebel' that-er-way," said Mrs. Green. "There's lonelier and deeper ways of rebellin'. You don't get killed with an army cheerin' you, and newspapers goin' into black, and a state full of people, that were 'rebels' too, keepin' your memory green,—what happens, happens just to you, by yourself without any company, and no wreaths of flowers and farewell speeches. They just open the door and put you out."

"Out where?"

"Out by yourself. Out of this earth's favour. And, though we mayn't think it," said Mrs. Green, "this earth's favour is our sunshine. It's right hard to go where there isn't any sunshine.... I don't know why I'm talking like this to you—but you're a strange child and always were, and I reckon you come by it honest!" She rose from among the peavines. "Well, I've been baking apple turnovers, and they ain't bad to picnic on! Suppose you take a couple up on the ridge with you."

There grew, on the very top of the ridge, a cucumber tree that Hagar loved. Underneath was a little fine, sparse grass and enough pennyroyal to make the place aromatic when the sunshine drew out all its essence, as was the case to-day. Over the light soil, between the sprigs of pennyroyal, went a line of ants carrying grains of some pale, amber-clear substance. Hagar watched them to their hill. When, one by one, they had entered, a second line of foragers emerged and went off to the right through the grass. In a little time these, too, reappeared, each carrying before her a tiny bead of the amber stuff. Hagar watched, elbows on ground and chin on hands. She had a feeling that they were people, and she tried giving them names, but they were so bewilderingly alike that in a moment she could not tell which was "Brownie" and which "Pixie" and which "Slim." She turned upon her back and lying in the grass and pennyroyal saw above her only blue sky and blue sky. She stared into it. "If the angels were sailing like the birds up there and looking down—and looking down—we people might seem all alike to them—all alike and not doing things that were very different—all alike.... Only there are our clothes. Pink ones and blue ones and white ones and black ones and plaid ones and striped ones—" She stared at the blue until she seemed to see step after step of blue, a great ladder leading up, and then she turned on her side and gazed at Gilead Balm and, a mile away, the canal and the shining river.

She could see many windows, but not her mother's window. She had to imagine that. Lonesomeness and ennui, that had gone away for a bit in the interest of watching the ants, returned full force. She stood up and cast about for something to break the spell.

The apple turnovers wrapped in a turkey-red, fringed napkin, rested in a small willow basket upon the grass. Hagar was not hungry, but she considered that she might as well eat a turnover, and then that she might as well have a party and ask a dozen flower dolls. Her twelve years were as a moving plateau—one side a misty looming landscape of the mind, older and higher than her age would forecast; on the other, green, hollow, daisy-starred meadows of sheer childhood. Her attention passed from side to side, and now it settled in the meadows.

She considered the grass beneath the cucumber tree for a dining-room, and then she grew aware that she was thirsty, and so came to the conclusion that she would descend the back side of the ridge to the spring and have the party there. Crossing the hand's breadth of level ground she began to climb down the long shady slope toward a stream that trickled through a bit of wood and a thicket, and a small, ice-cold spring in a ferny hollow. The sun-bathed landscape, river and canal and fields and red-brick Gilead Balm with its cedars, and the garden and orchard, and the overseer's house sank from view. There was only the broad-leaved cucumber tree against the deep blue sky. The trunk of the cucumber tree disappeared, and then the greater branches, and then the lesser branches toward the top, and then the bushy green top itself. When Hagar and the other children played on the ridge, they followed her lead and called this side "the far country." To them—or perhaps only to Hagar—it had a clime, an atmosphere quite different from the homeward-facing side.

When she came to the spring at the foot of the ridge she was very thirsty. She knelt on a great sunken rock, and, taking off her sunbonnet, leaned forward between the fern and mint, made a cup of her hands and drank the sparkling water. When she had had all she wished, she settled back and regarded the green, flowering thicket. It came close to the spring, filling the space between the water and the wood, and it was a wild, luxuriant tangle. Hagar's fancy began to play with it. Now it was a fairy wood for Thumbelina—now Titania and Oberon danced there in the moonlight—now her mind gave it height and hugeness, and it was the wood around the Sleeping Beauty. The light-winged minutes went by and then she remembered the apple turnovers.... Here was the slab of rock for the table. She spread the turkey-red napkin for cloth, and she laid blackberry leaves for plates, and put the apple turnovers grandly in the middle. Then she moved about the hollow and gathered her guests. Wild rose, ox-eye daisy, Black-eyed Susan, elder, white clover, and columbine—quite a good party.... She set each with due ceremony on the flat rock, before a blackberry-leaf plate, and then she took her own place facing the thicket, and after a polite little pause, folded her hands and closed her eyes. "We will say," she said, "a silent Grace."

When she opened her eyes, she opened them full upon other eyes—haggard, wolfishly hungry eyes, looking at her from out the thicket, behind them a body striped like a wasp....

"I didn't mean to scare you," said the boy, "but if you ever went most of two days and a night without anything to eat, you'd know how it felt."

"I never did," said Hagar. "But I can imagine it. I wish I had asked Mrs. Green for five apple turnovers." As she spoke, she pushed the red fringed napkin with the second turnover toward him. "Eat that one, too. I truly don't want any, and the flowers are never hungry."

He bit into the second turnover. "It seems mean to eat up your tea-party, but I'm 'most dead, and that's the truth—"

Hagar, sitting on the great stone with her hands folded in her lap and her sunbonnet back on her shoulders, watched her suddenly acquired guest. He would not come clear out of the thicket; the tangled growth held him all but head and shoulders. "I believe I've seen you before," she said at last. "About two weeks ago grandfather and Aunt Serena and I were on the packet-boat. Weren't you at the lock up the river? The boat went down and down until you were standing 'way up, just against the sky. I am almost sure it was you."

He reddened. "Yes, it was me." Then, dropping the arm that held the yet uneaten bit of turnover, he broke out. "I didn't run away while I was a trusty! I wouldn't have done it! One of the men lied about me and said dirty words about my people, and I jumped on him and knocked his head against a stone until he didn't come to for half an hour! Then they did things to me, and did what they called degrading me. 'No more trustying for you!' said the boss. So I run away—three days ago." He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "It seems more like three years. I reckon they've got the dogs out."

"What have they got the dogs out for?"

"Why, to hunt me. I—I—"

His voice sunk. Terror came back, and will-breaking fear, a chill nausea and swooning of the soul. He groaned and half rose from the thicket. "I was lying here till night, but I reckon I'd better be going—" His eyes fell upon his body and he sank back. "O God! I reckon in hell we'll wear these clothes."

Hagar stared at him, faint reflecting lines of anxiety and unhappiness on her brow, quiverings about her lips. "Ought you to have run away? Was it right to run away?" The colour flooded her face. It was always hard for her to tell of her errors, but she felt that she and the boy were in somewhat the same case, and that she ought to do it. "I did something my aunt had told me not to do. It was reading a book that she said was wicked. I can't see yet that it was wicked. It was very interesting. But the Bishop said that he didn't christen me for that, and that it was a sin. And now, for a whole week, grandmother says that I'm not to read any book at all—which is very hard. What I mean is," said Hagar, "though I don't feel yet that there was anything wicked in that book (I didn't read much of it), I feel perfectly certain that I ought to obey grandmother. The Bible tells you so, and I believe in the Bible." Her brow puckered again. "At least, I believe that I believe in the Bible. And if there wasn't anybody in the house, and the most interesting books were lying around, I wouldn't—at least I think I wouldn't—touch one till the week is over." She tried earnestly to explain her position. "I mean that if I really did wrong—and I reckon I'll have to say that I oughtn't to have disobeyed Aunt Serena, though the Bible doesn't say anything about aunts—I'll take the hard things that come after. Of course"—she ended politely—"your folks may have been mistaken, and you may not have done anything wrong at all—"

The boy bloomed at her. "I'll tell you what I did. I live 'way out in the mountains, the other end of nowhere. Well, Christmas there was a dance in the Cove, and I went, but Nancy Horn, that had promised to go with me, broke her word and went with Dave Windless. There was a lot of apple jack around, and I took more'n I usually take. And then, when we were dancing the reel, somebody—and I'll swear still it was Dave, though he swore in the court-room it wasn't—Dave Windless put out his foot and tripped me up! Well, Nancy, she laughed.... I don't remember anything clear after that, and I thought that the man who was shooting up the room was some other person, though I did think it was funny the pistol was in my hand.... Anyhow, Dave got a ball through his hip, and old Daddy Jake Willy, that I was awful fond of and wouldn't have hurt not for a still of my own and the best horse on the mountain, he got his bow arm broken, and one of the women was frightened into fits, and next week when her baby was born and had a harelip she said I'd done it.... Anyhow the sheriff came and took me—it was about dawn, 'way up on the mountain-side, and I still thought it was another man going away toward Catamount Gap and the next county where there wasn't any Nancy Horn—I thought so clear till I fired at the sheriff and broke his elbow and the deputy came up behind and twisted the pistol away, and somebody else threw a gourd of water from the spring over me ... and I come to and found it had been me all the time.... That's what I did, and I got four years."

"Four years?" said Hagar. "Four years in—in jail?"

"In the penitentiary," said the boy. "It's a worse word than jail.... I know what's right and wrong. Liquor's wrong, and the Judge said carrying concealed weapons was wrong, and I reckon it is, though there isn't much concealment when everybody knows you're wearing them.... Yes, liquor's wrong, and quarrels might go off just with some words and using your fists if powder and shot weren't right under your hand, tempting you. Yes, drinking's wrong and quarreling's wrong, and after I come to my senses it didn't need no preacher like those that come round Sundays to tell me that. But I tell you what's the whole floor space of hell wronger than most of the things men do and that's the place the lawyers and the judges and the juries send men to!"

"Do you mean that they oughtn't to—to do anything to you? You did do wrong."

"No, I don't mean that," said the boy. "I've got good sense. If I didn't see it at first, old Daddy Jake Willy came to the county jail three or four times, and he made me see it. The Judge and the lawyer couldn't ha' made me see it, but he did. And at last I was willing to go." His face worked. "The day before I was to go I was in that cell I'd stayed in then two months and I looked right out into the sunshine. You could see Old Rocky Knob between two bars, and Bear's Den between two, and Lonely River running down into the valley between the other two, and the sun shining over everything—shining just like it's shining to-day. Well, I stood there, looking out, and made a good resolution. I was going to take what was coming to me because I deserved it, having broken the peace and lamed men and hurt a woman, and broken Daddy Jake's arm and fired at the sheriff. I hadn't meant to do all that, but still I had done it. So I said, 'I'll take it. And I won't give any trouble. And I'll keep the rules. If it's a place to make men better in, I'll come out a better man. I'll work just as hard as any man, and if there's books to study I'll study, and I'll keep the rules and try to help other people, and when I come out, I'll be young still and a better man.'" He rose to his full height in the thicket, the upper half of his striped body showing like a swimmer's above the matted green. He sent out his young arms in a wide gesture at once mocking and despairing, but whether addressed to earth or heaven was not apparent. "You see, I didn't know any more about that place than a baby unborn!"

With that he dropped like a stone back into the thicket and lay dumb and close, with agonized eyes. Around the base of the ridge out of the wood came the dogs; behind them three men with guns.

...One of the men was a jolly, fatherly kind of person. He tried to explain to Hagar that they weren't really going to hurt the convict at all—she saw for herself that the dogs hadn't hurt him, not a mite! The handcuffs didn't hurt him either—they were loose and comfortable. No; they weren't going to do anything to him, they were just going to take him back.—He hadn't hurt her, had he? hadn't said anything disagreeable to her or done anything but eat up her tea-party?—Then that was all right, and the fatherly person would go himself with her to the house and tell the Colonel about it. Of course he knew the Colonel, everybody knew the Colonel! And "Stop crying, little lady! That boy ain't worth it."

The Colonel's dictum was that the country was getting so damned unsettled that Hagar must not again be let to play on the ridge alone.

Old Miss, who had had that morning a somewhat longish talk with Dr. Bude, stated that she would tell Mary Green to send for Thomasine and Maggie and Corker. "Dr. Bude thinks the child broods too much, and it may be better to have healthy diversion for her in case—"

"In case—!" exclaimed Miss Serena. "Does he really think, mother, that it's serious?"

"I don't think he knows," answered her mother. "I don't think it is, myself. But Maria was never like anybody else—"

"Dear Maria!" said Mrs. LeGrand. "She should have made such a brilliant, lovely woman! If only there was a little more compliance, more feminine sweetness, more—if I may say so—unselfishness—"

"Where," asked the Bishop, "is Medway?"

Mrs. Ashendyne's needles clicked. "My son was in Spain, the last we heard: studying the painter Murillo."

CHAPTER V
MARIA

Thomasine and Maggie and Corker arrived and filled the overseer's house with noise. They were a blatantly healthful, boisterous set, only Thomasine showing gleams of quiet. They wanted at once to play on the ridge, but now Hagar wouldn't play on the ridge. She said she didn't like it any more. As she spoke, her thin shoulders drew together, and her eyes also, and two vertical lines appeared between these. "What you shakin' for?" asked Corker. "Got a chill?"

So they played down by the branch where the willows grew, or in the old, disused tobacco-house, or in the orchard, or about a haystack on a hillside. Corker wanted always to play robbers or going to sea. Maggie liked to jump from the haystack or to swing, swing, swing, holding to the long, pendant green withes of the weeping willow, or to climb the apple trees. Thomasine liked to make dams across the streamlet below the tobacco-house. She liked to shape wet clay, and she saved every pebble or bit of bright china, or broken blue or green glass with which to decorate a small grotto they were making. She also liked to play ring-around-a-rosy, and to hunt for four-leaved clovers. Hagar liked to play going to sea, but she did not care for robbers. She liked to swing from the willows and to climb a particular apple tree which she loved, but she did not want to jump from the haystack, nor to climb all trees. She liked almost everything that Thomasine liked, but she was not so terribly fond of ring-around-a-rosy. In her own likings she found herself somewhat lonely. None of the three, though Thomasine more than the others, cared much for a book. They would rather have a sugar-cake any day. When it came to lying on the hillside without speaking and watching the clouds and the tree-tops, they did not care for that at all. However, when they were tired, and everything else failed, they did like Hagar to tell them a story. "Aladdin" they liked—sitting in the shadow of the haystack, their chins on their hands, Thomasine's eyes still unconsciously alert for four-leaved clovers, Corker with a June apple, trying to determine whether he would bite into it now or wait until Aladdin's mother had uncovered the jewels before the Sultan. They liked "Aladdin" and "Queen Gulnare and Prince Beder" and "Snow White and Rose Red."

And then came the day that they went after raspberries. That morning Hagar, turning the doorknob of her mother's room, found the door softly opened from within and Phœbe on the threshold. Phœbe came out, closing the door gently behind her, beckoned to Hagar, and the two crossed the hall to the deep window. "I wouldn't go in this mahnin' ef I were you, honey," said Phœbe. "Miss Maria done hab a bad night. She couldn't sleep an' her heart mos' give out. Oh, hit's all right now, an' she's been lyin' still an' peaceful since de dawn come up. But we wants her to sleep an' we don' want her to talk. An' Old Miss thinks an' Phœbe thinks too, honey, dat you'd better not go in this mahnin'. Nex' time Old Miss 'll let you stay twice as long to make up for it."

Hagar looked at her large-eyed, "Is my mother going to die, Aunt Phœbe?"

But old Phœbe put her arms around her and the wrinkles came out all over her brown face as they did when she laughed. Phœbe was a good woman, wise and old and tender and a strong liar. "Law, no, chile—What put dat notion in yo' po' little haid? No, indeedy! We gwine pull Miss Maria through, jes' as easy! Dr. Bude he say he gwine do hit, and what Dr. Bude say goes for sho! Phœbe done see him raise de mos' dead. Law, no, don' you worry 'bout Miss Maria! An' de nex' time you goes in de room, you kin stay jes' ez long ez you like. You kin sit by her er whole hour an' won't nobody say you nay."

Downstairs Captain Bob was sitting on the sunny step of the sunny back porch, getting a thorn out of Luna's paw. "Hi, Gipsy," he said, when Hagar came and stood by him; "what's the matter with breakfast this morning?"

"I don't know," said Hagar. "I haven't seen grandmother to-day. Uncle Bob—"

"Well, chicken?"

"They'd tell you, wouldn't they, if my mother was going to die?"

Captain Bob, having relieved Luna of the thorn, gave his attention fully to his great-niece. He was slow and kindly and unexacting and incurious and unimaginative, and the unusual never occurred to him before it happened. "Maria going to die? That's damned nonsense, partridge! Haven't heard a breath of it—isn't anything to hear. Nobody dies at Gilead Balm—hasn't been a death here since the War. Besides, Medway's away.—Mustn't get notions in your head—makes you unhappy, and things go on just the same as ever." He pulled her down on the step beside him. "Look at Luna, now! She ain't notionate—are you, Luna? Luna and I are going over the hills this morning to find Old Miss's guineas for her. Don't you want to go along?"

"I don't believe I do, thank you, Uncle Bob."

Mrs. LeGrand came out upon the porch, fresh and charming in a figured dimity with a blue ribbon. "Mrs. Ashendyne and Serena are talking to Dr. Bude, and as you men must be famished, Captain Bob, I am going to ring for breakfast and pour out your coffee for you—"

In the hall Hagar appealed to her. "Mrs. LeGrand, can't I go into grandmother's room and hear what Dr. Bude says about my mother?" But Mrs. LeGrand smiled and shook her head and laid hands on her. "No, indeed, dear child! Your mother's all right. You come with me, and have your breakfast."

The Bishop appearing at the stair foot, she turned to greet him. Hagar, slipping from her touch, stole down the hall to Old Miss's chamber and tried the door. It gave and let her in. Old Miss was seated in the big chair, Dr. Bude and the Colonel were standing on either side of the hearth, and Miss Serena was between them and the door.

"Hagar!" exclaimed Miss Serena. "Don't come in now, dear. Grandmother and I will be out to breakfast in a moment."

But Hagar had the courage of unhappiness and groping and fear for the most loved. She fled straight to Dr. Bude. "Dr. Bude—oh, Dr. Bude—is my mother going to die?"

"No, Bude," said the Colonel from the other side of the hearth.

Dr. Bude, an able country doctor, loved and honoured, devoted and fatherly and wise, made a "Tchk!" with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

Old Miss, leaving the big chair, came and took Hagar and drew her back with her into the deep chintz hollows. No one might doubt that Old Miss loved her granddaughter. Now her clasp was as stately as ever, but her voice was quite gentle, though of course authoritative—else it could not have belonged to Old Miss. "Your mother had a bad night, dear, and so, to make her quiet and comfortable, we sent early for Dr. Bude. She is going to sleep now, and to-morrow you shall go in and see her. But you can only go if you are a good, obedient child. Yes, I am telling you the truth. I think Maria will get well. I have never thought anything else.—Now, run away and get your breakfast, and to-day you and Thomasine and Maggie and Corker shall go raspberrying."

Dr. Bude spoke from the braided rug. "No one knows, Hagar, what's going to happen in this old world, do they? But Nature has a way of taking care of people quite regardless and without waiting to consult the doctors. I've watched Nature right closely, and I never give up anything. Your mother's right ill, my dear, but so have a lot of other people been right ill and gotten well. You go pick your raspberries, and maybe to-morrow you can see her—"

"Can't I see her to-night?"

"Well, maybe—maybe—" said the doctor.

The raspberry patches were almost two miles away, past a number of shaggy hills and dales. A wood road led that way, and Hagar and Thomasine and Maggie and Corker, with Jinnie, a coloured woman, to take care of them, felt the damp leaf mould under their feet. A breeze, coming through oak and pine, tossed their hair and fluttered the girls' skirts and the broad collar of Corker's voluminous shirt. The sky was bright blue, with two or three large clouds like sailing vessels with all sail on. A cat-bird sang to split its throat. They saw a black snake, and a rabbit showed a white tip of tail, and a lightning-blasted pine with a large empty bird-nest in the topmost crotch, ineffably lonely and deserted against the deep sky, engaged their attention. They had various adventures. Each of the children carried a tin bucket for berries, and Jinnie carried a white-oak split basket with dinner in it—sandwiches and rusks and a jar with milk and snowball cakes. They were going to stay all day. That was what usually they loved. It was so adventurous.

Corker strode along whistling. Maggie whistled, too, as well as a boy, though he looked disdain at her and said, "Huh! Girls can't whistle!"

"Dar's a piece of poetry I done heard," said Jinnie,—

"'Er whistlin' woman an' er crowin' hen,
Dey ain' gwine come ter no good end.'"

Thomasine hummed as she walked. She had filled her bucket with various matters as she went along, and now she was engaged in fashioning out of the green burrs of the burdock a basket with an elaborate handle. "Don't you want some burrs?" she asked Hagar, walking beside her. Thomasine was always considerate and would give away almost anything she had.

Hagar took the burrs and began also to make a basket. She was being good. And, indeed, as the moments passed, the heavy, painful feeling about her heart went away. The doctor had said and grandmother had said, and Uncle Bob and Phœbe and every one.... The raspberries. She instantly visualized one of the blue willow saucers filled with raspberries, carried in by herself to her mother, at supper-time. Yarrow was in bloom and Black-eyed Susans and the tall white Jerusalem candles. Coming back she would gather a big bouquet for the grey jar on her mother's table. She grew light-hearted. A bronze butterfly fluttered before her, the heavy odour of the pine filled her nostrils, the sky was so blue, the air so sweet—there was a pearly cloud like a castle and another like a little boat—a little boat. Off went her fancy, lizard-quick, feather-light.

"Swing low, sweet chariot—"

sang Jinnie as she walked.

The raspberry patches were in sunny hollows. There was a span-wide stream, running pure over a gravel bed, and a grazed-over hillside, green and short-piled as velvet, and deep woods closing in, shutting out. Summer sunshine bathed every grass blade and berry leaf, summer winds cooled the air, bees and grasshoppers and birds, squirrels in the woods, rippling water, wind in the leaves made summer sounds. It was a happy day. Sometimes Hagar, Thomasine, Maggie, Corker, and Jinnie picked purply-red berries from the same bush; sometimes they scattered and combined in twos and threes. Sometimes each established a corner and picked in an elfin solitude. Sometimes they conversed or bubbled over with laughter, sometimes they kept a serious silence. It was a matter of rivalry as to whose bucket should first be filled. Hagar strayed off at last to an angle of an old rail fence. The berries, as she found, were very fine here. She called the news to the others, but they said they had fine bushes, too, and so she picked on with a world of her own about her. The June-bugs droned and droned, her fingers moved slower and slower. At last she stopped picking, and, lying down on a sunken rock by the fence, fell to dreaming. Her dreams were already shot with thought, and she was apt, when she seemed most idle, to be silently, inwardly growing. Now she was thinking about Heaven and about God. She was a great committer of poetry to memory, and now, while she lay filtering sand through her hands as through an hourglass, she said over a stanza hard to learn, which yet she had learned some days ago.

"Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home—"

When she had repeated it dreamily, in an inward whisper, the problem of why, in that case, she was so far from home engaged her attention. The "here" and the "there—" God away, away off on a throne with angels, and Hagar Ashendyne, in a blue sunbonnet here by a Virginia rail fence, with raspberry stain on her hands. Home was where you lived. God was everywhere; then, was God right here, too? But Hagar Ashendyne couldn't see the throne and the gold steps and floor and the angels. She could make a picture of them, just as she could of Solomon's throne, or Pharaoh's throne, or Queen Victoria's throne, but the picture didn't stir anything at her heart. She wasn't homesick for the court. She was homesick to be a good woman when she grew up, and to learn all the time and to know beautiful things, but she wasn't homesick for Heaven where God lived. Then was she wicked? Hagar wondered and wondered. The yellow sand dropped from between her palms.... God in the sand, God in me, God here and now.... Then God also is trying to grow more God.... Hagar drew a great sigh, and for the moment gave it up.

Before her on the grey rail was a slender, burnished insect, all gold-and-green armour. Around the lock of the fence came, like a gold-and-green moving stiletto, a lizard which took and devoured the gold-and-green insect.... God in the lizard, God in the insect, God devouring God, making Himself feed Himself, growing so.... The sun suddenly left the grass and the raspberry bushes. A cloud had hidden it. Other cloud masses, here pearly white, here somewhat dark, were boiling up from the horizon.

Jinnie called the children together. "What we gwine do? Look like er storm. Reckon we better light out fer home!"

Protests arose. "Ho!" cried Corker, "it ain't going to be a storm. I haven't got my bucket more'n half full and we haven't had a picnic neither! Let's stay!"

"Let's stay," echoed Maggie. "Who's afraid of a little bit of storm anyhow?"

"It's lots better for it to catch us here in the open," argued Thomasine. "They're all tall trees in the wood. But I think the clouds are getting smaller—there's the sun again!"

The sunshine fell, strong and golden. "We's gwine stay den," said Jinnie. "But ef hit rains an' you all gets wet an' teks cold, I's gwine tell Old Miss I jus' couldn't mek you come erway!—Dar's de old cow-house at de end of de field. I reckon we kin refugee dar ef de worst comes to de worst."

While they were eating the snowball cakes, a large cloud came up and determinedly covered the sun. By the time they had eaten the last crumb, lightnings were playing. "Dar now, I done tol' you!" cried Jinnie. "I never see such children anyhow! Old Miss an' Mrs. Green jus' ought-ter whip you all! Now you gwine git soppin' wet an' maybe de lightning'll strike you, too!"

"No, it won't!" cried Corker. "The cow-house's my castle, an' we've been robbing a freight train an' the constable an' old Captain Towney and the army are after us—I'm going to get to the cow-house first!"

Maggie scrambled to her feet. "No, you ain't! I'm going to—"

The cow-house was dark and somewhat dirty, but they found a tolerable square yard or two of earthen floor and they all sat close together for warmth—the air having grown quite cold—and for company, a thunderstorm, after all, being a thing that made even train robbers and castled barons feel rather small and helpless. For an hour lightnings flashed and thunders rolled and the rain fell in leaden lines. Then the lightnings grew less frequent and vivid, and the thunder travelled farther away, but the rain still fell. "Oh, it's so stupid and dark in here!" said Corker. "Let's tell stories. Hagar, you tell a story, and Jinnie, you tell a story!"

Hagar told about the Snow Queen and Kay and Gerda, and they liked that very well. All the cow-house was dark as the little robber girl's hut in the night-time when all were asleep save Gerda and the little robber girl and the reindeer. When they came to the reindeer, Corker said he heard him moving behind them in a corner, and Maggie said she heard him, too, and Jinnie called out, "Whoa, dere, Mr. Reindeer! You des er stay still till we's ready fer you!"—and they all drew closer together with a shudder of delight.

The clouds were breaking—the lines of rain were silver instead of leaden. Even the cow-house was lighter inside. There was no reindeer, after all; there were only brown logs and trampled earth and mud-daubers' nests and a big spider's web. "Now, Jinnie," said Corker, "you tell a ghost story."

Thomasine objected. "I don't like ghost stories. Hagar doesn't either."

"I don't mind them much," said Hagar. "I don't have to believe them."

But Jinnie chose to become indignant. "You jes' hab to believe dem. Dey're true! My lan'! Goin' ter church an' readin' de Bible an' den doubtin' erbout ghosts! I'se gwine tell you er story you's got ter believe, 'cause hit's done happen! Hit's gwine ter scare you, too! Dey tell me hit scare a young girl down in de Hollow inter fits. Hit's gwine ter mek yo' flesh crawl. Sayin' ghos' stories ain't true, when everybody knows dey's true!"

The piece of ancient African imagination, traveller of ten thousand years through heated forests, was fearsome enough. "Ugh!" said the children and shivered and stared.—It took the sun, indeed, to drive the creeping, mistlike thoughts away.

Going home through the rain-soaked woodland, Hagar began to gather flowers. Her bucket of berries on her arm, she stepped aside for this bloom and that, gathering with long stems, making a sheaf of blossoms. "What you doin' dat for?" queried Jinnie. "Dey's all wet. You'll jes' ruin dat gingham dress!" But Hagar kept on plucking Black-eyed Susans, and cardinal flowers, and purple clover and lady's-lace.

They came, in the afternoon glow, in sight of Gilead Balm. They came closer until the house was large, standing between its dark, funereal cedars, with a rosy cloud behind.

"All the blinds are closed as though we'd gone away!" said Hagar. "I never saw it that way before."

Mrs. Green was at the lower gate, waiting for them. Her old, kind, wrinkled face was pale between the slats of her sunbonnet, but her eyelids were reddened as though she had been weeping. "Yes, yes, children, I'm glad you got a lot of berries!—Corker and Maggie and Thomasine, you go with Jinnie. Mind me and go.—Hagar, child, you and me are goin' to come on behind.... You and me are goin' to sit here a bit on the summer-house step.... The Colonel said I was the best one after all to do it, and I'm going to do it, but I'd rather take a killing! ... Yes, sit right here, with my arm about you. Hagar, child, I've got something to tell you, honey."

Hagar looked at her with large, dark eyes. "Mrs. Green, why are all the shutters closed?"

CHAPTER VI
EGLANTINE

No one could be so cross-grained as to deny that Eglantine was a sweet place. It lay sweetly on just the right, softly swelling hill. The old grey-stucco main house had a sweet porch, with wistaria growing sweetly over it; the long, added grey-stucco wings had pink and white roses growing sweetly on trellises between the windows. There were silver maples and heavily blooming locust trees and three fine magnolias. There were thickets of weigelia and spiræa and forsythia, and winding walks, and an arbour, and the whole twenty acres or so was enclosed by a thorny, osage-orange hedge, almost, though not quite so high as the hedge around the Sleeping Beauty's palace. It was a sweet place. Everyone said so—parents and guardians, the town that neighboured Eglantine, tourists that drove by, visitors to the Commencement exercises—everybody! The girls themselves said so. It was praised of all—almost all. The place was sweet. M. Morel, the French teacher, who was always improving his English, and so on the hunt for synonyms, once said in company that it was saccharine.

Miss Carlisle, who taught ancient and modern history and, in the interstices, astronomy and a blue-penciled physiology, gently corrected him. "Oh, M. Morel! We never use that word in this sense! If you wish to vary the term you might use 'charming,' or 'refined,' or 'elegant.' Besides"—she gazed across the lawn—"it isn't so sweet, I always think, in November as it is in April or May."

"The sweetest time, I think," said Miss Bedford, who taught mathematics, geography, and Latin, "is when the lilac is in bloom."

"And when the robins nest again," sighed a pensive, widowed Mrs. Lane, who taught the little girls.

"It is 'refined' always," said M. Morel. "November or April, what is ze difference? It has ze atmosphere. It is sugary."

"Here," remarked Miss Gage, who taught philosophy—"here is Mrs. LeGrand."

All rose to greet the mistress of Eglantine as she came out from the hall upon the broad porch. Mrs. LeGrand's graciously ample form was wrapped in black cashmere and black lace. Her face was unwrinkled, but her hair had rapidly whitened. It was piled upon her head after an agreeable fashion and crowned by a graceful small cap of lace. She was ample and creamy and refinedly despotic. With her came her god-daughter, Sylvie Maine. It was early November, and the sycamores were yet bronze, the maples aflame. It was late Friday afternoon, and the occasion the arrival and entertainment overnight of an English writer of note, a woman visiting America with a book in mind.

Mrs. LeGrand said that she had thought she heard the carriage wheels. Mr. Pollock, the music-master, said, No; it was the wind down the avenue. Mrs. LeGrand, pleasantly, just condescending enough and not too condescending, glanced from one to the other of the group. "M. Morel and Mr. Pollock and you, Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford, will, I hope, take supper with our guest and me? Sylvie, here, will keep her usual place. I can't do without Sylvie. She spoils me and I spoil her! And we will have besides, I think, the girl that has stood highest this month in her classes. Who will it be, Miss Gage?"

"Hagar Ashendyne, Mrs. LeGrand."

Mrs. LeGrand had a humorous smile. "Then, Sylvie, see that Hagar's dress is all right and try to get her to do her hair differently. I like Eglantine girls to look their birth and place."

"Dear Cousin Olivia," said Sylvie, who was extremely pretty, "for all her plainness, Hagar's got distinction."

But Mrs. LeGrand shrugged her shoulders. She couldn't see it. A little wind arising, all the place became a whirl of coloured leaves. And now the carriage wheels were surely heard.

Half an hour later Sylvie went up to Hagar's room. It was what was called the "tower room"—small and high up—too small for anything but a single bed and one inmate. It wasn't a popular room with the Eglantine girls—a room without a roommate was bad enough, and then, when it was upon another floor, quite away from every one—! Language failed. But Hagar Ashendyne liked it, and it had been hers for three years. She had been at Eglantine for three years, going home to Gilead Balm each summer. She was eighteen—old for her age, and young for her age.

Sylvie found her curled in the window-seat, and spoke twice before she made her hear. "Hagar! come back to earth!"

Hagar unfolded her long limbs and pushed her hair away from her eyes. "I was travelling," she said. "I was crossing the Desert of Sahara with a caravan."

"You are," remarked Sylvie, "too funny for words!—You and I are to take supper with 'Roger Michael'!"

A red came into Hagar's cheek. "Are we? Did Mrs. LeGrand say so?"

"Yes—"

Hagar lit the lamp. "'Roger Michael'—'Roger Michael'—Sylvie, wouldn't you rather use your own name if you wrote?"

"Oh, I don't know!" answered Sylvie vaguely. "What dress are you going to wear?"

"I haven't any but the green."

"Then wear your deep lace collar with it. Cousin Olivia wants you to look as nice as possible. Don't you want me to do your hair?"

Hagar placed the lamp upon the wooden slab of a small, old-time dressing-table. That done, she stood and looked at herself with a curious, wistful puckering of the lips. "Sylvie, prinking and fixing up doesn't suit me."

"Don't you like people to like you?"

"Yes, I do. I like it so much it must be a sin. Only not very many people do.... And I don't think prinking helps."

"Yes, it does. If you look pretty, how can people help liking you? It's three fourths the battle."

Hagar fell to considering it. "Is it?... But then we don't all think the same thing pretty or ugly." The red showed again like wine beneath her smooth, dark skin, "Sylvie, I'd like to be beautiful. I'd like to be as beautiful as Beatrix Esmond. I'd like to be as beautiful as Helen of Troy. But everybody at Eglantine thinks I am ugly, and I suppose I am." She looked wistfully at Sylvie.

Now in the back of Sylvie's head there was certainly the thought that Hagar ought to have said, "I'd like to be as beautiful as you, Sylvie." But Sylvie had a sweet temper and she was not unmagnanimous. "I shouldn't call you ugly," she said judicially. "You aren't pretty, and I don't believe any one would ever call you so, but you aren't at all disagreeably plain. You've got something that makes people ask who you are. I wouldn't worry."

"Oh, I wasn't worrying!" said Hagar. "I was only preferring.—I'll wear the lace collar." She took it out of a black Japanned box, and with it the topaz brooch that had been her mother's.

The visitor from England found the large, square Eglantine parlour an interesting room. The pier-glasses, framed in sallow gilt, the many-prismed chandelier, the old velvet carpet strewn with large soft roses, the claw-foot furniture, the two or three portraits of powdered Colonial gentlemen, the bits of old china, the framed letters bearing signatures that seemed to float to her from out her old United States History—all came to her like a vague fragrance from some unusual old garden. And then, curiously superimposed upon all this, appeared memorials of four catastrophic years. Soldiers and statesmen of the Confederacy had found no time in which to have their portraits painted. But Mrs. LeGrand had much of family piety and, in addition, daguerreotypes and cartes de visite of the dead and gone. With her first glow of prosperity she had a local artist paint her father from a daguerreotype. Stalwart, with a high Roman face, he looked forth in black broadcloth with a roll of parchment in his hand. The next year she had had her husband painted in his grey brigadier's uniform. Her two brothers followed, and then a famous kinsman—all dead and gone, all slain in battle. The portraits were not masterpieces, but there they were, in the pathos of the grey, underneath each a little gilt plate. "Killed at Sharpsburg."—"Killed Leading a Charge in the Wilderness."—"Killed at Cold Harbour." Upon the wall, against the pale, century-old paper, hung crossed swords and cavalry pistols, and there were framed commissions and battle orders, and an empty shell propped open the wide white-panelled door. The English visitor found it all strange and interesting. It was as though a fragrance of dried rose-leaves contended with a whiff of gunpowder. The small dining-room into which presently she was carried had fascinating prints—"Pocahontas Baptized," and "Pocahontas Married," and a group of women with children and several negroes gathered about an open grave, one woman standing out, reading the burial service.—Roger Michael was so interested that she would have liked not to talk at all, just to sit and look at the prints and mark the negro servants passing about the table. But Mrs. LeGrand's agreeable voice was asking about the health of the Queen—she bestirred herself to be an acceptable guest.

The small dining-room was separated only by an archway from the large dining-room, and into the latter, in orderly files, came the Eglantine pupils, wound about to their several tables and seated themselves with demureness. M. Morel was speaking of the friendship of France and England. Roger Michael, while she appeared to listen, studied these American girls, these Southern girls. She found many of them pretty, even lovely,—not, emphatically, with the English beauty of skin, not with the colour of New England girls, among whom, recently, she had been,—not with the stronger frame that was coming in with this generation of admission to out-of-door exercise, the certain boyish alertness and poise that more and more she was seeing exhibited,—but pretty or lovely, with delicacy and a certain languor, a dim sweetness of expression, and, precious trove in America! voices that pleased. She noted exceptions to type, small, swarthy girls and large overgrown ones, girls that were manifestly robust, girls that were alert, girls that were daring, girls that were timid or stupid, or simply anæmic, girls that approached the English type and girls that were at the very antipodes—but the general impression was of Farther South than she had as yet gone in America, of more grace and slowness, manner and sweetness. Their clothes interested her; they were so much more "dressed" than they would have been in England. Evidently, in deference to the smaller room, there was to-night an added control of speech; there sounded no more than a pleasant hum, a soft, indistinguishable murmur of young voices.

"They are so excited over the prospect of your speaking to them after supper," said Mrs. LeGrand, her hand upon the coffee urn.—"Cream and sugar?"

"They do not seem excited," thought Roger Michael.—"Sugar, thank you; no cream. Of what shall I talk to them? In what are they especially interested?"

"In your charming books, I should say," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "In how you write them, and in the authors you must know. And then your sweet English life—Stratford and Canterbury and Devonshire—"

"We have been reading 'Lorna Doone' aloud this month," said Miss Carlisle. "And the girls very cleverly arranged a little play.... Sylvie here played Lorna beautifully."

Roger Michael smiled across at Hagar, two or three places down, on the other side of the table. "I should like to have seen it," she said in her good, deep English voice.

"Oh," said Hagar, "I'm not Sylvie. I played Lizzie."

"This is my little cousin and god-daughter, Sylvie Maine," said Mrs. LeGrand. "And this is Hagar Ashendyne, the granddaughter of an old friend and connection of my family."

"Hagar Ashendyne," said Roger Michael. "I remember meeting once in the south of France a Southerner—a Mr. Medway Ashendyne."

"Indeed?" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand. "Then you have met Hagar's father. Medway Ashendyne! He is a great traveller—we do not see as much of him as we should like to see, do we, Hagar?"

"I have not seen him," said Hagar, "since I was a little girl."

Her voice, though low, was strange and vibrant. "What's here?" thought Roger Michael, but what she said was only, "He was a very pleasant gentleman, very handsome, very cultivated. My friends and I were thrown with him during a day at Carcassonne. A month afterwards we met him at Aigues-Mortes. He was sketching—quite wonderfully."

Mrs. LeGrand inwardly deplored Medway Ashendyne's daughter's lack of savoir-faire. "To give herself away like that! Just the kind of thing her mother used to do!" Aloud she said, "Medway's a great wanderer, but one of these days he will come home and settle down and we'll all be happy together. I remember him as a young man—a perfectly fascinating young man.—Dinah, bring more waffles!—Yes, if you will tell our girls something of your charming English life. We are all so interested—"

Miss Carlisle's voice came in, a sweet treble like a canary's. "The Princess of Wales keeps her beauty, does she not?"

The study hall was a long, red room, well enough lighted, with a dais holding desk and chairs. Roger Michael, seated in one of these, watched, while her hostess made a little speech of introduction, the bright parterre of young faces. Sitting so, she excercised a discrimination that had not been possible in the dining-room. Of the faces before her each was different, after all, from the other. There were keen faces as well as languorous ones; brows that promised as well as those that did not; behind the prevailing "sweet" expression, something sometimes that showed as by heat lightning, something that had depth. "Here as elsewhere," thought Roger Michael. "The same life!"

Mrs. LeGrand was closing, was turning toward her. She rose, bowed toward the mistress of Eglantine, then, standing square, with her good, English figure and her sensibly shod, English feet, she began to talk to these girls.

She did not, however, speak to them as, even after she rose, she meant to speak. She did not talk letters in England, nor English landscape. She spoke quite differently. She spoke of industrial and social unrest, of conditions among the toilers of the world. "I am what is called a Fabian," she said, and went on as though that explained. She spoke of certain movements in thought, of breakings-away toward larger horizons. She spoke of various heresies, political, social, and other. "Of course I don't call them heresies; I call them 'the enlarging vision.'" She gave instances, incidents; she spoke of the dawn coming over the mountains, and of the trumpet call of "the coming time." She said that the dying nineteenth century heard the stronger voice of the twentieth century, and that it was a voice with a great promise. She spoke of women, of the rapidly changing status of women, of what machinery had done for women, of what education had done. She spoke of the great needs of women, of their learning to organize, of the need for unity among women. She used the words "false position" thrice. "Woman's immemorially false position."—"Society has so falsely placed her."—"Until what is false is done away with."—She said that women were beginning to see. She said that the next quarter-century would witness a revolution. "You young people before me will see it; some of you will take part in it. I congratulate you on living when you will live." She talked for nearly an hour, and just as she was closing it came to her, with a certain effect of startling, that much of the time she had been speaking to just one countenance there. She was speaking directly to the girl called Hagar Ashendyne, sitting halfway down the hall. When she took her seat there followed a deep little moment of silence broken at last by applause. Roger Michael marked the girl in green. She didn't applaud; she sat looking very far away. Mrs. LeGrand was saying something smoothly perfunctory, beflowered with personal compliments; the girls all stood; the Eglantine hostess and guest, with the teachers who had been at table, passed from the platform, and turned, after a space of hallway, into the rose-carpeted big parlour.

Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford brought up the rear. "Didn't you think," murmured the latter, "that that was a very curious speech? Now and then I felt so uneasy.—It was as though in a moment she was going to say something indelicate! Dear Mrs. LeGrand ought to have told her how careful we are with our girls."

The wind rose that night and swept around the tower room, and then, between eleven and twelve, died away and left a calm that by contrast was achingly still. Hagar was not yet asleep. She lay straight and still in the narrow bed, her arms behind her head. She was rarely in a hurry to go to sleep. This hour and a half was her dreaming-awake time, her time for romance building, her time for floating here and there, as in a Witch of Atlas boat in her own No-woman's land. She had in the stalls of her mind half a dozen vague and floating romances, silver and tenuous as mist; one night she drove one afield, another night another. All took place in a kind of other space, in countries that were not on any map. She brought imagined physical features into a strange juxtaposition. When the Himalayas haunted her she ranged them, snow-clad, by a West Indian sea. Ætna and Chimborazo rose over against each other, and a favourite haunt was a palm-fringed, flower-starred lawn reached only through crashing leagues of icebergs. She took over localities that other minds had made; when she wished to she pushed aside a curtain of vine and entered the Forest of Arden; she knew how the moonlight fell in the wood outside Athens; she entered the pilotless boat and drove toward the sunset gate of the Domain of Arnheim. Usually speaking, people out of books made the population of these places, and here, too, there were strange juxtapositions. She looped and folded Time like a ribbon. Mark Antony and Robin Hood were contemporaries; Pericles and Philip Sidney; Ruth and Naomi came up abreast, with Joan of Arc, and all three with Grace Darling; the Round Table and the Girondins were acquainted. All manner of historic and fictive folk wandered in the glades of her imagination, any kind of rendezvous was possible. Much went on in that inner world—doubts and dreams and dim hypotheses, romance run wild, Fata Morganas, Castles in Spain, passion for dead shapes, worship of heroes, strange, dumb stirrings toward self-immolation, dreams of martyrdom, mind drenched now with this poem, now with that, dream life, dream adventures, dream princes, religions, world cataclysms, passionings over a colour, a tone, a line of verse—much utter spring and burgeoning. Eighteen years—a fluid unimprisoned mind—and no confidante but herself; of how recapitulatory were these hours, of how youth of all the ages surged, pulsed, vibrated through her slender frame, she had, of course, no adequate notion. She would simply have said that she couldn't sleep, and that she liked to tell herself stories. As she lay here now, she was not thinking of Roger Michael's talk, though she had thought of it for the first twenty minutes after she had put out the lamp. It had been very interesting, and it had stirred her while it was in the saying, but the grappling hook had not finally held; she was not ready for it. She had let it slip from her mind in favour of the rose and purple and deep violin humming of one of her romances. She had lain for an hour in a great wood, like a wood in Xanadu, beneath trees that touched the sky, and like an elfin stream had gone by knights and ladies.... The great clock down in the hall struck twelve. She turned her slender body, and the bed being pushed against the window, laid her outstretched hands upon the window-sill, and looked up, between the spectral sycamore boughs, to where Sirius blazed. Dream wood and dream shapes took flight. She lay with parted lips, her mind quiet, her soul awake. Minutes passed; a cloud drove behind the sycamore branches and hid the star. First blankness came and then again unrest. She sat up in bed, pushing her two heavy braids of hair back over her shoulders. The small clock upon the mantel ticked and ticked. The little room looked cold in the watery moonlight. Hagar was not dreaming or imagining now; she was thinking back. She sat very still for five minutes, tears slowly gathering in her eyes. At last she turned and lay face down upon the bed, her outstretched hands against the wooden frame. Her tears wet the sleeve of her gown. "Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes. Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes...."

CHAPTER VII
MR. LAYDON

The winter was so open, so mild and warm, that a few pale roses clung to their stems through half of December. Christmas proved a green Christmas; neither snow nor ice, but soft, Indian summer weather. Eglantine always gave two weeks' holiday at Christmas. It was a great place for holidays. Right and left went the girls. Those whose own homes were too far away went with roommates or bosom friends to theirs; hardly a pupil was left to mope in the rooms that grew so still. Most of the teachers went away. The scattering was general.

But Hagar remained at Eglantine. Gilead Balm was a good long way off. She had gone home last Christmas and the Christmas before, but this year—she hardly knew how—she had missed it. In the most recently received of his rare letters her grandfather had explicitly stated that, though he was prepared to pay for her schooling and to support her until she married, she must, on her side, get along with as little money as possible. It was criminal that he had so little nowadays, but such was the melancholy fact. The whole world was going to the dogs. He sometimes felt a cold doubt as to whether he could hold Gilead Balm. He wished to die there, at any rate. Hagar had been very unhappy over that letter, and it set her to wondering more strongly than ever about money, and to longing to make it. In her return letters he suggested that she stay at Eglantine this Christmas, and so save travelling expenses. And in order that Gilead Balm might not feel that she would be too dreadfully disappointed, she said that it was very pleasant at Eglantine, and that several of the girls were going to stay, and that she would be quite happy and wouldn't mind it much, though of course she wanted to see them all at Gilead Balm. The plan was of her suggesting, but she had not realized that they might fall in with it. When her grandmother answered at length, explaining losses that the Colonel had sustained, and agreeing that this year it might be best for her to stay at Eglantine, she tried not to feel desperately hurt and despondent. She loved Gilead Balm, loved it as much as her mother had hated it. Old Miss's letter had shown her own disappointment, but—"You are getting to be a woman and must consider the family. Ashendyne and Coltsworth women, I am glad to say, have always known their duty to the family and have lived up to it." The last half of the letter had a good deal to say of Ralph Coltsworth who was at the University.

Hagar was here at Eglantine, and it was two days before Christmas, and most of the girls were gone. Sylvie was gone. The teacher whom she liked best—Miss Gage—was gone. Mrs. LeGrand, who liked holidays, too, was going. Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford and the housekeeper were not going, and they and the servants would look after Eglantine. Besides these there would be left the books in the book-room, and Hagar would have leave to be out of doors, in the winding walks and beneath the trees, alone and whenever she pleased. The weather was dreamy still; everywhere a warm amethyst haze.

This morning had come a box from Gilead Balm. Her grandmother had filled it with good things to eat and the Colonel sent his love and a small gold-piece. There was a pretty belt from Captain Bob and a hand-painted plate and a soft pink wool, shell-pattern, crocheted "fascinator" from Miss Serena. Mrs. Green sent a hemstitched handkerchief, and the servants sent a Christmas card. Through the box were scattered little sprays from the Gilead Balm cedars, and there was a bunch of white and red and button chrysanthemums. Hagar, sitting on the hearth-rug, unpacked everything; then went off into a brown study, the chrysanthemums in her lap.

Later in the morning she arranged upon the hand-painted plate some pieces of home-made candy, several slices of fruitcake, three or four lady apples, and a number of Old Miss's exquisitely thin and crisp wafers, and with it in her hand went downstairs to Mrs. LeGrand's room, knocked at the door, and was bidden to enter. Mrs. LeGrand half-raised herself from a flowery couch near the fire, put the novel that she was reading behind her pillow, and stretched out her hand. "Ah, Hagar!—Goodies from Gilead Balm? How nice! Thank you, my dear!" She took a piece of cocoanut candy, then waved the hand-painted plate to the round table. "Put it there, dear child! Now sit down for a minute and keep me company."

Hagar took the straight chair on the other side of the hearth. The bright, leaping flame was between the two. It made a kind of softer daylight, and full in the heart of it showed Mrs. LeGrand's handsome, not yet elderly countenance, the ripe fullness of her bust, covered by a figured silk dressing-sacque, and her smooth, well-shaped, carefully tended hands. Hagar conceived that it was her duty to think well and highly of Mrs. LeGrand, who was such an old friend of the family, and who, she knew, out of these same friendly considerations, was keeping her at Eglantine on the easiest of terms. Yes, it was certainly her duty to love and admire Mrs. LeGrand. That she did not do so caused her qualms of conscience. Many of the girls raved about Mrs. LeGrand, and so did Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford. Hagar supposed with a sigh that there was something wrong with her own heart. To-day, as she sat in the straight chair, her hands folded in her lap, she experienced a resurgence of an old childhood dislike. She saw again the Gilead Balm library, and the pool of sunlight on the floor and the "Descent of Man," and heard again Mrs. LeGrand telling the Bishop that she—Hagar—was reading an improper book. Time between then and now simply took itself away like a painted drop-scene. Six years rolled themselves up as with a spring, and that hour seamlessly adjoined this hour.

"I'm afraid," said Mrs. LeGrand, "that you'll be a little lonely, dear child, but it won't be for long. Time flies so!"

"I don't exactly get lonely," said Hagar gravely. "You are going down the river, aren't you?"

"Yes, for ten days. My dear friends at Idlewood won't hear of my not coming. They were my dear husband's dearest cousins. Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford, together with Mrs. Brown, will take, I am sure, the best of care of things here."

"Yes, of course. We'll get on beautifully," said Hagar. "Mr. Laydon is not going away either. His mother is ill and he will not leave her. He says that if we like to listen, he will come over in the evenings and read aloud to us."

Mr. Laydon was teacher of Belles-Lettres at Eglantine, a well-looking young gentleman, with a good voice, and apparently a sincere devotion to the best literature. Eglantine and Mr. Laydon alike believed in the future of Mr. Laydon. It was understood that his acceptance of a position here was of the nature of a makeshift, a mere pot-boiler on his road to high places. He and his mother were domiciled with a cousin from whose doorstep you might toss a pebble into the Eglantine grounds. In the past few years the neighbouring town had begun to grow; it had thrown out a street which all but touched the osage-orange hedge.

Mrs. LeGrand made a slight motion with her hand on which was her wedding-ring, with an old pearl ring for guard. "I shall tell Mrs. Lane not to let him do that too often. I have a great esteem for Mr. Laydon, but Eglantine cannot be too careful. No one with girls in their charge can be too careful!—What is the Gilead Balm news?"

"The letter was from grandmother. She is well, and so is grandfather. They have had a great deal of company. Uncle Bob has had rheumatism, but he goes hunting just the same. The Hawk Nest Coltsworths are coming for Christmas—all except Ralph. He is going home with a classmate. Grandmother says he is the handsomest man at the University, and that if I hear tales of his wildness I am not to believe them. She says all men are a little wild at first. Aunt Serena is learning how to illuminate texts. Mrs. Green has gone to see her daughter, who has something the matter with her spine. Thomasine's uncle in New York is going to have her visit him, and grandmother thinks he means to get Thomasine a place in a store. Grandmother says no girl ought to work in a store, but Thomasine's people are very poor, and I don't see what she can do. She's got to live. Corker has a place, but he isn't doing very well. Car'line and Isham have put a porch to their cabin, and Mary Magazine has gotten religion."

"Girls of Thomasine's station," said Mrs. LeGrand, "are beginning more and more, I'm sorry to see, to leave home to work for pay. It's spreading, too; it's not confined to girls of her class. Only yesterday I heard that a bright, pretty girl that I used to know at the White had gone to Philadelphia to study to be a nurse, and there's Nellie Wynne trying to be a journalist! A journalist! There isn't the least excuse for either of those cases. One of those girls has a brother and the other a father quite able to support them."

"But if there really isn't any one?" said Hagar wistfully. "And if you feel that you are costing a lot—" Her dreams at night were beginning to be shot with a vague but insistent "If I could write—if I could paint or teach—if I could earn money—"

"There is almost always some one," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "And if a girl knows how to make the best of herself, there inevitably arrives her own establishment and the right man to take care of her. If"—she shrugged—"if she doesn't know how to make the best of herself, she might as well go work in a store. No one would especially object. That is, they would not object except that when that kind of thing creeps up higher in the scale of society, and girls who can perfectly well be supported at home go out and work for pay, it makes an unfortunate kind of precedent and reacts and reflects upon those who do know how to make the best of themselves."

Hagar spoke diffidently. "But a lot of women had to work after the war. Mrs. Lane and General ——'s daughters, and you yourself—"

"That is quite different," said Mrs. LeGrand. "Gentlewomen in reduced circumstances may have to battle alone with the world, but they do not like it, and it is only hard fate that has put them in that position. It's an unnatural one, and they feel it as such. What I am talking of is that nowadays you see women—young women—actually choosing to stand alone, actually declining support, and—er—refusing generally to make the best of themselves. It's part of the degeneracy of the times that you begin to see women—women of breeding—in all kinds of public places, working for their living. It's positively shocking! It opens the gate to all kinds of things."

"Wrong things?"

"Ideas, notions. Roger Michael's ideas, for instance,—which I must say are extremely wrong-headed. I regretted that I had asked her here. She was hardly feminine." Mrs. LeGrand stretched herself, rubbed her plump, firm arms, from which the figured silk had fallen back, and rose from the couch. "I hope that Eglantine girls will always think of these things as ladies should. And now, my dear, will you tell Mrs. Lane that I want to see her?"

Mrs. LeGrand went away from Eglantine for ten days. Of the women teachers living in the house, all went but Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford. All the girls went but three, and they were, first, Hagar Ashendyne; second, a pale thin girl from the Far South, a martyr to sick headaches; and third, Francie Smythe, a girl apparently without many home people. Francie was sweetly dull, with small eyes and a perpetual smile.

How quiet seemed the great house with its many rooms! They closed the large dining-room and used the small room where Roger Michael had supped. They shut the classrooms and the study-hall and the book-room, and sat in the evenings in the bowery, flowery parlour. Here, the very first evening, and the second, came Mr. Laydon with Browning in one pocket and Tennyson in the other.

Mrs. Lane was knitting an afghan of a complicated pattern. Her lips moved softly, continuously, counting. Mr. Laydon, making an eloquent pause midway of "Tithonous" caught this One—two—three—four—and had a fleeting expression of pain. Mrs. Lane saw the depth to which she had sunk in his esteem and flushed over her delicate, pensive face. For the remainder of the hour she sat with her knitting in her lap. But really the afghan must be finished, and so, the second evening, she placed her chair so as to face not the reader but a shadowy corner, and so knit and counted in peace. Miss Bedford neither knit nor counted; she said that she adored poetry and sighed rapturously where something seemed to be indicated. She also adored conversation and argumentation as to this or that nice point. What did Mr. Laydon think Browning really meant in "Childe Roland," and was Porphyria's lover really mad? Was Amy really to blame in "Locksley Hall"? Miss Bedford made play with her rather fine eyes and teased the fringe of the table-cover. The pale girl from the Far South—Lily was her name—sat by the fire and now rubbed her forehead with a menthol pencil and now stroked Tipsy Parson, Mrs. LeGrand's big black cat. Francie Smythe had a muslin apron full of coloured silks and was embroidering a centre-piece—yellow roses with leaves and thorns. Francie was a great embroiderer. Hagar sat upon a low stool by the hearth, over against Lily, close to the slowly burning logs. She was a Fire-Worshipper. The flames were better to her than jewels, and the glowing alleys and caverns below were treasure caves and temples. She sat listening in the rosy light, her chin in her hands. She thought that Mr. Laydon read very well—very well, indeed.

"'Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles,
On the solitary pastures—'"

Midway of the poem she turned a little so that she could see the reader.

He sat in the circle of lamplight, a presentable man, well-formed, dark-eyed, and enthusiastic; fairly presentable within, too, very fairly clean, a good son, filled with not unhonourable ambitions; good, average, human stuff with an individual touch of impressionability and a strong desire to be liked, as he expressed it, "for himself"; young still, with the momentum and emanation of youth. The lamp had a rose and amber shade. It threw a softened, coloured, dreamy light. Everything within its range was subtly altered and enriched.

"'And I knew—while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey
Melt away—'"

Hagar sat in her corner, upon the low stool, in the firelight, as motionless as though she were in a trance. Her eyes, large, of a marvellous hazel, beneath straight, well-pencilled brows of deepest brown, were fixed steadily upon the man reading. Slowly, tentatively, something rich and delicate seemed to rise within her, something that clung to soul and body, something strange, sweet and painful, something that, spreading and deepening with great swiftness, suffused her being and made her heart at once ecstatic and sorrowful. She blushed deeply, felt the crimsoning, and wished to drop her head upon her arms and be alone in a balmy darkness. It was as though she were in a strange dream, or in one of her long romances come real.

"'In one year they sent a million fighters forth,
South and North,—
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky— ...
... Love is best.'"

Laydon put the book down upon the table. While he read, one of the maids, Zinia, had brought a note to Miss Bedford, and that lady had gone away to answer it. Mrs. Lane knitted on, her lips moving, her back to the table and the hearth. Francie Smythe was sorting silks. "That was a lovely piece," she said unemotionally, and went on dividing orange from lemon. The girl with the menthol pencil was more appreciative. "Once, when I was a little girl I went with my father and mother to Rome. We went out on the Campagna. I remember now how it was all green and flat and wide as the sea and still, and there were great arches running away—away—and a mist that they said was fever." Her voice sank. She sighed and rubbed her forehead with the menthol. Her eyes closed.

Edgar Laydon rose and came into the circle of firelight. He was moved by his own reading, shaken with the impulse and rhythm of the poem. He stood by the mantel and faced Hagar. She was one of his pupils, she recited well; of the essays, the "compositions," which were produced under his direction, hers were the best; he had told her more than once that her work was good; in short, he was kindly disposed toward her. To this instant that was all; he was scrupulously correct in his attitude toward the young ladies whom he taught. He had for his work a kind of unnecessary scorn; he felt that he ought to be teaching men, or at the very least should hold a chair in some actual college for women. Eglantine was nothing but a Young Ladies' Seminary. He felt quite an enormous gulf between himself and those around him, and, as a weakness will sometimes quaintly do, this feeling kept him steady. Until this moment he was as indifferent to Hagar Ashendyne, as to any one of the fifty whom he taught, and he was indifferent to them all. He had a picture in his mind of the woman whom some day he meant to find and woo, but she wasn't in the least like any one at Eglantine.

Now, in an instant, came a change. Hagar's eyes, very quiet and limpid, were upon him. Perhaps, deep down, far distant from her conscious self, she willed and exercised an ancient power of her sex and charmed him to her; perhaps—in his lifted mood, the great, sensuous swing of the verse still with him, the written cry of passion faintly drumming within his veins—he would have suddenly linked that diffused emotion to whatever presence, young and far from unpleasing, might have risen at this moment to confront him. However that may be, Laydon's eyes and those of Hagar met. Each gaze held the other for a breathless moment, then the lids fell, the heart beat violently, a colour surged over the face and receded, leaving each face pale. A log, burned through, parted, striking the hearth with a sound like the click of a closing trap.

Mrs. Lane, having come to an easy part in the pattern, turned her face to the rest of the room. "Aren't we going to have some more poetry? Read us some more, Mr. Laydon."

The girl with the menthol pencil spoke dreamily. "Isn't there another piece about the Campagna? I can see it plain—green like the sea and arches and tombs and a mist hanging over it, and a road going on—a road going on—a road going on."

CHAPTER VIII
HAGAR AND LAYDON

This is what they did. The next day was soft as balm. To Hagar, sitting in the sun on the step of the west porch, came the sound of steps over the fallen leaves of what was called at Eglantine the Syringa Alley—sycamore boughs above and syringa bushes thickly planted and grown tall, making winding walls for a winding path. The red surged over Hagar, her eyes, dark-ringed, half-closed. Laydon, emerging from the alley, came straight toward her, over a space of gravel and wind-brought leaves. It was mid-morning, the place open and sunny, to be viewed from more windows than one, with the servants, moreover, going to and fro on their morning business, apt to pass this gable end. Aunt Dorinda, for instance, the old, turbaned cook, passed, but she saw nothing but one of the teachers stopping to say, "Merry Christmas!" to Miss Hagar. All the servants liked Miss Hagar.

What Laydon said was not "Merry Christmas!" but, "Hagar, Hagar! that was Love came to us last night! I have not slept. I have been like a madman all night! I did not know there was such a force in the world."

"I did not sleep either," answered Hagar. "I did not sleep at all."

"Every one can see us here. Let us walk toward the gate, through the alley."

She rose from the step and went with him. Well in the shelter of the syringa, hidden from the house, he stopped, and laid his hands lightly upon her shoulders, then, as she did not resist, drew her to him. They kissed, they clung together in a long embrace, they uttered love's immemorial words, smothering each with each, then they fell apart; and Hagar first buried her face in her hands, then, uncovering it, broke into tremulous laughter, laughter that had a sobbing note.

"What will they say at Gilead Balm—oh, what will they say at Gilead Balm?"

"Say!" answered Laydon. "They'll say that they wish your happiness! Hagar, how old are you?"

"I'm nearly eighteen."

"And old for your years. And I—I am twenty-eight, and young for my years." Laydon laughed, too. He was giddy with happiness. "Gilead Balm! What a strange name for a place—and you've lived there always—"

"Always."

They were moving now down the alley toward a gate that gave upon the highroad. Near by lay an open field seized upon, at Christmas, by a mob of small boys with squibs and torpedoes and cannon crackers. They had a bonfire, and the wood smoke drifted across, together with the odour of burning powder. The boys were shouting like Liliputian soldiery, and the squibs and giant crackers shook the air as with a continuous elfin bombardment. The nearest church was ringing its bells. Laydon and Hagar came to the gate—not the main but a lesser entrance to Eglantine. No one was in view; hand in hand they leaned against the wooden palings. Before them stretched the road, an old, country pike going on and on between cedar and locust and thorn until it dropped into the violet distance.

"I wish we were out upon it," said Hagar; "I wish we were out upon it, going on and on through the world, travelling like gipsies!"

"You look like a gipsy," he said. "Have you got gipsy blood in you?"

"No.... Yes. Just to go on and on. The open road—and a clear fire at night—and to see all things—"

"Hagar—Why did they call you Hagar?"

"I don't know. My mother named me."

"Hagar, we've got to think a little.... It took us so by surprise.... We had best, I think, just quietly say nothing to anybody for a while.... Don't you think so?"

"I had not thought about it, but I will," said Hagar. She gazed down the road, her brows knit. The Christmas cannonading went on, a continuous miniature tearing and shaking of the air, with a dwarf shouting and laughing, and small coalescing clouds of powder smoke. The road ran, a quiet, sunny streak, past this small bedlam, into the still distance. "I won't tell any one at Eglantine," she said at last, "until Mrs. LeGrand comes back. She will be back in a week. But I'll write to grandmother to-night."

Laydon measured the gate with his hand. "I had rather not tell my mother at once. She is very delicate and nervous, and perhaps she has grown a little selfish in her love for me. Besides, she had set her heart on—" He threw that matter aside, it being a young and attractive kinswoman with money. "I had rather not tell her just now. Then, as to Mrs. LeGrand.... Of course, I suppose, as I am a teacher here, and you are a pupil ... but there, too, had we not best delay a little? It will make a confusion—things will be said—my position will become an embarrassing one. And you, too, Hagar,—it won't be pleasant for you either. Isn't it better just to keep our own concerns to ourselves for a while? And your people up the river—why not not tell them until summer-time? Then, when you go home,—and when I have finished my engagement here, for I don't propose to come back to Eglantine next year,—then you can tell them, and so much better than you could write it! I could follow you to Gilead Balm—we could tell them together. Then we could discuss matters and our future intelligently—and that is impossible at the moment. Let us just quietly keep our happiness to ourselves for a while! Why should the world pry into it?" He seized her hands and pressed his face against them. "Let us be happy and silent."

She looked at him with her candid eyes. "No, we shouldn't be happy that way. I'll write to grandmother to-night."

They gazed at each other, the gate between them. The strong enchantment held, but a momentary perplexity crossed it, and the never long-laid dust of pain was stirred. "I am not asking anything wrong," said Laydon, a hurt note in his voice. "I only see certain embarrassments—difficulties that may arise. But, darling, darling! it shall be just as you please! 'I'd crowns resign to call you mine'—and so I reckon I can face mother and Mrs. LeGrand and Colonel Ashendyne!" A flush came into his cheek. "I've been so foolish, too, as to—as to pay a little attention to Miss Bedford. But she is too sensible a woman to think that I meant anything seriously—"

"Did you?"

"Not in the least," said Laydon truthfully. "A man gets lonely, and he craves affection and understanding, and he's in a muddle before he knows it. There isn't anything else there, and I never said a word of love to her. Darling, darling! I never loved any one until last night by the fire, and you looked up at me with those wonderful eyes, and I looked down, and our eyes met and held, and it was like a fine flame all over—and now I'm yours till death—and I'll run any gauntlet you tell me to run! If you write to your people to-night, so will I. I'll write to Colonel Ashendyne."

They left the gate and again pursued the syringa alley. The sound of the Christmas bombardment drifted away. When they reached the shadow of the great bushes, he kissed her again. All the air was blue and hazy and the church bells were ringing, ringing. "I haven't any money," said Laydon. "Mother has a very little, but I've never been able, somehow, to lay by. I'll begin now, though, and then, as I told you, I expect next year to have a much better situation. Dr. —— at —— thinks he may get me in there. It would be delightful—a real field at last, the best of surroundings and a tolerable salary. If I were fortunate there, we could marry very soon, darling, darling! But as it is—It is wretched that Eglantine pays so little, and that there is so little recognition here of ability—no career—no opportunity! But just you wait and see—you one bright spot here!"

Hagar gazed at the winding path, strewn with bronze leaves, and at the syringa bushes, later to be laden with fragrant bloom, and at the great white sycamore boughs against the pallid blue, and at the roof and chimneys of Eglantine, now apparent behind the fretwork of trees. The inner eye saw the house within, the three-years-familiar rooms, her "tower room"—and all the human life, the girls, the teachers, the servants. Bright drops came to her eyes. "I've been unhappy here, too, sometimes. But I couldn't stay three years in a place and not love something about it."

"That is because you are a woman," said the lover. "With a man it is different. If a place isn't right, it isn't right.—If I had but five thousand dollars! Then we might marry in a month's time. As it is, we'll have to wait and wait and wait—"

"I am going to work, too," said Hagar. "I am going to try somehow to make money."

He laughed. "You dear gipsy! You just keep your beautiful, large eyes, and those dusky warm waves of hair, and your long slim fingers, and the way you hold yourself, and let 'trying to earn money' go hang! That's my part. Too many women are trying to earn money, anyhow—competing with us.—You've got just to be your beautiful self, and keep on loving me." He drew a long breath. "Jove! I can see you now, in a parlour that's our own at ——, receiving guests—famous guests, maybe, after a while; people who will come distances to see me! For I don't mean to remain unknown. I know I've got ability."

Before they left the alley they settled that both should write that night to Gilead Balm. Laydon found the idea distasteful enough; older and more worldly-wise than the other, he knew that there would probably ensue a tempest, and he was constitutionally averse to tempests. He was well enough in family, but no great things; he had a good education, but so had others; he could give a good character—already he was running over in mind a list of clergymen, educators, prominent citizens, and Confederate veterans to whom he could refer Colonel Ashendyne. He had some doubt, however, as to whether comparative spotlessness of character would have with Colonel Ashendyne the predominant and overweening value that it should have. Money—he had no means; position—he had as yet an uncertain foothold in the world, and no powerful relatives to push him. Unbounded confidence he had in himself, but the point was to create that confidence in Hagar's people. Of course, they would say that she was too young, and that he had taken advantage. His skirts were clear there; both had truthfully been taken prisoners, fallen into an ambuscade of ancient instinct; there hadn't been the slightest premeditation. But how to convey that fact to the old Bourbon up the river? Laydon had once been introduced to Colonel Ashendyne upon one of the latter's rare visits to the neighbouring city and to Eglantine. He remembered stingingly the Colonel's calm and gentlemanly willingness immediately to forget the existence of a teacher of Belles-Lettres in a Young Ladies' School. The letter to Gilead Balm. He didn't want to write it, but he was going to—oh! he was going to.... Women were curiously selfish about some things.... Mrs. LeGrand, too; he thought that he would write about it to Mrs. LeGrand. He could imagine what she would say, and he didn't want to hear it. He was in love, and he was going to do the honourable thing, of course; he had no idea otherwise. But he certainly entertained the wish that Hagar could see how entirely honourable, as well as discreet, would be silence for a while.

Hagar never thought of it in terms of "honour." She had no adequate idea of his reluctance. It might be said that she knew already the arching of Mrs. LeGrand's brows and the lightning and thunder that might issue from Gilead Balm. Grandfather and grandmother, Aunt Serena and Uncle Bob looked upon her as nothing but a child. She wasn't a child; she was eighteen. She felt no need to vindicate herself, nor to apologize. She was moving through what was still almost pure bliss, moving with a dreamlike tolerance of difficulties. What did it matter, all those things? They were so little. The air was wine and velvet, colours were at once soft and clear, sound was golden. In the general transfiguration the man by her side appeared much like a demigod. Her wings were fairly caught and held by the honey. It was natural for her to act straightforwardly, and when she must propose that she act so still, it was simply a putting forward, an unveiling of the mass of her nature. She showed herself thus and so, and then went on in her happy dream. Had he been able to make her realize his great magnanimity in giving up his point of view to hers, perhaps she might have striven for magnanimity, too, and acquiesced in a temporary secrecy, perhaps not—on the whole, perhaps not. Had she deeply felt the secrecy to be necessary, had they paced the earth in another time and amid actual dangers, wild beasts could not have torn from her a relation of their case.

But Laydon thought that she was thinking in terms of "honour." Pure women were naturally up in arms at the suggestion of secrecy. Their delicate minds had at once a vision of deception, desertion, all kinds of horrors. He acknowledged that men had given them reason for the vision; they could not be blamed if they saw it even when an entirely honourable and devoted man was at their feet. He smiled at what he supposed Hagar thought; his warm sense of natural supremacy became rich and deep; he felt like an Eastern king unfolding a generous and noble nature to some suppliant who had reason to doubt those qualities in Eastern kings at large—he experienced a sumptuous, Oriental, Ahasuerus-and-Esther feeling. Poor little girl! If she had any absurd fear like that—He began to be eager to get to the letter to Colonel Ashendyne. He could see his own strong black handwriting on a large sheet of bond paper. My dear Colonel Ashendyne:—You will doubtless be surprised at the nature and contents of this letter, but I beg of you to—

The syringa alley ended, and the west wing of the house, beyond which stretched the offices, opened upon them. Zinia, the mulatto maid, and old Daniel, the gardener, watched them from a doorway. "My Lord!" said Zinia. "Dey's walkin' right far apart, but I knows a co'tin' air when I sees it! Miss Sarah better come back here!"

Daniel frowned. He had been born on the Eglantine place and the majesty and honour and glory of Eglantine were his. "Shet yo' mouf, gal! Don't no co'tin' occur at Eglantine. Hit's Christmas an' everybody looks good an' shinin' lak de angels. Dey two jes' been listenin' to de 'lumination an' talkin' jography an' Greek!"

As the two stepped upon the west porch, the door opened and Miss Bedford came out—Miss Bedford in a very pretty red hood and a Connemara cloak. Miss Bedford had a sharp look. "Where did you two find each other?" she asked; then, without waiting for an answer, "Hagar! Mrs. Lane has been looking for you. She wants you to help her do up parcels for her mission children. I've been tying up things until I am tired, and now I am going to walk down the avenue for a breath of air. Hurry in, dear; she needs you.—Oh, Mr. Laydon! there's a passage in 'The Ring and the Book' that I've been wanting to ask you to explain—"

Hagar went in and tied up parcels in coloured tissue paper. The day went by as in a dream. There was a Christmas dinner, with holly on the table, and little red candles, and in the afternoon she went with Mrs. Lane to a Christmas tree for poor children in the Sunday-School room of a neighbouring church. The tree blazed with an unearthly splendour, the star in the top seemed effulgent, the "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" and laughter of the circling children, fell into a rhythm like sweet, low, distant thunder.

That night she wrote both to her grandmother and her grandfather. When she had made an end of doing so, she kneeled upon the braided rug before the fire in her tower room, loosed her dark hair, shook it around her, and sat as in a tent, her arms clasping her knees, her head bowed upon them. "Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes. Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes. I can't send a letter to father, for I don't know where to address it. Mother—mother—mother! I can't send a letter to you either...."

CHAPTER IX
ROMEO AND JULIET

That week a noted actress played Juliet several evenings in succession at the theatre in the neighbouring town. The ladies left adrift at Eglantine read in the morning paper a glowing report of the performance. Miss Bedford said she was going; she never missed an opportunity to see "Romeo and Juliet."

Mr. Laydon, walking in at that moment—they were all in the small book-room—caught the statement. "Why shouldn't you all go? I have seen her play it once, but I'd like to see it again." He laughed. "I feel reckless and I'm going to get up a theatre-party! Mrs. Lane, won't you go?"

Mrs. Lane shook her head. "My theatre days are over," she said in her gentle, plaintive voice. "Thank you just the same, Mr. Laydon. But the others might like to go."

"Miss Bedford—"

"We ought," said Miss Bedford, "by rights to have Mrs. Lane to chaperon us, but it's Christmas, isn't it?—and everybody's a little mad! Thank you, Mr. Laydon."

Laydon looked at Francie. "Miss Smythe, won't you come, too?" He had made a rapid calculation. Yes, it would cost only so much,—they would go in of course on the street car,—and in order to ask one he would have to ask all.

Yes, Francie would go, though she was sorry that it was Shakespeare, and just caught herself in time from saying so. "It will be lovely," she said, instead, unemotionally.

Miss Bedford supplied the lacking enthusiasm. "It will be the treat of the winter! Oh, the Balcony Scene, and where she drinks the sleeping-draught, and the tomb—" She moved nearer Laydon as she spoke and managed to convey to him, sotto voce, "You mustn't be extravagant, you generous man! Don't think that you have to ask these girls just because they are in the room." But she was too late; Laydon was already asking.

"Miss Goldwell, won't you come, too, to see 'Romeo and Juliet'?"

If she didn't have a headache, Miss Goldwell would be glad to,—"Thank you, Mr. Laydon."

"Miss Ashendyne, won't you?"

"Yes, thank you."

"I will go at once," said Laydon, "and get the tickets."

In the end, Lily Goldwell went, and Francie Smythe did not. Francie developed a sore throat that put Mrs. Lane in terror of tonsillitis. Nothing must go wrong—nobody must get ill while dear Mrs. LeGrand was away!—it would be madness for Francie to go out. Where "what Mrs. LeGrand might think" came into it, Mrs. Lane was adamant. Francie sullenly stayed at home. Lily, for a marvel, didn't have a headache, and she said she would take her menthol pencil, in case the music should bring on one.

The four walked down the avenue, beneath the whispering trees. There was no moon, but the stars shone bright, and it was not cold. Mr. Laydon and Miss Bedford went a little in front, and Lily and Hagar followed. They passed through the big gate and, walking down the road a little way, came to where the road became a street, and, at ten minutes' interval, a street-car jingled up, reversed, and jingled back to town again.

On the street-car Miss Bedford and Mr. Laydon were again together, and Lily and Hagar. Between the two pairs stretched a row of men, several with the evening newspaper. It was too warm in the car, and Lily, murmuring something, took out her menthol pencil. Hagar studied the score of occupants, and the row of advertisements, and the dark night without the windows. The man next her had a newspaper, and now he began to talk to an older man beside him.

"The country's doing pretty well, seems to me."

The other grunted. "Isn't anything doing pretty well. I'm getting to be a Populist."

"Oh, go away! Are you going to the World's Fair?"

"No. There's going to be the biggest panic yet in this country about one year from now."

"Oh, cheer up! You've been living on Homestead."

"If I have, it's poor living."

Across the aisle a woman was talking about the famine in Russia. "We are going to try to get up a bazaar and make a little money to send to get food with. Tolstoy—"

The horse-car jingled, jingled through the night. All the windows were down; it grew hot and close and crowded. The black night without pressed alongside, peered through the clouded glass. Within were a muddy glare and swaying and the mingled breath of people.

Lily sighed. "Don't you ever wish for just a clear Nothing? No pain, no feeling, no people, no light, no sound, no anything?"

The street-car turned a corner and swayed and jingled into a lighted, business street, where were Christmas windows and upon the pavement a Christmas throng. A drug store—a wine and liquor store—a grocery—a clothing store—a wine and liquor store—a drug store; amber and crimson, green and blue, broken and restless arrived the lights through the filmy glass. Laughter and voices of the crowd came with a distant humming, through which clanged the street-car bell. The car stopped for passengers, then creaked on again. A workman entered, stood for a couple of minutes, touching Hagar's skirt, then, a man opposite rising and leaving the car, sank into the vacant place. Hagar's eyes swept him dreamily; then, she knew not why, she fell to observing him with a puzzled, stealthy gaze. He was certainly young, and yet he did not look so. The lower part of his face was covered by a short soft, dark beard; he had a battered slouch hat pulled down low; the eyes beneath were sombre and the face lined. There was a dinner pail at his feet. He, too, had an evening paper; Hagar saw the headlines of the piece he was reading: "HOMESTEAD"; and underneath, "STRONG HAND OF THE LAW." Outside, topaz and ruby and emerald drifted by the windows of a wine and liquor store.

She knit her brows. Some current in the shoreless sea of mind had been started, but she could not trace its beginning nor where it led. Another minute and the car stopped before the theatre.

Within, Laydon manœuvred, and the end was that if he had Miss Bedford upon his right, yet he had Hagar upon his left. The orchestra had not yet begun; the house was dim, people entering, those seated having to stand up to let the others pass. Once, when this happened, he leaned toward her until their shoulders touched, until his breath was upon her cheek. He dared so much as to whisper, "If only we were here, just you and I, together!"

Every one was seated now, and she looked at the people with their festal, Christmas air. There was a girl in a box who was like Sylvie, and nearer yet a grey-haired gentleman with a certain vague resemblance to her grandfather. Her thought flashed across the dark country, up the winding, amber-hued river to Gilead Balm. They would have had her letter yesterday. The shimmer and murmur of the filled theatre were all about her, but so was Gilead Balm—she tried to hear what they would be saying there to-night. The music began, and in a moment she was in a colourful dream. The curtain went up, and here was the hot, sunshiny street of Verona and all the heady wine of youth and love.

When the curtain fell and the lights brightened, Miss Bedford, after frantically applauding, claimed Laydon for her own. She had raptures to impart, criticisms to exchange, knowledge to imbibe. Minutes passed ere, during a momentary lapse into her programme, Laydon could bend toward the lady on his left. Did she like it? What did she think of Juliet?—What did she think of Romeo?—Was it not well-staged?

Hagar did not know whether it were well staged or not. She was eighteen years old; she had been very seldom to the theatre; she was moving through a dreamy paradise. She wanted just to sit still and bring it all back before the inner eye. Despite the fact that he was her lover, she was not sorry when Laydon must turn to the lady on his right. When Lily spoke to her, she said, "Don't let's talk. Let's sit still and see it all again." Lily agreed. She was no chatterbox herself. The music played; the lights in the house were lowered; up, slowly, gently, went the curtain; here was the orchard of the Capulets.

The great concave of the theatre was dim. Laydon's hand sought Hagar's, found it in the semi-darkness, held it throughout the act. She acquiesced; and yet—and yet—She did not wish him to fondle her hand, nor yet, as once or twice he did, to whisper to her. She wished to listen, listen. She was in Verona, not here.

The act closed. The lights went up, Laydon softly withdrew his hand. He applauded loudly, all the house applauded. Hagar hated the clapping, not experienced enough to know how breath-of-life it was to the people behind the curtain. Already the curtain was rising for Juliet to come forth and bow, and then for Juliet to bring forth Romeo, and both to bow. Had she known, she would have applauded, too; she was a kindly child. The curtain was down now, the house rustling. All around was talking; people seemed never to wish to be quiet. Laydon was talking, too, answering Miss Bedford's artful-artless queries, embarking on a commentary upon act and actors. He talked with a conscious brilliance as became a professor of Belles-Lettres, more especially for Hagar's delight, but aware also that the people directly in front and behind were listening. Was Hagar delighted? Very slowly and insidiously, like a slender serpent stealing into some Happy Valley, there came into her heart a distaste for commentaries. As the valley might be ignorant of the serpent, so neither did she know what was the matter; she was only not so mystically happy as she had been before.

The orchestra came back, there was a murmur of expectation, Laydon ceased to discourse of Bandello, and of Dante's reference to Montague and Capulet. Lily, on the other side of Hagar, complained of the heat and the music. "I like stringed instruments, but those great brass horns make the back of my head hurt so."

Hagar touched her cold, little hand. "Poor Lily! I wish you didn't feel badly all the time! I wish you liked the horns."

The curtain rose, the play rolled on. Mercutio was slain,—Mercutio and Tybalt,—Romeo was banished. The scene changed, and here was the great window of Juliet's room—the rope ladder—the envious East.

"Night's candles are burned out and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops;
I must be gone and live, or stay and die—"

Hagar sat, bent forward, her eyes dark and wide, the wine-red in her cheeks. When the curtain went down she did not move; Laydon, under cover of the loud applause, spoke to her twice before she attended. Her eyes came back from a long way off, her mind turned with difficulty. "Yes? What is it?" Laydon was easily aggrieved. "You are thinking more of this wretched play," he whispered, "than you are of me!"

On rolled the swift events, gorgeous and swift as shadows. The curtain fell, the curtain rose. The potion was drunk—the wailing was made—Balthasar rode to warn Romeo. There came the last act: the poison—County Paris—the Tomb—

"Here will I set up my everlasting rest—"

It was over.... She helped Lily with her red evening cloak, she found Miss Bedford's striped silk bag that Laydon could not find; they all passed out of the house of enchantments. Here was the night, and the night wind, and broken lights and carriages, and a clamour of voices, and at last the clanging street-car with a great freight of talking people. She wanted to sit still and dream it over—and fortunately Laydon was again occupied with Miss Bedford.

"You liked it, didn't you?" asked Lily. "I think that you like things that you imagine better than you like things that you do."

Hagar looked at her with eyes that were yet wide and fixed. "I don't know. If you could be and do all that you can imagine—but you can't—you can't—" she smiled and rubbed her hand across her eyes— "and it's a tragedy."

When they left the street-car and walked toward the Eglantine gates, it was drawing toward midnight. Laydon and Hagar now moved side by side through the darkness. Lily—who said that her head had ached very little, thank you!—exchanged comments on the play with Miss Bedford.

Laydon held the gate open; then, closing it, fell a few feet behind with Hagar. "You enjoyed it?"

"Oh—"

He was again in love. "The plays we'll see together, darling, darling! 'Two souls with but a single thought—'"

"There is no need to walk so fast," said Miss Bedford. "Oh, Mr. Laydon, a briar has caught my skirt—Will you—? Oh, thank you!"

The house showed before them. "The parlour windows are lighted," said Lily. "Mrs. Lane must have company."

Mrs. Lane did have company. She herself opened the front door to them. Mrs. Lane's eyes were red, and she looked frightened. "Wait," she said, and got between the little group and the parlour door. "Lily, you had best go straight upstairs, my dear! Miss Bedford, will you please wait here with me just a minute? Mr. Laydon, Mrs. LeGrand says will you come into the parlour? Hagar, you are to go, too. Your grandfather is here."

Colonel Ashendyne stood between the table and the fire. Mrs. LeGrand was seated upon the sofa, which meant that she sat in state. Mrs. Lane, who came presently stealing in again, sat back from the centre in a meek, small chair, and at intervals wiped her eyes. The culprits stood.

Colonel Argall Ashendyne never lacked words with which to express his meaning—words that bit. Now his well-cut lips opened, and out there came like a scimitar his part of the ensuing conversation.

"Hagar, your letter was read yesterday evening. I immediately telegraphed to Mrs. LeGrand at Idlewood, and she obligingly took this morning's boat. I myself came down on the afternoon train, and got here two hours ago. Now, sir—" he turned on Laydon—"what have you got to say for yourself?"

"I—I—"began Laydon. He drew a breath and his spine stiffened. "I have to say, sir, that I love your granddaughter, and that I have asked her to marry me."

Mrs. LeGrand, while the colonel's hawk eye dwelt witheringly, spoke from the sofa. "I have no words, Mr. Laydon, in which to express my disapproval of your action, or my disappointment in one whom I had supposed a gentleman. In my absence you have chosen to abuse my confidence and to do a most dishonourable and ungentlemanly thing—a thing which, were it known, might easily bring disrepute upon Eglantine. You will understand, of course, that it terminates your connection with this school—"

"Mrs. LeGrand," said Laydon, "I have done nothing dishonourable."

"You have taken advantage of my absence, sir, to make love to one of my pupils—"

"To an inexperienced child, sir," said the Colonel;—"too young to know better or to tell pinchbeck when she sees it! You should be caned."

"Colonel Ashendyne, if you were a younger man—"

"Bah!" said the Colonel. "I am younger now and more real than you!—Hagar!"

"Yes, grandfather."

"Come here!"

Hagar came. The Colonel laid his hands upon her shoulders, a little roughly, but not too roughly. The two looked each other in the eyes. He was tall and she but of medium height, she was young and he was her elder, he was ancestor and she descendant, he was her supporter and she his dependant, he was grandfather and she was grandchild. Gilead Balm had always inculcated reverence for dominant kin and family authority. It had been Gilead Balm's grievance, long ago, against her mother that she recognized that so poorly.... But Hagar had always seemed to recognize it. "Gipsy," said the Colonel now, "I am not going to be hard upon you. It's the nature of the young to be foolish, and a young girl may be pardoned anything short of the irrecoverable. All that I want you to do is to see that you have been very foolish and to say as much to this—this gentleman. Simply turn round and say to him 'Mr.—' What's his name?—Layton?"

"I wrote to you day before yesterday, Colonel Ashendyne," said Laydon. "You saw my name there—"

"I never got your letter, sir! I got hers.—Hagar! say after me to this gentleman, 'Sir, I was mistaken in my sentiment toward you, and I here and now release you from any fancied engagement between us.'—Say it!"

As he spoke, he wheeled her so that she faced Laydon. She stood, a scarlet in her cheeks, her eyes dark, deep, and angry. "Hagar!" cried Laydon, maddened, too, "are you going to say that?"

"No," answered Hagar. "No, I am not going to say it! I have done nothing wrong nor underhand, and neither have you! Mrs. LeGrand knew that you were coming here, in the evening, to read to us. Why shouldn't you come? Well, one evening you were reading and I was listening, and I was not thinking of you and you were not thinking of me. And then, suddenly, something—Love—came into this room and took us prisoner. We did not ask him here, we did not know anything.... But when it happened we knew it, and next morning, out in the open air, we told each other about it. Nothing could have kept us from doing that, and nothing had a right to keep us from it! Nothing!—And that very night I wrote to you, grandfather—and he wrote.... If I am mistaken I am mistaken, but I will find it out for myself!" She twisted herself in the Colonel's grasp until she faced him. "You say that you are real—Well, I am real too! I am as real as you are!"

The Colonel's fine, bony hands closed upon her shoulders until she caught her breath with the pain. The water rushed to her eyes, but she kept it from over-brimming. "Don't cry!" said a voice within her. "Whatever you do, don't cry!" It was like her mother's voice, and she answered instantly. Colonel Ashendyne, his lips white beneath his grey mustache, shook her violently, so violently that, pushed from her footing, she stumbled and sank to her knee.

Laydon came up with clenched fists and the colour gone from his face. "Let her go, damn you!—"

Mrs. Lane uttered a faint cry and Mrs. LeGrand rose from the sofa.

CHAPTER X
GILEAD BALM

The March winds shook the rusty cedars and tossed the pink peach branches, and carried a fleet of clouds swiftly overhead through the blue aërial sea. They rattled the windows of Gilead Balm and bent the chimney smoke aslant like streamers. The winds were rough but not cold. Now and again they sank into the sunniest of calms, little periods of stillness, small doldrums punctuating the stormiest sentences. Then with a whistle, shriller and shriller, they mounted again, tremendously exhilarated, sweeping earth and sky.

On the ridge back of Gilead Balm the buds of the cucumber tree were swelling, the grass beneath was growing green, the ants were out in the sunshine. Up in the branches a bluebird was exploring building-sites.

Hagar came wandering over the ridge. The wind wrapped her old brown dress about her limbs and blew her dark hair into locks and tendrils. Luna followed her, but Luna in no frolicsome mood. Luna was old, old, and to-day dispirited because Captain Bob had gone to a meeting of Democrats in the neighbouring town and had left her behind. Depression was writ in every line of Luna's body, and an old, experienced weariness and disillusionment in the eye with which she looked askance at a brand-new white butterfly on a brand-new dandelion.

Hagar stood with her back to the cucumber tree and surveyed the scene. The hills, scurried over by the shadows of the driven clouds, the river—the river winding down to the sea, and the ditch where used to be the canal; and away, away, the white plume of a passenger train. She was mad for travel, for wandering, for the open road; all the world sung to her as with a thousand tongues in the books she read. Pictures, cathedrals, statues, cities, snow on mountains, the ocean, deserts, torrid lands, France, Spain, Italy, England—oh, to go, to go! She would have liked to fling herself on the blowing wind and go with it over land and sea.

She looked with hot, sombre eyes at Gilead Balm. It was the home she had always known and she loved it; it was home,—yes, it was home; but it was not so pleasant at home just now. March—and the Colonel had withdrawn her from Eglantine, ordered her home, the first of January! January, February, a part of March—and her grandfather still eaten with a cold anger every time he looked at her, and her grandmother, outraged at her suddenly manifested likeness to Maria and Maria's "ways," almost as bad! Aunt Serena gave her no sympathy; Aunt Serena had become almost violent on the subject. If you were going to rebel and disobey, Aunt Serena told her, if you were going to be forward and almost fast, and rebel and disobey, you needn't look for any sympathy from her! Colonel Ashendyne had been explicit enough back in January. "When you send about his business that second-rate person you've chosen to entangle yourself with, then and not till then will you be 'Gipsy' again to me!"

Hagar put out her arms to the wind. "I want to go away! I want to go away! I'm tired of it all—tired of living here—"

The wind blew past her with its long cry; then it suddenly sank, and there came almost a half-hour of bright calm, warm stillness, astral gold. Hagar sat down between the roots of the cucumber tree and took her head within her arms. By degrees, in the sunshine, emotion subsided; she began to think and dream. Her mind sent the shuttle far and fast, it touched here and touched there, and in the course of its weaving it touched Eglantine, touched and quit and touched again. Laydon was still at Eglantine. He had been a very satisfactory Professor of Belles-Lettres; Mrs. LeGrand really did not know where, in mid-season, to find such another. He had behaved wretchedly, but the mischief was done, and there was—on consideration—no need to tell the world about it, no especial need, indeed, of proclaiming it at Eglantine or to Eglantine patrons at large. He was not—Mrs. LeGrand did him that justice—he was not at all a "fast" man or likely to give further trouble upon this line. And he was a good teacher, a good talker, in demand for lectures on cultural subjects before local literary societies, popular and pleasing, a creditable figure among the Eglantine faculty. Much of this matter was probably Hagar's fault. She had made eyes at him, little fool! When the Colonel declared his determination,—with no reflections on Eglantine, my dear friend!—to bring to an end his granddaughter's formal education, and to take her back to Gilead Balm where this infatuation would soon disappear,—Mrs. LeGrand saw daylight. She had an interview with Colonel Ashendyne. He was profoundly contemptuous of what Mr. Laydon did for a living or where he did it, of whom he taught or what he taught, so long as there was distance between him and an Ashendyne. "You know—you know, my dear friend, that I have always had in mind Ralph Coltsworth!" She had an interview—concert pitch—with Laydon. She had a smooth, quiet talk with her teachers. She mentioned casually, to one after another of the girls, that Mrs. Ashendyne at Gilead Balm was not as young as she had been, nor as strong, and that Colonel Ashendyne thought that Hagar should be at home with her grandmother. She, Mrs. LeGrand, regretted it, but every girl's duty to her family was paramount. They would miss Hagar sadly,—she was a dear girl and a clever girl,—but it seemed right that she should go. Hagar went and Laydon stayed, and without a word from any principal in the affair, every girl at Eglantine knew that Mr. Laydon had kissed Hagar, and that Hagar had said that she would love him forever, and that Colonel Ashendyne was very angry, and was probably keeping Hagar on bread and water at that instant, and that it was all very romantic.... And then at Eglantine examinations came on, and dreams of Easter holiday, and after that of Commencement, and Mr. Laydon taught with an entire correctness and an impassive attitude toward all young ladies; and Miss Bedford, who had been very bitter at first and had said things, grew amiable again and reopened her Browning. The ripple smoothed out as all things smoothed out at Eglantine. The place resumed its pristine "sweetness." It was believed among the girls that Mr. Laydon and Hagar "corresponded," but it was not certainly known. Mr. Laydon wrapped himself in dignity as in a mantle. As for Hagar, she had always been rather far away.

Up on the ridge to-day, Hagar's mind dwelt somewhat on Eglantine, but not overmuch. It was not precisely Eglantine that she was missing. Was she missing Laydon? Certainly, at this period, she would have answered that she was—though, to be perfectly truthful, she might have added, "But I do not think of that all the time—not nearly all the time." She was unhappy, and on occasions her fancy brooded over that night in the Eglantine parlour when he read of love, and the flames became jewelled and alive, and she saw the turret on the plain, "by the caper overrooted, by the gourd overscored," and suddenly a warmth and light wrapped them both. The warmth and light certainly still dwelt over that scene and that moment. To a lesser extent it abided over and around the next morning, the west porch, the syringa alley. Very strangely, as she was dimly aware, it stretched only thinly over the following days, over even the night of "Romeo and Juliet." There was there a mixed and wavering light, changing, for the hour that immediately followed,—the hour when she faced her grandfather, and he spoke with knives as he was able to do, when he laid his hands upon her and said untrue and unjust things to Laydon,—into an angry glow. That hour was bright and hot like a ruby. How much was love, and how much outraged pride and a burning sense of wrong, she was not skilled to know, nor how much was actual chivalric defence of her partner in iniquity.... The parting interview, when she and Laydon, having stood upon their rights, obtained a strange half-hour in the Eglantine parlour—strange and stiff, with "Of course, if I love you, I'll be faithful," repeated on her part some five times, with, on his part, Byronic fervour, volcanic utterances. Had he not gone over them to himself afterwards, in his homely, cheerfully commonplace room in the brown cottage outside the Eglantine grounds? They had been fine; from the point of view of Belles-Lettres they could not have been bettered. He felt a glow as he recognized that fact, followed by a mental shot at the great Seat of Learning where he wished to be. "By George! that's the place I'm fitted for! The man they've got isn't in the same class—".... The parting interview—to the girl on the ridge a cloud seemed to hang over that, a cloud that was here and there rose-flushed, but just as often fading into grey. Hagar drove her thoughts back to the first evening and the jewelled fire; that was a clear, fair memory, innocent, rich and sincere. The others had, so strangely, a certain pain and dulness.

She had a sturdy power of reaction against the melancholy and the painful, and as to-day she could not, somehow, fix her mind unswervingly upon the one clear hour, and the others perplexed and hurt, her mind at last turned with decision from any contemplation whatsoever of the round of events which lay behind her presence here, in March, upon the ridge behind Gilead Balm. Rising, she left the cucumber tree and walked along the crest of the ridge. The wind was not blowing now, the sunshine was very golden, the little leaves were springing. She crossed the ribbon-like plateau to its northern edge, and stood, looking down that slope. It was somewhat heavily wooded, and in shadow. It fell steeply to a handsbreadth of sward, a purling streamlet, sunken boulders, a wide thicket and a wood beyond. Hagar, leaning against a young beech, gazed down the shadowed stillness. Her eyebrows lifted at their inner ends, lines came into her forehead, wistful markings about her lips. Sometimes when she knew that she was quite alone she spoke aloud to her self. She did this now. "I haven't been here since that day it happened.... Six years.... I wonder if he ran away again, or if he stayed there to the end. I wonder where he is now. Six years...."

The wind rose and blew fiercely, rattling in the thicket and bending every tree; then it sank again. Hagar leaned against the trunk of the beech and thought and thought. As a child she had been speculative, everywhere and all the time; with youth had come dreams and imaginations, pushing the older intense querying aside. Now of a sudden a leaf was turned. She dreamed and imagined still, but the thinker within her rose a step, gained a foot on the infinite, mounting stair. Hagar began to brood upon the state of the world. "Black and white stripes like a zebra.... How petty to clothe a man—a boy he was then—like that, mark him and brand him, until through life he sees himself striped black and white like a zebra—on his dying bed, maybe, sees himself like that! Vindictive. And the world sees him, too, like that, grotesque and mean and awful, and it cannot cleanse his image in its mind. It is foolish."

The wind roared again up and down the ridge. Hagar shivered and began to move toward the warmer side; then halted, turned, and came back to the beech. "I'll not go away until the sun comes from under that cloud and the wind drops. It's like leaving him alone in the thicket down there, in the cold and shadow." She waited until the sun came out and the wind dropped, then took her hand from the beech tree and went away. Leaving the ridge, she came to the overseer's house, hesitated a moment, then went and knocked at the kitchen door.

"Come in!" called Mrs. Green, who was sitting by the kitchen table, in the patch of sunlight before the window, sewing together strips of bright cloth and winding them into balls for a rag carpet. "You, Hagar? Come right in! Well, March is surely going out like a lion!"

"It's so windy that the clouds are running like sheep," said Hagar. She took a small, split-bottom rocking-chair, drew it near Mrs. Green, and began to wind carpet rags. "Red and blue and grey—it's going to be a beautiful carpet! Have you heard from Thomasine?"

Mrs. Green rose and took a letter from behind the clock. "Read it. She's been to a theatre and the Eden Musée and Brooklyn Bridge, and she's going to visit the Statue of Liberty."

Hagar read five pages of lined notepaper, all covered with Thomasine's pretty, precise writing. "She's having a good time.... I wish I were there, too. I've never seen New York."

"Never mind! You will one day," said Mrs. Green. "Yes, Thomasine's having a good time. Jim was born generous."

"Is she really going to work if he can get her a place?"

"Yes, child, she is. Times seems to me to be gettin' harder right along instead of easier. Girls have got to go out in the world and work nowadays, just the same as boys. I don't know as it will hurt them; anyway, they've got to do it. Food an' clothes don't ask which sect you belong to."

"Thomasine ought to have gone to school. Girls can go to college now, and Thomasine and I both ought to have gone to college."

"Landsake!" said Mrs. Green. "Ain't you been to college for going on three years?"

But Hagar shook her head. "No. Eglantine wasn't exactly a college. I ought to have gone to a different kind of place. Thomasine likes books, too."

"Yes, she likes them, but she don't like them nothing like as much as you do. But Thomasine's a good child and mighty refined. I hope Jim'll take pains to get her a place where they are nice people. He means all right, but there! men don't never quite understand."

"I wish I could earn money," said Hagar. "I wish I could."

Mrs. Green regarded her over her spectacles. "A lot of women have wished that, child. A lot of women have wished it, and then again a lot of women haven't wished it. Some would rather do for themselves an' for others an' some would rather be did for, and that's the world. I've noticed it in men, too."

"It's in my head all the time. I think mother put it there—"

"Yes, I know," said Mrs. Green. "A lot of us have felt that way. But it ain't so easy for women to make money. There's more ways they can't than they can. It's what they call 'Sentiment' fights them. Sentiment don't mind their being industrious, but it draws the line at their getting money for it. It says it ought to be a free gift. It don't grudge—at least it don't grudge much—a little egg and butter money, but anything more—Lord!" She sewed together two strips of blue flannel. "No, it ain't easy. And a woman kind of gets discouraged. She's put her ambition to sleep so often that now with most of them it seems asleep for keeps. Them that's industrious don't expect to rise or anything to come of it, and them that's lazy gets lazier. It's a funny world—for women.—There's a lot of brown strips in the basket there."

"I'm going to tell you what I've done," said Hagar, winding a red ball. "I've written a fairy story—but I don't suppose it will be taken."

"I always knew you could write," said Mrs. Green. "A fairy story! What's it about?"

"About fairies and a boy and a girl, and a lovely land they found by going neither north nor south nor east nor west, and what they did there. It seemed to me right good," said Hagar wistfully; "but I sent it off a month ago, and I've never heard a word about it."

"Where did you send it? I never did know," said Mrs. Green, "how what people writes gets printed and bound. It don't do it just of itself."

Hagar leaned forward in her rocking-chair. Her cheeks were carmine and her eyes soft and bright. "The 'Young People's Home Magazine' offered three prizes for the three best stories—stories that it could publish. And I thought, 'Why not I as well as another?'—and so I wrote a fairy story and sent it. The first prize is two hundred dollars, and the second prize is one hundred dollars, and the third is fifty dollars.—If I could get even the third prize, I would be happy."

"I should think you would!" exclaimed Mrs. Green. "Fifty dollars! I don't know as I ever saw fifty dollars all in one lump—exceptin' war money. When are you going to hear?"

"I don't know. I'm afraid I won't ever hear. I'm afraid it wasn't good enough—not even good enough for them to write to me and say it wouldn't do and tell me why."

"Well, I wouldn't give up hope," said Mrs. Green. "It's my motto to carry hope right spang through the grave." She rose, fed the fire, and filled the tea-kettle, then returned to her rag carpet. "You're lookin' a little thin, child. Don't let them worry you up at the house."

"I'm not," answered Hagar sombrely. The light went out of her eyes. She stitched slowly, drawing her thread through with deliberation.

Mrs. Green again looked over her spectacles. "They're mighty fine folk, the Ashendynes," she said at last. "They've got old blood and pride for a dozen, and the settest heads! Ain't nothin' daunts them, neither Satan nor the Lord. They're goin' to run their own race.—You're more like your mother, but I wouldn't say you didn't have something of your grandfather in you at times. You've got a dash of Coltsworth, too."

"Haven't I anything of my father at all?"

Mrs. Green, leaning forward into the sunlight, threaded her needle. "I wouldn't be bitter about my father, if I were you. People can be born without a sense of obligation and responsibility just as they can be born without other senses. I suppose it's there somewhere, only, so many other things are atop, it ain't hardly ever stirred. Your father's right rich in other things."

"He's so poor he couldn't either truly love my mother or truly let her go.—But I didn't mean to talk about him," said Hagar. She laid the ball she had been winding in the basket with the other balls and stood up, stretching her young arms above her head. "Listen to the wind! I wish it would blow me away, neither north nor south nor east nor west!"

"Yes, you are like your mother," said Mrs. Green. "Have you got to go? Then will you take your grandmother's big knitting-needles back to her for me? And don't you want a winesap?—there's a basket of them behind the door."

CHAPTER XI
THE LETTERS

Miss Serena was playing "Silvery Waves." Hagar, kneeling on the hearth-rug, warmed her hands at the fire and studied the illuminated text over the mantel. "Silvery Waves" came to an end, and Miss Serena opened the green music-book at "Santa Anna's March."

"Has Isham gone for the mail?" asked Hagar.

"Yes. He went an hour ago.—You're hoping, I suppose, for a letter from that dreadful man?"

"You know as well as I do," said Hagar, "that I gave my word and he gave his to write only once a month. And he isn't a dreadful man. He's just like everybody else."

"Ha!" said Miss Serena, and brought her hands down upon the opening chord. Hagar, her elbows on her knees, hid her eyes in her hands. Within her consciousness Juliet was speaking as she had spoken that night upon the stage—spoken in the book—spoken in immortal life, youth, love. Not so, she knew with a suddenness and clangour as of a falling city, not so could Juliet have spoken! "Like everybody else"—Was Laydon, then, truly, like everybody else?—A horror of weakness and fickleness came over her. Was there something direfully wrong with her nature, or was it possible for people simply to be mistaken in such a matter? Her head grew tired; she was so unhappy that she wished to creep away and weep and weep.... Miss Serena, having marched with Santa Anna, turned a dozen pages and began "The Mocking Bird. With Variations."

Old Miss's step was heard in the hall, very firm and authoritative. In a moment she entered the room, portly, not perceptibly aged, her hair, beneath her cap, hardly more than powdered with grey, still wearing black stuff gowns and white aprons and heelless low shoes over white stockings. Hagar rose from the rug and pushed the big chair toward the fire.

Old Miss dropped into it—no, not "dropped"—lowered herself with dignity. "Has Isham brought the mail?"

"No, not yet."

"I dreamed last night that there was a letter from Medway. Serena!"

"Yes, mother?"

"The next text you paint I want you to do one for me. Honour thy father and mother that thy days may be long—"

Miss Serena turned on the piano-stool. "I'll do it right away, mother. It would be lovely in blue and gold.... You can't say that I haven't honoured father and mother."

Old Miss had drawn out her knitting and now her needles clicked. "No one honours them as they used to be honoured. No one obeys them as they used to obey. To-day children think that they are wiser than their fathers. They set up to use their own judgment until it's a scandal.... It's true you've been better than most, Serena. Taking you year in and year out, you've obeyed the commandment. It's more than many daughters and grand-daughters that I know have done." Her needles clicked again. "Yes, Serena, you haven't given us much trouble. You were easy to make mind from the beginning." She gave the due praise, but her tone was not without acerbity. It might almost have seemed that such forthright ductility and keeping of the commandment as had been Miss Serena's had its side of annoyance and satiety.

Hagar spoke from the window where she stood, her forehead pressed against the glass. "I see Isham down the road, by the Half-Mile Cedar."

Old Miss turned the heel of the Colonel's sock she was knitting. "Things that from the newspaper and my personal observation happen now in the world could not possibly have occurred when I was young. People defying their betters, women deserting their natural sphere, atheists denying hell and saying that the world wasn't made in six days, young girls talking about independence and their own lives—their own lives! Ha!"

Miss Serena began to play "The Sea in the Shell." "We all know how Hagar came by her disposition, but I must say it is an unfortunate one! When I was her age, no money could have made me act as she has done."

"No money could have made me, either," spoke Hagar at the window.

"Money has nothing to do with it!" said Old Miss. "At least as far as Hagar is concerned, nothing! But fitness, propriety, meekness, and modesty, consultation with those to whom she owes duty, and bowing to what they say—all those have something to do with it! But what could you expect? It was bound to come out some day. From a bush with thorns will come a bush with thorns."

"Here is Isham," said Hagar. "If you've said enough for to-day, grandmother, shall I get the mail?"

She brought the bag to her grandmother. When the Colonel was at home, no one else opened the small leather pouch and distributed its contents; when he was away Old Miss performed the ceremony. To-day he had mounted Selim and ridden to the meeting in the neighbouring town. Mrs. Ashendyne opened the bag and sorted the mail. There was no great amount of it, but—"I said so! I dreamed it. My dreams often come true. There it is!" "It" was a square letter, quite thick, addressed in a rather striking hand and bearing a foreign stamp and postmark. It was addressed to the Colonel, and Mrs. Ashendyne never opened the Colonel's letters—not even when they were from Medway. They were not from him very often. The last, and that thin between the fingers, had been in September. This one was so much thicker than that one! Old Miss gazed at it with greedy eyes.

Miss Serena, too, leaving the piano-stool, came to her mother's side and fingered the letter. "He must have had a lot to write about. From Paris.... I used to want to go to Paris so much!"

"Put it on the mantelpiece," said Old Miss. "It can't be long before the Colonel's home." Even when it was on the mantel-shelf she still sat looking at it with devouring eyes. "I dreamed it was coming—and there it is!" The remainder of the mail waited under her wrinkled hand.

Miss Serena grew mildly impatient. "What else is there, mother? I'm looking for a letter about those embroidery silks. There it is now, I think!" She drew from her mother's lap an envelope with a printed return address in the upper left-hand corner. "No, it isn't it. 'Young People's Home Magazine.' Some advertisement or other—people pay a lot to tell people about things they don't want! Miss Hagar Ashendyne. Here, Hagar! It evidently doesn't know that you are grown up—or think you are! There's my letter, mother,—under the 'Dispatch.'"

Hagar went away with the communication from the "Young People's Home Magazine" in her hand. She went upstairs to her own room. It had been her mother's room. She slept in the four-poster bed on which Maria had died, and she curled herself with a book in the corner of the flowered chintz sofa as Maria had done before her. She curled herself here to-day, though with the letter, not with a book. The letter lay upon her knees. She looked at it with a fixed countenance, hardly breathing. She had thought herself out of a deal of the conventional and materialized religious ideas of her world—not out of religion but out of conventional religion. She did not often pray now for rewards or benefits, or hiatuses in the common law, or for a salvation external to her own being. But at this moment the past reasserted itself. Her lips moved. "O God, let it have been taken! O God, let it have been taken! Let me have won the fifty dollars! Let me have won the third prize. O God, let it have been taken!"

At last, her courage at the sticking-point, she opened the envelope, and unfolded the letter within. The typewritten words swam before her eyes, the "Dear Madam," the page or two that followed, the "With Congratulations, we are faithfully yours." There was an enclosure—a cheque. She touched it with trembling fingers. It said: "Pay to Miss Hagar Ashendyne the Sum of Two Hundred Dollars."

An hour later, the dinner-bell sounding, she went downstairs. The Colonel and Captain Bob were yet at the meeting of Democrats. There was to be a public dinner; they would not be home before dusk. The three women ate alone, Dilsey waiting. Old Miss was preoccupied; the letter on the parlour mantelpiece filled her mind. "From Paris. In September he was at a place called Dinard." Miss Serena had her mind upon a panel—calla lilies and mignonette—which she was painting for the rectory parlour. As for Hagar, she did not talk much, nowadays, at Gilead Balm. If she were more silent than usual to-day, it passed without notice.

Only once Old Miss remarked upon her appearance. "Hagar, you've got a dazed look about the eyes. Are you feeling badly?"

"No, grandmother."

"You're not to get ill, child. I shall make a bottle of tansy bitters to-morrow morning. We've trouble enough in this family without your losing colour and getting circles round your eyes."

That was love and kindness from Old Miss. The water came into Hagar's eyes. She felt a desire to tell her grandmother and Aunt Serena about the letter, but in another moment it was gone. Her whole inner life was by now secret from them, and this seemed of the inner life. Presently, of course, she would deliberately tell them all; she had thought it out and determined that it would be after supper, before Uncle Bob went to bed and grandfather told her to get the chess-table. It seemed so wonderful a thing to her; she was so awed by it that she could not help the feeling that it would be wonderful to them, too.

In the afternoon she put a cape around her, left the home hill and went down the lane, skirted a ploughed field, and, crossing the river road, came immediately to the fringe of sycamores and willows upon the river bank. It was warmer and stiller than it had been in the morning, for the voice of the wind there sounded now the voice of the river; the many boughs above were still against the sky. She made for a great sycamore that she had known from childhood; it had a vast protuberant curving root in whose embrace you could sit as in an armchair. She sat there now and looked at the river that went so swiftly by. It was swollen with the spring rains; it made a deep noise, going by to the distant sea. To Hagar its voice to-day was at once solemn and jubilant, strong and stirred from depth to surface. She had with her the letter; how many times she had read it she could not have told. She could have said it by heart, but still she wanted to read it, to touch it, to become aware of meaning under meaning.... She could write, she could tell stories, she could write books.... She could earn money. It was one of the moments of her life: the moment when she knew of her mother's death—the moment when she changed Gilead Balm for Eglantine—the moment by the fire, Christmas eve—this moment. She was but eighteen; the right-angled turns in her road of this life had not been many; this was one and a main one. Suddenly, to herself, her life achieved purpose, direction. It was as though a rudderless boat had been suddenly mended, or a bewildered helmsman had seen the pole star.

She sat in the embrace of the sycamore, her feet lightly resting on the spring earth, her shoulders just touching the pale bark of the tree, her arms folded, her eyes level; poised, recollected as a young Brahman, conscious of an expanded space, a deeper time. How long she sat there she did not know; the sun slipped lower, touched her knees with gold. She sighed at last, raised her hands and turned her body.

What, perhaps, had roused her was the sound of a horse's hoofs upon the river road. At any rate, she now marked a black horse coming in the distance, down the road, by the speckled sycamores. It came on with a gay sound upon the wind-dried earth, and in its rider she presently recognized her cousin, Ralph Coltsworth.

"What are you doing here?" she asked when he reined in the black horse beside her. "Why aren't you at the University with Blackstone under your arm?"

He dismounted, fastened his horse, and came across to the sycamore root. "It's big enough for two, isn't it?" he asked, and sat down facing her. "You mentioned the University? The University, bless its old heart! doesn't appreciate me."

"Ralph! Have you been expelled?"

"Suspended." Hands behind head, he regarded first the blue sky behind the interlaced bare branches, then the tall and great gnarled trunk, then the brown-clad figure of his cousin, enthroned before him. "The suspense," he said, "is exquisite."

"What did you do?"

He grimaced. "I don't remember. Why talk about it? It wasn't much. Cakes and ale—joie de vivre—chimes at midnight—same old song." He laughed. "I gather that you've been rusticated, too."

Hagar winced. "Don't!... Let's laugh about other things. You'll break your family's hearts at Hawk Nest."

"Old Miss said in a letter which mother showed me that you were breaking hers. What kind of a fellow is he, Hagar?—Like me?"

Hagar looked at him gravely. "Not in the least. How long are you going to stay at Hawk Nest?"

"Oh, a month! I'm coming to see you every other day."

"Are you?"

"I am. If I could draw I'd like to draw you just as you look now—half marquise, half dryad—sitting before your own front door!"

"Well, you can't draw," said Hagar. "And it's getting cold, and the dryad is going home."

"All right," said Ralph. "I'm going, too. I've come to spend the night."

Leading his horse, he walked beside her. In the green lane, a wintry sunset glory over every slope and distant wood, the house between its black cedars rising before them, he halted a moment. "I haven't seen you since August when I rode over to tell Gilead Balm good-bye. You've changed. You've 'done growed.'"

"That may be. I've grown to-day."

"Since I came?"

"No. Before you came. For the first time I suppose in your life, grandmother is going to be sorry to see you. She worships you."

"She was sorry to see you, too, wasn't she? It's rather nice to be companions out of favour."

"Oh!" cried Hagar. "You are and always were the most provoking twister of the truth! I want to say to you that I do not consider that ours are similar cases! And now, if you please, that is the last word I am going to say to you on such a matter."

"All right!" said Ralph. "I was curious, of course. But I acknowledge your right to shut me up."

They passed through the home gate,—where a boy took his horse,—and went up the hill together. Dilsey was lighting the lamps. As they entered the hall Miss Serena came out of the library—Miss Serena looking curiously agitated. "Dilsey, hasn't Miss Hagar come in yet?... Oh, Hagar! I've been searching the place for you—Why, Ralph! Where on earth did you come from? Has the University burned down? Have you got a holiday?"

The library door was ajar. The Colonel's voice made itself heard from within. "Serena! Is that Hagar? Tell her to come here."

The three entered the room together. There was a slight clamour of surprise and greeting from its occupants for Ralph, but it died down in the face, as it were, of things of greater importance.

"What's the matter?" he asked, bringing up at last by Captain Bob in the background.

"A letter from Medway," answered the other. "Shh!"

The evenings falling cold, there was a fire upon the hearth. The reading-lamp was lit; all the room was in a glow that caressed the stiff portraits, the old mahogany and horsehair furniture, the bookcases and the books within. In the smaller of the two great chairs by the hearth sat Old Miss, preternaturally straight, her hands folded on the black silk apron which she donned in the evening, her still comely face and head rising from the narrow, very fine embroidered collar fastened by an oval brooch in which, in a complicated pattern, was wrought the hair of dead Coltsworths and Hardens. Her face wore a look at once softened and fixed. Across from her, in the big chair by the leaf-table, sat Colonel Ashendyne, a little greyer, a little more hawklike of nose, a little sparer in frame as the years went by, but emphatically not a person to whom could be applied the term "old." There breathed from him still an insolent, determined prime, a timelessness, a pictorial quality as of some gallery masterpiece. With the greyish-amber of his yet plentiful hair, his mustache and imperial, the racer set of his head, his well-shaped jaw and long nervous hands, his fine, long, spare figure and his eye in which a certain bladelike keenness and cynicism warred with native sensuousness, he stayed in the memory like such a canvas. His mood always showed through him, though somewhat cloudily like light through a Venetian glass. That it was a mixed and curious mood to-night, Hagar felt the moment she was in the room. She did not always like her grandfather, but she usually understood him. She saw the letter that had rested on the mantelpiece, the letter from Paris, in his hand, and at once there came over her a curious foreboding, she did not know whether of good or evil.

"Sit down," said the Colonel. "I have something to read to you."

For two months and more he had not looked at her without anger in his eyes. To-night the cloud seemed at least partly to have gone by. There was even in the Colonel's tone a touch of blandness, of enjoyment of the situation. She sat down, wondering, her eyes upon the letter. On occasion, when she searched her heart through, she found but a shrivelled love for her father. Except that he had had half-share in giving her life, she really did not know what she had to love him for. Now, however, what power of growth there was in the winter-wrapped root broke the soil. She began to tremble. "What is the matter? Is father ill? Is he coming home?"

"Not immediately," said the Colonel. "No, he is not ill. He appears to be in his usual health and to exhibit his usual good spirits. Your grandmother and I were fortunate in having a son of a disposition so happy that he left all clouds and difficulties, including his own, to other people. At the proper moment he has always been able to find a burden-bearer. No, Medway is well, and apparently happy. He has remarried."

"Remarried!..."

It was the Colonel's intention to read her the letter—indeed, it carried an inclosure for her—as he had already read it, twice, with varying comment, to the others assembled. But he chose to make first, his own introduction. "You've heard of the cat that always falls on its feet? Well, that's your father, Gipsy!"—Even in the whirl of the moment Hagar could not but note that he called her "Gipsy."—"That's Medway! Here's a careless, ungrateful, disobedient son, utterly reckless of his obligations. Is he hanged or struck by lightning? Not he! He goes happily along—Master Lucky-Dog! He makes a disastrous marriage with a penniless remnant of a broken-down family on some lost coast or other and brings her home, and presently there's a child. Does he undertake to support them, stay by his bargain, however poor a one? Not he! He's got a tiny income in his own right, left him by his maternal grandfather—just enough, with care, for one! Off he goes with that in his pocket and a wealthy friend and, from that day to this, we haven't laid eyes on Prince Fortunatus! Well, what happens? Does he come to eating husks with the swine and so at last slink back! Not he! He enjoys life; he's free and footloose; he's put his burden on other folk's backs! Death comes along and unmakes his marriage. His doting mother and his weak father apparently are prepared to charge themselves with the maintenance of his child. Why should he trouble? He doesn't—not in the least! He's got just enough in his own right to let him wander, en garçon, over creation. If he took the least care of another he couldn't wander, and he likes to wander. Ah, I understand Medway, from hair to heel!—What comes of it all? We used to believe in Nemesis, but that, like other beliefs, is going by the board. Isn't he going to suffer? Not at all! He remains the cat that falls, every time, upon its feet.—This, Gipsy, is the letter."

My dear Father and Mother:—As well as I can remember, I was staying at Dinard when I last wrote you. I was there because of the presence in that charming place of a lady whose acquaintance I had made, the previous year, at Aix-les-Bains. From Dinard I followed her, in November, to Nice, and from Nice to Italy. I spent a portion of February as her guest in her villa near Sorrento, and there matters were brought to a conclusion. I proposed marriage and she accepted. We were married a week ago in Rome, in the English church, before a large company, the American Minister giving her away. There were matters to be arranged with her banker and lawyer in Paris, and so, despite the fact that March is a detestable month in this city, we immediately came on here. Later we shall be in Brittany, and we talk of Norway for the summer.

The lady whom I have married was the widow of —— ——, the noted financier and railroad magnate. She is something under my own age, accomplished, attractive, handsome, and possessed of a boundless good nature and a benevolent heart. We understand each other's nature and expect to be happy together. I need hardly tell you that being who she is, she has extreme wealth. If you read the papers—I do not—you may perhaps recall that ——'s will left his millions to her absolutely without condition. There were no children. To close this matter:—she has been generous to a degree in insisting that certain settlements be made—it leaves me with a personal financial independence and assurance of which, of course, I never dreamed.... I have often regretted that I have been able to do so little for you, or for the upkeep of dear old Gilead Balm. This, in the future, may be rectified. I understand that you have had to raise money upon the place, and I wish you would let me know the amount.

The Colonel's eyes darted cold fire. He let the sheet fall for the moment and turned upon Hagar, sitting motionless on the ottoman by the fire. "Damn your father's impertinence, Gipsy!" he said.

Old Miss spoke in a soft and gentle voice. "Why do you call it that, Colonel? Medway always had a better heart than he's ever been given credit for. Why shouldn't he help now that he can do so? It's greatly to his credit that he should write that way."

"Sarah," said the Colonel, "you are a soft-hearted—mother!"

Captain Bob spoke from beyond the table. Captain Bob did not often speak, nor often with especial weight, but he had been pondering this matter for three quarters of an hour, and he had a certain kind of common sense. "I think Sarah's right. Medway's a curiosity to me, but I've always held that he was born that way. You are, you know; you're born so or you aren't born so. He's pretty consistent. There never was a time when I wouldn't have said that he would come to the fore just as soon as he didn't have to deny himself. Now the time's come, and here he is. I think Sarah's right. Forgive and forget! If he wants to pay his debts—and God knows he owes you and Sarah a lot—I'd let him. And as to Gipsy there—better late than never! Read her what he says."

"I am going to," said the Colonel sardonically. He read the page that remained, then laid the letter on the table, put his hands behind his head and regarded his granddaughter. "The benevolent parent arrived at last upon the scene—a kindly disposed stepmother with millions—and that teacher of surface culture to young ladies at Eglantine! Among the three you ought to be quite ideally provided for! I hope Medway will like the teacher."

Old Miss came, unexpectedly, to her granddaughter's aid. "Don't worry her, Colonel! I haven't thought her looking well to-day. Give her her letter, and let her go and think it out quietly by herself.—If you like, child, Phœbe shall bring you your supper."

Hagar did like—oh, would like that, thank you, grandmother, very much! She took the letter—it was addressed to her in a woman's hand—which her father had enclosed and which her grandfather now held out to her, and went away, feeling somewhat blindly for the door, leaving the others staring after her. Upstairs she lit her lamp and placed it on Maria's table, by Maria's couch. Then, curled there, against the chintz-covered pillows,—they were in a pattern of tulips and roses,—she read the very kind letter which her stepmother had written.

CHAPTER XII
A MEETING

The New Springs had been so christened about a hundred years before, when a restless pioneer family had moved westward and upward from the Old Springs, thirty miles away, at the foot of the great forest-clad range. The New Springs had been a deer-lick, and apparently, from the number of arrowheads forever being unearthed, a known region to the Indians. Now the Indians were gone, and the deer fast, fast withdrawing. Occasionally buck or doe was shot, but for the most part they were phantoms of the past. So with the bear who used to come down to the corncribs in the lonely clearings. Bear Mountain still rose dark blue, like a wall, and the stark cliff called Bear's Den caught the first ray of the sun, but the bears themselves were seldom seen. They also were phantoms of the past. But the fish stayed in the mountain streams. There were many streams and many fish,—bright, speckled mountain trout, darting and flashing among pools and cascades, now seen in the sunlight, now lurking by fern-crowned rocks, in the shadow of the dark hemlock spruce. The region was Fisherman's Paradise.

It was almost an all-day's climb from the nearest railway station to the New Springs. You took the stage in the first freshness of the morning; you went gaily along for a few miles through a fair grazing country; then the stage began to climb, and it climbed and climbed until you wondered where and when the thing was going to stop. Every now and then driver and passengers got down and walked. Here it was shady, with wonderful banks of rhododendron, with ferns and overhanging trees, and here it was sunny and hot, with the wood scrub or burned, and the only interesting growth huckleberries and huckleberries and huckleberries, dwarf under the blazing sun, with butterflies flitting over them. Up here you had wonderful views; you saw a sea of mountains, tremendous, motionless waves; the orb as it had wrinkled when man and beast and herb were not. At last, somewhere on the long crest, having been told that you must bring luncheon with you and having provided yourself at the railway station with cold bread and fruit and hard-boiled eggs, you had luncheon. It was eaten near a bubbling spring with a water-trough at which the horses were drinking, and eaten with the most tremendous appetite. By now you were convinced that the air up here was blowing through a champagne bottle. Luncheon over and the horses rested, on went the stage. Quite in the mid-afternoon you began to go down the mountain. Somewhat later, in a turn by a buckwheat field waving white in the summer wind, the driver would point with his whip—"Right down there—there's the New Springs! Be there in an hour now."

It might be "right down there," but still the New Springs was pretty high in the world, away, away above sea level. You always slept at the New Springs under blankets, you nearly always had a fire in the evening; even the heat of the midday sun in the dog days was only a dry, delightful warmth. Hardly anywhere did the stars shine so brightly, the air was so rare and fine.

The New Springs boasted no imposing dwellings. There was a hotel, of faint, old, red brick, with a pillared verandah, and there were half a dozen one-story frame cottages, each with a small porch and growing over it its individual vine. Honeysuckle clambered over one, and hops over another, and a scarlet bean over a third, and so on. There was an ice-cold sulphur spring where the bubbles were always rising, and around it was built a rustic pavilion. Also there existed a much-out-of-repair bowling-alley.

"Yes, there's the New Springs," said the driver, pointing with his whip. "But, Lord! it stopped being new a long time ago."

There were hardly any passengers to-day; only three in fact: two women and a man. All three were young enough to accomplish with enjoyment a great deal of walking up the long mountain. They had laughed and talked together, though of very nothings as became just-met folk. The birds and the bees and butterflies, the flowers, the air, and the view had been the chief subjects of comment. Now, back in the stage for the descent, they held in their hands flowers and ferns and branches covered with ripe huckleberries which they detached from the stems, lifted to their lips and ate. The two women were friends, coming, so they now explained to their fellow-traveller, from a distance to this little out-of-the-way place. The brother of one, it seemed, was a great fisherman and came often. He was not here this year; he was travelling in Palestine; but he had advised his sister, who was a little broken down and wanted a quiet place to work in, to come here. She said, jubilantly, that if the air was always going to be like this she was glad she had come. It had seemed funny, at first, to think of coming South for the summer—though her friend was half-Southern and didn't mind.

"I'm wondering," said the fellow-traveller, with an effect of gallantry, "what in the world the work can be! The very latest thing, I suppose, in fancy-work—or perhaps you do pastels?"

Elizabeth Eden looked at him with her very candid grey eyes. "I'm doing a book of statistics—women and children in industry."

"And I," said the other, Marie Caton, "I teach English to immigrant girls. We are both Settlement workers."

Laydon prided himself on his ability quickly to shift sail. "Oh!" he said; "a Settlement! That's an idea that hasn't got down to us yet. We are rather lazy, I suppose.—I was reading, though, an excellent article upon Settlements in one of the current magazines only the other day. Ladies, especially, seem to be going in for that kind of work;—of course, it is, when you think of it, only an extension of their historic function as 'loaf-giver.' Charity and Woman—they're almost synonymous."

"That's a magnificent compliment—or meant to be!" said Marie Caton. Her eyes were dancing. "I wonder what you'd say if I said that charity—charity in your sense—is one of woman's worst weaknesses? Thank God Settlements, bad as they are, aren't charity!"

"Look at the view, Marie," said Elizabeth. "And, oh! feel that wind! Isn't it divine?"

"Winds blow from all four points at oncet up here," said the driver. "Ain't many people at the New Springs this summer. Fish don't bite, or everybody's gone to the World's Fair, or something or other! Ain't more'n forty people, countin' children."

"What kind of people are they? Do the women fish, too?"

"No, ma'am, not much. It's the husbands and brothers and fathers does the fishing mostly—though there's Mrs. Josslyn. She fishes. The others just sit around in rocking-chairs, I reckon, and crochet. Them that has children looks after them, and them that hasn't listens to them that has. Then it's a fine air for the health; fine air and fine water. A lot of tired people come. Then there's others get into the habit of meeting friends here. Being on the border, as it were, it's convenient for more states than one. Colonel Ashendyne, for instance,—he comes because General Argyle and Judge Black and he made a pact in the war that if they lived through they'd spend a month together every two years until they died. They've kept it faithful, and because Judge Black's a great fisherman, and General Argyle likes the juleps they make here, and Colonel Ashendyne knew the place when he was a boy, they pitched on the New Springs. When they're here together, they're the three Kings.—Git up thar, Dandy!—This year the Colonel's got his daughter and granddaughter with him."

Laydon nodded, looking animated and handsome. "I know the Ashendynes. Indeed—but that is neither here nor there. The Ashendynes," he explained for the benefit of the two foreigners, "are one of our oldest families, with connections everywhere; not wealthy,—we have very little wealth, you know,—but old, very widespread and honoured. A number of them in the past were really famous. It might be said of the Ashendynes as it was said of an English family—'All the sons were brave and all the daughters virtuous.'"

"You seem," said Marie Caton, "to have a profound acquaintance with the best literature."

Laydon disclaimed it with a modest shake of the head. "Oh, only so-so! However, literature is my profession. I have a chair of Belles-Lettres."

"That is interesting," said Elizabeth in her friendly voice. "Is it your vacation? Are you a fisherman, too?"

"Oh, I fish a little on occasion! But I am not what you call a great fisherman. And I was never at the New Springs before." He gave a half-boyish, embarrassed laugh. "To tell the truth, I am one of those persons who've come because another person happens to be here—"

"Oh!" said Marie Caton, "I see!" She began presently to hum beneath her breath—

"Gin a body meet a body,
Comin' through the rye—"

"Oh, what a rough piece of road!"

"It ain't often mended," said the driver. "They say times is changing,—there was a fellow through here last summer said they was changing so rapid they made you dizzy,—but there ain't much change gotten round to Bear Mountain. I remember that identical rut there when I was just a little shaver.—Look out, now, on that side, and you'll see the New Springs again! We ain't more'n a mile an' a half away now. The ladies often walk up here to see the sunset."

"There's one coming up the road now," said Marie Caton, "In a green gingham and a shady hat."

"That," said the driver, "'ll be Miss Hagar—Colonel Ashendyne's granddaughter. She and me's great friends. Come by here 'most any evenin' and you'll find her sittin' on the big rock there, lookin' away to Kingdom Come."

"Stop a minute," spoke Laydon, "and let me out here. I know Miss Ashendyne. I'll wait here to meet her and walk back to the Springs with her."

He lifted his hat to his fellow-travellers and the stage went on without him. "A nice, clean-looking man," said Elizabeth who was inveterate at finding good; "not very original, but then who is?"

"I can't answer it," said Marie promptly. "Now we'll see the girl! She's coming up straight and light, like a right mountain climber." The stage met and passed Hagar, she and the driver exchanging "Good-evenings!" The stage lumbered on down the slope. "I liked her looks," said Marie. "Now, they're meeting—"

"Don't look back."

"All right, I won't. I'd like such consideration myself.—Betsy, Betsy! You are going to get strong enough at the New Springs to throw every statistic between Canada and Mexico!"

Back beside the big rock at the bend of the road, Hagar and Laydon met. "There isn't any one to see!" he exclaimed, and would have taken her in his arms.

She evaded his grasp, putting out her hand and a light staff which she carried. "No, Mr. Laydon! Wait—wait—" Stepping backward to the rock by the wayside she sat down upon it, behind her all the waves of the Endless Mountains. "I only got your letter yesterday. It had been delayed. If I had had it in time, I should have written to you not to come."

"I told you in it," smiled Laydon, "that I was not afraid of your grandfather. He can't eat me. The New Springs is as much mine to come to as it is his. I had just three days before I go to —— to see about that opening there. The idea came to me that if I could really see him and talk to him, he might become reconciled. And then, dear little girl! I wanted to see you! I couldn't resist—"

As he spoke he moved toward her again. She shook her head and put out again the hand with the staff. "No. That is over.... I came up here to meet you because I wanted to find out—to know—to be certain, at once—"

"To find out—to know—to be certain of what?" He smiled. "That I am just the same?—That I love you still?"

"To be certain," said Hagar, "that I was mistaken.... I have got my certainty."

"I wish," said Laydon, after a pause, "that I knew what you were driving at. There was something in your last month's letter, and for the matter of that in the month before, that struck cold. Have I offended you in any way, Hagar?"

"You have not been to blame," said Hagar. "I don't think either of us was to blame. I think it was an honest mistake. I think we took a passing lightning flash for the sun in heaven.... Mr. Laydon, that evening in the parlour at Eglantine and the morning after, when we walked to the gate, and the road was sunny and lonely and the bells were ringing, oh, then I am sure I loved you—" She drew her hand across brow and eyes. "Or, if not you, I loved—Love! But after that, oh, steadily after that, it lessened—"

"'Lessened'!—You mean that you are not in love with me as you were?"

"I am not in love with you at all. I was in love with you, or.... I was in love. I am not now." She struck her staff against the rock. "I almost hope I'll never be in love again!"

Across from a cleared hillside, steep and grassy, came a tinkling of sheep-bells. The sun hung low in the west and the trees cast shadows across the road. A vireo was singing in a walnut tree, a chipmunk ran along a bit of old rail fence. A zephyr brought an odour dank and rich, from the aged forest that hung above.

"I think," said Laydon, "that you are treating me very badly."

"Am I? I am sorry.... You mustn't think that I haven't been wretched over all this. But it would be treating you badly, indeed, if I were such a coward as to let it go on." She looked at him oddly. "Will you be—Are you much hurt?"

"I—I—" said Laydon. "I do not think you quite conceive what you are saying, nor what such a cool pronunciamento must mean to a man! Hurt? Yes, I am hurt. My pride—my confidence in you—my assurance that I had your heart and that you had put your life in my keeping—the love that I truly felt for you—"

"'Felt.'—You loved me, loving you. Oh," said Hagar, "I feel so old—so old!"

"I loved you sincerely. I imperilled my position for you—to a certain extent, all my prospects in life. I had delightful visions of the day when we should be finally together—the home you would make—the love and protection I should give you—"

"You are honest," said Hagar, "and I like honesty. If I have done you any wrong at all, if I have made life any harder for you, if I have destroyed any ideals, if I have done you the least harm, I very heartily beg your pardon."

Laydon drew from his pocket a small box and opened it. "I had brought you that—"

Hagar took it in her hand and looked at it. "It is lovely!" she said. "A diamond and a sapphire! And it isn't going to be wasted. You keep it. Sooner or later you'll surely need it. You couldn't have bought a prettier one." She looked up with a soft, bright, almost maternal face. "You don't know how much happier I am having faced it, and said it, and had it over with! And you—I don't believe you are so unhappy! Now are you—now are you?"

"You have put me in an absurd position. What am I to say—"

"To people? Nothing—or what you please. I will tell grandfather myself, to-night—and Aunt Serena. I shall tell them that you have behaved extremely well, and that it was all my fault. Or no! I shall tell them that we both found out that we had been mistaken, for I think that that is the truth. And that we have had an explanation, and are now and for always just well-wishers and common friends and nothing more. I am going to try—I think that now maybe I can do it—to get grandfather to treat you properly. There is nobody else here whose business it is, or who knows anything about it—and you have only three days anyway. There are some pleasant people, and you'll meet them. It isn't going to be awkward, indeed, it isn't—"

"By George!" said Laydon, "if you aren't the coolest.... Of course, if this is the way you feel, it may be wisest not to link my life with—Naturally a man wants entire love, admiration, and confidence—"

"Just so," said Hagar. "And you'll find some one to feel all that. And now let's walk to the New Springs."

CHAPTER XIII
THE NEW SPRINGS

Laydon's three days spun themselves out to five with a fine smoothness. Colonel Ashendyne's tone was balm itself to what it might have been. Miss Serena was willing to discuss with him "In Memoriam" and the novels of Miss Broughton, and Ralph Coltsworth who was also at the New Springs walked with him over the place. Laydon was keen enough to see that Hagar had appealed to her family, and that Ashendyne breeding had rallied to her support. He was at once provoked and soothed; now conscious only of the injury to his healthy self-love, and now of a vague relief that, young as he still was, and with that wonderful future all to make, he really was not tied down. His very vanity would not agree but that the woman with whom he had thought himself in love must be of a superior type and an undeniable charm, but the same vanity conceded gently that to err was mortal, and that there were as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and that he certainly had not been fatally smitten—on the whole, she, poor little thing! had probably suffered the most of the two. Charming as she was, the glamour for him, he conceded, was gone. He had come off pretty well, after all.

When the five days were up, he felt positive regret at having to go, and his good-bye to all the Ashendynes was cordial. He had already written to Mrs. LeGrand, and, of course, to his mother. He went; the stage took him up the mountain....

"For all I could see—and I watched pretty closely—there didn't anything come of it," remarked Marie Caton. "On the whole, I am rather glad. Now you can't hear the rumble of the stage any longer. He's gone out of the picture.—Betsy, stop writing and look at the robin and the chipmunk—"

They had the tiniest cottage to themselves—Elizabeth's brother being an old-timer here, and his letter to the proprietor procuring them great consideration. There were but two rooms in the cottage. Roof and porch, it was sunk in traveller's-joy, and in front sprang a vast walnut tree, and beyond the walnut a span-wide stream purled between mint over a slaty bed. From the porch you looked southward over mountains and mountains, and every evening Antares looked redly back at you. Now it was morning, and wrens and robins and cat-birds all were singing.

Elizabeth looked up from the table where she was working. "If I watch chipmunks all morning, I'll never get these textile figures done.—Mrs. Josslyn said at breakfast that it wasn't a good day for fishing, and that she might wander by."

"She's coming now. I see her in the distance. I like Molly Josslyn."

"So do I.—We haven't been here a week and yet we talk as though we had known these people always!"

"Well, the fact that quite a number knew your brother made for there being no ice to break. And it would be so absurd not to know one another at the New Springs! as absurd as if a shipload of people cast on a desert island—Here she is. Come in, Mrs. Josslyn!"

"Thank you, I don't want a chair," said Molly Josslyn. "You don't mind if I sit on the edge of the porch and dangle my feet, do you? Nor if I take off my hat and roll up my sleeves so that I can feel the air on my arms?"

"Not a bit. Take the hairpins out of your hair and let it fly."

"I wish that I could cut it off!" said Molly viciously. "I will some day! Pretty nearly a whole three-quarters of an hour out of every twenty-four gone in brushing and combing and doing up hair! You have to do it in the morning and the middle of the day and the evening. A twentieth part of your whole waking existence!... Oh, me!"

"What a sigh!"

"I've been in rocking-chair-and-gossip land over on the big porch. I've heard everybody—in a petticoat—who wasn't there hanged, drawn, and quartered. Of course, I knew they were eager to get at me, and so I was obliging and came away."

Marie Caton laughed. "Miss Eden here is an optimist of the first water. If you ask her she'll tell you that women are growing beyond that sort of thing—that they don't sting one another half as much as they used to!"

"No, I don't think they do," said Mrs. Josslyn. "I think that's getting apparent nowadays. Speaking for myself, fresh air and out of doors and swinging off by one's self seem to make a body more or less charitable. But some of us have got the habit yet. Gnat or wasp or hornet or snake, on they go!" she laughed. "Over on the porch it wasn't anything but a little cloud of gnats. They weren't really stinging—just getting between your eyes and the blue sky."

"But it is growing better—it is, it is!" said Elizabeth. "I wouldn't give up that belief for anything."

"No, don't!" said Molly Josslyn. "I like women and like to think well of them."

A strong, rosy blonde, she stood up and stretched her arms above her head. "I wish there were a pool somewhere, deep enough to swim in! I'd like to cross the Hellespont this morning—swim it and swim back.—Christopher is coming to-morrow."

"Christopher?"

"My husband—Christopher Josslyn. They don't," said Mrs. Josslyn, "make them any nicer than Christopher! Christopher was my born mate." And went away with a beamy look, over the grass.

Marie spoke thoughtfully. "Yesterday I heard one of the gnats singing. It sang, 'Yes, rather handsome, but don't you find her dreadfully unfeminine?'"

"Oh, 'feminine'!" said Elizabeth, and went on adding figures.

Marie Caton took a book from the generous number ranged around a jar of Black-eyed Susans on the rustic table in the middle of the porch, but "The chipmunks and the robins get so in the way," she presently dreamily murmured, and then, "You had just as well put up your work. Here's Judge Black and General Argyle!"

Judge Black was sixty-two, rather lean than stout, rather short than tall, clean-shaven, with a good-looking countenance below grizzled, close-clipped hair, with a bald spot at the top like a monk's tonsure. General Argyle was a much larger and taller man, big-framed, wide-girthed, with a well-set head framed about with shaggy white hair. His countenance was rubicund, his voice mellow. He was sixty-seven, in some respects very old, and in others quite young. Usually, at the New Springs, Colonel Ashendyne marched in company, but this morning—"Ashendyne's got some family conference or other on hand. It's a day off for fishing, and nobody seems to have a mind for whist or poker, and the papers haven't come. Argyle and I are floating around like two lost corks or the Babes in the Wood—"

"So I said," said General Argyle richly, "let's stroll over there and say good-morning to Tom Eden's sister and her attractive friend.—No, no; no chairs! We'll sit here on the steps. As soon as Ashendyne appears, we're going after young Coltsworth and have a turn in the bowling-alley. Must exercise!—that's what I'm always telling Black here—"

"As if I didn't exercise," said Judge Black, "more in a day than he does in a week.—What a pretty little porch you've got! Books, flowers, needlework—"

The General surveyed it, too. "It is pretty. Woman's touch—woman's touch!"

"That isn't needlework in the basket," said Marie demurely. "It's apples. Will you have one?"

"No, thanks, Mistress Eve—or yes, on second thoughts, I will! What are you reading?—'The Doll's House.' Ibsen!"

"Yes."

"I do not know," said the Judge, "what young ladies are coming to! I have never had time, nor, I may say, inclination, to read Ibsen myself, but of course I know the kind of thing he's responsible for. And, frankly, I should not permit my daughter to read that book!"

"Oh," said Marie, "I don't think myself it is a book for a child!"

"She's not a child. She's twenty-six. I should dissuade my wife, too, from reading it."

"Then your wife," answered Marie, "would miss an illuminating piece of literature."

Elizabeth came in with her serene voice. "Don't you think, Judge Black, that we all acquire a habit of judging a writer, whom we haven't yet had time to study for ourselves, too much in terms of some review or other, or of the mere unthinking, current talk? I think we all do it. I believe when you read Ibsen you will feel differently about him."

"Not I!" said the Judge. "I have seen extracts enough. I tell you, Miss Eden, the age is reading too much of such decadent stuff—"

"Oh, 'decadent'!"

"And it is read, amazingly, by women. I would rather see my wife or daughter with the old dramatists at their worst in their hands than with stuff like that—! Overturning all our concepts, criticizing supremacies—I beg your pardon, Miss Caton, but if you knew how women, nowadays, amaze me—"

"Stop hectoring, Black," said the General mellowly. "She's not in the dock. Just so that women stay women, they can fill their heads with what stuff they will—"

"Exactly!" said Judge Black. "Do you see them staying women?"

"Women of the past," said Elizabeth.

"That is woman,—the women of the past. There isn't any other. The eternal feminine—"

"I think you are limiting the eternal and denying the universe power to evolve," said Elizabeth. "Why not eternally the man of the past? Why not 'There isn't any other'? Why not 'The eternal masculine'? Why do you change and grow from age to age?"

"I'm not so sure that they do," said Marie sotto voce.

"Yes, they do! They grow and become freer always; though I think," said Elizabeth painfully, "that they lag in the way they look at women.—Well, if you grow, being one half, do you suppose that we are not going to grow, being the other half? And if you think that the principle of growth is not in us, still I shouldn't worry! If we can't grow, we won't grow, and you needn't fash yourselves. On the other hand, if we can, we will—and that is all there is about it. And it wouldn't do you the least harm to read Ibsen—nor to get another definition of 'decadent.'"

She leaned forward in her chair. "Do you see that strip of blanched grass there?—or rather it was blanched yesterday when that board over there was lying upon it and had lain, I don't know how long!—blanched and bent and sicklied over. Now look! It is getting colour and standing straight—only beginning, but it is beginning—beginning to be on terms with the sun! Well, that grass is woman to-day! The heavy board is being lifted, and that's the change and all the change—and you find it 'pernicious'!"

Glowing-cheeked, she ceased speaking. Judge Black's colour, too, had heightened. "My dear Miss Eden, how did all this begin? I'm the last person in the world to deny to woman a proper freedom. I only ask that it shan't go beyond a certain point—that it shan't threaten the unsettling of a certain divine status quo—"

"I doubt if a divine status quo is ever unsettled, Judge Black," said Elizabeth. "But there—but there!" She smiled, and she had a very sweet, sunny smile. "I didn't in the least mean to quarrel! Tom will have told you that I sometimes use my tongue, and that's the ancient woman, still, isn't it? You see I care for women—being one—a good deal."

"Let us," said Marie Caton, "talk about fishing."

General Argyle chuckled. "Black doesn't think you know anything about fishing. He has to acknowledge that Mrs. Josslyn does—but then he thinks that she's a charming lusus naturæ. I like to hear you give it to Black. Pay him back. He's always giving it to me!"

"That's right!" said Black. "Pitch into me! Cover me with obloquy! Poor homeless, friendless sailor with the pole star mysteriously shifted from its place—" ...

"The homeless, friendless sailor stayed a long time, even with the pole star shifted," remarked Marie, forty minutes later.

"I certainly didn't mean to be rude," murmured Elizabeth, her eyes upon the disappearing guests, now well on their way to the bowling-alley. "They mean you never to resent a thing which they would at once recognize for an impertinence if one of themselves said it to another—"

"Oh, I shouldn't dub you rude," said the other. "And if he found you uncomfortable for a minute, you made up for it afterwards! You were charming enough, just as charming as if the pole star had never shifted. He went off still in mind the Eastern King."

"Ah," said Elizabeth, "that is where all of us are weak. We say the truth, and then we bring in 'charm' and sandpaper it away again! It's going to take another generation, Marie!"

"Another?" said Marie. "A dozen, more like!—Now I suppose I can read 'The Doll's House' in peace.—No, by all that's fated in this place, here comes another guest!"

This was Ralph Coltsworth, but he made no long tarrying; he was as transient as a butterfly. "Have you ladies seen Hagar Ashendyne? I want her to go to walk with me, and I can't find her anywhere."

"No, we haven't," said Marie. "Judge Black and General Argyle are looking for you to play tenpins."

Ralph smiled back at her. "Let them look! It will do the old codgers good. Do you like this place?"

"Yes, very much. Don't you?"

"Oh, I like it so-so!" said Ralph. "It's a good enough lotus land, but there's a lack somehow of wild, exciting adventure. I've been trying to read on the hotel porch. What do you think they're talking about over there? Fringed doilies!"

"What do you like to do and to talk about?"

"Live things." He laughed, tossed an apple into the air and caught it again. "I want first to make fifty millions, and then I want to spend fifty millions!"

"What an admirable American you are!"

"Am I not? And I vary it with just wanting to be a cowboy with a six-shooter on a Western plain—" He tossed the apple into the air again and, watching it, missed the glimpse of Hagar which the other two received. She appeared around the corner of a neighbouring cottage, her face directed toward the traveller's-joy porch, saw Coltsworth, wheeled and withdrew. He caught the apple, and after gazing meditatively for a moment in the direction of the tenpin-alley, sighed, and said that he supposed after all he might as well go help the General demolish the Army of the Potomac. "That's what he calls the pins when they're set up. He takes the biggest bowl and sends it thundering. I believe he thinks for the moment it is a ball from one of his old twenty-pounders. He sees fire and smells smoke. Sometimes he demolishes the Army of the Potomac and sometimes he doesn't; but he never gets discouraged. The next cannon ball will surely do the work!"

When he was gone, and had been gone twenty minutes or more, Hagar reappeared. She came swiftly across the grass, mounted the porch steps, and stood, with a little deprecating shake of her head for the offered chair, by Elizabeth's work-table. "I am not going to stay, thank you! Miss Eden, somebody told me last night that you had written and published books—"

"Only text and reference books—compilations," said Elizabeth. "I only do that kind of unoriginal work."

"Yes, but a book is a book," said Hagar. "What I wondered was if you wouldn't be good enough to tell me some things. No one in all my connection writes—I don't know any one to go to. I only want to know plain things—A, B, C's of how to manage—"

"About a manuscript, you mean?"

"Yes. I don't know anything. I've read all kinds of useless things and so little useful! For instance," said Hagar, "is it wrong to write on both sides of the paper?"

CHAPTER XIV
NEW YORK

In August—the Ashendynes being back at Gilead Balm—the "Young People's Home Magazine" published Hagar's fairy story. Gilead Balm was impressed, but not greatly impressed. It had the aristocratic tradition as to writers; no Ashendyne had ever needed to be one. There had been editor Ashendynes, in the old fiery, early, and mid-century times, but editorship came out naturally from the political stream, and the political, with law, planting, and soldiery, had been the Ashendyne stream. The Ashendyne mind harked back to Early Georgian, even to Stuart times; when you said "writer" it saw something Grub Streetish. In addition, Hagar's was, of course, only a child's story.

The two hundred dollars shrank in impressiveness from being known of after and not before Medway Ashendyne's letter. But to the eyes of her grandmother and her Aunt Serena the two hundred dollars was the impressive, the only really impressive, thing. Her grandmother advised that it be put in bank. Miss Serena said that, when she was Hagar's age, she had had a watch and chain for more than two years. "What would you like to do with it, Gipsy?" asked Captain Bob.

The colour came into Hagar's cheeks. "With one half I want to get my two winter dresses and my coat and hat, and with the other half I want to get books."

"Books!" exclaimed the Ashendynes—the Colonel was not present. "Why, aren't there books enough here?"

"They are not the kind of books I need."

"Nonsense!" said Old Miss. "Get your winter clothes if you wish,—though I am sure that Medway means now to send the Colonel money for you,—but save the rest. It will come in useful some day. Some day, child, you'll be thinking about your marriage clothes."

"Luna and I came over the hill just now with Ralph Coltsworth," remarked Captain Bob cheerfully, apropos of nothing. "He says he's studying hard—means to catch up at the University and be a credit to the family."

Miss Serena was talented in taking offence at small things. She had evolved the watch-and-chain idea and she thought it should have received more consideration. In addition she had the kind of memory that always holds the wrong things. "Books! I suppose you mean a kind of books that we certainly don't have many of here!—French novels and Darwin and the kind of books those two Northern women were reading this summer! Even when you were a child—don't you remember, mother?—you had a perfect talent for getting your hands on debasing literature! I supposed you had outgrown it. I'm sure Mrs. LeGrand never encouraged it. A hundred dollars worth of books!—and I suppose you are to choose them! Well, if I were father, I'd look over the list first."

"Aunt Serena," said Hagar, with a Spanish gravity and courtesy, "there are times when I understand the most violent crimes.... Yes; I know you don't know what I mean."

That was in August. September passed and part of October, and then, late in that month, Hagar went to New York.

Medway Ashendyne and his wife were travelling in the East. Next year or the year after, they might, Medway wrote, be in America. In the meantime, Hagar must have advantages. He had not the least idea, he wrote his father, what kind of a person she was. Her letters were formal, toneless and colourless to a degree. He hoped she had not inherited—But whatever she had inherited, she was, of course, his daughter, and he must take care of her, being now in a position properly to do so. His wife suggested, for the moment, a winter in New York, properly chaperoned. The money would be forthcoming (there followed a memorandum of a handsome sum placed in bank to the Colonel's credit). He could, he knew, leave it to his father and mother to see that she was properly chaperoned. His wife had thought of making certain suggestions, but upon talking it over together, they had come to the conclusion that, at the moment, at least, it would be wisest not to interfere with the Gilead Balm order and way of life. It was admirably suited, he judged, for a young girl's bringing up—much better than the modern American way of doing things. Only in France—or the Orient—was the jeune fille really preserved.

The Colonel wrote to Mrs. LeGrand. Mrs. LeGrand returned one of her long, fluent letters. First of all, congratulations that Hagar had come to her senses about Mr. Laydon, then—"Now as to New York—"

Sylvie was going to New York too,—going to have singing lessons, for she had a very sweet voice, and every one agreed that it would be a mistake not to give it the best training. The problem of how to manage for Sylvie had received the following solution, and Mrs. LeGrand proffered it as a possible way to manage for Hagar also. There was Powhatan Maine's family in New York—Powhatan himself and Bessie and their widowed daughter, Mrs. Bolt, with her two children. They lived well, "in our quiet, homelike, Southern fashion, of course." Powhatan was a solid lawyer in a solid firm. Sylvie had paid them a visit once before, but of course this year it was a question of her being in New York for months and months. Now, ordinarily, the Maines would not have heard of such a thing, but this disastrous year, with everybody failing, Powhatan had lost heavily in stocks and apparently they were having to economize. At any rate, Bessie was willing, just for this year, to take Sylvie under her wing and to let her pay for her room and board. The Maines' house was a good, big one, and Mrs. LeGrand had very little doubt that, just as a family favour, Bessie would be willing to receive Hagar on similar terms. Bessie would certainly stipulate that the arrangement should be a quiet one, just between themselves, and that Hagar, no less than Sylvie, should be regarded merely as a young friend and connection, visiting her that winter. This understood, Bessie would look after the two as if they were her own. It was fortunate that neither Sylvie nor Hagar was "out," for the Maines were in mourning. But Powhatan and Bessie knew a great many people, and the two girls would probably see company enough. "You remember Bessie, don't you? Good-nature itself! Nothing pleases her so much as having people happy about her." Then, too, there would be Rachel Bolt. She could take Hagar to the theatre and to concerts and the picture galleries and where not. "The Maines are all members of St. Timothy's—the Bishop's nephew's church, you know."—In fine, Mrs. LeGrand advised that the Ashendynes write at once to Mrs. Maine. It was done and Hagar's winter soon arranged for.

New York!... She had dreamed of great cities, but she had never seen one. The night on the sleeping-car—her first night on any sleeping-car—she stayed awake and watched through the window the flying clouds and the moon and stars between, and, underneath, the fugitive landscape. There was a sense of exaltation, of rushing on with the rushing world. Now and again, as the train creaked and swung, and once, as another roared past, there came moments of fascinated terror. Rushing train and rushing world, all galloping wildly through the night, and in front, surely some bottomless precipice!... She and Sylvie had a section, and though Hagar had offered to take the upper berth, it had ended in their having it put back and sleeping together. Now Hagar sat up in bed, and looked at the sleeping Sylvie. There was a dim, blended light, coming from the lamp above and the moonlight night without. Sylvie lay, half-uncovered, fast asleep, her hair in glossy braids, her pretty face, shell-tinted, sunk in the pillow, her breast quietly rising and falling. Hagar had an intense, impersonal, abstract passion for beauty wherever and in whatever form it resided. Now, limbs beneath her, her arms nursing each other, she sat and regarded the sleeping Sylvie with a pure, detached admiration. The train roared into a station; she drew the window curtain until it roared out again, then bared the window, and sat and watched the flying dark woods and the silver surface of some wide water. New York—New York—New York....

Sylvie was a travelled lady. Sylvie had been to New York before. She had been to Florida and New Orleans and Niagara and Saratoga. She could play sweetly, not arrogantly,—Sylvie was not arrogant, except, perhaps, a little when it came to good looks,—the part of guide and mentor to Hagar. In the Jersey City station she kept a reassuring touch upon Hagar's arm down the long platform to the gate. "The New York Ferry has a sign over it. Even if they don't meet us, I know how to manage—Oh, there's Cousin Powhatan!"

It was a pearl-grey morning, going over, with a mist that was almost a fog hanging upon the water and making unearthly and like a mirage the strange sky-line before them. There were not so many huge, tall buildings as there would be in after years, but they were beginning. The mist drifted, opening and closing, and to the mist was added the fairy garlands and pennants of white steam. Out of the luminous haze grew white ferryboats and low barges, and here passed an opalescent shape like a vast moth wing. "A sailboat," said Hagar under her breath. The air was chill and clinging. Sylvie and Captain Powhatan Maine preferred to sit and talk within the cabin, but Hagar remained outside. She stood with her hands lightly touching the rail, her eyes wide. Another sailboat slipped past. She turned and looked along the widening water, oceanward, and in a rift of the grey pearl clouds she seemed to see, at a great distance, a looming woman shape. A salt odour filled her nostrils. "Oh, the sea! I smell the sea!"

The ferryboat glided into its slip, the bell rang, the chains rattled; out resonantly, from the lower deck, passed the great dray horses and heavy wagons; the passengers disembarked; a crowd hurried, in column, toward the Elevated. Half-bewildered, Hagar found herself mounting long flights of steps, passing through a gateway, entering a train, which at once, with a shriek, began to run upon a level with second-story windows. She saw dingy red-brick factory and tenement buildings close, close to her face; fire-escapes and staring windows with squalid or horribly tawdry rooms beyond; on the window-sills spindling, starved plants in ancient, battered tin cans, children's faces, women leaning out, children, children, children—"We have to go quite far uptown," said Captain Maine. "Well, and what do you girls want to see first?"

He was a short, stout, gallant gentleman with a fierce grey mustache. Sylvie talked for both. Hagar nodded her head or commanded a smile when manners seemed to indicate it, but her mind was dealing with a nightmare. "Was this—was this New York?" Once she turned her head toward their escort, but something told her that if, indeed, she asked the absurd question, he would say, "Why, yes! Don't you like it?"

Where were the domes and colonnades? Where the cleanness and fairness—where the order and beauty? Where was the noble, great city? Where were the happy people? She tried to tell herself, first, that all these were there, that this was but a chance ugly street the train was going through ... but they went through it for miles, and she caught glimpses of so many other streets that seemed no better! And then she tried to tell herself, that, after all, she must have known it would be something like this. She had seen before, on a small scale, in a small city, decrepit buildings and decrepit people of all ages. Poverty, dirt, and disease.... One city would be like another, only larger.... She must have known. But knowing did not seem to have helped—or perhaps she had never really seen, nor thought it out. She was tired and overstrained; a horror came upon her. She looked through a window into a room hung with a ghastly green, torn, and soiled paper. Men and women were working in it, bent over a long table, working haggardly and fast, the shirts of the men, the bodices of the women, open at the throat. Another window—a wretched, blowsy woman and a young man with a bloated, unwholesome face;—another, and an old, old woman with a crying child, whom she struck;—then mere blank windows or windows with starveling geraniums in broken pots; and beneath and around and everywhere voices and heavy wheels, and the train rushing on upon its trestle high in the air. Something black and cold and hopeless rolled over Hagar's soul. It was as though the train were droning, droning, a melancholy text.

"Hagar! What is the matter? You looked as though you were going to faint!"

But Hagar wasn't going to faint. She pulled herself together. "No, no! It isn't anything! I was tired, I suppose—"

"Mustn't faint in New York," said Captain Maine genially. "You'll get run over if you do."

On went the Elevated, and the walls of windows grew vaguely better—or the shock of surprise was over—or the armoured being within shouldered away a hampering unhappiness. New York—New York—New York! Hope and vision sprang afresh. The windows and the houses in which they were set decidedly bettered. There were distant glimpses of fine buildings, spires of churches, trees that must be in a park. The sun, which had been all morning hidden by clouds, came suddenly forth and flooded the world with October gold. The gulf between what she had dreamed and what she saw perceptibly narrowed, though it was still there and though it still ached. "Here we are!" said Captain Maine, and folded his newspaper. Out of the train upon a platform—then more stairs, this time running downward—then a block or two of walking, in the crisp air, then a very different street from those the train had rushed through and very different houses. "Here we are!" said their host again, and they mounted a brownstone stoop. A coloured maid opened the door—they passed into a narrow reception hall with the Maines' ancestral tall clock standing by the stair and on the opposing walls engravings of Southern generals; thence, through folding doors, into a cool, deep parlour and the embrace of Mrs. Maine.

Mrs. Maine was large and sleepy and quiet and dark, with a nebulous personality. Everybody who knew her said that she was extremely good-natured, while a few added that she was too indolent to be irascible, and a fair number called it native kindliness and adduced a range of respectable incidents. No one ever hinted at intellectuality, and she certainly did not shine in conversation; she was not, apparently, socially ambitious, and nobody could be said to take less trouble—and yet a number of people—chiefly Southerners dwelling in New York, the more decorative and prosperous of St. Timothy's congregation, and Powhatan Maine's legal associates and acquaintances—exhibited a certain partiality for the Maine house. Powhatan told good war stories and darky stories; almost always there appeared something good to eat, with a Southern name and flavour; and Mrs. Maine was as unobtrusive and comfortable to get on with as the all-pervasive ether. There was nothing riotous nor especially buoyant in the house; it was rather dim and dull and staid; but people who had begun to visit the Maines twenty years before visited still. Perhaps most of them were dim and dull and staid themselves. Others, perhaps, liked the occasional salt of an environment which was not habitually theirs. The house itself was deep and for a New York dwelling wide, cool, high-ceilinged, and dark, with a gleam of white marble mantel-pieces and antiquated crystal chandeliers, with some ancient Virginia furniture and some ebony and walnut abominations of the 'seventies. Everything was a little worn, tending toward shabbiness; but a shabbiness not extreme, as yet only comfortable, though with a glance toward a more helpless old age. There were a fair number of books, some portraits and good, time-yellowed engravings. There were four coloured servants beside the nurse for Mrs. Bolt's children. The children, Charley and Betty, were pudgy, quaint elves of three and five. Charley, the younger, had been blind from birth.

That evening, Rachel Bolt came before bedtime into Hagar's room. "May I sit and talk a little while? Sylvie and mother and father and Dick Dabney, who came in a little while ago, are playing duplicate whist."

"Of course you may. It's such a pleasant room you've given me."

Rachel turned in her chair and regarded it from wall to wall somewhat cynically. "Well, I suppose at the first blush it may seem so. It is, however, rather shabby. We meant to do it over again this year, but times are so tremendously hard that we gave it up with a lot of other things.—What I really came in for was to ask what kind of things and places and people you'd like to see this winter. It's agreed with your grandfather that I'm to take you around."

"It is good of you to be willing to do it—"

"Oh, I'm to be paid for doing it! I'll be spinning my spring outfit and Betty's and Charley's while we gallivant. But I do not mean"—she laughed—"that it is going to be hard or disagreeable work, unless"—she ended coolly—"you want to go to places where I don't want to go."

"To those places," said Hagar seriously, "I will go alone."

"Then," said Rachel, "we will get along very well.... What do you want to do anyhow?"

"I want to feel around for a while. And I'd like to be shown how to go and how to manage, just at first. But after that I hope you won't mind if I just wander about by myself." She lifted her long arms above her head in a gesture, harassed and restless. "I think there are people to whom solitude means as much as food or sleep."

"Do you want me to get up and say good-night?" asked Rachel promptly.

Hagar gave a warm little laugh. "Not yet awhile. I'm not that greedy and sleepy. I strive to be temperate.... What I want to see first are pictures. I have never seen any—barring those at home and at Eglantine."

"Well, we can go to the Metropolitan to-morrow."

"I should like that. Then I want to hear music. I have never heard any to count."

"There'll be concerts and the opera later. The opera is, of course, very expensive, but I understand that your father wants you to do pretty well what you wish. If you don't mind being high up, we can do a good deal of it reasonably."

"Then let us go high up."

"At the moment there aren't even concerts. We might find an organ recital, and on Sundays there is music in the park."

"Day after to-morrow is Sunday. I'll go and hear that. Then I want to go to the theatre."

"Most of that will come later, too. Are you fond of the theatre?"

"I don't know. That is why I want to go—to find out. I have never seen but three plays."

"What an awfully lucky person! What were they?"

"One—I was a little girl and I went to Richmond for two days—was 'Maria Stuart.' Janauschek played it. The next was in the small town near where I live. It was rather terribly done, I believe, and it kept me awake for a week afterward. I was fifteen. It was 'The Corsican Brothers.' Then"—said Hagar, "last winter I saw 'Romeo and Juliet.'... They didn't seem like plays. They seemed like life,—sometimes terrible and sometimes beautiful. I want to go to find out if it is always so."

"It isn't," said Rachel. "You are inexperienced."

"There is a natural history museum here, isn't there?"

"Yes, a large one."

"I want to go there. I want to see malachite and chrysoprase and jade, and the large blue butterflies and the apes up to man and the models of the pterodactyl and dinosaur and a hundred other things."

"Until now," said Rachel, "I have thought that Charley and Betty had the largest possible appetites. What else?"

"Am I tiring you?"

"Not a bit. Besides, it is business. I came in here to get a catalogue raisonné.—It's rather curious that you should have such a passion for minerals and species and prehistoric things."

"Is it? Well, I have it," said Hagar. She put her arms again behind and above her head. "If you want to know All, you must live All—though in honour preferring one to the other."

Beside her, on the little table by the hearth, was a paper and pencil. Suddenly she unlocked her hands, bent over and drew a sheet of paper from under the book with which she had covered it on Rachel's entrance. "I was trying to write something when you came in. It is rough and crude,—just the skeleton,—but it's something like what I mean and what I want." She held it out; then, with a deprecating gesture and a shy flush, "If it doesn't bore you—"

Rachel took it and read.

"God that am I,
I that am God,
Mass and Motion and Psyche
Inextricably wound!
We began not; we end not;
And a sole purpose have we,—
Intimately to know
And exalted to taste,
In wisdom and beauty
Perpetually heightening,
The Absolute, Infinite,
One Substance Who Is!
In joy to name
In wisdom to know
All flames and all fruits
From that hearth and that tree!
To name infinite modes,
Eternally to name,
To name as we grow,
And grow as we name.
And stars shall arise,
Beyond stars that we see,
And self-knowledge shall come,
To me in God, God in me—"

Rachel put it down. "I'll think that out a little. We've never had any one in the house just like you."

"I thought," said Hagar, "that Sunday morning I would go to the Catholic Cathedral. If you tell me the way I can find it—"

"You are not a Catholic?"

"No. But I have always wanted so to smell incense.—

"'When from the censer clouds of fragrance roll—'"

"You are rich in differences," said Rachel. "I hope we'll get along well together. I think we will. Is there anything else you can think of at the moment?"

"I want to see the Salvation Army."

"That may be managed, if you are willing to take it in detachments."

"And I want—oh, I want to go somewhere where I can really see the ocean!"

"I'll get father to take us down to Brighton Beach. It isn't too late, this mild weather."

"This morning," said Hagar, "we came through—miles, I think—of places where poor people live. I want to see all that again."

"It isn't very edifying. But we can get under the wing of some association and do a little mild slumming."

"I want to go down there alone and often—"

"That," said Rachel, "is impossible."

"Why?"

"It is not done. Besides, it would be dangerous."

"Dangerous?"

"You might take any disease—or get into any kind of trouble. There are all sorts of traps."

"Why should they set traps?"

"Oh, all kinds of horrors happen.—Just look at the newspapers! A girl—alone—you'd be subjected to insult."

Hagar sighed. "I've always been alone. And I don't see that we are not subjected to insult everywhere. I could never feel more insulted than, sometimes, I have been at home."

Rachel, turning in her chair, darted at her a lightning-like glance of comprehension. "Well, that's true enough, though I never heard it put into words before! It's true.... But it remains that with our present conventions, you must have company when you go to see how the other half lives."

"The other half?"

"It's a term: One half of us doesn't know how the other half lives."

"I see," said Hagar. "Well, I'll be glad when I get out of fractions."

Both laughed. A kind of soft, friendly brightness prevailed in the third-floor back bedroom. There was no open fire, but they sat on either side of the little squat table, and the reading-lamp with a yellowy globe did the job of a common luminary. The light reached out to each and linked them together. Rachel Bolt was small and dark and slender. Much of the time she passed for a cynical and rather melancholy young woman; then, occasionally, sheaths parted like opening wings and something showed that was vivid and deep and duskily luminous. The next moment the rift might close, but there had been received an impression of the inward depths. She had been married at eighteen, her first child born a year later. She was now twenty-five, and had been a widow for two years. In worldly wisdom and savoir faire, and in several emotional experiences she was well ahead of Hagar, but in other respects the brain ways of the younger in years were deeper and older. Whatever differences, their planes were near enough for a comprehension that, continually deepening, passed before long into the country of lasting friendship.

CHAPTER XV
LOOKING FOR THOMASINE

When Hagar had been ten days in New York, she went early one afternoon to find Thomasine. She had the address, and upon showing it to Rachel the latter had pronounced it "poor but respectable," adding, "Are you sure you ought to go alone?"

"'Ought to go alone?—ought to go alone?'—I am so tired of that phrase 'ought to go alone'!" said Hagar. "At Gilead Balm they said, 'Don't go beyond the Mile-and-a-Half Cedar!' You say yourself that I couldn't get lost, and I was brought up with Thomasine, and Jim and his wife are perfectly good people."

Downstairs, as she was passing the parlour doors, Mrs. Maine called to her from within. "Where are you going, dear?" Hagar entered and explained. "That is very nice of you to look her up, but do you think you ought to go alone?" Hagar explained that, too; whereupon Mrs. Maine patted her hand and told her to trot along, but always to be careful! As the front door closed after her, her hostess resumed her box of chocolates and the baby sacque she was knitting. "It isn't as though I had promised to give her, or to make Rachel give her, continual chaperonage! To look after her in a general way is all that could possibly be expected. Besides, it's foolish always to be nervous about people!" She took a chocolate cream and began the sleeve. "Medway Ashendyne, with all those millions, isn't doing very much for her. She couldn't dress more plainly if she tried. I wonder what he means to do with her eventually. Perhaps he doesn't mean anything—just to let things drift...."

Hagar knew how to orientate herself very well. She took the surface car going in the right direction, and when she had travelled some distance she left it and took a cross-town car. This brought her to the block she wished. Out of the jingling car, across a street of push-carts and drays and hurrying, dodging people, she stood upon the broken and littered pavement a moment to look about her. The houses were tall and dreary; once good, a house to a family, but now not so good, and several families to a house. The corners were occupied by larger buildings, unadorned and jerry-built and ugly, each with a high-sounding name, each containing "flats";—flats and flats and flats, each with its ground floor occupied by small stores—unprosperous greengrocer, unprosperous butcher, poor chemist, prosperous saloon, and what not. It was a grimy, chilly grey afternoon with more than a hint of the approaching winter. All voices seemed raw and all colours cold. Among the children playing on the pavement and in areaways or on high, broken, entrance steps, there sounded more crying than laughing. Dirty papers were blown up and down; there floated an odour of stale beer; an old-clothes man went by, ringing a bell and crying harshly, "Old clothes! Old clothes! Got any rags?" Hagar stood with contracted brows. She shivered a little. "Why, Thomasine should not live in a place like this!" She looked about her. "Who should?" She had a vision of Thomasine playing ring-around-a-rosy, Thomasine looking for four-leaved clovers.

But when she climbed to the third floor of one of the corner buildings, and, standing in the perpetual twilight of the landing-way, rang the bell of a door from which much of the paint had been scarred, she found that Thomasine did not live there.

The door was opened by a gaunt, raw-boned woman. "Thomasine Dale? Did she live with Marietta Green and Jim?"

"Yes. She is Jim's niece."

"Well, she don't live here now."

"May I see Jim or his wife?"

"They don't live here neither."

The door across the landing opened, and a stout woman in a checked apron looked out. "Was you looking for the Greens?"

"Yes, please."

"If you'll come in and set a minute, I'll tell you about them. I've got asthmy, and there's an awful draught comes up those steps."

Hagar sat down in an orange plush rocking-chair and the stout woman, having removed her apron, took the green and purple sofa.

"There now! I meant to mend that carpet!"—and she covered the hole with the sole of her shoe. "I am as fond as I can be of the Greens! Jim's a good man, and if Marietta wa'n't so delicate she'd manage better. The children are nice youngsters, too.... Well, I'm sorry they've gone, but Jim hurt his arm down in the Works and Marietta couldn't seem to get strong again after the last baby, and everybody's cutting wages when they ain't turning men off short, and Jim's turn come, for all he's always been good and sober and a good workman. First the Works hurt his arm, and then it said that he wasn't so useful now; and then it said that it had seen for a long time that it would have to economize, and the men could choose between cut wages or no wages at all, and Jim was one of them it said it to. So he had to take the cut." She began to cough and wheeze and then to pant for breath. "Did you—ever have—the asthmy? I'm—going off—with it—some day. Glass of water? Yes—next room—cup by the sink.... Thank you—child! You're real helpful.—What was I saying? Oh, yes—'t was Jim and Marietta and the children and Thomasine who had to economize."

"Where are they gone?" asked Hagar sorrowfully.

"It isn't so awful far from here. I'll give you the address. The car at the corner'll take you there pretty quick. But it ain't nowhere near so nice a neighbourhood or a house as this." She regarded her plush furniture and Nottingham curtains with pride. "Thomasine's an awful nice girl."

"Yes," said Hagar. The tears came into her eyes. "I love Thomasine. I oughtn't to have waited so long before coming to find her, but I never thought of all this. It never entered my head."

"She's got an awful good place, for a woman—nine dollars a week. She could have kept a room here, but she's awful fond of Jim and Marietta and the children, and she went with them. I reckon she'll help right sharp this winter—'less'n the stores take to cutting too."

On the street-car, the new address in her hand, Hagar considered Poverty. It was there in person to illustrate, in an opposite row of anæmic, anxious faces and forms none too warmly clad; it was there on the street, going up and down; it was there in the houses that were so gaunt, defaced, and ugly. The very November air, cold and querulous, seemed poor. Her mind was sorting and comparing impressions. She had known, when she came to think of it, a good deal of poverty, and a number of poor people. In the first place, she had been brought up on the tradition of the poverty after the war—but that had been heroic, exalted poverty, in which all shared, and where they kept the amenities. Then, when that had passed, there were the steadygoing poor people in the country—those who had always been poor and apparently always would be so. But it did not seem to hurt so in the country, and certainly it was not so ugly. Often it was not ugly at all. Of course, everybody at home, in a cheerful tone of voice, called the Greens poor people. The Greens were poor,—Car'line and Isham were poor;—she remembered, with a curious vividness, the poor woman on the canal boat, the summer her mother died. She had even heard the Colonel say that he—the Colonel—was poor. Of course, she had seen hosts of poor people. And yet until to-day, or rather, to be more precise, until the morning of the ferry and the Elevated, she had never generalized Poverty, never conceived it abstractly. Poverty! What was Poverty? Why was Poverty? Was it a constant; was it going to last? If so, why? If it wasn't going to last, what was going to make things better? It was desirable that things should be better—oh, desirable, desirable! The slave of Beauty and the slave of Righteousness in Hagar's soul rose together and looked upon the dump-heap and the shards that were thrown upon it. "It shouldn't be. There is no need and no sense—"

Four or five summers past, visiting with Miss Serena some Coltsworth or Ashendyne house in the country, and exploring, as she always did almost at once, the bookcases, she had come upon—tucked away in the extreme shadow of a shadowy shelf—a copy of William Morris's "News From Nowhere." Hagar had long since come to the conviction that her taste was radically different from that of most Coltsworths and Ashendynes. Where they tucked away, she drew forth. She had read "News From Nowhere" upon that visit. But she had read it hurriedly, amid distractions, and she was much younger then than now. It had left with her chiefly an impression of a certain kind of haunting, other-world beauty. She remembered the boy and the girl in the tobacco-shop, playing merchant, and the cherry trees in the streets, and the cottage of Ellen, and Ellen herself, and the Harvest Home. Why it was written or what it was trying to show, she had not felt then with any clearness. Now, somehow, the book came back to her. "That was what 'News from Nowhere' was trying to show. That people might work, work well and enough, and yet there be for all beauty and comfort and leisure and friendliness.... I'll see if I can find that book and I'll read it again."

The car stopped at the street-corner indicated. When she was out upon the pavement, and again stood a moment to look about her, she was frightened. This was the region of the fire-escapes, zig-zagging down the faces of the buildings, the ramshackle buildings. It was the region of the black windows, and the women leaning out, and the wan children. This street was narrower than the other, grimier and more untidy, more crowded, colder, and the voice of it never died. It rose to a clamour, it sank to a murmur, but it never vanished. Usually it kept a strident midway, idle and fretful as the interminable blown litter of the street. Hagar drew a pained breath. "Thomasine's got no business living here—nor Jim and Marietta and the children either!"

But it seemed, when she mounted a dirty, narrow stair and made enquiries of a person she met atop,—it seemed that they didn't live there. "They moved out a week ago. The man was in some damned Works or other, and it threw him on the scrap-heap with about a thousand more. Then the place where the girl worked thought scrap-heaps were so pretty that it started one, too. Then he heard a report of work to be had over in New Jersey—as if, if this is the frying-pan, that ain't the fire!—and so they left this state. No; they didn't leave any address. Working people's address this year is 'Tramping It. Care of the Unemployed.' Sometimes, it's just plain 'Gone Under.'"

The man looked at Hagar, and Hagar looked at the man. She thought that he had the angriest, gloomiest eyes she had ever seen, and yet they were not wicked eyes. They blazed out of the dark entryway at her, but for all their coal-like glowing they were what she denominated far-away-seeing eyes. They seemed to look through her at something big and black beyond. "Have you seen the evening paper?" he asked abruptly.

"No, I have not. Why?"

"I wanted to see.... This morning's had an account of three Anarchist bits-of-business. A bomb in Barcelona, a bomb in Milan, and a bomb in Paris.—No, I can't tell you anything more about your friends. Yes, I'm sorry. It's a hard world. But there's a better time coming."

Grieving and bewildered, she came out upon the pavement. Why hadn't Thomasine—why hadn't Jim let them know? If there wasn't anything at home for Jim to do,—and she agreed that there wasn't—nor for Thomasine, still they could all have stayed there and waited for a while until Jim's arm and hard times got better. She tried to put them all—there were six—in the overseer's house with Mrs. Green. It would be crowded, but.... The overseer's house was her grandfather's; Mrs. Green had had it, rent free, since William Green's death, and most of her cornmeal and flour came from the Colonel's hand. Hagar tried to say to herself that her grandfather would be glad to see Jim and Marietta and Thomasine and the three children there staying with Mrs. Green as long as was necessary; that if it were crowded in the overseer's house her grandmother would be glad to have Thomasine and perhaps one of the children stay in the big house. It would not work. It came to her too, that perhaps Jim and Marietta and Thomasine might not be so fond of coming and sitting down on Mrs. Green and saying, "We've failed." But couldn't they work in the country? Jim was a mechanic; he didn't know anything about farming—and the farmers were having a hard time, too. Hagar's head began to ache. Then the travelling expenses—she tried to count those up. If they couldn't pay the rent, how could they pay for six to go down to Virginia—and the children's clothes, and the food and everything?... Was there no one who could send them money? Mrs. Green couldn't, she knew—and Thomasine's mother and father were very poor, and Corker wasn't doing well, and Maggie was at home nursing their mother whose spine was bad.... Gilead Balm had a kindly feeling for the Greens, she knew that. William Green had been a good overseer, and he had fought in the regiment the Colonel led. Her grandfather—if he knew how bad it was, if he could see these places where they had been living, if he could have heard the woman in the check apron and the man with the eyes—he might send Jim twenty-five dollars, he might even send him fifty dollars, though she doubted if he could do that much. She herself had twenty dollars left of that August two hundred. She had been saving it for Christmas presents for Gilead Balm, but now she was going to send it to Thomasine—just as soon as she knew where to send it. She walked on for a little way in a hopeful glow, and then the bottom dropped out of that, too. It wouldn't go far or do much. It was too small a cloth to wrap a giant in. Jim and Thomasine's unemployment—Jim's injured arm, hurt in the Works, Marietta weak and worn, trying to care for a little baby.... Other Mariettas, Jims, Thomasines, thousands and thousands of them.... They were willing and wanting to work. They were not lazy. Jim hadn't injured his own arm. Apparently there had to be babies.... Unemployment, and no one to help when help was needed.... It needed a giant. "All of us together could do it—all of us together."

She was cold, even under her warm jacket and with her thick gloves. The street looked horribly cold, but she did not notice many jackets, and no gloves. With all her beauty-loving nature she hated the squalid; nothing so depressed her. She had not seen it before so verily itself; in the country it was apt to have a draping and setting of beauty; even a pigpen might be environed by blossoming fruit trees. Here squalor environed squalor, ugliness ugliness. On a step before her sat a forlorn little girl of eight or nine, taking care of a large baby wrapped in a shawl. Hagar stopped and spoke.

"Are you cold?" The child shook her head. "Are you hungry?" She shook it still; then suddenly broke forth volubly in a strange tongue. She was telling her something, but what could not be made out. The door behind opened, and Elizabeth Eden came forth. She spoke to the child kindly, in her own language, with a caressing touch upon the shoulder. The little girl nodded, gathered up the baby, and went into the house.

"Miss Eden—"

Elizabeth turned. "What—Why, Miss Ashendyne! Did you drop out of the sky? What on earth are you doing in Omega Street?"

"I came down here to find some people whom I know. I am visiting in New York. Oh, I am glad to see you!"

"We can't stand here. The Settlement is just two blocks away. Can't you come with me and have a cup of tea? Where are you staying?"

Hagar told her, adding, "I must be back before dark or they won't let me come out again by myself."

"It isn't quite four. I'll put you on the Elevated in plenty of time.—What people were you looking for?"

Hagar told her as they walked. Elizabeth listened, knew nothing of them, but said gravely that it was a common lot nowadays. "I have seen many hard winters, but this promises to be one of the worst." She advised writing guardedly to Mrs. Green, until she found out how Thomasine and Jim wrote themselves. "They may not be telling her how bad it is, and if she cannot help, it is right that they shouldn't. I believe, too, in being hopeful. If they're sturdy, intelligent people, they'll weather the gale somehow, barring accidents. It's the miserable accidents—the strained arm, your Marietta's illness after the baby—things like that that tip the scales against them. Well, cheer up, child! You may hear that they've got work and are happy.—This is the Settlement."

Three old residences, stranded long years ago when "fashionable society" moved away, first street by street and at last mile by mile, formed the Settlement. Made one building by archways cut through, grave and plain, with a dignity of good woodwork and polished brass and fit furniture sparely placed, the house had the poise and force of a galleon caught and held intact in the arms of some sargasso sea. All around it were wrecks of many natures, strangled, pinned down, and disintegrating, but it had not disintegrated. One use and custom had left it, but another had passed in with a nobler plan.

Hagar Ashendyne went through the place, wondering, saw the workrooms, the classrooms, the assembly-room, the dwelling-rooms, austere, with a quiet goodness and fairness, of the people who dwelled there and made the heart of the place. "It is not like a convent," she said in a low voice; "at least, I imagine it is not—and yet—"

"Oh, the two ideas have a point of contact!" answered Elizabeth cheerfully. "Only, here, the emphasis is laid on action."

She met several people whom she thought she would like to meet again, and at the last minute came in Marie Caton. It was Marie, who, at five o'clock, put her on the Elevated that would take her home in twenty minutes. Marie had met the Maines—"I'm Southern, too, you know,"—and she promised to come to see Hagar, and she said that Hagar and Rachel Bolt must come, some Sunday afternoon, to the Settlement. "That is chiefly when we see our personal friends."

That night Hagar wrote to her grandmother and to Mrs. Green. In four days time she heard from the latter. Yes, Jim and all of them and Thomasine had moved to New Jersey. Times were hard, Jim said, and work was slack, and they thought they could better themselves. Sure enough he had got a right good job. They were living where it wasn't so crowded as it was in New York, almost in the country, right by a big mill. There was a row of houses, just alike, Thomasine said, and they were living in one of them. There wasn't any yard, but you could walk into the country and see the woods, and Thomasine said the sky was wonderful at night, all red from a furnace. Thomasine hadn't got work yet, but she thought that she would. There was a place where they made silk into ribbons, and she thought there'd be a place for her there. Marietta was better, and the children were fine. Mrs. Green sent the address—and Gilead Balm certainly missed Hagar.

Old Miss wrote an explanatory letter. Hagar knew or ought to know that they had little or nothing but the place. The Colonel had been in debt, but Medway had cleared that off, as it was right that he should, now that he was able to do it; right and kind. But as for ready money—country people never had any ready money, she knew that perfectly well. Medway was now, Old Miss supposed, a rich man, but no one knew exactly how rich, and at any rate it was his money, and living abroad as he did was, of course, expensive. He couldn't justly be expected to do much more than he was doing. "As for your having money to give the Greens, you haven't any, child! Medway has told your grandfather that he wants you from now on to have every proper advantage, but that he does not believe in the way young people to-day squander money, nor does he want you to depart from what you have been taught at Gilead Balm. He wants you to remain modest in your wants, as every woman should be. The money he has put in your grandfather's hands for you this year is to pay for this winter in New York and for wherever you go next summer. He never meant it to be diverted to helping people without any claim upon him that are out of employment. Your grandfather won't hear to any such thing as you propose. He says your idea of coming home and using the money you are costing in New York is preposterous. The money isn't your money; it's your father's money, to be used as he, and not as you, direct.... Of course, it's a hard year, and of course, there are people suffering. There always are. But Jim's a man and can get work, and Thomasine oughtn't to have gone away from home anyhow. They aren't starving, child."—So Old Miss, and more to the same effect, and then, at the end, a postscript. "I had a ten-dollar gold-piece that's been lying by me a long time, and I've taken it to Mary Green and told her to send it to Jim. She seemed surprised, and from what she says and what his letter says, I don't think they are any worse off than most people. You're young, and your feelings run away with you."

Hagar wrote a long, loving letter to Thomasine, and sent her the twenty dollars. Thomasine returned her effusive, pretty thanks, showed that she was glad, and glad enough to have the help, but insisted that she should regard it as a loan. She acknowledged that Jim and she, and therefore Marietta and the babies, had been pretty hard up. But things were better, she hopefully said. She had a place and Jim had a place. His arm was about well, and on the whole, they liked New Jersey, "though it isn't as interesting, of course, as New York."

CHAPTER XVI
THE MAINES

It was the year of the assassination of Sadi Carnot in France, of the trial of Emma Goldman in New York, of much "Hellish Anarchist Activity." It was a year of growth in the American Federation of Labour. It was a year of Socialist growth. It was a year of strikes—mine strikes, railway strikes, other strikes, Lehigh and Pullman and Cripple Creek. It was the year of the Army of Coxey. It was the year of the Unemployed and of Relief Agencies. It was the year when the phrase "A living wage" received currency.

In the winter of 1894 the Spanish War had not been, the Boer War had not been, the Russo-Japanese War had not been. The war between Japan and China was on the eve of being; people talked of Matabeleland, and Cecil Rhodes was chief in South Africa. Hawaii was in process of being annexed. In the winter of 1894 it was the Wilson Tariff Bill, and Bimetallism, and Mr. Gladstone and Home Rule, and the Mafia in Sicily, and the A.P.A., and the Bicycle, and Queen Liliuokalani, and the Causes of Strikes and of Panics, and Electric Traction, and the romances of Sienkiewicz and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "The Heavenly Twins." Mr. Howells was writing "Letters of an Altrurian Traveller"; George Meredith had published "Lord Ormont and his Aminta." Stevenson, at Vailima, was considering "Weir of Hermiston."

In 1894 occurred the first voting of women in New Zealand. It saw the opening of a Woman's Congress in Berlin. In New York a Woman Suffrage Amendment was strongly advocated before a Constitutional Convention. There was more talk than usual of the Unrest among Women, more editorials than usual upon the phenomenon, more magazine articles. But the bulk of the talk and the editorials and the magazine articles had to do with the business failures and the Unemployed and the Strikes.

The beating of the waves of the year was not loudly heard in the Maines' long, high-ceilinged parlour. The law droned on, bad years with good. Powhatan had speculated and made his little losses. His philosophy this winter was pessimistic, and the household "economized." But the table was still good and plentiful, and the coloured servants, who were fond of him and he of them, smiled and bobbed, and he had not felt it necessary to change his brand of cigars, and the same old people came in the evening. Mrs. Maine never read the newspapers. She rarely read anything, though once in a while she took up an old favourite of her youth, and placidly dipped now into it and now into her box of chocolates. Powhatan kept her supplied with the chocolates. Twice a week, when he came in at five o'clock, he produced out of his overcoat pocket a glazed, white, two-pound box:—"Chocolates, Bessie! Catch!"

Rachel Bolt was more alert to the world surge, but to her, too, it must come a little muted through the family atmosphere. Her swiftest vibrations were upon other lines, curious inner, personal revolts and rebellions, sometimes consumed below the crust, sometimes breaking forth with a flare and rain of words as of lava. The family and the people who habitually came to the house were used to Rachel's way of talking; as long as she did nothing outré,—and she did not,—it was no more to them than a painted volcano. As for Sylvie—Sylvie was as sweet and likeable as sugar, but not interested in anything outside of the porcelain world-dish that held her. She liked her clothes this winter, and the young men who came to the house, and she dutifully practised her voice, and enjoyed the shops and the plays, and wondered a good deal if she was or was not in love with Jack Carter, who was an interne in one of the hospitals, and who sent her every week six of the new roses called American Beauties. She had other, more distant relatives in New York, people of wealth who presently took her up. She was with them and away from the Maines a good deal, and, on the whole, Hagar saw not much of Sylvie this winter. She and Rachel were more together.

Almost every evening, at the Maines', people came in—old Southern friends, living in New York, or here on business or other occasions, young men and women, fond of Rachel, acceptable fellow-sheep from the fold of St. Timothy, now and then the rector himself, now and then some young man, Southern, with a letter of introduction. Sometimes there were but one or two besides the family, sometimes seven or eight. There was little or no formal entertainment, but this kind of thing always. Each day at dusk Hagar put on one of the two half-festive gowns which, at the last moment, Miss Serena had insisted she must have. Both were simplicity itself, both of some soft, crêpy stuff, one dark bronze and one dark green. They were made with the large puffed sleeves of the period, and the throat slightly low and square. "Country-made, but somehow just right," Rachel judged. "You aren't any more adorned than the leaf of a tree, and yet you might walk, just as you are, into Cæsar's palace."

Usually by half-past ten visitors were gone, lights downstairs were out. Powhatan and Bessie believed in early to bed and late to rise. Upstairs, in her bedroom on the third floor, Hagar shook out and hung in the closet the bronze or green dress, as the case might be, put on her gown and her red wrapper, braided her hair, pushed the couch well beneath the light, curled herself up on it under the eider-down quilt, and, tablet against knee, began to write.... The Short Story—it was that she dreamed and wrote and polished. Two currents of thought and aspiration ran side by side. "To earn money—to make my own living—to be able to help"; and "To make this Idea, that I think is beautiful, come forth and grow.—To get this thing right—to make this dream show clear—to do it, to do it!—To create!" The latter current was the most powerful. The former would sooner or later accomplish its end; it would turn the mill-wheel and be content. But the latter—never, never would it be satisfied; never would it say, "It is accomplished." Always there would be the further dream, always the necessity to make that, too, come clear. There were other currents, more or less strong, Desire of Fame, Desire to be Known, Desire to Excel, and others; but the first two were the great currents.

Since March and the fairy story she had written other stories, four or five in all. She had sent them to magazines, and all but one had come back. That one she had sent immediately after her search for Thomasine. In a month she had word that it was taken, and that, on publication, she would be paid fifty dollars. The letter was like manna, she went about all day with a rapt face. To write—to write—to write stories like Hawthorne, like Poe....

She had been six weeks in New York. That night, when she had worked for an hour over one half-page, and then, the light out, had sat for a long while in the window looking at the winter stars above the city roofs, she could not sleep when she went to bed, but lay, straight and still, half-thinking, half-dreaming. A pageant of impressions, waves of repeated, altered, rearranged contacts drove through her mind. The pictures and marbles of the Metropolitan, the sculptures and casts of sculptures which she cared for more than for the paintings, those of the latter which she loved—the music that she had heard, the plays she had seen, the Park and the slow, interminable afternoon parade of carriages watched from a bench beneath the trees, Fifth Avenue, Broadway, the hurrying crowds, the rush and roar, tramp and clangour, the colour and bravura—Omega Street, the Settlement, a Sunday afternoon there, discussions to which she had listened, a mass meeting of strikers which, Powhatan having taken her downtown to show her the Stock Exchange and Trinity, they had inadvertently fringed, and from which, with epithets of disapproval, he had hurried her away;—uptown once more and the florists' windows and the wheels on the asphalt, a Sunday morning at St. Timothy's with the stained glass and the Bishop's nephew intoning;—again the theatres, a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, the "Merchant of Venice," a play of Pinero's; again the pictures and the statues, the cast of the great Venus, the cast of Niobe, of the Diana with the hound, of Apollo and Hermes; the pictures, Rembrandts and Vandykes, and certain landscapes, and a form that she liked, firelit and vague, blind Nydia moving through ruining Pompeii, and Bastien LePage's Joan of Arc; then the Park again, and the great trees above the mall, and people, people, people!—all made a vibrating whirl, vast, many-hued, and with strange harmonies. She lay until it passed and sank like the multi-coloured sand of the desert.

When at last she slept, she had a curious dream. She and her mother were alone on an island with palm trees. She was used to being with her mother in dreams. She had for the memory of her mother so passionate a loyalty; the figure of Maria, young, it always seemed to her, as herself, so kept abreast with her inner life that it was but a naturalness that she should be there in the dream mind, too. She was there now, on the island with the palm trees, and the two sat and looked at the sea, which was very blue. Then, right out of the lonely sea, there grew a crowded wharf, with a white steamship and people going to it and coming from it. Her father came from it, dressed in white with a white hat like a helmet, and then suddenly there was no wharf nor ship, but they were in a curious street of low, pale-coloured houses—her father and her mother and herself and the palm trees. "Now we are all going to be happy together," she said; but "No," said her mother, "wait until the procession passes." Then there was a procession, and they were all women, and at first they all had the face and eyes of Bastien LePage's Joan of Arc, but then that faded, and they were simply many women, but each of them carried a blossoming bough. She saw faces that she knew among them, and she saw women that she thought belonged to the Middle Ages, and Greek women, and Egyptians, and savages. They went by for a long time, and then, with a turn of the hand, the dream changed, and they were all in a courtyard with a well and more palm trees, and people coming and going, and they were eating and drinking, and there was a third woman with them whom her father called Anna. She had a string of jewels, and she tried them, first on Hagar and then on Maria; but Maria had a knife and suddenly she struck at her father with it. She cut him across both wrists and the blood flowed.—Hagar wakened and sat up in bed, shivering. Her father's face was still plain against her eyeballs—bearded and handsome, with red in his cheeks and the hat like a helmet.

During Christmas week Ralph Coltsworth appeared. He had to spend his holidays somewhere, he said. Hawk Nest was dull and he didn't like Gilead Balm without Hagar.

"Ralph, why don't you study?"

"I do study. I'm a star student. Only I don't like the law. I'm going to do a little more convincing myself and the family, and then I'm going to chuck it! I've got a little money to start things with. I want to go in with a broker I know."

"What do you want to do that for?"

"Oh, because!... There are chances, if you've got the feeling in your finger tips!... Don't you know, Gipsy, that something like that is the career for a man like me? If I had been my father, I could have waved my sword and gone charging down history—and if I'd been my grandfather, I could have poured out Whig eloquence from every stump in the country and looked Olympian and been carried in procession (I don't like politics now; it's an entirely different thing);—and if I'd been my great-grandfather, I could have filibustered or settled the Southwest; and back of that I could have done almost any old thing—come over with the Adventurers, seized a continent, shared England with the Normans, marauded with the Vikings, whiled through Europe with Attila, done almost anything and come out with a name and my arms full! Now you can't conquer things like that, but, by George, you can corner things!"

"What do you mean?—That you want to become a rich man?"

"That's what most of those others wanted. Yes, riches and power."

"I was reading the other day a magazine article. It said that the day when any American, if he had energy and ambition, might hope to make a great fortune was past. It said that the Capets and Plantagenets and Hapsburgs were all here; that the dynasties were established and the entente cordiale in operation; that young and adventurous Americans might hope to become captains of mercenaries, or they might go in for being court chaplains, and troubadours."

"Oh, that article had dyspepsia!" said Ralph. "It isn't as easy as it was, that's certain! but it's possible yet, in 1894—if you've got an opening."

"Have you got one?"

"Elder and Marten would take me in. Marten was an old flame of my mother's, and I got his son Dick out of a scrape last year.—In ten years, you'll see, Gipsy! I'll send you orchids and pearls!"

"I don't want them, thank you, Ralph."

Ralph took the flower from his buttonhole and began to pluck away its petals. "Gipsy, I was awfully glad, last summer, when you sent that Eglantine fellow about his business."

"Mr. Laydon and I sent each other."

"Well, the road's clear—that's all I want to know! Gipsy—"

"Ralph, it's no use. I'm not going to listen."

"The family has planned this ever since we were infants. When you used to come to Hawk Nest with your big eyes and your blue gingham dress and your white stockings—I knew it somehow even then, even when I teased you so—"

"You certainly teased me. Do you remember the rain barrel?"

"No, I don't. The family has set its heart—"

"Oh, Ralph, family can be such a tyrant! At any rate, ours will have to take its heart off this."

Ralph turned sullen. "Well, the family used to settle it for women."

"Yes, it did—when you came over with William the Conqueror! Do you want to take me, regardless—just as you'd take those millions? Well, you may take those millions, but you can't take me!"

"Your father wants it, too. The Colonel showed me a letter—"

Hagar stopped short—they were walking in the Park. "My father!... Do you think I owe my father so great a love and obedience?" She looked before her, steadily, down the vista of vast, leafless trees. "The strongest feeling," she said, "that I have about my father is one of strong curiosity."

CHAPTER XVII
THE SOCIALIST MEETING

The house was full, said the man at the ticket-window. Nothing to be had, short of almost the back row, under the gallery. Rachel shook her head, and her cousin, Willy Maine, leaving the window, expressed his indignation. "You ought to have told me this afternoon that you wanted to go! Anybody might have known"—Willy was from one of the sleepier villages in one of the sleepiest counties of his native state—"Anybody might have known that in New York you have to get your tickets early! Now we've missed the show!" By now they were out of the swinging doors and down upon the pavement. The night was bright and not especially cold. It was the Lyceum Theatre, and they stood at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street.

"It's too late to try anything else," pondered Rachel. "Willy, I'm sorry. But we truly didn't know we could go until the last minute, and I didn't believe it would be crowded."

"It's a beautiful night," said Hagar. "It's light and bright, and there are crowds of people. Why can't we just walk about until bedtime?"

Willy, who was nineteen but a young giant, pursed his lips. "Is it proper for ladies?"

"Oh, I think so," said Rachel absently, "but would it really amuse you, Hagar?"

"Yes, it would. Let us go slowly, Rachel, and look in windows and pretend to be purchasing."

Willy laughed, genially and patronizingly. "I've been along here. There aren't any Paris fashions in these windows."

"I want," said Hagar succinctly, "to saunter through the streets of a great city."

They began to walk, their faces turned downtown, staying chiefly upon the avenue, but now and then diverging into side streets where there were lights and people. By degrees they came into congested, poorer quarters. To Willy, not long removed from a loneliness of tidal creeks, vast stretches of tobacco, slow, solitary sandy roads, all and any of New York was exciting, all a show, a stimulus swallowed without discrimination. That day Rachel had found occasion to rage against a certain closed circle of conventions. The subject had come up at the breakfast table, introduced by a headline in the morning paper, and she had so shocked her family that for once they had acted as though the volcano was real. Mrs. Maine had grown moist and pink, and had said precipitately that in her time a young woman—whether she were married or single, that didn't matter!—would as soon have thought of putting her hand in the fire as of mentioning such things! And Powhatan had as nearly thundered as was in his nature to do. Rachel shrugged her shoulders and desisted, but she had gone about all day with defiance written in her small, sombre face. Now to-night, the street, the broad stripes of blackness, the thin stripes of gold light, the sound of voices and of many footfalls, the faces when the light fell upon them and the brushing by of half-seen forms suited her raised, angry, and mutinous mood. As for Hagar, the street and its movement simply became herself. She never lost the child's and the poet's power of coalescence.

It was before the days of Waring. The only White Wings upon this avenue had been the snowflakes which a week ago had fallen thickly, which had been dully scraped over the curbing into the gutter, and which now stayed there in irregular, one to three feet in altitude, begrimed Alpine ranges. The cobblestones of the street between, over which the great dray horses ceaselessly passed, were foul enough, while the sidewalks had their own litter of torn scraps of paper, cheap cigar ends, infinitesimal bits of refuse. The day of the weirdness of electric lighting, of the bizarre come-and-go of motion signs was not yet either. Down here there were occasional arc lights, but gas yet reigned in chief. The shops, that were not shops for millionaires, nor even for the Quite Comfortable, all had their winking gaslights. Below them like chequered walls sprang out the variegated show-windows. The wares displayed were usually small in size, slight of value, and high in colour, a kaleidoscopic barbaric display. Above dark doorways the frequent three golden balls showed up well.

Because the night was so mild and windless many people were abroad—people not well-dressed, and yet not quite poverty-stricken in aspect; others who were so, lounging men with hopeless faces, women wandering by, pinched and lost-looking; then again groups or individuals of a fairly prosperous appearance. The flaring gas showed now and again faces that were evidently alien, or there came a snatch of strange jargon. A crowd had gathered at a street corner. A girl wearing a dark-blue poke bonnet with a red ribbon across it was going from one to the other holding out a tambourine. A few pennies clinked into it. A man standing in the centre of the crowd, raised his arm. "Now, we are going to sing." The women in the bonnets beat upon the tambourines, a man with a drum and another with a cornet gave the opening bars, the women raised shrill, sweet voices,—

"There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Immanuel's veins,
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains—"

The hymn ended, a woman lifted both hands and prayed with fervour and a strange, natural eloquence. Then the squad gathered up horn and drum and tambourines, and, drawing a part of the crowd with it, moved up the street to another skirmish ground.

Rachel and Willy and Hagar drifted on. The night was still young, the stars glittering above, the gaslamps making a vista, the footfalls on the pavement murmurous as a stream. The clanging of the street-car bell, the rush of a train on the neighbouring Elevated, the abrupt rise and fall of passing voices—all exercised a fascination. The night was coloured, rhythmic. They came to a building, narrow and plain, with lit windows, as of a hall, on the second floor, and with a clean, fairly lighted stair going up from an open street door. Men and women were entering. A care-worn, stooping, workman-looking man stood by the door with handbills or leaflets which he was giving out. "Socialist Meeting," he said. "Good speaking. The Unemployed and the Strikes. Socialist Meeting. Everybody welcome."

Hagar stopped. "Rachel, I want to go in here. Yes, I do! Come now, be good to me, Rachel! Mr. Maine wants to go, too."

"Socialists!" said Willy. "Those are the people who are blowing up everybody with bombs. I didn't suppose New York would let them hold a meeting! They're devils!"

But Willy had so well-grown a human curiosity that he was not averse to a glimpse of devils. Perhaps he heard himself, back home in the sleepy county, talking at the village post-office or in the churchyard before church. "Yes, and where else do you think I went? I went to a Socialist Meeting! Bomb-throwers—Socialists and Anarchists, you know!" Rachel, hardly more informed, was ready to-night for anything a little desperate. She would not have taken Hagar where she positively thought she ought not to go,—but if these were desperate people going in, they were, to say the least, pretty quiet and orderly and decent-looking;—and it could do no harm just to slip in and sit on a back seat for a few minutes and look on—just as you might go to mass in a cathedral abroad, disapproving all the time, of course. But Hagar had a book or two in her mind, and in addition the talk that Sunday afternoon at the Settlement.

When they had climbed the stairs and come into the hall, which was a small one, they found that the back seats were all taken. Apparently all seats were taken, but as they stood hesitating, a young man beckoned, and before they knew it they found themselves well down the place, seated near the platform. Rachel looked around a little uneasily. "Crowded, and they all look so intent! It's not going to be easy to get up and leave."

The hall was rude enough, and small, the light not brilliant, the platform a few bare boards. Upon it stood a deal table, and three or four chairs. Back of these, fastened against the wall, was a red flag, and on either side of this a strip of canvas with large letters. On one side, UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD, and on the other, WORKINGMEN, UNITE! Now standing beside the table, and slowly walking from end to end of the platform, a dark-eyed, well-knit man was speaking, quite conversationally, with a direct appeal, now to this quarter of the hall, now to that. His voice was deep and mellow; he spoke without denunciations, with a quiet reasonableness and conviction. At the moment he was stating a theory, giving the data upon which it was based, weighing it, comparing it with its counter theory. He used phrases—"Economic Determinism"—"Unearned Increment"—"Class-Consciousness"—"Problem of Distribution"—explained clearly what he meant by them, then put them aside. "They are phrases that will serve their ends and pass from speech," he said. "We shall bring in modifiers, we shall make other phrases, and they, too, in their turn, will pass from the tongues of men; but the idea behind them—the idea—the idea and its expression, the intellectual and moral sanction, the thing that is metaphysical and immortal, that will not pass! The very word Socialism may pass, but Socialism itself will be in the blood and bone and marrow of the world that is to be! And this is what is that Socialism." He began to speak in aphorisms, in words from old Wisdom-Religions, and then, for all they were stories of quite modern happenings, in parables—the woe of the world epitomized, a generalization of its needs, all lines of help synthesized into a world saviour, which, lo! was the world itself. He made an end, stood a moment with kindling eyes, then sat down. After an appreciable silence there came a strange, deep applause, men and women striking fist on palm, striking the bare floor with ill-shod feet.

A small, wiry dark man, sitting on the platform, rose and spoke rapidly for twenty minutes. He had a caustic wit and the power of invective which, if possessed by the other, had not been displayed. Once or twice he evoked a roar of angry laughter. When he had finished, and the applause had subsided, the chairman of the evening stood up and spoke. "As the comrades know, it is our habit to turn the last half-hour into an open meeting. Nearly always there's somebody who's been thinking and studying and wants to say a word as to what he's found—or there's somebody who's got a bit of personal experience that he thinks might help a comrade who's struggling, maybe, through a like pit. Anybody that feels like speaking out, let him do it—or let her do it. Men and women, we're all comrades—and though Socialists are said not to be religious, we're all religious enough to like a good experience meeting—"

He paused, waiting for some one to rise. The first speaker came for a moment to his side. "Mr. Chairman, may I say one word to our comrades, and to any others who may be here? It is this. If 'religious' means world-service and a recognition and a striving toward the ultimate divine in my neighbour as in myself, and in myself as in my neighbour—then I think Socialism may be called religious."

As he moved back to his chair a man arose in the back of the house and began to speak. After a moment the chairman halted him with a gesture. "It is difficult for the comrades on this side the hall to hear you. Won't you come to the platform?" The man hesitated, then nodded his head; and with a certain deliberateness moved down the aisle, and stepping upon the only slightly raised platform stood facing the gathering. A colour flared in his cheek, and his hands, held somewhat stiffly at his sides, opened and shut. It was evident that he was not an accustomed speaker, and that there was diffidence or doubt of himself and his welcome to be overcome. He began stammering, with nervous hesitation. If anything he could say would help by one filing he would say it, though he wasn't used—yet—to speaking. He owed a debt and he believed in paying debts—though not the way the world made you pay them.

It was hard to tell how young or old he was. At times he looked boyish; then, when a certain haggard, brooding aspect came upon him, he seemed a middle-aged man. His clothes were poor, but whole and clean, his shirt a grey flannel one. Above the loose collar showed a short, dark beard, well-cut features, and deep-set dark eyes.

Lines came into Hagar's forehead between her eyes. She had seen this man somewhere. Where? She had a trick of holding her mind passive, when the wanted memory would slowly rise, like water from a deep, deep well. Now, after a minute or two, it came. She had seen him in the street-car that night, going from Eglantine to see "Romeo and Juliet." He had been in workman's clothes, he had touched her skirt, standing before her in the car; then he had found a seat, and she had watched him unfold and read a newspaper. Some vague, uncertain thought that she could not trace had made her regard him at intervals until with Miss Bedford and Lily and Laydon she had left the car....

The man on the platform had shaken off the initial clumsiness of speech and bearing. Like a swimmer, he had needled the wave. He was not clumsy now; he was speaking with short, stripped words, nakedly, with earnestness at white heat. Once he had been dumb and angry, he said, as a maddened dog. He had been through years that had made him so. He had been growing like a wolf. There were times when he wanted to take hold of the world's throat and tear it out. "Do you remember Ishmael in the Bible?—his hand against every man and every man's hand against him? Well, I was growing to feel that way." Then at that point—"and that was perhaps three years ago, and I was down South in a town in my state, trying to get work. I knew how to break rock, and I knew how to make parts of shoes, and I didn't know much besides, except that it was a hard world and I hated it"—at this point chance "or something" had sent him an acquaintance, an educated man, a bookkeeper in the concern where he finally got a job. Out of the acquaintanceship had grown a friendship. "After a while I got to going to his house. He had a wife who helped him lots." The three used to talk together, and the man lent him books and made him read them, and "little by little, he led me on. He was like an old man I knew in the mountains when I was a boy. He showed me that we're all sick and sorry, but that we're growing a principle of health. He showed me how slow we creep up from worm to man, and how now we're fluttering toward something farther on, and how hands of the past come upon us, and how we yet escape—and the wings strengthen. He showed me how vindictiveness is no use, and how much that is wrong with the world is owing to poor social mechanism and can be changed. He showed me what Brotherliness means, on the road to Unity. He put it in my mind and heart to want to help. He told me I had a good mind. I had always rather liked books, but I'd been where I couldn't get any, even if they'd given you time for reading. He made me study things out, and one day I began to think—think for myself—think it out. I've never stopped. Usually now, I'm at night-school nights. I'm learning, and I'm going to keep on, until I make thinking Wisdom." He studied the ceiling a moment, then spoke out with a ring in his voice. "I was a mountain boy. When I wasn't out of my teens I got drunk at a dance and played hell-fool and almost killed a man or two. Then the sheriff chased me up to Catamount Gap, and the stuff was still in me and my head hitting the stars, and I shot and shot at the sheriff.... Well, the end of all that playing was that I went to the penitentiary for four years. One thing I want wisdom for is to know how to talk to people about what is called crime and about that great crime, our law courts and penal system. Well, I came out of the penitentiary, and then it was very hard to get work. It was bitter hard. That's another thing I want learning and wisdom for—to talk about that. You see, the penitentiary wasn't content with the four years; it followed me always. And then it's hard to get work anyhow. There wasn't any use in going back to the mountains. But after a while I got work and kept it. Then, three months ago, I came up here, and I got work here. I'm working on your streets now, and studying between times.... I'm standing up here to-night to tell you that you've got a flag that draws the unhappy to you, when it happens that they're seeking with the mind. I don't know much about class-consciousness. We didn't have it in the mountains, though, of course, we had it in the penitentiary. But I know that we've got to take the best that was in the past and leave the worst, and go on with the best toward new things. We've got to help others and help ourselves. And it doesn't do just to want to help; you've got to have a working theory; you've got to use your mind. You've got to consider your line of march and mark it out and blast away the rock upon it and go on. And I am willing to be of your construction gang. The man I was talking about thought pretty much that way, too. He said there were a lot of isolated people, here, there, and everywhere, not only those that call themselves working-people, but others, too, and women just as well as men, who were thinking that way—that they might not call themselves Socialists, but that they were blood kin just the same. I don't know why, to-night, but I am thinking of something that happened when I had been a year in the penitentiary, and they had rented a lot of us up the river to make the bed for a railroad. While I was up there, I couldn't stand it any longer, and I ran away. They set the dogs on my track and took me, of course, but before they did, I was lying in a thicket, and I hadn't had anything to eat for two days and a night. A little girl, about twelve years old, I reckon, came over a hill and down to the stream by the thicket. She gathered flowers and set them around a big rock for a flower doll tea-party. She had two little apple pies and she put those in the middle—and then she saw me, lying in the thicket. And I was wearing"—the colour flared into his face, then ebbed—"I was wearing stripes.... I don't think she ever thought of being frightened. She gave me both pies, and she sat and talked to me like a friendly human being. I've never forgotten. And when the dogs came, as they did pretty soon, and the men behind them, she lay on the grass and cried and cried as if her heart would break. I've never forgotten. That's what I mean. I don't care what we've done, if we're not fiends incarnate, and very few of us are, we've got to feel toward one another like that. We've got to feel, 'if you are struck, I am struck. If you are wearing stripes, I am wearing stripes.' We've got to feel something more than Brotherhood. We've got to feel identity. And as a part, anyway, of that road seems to me to be named Socialization, I'm willing to be called a Socialist."

He nodded to the audience, and, stepping from the platform, amid a clapping of hands and stamping of feet, did not return to his place in the back of the hall, but sat upon the edge of the stage, his hands clasped around his knee. A German clockmaker and a fiery, dark woman spoke each for a few minutes, and then the meeting ended. There was a noise of rising, of pushing back chairs, a surge of people, in part toward the exit, in part toward the platform. Hagar touched Rachel on the arm. "Wait here for me. I want to speak to that man.—Yes, I know him. Wait here, Rachel."

She made her way to the space before the platform where men and women were pressing about the speakers. The man with the grey flannel shirt was answering a question or two, put by the dark-eyed man who had spoken first. He stood with a certain mountain litheness and lack of tension. A movement, his answer given, brought him face to face with Hagar. She had taken off her hat, so that it might not trouble the people behind her, and she had it still in her hand. Her dark, soft hair framed her face much as it had done in childhood; she was looking at him with wide, startled eyes.

"I had to come to tell you," she said, "that I am glad you came through. I never forgot you either."

"'Forgot you either!'—" The man stared at her.

"They were apple turnovers," she said; but before she had really spoken there came the flush and light of recognition.

"Oh—h!..." He fell back a step; then, with a reddened cheek and a light in his eyes, put out his hand. She laid hers in it; his fingers closed over hers in a grasp strong enough to give pain.

Then, as their hands dropped, as she fell back a little, the second speaker came between, then others. Suddenly the lights were lowered, people were staying too long. Rachel's hand on Hagar's arm drew her back. "Come, we must go!" Willy, too, was insistent. "It's getting late. Show's over!" The space between her and the boy of the thicket, the figure drawn against the sky of the canal lock, widened, filled with forms in the partial dusk. She was half-drawn, half-pushed by the outgoing stream through the door, out upon the stair, and so down to the street, where now there were fewer lights. The wind had arisen and the air turned colder. "We'll take this cross-town car, and then the Elevated," and while she was still bewildered, they were on the car. The bell clanged, they went on; again, in what seemed the shortest time, they were out in the night, then climbing the long stairs, then through the gate and upon the rushing Elevated. Willy talked and talked. He was excited. "I thought it was going to be all about bombs! But they talked sense, didn't they?—and there was something in the air that kind of warmed you! Next time I'm in New York I'm going again. Look at the lights streaming off! By Jiminy! New York's great!"

He was not staying at the Maines', but with other kinspeople a few blocks away. He saw the two in at the door, said good-night, and went whistling away. Hagar and Rachel turned off the lowered gas in the hall and went softly upstairs.

As they passed Mrs. Maine's door she asked sleepily from within, "Did you enjoy the play?"

"We didn't go," said Rachel. "We'll tell you about it in the morning."

When the two had said good-night and parted and Hagar, in her own room, kneeling at the window, looked up at the Pleiades, at Aldebaran—only then came the realization that she did not know that man's name, that she had never heard it. In her thoughts he had always been "the boy."

CHAPTER XVIII
A TELEGRAM

The next day she went down to the Settlement.

Elizabeth was at home. "Yes, I could give you a list of books on Socialism. I read a good deal along those lines myself. I am glad you are interested."

"I am interested," answered Hagar. "I cannot get any of these books now, but I am looking for fifty dollars, and when it comes, I will."

"But I can lend you two or three," said Elizabeth. "Won't you take them—dear Hagar?"

She regarded the younger woman with her steady, friendly eyes, her strong lips just parting in a smile. There was perhaps nine years' difference in their ages, but mentally they came nearer. It was the first time that she had dropped the formal address.

Hagar answered with a warm colour and a tremulous light from brow to chin. "Yes, if you'll be so good—Elizabeth!"

She crossed the floor with the other to the long, low, bookcase. Elizabeth drew out a couple of volumes. "These are good to begin with—and this." She stood a moment in thought, her back to the case, her elbow resting on its polished top and her head upon her hand. On a shelf behind her stood a small bronze Psyche, a photograph of Botticelli's Judith, a drawing of Florence Nightingale. "Hagar," said Elizabeth, "if I give you two or three books upon the position of woman in the past and to-day, will you read them?"

"I will read anything you give me, Elizabeth."

She took her parcel of books and went back to the Maines'. She read with great rapidity. Her memory was not a verbal one, but her very tissues seemed to absorb the sense of what she read. Much in these books simply formulated for her with clearness what was already in solution in her mind. Here and there she was conscious of lines of difference, of inward criticism, but in the main they but enlarged a content already there, but brought above the threshold, named and fed what she was already thinking. Her mind went back to Eglantine and Roger Michael's talk. "No. It did not begin even here. It was in me. It had been in me a long time, only I didn't know it, or called it other names."

Before these books were finished she got her fifty dollars from the magazine, and the magazine itself was sent her with her story in it. She sat and read the story, and it seemed strange and new in its robe of print. The magazine had provided an illustration—and how strange it was to see her figures (or rather not her figures) moving and laughing there! Again and again, after the first time, she opened the magazine and in part or whole read the story and gazed upon the illustration—half a dozen or more times during the first twenty-four hours, then with dwindling frequency day after day, for a week or so. After that her appetite for her own completed work flagged. She laid the magazine away, and it was years before she read that story again. The fifty dollars—She put thirty-five away to go toward her summer clothes and wrote to her grandmother that she had done so. The remaining fifteen she expended on books, taking starred titles from Elizabeth's list. In January she wrote "The Lame Duck." She sent it to one of the great monthlies. It was accepted, she was paid a fair price, and the monthly gave her to understand that it should like to see Hagar Ashendyne's next story.

The letter came as she was leaving the house for a walk in the Park. There was no great distance to go before you came to an entrance, and she often went alone and wandered here and there by herself. The country was in her veins; not to see trees and grass very often was very bad. She opened the letter, saw what it was, then walked on in a rosy mist. After a while, out under the branched grey trees, she found a bench, sat down, and read it again and yet again. Her soul passioned to do this thing; to write, to write well, to give out wonderfully, beautifully. A letter that told her it was so, that she was doing that which, with the strongest longing, she longed to do, must be to her golden as a love letter. With it open on her lap, with her eyes on the serene, pearl-grey meadow on the edge of which she sat, she stayed a long time, dreaming. A young man and woman, lovers evidently, slowly passed her bench beneath the trees. She watched them with tranquil eyes. "They're lovers," and she felt a reflex of their bliss. They passed, and she watched as happily the grey spaces where a few sheep stirred, and the edge of trees beyond, dream trees in the mist.

Quite simply she fell to thinking of "the boy." He had been often in her mind since the evening of that meeting; she wondered about him a good deal. She did not know his name; she had no idea where he lived; he might be in New York now, or he might not be; she might pass him in the street and not know—though, indeed, now she kept a lookout. He did not know her name; she was to him "the little girl" as he was to her "the boy." They might never meet again, but she had a faith that it would not be so. What she felt toward him was but friendliness, concern, and some admiration; but the feeling had a soft glow and pulse. The most marked thing was the consciousness that she knew him truly; reasoning did not come into it; she could have told herself a dozen times how little she did know, and it would have made no difference. It was as though the boy and she had seen each other's essential self through a clear pane of glass.

Her mind did not dwell long upon him to-day. She sat with her hands crossed above the letter, and her eyes, half-veiled, upon the far horizon. To write—to write—to produce, to lead forth, to give birth, to push out and farther on forever, to make a beautiful thing, and always a more beautiful thing—always—always.... She was more mind than body as she sat there; she saw her thought-children going up to heaven before her.

There came an impulse to look on beauty that other minds had sent forth. She rose and walked, with her light, rhythmic swiftness, northward toward the Metropolitan. When she passed the turnstile there lacked less than an hour of closing time. She went at once toward the rooms where were the casts. There was hardly a moving figure besides herself; there were only the still, white giants. She entered an alcove where there was a seat drawn before a cast of the tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici. She sat down and gazed upon Michael Angelo's Thinker. After a while her eyes moved to the great figures of Twilight and Dawn, and then, rising, she crossed to Guliano's Tomb and stood before Day and Night. Presently she left the alcove, and crossing by the models of the Parthenon and of Notre Dame came into the Hall of the Antique and into the presence of the great Venus. Here she stayed until a man came through the place and said it was closing time.

In February she sent to the same monthly "The Mortal." It passed from hand to hand until in due time it reached the editor. He read it, then strolled into the assistant editor's room:—"New star in the sky." But before Hagar could hear from the monthly, another moment in her life was here.

A week after she had mailed this story, she and Rachel were together one evening in the latter's room. It was pouring rain, and there would be no company. Supper was just over,—the Maines clung to supper,—and the children had not been put to bed. Nightgowned, they made excursions and alarms from their nursery into their mother's room and out again and in again. Then Rachel turned out the gas, and they all sat in the light of the coal fire, and first Rachel told a story, and then Betty told one, and then Hagar, and then Charley. They were all stories out of Mother Goose, so no one had to wait long for their turn. Then Hagar had to tell about Bouncing Bet and Creeping Charley, which was a continued story with wonderful adventures, an adventure a night. Then the clock struck eight with a leaden sound, and Mammy appeared in the nursery door. "You carry me!" cried Bouncing Bet, and "You carry me!" cried Creeping Charley. So Rachel took one and Hagar took the other, mounted them like papooses, and in the nursery shot each into the appropriate small, white bed.

Back before the fire, with the lights still out, the two sat for a time in silence. Hagar had a story in mind. She was musing it out, seeing the figures come true in the lit hollows. Rachel had a habit of crooning to herself. She went on now with one of the children's rhymes:—

"Baa, baa, Black Sheep,
Have you any wool?"
"Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full—
One for my master and one for my dame,
And one for the little boy that lives in the lane!"

Hagar stirred, lifted her arms, and clasped her hands behind her head. "How the rain pours! The winter is nearly over. It has been a wonderful winter."

"I'm glad you've found it so," said Rachel. "You've got a wonder-world of your own, behind your eyes. Everything spins out for good for you sooner or later and somehow or other. You're lucky!"

"Aren't you lucky, too? Haven't you liked this winter?"

"Oh, I've liked it so-so! I've liked you."

"Rachel, I wish you'd be happy. You've got those darling children."

"I am happy where the children touch. And, oh, yes, they touch a long way round! But there's a gap in the circle where you go out lonely and come in lonely."