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."