By Meredith Nicholson

OTHERWISE PHYLLIS. With frontispiece in color.

THE PROVINCIAL AMERICAN AND OTHER PAPERS.

A HOOSIER CHRONICLE. With illustrations.

THE SIEGE OF THE SEVEN SUITORS. With illustrations.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston and New York

OTHERWISE PHYLLIS

PHYLLIS

OTHERWISE PHYLLIS

BY

MEREDITH NICHOLSON

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

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY MEREDITH NICHOLSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September 1913

TO

ALBERT B. ANDERSON

A CITIZEN OF THE HOOSIER COMMONWEALTH
WHOSE ATTAINMENTS AS LAWYER AND JUDGE
HAVE ADDED TO THE FAME OF MONTGOMERY
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
WITH SINCERE REGARD AND ADMIRATION

CONTENTS

OTHERWISE PHYLLIS

OTHERWISE PHYLLIS

CHAPTER I

THE KIRKWOODS BREAK CAMP

"Stuff's all packed, Phil, and on the wagon. Camera safe on top and your suit-case tied to the tail-gate. Shall we march?"

"Not crazy about it, daddy. Why not linger another week? We can unlimber in a jiffy."

"It's a tempting proposition, old lady, but I haven't the nerve." Kirkwood dropped an armful of brush on the smouldering camp-fire and stood back as it crackled and flamed. There came suddenly a low whining in the trees and a gust of wind caught the sparks from the blazing twigs and flung them heavenward. He threw up his arm and turned his hand to feel the wind. "The weather's at the changing point; there's rain in that!"

"Well, we haven't been soaked for some time," replied Phil. "We've been awfully respectable."

"Respectable," laughed her father. "We don't know what the word means! We're unmitigated vagabonds, you and I, Phil. If I didn't know that you like this sort of thing as well as I do, I shouldn't let you come. But your aunts are on my trail."

"Oh, one's aunts! Oh, one's three aunts!" murmured Phil.

"Not so lightly to be scorned! When I was in town yesterday your Aunt Kate held me up for a scolding in the post-office. I'd no sooner climbed up to my den than your Aunt Josie dropped in to ask what I had done with you; and while I was waiting for you to buy shoes at Fisher's your Aunt Fanny strolled by and gave me another overhauling. It's a question whether they don't bring legal process to take you away from me. What's a father more or less among three anxious aunts! As near as I can make out, Aunt Fanny's anxiety is chiefly for your complexion. She says you look like an Indian. And she implied that I am one."

"One of her subtle compliments. I've always thought Indians were nice."

It was clear that this father and daughter were on the best of terms, and that admiration was of the essence of their relationship. Phil stooped, picked up a pebble and flung it with the unconscious grace of a boy far down the creek. Her Aunt Fanny's solicitude for her complexion was or was not warranted; it depended on one's standard in such matters. Phil was apparently not alarmed about the state of her complexion.

"Suppose we wait for the moon," Kirkwood suggested. "It will be with us in an hour, and we can loaf along and still reach town by eleven. Only a little while ago we had to get you to bed by eight, and it used to bother me a lot about your duds; but we've outgrown that trouble. I guess—"

He paused abruptly and began to whistle softly to himself. Phil was familiar with this trick of her father's. She knew the processes of his mind and the range of his memories well enough to supply the conclusion of such sentences as the one that had resolved itself into a doleful whistle. As he was an excellent amateur musician, the lugubrious tone of his whistling was the subject of many jokes between them.

The walls of a miniature cañon rose on either side of the creek, and the light of the wind-blown camp-fire flitted across the face of the shelving rock, or scampered up to the edge of the overhanging cliff, where it flashed fitfully against the sky. The creek splashed and foamed through its rough, boulder-filled channel, knowing that soon it would be free of the dark defile and moving with dignity between shores of corn toward the Wabash. The cliffs that enclosed Turkey Run represented some wild whim of the giant ice plow as it had redivided and marked this quarter of the world. The two tents in which the Kirkwoods had lodged for a month had been pitched in a grassy cleft of the more accessible shore, but these and other paraphernalia of the camp were now packed for transportation in a one-horse wagon. As a fiercer assault of the wind shook the vale, the horse whinnied and pawed impatiently.

"Cheer up, Billo! We're going soon!" called Phil.

Kirkwood stood by the fire, staring silently into the flames. Phil, having reassured Billo, drew a little away from her father. In earlier times when moods of abstraction fell upon him, she had sought to rouse him; but latterly she had learned the wisdom and kindness of silence. She knew that this annual autumnal gypsying held for him the keenest delight and, in another and baffling phase, a poignancy on which, as she had grown to womanhood, it had seemed impious to allow her imagination to play. She watched him now with the pity that was woven into her love for him: his tall figure and the slightly stooped shoulders; the round felt hat that crowned his thick, close-cut hair, the dejection that seemed expressed in so many trifles at such moments,—as in his manner of dropping his hands loosely into the pockets of his corduroy coat, and standing immovable. Without taking his eyes from the fire he sat down presently on a log and she saw him fumbling for his pipe and tobacco. He bent to thrust a chip into the fire with the deliberation that marked his movements in these moods. Now and then he took the pipe from his mouth, and she knew the look that had come into his gray eyes, though she saw only the profile of his bearded face as the firelight limned it.

Now, as at other such times, on summer evenings in the little garden at home, or on winter nights before the fire in their sitting-room, she felt that he should be left to himself; that his spirit traversed realms beyond boundaries she might not cross; and that in a little while his reverie would end and he would rise and fling up his long arms and ask whether it was breakfast-time or time to go to bed.

Phil Kirkwood was eighteen, a slim, brown, graceful creature, with a habit of carrying her chin a little high; a young person who seemed to be enjoying flights into the realm of reverie at times, and then, before you were aware of it, was off, away out of sight and difficult to catch with hand or eye. As a child this abruptness had been amusing; now that she was eighteen her aunts had begun to be distressed by it. Her critics were driven to wild things for comparisons. She was as quick as a swallow; and yet a conscientious ornithologist would have likened her in her moments of contemplation to the thrush for demureness. And a robin hopping across a meadow, alert in all his mysterious senses, was not more alive than Phil in action. Her middle-aged aunts said she was impudent, but this did not mean impudent speech; it was Phil's silences that annoyed her aunts and sometimes embarrassed or dismayed other people. Her brown eye could be very steady and wholly respectful when, at the same time, there was a suspicious twitching of her thread-of-scarlet lips. The aunts were often outraged by her conduct. Individually and collectively they had endeavored to correct her grievous faults, and she had received their instructions meekly. But what could one do with a mild brown eye that met the gaze of aunts so steadily and submissively, while her lips betrayed quite other emotions!

Phil's clothes were another source of distress. She hated hats and in open weather rejected them altogether. A tam-o'-shanter was to her liking, and a boy's cap was even better. The uniform of the basketball team at high school suited her perfectly; and yet her unreasonable aunts had made a frightful row when she wore it as a street garb. She gave this up, partly to mollify the aunts, but rather more to save her father from the annoyance of their complaints. She clung, however, to her sweater,—on which a large "M" advertised her alma mater most indecorously,—and in spite of the aunts' vigilance she occasionally appeared at Center Church in tan shoes; which was not what one had a right to expect of a great-granddaughter of Amzi I, whose benevolent countenance, framed for adoration in the Sunday-School room, spoke for the conservative traditions of the town honored with his name.

Phil had no sense of style; her aunts were agreed on this. Her hair-ribbons rarely matched her stockings; and the stockings on agile legs like Phil's, that were constantly dancing in the eyes of all Montgomery, should, by all the canons of order and decency, present holeless surfaces to captious critics. That they frequently did not was a shame, a reproach, a disgrace, but no fault, we may be sure, of the anxious aunts. Manifestly Phil had no immediate intention of growing up. The idea of being a young lady did not interest her. In June of this particular year she had been graduated from the Montgomery High School, in a white dress and (noteworthy achievement of the combined aunts!) impeccable white shoes and stockings. Pink ribbons (pink being the class color) had enhanced the decorative effect of the gown and a pink bow had given a becoming touch of grace to her head. Phil's hair—brown in shadow and gold in sunlight—was washed by Montgomery's house-to-house hairdresser whenever Aunt Fanny could corner Phil for the purpose.

Phil's general effect was of brownness. Midwinter never saw the passing of the tan from her cheek; her vigorous young fists were always brown; when permitted a choice she chose brown clothes: she was a brown girl.

Speaking of Phil's graduation, it should be mentioned that she had contributed a ten-minute oration to the commencement exercises, its subject being "The Dogs of Main Street." This was not conceded a place on the programme without a struggle. The topic was frivolous and without precedent; moreover, it was unliterary—a heinous offense, difficult of condonation. To admit the dogs of Main Street to a high-school commencement, an affair of pomp and ceremony held in Hastings's Theater, was not less than shocking. It had seemed so to the principal, but he knew Phil; and knowing Phil he laughed when the English teacher protested that it would compromise her professional dignity to allow a student to discuss the vagrant canines of Main Street in a commencement essay. She had expected Phil to prepare a thesis on "What the Poets Have Meant to Me," and for this "The Dogs of Main Street" was no proper substitute. The superintendent of schools, scanning the programme before it went to the printer, shuddered; but it was not for naught that Phil's "people" were of Montgomery's elect.

Phil was, in fact, a Montgomery. Her great-grandfather, Amzi Montgomery, observing the unpopulous Hoosier landscape with a shrewd eye, had, in the year of grace 1829, opened a general store on the exact spot now occupied by Montgomery's Bank, and the proper authorities a few years later called the name of the place Montgomery, which it remains to this day. This explains why the superintendent of schools overlooked the temerity of Amzi's great-granddaughter in electing the Main Street fauna as the subject of her commencement address rather than her indebtedness to the poets, though it may not be illuminative as to the holes in Phil's stockings. But on this point we shall be enlightened later.

Phil raised her head. There had come a lull in the whisper of the weather spirit in the sycamores, and she was aware of a sound that was not the noise of the creek among the boulders. It was a strain of music not of nature's making and Phil's healthy young curiosity was instantly aroused by it. Her father maintained his lonely vigil by the fire, quite oblivious of her and of all things. She caught another strain, and then began climbing the cliff.

The ascent was difficult, but she drew herself up swiftly, catching at bushes, seeking with accustomed feet the secure limestone ledges that promised safety, pausing to listen when bits of loosened stone fell behind her. Finally, catching the protruding roots of a great sycamore whose shadow had guided her, she gained the top. The moon, invisible in the vale, now greeted her as it rose superbly above a dark woodland across a wide stretch of intervening field. But there were nearer lights than those of star and moon, and their presence afforded her a thrill of surprise.

Clearer now came the strains of music. Here was a combination of phenomena that informed the familiar region with strangeness. The music came from a barn, and she remembered that barn well as a huge, gloomy affair on the Holton farm. Satisfied of this, Phil turned, half-unconsciously, and glanced up at the sycamore. That hoary old landmark defined a boundary, and a boundary which, on various accounts, it was incumbent upon the great-granddaughter of Amzi Montgomery I to observe. A dividing fence ran from the sycamore, straight toward the moon. It was a "stake-and-rider" fence, and the notches on the Holton side of it were filled with wild raspberry, elderberry, and weeds; but on the Montgomery side these interstices were free of such tangle. The fact that lights and music advertised the Holton farm to the eye and ear seemed to Phil a matter worthy of her attention. The corn was in the shock on the Montgomery side; the adjacent Holton field had lain fallow that year. The shocks of corn suggested to Phil's imagination the tents of an unsentineled host or an abandoned camp; but she walked fearlessly toward the lights and music, bent upon investigation. The moon would not for some time creep high enough to light the valley and disturb her father's vigil by the camp-fire: there need be no haste, for even if he missed her he would not be alarmed.

The old Holton house and its outbuildings lay near the fence and Phil calculated that without leaving her ancestral acres she would be able to determine exactly the nature and extent of this unprecedented revelry in the Holton barn. She approached as near as possible and rested her arms on the rough top rail of the fence. There were doors on both sides of the lumbering old structure, and her tramp across the cornfield was rewarded by a comprehensive view of the scene within. The music ceased and she heard voices—gay, happy voices—greeting some late-comers whose automobile had just "chug-chugged" into the barnyard. She saw, beyond the brilliantly lighted interior, the motors and carriages that had conveyed the company to the dance; and she caught a glimpse of the farmhouse itself, where doubtless refreshments were even now in readiness. Phil was far enough away to be safe from observation and yet near enough to identify many of the dancers. They were chiefly young people she had known all her life, and the strangers were presumably friends of the Holtons from Indianapolis and elsewhere.

The strains of a familiar waltz caused a quick reassembling of the dancers. The music tingled in Phil's blood. She kept time with head and hands, and then, swinging round, began dancing, humming the air as her figure swayed and bent to its cadences. By some whim the nearest corn-shock became the center of her attention. Round and round it she moved, with a child's abandon; and now that the moon's full glory lay upon the fields, her shadow danced mockingly with her. Fauns and nymphs tripped thus to wild music in the enchanted long ago when the world was young. Hers was the lightest, the most fantastic of irresponsible shadows. It was not the mere reflection of her body, but a prefigurement of her buoyant spirit, that had escaped from her control and tauntingly eluded capture. Her mind had never known a morbid moment; she had never feared the dark, without or within. And this was her private affair—a joke between her and the moon and the earth. It was for the moment all hers—earth and heaven, the mystery of the stars, the slumbering power of a beneficent land that only yesterday had vouchsafed its kindly fruits in reward of man's labor.

After a breathless interval a two-step followed, and Phil danced again, seizing a corn-stalk and holding it above her head with both hands like a wand. When the music ended she poised on tiptoe and flung the stalk far from her toward the barn as though it were a javelin. Then as she took a step toward the fence she was aware that some one had been watching her. It was, indeed, a nice question whether the flying stalk had not grazed the ear of a man who stood on Holton soil, his arms resting on the rail just as hers had been ten minutes earlier, and near the same spot.

"'Lo!" gasped Phil breathlessly.

"'Lo!"

They surveyed each other calmly in the moonlight. The young man beyond the fence straightened and removed his hat. He had been watching her antics round the corn-shock and Phil resented it.

"What were you doing that for?" she demanded indignantly, her hands in her sweater pockets.

"Doing what, for instance?"

"Watching me. It wasn't fair."

"Oh, I liked your dancing; that was all."

"Oh!"

An "Oh" let fall with certain intonations is a serious impediment to conversation. The young gentleman seemed unable at this crucial instant to think of a fitting reply. Finding himself unequal to a response in her own key he merely said:—

"I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to. I came over here to sit on the fence and watch the party."

"Watch it! Why don't you go in and dance?"

He glanced down as though to suggest that if Phil were to scrutinize his raiment she might very readily understand why, instead of being among the dancers, he contented himself with watching them from a convenient fence corner. He carried a crumpled coat on his arm; the collar of his flannel shirt was turned up round his throat. His hat was of battered felt with a rent in the creased crown.

"My brother and sister are giving the party. I'm not in it."

"I suppose your invitation got lost in the mail," suggested Phil, this being a form of explanation frequently proffered by local humorists for their failure to appear at Montgomery functions.

"Nothing like that! I didn't expect to be here to-day. In fact, I've been off trying to borrow a team of horses; one of mine went lame. I've just brought them home, and I'm wondering how long I've got to wait before the rumpus is over and those folks get out of there and give the horses a chance. It's going to rain before morning."

Phil had heard the same prognostication from her father, and it was in the young man's favor that he was wise in weather lore. The musicians had begun to play a popular barn dance, and the two spectators watched the dancers catch step to it. Then Phil, having by this time drawn a trifle closer to the fence and been reassured by her observations of the clean-shaven face of the young man, became personal.

"Are you Charlie Holton?"

"No; Fred. Charlie's my brother."

"And your sister's name is Ethel."

"O. K. I'm trying to figure you out. If you weren't so tall I'd guess you were Phyllis Kirkwood."

"That's all of my name," replied Phil. "I remember you now, but you must have been away a long time. I hadn't heard that anybody was living over there."

"The family haven't been here much since I was a kid. They have moved out their things. What's left is mine."

Mr. Frederick Holton turned and extended the hand that held his hat with a comprehensive gesture. There was a tinge of irony in his tone that Phil did not miss. "What's left here—house, barn, and land—belongs to me. The town house has been sold and Charlie and Ethel have come out here to say good-bye to the farm."

"Oh!"

This time Phil's "Oh" connoted mild surprise, polite interest, and faint curiosity.

The wind rustled the leaves among the corn-shocks. The moon gazed benevolently upon the barn, tolerant of the impertinence of man-made light and a gayety that was wholly inconsonant with her previous knowledge of this particular bit of landscape.

Fred Holton did not amplify his last statement, so Phil's "Oh," in so far as it expressed curiosity as to the disposition of the Holton territory and Mr. Frederick Holton's relation to it, seemed destined to no immediate satisfaction.

"I must skip," remarked Phil; though she did not, in fact, skip at once.

"Staying over at your grandfather's?" The young man's arm pointed toward the north and the venerable farmhouse long occupied by tenants of the Montgomerys.

Old Amzi had acquired much land in his day and his grandson, Amzi III, clung to most of it. But this little availed Phil, as we shall see. Still it was conceivable and pardonable that Fred Holton should assume that Phil was domiciled upon soil to which she had presumably certain inalienable rights.

"No; I've been camping and my father's waiting for me down there in Turkey Run. We've been here a month."

"It must be good fun, camping that way."

"Oh, rather! But it's tough—the going home afterwards."

"I hate towns myself. I expect to have some fun out here."

"I heard this farm had been sold," remarked Phil leadingly.

"Well, I suppose it amounts to that. They were dividing up father's estate, and I drew it."

"Well, it's not so much to look at," remarked Phil, as though the appraisement of farm property were quite in the line of her occupations. "I've been across your pasture a number of times on my way to Uncle Amzi's for milk, but I didn't know any one was living here. One can hardly mention your farm in terms of grandeur or splendor."

Fred Holton laughed, a cheerful, pleasant laugh. Phil had not thought of it before, but she decided now that she liked him. His voice was agreeable, and she noted his slight drawl. Phil's father, who was born in the Berkshires, said all Hoosiers drawled. As a matter of fact, Phil, who was indubitably a Hoosier, did not, save in a whimsical fashion of her own, to give a humorous turn to the large words with which she sometimes embellished her conversation. Her father said that her freedom from the drawl was no fault of the Montgomery High School, but attributable to his own vigilance.

Phil knew that it was unseemly to be talking across a fence to a strange young man, particularly when her father was doubtless waiting for her to return for the homeward journey; and she knew that she was guilty of a grievous offense in talking to a Holton in any circumstances. Still the situation appealed to her imagination. There hung the moon, patron goddess of such encounters, and here were fields of mystery.

"They say it's no good, do they? They're right. I know all about it, so you don't need to be sorry for me."

Sensitiveness spoke here; obviously others had made the mistake, of which she would not be guilty, of sympathizing with him in his possession of these unprofitable acres. Phil had no intention of being sorry for him. She rather liked him for not wanting her sympathy, though to be sure there was no reason why he should have expected it.

"You've been living in Indianapolis?"

"The folks have. Father died, you know, nearly two years ago. I was in Mexico, and now I'm back to stay."

"I suppose you learned farming in Mexico?" Phil pursued.

"Well, hardly! Mining; no silver; quit."

"Oh," said Phil, and filed his telegram for reference.

They watched the dance for a few minutes.

"What's that?"

Phil started guiltily as Holton turned his head toward the creek, listening. Her father was sounding the immelodious fish-horn which he called their signal corps. He must have become alarmed by her long absence or he would not have resorted to it, and she recalled with shame that it had been buried in a soap-box with minor cooking-utensils at the bottom of the wagon, and could not have been resurrected without trouble.

"Good-bye!" She ran swiftly across the field toward the creek. The horn, sounding at intervals in long raucous blasts, roused Phil to her best speed. She ran boy fashion with her head down, elbows at her sides. Fred Holton watched her until she disappeared.

He made a detour of the barn, followed a lane that led to the town road, and waited, in the shadow of a great walnut at the edge of a pasture. He was soon rewarded by the sound of wheels coming up from the creek, and in a moment the one-horse wagon bearing Phil and her father passed slowly. He heard their voices distinctly; Kirkwood was chaffing Phil for her prolonged absence. Their good comradeship was evident in their laughter, subdued to the mood of the still, white night. Fred Holton was busy reconstructing all his previous knowledge of the Kirkwoods, and he knew a good deal about them, now that he thought of it.

At the crest of Listening Hill,—so called from the fact that in old times farm-boys had listened there for wandering cows,—the wagon lingered for a moment—an act of mercy to the horse—and the figures of father and daughter were mistily outlined against the sky. Then they resumed their journey and Fred slowly crossed the fields toward the barn.

CHAPTER II

THE MONTGOMERYS OF MONTGOMERY

A stout, spectacled gentleman of fifty or thereabouts appeared at intervals, every business day of the year, on the steps of Montgomery's Bank, at the corner of Main and Franklin Streets. As he stood on this pedestal, wearing, winter and summer, a blue-and-white seersucker office coat tightly buttoned about his pudgy form, and frequently with an ancient straw hat perched on the side of his head, it was fair to assume that he was in some way connected with the institution from whose doors he emerged. This was, indeed, the fact, and any intelligent child could have enlightened a stranger as to the name of the stout gentleman indicated. He was one of the first citizens of the community, if wealth, probity, and long residence may be said to count for anything. And his name, which it were absurd longer to conceal, was Amzi Montgomery, or, to particularize, Amzi Montgomery III. As both his father and his grandfather who had borne the same name slept peacefully in Greenlawn, it is unnecessary to continue in this narrative the numerical designation of this living Amzi who braved the worst of weathers to inspect the moving incidents of Main Street as a relief from the strain and stress of the business of a private banker.

When, every hour or so, Mr. Montgomery, exposing a pink bald head to the elements, glanced up and down the street, usually with a cigar planted resolutely in the corner of his mouth, it was commonly believed that he saw everything that was happening, not only in Main Street, but in all the shops and in the rival banking-houses distributed along that thoroughfare. After surveying the immediate scene,—having, for example, noted the customers waiting at the counter of the First National Bank, diagonally opposite,—something almost invariably impelled his glance upward to the sign of a painless dentist, immediately above the First National,—a propinquity which had caused a wag (one of the Montgomery's customers) to express the hope that the dentist was more painless than the bank in his extractions.

There was a clothing store directly opposite Amzi's bank, and his wandering eye could not have failed to observe the lettering on the windows of the office above it, which, in badly scratched gilt, published the name of Thomas Kirkwood, Attorney at Law, to the litigiously inclined. Still higher on the third and final story of the building hung a photographer's sign in a dilapidated condition, and though a studio skylight spoke further of photography, almost every one knew that the artist had departed years ago, and that Tom Kirkwood had never found another tenant for those upper rooms.

At two o'clock on the afternoon of the day following the return of Phil Kirkwood and her father from their camp on Sugar Creek, as Mr. Montgomery appeared upon the steps of the bank and gazed with his usual unconcern up and down Main Street, his spectacles pointed finally (or so it seemed) to the photographer's studio over the way. Although a slight mist was falling and umbrellas bobbed inanely in the fashion of umbrellas, Amzi in his seersucker coat was apparently oblivious of the weather's inclemency. One of the windows of the abandoned photograph gallery was open, and suddenly, without the slightest warning, the head of Miss Phyllis Kirkwood bent over the cornice and she waved her hand with unmistakable friendliness. It was then that Mr. Montgomery, as though replying to a signal, detached his left hand from its pocket, made a gesture as graceful as a man of his figure is capable of, and then, allaying suspicion by passing the hand across his bald head, he looked quickly toward the court-house tower and immediately withdrew to continue his active supervision of the four clerks who sufficed for his bank's business.

As depositors were now bringing to the receiving teller's window their day's offerings, Mr. Montgomery took his stand at the paying teller's window,—a part of his usual routine,—to relieve the pressure incident to the closing hour, one teller at other times being quite equal to the demands of both departments. Mr. Montgomery's manner of paying a check was in itself individual. He laid his cigar on the edge of the counter, passed the time of day with a slightly asthmatic voice, drew the check toward him with the tips of his fingers, read it, cocked an eye at the indorsement, and counted out the money with a bored air. If silver entered into the transaction, he usually rang the last coin absently on the glass surface of the counter.

In other times the sign on the window had proclaimed "Montgomery & Holton, Bankers"; and the deletion of the second name from the copartnership was due to an incident that must be set down succinctly before we proceed further. Amzi II had left a family of five children, of whom Phil Kirkwood's three aunts have already been mentioned. The only one of the Montgomery girls, as they were locally designated, who had made a marriage at all in keeping with the family dignity, had been Lois.

Lois, every one said, was the handsomest, the most interesting of the Montgomerys, and she had captured at eighteen the heart of Tom Kirkwood, who had come out of the East to assume the chair of jurisprudence in Madison College, which, as every one knows, is an institution inseparably associated with the fame of Montgomery as a community of enlightenment. Tom Kirkwood was a graduate of Williams College, with a Berlin Ph.D., and he had, moreover, a modest patrimony which, after his marriage to Lois Montgomery, he had invested in the block in Main Street opposite the Montgomery Bank. The year following the marriage he had, in keeping with an early resolution, resigned his professorship and begun the practice of law. He seemed to have escaped the embarrassments and prejudices that attend any practical undertakings by men who have borne the title of professor, and whether his connection with the Montgomery family saved him from such disqualification it was nevertheless true that he entered upon the law brilliantly. Two or three successes in important cases had launched him upon this second career auspiciously.

Amzi II was still living at the time of the marriage, and as he valued his own position in the community and wished his family to maintain its traditions, he had subdivided a large tract of woodland in which his father's house stood, and bestowed an acre lot upon each of his daughters. His son had declined a similar offer, having elected early in life the bachelor state in which we have found him. As Lois had been the first to marry, her house was planted nearest to the gray old brick in which she had been reared.

If the gods favored the Montgomerys, they seemed no less to smile with a peculiar indulgence upon the Kirkwoods. People who had said that Lois was a trifle strong-willed and given to frivolity were convinced that her marriage had done much to sober her. In the second year thereafter Phyllis was born, a further assurance that Lois was thoroughly established among the staid matrons of her native town. Then in the fifth year of her marriage, rumors—almost the first scandalous gossip that had ever passed current in those quiet streets—began to be heard. It did not seem possible that in a community whose morals were nurtured in Center Church, a town where everybody was "good," where no respectable man ever entered a saloon and divorce was a word not to be spoken before children,—that here, a daughter of the house of Montgomery was causing anxiety among those jealous of her good name. A few of Kirkwood's friends—and he had many—may have known the inner history of the cloud that darkened his house; but the end came with a blinding flash that left him dazed and dumb.

The town was so knit together, so like a big family, that Lois Montgomery's escapade was a tragedy at every hearth-side. It was immeasurably shocking that a young woman married to a reputable man, and with a child still toddling after her, should have done this grievous thing. To say that she had always been flighty, and that it was what might have been expected of a woman as headstrong as she had been as a girl, was no mollification of the blow to the local conscience, acutely sensitive in all that pertained to the honor and sanctity of the marriage tie. And Jack Holton! That she should have thrown away a man like Tom Kirkwood, a gentleman and a scholar, for a rogue like Holton, added to the blackness of her sin. The Holtons had been second only to the Montgomerys in dignity. The conjunction of the names on the old sign over the bank at Main and Franklin Streets had expressed not only unquestioned financial stability, but a social worth likewise unassailable. Jack Holton, like Amzi Montgomery, had inherited an interest in the banking-house of Montgomery & Holton. To be sure his brother William had been the active representative of the second generation of Holtons, and Jack had never really settled down to anything after he returned from the Eastern college to which he had been sent; but these were things that had not been considered until after he decamped with Lois Kirkwood. Many declared after the event that they had "always known" that Jack was a bad lot. Those who sought to account for Lois Kirkwood's infatuation remembered suddenly that he and Lois had been boy and girl sweethearts and that she had once been engaged to marry him. It was explained that his temperament and hers were harmonious, and that Kirkwood, for all his fine abilities, was a sober-minded fellow, without Holton's zest for the world's gayety. Any further details—the countless trifles with which for half a dozen years the gossips of Montgomery regaled themselves—are not for this writing.

Many years had passed—or, to be explicit, exactly sixteen. One of the first results of the incident had been the immediate elimination of the Holton half of the firm name by which the bank had long been known. Jack's brother William organized the First National Bank, toward which Mr. Amzi Montgomery's spectacles pointed several times daily, as already noted. Samuel, the oldest son of the first Holton, tried a variety of occupations before he was elected Secretary of State. He never fully severed his ties with Montgomery, retaining a house in town and the farm on Sugar Creek. After retiring from office, he became a venturesome speculator, capitalizing his wide political acquaintance in the sale of shares in all manner of mining and plantation companies, and dying suddenly, had left his estate in a sad clutter.

In due course of time it became known that Lois Kirkwood had divorced her husband at long range, from a Western state where such matters were at the time transacted expeditiously, and a formal announcement of her marriage to Holton subsequently appeared in the Montgomery "Evening Star."

The day after his wife's departure Kirkwood left his home and did not enter it again. It was said by romanticists among the local gossips that he had touched nothing, leaving it exactly as it had been, and that he always carried the key in his pocket as a reminder of his sorrow. Phil was passed back and forth among her aunts, seriatim, until she went to live with her father, in a rented house far from the original roof-tree.

Even in practicing the most rigid economy of space some reference must be made to the attitude of Lois Kirkwood's sisters toward her as a sinning woman. Their amazement had yielded at once to righteous indignation. It was enough that she had sinned against Heaven; but that she should have brought shame upon them all and placed half the continent between herself and the scene and consequences of her iniquity, leaving her family to shoulder all its responsibilities, was too monstrous for expression. They were Montgomerys of Montgomery; it seemed incredible that the town itself could ever recover from the shock of her egregious transgression. They vied with each other in manifestations of sympathy for Kirkwood, whose nobility under suffering was so admirable; and they lavished upon Phil (it had been like Lois, they discovered, to label her with the preposterous name of Phyllis!) an affection which became in time a trial to the child's soul.

Their fury gained ardor from the fact that their brother Amzi had never, after he had blinked at them all when they visited him in his private room at the bank the morning after the elopement, mentioned to any living soul the passing of this youngest sister. It had been an occasion to rouse an older brother and the head of his house to some dramatic pronouncement. He should have taken a stand, they said, though just what stand one should take, when one's sister has run off with another man and left a wholly admirable husband and a winsome baby daughter behind, may not, perhaps, have been wholly clear to the minds of the remaining impeccable sisters. They demanded he should confiscate her share of their father's estate as punishment; this should now be Phil's; they wanted this understood and they took care that their friends should know that they had made this demand of Amzi. But a gentleman of philosophic habit and temper, who serenely views the world from his bank's doorstep, need hardly be expected to break his natural reticence to thunder at an erring sister, or even to gladden the gallery (imaginably the whole town that bears his name) by transfers of property, of which he was the lawful trustee, to that lady's abandoned heir.

Lois had caused all eyes to focus upon the Montgomerys with a new intentness. Before her escapade they had been accepted as a matter of course; now that she had demonstrated that the Montgomerys were subject to the temptations that beset all mankind, every one became curious as to the further definition of the family weaknesses. The community may be said to have awaited the marriages of the three remaining Montgomery girls in much the same spirit that a family physician awaits the appearance of measles in a child that has been exposed to that malady. And Montgomery was not wholly disappointed.

Kate, who like Lois, was a trifle temperamental, had fallen before the charms of one Lawrence Hastings. The manner of Hastings's advent in Montgomery is perhaps worthy of a few words, inasmuch as he came to stay. Hastings was an actor, who visited Montgomery one winter as a member of a company that had trustfully ventured into the provinces with a Shakespearean repertoire. Montgomery was favored in the hope that, being a college town, it would rally to the call of the serious drama. Unfortunately the college was otherwise engaged at the moment with a drama of more contemporaneous interest and authorship. An unusually severe January added to the eager and nipping air upon which the curtain rises in "Hamlet," and proved too much for the well-meaning players. Hastings (so ran tradition) had gallantly bestowed such money as he had upon the ladies of the company to facilitate their flight to New York. His father, a successful manufacturer of codfish packing-boxes at Newburyport, telegraphed money for the prodigal's return with the stipulation that he should forswear the inky cloak and abase himself in the box factory.

At this point Kate Montgomery, in charge of an entertainment for the benefit of Center Church, invited Hastings (thus providentially flung upon the Hoosier coasts) to give a reading in the church parlors. Almost coincidently the opera house at Montgomery needed a manager, and Hastings accepted the position. The Avon Dramatic Club rose and flourished that winter under Hastings's magic wand. It is not every town of fifteen thousand that suddenly enrolls a Hamlet among her citizens, and as the creator and chief spirit of the dramatic club, Hastings's social acceptance was immediate and complete. In other times the town would have been wary of an actor; but had not Hastings given his services free of charge for the benefit of Center Church, and was he not a gentleman, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, and had he not declined money offered by telegraph that he might cling stubbornly to his art? Kate Montgomery talked a good deal about his art, which he would not relinquish for the boxing of codfish. After Hastings had given a lecture on "Macbeth" (with readings from the play) in the chapel of Madison College, his respectability was established. There was no reason whatever why Kate Montgomery should not marry him; and she did, at the end of his first year in town. He thereupon assumed the theater lease and what had been the old "Grand Opera House" became under his ownership "Hastings's Theater," or "The Hastings."

Fanny Montgomery had contented herself with the hand of a young man named Fosdick who had been summoned to town to organize a commercial club. In two years he added several industries to Montgomery's scant list, and wheedled a new passenger station out of one of the lordly railroads that had long held the town in scorn. Two of the industries failed, the new station was cited as an awful example by the Professor of Fine Arts at the college, and yet Paul Fosdick made himself essential to Montgomery. The commercial club's bimonthly dinners gave the solid citizens an excuse for leaving home six nights a year, and in a community where meetings of whist clubs and church boards constituted the only justification for carrying a latch-key this new freedom established him at once as a friend of mankind. Fosdick was wholly presentable, and while his contributions to the industrial glory of Montgomery lacked elements of permanence, he had, so the "Evening Star" solemnly averred, "done much to rouse our citizens from their lethargy and blaze the starward trail." After he married Fanny, Fosdick opened an office adjoining the Commercial Club rooms and his stationery bore the legend "Investment Securities." Judge Walters, in appointing a receiver for a corporation which Fosdick had organized for the manufacture and sale of paving-brick, inadvertently spoke of the promoter's occupation as that of a "dealer in insecurities"; but this playfulness on the court's part did not shake confidence in Fosdick. He was a popular fellow, and the success of those Commercial Club dinners was not to be discounted by the cynical flings of a judge who was rich enough to be comfortably indifferent to criticism.

Amzi Montgomery being, as hinted, a person of philosophic temperament, had interposed no manner of objection to the several marriages of his sisters until Josephine, the oldest, and the last to marry, tendered him a brother-in-law in the person of Alexander Waterman. Josephine was the least attractive of the sisters, and also, it was said, the meekest, the kindest, and the most amiable. An early unhappy affair with a young minister was a part of the local tradition, and she had been cited as a broken-hearted woman until she married Waterman. Waterman was a lawyer who had been seized early in life with a mania for running for Congress. The district had long been Republican, but with singular obstinacy Waterman insisted on being a Democrat. His party being hopelessly in the minority he was graciously permitted to have such nominations as he liked, with the result that he had been defeated for nearly every office within the gift of a proud people. He was a fair jury lawyer, and an orator of considerable repute among those susceptible to the blandishments of the florid school.

Amzi's resentment of Josephine's choice was said to be due to a grilling the banker had received at Waterman's hands on the witness stand. Once while standing on the steps of his bank for a survey of the visible universe, Amzi was rewarded with an excellent view of the liveliest runaway that had thrilled Main Street in years. Several persons were hurt, and one of the victims had sued the grocer whose wagon had done the mischief.

Waterman was the plaintiff's attorney, and Amzi Montgomery was, of course, an important though reluctant witness. The banker loathed litigation in all its forms and in his own affairs studiously avoided it. It enraged him to find one of his idiosyncrasies advertised by the fact that he had observed the violent collision of a grocer's wagon with a fellow-citizen. His anger was augmented by the patronizing manner in which Waterman compelled him to contribute to the record of the case admissions touching his habits of life, which, though perfectly lawful and decorous, became ridiculous when uttered on oath in a law court. Every one knew that Mr. Montgomery stood on the bank steps at intervals to take the air, but no one had ever dreamed that he would be obliged to discuss or explain the habit.

The "Evening Star" printed all of his testimony that it dared; but as the cross-examination had been conducted before a crowded courtroom the neat give and take between lawyer and witness had not lacked thorough reporting. For several weeks thereafter Amzi did not appear on the bank steps; nor did he revert to his old habit until satisfied that groups of idlers were not lying in wait. After Josephine introduced Waterman to the family circle Amzi seemed generously to overlook the offense. He was as cordial toward him as toward either of the other brothers-in-law, with the exception of Kirkwood, though of course Kirkwood, strictly speaking, no longer continued in that relationship.

These details aside, it is possible to return to the bank, and await the result of that furtive gesture with which Mr. Amzi Montgomery responded to Phil Kirkwood's signal from the window of the photograph gallery. By half-past four the clerks had concluded their day's work; the routine letters to Chicago, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis correspondents had been sealed and dispatched, and the vault locked by Mr. Montgomery's own hand. Thereupon he retired to the back room, unlocked the Franklin Street door and beguiled himself with the "Evening Star." Shortly before five o'clock he heard light steps outside followed by a tap and Phil opened and closed the door.

"Lo, Amy!"

She pronounced the a long, after a fashion she had adopted in childhood and refused to relinquish. Amzi was "A-mee" to Phil. She glanced into the bank room, seized his newspaper, crunched it into a football, and kicked it over the tellers' cages into the front window. Then she pressed her uncle down into his chair, grasped his face in her hands, and held him while she kissed him on the nose, the left eye, and the right cheek, choosing the spot in every instance with provoking deliberation as she held his wriggling head. He lost his cigar and his spectacles were knocked awry, but he did not appear to be distressed. Phil set his spectacles straight, struck a match for a fresh cigar, and seated herself on the table.

"I'm back, Amy. How did you know we'd be home to-day?"

"Dreamed it," said Amzi, apparently relieved that her assaults upon his peace and dignity were ended.

"I'd been watching for you half an hour before you came out on the steps. I'd about given you up."

"So? You were pretty late getting home last night. Your father ought to be ashamed of himself."

Amzi glared at Phil. His curiously large blue eyes could, at will, express ferocity, and the red and purple in his face deepened as he shut his jaws tight. She was not, however, in the least disturbed, not even when he pushed back his chair to escape her swinging legs, and pointed his finger at her threateningly.

"I wanted to see you," he gasped.

"So I inferred," Phil remarked, bending forward and compressing her lips as though making a careful calculation, then touching the point of his nose.

Amzi rubbed the outraged nose with the back of his hand, wheezed hoarsely (the effect of the rain upon his asthma), and cleared his throat.

"You'll come down from your high horse in a minute. I've got something to tell you that will sober you up a bit."

Phil raised her hands and with brown nimble fingers found and readjusted the pin that affixed a shabby felt hat to her hair. Then she folded her arms and looked at the tips of her shoes.

"The suspense is killing me. I who am about to die salute you!"

Amzi frowned at her levity. His frown caused a disturbance throughout his vast tracts of baldness.

"You'll change your tune in a minute, my young commodore. Have you seen your aunts?"

"No; but it's not their fault! Aunt Josie called; the others telephoned for dates. I saw Aunt Josie first, which explains why we didn't meet. I knew something was up."

"Something is up. They got me over to Josie's last night to ask me to help. It's a big programme. And I wanted to warn you in advance. You've got to stop all your capers; no more camps on Sugar Creek, no more tomboy foolishness; no more general nonsense. You've got to be a civilized woman, and conduct yourself according to the rules in such cases made and provided."

"Oh, is that it? And they got you to tell me, did they? How sweet of them!" observed Phil. "I might have guessed it from the look of Aunt Josie's back as she went out the gate."

"Her back? Thunder! How did you see her back?"

"From the roof, Amy, if you must know. If you had three aunts who had turned up every few minutes all your natural life to tell you what not to do, you'd run for the roof, too, every time you heard the gate click. And that last cook they put in the house was just a spy for them. But she didn't spy long! I've bounced her!"

Amzi blinked and coughed, and feigned even greater ferocity.

"That's it! That's the kind of thing you've got to stop doing! You're always bouncing the hired girls your aunts put in the house to take care of you and you've got to quit; you've got to learn how to manage a servant; you've got"—and he drew himself up to charge his words with all possible dignity—"you've got to be a lady."

"You insinuate, Amy, that I'm not one, just natural born?"

"I don't mean any such thing," he blurted. "You know mighty well what I mean—this skylarking, this galloping around town on your pony. You've got to behave yourself; you've got to pay attention to what your aunts tell you. You've got to listen to me!"

"Look me in the eye, you old fraud! I'll bet every one of 'em has called you up to tell you to see me and give me a lecturing. They're a jolly lot of cowards, that's all. And I came over here thinking you wanted to be nice and cheerful like you always used to be. All by your dear old lonesome you'd never think of talking to me like this; I've a good notion to muss you up!"

The thought of being mussed was clearly disturbing. He rose hastily and retreated to the barred window, with the table between them.

"Oh, you're guilty! I always know when they've been putting you up to something. Come along now and sit down like a good old uncle and tell me what new idea has struck those foolish females. Sit down right there in your little chair, Amy; I'll let you off from that mussing if you tell the truth."

"You see, Phil," he began earnestly, "you've grown up. You're not a kid any more to chase cats and dogs through the court-house square, and flip on the interurbans, but a grown woman, and you've got to begin acting like one. And you've got to begin right now. Just look at your shoes; look at that hat! What kind of clothes is that sailor boy's suit you're wearing? You've got to dress like a decent white girl that's had some bringing-up, and you've got to—you've got—" Amzi coughed as though afraid of the intended conclusion of his sentence. Phil's eyes were bent upon him with disconcerting gravity. He hoped that Phil would interrupt with one of her usual impertinences; but with the suspicion of laughter in her eyes she waited, so that he perforce blurted it out. "You've got to go into society; that's what's the matter!"

Phil moved her head slightly to one side, and her lips parted. A faraway look came into her eyes for an instant only. Amzi was watching her keenly. He was taken aback by her abrupt change of manner; her sudden sobriety baffled him. Something very sweet and wistful came into her face; something that he had not seen there before, and he was touched by it.

"I suppose I must change my ways, Uncle Amy. I do act like a wild zebra,—I know that. But I'm sorry. Of course it's silly for a girl who's nearly nineteen to be as skittish as I am. And they tell me I'm a bad example to my cousins and the whole town. It's tough to be a bad example. What's this they're going to do to me?"

"Oh, you've got to be brought out; you've got to have a party; they want me to have it in my house."

"All right," said Phil tamely. She seemed, indeed, to be thinking of something else. Her manner continued to puzzle him; he was even troubled by it. He relighted his cigar and watched the smoke of the extinguished match after he had tossed it into the little grate.

"Uncle Amy," said Phil, quite soberly, "I'm really serious now. I've been wondering a good deal about what's going to become of me."

"How's that, Phil?"

"Well, I'm not as silly as I act; and I've been wondering whether I oughtn't to try to do something?"

"What kind of something? Housekeeping—that sort of thing?"

"Yes; but more than that. I ought to go to work to earn money."

Amzi shrugged his shoulders.

"Thunder! you can't do that," he said with decision. "It wouldn't be proper for you to do that."

"I don't see why not. Other girls do."

"Girls do when they have to. You don't have to."

"I'm not so sure of that. We might as well be sensible if we're going to talk about it."

Amzi agreed to this with a nod and resettled himself in his chair.

"Daddy isn't making enough to take care of us, that's all. This afternoon I was over in his office cleaning up his desk,—you know he never does it himself, and even a harum-scarum like me can help it some,—and I saw a lot of things that scared me. Bills and things like that. And it would be hard to talk to daddy about it; I don't think I ever could. And you know he really could make a lot of money if he wanted to; I can tell that from the letters he gets. He doesn't answer his letters. Every month last year I used to straighten his desk, and some of last spring's bills are still there, and they haven't been paid. I know, of course, that that can't go on forever."

"You oughtn't to have to bother about that, Phil. It's none of your business."

"Yes," she replied, earnestly, "it is my business. And it's been troubling me for a long time. I can't talk to father about it; you can see how that would be; and he's such a dear—so fine and kind. I suppose there isn't anybody on earth as fine as daddy. And he breaks my heart, sometimes; goes about so quiet, as though he had gone into himself and shut the blinds, as they do in a house where somebody's dead. It seems just like that, Uncle Amy."

Amzi was uncomfortable. It was not to hear her speak of drawn blinds in houses of the dead that he had summoned Phil for this interview. His sisters had asked him to reason with her, as they had often appealed to him before in their well-meant but tactless efforts to correct her faults, but she had evinced an accession of reasonableness that made him uneasy. She had changed from the impulsive, exasperating young creature he knew into an anxious, depressed woman in a mackintosh, whom he did not know at all! He breathed hard for a few minutes, angry at his sisters for bringing this situation to pass. It was absurd to tame a girl of Phil's spirit. He had enjoyed, more than anything in his life, his confidential relations with Phil. It was more for the fun of the thing than because there was any cause for it that a certain amount of mystery was thrown about such interviews as this. There was no reason on earth why Phil shouldn't have entered by the front door in banking-hours, or visited him in her grandfather's house where he lived. But he liked the joke of it. He liked all their jokes, and entered zestfully into all manner of conspiracies with her, to the discomfiture of the aunts, to thwart their curbing of her liberties. He prided himself upon his complete self-control, and it was distinctly annoying to find that Phil's future, seen against a background plastered with her father's unpaid bills, caused a sudden hot anger to surge in his heart. Within the range of his ambitions and desires he did as he liked; and he had a hardened bachelor's fondness for having his way. He walked to the window and stared out at the street. It grew late and the rain was gathering volume as though preparing for a night of it.

A truck heavily loaded with boxes and crates of furniture moved slowly through Franklin Street toward the railway. Amzi was at once alert. He read much current history in the labels on passing freight, and often formed the basis for credits therefrom. Was it possible that one of the bank's customers was feloniously smuggling merchandise out of town to avoid writs of attachment? Such evils had been known. Phil jumped from the table and joined him at the window. She knew her Uncle Amzi's mental processes much better than he imagined; suspicion was writ large on his countenance.

"Humph!" she said. "That's only the stuff from the Samuel Holton house. Charlie and Ethel are moving to Indianapolis. That's some of the furniture they had in their town house here. I saw the crates in the yard this morning."

"I believe you're right, Phil; I believe you're right."

His eyes opened and shut several times quickly, as he assimilated this information. Then he recurred to Phil's affairs.

"Speaking of money, Phil, we'll have to do something about those unpaid bills. In a town like this everybody knows everybody's business—except yours and mine. We can't have your father's bills piling up; they've got to be paid. And this brings me to something I've meant to speak to you about for some time. In fact, I've just been waiting for a chance, but you're so confoundedly hard to catch. There's—a—some money—er—that is to say, Phil, as executor of your grandfather's estate, I hold some money, that—er—"

He coughed furiously, blew his nose, and made a fresh start.

"I'm going to open an account for you—your own money, understand!—and you can pay those bills yourself. We'll start with, say, five hundred dollars and you can depend on a hundred a month. It will be strictly—er—your money. Understand? You needn't say anything to your father about it. That's all of that."

He feigned sudden interest in the wet street, but Phil, whose eyes had not left him, tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

"Oh, no, you don't! You haven't a cent that belongs to me, and you know it, you splendid old fraud. And don't you try that game on me again or I'll stop speaking to you."

"Do you mean—" he began to bluster; "do you mean to say that I don't know my own business? Do you think I'm going to steal money from your grandfather's estate to give you? Why—"

"You weren't born to adorn the front row of successful liars, Amy. And even if you had a million or two lying round loose, you couldn't give me a cent of it; I wouldn't take it. It wouldn't be square to daddy; daddy's a gentleman, you know, and I couldn't do anything meaner than to take your money to pay his debts with. So there, you old dear, I've a good notion to muss you up, after all."

He again put the table between them, and stood puffing from the unwonted haste with which he had eluded her grasp. He had managed the matter badly, and as his hand, thrust into his coat pocket, touched a check he had written and placed there as a preliminary to this interview, a sheepish expression crossed his face.

"Well," he blurted, "I'd like to know what in thunder you're going to do! I tell you it's yours by right. I ought to have given it to you long ago."

"I'm skipping," said Phil, reaching down to button her raincoat. "We're going to Rose's for tea."

"Tea?"

Amzi's emphasis implied that in tea lay the sole importance of Phil's announcement; and yet, subjected to even the most superficial analysis, Mr. Montgomery's sensations were not in the least attributable to the thought of tea. Tea in the sense intended by Phil was wholly commonplace,—a combination of cold meat, or perhaps of broiled chicken, with hot biscuits, and honey or jam, or maybe canned peaches with cream. Considered either as a beverage or as a meal, tea contained no thrill; and yet perhaps the thought of tea at Miss Rose Bartlett's aroused in Amzi Montgomery's breast certain emotions which were concealed by his explosive emphasis. Phil, turning up the collar of her mackintosh, reaffirmed the fact of tea.

"You never come to my house for just tea, but you go to Rose's. You're always going to Rose's for tea," boomed Amzi.

"Daddy likes to go," added Phil, moving toward the door.

"I suppose he does," remarked Amzi, a little absently.

"By-by, Amy. Thanks, just the same, anyhow."

"Good-night, Phil!"

Phil lingered, her hand on the knob.

"Come over yourself, after tea. There may be music. Daddy keeps his 'cello over there, you know."

"His 'cello?"

It seemed that 'cello, like tea, was a word of deep significance. Amzi glared at Phil, who raised her head and laughed.

"Nonsense!" he ejaculated, though it was not clear just wherein the nonsense lay.

"Oh, your old flute is over there, too," said Phil, not without scorn.

Having launched this she laughed again and the door closed upon her with a bang. She hammered the glass with her knuckles to attract his attention, flung back her head as she laughed again, and vanished.

Amzi stared at the door's rain-splashed pane. The world was empty now that Phil had gone. He drew down the shabby green blind with a jerk and prepared to go home.

CHAPTER III

98 BUCKEYE LANE

The Bartlett sisters lived in Buckeye Lane, a thoroughfare that ran along the college campus. Most of the faculty dwelt there, and the Bartlett girls (every one said "the Bartlett girls" just as every one said "the Montgomery girls": it was established local usage) were daughters of a professor who had died long ago.

Rose was the housekeeper, and a very efficient one she was, too. In all business transactions, from the purchase of vegetables to the collection of the dividends on their small inheritance, Rose was the negotiator and active agent. She was, moreover, an excellent cook; her reputation in this department of domestic science was the highest. And as two women can hardly be expected to exist on something like four hundred dollars a year (the sum reluctantly yielded by their patrimony), Miss Rose commercialized her genius by baking cakes, cookies, jumbles, and pies, if demanded. In Montgomery, where only Mrs. William Holton had ever kept more than one servant (though Fanny Fosdick had attempted higher flights), Miss Rose was an ever-ready help in times of domestic adversity to distracted housekeepers who found the maintenance of even one servant attended with the gravest difficulties.

Miss Nan was an expert needlewoman, and, like her sister, augmented their income by the labor of her hands. Her contributions to the pot were, indeed, much larger than Rose's. The clients she served were chiefly women of fastidious taste in these matters who lived in surrounding cities. Her exhibitions of cross-stitching, hemstitching, and drawn-work were so admirable as to establish a broad field for her enterprises. Her designs were her own, and she served ladies who liked novel and exclusive patterns. These employments had proved in no wise detrimental to the social standing of the Bartlett girls. If Rose baked a cake for a wedding supper, this did not militate in the least against her eligibility as a guest of the occasion. And likewise Nan could unfold a napkin she had herself hemstitched for a consideration, without the slightest fear that any one would make invidious comments upon the fact.

In the matter of the respective ages of the sisters no stranger was ever informed of the exact fact, although every one knew. Judge Walters had established an unchangeable age for both of them. They were, the judge said, twenty-nine; though as they were not twins, and as he had persisted in this fallacy for almost a decade, it is difficult to see how they could both be permanently twenty-nine.

Not all the time of these ladies was spent in cooking and needlework. Miss Rose was a musician, who played the organ at Center Church and was usually the sympathetic accompanist at all concerts given by local talent. And, as though not to be outdone, Miss Nan quietly exercised the pen conjointly with the needle. Several editors in New York were quite familiar with the neat backhand of a lady they had never seen who sent them from an unheard-of town in Indiana the drollest paragraphs, the most amusing dialogues, and the merriest of jingles. Now and then Nancy Bartlett's name was affixed to an amusing skit in which various Montgomery people found their foibles published to the world, though with a proper discretion, and so amiably that no one could take offense. With the perversity of such communities, many declared that Miss Rose was more talented than Miss Nan, and that she could have written much better things than her sister if she had chosen. But what could have been more ridiculous than any attempt to arouse rivalry between sisters who dwelt together so contentedly, and who were the busiest and happiest women in town!

The Bartlett girls were the best friends the college boys had. If one of these ladies undertook, in the absence of a manservant, to drive the mower across their fifty feet of lawn, some youngster invariably appeared to relieve her of this task. Or if wood or coal were observed lying upon the walk in front of the Bartlett gate, it was always a question whether the Sigma Chis or the Phi Gamma Deltas would see the fuel first and hasten to conceal anything so monstrous, so revolting to the soul of young Greeks, in the Bartlett cellar. Amid all their vocations and avocations, the Bartletts moved tranquilly in an atmosphere of luxurious leisure. They were never flustered; their employments were a kind of lark, it seemed, never to be referred to except in the most jocular fashion. When Rose had entrusted to the oven a wedding-cake or a pan of jumbles she would repair to the piano for a ten-minute indulgence in Chopin. Similarly indifferent to fate, Nan at intervals in the day drew a tablet and fountain-pen from her sewing-table and recorded some whimsicality which she had seemingly found embedded in the mesh of a shopping-bag she was embellishing. And when, in due course, a funny-looking, canary-colored envelope carried this fragment to the desk of some bored phlegmatic editor, he would, as like as not, grin and scribble an order to the cashier for two dollars (or some such munificent sum) and pin it to the stamped "return" canary envelope, which would presently reach Number 98 Buckeye Lane, Montgomery, Indiana.

Phil Kirkwood hardly remembered a time when Number 98 had not been a safe port in the multitudinous squalls that beset her youth. The Bartletts were wholly human, as witness their pantry and garret—veritable magazines of surprises! Miss Rose was a marvel at cutting out silhouettes; Miss Nan would, with the slightest provocation, play bear or horse, crawling over the floor with Phil perched on her back blowing a horn. It was no wonder that Phil's vagrant steps turned instinctively toward Number 98. In the beginning her father used to seek her there; and having by this means learned the way, it was the most natural thing in the world for father and daughter to visit the Bartletts together. A man whose wife divorces him is entitled to some social consolations, and if tea and jam at the house of two maiden ladies of irreproachable character satisfies him, the community should be satisfied also. The gossips had never been able to decide which of the Bartlett girls was likelier to assume the rôle of Phil's stepmother. There were those who favored Rose. As Kirkwood played the 'cello, Rose to some observers seemed more plausible by reason of her musical talent. Others believed that it would be Nan, as Nan was "literary" and Kirkwood was a scholar, suspected of "writing," though just what he wrote no one was able to say. It had been said thousands of times that Amzi Montgomery must eventually marry one of the Bartletts, but here, too, opinion was divided as to which one would probably be so favored. Amzi had fluted in the Schumann Quartette, devoted to chamber music, but his asthma had broken up the club, and he now rarely essayed the instrument. Still, Amzi loved his joke, and Nan was a joker. So it was clear that either Kirkwood or Montgomery might with propriety marry either Rose or Nan. Whenever a drought seemed imminent in local gossip, these oases bubbled.

Phil's aunts were not unaware of the high favor in which their niece held the Bartletts; nor had they failed to speculate upon the chances of Kirkwood's remarrying. They resented the idea, chiefly because such action would cause a revival of the old scandal involving their sister, which they were pardonably anxious to have forgotten. Then, too, it was their solemn duty to keep their hands on Phil, who was a Montgomery and entitled to their consideration and oversight, and if Kirkwood should remarry, Phil would be relinquished to the care of a stepmother, a grievous thought at all times.

On this rainy October evening, tea was dispatched in the gayest humor in the little Bartlett dining-room. Rose and Phil disappeared in the kitchen to "do" the dishes while Nan and Kirkwood communed in the book-lined living-room.

"You've had a talking with Phil," said Kirkwood.

"Yes; she came in this morning, when Rose was out and I said several things to her that I ought to have said long ago. It wasn't easy to say them. But it's time for her to sober down a little, though I wish in my heart she could go on forever just as she is. It doesn't seem possible that she's a woman, with a future to think about."

"Phil's future—" murmured Kirkwood pensively.

"Your future and hers are bound up together; there's no escaping that."

"I'm afraid that's so! There are a thousand things I know should be done for her, but I don't grasp them. I seem unable to get hold of anything these days."

He looked at his hands, as though wondering at their impotence. They were bronzed and rough from the camp, but his sensitive nature was expressed in them. The gray showed in his beard and hair. Where the short beard did not hide his cheeks they were tanned. His blue serge suit had been freshly pressed; a polka-dot scarf was neatly tied under the points of a white-wing collar. He suggested an artist who had just returned from a painting trip in the open—a town man who wasn't afraid of the sun. If an artist one might have assumed that he was none too prosperous; his white cuffs were perceptibly frayed. Nan Bartlett scrutinized him closely, and there came into her eyes the look of one about to say something, long withheld and difficult to say.

She was a small, fair woman, with a becoming roundness of figure. Her yellow hair, parted evenly in the middle, curled prettily on her forehead. A blue shirt-waist with a turnover collar and a ready-made skirt spoke for a severe taste in dress. A gold-wire bracelet on her left wrist and a stickpin in her four-in-hand tie were her only ornaments. She had a fashion of raising her arm and shaking the bracelet back from her hand. When she did this, it was to the accompaniment of a slight turning of the head to one side and a dreamy look came into her large blue eyes. It was a pretty, graceful trick. She did not hesitate now that her mind was made up, but spoke quickly and crisply.

"You don't work hard enough; you are not making your time count. It isn't fair to Phil; it isn't fair to yourself."

"That's true; I know it," he replied, meeting her eyes quickly.

"And now's the time for you to change; Phil needs you. Phil's going to need a lot of things—money, for example. And you've reached a time of life when it's now or never."

The bracelet flashed back under her cuff. She looked at her wrist wonderingly as if surprised that the trinket had disappeared; then she glanced at Kirkwood, casually, as though she were in the habit of saying such things to him, which was not, however, the fact.

He straightened himself and his hands clenched as though to do battle at her behest.

"Mine's a wasted life; for years everything has seemed futile. I'm glad you spoke to me. I need to be brought up short."

Nan nodded. This was not a debatable question; undeniably he did need to be brought up with a sharp turn. It was in her mind that perhaps she had said enough; but she wished to make sure of it.

"Nobody can touch you at your best; it's your best that you've got to put into the struggle. It mustn't be said of you that you neglect business, and even refuse cases; and they do say that of you."

"I've grown careless and indifferent," he confessed; "but it's time for me to wake up. I can't see Phil heading for the poorhouse and that's where we're going."

"No doubt of it!" she assented. "Phil's aunts complain of you, and say that if you won't care for her you ought to turn her over to them. That's funny, on one side, and on the other it isn't. There's a good deal to support their attitude. Phil's needs are those of a girl ready to meet the world, and she will need money. And I've noticed that money is a shy commodity; it doesn't just come rolling uphill to anybody's doorstep."

Kirkwood knew perfectly well the elusiveness of money; it seemed less so now from Nan's way of stating the fact. When one needed a dollar one should go and find it; this was clearly Miss Nan's philosophy, and in her own affairs he knew that she had demonstrated its efficacy.

He lowered his voice as though about to touch upon a matter even more confidential than any that had engaged their attention. It was evidently something wholly pleasant that he wished to speak of; his eye brightened and his face flushed slightly. The look he bent upon her was of unmistakable liking.

"'The Gray Knight of Picardy' is booming. I saw a stack of him at Crosby's to-day: half a dozen people have asked me if I read it. It was put out so late in the spring that it's astonishing how it's carried through the summer. Some of the papers are just reviewing it—and the more deliberate journals are praising it. And when we were speaking of money matters a bit ago, I clean forgot that I have a check from the publisher that I'm going to hand you now."

He drew from his pocket a draft which she took eagerly and glanced at.

It was for two thousand dollars, payable to Nancy Bartlett. Nan slipped it quickly into the drawer of her sewing-table. As she drew her hand away, he caught and held it an instant. Nan did not look at him as she quietly freed herself. She ignored the act, though her cheek flushed scarlet. She minimized the incident by shaking down her bracelet.

"Half of that is yours," she said. "I will deposit it to-morrow and give you my check. You ought to have made the contract in your own name, but I never thought they would take it—much less that it would sell, or I should have insisted in the beginning."

"Well, I had faith in your three quarters of the work; mine is the poorest part of it."

"Your half made it possible,—the form and the planning. I never could have done a long-sustained thing like that; I'm a paragrapher, that's all."

"You're a humorist of a high order," he said warmly. "It's the huge joke of the thing that is making people like it. Let me see, the publisher is advertising a quotation from some paper that has called it the funniest book in ten years."

"That's a stock phrase of the critics," said Nan; "they merely change the title of the book from year to year. But it's been fun doing a book that way and putting it out anonymously. Judge Walters spoke to me of it yesterday; said he had stayed up all night to finish it."

"It's going to take more ingenuity than I possess to hide the authorship; that's why I want you to carry the burden. The publisher says the public demand to know who Merlin Shepperd is. And three magazines want a short story by the author of 'The Gray Knight of Picardy.' I'll send you the letters. That enterprising Phil has an uncomfortable habit of running through my desk and I'm likely to forget to lock up these things. She thought I was working on a brief all last winter when I was doing my part of the 'Gray Knight.' But I turn the partnership over to you now—with all the assets and liabilities and the firm name and style. You are Merlin Shepperd and I am Kirkwood, attorney and counselor at law, over Bernstein's. You see," he added, smiling, "your lecture led right up to that. No more literary ventures for me!"

"Well, I'd forgotten the 'Gray Knight' for the moment; but in spite of him I believe you had better stick to the law."

"There's this, Nan," he said earnestly, looking at her with an intentness that caused her to move uneasily; "it would seem quite natural for a partnership like this to be extended further. This world would be a pretty bleak place without you. You know and understand that. And there is Phil; Phil needs you just as I do. I mean to start afresh at the law; I mean to make myself count. And I need you."

He rose and looked down at her. It was as though by this act he presented himself as a rehabilitated Thomas Kirkwood; a man ready to grapple with the world afresh for her sake. He bent over and touched lightly her hands clasped quietly upon her knee.

"Dear Nan: I love you, Nan," he said softly, and stepped back, waiting for her to speak.

She raised her head and their eyes met.

"Tom," she said, "you are the dearest of men; but that is not for you and me. It will never be for you and me. And please, Tom, because you are the finest of men, never speak of this again. You will promise, won't you?"

"No," he said, shaking his head slowly; "I will not promise. You have reasons and I think I know what they are. I want to talk to you soon, for this has been in my heart a long time. I meant to speak to you last spring. But now the need is greater. I not only need you, but Phil needs you."

She smiled at the mention of Phil.

"That's a poor argument. Phil really doesn't need any one but you. I should be afraid of spoiling dear, splendid Phil."

It was upon this that Rose and Phil came in from the kitchen. Rose was taller than her sister, a slender, handsome woman, with an air of distinction which dishwashing in no wise abated. She was one of those American women who wear an apron like a vestment—who, the vestis domestica flung aside, adorn the parlor as charmingly as they grace the kitchen.

Phil began to whistle a tune, which Rose tried to identify for her by striking the chords.

"What are you two talking about?" asked Phil, turning from the piano.

"Discussing the origin of the pyramids," replied Nan, rising. "You and Rose must have settled something in all the time you took to the dishes. It was a noisy session, too. You must have been playing drop the teacup."

Phil clasped her hands dramatically, reciting:—

"A moment then,
She poised upon the dishpan's utmost verge
The heirloom teapot old, with flowers bedight.
And with a cry—"

She paused, feigning forgetfulness. Her father rose quickly and caught up the imaginary fragment:—

"And with a cry
As when some greedy wight, on porridge keen,
Gulps it, and bawleth loud to find it hot,—
Screams for the cook and tuggeth at his sword—"

"Familiar," observed Rose dreamily from the piano. "Is it 'Pelleas and Etarre' or 'The Passing of Arthur'?"

"Nope. 'The Bold Buccaneer,' by the Honest Iceman of Mazoopa," answered Phil.

"And here he is now," said Nan as the front door boomed and rattled.

There was no bell at the Bartletts': but from the door hung a bass-drumstick, with which visitors were expected to thump. This had been a part of the equipment of a local band that had retired from business. In the dispersion of its instruments the drum had reached a second-hand store. Nan, with a keen eye for such chances, had bought and dismantled the drum, and used the frame as a stockade for fresh chirpers from her incubator. The drumstick seemed to have been predestined of all time to serve as a knocker.

"It's Amy. I told him to come," said Phil.

Her father's face fell almost imperceptibly. The company was complete as it was and much as he liked Amzi he resented his appearance at this hour. Rose went to the door.

"It may be Judge Walters. He's been trying to get over for some time to talk about that new book on hypnotism," said Nan.

It proved, however, to be Amzi. They heard him telling Rose in the entry that he was just passing and thought he would drop in.

"That will do for that, Amy," called Phil. "You told me you were coming."

"I told you nothing of the kind!" blustered Amzi.

"Then, sir, you didn't; you did not!"

Amzi glared at them all fiercely. His cherubic countenance was so benevolent, the kind eyes behind his spectacles so completely annulled his ferocity, that his assumed fierceness was absurd.

He addressed them all by their first names, and drew out a cigar. Kirkwood was smoking his pipe. Phil held a match for her uncle and placed a copper ash-tray on the table at his elbow. Rose continued her search for a piece of music, and Nan curled herself on the corner of a davenport that occupied one side of the room under the open bookshelves.

"This looks like a full session; first we've had for some time," remarked Amzi. "Been playing, Rose?"

"No; Phil's trying to remember a tune. Whistle it, Phil."

Phil whistled it, her eyes twinkling.

"Sounds like a dead march done in ragtime," suggested Nan, whose ear was said to be faulty.

"All the great masters will be done over pretty soon by the raggists," declared Phil.

"Spoken like the Philistine you are not, Phil," said Kirkwood. "What you were trying to whistle is the 'Lucia Sextette' upside down. Rose, let's have the 'Mozart Minuet' we used to play. We haven't had it for moons."

She played it, Phil turning the music. Then Kirkwood was reminded of the existence of his 'cello. Amzi watched him tuning it, noted the operation restlessly, and then rose demanding:—

"Nan, where's my flute? Seems to me I left it here the last time we played."

This was a joke. It had been in the house at least six years. Phil whistled a few bars from a current light opera, and pretended to be absorbed in an old etching of Beethoven that hung over the piano. She glanced covertly at her uncle, who knew perfectly well that Phil was laughing at him. Nan, meanwhile, produced the flute. It was in this fashion that the trio was usually organized.

"Bad night for asthma, but let's tackle some of the good old ones," said Amzi.

This, too, was part of a familiar formula, and Rose found the music. Soon Amzi's cheeks were puffing with the exertion of fluting the "Minuet," while Kirkwood bent to the 'cello. Nan and Phil became an attentive audience on the davenport, as often before. When Amzi dropped out (as he always did), Phil piped in with her whistle, and that, too, was the usual procedure. She whistled a fair imitation of the flute; she had a "good ear"; Rose said her "ear" was too good, and that this explained her impatience of systematic musical instruction. Amzi abused the weather and incidentally the flute; they essayed the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria" and the "Träumerei," with like failure on Amzi's part. Then Rose played, number after number, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, without pause. It was clear that the woman loved her music; that it meant a very great deal to her. Its significance was in the fine lines of her face, beautifully grave, but lighting wonderfully through passages that spoke to her with special meaning. Her profile was toward Kirkwood. He had, indeed, taken a seat that gave him a particular view that he fancied and his eyes wandered from her hands to her lovely, high-bred face. No one spoke between the numbers, or until Rose, sitting quiet a moment at the end, while the last chord died away, found her own particular seat by the white wooden mantel.

"I guess those chaps knew their business," observed Amzi. "And I guess you know yours, Rose. I don't know that you ever brought out that nocturne quite so well before. Eh, Tom?"

Kirkwood agreed with him. Rose had surpassed herself, in the opinion of the lawyer. Both men found pleasure in paying tribute to her talents. Amzi turned to Nan, who nodded acquiescence. The banker really loved music, and slipped away several times every winter to Chicago, to hear concerts or the opera. On occasions he had taken Kirkwood and Phil and they had made a great lark of it.

"What's this rumor about the Sycamore Traction being in trouble?" asked Nan.

Amzi rubbed his head. He had not come to the Bartletts' to discuss business, and the topic was not, moreover, one that interested him at the moment.

"There are a lot of papers on your desk about that, daddy," Phil remarked. "But I suppose those are office secrets."

There was, indeed, a telegram from a New York lawyer asking why Kirkwood had not replied to a certain letter. He glanced at her quickly, apparently disturbed that the matter had been mentioned. Her father's inattention to the letter of the New York lawyer had, independently of Nan Bartlett's reference to the traction company, caused Phil to make certain resolutions touching both her father and herself.

"I've got my hand on that, Phil. I've answered."

Phil saw that the subject of this correspondence, whose import she had scarcely grasped, was not to be brought into the conversation. She turned away as Amzi addressed her father in a low tone.

"Tom, as I remember, you made a report on that scheme before the bonds were sold. Do you mind telling me whether that was for the same crowd that finally took it up?"

"Yes; but they cut down the amount they undertook to float. Sam Holton sold a lot of the bonds along the line; a good many of them are held right here in this county."

"They are, indeed. It seemed a plausible thing for the home folks to own the securities of a company that was going to do so much for the town; they pulled that string hard. It was a scheme to draw the coin out of the old stocking under the fireplace. If it was good for widows and orphans out in Seattle and Bangor, why wasn't it good for 'em at home? And it is good for the people at home if it's played straight. I've had an idea that these cross-country trolleys will have about the same history the steam roads had,—a good many of 'em will bust and the original investors will see their securities shrink; and there will be smash-ups and shake-downs and then in time the lines will pay. Just what's the trouble here, Tom, if you don't mind?"

"There's an apprehension that the November interest won't be paid. The company's had some hard luck—a wreck that's piled up a lot of damage suits, for one thing; and in one or two counties the commissioners are trying to make them pay for new bridges—a question of the interpretation of the franchise. I gave warning of that possibility."

"Thunder! I hope it won't come to the worst. I didn't know you were keeping track of it."

"One of my old classmates at Williams is counsel for the Desbrosses Trust and Guaranty Company which is the trustee for the bondholders. I passed on the mortgage for them as to its local aspects. I'm going over to Indianapolis to meet him in a few days to determine what to do in event the interest is defaulted. The management has been unsatisfactory, and after five years the replacements are running ahead of the estimates."

"I wonder—" began Amzi; then he paused and rubbed his scalp. "I suppose my neighbor Bill is already out from under."

"I don't know," said Kirkwood soberly. "It was Sam who was the chief promoter."

"Sam was a smooth proposition. Thunder! I lost money when Sam died. I'd made a bet with myself that they'd pin something on him before he got through, but he died just out of spite to make me lose. Thunder! Bill makes strong statements."

The strength of the statements made by the First National Bank did not, however, seem to disturb Amzi. What he had learned from Kirkwood had not been in the nature of fresh information, but it had confirmed certain suspicions touching the Sycamore Traction Company. The Bartletts and Phil were talking quietly in a corner. Amzi rose and pulled down his percale waistcoat and buttoned the top button of his cutaway coat, in which he looked very much like a fat robin. He advanced toward the group in the corner.

"Nan," he said, "you didn't buy a Sycamore bond that time I told you not to, did you?"

Rose beat time for her sister mockingly, and they answered in singsong.

"We did not! We did not! But," Nan added, dropping her hands to her sides tragically, "but if we had, oh, sir!"

"If you had I should have bought it of you at a premium. It's hard work being a banker for women: they all want ten per cent a month."

"Paul Fosdick's things were all guaranteed ten per cent a year," remarked Rose.

They all waited for the explosion that must follow the mention of this particular brother-in-law. Nowhere else in town would any one have dared to bring Fosdick, who was believed to be his pet abomination, into a conversation. Even in Hastings he found a kind of joy; the presence of a retired Hamlet among the foliage of the family tree was funny now that he had got used to it; and Amzi had a sense of humor. This little company expected him to explode and he must not disappoint them. The color mounted to his bald dome and his eyes bulged.

"Thunder! Rose, play that jiggly funeral march of a marionette!"

"I refuse," said Rose, spreading her skirts on the divan, "to do anything so cruel!"

"And besides," said Nan, "I bought a share of stock in his brickyard."

"Nan Bartlett," said Amzi, planting himself before her, "I will give you a peck of parsnips for that share."

"Couldn't take advantage of you, Amzi; and we never eat parsnips. They're bad for the complexion."

"Thunder!" he snorted contemptuously.

"Thunder" was his favorite, almost his only, expletive, but his thunder was only a single boom without reverberations. His four auditors understood him perfectly, however. Fosdick was always "starting" something. He had even attempted to organize a new cemetery association, which, as Greenlawn was commodious, and as any amount of land adjacent made possible its indefinite expansion, Amzi regarded as an absurd and unholy project. With Fosdick, Amzi had no business relations of any kind. He belonged to the Commercial Club, to be sure, but this was a concession on his part; he never attended any of its meetings. And he had, it was said, requested his enterprising brother-in-law to withdraw his patronage from the Montgomery Bank for reasons never wholly clear to the curious. Fosdick had talked about it in bitterness of spirit; Amzi had not. Amzi never talked of his business. He rarely lost a customer; and if a citizen transferred his account to the First or the Citizens' National, it was assumed that Amzi no longer cared particularly to have that individual on his ledgers. Such a transfer aroused in cautious minds a degree of suspicion, for horses rarely died in Amzi's stable.

"Thunder! It's time to go home. Guess the rain's stopped."

Amzi set out for home with the Kirkwoods. He was in capital spirits, and kept up a steady give and take with Phil. Just before reaching his own gate they passed Kirkwood's former home. Amzi's sisters persistently demanded that something be done about the abandoned house, which, with its neglected garden, was a mournful advertisement of their sister's ill-doings. It had been a shock to them to discover, a few years after her flight, that it had passed from her to Amzi and from him to Kirkwood. The consideration had been adequate; the county records told the story plainly. There was, of course, no reason why Lois should continue to own a house for which she had no use; but there was less reason why her former husband should acquire the property merely, as it seemed, from motives of sentiment. Every weed in the garden—and the crop was abundant—called attention to the blot on the Montgomery 'scutcheon. And if Kirkwood was silly enough to cling to the old home, while living in a rented house in a less agreeable neighborhood, there was no reason why he should refuse to lease it and devote the income to Phil's upbringing.

It was not a cheerful item of the urban landscape and the sorrow of Amzi's sisters that it should remain dolefully at their own thresholds was pardonable. The moon looked down at it soberly through dispersing clouds as though grieved by its disrepair. The venerable forest trees that gave distinction to the "old Montgomery place" had shaken their leaves upon this particular part and parcel of the elder Amzi's acres, and piled them upon the veranda steps. The gate, fastened to the post by a chain and padlock, sagged badly, and bulged upon the public walk.

Amzi stopped and pushed it back, causing the chain to rattle dolorously. Kirkwood watched him indifferently. Phil lent her uncle a hand. Amzi, panting from his efforts, ejaculated: "Thunder!" and a moment later they bade each other good-night under the gas lamp at his own gate.

CHAPTER IV

A TRANSACTION IN APPLES

Phil was not visible the next morning when at seven o'clock Kirkwood glanced about the house for her. She had indulged herself in the matter of rising since the high-school bell no longer regulated her habits, and her father had hardly expected to see her. There was no morning newspaper to read—he took a Chicago daily at his office—and he opened the windows and doors to admit the air. Domestic affairs interested Thomas Kirkwood little. During the years in which Phil was passed from aunt to aunt he had lived at the Morton House, and after establishing the new home that he might have her with him, one or another of the aunts had supervised his household, and at times, to his discomfiture, all had taken a hand at it.

This rented cottage where the Kirkwoods lived was in the least fashionable part of Main Street, beyond the commercial district and near the railroad. Trains thundered through a cut not far from the rear fence, and the cars of the Sycamore Traction Company rumbled by at intervals. The cottage was old but comfortable, and it was remarked that Kirkwood had probably chosen it for the reason that he could go to and from his office without passing his abandoned home. Phil liked living on Main Street. Her devotion to that thoroughfare had been a source of great pain to her aunts. Even as her Uncle Amzi absorbed local color from the steps of his bank, Phil was an alert agent in the field, on nodding terms with the motormen of the interurban cars, and with the jehus, who, cigarette in mouth and hat tipped on one side, drove the village hacks. Captain Joshua Wilson, who had been recorder of his county continuously since he lost a leg at Missionary Ridge, and who wrote a poem every year for the reunion of his regiment, had written certain lines for the "Evening Star" in which "P. K." was addressed as the Diana of Main Street. As to the soundness of his mythology there might be debate, but there was no question as to Phil's thorough identification with Main Street, all the way from her father's house, past the court-house, shops, and banks, out to the old Sugar Creek Bridge where the town became country without any warning whatever.

It was Judge Walters who first called her "Otherwise Phyllis." This was in Phil's school days before she passed from her aunts' custody. The judge delighted in Phil's battles with the aunts. Whenever his wife began to recount a day's occurrences at the supper-table, and the recital opened promisingly, it was the judge's habit to cut short her prefaces with, "Otherwise Phyllis—" and bid her hurry on to the catastrophe, sparing no tragic detail.

Kirkwood had never, from the day his wife left him, offered himself in the market-place as an object of sympathy. He had been a man of reserves at all times, and the sudden termination of his married life had merely driven him in further upon himself. If he was broken-hearted, the fragments were well hidden. He felt that he was a failure, and he saw men of less ability passing him in the race. Now and then he had roused himself under stress and demonstrated his unusual gifts by striking successes; but after one of these spurts he would relapse into an indifference to which he seemed increasingly ready to yield.

He had risen this morning with a new resolution, attributable to his talk with Nan Bartlett the night before. Even if he did not care for himself, there was always Phil to consider. And Phil was very much to consider. She had decided for herself that the high school had given her all the education she needed. Kirkwood had weighed the matter carefully and decided that she would not profit greatly by a college course—a decision which Phil had stoutly supported. Her aunts favored a year at a finishing school to tone down her rough edges, but having laid their plan before their brother Amzi that gentleman had sniffed at it. What was the use of spoiling Phil? he demanded. "Thunder!" And there was no reason in the world why Phil should be spoiled.

Phil was not, in any view of the case, an ignorant person. She knew a great many things that were not embraced in the high-school curriculum. Her father harbored an old-fashioned love of the poets; which is not merely to say that at some time in his life he had run through them, but that he read poetry as one ordinarily reads novels, quite naturally and without shame. Something of his own love of poetry had passed to his daughter. He had so trained her that literature meant to Phil not printed pages, but veritable nature and life. Books were a matter of course, to be taken up and put down as the reader pleased, and nothing to grow priggish about. She had caught from him an old habit, formed in his undergraduate days, of a light, whimsical use of historical and literary allusions. She entered zestfully into the spirit of this kind of fooling; and, to his surprise, she had developed an astonishing knack of imitation and parody. Sometimes Kirkwood without preluding, would utter a line for Phil to cap; they even composed sonnets in this antiphonal fashion and pronounced them superior to the average magazine product. Phil had not only learned much from her father, but she had absorbed a great deal of lore at the Bartletts', where everything bookish was vitalized and humanized.

Kirkwood, hearing the creak of the swinging door between the pantry and dining-room,—a familiar breakfast signal,—chose with care a volume of Bagehot and carried it to the table which had been set, he imagined, by the "girl" selected by his sisters-in-law to carry on his establishment during the winter.

He helped himself to grapes, and was eating with his eye on a page of Bagehot when the door swung again and Phil piped a cheerful good-morning. She was an aproned young Phil and her face was flushed from recent proximity to the range. She described her entrance in lines she had fashioned for the purpose:—

"She came
While yet the jocund day was young, and fetched
In hands but lightly singed upon the stove
The coffee-pot, with muddy contents filled—"

Kirkwood, concealing his surprise at seeing her, took his cue:—

"And he, toying meanwhile with fruitage of the vine,
To-wit the mellow grape, scarce breathed to see
The nut-brown maid, and gasped, 'Where is the cook?'"

"Oh, the cook has went, to come down to the plain prose of it, daddy. There was one here yesterday, but one's dynastic aunts had picked her for her powers of observation and ready communication, so I fired her hence. And with that careless grace which I hope you find becoming in me I decided to run the shop all by my lonesome for a while. I thought I'd start with breakfast so that any poisons that may creep into the victuals will have time to work while the drug-stores are open. How long do you cook an egg, is it two minutes or two weeks?"

"This will never do," said Kirkwood gravely, watching her pour the coffee. "You shouldn't have discharged one cook until you had another."

"Tut! There's not enough to do in this house for two able-bodied women—and I'm one! Rose taught me how to make coffee yesterday, and toast and eggs are easy. Just look at that coffee! Real amber? It's an improvement for looks on what you've been brewing for yourself in camp. And I've been watching your winning ways with the camp frying-pan. Rose gave me a cook-book that is full of perfectly adorable ideas. Come up for lunch and I'll show you some real creations."

She slipped away into the kitchen and reappeared with toast and boiled eggs. She had cooked the eggs by the watch as Rose had instructed her. Her father relaxed the severity of his countenance to commend them. But he did not like Phil in this new rôle. The casting forth of the cook provided by the aunts would be regarded as an offense not lightly to be passed by those ladies; but Phil had never appeared so wholly self-possessed. She poured coffee for herself, diluted it with hot water, buttered a slice of toast with composure, tasted it and complained that the grocer had sent rancid butter.

Kirkwood pushed aside his Bagehot. He did not know just how to deal with a daughter who, without the slightest warning, dispatched her cook and took upon herself the burden of the household. The coffee was to his liking; it was indubitably better than he had been used to; but the thing would not do. He must show Phil the error of her ways and lose no time about it.

"I'm sorry you didn't like the girl they sent you; but you must find another. There's no reason, of course, why you shouldn't choose for yourself; but it's not easy to find help in a town like this. I can't have you doing the housework. That must be understood, Phil."

"You're not having me; I'm having me, which is a very different thing. If you had driven me into the kitchen with loud, furious words, I should have rebelled—screamed, and made a terrible scene. But you did nothing of the kind. It happened in this wise. Glancing up quite by chance, as it were, you beheld me pouring coffee of my own brewing. Fatherly pride extinguished any feeling of shock or chagrin. You have smothered any class feeling that may linger in your aristocratic soul and are making a good bluff at enjoying the eating of your breakfast with the lady who cooked it. Could anything be more beautiful? The ayes seem to have it; the ayes have it, as I used to be fond of saying when I was boss of the Philomathean. I wish now I'd taken the domestic science course more seriously and spent less time in the gymnasium. But thus it is we live and learn."

Phil's tone made rebuke difficult. He loved her foolishness just as her Uncle Amzi did—just as every one did except her aunts, for whom the affected stiltedness of her speech was merely a part of her general deplorable unconventionality.

"Well, Phil, the idea of your cooking the meals for this establishment isn't debatable. You're overruled and the debate closed."

"Still harping on my daughter's cooking! Please, in current idiom, cut it out. Try marmalade on that too, too perfect toast."

He accepted marmalade and returned to the attack.

"You see, Phil, everything's different now. You've got to wake up to your social responsibilities."

"And be a perfect lady? I know. Amy got me into the back room of the bank yesterday and told me. One's aunts had bullied the old dear into springing the sad intelligence. Then Nan had already given me a session. And now you, too, Brutus, are about to lay the matter before me in a few crisp sentences. But why all this assumption that I'm not a real lady? There's a good deal of loose thinking on that subject, to use one of your own best phrases. If there is nothing more before the house—"

Phil had been studiously stuccoing her toast with marmalade, and she bit into it before looking at her father.

"You know perfectly well what I mean, Phil. This is a serious time in your life. You've got to adapt yourself to the ways of the world—the world of convention. You must consider yourself as a member of society. It's only in a limited sense that we can be individualists. And I can't have my daughter weighed down with such cares as these you threaten to assume. It would hurt me more than I can tell you if I believed it necessary. But it isn't necessary. None the less I know perfectly well that if it were necessary you would be equal to it—you are equal to anything you undertake. But I can't have you wasting yourself on such things."

"Daddy dear, this is getting terribly philosophical. Let us be really serious for a little bit. You know, we haven't much money, have we? Not very much, anyhow."

She had broached the matter as delicately as possible. It had been in her mind that she must speak to her father about their affairs, but she had not thought the opportunity would offer so quickly. It was hard to say to him that she had undertaken to manage the housekeeping as an economical measure; that she knew he owed money that he had no immediate prospect of paying.

The hurt look that she had seen in his eyes sometimes was heartbreaking. When Phil was younger, she used to ask about her mother, but later she had never referred to her. Her aunts had, after their fashion, not been above using her mother to point a moral. In their lack of appreciation of the keenness of the child's intuitions or her eager imagination, they had established in her a belief that her mother was a bad woman: the facts spoke for themselves. And having had a bad mother it was incumbent upon Phil to choose her path with a particular care and to walk in it circumspectly.

Phil had, by this time, considered the case from the changing viewpoints natural to the young mind. In that rosy light through which a girl of fifteen is apt to view life,—the first realizations of sex, the age of the first novels,—Phil had not been free from the contemplation of her mother as a romantic figure. For a woman to forsake a husband for a lover was not without precedents. Phil had dreamed over this a good deal, in an impersonal sort of way, and the unknown mother had been glorified in scenes of renunciation, following nobly the high call of a greater love. By a swift transition her father assumed the sympathetic rôle in the domestic drama. She chanced upon novels in which the spurned husband was exalted to the shame of the dishonorable wife. Her father fitted well into this picture. She even added herself to the dramatis personæ, not without a sense of her value in the scene. But these were only passing phases. There was no morbid strain in Phil. Her father was the best of companions, and she was quick to recognize his fineness and gentleness and to appreciate his cultivation with its background of solid learning.

Phil's question startled her father. Money had never been discussed in the household, and this new gravity in his daughter's eyes troubled him. Phil's needs had been few; her demands had burdened him little. Her aunts had bought her clothes and sent him the bills. When he gave her money to spend, he never asked for an accounting, though he was often amused by the uses to which she put it; and sometimes he had been touched by her gifts at Christmas or on his birthdays, which ranged from a reckless investment in gay neckties to a set of some author whose definitive edition he had coveted—Shelley or Landor or Matthew Arnold. No; money was not a subject that had interested Phil, and her father found her direct question disconcerting.

"No, Phil. We are not rich—far from it. It's hardly possible for a lawyer to grow rich in a town like this. But I haven't been doing as well as I could lately. I've got to do better and I must be about it."

He drew himself up in his chair and glanced at his watch. It had stopped, and as the court-house clock boomed eight he set it. It was quite like him to allow his watch to run down.

"I was in your office yesterday, daddy, and I hope you won't mind, but I was straightening your desk and I couldn't help seeing some old bills. Several of them had been there a long time. My graduating dress hasn't been paid for—and some things like that. We must economize until those bills are paid. And I was thinking that you ought to get more money out of the building. Rents are going up on Main Street. I heard Paul Fosdick say so. You ought to raise the clothing store rent right away. I don't know of any easier way of getting money," she added drolly, "than by wringing it from the tenants."

She laughed, to make it easier for him.

"Yes; that's one way of doing it; only Bernstein had a long lease that expires—I'm not sure when it does expire—" he concluded, and the color deepened in his dark cheeks. It was his business to know when the lease on the property expired, and as though reminded by this lapse of similar failures in other directions, he drew out his watch again and made sure that he had wound it.

"It expires," said Phil, "on the last day of this next December. I looked it up yesterday afternoon in that little memorandum book you keep in your desk."

"I guess that's right. I'm glad you mentioned it. I'll see Bernstein right away and ask him if he wants to renew the lease. I suppose I ought to coax a higher rent out of him, but he's been there a long time."

"Oh, he'll stand another fifty and be glad of it. His sign is on all the fences in the country—'Bernstein's—The Same Old Place.' It would cost him some money to change that. And you could cheer him up by painting the front of the building. The interurban is bringing a lot more business to Montgomery. I've been thinking we ought to do something about that third floor room where the photograph shop used to be. Bernstein has an upstairs room in the next building where his tailor imparts that final deft touch that adjusts ready-made garments to the most difficult figure. It would be handier for him to conduct the sartorial transformations in the chamber over his own gate, wouldn't it? And I don't think we need wait for that photographer to come back from the penitentiary or wherever he languisheth."

She was minimizing the significance of these suggestions—a significance that lay, she knew, in the fact of their coming from her—by lapsing into the absurdities with which she embellished her familiar talk. She pronounced "languisheth" with a prolongation of the last syllable that gave to it a characteristic touch of mockery.

"I'd been hoping he'd show up again and cart off his rubbish. But we've had some fun out of the gallery. If we rent it to Bernstein for his retouching mysteries, we shan't have any place to develop our negatives."

"That's so; but maybe we can retouch Bernstein for enough extra to get them done for us. It's the ducats, my lord, that move my fancy. The Bernsteins have grown almost disagreeably rich at the same old stand and it's about time the Kirkwoods were thrusting their talons into the treasure chest."

Sounds of disaster in the kitchen caused Phil to rise hastily and disappear through the swing doors. She returned calmly a moment later.

"Only the tea-kettle playing at being a geyser. When we get rich I'm going to have a gas range. They say it's the only way to cook and cook and be a lady still."

"That brings us back to cooking—" began her father.

"Not at all, daddy. The subject is dismissed forever. I'm going to have that Ethiop who does chores for us clean up the photograph gallery. I'll be down after while, to see how it looks."

She bade him good-bye at the front door, and went whistling about the further business of the morning. The sky was blue and the air warmed as the sun climbed into the heavens. Phil felt that she had conveyed to her father a sense of their imperative needs without wounding him. She was resolved to help him if she could. Her pride had been pricked by her Uncle Amzi's proffered aid, which she had carefully avoided mentioning to her father. She knew that it would have hurt him, and she had reasoned, much in the fashion of Nan Bartlett, that her father owed it to himself to exercise his unquestioned gifts to reëstablish himself in his profession. As he left her and walked toward the street, she was aware that he strode away more quickly than was his wont.

Phil's morning was not eventless. The telephone jingled three times, as three aunts demanded to know why she had parted with the maid-of-all-work they had installed in the Kirkwood kitchen. Aunt Josie was censorious and Aunt Fanny mildly remonstrative; Aunt Kate sought light as to the reason for the cook's early passing, as she was anxious to try her herself. Phil disposed of these calls with entire good humor. Then a senior, between lectures at the college, asked her if she would go driving with him Sunday afternoon. The senior, in the security of his fraternity house, prolonged the conversation. As this was Thursday and there was never any imperative need in Montgomery for making engagements so far ahead, the senior was exercising unjustifiable precaution. Phil declined the invitation. Her aunts had repeatedly warned her against college boys. A daughter of the house of Montgomery was not to waste herself upon students, a lawless body of whom no one knew anything in particular save that they seized every opportunity to murder sleep for reputable citizens.

Phil employed the telephone to order of the grocer and butcher, made beds, swept rooms, and sat down with a new magazine, dropped at the door by the postman, to run her eyes over the pictures. One or two things she was sure her father would like; a sketch of Massenet she must call to Rose Bartlett's attention. She planned luncheon and began the peeling of potatoes with a page of Keats propped on the table beside her—a trick she had learned at the Bartletts'. "Endymion" need suffer nothing from proximity to potatoes, though it should be said that Phil's paring would have distressed a frugal housekeeper.

While thus employed a step sounded on the brick walk, and a young man knocked at the open door without glancing in. He chewed a straw as he observed the chimneys of the adjoining house, and Phil, sitting by the kitchen table, paused in her paring to make sure of his identity. Then she placed her pan of potatoes on the table and crossed quickly to the door.

"Good-morning, madam. Would you like—"

He extended two apples as samples. Phil glanced at them with interest. They were not the best of apples, as any one could see. Fred Holton removed his hat and pulled the straw from his mouth.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Kirkwood," he said, with a gravity that was not mitigated by a slight quivering of Phil's lips as she continued to ignore their earlier acquaintance. "I didn't know this was your house or I shouldn't have come in."

"Then it's a good thing you didn't know," replied Phil. "If you're selling apples you have to try all the houses you come to. Not to go into every gate wouldn't be business."

"Well, I suppose that's so," observed Holton doubtfully, letting one of the apples fall. Phil picked it up with the quick reach of a shortstop. She ignored his apologies for failing to recover it himself, and examined the apple critically.

"If you haven't any better apples in your wagon than this, you're not likely to sell many," Phil commented. "This one's spotted and it's a safe guess that a worm nestles within. You ought to pick out the best for samples."

"They're not a very good lot," confessed Holton. "It's an old orchard and it hasn't had any attention. I'm going to put out some new trees next year."

"That's a good idea," Phil observed reflectively. "I've noticed that they've been planting pears and apples in several places around there. Uncle Amy got a good first crop this year from his young orchard. But he had a man spray the bugs off. There are a lot of things to do to an orchard. The land Uncle Amy turned into an orchard runs right up to your place, and it must be the same kind of land. But it isn't as easy as it looks—apples isn't."

"Apples isn't?" he repeated soberly.

"Oh, cheer up, that's a joke! I know apples aren't!"

The young man smiled.

"Mine isn't, I'm afraid, from what you say about them."

"I think maybe that speck isn't a wormhole, after all," said Phil, subjecting the apple she still held to another scrutiny. "You might give us a half a bushel of these. My ambitions lead me toward apple pie, and if it doesn't come out well I can blame your apples."

He smiled again, and frank admiration shone in his eyes as they surveyed Phil with more assurance.

"If you really want some of these I'll bring them in. Half a bushel?"

"That will be enough," replied Phil succinctly. She rubbed the apple with the corner of her blue-and-white apron, chose a spot that inspired confidence, and bit into it. She waited for the effect absently and puckered her lips. "It's a cooker. What's the name of the brand?"

"Give it up."

"Then I'll tell you. It's a 'Liza Browning. You'd better learn the names of apples before you go much further in the business. Any farmhand can tell you. Uncle Amy's taught me about twenty. What's the price of this precious fruit?"

"Oh, I couldn't charge you for these, you know. You see—"

"Then I won't take them—nary an apple! You bring in those apples and I'll pay you just the same price you ask everybody else."

Her attention was attracted by a black cat moving along the alley fence with noble unconcern. Phil stepped out upon the brick walk, drew back her arm and threw the apple. It struck the fence immediately beneath the cat, which vanished on the alley side.

"Good shot. You almost got him!"

"Almost nothing!" said Phil scornfully. "You didn't suppose I wanted to hit the wretch, did you? He's an old pal of mine and would be lonesome if I didn't scare him to death occasionally."

Holton brought the apples in a sack which he emptied into a basket Phil found for the purpose. His absence had been prolonged. To measure half a bushel of apples is not ordinarily a serious matter, but in this instance the vendor chose fastidiously. The fruit that went into the sack was beyond question the best in the wagon.

"How much?" asked Phil, surveying her purchase, purse in hand.

"Oh, about a quarter."

She handed him a fifty cent piece.

"Please don't try that again—not here! I've been telephoning the grocery and apples about like those are a dollar a bushel. Good-morning!"

"Good-morning, Miss Kirkwood."

He looked at her intently, laughed, threw the sack over his shoulder and went out, holding the coin in his hand.

CHAPTER V

THE OTHERWISENESS OF PHYLLIS

Hint to those who read with an eye on the clock: skip this chapter! It is made up from notes furnished by Mrs. John Newman King, Judge Walters, Captain Joshua Wilson, the veteran recorder, former-Sheriff Whittlesey and others, and is included merely to satisfy those citizens of Montgomery who think this entire history should be devoted to Phil, to the exclusion of her friends and relations. The historian hopes he is an open-minded person, and he would rather please Montgomery than any other center of thought and industry he knows; but the laws of proportion (as Phil would be the first to point out) may not lightly be ignored. Phil's otherwiseness was always difficult to keep in bounds; it must not tyrannize these pages. Skip and carry thirteen, but don't complain if pilgrims from Montgomery take you to task for denying Phil five minutes of your time.

Phil was on her way to Buckeye Lane the first cold day in November to call on the daughter of a newly enrolled member of the Madison faculty when she saw her Uncle Amzi on the bank steps taking the air. She had on her best walking-suit, and swung a silver cardcase in her hand. The cardcase marked an advance. Formal calls were not to Phil's taste, but her aunts had lately been endeavoring to persuade her that it was no longer seemly for her to "drop in" when and where she pleased, but that there were certain calls of duty and ceremony which required her best togs and the leaving of circumspect bits of cardboard inscribed "Miss Kirkwood." When Phil set forth to call upon a girl friend it was still something of a question whether caller and callee would sit in the parlor and be ladies or seek the open to crack walnuts on the kitchen steps or slide down the cellar door.

As Phil spied her uncle she stopped abruptly, feigned to be looking at the sign over his head, and when his glasses presently focused upon her, pretended suddenly to be intent upon the face of the court-house clock two blocks distant.

"Beg pardon, sir, but is this a bank?"

Thus accosted Mr. Montgomery looked upon his niece with exaggerated surprise.

"A bank, little girl? What on earth do you want with a bank?"

"I thought I might separate it from some of its cash; or if the terms are satisfactory I might leave some money. If the venerable old party I address holds a job inside we might withdraw from the public gaze and commune within the portals. The day is raw and that ice-cream suit invites pneumonia."

Passers-by viewed the pair with an amused smile. Captain Wilson, stumping along at the moment, asked without pausing:—

"Stranger in town, Amzi?"

"Yes, Cap; she's just bought the town and wants the key to the bank vault."

Phil followed her uncle into the bank and waited for him to walk round behind the cages. The dingy old room with its walnut counter and desks seemed at once a brighter place. The four clerks made it convenient to expose themselves to Phil's smile. She planted herself at the paying teller's cage and waited for Amzi's benevolent countenance to appear at the wicket. She held up her cardcase that he might have the full benefit of her splendor, extracted a small bit of paper, and passed it in to him. Seeing that it was not one of the familiar checks of the Montgomery Bank, he scrutinized it closely. It was a check of the "Journey's End" Magazine Company for fifty dollars, drawn upon a New York bank and payable to Phyllis Kirkwood.

Amzi's face expressed no surprise. He threw it back and waved her away.

"It's no good. Worthless!"

"No good? You don't mean—"

"No good, Miss Kirkwood—without your indorsement."

"Why didn't you say so! I don't want to come as near sudden death as that again."

He thrust out a pen so that she need not turn to the tall desk behind her to make the indorsement. He examined the signature carefully and blotted it.

"One of your own efforts, Phil?" he asked carelessly.

"Well, yes, you might say so. I suppose you'd call it that."

"Poetry?"

"A poor guess, Amy, and marks you as an ignorant person. Fifty dollars for a poem out of my green little cantaloupe? That's half what Milton got for 'Paradise Lost.' And the prices haven't gone up much since John died."

She knew that his curiosity was aroused. This play of indifference was an old game of theirs, a part of the teasing to which she subjected him and which he encouraged.

"Story?"

"Absurd! Everybody in this town is writing a novel. Every time I go into the post-office I see scared-looking people getting their manuscripts weighed, and nervously looking round for fear of being caught. Nan says it's a kind of literary measles people have in Indiana. Aunt Josephine's cook writes poetry—burnt up a pan of biscuits the other day when she was trying to find a rhyme for 'Isaiah.'"

"I wondered what caused me so much pain the last time I ate supper at Josie's. I must have swallowed a sonnet. What's your line, Phil?"

"Zoölogy."

"Possible?"

"It was this way, Amy. You know that piece I read at the high-school commencement—'The Dogs of Main Street'?"

"I do, Phil, I do; I nearly laughed myself to death."

"Well, it did seem to tickle the folks. I was about to kindle the fire with it one day when I happened to think that if it would make a high-school commencement laugh it ought to raise a laugh out of 'most anybody. So I touched it up and put in a few new dogs I've got the boys in Landers's livery-stable taking care of, and sent it to three magazines. The first two regretted, but the third fell for it. They want pictures of the dogs, though, and will give me twenty more round iron dollars for a full set, so if you see me on the hike with the camera in the morning, don't ring up the town marshal."

"Well, well," said Amzi; "it sounds like easy money. Going to keep it up?"

"I have said nothing," replied Phil, holding up her cardcase and swinging it by its short chain. "Just credit me with the fifty and I'll bring in my book the next time I find it."

In front of the theater she ran into her Uncle Lawrence, gloomily posed before the entrance with his astrakhan collar drawn up about his ears. He had once seen Richard Mansfield in just such a coat and had been moved to imitation.

"Divinity!" breathed Hastings tragically, noting Phil's glowing cheeks and satisfying raiment.

"Forget it!" said Phil. "How about a box for the Saturday matinee? I think I'll pull off a party for a bunch of girls at your expense. What is that on the boards? You don't mean that 'Her Long Road Home' threatens this town again? Why rub it in, Lawrince?"

"They've canceled," said Hastings with a sigh. "That booking-office is a den of thieves. No honor, no feeling, no ideals of art!"

His tones were unusually abysmal. He stood with his back to the door of his theater as though shielding it from Philistine assaults upon the drama's divine temple.

"By the way, Lawrince—" Her Aunt Kate had rebuked her at least a thousand times for calling him "Lawrince." He had asked her to call him "Uncle Larry," which was her main reason for not doing so. Her standard of uncles was high. She had never admitted her aunts' husbands to a share in a relationship that was ennobled by Amzi Montgomery. Fosdick was usually "Paul" to Phil; Waterman she always called "Judge," which he hated. "Lawrince, what became of that play you wrote yourself and put on in Chicago? Why don't you bring it here and give the town a treat?"

Hastings bent upon her the grieved look of a man who suffers mutely the most unkindest cut of all. Et tu, Brute! was in his reproachful glance.

"I didn't think this of you, Phil. Of course you knew the piece closed Saturday night at Peoria."

She had not known. Her aunt had spoken largely of the venture. The theatrical powers of New York having frowned upon Hastings's play, he had produced it himself, sending it forth from Chicago to enlighten the West before carrying it to Broadway, there to put to rout and confusion the lords of the drama who had rejected it. Five thousand dollars had been spent and the play had failed dismally. Nor was this the first of Hastings's misadventures of the same sort. Phil analyzed her uncle's gloom and decided that it was sincere, and she was sorry for him as was her way in the presence of affliction. Hastings was an absurd person, intent upon shining in a sphere to which the gods had summoned him only in mockery. Phil lingered to mitigate his grief as far as possible.

"I'm sorry; but I suppose if a play won't go, it won't."

"A play of merit won't! My aim was to advance the ideal of American drama; that was all. The same money put into musical comedy would have nailed S. R. O. on the door all winter."

"Lawrince," said Phil, glancing up at the façade of The Hastings, "I'll tell you how you can make a barrel of money out of this brick building."

He looked at her guardedly. Phil was a digger of pits, as he knew by experience, and he was in no humor for trifling. His own balance at the bank was negligible, and his wife had warned him that no more money would be forthcoming for the encouragement of the American drama.

"Lawrince, what you ought to do is to hire that blind piano-pounder who thumps for the fraternity dances, put a neat red-haired girl in a box on the sidewalk, get one of the football team who's working his way through college to turn the crank, and put on a fil-lum."

This was, indeed, rubbing salt in his wounds. He flinched at the thought.

"Turn my house over to the 'movies'! Phil, I didn't think this of you. After all I've tried to do to lift this dingy village to a realizing sense of what drama is—what it should mean—"

"Trim it, Hector. You can break all the banks in town uplifting the drama and never put it over. About once a winter you have a good piece; the rest of the time the folks who want to see real actors go to Indianapolis or sneak up to Chicago for a week and beat you to it. That fil-lum show down by the court-house is rotten. Coarse and stupid. Why not spend a few dollars changing the front of this joint and put on good pictures? The people who keep the pictures moving in Indianapolis sit around the fire Sunday evenings and burn money—it comes in so fast the banks haven't room for it. Call this 'The Home Fireside'—no nickelodeon business—and get the Center Church quartette to sing. It will sound just like prayer-meeting to people who think a real theater a sinful place. If you don't tackle it, I'll throw Bernstein out and take it up myself. There's a new man in town right now trying to locate a screen; beat him to the wire, Lawrince."

"By Jove, Phil—!"

She started off briskly and a little farther on met Jack Whittlesey the sheriff, who grinned and touched his coonskin cap.

"Got an engagement, Phil? Hope not. Uncle Alec is goin' to holler in a few minutes."

"I'm out calling, Sheriff, but if you're sure the judge is going to act up, I'll take a look in."

She crossed the street to the court-house. To Phil nothing was funnier than Alec Waterman in the throes of oratory. Waterman was big and burly, with a thunderous voice; and when he addressed a jury he roared and shook his iron-gray mane in a manner truly terrifying. In warm weather when the windows were open, he could be plainly heard in any part of the court-house square. When Phil reached the circuit court-room Judge Walters, with his feet on the judicial desk, was gazing at the ceiling, as was his habit when trials grew tedious. As Phil entered, he jerked down his feet, sat erect, snapped his fingers at the bailiff, and directed the placing of a chair within the space set apart for the bar. Phil smiled her thanks, and made herself comfortable with her back to the clerk's desk. The case in progress was a suit for personal injuries against the Sycamore Traction Company, brought by Waterman for a farmer, who, on the preceding Fourth of July, had been tossed a considerable distance toward Chicago by a violent contact with one of the defendant's cars. The motorman and the conductor had both testified that the car was running empty and that the proper signals had been given at the required crossings.

The judge left the bench and lounged about the clerk's desk, hoping to catch Phil's eye and draw her aside for one of the parleys in which he delighted; but Phil had immediately become absorbed in the testimony. Waterman's voice rose louder and louder as he sought to befuddle the motorman as to the time of the accident, the place where the collision occurred and the signaling, but without avail. The attorney for the company looked on with an amused smile of unconcern. Both the motorman and the conductor had been carefully rehearsed in their testimony and there was little likelihood that plaintiff's counsel would be able to trap them. Waterman was going back and forth over the time of day, attempting to show that the car was behind its schedule, and exceeding the speed limit, but the man clung to his story stubbornly. It was at exactly five minutes past three; he was running slowly, and had whistled at all the earlier stops; and when he saw the plaintiff driving upon the right of way ahead of him he put on the brakes as quickly as possible.

Phil moved to a chair just behind Waterman. He was so deeply engrossed that he did not notice her. He was making no headway, and was about to drop the witness when Phil bent over and whispered. Without turning round he rose and renewed the attack.

"I will ask you, sir, to state to this jury whether it is not a fact that the brake of your car was out of order and whether it had not given you trouble before you struck the plaintiff?"

The witness stammered and glanced at counsel for the defendant, who rose and objected to the question as not proper cross-examination. The judge returned to the bench with renewed interest and overruled the objection. The witness admitted that there had been some slight trouble with the brake, and Waterman roared another question that drowned the explanation.

"Isn't it a fact that you ran past Stop 7 just south of the scene of this collision, and did not stop your car because it was out of control by reason of a crippled brake?"

The witness was plainly disturbed, and the defendant's counsel was unable to protect him. He admitted that the brake might not have been in perfect order, but it was an old car—

"It was an old car," boomed Waterman, "and the brake was worn out and you couldn't have stopped at that crossing even if you had wanted to! Isn't that the fact?"

The motorman telegraphed appealingly to the company's lawyer. The judge ordered him to answer the question.

"There were no passengers on the car," the man, now thoroughly confused, murmured inconsequently.

Waterman bent his head and took another cue from Phil, then strode majestically toward the witness.

"There were no passengers on your car? Why not?" he thundered.

"Why not what?" faltered the witness.

"I ask you, sir, if it isn't true that there was a passenger waiting at Stop 7 and that you ran by that crossing because your brake wouldn't work?"

The witness looked at Phil and involved himself in difficulty by admitting that the car's speed was such that he was unable to see clearly whether any passenger was waiting at Stop 7. After sparring between counsel, Phil was placed upon the stand and sworn to tell the whole truth. Main Street had heard that something unusual was happening in the circuit court and the room filled.

Her name, she testified, was Phil Kirkwood. (She always signed herself Phil at school, distrusting Phyllis as high-falutin'.)

"Otherwise Phyllis," interposed the judge soberly. "It is essential that the record identify all witnesses beyond per-adventure."

The audience tittered. Phil began her story. She had been spending the Fourth of July at her Uncle Amzi's farm, but wanted to return home before her uncle was ready, to attend a party. There was no question of the time, as she had walked across the fields to that particular stop to meet the car on its scheduled hour. She had stood upon the track and waved the flag placed in the shed at the stop for that purpose, but to her disgust the car had rushed by at full speed. She had heard the hissing of the air as the car whirled by, and there being no other car for an hour she had been obliged to return to the farm and wait for her uncle to drive her in.

Counsel for defendant, a stranger to the ways of Montgomery, who had come from Indianapolis to try the case, asked Phil ironically if she were an expert in the management of a trolley car.

"Oh, I shouldn't say that," said Phil; "but I used to ride with motormen sometimes, back and forth to the farm, and they let me stop and start the car."

She explained that she knew from the sound as the air went on that the brake was out of order. The twelve good men and true in the jury box bent forward attentively as she met the lawyer's questions. He was a young man and Phil was undeniably pretty. In her calling clothes she did not look like a girl who would chum with motormen. His manner was elaborately deferential.

"Miss Kirkwood, may I trouble you to tell the jury whether you ever rode in the car of this particular motorman?" he asked.

"No, sir," replied Phil.

"You never saw him before, and after all you're not sure he's the man who was in charge of that car that day, are you?"

Phil dangled the cardcase from her white-gloved fingers carelessly.

"Perfectly confident of it," she answered.

"If you are sure of it, will you kindly tell the jury just how it is you remember him—how you identify him as the motorman on this car on that particular afternoon?"

"Oh! Do you really want me to tell that?" asked Phil.

"Answer the question!" the attorney returned sharply, misreading her apparent reluctance.

"Why," began Phil, speaking rapidly and distinctly and turning toward the jurors,—"why, it's because I had noticed him all that summer passing our house and he always ran faster than the other motormen,—you could tell his car at night if you didn't see it because it ran so fast,—and he's the same man who ran into Bernstein's delivery wagon—the one with the lame horse—at the corner of Monon Street about a week before the Fourth of July. I saw that, too!"

"If Your Honor please," said Waterman, rising as the court ruled that Phil's last answer, which the defendant's counsel had sought vainly to interrupt, should be stricken out, "the plaintiff rests. We will waive argument in this case," he added impressively, putting from him, with unprecedented self-denial, the chance of pillorying the unfeeling defendant corporation.

Judge Walters looked down at Phil solemnly.

"The court is unable to determine whether the witness is also associate counsel for plaintiff, but in any event, I suggest that she claim the usual witness fee at the clerk's office."

Phil left the court-room and resumed her walk toward Buckeye Lane.

Paul Fosdick, just coming down from his office, arrested her. Fosdick, whose blithe spirit was never greatly disturbed by the failure of his enterprises, greeted Phil gayly. He entertained a high opinion of Phil. At family gatherings, which his wife and sisters-in-law made odious by petty bickerings, Phil was always a refuge. It was nothing to Phil which of her aunts wore the best hat, or that Mrs. Hastings had been abroad and to New York while the others had been denied these recreations and delights. If his wife's faith in him had been shaken by his inability to grasp the fortune which always seemed just within reach; and if, on Christmas and New Year's and Thanksgiving Day, when they met at Amzi's, he was a bit uncomfortable, knowing that his wife's share of the Montgomery money had gone into many ventures without ever coming out again, Phil could be depended upon to infuse cheer into those somber occasions. He frequently discussed his schemes with Phil, who was usually sympathetic; and now and then she made a suggestion that was really worth considering. Where other members of the family criticized him harshly behind his back, Phil delivered her criticisms face to face.

"Lo, Phil!"

"Lo, Paul!"

"Phil, what's new about Sycamore Traction? They say your pa's going to have a receiver appointed."

"If he does they will print it in the papers. How do you like my hat?"

"It's a dream, but I hope you're not going to make trouble for your dear aunts' husbands by going in for clothes. The competition in the family is hot enough now without you butting in. Hastings is in mourning at the bank and Waterman is sad over his last political licking and my billions are coming by slow freight."

"By the way, Paul, I fell over that busted brickyard of yours out by the flour mill the other day when I was walking for my health. There ought to be money in bricks," she ended meditatively.

"There ought, Phil, but there ain't. I'm still hoping to pull that scheme out, but it takes time. You know this town doesn't know how to back up its enterprises."

"Cease knocking! What you want to do is to stop trying to organize an undertakers' trust in this town where everybody lives to a green old age and get busy with brick. The last time I was in Indianapolis I saw a lot of new houses built out of brick that looked just about like those pink-and-yellow effects you started in on. They came from over in Illinois somewhere, and I guess the clay's off the very same stratum. What you ought to do is to nail close to some of the city architects and hypnotize them into using your goods."

"We tried all that, Phil; but they wouldn't listen."

"Let me see; what name did you give those bricks?"

"We called 'em the 'Gold Finish.' Nothing the matter with that, is there?"

"'Most everything's the matter with that name. Anything that suggests a gold brick is bound to scare sensible people. Think of living in a house that people would laugh at and call the 'gold-brick' house! You've got to get a lot better, Paul. Try once more and call 'em the 'Daffodil' or the 'Crocus'—something that sounds springlike and cheerful. And play up local pride—a Hoosier product for Hoosier people. Then when you've done that, fly to Chicago and give away enough to build a house in one of the new suburbs and daffodils will spring up all over the prairie. Am I lucid?"

"There may be something in giving an old dog a new name. I've a good notion to give it a try, and if—"

"Oh, there's no charge! You might send me up a couple of those brick; I can use 'em for nut-crackers."

Judge Walters once said of Phil that if she would keep a diary and write down honestly everything that happened to her if would some day put Pepys to the blush. Not every day was as rich in adventure as this; but this is not a bad sample. If Phil had been a prig or fresh or impertinent, she would not have been the idol of Main Street. A genius for being on the spot when events are forward must be born in one, and her casual, indifferent air contributed to a belief in Main Street that she was leagued with supernatural agencies. If there was a fire, Phil arrived ahead of the department; and if a prisoner broke out of jail, Phil knew it before the "Evening Star" could print the fact.

"Some one told me," Captain Wilson would begin, addressing Judge Walters; and the judge would answer, "Otherwise Phyllis." And the judge would say, "I'm going to quit taking the 'Star' and subscribe for Phil."

Phil had, on the whole, a pretty good time.

CHAPTER VI

THE SMOKING-OUT OF AMZI

Although a Holton had brought scandal upon the house of Montgomery by eloping with one of its duly married daughters, or perhaps because of that disagreeable circumstance, Mrs. Hastings, Mrs. Fosdick, and Mrs. Waterman were constantly exercised over the affairs of the Holtons. The Holtons prospered, as witness the fashion in which William (the wicked Jack's brother) had built up the First National Bank after the dissolution of the old Montgomery & Holton partnership. And there was Samuel, who had varied his political activities by organizing companies to raise vanilla beans or sarsaparilla, or to dig silver in Mexico—a man of affairs, unquestionably, who had outgrown Montgomery and moved to the state capital where he died. Even Samuel's paltry achievements were touched with a certain magnificence in the eyes of these ladies; Samuel had escaped from Montgomery and this was a consummation that had long been the burden of their prayers. The very existence of the First National Bank was offensive to the sisters of Amzi Montgomery. They had wanted Amzi to "nationalize" his bank when the break occurred and it had been "just like" their stubborn brother to continue in the old rut.

Mrs. William Holton lived in a modern house that was superior to anything the Montgomerys could boast. It had two bathrooms, a music-room, and electric lights. In Montgomery one bathroom had long been a summit-crowning achievement, to which the fortunate possessor might point with pride; and as for dedicating a room to music, and planting in it a grand piano flanked by a bust of Mozart, and shedding upon it a dim opalescent glow from concealed lights—no one in the community had ever before scaled such heights of grandeur.

For half a dozen years after their sister's escapade the Montgomery sisters had not spoken to a Holton; but in such communities as theirs the "cutting" of persons with whom one has been brought up is attended with embarrassments. William Holton had married, a little late, a Memphis woman he had met on a trip to Mexico to inspect the plantations in which he and his brother Samuel were interested. She was "a Southern woman," with a charming accent, as every one admitted. The accent was greatly admired. Several young girls sought to soften the vowels of their native Hoosier speech in conformity with the models introduced by Mrs. Holton. The coming of this lady, the zest with which she entered into the social life of the town, the vacillations of certain old friends of the Montgomerys who had taken sides against the Holtons after the Kirkwood incident, had given the three sisters an excuse for abandoning the feud in so far at least as it applied to William Holton. In any view of the case, no matter how base the Holtons might be, there was no reason why the family sins should be visited upon the lady with the aforesaid accent, whose taste in dress was unassailable and who poured tea with such an air.

Amzi read his newspaper in the little back room of the bank on a November afternoon and awaited the coming of his sisters. The necessity for any business discussions between them had steadily diminished. Their father's estate had long ago been distributed, and Amzi had not troubled himself as to the subsequent fate of the money he had paid to his sisters. They were all blessed with husbands, and if these gentlemen did not safeguard their wives' property it was no affair of his. There had been about half a million dollars, which meant in round figures a hundred thousand dollars apiece, and this in Montgomery is a great deal of money.

When his sisters arrived, Amzi rose with the nice courtesy that lay in him and placed chairs for them about the table. Then panting from his exertion he pulled a cigar from his waistcoat and dry-smoked it. They were unwontedly grave, suggesting the gloom of a committee appointed to perfect funeral arrangements for a poor relation.

"You have talked to Phil about the party, I suppose," said Mrs. Waterman.

"I have: I most certainly have, Josie," replied Amzi, sighing heavily.

"And she's going to do what we want?"

Amzi tilted his head to one side reflectively, and took the cigar from his mouth.

"She's going to stand for the party, if that's what you mean; but as to doing what you want on general principles, I'm not so dead sure."

"It was your duty, Amzi, to go into the matter thoroughly—to lay down the law to her," observed Mrs. Fosdick.

"All right," nodded Amzi. "In the words of the poet, I done it. But Phil doesn't need lectures."

"Doesn't need them?" sniffed Mrs. Fosdick. "That poor child couldn't have a lecture too many. She always pulls the wool over your eyes. It's right and proper for us to know just what she said when you told her she had to stop running round so much and act like a respectable well-brought-up girl."

"You're a lot of silly geese about Phil—all of you," declared Amzi, bringing his gaze to bear upon them seriatim. "Phil is far from being a fool, and there's a heart in her as big as the court-house. We don't appreciate her; we're always nagging her and trying to reform her."

The plural was pure chivalry. It was not Amzi who nagged Phil. The aunts, perfectly aware of this, and ready usually to challenge any intimation that their attitude toward Phil was not dictated by equity and wisdom, were silent. Their failure to respond with their customary defense aroused his suspicions. They had been to a tea somewhere and were in their new fall togs. Their zealous attempts to live up to what were to him the absurdest, the most preposterous ideals, struck him just now as pathetic; but he was fond of his sisters. If the course of their lives was inexplicable and their ambitions ridiculous and futile, his good humor never failed in his intercourse with them. But they had not disclosed their hand on this occasion—he was confident of this—and he warily fortified himself to meet whatever assault their strategy had planned. The three women glanced at one another covertly: Kate and Fanny seemed to be deferring to their older sister. It was with unmistakable diffidence and after a minute scrutiny of her cardcase that Mrs. Waterman spoke.

"Amzi, this is an important time in Phil's life, and there are some things we ought to counsel each other about. We all take it for granted that you know where Lois is."

Amzi crossed his fat legs and shrugged his fat shoulders. He was not in the least pleased by the direction of the inquiry.

"We feel we are entitled to know all you know about her," added Mrs. Fosdick.

"You should remember," said Mrs. Hastings, "that she's our sister as well as yours."

Amzi's jaws tightened and he inspected the end of his cigar. This sudden manifestation of sisterly interest in Lois was not without its amusing side. They had long ago spurned their sister with bitterness, and his speculations as to the real object of their visit had not touched the remote horizons against which Lois was vaguely limned.

"I don't see," he observed deliberately, "that Lois has anything whatever to do with Phil or any of the rest of us."

"Of course not, Amzi. That's exactly the point. We only want to be sure she's a long way off; we're entitled to know that. And we've heard—"

Mrs. Hastings laid upon heard that fine, insinuating inflection that is a part of the grammar of gossip. His sisters had heard something, and while he discounted its value automatically, as was his way, he was not without curiosity as to its nature. They saw that he was interested.

"The Walters have just got back from a Western trip, and they heard in Seattle that Lois has left Holton. He had been doing badly—drinking, and all that."

"It was bound to come, of course," said Mrs. Waterman. "You can't tell me that people who do a thing like that can ever be happy."

Her tone did not please Amzi. It was clear that he found the whole subject disagreeable. He was immensely annoyed that they had come to him to discuss Lois after years of silence. It was as though a great rock planted in the avenue of her exit had succumbed to the tooth of Time and its exfoliations were falling ominously about him.

"I thought it was understood long ago that we had dropped Lois. If she and Holton got tired of each other, it's their business. I don't imagine you want me to send for her to come home."

"Amzi!" they gasped.

It seemed that this shuddering exclamation expressed a horror that shook their very souls. It was incredible that so dark a thought should have crossed the mind of a man commonly looked upon as sane.

"That would be the limit," cried Mrs. Hastings. "Don't even mention such a thing—it's too horrible to joke about."

"I wasn't joking. If she's gone to smash with Holton, I thought maybe you wanted us to bring the prodigal home, and give her veal loaf for Sunday evening tea. By the way, Kate, don't ever turn me loose on any of your veal loaf again. The last I had at your house gave me indigestion; it might have led to apoplexy and killed me."

The fierceness of his frowning caused his scalp to wrinkle clear back to his fringe of hair. His sisters were vexed by his attempt to relieve the discussion with humor. It was necessary to sober him, and Mrs. Hastings thought she could effect the sobering of Amzi.

"Minnie Walters says they have lost their money; the judge saw Jack Holton, but you know how the judge is; he wouldn't ever speak of it to a soul."

"Minnie would," said Amzi dryly.

"Minnie only mentioned it in the kindest way," said Mrs. Waterman, coloring. "You know Minnie doesn't gossip; but as an old friend of our family she thought we ought to know. I think it was kind of her to tell us."

"Well, it doesn't seem to have made you girls much happier. What on earth are you going to do; what do you want me to do?" he demanded, blowing out his cheeks and glaring.

"We don't want you to do anything, Amzi," said Mrs. Hastings, with that sweetness with which women of little discernment attempt to blunt the wrath of man.

It was important to keep Phil in the picture: with Phil dancing before them Amzi could be held in subjection. Mrs. Waterman hastened to mention Phil and the responsibility they all felt about her, to justify their curiosity as to Phil's mother. Amzi blew his nose and readjusted his spectacles. Mrs. Waterman advanced the battle-line boldly.

"We assume that you have always kept in touch with poor Lois and that you still hear from her. And we feel that the time has come for you to treat us more frankly about her. It's for Phil's sake, you know, Amzi."

Amzi could not see how any of the later transactions in the life of Phil's mother were of the slightest importance to Phil. He shook his head impatiently and shrugged his shoulders.

"Lois," he blurted, "is in Dresden."

"Then she has left him!" cried Mrs. Fosdick, with a note of triumph that trumpeted the complete vindication of Mrs. Waterman's averments.

"I tell you I don't know anything about Holton," replied Amzi, who had, in strictest truth, told them nothing of the kind. He experienced the instant regret suffered by secretive persons who watch a long-guarded fact slip away beyond reclamation; but repentance could avail nothing, so he added,—

"Yes; she's abroad. She's been over there for some time."

"Of course, he's run through her money; that was to be expected!" exclaimed Mrs. Fosdick in a tone that implied a deep resentment of the fate that had robbed the erring Lois of her money.

"If he did she never told me so," Amzi answered. "But Lois was never what you might call a squealer; if he robbed her you can be pretty dead sure she wouldn't sob about it on the street corners. That wouldn't be a bit like the Lois I remember. Lois wasn't the woman to go scampering off after the Devil and then get scared and burst out crying when she found her shoes beginning to get hot."

After all these years Amzi had spoken, and his sisters did not like his tone. Their brother, a gentleman the correctness of whose life had never been questioned, was referring to the conduct of the sister who had disgraced her family in outrageous and sinful terms. The Prince of Darkness and the fervid pavements of his kingdom were not to be brought into conversation with any such lightness, as though the going to the Devil were not, after all, so horrible—not something to be whispered with terror in the dark confessional of their souls. One might have imagined that Lois's very sins had endeared her to this phlegmatic older brother! There was not only this gloomy reflection, but his admissions had opened long vistas to their imaginations. He probably knew more than he meant to disclose, and this made it necessary to continue their pumping with the greatest discretion.

"It would be hard if she came back on you for help—after everything that's happened; but of course that would be your affair, Amzi," said Mrs. Hastings leadingly.

"It would," Amzi admitted explosively. "It undoubtedly would!"

This, in their eagerness, seemed an admission. The interview was proving fruitful beyond their fondest hopes. He had doubtless been in Lois's fullest confidence from the first; and darkest of all, it was wholly likely, now that she had broken with Holton, that Amzi was supplying her with the means of subsistence in the capitals of Europe. Around this last thought they rallied.

"Of course, if Lois should really be in need, Amzi," said Mrs. Waterman, "it would be the duty of all of us to help her; that would only be right. But even if it comes to that we should have to consider Phil, too. When you think of everything, our responsibility is much greater for Phil than for Lois. Phil is here; her life's before her; she's one of us, you know, Amzi."

"Right, Josie; you are mighty right. What you mean is that if it came to a question of Lois's starving in Europe and Phil's starving on our doorsteps, we'd help Phil first because she's right here under our noses. But I don't understand that Lois is starving; nor is Phil for that matter. Phil's all right."

The thought that he was sending money to Lois was disagreeable; that he should be doing so when Phil's needs cried so stridently aroused the direst apprehensions. They had all received from Amzi their exact proportion of their father's estate; even Waterman had never been able to find a flaw in the adjustment. Through Waterman they had learned that Lois's proper receipt was on file; they knew exactly the date on which it had been placed of record in the county clerk's office. They had looked upon this as the final closing of all the doors that shut this sister out of their calculations. They, or their children, were potential beneficiaries in Amzi's property if he ultimately died a bachelor. And there was no telling when his asthma might be supplemented by a fatal pneumonia. This was never to be whispered in so far as the chances of their own offspring were concerned; but of Phil and the propriety of her expectations they might speak with entire candor.

"While we are talking of these matters," observed Mrs. Hastings, "we may as well face one or two things that have troubled us all a good deal. You know as well as we do that poor Tom has gradually been playing out; it's pitiful the way he has been letting his business go. Every one knows that he has ability, but he's been living more and more up in the air. He owns the block over there and the rent he gets from that is about all he has. And I shouldn't be at all surprised if the block had been mortgaged."

"I've heard," said Mrs. Waterman, examining a button on her white glove, "that he has borrowed money on it."

They looked guardedly at Amzi. Mrs. Waterman's husband, who kept an eye on the county records, had, at his wife's behest, assured himself frequently that Kirkwood's block in Main Street was unencumbered. Kirkwood's former home, the decaying monument to his domestic tragedy, and the only other thing he owned, was free also. In this process of "smoking out" their brother it would have helped if they could have pointed to the menace of her father's encumbered property to Phil; but they had already learned more than they had expected in establishing beyond per-adventure the fact that Lois and Amzi maintained communication, and that in all likelihood he was providing for her in her exile. It was high time they scanned the top shelves of the closet occupied by the dancing family skeleton!

"While we're about it we may as well face the possibility that Tom may marry again," remarked Mrs. Fosdick suddenly.

Amzi drew his hand across his pink dome.

"Nothing to hinder him that I know of," he replied.

"I don't know of anything that would wake him up unless it would be that. The right sort of woman could do a lot for a man like Tom, with all that he has suffered." This from Mrs. Waterman, who seemed deeply moved by the thought of Kirkwood's sufferings.

"But Phil—I can't imagine Phil with a stepmother. We never could allow that; we should have to take her away from him," declared Mrs. Fosdick.

Amzi rested his elbow on the table, and breathed hard for a minute. He took the unlighted cigar from his mouth and waved it at them.

"What's got into you girls anyhow! You're borrowing trouble in all the banks in the universe—a little above your line of credit. You seem terribly anxious about Lois all of a sudden. It just happens that I know she ain't hungry, and that she's over there living like a respectable woman. Lois isn't like the rest of us; Lois is different! There's more electricity in Lois than the rest of us have; you know it as well as I do. Now just to satisfy your curiosity I'll tell you that I saw Lois—"

"You saw her!" they chorused.

"I saw her in Chicago about two months ago. She was on her way to Europe then; I had dinner with her and put her on the train for New York, and she sailed the day she got there; so now, if you're scared to death for fear she's going to turn up here in town, you can put it clean out of your minds."

They sighed their relief. He was not given to long speeches and the effort of his recent deliverances caused him to cough, and the coughing brought his voice finally to a high wheeze. He had not quite finished yet, however.

"Now, as for Tom Kirkwood marrying," he went on, "let him marry. It's none of our business, is it? He married into our family and got the worst of it. It wasn't a particularly cheerful business, the way it came out. If he's fool enough to try it again, it's his trouble not ours; and you can't tell but he might make a go of it next time."

"We have no idea of trying to hinder him," said Mrs. Waterman with dignity. "As you say, it's Tom's trouble. And of course we could manage so Phil wouldn't suffer, no matter what he did."

"Phil suffer! Thunder! What are you always talking about Phil for; I tell you Phil's all right! Phil's got more gumption than all the rest of us put together. Phil's an honor to the family; she's the best girl in this town and the best girl in the whole state of Indiana, or the United States, for that matter. If you have visions of seeing Phil chased over the back lot by any stepmother, you have another guess coming. Thunder!"

He drew out a white silk handkerchief and blew his nose. The sisters saw with regret that there was no recurring to the attractive subject of that interview in Chicago, though their minds were beset with a thousand questions they wished to ask him about it. They realized that to do so would be a blunder. They had stumbled upon a gold mine and were obliged to leave its rich hoard untouched. They returned to Phil, who, as a topic, offered safer ground than her mother.

"Phil's party," said Mrs. Hastings briskly, "ought to be in keeping with the family dignity. We thought it a lot better for you to have it in your house than for us—our own houses are small." (This with resignation.) "And it doesn't seem quite nice for us to have it in the Masonic Hall, though some of the nicest people are doing that. To bring Phil out in her grandfather's house speaks for the whole family. And it's dear of you to consent to it. We all appreciate that, Amzi."

"Of course it's the place for it!" affirmed Amzi impatiently. "I'll give that party and you can get whatever Phil needs and do it right; you understand? And then I want you to give me all the bills. Now what else do you want?"

"We feel," began Mrs. Fosdick, "that the invitations, which will go out in your name, should take in everybody we want Phil to know."

Amzi grinned guardedly.

"That's pretty good, Fanny. Do you suppose there's a man, woman, baby, or yellow dog in this town that Phil doesn't know? I doubt it. But go on."

"We don't mean that way, Amzi," said Mrs. Waterman patiently. "We mean—"

"Thunder! Go on!"

"We mean that the list should be representative—that old differences should be put aside."

The wrinkles on Amzi's pink pate scampered back to find refuge in his absurd fringe of pale-gold hair. Mrs. Waterman advanced her pickets hurriedly.

"You know we've had to recognize the Holtons of late, disagreeable though it has been. William isn't like Jack—you know that; and when he brought his wife here, a perfect stranger, it didn't seem fair to ignore her."

"The fact is," Mrs. Fosdick interpolated, "we simply couldn't, Amzi. This town's too small to carry on a feud comfortably. We all stopped speaking to the Holtons after poor Lois left, but the rest of them couldn't help what Jack did; and, of course, Lois—"

"You want to ask Mr. and Mrs. William to Phil's party?"

Mrs. Fosdick, fearing from the fierceness with which he reduced the matter to words, that he was about to veto the suggestion, hastened to strengthen their case.

"For business reasons, Amzi, we feel that we ought to bury the hatchet. Paul has to meet William Holton constantly. No matter what we think, William is really one of the wide-awake business men of the town, and in all sorts of things; and Paul has to keep him on the executive committee of the Commercial Club—the president of the First National Bank can't be overlooked, though you can't ever doubt Paul's devotion to all our interests."

"And," Mrs. Waterman added, "Mr. Holton retained Alec in a case last winter."

"Yep," observed Amzi, "he did. It was that suit about opening up Chapel Street and I was one of the defendants." And then he added, with calculated softness, as though recalling a pleasant memory, "Alec lost the suit."

The mention of the Chapel Street Extension had been an unfortunate slip on Mrs. Waterman's part; but Amzi was generous.

"Bill Holton is undoubtedly a leading citizen," he observed, looking at the ceiling and rubbing his nose absently. The irony of this, if he intended any, was well hidden. William Holton, president of the First National Bank, was a business rival, and Amzi never abused his competitors. Having satisfied his curiosity as to the ceiling, he announced his complete acquiescence in the idea of inviting the William Holtons. "No objection whatever," he declared, "to asking Bill and his wife. Is that all of 'em you want?"

"Well, there are Ethel and Charlie. They've just closed their house here and mean to live in Indianapolis, but of course they still belong here. Charlie is doing very well, they say—quite a brilliant young man; and Ethel is very sweet and well-bred. She went to Miss Waring's school in Indianapolis and knows some of the nicest young people in the city. I think it would be nice to ask them; it always looks well to have some out-of-town guests."

"That Sam's children you're talking about? What's the matter with the other boy?"

"Fred? I think the less we say about him the better. He's been down in Mexico on one of Sam's schemes and I guess he didn't do well. He's on the old farm next your place. I guess Ethel and Charlie can represent that branch of the family. If you think—" began Mrs. Fosdick, anxious that Amzi should be fully satisfied.

"Thunder! I don't think. You fix it up to suit yourselves."

They began to adjust their wraps, fairly well satisfied with the results of the visit. Amzi eyed their autumnal splendors with the mild wonder a woman's raiment always aroused in him.

"Tom marry again, you say," he observed pensively. "What's put that idea in your head?"

"Why, you know as well as we do, Amzi, that he and Rose Bartlett are very sympathetic," exclaimed Mrs. Hastings, veiling a sharp glance at him. The three women, feigning inattention, were alert for their brother's reply. It came promptly.

"Rose is a fine woman," he said with cordial emphasis. "A fine woman. And," he immediately added, "so's Nan!"

Then he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and filled his cheeks and glared.

They were grieved by the mention of Nan. The bluff heartiness with which he had expressed his admiration for Rose had been gratifying and satisfying; but by speaking with equal fervor of Nan he had sent them adrift again.

CHAPTER VII

GHOSTS SEE THE LIGHT AGAIN

Kirkwood plunged into work with an ardor that was not lost upon Phil. He rose early and kept office hours with a new faithfulness, and he frequently carried books and papers home for study. Something was impending, Phil surmised, in the affairs of the Sycamore Traction Company, for he had been to Indianapolis to confer with the New York lawyer who represented the trustee for the bondholders and they had made an inspection of the road together. It had always been Kirkwood's way when aroused to devote himself tirelessly to his client's business, and Phil had not failed to note how completely labor transformed him. His languor and indifference now disappeared; he spoke feelingly of the generosity of his Williams classmate, who had placed the Sycamore case in his hands. It was a great opportunity and he assured her that he meant to make the most of it.

He warned her that she was not to tell any one what he was engaged upon, and that she must not be surprised into confessions by her aunts. He began to visit the capital, always returning on the evening train, though she knew that he might more comfortably have spent the night in the city. He explained to Phil that he hoped to adjust the Sycamore's affairs without litigation.

"I'm just enough of an old fogy to cut myself out of a big fee by smoothing the wrinkles without a lawsuit. It's the professor in me, Phil; it's the academic taint."

And to this the obvious retort was, of course, that it was because of his highmindedness that he sought peaceable adjustments where more drastic measures would have been to his profit.

She, too, was putting forth her best energies, and he was relieved to find that she disposed of her work so lightly; even her frequent calamities were a matter for jesting. They made a joke of the washing of the supper dishes: he insisted on helping her, and would don an apron and do the rougher part of it. He declared that he had never been so well fed before, and that her cooking showed real genius. It would be a dark day when his fee in the traction case would make it possible to install a new maid-of-all work.

Phil was aware that their talk drifted often and with seeming inevitableness to the Bartletts. Her successes with the housekeeping were due to the friendly supervision of the sisters in Buckeye Lane. He liked to hear her recount the ways in which they were her guide and inspiration. In doubts she flew to them; but one or the other appeared almost daily at the cottage. "Rose showed me how to make that sponge cake," Phil would say; or, if the furniture in their little parlor had been rearranged, it was very likely Nan who had suggested the change. It was a considerable distance across town from the Kirkwoods' to Number 98 Buckeye Lane, and as these women were exceedingly busy it was not without sacrifice that they visited Phil so constantly. "Nan read me some new jokes she's just sending off this morning: I wonder how people think up such things," Phil would observe, turning, perhaps, with her hand on the pantry door; and she knew that her father's face lighted at the mention of Nan and her jokes.

The aunts had not been above planting in Phil's young breast the suspicion that her father was romantically "interested" in one of the Bartletts—as to which one they hoped she would enlighten them. They tried to keep track of the visits paid by the father and daughter to Buckeye Lane; their veiled inquiries were tinged also with suspicions that Amzi might be contemplating marriage with one of these maiden ladies of the Lane—the uncertainties in each case as to the bright star of particular adoration giving edge to their curiosity. The cautious approaches, the traps set in unexpected places, amused Phil when she was not angered by them. As she viewed the matter it would be perfectly natural for her father to marry either of the Bartlett sisters, her only fear being that marriage would disturb the existing relations between the two houses which were now so wholly satisfactory.

Phil managed to visit her father's office every day or two, trips to "town" being among the Montgomery housewife's privileges, a part of her routine. Much visiting was done in Main Street, and there was always something to take one into Struby's drug-store, which served as a club. Even in winter there was hot chocolate and bouillon to justify the sociably inclined in lingering at the soda-water tables by the front windows. Phil, heedful of the warnings of the court-house clock, managed to keep in touch with current history without jeopardizing the regularity of meals at home. She was acquiring the ease of the Bartletts in maintaining a household with a minimum of labor and worry. Her aunts had convoyed her to Indianapolis to buy a gown for the coming-out party, which was now fixed for the middle of November; and they were to return to the city shortly for a fitting. All Main Street was aware that Phil was to be brought out; the aunts had given wide publicity to the matter; they had sighingly confessed to their friends the difficulties, the labor, the embarrassment of planting their niece firmly in society.

Phil, dropping into her father's office in the middle of an afternoon and finding him absent, dusted it from force of habit and began turning the pages of a battered copy of "Elia" she kept tucked away in an alcove that contained the Indiana Reports. A sign pinned on the door stated that her father would return in half an hour. This card, which had adorned the door persistently for several years, had lately ceased to prophesy falsely, Phil knew, and she thought she heard her father on the stairs when a young man she did not at once recognize opened the door and glanced about, then removed his hat and asked if Mr. Kirkwood would return shortly.

"I'm Mr. Charles Holton," said the visitor.

For a man to prefix "mister" to his own name was contrary to local usage, and the manner, the voice, the city clothes of Charles Holton at once interested Phil. She was sitting in her father's old swivel chair, well drawn in under his big flat-top desk, across which she surveyed the visitor at leisure. She placed him at once in his proper niche among the Holtons: it was of him that people were speaking as a Montgomery boy who was making himself known at the capital. He was the brother of Ethel and Fred, and clearly an alert and dashing person.

"Pardon me; but I remember you perfectly, Miss Kirkwood. I hope we may dispense with the formality of an introduction—we old Montgomery people—and that sort of thing!"

Holton carried a stick, which was not done in Montgomery save by elderly men, or incumbents of office, like Judge Walters or Congressman Reynolds. His necktie also suggested more opulent avenues than Main Street.

"By the outward and visible sign upon the portal I assume that Mr. Kirkwood will return shortly."

He referred to his watch, absently turned the stem-key, and sat down in one of the chairs which Phil had lately dusted.

"I used to see you around a lot when I was a boy—you and your pony; but we've all been away so much—my sister Ethel and I. You know Ethel?"

"I've seen her," said Phil.

"We've just been breaking up our old home here. Rather tough, too, when you think we're quite alone. We've sold the old house; sorry, but the best offer I got was from a doctor who wants to turn it into a drink-cure sanatorium. Tough on the neighbors, but there you are! It didn't seem square to stand in the way of bracing up booze victims."

He expected her approval of this attitude; and Phil murmured phrases that seemed to fill the gap he left for them.

"Had to go to the highest bidder—you can hardly give away an old house like that in a place like this. Neighbors are kicking, but it wasn't my fault."

Phil said she supposed that was so.

She was still noting various small items of Holton's raiment—his tan oxford shoes, brilliant socks, and brown derby. A brown derby seemed odd in Montgomery. From the pocket of his sackcoat protruded the cuffs of tan gloves, and he wore an inconspicuous watch chain passed from pocket to pocket of his waistcoat. Not even the most prosperous of the college seniors had ever presented to Phil's eye a variety of adornments so tastefully chosen, a color scheme so effective. The interview seemed to be to the young man's liking. He talked with assurance, holding his light stick with one hand, and balancing his hat on his knee with the other. Often before men had come into the office as Phil sat there and she had conversed with them while they waited for her father. She had usually exhausted the possibilities in forecasting her father's return at such times; but this gentleman seemed in no wise impatient. He spoke of the world's affairs lightly and with a flattering confidence in the understanding and sympathy of his auditor. The theatrical attractions at the capital, the promise of grand opera in Chicago, the political changes, these were things of passing interest, but nothing to grow feverish about.

"The new trolley line will make a lot of difference to towns like Montgomery—revolutionize things in fact. Part of the great social change that is apparent all over the Middle West. There won't be any country folks any more; all hitched on to the cities—the rubes derubenized and inter-urbanized!"

Phil admitted that the changes he suggested were of significance. Her father often used similar phrases in speaking of tendencies and influences; but it was to be expected of him. The same ideas as expressed by Charles Holton derived a certain importance from the fact that he condescended to utter them; they gained weight and authority from his manner of presenting them. He was not only a man of the world, but an acute observer of social phenomena; and he was a new sort. She had not known any one like him. The memory of her two meetings with Fred came back to her: she recalled them the more clearly by reason of the contrast between the brothers.

"Your brother has moved back to the farm," she suggested to gain confirmation of a relationship which seemed hardly plausible with this radiant young person before her.

"Oh, Fred! Well, I'd have you know that I offered to take Fred in with me, but he wouldn't see it. I'd like the folks over here to know that; but I couldn't do anything with him. He camped on one of our Mexican mines so long that he is afraid of cities,—isn't city-broke,—and seemed relieved when I suggested that he take the farm. It's no great shakes of a farm as farms go, but he's one of these plodding chaps who like a hard job. He came back and took a look around and said it was back to the soil for him! So there was the farm, just waiting for somebody to tackle it. I haven't seen him for some time,—I'm terribly busy,—but I dare say he's out there, an earnest young husbandman anxious to become one of these prosperous farmers who push the price of bread out of sight and cry to have the tariff taken off champagne. You don't happen to know Fred?"

"I've met your brother," said Phil with reserve.

"Well, I suppose we Montgomery folks are all acquainted without being introduced. Lots of 'em moving to Indianapolis; I'm thinking of organizing a club over there to keep the Montgomery people together—an annual dinner, say; and that sort of thing. Do you know, it's rather nice of you to be talking to me in this friendly, neighborly way; it really is."

As Phil seemed not to see at once wherein the particular kindness of it lay, he smiled and continued:—

"Our families haven't been so friendly, you know. Pardon me!"

Phil, seeing now what he meant, colored deeply, and glancing out of the window was rewarded by a glimpse of Amzi's back. He had just concluded an observation and was turning into the bank.

"You will pardon me, won't you," pleaded young Holton, lowering his voice.

"I think father will be here shortly," Phil remarked irrelevantly.

He had opened himself to the suspicion that he had broached the subject of the antipathy between their houses merely to test its dramatic value. To be talking to the daughter of a woman with whom his uncle had eloped made a situation; it is possible that he liked situations that called into action his wits and an evident gift for using his voice and eyes. He had been rapidly noting Phil's good points. He wished to impress her, and he was not convinced that the impression he had made was favorable or that she forgave him for touching, however lightly, upon the ungrateful topic of her mother's dereliction. He had never thought of his Uncle Jack's escapade with Mrs. Kirkwood concretely; it had happened long ago, before he became attentive to such things; but the young woman with whom he was now conversing visualized the episode for him. In his mind there was an element of picturesqueness in that joint page of Holton-Montgomery history. He wondered whether Phil looked like her mother. Phil was pretty enough, though in repose she seemed rather spiritless. She was swinging herself in the swivel chair, carelessly, and since his reference to the old scandal he saw or imagined that he saw her manner change from courteous interest to a somewhat frosty indifference. His pride was pricked by the sense of his blunder. He flattered himself that in his intercourse with men and women he was adroit in retrieving errors, and his instinct warned him that the curtain must not fall upon a scene that left him in discomfiture at the back of the stage.

"It pleased Ethel and me very much to have an invitation to your party, Miss Kirkwood. It was nice of you to ask us, and we shall certainly come over, even if I have to give up a trip to New York I had expected to make at just that time. Let me see, it's the twentieth, isn't it? Well, I guess I can make them wait down there. We Western folks don't often get a chance to make New Yorkers wait."

Phil was disposed to be magnanimous. He undoubtedly wished to be agreeable; and it was his uncle, a remote person whom she had never seen, who had decamped with her mother. It was hardly just to hold him accountable for his uncle's misdeeds. She wondered whether the uncle had been like this nephew, or whether he was more like William Holton, whom she had seen frequently all her life. In her encounters with Fred Holton, she had only vaguely associated him with that other and indubitably wicked Holton who had eloped with her mother.

She was conscious that some one was stirring in the room overhead, and she became attentive to the sounds. Her father had asked delay in disposing of the apparatus of the old photograph gallery; he had wanted to look the old stuff over, he had said, and he wished also to utilize the darkroom in developing the pictures he had taken on their last outing. One of the objects of her call this afternoon had been to urge him to haste, as Bernstein wanted to move his remodeling shop into the rooms at once.

"I make it a rule of my life," Holton went on, "to duck when it comes to other people's mistakes. I make enough of my own without shouldering those my friends and relations are responsible for—particularly my relations. For example, if dear old Fred wants to throw himself away on a farm, that's his trouble. I did all I could to save him. And when I had done that, I had done my best, and I'm a busy man with troubles of my own!"

Her reception of this was not wholly satisfactory. She made in fact no reply at all.

"Excuse me," she said, hearing steps unmistakably; "I think maybe father is on the floor above. If you will wait here, I'll run up and see."

He saw her erect for the first time as she passed him. Her apparent languor as she swung in the old creaky chair had belied what was evidently her more natural manner. The few steps necessary to carry her from the desk to the door were taken lightly, with a long, free stride. Captain Wilson, in apostrophizing her as the Diana of Main Street, had paid no inappropriate tribute to Phil's graceful carriage. Holton rose as she crossed the room, noting her brown cheek, the golden glint in her hair, her finely modeled features, her clear brown eyes and their dark lashes. His eyes still rested upon the door for a moment after it had closed upon her. Then he struck the floor with his stick, and whistled softly. "Lordy!" he ejaculated.

Phil accused herself of dullness in not having thought earlier of the photograph gallery. Her father must have been conducting himself very quietly there or she would have heard him before. It had been a bright day and he had undoubtedly been taking advantage of the sun to do his printing. She had always encouraged his experiments in photography, which afforded him one of his few recreations. He owned a fine camera and he gave to every detail of the photographer's art the care he bestowed upon anything that deeply interested him. They had bound in portfolios many of the views obtained in their adventures afield, and he had won prizes at state and national exhibitions of camera societies. Phil was relieved to know that he was developing these newest plates, for now there would be no excuse for retaining the deserted gallery and it could be turned over to Bernstein without further delay.

It had grown late, and even under the glazed roof she did not at once make him out.

"Daddy!" she called softly.

She had broken in upon one of his deep reveries, and as she spoke he started guiltily. The oblong of glass he had been holding, staring at in the lessening light, fell with a crash, breaking into countless pieces.

"Oh, daddy! Did I scare you like that! Hope it wasn't one of the best negatives that went to smash—hard luck to wipe one of those Autumn on Sugar Creek gems out of existence!"

"It's all right, Phil—all right. It was only an old negative. I was looking over the rubbish here and amused myself by printing some of the old plates. There are a lot of old ghosts hidden away there in the closet. This was an old shop, you know, dating back to the Civil War, and there are negatives here of a lot of our local heroes. I wonder if it's right to throw them away? It's like exterminating a generation to destroy them. There must be people who would like to have prints of some of these."

"We might sell them to that new photographer for money enough to paint the building," she suggested. "The real owner would owe us a lot of rent if he ever turned up, which he never will. That would be our only way of getting even."

"There spoke a practical mind, Phil!"

She knew from the poor result of his effort to appear cheery that something had occurred to depress him. His own associations with Montgomery had been too recent for the resurrection of old citizens to have any deep significance for him.

"We must go, Phil; I didn't mean for you to catch me here. I've wasted the whole afternoon—but some of the Sugar Creek views have come out wonderfully. We must clean up and turn the room over to Bernstein right away."

Her alert eyes marked the Sugar Creek pictures at one end of a shelf built against the window, but from his position at the moment she had surprised him in his brooding she knew that he had not been studying them. Nor did these new prints from old plates present likenesses of Montgomery's heroes of the sixties; but there were three—a little quaint by reason of the costumes—of a child, a girl of fourteen, and a young woman; and no second glance was necessary to confirm her instant impression that these represented her mother—the mother of whom she had no memory whatever. There were photographs and a miniature of her mother at home, and at times she had dreamed over them; and there was a portrait done by an itinerant artist which hung in her Uncle Amzi's house, but this, her Aunt Josephine had once told her, did not in the least resemble Lois.

Kirkwood tried clumsily to hide the prints.

"No; Phil, please don't!" he exclaimed harshly.

"Of course, I may see them, daddy,—of course!"

He allowed her to take them from him.

"It's mamma," said Phil. "How dear they are!" she murmured softly.

As she turned the prints to catch the dimming light, he watched her, standing inertly with his elbow on the shelf.

"Isn't it odd that I never saw any of these! even Uncle Amy hasn't them."

She bent over the print of the child, who stood with a hoop, smiling as though in delight at her belated rescue from oblivion.

"You were going to give these to me, weren't you, daddy?" She was running over the others. One that showed the mature woman in a fur cape long out of fashion and with a fur cap perched on her head, held her longest.

"If you want them," said her father, "you shall have them, of course. I will touch them up a bit in the morning."

"Maybe," said Phil looking at him quickly, "it is better not to keep them. Was it one of these plates that broke?"

"Yes," said Kirkwood; "it was this one"; and he indicated the picture that revealed his wife in her young womanhood.

It was over this that he had been dreaming alone in the dim gallery when she had interrupted his reverie. The pity of it all, the bleak desolation of his life, smote her sharply, now that she had caught a glimpse of the ghosts scampering off down the long vistas. With an abrupt gesture she flung aside the melancholy reminder of his tragedy.

"Dear old daddy!" She held him in her strong arms and kissed him.

She felt that all these spectres must be driven back into their world of shadows, and she seized the prints and tore them until only little heaps of paper remained and these she scattered upon the floor.

"Are these the plates?"

He indicated them with a nod. One after the other they crashed echoingly in the bare gallery. She accomplished the destruction swiftly and with certainty. One that fell on edge undamaged she broke with her heel.

Then she took a match from his pocket and lit the gas in one of the old burners. The light revealed a slight smile on his face, but it was not his accustomed smile of good humor. His eyes were very sad and gentle.

"Thank you, dear old Phil! I guess that's the best way, after all. It must be time to go home now. Are you ready?"

"Wait here a minute—you had better pull down the windows and lock up. I'll close the office and you can meet me on the landing."

She went out, closing the door, and ran down to the office, where Charles Holton stood at the window looking out upon Main Street, where the electric lamps were just sputtering into light.

"Ah," he cried turning toward her with a bow, "I'd begun to think you had forgotten my unworthy presence on earth!"

"Not at all, Mr. Holton. I'm sorry, but my father is too much engaged to see you to-day. If you really want to see him you can come in to-morrow."

This was not what he had expected. Dismissal was in her tone rather more than in her words. Their eyes met for a moment in the dim dusk and he would have prolonged the contact; but she walked to the desk and stood there, looking down at the copy of "Elia" which lay as she had left it when he had interrupted her reading. She refused to be conscious of his disappointment or to make amends for having caused him to wait needlessly. He turned at the door.

"I hope I haven't put you to any inconvenience?" he remarked, but without resentment.

"Not at all, Mr. Holton. Good-afternoon!"

"Good-day, Miss Kirkwood."

She listened until his step died away down the stair and then went out and whistled for her father.

CHAPTER VIII

LISTENING HILL

The Holton farmhouse, a pretentious place in the day of Frederick Holton's grandfather, was now habitable and that was the most that could be said for it. When the second generation spurned the soil and became urbanized, the residence was transformed from its primal state into a country home, and the family called it "Listening Hill Farm." Its austere parlor of the usual rural type was thrown together with the living-room, the original fireplace was reconstructed, and running water was pumped to the house by means of a windmill. The best of the old furniture had been carried off to adorn the town house, so that when Fred succeeded to the ownership it was a pretty bare and comfortless place. Samuel had never lived there, though the farm had fallen to him in the distribution of his father's estate; but he had farmed it at long range, first from Montgomery, and latterly, and with decreasing success, from Indianapolis after his removal to the capital. The year before Fred's arrival no tenant had been willing to take it owing to the impoverished state of the land.

Most of the farms in the neighborhood were owned by town people, and operated by tenants. As for Fred, he knew little about agriculture. On the Mexican plantation which his father and Uncle William had controlled, he had learned nothing that was likely to prove of the slightest value in his attempt to wrest a living from these neglected Hoosier acres. His main qualifications for a farming career were a dogged determination to succeed and a vigorous, healthy body.

The Holtons had always carried their failures lightly, and even Samuel, who had died at Indianapolis amid a clutter of dead or shaky financial schemes, was spoken of kindly in Montgomery. Samuel had saved himself with the group of politicians he had persuaded to invest in the Mexican mine by selling out to a German syndicate just before he died; and Samuel had always made a point of taking care of his friends. He had carried through several noteworthy promotion schemes with profit before his Mexican disasters, and but for the necessity of saving harmless his personal and political friends he might not have left so little for his children. So spake the people of Montgomery.

Charles Holton was nearing thirty, and having participated in his father's political adventures, and been initiated into the mysteries of promotion, he had a wide acquaintance throughout central Indiana. He had been graduated from Madison, and in his day at college had done much to relieve the gray Calvinistic tone of that sedate institution. It was he who had transformed the old "college chorus"—it had been a "chorus" almost from the foundation—into a glee club, and he had organized the first guitar and banjo club. The pleasant glow he left behind him still hung over the campus when Fred entered four years later. Charles's meteoric social career had dimmed the fact (save to a few sober professors) that he had got through by the skin of his teeth. Fred's plodding ways, relieved only by his prowess at football, had left a very different impression. Fred worked hard at his studies because he had to; and even with persistence and industry he had not shone brilliantly in the scientific courses he had elected. The venerable dean once said that Fred was a digger, not a skimmer and skipper, and that he would be all right if only he dug long enough. He was graduated without honors and went South to throw in his fortunes with his father's Mexican projects. He was mourned at the college as the best all-round player a Madison eleven had ever boasted; but this was about all.

When he accepted Listening Hill Farm as his share of his father's estate, Fred had a little less than one thousand dollars in cash, which he had saved from the salaries paid him respectively by the plantation and mining companies. This had been deposited as a matter of convenience in an Indianapolis bank and he allowed it to remain there. He realized that this money must carry him a long way, and that every cent must go into the farm before anything came out of it. He had moved to the farm late in the summer—just in time to witness the abundant harvests of his neighbors.

One of the friendliest of these was a young man named Perry, who had charge of Amzi Montgomery's place. Perry belonged to the new school of farmers, and he had done much in the four years that he had been in the banker's employ to encourage faith in "book farming," as it had not yet ceased to be called derisively. He was a frank, earnest, hard-working fellow whose ambition was to get hold of a farm of his own as quickly as possible. He worked Amzi's farm on shares, with certain privileges in the matter of feeding cattle. Amzi picked him up by chance and with misgivings; but Perry had earned the biggest dividends the land had ever paid. Perry confided to Fred a hope he had entertained of leasing the Holton farm for himself when his contract with Montgomery expired. Now that Fred had arrived on the scene he explained to the tyro exactly what he had meant to do with the property. As he had seriously canvassed the situation for a couple of years, witnessing the failures of the last two tenants employed by Samuel Holton, Fred gladly availed himself of his advice.

Fred caught from Perry the spirit of the new era in farming. It no longer sufficed to scratch the earth with a stick and drop in a seed; the earth itself must be studied as to its weaknesses and the seed must be chosen with intelligent care. One of the experts from the state agricultural school, in the field to gather data for statistics, passed through the country, and spent a week with Fred for the unflattering reason that the Holton acres afforded material for needed information as to exhausted soils. He recommended books for Fred to read, and what was more to the point sent a young man to plan his work and initiate him into the mysteries of tilling and fertilizing. The soil expert was an enthusiast, and he left behind him the nucleus of a club which he suggested that the young men of the neighborhood enlarge during the winter for the discussion of new methods of farm efficiency.

Fred hired a man and went to work. He first repaired the windmill and assured the water-supply of the house and barn. A farmer unembarrassed by crops, he planned his campaign a year ahead. He worked harder on his barren acres than his neighbors with the reward of their labor in sight. He tilled the low land in one of his fallow fields and repaired the fences wherever necessary. His most careful scrutiny failed to disclose anything on which money could be realized at once beyond half a dozen cords of wood which he sent to town and sold and the apples he had offered for sale in the streets of Montgomery. These by-products hardly paid for the time required to market them. Perry had suggested that winter wheat be tried on fifty acres which he chose for the experiment, and in preparing and sowing the land Fred found his spirits rising. The hired man proved to be intelligent and capable, and Fred was not above learning from him. Fred did the cooking for both of them as part of his own labor.

Some of his old friends, meeting him in Main Street on his visits to town, commiserated him on his lot; and others thought William Holton ought to do something for Fred, as it was understood that he was backing Charles in his enterprises. Still other gossips, pointing to the failure of the Mexican ventures, inclined to the belief that Fred was a dull fellow, and that he would do as well on the farm as anywhere else.

On a Sunday afternoon in this same November, Fred had cleaned up after his midday meal with the hired man and was sprawled on an old settle reading when a motor arrived noisily in the dooryard. Charles was driving and with him were three strangers. Fred went out to meet his brother, who introduced his companions as business men from Indianapolis.

"We're taking a run over the route of the new trolley line you've probably read about in the papers. Hadn't heard of it yet? Well, it's going to cut the Sycamore line at right angles in Montgomery, and run down into the coal fields. We're going to haul coal by electricity—a new idea in these parts—and it's going to be a big factor in stimulating manufactures in small centers. It's going to be a big thing for this section—your farm is worth twenty dollars more an acre just on our prospectus."

"No doubt you'd be glad to take that twenty right now," remarked one of the strangers.

"Oh, I'll wait for it," replied Fred, laughing.

"Are you implying that you're likely to have to wait?" demanded Charles. "My dear boy, we're doing this just for you farmers. In the old days the railroads were all in league against the poor but honest farmer; he was crippled as much as he was helped by the railroads; but with the trolley the farmer can be in the deal from the jump. We want every farmer on this line to have an interest; we're going to give him a chance to go in. Am I right, Evans?"

Evans warmed to the topic. He was a young broker and wore city clothes quite as good as Charles's. It was going to be a great thing for the country people; the possibilities of the trolley line had not yet been realized. Social and economic conditions were to be revolutionized, and the world generally would be a very different place when the proposed line was built. Charles allowed his friends to do most of the talking and they discussed the project eloquently for an hour.

The men refused Fred's invitation to go indoors, and said they would walk to the highway and the machine could pick them up.

When the brothers were alone, Charles spoke of the farm.

"I see you've got to work. The whole thing looks better than I ever saw it. I'm glad you've painted the barn red; there's nothing like red for a barn. I must make a note of that; all barns should be painted red."

With a gesture he colored all the barns in the world to his taste. Fred grinned his appreciation of his brother's humor.

"I thought that on Sundays all you young farmers hitched a side-bar buggy to a colt and gave some pretty girl a good time."

"I'd be doing just that but for two reasons—I haven't the colt or the side-bar, and I don't know any girls. What about this trolley line? I thought the field was crowded now."

"Oh, Uncle Will and I are going to put this one through and we're going to make some money out of it, too. There's money in these things if you know how to handle 'em. It's in the promotion, not the operating."

"But I heard in town that the Sycamore line isn't doing well. There are rumors—"

"Oh, I know about that; it's only a fuss among the fellows who are trying to control it to reorganize and squeeze the bondholders. If father had lived he'd have kept it level. But we're all out of it—away out and up the street."

"Glad to hear it," Fred remarked. The gift of easy and picturesque speech had been denied him. All his life he had heard his father talk in just this strain; and his Uncle William, while less voluble, was even more persuasive and convincing. Charles did not always ring true, but any deficiencies in this respect were compensated for by his agreeable and winning manners. Fred had the quiet man's distrust of ready talkers; but he admired his brother. Charles was no end of a bright fellow and would undoubtedly get on.

"I tell you what I'll do with you, old man," Charles continued. "I suppose you already know some of these farmers around here. We're going to give them every chance to go in with us—let 'em in on the ground floor. We feel that this should be the people's line in the broadest sense,—give 'em a share of the benefits,—not merely that they can flip a can of milk on board one of our cars and hustle it direct to the consumer and get back coal right at their door, but they shall participate in the profits they help to create. Now listen to this; there's not much you can do this winter out here and I stopped to make you an offer to solicit stock subscriptions among the country people. A lot of these farmers are rich fellows,—the farmers are getting altogether too much money for their own good,—and here's an ideal investment for them, a chance to add to the value of their farms and at the same time earn a clean six per cent on our bonds and share in the profits on a percentage of common that we're giving bondholders free gratis for nothing. What do you say to taking a hand with us? We'll put you on a salary right away if you say so. The very fact that you've chosen to come here to live and take up farming will give you standing with the country folks."

Fred smiled at this.

"On the other side of the sketch the fact that I'm as ignorant of farming as the man in the moon is likely to rouse their suspicions. I'm much obliged, Charlie, but my job's right here. I'm going to try to raise something that I can haul to town in a wagon and get money for. I haven't your business genius. It would seem queer to me to go about asking people to take their money out of the bank to give me in exchange for pieces of paper that might not be good in the end. And besides, a good many of these country people swallowed the same hook when it was baited with Sycamore. It's not a good time to try the same bait in this neighborhood,—not for the Holton family, at any rate."

"Mossback! I tell you we're out of Sycamore with clean hands. Don't you know that the big fellows in New York are the men who get in on such promotions as this and clean up on it! I'm giving you a chance that lots of men right here in this county would jump at. It's a little short of a miracle that a trolley coal road hasn't been built already. And think, too, of the prestige our family will get out of it. We've always been the only people in Montgomery that had any 'git up and git.' You don't want to forget that your name Holton is an asset—an asset! Why, over in Indianapolis the fact that I'm one of the Montgomery Holtons helps me over a lot of hard places, I can tell you. Of course, father had plowed the ground, and the more I hear about him the more I admire him. He had vision—he saw things ahead."

"And he came pretty near dying busted," observed Fred.

"But no man lost a cent through him!" Charles flashed. "That makes me swell up with pride every time I think of it—that he took care of his friends. He saw things big, and those Mexican schemes were all right. If he'd lived, they would have pulled through and been big moneymakers."

They had been walking slowly towards Charles's machine.

"I'm not saying anything against father," said Fred; "but the kind of things he took up strike me as dangerous. I know all about that plantation and the mine, too, for that matter. I don't blame father for sending me down there, but I wish I had back the years I put on those jobs."

"Oh, rot! The experience was a big thing for you. And you got paid for it. You must have saved some money—wasn't any way to spend money down there."

"I don't keep an automobile," remarked Fred ruefully.

"By Jove, I can't afford it myself, but I've got to make a front. Now those fellows—"

His companions were hallooing from the highway to attract his attention. He waved and shouted that he was coming.

"Those fellows are in touch with a lot of investors. Nice chaps. I promised to get 'em home for dinner, and I must skip. You'd better think over my proposition before turning it down for good. I don't like to think of your being out here all winter doing nothing. You might as well take a hand with us. I'll guarantee that you won't regret it."

"I don't believe I care to try it. I'm a born rube, I guess; I like it out here. And I'm going to stick until I make good or bust."

Charles had cranked his machine and jumped in.

"Look here, Fred," he said, raising his voice above the noise of the engine, "when I can do anything for you, I want you to call on me. And if you need money at any time, I want you to come to me or go to Uncle Will. In fact, he's a little sore because you don't drop in on him oftener. So long!"

The machine went skimming down the road, and when it reached the pike and Charles picked up his friends, Fred watched its slow ascent of Listening Hill, and waited for it to disappear beyond the crest.

CHAPTER IX

ON AN ORCHARD SLOPE

Fred moved off across the fields in quest of Perry. Charles never left him wholly happy. His long absence from home had in a way lessened his reliance on family ties, and an interview with his brother deepened the sense of his own dullness. He wondered whether it were not proof of his general worthlessness that he was so quickly adjusting himself to the conditions of rural life; and yet from such reflections his spirit quickly rebounded. In the very soil itself, he felt a kinship, born of a hidden, elusive, cramped vein of poetic feeling that lay deep in his nature. All life, he vaguely realized, is of a piece: man and the earth to which he is born respond to the same laws. He contemplated the wheatfield, tilled partly by his own hands, with a stirring of the heart that was new to his experience. He was wedded to this land; his hope was bound up in it; and he meant to serve it well.

He sprang over the fence into a woods pasture on Amzi Montgomery's farm and strode on. He picked up a walnut and carried it in his hand, sniffing the pungent odor of the rind. It was as warm as spring, and the dead leaves, crisp and crackling under his tread, seemed an anomaly. The wood behind him, he crossed a pasture toward the barn and hesitated, seeing that Perry was entertaining visitors. He had fallen into the habit of dropping in at the Perrys' on Sunday afternoons and he was expected to-day, so he kept on. As he reached the barn lot, he identified Amzi Montgomery and Phyllis Kirkwood, to whom Perry was apparently dilating on the good points of a Jersey calf that was eyeing the visitors wonderingly.

"Don't be afraid, Holton; my lecture is just over. You've heard it before and I'm not going to repeat it," Perry called to him.

"How do you do, Mr. Holton," said Phil.

He pulled off his hat and walked up to shake hands with her.

"I didn't expect to find you here. I usually come over Sunday afternoons."

"Does that mean you wouldn't have come if you'd known we were here!" laughed Phil. "Oh, Uncle Amy, this is Mr. Fred Holton. He's your next-door neighbor."

Amzi turned from his observation of the calf and took the cigar from his mouth. He remembered Fred Holton as a boy and the young man had latterly fallen within his range of vision in Main Street. He availed himself of this nearer view to survey Samuel Holton's younger son deliberately. Fred waited an instant for the banker to make a sign. Amzi took a step toward him and Fred advanced and offered his hand.

"How d' ye do, Fred," said Amzi, and looked him over again. He addressed him quite as cordially as he would have spoken to any other young man he might have found there. "Perry has told me about you. I guess you've got quite a job over there."

"Yes, but I was looking for a job when I took it," said Fred.

"I like being a farmer myself," said the banker, "when I know the corn's growing while I'm in bed in town."

"I think I'll stay up nights to watch my corn grow, if it ever does," said Fred.

"That land of yours is all right," said Amzi amiably, "but it's got to be brought up. That farm's been cursed with overdrafts, and overdrafts in any business are bad."

"That's a new way of putting it," Fred replied, "but I'm sure it's sound doctrine. You can't take out what you don't put in."

"That," said Amzi, feeling in his pocket for his matchbox, "is a safe general principle."

He passed his cigar-case to Perry and Fred, commended his own cigars humorously, and looked Fred over again as the young man refused, explaining that he had grown used to a pipe and was afraid of the shock to his system of a good cigar.

"We were going to take a walk over the place; Mr. Montgomery wants to see his orchard. Come along, won't you?" said Perry.

Fred waited for a confirmation of the tenant's invitation.

"Yes; come along, Fred," said Amzi.

His manner toward Holton was that of an old acquaintance; he called him Fred quite as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do so. Phil and Perry moved off together and Amzi walked along beside Fred across a field of wheat stubble toward the orchard that stretched away on a slope that corresponded to the rise of Listening Hill in the highway. He talked of fruit-growing in which he appeared to be deeply interested, and declared that there was no reason why fruit should be only an insect-blighted by-product of such farms as his; that intelligent farmers were more and more taking it up. He confessed his firm belief in scientific farming in all its branches. Most men in small towns keep some touch with the soil. In a place like Montgomery the soil is the immediate source of urban prosperity, and in offices and stores men discuss crop conditions and prospects as a matter of course. Amzi owned a number of farms in different parts of the county, but this one that had been long in the family was his particular pride. He paused now and then to point out features of his possessions for Fred's admiration.

"Land," he observed reflectively, "is like a man or a horse; you got to treat 'em right or they won't work. Thunder! You think you'll stick it out over there, do you?"

"I've got to; and I want to! I want to make it go!"

Amzi glared at him a moment with puffed cheeks. Fred had spoken with warmth, and being unfamiliar with the banker's habit of trying to blow up occasionally, for no reason whatever, he was a little appalled by Amzi's manner of receiving his declaration.

"If you mean it like that," said the banker, "you will make it go. It's the wanting to do a thing real hard that brings it round. Is that gospel?"

He blurted his question with a ferociousness that again startled Fred; but he was beginning to suspect that this was the banker's usual way of conversing, and his awe of him diminished. Amzi was an amusing person, with a tang of his own; and he clearly meant to be kind. It was necessary to answer the banker's last explosion and Fred replied soberly:

"I hope it is; I hope the wanting to do it will help in the doing."

Amzi made no response to this. He seemed to ignore it, and spoke of Perry admiringly, as the kind of man he liked, quoting statistics of the wheat yield of the field they were traversing, and then stopped abruptly.

"Thunder! How did they come to give you the farm?"

"I took it: I chose to take it. It was by an agreement between my brother and sister and me. I'm not sure but that I got the best of the partition. The stocks and bonds father left didn't mean anything to me. I don't know anything about such things."

"They let you have the farm as your share; you were afraid of the other stuff?"

"Yes; it didn't look very good and I was perfectly satisfied. I thought the arrangement fair enough to me: Charlie knew about the other things and I didn't. Most of them were very doubtful."

"They told you they were doubtful; you didn't know anything about them. Was that the way of it?"

"Yes; that was about the way of it, Mr. Montgomery."

Amzi glared and drew out his handkerchief to mop his face.

"I saw an automobile come out of your place awhile ago and climb the hill toward town. Charlie been to see you?"

"Yes. He had some friends with him from the city. Charlie knows no end of people."

"There are people like that," said Amzi, kicking a clod, and in doing so nearly losing his equilibrium; "there are people with a talent for knowing folks." This was not an important observation, nor was it at all relevant. Mr. Montgomery had merely gone as far as he cared to in the discussion of the distribution of Samuel Holton's estate and this was his way of changing the subject.

Amzi walked ahead with Perry when they met at the edge of the orchard and Phil loitered behind with Fred. A hawk swung from the cloudless blue; sparrows, disturbed by these visitors, flew down the orchard aisles in panic. The air was as dry as the stubble of the shorn fields. From the elevation crowned by the orchard it was possible to survey the neighborhood and Phil and Fred paused in silence for several minutes, with their faces turned toward the creek.

Seeing Phil thus was very different from seeing her across a fence in the moonlight, or meeting her at her kitchen door. Her new dark-blue gown with hat to match struck him as being very stylish, as indeed, they were, having come from the best shop in Indianapolis. Phil in gloves was a different Phil, a remote being quite out of hailing distance. He was torn between admiration for her dressed-upness and rebellion against a splendor that set her apart like a goddess for timorous adoration. Standing beside and a little behind her, his soul was shaken by the quick shadowings of her lashes. He was so deep in thought during this silent contemplation that he started and blushed when she turned round suddenly.

"We're terribly solemn, I think," she remarked, regarding him carelessly.

This was unfair. She had no right to look at him in that fashion, taking his breath away and saying something to which he could think of no reply whatever. Amzi and Perry had wandered away out of sight. She had spoken of solemnity; it was a solemn thing to be alone with a girl like Phil, on a day like this, under a fleckless sky, and with the scarlet maples and the golden beeches gladdening the distances. Without looking at him, Phil extended her monologue:—

"I like cheerfulness myself."

"I'm not so opposed to it as you may imagine," he replied, smiling. "I'm not much of a talker. I've been alone a whole lot, in lonesome places where there wasn't anybody to talk to. I suppose talking is a habit. When there are people around who talk about things it's natural to get into the way of talking. Isn't that so?"

"I suspect it is," Phil answered. "While my critics haven't exactly said that I talk too much, they agree that I talk at the wrong time. Let's all be seated."

She dropped down on the grass, and smoothed her skirt. It was the best everyday dress she had ever owned and she meant to be careful of it. Her patent leather oxford ties were the nicest she had ever had, and she was not without her pride in their brightness. Fred seated himself near her. His clothes were his Sunday best, and none too good at that; he was painfully conscious of the contrast of their raiment.

"Your brother Charlie talks a good deal. I saw him the other day," said Phil.

"Yes; Charlie talks mighty well. He can talk to anybody. Where did you meet him?"

"In town, at father's office."

"Oh; he was there, was he?"

It was plain that Fred was surprised that there should be any intercourse between the Kirkwoods and his brother.

"He called to see father; but he didn't see him," explained Phil, as though reading his thoughts and willing to satisfy his curiosity.

"Charlie's getting up a new trolley line. He wanted me to go in with him."

"Gave you a chance to escape from your farm? I should think you would be tempted."

"I didn't feel the temptation particularly," answered Fred; "but it was kind of him to come and see me."

"Well, there is that," Phil replied indifferently. "You seemed to get on first-rate with Uncle Amy. Was that the first time you ever talked to him?"

"Yes. But I remember that once when I was a little chap he met me in the street over by the college—I remember the exact spot—and gave me a penny. I seem to remember that he used to do that with children quite unexpectedly. I imagine that he does a lot of nice things for people."

"Uncle Amy," said Phil deliberately, "is the second grandest man now present on earth. Daddy is the first."

"I don't know your father, except as I see him in the street."

"I suppose not," said Phil.

These commonplaces were leading nowhere, and they were becoming the least bit trying.

"My aunts have decided that the Montgomerys and the Holtons might as well bury the hatchet. They're going to ask your Uncle William to my party. They can't stand not knowing your aunt."

He did not at once grasp this. He was only dimly conscious of Montgomery social values and the prominence of his Uncle William's wife had not seemed to him a matter of importance. His acquaintance with that lady was indeed slight, and he did not see at once wherein Phil's aunts had anything to gain by cultivating her society, nor did Phil enlighten him. This turn of the talk embarrassed him by its suggestion of the escapade in which Phil's mother and his uncle had figured. Phil was not apparently troubled by this.

"They didn't invite you to my party, did they?"

He did not know exactly whom she meant by "they"; and he had not heard of Phil's party.

"No," he answered, smiling; "they probably never heard of me."

"Well, you will be invited. Your brother and sister are coming. Your brother Charlie told me so. He's going to give up a trip to New York just to be there."

Phil, he reflected, had been pleased by Charles's magnanimity in changing plans that embraced the magical name of New York to be present at her coming-out party. From his knowledge of his brother he felt quite sure that Charles must think it worth while to abandon the visit to New York to pay the tribute of his presence to a daughter of the Montgomerys. This contributed to Fred's discomfiture and made it more difficult to talk to Phil. On the face of it Phil was not a difficult person. He had seen her dance round a corn-shock in the moonlight, and a girl who would do that ought to be easy to talk to; and he had seen her, aproned at her kitchen door, throw an apple at a cat with enviable exactness of aim, and a girl who threw apples at cats should be human and approachable. It must be her smart city frock that made the difference: he hated Phil's clothes, and he resented with particular animosity the gloves that concealed her hands.

She saw the frown on his face.

"I don't believe I heard you say whether you were coming to my party or not. If you expect to travel about that time you needn't put yourself out, of course. You shall have one of our regular engraved invitations. How do you get mail out here?" she ended practically.

"R.F.D. 7. It will be thrilling to get something out of that bird's nest besides bills, fertilizer and incubator circulars, and the bulletins of the Department of Agriculture. Thank you very much. But if, after conferring with your aunts, you find that they don't approve of me, it will be all right."

"You have funny thoughts in your head, don't you? Don't you suppose I'm going to have something to say about my own party? Just for a postscript I'll tell you now that I expect you to come. If I've got to have a party I want to have as many fellow-sufferers as possible."

"Does that mean"—and Fred laughed—"that you are not terribly excited about your own party? It sounded that way."

He was not interested in parties himself; he had hardly been to one since he was a child, and the thought of such an imposing function as he assumed Phil's coming out would be appalled him. And there was the matter of clothes: the dress-suit he had purchased while he was in college had gone glimmering long ago. The Sunday best he wore to-day was two years old, and a discerning eye might have detected its imperfections which a recent careful pressing had not wholly obliterated. His gaze turned for a moment toward the land in which lay his hope; he had to look past Phil to see those acres. His thoughts were still upon her party and his relation to it, so that it was with a distinct shock that he heard her say softly and wistfully:—

"It's queer, isn't it?"

"What is?"

She lifted her arm with a sweeping gesture.

"The world—things generally—what interests you and me; what interests Uncle Amy and Mr. Perry; the buzzings in all our noddles. Thousands of people, in towns just like Montgomery, live along some way or other, and most of them do the best they can, and keep out of jails and poorhouses, mostly, and nothing very important happens to them or has to. It always strikes me as odd how unimportant we all are. We're just us, and if God didn't make us very big or wise or good, why, there's nothing to be done about it. And no matter how hard we get knocked, or how often we stumble, why, most of us like the game and wouldn't give it up for anything. I think that's splendid; the way we just keep plugging on. We all think something pleasant is going to happen to-morrow or day-after-to-morrow. Everybody does. And that's what keeps the world moving and everybody tolerably cheerful and happy."

Phil the philosopher was still another sort of person. She had spoken in her usual tone and he looked at her wonderingly. It was a new experience to hear life reduced to the simple terms Phil used. She seemed to him like a teacher who keeps a dull pupil after class, and, by eliminating all unessential factors, makes clear what an hour before had been only a jumble of meaningless terms in the student's mind.

He was still dumb before this new Phil with her a, b, c philosophy when her eyes brightened, and she sprang to her feet. Bending forward with her hand to her ear, and then dropping her arms to her sides, she said:—

"Adown the orchard aisles they come, methinks,—
My lord who guardest well his treasure chests,
Attended by his squire and faithful drudge,
And back to town I soon must lightly skip
Else father will be roaring for his tea."

She was, indeed, a mystifying being! It was not until the absurdity of her last line broke upon him that he saw that this was only another side of Phil the inexplicable. She threw up her arm and signaled to her Uncle Amzi, who was approaching with Perry. The interruption was unwelcome. It had been a bewildering experience to sit beside Phil on the sunny orchard slope. He had not known that any girl could be like this.

"Do you write poetry?" he asked, from the depths of his humility.

She turned with a mockery of disdain.

"I should think you could see, Mr. Holton, that these are not singing robes, nor is this lovely creation of a hat wrought in the similitude of a wreath of laurel; but both speak for the plain prose of life. You have, therefore, no reason to fear me."

In a moment they were all on their way to the house; and soon Phil and Amzi were driving homeward.

"What was Fred Holton talking to you about?" asked Amzi, as he shook the reins over the back of his roadster.

"He wasn't talking to me, Amy; I was talking to him. He's a nice boy."

"He doesn't run so much to gold watches and chains as the rest of 'em. He seems to be pretty decent. Perry says he's got the right stuff in him." And then, with more animation: "Those Holtons! Thunder!"

CHAPTER X

PHIL'S PARTY

Mr. Amzi Montgomery thought it only proper to learn all that was possible of the affairs of his customers. This was the part of wisdom in a cautious banker; and he was distressed when checks that were not self-explanatory passed through the receiving-teller's window. A small bank is a good place in which to sharpen one's detective sense. Every check tells a story and is in some degree a clue.

No account on his bank's ledgers was more often scrutinized than that of Nancy Bartlett, and when she deposited a draft for $2115.15, the incident was not one to be passed lightly. No such sum had ever before been placed to Nan's credit. He knew that she received five- and ten- and even fifty-dollar drafts from Eastern periodicals, and he had touched these with reverent hands: but two thousand dollars in a lump from one of the best-known publishers in the country staggered Amzi. To add to his mystification, half the amount plus one cent, to-wit, $1057.58, was immediately transferred to Thomas Kirkwood's account, and this left Amzi away up in the air. Just what right Tom Kirkwood had to participate in Nan's earnings Amzi did not know, nor did he see immediately any way of finding out.

What did happen, though, coincident with this event, and much to his gratification, was the installation of a girl-of-all-work in Kirkwood's house. Phil had been dislodged from the kitchen, and Amzi was mightily relieved by this. A kitchen was no place for his niece, that flower of the Montgomery flock. His spirits rose when Phil hailed him one morning as he stood baring his head to the November air on the bank steps, and told him that her occupation was gone. She made the confession ruefully; it was unfair for her father to discharge her just as she was getting the hang of the range and learning to broil a steak without incinerating it. "Just for that" she would spend a great deal of time in Main Street, and ruin her constitution at Struby's soda-fountain.

While Amzi was still trying to account for Nan's check, two other incidents contributed further to his perplexities. On his way home one evening he saw Nan and Kirkwood walking together. It was only a fair assumption that the two friends had met by chance and that Kirkwood was merely accompanying Nan to her door, as he had every right to do. They were walking slowly and talking earnestly. To avoid passing them, Amzi turned off at the first cross-street, but stood for a moment staring after them. Then the next evening he had gone to call at the Bartletts' and all his intervening speculations were overthrown when he found Kirkwood there alone with Rose, Nan being, it seemed, in Indianapolis on a visit. Rose and Kirkwood had evidently been deeply engrossed, too, when Amzi interrupted their conference with the usual thump of the drumstick. The piano, he observed, was closed, and it was inexplicable that Kirkwood should be spending an unmusical evening with Rose. Nor was Phil with her father. This was another damaging fact. It was a blow to Amzi to find that such things could happen in his own town, and under his very eyes.

If it hadn't been for Phil's party, the preparations for which gave him plenty to do, Amzi's winter would have opened most unhappily; but Phil's party was an event of importance not only in her life, but in Amzi's as well. Everybody who had the slightest title to consideration received an invitation. He was glad his sisters had suggested that the Holtons be invited. It gave him an excuse for opening the doors wide. He heard much from his kinsfolk about the prosperity of the Holtons, who were held up to him in rebuke for his own sluggish business methods. He wanted his sisters and the rest of the world to know that the First National Bank of Montgomery aroused in him no jealous pangs.

Phil arrived at Amzi's early and ran upstairs to take off her wraps. When this was accomplished and her Aunt Fanny's housemaid, lent for the occasion, had duly admired her, she knocked boldly on her uncle's door.

"Come in, you Phil," he shouted.

Amzi stood before his chiffonier in his shirt sleeves, trying to make a bow of his white tie. A cigar, gripped firmly in his teeth, was not proving of much assistance in the operation. As Phil crossed the room, he jerked off the strip of lawn and threw it into the open drawer.

"See what you've done? See all that litter? All that stuff crumpled up and wasted just on your account? I told that fellow in Indianapolis to give me the ready-made kind that buckles behind, but he wouldn't listen; said they don't keep 'em any more. And look at that! It's a good thing I got a dozen! Thunder!"

The "Thunder" was due to the fact that in his excess of emotion over the difficulties with his raiment, his eyes had not until that instant taken in Phil. His jaw fell as he stared and tears filled his eyes. Above the soft folds of her white crêpe gown the firm clean lines of her shoulders and throat were revealed and for the first time he fully realized that the Phil who had gladdened his days by her pranks—Phil the romp and hoyden—had gone, and that she would never be quite the same again. There was a distinct shock in the thought. It carried him back to the day when her mother had danced across the threshold from youth to womanhood, with all of Phil's charm and grace and her heart of laughter.

Phil fanned herself languidly, feigning to ignore his bewilderment. An aigrette in her hair emphasized her height. She lifted her arms and, whistling softly, pirouetted about the room. Her movements were those of vigorous, healthy youth. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks aglow.

"Thunder!" gasped Amzi, feeling absently of his collar. "Is that you, Phil?"

"Generally speaking, it ain't, Amy. What do you think of the gladness of these joyful rags anyhow?"

"You look right, Phil. You've grown about six inches since I saw you last. High heels?"

She thrust out a slipper for his inspection.

"Those clothes are not as bad as some I've seen. I don't mind the low-in-the-neck effect when there's a neck to show like yours. Most of 'em look like the neck of a picked gander. I guess Fanny did about the right thing. Fanny's taste is usually pretty fair."

"Oh, the whole syndicate took a hand in it," said Phil with a sigh. "They nearly wore me out; but they were so busy consulting each other that they didn't notice that I chose the crêpe myself. But I wanted you to like my things, Amy."

"Of course I like 'em. You certainly look grand."

He rummaged in one of the chiffonier drawers.

"Just wait a minute," he said; "you've got to fix this fool thing for me." He placed a fresh tie round his white-wing collar and loosely crossed the ends. "I ain't going to take any chances of spoiling this. Now, Phil, do your noblest."

"With gloves on? Well, I'm used to doing daddy's over again, so here goes."

He stood with his chin in air while she tied the bow. Her youth, her loveliness, her red lips, compressed at the crucial moment when the bow took form, moved and thrilled him. No one in the world had ever been so dear to him as Phil! When she rested her hands on his shoulders and tilted her head to one side to study her handiwork he raised himself on his toes and lifted his hands, in one of which he had concealed something.

"Bend your head a little, Phil; I ought to have a ladder for this."

And in a moment he drew down upon her neck a chain with a pendant of pearls, which he had chosen with the greatest care at the best jeweler's in Indianapolis.

"Now look at yourself!"

She sprang to the mirror, and while she was exclaiming over it, he remarked, "I guess it don't make you look much worse, Phil. But it doesn't make you look much nicer. Thunder! Nothing could!"

"Amy! I'm going to muss you up!" she cried, wheeling round.

"Phil—don't you touch me; don't you dare!"

He backed away and began drawing on his coat, and she abandoned the idea of mussing him to make sure his tie didn't crawl up over his collar. She clasped him tight and kissed him on the mouth.

"What a dear old pal you are, Amy," she said, laying her cheek against his. "Don't you ever think I don't appreciate what you do for me—what you are to me!"

"I guess that's all right, Phil," he said, and turned round to the chiffonier and blew his nose furiously. "Where's Tom?"

"I guess daddy's gone downstairs."

"Well, most of your aunts are on the job somewhere and we'd better go down and start this party. I hear the fiddlers tuning up."

Amzi II had built a big house with a generous hall and large rooms, and it had been a matter of pride with Amzi III to maintain it as it had been, refusing to listen to the advice of his sisters that he shut off part of it. Amzi liked space, and he was not in the least dismayed by problems of housekeeping. In preparing for Phil's party he had had all the white woodwork repainted, and the floors of the drawing- and living-rooms had been polished for dancing.

In Montgomery functions of all sorts begin early. The number of available public vehicles is limited, and by general consent the citizens take turns in the use of them. There hadn't been a party at the Montgomery homestead since the marriage of the last of the Montgomery girls. It was not surprising that to-night many people thought a little mournfully of the marriage of the first! The launching of Phil afforded opportunity for contrasting her with her mother; she was or she was not like Lois; nearly all the old people had an opinion one way or another.

Among the early arrivals was Mrs. John Newman King. Mrs. King, at eighty, held her own as the person of chief social importance in town. The Montgomerys were a good second; but their standing was based merely upon long residence and wealth; whereas Mrs. King had to her credit not only these essential elements of provincial distinction, but she had been the wife of a United States Senator in the great days of the Civil War. She had known Lincoln and all the host of wartime heroes. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman had been her guests right there in Montgomery—at the big place with the elms and beeches, all looking very much to-day as it did in the stirring sixties. Mrs. King wore a lace cap and very rustling silk, and made pretty little curtsies. She talked politics to gentlemen, and asked women about their babies, and was wholly charming with young girls.

She paused before Phil, in the semicircle that included Amzi and his sisters with their husbands, and Tom Kirkwood.

"My dear child, on this proud occasion I want to say that the day you fell out of the cherry tree in my back yard and broke your arm and came into the house to get a sand tart as usual before going home, just as though nothing had happened, I loved you and I have loved you ever since. And you didn't cry either!"

"I didn't cry, Aunt Jane, because I hadn't sense enough to know I'd been hurt!"

"You were always a child of spirit! It's spirit that counts in this life. And for all we know in the next one, too. Don't you let all these relations of yours spoil you; I've known all the Montgomerys ever since your great-grandfather came here from Virginia, and you please me more than all the rest of 'em put together. Do you hear that, Amzi!"

Amzi was prepared to hear just this; he was nigh to bursting with pride, for Mrs. King was the great lady of the community and her opinion outweighed that of any dozen other women in that quarter of Indiana.

Montgomery is just a comfortable, folksy, neighborly town, small enough to make hypocrisy difficult and unnecessary. In a company like this that marked Phil's entrance upon the great little world, no real Montgomeryite remembered who had the most money, or the costliest automobile, or the largest house. The Madison professors, who never had any hope of earning more than fifteen hundred dollars a year if they lived forever, received the special consideration to which they were entitled; and Judge Walters might be hated by most of the lawyers at the bar for his sharp admonitions from the bench, but they all respected him for his sound attainments and unquestioned probity. Among others who were presented to Phil (as though they hadn't known her all her life!) were a general and a colonel and other officers of the line, including Captain Joshua Wilson, poet and county recorder, and the editors of the two newspapers, and lawyers and doctors and shopkeepers, and, yes, clerks who stood behind counters, and insurance agents and the postmaster, all mingling together, they and their children, in the most democratic fashion imaginable.

"We're all here," said old General Wilks, who had been a tower of strength in the Army of the Tennessee, "and we're the best people of the best state on earth. I claim the privilege of age, Amzi, to kiss the prettiest girl in Indiana."

Beyond question the arrival of the William Holtons, with their niece and nephew from Indianapolis, caused a stir. They were among the late comers, and the curious were waiting to witness their reception, which proved to be disappointingly undramatic. Their welcome in no wise differed from that accorded to other guests. Every one said that Charles Holton was a handsome fellow, and his sister Ethel a very "nice" though rather an insipid and colorless young woman. It was generally understood that Amzi's sisters had forced his hand. The conservatives were disposed to excuse Amzi for permitting the Holtons to be invited; but they thought the Holtons displayed bad taste in accepting. It was Phil's party, and no Holton had any business to be connected with anything that concerned Phil. And Tom Kirkwood's feelings ought to have been considered, said his old friends.

"You see," Charles Holton remarked to Phil, when he had bowed over her hand with a good deal of manner, "I really did give up that New York trip. I would have come back from China to see you in that gown!"

The musicians (five artists from the capital, and not the drummer and piano-thumper usually considered adequate in Montgomery for fraternity and class functions) now struck up the first number.

"Please give me a lot of dances," begged Charles, looking at Phil's card.

"One! Just one!" replied Phil.

"You are bound to be a great tyrant; you should be merciful to your humblest subject."

"I haven't seen any of the humility yet," she laughed.

Her Uncle Lawrence Hastings had undertaken to manage the dance and he glided away with her to the strains of the first waltz. Hastings boasted a velvet collar to his dress-coat, and the town had not yet ceased to marvel that fortune had sent to its door a gentleman so exquisite, so finished, so identified with the most fascinating of all the arts. Hastings had for the social affairs of Montgomery a haughty scorn. It pained him greatly to be asked to a neighbor's for "supper," particularly when it was quite likely that the hostess would herself cook and serve the food; and the Fortnightly Assembly, a club of married folk that met to dance in Masonic Hall, was to him the tamest, the dullest of organizations, and the fact that his brother-in-law Waterman, who waltzed like a tipsy barrel, enjoyed those harmless entertainments had done much to embitter Hastings's life. Hastings imagined himself in love frequently; the Dramatic Club afforded opportunities for the intense flirtations in which his nature delighted. The parents of several young women who had taken part in his amateur theatricals had been concerned for their daughters' safety. And now Phil interested him—this new Phil in city clothes. The antics of Phil, the tomboy of Main Street, had frequently aroused his indignation; Phil, a débutante in an evening gown that he pronounced a creation of the gods, was worthy of serious attention. She was, he averred, Hermione, Rosalind, Portia, Beatrice, combined in one perfect flower of womanhood.

"You are adorable, Phil," he sighed, when the music ceased, leaving them at the end of the living-room. "A star danced and you were born."

"That is very sweet, Lawrince," said Phil; "but here comes my next partner. You mustn't stand in the way of the young men."

The very lightest laughing emphasis on "young" made a stab of this. He posed in a window and watched her, with his gloomiest Hamlet-like air, until his wife, noting this familiar symptom, interrupted his meditations and commissioned him to convoy a lady with an ear-trumpet to the dining-room.

The party was going merrily; there was no doubt of its complete success. Some of the older folk remarked upon the fact that Phil had danced with Charles Holton; and he danced well. There was a grace in the Holtons, and Charles was endowed with the family friendliness. He made a point of speaking to every one and of dancing with the wall-flowers. It was noted presently that he saw Mrs. King to her carriage, and was otherwise regardful of the old folks.

Phil had wondered whether Fred Holton would come. She had hoped he would when she asked him at her uncle's farm, and the formal invitation had been dispatched to R.F.D. 7 as promised.

It was ten o'clock when Fred appeared. Phil saw him over her partner's shoulder talking to Amzi in the hall door, and as she swept by him in the dance she caught his eye. Fred had come late out of sheer timidity, but he had arrived at a moment when the gayety was at its height.

His diffidence had been marked even in his college days, and he was unused to gatherings of this kind. The proximity of so many gay, laughing people was a real distress to him. And if the other members of his family were able to overlook Jack Holton's great sin, Fred was acutely conscious of it now that Phil had dawned on his horizon. He had no sooner entered the house than he regretted his temerity in coming; and he had come merely to see Phil—that was the whole of it. Nor did the thought of this now contribute to his comfort. His glimpses of her as she danced up and down the room with three partners in turn—one of them his brother—set his pulses throbbing. Phil in her simple white gown—this glowing, joyous woman was no longer of his world. For the first time in his life his heart was shot through with jealousy. He had always felt Charles's superiority, but with a younger brother's loyal admiration he had not resented it. He resented it now. Fred had resurrected a cutaway coat for this adventure, and he was acutely aware that there were more dress-coats in evidence than he had imagined were available in Montgomery. Amzi, who had greeted him kindly, introduced him to a visiting girl whose name he did not catch, and he was doing his best to present an appearance of ease in talking to her. It had been a long time since he had danced, and he did not know the new steps. The girl asked him why he did not invite her to dance, and this added to his discomfiture. There is no greater unhappiness than that of the non-dancing young man at a dancing-party. He is drawn to such functions by a kind of fascination; he does not understand why other young men with no better brains than his are able to encircle the waists of the most beautiful girls and guide them through difficult evolutions. He vows that he will immediately submit himself to instruction and lift himself from the pits of torment.

The visiting girl was carried off, evidently to her relief and delight, by a strange young man and Fred was left stranded in an alcove. He had never felt so lonesome in his life. Phil vanished and now that he no longer enjoyed even his earlier swift glimpses of her, his dejection increased. He was meditating an escape when, as his eyes sought her, she stood suddenly breathless beside him. A divinity had no right thus to appear unheralded before mortal eyes. Fred blushed furiously and put out his hand awkwardly. Phil's latest partner begged for another dance; there was to be an extra, he pleaded; but she dismissed him with a wave of her fan. There had been high-school dances where Phil had learned to steel her heart against the importunate.

"Why didn't you come and speak to me?" demanded Phil when they were alone.

"I was just waiting for a chance. I didn't want to bother you."

"Well, you'll have to do better than this! You're the only person in the house who hasn't spoken to me! But it was nice of you to come: it must be a trouble to come to town at night when you live so far." She sat down in the window-seat and bade him do likewise. "You did see Uncle Amy, didn't you? I saw you talking to him; but you ought to have come earlier while there was a receiving-line ready for you. Now you'll have to look around for everybody; you have to speak to my three aunts and all my uncles and my father."

"I'll be glad to," declared Fred; and then realizing the absurdity of his fervor in consenting to speak to the aunts and uncles he laughed.

"You're scared," said Phil. "And if you won't tell anybody I'm a little bit scared myself, just because everybody tells me how grown-up I am."

The music struck up and a young cavalier—a college senior, who had worshiped Phil since his freshman year—came to say that it was his dance. She told him that she was tired and would have to be excused. He wished to debate the question, but she closed the incident promptly and effectively.

"I'm busy talking to Mr. Holton; and I can see you any time, Walter."

Walter departed crestfallen; she treated him as though he were still a freshman. He was wearing his first dress-coat and the tallest collar he could buy, and it was humiliating to be called Walter and sent away by a girl who preferred to talk to a rustic-looking person in a cutaway coat and a turnover collar with a four-in-hand tie.

Phil carried Fred off for a tour of the rooms, pausing to introduce him to her father and to the three aunts, to whom she said how kind it was of Fred to come; that he was the only person she had personally asked to the party. And it was just like Phil, for years the loyal protector of all the discards among the cats and dogs in town, to choose a clodhopper for special attention. Kirkwood, who had forgotten Fred's existence, greeted him in his pleasant but rather absent way.

The torrid Wabash Valley summers of many years had not greatly modified the chill in Kirkwood's New England blood, and the isolation in which he had lived so long had deepened his reserve. The scholarly stamp had not been effaced by his abandonment of the academic life, and many of his fellow-townsmen still addressed him as Professor Kirkwood. His joy to-night lay in Phil's happiness; his heart warmed to the terms of praise in which every one spoke of her. It touched his humor that his daughter was in some degree a public character. Her escapades in childhood and youth had endeared her to the community. In her battles with the aunts public sympathy had been pretty generally with Phil. "Otherwise Phyllis—?" Many a smile had been occasioned by that question. Tom Kirkwood knew all this and was happy and grateful. He had not attended a large gathering of his fellow-townfolk since his wife left him, so that his daughter's coming-out was an event of double significance for him.

The aunts were somewhat critical of the arrangements for refreshing the guests. Amzi, refusing to heed their suggestions that the catering be entrusted to an Indianapolis firm, had arranged everything himself. The cakes were according to the best recipes known at 98 Buckeye Lane, and Rose and Nan were there, assisting, by Amzi's special command. During the evening he consulted first one and then the other; and when his sisters asked icily for instructions, he told them to look handsome and keep cheerful. This was unbrotherly, of course, but Amzi was supremely happy.

The older people had been served in the dining-room and many of them had already gone or were now taking leave, and the waiters were distributing little tables for the young people.

"Let me see, you were to have refreshments with me, Miss Kirkwood; I have a table in the drawing-room alcove all ready," said Charles Holton to Phil as she still stood talking to Fred in the hall. Fred had been wondering just what his own responsibilities were in the matter. Charles had greeted him affably; but Fred's diffidence deepened in his brother's presence: Charles was a master of the social arts, whereas Fred had only instinctive good-breeding to guide him. Fred was about to move away, but Phil detained him.

"Isn't it curious that you two brothers should have the same idea," said Phil artlessly. "It's really remarkable! But I think"—and she turned gravely to Fred—"I think, as long as you came too late for a dance with me, I shall eat my piece of pie with you—and I think right up there on the stairs would be an excellent place to sit!"

Fred, radiant at the great kindness of this, went off to bring the salad for which she declared she was perishing. Charles looked at her with an amused smile on his face.

"You're a brick! It's mighty fine of you to be so nice to Fred. Dear old Fred!"

Phil frowned.

"Why do you speak of your brother in that way?"

"How did I speak of him?"

"Oh, as if he were somebody to be sorry for!"

"Oh, you misunderstood me! I was merely pleased that you were being nice to him. Fred would never have thought of asking you to sit on the stairs with him—I knew that; it was just like you to save him from embarrassment."

"Oh!"

He was piqued by the connotations suggested by Phil's "Oh!" Phil was not only stunningly pretty, but she had wits. It was his way to impress girls he met, and there was no time for dallying now; Fred would return in a moment and take Phil away from him. He intended to see a great deal of her hereafter, and he believed that in the opening skirmishes of a flirtation a bold shot counts double. Phil waved her hand in the direction of the table where the Bartletts, her father, and Amzi were seating themselves, and when she looked round at Holton, she found his eyes bent upon her with a fair imitation of wistfulness and longing which in previous encounters of this sort he had found effective.

"I don't believe you realize how beautiful you are. I've been over the world a good deal and there's no one anywhere who touches you. There are lots of nice and pretty girls, of course, but you are different; you are a beautiful woman! To see you like this is to know for the first time what beauty is. And I know—I appreciate the beautiful soul there is in you—that shines out of your eyes!" His voice was low, and a little tremulous. "I want the chance to fight for you! From that first moment I saw you in your father's office I have thought of nothing but you. That's why I came—why I gave up business of real importance to come. And I shall come again and again, until you tell me I may come no longer."

His voice seemed to break with the stress of deep feeling. Phil listened, first in surprise that yielded perhaps to fear, and then her head bent and she looked down at her fan which she slowly opened and shut. She did not lift her eyes until she was sure he had finished.

"By the way," she remarked, with studied carelessness, as she continued to play with her fan, "I wish I could quote things offhand like that. It must be fine to have such a memory! Let me see, what is that from—'The Prisoner of Zenda' or 'How Lulu Came to Logansport'? Oh!" (with sudden animation as Fred came bearing two plates) "there's my young life-saver now!" Then to Charles again: "Well, I shall certainly look up that quotation. It was ever so nice of you to remind me of it!"

Holton struck his gloved hands together smartly in his irritation and turned away. Phil was undoubtedly different; but she was not through yet. She called him back, one foot on the stair, and said in a confidential tone, "That nice little Orbison girl,—the blonde one, I mean, who's visiting here from Elwood,—I wish you'd take good care of her; I'm afraid she isn't having a wildly exciting time."

"This is what I call being real comfortable and cozy," she remarked to Fred as they disposed themselves on one of the lower steps.

Below and near at hand were most of the members of her family. She saw from the countenances of the three aunts that they were displeased with her, but the consciousness of this did not spoil life for her. She humanly enjoyed their discomfiture, knowing that it was based upon the dinginess of Fred's clothes and prospects. Their new broad tolerance of the Holtons did not cover the tragic implications of Fred's raiment. They meant to protect Phil in every way, and yet there was ground for despair when she chose the most undesirable young man in the county to sit with in the intimacy of the refreshment hour at her own coming-out. Mrs. Fosdick leaned back from her table to ask Amzi in an angry whisper what he meant by allowing Phil to invite Fred Holton to her party.

"What's that? Allow her! I didn't allow her! Nobody allows Phil! Thunder!" And then, after he had picked up his fallen napkin, he turned to add: "There's nothing the matter with Fred that I know of!"

The comparative quiet that now reigned was much more to Fred's liking than the gayety of the dance. Phil treated their companionship as a matter of course and his timidity and restraint vanished. Nothing in his experience had ever been so agreeable and stimulating as this. That Phil, of all humankind, should have made this possible was to him inexplicable. It could not be that when this was over, he should be hurled back to Stop 7.

Phil, who had disposed of Charles's confession of adoration to her own satisfaction, now seemed bent upon winning some praise from the halting tongue of Charles's brother. To make conversation she directed attention to her new trinket, holding out the chain for Fred to admire the pearls. In doing this he saw the pulse throbbing in her slim throat, and this in itself was disturbing. Her nearness there on the stairway affected him even more than on the orchard slope where he had experienced similar agitations. When she laughed he noticed an irregularity in one of her white teeth; and there was a tiny mole on her neck, just below her left ear. He did not know why he saw these things, or why seeing them increased his awe. It seemed wonderful that she could so easily slip her hands out of her gloves without drawing the long gauntlets from her arms. Farther and farther receded the Phil of the kitchen apron with whom he had bargained for the sale of the saddest apples that had ever been brought to Montgomery by a self-respecting farmer! When her father came to the stair-rail to ask if she felt a draft from the upper windows, Fred was shaken with fear; the thought that the airs of heaven might visit affliction upon this brown-haired and brown-eyed marvel was at once a grief to him. He felt the world rock at the bare thought of any harm ever coming to her.

"As if," said Phil, when her father had been reassured, "the likes of me could take cold. What do you do all day on a farm in winter weather?"

"Let me see; I chopped wood, this morning; and I'd bought some corn of Perry—that is, of your uncle—and went over with the wagon to get it; and this afternoon I brought the wood I had chopped to the woodshed; and then I went out to look at my wheatfield, and almost bought a cow of another neighbor—but didn't quite make a bargain. And then I began to get ready to come to your party."

"You must have worked awfully hard to get ready," said Phil, "for you were late getting here."

"Well, I loafed around outside for an hour or so before I came in," and he smiled ruefully. "I'm not used to parties."

"You seem to get on pretty well," said Phil reassuringly.

One of the waiters had brought them ice-cream and cake, and after she had tasted the cake Phil caught Rose Bartlett's eye and expressed ecstasy and gratitude by a lifting of the head, a closing of the eyes, a swift folding of the hands.

"How are you going to amuse yourself out there by yourself all winter?" she remarked to Fred; "I shouldn't think there would be much to do!"

"Oh, there won't be any trouble about that! I've got plenty to do and then I want to do some studying, too. I'm going up to the University in January to hear lectures—farming and stock-raising and things like that. Perry has put me up to it. And then in between times I want to get acquainted with the neighbors; they're all mighty nice people and kind and friendly. That sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?"

"Well, it sounds wholesome if not wildly exciting. I've lost my job. They took my kitchen away from me just as I was getting started; and I haven't anything much to do—except being sociable."

"Of course, you've come out now, and you'll be going to receptions and dances all the time."

"I can't exactly cry O joy, O joy at the thought of it. There must have been gypsies in my family somewhere. You'll think I'm crazy, but I'd like to go out right now and run a mile. But there will be skating afterwhile; and snowstorms to go walking in. I like walking in snowstorms,—the blustering kind where you can't see and go plunking into fences."

Fred agreed to this; he readily visualized Phil tramping 'cross-country in snowstorms. "It's an awful thing," Phil resumed, "to have to be respectable. Aunt Kate wants to go South this winter and take me with her. But that would mean being shut up in a hotel. If daddy didn't have to work, I'd make him take me to California where we could get a wagon and just keep camping. Camping out is the most fun there is in this world. There's a nice wooziness in waking up at night and hearing an owl right over your head; and there are the weather changes, when you go to sleep with the stars shining and wake up and hear the rain slapping the tent. And when you've gone for a long tramp and come back tired and wet and hungry, and sit and talk about things awhile and then tumble into bed and get up in the morning to do it all over again—! Does that sound perfectly wild? If it does, then I'm crazy, for that's the kind of thing I like—not to talk about it at parties in my best clothes, but to go out and do it and keep on doing it forever and ever."

She put the last crumb of the Bartlett cake into her mouth meditatively.

"I like the outdoors, too," said Fred, for whom this statement of her likings momentarily humanized his goddess and brought her within the range of his understanding. "The earth is a good old earth. There are no jars in the way she does her business. There's something that makes me feel sort o' funny inside when I go out now and see that little wheat-patch of mine, and know that the snow is going to cover it, and that with any kind of good luck it's going to live right through the cold and come to harvest next summer. And it gives me a queer feeling, and always did, the way it all goes on—and has always gone on since the beginning of the world. When I was a little boy here in Montgomery and went to Center Church Sunday-School, the most interesting things in the Bible were about those Old Testament people, raising cattle and tending flocks and farming just like the people right here at home. I suppose it's a feeling like that I always had that makes me want to be a farmer and live close to the ground—that and wanting to earn a living," he concluded, smiling. He was astonished at his own speech, which had expressed ideas that had never crystallized in his mind before.

"That," said Phil, "is what poetry is—feeling like that."

"I suppose it is," Fred assented.

The waiters were relieving the guests of their burdens, and carrying out the tables, and there was a stir through the house as the musicians took their places. Phil rose and nodded to a young gentleman who sought her for the next dance.

"I've got to go," said Fred. "I'll just about catch my last car. It's been fine to be here. And I've enjoyed talking to you. It was mighty kind of you to sit up here with me. I shall always remember it."

Phil was drawing on her gloves, looking down upon the hall through which the guests from the other rooms were now passing.

At this moment the outer hall door opened cautiously and a man stepped inside, closed it noisily, and placed his back against it with an air of defiance. He stood blinking in the strong light, moving his head from side to side as though in the effort to summon speech. The waiter who had been stationed at the door was helping to clear away the tables, but he hurried forward and began directing this latest guest where to leave his wraps. The stranger shook his head protestingly. It was quite evident that he was intoxicated. He wore a long overcoat spattered with mud, and there was a dent in the derby hat he removed with elaborate care and then swung at arm's length. The doorways filled. Something not down in the programme was occurring. A sudden hush fell upon the house; whispered inquiries as to the identity of the stranger, who stood drunkenly turning his gaze from left to right, passed guardedly from lip to lip. Amzi, Kirkwood, and the Bartletts remained near where they had risen from their table, sharing the general consternation. Amzi was the first to recover; he took a step toward the door, but paused as the man began to speak slowly and drunkenly. He seemed annoyed by his inability to control his tongue and his voice rose raspingly.

"'M looking for my bruf—my bruf—my brother. Tole me 'tis h-h—'tis house he was 't Amzi's to party. Holtons and Mungummer—Montgomerys all good fr'ens now. Bes' ole fam'lies in town. 'Pologize for coming s' late; no time change my clothes; disgraceful—puf-puf-perfectly disgraceful, that's whasmasser. Want t' see Will. Anybody here seen Will? Don' tell me Will's gone home s' early; mos' unfashion'ble; mos' disgracefully unfashion'ble!"

Jack Holton had come back, and this was the manner of his coming. To most of those who saw him that night tipsily planted against the door of the old Montgomery house, he was an entire stranger, so long had been his exile; but to Amzi, to Tom Kirkwood, to Rose and Nan Bartlett there came at the instant of identification a thronging weight of memories. Some one had called William Holton—he was discussing local business prospects with Paul Fosdick—and the crowd about the drawing-room door made way for him. His nephew Charles was at his elbow.

"Bring my coat and hat to the back door, Charlie, and see that your Aunt Nellie gets home," he said; and people spoke admiringly afterward of the composure with which he met the situation.

Amzi was advancing toward the uninvited guest and William turned to him.

"This is unpardonable, Mr. Montgomery, but I want you to know that I couldn't have foreseen it. I am very sorry. Good-night!"

Preceded by Amzi, William led his brother, not without difficulty, through the hall to the dining-room and into the kitchen, where Charles joined him in a moment by way of the back stairs.

"It's Uncle Jack, is it?" Charles asked, looking at the tall figure with a curiosity that was unfeigned.

"M' dear boy, I s'pose 's possible I'm your lon—lon—long los' uncle; but I haven't zonner—haven't zonner your acquaintance. Want to see Will. Got prodigal on zands, Will has. Seems t'ave come back mos' 'no—mos' 'nopportune 'casion. All right, ole man: jus' give me y' arm and I get 'long mos' com-for-ble, mos' comfort-a-ble," he ended with a leer of triumph at having achieved the vowel.

Charles helped him down the steps to the walk and then returned to the house. In his unfamiliarity with its arrangements, he opened by mistake the door that led to a little den where Amzi liked to read and smoke. There quite alone stood Tom Kirkwood, his hands in his pockets, staring into the coal-fire of the grate. Charles muttered an apology and hastily closed the door.

Through the house rang the strains of a waltz, and the dance went on.

CHAPTER XI

BROTHERS

William Holton spoke the truth to Amzi when he said that he had had no warning of his brother's return. William, with all his apparent prosperity, was not without his troubles, and he took it unkindly that this brother, who for sixteen years had kept out of the way, should have chosen so unfortunate a moment for reintroducing himself to his native town. He had not set eyes on Jack since his flight with Lois Kirkwood, though Samuel had visited the Western coast several times on business errands and had kept in touch with him. William had been glad enough to forget Jack's existence, particularly as the reports that had reached him—even those brought back by the sanguine Samuel—had been far from reassuring as to Jack's status in Seattle.

Jack's return meant a recrudescence of wounds which time had seemingly healed, with resulting discomforts that might have far-reaching consequences. Mrs. William had a pride of her own, and it was unjust to her for a man who had so shocked the moral sensibilities of the town to thrust himself back upon his family, especially when he had chosen to present himself first at the domicile of the head of a house against which he had so grossly sinned.

William took Jack home and put him to bed; and when Charles followed a little later with Mrs. Holton, the prodigal slept the sleep of weary intoxication in her guest chamber.

The next day the town buzzed, and the buzzing was loud enough to make itself heard at the desk of the president of the First National Bank. William had left word at home that when Jack came to himself, he was to be dispatched to the bank forthwith. He meant to deal with this unwelcome pilgrim upon a business basis strictly, without any softening domestic influences. The honor of the Holtons was touched nearly and Jack must be got rid of. Mrs. Holton telephoned at eleven o'clock that Jack was on his way downtown, and William was prepared for the interview when his brother strolled in with something of his old jauntiness.

The door of the directors' room closed upon them. The word passed along Main Street that Jack and William were closeted in the bank. Phil, walking downtown on an errand, with the happiness of her party still in her eyes, was not without her sense of the situation. At the breakfast-table her father, deeply preoccupied, had brought himself with an effort to review the happier events of the party. Knowing what was in his mind Phil mentioned the untoward misfortune that had cast Jack Holton of all men upon the threshold of her uncle's house.

"It really didn't make any difference, daddy,—that man's coming. Everybody tried to forget it. And some of the young people didn't know him at all."

"No; it didn't matter, Phil. Your Uncle Amzi is a fine gentleman: I never fully appreciated his goodness and generosity as much as I did last night."

Phil did not know that Amzi had sought Kirkwood in the den where the lawyer had gone to take counsel with himself, and had blown himself purple in the face in his kind efforts to make light of the incident. The two men had never been drawn closer together in their lives than in that meeting.

"It wasn't Uncle Amy's fault that the William Holtons were asked to the party; I think it was Aunt Kate who started that. And when I heard of it, it was all over and the invitations had been sent," Phil said.

Kirkwood repeated his assurance that it made no difference in any way. And Phil remembered for a long time a certain light in his gentle, candid eyes as he said:—