DIVERGING ROADS

BY ROSE WILDER LANE

NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1919

Copyright, 1919, by The Century Co.

Published, March, 1919

Contents

PROLOGUE

The tale of California's early days is an epic, an immortal song of daring, of hope, of the urge of youth to unknown trails, of struggle, and of heartbreak. Across the great American plains the adventurers came, scrawling the story of their passing in lines of blood; they came around the Horn in wind-jammers, beating their way northward in the strange Pacific; they forced their way into the wilderness, awakening California's hills from centuries-long sleep, and they pitched their tents and built their cabins by thousands in Cherokee Valley.

Those were the great days of Cherokee, days of feverish activity, of hard, fierce living, of marvelous event. The tales came down to Masonville, where the stage stopped to change horses, and drivers, express-messengers, and prospectors gathered in Mason's bar. The Chinese laundryman had found beside his cabin a nugget worth sixteen hundred dollars; the stage to Honey Creek had been held up just north of Cherokee Hill; Jim Thane had struck it rich on North Branch.

Mason, prospering, ordered a billiard-table sent up from San Francisco, built a dance-hall. Richardson came in with his family and put up a general store. Cherokee was booming; Cherokee miners came down with their sacks of gold-dust, and Masonville thrived.

But the great days passed. The time came when placer mining no longer paid in Cherokee, and the camp moved on across the mountains. Cherokee Valley was left behind, a desolate little hollow among the hills, denuded of its trees, disfigured here and there by the scars of shallow tunnels where hope still fought against defeat. A handful of dogged miners remained, and a few Portuguese families living in little cabins, harvesting a bare subsistence from the unwilling soil.

A few discouraged men came down to Masonville and took up homestead claims, clearing the chaparral from their rolling acres, sowing grain or setting out fruit-trees. They had wives and children; in time they built a school-house. Later the railroad came through, and there was a station and a small bank.

But the stirring times of enterprise and daring were gone forever. The epic had ended in bad verse. Masonville slipped quietly to sleep, like an old man sitting in the sun with his memories. And youth, taking up its old immortal song of courage and of hope, went on to farther unknown trails and different adventure.

CHAPTER I

There is a peculiar quality in the somnolence of an old town in which little has occurred for many years. It is the unease of relaxation without repose, the unease of one who lies too late in bed, aware that he should be getting up. The men who lounge aimlessly about the street corners cannot be wholly idle. Their hands, at least, must be busy. The scarred posts and notched edges of the board sidewalks show it; the paint on the little stations is sanded shoulder-high to prevent their whittling there. Energy struggles feebly under the weight of the slow, uneventful days; but its pressure is always there, an urge that becomes an irritation in young blood.

Helen Davies, pausing in the doorway of Richardson's store on a warm spring afternoon, said to herself that she would be glad never to see Masonville again. The familiar sight of its one drowsy street, the rickety wooden awnings over the sidewalks, the boys pitching horseshoes in the shade of the blacksmith-shop, was almost insupportable.

She did not want to stand there looking at it. She did not want to follow the old stale road home to the old farm-house, which had not changed since she could remember. She felt that she should be doing something, she did not know what.

A long purple curl of smoke unrolling over the crest of Cherokee Hill was the plume of Number Five coming in. Two short, quick puffs of white above the bronze mist of bare apricot orchards mutely announced the whistle for the grade.

Men sauntered past, going toward the station. The postmaster appeared in his shirt-sleeves, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with mail sacks down the middle of the street. The afternoon hack from Cherokee rattled by, bringing a couple of tired, dust-grimed drummers. And the Masonville girls, bare-headed, laughing, talking in high, gay voices, came hurrying from the post-office, from the drug-store, from one of their Embroidery Club meetings, to see Number Five come in. Helen shifted the weight of the package on her arm, pulled her sunbonnet farther over her face, and started home.

Depression and revolt struggled in her mind. She passed the wide, empty doorway of Harner's livery-stable, the glowing forge of the blacksmith-shop, without seeing them, absorbed in the turmoil of her thoughts. But at the corner where the gravel walk began, and the street frankly became a country road slipping down a little slope between scattered white cottages, her self-absorption vanished.

A boy was walking slowly down the path. The elaborate unconcern of his attitude, the stiffness of his self-conscious back, told her that he had been waiting for her, and a rush of dizzying emotion swept away all but the immediate moment. The sunshine was warm on her shoulders, the grass of the lawns was green, every lace-curtained window behind the rose-bushes seemed to conceal watching eyes, and the sound of her feet on the gravel was loud in her ears. She overtook him at last, trying not to walk too fast. They smiled at each other.

"Hello, Paul," she said shyly.

He was a stocky, dark-haired boy, with blue eyes. His father was dead, killed in a mine over at Cherokee. He had come down to the Masonville school, and they were in the same class, the class that would graduate that spring. He was studying hard, trying to get as much education as possible before he would have to go to work. He lived with his mother in a little house near the edge of town, on the road to the farm.

"Hello," he replied. He cleared his throat. "I had to go to the post-office to mail a letter," he said.

"Did you?" she answered. She tried to think of something else to say. "Will you be glad when school's over?" she asked.

Paul and she stood at the head of the class. He was better in arithmetic, but she beat him in spelling. For a long time they had exchanged glances of mutual respect across the school-room. Some one had told her that Paul said she was all right. He had beat her in arithmetic that day. "She takes a licking as well as a boy," was what he had said. But she had gone home and looked in the mirror.

The flutter at her heart had stopped then. No, she was not pretty. Her features were too large, her forehead too high. She despised the face that looked back at her. She longed for tiny, pretty features, large brown eyes, a low forehead with curling hair. The eyes in the mirror were gray and the hair was straight and brown. Not even a pretty, light brown. It was almost black. For the first time she had desperately wanted to be pretty. But now she did not care. He had waited for her, anyway.

They walked slowly along the country road, under the arch of the trees, through the branches of which the sun sent long, slanting rays of light. There was a colored haze over the leafless orchards, and the hills were freshly green from the rains.

"Well, I've got a job promised as soon as school is over," said Paul.

"What kind of job?" she asked.

"Working at the depot. It pays fifteen a month to start," he replied. It was as if they were uttering poetry. The words did not matter. What they said did not matter.

"That's fine," she said. "I wish I had a job."

"Gee, I hate to see a girl go to work," said Paul.

His lips were full and very firm. When he set them tightly, as he did then, he looked determined. There was something obstinate about the line of his chin and the slight frown between his heavy black brows. Her whole nature seemed to melt and flow toward him.

"I don't see why!" she flashed. "A girl like me has to work if she's going to get anywhere. I bet I could do as well as a boy if I had a chance."

The words were like a defensive armor between her and her real desire. She did not want to work. She wanted to be soft and pretty, tempting and teasing and sweet. She wanted to win the things she desired by tears and smiles and coaxing. But she did not know how.

Paul looked at her admiringly. He said, "I guess you could, all right. You're pretty smart for a girl."

She glowed with pleasure.

They had often walked along this road as far as his house, when accident brought them home from school at the same time. But their talk had never had this indefinable quality, as vague and beautiful as the misty color over the orchards.

Sometimes she had stopped at his house for a few minutes. His mother was a little woman with brisk, bustling manner. She always stood at the door to see that they wiped their feet before they went in. The house was very neat. There was an ingrain carpet on the front-room floor, swept till every thread showed. The center-table had a crocheted tidy on it and a Bible and a polished sea-shell. This room rose like a picture in her mind as they neared the gate. She did not want to leave Paul, but she did not want to go into that room with him now.

"Look here—wait a minute—" he said, stopping in the gateway. "I wanted to tell you—" He turned red and looked down at one toe, boring into the soft ground. "About this being valedictorian—"

"Oh!" she said. There had been a fierce rivalry between them for the honor of being valedictorian at the graduating exercises. There was nothing to choose between them in scholarship, but Paul had won. She knew the teachers had decided she did not dress well enough to take such a prominent part.

"I hope you don't feel bad about it, Helen," he went on awkwardly. "I told them I'd give it up, because you're a girl, and anyway you ought to have it, I guess. I don't feel right about taking it, some way."

"That's all right," she answered. "I don't care."

"Well, it's awfully good of you." She could see that he was very much relieved. She was glad she had lied about it. "Come in and look at what I've got in the shed," he said, getting away from the subject as quickly as possible.

She followed him around the house, under the old palm-tree that stood there. He had cleared out the woodshed and put in a table and a chair. On the table stood a telegraphic-sounder and key and a round, red, dry battery.

"I'm going to learn to be an operator," he said. "I've got most of the alphabet already. Listen." He made the instrument click. "I'm going to practise receiving, listening to the wires in the depot. Morrison says I can after I get through work. Telegraph-operators make as much as seventy dollars a month, and some of them, on the fast wires, make a hundred. I guess the train-dispatcher makes more than that."

"Oh, Paul, really?" She was all enthusiasm. He let her try the key. "I could do it. I know I could," she said.

He was encouraging.

"Sure you could." But there was a faint condescension in his tone, and she felt that he was entering a life into which she could not follow him.

"That's the trouble with this rotten old world," she said resentfully. "You can get out and do things like that. A girl hasn't any chance at all."

"Oh, yes, she has," he answered. "There's lots of girl operators. There's one down the line. Her father's station agent. And up at Rollo there's a man and his wife that handle the station between them. He works nights, and she works daytimes. They live over the depot, and if anything goes wrong she can call him."

"That must be nice," she said.

"He's pretty lucky, all right," Paul agreed. "It isn't exactly like having her working, of course—right together like that. I guess maybe they couldn't—been married, unless she did. He didn't have much, I guess. He isn't so awful much older than—But anyway, I'd hate to see—anybody I cared about going to work," he finished desperately. He opened and shut the telegraph-key, and the metallic clacks of the sounder were loud in the stillness. Unsaid things hung between them. Dazzled, tremulous, shaken by the beating of her heart, Helen could not speak.

The palpitant moment was ended by the sound of his mother's voice. "Paul! Paul, I want some wood." They laughed shakily.

"I—I guess I better be going," she said. He made no protest. But when they stood in the woodshed doorway he said all in a rush:

"Look here, if I get a buggy next Sunday, what do you say we go driving somewhere?"

She carried those words home with her, singing as she went.

CHAPTER II

He came early that Sunday afternoon, but she had been ready, waiting, long before she saw the buggy coming down the road.

She had tried to do her hair in a new way, putting it up in rag curlers the night before, working with it for hours that morning in the stuffy attic bedroom before the wavy mirror, combing it, putting it up, taking it down again, with a nervous fluttering in her wrists. In the end she gave it up. She rolled the long braid into its usual mass at the nape of her neck, and pinned on it a black ribbon bow.

She longed for a new white dress to wear that day. Her pink gingham, whose blue-and-white-plaid pattern had faded to blurred lines of mauve and pale pink, was hideous to her as she contemplated it stretched in all its freshly ironed stiffness on the bed. But it was the best she could do.

While she dressed, the sounds of the warm, lazy, spring morning floated in to her through the half-open window. The whinnying of the long-legged colt in the barnyard, the troubled, answering neigh of his mother from the pasture, the cackling of the hens, blended like the notes of a pastoral orchestra with the rising and falling whirr of steel on the grindstone. Under the stunted live-oak in the side-yard her father was sharpening an ax, while her little sister Mabel turned the crank and poured water on the whirling stone. The murmur of their talk came up to her, Mabel's shrill, continuous chatter, her father's occasional monosyllables. She heard without listening, and the sounds ran like an undercurrent of contentment in her thoughts.

When she had pinned her collar and put on her straw sailor she stood for a long time gazing into the eyes that looked back at her from the mirror, lost in a formless reverie.

"My land!" her mother said when she appeared in the kitchen. "What're you all dressed up like that for, this time of day?"

"I'm going driving," she answered, constrained. She had dreaded the moment. Her mother stopped, the oven door half open, a fork poised in her hand.

"Who with?"

"Paul." She tried to say the name casually, making an effort to meet her mother's eyes as usual. It was as if they looked at each other across a wide empty space. Her mother seemed suddenly to see in her a stranger.

"But—good gracious, Helen! You're only a little girl!" The words were cut across by Tommy's derisive chant from the table, where he sat licking a mixing-spoon.

"Helen's got a feller! Helen's got a feller!"

"Shut up!" she cried. "If you don't shut up—!"

But he got away from her and, slamming the screen door, yelled from the safe distance of the woodpile:

"Helen's mad, and I'm glad, an' I know what will please her—!"

She went into the other room, shutting the door with a shaking hand. She felt that she hated the whole world. Yes, even Paul. Her mother called to her that even if she was going out with a beau, that was no reason she shouldn't eat something. Dinner wouldn't be ready till two o'clock, but she ought to drink some milk anyway. She answered that she was not hungry.

Paul would come by one o'clock, she thought. His mother had only a cold lunch on Sundays, because they went to church. He came ten minutes late, and she had forgotten everything else in the strain of waiting.

She met him at the gate, and he got out to help her into the buggy-seat. He was wearing his Sunday clothes, the blue suit, carefully brushed and pressed, and a stiff white collar. He looked strange and formal.

"It isn't much of a rig," he said apologetically, clearing his throat. She recognized the bony sorrel and the rattling buggy, the cheapest in Harner's livery-stable. But even that, she knew, was an extravagance for Paul.

"It's hard to get a rig on Sunday," she said, "Everybody takes them all out in the morning. I think you were awfully lucky to get such a good one. Isn't it a lovely day?"

"It looks like the rains are about over," he replied in a polite voice. After the first radiant glance they had not looked at each other. He chirped to the sorrel, and they drove away together.

Enveloped in the hood of the buggy-top, they saw before them the yellow road, winding on among the trees, disappearing, appearing again like a ribbon looped about the curves of the hills. There was gold in the green of the fields, gold in the poppies beside the road, gold in the ruddiness of young apricot twigs. The clear air itself was filled with vibrant, golden sunshine. They drove in a golden haze. What did they say? It did not matter. They looked at each other.

His arm lay along the back of the buggy-seat. Its being there was like a secret shared between them, a knowledge held in common, to be cherished and to be kept unspoken. When the increasing consciousness of it grew too poignant to be borne any longer in silence they escaped from it in sudden mutual panic, breathless. They left the buggy, tying the patient sorrel in the shade beneath a tree, and clambered up the hillside.

They went, they said, to gather wild flowers. He took her hand to help her up the trail, and she permitted it, stumbling, when unaided she could have climbed more easily, glad to feel that he was the leader, eager that he should think himself the stronger. At the top of the hill they came to a low-spreading live-oak with a patch of young grass beneath it, and here, forgetting the ungathered flowers, they sat down.

They sat there a long time, talking very seriously on grave subjects; life and the meaning of it, the bigness of the universe, and how it makes a fellow feel funny, somehow, when he looks at the stars at night and thinks about things. She understood. She felt that way herself sometimes. It was amazing to learn how many things they had felt in common. Neither of them had ever expected to find any one else who felt them, too.

Then there was the question of what to do with your life. It was a pretty important thing to decide. You didn't want to make mistakes, like so many men did. You had to start right. That was the point, the start. When you get to be eighteen or so, almost twenty, you realize that, and you look back over your life and see how you've wasted a lot of time already. You realize you better begin to do something.

Now here was the idea of learning telegraphy. That looked pretty good. If a fellow really went at that and worked hard, there was no telling what it might lead to. You might get to be a train-dispatcher or even a railroad superintendent. There were lots of big men who didn't have any better start than he had. Look at Edison.

She agreed. She was sure there was nothing he could not do. Somehow, then, they began to talk as if she would be with him. She might be a telegrapher, too. Wouldn't it be fun if she was, so they could be in the same town? He'd help her with the train orders, and if he worked nights she could fix his lunch for him.

They made a sort of play of it, laughing about it. They were only supposing, of course. They carefully refrained from voicing the thought that clamored behind everything they said, that set her heart racing and kept her eyes from meeting his, the thought of that young couple at Rollo.

And at the last, when they could no longer ignore the incredible fact that the afternoon was gone, that only a golden western sky behind the flat, blue mass of the hills remained to tell of the vanished sunlight, they rose reluctantly, hesitant. He had taken her two hands to help her to her feet. In the grayness of the twilight they looked at each other, and she felt the approach of a moment tremendous, irrevocable.

He was drawing her closer. She felt, with the pull of his hands, an urging within herself, a compulsion like a strong current, sweeping her away, merging her with something unknown, vast, beautifully terrible. Suddenly, in a panic, pushing him blindly away, she heard herself saying, "No—no! Please—" The tension of his arms relaxed.

"All right—if you don't want—I didn't mean—" he stammered. Their hands clung for a moment, uncertainly, then dropped apart. They stumbled down the dusky trail and drove home almost in silence.

Spring came capriciously that next year. She smiled unexpectedly upon the hills through long days of golden sunshine, coaxing wild flowers from the damp earth and swelling buds with her warm promise. She retreated again behind cold skies, abandoning eager petals and sap-filled twigs to the chill desolation of rain and the bitterness of frost.

Farmers trudging behind their plows felt her coming in the stir of the scented air, in the responsiveness of the springy soil and, looking up at the sparkling skies, felt a warmth in their own veins even while they shook their heads doubtfully. And rising in the dawns they tramped the orchard rows, bending tips of branches between anxious fingers, pausing to cut open a few buds on their calloused palms.

But to Helen the days were like notes in a melody. Linnet's songs and sunshine streaming through the attic windows or gray panes and rain on the roof were one to her. She woke to either as to a holiday. She slipped from beneath the patchwork quilt into a cold room and dressed with shivering fingers, hardly hearing Mabel's drowsy protests at being waked so early. Life was too good to be wasted in sleep. She seemed made of energy as she ran down the steep stairs to the kitchen. It swelled in her veins as a river frets against its banks in the spring floods.

Every sight and sound struck upon her senses with a new freshness. There was exhilaration in the bite of cold water on her skin when she washed in the tin basin on the bench by the door, and the smell of coffee and frying salt pork was good. She sang while she spread the red table-cloth on the kitchen table and set out the cracked plates.

She sang:

"You're as welcome as the flowers in Ma-a-ay,

And I—love you in the same o-o-old way."

It seemed to her that she was caroling aloud poetry so exquisite that all its meaning escaped the dull ears about her. She walked among them, alone, wrapped in a glory they could not perceive.

Even her mother's tight-lipped anxiety did not quite break through her happy absorption. Her mother worked silently, stepping heavily about the kitchen, now and then glancing through the window toward the barn. When her husband came clumping up the path and stopped at the back steps to scrape the mud from his boots, she went to the door and opened it, saying almost harshly, "Well?"

He said nothing, continuing for a moment to knock a boot heel against the edge of the step. Then he came slowly in, and began to dip water from the water pail into the wash-basin. The slump of his body in the sweat-stained overalls expressed nothing but weariness.

"I guess last night settled it," he said. "We won't get enough of a crop to pay to pick it. Outa twenty buds I cut on the south slope only four of 'em wasn't black."

His wife went back to the stove and turned the salt pork, holding her head back from the spatters. "What're we going to do about the mortgage?" The question filled a long silence. Helen's song was hushed, though the echoes of it still went on in some secret place within her, safe there even from this calamity.

"Same as we've always done, I guess," her father answered at last, lifting a dripping face and reaching for the roller towel. "See if I can get young Mason to renew it."

"Well, he will. Surely he will," Helen said. Her tone of cheerfulness was like a slender shaft splintering against a stone wall. "And there must be some fruit left. If there isn't much of a crop what we do get ought to bring pretty good prices, too."

"You're right it ought to," her father replied bitterly. "A good crop never brings 'em."

"Well, anyway, I'm through school now, and I'll be doing something," Helen said. She had no clear idea what it would be, but suddenly she felt in her youth and happiness a strength that her discouraged father and mother did not have. For the first time they seemed to her old and worn, exhausted by an unequal struggle, and she felt that she could take them up in her arms and carry them triumphantly to comfort and peace.

"Eat your breakfast and don't talk nonsense," her father said.

But her victorious mood revived while she washed the dishes. She felt older, stronger, and more confident than she had ever been. The news of the killing frost, which depressed her mother and quieted even Mabel's usual rebellion at having to help with the kitchen work, was to Helen a call to action. She splashed the dishes through the soapy water so swiftly that Mabel was aggrieved.

"You know I can't keep up," she complained. "It's bad enough to have the frost and never be able to get anything decent, and stick here in this old kitchen all the time, without having you act mean, too."

"Oh, don't start whining!" Helen began. They always quarreled about the dishes. "I'd like to know who did every smitch of work yesterday, while you went chasing off." But looking down at Mabel's sullen little face, she felt a wave of compassion. Poor little Mabel, whose whole heart had been set on a new dress this summer, who didn't have anything else to make her happy! "I don't mean to be mean to you, Mabel," she said. She put an arm around the thin, angular shoulders. "Never mind, everything'll be all right, somehow."

That afternoon when the ironing was finished she dressed in her pink gingham and best shoes. She was going to town for the mail, she explained to her mother, and when her sister said, "Why, you went day before yesterday!" she replied, "Well, I guess I'll just go to town, anyway. I feel like walking somewhere."

Her mother apparently accepted the explanation without further thought. The blindness of other people astonished Helen. It seemed to her that every blade of grass in the fields, every scrap of white cloud in the sky, knew that she was going to see Paul. The roadside cried it aloud to her.

She let her hand rest a moment on the gate as she went through. It was the gate on which they leaned when he brought her home from church on Sunday nights. She could feel his presence there still; she could almost see the dark mass of his shoulders against the starry sky, and the white blur of his face.

The long lane by Peterson's meadow was crowded with memories of him. Here they had stopped to gather poppies; there, just beside the gray stone, he had knelt one day to tie her shoe. On the little bridge shaded by the oak-trees they always stopped to lean on the rail and watch their reflections shot across by ripples of light in the stream below. She was dazzled by the beauty of the world as she went by all these places. The sky was blue. It was a revelation to her. She had never known that skies were blue with that heart-shaking blueness or that hills held golden lights and violet shadows on their green slopes. She had never seen that shadows in the late afternoon were purple as grapes, and that the very air held a faint tinge of orange light. It seemed to her that she had been blind all her life.

She stood some time on the little bridge, looking at all this loveliness, and she said his name to herself, under her breath "Paul." A quiver ran along her nerves at the sound of it.

He would be busy handling baggage at the station when Number Five came in. She thought of his sturdy shoulders in the blue work-shirt, the smooth forehead under his ragged cap, the straight-looking blue eyes and firm lips. She would stand a little apart, by the window where the telegraph-keys were clicking, and he would pass, pushing a hand-truck through the crowd on the platform. Their eyes would meet, and the look would be like a bond subtly uniting them in an intimacy unperceived by the oblivious people who jostled them. Then she would go away, walking slowly through the town, and he would overtake her on his way home to supper. She could tell him, then, about the frost. Her thoughts went no further than that. They stopped with Paul.

But before she reached his house she saw Sammy Harner frolicking in the road, hilarious in the first spring freedom of going barefoot. He skipped from side to side, his wide straw hat flapping; he shied a stone at a bird; he whistled shrilly between his teeth. When he saw her he sobered quickly and came trotting down the road, reaching her, panting.

"I was coming out to your house just 's fast as I could," he said. "I got a note for you." He sought anxiously in his pockets, found it in the crown of his hat. "He gave me a nickel, and said to wait if they's an answer."

She saw that his eyes were fixed curiously on her hands, which shook so with excitement that she could hardly tear the railway company's yellow envelope. She read:

Dear Friend Helen:

I have got a new job and I have to go to Ripley to-night where I am going to work. I would like to see you before I go, as I do not know when I can come back, but probably not for a long time. I did not know I was going till this afternoon and I have to go on the Cannonball. Can you meet me about eight o'clock by the bridge? I have to pack yet and I am afraid I cannot get time to come out to your house and I want to see you very much. Please answer by Sammy.

Your Friend, Paul.

Sammy's interested gaze had shifted from her hands to her face. It rested on her like an unbearable light. She could not think with those calm observant eyes upon her. She must think. What must she think about? Oh, yes, an answer. A pencil. She did not have a pencil.

"Tell him I didn't have a pencil," she said. "Tell him I said, 'Yes.'" And as Sammy still lingered, watching her with unashamed curiosity, she added sharply, "Hurry! Hurry up now!"

It was a relief to sit down, when at last Sammy had disappeared around the bend in the road. The whirling world seemed to settle somewhat into place then. She had never thought of Paul's going away. She wondered dully if it were a good job, and if he were glad to go.

CHAPTER III

She came down the road again a little after seven o'clock. It was another cold night, and the stars glittered frostily in a sky almost as black as the hills. The road lost itself in darkness before her, and the fields stretched out into a darkness that seemed illimitable, as endless as the sky. She felt herself part of the night and the cold.

For an eternity she walked up and down the road, waiting. Once she went as far as the top of the hill beyond the bridge, and saw shining against the blackness the yellow lights of his house. She looked at them for a long time. She thought that she would watch them until he came out. But she was driven to walking up and down, up and down, stumbling in the ruts of the road. At last she saw him coming, and stood still in the pool of darkness under the oaks until he reached her.

"Helen?" he said uncertainly. "Is it you?"

"Yes," she answered. Her throat ached.

"I came as quick as I could," he said. Somehow she knew that his throat ached, too. They moved to the little railing of the bridge and stood trying to see each other's faces in the gloom. "Are you cold?" he asked.

"No," she said. She saw then that the shawl had slipped from her shoulders and was dragging over one arm. The wind fluttered it, and her hands were clumsy, trying to pull it back into place.

"Here," he was taking off his coat. "No," she said again. But she let him wrap half the coat around her. They stood close together in the folds of it. The chilly wind flowed around them like water, and the warmth of their trembling bodies made a little island of cosiness in a sea of cold.

"I got to go," he said. "It's a good job. Fifty dollars a month. I got to support mother, you know. Her money's pretty nearly gone already, and she spent a lot putting me through school. I just got to go. I wish—I wish I didn't have to."

She tried to hold her lips steady.

"It's all right," she said. "I'm glad you got a good job."

"You mean you aren't going to miss me when I'm gone?"

"Yes, I'll miss you."

"I'm going to miss you an awful lot," he said huskily. "You going to write to me?"

"Yes, I'll write if you will."

"You aren't going to forget me—you aren't going to get to going with anybody else—are you?"

She could not answer. The trembling that shook them carried them beyond speech. Wind and darkness melted together in a rushing flood around them. The ache in her throat dissolved into tears, and they clung together, cheek against hot cheek, in voiceless misery.

"Oh, Helen! Oh, Helen!" She was crushed against the beating of his heart, his arms hurt her. She wanted them to hurt her. "You're so—you're so—sweet!" he stammered, and gropingly they found each other's lips.

Words came back to her after a time.

"I don't want you to go away," she sobbed.

His arms tightened around her, then slowly relaxed. His chin lifted, and she knew that his mouth was setting into its firm lines again.

"I got to," he said. The finality of the words was like something solid beneath their feet once more.

"Of course—I didn't mean—" She moved a little away from him, smoothing her hair with a shaking hand. A new solemnity had descended upon them both. They felt dimly that life had changed for them, that it would never be the same again.

"I got to think about things," he said.

"Yes—I know."

"There's mother. Fifty dollars a month. We just can't—"

Tears were welling slowly from her eyes and running down her cheeks. She was not able to stop them.

"No," she said. "I've got to do something to help at home, too." She groped for the shawl at her feet. He picked it up and wrapped it carefully around her.

They walked up and down in the starlight, trying to talk soberly, feeling very old and sad, a weight on their hearts. Ripley was a station in the San Joaquin valley, he told her. He was going to be night operator there. He could not keep a shade of self-importance from his voice, but he explained conscientiously that there would not be much telegraphing. Very few train orders were sent there at night. But it was a good job for a beginner and pretty soon maybe he would be able to get a better one. Say, when he was twenty or twenty-one seventy-five dollars a month perhaps. It wouldn't be long to wait. They were clinging together again.

"You—we mustn't," she said.

"It's all right—just one—when you're engaged." She sobbed on his shoulder, and their kisses were salty with tears.

He left her at her gate. The memory of all the times they had stood there was the last unbearable pain. They held each other tight, without speaking.

"You—haven't said—tell me you—love me," he stammered after a long time.

"I love you," she said, as though it were a sacrament. He was silent for another moment, and in the dim starlight she felt rather than saw a strange, half-terrifying expression on his face.

"Will you go away with me—right now—and marry me—if I ask you to?" His voice was hoarse.

She felt that she was taking all she was or could be in her cupped hands and offering it to him.

"Yes," she said.

His whole body shook with a long sob. He tried to say something, choking, tearing himself roughly away from her. She saw him going down the road, almost running, and then the darkness hid him.

In the days that followed it seemed to her that she could have borne the separation better if she had not been left behind. He had gone down the shining lines of track beyond Cherokee Hill into a vague big world that baffled her thoughts. He wrote that he had been in San Francisco and taken a ride on a sight-seeing car. It was a splendid place, he said; he wished she could see the things he saw. He had seen Chinatown, the Presidio, the beach, and Seal Rocks. Then he had gone on to Ripley, which wasn't much like Masonville. He was well, and hoped she was, and he thought of her every day and was hers lovingly. Paul. But she felt that she was losing touch with him, and when she contemplated two or three long years of waiting she felt that she would lose him entirely. She thought again of that young couple at Rollo, and pangs of envy were added to the misery in which she was living.

He had been gone two weeks when she announced to her mother that she was going to be a telegraph-operator. She held to the determination with a tenacity that surprised even herself. She argued, she pleaded, she pointed out the wages she would earn, the money she could send home. There was a notice in the Masonville weekly paper, advertising a school of telegraphy in Sacramento, saying: "Operators in great demand. Graduates earn $75 to $100 a month up." She wrote to that school, and immediately a reply came, assuring her that she could learn in three months, that railroad and telegraph companies were clamoring for operators, that the school guaranteed all its graduates good positions. The tuition was fifty dollars.

Her father said he guessed that settled it.

But in the end she won. When he renewed the mortgage he borrowed another hundred dollars from the bank. Fifty dollars seemed a fortune on which to live for three months. Her mother and she went over her clothes together, and her mother gave her the telescope-bag in which to pack them.

An awkward intimacy grew up between the two while they worked. Her mother said it was just as well for her to have a good job for a while. Maybe she wouldn't make a fool of herself, getting married before she knew her own mind. Helen said nothing. She felt that it was not easy to talk with one's mother about things like getting married.

Her mother said one other thing that stayed in her mind, perhaps because of its indefiniteness, perhaps because of her mother's embarrassment when she said it, an embarrassment that made them both constrained.

"There's something I got to say to you, Helen," she said, keeping her eyes on the waist she was ironing and flushing hotly. "Your father's still against this idea of your going away. He says first thing we know we'll have you back on our hands, in trouble. Now I want you should promise me if anything comes up that looks like it wasn't just right, you let me know right away, and I'll come straight down to Trenton and get you. I'm going to be worried about you, off alone in a city like that."

She promised quickly, uncertainly, and her mother began in a hurry to talk of something else. Mrs. Updike, who lived on the next farm, was going down to San Francisco to visit her sister. She would take Helen as far as Sacramento and see her settled there. Helen must be sure to eat her meals regularly and keep her clothes mended and write every week and study hard. She promised all those things.

There was a flurry on the last morning. Between tears and excitement, Mabel was half hysterical, Tommy kept getting in the way, her mother unpacked the bag a dozen times to be sure that nothing was left out. They all drove to town, crowded into the two-seated light wagon, and there was another flurry at the station when the train came in. She hugged them all awkwardly, smiling with tears in her eyes. She felt for the first time how much she loved them.

Until the train rounded the curve south of town she gazed back at Masonville and the little yellow station where Paul had worked. Then she settled back against red velvet cushions to watch unfamiliar trees and hills flashing backward past the windows. She had an excited sense of adventure, wondering what the school would be like, promising herself again to study hard. She and Mrs. Updike worried at intervals, fearing lest by some mischance Mr. Weeks, the manager of the school, would fail to meet them at the Sacramento station. They wore bits of red yarn in their buttonholes so that he would recognize them.

He was waiting when the train stopped. He was a thin, well-dressed man, with a young face that seemed oddly old, like a half-ripe apple withered. He hurried them through noisy, bustling streets, on and off street-cars, up a stairway at last to the school.

There were two rooms, a small one, which was the office, and a larger one, bare and not very clean, lighted by two high windows looking out on an alley. In the large room were half a dozen tables, each with a telegraph-sounder and key upon it. There was no one there at the moment, Mr. Weeks explained, because it was Saturday afternoon. The school usually did no business on Saturday afternoons, but he would make an exception for Helen. If she liked, he said briskly, she could pay him the tuition now, and begin her studies early Monday morning. He was sure she would be a good operator, and he guaranteed her a good position when she graduated. He would even give her a written guarantee, if she wished. But she did not ask for that. It would have seemed to imply a doubt of Mr. Weeks' good faith.

Mrs. Updike, panting from climbing the stairs and nervous with anxiety about catching her train, asked him about rooms. Providentially, he knew a very good one and cheap, next door to the school. He was kind enough to take them to see it.

There were a number of rooms in a row, all opening on a long hallway reached by stairs from the street. They were kept by Mrs. Brown, who managed the restaurant down-stairs. She was a sallow little woman, with very bright brown eyes and yellow hair. She talked continuously in a light, mechanically gay voice, making quick movements with her hands and moving about the room with a whisking of silk petticoats, driven, it seemed, by an intensity of energy almost feverish.

The room rented for six dollars a month. It had a large bow-window overlooking the street, gaily flowered wall-paper, a red carpet, a big wooden bed, a wash-stand with pitcher and bowl, and two rocking-chairs. At the end of the long hall was a bathroom with a white tub in it, the first Helen had seen. There was something metropolitan about that tub; a bath in it would be an event far different from the Saturday night scrubs in the tin wash-tub at home. And she could eat in the restaurant below; very good meals for twenty cents, or even for less if she wanted to buy a meal-ticket.

"I guess it's as good as you can do," said Mrs. Updike.

"I think it's lovely," Helen said.

So it was settled. Helen gave Mrs. Brown six dollars, and she whisked away after saying: "I'm sure I hope you'll like it, dearie, and if there's anything you want, you let me know. I sleep right in the next room, so nothing's going to bother you, and if you get lonesome, just come and knock on my door."

Then Mrs. Updike, with a hasty farewell peck at her cheek, hurried away to catch her train, Mr. Weeks going with her to take her to the station, and Helen was left alone.

She locked her door first, and counted her money, feeling very businesslike. Then she unpacked her bag and put away her things, pausing now and then to look around the room that was hers. It seemed very large and luxurious. She felt a pleasant sense of responsibility when everything was neatly in order and she stood at the window, looking down the street to the corner where at intervals she saw street-cars passing. She promised herself to work very hard, and to pay back soon the money her father had lent her, with interest.

Then she thought, smiling, that in a little while she would go down-stairs and eat supper in a restaurant, and then she would buy a tablet and pencil and, coming back to this beautiful room, she would sit down all alone and write a letter to Paul.

CHAPTER IV

The thought of Paul was the one clear reality in Helen's life while she blundered through the bewilderments of the first months in Sacramento. It was the only thing that warmed her in the midst of the strangeness that surrounded her like a thin, cold fog.

There was the school. She did not know what she had expected, but she felt vaguely that she had not found it. Faithfully every morning at eight o'clock she was at her table in the dingy back room, struggling to translate the dots and dashes of the Morse alphabet into crisp, even clicks of the sounder. There were three other pupils, farm boys who moved their necks uncomfortably in stiff collars and reddened when they looked at her.

There was a wire from that room into the front office. Sometimes its sounder opened, and they knew that Mr. Weeks was going to send them something to copy. They moved to that table eagerly. There were days when the sounder did not click again, and after a while one of the boys would tiptoe to the office and report that Mr. Weeks was asleep. On other days the sounder would tap for a long time meaninglessly, while they looked at each other in bewilderment. Then it would make a few shaky letters and stop and make a few more.

Then for several days Mr. Weeks would not come to the school at all. They sank into a kind of stupor, sitting in the close, warm room, while flies buzzed on the window-pane. Helen's moist finger-tips stuck to the hard rubber of the key; it was an effort to remember the alphabet. But she kept at work doggedly, knowing how much depended upon her success. Always before her was the vision of the station where she would work with Paul, a little yellow station with housekeeping rooms up-stairs. She thought, too, of the debt she owed her father, and the help she could give him later when she was earning money.

Bit by bit she learned a little about the other pupils. Two of them had come down from Mendocino County together. They had worked two summers to earn the money, and yet they had been able to save only seventy-five dollars for the tuition. However, they had been sharp enough to persuade Mr. Weeks to take them for that sum. They lived together in one room, and cooked their meals over the gas-jet. It was one of them who asked Helen if she knew that gas would kill a person.

"If you turned it on for a long time and set fire to it, I suppose it would burn you up," she said doubtfully.

"I don't mean that way," he informed her, excited. "It kills you if you just breathe it long enough. It's poison." After that she looked with terrified respect at the gas-jet in her room, and was always very careful to turn it off tightly.

The other boy had a more knowing air and smoked cigarettes. He swaggered a little, giving them to understand that he was a man of the world and knew all the wickedness of the city. He looked at Helen with eyes she did not like, and once asked her to go to a show with him. Although she was very lonely and had never seen a show in a real theater, she refused. She felt that Paul would not like her to go. At the end of three months in Sacramento these were the only people she knew, except Mrs. Brown.

She felt that she would like Mrs. Brown if she knew her better. Her shyness kept her from saying more than "Good evening," when she handed her meal-ticket over the restaurant counter to be punched, and for some inexplicable reason Mrs. Brown seemed shy with her. It was her own fault, Helen thought; Mrs. Brown laughed and talked gaily with the men customers, cajoling them into buying cigars and chewing-gum from her little stock.

Helen speculated about Mr. Brown. She never saw him; she felt quite definitely that he was not alive. Yet Mrs. Brown often looked at her wide wedding-ring, turning it on her finger as if she were not quite accustomed to wearing it. A widow, and so young! Helen's heart ached at the thought of that brief romance. Mrs. Brown's thin figure and bright yellow hair were those of a girl; only her eyes were old. It must be grief that had given them that hard, weary look. Helen smiled at her wistfully over the counter, longing to express her friendliness and sympathy. But Mrs. Brown's manner always baffled her.

These meetings were not frequent. Helen tried to make her three-dollar meal ticket last a month, and that meant that only five times a week she could sit in state, eating warm food in an atmosphere thick with smells of coffee and stew and hamburger steak. She had learned that cinnamon rolls could be bought for half price on Saturday nights, and she kept a bag of them in her room, and some fruit. This made her a little uneasy when she saw Mrs. Brown's anxious eye on the vacant tables; she felt that she was defrauding Mrs. Brown by eating in her room.

Mrs. Brown worked very hard, Helen knew. It was she who swept the hall and kept the rooms in order. She did not do it very well, but Helen saw her sometimes in the evenings working at it. She swept with quick, feverish strokes. Her yellow hair straggled over her face; her high heels clicked on the floor; her petticoats made a whisking sound. There was something piteous about her, as there is about a little trained animal on the stage, set to do tasks for which it is not fitted. Helen stole down the hallway at night, taking the broom from its corner as if she was committing a theft, and surreptitiously swept and dusted her own room, so that Mrs. Brown would not have to do it.

She wished that it took more time. When she had finished there was nothing to do but sit at her window and look down at the street. People went up and down, strolling leisurely in the warm summer evening. She saw girls in dainty dresses, walking about in groups, and the sight increased her loneliness. Buggies went by; a man with his wife and children out driving, a girl and her sweetheart. At the corner there was the clanging of street-cars, and she watched to see them passing, brightly lighted, filled with people. Once in a while she saw an automobile, and her breath quickened, she leaned from the window until it was out of sight. She felt then the charm of the city, with its crowds, its glitter, its strange, hurried life.

Two young men passed often down that street in an automobile. They looked up at her window when they went by and slowed the machine. If she were leaning on the sill, they waved to her and shouted gaily. She always pretended that she had not seen them, and drew back, but she watched for the machine to pass again. It seemed to be a link between her and all that exciting life from which she was shut out. She would have liked to know those young men.

She sat at the window one evening near the end of the three months that she had planned to spend in the telegraph school. Paul's picture was in her hand. He had had it taken for her in Ripley. It was a beautiful, shiny picture, cabinet size, showing him against a tropical background of palms and ferns. He had taken off a derby hat, which he held self-consciously; his stocky figure wore an air of prosperity in an unfamiliar suit.

She brooded upon the firm line of his chin, the clean-cut lips, the smooth forehead from which the hair was brushed back slickly. His neck was turned so that his eyes did not quite meet hers. It was baffling, that aloof gaze; it hurt a little. She wished that he would look at her. She felt that the picture would help her more if he would, and she needed help.

Mr. Weeks had returned from one of his long absences that day, and she had taken courage to ask him about a job. He had listened while she stood beside his desk, stammering out her worry and her need. Her money was almost gone; she thought she telegraphed pretty well, she had studied hard. She watched his shaking hand fumbling with some papers on his desk, and felt pityingly that she should not bother him when he was sick. But desperation drove her on. She did not suspect the truth until he looked up at her with reddened eyes and answered incoherently. Then she saw that he was drunk.

Her shock of loathing came upon her in a wave of nausea. She trembled so that she could hardly get down the stairs, and she had walked a long time in the clean sunshine before the full realization of what it meant chilled her. She sat now confronting that realization.

She had only two dollars, a half-used meal-ticket, and a week's rent paid in advance. She saw clearly that she could hope for nothing from the telegraph school. It did not occur to her to blame anybody. Her mind ran desperately from thought to thought, like a caged creature seeking escape between iron bars.

She could not go home. She could not live there again, defeated, knowing day by day that she had added a hundred dollars to the mortgage. She had told Paul so confidently that she could do as well as a boy if she had the chance, and she had had the chance. He could not help her. The street below was full of happy people going by, absorbed in their own concerns, careless of hers.

She had not seen the automobile with the two young men in it until it stopped across the street. Even then she saw it dimly with dull eyes. But the two young men were looking up at her window, talking together, looking up again. They were getting out. They crossed the street. She heard their voices below, and a moment later her heart began to thump. They were coming up the stairs.

Something was going to happen. At last something was going to break the terrible loneliness and deadness. She stood listening, one hand at her throat, alert, breathless.

They were standing half-way up the stairs, talking. She felt indecision in the sound of their voices. One of them ran down again. There was an aching silence. Then she heard footsteps and the high, gay voice of Mrs. Brown. They were laughing together. "Oh, you Kittie!" one of the young men said. The three came up the stairs, and she heard their clattering steps and caught a word or two as they went past her room. Then the scratch of a match, and light gleamed through the crack of Mrs. Brown's door.

They went on talking. It appeared that they were arguing, coaxing, urging something. Mrs. Brown's voice put them off. There was a crash and laughter. She gathered that they were scuffing playfully. Later she heard Mrs. Brown's voice at the head of the back stairs, calling down to some one to send up some beer.

Her tenseness relaxed. She felt herself falling into bottomless depths of depression. The bantering argument was going on again. Meaningless scraps of it came to her while she undressed in the dark and crept into bed.

"Aw, come on, Kittie, be a sport! A stunning looker like that! What're you after anyhow—money?"

"Cut that out. No, I tell you. What's it to you why I won't?"

She crushed her face into the pillow and wept silently. It seemed the last unkindness of fate that Mrs. Brown should give a party and not ask her.

CHAPTER V

The next day she dressed very carefully in a fresh white waist and her Indianhead skirt and went down to the telegraph-office to ask for a job. She knew where to find the office; she had often looked at its plate-glass front lettered in blue during her lonely walks on the crowded street. Her heart thumped loudly and her knees were weak when she went through the open door.

The big room was cut across by a long counter, on which a young man lounged in his shirt-sleeves, a green eye-shade pushed back on his head. Behind him telegraph instruments clattered loudly, disturbing the stifling quiet of the hot morning. The young man looked at her curiously.

"Manager? Won't I do?" he asked.

She heard her voice quavering:

"I'd rather see him—if he's busy—I could—wait."

The manager rose from the desk where he had been sitting. He was a tall, thin man, with thin hair combed carefully over the top of his head. His lips were thin, too, and there were deep creases on either side of his mouth, like parentheses. His eyes looked her over, interested. He was sorry, he said. He didn't need another operator. She had experience?

She was a graduate of Weeks' School of Telegraphy, she told him breathlessly. She could send perfectly, she wasn't so sure of her receiving, but she would be awfully careful not to make mistakes. She had to have a job, she just had to have a job; it didn't matter how much it paid, anything. She felt that she could not walk out of that office. She clung to the edge of the counter as if she were drowning and it were a life-line.

"Well—come in. I'll see what you can do," he said. He swung open a door in the counter, and she followed him between the tables. There was a dusty instrument on a battered desk, back by the big switchboard. The manager took a message from a hook and gave it to her. "Let's hear you send that."

She began painstakingly. The young man with the eye-shade had wandered over. He stood leaning against a table, listening, and after she had made a few letters she felt that a glance passed between him and the manager, over her head. She finished the message, even adding a careful period. She thought she had done very well. When she looked up the manager said kindly:

"Not so bad! You'll be an operator some day."

"If you'll only give me a chance," she pleaded.

He said that he would take her address and let her know. She felt that the young man was slightly amused. She gave the manager her name and the street number. He repeated it in surprise.

"You're staying with Kittie Brown?" Again a glance passed over her head. Both of them looked at her with intensified interest, for which she saw no reason. "Yes," she replied. She felt keenly that it was an awkward moment, and bewilderment added to her confusion. The young man turned away and, sitting down, began to send a pile of messages, working very busily, sending with his right hand and marking off the messages with his left. But she felt that his attention was still upon her and the manager.

"Well! And you want to work here?" The manager rubbed one hand over his chin, smiling. "I don't know. I might."

"Oh, if you would!"

He hesitated for an agonizing moment.

"Well, I'll think about it. Come and see me again." He held her fingers warmly when they shook hands, and she returned the pressure gratefully. She felt that he was very kind. She felt, too, that she had conducted the interview very well, and returning hope warmed her while she went back to her room.

That afternoon she had a visitor. She had written her weekly letter to her mother, saying that she had almost finished school and was expecting to get a job, hesitating a long time, miserably, before she added that she did not have much money left and would like to borrow another five dollars. She had eaten a stale roll and an apple and was considering how long she could make the meal-ticket last when she heard the knock on her door.

She opened it in surprise, thinking there had been a mistake. A stout, determined-looking woman stood there, a well-dressed woman who wore black gloves and a veil. Immediately Helen felt herself young, inexperienced, a child in firm hands.

"You're Helen Davies? I'm Mrs. Campbell." She stepped into the room, Helen giving way before her assured advance. She swept the place with one look. "What on earth was your mother thinking of, leaving you in a place like this? Did you know what you were getting into?"

"I don't—what—w-won't you take a chair?" said Helen.

Mrs. Campbell sat down gingerly, very erect. They looked at each other.

"I might as well talk straight out to you," Mrs. Campbell said, as if it were a customary phrase. "I met Mrs. Morris, Mrs. Updike's sister, at the lodge convention in Oakland last week, and she told me about you, and I promised to look you up. Well, when I found out! I told Mr. Campbell I was coming straight down here to talk to you. If you want to stay in a place like this, well and good, it's your affair. Though I should feel it my duty to write to your mother. I wouldn't want my own girl left in a strange town, at your age, and nobody taking any interest in her."

"I'm sure it's very kind." Helen murmured in bewilderment.

"Well,"—Mrs. Campbell drew a long breath and plunged,—"I suppose you know the sort of person this Kittie Brown, she calls herself, is? I suppose you know she's a bad woman?"

A wave of blackness went through the girl's mind.

"Everybody in town knows what she is," Mrs. Campbell continued. "Everybody knows—" She went on, her voice growing more bitter. Helen, half hearing the words, choked back a sick impulse to ask her to stop talking. She felt that everything about her was poisoned; she wanted to escape, to hide, to feel that she would never be seen again by any one. When the hard voice had stopped it was an effort to speak.

"But—what will I do?"

"Do? I should think you'd want to get out of here just as quick as you could."

"Oh, I do want to. But where can I go? I—my rent's paid. I haven't any money."

Mrs. Campbell considered.

"Well, you will have money, won't you? Your folks don't expect you to live here on nothing, do they? If it's only a day or two, I could take you in myself rather than leave you in a place like this. There's plenty of decent places in town." She became practical. "The first thing to do's to pack your things right away. How long is your rent paid? Can't you get some of it back?"

She waited while Helen packed. She did not stop talking, and Helen tried to answer her coherently and gratefully. She felt that she should be grateful. They went down the stairs, and Mrs. Campbell waited outside the restaurant while Helen went in to ask Mrs. Brown to refund the week's rent.

It was noon, but there were only one or two people in the restaurant. Mrs. Brown's smile faded when Helen stammered that she was leaving.

"You are? What's wrong? Anybody been bothering you?" Her glance fell upon the waiting Mrs. Campbell, and her sallow face whitened. "Oh, that's it, is it?"

"No," Helen said hastily. "That is, it's been very nice here, and I liked it, but a friend of mine—she wants me to stay with her. I'm sorry to leave, but I haven't much money." She struggled against feeling pity for Mrs. Brown. She choked over asking her to refund the rent.

Mrs. Brown said she could not do it. She offered, however, to give Helen something in trade, two dollars' worth. They both tried to make the transaction commonplace and dignified.

Helen, at a loss, pointed out a heap of peanut candy in the glass counter. She had often looked at it and wished she could afford to buy some. Mrs. Brown's thin hands shook, but she was piling the candy on the scale when Mrs. Campbell came in.

"What's she doing?" Mrs. Campbell asked Helen. "You buying candy?"

"I don't know what business it is of yours, coming interfering with me!" Mrs. Brown broke out. "I never did her any harm. I never even talked to her. You ask her if I ever bothered her. You ask her if I didn't leave her alone. You ask her if I ain't keeping a decent, respectable, quiet place and doing the best I can and minding my own business and trying to make a square living. You ask her what I ever did to her all the time she's been here." Her voice was high and shrill. Tears were rolling down her face. Mechanically she went on breaking up the candy and piling it on the scales. "I don't know what I ever did to you that you don't leave me alone, coming poking around."

"I didn't come here to talk to you," said Mrs. Campbell. "Come on out of here," she commanded Helen.

"I wish to God you'd mind your own business!" Mrs. Brown cried after them. "If you'd only tend to your own affairs, you good people!" She hurled the words after them like a curse, her voice breaking with sobs. The door slammed under Mrs. Campbell's angry hand.

Helen, shaking and quivering, tried not to be sorry for Mrs. Brown. She was ashamed of the feeling. She knew that Mrs. Campbell did not have it. Hurrying to keep pace with that furious lady's haste down the street, she was overwhelmed with shame and confusion. The whole affair was like a splash of mud upon her. Her cheeks were red, and she could not make herself meet Mrs. Campbell's eyes.

Even when they were on the street-car, safely away from it all, her awkwardness increased. Mrs. Campbell herself was a little disconcerted then. She looked at Helen, at the bulging telescope-bag, the shabby shoes, and the faded sailor hat, and Helen felt the gaze like a burn. She knew that Mrs. Campbell was wondering what on earth to do with her.

Pride and helplessness and shame choked her. She tried to respond to Mrs. Campbell's efforts at conversation, but she could not, though she knew that her failure made Mrs. Campbell think her sullen. Her rescuer's impatient tone was cutting her like the lash of a whip before they got off the car.

Mrs. Campbell lived in splendor in a two-story white house on a complacent street. The smoothness of the well-kept lawns, the immaculate propriety of the swept cement walks, cried out against Helen's shabbiness. She had never been so aware of it. When she was seated in Mrs. Campbell's parlor, oppressed by the velvet carpet and the piano and the bead portieres, she tried to hide her feet beneath the chair and did not know what to do with her hands.

She answered Mrs. Campbell's questions because she must, but she felt that her last coverings of reticence and self-respect were being torn from her. Mrs. Campbell offered only one word of advice.

"The thing for you to do is to go home."

"No," Helen said. "I—I can't—do that."

Mrs. Campbell looked at her curiously, and again the red flamed in Helen's cheeks. She said nothing about the mortgage. Mrs. Campbell had not asked about that.

"Well, you can stay here a few days."

She lugged the telescope-bag up the stairs, the wooden steps of which shone like glass. Mrs. Campbell showed her a room at the end of the hall. A mass of things filled it; children's toys, old baskets, a broken chair. It was like the closets at home, but larger. It was large enough to hold a narrow white iron bed, a wash-stand, and a chair, and still leave room to swing the door open. These things appeared when Mrs. Campbell had dragged out the others.

Watching her swift, efficient motions in silence, Helen tried again to feel gratitude. But the fact that Mrs. Campbell expected it made it impossible. She could only stand awkwardly, longing for the moment when she would be alone. When at last Mrs. Campbell went down-stairs she shut the door quickly and softly. She wanted to fling herself on the sagging bed and cry, but she did not. She stood with clenched hands, looking into the small, blurred mirror over the wash-stand. A white, tense face looked back at her with burning eyes. She said to it, "You're going to do something, do you hear? You're going to do something quick!" Although she did not know what she could do, she could keep her self-control by telling herself that she would do something.

Some time later she heard the shouts of children and the clatter of pans in the kitchen below. It was almost supper-time. She took a cinnamon roll from the paper sack in her bag, but she could not eat it. She was looking at it when Mrs. Campbell called up the back stairs, "Miss Davies! Come to supper."

She braced herself and went down. It was a good supper, but she could not eat very much. Mr. Campbell sat at the head of the table, a stern-looking man who said little except to speak sharply to the children when they were too noisy. There were two children, a girl of nine and a younger boy in a sailor suit. They looked curiously at Helen and did not reply when she tried to talk to them. She perceived that they had been told to leave her alone, and she felt that her association with a woman like Mrs. Brown was still visible upon her like a splash of mud.

When she timidly offered to help with the dishes after supper Mrs. Campbell told her that she did not need any help. Her tone was not unkind, but Helen felt the rebuff, and fearing she would cry, she went quickly up-stairs.

She looked at Paul's picture for some time before she put it back into her bag where she thought Mrs. Campbell would not see it. Then, sitting on the edge of the bed under a flickering gas-jet, she wrote him a long letter. She told him that she had moved, and in describing the street, the beautiful house, the furniture in the parlor, she drew such a picture of comfort and happiness that its reflection warmed her somewhat. It was a beautiful letter, she thought, reading it over several times before she carefully turned out the gas and went to bed.

Early in the morning she went to the telegraph-office and pleaded again for a job. Mr. Roberts, the manager, was very friendly, talking to her for some time and patting her hand in a manner which she thought fatherly and found comforting. He told her to come back. He might do something.

She went back every morning for a week, and often in the afternoons. The rest of the time she wandered in the streets or sat on a bench in the park. She felt under such obligations when she ate Mrs. Campbell's food that several times she did not return to the house until after dark, when supper would be finished. She had to ring the door-bell, for the front door was kept locked, and each time Mrs. Campbell asked her sharply where she had been. She always answered truthfully.

At the end of the week she received a letter from her mother, telling her to come home at once and sending her five dollars for the fare. Mrs. Campbell had written to her, and she was horrified and alarmed.

Your father says we might have known it and saved our money, and I blame myself for ever letting you go. I don't say it will be easy for you here, short as we are this winter, but you ought to be glad you have a good home to come to even if it isn't very fine, and don't worry about the money, for your father won't say a word. Just you come home right away. Lovingly,

Your Mother

Helen hated Mrs. Campbell. What right had that woman to worry her mother? Helen could get along all right by herself, and she wrote her mother that she could. She had a job at last. Mr. Roberts had made a place for her in the office, as a clerk at five dollars a week. She did not mention the wages to her mother; she said only that she had a job, and her mother was not to worry. She would be making more money soon and could send some home.

The letter had been waiting for her, propped on the hall table, when she hurried in, eager to tell Mrs. Campbell the glad news. Her anger when she read it was obscurely a relief. The compulsion to feel gratitude toward Mrs. Campbell was lifted from her. She wrote her answer and hastened to drop it in the corner mail-box.

Running back to the house, she met Mrs. Campbell returning from a sewing-circle meeting. Mrs. Campbell was neatly hatted and gloved, and the expression in her pale blue eyes behind the dotted veil suddenly made Helen realize how blow-away she looked, bare-headed, her loosened hair ruffled by the breeze, her blouse sagging under the arms. She stood awkwardly self-conscious while Mrs. Campbell unlocked the front door.

"Did you get your mother's letter?"

"Yes. I got it."

"Well, what did she say?"

Helen did not answer that.

"I got a job," she said. Her breath came quickly.

"You have? What kind of job?"

Helen told her. They were in the hall now, standing by the golden-oak hat-rack at the foot of the stairs. The children watched, wide-eyed, in the parlor door.

Perplexity and disgust struggled on Mrs. Campbell's face.

"You think you're going to live in Sacramento on five dollars a week?"

"I'm going to. I got to. I'll manage somehow. I won't go home!" Helen cried, confronting Mrs. Campbell like an antagonist.

"Oh, I don't doubt you'll manage!" Mrs. Campbell said cuttingly. She went down the hall, and the slam of the dining-room door shouted that she washed her hands of the whole affair.

She came up the back stairs half an hour later. Helen was sitting on the bed, her bag packed, trying to plan what to do. She had only the five dollars. It would be two weeks before she could get more money from the office. Mrs. Campbell opened the door without knocking.

"I'm going to talk this over with you," she said, patient firmness in her tone. "Don't you realize you can't get a decent room and anything to eat for five dollars a week? Do you think it's right to expect your folks to support you, poor as they are? It isn't—"

"I don't expect them to!" Helen cried.

"As though you didn't have a good home to go back to," Mrs. Campbell conveyed subtly that a well-bred girl did not interrupt while an older woman was speaking. "Now be reasonable about this, my—"

"I won't go back," Helen said. She lifted miserable eyes to Mrs. Campbell's, and the expression she saw there reminded her of a horse with his ears laid back.