The Boss of Little Arcady

by Harry Leon Wilson

"THE BOOK OF LITTLE MISS."

[CHAPTER XXII]

THE TIME OF DREAMS

I had Clem to myself for a time. Little Miss, it seemed, was not yet rugged enough for travel into the far Little Country. Nor was she at once to be convinced that she might safely leave her work. I suspect that she had found cause in the past to rank her mother with Clem as a weigher and disburser of moneys. I noticed that she chose to accept Miss Caroline's earliest letters about their good fortune with a sort of half-tolerant attention, as an elder listens to the wonder-tales of an imaginative child, or as I had long listened to Clem's own dreamy-eyed recital of the profits already his from "brillions" of chickens not yet come even to the egg-stage of their careers.

Not until Miss Caroline had ceased from large and beauteous phrases about "the great good fortune that has befallen us in the strangest manner"—not until she descended to actual, dumfounding figures with powerful little dollar-marks back of them, did her daughter seem to permit herself the sweet alarms of hope. Even in that moment she did not forget that she knew her own mother, for she took the precaution to elicit a confirmatory letter from her mother's attorney, under guise of thanking him for the friendly interest he had "ever manifested" in the welfare of the Lansdales.

It occurred to me that Little Miss had been endowed, either by nature or experience, with a marked distrust of mere seemings. The impression conveyed to me by her unenthusiastic though skilfully polite letter was of one who had formed the habit of doubting beyond her years. These I judged to be twenty-eight or thereabouts, while her powers of restraint under provocation to believe savored of more years than even her mother could claim. I had myself been compelled to note the value of negative views, save in that inner and lonely world where I abode of nights and Sundays; I, too, had proved the wisdom of much doubting as to actual, literal events; but Little Miss was making me think of myself as almost raw-and-twenty credulous. In a lawyer's letter of formal conciseness, devoid of humanities, maintaining to the end an atmosphere of unemotional fact and figure that descended not even to conventional felicitations upon the result, I therefore acquainted Little Miss with the situation. So nearly perfect was this letter that it caused her to refer to me, in a later communication to Miss Caroline, as "your dry-and-dusty counting-machine of a lawyer, who doubtless considers the multiplication table as a cycle of sonnets." That, after I had merely determined to meet her palpable needs and had signed myself her obedient servant!

But I had convinced her. She admitted as much in words almost joyous, so that Miss Caroline went to be with her—to fetch her when she should be strong enough for the adventure of travel.

There were three weeks of my neighbor's absence—three weeks in which Clem "cleaned house", polished the battered silver, "neated" the rooms, and tried to arrange the remaining furniture so that it would look like a great deal of furniture indeed; three weeks in which Little Arcady again decked itself with June garlands and seemed not, at first glance, to belie its rather pretentious name; three weeks when I studied a calendar which impassively averred that I was thirty-five, a mirror which added weight to that testimony, and the game which taught me with some freshness at each failure that the greater game it symbolizes is not meant to be won—only to be played forever with as eager a zest, as daring a hope, as if victory were sure.

The season at hand found me in sore need of this teaching. It was then that errant impulse counselled rebellion against the decrees of calendar and looking-glass. If vatted wine in dark cellars turns in its bed and mutters seethingly at this time, in a mysterious, intuitive sympathy with the blossoming grape, a man free and above ground, with eyes to behold that miracle, may hardly hope to escape an answering thrill to its call.

Wherefore I played the game diligently, torn by the need of its higher lessons. And at last I was well instructed by it, as all may be who approach it thus, above a trivial lust for winning.

Two of us played in that provocative June. One was myself, alert for auspicious falls of the cards, yet stoical and undepressed when a deal promising to be almost too easy for interest was suddenly blocked by some trifling card. Thus was I schooled to expectations of a wise shallowness, not so deep but that they might be overrun by the moderate flow of human happiness. Thus one learned to expect little under much wanting, and to find his most certain profit in observing the freshness of those devices which left him frustrated. Jim, the other player of us, chased gluttonous robins on the lawn, ever with an indifferent success, but with as undimmed a faith, as fatuous a certainty, as the earliest of gods could have wished to see. And between us we achieved a conviction that the greater game is worth playing, even when one has discovered its terrific percentage of failures.

I was not unpleased to be alone during this period of discipline when my soul was perforce purged of its troublesome ferments. It was well that my neighbor should have gone where she might distract me never so little.

For it was at the season when Nature brews the irresistible philter. Always, I resolved to forego it like a man; always, like a man, I was overborne by the ancient longing, the formless "heimweh" that haunts the hearts of the unmated, and which in my own case made short work of stoic resolutions. And, since the game had taught me that yielding—where opposition is fated to avail not—is graceful in proportion to its readiness, I surrendered as quietly as might be.

One woman face had been wholly mine for hidden cherishing through all the years. A woman face, be it understood, not the face of a woman. At first it had been that; but with the years it had lost the lines that made it but that one. Imperceptibly, it had taken on an alien, vague softness that but increased its charm while diminishing its power to hurt.

It brought me now only a pensive pleasure and no feeling more acute. It was my ashes of roses, the music of my first love, its poignancies softened by time and memory into an ineffable, faint melody; it was the moon that drenched my bygone youth with wonder-light—a dream-face, exquisite as running water, unfolding flowers and those other sweets that poets try in vain to entangle in the meshes of word and rhythm.

This was the face my fancy brought to go with me into every June garden of familiar surprises. All of which meant that I was a poor thing of clay and many dolors, who still perversely made himself believe that somewhere between him and God was the one woman, breathing and conscious, perhaps even longing. More plainly, it meant that I was a man whose gift for self-fooling promised ably to survive his hair. Gravitation would presently pull down my shoulders, my face would flaunt "the wrinkled spoils of age", my voice would waver ominously, and I should forfeit the dignities befitting even this decay by still playing childish games of belief with some foolish dog. I would be a village "character" of the sort that is justly said to "dodder." And the judicious would shun observation by me, or, if it befell them, would affect an intense preoccupation lest I halt and dodder to them of a past unromantically barren.

There were moments in which I made no doubt of all this. But I fought them off as foolishly as did Jim his own intervals of clear seeing. Sometimes in a half doze he breathes a long, almost human sigh of perfect and despairing comprehension, as if the whole dead weight of his race's history flashed upon him; as if the woful failure of his species to achieve anything worth while, and the daily futilities of himself as an individual dog were suddenly revealed. In such instants he knows, perhaps, that there is little reward in being a dog, unless you cheat yourself by believing more than the facts warrant. But presently he is up to dash at a bird, with a fine forgetfulness, quite as startled by the trick of flight as in his first days. And I, envying him his gift of credulity, weakly strive for it.

As I have said, I had noted that in these free dreamings of mine the painted face above my neighbor's mantel seemed to have had a place long before I looked upon its actual lines. This perplexed me not a little; that the face should seem to have been familiar before I had seen it—the portrait, that it should have blended with and then almost replaced another's, so that now the woman face I saw was eloquent of two, though fittingly harmonized in itself. Must I lay to the philter's magic this audacious notion; that the face of Little Miss had tangibly come to me in some night of the mind? Sober, I was loath to commit this absurdity; but breasting drunkenly that tide of dreams, it ceased to be absurd.

And so I had plunged into the current again one early evening when the growing things seemed to have stopped reluctantly for rest, when the robins had fluted of their household duties the last time for the day, and when only the songs of children at a game were brought to me from a neighboring yard.

Unconsciously my thoughts fell into the rhythm of this song, with the result that I presently listened to catch its words—faint, childish, laughing, yet musical in the scented dusk:—

"King William was King James's son and from the royal race he sprung;
Upon his breast he wore a star that showed the royal points of war.
Go choose your east and choose your west, and choose the one that you love best.
If she's not here to take your part, go choose another with all your heart.
Down on this carpet you must kneel, low as the grass grows in yon field.
Salute your bride and kiss her sweet, and then arise upon your feet."

The sentiment was ill suited to my own at the moment, but the raw-voiced little singers appealed to my ears not unpleasantly. Again the verse came—

"If she's not here to take your part—go choose another with all your heart!"

I heard wheels then, nearer than the singing,—the clumsy rumble of our big yellow 'bus. Voices were borne to me,—Clem's voice, Miss Caroline's and another not like her's, a voice firmer, yet a dusky-warm woman's voice. That was all I could think of at the time: perhaps the night suggested it; they had qualities in common. It was a woman's voice, but a determined woman's. I knew of course that Little Miss had come. But also I knew at once—this being her voice—that it would not be in my power to call her Little Miss.

[CHAPTER XXIII]

THE STRAIN OF PEAVEY

It was too true that I could not call her "Little Miss," as I had lightly called her mother "Miss Caroline" at our first encounter. Of a dusky pallor was Miss Lansdale when I first beheld her under the night of her hair. As the waning light showed me her, I thought of a blossomed young sloe tree in her own far valley of the Old Dominion. Closer to her I could note only that she was dark but fair, for observations of this character became, for some reason, impracticable in her immediate presence.

She greeted me kindly, as her mother's lawyer; she was cordial to me a moment, as her mother's friend; but later, when these debts of civility had been duly paid, when we had gone from the outer dusk into candle light, she favored me only with occasional glances of the mildest curiosity, in which was neither kindness nor cordiality. Not that these had given way to their opposites; they were simply not there. Not the faintest hint of unfriendliness could I detect. Miss Lansdale had merely detached herself into a magnificent void of disinterest, from the centre of which she surveyed me without prejudice in moments when her glance could not be better occupied.

I have caught much the same look in the eyes of twelve bored jurymen who were, nevertheless, bound to give my remarks their impartial attention. Sometimes one may know from the look of these twelve that one's case is already as good as lost; or, at least, that an opinion has been reached which new and important testimony will be required to change.

It occurred to me as my call wore on that I caught even a hint of this prejudgment in the eyes of the young woman. It put me sorely at a disadvantage, for I knew not what I was expected to prove; knew not if I were on trial as her mother's lawyer, her mother's friend, or as a mere man. The latter seemed improbable as an offence, for was not my judge a daughter of Miss Caroline? And yet, strangely enough, I came to think that this must be my offence—that I was a man. She made me feel this in her careless, incidental glances, her manner of turning briskly from me to address her mother with a warmer show of interest than I had been able to provoke.

It seemed, indeed, opportune to remember at the moment that, while this alleged Little Miss was the daughter of Miss Caroline, she was likewise—and even more palpably, as I could note by fugitive swift glimpses of her face—the daughter of a gentleman whose metal had been often tried; one who had won his reputation as much by self-possession under difficulties as by the militant spirit that incurred them.

"Kate has little of the Peavey in her,—she is every inch a Lansdale," Miss Caroline found occasion to say; while I, thus provided with an excuse to look, remarked to myself that her inches, while not excessive, were unusually meritorious.

"Worse than that—she's a Jere Lansdale," was my response, though I tactfully left it unuttered for an "Indeed?" that seemed less emotional. I could voice my deeper conviction not more explicitly than by saying further to Miss Caroline, "Perhaps that explains why she has the effect of making her mother seem positively immature."

"My mother is positively immature," remarked the daughter, with the air of telling something she had found out long since.

"Then perhaps the other is the false effect," I ventured. "It is your mother's immaturity that makes you seem so—" I thought it kind to hesitate for the word, but Miss Lansdale said, again confidently:—

"Oh, but I really am," and this with a finality that seemed to close the incident.

Her voice had the warm little roughness of a thrush's, which sings through a throat that is loosely strung with wires of soft gold.

"In my day," began Miss Caroline; but here I rebelled, no longer perceiving any good reason to be overborne by her daughter. I could endure only a certain amount of that.

"Your day is to-day," I interrupted, "and to-morrow and many to-morrows. You are a woman bereft of all her yesterdays. Let your daughter have had her day—let her have come to an incredible maturity. But you stay here in to-day with me. We won't be fit companions for her, but she shall not lack for company. Uncle Jerry Honeycutt is now ninety-four, and he has a splendid new ear-trumpet—he will be rarely diverting for Miss Lansdale."

But the daughter remained as indifferent to taunts as she had been to my friendly advances. It occurred to me now that her self-possession was remarkable. It was little short of threatening if one regarded her too closely. I wondered if this could really be an inheritance from her well-nerved father or the result of her years as teacher in a finishing school for young ladies. I was tempted to suspect the latter, for, physically, the creature was by no means formidable. Perhaps an inch or two taller than her mother, she was of a marked slenderness; a completed slenderness, I might say—a slenderness so palpably finished as to details that I can only describe it as felicitous in the extreme. It seemed almost certain that her appearance had once been disarming, that the threat in her eye-flash and tilted head was a trick learned by contact with many young ladies who needed finishing more than they would admit.

Of course this did not explain why Miss Lansdale should visually but patently disparage me at this moment. I was by no means an unfinished young lady, and, in any event, she should have left all that behind; the moment was one wherein relaxation would have been not only graceful but entirely safe, for she was in no manner to be held accountable for my conduct.

Yet again and again her curious reserve congealed me back upon the stanch regard of Miss Caroline. My passion for that sprightly dame and her gracious acceptance of it were happily not to deteriorate under the regard of any possible daughter, however egregiously might we flaunt to her trained eye our need to be "finished."

The newcomer's reserve was indeed pregnable to no assault I could devise. Not even did she lighten when I said to her mother, in open mockery of that reserve, "Well, she cost you a lot of furniture that was really most companionable about the house," and paused with a sigh betokening a regretful comparison of values. That lance shattered against her Lansdale shield like all the others.

Ending my call, I felt vividly what I have elsewhere seen described as "the cosmic chill". The small, mighty, night-eyed, well-completed Miss Lansdale, with the voice of a golden jangle, had frozen it about me in lavish abundance.

I went home to play the game, until my eyes tired so that the face of king, queen, and knave leered at me in defeat or simpered sickeningly when I was able to shape their destinies. Thrice I lost interestingly and with profit to my soul, and once I won, though without elation, for we know that little skill may be needed to win when the cards fall right; whereas, to lose profitably is a mark of supreme merit.

Even after that I must have recourse to the wonted philter to bring sleep, the face of my vision being unaccountably the face of the true Little Miss before she had evolved into Miss Lansdale of the threatening self-possession. I refused to bother about the absurdity of this, for the sake of bringing sleep the sooner.

I was privileged to observe the following day that my neighbor's daughter was still of a dusky whiteness, the baffling, shaded whiteness of soft new snow in a cedar thicket. Incidentally she partook of another quality of soft new snow—one by no means so incommunicable.

And yet in sunlight I incurred the full, close look of her eyes, and no longer doubted the presence of a Peavey strain in her immediate ancestry. Far in their incalculable depths I saw a myriad of lights, brown-gold, that smouldered, ominously, even promisingly. It might never meet this young woman's caprice to be flagrantly a Peavey in my presence, but her capacity for this, if she chose to exercise it, I detected beyond a doubt. She was patently a daughter of Miss Caroline, and the cosmic chill had been an afterthought of her own.

She did me the honor, late in the afternoon of this day, to occupy an easy-chair within my vined porch. She went farther. She affected a polite interest in myself. But her craft was crude. I detected at once that she had fallen in love with my dog; that she came not to seek me, but to follow him, who had raced joyously from her at his first knowledge of my home-coming.

I was secretly proud of the exquisite thoroughness with which he now ignored her. Again and again he assured me in her very presence that the woman was nothing, could be nothing, to him. I knew this well enough—I needed no protestations from him; but I thought it was well that she should know it. I saw that he had probably consented to receive her addresses through a long afternoon, had perhaps eaten of her provender, and even behaved with a complaisance which could have led her to hope that some day she might be something to him. But I knew that he had not persistently faced the peril of being trampled to death by me in his pulpy infancy—so great his fear of our separation—to let a mere woman come between us at this day. And it was well that he should now tell her this in the plainest of words.

The woman seemed to view me with an increased respect from that very moment. She tried first to bring Jim to her side by a soft call that almost made me tremble for his integrity. But he did not so much as turn his head. His eyes were for me alone. With a rubber shoe flung gallantly over his shoulder, he danced incitingly before me, praying that I would pretend to be crazed by the sight of his prize and seek to wrench it from him.

But I pretended instead to be bored by his importunities, choosing to rub it in. To her who longed for his friendly notice,—a little throaty bark, a lift of the paw, perhaps a winsome laying of his head along her lap,—I affected indifference to his infatuation for me. I pretended always to have been a perfect devil of a fellow among the dogs, and professed loftily not to have divined the secret of my innumerable and unvarying conquests.

"Dogs are so foolishly faithful," remarked Miss Lansdale, with polite acerbity.

"I know it," I conceded; "that fellow thinks I am the most beautiful person in all the world."

She said "Indeed?" with an inflection and a sweeping glance at me which I found charged with meaning. But I knew well enough that I had for all time mastered a certain measure of her difficult respect.

"And he's such a fine dog, too," she added in a tone intended to convey to me the full extent of her pity for him.

"I have him remarkably well trained," I said. "I can often force him to notice people whom I like, especially if they are clever enough to let him see that they like me rather well."

"It would be almost worth while," she remarked with a longing look at Jim but none at me.

"Many have found it quite so," I said, ordering Jim to charge at my feet, "but it's a great bore, I assure you."

I needed not to be told that she envied me my power, and so deep and genuine appeared to be her love for him that secretly I hoped he would again be amiable to her during my absence on the morrow. The contrast of his manner on my return would further chasten her.

From the porch we both watched her move across the little stretch of lawn, and, at my whispered suggestion, Jim rose to his feet and barked her insultingly over the last twenty feet of it. I was delighted to note that this induced a shamed acceleration of her pace and a tighter clutching of her skirts. I thought it important to let her know clearly and at once just who was the master in my own house.

[CHAPTER XXIV]

THE LOYALTY OF JIM

If it must be my lot to dream out a life of insubstantial visions, that were well. But it appeared not unreasonable that I should keep at least one ponderable dog by me, as an emblem of something I had missed through one too many shuffle of the cards before this big game began. Yet Miss Lansdale had clearly resolved to deprive my dreaming of even this slight support of realness. I tried always to remember, in her behalf, that she did not know the circumstances, and she herself very soon discovered that she did not know Jim. The assaults she made upon his fidelity proved her to be past-mistress of tactics and strategy. No possible approach to his heart did she leave untried. She flattered and petted, lured, cajoled, entreated; she menaced, commanded, stormed, raged. Drawing inspiration from a siege celebrated in antiquity, she sought to secrete her forces—not in a horse of wood, but within the frames of numerous fowl, picked to the bone but shredded over so temptingly with fugitive succulence as to have made a dog of feelings less fine her slave for life.

It was not until the desperate woman had, in the terminology of Billy Durgin, been "baffled and beaten at every turn," that I could get into communication with her on a basis at all acceptable to a free-necked man. Having proved to the last resource of her ingenuity that Jim was more than human in his loyalty, she seemed disposed to admit, though grudgingly enough, that I myself might be not less than human to have won him so utterly. And thereafter I found it often practicable to associate with her on terms of apparent equality.

She surrendered, I believe, on a day when she had thought to lure Jim into her boat,—fatuously, for was I not a distinguishable figure in the landscape? Her hopes must have been high, for she had but lately repleted him with chicken-bones divinely crunchable, and then bestowed upon him a charlotte russe, an unnatural taste for which she had succeeded in teaching him.

With something of a swagger,—she swaggered in a rather starchy white dress that day, and under a garden hat of broad rim,—she had enticed him to the water's edge, so that I must have been nervous but for knowing the dog through and through.

Her failure was so crushing, so swift, so entire, that for an instant I almost failed to rejoice in her open humiliation. Seated in the boat, oars poised, she invited Jim with soft speech and a smile that might have moved an iron dog without occasioning any remark from me; but Jim, noting, with one paw already in the boat, that I was not to be of the party, turned quickly from her and came to me with his head down. His informing and well-feathered tail signalled to Miss Lansdale that she seemed to have forgotten herself.

At that moment, I think, the woman abandoned all her preposterous hopes; then, too, I think, she learned the last and bitterest lesson which great fighters must learn, to embellish defeat with an air of urbane acceptance. Miss Lansdale relaxed—she melted before my eyes to an aspect that no victor who knew his business could afford to despise.

I clambered in. Jim followed, remarking amiably to the woman as he passed her on his way to the bow of the boat, "I thought you couldn't have meant that!"

And Defeat rowed Jim and me; rowed us past the feathered marge of green islands quite as if nothing had happened. But I knew it had happened, for Miss Lansdale was so nearly human that I presently found myself thinking "Miss Kate" of her. She not only answered questions, but, what amazed me far more, she condescended to ask them now and then. To an observer we might have seemed to be holding speech of an actual friendliness—speech of the water and the day; of herself and the dog and a little of me.

At length, as I caught an overhanging willow to rest her arms a moment, I felt bold enough to venture words about this assumption of amity which was so becoming in her. I even confessed that she was reminding me of certain distinguished but truly amiable personages who are commonly to be found in the side-show adjacent to the main tent. "Particularly of the wild man," I said, to be more specific, for my listener seemed at once to crave details.

"There is a powerfully painted banner swelling in the breeze outside, you know. It shows the wild man in all his untamed ferocity, in his native jungle, armed with a simple but rather promising club. A dozen intrepid tars from a British man-of-war—to be seen in the offing—are in the act of casting a net over him. It's an exciting picture, I assure you, Miss Lansdale. The net looks flimsy, and the wild person is not only enraged but very muscular—"

"I fail to see," she interrupted, with a slight lapse into what I may call her first, or Lansdale, manner.

"Of course you fail! You have to go inside to see," I explained kindly. "But it only costs a dime, which is little enough—the hired enthusiast, indeed, stationed just outside the entrance, reminds us over and over again that it is only 'the tenth part of a dollar,' and he sometimes adds that 'it will neither make nor break nor set a man up in business.' He is a flagrant optimist in small money matters, ever looking on the bright side."

"Inside?" suggested my listener, with some impatience. I had regretted my beginning and had meant to shirk a finish if she would let me; but it seemed I must go on.

"Well, inside there's a hand-organ going all the time, you know—"

"The wild man?" she insisted, like a child looking ahead for the real meat of the story one is telling it.

"I'm getting to him as fast as I consistently can. The wild man sits tamely in a cheap chair on a platform, with a row of his photographs spread charmingly at his feet. Of course you are certain at once that he is no longer wild. You know that a wild man whose spirit had not been utterly broken would never sit there and listen to that hand-organ eight hours every day except Sunday. The fluent and polished gentleman in charge—who has a dyed mustache—assures us that we have nothing to fear from this 'once ferocious monster of the tropic jungle, with his bestial craving for human flesh,' but that seems a mere matter of form, with the hand-organ going in our ears—"

"Really," Miss Lansdale began—or tried to.

"One moment, please! The scholarly person goes on to relate the circumstances of the wild person's capture—substantially as depicted upon the canvas outside—and winds up with: 'After being brought to this country in chains he was reclaimed from his savage estate, was given a good English education, and can now converse intelligently upon all the leading topics of the day. Step up, ladies and gentlemen' he concludes, with a rather pointed delicacy, 'and you will find him ready and willing to answer all proper questions.'"

Miss Lansdale dropped her oars into the water, dully, I thought. I released the willow that had moored us, but I persisted.

"And he always does answer all proper questions, just as the gentleman said he would. Doubtless an improper question would be to ask him if he weren't born tame on our own soil, of reputable New England parents; but I don't know. I have always conducted myself in his presence as a gentleman must, with the result that he has never failed to be chatty. He is a trifle condescending, to be sure; he does not forget the difference in our stations, but he does not permit himself to study me with eyes of blank indifference, nor is he reticent to the verge of hostility. Of course he feels indifferent to me,—nothing else could be expected,—but his captors have taught him to be gracious in public. And, really, Miss Lansdale, you seemed strangely tame and broken to-day yourself. You have not only received a good English education, but you answer all proper questions with a condescension hardly more marked than that of the wild person's. I can only pray you won't resume a manner that will inevitably recall him to me to your own disadvantage."

She rowed in silence against the gentle current, but she lifted her eyes to me with a look that was not all Lansdale. There was Peavey in it. And she smiled. I had seen her smile before, but never before had she seen me at those times. That she should now smile for and at me seemed to be a circumstance little short of epoch-making.

I cannot affirm that there was even one moment of that curiously short afternoon when she became wholly and frankly a Peavey. But more than once did this felicity seem to impend, and I suspected that she might even have been more graciously endowed than with a mere Peavey capacity in general. I believed that if she chose, she might almost become a Miss Caroline Peavey. This occurred to me when she said:—

"I only brought you along for your dog."

It was, of course, quite like a Lansdale to do that; but much liker a Peavey to tell it, with that brief poise of the opened eyes upon one's own.

"Don't hold it against Jim," I pleaded. "It's my fault. I'm obliged to be most careful about his associates. I've brought him up on a system."

"Indeed? It would be interesting to know why you object—" she bridled with a challenge almost Miss Caroline in its flippancy.

"Well, for one thing, I have to make sure that he doesn't become worldly. Lots of good dogs are spoiled that way. And I've succeeded very well, thus far. To this moment he believes everything is true that ought to be true; or, if not, that something 'just as good' is true, as the people in drug stores tell one."

"And you are afraid of me—that I'll—"

"One can't be too careful about dogs, especially one that believes as much as that one does. Frankly, I am afraid of you. You have such a knowing way of fighting off moments that might become Peavey."

"I don't quite understand—"

"Of course you don't, but that's of little consequence—to Jim. He doesn't understand either. But you see he has a fine faith now that the world is all Peavey—he learned it from me. Of course, I know better, but I pretend not to, and often I can fool myself for half an hour at a time. And of course I shouldn't care to have that dog find out that this apparently Peavey world—flawlessly Peavey—has a streak of Lansdale running through it—that it has even its moments of curious, hard suspicion, of distrust, of downright disbelief in all the good things,—in short, its Miss Katherine Lansdale moments, if you will pardon that hastily contrived metaphor."

Perceiving that further concealment would be unavailing, I added quite openly: "Now, young woman, you see that I know your secret. I felt it in the dark of our first meeting; it has since become plainer,—too plain. You know too much—far more than is good for either Jim or me to know. You can't believe enough—all those things that Jim and I have found it best to believe. I myself always fear that I shall be led into ways of unbelief in your presence. That is why I can't trust Jim with you alone, and why I could hardly trust myself there without Jim's sustaining looks—that is why, in fact, that I shall try to shun you in all but your approximately Peavey moments. I trust now that this shall be the last time I must ever speak bitterly in your presence. You are sufficiently warned."

While I spoke she had ceased rowing, and we drifted with the current. A long time we drifted, and I rejoiced to see that I had taunted Miss Lansdale into something like interest. I saw that she was uncertain as to the degree of seriousness I had meant my words to convey. Once she began as if they were wholly serious, and once again as if they had been wholly unserious. If she at last appeared to suspect that she must effect a compromise, I dare say she was as nearly correct as I could have put her with any words I knew.

"But you had that dog from the first," she at length decided to say, clearly in self-defence, "and still you are worried and obliged to guard him from evil companions."

"You confess," I exclaimed in triumph.

"You had him as a puppy. Could you have expected so much of him if he had run wild, in a world where any number of good dogs learn unbelief, where they are shocked into it, all in a moment?"

"I didn't have myself from the first," I reminded her, "and I believe only a few trifles less than Jim does. I know that robins ascend without visible means, for example, if you run at them; but I believe it's good to run at them just the same, even more enjoyable than if they sat still to be caught."

"We were speaking of dogs," said Miss Lansdale. "At any rate Jim had you from the first."

"Let us keep to dogs, then," I answered. "Meantime, if you listen to me, you'll soon be in deep water, when we've both lost the taste for adventure. This current will take us over the dam in about seven minutes, I should judge."

She fell to the oars again with a dreaming face, in which Lansdale and the other were so well blended that it was indeed the face of visions that had long been coming to me.

"You remind me again of the wild gentleman," I said, after a long look at her, a look which she was good enough to let me see that she observed.

"Et ego in Arcadia vixi—and I, too, was netted in my native jungle."

I saw that she, too, essayed the feat of being both light and serious without letting the seam show.

"I mean about pictures," I explained. "The gentlemanly curator of the side-show always says of the wild man thoughtfully, 'I believe he has a few photographs for sale.' He is always right—the wild man does have them, though I should not care to say that they're worth the money; that depends upon one's tastes, of course—by the way, Miss Lansdale, I have long had a picture of you."

"Has mother—"

"No—long before I became a fellow-slave with Clem—long before there was a juvenile mother or even a Clem in Little Arcady."

"May I ask how you got it?"

"Certainly you may! I don't know."

"May I see it?" I thought she felt a deeper interest than she cared to reveal.

"Unfortunately, no. If you only could see it, you would see that it is almost a perfect likeness—perhaps a bit more Little Miss than you could be now—but it's unmistakably true."

"I lost such a picture once," she said with a fall of her eyes. "Where is the one you have?"

"Sometimes it's behind my eyes and sometimes it is out before them."

"Nonsense!"

"To be sure! Only Jim and I, trained and hardened in the ways of belief, are equal to a feat of that sort."

"I see no merit in believing that."

"I don't know that there is, especially—not in believing this particular thing, but the power for belief in general which it implies—you see I am unprejudiced."

"Why should you want to believe it?"

I should have known, without catching the glint of her eyes under the hat brim, that a Peavey spoke there.

"If you could see the thing once, you'd understand," I said, an answer, of course, fit only for a Peavey.

"At all events, you'll not keep it long." The words were Peavey enough, but the voice was rather curiously Lansdale.

"I have made as little effort to keep it as I did to acquire it," I said, "but it stays on, and I've a notion it will stay on as long as Jim and I are uncorrupted. But it shan't inconvenience you," I added brightly, in time to forestall an imminent other "Nonsense!"

Being thus neatly thwarted, she looked over my shoulder and bent to her oars, for we had again drifted toward the troubled waters of the dam.

"I warned you—if you listened to me," I reminded her.

"Oh, I've not been listening—only thinking."

"Of course, and you were disbelieving. It's high time you put us ashore. I want to believe, and I want not to be drowned. So does Jim,—both of 'em."

She pointed the boat to our landing, and as she leaned her narrow shoulders far back she shot me; one swift look. But I could see much farther into the water that floated us.

[CHAPTER XXV]

THE CASE OF FATTY BUDLOW

Lest Miss Katharine Lansdale seem unduly formidable, I should, perhaps, say that I appeared to be alone in finding her so. Little Arcadians of my own sex younger than myself—and, if I may suggest it, less discerning—were not only not menaced, but she invited them with a cordiality in which the keenest eye among them could detect no flaw. Miss Lansdale's mother had also pleased the masculine element of the town at her first progress through its pleasant streets. But Miss Caroline, despite many details of dress and manner that failed interestingly to corroborate the fact, was an old woman, and one whose way of life made her difficult of comprehension to the Little Country. Socially and industrially, one might say, she did not fit the scheme of things as the town had been taught to conceive it. Whereas, her daughter was a person readily to be understood in all parts of the world where men have eyes—as well by the homekeeping as by the travelled. Eustace Eubanks, more or less a man of the world by virtue of that adventurous trip to the Holy Land, understood her at one glance, as did Arthur Updyke, who had fared abroad to the college of pharmacy and knew things. But she was also lucid as crystal to G. Brown and Creston Fancett, whose knowledge of the outside world was somewhat affected by their experience of it, which was nothing. To all seven of the ages was this woman comprehensible. Old Bolivar Kent, eighty-six and shuffling his short steps to the grave not far ahead, understood her with one look; the but adolescent Guy McCormick, hovering tragically on the verge of his first public shave, divined her quite as capably; the middle-yeared Westley Keyts read her so unerringly on a day when she first regaled his vision that he toiled for half an hour as one entranced, disengaging what he believed to be porter-house steaks long after the porter-house line in the beef under his hand had been passed.

In short, Miss Lansdale was understood spontaneously—to borrow a phrase from the Argus—"by each and all who had the good fortune to be present," for she was dowered with that quick-drawing charm which has worked a familiar spell upon the sons of men in all times. She was incontestably feminine. She gave the woman-call. That she seemed to give it against her wish,—without intention,—that I was alone in detecting this, were trifles beside the point. Masculine Little Arcady cared not that she had been less successful than the late Colonel Potts, for example, in preserving the truly Greek spirit—cared naught for this so long as, meaningly or otherwise, she uttered the immemorial woman-call in its true note wheresoever she fared.

And, curiously, since Miss Lansdale did not appear formidable to masculine Little Arcady—with one negligible exception—she seemed to try perversely not to be so. She was amazingly gracious to it—still with one exception. She melted to frivolity and the dance of mirth. She affected joy in its music and confessed to a new feeling for Jerusalem after attending a lawn party at which Eustace Eubanks did his best to please. She spoke of this to Eustace with a crafty implication that it had remained for him to interpret the antique graces of that storied place to a world all too heedless. Eustace himself felt not only a renewed interest in the land exploited by his magic lantern, but he began to view all the rest of the world in a new and rosy light, of which Miss Lansdale was the iridescent globe that diffused and subdued it to the mellow hue of romance.

It is impossible to believe that Eustace was ever at any pains to conceal the effects of this astral phenomenon from his family, for its members were very quickly excited. If in that vale the woman-call could be heard by ears attuned to its haunting cadences, so also did the frightened mother-call echo its equally primitive note, accompanied by the less well-known sister-call of warning and distress.

The truth is that Eustace was becoming harder to manage with each recurring crisis. For testimony in the present instance, I need only adduce that he wrote poetry, more or less, after meeting Miss Lansdale but a scant half-dozen times. This came to me in confidence, however, and the obliquity of it spread no farther beyond the family lines.

Fluttering with alarm, the mother of Eustace approached me as one presumably familiar with the power of the Lansdales to work disaster in a peaceful and orderly family. She sought to know if I could not prevent her boy from "making a fool of himself." It was never her way to bother with many words when she knew the right few.

With an air that signified her intention of letting me know the worst at once, Mrs. Eubanks drew from her bead reticule a sheet of paper scribbled over in the handwriting of her misguided offspring. It was a rondeau; I knew that by the shape, and the mother apologized for the indelicacy of it before permitting my own cheeks to blush thereat. The dominant line of the composition I saw to be—

"When love lights night to be its day."

I turned from the stricken mother to cough deprecatingly when I had read. She likewise had the delicacy to turn away and cough. But an emergency of this momentous import must be discussed in plain terms, however disconcerting the details, and Mrs. Eubanks had nerved herself for the ordeal.

"I can't think," she began, "where the boy learned such things!"

I had not the courage to tell her that they might be entirely self-taught under certain circumstances.

"Such shameless, brazen things!" she persisted. "We have always been so careful of Euty—striving to keep him—well, wholesome and pure, you understand, Major Blake."

"There are always dangers," I said, but only because she had stopped speaking, and not in any hope of instructing her.

"If only we can keep him from making a fool of himself—"

"It seems rather late," I said, this time with profound conviction. "See there!"

Upon the margin of that captured sheet Eustace had exposed, as it were, the very secret mechanics of his passion. There were written tentative rhymes, one under another, as "Kate—mate—Fate—late"—and eke an unblushing "sate." Also had he, in the frenzy of his poetic rapture, divined and indicated the technical affinities existing among words like "bliss," "kiss," and "miss."

Interference, however delicately managed, seemed hopeless after that, and I said as much. But I added: "Of course, if you let him alone, he may come back to his better self. Perhaps the young lady herself may prove to be your ally."

"Indeed not! She has set out deliberately to ensnare my poor Euty," said the mother, with an incisive drawing in of her expressively thin lips. "I knew it the very first evening I saw them together."

"Mightn't it have been sheer trifling on her part ?" I suggested.

"Can you imagine that young woman daring to trifle with Eustace Eubanks?" she demanded.

I could, as a matter of fact; but as her query seemed to repel such a disclosure, I lied.

"True," I said, "she would never dare. I didn't think of that."

"With all her frivolity and lightness of manner and fondness for dress, she must have some sense of fitness—"

"She must, indeed!"

"She could not go that far!"

"Certainly not!"

"Even if she does wear too many ribbons and laces and fancy furbelows, with never a common-sense shoe to her foot!"

"Even if she does" I assented warmly.

And thus we were compelled to leave it. In view of those verses I could suggest no plan for relief, and my one poor morsel of encouragement had been stonily rejected.

Eustace went the mad pace. So did Arthur Updyke. It was rather to be expected of Arthur, however. His duties at the City Drug Store seemed to encourage a debonair lightness of conduct. He treated his blond ringlets assiduously from the stock of pomades; he was as fastidious about his fingernails as we might expect one to be in an environment of manicure implements and nail beautifiers; it was his privilege to make free with the varied assortment of perfumes—a privilege he forewent in no degree; his taste in tooth-powders was widely respected; and in moments of leisure, while he leaned upon a showcase awaiting custom, he was wont to draw a slender comb from an upper waistcoat pocket and pass it delicately through his small but perfect mustache. Naturally enough, it was said by the ladies of Little Arcady that Arthur's attentions were never serious,—"except them he pays to himself!" Aunt Delia McCormick would often add, for that excellent woman was not above playing venomously with familiar words.

Also did G. Brown and Creston Fancett go the same mad pace. These four were filled with distrust of one another, but as they composed our male quartette, they would gather late on summer nights and conduct themselves in a manner to make me wish that old Azariah Prouse's peculiar belief as to house structure might have included a sound-proof fence about his premises. For, on the insufficient stretch of lawn between that house and my own, the four rivals sang serenades.

"She sleeps—my lady sleeps," they sang, with a volume that seemed bound to insure their inaccuracy as to the lady, and which assuredly left them in the wrong as to her mother's attorney—if their song meant in the least to report conditions at large. As this was, however, the one occasion when they felt that none of the four had any advantage over his fellows, they made the most of it. Then, in the dead of night, I would be very sorry that I had not counselled the mother of Eustace Eubanks to send him around the world on a slow sailing ship; for it was his voice, even in songs of sleep, that rendered this salutary exercise most difficult.

On one of these wakeful summer nights, however, I received a queer little shock. Perhaps I half dreamed it in some fugitive moment of half sleep; but it was as if I were again an awkward, silent boy, worshipping a girl new to the school, a girl who wore two long yellow braids. I worshipped her from afar so that she saw me not, being occupied with many adorers less timid, who made nothing of snatching a hair ribbon. But the face in that instant of dream was the face of Miss Katharine Lansdale, and coupled with the vision was a prescience that in some later life I should again look back and see myself as now, a grown but awkward boy, still holding aloof—still adoring from some remote background while other and bolder gallants captured trophies and lightly carolled their serenades. It seemed like borrowing trouble to look still farther into the future, but the vision was striking. Surely, History does repeat itself. I should have made this discovery for myself had it not been exploited before my day. For on the morrow I found my woman child on the Lansdale lawn when I went home in the afternoon. She had now reached an age when she was beginning to do "pretties" with her lips as she talked—almost at the age when I had first been enraptured by her mother, with the identical two braids, also the tassels dangling from her boot tops. This latter was unexciting as a coincidence, however. I myself had deliberately produced it.

Miss Lansdale turned from talk with the child to greet me. Her face was so little menacing that I called her "Miss Katharine" on the spot. But my business was with the child.

"Lucy," I said, as I took the wicker chair by the hammock in which they both lounged, "there is a boy at school who looks at you a great deal when you're not watching him—you catch him at it—but he never comes near you. He acts as if he were afraid of you. He is an awkward, stupid boy. If he gets up to recite about geography, or about 'a gentleman sent his servant to buy ten and five-eighths yards of fine broadcloth,' or anything of that sort, and if he happens to catch your eye at the moment, he flounders like a caught fish, stares hard at the map of North America on the wall, and sits down in disgrace. And when the other boys are chasing you and pulling off your hair ribbons, he mopes off in a corner of the school yard, though he looks as if he'd like to shoot down all the other boys in cold blood."

"He has nice hair," said my woman child.

"Oh, he has! Very well; does his name happen to be 'Horsehead' or anything like that—the name the boys call him by, you know?"

"Fatty—Fatty Budlow, if that's the one you mean. Do you know him, Uncle Maje?"

"Better than any boy in the world! Haven't I been telling you about him?"

"Once he brought a bag of candy to school, and I thought he was coming up to hand it to me, but he turned red in the face and stuffed it right into his pocket."

"He meant to give it to you, really—he bought it for you—but he couldn't when the time came."

"Oh, did he tell you?"

"It wasn't necessary for him to tell me. I know that boy, I tell you, through and through. Lucy, do you think you could encourage him a little, now and then—be sociable with him—not enough to hurt, of course? You don't know how he'd appreciate the least kindness. He might remember it all his life."

"I might pat his hair—he has such nice hair—if he wouldn't know it—but of course he would know it, and when he looks at you, he is so queer—"

"Yes, I know; I suppose it is hopeless. Couldn't you even ask him to write in your autograph album?"

"Y-e-s—I could, only he'd be sure to write something funny like 'In Memory's wood-box let me be a stick.' He always does write something witty, and I don't much care for ridiculous things in my album; I'm being careful with it."

"Well, if he's as witty as that in your album, it will be to mask a bleeding heart. I happen to know that in a former existence he was never even asked to write, though he always hoped he might be."

"I'm sorry if you like him, Uncle Maje, but I'm positive that Fatty Budlow is not a boy I could ever feel deeply for. I don't believe our acquaintance will even ripen into friendship," and she looked with profound eyes into the wondrous, opening future.

"Of course it won't," I said. "I might have known that. He will continue through the ages to be an impossible boy. Miss Lansdale feels the same way about him. Poor Fatty or Horsehead or whatever they call him stands off and glares at her, and can't say his lesson when he catches her eye—only he seldom does catch it, because she's so busy with other boys of more spirit who crowd about her and snatch hair ribbons and sing 'My lady sleeps' until no one else can."

"Do you know Fatty Budlow?" asked my surprised woman child of Miss Lansdale. But that young woman only reached out one foot to point its toe idly at a creeping green worm and turn its vagrant course. The toe was by no means common-sense, and the heel was simply idiotic.

"Of course she knows him," I said; "she knows he would give his right hand for her, which is a good deal under the circumstances, and she very properly despises him for it. She'd take her picture away from him if she could."

"She wouldn't," said Miss Lansdale, with a gesture of her foot that disconcerted me.

"Miss Kate," I said, "I have lived my life in terror of seeing one of those squashy green worms meet a fearful disaster in my presence. Would you mind—"

With a fillip of the bronzed toe she sent the amazed worm into a country that must have been utterly strange to it,

"She'd take it back quickly enough if she knew what he makes of it," I said, returning to the picture; "if she knew that he had kept it ever since he learned that agriculture, mining, and ship-building are principal industries—only at first it had two long yellow braids, and tassels dangling from its boot tops."

"My mother had beautiful long golden hair," said the woman child, adding simply, "papa says mine is just like it."

Miss Lansdale regarded me narrowly.

"You get me all mixed up," she said.

"I like to. You're heady then—like your mother's punch when it's 'all mixed up.'"

"I must put in more ice," remarked Miss Lansdale, calmly.

"Fatty Budlow is so serious," said the woman child, suspecting that the talk had drifted away from her.

"It's his curse," I admitted. "If he weren't an A No. 1 dreamer, he'd be too serious to live, but be goes dreaming and maundering along—dreaming that things are about as he would like to have them. He sees your face and Miss Lansdale's, and then they get mixed up in a queer way, and Miss Kate's face comes out of the picture with such a look in the eyes that a man of ordinary spirit would call her 'Little Miss' right off without ever stopping to think; but of course this Fatty or Horsehead or whatever it is can't say it right out, so he says it to himself about twenty-three or twenty-four thousand times a day, as nearly as he can reckon—he always was weak in arithmetic."

"You might let him write in your autograph album," said the woman child, brightly, to Miss Lansdale.

"I know what he'd write if he got the chance," I added incitingly. But it did not avail. Miss Lansdale remained incurious and merely said, "Long golden braids," as one trying to picture them.

"And later a little row of curls over each ear, and a tiny chain with a locket around the neck. I had a picture once—"

"You have had many pictures."

"Yes—two are many if you've had nothing else."

But she was now regarding the woman child with a curious, close look, almost troubled in its intensity.

"Do you look like your mother?" she asked.

"Papa says I do, and Uncle Maje thinks so too. She was very pretty," This came with an unconscious placidity.

"She looks almost as her mother's picture did," I said.

When the child had gone, Miss Lansdale searched my face long before speaking. She seemed to hesitate for words, and at length to speak of other matters than those which might have perplexed her.

"Why did they call you 'Horsehead'?" she asked almost kindly.

"I never asked. It seemed to be a common understanding. Doubtless there was good reason for it, as good as there is for calling Budlow 'Fatty.'"

"What did you do?" she asked again.

"I went to the war with what I could take—nothing but a picture."

"And you lost that?"

"Yes—under peculiar circumstances. It seemed a kind thing to do at the time."

"And you came back with—"

"With yours, Little Miss!"

Some excitement throbbed between us so that I had involuntarily emphasized my words. Briefly her eyes clung to mine, and very slowly we relaxed from that look.

"I only wanted to say," she began presently, "that I shall have to believe your absurd tale of my picture being with you before you saw me. Something makes me credit it—a strange little notion that I have carried that child's picture in my own mind."

"We are even, then," I answered, "only you are thinking more things than you say. That isn't fair."

But she only nodded her head inscrutably.

[CHAPTER XXVI]

A LITTLE MYSTERY IS SOLVED

The significance of Miss Lansdale's manner, rather than her words, ran through my darkened thoughts like a thread as I played the game that night. After a third defeat this thread seemed to guide me to daylight from a tortuously winding cavern. At first the thing was of an amazing simplicity.

In a far room was a chest filled with forgotten odds and ends that had come back with me years before. I ran to it, and from under bundles of letters, old family trinkets, a canteen, a pair of rusty pistols, and other such matters, I brought forth an ambrotype—the kind that was mounted in a black case of pressed rubber and closed with a spring.

But even as I held the thing, flushed with my discovery, another recollection cooled me, and the structure of my discovery tumbled as quickly as it had built itself. Little Miss had found her own picture when she found him. Her mother had told me this definitely. It had been clutched in his hands, and she, after a look, had tenderly replaced it to stay with his dust forever. This I had forgotten at first, in my eagerness for light.

I pressed the spring that brought the face to my eyes, knowing it would not be her face. Close to the light I studied it; the face of a girl, eighteen or so, with dreaming eyes that looked beyond me. It could not be Miss Lansdale, and yet it was strangely like her—like the Little Miss she must once have been.

But one mystery at least was now plain—the mystery of my own mind picture. I had not looked at this thing for ten years, but its lines had stayed with me, and this was the face of my dreaming, carried so long after its source had been forgotten. The face of this picture had naturally enough changed to seem like the face of Miss Lansdale after I had seen her.

Perhaps it was the face of a Peavey; there was at least a family resemblance; that would explain the likeness to Miss Kate. This was not much, but it was enough to sleep on.

As I left the house the following morning, Miss Lansdale, her skirts pinned up, was among her roses with a watering pot and a busy pair of scissors.

As I approached her I had something to say, but it was, for an interval, driven from my lips.

"Promise me," I said instead, "never to wear a common-sense shoe."

She stared at me with brows a trifle raised.

"Of course it will displease Mrs. Eubanks, but there is still a better reason for it."

The brows went farther up at this until they were hardly to be detected under the broad rim of her garden hat.

Her answer was icy, even for an "Indeed?"—quite in her best Lansdale manner.

"Yes, 'indeed!'" I retorted somewhat rudely, "but never mind—it's not of the least consequence. What I meant to say was this—about those pictures of people, you remember."

"I remember perfectly, and I've concluded that it's all nonsense—all of it, you understand."

"That's queer—so have I." Had I been a third person and an observer, I would doubtless have sworn that Miss Lansdale was more surprised than pleased by this remark of mine.

"I haven't had your picture at all," I went on; "it was a picture of some one else, and I hadn't thought to look at it for a long time—had forgotten it utterly, in fact. That's how I came to think I knew your face before I knew you."

"I told you it was nonsense!" and she snipped off a rose with a kind of miniature brusqueness.

"But you shall see that I had some reason. If you find time to-day, step into my library and look at the picture. It's on the mantel, and the door is open. It may be some one you know, though I doubt even that."

With this I brazenly snatched a pink rose from those within her arm.

"You see Fatty Budlow is coming on," I remarked of this bit of boldness.

"Let him come—he shan't find me in the way." This with an effort to seem significant.

"Oh, not at all!" I assured her politely, and with equal subtlety, I believe.

Had I known that this was the last time I should ever look upon Miss Katharine Lansdale, I might have looked longer. She was well worth seeing for sundry other reasons than her need for common-sense shoes. But those last times pass so often without our suspecting them! And it was, indeed, my good fortune never to see her again. For never again was she to rise, even at her highest, above Miss Kate.

She was even so low as Little Miss when I found her on my porch that afternoon—a troubled Little Miss, so drooping, so queerly drawn about the eyes, so weak of mouth, so altogether stricken that I was shot through at sight of her.

"I waited here—to speak alone—you are late to-day."

I was early, but if she had waited, she would of course not know this.

"What has happened, Miss Kate?"

"Come here."

Through my opened door I followed her quick step.

"You were jesting about that this morning,"—she pointed to the picture, propped open against a book on the mantel; and then, with an effort to steady her voice,—"you were jesting, and of course you didn't know—but you shouldn't have jested."

"Can it be you, Miss Kate—can it really be you?"

"It is, it is—couldn't you see? Tell me quickly—don't, don't jest again!"

"Be sure I shall not. Sit down."

But she stood still, with an arm extended to the picture, and again implored me: "See—I'm waiting. Where—how—did you get it?"

"Sit down," I said; and this time she obeyed with a little cry of impatience.

"I'll try to bring it back," I said. "It was that day Sheridan hurried back to find his army broken—all but beaten. Just at dark there was a last charge—a charge that was met. I went down in it, hearing yells and a spitting fire, but feeling only numbness. When I woke up the firing was far off. Near me I could hear a voice, the voice of a young man, I thought, wounded like myself. I first took him for one of our men. But his talk undeceived me. It was the talk of your men, and sorrowful talk. He was badly hurt; he knew that. But he was sure of life. He couldn't die there like a brute. He had to go back and he would go back alive and well; for God was a gentleman, whatever else He was, and above practical jokes of that sort. Then he seemed to know he was losing strength, and he cried out for a picture, as if he must at least have that before he went. Weak as he was, he tried to turn on his side to search for it. 'It was here a moment ago,' he would say; 'I had it once,' and he tried to turn again, still crying out for it,—he must not die without it. It hurt me to hear his voice break, and I made out to roll near him to help him search. 'We'll find it,' I told him, and he thanked me for my help. 'Look for a square hard case,' he said eagerly. 'It must be here; I had it after I fell down.' Together we searched the rough ground over in the dark as well as we could. I was glad enough to help him. I had a picture like that of my own that I shouldn't have liked to lose. But we were clumsy searchers, and he seemed to lose hope as he lost strength. Again he cried out for that picture, but now it was a despairing cry, and it hurt me. Under the darkness I reached my one good hand up and took my own picture from its place. So many of us carried pictures over our hearts in those days. I pretended then to search once more, telling him to have courage, and then I said, 'Is this it?' He fumbled for it, and his hand caught it quickly up under his chin. He was so glad. He thanked me for finding it, and then he lay still, panting. After a while—we both wanted water—I crawled away to where I heard a running stream. It must have been farther than I thought, and I couldn't be quick because so much of me was numb and had to be dragged. But I reached the water and filled a canteen I had found on the way. As soon as I could manage it I went back to him with the water, but I must have been gone a long time. He wasn't there. But as I crawled near where he had lain, I put my hand on a little square case such as I had given him. I thought it must be mine. I lost consciousness again. When I awoke two hospital stewards carried me on a stretcher, and a field surgeon walked beside us. I still had the picture, and not for many days did I know that it wasn't my own. After that I forgot it—but I've already told you of that."

Her eyes had not quitted my face while I spoke, though they were glistening; her mouth had weakened more than once, and a piteous little "Oh!" would come from her lips. When I had finished she looked away from me, dropping her eyes to the floor, leaning forward intently, her hands shut between her knees. For a long time she remained so, forgetting me. But at last I could hear her breathe and could see the increasing rise and fall of it, so that I feared a crisis. But none came. Again she mastered herself and even managed a smile for me, though it was a poor thing.

"I've told you all, Miss Kate."

"Yes—I'm unfair, but you have a right to know. I found that picture—your picture, when they brought him in. His hands were clenched about it. They said he had pleaded to hold it and made them promise not to take it from him—ever. I was left alone, and I dared to take it, just for a moment. Something in the design of the cover puzzled me. I had meant to put it right back, and after I had looked at it there was only one thing to do—to put it back."

"They said you found your own picture, or I might have suspected."

"They had reason to say it—I never told."

"Of course you never told, Miss Kate!" I seemed to learn a great deal of her from that. She had carried her wound secretly through all those years.

"Poor Little Miss!" I said in spite of myself, and at this quite unexpectedly there befell what I had hoped we might both be spared.

I might not soothe her as I would have wished, so I busied myself in the next room until she called to me. She was putting what touches she could to her eyes with a small and sadly bedraggled handkerchief.

"There is a better reason for telling no one now," she said, "so we must destroy this. Mother might see it."

My grate contained its summer accumulation of waste paper. She laid the picture on this and I lighted the pyre.

"Your mother will see your eyes," I said.

"She has seen them so before." And she gave me her hand, which I kissed.

"Poor Little Miss!" I said, still holding it.

"Not poor now—you have given me back so much. I can believe again—I can believe almost as much as Jim."

But I released her hand. Though her eyes had not quitted mine, their look was one of utter friendliness.

[CHAPTER XXVII]

HOW A TRUCE WAS TROUBLESOME

In the days and nights that followed this interview I associated rather more than usual with Jim. It seemed well to do so. I needed to learn once more some of the magnificent belief that I had taught him in days when my own was stronger. Close companionship with a dog of the truly Greek spirit, under circumstances in which I now found myself, was bound to be of a tonic value. I had seen, almost at the moment of Miss Kate's disclosure, that a change was to come in our relations. Perhaps I was wild enough at the moment to hope that it might be a change for the better; but this was only in the first flush of it—of a moment ill adapted for close reasoning. It took no great while to convince me that the discovery in which we had cooperated was of a character necessarily to put me from her even farther than she had at first chosen to put me—and that was far enough, Heaven knows.

In effect I had given back her love to her, a love she had for ten years unjustly doubted. That was the cold truth of it for one who knew women. One who could doubt the tenth year as poignantly as she had doubted in the first—would she not in bitterness regret her doubt ten other years, and sweetly mourn her lost love still another ten? She who had let me be little enough to her while she felt her wound—how much less could I be when the hurt was healed? Before she might have been in want. At least that was conceivable. Now her want was met. Not only was there this to fill her heart, but remorse, the tenderest a woman may know, it seems to me—remorse for undeserved suspicion.

In a setting less prosaic than Little Arcady, where events might be of a story-fitness, that lover would have been alive by a happy chance, estranged by the misunderstanding but splendidly faithful, and I should have been helper and interested witness to an ideal reconciliation; thereafter to play out my game with a full heart, though with an exterior placidly unconcerned. But with us events halt always a little short of true romance. They are unexcitingly usual.

I would have to play out my game full heartedly, nursing my powers of belief back to their one-time vigor; nothing would occur to ease my lot—not even an occasion to pretend that I gave my blessing to a reunited and happy pair. Miss Kate could go on believing. Unwittingly I had given her the stuff for belief. I, too, must go on believing, and providing my own material, as had ever been my lot; all of which was why my dog seemed my most profitable companion at this time. His every bark at a threatening baby-carriage a block away, each fresh time he believed sincerely that a rubber shoe was engaging in deadly struggle with him, taxing all his forces to subdue it, each time he testified with sensitive, twitching nostrils that the earth is good with innumerable scents, each streaking of his glad-tongued white length over yellowing fields designed solely for his recreation held for me a certain soothing value. And when in quiet moments he assured me with melting gaze that I was a being to challenge the very heart of love—in some measure, at least, did my soul gain strength from his own.

To know as much as I have indicated had been unavoidable for one of any intuitive powers. The change at once to be detected in Miss Kate's manner toward me confirmed my divinations without enlarging them. Miss Katharine Lansdale was gone forever; in her place was a Miss Kate,—even a Little Miss to the eye,—who regarded me at first with an undisguised alarm, then with a curious interfusion of alarm and shyness, a little disguised with not a little effort. This was plain reading. She would at first have distrusted me, apprehending I know not what rashness of ill-timed and forever impossible declarations. As she perceived this alarm to be baseless, for I not only refrained from intruding but I ostentatiously let Miss Kate alone, shyness would creep into her apprehension to make amends for its first crude manifestations.

As the days went by and I displayed still the fine sense to keep myself aloof, to seek Miss Kate only in those ways that I sought her refreshing mother, she let me discern more clearly her faith in my firmness and good sense. To be plain, in reward for letting her alone, she did not let me alone. And this reward I accepted becomingly, with a resolve—the metal of which I hoped she would divine—never to show myself undeserving of its benisons.

When I say that the young woman did not let me alone, I mean that she seemed almost to put herself in my way; not obviously, true enough, but in a degree palpable enough to one who had observed her first almost shrinking alarm. And this behavior of hers went forward, at last, without the slightest leaven of apprehension on her part, but her shyness remained. It was so marked and so novel in her—with reference to myself—that I could not fail to be sensible to it. It was as if she divined that mad notions might still lurk within my untaught mind to be reasons why she should fear me; but that her confidence in my self-mastery could not, at the same time, be too openly shown.

Tacitly, it was as if we had treated together; a treaty that bound me to observe a perpetual truce. My arms were forever laid down, and she, who had once so feared me, was now free to wander when she would within the lines of an honorable enemy. That she should walk there with increasing frequency as the days passed was a tribute to my powers of restraint which I was too wise to undervalue. I ignored the shyness of which she seemed unable to divest herself in my presence. It would have been easy not to ignore it, for there were times when, so little careful was she to guard herself, that this shyness suggested, invited, appealed, signalled; times when, without my deeper knowledge of her sex, I could have sworn that the true woman-call rang in my ears. But a treaty is a treaty, on paper or on honor, and ours would never be broken by black treachery of mine, let her eyes fall under my own with never so fluttering an allurement.

They were not bad days, as days go in this earth-life of too much exact knowledge. Miss Kate rowed me over still waters and walked beside me in green pastures. At times like these she might even seem to forget. She would even become, I must affirm, more nearly Peavey than was strictly her right; for it was plain that our treaty, must involve certain stipulations of restraint on her part as well as on my own. The burden was not all to be mine. But these moments I learned to withstand, remembering that she was a woman. That was a circumstance not hard to remember when she was by. It is probable that my heart could not have forgotten it, even had my trained head learned blandly to ignore it.

Further to enliven those days, I permitted Jim to give her lessons in believing everything. When I told her of this, she said, "I need them, I'm so out of practice." That was the nearest we had come to touching upon the interview of a certain afternoon. I should not have considered this a forbidden topic, but her shyness became pitiful at any seeming approach to it. "Jim will put you right again," I assured her. And I believe he did, though it was not easy to persuade him that she could be morally recognized when I was by. The occasion on which he first remained crouching at her feet while I walked away was regarded by Miss Kate as a personal triumph. She was so childishly open of her pleasure at this that I did not tell her it was a mere trick of mine; that I had told him to charge when he sprang up. She knew his eyes so little as to think he displayed regard for rather than respect for my command. She could not see that he begged me piteously to know why he must crouch there at a couple of strange inconsequential feet and see the good world go suddenly wrong.

Still further, to make those days not bad days, Miss Kate would cross our little common ground of an early evening to where I played the game on my porch. Often I did this until dusk obscured the faces of the cards. I faintly suspected in the course of these bird-like visits a caprice in Miss Kate to know what it might be that I preferred to the society of her mother on her own porch. She appeared to be more curious than interested. She promptly made those observations which the unillumined have ever considered it witty to make concerning those who play at solitaire. But, finding that I had long ceased to be moved by these, she was friendly enough to judge the game upon its merits. That she judged it to be stupid was neither strange nor any reflection upon the fairness of her mind. The game—in those profounder, rarer aspects which alone dignify it—is not for women. I believe that the game of cards to teach them philosophy under defeat, respect for the inevitable and a cheerful manipulation of such trifling good fortune as may befall—instead of that wild, womanish demand for all or nothing—has yet to be invented. I predict of this game, moreover, if ever it be found, that it will be a game at which two, at least, must play. Rarely have I known a woman, however rigid her integrity otherwise, who would not brazenly amend or even repeal utterly those decrees of Fate which are symbolized by the game. She desires intensely to win, and she will not be above shifting a card or two in contravention of the known rules. Far am I from intimating that this puts upon her the stigma of moral delinquency. It is mere testimony, rather, to her astounding capacity for self-deception. And this I cannot believe to be other than gracious of influence upon the intricate muddle of human association.

Miss Kate was finely the woman at those times when she deigned for a ten minutes to overlook my playing of the game. Before I had half finished, on the first occasion, she had mastered its simple mechanism; and before I had quite finished she sought to practise upon it those methods of the world woman in games of solitaire. She would calmly have placed a black nine on a black ten.

"But the colors must alternate," I protested, thinking she had forgotten this important rule.

"Of course—I know that perfectly well—but look what a fine lot of cards that would give you. There's a deuce of hearts you could play up and a three of spades, and then you could go back to crossing the colors again, right away, you know, and you'd have that whole line running up to the king ready to put into that space."

I looked at her, as she would have glided brazenly over that false play to rejoice in the true plays it permitted. But I did not speak. There are times, indeed, when we most honor the tongue of Shakspere by silence; emergencies to which words are so inadequate that to attempt to use them were to degrade the whole language.

At the last I was brought face to face with a most intricately planned defeat; a defeat insured by one spot on a card. Had the obstructive card been a six-spot of clubs instead of a seven-spot, victory was mine. I pointed this out to Miss Kate, who had declined a chair at the table and had chosen to stand beside my own. I showed her the series of plays which, but for that seven-spot, would put the kings in their places at the top and let me win. And I was beaten for lack of a six.

That she had grasped my explanation was quickly made plain. Actually with some enthusiasm she showed me that the much-desired six of clubs lay directly under the fatal seven.

"Just lay the seven over here," she began eagerly, "and there's your black six ready for that horrid red five that's in the way—"

"But there isn't any 'over here,'" I exclaimed in some irritation. "There can only be eight cards in a row—that would make nine."

"Yes, but then you could play up all the others so beautifully—just see!"

"Is this a game," I asked, "or a child's crazy play?"

"Then it's an exceedingly stupid game if you can't do a little thing like that when it's absolutely necessary. What is the sense of it?"

Her eyes actually flashed into mine as she leaned at my side pointing out this simple way to victory.

"What's the sense of any rules to any game on earth?" I retorted. "If I hadn't learned to respect rules—if I hadn't learned to be thankful for what the game allows me, however little it may be—" I paused, for the water was deeper than I had thought.

"Well?"

"Well—well then—I shouldn't be as thankful as I am this instant for—for many things that I can't have more of."

She straightened herself and favored me with a curious look that melted at last into a puzzling smile.

"I don't understand you," she said. With a shade more of encouragement in her voice I had been near to forgetting my honor as a truce-observing enemy. I was grateful, indeed, afterwards, that her wish to understand me was not sufficiently implied to bring me thus low.

"Neither do I understand the morbid psychology that finds satisfaction in cheating at solitaire," I succeeded in saying. "I never can see how they fix it up with themselves."

"I believe you think and talk a great deal of foolishness," said Miss Kate, in tones of reproof; and with this she was off the porch before I could rise.

She wore pink, with bits of blue spotting it in no systematic order that I could discern, and a pink rose lay abashed in her hair.

[CHAPTER XXVIII]

THE ABDICATION OF THE BOSS

There is no need to conceal that I was by this time put to it for matters to think upon not clearly related to myself; in other words for matters extraneous to my neighbor's troublesome daughter. In sheer self-defence was I driven to look abroad for interests that would suffice without disquieting me. I was now compelled to admit that there was plainly to be observed in Miss Kate Lansdale something more than a mere winning faith in my powers of self-control. It was difficult at first to suspect that she actually meant to try me to the breaking point. The suspicion brought a false note to that harmony of chastened grief wherein, I had divined, she meant to live out her life. It seemed too Peavey and perverse a thing that she should, finding our truce honorably observed by myself, behave toward me as if with a cold design to bring me down in disgrace—as a proof of her superior powers and my own wretched weakness. Yet this very thing was I obliged regretfully to concede of her before many days. And it was behavior that I could palliate only by reminding myself constantly that she was not only a woman but the daughter of Miss Caroline, and by that token subject inevitably to certain infirmities of character. And still did she at times evince for me that shyness which only enhanced my peril.

I managed to refrain, though in so grievous a plight, from wishing for another war; though I did concede that if we must ever again be cursed with war, it might as well come now as later. Regrettable though I must consider it, I should there find, spite of my disability, some field of active endeavor to engage my mind.

Lacking war, I sought distraction in a matter close at hand—one which possessed quite all the vivacity of war without its violence.

Early in the summer Mrs. Aurelia Potts had resumed her activities in behalf of our broader culture, whereupon our people murmured promptly at Solon Denney; for him did Little Arcady still hold to account for the infliction of this relentless evangel.

It was known that something still remained to Mrs. Potts, even after a year, of the pittance secured from the railway company, so that it was not necessity which drove her. To a considerable element of the town it seemed to be mere innate perversity. "It's in her," was an explanation which Westley Keyts thought all-sufficient, though he added by way, as it were, of putting this into raised letters for the blind, "she'd have to raise hell just the same if it had cost that there railroad eight million 'stead of eight hundred to exterminate Potts!"

For myself, I should have set this thing to different words. I regarded Mrs. Potts as a zealot whom no advantage of worldly resource could blind to our shortcomings, nor deter from ministering unto them. Had it been unnecessary to earn bread for herself and little Roscoe, I am persuaded that she would still have been unremitting in her efforts to uplift us. In that event she might, it is true, have read us more papers and sold us fewer books; but she would have allowed herself as little leisure.

That Little Arcady was unequal to this broader view, however, was to be inferred from comments made in the hearing of and often, in truth, meant for the ears of Solon Denney. The burden was shifted to his poor shoulders with as little concern as if our best citizens had not coöperated with him in the original move, with grateful applause for its ingenious and fanciful daring. In ways devoid of his own vaunted subtlety, it was conveyed to Solon that Little Arcady expected him to do something. This was after the town had been cleanly canvassed for two monthly magazines—one of which had a dress-pattern in each number, to be cut out on the dotted line—and after our heroine had gallantly returned to the charge with a rather heavy "Handbook of Science for the Home,"—a book costing two dollars and fifty cents and treating of many matters, such as, how to conduct electrical experiments in a drawing-room, how to cleanse linen of ink-stains, how the world was made, who invented gun-powder, and how to restore the drowned. I recite these from memory, not having at hand either of my own two copies of this valuable work. Upon myself Mrs. Potts was never to call in vain, for to me she was an important card miraculously shuffled into the right place in the game. It was the custom of Miss Caroline, also, to sign gladly for whatsoever Mrs. Potts signified would be to her advantage. She gave the "Handbook of Science" to Clem, who, being strongly moved by any group of figures over six, rejoiced passionately to read the weight of the earth in net tons, and to dwell upon those vastly extensive distances affected by astronomers.

But abroad in the town there was not enough of this complaisance nor of this passion for mere numerals to prevent worry from creasing the brow of Solon Denney.

"The good God helped him once, but it looks like he'd have to help himself now," said Uncle Billy McCormick, the day he refused to subscribe for an improving book on the ground that the clock-shelf wouldn't hold another one. And this view of the situation came also to be the desperate view of Solon himself. That he suffered a black hour each week when Mrs. Potts read the Argus to him with corrections to make it square with "One Hundred Common Errors" and with good taste, in no way lessened the feeling against him. If he sustained an injury peculiar to his calling, it seemed probable that he would the sooner be moved to action. Little Arcady did not know what he could do, but it had faith that he would do something if he were pushed hard enough. So the good people pushed and trusted and pushed.

To those brutal enough to seek direct speech about it with Solon, he professed to be awaiting only the right opportunity for a brilliant stroke, and he counselled patience.

To me alone, I think, did he confide his utter lack of inspiration. And yet, though he seemed to affect entire candor with me, I was, strangely enough, puzzled by some reserve that still lurked beneath his manner. I hoped this meant that he was slowly finding a way too good to be told as yet, even to his best friend.

"Something must be done, Cal," he said, on one occasion, "but you see, here's the trouble—she's a woman and I'm a man."

"That's a famous old trouble," I remarked.

"And she's got to live, though Wes' Keyts says he isn't so sure of that—he says I'm lucky enough to have an earthquake made up especially for this case—and if she lives, she must have ways and means. And then I have my own troubles. Say, I never knew I was so careless about my language until she came along. She says only an iron will can correct it. Did you ever notice how she says 'i—ron' the way people say it when they're reading poetry out loud? I'll bet, if he had her help, the author of 'One Hundred Common Errors' could take an Argus and run his list up to a hundred and fifty in no time. She keeps finding common errors there that I'll bet this fellow never heard of. You mustn't say 'by the sweat of the brow,' but 'by the perspiration'—perspiration is refined and sweat is coarse—and to-day I learned for the first time that it's wrong to say 'Mrs. Henry Peterby of Plum Creek, née Jennie McCormick, spent Sunday with her parents of this city.' It looks right on the face of it, but it seems you mustn't say 'née' for the first name—only the last; though it means in French that that was her name before she was married. I tell you, that woman is a stickler. But what can I do?"

"Well, what can you do? Far be it from me to suggest that something must be done."

"Do you know, Cal, sometimes I've thought I'd adopt a tone with her?"

"Better be careful," I cautioned. Mrs. Potts was not a person that one should adopt a tone with except after long and prayerful deliberation.

"Oh, I've considered it long enough—in fact I've considered a lot of things. That woman has bothered me in more ways than one, I tell you frankly. She's such a fine woman, splendid-looking, capable, an intellectual giant—one, I may say, who makes no common errors—and yet—"

"Ah! and yet—?" There was then in Solon's eyes that curious reserve I had before noted—a reserve that hinted of some desperate but still secret design.

"Well, there you are."

"Where?"

"Well—she seems to me to be a born leader of men."

"I see, and you?"

"Oh, nothing—only I'm a man. But something has got to be done. We must use common sense in these matters."

It was early evening a week later when I again saw Solon; one of those still, serene evenings of later summer when the light would yet permit an hour's play at the game. I heard a step, but it was not she I longed, half-expected, and wholly dreaded to see. Instead came Solon, and by his restored confidence of bearing I knew at a glance that something had been done or—since he seemed to be hurried—that he was about to do it.

"It's all over, Cal—it's fixed!"

"Good—how did you fix it?"

"Well—uh—I adopted a tone."

"That was brave, Solon. No other man on God's earth would have dared—"

"A tone, I was about to say—" he broke in a little uncomfortably, I thought—"which I have long contemplated adopting. If I could tell you just how that woman has impressed herself upon me, you'd understand what I mean when I say that she has powers. But I suppose you can't understand it, can you?" His tone, curiously enough, was almost pleading.

"It isn't necessary that I should. I can at least understand that you are the Boss of Little Arcady once more."

"Boss of nothing!—that's all over. Cal, I've abdicated—I'm not even Boss of myself."

"Why, Solon—you can't possibly mean—"

"I do, though! Mrs. Potts is going to marry me and—uh—put an end to everything!"

With this rather curious finish he held out his hand expectantly.

"Well, you certainly did something, Solon."

"We have to use common sense in these matters," he said with an effort to control his excitement. But, looking into his eyes, I saw reason to shake him warmly by the hand. What was my own poor opinion at a crisis like this? Certainly nothing to be obtruded upon my friend. It was clear that he had done a thing which he earnestly wanted and had earnestly dreaded to do—and that the dread was past.

"I'm pretty happy, Cal—that's all. Of course you'll soon know how it is yourself." He referred here to the well-known fact that I was much in the company of Miss Lansdale. But this was a thing to be turned.

"Oh, the game is teaching me resignation to a solitary life," I said with an affectation of disinterest that must have irritated him, for he asked bluntly:—

"Say, Calvin, how long do you intend to keep up that damned nonsense when everybody knows—"

This interesting sentence was cut off by Miss Kate Lansdale, who appeared around the corner and paused politely before us, with a look of trained and admirable deafness.

"Ah, Miss Lansdale," said Solon, urbanely, "I was just about to speak of you."

"Dear me!" said the young woman, simply. I thought she was aghast.

"Yes—but it's not worth repeating—or finishing."

Miss Lansdale seemed to be relieved by this assurance.

"And now I must hurry off," added Solon.

"Good evening!" we both said.

It seemed to be of a stuff from which curtains are sometimes made, white, with little colored figures in it, but the design would have required at least a column of the most technical description in a magazine I had subscribed for that summer. There was lace at the throat, and I should say that the thing had been constructed with the needs of Miss Lansdale's slender but completed figure solely and clearly in mind.

[CHAPTER XXIX]

IN WHICH ALL RULES ARE BROKEN

Swiftly I appraised the cool perfection of her attire, scenting the spice of the pinks she had thrust at her belt. And I suffered one heart-quickening look from her eyes before she could lower them to me. In that instant I was stung with a presentiment that our treaty was in peril—that it might go fearfully to smash if I did not fortify myself. It came to me that the creature had regarded my past success in observing this treaty with a kind of provocative resentment. I cannot tell how I knew it—certainly through no recognized media of communication.

Most formally I offered her a chair by the card-table, and resumed my own chair with what I meant for an air of inhospitable abstraction. She declined the chair, preferring to stand by the table as was her custom.

"It was on this spot years ago," I said, laying down the second eight cards, "that Solon Denney first told me he was about to marry."

Discursive gossip seemed best, I thought.

"Two long yellow braids," she remarked. It would be too much to say that her words were snapped out.

"And now he has told me again—I mean that he's going to marry again."

"What did you do?" she asked more cordially, studying the cards.

"The first time I went to war," I answered absently, having to play up the ace and deuce of diamonds.

"I have never been able to care much for yellow hair," she observed, also studying the cards; "of course, it's effective, in a way, but—may I ask what you're going to do this time?"

"This time I'm going to play the game."

Again she studied the cards.

"It's refining," I insisted. "It teaches. I'm learning to be a Sannyasin."

Eight other cards were down, and I engrossed myself with them.

"Is a Sannyasin rather dull?"

"In the Bhagavad-gita," I answered, "he is to be known as a Sannyasin who does not hate and does not love anything."

"How are you progressing?" I felt her troubling eyes full upon me, and I suspected there was mockery in their depths.

"Oh, well, fairishly—but of course I haven't studied as faithfully as I might."

"I should think you couldn't afford to be negligent."

I played up the four of spades and put a king of hearts in the space thus happily secured.

"I have read," I answered absently, "that a benevolent man should allow himself a few faults to keep his friends in countenance. I mustn't be everything perfect, you know."

"Don't restrain yourself in the least on my account."

"You are my sole trouble," I said, playing a black seven on a red eight. She looked off the table as I glanced up at her.

I am a patient enough man, I believe, and I hope meek and lowly, but I saw suddenly that not all the beatitudes should be taken without reservation.

"I repeat," I said, for she had not spoken, "your presence is the most troubling thing I know. It keeps me back in my studies."

"There's a red five for that black six," she observed.

"Thank you!" and I made the play.

"Then you're not a Sannyasin yet?"

"I've nearly taken the first degree. Sometimes after hard practice I can succeed in not hating anything for as much as an hour."

I dealt eight more cards and became, to outward seeming, I hope, absorbed in the new aspect of the game.

"Perseverance will be rewarded," she said kindly. "You can't expect to learn it all at once."

"You might try not to make it harder for me."

Again had I been a third person of fair discernment, I believe I should have sworn that I caught in her eyes a gleam of hardened, relentless determination; but she only pointed to a four of hearts which I was neglecting to play up.

"Why not play the game to win?" she asked, and there was that in her voice which was like to undo me—a tone and the merest fanning of my face by her loose sleeve as she pointed to the card.

Suddenly I knew that honor was not in me. She walked within my lines in imminent peril of the deadliest character. But there was no sign of fear in the look she held me with, and I knew she had not sensed her danger.

"You should play your stupid game to win," she repeated terribly. "You are too ingenious at finding balm in defeat." That little golden roughness in her voice seemed to grate on my bared heart. I left her eyes with a last desperate appeal to the game. My hand shook as it laid down the final eight cards.

"Have I ever had any reason to think I could win?" I found I could ask this if I kept my eyes upon the cards.

She laughed a curious, almost silent, confidential little laugh, through which a sigh of despair seemed to breathe.

I looked quickly up, but again there was that strange gleam in her eyes, a gleam of sternest resolve I should have called it under other circumstances.

"You see!" I exclaimed, pointing with a trembling but triumphant finger at the cards. "You see! I am beaten now, in this game that seemed easy up to the very last moment. What could I hope for in a game where the cards fell wretchedly from the very start? If I hoped now, I'd be a hopeless fool, indeed!"

"'THAT WILL DO,' I SAID SEVERELY. 'REMEMBER THERE IS A GENTLEMAN PRESENT.'"

"Are you sure you know how to play this game?"

There was a sort of finality in her words that sickened me.

"I have abided always by the rules," I answered doggedly, "and I do know the rules. Look—this game is neatly blocked by one little four-spot on that queen. If that queen were free, I could finish everything."

"Oh, oh—I've told you it's a stupid game with stupid rules—and it makes its players—" She did not complete that, but went about on another tack—with the danger note in her voice. "Just now I overheard your caller say a thing—"

"Ah, I feared you overheard."

The arrogance of the gesture with which she interrupted me was splendid.

"He said, 'How long are you going to keep up that—that—'"

"That will do," I said severely. "Remember there is a gentleman present." But my voice sounded queerly indeed to the ears most familiar with its quality. Also it trembled, for her gaze, almost stern in its questioning, had not released me.

"But how long are you?" Her own voice had trembled, as mine did. She might as well have used the avoided word. Her tone carried it far too intelligibly. It was quite as bad as swearing. I tried twice before I succeeded in finding my voice.

"I've told you," I said desperately; "can't you see—that queen isn't free?"

Swiftly—I regret to say, almost with a show of temper—she snatched the four of diamonds from its lawful place and laid it brazenly far outside the game.

"The creature is free," she said crisply—but at once her arrogance was gone and she drooped visibly in weakness.

So quickly did I rise from the table that the cards of the game were hurled into a meaningless confusion. I stood at her side. I had lost myself.

"Little Miss,—oh, Little Miss! I've a thousand arms all crying for you."

Slowly she made her eyes come to mine—not without effort, for we were close.

"I am glad we left you,"—she had meant to say "that arm," I judge, but there was a break in her voice, a swift movement, and she suddenly said "this arm," with a little shudder in which she could not meet my eyes; for, such as the arm was, she had finished her speech from within it. Close I held her, like a witless moonling, forgetting all resolves, all lessons, all treaties—all but that she was not a dream woman.

"Oh, Little Miss!" was all I could say; and she—"Calvin Blake!" as if it were a phrase of endearment.

"Little Miss, that loss has put me out, but never has it been the hardship it is now—one arm!"

I had not thought it possible for her to come nearer, but a successful nestling movement was her answer.

"I feel the need of a thousand arms, and yet their strength is—"

"Is in this one." She completed my sentence with her own nestling emphasis for "this one."

"Can you believe now, Little Miss?"

"Yes—you gave it to me again."

"Can you believe that I—I—"

"That was never hard. I believed that the first evening I saw you."

"A womanish thing to say—I didn't know it myself."

But she laughed to me, laughed still as I brought her face nearer—so near. Only then did her parted lips close tensely in the woman fear of what she read in my eyes. I have reason to believe that she would have mastered this fear, but at that instant Miss Caroline coughed rather alarmingly.

"You should do something for that right away," I said, as we struck ourselves apart. "You let a cough like that run along and you don't know what it may end in." Whereupon, having kissed no one on this occasion, I now kissed Miss Caroline,—without difficulty, I may add.

"I've been meaning to do it for a year," I explained.

"I must remind you that they were far less deliberate in my day," said she, with a delicate hint of reminiscence in her tone. Whereupon she looked searchingly at each of us in turn. Then, with a little gasp, she wept daintily upon my love's shoulder.

I had long suspected that tears were a mere aesthetic refreshment with Miss Caroline. I had never known her weaken to them when there seemed to be far better reasons for it than the present occasion furnished.

"I must take her home," said my love, without speaking.

"Do!" I urged, likewise in silence, but understandably.

"And I must be alone," she called, as they stepped out on to the lawn.

"So must I." It had not occurred to me; but I could see thoughts with which my mind needed at once to busy itself. I watched them go slowly into the dusk. I thought Miss Caroline seemed to be recovering.

When they had gone, I stepped out to look up at the strange new stars. The measure of my dream was full and running over. To stand there and breathe full and laugh aloud—that was my prayer of gratitude; nor did I lack the presence of mind to hope that, in ascending, it might in some way advantage the soul of J. Rodney Potts, that humble tool with which the gods had wrought such wonders.

It was no longer a dream, no vision brief as a summer's night, when the light fades late to come again too soon. Before, in that dreaming time, I saw that I had drawn water like the Danaides, in a pitcher full of holes. But now—I wondered how long she would find it good to be alone. I felt that I had been alone long enough, and that seven minutes, or possibly eight, might suffice even her.

She came almost with the thought, though I believe she did not hurry after she saw that I observed her.

"I had to be alone a long time, to think well about it—to think it all out," she said simply.

I thought it unnecessary to state the precise number of minutes this had required. Instead I showed her all those strange new stars above us, and together we surveyed the replenished heavens.

"How light it is—and so late!" she murmured absently.

"Come back to our porch."

There for the first time in its green life my vine came into its natural right of screening lovers. In its shade my love cast down her eyes, but intrepidly lifted her lips. Miss Caroline was still where she should have remained in the first place.

"I am very happy, Little Miss!"

"You shall be still happier, Calvin Blake. I haven't waited this long without knowing—"

"Nor I! I know, too."

"I hope Jim will be glad," she suggested.

"He'll be delighted, and vastly relieved. It has puzzled him fearfully of late to see you living away from me."

We sat down, for there seemed much to say.

"I believed more than you did, with all your game," she taunted me.

"But you broke the rules. Anybody can believe anything if he can break all the rules."

"I'd a dreadful time showing you that I meant to."

I shall not detail a conversation that could have but little interest to others. Indeed, I remember it but poorly. I only know that it seemed magically to feed upon itself, yet waxed to little substance for the memory.

One thing, however, I retain vividly enough. In a moment when we both were silent, renewing our amazement at the stars, there burst upon the night a volume of song that I instantly identified.

"She sleeps, my lady sleeps!" sang the clear tenor of Arthur Updyke. "My lady sleeps—she sleeps!" sang three other voices in well-blended corroboration; after which the four discoursed upon this interesting theme.

We were down from the stars at once, but I saw nothing to laugh at, and said as much.

"We might take them out some sandwiches and things to drink," persisted my Little Miss.

But the starlight had shown me a gleam in her eyes that was too outrageously Peavey.

"We will not" I chanted firmly to the music's mellowed accompaniment. "I am free to say now that the thing must be stopped, but you shall do it less brutally—to-morrow or next day."

"Oh, well, if you—"

She nestled again. So soon had this habit seemed to fasten upon her adaptable nature.

"It's wonderful what one arm can do," she said; and in the darkness she felt for the closing hand of it to draw it yet more firmly about her.

"It has the spirit of all the arms in the world, Little Miss—oh, my Little Miss—my dream woman come true!"

She nestled again, with a sigh of old days ended.

"You can't get any closer," I admonished.

"Here!" she whispered insistingly, so that I felt the breath of it.

[CHAPTER XXX]

BY ANOTHER HAND

A wanderer from Little Arcady in early days returned to its placid shades after many years, drawn thither by a little quick-born yearning to walk the old streets again. But he found such strangeness in these that his memory was put to prodigious feats of reconstruction ere it could make them seemly as of yore.

To the west, away from the river, the town has groped beyond a prairie frontier that had once been sacred to boyish games and the family cow. Now, so thickly was it built with neat white houses, that only with strenuous clairvoyance could famous old localities be identified: the ball-ground; the marshy stretch that made skating in winter, or, in spring, a fascinating place to catch cold by wading; the grassy common where "shinny" was played by day and "Yellow Horn" by night; the enchanted spot where the circus built airy castles of canvas, and where, on the day after, one might plant one's feet squarely in the magic ring, on the veritable spot, perchance, where the clown had superhumanly ridden the difficult trick-mule after local volunteers had failed so entertainingly.

Barns in this once wild country had failed amazingly. Only one of any character was left, and it had shrunk. Of old a structure of possibilities intensely romantic, it was now dingy, pitiable, insignificant. No reasonable person would consider holding a circus there—admission ten pins for boys and five pins for girls.

Orchards, too, had suffered. Acres of them, once known to their last tree, including the safest routes of approach by day or night, had been cut down to make space for substantial but unexciting houses, quite like the houses in anybody's town. Other orchards had shrunk to a few poor unproductive trees so little prized by their owners that they could no longer excite evil thoughts in the young.

Indeed, almost everything had shrunk. The church steeples, once of an inconceivable height, were now but a scant sixty feet; and the buildings beneath them, that once had vied with old-world cathedrals, were seen to be but toy churches.

Especially had gardens shrunk. One that boasted the widest area in days when it must be hoed for the advantage of potatoes insanely planted there, was now a plot so tiny that the returned wanderer, amazedly staring at it, abandoned all effort to make it occupy its old place in his memory.

North and south were dozens of strange, prim houses to puzzle up the streets. The street-signs, another innovation, were truly needed. Of old it had been enough to say "down toward the depot," "out by the McCormick place," "next to the Presbyterian church," "up around the schoolhouse," or "down by the lumber yard." But now it was plain that one had to know First, Second, and Third streets, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson streets.

Socially as well, the town had changed. Not only is the native stock more travelled, speaking—entirely without an air—of trips to the Yellowstone, to Europe, Chicago, or Santa Barbara, but a new element has invaded the little country. It goes in the fall, but it comes again each summer, drawn by the green beauty of the spot, and it has left its impress.

The revisiting wanderer observed, as in a dream, an immaculate coupé with a couple of men on the box who behaved quite as if they were about to enter the park in the full glare of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, though they were but on a street of the little country among farm wagons. The outfit was ascertained to belong to a summer resident who was said, by common report, to "have wine right on the table at every meal." No one born out of Little Arcady can appraise the revolutionary character of this circumstance at anything like its true value.

Further, in the line of vehicular sensationalism, a modish wicker-bodied phaeton and a minute pony-cart were seen on a pleasant afternoon to issue from a driveway far up a street that now has a name, but which used to be adequately identified by saying "up toward the Fair Grounds."

The phaeton was occupied by two ladies, one rather old, to whom a couple of half-grown children in the pony-cart kissed their hands and shouted. They were not permitted to follow the phaeton, however, as they seemed to have wished. Its shock-headed pony, driven by an aged negro who scolded both children with a worn and practised garrulity, was turned in another direction. One of the children, a little dark-faced girl of eight or nine, called "Little Miss" by the driver, was repeatedly threatened in the fiercest tone by him because of her perilous twistings to look back at the phaeton. The cart was followed by a liver-and-white setter; a young dog, it seemed, from his frenzied caperings and his manner of appearing to think of something else in the midst of every important moment.

There proved to be two papers in the town, as of old, but the Argus was now published twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The wanderer eagerly scanned its columns for familiar names and for something of the town's old tone; but with little success.

Said one item, "A string of electric lights, on a street leading up one of our hills, looks like a necklace of brilliants on the bosom of the night." Old Little Arcady had not electric lights; nor the Argus this exuberance of simile.

Again: "This new game of golf that the summer folks play seems to have too much walking for a good game and just enough game to spoil a good walk." Golf in the Little Country!

The advent of musical culture was signified by this: "At least thirty girls in this town can play the first part of 'Narcissus' pretty well. But when they come to the second part they mangle the keys for a minute and then say, 'I don't care much for that second part—do you?' Why don't some of them learn it and give us a chance to judge?"

The Argus had acquired a "Woman's Department," conducted by Mrs. Aurelia Potts Denney, wife of the editor,—a public-spirited woman, prominent in club circles, and said to be of great assistance to her husband in his editorial duties. The town was proud of her, and sent her as delegate to the Federation of Woman's Clubs; her name, indeed, has been printed in full more than once, even by Chicago newspapers. Some say that wisely she might give more attention to her twin sons, Hayes and Wheeler Denney; but this likely is ill-natured carping, for Hayes and Wheeler seem not more lawless than other twins of eight. And carpers, to a certainty, do exist in Little Arcady.

One Westley Keyts, for example, lounging in the doorway of his meat-shop, renewed acquaintance with the wanderer, who remembered him as a glum-faced but not bad-hearted chap. Names recalled and hands shaken, Mr. Keyts began to lament the simple ways of an elder day, glancing meanwhile with honest disapproval at a newly installed competitor across the street. The shop itself was something of an affront, its gilt name more—"The Bon Ton Market." Mr. Keyts pronounced "Bon Ton" in his own fashion, but his contempt was ably and amply expressed.

"Sounds like one of them fancy names for a corset or a patent lamp," he complained. "It's this here summer business that done it. They swarm in here with their private hacks and their hired help all togged out till you'd think they was generals in the army, and they play that game of sissy-shinny (drop-the-handkerchief for mine, if I got to play any such game), and they're such great hands to kite around nights when folks had ought to be in their beds. I tell you, my friend, it ain't doing this town one bit of good. The idea of a passel of strong, husky young men settin' around on porches in their white pants and calling it 'passing the summer.' I ain't never found time to pass any summers."

The wanderer expressed a proper regret for this decadence. Mr. Keyts reverted bitterly to the Bon Ton market:—

"Good name for a tooth powder, or a patent necktie, or an egg-beater. But a butcher-shop!—why, it's a hell of a name for a butcher-shop!"

The wanderer expressed perfect sympathy with this view of the shop legend, and remarked, "By the way, whose big house is that with the columns in front, up where the Prouse and old Blake houses used to be?"

The face of Mr. Keyts became pleasanter.

"Oh, that?—that's Cal Blake's—Major Blake's, you know. He married a girl that come in here from the South with her mother. I guess that was after you got out of here. They tore down the two houses and built that big one. They say it's like them Southern houses, but I don't know. It seems awful plain up the front of it. Cal's all right, though. I guess mebbe he built the house kind of bare that way to please his wife and his mother-in-law. I'll bet if he'd had his own way, there'd be some brackets and fret work on the front to liven it up some. But I'd a done just like him in his place, I would, by Gee! So would you if you seen his wife. Say! but never mind; you wait right here. She'll drive up to git Cal from his office at four-thirty—it's right across there over the bank where that young fellow is settin' in the window—that's young Cal Denney, studyin' law with Blake. You just wait and see—she'll drive up in about six minutes."

The wanderer waited, out of pure cordiality to Mr. Keyts. The prospect was not exciting, but the simple faith of the villagers that outsiders must share their interest in local concerns has always seemed too touching a thing to wreck.

Within the six minutes mentioned by Mr. Keyts the diurnal happening to which he attached such importance was observed. A woman (the younger of the two seen in the phaeton) drove up for Major Calvin Blake; a youngish rather than a young woman, slight, with an effect of stateliness, and not unattractive. Her husband, a tall and pleasant enough looking man, came down the stairs, and when he saw the woman his face lighted swiftly—and rather wonderfully, when one considers that she was not unexpected. They drove away.

The wanderer was not disposed to minimize the incident, however far he might fall short of Westley Keyts's appreciation. But he had been long absent from the Little Country, and the people of to-day were strange and unimportant. He preferred to revive, as best he might, the days of his own simple faith in the town's sufficiency; days when the world beyond the Little Country was but a place from which to order merchandise, or into which, at the most, adventurous Arcadians dared brief journeys for profit or a doubtful pleasure; the days of a boy's Little Arcady, that existed no more save as a wraith in remembering minds.