Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

PART II.—FANNY AND JACK.

Chapter I.—Annie’s Story Continued.
AFTER FIVE YEARS.

It is a question whether one can truly love more than once. I do not think a woman can. But men are different and seem capable of many loves. If anyone doubts this let him recall the number of widows and widowers among his acquaintance, and see if there are not fifty per cent. more of the former than of the latter. Three women had called my father husband and I believe he had loved them all devotedly, but whether it was the suddenness of the blow, or because he missed the force and energy which had kept him going, the death of the last Mrs. Hathern crushed him completely, and made him an old man at once.

“I don’t know what ails me, girls, but since your mother died I don’t seem to have any life or ambition left. I am like a clock which has run down and can’t be wound up again,” he would say to us when he came in from a walk into town or country where he still had a few patients of the old school.

He had never spoken to us of Mrs. Hathern as our mother while she lived; but now that she was dead he always mentioned her in that way, and we humored him, and sometimes called her so ourselves, and petted and made much of him, and felt that, like him, we were ships without rudders and didn’t know how to run ourselves. Especially was this the case with Phyllis, who needed whip and spur to keep her in the harness.

“I ’clars to goodness I don’t know nothin’ now the missus isn’t here to boss,” she said, as she sat on the bench outside the cabin door, her feet stretched out in front of her, her hands idly folded on her lap, her ironing neglected and her irons cooling on the hearth.

Only Norah kept her balance and went steadily on her way, her shoes creaking a good deal and her sharp tongue often lashing Phyllis when she got too far out of line. For three or four months Norah staid with us and then, as it was impossible for us to pay her the wages she had been receiving, she left us for Boston. But not until she had everything in what she called “apple pie order,” an expression which, I think, must belong exclusively to the east, as it was a favorite with Mrs. Hathern, and I have never heard it elsewhere. Owing to her delicate health Mrs. Hathern had deferred the spring cleaning, which she intended to take in hand as soon as her illness was over. But death snatched her away and it was left for Norah to carry out her plans, which she did with a vengeance. Everything was turned topsy-turvey, as it had been the year before when Mrs. Hathern was the presiding genius of brush and broom and soap suds. There was, however, this difference, there were no carpenters and masons and plumbers blocking the way, or hired negroes either. Knowing the low state of our finances Norah did everything herself with the little help she could extort from Phyllis. That functionary had taken to violent fits of short breath when there was more than usual to do. “Physicy,” she called it, and she had it badly now and wheezingly protested against so much useless cleaning. A little dirt was healthy, she said, and privately we sympathized with her, and were glad when Norah told us that we needn’t go through with quite so much in the fall. Boston folks didn’t as a rule.

“Wash the windows; wipe the fly-specks from the paint; air everything, and give the rest a lick and a promise and let it go till spring, when mabby I’ll visit you and see to the annual clean myself,” she said. Then, as a happy inspiration seized her, she added: “There are a few things you must see to every day, and as I know you won’t remember ’em all I’ll write ’em down.”

The result of this was a long document so full of what we were to do and not to do that I felt dizzy and bewildered as I read it, and then passed it on to Fan, who, with no fancy for housekeeping, threw it aside. This morning while looking over a trunk of old papers I came across that sheet of foolscap, written nearly thirty years ago, yellow with age, blurred and blotted and wonderful for composition and orthography. There were tear stains upon it, too, as I re-read it and thought of all which had happened since the autumnal day when Norah first brought it to me and asked me to nail it up in the pantry where it could be seen every day. I will give a few extracts: “Fust and fornenst, don’t let Phyllis make a pig-sty of my kitchen. I’ve kept it so clane that I can need bred in it anywhere; don’t let her get pot black all over the table, and greese on the floor; don’t let her leave the kittles on the range till they bile dry, specially the Te kittle. Ittle leek, and hev to be mended, an’t costs money; an’ there an’t no Miss Hathern to pay the bills now; don’t let her put the wash biler away till she’s wiped it and the cover dry, or the close will be all iron rust; don’t let her open all the draffs and pile the cole on till the griddles is red hot, an’ the fire all going up the chimly. Ittle warp ’em an’ spile the range. Make her hang up the broom, or stand it on end. Ittle last longer. An’ ef I’se you, I wouldn’t use gilt ege chany every day as Miss Hathern did. You’se them tothers. An’ don’t let Phyllis jab her big black thum into that mended place on the vegetable dish. Ittle break sure. An’ don’t let her slat her things round everywhere in my nice kitchen. Tell her Miss Hathern will appear to her some nite if she does. That’ll fetch her. She’s afraid of spooks.”

All this, and much more, Norah wrote, and I promised to follow her instructions as well as I could. Then one morning in October the ‘bus which had brought her to us came to take her away. Lifting the baby from his cradle she cried over and kissed him and, assuring us that he was not long for this world, he looked so pimpin, she put him back and said good-bye and went away, while we watched her as far as we could see her with swelling hearts and tearful eyes, wondering how we should get on without her.

The next morning I read her instructions to Phyllis. She had moved her belongings from her cabin into the kitchen, which already began to show signs of a new administration. Seated upon an inverted wash tub she listened to my reading with sundry snorts and shakes of her head until her turban fell off and lay upon the floor.

“For de Lord’s sake, chile, is you that soft to think I can ‘member all dem things. No, sor; but nebber you mind, honey, I’se no fool, if I is a brack nigger. I’se kep’ my eyes open more’n you thinks an’ learned a heap of dem Boston ways. You’ll see; don’t you worry, nor come speerin’ ’round de kitchen. Jess stay in de parlor whar ladies belong, an’ I’ll run de ranch! I’se cap’n now.”

She adjusted her turban, picked up the mop and the broom, put them together behind the door, where Norah’s sunbonnet used to hang, and began to bustle about with the activity of a young girl. Norah’s instructions I pinned up, as I said I should, but they were all lost on Phyllis except the possibility of Mrs. Hathern’s return if things were too much mixed; that troubled her. For several nights when we were up with our baby we saw a light in the cabin where she slept. When questioned about it she owned to keeping a candle burning “So as to see de missus if she comes. I’se not gwine to be took unawares, nor be so unmanneredly as to let her stumble roun’ in de dark.”

“But, Phyllis,” Fan said, “if it is dark she can’t see the litter.”

“Dat’s so, honey, I hain’t thought of dat,” was Phyllis’s rejoinder, and that night there was no candle burning in Phyllis’s room, but the door we knew was barricaded and the window nailed down to keep out Norah quite as much as Mrs. Hathern.

The superstitious old woman had been detected so often by the former in her little attempts to deceive that she had come to look upon her with a kind of awe as one gifted with second sight, who might pounce upon her in bodily shape quite as readily as Mrs. Hathern in ghostly form. With Norah’s departure the last link was severed which bound us to the new life, and I am ashamed to confess how quickly and unconsciously we took up the old one. It was so easy to do it, with Phyllis anticipating all our wants and encouraging us in our indolence. We breakfasted when we felt like it; had dinner and supper at all hours, while the kitchen gradually came to look like anything but a place where Norah could knead her bread on the floor. Phyllis’s handiwork was everywhere. There was pot black on the sink, and grease on the floor. Her big black thumb had jabbed out the broken piece in the vegetable dish, and the hot tomatoes had been spilled, some on the carpet and some down Fan’s back. The wash boiler had been discarded for an iron kettle, and was filled with a variety of articles, conspicuous among which were father’s boot-jack and blacking brush. The griddles on the range were red most of the time and began to warp and crack; the kettles burned dry; the tea kettle leaked and was mended so often that father at last mildly protested, saying it was cheaper to get a new one, which he could ill afford as his bill at the hardware store was already a large one. Then I tried to take the helm. There were a good many battles with Phyllis, who, however, succumbed so far as to have one day in each week for clarin up, “and the Lord himself couldn’t ax more’n that ef she was workin’ for him,” she said.

In the midst of all our difficulties our baby was never for a moment forgotten or neglected. Norah had called him pimpin, by which she meant delicate, and so he was. But he was a beautiful child, with wavy hair, and eyes a cross between blue and gray, a complexion like wax and the prettiest ways, which made us all his slaves. It was Fan who devoted herself to him, while I wrestled with the house. When he began to talk, her name, or an attempt at it, was the first word he tried to speak. He had often heard us spoken of as “Fan-and-Ann,” and with a quickness and persistence for which he was remarkable, he caught it and applied it to her alone. “Fan-er-nan” he always called her, while, for some reason known only to himself, I was Annie-mother, although I didn’t take half the care of him that she did. As soon as we thought he could understand we told him of his mother, and when he asked us where she was Fan answered “In Paradise,” and tried to make him repeat the word after her.

“Oh, my lan!” came derisively from Phyllis, who was within hearing. She didn’t “b’lieve in ‘dat ar pair-o’-dice,’” she said, and when next she was alone with the little fellow she took him in her lap, gave him a lump of sugar and said to him, “Don’t you let ’em fool you about dat ar pair-o’-dice. Dar ain’t no sich place. Your mar’s sperrit is in heaven, and her body in Boston.”

After that he always insisted that his mother had gone to heaven in Boston. He knew that Carl was in Boston, and saw no reason why his mother should not be there too. We told him a great deal of Carl, who became to him a kind of imaginary hero, and whom he always remembered in his prayers, asking that God would bless “brother Tarl, make him a good boy, and keep him straight.” Mrs. Hathern’s dying injunction had been “Keep Carl straight,” and as we never saw him Fan hoped a baby’s prayers might accomplish what we had no means of doing, and taught the words to Paul. Carl was in Harvard, doing fairly well for a young man of his means and tastes. He had plenty of money, and was fond of luxury and “larks,” and sometimes wrote us letters which made our hair stand on end. It was usually Fan who took up the cudgels and berated him for what she called his “goings on.” He always answered good-humoredly, telling her she was too prudish and knew nothing of the world, living as she did in that out of the way place.

“Not that Lovering isn’t lovely,” he added, “and I’d like nothing better than to live with you in the charming old home I remember with so much pleasure.”

He always addressed us as “My dear sisters,” and signed himself, “Your loving brother.”

“Words,—nothing but words, which are so cheap,” Fan would say derisively. “If we are so dear, and the old house so charming, why does he never come near us. I tell you there is something wrong about Carl. He is fickle and fast.”

I feared so, too; but there was a very warm spot in my heart for Carl, whom I always defended, while Katy would never hear a word of censure against him. He was her hero as well as Paul’s, and she would rather he would be fast than stupid, she said. Just before he was graduated he sent a most cordial invitation for us all to come east and see him take his degree.

“I have been in a good many scrapes,” he wrote, “but have managed to slip out. I always have my lessons and shall come off with some honor, and I want you here to share it. So, pack up your best clothes. I shall want my sisters to look well, and some of the Boston girls are stunners. Bring Phyllis and the baby, and I will quarter you all in my house in Boston, with Norah to superintend. Did I tell you that I took the house when the last tenant’s lease expired, and had it refurnished from top to toe, and put Norah there to keep it for me? Quite a comfortable bachelor’s home you will find it.”

“Oh, how I’d like to go,” I exclaimed, remembering the pleasant house looking out upon the Common, and feeling a great desire to see Boston and Carl again.

But the thing was impossible. It was five years now since Mrs. Hathern died, and every year we had been growing poorer. Father’s practice was gone, or nearly so, and the few thousands left him by his wife had been drawn upon so many times that there was not much now to draw from. The trip to Boston was not to be thought of, and Fan answered the letter, declining the invitation.

He was sorry, he wrote in reply, adding that as we were not coming he should give a swell dinner in his house to his classmates and have a “high old time.”

As it chanced Jack was in Boston on business and meeting Carl accidentally was persuaded to be present at the dinner, which surpassed anything he had ever seen.

“The flowers alone and decorations must have cost hundreds of dollars,” he wrote to Fan; “and there were dishes whose name I never heard before and which I never care to taste again. Everyone was in evening dress but myself, who felt rather countryfied and out of place in my business clothes. But Carl was the same old kind-hearted boy, and made me feel perfectly at home and treated me as his honored guest. We sat down at nine and did not get up till two in the morning. Even then some of them did not get up at all for they were under the table, and lying round loose anywhere, and I shouldn’t like to tell Fan how many empty wine bottles were carried out by the waiters; but this I will say, I turned my glass down every time, although I know I was thought a milksop for doing it.”

This was at the time the great temperance crusade was beginning to sweep over the land, and Fan was head and front of the movement in Lovering. She had led a band of women into some of the lowest saloons and been threatened with eggs and brickbats, but had held her own bravely and won respect and attention where, at first, she met with coarse language and derisive jeers. Jack’s letter roused her to a pitch of white heat and she wrote to Carl, asking what his mother would say could she have looked upon the drunken revel, and if he didn’t think himself about as mean and low as he well could be for acting so entirely at variance with his mother’s wishes.

Carl’s reply was good-humored and apologetic. He was a cad, he said, to break his promise to his mother, but he positively had never been tipsy.

“I suppose, though, I can drink more than most fellows and not be affected by it,” he wrote. “But that is no excuse, and to prove that I am in earnest I have taken the pledge and shall keep it, too, as bravely as Jack Fullerton did that night. I never respected a man more in my life than I did him, even while chaffing him a little and calling him an old maid. He is the right kind of stuff, and I don’t see why you don’t marry him.”

“Carl’s advice is good,” I said. “Why don’t you marry Jack?”

There was an upward turn of Fan’s chin as she answered me—

“Poor, too poor. I can struggle with poverty at home but when I have one of my own I must have some luxuries. So I’ll wait awhile. I am only twenty-five, if old Granny Baker did say at the sewing society that ‘it was time them Hathern girls were married, as they are gettin’ to be old maids.’ Old maids, indeed! Do I look like one?”

She had never been more beautiful and attractive than she was then in the full bloom of her womanhood. Jack thought so, too, and often asked her to be his wife, while she as often answered him in a manner which, while it did not mean yes, certainly was not a decided no.

Chapter II.—Annie’s Story Continued.
THE FEVER.

That summer our town was visited with typhoid fever in its most malignant form. Jack’s mother was among the first to take it, and in their fear of the disease her servants forsook her, and as nurses were scarce Jack was left alone with her until Fan joined him and together they cared for her until she died. A week later our father was smitten with the terrible scourge, which found him an easy prey. He had never been himself since Mrs. Hathern died, and now it seemed to me as if he gladly lay down upon the bed from which he was never to rise again.

“I am so tired,—so tired!” he said, as he folded his thin hands like a child going to sleep, and scarcely moved or spoke again until toward the last when he asked that we send for Carl. “I want to see him,” he said; “there’s something very winsome about Carl, and I must talk to him about the little boy!”

Jack, who had been with us all the time, hiding his own pain to comfort us, telegraphed to Carl’s address in Boston. It was Norah who replied, and her answer was so like her that we could not repress a smile as we read it: “He is scurripin’ around the country, the Lord only knows where, but I’ll find him,—sure.”

When we told father he said very faintly, “I shall not be here when he comes, but tell him that I have loved him like a son, and he must avoid temptation. He is easily lead. Tell him, too, about the boy.”

All the next day and the next we watched for some message from Carl, but none came. The third day, however, a telegram reached us from Norah saying, “I’ve run him down at last in Canada.” That evening there was another from Carl, saying, “Shall start to-morrow morning.”

Oh, how hard our father tried to live until Carl reached us. It was a fierce struggle between death and an indomitable will, and it was a question which would conquer. Jack kept up his courage and ours.

“If he left Boston at nine, as he probably did, he is in New York by this time,” he would say; and, later on, “He is in Washington now, and will be in Richmond to-morrow morning;” then the line of prevision was broken and we knew no more until the next day at noon, when there came a message from Richmond: “Train late. Have just arrived. Will be with you at four. Carl.”

Fan read it to our father, whose eyes shone for a moment with an eager light, while his paralyzed tongue tried to speak. But he had drifted too far away for anything to hold him longer, and when the old clock in the church tower struck one he was dead. I cannot describe our anguish as we kissed his cold, white face in the last good-bye, while his eyes, to the very last, looked so lovingly at us and his pale lips tried to whisper his farewell. Even now, after many years, my heart throbs with pain as every incident of that day comes back to me. The warm sunshine, the scent of the flowers, the song of the robin, the hum of the bees, the low murmur of voices in the room where the undertaker and his assistants were at work, Jack going in and out, occasionally consulting us but mostly doing what he thought best, and later on going with the phaeton and Black Beauty to meet Carl, while Fan and I sat on the piazza waiting for him just as we waited years before when he surprised us by coming on foot across the field and in at the rear door. Now he came more decorously, with Paul in his lap, one arm around his neck and his curly head nestling on Carl’s shoulder, while he talked continually. Paul had gone with Jack to the station, eager to meet his brother; but when a tall young man, dressed in the height of fashion, stepped upon the platform and came briskly towards him, he drew back, until Jack said, “That’s he that’s your brother; go and speak to him.”

Then he ran forward and looking shyly up at the stranger, said, “Is you my brother Carl? I’m Paul, and papa’s dead and Fan-er-Nan and Annie-mother and Katy has cried themselves sick.”

With the exception of a few presents at Christmas and an occasional mention of him in his letters Carl had never evinced any interest in Paul. But no one could withstand that upturned face and the little hands held out in welcome, and lifting the child in his arms Carl kissed him lovingly.

“Yes, I’m Carl,” he said, “and your brother, if you are really Paul; but, zounds! how you have grown. I have imagined you still a baby. What a stupid I must be.”

After that the acquaintance progressed rapidly, and the two were on the best of terms by the time the phaeton drew up to the door and Carl sprang out to meet us. The same Carl in some respects we had known as a boy, and in others so very different. Broad-shouldered, perfectly formed, six feet tall, with a heavy mustache, and an unmistakable air distingué, he impressed us for a moment as he had little Paul, and I felt half afraid of him. That feeling, however, vanished the moment I heard his voice, full of sympathy, as he kissed us and said, “I am sorry that I did not get here sooner. I’d give so much to see him alive once more. He was the best man I ever knew.”

I was crying and could not answer him. Just what Fan said I do not know, until I heard her exclaim, “Katy Hathern, why are you here? I told you not to get up.” Aside from the grief at the loss of our father there was a terrible fear haunting us lest Katy was coming down with the fever. For two or three days she had complained of her head, and just after father died she had been seized with a nervous chill. The doctor, whom we called at once, had ordered her to bed, and his face was very grave as he prescribed for her. She had refused to go to bed, saying she was only tired; but we persuaded her to lie down upon the couch in her room where I supposed she was until I saw her standing in the doorway, her eyes unusually bright and a deep flush upon her cheeks. She had been very small as a child, seeming younger than she really was; but within the last two or three years she had shot up rapidly, until at fifteen she was taller than either Fan or myself, with the loveliest face I have ever seen. Fan was beautiful, with a brilliant, glowing beauty like the gorgeous flowers of autumn, while Katy was fair as a lily, with a complexion like the pink-and-white shells fresh from the sea. Her eyes were large and blue as a bit of summer sky, the heavy brows and long lashes making them seem darker than they really were. Her hair, once almost yellow, was now a golden brown, with auburn tints upon it when seen in certain lights, and fell in curls upon her neck. No stranger ever looked at Katy once that did not look again, and now, as she appeared in the doorway, the purity of her complexion heightened by the black dress she wore, and her lips parted with a smile of welcome to Carl, it was not surprising that he sprang to his feet exclaiming, “Great Scott! This can’t be Katy! Why, I’ve always thought of you as a little girl in pantelets tumbling into the frog pond, and by Jove! I’ve brought you a doll.”

He had both her hands in his and was looking at her with eyes which seemed to take in every point of beauty and gloat over it as over some rare treasure found unexpectedly. He had kissed Fan and me, but he did not kiss Katy. Possibly she saw the glowing fire in his eyes which I saw, and did not like it, or it might have been the mention of the doll which put her upon her dignity, and when he stooped as if to kiss her she drew her head back with a sideways movement natural to her when surprised or displeased. She was very gracious to him, however, and let him lead her to a seat while he sat down beside her and talked, to us, still looking at her as if he would never tire of her fair girlish beauty. Then suddenly the color left her face, her head began to droop, and finally rested on his shoulder. She had fainted from her weakness and over-exertion. It was Carl who carried her up stairs and laid her upon the bed, from which she did not rise again until the summer was on the wane and there was a foreshadowing of the September haze upon the hills and woods of Lovering.

What passed during the next few days after Katy’s faint was very vague and misty. I seemed like one in a horrible nightmare, my heart torn with anguish for the living and sorrow for the dead. The latter we buried with as little ceremony as possible. Letters of sympathy we had in abundance, but many of our friends were ill and others were too much afraid of the terrible scourge to come near us when they heard there was a fresh case in our midst. So, only the clergyman, the bearers, Jack, Paul, Fan and myself and Phyllis went across the field to the hillside where, under the pines, we buried our father beside Charlie and The Boy. Even Carl was not with us. Katy had been delirious from the first and clung to him as if he were her mother. She knew the moment he left the room and was only quiet when he sat by her, as he did almost constantly, scarcely giving himself time to eat or sleep.

“We can’t let Katy die,” he said, and everything which could be done to save the life so dear to us was done.

We had a trained nurse from Richmond and a physician who came every other day, while the doctor from Lovering came almost every hour, it seemed to me. This was Carl’s idea. He had taken the matter in charge and was spending his money like water. We had a colored woman in the kitchen to help Phyllis and he would have hired another if we had let him. Incidentally, we learned that a party of friends were waiting for him to join them in Montreal. But he telegraphed to them, “My sister is very ill and I cannot come.” He called her his sister, but his manner towards her was that of the tenderest of lovers. Many times I saw him kiss her forehead when she was more than usually restless, and once he pressed his lips to hers, from which the feverish breath came scorchingly.

“Are you not afraid?” I asked, and he answered promptly, “Afraid? No. Nothing about Katy can be infectious, and I would kiss her if I knew I should have the fever a hundred times.”

We tried in vain to keep Paul from the room. He was perfectly infatuated with Carl, who, in his absorption, paid little attention to the child. But that did not matter. Paul was not to be repressed. He would put his little hands into Carl’s and hold it fast until the young man was compelled to notice him. By some means unknown to us he had unearthed the high chair in which Katy had done penance so many times, and dragging it into the sick-room placed it where it would be most out of the way. Here he would sit in spite of us, watching Carl as he bent over the fever-stained face and restless head upon the pillow.

“Does you sink God will let Katy die?” he once asked, as the disease progressed and the hope in our hearts was nearly gone.

“No, she shall not die!” Carl answered, fiercely, and Paul continued, “I prays every night and morning that God will make her well. Does you pray, broder Carl?”

“Oh, Paul, I am too wicked to pray. God wouldn’t hear me, but he will you. Keep on, and if she lives I’ll give you a much prettier riding pony than Black Beauty ever was,” Carl said.

After that, when Paul was not in the sick-room, we found him on his knees at all hours of the day praying that Katy might live.

“And she will, you bet,” he horrified me by saying, as he came from a dark corner where he had been earning his pony.

“Oh, Paul! Where did you get that dreadful word?” I asked.

It was Fan who explained. That morning as she was entering Katy’s room, she saw Carl stoop to kiss the sick girl and heard Paul, who was as usual seated in his high chair, ask “Does you love her very much?”

“You bet,” was the answer inadvertently given; then, as he met Fan’s eyes full of reproach, Carl hastened to say, “I beg your pardon. You see we fellows use a lot of slang when alone, and it came from me unawares. I hope that you will excuse me, and that no harm is done.”

He was looking at Paul, who had caught the expression, as he caught everything out of the common, and who, in spite of our remonstrances, used it continually until Fan shut him up in the meal room, from which he emerged penitent and cured.

For weeks Katy hovered between life and death and went so far down the dark valley that we once thought she had left us forever. But she came back again, and after a few days it became evident that the crisis was past and she would live if her strength was sufficient for the struggle. For days she lay perfectly still with her eyes closed and her face as white as the pillow her shorn head rested upon. We had cut off her hair when her fever and delirium were at their height, for it seemed to trouble her, and she looked like a little child again, with her thin face and short curls clustering around her forehead. Suddenly one evening when we thought her sleeping, she opened her eyes and looked wonderingly at us. Then in a voice so low that we could scarcely hear her, she said, “What has happened, and why are you all in here, and why am I in bed? Am I very ill?” Then as her eyes fell upon Carl they lighted up with something of their old brilliancy, and her voice was steadier as she said, “Oh, Carl, you here? Yes, I remember now; but it seems so long ago.”

“Yes, darling, I am here,” Carl said, laying his hand on her white cheeks, which flushed quickly.

They were scarlet a moment later when Paul, who had climbed upon the bed, chimed in: “He’s been here ever so long and tissed you, oh so many times, I seen him, and once he cried when he so’t you was dead, and he’s goin’ to div me an ittle pony ’cause I prayed so much for God to make you well. I love Carl, don’t you?”

He had blurted out everything, and I glanced nervously at Carl to see how he would take it. He only laughed and said something about “Little pitchers telling all they knew,” and adding, “Why shouldn’t a fellow kiss his sister if he wants to?”

Instantly Katy’s eyes looked searchingly into his with an expression which told me that for her had commenced the old, old story, which has gone on since Adam and Eve first dwelt in Eden, and will go on as long as there is a tongue to tell it, or an ear to listen to it. But how was it with Carl, the young man of the world, with unbounded wealth at his command and his choice of any fair girl in the set to which he belonged? Did he really care for Katy, except as a brother might care for a sister as lovely as she was? and if he cared now, was he not of too fickle a nature to carry her image with him until time had developed her from a girl of fifteen into a full-grown woman?

Rumors had come to us in various ways of numerous flirtations which meant nothing to him and were dropped as soon as the first glamour was worn away and there were fresh fields to glean. From what we had seen of him we could understand how with his face and voice and manner he had only to stretch out his hand and gather almost any flower, just to inhale its sweetness for an hour and then drop it for another. Would he trifle with our Katy, or was it really only a brother’s affection he was giving to her? These questions Fan and I asked ourselves many times during the days of Katy’s convalescence, when Carl was with her so constantly, and we saw the brightness in her eyes when he came into her room, bringing fruit and flowers and books to read, but, most of all, bringing himself. There were drives in the leafy woods as she grew stronger, and walks to the cemetery on the hill side, where we often saw them sitting side by side upon the seat under the pines, his arm sometimes around her waist and her head upon his shoulder.

“Is he making love to her, and shall we let it go on? She is too young,” Fan would say, and calling Paul she would give him some flowers for the graves and tell him he might stay as long as he chose.

The chances were that Paul, who always wanted to go where Carl and Katy went, had already been there and been gotten rid of in some way, but delighted with his commission he would start across the field to execute it.

“Halloo, youngster, who told you to come here after I sent you back?” Carl said to him once, when Katy’s hand lay in his and her eyes were shining like diamonds.

“Fan-er-Nan send me,” Paul replied. “I’ve bringed flowers for papa’s grave an’ Charlie’s an’ The Boy’s, an’ my two first mammas, an’ I’m goin’ to stay.”

A few incidents like this broke up the walks to the cemetery, and, as if divining our suspicions, Carl’s manner to Katy changed a little and was more like that of a brother than of a lover. Katy was not one who carried her thoughts on her face, or talked much of her inner feelings. She was more reticent and self-contained than either Fan or myself, and if she noticed a change in Carl she gave no sign of it. But when about the middle of September he told us one morning at breakfast that he had letters from Boston requiring his immediate presence there, and that he must start the next day, her checks where the roses were beginning to bloom again became a shade paler, and there was a troubled look in her eyes whenever they rested on Carl. He seemed very cheerful and went whistling about the house as he made his preparations for his departure. He had paid every bill contracted during Katy’s illness, had bought a pretty white pony for Paul as a reward for his prayers, and done many things for our comfort.

That night,—the last he was to spend with us,—Fan found an opportunity to speak to him alone, reminding him of his mother’s dying message and what our father had said of his being easily influenced. With a laugh in which there was some bitterness, he replied, “Oh, bother, don’t you fear for me. I’m all right. Lots of us fellows have sprees but we do nothing bad. I shall sow my wild oats early and settle into a model married man. You’ll see!”

There was a thought of Katy in Fan’s mind, and she replied, “Not for years yet; and, Carl, be careful what kind of girls you consort with. Choose the purest and best. Remember that your mother said, ‘If Carl falls, it will be a woman that tempts him.’”

Then for the first time Carl showed real irritation.

“Who has been talking to you?” he said. “Has that old cat, Miss Errington, of Washington, been writing things to you? She was in Boston last winter and I met her several times. She was visiting in a house where I often called; there were three pretty girls there and once they chaffed me before her about a French grisette with whom they said I corresponded. It was just this way; you remember Julina?”

“Yes,” Fan said.

“Well,” Carl continued, “she wrote me a letter in French. She has been in Paris five years and must be perfect in the language. She was with her aunt, Madame Du Bois, who keeps a pension. She addressed me as ‘My dear Carl,’ and signed herself ‘Your devoted Julina.’ I am so poor a French scholar that I couldn’t make it all out, and got a fellow to help me, and by Jove he told of it to these girls as a joke on me, and I was hectored until I almost hated the name Julina. I didn’t answer her letter; upon my word I didn’t.”

“I know nothing about Julina and care less,” Fan replied, “but Miss Errington did write me that you were something of a flirt, and I should know that if she had not written it.”

Again Carl seemed irritated and answered warmly, “I don’t know what you mean. Can’t a fellow enjoy himself with a pretty girl who enjoys herself with him? I like them all, and the one I am with last I like the best. It is my nature. I can’t help it; but I’d burn my hands to the bone before I would wrong any girl, or knowingly deceive her. I have given no woman reason to think my attentions more than those of a friend, and if she thought so it was her own fault and because she did not understand me.”

At this moment Katy entered the room. She had heard his last words, and there was a look of surprise in her eyes for a moment; then they suddenly hardened and her manner was more like that of a Grande Duchesse than our simple-hearted Katy as she took the chair he brought her, and bending over her with his hand on her shoulder stroked her hair and said, “You look pale, are you tired?”

Leaning her head against the back of the chair Katy closed her eyes as if she were tired, but really to repress the tears which in her weak state came so easily. Months after, when Carl’s letters, at first so long and frequent, had become like angel’s visits, “short and far between,” she said to me, hesitatingly, “I thought Carl liked me just as Jack likes Fanny. He never said so, it is true, but he acted it, and I was pleased and happy. There is something about him which wins you in spite of yourself. Hypnotism, perhaps. But I am over it now. I know he does not care for me as I did for him.”

She spoke sadly, and I felt a throb of indignation against Carl, who had, unwittingly, perhaps, thrown a shadow on Katy’s life. She was young in years, but old in much which makes mature womanhood, and the attentions of a man like Carl could not fail to impress her with a deeper feeling than sisters feel for brothers. He still wrote her occasionally,—bright, chatty letters, full of protestations of affection for herself and all of us, and telling her of a life of which she knew nothing. But he didn’t come again, and he seemed at last to have passed out of our lives, into which another exciting interest had entered.

Chapter III.—Annie’s Story Continued.
THE ENGAGEMENT.

The winter succeeding father’s death was a hard one for us. Our effort to economize and still not seem to do so was a struggle, and probably did not deceive anyone. Jack understood all our needs and straits and helped us wherever he could,—not in money, but in many ways where a man’s advice and assistance are invaluable. He was now agent for a large firm which paid him well, and as he was traveling only a part of the time we saw a great deal of him, and the evenings when he was not with us seemed monotonous and long. Sometimes when the days were fine and he had leisure for it he took long walks with Fan in the woods, and when they came back I used to notice a brightness in his manner and a look in Fan’s eyes which I had not seen there before. Christmas week and the one following he was in town, negotiating a sale for his mother’s house. When he left it was early on the morning train, and that night, when Fan and I were alone in our room and she was brushing her glossy hair, she turned suddenly to me and said, “I have promised to marry Jack. Didn’t you notice that he looked more like an idiot than usual?”

I was standing by my dressing bureau with my back to her, so that she could not see the whiteness of my face as I put my hand upon my heart, where for a moment there was the sharpest pain I had ever known or ever shall again. I had expected this would come sometime and I thought I was prepared, but now that it had come, I found myself a weak, wicked woman, loving a man who was to marry my sister, and who, under no circumstances, could ever have cared for me. Rallying in a moment and laughing at her likening him to an idiot, I replied, “You forget I have not seen him since I left you with him last night in the parlor and went to bed with a headache. I suppose it was after I came up stairs.”

“Yes,” she nodded, and after a moment went on; “What a great awkward baby of a fellow he is. Why he almost cried when I consented to marry him, and went off into a tantrum which frightened me and made me half wish I hadn’t said yes. I do believe if I were to go back on him now it would kill him.”

“Go back on him!” I said. “You could never do that. Go back on Jack; the best and noblest man that ever lived!”

She had drawn her long hair across her face, and through it her black eyes looked curiously at me as she said, “I believe you are in love with Jack, or could easily be, and I wish it were you instead of me. Don’t stare at me as if you thought me a fiend. I like him; sometimes I think I love him. I dare say I should love him desperately if there were any danger of losing him, but I can’t help wishing he had more style, and more money. He is a gentleman, of course, but he has not the manner of Carl or Col. Errington. Half a dozen times I have been on the point of accepting the latter. You know his letter is still unanswered; but, you don’t know that in his letter of sympathy after father died there was a slip I did not show you. Just four words, “Are you still considering?” That shows he has remembered all these years, and since we have had so hard a struggle with poverty my thoughts have more than once turned to him, or rather to what he could give me.”

“Fan Hathern!” I exclaimed, indignantly. “You are not worthy the love of a good man like Jack, and I am half tempted to tell him so.”

“I wish you would; but you needn’t knock things over before you do it,” she answered, with the utmost unconcern, as in my excitement I ran against the table on which the lamp was standing. “You know the plateau on the hill where the Ponsonby mansion stood before it was burned?” she continued. “Well, it is for sale, and Jack is going to buy it and build a pretty cottage on it with all the modern improvements. He was just like a boy talking about it. He has more money than I supposed, or will have, when his mother’s estate is settled, and his salary is good. So we shall begin housekeeping in fine style for Lovering, but—bah, nothing to what I would like.”

I was never so angry with Fan in my life as I was that night when she showed me the heartless side of her, and I staid angry for two or three days until Jack came with a plan for the cottage he was going to build on the Ponsonby plateau. Then I forgave her when I saw her eyes light up as she lifted her face to be kissed and sat down close to him, while with one arm around her waist he explained the plan to us both. It was as nearly perfect as could be, especially the square hall with the fireplace, the deep window seats and the broad staircase, with the landing where his mother’s tall clock was to stand. There were to be bay windows and alcoves and verandas, above and below, and a room for Katy, and Paul, and myself whenever we chose to stay there, which he hoped would be very often. He was like a boy in his enthusiasm and Fan caught the spirit, too, and began to furnish the different rooms in a manner which took my breath away. Jack had thought to use some of his mother’s furniture, but Fan promptly vetoed the idea. It was too old fashioned, she said. She must have everything fresh and new, and she fitted up room after room, one with pink, one with blue, one with red. Her own, with the bay window overlooking the town and the valley and hills beyond, was to be of white enameled wood, with touches of gold here and there, while the window itself was bewildering with its white silk canopy and fringe of gold, its fleecy curtains and soft cushioned window stools and chairs.

If Jack had known Fan as well as I did he would have understood that much of her talk was for effect, that she never expected to have a house furnished as she was furnishing it in fancy. Unfortunately, he was apt to take things literally, and as he saw his pocket-book emptied and himself heavily in debt if he carried out her plans, he gasped a little and said, “That would be lovely, but I am afraid I can’t afford it all at first. Sometime we will have it, but now we must cut the garment according to the cloth.”

Instantly Fan’s face clouded. She lost her interest in the plan, and nearly lost it in Jack, who was, however, too supremely happy to notice it. She had promised to be his wife the next Christmas, when the house which was now on paper would be ready for her, and knowing that he would sooner die than break his word to her, he believed in and trusted her, and I never saw any human being more happy than he seemed on the nights when he used to come to us, bringing so much sunshine with his kindness and thoughtfulness that the winter did not seem half as long and dreary as we thought it would be with our father gone. We missed him everywhere, it is true; but as far as possible Jack filled his place, planning for us, transacting all our business, and collecting many a dollar which but for him we could never have recovered. Occasionally we heard from Carl, who wrote that he was studying law and was as steady as an old clock. Once Norah wrote asking if Phyllis had done this and that and presuming she hadn’t. Then she spoke of Carl, of whom she was very proud. “About the firstest young man in Boston,” she said, “with all the girls after him. But he don’t seem to hanker in particular for none of ’em. He has a way, though, of makin’ ’em all b’lieve she’s the one. But, good land, ’taint wuth no girl’s while to set her heart on him. He’s like a wind-mill, turnin’ and turnin’. He’s stiddy, though, and keeps middlin’ good hours—for Boston.”

This was encouraging so far as Carl was concerned, but there was a shadow on Katy’s face, and for several days we missed the music of her voice as she moved rather dejectedly around the house, apparently pondering Norah’s words, “Tain’t wuth no girl’s while to set her heart on Carl.”

Chapter IV.—Annie’s Story Continued.
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.

Owing to some defect found in the title to the Ponsonby plateau after Jack had bargained for it, there was a delay of two or three months and it was the first of June before the way was clear for him to begin his new house. As he meant to superintend it himself and work with his own hands as much as possible there was ample time to finish it before Christmas, the day appointed for the wedding. After many consultations and a great deal of walking around the plateau to get the very best point for views in every direction, it was decided to build the cottage a little to the north of the spot where the Ponsonby house had stood. This necessitated a new cellar, and on the morning when the work was to commence Jack came to us and said, “I wish you’d all come up and see the first furrow turned. It will be something like laying the corner stone.”

As the day was one of Phyllis’s “clarin’ up” days we were glad to escape from the discomfort of it, and deciding to have a kind of picnic we took our lunch with us, and sitting down on a bit of broken wall in the shadow of a dogwood tree Katy, Paul and I looked on while Fan and Jack steadied the plow and drove the horses around the ground staked out for the cellar.

“Don’t this make you think of Romulus and Remus building Rome? I don’t believe, though, that Jack will kill me if I jump over the wall,” Fan said, laughingly, as she let go the plow and bounding over the furrow came up to where we were sitting, flushed with exercise and seemingly very happy.

When the horses had done all they could and the workmen had taken the cellar in hand we sat down to our lunch, which was nearly finished when we heard the sound of voices coming up the hill and a moment after a gentleman and lady came into view, walking very leisurely, but quickening their steps when they saw us.

“Colonel and Miss Errington,” Fan exclaimed. “What evil genius sent them here to-day!”

Was it an evil genius, or good, or was it fate which sent them there? I often asked myself afterwards, when a great happiness and a great sorrow followed as the result of their coming.

“Here you are! What a climb, and how tired and hot I am,” Miss Errington said, as, after shaking hands with us, she dropped down upon the nearest big stone and began to fan herself.

It was years since we had seen either the Colonel or his sister, but it did not seem to me that they had changed much. Both were a little stouter, perhaps, and there were a few white hairs in the Colonel’s side-whiskers, worn after the English fashion. Otherwise he was the same tall, elegant man, with a military look and air, and the same cold, hard expression in his eyes which, as they had always done, softened when they rested on Fan. Every color became her, but to me she had never been as handsome as since she had worn black. It toned down her brilliant color, and made her look more womanly and lovable. That day her dress was a thin muslin, which showed her white neck and arms, and she had pinned some white roses at her throat and fastened some in her hair “to scratch Jack when he tries to kiss me,” she said, but really because she inwardly chafed against black and wanted some color to relieve it.

The Colonel was very polite to me, and said to Katy, “Upon my soul, how you have grown!” and “What little shaver is this?” to Paul. Then he took Fan’s hand and held it much longer than he had held mine, and looked at her until she shrank from him and moved nearer to Jack. Miss Errington was explaining that, as they were in Richmond and had not seen us in years, they had decided to surprise us with a call.

“We drove from the station to the house,” she said, “and found your factotum, Phyllis, asleep on the front piazza with mop and pails and broom at her side. It was a work of time to rouse her, but when she was fairly awake she was profuse in her excuses, saying she was that tired in her bones that she “had done drapped asleep arsidentally,” and also that you were all digging the cellar for Mas’r Jack’s and Miss Fanny’s new house, from which I infer that congratulations are en règle, or are you already married?”

“No, oh no!” Fan exclaimed, while Jack put his hand on her shoulder with an air of proud ownership and said, “Not yet, but I invite you to our wedding next Christmas.”

“Christmas! That’s a long way off,” the Colonel rejoined, his manner changing at once from one of indifference, or disappointment, or both, to one almost hilarious. I was told that I looked younger than when he last saw me. Katy was delicately complimented on her wonderful beauty. Paul was taken up and set upon the highest bit of wall, which he made believe was a horse, and Fan was reminded of the saucy things she said to him when he first invaded our house as a Federal officer with his soldiers, and asked if she hated them all now as much as she did then.

“I should if they came on the same errand,” was her reply, and then walking slowly around the broken ground the Colonel asked if that was to be the size of the house?

“Yes, and you’d be surprised to know how much room there will be in it,” Jack said, beginning eagerly to explain that here was the hall, there the dining-room, there the library and sitting-room, and “upstairs, right here, with the bay window, where we get the finest view, our room,” he added, with a world of love and tenderness on the words our room.

“Ah, yes, I see; all very fine,” the Colonel rejoined, with a look I did not like, it seemed so like the look a snake might give the bird it meant to destroy. “And what do you intend to call this Paradise? You Southerners, like the English, usually have names for your places,” was his next question, to which Jack replied, “We haven’t thought so far as that. The people who used to live here called the place The Plateau, but I’d like something else. Suppose you name it.”

“How would ‘The House that Jack built’ do?” the Colonel said, in an ironical tone which irritated me, but which was lost sight of by the rest because of Paul, who, catching the words “The House that Jack built,” began at once to repeat the rhyme which he knew by heart.

“Bravo, young man!” the Colonel said, patting the child’s head, while Fan suggested that we return to The Elms, where we could offer a cup of tea to our guests.

Jack excused himself, as he must stay with his men, and the rest of us went slowly down the hill, Miss Errington, Katy, Paul and myself in advance, the Colonel and Fan in the rear, walking very slowly and engaged in what seemed a very animated conversation. Phyllis had finished her “clarin’ up,” donned her Sunday dress and turban, and in anticipation of our return was moulding biscuits for tea. It was served on the rear porch, where the clematis and honeysuckle shielded us from the heat of the June sun, and after it was over Miss Errington asked Katy to sing for her. The song was followed by another and another, during which the Colonel, who cared little for music, walked up and down the long piazza with Fan, whose cheeks were very red when she at last joined us at my call.

Miss Errington was going to Saratoga in August and would like to take Katy with her if Fan and I were willing. As all important decisions were usually left to Fan I beckoned her to us. Before she could reply to the proposition, which Miss Errington repeated, the Colonel interposed, “That’s a capital idea, but why not invite Miss Fanny also? You can chaperon two young ladies as well as one, and I am sure she would like to see something of the north she affects to hate.”

This suggestion was warmly seconded by Miss Errington, while Fan stood irresolute. I did not think she would accept without seeing Jack, and was surprised when she said at last, “I should like it so much if Miss Errington really wants me.”

Miss Errington did want her, and as I was not consulted it was arranged that Fan and Katy should go to Washington the last week in July and from there to Saratoga in company with Miss Errington. Nothing had been said of the Colonel’s going, and when I asked what he meant to do, he replied, “Oh, stay at home; Saratoga is not to my taste.”

It was later than usual that night when Jack came to us, more tired than I had ever seen him. He had worked harder than any of his men, he said, as he leaned back in his chair and asked where Fan was. She was putting Paul to bed, and it was Katy who told him of the proposed trip.

“Fanny going!” he repeated, his face flushing for a moment, and then turning paler than before. She had just come in, and going up to him began to smooth his hair and forehead, saying, “You poor boy, you are all tired out. You ought not to work so hard. Let those lazy negroes do it. Yes, I thought I’d go; it is a good chance to see a little of the world before I settle down into a Joan. You don’t care, do you?”

She was still manipulating his hair, with her face very near to his and something so coaxing in her voice that a man less in love than Jack would have yielded to it and granted what she wished.

“I am glad to have you go, if it pleases you,” he said. “Only I thought you might like to be here and watch the house as it progresses. But you’ll be back before we get to the rooms.”

“Oh, yes,” she answered very promptly. “I shall be back before you reach the rooms. It is only for August, and I have always wanted to see Saratoga.”

“Is the Colonel going?” Jack asked and Fan answered, “No, indeed, and I’m glad; I think him horrid and so patronizing.”

The fact that the Colonel was not to make one of the party reconciled Jack to Fan’s absence more than anything else, and in spite of his fatigue he grew very cheerful and quite like himself as the evening wore on. That night in our room there was a spirited discussion between Fan and myself with regard to her proposed trip, I arguing that for Jack’s sake she should stay at home, and she declaring she would not. It was the only bit of life she’d ever see, she said, and she meant to take it. She’d never been beyond the smoke of our chimney, and after she was married she should of course settle down, just as all the Lovering women did, into a domestic drudge. Poverty was hateful, and she was glad she was for once going to know how rich people lived and play rich herself.

The next morning she was very pliable and sweet, and spent half the day at The Plateau with Jack whom she brought home with her to supper, and then sat with him alone on the piazza until the clock struck eleven and old Phyllis appeared on the scene in wonderful night-gear, with a tallow dip in her hand, saying she “had done hearn sunthin’, and thought mebby thar was burgles in the house.”

Chapter V.—Annie’s Story Continued.
SEEING THE WORLD.

It was the last week in July when Fan and Katy left us for Washington. Jack, Paul and I went to the station with them, waving and kissing our hands to them as long as we could see them standing upon the rear platform and waving to us. How often now do I recall Fanny as she was then starting out to see the world. Although twenty-six she scarcely looked more than twenty, so lightly had the years touched her bright face and starry eyes, which tears made softer and lovelier as she said good-bye to us. With wonderful skill and some help from the fashion plates she had remodeled her wardrobe, adding a little to it as we could afford, but refusing the money Jack offered her, saying he knew she must need it and he wanted her to hold her own among the fashionables she was to meet.

“No, Jackey, dear,” she said, “I can’t take money from you now; but when I am your wife, it will not be safe to offer it to me. And don’t you worry, I shall hold my own.”

At first she wrote three times a week to Jack, and her letters were very satisfactory, judging from his manner after receiving them. To me she wrote once a week, but it was from Katy that I had the most reliable information. They had reached Washington safely, and been met by Colonel and Miss Errington in a superb turnout, with coachman and footman in livery. The house was more elegant than anything Katy had ever imagined, and all its appointments of service and servants were perfect, and Fan adapted herself to everything with the air of a duchess born to the purple. Both the Colonel and his sister were very kind and had taken them everywhere in and around Washington, which was a beautiful city, but so hot that after a week’s sojourn they were glad to leave it for Saratoga. At the very last moment the Colonel had decided to go with them. He had said he couldn’t be hired to spend a month in that frivolous place, but when in the morning they came down to breakfast there was his baggage with theirs in the hall waiting for the expressman, and he was in his light traveling suit giving directions. They were stopping at the United States, where they had a suite of rooms on the second floor, parlor, three bedrooms, dressing-rooms and bath-rooms, and were quite the distinguished guests of the house. After she had been in Saratoga two or three weeks Katy wrote again.

“We know everybody worth knowing and everybody knows us and are very polite and attentive, notwithstanding our plain black gowns, which contrast so strongly with the elegant dresses worn morning, noon and night, any one of which must have cost more than all our simple wardrobe. There is a story going the rounds that we were very wealthy before the war,—that being on the frontier we were overrun by both armies, our house burned, our negroes stolen, and that we lost all we had. Fan, they say, was a fierce rebel, and with a revolver once kept Col. Errington and his whole regiment at bay when he tried to quarter his men upon us. All this fiction seems to make the people think more of us. Funny, isn’t it? Fan is the belle of the season and more flattered and complimented and sought after than any young lady here. And you don’t know how beautiful she is even in her simple black lawn and linen collar, with her brilliant complexion, her eyes like diamonds and her smile which brings every man to her feet. You ought to see her sitting in one of the big chairs on the piazza, or in the hall, surrounded by half a dozen admirers of all ages from sixteen to sixty. She knows the right word to say to each one, and keeps them all on the qui vive, while the Colonel, who is always very near, looks on with an expression which says as plain as words can say, ‘Don’t go too far, gentlemen. It will do no good.’ His attentions are constant and so delicate and marked that people begin to associate their names together, and I have been asked if they were not engaged. I said no, decidedly, and told them about Jack, whom she is to marry at Christmas. In less than twenty-four hours, so fast does gossip travel here, I overheard one lady tell another that the eldest Miss Hathern was engaged to a wealthy Virginia planter who lived near Richmond.

“‘That splendid girl engaged to a farmer,’ the second lady exclaimed, and her friend replied, ‘No, a planter.’

“‘Oh, that will do,’ the other said, in a satisfied tone, ‘as if there were any difference between a planter and a farmer except the spelling.’ Do you see any?

“That night Fan and I quarrelled for the first time in our lives. She said that I had no business to tell that she was engaged and spoil her fun, and I said she had no business to flirt so outrageously with everybody, and that if she didn’t quit it I’d write to Jack. Then she began to cry and wish she was dead. She didn’t see why when a glimpse of the world was given her to enjoy she couldn’t be allowed to enjoy it in her own way, and if she chose to have a taste of the world, the flesh and the devil, meaning the Colonel, she didn’t know why I should interfere. She intended to marry Jack, but she meant to have a good time first before settling down in dull old Lovering, which she hated. Then her mood changed and she acknowledged that she was wrong, and that night she wrote Jack the longest letter she has written since we came here, and the most loving, I dare say. The next day she was as shy and demure as a nun, which sent the whole pack after her fiercer than ever, but she cut them dead and kept close to the Colonel as if for protection, and drove with him to the lake and didn’t get back until ten o’clock. She was gone with him again this afternoon, and the people crowded on to the piazza to see them off in his stylish turnout,—the finest here by far.”

This letter troubled me greatly, and I wondered what Jack would think of it. I remembered the long letter he had received and how happy he had looked after it. I had seen him reading it at least three different times, until I felt sure he must know it by heart. After that her letters were very short, both to him and to me. She had not time to write much, she said, she was kept in such a whirl, which grew dizzier as the season drew near its close. She never mentioned the Colonel, or any other gentleman in particular, but was loud in her praise of Katy, whose flowerlike beauty, she said, had turned the heads of half the men in Saratoga.

“And her voice,” she wrote; “people rave about it as if she were Patti herself. It seems the Diva sang here once years ago, when she was about Katy’s age, and a woman who heard her says she likes Katy’s voice better and that she is far prettier, she is so fair and sweet and unconscious of her great gift. I have let her sing twice in public for some charities; they are always getting up something of that sort and levying on any talent there may be here. Prejudiced as I am against the stage I was proud of Katy, she was so modest and unaffected, and received the applause of the people so shyly and sweetly. Miss Errington has a plan in her mind for keeping Katy in Washington and giving her lessons. She will probably write you about it. I shall oppose it if there is a career behind it. I have not yet reached a point where I want my sister a public character, with her photographs in the shop windows, and horrid wood-cuts of her in the papers. I intend to have her at The Plateau a good deal of the time to keep me from stagnating. Just think of it! Only Jack and me, sitting there alone, admiring each other! Well, nothing can blot out the remembrance of the good time I am having now seeing the world, and there is so much to see and enjoy, if one only had money.

“I hoped at one time Carl might join us. Katy has had a few lines from him; did she tell you? He has gone with a party to some outlandish place beyond the Rockies. There are some people here from Boston who know him well and speak highly of him. They say, however, that he is a little too much inclined to forget the friends of yesterday for those of to-day. We know that, don’t we? An uncle on his father’s side has recently died and left him what we should think a fortune. So he is richer now than ever. I wish we had an uncle to die and leave us some money. But, alas! if we ever had an uncle he was dry as dust long ago.

“Miss Errington came in just here and proposed that, instead of going back to Washington, we take a trip to Quebec and Montreal and Chicago, returning by way of the Falls and New York, where, she says, I can buy my wedding trousseau. That last sounds fine, don’t it? I wonder if she suspects how poor we really are and how little there is for a trousseau. I don’t believe that, all told, we can get together a hundred dollars without drawing on the small sum we have in the bank in Richmond, or selling Black Beauty. It may come to that yet. And what do you think of the plan? Katy is crazy to go, and I am just as anxious. I see no reason why we should not, and I have virtually said we would, provided you do not object too strenuously, and you are too unselfish an old darling to do that. And so is Jack. How is the dear boy? ‘Working like an ox to get the nest ready for his bird,’ he wrote me. Oh, Jack, Jack! How good he is; far too good for me! His letters always make me cry. I feel my unworthiness so after reading them. I really mean to settle down into the best and most domestic of wives after I have seen the world.

“A gentleman has sent up for me to drive with him, so good-bye. We shall leave here within a week.

“Lovingly, Fan.”

Chapter VI.—Annie’s Story Continued.
FURNISHING THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.

It was no use to protest against the journey which would keep Fan and Katy from home four or five weeks longer, and all Jack and I could do was to make the best of it. Jack looked very sober when we talked it over together.

“I am glad for her to enjoy herself and see the world, as she calls it,” he said, smiling sadly; “but I miss her so much. I am always wanting to ask her advice and know if what I am doing suits her. You will have to take her place in that respect.”

He was looking so tired and pale that night that even Phyllis noticed it and asked, “What has done happened to Mas’r Jack; he don’t look so peart-like as he did? Is he frettin’ for Miss Fanny? She don’t or’to go to the ends of the airth an’ her the same as merried. No man would bar it.”

Phyllis and I were thrown so much together for companionship that she usually told me what she thought.

“‘Pears mos’ like she was never comin’ back,” she said more than once, and in spite of myself I was haunted by a similar presentiment, which followed me everywhere, and made me very kind and pitiful towards Jack.

He was working very hard, and with his labor and under his supervision the house was going up faster than ever a house went up before in Lovering. The walls were all enclosed and the rooms divided off according to the plan, which Jack often brought to me, asking if I could suggest any change. I could not. It was perfect as it was. New houses were not common in Lovering. This was the first since the war, and to me it seemed the quintessence of all that was pretty and desirable. Nearly every day all through September and on into October I went with Paul to The Plateau to watch the work as it progressed, and to please Jack, who said that he got on better when I was there,—that I seemed a part of Fan herself, and if he couldn’t have her I was next best. This might be called a questionable compliment, but I was grateful for crumbs. I doubt if Fan on her western tour, which finally extended as far as Colorado and Salt Lake City, was much happier than I was those long autumn days, when I sat in a niche in the wall and watched Jack busy with his men, of whom there were at least a dozen, so anxious was he to surprise Fan when she came home. How kind and attentive he was, coming often to me and trying to shield me from the sun if it were too warm, or from the wind if it blew cold from the woods or hills.

“You don’t know what a comfort it is to have you here,” he said to me one cool morning in October as he sat down beside me, pulling my shawl over my shoulder and unconsciously letting his hand rest there a moment as a brother might have done. “I wish you were going to live with Fanny and me. We need you to balance our nervousness and excitement, you are so quiet and self-contained. It will be a happy man who gets you, Annie.”

“Oh, Jack,” was all I said, as I drew away from him and turned my head that he might not see the waves of crimson on my face, or hear the loud beating of my heart as I could hear it.

Not for worlds would I have let him know that the girl he thought so self-contained and quiet loved him with a love far more enduring than any which Fan had ever given to him. It was a sin, I knew, or soon would be, and I fought against it with all my might, only to find it growing stronger as the days went by and the time drew near when he would be the husband of my sister. My only resource when his spell was over me was to talk to him of Fan,—where she was, what she was doing, what she was seeing, and when she would be home. To all this he responded readily, especially the coming home, and how he meant to surprise her.

One day in October when I went with Paul to The Plateau he met me with a beaming face. Some land of his near Richmond, which he had scarcely thought worth anything, had been bought by a gentleman from the north, who was going to put two or three houses upon it.

“I feel rich,” he said,—“so rich that I am going to commit the extravagance of buying lace curtains, the real sort, not shams, a moquette carpet and upright Steinway for the parlor. That will please Fanny. She likes moquettes, they tread so softly, and I know she will like a piano. I heard her say that no house was furnished without one. Don’t you approve?” he continued, as I did not answer.

A moquette, at the prices they then brought with us, was an extravagance, while the Steinway was a superfluity. Fan had taken a few lessons and could play simple music. But she didn’t care for it and seldom tried the superb instrument which Mrs. Hathern had brought from Boston. Under these circumstances it seemed to me that the money he must pay for a Steinway could be better expended, and I said so, giving as a reason that Fan was not much of a musician.

“Yes, she is,” Jack answered quickly; “I’ve heard her sing Bonny Doon when she actually brought tears, I was so sorry for the chap who wrote it. Burns, wasn’t it? That’s my favorite, words and all. And the way Fanny sang it. I want to hear it again in this room; and Dixie. How she can rattle that off; and Fisher’s Hornpipe, and Money Musk. They are worth all the classics in the world, and Bonny Doon is a hundred times better than the hifalutin things you hear at concerts, when the singer almost turns black in the face, and wiggles and twists and stands on tiptoe as if she were going up bodily with her voice, which, when it gets up as far as it can go ends with a screech like she was in a fit. No, sir! Give me the good, old-fashioned tunes such as Fan can play.”

Evidently Jack’s taste for music was not cultivated, and I laughed merrily at his tirade against fashionable singing, and then watched him as he drummed on the window stool in imitation of playing a piano, and whistled the air of Bonny Doon. I knew he would buy the moquette and the Steinway, and said no more to discourage him.

“Now come up to our room,” he said, after he had finished Bonny Doon and tried a few notes of Suwanee River, another of his favorites.

I followed him up to what was to be his sleeping-room, and which he never entered without removing his hat as reverently as if it had been a church. It was a sacred place to him, and the one he meant to make the most attractive in the house.

“Fanny will sit here a great deal,” he said, “because the view is so fine, and then she can see me coming up the hill on my way home. I know just how she will look and can see her now, watching and waiting, and throwing me kisses. What is that they sing in the prayer meetings?” and he began to hum,

“Will anyone then at the beautiful gate,

Be watching and waiting for me.”

He was very musical that afternoon because he was so happy, and Fan was very real to him watching by the window as he came up the hill to what would be Paradise because she was in it. Do the hearts of men like Jack break more easily when betrayed? I do not know, but I remember thinking that God would hardly forgive the woman who played false to one who trusted her as Jack trusted Fan.

“She spoke of having this room all white and gold,” he said, “and I am going to finish it up in white wood, polished to look like marble with faint lines of gilt in it. There’s a chamber set in Richmond, part willow work and part white wood, with scrolls of gold here and there, and on the headboard a medallion, with the figure of a little girl in crimson cloak, with the hood brought over her head and looking just as Fanny looked years ago when a child and I drew her to school on my sled that winter we had so much snow. The eyes of the girl in the medallion smile at me just as Fanny’s did when I looked back at her to see how she liked it. Don’t you remember? You were there, too.”

I did remember very well the day when Fanny had her first sled ride, and in her new cloak, which was scarlet instead of crimson, looked like a little queen as she sat on the sled, while I trudged at her side in the snow, proud of that privilege, and especially proud when, on going up a hill which was nearly bare, Jack let me help him pull her, and told me I made a very nice little filly. He had asked Fan to get off in the steepest place, where the snow had melted and made it muddy, and she had stormed and kicked and said she wouldn’t, telling him he was her slave and was to do her bidding. He had been her slave ever since, and I had trudged beside them and was trudging still, with, God knows, no envy or bitterness in my heart because of the drudgery, or that Fan was always preferred before me, but often with the thought of the joy it would be to be loved by a man like Jack Fullerton.

“Yes, I remember it,” I said, and he continued, “I do want to buy that set, but if I get the moquette and the Steinway it is beyond my pile at present, unless—”

He stopped and his face beamed as with a sudden inspiration. He had taken his watch from his pocket to see what time it was, and was looking at it intently. It was a stem-winder and very handsome, and Jack was very proud of it. I suspected what was in his mind, but said nothing, lest I might be mistaken. As it was getting late and growing rather cool I left him settling in his mind where the different pieces of furniture would stand provided he bought the coveted set. Outside in the yard I found Paul, who had preferred to stay with the workmen while I went through the rooms with Jack. In climbing over the broken wall he had fallen upon his back or side and was crying, saying it hurt him to walk. No bones were broken, nor were any of his limbs sprained that I could find, and after a while he signified his readiness to go home, limping a little but utterly refusing the poultice which Phyllis made that night and which was big enough to encircle his entire body. The next morning he seemed all right, except for an occasional halt in walking, and I forgot the incident entirely in the greater interest of house-furnishing.

A week later Jack, who had been to Richmond, came to me one night and told me the moquette and piano and lace curtains and chamber set were bought and paid for, and would be at The Plateau in a few days. Glancing at his vest I saw that the gold chain was gone, and in its place was a black ribbon, and then I knew what he had done.

“What time is it, please?” I asked.

Flushing and hesitating he finally drew out a plain silver watch and held it up to me.

“Yes, I’ve gone and done done it, as Phyllis would say,” he said, laughingly. “I’ve sold my gold watch and bought me a silver one, which keeps just as good time. Fan always told me I was too fond of jewelry,—that my big chain looked flashy. She’ll be pleased with the black ribbon, and that child in the medallion is so like her. Seems as if she would speak to me and say ‘Get up, old nigger,’ just as Fan did the day I drew her on my sled.”

There was no use in protesting, now that the deed was done. So I said nothing, and after a moment Jack exclaimed, as he put his hand in his pocket, “By Jove I came near forgetting it; I have a letter for you, which I found in the office as I came down. It is addressed in Fanny’s handwriting and mailed in New York. They are so far on their way home, and must be here soon. I wonder she didn’t write to me, too. What does she say? It’s a fat one, any way; there’s something in it from Katy probably,” he continued, as he saw me take out a note and glance at it before commencing to read the letter.

I knew it was not always safe to read Fan’s letters aloud, and I ran my eyes hastily over this one, while Jack waited impatiently. The travelers were in New York at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and Fanny was wild over what she had seen and was seeing, especially on Broadway, where she had done a little shopping.

“Such lovely things,” she wrote, “but so expensive, and my purse is so very small. Why, one suit, such as I want, will take my entire fund. I have set my heart on a cloth dress, tailor made, which is awfully stylish, and will do to wear all winter, to mill and to meeting,—to call in and to receptions,—only there will not be any in Lovering, where the people have as much as they can do to get enough to eat without throwing away their money on frivolities. More’s the pity; and how stupid I shall find it after seeing the world. Don’t be surprised if some day, when you come up to The Plateau, you find me dangling from a beam in the cellar. If so, put on my headstone ‘Died of a broken neck, caused by ennui.’ But what nonsense. Let’s come to business, at once. I must have more money, and this is what you are to do, ‘Sell Black Beauty.’

“Oh,” I gasped, with a feeling similar to what I might have felt if she had said “Sell Phyllis.”

“What is it? What’s the matter?” Jack asked, and without stopping to think, I replied, “She wants to sell Black Beauty to buy her a tailor-made gown.” “Sell Black Beauty, her pony! Never!” Jack exclaimed, while I read on:

“I don’t ride him very often now, and when I am married I shall have less use for him. He is getting old any way, seventeen or eighteen, and eating his head off. I am very fond of him, and there’s a big lump in my throat when I think of parting with him, but that gown is so ravishingly pretty and so becoming, and I want it so much. Old Mrs. Arthur has asked me for Black Beauty a number of times. He is just right to amble around the neighborhood with her on his back or in the phaeton behind him. She will take good care of him and pet him more than I do. Go and see her, Annie, and if she’ll give a hundred dollars,—that’s what she offered last summer,—take it, and send at once before the gown is gone. You don’t know how swell I feel driving to Arnold’s and Stewart’s and Lord and Taylor’s in Miss Errington’s handsome carriage, with two black men in livery, nor how obsequious they are at these places to those who come in carriages. Do you remember a copy which a Yankee schoolmaster set for me years ago, and which we thought so funny, ‘Money makes the mare go?’ It is true, and the more money you have the faster the mare goes. ‘Fan is an idiot!’ I think I hear you say. Perhaps I am, but idiot or not, sell Black Beauty and send me the money.

“When am I coming home? I really don’t know for sure. In time to be married, I suppose. Miss Errington suggests that whatever dress-making I have to do be done in Washington under her supervision and by her dressmaker, who comes to the house. If I do this I shall, of course, stay longer than I at first intended. Tell Jack not to fret. He will have enough of me after we are married. How is the house progressing? And how is Paul’s lameness? Better, I hope. Miss Errington, to whom I read your letter, made me very nervous by suggesting that his fall might result in hip disease. That would be dreadful. Paul a cripple! It can’t be; Miss Errington is always seeing scare-crows. She is exceedingly kind, however, and will send a note in this letter asking if she can keep Katy during the winter and give her every advantage for musical instruction. I have consented, and you may as well. Katy will of course go home for Thanksgiving, and Miss Errington has invited herself to accompany her,—or rather us,—when we come.

“Did I tell you the Colonel was to sail for Europe the 3d of November in the Celtic? As she will wish to see him off you may expect us the 25th,—three days before Thanksgiving. That is Miss Errington’s plan. She just came in to give me her note.

“Lovingly,

“Fan.”

“P. S. I shall write Jack to-morrow.”

I read parts of this letter to Jack, skipping what I thought he ought not to hear. He looked very grave when I finished it, and said, “She is putting off her coming as long as she can. It is three weeks to the 25th. Does dress-making take so long?”

It took a good while, I told him, although Fan could not have a great deal to do. Then I spoke of Black Beauty, lamenting that he must be sold. We have had him so long that he seemed like one of us, with human instincts and affections.

“Isn’t there some other way of getting that tailor gown, if she must have it?” I said, looking up at Jack, whose face wore an expression different from any I had ever seen there.

I thought he consigned the tailor-made gown to perdition, but was not sure, he spoke so low. What I did understand was that Black Beauty would not be sold to Mrs. Arthur, and that I was to do nothing about it until I saw him again. Then he went away, seeming a good deal excited for Jack, and banged the door so hard behind him that Paul, who had been sitting very quietly in his high chair, asked “Is Jack mad?”

This reminded me of what Fanny had said of possible hip disease, and I remembered with a pang that Paul had not played horse on father’s cane quite as much, or run quite as fast since that fall on The Plateau. When I questioned him, however, he said he had no pain except once in a while when he was tired and then “something hurts me here,” and he put his hand low down on his back. I was not quite reassured, and determined to consult the village doctor the next time I saw him. Then I read Fan’s letter again, feeling as if an incubus had dropped from me because the Colonel was going abroad. Fan had never mentioned him before, but there had always been in my mind an undefinable feeling of uneasiness as if he were a dark shadow falling between her and Jack.

It was two days before I saw the latter again and when he came he was in a very different mood. He had received Fan’s letter of four pages crossed and so full of love and pretty sayings that if he could he would have bought her ten tailor-made gowns.

“I was a brute the last time I was here,” he said, “I was so disappointed that Fanny was not coming sooner. Old Mrs. Arthur can’t have Black Beauty, for I’ve bought him myself. I can’t part with him. I’ve had too many plans of riding through the woods and around the country with Fanny at my side. She never looks better than when on Beauty’s back. Here is the money.”

He held out a hundred dollar bill, which I was to send at once and ask no questions as to where he got it. I think he borrowed it and at first refused to take it, but he overruled my objections, and that night it was on its way to New York. Four days later an answer came to Jack and to me. The gown was bought, and Jack was the dearest, most indulgent fellow in the world, and she was beginning to be very impatient to see him and all of us. They were going to Washington the next day and in two weeks were coming home. It was the nicest letter she had written in some time, and Jack went off whistling to The Plateau, where the house was nearly completed, so far as masons, carpenters and painters were concerned. The plastering was dry and the paint nearly so. Phyllis had cleared up the rubbish, and cleaned the windows and floors, which were ready for the carpets, which, with the furniture, were standing about everywhere in boxes and bales. Nearly all Lovering had been over the house, pronouncing it perfect.

“Wait till it is furnished and we give a house-warming; then see what you think,” Jack said, as he piloted party after party through all the rooms but the one which was too sacred for common eyes to see and comment upon. “Our room,” where the bedstead with the medallion was to be set up, and Fanny was to be waiting and watching for him as he came over the hill.

“Alas, alas, for the dreams which come,

And alas for the dreams which go;

Leaving only an aching heart

Crushed with a sudden blow.”

Chapter VII.—Annie’s Story Continued.
THE 25TH OF NOVEMBER.

The beginning of the day was bright and fair, with no cloud in the blue sky, and the warmth of the Indian summer filled the hazy air. The close was dark and cold and rainy, and left me a half-crazed woman, scarcely knowing what I did or said, while Jack was as broken and blighted as some tall tree which the storm has torn up by the roots and cast helpless upon the ground. During the last two weeks only short letters had come to Jack from Fanny, while to me she had written at length, telling me how glad she was at the prospect of coming home.

“I reckon too much sight-seeing and dissipation have made me nervous, or bilious, or both,” she wrote. “I am not myself at all, either waking or sleeping. In fact I don’t sleep. I, who used to drop off the moment my head touched the pillow, now toss for hours without losing consciousness, thinking—thinking—of everything, of the past, the present, and the future, until my brain seems actually broiling. Oh, the future! Don’t ever get married, Annie. It’s dreadful,—not being quite certain of anything except that you are not half good enough for the man who loves and trusts you so fully. I wish Jack were not so good. Wish he were more like me. There would then be something like equality. But now,—Annie, did you ever have a horrid nightmare in which you were more awake than asleep, because you could see and hear and feel, but had no power to move, although you knew there was something creeping towards you slowly, surely, with its arms stretched out to enfold you? If you could cry out the spell would be broken, but you can’t, and you lie there dead, as it were, waiting for the end you cannot ward off. That is my condition, and will be until I am under our Virginia skies and breathing Virginia air at home with you.

“We have fixed upon Monday the 25th for starting, and as we do not reach Richmond until night you will not see us until Tuesday morning. Shall I be awake then, I wonder; or, will the creeping shadow have me in its embrace? Pray for me, Annie. I need it more than you know; why, I actually feel like asking Phyllis to rassle in prar for me, I am in such a state. I wish we were coming sooner, but Miss Errington wants to see her brother off. You know he sails the 23d, and she is going to New York with him on Friday. If I could, I’d start for Lovering to-morrow.”

This was a part of Fan’s letter. The rest was full of fun and jokes and anticipations of the Thanksgiving dinner she was to eat at home, with some directions to Phyllis how to cook it, and one or two allusions to “the house that Jack built,” and which she knew she should like. She closed with: “Your wretched sister, who knows how Paul felt when he wrote to the Romans, chap. 7, verse 15, ‘What I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that do I.’ If as good a man as Paul whiffled round like that, what can you expect of a weak, wicked girl like Fan Hathern?”

This letter troubled me a great deal at first. What did it mean? What could it mean except that as the time drew near Fan shrank from giving up her girlish life and becoming the wife of Jack Fullerton. If this were so I had no patience with her. After a little reflection, however, I concluded that, as she had hinted, too much sight-seeing and dissipation had unsettled her mind and liver, making her both bilious and morbid. She would be all right again when once in the quiet, healthful atmosphere of home; and dismissing all anxiety from my mind, I began to make preparations for the Thanksgiving dinner at which Miss Errington and Jack were to be present. In this Phyllis was quite as much interested as myself. For weeks she had had a turkey fattening in a little pen, and every time she fed it she informed it how many days more it had to live before she cut off its head, and how many hours it would probably take to roast it, information which must have been very exhilarating to the bird, if it could have understood it. After her fashion she had cleaned the house, which, borrowing a term which she had heard from Mrs. Hathern and Norah O’Rourke, was in apple pie order. “Yankee apple pie, too,” she said, when telling me how much soap and water she had used. “I only give the kitchen a lick and a promise, as nobody ’ll meddle thar but myself,” she said.

I expressed my approbation of the cleaning, although I knew that in all human probability she had not raised a window when she washed it, and that if Mrs. Hathern could have walked in to investigate she would have found the dust piled high on the top of the doors where Phyllis had not thought to look. But Mrs. Hathern was where neither moth nor rust corrupt, nor dust gathers on the golden walls, and Phyllis was mistress of the kitchen. The room which father had occupied had not been slept in since he died, but we arranged it now for Jack, who was to spend the night of Thanksgiving with us. Carl’s room was to be given to Miss Errington, and both were in readiness, as was everything else so far as I knew, and I was looking forward anxiously to the coming Tuesday, when our house would be filled with the sound of laughter and happy voices.

I had not been feeling very well and was, besides, so busy with my own affairs that I had not been to The Plateau for a week. I knew Jack was there early and late, with men and women both, pushing matters as fast as possible, and that some of the rooms were settled. Sunday he was out of town, but Monday morning he came to The Elms on his way to The Plateau, figuratively walking upon air, he was so elated. I think I never saw a happier light in any eyes than shone in Jack’s, or heard a more joyful ring in any human voice than there was in his as he bade me good morning, and added, “They will soon be on their way. Hurrah!”

Catching up Paul he swung him on his shoulder and carried him two or three times across the wide hall. Then, putting him down and rubbing his hands together, he continued: “I tell you, Annie, the house is a daisy, and so she will think. Four of the rooms are settled,—square hall, dining-room, parlor and our room,—and I am coming round in my buggy this afternoon to take you up there. I’ve had fires in all the grates to dry out any dampness, and everything is perfect. The bedrooms and kitchen and such like are not settled, but they soon will be. I have ordered a range just like yours and expect it every day, and,—do you know who is to be the high cockolorum in the kitchen?”

I could not guess, and he continued: “No darkies for me, but the real article from Yankee land,—Miss Norah O’Rourke! What do you think of that?”

“Norah,” I exclaimed; “Norah!”

“Yes, Norah,” he replied. “We have had quite a brisk correspondence, Norah and I. She wrote me three or four weeks ago, confidentially, saying Carl was tired of keeping up his big establishment in Boston,—that he was going to rent it and travel. That would throw her out of a home. Next to Boston she liked The Elms, and would come back, provided that lazy, sozzlin’ nigger wasn’t here. I think that’s the way she put it. She couldn’t abide the blacks, with their shiftlessness, she said, and it wasn’t healthy to be with them. Her temper was never the sweetest at its best, and they riled her so, slattin’ things round, and het her blood so hot that she was apt to break out all over with a kind of rash. I am using her vernacular as far as possible; but to come to the point. If you hadn’t Phyllis and would dispose of any colored gentry you might have and wanted her, she would come for a price within your means. She could afford it, as she had recently got a pension of eight dollars a month on account of her brother Mike, who was killed at Gettysburg. I don’t believe she was ever really dependent upon him for support, and don’t quite understand how she got it. Somebody did some tall swearing. But that’s not my matter. If I were to swear a blue streak from here to Washington, I couldn’t get a pension. Was on the wrong side of the fence. But to proceed. If you had Phyllis, I was to say nothing. If you hadn’t, I was to ask you if you wanted her. You had Phyllis. I said nothing, but remembering to have heard Fan say that she would give more for Norah’s little finger than for Phyllis’s whole body, so far as order and neatness were concerned, I wrote to Norah, telling her my prospects and asking her how she would like to live with us. ‘Tip-top,’ she said, and she will be here within a week,—go right into the house and have it all in readiness from stem to stern by Christmas. For once I am in luck, and Fan is coming to-morrow. Do you realize it? To-morrow we shall see her. I can hardly wait. Be ready this afternoon at two sharp. Au revoir.”

As he went down the steps two at a time he was singing:

“Never morning dawned so gaily,

Never sky such radiance wore.”

Alas, alas! I don’t know why I have written these two words, and so anticipated the denouement. I should not have done it had I not been nearing the almost tragedy with which the day, which dawned so gaily, closed.

Chapter VIII.—Annie’s Story Continued.
AT THE PLATEAU.

Precisely at two o’clock Jack was at the door, and a few minutes after we were driving rapidly through the town toward The Plateau. Jack had put on his best clothes, as it was a half holiday with him, he said, and he looked very handsome and animated as he talked constantly of Fanny, recalling many incidents of her childhood, and trying to decide just when he made up his mind that she was the one girl in all the world for him.

“I reckon,” he said, “it was the first time I went off to the war with my company, and she stood on the horse block throwing kisses to us and waving a red shawl she had tied to a broom handle. Most of the boys were in love with her, and I think it was her fierce patriotism which kept our courage up, when it might otherwise have cooled. I remember once when we were waiting for a battle to begin, a comrade who stood beside me said, ‘What are you thinking of, Jack?’ I was thinking of Fan, but I replied, ‘Nothing; what are you thinking of?’ ‘Nothing,’ was his answer. Just then there came the opening roar of cannon, with the order for our company to move on. Simultaneously we both shouted, ‘Hurrah for the South, and Fanny Hathern.’ The comrade was poor Tom Allen, who was killed in that battle, and Fan’s name was the last upon his lips. I never told her, and never shall. I don’t think she cared for him, and I have sometimes been afraid she did not care for me as I do for her. But she will. I shall be so kind to her and try to make her so happy that she must love me after awhile, if she does not at first. I am a sort of country clown, I suppose, and not at all like the high-toned chaps she has been consorting with; but I do believe my heart is in the right place,—that is, my intentions are good.”

He was silent a moment,—then turning towards me he continued: “You know the best and the worst of me, if anybody does, and I feel like making you a kind of confessor, or rather confidant, as to how I feel and what I mean to do. Shall I, Annie-mother?”

This name by which Paul called me Jack had taken up since he had been so much at The Elms, saying it suited me, I was such a motherly little woman, with a manner which made everyone confide in and trust me. I liked the name as used by Paul, to whom I was a kind of mother, but I did not quite like to have Jack call me thus. It made me feel so much older than I really was,—older than he, and a great deal older than Fan, who, Phyllis said, was really my senior by half an hour. I had never given any sign that it was distasteful to me, nor did I now. I merely said, “I am sure you have nothing to confess.”

“Well, not exactly that. It is more a confidence as to what I mean to do,” he said. “I am all strung up to a pitch of nervousness or exhilaration, and must talk to somebody. This morning when I woke up, and the sun was just rising over the woods, and I felt so light and airy, I asked myself what it was? What had happened, or what was going to happen? Then I remembered that Fanny was coming to-morrow, and that in just a month she would be my wife. I was so thankful and happy that I wanted to do something. You know I’m not very religious, like you and Fan, and I’m not a praying man. I say the prayers in church with the rest of the people, but half the time I’m thinking of something else, and once in a while I go to sleep during the Litany. But I am going to turn over a new leaf, and this morning I went down on my knees and thanked God for Fanny, and asked that I might make her happy, and that she might come safely home to me, and I promised to be a better man and join the church and have family prayers just as your father did, and ask a blessing at the table as mother did. Fanny will like that, I am sure. You don’t know how peaceful and quiet I felt after that. Why, it seemed as if I really had been talking to some one who heard and answered me, and the future looks so bright that if I were in one of Phyllis’s pra’r meetings I believe I should shout. I can readily understand how she works herself up to having the power. I could have it in a little while.”

We were going up the hill to The Plateau by this time, and in Jack’s face there was the rapt expression of one who had talked with God as friend talks with friend, and been made the better for it. The sky, which in the morning had been so clear, had gradually been growing grey and overcast, until the sun was hidden from view, and in the west a bank of clouds was rising rapidly and threatening rain. It was growing chilly, too, and as a cold breeze came down the hill, Jack urged his horse on until we came upon the house which looked so pretty and attractive, with all the debris cleared away and the grounds brought up somewhat to their former condition when it was the show place of the town.

“Isn’t it lovely?” Jack said, helping me to alight, and then marching me round to look at a view we had both seen a thousand times, but which was always new to him because Fanny’s eyes were to see it daily.

He pointed out the tops of the Blue Ridge in the distance, the valley through which the river ran, and the opening in the woods through which the first Federal soldiers who appeared in our midst came marching, years ago, throwing our little town into wild excitement and alarm.

“I heard you were so frightened that you ran to the attic and hid behind the chimney, while Fan armed herself with the poker and went into the street ready to fight, if necessary,” he said.

He frequently made comparisons between Fan and myself, and usually to my disadvantage. But I did not care, and now I laughed merrily as I recalled the day when I first heard the Yankees were coming and crawled behind the chimney, half expecting to be shot. I had not then learned that there was very little difference between the conduct of the Yankees and the rebels, and not much to be feared from either. After the view was exhausted I was taken to see the bit of sodding which had been done where the ground was torn up,—the shrubs which had been planted and the flower beds which had been marked out ready for spring. Noticing at last that I shivered as a gust of wind, damp with coming rain, swept across The Plateau, Jack said, “Why, you are cold, aren’t you? I do believe it’s going to rain right away. Go into the house where there is a fire. I will be there in a few minutes.”

He went whistling to the stable with his horse, while I made my way alone into the house. Passing through the kitchen I came first to the dining-room, with its crimson carpet and curtains, its polished oak table and carved chairs of the same wood, upholstered in dark-green leather,—its handsome sideboard standing in the niche made for it,—its china and glass and fancy cups hanging on hooks,—a fashion beginning to prevail at the north and which Jack had seen in Richmond. There was no grate in this room, but a deep fireplace, ornamented with the brass andirons and fender which had belonged to Jack’s mother. On the hearth some pine knots were laid ready for a fire on the morrow, when the real mistress came to see her new home. On one side of the room was a pretty conservatory half full of plants with a hanging basket before two of the windows. Fanny was fond of flowers and Jack had remembered everything.

“Well, what do you think of it? Have I been too extravagant to suit my little economical Annie-mother?” he said, coming in just as I had finished inspecting the room.

I told him it was lovely, but said nothing about extravagance, although I did wonder where all the money came from. I kept on wondering as I went from room to room, stopping next in the square hall with its broad landing, in an angle of which the tall clock was ticking, with a stained glass window on one side of it and Mrs. Fullerton’s portrait on the other. The polished floor in this room was bare with the exception of a few rugs here and there. The deep window seats were cushioned, and a bright fire was burning in the grate. This had been my favorite room from the first, it was so unlike in its construction any room I had then seen, and I was disposed to linger there in the easy chair before the warm fire. But Jack hurried me on to the parlor,—the great room he laughingly called it, as he threw open the door. The moquette carpet was down and so thick and soft that my feet nearly went out of sight as I trod upon it. Nothing could have been in better taste than the whole arrangement of the room, from the lace draperies at the windows to the Steinway in the corner. I had not seen it since it was unpacked, and anxious to hear its tone I stepped up to open it when Jack laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “Excuse me, please, but it is a fad of mine that Fanny’s fingers must be the first to touch the keys. I’ve had it tuned and know it is in good shape, and to-morrow afternoon, when I bring Fanny up here, I am going to have her sing and play Home, Sweet Home, and Bonny Doon, and then, little woman, you may drum away on it all you please. Of course the room is not quite finished. It looks a little stiff yet,” he continued, glancing around. “It wants some jim-cracks and things, which Fanny will see to. An old shawl of hers, thrown on the back of a chair will change it wonderfully. By George, it begins to rain. I didn’t think it would come so soon. I am glad I put Robin in the stable,” he exclaimed, as a few drops pattered against the windows, “Let’s go now to our room.”

This I knew was the pièce de résistance, the grand reserve kept for the last, and it seemed to me as I followed Jack up the stairs as if he stepped softly, reverently, as we go to look at the dead. But it was not much like a death chamber,—that bright room, with its wide bay window, from which fluted muslin curtains were artistically draped back so as not to obstruct the view. By the centre window a pretty work-table stood, with an inlaid work-box on the top ready for use. On one side of the table a large easy chair, with head and foot rest. On the other side a low rocker, where Fan was to sit and watch for Jack, and later on sew and listen while, in the chair opposite, he talked or read to her, or smoked a little, if she would let him, and he reckoned she would. All this he explained to me, making me try first Fanny’s chair to get the view on one side; then his to get the view on the other side, and then calling my attention to the carpet, a light, pretty ingrain, with a delicate pattern of roses.

“I wanted to get Brussels,” he said, “but couldn’t quite afford it yet. We can put down some matting in the summer. Mrs. Maney of Richmond says that is the correct thing. She helped me a lot. Couldn’t have got along without her. What do you think of the furniture?”

I said it was prettier than anything I had ever seen, especially the bedstead, with the medallion and the young girl in the crimson cloak and hood, looking at me with Fanny’s eyes and Fanny’s smile as I remembered it when she was a child.

“It is very much like Fanny, and looks as if it could speak to us,” I said, and Jack, who was regarding it with all his heart in his eyes replied, “She is speaking to me, and saying, ‘I am coming. I shall be with you to-morrow,’ God bless her.”

He was almost childish in his happiness, and more like an expectant boy than a man, and I am glad to remember that for a brief space of time he was as perfectly happy as it is often given us to be; glad, too, that in that supreme moment, when all his mighty love was showing in his face and voice, I had no pang of regret or pain because it was another and not myself to whom his love was given. Was there, I wonder, no influence emanating from that room strong enough to reach the girl of whom we both were thinking so intently, and tell her that this was her hour,—the last in which she would ever be loved by a man as good and true as Jack Fullerton?

For a moment we stood looking at the picture, and then Jack, who had spied a bit of dust on a table, took his handkerchief from his pocket to wipe it off. In doing so his hand came in contact with a letter for me which he had found in the office and forgotten until this moment.

“I don’t know why I was so stupid. If it had been from Fanny I should have remembered it, but it is from New York,” he said, as he handed me the rather bulky letter, which was postmarked New York and directed in a handwriting I did not at first recognize.

“Who is writing me from New York?” I said, examining the writing minutely, with a feeling that I had seen it before. Suddenly it came to me, and I exclaimed “Col. Errington. He was to sail Saturday and this is mailed Saturday. What can he have written to me, and so much, too?”

Just then word came up that the new range had arrived, and Mr. Fullerton was wanted to superintend the placing it.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be there directly;” then to me, “you will excuse me a moment.”

Then he was gone, and I sat looking at the letter and hesitating to break the seal.

Chapter IX.—Annie’s Story Continued.
THE LETTER.

There certainly are times in one’s life when there comes a presentiment of impending evil, and such a time was that when something told me that the reading of the letter in my lap would not leave me just as it found me. But there was no thought of Fanny in my mind until I opened it, and saw that it contained a note directed to Jack in her handwriting, a little unsteady and crooked, but unmistakably hers. There was a trembling in my hands, a weakness in my wrists and back, and I felt my eyes growing hot and dim, as, putting the note on the table, I resolutely turned to the beginning of the letter and read:

“Washington, November 21st, 18—. Thursday

Evening, after 11 o’clock, with my

trunk packed for the journey, and everybody

in the house asleep but myself, who

feel as if I should never sleep again.

“Dear Annie,

“I am writing to you for the last time as Fanny Hathern. When this reaches you I shall be on the sea,—going to Europe with Col. Errington as his wife!”

If some one had written to me that Fanny was dead, the shock would not have been so great, although different. Consciousness did not forsake me, but for a brief space hearing and seeing did, except that rings of fire danced before my eyes, and in my ears there was a roaring, far-off noise, as if some one were repeating over and over again “with Col. Errington as his wife.” I have been told that when one is near drowning, all the incidents of his life are unrolled before him. I was neither drowning, nor dying, but I seemed to see at a glance all Fan’s past as connected with Jack, and her present as connected with Col. Errington, and I scarcely needed to read her letter to know how it had happened. When sight and sound came back, I was conscious of a feeling of intense heat as if I was smothering. I must have air, and dragging myself to the window I opened it, and with the rain beating upon me, although I did not feel it, I read the letter through. It was written half in badinage, half in extenuation, and had in it a ring of pain which told me that there was enough of the old Fan left to torture the new one with remorse when she had time to realize what she had done, and to learn the difference between a heart which beat for her alone, and one which cared for her only as she ministered to its selfishness and pride.

“Don’t condemn me utterly,” she wrote, “until you read my letter and know how it has come about, if indeed I can tell you. I believe it has been coming ever since that day when Col. Errington came to The Elms with his sister and found us picking grapes. He says it began when he raided our house with his troops and I talked so saucily to him. I could have killed him then in my hatred of everything wearing the Federal uniform. I have at times almost wished I had done so, when I have felt his meshes closing round me until I had no power to resist. Do you remember the old geography we studied years ago, when Mr. Allen from the north was our teacher? There was in it a picture of the so-called Maelstrom on the coast of Norway, with a ship which had got into the whirl going down, the faces and hands of the ill-fated passengers upturned and imploring help, which could not reach them. That picture had a great fascination for me, especially after Mr. Allen explained it to us so vividly that I felt my hair prickle at the roots, and could see it all so distinctly. The pleasure boat full of giddy young people skirting around the edge of the whirlpool into whose circle they were being gradually drawn;—sailing pleasantly and smoothly round and round, each time swifter than before until at last the line was crossed over which there was no return. Human skill was of no avail. Human aid could not reach them, and they were drawn on and on, nearer and nearer to the roaring mass of angry waters into which they entered at last and went down to the depths below, where, according to his statement the sea floor is strewed with the wrecks of boats and white with human bones. This picture was bad enough, but it was worse still when he drew a moral lesson from it and told us how our little faults, if not overcome would grow until we could not control them and they would drag us on to the great Maelstrom of sin into which we would plunge, head first, I think he said, and go down, down, down,—not to the bottom of the sea,—but to hell,—and he emphasized the last word with a blow on the table with his big ruler which made me nearly jump out of my skin. I was scared almost to death, and began to think of all the bad things I had done, putting beech nuts in Charlie’s bed, and a little mud-turtle in the pocket of Phyllis’s Sunday gown, calling you a fool, and spitting at Jack, when he tried to kiss me. I could not sleep for thinking about it, and finally made Phyllis my confessor and told her of my fear of the Maelstrom of sin.

“‘Laws, honey,’ she said, stroking my hair, ‘don’t you worry. What’s you got to do any way with Moll Stroon’s sin? Let her take keer of it herself. You’se nothin’ to do with it. What was it any way? And who was Moll Stroon?’

“I laughed till I cried at her mistake, and called her an old idiot, and didn’t worry any more about Moll Stroon’s sin. I have since read that the Maelstrom, as we regarded it, is a myth, or at the most a very narrow strait on the coast of Norway through which the sea pours rapidly four times a day with the ebb and flow of the tide,—that when it meets a strong wind from the opposite direction, the water bubbles and boils and seethes like a cauldron, but nothing is ever drawn into it except foolish whales who are too big to turn round and go back. Why have I dwelt so long on this Maelstrom? I don’t know, unless it is to show you how, ever since I left home, I have been hanging on the verge of a moral whirlpool, sliding over one circular wave after another until I grew dizzy and have finally tumbled in. To use a slang phrase, ‘that is about the size of it.’ Col. Errington says that he never forgot me for a day after the first time he saw me, and I stood up so bravely and told him what I thought of him; that when he saw me the second time on the ladder with grape stains on my face and I as unconcerned about my personal appearance as if I had been a queen and he my subject, he registered a vow that if possible he would make me his wife. You know he did write, offering me his hand. I never answered his letter, and that cooled his ardor, until he came the third time and found us at The Plateau. The knowledge that I was engaged to Jack dampened him a little, but he did not despair, and when he succeeded in getting me to Washington and under his influence he felt tolerably sure of success, seeing as he did how fond I was of everything which riches can give. He has never said a word against Jack. That would have defeated his plan, but in a thousand ways I cannot describe he has made me feel how wholly unfitted I am to be the wife of a poor man, and how eminently fitted to shine in a society different from anything in Lovering. He has made me feel, too, that Jack is countrified and that after a while I should grow away from him and perhaps be ashamed of him,—a state of things which would make me wretched. I know there is more real goodness in Jack’s little finger than in the Colonel’s whole body and told him so. He only laughed and said he had no doubt of it, but he believed I would be happier with his whole body bad as it was than with Jack’s good little finger. If he has never said anything derogatory of Jack he has of Lovering, which seen with his eyes and my recent experience of something better seems to me the dullest place on earth, and one in which I couldn’t possibly live again. You don’t know anything about it Annie; you who have never been anywhere except to Boston. Then it was a funeral at which you could not be very gay. You only saw the usual sights of the city with Carl. You know nothing of grand hotels, with suites of rooms and obsequious waiters, who come at your nod, because you belong to the Errington party,—of fine turnouts with coachmen and footmen in livery, and people looking admiringly after you;—of elegant houses, such as there are in New York and Washington, and especially Col. Errington’s, where everything is the most expensive kind, with hosts of servants to do your bidding;—of splendid dresses and jewels such as ladies wear to dinners and receptions; boxes at the opera, and all the pleasant gossip, a knowledge of these things brings to those who are in the swim. This is society, and I like it and it has been offered me a good many times in return for myself, and a good many times I have refused it, but when I thought the matter settled the Colonel has changed his base of operations and commenced the siege again. His love-making has never been open and impetuous like Jack’s, but done persistently and in that delicate, persuasive way so hard to resist. Neither Miss Errington nor Katy have a suspicion of it. Indeed, his sister expects to go with him to New York to-morrow and see him off on Saturday, and she has asked Katy and me to accompany her. I declined, but I believe Katy intends to go. I hardly think she will, and I dread the scene in the morning when they must know the truth.

“I did not decide until this afternoon. I drove with the Colonel this morning far out into the country. We were gone two or three hours, and he improved his opportunity, urging every possible reason why I should not marry Jack and should marry him. In Lovering I would be a nonentity, darning my husband’s socks and looking after the kitchen to see things were not wasted. In Washington I would be a leader in society, quoted and admired, with every wish gratified, and the finest establishment in the city. He would build a house for me, he said, much handsomer than the one he now occupies, and he took me around to see the site on one of the pleasantest and most fashionable avenues. He would have two or three plans sent to us for approval in Europe, and it could be commenced at once. As soon as we had the measurements of the rooms I could, if I liked, order the carpets and rugs, together with the furniture. There were to be draperies from Paris, pictures and statuary from Rome and Florence, china and linen from Dresden and England, and bric-a-brac from everywhere. There was to be a cottage at Newport in the summer,—trips to Florida in the winter, where, if I liked, he would build a pretty villa near some one of the many lakes which abound in the southern part of the state. He knows a spot which will just suit me in Orange County. I think it was this villa, which he described so vividly, with its broad piazza,—vine covered and cool,—its palms and magnolias and orange trees and roses, and fanciful rowboat on the lake, which moved me the most. I can have you and Paul there. The place will suit you better than the gayeties of Washington, or Newport, and in imagination I have already filled the wide piazza of Palmetto Villa with chairs and stools, and a little round table for books or work, or afternoon tea, and I have put Paul into a hammock and you into an easy chair, and have with you looked across the road to Lake Hathern sparkling in the sunlight, and have inhaled the perfume of orange blossoms and the delicious Florida air, freighted with the odor of many flowers. And by and by carriages come out from Orlando, a pretty town close by, with people to call upon us, English and Americans, and our grounds are bright with the flutter of gay dresses, and the house is filled with the chatter of small talk,—admiration of the place, and implied compliments of the beautiful hostess,—that is I, who carries herself like a duchess, and says to herself, ‘This is life; I did well not to refuse it.’ Isn’t that a charming picture? I thought so and began to waver.

“On our return to the house the Colonel found a telegram from the White Star office, asking if he still wished them to reserve the staterooms he had looked at when in the city last week. If so, he must let them know at once, as another party wanted them. He had been so sure that I would go with him, he said, that he had partially engaged the rooms, and now I must decide.

“‘Give me an hour,’ I said, and after my lunch I went directly to my room, pleading a headache, which would keep me from going out with Miss Errington and Katy, who were to make some purchases for Lovering. I locked the door, took off my dress, put on a wrapper, let down my hair, unbuttoned my boots, looked in the glass, and then sat down to weigh the pro’s and con’s of the situation.

“Do you remember that queer little thing which I once recited at school, ‘The Philosopher’s Scales,’ which were not made to weigh sugar and tea, but qualities, feelings, thoughts and sense. The first thing he tried, we are told, was the head of Voltaire pitted against the prayer of the penitent thief, with the result that the head flew up and the prayer down. Then

‘A lord and a lady went up at full sail,

When a bee chanced to light in the opposite scale.’

Then at last,

‘The whole world was bowled in at the grate,

With the soul of a beggar to serve for a weight,

When the scale with the soul in’t so mightily fell,

That it jerked the philosopher out of his cell!’

“All this recurred to me so vividly this afternoon and keeps repeating itself over and over in my brain as I sit writing this to you. I am a little girl again in the old school-house at Lovering. It is Wednesday afternoon, and outside under the trees several horses are tied, with here and there a negro in attendance. Inside, the western sun comes through the windows and lies in great splashes of light on the floor. On his little perch of a platform Mr. Allen, of Maelstrom notoriety, sits calling the names of those who are to recite or declaim, his voice sounding like thunder when he says ‘Fanny Hathern: The Philosopher’s Scales.’ In her red merino gown and white apron Fanny Hathern walks from her seat to the platform, the distance seeming a mile, and her heart thumping like a trip-hammer, as she tries to remember whether it was the prayer of Voltaire and the skull of the thief, or vice versa. There is company in school that afternoon, the Trustees, of whom the girl’s father is one, and hence her anxiety to acquit herself creditably with her scales. You are there and Charlie, and Jack is in the corner just where the little girl can see him, as she curtsies straight down and begins, with her eyes fixed on him, for she knows his lips will try to form the words if she wavers. He has helped her learn the piece and heard her rehearse it many times, telling her how to manage her voice, for Jack is a natural orator. The little girl acquits herself very creditably and goes back to her seat, passing so near to Jack that she hears distinctly his whispered words, ‘You did it tip-top.’

“Dear old Jack, who always thought I did everything ‘tip-top,’ and who brought me the biggest apples he could find in the bin, who put so many sugar hearts and raisins into my desk, and carried me in his arms across the puddles of water, when I was afraid of spoiling my new shoes. What will he think of me now, I wonder? Believe me, Annie, my face is wet with tears as I recall those far-off days and think of Jack, who would never serve me as I am serving him. It is raining heavily to-night and the wind howls at my window with a sound in it like a human sob or moan,—like Jack’s voice calling to me through the storm, and saying it is not too late to draw back. There it comes again, the moan,—making me creep all over, there is something so uncanny in the sound at this hour of the night. It is not too late to draw back, and I’ll do it, too. If the Colonel is still up,—if there is a light over or under his door, I will knock and tell him I have changed my mind, that I cannot break Jack’s heart—I have been out into the hall and the whole length of it, treading very cautiously lest Miss Errington or Katy should hear me. There was no light over or under the Colonel’s door. He was fast asleep, snoring horribly at intervals, and it was these snores which I mistook for Jack’s moaning in the wind. I cannot draw back. It is too late. I believe I am half crazed and don’t know what I am writing, or have written. I remember I had reached the ‘Philosopher’s Scales’ when I digressed so widely, so I will return to that point and the time this afternoon when I sat down to weigh the pro’s and con’s,—the pro’s for my marrying the Colonel, and the con’s against it. Into the con I put Jack, young, handsome, true as steel, good every way, with no fault whatever except that he is poor, knows but little of fashionable society and cares less, wears old-fashioned coats and slouch hats, with his trousers in his boots when the roads are muddy. That was Jack, and of course the con went down with a whack as there was nothing to balance it. Then I took the Colonel, years older than I am, growing bald on the top of his head and a little deaf in one ear, with some grey in his hair and whiskers, and no power to thrill or quicken my pulse when he touches my hand, as Jack has. Good habits, distinguished looking, remarkably well preserved, polished manners, perfect knowledge of the world and every shade of etiquette, and always habited in the last style from his collar to his boots. That was the Colonel, and I put him into the pro scale, which was up in the air and swung and teetered, but did not make Jack, who was down, budge an inch. The con was ahead, and I was glad, but I meant to be fair, and took up Lovering next, asking what besides Jack and you and Paul it had to offer me in exchange for the world of society I liked so much. Two or three picnics in the summer when the people eat their lunch on the ground in the woods, with bugs and ants crawling over them, and pretend they like it. A few tea parties, where the talk is mostly of the good times before the war and the bad times since. Possibly a circus. (By the way, I hear Buffalo Bill is going to Richmond next spring. If he does, sell your best bonnet and go and see him and take Paul.) So much for summer dissipation. In the winter it is a little better. A singing school, amateur theatricals for the churches, or Y. M. C. A.’s, or W. C. T. U.’s, of which half the people approve and the other half disapprove. Occasionally a lecture and concert and travelling play actors, who are second class, or they would not come to Lovering. The negro revival, which is lively, and the Sewing Society or Guild once a month, with tea, one kind of cake, no napkins, and gossip. As Mrs. Jack Fullerton I might in time become President of the Guild and walk miles to find a place for it to meet; that would perhaps be some compensation for the dullness of the place, and relieve the ennui of living alone at The Plateau, with you at the other end of the town. Think how bored I should be after the novelty of counting my silver and dishes had worn off. There would be nothing left me to do but to hob-a-nob with the cook and watch for Jack, who would in time be as bored as I. That is Lovering life and I put it in the scale with Jack, expecting that, like the lord and the lady, he would go up at full sail. He only stirred a very little and looked at me so steadfastly with his honest, trusting eyes, that I still hoped he would win.

“I must, however, be fair to the Colonel, and I piled on top of him the trip to Europe, jewels and dresses and travel and a French maid. The new house and grounds in Washington, the cottage at Newport, Palmetto Villa in Florida, a box at the opera, horses and carriages, and all the money I want to spend, with nothing to do except to enjoy it. This settled the matter and the pro’s went down so fast and the con went up so swiftly, that Jack and Lovering were thrown out and vanished entirely. The die was cast, and without a moment’s hesitation I made myself presentable and went to the library, where I found the Colonel, calm and cool and polishing his thumb nail with one of those little brushes which come for that purpose: He has a full set. Rather effeminate, I think. I did not stop a minute lest my courage should fail, for something was tugging at my heart, which felt like a lump of ice.

“‘I am going with you to Europe,’ I said, the words half choking me.

“He stopped polishing his thumb nail, and drawing me to him——Well, no matter what he did, except that it was all very dignified and circumspect, and not at all like Jack, who nearly ate me up when I promised to marry him. Poor Jack! I have said that to myself many times since my interview with the Colonel, which did not last long. I was in a hurry to get away from him, his hands were so cold and clammy, not at all like Jack’s. But then he is a man of an entirely different temperament, and may be just as kind. He was very glad for my decision, he said, and he trusted I would never regret it; he should certainly try to make me happy. I didn’t tell him I was regretting it even then. Disengaging myself from him I went to my room and cried as if my heart would break. I heard him go out and knew that in a few moments there would flash across the electric wires to the White Star office in New York the message ‘Keep the staterooms, Nos. —— and —— for me. G. Errington.’ The deed was done, and when about five o’clock Miss Errington and Katy came in from their shopping I was lying on the couch in my room with a headache which was not feigned. Katy was full of purchases made for you and Paul and Phyllis and Jack, while Miss Errington had been busy collecting a few things for her brother’s comfort on the sea. You know she was intending to go with him to New York and take Katy with her, and my conscience smote me as I heard her talking about it and planning that I should not be lonely during her absence. The Colonel told me to have my trunk packed to-night, taking as little as possible. I was to say nothing to anyone, but leave it for him to tell his sister in the morning before I came down to breakfast. Ah me, how I dread the scorn in her eyes and the surprise in Katy’s when they know all. Miss Errington is a splendid woman; rather peculiar in some respects and nearly as determined as her brother when once her mind is made up. She has been most kind and generous to me and seems to like me very much. But Katy is her favorite. She has spoken of taking her abroad. If she is still of this mind, don’t oppose it, although it will leave you very lonely. Let Katy see the world. She is exceedingly beautiful, with a face and voice like an angel. She ought to make a brilliant match, and with Miss Errington to chaperone her, I think she will, and forget her foolishness about the stage. There is no one in Lovering for her, but with Miss Errington her chances are many. I suspect she has a fancy for Carl, but that will never amount to anything. He scatters too much. I hear of him here and there and everywhere, sipping sweets from many flowers and caring particularly for none.

“It is one o’clock in the morning. I have still my note to write to Jack, a harder task than writing to you, so I will leave this letter and finish it in New York after the deed is done and I can tell you of the manner with which the news was received by Miss Errington and Katy.

“Saturday, Nov. 23d, 5th Avenue Hotel,

10 o’clock in the morning.

“Dear Annie,

“I have on my traveling gown and jacket,—the tailor-made one, which is very becoming, with gilt buttons and braid. On the table is a fur lined cloak, with shawls and wraps enough to have warmed even Harry Gill, if anything could have thawed that chattering wretch. I feel some like him, for my hands and feet are icy cold. But I must finish my letter commenced in Washington and tell you of the row we had when it was known that I was to marry the Colonel. He told his sister in the library before breakfast, when she came in ready for the journey she expected to take. At first she refused to believe it, and I was sent for to confirm the news. I went with my knees shaking under me and in a condition more like Harry Gill than ever. She was white to her lips, and her eyes burned like coals of fire as she demanded if what she had heard was true.

“‘Answer her, Fanny. She does not believe me,’ the Colonel said.

“I was never afraid to speak before, but something in Miss Errington’s manner and attitude cowed me completely and I hesitated before stammering out that it was true, and I was going to marry her brother.

“‘If you will excuse me I will leave you to settle it between yourselves, as I have something to see to. But don’t be long, there is not much time to lose,’ the Colonel said, in his usual suave manner.

“Bowing politely he disappeared, while his sister stood clutching the back of a chair, tall and erect and confronting me like some dreadful Nemesis. I knew I deserved the worst that she could say or think of me, and cowered before her while she regarded me with unutterable disdain.

“‘Miss Hathern,’ she began, ‘If there were no reason why it should not be, I might be glad to receive you as my brother’s wife, but to break your engagement with another man so suddenly is monstrous. Have you weighed the subject well?’

“I thought of the Scales, but knew she would not understand that, or the Maelstrom either. She was matter of fact and I must answer her in the same spirit. As well as I could I tried to explain till she had a tolerably fair insight as to the real motives which actuated me.

“‘I see,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘Because the man is poor you are throwing him over and selling yourself for money and freedom. I pity you when you waken to know what you have done. My brother is dear to me, of course, but I know him, and he will not be a pleasant man for a woman of your spirit to live with. Everything in his power must bend to his will or break. He may not beat you, although he does his horses and dogs, when they disobey, but he will bend you until you have no free will of your own, and the time will come when you will long with inexpressible longing for the love and tenderness and consideration of the man you are discarding.’

“At this moment Katy came rushing in. She had heard the news from the Colonel, and throwing her arms around my neck sobbed hysterically, begging me to give it up for all our sakes,—Jack’s, your’s, Paul’s, Phyllis’s, father’s and Charlie’s, and I think she mentioned The Boy, but am not sure. It was a sin to Jack, she said, and a disgrace to our family, and would make me a by-word with every decent person in Lovering.

“Between Katy’s tears and Miss Errington’s scorn I was so limp and crushed that I might have given it up if the Colonel had not come to my rescue.

“‘There has been enough of this,’ he said, sternly, ‘come to breakfast, time is passing.’

“He put his arm around me and led me to the dining-room, where we breakfasted alone. Katy was upstairs crying and Miss Errington was ordering her valise to be taken to her room, as she would not need it now. Her brother, who had recovered his composure and was as quiet and calm and cool as ever, suggested that she still go with us and take Katy. But she declined. Katy, I think, wished to go, and clung to me at parting in a way which wholly upset me.

“‘Remember Jack,’ she whispered to me, ‘have pity on him and give it up. It is not too late, and will not be till the very last.’

“Was there ever a girl more wretched on her wedding day than I was, I wonder? Of the journey to New York I can recall very little, except that the Colonel was unremitting in his care for my comfort, and that once when he spread his rug across my lap I smiled on him and said ‘You are very kind.’ Aside from that I hardly spoke, but sat leaning back in my chair with my eyes closed, sometimes asleep, for I was perfectly exhausted, and sometimes thinking, always the same thought, ‘It is not too late yet.’ The words were whispered into my ears continually by something which seemed to be sitting on my shoulder and croaking, until I was nearly mad. There was, however, a comfort in knowing that I could still draw back, and I counted how many hours probation were left me before it would be too late. Jack will hardly suffer more than I did during that rapid journey, when to everything else, was added homesickness for The Elms, and you and the dear old life I was throwing away. It was a kind of nightmare, I think, and by the time our train was nearing Jersey City I had made up my mind to jump from the car the moment we stopped and lose myself in the crowd; in short, to run away! The bustle and excitement at the station and the hurrying to the boat revived me. The thing on my shoulder stopped its croaking, and the Colonel had my arm in his and held my hand tightly as if he divined my thoughts. So the newspapers lost an exciting paragraph headed ‘Strange disappearance of a bride on her wedding day.’

“When we reached the hotel and were ushered into the suite of rooms the Colonel had ordered for us I felt better, and when Mr. and Mrs. Darcy, friends of the Colonel, who board at the hotel and whom I had met when I stopped there with Miss Errington, came in to see me and made much of me as the future Mrs. Errington, I was quite myself, and all through dinner, which they took with us and which was served in our private parlor, I was in high spirits, too high, I fear, as I saw them look curiously at me once or twice, as if wondering whether I were quite sane. After dinner the three conferred in low tones, while I stood with my back to them looking into the busy street below and vaguely wondering if it would break one’s neck to jump from the second story to the sidewalk, and if one could so manage as not to land on the head of some pedestrian. I heard the Colonel say, ‘As soon as possible now. I have dispatched a messenger boy.’ I knew what he meant and grew hot and cold again in a minute, while the creature on my shoulder began its warning cry, ‘Not too late yet,’ and pressed so close to my ears that I fancied it touched my hair with its wings. In the car I had thought of Poe’s raven, but now I said to myself, ‘It is a bat.’ I have a mortal terror of bats and put up my hand to brush it away. But it stayed and clamored louder and louder, while I kept trying to brush it off, until Mrs. Darcy came to me and said, ‘There is a lock of hair loose on your neck. I think that is what annoys you. Let me fix it.’

“She took out a hairpin and fastened the refractory lock, while I wondered if she would see the thing on my shoulder. She didn’t, and I began to fear I was losing my mind, and made a great effort to pull myself together. There was a knock at the door and the Rev. Mr. Gillson came in, book in hand, ready for business. I was presented to him, and the Colonel explained as a reason for this seemingly sudden marriage that I could not decide to brave the ocean in the winter until the night before. The clergyman bowed and looked very searchingly at me as I stood in the corner with a face white as a corpse. If Mr. and Mrs. Darcy had not been his parishioners he might have questioned me, thinking me an unwilling bride. But they were my vouchers and Col. Errington was well known to him by reputation. It was all right and the ceremony began, while the bat, if bat it were, shrieked and fluttered and flapped, until it seemed to me they must all hear it. But when the Colonel took the ring, it gave one despairing cry, ‘Too late, too late!’ and flew away, leaving me calm and quiet, with a strange hallucination of the brain. It was Jack putting the ring on my finger,—Jack’s voice, which said, ‘With this ring I thee wed, with all my worldly goods I thee endow.’ I smiled as I thought how few were his worldly goods, compared to what might have been mine, but I was glad that the nightmare was over, the horrid dream passed, and I awake again in the old spare room at home with Jack at my side. I was very much awake when Mr. and Mrs. Darcy kissed me and called me ‘Mrs. Errington,’ while somebody, who was not Jack, kissed me and called me his wife. The room at The Elms resolved itself into the parlor at the hotel, and Jack was lost to me forever by my own act, and I felt like a block of stone as I received the congratulations of the clergyman and felt that the Colonel’s eyes were upon me.

“I have read somewhere that in the great crises of one’s life the most ridiculous thoughts will sometimes intrude, and there came to me a saying I have heard father use so often when I was fretting over some disaster, ‘Never cry for spilled milk!’ It helped me wonderfully. I had spilled all mine,—a brimming pail, and drowned my heart in doing it. I could never undo what I had done, but I could make the best of it, and I mean to. I have written you thus fully because I wanted you to know that I am not altogether callous, and that I did struggle against my fate. A stronger will than mine conquered me. I am Col. Errington’s wife and shall be faithful to him, and however my heart may ache for the might have been, no one, not even you, shall know it. My husband——. I have written the word, and feel better,—is very kind and generous. He knows I did not marry him for love, and I think he means me to have my price,—all the money I want. His wedding present is $10,000, to do with as I please. Half of it I shall send to you, as I know how low our finances are. He does not object. He thought I would do it, he said, and has made arrangements to send it before we sail. He has bought me a lovely fur cloak for the voyage, and given me two one hundred dollar bills for pin money. More than I ever had in all my life. One of the bills I am sending to Jack in payment for what he sent me on the pretense of buying Black Beauty. I bought the tailor-made gown with it, my wedding gown, which I am wearing now, and which I can not bear to think was bought with Jack’s money. Make him take it. Tell him it is to buy Black Beauty back, and don’t let him hate me. Tell him I did love him dearly and am afraid I do now when to do so is a sin. I am another man’s wife, and my husband has come in and says I have but little more time, as he wishes to get settled in our staterooms before the ship sails. I wonder if I shall throw myself into the sea. Perhaps. If you hear of an ‘accidental drowning of the lovely young bride of the Hon. George W. Errington,’—that’s the way they will word it,—you will know it was not accidental, but keep it to yourself.

“I have not time to read what I have written. If I had I probably should not send it. I think I have told you everything in a wild, disconnected and perhaps contradictory way, and I have felt disconnected and wild as I told it. You may show this letter to Miss Errington, who still intends going to The Elms with Katy. Perhaps she will feel less hard towards me. You may also tell Jack some things that are in it and which I could not write to him. Oh, Jack, oh Annie! Good-bye, Good-bye! I put my arms around your necks and kiss you both. God bless you. Write to me and tell me about Jack. The Colonel will cable from Queenstown. He is getting impatient and to save time has directed the envelope for me. Good-bye, again.

“Fanny Hathern Errington. Ah me!”

Chapter X.—Annie’s Story Continued.
THE EFFECT.

Fanny’s handwriting was never very legible, and now it was worse than usual, while her letter was so long and my eyes so blurred with tears that it took me a long time to read it, and after it was read I leaned back in my chair shaking from head to foot, with a sense of loss and shame and pity for us all who must bear the disgrace, for such I felt Fan’s conduct to be. I pitied her, but not as I did Jack, who was so full of anticipations of the morrow and so little prepared for the blow awaiting him. I heard him come whistling up the stairs, two at a time, and involuntarily put up my hands to ward him off,—to keep him a little longer from what I knew would be worse than death.

“Hallo!” he said, as he came in. “I didn’t expect to be gone so long, but those stupid men didn’t seem to understand the range at all, and I’ll be hanged if I know much more than they do. Mother always used a fireplace, you know. But I reckon we have got it into shipshape. If not, Norah can fix it when she comes. Why, Annie, Annie!” he exclaimed suddenly, struck by my attitude and the expression of my face, “Are you ill? What has happened? You are as white as a ghost, and the rain beating in upon you, too.”

He shut the window and continued, as the letter in my lap rustled a little. “You have had bad news. Is it Carl? Is he ill? Is he dead?”

I shook my head, and he went on: “What is it then? What has happened?”

As he stepped back his eye fell upon the note directed to him, which lay upon the table. He recognized his name, and the handwriting, and catching it up, he said, “From Fanny; how did it get here? Did it come in that letter from New York, which you said was from Col. Errington?”

I nodded and managed to gasp, “Oh Jack, oh Jack! How will you bear it!”

“Bear what?” he asked. “Tell me; the suspense is torture to me. Has anything happened to Fanny? She isn’t dead or she could not write to me.”

Summoning all my strength, I answered. “No, Jack, Fanny is not dead. It is worse than that. She is married to Col. Errington and gone with him to Europe.”

I have heard Jack tell with a shudder of men at his side in battle dropping instantly when a ball struck them, but surely no man in the fiercest battle which ever raged could have fallen more suddenly than Jack did into the chair nearest to him, where he sat huddled together like an old man, his mouth open and his glazed eyes looking at me in dumb despair.

“N-n-no, Annie,” he began at last, with quivering lips and chin and in a voice I would never have known as his. “N-n-no, Annie. Say it again. I didn’t hear you right. There’s a roaring in my ears. Fanny—isn’t—married! My—Fanny, who was to have this room, and watch for me. N-n-no, Annie, N-no.”

There was a huskiness in his voice which frightened me, and a moan like one in mortal pain, which made me forget myself in my desire to comfort him.

“Don’t Jack,” I said, going up to him and rubbing his cold hands and face, which was not pale but of a greenish hue. “Don’t take it so hard. She is my sister, but if she were ten times that I should say she is not worth the anguish you are enduring. She has sold herself for money. She was married Friday evening in New York and sailed in the Celtic Saturday afternoon. She had a hard struggle before she decided to do what she has done. I think she loves you still.”

As I talked the greenish hue left his face and was succeeded by a deathly pallor, as, reaching out his hand, he said, “Give me her letter.”

“Yours, you mean,” I said, offering him the note addressed to him.

“No,—yours. I have a right to know all she can say,” he answered, and his voice was not like the Jack of an hour ago. There was a ring in it like one who would be obeyed. “I don’t care what she has written to me; to you she would tell the truth. Give me her letter,” he continued.

I gave it to him and then watched him as he read it rapidly in the waning light of that dreary November afternoon, with the rain beating against the windows, and the wind which was beginning to rise howling around the house, as Fanny said it howled the night she wrote the letter. It was curious to watch the different expressions of Jack’s face as his eyes went over the pages. Sometimes his breath came heavily, his teeth shut tightly together and there were great ridges in his forehead between his eyes. Again his face softened and his lips quivered and I knew he was reading the parts where Fan spoke of him. I knew, too, when he reached the Scales and the weighing process by the throwing up of his head and the flaring of his nostrils like one under strong excitement. Once he brought his hand down heavily upon the arm of his chair, and if I had ever heard him swear I should have suspected that something like an oath escaped him. Then he read on until he came to the marriage scene in the hotel, when his whole aspect changed. The hardness was gone and he shook like one in a chill, although he asked me to open the window again, saying he could not breathe.

“Oh, Fanny; Fanny, how could you do this to me, who loved and trusted you so!” he said, and letting the letter drop to the floor and covering his face with his hands he rocked to and fro and cried as I had never seen any one cry before, and pray I never may again. And yet he shed no tears, but sobbed and moaned so pitifully that I went to him again and laying my arm across his shoulder drew his hot head down upon it as I would if he had been my brother.

There was then no thought of the love I had borne him so long; it was only intense pity for the man whose heart I knew was breaking, and whom I tried to comfort.

“Don’t, Jack; don’t,” I said, brushing back his hair, which was wet with the great drops of sweat which stood under it and upon his forehead. “I wish I could comfort you. Oh, I wish I could, but only God can do that.”

Then he started, and looking at me fiercely exclaimed, “Don’t speak to me of God. I have lost all faith in everything. Didn’t I trust Him, and wasn’t my heart so full of gratitude this morning for all the good I thought He had given me! And didn’t I make resolutions for a better life? Tell me that. And what has come of it? When I was on my knees thanking Him for Fanny and asking that I might be worthy, she was another man’s wife, and He gave me no sign, but let me go on in my fool’s paradise. How could God do that? How could Fanny do it? Oh, Fanny, Fanny! If you were lying dead here in what was to have been our bridal chamber it would be happiness compared to this. Don’t speak to me, Annie. Don’t touch me,” and he pushed me from him. “It seems to bring Fanny near to me, and I can’t bear it now, when my love for her is dying so hard. Shut the window, please. I am shivering again.”

I closed the window and then stood looking at him writhing in pain, as if he were indeed enduring the throes of death. It was growing late and I roused him at last, pointing to the darkness outside and telling him that Paul and Phyllis would be waiting anxiously for us.

“Can you get your horse, or shall I?” I asked.

“I’ll go,” he said, getting up and tottering as if he were an old man.

On the table where he had lain it without reading was Fanny’s note to him, and I put it in my purse with the bill which had been in my letter and which I had not given him. I heard the buggy at the door, and going out got in beside him and we started down the hill. It was raining fast and had grown very dark. If the horse had not been perfectly gentle and known every turn of the road, we might have met with some disaster, for the reins hung loosely in Jack’s hands and he seemed to notice nothing. Once we met a carriage which passed so close to us that the wheels grazed each other, but Jack paid no attention. Then I took the lines from him and drove myself, while he sat with his head bent so low that his chin must have rested upon his chest. Once I spoke to him, but he did not answer, and when we reached the town I called to a boy on the walk bidding him to go for a physician and tell him to come at once to The Elms, adding that Mr. Fullerton had been taken suddenly ill. I had no intention of having Jack in his present condition go to his boardinghouse that night. He would be better at The Elms, and after speaking to the boy I drove rapidly home. There was a bright light in the dining-room and Paul’s face was pressed against the window pane watching for me. At the sound of wheels Phyllis hurried to the door, peering out into the darkness and shading her eyes with her hand.

“For de Lord’s sake, Miss Annie and Mas’r Jack,” she began. “Whar has you been, and what has happened you? De muffins is all fell flat, an’ de coffee biled till it’s spiled.”

“Sh-sh,” I said warningly. “Bring a light, and come and help me; Mr. Fullerton is ill,—very ill, I am afraid.”

She had a candle at the door in a minute and was at my side, as I sprang to the ground after giving Jack a vigorous shake which roused him a little.

“Yes. Where are we? At home? All right. I’ll see you to-morrow before she comes,” he said, putting out his hand and feeling for the lines.

“Jack, you are to stay at The Elms with me,” I said, wondering how I was to make him get out if he were disposed not to do so.

Just then I heard the tramp of horses’ feet in the avenue and the doctor came riding up rapidly. He was just starting to visit a patient in the country when he received my message and came at once to know what had happened. Between him and Phyllis Jack was gotten into the house, his weakness and silence so alarming that I was relieved when, as he felt the warmth of the dining-room, he stretched his hands toward the light-wood fire and said, “Ah-h, that feels good. I think I must have taken cold. I am so chilly. I wish somebody would cover up Robin,” referring to his horse, of which he was very fond. Sinking into the chair which Phyllis drew close to the hearth, he gave a long sigh, leaned his head back and closed his eyes, while the doctor looked curiously at him and then at me.

“He is in a high fever,” he said, “although he seems so cold. How did the attack come on and what caused it?”

I could not explain then, and answered evasively. “He must stay here to-night, in father’s room, and the sooner you get him in there the better,” I said, telling Phyllis to kindle a fire and get the bed ready. I knew the condition of things better than the doctor, who, for a time, acted under my orders. At first Jack resisted, saying he must go home as his landlady would not like it if he kept supper waiting. Then he began to talk of Scales and Maelstroms, and Fanny, who was coming to-morrow. We got him quiet at last and into bed where he lay perfectly still, with his hands folded, his eyes closed and his face white as the pillow it rested upon.

“I can’t make it out,” the doctor said. “It is not often a young and strong man like him comes down so suddenly and so fast. Why, there is no more life in him than in a piece of paper. Looks to me as if he had received some great mental shock. Can’t account for it in any other way.”

Reflecting that on the morrow when Miss Errington and Katy came without Fanny the truth must be told, I replied, “He has had a shock. You know he was to have been married on Christmas day.”

The doctor nodded, and I went on slowly, with a feeling that my tongue was very thick.

“This evening I had a letter from Fanny, who has married Col. Errington and gone to Europe with him.”

The doctor dropped into the chair nearest him almost as quickly as Jack had dropped when I told the news to him. But he did not speak, for Fanny was my sister and he would not say what was in his mind. I, however, relieved him from all embarrassment by saying, “It has quite unnerved me. It came like a thunderclap. I had no suspicion of it. I think it a cruel, wicked act.”

“Yes, yes, all of that,” he answered, “and may have serious results. There are symptoms about Mr. Fullerton which I do not like. He is strong in everything pertaining to his manhood, but in his nature gentle and tender and trustful as a woman. The blow has struck him hard. See that he has his medicine regularly. I will be here early in the morning. Now, I must go, as I have a patient waiting for me three miles in the country.”

He went out and I followed him, meeting in the hall with Phyllis, who was eager in her inquiries for Mas’r Jack and what had “done took him so suddently.” I told her the truth, and if a negro can turn pale she certainly did. Throwing up her hands and dropping the cup of milk she was taking to Paul, who was clamoring for his supper, she staggered against the door, exclaiming, “Lor’ a ’mighty! What for has Miss Fanny gone done dat ar mean trick to Mas’r Jack, an’ a disgracin’ de whole of us. No weddin’,—no nothin’,—an’ sich gossip in de town. Gone to Europe has she in de big ship?” I nodded and she continued, “May de Lord s——.” She was going to say “sink de ship,” but changed her mind and added, “may he make her so sick she’ll heave up Jonah an’ that Cunnel too. I ’members him well fust time he was here, orderin’ dem soldiers roun’ as if dey was dirt. Jess so he’ll done order Miss Fanny, and sarve her right.”

A moan from Jack and an imperative call from Paul brought the interview to an end, and while Phyllis went to the one I hastened to the other, who was talking rather wildly. This did not greatly surprise me as I remembered having heard his mother say that whenever anything ailed him, if it were only the earache, to which as a boy he was subject, it made him delirious. It was more than earache now, and I tried to quiet him as he talked disconnectedly of several things, but mostly of Fanny and the house on The Plateau, and our room, wondering if she would like it, and the medallion on the bedstead which looked so much like her.

“I love her so! I love her so! How can I give her up!” he suddenly exclaimed, throwing his arms down with great force upon the spread, while the perspiration rolled down his face, and his eyes glared at me questioningly and then wandered swiftly around the room.

He wanted to go home, he said; this was no place for him, and Fanny coming to-morrow. Once he tried to get up, but I kept him back, telling him to wait till to-morrow, when I hoped he would be better.

“What little dark-faced woman are you, I’d like to know, trying to boss me?” he said, looking curiously at me, as I kept my arm across his chest. “You can’t hold a candle to Fanny. Where is she? You go away and send her here.”

I knew he was not conscious of what he was saying, but in my nervous condition his words hurt me, and my voice shook as I replied, “Fanny has not come yet. You didn’t expect her till to-morrow. I am Annie. Don’t you know me Jack?”

Something in my voice arrested his attention, and looking fixedly at me he said, “You want to cry, don’t you? Put your head down here and have it out.” With one hand he drew my head down upon his other hand and kept it there, while I cried like a child. It was his part to comfort me now, and he tried to do so, asking why I cried and what had happened.

“Something has, I know; but I can’t remember what it is,” he said. “But never mind. We’ll meet it bravely together, little Annie-mother, and Fanny will be here to-morrow.”

That thought comforted him, and many times during the night as I sat by him he asked if it were to-morrow yet.

“The to-morrow, you know, when she is coming,” he would add, and to this I could truthfully answer no, even when it was the dawn of the to-morrow he had anticipated so much and the grey morning was looking in at the windows.

At an early hour Phyllis came to relieve me, and shivering in every limb and with my head aching as if it would burst, I crept up to my bed, where I fell at once into a heavy sleep which lasted for hours. When I awoke both Phyllis and the doctor were with me. The latter held a telegram from Katy, saying that she and Miss Errington would come that day as they had arranged. My first inquiry was for Jack.

“I am afraid he is in for brain fever,” the doctor said. “He has been working very hard lately, and this, with the wetting he got last night and the terrible blow have proved more than he can bear. He is apt to be flighty from pain anyway and is crazy as a loon this morning and is asking first if it is to-morrow, then for Fanny and then for Annie-mother. That I reckon is you, but you are better where you are for a day or so, or I shall have two on my hands, and I fancy Jack will be about as much as I can manage.”

“Oh, I must get up,” I said, trying to rise, when a sharp pain in the back of my head pulled me back.

“I told you so,” the doctor said. “You’ve got neuralgia in your neck. You never changed your wet clothes at all last night, Phyllis says, and if you don’t look out you’ll have pneumonia and the Lord knows what else. You must keep quiet.”

I had no choice but to obey, the pain in my neck was so severe, and were I to try I could not narrate what came with and followed that to-morrow of which Jack had talked so much and which was ushered in so sadly. This task devolves upon another.