Mrs. Hallam's companion; and The Spring Farm, and other tales

by Mary Jane Holmes

MRS. HALLAM’S COMPANION.

CHAPTER I.
THE HALLAMS.

Mrs. Carter Hallam was going to Europe,—going to Aix-les Bains,—partly for the baths, which she hoped “would lessen her fast-increasing avoirdupois, and partly to join her intimate friend, Mrs. Walker Haynes, who had urged her coming and had promised to introduce her to some of the best people, both English and American. This attracted Mrs. Hallam more than the baths. She was anxious to know the best people, and she did know a good many, although her name was not in the list of the four hundred. But she meant it should be there in the near future, nor did it seem unlikely that it might be. There was not so great a distance between the four hundred and herself, as she was now, as there had been between Mrs. Carter Hallam and little Lucy Brown, who used to live with her grandmother in an old yellow house in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and pick berries to buy herself a pair of morocco boots. Later on, when the grandmother was dead and the yellow house sold, Lucy had worked first in a shoe-shop and then in a dry-goods store in Worcester, where, attracted by her handsome face, Carter Hallam, a thriving grocer, had made her his wife and mistress of a pretty little house on the west side of the city. As a clerk she had often waited upon the West Side ladies, whom she admired greatly, fancying she could readily distinguish them from the ladies of the East Side. To marry a Hallam was a great honor, but to be a West-Sider was a greater, and when both came to her she nearly lost her balance, although her home was far removed from the aristocratic quarters where the old families, the real West-Siders, lived. In a way she was one of them, she thought, or at least she was no longer a clerk, and she began to cut her old acquaintances, while her husband laughed at and ridiculed her, wondering what difference it made whether one lived on the east or west side of a town. He did not care whether people took him for a nabob, or a fresh importation from the wild and woolly West; he was just Carter Hallam, a jolly, easy-going fellow whom everybody knew and everybody liked. He was born on a farm in Leicester, where the Hallams, although comparatively poor, were held in high esteem as one of the best and oldest families. At twenty-one he came into the possession of a few thousand dollars left him by an uncle for whom he was named, and then he went to the Far West, roughing it with cowboys and ranchmen, and investing his money in a gold-mine in Montana and in lands still farther west. Then he returned to Worcester, bought a small grocery, married Lucy Brown, and lived quietly for a few years, when suddenly one day there flashed across the wires the news that his mine had proved one of the richest in Montana, and his lands were worth many times what he gave for them. He was a millionaire, with property constantly rising in value, and Worcester could no longer hold his ambitious wife.

It was too small a place for her, she said, for everybody knew everybody else’s business and history, and, no matter how much she was worth, somebody was sure to taunt her with having worked in a shoe-shop, if, indeed, she did not hear that she had once picked berries to buy herself some shoes. They must go away from the old life, if they wanted to be anybody. They must travel and see the world, and get cultivated, and know what to talk about with their equals.

So they sold the house and the grocery and traveled east and west, north and south, and finally went to Europe, where they stayed two or three years, seeing nearly everything there was to be seen, and learning a great deal about ruins and statuary and pictures, in which Mrs. Hallam thought herself a connoisseur, although she occasionally got the Sistine Chapel and the Sistine Madonna badly mixed, and talked of the Paul Belvedere, a copy of which she bought at an enormous price. When they returned to America Mr. Hallam was a three times millionaire, for all his speculations had been successful and his mine was still yielding its annual harvest of gold. A handsome house on Fifth Avenue in New York was bought and furnished in the most approved style, and then Mrs. Hallam began to consider the best means of getting into society. She already knew a good many New York people whom she had met abroad, and whose acquaintance it was desirable to continue. But she soon found that acquaintances made in Paris or Rome or on the Nile were not as cordial when met at home, and she was beginning to feel discouraged, when chance threw in her way Mrs. Walker Haynes, who, with the bluest of blood and the smallest of purses, knew nearly every one worth knowing, and, it was hinted, would for a quid pro quo open many fashionable doors to aspiring applicants who, without her aid, would probably stay outside forever.

The daughter and grand-daughter and cousin of governors and senators and judges, with a quiet assumption of superiority which was seldom offensive to those whom she wished to conciliate, she was a power in society, and more quoted and courted than any woman in her set. To be noticed by Mrs. Walker Haynes was usually a guarantee of success, and Mrs. Hallam was greatly surprised when one morning a handsome coupé stopped before her door and a moment after her maid brought her Mrs. Walker Haynes’s card. She knew all about Mrs. Walker Haynes and what she was capable of doing, and in a flutter of excitement she went down to meet her. Mrs. Walker Haynes, who never took people up if there was anything doubtful in their antecedents, knew all about Mrs. Hallam, even to the shoe-shop and the clerkship. But she knew, too, that she was perfectly respectable, with no taint whatever upon her character, and that she was anxious to get into society. As it chanced, Mrs. Haynes’s funds were low, for business was dull, as there were fewer human moths than usual hovering around the social candle, and when the ladies of the church which both she and Mrs. Hallam attended met to devise ways and means for raising money for some new charity, she spoke of Mrs. Hallam and offered to call upon her for a subscription, if the ladies wished it. They did wish it, and the next day found Mrs. Haynes waiting in Mrs. Hallam’s drawing-room for the appearance of its mistress, her quick-seeing eyes taking in every detail in its furnishing, and deciding on the whole that it was very good.

“Some one has taste,—the upholsterer and decorator, probably,” she thought, as Mrs. Hallam came in, nervous and flurried, but at once put at ease by her visitor’s gracious and friendly manner.

After a few general topics and the mention of a mutual friend whom Mrs. Hallam had met in Cairo, Mrs. Haynes came directly to the object of her visit, apologizing first for the liberty she was taking, and adding:

“But now that you are one of us in the church, I thought you might like to help us, and we need it so much.”

Mrs. Hallam was not naturally generous where nothing was to be gained, but Mrs. Haynes’s manner, and her “now you are one of us,” made her so in this instance, and taking the paper she wrote her name for two hundred dollars, which was nearly one-fourth of the desired sum. There was a gleam of humor as well as of surprise in Mrs. Haynes’s eyes as she read the amount, but she was profuse in her thanks and expressions of gratitude, and, promising to call very soon socially, she took her leave with a feeling that it would pay to take up Mrs. Hallam, who was really more lady-like and better educated than many whom she had launched upon the sea of fashion. With Mrs. Walker Haynes and several millions behind her, progress was easy for Mrs. Hallam, and within a year she was “quite in the swim,” she said to her husband, who laughed at her as he had done in Worcester, and called Mrs. Haynes a fraud who knew what she was about. But he gave her all the money she wanted, and rather enjoyed seeing her “hob-a-nob with the big bugs,” as he expressed it. Nothing, however, could change him, and he remained the same unostentatious, popular man he had always been up to the day of his death, which occurred about three years before our story opens.

At that time there was living with him his nephew, the son of his only brother, Jack. Reginald,—or Rex as he was familiarly called,—was a young man of twenty-six, with exceptionally good habits, and a few days before his uncle died he said to him:

“I can trust you, Rex. You have lived with me since you were fourteen, and have never once failed me. The Hallams are all honest people, and you are half Hallam. I have made you independent by my will, and I want you to stay with your aunt and look after her affairs. She is as good a woman as ever lived, but a little off on fashion and fol-de-rol. Keep her as level as you can.”

This Rex had tried to do, rather successfully, too, except when Mrs. Walker Haynes’s influence was in the ascendant, when he usually succumbed to circumstances and allowed his aunt to do as she pleased. Mrs. Haynes, who had profited greatly in a pecuniary way from her acquaintance with Mrs. Hallam, was now in Europe, and had written her friend to join her at Aix-les-Bains, which she said was a charming place, full of titled people both English and French, and she had the entrée to the very best circles. She further added that it was desirable for a lady traveling without a male escort to have a companion besides a maid and courier. The companion was to be found in America, the courier in London, and the maid in Paris; “after which,” she wrote, “you will travel tout-à-fait en princesse. The en princesse appealed to Mrs. Hallam at once as something altogether applicable to Mrs. Carter Hallam of New York. She was a great lady now; Sturbridge and the old yellow house and the berries and the shoe-shop were more than thirty years in the past, and so covered over with gold that it seemed impossible to uncover them; nor had any one tried, so far as she knew. The Hallams as a family had been highly respected both in Worcester and in Leicester, and she often spoke of them, but never of the Browns, or of the old grandmother, and she was glad she had no near relatives to intrude themselves upon her and make her ashamed. She was very fond and very proud of Reginald, who was to her like a son, and who with the integrity and common sense of the Hallams had also inherited the innate refinement and kindly courtesy of his mother, a Bostonian and the daughter of a clergyman. As a rule she consulted him about everything, and after she received Mrs. Haynes’s letter she showed it to him and asked his advice in the matter of a companion.

“I think she would be a nuisance and frightfully in your way at times, but if Mrs. Haynes says you must have one, it’s all right, so go ahead,” Rex replied, and his aunt continued:

“But how am I to find what I want? I am so easily imposed upon, and I will not have one from the city. She would expect too much and make herself too familiar. I must have one from the country.”

“Advertise, then, and they’ll come round you like bees around honey,” Rex said, and to this suggestion his aunt at once acceded, asking him to write the advertisement, which she dictated, with so many conditions and requirements that Rex exclaimed, “Hold on there. You will insist next that they subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, besides believing in foreordination and everything in the Westminster Catechism. You are demanding impossibilities and giving too little in return. Three hundred dollars for perfection! I should say offer five hundred. ‘The higher-priced the better’ is Mrs. Walker Haynes’s motto, and I am sure she will think it far more tony to have an expensive appendage than a cheap one. The girl will earn her money, too, or I’m mistaken; for Mrs. Haynes is sure to share her services with you, as she does everything else.”

He spoke laughingly, but sarcastically, for he perfectly understood Mrs. Walker Haynes, whom his outspoken uncle had called “a sponge and a schemer, who knew how to feather her nest.” Privately Rex thought the same, but he did not often express these views to his aunt, who at last consented to the five hundred dollars, and Rex wrote the advertisement, which was as follows:

“Wanted,

“A companion for a lady who is going abroad. One from the country, between twenty and twenty-five, preferred. She must be a good accountant, a good reader, and a good seamstress. She must also have a sufficient knowledge of French to understand the language and make herself understood. To such a young lady five hundred dollars a year will be given, and all expenses paid. Address,

“Mrs. Carter Hallam,

“No. — Fifth Avenue, New York,”

When Rex read this to his aunt, she said:

“Yes, that will do; but don’t you think it just as well to say young person instead of young lady?”

“No, I don’t,” Rex answered, promptly. “You want a lady, and not a person, as you understand the word, and I wouldn’t begin by insulting her.”

So the “lady” was allowed to stand, and then, without his aunt’s knowledge, Rex added:

“Those applying will please send their photographs.”

“I should like to see the look of astonishment on aunt’s face when the pictures come pouring in. There will be scores of them, the offer is so good,” Rex thought, as he folded the advertisement and left the house.

That night, when dinner was over, he said to his aunt: “I have a project in mind which I wish to tell you about.”

Mrs. Hallam gave a little shrug of annoyance. Her husband had been full of projects, most of which she had disapproved, as she probably should this of Rex, who continued:

“I am thinking of buying a place in the country,—the real country, I mean,—where the houses are old-fashioned and far apart, and there are woods and ponds and brooks and things.”

“And pray what would you do with such a place?” Mrs. Hallam asked.

Rex replied, “I’d make it into a fancy farm and fill it with blooded stock, hunting-horses, and dogs. I’d keep the old house intact so far as architecture is concerned, and fit it up as a kind of bachelor’s hall, where I can have a lot of fellows in the summer and fall, and hunt and fish and have a glorious time. Ladies will not be excluded, of course, and when you are fagged out with Saratoga and Newport I shall invite you, and possibly Mrs. Haynes and Grace, down to see the fox-hunts I mean to have, just as they do in the Genesee Valley. Won’t it be fun?”

Rex was eloquent on the subject of his fancy farm. He was very fond of the country, although he really knew but little about it, as he was born in New York, and had lived there all his life with the exception of two years spent at the South with his mother’s brother and four years at Yale. His aunt, on the contrary, detested the country, with its woods, and ponds, and brooks, and old-fashioned houses, and she felt very little interest in Rex’s fancy farm and fox-hunts, which she looked upon as wholly visionary. She asked him, however, where the farm was, and he replied:

“You see, Marks, who is in the office with me, has a client who owns a mortgage on some old homestead among the hills in Massachusetts. This mortgage, which has changed hands two or three times and been renewed once or twice, comes due in October, and Marks says there is not much probability that the old man,—I believe he is quite old,—can pay it, and the place will be sold at auction. I can, of course, wait and bid it off cheap, as farms are not in great demand in that vicinity; but I don’t like to do that. I’d rather buy it outright, giving the old fellow more than it is worth rather than less. Marks says it is a rambling old house, with three or four gables, and stands on a hillside with a fine view of the surrounding country. The woods are full of pleasant drives, and ponds where the white lilies grow and where I can fish and have some small boats.”

“But where is it? In what town, I mean?” Mrs. Hallam asked, with a slight tremor in her voice, which, however, Rex did not notice as he answered:

“I don’t remember where Marks’s client said it was, but I have his letter. Let me see.” And, taking the letter from his pocket, he glanced at it a moment, and then said, “It is in Leicester, and not more than five or six miles from the city of Worcester and Lake Quinsigamond, where I mean to have a yacht and call it the Lucy Hallam for you. Why, auntie, it has just occurred to me that you once lived in Worcester, and Uncle Hallam, too, and that he and father were born in Leicester. Were you ever there,—at the house where father was born, I mean? But of course you have been.”

Rex had risen to his feet and stood leaning on the mantel and looking at his aunt with an eager, expectant expression on his face. She was pale to her lips as she replied:

“Yes, I was there just after I was married. Your uncle drove me out one afternoon to see the place. Strangers were living there then, for his father and mother were dead. He was as country mad as you are, and actually went down upon his knees before the old well-sweep and bucket.”

“I don’t blame him. I believe I’d do the same,” Rex replied, and then went on questioning her rapidly. “What was the house like? Had it a big chimney in the centre?”

Mrs. Hallam said it had.

“Wide fireplaces?”

“Rather wide,—yes.”

“Kitchen fireplace, with a crane?”

“I don’t know, but most likely.”

“Little window-panes, and deep window-seats?”

“I think so.”

“Big iron door-latches instead of knobs?”

“Yes, and a brass knocker.”

“Slanting roof, or high?”

“It was a high gabled roof,—three or four gables, and must have been rather pretentious when it was new.

“Rex,”—and Mrs. Hallam’s voice trembled perceptibly,—“the gables and the situation overlooking the valley make me think that the place you have in view is possibly your father’s old home.”

“By Jove,” Rex exclaimed, “wouldn’t that be jolly! I believe I’d give a thousand dollars extra for the sake of having the old homestead for my own. I wonder who the old chap is who lives there. I mean to go down and see for myself as soon as I return from Chicago and we get the lawsuit off our hands which is taking all Marks’s time and mine.”

Mrs. Hallam did not say what she thought, for she knew there was not much use in opposing Rex, but in her heart she did not approve of bringing the long-buried past up to the present, which was so different. The Homestead was well enough, and Leicester was well enough, for Hallam had been an honored name in the neighborhood, and Rex would be honored, too, as a scion of the family; but it was too near Worcester and the shoe-shop and the store and the people who had known her as a working-girl, and who would be sure to renew the acquaintance if she were to go there. She had no relatives to trouble her, unless it were a certain Phineas Jones, who was so far removed that she could scarcely call him a relative. But if he were living he would certainly find her if she ventured near him, and cousin her, as he used to do in Worcester, where he was continually calling upon her after her marriage and reminding her of spelling-schools and singing-schools and circuses which he said he had attended with her. How distasteful it all was, and how she shrank from everything pertaining to her early life, which seemed so far away that she sometimes half persuaded herself it had never been!

And yet her talk with Rex about the old Homestead on the hill had stirred her strangely, and that night, long after her usual hour for retiring, she sat by her window looking out upon the great city, whose many lights, shining like stars through the fog and rain, she scarcely saw at all. Her thoughts had gone back thirty years to an October day just after her return from her wedding trip to Niagara, when her husband had driven her into the country to visit his old home. How happy he had been, and how vividly she could recall the expression on his face when he caught sight of the red gables and the well-sweep where she told Reginald he had gone down upon his knees. There had been a similar expression on Rex’s face that evening when he talked of his fancy farm, and Rex was in appearance much like what her handsome young husband had been that lovely autumn day, when a purple haze was resting on the hills and the air was soft and warm as summer. He had taken her first to the woods and shown her where he and his brother Jack had set their traps for the woodchucks and snared the partridges in the fall and hunted for the trailing arbutus and the sassafras in the spring; then to the old cider-mill at the end of the lane, and to the hill where they had their slide in winter, and to the barn, where they had a swing, and to the brook in the orchard, where they had a water-wheel; then to the well, where he drew up the bucket, and, poising it upon the curb, stooped to drink from it, asking her to do the same and see if she ever quaffed a sweeter draught; but she was afraid of wetting her dress, and had drawn back, saying she was not thirsty. Strangers occupied the house, but permission was given them to go over it, and he had taken her through all the rooms, showing her where he and Jack and Annie were born, and where the latter had died when a little child of eight; then to the garret, where they used to spread the hickory-nuts and butternuts to dry, and down to the cellar, where the apples and cider were stored. He was like a school-boy in his eagerness to explain everything, while she was bored to death and heard with dismay his proposition to drive two or three miles farther to the Greenville cemetery, where the Hallams for many generations back had been buried. There was a host of them, and some of the headstones were sunken and mouldy with age and half fallen down, while the lettering upon them was almost illegible.

“I wonder whose this is?” he said, as he went down upon the ground to decipher the date of the oldest one. “I can’t make it out, except that it is seventeen hundred and something. He must have been an old settler,” he continued, as he arose and brushed a patch of dirt from his trousers with his silk handkerchief. Then, glancing at her as she stood listlessly leaning against a stone, he said, “Why, Lucy, you look tired. Are you?”

“No, not very,” she answered, a little pettishly; “but I don’t think it very exhilarating business for a bride to be visiting the graves of her husband’s ancestors.”

He did not hunt for any more dates after that, but, gathering a few wild flowers growing in the tall grass, he laid them upon his mother’s grave and Annie’s, and, going out to the carriage standing by the gate, drove back to Worcester through a long stretch of woods, where the road was lined on either side with sumachs and berry-bushes and clumps of bitter-sweet, and there was no sign of life except when a blackbird flew from one tree to another, or a squirrel showed its bushy tail upon the wall. He thought it delightful, and said that it was the pleasantest drive in the neighborhood and one which he had often taken with Jack when they were boys; but she thought it horribly lonesome and poky, and was glad when they struck the pavement of the town.

“Carter always liked the country,” she said to herself when her reverie came to an end, and she left her seat by the window; “and Rex is just like him, and will buy that place if he can, and I shall have to go there as hostess and be called upon by a lot of old women in sun-bonnets and blanket shawls, who will call me Lucy Ann and say, ‘You remember me, don’t you? I was Mary Jane Smith; I worked in the shoe-shop with you years ago.’ And Phineas Jones will turn up, with his cousining and dreadful reminiscences. Ah me, what a pity one could not be born without antecedents!”

CHAPTER II.
THE HOMESTEAD.

It stood at the end of a grassy avenue or lane a little distance from the electric road between Worcester and Spencer, its outside chimneys covered with woodbine and its sharp gables distinctly visible as the cars wound up the steep Leicester hill. Just what its age was no one knew exactly. Relic-hunters who revel in antiquities put it at one hundred and fifty. But the oldest inhabitant in the town, who was an authority for everything ancient, said that when he was a small boy it was comparatively new, and considered very fine on account of its gables and brass knocker, and, as he was ninety-five or six, the house was probably over a hundred. It was built by a retired sea-captain from Boston, and after his death it changed hands several times until it was bought by the Hallams, who lived there so long and were so highly esteemed that it came to bear their name, and was known as the Hallam Homestead. After the death of Carter Hallam’s father it was occupied by different parties, and finally became the property of a Mr. Leighton, who rather late in life had married a girl from Georgia, where he had been for a time a teacher. Naturally scholarly and fond of books, he would have preferred teaching, but his young wife, accustomed to plantation life, said she should be happier in the country, and so he bought the Homestead and commenced farming, with very little knowledge of what ought to be done and very little means with which to do it. Under such circumstances he naturally grew poorer every year, while his wife’s artistic tastes did not help the matter. Remembering her father’s plantation with its handsome grounds and gardens, she instituted numerous changes in and about the house, which made it more attractive, but did not add to its value. The big chimney was taken down and others built upon the outside, after the Southern style. A wide hall was put through the centre where the chimney had been; a broad double piazza was built in front, while the ground was terraced down to the orchard below, where a rustic bridge was thrown across the little brook where Carter and Jack Hallam had built their water-wheel. Other changes the ambitious little Georgian was contemplating, when she died suddenly and was carried back to sleep under her native pines, leaving her husband utterly crushed at his loss, with the care of two little girls, Dorcas and Bertha, and a mortgage of two thousand dollars upon his farm. For some years he scrambled on as best he could with hired help, giving all his leisure time to educating and training his daughters, who were as unlike each other as two sisters well could be. Dorcas, the elder, was fair and blue-eyed, and round and short and matter-of-fact, caring more for the farm and the house than for books, while Bertha was just the opposite, and, with her soft brown hair, bright eyes, brilliant complexion, and graceful, slender figure, was the exact counterpart of her beautiful Southern mother when she first came to the Homestead; but otherwise she was like her father, caring more for books than for the details of every-day life.

“Dorcas is to be housekeeper, and I the wage-earner, to help pay off the mortgage which troubles father so much,” she said, and when she was through school she became book-keeper for the firm of Swartz & Co., of Boston, with a salary of four hundred dollars a year. Dorcas, who was two years older, remained at home as housekeeper. And a very thrifty one she made, seeing to everything and doing everything, from making butter to making beds, for she kept no help. The money thus saved was put carefully by towards paying the mortgage coming due in October. By the closest economy it had been reduced from two thousand to one thousand, and both Dorcas and Bertha were straining every nerve to increase the fund which was to liquidate the debt.

It was not very often that Bertha indulged in the luxury of coming home, for even that expense was something, and every dollar helped. But on the Saturday following the appearance of Mrs. Hallam’s advertisement in the New York Herald she was coming to spend Sunday for the first time in several weeks. These visits were great events at the Homestead, and Dorcas was up as soon as the first robin chirped in his nest in the big apple-tree which shaded the rear of the house and was now odorous and beautiful with its clusters of pink-and-white blossoms. There was churning to do that morning, and butter to get off to market, besides the usual Saturday’s cleaning and baking, which included all Bertha’s favorite dishes. There was Bertha’s room to be gone over with broom and duster, and all the vases and handleless pitchers to be filled with daffies and tulips and great bunches of apple-blossoms and a clump or two of the trailing arbutus which had lingered late in the woods. But Dorcas’s work was one of love; if she were tired she scarcely thought of it at all, and kept steadily on until everything was done. In her afternoon gown and white apron she sat down to rest awhile on the piazza overlooking the valley, thinking as she did so what a lovely place it was, with its large, sunny rooms, wide hall, and fine view, and how dreadful it would be to lose it.

“Five hundred dollars more we must have, and where it is to come from I do not know. Bertha always says something will turn up, but I am not so hopeful,” she said, sadly. Then, glancing at the clock, she saw that it was nearly time for the car which would bring her sister from the Worcester station. “I’ll go out to the cross-road and meet her,” she thought, just as she heard the sharp clang of the bell and saw the trolley-pole as it came up the hill. A moment more, and Bertha alighted and came rapidly towards her.

“You dear old Dor, I’m so glad to see you and be home again,” Bertha said, giving up her satchel and umbrella and putting her arm caressingly around Dorcas’s neck as she walked, for she was much the taller of the two.

It was a lovely May afternoon, and the place was at its best in the warm sunlight, with the fresh green grass and the early flowers and the apple orchard full of blossoms which filled the air with perfume.

“Oh, this is delightful, and it is so good to get away from that close office and breathe this pure air,” Bertha said, as she went from room to room, and then out upon the piazza, where she stood taking in deep inhalations and seeming to Dorcas to grow brighter and fresher with each one. “Where is father?” she asked at last.

“Here, daughter,” was answered, as Mr. Leighton, who had been to the village, came through a rear door.

He was a tall, spare man, with snowy hair and a stoop in his shoulders, which told of many years of hard work. But the refinement in his manner and the gentleness in his face were indicative of good breeding, and a life somewhat different from that which he now led.

Bertha was at his side in a moment, and had him down in a rocking-chair, and was sitting on an arm of it, brushing the thin hair back from his forehead, while she looked anxiously into his face, which wore a more troubled expression than usual, although he evidently tried to hide it.

“What is it, father? Are you very tired?” she asked, at last, and he replied;

“No, daughter, not very; and if I were the sight of you would rest me.”

Catching sight of the corner of an envelope in his vest pocket, with a woman’s quick intuition, she guessed that it had something to do with his sadness.

“You have a letter. Is there anything in it about that hateful mortgage?” she said.

“It is all about the mortgage. There’s a way to get rid of it,” he answered, while his voice trembled, and something in his eyes, as he looked into Bertha’s, made her shiver a little; but she kissed him lovingly, and said very low:

“Yes, father. I know there is a way,” her lips quivering as she said it, and a lump rising in her throat as if she were smothering.

“Will you read the letter?” he asked, and she answered:

“Not now; let us have supper first. I am nearly famished, and long to get at Dor’s rolls and broiled chicken, which I smelled before I left the car at the cross-roads.”

She was very gay all through the supper, although a close observer might have seen a cloud cross her bright face occasionally, and a look of pain and preoccupation in her eyes; but she laughed and chatted merrily, asking about the neighbors and the farm, and when supper was over helped Dorcas with her dishes and the evening work, sang snatches of the last opera, and told her sister about the new bell skirt just coming into fashion, and how she could cut over her old ones like it. When everything was done she seemed to nerve herself to some great effort, and, going to her father said:

“Now for the letter. From whom is it?”

“Gorham, the man who holds the mortgage,” Mr. Leighton replied.

“Oh-h, Gorham!” and Bertha’s voice was full of intense relief. “I thought perhaps it was —— but no matter, that will come later. Let us hear what Mr. Gorham has to say. He cannot foreclose till October, anyhow.”

“And not then, if we do what he proposes. This is it,” Mr. Leighton said, as he began to read the letter, which was as follows:

“Brooklyn, N. Y., May —, 18—.

“Mr. Leighton:

“Dear Sir,—A gentleman in New York wishes to purchase a farm in the country, where he can spend a part of the summer and autumn, fishing and fox-hunting and so on. From what he has heard of your place and the woods around it, he thinks it will suit him exactly, and in the course of a few weeks proposes to go out and see it. As he has ample means, he will undoubtedly pay you a good price, cash down, and that will relieve you of all trouble with the mortgage. I still think I must have my money in October, as I have promised it elsewhere.

“Very truly,

“John Gorham.”

“Well?” Mr. Leighton said, as he finished reading the letter, and looked inquiringly at his daughters.

Bertha, who was very pale, was the first to speak. “Do you want to leave the old home?” she asked, and her father replied, in a choking voice, “No, oh, no. I have lived here twenty-seven years, and know every rock and tree and shrub, and love them all. I brought your mother here a bride and a slip of a girl like you, who are so much like her that sometimes when I see you flitting around and hear your voice I think for a moment she has come back to me again. You were both born here. Your mother died here, and here I want to die. But what is the use of prolonging the struggle? I have raked and scraped and saved in every possible way to pay the debt contracted so long ago, the interest of which has eaten up all my profits, and I have got within five hundred dollars of it, but do not see how I can get any further. I may sell a few apples and some hay, but I’ll never borrow another dollar, and if this New York chap offers a good price we’d better sell. Dorcas and I can rent a few rooms somewhere in Boston, maybe, and we shall all be together till I die, which, please God, will not be very long.”

His face was white, with a tired, discouraged look upon it pitiful to see, while Dorcas, who cried easily, was sobbing aloud. But Bertha’s eyes were round and bright and dry, and there was a ring in her voice as she said, “You will not die, and you will not sell the place. Horses and dogs and fox-hunts, indeed! I’d like to see that New Yorker plunging through the fields and farms with his horses and hounds, for that is what fox-hunting means. He would be mobbed in no time. Who is he, I wonder? I should like to meet him and give him a piece of my mind.”

She was getting excited, and her cheeks were scarlet as she kissed her father again and said, “Write and tell that New Yorker to stay where he is, and take his foxes to some other farm. He cannot have ours, nor any one else. Micawber-like, I believe something will turn up; I am sure of it; only give me time.”

Then, rising from her chair, she went swiftly out into the twilight, and, crossing the road, ran down the terrace to a bit of broken wall, where she sat down and watched the night gathering on the distant hills and over the woods, and fought the battle which more than one unselfish woman has fought,—a battle between inclination and what seemed to be duty. If she chose, she could save the farm with a word and make her father’s last days free from care. There was a handsome house in Boston of which she might be mistress any day, with plenty of money at her command to do with as she pleased. But the owner was old compared to herself, forty at least, and growing bald; he called her Berthy, and was not at all like the ideal she had in her mind of the man whom she could love,—who was really more like one who might hunt foxes and ride his horses through the fields, while she rode by his side, than like the commonplace Mr. Sinclair, who had asked her twice to be his wife. At her last refusal only a few days ago he had said he should not give her up yet, but should write her father for his co-operation, and it was from him she feared the New York letter had come when she saw it in her father’s pocket. She knew he was honorable and upright and would be kind and generous to her and her family, but she had dreamed of a different love, and she could not listen to his suit unless it were to save the old home for her father and Dorcas.

For a time she sat weighing in the balance her love for them and her love for herself, while darkness deepened around her and the air grew heavy with the scent of the apple-blossoms and the grove of pine-trees not far away; yet she was no nearer a decision than when she first sat down. It was strange that in the midst of her intense thinking, the baying of hounds, the tramp of horses’ feet, and the shout of many voices should ring in her ears so distinctly that once, as some bushes stirred near her, she turned, half expecting to see the hunted fox fleeing for his life, and, with an impulse to save him from his pursuers, put out both her hands.

“This is a queer sort of hallucination, and it comes from that New York letter,” she thought, just as from under a cloud where it had been hidden the new moon sailed out to the right of her. Bertha was not superstitious, but, like many others, she clung to some of the traditions of her childhood, and the new moon seen over the right shoulder was one of them. She always framed a wish when she saw it, and she did so now, involuntarily repeating the words she had so often used when a child:

“New moon, new moon, listen to me,

And grant the boon I ask of thee,”

and then, almost as seriously as if it were a prayer, she wished that something might occur to keep the home for her father and herself from Mr. Sinclair.

“I don’t believe much in the new moon, it has cheated me so often; but I do believe in presentiments, and I have one that something will turn up. I’ll wait awhile and see,” she said, as the silvery crescent was lost again under a cloud. Beginning to feel a little chilly, she went back to the house, where she found her father reading his evening paper.

This reminded her of a New York Herald she had bought on the car of a little newsboy, whose ragged coat and pleasant face had decided her to refuse the chocolates offered her by a larger boy and take the paper instead. It was lying on the table, where she had put it when she first came in. Taking it up, she sat down and opened it. Glancing from page to page, she finally reached the advertisements, and her eye fell upon that of Mrs. Hallam.

“Oh, father, Dorcas, I told you something would turn up, and there has! Listen!” and she read the advertisement aloud. “The very thing I most desired has come. I have always wanted to go to Europe, but never thought I could, on account of the expense, and here it is, all paid, and five hundred dollars besides. That will save the place. I did not wish the new moon for nothing. Something has turned up.”

“But, Bertha,” said the more practical Dorcas, “what reason have you to think you will get the situation? There are probably more than five hundred applicants for it,—one for each dollar.”

“I know I shall. I feel it as I have felt other things which have come to me. Theosophic presentiments I call them.”

Dorcas went on: “And if it does come, I don’t see how it will help the mortgage due in October. You will not get your pay in advance, and possibly not until the end of the year.”

“I shall borrow the money and give my note,” Bertha answered, promptly. “Anybody will trust me. Swartz & Co. will, anyway, knowing that I shall come back and work it out if Mrs. Hallam fails me. By the way, that is the name of the people who lived here years ago. Perhaps Mrs. Carter belongs to the family. Do you know where they are, father?”

Mr. Leighton said he did not. He thought, however, they were all dead, while Dorcas asked, “If you are willing to borrow money of Swartz & Co., why don’t you try Cousin Louie, and pay her in installments?”

“Cousin Louie!” Bertha repeated. “That would be borrowing of her proud husband, Fred Thurston, who, since I have been a bread-winner, never sees me in the street if he can help it. I’d take in washing before I’d ask a favor of him. My heart is set upon Europe, if Mrs. Hallam will have me, and you do not oppose me too strongly.”

“But I must oppose you,” her father said; and then followed a long and earnest discussion between Mr. Leighton, Dorcas, and Bertha, the result of which was that Bertha was to wait a few days and consider the matter before writing to Mrs. Hallam.

That night, however, after her father had retired, she dashed off a rough draught of what she meant to say and submitted it to Dorcas for approval. It was as follows:

“Mrs. Hallam:

“Madam,—I have seen your advertisement for a companion, and shall be glad of the situation. My name is Bertha Leighton. I am twenty-two years old, and was graduated at the Charlestown Seminary three years ago. I am called a good reader, and ought to be a good accountant, as for two years I have been book-keeper in the firm of Swartz & Co., Boston. I am not very handy with my needle, for want of practice, but can soon learn. While in school I took lessons in French of a native teacher, who complimented my pronunciation and quickness to comprehend. Consequently I think I shall find no difficulty in understanding the language after a little and making myself understood. I enclose my photograph, which flatters me somewhat. My address is

“Bertha Leighton,

“No. — Derring St., Boston, Mass.”

“I think it covers the whole business,” Bertha said to Dorcas, who objected to one point. “The photograph does not flatter you,” she said, while Bertha insisted that it did, as it represented a much more stylish-looking young woman than Mrs. Carter Hallam’s companion ought to be. “I wonder what sort of woman she is? I somehow fancy she is a snob,” she said; “but, snob me all she pleases, she cannot keep me from seeing Europe, and I don’t believe she will try to cheat me out of my wages.”

CHAPTER III.
MRS. HALLAM’S APPLICANTS.

Several days after Mrs. Hallam’s advertisement appeared in the papers, Reginald, who had been away on business, returned, and found his aunt in her room struggling frantically with piles of letters and photographs and with a very worried and excited look on her face.

“Oh, Rex,” she cried, as he came in, “I am so glad you have come, for I am nearly wild. Only think! Seventy applicants, and as many photographs! What possessed them to send their pictures?”

Rex kept his own counsel, but gave a low whistle as he glanced at the pile which filled the table.

“Got enough for an album, haven’t you? How do they look as a whole?” he asked.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. Such a time as I have had reading their letters, and such recommendations as most of them give of themselves, telling me what reverses of fortune they have suffered, what church they belong to, and how long they have taught in Sunday-school, and all that, as if I cared. But I have decided which to choose; her letter came this morning, with one other,—the last of the lot, I trust. I like her because she writes so plainly and sensibly and seems so truthful. She says she is not a good seamstress and that her picture flatters her, while most of the others say their pictures are not good. Then she is so respectful and simply addresses me as ‘Madam,’ while all the others dear me. If there is anything I like, it is respect in a servant.”

“Thunder, auntie! You don’t call your companion a servant, do you?” Rex exclaimed, but his aunt only replied by passing him Bertha’s letter. “She writes well. How does she look?” he asked.

“Here she is.” And his aunt gave him the photograph of a short, sleepy-looking girl, with little or no expression in her face or eyes, and an unmistakable second-class air generally.

“Oh, horrors!” Rex exclaimed. “This girl never wrote that letter. Why, she simpers and squints and is positively ugly. There must be some mistake, and you have mixed things dreadfully.”

“No, I haven’t,” Mrs. Hallam persisted. “I was very careful to keep the photographs and letters together as they came. This is Bertha Leighton’s, sure, and she says it flatters her.”

“What must the original be!” Rex groaned.

His aunt continued, “I’d rather she’d be plain than good-looking. I don’t want her attracting attention and looking in the glass half the time. Mrs. Haynes always said, ‘Get plain girls by all means, in preference to pretty ones with airs and hangers-on.’”

“All right, if Mrs. Haynes says so,” Rex answered, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he put down the photograph of the girl he called Squint-Eye, and began carelessly to look at the others.

“Oh-h!” he said, catching up Bertha’s picture. “This is something like it. By Jove, she’s a stunner. Why don’t you take her? What splendid eyes she has, and how she carries herself!”

“Read her letter,” his aunt said, handing him a note in which, among other things, the writer, who gave her name as Rose Arabella Jefferson, and claimed relationship with Thomas Jefferson, Joe Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, said she was a member in good standing of the First Baptist Church, and spelled Baptist with two b’s. There were also other mistakes in orthography, besides some in grammar, and Rex dropped it in disgust, but held fast to the photograph, whose piquant face, bright, laughing eyes, and graceful poise of head and shoulders attracted him greatly.

“Rose Arabella Jefferson,” he began, “blood relation of Joe Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson Davis, and member in good standing in the First Baptist Church, spelled with a b in the middle, you never wrote that letter, I know; and if you did, your blue blood ought to atone for a few lapses in grammar and spelling. I am sure Mrs. Walker Haynes would think so. Take her, auntie, and run the risk. She is from the country, where you said your companion must hail from, while Squint-Eye is from Boston, with no ancestry, no religion, and probably the embodiment of clubs and societies and leagues and women’s rights and Christian Science and the Lord knows what. Take Rose Arabella.”

But Mrs. Hallam was firm. Rose Arabella was quite too good-looking, and Boston was country compared with New York. “Squint-Eye” was her choice, provided her employers spoke well of her; and she asked Rex to write to Boston and make inquiries of Swartz & Co., concerning Miss Leighton.

“Not if I know myself,” Rex answered. “I will do everything reasonable, but I draw the line on turning detective and prying into any girl’s character.

He was firm on this point, and Mrs. Hallam wrote herself to Swartz & Co., and then proceeded to tear up and burn the numerous letters and photographs filling her table. Rose Arabella Jefferson, however, was not among them, for she, with other pretty girls, some personal friends and some strangers, was adorning Rex’s looking-glass, where it was greatly admired by the housemaid as Mr. Reginald’s latest fancy.

A few days later Mrs. Hallam said to Rex, “I have heard from Swartz & Co., and they speak in the highest terms of Miss Leighton. I wish you would write for me and tell her I have decided to take her, and that she is to come to me on Friday, June —, as the Teutonic sails the next morning.”

Reginald did as he was requested, thinking the while how much he would rather be writing to Rose Arabella, Babtist and all, than to Bertha Leighton. But there was no help for it; Bertha was his aunt’s choice, and was to be her companion instead of his, he reflected, as he directed the letter, which he posted on his way down town. The next day he started for the West on business for the law firm, promising his aunt that if possible he would return in time to see her off; “and then,” he added, “I am going to Leicester to look after my fancy farm.”

CHAPTER IV.
MRS. FRED THURSTON.

Bertha waited anxiously for an answer to her letter; when it did not come she grew very nervous and restless, and began to lose faith in the new moon and her theosophical presentiments, as she called her convictions of what was coming to pass. A feeling of dread began also to haunt her lest, after all, the man with the bald head, who called her Berthy, might be the only alternative to save the homestead from the auctioneer’s hammer. But the letter came at last and changed her whole future. There was an interview with her employers, who, having received Mrs. Hallam’s letter of inquiry, were not surprised. Although sorry to part with her, they readily agreed to advance whatever money should be needed in October, without other security than her note, which she was to leave with her father.

There was another interview with Mr. Sinclair, who at its close had a very sorry look on his face and a suspicion of suppressed tears in his voice as he said, “It is hard to give you up, and I could have made you so happy, and your father, too. Good-bye, and God bless you. Mrs. Thurston will be disappointed. Her heart was quite set upon having you for a neighbor, as you would be if you were my wife. Good-bye.”

The Mrs. Thurston alluded to was Bertha’s cousin Louie, from the South, who, four years before had spent part of a summer at the Homestead. She had then gone to Newport, where she captured Fred Thurston, a Boston millionaire, who made love to her hotly for one month, married her the next, swore at her the next, and in a quiet but decided manner had tyrannized over and bullied her ever since. But he gave her all the money she wanted, and, as that was the principal thing for which she married him, she bore her lot bravely, became in time a butterfly of fashion, and laughed and danced and dressed, and went to lunches and teas and receptions and dinners and balls, taking stimulants to keep her up before she went, and bromide, or chloral, or sulfonal, to make her sleep when she came home. But all this told upon her at last, and after four years of it she began to droop, with a consciousness that something was sapping her strength and stealing all her vitality. “Nervous prostration,” the physician called it, recommending a change of air and scene, and, as a trip to Europe had long been contemplated by Mr. Thurston, he had finally decided upon a summer in Switzerland, and was to sail some time in July. Mrs. Thurston was very fond of her relatives at the Homestead, and especially of Bertha, who when she was first married was a pupil in Charlestown Seminary and spent nearly every Sunday with her. After a while, however, and for no reason whatever except that on one or two occasions he had shown his frightful temper before her, Mr. Thurston conceived a dislike for Bertha and forbade Louie’s inviting her so often to his house, saying he did not marry her poor relations. This put an end to any close intimacy between the cousins, and although Bertha called occasionally she seldom met Louie’s husband, who, after she entered the employment of Swartz & Co., rarely recognized her in the street. Bread-winners were far beneath his notice, and Bertha was a sore point between him and his wife, who loved her cousin with the devotion of a sister and often wrote, begging her to come, if only for an hour.

But Bertha was too proud to trespass where the master did not want her, and it was many weeks since they had met. She must go now and say good-bye. And after Mr. Sinclair left her she walked along Commonwealth Avenue to her cousin’s elegant house, which stood side by side with one equally handsome, of which she had just refused to be mistress. But she scarcely glanced at it, or, if she did, it was with no feeling of regret as she ran up the steps and rang the bell.

Mrs. Thurston was at home and alone, the servant said, and Bertha, who went up unannounced, found her in her pleasant morning room, lying on a couch in the midst of a pile of cushions, with a very tired look upon her lovely face.

“Oh, Bertha,” she exclaimed, springing up with outstretched hands, as her cousin came in, “I am so glad to see you! Where have you kept yourself so long? And when are you coming to be my neighbor? I saw Mr. Sinclair last week, and he still had hopes.”

Bertha replied by telling what the reader already, knows, and adding that she had come to say good-bye, as she was to sail in two weeks.

“Oh, how could you refuse him, and he so kind and good, and so fond of you?” Louie said.

Bertha, between whom and her cousin there were no domestic secrets, replied:

“Because I do not love him, and never can, good and kind as I know him to be. With your experience, would you advise me to marry for money?”

Instantly a shadow came over Louie’s face, and she hesitated a little before she answered:

“Yes, and no; all depends upon the man, and whether you loved some one else. If you knew he would swear at you, and call you names, and storm before the servants, and throw things,—not at you, perhaps, but at the side of the house,—I should say no, decidedly; but if he were kind, and good, and generous, like Charlie Sinclair, I should say yes. I did so want you for my neighbor. Can’t you reconsider? Who is Mrs. Hallam, I wonder? I know some Hallams, or a Hallam,—Reginald. He lives in New York, and it seems to me his aunt’s name is Mrs. Carter Hallam. Let me tell you about him. I feel like talking of the old life in Florida, which seems so long ago.”

She was reclining again among the cushions, with one arm under her head, a far-away look in her eyes, and a tone in her voice as if she were talking to herself rather than to Bertha.

“You know my father lived in Florida,” she began, “not far from Tallahassee, and your mother lived over the line in Georgia. Our place was called Magnolia Grove, and there were oleanders and yellow jasmine and Cherokee roses everywhere. This morning when I was so tired and felt that life was not worth the living, I fancied I was in my old home again, and I smelled the orange blossoms and saw the magnolias which bordered the avenue to our house, fifty or more, in full bloom, and Rex and I were playing under them. His uncle’s plantation joined ours, and when his mother died in Boston he came to live with her brother at Grassy Spring. He was twelve and I was nine, and I had never played with any boy before except the negroes, and we were so fond of each other. He called me his little sweetheart, and said he was going to marry me when he was older. When he was fourteen, his uncle on his father’s side, a Mr. Hallam, from New York, sent for him, and he went away, promising to come back again when he was a man. We wrote to each other a few times, just boy and girl letters, you know. He called me Dear Louie and I called him Dear Rex, and then, I hardly know why, that chapter of my life closed, never to be reopened. Grandfather, who owned Magnolia Grove, lost nearly everything during the war, so that father, who took the place after him, was comparatively poor, and when he died we were poorer still, mother and I, and had to sell the plantation and move to Tallahassee, where we kept boarders,—people from the North, mostly, who came there for the winter. I was sixteen then, and I tried to help mother all I could. I dusted the rooms, and washed the glass and china, and did a lot of things I never thought I’d have to do. When I was eighteen Rex Hallam came to Jacksonville and ran over to see us. If he had been handsome as a boy of fourteen, he was still handsomer as a man of twenty-one, with what in a woman would be called a sweet graciousness of manner which won all hearts to him; but as he is a man I will drop the sweet and say that he was kind alike to everybody, old and young, rich and poor, and had the peculiar gift of making every woman think she was especially pleasing to him, whether she were married or single, pretty or otherwise. He stopped with us a week, and because I was so proud and rebellious against our changed circumstances, and so ashamed to have him find me dusting and washing dishes, I was cold and stiff towards him, and our old relations were not altogether resumed, although he was very kind. Sometimes for fun he helped me dust, and once he wiped the dishes for me and broke a china teapot, and then he went away and I never saw him again till last summer, when I met him at Saratoga. Fred, who was with him in college, introduced us to each other, supposing we were strangers. You ought to have seen the look of surprise on Rex’s face when Fred said, ‘This is my wife.’

“Why, Louie,” he exclaimed, “I don’t need an introduction to you,” then to my husband, “We are old friends, Louie and I;” and we told him of our early acquaintance.

“For a wonder, Fred did not seem a bit jealous of him, although savage if another man looked at me. Nor had he any cause, for Rex’s manner was just like a brother’s, but oh, such a brother! And I was so happy the two weeks he was there. We drove and rode and danced and talked together, and never but once did he refer to the past. Then, in his deep, musical voice, the most musical I ever heard in a man, he said, ‘I thought you were going to wait for me,’ and I answered, ‘I did wait, and you never came.’

“That was all; but the night before he went away he was in our room and asked for my photograph, which was lying upon the table. He had quite a collection, he said, and would like to add mine to it, and I gave it to him. Fred knew it and was willing, but since then, when he is in one of his moods, he taunts me with it, and says he knew I was in love with Rex all the time,—that he saw it in my face, and that Rex saw it, too, and despised me for it while pretending to admire me, and because he knew Rex despised me and he could trust him, he allowed me full liberty just to see how far I would go and not compromise myself. I do not believe it of Rex: he never despised any woman; but it is hard to hear such things, and sometimes when Fred is worse than usual and I have borne all I can bear, I go away and cry, with an intense longing for something different, which might perhaps have come to me if I had waited, and I hear Rex’s boyish voice just as it sounded under the magnolias in Florida, where we played together and pelted each other with the white petals strewing the ground.

“I am not false to Fred in telling this to you, who know about my domestic life, which, after all, has some sunshine in it. Fred is not always cross. Every one has a good and a bad side, a Jekyll and Hyde, you know, and if Fred has more Hyde than Jekyll, it is not his fault, perhaps. I try him in many ways. He says I am a fool, and that I only care for his money, and if he gives me all I want I ought to be satisfied. Just now he is very good,—so good, in fact, that I wonder if he isn’t going to die. I believe he thinks I am, I am so weak and tired. I have not told you, have I, that we, too, are going to Europe before long? Switzerland is our objective point, but if I can I will persuade Fred to go to Aix, where you will be. That will be jolly. I wonder if your Mrs. Hallam can be Rex’s aunt.”

“Did you ever see her?” Bertha asked, and Louie replied:

“Only in the distance. She was in Saratoga with him, but at another hotel. I heard she was a very swell woman with piles of money, and that when young she had made shoes and worked in a factory, or something.”

“How shocking!” Bertha said, laughingly, and Louie rejoined:

“Don’t be sarcastic. You know I don’t care what she used to do. Why should I, when I have dusted and washed dishes myself, and waited on a lot of Northern boarders, with my proud Southern blood in hot rebellion against it? If Mrs. Hallam made shoes or cloth, what does it matter, so long as she is rich now and in the best society? She is no blood relation to Rex, who is a gentleman by birth and nature both. I hope Mrs. Carter is his aunt, for then you will see him; and if you do, tell him I am your cousin, but not how wretched I am. He saw a little in Saratoga, but not much, for Fred was very guarded. Hark! I believe I hear him coming.”

There was a bright flush on her cheeks as she started up and began to smooth the folds of her dress and to arrange her hair.

“Fred does not like to see me tumbled,” she said, just as the portière was drawn aside and her husband entered the room.

He was a tall and rather fine-looking man of thirty, with large, fierce black eyes and an expression on his face and about his mouth indicative of an indomitable will and a temper hard to meet. He had come in, he said, to take Louie for a drive, as the day was fine and the air would do her good; and he was so gracious to Bertha that she felt sure the Jekyll mood was in the ascendant. He asked her if she was still with Swartz & Co., and listened with some interest while Louie told him of her engagement with Mrs. Carter Hallam, and when she asked if that lady was Rex’s aunt, he replied that she was, adding that Rex’s uncle had adopted him as a son and had left a large fortune.

Then, turning to Bertha, he said, “I congratulate you on your prospective acquaintance with Rex Hallam. He is very susceptible to female charms, and quite indiscriminate in his attentions. Every woman, old or young, is apt to think he is in love with her.”

He spoke sarcastically, with a meaning look at his wife, whose face was scarlet. Bertha was angry, and, with a proud inclination of her head, said to him:

“It is not likely that I shall see much of Mr. Reginald Hallam. Why should I, when I am only his aunt’s hired companion, and have few charms to attract him?”

“I am not so sure of that,” Fred said, struck as he had never been before with Bertha’s beauty, as she stood confronting him.

She was a magnificent-looking girl, who, given a chance, would throw Louie quite in the shade, he thought, and under the fascination of her beauty he became more gracious than ever, and asked her to drive with them and return to lunch.

“Oh, do,” Louie said. “It is ages since you were here.”

But Bertha declined, as she had shopping to do, and in the afternoon was going home to stay until it was time to report herself to Mrs. Hallam. Then, bidding them good-bye, she left the house and went rapidly down the avenue.

CHAPTER V.
THE COMPANION.

Bertha kept up very bravely when she said good-bye to her father and Dorcas and started alone for New York; but there was a horrid sense of loneliness and homesickness in her heart when at about six in the afternoon she rang the bell of No. — Fifth Avenue, looking in her sailor hat and tailor-made gown and Eton jacket of dark blue serge more like the daughter of the house than like a hired companion. Peters, the colored man who opened the door, mistook her for an acquaintance, and was very deferential in his manner, while he waited for her card. By mistake her cards were in her trunk, and she said to him, “Tell Mrs. Hallam that Miss Leighton is here. She is expecting me.”

Mrs. Hallam’s servants usually managed to know the most of their mistress’s business, for, although she professed to keep them at a distance, she was at times quite confidential, and they all knew that a Miss Leighton was to accompany her abroad as a companion. So when Peters heard the name he changed his intention to usher her into the reception-room, and, seating her in the hall, went for a maid, who took her to a room on the fourth floor back and told her that Mrs. Hallam had just gone in to dinner with some friends and would not be at liberty to see her for two or three hours.

“But she is expecting you,” she said, “and has given orders that you can have your dinner served here, or if you choose, you can dine with Mrs. Flagg, the housekeeper, in her room in the front basement. I should go there, if I were you. You’ll find it pleasanter and cooler than up here under the roof.”

Bertha preferred the housekeeper’s room, to which she was taken by the maid. Mrs. Flagg was a kind-hearted, friendly woman, who, with the quick instincts of her class, recognized Bertha as a lady and treated her accordingly. She had lived with the Hallams many years, and, with a natural pride in the family, talked a good deal of her mistress’s wealth and position, but more of Mr. Reginald, who had a pleasant word for everybody, high or low, rich or poor.

“Mrs. Hallam is not exactly that way,” she said, “and sometimes snubs folks beneath her; but I’ve heard Mr. Reginald tell her that civil words don’t cost anything, and the higher up you are and the surer of yourself the better you can afford to be polite to every one; that a gold piece is none the less gold because there is a lot of copper pennies in the purse with it, nor a real lady any the less a lady because she is kind of chummy with her inferiors. He’s great on comparisons.”

As Bertha made no comment, she continued, “He’s Mrs. Hallam’s nephew, or rather her husband’s, but the same as her son;” adding that she was sorry he was not at home, as she’d like Miss Leighton to see him.

When dinner was over she offered to take Bertha back to her room, and as they passed an open door on the third floor she stopped a moment and said, “This is Mr. Reginald’s room. Would you like to go in?”

Bertha did not care particularly about it, but as Mrs. Flagg stepped inside, she followed her. Just then some one from the hall called to Mrs. Flagg, and, excusing herself for a moment, she went out, leaving Bertha alone. It was a luxuriously furnished apartment, with signs of masculine ownership everywhere, but what attracted Bertha most was a large mirror which, in a Florentine frame, covered the entire chimney above the mantel and was ornamented with photographs on all its four sides. There were photographs of personal friends and prominent artists, authors, actors, opera-singers, and ballet-dancers, with a few of horses and dogs, divided into groups, with a blank space between. Bertha had no difficulty in deciding which were his friends, for there confronting her, with her sunny smile and laughing blue eyes, was Louie’s picture given to him at Saratoga, and placed by the side of a sweet-faced, refined-looking woman wearing a rather old-style dress, who, Bertha fancied, might be his mother.

“How lovely Louie is,” she thought, “and what a different life hers would have been had her friendship for Reginald Hallam ripened into love, as it ought to have done!” Then, casting her eyes upon another group, she started violently as she saw herself tucked in between a rope-walker and a ballet-dancer. “What does it mean? and how did my picture get here?” she exclaimed, taking it from the frame and wondering still more when she read upon it, “Rose Arabella Jefferson, Scotsburg.”

“Rose Arabella Jefferson!” she repeated. “Who is she? and how came her name on my picture? and how came my picture in Rex Hallam’s possession?” Then, remembering that she had sent it by request to Mrs. Hallam, she guessed how Rex came by it, and felt a little thrill of pride that he had liked it well enough to give it a place in his collection, even if it were in company with ballet-girls. “But it shall not stay there,” she thought. “I’ll put it next to Louie’s, and let him wonder who changed it, if he ever notices the change.”

Mrs. Flagg was coming, and, hastily putting the photograph between Louie’s and that of a woman who she afterwards found was Mrs. Carter Hallam, she went out to meet the housekeeper, whom she followed to her room.

“You will not be afraid, as the servants all sleep up here. We have six besides the coachman,” Mrs. Flagg said as she bade her good-night.

“Six servants besides the coachman and housekeeper! I make the ninth, for I dare say I am little more than that in my lady’s estimation,” Bertha thought, as she sat alone, watching the minute-hand of the clock creeping slowly round, and wondering when the grand dinner would be over and Mrs. Hallam ready to receive her. Then, lest the lump in her throat should get the mastery, she began to walk up and down her rather small quarters, to look out of the window upon the roofs of the houses, and to count the chimneys and spires in the distance.

It was very different from the lookout at home, with its long stretch of wooded hills, its green fields and meadows and grassy lane. Once her tears were threatening every moment to start, when a maid appeared and said her mistress was at liberty to see her. With a beating heart and heightened color, Bertha followed her to the boudoir, where, in amber satin and diamonds Mrs. Hallam was waiting, herself somewhat flurried and nervous and doubtful how to conduct herself during the interview. She was always a little uncertain how to maintain a dignity worthy of Mrs. Carter Hallam under all circumstances, for, although she had been in society so long and had seen herself quoted and her dinners and receptions described so often, she was not yet quite sure of herself, nor had she learned the truth of Rex’s theory that gold was not the less gold because in the same purse with pennies. She had never forgotten the shoe-shop and the barefoot girl picking berries, with all the other humble surroundings of her childhood, and because she had not she felt it incumbent upon her to try to prove that she was and always had been what she seemed to be, a leader of fashion, with millions at her command. To compass this she assumed an air of haughty superiority towards those whom she thought her inferiors. She had never hired a companion, and in the absence of her mentor, Mrs. Walker Haynes, she did not know exactly how to treat one. Had she asked Rex, he would have said, “Treat her as you would any other young lady.” But Rex held some very ultra views, and was not to be trusted implicitly. Fortunately, however, a guest at dinner had helped her greatly by recounting her own experience with a companion who was always getting out of her place, and who finally ran off with a French count at Trouville, where they were spending the summer.

“I began wrong,” the lady said. “I was too familiar at first, and made too much of her because she was educated and superior to her class.”

Acting upon this intimation, Mrs. Hallam decided to commence right. Remembering the picture which Rex called Squint-Eye, she had no fear that the original would ever run off with a French count, but she might have to be put down, and she would begin by sitting down to receive her. “Standing will make her too much my equal,” she thought, and, adjusting the folds of her satin gown and assuming an expression which she meant to be very cold and distant, she glanced up carelessly, but still a little nervously, as she heard the sound of footsteps and knew there was some one at the door. She was expecting a very ordinary-looking person, with wide mouth, half-closed eyes, and light hair, and when she saw a tall, graceful girl, with dark hair and eyes, brilliant color, and an air decidedly patrician, as Mrs. Walker Haynes would say, she was startled out of her dignity, and involuntarily rose to her feet and half extended her hand. Then, remembering herself, she dropped it, and said, stammeringly, “Oh, are you Miss Leighton?”

“Yes, madam. You were expecting me, were you not?” Bertha answered, her voice clear and steady, with no sound of timidity or awe in it.

“Why, yes; that is—sit down, please. There is some mistake,” Mrs. Hallam faltered. “You are not like your photograph, or the one I took for you. They must have gotten mixed, as Rex said they did. He insisted that your letter did not belong to what I said was your photograph and which he called Squint-Eye.”

Here it occurred to Mrs. Hallam that she was not commencing right at all,—that she was quite too communicative to a girl who looked fully equal to running off with a duke, if she chose, and who must be kept down. But she explained about the letters and the photographs until Bertha had a tolerably correct idea of the mistake and laughed heartily over it. It was a very merry, musical laugh, in which Mrs. Hallam joined for a moment. Then, resuming her haughty manner, she plied Bertha with questions, saying to her first, “Your home is in Boston, I believe?”

“Oh, no,” Bertha replied. “My home is in Leicester, where I was born.”

“In Leicester!” Mrs. Hallam replied, her voice indicative of surprise and disapprobation. “You wrote me from Boston. Why did you do that?”

Bertha explained why, and Mrs. Hallam asked next if she lived in the village or the country.

“In the country, on a farm,” Bertha answered, wondering at Mrs. Hallam’s evident annoyance at finding that she came from Leicester instead of Boston.

It had not before occurred to her to connect the Homestead with Mrs. Carter Hallam, but it came to her now, and at a venture she said, “Our place is called the Hallam Homestead, named for a family who lived there many years ago.”

She was looking curiously at Mrs. Hallam, whose face was crimson at first and then grew pale, but who for a moment made no reply. Here was a complication,—Leicester, and perhaps the old life, brought home to her by the original of the picture so much admired by Rex, who had it in mind to buy the old Homestead, and was sure to admire the girl when he saw her, as he would, for he was coming to Aix-les-Bains some time during the summer. If Mrs. Hallam could have found an excuse for it, she would have dismissed Bertha at once. But there was none. She was there, and she must keep her, and perhaps it might be well to be frank with her to a certain extent. So she said at last, “My husband’s family once lived in Leicester,—presumably on your father’s farm. That was years ago, before I was married. My nephew, Mr. Reginald” (she laid much stress on the Mr., as if to impress Bertha with the distance there was between them), “has, I believe, some quixotic notion about buying the old place. Is it for sale?”

The fire which flashed into Bertha’s eyes and the hot color which stained her cheeks startled Mrs. Hallam, who was not prepared for Bertha’s excitement as she replied, “For sale! Never! There is a mortgage of long standing on it, but it will be paid in the fall. I am going with you to earn the money to pay it. Nothing else would take me from father and Dorcas so long. We heard there was a New York man wishing to buy it, but he may as well think of buying the Coliseum as our home. Tell him so, please, for me. Hallam Homestead is not for sale.”

As she talked, Bertha grew each moment more earnest and excited and beautiful, with the tears shining in her eyes and the bright color on her cheeks. Mrs. Hallam was not a hard woman, nor a bad woman; she was simply calloused over with false ideas of caste and position, which prompted her to restrain her real nature whenever it asserted itself, as it was doing now. Something about Bertha fascinated and interested her, bringing back the long ago, with the odor of the pines, the perfume of the pond-lilies, and the early days of her married life. But this feeling soon passed. Habit is everything, and she had been the fashionable Mrs. Carter Hallam so long that it would take more than a memory of the past to change her. She must maintain her dignity, and not give way to sentiment, and she was soon herself, cold and distant, with her chin in the air, where she usually carried it when talking to those whom she wished to impress with her superiority.

For some time longer she talked to Bertha, and learned as much of her history as Bertha chose to tell. Her mother was born in Georgia, she said; her father in Boston. He was a Yale graduate, and fonder of books than of farming. They were poor, keeping no servants; Dorcas, her only sister, kept the house, while she did what she could to help pay expenses and lessen the mortgage on the farm. All this Bertha told readily enough, with no thought of shame for her poverty. She saw that Mrs. Hallam was impressed with the Southern mother and scholarly father, and once she thought to speak of her cousin, Mrs. Louie, but did not, and here she possibly made a mistake, for Mrs. Hallam had a great respect for family connections, as that was what she lacked. She had heard of Mrs. Fred Thurston, as had every frequenter of Saratoga and Newport, and once at the former place she had seen her driving in her husband’s stylish turnout with Reginald at her side. He was very attentive to the beauty whom he had known at the South, and Mrs. Hallam had once or twice intimated to him that she, too, would like to meet her, but he had not acted upon the hint, and she had left Saratoga without accomplishing her object. Had Bertha told of the relationship between herself and Louie, it might have made some difference in her relations with her employer. But she did not, and after a little further catechising Mrs. Hallam dismissed her, saying, “As the ship sails at nine, it will be necessary to rise very early; so I will bid you good-night.”

The next morning Bertha breakfasted with Mrs. Flagg, who told her that, as a friend was to accompany Mrs. Hallam in her coupé to the ship, she was to go in a street-car, with a maid to show her the way.

“Evidently I am a hired servant and nothing more,” Bertha thought; “but I can endure even that for the sake of Europe and five hundred dollars.” And, bidding good-bye to Mrs. Flagg, she was soon on her way to the Teutonic.

CHAPTER VI.
ON THE TEUTONIC.

Bertha found Mrs. Hallam in her state-room, which was one of the largest and most expensive on the ship. With her were three or four ladies who were there to say good-bye, all talking together and offering advice in case of sickness, while Mrs. Hallam fanned herself vigorously, as the morning was very hot.

“Are you not taking a maid?” one of the ladies asked, and Mrs. Hallam replied that Mrs. Haynes advised her to get one in Paris, adding, “I have a young girl as companion, and I’m sure I don’t know where she is. She ought to be here by this time. I dare say she will be more trouble than good. She seems quite the fine lady. I hardly know what I am to do with her.”

“Keep her in her place,” was the prompt advice of a little, common-looking woman, who was once a nursery governess, but was now a millionaire, and perfectly competent to advise as to the proper treatment of a companion.

Just then Bertha appeared, and was stared at by the ladies, who took no further notice of her.

“I am glad you’ve got here at last. What kept you so long?” Mrs. Hallam asked, a little petulantly, while Bertha replied that she had been detained by a block in the street cars, and asked if there was anything she could do.

“Yes,” Mrs. Hallam answered. “I wish you would open my sea trunk and satchel, and get out my wrapper, and shawl, and cushion, and toilet articles, and salts, and camphor. I am sure to be sick the minute we get out to sea.” And handing her keys to Bertha, she went with her friends outside, where the crowd was increasing every moment.

The passenger-list was full, and every passenger had at least half a dozen acquaintances to see him off, so that by the time Bertha had arranged Mrs. Hallam’s belongings, and gone out on deck, there was hardly standing room. Finding a seat near the purser’s office, she sat down and watched the surging mass of human beings, jostling, pushing, crowding each other, the confusion reaching its climax when the order came for the ship to be cleared of all visitors. Then for a time they stood so thickly around her that she could see nothing and hear nothing but a confused babel of voices, until suddenly there was a break in the ranks, and a tall young man, who had been fighting his way to the plank, pitched headlong against her with such force that she fell from the seat, losing her hat in the fall, and striking her forehead on a sharp point near her.

“I beg your pardon; are you much hurt? I am so sorry, but I could not help it, they pushed me so in this infernal crowd. Let me help you up,” a pleasant, manly voice, full of concern, said to her, while two strong hands lifted her to her feet, and on to the seat where she had been sitting. “You are safe here, unless some other blunderhead knocks you down again,” the young man continued, as he managed to pick up her hat. “Some wretch has stepped on it, but I think I can doctor it into shape,” he said, giving it a twist or two, and then putting it very carefully on Bertha’s head hind side before. “There! It is all right, I think, though, upon my soul, it does seem a little askew,” he added, looking for the first time fully at Bertha, who was holding her hand to her forehead, where a big bump was beginning to show.

Her hand hid a portion of her face, but she smiled brightly and gratefully upon the stranger, whose manner was so friendly and whose brown eyes seen through his glasses looked so kindly at her.

“By Jove, you are hurt,” he continued, “and I did it. I can’t help you, as I’ve got to go, but my aunt is on board,—Mrs. Carter Hallam; find her, and tell her that her awkward nephew came near knocking your brains out. She has every kind of drug and lotion imaginable, from morphine to Pond’s extract, and is sure to find something for that bump. And now I must go or be carried off.”

He gave another twist to her hat and offered her his hand, and then ran down the plank to the wharf, where, with hundreds of others, he stood, waving his hat and cane to his friends on the ship, which began to move slowly from the dock. He was so tall that Bertha could see him distinctly, and she stood watching him and him alone, until he was a speck in the distance. Then, with a feeling of loneliness, she started for her state-room, where Mrs. Hallam, who had preceded her, was looking rather cross and doing her best to be sick, although as yet there was scarcely any motion to the vessel.

Reginald, whose train was late, had hurried at once to the ship, which he reached in time to see his aunt for a few moments only. Her last friend had said good-bye, and she was feeling very forlorn, and wondering where Bertha could be, when he came rushing up, bringing so much life and sunshine and magnetism with him that Mrs. Hallam began to feel doubly forlorn as she wondered what she should do without him.

“Oh, Rex,” she said, laying her head on his arm and beginning to cry a little, “I am so glad you have come, and I wish you were going with me. I fear I have made a mistake starting off alone. I don’t know at all how to take care of myself.”

Rex smoothed her hair, patted her hand, soothed her as well as he could, and told her he was sure she would get on well enough and that he would certainly join her in August.

“Where is Miss Leighton? Hasn’t she put in an appearance?” he asked, and his aunt replied, with a little asperity of manner:

“Yes; she came last night, and she seems a high and mighty sort of damsel. I am disappointed, and afraid I shall have trouble with her.”

“Sit down on her if she gets too high and mighty,” Rex said, laughingly, while his aunt was debating the propriety of telling him of the mistake and who Bertha was.

“I don’t believe I will. He will find it out soon enough,” she thought, just as the last warning to leave the boat was given, and with a hurried good-bye Rex left her, saying, as he did so:

“I’ll look a bit among the crowd, and if I find your squint-eyed damsel I’ll send her to you. I shall know her in a minute.”

Here was a good chance to explain, but Mrs. Hallam let it pass, and Rex went his way, searching here and there for a light-haired, weak-eyed woman answering to her photograph.

But he did not find her, and ran instead against Bertha, with no suspicion that she was the girl he had told his aunt to sit on, and for whom that lady waited rather impatiently after the ship was cleared.

“Oh!” she said, as Bertha came in. “I have been waiting for you some time. Did you have friends to say good-bye to? Give me my salts, please, and camphor, and fan, and a pillow, and close that shutter. I don’t want the herd looking in upon me; nor do I think this room so very desirable, with all the people passing and repassing. I told Rex so, and he said nobody wanted to see me in my night-cap. He was here to say good-bye. His train got in just in time.”

Bertha closed the shutters and brought a pillow and fan and the camphor and salts, and then bathed the bruise on her forehead, which was increasing in size and finally attracted Mrs. Hallam’s attention.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, and Bertha replied, “I was knocked down in the crowd by a young man who told me he had an aunt, a Mrs. Hallam, on board. I suppose he must have been your nephew.”

“Did you tell him who you were?” Mrs. Hallam asked, with a shake of her head and disapproval in her voice.

“No, madam,” Bertha replied. “He was trying to apologize for what he had done, and spoke to me of you as one to whom I could go for help if I was badly hurt.”

“Yes, that is like Reginald,—thinking of everything,” Mrs. Hallam said. After a moment she added, “He has lived with me since he was a boy, and is the same as a son. He will join me in Aix-les-Bains in August. Miss Grace Haynes is there, and I don’t mind telling you, as you will probably see for yourself, that I think there is a sort of understanding between him and her. Nothing would please me better.”

“There! I have headed off any idea she might possibly have with regard to Rex, who is so democratic and was so struck with her photograph, while she,—well, there is something in her eyes and the lofty way she carries her head and shoulders that I don’t like; it looks too much like equality, and I am afraid I may have to sit on her, as Rex bade me do,” was Mrs. Hallam’s mental comment, as she adjusted herself upon her couch and issued her numerous orders.

For three days she stayed in her state-room, not because she was actually sea-sick, but because she feared she would be. To lie perfectly quiet in her berth until she was accustomed to the motion of the vessel was the advice given her by one of her friends, and as far as possible she followed it, while Bertha was kept in constant attendance, reading to her, brushing her hair, bathing her head, opening and shutting the windows, and taking messages to those of her acquaintances able to be on deck. The sea was rather rough for June, but Bertha was not at all affected by it, and the only inconvenience she suffered was want of sufficient exercise and fresh air. Early in the morning, while Mrs. Hallam slept, she was free to go on deck, and again late in the evening, after the lady had retired for the night. These walks, with going to her meals, were the only recreation or change she had, and she was beginning to droop a little, when at last Mrs. Hallam declared herself able to go upon deck, where, by the aid of means which seldom fail, she managed to gain possession of the sunniest and most sheltered spot, which she held in spite of the protestations of another party who claimed the place on the ground of first occupancy. She was Mrs. Carter Hallam, and she kept the field until a vacancy occurred in the vicinity of some people whom to know, if possible, was desirable. Then she moved, and had her reward in being told by one of the magnates that it was a fine day and the ship was making good time.

Every morning Bertha brought her rugs and wraps and cushions and umbrella, and after seeing her comfortably adjusted sat down at a respectful distance and waited for orders, which were far more frequent than was necessary. No one spoke to her, although many curious and admiring glances were cast at the bright, handsome girl who seemed quite as much a lady as her mistress, but who was performing the duties of a maid and was put down upon the passenger-list as Mrs. Hallam’s companion. As it chanced, there was a royal personage on board, and one day when standing near, Bertha, who was watching a steamer just appearing upon the horizon, he addressed some remark to her, and then, attracted by something in her face, or manner, or both, continued to talk with her, until Mrs. Hallam’s peremptory voice called out:

“Bertha, I want you, Don’t you see my rug is falling off?”

There was a questioning glance at the girl thus bidden and at the woman who bade her, and then, lifting his hat politely to the former, the stranger walked away, while Bertha went to Mrs. Hallam, who said to her sharply:

“I wonder at your presumption; but possibly you did not know to whom you were talking?”

“Oh, yes, I did,” Bertha replied. “It was the prince. He speaks English fluently, and I found him very agreeable.”

She was apparently as unconcerned as if it had been the habit of her life to consort with royalty, and Mrs. Hallam looked at her wonderingly, conscious in her narrow soul of an increased feeling of respect for the girl whom a prince had honored with his notice and who took it so coolly and naturally. But she did not abate her requirements or exactions in the least. On the contrary, it seemed as if she increased them. But Bertha bore it all patiently, performing every task imposed upon her as if it were a pleasure, and never giving any sign of fatigue, although in reality she was never so tired in her life as when at last they sailed up the Mersey and into the docks at Liverpool.

At Queenstown she sent off a letter to Dorcas, in which, after speaking of her arrival in New York and the voyage in general, she wrote, “I hardly know what to say of Mrs. Hallam until I have seen more of her. She is a great lady, and great ladies need a great deal of waiting upon, and the greater they are the greater their need. There must be something Shylocky in her nature, and, as she gives me a big salary, she means to have her pound of flesh. I am down on the passenger-list as her companion, but it should be maid, as I am really that. But when we reach Paris there will be a change, as she is to have a French maid there. It will surprise you, as it did me, to know that she belongs to the Hallams for whom the Homestead was named and who father thought were all dead. Her husband was born there. Where she came from I do not know. She is very reticent on that point. I shouldn’t be surprised if she once worked in a factory, she is so particular to have her position recognized. Such a scramble as she had to get to the captain’s table; though what good that does I cannot guess, inasmuch as he is seldom there himself. I am at Nobody’s table, and like it, because I am a nobody.

“Do you remember the letter father had, saying that some New Yorker wanted to buy our farm and was coming to look at it? That New Yorker is cousin Louie’s Reginald Hallam, of whom I told you, and Mrs. Carter’s nephew; not in the least like her, I fancy, although I have only had the pleasure of being knocked down by him on the ship. But he was not to blame. The crowd pushed him against me with such force that I fell off the seat and nearly broke my head. My hat was crushed out of all shape, and he made it worse trying to twist it back. He was kindness itself, and his brown eyes full of concern as they looked at me through the clearest pair of rimless glasses I ever saw. He did not know who I was, of course, but I am sure he would have been just as kind if he had. I can understand Louie’s infatuation for him, and why his aunt adores him.

“But what nonsense to be writing with Queenstown in sight, and this letter must be finished to send off. I am half ashamed of what I have said of Mrs. Hallam, who when she forgets what a grand lady she is, can be very nice, and I really think she likes me a little.

“And now I must close, with more love for you and father than can be carried in a hundred letters. Will write again from Paris. Good-bye, good-bye.

“Bertha.

“P. S. I told you that if a New Yorker came to buy the farm you were to shut the door in his face. But you may as well let him in.”

CHAPTER VII.
REGINALD AND PHINEAS JONES.

After bidding his aunt good-bye, Reginald went home for a few moments, and then to his office, where he met for the first time Mr. Gorham, the owner of the Leighton mortgage, and learned that the place was really where his father used to live and that the Homestead was named for the Hallams. This increased his desire to own it, and, as there was still time to catch the next train for Boston, he started for the depot and was soon on his way to Worcester, where he arrived about four in the afternoon. Wishing to make some inquiries as to the best means of reaching Leicester, he went to a hotel, where he found no one in the office besides the clerk except a tall, spare man, with long, light hair tinged with gray, and shrewdness and curiosity written all over his good-humored face. He wore a linen duster, with no collar, and only an apology for a handkerchief twisted around his neck. Tipping back in one chair, with his feet in another, he was taking frequent and most unsuccessful aims at a cuspidor about six feet from him.

“Good-afternoon,” he said, removing his feet from the chair for a moment, but soon putting them back, as he asked if Reginald had just come from the train, and whether from the East or the West. Then he told him it was an all-fired hot day, that it looked like thunder in the west, and he shouldn’t wonder if they got a heavy shower before night.

To all this Reginald assented, and then went to the desk to register, while the stranger, on pretense of looking at something in the street, also arose and sauntered to the door, managing to glance at the register and see the name just written there.

Resuming his seat and inviting Rex to take a chair near him, he began: “I b’lieve you’re from New York. I thought so the minute you came in. I have traveled from Dan to Beersheba, and been through the war,—was a corp’ral there,—and I generally spot you fellows when I first put my eye on you. I am Phineas Jones,—Phin for short. I hain’t any real profession, but am jack at all trades and good at none. Everybody knows me in these parts, and I know everybody.”

Rex, who began to be greatly amused with this queer specimen, bowed an acknowledgment of the honor of knowing Mr. Jones, who said, “Be you acquainted in Worcester?”

“Not at all. Was never here before,” was Rex’s reply, and Phineas continued: “Slow old place, some think, but I like it. Full of nice folks of all sorts, with clubs, and lodges, and societies, and no end of squabbles about temperance and city officers and all that. As for music,—my land, I’d smile to see any place hold a candle to us. Had all the crack singers here, even to the diver.”

Rex, who had listened rather indifferently to Phineas’s laudations of Worcester, now asked if he knew much of the adjoining towns,—Leicester, for instance.

“Wa-all, I’d smile,” Phineas replied, with a fierce assault upon the cuspidor. “Yes, I would smile if I didn’t know Leicester. Why, I was born there, and it’s always been my native town, except two or three years in Sturbridge, when I was a shaver, and the time I was to the war and travelin’ round. Pleasant town, but dull,—with no steam cars nigher than Rochdale or Worcester. Got stages and an electric car to Spencer;—run every half hour. Think of goin’ there?”

Rex said he did, and asked the best way of getting there.

“Wa-all, there’s four ways,—the stage, but that’s gone; hire a team and drive out,—that’s expensive; take the steam cars for Rochdale, or Jamesville, and then drive out,—that’s expensive, too; or take the electric, which is cheaper, and pleasanter, and quicker. Know anybody in Leicester?”

Rex said he didn’t, and asked if Phineas knew a place called Hallam Homestead.

“Wa-all, I’d smile if I didn’t,” Phineas replied. “Why, I’ve worked in hayin’-time six or seven summers for Square Leighton. He was ’lected justice of the peace twelve or fifteen years ago, and I call him Square yet, as a title seems to suit him, he’s so different-lookin’ from most farmers,—kind of high-toned, you know. Ort to have been an aristocrat. As to the Hallams, who used to own the place, I’ve heard of ’em ever since I was knee-high; I was acquainted with Carter; first-rate feller. By the way, your name is Hallam. Any kin?”

Rex explained his relationship to the Hallams, while the smile habitual to Phineas’s face, and which, with the expressions he used so often, had given him the sobriquet of Smiling Phin, broadened into a loud laugh of genuine delight and surprise, and, springing up, he grasped Rex’s hand, exclaiming: “This beats the Dutch! I’m glad to see you, I be. I thought you was all dead when Carter died. There’s a pile of you in the old Greenville graveyard. Why, you ’n’ I must be connected.”

Rex looked at him wonderingly, while he went on: “You see, Carter Hallam’s wife was Lucy Ann Brown, and her great-grandmother and my great-grandfather were half-brother and sister. Now, what relation be I to Lucy Ann, or to you?”

Rex confessed his inability to trace so remote a relationship on so hot a day, and Phineas rejoined:

“’Tain’t very near, that’s a fact, but we’re related, though I never thought Lucy Ann hankered much for my society. I used to call her cousin, which made her mad. She was a handsome girl when she clerked it here in Worcester and roped Carter in. A high stepper,—turned up her nose when I ast her for her company. That’s when she was bindin’ shoes, before she knew Carter. I don’t s’pose I could touch her now with a ten-foot pole, though I b’lieve I’ll call the fust time I’m in New York, if you’ll give me your number. Blood is blood. How is the old lady?”

Here was a chance for Rex to inquire into his aunt’s antecedents, of which he knew little, as she was very reticent with regard to her early life. He knew that she was an orphan and had no near relatives, and that she had once lived in Worcester, and that was all. The clerkship and the shoe-binding were news to him; he did not even know before that she was Lucy Ann, as she had long ago dropped the Ann as too plebeian; but, with the delicacy of a true gentleman, he would not ask a question of this man, who, he was sure, would tell all he knew and a great deal more, if urged.

“I wonder what Aunt Lucy would say to being visited and cousined by this Yankee, who calls her an old lady?” he thought, as he said that she was very well and had just sailed for Europe, adding that she was still handsome and very young-looking.

“You don’t say!” Phineas exclaimed, and began at once to calculate her age, basing his data on a spelling-school in Sturbridge when she was twelve years old and had spelled him down, a circus in Fiskdale which she had attended with him when she was fifteen, and the time when he had asked for her company in Worcester. Naturally, he made her several years older than she really was.

But she was not there to protest, and Rex did not care. He was more interested in his projected purchase than in his aunt’s age, and he asked if the Hallam farm were good or bad.

“Wa-all, ’taint neither,” Phineas replied. “You see, it’s pretty much run down for want of means and management. The Square ain’t no kind of a farmer, and never was, and he didn’t ort to be one, but his wife persuaded him. My land, how a woman can twist a man round her fingers, especially if she’s kittenish and pretty and soft-spoken, as the Square’s wife was. She was from Georgy, and nothin’ would do but she must live on a farm and have it fixed up as nigh like her father’s plantation as she could. She took down the big chimbleys and built some outside,—queer-lookin’ till the woodbine run up and covered ’em clear to the top, and now they’re pretty. She made a bath-room out of the but’try, and a but’try out of the meal-room. She couldn’t have niggers, nor, of course, nigger cabins, but she got him to build a lot of other out-houses, which cost a sight,—stables, and a dog-kennel.”

“Dog-kennels!” Rex interrupted, feeling more desirous than ever for a place with kennels already in it. “How large are they?”

“There ain’t but one,” Phineas said, “and that ain’t there now. It was turned into a pig-pen long ago, for the Square can’t abide dogs; but there’s a hen-house, and smoke-house, and ice-house, and house over the well, and flower-garden with box borders, and yard terraced down to the orchard, with brick walls and steps, and a dammed brook——”

“A what?” Reginald asked, in astonishment.

“Wa-all, I should smile if you thought I meant disrespect for the Bible; I didn’t. I’m a church member,—a Free Methodist and class-leader, and great on exhortin’ and experiencin’, they say. I don’t swear. You spelt the word wrong, with an n instead of two m’s, that’s what’s the matter. That’s the word your aunt Lucy Ann spelt me down on at the spellin’-school. We two stood up longest and were tryin’ for the medal. I was more used to the word with an n in it than I am now, and got beat. What I mean about the brook is that it runs acrost the road into the orchard, and Mis’ Leighton had it dammed up with boards and stones to make a waterfall, with a rustic bridge below it, and a butternut tree and a seat under it, where you can set and view nature. But bless your soul, such things don’t pay, and if Mis’ Leighton had lived she’d of ruined the Square teetotally, but she died, poor thing, and the Square’s hair turned white in six months.”

“What family has Mr. Leighton?” Rex asked, and Phineas replied:

“Two girls, that’s all; one handsome as blazes, like her mother, and the other—wa’all, she is nice-lookin’, with a motherly, venerable kind of face that everybody trusts. She stays to hum, Dorcas does, while——” Here he was interrupted by Rex, who, more interested just then in the farm than in the girls, asked if it was for sale.

“For sale?” Phineas replied. “I’d smile to see the Square sell his farm, though he owes a pile on it; borrows of Peter to pay Paul, you know, and so keeps a-goin’; but I don’t believe he’d sell for love nor money.”

“Not if he could get cash down and, say, a thousand more than it is worth?” Rex suggested.

Staggered by the thousand dollars, which seemed like a fortune to one who had never had more than a few hundred at a time in his life, Phineas gasped:

“One thousand extry! Wa-all, I swan, a thousand extry would tempt some men to sell their souls; but I don’t know about it fetchin’ the Square. Think of buyin’ it?”

Rex said he did.

“For yourself?”

“Yes, for myself.”

“You goin’ to turn farmer?” and Phineas looked him over from head to foot. “Wa-all, if that ain’t curi’s. I’d smile to see you, or one of your New York dudes, a-farmin’ it, with your high collars, your long coats and wide trouses and yaller shoes and canes and eye-glasses, and hands that never done a stroke of hard work in your lives. Yes, I would.”

Rex had never felt so small in his life as when Phineas was drawing a picture he recognized as tolerably correct of most of his class, and he half wished his collar was a trifle lower and his coat a little shorter, but he laughed good-humoredly and said, “I am afraid we do seem a useless lot to you, and I suppose we might wear older-fashioned clothes, but I can’t help the glasses. I couldn’t see across the street without them.”

“I want to know,” Phineas said. “Wa-all, they ain’t bad on you, they’re so clear and hain’t no rims to speak of. They make you look like a literary feller, or more like a minister. Be you a professor?”

Rex flushed a little at the close questioning, expecting to be asked next how much he was worth and where his money was invested, but he answered honestly, “I wish I could say yes, but I can’t.”

“What a pity! Come to one of our meetin’s, and we’ll convert you in no time. What persuasion be you?”

Reginald said he was an Episcopalian, and Phineas’s face fell. He hadn’t much faith in Episcopalians, thinking their service was mere form, with nothing in it which he could enjoy, except that he did not have to sit still long enough to get sleepy, and there were so many places where he could come in strong with an Amen, as he always did. This opinion, however, he did not express to Reginald. He merely said, “Wa-all, there’s good folks in every church. I do b’lieve the Square is pious, and he’s a ’Piscopal. Took it from his Georgy wife, who had a good many other fads. You have a good face, like all the Hallams, and I b’lieve they died in the faith. Says so, anyway, on their tombstones; but monuments lie as well as obituaries. But I ain’t a-goin’ to discuss religious tenants, though I’m fust-rate at it, they say. I want to know what you want of a farm?”

Rex told him that he had long wished for a place in the country, where he could spend a part of each year with a few congenial friends, hunting and fishing and boating, and from what he had heard of the Homestead, he thought it would just suit him, there were so many hills and woods and ponds around it.

“Are there pleasant drives?” he asked, and Phineas replied:

“Tip-top, the city folks think. Woods full of roads leading nowhere except to some old house a hundred years old or more, and the older they be the better the city folks like ’em. Why, they actu’lly go into the garrets and buy up old spinning-wheels and desks and chairs; and, my land, they’re crazy over tall clocks.”

Rex did not care much for the furniture of the old garrets unless it should happen to belong to the Hallams, and he asked next if there were foxes in the woods, and if he could get up a hunt with dogs and horses.

Phineas did not smile, but laughed long and loud, and deluged the cuspidor, before he replied:

“Wa-all, if I won’t give up! A fox-hunt, with hounds and horses, tearin’ through the folks’s fields and gardens! Why, you’d be mobbed. You’d be tarred and feathered. You’d be rid on a rail.”

“But,” Rex exclaimed, “I should keep on my own premises. A man has a right to do what he pleases with his own,” a remark which so affected Phineas that he doubled up with laughter, as he said:

“That’s so; but, bless your soul, the Homestead farm ain’t big enough for a hunt. It takes acres and acres for that, and if you had ’em the foxes wouldn’t stop to ask if it’s your premises or somebody else’s. They ain’t likely to take to the open if they can help it, but with the dogs to their heels and widder Brady’s garden right before ’em they’d make a run for it. Her farm jines the Homestead, and ’twould be good as a circus to see the hounds tearin’ up her sage and her gooseberries and her violets. She’d be out with brooms and mops and pokers; and, besides that, the Leicester women would be up in arms and say ’twas cruel for a lot of men to hunt a poor fox to death just for fun. They are great on Bergh, Leicester women are, and they might arrest you.”

Reginald saw his fox-hunts fading into air, and was about to ask what there was in the woods which he could hunt without fear of the widow Brady or the Bergh ladies of the town, when Phineas sprang up, exclaiming:

“Hullo! there’s the Square now. I saw him in town this mornin’ about some plasterin’ I ort to have done six weeks ago.”

And he darted from the door, while Rex, looking from the window, saw an old horse drawing an old buggy in which sat an old man, evidently intent upon avoiding a street-car rapidly approaching him, while Phineas was making frantic efforts to stop him. But a car from an opposite direction and a carriage blocked his way, and by the time these had passed the old man and buggy were too far up the street for him to be heard or to overtake them.

“I’m awful sorry,” he said, as he returned to the hotel. “He was alone, and you could of rid with him as well as not and saved your fare.”

Rex thanked him for his kind intentions, but said he did not mind the fare in the least and preferred the electric car. Then, as he wished to look about the city a little, he bade good-bye to Phineas, who accompanied him to the door, and said: “Mabby you’d better mention my name to the Square as a surety that you’re all right. He hain’t traveled as much as I have, nor seen as many swells like you, and he might take you for a confidence man.”

Rex promised to make use of his new friend if he found it necessary, and walked away, while Phineas looked after him admiringly, thinking, “That’s a fine chap; not a bit stuck up. Glad I’ve met him, for now I shall visit Lucy Ann when she comes home. He’s a little off, though, on his farm and his fox-hunts.”

Meanwhile, Reginald walked through several streets, and at last found himself in the vicinity of the electric car, which he took for Leicester. It was a pleasant ride, and he enjoyed it immensely, especially after they were out in the country and began to climb the long hill. At his request he was put down at the cross-road and the gabled house pointed out to him. Very eagerly he looked about him as he went slowly up the avenue or lane bordered with cherry-trees on one side, and on the other commanding an unobstructed view of the country for miles around, with its valleys and thickly wooded hills.

“This is charming,” he said, as he turned his attention next to the house and its surroundings.

How quiet and pleasant it looked, with its gables and picturesque chimneys under the shadow of the big apple-tree in the rear and the big elm in the front! He could see the out-buildings of which Phineas had told him,—the well-house, the hen-house, the smoke-house, the ice-house and stable,—and could hear the faint sound of the brook in the orchard falling over the dam into the basin below.

“I wish I had lived here when a boy, as my father and uncle did,” he thought, just as a few big drops of rain fell upon the grass, and he noticed for the first time how black it was overhead, and how threatening were the clouds rolling up so fast from the west.

It had been thundering at intervals ever since he left Worcester, and in the sultry air there was that stillness which portends the coming of a severe storm. But he had paid no attention to it, and now he did not hasten his steps until there came a deafening crash of thunder, followed instantaneously by a drenching downpour of rain, which seemed to come in sheets rather than in drops, and he knew that in a few minutes he would be wet through, as his coat was rather thin and he had no umbrella. He was still some little distance from the house, but by running swiftly he was soon under the shelter of the piazza, and knocking at the door, with a hope that it might be opened by the girl who Phineas had said “was handsome as blazes.”

CHAPTER VIII.
REX AT THE HOMESTEAD.

The day had been longer and lonelier to Dorcas than the previous one, for then she had gone with Bertha to the train in Worcester, and after saying good-bye, had done some shopping in town and made a few calls before returning home. She had then busied herself with clearing up Bertha’s room, which was not an altogether easy task. Bertha was never as orderly as her sister, and, in the confusion of packing, her room was in a worse condition than usual. But to clear it up was a labor of love, over which Dorcas lingered as long as possible. Then when all was done and she had closed the shutters and dropped the shades, she knelt by the white bed and amid a rain of tears prayed God to protect the dear sister on sea and land and bring her safely back to the home which was so desolate without her. That was yesterday; but to-day there had been comparatively nothing to do, for after an early breakfast her father had started for Boylston, hoping to collect a debt which had long been due and the payment of which would help towards the mortgage. After he had gone and her morning work was done, Dorcas sat down alone in the great, lonely house and began to cry, wondering what she should do to pass the long hours before her father’s return.

“I wish I had Bertha’s room to straighten up again,” she thought. “Any way I’ll go and look at it.” And, drying her eyes, she went up to the room, which seemed so dark and close and gloomy that she opened the windows and threw back the blinds, letting in the full sunlight and warm summer air. “She was fond of air and sunshine,” she said to herself, remembering the many times they had differed on that point, she insisting that so much sun faded the carpets, and Bertha insisting that she would have it, carpets or no carpets. Bertha was fond of flowers, too, and in their season kept the house full of them. This Dorcas also remembered, and, going to the garden, she gathered great clusters of roses and white lilies, which she arranged in two bouquets, putting one on the bureau and the other on the deep window-seat, where Bertha used to sit so often when at home, and where one of her favorite books was lying, with her work-basket and a bit of embroidery she had played at doing. The book and the basket Dorcas had left on the window-seat with something of the feeling which prompts us to keep the rooms of our dead as they left them. At the side of the bed and partly under it she had found a pair of half-worn slippers, which Bertha was in the habit of wearing at night while undressing, and these she had also left, they looked so much like Bertha, with their worn toes and high French heels. Now as she saw them she thought to put them away, but decided to leave them, as it was not likely any one would occupy the room in Bertha’s absence.

“There, it looks more cheerful now,” she said, surveying the apartment with its sunlight and flowers. Then, going down-stairs she whiled away the hours as best she could until it was time to prepare supper for her father, whose coming she watched for anxiously, hoping he would reach home before the storm which was fast gathering in the west and sending out flashes of lightning, with angry growls of thunder. “He will be hungry and tired, and I mean to give him his favorite dishes,” she thought, as she busied herself in the kitchen. With a view to make his home-coming as pleasant as possible, she laid the table with the best cloth and napkins and the gilt band china, used only on great occasions, and put on a plate for Bertha, and a bowl of roses in the centre, with one or two buds at each plate, “Now, that looks nice,” she thought, surveying her work, with a good deal of satisfaction, “and father will be pleased. I wish he would come. How black the sky is getting, and how angry the clouds look!” Then she thought of Bertha on the sea, and wondered if the storm would reach her, and was silently praying that it would not, when she saw old Bush and the buggy pass the windows, and in a few moments her father came in looking very pale and tired. He had had a long ride for nothing, as the man who owed him could not pay, but he brightened at once when he saw the attractive tea-table and divined why all the best things were out.

“You are a good girl, Dorcas, and I don’t know what I should do without you now,” he said, stroking Dorcas’s hair caressingly, and adding, “Now let us have supper. I am hungry as a bear, as Bertha would say.”

Dorcas started to leave the room just as she heard the sound of the bell and knew the electric car was coming up the hill. Though she had seen it so many times, she always stopped to look at it, and she stopped now and saw Reginald alight from it and saw the conductor point towards their house as if directing him to it. “Who can it be?” she thought, calling her father to the window, where they both stood watching the stranger as he came slowly along the avenue. “How queerly he acts, stopping so much to look around! Don’t he know it is beginning to rain?” she said, just as the crash and downpour came which sent Rex flying towards the house.

“Oh, father!” Dorcas exclaimed, clutching his arm, “don’t you know, Mr. Gorham wrote that the New Yorker who wanted to buy our farm might come to look at it? I believe this is he. What shall we do with him? Bertha told us to shut the door in his face.”

“You would hardly keep a dog out in a storm like this. Why, I can’t see across the road. I never knew it rain so fast,” Mr. Leighton replied, as Rex’s knock sounded on the door, which Dorcas opened just as a vivid flash of lightning lit up the sky and was followed instantaneously by a deafening peal of thunder and a dash of rain which swept half-way down the hall.

“Oh, my!” Dorcas said, holding back her dress; and “Great Scott!” Rex exclaimed, as he sprang inside and helped her close the door. Then, turning to her, he said, with a smile which disarmed her at once of any prejudice she might have against him, “I beg your pardon for coming in so unceremoniously. I should have been drenched in another minute. Does Mr. Leighton live here?”

Dorcas said he did, and, opening a door to her right, bade him enter. Glancing in, Rex felt sure it was the best room, and drew back, saying, apologetically, “I am not fit to go in there, or indeed to go anywhere. I believe I am wet to the skin. Look,” and he pointed to the little puddles of water which had dripped from his coat and were running over the floor.

His concern was so genuine, and the eyes so kind which looked at Dorcas, that he did not seem like a stranger, and she said to him, “I should say you were wet. You’d better take off your coat and let me dry it by the kitchen fire or you will take cold.”

“She is a motherly little girl, as Phineas Jones said,” Rex thought, feeling sure that this was not the one who was “handsome as blazes,” but the nice one, who thought of everything, and if his first smile had not won her his second would have done so, as he said, “Thanks. You are very kind, but I’ll not trouble you to do that, and perhaps I’d better introduce myself. I am Reginald Hallam, from New York, and my father used to live here.”

“Oh-h!” Dorcas exclaimed, her fear of the dreaded stranger who was coming to buy their farm vanishing at once, while she wondered in a vague way where she had heard the name before, but did not associate it with Louie Thurston’s hero, of whom Bertha had told her.

He was one of the Hallams, of whom the old people in town thought so much, and it was natural that he should wish to see the old Homestead. At this point Mr. Leighton came into the hall and was introduced to the stranger, whom he welcomed cordially, while Dorcas, with her hospitable instincts in full play, again insisted that he should remove his wet coat and shoes before he took cold.

“They are a little damp, that’s a fact; but what can I do without them?” Reginald replied, beginning to feel very uncomfortable, and knowing that in all probability a sore throat would be the result of his bath.

“I’ll tell you,” Dorcas said, looking at her father. “He can wear the dressing-gown and slippers Bertha gave you last Christmas.” And before Rex could stop her she was off up-stairs in her father’s bedroom, from which she returned with a pair of Turkish slippers and a soft gray cashmere dressing-gown with dark blue velvet collar and cuffs.

“Father never wore them but a few times; he says they are too fine,” she said to Rex, who, much against his will, soon found himself arrayed in Mr. Leighton’s gown and slippers, while Dorcas carried his wet coat and shoes in triumph to the kitchen fire.

“Well, this is a lark,” Rex thought as he caught sight of himself in the glass. “I wonder what Phineas Jones would say if he knew that instead of being taken for a confidence man I’m received as a son and a brother and dressed up in ‘the Square’s’ best clothes.”

Supper was ready by this time, and without any demur, which he knew would be useless, Rex sat down to the table which Dorcas had made so pretty, rejoicing now that she had done so, wondering if their guest would notice it, and feeling glad that he was in Bertha’s chair. He did notice everything, and especially the flowers and the extra seat, which he occupied, and which he knew was not put there for him, but probably for the handsome girl, who would come in when the storm was over, and he found himself thinking more of her than of the blessing which Mr. Leighton asked so reverently, adding a petition that God would care for the loved one wherever and in whatever danger she might be.

“Maybe that’s the girl; but where the dickens can she be that she’s in danger?” Rex thought, just as a clap of thunder louder than any which had preceded it shook the house and made Dorcas turn pale as she said to her father:

“Oh, do you suppose it will reach her?”

“I think not,” Mr. Leighton replied; then turning to Rex, he said, “My youngest daughter, Bertha, is on the sea,—sailed on the Teutonic this morning,—and Dorcas is afraid the storm may reach her.”

“Sailed this morning on the Teutonic!” Rex repeated. “So did my aunt, Mrs. Carter Hallam.”

“Mrs. Carter Hallam!” and Dorcas set down her cup of tea with such force that some of it was spilled upon the snowy cloth. “Why, that is the name of the lady with whom Bertha has gone as companion.”

It was Rex’s turn now to be surprised, and explanations followed.

“I supposed all the Hallams of Leicester were dead, and never thought of associating Mrs. Carter with them,” Mr. Leighton said, while Rex in turn explained that as Miss Leighton’s letter had been written in Boston and he had addressed her there for his aunt it did not occur to him that her home was here at the Homestead.

“Did you see her on the ship, and was she well?” Dorcas asked, and he replied that, as he reached the steamer only in time to say good-bye to his aunt, he did not see Miss Leighton, but he knew she was there and presumably well.

“I am sorry now that I did not meet her,” he added, looking more closely at Dorcas than he had done before, and trying to trace some resemblance between her and the photograph he had dubbed Squint-Eye.

But there was none, and he felt a good deal puzzled, wondering what Phineas meant by calling Dorcas “handsome as blazes.” She must be the one referred to, for no human being could ever accuse Squint-Eye of any degree of beauty. And yet how the father and sister loved her, and how the old man’s voice trembled when he spoke of her, always with pride it seemed to Rex, who began at last himself to feel a good deal of interest in her. He knew now that he was occupying her seat, and that the rose-bud he had fastened in his button-hole was put there for her, and he hoped his aunt would treat her well.

“I mean to write and give her some points, for there’s no guessing what Mrs. Walker Haynes may put her up to do,” he thought, just as he caught the name of Phineas and heard Mr. Leighton saying to Dorcas:

“I saw him this morning, and he thinks he will get up in the course of a week and do the plastering.”

“Not before a week! How provoking!” Dorcas replied, while Rex ventured to say:

“Are you speaking of Phineas Jones? I made his acquaintance this morning, or rather he made mine. Quite a character, isn’t he?”

“I should say he was,” Dorcas replied, while her father rejoined:

“Everybody knows Phineas, and everybody likes him. He is nobody’s enemy but his own, and shiftlessness is his great fault. He can do almost everything, and do it well, too. He’ll work a few weeks,—maybe a few months,—and then lie idle, visiting and talking, till he has spent all he earned. He knows everybody’s business and history, and will sacrifice everything for his friends. He attends every camp-meeting he can hear of, and is apt to lose his balance and have what he calls the power. He comes here quite often, and is very handy in fixing up. I’ve got a little job waiting for him now, where the plastering fell off in the front chamber, and I dare say it will continue to wait. But I like the fellow, and am sorry for him. I don’t know that he has a relative in the world.”

Rex could have told of his Aunt Lucy, and that through her, Phineas claimed relationship to himself, but concluded not to open up a subject which he knew would be obnoxious to his aunt. Supper was now over, but the rain was still falling heavily, and when Rex asked how far it was to the hotel, both Mr. Leighton and Dorcas invited him so cordially to spend the night with them, that he decided to do so, and then began to wonder how he should broach the real object of his visit. From all Phineas had told him, and from what he had seen of Mr. Leighton, he began to be doubtful of success, but it was worth trying for, and he was ready to offer fifteen hundred dollars extra, if necessary. His coat and shoes were dry by this time, and habited in them he felt more like himself, and after Dorcas had removed her apron, showing that her evening work was done, and had taken her seat near her father, he said:

“By the way, did Mr. Gorham ever write to you that a New Yorker would like to buy your farm?”

“Yes,” Mr. Leighton replied, and Rex continued:

“I am the man, and that is my business here.”

“Oh!” and Dorcas moved uneasily in her chair, while her father answered, “I thought so.”

Then there was a silence, which Rex finally broke, telling why he wanted that particular farm and what he was willing to give for it, knowing before he finished that he had failed. The farm was not for sale, except under compulsion, which Mr. Leighton hoped might be avoided, explaining matters so minutely that Rex had a tolerably accurate knowledge of the state of affairs and knew why the daughter had gone abroad as his aunt’s companion, in preference to remaining in the employ of Swartz & Co.

“Confound it, if I hadn’t insisted upon aunt’s offering five hundred instead of three hundred, as she proposed doing, Bertha would not have gone, and I might have got the place,” he thought.

Mr. Leighton continued, “I think it would kill me to lose the home where I have lived so long, but if it must be sold, I’d rather you should have it than any one I know, and if worst comes to worst, and anything happens to Bertha, I’ll let you know in time to buy it.”

He looked so white and his voice shook so as he talked that Rex felt his castles and fox-hunts all crumbling together, and, with his usual impulsiveness, began to wonder if Mr. Leighton would accept aid from him in case of an emergency. It was nearly ten o’clock by this time, and Mr. Leighton said, “I suppose this is early for city folks, but in the country we retire early, and I am tired. We always have prayers at night. Bring the books, daughter, and we’ll sing the 267th hymn.”

Dorcas did as she was bidden, and, offering a Hymnal to Rex, opened an old-fashioned piano and began to play and sing, accompanied by her father, whose trembling voice quavered along until he reached the words,—

“Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee

For those in peril on the sea.”

Then he broke down entirely, while Dorcas soon followed, and Rex was left to finish alone, which he did without the slightest hesitancy. He had a rich tenor voice; taking up the air where Dorcas dropped it, he sang the hymn to the end, while Mr. Leighton stood with closed eyes and a rapt expression on his face.

“I wish Bertha could hear that. Let us pray,” he said, when the song was ended, and, before he quite knew what he was doing, Rex found himself on his knees, listening to Mr. Leighton’s fervent prayer, which closed with the petition for the safety of those upon the deep.

As Rex had told Phineas Jones, he was not a professor, and he did not call himself a very religious man. He attended church every Sunday morning with his aunt, went through the services reverently, and listened to the sermon attentively, but not all the splendors of St. Thomas’s Church had ever impressed him as did that simple, homely service in the farm house among the Leicester hills, where his “Amen” to the prayer for those upon the sea was loud and distinct, and included in it not only his aunt and Bertha, but also the girl whom he had knocked down, who seemed to haunt him strangely.

“If I were to have much of this, Phineas would not be obliged to take me to one of his meetings to convert me,” he thought, as he arose from his knees and signified his readiness to retire.

CHAPTER IX.
REX MAKES DISCOVERIES.

It was Mr. Leighton who conducted Rex to his sleeping-room, saying, as he put the lamp down upon the dressing-bureau: “There’s a big patch of plaster off in the best chamber, where the girls put company, so you are to sleep in here. This is Bertha’s room.”

Rex became interested immediately. To occupy a young girl’s room, even if that girl were Squint-Eye, was a novel experience, and after Mr. Leighton had said good-night he began to look about with a good deal of curiosity. Everything was plain, but neat and dainty, from the pretty matting and soft fur rug on the floor, to the bed which looked like a white pin-cushion, with its snowy counterpane and fluted pillow-shams.

“It is just the room a nice kind of a girl would be apt to have, and it doesn’t seem as if a great, hulking fellow like me ought to be in it,” he said, fancying he could detect a faint perfume such as he knew some girls affected. “I think, though, it’s the roses and lilies. I don’t believe Squint-Eye goes in for Lubin and Pinaud and such like,” he thought, just as he caught sight of the slippers, which Dorcas had forgotten to remove when she arranged the room for him.

“Halloo! here are Cinderella’s shoes, as I live,” he said, taking one of them up and handling it gingerly as if afraid he should break it. “French heels; and, by Jove, she’s got a small foot, and a well-shaped one, too. I wouldn’t have thought that of Squint-Eye,” he said, with a feeling that the girl he called Squint-Eye had no right either in the room or in the slipper, which he put down carefully, and then continued his investigations, coming next to the window-seat, where the work-basket and book were lying. “Embroiders, I see. Wouldn’t be a woman if she didn’t,” he said, as he glanced at the bit of fancy work left in the basket. Then his eye caught the book, which he took up and saw was a volume of Tennyson, which showed a good deal of usage. “Poetical, too! Wouldn’t have thought that of her, either. She doesn’t look it.” Then turning to the fly-leaf, he read, “Bertha Leighton. From her cousin Louie. Christmas, 18—.”

“By George,” he exclaimed, “that is Louie Thurston’s handwriting. Not quite as scrawly as it was when we wrote the girl and boy letters to each other, but the counterpart of the note she sent me last summer in Saratoga, asking me to ride with her and Fred. And she calls herself cousin to this Bertha! I remember now she once told me she had some relatives North. They must be these Leightons, and I have come here to find them and aunt’s companion too. Truly the world is very small. Poor little Louie! I don’t believe she is happy. No woman could be that with Fred, if he is my friend. Poor little Louie!”

There was a world of pathos and pity in Rex’s voice as he said, “Poor little Louie!” and stood looking at her handwriting and thinking of the beautiful girl whom he might perhaps have won for his own. But if any regret for what might have been mingled with his thoughts, he gave no sign of it, except that the expression of his face was a shade more serious as he put the book back in its place and prepared for bed, where he lay awake a long time, thinking of Louie, and Squint-Eye, and the girl he had knocked down on the ship, and Rose Arabella Jefferson, whose face was the last he remembered before going to sleep.

The next morning was bright and fair, with no trace of the storm visible except in the freshened foliage and the puddles of water standing here and there in the road, and Rex, as he looked from his window upon the green hills and valleys, felt a pang of disappointment that the place he so coveted could never be his. Breakfast was waiting when he went down to the dining-room, and while at the table he spoke of Louie and asked if she were not a cousin.

“Oh, yes,” Dorcas said, quickly, a little proud of this grand relation. “Louie’s mother and ours were sisters. She told Bertha she knew you. Isn’t she lovely?”

Rex said she was lovely, and that he had known her since she was a child, and had been in college with her husband. Then he changed the conversation by inquiring about the livery-stables in town. He would like, he said, to drive about the neighborhood a little before returning to New York, and see the old cemetery where so many Hallams were buried.

“Horses enough, but you’ve got to walk into town to get them. If old Bush will answer your purpose you are quite welcome to him,” Mr. Leighton said.

“Thanks,” Rex replied. “I am already indebted to you for so much that I may as well be indebted for more. I will take old Bush, and perhaps Miss Leighton will go with me as a guide.”

This Dorcas was quite willing to do, and the two were soon driving together through the leafy woods and pleasant roads and past the old houses, where the people came to the doors and windows to see what fine gentleman Dorcas Leighton had with her. Every one whom they met spoke to Dorcas and inquired for Bertha, in whom all seemed greatly interested.

“Your sister must be very popular. This is the thirteenth person who has stopped you to ask for her,” Rex said, as an old Scotchman finished his inquiries by saying, “She’s a bonnie lassie, God bless her.”

“She is popular, and deservedly so. I wish you knew her,” was Dorcas’s reply; and then as a conviction, born he knew not when or why, kept increasing in Rex’s mind, he asked, “Would you mind telling me how she looks? Is she dark or fair? tall or short? fat or lean?”

Dorcas answered unhesitatingly, “She is very beautiful,—neither fat nor lean, tall nor short, dark nor fair, but just right.”

“Oh-h!” and Rex drew a long breath as Dorcas went on: “She has a lovely complexion, with brilliant color, perfect features, reddish-brown hair with glints of gold in it in the sunlight, and the handsomest eyes you ever saw,—large and bright and almost black at times when she is excited or pleased,—long lashes, and carries herself like a queen.”

“Oh-h!” Rex said again, knowing that Rose Arabella Jefferson had fallen from her pedestal of beauty and was really the Squint-Eye of whom he had thought so derisively. “Have you a photograph of her?” he asked, and Dorcas replied that she had and would show it to him if he liked.

They had now reached home, and, bringing out an old and well-filled album, Dorcas pointed to a photograph which Rex recognized as a facsimile of the one his aunt had insisted belonged to Miss Jefferson. He could not account for the peculiar sensations which swept over him and kept deepening in intensity as he looked at the face which attracted him more now than when he believed it that of Rose Arabella of Scotsburg.

“I wish you would let me have this. I am a regular photo-fiend,—have a stack of them at home, and would like mightily to add this to the lot,” he said, remembering that the one he had was defaced with Rose Arabella’s name.

But Dorcas declined. “Bertha would not like it,” she said, taking the album from him quickly, as if she read his thoughts and feared lest he would take the picture whether she were willing or not.

It was now time for Rex to go, if he would catch the next car for Worcester. After thanking Mr. Leighton and Dorcas for their hospitality and telling them to be sure and let him know whenever they came to New York, so that he might return their kindness, he bade them good-bye, with a feeling that although he had lost his fancy farm and fox-hunts, he had gained two valuable friends.

“They are about the nicest people I ever met,” he said, as he walked down the avenue. “Couldn’t have done more if I had been related. I ought to have told them to come straight to our house if they were ever in New York, and I would if it were mine. But Aunt Lucy wouldn’t like it. I wonder she didn’t tell me about the mistake in the photographs when I was on the ship. Maybe she didn’t think of it, I saw her so short a time. I remember, though, that she did say that Miss Leighton was rather too high and mighty, and, by George, I told her to sit down on her! I have made a mess of it; but I will write at once and go over sooner than I intended, for there is no telling what Mrs. Haynes may put my aunt up to do. I will not have that girl snubbed; and if I find them at it, I’ll——”

Here he gave an energetic flourish of his cane in the air to attract the conductor of the fast-coming car, and posterity will never know what he intended doing to his aunt and Mrs. Walker Haynes, if he found them snubbing that girl.

CHAPTER X.
AT AIX-LES-BAINS.

There was a stop of a few days at the Metropole in London, where Mrs. Hallam engaged a courier; there was another stop at the Grand in Paris, where a ladies’ maid was secured; and, thus equipped, Mrs. Hallam felt that she was indeed traveling en prince as she journeyed on to Aix, where Mrs. Walker Haynes met her at the station with a very handsome turnout, which was afterwards included in Mrs. Hallam’s bill.

“I knew you would not care to go in the ’bus with your servants, so I ventured to order the carriage for you,” she said, as they wound up the steep hill to the Hôtel Splendide.

Then she told what she had done for her friend’s comfort and the pleasure it had been to do it, notwithstanding all the trouble and annoyance she had been subjected to. The season was at its height, and all the hotels were crowded, especially the Splendide. A grande duchesse with her suite occupied the guestrooms on the first floor; the King of Greece had all the second floor south of the main entrance; while English, Jews, Spaniards, Greeks, and Russians had the rooms at the other end of the hall; consequently Mrs. Hallam must be content with the third floor, where a salon and a bedchamber, with balcony attached, had been reserved for her. She had found the most trouble with the salon, she said, as a French countess was determined to have it, and she had secured it only by engaging it at once two weeks ago and promising more per day than the countess was willing to give for it. As it had to be paid for whether occupied or not, she had taken the liberty to use it herself, knowing her friend would not care. Mrs. Hallam didn’t care, even when later on she found that the salon had been accredited to her since she first wrote to Mrs. Haynes that she was coming and asked her to secure rooms. She was accustomed to being fleeced by Mrs. Haynes, whom Rex called a second Becky Sharp. The salon business being settled, Mrs. Haynes ventured farther and said that as she had been obliged to dismiss her maid and had had so much trouble to fill her place she had finally decided to wait until her friend came, when possibly the services of one maid would answer for both ladies.

“Gracie prefers to wait upon herself,” she continued, “but I find it convenient at times to have some one do my hair and lay out my dresses and go with me to the baths, which I take about ten; you, no doubt, who have plenty of money, will go down early in one of those covered chairs which two men bring to your room. It is a most comfortable way of doing, as you are wrapped in a blanket quite en déshabille and put into a chair, the curtains are dropped, and you are taken to the bath and back in time for your first déjeûner, and are all through with the baths early and can enjoy yourself the rest of the day. It is rather expensive, of course, and I cannot afford it, but all who can, do. The Scrantoms from New York, the Montgomerys from Boston, the Harwoods from London, and old Lady Gresham, all go down that way; quite a high-toned procession, which some impertinent American girls try to kodak. I shall introduce you to these people. They know you are coming, and you are sure to like them.”

Mrs. Haynes knew just what chord to touch with her ambitious friend, who was as clay in her hands. By the time the hotel was reached it had been arranged that she was not only to continue to use the salon, but was also welcome to the services of Mrs. Hallam’s maid, Celine, and her courier, Browne, and possibly her companion, although on this point she was doubtful, as the girl had a mind of her own and was not easily managed.

“I saw that in her face the moment I looked at her, and thought she might give you trouble. She really looked as if she expected me to speak to her. Who is she?” Mrs. Haynes asked, and very briefly Mrs. Hallam told all she knew of her,—of the mistake in the photographs, of Reginald’s admiration of the one which was really Bertha’s, and of his encounter with her on the ship.

“Hm; yes,” Mrs. Walker rejoined, reflectively, and in an instant her tactics were resolved upon.

Possessed of a large amount of worldly wisdom and foresight, she boasted that she could read the end from the beginning, and on this occasion her quick instincts told her that, given a chance, this hired companion might come between her and her plan of marrying her daughter Grace to Rex Hallam, who was every way desirable as a son-in-law. She had seen enough of him to know that if he cared for a girl it would make no difference whether she were a wage-earner or the daughter of a duke, and Bertha might prove a formidable rival. He had admired her photograph and been kind to her on the boat, and when he met her again there was no knowing what complications might arise if, as was most probable, Bertha herself were artful and ambitious. And so, for no reason whatever except her own petty jealousy, she conceived a most unreasonable dislike for the girl; and when Mrs. Haynes was unreasonable she sometimes was guilty of acts of which she was afterwards ashamed.

Arrived at the hotel, which the ’bus had reached before her, she said to Bertha, who was standing near the door, “Take your mistress’s bag and shawl up to the third floor, No. —, and wait there for us.”

Bertha knew it was Celine’s place to do this, but that demoiselle, who thus far had not proved the treasure she was represented to be, had found an acquaintance, to whom she was talking so volubly that she did not observe the entrance of her party until Bertha was half-way up the three flights of stairs, with Mrs. Hallam’s bag and wrap as well as her own. The service at the Splendide was not the best, and those who would wait upon themselves were welcome to do so, and Bertha toiled on with her arms full, while Mrs. Hallam and Mrs. Haynes took the little coop of a lift and ascended very leisurely.

“This is your room. I hope you will like it,” Mrs. Haynes said, stopping at the open door of a large, airy room, with a broad window opening upon a balcony, where a comfortable easy-chair was standing. Mrs. Hallam sank into it at once, admiring the view and pleased with everything. The clerk at the office had handed her a letter which had come in the morning mail. It was from Rex, and was full of his visit to the Homestead, the kindness he had received from Mr. Leighton and Dorcas, and the discovery he had made with regard to Bertha.

“I wonder you didn’t tell me on the ship that I was right and you wrong,” he wrote. “You did say, though, that she was high and mighty, and I told you to sit on her. But don’t you do it! She is a lady by birth and education, and I want you to treat her kindly and not let Mrs. Haynes bamboozle you into snubbing her because she is your companion. I sha’n’t like it if you do, for it will be an insult to the Leightons and a shame to us.” Then he added, “At the hotel in Worcester I fell in with a fellow who claimed to be a fortieth cousin of yours, Phineas Jones. Do you remember him? Great character. Called you cousin Lucy Ann,—said you spelled him down at a spelling-match on the word ‘dammed,’ and that he was going to call when you got home. I didn’t give him our address.”

After reading this the view from the balcony did not look so charming or the sunlight so bright, and there was a shadow on Mrs. Hallam’s face caused not so much by what Rex had written of the Homestead as by his encounter with Phineas Jones, her abomination. Why had he, of all possible persons, turned up? And what else had he told Rex of her besides the spelling episode? Everything, probably, and more than everything, for she remembered well Phineas’s loquacity, which sometimes carried him into fiction. And he talked of calling upon her, too! “The wretch!” she said, crushing the letter in her hands, as she would have liked to crush the offending Phineas.

“No bad news, I hope?” Mrs. Haynes said, stepping upon the balcony and noting the change in her friend’s expression.

Mrs. Hallam, who would have died sooner than tell of Phineas Jones, answered, “Oh, no. Rex has been to the Homestead and found out about Bertha, over whom he is wilder than ever, saying I must be kind to her and all that; as if I would be anything else.”

“Hm; yes,” Mrs. Haynes replied, an expression which always meant a great deal with her, and which in this case meant a greater dislike to Bertha and a firmer resolve to humiliate her.

It was beginning to grow dark by this time. Reentering her room, Mrs. Hallam asked, “Where is Celine? I want her to open my trunk and get out a cooler dress; this is so hot and dusty.”

But Celine was not forthcoming, and Bertha was summoned in her place. At the Metropole Bertha had occupied a stuffy little room looking into a court, while at the Grand in Paris she had slept in what she called a closet, so that now she felt as if in Paradise when she took possession of her room, which, if small and at the rear, looked out upon grass and flowers and the tall hills which encircle Aix on all sides.

“This is delightful,” she thought, as she leaned from the window inhaling the perfume of the flowers and drinking in the sweet, pure air which swept down the green hillside, where vines and fruits were growing. She, too, had found a letter waiting for her from Dorcas, who detailed every particular of Reginald’s visit to the Homestead, and dwelt at some length upon his evident admiration of Bertha’s photograph and his desire to have it.

“I don’t pretend to have your psychological presentiments,” Dorcas wrote, “but if I had I should say that Mr. Hallam would admire you when he sees you quite as much as he did your picture, and I know you will like him. You cannot help it. He will join you before long.”

Bertha knew better than Dorcas that she should like Rex Hallam, and something told her that her life after he came would be different from what it was now. For Mrs. Hallam she had but little respect, she was so thoroughly selfish and exacting, but she did not dislike her with the dislike she had conceived in a moment for Mrs. Haynes, in whom she had intuitively recognized a foe, who would tyrannize over and humiliate her worse than her employer. During her climb up-stairs she had resolved upon her course of conduct towards the lady should she attempt to browbeat her.

“I will do my best to please Mrs. Hallam, but I will not be subject to that woman,” she thought, just as some one knocked, and in response to her “Come in,” Mrs. Haynes appeared, saying, “Leighton, Mrs. Hallam wants you.”

“Madam, if you are speaking to me, I am Miss Leighton,” Bertha said, while her eyes flashed so angrily that for a moment Mrs. Haynes lost her self command and stammered an apology, saying she was so accustomed to hearing the English employees called by their last names that she had inadvertently acquired the habit.

There was a haughty inclination of Bertha’s head in token that she accepted the apology, and then the two, between whom there was now war, went to Mrs. Hallam’s room, where Bertha unlocked a trunk and took out a fresher dress. While she was doing this, Mrs. Hallam again stepped out upon the balcony with Mrs. Haynes, who said;

“It is too late for table d’hôte, but I have ordered a nice little extra dinner for you and me, to be served in our salon. I thought you’d like it better there the first night. Grace has dined and gone to the Casino with a party of English, who have rooms under us. The king is to be there.”

“Do you know him well?” Mrs. Hallam asked, pleased at the possibility of hobnobbing with royalty.

“Ye-es—no-o. Well, he has bowed to me, but I have not exactly spoken to him yet,” was Mrs. Haynes’s reply, and then she went on hurriedly, “I have engaged seats for lunch and dinner for you, Grace and myself in the salle-à-manger, near Lady Gresham’s party, and also a small table in a corner of the breakfast-room where we can be quite private and take our coffee together, when you do not care to have it in your salon. Grace insists upon going down in the morning, and of course, I must go with her.”

“You are very kind,” Mrs. Hallam said, thinking how nice it was to have all care taken from her, while Mrs. Haynes continued:

“Your servants take their meals in the servants’ hall. Celine will naturally prefer to sit with her own people, and if you like I will arrange to have places reserved with the English for your courier and—and——”

She hesitated a little, until Mrs. Hallam said, in some surprise:

“Do you mean Miss Leighton?”

Then she went on. “Yes, the courier and Miss Leighton; he seems a very respectable man,—quite superior to his class.”

Here was a turn in affairs for which even Mrs. Hallam was not prepared. Heretofore Bertha had taken her meals with her, nor had she thought of a change; but if Mrs. Walker Haynes saw fit to make one, it must be right. Still, there was Rex to be considered. Would he think this was treating Bertha as she should be treated? She was afraid not, and she said, hesitatingly, “Yes, but I am not sure Reginald would like it.”

“What has he to do with it, pray?” Mrs. Haynes asked, quickly.

Mrs. Hallam replied, “Her family was very nice to him, and you know he wrote me to treat her kindly. I don’t think he would like to find her in the servants’ hall.”

This was the first sign of rebellion Mrs. Haynes had ever seen in her friend, and she met it promptly.

“I do not see how you can do differently, if you adhere to the customs of those with whom you wish to associate. Several English families have had companions, or governesses, or seamstresses, or something, and they have always gone to the servants’ hall. Lady Gresham has one there now. Miss Leighton may be all Reginald thinks she is, but if she puts herself in the position of an employee she must expect an employee’s fare, and not thrust herself upon first-class people. You will only pay second-class for her if she goes there.”

Lady Gresham and the English and paying second-class were influencing Mrs. Hallam mightily, but a dread of Rex, who when roused in the cause of oppression would not be pleasant to meet, kept her hesitating, until Bertha herself settled the matter. She had heard the conversation, although it had been carried on in low tones and sometimes in whispers. At first she resolved that rather than submit to this indignity she would give up her position and go home; then, remembering what Mrs. Hallam had said of Reginald, who was sure to be angry if he found her thus humiliated, she began to change her mind.

“I’ll do it,” she thought, while the absurdity of the thing grew upon her so fast that it began at last to look like a huge joke which she might perhaps enjoy. Going to the door, she said, while a proud smile played over her face, “Ladies, I could not help hearing what you said, and as Mrs. Hallam seems undecided in the matter I will decide for her, and go to the servants’ hall, which I prefer. I have tried first-class people, and would like a chance to try the second.”

She looked like a young queen as she stood in the doorway, her eyes sparkling and her cheeks glowing with excitement, and Mrs. Haynes felt that for once she had met a foe worthy of her.

“Yes, that will be best, and I dare say you will find it very comfortable,” Mrs. Hallam said, admiring the girl as she had never admired her before, and thinking that before Rex came she would manage to make a change.

That night, however, she had Bertha’s dinner sent to her room, and also made arrangements to have her coffee served there in the morning, so it was not until lunch that she had her first experience as second-class. The hall, which was not used for the servants of the house, who had their meals elsewhere, was a long room on the ground-floor, and there she found assembled a mixed company of nurses, maids, couriers, and valets, all talking together in a babel of tongues, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Greek, and all so earnest that they did not see the graceful young woman who, with a heightened color and eyes which shone like stars as they took in the scene, walked to the only vacant seat she saw, which was evidently intended for her, as it was next the courier Browne. But when they did see her they became as silent as if the king himself had come into their midst, while Browne rose to his feet, and with a respectful bow held her chair for her until she was seated, and then asked what he should order for her. Browne, who was a respectable middle-aged man and had traveled extensively with both English and Americans, had seen that Bertha was superior to her employer, and had shown her many little attentions in a respectful way. He had heard from Celine that she was coming to the second salon, and resented it more, if possible, than Bertha herself, resolving to constitute himself her protector and shield her from every possible annoyance. This she saw at once, and smiled gratefully upon him. No one spoke to her, and silence reigned as she finished her lunch and then left the room with a bow in which all felt they were included.

“By Jove, Browne, who is that person, and how came she here? She looks like a lady,” asked an English valet, while two or three Frenchmen nearly lost their balance with their fierce gesticulations, as they clamored to know who the grande mademoiselle was.

Striking his fist upon the table to enforce silence, Browne said:

“She is a Miss Leighton, from America, and far more a lady than many of the bediamonded and besatined trash above us. She is in my party as madam’s companion, and whoever is guilty of the least impertinence towards her in word or look will answer for it to me; to me, do you understand?” And he turned fiercely towards a wicked-looking little Frenchman, whose bad eyes had rested too boldly and too admiringly upon the girl.

“Mon Dieu, oui, oui, oui!” the man replied, and then in broken English asked, “Why comes she here, if she be a lady?”

It was Celine who answered for Browne:

“Because her mistress is a cat, a nasty old cat,—as the English say. And there is a pair of them. I heard them last night saying she must be put down, and they have put her down here. I hate them, and mine most of all. She tries to get me cheap. She keeps me fly-fly. She gives me no pourboires. She sleeps me in a dog-kennel. Bah! I stay not, if good chance come. L’Amèricaine hundred times more lady.”

This voluble speech, which was interpreted by one to another until all had a tolerably correct idea of it, did not diminish the interest in Bertha, to whom after this every possible respect was paid, the men always rising with Browne when she entered the dining-hall and remaining standing until she was seated. Bertha was human, and such homage could not help pleasing her, although it came from those whose language she could not understand, and who by birth and education were greatly her inferiors. It was something to be the object of so much respect, and when, warmed by the bright smile she always gave them, the Greeks, and the Russians, and the Italians, not only rose when she entered the hall, but also when she passed them outside, if they chanced to be sitting, she felt that her life had some compensations, if it were one of drudgery and menial service.

True to her threat, Celine left when a more desirable situation offered, and Mrs. Hallam did not fill her place. “No need of it, so long as you have Miss Leighton and pay her what you do,” Mrs. Haynes said; and so it came about that Bertha found herself companion in name only and waiting-maid in earnest, walking demurely by the covered chair which each morning took Mrs. Hallam to her bath, combing that lady’s hair, mending and brushing her clothes, carrying messages, doing far more than Celine had done, and doing it so uncomplainingly that both Mrs. Hallam and Mrs. Haynes wondered at her. At last, however, when asked to accompany Mrs. Haynes to the bath, she rebelled. To serve her in that way was impossible, and she answered civilly, but decidedly, “No, Mrs. Hallam. I have done and will do whatever you require for yourself, but for Mrs. Haynes, nothing. She never spares an opportunity to humiliate me. I will not attend her to her bath. I will give up my place first.” That settled it, and Bertha was never again asked to wait upon Mrs. Haynes.

CHAPTER XI.
GRACE HAYNES.

“Bravo, Miss Leighton! I did not suppose there was so much spirit in you, when I saw you darning madam’s stockings and buttoning her boots. You are a brick and positively I admire you. Neither mamma nor Mrs Hallam needs any one to go with them, any more than the sea needs water. But it is English, you know, to have an attendant, and such an attendant, too, as you. Yes, I admire you! I respect you! Our door was open, and I heard what you said; so did mamma, and she is furious; but I am glad to see one woman assert her rights.”

It was Grace Haynes, who, coming from her bedroom, joined Bertha, as she was walking rapidly down the hall and said all this to her. Bertha had been nearly two weeks at Aix, and, although she had scarcely exchanged a word with Grace, she had often seen her, and remembering what Mrs. Hallam had said of her and Reginald, had looked at her rather critically. She was very thin and wiry, with a pale face, yellow hair worn short, large blue eyes, and a nose inclined to an upward curve. She was a kind-hearted, good-natured girl, of a pronounced type both in dress and manner and speech. She believed in a little slang, she said, because it gave a point to conversation, and she adored baccarat and rouge-et-noir, and a lot more things which her mother thought highly improper. She had heard all that her mother said of Bertha, and, quick to discriminate, she had seen how infinitely superior she was to Mrs. Hallam and had felt drawn to her, but was too much absorbed in her own matters to have any time for a stranger. She was a natural flirt, and, although so plain, always managed to have, as she said, two or three idiots dangling on her string. Just now it was a young Englishman, the grandson of old Lady Gresham, whom she had upon her string, greatly to the disgust of her mother, with whom she was not often in perfect accord.

Linking her arm in Bertha’s as they went down the stairs, she continued, “Are you going to walk? I am, up the hill. Come with me. I’ve been dying to talk to you ever since you came, but have been so engaged, and you are always so busy with madam since Celine went away. Good pious work you must find it waiting on madam and mamma both! I don’t see how you do it so sweetly. You must have a great deal of what they call inward and spiritual grace. I wish you’d give me some.”

Grace was the first girl of her own age and nation who had spoken to Bertha since she left America, and she responded readily to the friendly advance.

“I don’t believe I have any inward and spiritual grace to spare,” she said. “I only do what I hired out to do. You know I must earn my wages.”

“Yes,” Grace answered, “I know, and I wish I could earn wages, too. It would be infinitely more respectable than the way we get our money.”

“How do you get it?” Bertha asked, and Grace replied, “Don’t you know? You have certainly heard of high-born English dames who, for a consideration, undertake to hoist ambitious Americans into society?”

Bertha had heard of such things, and Grace continued, “Well, that is what mamma does at home on a smaller scale; and she succeeds, too. Everybody knows Mrs. Walker Haynes, with blood so blue that indigo is pale beside it, and if she pulls a string for a puppet to dance, all the other puppets dance in unison. Sometimes she chaperons a party of young ladies, but as these give her a good deal of trouble, she prefers people like Mrs. Hallam, who without her would never get into society. Society! I hate the word, with all it involves. Do you see that colt over there?” and she pointed to a young horse in an adjoining field. “Well, I am like that colt, kicking up its heels in a perfect abandon of freedom. But harness it to a cart, with thills and lines and straps and reins, and then apply the whip, won’t it rebel with all its might? And if it gets its feet over the traces and breaks in the dash-board who can blame it? I’m just like that colt. I hate that old go-giggle called society, which says you mustn’t do this and you must do that because it is or is not proper and Mrs. Grundy would be shocked. I like to shock her, and I’d rather take boarders than live as we do now. I’d do anything to earn money. That’s why I play at baccarat.”

“Baccarat!” Bertha repeated, with a little start.

“Yes, baccarat. Don’t try to pull away from me. I felt you,” Grace said, holding Bertha closer by the arm. “You are Massachusetts born and have a lot of Massachusetts notions, of course, and I respect you for it, but I am Bohemian through and through. Wasn’t born anywhere in particular, and have been in your so-called first society all my life and detest it. We have a little income, and could live in the country with one servant comfortably, as so many people do; but that would not suit mamma, and so we go from pillar to post and live on other people, until I am ashamed. I am successful at baccarat. They say the old gent who tempted Eve helps new beginners at cards, and I believe he helps me, I win so often. I know it isn’t good form, but what can I do? If I don’t play baccarat there’s nothing left for me but to marry, and that I never shall.”

“Why not?” Bertha asked, becoming more and more interested in the strange girl talking so confidentially to her.

“Why not?” Grace repeated. “That shows that you are not in it,—the swim, I mean. Don’t you know that few young men nowadays can afford to marry a poor girl and support her in her extravagance and laziness? She must have money to get any kind of a show, and that I haven’t,—nor beauty either, like you, whose face is worth a fortune. Don’t say it isn’t; don’t fib,” she continued, as Bertha tried to speak. “You know you are beautiful, with a grande-duchesse air which makes everybody turn to look at you, even the king. I saw him, and I’ve seen those Russians and Greeks, who are here with some high cockalorums, take off their hats when you came near them. Celine told me how they all stand up when you enter the salle-à-manger. I call that genuine homage, which I’d give a good deal to have.”

She had let go Bertha’s arm and was walking a little in advance, when she stopped suddenly, and, turning round, said, “I wonder what you will think of Rex Hallam.”

Bertha made no reply, and she went on: “I know I am talking queerly, but I must let myself out to some one. Rex is coming before long, and you will know then, if you don’t now, that mamma is moving heaven and earth to make a match between us; but she never will. I am not his style, and he is far more likely to marry you than me. I have known him for years, and could get up a real liking for him if it would be of any use, but it wouldn’t. He doesn’t want a washed-out, yellow-haired girl like me. Nobody does, unless it’s Jack Travis, old Lady Gresham’s grandson, with no prospects and only a hundred pounds a year and an orange grove in Florida, which he never saw, and which yields nothing, for want of proper attention. He says he would like to go out there and rough it; that he does not like being tied to his grandmother’s apron-strings; and that, give him a chance, he would gladly work. I have two hundred dollars a year more. Do you think we could live on that and the climate?”

They had been retracing their steps, and were near the hotel, where they met the young Englishman in question, evidently looking for Miss Haynes. He was a shambling, loose-jointed young man, but he had a good face, and there was a ring in his voice which Bertha liked, as he spoke first to Grace and then to herself, as Grace presented him to her. Knowing that as a third party she was in the way, Bertha left them and went into the hotel, while they went down into the town, where they stayed so long that Lady Gresham and Mrs. Haynes began to get anxious as to their whereabouts. Both ladies knew of the intimacy between the young people, and both heartily disapproved of it. Under some circumstances Mrs. Haynes would have been delighted to have for a son-in-law Lady Gresham’s grandson. But she prized money more than a title, and one hundred pounds a year with a doubtful orange grove in Florida did not commend themselves to her, while Lady Gresham, although very gracious to Mrs. Haynes, because it was not in her nature to be otherwise to any one, did not like the fast American girl, who wore her hair short, carried her hands in her pockets like a man, and believed in women’s rights. If Jack were insane enough to marry her she would wash her hands of him and send him off to that orange grove, where she had heard there was a little dilapidated house in which he could try to live on the climate and one hundred a year. Some such thoughts as these were passing through Lady Gresham’s mind, while Mrs. Haynes was thinking of Grace’s perversity in encouraging young Travis, and of Reginald Hallam, from whom Mrs. Hallam had that morning had a letter and who was coming to Aix earlier than he had intended doing. Nearly all his friends were out of town, he wrote, and the house was so lonely without his aunt that she might expect him within two or three weeks at the farthest. He did not say what steamer he should take, but, as ten days had elapsed since his letter was written, Mrs. Hallam said she should not be surprised to see him at any time, and her face wore an air of pleased expectancy at the prospect of having Rex with her once more. But a thought of Bertha brought a cloud upon it at once. She had intended removing her from the second-class salle-à-manger before Rex came, but did not know how to manage it.

“The girl seems contented enough,” she thought, “and I hear has a great deal of attention there,—in fact, is quite like a queen among her subjects; so I guess I’ll let it run, and if Rex flares up I’ll trust Mrs. Haynes to help me out of it, as she got me into it.”

CHAPTER XII.
THE NIGHT OF THE OPERA.

It was getting rather dull at the Hôtel Splendide. The novelty of having a king in their midst, who went about unattended in citizen’s dress, and bowed to all who looked as if they wished him to bow to them, was wearing off, and he could go in and out as often as he liked without being followed or stared at. The grand duchess, too, whose apartments were screened from the great unwashed, had had her Sunday dinner-party, with scions of French royalty in the Bourbon line for her guests, and a band of music outside. The woman from Chicago, who had flirted so outrageously with her eyes with the Russian, while his little wife sat by smiling placidly and suspecting no evil because the Chicagoan professed to speak no language but English, of which her husband did not understand a word, had departed for other fields. The French count, who had beaten his American bride of three weeks’ standing, had also gone, and the hotel had subsided into a state of great respectability and circumspection.

“Positively we are stagnating, with nothing to gossip about except Jack and myself, and nothing going on in town,” Grace Haynes said to Bertha, with whom she continued on the most friendly terms.

But the stagnation came to an end and the town woke up when it was known that Miss Sanderson from San Francisco was to appear in opera at the Casino. Everybody had heard of the young prima donna, and all were anxious to see her. Mrs. Hallam took a box for Mrs. Haynes, Grace, and herself, but, although there was plenty of room, Bertha was not included in the party. Nearly all the guests were going from the third floor, which would thus be left entirely to the servants, and Mrs. Hallam, who was always suspecting foreigners of pilfering from her, did not dare leave her rooms alone, so Bertha must stay and watch them. She had done this before when Mrs. Hallam was at the Casino, but to-night it seemed particularly hard, as she wished to see Miss Sanderson so much that she would willingly have stood in the rear seats near the door, where a crowd always congregated. But there was no help for it, and after seeing Mrs. Hallam and her party off she went into the salon, and, taking an easy-chair and a book, sat down to enjoy the quiet and the rest. She was very tired, for Mrs. Hallam had kept her unusually busy that day, arranging the dress she was going to wear, and sending her twice down the long, steep hill into the town in quest of something needed for her toilet. It was very still in and around the hotel, and at last, overcome by fatigue and drowsiness, Bertha’s book dropped into her lap and she fell asleep with her head thrown back against the cushioned chair and one hand resting on its arm. Had she tried she could not have chosen a more graceful position, or one which showed her face and figure to better advantage, and so thought Rex Hallam, when, fifteen or twenty minutes later, he stepped into the room and stood looking at her.

Ever since his visit to the Homestead he had found his thoughts constantly turning to Aix-les-Bains, and had made up his mind to go on a certain ship, when he accidentally met Fred Thurston, who was stopping in New York for two or three days before sailing. There was an invitation to dinner at the Windsor, and as a result Rex packed his trunk, and, securing a vacant berth, sailed for Havre with the Thurstons a week earlier than he had expected to sail. Fred was sick all the voyage and kept his berth, but Louie seemed perfectly well, and had never been so happy since she was a child playing with Rex under the magnolias in Florida as she was now, walking and talking with him upon the deck, where, with her piquant, childish beauty, she attracted a great deal of attention and provoked some comment from the censorious when it was known that she had a husband sick in his berth. But Louie was guiltless of any intentional wrong-doing. She had said to Bertha in Boston, that she believed Fred was going to die, he was so good; and, with a few exceptions, when the Hyde nature was in the ascendant, he had kept good ever since. He had urged Rex’s going with them quite as strongly as Louie, and when he found himself unable to stay on deck, he had bidden Louie go and enjoy herself, saying, however:

“I know what a flirt you are, but I can trust Rex Hallam, on whom your doll beauty has never made an impression and never will; so go and be happy with him.”

This was not a pleasant thing to say, but it was like Fred Thurston to say it, and he looked curiously at Louie to see how it would affect her. There was a flush on her face for a moment, while the tears sprang to her eyes. But she was of too sunny a disposition to be miserable long, and, thinking to herself, “Just for this one week I will be happy,” she tied on her pretty sea-cloak and hood, and went on deck, and was happy as a child when something it has lost and mourned is found again. At Paris they separated, the Thurstons going on to Switzerland, and Rex to Aix-les-Bains, laden with messages of love to Bertha, who had been the principal subject of Louie’s talk during the voyage. In a burst of confidence Rex had told her of Rose Arabella Jefferson’s photograph, and Louie had laughed merrily over the mistake, saying:

“You will find Bertha handsomer than her picture. I think you will fall in love with her; and—if—you—do——” she spoke the last words very slowly, while shadow after shadow flitted over her face as if she were fighting some battle with herself; then, with a bright smile, she added, “I shall be glad.”

Rex’s journey from Paris to Aix was accomplished without any worse mishap than a detention of the train for three hours or more, so that it was not until his aunt had been gone some time that he reached the hotel, where he was told that Mrs. Hallam and party were at the Casino.

“I suppose she has a salon. I will go there and wait till she returns,” Rex said, and then followed a servant up-stairs and along the hall in the direction of the salon.

He had expected to find it locked, and was rather surprised when he saw the open door and the light inside, and still more surprised as he entered the room to find a young lady so fast asleep that his coming did not disturb her. He readily guessed who she was, and for a moment stood looking at her admiringly, noting every point of beauty from the long lashes shading her cheeks to the white hand resting upon the arm of the chair.

“Phineas was right. She is handsome as blazes, but I don’t think it is quite the thing for me to stand staring at her this way. It is taking an unfair advantage of her. I must present myself properly,” he thought, and, stepping into the hall, he knocked rather loudly upon the door.

Bertha awoke with a start and sprang to her feet in some alarm as, in response to her “Entrez,” a tall young man stepped into the room and stood confronting her with a good deal of assurance.

“You must have made a mistake, sir. This is Mrs. Hallam’s salon,” she said, rather haughtily, while Rex replied:

“Yes, I know it. Mrs. Hallam is my aunt, and you must be Miss Leighton.”

“Oh!” Bertha exclaimed, her attitude changing at once, as she recognized the stranger. “Your aunt is expecting you, but not quite so soon. She will be very sorry not to have been here to meet you. She has gone to the opera. Miss Sanderson is in town.”

“So they told me at the office,” Rex said, explaining that he had crossed a little sooner than he had intended, but did not telegraph his aunt, as he wished to surprise her. He then added, “I am too late for dinner, but I suppose I can have my supper up here, which will be better than climbing the three flights of stairs again. That scoop of an elevator has gone ashore for repairs, and I had to walk up.”

Ringing the bell, he ordered his supper, while Bertha started to leave the salon, saying she hoped he would make himself comfortable until his aunt returned.

“Don’t go,” he said, stepping between her and the door to detain her. “Stay and keep me company. I have been shut up in a close railway carriage all day with French and Germans, and am dying to talk to some one who speaks English.”

He made her sit down in the chair from which she had risen when he came in, and, drawing another near to her, said, “You do not seem like a stranger, but rather like an old acquaintance. Why, for a whole week I have heard of little else but you.”

“Of me!” Bertha said, in surprise.

He replied, “I crossed with Mr. and Mrs. Fred Thurston. She, I believe, is your cousin, and was never tired of talking of you, and has sent more love to you than one man ought to carry for some one else.”

“Cousin Louie! Yes, I knew she was coming about this time. And you crossed with her?” Bertha said, thinking what a fine-looking man he was, while there came to her mind what Louie had said of his graciousness of manner, which made every woman think she was especially pleasing to him, whether she were old or young, pretty or plain, rich or poor. He talked so easily and pleasantly and familiarly that it was difficult to think of him as a stranger, and she was not sorry that he had bidden her stay.

When supper was on the table he looked it over a moment, and then said to the waiter, “Bring dishes and napkins enough for two;” then to Bertha, “If I remember the table d’hôtes abroad, they are not of a nature to make one refuse supper at ten o’clock; so I hope you are ready to join me.”

Bertha had been treated as second-class so long that she had almost come to believe she was second-class, and the idea of sitting down to supper with Rex Hallam in his aunt’s salon took her breath away.

“Don’t refuse,” he continued. “It will be so much jollier than eating alone, and I want you to pour my coffee.”

He brought her a chair, and before she realized what she was doing she found herself sitting opposite him quite en famille, and chatting as familiarly as if she had known him all her life. He told her of his visit to the Homestead, his drive with Dorcas, and his meeting with Phineas Jones, over which she laughed merrily, feeling that America was not nearly so far away as it had seemed before he came. When supper was over and the table cleared, he began to talk of books and pictures, finding that as a rule they liked the same authors and admired the same artists.

“By the way,” he said, suddenly, “why are you not at the opera with my aunt? Are you not fond of music?”

“Yes, very,” Bertha replied, “but some one must stay with the rooms. Mrs. Hallam is afraid to leave them alone.”

“Ah, yes. Afraid somebody will steal her diamonds, which she keeps doubly and trebly locked, first in a padded box, then in her trunk, and last in her room. Well, I am glad for my sake that you didn’t go. But isn’t it rather close up here? Suppose we go down. It’s a glorious moonlight night, and there must be a piazza somewhere.”

Bertha thought of the broad, vine-wreathed piazza, with its easy-chairs, where it would be delightful to sit with Reginald Hallam, but she must not leave her post, and she said so.

“Oh, I see; another case of the boy on the burning deck,” Rex said, laughing. “I suppose you are right; but I never had much patience with that boy. I shouldn’t have stayed till I was blown higher than a kite, but should have run with the first sniff of fire. You think I’d better go down? Not a bit of it; if you stay here, I shall. It can’t be long now before they come. Zounds! I beg your pardon. Until I said they, I had forgotten to inquire for Mrs. Haynes and Grace. They are well, I suppose, and with my aunt?”

Bertha said they were, and Rex continued:

“Grace and I are great friends. She’s a little peculiar,—wants to vote, and all that sort of thing,—but I like her immensely.”

Then he talked on indifferent subjects until Mrs. Hallam was heard coming along the hall, panting and talking loudly, and evidently out of humor. The elevator, which Rex said had been drawn off for repairs, was still off, and she had been obliged to walk up the stairs, and didn’t like it. Bertha had risen to her feet as soon as she heard her voice, while Rex, too, rose and stood behind her in the shadow, so his aunt did not see him as she entered the room, and, sinking into the nearest chair, said, irritably:

“Hurry and help me off with my things. I’m half dead. Whew! Isn’t that lamp smoking? How it smells here! Open another window. The lift is not running, and I had to walk up the stairs.”

“I knew it stopped earlier in the evening, but supposed it was running now. I am very sorry,” Bertha said, and Mrs. Hallam continued:

“You ought to have found out and been down there to help me up.”

“I didn’t come any too soon,” Rex thought, stepping out from the shadow, and saying, in his cheery voice, “Halloo, auntie! All tuckered out, aren’t you, with those horrible stairs! I tried them, and they took the wind out of me.”

“Oh, Rex, Rex!” Mrs. Hallam cried, throwing her arms around the tall young man, who bent over her and returned her caresses, while he explained that he did not telegraph, as he wished to surprise her, and that he had reached the hotel half an hour or so after she left it.

“Why didn’t you come at once to the Casino? There was plenty of room in our box, and you must have been so dull here.”

Rex replied: “Not at all dull, with Miss Leighton for company. I ordered my supper up here and had her join me. So you see I have made myself quite at home.”

“I see,” Mrs. Hallam said, with a tone in her voice and a shutting together of her lips which Bertha understood perfectly.

She had gathered up Mrs. Hallam’s mantle and bonnet and opera-glass and fan and gloves by this time; and, knowing she was no longer needed, she left the room just as Mrs. Haynes and Grace, who had heard Rex’s voice, entered it.

CHAPTER XIII.
AFTER THE OPERA.

The ladies slept late the next morning, and Rex breakfasted alone and then went to the salon to meet his aunt, as he had promised to do the night before. It was rather tiresome waiting, and he found himself wishing Bertha would come in, and wondering where she was. As a young man of position and wealth and unexceptionable habits, he was a general favorite with the ladies, and many a mother would gladly have captured him for her daughter, while the daughter would not have said no if asked to be his wife. This he knew perfectly well, but, he said, the daughters didn’t fill the bill. He wanted a real girl, not a made-up one, with powdered face, bleached hair, belladonna eyes, and all the obnoxious habits so fast stealing into the best society. Little Louie Thurston had touched his boyish fancy, and he admired her more than any other woman he had ever met; Grace Haynes amused and interested him; but neither she nor Louie possessed the qualities with which he had endowed his ideal wife, who, he had come to believe, did not exist. Thus far everything connected with Bertha Leighton had interested him greatly, and the two hours he had spent alone with her had deepened that interest. She was beautiful, agreeable, and real, he believed, with something fresh and bright and original about her. He was anxious to see her again, and was thinking of going down to the piazza, hoping to find her there, when his aunt appeared, and for the next hour he sat with her, telling her of their friends in New York and of his visit to the Homestead, where he had been so hospitably entertained and made so many discoveries with regard to Bertha.

“She is a great favorite in Leicester,” he said, “and I think you have a treasure.”

“Yes, she serves me very well,” Mrs. Hallam replied, and then changed the conversation, just as Grace knocked at the door, saying she was going for a walk into town, and asking if Rex would like to go with her.

It was a long ramble they had together, while Grace told him of her acquaintances in Aix, and especially of the young Englishman, Jack Travis, and the Florida orange grove on which he had sunk a thousand dollars with no return.

“Tell him to quit sinking, and go and see to it himself,” Rex said. “Living in England or at the North and sending money South to be used on a grove, is much like a woman trying to keep house successfully by sitting in her chamber and issuing her orders through a speaking tube, instead of going to the kitchen herself to see what is being done there.”

Rex’s illustrations were rather peculiar, but they were sensible. Grace understood this one perfectly, and began to revolve in her mind the feasibility of advising Jack to go to Florida and attend to his business himself, instead of talking through a tube. Then she spoke of Bertha, and was at once conscious of an air of increased interest in Reginald, as she told him how much she liked the girl and how strangely he seemed to be mixed up with her.

“You see, Mrs. Hallam tells mamma everything, and so I know all about Rose Arabella Jefferson’s picture. I nearly fell out of my chair when I heard about it; and I know, too, about your knocking Miss Leighton down on the Teutonic——”

“Wha-at!” Rex exclaimed; “was that Ber—Miss Leighton, I mean?”

“Certainly that was Bertha. You may as well call her that when with me,” Grace replied. “I knew you would admire her. You can’t help it. I am glad you have come, and I hope you will rectify a lot of things.”

Rex looked at her inquiringly, but before he could ask what she meant, they turned a corner and came upon Jack Travis, who joined them, and on hearing that Rex was from New York began to ask after his orange grove, as if he thought Reginald passed it daily on his way to his business.

“What a stupid you are!” Grace said. “Mr. Hallam never saw an orange grove in his life. Why, you could put three or four United Kingdoms into the space between New York and Florida.”

“Reely! How very extraordinary!” the young Englishman said, utterly unable to comprehend the vastness of America, towards which he was beginning to turn his thoughts as a place where he might possibly live on seven hundred dollars a year with Grace to manage it and him.

When they reached the hotel it was lunch-time, and after a few touches to his toilet Rex started for the salle-à-manger, thinking that now he should see Bertha, in whom he felt a still greater interest since learning that it was she to whom he had given the black eye on the Teutonic. “The hand of fate is certainly in it,” he thought, without exactly knowing what the it referred to. Mrs. Hallam and Mrs. Haynes and Grace were already at the table when he entered the room and was shown to the only vacant seat, between his aunt and Grace.

“This must be Miss Leighton’s place,” he said, standing by the chair. “I do not wish to keep her from her accustomed seat. Where is she?” and he looked up and down both sides of the long table, but did not see her, “Where is she?” he asked again, and his aunt replied “She is not coming to-day. Sit down, and I will explain after lunch.”

“What is there to explain?” he thought, as he sat down and glanced first at his aunt’s worried face, then at Grace, and then at Mrs. Haynes.

Then an idea occurred to him which almost made him jump from his chair. He said to Grace:

“Does Miss Leighton lunch in her room?”

“Oh, no,” Grace replied.

“Doesn’t she come here?” he persisted.

“Your aunt will explain. I would rather not,” Grace said.

There was something wrong, Rex was sure, and he finished lunch before the others and left the salon just in time to see Bertha half-way up the second flight of stairs. Bounding up two steps at a time, he soon stood beside her, with his hand on her arm to help her up the next flight.

“I have not seen you this morning. Where have you kept yourself?” he asked, and she replied:

“I have been busy in your aunt’s room.”

“Where is her maid?” was his next question, and Bertha answered:

“She has been gone some time.”

“And you fill her place?”

“I do what Mrs. Hallam wishes me to.”

“Why were you not at lunch?”

“I have been to lunch.”

“You have! Where?”

“Where I always take it.”

“And where is that?”

There was something in Rex’s voice and manner which told Bertha that he was not to be trifled with, and she replied, “I take my meals in the servants’ hall, or rather with the maids and nurses and couriers. It is not bad when you are accustomed to it,” she added, as she saw the blackness on Reginald’s face and the wrath in his eyes. They had now reached the door of Mrs. Hallam’s room, and Mrs. Hallam was just leaving the elevator in company with Mrs. Haynes, who very wisely went into her own apartment and left her friend to meet the storm alone.

And a fierce storm it was. At its close Mrs. Hallam was in tears, and Rex was striding up and down the salon like an enraged lion. Mrs. Hallam had tried to apologize and explain, telling how respectful all the couriers and valets were, how much less it cost, and that Mrs. Haynes said the English sent their companions there, and governesses too, sometimes. Rex did not care a picayune for what the English did; he almost swore about Mrs. Haynes, whose handiwork he recognized; he scorned the idea of its costing less, and said that unless Bertha were at once treated as an equal in every respect he would either leave the hotel or join her in the second-class salon and see for himself whether those rascally Russians and Turks and Frenchmen looked at her as they had no business to look.

At this point Bertha, who had no suspicion of what was taking place in the salon, and who wished to speak to Mrs. Hallam, knocked at the door. Rex opened it with the intention of sending the intruder away, but when he saw Bertha he bade her come in, and, standing with his back against the door, went over the whole matter again and told her she was to join them at dinner.

“And if there is no place for you at my aunt’s end of the table there is at the other, and I shall sit there with you,” he said.

He had settled everything satisfactorily, he thought, when a fresh difficulty arose with Bertha herself. She had listened in surprise to Rex, and smiled gratefully upon him through the tears she could not repress, but she said, “I cannot tell you how much I thank you for your sympathy and kind intentions. But really I am not unhappy in the servants’ hall, nor have I received the slightest discourtesy. Browne, our courier, has stood between me and everything which might have been unpleasant, and I have quite a liking for my companions. And,”—here her face hardened and her eyes grew very dark,—“nothing can induce me to join your party as you propose while Mrs. Haynes is in it. She has worried and insulted me from the moment she saw me. She suggested and urged my going to the servants’ hall against your aunt’s wishes, and has never let an opportunity pass to make me feel my subordinate position. I like Miss Haynes very much, but her mother ——” there was a toss of Bertha’s head indicative of her opinion of the mother, an opinion which Rex fully shared, and if he could he would have turned Mrs. Haynes from the hotel bag and baggage.

But this was impossible. He could neither dislodge her nor move Bertha from her decision, which he understood and respected. But he could take her and his aunt away from Aix and commence life under different auspices in some other place. He had promised to join a party of friends at Chamonix, and he would go there at once, and then find some quiet, restful place in Switzerland, from which excursions could be made and where his aunt could join him with Bertha. This was his plan, which met with Mrs. Hallam’s approval. She was getting tired of Aix, and a little tired, too, of Mrs. Haynes, who had not helped her into society as much as she had expected. Lady Gresham, though civil, evidently shunned the party, presumably because of Grace’s flirtation with Jack, while very few desirable people were on terms of intimacy with her, and the undesirable she would not notice. In fresh fields, however, with Rex, who took precedence everywhere, she should do better, and she was quite willing to go wherever and whenever he chose. That night at dinner she told Mrs. Haynes her plans, and that Rex was to leave the next day for Chamonix.

“So soon? I am surprised, and sorry, too; Grace has anticipated your coming so much and planned so many things to do when you came. She will be so disappointed. Can’t we persuade you to stop a few days at least?” Mrs. Haynes said, leaning forward and looking at Rex with a very appealing face, while Grace stepped on her foot and whispered to her:

“For heaven’s sake, don’t throw me at Rex Hallam’s head, and make him more disgusted with us than he is already.”

The next morning Rex brought his aunt a little, black-eyed French girl, Eloïse, whom he had found in town, and who had once or twice served in the capacity of maid. He had made the bargain with her himself, and such a bargain as he felt sure would ensure her stay in his aunt’s service, no matter what was put upon her. He had also enumerated many of the duties the girl was expected to perform, and among them was waiting upon Miss Leighton equally with his aunt. He laid great stress upon this, and, in order to secure Eloïse’s respect for Bertha, he insisted if the latter would not go to the same table with Mrs. Haynes she should take her meals in the salon. To this Bertha reluctantly consented, and at dinner she found herself installed in solitary state in the handsome salon and served like a young empress by the obsequious waiter, who, having seen the color of Reginald’s gold, was all attention to Mademoiselle. It was a great change, and in her loneliness she half wished herself back with her heterogeneous companions, who had amused and interested her, and to some of whom she was really attached. But just as dessert was served Rex came in and joined her, and everything was changed, for there was no mistaking the interest he was beginning to feel in her; it showed itself in ways which never fail to reach a woman’s heart. At his aunt’s earnest entreaty he had decided to spend another night at Aix, but he left the next morning with instructions that Mrs. Hallam should be ready to join him whenever he wrote her to do so.

“And mind,” he said, laying a hand on each of her shoulders, “don’t you bring Mrs. Haynes with you, for I will not have her. Pension her off, if you want to, and I will pay the bill; but leave her here.”

CHAPTER XIV.
AT THE BEAU-RIVAGE.

“Beau-Rivage, Ouchy, Switzerland, August 4, 18—.

“To Miss Bertha Leighton, Hôtel Splendide,

Aix-les-Bains, Savoie.

“Fred is dying, and I am ill in bed. Come at once.

“Louie Thurston.”

This was the telegram which Bertha received about a week after Rex’s departure for Chamonix, and within an hour of its receipt her trunk was packed and she was ready for the first train which would take her to Ouchy. Mrs. Hallam had made no objection to her going, but, on the contrary, seemed rather relieved than otherwise, for since the revolution which Rex had brought about she hardly knew what to do with Bertha. The maid Eloïse had proved a treasure, and under the combined effects of Rex’s pourboire and Rex’s instructions, had devoted herself so assiduously to both Mrs. Hallam and Bertha that it was difficult to tell which she was serving most. But she ignored Mrs. Haynes entirely, saying that Monsieur’s orders were for his Madame and his Mademoiselle, and she should recognize the rights of no third party until he told her to do so. In compliance with Rex’s wishes, very decidedly expressed, Mrs. Hallam now took all her meals in the salon with Bertha, but they were rather dreary affairs, and, although sorry for the cause, both were glad when an opportunity came for a change.

“Certainly it is your duty to go,” Mrs. Hallam said, when Bertha handed her the telegram, while Mrs. Haynes also warmly approved of the plan, and both expressed surprise that Bertha had never told them of her relationship to Mrs. Fred Thurston.

They knew Mrs. Fred was a power in society, and Mrs. Haynes had met her once or twice and through a friend had managed to attend a reception at her house, which she described as magnificent. To be Mrs. Fred Thurston’s cousin was to be somebody, and both Mrs. Hallam and Mrs. Haynes became suddenly interested in Bertha, the latter offering her advice with regard to the journey, while the former suggested the propriety of sending Browne as an escort. But Bertha declined the offer. She could speak the language fluently and would have no difficulty whatever in finding her way to Ouchy, she said, but she thanked the ladies for their solicitude and parted with them, apparently, on the most amicable terms. Grace accompanied her to the station, and while waiting for the train said to her confidentially, “I expect there will be a bigger earthquake bye-and-bye than Rex got up on your account. Jack and I are engaged. I made up my mind last night to take the great, good-natured, awkward fellow and run my chance on seven hundred dollars a year. It will come off early in the autumn, and we shall go to Florida and see what we can do with that orange grove. Jack will have to work, and so shall I, and I shall like it and he won’t, but I shall keep him at it, trust me. Can you imagine mother’s disgust when I tell her? She really thinks that I have a chance with Rex. But that is folly. Play your cards well. I think you hold a lore hand. There’s your train. Write when you get there, Good-bye.”

There was a friendly parting, a rush through the gate for the carriages, a slamming of doors, and then the train sped on its way, bearing Bertha to a new phase of life in Ouchy.

Thurston had been sick all the voyage, and instead of resting in Paris, as Rex had advised him and Louie had entreated him to do, he had started at once for Geneva and taken a severe cold on the night train. Arrived at the Beau-Rivage in Ouchy, he refused to see a physician until his wife came down with nervous prostration and one was called for her. Louie had had rather a hard time after Rex left her in Paris, for, as if to make amends for his Jekyll mood on the ship, her husband was unusually unreasonable, and worried her so with sarcasm and taunts and ridicule that her heart was very sore when she reached Ouchy. The excitement of the voyage, with Reginald as her constant companion, was over, and she must again take up the old life, which seemed drearier than ever because everything and everybody were so strange, and she found herself constantly longing for somebody to speak a kind and sympathetic word to her. In this condition of things it was not strange that she succumbed at last to the extreme nervous depression which had affected her in Boston, and which was now so intensified that she could scarcely lift her head from the pillow.

“I am only tired,” she said to the physician, a kind, fatherly old man, who asked her what was the matter. “Only tired of life, which is not worth the living.” And her sad blue eyes looked up so pathetically into his face that the doctor felt moved with a great pity for this young, beautiful woman, surrounded with every luxury money could buy, but whose face and words told a story he could not understand until called to prescribe for her husband; and then he knew.

Thurston had made a fight against the illness which was stealing over him and which he swore he would defy. Drugs and doctors were for silly women like Louie, who must be amused, he said, but he would have none of them. “Only exert your will and you can cheat Death himself,” was his favorite saying, and he exerted his will, and went to Chillon, rowed on the lake in the moonlight, took a Turkish bath, and next day had a chill, which lasted so long and left him so weak that he consented to see the doctor, but raved like a madman when told that he must go to bed and stay there if he wished to save his life.

“I don’t know that I care particularly about it. I haven’t found it so very jolly,” he said; then, after a moment, he added, with a bitter laugh, “Tell my wife I am likely to shuffle off this mortal coil, and see how it affects her.”

He was either crazy, or a brute, or both, the doctor thought, but he made him go to bed, secured the best nurse he could find, and was there early the next morning to see how his patient fared. He found him so much worse that when he went to Louie he asked if she had any friends near who could come to her, saying, “If you have, send for them at once.”

Louie was in a state where nothing startled her, and without opening her eyes she said, “Am I going to die?”

“No,” was the doctor’s reply, and she continued, “Is my husband?”

“I hope not, but he is very ill and growing steadily worse. Have you any friend who will come to you?”

“Yes,—my cousin, Miss Leighton, at Aix,” Louie answered; and she dictated the telegram, which the doctor wrote after asking if she had no male friend.

For a moment she hesitated, thinking of Reginald, who would surely come if bidden, and be so strong and helpful. But that would not do; and she answered, “There is no one. Bertha can do everything.”

So Bertha was summoned, and the day after the receipt of the telegram she was at the Beau-Rivage, feeling that she had not come too soon when she saw how utterly prostrated Louie was, and how excited and unmanageable Thurston was becoming under the combined effects of fever and his dislike of his nurse, who could not speak a word of English, while he could understand very little French. Frequent altercations were the result, and when Bertha entered the sick-room there was a fierce battle of words going on between the two, Victoire trying to make the patient take his medicine, while Fred sat bolt upright in bed, the perspiration rolling down his face as he fought against the glass and hurled at the half-crazed Frenchman every opprobrious epithet in the English language. As Bertha appeared the battle ceased, but not until the glass with its contents was on the floor, where Thurston had struck it from Victoire’s hand.

“Ah, Bertha,” he gasped, as he sank exhausted upon his pillow, “did you drop from heaven, or where? and won’t you tell this idiot that it is not time to take my medicine? I know, for I have it written down in good English. Blast that French language, which nobody can understand! I doubt if they do themselves, the gabbling fools, with their parleys and we-we’s.”

It did not take Bertha long to bring order out of confusion. She was a natural nurse, and when the doctor came and she proposed to take Victoire’s place until a more suitable man was found, her offer was accepted. But it was no easy task she had assumed, and after two days and nights, during which she was only relieved for a few hours by John, Thurston’s valet, when sleep was absolutely necessary, she was thoroughly worn out. Leaving the sick man in charge of John, she started for a ramble through the grounds, hoping that the air and exercise would rest and strengthen her. The Thurston rooms were at the rear of a long hall on the second floor, and, as the other end was somewhat in shadow, she only knew that some one was advancing towards her as she went rapidly down the corridor. Nor did she look up until a voice which sent a thrill through every nerve said to her, “Good-afternoon, Miss Leighton. Don’t you know me?” Then she stopped suddenly, while a cry of delight escaped her, as she gave both her hands into the warm, strong ones of Rex Hallam, who held them fast while he questioned her rapidly and told her how he chanced to be there. He had joined his party at Chamonix, where they had stayed for several days, crossing the Mer-de-Glace and making other excursions among the mountains and glaciers. He had then made a flying trip to Interlaken, Lucerne, and Geneva, in quest of the place to which he meant to remove his aunt, and had finally thought of Ouchy, where he knew the Thurstons were, and to which he had come in a boat from Geneva. Learning at the office of his friend’s illness, he had started at once for his room, meeting on the way with Bertha, whose presence there he did not suspect. While he talked he led her near to a window, where the light fell full upon her face, showing him how pale and tired it was.

“This will not do,” he said, when he had heard her story. “I am glad I have come to relieve you. I shall write to Aix to-day that I am going to stay here, where I can be of service to Fred and Louie, and to you too. You will not go back, of course, while your cousin needs you. And now go out into the sunshine, and bye-and-bye I’ll find you somewhere in the grounds.”

He had taken matters into his own hands in his masterful way, and Bertha felt how delightful it was to have some one to lean upon, and that one Rex Hallam, whose voice was so full of sympathy, whose eyes looked at her so kindly, and whose hands held hers so long and seemed so unwilling to release them. With a blush she withdrew them from his clasp. Leaving her at last, he walked down the hall, entering Louie’s room first and finding her asleep, with her maid in charge. For a moment he stood looking at her white, wan face, which touched him more than her fair beauty had ever done, for on it he could read the story of her life, and a great pity welled up in his heart for the girl who seemed so like a lovely flower broken on its stem.

“Poor little Louie!” he said, involuntarily, and at the sound of his voice Louie awoke, recognizing him at once, and exclaiming:

“Oh, Rex! I was dreaming of you and the magnolias. I am so glad you are here! You will stay, won’t you? I am afraid Fred is going to die, he is so bad, and then what shall I do?”

She gave him her hand, which he did not hold as long as he had held Bertha’s, nor did the holding it affect him the same. Bertha’s had been warm and full of life, with something electrical in their touch, which sent the blood bounding through his veins and made him long to kiss them, as well as the bright face raised so eagerly to his. Louie’s hand was thin and clammy, and so small that he could have crushed it easily, as he raised it to his lips with the freedom of an old-time friend, and just as he would have done had Fred himself been present. He told her he should stay as long as he was needed, and after a few moments went to see her husband, who was beginning to grow restless and to fret at Bertha’s absence. But at sight of Reginald his mood changed, and he exclaimed joyfully:

“Rex, old boy, I wonder if you know how glad I am to see you. I do believe I shall get well now you are here, though I am having a big tussle with some confounded thing,—typhoid, the doctor calls it; but doctors are fools. How did you happen to drop down here?”

Rex told him how he chanced to be there, and that he was going to stay, and then, excusing himself, went in quest of Bertha, whom he found sitting upon a rustic seat which was partially concealed by a clump of shrubbery. It was a glorious afternoon, and Rex, who was very fond of boating, proposed a row upon the lake, to which Bertha consented.

“I have had too many races with Harvard not to know how to manage the oars myself,” he said, as he handed Bertha into the boat, and dismissing the boy, pushed off from the shore.

It was a delightful hour they spent together gliding over the smooth waters of the lake, and in that time they became better acquainted than many people do in years. There was no coquetry nor sham in Bertha’s nature, while Rex was so open and frank, and they had so much in common to talk about, that restraint was impossible between them. Poor Rose Arabella Jefferson was discussed and laughed over, Rex declaring his intention to find her some time, if he made a pilgrimage to Scotsburg on purpose. Then he spoke of the encounter on the ship, and said:

“I can’t tell you how many times I have thought of that girl before I knew it was you, or how I have wanted to see her and apologize properly for my awkwardness. Something seems to be drawing us together strangely.” Then he spoke again of his visit to the Homestead, while Bertha became wonderfully animated as she talked of her home, and Rex, watching her, felt that he had never seen so beautiful a face as hers, or listened to a sweeter voice. “I wonder if I am really falling in love,” he thought, as he helped her from the boat, while she was conscious of some subtle change wrought in her during that hour on Lake Geneva, and felt that life would never be to her again exactly what it had been.

CHAPTER XV.
THE UNWELCOME GUEST.

Thurston was very ill with typhoid fever, which held high carnival with him physically, but left him mentally untouched. One afternoon, the fifth after Rex’s arrival, the two were alone, and for some time Fred lay with his eyes closed and an expression of intense thought upon his face. Then, turning suddenly to Rex, he said, “Sit close to me. I want to tell you something.”

Rex drew his chair to the bedside, and Fred continued, “That idiot of a doctor has the same as told me I am going to die, and, though I don’t believe him, I can’t help feeling a little anxious about it, and I want you to help me get ready.”

“Certainly,” Rex answered, with a gasp, entirely misunderstanding Fred’s meaning, and wishing the task of getting his friend ready to die had devolved on some one else. “We hope to pull you through, but it is always well to be prepared for death, and I’ll help you all I can. I’m afraid, though, you have called upon a poor stick. I might say the Lord’s Prayer with you, or, better yet,” and Rex grew quite cheerful, “there’s a young American clergyman in the hotel. I will bring him to see you. He’ll know just what to say.”

“Thunder!” Fred exclaimed, so energetically that Rex started from his chair. “Don’t be a fool. I shall die as I have lived, and if there is a hereafter, which I doubt, I shall take my chance with the rest. I don’t want your clergy round me, though I wouldn’t object to hearing you say, ‘Our Father.’ It would be rather jolly. I used to know it with a lot of other things, but I quit it long ago,—left all the praying to Louie, who goes on her knees regularly night and morning in spite of my ridicule. Once, when she was posing beautifully, with her long, white dressing-gown spread out a yard or so on the floor, I walked over it on purpose to irritate her, but didn’t succeed. I never did succeed very well with Louie. But it is more my fault than hers, although I was fonder of her than she ever knew. She never pretended to love me. She told me she didn’t when she promised to marry me, and when I asked her if any one stood between us she said no, but added that there was somebody for whom she could have cared a great deal if he had cared for her. I did not ask her who it was, but I think I know, and she would have been much happier with him than with me. Poor Louie! maybe she will have a chance yet; and if she does I am willing.”

His bright, feverish eyes were fixed curiously on Rex, as he went on, “It’s for Louie and her matters I want help, not for my soul; that’s all right, if I have one. Louie is a child in experience, and you must see to her when I am gone, and stand by her till she goes home. There’ll be an awful row with the landlord, and no end of expense, and a terrible muss to get me to America. My man, John, will take what there is left of me to Mount Auburn, if you start him right. Louie can’t go, and you must stay with her and Bertha. If Mrs. Grundy kicks up a row about your chaperoning a handsome girl and a pretty young widow,—and, by Jove, Louie will be that,—bring your aunt to the rescue; that will make it square. And now about my will. I made one last summer, and left everything to Louie on condition that she did not marry again. That was nonsense. She will marry if the right man offers;—wild horses can’t hold her; and I want you to draw up another will, with no conditions, giving a few thousands to the Fresh Air Fund and the Humane Society. That will please Louie. She’s great on children and horses. What is it about a mortgage on old man Leighton’s farm? Louie wanted me to pay it and keep Bertha from going out to service, as she called it. But I was in one of my moods, and swore I wouldn’t. I am sorry now I didn’t. Maybe I have a soul, after all, and that is what is nagging me so when I think of the past. I wish I knew how much the mortgage was.”

“I know; I can tell you,” Rex said, with a great deal of animation, as he proceeded to narrate the particulars of the mortgage and his visit to the Homestead, while Fred listened intently.

“Ho-ho,” he said, with a laugh, when Rex had finished. “Is that the way the wind blows? I thought maybe—but never mind. Five hundred, is it? I’ll make it a thousand, payable to Bertha at once. You’ll find writing-materials in the desk by the window. And hurry up; I’m getting infernally tired.”

It did not take long to make the will, and when it was finished, Rex and Mr. Thurston’s valet John and Louie’s maid Martha, all Americans, witnessed it. After that Fred, who was greatly exhausted, fell into a heavy sleep, and when he awoke Bertha was alone with him. He seemed very feverish, and asked for water, which she gave him, and then bathed his forehead and hands, while he said to her faintly, “You are a trump. I wish I’d made it two thousand instead of one; but Louie will make it right. Poor Louie! she’s going to be so disappointed. It’s a big joke on her. I wonder how she will take it.”

Bertha had no idea what he meant, and made no reply, while he continued, “Say, how does a fellow feel when he has a soul?”

Bertha felt sure now that he was delirious, but before she could answer he went on, “I never thought I had one, but maybe I have. I feel so sorry for a lot of things, and mostly about Louie. Tell her so when I am dead. Tell her I wasn’t half as bad a sort as she thought. It will be like her to swathe herself in crape, with a veil which sweeps the ground. Tell her not to. Black will not become her. Think of Louie in a widow’s cap!”

Weak as he was, he laughed aloud at the thought of it, and then began to talk of the prayer which had “forgive” in it, and which Rex was to say with him.

“Do you know it?” he asked, and, with her heart swelling in her throat, Bertha answered that she did, and asked if she should say it.

He nodded, and Rex, who at that moment came unobserved to the door, never forgot the picture of the kneeling girl and the wistful, pathetic expression on the face of the dying man as he tried to say the words which had once been familiar to him.

“Amen! So be it! Finis! I guess that makes it about square. Tell Louie I prayed,” he whispered, faintly, and never spoke again until the early morning sunlight was shining on the lake and the hills of Savoy, when he started suddenly and called, “Louie, Louie! Where are you? I can’t find you. Oh, Louie, come to me.”

But Louie was asleep in her room across the long salon, and when, an hour later, she awoke, Bertha told her that her husband was dead.

CHAPTER XVI.
TANGLED THREADS.

As Thurston had predicted, there was a great deal of trouble and no end of expense; but Rex attended to everything, while Bertha devoted herself to Louie, who had gone from one hysterical paroxysm into another until she was weaker and more helpless than she had ever been, but not too weak to talk continually of Fred, who, one would suppose, had been the tenderest of husbands. All she had suffered at his hands was forgotten, wiped out by the message he had left for her and by knowing that his last thoughts had been of her. But she spurned the idea of not wearing black, and insisted that boxes of mourning dresses and bonnets and caps should be sent to her on approbation from Geneva and Lausanne, until her room looked like a bazaar of crape, and not only Bertha and Martha, the maid, but Rex was more than once called in for an opinion as to what would be most suitable. It was rather a peculiar position in which Rex found himself,—two young ladies on his hands, with one of whom he was in love, while the other would unquestionably be in love with him as soon as her first burst of grief was over and she had settled the details of her wardrobe. But he did not mind it; in fact, he found it delightful to be associated daily with Bertha, and to be constantly applied to for sympathy and advice by Louie, who treated him with the freedom and confidence of a sister, and he would not have thought of a change, if Bertha had not suggested it. She had been told of the bequest which secured the Homestead from sale and made it no longer necessary for her to return to Mrs. Hallam, and she wrote at once asking to be released from her engagement, but saying she would keep it if her services were still desired.

It was a very gracious reply which Mrs. Hallam returned to her, freeing her from all obligations to herself, while something in the tone of the letter made Bertha suspect that all was not as rose-colored at Aix as it had been, and that Mrs. Hallam would be glad to make one of the party at Ouchy. This she said to Rex, suggesting that he should invite his aunt to join them, and urging so strongly the propriety of either bringing her to him, or going himself to her, that he finally wrote to his aunt to come to him, and immediately received a reply that she would be with him the next day. Rex met her at the station in Lausanne, and Bertha received her at the hotel as deferentially and respectfully as if she were still her hired companion, a condition which Mrs. Hallam had made up her mind to ignore, especially as it no longer existed between them. Taking both Bertha’s hands in hers, she kissed her effusively and told her how much better she was looking since she left Aix.

“And no wonder,” she said. “The air there was not good, and either that or something made me very nervous, so that I did things for which I am sorry, and which I hope you will forget.”

This was a great concession which Bertha received graciously, and the two were on the best of terms when they entered Louie’s room. Louie had improved rapidly during the week, and was sitting in an easy-chair by the window, clad in a most becoming tea-gown fashioned at Worth’s for the first stages of deep mourning, and looking more like a girl of eighteen than a widow of twenty-five. Notwithstanding her husband’s assertion that black would not become her, she had never been half so lovely as she was in her weeds, and her face was never so fair as when framed in her little crêpe bonnet and widow’s cap, which sat so jauntily on her golden hair. “Dazzlingly beautiful and altogether irresistible,” was Mrs. Hallam’s opinion as the days went by, and Louie grew more and more cheerful and sometimes forgot to put Fred’s photograph under her pillow, and began to talk less of him and more to Rex, whose attentions she claimed with an air of ownership which would have amused Bertha if she could have put from her the harrowing thought of what might be a year hence, when the grave at Mount Auburn was not as new, or Louie’s loss as fresh, as they were now.

“He cannot help loving her,” she would say to herself, “and I ought to be glad to have her happy with him.”

But she was not glad, and it showed in her face, whose expression Rex could not understand. Louie’s was one of those natures which, without meaning to be selfish, make everything subservient to them. She was always the centre about which others revolved, and Rex was her willing slave, partly because of Thurston’s dying charge, and partly because he could not resist her pretty appealing ways, and would not if he could. But he never dreamed of associating his devotion to her with Bertha’s growing reserve. She was his real queen, without whom his life at Ouchy would have been very irksome, and when she suggested going home, as Dorcas had written urging her to do, he protested against it almost as strenuously as Louie. She must stay, both said, until she had seen something of Europe besides Aix and Ouchy. So she stayed, and they spent September at Interlaken and Lucerne, October in Paris, and November at the Italian lakes, where she received a letter from Grace, written in New York and signed “Grace Haynes Travis.”

“We were married yesterday,” she wrote, “and to-morrow we start for our Florida cabin and orange grove, near Orlando, where so many English people have settled. Mother gave in handsomely at the last, when she found there was no help for it, and I actually won over Lady Gresham, who used to think me a Hottentot, and always spoke of me as ‘that dreadful American girl.’ She invited mother and me to her country house, The Limes, near London, and suggested that Jack and I be married there. But I preferred New York; so she gave us her blessing and a thousand pounds, and mother, Jack, and I sailed three weeks ago in the Umbria. When are you coming home? and how is that pretty little Mrs. Thurston? I saw her once, and thought her very lovely, with that sweet, clinging, helpless manner which takes with men wonderfully. I have heard that she was an old flame of Rex Hallam’s, or rather a young one, but I’ll trust you to win him, although as a widow she is dangerous; so, in the words of the immortal Weller, I warn you, ‘Bevare of vidders.’”

There was much more in the same strain, and Bertha laughed over it, but felt a pang for which she hated herself every time she looked at Louie, whose beauty and grace drew about her many admirers besides Rex, in spite of her black dress and her frequent allusions to “dear Fred, whose grave was so far away.” She was growing stronger every day, and when in December Rex received a letter from his partner saying that his presence in New York was rather necessary, she declared herself equal to the journey, and said that if Rex went she should go too. Consequently the 1st of January found them all in London, where they were to spend a few days, and where Rex brought his aunt a letter, addressed, bottom side up, to “Mrs. Lucy Ann Hallam, Care of Brown, Shipley & Co., London. Post Restant.”

There was a gleam of humor in Rex’s eyes as he handed the missive to his aunt, whose face grew dark as she studied the outside, and darker still at the inside, which was wonderful in composition and orthography. Phineas Jones had been sent out to Scotland by an old man who had some property there and who knew he could trust Phineas to look after it and bring him back the rental, which he had found it hard to collect. After transacting his business, Phineas had decided to travel a little and “get cultivated up, so that his cousin Lucy Ann shouldn’t be ashamed of him.” Had he known where she was, he would have joined her, but, as he did not he wrote her a letter, which had in it a great deal about Sturbridge and the old yellow house and the huckleberry pasture and the circus and the spelling-school, all of which filled Mrs. Hallam with disgust. She was his only blood kin extant, he said, and he yearned to see her, but supposed he must wait till she was back in New York, when he should pay his respects to her at once. And she wouldn’t be ashamed of him, either. He knew what was what, and had hob-a-nobbed with nobility, who took a sight of notice of him. He was going to sail the 10th in the Germanic, he said, and if she’d let him know when she was coming home he’d be in New York on the wharf to meet her.

As it chanced, the Germanic was the boat in which the Hallam party had taken passage for the 10th, but Mrs. Hallam suddenly discovered that she had not seen enough of London; Rex could go, if he must, but she should wait for the next boat of the same line. Rex had no suspicion as to the real reason for her change of mind, and, as a week or two could make but little difference in the business calling him home, he stayed, and when the next boat of the White Star line sailed out of the docks of Liverpool it carried the party of four: Louie, limp and tearful as she thought of her husband who had been with her when she crossed before; Mrs. Hallam, excited and nervous, half expecting to see Phineas pounce upon her, and haunted with a presentiment that he was somewhere on the ship; and Rex, with Bertha, hunting for the spot where he had first seen her and knocked her down.

CHAPTER XVII.
ON THE SEA.

It was splendid weather for a few days, and no one thought of being sea-sick, except Mrs. Hallam, who kept her room, partly because she thought she must, and partly because she could not shake off the feeling that Phineas was on board. She had read the few names on the passenger-list, but his was not among them, nor did she expect to find it, as he had sailed two weeks before. Still, she would neither go on deck nor into the dining-saloon, and without being really ill, kept her berth and was waited upon by Eloïse, who was accompanying her home. Louie, who was still delicate and who always shrank from cold, stayed mostly in the salon. But the briny, bracing sea air suited Bertha, and for several hours each day she walked the deck with Rex, whose arm was sometimes thrown around her when the ship gave a great lurch, or when on turning a corner they met the wind full in their faces. Then there were the moonlight nights, when the air was full of frost and the waves were like burnished silver, and in her sealskin coat and cap, which Louie had bought for her in Geneva, Bertha was never tired of walking and never thought of the cold, for, if the exercise had not kept her warm, the light which shone upon her from Rex’s eyes when she met their gaze would have done so. Perhaps he looked the same at Louie,—very likely he did,—but for the present he was hers alone, and she was supremely happy while the fine, warm weather lasted and with it the companionship on deck. But suddenly there came a change.

Along the western coast of the Atlantic a wild storm had been raging, and when it subsided there it swept towards the east, gathering force as it went, and, joined by the angry winds from every point of the compass, it was almost a cyclone when it reached the Teutonic. But the great ship met it bravely, mounting wave after wave like a feather, then plunging down into the green depths below, then rising again and shaking off the water as if the boiling sea were a mere plaything and the storm gotten up for its pastime. The passengers, who were told that there was no real danger, kept up their courage while the day lasted, but when the night came on and the darkness grew deeper in the salon, where nearly all were assembled, many a face grew white with fear as they listened to the howling of the wind and the roaring of the sea, while wave after wave struck the ship, which sometimes seemed to stand still, and then, trembling in every joint, rose up to meet the angry waves which beat upon it with such tremendous force.

Early in the day Louie had taken to her bed, where she lay sobbing bitterly, while Bertha tried to comfort her. As the darkness was increasing and the noise overhead grew more and more deafening, Rex brought his aunt to the salon, where, like many of the others, she sat down upon the floor, clinging to one of the chairs for support. Then he went to Louie and asked if he should not take her there too.

“No, no! oh, no!” she moaned. “I’d rather die here, if you will stay with me.”

Just then a roll of the ship sent her out upon the floor, where every movable thing in the room had gone before her. After that she made no further resistance, but suffered Bertha to wrap her waterproof around her, and was then carried by Rex and deposited upon one end of a table, where she lay, too much frightened to move, with Rex supporting her on one side and Bertha on the other. And still the storm raged on, and the white faces grew whiter as the question was asked, “What will the end be?” In every heart there was a prayer, and Rex’s mind went back to that night at the Homestead and the prayers for those in peril on the deep. Were they praying now, and would their prayers avail, or would the sad news go to them that their loved one was lying far down in the depths of the sea?

“Oh, if I could save her!” he thought, moving his hand along upon the table until it touched and held hers in a firm clasp which seemed to say, “For life or death you are mine.”

Just then Louie began to shiver, and moaned that she was cold.

“Wait a minute, darling,” Bertha said, “and I will bring you a blanket from our state-room, if I can get there.”

This was no easy task, for the ship was plunging fearfully, and always at an angle which made walking difficult. Twice Bertha fell upon her knees, and once struck her head against the side of the passage, but she reached the room at last, and, securing the blanket, was turning to retrace her steps, when a wave heavier than any which had preceded it struck the vessel, which reeled with what one of the sailors called a double X, pitching and rolling sidewise and endwise and cornerwise all at once. To stand was impossible, and with a cry Bertha fell forward into the arms of Rex Hallam.

“Rex!” she said, involuntarily, and “Bertha!” he replied, showering kisses upon her face, down which the tears were running like rain.

She had been gone so long that he had become alarmed at her absence, and with great difficulty had made his way to the state-room, which he reached in time to save her from a heavy fall. Both were thrown upon the lounge under the window, where they sat for a moment, breathless and forgetful of their danger, Bertha was the first to speak, saying she must go to Louie, but Rex held her fast, and, steadying himself as best he could, drew her face close to his, and said, “This is not a time for love-making, but I may never have another chance, and, if we must die, death will be robbed of half its terrors if you are with me, my darling, my queen, whom I believe I have loved ever since I saw your photograph and thought it was poor Rose Arabella Jefferson.”

He could not repress a smile at the remembrance of that scion of the Jeffersons, but Bertha did not see it. Her head was lying upon his breast, and he was holding to the side of the door to keep from being thrown upon the floor as he urged his suit and then waited for her answer. Against the windows and the dead-lights the waves were dashing furiously, while overhead was a roar like heavy cannonading, mingled with the hoarse shouts of voices calling through the storm. But Rex heard Bertha’s answer, and at the peril of his limbs folded her in his arms and said, “Now we live or die together; and I think that we shall live.”

Naturally they forgot the blanket and everything else as they groped their way back to the door of the salon, where Rex stopped suddenly at the sound of a voice heard distinctly enough for him to know that some one was praying loudly and earnestly, and to know, too, who it was whose clear, nasal tones could be heard above the din without.

“Phineas Jones!” he exclaimed. “Great Cæsar! how came he here?” And he struggled in with Bertha to get nearer to him.

Phineas had been very ill in Liverpool, and when the Germanic left he was still in bed, and was obliged to wait two weeks longer, when he took passage on the same ship with Mrs. Hallam. Even then he was so weak that he did not make up his mind to go until an hour before the ship sailed. As there were few passengers, he had no difficulty in securing a berth, where during the first days of the voyage he lay horribly sea-sick and did not know who were on board. He had been too late for his name to be included in the passenger-list, and it was not until the day of the storm that he learned that Mrs. Hallam and Rex and Bertha were on the ship. To find them at once was his first impulse, but when the cyclone struck the boat it struck him, too, with a fresh attack of sea-sickness, from which he did not rally until night, when he would not be longer restrained. Something told him, he said, that Lucy Ann needed him,—in fact, that they all needed him in the cabin, and he was going there. And he went, nearly breaking his neck. Entering the salon on his hands and knees, he made his way to the end of the table on which Louie lay, and near which Mrs. Hallam was clinging desperately to a chair as she crouched upon the floor. It was at this moment that the double X which had sent Bertha into Rex’s arms struck the ship, eliciting shrieks of terror from the passengers, who felt that the end had come. Steadying himself against a corner of the table, Phineas called out, in a loud, penetrating voice:

“Silence! This is no time to scream and cry. It is action you want. Pray to be delivered, as Jonah did. The captain and crew are doing their level best on deck. Let us do ours here, and don’t you worry. We shall be heard. The Master who stilled the storm on Galilee is in this boat, and not asleep, either, in the hindermost part. If He was, no human could get to Him, with the ship nearly bottom side up. He is in our midst. I know it, I feel it; and you who are too scart to pray, and you who don’t know how, listen to me. Let us pray.”

The effect was electric, and every head was bowed as Phineas began the most remarkable prayer which was ever offered on shipboard. He was in deadly earnest, and, fired with the fervor and eloquence which made him so noted as a class-leader, he informed the Lord of the condition they were in and instructed Him how to improve it. Galilee, he said, was nothing to the Atlantic when on a tear as it was now, but the voice which had quieted the waters of Tiberias could stop this uproar. He presumed some of them ought to be drowned, he said, but they didn’t want to be, and were going to do better. Then he confessed every possible sin which might have been committed by the passengers, who, according to his statement, were about the wickedest lot, take them as a whole, that ever crossed the ocean. There were exceptions, of course. There were near and dear friends of his, and one blood kin, on board, for whom he especially asked aid. He had not looked upon the face of his kinswoman for years, but he had never forgotten the sweet counsel they took together when children in Sturbridge, and he would have her saved anyway. Like himself, she was old and stricken in years, but——

“Horrible!” came in muffled tones from something at his feet, and, looking down, he saw the bundle of shawls, which, in its excitement, had loosened its hold on the chair and was rolling down the inclined plane towards the centre of the room.

Reaching out his long arm, he pulled it back, and, putting his foot against it, went on with what was now a prayer of thanksgiving. Those who have been in a storm at sea like the one I am describing, will remember how quick they were to detect a change for the better, as the blows upon the ship became less frequent and heavy and the noise overhead began to subside.

Phineas was the first to notice it, and, with his foot still firmly planted against the struggling bundle to keep it in place, he exclaimed, in a voice which was almost a shriek:

“We are saved! We are saved! Don’t you feel it? Don’t you hear it?”

They did hear it and feel it, and with glad hearts responded to the words of thanksgiving which Phineas poured forth, saying the answer to his prayer had come sooner than he expected, and acknowledging that his faith had been weak as water. Then he promised a forsaking of their sins, and a life more consistent with the doctrine they professed, for them all, adapting himself as nearly as he could to the forms of worship familiar to the different denominations he knew must be assembled there. For the Presbyterians there was a mention made of foreordination and the Westminster Catechism, for the Baptists, immersion, for the Methodists, sanctification, for the Roman Catholics, the Blessed Virgin; but he forgot the Episcopalians, until, remembering, with a start, Rex and Lucy Ann, he wound up with:

“From pride, vainglory and hypocrisy, good Lord deliver us. Amen.”

The simple earnestness of the man so impressed his hearers that no one thought of smiling at his ludicrous language, and when the danger was really over and they could stand upon their feet, they crowded around him as if he had been their deliverer from deadly peril, while Rex introduced him as his particular friend. This stamped him as somebody, and he at once became a sort of lion. We are all more or less susceptible to flattery, and Phineas was not an exception; he received the attentions with a very satisfied air, thinking to himself that if his recent prayers had so impressed them, what would they say if they could hear him when fully under way at a camp-meeting?

“Where’s your aunt?” he asked Rex, suddenly, while Rex looked round for her, but could not find her.

More dead than alive, Mrs. Hallam had clung to the chair in momentary expectation of going down, never to rise again, and in that awful hour it seemed to her that everything connected with her life had passed before her. The old, yellow house, the grandmother to whom she had not always been kind, the early friends of whom she had been ashamed, the husband she had loved, but whom she had tried so often, all stood out so vividly that it seemed as if she could touch them.

“Everything bad,—nothing good. May God forgive it all!” she whispered more than once, as she lay waiting for the end and shuddering as she thought of the dark, cold waters so soon to engulf her.

In this state of mind she became conscious that some one was standing so close to her that his boots held down a portion of her dress, but she did not mind it, for at that moment Phineas began his prayer, to which she listened intently. She knew it was an illiterate man, that his boots were coarse, that his clothes were saturated with an odor of cheap tobacco, and that he belonged to a class which she despised because she had once been of it. But as he prayed she felt, as she had never felt before, the Presence he said was there with him, and thought nothing of his class, or his tobacco, or his boots. He was a saint, until he spoke of Sturbridge and his blood kin who was old and stricken in years. Then she knew who the saint was, and as soon as it was possible to do so she escaped to her state-room, where Rex found her in a state of great nervous excitement. She could not and would not see Phineas that night, she said. Possibly she might be equal to it in the morning. With that message Phineas, who was hovering around her door, was obliged to be content, but before he retired, every one with whom he talked knew that Mrs. Hallam was his cousin Lucy Ann, whom he used to know in Sturbridge when she was a girl.

CHAPTER XVIII.
ON SEA AND LAND.

Naturally the captain and officers made light of the storm after it was over, citing, as a proof that it was not so very severe, the fact that within four hours after it began to subside the ship was sailing smoothly over a comparatively calm sea, on which the moon and stars were shining as brightly as if it had not so recently been stirred to its depths. The deck had been cleared, and, after seeing Louie in her berth, Bertha went up to join Rex, who was waiting for her. All the past peril was forgotten in the joy of their perfect love, and they had so much to talk about and so many plans for the future to discuss that the midnight bells sounded before they separated.

“It is not very long till morning, when I shall see you again, nor long before you will be all my own,” Rex said, holding her in his arms and kissing her many times before he let her go.

She found Louie asleep, and when next morning Bertha arose as the first gong sounded, Louie was still sleeping, exhausted with the excitement of the previous day. She was evidently dreaming, for there was a smile on her lips which moved once with some word Bertha could not catch, although it sounded like “Rex.”

“I wonder if she cares very much for him,” Bertha thought, with a twinge of pain. “If she does, I cannot give him up, for he is mine,—my Rex.”

She repeated the name aloud, lingering over it as if the sound were very pleasant to her, and just then Louie’s blue eyes opened and looked inquiringly at her.

“What is it about Rex?” she asked, smiling up at Bertha in that pretty, innocent way which children have of smiling when waking from sleep. “Has he been to inquire for me?” she continued; and, feeling that she could no longer put it off, Bertha knelt beside her and told her a story which made the bright color fade from Louie’s face and her lips quiver in a grieved kind of way as she listened to it.

When it was finished she did not say a word, except to ask if it was not very cold.

“I am all in a shiver. I think I will not get up. Tell Martha not to come to me. I do not want any breakfast,” she said, as she turned her face to the wall.

For a moment Bertha lingered, perplexed and pained,—then started to leave the room.

“Wait,” Louie called, faintly, and when Bertha went to her she flung her arms around her neck and said, with a sob, “I am glad for you, and I know you will be happy. Tell Rex I congratulate him. And now go and don’t come back for ever so long. I am tired and want to sleep.”

When she was alone, the little woman buried her face in the pillows and cried like a child, trying to believe she was crying for her husband, but failing dismally. It was for Rex, whom she had held dearer than she knew, and whom she had lost. But with all her weakness Louie had a good deal of common sense, which soon came to her aid. “This is absurd,—crying for one who does not care for me except as a friend. I’ll be a woman, and not a baby,” she thought, as she rung for Martha to come and dress her. An hour later she surprised Bertha and Rex, who were sitting on a seat at the head of the stairs, with a rug thrown across their laps, concealing the hands clasped so tightly beneath it. Nothing could have been sweeter than her manner as she congratulated Rex verbally, and then, sitting down by them, began to plan the grand wedding she would give them if they would wait until poor Fred had been dead a little longer, say a year.

Rex had his own ideas about the wedding and waiting, but he did not express them then. He had settled in his own mind when he should take Bertha, and that it would be from the old house in which he began to have a feeling of ownership.

Meanwhile Mrs. Hallam had consented to see Phineas, whom Rex took to her state-room. What passed at the interview no one knew. It did not last long, and at its close Mrs. Hallam had a nervous headache and Phineas’s face wore a troubled and puzzled expression. He would never have known Lucy Ann, she had altered so, he said. Not grown old, as he supposed she would, but different somehow. He guessed she was tuckered out with fright and the storm. She’d be better when she got home, and then they’d have a good set-to, talking of the old times. He was going to visit her a few days.

This accounted for her headache which lasted the rest of the voyage, so that she did not appear again until they were at the dock in New York. Handing her keys to Rex, she said, “See to my trunks, and for heaven’s sake—keep that man from coming to the house, if you have to strangle him.”

She was among the first to leave the ship, and was driving rapidly home, while Phineas was squabbling with a custom-house officer over some jewelry he had bought in Edinburgh as a present for Dorcas, and an overcoat in London for Mr. Leighton, and which he had conscientiously declared.

“I’m a class-leader,” he said, “and I’d smile to see me lie, and when they asked me if I had any presents I told ’m yes, a coat for the ’Square, and some cangorms for Dorcas, and I swan if they didn’t make me trot ’em out and pay duty, too; and they let more’n fifty trunks full of women’s clothes go through for nothin’. I seen ’m. Where’s Lucy Ann? I was goin’ with her,” he said to Rex, who could have enlightened him with regard to the women’s clothes which “went through for nothin’,” but didn’t.

“Mr. Jones,” he said, buttonholing him familiarly as they walked out of the custom-house, “my aunt has gone home. She is not feeling well at all, and, as the house is not quite in running order, I do not think you’d better go there now. I’ll take you to dine at my club, or, better yet, to the Waldorf, where Mrs. Thurston and Miss Leighton are to stop, and to-morrow we will all go on together, for I’m to see Mrs. Thurston home to Boston, and on my way back shall stop at the Homestead. I am to marry Miss Bertha.”

“You be! Well, I’m glad on’t; but I do want to see Lucy Ann’s house, and I sha’n’t make an atom of trouble. She expects me,” Phineas said, and Rex replied, “I hardly think she does. Indeed, I know she doesn’t, and I wouldn’t go if I were you.”

Gradually the truth began to dawn upon Phineas, and there was a pathos in his voice and a moisture in his eyes as he said, “Is Lucy Ann ashamed of me? I wouldn’t have believed it, and she my only kin. I’d go through fire and water to serve her. Tell her so, and God bless her.”

Rex felt a great pity for the simple-hearted man to whom the glories of a dinner at the Waldorf did not quite atone for the loss of Lucy Ann, whom he spoke of again when after dinner Rex went with him to the hotel, where he was to spend the night.

“I’m an awkward critter, I know,” he said, “and not used to the ways of high society, but I’m respectable, and my heart is as big as an ox.”

Nothing, however, rested long on Phineas’s mind, and the next morning he was cheerful as ever when he met his friends at the station, and committed the unwonted extravagance of taking a chair with them in a parlor car, saying as he seated himself that he’d never been in one before, and that he found it tip-top.

CHAPTER XIX.
“I, REX, TAKE THEE, BERTHA.”

The words were said in the old Homestead about a year from the time when we first saw Bertha walking along the lane to meet her sister and holding in her hand the newspaper which had been the means of her meeting with Rex Hallam. The May day had been perfect then, and it was perfect now. The air was odorous with the perfume of the pines and the apple-blossoms, and the country seemed as fresh and fair as when it first came from the hands of its Creator. The bequest which Fred had made to Bertha, and which he wished he had doubled, had been quadrupled by Louie, who, when Bertha declined to take so much, had urged it upon her as a bridal present in advance. With that understanding Bertha had accepted it, and several changes had been made in the Homestead, both outside and in. Bertha’s room, however, where Rex had once slept, remained intact. This he insisted upon, and it was in this room that he received his bride from the hands of her bridesmaids. It was a very quiet affair, with only a few intimate friends from Worcester and Leicester, and Mrs. Hallam from New York. Bertha had suggested inviting Mrs. Haynes, but Rex vetoed that decidedly. She had been the direct cause of so much humiliation to Bertha that he did not care to keep her acquaintance, he said. But Mrs. Haynes had no intention to be ignored by the future Mrs. Rex Hallam, and one of the handsomest presents Bertha received came from her, with a note of congratulation. Louie and Phineas were master and mistress of ceremonies, Louie inside and Phineas outside, where he insisted upon caring for the horses of those who drove from Worcester and the village.

He’d “smile if he couldn’t do it up ship-shape,” he said, and he came at an early hour, gorgeous in swallowtail coat, white vest, stove-pipe hat, and an immense amount of shirt-front, ornamented with Rhine-stone studs. In his ignorance he did not know that a dress-coat was not just as suitable for morning as evening, and had bought one second-hand at a clothing-store in Boston. He wanted to make a good impression on Lucy Ann, he said to Grace, who had been at the Homestead two or three days, and who, declaring him a most delicious specimen, had hobnobbed with him quite familiarly. She told him she had no doubt he would impress Lucy Ann; and he did, for she came near fainting when he presented himself to her, asking what she thought of his outfit, and how it would “do for high.” She wanted to tell him that he would look far better in his every-day clothes than in that costume, but restrained herself and made some non-committal reply. Since meeting him on the ship she had had time to reflect that no one whose opinion was really worth caring for would think less of her because of her relatives, and she was a little ashamed of her treatment of him. Perhaps, too, she was softened by the sight of the old homestead, which had been her husband’s home, or Grace Travis’s avowal that she wished she had just such a dear codger of a cousin, might have had some effect in making her civil and even gracious to the man who, without the least resentment for her former slight of him, “Cousin Lucy Ann”-ed her continually and led her up to salute the bride after the ceremony was over.

There was a wedding breakfast, superintended by Louie, who, if she felt any regret for the might-have-been, did not show it, and was bright and merry as a bird, talking a little of Fred and a great deal of Charlie Sinclair, whom business kept from the wedding and whose lovely present she had helped select. The wedding trip was to extend beyond the Rockies as far as Tacoma, and to include the Fair in Chicago on the homeward journey. The remainder of the summer was to be spent at the Homestead, where Rex could hunt and fish and row to his heart’s content, if he could not have a fox-hunt. Both he and Bertha wished a home of their own in New York, but Mrs. Hallam begged so hard for them to stay with her for a year at least that they consented to do so.

“You may be the mistress, or the daughter of the house, as you please, only stay with me,” Mrs. Hallam said to Bertha, of whom she seemed very fond.

Evidently she was on her best behavior, and during the few days she stayed at the Homestead she quite won the hearts of both Mr. Leighton and Dorcas, and greatly delighted Phineas by asking him to spend the second week in July with her. In this she was politic and managing. She knew he was bound to come some time, and, knowing that the most of her calling acquaintance would be out of town in July, she fixed his visit at that time, making him understand that he could not prolong it, as she was to join Rex and Bertha in Chicago on the 15th. Had he been going to visit the queen, Phineas could not have been more elated or have talked more about it.

“I hope I sha’n’t mortify Lucy Ann to death,” he said, and when in June Louie came for a few days to the Homestead, he asked her to give him some points in etiquette, which he wrote down and studied diligently, till he considered himself quite equal to cope with any difficulty, and at the appointed time packed his dress-suit and started for New York.

This was Monday, and on Saturday Dorcas was surprised to see him walking up the avenue from the car.

He’d had a tip-top time, he said, and Lucy Ann did all she could to make it pleasant.

“But, my!” he added, “it was so lonesome and grand and stiff; and didn’t Lucy Ann put on the style! But I studied my notes, and held my own pretty well. I don’t think I made more than three or four blunders. I reached out and got a piece of bread with my fork, and saw a thunder-cloud on Lucy Ann’s face; and I put on my dress-suit one morning to drive to the Park, but took it off quicker when Lucy Ann saw it. Dress-coats ain’t the thing in the morning, it seems. I guess they ain’t the thing for me anywhere. But my third blunder was wust of all, though I don’t understand it. Between you ’n’ I, I don’t believe Lucy Ann has much company, for not a livin’ soul come to the house while I was there, except one woman with two men in tall boots drivin’ her. Lucy Ann was out and the nigger was out, and I went to the door to save the girls from runnin’ up and down stairs so much. I told her Mis’ Hallam wa’n’t to home, and I rather urged her to come in and take a chair, she looked so kind of disappointed and tired, and curi’s, too, I thought, as if she wondered who I was; so I said, ‘I’m Mis’ Hallam’s cousin. You better come in and rest. She’ll be home pretty soon.’

“‘Thanks,’ she said, in a queer kind of way, and handed me a card for Lucy Ann, who was tearin’ when I told her what I’d done. It was the servants’ business to wait on the door when Peters was out, she said, and on no account was I to ask any one in if she wasn’t there. That ain’t my idea of hospitality. Is’t yours?”

Dorcas laughed, and said she supposed city ways were not exactly like those of the country. Phineas guessed they wasn’t, and he was glad to get where he could tip back in his chair if he wanted to, and eat with his knife, and ask a friend to come in and sit down.

A few days later Dorcas and her father, with Louie, started for Chicago to join the Hallams. For four weeks they reveled in the wonders of the beautiful White City. After that Mrs. Hallam returned to her lonely house in New York, while Rex and Bertha and Louie went back to the old Homestead. There they spent the remainder of the summer, and there Bertha lingered until the hazy light of October was beginning to hang over the New England hills and the autumnal tints to show in the woods. Then Rex, who had spent every Sunday there, took her to her new home, where her reception was very different from what it had been on her first arrival. Then she was only a hired companion, dining with the housekeeper and waiting on the fourth floor back for her employer to give her an audience. Now she was a petted bride, the daughter of the house, with full authority to go where she pleased, do what she pleased, and make any change she pleased, from the drawing-room to the handsome suite which had been fitted up for her. But she made no change, except in Rex’s sleeping-apartment, where she did take the pictures of ballet-dancers, rope-walkers, and sporting men from the mirror-frame, and substituted in their place those of her father, Dorcas, and Grace. She would have liked to remove her own picture, with “Rose Arabella Jefferson” written upon it, but Rex interfered. It seemed to him, he said, a connecting link between his bachelor life and the great joy which had come to him, and it should stay there, Rose Arabella and all.

Mr. Leighton and Dorcas have twice visited Bertha in her home, and been happy there because she was so happy. But both were glad to go back to the old house under the apple-trees and the country life which they like best. Bertha, on the contrary, takes readily to the ways of the great city, although she cares but little for the fashionable society that is so eager to take her up, and prefers the companionship of her husband and the quiet of her home to the gayest assemblage in New York. Occasionally however, she may be seen at some afternoon tea, or dinner, or reception, where Mrs. Hallam is proud to introduce her as “my nephew’s wife,” while Mrs. Walker Haynes, always politic and persistent, speaks of her as “my friend, that charming Mrs. Reginald Hallam.”