O. Henry memorial award prize stories of 1923

by Unknown

IV

As he left the Place of the wonderful lights and shades and colours and perfumes, he realized that he could not have been perfectly happy in it. He could not have been perfectly happy, because he now perceived that by the mere act of leaving it behind he had become still happier, and that perfect happiness could only be his when he reached “home” and beheld his loved ones.

When he had been taken from his home to the hospital the buds on the pear trees had been on the point of bursting. The pear trees would be in full bloom now. When he had been taken away the shutters of the house had been taken from their hinges, painted a pleasant apple green and stood in the old carriage house to dry. They would be back on their hinges now, vying in smartness with the two new coats of white paint which the painters had been spreading over the low rambling house itself. How sweet the house would look among the fresh young greens of spring! Perhaps the peewees who came every year had already begun to build in the veranda eaves.

The little river which tumbled over the old mill dam and for a mile flowed tranquilly on with little slipping rushes through his farm, would be very full of water now. It would be roaring and foaming among the rocks at the foot of the dam. The elms which shaded the bridge and the ford beside it would be at their best, before the leaves became worm-eaten and cobwebby. Perhaps one of the cars would be in the ford to its hubs getting washed, with one of the children sitting in the front seat. The dark blue roadster with the special body looked especially gay and sporty in the ford under the shadow of the elms.

He had no more than time to think these things before he had come to the end of his journey.

Home had never looked so sweet or inviting. The garden was bounded on the south by a little brook; and beyond this was a little hill planted with kalmia and many species of native ferns.

It was on the top of this hill that he lighted, and here he paused for a while and filled his eyes with the humble beauty of the home which his earth mind had conceived and achieved.

Beyond the garden carpeted with jonquils and narcissuses between and above graceful pyramids of pear blossoms, the house, low and rambling, with many chimneys, gleamed in the sunlight. It was a heavenly day.

From the hill he could see not only the house, but to the left the garage and beyond that the stable. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, and it seemed queer to him that at that hour and at that season there should be no sign of life anywhere. Surely the gardener and his assistant ought to be at work. He turned a puzzled and indignant glance back upon the garden, and he observed a curious phenomenon.

A strip of soil in the upper left hand corner of the garden was being turned and broken by a spade. Near by a fork was taking manure from a wheelbarrow and spreading it over the roots of a handsome crab apple.

Both the spade and the fork appeared to be performing these meritorious acts without the aid of any human agency.

And Derrick knew at once that McIntyre, the gardener, and Chubb, his assistant, must, since his departure, have sinned in their own eyes, so that they could now no longer show themselves to him, or he to them.

He started anxiously toward the house, but a familiar sound arrested him.

The blue roadster, hitting on all its cylinders, came slowly out of the garage and descended the hill and crossed the bridge and honked its horn for the mill corner and sped off along the county road toward Stamford all by itself.

There was nobody in the roadster. He could swear to that.

And this meant, of course, that Britton, the chauffeur, had done something which he knew that he ought not to have done, and was for ever separated from those who had gone beyond.

When Derrick reached the house he was in an exceedingly anxious state of mind. He stepped into the entrance hall and listened. And heard no sound. He passed rapidly through the master’s rooms downstairs and upstairs. In the sewing room a thread and needle was mending the heel of a silk stocking, but there did not seem to be anybody in the room.

He looked from the window and saw two fishing poles and a tin pail moving eagerly toward the river. The boys, perhaps. Oh, what could they have done to separate themselves from him? The window was open and he called and shouted, but the fishing poles and the tin pail kept on going.

He went downstairs, through the dining room and into the pantry.

His heart stood still.

On tiptoe on the seat of a chair stood his little girl, Ethel. Her hair shone like spun gold. She looked like an angel. And his heart swelled with an exquisite bliss; but before he could speak to her and make himself known, she had reached down something from the next to the top shelf and put it in her mouth.

At that instant she vanished.

He lingered for a while about the house and gardens, but it was no use. He knew that. They had all sinned in some way or other, and therefore he was indeed dead to them, and they to him.

Back of the stables were woods. From these woods there came a sudden sound of barking. The sound was familiar to Derrick, and thrilled him.

“If I can hear Scoop,” he thought, “Scoop can hear me.” He whistled long and shrill.

Not long after a little black dog came running, his stomach to the ground, his floppy silk ears flying. With a sob, Derrick knelt and took the little dog in his arms.

“Oh, Mumsey!” called Ethel. “Do come and look at Scoopie. He’s doing all his tricks by himself, just as if somebody was telling him to do them.”

The two looked from a window, and saw the little dog sit up and play dead and roll over—all very joyously—and jump as if through circled arms. Then they saw his tail droop and his head droop and his left hind leg begin to scratch furiously at his ribs. He always had to do that when anyone scratched his back in a particular place.

When Derrick returned to the Place of the wonderful lights and shadows he was very unhappy and he knew that he must always be unhappy.

“Instead of coming to this Place,” he said to himself, “knowing what I know now, I might just as well have gone to Hell.”

A voice, sardonic and on the verge of laughter, answered him.

“That’s just what you did.”

SHADOWED
By MARY SYNON
From Red Book

ALL the way down from the Capitol, Stroude knew that he was being followed. From the moment he had come out of the Senate office building upon the plaza, fragrant with forsythia in the March moonlight, he had been conscious of the man who trailed his sauntering footsteps. He had led him down a winding way past the Marshall statue and into the deserted wideness of Pennsylvania Avenue. He had thought to lose him when he stepped into the lobby of a big hotel, pausing for a word there with men he knew, men who made their greetings casual or portentous, according to their knowledge of the turning of the inner wheels of Washington; but he found the other man some twenty paces behind him as he crossed Lafayette Square, and his amused acceptance of the situation curdled to annoyance at the possibility of having to deal with an irresponsible crank determined on an interview.

The day had been more than ordinarily difficult, one of the hardest Stroude had known since the turmoiled times of war. He had suffered under the sense of impending crisis knowing that his future hung on to-morrow’s balance; and his temper, always drawn like a taut bow, had been ready to snap a hundred times through the afternoon’s battle in the Senate chamber. Now, at the doorway of his house, that limestone palace of Georgian severity which loomed in stately classicism among the older residences of the neighbourhood, he poised the arrow of his wrath as he turned to confront the man behind him. “What do you want?” he snapped at him.

The man came nearer. By the dim light of the hall lantern Stroude saw his shambling listlessness, and his hand went to his pocket with a thought of relief that the other sought only alms. The man, seeing the gesture, put up his hand arrestingly. “Remember me?” he inquired, almost too nonchalantly. His voice for all its soft slurring of the consonants, was threaded with a fibre of steel which edged the menace of his quiet poise.

“Why not?” Stroude asked sharply, his shoulders lifting as if for defence.

“Then I reckon you’re none too glad to see me?”

“You haven’t come here to ask me that. You might as well tell me first as last what you want from me.”

“Nothing you’ll call the sheriff about,” the man told him. He faced the Senator squarely, revealing even in the half-darkness a certain racial resemblance to him which made them equals on the instant. For all Stroude’s grooming and the stranger’s shabbiness, they were strangely akin in their antagonism, bound not by family ties but by broader, more basic associations. Each of them, tall, thin, lithe, gazed on the other with unflinching blue eyes. Each of them kept watch with wildcat tenacity. From each of them emanated the recklessness of personal courage that takes no count of law beyond its own code. In their sudden springing to guard, the predominant characteristics of the two men, the Senator and the shambling shadower, flared up stronger than their setting, and although the lights of the White House gleamed golden across the Square, they were mountaineers facing each other in the hate of vendetta. The years and the place fell away from Stroude, leaving him stripped to the bone of his clan’s creed.

“We’ve settled our own affairs before,” Stroude said. “We can do it now.”

As if the words gave him advantage, the other man seized them swiftly. “Let’s do it, then,” he replied. “I’ve come here to get you to do something you won’t want to do. Will you fight me for it?”

“Not till I know the stake.”

“Didn’t you get her letter?”

“Whose?”

“There’s only one woman I’d be coming to you about, I reckon.”

“I’ve never heard from her since the day she went back to you. That was twenty-six years ago last May.”

“The fourteenth.”

“Why should she have written me now?”

“She’s dying.” The man’s voice sounded in a softer timbre. “A month ago the doctor from the moonlight school told her that she had only a little while to live. She’s been pining ever since, not about dying, for she’s brave as any man, but for something I couldn’t guess until she told me. She wants to see you. She wrote you a letter, but she was afraid you might not get it, and so she sent me. ‘Tell him,’ she said, ‘that I won’t rest easy in my grave over there on the side of Big Stony, if he don’t come to me before I die. He told me once,’ she said, ‘that he’d come when I’d call. I’m calling now.’ That’s her message.” His tone lifted from its softer depth. “Are you coming to her?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve a thousand duties. I’ve—— It’s ridiculous.”

“Then you’re not coming?”

“How can I, Martin? I’m not my own man. I’m here for my state, for my country. I have work to do. I can’t let any personal obligation interfere with it. Besides——”

“It couldn’t hurt your wife, not even if she knew it. And Dell’s dying.”

“I’m sorry, Martin. I am, honestly. Will you tell Dell that I——”

“I’ll tell her nothing but that you wouldn’t come. Nothing else matters. And I think you owe her that, at least.”

“But——”

The other man turned away, crossed the street, and walked back across the Square. Stroude could see him swinging on between the bushes, and the remembrance of another trail which Boyce Martin would climb rushed over him. More plainly than the crocus-bordered path to the White House shone the moonlit path up to the cabin on Pisgah where Dell Martin used to wait for his own coming, the cabin where she now waited for death. The memory of that way, twisting among laurel and rhododendrons, stabbed him more sharply than had Boyce Martin’s words; but with the old habit of setting aside disturbing thoughts, he tried to thrust the memory from his brain as he unlocked the door of his house.

A servant, coming forward at the sound of his key in the lock, gave him a message with a careful precision which bespoke respect for the executive management that directed his tasks. “Mrs. Stroude wishes you to be told, sir, that she is at the theatre and will see you when she comes in. And she made an appointment, sir, for Senator Manning and two other gentlemen to see you to-night on their way from the Pan-American dinner. She said it was very important.”

He thanked the man and went upstairs to the library, switching on light after light to dispel its shrouding gloom. He tried to read, but the pages of the periodicals he took up ran into dullness. He chewed his cigar savagely, finding it flavourless. He strove to concentrate on his impending interview with Manning and his companions, realizing its portent, but he could not focus his attitude. Impatiently he thrust away the work which always waited his attention on his homecoming—findings of committees, digests of newspaper editorials, confidential reports on public interests in various measures, letters from men who had constituted themselves his captains. He frowned at the framed photograph of his wife, the only decoration she had placed upon his table; and he grimaced at the portrait of himself which Rhoda had set above the immaculate mantel. He was weary with work, he told himself, crossing the room and flinging wide open the windows which looked down on the Square.

The thrill of the night wind, prematurely warm as it crossed the Potomac, and burdened with elusive odours of a Southern March, caught him unawares. For a moment he stood drinking deeply of the immortal beauty of the recurrent springtime. Memories he had thought long dead and buried went over him. Pictures more vivid than those on the walls framed themselves in the darkened greenery of the little park: a girl in a faded gingham dress waving him welcome on a hill road, a girl with eyes brighter than mountain stars telling him her love, flinging away all thought or care of herself, giving him everything and glorying in the gift, even to the last sacrifice of her departure from him. Not as she was now, Boyce Martin’s wife dying in that far-away little community of his native hills, but as she had been when she had defied their little world to come to him, Stroude saw her. In the thought of what she had been to him, he flung out his arms. “After all these years,” he muttered, “after all these years!” And as if drawn by a power stronger than his will, he crossed to the table, and picking up the telephone, called the information desk of the Union Station. “What time does the Mountain Mail on the C. & O. go out now?” he asked. “One o’clock? One-fifteen.” He hung up the receiver and saw again the photograph of his wife.

He studied it with suddenly arrested attention. What would she think of his desire to leave Washington at a time when, according to her fundamental ideas, his presence was imperative for the fulfillment of his ambition? Or was it her ambition? He gazed at the pictured countenance, seeing the determination of the uplifted chin, meeting the challenge in the steady eyes. Rhoda was certainly her father’s daughter. Old Peter Armond’s indomitable will and shrewdly calculating brain lived on in her. For the fourteen—or was it fifteen?—years of their marriage she had managed Stroude’s career as cleverly as ever her father had directed one of his lieutenants, and he had acknowledged his debt to her with a certain attitude of amusement. Now, facing the last triumphal stage of its development, he felt an angry distaste of Rhoda’s manœuvring. It might bring him, he conceded, to the goal but he wished he might have travelled a simpler path.

He had been an obscure Congressman of fiery political rectitude when he had met Rhoda Armond. She, and her group, and the circumstances the Armond connection had conjured for him, had made him into a statesman. Or was it only that they had made it possible for him to plant his own standards on the heights? At any rate, he owed her something, he thought. She was his wife, even though her attitude toward him was that of a director of destinies. She had given him, after all, what he had desired from her. She had made the upward road smooth, and she had dowered him with loyal faith in his ability. It wasn’t fair to compare her attitude toward him with Dell’s. He had never given to Rhoda what he had given Dell. Poor little Dell! But what good could he do her now by going to her? Twenty-five years would have changed her as they had changed him. They had had their day, and the sun of it had set long since. “I won’t go; I can’t,” he said, and turned back to the work on his desk, not looking up until his wife entered the room.

She came, a tall, consciously beautiful woman, bringing with her an aroma of power as subtle and as pervasive as the perfume of her toilet. She gave to Stroude the greeting of a perfunctory kiss on his brow, and stood off for his admiration. It was, however, not the product of her personality as much as her satisfaction in the work which struck him as he watched her. Rhoda’s thought of herself as well as of him was that of a sculptor of his masterpieces. Stroude accepted it with the affectionate tolerance of a long marital relationship, feeling somehow sorrier for Rhoda than she would ever feel for herself, since she would never know what she had missed from life. “I was playing your game to-night,” she told him.

“Isn’t it yours too?” he smiled.

“In a way, yes,” she acknowledged, “but this involved real sacrifice and I want reward. I went to the theatre with the Covingers.”

“Was the play deadly?”

“No, but the Covingers are.”

“He isn’t a bad sort, and——”

“Oh, I know that he’ll have the delegation from his state, and that it’s one of the big states; but oh, my dear, have you ever had to listen to his wife?”

“She isn’t so terrible, Rhoda.”

“Oh, of course, if you will look at people as characters rather than as social factors, you won’t see the awfulness of the Mrs. Covingers of Washington. But really——”

“Did Manning hint at why he had to see me to-night?”

“At nothing but the importance of seeing you. He is bringing he said, Mr. Laflin and Senator Wilk.”

“He probably said Senator Wilk and Mr. Laflin, but you know the field well enough to put them in the order of their importance. Laflin’s the new factor, a shrewd wolf raised in a wild forest.”

“Does it mean”—she leaned forward, tapping the table with her fan in eagerness—“that they are going to ask you to take the nomination?”

“They haven’t the entire giving of it, my dear.”

“Don’t be silly, Burton. You know that they are the architects of presidential nominations.”

“But even architects——”

“Oh, Burt, don’t quibble. You know that you’re the logical man for the place. You’re squarely based in party policies——”

“Safe, and steady.” His tone was whimsical.

“But picturesque enough to be a good campaigner.”

“Barefoot boy from the mountains. Good American stock with fine traditions. Reads rhetorically, doesn’t it?”

“And a border state gives you strategic advantage.”

“Some one has coached you well.”

“I was coached before I ever knew you, Burt dear. My father taught us politics as religiously as my mother taught us sewing. It wasn’t as practical, perhaps, as yours, but——”

“There haven’t been many men more practical in their politics than Peter Armond,” Stroude said dryly.

“Even if he did grow wealthy,” his daughter defended, “you know how high he kept his standards.”

“I can guess,” Stroude said, but his tone gave her no handle to catch for controversy, and she swung into off-side statement. “Mrs. Covinger let slip something that may be vital to us,” she told him.

“If it’s vital, she let it slip with due deliberation,” he declared. “Don’t underestimate her brains, Rhoda, even if she wasn’t raised by the Armond code. What did she say?”

“I don’t believe I’ll tell you.”

“Yes, you will.”

“We do run in double harness, don’t we? Well, she said that Covinger wasn’t going back to New York until to-morrow night, as there was a tremendously important conference at noon to-morrow. Seven men will be there, and they will decide the fate of the nation. That’s exactly what she said. She’s bombastic, you know.”

“Seven? Then they’re letting Covinger in?”

“You knew about it?”

“Not that it would be to-morrow.”

“Is that why Senator Manning is coming to-night?”

“Probably.”

“Then that means——” Her voice broke in excitement.

“That our fate hangs in the balance.”

“Does it?”

“It looks like it.” He smiled at her through the smoke of his cigar. Her eyes shone with myriad points of light. “Not planning what you’ll wear at the inauguration, are you?” he teased her.

“No,” she said, “but wondering what you’ll say. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Don’t count your chickens yet, Rhoda,” he warned her. “We, both of us, know the thousand slips between the cup of consideration and the lip of nomination. We’ve gone through it all for other offices.”

“But we’ve won every time,” she said solemnly. “You’ve never been beaten, Burt. Don’t you see what an advantage that is, now? You’ve been going up, and up, and up.”

“The Senate’s a rather high plateau, at that.”

“But not the high mountain. Oh, Burt, think of it! It seems almost unbelievable, and yet I’ve always known you were destined for it. I knew you’d be great. Why, even in those first days here, you promised it. You knew it, too. You had the look of a man who was dedicated to something beyond the immediate, the look of one who is going to travel far and high. I believe that was one of the reasons why I loved you. And you——” She leaned over the table, and spread out the brilliant feathers of her fan, gazing at their splendour and not at her husband as she went on: “Did you love me when you married me?”

“Why else do men marry women?” he countered, letting the smoke veil his eyes.

“To put other women out of their lives, sometimes,” she said.

“Well?” He drew hard on the cigar.

“I never knew until to-day who she was,” she said. “I opened a letter by mistake. You may see from the envelope how easy it was for me to think it was addressed to me when I found it in my mail. It was directed merely to Washington, and the post office sent it to the house here.”

“I quite understand,” he said, and held out his hand for Dell Martin’s letter.

His wife drew it from the gay bag she had borne, and gave it to him. For a moment he looked at the pitiful missive, contrasting it with the appointments of the table before him.

“She’s dying,” Rhoda said, “and she asks you to go to her.”

“Yes,” he said, “I know it.”

“But——”

“How did I know? Her husband followed me down from the Hill to-night. He demanded that I return with him.”

“Then she married, after——”

“She was married,” he said, “when I met her.”

“Oh!” She snapped shut the great fan, twisting its tortoise-shell handle between her lithe fingers. “When was that?”

“Before I knew you.” He sank down into his chair, staring forward as if he were a judge considering a decision. “I was twenty-two years old, teaching school in the mountains and studying law with old Judge McLaurin, when I met Dell Martin. She had been married to Boyce against her will, as plenty of the girls in the hills are married. She was lonely and wretched, and lovelier than a wild rose. I was young and reckless. I fell in love with her and I made her love me. Boyce found it out. He drew me into a fight and I won it. He shot me then. Dell came to nurse me and I wouldn’t let her go. Boyce wouldn’t get a divorce and she couldn’t, but she stayed with me. We had two years of utter happiness. I’d have gone through hell to win them.”

A stick of the tortoise-shell handle of the fan broke in Rhoda’s hands. “But you left her?”

“No,” he said. “She left me. She saw before I did that it couldn’t go on. She saw in me the ambition that I thought I had buried in my love for her. She knew that if I stayed with her, I’d never be anything but a miserable shyster, living from hand to mouth, despising myself and all I did, coming perhaps in time to hate her because she had been the cause of my degradation. She went to Judge McLaurin, and asked him to tell her the truth. He told her, old Covenanter that he was. Then she went up the mountain to Boyce and asked him if he wanted her to come back to him. She knew that it was the only action I’d consider final. He told her to come. She told me that she was leaving me. I pleaded with her all that night, but she went with the dawn. I couldn’t hold her. I went up Pisgah with her till we came to the trail to Boyce’s cabin. We could see the wood smoke curling up above the masses of shining green leaves and pink clusters of the laurel. ‘You’re going away from me,’ she said, ‘far away, and you’ll climb a higher mountain than Pisgah.’ I begged her to come with me, but she shook her head. ‘I’m giving you up for your sake,’ she told me. ‘But you need me,’ I pleaded. ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘But some day I shall, and then I’ll call you. And no matter where you are, you’ll come, won’t you, Burt?’ I promised her that I would. The last I saw of her was as she climbed the trail to Boyce’s cabin. From that day to this”—he touched the crumpled little white letter—“she has sent me no word.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” Rhoda said, her voice not quite steady, “that a woman may live with a man through long years and never really know him at all?”

“Should I have told you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I’d have married you, even if you had. It’s not deception, perhaps, when you’ve never seen her nor written to her since you married me; and yet—— Are you going to her, Burt?”

“To-morrow’s the conference. I must be there if I am to be the man chosen.”

“Do you want to go?”

“I wonder,” he mused, “if you’ll understand me when I tell you that, other things being equal, I should go to-night. It’s with no sense of failing you, and with no idea of helping her, but I promised her—that I’d come if she called.”

“Even if there weren’t the conference,” Rhoda said, “you’re a marked man now. You couldn’t go back to a little village in the mountains without it being known and the reason for it blazoned. It wouldn’t do, would it?” She could not quite succeed in making her tone judicial. Her own eagerness palpitated back of the assumed impartiality. “You’ve wanted the presidency too long to throw away the chance of it.”

“I’ve never wanted it,” he said.

“You don’t mean,” she demanded, her vexation rising into view, “that I’ve urged you to seek something you haven’t desired?”

“It’s more complex than that,” he shrugged. “I suppose it’s simply that I married the Armond hope as well as you. Old Peter set a standard for your family which has kept you all up on your toes. If the dead see, he must chuckle sometimes over its way of working.”

“Why?” she flared, letting her annoyance catch at a point of difference less vital than the main issue. “He gave his whole service to his country. He was one of the really great men of his generation, wasn’t he? You’ve never known my father as I knew him. You’ve always let yourself be influenced by the demagogic attacks on him. You’ve thought that because he made a great fortune he couldn’t be an idealist. Haven’t you seen that, if he had been a materialist, he wouldn’t have trained his family as he did? Why, it’s been his torch that I’ve tried to keep alight, and if I have done anything for you, Burton, it has been by that torch’s flame.”

“You’ve done a very great deal, Rhoda,” he said. “I’m not questioning the number or the brightness of the candles you’ve burned in my game. I’m only questioning the value of the game itself. Power’s like money. If you give up all else to possess it, then it possesses you.”

“But——”

“I know. I should have chosen long ago. I’m not turning back now. I owe you that, I think. If I’m anything at all beyond a struggling lawyer in a little city——” He broke off suddenly as the young servant came to the library curtains.

“Senator Manning and two other gentlemen,” he announced.

They came almost on his heels, three men with the aspect of dignitaries: Manning tall, thin, almost cadaverous, with the eye and the hand of a Richelieu; Wilk heavy, ponderous, inscrutable as a great Buddha; Laflin, a blend of college professor and Wall Street lawyer, hiding a predatory keenness behind horn-rimmed spectacles. Characteristically, Stroude felt, they fell into place, Wilk into the nearest easy chair, Manning into an Italian seat which put him in the centre of a softly lighted stage, and Laflin back in the shadows. After a moment of casual conversation Rhoda rose to leave them. Stroude halted her. “I have an idea,” he said, “that these gentlemen have come to me on an errand which concerns you as well as myself.—Do you mind if she stays?”

“Not at all,” said Manning suavely. Laflin nodded, and old man Wilk grunted assent. Rhoda went over beyond Laflin as far outside the group as she could, and just out of her husband’s line of vision; but he turned his chair a little, that he might encompass her in his sight as Manning began to speak.

“It makes it a little easier for us,” he said, “that you have guessed something of our mission.”

“I couldn’t help knowing,” Stroude swung back, “when every other man in the Senate has known it for days.”

“Not definitely,” boomed Wilk. “There’s always talk, of course, and often more smoke than fire.”

“Sometimes it’s only a screen for the protection of a real issue,” Manning went on, “but in this case the fire is burning. You know, I am sure, that the conference to determine the best candidate for the next term of the presidency is to be held here in Washington to-morrow.”

“At noon,” smiled Stroude.

“Your information,” Manning said, “is speedy as well as accurate. The time was not determined until seven o’clock this evening. Seven men know it.”

“And their wives,” cut in Laflin, peering at Rhoda.

“We have canvassed the field thoroughly before coming to you,” Manning continued with his air of authoritative spokesmanship. “We have eliminated, for one reason or another, all the men who have been under consideration. Bannister is too old. Maxwell is too radical. Vandringham is too theatrical. Stearns is too variable. Durham is too light. Landreau lacks the necessary tradition. Penn comes from the wrong location. Jarvis jumped the party. The process brings us to you.”

“How about Corliss?”

“I don’t mind telling you,” Manning said, “that Carmichael is fighting desperately for Corliss, and that, without Covinger’s help, he might be able to swing the conference. Mr. Laflin, Senator Wilk, and I have never swerved from our determination to have you. Carmichael has Bennett and Franklin with him. Covinger is the determining vote. You have him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain. He’s attending on Parker’s proxy. We won that point this afternoon. He’s solidly with you.”

“Even against Corliss? Corliss is from his state.”

“Even against him.”

“Why?”

“Well, it seems that Corliss has an old scandal against him which frightens Covinger. He’s afraid that it might make an election issue. By the way—— You’re not interested in these affairs, Mrs. Stroude?”

“Very vitally,” she said, “and there’s nothing you need fear to discuss before me.”

Manning cleared his throat, and old man Wilk stirred uneasily in his chair. Laflin’s mobile mouth twisted.

“Go on,” said Stroude. “What’s the charge?”

“Carmichael says,” Manning stated, “that there’s an old story back in your own state, Stroude, that might explode. We’ve all known you a good many years, all of us but Laflin, and we’ve never heard a whisper of it. I have told him that I do not believe it. So has Senator Wilk.”

“What’s the story?” Stroude’s fingers, lighting a match, did not tremble.

“Well, if you insist——”

“I do.”

“Carmichael says that you stole another man’s wife.”

“There was no theft about it. She came with me. Later she went back to her husband. I left the place, started to practise law, and married. My wife never heard the story until to-night.” He looked down at Dell Martin’s letter, not yet read by him, topping the documents on the table in front of him. “It’s an old story,” he said, “and one not likely to explode unless——”

“Unless what?” Laflin demanded from the gloom.

“Unless I choose to revive it by an overt act,” Stroude retorted. “It all happened more than twenty-five years ago in a tiny community in the mountains. I know the people there. They’re my kind, my stock. They won’t talk to strangers coming in. There’s only one way the newspapers could get the story. I’d have to lead them to it.”

“That’s true,” old man Wilk grunted. “I know the mountains.”

“Then it’s settled,” Manning said with evident relief. “I fancy a story as old as that, cut off altogether by the time between, could not be a very appalling Banquo’s ghost.” He arose a little wearily. “You’ll be at the conference to-morrow?” He named the time and place. “It’s necessary that you should be. Without you, Covinger may switch. You may have to combat Carmichael directly. You’ll be ready?”

“If I’m—if it’s necessary,” Stroude said.

The other two men stood up. Wilk unwieldily, Laflin with quick ease, smiling at Stroude as he held out his hand. “This was a real star-chamber session,” he said, “according to the best rules of old Peter Armond. Wouldn’t the old pirate have loved to sit in a ten-minute game of four men who decided the next president?”

“What do you mean?” Rhoda’s voice rang out in challenge, and Manning and Wilk rushed to speech to head off Laflin, but he went on in almost boyish unconcern: “Old Peter trained me, you know, and I’ve always had a soft spot for him in my heart, although I’ve known what a wolf in sheep’s clothing he was. We have to hand it to him, though, that with all his grafting and his materialism, he was a great party builder. He was the first of the Warwicks in American national life. We’re just rattling around in his shoes, but we’ll do our best to put you over.”

He moved off, almost pushed by Manning’s eagerness to depart, but his voice seemed to linger in the room after the three of them had gone. Stroude sat toying with a paper-knife. Rhoda, deep in the shadows, did not stir. A clock in the hall boomed twelve. Stroude, sighing, put his hand over Dell Martin’s letter. Then Rhoda spoke. “Is Mr. Laflin telling the truth about my father,” she asked Stroude, “or what he thinks is the truth?”

“The truth.”

“That he wasn’t an idealist—a patriot?”

“Well, if he was——”

“I understand. And you’ve known it always?”

“Since before I knew you.”

“Then do you mean”—she came back to the chair beside the table—“that through all these years my standards have meant nothing to you? That you have known them to be false?”

“They aren’t false,” he said. “The standards are true enough.”

“But the man who gave them to me wasn’t?”

“Well, he didn’t live up to the code.”

“Your own code?”

“I’ve tried to hold to it.”

“The one Judge McLaurin taught you?”

“The very one. The one Judge Foxwell taught him. He got it, I believe, from John Marshall. Don’t think about it, Rhoda. Those old boys lived in different days. Sometimes I think that I’m an anachronism.” He sought to smile at her, but the smile faded before her intensity. “Don’t let a chance word of Laflin’s bother you,” he counselled. “He didn’t know you, of course, as your father’s daughter, or he’d have cut out his tongue before saying what he did.”

“It doesn’t matter who said it,” she declared. “It’s not that alone that hurts; it’s the knowledge that I’ve meant so little to you that cuts deep—now. I used to think, Burt, even when I knew that you didn’t love me, that I was giving you something fine and splendid. I let myself believe that the Armond tradition was the beacon which was lighting your way. I thought that if I couldn’t give you anything else, I was at least giving you that torch. And now I find out that the light I was holding for you was only marsh fire. You’ve never needed me!” Her voice rose to accusation.

“Oh, yes,” he countered, but he could not put verity into his tone.

“No,” she said. “You don’t owe me anything for the playing of the game. I’ve loved that for itself.”

“But you thought you were giving me the other——”

“And I wasn’t. It’s really a joke, isn’t it? A buccaneer teaching his family the Golden Rule, and the family passing it on!”

“It isn’t a joke, Rhoda. I’ve always taken it in the measure of your intention.”

“And been sorry for me?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never sought pity.”

“None of us do.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” she mused, “that one woman who loved you set you free, so that another woman whom you didn’t love might take away that freedom?”

“I’ve had as much freedom as most men,” he said, but his eyes went back to the crumpled missive. Rhoda’s glance, following his, saw its significance. “Read it,” she challenged him. He hesitated an instant, as if doubting his desire to read it before her watchfulness, then drew the letter from its envelope.

Pale tracing on common paper met his gaze. “Burt,” he read, “you’re a great man now, and maybe you’ve forgotten me. I’ve never forgotten you. Every morning and every night I’ve prayed for you. Boyce has been good to me, better than I deserved; but oh, Burt, all that my life has been since I left you is just a hope that eternity will bring us together again. I used to believe it would, but I’m getting afraid, now that it’s coming near. Won’t you come to me for just one hour before I go? You told me once that hell wouldn’t keep you if I——”

Before the pathos of the call something in Stroude’s soul trembled. He didn’t love Dell now, he told himself as he came to the end of the page. He hadn’t loved her in twenty years. There was no thrill of remembered passion rising from the white page to stir his heart, but there was something deeper, more poignant than romance in the plea which this woman in the mountains had sent him across time and distance. Through those long years she had never wavered in her belief in him and in the promise he had made to her. Out of the depths of his spirit he had told her that he would come to her if she should ever need him. It was a promise given not only to the woman who had heard and heeded it, but to the God of his faith and his fathers. If he failed to keep it, no matter what the cost, he would be violating more than an old love. He would be tearing down his own code. Through whatever glory might come to him he would know himself as a man who had failed in the one virtue on which he had always prided himself, the keeping of his word. It was an oath he had taken to Dell Martin, just as he would take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States if—if he climbed the mountain of Rhoda’s vision!

Realization of the immediacy of his problem came to him with the sight of his wife’s fan, broken, lying beyond the letter in his hand. He looked up to find Rhoda’s eyes studying him. But he must not fail her, he told himself, snatching at the straw of conventionality in the current of emotion. The very fact that he had not given her love put him under obligation to her. Because of her, because of the expectations she had harboured for him, because of the time and thought and labour she had spent for the advancement she had thought he sought, because of her very disillusionment now, he could not fail her. He must go to the conference, even if it meant the breaking of a vow he had made before the altar of his one great love. It was part of the price, he reasoned, that all men pay for power; but he felt that something within him was dying as he turned the page of Dell Martin’s letter.

“—if I called for you,” he picked up the thread. “That was why I didn’t call when I needed you before, when our boy was born. I couldn’t let you know about him. You’d never have let me go if you’d known. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? And oh, Burt, I need you so! If you’ll only hold my hand again, I won’t fear the crossing. And perhaps when you come to die, you’ll find the going easier if you have the memory of this hour you’ll give me. Won’t you come?” It was signed waveringly, “Dell.”

He folded it back into the envelope, and put it in his pocket. “You aren’t going?” Rhoda asked him, her voice strangely strained.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m going.”

“But to-morrow——”

“It’s the long years afterward I’m thinking of,” he told her.

“And the nomination——”

“Sometimes the things we put out of our lives,” he said, “are the only things we really keep.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I can’t understand you at all to-night, Burton. Why should a man give up the highest honour a nation can give him——”

“There are other kinds of honour, Rhoda.”

“To go to a woman he hasn’t seen for twenty-five years?”

“She is the——” he began, then halted quickly in the fear of the hurt his word might give her.

“I understand,” she said.

She picked up her broken fan, and moved toward the door, but before she reached it, turned back. Her face was stonily calm. “Shall I telephone Senator Manning in the morning that you will not be there?” she asked him.

“If you will,” he said.

As his car bore him past the shadowy white pile on the other side of the Square, Stroude sighed. A man does not live with a dream—even the dream of another—through season after season without catching some gleam of its radiance; but in Boyce Martin’s straight look as he met him at the train gate, Stroude began to drink of his justification.

“You Stroudes always kept your word,” the other man said.

“We aim to,” said Stroude, unconsciously slipping back into the vernacular of his youth. “It was her letter,” he explained. “I never knew about the boy.”

“I know,” said Martin. “I—I’ve loved him as if he’d been the child I’ve never had. That’s why I came for you.” He held out his hand and Stroude grasped it. “You’re one of us, after all.”

As the train slid past the Potomac and threaded the low pines of the Virginia river lands, Stroude pondered the mountaineer’s tribute. In the light of it he saw the path to Dell Martin’s cabin leading higher than the way across the Square. For the first time in many years he felt the surge of freedom rising in his soul. A thousand shackles fell away as the last lights of Washington slid down on the horizon.

THE ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL
By BOOTH TARKINGTON
From McCall’s

THE new one hundred dollar bill, clean and green, freshening the heart with the colour of springtime, slid over the glass of the teller’s counter and passed under his grille to a fat hand, dingy on the knuckles, but brightened by a flawed diamond. This interesting hand was a part of one of those men who seem to have too much fattened muscle for their clothes: his shoulders distended his overcoat; his calves strained the sprightly checked cloth, a little soiled, of his trousers; his short neck bulged above the glossy collar. His hat, round and black as a pot and appropriately small, he wore slightly obliqued, while under its curled brim his small eyes twinkled surreptitiously between those upper and nether puffs of flesh that mark the too faithful practitioner of unhallowed gaieties. Such was the first individual owner of the new one hundred dollar bill, and he at once did what might have been expected of him.

Moving away from the teller’s grille, he made a cylindrical packet of bills smaller in value—“ones” and “fives”—then placed round them, as a wrapper, the beautiful one hundred dollar bill, snapped a rubber band over it; and the desired inference was plain: a roll all of hundred dollar bills, inside as well as outside. Something more was plain, too: obviously the man’s small head had a sportive plan in it, for the twinkle between his eye puffs hinted of liquor in the offing and lively women impressed by a show of masterly riches. Here, in brief, was a man who meant to make a night of it, who would feast, dazzle, compel deference and be loved. For money gives power, and power is loved; no doubt he would be loved. He was happy, and went out of the bank believing that money is made for joy.

So little should we be certain of our happiness in this world. The splendid one hundred dollar bill was taken from him untimely, before nightfall that very evening. At the corner of two busy streets he parted with it to the law, though in a mood of excruciating reluctance and only after a cold-blooded threatening on the part of the lawyer. This latter walked away thoughtfully with the one hundred dollar bill, not now quite so clean, in his pocket.

Collinson was the lawyer’s name, and in years he was only twenty-eight, but already of the slightly harried appearance that marks the young husband who begins to suspect that the better part of his life was his bachelorhood. His dark, ready-made clothes, his twice soled shoes, and his hair, which was too long for a neat and businesslike aspect, were symptoms of necessary economy; but he did not wear the eager look of a man who saves to “get on for himself.” Collinson’s look was that of an employed man who only deepens his rut with his pacing of it.

An employed man he was, indeed; a lawyer without much hope of ever seeing his name on the door or on the letters of the firm that employed him, and his most important work was the collection of small debts. This one hundred dollar bill now in his pocket was such a collection, small to the firm and the client, though of a noble size to himself and the long-pursued debtor from whom he had just collected it.

The banks were closed; so was the office, for it was six o’clock and Collinson was on his way home when by chance he encountered the debtor: there was nothing to do but to keep the bill overnight. This was no hardship, however, as he had a faint pleasure in the unfamiliar experience of walking home with such a thing in his pocket; and he felt a little important by proxy when he thought of it.

Upon the city the November evening had come down dark and moist. Lighted windows and street lamps appeared and disappeared in the altering thicknesses of fog, but at intervals, as Collinson walked on northward, he passed a small shop, or a cluster of shops, where the light was close to him and bright, and at one of these oases of illumination he lingered a moment, with a thought to buy a toy in the window for his three-year-old little girl. The toy was a gaily coloured acrobatic monkey that willingly climbed up and down a string, and he knew that the “baby,” as he and his wife still called their child, would scream with delight at the sight of it. He hesitated, staring into the window rather longingly, and wondering if he ought to make such a purchase. He had twelve dollars of his own in his pocket, but the toy was marked “35 cents,” and he decided he could not afford it. So he sighed and went on, turning presently into a darker street.

When he reached home, the baby was crying over some inward perplexity not to be explained; and his wife, pretty and a little frowzy, was as usual, and as he had expected. That is to say, he found her irritated by cooking, bored by the baby, and puzzled by the dull life she led. Other women, it appeared, had happy and luxurious homes, and during the malnutritious dinner she had prepared she mentioned many such women by name, laying particular stress upon the achievements of their husbands. Why should she (“alone,” as she put it) lead the life she did in one room and a kitchenette, without even being able to afford to go to the movies more than once or twice a month? Mrs. Theodore Thompson’s husband had bought a perfectly beautiful little sedan automobile; he gave his wife everything she wanted. Mrs. Will Gregory had merely mentioned that her old Hudson seal coat was wearing a little, and her husband had instantly said: “What’ll a new one come to, girlie? Four or five hundred? Run and get it!” Why were other women’s husbands like that—and why, oh, why—was hers like this?”

“My goodness!” he said. “You talk as if I had sedans and sealskin coats and theatre tickets on me! Well, I haven’t; that’s all!”

“Then go out and get ’em!” she said fiercely. “Go out and get ’em!”

“What with?” he inquired. “I have twelve dollars in my pocket, and a balance of seventeen dollars at the bank; that’s twenty-nine. I get twenty-five from the office day after to-morrow—Saturday; that makes fifty-four; but we have to pay forty-five for rent on Monday; so that’ll leave us nine dollars. Shall I buy you a sedan and a sealskin coat on Tuesday, out of the nine?”

Mrs. Collinson began to weep a little. “The old, old story!” she said. “Six long, long years it’s been going on now! I ask you how much you’ve got, and you say, ‘nine dollars,’ or ‘seven dollars,’ or ‘four dollars,’ and once it was sixty-five cents! Sixty-five cents; that’s what we had to live on! Sixty-five cents!”

“Oh, hush!” he said wearily.

“Hadn’t you better hush a little yourself?” she retorted. “You come home with twelve dollars in your pocket and tell your wife to hush! That’s nice? Why can’t you do what decent men do?”

“What’s that?”

“Why, give their wives something to live for. What do you give me, I’d like to know! Look at the clothes I wear, please!”

“Well, it’s your own fault,” he muttered.

“What did you say! Did you say it’s my fault I wear clothes any women I know wouldn’t be seen in?”

“Yes, I did. If you hadn’t made me get you that platinum ring——”

“What!” she cried, and flourished her hand at him across the table. “Look at it! It’s platinum, yes; but look at the stone in it, about the size of a pinhead, so’s I’m ashamed to wear it when any of my friends see me! A hundred and sixteen dollars is what this magnificent ring cost you, and how long did I have to beg before I got even that little out of you? And it’s the best thing I own and the only thing I ever did get out of you!”

“Oh, Lordy!” he moaned.

“I wish you’d seen Charlie Loomis looking at this ring to-day,” she said, with a desolate laugh. “He happened to notice it, and I saw him keep glancing at it, and I wish you’d seen Charlie Loomis’s expression!”

Collinson’s own expression became noticeable upon her introduction of this name; he stared at her gravely until he completed the mastication of one of the indigestibles she had set before him; then he put down his fork and said:

“So you saw Charlie Loomis again to-day. Where?”

“Oh, my!” she sighed. “Have we got to go over all that again?”

“Over all what?”

“Over all the fuss you made the last time I mentioned Charlie’s name. I thought we settled it you were going to be a little more sensible about him.”

“Yes,” Collinson returned. “I was going to be more sensible about him, because you were going to be more sensible about him. Wasn’t that the agreement?”

She gave him a hard glance, tossed her head so that the curls of her bobbed hair fluttered prettily, and with satiric mimicry repeated his question. “‘Agreement’! Wasn’t that the agreement! Oh, my, but you do make me tired, talking about ‘agreements’! As if it was a crime my going to a vaudeville matinée with a man kind enough to notice that my husband never takes me anywhere!”

“Did you go to a vaudeville with him to-day?”

“No, I didn’t!” she said. “I was talking about the time when you made such a fuss. I didn’t go anywhere with him to-day.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Collinson said. “I wouldn’t have stood for it.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t?” she cried, and added a shrill laugh as further comment. “You ‘wouldn’t have stood for it’!”

“Never mind,” he returned doggedly. “We went over all that the last time, and you understand me: I’ll have no more foolishness about Charlie Loomis.”

“How nice of you! He’s a friend of yours; you go with him yourself; but your wife mustn’t even look at him, just because he happens to be the one man that amuses her a little. That’s fine!”

“Never mind,” Collinson said again. “You say you saw him to-day. I want to know where.”

“Suppose I don’t choose to tell you.”

“You’d better tell me, I think.”

“Do you? I’ve got to answer for every minute of my day, have I?”

“I want to know where you saw Charlie Loomis.”

She tossed her curls again, and laughed. “Isn’t it funny!” she said. “Just because I like a man, he’s the one person I can’t have anything to do with! Just because he’s kind and jolly and amusing, and I like his jokes and his thoughtfulness toward a woman when he’s with her, I’m not to be allowed to see him at all! But my husband—oh, that’s entirely different! He can go out with Charlie whenever he likes and have a good time, while I stay home and wash the dishes! Oh, it’s a lovely life!”

“Where did you see him to-day?”

Instead of answering his question, she looked at him plaintively and allowed tears to shine along her lower eyelids. “Why do you treat me like this?” she asked in a feeble voice. “Why can’t I have a man friend if I want to? I do like Charlie Loomis. I do like him——”

“Yes! That’s what I noticed!”

“Well, but what’s the good of always insulting me about him? He has time on his hands of afternoons, and so have I. Our janitor’s wife is crazy about the baby and just adores to have me leave her in their flat—the longer the better. Why shouldn’t I go to a matinée or a picture show sometimes with Charlie? Why should I just have to sit around instead of going out and having a nice time, when he wants me to?”

“I want to know where you saw him to-day!”

Mrs. Collinson jumped up. “You make me sick!” she said, and began to clear away the dishes.

“I want to know where——”

“Oh, hush up!” she cried. “He came here to leave a note for you.”

“Oh,” said her husband. “I beg your pardon. That’s different.”

“How sweet of you!”

“Where’s the note, please?”

She took it from her pocket and tossed it to him. “So long as it’s a note for you it’s all right, of course,” she said. “I wonder what you’d do if he’d written one to me!”

“Never mind,” said Collinson, and read the note.

Dear Collie: Dave and Smithie and Old Bill and Sammy Hoag and maybe Steinie and Sol are coming over to the shack about eight-thirty. Home brew and the old pastime. You know! Don’t fail.

Charlie.

“You’ve read this of course,” Collinson said. “The envelope wasn’t sealed.”

“I have not,” his wife returned, covering the prevarication with a cold dignity. “I’m not in the habit of reading other people’s correspondence, thank you! I suppose you think I do so because you’d never hesitate to read any note I got; but I don’t do everything you do, you see!”

“Well, you can read it now,” he said, and gave her the note.

Her eyes swept the writing briefly, and she made a sound of wonderment, as if amazed to find herself so true a prophet. “And the words weren’t more than out of my mouth! You can go and have a grand party right in his flat, while your wife stays home and gets the baby to bed and washes the dishes!”

“I’m not going.”

“Oh, no!” she said mockingly. “I suppose not! I see you missing one of Charlie’s stag parties!”

“I’ll miss this one.”

But it was not to Mrs. Collinson’s purpose that he should miss the party; she wished him to be as intimate as possible with the debonair Charlie Loomis; and so, after carrying some dishes into the kitchenette in meditative silence, she reappeared with a changed manner. She went to her husband, gave him a shy little pat on the shoulder and laughed good-naturedly. “Of course you’ll go,” she said. “I do think you’re silly about my never going out with him when it would give me a little innocent pleasure and when you’re not home to take me, yourself; but I wasn’t really in such terrible earnest, all I said. You work hard the whole time, honey, and the only pleasure you ever do have, it’s when you get a chance to go to one of these little penny-ante stag parties. You haven’t been to one for ever so long, and you never stay after twelve; it’s really all right with me. I want you to go.”

“Oh, no,” said Collinson. “It’s only penny-ante, but I couldn’t afford to lose anything at all.”

“If you did lose, it’d only be a few cents,” she said. “What’s the difference, if it gives you a little fun? You’ll work all the better if you go out and enjoy yourself once in a while.”

“Well, if you really look at it that way, I’ll go.”

“That’s right, dear,” she said, smiling. “Better put on a fresh collar and your other suit, hadn’t you?”

“I suppose so,” he assented, and began to make the changes she suggested.

When he had completed his toilet, it was time for him to go. She came in from the kitchenette, kissed him, and then looked up into his eyes, letting him see a fond and brightly amiable expression.

“There, honey,” she said. “Run along and have a nice time. Then maybe you’ll be a little more sensible about some of my little pleasures.”

He held the one hundred dollar bill folded in his hand, meaning to leave it with her, but as she spoke a sudden recurrence of suspicion made him forget his purpose. “Look here,” he said. “I’m not making any bargain with you. You talk as if you thought I was going to let you run around to vaudevilles with Charlie because you let me go to this party. Is that your idea?”

It was, indeed, precisely Mrs. Collinson’s idea, and she was instantly angered enough to admit it in her retort. “Oh, aren’t you mean!” she cried. “I might know better than to look for any fairness in a man like you!”

“See here——”

“Oh, hush up!” she said. “Shame on you! Go on to your party!” With that she put both hands upon his breast, and pushed him toward the door.

“I won’t go. I’ll stay here.”

“You will, too, go!” she cried, shrewishly. “I don’t want to look at you around here all evening. It’d make me sick to look at a man without an ounce of fairness in his whole mean little body!”

“All right,” said Collinson, violently, “I will go!”

“Yes! Get out of my sight!”

And he did, taking the one hundred dollar bill with him, to the penny-ante poker party.

The gay Mr. Charlie Loomis called his apartment “the shack” in jocular depreciation of its beauty and luxury, but he regarded it as a perfect thing, and in one way it was: for it was perfectly in the family likeness of a thousand such “shacks.” It had a ceiling with false beams, walls of green burlap, spotted with coloured “coaching prints,” brown shelves supporting pewter plates and mugs, “mission” chairs, a leather couch with violet cushions, silver-framed photographs of lady friends and officer friends, a drop light of pink-shot imitation alabaster, a papier-mâché skull tobacco jar among moving-picture magazines on the round card table; and, of course, the final Charlie Loomis touch—a Japanese manservant.

The master of all this was one of those neat, stoutish young men with fat, round heads, sleek, fair hair, immaculate, pale complexions, and infirm little pink mouths—in fact, he was of the type that may suggest to the student of resemblances a fastidious and excessively clean white pig with transparent ears. Nevertheless, Charlie Loomis was of a free-handed habit in some matters, being particularly indulgent to pretty women and their children. He spoke of the latter as “the kiddies,” of course, and liked to call their mothers “kiddo,” or “girlie.” One of his greatest pleasures was to tell a woman that she was “the dearest, bravest little girlie in the world.” Naturally he was a welcome guest in many households, and would often bring a really magnificent toy to the child of some friend whose wife he was courting. Moreover, at thirty-three, he had already done well enough in business to take things easily, and he liked to give these little card parties, not for gain, but for pastime. He was cautious and disliked high stakes in a game of chance.

“I don’t consider it hospitality to have any man go out o’ my shack sore,” he was wont to say. “Myself, I’m a bachelor and got no obligations; I’ll shoot any man that can afford it for anything he wants to. Trouble is, you never can tell when a man can’t afford it or what harm his losin’ might mean to the little girlie at home and the kiddies. No, boys, penny-ante and ten-cent limit is the highest we go in this ole shack. Penny-ante and a few steins of the ole home-brew that hasn’t got a divorce in a barrel of it!”

Penny-ante and the ole home-brew had been in festal operation for half an hour when the morose Collinson arrived this evening. Mr. Loomis and his guests sat about the round table under the alabaster drop light; their coats were off; cigars were worn at the deliberative poker angle; colourful chips and cards glistened on the cloth; one of the players wore a green shade over his eyes; and all in all, here was a little poker party for a lithograph.

“Ole Collie, b’gosh!” Mr. Loomis shouted, humorously. “Here’s your vacant cheer; stack all stuck out for you ’n’ ever’thin’! Set daown, neighbour, an’ Smithie’ll deal you in, next hand. What made you so late? Helpin’ the little girlie at home get the kiddy to bed? That’s a great kiddy of yours, Collie.”

Collinson took the chair that had been left for him, counted his chips and then as the playing of a “hand” still preoccupied three of the company, he picked up a silver dollar that lay upon the table near him. “What’s this?” he asked. “A side bet? Or did somebody just leave it here for me?”

“Yes; for you to look at,” Mr. Loomis explained. “It’s Smithie’s.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothin’. Smithie was just showin’ it to us. Look at it.”

Collinson turned the coin over and saw a tiny inscription that had been lined into the silver with a point of steel. “Luck,” he read—“Luck hurry back to me!” Then he spoke to the owner of this marked dollar. “I suppose you put that on there, Smithie, to help make sure of getting our money to-night.”

But Smithie shook his head, which was a large, gaunt head, as it happened—a head fronted with a sallow face shaped much like a coffin, but inconsistently genial in expression. “No,” he said. “It just came in over my counter this afternoon, and I noticed it when I was checkin’ up the day’s cash. Funny, ain’t it: ‘Luck hurry back to me!’”

“Who do you suppose marked that on it?” Collinson said thoughtfully.

“Golly!” his host exclaimed. “It won’t do you much good to wonder about that!”

Collinson frowned, continuing to stare at the marked dollar. “I guess not, but really I should like to know.”

“I would, too,” Smithie said. “I been thinkin’ about it. Might ’a’ been somebody in Seattle or somebody in Ipswich, Mass., or New Orleans or St. Paul. How you goin’ to tell? It’s funny how some people like to believe luck depends on some little thing like that.”

“Yes, it is,” Collinson assented, still brooding over the coin.

The philosophic Smithie extended his arm across the table collecting the cards to deal them, for the “hand” was finished. “Yes, sir, it’s funny,” he repeated. “Nobody knows exactly what luck is, but the way I guess it out, it lays in a man’s believin’ he’s in luck, and some little object like this makes him kind of concentrate his mind on thinkin’ he’s goin’ to be lucky, because of course you often know you’re goin’ to win, and then you do win. You don’t win when you want to win, or when you need to; you win when you believe you’ll win. I don’t know who it was that said, ‘Money’s the root of all evil’; but I guess he didn’t have too much sense! I suppose if some man killed some other man for a dollar, the poor fish that said that would let the man out and send the dollar to the chair——”

But here this garrulous and discursive guest was interrupted by immoderate protests from several of his colleagues. “Cut it out!” “My Lord!” “Do something!” “Smithie! Are you ever goin’ to deal?”

“I’m goin’ to shuffle first,” he responded, suiting the action to the word, though with deliberation, and at the same time continuing his discourse. “It’s a mighty interesting thing, a piece o’ money. You take this dollar, now: Who’s it belonged to? Where’s it been? What different kind o’ funny things has it been spent for sometimes? What funny kind of secrets do you suppose it could ’a’ heard if it had ears? Good people have had it and bad people have had it: why, a dollar could tell more about the human race—why, it could tell all about it!”

“I guess it couldn’t tell all about the way you’re dealin’ those cards,” said the man with the green shade. “You’re mixin’ things all up.”

“I’ll straighten ’em all out then,” said Smithie cheerfully. “They say, ‘Money talks.’ Golly! If it could talk, what couldn’t it tell? Nobody’d be safe. I got this dollar now, but who’s it goin’ to belong to next, and what’ll he do with it? And then after that! Why, for years and years and years, it’ll go on from one pocket to another, in a millionaire’s house one day, in some burglar’s flat the next, maybe, and in one person’s hand money’ll do good, likely, and in another’s it’ll do harm. We all want money; but some say it’s a bad thing, like that dummy I was talkin’ about. Lordy! Goodness or badness, I’ll take all anybody——”

He was interrupted again, and with increased vehemence. Collinson, who sat next to him, complied with the demand to “ante up,” then placed the dollar near his little cylinder of chips, and looked at his cards. They proved unencouraging, and he turned to his neighbour. “I’d sort of like to have that marked dollar, Smithie,” he said. “I’ll give you a paper dollar, Smithie,” he said. “I’ll give you a paper dollar and a nickel for it.”

But Smithie laughed, shook his head and slid the coin over toward his own chips. “No, sir. I’m goin’ to keep it—awhile, anyway.”

“So you do think it’ll bring you luck, after all!”

“No. But I’ll hold on to it for this evening, anyhow.”

“Not if we clean you out, you won’t,” said Charlie Loomis. “You know the rules o’ the old shack: only cash goes in this game; no I. O. U. stuff ever went here or ever will. Tell you what I’ll do, though, before you lose it: I’ll give you a dollar and a quarter for your ole silver dollar, Smithie.”

“Oh, you want it, too, do you? I guess I can spot what sort of luck you want it for, Charlie.”

“Well, Mr. Bones, what sort of luck do I want it for?”

“You win, Smithie,” one of the other players said. “We all know what sort o’ luck ole Charlie wants your dollar for: he wants it for luck with the dames.”

“Well, I might,” Charlie admitted not displeased. “I haven’t been so lucky that way lately—not so dog-gone lucky!”

All of his guests, except one, laughed at this; but Collinson frowned, still staring at the marked dollar. For a reason he could not have put into words just then, it began to seem almost vitally important to him to own this coin if he could, and to prevent Charlie Loomis from getting possession of it. The jibe, “He wants it for luck with the dames,” rankled in Collinson’s mind: somehow it seemed to refer to his wife.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Smithie,” he said. “I’ll bet two dollars against that dollar of yours that I hold a higher hand next deal than you do.”

“Here! Here!” Charlie remonstrated. “Shack rules! Ten-cent limit.”

“That’s only for the game,” Collinson said, turning upon his host with a sudden sharpness. “This is an outside bet between Smithie and me. Will you do it, Smithie? Where’s your sporting spirit?”

So liberal a proposal at once roused the spirit to which it appealed. “Well, I might, if some o’ the others’ll come in, too, and make it really worth my while.”

“I’m in,” the host responded with prompt inconsistency; and others of the party, it appeared, were desirous of owning the talisman. They laughed and said it was “crazy stuff,” yet they all “came in,” and, for the first time in the history of this “shack,” what Mr. Loomis called “real money,” was seen upon the table as a stake. It was won, and the silver dollar with it, by the largest and oldest of the gamesters, a fat man with a walrus moustache that inevitably made him known in this circle as “Old Bill.” He smiled condescendingly, and would have put the dollar in his pocket with the “real money,” but Mr. Loomis protested.

“Here! What you doin’?” he shouted, catching Old Bill by the arm. “Put that dollar back on the table.”

“What for?”

“What for? Why, we’re goin’ to play for it again. Here’s two dollars against it I beat you on the next hand.”

“No,” said Old Billy calmly. “It’s worth more than two dollars to me. It’s worth five.”

“Well, five then,” his host returned. “I want that dollar!” “So do I,” said Collinson. “I’ll put in five dollars if you do.”

“Anybody else in?” Old Bill inquired, dropping the coin on the table; and all of the others again “came in.” Old Bill won again; but once more Charlie Loomis prevented him from putting the silver dollar in his pocket.

“Come on now!” Mr. Loomis exclaimed. “Anybody else but me in on this for five dollars next time?”

“I am,” said Collinson, swallowing with a dry throat; and he set forth all that remained to him of his twelve dollars. In return he received a pair of deuces, and the jubilant Charlie won.

He was vainglorious in his triumph. “Didn’t that little luck piece just keep on tryin’ to find the right man?” he cried, and read the inscription loudly. “‘Luck hurry back to me!’ Righto! You’re home where you belong, girlie! Now we’ll settle down to our reg’lar little game again.”

“Oh, no,” said Old Bill. “You wouldn’t let me keep it. Put it out there and play for it again.”

“I won’t. She’s mine now.”

“I want my luck piece back myself,” said Smithie. “Put it out and play for it. You made Old Bill.”

“I won’t do it.”

“Yes, you will,” Collinson said, and he spoke without geniality. “You put it out there.”

“Oh, yes, I will,” Mr. Loomis returned mockingly. “I will for ten dollars.”

“Not I,” said Old Bill. “Five is foolish enough.” And Smithie agreed with him. “Nor me!”

“All right, then. If you’re afraid of ten, I keep it. I thought the ten’d scare you.”

“Put that dollar on the table,” Collinson said. “I’ll put ten against it.”

There was a little commotion among these mild gamesters; and someone said: “You’re crazy, Collie. What do you want to do that for?”

“I don’t care,” said Collinson. “That dollar’s already cost me enough, and I’m going after it.”

“Well, you see, I want it, too,” Charlie Loomis retorted cheerfully; and he appealed to the others. “I’m not askin’ him to put up ten against it, am I?”

“Maybe not,” Old Bill assented. “But how long is this thing goin’ to keep on? It’s already balled our game all up, and if we keep on foolin’ with these side bets, why, what’s the use?”

“My goodness!” the host exclaimed. “I’m not pushin’ this thing, am I? I don’t want to risk my good old luck piece, do I? It’s Collie that’s crazy to go on, ain’t it?” He laughed. “He hasn’t showed his money yet, though, I notice, and this old shack is run on strickly cash principles. I don’t believe he’s got ten dollars more on him!”

“Oh, yes, I have.”

“Let’s see it then.”

Collinson’s nostrils distended a little, but he said nothing, fumbled in his pocket, and then tossed the one hundred dollar bill, rather crumpled, upon the table.

“Great heavens!” shouted Old Bill. “Call the doctor: I’m all of a swoon!”

“Look at what’s spilled over our nice clean table!” another said, in an awed voice. “Did you claim he didn’t have ten on him, Charlie?”

“Well, it’s nice to look at,” Smithie observed. “But I’m with Old Bill. How long are you two goin’ to keep this thing goin’? If Collie wins the luck piece I suppose Charlie’ll bet him fifteen against it, and then——”

“No, I won’t,” Charlie interrupted. “Ten’s the limit.”

“Goin’ to keep on bettin’ ten against it all night?”

“No,” said Charlie. “I tell you what I’ll do with you, Collinson; we both of us seem kind o’ set on this luck piece, and you’re already out some on it. I’ll give you a square chance at it and at catchin’ even. It’s twenty minutes after nine. I’ll keep on these side bets with you till ten o’clock, but when my clock hits ten, we’re through, and the one that’s got it then keeps it, and no more foolin’. You want to do that, or quit now? I’m game either way.”

“Go ahead and deal,” said Collinson. “Whichever one of us has it at ten o’clock, it’s his, and we quit!”

But when the little clock on Charlie’s green painted mantel-shelf struck ten, the luck piece was Charlie’s and with it an overwhelming lien on the one hundred dollar bill. He put both in his pocket. “Remember this ain’t my fault; it was you that insisted,” he said, and handed Collinson four five-dollar bills as change.

Old Bill, platonically interested, discovered that his cigar was sparkless, applied a match, and casually set forth his opinion. “Well, I guess that was about as poor a way of spendin’ eighty dollars as I ever saw, but it all goes to show there’s truth in the old motto that anything at all can happen in any poker game! That was a mighty nice hundred dollar bill you had on you, Collie; but it’s like what Smithie said: a piece o’ money goes hoppin’ around from one person to another—it don’t care!—and yours has gone and hopped to Charlie. The question is: Who’s it goin’ to hop to next?” He paused to laugh, glanced over the cards that had been dealt him, and concluded: “My guess is ’t some good-lookin’ woman’ll prob’ly get a pretty fair chunk o’ that hundred dollar bill out o’ Charlie. Well, let’s settle down to the ole army game.”

They settled down to it, and by twelve o’clock (the invariable closing hour of these pastimes in the old shack) Collinson had lost four dollars and thirty cents more. He was commiserated by his fellow gamesters as they put on their coats and overcoats, preparing to leave the hot little rooms. They shook their heads, laughed ruefully in sympathy, and told him he oughtn’t to carry hundred dollar bills upon his person when he went out among friends. Old Bill made what is sometimes called an unfortunate remark.

“Don’t worry about Collie,” he said, jocosely. “That hundred dollar bill prob’ly belonged to some rich client of his.”

“What!” Collinson said, staring.

“Never mind, Collie; I wasn’t in earnest,” the joker explained. “Of course I didn’t mean it.”

“Well, you oughtn’t to say it,” Collinson protested. “People say a thing like that about a man in a joking way, but other people hear it sometimes and don’t know they’re joking, and a story gets started.”

“My goodness, but you’re serious!” Old Bill exclaimed. “You look like you had a misery in your chest, as the rubes say; and I don’t blame you! Get on out in the fresh night air and you’ll feel better.”

He was mistaken, however; the night air failed to improve Collinson’s spirits as he walked home alone through the dark and chilly streets. There was, indeed, a misery in his chest, where stirred a sensation vaguely nauseating; his hands were tremulous and his knees infirm as he walked. In his mind was a confusion of pictures and sounds, echoes from Charlie Loomis’s shack: he could not clear his mind’s eye of the one hundred dollar bill; and its likeness, as it lay crumpled on the green cloth under the drop light, haunted and hurt him as a face in a coffin haunts and hurts the new mourner.

It seemed to Collinson then that money was the root of all evil and the root of all good, the root and branch of all life, indeed. With money, his wife would have been amiable, not needing gay bachelors to take her to vaudevilles. Her need of money was the true foundation of the jealousy that had sent him out morose and reckless to-night; of the jealousy that had made it seem, when he gambled with Charlie Loomis for the luck dollar, as though they really gambled for luck with her.

It still seemed to him that they had gambled for luck with her, and Charlie had won it. But as Collinson plodded homeward in the chilly midnight, his shoulders sagging and his head drooping, he began to wonder how he could have risked money that belonged to another man. What on earth had made him do what he had done? Was it the mood his wife had set him in as he went out that evening? No; he had gone out feeling like that often enough, and nothing had happened.

Something had brought this trouble on him, he thought; for it appeared to Collinson that he had been an automaton, having nothing to do with his own actions. He must bear the responsibility for them; but he had not willed them. If the one hundred dollar bill had not happened to be in his pocket—— That was it! And at the thought he mumbled desolately to himself: “I’d been all right if it hadn’t been for that.” If the one hundred dollar bill had not happened to be in his pocket, he’d have been “all right.” The one hundred dollar bill had done this to him. And Smithie’s romancing again came back to him: “In one person’s hands money’ll do good, likely; in another’s it’ll do harm.” It was the money that did harm or good, not the person; and the money in his hands had done this harm to himself.

He had to deliver a hundred dollars at the office in the morning, somehow; for he dared not take the risk of the client’s meeting the debtor.

There was a balance of seventeen dollars in his bank, and he could pawn his watch for twenty-five, as he knew well enough, by experience. That would leave fifty-eight dollars to be paid, and there was only one way to get it. His wife would have to let him pawn her ring. She’d have to!

Without any difficulty he could guess what she would say and do when he told her of his necessity: and he knew that never in her life would she forego the advantage over him she would gain from it. He knew, too, what stipulations she would make, and he had to face the fact that he was in no position to reject them. The one hundred dollar bill had cost him the last vestiges of mastery in his own house; and Charlie Loomis had really won not only the bill and the luck, but the privilege of taking Collinson’s wife to vaudevilles. And it all came back to the same conclusion: The one hundred dollar bill had done it to him. “What kind of a thing is this life?” Collinson mumbled to himself, finding matters wholly perplexing in a world made into tragedy at the caprice of a little oblong slip of paper.

Then, as he went on his way to wake his wife and face her with the soothing proposal to pawn her ring early the next morning, something happened to Collinson. Of itself the thing that happened was nothing, but he was aware of his folly as if it stood upon a mountain top against the sun—and so he gathered knowledge of himself and a little of the wisdom that is called better than happiness.

His way was now the same as upon the latter stretch of his walk home from the office that evening. The smoke fog had cleared, and the air was clean with a night wind that moved briskly from the west; in all the long street there was only one window lighted, but it was sharply outlined now, and fell as a bright rhomboid upon the pavement before Collinson. When he came to it he paused, at the hint of an inward impulse he did not think to trace; and, frowning, he perceived that this was the same shop window that had detained him on his homeward way, when he had thought of buying a toy for the baby.

The toy was still there in the bright window: the gay little acrobatic monkey that would climb up or down a red string as the string slacked or straightened; but Collinson’s eye fixed itself upon the card marked with the price: “35 cents.”

He stared and stared. “Thirty-five cents!” he said to himself. “Thirty-five cents!”

Then suddenly he burst into loud and prolonged laughter.

The sound was startling in the quiet night, and roused the interest of a meditative policeman who stood in the darkened doorway of the next shop. He stepped out, not unfriendly.

“What you havin’ such a good time over, this hour o’ the night?” he inquired. “What’s all the joke?”

Collinson pointed to the window. “It’s that monkey on the string,” he said. “Something about it struck me as mighty funny!”

So, with a better spirit, he turned away, still laughing, and went home to face his wife.

NICE NEIGHBOURS
By MARY S. WATTS
From Harper’s

GUIDING the possible tenant about the house, Miss Wilcox pointed out its desirable features in a dry little monotone that gave no hint, she hoped, of her inward taut anxiety. She could not have achieved the persuasive enthusiasm of the young man from the real-estate office even if she had thought it becoming to a gentlewoman. Apparently he could see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil; there was something abnormal about his incapacities; he was magnificent, but at moments Miss Martha feared that he was not strictly conscientious. And besides, to what end shutting his eyes and thereby perhaps influencing others to shut theirs against unhappy facts? Truth will out. The house was old; the floors did need refinishing: the front-parlour fireplace did smoke——

“Them ceilings sure are high!” ejaculated the possible tenant, cocking a measuring eye heavenward.

“Y-yes, they are high,” Miss Martha admitted helplessly. At this familiar—and perfectly just—criticism the agent always burst into flaming eulogies of high ceilings. Just the thing for our summer climate, our super-heated furnaces in winter! Tell you, the old-timers knew how to build for comfort! Miss Martha shrank from conjecturing what he said when ceilings were low. This whole experience illuminated depressingly the practice current in what it was the modern shibboleth to call “big business,” she thought.

“Well, eight-five per is a whole lotta money,” said the possible tenant. She gazed round indifferently as they stepped out on the little side porch; then all at once her expression altered with surprise and interest. She clutched Miss Wilcox’s arm, holding her back with an energetic whisper of warning. “Sh-h! See that bird? See him? Washing himself in that old pedestal washstand somebody’s left out there? If that ain’t the cutest thing! He’s just sloshin’ right in like a person, you ’r I ’r anybody. Like it was put there just on purpose for him!”

“Why, it was. It’s a birds’ bath, you know,” said Miss Martha, somewhat startled, fumbling for her eyeglasses; the pretty spectacle was no novelty to her, yet it never lost its charm. “Oh, that’s one of the thrushes. They must have a nest somewhere near——”

“Sh-h!” the other interrupted peremptorily. “There’s another one goin’ in!” She tiptoed to the edge of the porch and stood there entranced, following the movements of the birds, a vague smile irradiating her worn, sharpened, insignificant features. The shoving and spattering and small outcry finally subsided, the last robin hopped out, spinning the moisture from his feathers with quick wings; and she turned away reluctantly, drawing a long breath in childishly frank delight. “What d’you know about that, huh? I wouldn’ta believed they’d do that, take a bath that way. You couldn’ta made me believe it? I don’t know much about ’em, but I always have liked ’em. Birds, I mean, and—well, dogs and all kinds of regular pets, you know. I always did like ’em. Say, you got your grounds fixed up real nice, ain’t you? I like flowers, too.”

She went down the steps, and Miss Wilcox trailed after, resigned to seeing the garden butchered to make a possible tenant’s holiday; but the visitor moved about carefully, without offering to pluck or mishandle, and paused at last in the middle of the tidy plot, surveying its beds and borders with full appreciation. Then she wheeled to appraise again the mid-Victorian house whose stark tastelessness and characterlessness no garden setting could relieve; and Miss Martha’s heart sank.

“The neighbourhood’s very nice,” she murmured desperately; this ladylike insinuation went to the limits of propriety in salesmanship according to Miss Martha’s code. “So—so permanent. The church on the corner and the parsonage next door. It will always be nice. Everybody likes it so much on that account—that is——” She could get no farther, overcome by a hideous sense of disloyalty to this same neighbourhood whose select character she was exploiting. For, looking upon her, the conviction would not down that Mrs. Shields, if a possible tenant, was abysmally impossible otherwise. She must be near Miss Martha’s own age, yet was dressed, tinted, bedizened as if sixteen; there was a kind of withered pertness about her; she had a trick of glancing sidewise with her large, shadowed eyes in a style of roguish challenge and invitation combined; and her disturbingly frequent and facile smile suggested somehow a mere embellishment, obvious and inexpressive as her rouge. Such a figure in the rarefied atmosphere of Saint Luke’s was unthinkable; but here she was, Martha Wilcox, making capital out of that proximity with all its implications. Contact with “big business” had done its debasing work! “Of course, the music might be an objection,” she faltered, conscience-struck. “And sometimes one can hear Doctor Gowdy quite distinctly on Sundays in warm weather when the windows are open.”

“Music? Oh, you mean hymns?” queried Mrs. Shields. “Doctor Gowdy’s the preacher, huh? I went to Billy Sunday once. Tell you, the rev’rend’d have to go some to beat him! Well, I don’ know—eighty-five—” She hesitated, looking around the genteel landscape; then faced Miss Martha with the air of giving up argument, not without wonder and some amusement at herself. “Well, I guess them birds has got me going. I guess you’ve rented a house!”

Miss Wilcox, comprehending her expression rather than the words, stood dumb for an instant in half-incredulous relief. The thing was almost too good to be true, coming to pass with this uncanny suddenness. Eighty-five dollars a month and the hopeless old place off her hands at last! All the dreams which even in the act of dreaming she had stigmatized as rank folly, revisited her in flashing procession: having her hair “permanented,” going to Atlantic City, buying a fur coat—how often had she spent that rainbow gold! This time it was real. There would be only the pleasing care of letting it accumulate for a while. She awoke to new apprehensions. “I—I suppose there will be things to do? Changes? I mean you will want——?”

Mrs. Shields applied the decorative smile to her face. “Oh, my, no, I don’t want nothin’. The house is just swell, and anyways I never was one to keep running to people for new wallpaper, and ever’ little thing that needs fixing. I like to keep things up my own self. I’m awful easy to get along with,” she assured her prospective landlady eagerly. Miss Martha, who had been recalling terrifying tales she had had from more than one earnest friend about the misdemeanours and the tyrannous exactions of the average tenant, breathed freely again. It began to seem a leisurely, congenial, and singularly profitable occupation to rent houses as the patient waiting and many disappointments of the last six months retired to the background of her memories. Mrs. Shields, meanwhile, fluttered up and down the garden, already assuming innocent airs of proprietorship.

“You gotta tell me where at you get a bird bath like that, ’cause that’s what I’m gonna have the first thing!” she proclaimed with enthusiasm. “Never you mind! It’ll all be took good care of, and I won’t change a thing. It’s so nice the way it is, all clean and quiet and kinda restful. I got the same old-style notions as you. I’m crazy about having a real refined home.”

Miss Wilcox, not for the first time, wished that the questionably adaptable young man from the real-estate office were there; he would know what to say. “You’re a stranger here?” she ventured at length.

“Oh, I’ve lived lotsa places,” said the other, smiling blankly. “Is that as far as the yard goes to, that fence, with the vines on? My, they grow thick, don’t they?”

They did indeed, forming a broad, tangled breastwork of honeysuckle and rambler roses valued by Miss Martha for being comely to the view in blooming time and all the year round an impregnable defence against boys and other animals. Mrs. Shields, craning slightly to peer over it, inspected the adjoining territory with her naïvely open curiosity; she gave an exclamation. “For Pete’s sake! Didn’t you tell me that’s where the preacher lives?”

“Doctor Gowdy. Yes,” said Miss Martha, a little uncomfortable.

“Keeps it lovely, don’t he? Just like this side!”

Miss Martha perceived that this was to be taken in an ironic sense; making every allowance for the other’s idiosyncrasies of speech and manner, it was impossible that she could be in earnest. Even the most stalwart members of his congregation had been overheard to express themselves unfavourably about Doctor Gowdy’s yard. “Well—a clergyman, you know—he’s so busy. Besides, one really ought not to expect him—— And Mrs. Gowdy—— They have quite a family. It’s almost impossible for her to keep a servant. Even coloured——”

“They got a coon in the kitchen now. I can see her,” said Mrs. Shields.

“Er—yes—but often there isn’t anybody. It makes a great deal of work for poor Mrs. Gowdy. She can’t see to everything outside as well as in,” said Miss Wilcox, nervously, conscious that her explanations amounted to an apology; it annoyed her. And now the coon in the kitchen unwittingly added to the embarrassments of the situation by shoving up the window-screen and flinging an over-ripe tomato in the general direction of the ministerial garbage can; it fell short, spattering seeds and pulp; the coon—she was a strapping, coffee-coloured slattern—regarded it absently a moment while she wrung out a leprous-looking rag, sent a sharp glance toward the audience on the other side of the fence, and slammed down the screen, slouching back to her labours at a sink full of dishes.

“Mrs. Gowdy simply can’t see to everything,” Miss Martha repeated feebly. She awaited the other’s further comment in something of a panic; but Mrs. Shields had none to make. Her gaze, as it roved round the unkempt enclosure, was one of complete detachment. She was turning away when melodious, preluding chords on the piano sounded from within the parsonage, and Mrs. Gowdy’s pleasant soprano uplifted in “Angels ever bright and fair.” She sang with taste and feeling, but Miss Martha uneasily wished that she had not begun just at this moment; it was inopportune, somehow.

“That’s some of that music you was scairt I wouldn’t like, huh? Why, it ain’t so bad!” said Mrs. Shields tolerantly. “Anyway, I never let nothing the neighbours does worry me much,” she added, glancing again, perhaps involuntarily, at the Gowdy premises. “Live and let live, I always say. Oh, say, look what’s coming!”

It was a little procession of the Gowdy children round the corner of the house, Thomas junior in the lead, shouldering a spade and issuing bluff words of command; Florence came next, with a black silk petticoat, evidently borrowed from some much more mature wardrobe than her own, solemnly draped upon her; the twins were hauling the catafalque, that is, their Irish-Mail wagon, a shoe-box disposed upon it and covered with an unbelievably dirty towel; and Wilbur, straddling his kiddie-car, theoretically brought up the rear. In reality, he tooled along to suit himself, with erratic swoops and circles, carrying on an inarticulate, one-sided conversation the while. They halted, after some shrill disagreements, at one of the bare, hard-trodden spots occurring sporadically among the weeds of the parsonage back yard, and Tommie was about to attack it with the spade when all hands simultaneously became aware of the uninvited witnesses. There was an interval of silent staring broken by Wilbur, who, as has been seen, was a sociable soul, without sufficient field for the exercise of his gift.

“’O,’ady!” said he, steering up to the fence.

“My, my, ain’t you little folks busy, though!” said Mrs. Shields genially. “Watch out, buddy, you’ll get a sticker in your eye. What’s he say?”

“’O,’ady!” cried Wilbur with vehemence.

Tom authoritatively advised him to shut up. “‘Hello, lady!’ that’s what he’s trying to say. He can’t talk plain yet, he’s only two and a half. We’ve got to be after him the whole time. It’s fierce!” he explained gloomily.

“Well, now, I think that’s real nice, taking care of your little brother——”

“Icky eye!” interrupted Wilbur urgently. “Icky eye!”

Florence undertook the translation. “He’s saying the kitty died.”

“Oh, ain’t that too bad! Poor kitty! What was the matter with her?”

“I don’t know. She just died,” said Florence indifferently. “We’re having a funeral with her.”

“You are? Well, I declare! And I s’pose Mommer’s singing that lovely hymn for you.”

They eyed her in the wary fashion of children suspicious of the false interest of grown-ups. “No, she isn’t. She’s just singing.” Tom said curtly. “I don’t b’lieve she knows about the kitty even.”

Here the auburn-haired twin precipitately entered the conversation with the information that the bird died, too. “It was a canary. It sang and sang, and then it stopped singing and died.”

“Oh, my, you musta felt bad!”

“Ho, that ain’t anything!” said the blue-eyed twin in a superior manner. “We’ve had lots of things die. Just lots!” He launched into large statements. “Everything we get dies! We had some white mice and they died, and we had a dog and it died, and we had——”

“Aw, shut up, we didn’t any such thing!”

“We did so! Don’t we, Flo, have everything die? Don’t we, Reddy?”

“Aw, you’re lying! Shut up, I tell you!”

Mrs. Shields intervened on the side of peace and propriety. “Now, now, don’t you kids get to scrapping. You go ahead and have your funeral, and play nice and pretty. First thing you know you’ll have Mommer out here, scairt to death for fear some of you has got their neck broke, hollerin’ like that.”

“Aw, she won’t hear, she never does,” growled Thomas junior. And in fact, the voice and piano, now sweetly rilling arpeggios throughout all the keys in ardent practice, kept on undisturbed. Mrs. Shields retreated, joining Miss Martha with confidences uttered in a voice of polite caution.

“I expect them young ones are right nice-looking when they’re washed up. They’re all right, only I don’t know as I’m keen for ’em to come over on my side of the fence. Of course, Mrs. Rev’rend, she’s used to the racket and muss.”

She asked whether she was to pay in advance, briskly announcing that she would while Miss Martha was still hanging in timorous indecision. The maiden lady moved in a haze of doubt and awe in what she considered the business world; out-of-hand offers to pay rent in advance might be one of its pitfalls for what Miss Martha knew. But in due time the check arrived, and though intrinsically an unhandsome document executed in weak, loosely flowing figures and handwriting with the signature “Tillie Shields” sidling downhill into the corner, it was negotiable like any other check. Eighty-five dollars! The dream had come true! Miss Martha was thriftily resolved not to spend it this first time, but it gave her a solid foundation on which to erect more dreams. Moreover, she took an almost equally solid satisfaction in replying coolly and competently to all inquirers, yes, the house was rented; yes, very advantageously, thank you! Hitherto she had had to endure their discouraging sympathy; and now detected, in spite of the felicitations, the great fundamental truth that nobody is really glad when somebody else gets a house rented! Eliza Seabury was the one exception; Eliza was too blunt-minded and blunt-spoken for civil pretenses. She rushed up on the street one day, and opened the subject, or in a manner of speaking, committed assault and battery on it with: “Martha Wilcox, where on earth did you pick up that weird woman you’ve got in your house?”

“I didn’t pick her up at all. She saw the advertisement,” said Miss Martha, a trifle stiffly.

“Well, she’s positively weird. I saw her the other day, and when somebody said she was in your house I nearly passed away. Her clothes! And those eyes rolling around like two buckeyes in a pan of milk! It’s simply weird! Who is she, anyhow, and where did she come from?”

“She’s a Mrs. Matilda Shields,” said Miss Martha, sagely correcting that too informal “Tillie.” “I don’t know where her home was originally. I understood she’d travelled about a good deal.”

“Mercy, Martha, I hope you didn’t take her without a reference. It would be awful if she didn’t pay you.”

“The bank said she was all right,” said Miss Martha triumphantly. The bank’s endorsement was her trump card; it left criticism without a leg to stand on. She was prompted to testify to Mrs. Shields’s credit on other grounds. “She’s been very nice about the house, not finding fault and not asking for anything, you know.”

“What, not a thing?” Mrs. Seabury exclaimed on a high note of astonishment. “That old rookery! Well, of course, I don’t mean it’s not a lovely house,” she amended hastily. “Only naturally, you’ve never spent any more on it than you could help, I suppose. It’s weird her not wanting some repairs. She can’t be much of a housekeeper. Maybe that’s just as well, though. She won’t mind living next door to the Gowdys. Has she ever said anything about them?”

“I haven’t inquired,” said Miss Martha, stiffening again.

“Oh, well, she probably will later on,” Mrs. Seabury prophesied blithely; she was not a member of Saint Luke’s congregation. “Unless she’s a saint, she’ll have trouble over the ashes or the garbage or the children or something.”

Mrs. Shields, however, was apparently bent on justifying her claim to being “awful easy to get along with,” if that phrase connotes living quietly and seeking no one’s acquaintance. She went about domestic duties with an extraordinary zest, cooked, cleaned, ran up and down stairs endlessly; and spent hours in the garden applying her patently unskilled energies to weeding and trimming it, or motionless in some coign of vantage, watching the birds. Except for these robins and jays and an occasional squirrel, she had no visitors, and defeated expectations by never publicly falling foul of the Gowdy ash-heap, the Gowdy garbage, or the Gowdy children, whatever her private attitude toward them. Mrs. Gowdy, with characteristic sweet thoughtfulness—everybody acclaimed her as the ideal wife for a clergyman—introduced herself over the hedge after a few days with a smiling word or two about the other’s courage in coming to live alongside such a houseful. “We used to be afraid our youngsters were a good deal of a trial to Miss Wilcox.”

“I don’t mind ’em, only when it sounds like somebody was getting hurt,” said Mrs. Shields, whereat the experienced mother began to laugh.

“Oh, children are always getting hurt, you know. Mine seem to be made of steel and india-rubber. They stand everything. Luella—that’s the maid I have now—worries over them more than I do! She’s so good with them, and perfectly devoted to Wilbur, especially.”

Mrs. Shields looked at her uncertainly.

“Well, Luella ain’t always on the job, is she? I don’t see how she can be.”

“Oh, yes, she’s very efficient. I hardly ever give an order. Sometimes coloured people are like that, wonderful with children and about the housework too.” With other agreeable generalities, she moved away; and Mrs. Shields, after a speculative stare at the retreating back, shook her own overdressed head soberly, and moved away, too.

It happened that she did not encounter Doctor Gowdy until some time later, on an occasion which turned out to be more or less momentous. Pottering about among the flower beds, she heard without heeding a piping excitement in the other back yard, and only looked across at last when a heavier voice was added to the children’s. “Now, we must have a coop, you know, boys. They have to be kept in a coop,” Doctor Gowdy was expounding. “Let’s see! What shall we do? Oh, I’ll tell you! There’s that old peach crate over there; you get that, Robbie, and I shouldn’t wonder if Tom could nail some strips up the sides. Everybody must help, that’s the only way to get along——” he kept on fluently in his trained, carrying voice, while the boys circled about, squabbling over his directions. Then, as he caught Mrs. Shields’s eye, smiled with a gesture toward the basket in his hands.

“Day-old chicks. Wouldn’t you like to see them?” And in the direct, hearty way which everybody so liked, without any ado of formalities, he came over, the children hanging on and hampering him. The basket was full of soft cheepings and movement; looking down into it, one got an impression of little round, animated, cuddling patches of brown velvet, striped with yellow, of little yellow heads and eyes with the bright fixity of beads. Mrs. Shields exclaimed delightedly.

“Aren’t they cunning?” said the minister in sympathetic pleasure. “The kiddies and I—we’re great pals, all of us together, you know—we’re going to make a coop and raise them. First thing you know, we’ll have a regular chicken farm!”

Mrs. Shields looked at his kind, eager face, at the basket of chickens, at the surging children, at the littered yard, and spoke diffidently. “Well, they’re awful cute, but—I guess it’s kinda work to bring up chickens, ain’t it? I mean I thought people got all fixed for it, and didn’t do nothing else.”

“Oh, no, you just feed and water them,” said Doctor Gowdy buoyantly. “They ‘do the rest’—hey? Ha, ha!” He dropped to a confidential tone. “It will be good for the children. Teaches them practical humanity—Joe, Florence, stop it! You can’t both of you play with the same chicken!”

Mrs. Shields returned to her gardening with an oddly dubious expression. Judging by what she could hear, the coop was finally erected to everybody’s satisfaction, and after an hour or so of vociferous children and chickens, the latter appeared to lose their charm of novelty temporarily, at least. There was quiet in both back yards; she was trowelling industriously around the roots of a rosebush when Wilbur was brought downstairs from his nap, and released from the house; and directly his voice arose in gleeful squealings. “Chicky! Chicky!”

Mrs. Shields straightened up, listened a second, looked over the hedge. What she saw caused her to drop the trowel and fly around to the alley, bursting through the tumbledown gate into the parsonage grounds without ceremony. “Wilbur! Wilbur! Don’t do that! Don’t grab the chickies, dearie! No, no! Mustn’t touch!”

“Make chicky go!” shouted Wilbur happily, squeezing a limp bit of brown velvet between his sturdy little hands. The coop was upset; he danced with joyful impatience among splintered slats and chickens. “Chicky go!” He threw it down and kicked it. “Go!”

The chicken made a difficult movement, then settled down motionless with filming eyes. “There now, see what you done! You’ve broke the chicky, Wilbur. Poor chicky, now it won’t ever go any more!” said Mrs. Shields, instinctively adapting her words to the child’s comprehension. “No, no, Wilbur mustn’t play with chickies!”

“Chicky go!” screamed Wilbur. He was too quick for her; the chicken that he aimed a lusty kick at escaped, but losing his balance and recovering, he came down vigorously with his whole weight on another. “Make chicky go!”

All at once with dynamic suddenness, Mrs. Shield’s aspect underwent an appalling transformation. Red spots flamed through the rouge on her meagre cheeks; her eyes ceased to languish; they glared balefully. In a twinkle she became years older, a formidable virago, a hag! She darted out a tentacle of an arm, and whirled Wilbur away from his pastime with a couple of stinging slaps. “You let them chickens alone, young one, you hear me? You won’t, won’t you? I’ll learn you!”

Wilbur raised a long howl of protest, exerting fists and feet impotently; Luella appeared at the kitchen door alarmed and inquiring, and after one look, charged to the rescue. “Wha’ you doin’ t’ that chile? Don’t you dare tech that chile!”

Mrs. Shields hurled at her an epithet foreign to the vocabularies of real refined homes; the mulatto woman, in a fury, screeched a retort as flavoursome; linguistically it was a battle of giants. Wilbur bawled between them; what chickens survived scattered, peeping wildly, the conflict assailed the very vault of heaven. At that pitch it actually brought Mrs. Gowdy from the piano and “Hark, the herald angels sing”; the rest of the children arrived in a scurry; the postman halted on his round, petrified; a stray delivery boy, lingering, impartially contributed his mite, “Yah-de-dah! Yee-i! Yee-i!” he yelped ecstatically, and drifted on, a ship that passed in the night.

Wilbur fled to his mother, bellowing more in fright and anger than pain; she received him with bewildered tenderness. “What is it? What has happened? Tell Mother where it hurts, darling!” She gazed round distractedly, seeking to interpret the blubbering and unintelligible references to ady and chicky. “What is he trying to say? Luella——?”

Luella plunged into dramatic recital with an effect of being all eyeballs and incredibly rapid jaws. “—An’ Mis’ Gowdy, nex’ thing Ah heah’d Wilbuh hollerin’ an’ Ah come runnin’ an’ heah she was lammin’ him lak he was her own chile! An’ Ah ain’t gwine tek no talk lak she done give me offa no white lady!”

“Hush, Luella, please——!”

“I’m real sorry I smacked the little fella,” said Mrs. Shields. Her ire had flickered out as suddenly as it exploded; she spoke in visible distress and remorse. “I didn’t go to hurt him, just to make him mind. I only wanted to stop him stompin’ and slammin’ them chickens. I—I just plumb couldn’t stand it. You look what he done, Mis’ Gowdy, you just look. You wouldn’ta left him do that yourself if you’d been here.”

Mrs. Gowdy clicked regretfully, viewing the massacre.

“Tst! Tst! Why, Wilbur, did you hurt the chickies? Did mother’s little boy do that? Don’t you remember mother’s often told you you mustn’t hurt anything?”

“Make chicky go?” Wilbur suggested with reviving spirits. “Make go, mamma?”

“No, Wilbur, can’t. My little boy must be kind to dumb animals,” said Mrs. Gowdy in gentle reproof.

“He’s too little, he can’t understand, he don’t know any better. It ain’t any use telling him; there’d oughta be somebody after him,” argued Mrs. Shields desperately. “I’m awful sorry, but I just had to make him quit it. I know I hadn’t no right to, but——”

“Yes? Yes!” said Mrs. Gowdy vaguely but forgivingly. The older children stood around in a silence that conveyed a certain clannish hostility toward Mrs. Shields, yet no very lively sympathy for Wilbur. Luella retired sulkily, and Mrs. Gowdy looked after her with something as near anxiety as her placid countenance could express. “I do hope she won’t leave!”

“Mis’ Gowdy, I wouldn’ta done it, only there wasn’t none of you round, and somebody had to!”

“Yes? Well, perhaps it would have been better to telephone in and tell me first. But never mind!” said Mrs. Gowdy kindly.

This episode resulted in a species of armed peace between the two households, or on Mrs. Shields’s side at any rate. The others were either too magnanimous or too irresponsible to hold a grudge; they forgave and forgot even before the last of the chickens had come to its end one way or another, that is, within the next twenty-four hours. Mrs. Shields resolutely ignored their fate; she cleaned, gardened, spread meals for the birds with her back carefully turned on the church premises, and it was only by accident that from an upper window she caught a glimpse one day of another slatted box not far from where the wreckage of the first still lay, and of the family gathered around, peering in, reaching down into it, exclaiming. “Bunny! Bunny!” they chorused. Plainly, another course in humanity was being inaugurated. “My God!” said Mrs. Shields aloud, and turned away with a despairing philosophical shrug. At intervals for a week thereafter, escaping rabbits scudded through her yard, or housed under the shrubbery, proceedings which she unaccountably never witnessed. “Your bunnies? No, I ain’t seen none round here,” she would assure the pursuing children with her meaningless smile; and when the animals were recaptured, exhibited none of the relief that might have been expected. But in a little while the incursions ceased; the rabbits were apparently disciplined to their prison. It stood in the same place, rain or shine, day after day, and the “Bunny, bunny” was heard with less and less frequency.

Perhaps sheer curiosity, perhaps some more creditable feeling at last overcame Mrs. Shield’s self-enforced inhibitions; for one sultry afternoon when the family were all out on a swimming and picnicking expedition, conveyed in a parishioner’s automobile, she guiltily slipped around through the alley into the other yard. There was one rabbit left of the pair; it lay on its side in one corner of the stifling pen, breathing hurriedly. Mrs. Shields cleaned out the pan in another corner and filled it with fresh water; she put a little store of lettuce leaves alongside. The creature turned a lack-lustre eye on her, without stirring. She stood awhile contemplating it, or it might be some purpose slowly forming in her mind. “For two cents I’d let you out,” she remarked finally. “Only you’re so sick and weak you can’t get away. So that wouldn’t be any use!” She pondered awhile longer, then with an air of decision, marched back into her own house and sat down to the telephone. With her hand on the instrument, she seemed to waver, reconsidering; then with a defiant gesture, snatched the receiver off the hook.

A complacent patriot would have looked upon succeeding events as demonstrating conclusively an efficiency in public office which some other patriots are prone to question. Bright and early the next morning there presented himself at the parsonage front door a massive, elderly, decent, badged official, and incontinently agitated rumours filled the air. Luella might be heard declaiming violently; Doctor Gowdy, Mrs. Gowdy uplifted mild, startled argument; everybody united in silencing the children. A caucus was held in the back yard; and then the officer departed. It was most melodramatic and intriguing; there were communicants of Saint Luke’s, not to mention innumerable outsiders, who would have envied Mrs. Shields her proscenium-box location, but she herself took no advantage of it, and it was without alacrity that she answered the doorbell when the officer visited her in turn.

He touched his hat. “Good morning! Is this where the lady telephoned for the Humane S’ciety——?” He stopped short abruptly, staring, seeming to labour vainly with some stupendous fact well-nigh beyond his grasp. “Well, well, well! Look who’s here!” he managed to get out, after a long minute.

Mrs. Shields did not answer; she stood before him, her bearing sullen, hostile, a little frightened.

“Look who’s here!” the officer ejaculated again, apostrophizing the ceiling; then he brought his gaze down, and sent it everywhere, alertly exploring. “You living here?”

“Yeh. What’s matter my living here? I gotta live somewhere. I ain’t doin’ nothing.”

“Naw, I guess you ain’t, Tillie, or everybody’s heard before this,” the other agreed amiably. “But say, was it you called the S’ciety, honest?”

“Yeh. What of it?”

“Why, nothin’. Nothin’ ’t all,” said the official soothingly; a grin slowly worked its way across his features. “Only, it’s kinda funny when you think about it, ain’t it? Don’t it strike you kinda funny?”

“It strikes me you was needed,” said Mrs. Shields, glowering at him. “It strikes me you’n your old S’ciety better get busy.”

“Sure, sure! We’re going to. Only the rev’rend next door, and you sickin’ the authorities onta him——” Some obscurely humorous aspect of the situation overcame him; he propped himself against the doorpost, shaken with chuckles.

“When you’re through——?” said Mrs. Shields with chilly venom.

“Oh, all right! All right, Tillie!” He wiped his eyes, saluted her with burlesque obsequiousness, and went off down the walk; at the street another convulsion overtook him.

Miss Martha Wilcox, meanwhile, in contented ignorance of all these happenings, dreamed on, spending the rent, recounting it and spending it over again, Alnaschar-wise; with apologies to herself, she did actually spend some of it, here and there. It fairly burned a hole in her pocket, and there seemed no harm in a few small indulgences; she had gone without so long! But now Mrs. Seabury descended on her, headlong as usual, this time with a face of portentous gloom.

“Martha, have you heard? Oh, well, I know you haven’t heard! That’s the reason I’m here. It just got around to me, and I didn’t wait a minute. I’ve come right over to tell you; it’s the part of kindness. I mean about that woman you’ve got in your house. You haven’t heard?”

Miss Martha anticipated battle, murder, and sudden death. “No. What is it? Is she——?”

“Oh, nothing’s happened to her! Goodness, it’s a great deal worse than that!” She lowered her voice with cautious glances right and left, though they were alone. “Martha, it’s just got out who she is! You know everybody thought there was something the matter, she was so weird looking. Well, she’s notorious! The notorious Tillie Shields, that’s what they call her. You said her name was Matilda. Well, that’s who she is!” Mrs. Seabury concluded, leaning back in triumph.

For an instant Miss Martha was conscious only of acute vexation. “Notorious how, Eliza? What way?” she stammered, groping for objections, refutations.

“Oh, for mercy’s sake, the way they all are!” Mrs. Seabury rejoined in sharp impatience. “Well, to be sure, you’ve never been married,” she added more leniently, and followed up this apparently irrelevant statement with others very much to the point. “She had a place—one of those places—in the red-light district, you know. It was a good while ago—I don’t suppose she’s really notorious any more, she’s too old. But that’s who she is, the notorious Tillie Shields.”

Miss Martha, envisaging calamity, averted her mind in desperate unwillingness, desperate hope. “But how do you know? Who told you?”

“Why, Martha, it’s all over! Everybody’s heard! It seems she had a fuss with the Gowdy’s cook over their cat or the birds or something——” Mrs. Seabury entered into graphic and approximately accurate details, winding up with: “And the officer used to be on the police force, so, of course, he recognized her right away! I told you you oughtn’t to have taken her without a reference.”

“But the bank said——”

“Oh, the bank!” said Mrs. Seabury scornfully. “She probably keeps a big account there, and that’s all they care about. It’s awful to think how that money was made, but that’s nothing to a bank.—Oh, nobody suspects you of knowing, Martha,” she interrupted herself quickly, misreading her friend’s silence. “Nobody would believe that of you for a minute. We all know you didn’t know.”

Poor Miss Wilcox, in horror, found herself for a moment wishing vehemently that nobody knew. All her castles lay in ruins; and there were those bills that had seemed so trifling, looming monumentally now! She must undertake the abhorrent duty of putting Mrs. Shields out; and where or when would she get another tenant? She went to the house, flinching in expectation of the encounter with this person whom she now classified with formless dread as one of those women; to be sure, previous experience had revealed nothing alarming about her, but now that Mrs. Shields knew herself discovered, it would undoubtedly be different. She did not answer the bell, and Miss Martha, worriedly investigating, at length came upon her in the back yard where she had just finished scrubbing and refilling the bird-bath. Leaning on the broom, she was awaiting the approach of a robin; she saw Miss Wilcox out of the corner of her eye, and made a slight arresting gesture. The bird came on, with a kind of wary confidence, his bright, sidewise glance fixed on her.

“He’s just playing scairt. He knows me,” Mrs. Shields whispered. “But you better keep back a second.”

Miss Wilcox received a definite and most disconcerting shock. She had come prepared as conscious Virtue—and her logical opponent, conscious Vice, failed her! The notorious Tillie Shields did not look in the least notorious; she looked like an ignorant, dull, good-hearted woman, old and alone, cheaply pathetic with her paint and her terrific trade simper. It was with reluctance and difficulty that Miss Martha began to state her errand, but before she was halfway through, the other understood.

“I s’pose Pete Maguire’s been talking,” she said with a flash of resentful conviction. “Anyhow, I had a hunch I’d get in bad, right when I was settin’ there at the ’phone. I don’t care! I’m glad I done it. I’d done it, even ’f I’d known for certain!”

“I’m sorry I have to ask you to—to move,” Miss Martha began again, with miserable diffidence. “But I—I——”

“Oh, it’s all right,” said Tillie Shields, submissively. “I’ll find some other place to go. I always find a place, for a while, anyhow.” Obviously she spoke in no intention of enlisting sympathy; it was a mere statement of fact. Yet Miss Martha was remotely perturbed; and now, to her dismay, she saw the other’s chin quiver and two tears tracking down the paint.

“I—I liked it awful well here. Them birds——” She swallowed hard, bringing her features under control with an effort. “Ever’thing’s been took good care of. If it hadn’t been for next door——” She began to talk impetuously; it was a childishly incoherent, confident outpouring. “Miss Wilcox, you know how they do! Miss Wilcox, I can’t see how folks can do that way! That rabbit had a great sore on its side! And Doctor Gowdy’s a preacher!” Her voice rose in rebellious bewilderment. “He—why, he talks beautiful in church—I’ve heard him——”

So had Miss Martha. Fragments of the doctor’s noble and touching utterances on the text: “Inasmuch as ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” inconveniently returned to her.

“I can’t see——” Mrs. Shields reiterated helplessly. And neither could Martha Wilcox. The puzzle was too much for her. Nobody, not even the notorious Tillie Shields, had intentionally done any wrong, yet the cumulative result of all their acts seemed to be heartbreakingly wrong, somehow; she herself, were it not for needing the income, could have let Mrs. Shields live there for nothing—but she could not let her live there for eighty-five dollars a month!

“I’m so sorry——!” was all that she could say.

NOT WANTED
By JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS
From Saturday Evening Post

PHIL had read it in a book. But life did not come true to literature. When they put his first-born in his arms a strange nausea suffused this father’s frame and he handed the warm little bundle back to his sister hastily, as if it were hot.

“Take it away,” he whispered to Mary. “I might break it.”

And he bolted out of the room, for the doctor said he could see Nell now. The only joy he felt was over a less vainglorious but more important matter than becoming a father. The beautiful brave mother was all right.

This young man had not wanted to become a father; not in the least. He and Junior’s mother had been happy together. Now they would have to be happy apart, if at all, for whole years at a time, until Junior was big enough to stand trips to the wilds of Alaska or Africa or wherever else mining engineers had to go. Nell had always gone along until this usurper spoiled their life together. So Junior was really doing a scandalous thing, coming between husband and wife. No wonder that Phil had not wanted him.

Well, Junior’s mother wanted him anyway. She wanted him terrifically, more than anything in the world except Junior’s father. And as her husband wanted her to have everything she desired, why, probably it was all right. There was not much else that she had lacked.

Junior did not seem to understand that he wasn’t wanted by his father and took to Phil from the first. “All babies do,” said the jealous young aunt. “It’s a great gift and it’s wasted on a man.” Mary was a maiden, but she had hopes.

“He’s so big and so kind,” said the contented mother. “Children, dogs, and old ladies always adore Phil.”

With Junior it was clearly a case of love at first sight, and he did not act as if he were a victim of unrequited affection. For example, unlike a woman scorned, he had no fury for his father at all except when Phil left the room. Then he howled. His father could soothe him when even his mother failed, and Junior would settle down into Phil’s arms with a sigh of voluptuous satisfaction, quite as if he belonged there; and of course, he did. That was the dismaying part about it to his father, who scowled and looked bored. This made the young mother laugh; and that in turn made Junior laugh, too, and look down at her from the eminence of his father’s arms, as if trying to wink and say, “Rather a joke on the old man.”

“I suppose I’ve got to do this all my life,” said Phil.

“All your life,” said Nell, rubbing it in; “but after a while you’ll like it.”

She had great faith in her son’s charm.

Junior was five years old when his father came back from the Alaska project. He could not remember having met this grown-up before, but he might have said, “I have heard so much about you.” His mother had told him. For example, his father was the best and bravest man in the world. Also, according to the same reliable authority, he loved Junior and his mother enormously and equally. He was far away, getting bread and butter for them. A wonderful person, a great big man, six feet two inches “and well proportioned,” and such an honourable gentleman that—well, that was the only reason he was not coming home with a huge fortune, she explained. But at any rate he was coming home at last and would be awfully glad to see what a big boy Junior had become.

He was, but Phil had always been rather shy with strangers, and did not pay so much attention to his namesake as Junior had been led to expect. You see, everyone in this tyrant’s kingdom worshipped him, and Junior assumed that his father would follow conventions. For every night before he went to sleep his father’s name had invariably been mentioned first in the list of people and animals and playthings that loved him.

Junior, though quite small, was a great lover and much given to kissing. On momentous occasions, such as the start for the picnic the day after his father’s arrival, Junior manifested his excitement by hugging and kissing everybody in sight, including the dogs. It was his earliest form of selfexpression. His father, as it happened, was absorbed in packing the tea basket and had never been accustomed to being kissed while packing in camp. Besides, Junior had been helping his mother prepare the luncheon. That is, he had taken a hand in the distribution of guava jelly, and there was just one hardship in the life of this immaculate mining engineer he could never endure—sticky fingers. But Junior had not yet learned that, and so, taking advantage of his father’s kneeling posture, he tackled him around the neck and indulged in passionate osculation.

“Call your child off,” said Phil to Nell. She laughed.

“Come, precious, don’t bore your father.”

Junior did not know what that new word “bore” meant, but he released his father and transferred his demonstration to his mother. She never seemed to get too much and did not object to sweet fingers.

“Mamma,” said Junior as they started off in the car, “I don’t believe that man in front likes me.”

“He adores you, darling; he’s your father.”

Well, it sounded reasonable, but he remembered the new word. That evening when they came home the dogs, not having been allowed to go on the picnic, thought it was their turn and jumped up on Phil with muddy paws. Junior took command of the situation and of the new word.

“Down, Rex!” he said to the sentimental setter. “Don’t bore my father.” And he pulled Rex away by the tail.

At bedtime, when the nurse came to bear him off, he raised his arms to Phil.

“Can I bore you now?”

Phil laughed and kissed him good night.

“Funny little cuss, isn’t he?” said Phil.

“He’s a very unusual child,” said this very unusual Mother.

“Unusually ugly, you mean.”

But he couldn’t get a rise out of Nell.

“Oh, you’ll learn to appreciate him yet.”

Shortly before Phil left for his next trip the paternal passion had its way with this reserved father, for once. Some little street boys, as they were technically classified by the nurse, had been ordered off the drive by Junior, who was playing out there alone. They did not like his aristocratic manner and rolled him in the mud. They were pommelling him in spite of his protests, when Phil heard the outcry and, getting a glimpse of the unequal contest from the library window, gave forth a shout that made the intruders take to their heels, the infuriated father after them.

As he raced down the drive he saw the wide-eyed animal terror on his child’s face and it aroused within him an animal emotion of another kind, one he had never felt before, though he had often seen it exhibited by wild beasts—usually the mothers. It was a lust to destroy those two little boys, to render them extinct. He might have done so too; but fortunately they had a good start, and by the time he caught up with them civilization caught up with him sufficiently to make him realize what century he was living in. So, with a few vigorous cuffs and an angry warning, he hastened back to his bleating offspring, recognizing with astonishment and some alarm how near blind parental rage can bring a man to murder.

Junior was not so much damaged as his white clothes were, but his childish terror was pitiful. He rushed into his father’s arms and clung, quivering. Phil held him close.

“There, there, it’s all right now. I won’t let anybody hurt you.”

Without realizing it, this fastidious father was kissing an extremely dirty face again and again. Junior, still sobbing convulsively, clung closer.

“You’ll always be on my side, won’t you, Father?”

“You bet I will!” said Phil. “You’re my own darling little boy.”

He had had no intention of saying things quite like that, and didn’t know that he could; but it sounded all right to Junior. This moment was to be one of those vivid recollections that last through a lifetime.

With a final long-drawn sigh of complete and passionate comfort, the small boy looked up into the big man’s face and smiled.

“You love me now, don’t you, Father?” he said.

“You bet I love you!”

The boy had got him at last. But perhaps Junior presumed upon this new privilege. The next morning he awoke with a bad dream about those street boys, and as soon as the nurse permitted he rushed in to be reassured by his big father. Phil was preoccupied with shaving and did not know about the bad dream. Junior tried to climb up Phil’s legs.

“That will do,” said his father in imminent peril of cutting his chin; “get down. Get down, I tell you. Oh, Nell!”—she was in the next room—“make your child quit picking on me.”

“Come to me, dearest. Mustn’t bother Father when he’s shaving.”

Junior wasn’t piqued but he was puzzled.

“But I thought he loved me; he told me he loved me,” he called out. “Didn’t you tell me you loved me, Father?”

Phil laughed to cover his embarrassment. He had not reckoned on Junior’s giving him away to Nell, and knew that she was triumphing over him now in silence.

“Your father never loves anybody before breakfast,” said Junior’s mother, smiling as she covered him with kisses.

Apparently fathers could never be like mothers.

Nell knew it was a risk, but she wanted to be with Phil as much as he wanted to be with her—the old life together they both loved. So they decided that Junior was big enough now to stand the trip to Mongolia. It was a great mistake. Before they had crossed Russia all of them regretted it—except Junior. He was having a grand time. At present he was working his way back from the door of the railway compartment to the window again, and for the third time was stepping upon his father’s feet. Phil had had a bad time with the custom officials, a bad time with the milk boxes and a bad night’s sleep. His temper broke under the strain.

“Oh, children are a damn nuisance,” he growled.

“Come, dear, look at these funny houses out of the window,” said Junior’s mother. “Aren’t they funny houses?”

That night when she was putting him to sleep with the recital of those who loved him, Junior inquired, “Mamma, what is a damn nuisance?”

“A damn nuisance,” said his mother, “is a perfect darling.”

All the same he had learned that he must avoid stepping on his father’s freshly polished boots. One more item added to the list. Mustn’t touch him with sticky hands, mustn’t play with his pipes, mustn’t make a noise when he takes his nap on the train—so many things to remember, such a small head to keep them all in.

There was no more milk. There was very little proper food of any kind for Junior in the camp, although Phil sent a small-sized expedition away over the divide for the purpose. The boy became ill. Phil ordered a special train to bring a famous physician. He even neglected this work on the boy’s account, something unprecedented for Phil. But this was no place for children. The boy would have to go home. That meant that his mother would too.... All the beautiful dream of being together spoiled.

“I’m going back to America because I am a damn nuisance to my father,” Junior announced to Phil’s assistant.

Phil neglected his work again and went with them as far as the border. “But you do love him,” said Nell; “you know you do. You’d give up your life for him.”

“Naturally. All I object to is giving up my wife for him.”

But Phil’s last look was at the poor little sickly boy. He wondered if he would ever see him again. He did. But he never saw his wife again.

It was too late to do anything about it. His assistant, who had seen these married lovers together, marvelled at the way his silent chief went about the day’s work until his responsibility to the syndicate was discharged. Then he marvelled more when just as the opportunity of a professional lifetime came to Phil he threw up his job and started for home.

He meant to stay there. He would get into the office end of the work and devote the rest of his life to Nell’s boy. That was his job now. Previously he had left it to her—too much so. The brave girl! Never a whine in all the blessed years of their marriage. The child until now had seemed merely to belong to him, a luxury he did not particularly want. Now he belonged to the child, a necessity, and being needed made Phil want him. But the Great War postponed this plan.

So Junior continued to live with his devoted Aunt Mary. She cherished his belief in Phil’s perfection, but she could not understand why her busy brother never wrote to his adoring little son. But for that matter, Phil never wrote to his adoring little sister. He never wrote letters at all, except on business. He sent telegrams and cables—long, expensive ones.

On the memorable day when father and son were reunited at last an unwelcome shyness came upon them and fastened itself there like a bad habit. Neither knew how to break it. Each looked at the other wistfully with eyes that were veiled.

Junior was more proud of his wonderful father now than ever. Phil had a scar on his chin. The boy was keen to hear all about it. His father did not seem inclined to talk of that, and Junior had a precocious fear of boring him. He had made up his mind never to be a damn nuisance to his father again. He had long since discovered the meaning of those words.

Phil soon became restless and discontented with office work. He had done the other thing too long and too well to enjoy civilization for more than a month or so at a time, and the financial crowd infuriated him. He was interested in mining problems. They were interested in mining profits.

Owing to changes wrought by the war another great opportunity had arisen in a part of the world Phil knew better than any other member of his profession. “It’s a man’s job,” they told him, “and you’re the only one who could swing it.”

Phil shook his head. “Not fair to the boy.”

“But with the contract we’re prepared to offer you, why, your boy will be on Easy Street all his life.”

That got him. “Just once more,” thought Phil. “I’ll clean up on this and then retire to the country—make a real home for him—dogs and horses. I’ll teach him to shoot and fish. That ought to bring us together.”

So Junior’s father was arranging to go away again. He told the boy about the plan for the future. “And we’ll spend a lot of time in the woods together,” said Phil. “I’ll make a good camper of you. Your mother was a good camper.” This comforted the silent little fellow and he did not let the tears come until after Phil’s back was turned.

Meanwhile Phil had been going into the school question with the same thoroughness he devoted to every other job he undertook.

And now the epochal time had come for Junior to go away to boarding school. He was rather young for it, but Aunt Mary, it seems, was going to be married at last.

She volunteered to accompany the boy on the journey and see him through the first day. His father was very busy, of course, with preparations for his much longer and more important journey. Junior had always been fond of Aunt Mary, had transferred to her a little of the passionate devotion that had belonged to his mother. Only a little. The rest was all for his father, though Phil did not know it, and sometimes watched these two together with hungry eyes, wondering how they laughed and loved so comfortably.

On the evening before the great day his father said, “I know several of the masters up there.” A little later, he added, “One of the housemasters was a classmate of mine at college.” Then he said, “I’ve been thinking it over. Maybe I better go up there with you myself.”

“Oh, if you only would!” thought the little fellow. But he considered himself a big fellow now and had learned to repress such impulses, just as he and the dogs had learned not to jump up and kiss Phil’s face. So all Junior said was, “That’s awfully kind of you, but can you spare the time?” He always became self-conscious in his father’s presence.

“You’d rather have your Aunt Mary? Well, of course, that’s all right.”

“No, but”—Junior dropped his eyes and raised them again—“sure I won’t be a nuisance to you?”

Phil had forgotten the association of that word. All he saw was that the boy wanted him more than he did Mary and it pleased him tremendously. “Then that’s all fixed,” he said.

The housemaster was of the hearty pseudo-slangy sort. He said to Junior’s father, “Skinny little cuss, isn’t he? Well, we’ll soon build him up.”

“Aleck, I want you to take good care of this fellow,” said Phil. “He’s all I’ve got, you know.”

“Oh, I’ll keep a strict eye on him, and if he gets fresh I’ll bat him over the head.”

Junior knew that he was supposed to smile at this and did so. He did not feel much like smiling. He discovered that he was to be in the housemaster’s house. He did not believe that he would ever like this Mr. Fielding, but he did in time.

As it came nearer and nearer his father’s train time the terrible sinking feeling became worse, and he was afraid that he might cry after all; and that would disgrace his father. They walked down to the station together. They walked slowly. They would not see each other again for a year—maybe two. Both were thinking about it, neither referring to it. “I suppose that’s the golf links over there?” said Junior.

“I suppose so,” said Phil. He hadn’t looked.

There were a number of fathers and a greater number of mothers saying good-bye. Some of the mothers were crying, all of them were kissing their boys. Even some of the fathers did that. Junior and Phil saw it. They glanced at each other and away again, both wondering whether it would be done by them; each hoping so, yet fearing it wouldn’t be. Phil remembered how when he was a youngster he hated to be kissed before the other boys. He did not want to mortify the manly little fellow; and the boy knew better than to begin such things. (“Don’t bore your father.”)

“Well,” said Phil, looking at his watch, “I suppose I might as well get on the train.” Then he laughed as though that were funny. “Good-bye,” he said. “Work hard and you’ll have a good time here. Good-bye, Junior.” The father held out his hand.

The son shook it. “Good-bye, Father, I’ll bet you have a great trip in the mountains.” And Junior laughed too. The train pulled out, and the forlorn little boy was alone now. Worse. Surrounded by strangers.

“Well, I didn’t mortify him, anyway,” said the father.

“Well, I didn’t cry before him, anyway,” said the son. But he was doing it now.

The veil between them was not yet lifted.

Junior had a roommate named Black. So he was called Blackie. Blackie had a nice mother who used to come to see him frequently. Junior took considerable interest in mothers, observed them closely when even the most observant of them were quite unaware of it. He approved of his roommate’s mother, despite her telling Blackie not to forget his rubbers, dear. Blackie glanced at Junior to see if he was listening. Junior pretended that he wasn’t.

“Aren’t mothers queer?” said Blackie after she had gone.

“Sure,” said Junior.

“Always worrying about you. You know how it is.”

“Sure.”

“I bet your mother’s the same way.”

Junior hesitated. “My mother’s dead,” he said. “Bet I can beat you to the gate.” They raced and Junior beat him.

But he soon perceived that he would never make an athlete, and so he was a nonentity all through the early part of his school career, one of the little fellows in the lower form, thin legs and squeaky voice.

The things on the walls of Junior’s room—spears, arrows, shields, and an antelope head—first drew attention to Junior’s only distinction. That was why he had put them there.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” he said with some arrogance, after the expected admiration and curiosity had been elicited. “You just ought to see my father’s collection.” And this gave Junior his chance to tell about the collector. “These things—only some junk he didn’t want and sent to me.”

This was not strictly true. His father had not sent them. Junior had begged them from his aunt, and she was glad to get them out of her new house. They did not go in any of her rooms. It was soon spread about the school, as Junior knew it would be, that this skinny little fellow in the lower form had a father who was worth while, a dare-devil who led expeditions to distant and dangerous lands and seldom lived at home. He had killed his man, it seems, had nearly lost his life from an attack by a hostile tribe in Africa. He became a romantic, somewhat mythical figure.

“When my old man was in college,” said Smithy, also a lower-form boy and envious of Junior’s vicarious fame, “he made the football team.”

“My father was the captain of his eleven,” said Junior.

“My father was in the war,” said Smithy.

“Mine was wounded.”

But he soon observed that one could not boast too openly about one’s father. Smithy made that mistake about the family possessions—yachts and the like. He was squelched by an upper-form boy. Junior became subtle. He caused questions to be asked and answered them reluctantly, it seemed.

Many of the boys had photographs of fathers in khaki. Junior went them one better. After the Christmas holidays the crowded mantelpiece included an old faded kodak of Phil in a tropical explorer’s costume—white helmet, rifle, binoculars, cartridge belt. It had been taken as a joke by one of his engineer associates in Africa but it was taken seriously by Junior and his associates in school.

“Where is the scar from the African spear thrust?” asked Smithy.

“It doesn’t show in the picture,” said Junior, “but he often lets me see it. He and I always go fishing together in the North Woods when he’s in this country. Long canoe trips. I enjoy camping with him because he’s had a pretty good deal of experience at that sort of thing.”

Junior established a very interesting personality for Phil.

“Gee! I wish my father was like that,” said one of the boys. “My old man always gives me hell.”

One day during the second year Blackie said, “June, why doesn’t your father ever come here to see you?”

“Oh, he’s so seldom in this country, and he’s terribly busy when he gets here. Barely has time to jump from one large undertaking to another.” He had heard Aunt Mary’s husband say “large undertaking.”

“Well, some of the fellows think you’re just bluffing about your father.”

“Huh! They’re jealous. Look at Smithy’s father. Nothing but money and fat. Huh!”

Then came the great day when a wireless arrived for Junior. Very few boys get messages from their fathers by wireless. “Land Friday,” it said. “Coming to see you Saturday.” Ah! That would show them!

Junior jumped into a sort of first-page prominence in the news of the day. He let some of his friends see the wireless. And now all of them would see his father on Saturday. That was the day of the game. Junior would have a chance to exhibit him before the whole school. “Six feet two and well proportioned.” “Captain of his team in college.” He planned it all out carefully. They would arrive late at the game and Junior would lead him down the line. But he would do it with a matter-of-fact manner as if used to going to games with his father.

On Friday he received a telegram. “Sorry can’t make it stop am wiring headmaster permission spend week-end with me stop meet at office lunch time stop go to ball game and theatre in the evening.” It was a straight telegram at that, not a night letter. That would show the boys what kind of a father he had.

“Hot dog!” they said. “But look here! You’ll miss the game.”

“The game” meant the great school game, of course, not the mere world-series event Junior was going to.

“Well, you see, he doesn’t have many chances to be with me. I’ll have to go.” A dutiful son.

But on Saturday morning he received another telegram. “Sorry must postpone our spree together letter follows.”

He was beginning to wonder if his father really wanted to see him. It was a great jolt to his pride. He had counted upon letting the boys know where they lunched, what play they saw together, and perhaps there might be a few hairbreadth escapes to relate.

“He can’t come,” said Junior to his roommate, tearing up the telegram.

“Why can’t he?” asked Blackie. Did Blackie suspect anything? His parents never let anything prevent their seeing Blackie.

“Invited to the White House,” said Junior, tossing the torn telegram into the fire. “The President wants to consult him about conditions in Siberia.”

“Gee!” This made a sensation and it would spread. “But aren’t you going to see him at all?”

“Of course. Going down next week probably, but you know an invitation to the White House is a command.”

“That’s so.” Junior’s father’s stock was soaring.

That evening Smithy dropped in. He had heard about the White House and the President.

“Huh! I don’t believe you’ve got a father,” said Smithy.

Junior only smiled and glanced at his roommate. Later Blackie told the others that Smithy was jealous. “His father has nothing but money and fat.” Junior was always too much for Smithy. But suppose the promised letter did not follow. It hardly seemed possible. He had received occasional cables, several telegrams, and that one notable wireless, but never in all his life a letter from his father.

It came promptly. It was brief and it was dictated, but it was a letter all the same, and he was much impressed. He had a letter from his father, like other fellows. It explained that the writer had been called away to New Mexico by important business, but that he hoped to join his son during the summer. “It’s time we got acquainted. With much love, Your Father.”

“Well, we’re going to meet during the summer anyway,” thought Junior, folding up the letter. And his father had sent his love. To be sure, he sent it through his secretary. But he sent it all the same.

That evening Junior arranged to be found casually reading a letter when the gang dropped in.

“What have you got?” asked Smithy.

“Oh, just a letter from my father,” remarked Junior casually. “Wants to know if I won’t go out to the Canadian Rockies with him next summer.” He seemed to keep on reading. It was a bulky letter apparently. Junior had attached three blank sheets of paper at the same size as that on which the note was written.

“Gee! Your old man writes you long ones,” said Smithy. “What’s it all about?”

“Oh, he merely wanted to tell me about his conference with the President.”

“Hot dog! Read it aloud.”

“Sorry, Smithy, but it’s confidential!” Folded in such a way that its brevity was concealed, Junior carelessly exposed the first sheet bearing his father’s engraved letterhead. “Confidential” had been written by pen across the top. Junior had written it.

All this produced the calculated effect for his father, but it was cold comfort for the son.

Well, he did see his father at last, but it was during the summer vacation, and the boys would know nothing about it until the fall term opened. Junior was staying with Aunt Mary in the country, and came in for the day. Phil was dictating letters and jumped up with a loud “Hello, there, hello!” And this time he kissed his son, right in front of his secretary. She was the only one of the three not startled. Phil and Junior both blushed.

“Mrs. Allison, this is Junior,” said Phil. He seemed to be really glad to see the boy, and Junior’s heart was thumping. Mrs. Allison said, “Pleased, to meet you,” but Junior liked her all the same. She looked kind. And while her employer finished his dictation she glanced at Junior and smiled. The letter progressed slowly and had to be changed twice. Mrs. Allison knew why, and smiled again, at her pencil this time. She understood them both better than they understood each other.

“Thank you, Mrs. Allison,” Phil said; “that will be all to-day. I’m too tired.” She knew he never tired. “I’ll sign them after lunch and mail them myself.” Then he turned to Junior. “Now you and I are going out to have a grand old time together, eh, what, old top?”

He slapped Junior on the back. Then Mrs. Allison left the room, and father and son were alone together. It frightened them.

Already the old clamping habit of reserve was trying to have its way with them, though each was determined to prevent it. Both of them laughed and said, “Well, well!” hoping to bluff it off.

“First, let’s have a look at you,” said Phil; and he playfully dragged Junior toward the window. The boy’s laughter suddenly died, and Phil now had a disquieting sense of making an ass of himself in his son’s eyes. But that was not it. Junior dreaded the strong light of the window. With his changing voice had arrived a few not very conspicuous pimples; such little ones, but they distressed him enormously.

“Well, feel as if you could eat something?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Junior. He feared it sounded cold and formal. He couldn’t help it.

They went to a club on the top of a high office building. Junior’s name was written in the guest book, which awed him agreeably. A large, luxurious luncheon was outlined by Phil, beginning with a cantaloupe and ending with ice cream—a double portion for Junior. This was first submitted to Junior for approval. He had forgotten his facial blemishes.

“Golly! You bet I approve,” said Junior laughing. That was more like it.

Phil summoned a waiter and then sent for the head waiter. A great man, his father, not afraid even of head waiters. And he ordered with the air of one who knew. No wonder the waiters seemed honoured to serve him. Only, how was one to “get this over” to the boys without seeming to boast?

“A little fish, sir, after the melon?”

“Yes, if you’ll bring some not on the menu.” That was puzzling. Phil explained. Fish which had arrived at the club after the menu had been printed was sure to be fresh.

“Oh, I see,” said Junior. This would make a hit with the boys.

There was no doubt about it, his handsome father was the most distinguished personage in the whole large roomful of important-looking people. Several of them gathered around to welcome Phil. Junior was presented. Their greetings to the son showed their warm affection, their high regard for the father. Junior wallowed in filial pride. If only Smithy could see him now! What a father! A citizen of the world who did big things and wore perfect-fitting clothes, cut by his Bond Street tailor in London—the finishing touch of greatness to a boy of Junior’s age—and he recalled what one of the engineers had said to Aunt Mary, “Even in camp he shaves every day.”

“Well, tell me how everything is going at school,” said the father, who did not dream that he was being hero-worshipped.

But Junior could not be easy and natural, as with Aunt Mary. He blushed as in the presence of a stranger. He heard his own raucous voice and hated it. He took unnecessary sips of water.

He felt better and bolder after the delicious food arrived. Phil looked on with amusement, amazement at the amount the youngster consumed.

“Next year I hope you can find time to come down to see us at school,” Junior ventured with his double portion of ice cream. “All the fellows want to meet you.”

“I want to meet them,” said his father. “This fall on the way back, maybe.”

“Oh, you’re going away again?”

“Next week I’m going up into the woods with Billy Norton on a long canoe trip. Some new country I want to show him. Trout streams never yet fished by a white man.”

“Gosh! That’ll be great,” said Junior.

“Some day I’ll take you up there. It’s time you learned that game. Fly casting, like swinging a golf club, should begin before your muscles are set. Would you care to go on a camping trip with me?”

Care to! Of course it was the very thing he was doing all the time in his daydreams, but he could not say that to his father. He said, “Yes, thanks,” and paused for another sip of water. “You wouldn’t—no, of course, you wouldn’t want me to go along this time.”

“Not this time. You see, I promised Billy. Some day though—you and I alone. Much better, don’t you think?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir! Makes me feel like a master. I’m your father.” They laughed at that and went back to the office. “Only take me a second to sign these letters,” said Phil. Junior looked at the neat pile of them, again impressed by his father’s importance.

“That’s awfully nice paper,” he said, coveting the engraved letterhead with his father’s name on it, which was also his name.

“If you like it, take some,” said Phil as he rapidly signed that name. “Help yourself, all you want. Wait, I’ll get you a whole box.” He touched a bell and a boy came in. “Get a box of my stationery and ship it to this address.” He turned to his letters again. “Then you won’t have to pack it all the afternoon.” Pack it? Oh, yes, out-of-doors men said “pack” instead of “carry.” He would say it hereafter.

On the way from the elevator, as they passed through the arcade, Junior stopped to gaze with admiration at a camera in a shop window.

“Like one of those?” asked Phil. He led the way in. “Take your pick,” he said. And then, “Ship it to this address.”

It was the only way this shy father knew how to express his affection. It was not easy to say much to this boy. He seemed keen and critical under his quiet manner.

Before the baseball game was over—a dull, unimportant game—they were both talked out, each wondering what was the matter. “I suppose I bore him,” said Phil to himself, and soon began thinking about his business. When their grand old time together was finished each felt a horrible sense of relief, though neither would acknowledge it to himself.

“Poor little cuss!” thought Phil. “I’d like to be a good father to him, but I don’t know how.”

And the boy: “I’m afraid he’s disappointed in me. I’m so skinny and have pimples.” If he were only a big, good-looking fellow like Smithy, who played on the football team, his father would be proud of him. Smithy’s parents saw him almost every week in term time and took him abroad every summer. They were having his portrait painted.

“What kind of time did you have with your father in town?” asked his Aunt Mary. Junior felt rather in the way at times, now that she had a husband.

“Bully! Great!” and he made an attractive picture of it. “Father and I are so congenial, now that I’m old. Next summer we’re going to the woods together.”

“How do you talk to your kids?” Phil asked Bill Norton by the camp fire.

“I don’t talk to them. They aren’t interested in me except as a source of supply. New generation!”

“I’m crazy about my boy,” said Phil, “but I have an idea that he considers the old man a well-meaning ass. Funny thing; that little fellow is the only person in the world I’m afraid of.”

“No father really knows his own son,” said Billy. “Some of them think they do, but they don’t. It’s a psychological impossibility.”

Back at school again. A quick, scudding year. Summer vacation approaching already!

“We’d be so pleased if you would spend the month of August with us in Maine,” wrote Blackie’s mother. She had grown fond of the boy and was sorry for him. Motherless—fatherless, too, for practical, for parental purposes.

Junior, with his preternatural quickness, knew she was sorry for him and appreciated her kindness, but he was not to be pitied and his father was not to be criticized. “That’s awfully good of you,” he replied, “but Father is counting upon my going up to the North Woods with him on a long canoe trip. Some new country where no other white man has ever been.”

He went to the woods, but not with his father. It was the school camp—not the wild country his father penetrated; but there was trout fishing all the same, and he loved it. Like many boys who are not proficient at athletics, he took to camp life like a savage and developed more expertness at casting and cooking and canoeing than did certain stars of the football field or track. He had natural savvy. The guides said so. Besides, he had an incentive to excel. He was not going to be a nuisance to his father on the trip they would take together some day. And though he reverted to a state of savagery in the woods, he kept his tent and his outfit scrupulously neat and won first prize in this department by a vote of the counsellors. For excellent reasons he did not shave every day in camp, but he would some day.

He learned a great deal about the ways of birds while he was in the woods, and back at school he persuaded Blackie to help organize The Naturalists Club, despite the jeers of the athlete idolaters. He took many bird pictures with the camera and he prepared a bird census of the township. This was published in the school magazine, and so Junior decided that when he got through college he would be a writer.

He had not seen his father for two years. South America this time—in the Andes. The canoe trip was no longer mentioned. Junior went to the school camp regularly now. He was acknowledged the best all-round camper in school. He won first prize in fly casting and the second in canoeing. He was getting big and strong, and became a good swimmer.

He spent his Christmas vacation with Aunt Mary, and while there Mrs. Fielding, the wife of the housemaster, in town for the holidays, dropped in for tea one day with Aunt Mary. They did not know that Junior was in the adjoining room, reading Stewart Edward White.

“But it’s criminal the way Phil neglects that darling boy,” said Aunt Mary.

“And he’s developing in such a fine way too,” said Mrs. Fielding. “He’s one of the best liked boys in school.”

“I can’t understand my brother. Of course he’s terribly engrossed with his career, now that he has won success, but he might at least send a picture post card occasionally.”

“You mean to say he never writes to his own son!” Mrs. Fielding was shocked and indignant. And then came this tragic revelation to Junior:

“Well, you see,” said Aunt Mary, “Phil never wanted children, and he’s not really interested in the boy.”

“You don’t tell me so! Why, Aleck always speaks of your brother as if he were so generous and warm-hearted.”

“Yes, that’s what makes it so pathetic. He is kind and tries to make up for his lack of affection by giving Junior a larger allowance than is good for him. But he never takes the trouble to send him a Christmas present.”

So that explained it all. “He’s not interested in me. I wasn’t wanted.” And after that he had his first experience with a sleepless night.

A few days later Junior remarked, “By the way, Aunt Mary, did I show you the binoculars Father sent me for Christmas?” He handed them to her for inspection. They looked secondhand. They were. He had picked them up that morning in a pawnshop. “These are the very ones that Father carried all through the war. He knew I’d like them better than new ones. Just like Father to think of that. You remember his showing them to us when he got back?”

Aunt Mary did not remember such things—he knew she wouldn’t—but she rejoiced to hear it.

“He has sent me a typewriter too; only he ordered it shipped directly to the school.”

“That was nice of him, wasn’t it?” said Aunt Mary.

“That’s the way he does with most of the presents he sends me. You remember the camera?”

She did remember the camera.

The typewriter had been ordered on the installment plan. Junior hadn’t saved enough money from his allowance to buy it outright.

“He’s not going to get me a radio set until he finds out which is the best make on the market, he says.”

“Oh, has he written to you?” Aunt Mary was still more surprised.

“Every week,” said Junior.

“Oh, Junior! I’m so glad. But why haven’t you ever told me, dear?”

Junior smiled. “I didn’t want to make you jealous. He never writes to you.”

“But didn’t you know how I would want to hear all his news?”

“You are so terribly engrossed in Uncle Robert’s career, I thought maybe you weren’t interested in Father.”

At school the binoculars made a hit with the boys because they showed the scars of war, but no one thought much of typewriters as Christmas presents except Junior. He knew what he was doing.

A few days later, when Blackie entered the room he found his roommate engrossed in reading a letter and so said nothing until Junior emitted an absent-minded chuckle.

“What’s the joke?”

“Oh, nothing; just a letter from my father.”

“From your father? I thought he never wrote to you.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Well, I never see any envelopes with foreign stamps.”

“He always incloses mine in letters to my aunt.”

“But you never mentioned them, all the same,” said Blackie, “except the one about the White House.”

“They are confidential, mostly.” Junior returned to the absorbing letter. Presently he laughed outright.

“What does he say that’s so funny?”

“Oh, hell! Read it yourself.” Junior seemed irritated and tossed the bulky letter across to his roommate.

It had taken the boy some time to compose this letter to himself, for it required more than the possession of a typewriter and his father’s engraved stationery to create a convincing illusion of a letter from a father. Junior had seen so few, except for those Blackie had allowed him to read, that he had no working model for long, interesting letters worthy of a great man like his father.

The first draught had begun, “My darling boy,” but he changed that—it sounded too much like Blackie’s mother. He made it “My dearest son.” He rather fancied that, but finally played safe and addressed himself simply as “Dear Junior.”

My work here is going fine. I have three thousand natives at work under me not to speak of a hundred engineers on my staff doing the technikal work. I am terribly busy but of course won’t let that interfere with my regular weekly letter to you.

Junior was watching Blackie’s face.

I often think of the last canoe trip with you in Canada and can hardly wait until I take another canoe trip with you in Canada. Remember that time you hooked a four-pounder with your three ounce rod? You were a little fellow then, that was before you went away to school. Remember how you yelled to me for help to land same?

Business men always said “same,” but Junior didn’t like it, and besides, his father was a professional man, so he changed “same,” to “him.”

Of course it wasn’t much of a trick for me to land that four pound trout on a three ounce rod, because I am probly the best fisherman in any of the dozen or more fishing clubs I belong to.

Junior revised that to read:

Because I happen to have quite a little experience landing trout and salmon in some of the most important streams in the world, from the high Sierras to the Ural Mountains.

It would never do to make his father guilty of blowing—the unforgivable sin.

He thought that was all right for a beginning, but did not know how to follow it up. He wanted to put in something about the Andes, with a few stories of wild adventure and hairbreadth escapes, but although he read up on the Andes in the encyclopædia, as he did on all his father’s temporary habitats, he did not feel that the encyclopædia style suited his father’s vivid personality. In an old copy of the National Geographic Magazine he found a traveller’s description of adventures in that part of the world, and simply copied a page or two. It had to do with an amusing though extremely dangerous adventure with a python, which had treed one of the writer’s gun bearers—a narrow escape told as a joke—quite his father’s sort of thing; and no one would ever accuse Junior of inventing such a well-written narrative with such circumstantial local colour.

Blackie was properly impressed by the three thousand natives and one hundred experts, and he too, laughed aloud at the antics of the gun bearer. He told the other boys about it, as Junior meant him to do, and some of them wanted to read it too. They dropped in after study hour.

Junior, it seems, required urging, like an amateur vocalist who nevertheless has brought her music.

“Oh, shoot!” he said. “It doesn’t amount to anything. Just a letter from my father.”

“Why don’t you read it aloud?” suggested Blackie.

Junior seemed bored, but soon submitted. Like vocalists, he was afraid that they might stop urging him.

“Oh, very well,” he said. He skimmed lightly over the opening personal paragraph with the parenthetical voice people use when leading up to the important part of a letter, though this was a very important part for Junior, to get it over. Then, with the manner of saying, “Ah, here we are,” he began reading in a louder and more deliberate tone, but not without realistic hesitation here and there, as if unfamiliar with the text. He read not only the amusing adventure with the python, but an authoritative paragraph on the mineral deposits of the mountains. So his audience never doubted that he had a real letter from a real mining expert who signed himself “Your affectionate friend and father.”

Junior carelessly tossed the letter upon the table. “Some day I’ll read you one of his interesting ones,” he said.

“Do it now,” said one of his admirers. “It’s great stuff.”

“No, I never keep letters,” said Junior and, to prove it, tore up the carefully prepared document and tossed it in the fire.

“I’ll let you know when I get a good one.”

This was so successful that he did it again. There were plenty of other quotable pages in the same magazine article, and Junior had a whole box of his father’s stationery. But at the beginning and end of each letter Junior always insinuated a few paternal touches, suggesting a rich past of intimacy and affection, though just to make it a little more convincing he would occasionally insert something like this, “But I must tell you frankly, as man to man, that you spent entirely too much money last term,” and interrupted his reading to say, “Gee! I didn’t mean to read you fellows that part.” And they all laughed. A touch of parental nature that made all the boys akin.

The fame of these letters spread from the boys’ end of the dinner table to the master’s. Mr. Fielding said to Junior one day, “I’m so glad your father has been writing to you lately.”

“Lately? Why, he always writes to me. But don’t tell my Aunt Mary. Might make her jealous.”

Junior smiled as if he had a great joke on his Aunt Mary. There, he got that over too! Neither of these ladies would dare criticize his father again.

“Is your Aunt Mary so fond of him as all that?”

“Why, of course!”

“Well, I’m glad you’re hearing from him, anyway. I so seldom see letters addressed to you on the hall table.

“I have a lock box at the post office.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Fielding.

So that explained it all. It was true about the lock box. Junior exhibited the key while was he speaking, and he was seen at the post office frequently to make the matter more plausible. He even opened the box if any one was around to watch him, though he never found any letters there except those he put in and pulled out again by sleight of hand, whistling carelessly as he did so.

Mr. Fielding had asked Junior to step into the office a moment. “What do you hear from your father?” he said.

“Oh, he’s quite well, thank you, sir. He’ll be starting for home soon. He says he’s not going to let anything interfere with our canoe trip this year. It’s the funniest thing how something has always happened every summer to prevent it. Father says we’re going to break the hoodoo this time.”

“I see,” said Mr. Fielding.

Junior had heard Mr. Fielding say “I see” before and he had been in school too long now to undervalue its significance. He would have to be on guard. He knew he had told conflicting stories.

“Do you hear from him regularly?”

“Oh, no; the mails are so irregular from that part of the world.”

“How often?”

“Well,” said Junior, with his engaging smile, “not so often as I’d like, of course. But then he’s a very busy man.”

“That story about the python—it sounded like a corker as Blackie told it secondhand. Mind letting me read that letter?”

“Sorry, sir. I destroyed it.” Blackie would vouch for that, if necessary.

“I see.” The head master looked at Junior in silence, then he said with a not unkind smile. “Junior, I’m very fond of your father. He’s one of the finest fellows that ever lived.”

“Sure,” said Junior.

“I’ve known him longer than you have. I don’t think he ever did anything dishonourable in his life.”

“Of course not.”

What was coming? He must keep his head now.

“You know how your father would feel if I couldn’t honestly say the same thing about you?”

“Why, what do you mean, Mr. Fielding?”

“Just tell me the truth, Junior, and it needn’t ever go out of this room. Does your father ever write to you at all?”

“Why, sir, you don’t think my father is the sort who wouldn’t write to his own son, do you?” Then the boy added desperately, “I don’t see why you all want to make him out a piker.”

“Did your father write the letter describing the fight with the python?”

“Look here, Mr. Fielding, you people don’t understand. I’m better friends with my father than most boys. You see, my mother’s dead and all that. So—well, don’t you see, he sort of takes it out in writing me long letters. He thought that stuff about the python would amuse me.”

He was a loyal little liar and the head master admired him for it. But it wouldn’t do. Mr. Fielding opened a drawer of his desk and took out an old magazine.

“Does your father take the National Geographic?”

Junior crumpled up.

“I don’t know, sir.” He was in for it now—caught. Mr. Fielding opened the magazine and pointed out a marked page to Junior.

“Junior, I know you won’t accuse an honourable gentleman like your father of stealing another man’s writings, passing them off as his own. There’s an ugly name for that. It’s called plagiarism.”

He had tried to defend his father, and look at the result!

“I wrote those letters, Mr. Fielding.”

“I knew that,” said Mr. Fielding gently. “You won’t do it again, though, will you, Junior?”

“Hardly.”

“That’s all. You may go now.”

Junior turned at the door. He knew that this was not all. He was being let down too easily.

“Mr. Fielding——” he began, and hesitated. “It won’t be necessary for you to tell my father, will it?”

“I won’t tell him, but you will.”

“No, sir, I could never do that.”

“Well, we’ll see. Good night, Junior.”

So he could write no more letters to exhibit to the boys. He explained that his father had gone on a long expedition inland. No chance for mail for months. They made no comment, but the whole house knew that he had been summoned “to the office.” They suspected something, but they would never discover the truth from him. He would bluff it out to the end.

But now, more than ever, he wanted letters from father, even if written by himself. He had formed the habit. They somehow did him good. They made him feel that his father was interested in him.

So, once in a while, just for his own eyes, when Blackie was not around he opened the typewriter and said all the things he wanted his father to say to him. As no one would ever see these letters, he could go as far as he liked. He went quite far. He even said things that only mothers said:

My darling son: Don’t you care what he thinks about you; I understand and I forgive you. You meant it all right and I like you just the same, even if you are not an athlete and have got pimples. When I get back we’ll go off to the West together and live down this disgrace. Your devoted father and friend.

Sometimes he laughed a little, or tried to, when he realized how these letters would bore his distinguished parent. But while writing them his father seemed not only fond of him but actually proud of him. A writer can invent anything.

I was so pleased to hear your poem about the meadow lark was accepted by the magazine. Your article about Birds in Our Woods was very interesting and very well written. I believe you will make a great writer some day, and think how proud I will be when you are a great writer, and people point to your picture in the newspapers! I’ll say, “That’s my son; I’m his father.” Of course, I was disappointed that you did not become a great athlete like me, but intellectual destinction is good if you can’t get athletic destinction, and it may be more useful for a career.

He got a good deal of comfort out of being a father to himself, and sometimes the letters ran into considerable length, unless Blackie butted in. His father, it seemed, even consulted him about his own affairs:

I am glad you approve of my taking on the San Miguel project. I think a great deal of your business judgment and it is great to have a son who has good business judgment even though he cannot make the team. In that respect it is better than making the team, because you can help me in my problems away off here just as I help you with your problems up there at school.

He enjoyed writing that one, but when he became the reader of it, that last sentence made him cry. And the worst of it was, at that point Blackie came in.

“What are you writing?”

“Just some stuff for the mag.”

“You’re always writing for the mag. Get your racket and come on.”

“Oh, get out of here and quit interrupting my literary work.” Junior had not cared to turn his telltale face toward his roommate.

The school year was closing, and Junior was packing to leave the next day. The last time he had gone to town he learned at the office that his father was returning soon. They did not know which steamer. They never did. The secret letters had all been kept carefully locked in his trunk, and now Junior was taking them out to put neatly folded trousers in the bottom. Blackie was playing tennis. None of the boys had learned the truth, though in secret Blackie felt pretty sure of it now, but was so loyal that he had a fight with Smithy for daring to say in public that Junior’s letters were a damn fake.

Mr. Fielding came in. He did not notice the letters lying there on the table, and he seemed very friendly. The housemaster knew how fine and sensitive this boy was and that the only way to handle him was by encouragement. “We are all much pleased with your classroom work, Junior; but as for the mag, you’re a rotten speller, but a good writer, and I don’t mind telling you a secret: You have been elected to be one of the editors next year.”

“Oh, Mr. Fielding! Are you sure?” This had been his ambition for a year. That settled it for life. A great writer like W. H. Hudson, who loved both nature and art, but nature more.

“Of course your appointment has to be confirmed by the faculty, but there’ll be no trouble with a boy of your standing. All you have to do is straighten out that little matter with your father. Naturally, an editor has got to have a clean literary record.”

This was not meant entirely as punishment for Junior. The master thought it would be salutary for Phil to know. It might wake him up.

“You mean I can’t make the mag unless I tell him what I did?”

“Do you want me to tell him?”

“If you do I’ll run away and I’ll never come back.”

“Can’t you get up your courage to do it, Junior? I know you didn’t mean to do wrong. Your father will, too, when he understands.”

Junior was shaking his head.

“It isn’t a matter of courage,” he said, straightening up. “He’d think I was knocking him out for not writing to me.

“Well, if you won’t talk to him about it I must. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“A few minutes! Here? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“He landed yesterday. The papers ran an interview with him this morning. I telegraphed him to come at once.” Mr. Fielding looked at his watch. “Why, his train must be coming in now. Excuse me. I said I’d meet him at the station.”

A mental earthquake turned Junior’s universe upside down. His father was coming at last! Why? His offense must have been pretty serious to bring his father. Why, of course! Mr. Fielding had sent for him. The most honourable gentleman in the world was going to find out in a few minutes that his own son and namesake was a liar, a plagiarist, and a forger. Junior could not face it. He rushed from the room and out by the back stairs. His father was coming, the thing he planned and longed for ever since he had been a member of the school, and he was running away from him.

He went out into the woods by the river, where he had spent so many happy hours with Blackie and the birds. He could never face Blackie again, nor the school, no, nor his father. Life was empty and horrible. “Why not end it all in the river?” He had read that phrase, but the impulse was genuine.

“The hell of it is,” he heard himself saying, “I’m such a good swimmer.”

But he could load his coat with stones and bind his feet with his trousers. He began picking out the stones.

“Well, what’s it?” said Phil to the housemaster, trying to hide his paternal eagerness. The boy was in trouble, the old man would get him out. Good! Needed at last. “Has my young hopeful been getting tight?”

“Oh, nothing as serious as that. He’s a finely organized, highly evolved youngster, and so he has a rather vivid imagination.”

“Speak up, Aleck! You haven’t caught him in a lie? That’s a good deal more serious than getting tight.”

“Well, it’s a likable lie.”

“It’s a lie all the same, and I’ll give him the devil.”

“Oh, no, you won’t. The kid lied for you, old man; perjured himself like a gentleman. Now you go and get it out of him. It’ll do you both good.” They had arrived at the house.

“Where is the little cuss?” Phil was trying without success to seem calm and casual.

“He’s no longer little. You won’t know him. He’s come into his heritage of good looks at last.”

“For God’s sake, shut up and tell me where to find him.”

Fielding laughed. “Upstairs, second door on the left. I won’t butt in on this business. It’s up to you now.” But Phil did not wait to hear all that.

Not finding his namesake and glancing about at the intimate possessions of his little-known son, Phil was surprised to see a sheath of letters on the table, bearing his own engraved stamp at the top.

“That’s odd,” he thought. “Who’s been writing to him on my paper?” He had forgotten the presentation box of stationery. His eye was caught by these words neatly typed, “My beloved son,” At the bottom of the page he saw, “Your faithful friend and father.” He picked the letter up and read it.

As I told you in my last, I am counting the days until we get together again and go up to Canada on another canoe trip, just you and I alone this time without any guide. You have become such a good camper now that we don’t want any greasy Indian guides around. I am glad that you are a good camper. I don’t care what you say, I’d rather go to the woods with you than Billy Norton or anybody because you and I are not like ordinary father and sons; we are congenial friends. Of course you are pretty young to be a friend of mine and you may be an ugly and unattractive kid, but you are mine all the same, and I’m just crazy about you. They say I neglect you, but you know better. All these letters prove it. Your faithful friend and father.

Junior’s father picked up the rest of the letters and, with the strangest sensations a father ever had, read them all.

Perhaps it was telepathy. Junior suddenly remembered that he had left the letters exposed upon the table. His father would go upstairs after the talk with Mr. Fielding, to disown him. He would find those incriminating letters. Then when they found his body his father would know that his son was not only a liar and a forger but a coward and a quitter. In all his life his father had never been afraid of anything. If his father were in his place what would he do?

That saved him. He dumped out the stones and ran back to the room. He would face it.

Phil was aware that a tall slender youth with a quick elastic stride had entered the room and had stopped abruptly by the door, staring at him. There were reasons why he preferred not to raise his face at present, but this boy’s figure was unrecognizably tall and strong, and Phil was in no mood to let a young stranger come in upon him now.

“What do you want?” he asked gruffly, still seated still holding the letters.

There was no answer. Junior had never seen a Father disown a son, but he guessed that was the way it was done. He saw the letters in his father’s hands. Certainly, this was being disowned.

The boy took a step forward. “Well, anyway,” he said, maintaining a defiant dignity in his disgrace, “no one else has seen those letters, so you won’t be compromised, Father.” The boy was a great reader, and had often heard of compromising letters.

Phil sprang up from his chair, dropped the letters and gazed into the fine sensitive face, a beautiful face, it seemed to him now, quivering, but held bravely up to meet his sentence like a soldier.

Junior could now see that his father’s strong face was also quivering, but misunderstood the reason for his emotion. There was a silence while Phil gained control of his voice. Then he said, still gazing at the boy, “But how did you know I felt that way about you?”

“What way?”

“Those letters. I’ve read them. I wish to God I’d written them.”

Junior, usually so quick, still could not get it right. “You mean, you’re going to forgive me for lying about you?”

“Lying about me! Why, boy, you’ve told the truth about me. I didn’t know how. Can you forgive me for that?”

Now Junior was getting it. His face was lighting up. “Why, Father,” he began, and faltered. “Why, Father—why, Father—you really like me!”

Junior felt strong hands gripping his shoulders and once more the vivid recollection of the street boys and the big man who comforted him. “You know what one of those letters says, Junior—I’m just crazy about you.”

“Oh, Father, why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Well, what’s the use of having a great writer in the family anyway!”

They laughed and looked at each other and found that the strange thing that kept them apart was gone for ever. In the future they might differ, quarrel even, but the veil between them was torn asunder at last.

The rest of the boys had finished dinner when Junior came down, leading in his tall bronzed father with the perfectly fitting clothes and the romantic scar on his handsome face.

“Say, fellows, wait a minute. I want you to know my father.” He did it quite as if accustomed to it, but Mrs. Fielding down at the end of the table could see that father and son were reeking with pride. “He’s my son; I’m his father.”

“So this is Blackie?” said Phil. “Did you give him that message in my last letter?” Even his father could lie when he wanted to.

“Sorry, I forgot.”

Phil turned and gave his old classmate a shameless wink. “I can’t really blame the kid. I write him such awfully long letters.”

“Father just landed from South America yesterday,” Junior was explaining to Smithy. “So he hurried right up here.”

“You see we’re starting for the Canadian Rockies to-morrow,” said Phil. “This fellow’s got an impudent idea that he can out-cast the old man now, but I’ll show him his place.”

Mr. Fielding took the floor. “Junior ought to get some good material for the magazine up there,” he said. “Boys, he’s going to be one of the editors next year.”

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[A] In the United States, written by citizens of the United States.

[B] Modern advertising needs many media. Mark Sullivan, at the Author’s League Dinner, Hotel Plaza, 1916, attributed the increase in short stories to the invention of the gasolene engine. Periodical literature, if in part literature only by courtesy, meets the taste and intelligence of all classes.

[C] June, 1850.

[D] January-June, 1887.

[E] “Short Story Writing,” N. Bryllion Fagin, Thomas Seltzer, 1923, p. 98.

[F] New York Times Book Review, December 23, 1923. Article by Rose C. Feld.

[G] “Yet Again,” by Max Beerbohm, Alfred Knopf, 1923.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

done so with orginality=> done so with originality {pg xvi}

became almost ununbearable=> became almost unbearable {pg 7}

said to Naopleon=> said to Napoleon {pg 22}

he came to Naopleon=> he came to Napoleon {pg 23}

thick atmsophere=> thick atmosphere {pg 31}

I want someobdy=> I want somebody {pg 48}

was appproaching=> was approaching {pg 80}

charged with an electricty=> charged with an electricity {pg 82}

calesa and tood refuge=> calesa and took refuge {pg 90}

two fliers appeard=> two fliers appeared {pg 96}

his horny plams=> his horny palms {pg 104}

the men lengthenend=> the men lengthened {pg 113}

stood one one side=> stood on one side {pg 117}

commites a murder=> commits a murder {pg 137}

faces oppposite her=> faces opposite her {pg 159}

with Wallie=> with Wally {pg 160}

tilted you head back=> tilted your head back {pg 171}

could he commmunicate=> could he communicate {pg 185}

predatory keeness=> predatory keenness {pg 203}

“What’s this?” he sked.=> “What’s this?” he asked. {pg 220}

been accumstomed=> been accustomed {pg 249}

on on reading=> on on reading {pg 259}

that kept tham apart=> that kept them apart {pg 277}

---