He drew back and straightened his shoulders as though daring the world to gainsay him.

“Why, of course, Shep!” Bruce replied quietly. He drew a memorandum from his pocket and asked about some bonds the trust company had advertised and into which he considered converting some of the securities he had left with his banker at Laconia which were now maturing. Shep, pleased that Bruce was inviting his advice in the matter, produced data from the archives in confirmation of his assurance that the bonds were gilt-edge and a desirable investment. Bruce lingered, spending more time than was necessary in discussing the matter merely to divert Shep’s thoughts from the Walters’ episode.

III

Bruce had never before worked so hard; Freeman said that the designer of the Parthenon had been a loafer in comparison. After a long and laborious day he would drive to the Freemans with questions about his designs for the memorial that he feared to sleep on. Dale remarked to her husband that it was inspiring to see a young man of Bruce’s fine talent and enthusiasm engrossed upon a task and at the same time in love—an invincible combination.

Carroll had kept in mind the visit to Laconia he had proposed and they made a week-end excursion of it in May. Bruce was glad of the chance to inspect the site of the memorial, and happier than he had expected to be in meeting old friends. It was disclosed that Carroll’s interest in Bruce’s cousin was not quite so incidental as he had pretended. Mills’s secretary had within the year several times visited Laconia, an indication that he was not breaking his heart over Leila.

Bruce stole away from the hotel on Sunday morning to visit his mother’s grave. She had lived so constantly in his thoughts that it seemed strange that she could be lying in the quiet cemetery beside John Storrs. There was something of greatness in her or she would never have risked the loss of his respect and affection. She had trusted him, confident of his magnanimity and love. Strange that in that small town, with its brave little flourish of prosperity, she had lived all those years with that secret in her heart, perhaps with that old passion tormenting her to the end. She had not been afraid of him, had not feared that he would despise her. “O soul of fire within a woman’s clay”—this line from a fugitive poem he had chanced upon in a newspaper expressed her. On his way into town he passed the old home, resenting the presence of the new owner, who could not know what manner of woman had dwelt there, sanctified its walls, given grace to the garden where the sun-dial and the flower beds still spoke of her.... Millicent was like Marian. Very precious had grown this thought, of the spiritual kinship of his mother and Millicent.

Traversing the uneven brick pavements along the maple arched street, it was in his mind that his mother and Millicent would have understood each other. They dreamed the same dreams; the garden walls had not shut out Marian Storrs’s vision of the infinite. A church bell whose clamorous peal was one of his earliest recollections seemed subdued today to a less insistent note by the sweetness of the spring air. Old memories awoke. He remembered a sermon he had heard in the church of the sonorous bell when he was still a child; the fear it had wakened in his heart—a long noisy discourse on the penalties of sin, the horror in store for the damned. And he recalled how his mother had taken his hand and smiled down at him there in the Storrs pew—that adorable smile of hers. And that evening as they sat alone in the garden on the bench by the sun-dial she had comforted him and told him that God—her God—was not the frightful being the visiting minister had pictured, but generous and loving. Yes, Millicent was like Marian Storrs....

After this holiday he fell upon his work with renewed energy—but he saw Millicent frequently. It was much easier to pass through the Harden gate and ring the bell now that the windows of the Mills house were boarded up. Mrs. Harden and the doctor made clear their friendliness—not with parental anxiety to ingratiate themselves with an eligible young man, but out of sincere regard and liking.

“You were raised in a country town and all us folks who were brought up in small towns speak the same language,” Mrs. Harden declared. She conferred the highest degree of her approval by receiving him in the kitchen on the cook’s day out, when she could, in her own phrase, putter around all she pleased. Millicent, enchantingly aproned, shared in the sacred rites of preparing the evening meal on these days of freedom, when there was very likely to be beaten biscuit, in the preparation of which Bruce was duly initiated.

Spring repeated its ancient miracle in the land of the tall corn. A pleasant haven for warm evenings was the Harden’s “back yard” as the Doctor called it, though it was the most artistic garden in town, where Mrs. Harden indulged her taste in old-fashioned flowers; and there was a tea house set in among towering forest trees where Millicent held court. Bruce appearing late, with the excuse that he had been at work, was able to witness the departure of Millicent’s other “company” as her parents designated her visitors, and enjoy an hour with her alone. Their privacy was invaded usually by Mrs. Harden, who appeared with a pitcher of cooling drink and plates of the cakes in which she specialized. She was enormously busy with her work on the orphan asylum board. She was ruining the orphans, the Doctor said; but he was proud of his wife and encouraged her philanthropies. He was building a hospital in his home town—thus, according to Bud Henderson, propitiating the gods for the enormity of his offense against medical ethics in waxing rich off the asthma cure. The Doctor’s sole recreation was fishing; he had found a retired minister, also linked in some way with the Hardens’ home town, who shared his weakness. They frequently rose with the sun and drove in Harden’s car to places where they had fished as boys. Bruce had known people like the Hardens at Laconia. Even in the big handsome house they retained their simplicity, a simplicity which in some degree explained Millicent. It was this quality in her that accounted for much—the sincerity and artlessness with which she expressed beliefs that gained sanctity from her very manner of speaking of them.