PAUL STOOD BY HER, LOOKING DOWN INTO HER EYES, BENDING OVER HER, SMILING, PRESSING, CONFIDENT, MASTERFUL (PAGE 96)

Copyright, 1911, 1912
by
THE RIDGWAY COMPANY

Copyright, 1912
by
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Published March, 1912

CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE FAIRY PRINCESS

BOOK II

IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB

BOOK III

A SUITABLE MARRIAGE

BOOK IV

BUT IT’S NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE SQUIRREL-CAGE

BOOK I

THE FAIRY PRINCESS

CHAPTER I

AN AMERICAN FAMILY

The house of the Emery family was a singularly good example of the capacity of wood and plaster and brick to acquire personality. It was the physical symbol of its owners’ position in life; it was the history of their career, written down for all to see, and as such they felt in it the most justifiable pride. When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after their wedding in a small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio they had spent their tiny capital in building a small story-and-a-half cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning popular in 1872, and this had been the nucleus of their present rambling, picturesque, many-roomed home. Every step in the long series of changes which had led from its first state to its last had a profound and gratifying significance for the Emerys, and its final condition, prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of woodwork in every room that showed, with the latest, most unobtrusively artistic effects in decoration, represented their culminating well-earned position in the inner circle of the best society of Endbury.

Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained with effort, self-denial and careful calculations, yet still without incurring debt, so their social position had been secured by unremitting diligence and care, but with no loss of self-respect or even of dignity. They were honestly proud both of their house and of their list of acquaintances and saw no reason to regard them as less worthy achievements of an industrious life than their four creditable grown-up children or Judge Emery’s honorable reputation at the bar. In their youth they had conceived of certain things as worth attaining. They had worked hard for these things and their unabashed pleasure in possessing them had the vivid and substantial quality which comes from a keen memory of battles with a world none too ready to grant human desires.

The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember those early struggling days with almost as fresh an emotion as that of their parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed matron of thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous colored lithograph without an uncontrollable wave of bitterness, so present to her mind was the period when they painfully groped their way out of chromos.

The date of that epoch coincided with the date of their first acquaintance with the Hollisters. The Hollisters were Endbury’s First Family; literally so, for they had come up from their farm in Kentucky to settle in Endbury when it was but a frontier post. It was a part of their superiority over other families that their traditions took cognizance of the time when great stumps from the primeval forest stood in what was now Endbury’s public square, the hub of interurban trolley traffic, whence the big, noisy cars started for their infinitely radiating journeys over the flat, fertile country about the little city. The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded chromos as much as five years before. Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly admitted to the honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the cold monotony of her black and white engravings. The artlessness of this wonder struck shame to their hearts when they chanced to learn that the lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amusement at their own highly-colored waterfalls and snow-capped mountain-peaks. Marietta could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental salt-and-pepper “caster” which had been one of their most prized wedding presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so intolerably did it spell humiliation.

Even the oldest son, prosperous, well-established manufacturer that he was, could not recall without a shudder his first dinner-party. A branch of the Hollisters had moved next door to the Emerys and, to Mrs. Emery’s great satisfaction, an easy neighborly acquaintance had sprung up between the two families. Secure in this familiarity, and not distinguishing the immense difference between a chance invitation to drop in to dinner and a formal invitation to dine, the young business-man had almost forgotten the date for which he had been bidden. Remembering it with a start, he had gone straight from his office to the house of his hosts, supposing that he would be able, as he had done many times before, to wash his face and hands in the bath-room and brush his hair in the room of the son of the house.

The sight of a black man in evening dress, who opened the door to him instead of the usual maid, sent a vague apprehension through his preoccupied mind, but it was not until he found himself in the room set apart for the masculine guests and saw everyone arrayed in “swallow-tails,” as he thought of them, that he realized what he had done. The emotion of the moment was one that made a mark on his life.

He had an instant’s wild notion of making some excuse to go home and dress, for his plight was by no means due to necessity. He had a correct outfit of evening clothes, bought at the urgent command of his mother, which he had worn several times at public dinners given by the city Board of Trade and once at a dancing party at the home of the head of his firm. However, the hard sense which made him successful in his business kept him from a final absurdity now. He had been seen, and he decided grimly that he would be, on the whole, a shade more laughable if he appeared later in a changed costume.

He was twenty-one years old at that time; he considered himself a man grown. He had been in business for five years and his foot was already set firmly on the ladder of commercial success on which he was to mount high, but not for nothing had he felt about him all his life the inextinguishable desire of his family to outgrow rusticity. He chided himself for unmanly pettiness, but the fact remained that throughout the interminable evening the sight of his gray striped trousers or colored cuffs affected him to a chagrin that was like a wave of physical nausea. Four years later he had married a handsome young lady from among the Hollister connections, and, moving away to Cleveland, where no memory of his antecedents could handicap him, had begun a new social career as eminently successful as his rapid commercial expansion. He forced himself sometimes to think of that long-past evening as one presses on a scar to learn how much soreness is left in an old wound, and he smiled at the little tragedy of egotism it had been to him. But it was a wry smile.

A brighter recollection to all the Emerys was the justly complacent and satisfied remembrance of the house grounds during the first really successful social event they had achieved. It was a lawn-fête, given for the benefit of St. Luke’s church, which Mrs. Emery and Marietta had recently joined. Socially, it was the first fruits of their conversion from Congregationalism. The weather was fine, the roses were out, the very best people were there, the bazaar was profitable, and the dowager of the Hollister matrons had spoken warm words of admiration of the competent way in which the occasion had been managed to Mrs. Emery, smiling and flushed in an indomitably self-respecting pleasure. The older Emerys still sometimes spoke of that afternoon and evening as parents remember the hour when their baby first walked alone, with something of the same mixture of pride in the later achievements of the child and of tenderness for its early weakness.

The youngest of the Emerys, many years the junior of her brothers and sister, knew nothing at all of the anxious bitter-sweet of these early endeavors for sophistication. By the time she came to conscious, individual life the summit had been virtually reached. It is not to be denied that Lydia had witnessed several abrupt changes in the family ideal of household decoration or of entertaining, but since they were exactly contemporaneous with similar changes on the part of the Hollisters and other people in their circle, these revolutions of taste brought with them no sense of humiliation. Such, for instance, was the substitution for carpets of hardwood floors and rugs as oriental as the purse would allow. Lydia could remember gorgeously flowered carpets on every Emery floor, but since they also covered all the prosperous floors in town at the same time, it was not more painful to have found them attractive than to have worn immensely large sleeves or preposterously blousing shirt waists, to have ridden bicycles, or read E. P. Roe, or anything else that everybody used to do and did no more. She could remember, also, when charades and book-parties were considered amusing pastimes for grown-ups, but in passing beyond these primitive tastes the Emerys had been well abreast of their contemporaries. The last charade party had not been held in their parlors, they congratulated themselves.

A philosophic observer who had known the history of Mrs. Emery’s life might have found something pathetic in her pleasure at Lydia’s light-hearted jesting at the funny old things people used to think pretty and the absurd pursuits they used to think entertaining. It was to her a symbol that her daughter had escaped what had caused her so much suffering, the uneasy, self-distrusting dread lest she might still be finding pretty things that up-to-date people thought grotesque; lest suddenly what she had toiled so painfully to obtain should somehow turn out to be not the “right thing” after all. Marietta did not recall more vividly than did her mother the trying period that had elapsed between their new enlightenment on the subject of chromos and the day when an unexpected large fee from a client of Mr. Emery (not yet Judge) enabled them to hang their Protestant walls with engravings of pagan gods and Roman Catholic saints. For their problem had never been the simple one of merely discovering the right thing. There had always been added to it the complication of securing the right thing out of an income by no means limitless. The head of the household had enjoyed the success that might have been predicted from his whole-souled absorption in his profession, but Judge Emery came of old-fashioned rural stock with inelastic ideas of honesty, and though he was more than willing to toil early and late to supply funds for his family and satisfy whatever form of ambition his women-folk might decree to be the best one, he was not willing to take advantage of the perquisites of his position, and never, as the phrase in the town ran, “made on the side.” Of his temptations and of his stout resistance to them, his wife and children knew no more, naturally, than of any of the other details of his professional life, which, according to the custom of their circle, were as remote and hidden from them as if he had departed each morning after his hearty early breakfast into another planet; but his wife was proud of the integrity which she divined in her husband and, as she often declared roundly to Marietta, would not have exchanged his good name for a much larger income.

Indeed, the acridity which for Marietta lingered about the recollection of their efforts to make themselves over did not exist in the more amply satisfied mind of her mother. The difference showed itself visibly in the contrast between the daughter’s face, stamped with a certain tired, unflagging intensity of endeavor, and the freshness of the older woman. At thirty-two, Marietta looked, perhaps, no older than her age, but obviously more worn by the strain of life than her mother at fifty-six. Sometimes, as she noted in her mirror the sharp lines of a fatigue that was almost bitterness, she experienced a certain unnerving uncertainty, a total lack of zest for what she so eagerly struggled to attain, and she envied her mother’s single-minded satisfaction in getting what she wanted.

Mrs. Emery had enjoyed the warfare of her life heartily; the victories for their own sake, the defeats because they had spurred her on to fresh and finally successful efforts, and the remembrance of both was sweet to her. She loved her husband for himself and for what he had been able to give her, and she loved her children ardently, although she had been sorely vexed by her second son’s unfortunate marriage. He had always been a discordant note in the family concert, the veiled, unconscious, uneasy skepticism of Marietta bursting out openly in Henry as a careless, laughing cynicism, excessively disconcerting to his mother. She sometimes thought he had married the grocer’s daughter out of “contrariness.” The irritation which surrounded that event, and the play of cross-purposes and discord which had filled the period until the misguided young people had voluntarily exiled themselves to the Far West, remained more of a sore spot in Mrs. Emery’s mind than any blow given or taken in her lifelong campaign for distinction. She admitted frankly to herself that it was a relief that Harry was no longer near her, although her mother’s heart ached for the Harry he had seemed to her before his rebellion. She fancied that she would enjoy him as of old if the litter of inconvenient persons and facts lying between them could but be cleared away; with a voluntary blindness not uncommon in parents, refusing to recognize that these superficial differences were only the outward expression of a fundamental alienation within. At all events, it was futile to speculate about the matter, since the width of the continent and her son’s intense distaste for letter-writing separated them. She had come, therefore, to turn all her attention and proud affection on her youngest child.

It seemed to her sometimes that Lydia had been granted her by a merciful Providence in order that she might make that “fresh start all over again” which is the never-realized ideal of erring humanity. Marietta had been a young lady fourteen years before, and fourteen years meant much—meant everything to people who progressed as fast as the Emerys. Uncertain of themselves, they had not ventured to launch Marietta boldly upon the waves of a society the chart of which was so new to them. She had no coming-out party. She simply put on long skirts, coiled her black hair on top of her head, and began going to evening parties with a few young men who were amused by the tart briskness of her tongue and attracted by the comeliness of her healthful youth. She had married the first man who proposed to her—a young insurance agent. Since then they had lived in a very comfortable, middling state of harmony, apparently on about the same social scale as Marietta’s parents. That this feat was accomplished on a much smaller income was due to Marietta’s unrivaled instinct and trained capacity for keeping up appearances.

All this history had been creditable, but nothing more; and Mrs. Emery often looked at her elder daughter with compunction for her own earlier ignorance and helplessness. She could have done so much more for Marietta if she had only known how. Mrs. Mortimer was, however, a rather prickly personality with whom to attempt to sympathize, and in general her mother felt the usual -in-law conclusion about her daughter’s life: that Marietta could undoubtedly have done better than to marry her industrious, negligible husband, but that, on the whole, she might have done worse; and it was much to be hoped that her little boy would resemble the Emerys and not the Mortimers.

No such philosophical calm restrained her emotions about Lydia. She was in positive beauty and charm all that poor Marietta had not been, and she was to have in the way of backing and management all that poor Marietta had lacked. It seemed to Mrs. Emery that her whole life had been devoted to learning what to do and what not to do for Lydia. As the time of action drew nearer she nerved herself for the campaign with a finely confident feeling that she knew every inch of the ground. Her expectancy grew more and more tense as her eagerness rose. During the long year that Lydia was in Europe, receiving a final gloss, even higher than that imparted by the expensive and exclusive girls’ school where she had spent the years between fourteen and eighteen, Mrs. Emery laid her plans and arranged her life with a fervent devotion to one end—the success of Lydia’s first season in society. Every room in the house seemed to her vision to stand in a bright vacancy awaiting the arrival of the débutante.

CHAPTER II

AMERICAN BEAUTIES

On the morning of Lydia’s long-expected return, as Mrs. Emery moved restlessly about the large double parlors opening out on a veranda where the vines were already golden in the September sunlight, it seemed to her that the very walls were blank in hushed eagerness and that the chairs and tables turned faces like hers, tired with patience, toward the open door. She had not realized until the long separation was almost over how unendurably she had missed her baby girl, as she still thought of the tall girl of nineteen. She could not wait the few hours that were left. Her fortitude had given way just too soon. She must have the dear child now, now, in her arms.

She moved absently a spray of goldenrod which hid a Fra Angelico angel over the mantel and noted with dramatic self-pity that her hand was trembling. She sat down suddenly, and lost herself in a vain attempt to recall the well-beloved sound of Lydia’s fresh young voice. A knot came in her throat, and she covered her face with her large, white, carefully-manicured hands.

Marietta came in briskly a few moments later, bringing a bouquet of asters from her own garden. She was dressed, as always, with a severe reticence in color and line which, though due to her extreme need for economy, nevertheless gave to the rather spare outlines of her tall figure a distinction, admired by Endbury under the name of stylishness. Her rapid step had carried her half-way across the wide room before she saw to her surprise that her mother, usually so self-contained, was giving way to an inexplicable emotion.

“Good gracious, Mother!” she began in the energetic fashion which was apt to make her most neutral remarks sound combative.

Mrs. Emery dried her eyes with a gesture of protest, adjusted her gray pompadour deftly, and cut off her daughter’s remonstrance, “Oh, you needn’t tell me I’m foolish, Marietta. I know it. I just suddenly got so impatient it didn’t seem as though I could wait another minute!”

The younger woman accepted this explanation of the tears with a murmured sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during the past winter by her mother’s favorite woman’s club. Mrs. Emery watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side the vase. The sight stirred her to speech. “Oh, Marietta, how do you suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope she won’t be disappointed. I’ve done so much to it this last year, perhaps she won’t like it. And Oh, I was so tried because we weren’t able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!”

Mrs. Mortimer glanced without smiling at a miniature of her sister, blooming in a shrine-like arrangement on her mother’s writing-desk. She shook her dark head with a gesture like her father’s, and said with his blunt decisiveness, “Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia. She’s only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and father it is good enough for her.”

She crossed the room toward the door with a brisk rattle of starched skirts, but as she passed her mother her hand was caught and held. “That’s just it, Marietta—that’s just what came over me! Is what’s good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won’t anything, even the best, in Endbury be a come-down for her?”

The slightly irritated impatience with which Mrs. Mortimer had listened to the first words of this speech gave way to a shrewd amusement. “You mean that you’ve put Lydia up on such a high plane to begin with that whichever way she goes will be a step down,” she asked.

“Yes, yes; that’s just it,” breathed her mother, unconscious of any irony in her daughter’s accent. She fixed her eyes, which, in spite of her having long since passed the half-century mark, were still very clear and blue, anxiously upon Marietta’s opaque dark ones. She felt not only a need to be reassured in general by anyone, but a reluctant faith in the younger woman’s judgment.

Marietta released herself with a laugh that was like a light, mocking tap on her mother’s shoulder. “Well, folks that haven’t got real worries will certainly manufacture them! To worry about Lydia’s future in Endbury! Aren’t you afraid the sun won’t rise some day? If ever there was any girl that had a smooth road in front of her—”

The door-bell rang. “They’ve come! They’ve come!” cried Mrs. Emery wildly.

“Lydia wouldn’t ring the bell, and her train isn’t due till ten,” Mrs. Mortimer reminded her.

“Oh, yes. Well, then, it’s the new sideboard. I am so—”

“It’s a boy with a big pasteboard box,” contradicted Mrs. Mortimer, looking down the hall to the open front door.

Seeing someone there to receive it, the boy set the box inside the screen door and started down the steps.

“Bring it here! Bring it here!” called Mrs. Mortimer, commandingly.

“It’s for Lydia,” said Mrs. Emery, looking at the address. She spoke with an accent of dramatic intensity, and a flush rose to her fair cheeks.

Her olive-skinned daughter looked at her and laughed. “What did you expect?”

“But he didn’t care enough about her coming home to be in town to-day!” Mrs. Emery’s maternal vanity flared up hotly.

Mrs. Mortimer laughed again and began taking the layers of crumpled wax-paper out of the box. “Oh, that was the trouble with you, was it? That’s nothing. He had to be away to see about a new electrical plant in Dayton. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to let anything interfere with business?” This characterization was delivered with an intonation that made it the most manifest praise.

Her mother seconded it with unquestioning acquiescence. “No, that’s a fact; I never did.”

Mrs. Mortimer in her turn had an accent of dramatic intensity as she cried out, “Oh! they are American Beauties! The biggest I ever saw!”

The two women looked at the flowers, almost awestruck at their size.

“Have you a vase?” Mrs. Mortimer asked dubiously.

Mrs. Emery rose to the occasion. “The Japanese umbrella stand.”

There was a pause as they reverently arranged the great sheaf of enormous flowers. Then Mrs. Emery began, “Marietta—” She hesitated.

“Well,” Mrs. Mortimer prompted her, a little impatiently.

“Do you really think that he—that Lydia—?”

Marietta accepted with a somewhat pinched smile her mother’s boundary lines of reticence. “Of course. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to give up anything he wanted?”

Her mother shook her head.

Mrs. Mortimer rose with a “Well, then!” and the air of one who has said all there is to be said on a subject, and again crossed the room toward the door. Her mother drifted aimlessly in that direction also, as though swept along by the other’s energy.

“Well, it’s a pity he is not here now, anyhow,” she said, adding in a spirited answer to her daughter’s expression, “Now, you needn’t look that way, Marietta. You know yourself that Lydia is very romantic and fanciful. It would be a very different matter if she were like Madeleine Hollister. She wouldn’t need any managing.”

Mrs. Mortimer smiled at the idea. “Yes, I’d like to see somebody try to manage Paul’s sister,” she commented.

“They wouldn’t have to,” her mother pointed out, “she’s so levelheaded and sane. But Lydia’s different. It’s part of her loveliness, of course, only you do have to manage her. And she’ll be in a very unsettled state for the first week or two after she gets home after such a long absence. The impressions she gets then—well, I wish he were here!”

Mrs. Mortimer waved her hand toward the roses.

“Of course, of course,” assented her mother, subsiding peaceably down the scale from anxiety to confidence with the phrase. She looked at the monstrous flowers with the gaze of acquired admiration so usual in her eyes. “They don’t look much like roses, do they?” she remarked irrelevantly.

Mrs. Mortimer turned in the doorway, her face expressing an extreme surprise. “Good gracious, no,” she cried. “Why, of course not. They cost a dollar and a half apiece.”

She did not stop to hear her mother’s vaguely assenting reply. Mrs. Emery heard her firm, rapid tread go down the hall to the front door and then suddenly stop. Something indefinable about the pause that followed made the mother’s heart beat thickly. “What is it, Marietta?” she called, but her voice was lost in Mrs. Mortimer’s exclamation of surprise, “Why it can’t be—why, Lydia!”

As from a great distance, the mother heard a confused rush in the hall, and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came the sweet, high note of a girl’s voice, laughing, but with the liquid uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. “Oh, Marietta! Where’s Mother? Aren’t you all slow-pokes—not a soul to meet us at the train—where’s Mother? Where’s Mother? Where’s—” The room swam around Mrs. Emery as she stood up looking toward the door, and the girl who came running in, her dark eyes shining with happy tears, was not more real than the many visions of her that had haunted her mother’s imagination during the lonely year of separation. At the clasp of the young arms about her face took light as from an inner source, and breath came back to her in a sudden gasp. She tried to speak, but the only word that came was “Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!”

The girl laughed, a half-sob breaking her voice as she answered whimsically, “Well, who did you expect to see?”

Mrs. Mortimer performed her usual function of relieving emotional tension by putting a strong hand on Lydia’s shoulder and spinning her about. “Come! I want to see if it is you—and how you look.”

For a moment the ardent young creature stood still in a glowing quiet. She drank in the dazzled gaze of admiration of the two women with an innocent delight. The tears were still in Mrs. Emery’s eyes, but she did not raise a hand to dry them, smitten motionless by the extremity of her proud satisfaction. Never again did Lydia look to her as she did at that moment, like something from another sphere, like some bright, unimaginably happy being, freed from the bonds that had always weighed so heavily on all the world about her mother.

Before she could draw breath, Lydia moved and was changed. Her mother saw suddenly, with that emotion which only mothers know, reminiscences of little-girlhood, of babyhood, even of long-dead cousins and aunts, in the lovely face blooming under the wide hat. She felt the sweet momentary confusion of individuality, the satisfied sense of complete ownership which accompanies a strong belief in family ties. Lydia was not only altogether entrancing, but she was of the same stuff with those who loved her so dearly. It gave a deeper note to her mother’s passion of affectionate pride.

The girl turned with a pretty, defiant tilt of her head. “Well, and how do I look?” she asked; and before she could be answered she flew at Mrs. Mortimer with a gentle roughness, clasping her arms around her waist until the matron gasped. “You look too good to be true—both of you—if you are such lazybones that you wouldn’t go to the station to meet the prodigal daughter!”

“Well, if you will come on an earlier train than you telegraphed—” began Mrs. Mortimer, “Everybody’s getting ready to meet you with a brass band. What did you do with Father?”

The girl moved away, putting her hands up to her hat uncertainly as though about to take out the hat-pins. There was between the three a moment of that constraint which accompanies the transition from emotional intensity down to an everyday level. In Lydia’s voice there was even a little flatness as she answered, “Oh, he put me in the hack and went off to see about business. I heard him ’phoning something to somebody about a suit. We got through the customs sooner than we thought we could, you see, and caught an earlier train.”

Mrs. Emery turned her adoring gaze from Lydia’s slim beauty and looked inquiringly at her elder daughter. Mrs. Mortimer understood, and nodded.

“What are you two making faces about?” Lydia turned in time to catch the interchange of glances.

Mrs. Emery hesitated. Marietta spoke with a crisp straightforwardness which served as well in this case as nonchalance for keeping her remark without undue significance. “We were just wondering if now wasn’t a good time to show you what Paul Hollister did for your welcome home. He couldn’t be here himself, so he sent those.” She nodded toward the bouquet.

As Lydia turned toward the flowers her two elders fixed her with the unscrupulously scrutinizing gaze of blood-relations; but their microscopic survey showed them nothing in the girl’s face, already flushed and excited by her home-coming, beyond a sudden amused surprise at the grotesque size of the tribute.

“Why, for mercy’s sake! Did you ever see such monsters! They are as big as my head! Look!” She whirled her hat from the pretty disorder of her brown hair and poised it on the topmost of the great flowers, stepping back to see the effect and laughing, “They don’t look any more like roses, do they?” she added, turning to her mother. Mrs. Emery’s answer rose so spontaneously to her lips that she was not aware that she was echoing Marietta. “Good gracious, no; of course not. They cost a dollar and a half apiece.”

Lydia neither assented to nor dissented from this apothegm. It started another train of thought in her mind. “As much as all that! Why, Paul oughtn’t to be so extravagant! He can’t afford it, and I should have liked something else just as—”

Her sister broke in with an ample gesture of negation. “You don’t know Paul. If he goes on the way he’s started—he’s district sales manager for southern Ohio already.”

Lydia paid to this information the passing tribute of a moment’s uncomprehending surprise. “Think of that! The last time Paul told me about himself he was working day and night in Schenectady, learning the business, and getting—oh, I don’t know—fifty cents an hour, or some such starvation wages.”

Mrs. Mortimer’s bitterly acquired sense of values revolted at this. “What are you talking about, Lydia? Fifty cents an hour starvation wages!”

“Well, perhaps it was five cents an hour. I don’t remember. And he worked with his hands and was always in danger of getting shot through with a million volts of electricity or mashed with a breaking fly-wheel or something. He said electricians were the soldiers of modern civilization. I told that to a German woman we met on the boat when she said Americans have no courage because they don’t fight duels. The idea!”

She began pulling off her gloves, with a quick energetic gesture. Mrs. Mortimer went on, “Well, he certainly has a brilliant future before him. Everybody says that—” She stopped, struck by her rather heavy emphasis on the theme and by a curious look from Lydia. The girl did not blush, she did not seem embarrassed, but for a moment the childlike clarity of her look was clouded by an expression of consciousness.

Mrs. Emery made a rush upon her, drawing her away toward the door with a displeased look at Marietta. “Never mind about Paul’s prospects,” she said. “With Lydia just this minute home, to begin gossiping about the neighbors! Come up to your room, darling, and see the little outdoor sitting-room we’ve had fixed over the porch.”

Mrs. Mortimer was not given to bearing chagrin, even a passing one, with undue self-restraint. She threw into the intonation of her next sentence her resentment at the rebuke from her mother. “I still live, you know, even if Lydia has come home!” As Mrs. Emery turned with a look of apology, she added, “Oh, I only wanted to make you turn around so that I could tell you that I am going to bring my two men-folks over here to-night, to the gathering of the clans, and that I must go home until then. Dr. Melton and Aunt Julia are coming, aren’t they?”

“Oh, yes!” cried Lydia. “It doesn’t seem to me I can wait to see Godfather. I sort of half hoped he might be here now.”

“Well, Lydia!” her mother reproached her jealously.

“Oh, you might as well give in, Mother, Lydia likes the little old doctor better than any of the rest of us.”

“He talks to me,” said Lydia defensively.

“We never say a word,” commented Mrs. Mortimer.

Lydia broke away from her mother’s close clasp and ran back to her sister. She was always running, as though to keep up with the rapidity of her swift impulses. She held her subtly-curved cheek up to the other’s strongly-marked face. “You just kiss me, Etta dear,” she pleaded softly, “and stop teasing.”

Mrs. Mortimer looked long into the clear dark eyes with an unmoved countenance. Then her face melted suddenly till she looked like her mother. She put her arms about the girl with a fervent gesture of tenderness. “Dear little Lydia,” she murmured, with a quaver in her voice.

CHAPTER III

PICKING UP THE THREADS

After she was alone she looked again at the miniature of Lydia. The youthful radiance of the face had singularly the effect of a perfect flower. Mrs. Mortimer glanced at the hat still drooping its wide brim over the rose where Lydia had forgotten it, and stood still in a reverie that had, from her aspect, something of sadness in it. After a moment she sighed out, “Poor little Lydia!”

“What’s the matter with Lydia?” asked someone behind her.

She turned and faced a dark, elderly personage, the robust dignity of whose bearing was now tempered with shamefacedness. Mrs. Mortimer’s face sharpened in affectionate malice. “What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?” she asked with a humorously exaggerated air of amazement. “No self-respecting man is ever seen in his house during business hours!” She went on, “Oh, I know well enough. You let Mother have her first to make up for her being sick and not able to go to meet her ship; but you can’t stay away.”

The Judge waved her raillery away with a smile. The physical resemblance between father and daughter was remarkable. “I asked you what was the matter with Lydia,” he repeated.

Mrs. Mortimer’s face clouded. “Oh, it’s a hateful, horrid sort of world we’re all so eager to push her into. It’s like a can full of angleworms, everlastingly squirming and wriggling to get to the top. I was just thinking that it would be better for her, maybe, if she could always stay a little girl and travel ’round to see things.”

“Why, Etta! I tell you I’m glad to have Lydia get through with her traveling ’round. Maybe I can see something of her if I hurry up and do it now before your mother gets things going. I won’t after that, of course. I never have.”

To this his daughter had one of her abrupt, disconcerting responses. “You’d better hurry and do it before you get so deep in some important trial that you wouldn’t know Lydia from a plaster image. There are more reasons than just Mother and card parties why you don’t see much of her, I guess.”

Judge Emery forbore to argue the point. “Where are they now?” he asked.

“Oh, upstairs, out of my way. Mother’s usual state of mind about Lydia is more so than ever, I warn you. She thought I wasn’t refined enough company.”

“Now, Etta, you know your mother never thought any such thing.”

“Well, I know she was inconsistent, whatever she thought. While we were here alone she was speculating about Paul Hollister like anything. And yet, because I just happened to mention to Lydia that he is getting on in the world, I got put down as if I’d tried to make her marry him for his prospects.”

There was an edge in her voice which her father deprecated, rubbing his shaven chin mildly. He deplored the appearance of a flaw in the smooth surface of harmony he loved to see in his family.

“Well, you know, Marietta, we aim to have everything about right for Lydia. She’s all we’ve got left now the rest of you are settled.”

The deepening of the careworn lines in the woman’s face seemed a justification for the undisguised bitterness of her answer. “I don’t see why nobody must breathe a word to her about what everybody knows is so. What’s the use of pretending that we’d be satisfied or she’d be comfortable a minute if Paul didn’t promise to be a money-maker—or at least to have a good income?”

She turned away and walked rapidly down the hall, followed by her father, half apologetic, half reproachful. “Why, Daughter, you don’t grudge your sister! We couldn’t do so much for you; but we’re better off since you were a young lady and we want Lydia to have the benefit.”

Mrs. Mortimer paused on the veranda and stood looking in a troubled silence at the broad, well-kept lawn, stretching down to the asphalt street, shaded by vigorous young maples. Her father waited for her to speak, too good a lawyer to spoil by superfluous words the effect of a well-calculated appeal.

Finally she turned to him contritely. “I’m hateful, Dad, and I’m sorry. Of course I don’t grudge dear little Lydia anything. Only I have a pretty hard time of it scratching along, and when I’m awfully tired of contriving and calculating how to manage somehow and anyhow, it’s hard to come up to the standard of saying everything’s lovely that you and Mother want for Lydia.”

“Anything the trouble specially?” asked her father guardedly.

“Oh, no; same old thing. Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment on a one-maid income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid. There aren’t any girls to be had lately. It means I have to be the other maid and the man all of the time, and all three, part of the time.” She was starting down the step, but paused as though she could not resist the relief that came from expression. “And the cost of living—the necessities are bad enough, but the other things—the things you have to have not to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I think of it in church. I can’t think of anything else but the way the expenses mount up. Everybody’s getting so reckless and extravagant and I won’t go into debt! I’ll come to it, though. Everybody else does! We’re the only people that haven’t oriental rugs now. Why, the Gilberts—and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for Ellen’s appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several hundred dollars—well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they ‘just had to have it, and you can always have what you have to have.’ It makes me sick! Our parlor looks so common! And the last dinner party we gave cost—” She detected a wavering in her father’s attention, as though he were listening for sounds inside the house, and broke off abruptly with a hurt and impatient “Oh, well, no matter!” and ran down the steps.

Judge Emery called after with a relieved belittling of her complaints, “Oh, if that’s all you mean. Why, that’s half the fun. I remember when you were a baby your mother did the washings so that we could have a nurse to take you out with the other children and their nurses.”

Mrs. Mortimer was palpably out of earshot before he finished his exhortation, so he wasted no more breath but turned back eagerly in response to a call from Lydia, who came skimming down the hall. “Oh, Daddy dearest, it’s a jewel of a little sitting-room, the one you fixed up for me—and Mother says we can serve punch there the night of my coming-out party.”

Mrs. Emery was at her heels. Her husband laughed at his wife’s expression, and drew her toward him. “Here, Mother, stop staring at Lydia long enough to welcome me home, too.” He bent over her and rubbed his cheek against hers. “Come, tell me the news. Are you feeling better?” He gave her a little playful push toward the door of the parlor. “Here, let’s go in and visit for a while. I’m an old fool! I can’t do any work this morning. I kept Lydia from telling me a thing all the way from New York, so that we could hear it together.”

Lydia protested. “Tell you! After those monstrous great letters I’ve written! There’s nothing you don’t know. There’s nothing much to tell, anyhow. I’ve been museumed and picture-galleried, and churched, and cultured generally, till I’m full—up to there!” She drew her hand across her slim white throat and added cheerfully, “But I forgot the most of that the last three months in Paris. Nearly every girl in the party was going home to come out in society, and of course we just concentrated on clothes. You don’t mind, do you?”

As she hesitated, with raised eyebrows of doubt, her mother, heedless of what she was saying, was suddenly overcome by her appealing look and drew her close with a rush of little incoherent tender cries choked with tears. It was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Judge Emery twice tried to speak before his husky voice was under control. He patted his wife on the shoulder. “There, there, Mother,” he said vaguely. To Lydia he went on, “You’ve been gone quite a while, you know, and—well, till you have a baby-girl of your own I guess you won’t have much notion of how we feel.”

Lydia’s dark eyes filled, responsive to the emotion about her. “I’m just about distracted,” she cried. “I love everybody and everything so, I can’t stand it! I want to kiss you both and I can’t make up my mind which to kiss first—and it’s that way about everything! It’s all so good I don’t know what to begin on.” She brought their faces together and achieved a simultaneous kiss with a shaky laugh. “Now, look here! If we stand here another minute we’ll all cry. Come and show me the house. I want to see every single thing. All the old things, and all the new ones Mother’s been writing about.” She seized their hands and pulled them into the parlor. “I’ve been in this room already, but I didn’t see it. I don’t believe I even touched the floor when I walked, I was so excited. Oh, it’s lovely—it’s lovely!”

She darted about the room like a humming-bird, recognizing what was familiar with fond little exclamations. “Oh, that darling little wicker chair!—the picture of the dog!—oh! oh! here’s my china lamb!” and crying out in admiration over new acquisitions.

“Oh, Mother, what a perfectly lovely couch—sofa—what do you call it? Why, it is so beautifully different! Wherever did you get that?”

Mrs. Emery turned to her husband. “There, Nathaniel, what did I tell you?” she triumphed.

“That’s one of your mother’s latest extravagances,” explained Judge Emery. “There’s a crazy fad in Endbury for special handmade furniture. Maybe it’s all right, but I can’t see it’s so much better than what you buy in the department stores. Grand Rapids is good enough for me.”

“He doesn’t like the man who made it,” said Mrs. Emery accusingly.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked Lydia, rubbing her hand luxuriously over the satin-smooth, lusterless wood of the sofa’s high back.

Judge Emery replied, with his laugh of easy, indifferent tolerance for everything outside the profession of the law, “Oh, I never said I didn’t like him; I only said he struck me as a crack-brained, self-willed, conceited—”

Lydia laughed. She thought her father’s dry, ironic turns very witty.

“I never saw anything conceited about him,” protested Mrs. Emery, admitting the rest of the indictment.

Judge Emery sat down on the sofa in question and pulled his tie into shape. “Well, folks are always conceited who find the ordinary ways of doing things not good enough for them. Lydia, what do you think of this tie? Nobody pays a proper attention to my ties but you.”

“I’ve brought you some beauties from London,” said Lydia. Then reverting with a momentary curiosity to the subject they had left, “Whatever does this man do that’s so queer?”

“Oh, he’s just one of the back-to-all-fours faddists,” said her father.

“Back-to-all-fours?” Lydia was dim as to his meaning, but willing to be amused.

“That’s just your father’s way,” exclaimed Mrs. Emery, who had not her daughter’s fondness for the Judge’s tricks of speech.

“He lives as no Dago ditch-digger with a particle of get-up-and-get in him would be willing to,” said Judge Emery finally.

Lydia turned to her mother.

“Why, it’s nothing that would interest you in the least, dear,” said the matron, taking in admiringly Lydia’s French dress. “Only for a little while everybody was talking about how strangely he acted. He was an insurance man, like Marietta’s husband, and getting on finely, when all of a sudden, for no reason on earth, he threw it all up and went to live in the woods. Do you mean to say you only paid twenty dollars for that dress?”

“In the woods!” repeated Lydia.

“Yes; the real woods. His father was a farmer, and left him—why you know, you’ve been there ever so many times—the Black Rock woods, the picnic woods. He has built him a little hut there and makes his furniture out of the trees.”

Lydia’s passing curiosity had faded. “Not quite twenty, even—only ninety-two francs,” she at last answered her mother’s question. “You never saw anything like the bargains there in summertime. Well, I should think your carpenter man was crazy.” She glanced down with satisfaction at the hang of her skirt.

“Oh, not dangerous,” her mother reassured her; “just socialistic, I suppose, and all that sort of thing.”

“Well, who’s crazier than a socialist?” cried her father genially. He added, “Where are you going, Daughter?”

Lydia stopped in the doorway, with a look of apology for her lack of interest in their talk. “I thought I’d just slip into the hall and see if there’s anything new there. There’s so much I want to see—all at once.”

Her fond impatience brought her parents forward with a start of pleasure, and the tour of inspection began. She led them from one room to another, swooping with swallow-like motions upon them for sudden caresses, dazzling them with her changing grace. She liked it all—all—she told them, a thousand times better than she remembered. She liked the new arrangement of the butler’s pantry; she loved the library for being all done over new; she adored the hall for being left exactly the way it was. The dining-room was the best of all, she declared, with so much that was familiar and so much that was new. “Only no sideboard,” she commented. “Have they gone out of fashion while I was away?”

Mrs. Emery, whose delight at Lydia’s approval had been mounting with every breath, looked vexed. “I knew you’d notice that!” she said. “We tried so hard to get the new one put in before you got back, but Mr. Rankin won’t deliver a thing till it’s just so!”

“Rankin!” cried Lydia, stopping so short in one of her headlong rushes across the room that she gave the impression of having encountered an invisible obstacle, “Who’s that?”

“Oh, that’s the crazy cabinet-maker we were talking about. The one who—”

“Why, I’ve met a Mr. Rankin,” said Lydia, with more emphasis than the statement seemed to warrant.

“It’s a common enough name,” said her mother, struck oddly by her accent.

“But here, in Endbury. Only it can’t be the same person. He wasn’t queer; he was awfully nice. I met him once when a crowd of us were out skating that last Christmas I was home from school; the time when you and Father were in Washington and left me at Dr. Melton’s with Aunt Julia. I used to see him there a lot. He used to talk to the doctor by the hour, and Aunt Julia and I were doing that set of doilies in Hardanger work and we used to sit and sew and count threads and listen.”

“That’s the one,” said her father. “Melton has one of his flighty notions that the man is something wonderful.”

“But he wasn’t queer or anything then!” protested Lydia. “He never talked to me any, of course, I was such a kid, but it was awfully interesting to hear him and Godfather go on about morals, and the universe, and the future of man, and such—I never heard such talk before or after—but it can’t be that one!” Lydia broke off to marvel incredulously at the possibility. “He was—why, he was awfully nice!” she fell back on reiteration to help out her affirmation.

“They say there’s queer blood in the family, and I guess he’s got his share,” Judge Emery summed up and dismissed the case with a gesture of finality. He glanced up at a tall clock standing in the corner, compared its time with his watch, exclaimed impatiently, “Slow again!” and addressed himself with a householder’s seriousness to setting it right.

A new aspect of the matter they had been discussing struck Lydia. “But what does he—what do people do about him?” she asked.

This misty inquiry was as intelligible to her mother as a cipher to the holders of a key. “Oh, he’s very nice about that. He has dropped out of society completely and keeps out of everybody’s way. Of course you see him when he comes to set up a piece of his furniture or to take an order, but that’s all. And he used to be so popular!” The regret in the last clause was that of a thrifty person before waste of any kind. “I understand he still goes to Dr. Melton’s a good deal, but that just counts him in as one of the doctor’s collection of freaks; it doesn’t mean anything. You know how your godfather goes on about—” She broke off to look out the window. “Oh, Lydia! your trunks are here. Quick! where are your keys? It seems as though I couldn’t wait to see your dresses!” She hurried to the door and vanished.

Lydia did not stir for a moment. She was looking down at the table, absorbed in watching the dim reflections of her pink finger-tips as she pressed them one after another upon the dark polished wood. Her father opened the door of the clock with a little click, but she did not heed it. She drew her hand away from the table and inspected her finger-tips intently, as though to detect some change in them. When her father closed the clock-door and turned away she started, as though she had forgotten his presence. Her gaze upon him gave him an odd feeling of wonder, which he took to be apologetic realization that he had spent a longer time oblivious of her than he had meant. His explanation had a little compunction in it. “I have a time with that pendulum always. I can’t seem to get it the right length!”

Lydia continued to look at him blankly for a moment. Then she drew a long breath and took an aimless step away from the table. “Well, if that isn’t too queer for anything!” she exclaimed.

Judge Emery stared. “Why, no; it’s quite common in pendulum clocks,” he told her.

CHAPTER IV

THE DAWN

The morning after her return from Europe, Lydia awoke with a start, as though in answer to a call. The confusion of the last days had been such that she had for a moment the not uncommon experience of an entire blankness as to her whereabouts and identity. Realization of where and who she was came back to her with much more than the usual neutral relief at slipping into one’s own personality as into the first protection available against the vague horror of nihility. After an instant’s uncomfortable wandering in chaos, Lydia found herself with a thrill of exultation. She was not negatively relieved that she was somebody; she rejoiced to find herself Lydia Emery. She pounced on her own personality with a positive joy which for a moment moved her to a devout thanksgiving.

It all seemed, as she said to herself, too good to be true—certainly more than she deserved. Among her unmerited blessings she quaintly placed being herself, but this was the less naïve in that she placed among her blessings nearly everything of which she was conscious in her world. Her world at this time was not a large one, and every element in it seemed to her ideal. Her loving, indulgent father, who always had a smile for her as he looked up over his newspaper at the table, and who, though she knew he was too good to be wealthy, always managed somehow to pay for dresses just a little prettier than other girls’ clothes; her devoted, idolizing mother, whose one thought was for her daughter’s pleasure; her rich big Brother George in Cleveland, whom she saw so seldom, but whose handsome presents testified to an affection that was to be numbered among the objects of her gratitude; good, sharp-tongued Sister Etta, who said such quick, bright things and ran her house so wonderfully; Aunt Julia, dear, dear Aunt Julia, whose warm heart was one of Lydia’s happiest homes, and Aunt Julia’s brother, Dr. Melton—ah, how could anyone be grateful enough for such an all-comprehending, quick-helping, ever-ready ally, teacher, mentor, playmate, friend and comrade as her godfather!

As she lay in her soft white bed and looked about her pretty room with an ineffable sense of well-being, it seemed to her that everything that had happened to her was lovely and that the prospect of her future could contain only a crescendo of good-fortune. It was not that she imagined for herself a future remarkably different in detail from what was the past of the people about her. Even now at what she felt was the beginning of the first chapter, she knew the general events of the story before her; but this morning she was penetrated with the keenest sense of the unfathomable difference it made in those events in that they were about to happen to her. She had been passively watching the excited faces of people hurling themselves down-hill on toboggans, but now she was herself poised on the crest of the slope, tense with an excitement not only more real, but somehow more vital to the scheme of things, than that felt by other people who had made the thrilling trip before her.

She lay still for a few moments, luxuriating in the innocent egotism of this view of her future, which was none the less absorbing for being so entirely unterrifying, and then sprang up, impatient to begin it. No one else in the house was awake. She saw with surprise that it was barely five o’clock. She wondered that she felt so little sleepy, since she had been up late the night before. All the family and connections had gathered, and she had talked with an eager breathlessness and had listened as eagerly to pick up all those details of home news which do not go into letters; those insignificant changes and events that make up the physiognomy of an existence, without which one cannot again become an integral part of a life once familiar. It had been a fatiguing, illuminating evening.

A change of mood had come in the night. As she dressed she felt that, in some way, neither the fatigue nor the illumination had lasted on through the blankness of her sound young sleep. She felt restlessly fresh and vigorous, like a creature born anew with the morning light, and she did not feel herself as yet an integral part of the busy, absorbing life to which she had returned. The countless tendrils of Endbury feelings, standards, activities, brushed against her, but had not as yet laid hold on her. Europe had never been more real to her young-lady eyes than an immense World’s Exposition, rather overwhelmingly full of objects to be inspected, and now, here in Ohio, even that impression was dim and remote. But so, also, was Endbury; she had left the one, she had not yet arrived at the other. She felt herself for the moment in a neutral territory that was scarcely terrestrial.

The silent house was a kingdom of delight to be rediscovered. She wandered about it, enchanted with the impressions which her solitude gave her leisure to savor and digest. She threw open a window, and was struck with the sweet freshness of the morning air, as though it were a joy new in the history of the world. She looked out on the lawn, with its dew-studded cobwebs, and felt her heart contract with pleasure. When she stepped out on the veranda, the look of the trees, the breath of the light wind across her cheek, the odor of dawn, all the indefinable personality of that early hour was like an enchantment about her.

She ran out to her favorite arbor and plucked one of the heavy clusters of purple grapes, finding their cool acidity an exquisite surprise. She raised her face to the sky with wonder. She had never, it seemed to her, seen so pure yet colorful a sky. The horizon was still faintly flushed with the promise of a dawn already fulfilled in the fresh splendor of the sunbeams slanting across the fresh splendor of her own youth.

Never again did Lydia see the things she saw that morning. Never again did she have so unquestioningly the happy child’s conception of the whole world as magically centered in indulgent kindness about herself. As she looked up the clean, empty street stretching away under the shade of its thrifty young trees, it seemed made only to lead her forward into the life for which she had been so long preparing herself. Endbury, with its shops, its bustle of factories so unmeaning to her, the great bulk of its inexplicable “business,” existed only as the theater upon the stage of which she was to play the leading rôle in the drama of life—she almost consciously thought of it in those terms—which, after some exciting and pleasurable incidents and a few thrilling situations, was to have a happy ending, none the less actual to her mind because lost in so vague a golden shimmer. Her father’s house, as familiar to her as her hand, took on a new and rich dignity as the background for the unfolding of that wonderful creature, herself; that unknown, future, grown-up self, which was to be all that everyone who loved her expected, and more than she in her inexperience knew how to expect.

She was in a little heaven, made up of the most ingenuous aspirations, the innocence of which seemed to her a guarantee of their certain fulfillment. Her fervent desire to be good was equal to and of the same quality as her desire to be a successful débutante. It would make her family so happy to have her both. These somewhat widely diverging aims were all a part of the current of her life, the impulse to be what those she loved would like to have her. It was not that she was willing to give up her own individuality to gratify the impulse, but rather that she did not for an instant conceive of the necessity for such a sacrifice. It was part of her immense happiness that she had always loved to be what it pleased everyone to have her, and that, apparently, people wished to have her only what she wished to be. She was like a child guarded by her elders from any knowledge of forbidden food. All the goodies of which she had ever heard were hers for the asking. In such a carefully arranged nursery it would be perversity to doubt the everlasting quality of the coincidence between one’s desires and one’s obedience. It was no more remarkable a coincidence than that both dew and sunshine were good for the grass over which she now ran lightly to another corner of the grounds about her parents’ house. Here, just outside the circle of deep shade cast by an exuberantly leaved maple, she stood for a moment, her hands full of grapes, her eyes wandering about the green, well-kept double acres called diversely in the family “the grounds” (Mrs. Emery’s name) and “the yard.” Lydia always clung to her father’s name; she had very little inborn feeling for the finer shades of her mother’s vocabulary. Mrs. Emery rejoiced in the careless unconsciousness of the importance of such details, but she felt that Lydia should be cautioned against going too far. It was one of the girl’s odd ways to be fond of the few phrases left over in the Emery dictionary from their simpler earlier days. She always called the two servants “the girls” or “the help” instead of “the maids,” spoke of the “washwoman” instead of the “laundress,” and, as did her father, called the man who took care of the grounds, ran the furnace, and drove the Emery’s comfortable surrey, the “hired man” instead of the “gardener” or the “coachman,” or, in Mrs. Emery’s elegantly indefinite phrase, “our man.”

Lydia explained this whimsical reaction rather incoherently by saying that those nice old words were so much more fun than the others, and in spite of remonstrance she clung to her fancy with so lightly laughing an obstinacy that neither she nor anyone suspected it of being a surface indication of a significant tendency.

She had occasionally other droll little ways of differing from the family, which were called indulgently “Lydia’s notions.” Her mother would certainly have thus named this flight out into the early morning. She would have found extravagant, and a little disconcerting, the completeness of Lydia’s content in so simple a thing as standing in the first sunshine of an early morning in September, and she would have been unquestionably disturbed, perhaps even a little alarmed, by the beatific expression of Lydia’s face as she gazed fixedly up into the sky, the tempered radiance of which was as yet not too bright for her clear gaze.

All the restless joy of a few minutes before, which had driven her about from one delight to another, fused under the sun’s first warmth into a trance-like quiet. She stood still in the sunshine, a slow flush, like a reflection of dawn, rising to her cheeks, her lips parted, her eyes bright and vacant. An old person coming upon her at this moment would have been painfully moved by that tragic pity which age feels for the unreasoning joy of youth. She looked a child, open-eyed and breathless before the fleeting beauties of a bubble, most iridescent when about to disappear.

It was a man by no means old who swung suddenly into sight around the corner, walking swiftly and noiselessly upon the close-cut grass, and the startled expression with which he found himself close to Lydia was by no means one of pity. He fell back a step, and in the instant before the girl was aware of his presence his gaze upon her was that of a man dazzled by an incredible vision.

She brought her eyes down to him, and for the space of a breath the expression was hers as well. The sunlight glowing about them seemed the reflection of their faces. Then, for a moment longer, though mutual recognition flashed into their eyes, they did not speak, looking at each other long and seriously.

Finally, with a nymph-like stir of all her slender body, Lydia roused herself. “Well, I can speak—can you?” she asked whimsically. “Don’t you remember me?”

The man drew a long breath and took off his cap, showing close-cropped auburn hair gleaming, like his beard, red in the sun. “You took my breath away!” he exclaimed.

“What was the matter with me?” asked Lydia, prettily confident of a compliment to follow.

It came in so much less direct a form than she had expected that before she recognized it she had returned it with naïve impulsiveness.

“I didn’t think you could be real,” said the man, “you looked so exactly the way this glorious morning made me feel.”

“Why, that’s just how you looked to me!” she cried, and flushed at the significance of her words.

Before her confusion the other turned away his quiet gray eyes, and said lightly, “Well, that’s because we are the only people in all the world with sense enough to get up so early on a morning like this. I’ve been out tramping since dawn.”

Lydia explained herself also. “I just couldn’t sleep, it seemed so lovely. It’s my first morning home, you know.”

“Is it?” responded the man, with a vagueness he made no effort to conceal.

It came over Lydia with a shock that he did not know she had been away. She felt hurt. It seemed ungracious for anyone in Endbury not to have missed her, not to share in the joyful excitement of her final return. “I’ve been in Europe for a year,” she told him, with a dignity that was a reproach.

“Oh, yes, yes; I remember now hearing Dr. Melton speak of it,” he answered, with no shade of apology for his forgetfulness. He looked at her speculatively, as if wondering what note to strike for the continuation of their talk. Apparently he decided on the note of lightness. “Well, you’re the most important person there is for me to-day,” he told her unexpectedly.

Lydia arched her dark eyebrows inquiringly. She was always sensitively responsive, and now had forgotten, like a sweet-tempered child, her momentary pique.

He smiled suddenly, moved, as people often were, to an apparently irrelevant tenderness for her. His voice softened into a playfulness like that of a person speaking to an imaginative little girl. “Why, didn’t you learn in school that all wise old nations have the belief that the first person you meet after you go out in the morning decides the fortune of the day for you? Now, what kind of a day are you going to give me?”

Lydia laughed. “Oh, you must tell first! You forget you’re the first person I’ve seen this morning. I’ll see what I can do for you after I’ve seen what you are going to do for me.” She added, with a solemnity only half jocular, “But it’s ever so much more important in my case, for you’re the first person I meet as I begin my life in Endbury. Think what a responsibility for you! You ought to give me something extra nice beside, for not remembering me any better and never noticing that I had been away.” She broke into a sunny mitigation of her own severity, “But you can have some grapes, even if you are not very flattering.”

The man took the cluster she held out to him, but only eyed them as he answered, “Oh, I remember you very well. You’re a niece of Mrs. Sandworth’s, or of her husband’s, and Mrs. Sandworth is Dr. Melton’s sister. You’re the big-eyed little girl who used to sit in a corner and sew while the doctor and I talked, and now,” he brought it out rotundly, “you’ve been to Europe for a year, and you’re grown-up.”

Lydia hung her head laughingly at his good-natured caricature. “Well, but I have, really and truly,” she protested, “all of that. And I just guess you haven’t had two such interesting things happen to you in such a short time as—” She stopped short, struck dumb by a sudden recollection. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” she murmured; “I forgot about what they said you had—”

Her expression was so altered, she looked at him with so curious a change from familiarity to strangeness, that his steady eyes wavered a moment in startled surprise. “What’s that?” he asked sharply; “I didn’t catch what you said.”

“Why, nothing—nothing—only they were telling me yesterday about how you—why, it just came over me that you had had a great deal happen to you this last year, as well as I.”

He looked a relieved and slightly annoyed comprehension of the case. “Oh, that!” he summed it up for her with a grave brevity. “I have lost my father, and I have started life on a new footing during the past year.”

Lydia fumbled for words that would be applicable and not wounding. “I was so sorry to hear that—about your father, I mean. And about the other—it must be very—interesting, I’m sure.”

His silence and enigmatic gaze upon her moved her to a fluttered fear lest she seem ungracious. She added, with a droll little air of letting him see that she was not of the enemy, “I do hope some day you’ll tell me all about it; it sounds so romantic.”

The young man gave an inarticulate sound, and stroked his ruddy beard to conceal a smile. “It’s not,” he said briefly. He put his cap back on his head and looked down the street as though his thoughts were already away.

His lack of responsiveness came, Lydia thought, from her having wounded his feelings. “Oh, I’m sure you must have some good reason for doing such a queer thing,” she said hurriedly. Then, appalled by the words on which the haste of her good intentions had carried her, “Oh, I mean that it’s very brave, heroic, of you to have the courage—perhaps something very sad happened to you, and to forget it you—”

The other broke into the laugh he had been trying to suppress. His gray eyes lighted up brilliantly with his mirth. “You’re very kind,” he said, “you’re very kind, but rather imaginative. It doesn’t take any courage; quite the reverse. And it’s not a picturesque way of doing a retreat from active life. I hope and pray that it’s to be a way of getting into it.”

The girl’s face of bewilderment at his tone moved him to add, a ripple of amusement still in his voice, “Ah, don’t try to make me out. I don’t belong in your world, you know; I’m real.”

Lydia continued to look at him blankly. The obscurity of his remarks was in no way lessened by this last addition, but he vouchsafed no further explanation. “You’ve given me my breakfast,” he said, holding up the grapes; “I mustn’t keep you any longer from yours.”

He waited for a moment for Lydia to respond to this speech, struck by a sudden realization that it might sound like an unceremonious hint to her to retire, rather than the dismissal of himself he intended. When she made no answer, he turned away with a somewhat awkward gesture of leave-taking. Lydia looked after him in silence.

CHAPTER V

THE DAY BEGINS

She watched him until he was out of sight, and although the vigorous, rhythmic swing of his broad shoulders was like another manifestation of the morning’s joyous, buoyant spirit, it did not move her to a responsive alertness. After he had turned a corner, she lowered her eyes to the cluster of grapes she still held; a moment after, without any change in expression, she relaxed her grasp on them and let them fall, turning away and walking soberly back to the house. The dew had already disappeared from the grass. There was now no hint of the dawn’s coolness; the day had begun.

Her father met her at the door with an exclamation about her early hours. He would really see something of her, he said, if she kept up this sort of thing. It would be too good to be true if he could breakfast with her every morning. Whereupon he rang for the coffee and unfolded his newspaper. Lydia did not notice his absorption in the news of the day, partly because she was trained from childhood up to consider reading the newspaper as the main occupation of a man at home, but more because on this occasion she was herself preoccupied. When Mrs. Mortimer came in on an errand and was prevailed upon to sit down for some breakfast with her father and sister, there was a little more conversation.

Mrs. Emery had not come down stairs. A slight indisposition which she had felt for several days seemed to have been augmented by the excitement of Lydia’s return. She had slept badly, and was quite uncomfortable, she told her husband, and thought she would stay in bed and send for Dr. Melton. It seemed foolish, she apologized, but now that Lydia was back, she wanted to be on the safe side and lose no time. After these facts had been communicated to her older daughter, Mrs. Mortimer asked, “How in the world does it happen that you’re up at this hour?”

Lydia answered that she had been inspecting the yard, which she had not seen the day before. She described quite elaborately her tour of investigation, without any mention of her encounter with her early caller, and only after a pause added carelessly, “Who do you suppose came along but that Mr. Rankin you were all talking about yesterday?”

Judge Emery laid down his paper. “What under the sun was he prowling about for at that hour?”

“He wasn’t prowling,” said Lydia. “He was fairly tearing along past the house so fast that he ’most ran over me before I saw him. I’d forgotten he is so handsome.”

“Handsome!” Mrs. Mortimer cried out at the idea. “With that beard!”

“I like beards, sometimes,” said Lydia.

“It makes a man look like a barbarian. I’d as soon wear a nose-ring as have Ralph wear a beard.”

“Why, everybody who is anybody in Europe wears a beard, or a mustache, anyhow,” opposed Lydia. “I got to liking to see them.”

“Oh, of course if they do it in Europe, we provincial stay-at-homes haven’t a word to say.” Mrs. Mortimer had invented a peculiar tone which she reserved for speeches like this, the neutrality of which gave a sharper edge to the words.

“Now, Marietta, that’s mean!” Lydia defended herself very energetically; “you know I didn’t say it for that.” There was a moment’s pause, of which Marietta did not avail herself for a retraction, and then Lydia went on pensively, “Well, he may be handsome or not, but he’s certainly not very polite.”

“He didn’t say anything to you, did he?” asked her father in surprise, laying down the paper he had raised again during the passage between the sisters.

Lydia hastily proffered an explanation. “He couldn’t help speaking; he almost ran into me, you know. I was standing under the maple tree in the corner as he came around from Garfield Avenue. He just took off his cap and said good morning, and what a fine day it was, and a few words like that.”

“I don’t see anything so impolite in that. Perhaps he wasn’t European in his manners,” suggested Mrs. Mortimer dryly. She had evidently arisen in the grasp of a mood, not uncommon with her, when an apparently causeless irritability drove her to say things for which she afterward suffered an honest but fruitless remorse. Dr. Melton had recently evolved for this characteristic of hers one of the explanations which the Emerys found so enigmatic. “Marietta,” he said critically, “is in a perpetual state of nervous irritation from eye-strain. She has naturally excellent and normal eyesight, but she has always been trained to wear other people’s spectacles. It puts her out of focus all the time, and that makes her snappy.”

She had answered explicitly to this vague diagnosis, “Nonsense! The thing that makes me snappy is the lack of an oriental rug in our parlor.”

“You’re looking at that through Mrs. Gilbert’s magnifying glasses,” suggested the doctor.

“I’m not looking at it at all, and that’s the trouble,” Marietta had assured him.

“Absence makes the heart—” the doctor had the last word.

Lydia tried this morning at breakfast to obtain the same advantage over her sister. She flushed with a mixture of emotions and tried in a resentful silence to think of some definable cause for her accusation against Rankin’s manners. Finally, “Well, I gave him a bunch of grapes, and he never so much as said thank you. He just took them and marched off.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t like grapes,” suggested Mrs. Mortimer, grim to the last.

After breakfast, when Mrs. Mortimer and her father disappeared, Lydia found herself with a long morning before her. The doctor telephoned that he could not come before noon. Judge Emery, after his proprietary good-by kiss, advised her to be quiet and rest. She looked a little pale, he thought, and he was afraid that, after her cool ocean voyage, she would find the heat of an Ohio September rather trying. Indeed, as Lydia idled for a moment over the dismantled breakfast table she was by no means moved to activity. Dark shades were everywhere drawn down and the house was like a dimly-lighted cave, but through this attempt at protection the sun was making itself felt in a slowly rising, breathless, moist heat.

Lydia climbed the stairs to her mother’s room. She was looking forward to a long visit, but finding the invalid asleep she turned away from the door rather blankly. She was as yet too much a stranger in her own home to have at hand the universal trivial half-dozen unfinished tasks that save idle women from the perils of uninterrupted thought. The ribbons were all run in her pretty underwear; she owed no notes to anyone, because she had been at home too short a time to have received any letters; her hair had been washed the last day on the steamer, and her new dresses needed no mending. Her trunks had been unpacked the day before by her mother’s competent hands, which had also arranged every detail of her tasteful room until to touch it would disturb the effect.

Lydia began to experience that uneasy, unsettling discomfort that comes to modern people in ordinary modern life if some unusual circumstance throws them temporarily on their own resources. She lingered aimlessly for some time at the head of the stairs, and then, leaning heavily against the rail, began to descend slowly, one step at a time, to prolong the transit. Where the stairs turned she noticed a stain on the crisp sleeve of her white dress. It came, evidently, from one of the grapes she had eaten that morning under the maple tree. A current of cool air blew past her. It was the first relief from the stagnation of the sultry day and, sitting down on the landing, she lost herself in prolonged meditation.

In the obscurity of the darkened hall she was scarcely visible save as a spot of light showing dimly through the balustrade, and she sat so still that the maid, stepping about below, did not see her. On her part, Lydia noticed but absently this slight stir of domestic activity, nor, after a time, louder but muffled noises from the dining-room. Even when the door to the dining-room opened and quick, light steps came to the foot of the stairs, she did not heed them. A confused, hushed sound of someone busy about various small operations did not rouse her, and it was not until the fall of a large object, clattering noisily on the floor, that she became conscious that someone beside the maid was in the hall. She leaned forward, and saw that the object which had fallen was the newel-post of the stairs. It had evidently been detached from its fastenings by the workman who, with his back to her, now knelt over a tool-box, fumbling among the tools with resultant little metallic clicks.

Lydia ran down the stairs, finger on lip. “Hush! Don’t make any more noise than you can help. Mother’s still asleep.” At his gaze of stupefaction she broke into her charming light laugh, “Why, I always seem to strike you speechless. What’s the matter with me now?”

The other emerged from his surprise with a ready, smiling acceptance of her tone, “I was wondering if I oughtn’t to apologize to you—if I should ever see you again—for being so curt this morning. And then you spring up out of the ground before me. Well, so I will apologize. I do. I’m very sorry.”

They adopted, as in the first part of their earlier talk, the half-humorous familiarity of people surprised in an unconventional situation, but, in spite of this, the young man’s apology was not without the accent of serious sincerity.

Lydia responded heartily in kind. “Oh, it was I who was horrid. And—wasn’t it funny—I was just thinking—wondering if I should ever have a chance to try to make you see that I didn’t mean to be so—” she hesitated, and fell back on iteration again—“so horrid.”

The fashionable Endbury boarding-school had not provided its graduate with any embarrassment of riches in the way of expression for various shades of meaning. He answered, lowering his voice as she did, “Oh, you were all right, but I was most objectionable with my impertinent laugh. I’m sorry.”

She challenged his sincerity, “Are you really, really?”

“Oh, really, really,” he assured her.

“And you want to do something nice to make it up to me?”

“Anything,” he promised, smiling at her as at a child.

“You’ve promised! You’ve promised!” She indulged herself in a noiseless hand-clasp. “Well, then, the forfeit is to tell me all about it.”

“All about what?”

“Goodness gracious! Don’t you remember? That’s what we were both horrid about. I asked you to tell me about it, and you—”

He remembered, evidently with an amusement not entirely free from annoyance. “Oh, I’m safe. I’ll never see you to tell you.”

She sat down on the bottom step and drew her white skirts about her. “What’s the matter with right now?” she asked, smiling.

“I’ve got to earn my living right now,” he objected, beginning with a swift deftness to bore a tiny hole.

She was diverted for an instant. “What are you doing to our nice old newel-post?” she asked. “I thought they said you were going to set up the new sideboard.”

“Oh, that’s no job at all; it’s done. Didn’t you hear me pushing and banging things around? Now I’ve the job before me of fitting the very latest thing in newel-posts in place of your old one.”

The girl returned to her first attack. “Well, anyhow, if it’s a long job, it’s all the better. Go ahead and talk at the same time. You won’t feel you’re wasting time.”

Their low-toned talk and the glimmering light of the hall made them seem oddly intimate. Lydia expressed this feeling while Rankin stood looking doubtfully at her, a little daunted by the pretty relentlessness of her insistence. “You see, you’re not nearly so much a stranger to me as I am to you. Remember how I sewed and listened. I’m a grown-up little pitcher, and my ears are still large. I was remembering just now, before you came in, how strangely you used to talk to Dr. Melton, and I thought it wasn’t so surprising, after all, your doing ’most anything queer.”

Rankin laughed as he bent over his tools. “Little pitchers have tongues, too, I see.”

Either Lydia felt herself more familiar with her interlocutor than before, or one result of her meditation had been the loss of her excessive fear of wounding his feelings. She spoke now quite confidently, “But, honestly, what in the world did you do it for?”

“It?” He made her define herself.

“Oh, you know! Give up everything—lose your chance in society, and poke off into the woods to be a common—” In spite of her new boldness she faltered here.

He supplied the word, with a flash of mirth. “Don’t be afraid to say it right out—even such an awful term as workman, or carpenter. I can bear it.”

“I knew it!” Lydia exclaimed. “As I was thinking it over on the stairs just now, I said to myself that probably you weren’t a bit apologetic about it; probably you had some queer reason for being proud of yourself for doing it.”

He cast a startled look at her. “You’re the only person in Endbury with imagination enough to guess that.”

“But why? why? why?” she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the eagerness of her inquiry. “I feel just as though I were going to hear the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle.”

He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. “It wouldn’t be polite to tell you the answer, for what I’m trying to do is to get out of being what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be—except Dr. Melton, of course.”

“What’s the matter with ‘all the people I know,’” she challenged him explicitly.

He laughed and shook his head. “Oh, I’ve nothing new to say about them. Everybody has said it, from Ecclesiastes to Tolstoi.”

“They never say anything about just ordinary folks in Endbury that I know.”

Rankin looked at her whimsically. “Oh, don’t they?”

“Do they?” Lydia wondered at the possibility. Presently she brought out, as a patently absurd supposition, “You don’t mean to say that Endbury people are wicked?”

“Do you think that none but wicked people are written about in serious books? No; Lord, no! I don’t think they are wicked—just mistaken.”

“What about? Now we’re getting warm. I’ll guess in a minute.”

He looked a little sadly down at her bright, eager face. “I’m afraid you would never guess. It’s all gone into your blood. You breathe it in and out as you live, every minute.”

“What? what? what? You can’t say it, you see, when it comes right down to the matter.”

“Oh, yes, I can; I can ask you if it wouldn’t be a tragedy if they should all be killing themselves to get what they really don’t want and don’t need, and starving for things they could easily have by just putting out their hands.”

Lydia’s blankness was immense.

He said, with ironic triumph: “You see, when I do say it you can’t make anything out of it.” After this he turned for a time all his attention to his work.

He had evidently reached a critical point in his undertaking. Lydia watched in silence the deft manipulations of his strong, brown fingers, wondering at the eager, almost sparkling, alertness with which he went from one step to another of the process that seemed unaccountably complicated to her. After he had finally lifted the heavy piece of wood into place, handling its great weight with assurance, and had submitted the joint to the closest inspection, he gave a low whistle of satisfaction with himself, and stepped back to get the general effect. As he did so he happened to glance at the girl, drooping rather listlessly on the stair. He paused instantly, with an exclamation of dismay.

“No; I’m not going to cry,” Lydia told him with a very small smile, “but it would serve you right if I did.”

The workman wiped his forehead and surveyed her in perplexity. “What, can I do for you?” he asked.

“If you’re really serious in asking that,” said Lydia with dignity, “I’ll tell you. You can take for granted that I am not an idiot or a child and talk to me sensibly. Dr. Melton does. And you can tell me what you started out to—the real reason why you are a common carpenter instead of in the insurance business. Of course if you think it is none of my concern, that’s another matter. But you said you would.”

Rankin looked a little abashed by the grave seriousness of this appeal, although he smiled at its form. “You speak as though I had my reason tied up in a package about me, ready to hand, out.”

Lydia said nothing, but did not drop her earnest eyes.

He thrust his hands into his pockets and returned this intent gaze, a new expression on his face. Then picking up a tool, and drawing a long breath, he said, with the accent of a man who takes an unexpected resolution: “Well, I will tell you.”

He returned to his work, tightening various small screws under the railing, speaking, as he did so, in a reasonable, quiet tone, with none of the touch of badinage which had thus far underlain his manner to the girl. “It’s very simple—nothing romantic or sudden about it all. I did not like the insurance business as I saw it from the inside, and the more I saw of it, the less I liked it. I couldn’t see how I could earn my living at it and arrive at the age of forty with an honest scruple left. Not that the insurance business is, probably, any worse than any other—only I knew about it from the inside. So far as I could guess the businesses my friends were in weren’t very different. At least, I didn’t think I could improve things by changing to them. Also, it was going to grow more and more absorbing—or, at least, that was the way it affected the older men I knew—so that at forty I shouldn’t have any other interests than getting ahead of other people in the line of insurance.

“Now, what was I to do about it? I can’t make speeches, and nobody but crack-brained soreheads like me would listen to them if I did. I’m not a great philosopher, with a cure for things. But I didn’t want to fight so hard to get unnecessary things for myself that I kept other people from having the necessaries, and didn’t give myself time to enjoy things that are best worth enjoying. What could I do? I bothered the life out of Dr. Melton and myself for ages before it occurred to me that the thing to do, if I didn’t like the life I was in, was to get out of it and do something harmless, at least, if I didn’t have gumption enough to think of something worth while, that might make things better.

“I like the cabinet-maker’s trade, and I couldn’t see that practicing it would interfere with my growing all the honest scruples that were in me. Oh, I know that it’s the easiest thing in the world for a carpenter to turn out bad work for the sake of making a little more money every day; I haven’t any illusions about the sanctity of the hand-crafts. But, anyhow, I saw that as a maverick cabinet-maker I could be pretty much my own master. If I had strength of mind enough I could be honest without endless friction with partners, employers, banks, creditors, employés, and all the rest of the spider web of business life. At any rate, it looked as though there were a chance for me to lead the life I wanted, and I had an idea that if I started myself in square and straight, maybe after a little while I could see clearer about how to help other people to occupations that would let them live a little as well as make money, and let them grow a few scruples into the bargain.

“You see, there’s nothing mysterious about it—nor interesting. Just ordinary. I’m living the way I do because I’m not smart enough to think of a better way. But one advantage of it is that I have a good deal of time to think about things. Maybe I’ll think of a way to help, later. And, anyway, just to look at me is proof that you don’t have to get ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps that’ll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own tangent.”

Lydia drew a long breath at the conclusion of this statement. “Well—” she said, inconclusively; “well!” After a pause she advanced, “My sister’s husband is in the insurance business.”

“You see,” said the workman, drilling a hole with great rapidity, “you see I ought not to talk to you. I can’t without being impolite.”

Lydia seemed in no haste to assure him that he had not been. She pulled absently a loose lock of hair—a little-girl trick that came back to her in moments of abstraction—and looked down at her feet. When she looked up, it was to say with a bewildered air, “But a man has to earn his living.”

Rankin made a gesture of impatience, and stopped working to answer this remark. “A living isn’t hard to earn. Any healthy man can do that. It’s earning food for his vanity, or his wife’s, that kills the average man. It’s coddling his moral cowardice that takes the heart out of him. Don’t you remember what Emerson says—Melton’s always quoting it—‘Most of our expense is for conformity to other men’s ideas? It’s for cake that the average man runs in debt.’ He must have everything that anyone else has, whether he wants it or not. A house ever so much bigger and finer than he needs, with ever so many more things in it than belong there. He must keep his wife idle and card-playing because other men’s wives are. He must have his children do what everyone else’s children do, whether it’s bad for their characters or not. Ah! the children! That’s the worst of it all! To bring them up so that these futile complications will be essentials of life to them! To teach them that health and peace of mind are not too high a price for a woman to pay for what is called social distinction, and that a man must—if he can get it in no other way—pay his self-respect and the life of his individuality for what is called success—”

Lydia broke in with a sophisticated amusement at his heat. “Why, you’re talking about Newport, or the Four Hundred of New York—if there is any such thing! The rest of America—why, any European would say we’re as primitive as Aztecs! They do say so! Endbury’s not complicated. Good gracious! A little, plain, middle-western town, where everybody that is anybody knows everybody else!”

“No; it’s not complicated compared with European standards, but it’s more so than it was. Why, in Heaven’s name, should it strain every nerve to make itself as complicated as possible as fast as it can? We’re free yet—we’re not Europeans so shaken down into a social rut that only a red revolution can get us out of it. Why can’t we decide on a rational—” He broke off to say, gloomily: “The devil of it is that we don’t decide anything. We just slide along thinking of something else. If people would only give, just once in their lives, the same amount of serious reflection to what they want to get out of life that they give to the question of what they want to get out of a two-weeks’ vacation, there aren’t many folks—yes, even here in Endbury that seems so harmless to you because it’s so familiar—who wouldn’t be horrified at the aimless procession of their busy days and the trivial false standards they subscribe to with their blood and sweat.”

“My goodness!” broke in Lydia.

The exclamation came from her extreme surprise, not only at the extraordinary doctrine enunciated, but at the experience, new to her, of hearing convictions spoken of in ordinary conversation. The workman took it, however, for a mocking comment on his sudden fluency. He gave a whimsical grimace, and said, as he began picking up his tools, “Ah, I shouldn’t have given in to you. When I get started I never can stop.” His expression altered darkly. “But I hate all that sort of thing so! I hate it!”

Lydia shrank back from him, startled, but aroused. “Well, I hate hate!” she cried with energy. “It’s horrid to hate anything at all, but most of all what’s wrong and doesn’t know it’s wrong. That needs help, not hate.”

He had slung his tool-box on his shoulder before she began speaking, and now stood, ready for departure, looking at her intently. Even in the dim light of the hall she was aware of a wonderful change in his face. She was startled and thrilled by the expression of his eyes in the moment of silence that followed.

Finally, “You’ve given me something to remember,” he said, his voice vibrating, and turned away.

CHAPTER VI

LYDIA’S GODFATHER

Lydia stood where he left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps die down the walk outside. She was still standing there when, some time later, the door to the dining-room behind her opened and a tiny elderly man trotted across the hall to the stairs. Lydia recognized him before he saw that she was there, so that he exclaimed in surprise and pleasure as she came running toward him, her face quivering like a child’s about to weep.

“Oh, dear Godfather!” she cried, as she flung herself on him; “I’m so glad you’ve come! I never wanted so much to see you!”

He was startled to feel that she was trembling and that her cheek against his forehead, for she was taller than he, was burning hot. “Good gracious, my dear!” he said, in the shrill voice his size indicated, “anybody’d think you were the patient I came to see.”

His voice, though high, was very sweet—a quality that made it always sound odd, almost foreign, in the midst of the neutral, colorless middle-western tones about him. He spoke with a Southern accent, dropping his r’s, clipping some vowels and broadening others, but there was no Southern drawl in the clicking, telegraphic speed of his speech. He now looked up at his tall godchild and said without a smile: “If you’ll kindly come down here where I can get at you, I’ll shake you for being so foolish. You needn’t be alarmed about your mother.”

Lydia recoiled from the little man as impulsively as she had rushed upon him. “Why, how awful!” she accused herself, horrified. “I’d forgotten Mother!”

Dr. Melton took off his hat and laid it on the hall shelf. “I will climb up on a chair to shake you,” he continued cheerfully, “if already, in less than twenty-four hours, you’re indulging in nerves, as these broken and meaningless ejaculations seem to indicate.”

He picked up a palm-leaf fan, lost himself in a big hall-chair, and began to fan himself vigorously. He looked very hot and breathless, but he flowed steadily on.

“I can’t diagnose you yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I do your mother, so you’ll have to give me some notion of what’s the occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless Lilliputian godfather.” He made a confident gesture toward the upper part of the house with his fan. “About your mother—I know without going upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It’s not so bad as it seems when you’ve got the right doctor. I’ve practiced for thirty years among Endbury ladies. They can’t spring anything new on me. I’ve taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from table-cloths to bare tops, through portière inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper, through art-nouveau prostration and mission furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity over the necessity for having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her.”

He had run on volubly, to give Lydia time to recover herself, his keen blue eyes fixing her, and now, as she wavered into something like a smile at his chatter, he shot a question at her with a complete change of manner: “But what’s the matter with you?”

Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder. “I—why, I—just—” she hesitated, “why, I don’t know what is the matter with me.” She brought it out with the most honest surprise in the world.

Dr. Melton’s approval of this answer was immense. “Why, Lydia, I’m proud of you! You’re one in a thousand. You’ll break the hearts of everyone who knows you by turning out a sensible woman if you don’t look out. I don’t believe there’s another girl in Endbury who would have had the nerve to tell the truth and not fake up a headache, or a broken heart, or Weltschmerz, or some such trifle, for a reason.” He pulled himself up to his feet. “Of course, you don’t know what’s the matter with you, my dear. I do. I know everything, and can’t do a thing. That’s me! Physically, you’re upset by Endbury heat after an ocean voyage, and mentally it’s the reaction caused by your subsidence into private life after being the central figure of the returned traveler. Last evening, now, with that mob of friends and the family pawing at you and trying to cram-jam you back into the Endbury box and shut the lid down—that was enough to kill anybody with a nerve in her body. What’s the history of the morning? I hope you slept late.”

Lydia shook her head. “No; I was up ever so early.—Marietta came over to borrow the frames for drying curtains, and stayed to breakfast.”

Something about her accent struck oddly on the trained sensitiveness of the physician’s ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something kept back.

“Marietta’s been snapping at you,” he diagnosed rapidly.

“Well, a little,” Lydia admitted.

The doctor laid the palm-leaf fan aside and took Lydia’s slim fingers in both his firm, sinewy hands. “My dear, I’m going to do as I have always done with you, and talk with you as though you were a grown-up person and could take your share in understanding and bearing family problems. Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your father’s brains for the life she’s been shunted into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like your father. She does it; she’s a remarkably forceful woman, but it frets her. She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though she won’t admit it. So, don’t you mind if she’s sharp-tongued once in a while. It’s when she feels the muddy water oozing through her fingers.”

He fancied that Lydia’s eyes on his were a little blank, perhaps absent, and broke off with a short laugh. He was quite hardened to the fact that people never understood his fanciful metaphors, but Lydia, as a child, had used to have a curious intuitive divination of his meaning. After his laugh he sighed and turned the talk.

“Well, and has Flora Burgess been after you to get your impression of Endbury as compared with Europe? Your mother said she wanted an interview with you for next Sunday’s Society Notes.”

Lydia smiled. The subject was an old joke with them. “No; she hasn’t appeared yet. I haven’t seen her—not since my birthday a year ago, the time she described the supper-table as a ‘glittering, scintillating mass of cut-glass and silver, and yet without what could really be called ostentation.’ Isn’t she delicious! How is the little old thing, anyway?”

“Still trotting industriously about Endbury back yards sowing the dragon’s teeth of her idiotic ideas and standards.”

“Oh, I remember, you don’t like her,” said Lydia. “She always seems just funny to me—funny and pathetic. She’s so dowdy, and reverential to folks with money, and enjoys other people’s good times so terrifically.”

“She’s like some political bosses—admirable in private life, but a menace to the community just the same.”

Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. “Flora Burgess a menace to the community!”

The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. “Me and Cassandra!” he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. “Just you wait and see!”

He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened house with a familiarity that betokened long practice.

Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but half a day had passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an instant she had the naïve, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with gusto that she had passed some important turning-point in her life; when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off from definite reflection. Complicated things that moved rapidly always tired Lydia. She had an enormous capacity for quiet and tranquillity. To-day she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside her head than ever before—as though she had tried to keep track of the revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright his eyes were when he looked at you—as though he were, somehow, seeing you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that about Marietta? It had never occurred to her that the life of anyone about her might have been different from what it was. What else was there for people to do but what everybody else did? It was all very unsettling and, in this heat and loneliness, daunting.

Through this vague discomfort there presently pierced a positive apprehension of definite unpleasantness. She would have to tell her mother that she had spent the whole morning talking to Mr. Rankin, and her mother would be cross, and would say such—Lydia remembered as in a distant dream her supreme content with life of only a few hours earlier. It seemed a very bewildering matter to her now.

Ought she so certainly to tell her mother? She lingered for a moment over this possibility. Then, “Oh, of course!” she said aloud, flushing with an angry shame at her moment’s parley with deceit.

She heard her mother’s door open and turned to see the doctor running down the stairs, his wrinkled little face very grave. “You were right, Lydia, to be anxious about your mother, and I am an old fool! There is no fool like a fluent fool! I’m afraid she’s in for quite a siege. There’s no danger, thank Heaven! but I don’t believe she can be about for a month or more. I’m going to ’phone for a trained nurse. Just see that nobody disturbs her, will you?”

He darted away, leaving Lydia leaning against the newel-post, gasping. The clock in the dining-room chimed the quarter-hour. She cried out to herself, as she climbed the stairs heavily, that she could not stand it to have things happen to her so fast. If all Endbury days were going to be like this one—

She was for a moment brought to a standstill by a realization of depths within herself that she had not dreamed of. She realized, horrified, that on hearing the doctor’s verdict her first thought—gone before it was formulated, but still her first thought—had been one of relief that now she need not tell her mother.

It had not occurred to her at all, nor did it now, that she either should or should not tell her father.

CHAPTER VII

OUTSIDE THE LABYRINTH

The Black Rock woods lay glowing under the cloudy autumn sky like a heap of live coals, the maples still quivering in scarlet, the chestnuts sunk into a clear yellow flame, the oaks, parched by the September heat, burnt out into rusty browns. Above them, the opalescent haze of October rose like a faint blue smoke, but within the woods the subdued light was richly colored, like that which passes through the stained glass of a great cathedral. The first of the fallen leaves lay in pools of gold in the hollows of the brown earth, where the light breezes had drifted them.

It was, for the moment, singularly quiet, so, that, as Lydia walked quickly along the footpath, the pleasant rustle of her progress was the only sound she heard. Under a large chestnut she paused, gathering her amber-colored draperies about her and glancing uncertainly ahead to where the path forked. She looked a yellow leaf blown by some current of the air unfelt by the rest of the forest and caught against the rough bark of the tree. After hesitating for a moment, she drifted slowly along the right-hand path, looking about her with dreamy, dazzled eyes. From time to time, she stopped and lifted her face to the light and color above her, and once she stood a long time leaning against a tree, stirring with the tip of her parasol a heap of burning maple leaves. Under her drooping hat her face was almost vacant in a wide beatitude of harmony with the spirit of day. When she walked on again it was with a lighter and lighter step, as though the silence had come to have a lovely meaning for her which she feared to disturb.

The path turned sharply after passing through a thicket of ruddy brambles, and she found herself in a little clearing which the haze of the upper air descended to fill. The yellow chestnuts stood in a ring about the sunburnt grass. It was like a golden cup filled with some magic, impalpable draught.

Through this she now saw a rough little house, brown as an oak leaf, with a wide veranda, under which, before a work-bench, sat Daniel Rankin. His tanned arms moved rhythmically backward and forward, but his ruddy head was high, and his eyes, roving about the leafy walls of the clearing, caught sight of Lydia as soon as she had turned the corner. She stopped short, with a startled gesture, on the edge of the woods, but remained standing quietly while Rankin sprang up from his seat and walked toward her smiling.

“Oh, Miss Emery,” he called welcomingly. “I didn’t recognize you for a minute. Every once in a while a young lady or a child loses her way from a picnic in the woods and stumbles into my settlement. I always have to hurry to show them there’s no danger of the wild man who lives in that house eating them up.” He came up to her now, and put out his hand with a frank pleasure.

“I wasn’t afraid,” said Lydia; “I was startled for a minute, but I knew right away it must be your house. You described it to me, you know.”

“It’s very much flattered that you remember its portrait,” said the owner. “Won’t you honor it some more by sitting down in its veranda for a while? Or must I take you back to your picnic party at once?”

Lydia moved on, looking about her at the piles of boards, half hidden by vines, at the pool of clear water welling up through white sand in front of the house, and at the low rough building, partly covered with woodbine ruby-red against the weather-beaten wood.

“My picnic party’s gone home,” she explained. “It was only Marietta and her little boy, anyhow. My sister thought it was going to rain, and took the quickest way home. I told Marietta I’d walk across and take the Garfield Avenue trolley line. I must have taken a wrong turn in the path.”

They had reached the veranda now, and Lydia sank into the chair which Rankin offered her. She smiled her thanks silently, her face still steeped in quiet ecstasy, and for a long time she said nothing. The quick responsiveness that was at all times her most marked characteristic answered this rare mood of Nature with an intensity almost frightening in its visible joy.

Rankin also said nothing, looking at her reflectively and stroking his close-clipped red beard. Above the faded brown of his work-shirt, his face glowed with color. In the silent interval of the girl’s slow emergence from her reverie, his gaze upon her was so steady that when Lydia finally glanced up at him he could not for a moment look away. The limpid unconsciousness of her eyes changed into a startled look of inquiry, as though he had spoken and she had not understood. Then a flush rose to her cheeks, she looked down and away in a momentary confusion, moved in her chair, and began to talk at random.

“So this is where you live. It’s lovely. It looks like a fairy story—the little house in the wood, you know—nothing seems real to-day—the woods—it makes me want to cry, they are so beautiful. I’ve been wondering and wondering what outdoors was looking like. You know poor Mother is sick, and though she’s not so awfully sick, and of course we’ve a trained nurse for her, still I’ve had to be housekeeper and I haven’t had time to breathe. The second girl left right off because of the extra work she thought sickness would make, but it seems to me we’ve had a million new second girls in the three weeks. It’s been awful! I haven’t had time to get out at all or to see anybody.”

She was quite herself now, and confided her troubles with a naïve astonishment, as though they were new to humanity.

“Yes; I’ve heard ladies say before that it’s quite awful,” agreed her companion gravely. He swung himself up to sit on his work-bench, his long legs stretched before him, just reaching the ground. “Envy me,” he went on, smiling; “I don’t have to have a second girl, or a first one, either.”

“What do you do?” asked Lydia, not waiting, however, for an answer, but continuing her relieved outpouring of her own perplexities. “It’s perfectly desperate at home. I haven’t had a minute’s peace. This afternoon I just got wild, and said I would get away from it for a minute, and just ran away. Father’s nice about it, but he does look something fierce when he comes home and finds another one left. He says that Mother doesn’t have to change more than two or three times a year!” She presented this as the superlative of stability.

Rankin laughed again. Lydia felt more and more at her ease. He was evidently thinking of her pretty looks and ways rather than of what she was saying, and, like all of her sisterhood, this was treatment which she thoroughly understood. For the moment she forgot that he was the man who had startled and almost shocked her by his unabashed presentation, in a conversation with a young lady, of ideas and convictions. She leaned back in her chair and put on some of the gracefully imperious airs of regnant American young-ladyhood. “You must show me all about how you live, and everything,” she commanded prettily. “I’ve been so curious about it—and now here I am.”

She was enchantingly unconscious of the possibility of her having seemed to seek him out. “What a perfectly beautiful piece of wood you have in that chair-back.” She laid her ungloved, rosy finger-tips on a dark piece of oak. “And so this is where you work?”

“I work everywhere,” he told her. “I do all that’s done, you see.”

“You must have to walk quite a ways to get your meals, don’t you?” Lydia turned her white neck to glance inside the house.

Rankin’s mouth twitched humorously. “You’ll never understand me,” he said lightly. “I get my meals myself, here.”

Lydia turned on him sharply. “You don’t cook!” she cried out.

“And wash dishes, and make my bed, and sweep my floor, and, once in a great while, dust.”

The romantic curiosity died out of the girl’s eyes into a shocked wonder. She glanced at his large brown hands, and seemed about to speak. Nothing came from her lips finally, however, beyond the pregnant “Well!” which seemed the only expression in her vocabulary for extreme surprise. Rankin threw back his head, showing a triangle of very white throat above his loose collar, and laughed aloud. The sound of his mirth was so infectious that Lydia laughed with him, though half uneasily.

“It’s so funny,” he explained, “to see the picture of myself I gather from your shocked and candid eyes. I’m so used to my queer ideas nowadays that I forget that what seems perfectly natural to me still seems perfectly crazy to others.”

“Well, not crazy.” Lydia proffered this negation in so halting an accent that Rankin burst into another peal of laughter. “But it must be horrid for you to wash dishes and cook!” protested Lydia, feeling resentful that her inculcated horror of a man’s “lowering himself” to woman’s work should be taken with so little seriousness. She tried to rearrange a mental picture which the other was continually destroying. “But I suppose it’s very picturesque. You cook over an open fire, I imagine.”

There was a humorous glint in his eye, “I cook over the best brand of oil-stove that money can buy,” he told her, relentlessly, watching her wince from the sordid image. “I have all the conveniences I can think of. All I’m trying to do is to get myself fed with the least expenditure of gray matter and time on my part, and as things are now arranged in this particular corner of the country I find I can do it best this way. It’s more work trying to persuade somebody who doesn’t want to wait on me than to jump up and do it myself. Also, having brains, I can certainly cook like a house afire.”

At this, Lydia was overcome by that openness to conviction from unexpected sources which gave her mother one of her great anxieties for her. “Well, honestly, do you know,” she said unexpectedly, “there is a lot in that. I’ve thought ever so many times in the last two weeks that if Father would let me wait on the table, for instance, I could get on ever so much easier.”

“And I’ll just warrant,” the man went on, “that I’ve had more time to myself lately than you have, for all I’ve my living to earn as well as the housework.”

“My goodness!” cried Lydia, repudiating the comparison. “That needn’t be saying much for you, for I haven’t had a minute—not even to sit with Mother as much as I ought.”

“What did you have to do that kept you from that?”

“Oh, you’re no housekeeper, that’s evident, or you wouldn’t ask. A man never has any idea about the amount of work there is to do in a house. Why, set the table, and sweep the parlors, and change the flower vases, and dust, and pick up, and dust—I don’t know what makes things get so dusty. We’ve got an awfully big house, you know, and of course I want to keep everything as nice as if Mother were up. Everybody expects me to do that!”

“I had a great-aunt,” began Rankin with willful irrelevancy, “a very wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was considered cracked, so maybe that’s why I am a freak, and she was as wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned him that if they ever ran away they’d be spoiled for life, and he got carefuller and carefuller of them. One day he and his father were haying beside a river, and the father, who couldn’t swim a stroke, fell in. The horses were frightened by the splash and began to prance, and the son ran to their heads, beside himself with fear. The old man came to the top and screamed, ‘Help! help!’ and the son answered, fairly jumping up and down in his anguish of mind over his poor old father’s fate, ‘Oh, help, somebody! Somebody come and help! I can’t leave my horses!’”

He stopped. Lydia slid helplessly into the naïve question, “Well, did his father drown?” before the meaning of the little parable struck her. She began to laugh, with her gay, sweet inability to resent a joke made at her own expense. “Don’t you think you are a good hand at sermon-making!” she mocked him. “It’s all very well to preach, but just you tell me what you would have done in my place.”

“I should have left those big rooms, filled with things to dust, and let the dust lie on them—even such an awful thing as that!”

Lydia considered this with honest surprise. “Why, do you know, it never occurred to me I could do that!”

Rankin nodded. “It’s a common hallucination,” he explained. “I’ve had it. I have to struggle against it still.”

“Hallucination?”

“The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you.”

Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. “I wonder,” she mused, “if that’s why I always feel so much freer and happier in old clothes—that I don’t forget that they’re for me and I’m not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks get you to thinking that you are for clothes—you’re made to show them off.” Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood. “Here’s your sister’s rain,” he said instead, pointing across the clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted down to the dry grass. Lydia rose in some agitation. “Why, I didn’t really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta’s—” She glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk of her ruffled skirt.

Rankin stood up eagerly. “Ah, I’ve a chance to do you a service. Just step in, won’t you, a moment and let me skirmish around and see what a bachelor’s establishment can offer to a beautiful young lady who mustn’t get wet.”

Lydia moved into the wide, low room, saying deprecatingly, “It wouldn’t hurt me to get wet, you know. But this dress just came from Paris, and I haven’t had a chance to show it to anybody yet.”

Rankin laughed, hastening to draw up a chair before the hearth, where a few embers still glowed, their presence explained by the autumnal chill which now struck sharply across the room from the open door as the rain began to patter on the roof. The girl looked about her in silence, apparently with surprise.

“Well, how do you like it?” asked the master of the house, throwing some dry twigs on the fire so that the flame, leaping up, lighted the corners, already dusky with the approach of evening. “It’s not very tidy, is it?” He began rummaging in a recess in the wall, tumbling out coats and shoes and hats in his haste. Finally, “There!” he cried in triumph, shaking out a rain-coat, “That will keep your pretty French finery dry.”

He turned back to the girl, who was sitting very straight in her chair, peering about her with wide eyes and a strange expression on her face. “Why, what’s the matter?” he asked.

“YOU SAY BEAUTIFUL THINGS!” HE REPLIED QUIETLY. “MY ROUGH QUARTERS ARE GLORIFIED FOR ME.”

Lydia stood up, with a quick indrawn breath. “I don’t know,” she said, “what it is. It seems as though I’d been here before. It looks so familiar to me—so good—” She went closer to where, still holding out the rain-coat, he stood on the other side of a table strewn with papers. She leaned on this, fingering a pen and looking at him with a shy eagerness. She was struggling, as so often, with an indefinable feeling which she had no words to express. “Don’t you know,” she went on, “every once in a while you see somebody—an old man or woman, perhaps, on the street cars, in the street—and somehow the face goes home to you. It seems as though you’d been waiting to see that face again. Well, it’s just so with this room. It has a face. I like it very—” She broke off, helplessly inarticulate before the confusion of her thoughts, and looked timidly at the man. She was used to kindly, amused laughter when she tried, stumblingly, to phrase some of the quickly varying impressions which made her life so full of invisible incidents.

But Rankin did not laugh, even kindly. His clear eyes were more than serious. They seemed to show him moved to an answering emotion. “You say beautiful things!” he replied quietly. “My rough quarters are glorified for me. I’ve been fond of them before—they’re the background to a good many inward struggles and a considerable amount of inward peace, but now—” He looked about him with new eyes, noting the dull gleam of gold with which the chestnut ceiling answered the searching flicker of the fire, the brighter sparkles which were struck out from the gilded lettering on the books which lined the walls, and the diamond-like flashes from the polished steel of the tools on the work-bench at the other end of the room. There was a pause in which the silence within the house brought out the different themes composing the rich harmony of the rain, the steady, resonant downpour on the roof, the sweet whispers of the dried grass under the torrent, the muted thuddings of the big drops on the beaten earth of the veranda floor, and the hurried liquid overflow of the eaves. It was still light enough to see the fine color of the leather that covered the armchairs, and the glossy black of a piano, heaped with a litter of music. Near the piano, leaning against the wall, a violoncello curved its brown crook-neck over the shapeless bag that sheltered it.

Lydia pointed to it. “You’re musical!” she said, as if she had made an important discovery.

Rankin roused himself, followed the direction of her gaze, and shook his head. “No; I can’t play a note,” he said cheerfully, laying the rain-coat down and going to look over the pile of overshoes in a box; “but I like it. My queer old great-aunt left me that ’cello. It had belonged to her grandfather. I believe being so old makes it quite valuable. The piano belongs to an old German friend of mine who has seen better days and has now no place to keep it. Two or three times a week he comes out here with an old crony who plays the ’cello, and they make music till they get to crying on each other’s necks.”

“Do you cry, too?” Lydia smiled at the picture.

Rankin came back to the fire with a pair of rubbers in his hand. “No; I’m an American. I only blow my nose hard,” he said gravely.

“Well, it must be lovely!” She sighed this out ardently, sinking back in her chair. “I love music so it ’most kills me, but I don’t get very much of it. I took piano lessons when I was little, but there were always so many other things to do I never got time to practice as much as I wanted to, and so I didn’t get very far. Anyhow, after I heard a good orchestra play, my little tinklings were worse than nothing. I wish I could hear more. But perhaps it’s just as well, Mother says. It always gets me so excited. I’m sure I should cry, along with the Germans.”

“They would like that,” observed her host, “above everything.”

“Father keeps talking about getting one of those player-pianos, but Mother says they are so new you can’t tell what they are going to be. She says they may get to be too common.”

Rankin looked at her hard. “Would you like one?” He asked this trivial question with a singular emphasis.

“Why, I haven’t really thought,” said Lydia, considering the matter.

The man looked oddly anxious for her answer.

Finally, “Why, it depends on how much music you can make with them. If they are really good, I should want one, of course.”

Rankin smiled, drew a long breath, and fell sober again as if at a sudden thought.

“I don’t see any oil-stove,” said the girl, skeptically, looking about her.

“Oh, I have a regular kitchen. It’s there,” he nodded back of him; “and two rooms beside for me and for Dr. Melton or my Germans, or some of my other freak friends when they stay too long and miss the last trolley in to town. Oh, I have lots of room.”

“It looks really rather nice, now I’m here and all,” Lydia vaguely approved; “though I don’t see why you couldn’t have gone on more like other folks and just changed some things—not been so awfully queer!”

Rankin was kneeling before her, holding out a pair of rubbers. At this remark he sat back on his heels, and began: “My great-aunt said that there was a man in her town who had such a terrible temper that his wife was in perfect terror of him, and finally actually died of fear. Everybody was paralyzed with astonishment when, two or three years after, one of the nicest girls in town married him. People told her she was crazy, but she just smiled and said she guessed she could get along with him all right. Everything went well for a week or two, and then one day he said the tea was cold and not fit for a pig to drink, and threw the cup on the floor. She threw hers down and broke it all to smash. He stared and glared, and threw his plate down. She set her lips and banged her own plate on the hearth. He threw his knife and fork through the window. She threw hers after, and added the water-pitcher for good measure.”

Lydia’s astonishment at this point was so heartfelt that the raconteur broke off, laughed, and ended hastily, “I spare you the rest of the dinner-service. The upshot of it was that every dish in the house was smashed and not a word spoken. Then the man called for his carriage (he was a rich man—that sort usually is), drove to the nearest china-store, bought a new set, better than the old, took it back, and lived in peace and harmony with his wife ever after. And here is the smallest pair of rubbers I can find, and I shall have to tie these on!”

Lydia watched the operation in silence. As he finished it and rose to his feet again, “What was that all about?” she inquired simply.

“Compromise,” he answered. “There are occasions when it doesn’t do any good.”

“Does it do such a lot of good to go off in the woods by yourself and do your own cooking?” asked Lydia with something of her father’s shrewd home-thrusting accent. “What would happen if everybody did that?”

Rankin laughed. “Everybody’d have a good time, for one thing,” he answered, adding, more seriously, “The house of Rimmon may be all right for some people, but my head isn’t clear enough.”

Lydia looked frankly at a loss. She did not belong to the alert, quickly “bluffing” type of young lady. “Rimmon?” she asked.

“He’s in the Bible.”

“That’s a good reason why I’ve never heard of him,” she said ruefully.

“All I meant by him was that people who conform outwardly to a standard they don’t really believe in, are in danger of getting most awfully mixed up. And certainly they don’t stand any chance of convincing anybody else that there’s anything the matter with the standard. What’s needed isn’t to upset everything in a heap, but to call people’s attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are. And that’s hard to do. And who ever called more people’s attention to that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn’t a particle of sense to what Tolstoi did, but—” He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that Lydia understood with a touching humility.

“Oh, you needn’t explain who Tolstoi is. I’ve heard of him.”

“Well, you mustn’t imagine I’m anything like Tolstoi!” cried the young man, laughing aloud at the idea, “for I don’t take a bit of stock in his deification of working with your muscles. That was an exaggeration he fell into in his old age because he’d been denied his fair share of manual work when he was young. If he’d had to split kindlings and tote ashes and hoe corn when he was a boy, I bet he wouldn’t have thought there was anything so sanctifying about callouses on your hands!”

“Oh, dear! You’re awfully confusing to me,” complained Lydia. “You always seem to be making fun of something I thought just the minute before you believed in.”

Rankin looked intensely serious. “There isn’t an impression I’d be sorrier to give you,” he said earnestly. “Perhaps the trouble is that you don’t as yet know much about the life I’ve got out of.”

“I’ve lived in Endbury all my life,” protested Lydia.

“There may still be something for you to learn about the lives of its men,” suggested her companion.

“If you think it’s so wrong, why don’t you reform it?” Lydia launched this challenge suddenly at him with the directness characteristic of her nation.

“I have to begin with reforming myself,” he said, “and that’s job enough to last me a long while. I have to learn not to care about being considered a failure by all the men of my own age who are passing me by; and I don’t mind confessing to you that that is not always easy—though you mustn’t tell Dr. Melton I’m so weak. I have to train myself to see that they are not really getting up so fast, but only scrambling fast over slipping, sliding stones; and then I have to try to find some firm ground where I can make a path of my own, up which I can plod in my own way.”

The tone of the young people, as they talked with their innocent grandiloquence of these high matters, might have been taken for that of a couple deep in some intimate discussion, so honestly serious and moved was it. There was a silence now, also like the pause in a profoundly personal talk, in which they looked long into each other’s eyes.

The clock struck five. Lydia sprang to her feet. “Oh, I must hurry on! I told Marietta to telephone home that I’d be there at six.”

She still preserved her charming unconsciousness of the unconventionality of her situation. A European girl, brought up in the strictest ignorance of the world, would still have had intuitions to make her either painfully embarrassed or secretly delighted with this impromptu visit to a young bachelor; but Lydia, who had been allowed to read “everything” and the only compromise to whose youth had been fitful attempts of the family to remember “not to talk too much about things before Lydia,” was clad in that unearthly innocence which the advancing tide of sophistication has still left in some parts of the United States—that sweet, proud, pathetic conviction of the American girl that evil is not a vital force in any world that she knows. The young man before her smiled at her in as artless an unconsciousness as her own. They might have been a pair of children.

“You’ve plenty of time,” he assured her. “Though I live so far out of the world, the Garfield Avenue trolley line is only five minutes’ walk away. Oh, I’m prosaic and commonplace, with my oil-stove and trolley cars. There’s nothing of the romantic reactionary about me, I’m afraid.” He wrapped the rain-coat about her and took an umbrella.

“Don’t you lock up your house when you go away?” asked Lydia.

“The poor man laughs in the presence of thieves,” quoted Rankin.

They stood on the veranda now, looking out into the blue twilight. The rain drummed noisily on the roof and the soft swish of its descent into the grass rose to a clear, sibilant note. The wind had died down completely, and the raindrops fell in long, straight lines like an opaque, glistening wall, which shut them off from the rest of the world. Back of them, the fire lighted up the empty chair that Lydia had left. She glanced in, and, moved by one of her sudden impulses, ran back for a moment to cast a rapid glance about the quiet room.

When she returned to take Rankin’s arm as he held the open umbrella, she looked up at him with shining eyes. “I have made friends with it—your living-room,” she said.

As they made their way along the footpath, she went on, “When I get into the trolley car I shall think I have dreamed it—the little house in the clearing—so peaceful, so—just look at it now. It looks like a little house in a child’s fairy-tale.” They paused on the edge of the clearing and looked back at the pleasant glow shimmering through the windows, then plunged into the strip of forest that separated the clearing from the open farming country and the main road to Endbury.

Neither of them spoke during this walk. The rain pattered swiftly, varying its monotonous refrain as it struck the umbrella, the leaves, the little brook that ran beside them, or the stony path. Lydia clung to Rankin’s arm, peering about her into the dim caves of twilight with a happy, secure excitement. After her confinement to the house for the last fortnight, merely to be out of doors was an intoxication for her, and ever since she had left her sister and begun her wanderings in the painted woods she had felt the heroine of an impalpable adventure. The silent flight through the dripping trees was a fitting end. Except for breaking in upon the music of the rain, she would have liked to sing aloud.

She thought, flittingly, how Marietta would laugh at her manufacturing anything romantic out of the commonplace facts of the insignificant episode, but even as she turned away from her sister’s imagined mocking smile, she felt an odd certainty that to Rankin there was also a glamour about their doings. It was as though the occasional contact of their bodies as they moved along the narrow path were a wordless communication.

He said nothing, but as they emerged upon the long treeless road, stretching away over the flat country to where the lights of Endbury glowed tremulously through the rain, he looked at his companion with a quick intensity, as though it were the first time he had really seen her.

It was that man’s look which makes a woman’s heart beat faster, even if she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face glow. It shone through the half-light as though a lamp had been lighted within.

They stood silently waiting for the car which flashed a headlight toward them far down the track. As it drew near, bounding over the rails, humming like a great insect, and bringing visibly nearer and nearer the end of their time together, Lydia was aware that Rankin was in the grasp of an emotion that threatened to become articulate. The steady advance of the car was forcing him to a speech against which he struggled in vain. Lydia began to quiver. She felt an expectancy of something lovely, moving, new to her, which grew tenser and tenser, as though her nerves were the strings of an instrument being pulled into tune for a melody. Standing there in the cold, rainy twilight, she had a moment of the exultation she had thought was to be so common in her Endbury career. She felt warmed through with the consciousness of being lovely, admired, secure, supremely fortunate, just as she had thought she would feel; but she had not been able to imagine the extraordinary happiness that this, or some unrecognized element of the moment, gave to her.

The car was almost upon them; the blinding glare of the headlight showed their faces with startling suddenness. She saw in Rankin’s eyes a tenderness that went to her heart. She leaned to him from the steps of the car to which he swung her—she leaned to him with a sweet, unconscious eagerness. In the instant before the car moved forward, as he stood gazing up at her, he spoke at last.

The words hummed meaningless in Lydia’s ears, and it was not until some time after, in the garish white brilliance of the car, that she convinced herself that she had heard aright. Even then, though she still saw his face raised to hers, the raindrops glistening on his hair and beard, even though she still heard the fervor of his voice, she remained incredulous before the enigma of his totally unexpected words. He had said, with a solemn note of pity in his voice: “Ah, my poor child, I am so horribly, horribly sorry for you!”

CHAPTER VIII

THE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT

Judge Emery looked tired and old as he sat down heavily at his dinner-table opposite his pretty daughter. The discomfort and irregularity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work. It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods. Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.

In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.

She knew him and all his capabilities very well, his wife told herself, and so used was she to the crystallized form in which she had for so many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical “notions,” the speculations of her doctor—also a lifelong friend of her husband’s—as to what Judge Emery might have become if—the doctor spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon—“he had not had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage.” “When I first knew Nat Emery,” he once said, “he was sitting up till all hours reading Les Miserables, and would knock you down if you didn’t bow your head at the mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn’t inherently incapable of that, I suppose.” At which he had turned on sixteen-year-old Lydia with, “Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that’d make you five thousand a year?” Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs. Emery had rebuked the doctor later for “putting ideas in girls’ heads.” It was an objection at which he had laughed long and loud.

Mrs. Emery liked her doctor in spite of not understanding him; but she loved her husband because she knew him through and through. In his turn, Judge Emery bestowed on his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not tempered by his occasional amusement at her—an amusement which Mrs. Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous, though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had shielded him, as a rule, from the uproar of the engagement.

This evening, as he looked across the white table-cloth at his daughter, he had a sudden qualm of doubt, not unusual in parents, as to the capacity of the younger generation to carry on the work begun by the older. Of course, he reassured himself, this had scarcely been a fair trial. The child had been plunged into the business the day after her return, with the added complication of her mother’s illness; but, even making all allowances, he had been dismayed by the thorough-going domestic anarchy that had ensued. He was partly aware that what alarmed him most was Lydia’s lack of zest in the battle, an unwillingness to recognize its inevitability and face it; a strange, apparently willful, blindness to the value of victory. Her father was disturbed by this failure to acquiesce in the normal, usual standard of values. He recalled with apprehension the revolutionary sayings and doings of his second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household æsthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the Lord protect him from everlastingly making omelets to look at and not to eat.

Lydia, to be sure, had ventured no irreverent jokes, and, so far as her father could see, had never conceived them; but a few days before she had suggested seriously, “Why can’t we shut up all of the house we don’t really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the library when you and I are always in the dining-room or upstairs with Mother, now she’s sick?”

Judge Emery had thought of the grade of society which keeps its “best room” darkened and closed, of the struggles with which his wife had dragged the family up out of that grade, and was appalled at Lydia’s unconscious reversion to type. “Your mother would feel dreadfully to have you do that; you know she thinks it very bad form—very green.”

Lydia had not insisted; it ran counter to every instinct in Lydia to insist on anything. She had succumbed at the first of his shocked tones of surprise; but the suggestion had shown him a glimpse of workings in her mind which made him uneasy.

However, to-night there were several cheering circumstances. The doctor had left word that, in all probability, Mrs. Emery would be quite herself in ten days—a shorter time than he had feared. Lydia was really charming in a rose-colored dress that matched the dewy flush in her cheeks; the roast looked cooked as he liked it, and he had heard some warm words that day about the brilliancy of young Paul Hollister’s prospects. He took a drink of ice-water, tucked his napkin in the top of his vest—a compromise allowed him by his wife at family dinners, and smiled at his daughter. “Your mother tells me that you’ve had a letter from Paul, saying that he’ll be back shortly,” he said with a jocosely significant emphasis. “I suppose we shall hardly be able to get a glimpse of you after he’s in town again.”

At this point, beginning to carve the roast, he had a sinking premonition that it was going to be very tough, and though he heroically resisted the ejaculation of embittered protest that rose to his lips, this magnanimity cost him so dear that he did not think of Lydia again till after he had served her automatically, dashing the mashed potato on her plate with the gesture of an angry mason slapping down a trowelful of mortar. It seemed to him at the moment that the past three weeks had been one succession of tough roasts. He took another drink of ice-water before he gloomily began on his first mouthful. It was worse than he feared, and he was in no mood to be either very imaginative or very indulgent to a girl’s whims when Lydia said, suddenly and stiffly, “I wish you wouldn’t speak so about Paul. I don’t know what makes everybody tease me so about him!”

Her father was chewing grimly. “I don’t know why they shouldn’t, I’m sure,” he said. “Young folks can’t expect everybody to keep their eyes shut and draw no conclusions. Of course I understand Paul’s not saying anything definite till now, on account of your being so young.”

Something of Marietta’s unsparing presentation of facts was inherited from her father, though, under his wife’s tutelage, he usually spared Lydia when he thought of it. At this time he was speaking almost absently, his attention divided between the exceptions to his rulings taken by the corporation counsel and the quality of his dinner; both disturbing to his quiet. He finally gave up the attempt at mastication and swallowed the morsel bodily, with a visible gulp. As he felt the consequent dull lump of discomfort, he allowed himself his first articulate protest. “Good Heavens! What meat!”

Lydia had grown quite pale. She pushed back her plate and looked at her father with horrified eyes. “Father! What a thing to say!” she finally cried out. “You make me ashamed to look him—to look anybody in the face. Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! I never—”

Judge Emery was very fond of his pretty daughter, and at this appeal from what he felt to be a very mild expression of justified discontent, he melted at once. “Now, never mind, Lydia, it won’t kill me. Only as soon as your mother gets about again, for the Lord’s sake have her take you to a butcher shop and learn to select meats.”

Lydia looked at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to speak, but at that moment the maid—the latest acquisition from the employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl—went through the dining-room on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father’s amused comment cut her short. “Lydia, you’ll have your guests thinking they’re at a lunch counter if you let that girl go on wearing that agglomeration of hair.”

The maid reappeared, sidling into the room, half carrying, half dragging a narrow, tall green pasteboard box, higher than herself but still not long enough for its contents, which protruded in leafy confusion from one end. “It’s for you,” she said bluntly, depositing it beside Lydia and retreating into the kitchen.

Lydia looked at it in wonder, turning to crimson confusion when her father said: “From Paul, I suppose. Very nice, I’m sure. Ring the bell for dessert before you open it. Of course you’re in a hurry to read the card.” He smiled with a tender amusement at the girl, who met his eyes with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and naïvely read the card aloud: “To the little girl grown up at last—to the young lady I’ve waited so long to see.”

She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it, hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entrées, made dishes, were not for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. “Meat’s business,” he was wont to say, “and dessert’s fun. The rest of one’s victuals is society and art and literature and such—things to leave to the women.”

He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with an effort to his daughter’s impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring, “But, Father—you must be mistaken— Why, nobody so much as hinted at such a—”

“That’s your mother’s doings. She’d be furious now if she knew I’d spoken right out. But you don’t want to be treated like a little girl all your life, do you?” He laughed at her speechless embarrassment with a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: “There aren’t many girls in Endbury who don’t envy my little Lydia, I guess. Paul is considered—”

At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of her heel on the top step before he could draw his breath. He laughed uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer’s caution, he waited a moment outside his wife’s room, where he heard Lydia’s voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration to quiet the girl’s exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest indulgence to his daughter’s confusion, but he was not without a humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of the business was already present to his mind. He was vastly relieved that Lydia had a mother to understand her fancies, and upon his wife, whom he would not have trusted to undertake the smallest business transaction without his advice, he transferred, with a sigh of content, the entire responsibility of wisely counseling their daughter. “Thank the Lord, that’s not my job!” he had often said about some knotty point in the up-bringing of the children. Mrs. Emery had always answered that she could not be too thankful for a “husband who was not a meddler.”

The Judge now listened at the door to the conversation between the two women with a grin of satisfaction.

“Why, my dear, what is there so terrible in having the handsomest and most promising young man in Endbury devoted to you? You don’t need to marry him for years and years if you don’t want to—or never, if you don’t like him enough.” She laughed a little, teasingly, “Perhaps it’s all just our nonsense, and he never has thought of you in that way. Maybe when he comes to see you he’ll tell you about a beautiful girl in Urbana or Cincinnati that he’s engaged to—and then what would your silly father say?”

“Oh, if I could only think that,” breathed Lydia, as though she had been reprieved from a death sentence. “Of course! Father was just joking. But he startled me so!”

“He was probably thinking of his horrid law business, darling. When a big trial is on he wouldn’t know me from Eve. He says anything at such times.”

Judge Emery laughed noiselessly, and quite without resentment at this wifely characterization.

Lydia went on: “It wasn’t so much what he said, you know—as—oh, the way he took it for granted—”

“Well, don’t think about it any more, dear; just be your sweet natural self when Paul comes to see you the first time—and don’t let’s talk any more now. Mother gets tired so easily.”

Lydia’s remorseful outcry over having fatigued her mother seemed a good occasion for Judge Emery’s entrance into the room and for his announcement. He felt that she would make an effort to control any agitation she might feel, and indeed, beyond a startled gasp, she made no comment on his news. Mrs. Emery herself was more obviously stirred to emotion. “To-night? Why, I didn’t think he’d be in town for several days yet.”

“He only got in at five o’clock this afternoon, he said.”

The two parents exchanged meaning glances over this chronology, and Mrs. Emery flushed and smiled. “Now, Lydia,” she said, “it’s a perfect shame I’m not well enough to be there when he comes. It would make it easier for you. But I wish you’d say honestly whether you’d rather have your father there or see Paul alone.”

Judge Emery’s face took on an aggrieved look of alarm. “Good gracious, my dear! What good would I be? You know I can’t be tactful. Besides, I’ve got an appointment with Melton.”

Lydia rose from where she knelt by the bed. Her chin was quivering. “Why, you make me feel so—so queer! Both of you!—As though it were anything—to see Paul—when I’ve known him always.”

Her mother seized on the rôle opened to them by this speech, and said quickly: “Why, of course! Aren’t we silly! I don’t know what possesses us. When he comes you just run along and see him, and say your father and I are sorry not to be there.”

During the next half-hour she made every effort, heroically though obviously seconded by her husband, to keep the conversation in a light and casual vein, but when the door-bell rang, they all three heard it with a start. Mrs. Emery said, very carelessly, “There he is, dear. Run along and remember me to him.” But she pulled Lydia down to her, straightened a bow on her waist with a twitch, loosened a lock of the girl’s shining dark hair, and kissed her with a sudden yearning fervor.

After they were alone, Judge Emery laughed aloud. “You’re just as bad as I am, Sarah. You don’t say anything, but—”

“Oh, I know,” his wife said; “I can’t help it!” She deliberated unresignedly over the situation for a moment, and then, “It seems as though I couldn’t have it so, to be sick just now, when I’m needed so much. This first month is so important! And Lydia’s getting such a different idea of things from what I meant, having this awful time with servants, and all. I have a sort of feeling once in a while that she’s getting notions!” She pronounced the word darkly.

“Notions?” Judge Emery asked. He had never learned to interpret his wife’s obscurities when the mantle of intuitions fell on her.

“Oh, don’t ask me what kind! I don’t know. If I knew I could do something about it. But she speaks queerly once in a while, and the evening of the day she was out with Marietta in the Black Rock woods she was— Do you know, I think it’s not good for Lydia to be outdoors too much. It seems to go to her head so. She gets to looking like Harry—almost reckless, and like some little scampering wild animal.”

Judge Emery rose and buttoned his coat about his spare figure. “Maybe she takes a back track, after some of my folks. You know there’s one line in my mother’s family that was always crazy about the woods. My grandfather on my mother’s side used to go off just as regular as the month of May came around, and—”

Mrs. Emery interrupted him with the ruthless and justifiable impatience of people at the family history of their relations by marriage. “Oh, go along! And stop and speak to Paul on your way out. Just drop in as you pass the door. We don’t want to really chaperone her. Nobody does that yet—but—the Hollisters are so formal about their girls—well, you stop in, anyhow. It’s borne in on me that that’ll look better, after all.”

CHAPTER IX

FATHER AND DAUGHTER

In the midst of his conference with Dr. Melton, an hour later, it came upon Judge Emery with a clap that he had forgotten this behest of his wife’s, plunged deep in legal speculations as he had been, the instant he turned from her door. He brought his hand down on the table.

“What’s the matter?” asked the little doctor, peering up at him.

“Oh, nothing important—women’s cobwebs. I’m afraid I’ll have to go, though. We can take this up again to-morrow, can’t we?”

“At your service,” said the doctor; but he pulled with some exasperation at a big pile of pamphlets still to be examined.

“It’s something about Lydia’s receiving a call from Paul Hollister, and her mother wanting me to stop in as I left the house and say good-evening—sort of represent the family—do the proper thing. Don’t it tickle you to see women who used to sleigh-ride from seven to eleven every evening in a little cutter just big enough for one and a half, begin to wonder if they hadn’t better chaperone their girls when they have callers in the next room?”

He stirred up the pamphlets with a discontented look. “Confound it, I wish I could stay! Which one of those has the statistics about the accidents when the men aren’t allowed one day in seven?”

“See here, Emery!” In spite of his evident wish to exhort, the doctor continued sitting as he spoke. He was so short that to rise could have given him no perceptible advantage over the tall lawyer. “See here; do you know that you have a most unusual girl for a daughter?”

“I have heard people say that I have a glimmering notion of her merits,” said the other with a humorous gravity.

“Oh, I don’t mean pretty, and appealing, and with a good complexion, and all that—and I don’t mean you don’t spoil her most outrageously. I mean she’s got the oddest make-up for a modern American girl—she’s simple.”

“I don’t see anything odd about her—or simple!” Her father resented the adjectives with some warmth.

Dr. Melton answered with his usual free-handed use of language: “Well, it’s because, like everybody else old and spoiled and stodgy and settled, you’ve no eyes in your head when it comes to something important, like young people. Because they’re all smooth and rosy you think they’re all alike.” He rushed on, delivering himself as always with restless vivacity of gesture, “I tell you youth is one of the most wastefully ignored forces in the world! Talk about our neglecting to get the good out of our water-power! The way we shut off the capacity of youth to see things as they are, before it gets purblind with our own cowardly unreason—why, it’s as if we tried to make water run uphill instead of turning our mill-wheels with its natural energy.”

Judge Emery had listened to a word or two of this harangue and then had looked for and found his hat and coat, with which he had invested himself, and now stood ready for the street, one hand on the knob of the door. “Well, good-night to you,” he said pleasantly, as though the doctor were not speaking; “I’ll try to see you to-morrow.”

Dr. Melton jumped to his feet, laughing, ran across the room and caught at the other’s arm. “Don’t blame me. Much preaching of true gospel to deaf ears has made me yell all the time. You know you don’t really hear me, any more than anyone else.”

“There’s no doubt about that, I don’t!” acquiesced the Judge frankly.

“I will run on, though I know it never does any good. How’d I begin this time? What started me off? What was I saying?”

“You were saying that Lydia was queer and half-witted,” said the Judge moderately.

“I said she was simple—and by that I mean she’s so wise you’d better look out or she’ll find you out. She’s as dangerous as a bomb. She has a scent for essentials. She can tell ’em from all our flummery. I’m afraid of her, and I’m afraid for her! Remember the fate of the father in the Erl-King! He thought, I dare say, that he was doing a fine thing for his child, to hurry it along to a nice, warm, dry, safe place!”

Judge Emery broke in, impatient of this fantastic word-bandying. “Oh, come, Melton, I can’t stand here while you spin your paradoxes. I’ve got to get home before young Hollister leaves or my wife won’t like it.”

“I’ll go with you, then,” cried the little doctor, clapping on his hat. “You sha’n’t escape me that way. I’m in full cry after the best figure of speech I’ve hit on in months.”

“Good Lord!” The lawyer looked down laughingly at his friend as the two set off, a stork beside a sparrow. “You and your figures!”

“It came over me with a bang the other day that in Lydia we have in our midst that society-destroying child in The Kaiser’s New Clothes.”

“Eh?” said Lydia’s father blankly.

“You remember the last scene in that inimitable tale? Where the Kaiser walks abroad with all the people shouting and hurrahing for the new clothes, and not daring to trust their own eyes, and suddenly a little child’s voice is heard, ‘But the Kaiser has nothing on!’”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the Judge with a patient indifference.

“Well, you will know when you hear Lydia say that some day. She knows—she’ll know! Perhaps you’ve done well to send her to that idiotic finishing school.”

“Don’t lay it to me!” cried the Judge, laughing; “I didn’t send her—or not send her. If you were married you’d know that fathers never have anything to say about what their daughters do.”

“More fools they!” rejoined the doctor pointedly. “But in this case maybe it’s all right. She’s as ignorant as a Hottentot, of course, but perhaps any real education might have spoiled her innate capacity to—”

“Oh, pshaw!” The Judge was vaguely uneasy. “You let Lydia alone. Talk your nonsense about something else. There’s nothing queer about Lydia, thank heavens! She’s just like all young ladies.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say about one’s own daughter!” cried the doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. “There won’t be anything queer about her long, that’s fact. In real life the child is never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are clapped over its mouth, and it’s hustled, and shaken, and frightened, and scolded, till it thinks there’s something the matter with its eyesight. And Lydia’s a sweet, gentle child, who’ll want to say whatever pleases people she loves—that’ll be another bandage over her eyes. And she’s not dowered with an innate fondness for shrieking out contradictions at the top of her voice, and unless you’ve a real passion for that you get silenced early in life.”

The lawyer laughed with the good-natured contempt of a large, silent man for a small, voluble one. “That’s a tragedy you can’t know much about from experience, Melton. No cruel force ever silenced you.”

He paused at the walk leading to his house. A big street light glowed and sputtered over their heads. “Come in, won’t you, and see Lydia?”

“No; no cruel force has ever silenced me,” the doctor mused, putting his hands slowly into his pockets, “but it has bound me hand and foot. I talk, and I talk, but do you ever see me doing anything different from the worst fools of us all?”

“Are you coming in?” The Judge spoke with his absent tolerance of his doctor’s fancies.

“No, thank you, as the farmer said to the steeple-climber. I’m going home to my lonely office to give thanks to Providence that I’m not responsible for a daughter.”

The Judge frowned. “Nonsense! Look at Marietta.”

“I do,” said the doctor.

“Well—?” The lawyer was challenging. In the long run the doctor rubbed him the wrong way.

“I hope you make a better job of bandaging Lydia’s eyes than you did hers.”

The Judge had turned toward the house. At this he stopped and made an irritated gesture. “Melton, you are enough to give a logical man brain fever. You’re always proclaiming that parents have no real influence over their children’s lives—that it’s fate, or destiny, or temperament—and now—you blame me because Marietta’s discontented over her husband’s small income.”

The doctor looked up quickly, his face twitching. “You think that’s the cause of Marietta’s discontent? By Heaven, I wish Lydia could go into a convent.”

Suddenly his many-wrinkled little face set like a mask of tragedy. “Oh, Nat, you know what Lydia’s always been to me—like my own—as precious—Oh, take care of her! take care of her! See, Lydia can’t fight. She can’t, even if she knew what was going on to fight against—” His voice broke. He looked up at his tall friend and shivered.

Judge Emery clapped him on the shoulder with a rough friendliness. “No wonder you do miracles in curing women, Marius. You must know their insides. You talk like a mother in a fit of the nerves over a sick child. In the Lord’s name, what has Lydia to fight against? If there was ever a creature with a happy, successful life before her— Besides, don’t we all stand ready to do her fighting for her?”

Though the night was cool, the doctor took off his hat and wiped his forehead. He looked up once as though he were about to speak, but in the end he only put his hat back on his head, nodded, and went his way, his quick, light, uneven tread waking a faint echo in the empty street.

As the Judge let himself in at the front door, a murmur of voices from the brightly-lighted parlor struck gratefully on his ear. He was not too late. “How are you, Hollister?” he called as he pulled off his overcoat. “Glad to see you back. Let’s hear all about the Urbana experience.”

Hollister’s dramatic interest in each engagement of his battle for success was infectious. Those who knew him, whether they liked him or not, waited for news of the results of his latest skirmish as they waited for the installments of an exciting serial story.

As the older man entered, the tall, quick-moving young fellow came over to the door and shook his hand with energy. The Judge reflected that nobody but Hollister could so convey the effect that he was being made kindly welcome in his own house; but he did not dislike this vigor of personality. He sat down on the chair which his young guest indicated as a suitable one, and rubbed his chin, smiling at his daughter. “Dr. Melton sent his love to you, but he wouldn’t come in.”

Paul looked brightly at Lydia. “I should hope not! My first evening with her! To share it with anybody! Except her father, of course!” He added the last as an afterthought, more with the air of putting the Judge at his ease than of excusing himself for an ungraceful slip of the tongue.

The Judge laughed, restraining an impulse to call out, “You’re a wonder, young man!” and said instead, “Well, let’s hear the news.”

Lydia said nothing, but her aspect, always vividly expressive of her mood, struck her father as odd. As he glanced at her from time to time during the ready, spirited narrative of the young “captain in the army of electricity,” as he had once called himself, Lydia’s father felt a qualm of uneasiness. Her lips were very red and a little open, as though she were breathless from some exertion, and a deep flush stained her cheeks. She looked at Paul while he talked animatedly to her father, but when he addressed himself to her she looked down or away, meeting her father’s eyes with a curious effect of not seeing him at all. The Judge, moved by the oblique, harassing intimations he had been forced to hear from the doctor as to the possibility of his not understanding all that was in his daughter’s mind, was oppressed by that most nightmarish of emotions for a man of clear-cut intellectual interests—an apprehension, like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia “safely married.” Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced on one the reality of a world of intangible conditions which one could, somehow, comfortably ignore with sons. And yet, how about Harry? Perhaps if some one had not ignored with him—

“I should have been back ten days ago,” Paul drew to the end of his story, “but I simply had to wait to oversee those tests myself. Since I’ve adopted that rule of personally checking the inspector’s work, we’ve been able to report forty per cent. fewer complaints of newly installed dynamos to the general office. And you see in this case, from the accident, what might have happened.”

“By the Lord!” cried the lawyer, moved in spite of his preoccupations by the story of danger the other had been relating, “I should think it would turn your hair white every time a dynamo’s installed. How did you feel when the fly-wheel broke?”

“The fly-wheel isn’t on the dynamo, of course,” corrected Paul, “so I don’t feel responsible for it in a business way, and that’s everything. As for being frightened, why, it’s all over so quickly. You don’t have time to take in what’s happening. You’re there or you’re not. And if you are, the best thing is to get busy with repairs,” he added, with a simple, manly depreciation of his courage. “You mustn’t think it often happens, you know; it’s supposed never to.”

He spoke of the personal side of the matter with a dry brevity which contrasted effectively with the unconscious eloquence with which he had previously brought before their eyes the tense excitement in the new power-house when the wheels first stir to life in incredibly rapid revolutions and the mysterious modern genii begins to rush through the wires. At no time did Lydia’s suitor show to better advantage than in speaking of his profession. The alertness of his face and the prompt decision of his speech suited the subject. His mouth fell into lines of grimly fixed purpose which expressed even more than his words when he spoke of the rivalry in endurance, patience and daring in the army of young electrical engineers, all set, as he was, on crowding one another out of the rapidly narrowing road to preferment and the few great golden prizes of the profession.

This evening he was more than usually fervent. Judge Emery thought he detected in him traces of the same excitement that flamed from Lydia’s cheeks. “I tell you, Judge, I was wrong when I spoke of the ‘army’ of electricity. In the army advancement comes only from somebody’s death, and with us it’s simply a question of who’s got the most to give. He gets the most back—and that’s all there is to it. The company’s bound to have the man it can get the most work out of. If you can do two ordinary men’s work, you get two men’s pay. See? There’s no limit to the application of that principle. Why, our field organizer on the Pacific Coast is only a little older than I, and, by Jove! the work they say he’ll turn off is something marvelous! You wouldn’t believe it. But you can train yourself to it, like everything else. To be able to concentrate—not to lose a detail—to put every ounce of your force into it—that’s the thing.”

He brought one hand down inside the other, and sat for a moment in silence as tense with stirring possibilities to the others as to himself. The Judge felt moved to a most unusual sensation, as if he were a loosened bowstring beside this twanging, taut intensity. He felt slightly dismayed to have his unspoken principles carried to this nth power. He had given the best of himself, all his thoughts, illusions, hopes, endeavors, to his ideal of success, but his ambition had never been concentrated enough to serve as a lens through which the rays of his efforts might focus themselves into the single beam of devastating heat on which Paul counted so certainly to burn away the obstacles between himself and success. Various protesting comments rose to his lips, which he kept back, disconcerted to find how much they resembled certain remarks of Dr. Melton’s.

The young man stirred, looked at Lydia, and smiled brilliantly. “I mustn’t keep this little sick-nurse up any later, I suppose,” he said; but for a moment he made no movement to go. He and Lydia exchanged a gaze as long and silent as if they had been alone. It occurred to the Judge that they both looked dazzled. When Paul rose he drew a long breath and shook his head half humorously at his host. “You and I will have to look to our guns, during the next season, to hold our own, won’t we? I’ve been making Lydia promise to reserve me three dances at every single ball this winter, and I think I’m heroic not to insist on more—but her first season—!”

Lydia said, with her pretty, light laugh, a little shaking now, “But suppose you’re out of town, setting up some new dynamo or something and your three dances come along?”

Paul crossed the room to her, as if drawn irresistibly by the sound of her voice. He stood by her, looking down into her eyes (he was very tall), bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful. “You’re to sit out those three dances and think of me, and think of me—of course! I shall be thinking of you.”

Lydia’s little tremulous air of archness dropped under this point-blank rejoinder. She flushed, and looked at her father. That unimaginative person started toward her as though she had called to him for help, and then, ashamed of his inexplicable impulse, turned away confusedly and disappeared into the hall.

Paul took this movement as a frank statement of the older man’s desire to be, for the moment, rid of him. “Oh, I am going, Judge,” he called after him, unabashed; “it is just a bit hard to tear myself away—I’ve been waiting so long for her to get back!” To Lydia he went on, “I’ve grown thin and pale waiting for you, while you—look at yourself, you heartless little witch!”

He pointed across to a tall mirror in which they were reflected against the rich background of his roses. For a moment both the beautiful young creatures looked each into his own eyes, mysterious with youth’s total ignorance of its own meaning. Paul took Lydia’s hand in his, and pointed again to their reflections as they stood side by side. He tried to speak, but for once his ready tongue was silent. Judge Emery came back to the door, a weary patience on his white, tired face.

The young man turned away with a sigh and a smile. “Yes, yes, Judge, I’m off. Good-night, Lydia. Don’t forget the theater Wednesday night.”

He crossed the room with a rapid, even step, shook hands with the Judge, and got himself out of the room with an easy briskness which the older man, mindful of his own rustic youth, was half-inclined to envy.

After he and Lydia were left alone he did not venture a word of comment, lest he hit on the wrong thing. He went silently about, putting out the lights, and locking the windows. Lydia stood where Paul had left her, looking at her bright image in the mirror. When the last bulb went out, the room was in a flickering twilight, the street arc-light blinking uncertainly into the windows. Judge Emery stood waiting for his daughter to move. He could scarcely see her form—her face not at all, but there flashed suddenly upon him the memory of her appealing look toward him earlier. It shook him as it had then. His heart yearned over her. He would have given anything he possessed for the habit of intimate talk with her. He put out his hands, but in the twilight she did not see the gesture. He felt shy, abashed, horribly ill at ease, torn by his tenderness, by his sense of remoteness. He said, uncertainly, “Lydia—Lydia dear—”

She started. “Oh, yes, of course. It’s late.” She passed, brushed lightly against him, as he stood trembling with the sense of her dearness to him. She began to ascend the stairs. He had felt from her the emanation of excitement, guessed that she was shivering like himself before a crisis—and he could find no word to say.

She had passed him as though he were a part of the furniture. He had never talked to her about—about things. He stood at the foot of the stairs in the darkness, listening to her light, mounting footfall. Once he opened his mouth to call to her, but the habit of a lifetime closed it.

“She will talk to her mother,” he told himself; “her mother will know what to say.” When he followed her up the stairs he was conscious chiefly that he was immeasurably tired. Melton, perhaps, had something on his side with his everlasting warnings about nervous breakdowns. He could not stand long strains as he used to do.

He fell asleep tracing out the thread of the argument presented that day by the counsel for the defense.

CHAPTER X

CASUS BELLI

Dr. Melton looked up in some surprise from his circle of lamplight as his goddaughter came swiftly into the room. “Your mother worse?” he queried sharply.

“No, no, dear Godfather. I just thought I’d come over and see you for a while. I had a little headache—Marietta’s back from Cleveland to-day, and she and Flora Burgess are at the house—”

“You’ve said enough. I’m thankful that you have this refuge to fly to from such—”

“Oh, Flora’s not so bad as you make her out, the queer, kind little old dowdy—only I didn’t feel like talking ‘parties,’ and ‘who’s who,’ to-night—and their being with Mother made it all right for me to leave her.”

The doctor took off his eye-shade and showed his little wizened face rather paler than usual. “That’s a combination that would kill me, and your mother not well yet—still, many folks, many tastes.”

He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. “Well, Lydia, my dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what are yours going to be like, I wonder?”

“I wonder,” she repeated absently.

“Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last night is to your taste?”

Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. “Oh, don’t, Godfather!”

“Very well, I won’t,” he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the instinct of one who knows his womankind.

There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. “Of course that was what I came to see you about,” she admitted, her sensitive lips quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; “but now I’m here I find I haven’t anything to say. Perhaps you’d better give me a pink pill and send me home to forget all about everything.”

Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy hands. “Oh, if I could—if I only could do something for you!” He searched her face anxiously. “What did young Hollister say that makes you so troubled?”

She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. “It wasn’t anything he said,” she admitted. “He was all right, I guess. Father had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for granted—Oh, you know—the silly way people do—”

“Yes.”

“Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go— He didn’t say a thing embarrassing or—or hard to answer, but he let me see—all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I’d be to an ambitious man. He said he didn’t see why I shouldn’t grow into the leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he and his sister live with, you know.”

“I suppose he’s right,” conceded the doctor, reluctantly.

“Well, while he was talking about it, it seemed all very well—you know the way he goes at things—how he makes you feel as though he were a locomotive going sixty miles an hour and you were inside the engine cab, holding on for dear life?”

Dr. Melton shook his head. “Paul has given me a great variety of sensations,” he admitted, “but I can’t say that he ever gave me quite this locomotive-cab illusion you speak of.”

“Well, he has me, lots of times,” persisted Lydia. “It’s awfully exciting—you don’t know where you’re going, and you can’t stop to think, everything tears past you so fast and your breath is so blown out of you. You feel like screaming. You forget everything else, you get so—so stirred up and excited. But after it’s over there’s always a time when things are flat. And this morning, and all day long, I’ve felt very—different about what he wants and all. I don’t believe I’m very well, perhaps—or maybe—” she broke off, to say with emotion, “Oh, Godfather, wouldn’t it be too awful if I should turn out to be without ambition.” She pronounced the word with the reverence for its meaning that had been drilled into her all her life, and looked at Dr. Melton with troubled eyes.

He thrust his lips out with a grimace habitual to him in moments of feeling, and for an instant said nothing. When he spoke his voice broke on her name, as it had the night before when he had stood looking up at her windows. “Oh, Lydia!—Oh, my dear, I’m terribly afraid of your future!”

“I’m a little scared of it myself,” she said tremulously, and hid her face on his shoulder.

She was the first to speak. “Wouldn’t Marietta just scream with laughter at us?” she reminded him. “We are foolish, too! There’s nothing in the world you could lay your finger on. There’s nothing anyhow, I guess, but nerves. I wouldn’t dare breathe it to anybody else, but you always know how I’m feeling, anyhow. It’s as though—here I am, grown up, and there’s nothing for me to do that’s worth while—even if—even if—Paul—”

The doctor took a sudden resolution. “Why don’t you talk to your father, Lydia? Why don’t you ask him about—”

He was cut short by Lydia’s gesture of utter wonder. “Father? Don’t you know that there’s a big trial on? He couldn’t tell without figuring up, if you should ask him quick, whether I’m fourteen or nineteen—or nine! Mother wouldn’t let me, anyhow, even if he could have any idea of what I was driving at. She never let us bother him the least bit when there was something big happening in his lawyering. I remember that time I had pneumonia and nearly died, when I was a little girl, that she told him I had just a cold; and he never knew any different for years afterward, when I happened to say something about it. She didn’t want him worried when he needed all his wits for some important business.”

The doctor looked at her with frowning intensity, and then down at his papers. He seemed on the point of some forcible utterance, which he restrained with many twitchings of his mouth. Finally he got up and went to a window, staring out silently.

“I think I’ll go and look up dear Aunt Julia,” said Lydia.

“Very well, my dear,” said the doctor over his shoulder. “She’s in her room, I think.” In exactly the same mild tone, he added, “Damnation!”

“What did you say?” asked Lydia.

He turned toward her, and took up a book from the table. “I said nothing, dear Lydia—I’ve nothing to say, I find.”

Lydia broke into a light, mocking laugh—the doctor’s volubility was an old joke—and began to speak, when a woman’s voice called, “Oh, Marius, here’s Mr.—— why, Lydia, how did you get in without my seeing you?”

She entered the room as she spoke—a middle-aged woman, with large blue eyes and graying fair hair, who evidently did her duty by the prevailing styles in dress with a comfortable moderation of effort. Lydia’s mother, as the sister of Mrs. Sandworth’s long-dead husband, thought it necessary, from time to time, to endeavor to stir her sister-in-law up to a keener sense of what was due the world in the matter of personal appearance; but Mrs. Sandworth, born a Melton, had the irritating unconcern for social problems of that distinguished Kentucky family. She cared only to please her brother Marius, she said, and he never cared what she had on, but only what was in her mind—a remark that had once caused Judge Emery to say, in a fit of exasperation with her wandering wits, that if she ever had as little on as she had in her mind, he guessed Melton would sit up and take notice.

Lydia now rushed at her aunt, exclaiming, “Oh, Aunt Julia, how good you do look to me! The office door was open and I slipped in that way, without ringing the bell.”

“It’s four years old, and never been touched, not even the sleeves,” said the other deprecatingly.

Her brother laughed. “Who did you say was here—Oh, it’s you, Rankin; come in, come in.”

The newcomer was half-way across the room before he saw Lydia. He stopped, with a look of extreme pleasure and surprise, which Lydia answered with a frank smile.

“Why, have you met my niece?” asked Mrs. Sandworth, looking from one to the other.

“Oh, yes; Mr. Rankin’s my oldest new friend in Endbury. I met him the first day I was back.”

“And when I set up the newel-post—”

“And I ran on to his house by accident the day Marietta and I were out with little Pete, when it rained and I borrowed his overcoat and umbrella—”

“And then I had to call to take them away, of course—”

They intoned their confessions like a gay antiphonal chant. A bright color had come up in Lydia’s cheeks. She looked very sunny and good-humored, like a cheerful child, an expression which up to that year had been habitual to her. Dr. Melton looked at her without speaking.

“So, you see,” she concluded, “not to speak of several other times—we’re very well acquainted.”

“Well, Marius! Did you ever!” Mrs. Sandworth appealed to her brother.

“Oh, I’ve known about it all along. Rankin and I have discussed Lydia as well as other weighty matters, a great many times.”

Mrs. Sandworth’s easily diverted mind sped off into another channel. “Yes, how you do discuss. I’m going to look right at the clock every minute from now on, so’s to be sure to remind you of that engagement at Judge Emery’s office at half-past nine. I know what happens when you and Mr. Rankin get to talking.”

“I’ll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence.”

“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Lydia.

“They won’t—nor anything else,” her aunt assured her.

Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he was startled by the younger man’s next statement.

“I’ve got an apprentice,” he announced.

“Eh?” queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.

“The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on the railroad. The boy’s been bad—truant—street gamin—all that sort of thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a passion for tools—maybe his ancestors were mediæval craftsmen. Anyhow, he’s been working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really learning fast. And he’s been so interested he’s forgotten all his deviltry. So, yesterday, didn’t he and his father and his mother and about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my profession, as they grandly call it.”

“Oh, how perfectly lovely!” cried Lydia.

The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. “Of course you know the end of that.”

“You mean he’ll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts again?”

“Not much! He’ll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you’ll extend operations and build shops, and in no time you’ll go the way of all the world—a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your competitors; forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting special railroad rates for your stuff; can’t remember how many children you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done by attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright’s disease at fifty; leave a million.”

Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without smiling. “I’ve got ten million blue devils on my back to-night,” he said.

“So I see—so I see.” Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to look into his old friend’s face his own grew grave by reflection. “You don’t believe all that?”

“Oh, you won’t mean to. It’ll come gradually.” He broke out suddenly, “Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer.”

“Answer!” The cabinet-maker’s bewilderment was immense. “Have you asked me anything?”

The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman whose inner thoughts are not divined.

“He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense,” Rankin appealed to the two women.

Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. “Oh, nobody ever can make out what he’s driving at. I never try.” She took out a piece of crochet work. “Lydia, they’re at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on. Would you make this in shell stitch? It’s much newer, of course, but they say it don’t wash so well.” As Lydia’s attention wavered, “Oh, there’s not a particle of use in trying to make out what they’re saying. They just go on and on.”

Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor’s back. “I don’t, you know, see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a few by hand. I’m no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being too tied up to folks, and I couldn’t think of any other way. But I think, now that you’ve put the idea into my head—I think it would be a good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me—and, by gracious! the girls too! That’s one of my convictions—that girls need very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a large business (which I doubt strongly), what’s the harm? The motive lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me time and strength to live—‘leisure to be good.’ Who said that, anyway? It’s fine.”

“Hymn to Adversity,” supplied the doctor, who was better read in the poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, “Could you, though, do any such thing? Wouldn’t it run you, once you got to going?”

“Well, if worst came to worst—” began Rankin, then changing front, he began again: “My great-aunt—”

The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.

“Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until, when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up, heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to—”

“You see. You see. That’s just what I meant,” broke in the doctor.

“Well, I’m a near relative of my great-aunt’s. One day, when all the rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to the ground, with everything in it.”

“She didn’t!” broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful attention by the promise of a coherent story.

Rankin laughed. “Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don’t doubt she would have,” he amended.

The doctor grunted, “Huh! But would you!” He went on, “You couldn’t compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn’t concentrate everything on making chairs. Don’t you know the successful business man’s best advertisement? ‘All of my life-strength I’ve put into the product I offer you,’ he says to the public, and it’s true.”

“Oh, well, if I couldn’t do business there’d be an end of the matter, and none of your horrible prophecies would come true.”

“Your wife wouldn’t let you.”—Dr. Melton took up another line of attack—“she’d want a motor-car and ‘nice’ associates and a fashionable school for the children, and a home in the ‘respectable’ part of town.”

Rankin’s easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. “There you step on one of my corns, Doctor”—he did not apologize for the rustic metaphor—“I don’t believe a single, solitary identical word of that. It’s my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans that you can’t tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they’re interested in petty, personal things it’s because they’re not given a fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody’s jumping on the American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her husband’s business. Why does she? Because he’s satisfied to have her—you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art, just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife’s attention off him. It’s the American man just as much as the woman who’s mortally afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He doesn’t want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the questions of family life, and he doesn’t want his wife bothering him in his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That idea of the matter is common to them both.”

“That’s a fine, chivalric view of the situation,” said the doctor sardonically. “Maybe if you’d practiced as long in as many American families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female compatriots.”

“I don’t idealize ’em,” cried Rankin. “Good Lord! Don’t I say they’re just like men? They amount to something if they’re given something worth while to do—not otherwise.”

“Don’t you call bringing up children worth while?”

“You bet I do. So much so that I’d have the fathers take their full half of it. I’d have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the women the other way ’round.”

The doctor recoiled at this. “Oh, you’re a visionary. It couldn’t be done.”

“It couldn’t be done in a minute,” admitted Rankin.

The doctor mused. “It’s an interesting thought. But it’s not for our generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the children. Adults are hopeless. There’s never any use trying to change them.”

“Oh, you can’t fool children,” said Rankin. “It’s no use teaching them something you’re not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through that quick enough! What you’re really after, is what they see and learn to go after themselves. If anything’s to be done, the adults must take the first step.”

“But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous.”

“Society’s been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who tells me that it’s bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it hasn’t got me bluffed, anyhow! My wife—if I ever have one—is going to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, my children. I won’t have a business that they can’t know about, or that doesn’t leave me strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!”

The doctor looked wonderingly at the other’s kindling face. “Rankin,” he asked irrelevantly, “aren’t there ever moments when you despair of the world?”

The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he answered, “Why, good heavens, no, Doctor! That’s why I dare criticize it so.”

The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other’s confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other’s big brown fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. “But I’m sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of—believe in,” he burst out finally. “It comes too late—the advance from our tragic materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most.” He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt’s fancy work. Rankin followed the direction of his eyes.

“Yes; that’s what I mean,” said the doctor heavily, rising from his chair. “That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!”

Rankin shook his head. “I think I’m proving that you don’t have to go into the labyrinth—that you can live in health and happiness outside.”

“There’s rather more than that to be done, you’ll admit,” said the doctor with an uncompromising bitterness.

Rankin colored. “I don’t pretend that it’s much of anything—what I’ve done.”

The doctor did not deny him. He thrust out his lips and rubbed his hand nervously over his face. Finally, “But you have done it, at least,” he brought out, “and I’ve only talked. As another doctor has said: ‘I’ve never taken a bribe; but there’s a pale shade of bribery known as prosperity.’”

They fell into a silence, broken by Mrs. Sandworth’s asking, “Lydia, have your folks got an old mythology book? I studied it at school, of course, but it has sort of passed out of my mind. Was it the Minotaur that sowed teeth and something else very odd came up that you wouldn’t expect?”

Lydia did not smile. “I don’t know whether we have the book or not, but Miss Slater told us the story of the Minotaur. There’s a picture of Theseus and Ariadne in Europe somewhere—Munich, I think—or maybe Siena. It was where one of the girls had a sore throat, I remember, and we had to stay quite a while. Miss Slater told us about it then.”

The doctor stood up. “Julia, it’s nearly half-past now. Who remembered this time? I’m off, all of you. Rankin, see that Lydia gets home safely, will you?”

“Oh, I must go too—now, with you.” The girl jumped up. “I didn’t realize it was so late. They’ll be wondering at home.”

“Come along, then, both of you. I’ll go with you to the corner where I take my car.”

The chill of the night air sent them along at a brisk gait, Lydia swinging easily between them, her head on a level with Rankin’s, the doctor’s hat on a level with her ear. She said nothing, and the two talked across her, disjointed bits of an argument apparently under endless discussion between them.

The doctor flung down, with a militant despondency, “It’d be no use trying to do anything, even if you weren’t so slothful and sedentary as you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what the majority want, the majority’ll go on wanting it. Hardy says somewhere that it’s innate in human nature not to desire the undesired of others.”

Rankin sang out a ringing “Aw, g’wan! It’s innate in human nature to murder and steal whenever it pleases, and I guess even Hardy’d admit that those aren’t the amusements of the majority quite so extensively as they used to be—what? First thing you know people’ll begin to desire things because they’re worth desiring and not because other folks have them—even so astonishing a flight as that!” he made a boyish gesture—“and what a grand time that’ll be to live in, to be sure!”

They were waiting at the corner for the doctor’s street car, which now came noisily down toward them. He watched it advance, and proffered as a valedictory, his gloom untempered to the last, “You’re a wild man that lives in the woods. I’ve doctored everybody in the world for thirty years. Which knows human nature best?”

Rankin roared after him defiantly, waking the echoes and startling the occupants of the car, “I do! I do! I do!”

The car bore the doctor away, a perversely melancholy little figure, contemplating the young people blackly.

“Whatever do you suppose set him off so?” Rankin wondered aloud as they resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.

“I’m afraid I did,” Lydia surmised. “I had a wretched fit of the blues, and I guess he must have caught them from me.”

Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered by her phrase. “Ah, he worries a great deal about you,” he murmured.

Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night. Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin’s face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.

Lydia’s voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension—a certainty—they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was not frightened, not even conscious of it. “Why should the doctor worry? What is the matter? Marietta says the trouble with me is that I’m spoiled with having everything that I want.”

“Have you everything you want?” Rankin’s bluntness of interrogation was unmitigated.

Lydia looked up at him swiftly, keenly. In his grave face there was that which made her break out with an open quivering emotion she had not shown even to the doctor’s loving heart. “It’s a weight on my very soul—that there’s nothing for me to look forward to—nothing, nothing that’s worth growing up to do. I haven’t been taught anything—but I know I want to be something better than—perhaps I can’t be—but I want to try! I want to try! That’s not much to ask—just a chance to try—But I don’t even know how to get that. I don’t even dare to speak of—of—such things. People laugh and say it’s Sunday-schooley fancies that’ll disappear, that I’ll forget as I get into living. But I don’t want to forget. I’m afraid I shall. I want to keep trying. I don’t know—”

They did not slacken their swift advance as they talked. They looked at each other seriously in the starlight.

Rankin had given an indrawn exclamation as she finished, and after an instant’s pause he said, with a deep emotion, “Oh, perhaps—at least we both want to try—Be Ariadne for me! Help me to find the clue to what’s wrong in our lives, and perhaps—” He looked down at her, shaken, drawing quick breaths. She answered his gaze silently, her face as shining white as his.

He went on: “You shall decide what Ariadne may be or may come to be—I will take whatever you choose to give—and bless you!”

She had a gesture of humility. “I haven’t anything to give.”

His accent was memorable as he cried, “You have yourself—you—you! But you are too gentle! It is hard for you—it will be too hard for you to do what you feel should be done. I could perhaps do the things if you would tell me—help you not to forget—not to let life make you forget what is worth doing and learning!”

She put back a mesh of her wind-blown hair to look at him intently, and to say again in wonder, “I’m not anything. What can you think I—what can you hope—”

They were standing now on the walk before her father’s house. “I can hope—” his voice shook, “I can hope that you may make me into a man worthy to help you to be the best that’s in you.”

Lydia put out her hand impulsively. It did not tremble. She looked at him with radiant, steady eyes. He raised the slim, gloved fingers to his lips. “Whether to leave you, or to try to—Oh, I would give my life to know how best to serve you,” he said huskily. He turned away, the sound of his steps ringing loud in the silent street.

Lydia went slowly up the walk and into the empty hall. She stood an instant, her hands clasped before her breast, her eyes closed, her face still and clear. Then she moved upstairs like one in a dream.

As she passed her mother’s door she started violently, and for an instant had no breath to answer. Some one had called her name laughingly.

Finally, “Yes,” she answered without stirring.

“Oh, come in, come in!” cried Marietta mockingly. “We know all about everything. We heard you come up the street, and saw you philandering on the front walk. And for all it’s so dark, we made out that Paul kissed your hand when he went away.”

There was a silence in the hall. Then Lydia appeared in the door. Mrs. Emery gave a scream. “Why, Lydia! what makes you look so queer?”

They turned startled, inquiring, daunting faces upon her. It was the baptism of fire to Lydia. The battle, inevitable for her, had begun. She faced it; she did not take refuge in the safe, silent lie which opened before her, but her courage was a piteous one. In her utter heartsick shrinking from the consequences of her answer she had a premonition of the weakness that was to make the combat so unequal. “It was not Paul,” she said, pale in the doorway; “it was Daniel Rankin.”

BOOK II

IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB

CHAPTER XI

WHAT IS BEST FOR LYDIA

The girls who were to be débutantes that season, the “crowd” or (more accurately to quote Madeleine Hollister’s racy characterization) “the gang,” stood before Hallam’s drug store, chattering like a group of bright-colored paroquets. They had finished three or four ice-cream sodas apiece, and now, inimitably unconscious that they were on the street corner, they were “getting up” a matinée party for the performance of the popular actress whom, at that time, it was the fashion for all girls of their age and condition to adore. They had worked themselves up to a state of hysteric excitement over the prospect.

A tall brown-eyed blonde, with the physical development of a woman and the facial expression of a child of twelve, cried out, “I feel as though I should swoon for joy to see that darling way she holds her hands when the leading man’s making love to her—so sort of helpless—like this—”

“Oh, Madeleine, that’s not a bit the way. It’s so!”

The first speaker protested, “Well, I guess I ought to be able to do it. I’ve practiced for hours in front of the glass doing it.”

“For mercy’s sake that’s nothing. So have I. Who hasn’t?”

Madeleine referred the question to Lydia, “Lyd has seen her later than anybody. She saw her in London. Just think of going to the theater in London—as if it was anywhere. She says they’re crazy about her over there.”

“Oh, wild!” Lydia told them. “Her picture’s in every single window!”

“Which one? Which one?” they clamored, hanging on her answer breathlessly.

“That fascinating one with the rose, where she’s holding her head sideways and—” Oh, yes, they had that one, their exclamation cut her short, relieved that their collections were complete.

“Lyd met a woman on the steamer coming back whose sister-in-law has the same hairdresser,” Madeleine went on.

They were electrified. “Oh, honestly? Is it her own?” They trembled visibly before solution of a problem which had puzzled them, as they would have said, “for eternities.”

“Every hair,” Lydia affirmed, “and naturally that color.”

Their enthusiasm was prodigious, “How grand! How perfectly grand!”

They turned on Lydia with reproaches. “Here you’ve been back two months and we haven’t got a bit of good out of you. Think of your having known that, all this—”

“Her mother’s sick, you know,” Madeleine Hollister explained.

“She hasn’t been so sick but what Lydia could get out to go buggy-riding with your brother Paul ever since he got back this last time.”

Lydia, as though she wished to lose herself, had been entering with a feverish intensity into the spirit of their lively chatter; but now, instead of responding with some prompt, defensive flippancy, she colored high and was silent. A clock above them struck five. “Oh, I must get on,” she cried; “I’m down here, you know, to walk home with Father.”

They laughed loudly, “Oh, yes, we know all about this sudden enthusiasm for Poppa’s society. Where are you going to meet Paul?”

Lydia looked about at the crush of drays, trolley-cars, and delivery-wagons jamming the busy street, “Well, not here down-town,” she replied, her tone one of satisfied security.

A confused and conscious stir among her companions and a burst of talk from them cut her short. They cried variously, according to their temperaments, “Oh, there he comes now!” “I think it’s mean Lydia’s gobbling him up from under our noses!” “I used to have a ride or two behind that gray while Lydia was away!” “My! Isn’t he a good-looker!”

They had all turned like needles to the north, and stared as the spider-light wagon, glistening with varnish, bore down on them, looking singularly distinguished and costly among the dingy business-vehicles which made up the traffic of the crowded street. The young driver guided the high-stepping gray with a reckless, competent hand through the most incredibly narrow openings and sent his vehicle up against the flower-like group of girls, laughing as he drew rein, at the open, humorous outcry against him. A chorus of eager recrimination rose to his ears, “Now, Mr. Hollister, this is the first time Lydia’s been out with our crowd since she came home!” “You might let her alone!” “Go away, Paul, you greedy thing!” “I haven’t asked Lydia a single thing about her European trip!”

“Well, maybe you think,” he cried, springing out to the sidewalk, “that I’ve been spending the last year traveling around Europe with Lydia! I haven’t heard any more than you have.” He threw aside the lap-robe of supple broadcloth, and offered his hand to Lydia. A flash of resentment at the cool silence of this invitation sprang up in the girl’s eyes. There was in her face a despairing effort at mutiny. Her hands nervously opened and shut the clasp of the furs at her throat. She tried to look unconscious, to look like the other girls, to laugh, not to know his meaning, to turn away.

The young man plunged straight through these pitiful cobwebs. “Why, come on, Lydia,” he cried with a good-humored pointedness, “I’ve been all over town looking for you.” She backed away, looking over her shoulder, as if for a lane of escape, flushing, paling. “Oh, no, no thank you, Paul. Not this afternoon!” she cried imploringly, with a soft fury of protest, “I’m on my way to Father’s office. I want to walk home with him. I want to see him. I thought it would be nice to walk home with him. I see so little of him! I thought it would be nice to walk home with him.” She was repeating herself, stammering and uncertain, but achieving nevertheless a steady retreat from the confident figure standing by the wagon.

This retreat was cut short by his next speech. “Oh, I’ve just come from your father. I went to his office, thinking you might be there. He said to tell you and your mother that he won’t be home to dinner to-night at all. He’s got some citations on hand he has to verify.”

Lydia had stopped her actual recoil at his first words and now stood still, but she still tugged at the invisible chain which held her. She was panting a little. She shook her head. “Well—anyhow—I want to see him!” she insisted with a transparently aimless obstinacy like a frightened child’s. “I want to see my father.” Paul laughed easily, “Well, you’d better choose some other time if you want to get anything out of him. He had turned everybody out and was just settling to work with a pile of law-books before him. You know how your father looks under those circumstances!” He held the picture up to her, relentlessly smiling.

Lydia’s lips quivered, but she said nothing.

Paul went on soothingly, “I’ve only come to take you straight home, anyhow. Your mother wants you. She said she had one of those fainting turns again. She said to be sure to bring you.”

At the mention of her mother’s name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. “Oh, if Mother needs me—” she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into the wagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the chorus of facetious good-bys which rose from the group they were leaving.

She said little or nothing in answer to the young man’s kind, cheerful talk, as they drove along one main thoroughfare after another, conspicuous by the brilliant, prosperous beauty of their well-fed youth and their handsome garb, pointed out by people on the sidewalks, constantly nodding in response to greetings from acquaintances. Lydia flushed deeply at the first of these salutations, a flush which grew deeper and deeper as these features of their processional advance repeated themselves. She put her hand to her throat from time to time as though it ached and when the red rubber-tired wheels turned noiselessly in on the asphalt of her home street, she threw the lap-robe brusquely back from her knees as though for an instant escape.

The young man’s pleasant chat stopped. “Look here, Lydia,” he said in another tone, one that forced her eyes to meet his, “look here, don’t you forget one thing!” His voice was deep with the sincerest sympathy, his eyes full of emotion, “Don’t you forget, little Lydia, that nobody’s sorrier for you than I am! And I don’t want anything that—” he cried out in sudden passion—“Good Lord, I’d be cut to bits before I’d even want anything that wasn’t best for you!” He looked away and mastered himself again to quiet friendliness, “You know that, don’t you, Lydia? You know that all I want is for you to have the most successful life anyone can?”

He leaned to her imploring in his turn.

She drew a quick breath, and moved her head from side to side restlessly. Then drawn by the steady insistence of his eyes, she said, as if touched by his patient, determined kindness, “Oh, yes, yes, Paul, I realize how awfully good you’re being to me! I wish I could—but—yes, of course I see how good you are to me!”

He laid his hand an instant over hers, withdrawing it before she herself could make the action. “It makes me happy to have you know I want to be,” he said simply, “now that’s all. You needn’t be afraid. I shan’t bother you.”

They were in front of the Emery house now. He did not try to detain her longer. He helped her down, only repeating as she gave him her gloved hand an instant, “That’s what I’m for—to be good to you.”

The wagon drove off, the young man refraining from so much as a backward glance.

The girl turned to the house and stood a moment, opening and shutting her hands. When she moved, it was to walk so rapidly as almost to run up the walk, up the steps, into the hall and into her mother’s presence, where, still on the crest of the wave of her resolution, she cried, “Mother, did you really send Paul for me again. Did you really?”

“Why, yes, dear,” said Mrs. Emery, surprised, sitting up on the sofa with an obvious effort; “did somebody say I didn’t?”

“I hoped you didn’t!” cried Lydia bitterly; “it was—horrid! I was out with all the girls in front of Hallam’s—everybody was so—they all laughed so when—they looked at me so!”

Mrs. Emery spoke with dignity, “Naturally I couldn’t know where he would find you.”

“But, Mother, you did know that every afternoon for two weeks you’ve—it’s been managed so that I’ve been out with Paul.”

Mrs. Emery ignored this and went on plaintively, “I didn’t see that it was so unreasonable for an invalid to send whoever she could find after her only daughter because she was feeling worse.”

Lydia’s frenzy carried her at once straight to the exaggeration which is the sure forerunner of defeat in the sort of a conflict which was engaging her. “Are you feeling any worse?” she cried in a despairing incredulity which was instantly marked as inhumanly unfilial by the scared revulsion on her face as well as Mrs. Emery’s pale glare of horror. “Oh, I didn’t mean that!” she cried, running to her mother; “I’m sorry, Mother! I’m sorry!”

The tears began running down Mrs. Emery’s cheeks, “I don’t know my little Lydia any more,” she said weakly, dropping her head back on the pillow.

“I don’t know myself!” cried Lydia, sobbing violently, “I’m so unhappy!”

Mrs. Emery took her in her arms with a forgiveness which dropped like a noose over Lydia’s neck, “There, there, darling! Mother knows you didn’t mean it! But you must remember, Lydia dearest, if you’re unhappy these days, so is your poor mother.”

“I’m making you so!” sobbed Lydia, “I know it! something like this happens every day! It’s why you don’t get well faster! I’m making you unhappy!”

“It doesn’t make any difference about me!” Mrs. Emery heroically assured her, “I don’t want you to be influenced by thinking about my feelings, Lydia. Above everything in the world, I don’t want you to feel the slightest pressure from me—or any one of the family. Oh, darling, all I want—all any of us want, is what is best for our little Lydia!”

CHAPTER XII

A SOP TO THE WOLVES

Six o’clock had struck when Mrs. Sandworth came wearily back from her Christmas shopping. It was only the middle of November, but each year she began her preparations for that day of rejoicing earlier and earlier, in a vain attempt to avoid some of the embittering desolation of confusion and fatigue which for her, as for all her acquaintances, marked the December festival. She let herself down heavily from the trolley-car which had brought her from the business part of Endbury back to what was known as the “residential section,” a name bestowed on it to the exclusion of several other much larger divisions of town devoted exclusively to the small brick buildings blackened by coal smoke in which ordinary people lived.

As she walked slowly up the street, her arms were full of bundles, her heart full of an ardent prayer that she might find her brother either out or in a peaceable mood. She loved and admired Dr. Melton more than anyone else in the world, but there were moments when the sum total of her conviction about him was an admission that his was not a reposeful personality. For the last fortnight, this peculiarity had been accentuated till Mrs. Sandworth’s loyalty had cracked at every seam in order not to find him intolerable to live with. Moreover, her own kind heart and intense partiality for peace in all things had suffered acutely from the same suspense that had wrought the doctor to his wretched fever of anxiety. It had been a time of torment for everybody—everybody was agreed on that; and Mrs. Sandworth had felt that life in the same house with Lydia’s godfather had given her more than her share of misery.

On this dark November evening she was so tired that every inch of her soft plumpness ached. She had not prospered in her shopping. Things had not matched. She let herself into the front door with a sigh of relief at finding the hall empty. She looked cautiously into the doctor’s study and drew a long breath, peeped into the parlor and, almost smiling, went on cheerfully upstairs to her room. From afar, she saw the welcoming flicker of the coal fire in her grate, and felt a glow of surprised gratitude to the latest transient from the employment agency who was now occupying her kitchen. She did not often get one that was thoughtful about keeping up fires when nobody was at home. It would be delicious to get off her corset and shoes, let down her hair—there he was, bolt upright before the fire, his back to the door. She took in the significance of his tense attitude and prepared herself for the worst, sinking into a chair, letting her bundles slide at various tangents from her rounded surface, and surveying her brother with the utmost unresignation. “Well, what is it now?” she asked.

He had not heard her enter, and now flashed around, casting in her face like a hard-thrown missile, “Lydia’s engaged.”

All Mrs. Sandworth’s lassitude vanished. She flung herself on him in a wild outcry of inquiry—“Which one? Which one?”

He answered her angrily, “Which do you suppose? Doesn’t a steam-roller make some impression on a rose?”

“Oh!” she cried, enlightened; and then, with widespread solemnity, “Well, think—of—that!”

“Not if I can help it,” groaned the doctor.

“But that’s not fair,” his sister protested a moment later as she took in the rest of his speech.

“Heaven knows it’s not,” he agreed bitterly.

She stared. “I mean that Paul hasn’t been nearly so steam-rollery as usual.”

The doctor rubbed his face furiously, as though to brush off a disagreeable clinging web. “He hasn’t had to be. There have been plenty of other forces to do his rolling for him.”

“If you mean her father—you know he’s kept his hands off religiously.”

“He has that, damn him!” The doctor raged about the room.

A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth’s face. “You’re just as inconsistent as you can be!” she cried.

“I’m more than that,” he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the corner of the room; “I’m heartsick.” He shivered, thrust his hands into his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.

One of Mrs. Sandworth’s cheerful capacities was for continuing tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every disturbance in the region of the emotions. You had to, she said, to get them done—anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps, loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.

She answered him reasonably, “It wouldn’t help Lydia any if I took it off and threw it in the fire, would it? It’s my best one, too; the other’s at the hairdresser’s, getting curled.”

“It’s not,” the doctor broke out—“it’s not, Heaven be my judge! that I want to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself.”

“She has, at last,” Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at his forgetting so important a fact.

“She has not!” roared the doctor.

His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. “Marius, you’re unkind. What did you tell me she had for—when I’m so tired it seems as if I could lie down and die if I—”

Dr. Melton knew his sister. He made a rapid plunge through the obscurity of her brain into her heart’s warm clarity, and, “Oh, Julia, if you had seen her!” he cried.

She leaned toward him, responsive to the emotion in his voice. “Tell me about it, poor Marius,” she said, yearning maternally over his pain.

“I can’t—if you had seen her—”

“But how did you hear? Did she tell you? When did—”

“I was there at five, and her mother met me at the door. She took me upstairs, a finger on her lip, and there she and Marietta said they guessed this afternoon would settle things. A week ago, she said, she’d had an up-and-down talk with that dreadful carpenter and as good as forbade him the house—”

Mrs. Sandworth had a gesture of intuition. “Oh, if they’ve managed to shut Lydia off from seeing him—”

The doctor nodded. “That’s what her mother counted on. She said she thought it a sign that Lydia was just infatuated with Rankin—her being so different after she’d seen him—so defiant—so unlike Lydia! But now she hadn’t seen him for a week, and her mother and Marietta had been ‘talking to her’—Julia!—and then Paul had come to see her every evening, and had been just right—firm and yet not exacting, and ever so gentle and kind—and this afternoon when he came Lydia cried and didn’t want to go down, but her mother said she mustn’t be childish, and Marietta had just taken her right down to the library and left her there with Paul, and there she was now.” The doctor started up and beat his thin, corded hand on the mantel. He could not speak. His sister got up and laid a tender hand on his shoulder. “Poor Marius!” she said again.

He drew a long breath. “I did not fly at their throats—I turned and ran like mad down the stairs and into the library. It was Rankin I wanted to kill for letting his pride come in—for leaving her there alone with those—I was ready to snatch Lydia up bodily and carry her off to—” He stopped short and laughed harshly. “I reach to Lydia’s shoulder,” he commented on his own speech. “That’s me. To see what’s to be done and—”

“What was to be done?” asked Mrs. Sandworth patiently. She was quite used to understanding but half of what her brother said and had acquired a quiet art of untangling by tireless questionings the thread of narrative from the maze of his comments and ejaculations.

“There was nothing to be done. I was too late.”

“You didn’t burst in on them while Paul was kissing her or anything, did you?”

“Paul wasn’t there.”

“Not there! Why, Marius, you’re worse than usual. Didn’t you tell me her mother said—”

“He had been there—one look at Lydia showed that. She sat there alone in the dim light, her face as white—and when I came in she said, without looking to see who it was, ‘I’m engaged to Paul.’ She said it to her mother, who was right after me, of course, and then to Marietta.”

“Well—!” breathed Mrs. Sandworth as he paused; “so that was all there was to it?”

“Oh, no; they did the proper thing. They kissed her, and cried, and congratulated everybody, and her mother said, with an eye on me: ‘Darling, you’re not doing this just because you know it’ll make us so very happy, are you?’ Lydia said, ‘Oh, no; she supposed not,’ and started to go upstairs. But when Marietta said she’d go and telephone to Flora Burgess to announce it, Lydia came down like a flash. It was not to be announced she told them; she’d die if they told anybody! Paul had promised solemnly not to tell anybody. Her mother said, of course she knew how Lydia felt about it. It was a handicap for a girl in her first season. Lydia was half-way up the stairs again, but at that she looked down at her mother—God! Julia, if a child of mine had ever looked at me like that—”

Mrs. Sandworth patted him vaguely. “Oh, people always look white and queer in the twilight, you know—even quite florid complexions.”

The doctor made a rush to the door.

“But dinner must be ready to put on the table,” she called after him.

“Put it on, then,” he cried, and disappeared.

A plain statement was manna to Mrs. Sandworth. She had finished her soup, and was beginning on her hamburg steak when the doctor came soberly in, took his place, and began to eat in silence. She took up the conversation where they had left it.

“So it’s all over,” she commented, watching his plate to see that he did not forget to salt his meat and help himself to gravy.

“Nothing’s ever over in a human life,” he contradicted her. “Why do you suppose she doesn’t want it announced?”

“You don’t suppose she means to break it off later?”

“I haven’t any idea what she means, any more than she has, poor child! But it’s plain that this is only to gain time—a sop to the wolves.”

“Wolves!” cried poor Mrs. Sandworth.

“Well, tigers and hyenas, perhaps,” he added moderately.

“They’re crazy about Lydia, that whole Emery family,” she protested.

“They are that,” he agreed sardonically. “But I don’t mean only her family. I mean unclean prowling standards of what’s what, as well as—”

“They’d lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would—”

“If they thought she was going in the right direction.”

Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. “I wonder what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as she’s been!”

“Perhaps she was only snatching a little sensible talk where she could get it.”

“But they didn’t talk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home from here. Marietta said they were ‘too sickish!’ ‘Flat Sunday-school cant about wanting to be good,’ and all that sort of thing.”

“That certainly wouldn’t have tempted Marietta from the path of virtue and sharp attention to a good match,” murmured the doctor. “Nobody can claim that there’s anything very seductive to the average young lady in Rankin’s fanaticism.”

“Oh, you admit he’s a fanatic!” Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable piece of driftwood which the doctor’s tempest had thrown at her feet.

“Everybody who’s worth his salt is a fanatic.”

“Not Paul. Everybody says he’s so sane and levelheaded.”

“There isn’t a hotter one in creation!”

“Than Paul?”

“Than Paul.”

“Oh, Marius!” she reproached him for levity.

“He’s a fanatic for success.”

“Oh, I don’t call that—”

“Nor nobody else in Endbury—but it is, all the same. And the only wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin’s heretical brand and not by Paul’s orthodox variety. It shows she’s rare.”

“Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas or convictions.”

“That’s a horrible conception,” he admitted gravely.

“It’s which one she’s in love with!” Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with solemnity.

The doctor stood up to go. “She’s not in love with either,” he pronounced. “She’s never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or life or experience—how can she be in love?”

“Well, they’re in love with her,” she triumphed for her sex.

“I don’t know anything about Paul’s inner workings, and as for Rankin, I don’t know whether he’s in love with her or not. He’s sorry for her—he’s touched by her—”

Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her feet. “Good gracious me! If he’s not in love with her, nor she with him, what are you making all this fuss about?”

The doctor thrust out his lips. “I’m only protesting in my usual feeble, inadequate manner, after the harm’s all done, at idiots and egotists laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing—the right of youth to its own life—”

“Well, if you call that a feeble protest—!” she called after him.

He reappeared, hat in hand. “It’s nothing to what I’d like to say. I will add that Daniel Rankin’s a man in a million.”

Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so indeed, and added, “But, Marius, she couldn’t have married him—really! Mercy! What had he to offer her—compared with Paul? Everybody has always said what a suitable marriage—”

Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.

“But it’s so,” she insisted.

“He hasn’t anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps.”

“Marietta’s married!” Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anchored fast to the facts of any case under discussion.

“Is she?” queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which his sister found distracting.

“Oh, Marius!” she reproached him again; and then helplessly, “How did we get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia’s engagement.”

“I was,” he assured her.

“And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that’s so bad?”

“They’ve brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn’t a weapon to resist them.”

“Oh, Ma—” began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.

“Well, then, I will tell you—I’ll explain in words of one syllable. Mind you, I don’t undertake to settle the question—Heaven forbid! It may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by inches to keep what bores her to death to have—a social position in Endbury’s two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord’s sake, why do they make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia’s got the tragically important question to decide as to whether that’s what she wants? It’s like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst of an earthquake.”

Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of much painful experience with her brother’s conversation. She sank back in her chair and waved him off. “Calculus!” she cried, outraged; “earthquakes! And I’m sure you’re as unfair as can be! You can’t say her father’s obscured any question. You know he’s not a dictatorial father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children.”

“Yes; that’s his principle all right. His specialties are in other lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that.”

Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of a situation. “Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren’t you glad we haven’t any children!”

“Every child that’s not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have, should be our child,” he said.

He went up to her and kissed her gently. “Good-night,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“To the Black Rock woods.”

“Tell him—” she was inspired—“tell him to try to see Lydia again.”

“I was going to do that. But she won’t be allowed to. It’s pretty late now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago—from the time he was born.”

“But she’s ever so much younger than he,” cried Mrs. Sandworth after him, informingly.

CHAPTER XIII

LYDIA DECIDES IN PERFECT FREEDOM

The maid had announced to Mrs. Emery, finishing an unusually careful morning toilet, that Miss Burgess, society reporter of the Endbury Chronicle, was below. Before the mistress of the house could finish adjusting her well-matched gray pompadour, a second arrival was heralded, “The gentleman from the greenhouse, to see about Miss Lydia’s party decorations.” And as the handsome matron came down the stairs a third comer was introduced into the hall—Mme. Boyle herself, the best dressmaker in town, who had come in person to see about the refitting of the débutante’s Paris dresses, the débutante having found the change back to the climate of Endbury so trying that her figure had grown quite noticeably thinner.

“It was the one thing necessary to make Maddemwaselle’s tournoor exactly perfect,” Mme. Boyle told Mrs. Emery. Out of a sense of what was due her loyal Endbury customers, Mme. Boyle assumed a guileless coloring of Frenchiness, which was evidently a symbol, and no more intended for a pretense of reality than the honestly false brown front that surmounted her competent, kindly Celtic face.

Mrs. Emery stopped a moment by the newel-post to direct Madame to Lydia’s room and to offer up a devout thanksgiving to the kindly Providence that constantly smoothed the path before her. “Oh, Madame, just think if it had been a season when hips were in style!” As she continued her progress to what she was beginning to contemplate calling her drawing-room, she glowed with a sense of well-being which buoyed her up like wings. In common with many other estimable people, she could not but value more highly what she had had to struggle to retain, and the exciting vicissitudes of the last fortnight had left her with a sweet taste of victory in her mouth.

She greeted Miss Burgess with the careful cordiality due to an ally of many years’ standing, and with a manner perceptibly but indefinably different from that which she would have bestowed on a social equal. Mrs. Emery had labored to acquire exactly that tone in her dealings with the society reporter, and her achievement of it was a fact which brought an equal satisfaction to both women. Miss Burgess’ mother was an Englishwoman, an ex-housekeeper, who had transmitted to her daughter a sense, rare as yet in America, of the beauty and dignity of class distinctions. In her turn Miss Burgess herself, the hard-working, good-natured woman of fifty who for twenty years had reported the doings of those citizens of Endbury whom she considered the “gentry,” had toiled with the utmost disinterestedness to build up a feeling, or, as she called it, a “tone,” which, among other things, should exclude her from equality. When she began she was, perhaps, the only person in town who had an unerring instinct for social differences; but, like a kindly, experienced actor of a minor rôle in theatricals, she had silently given so many professional tips to the amateur principals in the play, and had acted her own part with such unflagging consistency and good-will, that she had often now the satisfaction of seeing one of her pupils move through her rôle with a most edifying effect of having been born to it.

Long ago she had taken the Emerys to her warm heart and she had rejoiced in all their upward progress with the sweet unenvious joy of an ugly woman in a pretty, much-loved sister’s successes. Lydia was to her, as to Mrs. Emery, a bright symbol of what she would fain have been herself. Miss Burgess’ feeling for her somewhat resembled that devout affection which, she had read, was felt by faithful old servants of great English families for the young ladies of the house. The pathetic completeness of her own insignificance of aspect had spared her any uneasy ambitions for personal advancement, and it is probable that the vigor of her character and her pleasure in industry were such that she had been happier in her daily column and weekly five-column Society Notes than if she had been as successful a society matron as Mrs. Emery herself.

She lived the life of a creator, working at an art she had invented, in a workroom of her own contriving, loyally drawing the shutters to shade an unfortunate occurrence in one of the best families, setting forth a partial success with its best profile to the public, and flooding with light real achievements like Mrs. Hollister’s rose party (the Mrs. Hollister—Paul’s aunt, and Madeleine’s). All that she wrote was read by nearly every woman in Endbury. She was a person of importance, and a very busy and happy old maid.

Mrs. Emery had a great taste for Miss Burgess’ conversation, admiring greatly her whole-hearted devotion to Endbury’s social welfare. She had once said of her to Dr. Melton, “There is what I call a public-spirited woman.” He had answered, “I envy Flora Burgess with the fierce embittered envy I feel for a cow”—an ambiguous compliment which Mrs. Emery had resented on behalf of her old ally.

Now, as Mrs. Emery added to her greeting, “You’ll excuse me just a moment, won’t you, I must settle some things with my decorator,” Miss Burgess felt a rich content in her hostess’ choice of words. There were people in Endbury society who would have called him, as had the perplexed maid, “the gentleman from the greenhouse.” Later, asked for advice, she had walked about the lower floor of the house with Mrs. Emery and the florist, saturated with satisfaction in the process of deciding where the palms should be put that were to conceal the “orchestra” of four instruments, and with what flowers the mantels should be “banked.”

After the man had gone, they settled to a consideration of various important matters which was interrupted by an impassioned call of Madame Boyle from the stairs, “Could she bring Maddemwaselle down to show this perfect fit?”—and they glided into a rapt admiration of the unwrinkled surface of peach-colored satin which clad Lydia’s slender and flexibly erect back. When she turned about so that Madame could show them the truly exqueese effect of the trimming at the throat, her face showed pearly shadows instead of its usual flower-like glow. As Madame left the room for a moment, Miss Burgess said, with a kind, respectful facetiousness, “I see that even fairy princesses find the emotions of getting engaged a little trying.”

Lydia started, and flushed painfully. “Oh, Mother—” she began.

Her mother cut her short. “My dear! Miss Burgess!” she pointed out, as who should deplore keeping a secret from the family priest, “You know she never breathes a word that people don’t want known. And she had to be told so she can know how to put things all this winter.”

“I’m sure it’s the most wonderfully suitable marriage,” pronounced Miss Burgess.

A ring at the door-bell was instantly followed by the bursting open of the door and the impetuous onslaught of a girl, a tall, handsome, brown-eyed blonde about Lydia’s age, who, wasting no time in greetings to the older women, flung herself on Lydia’s neck with a wild outcry of jubilation. “My dear! Isn’t it dandy! Perfectly dandy! Paul met me at the train last night and when he told me I nearly swooned for joy! Of all the tickled sisters-in-law! I wanted to come right over here last night, but Paul said it was a secret, and wouldn’t let me.” A momentary failure of lung-power forced her to a pause in which she perceived Lydia’s attire. She recoiled with a dramatic rush. “Oh, you’ve got one of them on! Lydia, how insanely swell you do look! Why, Mrs. Emery”—she turned to Lydia’s mother with a light-hearted unconsciousness that she had not addressed her before—“she doesn’t look real, does she!”

There was an instant’s pause as the three women gazed ecstatically at Lydia, who had again turned her back and was leaning her forehead against the window. Then the girl sprang at her again. “Well, my goodness, Lydia! I just love you to pieces, of course, but if we were of the same complexion I should certainly put poison in your candy. As it is, me so blonde and you so dark—I tell you what—what we won’t do this winter—” She ran up to her again, putting her arms around her neck from behind and whispering in her ear.

Miss Burgess turned to her hostess with her sweet, motherly smile. “Aren’t girls the dearest things?” she whispered. “I love to see them so young, and full of their own little affairs. I think it’s dreadful nowadays how so many of them are allowed to get serious-minded.”

Madeleine was saying to Lydia, “You sly little thing—to land Paul before the season even began! Where are you going to get your lingerie? Oh, isn’t it fun? If I go abroad I’ll smuggle it back for you. You haven’t got your ring yet, I don’t suppose? Make him make it a ruby. That’s ever so much sweller than that everlasting old diamond. He’s something to land, too, Paul is, if I do say it—not, of course, that we’ve either of us got any money, but,” she looked about the handsomely furnished house, “you’ll have lots, and Paul’ll soon be making it hand over fist—and I’ll be marrying it!” She ended with a triumphant pirouette her vision of the future, and encountered Madame Boyle, entering with a white and gold evening wrap which sent her into another paroxysm of admiration. The dressmaker had just begun to say that she thought another line of gold braid around the neck would—when Mrs. Emery, looking out of the window, declared the caterer to be approaching and that she must have aid from her subordinates before he should enter. “I do not want to have that old red lemonade and sweet crackers everybody has, and slabs of ice-cream floating around on your plate. Think quick, all of you! What kind of crackers can we have?”

“Animal crackers,” suggested Madeleine, with the accent of a remark intended to be humorous, drawing Lydia into a corner. “Now, don’t make Lydia work. She’s It right now, and everything’s to be done for her. Madame, come over here with that cloak and let’s see about the—and Oh, you and Lydia, for the love of Heaven tell me what I’m to do about this fashion for no hips, and me with a figure of eight! Lydia, the fit of that thing is sublime!”

“Maddemwaselle, don’t you see how a little more gold right here—”

“Here, Lydia,” called her mother, “it wasn’t the caterer after all; it’s flowers for you. Take it over there to the young lady in pink,” she directed the boy.

Madeleine seized on the box, and tore it open with one of her vigorous, competent gestures. “Orchids!” she shouted in a single volcanic burst of appreciation. “I never had orchids sent me in my life! Paul must have telegraphed for them. You can’t buy them in Endbury. And here’s a note that says it’s to be answered at once, while the boy waits—Oh, my! Oh, my!”

“Lydia, dear, here’s the caterer, after all. Will you just please say one thing. Would you rather have the coffee or the water-ices served upstairs—Oh, here’s your Aunt Julia—Julia Sandworth, I never needed advice more.”

Mrs. Sandworth’s appearance was the chord which resolved into one burst of sound all the various motives emitted by the different temperaments in the room. Every one appealed to her at once.

“Just a touch of gold braid on the collar, next the face, don’t you—”

“Why not a real supper at midnight, with creamed oysters and things, as they do in the East?”

“Do you see anything out of the way in publishing the details of Miss Lydia’s dress the day before? It gives people a chance to know what to look for.”

“NO, NO; I CAN'T—SEE HIM—I CAN'T SEE HIM ANY MORE—”

“How can we avoid that awful jam-up there is on the stairs when people begin to—”

Mrs. Sandworth made her way to the corner where Lydia stood, presenting a faultlessly fitted back to the world so that Madame Boyle might, with a fat, moist forefinger, indicate the spot where a “soupçon” of gold was needed.

“Please, ma’am, the gentleman said I was to wait for an answer,” said the messenger boy beside her.

“And she hasn’t read it, yet!” Madeleine was horrified to remember this fact.

“Turn around, Lydia,” said Mrs. Sandworth.

Lydia’s white lids fluttered. The eyes they revealed were lustrous and quite blank. Madeleine darted away, crying, “I’m going to get pen and paper for you to write your note right now.”

“Lydia,” said Mrs. Sandworth, in a low tone, “Daniel Rankin wants to speak with you again. Your godfather is waiting here in the hall to know if you’ll see him. He didn’t want to force an interview on you if you didn’t want it. He wants to see you but he wanted you to decide in perfect freedom—”

The tragic, troubled, helpless face that Lydia showed at this speech was a commentary on the last word. She looked around the room, her eyebrows drawn into a knot, one hand at her throat, but she did not answer. Her aunt thought she had not understood. “Just collect your thoughts, Lydia—”

The girl beat one slim fist inside the other with a sudden nervous movement. “But that’s what I can’t do, Aunt Julia. You know how easily I get rattled—I don’t know what I’m—I can’t collect my thoughts.”

As the older woman opened her lips to speak again she cut her short with a broken whispered appeal. “No, no; I can’t—see him—? I can’t stand any more—tell him I guess I’ll be all right—it’s settled now—Mother’s told all these—I like Paul. I do like him! Mother’s told everybody here—no, no—I can’t, Aunt Julia! I can’t!”

Mrs. Sandworth, her eyes full of tears, opened her arms impulsively, but Lydia drew back. “Oh, let me alone!” she wailed. “I’m so tired!”

Madame Boyle caught this through the clatter of voices. “Why, poor Maddemwaselle!” she cried, her kindly, harassed, fatigued face melting. “Sit down. Sit down. I can show the ladies about this collar just as well that way—if they’ll ever look.”

Mrs. Sandworth had disappeared.

Madeleine, coming with the pen and ink, was laughing as she told them, “I didn’t know Dr. Melton was in the house. I ran into him pacing up and down in the hall like a little bear, and just now I saw him—isn’t he too comical! He must have heard our chatter—I saw him running down the walk as fast as he could go it, his fingers in his ears as if he were trying to get away from a dynamite bomb before it went bang.”

“He hasn’t much patience with many necessary details of life,” said Mrs. Emery with dignity. She turned her criticism of her doctor into a compliment to her brother’s widow by adding, “Whatever he would do without Julia to look after him, I’m sure none of us can imagine.”

“He is a very original character,” said Miss Burgess, discriminatingly.

Madeleine dismissed the subject with a compendious, “He’s the most killingly, screamingly funny little man that ever lived!”

“Now, ladies,” implored Madame Boyle, “one more row—not solid—just a soupçon—”

CHAPTER XIV

MID-SEASON NERVES

“If I should wait and read my paper here instead of on the cars, do you suppose Lydia would be up before I left?” asked the Judge as he put his napkin in the ring and pushed away from the breakfast table.

Mrs. Emery looked up, smiling, from a letter, “‘Of course such a great favorite as Miss Emery,’” she read aloud, “‘will be hard to secure, but both the Governor and I feel that our party wouldn’t be complete without her. We’re expecting a number of other Endbury young people.’ And do you know who writes that?” she asked triumphantly of her husband.

“How should I?” answered the Judge reasonably.

“Mrs. Ex-Governor Mallory, to be sure. It’s their annual St. Valentine’s day house-party at their old family estate in Union County.”

The Judge got up, laughing. “Old family estate,” he mocked.

“They are one of the oldest and best families in this State,” cried his wife.

“The Governor’s an old blackguard,” said her husband tolerantly.

“The Mallorys—the Hollisters—Lydia is certainly,” began Mrs. Emery, complacently.

Lydia’s father laughed again. “Oh, with you and Flora Burgess as manager and press agent—! You haven’t answered my question about whether if I waited and—”

“No, she wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Emery decisively. “After dancing so late nights, I want her to sleep every minute she’s not wanted somewhere. I have the responsibility of looking after her health, you know. I hope she’ll sleep now till just time to get up and dress for Marietta’s lunch-party at one o’clock.”

The father of the family frowned. “Is Marietta giving another lunch-party for Lydia? They can’t afford to do so much. Marietta’s—”

“This is a great chance for Marietta—poor girl! she hasn’t many such chances—Lydia’s carrying everything before her so, I mean.”

“How does Marietta get into the game?” asked her father obtusely.

Mrs. Emery hesitated a scarcely perceptible instant, a hesitation apparently illuminating to her husband. He laughed again, the tolerant, indifferent laugh he had for his women-folks’ goings-on. “She thinks she can go up as the tail to Lydia’s kite, does she? She’d better not be too sure. If I don’t miss my guess, Paul’ll have a word or two to say about carrying extra weight. Gosh! Marietta’s a fool some ways for a woman that has her brains.”

He stated this opinion with a detached, impersonal irresponsibility, and began to prepare himself for the plunge into the damp cold of the Endbury January. His wife preserved a dignified silence, and in the middle of a sentence of his later talk, which had again turned on his grievance about never seeing Lydia, she got up, went into the hall, and began to use the telephone for her morning shopping. Her conversation gave the impression that she was ordering veal cutlets, maidenhair ferns, wax floor-polish, chiffon ruching, and closed carriages, from one and the same invisible interlocutor, who seemed impartially unable to supply any of these needs without rather testy exhortation. Mrs. Emery was one of the women who are always well served by “tradespeople,” as she now called them, “and a good reason why,” she was wont to explain with self-gratulatory grimness.

The Judge waited, one hand on the door-knob, squaring his jaw over his muffler, and listening with a darkening face to the interminable succession of purchases. After a time he released the door-knob, loosened his muffler, and sat down heavily, his eyes fixed on his wife’s back.

After an interval, Mrs. Emery paused in the act of ringing up another number, looked over her shoulder, saw him there and inquired uneasily, “What are you waiting for? You’ll catch cold with all your things on. Isn’t Dr. Melton always telling you to be careful?”

She felt a vague resentment at his being there “after hours,” as she might have put it, so definitely had long usage accustomed her to a sense of solitary proprietorship of the house except at certain fixed and not very frequent periods. She almost felt that he was eavesdropping while she “ran her own business.” There was also his remark about Marietta and kites, unatoned for as yet. She had not forgotten that she “owed him one,” as Madeleine Hollister light-heartedly phrased the connubial balanced relationship which had come under her irreverent and keen observation. A cumulative sharpness from all these causes was in her voice as she remarked, “Didn’t I tell you that Lydia—”

Judge Emery’s voice in answer was as sharp as her own. “Look-y here, Susan, I bet you’ve ordered fifty dollars’ worth of stuff since you stood there.”

“Well, what if I have?” She was up in arms in an instant against his breaking a long-standing treaty between them—a treaty not tacit, but frequently and definitely stated.

They regulated their relations on a sound business basis, they were wont to say of themselves, the natural one, the right one. The husband earned the money, the wife saw that it was spent to the best advantage, and neither needed to bother his head or dissipate his energies about the other’s end of the matter. They had found it meant less friction, they said; fewer occasions for differences of opinion. Once, when they had been urging this system upon their son George, then about to marry, Dr. Melton had made the suggestion that there would be still fewer differences of opinion if married people agreed never to see each other after the ceremony in the church. There would be no friction at all with that system, he added. It was one of his preposterous speeches which had become a family joke with the Emerys.

“Well, what if I have?” Mrs. Emery advanced defiantly upon her husband, with this remark repeated.

Judge Emery shared a well-known domestic peculiarity with other estimable and otherwise courageous men. He retreated precipitately before the energy of his wife’s counter-attack, only saying sulkily, to conceal from himself the fact of his retreat, “Well, we’re not millionaires, you know.”

“Did I ever think we were?” she said, smiling inwardly at his change of front. “If you stand right up to men, they’ll give in,” she often counseled other matrons. She began to look up another number in the telephone book.

“If you order fifty dollars’ worth every morning, besides—”

“Three-four-four—Weston,” remarked his wife to the telephone. To her husband she said conclusively, “I thought we were agreed to make Lydia’s first season everything it ought to be. And isn’t she being worth it? There hasn’t a girl come out in Endbury in years that’s been so popular, or had so much—” She jerked her head around to the telephone—“Three-four-four—Weston? Is this Mr. Schmidt? I want Mr. Schmidt himself. Tell him Mrs. Emery—”

The Judge broke in, with the air of launching the most startling of arguments, “Well, my salary won’t stand it; that’s sure! If this keeps up I’ll have to resign from the bench and go into practice again.”

His wife looked at him without surprise. “Well, I’ve often thought that might be a very good thing.” She added, with good-humored impatience, “Oh, go along, Nathaniel. You know it’s just one of your bilious attacks, and you will catch cold sitting there with all your—Mr. Schmidt, I want to complain about the man who dished up the ice-cream at my last reception. I am going to give another one next week, and I want a different—”

“I won’t be back to lunch,” said her husband. The door slammed.

As he turned into the front walk it opened after him, and his wife called after him, “I’m going to give a dinner party for Lydia’s girl friends here this evening, so you’d better get your dinner down-town or at the Meltons’. I’ll telephone Julia that—”

The Judge stopped, disappointment, almost dismay, on his face. “I’m going to keep track from now on,” he called angrily, “of just how often I catch a glimpse of Lydia. I bet it won’t be five minutes a week.”

Mrs. Emery evidently did not catch what he said, and as evidently considered it of no consequence that she did not. She nodded indifferently and, drawing in her head, shut the door.

At the end of the next week the Judge announced that he had put down every time he and Lydia had been in a room together, and it amounted to just forty-five minutes, all told. Lydia, a dazzling vision in white and gold, had come downstairs on her way to a dance, and because Paul, who was to be her escort, was a little late, she told her father that now was his time for a “visit.” This question of “visiting” had grown to be quite a joke. Judge Emery clutched eagerly at anything in the nature of an understanding or common interest between them.

“Oh, I don’t know you well enough to visit with you,” he now said laughingly, “but I’ll look at you long enough so I’ll recognize you the next time I meet you on the street-car.”

Lydia sat down on his knee, lightly, so as not to crumple her gauzy draperies, and looked at her father with the whimsical expression that became her face so well. “I’m paying you back,” she said gayly. “I remember when I was a little girl I used to wonder why you came all the way out here to eat your meals. It seemed so much easier for you to get them near your office. Honest, I did.”

“Ah, that was when I was still struggling to get my toes into a crack in the wall and climb up. I didn’t have time for you then. And you’re very ungrateful to bring it up against me, for all I was doing was to wear my nose clear off on the grindstone so’s to be able to buy you such pretty trash as this.” He stroked the girl’s shimmering draperies, not thinking of what he was saying, smiling at her, delighted with her beauty, with her nearness to him, with this brief snatch of intimate talk.

“Ungrateful—yourself! What am I doing but wearing my nose off on the grindstone—Dr. Melton threatens nervous prostration every day—so’s to show off your pretty trash to the best advantage. I haven’t any time to bother with you now!” she mocked him laughingly, her hands on his shoulders.

“Well, that sounds like a bargain,” he admitted, leaning back in his chair; “I suppose I’ve got to be satisfied if you are. Are you satisfied?” he asked with a sudden seriousness. “How do you like Paul, now you know him better?”

Lydia flushed, and looked away in a tremulous confusion. “Why, when I’m with him I can’t think of another thing in the world,” she confessed in a low, ardent tone.

“Ah, well, then that’s all right,” said the Judge comfortably.

There was a pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and he looked at Lydia. The girl’s face grew more and more absent and brooding.

The door-bell rang. “There he is, I suppose,” said her father.

“But isn’t it a pity we couldn’t make connections?” she asked musingly. “Maybe I’d have liked you better with your nose on, better even than pretty trash.”

“Eh?” said Judge Emery. His blankness was so acute that he slipped for an instant back into a rusticity he had long ago left behind him. “What say, Lydia?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, Paul; I didn’t hear you come in,” called the girl, jumping up and beginning to put on her wraps.

The young man darted into the room to help her, saying over his shoulder: “Much obliged to you, Judge, for your good word to Egdon, March and Company. I got the contract for the equipment of their new factory to-day.”

The Judge screwed himself round in his chair till he could see Paul bending at Lydia’s feet, putting on her high overshoes. “That’s quite a contract, isn’t it?” he asked, highly pleased.

“The biggest I ever got my teeth into,” said Paul, straightening up. “I’m ashamed to have Lydia know anything about it, though. I didn’t bring a hack to take her to the dance.”

“Oh, I never thought you would,” cried Lydia, standing up and stamping her feet down in her overshoes—an action that added emphasis to her protest. “I’d rather walk, it’s such a little way. I like it better when I’m not costing people money.”

“You’re not like most of your sex,” said Paul. “Down in Mexico, when I was there on the Brighton job, I heard a Spanish proverb: ‘If a pretty woman smiles, some purse is shedding tears.’”

The two men exchanged laughing glances of understanding. Lydia frowned. “That is hateful—and horrid—and a lie!” she cried energetically, finding that they paid no attention to her protest.

“I didn’t invent it,” Paul exonerated himself lightly.

“But you laughed at it—you think it’s so—you—” She was trembling in a sudden resentment at once inexplicable and amusing to the other two.

“Highty-tighty! you little spitfire!” cried her father, laughing. “I see your finish, my boy!”

“Good gracious, Lydia, how you do fly at a man! I take it back. I take it back.” Paul looked admiringly at his pretty sweetheart’s flashing eyes and crimson cheeks as he spoke.

She turned away and picked up her cloak without speaking.

“To tell the truth,” said Paul, going on with the conversation as though it had not been interrupted, and addressing his father-in-law-to-be, “every penny I can rake and scrape is going into the house. Lydia’s such a sensible little thing I knew she’d think it better to have something permanent than an ocean of orchids and candy now. Besides, such a belle as she is gets them from everybody else.”

Mrs. Emery often pointed out to Lydia’s inexperience that it was rare to see a man so magnanimously free from jealousy as her fiancé.

“The architect and I were going over it to-day,” the young electrician went on, “and I decided, seeing this new contract means such a lot, that I would have the panels in the hall carved, after all—of course if you agree,” he turned to Lydia, but went on without waiting for an answer. “The effect will be much handsomer—will go with the rest of the house better.”

“They’d be lots harder to dust,” said Lydia dubiously, putting a spangled web of gold over her hair. The contrast between her aspect and the dingy suggestions of her speech made both men laugh tenderly. “When Titania takes to being practical—” laughed Paul.

Lydia went on seriously. “Honestly, Paul, I’m afraid the house is getting too handsome, anyhow—everything in it. It’s too expensive, I’m—”

“Nothing’s too good for you.” Paul said this with conviction. “And besides, it’s an asset. The mortgage won’t be so very large. And if we’re in it, we’ll just have to live up to it. It’ll be a stimulus.”

“I hope it doesn’t stimulate us into our graves,” said Lydia, as she kissed her father good-night.

“Well, your families aren’t paupers on either side,” said Paul.

A casual remark like this was the nearest approach he ever made to admitting that he expected Lydia to inherit money. He would have been shocked at the idea of allowing any question of money to influence his marriage, and would not have lifted a hand to learn the state of his future father-in-law’s finances. Still, it was evident to the most disinterested eye that there were plenty of funds behind the Emery’s ample, comfortable mode of life, and on this point his eyes were keen, for all their delicacy.

As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out of his pocket and elaborately made a note. “Fifty-five minutes in eight days, Lydia,” he called.

At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia’s traveling bag. She looked very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some sort. Didn’t he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at the Judge’s complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of Lydia’s career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes, she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter’s interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was so much less zealous in the matter.

When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. “It’s my fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly on time. But I walked along with her and detained her.”

“It was the sunset,” said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps. “It was so fine that when Godfather called my attention to it, I just stood! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this winter, but it seems as though I hadn’t had time to see one before—over the ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and the sun turned it into such loveliness—”

“You’ve missed your trolley-car,” said her mother succinctly.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay, for she asked in a moment, very meekly, “Will it make so very much difference if I don’t go till the next one?”

“You’ll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car. You’ll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this one.”

“Oh, I don’t care about that,” cried Lydia. “If that’s all—I’d ever so much rather go alone. I’m never alone a single minute, and it’ll rest me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so—they always do.”

Her mother’s aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said nothing, bringing Lydia’s traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.

Dr. Melton cried out at this, “Look here, Susan Emery, you’re like the carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his boards all away to shavings.”

Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning equaled only by her evident indifference to it.

“I mean—I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good time this winter. You’re running her as though she were a transcontinental railway system.”

“You can’t accomplish anything without system in this world,” said Mrs. Emery. She added, “Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering her own life, that she will miss her old mother’s forethought and care.”

Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother’s neck. “I’m so sorry, Mother dear,” she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton’s professional eye took in the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. “The middle-of-the-social-season symptom,” he called it to himself. “I’m so sorry, Mother,” Lydia went on. “I will be more careful next time. You are so good to—to—”