Transcriber's Note:
A Table of Contents has been added.

Miss Theodora
A West End Story BY Helen Leah Reed

BOSTON
RICHARD G. BADGER & CO.
1898

Copyright, 1898, by
Richard G. Badger & Co.

All Rights Reserved

The frontispiece and chapter headings are from drawings by Florence Pearl England, the latter being after photographs.

CONTENTS.

[CHAPTER I.]
[CHAPTER II.]
[CHAPTER III.]
[CHAPTER IV.]
[CHAPTER V.]
[CHAPTER VI.]
[CHAPTER VII.]
[CHAPTER VIII.]
[CHAPTER IX.]
[CHAPTER X.]
[CHAPTER XI.]
[CHAPTER XII.]
[CHAPTER XIII.]
[CHAPTER XIV.]
[CHAPTER XV.]
[CHAPTER XVI.]
[CHAPTER XVII.]
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
[CHAPTER XIX.]
[CHAPTER XX.]
[CHAPTER XXI.]
[CHAPTER XXII.]
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
[CHAPTER XXV.]
[CHAPTER XXVI.]

I.

The tourist, with his day or two at a down town hotel, calls Boston a city of narrow streets and ancient graveyards; the dweller in one of the newer avenues is enthusiastic about the modern architecture and regular streets of the Back Bay region. Yet neither of these knows the real Boston, the old West End, with its quaint tree-lined streets sloping from the top of Beacon Hill toward the river.

Near the close of any bright afternoon, walk from the State House down the hill, pause half-way, and, glancing back, note the perfect Gothic arch formed by the trees that line both sides of Mount Vernon Street. Admire those old houses which have taken on the rich, deep tones that age so kindly imparts to brick. Then look across the river to the sun just setting behind the Brookline hills,—and admit that even in a crowded city we may catch glimpses of the picturesque.

Half-way down one of the quiet, hilly West End streets is the house of Miss Theodora—no, I will not tell you her true name. If I should, you would recognize it at once as that of a great New England jurist. This jurist was descended from a long line of scholars, whose devotion to letters had not prevented their accumulating a fair amount of wealth. Much of this wealth had fallen to the jurist, Miss Theodora's father, with whom at first everything went well, and then everything badly.

It was not entirely the great man's extravagance that wrought the mischief, although many stories were long told of his too liberal hospitality and lavish expenditure. He came, however, of a generous race; it was a cousin of his who divided a small fortune between Harvard College and the Provident Association, and for more than a century back the family name might be found on every list of contributions to a good cause.

Yet it was not extravagance, but blind faith in the financial wisdom of others, as well as an undue readiness to lend money to every man who wished to borrow from him, which brought to Miss Theodora's father the trouble that probably hastened him to his grave. When he died, it was found that he had lost all but a fraction of a former fortune. His widow survived him only a few years, and before her death the family had to leave their roomy mansion on the hill, with its pleasant garden, for a smaller house farther down the street.

Here Miss Theodora tried to make a pleasant home for John, her brother. He had just begun to practise law, and, with his talents, would undoubtedly do well, especially if he married as he should. Thus, with a woman's worldliness in things matrimonial, reasoned Miss Theodora, sometimes even going so far as to commend to John this girl or that among the family connections. But one day John put an end to all her innocent scheming by announcing his betrothal to the orphan daughter of a Plymouth minister, "a girl barely pretty, and certainly poor." It was only a half consolation to reflect that Dorothy had a pedigree going back to John Alden and Priscilla.

Ernest, John's boy, was just a month old when Sumter surrendered; yet John would go to the war, leaving Dorothy and the baby to the care of his sister. Eagerly the two women followed his regiment through each campaign, thankful for the bright and cheerful letters he sent them. They bore bravely that awful silence after Antietam, until at length they knew that John would never come home again.

It was simply of a broken heart that Dorothy died, said every one, for little Ernest was scarcely three years old when he was left with no one to care for him but Miss Theodora. How she saved and scrimped to give him what he needed, I will not say; but gradually her attire took on a quaintness that would have been thought impossible for her even to favor in the days of her girlhood, when she had been a critic of dress. She never bought a new gown now; every cent beyond what was required for living expenses must be saved for Ernest.

Before the boy knew his letters, Miss Theodora was planning for his career at Harvard. He should be graduated at the head of his class. With such a father, with such a grandfather, Ernest certainly must be a great man. The family glory would be renewed in him.

Little by little Miss Theodora withdrew from the world. She had not cared for gayety in her younger days; she hardly missed it now; yet she was not neglected by her relatives and old friends—even the most fashionable called on her once a year. These distant cousins and formal acquaintances had little personal interest in Miss Theodora. Their cards were left from respect to the memory of the distinguished jurist rather than from any desire to brighten the life of his daughter.

If Miss Theodora's invitations grew fewer and fewer, she herself was to blame, for she seldom accepted an invitation, even to luncheon, nor confided to any one that pride forbade her to accept hospitalities which circumstances prevented her returning.

II.

Although Miss Theodora disliked visiting, every summer she and Ernest spent a month at Nahant with her cousin, Sarah Somerset. She herself would have preferred the quiet independence of a New Hampshire country farm, but she thought it her duty to give Ernest this yearly opportunity of seeing his relatives in the intimacy possible only at their summer homes. This was before the days of Beverly's popularity, when almost every one at Nahant was cousin to every one else. Even the people at the boarding houses belonged to the little group held to have an almost inherent right to the rocky peninsula.

Both the little boy, therefore, and Miss Theodora were made much of by their kinsfolk; and the child thought these summer days the happiest of the year.

In other ways Miss Theodora was occasionally remembered by her relatives. Once she was asked to spend a whole year in Europe as chaperone to two or three girls, her distant cousins. Even if she could have made up her mind to leave Ernest, I doubt whether she would have accepted the invitation. She had almost determined never to go abroad again, preferring to hold sacred the journey that she and her parents and John had made two or three years before their troubles began.

For the most part, then, Miss Theodora repelled all attempts at intimacy made by her relatives. Unreasonable though she knew herself to be, she believed that she could never care so much for her cousins since they had all in such curious fashion—like swallows in winter—begun to migrate southward to the Back Bay. At first she felt as bitter as was possible for a person of her amiable disposition, when she saw people whom no necessity impelled leaving their spacious dwellings on the Hill for the more contracted houses on the flat land beyond the Public Garden.

Yet if Miss Theodora pitied her degenerate kin, how much more did they pity her! "Poor Theodora," some of them would say. "I don't see how she manages to get along at all. If she sold that house, with the interest of the money she and Ernest could board comfortably somewhere. Even as it is, she might let a room or two; but no—I suppose that would hardly do. Well, she must be dreadfully pinched."

Notwithstanding these well meant fears, Miss Theodora got along very well. The greatest sacrifice of pride that she had to make came when she found that she must send Ernest to a public school. Yet even this hardship might have been worse. "It isn't as if he were a girl, you know," she said half apologetically to Sarah Somerset. "Although he may make a few undesirable acquaintances, he will have nothing to do with them when he goes to Harvard." For Miss Theodora's plans for Ernest reached far into the future, even beyond his college days, and she must save all that was possible out of her meagre income.

Public or private school was all the same to Ernest; or perhaps his preference, if he had been asked to express it, would have been decidedly for the big brick schoolhouse, with its hosts of boys. What matter if many of these boys were rough and unkempt. Among them all he could always find some suitable companions. His refined nature chose the best; and if the best in this case did not mean rich boys or those of well-known names, it meant boys of a refinement not so very unlike that possessed by Ernest himself.

One day he came home from school later than usual, with his eye black and blue, and one of the pockets of his little jacket hanging ripped and torn.

"Why, what is the matter, Ernest?" cried his aunt; "have you been fighting?"

"Well, not exactly fighting, but kind of fighting," he replied, and "kind of fighting" became one of the joking phrases between aunt and nephew whenever the latter professed uncertainty as to his attitude on any particular question.

"You see, it was this way," and he began to explain the black eye and the torn pocket.

"There were two big mickies—Irish you know—bothering two little niggers—oh, excuse me! black boys—at the corner of our school; so I just pitched in and gave it to them right and left. But they were bigger than me, and maybe I'd have got whipped if it hadn't been for Ben Bruce. He just ran down the school steps like a streak of lightning, and you should have seen those bullies slink away. They muttered something about doing Ben up some other day; but I guess they'll never dare touch him."

Now, Ben Bruce, two or three classes ahead of Ernest in school, was a hero in the eyes of the younger boy. Ben was famous as an athlete, and Ernest, in schoolboy fashion, could never have hoped for an intimacy with one so greatly his superior in years and strength had not this chance encounter thrown them together. Ben appreciated the younger boy's manliness, and the two walked together down the hill, as a rearguard to the little negroes. The latter, too much amazed at the whole encounter even to speak, soon ran down a side street to their homes, and Ben and Ernest, if they did not say a great deal to each other at that time, felt that a real friendship had begun between them.

Miss Theodora heard Ernest's account of the affair with mixed feelings. She was glad that her boy had shown himself true to the principles of an Abolition family; yet she wished that circumstances had made a contact with rough boys impossible for him. She was not altogether certain that she approved the intimacy with Ben, whose family belonged to an outside circle of West Enders with which she had hardly come into contact herself.

An expression of her misgivings drew forth a remonstrance from Miss Chatterwits: "Why, you know Ben Bruce's father's grandfather was on General Washington's staff; they've got his sword and a painting in their front parlor." As Miss Chatterwits was an authority as to the biography of the meanest as well as the most important resident on the Hill, her approbation of the Bruces may have inclined Miss Theodora toward Ben. Yet, had he had no other recommendation, the boy's own good manners would have gone far to impress Miss Theodora in his favor.

Ernest never knew just how meagre his aunt's income was. He thought it chiefly lack of taste that led her to wear those queer, scant gowns. Year after year she drew upon an apparently inexhaustible store of changeable silks and queer plaided stuffs. Then she wore little tippets and small, flat hats, and in summer long black lace mitts, "like nobody else wears," sighed poor little Ernest one day, as he asked his aunt why she never bought anything new.

Yet even Miss Theodora's limited purse might occasionally have afforded her a new gown, had she not been well content with what she already had. She could not wish more, she reasoned, than to have her old-fashioned garments remodeled from year to year by good Miss Chatterwits.

Miss Chatterwits, who had sewed in the family from the days of Miss Theodora's childhood, lived in one of those curious short lanes off Revere street. It was a great comfort to Miss Theodora to have her come for a day's sewing with her queer green workbag dangling from her arm, with her funny little corkscrew curls bobbing at every motion of her funny little head. While she sewed, Miss Chatterwits kept her nimble tongue at work, lamenting the changes that had come to the old West End. She knew the region well, and understood the difference between the old residents and those newer people who were crowding in.

"It's shameful that the Somersets should think so little of themselves as to move from Chestnut to Beacon Street; and their new house isn't even opposite the Public Garden, but away up there beyond Berkeley Street. How aping the names of those Back Bay streets are,—Berkeley and Clarendon and Dartmouth,—as though American names wouldn't have done better than those English imitations! Well, Miss Theodora, we have Pinckney and Revere named after good American men, and Spruce and Cedar for good American trees. I wouldn't live on one of those new-fangled streets, not if they'd give it to me."

Then Miss Theodora, almost driven to apologize for her misguided relatives, little as she sympathized with them herself, would reply in words that she must have seen in some of the newspapers: "Well, I suppose the growth of the city's population makes it necessary for—"

"Fudge!" Miss Chatterwits would interrupt, "the West End seems to have room enough for lodging and boarding house keepers; and I guess it's big enough for true Boston folks. It just makes me furious to see "Rooms to Let," "Table Board, $3.50 per week," stuck up in every window on some streets. Goodness knows, I hope the Somersets like their neighbors out there on the Back Bay. I hear anybody with money enough can buy a house there." And a tear seemed ready to fall from her eyes.

III.

Ernest, himself, grew up without any social prejudices. His aunt often wondered at this, yet, like many sensible people, she did not try to impress him with her own views. As one by one the dwelling houses on Charles Street were changed into shops, he only rejoiced that Miss Theodora wouldn't have to send so far for her groceries and provisions. But Miss Theodora drew the line here. She had always been able to go to the market every day, and no thrifty housewife needs a provision shop under her very nose, she said.

Her one exception in favor of neighborhood shopping was made for the little thread and needle shop on the corner below her house. Even a person who doesn't have many new gowns occasionally needs tapes and needles, and may find it convenient to buy them near at hand.

This shop was a delight to Ernest, and in the days when his chin hardly reached the level of the counter, he loved to stand and gaze at the rows of jars filled with variegated sticks of candy, jaw-breakers and pickled limes; for the two maiden ladies who kept the shop sold many things besides needles and thread. In the little glass show-case, in addition to mittens and scissors and an occasional beautiful fan, and heaps of gay marbles, was a pile of highly-colored story books, "The Tale of Goody Two Shoes" and others of that ilk, and mysterious looking sheets of paper, which needed only the manipulation of skilful scissors to change them into life-like paper dolls with elaborate wardrobes. Ernest, of course, took little interest in the paper dolls,—he bought chiefly marbles; but his cousin, Kate Digby, whenever she was permitted to spend a day at the West End, was a devoted patron of the little shop, and saved all her pennies to increase her household of dolls. Indeed, she confided to Ernest that when she grew up she was going to have a shop just like the one kept by the Misses Bascom. If Mrs. Stuart Digby had heard her say this, she would have wondered where in the world her daughter had acquired a taste for anything so ordinary as trade.

A block or two away from the thread and needle shop was a shop that Miss Theodora abhorred. Within they sold every kind of thing calculated to draw the stray pennies from the pockets of the school children who passed it daily. Its windows, with their display of gaudy and vulgar illustrated papers, gave her positive pain. A generation ago ladies had not acquired the habit of rushing into print with every matter of reform; otherwise Miss Theodora might have sent a letter to the newspaper, signed "Prudentia," or something of that kind, deploring the fact that a shop like this should be allowed to exist near a school, drawing pennies from the pockets of the school children, at the same time that it vitiated their artistic sense.

Ernest, as I have said, grew up without marked local or social prejudices. Many of his spare pennies went into the money drawer of the corner shop, and much of his spare time he spent with the workmen at the cabinet-makers' near by. For little workshops were beginning to appear in the neighborhood of lower Charles Street, and some of their proprietors had cut away the front of an old house, in order to build a window to display their wares.

Ernest loved to gaze in at the shining faucets in the plumber's window, and horrified his aunt by announcing one day that when he was a man he meant to be either a plumber or a cabinet-maker. Among them all he preferred the cabinet-maker's. Everything going on there interested him, and the workmen, glad to answer his questions, showed him ways of doing things which he put into practice at home.

For Miss Theodora had given Ernest a basement room to work in, stipulating only that he should not bring more than three boys at a time into the house to share his labors. His joy was unbounded one Christmas when his cousin, Richard Somerset, sent him a turning lathe. Almost the first use to which he put it was to make a footstool, with delicately tapering legs, for his aunt's birthday. He tied it up in brown paper himself, and wound a great string about it with many knots.

"Law!" said Diantha, who stood by as Miss Theodora slowly untied the bulky package, "what's them boys been up to now? I believe it's some mischief."

"Now, old Di, you're mean," cried Ernest, dancing around in excitement in the narrow hall-way outside the bedroom door.

But Miss Theodora, as she bent over the package, tugging at the strings, caught sight of some sprawling letters that resolved themselves into "A birthday Present from your LOVEING nephew;" so, shaking her head at Diantha, she responded, loudly enough for Ernest to hear, and with no comment on the bad spelling, "Oh, no, it's a beautiful present from Ernest." And then Ernest ran in and undid the rest of the knots, and, setting the footstool triumphantly on its four legs on the floor, said: "Now, you'll always use it, won't you, Aunt Teddy?"

Of course Miss Theodora, as she kissed him, promised to use, and kept her promise, in spite of the fact that the little footstool—less comfortable than her well-worn carpet hassock—wasn't exactly steady on its feet. But although she so thoroughly appreciated Ernest's thoughtfulness, Miss Theodora did not regard the footstool with absolute pleasure. She was by no means sure that she approved of Ernest's skill in handicrafts. She wondered sometimes whether she ought to permit a probable lawyer to spend so much energy in work which could hardly go toward helping him in his profession. Yet, after all, she hadn't the heart to interfere with Ernest's mechanical tastes, when she saw that gratifying them gave him so much pleasure. She never forgot her fright one day on the Nahant boat, when Ernest, barely seven years old, was missing, and she found him only after a long search at the door of the engine room.

"You'd ought to be an engineer when you're grown up," she heard a gruff voice say, while Ernest meekly replied: "Well, I'd like to, but I've got to be a lawyer."

She did not scold Ernest as she took his hand to lead him up stairs, and she even lingered while he tried to put her in possession of all his own knowledge.

"This gentleman," he said apologetically, "has been explaining his engine to me," and the "gentleman," rubbing a light streak across his sooty face, turned to her with a sincere, "That there boy of yours has a big head, ma'am, for machinery, and, begging your pardon, if I was you I'd put him out to a machinist when he's a little bigger."

The plainness of Miss Theodora's dress may have placed her in this man's eye on the plane of those people who regularly sent their children to learn trades. Although in her mind she resented the suggestion, she listened attentively to Ernest as he tried, with glowing cheek and rapid tongue, to explain the various parts of the engine. If Miss Theodora never perhaps had more than a vague idea of the functions of piston and valve and the wonders of the governor, over which Ernest grew so eloquent, she was at least a sympathetic listener in this as in all other things that he cared for.

IV.

When it came to machinery, Ernest found his aunt much more sympathetic than his usual confidante, Kate Digby. As years went on, the childish companionship between the children deepened into friendship. They began to confide to each other their dreams for the future. Kate modelled herself somewhat on the accounts handed down of a certain ancestress of hers whose portrait hung in the stairway of her father's house.

The portrait was a copy of one thinly painted and flat looking, done by an obscure seventeenth century artist. It showed a very young girl dressed in gray, with a white kerchief folded around her slim neck, and with her thin little wrists meekly crossed in front. Whether her hair was abundant or not no one could tell, for an old-womanish cap with narrow ruffle so covered her head that only a faint blonde aureole could be seen beneath it. Colorless though this portrait seemed at first sight, longer study brought out a depth in the clear gray eye, a firmness in the small pink mouth, which consorted well with the stories told of this little Puritan's bravery.

One of the youngest of the children entering Massachusetts Bay on Winthrop's fleet, the little Mercy had been the pet of a Puritan household. Marrying early, she had gone from her father's comfortable house in Boston to live in the country forty miles away, a region remote and almost on the borders of civilization in those days. Not mere rumor but veritable records have told the story of the fierce attack of the savages on that secluded dwelling, of the murder of husband and man servant, of the flight of the wife and little children, and of their final rescue at the very moment when the Indians had overtaken them,—a rescue, however, not accomplished until one of the children had been killed by an arrow, while the mother pierced through the arm, was forced to drop the gun with which she held off her assailants.

"Just think of her being so brave and shooting like that!" Kate would say to Ernest. "I admire her more than any of my great-great-great-grandmothers—whichever of the 'greats' she was. And then she brought up all her children so beautifully, with almost nothing to live on, so that every one of them became somebody. I'm always delighted when people tell me I look like her."

"Well, you don't look like her," said Ernest, truthfully. "If you looked as flat and fady as that you wouldn't look like much. Besides, I don't like a woman's shooting and picking off the red-skins the way she did. Of course," in response to Kate's look of surprise, "it was all right; she had to save herself and the children; but some way it don't seem the kind of thing for a woman to do! Now, I like her because she wouldn't let her oldest son go back to England and have a title. You see, her husband's father had cast him off for being a Puritan."

"Oh, yes, I know," responded Kate. "But I wish she had let him take the title. I'd like to be related to a lord."

Kate and Ernest were no longer little children when this particular conversation took place; but its substance had come up between them many a time before. Yet Ernest always held to the more democratic position; and as years went by his acquaintance with Ben Bruce intensified his democratic feeling. No one recognized more clearly than Miss Theodora this tendency of Ernest's, and she questioned long whether she was doing what John would have approved in sending him to a school where he must mingle with his social inferiors. In John's day public schools had been different.

An unguarded expression of these feelings of hers one evening at the Digbys' led to an offer from Stuart Digby to share his son's tutor with Ernest, that the two boys might prepare for Harvard together. Now, the idea of a tutor was almost as unpleasant to Miss Theodora as the thought of the undesirable acquaintances that Ernest might make at a public school. In the choice between unrepublican aristocracy and simple democracy she almost inclined to the latter; but Stuart Digby, her second cousin, had been John's bosom friend, and she could not bring herself to refuse the well-meant offer. It was Ernest who rebelled.

"I don't want to go to college at all. I hate Latin; I won't waste time on Greek. I detest that namby-pamby Ralph. All he cares for is to walk down Beacon Street with the girls. He don't know a force pump from a steam engine!"

But Miss Theodora, though tearful—for she hated to oppose him—was firm; and for three years the boy went down the Hill and across the Garden to recite his lessons with Ralph. Out of school he saw as little as he could of Ralph. His time was spent chiefly with Ben Bruce. Ben's father kept a small retail shop somewhere down near Court Street, and his family lived in a little house at the top of the hill,—a little house that never had been meant for any but people of limited means.

Yet from the roof of the house there was a view such as no one at the Back Bay ever dreamed of; for past the sloping streets near by one could gaze on the river bounded like a lake by marshy low lands and the high sea walls, which, with the distant hills, the nearer factory chimneys, even the gray walls of the neighboring County Jail, on a dark day or bright day, formed a beautiful scene.

There in that little room of Ben's Ernest often opened his heart to his friend more freely than to his aunt. Ben, considerably Ernest's senior, had entered the Institute of Technology—in boys' language, "Tech"—soon after Ernest himself had begun to study with Ralph's tutor, and Ernest frankly envied his friend's opportunity for studying science.

V.

In his boyish way Ernest enjoyed life. The Somersets, the Digbys and the rest made much of him, and at the Friday evening dancing class he was a favorite. Had he been a few years older the mothers might have objected to his popularity. A penniless boy attending the Friday evening dancing class is not old enough to be regarded as a dangerous detrimental, and he may receive the adoration, expressive though silent, of half a dozen little maids in white frocks and pink sashes, without encountering rebuffs from their mammas when he steps up to ask them to dance. In this respect fifteen has a great advantage over twenty, emphasized, too, by the fact that fifteen has not yet learned his own deficiency, while twenty is apt to be all too conscious of it.

Children's parties had been within Ernest's reach even before the doors of Papanti's opened to him. They were a friendly people on the Hill and no birthday party was counted a success without the presence of Ernest. Simple enough these affairs were, the entertainment, round games like "Hunt the Button," and "Going to Jerusalem," and "London's Burning," the refreshment, a light supper of bread and butter and home-made cakes, with raspberry vinegar and lemonade as an extra treat.

Miss Theodora herself did not take part in the social festivities of the neighborhood, although her silver spoons and even pieces of her best china were occasionally lent to add to the splendor of some one's tea table. Mrs. Fetchum was always anxious to make a good impression on the neighbors whom she sometimes asked to tea. Especially desirous was she to have her table glitter with silver and glass when Miss Chatterwits was one of her guests. Since Miss Chatterwits knew only too well Mrs. Fetchum's humble origin as the daughter of a petty West End shoe-seller, the latter could never, like the little seamstress, talk of bygone better days and loss of position. She could only aspire to get even with her by offering her occasionally a plethoric hospitality, in which a superabundance of food and a dazzling array of silver and china were the chief elements. Miss Chatterwits had long suspected that much of this silver was borrowed; but she had never dared hint her suspicions to Mrs. Fetchum, and the latter held up her head with a pride that could not have been surpassed had she been dowered with a modern bride's stock of wedding presents. A day or two after a tea party at which she had been unusually condescending to Miss Chatterwits, she ran across the street to return the borrowed spoons to Miss Theodora. It was dusk as she entered the little doorway, and she hastily thrust the package into the hands of some one standing in the narrow hall, Miss Theodora as she thought, whispering loudly as she did so: "Don't tell Miss Chatterwits I borrowed the spoons." For she knew that the seamstress had been sewing for Miss Theodora that day, and she wasn't quite sure that the latter realized that the borrowing must be kept secret.

"It gave me quite a turn," she said as she told Mr. Fetchum about it. "It gave me quite a turn when I found that it was Miss Chatterwits; but I never let on I knew it was her, and I turned about as quick as I could. Only the next time I set foot out of this house I'll be sure I have my glasses."

It was hard to tell which of the two had the best of this chance encounter. Mrs. Fetchum consoled herself for the carelessness by reflecting on the presence of mind that had kept her from acknowledging her humiliation; and Miss Chatterwits gloated over the fact that she had caught Mrs. Fetchum in a peccadillo she had long suspected—borrowing Miss Theodora's silver.

In his early years Ernest had been a neighborly little fellow, and, alone or with his aunt, would lift his hat to a woman, old or young, easily winning for himself the name of "little gentleman." He wore out his shoes in astonishingly quick time playing hopscotch on the hilly sidewalks with the boys and girls who lived near, while Kate, to whom this sport was forbidden, sitting on the doorsteps, looked enviously on. Willingly would she have exchanged her soft kid shoes for the coarse copper-toed boots of Tommy Fetchum, had it only been permitted her to hop across on one foot and kick the stone from one big square to another chalked out so invitingly on the uneven bricks.

But Mrs. Stuart Digby, although willing enough to let Kate visit Miss Theodora, made it a rule—and no one dared break a rule of hers—that Kate was never to play on the street with the children of the neighborhood. Yet as she sat sadly in her corner, Kate, often referred to for her opinion on disputed points, at last came to have a forlorn pride in her position as umpire.

At length there came a time when Ernest's interests in the street games waned. His former playmates saw little of him. He neglected the boys and girls with whom he had once played tag and hopscotch, and some of the neighbors, especially Mrs. Fetchum, said that he was growing "stuck up." Miss Theodora hardly knew her neighbors by sight; for it was one of the evidences of the decadence of the region that the houses changed tenants frequently, and furniture vans were often standing in front of some of the houses near Miss Theodora's.

Mrs. Fetchum was a permanent neighbor. She had lived in the street longer even than Miss Theodora. She always called on new comers, and never failed to impress on them a sense of the greatness of the jurist's daughter, with the result that Miss Theodora's comings and goings were always a matter of general neighborhood interest. Sometimes Miss Theodora invited the children hanging about her doorstep to come inside the house, where she regaled them with gingerbread, or let them look through the folio of engravings in the library.

In spite of the lady's kindness they all stood in awe of her, as the daughter of a Great Man, whose orations were printed in their school readers beside those of Webster and Clay. Miss Theodora, with her quiet manner and high forehead, in a day when all other women wore more elaborate coiffures, seemed to the children like a person in a book, and their answers to her questions were always the merest monosyllables.

It was not worldliness altogether which took Ernest away from his former playmates. After his mornings with Ralph and their tutor, he had to study pretty hard in the afternoon. His evenings were generally devoted to Miss Theodora; either he read aloud while she sewed, or they played chess with that curious set of carved chessmen given her father by a grateful Salem client years before.

In little ways, Miss Theodora, though not a sharp observer, sometimes thought that she detected a growing worldliness in Ernest.

"Why don't we get some new carpets?" he asked one day. It was the very spring before he entered college. "I never could tell, Aunt Teddy, what those flowers were meant to be. When I was a little chap, I used to wonder whether they were bunches of roses or dahlias; but now you'd hardly know they were meant to be flowers at all."

This was true enough, for the carpet, with its huge pattern, designed for the drawing room of their old house, had been trodden upon by so many feet that now hardly the faint outline of its former roses remained. The furniture, too, was growing shabby; the heavy green rep of the easy chairs had faded in spots, the gilded picture frames were tarnished, and the window draperies, with their imposing lambrequins, were sadly out of fashion. Yet from Miss Theodora's evasive reply the boy did not realize that poverty prevented her refurnishing the rooms in modern fashion. He had everything he needed; but the circle of relatives all continued to say, "It's wonderful that Theodora manages as well as she does."

VI.

"Come along! Hurry up!" called Ernest to Ben, one winter's day, kicking his heels into the little hillocks of frozen snow on the sidewalk; and even as he spoke Ben, with a "Here I am," rushed from the house with his skates slung over his shoulder. Ernest carried in a green bag, on which his aunt had worked his initials in shaded brown, a pair of the famous "Climax" club skates, a present from his cousin, Richard Somerset. Reaching the Common, after a brisk run, they began to put on their skates.

The cold day had apparently kept many of the younger boys and girls away, and although there was room enough for all the skaters, not a few of them were objectionably rough and boisterous. Near the spot where Ernest and Ben were, among a small group of well-dressed lads, swinging stick or playing hockey, Ernest was sorry to recognize Ralph Digby.

"I wouldn't have come if I'd known Ralph would be here," he said regretfully to Ben.

"No matter, we needn't have anything to do with him," said Ben cheerfully. It was no secret to Ben that Ralph and Ernest, out of school hours, had little to do with each other.

"Well, I hate to go near Ralph," responded Ernest. "He always tries to make me feel small," and for the moment Ernest became uncomfortably conscious that the sleeves of his overcoat were a trifle too short, and that it had, on the whole, an outgrown look, for this was the second winter he had worn it.

"Don't take any notice of him, except to speak to him as you pass," said Ben.

"I know that's all I need do, but Ralph always seems to me to be saying to himself, 'Oh, you're nothing but a poor relation.'"

"Well, any way, he's a poorer skater," laughed Ben, and the two boys glided off, passing Ralph in his fur-trimmed coat, surrounded by half a dozen lads of his own kind.

It was this very superiority of Ernest's in skating, in his studies, in manners, that bred the ill-feeling in Ralph's heart towards him. Ralph was indolent in his studies and heavy on his feet. He looked on enviously as Ernest wheeled past him time and time again, and said to his friends that he didn't care to skate any longer. "There was too much riffraff on the pond." He was irritated, not only by Ernest's skill and grace in skating, but by the fact that his poorer cousin wore the famous "Climax" club skates. For a long time Ralph himself had been the only boy in his little set who possessed skates of this kind. They were a novelty and expensive, and the average boy wore the old-fashioned strap skates. No one knew that he begrudged Ernest his glistening skates. Regardless of the sneering words wafted to them as they skated past Ralph and his friends, Ernest and Ben, with glowing cheeks and tingling blood, wheeled and curvetted until they were well-nigh breathless. At last, as the reddening western sky marked the end of the brief afternoon, Ernest, unfastening his skates, laid them on the stony margin of the pond, as he hastened to one of the Garden paths to help a little girl who had fallen down.

"Where are my skates?" he shouted to Ben, who was still curvetting about.

"I haven't seen them. Where did you leave them?" he called back, and in a moment was at Ernest's side. The green bag hung limp on Ernest's arm; he could hardly believe that the skates were not there.

"Well, at any rate we can ask about them," said Ben, and the two boys, Ernest somewhat forlornly, went about among the few skaters still left on the pond, asking if any one could help them find the skates. A few of the boys answered pleasantly that they knew nothing about them, the majority—and these the rougher—professed to be insulted at the question, adding, "I'll knock you down if you think I took your skates," and even Ralph was disagreeable in his reply.

"Perhaps some of your friends could tell you something about them; you always are chumming with such queer fellows—you never can expect much from canaille." Ralph always had a French word ready. As he spoke he looked at Ben in a way that made Ernest cry:

"For shame, Ralph!"

Ben's eye flashed. He lifted his arm, seized Ralph by the coat collar, shook him with some violence, and then turned on his heel without a word.

"That was right," said Ernest, approvingly. "I often wonder how you stand so much from Ralph. He tries to make himself so disagreeable."

"He doesn't have to try very hard," answered Ben; "he's disagreeable enough without trying," for Ralph never neglected to show that he thought Ben infinitely beneath him. A curt nod when they happened to meet was almost more irritating than a direct cut. Sorrowfully enough Ernest went homewards. His skating for the season, he knew, was over unless he should recover the skates. Generally, he did not look on the dark side of things, but this day he was disconsolate. In spite of Ben's assurance that the lost skates would be found, he was confident that they were gone forever.

Two days later Ben came to him with more excitement in his manner than was his wont.

"Would your aunt let you go over to the school with me this afternoon? I think we've spotted them."

Ernest rushed for his cap and mittens.

"Of course she would! She's out now, but I can go without asking." No explanation was needed to tell him that the "them" meant his missing skates.

"You see, I had my suspicions from the first moment," said Ben, "but I didn't dare say anything till I was sure. You know, there's one thing we never agree about, but I won't say anything until you hear for yourself."

Ernest was soon following Ben up the broad wooden stairs to the Principal's room. The master himself looked up with some interest as the boys came in.

"Yes, yes, I'll send for him at once," he said, after he had briefly welcomed them, "or, no, I'll take you to the room where he is," and before he realized where he was going Ernest found himself following Ben and the Principal into the large schoolroom, where fifty pairs of curious eyes were turned toward them.

"Brown, come here," called the master. An undersized boy, freckled, with small eyes near together, shuffled forward.

"Did you tell Jim Grey that you had found a pair of skates the day before yesterday?—answer—'yes' or 'no.'"

Not a word came from the boy, who held his head down sulkily.

"Answer—quickly—or home you go at once. Did you or did you not find a pair of skates?"

"No, I didn't," at last came from the reluctant lips.

"That's enough, sir!" thundered the Principal. "Now, Bruce, tell your story."

Then Ben, leaving the room for a moment, came back, accompanied by a man who carried a package under his arm.

"Yes, sir, that's the boy, sir," said the man with the package, pointing to Brown. "He came to my shop yesterday with these skates, sir," and he held up before the astonished eyes of Ernest his beloved skates. "He said as how they'd been given to him, and as he didn't have no time for skating, would I buy them, which I did, sir, for a dollar."

"A dollar," said Ernest to himself, pitying the boy who knew so little the value of a good thing as to let it go for next to nothing.

"What have you to say to this, Brown?"

"Yes, they were given to me," said the boy, doggedly.

"Who gave them to you?"

"A chap in a fur coat, I dunno his name. I was standing by the pond, and says I, 'Wot beauties,' when I see them laying there, and says he, 'Take them quick, they're mine, but I don't want to skate no more,' and he poked them over to me with his stick, and says he, 'Hurry off, or I may change my mind,' and they wouldn't fit me, sir, and so I sold them."

"A likely story," said the Principal. But two or three boys were found to corroborate this statement of Brown, one of whom was above suspicion as regarded truthfulness—the other two were somewhat doubtful.

"Are these your skates?" asked the Principal of Ernest, who, stepping up, showed his name engraved on the sides.

"Go to my room, Brown," said the Principal. "I will settle with you—and you, young gentleman," handing Ernest his property, "take better care of your possessions in the future." Then turning to Ben, "Thank you, Bruce, for looking into this matter. Brown has given me a great deal of trouble in many ways, and now I guess the best thing is to suspend him." For, although at the head of a Boston school, the Principal still clung to the colloquial "guess."

Ben and Ernest withdrew from the room under the fire of as many approving as disapproving eyes. There were, of course, not a few boys who sympathized with Brown, some from a class feeling, and others because they felt themselves to be kindred spirits of the culprit.

"How did you manage to find out about it at all, Ben? You're awfully clever," said Ernest, and then the elder boy explained that he had remembered seeing Brown just before Ernest left the ice talking earnestly with Ralph, and that when he came across the skates in a shop he made inquiries, which resulted in his suspecting collusion between the two. Though Ernest did not speak to him about it, Ralph felt that his cousin despised his meanness, and Ernest knew that Ralph disliked him all the more for his knowledge.

While his regard for Ralph constantly diminished, Ernest's fondness for Kate as constantly increased.

"She doesn't seem a bit like Ralph's sister," he would say confidentially to Ben; and Ben would echo a hearty "Indeed she doesn't."

Kate was never happier than when she had permission to spend the day with Miss Theodora. Paying little attention to the charges of Marie, her French maid, to "Walk quietly like a little lady," she would hop and skip along the Garden mall and up the hill to Miss Theodora's house. What joy, when Marie had been dismissed and sent home, to sit beside Miss Theodora and learn some fancy stitch in crochet, or perhaps go to the kitchen to help Diantha make cookies.

"Our cook won't even let me go down the back stairs, and I've only been in our kitchen once in my life; and I just love Diantha for giving me that dear little rolling-pin, and showing me how to make cookies."

Kate was almost as fond of Miss Chatterwits as of Diantha. One of her chief childish delights was the privilege sometimes accorded her of spending an afternoon in the little suite of rooms occupied by the seamstress and her sisters. Besides the old claw-foot bureau and high-back chairs in her bedroom, the heavy fur tippet and faded cashmere shawl—either of which she donned (according to the season) on especially great occasions—Miss Chatterwits had a few treasures, relics of a more opulent past. These she always showed to Kate and Ernest when they visited her, as a reward for previous good behavior.

Ernest was usually less interested in these treasures than Kate. He liked better to talk to the green parrot that blinked and swung in its narrow cage in the room where lay the little seamstress's bedridden sister. But for Kate, the top drawer of Miss Chatterwits' bureau contained infinite wealth. The curious Scotch pebble pin, the silver bracelets, the long, thin gold chain, the old hair brooches, and, best of all, that curious spherical watch, without hands, without works, seemed to Kate more beautiful and valuable than all the jewelry in the velvet-lined receptacles of her mother's jewel casket. More attractive still was a shelf in the closet off Miss Chatterwits' bedroom. On this shelf was a row of pasteboard boxes, uniform in size, wherein were stored scraps of velvet, silk and ribbon, gingham, cloth and muslins—fragments, indeed, of all the dresses worn by Miss Chatterwits since her sixteenth year. As materials had not been bought by Miss Chatterwits since her father's death had left her penniless, a good thirty years before Kate knew her, the pieces in the boxes were genuine curiosities.

"Why didn't you ever get married, Miss Chatterwits?" asked Ernest one day when he and Kate were paying her a visit.

"Oh, I don't know;" and the old lady simpered with the same self-consciousness that prompts the girl of eighteen to blush when pointed questions are put to her; and when Ernest, who always wanted a definite answer to every question, persisted, she added with a sigh, "Well, I suppose I was hard to suit." Then, as if in amplification of this reply, she began to sing to herself the words of an old-fashioned song, which the children had heard her sing before:—

When I was a girl of eighteen years old,

I was as handsome as handsome could be;

I was taught to expect wit, wisdom and gold,

And nothing else would do for me—for me.

And nothing else would do for me.

The first was a youth any girl might adore,

And as ardent as lovers should be;

But mamma having heard the young man was quite poor,

Why, he wouldn't do for me—for me,

Why, he wouldn't do for me.

None of the many verses describing the various lovers of the scornful young lady made so deep an impression on the children as the opening lines, in which she was said to be "as handsome as handsome could be;" and Ernest, who was a literal little fellow, said to Kate, when they were out of Miss Chatterwits' hearing:

"Now, do you think that homely people were ever handsome once upon a time?"

Now, Kate could never be made to call Miss Chatterwits homely. Indeed, one day, in a burst of gratitude, when the latter had lent the child her watch to wear for an hour or two, the little girl exclaimed:

"Oh, Miss Chatterwits, you are very handsome!"

"Nobody ever told me that before, Kate," said the old woman.

Then, with the frankness that in later years often caused her to nullify the good impression made by some pretty speech, the child added:

"I mean very handsome all but your face."

What could be a clearer case of "handsome is what handsome does."

VII.

Mrs. Stuart Digby scarcely approved Kate's fondness for Miss Theodora and her friends. Stuart Digby had married two or three years before John, and was living in Paris when the Civil War broke out. His own impulse was to return at once and fight; but as his wife would not consent to this, they remained abroad until Ralph was ten years old and Kate four years younger. Both children at this time spoke French better than English, and Ralph for a long time disliked everything American—like his mother, who, not Boston born, professed little interest in things Bostonian. But in Kate Stuart Digby saw the enthusiasm which had marked his own youth, and he encouraged her in having ideals, only wishing that he had been true to his own.

"Perhaps if I hadn't married so early," he would think—then, with a sigh, would wonder if, left to himself, he might possibly have amounted to something. For Stuart Digby was not nearly as self-satisfied as the chance observer supposed.

When he and John were at school he had intended to study medicine, for his scientific tastes were as decided as John's bent for the law. But he had yielded all too weakly to his love for the prettiest girl in his set, and an heiress, too. By the death of his father and mother he had already come into possession of his own large fortune. When these two independent and rich young people were married, therefore, a month after he was graduated from Harvard, it was hardly strange that Stuart put aside his medical course until he should have made the tour of Europe. Then, when once domiciled in their own hotel in Paris, what wonder that they let all thoughts of Boston disappear in the background? Just before the war what could the United States offer pleasure-seekers comparable with the delights of Paris under the Second Empire? They stayed in Europe until the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, and managed to leave Paris just before the siege.

Not only the upsetting of things in France, but a crisis in Stuart Digby's business affairs, hastened him home at last. Besides, he felt a little remorse about his children. He did not wish them to grow up thorough Parisians; already, young as they were, they began to show symptoms of regarding France as their country rather than America. Disregarding, therefore, his wife's remonstrances, he broke up their Paris establishment, despatched his foreign furniture and bric-a-brac to Boston, and, following soon afterward with his family, bought a house in the new part of Beacon Street, a region which, when he went to Europe, had been submerged in water.

Though some people fancied that Stuart Digby could afford whatever he wished, he himself thought otherwise. After his return to Boston he found that there had been a shrinkage both in his own and his wife's income. There was little danger that they or their children should ever want, and yet the fact that they had a few thousands a year less than they had expected bred in them an unwonted spirit of economy. This spirit of economy showed itself chiefly in their dealings with other people. Stuart, for example, had always intended to settle a sum of money on Miss Theodora and Ernest, but now he decided to wait. He would help the boy somewhat in his education, and he would remember him in his will.

Faultless though he was in his address, elegant though he was in his personal appearance, Stuart Digby was by no means satisfied with the reflection that his mirror showed him. He had never expected at forty-five to find himself so portly, so rubicund. Idleness, easy living, and a steady, if moderate, indulgence in ruddy drinks will increase the girth and deepen the complexion of any man, no matter toward how lofty a goal the thoughts of his youth may have tended. In youth he had professed scorn for his own prospective wealth. He, as well as John, should carve out a career for himself. His money he would use in certain philanthropic schemes. But falling in love had been fatal to this single-mindedness,—and now, at forty-five, what wonder that he was dissatisfied.

To saunter down Beacon Street to the club, to play a game of whist with a trio as idle as himself, to drive, never in those days to ride, to sit near uncongenial people at a tedious, if fashionable, dinner, to dance attendance on his wife or some other woman in the brilliant crushes imposed on all who would be thought on intimate terms with society—this, he knew, was not the life he had once planned. To be sure, his footsteps sometimes carried him beyond the club to a little downtown office where he was supposed to have business—business so slight that it only irritated him to pretend to follow it. To sign papers, to approve plans which his lawyer and his agent had already carefully thought out, this, he reasoned, was almost beneath his notice; and so after a time he gave up even going to the office, and papers were sent to his house instead for his signature.

He might, of course, have rid himself, at least partially, of his ennui, by engaging in some definite philanthropic schemes; but philanthropy as a profession by itself wasn't the vogue among rich men in Boston two decades ago. Even had it been the fashion, Stuart Digby could with difficulty have adjusted himself to the condition which this work imposed. His long residence abroad made it impossible for him to regard impartially his American fellow-citizens, whether looked at as an object of political or philanthropic interest.

Yet if Stuart Digby fell far short of his own ideal, there was at least one person in the world who believed him to be perfect; not his wife, not his son, but his daughter Kate, who was never so happy as when, clinging to his hand, she could coax him to take a long walk with her over the Mill-dam toward the Brookline boundary.

Moreover, it may be said without sarcasm that his many years' residence in Europe had made Stuart Digby of much more value to his friends in general than he himself perhaps realized. He had what might be called a refined and thorough geographical taste; this is to say, he was a connoisseur of places. He could tell intending travellers just what climate, what cuisine, even what company they would be likely to find at Nice, at Gastein, at Torquay, at certain seasons. He had many a picturesque and hitherto unheard of nook to recommend, and when the great capitals, especially Paris, were under discussion, he could pronounce discriminatingly upon the hotels and shops most worthy the patronage of a man of culture.

VIII.

"Yes, it was a pleasant funeral," said Miss Chatterwits, as she sat sewing one morning at Miss Theodora's. Kate, who was present, laughed at the speech, although she understood Miss Chatterwits' idiosyncracies in the matter of funerals. To the latter, funerals were sources of real delight, and few at the West End were ungraced by her presence. In her best gown of shining black silk, with its rows and rows of bias ruffles, she seemed as necessary to the proper conduct of the ceremony as the undertaker himself. With her wide acquaintance among the people of the neighborhood, she could decide exactly the proper place for each mourner; she knew just who belonged in the back and who in the front parlor, and the grave demeanor with which she assigned each one his seat hardly hid her air of bustling satisfaction.

Miss Theodora and Kate were therefore not shocked when she repeated, "Yes, it was a pleasant funeral," continuing: "I declare, I don't think there was a soul there I didn't know. I was able to be real useful showing them where to sit. You should have seen the flowers. It took us the best part of a day to fix them. The family, of course, felt too bad to take much notice of the flowers, but I guess they enjoyed the choir singing. Mary Timpkins herself would have been pleased to see how well everything went off, for she always was so fussy about things."

Then, as no one interrupted her, she continued: "It's just a shame, Miss Theodora, that you did not go yourself. Mr. Blunt made the most edifying remarks you ever heard. Why, I almost cried, though you know I've had a great deal of experience in such occasions; and if you'd heard him I'm sure you'd have been miserable for the rest of the day."

Kate smiled at the thought of the pleasure her cousin had missed in escaping this misery, but Miss Theodora, not noticing Miss Chatterwits' humor, responded merely:

"Ah! the death of so young a person is always sad."

"Especially under such painful circumstances," added Miss Chatterwits.

"What circumstances?" asked Kate, now interested.

"Love!" answered Miss Chatterwits, solemnly. "She died of love."

"Love!" echoed Kate. "Shakespeare says nobody ever died of love." Then, with an afterthought: "Perhaps he was thinking only of men. But why do you think Miss Timpkins died of love? She didn't look as foolish as that."

"Well,"—and Miss Chatterwits shook her head in joyful significance, for it always pleased her to have news of this kind to tell,—"I guess if Hiram Bradstreet hadn't gone and left her she'd be alive to-day."

"What nonsense!" said Kate.

"Oh, you can smile, but I've sewed at her house by the week running, and he'd come sometimes two afternoons together to ask her to go to walk somewhere; and even if she was in the middle of trying on she'd drop everything and run, looking as pleased as could be."

"Any one would look pleased to escape a trying on."

"Oh, you can make light of it. But once when I said I guessed I'd be fitting a wedding dress soon, she colored right up, and said she, 'Oh, we're only friends.'"

"That's nothing."

"Perhaps it was nothing when Mary Timpkins began to fade the very minute she heard Hiram Bradstreet was engaged to a girl he met on the steamer last summer. Why did he go to Europe anyway?"

"Probably because Mary Timpkins wouldn't marry him; for truly, Miss Chatterwits, I'm going to agree with Dr. Jones that she died of typhoid fever."

"Maybe,—after she'd run herself down worrying about Hiram Bradstreet."

"Oh, no. Hiram Bradstreet, worrying about her, fled to Europe in despair, and let his heart be caught in the rebound by that girl on the steamer."

This sensible conclusion, though at the time uttered half in fun, was characteristic of Kate. She was loath to believe that a well balanced girl could die of love. Love in the abstract troubled her as little as love in the concrete. She seldom indulged in sentimental thoughts, much less in sentimental conversation.

In their distaste for sentimentality, Ernest and Kate met on common ground; and even Mrs. Digby, though at one time disposed to discountenance their intimacy, at length decided there was no danger of her somewhat self-willed daughter's falling in love with her penniless cousin. In time, however, as Ernest boy-like, found his pleasure more and more in things outside the house, Miss Theodora and Kate drew nearer together.

The elder woman had always had a certain pleasure in acting as friend and helper to a little circle of poor people, of whom there were so many on the narrow streets descending toward the north. These were not the poor whites to whom Miss Theodora's mother had been a Lady Bountiful, but "darkies," as Diantha called them, of mysterious origin and of still more mysterious habits. They were crowded together in queer-smelling houses, in narrow lanes and alleys, or in the upper stories over shops in the squalid main thoroughfares of the district which some people still call "Nigger Hill."

"It doesn't seem a bit like Boston," Kate would say, clinging to Miss Theodora's arm while they went in and out of the rickety dwellings, where stout black women, with heads swathed in bandannas, or shoeless children in ragged clothes saluted them respectfully. Although Miss Theodora knew nothing of modern scientific charities, she tried to make reform and reward go hand in hand.

"I feel," she said occasionally, "as if I oughtn't to help Beverly Brown's family when I know the man is drinking; but I can't bear to see those children without shoes, or let Araminta suffer for food with that baby to care for."

"Of course you can't," Kate would answer, emphatically: "and Moses and Aaron Brown are the very cunningest twins any one could imagine, even if they are bow-legged." And then Kate, opening her little silk bag, would display within a collection of oranges, sticks of candy, and even painted wooden toys which she had bought on her way through Charles Street. "Come, Cousin Theodora," she would cry, "put on your hat and coat, and let us go down and see the twins, and let me carry this basket."

Or again: "There isn't any harm in my just getting some of this bright calico for aprons for Araminta, and you don't care if I buy mittens for the twins," she would say entreatingly; for Miss Theodora, always careful of money herself, often had to restrain her young cousin's expenditures, at least in the matter of clothes. As regarded food, it was different.

When Kate, stopping in front of one of the little provision shops, with their fly-specked windows, through which was dimly seen an array of wilted vegetables and doubtful-looking meats, decided to order a dinner for this one or that of her proteges, Miss Theodora had not the heart to hinder. But I will do her the credit to say that she never encouraged the giving of dinners to those whose need was caused by vice. In the future of the dark-skinned boys and girls Miss Theodora took a great interest. She realized that in the public schools they had their opportunity; and she saw with regret that not all who were educated made the best use of their education. Restless, unwilling to take the kind of work which alone was likely to fall to their lot, some of the young girls, educated or uneducated, drifted into ways which the older women of their race spoke of with the strongest disapprobation.

"They's a wuthless lot, the hull of them, and I wouldn't try to do nothing for them if I was you," Diantha often exclaimed, when Miss Theodora admitted how sorely the problem of these dusky people pressed upon her. Yet Diantha herself was almost certain to call her mistress' attention to the next case of need on which she herself stumbled in her wanderings among her people. Or, as likely as not, when Miss Theodora was sought out by some poor creature in real or pretended misery, the present emergency would overthrow all theories.

In one of the hill streets there was a home for colored old women, holding not a large number of inmates, but still holding, as Kate expressed it, "a very contented crowd"—much more contented, indeed, than many of the dwellers in the "Old Ladies' Home," the refuge for white women who had seen better days.

"I went to see old Mrs. Smith," said Kate one day, speaking of an inmate of the latter institution. "She was sitting with her blind drawn, looking as glum as could be. 'Why don't you raise the curtain?' I asked. 'You have such a beautiful view of the river.' 'Oh, yes,' she said, 'beautiful for anybody who likes rivers.' Do you know she'd rather sit moping in a corner all day than try to get some pleasure out of the lovely view across the river from her window! She enjoys being miserable now, just because she has seen 'better days.'"

"There are a great many people like her in the world," smiled Miss Theodora.

"Well, I prefer old Auntie Jane up in the colored women's home. She says that she never was as well off as she has been since she came to the home. She has a little window box with a small geranium and some white elysium in blossom; and she says that it reminds her of the old plantation where she grew up. She can see nothing from her window but houses across the narrow street; but she is a great deal happier than Mrs. Smith with all her view."

IX.

When Kate accompanied her on her round of visits, Miss Theodora did not penetrate far into the little lanes that zigzagged off from Phillips Street. She kept more to the main road, and seldom took the young girl upstairs, or down into the dingy basements. For in her mind's eye a large place was occupied by Mrs. Stuart Digby, who at any time might end Kate's visiting among the poor. Kate, therefore, had to content herself with restricted vistas of fascinating alleys with wooden houses sloping toward each other at a curious angle, with little balconies of strangely southern appearance; and she sighed that she could not wander within them. She looked longingly, too, at the little church whenever they passed it; for Ben, who, rather for entertainment than edification, went there occasionally to the evening prayer meetings, had repeated many amusing speeches made by the colored brothers.

Still, if she could not do all that she wished to, she made the most of what came in her way. She loved to notice the difference between the kinds of things sold in Phillips Street shops and in those of the more pretentious thoroughfare to the north, through which the horse-cars ran to Cambridge. In the former case, eatables of all kinds were conspicuous,—not only meat and vegetables, and especially sausages, but corn for popping and molasses candy and spruce gum, all heterogeneously displayed in the small window of one little shop. On Cambridge Street, oyster saloons and bar-rooms and pawn-shops, before which hung a great variety of old garments on hooks, jostled against each other, strangely contrasting with numerous cake-shops, which offered to the passer-by a great variety of unwholesome comestibles. From the little windows of the dwelling rooms above the shops, frowsy and unkempt women looked down on the street below, and Miss Theodora usually drew Kate quickly along, as occasionally they traversed it for a short distance on their way to the hospital.

In the same neighborhood was a short street of unsavory reputation, partly on account of a murder committed within its limits many years before, and partly because it held the city morgue. Hardly realizing where she was, Miss Theodora one day was picking her way along the slippery sidewalk, with Kate closely following, when something dark crossed their path. They stopped to make way for it. It was a grim, indefinite something, which two men had lifted from a wagon to carry into a neighboring building—a something whose resemblance to a human body was not concealed by the dark green cloth covering it. Then they knew that they were near the morgue; and while the elder woman was regretting that she had brought Kate with her, she heard a voice speak her name, and, turning, saw Ben Bruce but a few steps behind.

"Isn't it late for you ladies to be in this part of the city?" he exclaimed as he overtook them, and they realized that it was almost dusk.

"We are not timid," smiled Miss Theodora; "but we shall be glad of your company, Ben. We stayed longer than we meant to stay at the hospital, and I know that I ought not to have kept Kate so late."

"I wasn't thinking so much of the time as the place," said Ben. "Some way I do not like to have you and Miss Kate wandering about in these dirty streets—at least alone."

"I suppose you think that we would be better off with any slip of a boy. But truly we do not need a protector, although we shall be very glad of your company home."

"I do not mean safety exactly," answered Ben; "but it does not seem to me—well, appropriate for you and Miss Kate to go around into all kinds of dirty houses," and he glanced at Kate's pretty gown and fur-trimmed coat.

"Oh, it does not hurt my clothes at all," Kate answered, as he glanced at her dress. "I have only my oldest clothes on to-day, and I've been in a very clean place, too. I'm sure nothing could be cleaner than the hospital."

"Well, you can turn it into fun, but you know what I mean," said Ben. For like many another young man, he felt that tenderly bred women should be kept ignorant of the unsightly parts of a city. Thus as they went up the hill Ben and Kate kept up their merry banter, until they reached Miss Theodora's door.

"Come in to tea with us. Ernest will be glad to see you," said the elder woman. But Ben shook his head.

"Thank you very much, but they expect me home."

Nevertheless, he went inside for a little while, and sat before the open fire in the little sitting-room,—Miss Theodora allowed herself this one extravagance,—and heard Kate humorously relate the adventures of the afternoon.

"I have brought," she said, "a bottle of old Mrs. Slawson's bitters. I feel guilty in not having any of the many diseases they are warranted to cure, but I shall give the bottle to our cook, who is always complaining, and keeps a dozen bottles sitting on the kitchen mantelpiece. You know about Mrs. Slawson, don't you, Ben?"

"Oh, she's the old person who made so much money out of a patent medicine."

"Yes, and then married a 'light-skinned darky,' as she called him, who ran away with it all. It is great fun to hear her tell of the large number of people she has cured. Why, the greatest ladies in Boston, she says, used to drive up in their carriages to patronize her."

"Why doesn't she keep up her business now?"

"Well, she is too old to continue it herself, and she does not wish any one else to have her formulas. She has just enough money to live on, and once in a while she has a few bottles put up to give away to her friends. My visits to her are purely social, not charitable, and this is my reward"—and Kate displayed a clumsy package in yellow wrappings.

Then Ernest came in—now a tall lad looking younger than Kate, though a year older—and welcomed Ben, and begged him to spend the evening. But Ben, resolute, though reluctant to leave the pleasant group clustered around Miss Theodora's fire, hurried off just as the clock struck six.

X.

His father opened the door for him when he reached home,—his father in his shirt sleeves, encircled with an odor of tobacco. With an eye keener than usual, the boy noted particularly, as if seen for the first time, things to which he had been accustomed all his life—the well-worn oil-cloth on the hall, the kerosene lamp flaring dismally in its bracket. How different it all was from the refinement of Miss Theodora's home,—for although Miss Theodora's carpets were worn and even threadbare, and, except in the hall, she was as sparing of gas as Mr. Bruce himself, the odor of cooking never escaped from Diantha's domain. The indefinable between comfort and discomfort made the Bruce's economy very unlike that practised by Miss Theodora.

"You are late," said Mrs. Bruce querulously as Ben entered the dining-room.

"Am I? I met Miss Theodora and walked home with them."

"Yes, and went into the house with them, I dare say!" interrupted Mr. Bruce.

"Why not?" asked Ben.

"You always seem taken up with those people. I don't see how you can be, all so patronizing as they are."

"Patronizing!" repeated Ben to himself. "Miss Theodora patronizing!" How far from the truth this seemed!

"You do not mean Miss Theodora?"

"Why not Miss Theodora? She walks along the street, never looking to the right or left, as if she were quite too good to speak to ordinary people."

"But she is terribly near-sighted. She does not see people unless they are right in front of her."

"I guess she could see well enough if she tried. I've noticed her cross the street almost on a run to speak to some little black boy. She's ready enough to take up with people like that; and she's able to see you. Ben,—but—"

Ben flushed a little. He did not like being put on a level with Miss Theodora's black proteges. Nor was this all. Mr. Bruce, taking up his wife's words, continued:

"Yes, it's just as your mother says; all those people think themselves a great way above the rest of us that are just as good as they are. I don't blame Miss Theodora so much, for her father really was a great man. But those Digbys! Who are they? Why, Mrs. Stuart Digby's grandfather, they say, was a tailor in New York when my grandfather was one of General Washington's staff officers. We didn't have to buy that sword in our parlor second-hand in a Cornhill shop, where some people get their family relics."

"Not the Digbys or Miss Theodora."

"About the Digbys I'm not so sure. Miss Theodora ought to have some good things, if they didn't sell off everything when they went into that little house." As a matter of fact, the kin of Mr. Bruce were so few that Ben could not understand how he could generalize about them. Yet, "my family" could not have figured more largely in his conversation, had he been chieftain of a Scottish clan.

So rapid was Mr. Bruce's flow of language, that Ben and his mother usually kept quiet when he was well launched on any subject. Often, indeed, Ben let his thoughts wander far away until recalled to himself by some direct question.

It was Kate, Kate alone, whom his father's words touched. For the moment he felt that he might be perfectly happy could he see with the bodily eye as small a gulf between the Digby family and his own as his father presented to his mental vision. Seated before Miss Theodora's hospitable fire, watching the color deepen on Kate's sensitive cheeks as the light flickered across them, he forgot everything but her. In Ralph's presence, however, he realized that his world and the Digbys' were very far apart, and that his own awkwardness and roughness must be felt all too strongly by Kate. Then for weeks he would avoid Miss Theodora's house when Kate was there, or would run in for only a moment with Ernest to inspect some wonderful invention by the latter then in process of development in the basement workroom. Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Digby he seldom thought of. But how to bridge the gulf between himself and Kate!

The story of his own good ancestry began to have new interest for him. He looked more closely at his little sisters. They had the delicacy of feature which their mother still retained. They had the wax-like color which she had long ago lost. He glanced around the shabby room and felt rebellious. Should they be restricted to the same narrow life as their mother's? Was poverty to keep them down as it kept down so many of their neighbors? No, no! he would devote himself to building up a fortune, and then—even here Kate began to be curiously mixed up with his musings, and then he was called back to earth by his mother's voice.

The claim of his ancestors had never made a very strong impression on Ben. He had classed them with certain other harmless pretences of his mother's, like making a rug in the parlor cover an unmendable hole in the carpet, or putting lace curtains in the front windows of an upper room which in other respects was meagerly furnished. But now his point of view had begun to change, and he could even imagine himself in time bowing to the fetich of family.

"What's the matter, Polly?" he said one afternoon to his youngest sister, whom he found sitting on the doorstep by herself with the traces of tears on her face.

"Oh, Ada Green says that my new winter dress is only an old one because it's made out of an old one of mother's; and," incoherently, "she had ice-cream for dinner—and why can't we?"

"Who, mother?" laughed Ben.

"No, you know who I mean, Ada—they have ice-cream every Saturday, and she always comes out and tells me, and asks me what day we have ice-cream, and I have to say 'Never.'"