[“DO YOU KNOW, IT WAS LIKE A PIRATE’S SHIP”]

LAUGHING LAST

BY

JANE ABBOTT

AUTHOR OF

HIGHACRES, KEINETH, RED ROBIN, Etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY

E. CORINNE PAULI

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

TO

FRANCES STANTON SMITH

WHOSE LOYAL INTEREST IN MY WORK IS AN

UNFAILING HELP TO ME, I AFFECTIONATELY

DEDICATE THIS BOOK

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[“Do You Know, It was Like a Pirate’s Ship”]

[Her Eyes Fell Upon an Entry on Another Page]

[Captain Davies Drew a Letter from His Pocket and Tapped It with His Finger]

[She Spied Approaching Figures—Trude and Mr. Dugald, Walking Slowly]

LAUGHING LAST

CHAPTER I
THE EGG

“I beg your pardon, but it’s my turn to have the Egg!”

Three pairs of eyes swept to the sunny window seat from which vantage-ground Sidney Romley had thrown her protest. Three mouths gaped.

“Yours—”

“Why, Sid—”

“Fifteen-year-olders don’t have turns!” laughed Victoria Romley, who was nineteen and very grown up.

Though inwardly Sidney writhed, outwardly she maintained a calm firmness. The better to impress her point she uncurled herself from the cushions and straightened to her fullest height.

“It’s because I am fifteen that I am claiming my rights,” she answered, carefully ignoring Vicky’s laughing eyes. “Each one of you has had the Egg twice and I’ve never had a cent of it—”

“Sid, you forget I bought a rug when it was my last turn and you enjoy that as much as I do,” broke in her oldest sister.

Sidney waved her hand impatiently. She had rehearsed this scene in the privacy of her attic retreat and she could not be deflected by mention of rugs and things. She must keep to the heart of the issue.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” she continued, loftily. “We’re always fair with one another and give and take and all that, and I think it’d be a blot on our honor if you refused me my lawful turn at the Egg. I’m willing to overlook each one of you having it twice.”

“That’s kind of you. What would you do with it, anyway, kid?” interrupted Vicky, quite unimpressed by her sister’s seriousness. She let a chuckle in her voice denote how amused she was.

Sidney flashed a withering look in Vicky’s direction.

“I wouldn’t spend it all on one party that’s over in a minute and nothing to show for it!” she retorted. Then: “And what I’d do with it is my own affair!” She swallowed to control a sob that rose in her throat.

“Tut! Tut!” breathed the tormenting Vicky.

“Why, Sid, dear!” cried Trude, astonished. She put a tray of dishes that she was carrying to the kitchen down upon the old sideboard and turned to face Sid. At the tone of her voice Sidney flew to her and flung her arms about her.

“I don’t care—I don’t care! You can laugh at me but I’m sick of being different. I—I want to do things like—other girls do. H-have fun—”

Over her head Trude’s eyes implored the others to be gentle. She herself was greatly disturbed. Even Vicky grew sober. In a twinkling this lanky, pigtailed little sister seemed to have become an individual with whom they must reckon. They had never suspected but that she was as contented with her happy-go-lucky way as any petted kitten.

Isolde, the oldest sister, frowned perplexedly.

“Sidney, stop crying and tell us what you want. As far as fun is concerned I don’t think you have any complaint. Certainly you do not have anything to worry about!” Isolde’s tone conveyed that she did.

“If it’s just the Egg that’s bothering you, why, take it!” cried Vicky, magnanimously.

Only Trude sensed that the cause of Sidney’s rebellion lay deeper than any desire for fun. She was not unaware of certain dissatisfactions that smoldered in her own breast. The knowledge of them helped her to understand Sidney’s mood. She patted the girl’s head sympathetically.

“I guess we haven’t realized you’re growing up, Sid,” she laughed softly. “Now brace up and tell us what’s wrong with everything.”

Trude’s quiet words poured balm on Sidney’s soul. At last—at last these three sisters realized she was fifteen. It hadn’t been the Egg itself she had wanted—it had been to have them reckon her in on their absurd family cogitations. She drew the sleeve of her blouse across her eyes and faced them.

“I want to go somewhere, to live somewhere where I won’t be Joseph Romley’s daughter! I want to wear clothes like the other girls and go to a boarding school and never set eyes on a book of poetry. I want adventure and to do exciting things. I want—”

Isolde stemmed the outpour with a shocked rebuke.

“Sid, I don’t think you realize how disrespectful what you are saying is to our father’s memory! He has left us something that is far greater than wealth. A great many girls would gladly change places with you and enjoy being the daughter of a poet—”

“Oh, tush!” Quite unexpectedly Sidney found an ally in Vicky. “Issy, you’ve acted your part so often, poor dear, that you really think we are blessed by the gods in having been born to a poet. And poor as church mice! I wish someone would change places with me long enough for me to eat a few meals without hearing you and Trude talk about how much flour costs and how we’re going to pay the milk bill. Yes, a fine heritage! Poor Dad, he couldn’t help being a poet, but I’ll bet he wishes now he’d been a plasterer or something like that—for our sakes, of course. I’m not kicking, I’m as game as you are, and I’m willing to carry on about Dad’s memory and all that—it’s the least we can do in return for what the League’s done for us, but just among ourselves we might enjoy the emotion of sighing for the things other girls do and have, mightn’t we?”

Sidney had certainly started something! The very atmosphere of the familiar room in which they were assembled seemed charged with strange currents. Never had any family council taken such a tone. Sidney thrilled to the knowledge that she was now a vital part of it. Her eyes, so recently wet, brightened and her cheeks flushed. So interested was she in what Issy would answer to Vick that she ignored the opening Vick had made for her.

But it was Trude who answered Vicky—Trude, the peaceful.

“Come! Come! First thing we know we’ll actually be feeling sorry for ourselves! I sometimes get awfully tired living up to Dad’s greatness, but I don’t think that’s being disrespectful to his memory. I don’t suppose there are any girls, even rich ones, who don’t sigh for something they haven’t. But just to stiffen our spines let’s sum up our assets. We’re not quite as poor as church mice; we have this old house that isn’t half bad, even if the roof does leak, and the government bonds and the royalties and living the way we had to live with Dad taught us to have fun among ourselves which is something! We’re not dependent upon outsiders for that. You, Issy, have your personality which will get you anywhere you want to go. And Vick’s better dressed on nothing than any girl in Middletown. We older girls do have a little more than Sid, so I vote she has the Egg this time all to herself to do exactly as she pleases with it—go ’round the world in search of adventure or any old thing. How’s that, family?”

The tension that had held the little circle broke under Trude’s practical cheeriness. Isolde smiled. Vick liked being told she looked well-dressed, she worked hard enough to merit that distinction. Sid had the promise of the Egg, which, be it known, was the royalty accruing each year from a collection of whimsical verse entitled “Goosefeathers” and which these absurd daughters of a great but improvident man set aside from the other royalties to be spent prodigally by each in turn.

“I’m quite willing,” Isolde conceded. “I was going to suggest that we agree to use it this time to fix the roof where it leaks but if Sid’s heart is set on it—”

“It would have been my turn—that is not counting Sid,” Vick reminded them, “and I’d have used it having that fur coat Godmother Jocelyn sent me made over. But let the roof leak and the coat go—little Sid must have her fling! I hope you’re happy now, kid. What will you really do with all that money?”

At no time had Sidney definitely considered such a question. Her point won she found herself embarrassed by victory. She evaded a direct answer.

“I won’t tell, now!”

“Oh—ho, mysterious! Well, there won’t be so much that you’ll hurt yourself in your youthful extravagance. Now that this momentous affaire de famille is settled, what are you girls going to do this morning?”

“As soon as these dishes are out of the way I’m going to trim that vine on the front wall. It’s disgustingly scraggly.”

“Oh, Trude—you can’t! You forget—it’s Saturday!”

Trude groaned. Vicky laughed naughtily. Saturday—that was the day of the week which the Middletown Branch of the League of American Poets kept for the privilege of taking visitors to the home of Joseph Romley, the poet. In a little while they would begin to come, in twos and threes and larger groups. First they’d stand outside and look at the old house from every angle. They would say to the strangers who were visiting the shrine for the first time: “No, the house wasn’t in his family but Joseph Romley made it peculiarly his; it’s as though his ancestors had lived there for generations—nothing has been changed—that west room with the bay window was his study—yes, his desk is there and his pencils and pens—just as he left them—even his old house jacket—of course we can go in—our League paid off the mortgage as a memorial and we have Saturday as a visiting day—there are four girls, most interesting types, but Isolde, the oldest, is the only one of them who is at all like the great poet—”

They would come in slowly, reverently. Isolde, in a straight smock of some vivid color, with a fillet about the cloudy hair that framed her thin face like a curtain, would meet them at the door of the study. She would shake hands with them and answer their awkward questions in her slow drawl which always ended in a minor note. They would look at Isolde much more closely than at the desk and the pens and pencils and the old swivel chair and the faded cushion. On their way out they’d peep inquisitively into the front room with its long windows, bared to the light and the floor looking dustier for the new rug, and the two faded, deep chairs near the old piano. They would see the dust and the bareness but they wouldn’t know how gloriously, at sunset time, the flame of the sky lighted every corner of the spacious room or what jolly fires could crackle on the deep hearth or what fun it was to cuddle in the old chairs—they could hold four—while Vicky’s clever fingers raced over the cracked ivory keys in her improvisations that sometimes set them roaring with laughter and sometimes brought mist to their eyes. The intruders would find some way to look into the dining room which for the girls was living room and sewing room, too, and they’d say: “How quaint everything is! These old houses have so much atmosphere;” when in their hearts they’d be thinking about the shabbiness of everything and they’d be rejoicing that their fathers and husbands were not poets! Vicky claimed to have heard one sacrilegious young creature, plainly on a honeymoon, exclaim: “I’m glad I’m not a poet’s daughter and have to live in that old sepulcher! Give me obscurity in a steam-heated three bathroom apartment, any day!”

Of course there could be no trimming the vines and Trude’s fingers itched for the task—not so much that she minded the unkempt growth as that she longed to be active out-of-doors. She had planned to plant another row of beans, too. The girls wouldn’t poke fun at her when they ate fresh vegetables right out of a garden all of their own! But the ladies of the League must not find her, earth-stained and disheveled, in the garden on Saturday!

“I’ll have to change my dress. I forgot it was Saturday when I put this old thing on.”

“Vick, dear, you haven’t taken your sketching things from Dad’s desk,” admonished Isolde a little frightenedly and Vicky jumped with a low whistle. “Good gracious! What if a High Lady Leaguer found my truck on that sacred shrine!” She rushed off to the study.

Trude having gone kitchenward with her dishes, Isolde and Sidney faced one another. Sidney grew awkwardly aware of a constraint in her sister’s manner. She was regarding her with a curious hardness in her grave eyes.

“You said you were sick of being different!” Isolde made Sidney’s words sound childish. “Well—I don’t know just how you can escape it—any more than the rest of us can. Look at me—look at Trude—” Then she shut her lips abruptly over what she had started to say. “What had you planned to do this morning, Sid?”

“I told Nancy Stevens I’d go swimming with her though I don’t much care whether I go or not.”

“Well—as long as you have claimed a share in our little scheme of life, kitten—perhaps you’d better receive the League visitors this morning. I have some letters to write and I want to dye that old silk. Don’t forget to enter the date in the register!”

With which astounding command Isolde walked slowly out of the room leaving Sidney with a baffled sense of—in spite of the promise of the Egg—having been robbed of something.

CHAPTER II
REBELLION

Not the least of the dissatisfactions that had grown in Sidney’s breast was belonging to an Estate.

Since the death of Joseph Romley four years earlier, the royalties from his published verse and the government bonds and the oil stock, that had never paid any dividend but might any year, and the four young daughters were managed by two trustees who had been college friends of the poet and who, even in his lifetime, had managed what of his affairs had had any managing. One was a banker and one was a lawyer and they lived in New York, making only rare visits to Middletown. They considered it far better for Isolde and Trude to visit them twice a year and to such an arrangement both older girls were quite agreeable.

But Sidney, knowing the Trustees only as two brusque busy men who talked rapidly and called her “mouse” and “youngster” and brought her childish presents and huge boxes of candy which never contained her favorite chocolate alligators, found them embarrassingly lacking in the dramatic qualities a “guardian,” to be of any value to a girl, should possess. Nor did they ever bother their heads in the least as to what she did or didn’t do! In fact no one did. There seemed to be only one law that controlled her and everything in the big old house—what one could afford to do! She disliked the word.

She resented, too, the Middletown Branch of the League of American Poets. This was a band of women and a scattering of men who had pledged to foster the art of verse-making; a few of them really wrote poetry, a few more understood it, the greater number belonged to the League as Associates. Before Joseph Romley’s death Sidney had thought them only very funny because her father and Trude and Isolde thought them funny. There had been then a great timidity in their approach. They had seemed to tremble in their adoring gratitude for a hastily scrawled autograph; they had sometimes knocked at the back door and with deep apologies asked if they might slip in very quietly and take a time exposure of THE desk where Joseph Romley worked. They brought senseless gifts which they left unobtrusively on the piano or the hall rack. They dragged their own daughters to the old house for awkwardly formal calls upon Isolde and Trude. But after her father’s death even Sidney realized that the League ladies were different. They were not shy any more, they swooped down upon the little household and cleaned and baked and sewed and “deared” the four girls, actually almost living in the house. Isolde and Trude had made no protest and had gone around with troubled faces and had talked far into the nights in the bed which they shared. Then one morning at breakfast Isolde had announced: “The League has paid the mortgage on this house so that we can keep our home here. It is very good of them—I’m sure I don’t know where we could have gone. We must show them how grateful we are.” And Sidney had come to know, by example and the rebukes cast her way by Isolde, that “showing them” meant living, not as they might want to live—but as the League expected the four daughters of a great poet to live. That was the price for the mortgage. The League wanted to say possessively: “This is Joseph Romley’s second daughter” or “That is our lamb who was only ten months old when the poor mother died. I am sure the great man would not have known what to do if it had not been for old Huldah Mueller who stayed on and took care of the house and the children for him. He wrote a sonnet to Huldah once. It was worth a month’s wages to the woman—” And the League had bought its right to that possessive tone. Sidney, when Isolde could not see, indulged in naughty faces behind stout Mrs. Milliken’s back and confided to her chum, Nancy Stevens, the story of how Dad had once, in a rage of impatience, called down to the adoring Mrs. Milliken, waiting in the hall for an autograph: “Madam, if you don’t go off at once and leave me alone I’ll come down to you in my pajamas! I tell you I’ve gone to bed.” Oh, Mrs. Milliken had fled then!

Sidney had to go to Miss Downs’ stupid private day school when she would have preferred the Middletown High (as long as she could not go away to a boarding school), simply because Miss Downs was one of the directors of the League and gave her her tuition as a scholarship.

But Sidney had never thought—until Isolde had spoken so strangely a moment before—that her sisters minded either the Trustees or the League or having to be “different.” Isolde naturally was everything the League wanted her to be, with her grave eyes and her cloudy hair with the becoming fillets and her drawling voice and her clever smocks. Trude always wanted to oblige everyone anyway, and Vicky was so pretty that it didn’t make any difference what she did. Sidney had considered that she was alone in her rebellion, a rebellion that had flamed in her outburst of the morning: “I’m sick of being different!”

Isolde’s words of a moment before, with their hard hint of some portentous meaning, started a train of thought now in Sidney’s mind that drove away all joy in the promise of the next Egg, that made her even forget her dislike of the duty Isolde had so unexpectedly put upon her. Isolde had said distinctly: “You can’t get away from it—look at me—look at Trude!” And it had sounded queer, bitter, as though somewhere down deep in her Isolde nursed an unhappy feeling about something. Sidney pondered, lingering in the deserted dining room. Maybe, after all, Isolde did not like being the daughter of a poet and her smocks and her fillets and all the luncheons and teas to which she had to go and the speeches of appreciation she had to make. And what did Trude dislike? She always seemed happy but maybe she wanted something. Sidney remembered once hearing Trude cry terribly hard in the study. She and Dad had been talking at dinner about college. They had come to the door of the study and Dad had said: “It can’t be done, sonny.” That’s what Dad had always called Trude because she was the boy of the family. Trude had come out with her face all shiny with tears and her father had stood on the threshold of the door with his hair rumpled and his nose twitching the way it did when something bothered him. That was probably it. Trude had wanted college. That seemed silly to Sidney who hated lessons, at least the kind Miss Downs gave, but it was too bad to have good old Trude, who was such a peach, want anything.

Isolde hadn’t included Vicky, but then Vicky couldn’t want anything. She wasn’t afraid to fly in the faces of the Trustees and the whole League and they wouldn’t mind if she did. She was as clever as she was pretty. She could take the old dresses which Mrs. Custer and Mrs. White, the Trustees’ wives, and Mrs. Deering whom Isolde had visited in Chicago, and Godmother Jocelyn sent every now and then and make the stunningest new dresses. And once an artist from New York had painted her portrait and exhibited it in Paris and had won a medal for it. The League ladies approved of that and always told of it.

Vicky had whole processions of beaux who came and crowded in the chairs in the front room or sat on the broad window sills of the open windows smoking while she talked to them or played for them. Isolde’s few beaux were not noisy and jolly like Vick’s—they all looked as though the League might have picked them out from some assortment. They usually read to Isolde verses of their own or made her read them some of Dad’s. Maybe, Sidney’s thoughts shot out at a new angle—maybe Isolde did not like beaux who were poets, liked Vick’s kind of men better.

Trude had only one beau and Sidney had never seen him because Trude had had him when she was visiting Aunt Edith White. Trude and Isolde had whispered a great deal about him and Trude had let Isolde read his letters. Then a letter had come that had made Trude look all queer and white and Isolde, after she had read it, had gone to Trude and put her arms around her neck and Isolde only did a thing like that when something dreadful happened. Sidney had hoped that she might find the letter lying around somewhere so carelessly that she could be pardoned for reading it, but though she had looked everywhere she had never found it. She had had to piece together Trude’s romance from the fabric of her agile imagination.

Sidney had often tried to make herself hate the old house. Though it was a jolly, rambly place it was so very down-at-the heels and the light that poured in through the windows made things look even barer and shabbier. Nancy Stevens lived in one of the new bungalows near the school and it was beautiful with shiny furniture and rugs that felt like woolly bed slippers under one’s tread and two pairs of curtains at each window and Nancy’s own room was all pink even to the ruffled stuff hung over her bed like a tent. But Sidney had once heard Mrs. Milliken say to Isolde: “I hope, dear girl, that you will not be tempted to change this fine old house in any way—to leave it just as your father lived in it is the greatest tribute we can pay to his memory.” After that Sidney knew there was no use hinting for even one pair of curtains. But her sisters had seemed quite contented.

There had been a disturbing ring of finality to Isolde’s, “You can’t get away from it,” that seemed almost to slap Sidney in the face. Would they always—at least she and Isolde and Trude, Vick would manage to escape someway—be bound down there in the “quaint” bare house with the Trustees sending their skimpy allowances and long letters of advice and the ladies of the League of Poets coming and going and owning them body and soul? What was to prevent such a fate? They didn’t have money enough to just say—“Dear ladies, take the old house and the desk and the pens and pencils and the old coat—they’re yours—” and run away and do what they pleased; probably a whole dozen of Eggs would not get them anywhere!

“What are you doing mooning there in the window?” cried Vick from the open door. Her arms were filled with a litter of boxes and old portfolios. “Where’s Isolde? I want her to know I dusted things in the study.”

“Isolde’s writing letters. Then she’s going to dye something.”

“On Saturday!”

“Yes. I’m going to receive the League visitors today.”

“You!” Victoria went off into such a peal of laughter that she had to lean against the door frame. “Oh—how funny! What’s ever in the air today.”

“I don’t know why it’s so funny. I’m—”

“Fifteen. So you are. But bless me, child, the Leaguers will never accept you in a middy blouse and pigtails. What’s Isolde thinking of? And you look much too plump! Now—” But Sidney stalked haughtily past her tormenter into the hall.

Vick’s bantering, however, had stung her. The old clock on the stair landing chiming out the approaching hour of the League visitors warned Sidney that there was not time to change her middy with its faded collar; nor to wind the despised pigtails, around her head in the fashion Mrs. Milliken called “So beautifully quaint.” Anyway, if there were all the time in the world she would not do it. She’d begin right now being her own self and not something the League wanted her to be because she was a poet’s daughter! Isolde and Trude might yield weakly to their fate but she would be strong. Perhaps, some day, she would rescue them—even Vicky!

But as an unmistakable wave of chattering from without struck her ear her fine defiance deserted her. She ran to the door and peeped through one of the narrow windows that framed the door on either side.

At the gate stood Mrs. Milliken and a strange woman. Behind them, in twos, stretched a long queue of girls—girls of about her own age. They wore trim serge dresses with white collars, all alike. They carried notebooks in their hands. They leaned toward one another, whispering, giggling.

Sidney’s heart gave a tremendous bound. It was most certainly a boarding school! It was the nearest she had ever been to one! She forgot her middy and the hated pigtails, and the dread of the League. She threw open the door. Mrs. Milliken’s voice came to her: “He died on April tenth, Nineteen eighteen. He had just written that sonnet to the West Wind. You know it I am sure. He bought this house when he came to Middletown but he made it his as though he’d lived in it all his life—we have left it exactly as it was when he was with us—our committee——”

They came walking slowly toward the house, Mrs. Milliken and the strange woman with reverent mien, the wriggling queue still whispering and giggling.

CHAPTER III
POLA LIFTS A CURTAIN

“Where is Isolde?” Mrs. Milliken whispered between her “Note the gracious proportions of this hall” and “Joseph Romley would never allow himself to be crowded with possessions.”

“She’s—she’s—” Sidney had a sudden instinct to protect Isolde. “She has—a headache.”

“I am so sorry that I cannot introduce you to Isolde Romley—the poet’s oldest daughter,” Mrs. Milliken pitched her voice so that it might reach even to the girls crowding into the front door. “She is a most interesting and delightful and unusual young lady. She was always closely associated with her gifted father and we feel that she is growing to be very like him. This—” smiling affectionately at Sidney and allowing a suggestion of apology to creep into her tone, “This is just our little Sidney, the poet’s baby-girl. Sidney, lamb, this is Miss Byers of Grace Hall, a boarding school for young ladies and these are her precious charges. They are making a pilgrimage to our beloved shrine—” Sidney, too familiar with Mrs. Milliken’s flowery phrases to be embarrassed by them, faced a little frightenedly the eyes that stared curiously at her from above the spotless collars.

“We will go right into the study,” Mrs. Milliken advised Miss Byers. “We can take the girls in in little groups. As poor Isolde is not here I will tell them some of the precious and personal anecdotes of the great poet. You know we, in Middletown—especially of the League—feel very privileged to have lived so close to him—”

Miss Byers briskly marshalled the first eight girls into the small study. The others broke file and crowded into the front room and on to the stairs, some even spilled over into the dining room. They paid not the slightest attention to anything about them. Assured that Miss Byers was out of hearing they burst into excited chatter and laughter. Except for one or two who smiled shyly at her they did not even notice Sidney.

Sidney, relieved that Mrs. Milliken did not expect her to recite the “precious and personal anecdotes,” drew back into a corner from where she could enjoy to its fullest measure the delight of such close propinquity to real boarding-school girls. Their talk, broken by smothered shrieks of laughter, rang like sweetest music to her. They seemed so jolly. Their blue serges and white collars were so stylish. She wondered where they all came from and whether they had “scrapes” at Grace Hall.

The first eight girls filed back into the hall from the study and Miss Byers motioned eight more to enter. There was a general stirring, then the chatter swelled again. Presently a girl slipped into Sidney’s corner and dropped down upon a chair.

“Isn’t this the stupidest bore!” she groaned. Then looking at Sidney, she gasped and laughed. “Say—I beg your pardon. I thought you were one of the girls. And you’re—you’re—the poet’s daughter, aren’t you?” The slanting dove-gray eyes above the white collar actually softened with sympathy.

Sidney thought this young creature the very prettiest girl—next to Vicky—she had ever seen. She did not mind her pity. The stranger had taken her for “one of the girls” and Sidney would have forgiven her anything for that!

“I suppose it is a bore. Isn’t it fun, though, just going places?”

The boarding school girl stared. “Oh, we go so much. There isn’t a big gun anywhere within a radius of five hundred miles that we don’t have to visit. We get autographs and listen to speeches and make notes about graves and look at pictures. Most of the girls get a kick out of it slipping in some gore behind Byers’ back—but I don’t. I travel so much with my family that nothing seems awfully exciting now.”

Sidney wished she’d say that over again—it sounded so unbelievable. And the girl couldn’t be any older than she was. She was conscious that the slanting eyes were regarding her closely.

“Do you like living here and having a lot of people tramp all over your house and stare at you and say things about you and poke at your father’s things?”

It was plain magic the way this stranger put her finger directly upon the sore spot.

“No, I don’t!” vehemently.

“I’d hate it, too. And I suppose you always have to act like a poet’s daughter, don’t you? Do you have to write poetry yourself?”

“No, I loathe poetry!”

“But I’ll bet you don’t dare say so when that Dame in there can hear you! I have to be careful talking about candy. My father makes the Betty Sweets. Don’t you know them? They’re sold all over the world. We have an immense factory. And there isn’t any other kind of candy that I don’t like better. But I don’t dare tell anybody that. Funny, I’m telling you! Our spirits must be drawn together by some invisible bond.”

Sidney’s ears fairly ached with the beauty of the other’s words. She stiffened her slender little body to control its trembling. She tried to say something but found her throat choked. The other girl rattled on:

“I didn’t take any notes. I’ll copy my roommate’s. You see we have to write a theme about our visit. Miss Byers prides herself on the girls of Grace being so well-informed. I know. I’ll put you into it. That’ll be fun. Only you’ll have to tell me something about yourself. How old are you? Do you go to a regular school and play with other girls like any ordinary girl?”

Sidney flushed at the other’s manner and found her tongue in an instinctive desire to defend her lot.

“Of course I go to school. It’s sort of a boarding school, only all the girls go home nights. And I do everything the others do. And I am fifteen.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you. I thought perhaps a poet’s daughter was different. If you don’t mind in my theme I’ll make you different—pale and thin, with curly hair in a cloud, and faraway eyes—”

“That’s like Isolde, my oldest sister, the one who usually tells the ‘precious and personal anecdotes.’ I wasn’t really offended—and I’ll admit most of the girls do treat me a little bit differently—but that’s Miss Downs’ fault; she won’t let them forget that I am Joseph Romley’s daughter. She uses it all the time in her catalogue and when any visitors come to the school it’s dreadful—”

“If you don’t like it why don’t you come to Grace Hall? We’d have no end of fun—”

“Gracious, I’ve never been anywhere. I only go to Miss Downs’ because it’s here at Middletown and because she gives me my tuition on account of Dad—” Sidney bit off her words in a sudden panic lest her admission of poverty shock this lovely creature. It had not, however. The dove-gray eyes had softened again with pity.

“Oh, I see. Of course, poets are always poor. I supposed they usually lived in garrets. I nearly flopped when I saw this big house!” This to comfort Sidney. “Well, it’s too bad you can’t go to Grace. I like the riding best. I have my own horse. Gypsy. She’s a darling. My roommate is the cutest thing. She’s captain of the hockey team and her picture was in the New York Times. Her mother made a dreadful fuss about it but it was too late. And she got a letter from a boy in New York who’d seen the picture—the most exciting letter—”

“Oh, here you are, Pola,” cried a voice behind them and a tall girl elbowed Sidney back into her corner. “Say, Byers will be here at least a half an hour longer. We’ll have time for a dope at that store we passed, if we hurry!”

All boredom vanished, the girl Pola sprang to her feet. She paused only long enough to hold out her hand to Sidney. “Don’t tell anyone that I don’t like Betty Sweets best of all the candy in the world, will you?” she laughed. “And I won’t tell anyone that you loathe poetry.” Then she ran after the tall girl. Sidney felt engulfed in a great and terrible loneliness.

For the next half hour she was only conscious of a fear that Pola and her companion might not get back before Miss Byers discovered their flight. But just as the last eight came out of the study and Miss Byers was lingering for a few words with Mrs. Milliken, Sidney saw two flying figures join the others at the gate. Her little hope that she might have a chance to talk again with Pola or hear her talk was lost in a surge of relief that she was quite safe.

Mrs. Milliken remained after the others had filed down the street. Sidney, troubled by her fib of the headache, wished with all her soul that she would go and strained her ears for any sound from the floor above that might betray Isolde’s activities.

“A lovely thing—to bring those young girls to this spot,” Mrs. Milliken was murmuring as she looked over the register which the League kept very carefully. “Here are some well-known names. Jenkins—probably that’s the iron family. Scott—I wonder if that’s the Scott who’s related to the Astors.” Sidney watched the gloved finger as it traced its way down the page of scrawled signatures.

“Is there a Pola Somebody there?” she asked, hopefully. Mrs. Milliken’s finger ran back up the page.

“No—not that I can find. The girls were very careless—not half of them registered.”

Of course Pola wouldn’t have registered—she had been too bored.

Her survey finished, Mrs. Milliken put the register in its place and regarded Sidney with contemplative eyes.

“Another time, dear lamb, if you receive, tell Isolde to—well, fix you up a little. I must speak to the Committee and plan something suitable for you. Perhaps we have been forgetting that our dear little girl is growing out of her rompers. Oh—and another thing, tell Isolde I was shocked to smell gasoline on your gifted father’s jacket—”

“Trude thought it had moths in it and she soaked it in gasoline,” explained Sidney uncomfortably.

“Oh, she mustn’t do it again. It—it spoiled the atmosphere of everything! I will speak to the dear girls. Give my love to Isolde and tell her to rest. I do not think anyone else will come today for I posted a notice at the clubrooms reserving this date for Grace School.”

With an affectionate leave-taking of her “lamb” Mrs. Milliken rustled off. Sidney slowly shut the door. Out there, beyond the hedge, went Pola and the other laughing girls of Grace Hall, out into a world of fun and adventure. And inside the door—

Pola had dared race off to the corner drug store; Sidney felt certain Pola would dare anything. And she had not even had spunk enough to speak up and tell interfering Mrs. Milliken that Trude and the rest of them would soak everything in gasoline, if they wanted to! Most certainly they were not going to let moths eat them all up alive!

Oh—oh, it was hateful! And Isolde had said they could not escape it; well, she’d find a way!

From abovestairs the three older sisters had witnessed the invasion of their home by the Grace Hall girls.

“It’s perfectly disgusting!” had been Vick’s comment.

Trude was all sympathy for Sidney. “You were cruel, Issy, making Sid receive that mob.”

Isolde reluctantly turned her attention from the faded silks in her lap.

“Sidney might as well realize with what we have to put up. Then perhaps she will not be so discontented with her own easy lot—”

From where she squatted on the floor, a huge mending basket balanced on her knees, Trude regarded Isolde with troubled eyes. Her forehead puckered with little criss-cross wrinkles. Of the three older girls Trude had the least claim to beauty; from constant exposure her skin had acquired a ruddiness like a boy’s which made her blue eyes paler by contrast; her hair had been cut after an attack of scarlet fever and had grown in so slowly that she wore it shingle-bobbed which added to the suggestion of boyishness about her; there was an ungirlish sturdiness and squareness to her build—one instinctively looked to her shoulders to carry burdens. Yet withal there was about her a lovableness infinitely more winning than Vick’s Grecian beauty or Isolde’s interesting personality—a lovableness and a loyalty that urged her on now to champion poor Sidney and yet made it the harder for her to express to the others what she felt deep in her heart.

“Stop a minute and think, Issy. Didn’t we used to feel discontented lots of times and fuss about things between ourselves? We knew—though we didn’t exactly ever say it—that we had to be different, on account of Dad. We couldn’t ever bother him, for fear we’d spoil his work. Of course it was all worth while and doesn’t make much difference—now, but, Issy, Sid doesn’t have to put up with what we did—” Trude stopped suddenly. It seemed dreadful to say: “Dad isn’t writing any poems now.” She felt the pang of loss in her tender heart that always came when she thought of her father, with his bursts of impatience and his twitching nose and his long hours in the study with the door closed, and then his great indulgence and boyish demonstrativeness when some work that had been tormenting was completed and off or when some unexpected acceptance came with an accompanying check. She blinked back some tears. “You know I wouldn’t talk like this to anyone outside of us, but, just among us—I wish we could let Sidney do the things we didn’t do when we were her age.”

“Trude, I have never heard you talk so foolishly. I’m sure our lot isn’t so tragic that Sid can’t share it. She has nice friends and goes to Miss Downs and hasn’t a responsibility in the world—”

“Sometimes we get tired of the brand of our best friends and want a change—even yearn for responsibility!”

“I’d say we’d spoiled her enough—she doesn’t need any more.”

“Isolde, you simply don’t want to understand me! Goodness knows I preach contentment the loudest—but— Are we going to live like this all our lives? Look at us, huddled up here, now, because the Saturdays belong to the League. Issy, you and I can go on because we got broken in to it years ago. Vick won’t, of course—” (flashing a smile at the disinterested Victoria) “but little Sid—She’s fifteen now. She has two more years at Miss Downs’. She may want college—or—or something—different——”

Isolde lifted her shoulders with an impatient shrug. Isolde’s thin shoulders were very expressive and had a way of communicating her thoughts more effectively than mere words. They silenced Trude, now.

“Do you think it’s a kindness to encourage Sid to want things that we simply can’t afford to give her? You ought to know that we can’t live a bit differently—you keep our accounts.”

Trude groaned. In any argument they always came back to that; their poverty was like the old wall outside that closed them around. If poor little Sid dreamed dreams it would be as it had been with her. Isolde was quite right—it might be no kindness to the child to let her want things—like college. Yet, though silenced, Trude was not satisfied; there were surely things one could want that could surmount even the ugly wall of poverty.

Vick broke into the pause.

“While we’re considering Sid, what are we going to do with her this summer? If she’s going to have fits like she had this morning it’ll be pleasant having her round with nothing to do. Of course if Godmother Jocelyn makes good on her promise to take me to Banff I won’t have to worry but—”

“Trude, have you written to Huldah asking her if she can come for July and August? Prof. Deering wrote last week suggesting that I spend the summer with them in their cottage on Lake Michigan. I can more than pay my board by helping Professor Deering with his book and that will relieve Mrs. Deering so that she can play with the children. It will be a change for me—”

“Some change, I’d say,” laughed Vicky. “A crabby professor and an overworked wife and two crying babies—”

“Professor Deering isn’t crabbed at all, Vick; he’s a dear and the babies are adorable and Mrs. Deering wrote that the bungalow is right on the water and that she’s going to reduce the housework to almost nothing.”

“It would be nice, Isolde. Why hadn’t you told us of the plan? I had better postpone going to New York. Aunt Edith White will invite me some other time.”

“You mustn’t do anything of the sort,” remonstrated Isolde quickly. “If you do I’ll write to Mrs. Deering and tell her I cannot come. You didn’t go to New York at Easter when Aunt Edith White invited you and she may think you don’t like to go.”

“It seems terribly selfish for us to go away and leave Sid with Huldah in this lonely old house.”

“She adores Huldah and she has her chums—”

“And she’ll have the Egg to spend—” from Vick.

“But there’s such a sameness. And the League brings so many more people—”

“Trude, you’re positively silly about Sid. When we were fifteen—”

“Just the same, I don’t want to be the one to tell her the three of us are going away to have a good time and leave her here with Huldah all summer—”

“I’ll tell her,” declared Isolde, firmly. “And I’ll try to make her understand she is very well off. Sidney really owes more to the League than the rest of us do for we could take care of ourselves. I think we ought to make her appreciate that fact. Vick, look out, quick! Did I hear Mrs. Milliken saying goodby?”

“Yes, there she goes!” cried Vick, now boldly at the window. “What luck to be free so early. Let’s see how much is left of poor old Sid.”

But Vick, opening the door, saw a very straight, pigtailed figure walk resolutely down the long hall toward the attic stairs. Her quick “Well, kid, how did it go?” fell upon deaf ears, nor did Sidney so much as glance in her direction.

CHAPTER IV
SIDNEY DIGS FOR COUSINS

The Romley house stood two stories and a half high, heavy-beamed, thick-walled, of square spacious rooms with deep-set windows and cavernous fireplaces under low marble mantels. Joseph Romley had chosen it because he said it was so big a man could think in it; he liked the seclusion, too, that the surrounding wall promised. If his wife faltered before the care it presented she had given no sign but had bravely spread their limited possessions through some of the rooms and had sensibly closed off others.

There had never been a time since the Romleys took possession when the house had not needed painting and shingling, when the guarding wall was not crumbling and the gate swinging on one hinge, when the furnace was not needing cleaning and the plumbing overhauling. But the wind sang cheerily down the great chimneys and the sun poured in through the windows and the ancient elms housed hosts of birds and the hollyhocks bloomed early and late against the wall so that Joseph Romley knew only the beauty of the place and was content and his family, perforce, was content because he was.

There had never been enough of the fine old furniture Mrs. Romley had collected in her bridehood to furnish a separate room for each one of the girls. Isolde and Trude had always shared a sunny room over the study. In a back room Victoria and Sidney still used the narrow beds of nursery days. Only lately Victoria had painted them gray with a trim of pink rose buds but the effect had suffered so sharply from Sidney’s “truck” that Sidney had been coerced into taking her precious belongings to the attic where she established a kingdom of her own.

It was a beautiful attic. Its rafters, shiny and brown, were so low that Sidney, by standing very straight, could touch them with the top of her head. It had mysterious crannies and shadowy corners and deep dusty holes. Sidney had walled off one end by piling one trunk upon another and pushing an old wardrobe next to them. There she had her possessions, a flat-topped desk with long wobbly legs which she reached by a box balanced on an old stool, the skeleton of a sofa on which sat five dusty and neglected dolls, a scrap of carpeting, amazing as to red roses but sadly frayed about its edges, one boastful rocker in complete possession of arms and legs, which Trude had smuggled up to her, and a conglomeration of her favorite books scattered everywhere, for in the seclusion of the attic she could pore over them without risk of some Lady Leaguer discovering her love of them.

To this sanctuary Sidney retreated now from Vick and the Leaguers and her luckless lot. Swinging open the door of the wardrobe so as to shut off any unannounced approach to her den, she tiptoed to a corner, knelt down and cautiously lifted a board from the floor, thereby revealing a space two feet square between the beams.

From among the treasures concealed there she drew out an old ledger on the first page of which was printed in large type: “Dorothea, friend and confidante of Sidney Romley.” Jerking herself closer to the window she opened the book across her knees and began to write in it with the stub of a pencil she extracted from the pocket of her middy blouse.

“Dearest Dorothea:

“Today I stand at a crossroad of life. I am fifteen. It is not my birthday for I had my birthday as you will see if you turn back to page 64 but I am fifteen today in the eyes of the world for I have come into my legal and just rights. I am to have the next Egg. I had to make a scene before I got them to promise I could have it but it was ever thus with rights. I swear solemnly now to you, dear Dorothea, that I shall never cry again in front of Victoria Romley. Never. I hate her when she laughs. I do not hate Isolde even though she does not understand me and that is hard. And I adore Trude as I have told you on many other pages. However, I am to have the Egg.

“But that is not all that happened this morning. I have talked to the most beautiful girl I ever saw. Her name is Pola and she goes to Grace Hall, which is a boarding school for very rich girls who have horses. Her father makes candy in a big factory and it is sold all over the world. When I get the Egg I shall buy a great deal of Betty Sweets. That is it. Pola has traveled so much that it bores her to think of it. When she talked she lifted a curtain and let me peep into a wonderful world. I think she liked me. She’s going to put me in a theme only she is going to make me like Isolde who just to be mean made me receive the Leaguers this morning and went upstairs and did things as though it was not Saturday at all. But for that I must love her just as if she had not done it to be mean for I would not have met Pola. Pola—is that not the most romantic name you ever heard?—feels sorry for me because my father was a poet and she knew right off how I hate having the Leaguers own us and the house. She was wonderful. I shall never see anyone like her again. My life is doomed to be sad and lonely.

“But though I never see Pola again I shall try to live to be like her. Inside of me, of course. It would be no use to try to be like her outside on account of my horrid hair. Pola’s hair is curly and short and she wears it caught with a ‘bonny bright ribbon.’ My eyes are plain blue and hers are a mysterious gray like an evening sky. Her skin is like creamy satin touched with rose petals and I think it is natural for it is not a bit like Josie Walker’s who uses rouge for Nancy caught her putting it on one day at school in the toilet. Pola is as brave as she is beautiful. She dares anything. She would despise me if she knew that I just let my fate close over my head and do nothing.

“But now that I am fifteen before the world I must take my life in my hands. As adventure will never come to this house on account of the League I must go forth to meet adventure. I will not let the others know what I am planning for, as I said heretofore, Isolde does not understand me and Victoria would only laugh. And as I said heretofore, I hate her when she laughs. But, Victoria Romley, remember the words of the prophet: ‘He who laughs last laughs loudest.’

“In case I pass to the Great Beyond and strange eyes read these confidences, let me add that I only hate Vicky when she laughs. At all other times I love her dearly. She is so beautiful that sometimes when I look at her I feel all queer and gaspy inside. Pola is not quite as beautiful as Vic but Pola is a girl like me.

“Dear Dorothea, friend of my inner spirit, as I close this page who knows what the future holds for me? I shall probably be very busy with my plans and may neglect you, my comforter, but as I go forth on my quest I shall often think of you, waiting, faithful, in my secret cranny. And I shall think of Isolde and Trude for I gleaned from something Isolde said to me this morning when she was mad that she and Trude long to escape from the League the way I do. But they think they have to stay here the rest of their lives. Mayhap I can bring escape to them. Vick will marry of course, but Isolde’s beaux look too poor to get married and they are mostly poets as I have told you. And Trude has only her one Lost Love. Dear Dorothea, farewell. ‘Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam, my heart will come to thee in thy deep and secret chamber.’”

Sidney liked the last line so well that she paused to read it over, aloud.

She closed the book simply because her thoughts were racing ahead so fast that to write them became a torture. She restored “Dorothea” rather carelessly to her “deep and secret chamber.” Having secured the loose planking she rose and turned her agile mind to the consideration of a desire that had began shaping when Trude said she could go around the world with the Egg. Of course the Egg would not take her that far but if it would only just take her somewhere on a train she’d be satisfied.

Travel in the Romley family had always been limited. One shabby bag had done comfortable duty for them all. Joseph Romley had never wanted to go away; if the girls’ mother ever yearned for other horizons she had hidden it behind a smiling contentment. Neither Isolde nor Trude had gone further than fifty miles from Middletown until the two trustees, after their father’s death, had summoned them to New York. Victoria, seemingly born to more fortune than the others, had been whisked away on several trips with Godmother Jocelyn, traveling luxuriously in a stateroom with a maid but she had returned from even the most prolonged of these so silent and dispirited that Sidney suspected traveling with Godmother Jocelyn, fat and fussy, was not the unalloyed pleasure Vick would have them believe.

To how much Sidney longed to vision the world that lay beyond the level horizons of Middletown an old map of the United States and Canada, tacked to one of the rafters, attested. Upon this Sidney had marked with various signs that meant much to her and nothing to any one else, the different localities of which she read in books or newspapers. When a Leaguer introduced some devotee from some far-off city Sidney promptly noted the visit on the map. In consequence she had a vicarious acquaintance scattered from coast to coast. It was the only way she had ever expected to “know” the world until Trude had said that about the Egg.

She did not count as “traveling” going once to Cascade Lake, twenty miles to the South, and spending a week there with Nancy. They had not gone on a train; they had driven down with Nancy’s father in the automobile. Though in anticipation the visit had appeared like an adventure, in later retrospection it was stupid. It had been just like being at Nancy’s house in Middletown; Nancy’s father and mother and Snap, the dog, and Caroline, the colored cook, and much of the furniture were all there. It had rained all week and they had had to play in the house and Nancy had had a cold in her head which had made her cross and horrid-looking. No, that had not been “going” somewhere, the way Trude went to New York and Isolde to Chicago.

Crouched low in the sound rocker Sidney stared at the old map with speculative eyes. One could not, when one was the youngest sister, simply pack the old bag and start off for just anywhere. All the trips she knew anything about had some objective; one went somewhere to see somebody. Trude went to see Aunt Edith White, Isolde the Deerings. Vick always went somewhere with Godmother Jocelyn. Plainly her first step was to find someone who lived somewhere where she could want to go.

It was a pity, Sidney lamented voicelessly, that her father had shunned all their relatives the way he had the autograph seekers. Nancy had a great many; she was always going to reunions at some aunt’s or cousin’s or her mother was having a big “family” dinner. It would help her now to have a few cousins herself. They surely must have some somewhere. Everyone did. That her father had snubbed them would not make them any the less related.

She suddenly remembered a book she had found once in a box consigned to the attic in that first settling. The book for a while had fascinated her and Nancy, then they had thrown it aside for something more novel, little dreaming that it was destined to hold an important part in the shaping of Sidney’s fortunes—and misfortunes. It was a very slender little volume with an embellished binding, long since yellow with dust.

Finding it now Sidney drew the sleeve of her blouse across its cover and opened it. Its first page was given over to a curious tree from the sprawling branches of which hung round things much like grapefruits, each ring encircling one or two names. From each fruit dangled more fruit until the tree was quite overladen. A line at the bottom explained that the curious growth was the Tree of the New England Ellis Family.

At that first inspection Sidney had felt no particular sense of belonging herself to the suspended grapefruits; the only thought that had held her was how many, many years it had taken all those people to live and what a little minute to read their names. But finding an “Ann Ellis” in a corner of the tree had brought them suddenly close to her. “Ann Ellis Green”—why, that was her mother’s name. She and Nancy figured out at once that these were her mother’s ancestors—her ancestors. Nancy had supplied the word. Nancy had been deeply impressed by the Tree and the Coat-of-Arms which had come down to these Ellises from a Welsh baron of feudal times. She had urged Sidney to use it on her school papers.

But neither the Coat-of-Arms nor the Tree held any especial value to Sidney, brought up as she had been in a state of family isolation, until this moment.

Now the little book offered the reasonable possibility that each ancestor recorded therein had had children, just as that Ann Ellis in the round enclosure had had her mother and her mother in turn had had Isolde and Trude and Vick and herself. These children would be cousins—and cousins were what she needed!

She remembered certain notations that had been made in a fine script on back pages of the book. In search of cousins she now scanned these carefully, with a shivery feeling of prowling over dead bones—the writing was so queer and faded, the paper crackled and smelled so old.

“Charles Ellis, son of James by Mary Martin, second wife. Served in the 102nd Regiment at Gettysburg. Awarded the Congressional Medal for exceptional bravery under fire.”

“Priscilla Ellis gave her life in the service of nursing through the epidemic of small-pox that swept Boston in the year of 18—” Sidney read this twice with a thrill. That was adventure for you. Small-pox. She wondered if Priscilla had been beautiful like Victoria and whether she had left a sweetheart to mourn her tragic death to the end of his days. She liked to think Priscilla had had such.

That one Abner Ellis had been a Selectman for ten years did not interest her—she passed him for the next entry.

“Ann Ellis married Jonathan Green, June 10, 1874. To this happy union has been born one precious daughter, our little Ann.” Why, this “little Ann” was her own mother, of course. And the Jonathan Green who was her father had written in the book the little notes about all the Ellises so that when the “Little Ann” grew up she would know all about them and be proud—Priscilla who had died of small-pox and the ancestor with the Congressional Medal. Sidney suddenly thought it strange that her mother had cared so little for the family tree that she had left it, dusty and forgotten, in the attic. Probably that was because her mother had been too busy being a poet’s wife to bother about dead and gone Ellises.

She felt a little rush of tender remorse toward Jonathan Green—she wished he had not died when her mother was a little girl. He was her own grandfather. And he had had a tree behind him—there had doubtless been as many Greens as Ellises. She wished she knew what they had been like. And almost in answer to the thought her eyes fell upon an entry on another page, made in Jonathan Green’s fine hand.

“On this day, October 6, 1869, my brother, Ezekiel Green, sailed from Provincetown for far shores on his good ship the Betsy King which same has come into his possession as a reward for years of thrift and perseverance. God’s blessing go with him—”

There were more entries concerning the brother, Ezekiel. He and his good ship the Betsy King were reported as returning safely from the Azores, and again they had rounded Cape Horn, again had ventured to East Indian waters.

“Oh-h!” cried Sidney aloud for at the top of another page she read that the Betsy King had foundered off the Cape in the storm of ’72—with all lives. “May the soul of my beloved brother, Ezekiel Green, rest in peace with his Maker.”

Sidney forgot the Burton-Ellis tree in her breathless interest in the fate of Ezekiel Green who had “foundered” and then rested in peace. It was like a story of marvellous adventure. Her grandfather had evidently thought a great deal of this brother who had sailed the oceans wide. He had added, beneath the entry of the foundering of the Betsy King: “Our loving prayers go out in behalf of our beloved Ezekiel’s son and daughter, Asabel and Achsa. May they walk in the path their respected father trod before them!” “That’s funny,” reflected Sidney, “How can they when he sailed the wide seas!”

HER EYES FELL UPON AN ENTRY ON ANOTHER PAGE

Sidney’s brain actually crackled with lightning calculations. This Asabel and Achsa must be old but they might be still living—and at Provincetown, from whence the Betsy King had sailed. Perhaps Asabel had a boat, too. Provincetown—she looked at the map. Why, Provincetown was at the very tip end of that crooked finger of land which always seemed to be beckoning to ships to come to Massachusetts. She knew all about it—she and Nancy had read a delightful book in which a little girl had lived with two guardians who were old sea captains—like Ezekiel Green. And she, Sidney Romley, had never known that she had relatives, real flesh-and-blood relatives, lots of them, no doubt, who lived right on Cape Cod! She wished that Nancy were with her that she might tell her at once. She figured off the generations on her fingers. Ezekiel Green was her mother’s uncle, her great uncle. This son and daughter, Asabel and Achsa, were her mother’s first cousins, her second cousins. She felt suddenly proudly rich in kin.

“Cousin Achsa!” she repeated the name slowly, wondering just how she ought to pronounce it. She pictured Cousin Achsa living in a square white cupolaed house of noble dimensions that crowned a rocky eminence from which a sweeping view of ocean distances might be had.

This picture had no more than shaped itself in her mind than the resolution formed to communicate at once with Asabel and Achsa. Not a day must be lost. When one had girded oneself to set forth in quest of the Gleam one must not dally over any uncertainties.

Sidney climbed on to the box before the high desk and spread the book before her for reference in spelling her relatives’ names. Then she took out a sheet of writing paper and dipped an old pen into a bottle of ink.

Her imagination seething, it was not difficult to frame her unusual letter. Indeed, the writing of it fell into quite easy lines.

“Dear Cousin Achsa:

“You will be very much surprised to get a letter from your second cousin, Sidney Ellis Romley. But I have heard my mother speak of you often. (Let it be said in justice to Sidney that she hesitated over this outrageous fib, then decided it was justified by the necessity for tact. However, some quick calculation caused her to amend her statement.) At least my older sisters have told me that she spoke often of you. You see she died when I was a baby. My father is dead, too. I live with my sisters in Middletown. I am the youngest though I am fifteen.

“My sisters have travelled extensively but I have never gone anywhere. But this summer I am going to have the Egg which is a sum of money that comes to us each year. (Here Sidney had paused to consider whether she ought to confess that her father had been a poet. She decided she need not.) I can spend the Egg any way I want to. I think I will go somewhere on a train. I came across a family tree of the New England Ellises which told all about the Greens, too, and Ezekiel Green who is your father as you know and his good ship the Betsy King which I think was thrilling and how his soul is with his Maker and all about you and Cousin Asabel and it was so interesting, I mean the Greens, not the Ellises, that I have decided to visit you if it is convenient. I will not be any trouble. I wish you would write and tell me if I can come. I shall await your letter with trembling expectancy.

“Your most affectionate and new-found Cousin,

“Sidney Ellis Romley.”

Sidney hurried the letter into an envelope, sealed it and addressed it. For a dreadful moment she wondered if she ought to know a street number in Provincetown. This Achsa might have married and have another name. Then she remembered that Isolde always put their own address in one corner of her envelopes. She printed it on hers in square letters. “There, it’ll come back to me if it doesn’t find Cousin Achsa! But, oh, I hope it does.”

“Sid-ney! Luncheon. I’ve called you three times.”

Vick’s voice, sharply rebuking, broke across Sidney’s occupation. She jumped hurriedly from her perch, tucking the letter into the pocket of her blouse. Her lips pressed together in a straight thin line of red. Life must, of course, appear to go on as usual—school and the same stupid things she did every day, Nancy, who was so distressingly short of the standard Pola had that day forever fixed. No one, her sisters least, must suspect that Adventure loomed so close. She would guard her plans carefully in her “inscrutable breast.”

CHAPTER V
“THE SUMMER WILL TELL WHO LAUGHS LAST!”

To use Sidney’s own thought, “things happened” with amazing swiftness. If a fairy godmother had been invited in at her christening her plans could not have prospered more.

First came Mrs. Milliken’s unpleasant announcement that the Summer Convention of the League was to be held in Middletown during July which meant that every day for two weeks would see the old house invaded by the curious and the reverent. Mrs. Milliken, in Sidney’s hearing, had gently hinted that it would be very nice if the girls could go away somewhere for July—at least all of them except dear Isolde.

Then Sidney heard for the first time of Isolde’s invitation to the Deerings. Isolde had thrown it in self-defense at Mrs. Milliken. “I do not expect to be here, Mrs. Milliken. I am going to Professor Deering’s for July and August to help him with his new book.” Sidney turned away to hide a sudden smile, not, however, before she caught Trude’s eyes anxiously upon her.

Then the Egg—seventy whole dollars—came on the same day that Godmother Jocelyn informed Vick by telegram that if she could be ready by the first of July she could go with her to California by way of the Canadian Rockies. “Be ready! Well, I should just say I could!” Vick’s eyes had shone like stars against a velvet black sky and Sidney had again intercepted that anxious glance from Trude.

Isolde considered this an auspicious moment, with all the excitement over Vick, to break to Sidney their plans for the summer—plans hurried to a head by the League’s announcement.

“And Trude’s going to Long Island with the Whites, dear, but you won’t be lonely with Huldah. You can have Nancy here and probably she will invite you down to Cascade.”

“Oh, there’s a letter from Huldah on the table in the hall! I meant to bring it in and forgot,” cried Vick.

“Get it, dear,” asked Isolde, gently, of Sidney. Action would help Sidney control her disappointment—if the child was disappointed. Perhaps Trude was over-apprehensive.

Trude hastily scanned the few lines of the letter Sidney put into her hands. “Oh, dear,” she exclaimed “Huldah can’t come.”

Could any fairy godmother, indeed, have shaped circumstances with more kindly hand?

“She says she can’t leave her niece. Her niece’s just had a baby. And her rheumatism is bad.”

“I call that rank disloyalty,” cried Isolde with spirit. “After all we’ve stood from Huldah!”

“What’ll we do? Can’t we make her come? Doesn’t she owe us more consideration than her niece?”

Trude put the letter down. “Huldah isn’t disloyal. You know that, Isolde. And she doesn’t owe us anything. Don’t forget, Vick, that she worked for us for years for almost nothing when she could have gone anywhere else and received good pay. This house is damp and big and Huldah is old. No, we can’t beg her to come—over this. It was probably hard for her to refuse. I’ll stay home with Sid. We’ll have lots more fun here together than I’d have with Aunt Edith White on Long Island—in spite of the League. Will we not, Sid?”

There was so much more sincerity in Trude’s honest blue eyes than any suggestion of self-sacrifice that Sidney ran around to her and hugged her. She longed to tell Trude and the others of her own budding plans—only she had not received as yet an answer from Cousin Achsa. So all she could say was: “We just won’t mind the League!”

And then that very afternoon the postman, meeting her outside the wall, had handed her an envelope addressed to “Miss Sidney Ellis Romley” and postmarked Provincetown!

Sidney ran with it straight to her attic retreat. Her heart within her breast hurt with its high hopes. There was a Cousin Achsa—her own letter had reached her and had been answered! She studied the unfamiliar writing on the envelope—it was a big sweeping script. The envelope felt fine and soft in her fingers and smelled faintly of a fragrance that was not of flowers and yet distinctly pleasant. Oh, this Cousin Achsa must be wealthy, like Pola!

She broke the envelope and spread out the double sheet it contained. At its top she read, “My dear little Cousin.” She paused long enough to wonder why Cousin Achsa thought that she was little.

“My dear little Cousin:

“Of course you may come to visit us. We shall enjoy learning to love a young cousin who must be delightful if we can judge from her letter. We blame ourselves and the miles that have separated us for not knowing anything of ‘Sidney Ellis Romley’ until yesterday, though we knew your mother in days long past. Will you write and tell us when we may expect you? Can a girl of fifteen find her way to this outlying bit of country? If you decide you cannot perhaps we can arrange for you to come with someone. We await your word with affectionate anticipation.

“Your already loving cousin,

“Achsa.”

Sidney blinked hard simply to be certain that the words actually lay before her eyes. Then she read it again and again—aloud. Oh, it was too wonderful to believe. It was a beautiful letter—Cousin Achsa must surely live in the square white house on the eminence she had pictured. She had written “we” so perhaps Cousin Asabel still lived or maybe there were young cousins. Anyway, they wanted her. She hugged the letter to her and rushed off to find the girls. Oh, Huldah could stay with her niece if she wanted to! And Trude could go to Long Island! The Leaguers could come and camp in the house! Guided by the murmur of voices Sidney broke headlong into an informal conference of the older sisters. Her drama-loving soul could not have built a more perfect stage, nor asked a more thrilling moment of denouement. Isolde had just declared generously, that she could not enjoy a day of her stay with the Deerings if Trude had to give up the Long Island plans.

“It isn’t as though we girls received invitations every day,” she explained tearfully. “And it’ll be stupid for you here, Trude, with just Sidney. Perhaps it’s my duty to stay home and help Mrs. Milliken.”

“Your sacrifice is quite unnecessary!” Sid answered in such a queer voice that the three older girls stared at her in alarm. In truth her flushed face and wild eyes gave strength to the sudden conviction that she had gone mad! She fairly leaped at Isolde and flung her letter into Isolde’s lap. “I guess ‘just Sid’ is capable of making her own plans!”

Sidney had a moment’s terror that she was “beginning” wrong but Isolde’s remark which she had overheard had upset all her preplanned diplomacy. Now she stood back, anxiously, and watched Isolde read the letter.

As Isolde read it aloud she punctuated it with excited exclamations.

“‘My dear little Cousin’—Why, Sid, how did you happen to write to her? How did you know she wasn’t dead? Why—‘Of course you may come and visit us!’ Sid, what have you been doing? Why—” and so, to the end.

Sidney drew a long breath and braced herself. Her explanation tumbled out with such incoherence that the girls kept interrupting her to ask her to repeat something. Well, they had told her she could use the Egg any way she wanted to and she wanted to go somewhere a long way off—on a train. One always had to visit someone or with somebody and she’d remembered these cousins—

“Why, how could you, Sid? I don’t think you’ve ever heard us speak of them. I’m sure I’d almost forgotten them—”

“Well, I did. Blood’s thicker than water,” witheringly, “and maybe you can just remember relatives without ever hearing anything about them. She’s nice, I know, because her father was persevering and thrifty—”

A sudden laugh from Vick brought Sidney to an abrupt stop. But Isolde, rebuking Vick with a lift of her right shoulder, turned her attention again to the letter.

“It’s a very nice letter—a—a cultured letter, don’t you think so, Trude? Somehow I have always had the idea that these relations in the East—the Greens—were very poor and—well, uneducated. But this letter doesn’t look like it. And they actually seem to want Sidney to come!”

“It’s a long way—” Trude put in.

“But I want to go a long way. I don’t just want to go to some place right near home—like Cascade. There’s money enough—Nancy and I asked at the railroad station. And the man there gave me a timetable with all sorts of interesting pictures on it. It’s the very most interesting place I ever heard of—it’s an education. I want to go. I’ve—I’ve never been anywhere.”

Isolde was trying not to look as though this unexpected development of things was pleasing but she simply could not suppress the thought that in permitting Sid to go to these cousins lay their one chance of happy escape for their summer. After all—these Cape Cod relatives were first cousins of their mother’s, her very own people. She wished she could remember what her mother had told of them from time to time but it could not have been anything to their discredit or she would have remembered. And the letter, in its woody fragrance, the bold sweep of the handwriting, the expensive texture of the paper, bespoke culture, even wealth. However, with a lingering sense of duty, she reminded Sidney that this Cousin Achsa must be very old.

As if that mattered! Sidney flung out an impatient hand. It was like Isolde to sit rock-fashion and trump up reasons why she’d better not go. But Vick came unexpectedly to her aid.

“If she’s old—all the better. She’ll make Sid behave herself. I think this is the luckiest thing that could have happened. Now we can all go away. Sid wanted adventure—she’ll have it with Cousin—what’s her name?”

Though she writhed under the tone in Vick’s voice Sidney bit her lips over the retort that sprang to them. Anyway, she would have her adventure. She wanted to go on the train all alone; the ticket office man had said it would be quite safe and had told her that he’d write something on a card that she could show to each conductor. She’d like not to have even to do that, for that seemed a little babyish.

Trude had found a reassuring thought. “I’ll be near enough, anyway, so that if Sid gets homesick or finds that things aren’t just what she’d like them to be she can telegraph to me and come home. You will, won’t you, kid?”

Sid promised hastily. Then for the next half hour everything whirled about her; she could not believe what her ears heard, what her eyes beheld. The girls were actually planning for her—clothes, trunks, tickets, trains. Trude was figuring and making notes on the back of Cousin Achsa’s letter. It was, “Sid will need this—Sid had better do that—it will be nice for Sid to see this—I think by way of Boston is the better route—you’d better write to Cousin Achsa, Trude—No, let Sid write herself—had we ought to consult the Trustees? Why, we’re old enough to decide this for ourselves—she’d better go just before Vick and then we can pack away our intimate things and turn the house over to the League.”

“Didn’t Evangeline come from somewhere up that way? Oh, no. Well, I always think of Cape Cod and Nova Scotia as being off there on the map together. Anyway, write and tell us, kid, when you find the Chalice or Grail or whatever it is! If you discover any untrodden fields of romance—wire us and we’ll send one of Issy’s poets down—”

Now, in her exalted spirit Sid could meet Vick’s raillery with a level glance. Let Vick laugh! Cape Cod wasn’t off “somewhere” in a corner of the map. It was as intriguing as the Canadian Rockies. And she had a lot shut away in her heart about which Vick and the others knew nothing. All that about the good ship Betsy King. Betsy King had foundered as a good ship should, but there was a big chance that Cousin Asabel, Ezekiel’s son, might have a boat. Then she had a glimpse into a beautiful world that Pola had given her; she would see Pola’s world from the train window. It was simply all too breath-taking to think of. Oh, the summer would tell who would laugh last!

CHAPTER VI
SUNSET LANE

When Tillie Higgins saw Joe the baker’s cart pass her house she ran to her gate.

“He must be going to Eph Calkins or to Achsy Green’s. Now I wonder—” Joe rarely penetrated Sunset Lane with his goods; Tillie Higgins and old Mrs. Calkins did their own baking and Achsa Green’s pies were legend.

Old Mrs. Calkins, too, had seen the baker’s rickety cart approaching through the deep sand. At once she “happened” to be out tying up her yellow rambler.

“Got a letter for Achsy Green,” the baker called to her, leaning out of his cart.

“You don’t say! Not bad news, I hope?”

“Dunno. It’s a letter. Thought I’d bring it to her. Gettap, General. Pretty nice weather we’re havin’. Dry, though.”

“Tell Achsy I’ll drop over soon’s my bakin’s done.”

Tillie Higgins’ shadow fell across the yellow roses. Tillie was a little breathless; she had hurried over to catch what the baker was saying.

“A letter? For Achsy Green? You don’t say. Not bad news I hope,” she echoed.

“Joe dunno. Cal’late that’s why he came all this way with it. He’ll find out what’s in that letter if he can. Then the hul town’ll know. I told him to tell Achsy I’d drop over soon’s my pies are out of the oven. Better set down a spell and go along with me.”

But Tillie Higgins, with regret in her voice, explained that she had bread in her own oven. “If it’s news send Martie over with it. Hope it’s nothing bothersome. Achsy Green has ’nough as ’tis.”

This Sunset Lane was the farthest byway of the northernmost habitation of Cape Cod. Only a ridge of sandy dunes at its back door kept it from tumbling into the blue Atlantic. Provincetown folk called it “up p’int way” and “t’other end.” The more fanciful name had been given to it by a young Portuguese who had essayed to convert that corner of Provincetown into a summer colony. He had only succeeded, after long effort, in selling the Carpenter house nearest Commercial Street, then had abandoned his enterprise to open a combination garage and one-arm lunch room on Commercial Street.

Sunset Lane led nowhere, unless one counted the dunes; it was only wide enough for a cart to pass between the hedging rows of crowding wild flowers and the guardian willows; it was deep in sand. The rising tide of commercialism that was destroying the eighteenth-century dignity of the little town turned before it reached it. Few went there unless on definite purpose bound, excepting the artists who came singly and in groups to paint an old gray gable against an overtowering hill of sand or a scrap of blue sky between crumbling chimney pots and peaked roofs or old Mrs. Calkins’ hollyhocks that flanked the narrow byway like gaudy soldiers. Some sketched Jeremiah Higgins’ octagonal house, more of an oddity than a thing of grace yet ornamented with hand-wrought cornices and dignified by a figurehead from the prow of a ship long since split into driftwood; others went on to the end of the lane to catch upon their canvases the grace of Achsa’s Green’s old gray-shingled cottage with its low roof and white pilastered doorway.

With the changing years Achsa Green had become as quaint as her surroundings. Bent, and small, her face seared to the brown of a withered leaf from the hot suns and biting winds, her hands knotted with labor, her sparse hair twisted into a knob at the exact center of the back of her head, she was not lovely to look upon, yet from her eyes gleamed a spirit that knew no wear of age, that took its knocks upstanding, that suffered when others suffered but that spread a healing philosophy of God’s wisdom. For Achsa’s acceptance of God’s wisdom faltered only when she thought of Lavender.

Lavender was her brother Asabel’s only child. His mother had died a week after his birth, his father five months before. Achsa had taken the babe into her arms and had promised to “do” for him. And she had, with a fierce yearning, a compassion that hurt to her very soul. For Lavender was not like other children; his poor little body was sadly crippled. Achsa had at first refused to believe but that he might “grow straight,” then as the years convinced her that this could never be she consecrated herself to the single task of keeping him fed and clothed and happy and “out o’ mischief.” She clung staunchly to the hope that, if she prayed hard enough by night and believed by day that her boy was “straight,” sometime Lavender would be straight and all their little world—the Cape—would know.

There was nothing unusual in Dugald Allan of Rahway, N. J., finding Sunset Lane, for he was a fledgling artist and came there like other artists, but certainly a destiny that was kind toward old Achsa had something to do in the skirmish that ensued between Poker, Allan’s brindle bull-pup, and Nip and Tuck, Achsa Green’s two black cats. Tuck, caught sunning herself in the middle of the lane, had recognized a foe in Poker and had defended her stronghold; Poker, resenting her exclusiveness, had offered battle. Nip, never far from his sister, had promptly thrown himself into the fray. There had resulted a whirl of sand like a miniature cyclone from which young Allan rescued Poker just in time to save his brindle hide. Nip, unvanquished, had retreated to the very doorway that Allan had come to paint; Tuck fled to the shelter of a bed of tall sweet william.

“Dear! Dear!” cried Achsa Green in the open doorway. “Oh, my cats—”

“Nobody hurt. I’m sorry,” laughed young Allan. “I mean—Poker’s sorry. I don’t understand his rudeness. He never fights anyone smaller than himself. I’ve brought him up to a high sporting code. He must have misunderstood your cat’s attitude. He apologizes, humbly.”

Assured that her pets were unharmed the little old woman in the doorway had laughed gleefully. “Tuck’s sort o’ suspicious o’ strange folks, but I cal’late she didn’t take a good look at you! She must a looked at your dog first!”

“I thank you for the compliment. You see, we came quite peaceably to paint your doorway. You’re Miss Green, aren’t you? I’m sure that’s the door they told me about. And if your defiant animal will stand like that long enough for me to sketch it—I’d consider myself in luck—”

“I cal’late he will—if your dog’s ’round. Nip ain’t ’fraid of nothin’ ’slong as his own door’s at his back. Don’t know as anyone’s wanted to draw his picture before. He’ll be all set up for sure!”

Whipping out his pad Dugald Allan, with rapid strokes, had sketched the door and the cat—and Achsa Green. Later the picture he painted from the sketch hung in a Paris exhibition. When he showed the drawing to Achsa Green she had beamed with pleasure. “Why, that’s as like Nip as though it war a twin.” Nip, scenting the friendly atmosphere, had relaxed, stretched, yawned, waved a plumy tail toward poor Poker, watching fearfully from behind his master, and had stalked, disdainful, over to the sweet william to reassure the more timid Tuck.

Of course Achsa Green had wanted to show the “picture” to Lavender and Dugald Allan, eager to see the inside of the old house, had followed her into the low-ceilinged kitchen. And that had been ten years ago and each succeeding spring since had brought Dugald Allan back to Sunset Lane.