Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

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BY

MRS. MARY J. HOLMES.

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Mrs. Hallam’s Companion.
AND
THE SPRING FARM,
AND OTHER TALES.

BY

Mrs. MARY J. HOLMES

AUTHOR OF

“TEMPEST AND SUNSHINE,” “’LENA RIVERS,” “GRETCHEN,” “MARGUERITE,” “DR. HATHERN’S DAUGHTERS,” ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK:

G. W. Dillingham, Publisher,

MDCCCXCVI.

Copyright, 1896, by

Mrs. MARY J. HOLMES.

[All rights reserved.]

CONTENTS

MRS. HALLAM’S COMPANION.

CHAPTER I.
THE HALLAMS.

Mrs. Carter Hallam was going to Europe,—going to Aix-les Bains,—partly for the baths, which she hoped “would lessen her fast-increasing avoirdupois, and partly to join her intimate friend, Mrs. Walker Haynes, who had urged her coming and had promised to introduce her to some of the best people, both English and American. This attracted Mrs. Hallam more than the baths. She was anxious to know the best people, and she did know a good many, although her name was not in the list of the four hundred. But she meant it should be there in the near future, nor did it seem unlikely that it might be. There was not so great a distance between the four hundred and herself, as she was now, as there had been between Mrs. Carter Hallam and little Lucy Brown, who used to live with her grandmother in an old yellow house in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and pick berries to buy herself a pair of morocco boots. Later on, when the grandmother was dead and the yellow house sold, Lucy had worked first in a shoe-shop and then in a dry-goods store in Worcester, where, attracted by her handsome face, Carter Hallam, a thriving grocer, had made her his wife and mistress of a pretty little house on the west side of the city. As a clerk she had often waited upon the West Side ladies, whom she admired greatly, fancying she could readily distinguish them from the ladies of the East Side. To marry a Hallam was a great honor, but to be a West-Sider was a greater, and when both came to her she nearly lost her balance, although her home was far removed from the aristocratic quarters where the old families, the real West-Siders, lived. In a way she was one of them, she thought, or at least she was no longer a clerk, and she began to cut her old acquaintances, while her husband laughed at and ridiculed her, wondering what difference it made whether one lived on the east or west side of a town. He did not care whether people took him for a nabob, or a fresh importation from the wild and woolly West; he was just Carter Hallam, a jolly, easy-going fellow whom everybody knew and everybody liked. He was born on a farm in Leicester, where the Hallams, although comparatively poor, were held in high esteem as one of the best and oldest families. At twenty-one he came into the possession of a few thousand dollars left him by an uncle for whom he was named, and then he went to the Far West, roughing it with cowboys and ranchmen, and investing his money in a gold-mine in Montana and in lands still farther west. Then he returned to Worcester, bought a small grocery, married Lucy Brown, and lived quietly for a few years, when suddenly one day there flashed across the wires the news that his mine had proved one of the richest in Montana, and his lands were worth many times what he gave for them. He was a millionaire, with property constantly rising in value, and Worcester could no longer hold his ambitious wife.

It was too small a place for her, she said, for everybody knew everybody else’s business and history, and, no matter how much she was worth, somebody was sure to taunt her with having worked in a shoe-shop, if, indeed, she did not hear that she had once picked berries to buy herself some shoes. They must go away from the old life, if they wanted to be anybody. They must travel and see the world, and get cultivated, and know what to talk about with their equals.

So they sold the house and the grocery and traveled east and west, north and south, and finally went to Europe, where they stayed two or three years, seeing nearly everything there was to be seen, and learning a great deal about ruins and statuary and pictures, in which Mrs. Hallam thought herself a connoisseur, although she occasionally got the Sistine Chapel and the Sistine Madonna badly mixed, and talked of the Paul Belvedere, a copy of which she bought at an enormous price. When they returned to America Mr. Hallam was a three times millionaire, for all his speculations had been successful and his mine was still yielding its annual harvest of gold. A handsome house on Fifth Avenue in New York was bought and furnished in the most approved style, and then Mrs. Hallam began to consider the best means of getting into society. She already knew a good many New York people whom she had met abroad, and whose acquaintance it was desirable to continue. But she soon found that acquaintances made in Paris or Rome or on the Nile were not as cordial when met at home, and she was beginning to feel discouraged, when chance threw in her way Mrs. Walker Haynes, who, with the bluest of blood and the smallest of purses, knew nearly every one worth knowing, and, it was hinted, would for a quid pro quo open many fashionable doors to aspiring applicants who, without her aid, would probably stay outside forever.

The daughter and grand-daughter and cousin of governors and senators and judges, with a quiet assumption of superiority which was seldom offensive to those whom she wished to conciliate, she was a power in society, and more quoted and courted than any woman in her set. To be noticed by Mrs. Walker Haynes was usually a guarantee of success, and Mrs. Hallam was greatly surprised when one morning a handsome coupé stopped before her door and a moment after her maid brought her Mrs. Walker Haynes’s card. She knew all about Mrs. Walker Haynes and what she was capable of doing, and in a flutter of excitement she went down to meet her. Mrs. Walker Haynes, who never took people up if there was anything doubtful in their antecedents, knew all about Mrs. Hallam, even to the shoe-shop and the clerkship. But she knew, too, that she was perfectly respectable, with no taint whatever upon her character, and that she was anxious to get into society. As it chanced, Mrs. Haynes’s funds were low, for business was dull, as there were fewer human moths than usual hovering around the social candle, and when the ladies of the church which both she and Mrs. Hallam attended met to devise ways and means for raising money for some new charity, she spoke of Mrs. Hallam and offered to call upon her for a subscription, if the ladies wished it. They did wish it, and the next day found Mrs. Haynes waiting in Mrs. Hallam’s drawing-room for the appearance of its mistress, her quick-seeing eyes taking in every detail in its furnishing, and deciding on the whole that it was very good.

“Some one has taste,—the upholsterer and decorator, probably,” she thought, as Mrs. Hallam came in, nervous and flurried, but at once put at ease by her visitor’s gracious and friendly manner.

After a few general topics and the mention of a mutual friend whom Mrs. Hallam had met in Cairo, Mrs. Haynes came directly to the object of her visit, apologizing first for the liberty she was taking, and adding:

“But now that you are one of us in the church, I thought you might like to help us, and we need it so much.”

Mrs. Hallam was not naturally generous where nothing was to be gained, but Mrs. Haynes’s manner, and her “now you are one of us,” made her so in this instance, and taking the paper she wrote her name for two hundred dollars, which was nearly one-fourth of the desired sum. There was a gleam of humor as well as of surprise in Mrs. Haynes’s eyes as she read the amount, but she was profuse in her thanks and expressions of gratitude, and, promising to call very soon socially, she took her leave with a feeling that it would pay to take up Mrs. Hallam, who was really more lady-like and better educated than many whom she had launched upon the sea of fashion. With Mrs. Walker Haynes and several millions behind her, progress was easy for Mrs. Hallam, and within a year she was “quite in the swim,” she said to her husband, who laughed at her as he had done in Worcester, and called Mrs. Haynes a fraud who knew what she was about. But he gave her all the money she wanted, and rather enjoyed seeing her “hob-a-nob with the big bugs,” as he expressed it. Nothing, however, could change him, and he remained the same unostentatious, popular man he had always been up to the day of his death, which occurred about three years before our story opens.

At that time there was living with him his nephew, the son of his only brother, Jack. Reginald,—or Rex as he was familiarly called,—was a young man of twenty-six, with exceptionally good habits, and a few days before his uncle died he said to him:

“I can trust you, Rex. You have lived with me since you were fourteen, and have never once failed me. The Hallams are all honest people, and you are half Hallam. I have made you independent by my will, and I want you to stay with your aunt and look after her affairs. She is as good a woman as ever lived, but a little off on fashion and fol-de-rol. Keep her as level as you can.”

This Rex had tried to do, rather successfully, too, except when Mrs. Walker Haynes’s influence was in the ascendant, when he usually succumbed to circumstances and allowed his aunt to do as she pleased. Mrs. Haynes, who had profited greatly in a pecuniary way from her acquaintance with Mrs. Hallam, was now in Europe, and had written her friend to join her at Aix-les-Bains, which she said was a charming place, full of titled people both English and French, and she had the entrée to the very best circles. She further added that it was desirable for a lady traveling without a male escort to have a companion besides a maid and courier. The companion was to be found in America, the courier in London, and the maid in Paris; “after which,” she wrote, “you will travel tout-à-fait en princesse. The en princesse appealed to Mrs. Hallam at once as something altogether applicable to Mrs. Carter Hallam of New York. She was a great lady now; Sturbridge and the old yellow house and the berries and the shoe-shop were more than thirty years in the past, and so covered over with gold that it seemed impossible to uncover them; nor had any one tried, so far as she knew. The Hallams as a family had been highly respected both in Worcester and in Leicester, and she often spoke of them, but never of the Browns, or of the old grandmother, and she was glad she had no near relatives to intrude themselves upon her and make her ashamed. She was very fond and very proud of Reginald, who was to her like a son, and who with the integrity and common sense of the Hallams had also inherited the innate refinement and kindly courtesy of his mother, a Bostonian and the daughter of a clergyman. As a rule she consulted him about everything, and after she received Mrs. Haynes’s letter she showed it to him and asked his advice in the matter of a companion.

“I think she would be a nuisance and frightfully in your way at times, but if Mrs. Haynes says you must have one, it’s all right, so go ahead,” Rex replied, and his aunt continued:

“But how am I to find what I want? I am so easily imposed upon, and I will not have one from the city. She would expect too much and make herself too familiar. I must have one from the country.”

“Advertise, then, and they’ll come round you like bees around honey,” Rex said, and to this suggestion his aunt at once acceded, asking him to write the advertisement, which she dictated, with so many conditions and requirements that Rex exclaimed, “Hold on there. You will insist next that they subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, besides believing in foreordination and everything in the Westminster Catechism. You are demanding impossibilities and giving too little in return. Three hundred dollars for perfection! I should say offer five hundred. ‘The higher-priced the better’ is Mrs. Walker Haynes’s motto, and I am sure she will think it far more tony to have an expensive appendage than a cheap one. The girl will earn her money, too, or I’m mistaken; for Mrs. Haynes is sure to share her services with you, as she does everything else.”

He spoke laughingly, but sarcastically, for he perfectly understood Mrs. Walker Haynes, whom his outspoken uncle had called “a sponge and a schemer, who knew how to feather her nest.” Privately Rex thought the same, but he did not often express these views to his aunt, who at last consented to the five hundred dollars, and Rex wrote the advertisement, which was as follows:

“Wanted,

“A companion for a lady who is going abroad. One from the country, between twenty and twenty-five, preferred. She must be a good accountant, a good reader, and a good seamstress. She must also have a sufficient knowledge of French to understand the language and make herself understood. To such a young lady five hundred dollars a year will be given, and all expenses paid. Address,

“Mrs. Carter Hallam,

“No. — Fifth Avenue, New York,”

When Rex read this to his aunt, she said:

“Yes, that will do; but don’t you think it just as well to say young person instead of young lady?”

“No, I don’t,” Rex answered, promptly. “You want a lady, and not a person, as you understand the word, and I wouldn’t begin by insulting her.”

So the “lady” was allowed to stand, and then, without his aunt’s knowledge, Rex added:

“Those applying will please send their photographs.”

“I should like to see the look of astonishment on aunt’s face when the pictures come pouring in. There will be scores of them, the offer is so good,” Rex thought, as he folded the advertisement and left the house.

That night, when dinner was over, he said to his aunt: “I have a project in mind which I wish to tell you about.”

Mrs. Hallam gave a little shrug of annoyance. Her husband had been full of projects, most of which she had disapproved, as she probably should this of Rex, who continued:

“I am thinking of buying a place in the country,—the real country, I mean,—where the houses are old-fashioned and far apart, and there are woods and ponds and brooks and things.”

“And pray what would you do with such a place?” Mrs. Hallam asked.

Rex replied, “I’d make it into a fancy farm and fill it with blooded stock, hunting-horses, and dogs. I’d keep the old house intact so far as architecture is concerned, and fit it up as a kind of bachelor’s hall, where I can have a lot of fellows in the summer and fall, and hunt and fish and have a glorious time. Ladies will not be excluded, of course, and when you are fagged out with Saratoga and Newport I shall invite you, and possibly Mrs. Haynes and Grace, down to see the fox-hunts I mean to have, just as they do in the Genesee Valley. Won’t it be fun?”

Rex was eloquent on the subject of his fancy farm. He was very fond of the country, although he really knew but little about it, as he was born in New York, and had lived there all his life with the exception of two years spent at the South with his mother’s brother and four years at Yale. His aunt, on the contrary, detested the country, with its woods, and ponds, and brooks, and old-fashioned houses, and she felt very little interest in Rex’s fancy farm and fox-hunts, which she looked upon as wholly visionary. She asked him, however, where the farm was, and he replied:

“You see, Marks, who is in the office with me, has a client who owns a mortgage on some old homestead among the hills in Massachusetts. This mortgage, which has changed hands two or three times and been renewed once or twice, comes due in October, and Marks says there is not much probability that the old man,—I believe he is quite old,—can pay it, and the place will be sold at auction. I can, of course, wait and bid it off cheap, as farms are not in great demand in that vicinity; but I don’t like to do that. I’d rather buy it outright, giving the old fellow more than it is worth rather than less. Marks says it is a rambling old house, with three or four gables, and stands on a hillside with a fine view of the surrounding country. The woods are full of pleasant drives, and ponds where the white lilies grow and where I can fish and have some small boats.”

“But where is it? In what town, I mean?” Mrs. Hallam asked, with a slight tremor in her voice, which, however, Rex did not notice as he answered:

“I don’t remember where Marks’s client said it was, but I have his letter. Let me see.” And, taking the letter from his pocket, he glanced at it a moment, and then said, “It is in Leicester, and not more than five or six miles from the city of Worcester and Lake Quinsigamond, where I mean to have a yacht and call it the Lucy Hallam for you. Why, auntie, it has just occurred to me that you once lived in Worcester, and Uncle Hallam, too, and that he and father were born in Leicester. Were you ever there,—at the house where father was born, I mean? But of course you have been.”

Rex had risen to his feet and stood leaning on the mantel and looking at his aunt with an eager, expectant expression on his face. She was pale to her lips as she replied:

“Yes, I was there just after I was married. Your uncle drove me out one afternoon to see the place. Strangers were living there then, for his father and mother were dead. He was as country mad as you are, and actually went down upon his knees before the old well-sweep and bucket.”

“I don’t blame him. I believe I’d do the same,” Rex replied, and then went on questioning her rapidly. “What was the house like? Had it a big chimney in the centre?”

Mrs. Hallam said it had.

“Wide fireplaces?”

“Rather wide,—yes.”

“Kitchen fireplace, with a crane?”

“I don’t know, but most likely.”

“Little window-panes, and deep window-seats?”

“I think so.”

“Big iron door-latches instead of knobs?”

“Yes, and a brass knocker.”

“Slanting roof, or high?”

“It was a high gabled roof,—three or four gables, and must have been rather pretentious when it was new.

“Rex,”—and Mrs. Hallam’s voice trembled perceptibly,—“the gables and the situation overlooking the valley make me think that the place you have in view is possibly your father’s old home.”

“By Jove,” Rex exclaimed, “wouldn’t that be jolly! I believe I’d give a thousand dollars extra for the sake of having the old homestead for my own. I wonder who the old chap is who lives there. I mean to go down and see for myself as soon as I return from Chicago and we get the lawsuit off our hands which is taking all Marks’s time and mine.”

Mrs. Hallam did not say what she thought, for she knew there was not much use in opposing Rex, but in her heart she did not approve of bringing the long-buried past up to the present, which was so different. The Homestead was well enough, and Leicester was well enough, for Hallam had been an honored name in the neighborhood, and Rex would be honored, too, as a scion of the family; but it was too near Worcester and the shoe-shop and the store and the people who had known her as a working-girl, and who would be sure to renew the acquaintance if she were to go there. She had no relatives to trouble her, unless it were a certain Phineas Jones, who was so far removed that she could scarcely call him a relative. But if he were living he would certainly find her if she ventured near him, and cousin her, as he used to do in Worcester, where he was continually calling upon her after her marriage and reminding her of spelling-schools and singing-schools and circuses which he said he had attended with her. How distasteful it all was, and how she shrank from everything pertaining to her early life, which seemed so far away that she sometimes half persuaded herself it had never been!

And yet her talk with Rex about the old Homestead on the hill had stirred her strangely, and that night, long after her usual hour for retiring, she sat by her window looking out upon the great city, whose many lights, shining like stars through the fog and rain, she scarcely saw at all. Her thoughts had gone back thirty years to an October day just after her return from her wedding trip to Niagara, when her husband had driven her into the country to visit his old home. How happy he had been, and how vividly she could recall the expression on his face when he caught sight of the red gables and the well-sweep where she told Reginald he had gone down upon his knees. There had been a similar expression on Rex’s face that evening when he talked of his fancy farm, and Rex was in appearance much like what her handsome young husband had been that lovely autumn day, when a purple haze was resting on the hills and the air was soft and warm as summer. He had taken her first to the woods and shown her where he and his brother Jack had set their traps for the woodchucks and snared the partridges in the fall and hunted for the trailing arbutus and the sassafras in the spring; then to the old cider-mill at the end of the lane, and to the hill where they had their slide in winter, and to the barn, where they had a swing, and to the brook in the orchard, where they had a water-wheel; then to the well, where he drew up the bucket, and, poising it upon the curb, stooped to drink from it, asking her to do the same and see if she ever quaffed a sweeter draught; but she was afraid of wetting her dress, and had drawn back, saying she was not thirsty. Strangers occupied the house, but permission was given them to go over it, and he had taken her through all the rooms, showing her where he and Jack and Annie were born, and where the latter had died when a little child of eight; then to the garret, where they used to spread the hickory-nuts and butternuts to dry, and down to the cellar, where the apples and cider were stored. He was like a school-boy in his eagerness to explain everything, while she was bored to death and heard with dismay his proposition to drive two or three miles farther to the Greenville cemetery, where the Hallams for many generations back had been buried. There was a host of them, and some of the headstones were sunken and mouldy with age and half fallen down, while the lettering upon them was almost illegible.

“I wonder whose this is?” he said, as he went down upon the ground to decipher the date of the oldest one. “I can’t make it out, except that it is seventeen hundred and something. He must have been an old settler,” he continued, as he arose and brushed a patch of dirt from his trousers with his silk handkerchief. Then, glancing at her as she stood listlessly leaning against a stone, he said, “Why, Lucy, you look tired. Are you?”

“No, not very,” she answered, a little pettishly; “but I don’t think it very exhilarating business for a bride to be visiting the graves of her husband’s ancestors.”

He did not hunt for any more dates after that, but, gathering a few wild flowers growing in the tall grass, he laid them upon his mother’s grave and Annie’s, and, going out to the carriage standing by the gate, drove back to Worcester through a long stretch of woods, where the road was lined on either side with sumachs and berry-bushes and clumps of bitter-sweet, and there was no sign of life except when a blackbird flew from one tree to another, or a squirrel showed its bushy tail upon the wall. He thought it delightful, and said that it was the pleasantest drive in the neighborhood and one which he had often taken with Jack when they were boys; but she thought it horribly lonesome and poky, and was glad when they struck the pavement of the town.

“Carter always liked the country,” she said to herself when her reverie came to an end, and she left her seat by the window; “and Rex is just like him, and will buy that place if he can, and I shall have to go there as hostess and be called upon by a lot of old women in sun-bonnets and blanket shawls, who will call me Lucy Ann and say, ‘You remember me, don’t you? I was Mary Jane Smith; I worked in the shoe-shop with you years ago.’ And Phineas Jones will turn up, with his cousining and dreadful reminiscences. Ah me, what a pity one could not be born without antecedents!”

CHAPTER II.
THE HOMESTEAD.

It stood at the end of a grassy avenue or lane a little distance from the electric road between Worcester and Spencer, its outside chimneys covered with woodbine and its sharp gables distinctly visible as the cars wound up the steep Leicester hill. Just what its age was no one knew exactly. Relic-hunters who revel in antiquities put it at one hundred and fifty. But the oldest inhabitant in the town, who was an authority for everything ancient, said that when he was a small boy it was comparatively new, and considered very fine on account of its gables and brass knocker, and, as he was ninety-five or six, the house was probably over a hundred. It was built by a retired sea-captain from Boston, and after his death it changed hands several times until it was bought by the Hallams, who lived there so long and were so highly esteemed that it came to bear their name, and was known as the Hallam Homestead. After the death of Carter Hallam’s father it was occupied by different parties, and finally became the property of a Mr. Leighton, who rather late in life had married a girl from Georgia, where he had been for a time a teacher. Naturally scholarly and fond of books, he would have preferred teaching, but his young wife, accustomed to plantation life, said she should be happier in the country, and so he bought the Homestead and commenced farming, with very little knowledge of what ought to be done and very little means with which to do it. Under such circumstances he naturally grew poorer every year, while his wife’s artistic tastes did not help the matter. Remembering her father’s plantation with its handsome grounds and gardens, she instituted numerous changes in and about the house, which made it more attractive, but did not add to its value. The big chimney was taken down and others built upon the outside, after the Southern style. A wide hall was put through the centre where the chimney had been; a broad double piazza was built in front, while the ground was terraced down to the orchard below, where a rustic bridge was thrown across the little brook where Carter and Jack Hallam had built their water-wheel. Other changes the ambitious little Georgian was contemplating, when she died suddenly and was carried back to sleep under her native pines, leaving her husband utterly crushed at his loss, with the care of two little girls, Dorcas and Bertha, and a mortgage of two thousand dollars upon his farm. For some years he scrambled on as best he could with hired help, giving all his leisure time to educating and training his daughters, who were as unlike each other as two sisters well could be. Dorcas, the elder, was fair and blue-eyed, and round and short and matter-of-fact, caring more for the farm and the house than for books, while Bertha was just the opposite, and, with her soft brown hair, bright eyes, brilliant complexion, and graceful, slender figure, was the exact counterpart of her beautiful Southern mother when she first came to the Homestead; but otherwise she was like her father, caring more for books than for the details of every-day life.

“Dorcas is to be housekeeper, and I the wage-earner, to help pay off the mortgage which troubles father so much,” she said, and when she was through school she became book-keeper for the firm of Swartz & Co., of Boston, with a salary of four hundred dollars a year. Dorcas, who was two years older, remained at home as housekeeper. And a very thrifty one she made, seeing to everything and doing everything, from making butter to making beds, for she kept no help. The money thus saved was put carefully by towards paying the mortgage coming due in October. By the closest economy it had been reduced from two thousand to one thousand, and both Dorcas and Bertha were straining every nerve to increase the fund which was to liquidate the debt.

It was not very often that Bertha indulged in the luxury of coming home, for even that expense was something, and every dollar helped. But on the Saturday following the appearance of Mrs. Hallam’s advertisement in the New York Herald she was coming to spend Sunday for the first time in several weeks. These visits were great events at the Homestead, and Dorcas was up as soon as the first robin chirped in his nest in the big apple-tree which shaded the rear of the house and was now odorous and beautiful with its clusters of pink-and-white blossoms. There was churning to do that morning, and butter to get off to market, besides the usual Saturday’s cleaning and baking, which included all Bertha’s favorite dishes. There was Bertha’s room to be gone over with broom and duster, and all the vases and handleless pitchers to be filled with daffies and tulips and great bunches of apple-blossoms and a clump or two of the trailing arbutus which had lingered late in the woods. But Dorcas’s work was one of love; if she were tired she scarcely thought of it at all, and kept steadily on until everything was done. In her afternoon gown and white apron she sat down to rest awhile on the piazza overlooking the valley, thinking as she did so what a lovely place it was, with its large, sunny rooms, wide hall, and fine view, and how dreadful it would be to lose it.

“Five hundred dollars more we must have, and where it is to come from I do not know. Bertha always says something will turn up, but I am not so hopeful,” she said, sadly. Then, glancing at the clock, she saw that it was nearly time for the car which would bring her sister from the Worcester station. “I’ll go out to the cross-road and meet her,” she thought, just as she heard the sharp clang of the bell and saw the trolley-pole as it came up the hill. A moment more, and Bertha alighted and came rapidly towards her.

“You dear old Dor, I’m so glad to see you and be home again,” Bertha said, giving up her satchel and umbrella and putting her arm caressingly around Dorcas’s neck as she walked, for she was much the taller of the two.

It was a lovely May afternoon, and the place was at its best in the warm sunlight, with the fresh green grass and the early flowers and the apple orchard full of blossoms which filled the air with perfume.

“Oh, this is delightful, and it is so good to get away from that close office and breathe this pure air,” Bertha said, as she went from room to room, and then out upon the piazza, where she stood taking in deep inhalations and seeming to Dorcas to grow brighter and fresher with each one. “Where is father?” she asked at last.

“Here, daughter,” was answered, as Mr. Leighton, who had been to the village, came through a rear door.

He was a tall, spare man, with snowy hair and a stoop in his shoulders, which told of many years of hard work. But the refinement in his manner and the gentleness in his face were indicative of good breeding, and a life somewhat different from that which he now led.

Bertha was at his side in a moment, and had him down in a rocking-chair, and was sitting on an arm of it, brushing the thin hair back from his forehead, while she looked anxiously into his face, which wore a more troubled expression than usual, although he evidently tried to hide it.

“What is it, father? Are you very tired?” she asked, at last, and he replied;

“No, daughter, not very; and if I were the sight of you would rest me.”

Catching sight of the corner of an envelope in his vest pocket, with a woman’s quick intuition, she guessed that it had something to do with his sadness.

“You have a letter. Is there anything in it about that hateful mortgage?” she said.

“It is all about the mortgage. There’s a way to get rid of it,” he answered, while his voice trembled, and something in his eyes, as he looked into Bertha’s, made her shiver a little; but she kissed him lovingly, and said very low:

“Yes, father. I know there is a way,” her lips quivering as she said it, and a lump rising in her throat as if she were smothering.

“Will you read the letter?” he asked, and she answered:

“Not now; let us have supper first. I am nearly famished, and long to get at Dor’s rolls and broiled chicken, which I smelled before I left the car at the cross-roads.”

She was very gay all through the supper, although a close observer might have seen a cloud cross her bright face occasionally, and a look of pain and preoccupation in her eyes; but she laughed and chatted merrily, asking about the neighbors and the farm, and when supper was over helped Dorcas with her dishes and the evening work, sang snatches of the last opera, and told her sister about the new bell skirt just coming into fashion, and how she could cut over her old ones like it. When everything was done she seemed to nerve herself to some great effort, and, going to her father said:

“Now for the letter. From whom is it?”

“Gorham, the man who holds the mortgage,” Mr. Leighton replied.

“Oh-h, Gorham!” and Bertha’s voice was full of intense relief. “I thought perhaps it was —— but no matter, that will come later. Let us hear what Mr. Gorham has to say. He cannot foreclose till October, anyhow.”

“And not then, if we do what he proposes. This is it,” Mr. Leighton said, as he began to read the letter, which was as follows:

“Brooklyn, N. Y., May —, 18—.

“Mr. Leighton:

“Dear Sir,—A gentleman in New York wishes to purchase a farm in the country, where he can spend a part of the summer and autumn, fishing and fox-hunting and so on. From what he has heard of your place and the woods around it, he thinks it will suit him exactly, and in the course of a few weeks proposes to go out and see it. As he has ample means, he will undoubtedly pay you a good price, cash down, and that will relieve you of all trouble with the mortgage. I still think I must have my money in October, as I have promised it elsewhere.

“Very truly,

“John Gorham.”

“Well?” Mr. Leighton said, as he finished reading the letter, and looked inquiringly at his daughters.

Bertha, who was very pale, was the first to speak. “Do you want to leave the old home?” she asked, and her father replied, in a choking voice, “No, oh, no. I have lived here twenty-seven years, and know every rock and tree and shrub, and love them all. I brought your mother here a bride and a slip of a girl like you, who are so much like her that sometimes when I see you flitting around and hear your voice I think for a moment she has come back to me again. You were both born here. Your mother died here, and here I want to die. But what is the use of prolonging the struggle? I have raked and scraped and saved in every possible way to pay the debt contracted so long ago, the interest of which has eaten up all my profits, and I have got within five hundred dollars of it, but do not see how I can get any further. I may sell a few apples and some hay, but I’ll never borrow another dollar, and if this New York chap offers a good price we’d better sell. Dorcas and I can rent a few rooms somewhere in Boston, maybe, and we shall all be together till I die, which, please God, will not be very long.”

His face was white, with a tired, discouraged look upon it pitiful to see, while Dorcas, who cried easily, was sobbing aloud. But Bertha’s eyes were round and bright and dry, and there was a ring in her voice as she said, “You will not die, and you will not sell the place. Horses and dogs and fox-hunts, indeed! I’d like to see that New Yorker plunging through the fields and farms with his horses and hounds, for that is what fox-hunting means. He would be mobbed in no time. Who is he, I wonder? I should like to meet him and give him a piece of my mind.”

She was getting excited, and her cheeks were scarlet as she kissed her father again and said, “Write and tell that New Yorker to stay where he is, and take his foxes to some other farm. He cannot have ours, nor any one else. Micawber-like, I believe something will turn up; I am sure of it; only give me time.”

Then, rising from her chair, she went swiftly out into the twilight, and, crossing the road, ran down the terrace to a bit of broken wall, where she sat down and watched the night gathering on the distant hills and over the woods, and fought the battle which more than one unselfish woman has fought,—a battle between inclination and what seemed to be duty. If she chose, she could save the farm with a word and make her father’s last days free from care. There was a handsome house in Boston of which she might be mistress any day, with plenty of money at her command to do with as she pleased. But the owner was old compared to herself, forty at least, and growing bald; he called her Berthy, and was not at all like the ideal she had in her mind of the man whom she could love,—who was really more like one who might hunt foxes and ride his horses through the fields, while she rode by his side, than like the commonplace Mr. Sinclair, who had asked her twice to be his wife. At her last refusal only a few days ago he had said he should not give her up yet, but should write her father for his co-operation, and it was from him she feared the New York letter had come when she saw it in her father’s pocket. She knew he was honorable and upright and would be kind and generous to her and her family, but she had dreamed of a different love, and she could not listen to his suit unless it were to save the old home for her father and Dorcas.

For a time she sat weighing in the balance her love for them and her love for herself, while darkness deepened around her and the air grew heavy with the scent of the apple-blossoms and the grove of pine-trees not far away; yet she was no nearer a decision than when she first sat down. It was strange that in the midst of her intense thinking, the baying of hounds, the tramp of horses’ feet, and the shout of many voices should ring in her ears so distinctly that once, as some bushes stirred near her, she turned, half expecting to see the hunted fox fleeing for his life, and, with an impulse to save him from his pursuers, put out both her hands.

“This is a queer sort of hallucination, and it comes from that New York letter,” she thought, just as from under a cloud where it had been hidden the new moon sailed out to the right of her. Bertha was not superstitious, but, like many others, she clung to some of the traditions of her childhood, and the new moon seen over the right shoulder was one of them. She always framed a wish when she saw it, and she did so now, involuntarily repeating the words she had so often used when a child:

“New moon, new moon, listen to me,

And grant the boon I ask of thee,”

and then, almost as seriously as if it were a prayer, she wished that something might occur to keep the home for her father and herself from Mr. Sinclair.

“I don’t believe much in the new moon, it has cheated me so often; but I do believe in presentiments, and I have one that something will turn up. I’ll wait awhile and see,” she said, as the silvery crescent was lost again under a cloud. Beginning to feel a little chilly, she went back to the house, where she found her father reading his evening paper.

This reminded her of a New York Herald she had bought on the car of a little newsboy, whose ragged coat and pleasant face had decided her to refuse the chocolates offered her by a larger boy and take the paper instead. It was lying on the table, where she had put it when she first came in. Taking it up, she sat down and opened it. Glancing from page to page, she finally reached the advertisements, and her eye fell upon that of Mrs. Hallam.

“Oh, father, Dorcas, I told you something would turn up, and there has! Listen!” and she read the advertisement aloud. “The very thing I most desired has come. I have always wanted to go to Europe, but never thought I could, on account of the expense, and here it is, all paid, and five hundred dollars besides. That will save the place. I did not wish the new moon for nothing. Something has turned up.”

“But, Bertha,” said the more practical Dorcas, “what reason have you to think you will get the situation? There are probably more than five hundred applicants for it,—one for each dollar.”

“I know I shall. I feel it as I have felt other things which have come to me. Theosophic presentiments I call them.”

Dorcas went on: “And if it does come, I don’t see how it will help the mortgage due in October. You will not get your pay in advance, and possibly not until the end of the year.”

“I shall borrow the money and give my note,” Bertha answered, promptly. “Anybody will trust me. Swartz & Co. will, anyway, knowing that I shall come back and work it out if Mrs. Hallam fails me. By the way, that is the name of the people who lived here years ago. Perhaps Mrs. Carter belongs to the family. Do you know where they are, father?”

Mr. Leighton said he did not. He thought, however, they were all dead, while Dorcas asked, “If you are willing to borrow money of Swartz & Co., why don’t you try Cousin Louie, and pay her in installments?”

“Cousin Louie!” Bertha repeated. “That would be borrowing of her proud husband, Fred Thurston, who, since I have been a bread-winner, never sees me in the street if he can help it. I’d take in washing before I’d ask a favor of him. My heart is set upon Europe, if Mrs. Hallam will have me, and you do not oppose me too strongly.”

“But I must oppose you,” her father said; and then followed a long and earnest discussion between Mr. Leighton, Dorcas, and Bertha, the result of which was that Bertha was to wait a few days and consider the matter before writing to Mrs. Hallam.

That night, however, after her father had retired, she dashed off a rough draught of what she meant to say and submitted it to Dorcas for approval. It was as follows:

“Mrs. Hallam:

“Madam,—I have seen your advertisement for a companion, and shall be glad of the situation. My name is Bertha Leighton. I am twenty-two years old, and was graduated at the Charlestown Seminary three years ago. I am called a good reader, and ought to be a good accountant, as for two years I have been book-keeper in the firm of Swartz & Co., Boston. I am not very handy with my needle, for want of practice, but can soon learn. While in school I took lessons in French of a native teacher, who complimented my pronunciation and quickness to comprehend. Consequently I think I shall find no difficulty in understanding the language after a little and making myself understood. I enclose my photograph, which flatters me somewhat. My address is

“Bertha Leighton,

“No. — Derring St., Boston, Mass.”

“I think it covers the whole business,” Bertha said to Dorcas, who objected to one point. “The photograph does not flatter you,” she said, while Bertha insisted that it did, as it represented a much more stylish-looking young woman than Mrs. Carter Hallam’s companion ought to be. “I wonder what sort of woman she is? I somehow fancy she is a snob,” she said; “but, snob me all she pleases, she cannot keep me from seeing Europe, and I don’t believe she will try to cheat me out of my wages.”

CHAPTER III.
MRS. HALLAM’S APPLICANTS.

Several days after Mrs. Hallam’s advertisement appeared in the papers, Reginald, who had been away on business, returned, and found his aunt in her room struggling frantically with piles of letters and photographs and with a very worried and excited look on her face.

“Oh, Rex,” she cried, as he came in, “I am so glad you have come, for I am nearly wild. Only think! Seventy applicants, and as many photographs! What possessed them to send their pictures?”

Rex kept his own counsel, but gave a low whistle as he glanced at the pile which filled the table.

“Got enough for an album, haven’t you? How do they look as a whole?” he asked.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. Such a time as I have had reading their letters, and such recommendations as most of them give of themselves, telling me what reverses of fortune they have suffered, what church they belong to, and how long they have taught in Sunday-school, and all that, as if I cared. But I have decided which to choose; her letter came this morning, with one other,—the last of the lot, I trust. I like her because she writes so plainly and sensibly and seems so truthful. She says she is not a good seamstress and that her picture flatters her, while most of the others say their pictures are not good. Then she is so respectful and simply addresses me as ‘Madam,’ while all the others dear me. If there is anything I like, it is respect in a servant.”

“Thunder, auntie! You don’t call your companion a servant, do you?” Rex exclaimed, but his aunt only replied by passing him Bertha’s letter. “She writes well. How does she look?” he asked.

“Here she is.” And his aunt gave him the photograph of a short, sleepy-looking girl, with little or no expression in her face or eyes, and an unmistakable second-class air generally.

“Oh, horrors!” Rex exclaimed. “This girl never wrote that letter. Why, she simpers and squints and is positively ugly. There must be some mistake, and you have mixed things dreadfully.”

“No, I haven’t,” Mrs. Hallam persisted. “I was very careful to keep the photographs and letters together as they came. This is Bertha Leighton’s, sure, and she says it flatters her.”

“What must the original be!” Rex groaned.

His aunt continued, “I’d rather she’d be plain than good-looking. I don’t want her attracting attention and looking in the glass half the time. Mrs. Haynes always said, ‘Get plain girls by all means, in preference to pretty ones with airs and hangers-on.’”

“All right, if Mrs. Haynes says so,” Rex answered, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he put down the photograph of the girl he called Squint-Eye, and began carelessly to look at the others.

“Oh-h!” he said, catching up Bertha’s picture. “This is something like it. By Jove, she’s a stunner. Why don’t you take her? What splendid eyes she has, and how she carries herself!”

“Read her letter,” his aunt said, handing him a note in which, among other things, the writer, who gave her name as Rose Arabella Jefferson, and claimed relationship with Thomas Jefferson, Joe Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, said she was a member in good standing of the First Baptist Church, and spelled Baptist with two b’s. There were also other mistakes in orthography, besides some in grammar, and Rex dropped it in disgust, but held fast to the photograph, whose piquant face, bright, laughing eyes, and graceful poise of head and shoulders attracted him greatly.

“Rose Arabella Jefferson,” he began, “blood relation of Joe Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson Davis, and member in good standing in the First Baptist Church, spelled with a b in the middle, you never wrote that letter, I know; and if you did, your blue blood ought to atone for a few lapses in grammar and spelling. I am sure Mrs. Walker Haynes would think so. Take her, auntie, and run the risk. She is from the country, where you said your companion must hail from, while Squint-Eye is from Boston, with no ancestry, no religion, and probably the embodiment of clubs and societies and leagues and women’s rights and Christian Science and the Lord knows what. Take Rose Arabella.”

But Mrs. Hallam was firm. Rose Arabella was quite too good-looking, and Boston was country compared with New York. “Squint-Eye” was her choice, provided her employers spoke well of her; and she asked Rex to write to Boston and make inquiries of Swartz & Co., concerning Miss Leighton.

“Not if I know myself,” Rex answered. “I will do everything reasonable, but I draw the line on turning detective and prying into any girl’s character.

He was firm on this point, and Mrs. Hallam wrote herself to Swartz & Co., and then proceeded to tear up and burn the numerous letters and photographs filling her table. Rose Arabella Jefferson, however, was not among them, for she, with other pretty girls, some personal friends and some strangers, was adorning Rex’s looking-glass, where it was greatly admired by the housemaid as Mr. Reginald’s latest fancy.

A few days later Mrs. Hallam said to Rex, “I have heard from Swartz & Co., and they speak in the highest terms of Miss Leighton. I wish you would write for me and tell her I have decided to take her, and that she is to come to me on Friday, June —, as the Teutonic sails the next morning.”

Reginald did as he was requested, thinking the while how much he would rather be writing to Rose Arabella, Babtist and all, than to Bertha Leighton. But there was no help for it; Bertha was his aunt’s choice, and was to be her companion instead of his, he reflected, as he directed the letter, which he posted on his way down town. The next day he started for the West on business for the law firm, promising his aunt that if possible he would return in time to see her off; “and then,” he added, “I am going to Leicester to look after my fancy farm.”

CHAPTER IV.
MRS. FRED THURSTON.

Bertha waited anxiously for an answer to her letter; when it did not come she grew very nervous and restless, and began to lose faith in the new moon and her theosophical presentiments, as she called her convictions of what was coming to pass. A feeling of dread began also to haunt her lest, after all, the man with the bald head, who called her Berthy, might be the only alternative to save the homestead from the auctioneer’s hammer. But the letter came at last and changed her whole future. There was an interview with her employers, who, having received Mrs. Hallam’s letter of inquiry, were not surprised. Although sorry to part with her, they readily agreed to advance whatever money should be needed in October, without other security than her note, which she was to leave with her father.

There was another interview with Mr. Sinclair, who at its close had a very sorry look on his face and a suspicion of suppressed tears in his voice as he said, “It is hard to give you up, and I could have made you so happy, and your father, too. Good-bye, and God bless you. Mrs. Thurston will be disappointed. Her heart was quite set upon having you for a neighbor, as you would be if you were my wife. Good-bye.”

The Mrs. Thurston alluded to was Bertha’s cousin Louie, from the South, who, four years before had spent part of a summer at the Homestead. She had then gone to Newport, where she captured Fred Thurston, a Boston millionaire, who made love to her hotly for one month, married her the next, swore at her the next, and in a quiet but decided manner had tyrannized over and bullied her ever since. But he gave her all the money she wanted, and, as that was the principal thing for which she married him, she bore her lot bravely, became in time a butterfly of fashion, and laughed and danced and dressed, and went to lunches and teas and receptions and dinners and balls, taking stimulants to keep her up before she went, and bromide, or chloral, or sulfonal, to make her sleep when she came home. But all this told upon her at last, and after four years of it she began to droop, with a consciousness that something was sapping her strength and stealing all her vitality. “Nervous prostration,” the physician called it, recommending a change of air and scene, and, as a trip to Europe had long been contemplated by Mr. Thurston, he had finally decided upon a summer in Switzerland, and was to sail some time in July. Mrs. Thurston was very fond of her relatives at the Homestead, and especially of Bertha, who when she was first married was a pupil in Charlestown Seminary and spent nearly every Sunday with her. After a while, however, and for no reason whatever except that on one or two occasions he had shown his frightful temper before her, Mr. Thurston conceived a dislike for Bertha and forbade Louie’s inviting her so often to his house, saying he did not marry her poor relations. This put an end to any close intimacy between the cousins, and although Bertha called occasionally she seldom met Louie’s husband, who, after she entered the employment of Swartz & Co., rarely recognized her in the street. Bread-winners were far beneath his notice, and Bertha was a sore point between him and his wife, who loved her cousin with the devotion of a sister and often wrote, begging her to come, if only for an hour.

But Bertha was too proud to trespass where the master did not want her, and it was many weeks since they had met. She must go now and say good-bye. And after Mr. Sinclair left her she walked along Commonwealth Avenue to her cousin’s elegant house, which stood side by side with one equally handsome, of which she had just refused to be mistress. But she scarcely glanced at it, or, if she did, it was with no feeling of regret as she ran up the steps and rang the bell.

Mrs. Thurston was at home and alone, the servant said, and Bertha, who went up unannounced, found her in her pleasant morning room, lying on a couch in the midst of a pile of cushions, with a very tired look upon her lovely face.

“Oh, Bertha,” she exclaimed, springing up with outstretched hands, as her cousin came in, “I am so glad to see you! Where have you kept yourself so long? And when are you coming to be my neighbor? I saw Mr. Sinclair last week, and he still had hopes.”

Bertha replied by telling what the reader already, knows, and adding that she had come to say good-bye, as she was to sail in two weeks.

“Oh, how could you refuse him, and he so kind and good, and so fond of you?” Louie said.

Bertha, between whom and her cousin there were no domestic secrets, replied:

“Because I do not love him, and never can, good and kind as I know him to be. With your experience, would you advise me to marry for money?”

Instantly a shadow came over Louie’s face, and she hesitated a little before she answered:

“Yes, and no; all depends upon the man, and whether you loved some one else. If you knew he would swear at you, and call you names, and storm before the servants, and throw things,—not at you, perhaps, but at the side of the house,—I should say no, decidedly; but if he were kind, and good, and generous, like Charlie Sinclair, I should say yes. I did so want you for my neighbor. Can’t you reconsider? Who is Mrs. Hallam, I wonder? I know some Hallams, or a Hallam,—Reginald. He lives in New York, and it seems to me his aunt’s name is Mrs. Carter Hallam. Let me tell you about him. I feel like talking of the old life in Florida, which seems so long ago.”

She was reclining again among the cushions, with one arm under her head, a far-away look in her eyes, and a tone in her voice as if she were talking to herself rather than to Bertha.

“You know my father lived in Florida,” she began, “not far from Tallahassee, and your mother lived over the line in Georgia. Our place was called Magnolia Grove, and there were oleanders and yellow jasmine and Cherokee roses everywhere. This morning when I was so tired and felt that life was not worth the living, I fancied I was in my old home again, and I smelled the orange blossoms and saw the magnolias which bordered the avenue to our house, fifty or more, in full bloom, and Rex and I were playing under them. His uncle’s plantation joined ours, and when his mother died in Boston he came to live with her brother at Grassy Spring. He was twelve and I was nine, and I had never played with any boy before except the negroes, and we were so fond of each other. He called me his little sweetheart, and said he was going to marry me when he was older. When he was fourteen, his uncle on his father’s side, a Mr. Hallam, from New York, sent for him, and he went away, promising to come back again when he was a man. We wrote to each other a few times, just boy and girl letters, you know. He called me Dear Louie and I called him Dear Rex, and then, I hardly know why, that chapter of my life closed, never to be reopened. Grandfather, who owned Magnolia Grove, lost nearly everything during the war, so that father, who took the place after him, was comparatively poor, and when he died we were poorer still, mother and I, and had to sell the plantation and move to Tallahassee, where we kept boarders,—people from the North, mostly, who came there for the winter. I was sixteen then, and I tried to help mother all I could. I dusted the rooms, and washed the glass and china, and did a lot of things I never thought I’d have to do. When I was eighteen Rex Hallam came to Jacksonville and ran over to see us. If he had been handsome as a boy of fourteen, he was still handsomer as a man of twenty-one, with what in a woman would be called a sweet graciousness of manner which won all hearts to him; but as he is a man I will drop the sweet and say that he was kind alike to everybody, old and young, rich and poor, and had the peculiar gift of making every woman think she was especially pleasing to him, whether she were married or single, pretty or otherwise. He stopped with us a week, and because I was so proud and rebellious against our changed circumstances, and so ashamed to have him find me dusting and washing dishes, I was cold and stiff towards him, and our old relations were not altogether resumed, although he was very kind. Sometimes for fun he helped me dust, and once he wiped the dishes for me and broke a china teapot, and then he went away and I never saw him again till last summer, when I met him at Saratoga. Fred, who was with him in college, introduced us to each other, supposing we were strangers. You ought to have seen the look of surprise on Rex’s face when Fred said, ‘This is my wife.’

“Why, Louie,” he exclaimed, “I don’t need an introduction to you,” then to my husband, “We are old friends, Louie and I;” and we told him of our early acquaintance.

“For a wonder, Fred did not seem a bit jealous of him, although savage if another man looked at me. Nor had he any cause, for Rex’s manner was just like a brother’s, but oh, such a brother! And I was so happy the two weeks he was there. We drove and rode and danced and talked together, and never but once did he refer to the past. Then, in his deep, musical voice, the most musical I ever heard in a man, he said, ‘I thought you were going to wait for me,’ and I answered, ‘I did wait, and you never came.’

“That was all; but the night before he went away he was in our room and asked for my photograph, which was lying upon the table. He had quite a collection, he said, and would like to add mine to it, and I gave it to him. Fred knew it and was willing, but since then, when he is in one of his moods, he taunts me with it, and says he knew I was in love with Rex all the time,—that he saw it in my face, and that Rex saw it, too, and despised me for it while pretending to admire me, and because he knew Rex despised me and he could trust him, he allowed me full liberty just to see how far I would go and not compromise myself. I do not believe it of Rex: he never despised any woman; but it is hard to hear such things, and sometimes when Fred is worse than usual and I have borne all I can bear, I go away and cry, with an intense longing for something different, which might perhaps have come to me if I had waited, and I hear Rex’s boyish voice just as it sounded under the magnolias in Florida, where we played together and pelted each other with the white petals strewing the ground.

“I am not false to Fred in telling this to you, who know about my domestic life, which, after all, has some sunshine in it. Fred is not always cross. Every one has a good and a bad side, a Jekyll and Hyde, you know, and if Fred has more Hyde than Jekyll, it is not his fault, perhaps. I try him in many ways. He says I am a fool, and that I only care for his money, and if he gives me all I want I ought to be satisfied. Just now he is very good,—so good, in fact, that I wonder if he isn’t going to die. I believe he thinks I am, I am so weak and tired. I have not told you, have I, that we, too, are going to Europe before long? Switzerland is our objective point, but if I can I will persuade Fred to go to Aix, where you will be. That will be jolly. I wonder if your Mrs. Hallam can be Rex’s aunt.”

“Did you ever see her?” Bertha asked, and Louie replied:

“Only in the distance. She was in Saratoga with him, but at another hotel. I heard she was a very swell woman with piles of money, and that when young she had made shoes and worked in a factory, or something.”

“How shocking!” Bertha said, laughingly, and Louie rejoined:

“Don’t be sarcastic. You know I don’t care what she used to do. Why should I, when I have dusted and washed dishes myself, and waited on a lot of Northern boarders, with my proud Southern blood in hot rebellion against it? If Mrs. Hallam made shoes or cloth, what does it matter, so long as she is rich now and in the best society? She is no blood relation to Rex, who is a gentleman by birth and nature both. I hope Mrs. Carter is his aunt, for then you will see him; and if you do, tell him I am your cousin, but not how wretched I am. He saw a little in Saratoga, but not much, for Fred was very guarded. Hark! I believe I hear him coming.”

There was a bright flush on her cheeks as she started up and began to smooth the folds of her dress and to arrange her hair.

“Fred does not like to see me tumbled,” she said, just as the portière was drawn aside and her husband entered the room.

He was a tall and rather fine-looking man of thirty, with large, fierce black eyes and an expression on his face and about his mouth indicative of an indomitable will and a temper hard to meet. He had come in, he said, to take Louie for a drive, as the day was fine and the air would do her good; and he was so gracious to Bertha that she felt sure the Jekyll mood was in the ascendant. He asked her if she was still with Swartz & Co., and listened with some interest while Louie told him of her engagement with Mrs. Carter Hallam, and when she asked if that lady was Rex’s aunt, he replied that she was, adding that Rex’s uncle had adopted him as a son and had left a large fortune.

Then, turning to Bertha, he said, “I congratulate you on your prospective acquaintance with Rex Hallam. He is very susceptible to female charms, and quite indiscriminate in his attentions. Every woman, old or young, is apt to think he is in love with her.”

He spoke sarcastically, with a meaning look at his wife, whose face was scarlet. Bertha was angry, and, with a proud inclination of her head, said to him:

“It is not likely that I shall see much of Mr. Reginald Hallam. Why should I, when I am only his aunt’s hired companion, and have few charms to attract him?”

“I am not so sure of that,” Fred said, struck as he had never been before with Bertha’s beauty, as she stood confronting him.

She was a magnificent-looking girl, who, given a chance, would throw Louie quite in the shade, he thought, and under the fascination of her beauty he became more gracious than ever, and asked her to drive with them and return to lunch.

“Oh, do,” Louie said. “It is ages since you were here.”

But Bertha declined, as she had shopping to do, and in the afternoon was going home to stay until it was time to report herself to Mrs. Hallam. Then, bidding them good-bye, she left the house and went rapidly down the avenue.

CHAPTER V.
THE COMPANION.

Bertha kept up very bravely when she said good-bye to her father and Dorcas and started alone for New York; but there was a horrid sense of loneliness and homesickness in her heart when at about six in the afternoon she rang the bell of No. — Fifth Avenue, looking in her sailor hat and tailor-made gown and Eton jacket of dark blue serge more like the daughter of the house than like a hired companion. Peters, the colored man who opened the door, mistook her for an acquaintance, and was very deferential in his manner, while he waited for her card. By mistake her cards were in her trunk, and she said to him, “Tell Mrs. Hallam that Miss Leighton is here. She is expecting me.”

Mrs. Hallam’s servants usually managed to know the most of their mistress’s business, for, although she professed to keep them at a distance, she was at times quite confidential, and they all knew that a Miss Leighton was to accompany her abroad as a companion. So when Peters heard the name he changed his intention to usher her into the reception-room, and, seating her in the hall, went for a maid, who took her to a room on the fourth floor back and told her that Mrs. Hallam had just gone in to dinner with some friends and would not be at liberty to see her for two or three hours.

“But she is expecting you,” she said, “and has given orders that you can have your dinner served here, or if you choose, you can dine with Mrs. Flagg, the housekeeper, in her room in the front basement. I should go there, if I were you. You’ll find it pleasanter and cooler than up here under the roof.”

Bertha preferred the housekeeper’s room, to which she was taken by the maid. Mrs. Flagg was a kind-hearted, friendly woman, who, with the quick instincts of her class, recognized Bertha as a lady and treated her accordingly. She had lived with the Hallams many years, and, with a natural pride in the family, talked a good deal of her mistress’s wealth and position, but more of Mr. Reginald, who had a pleasant word for everybody, high or low, rich or poor.

“Mrs. Hallam is not exactly that way,” she said, “and sometimes snubs folks beneath her; but I’ve heard Mr. Reginald tell her that civil words don’t cost anything, and the higher up you are and the surer of yourself the better you can afford to be polite to every one; that a gold piece is none the less gold because there is a lot of copper pennies in the purse with it, nor a real lady any the less a lady because she is kind of chummy with her inferiors. He’s great on comparisons.”

As Bertha made no comment, she continued, “He’s Mrs. Hallam’s nephew, or rather her husband’s, but the same as her son;” adding that she was sorry he was not at home, as she’d like Miss Leighton to see him.

When dinner was over she offered to take Bertha back to her room, and as they passed an open door on the third floor she stopped a moment and said, “This is Mr. Reginald’s room. Would you like to go in?”

Bertha did not care particularly about it, but as Mrs. Flagg stepped inside, she followed her. Just then some one from the hall called to Mrs. Flagg, and, excusing herself for a moment, she went out, leaving Bertha alone. It was a luxuriously furnished apartment, with signs of masculine ownership everywhere, but what attracted Bertha most was a large mirror which, in a Florentine frame, covered the entire chimney above the mantel and was ornamented with photographs on all its four sides. There were photographs of personal friends and prominent artists, authors, actors, opera-singers, and ballet-dancers, with a few of horses and dogs, divided into groups, with a blank space between. Bertha had no difficulty in deciding which were his friends, for there confronting her, with her sunny smile and laughing blue eyes, was Louie’s picture given to him at Saratoga, and placed by the side of a sweet-faced, refined-looking woman wearing a rather old-style dress, who, Bertha fancied, might be his mother.

“How lovely Louie is,” she thought, “and what a different life hers would have been had her friendship for Reginald Hallam ripened into love, as it ought to have done!” Then, casting her eyes upon another group, she started violently as she saw herself tucked in between a rope-walker and a ballet-dancer. “What does it mean? and how did my picture get here?” she exclaimed, taking it from the frame and wondering still more when she read upon it, “Rose Arabella Jefferson, Scotsburg.”

“Rose Arabella Jefferson!” she repeated. “Who is she? and how came her name on my picture? and how came my picture in Rex Hallam’s possession?” Then, remembering that she had sent it by request to Mrs. Hallam, she guessed how Rex came by it, and felt a little thrill of pride that he had liked it well enough to give it a place in his collection, even if it were in company with ballet-girls. “But it shall not stay there,” she thought. “I’ll put it next to Louie’s, and let him wonder who changed it, if he ever notices the change.”

Mrs. Flagg was coming, and, hastily putting the photograph between Louie’s and that of a woman who she afterwards found was Mrs. Carter Hallam, she went out to meet the housekeeper, whom she followed to her room.

“You will not be afraid, as the servants all sleep up here. We have six besides the coachman,” Mrs. Flagg said as she bade her good-night.

“Six servants besides the coachman and housekeeper! I make the ninth, for I dare say I am little more than that in my lady’s estimation,” Bertha thought, as she sat alone, watching the minute-hand of the clock creeping slowly round, and wondering when the grand dinner would be over and Mrs. Hallam ready to receive her. Then, lest the lump in her throat should get the mastery, she began to walk up and down her rather small quarters, to look out of the window upon the roofs of the houses, and to count the chimneys and spires in the distance.

It was very different from the lookout at home, with its long stretch of wooded hills, its green fields and meadows and grassy lane. Once her tears were threatening every moment to start, when a maid appeared and said her mistress was at liberty to see her. With a beating heart and heightened color, Bertha followed her to the boudoir, where, in amber satin and diamonds Mrs. Hallam was waiting, herself somewhat flurried and nervous and doubtful how to conduct herself during the interview. She was always a little uncertain how to maintain a dignity worthy of Mrs. Carter Hallam under all circumstances, for, although she had been in society so long and had seen herself quoted and her dinners and receptions described so often, she was not yet quite sure of herself, nor had she learned the truth of Rex’s theory that gold was not the less gold because in the same purse with pennies. She had never forgotten the shoe-shop and the barefoot girl picking berries, with all the other humble surroundings of her childhood, and because she had not she felt it incumbent upon her to try to prove that she was and always had been what she seemed to be, a leader of fashion, with millions at her command. To compass this she assumed an air of haughty superiority towards those whom she thought her inferiors. She had never hired a companion, and in the absence of her mentor, Mrs. Walker Haynes, she did not know exactly how to treat one. Had she asked Rex, he would have said, “Treat her as you would any other young lady.” But Rex held some very ultra views, and was not to be trusted implicitly. Fortunately, however, a guest at dinner had helped her greatly by recounting her own experience with a companion who was always getting out of her place, and who finally ran off with a French count at Trouville, where they were spending the summer.

“I began wrong,” the lady said. “I was too familiar at first, and made too much of her because she was educated and superior to her class.”

Acting upon this intimation, Mrs. Hallam decided to commence right. Remembering the picture which Rex called Squint-Eye, she had no fear that the original would ever run off with a French count, but she might have to be put down, and she would begin by sitting down to receive her. “Standing will make her too much my equal,” she thought, and, adjusting the folds of her satin gown and assuming an expression which she meant to be very cold and distant, she glanced up carelessly, but still a little nervously, as she heard the sound of footsteps and knew there was some one at the door. She was expecting a very ordinary-looking person, with wide mouth, half-closed eyes, and light hair, and when she saw a tall, graceful girl, with dark hair and eyes, brilliant color, and an air decidedly patrician, as Mrs. Walker Haynes would say, she was startled out of her dignity, and involuntarily rose to her feet and half extended her hand. Then, remembering herself, she dropped it, and said, stammeringly, “Oh, are you Miss Leighton?”

“Yes, madam. You were expecting me, were you not?” Bertha answered, her voice clear and steady, with no sound of timidity or awe in it.

“Why, yes; that is—sit down, please. There is some mistake,” Mrs. Hallam faltered. “You are not like your photograph, or the one I took for you. They must have gotten mixed, as Rex said they did. He insisted that your letter did not belong to what I said was your photograph and which he called Squint-Eye.”

Here it occurred to Mrs. Hallam that she was not commencing right at all,—that she was quite too communicative to a girl who looked fully equal to running off with a duke, if she chose, and who must be kept down. But she explained about the letters and the photographs until Bertha had a tolerably correct idea of the mistake and laughed heartily over it. It was a very merry, musical laugh, in which Mrs. Hallam joined for a moment. Then, resuming her haughty manner, she plied Bertha with questions, saying to her first, “Your home is in Boston, I believe?”

“Oh, no,” Bertha replied. “My home is in Leicester, where I was born.”

“In Leicester!” Mrs. Hallam replied, her voice indicative of surprise and disapprobation. “You wrote me from Boston. Why did you do that?”

Bertha explained why, and Mrs. Hallam asked next if she lived in the village or the country.

“In the country, on a farm,” Bertha answered, wondering at Mrs. Hallam’s evident annoyance at finding that she came from Leicester instead of Boston.

It had not before occurred to her to connect the Homestead with Mrs. Carter Hallam, but it came to her now, and at a venture she said, “Our place is called the Hallam Homestead, named for a family who lived there many years ago.”

She was looking curiously at Mrs. Hallam, whose face was crimson at first and then grew pale, but who for a moment made no reply. Here was a complication,—Leicester, and perhaps the old life, brought home to her by the original of the picture so much admired by Rex, who had it in mind to buy the old Homestead, and was sure to admire the girl when he saw her, as he would, for he was coming to Aix-les-Bains some time during the summer. If Mrs. Hallam could have found an excuse for it, she would have dismissed Bertha at once. But there was none. She was there, and she must keep her, and perhaps it might be well to be frank with her to a certain extent. So she said at last, “My husband’s family once lived in Leicester,—presumably on your father’s farm. That was years ago, before I was married. My nephew, Mr. Reginald” (she laid much stress on the Mr., as if to impress Bertha with the distance there was between them), “has, I believe, some quixotic notion about buying the old place. Is it for sale?”

The fire which flashed into Bertha’s eyes and the hot color which stained her cheeks startled Mrs. Hallam, who was not prepared for Bertha’s excitement as she replied, “For sale! Never! There is a mortgage of long standing on it, but it will be paid in the fall. I am going with you to earn the money to pay it. Nothing else would take me from father and Dorcas so long. We heard there was a New York man wishing to buy it, but he may as well think of buying the Coliseum as our home. Tell him so, please, for me. Hallam Homestead is not for sale.”

As she talked, Bertha grew each moment more earnest and excited and beautiful, with the tears shining in her eyes and the bright color on her cheeks. Mrs. Hallam was not a hard woman, nor a bad woman; she was simply calloused over with false ideas of caste and position, which prompted her to restrain her real nature whenever it asserted itself, as it was doing now. Something about Bertha fascinated and interested her, bringing back the long ago, with the odor of the pines, the perfume of the pond-lilies, and the early days of her married life. But this feeling soon passed. Habit is everything, and she had been the fashionable Mrs. Carter Hallam so long that it would take more than a memory of the past to change her. She must maintain her dignity, and not give way to sentiment, and she was soon herself, cold and distant, with her chin in the air, where she usually carried it when talking to those whom she wished to impress with her superiority.

For some time longer she talked to Bertha, and learned as much of her history as Bertha chose to tell. Her mother was born in Georgia, she said; her father in Boston. He was a Yale graduate, and fonder of books than of farming. They were poor, keeping no servants; Dorcas, her only sister, kept the house, while she did what she could to help pay expenses and lessen the mortgage on the farm. All this Bertha told readily enough, with no thought of shame for her poverty. She saw that Mrs. Hallam was impressed with the Southern mother and scholarly father, and once she thought to speak of her cousin, Mrs. Louie, but did not, and here she possibly made a mistake, for Mrs. Hallam had a great respect for family connections, as that was what she lacked. She had heard of Mrs. Fred Thurston, as had every frequenter of Saratoga and Newport, and once at the former place she had seen her driving in her husband’s stylish turnout with Reginald at her side. He was very attentive to the beauty whom he had known at the South, and Mrs. Hallam had once or twice intimated to him that she, too, would like to meet her, but he had not acted upon the hint, and she had left Saratoga without accomplishing her object. Had Bertha told of the relationship between herself and Louie, it might have made some difference in her relations with her employer. But she did not, and after a little further catechising Mrs. Hallam dismissed her, saying, “As the ship sails at nine, it will be necessary to rise very early; so I will bid you good-night.”

The next morning Bertha breakfasted with Mrs. Flagg, who told her that, as a friend was to accompany Mrs. Hallam in her coupé to the ship, she was to go in a street-car, with a maid to show her the way.

“Evidently I am a hired servant and nothing more,” Bertha thought; “but I can endure even that for the sake of Europe and five hundred dollars.” And, bidding good-bye to Mrs. Flagg, she was soon on her way to the Teutonic.

CHAPTER VI.
ON THE TEUTONIC.

Bertha found Mrs. Hallam in her state-room, which was one of the largest and most expensive on the ship. With her were three or four ladies who were there to say good-bye, all talking together and offering advice in case of sickness, while Mrs. Hallam fanned herself vigorously, as the morning was very hot.

“Are you not taking a maid?” one of the ladies asked, and Mrs. Hallam replied that Mrs. Haynes advised her to get one in Paris, adding, “I have a young girl as companion, and I’m sure I don’t know where she is. She ought to be here by this time. I dare say she will be more trouble than good. She seems quite the fine lady. I hardly know what I am to do with her.”

“Keep her in her place,” was the prompt advice of a little, common-looking woman, who was once a nursery governess, but was now a millionaire, and perfectly competent to advise as to the proper treatment of a companion.

Just then Bertha appeared, and was stared at by the ladies, who took no further notice of her.

“I am glad you’ve got here at last. What kept you so long?” Mrs. Hallam asked, a little petulantly, while Bertha replied that she had been detained by a block in the street cars, and asked if there was anything she could do.

“Yes,” Mrs. Hallam answered. “I wish you would open my sea trunk and satchel, and get out my wrapper, and shawl, and cushion, and toilet articles, and salts, and camphor. I am sure to be sick the minute we get out to sea.” And handing her keys to Bertha, she went with her friends outside, where the crowd was increasing every moment.

The passenger-list was full, and every passenger had at least half a dozen acquaintances to see him off, so that by the time Bertha had arranged Mrs. Hallam’s belongings, and gone out on deck, there was hardly standing room. Finding a seat near the purser’s office, she sat down and watched the surging mass of human beings, jostling, pushing, crowding each other, the confusion reaching its climax when the order came for the ship to be cleared of all visitors. Then for a time they stood so thickly around her that she could see nothing and hear nothing but a confused babel of voices, until suddenly there was a break in the ranks, and a tall young man, who had been fighting his way to the plank, pitched headlong against her with such force that she fell from the seat, losing her hat in the fall, and striking her forehead on a sharp point near her.

“I beg your pardon; are you much hurt? I am so sorry, but I could not help it, they pushed me so in this infernal crowd. Let me help you up,” a pleasant, manly voice, full of concern, said to her, while two strong hands lifted her to her feet, and on to the seat where she had been sitting. “You are safe here, unless some other blunderhead knocks you down again,” the young man continued, as he managed to pick up her hat. “Some wretch has stepped on it, but I think I can doctor it into shape,” he said, giving it a twist or two, and then putting it very carefully on Bertha’s head hind side before. “There! It is all right, I think, though, upon my soul, it does seem a little askew,” he added, looking for the first time fully at Bertha, who was holding her hand to her forehead, where a big bump was beginning to show.

Her hand hid a portion of her face, but she smiled brightly and gratefully upon the stranger, whose manner was so friendly and whose brown eyes seen through his glasses looked so kindly at her.

“By Jove, you are hurt,” he continued, “and I did it. I can’t help you, as I’ve got to go, but my aunt is on board,—Mrs. Carter Hallam; find her, and tell her that her awkward nephew came near knocking your brains out. She has every kind of drug and lotion imaginable, from morphine to Pond’s extract, and is sure to find something for that bump. And now I must go or be carried off.”

He gave another twist to her hat and offered her his hand, and then ran down the plank to the wharf, where, with hundreds of others, he stood, waving his hat and cane to his friends on the ship, which began to move slowly from the dock. He was so tall that Bertha could see him distinctly, and she stood watching him and him alone, until he was a speck in the distance. Then, with a feeling of loneliness, she started for her state-room, where Mrs. Hallam, who had preceded her, was looking rather cross and doing her best to be sick, although as yet there was scarcely any motion to the vessel.

Reginald, whose train was late, had hurried at once to the ship, which he reached in time to see his aunt for a few moments only. Her last friend had said good-bye, and she was feeling very forlorn, and wondering where Bertha could be, when he came rushing up, bringing so much life and sunshine and magnetism with him that Mrs. Hallam began to feel doubly forlorn as she wondered what she should do without him.

“Oh, Rex,” she said, laying her head on his arm and beginning to cry a little, “I am so glad you have come, and I wish you were going with me. I fear I have made a mistake starting off alone. I don’t know at all how to take care of myself.”

Rex smoothed her hair, patted her hand, soothed her as well as he could, and told her he was sure she would get on well enough and that he would certainly join her in August.

“Where is Miss Leighton? Hasn’t she put in an appearance?” he asked, and his aunt replied, with a little asperity of manner:

“Yes; she came last night, and she seems a high and mighty sort of damsel. I am disappointed, and afraid I shall have trouble with her.”

“Sit down on her if she gets too high and mighty,” Rex said, laughingly, while his aunt was debating the propriety of telling him of the mistake and who Bertha was.

“I don’t believe I will. He will find it out soon enough,” she thought, just as the last warning to leave the boat was given, and with a hurried good-bye Rex left her, saying, as he did so:

“I’ll look a bit among the crowd, and if I find your squint-eyed damsel I’ll send her to you. I shall know her in a minute.”

Here was a good chance to explain, but Mrs. Hallam let it pass, and Rex went his way, searching here and there for a light-haired, weak-eyed woman answering to her photograph.

But he did not find her, and ran instead against Bertha, with no suspicion that she was the girl he had told his aunt to sit on, and for whom that lady waited rather impatiently after the ship was cleared.

“Oh!” she said, as Bertha came in. “I have been waiting for you some time. Did you have friends to say good-bye to? Give me my salts, please, and camphor, and fan, and a pillow, and close that shutter. I don’t want the herd looking in upon me; nor do I think this room so very desirable, with all the people passing and repassing. I told Rex so, and he said nobody wanted to see me in my night-cap. He was here to say good-bye. His train got in just in time.”

Bertha closed the shutters and brought a pillow and fan and the camphor and salts, and then bathed the bruise on her forehead, which was increasing in size and finally attracted Mrs. Hallam’s attention.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, and Bertha replied, “I was knocked down in the crowd by a young man who told me he had an aunt, a Mrs. Hallam, on board. I suppose he must have been your nephew.”

“Did you tell him who you were?” Mrs. Hallam asked, with a shake of her head and disapproval in her voice.

“No, madam,” Bertha replied. “He was trying to apologize for what he had done, and spoke to me of you as one to whom I could go for help if I was badly hurt.”

“Yes, that is like Reginald,—thinking of everything,” Mrs. Hallam said. After a moment she added, “He has lived with me since he was a boy, and is the same as a son. He will join me in Aix-les-Bains in August. Miss Grace Haynes is there, and I don’t mind telling you, as you will probably see for yourself, that I think there is a sort of understanding between him and her. Nothing would please me better.”

“There! I have headed off any idea she might possibly have with regard to Rex, who is so democratic and was so struck with her photograph, while she,—well, there is something in her eyes and the lofty way she carries her head and shoulders that I don’t like; it looks too much like equality, and I am afraid I may have to sit on her, as Rex bade me do,” was Mrs. Hallam’s mental comment, as she adjusted herself upon her couch and issued her numerous orders.

For three days she stayed in her state-room, not because she was actually sea-sick, but because she feared she would be. To lie perfectly quiet in her berth until she was accustomed to the motion of the vessel was the advice given her by one of her friends, and as far as possible she followed it, while Bertha was kept in constant attendance, reading to her, brushing her hair, bathing her head, opening and shutting the windows, and taking messages to those of her acquaintances able to be on deck. The sea was rather rough for June, but Bertha was not at all affected by it, and the only inconvenience she suffered was want of sufficient exercise and fresh air. Early in the morning, while Mrs. Hallam slept, she was free to go on deck, and again late in the evening, after the lady had retired for the night. These walks, with going to her meals, were the only recreation or change she had, and she was beginning to droop a little, when at last Mrs. Hallam declared herself able to go upon deck, where, by the aid of means which seldom fail, she managed to gain possession of the sunniest and most sheltered spot, which she held in spite of the protestations of another party who claimed the place on the ground of first occupancy. She was Mrs. Carter Hallam, and she kept the field until a vacancy occurred in the vicinity of some people whom to know, if possible, was desirable. Then she moved, and had her reward in being told by one of the magnates that it was a fine day and the ship was making good time.

Every morning Bertha brought her rugs and wraps and cushions and umbrella, and after seeing her comfortably adjusted sat down at a respectful distance and waited for orders, which were far more frequent than was necessary. No one spoke to her, although many curious and admiring glances were cast at the bright, handsome girl who seemed quite as much a lady as her mistress, but who was performing the duties of a maid and was put down upon the passenger-list as Mrs. Hallam’s companion. As it chanced, there was a royal personage on board, and one day when standing near, Bertha, who was watching a steamer just appearing upon the horizon, he addressed some remark to her, and then, attracted by something in her face, or manner, or both, continued to talk with her, until Mrs. Hallam’s peremptory voice called out:

“Bertha, I want you, Don’t you see my rug is falling off?”

There was a questioning glance at the girl thus bidden and at the woman who bade her, and then, lifting his hat politely to the former, the stranger walked away, while Bertha went to Mrs. Hallam, who said to her sharply:

“I wonder at your presumption; but possibly you did not know to whom you were talking?”

“Oh, yes, I did,” Bertha replied. “It was the prince. He speaks English fluently, and I found him very agreeable.”

She was apparently as unconcerned as if it had been the habit of her life to consort with royalty, and Mrs. Hallam looked at her wonderingly, conscious in her narrow soul of an increased feeling of respect for the girl whom a prince had honored with his notice and who took it so coolly and naturally. But she did not abate her requirements or exactions in the least. On the contrary, it seemed as if she increased them. But Bertha bore it all patiently, performing every task imposed upon her as if it were a pleasure, and never giving any sign of fatigue, although in reality she was never so tired in her life as when at last they sailed up the Mersey and into the docks at Liverpool.

At Queenstown she sent off a letter to Dorcas, in which, after speaking of her arrival in New York and the voyage in general, she wrote, “I hardly know what to say of Mrs. Hallam until I have seen more of her. She is a great lady, and great ladies need a great deal of waiting upon, and the greater they are the greater their need. There must be something Shylocky in her nature, and, as she gives me a big salary, she means to have her pound of flesh. I am down on the passenger-list as her companion, but it should be maid, as I am really that. But when we reach Paris there will be a change, as she is to have a French maid there. It will surprise you, as it did me, to know that she belongs to the Hallams for whom the Homestead was named and who father thought were all dead. Her husband was born there. Where she came from I do not know. She is very reticent on that point. I shouldn’t be surprised if she once worked in a factory, she is so particular to have her position recognized. Such a scramble as she had to get to the captain’s table; though what good that does I cannot guess, inasmuch as he is seldom there himself. I am at Nobody’s table, and like it, because I am a nobody.

“Do you remember the letter father had, saying that some New Yorker wanted to buy our farm and was coming to look at it? That New Yorker is cousin Louie’s Reginald Hallam, of whom I told you, and Mrs. Carter’s nephew; not in the least like her, I fancy, although I have only had the pleasure of being knocked down by him on the ship. But he was not to blame. The crowd pushed him against me with such force that I fell off the seat and nearly broke my head. My hat was crushed out of all shape, and he made it worse trying to twist it back. He was kindness itself, and his brown eyes full of concern as they looked at me through the clearest pair of rimless glasses I ever saw. He did not know who I was, of course, but I am sure he would have been just as kind if he had. I can understand Louie’s infatuation for him, and why his aunt adores him.

“But what nonsense to be writing with Queenstown in sight, and this letter must be finished to send off. I am half ashamed of what I have said of Mrs. Hallam, who when she forgets what a grand lady she is, can be very nice, and I really think she likes me a little.

“And now I must close, with more love for you and father than can be carried in a hundred letters. Will write again from Paris. Good-bye, good-bye.

“Bertha.

“P. S. I told you that if a New Yorker came to buy the farm you were to shut the door in his face. But you may as well let him in.”

CHAPTER VII.
REGINALD AND PHINEAS JONES.

After bidding his aunt good-bye, Reginald went home for a few moments, and then to his office, where he met for the first time Mr. Gorham, the owner of the Leighton mortgage, and learned that the place was really where his father used to live and that the Homestead was named for the Hallams. This increased his desire to own it, and, as there was still time to catch the next train for Boston, he started for the depot and was soon on his way to Worcester, where he arrived about four in the afternoon. Wishing to make some inquiries as to the best means of reaching Leicester, he went to a hotel, where he found no one in the office besides the clerk except a tall, spare man, with long, light hair tinged with gray, and shrewdness and curiosity written all over his good-humored face. He wore a linen duster, with no collar, and only an apology for a handkerchief twisted around his neck. Tipping back in one chair, with his feet in another, he was taking frequent and most unsuccessful aims at a cuspidor about six feet from him.

“Good-afternoon,” he said, removing his feet from the chair for a moment, but soon putting them back, as he asked if Reginald had just come from the train, and whether from the East or the West. Then he told him it was an all-fired hot day, that it looked like thunder in the west, and he shouldn’t wonder if they got a heavy shower before night.

To all this Reginald assented, and then went to the desk to register, while the stranger, on pretense of looking at something in the street, also arose and sauntered to the door, managing to glance at the register and see the name just written there.

Resuming his seat and inviting Rex to take a chair near him, he began: “I b’lieve you’re from New York. I thought so the minute you came in. I have traveled from Dan to Beersheba, and been through the war,—was a corp’ral there,—and I generally spot you fellows when I first put my eye on you. I am Phineas Jones,—Phin for short. I hain’t any real profession, but am jack at all trades and good at none. Everybody knows me in these parts, and I know everybody.”

Rex, who began to be greatly amused with this queer specimen, bowed an acknowledgment of the honor of knowing Mr. Jones, who said, “Be you acquainted in Worcester?”

“Not at all. Was never here before,” was Rex’s reply, and Phineas continued: “Slow old place, some think, but I like it. Full of nice folks of all sorts, with clubs, and lodges, and societies, and no end of squabbles about temperance and city officers and all that. As for music,—my land, I’d smile to see any place hold a candle to us. Had all the crack singers here, even to the diver.”