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New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

PAUL RALSTON.
A Novel.

BY

MRS. MARY J. HOLMES,

AUTHOR OF

“’Lena Rivers,” “Gretchen,” “Marian Grey,” “Meadow Brook,” “Tempest and Sunshine,” Etc., Etc.

NEW YORK:

G. W. Dillingham Co., Publishers.

MDCCCXCVII.

Copyright, 1896 and 1897,

By MRS. MARY J. HOLMES.

[All rights reserved.]

Paul Ralston.

CONTENTS.

PAUL RALSTON.

CHAPTER I.
MISS PHEBE HANSFORD.

She was standing in the doorway of her cottage, in Oak City, one morning in May, watching the early boat as it came slowly up to the wharf and counting the passengers who landed from it. There were twenty in all,—some with their bags and umbrellas, walking briskly away in different directions, as if they knew where they were going and were in a hurry to get there,—while a few, who evidently did not know where they were going, stopped to parley with two or three hackmen on the stand in front of a hotel. These were undoubtedly strangers seeking information with regard to accommodations, and Miss Hansford decided that the season was likely to be a good one when people began to arrive so early. By a good season she meant her rooms full of lodgers, with plenty of money coming to her weekly, and not as was the case the previous summer,—barely enough to pay her taxes and insurance. As yet most of the cottages were closed and looked gloomy and somber, with their barred doors and boarded windows and no stir of life around them. But there were signs of the coming summer in the warm spring air which blew up from the sea. Crocuses and daffodils were blossoming in the borders and hyacinths in the beds in the parks, where the grass was fresh and green, and in a short time the place would shake off its winter lethargy and be alive and gay once more. Like many other people, Miss Hansford’s bones were her barometer. Whatever they indicated, whether physically or of matters outside her own personality, was pretty sure to come to pass, and as she counted the people crossing the pier she was conscious of a sudden exhilaration of spirits which boded well for the future. From living alone more than half the time she had acquired a habit of talking to herself, and frequently indulged in long conversations of questions and answers, in which she sometimes differed as sharply from her imaginary interlocutor or respondent as she would have done had they been real flesh and blood.

Seating herself upon the piazza, which extended on three sides of her cottage, and still watching the boat now moving out to sea, she said aloud: “Yes, I begin to feel it in my bones that it’s going to be an uncommon summer. Something out of the usual run. I don’t know, though, why I need be so anxious. I’ve enough to carry me through, and more, too, and I don’t want ’em to fight over the little there will be left when I’m gone. There ain’t many to fight, either. The nearest of kin is Roger, and I vowed I wouldn’t give him a thing when he married Lucy Potter.”

Here Miss Hansford paused in her soliloquy and changed her position a little, moving her left knee across her right and rolling her calico apron around her hands, which worked nervously as she recalled her old home in Ridgefield, a pretty inland town among the New England hills. In the cemetery there a host of Hansfords were lying,—her grandparents, her father and mother, her brothers and sisters,—sixteen in all,—and she had followed them one by one to their graves until there was only left her nephew, the recreant Roger, who had married Lucy Potter. For a few minutes Miss Hansford’s face was shadowed with memories of the farm-house, whose windows looked across the meadow and the river to the graves in the cemetery; then, brightening up with the thought that there was “no use in crying for spilt milk,” she returned to her talk of the coming season, which her bones told her was to be a profitable one.

“If the Methodists have as big a camp-meeting as they had last year, and the Baptists do anything at all, and the teachers come to the Institute, and the hotels are full, things’ll be lively for a spell,” she said, “and I wouldn’t wonder if I rented all my rooms, even to the back chamber, where a tall body can’t stand straight except in the centre. Folks mostly don’t take to it, because there’s no view from the windows, except the oak woods. Can’t see the water at all; seems as if inlanders were daft on the sea. If they had lived as long as I have, year in and year out, in sound of its fretting and moaning, from morning till night and night till morning; and if they could see it in winter when a storm is raging over it and the waves break on the shore with a noise like thunder, they’d sing another song than ‘The sea, the sea, the beautiful sea.’ It’s pretty, though, when it’s calm and still and there’s fifty or a hundred sails in sight, as I have counted when the yachts were anchored near here. Oak City ain’t as fashionable as Newport or Narragansett Pier, but it’s a mighty good place to rest in, and there isn’t a prettier spot on the whole coast from Maine to Florida, especially on a morning like this.”

Miss Hansford was waxing eloquent on the subject of Oak City, and quite forgot her rolls burning in the oven and her tea-kettle boiling dry on the stove, as she sat enjoying the view. She had seen it hundreds of times, but it never struck her as quite as fair as it did now, when earth and sky seemed laughing in the brightness and warmth of early May. The ocean was smooth as glass, with white sails dotting its surface in the distance and looking like great wings, as they moved slowly out of sight, or in. To her left a long, hazy line showed where the mainland lay, and between that and the island a thin wreath of smoke told where the boat was disappearing. In front of her, between Oceanside and the Heights, as the two divisions of the town were called, Lake Wenona and Lake Eau Claire sparkled in the sunshine,—the two connected by a narrow strip of land called the Causeway, and neither of them larger than a good-sized mill pond. She had seen them lashed into fury when a wild storm was sweeping the Atlantic coast, and seen them again, covered with boats filled with gay young people when the season was at its height and the place full of visitors. There was a small skiff now on Lake Eau Claire, rowed by a young man whose form seemed familiar to her.

“Who in the world can that be?” she thought, regretting that she had not on her far-seeing spectacles, which brought objects at a long distance distinctly within her range of vision. “Land o’ Goshen!” she exclaimed, as the boat came nearer. “I believe my soul it’s Paul Ralston. When did he get home, I’d like to know? I was up to the Ralston house last week, and Mrs. Drake wasn’t expectin’ the folks for some time. She was just beginning to air and clean that queer place in the basement cellar,—the Smuggler’s room. She said Paul was going to fit it up as a kind of billiard and smoking room this summer, because ’twas cool and quiet. They’ve got one room for billiards now upstairs, and I don’t see what they want of another. I call it wicked to waste so much money on a place to knock balls and smoke and play cards in, for it’ll come to that with all the young bucks who go there. Oh, my land, how times has changed since I was young, and such things as cards and billiard balls belonged to the evil one! Now they belong to everybody,—professors and all.”

In her lament over the degeneracy of the age, the good woman rocked back and forth, but kept her eyes upon the boat, which was heading for the shore. Miss Hansford was always spoken of as a character and was better known than any permanent resident in Oak City. Indeed, she was a part of the city, and had seen it grow from a few tents clustered around the camp grounds to its present proportions and modern usages, to which she did not take kindly. When a girl she had come from her home in Ridgefield with a party of young people as gay and thoughtless as herself to attend the annual camp-meeting, which was beginning to attract a good deal of attention. The site for the camp-meeting had been chosen by the Methodists, partly for its delightful situation, and partly for its entire seclusion from anything worldly which would disturb the mind and hinder the good work. The only house then upon the Heights was known as the Ralston House, which had been built for many years, and, with its huge chimney and square look-out on the roof, was a landmark for the surrounding country. Many strange stories were told of it and its first owner, old Captain Ralston, whose ship, the Vulture, had sailed to all parts of the world, and finally gone down in a wild storm off the Banks of Newfoundland. The house itself was said to have been a rendezvous for smugglers and a hiding place for their goods. But with the sinking of the Vulture and the death of the captain, who went down with it, the stories ceased, and when the first camp-meeting was held the great house was occupied by the elders and those who could afford to pay for the rooms. On the Oceanside a few straggling dwellings were springing up near the grounds and the shore, but for the most part the accommodations were of the crudest kind. People brought their own provisions and beds, and camped upon the ground and under trees and felt that they were worshiping God far more acceptably than if the blue sky above them had been the dome of some expensive church and the hard benches upon which they sat in its luxuriously cushioned pews.

At first the whole thing struck Phebe as grotesque, but youth is not apt to be very critical, especially if having a good time, and as she usually had a good time she enjoyed everything immensely after the first surprise wore off, and slept in a tent with the rain sometimes dripping on her face, and ate coarse fare from board tables, and watched the proceedings with feelings of curiosity and amusement and half contempt for what seemed to her emotional and senseless. The church in which she had been brought up did not worship that way, and, with something of a Pharisaical feeling, she was one night listening to an elder noted for piety and eloquence, who was exhorting some people near her to a better life. Considering herself as a spectator and no part of the congregation, she did not expect to be addressed. Anxious seats and extemporaneous prayers were not for one reared as she had been, and when the elder, who for some time had had her in his mind, turned suddenly towards her and asked if she were a Christian, she colored with confusion and alarm and answered, hurriedly: “No, so; no, sir; I am an Episcopalian.”

Something like a smile flitted across the elder’s face, as he said: “More’s the pity for you and your church,” and then passed on, leaving the girl, who was not a Christian because she was an Episcopalian, to the tender mercies of her companions. Young people are apt to be relentless where ridicule is concerned, and Phebe was jeered at and chaffed until in desperation she declared her intention to go forward for prayers the next time an invitation was given. New and strange feelings were beginning to influence her, and when at last she knelt with others to be prayed for it was more in sober earnest than in fun. There was something in this religion after all, and as she never did anything by halves, she tested it until she proved its reality, and went back to her home in Ridgefield an avowed Methodist. To the father and mother, equally as conscientious as herself, it seemed almost sacrilege that their daughter, born and brought up in the tenets of the church, should embrace another faith, or at least another form of worship. But Phebe was firm. Episcopacy, with its ritual and ceremonious dignity, would never appeal to her again. She liked better the stir and life of the Methodists. It was something real,—something to take hold of, and she liked their style of dress as more consistent with a Christian life. She could pray better in a plain gown than in a silk one, and she stopped curling her hair and laid aside her jewelry and her ribbons, and went every year to Oak City, where she was one of the most zealous workers, and was known as Sister Phebe. As long as her parents lived she stayed with them in Ridgefield, going with them occasionally to St. John’s, which, she thanked her stars, was low, as she understood the term, but going oftener to the plain wooden building on the shore of Podunk Pond, where for many years the Methodists held their services. When her father and mother were both dead and there was nothing to keep her in Ridgefield, she moved to Oak City, and, building herself a cottage on the Heights, lived mostly alone, except for the lodgers who came to her when the camp-meeting was in progress. The religious atmosphere of the place suited her, and, could she have had her way, nothing more exciting than the annual camp-meeting would have found entrance there. But the town was destined to grow, and as it increased in size, and hotels and handsome cottages were built on the Heights and Oceanside, and the streets were full of fashionably dressed people and stylish turnouts, she shook her head disapprovingly. She had renounced the world, the flesh and the devil twice, she said. Once by proxy when baptized in infancy in the Episcopal church, and again when, not holding her first baptism valid, she had been immersed in Podunk Pond, when the thermometer was nearly at zero and the wind was blowing a gale. It was a satisfaction to remember this. It seemed to make her a kind of martyr for endurance, and to freeze out any microbes of temptation which might assail her afterwards.

In the sanctity of Oak City she lived a long time before the world, the flesh and the devil came to confront her with a persistence she could not resist. Fashion and folly, as she called every innovation upon her ideas of right, crowded thick and fast into the pretty town, until the camp-meeting was a secondary matter, and ignored by two-thirds of the guests, who, if they attended the services at all, did so from curiosity, or because it was pleasant to while away an hour or so in the huge open tabernacle built upon the spot where the first tent had been set up many years before for the worship of God. Miss Hansford, as one of the oldest residents, was a power in the community, and her opinion carried great weight in her own church, but she found herself stranded and helpless in the society which knew not Joseph, or, knowing, did not care. It was in vain that she lifted up her voice against the dances at the hotels, the roller-skating at the rink, the play-acting at the Casino, the ocean bathers in suits which she said made even her blush to look at, and, worst of all, the band, which on Sunday afternoons gave what was called a sacred concert in the open air,—concerts which crowds attended, but which Miss Hansford bitterly denounced. A device of Satan, she called them, and resolutely stopped her ears with cotton to shut out the profane sounds which floated across Lake Wenona to where she sat reading her Bible and deploring the sins of the times. But neither her prayers nor her disapproval availed to stem the tide so fast setting in towards Oak City. The dancing went on in the hotels, the skating in the rink, the play-acting in the Casino, the flirting in the streets, while the bathing suits of the ladies grew shorter and lower each year, until they reminded her of a picture of a ballet girl which a mischievous boy had once sent her as a valentine, and which she had promptly burned.

Owing to the influence of a few New Yorkers and Bostonians, who came to Oak City every summer, spending their money freely and introducing many innovations in the old-established customs, the place was booming. A little church, holding the faith in which she was reared, was built under the shadow of one of the largest hotels. “Fashion’s Bazaar,” Miss Hansford called it, but she watched its growth with a strange interest, and a feeling as if something she had loved and lost were being restored to her. Unsolicited, she gave a hundred dollars towards its erection for the sake of her dead father and mother, and she never heard the sound of the bell calling the people to service without a wave of memory taking her back to the days of her childhood, and the broken bit of wall in the apple orchard, where she used sometimes to sit and listen to the chimes of St. John’s echoing across the river and the meadowland. Laid carefully away in her bureau drawer was the Prayer Book her mother had used, and, pressed between the leaves, was a rose taken from her mother’s hand as she lay in her coffin. Miss Hansford had not seen the book for a long time, but on the day of the consecration she took it from its hiding place, removed the folds of tissue paper and the handkerchief in which it was wrapped, and sat down to follow the morning service. She had once known it by heart, and she found herself repeating it now instead of reading it, while a feeling she had not experienced in years came over her as her lips pronounced the familiar words. There were passages in the book marked by her mother’s hand, and on the margin, at the commencement of the baptismal service for infants, was written: “June ——, 18——. Little Phebe was christened to-day. God keep her safe in His fold.”

On this and the marked passages and the faded rose Miss Hansford’s tears fell like rain, and with them much of her intolerance of other people’s opinions was washed away. When a girl she had sung in the choir, and now, as she glanced a second time at the grand old Te Deum, she began unconsciously to sing the opening sentence: “We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord!”

Whether she would have gone on to the end will never be known, for suddenly there came an interruption to her devotions. She had shut the door against any possible intruder, but the window was open, and through it came a mocking laugh and the words, “If I’se you, I’d join the Salvation Army, only your voice is a little cracked.”

It was the same boy who had sent her the valentine the previous winter,—Jack Percy, from Washington, and her special aversion. Her first impulse was to throw her Prayer Book at him, but he was beyond her reach and running rapidly towards the avenue, his laugh coming back to her as he ran, and making her shake with rage.

“May the Lord punish that boy as he deserves,” she said, as she wrapped her book in its folds of paper and replaced it in her bureau drawer. “He’s riled me all up, just as I was beginning to feel as if I had been to meetin’, or church, I s’pose I ought to call it,” she continued, as she opened her doors and went about her accustomed work.

Whether it was the service in the Prayer Book which did it, or the sight of her mother’s handwriting, or the faded flower, Miss Hansford gradually grew softer, and while religiously striving to live up to her principles, she became more tolerant of the world as she saw it around her. She still drew the line on dancing and play-acting and cards as emanating directly from the bottomless pit, but the sacred concerts were less obnoxious, and, instead of stopping her ears with cotton when the band played on Sunday, she sometimes found herself listening to it and nodding her head to the strains if they chanced to be familiar. With all her peculiarities, she was so thoroughly kind-hearted and loyal to her friends, that she was generally popular with those who knew her best. A few ridiculed her and resented her inordinate curiosity with regard to their affairs, of which she often seemed to know more than they did themselves. She had a wonderful faculty for remembering everybody’s age. She knew how much they were worth; how they made their money; who they were, and what they sprang from, and, by means of her far-seeing spectacles, with which she attended to her neighbor’s business, and her near-seeing ones, with which she attended to her own, she managed to keep a pretty firm hold on the affairs and conduct of the people around her.

On the morning when she is first introduced to the reader she had satisfied herself with regard to the number of passengers who came on the boat; had decided who most of them were, and then centered her interest on Paul Ralston, whose unexpected appearance surprised her a little. She prided herself on her intimacy with the Ralstons, and usually knew where they were, and what they were doing. Paul, she supposed, was in Europe, or possibly on the ocean; yet, here he was, fastening his boat and coming up the pathway across the park towards her cottage.

“For the land’s sake, I believe he’s coming here, and I looking like a fright, with this old apron on, and my sleeves rolled up,” she exclaimed, and, hastily entering the house, she put down her sleeves, exchanged her calico apron for a clean white one, took her tea-kettle off the stove, and was in the wide doorway ready to greet the young man, who came bounding up the steps two at a time and grasped her hand warmly with his cheery, “Hello, Aunt Phebe! How are you?”

CHAPTER II.
PAUL RALSTON.

He was a tall, broad-shouldered, fine-looking young man of twenty-three or twenty-four, with a frank, open countenance and a magnetism of voice and smile and manner which made every one his friend with whom he came in contact. City born and proud of being a Bostonian, he was still very fond of the country, and especially of Oak City, where he was just as polite and kind to the poorest fisherman on the beach as to the Governor’s son when he was there. Everybody knew him, and everybody liked him, especially Miss Hansford, with whom he was a great favorite. As a rule she didn’t think much of boys, and sometimes wondered why the Lord ever made them, or having made them, why He did not keep them shut up until they were men before turning them loose upon the community. Naturally boys didn’t like her, and many were the pranks played upon her by the mischief-loving lads, with Jack Percy at their head as ringleader. Him Miss Hansford detested as much as she liked Paul Ralston. She had known the latter since he wore wide collars and knickerbockers and stole her one watermelon from her bit of garden at the rear of her house. This garden was her pride, and she nursed her few flowers and vegetables and fruits with the utmost care, contriving various snares and traps as pitfalls for the marauding boys, who thought her garden and its contents lawful prey, and plundered it accordingly. Only one melon had rewarded her care, and this she watched vigilantly as it ripened in the August sun. Jack Percy was late in coming that summer, and to his absence she felt she owed the preservation of her cherished melon. Jack came at last on the afternoon boat, a guest of the Ralstons, whose acquaintance she had not then made. The next morning her melon was gone, and in the soft, sandy soil around the bed were the marks of two pairs of feet, and Miss Hansford had no hesitancy in fixing upon Jack Percy as one of the culprits. She knew of his arrival, and that he was visiting the Ralstons. Unquestionably Paul was the other delinquent.

“Birds of a feather flock together, and I’ve no doubt one is as bad as t’other. I wish I had ’em by the nape of the neck,” she was thinking, when a shadow fell upon the floor, and, turning from her breakfast table, which she was clearing, she saw a boy standing in the doorway with an immense watermelon in his arms and a frightened look in his blue eyes, which, nevertheless, confronted her steadily, as he said: “I am Paul Ralston, from Boston, and I live in the Ralston House.”

“Yes, I know you are Paul Ralston, and that you live in the Ralston House, but I don’t know as that makes you any better than if you lived in a hovel,” was Miss Hansford’s ungracious reply, at which the boy colored a little, and then went on: “I don’t s’pose it does. I didn’t tell you where I lived to make you think better of me. I only wanted you to know who I was, for I stole your watermelon last night after you were asleep.”

“How d’ye know I was asleep?” Miss Hansford asked. Paul did not dare tell her of the whispered comment of his companion: “Hear the old she-dragon go it. A cannonade can’t wake her,” but there was a twinkle in his eyes as he replied: “We—or I heard you snore.”

No one likes to be told they snore, and Miss Hansford was not an exception. With a toss of her head she replied: “A likely story. You must have good ears. How did you get over the piece of barbed wire I put in the grass to keep just such tramps as you out of my melon patch?”

“I fell over it and tore my trousers; that’s the way mother found out what I’d done. Father whaled me good,” the boy said, still holding the melon, which Miss Hansford had not offered to take.

“Served you right, and I s’pose he made you buy the melon and bring it to me,” was Miss Hansford’s comment, while something in the face of the boy appealed to her in his favor.

“He didn’t know a thing about it,” Paul said. “I bought it with my own money,—saved to buy me a fishing rod. I thought it out last night when I couldn’t sleep.”

“Your conscience troubled you, I hope,” Miss Hansford said, taking the melon from him at last, and thinking as she did so what a fine, large one it was.

She was beginning to soften, and Paul knew it, and was not half as much afraid of her as when he first came in, his knees knocking together with fear of what might befall him. Jack Percy, his coadjutor in the theft, had ridiculed the idea of making restitution and confession.

“The old woman is awful,” he said, “and will thrash you worse than your father did. I know her. She threw hot water on me once when I was tying a piece of paper to her cat’s tail. They say she keeps red pepper and fire crackers for dogs and boys.”

Paul was not to be persuaded from his purpose.

“I’ll risk her any way,” he said, while Jack rejoined: “Don’t bring me into the scrape. She’ll never forget it, for she hates me like pizen now.”

Paul promised not to implicate his friend, and as soon as he thought the fresh melons were in market he bought the finest one he could find and took it to Miss Hansford, feeling glad now that he had done so. She had thrown neither hot water, nor red pepper, nor fire crackers at him. Her face was not half as vinegary as it had been at first, and when she spoke of his conscience there was a roguish smile around his mouth as he replied: “I s’pose it ought to have troubled me, and it did some, but what kept me awake was the awful stomach-ache, which nearly bent me up double. I ate too much melon, and it wasn’t very good,—wasn’t ripe, nor half so sweet as this one I’ve brought you. I told ’em I wanted the very best, and made ’em plug it to be sure. It’s first rate. Cut it, and see.”

Miss Hansford was not one to capitulate at once, and she answered, rather stiffly: “You ought to have had stomach-ache. ’Twill teach you a lesson, maybe. Do you go to Sunday-school?”

“Yes’m,” Paul replied, and Miss Hansford continued: “’Piscopal, I s’pose?”

“Yes’m.”

“What do you learn?”

“Oh! my duty to my neighbor, and things,” Paul said, wondering if he was to be put through his catechism, and how he would come out of the ordeal.

He believed he would rather take his chance with fire crackers. Miss Hansford’s next remark reassured him.

“Umph! I know all about that catechism. A deal of good your duty to your neighbor has done you. What’s the eighth commandment?”

Paul repeated the seventh; then, seeing the look of disgust in Miss Hansford’s face, and realizing his mistake, he involuntarily began the response: “Lord have mercy upon us!” but got no farther, for the ludicrousness of the whole affair overcame every other feeling, and he burst into a peal of laughter, so merry and so boyish that Miss Hansford laughed with him in spite of herself.

“Better go home and learn which is which of the commandments,” she said, “but tell me first who was with you, and why he isn’t here too. I saw his tracks,—bigger than yours. I b’lieve ’twas Jack Percy, and that he put you up to it. Was it Jack?”

Instantly the expression of Paul’s face changed, and was more like that of a man of twenty than a boy of ten.

“I can’t tell you who was with me,” he said. “I promised I wouldn’t, and I’ve never told a lie. He didn’t put me up to it, either. He didn’t know the melon was here till I told him. He was sick, too,—sicker than I. I’m sorry I did it. I’m not half a bad sort of feller, and I hope you’ll forgive me. Will you?”

Miss Hansford had cut the melon in two, and, putting a big slice of the red, juicy fruit on a plate, she offered it to Paul and said: “I’ll think about it. Sit down and eat a piece.”

“No, thanks. No more melon for me,” he replied, and, feeling sure he was forgiven, he bade her good morning and went whistling off in the direction of the woods, where Jack Percy was lying under a clump of oaks, waiting to hear the result of the interview.

“Well, what did she say? I see you have escaped alive,” he said, as Paul joined him. “Rich, wasn’t it?” he continued, rolling in the sand and kicking as Paul related his experience. “I don’t wonder the old lady looked daggers at the commandment business. I wish I could have seen her, and I did. I say, Paul,” and Jack stopped rolling, and, creeping up under the shade of the bushes, went on, very soberly for him: “I went to sleep while waiting for you, and had the queerest dream. I thought Miss Hansford killed you or me,—seemed more as if it was me, although I could see it all; could see the one who lay here dead, just where I am lying, and could hear the talking ’round him, and see Miss Hansford, the most scared of them all, trying to lift me up and saying he isn’t dead,—he mustn’t be dead. It was me then, and I woke up with a kind of cramp in my stomach,—some of that confounded melon is there yet. Guess I had a kind of nightmare, but it seemed awful real. I shouldn’t wonder if she did kill me some time, she hates me so.”

“No, she won’t; her bark is a heap worse than her bite. Why, we got to be right chummy, and she offered me some of the melon. I really like the old lady,” Paul said, while Jack made a grimace, and then lay perfectly still, with his hands folded under his head, thinking of the dream which had so impressed him.

Meanwhile Miss Hansford, who had watched Paul until he disappeared from sight, was talking to herself about him as she went about her morning work.

“That’s a fine boy,” she said, “if he did steal my watermelon, and I’d trust him any where, if he don’t know the eighth commandment. I b’lieve t’other one was Jack Percy,—the worst limb I ever knew. Calls the camp-meetin’ a circus and me the clown! I’d like to——”

She jammed a griddle down hard on the stove in token of what she’d like to do to the reprobate Jack, who had dreamed that she killed him under the scrub oaks. Then she turned her thoughts to the Ralstons. It was only that summer that they had taken possession of the big house on the knoll overlooking the sea. Carpenters had been there at work early in May, removing walls inside to throw the rooms together, cutting the windows down to the floor, building piazzas and porches and bay windows here and there, until the house was so changed that there was little left of the original except the look-out on the roof and the immense chimney, which Mrs. Ralston clung to for the sake of the fireplaces, and because there was nothing like it on the Island. Once she thought to tear down the inclosure to the smugglers’ room in the cellar, entrance to which was through a concealed door under a closet stairs, but Paul, who was with her, begged her to leave it for his play-room. He knew all the stories of his ancestor, who was said to have filled the place from time to time with smuggled goods, which were sold at a high price and made the old sea captain rich. This, however, was so many years before that the smuggler taint had died out, except as some ill-natured people revived the story, with a sneer at the Ralston wealth, the foundation of which was laid in the cellar of the Ralston House. Paul, boy-like, was rather pleased with the idea of so renowned an ancestor, and, during his stay in Oak City, while the repairs were going on, used to spend half his time on the roof, pretending that he was watching for the Vulture returning from its long voyage and tacking about here and there until a white flag from the look-out told that the coast was clear. The other half of his time he spent in the Smugglers’ room, playing at hiding from the police, while Tom Drake, a boy about his own age, and son of the man who had charge of the place, acted the part of policeman and thundered for admittance against the door of the basement. Was there an influence in the atmosphere surrounding the two boys which prompted them to play at what in many of its details became a reality in after years. I think so, for I believe there comes to many of us at times a glimpse of what seems familiar, because we have been unconscious actors in something like it before. To Paul, however, only the present was tangible, and he enjoyed it thoroughly and played at smugglers and pirates and robbers and prisoners, in the queer room built around the big chimney.

For a little time the Ralstons returned to Boston, while the finishing touches were given to the house. Then they came back for the summer and there were signs of life everywhere around the handsome place. Occasionally Miss Hansford met the Ralston carriage with the Judge and his wife, a dainty little lady with a sweet, gentle face showing under her hat, which Miss Hansford decided was too youthful for a woman of her age to wear. As a rule, Miss Hansford did not take kindly to people who owned houses or cottages in Oak City, and only spent a few weeks in the summer there, bringing with them an assumption of superiority over their neighbors in the shape of horses and carriages and servants and city ways, which she did not like. They were pretty sure to be “stuck-ups” or nobodies.

Of the two she preferred the former. There had never been much money in the Hansford line, but there was plenty of blood of the bluest sort. Miss Hansford had the family tree at her fingers’ ends, and not a twig would she lop off, much less the branches reaching back to Oliver Cromwell and Miles Standish and a feudal lord in Scotland who held his castle days and weeks against a besieging party. At the Ralstons she first looked doubtfully. The old smuggler, whose bones were whitening off the Banks of Newfoundland, was not a desirable appendage, but to offset him was an ancestor who had heard the Indian war cry and helped to empty the chests of tea into the ocean on the night of the Boston Tea Party, while another had died at the battle of Bunker Hill, and these two atoned for shiploads of contraband goods and made the Ralstons somebody. Paul Miss Hansford had scarcely seen, except as he galloped down the avenue on his pony, until he came to ask forgiveness and make restitution. Then she was surprised to find how her heart went out to the boy, and after he was gone she began to consider the propriety of calling upon his mother.

“I don’t s’pose she cares whether I call or not,” she thought, “but I am about the oldest settler on the Island, and then if Miss Ralston returns it, it’ll be something to tell Mrs. Atwater, who has so much to say about her friends in Hartford.”

With all her war against the flesh, Miss Hansford had her weaknesses and ambitions, and one of the latter was to know and be known by Mrs. Ralston. This was an easy matter, for there was not a kinder-hearted or more genial woman in the world, and when she heard from her maid that Miss Phebe Hansford was in the drawing-room she went at once to meet her, and by her graciousness of manner put her at her ease and disarmed her of all prejudice there might have been against her. Miss Hansford was taken over the house to see the improvements and given a cup of tea and treated, as she told Mrs. Atwater when describing her call, “as if she and Miss Ralston were hand and glove.” The watermelon was not mentioned until just before Miss Hansford left, when Paul came in, accompanied by Jack Percy, who at sight of the woman sitting up so prim in a high-backed chair, with her far-seeing spectacles on, slunk out of sight. Paul, on the contrary, came forward, and, doffing his cap, offered her his hand.

“You have seen my son before?” Mrs. Ralston said, in some surprise, when Paul left the room.

“Why, yes. Didn’t he tell you about the melon he brought in place of the one——,” she was going to add “——he stole,” but something in Mrs. Ralston’s manner checked the harsh word before it was uttered.

Mrs. Ralston, however, understood, and her face flushed slightly as she replied: “I knew he took your melon, but not that he carried you another. I am very glad. Paul means to be a good boy. I hope you forgave him?”

“I did,” Miss Hansford exclaimed, “and I like him, too. I’m cross-grained, I know, but I’ve a soft spot somewhere, and your boy’s touched it and brought me here to see his mother. I hope we’ll be friends. I am a homely old woman with homely ways, and I hain’t anything like this,” glancing around the elegantly furnished drawing-room, “but I’ll be glad to see you any time.”

“I will surely come,” Mrs. Ralston said, offering her white hand covered with rings such as Miss Hansford considered it wicked to wear.

They did not look quite so sinful on Mrs. Ralston, who ever after was a queen among women as Paul was a king among boys. When Jack Percy’s mother came to the seashore and took him home Paul and Miss Hansford became fast friends. He called her “Aunt Phebe” and ate her ginger cookies and fried cakes and apple turnovers and huckleberry pies, and raced through her yard, and sometimes through her house, with his dog, Sherry, at his heels, upsetting things generally and seldom stopping to put in its place the stone tied in one corner of the netting which was tacked over the door to keep the flies out. This was a fashion followed by many of the cottagers whose doors were too wide to admit of screens. But Paul in his haste did not often think of it, and after a few attempts to make him remember the stone Miss Hansford gave it up and only held her breath when he came in like a whirlwind and out again as rapidly.

“Bless the boy, he goes so fast that the flies are blown away before they have a chance to get in,” she would say after one of his raids, as she put the netting back and picked up the books and papers, and sometimes things of more value which Sherry’s bushy tail had brushed from the table in his rapid transit through her rooms. Neither Paul nor Sherry could do wrong, and she waited anxiously for his coming to Oak City in the summer, and said good-bye to him with a lump in her throat when he went away.

Once by special invitation she spent a week with the Ralstons in Boston. “The tiredest week she ever knew,” she said to Mrs. Atwater after her return. “Kept me on the go all the time,—to Bunker Hill Monument, up which I clum every step,—then to Mt. Auburn and Harvard, where Paul is to go to college; then to the Old South Church, and the Picture Gallery, and if you’ll b’lieve it,” she added in a whisper, “they wanted me to go to a play at the Boston Museum Theatre, where they said everybody went, church members and all.”

“I hope you resisted,” Mrs. Atwater said in an awful tone of voice.

“No, I didn’t. I went,” Miss Hansford replied. “’Twas ‘Uncle Tom’ they played, and I was that silly that I cried when little Eva died, and I wanted to kill Legree. ’Twas wrong, I know, and I mean to confess it next class meetin’.”

“You or’to,” Mrs. Atwater said, with a great deal of dignity as she left the house.

Miss Hansford did confess it in a speech so long and so descriptive of the play that the people sitting in judgment upon her forgot their censure in the interest with which they listened to her.

“I’ve made a clean breast of it, and you can do what you like,” she said, as she finished and sat down.

They did nothing except to express disapproval of such things in general and to hope the offense would not be repeated, as it was a bad example for the young when a woman of her high religious principles went to a theatre. Paul, who happened to be in Oak City, was sitting by her, his face a study as he listened to what was a revelation to him. In a way they were censuring Miss Hansford, and just before the close of the meeting he startled them all by rising to his feet and saying: “You needn’t blame her. I teased her to go, and it isn’t wicked either to see ‘Uncle Tom.’ Everybody goes,—father and mother and everybody,—and they are good and pray every day.”

No one could repress a smile at the fearlessness of the boy in defending Miss Hansford, whose eyes were moist as she laid her hand on his head and whispered: “Hush, Paul; you musn’t speak in meeting.”

“Why not?” he answered aloud. “The rest do, and I’m going to stand up for you through thick and thin.”

He was only a boy, but he represented the Ralstons. To attend a theatre under their auspices was not so very bad, and the good people absolved their sister from wrongdoing and shook hands heartily with her champion when the services were over. After that Miss Hansford’s devotion to Paul was unbounded, and she watched him lovingly and proudly as he grew to manhood and passed unscathed through college, leaving a record blackened with only a few larks such as any young man of spirit might have, she said, when comparing him with Jack Percy, who was with him in Harvard for a while, and then quietly sent home. Paul’s vacations were mostly spent in Oak City, until he was graduated. He then went abroad with his father and mother for a year, and the house on the Island was closed, except as the rear of it was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Drake, who looked after the premises in the absence of the family. Miss Hansford, who missed him sadly, was anticipating his coming again much as a mother anticipates the return of her son. She did not, however, expect him so soon, as no news had been received of his arrival in New York, and she was surprised and delighted when he came upon her so early and so suddenly,—taking her breath away, she told him, as she led him into the house, looking at him to see if foreign travel had changed him any.

CHAPTER III.
PAUL’S NEWS.

He had grown broader and handsomer and looked a trifle older, with that brown beard on his chin, she thought, but otherwise he was the same Paul as of old, with his sunny smile, his friendly manner and his unmistakable joy at seeing her again. She made him sit down in the best rocking chair,—took his hat, and smoothed his hair caressingly, and forgot that she had not breakfasted and that her rolls were still blackening in the oven.

“How did you get here?” she asked. “Nobody knew you had landed or was on the way even.’

“I should suppose your bones would have warned you of our arrival. I hope they haven’t ceased to do duty,” Paul answered, and then explained that they had changed their plans and sailed from Havre a week earlier than they had intended. Some of their friends were coming on the Ville de Paris and among them Mrs. Percy and Clarice.

The name of Jack Percy was to Miss Hansford much like a red flag to a bull, while that of any member of his family was nearly as bad. Now, however, she only straightened her back a little with an ominous “Ugh,” which Paul did not notice, so absorbed was he in the great good news he had come to tell her. But first he must answer her numberless questions as to what he had seen and where he had been.

“Been everywhere and seen everything, from Queen Victoria to the Khedive of Egypt. Been on the top of Cheops, and inside of him, too,—and up the Nile to Assouan and Philae and Luxor, and seen old Rameses,—frightful looking old cove, too, with his tuft of hair and his one tooth showing,” he said, rattling on about places and people of whom Miss Hansford knew nothing.

Luxor and Assouan and Cheops were not familiar to her, but when he said, “I tell you what, the very prettiest place in all Europe is Monte Carlo,” she was on the alert in a moment. She looked upon Monte Carlo as a pool of iniquity, and she said to the young man, “Paul, you didn’t gamble there!”

Paul answered laughingly, “They don’t call it gambling; they call it play.”

“Well, play, then. You didn’t play? I know you didn’t, for when I heard you was there I wrestled in prayer three times a day that God would keep you unspotted, and he did, didn’t he?”

She had her hand on his shoulder and was looking into his face with such faith and trust in her kind old eyes that it was hard to tell her the truth. But the boy who had never told a lie when he stole the melon had not told one since, and would not do so now, even if he lost some of the good woman’s opinion.

“I’m afraid you didn’t wrestle enough,” he said, “for I did play.”

“Oh, Paul,” and Miss Hansford drew a long breath, which hurt the young man some, but he went on unfalteringly, “I didn’t mean to, but when I saw how easy it was to put down a piece of money and double it I tried and made quite a lot at first; then I began to lose and quit.”

“Thank God!” came with great fervor from Miss Hansford, while Paul continued, “It beats all what a fascination there is about it, and what luck some people have. There was Clarice, won straight along till she made two or three hundred dollars.”

“Clarice! oh, she was there, was she?” Miss Hansford asked, her tone indicating that she knew now perfectly well why Paul played and in a measure exonerated him.

Had Paul been less in love than he was, or less blinded with his great happiness, he would have interpreted her manner aright. But he was blind, and he was in love, and he replied, “Why, yes; didn’t you know that Mrs. Percy and Clarice were with us in Italy and Switzerland and in Paris, and on the same ship with us? That’s why we came a week earlier. We wanted to be with them.”

“I see, but I didn’t know as Miss Percy was able to go scurripin’ all over the world,” was Miss Hansford’s comment, to which Paul did not reply.

He was thinking how he should tell her what he had come to tell and what seemed very easy when he was by himself. If Miss Hansford had not been sitting up quite so straight and prim and looking at him so sharply through her spectacles, which he knew were her near-seers, and which nothing could escape, he would have been less nervous.

“You see,” he began at last, “we were together in Switzerland last summer,—met quite by accident at Chamonix,—and then at Geneva and Lucerne, and we walked up the Rigi together and got lost in a fog and stumbled around half the night. It was great fun and she was awfully plucky.”

Here Paul stopped to recall the fun it was to be lost in a fog with a pretty girl, who clung so closely to him for protection that he sometimes had to hold her hand in his when she was very nervous and timid, and sometimes had his arm around her waist to keep her from falling when the way was rough and steep. Miss Hansford was still looking at him, and when she thought he had waited long enough she brought him back from his blissful reminiscence by asking, “Who walked up the Rigi with you, and got lost in the fog, and stumbled round half the night, and was awfully plucky? Your mother?”

“Mother!” Paul repeated. “Mother walk up the Rigi! Great Scott! She was at the hotel, wild because we didn’t come. They had sent out two or three guides to look for us, and Mrs. Percy was in high hysterics when we finally reached the hotel. It was Clarice who was with me.”

“Oh!” and Miss Hansford’s mouth was puckered into the perfect shape of the letter O, and kept its position as Paul went on: “Clarice took a severe cold and was ill for a week at the Schweitzerhoff, in Lucerne. We left them there, but they were with us again in Monte Carlo and Florence and Rome—and—”

He hesitated, wishing Miss Hansford would say something to help him along. But she sat as rigid as a stone, while he floundered on until the climax was reached in Paris, where he asked Clarice to be his wife.

“I always thought she was a nice girl when I used to see her here,” he said, “but I didn’t know half how bright and pretty she was till—er—”

“Till you got lost with her in a fog on the Rigi,” Miss Hansford suggested grimly.

It was something to have her speak at all, and Paul answered briskly, “I guess that’s about the truth. I couldn’t forget her after that, you know, and so we are engaged. I wanted to tell you and came this way from New York last night on purpose to see you. I hope you are glad.”

Miss Hansford was not glad. She had never thought of Paul’s marrying for a long time,—certainly not that he would marry Clarice Percy, whom she disliked almost as much as she did her half brother, Jack. As Paul talked he had left the rocking chair and seated himself on the door step, with the netting thrown back, letting in a whole army of flies. But Miss Hansford did not notice them. She was trying to swallow the lumps in her throat and wondering what she could say. She could not tell him that she was sorry, and with a gasp and a mental prayer to be forgiven for the deception, she said, “Of course, I’m glad for anything which makes you happy. I never thought of you and Clarice. I s’posed she was after that snipper-snapper of an Englishman who was once here.”

She could not resist this little sting, which made Paul wince and fan himself with his hat.

“Oh! you mean Fenner, who has a title in his family. There’s nothing in that. Why, he hasn’t a dollar to his name.”

“And you have a good many dollars,” Miss Hansford rejoined; then added, as she saw a flush on Paul’s face and knew her shaft had hit, “You seem too young to get married.”

“Why, Aunt Phebe,” Paul exclaimed, “I am twenty-three, and Clarice is twenty-one. I look like a boy, I know, but this will age me some,” and he stroked the soft brown mustache, of which he was rather proud. “This was Clarice’s idea. I believe she thinks I look younger than she does, but I don’t. We are neither of us children. Some fellows are married when they are twenty. I shall be twenty-four, for we do not intend to be married until the middle of October. I mean to have you come to the wedding with mother. You have never been in Washington and you’ll like it. I shall have you stop at Willard’s. Mrs. Percy does not live far from there. You’ve heard of Willard’s?”

“I’d smile if I hadn’t,” Miss Hansford said, while Paul began to open a paper box which he had brought with him.

“You see,” he continued, as he untied the cords, “I wanted to bring you something from Europe. I found a creamy kind of shawl in Cairo,—the real thing, and no sham,—and after I was engaged I felt so happy that I wanted to give you something more to wear to my wedding, so I thought of a silk dress. Clarice picked it out for me at the Louvre in Paris. Here it is,” and he unrolled a pattern of grey silk, whose texture and quality Miss Hansford appreciated, although not much accustomed to fabrics like this. “Clarice said the color would be becoming to you and was just the thing. She knows what’s what,” he continued, gathering up the silk material in folds, just as the salesman had done at the Louvre.

He did not explain that when he spoke of inviting Miss Hansford to his wedding Clarice had at first objected and only been won over when she saw how much he wished it. It was not necessary to tell this, and he kept quoting Clarice, as if she had been prime mover in the matter. No woman is proof against a silk such as Paul was displaying, and Miss Hansford was not an exception.

“Oh, Paul,” she said, laying her hand upon the heavy folds which would almost stand alone, “what made you do this for an old woman like me, who never had but two silk gowns in her life, and both of ’em didn’t cost half as much as this, I know. It was kind in you and Clarice, too, I’m sure. Tell her I thank her, and I hope you will be happy.”

Her manner certainly had changed, mollified by the dress and the part Clarice had in it, and when Paul, emboldened by the change, ventured to say, “Clarice thinks you should have some little lace thingembob for your head such as mother wears,” she didn’t resent it, but replied, “I can find that in Boston. Neither you nor Clarice shall be ashamed of me if I go.”

“Of course, you’ll go,” Paul said, dropping the silk and throwing around her shoulders the shawl which had been his choice in Cairo. “Look in the glass and see if it isn’t a beauty.”

Miss Hansford admitted that it was a beauty, but on a very homely old stick, and Paul knew by her voice that the chords which had been a little out of tune were in harmony again. Suddenly it occurred to her that as she had not breakfasted, probably Paul had not either, and she urged him to stay, but he declined. He was to leave on the next boat, and there were some things he must attend to at the house. He should come to Oak City again in a few days, he said, and then bade her good-bye, while she folded up the shawl and dress, admiring the latter greatly, wondering if it were quite right for one who professed what she did to wear so expensive a silk, and if she were not backsliding a little. She did a good many things now which she would not have done when she first became a resident of the place. The world and the flesh were crowding her to the wall, and the devil, too, she sometimes feared, but she would keep her silk gown in spite of them all, and as she put it away in her bureau drawer she thought that as none of her immediate friends had anything like it they might disapprove.

“I don’t care much if they do. They haven’t chances to see things as I have,” she said, with a degree of complacency which would have amused one who knew that her superior chances “to see things” were comprised in the week she had spent in Boston years ago, and her frequent visits to the Ralston House, where, on Paul’s account, she was always a welcome guest.

And now the good days were drawing to a close, for Paul was going to be married. This in itself was bad enough, for with a wife he could never be the same to her, but worse than that, he was to marry Clarice Percy. This tarnished the lustre of the grey silk from Paris and marred the day she had thought so bright in the early morning.

“I’ve lost my boy,” she said, sadly, as she watched the boat which was taking Paul away, and on the upper deck of which he stood waving his umbrella towards her.

She didn’t wave back, but raised her hands in a kind of benediction and looked after him with an indefinable yearning until he was hidden from view. Her bones were in full swing this morning, and as she resumed her work she soliloquized, “I don’t know what ails me, but I feel that something bad will come of this marriage. How can it be otherwise? I know it is mean, and may be wicked, but I can’t abide the Percys.”

CHAPTER IV.
THE PERCYS.

They were a very old Virginian family whose line of ancestry stretched backward quite as far as that of Miss Hansford, and touched the days of Cromwell, when white people were sent to Virginia and sold as slaves for a longer or shorter period of years. Among them came Samuel Percy, a Royalist, transported for some offense against the government and condemned to servitude for five years. Just what he did during the five years was not certainly known. Some said he was a blacksmith, some a tailor, and others a common field laborer, or at best an overseer of the negroes. That he was a bondman was sure and he worked out his time and then, unbroken in spirit, resolved to make for himself a name and a fortune and a family. With the latter he succeeded admirably, for the descendants of his five sons were scattered all over the South, each generation forgetting more and more that the root of the family tree in America had been a slave, and growing more and more proud of its English ancestry.

When the civil war broke out old Roger Percy owned a few negroes, a worn-out plantation and a big, rambling house in Virginia, just across the border of Maryland. Proud, morose and contrary, he seldom agreed with the people with whom he came in contact. His opinion was always the better one. With the Confederates he was a Federal,—with the Federals a Confederate, hurling anathemas at the heads of each and ordering them from his premises. As he was near the frontier he was visited at intervals by detachments from both armies, who, as he said, squeezed him dry, and at the close of the war he found himself alone, with his wife dead, his negroes gone, his house a ruin, or nearly so, and his land good for nothing. Too proud and indolent to work, he might have starved but for his only son, James, who, scoffing at a pride which would neither feed nor clothe him, found a position in the Treasury Department in Washington and offered his father a home. Grumblingly the old man accepted it, cursing the government and his small quarters and his dinners and black Sally, who waited upon him, and who, of all his negroes, had come back to him when peace was restored. Sometimes he cursed his son for being willing to take a subordinate position and work like a dog under somebody. This was what galled the worst,—working under somebody, and doing it willingly.

“I believe you have some of your great-great-grandfather’s blood in you,” he would say. “He hadn’t pluck enough to cut his master’s throat and run away. By the lord, I’d have done it.”

“I’m proud of old Sam Percy’s grit,” James would reply, “and if I knew just where he was buried I’d raise him a monument. I’m not ashamed to work, or to have some one over me.”

“I’m ashamed for you, and you a Percy,” his father would growl, forgetting that without the work he so despised he would be homeless and almost a beggar.

The climax came when James brought home a wife,—a clerk like himself in the Treasury Department. This was the straw too many and the bridal was soon followed by a funeral, the old man saying he was glad to go where the Percys could not be disgraced. Had he lived a few months longer he would have seen his son’s wife an heiress in a small way. A maiden aunt, for whom she was named and who all her life had hoarded her money earned in the cotton mills of Lowell, died and left her niece ten thousand dollars. This was a fortune to the young couple, who left their cramped quarters for a larger house, where, with the father-in-law gone and a sturdy baby boy in the cradle, they were perfectly happy for a time. Then, with scarcely an hour’s warning, the wife was taken away, stricken with cholera, and James was alone with Sally and his boy, the notorious John, or Jack, the terror of Oak City and of every neighborhood he frequented.

Jack was bright and handsome, but proud and rebellious, and learned very soon that the woman his father married within two years of his wife’s death was not his own mother. She was pretty and indolent and easy-going, and could no more cope with her step-son’s will than she could stem Niagara. She disliked him and he disliked her for no reason except that she was his stepmother, and when Clarice was born the breach widened between them, although the boy showed affection for his little sister.

When she was five years old and Jack was ten their father died, leaving to his widow the house in which they lived and a few thousand dollars, besides the small fortune she had brought him as the result of her father’s speculations. To Jack was left his mother’s ten thousand dollars intact. Had Jack chosen he could have won his mother then when her heart was sore and aching for some one to comfort her, if it were only a boy. But he didn’t choose; he was wayward and headstrong, and always an anxiety and trouble to her. With many good qualities, Mrs. Percy was a weak woman and talked a great deal of her husband’s family and the old Virginia homestead and the ancestral hall in England. On this point she was a little shaky in her own mind, as the ancestral hall was only a tradition; but it was a fine thing to talk about and no one could dispute it. The Virginia homestead stood not many miles from what is known as Cabin John. It had been partly repaired by her husband, and some of the rooms made habitable for the time his family spent there. Beechwood it was called, and to those who never saw it Mrs. Percy talked of it as her country house, to which she went every summer for quiet and rest from the fatigue of society, and because it was so lovely. In reality she went there to economize, and not because she cared for the great bare rooms, the leaky roof and decaying timbers, which let one end of the broad piazza drop half a foot lower than the other. Economy was a necessity if she made any show in Washington, where she struggled hard to be recognized among the first and the best. A friend of hers, who knew her circumstances, incidentally spoke to her of Oak City as a change from Beechwood. It was, she said, one of the pleasantest and cheapest watering places on the New England coast.

“Are there any nice people there? Anything but a camp-meeting?” Mrs. Percy asked, and was assured that while the camp-meeting was a feature of the place and an attraction, too, there were many nice people there from the adjacent cities.

Satisfied on this point, Mrs. Percy concluded to try it, and took with her Jack and Clarice and black Sally, who clung to this remnant of her former master’s family with a pertinacity peculiar to the negro race. Sally was both waiting maid and nurse, and from this Miss Hansford at once decided that Mrs. Percy was airy, wondering why an able-bodied woman like her should need a waiting maid, or a child as old as Clarice a nurse. Still, as the lady was boarding near her, she made up her mind to call, and, to her horror, found Mrs. Percy playing whist!

“I hadn’t seen a pack of cards before in years, and the sight of them nearly knocked me down,” she said to her friend and confidante, Mrs. Atwater, when recounting her experience. “Cards in broad daylight, for it wasn’t four o’clock. She kept ’em in her hands all the time I was there as if she wished I’d go, and, if you’ll believe it, she asked me if I’d like to play a game! I didn’t stay long after that. Clarice was playing with her. Fine way to bring up a child!”

Miss Hansford’s call was not returned, and through some channel it reached her that Mrs. Percy did not care to make mixed acquaintances which she could not recognize at home. After this there was war in Miss Hansford’s heart against the Percys, and the feeling increased as time went on. Mrs. Percy’s affairs were more freely discussed than would have pleased her had she known it. Black Sally, who was loquacious, familiar and communicative, went frequently to Miss Hansford’s cottage for water, which was said to be the best on the Heights. Naturally, Miss Hansford talked with her, and, although she would have repudiated with scorn a charge that she was prying into her neighbor’s business, she managed to learn a good deal about Mrs. Percy, and to know how she lived at home, where Sally was cook, laundress, and maid of all work, as they kept no other servant.

“My land!” ejaculated Miss Hansford, “I s’posed you kept a retinue.”

“No, Missus, we never had nobody by that name,” Sally said, seating herself upon the doorstep, while Miss Hansford stood on the other side of the netting, wiping her dishes. “We ain’t rich folks, and Miss Percy has to save every way she can so’s to come here.”

“Why, how you talk,” Miss Hansford exclaimed, putting down the plate she had polished a full two minutes in absorbed interest. “I s’posed she was in society.”

“To be sho’ she is,” Sally rejoined. “Eberybody is in some kind of society in Wassinton if they wants to be. A heap of receptions is free. Dar’s de Presidents, and de Cabinet’s wives, and right smart more o’ de big bugs, whar any body can go, and dar’s ways of getting noticed in de papers and havin’ you close described ef you wants to. Wassinton is a great place!”

“I should say so,” Miss Hansford rejoined, more convinced than ever that Mrs. Percy was airy.

The next time Sally came for water she said that Mas’r James had been clerk in the Treasury when he married Jack’s mother, who was also a clerk in the same department.

“Well, if I ain’t beat. I s’posed Mr. Percy was the Great Mogul of the city from the airs his widder puts on,” Miss Hansford thought. “I dare say she was a clerk, too.”

Finally she put the question to Sally.

“I’se do’ know, but s’pecs not. She was bawn in Wassinton. T’other one was from de Noff,—a mighty nice woman, too, but she had a hard time wid ole Mar’s Roger, cussin’ at de house, and de dinners, and me, and de President, and all hands, and twittin’ Mar’s James for being like de fust Percy, who was a slave like de balance of us.”

“What are you talking about?” Miss Hansford almost screamed. “Was he a black man?”

“No, bless you; white as you is,” Sally answered, and Miss Hansford continued, “But there never was any white slaves.”

“Yes, thar was, way back, most to de flood, I reckon. I heard Mas’r James splainin’ to Miss’s onct after de ole Mas’r had been cussin’ bout him. It’s true’s you bawn, but mebby I didn’t orter speak of it,” and, picking up her pail of water, Sally hurried away, thinking that she had told too much and beginning to wish she had said nothing.

After that she was very reticent with regard to the family. But Miss Hansford had heard enough. Ordinarily, she would not have cared for the clerkship. She respected a man and woman who earned their own living if circumstances required it, but there had come to her rumors of Mrs. Percy’s remarks about the F. F. V.’s, and English ancestors, and now all this had resolved itself into Treasury clerks and white slaves. She did not believe the latter, but she never rested until she learned that white people had been sold into slavery in Virginia under Cromwell and the Stuarts, and then she did not doubt that the original stock of the Percys had been among these bondmen. She was honorable enough to keep her knowledge to herself, and only shut her lips a little closer when she came in contact with the lady who had not returned her call because she did not care for mixed acquaintances whom she could not recognize in Washington.

This was Mrs. Percy’s first season in Oak City, and before the Ralstons came there. The following winter the two families met in Florida and in Washington and became quite friendly, for Mrs. Percy was very pleasant to those whom she considered her equals. She was ambitious and managing, and knew how to get desirable acquaintances and invitations. She did not intend to go to Oak City very early that summer, and as Jack wanted to go, and she wanted to be rid of him, she contrived to have him invited to spend a short time with the Ralstons when they were fairly settled. And this was how he chanced to be at the Ralston House with Paul when the watermelon was stolen. That summer Mrs. Percy rented a cottage on the Oceanside and Miss Hansford saw little or nothing of her. Jack, however, was a constant source of annoyance and seldom let an opportunity pass to worry her. She had not forgotten his jeer at her singing, and advice to join the Salvation Army the previous summer, nor the valentine sent to her in February, but the crowning insult was given the only time she ever went bathing at the fashionable hour.

“She didn’t believe in spoiling her clothes with salt water, nor in showing her arms and legs to Tom, Dick and Harry,” she said, and, habited in white knit stockings, a faded calico skirt, woolen sacque, and a dilapidated hat, left with her by a former lodger, she presented a startling appearance as she went into the water, treading very gingerly over the stones and trying in vain to keep her dress from floating around her like a balloon.

Paul, who had urged her coming, could not repress a smile, but when a big wave came rolling in and nearly knocked her down, he went to her at once and said, “Let me help you. The sea is rough this morning. Come out where it is deeper and away from the stones. I won’t let you fall.”

He led her out to where the water came nearly to her waist, and then, holding both her hands in his, danced her up and down, she protesting that he was beating the breath out of her body, while the dog, Sherry, who always took his bath with his master, swam around them in circles, barking furiously and making occasional dashes at Miss Hansford’s dress, which still floated in spite of Paul’s efforts to keep it down. Everybody stood still to watch the proceeding and everybody laughed. Jack Percy, who was near her on a raft, ready to dive, called out, “Go it, old gal. You waltz first rate. Where did you get your hat and what’ll you take for it?”

Then, with a whoop, he made the plunge and sent great splashes of water into the face of the indignant woman, who hurried to the shore and, divesting herself of her wet clothes, went home so enraged with Jack that she never forgave him until years after, when she wiped the death sweat from his face and felt that she would almost give her own life to save his.

CHAPTER V.
CLARICE.

The next summer Mrs. Percy bought a pretty little cottage on Oceanside, which she occupied season after season, while Jack grew to manhood and Clarice to a brilliant, beautiful girl. Mrs. Percy was a delicate woman, and, aside from the cheapness of the place compared with more fashionable resorts, the quiet and rest suited her, and she found her pleasant, airy cottage a delightful change from her rather stuffy house in Washington, with negro huts crowded close to it in the rear. Clarice, on the contrary, detested it and the people, and took no pains to conceal her dislike. She was a haughty girl, with all the pride of the Percys, from the bondman down to old Roger, her grandfather, who, up to the last, wore his dress suit to dinner when there was nothing better than bacon and eggs. She gloried in such pride as that, she said, and respected him far more than if he had sat down to his bacon and eggs in his shirt sleeves. She knew her father had been a Treasury clerk, but he was a Percy and a gentleman, and she had no fault to find with him except that he did not leave more money. She wanted to be rich and live in the style of rich people. She would like to have had a large establishment, with housekeeper and butler and maids and horses and carriages, and she meant to have all this some time, no matter at what sacrifice. Given her choice between a man she loved who was poor, and a man she didn’t love who was rich and not obnoxious to her, she would unhesitatingly have taken the latter and overlooked any little escapades of which he might be guilty, provided he gave her all the money she wanted. In marrying Paul Ralston she was getting everything she desired,—family, position, love and money. She had had Paul in her mind for some time as a most desirable parti, provided one more desirable was not forthcoming. In Washington, where her beauty attracted a great deal of attention, she was much sought after by men who, while pleasing her in many respects, lacked the one thing needful.

In Oak City, to which she always went unwillingly, she frequently met men of her style,—class she called it,—and in this class Paul stood pre-eminent. With Ralph Fenner, whom Miss Hansford had designated as a snipper-snapper, she had flirted outrageously, but with no serious intent. He was too poor, and, although there was a title in his family, there were three lives between it and himself. To marry him would not pay, and over and above any other reasons which might influence her, she had a genuine liking for Paul, and when he asked her to be his wife she unhesitatingly answered yes.

After the betrothal there was no happier man in Paris than Paul Ralston. He went everywhere Clarice wished to go, from the Grand Opera House to the Champs d’Elysees, where Jenny Mills delighted a not very select audience with her dancing. He accompanied her and her mother on their shopping expeditions for the bridal trousseau, most of which was to be made in Paris. It was on one of these occasions that he thought of Miss Hansford and suggested getting her a dress to wear to his wedding.

“Do you propose to invite her?” Clarice asked, in some surprise, and he replied, “Certainly. She is one of my best friends. I wouldn’t slight her for the world.”

“An announcing card will answer every purpose,” was Clarice’s next remark.

Paul did not think it would. He wanted Miss Hansford to see him married. It would please her, and she had always been so kind to him. Clarice made a little grimace and said, “Let’s get her a dress, then, by all means. I want her to look decent if she comes,” and she selected the grey silk at his request, and made some additions to it in the way of laces and gloves, which last he forgot to take with him when he carried the dress to Miss Hansford.

Clarice could scarcely have given any good reason for her antipathy to Miss Hansford except on general principles. She did not like Oak City and would never have come there from choice. It was not gay enough, nor fashionable enough to suit her. She called Miss Hansford a dowdy and a crank and included her in the category of second-class people who were no society for her. All this was repeated to Miss Hansford by her colored factotum, Martha Ann, who had taken Sally’s place at the Percys, and, after a few weeks, had left because she was not allowed to entertain her young men on the steps of the dining room, and had been told she talked and laughed too loud for a servant. Her next place was with Miss Hansford, to whom she retailed all she had heard and seen at Mrs. Percy’s, with many additions. Miss Hansford knew it was not good form to listen to the gossip, but when she became mixed with it curiosity overcame her sense of propriety, and she not only listened but questioned, while her wrath waxed hotter and hotter with what she heard.

“Said you’s a second-class and a crank, and she didn’t see why Miss Ralston could make so much of you,” was Martha Ann’s last item, and then Miss Hansford, who had never forgotten Mrs. Percy’s slight in not returning her call, lost her temper entirely.

She had heard herself called a crank before, and, looking in the dictionary, had found so many definitions to the word that she felt a little uncertain as to which applied to herself.

“I s’pose I am queer and different from folks like the Percys, and I thank the Lord I am,” she thought, but to the “second-class” she objected.

She, whose lineage went back to Oliver Cromwell and Miles Standish and a Scotch lord, she to be called second-class by Clarice Percy was too much. Who were the Percys? she’d like to know. “Nobodies! Sprung from a white slave! Talk to me of F. F. V.’s, as if I didn’t know all about ’em. Second-class, indeed! It makes me so mad!” and Miss Hansford banged the door so hard that Martha Ann, who had evoked the storm and was washing dishes in the sink, dropped a china saucer in her fright and broke it.

After this, Miss Hansford’s antipathy to the Percys increased, and not even the grey silk Clarice had selected mollified her completely. Still, it did a good deal towards it, and she gradually became more reconciled to the thought of the engagement.

“I s’pose Paul must marry sometime,” she said, “and if it was anybody but Clarice, I’d try to be glad, but try as I will I can’t abide the Percys.”

CHAPTER VI.
ELITHE’S PHOTOGRAPH.

The May days were growing longer and warmer. Many of the cottages were open and there was a feeling of summer everywhere, when suddenly the weather changed. The sea looked green and angry, the wind blew cold across it from the east, bringing a drenching rain which, beginning in the early morning, lasted through the day with a persistency which precluded anything like intercourse with the outside world unless it were necessary. Miss Hansford had been alone all day, with no one to speak to but her cat, Jim. To him and to herself she had talked a good deal of the past, the present and the future. The present was dreary enough, with the thick fog on the water and the steady fall of rain, which increased rather than diminished as the night came on. It was some little diversion to carry pans and pails to places where the roof leaked, and to crowd bits of sacking against the doors, under which pools of water were finding their way. When this was done and darkness had settled down and her lamp was lighted, she began to wonder what she should do next to pass the time.

“I ain’t hungry, but it’ll take my mind if I get myself and Jim some supper. I b’lieve I’ll make griddle cakes. Paul used to be so fond of ’em when he was a boy. I wish he was here to-night,” she said, as she replenished her fire in her small kitchen and busied herself with her preparations for her evening meal. “I shall sit here by the stove where I can lift the cakes from the griddle to my plate and save steps,” she thought, and, bringing a small round table or stand from the dining room, she covered it with a towel, placed upon it a plate, a cup and a saucer and a dish of milk for Jim, who was badly spoiled, and was to take his supper with her.

The cakes were ready to bake and still she sat in her rocking chair, with her feet on the stove hearth and her head thrown back, listening to the rain beating dismally against the windows and wondering why she was so much more lonesome than common.

“I don’t know what’s come over me,” she said. “I actually feel as homesick as I did the first night I staid away from mother when I was a little girl. Maybe it’s Roger’s letter taking me back to when his father and I were young and lived on the farm at home. That’s fifty years ago, and John is dead. Everybody is dead but Roger and me, and he might almost as well be dead as to be buried alive in that heathenish country among miners and the dear knows what. Poor as Job’s turkey, five children, six hundred a year, with now and then a missionary box full of half-worn truck, catechisms, and old Churchmans I’ll warrant, though Roger didn’t say so. Queer that he would be a minister after all I said to him about going into business, offering to set him up and all that. But no; he must be a ’Piscopal minister and go out as a missionary to the West and marry Lucy Potter. I told him she was shiftless, and she was. I told him she’d be weakly, and she is. He said he didn’t care how shiftless or weakly she was, he should marry her. I wonder what he thinks now; five children, six hundred a year, and she not very strong, that’s the way he put it. I was glad to hear from him again, and to get Elithe’s picture.”

Taking from her pocket a letter received the previous day from her nephew, who was bravely doing his Master’s work among the mountains and mines of Montana, she read for a second time:

“Samona, May ——, 18——.

“My Dear Aunt—

“It is a long time since I have heard from you, and for the last few days I have been thinking a great deal about you and the old times when I was a boy and you were so kind to me. It is more than twenty years since you saw me and I wonder if you would know me now. Lucy says I am growing old, but I feel as young as ever, except, perhaps, when I have had a long ride of twenty or thirty miles on horseback and am very tired. I like my work and I think I have done some good among the people here. They are not all miners, and we have in our little town several good families from the East and from England. We are all poor, and that is a bond between us. I have six hundred dollars a year, which is a pretty good salary for this vicinity. Then we frequently get a missionary box and that helps wonderfully. You should be here when we open one and hear the expressions of delight as article after article is taken out,—not all new, of course, nor the best fit, but the neighbors come in and help cut and make them over, and we feel quite in touch with the world in our finery. I have five children, four of them sturdy boys, healthy as little bears and, I am sometimes fearful, almost as savage, brought up, as they are, just on the verge of civilization. Our eldest child and only daughter, Elithe, is nineteen, and as lovely a flower as ever blossomed in the wilds of the West. Lucy is not strong, and Elithe is our right hand and left hand, and both hands in one. I send you her photograph, taken by an inferior artist compared with those you have East, but still a very good likeness. There is something in her face which reminds me of you as you looked many years ago when I was a little boy and you came to my father’s one day, wearing a white dress, and your long curls tied with a red ribbon. That’s the way I often think of you now, although I know you must have changed. I should like to see you again and the old places of my childhood, but I fear I never shall. With my family and salary there is little surplus for travelling, and then I am trying hard to save something for my boys’ education when they are older. Elithe has studied with me since leaving the only school we have here, and I think her a fair scholar. She would like so much to go East. Please God, she may sometime. I have just been sent for to go to the mines twelve miles away to see a young man who they think is very ill. Elithe is going with me, as she often does on my visits to the sick, and I verily believe the sound of her voice and the sight of her bright face does more for them than many doctors can do. The horses we are to ride are at the door, and I must say good-bye, with love from us all.

“Your affectionate nephew,

“ROGER HANSFORD.”

“P. S.—I need not tell you how glad I shall be to hear from you. Letters are like angels’ visits.”

This was Roger’s letter, and as Miss Hansford read it for the second time, the tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped into her lap. The storm raging without was forgotten; the kitchen in which she sat in her loneliness vanished, and she was living forty-five years in the past, when she wore the white gown and her hair was bound with a crimson ribbon. She remembered the day so well and the little boy who had called her his pretty Auntie and played with her long curls, making lines of them while she was the horse to be driven.

“Who would believe I ever wore a white gown and red ribbon?” she said, looking down at her plain calico dress and gingham apron, and thinking of her grey hair, combed back from her face as smoothly as she could comb it, for, in spite of her efforts, it had a trick of twining around her forehead and only needed a little coaxing to curl again as it once had done.

She thought curls a device of Satan, and when she put him behind her she cut them off and burned them. It seemed to her now that she could smell the scorched hair blackening on the hearth, while she looked on with a feeling that, in some small degree, she was a martyr and doing God service.

“Maybe I was morbid and went too far, but I want to do right in that and in everything else,” she said, and then her mind recurred again to Roger and his letter and what he had said of Elithe, who reminded him of her.

Reading between the lines, she fancied that she detected a wish that she would invite Elithe to visit her. “But, my land!” she said, “what would I do with a girl singing and whistling and, maybe, dancing around the house, tramping the streets, racing outdoors and in at all hours, never putting the stone in its place and letting in the flies. No, I couldn’t stand it in Lucy Potter’s girl, any way. I dare say she is nice, and she’s handsome, too, if she is like her picture, but as to looking like me,—oh, my!—” and she laughed at the absurdity, but was conscious of a little stir of pleasure at the thought that she was ever at all like Elithe, or any young girl with pretense to beauty.

By this time Jim had become impatient for his supper, and from giving her sundry soft pats with his paws, had jumped into her chair and from thence on to her shoulder, where he sat coaxing and purring, in imminent danger of falling into her lap. She took him down at last, gave him his milk, and was putting a cake for herself upon the griddle, when on the steps outside there was a stamping of feet, followed by a knock upon the door, and Paul Ralston came in with pools of water dripping from his umbrella.

“Isn’t this a corker for a storm?” he said. “I went to the front door first and banged away. I knew you must be home, and so came round here.”

He was shutting his umbrella as he talked and removing his wet coat, while Miss Hansford looked wonderingly at him.

“Where upon earth did you come from?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you as soon as I get to the fire and that cake, which smells awfully good. Don’t you remember how I used to like them when I was a boy and happened in at supper time? Flap-jacks you called them, or something like that.”

She did remember and she hastened to fill the griddle and brought an extra plate and cup.

“Now for it,” he said, as she heaped his plate with the nicely browned cakes and covered them with maple syrup. “I’ve been to Washington,—sent for by telegram. The bottom has fallen out.”

“No, really! You haven’t broke with Clarice?” Miss Hansford asked eagerly, her countenance brightening and then falling at Paul’s answer.

“Not a bit of it. Why should I? It’s that rascally Jack. He’s gone to the bad entirely.”

“I knew he would. I always felt it in my bones. What’s he been up to now?” Miss Hansford asked, and Paul replied: “Drinks like a fish. He’s managed to get rid of most of his own money and has used some of Clarice’s that she gave him to invest and supposed he had, for he paid her the interest regularly until lately. He went West while Mrs. Percy and Clarice were in Europe, and they have heard nothing from him since February. Clarice’s interest was due the first of April, and as it didn’t come and she didn’t know where he was, she wrote to the firm in Denver, and they replied that it had been invested in his name and he had collected it and skipped. Naturally this cramps her, as they spent a lot in Europe and Clarice was depending upon a part of the Denver money to defray the expenses of her wedding in Washington. Meant to make a splurge, you know, but can’t now, and has decided to be married in Oak City the last of August. That suits me. I’d rather be married here, but I offered to pay for the wedding in Washington if Clarice would let me. She wouldn’t do it. Said she’d some pride left. She’s all broke up about Jack, for scamp as he is, she has some affection for him. She telegraphed to me to come and talk it over, and has finally settled upon almost as big a spread here as she meant to have had in Washington. We shall send out a great many invitations, and probably rent rooms in some of the cottages as well as at the hotels. I thought of you, and instead of going straight through to Boston from New York came here to ask you not to engage your rooms after the last of July. We shall have a lot of people at our house, and some of them must sleep elsewhere. I thought the boat would never reach the wharf, the waves were so high, and when it did it stormed so that I came here before going to the house, and am glad I did. These cakes are first rate.”

As he talked he was eating, and Miss Hansford was baking, wondering how many his stomach would hold, and if the batter would hold out. He was satisfied at last, and, taking Jim in his lap and stroking his soft fur with one hand, with the other he drew from his pocket a package, which he handed to Miss Hansford, saying: “I have brought you a present, Clarice’s photograph and mine, taken in Washington. Hers was so good I wanted you to have it. Isn’t she a stunner?”

He had opened the Turkish morocco case and was looking admiringly at the beautiful face of the girl who was to be his wife. Miss Hansford admitted that she was a stunner and asked how she was, and thanked Paul for the picture. Then she said: “I seem to have a run on pictures. This is the second I have had in two days.”

Going into the next room, she returned with something carefully wrapped in tissue paper.

“Maybe you didn’t know I had a nephew Roger, a ’Piscopal minister in Montana?” she said.

“Never knew you had a relation in the world,” Paul replied, and Miss Hansford continued: “Well, I have—plenty of ’em somewhere; none very near, though. Roger’s the nearest. His father was my brother John, and I quarrelled with him,—Roger I mean,—because, in spite of all I could say, he would marry Lucy Potter, a pretty little helpless thing, with no sort of get up in her. Her folks lived in Ridgefield same as we did. Respectable enough, but shiftless,—let things go to rack and ruin. The front gate hung on one hinge, the fence lopped over, the blinds swung loose, and for months there was a broken window light in the garret,—sometimes with paper pasted over it and sometimes an old shawl sticking out of it. That’s who the Potters were. Went everywhere and everybody liked ’em, but, my land, how Roger, who wouldn’t drink from a glass some one else had drank from, could marry one of ’em I don’t know. She was just a China doll, and her beauty took him. I guess he’s paid for it. I’ve no doubt her house looks like bedlam, and he so neat and particular! There was some French blood in old Miss Potter ’way back, and her sister, Lucy’s aunt, was on the stage,—an actress!”

Miss Hansford whispered the last word as if afraid the furniture in the room would hear and rise in judgment against her. Paul did not seem at all disturbed, and she continued: “Roger and Lucy went to hear her when she was in Boston, and tried to have me go. Think of it! I in such a place! I went with your folks, I know, to see ‘Uncle Tom,’ but that was different. This play the Potter woman was in was about Lady somebody, who put her husband up to kill somebody.”

“Lady Macbeth?” Paul suggested, and Miss Hansford replied: “Yes, that’s the one. A blood and thunder play. Why, I’d as soon go to Purgatory as to see it. I’ve never told a living soul before that we had an actress in the family. I’m so ashamed I hope you’ll keep it to yourself. I shouldn’t like to have Elder Atwater’s wife know it. She has never quite got over my going to see ‘Uncle Tom.’”

Paul did not share Miss Hansford’s prejudice against theatres and actresses, but he promised that neither Elder Atwater’s wife nor any other elder’s wife should ever hear from him of the disgrace attaching to Miss Hansford because her nephew’s wife’s aunt, dead years ago, had been an actress. Miss Hansford had handed him the picture, saying as she did so: “It’s Roger’s girl. He sent it in a letter. He thinks she looks like me.”

“By George, she’s a beauty, if she does; but what’s her name?” Paul said, bending close to the lamp and looking at the word “Elithe” written with very pale ink.

“I don’t wonder you ask,” Miss Hansford replied. “Such an outlandish name. I told you her great-grandmother was French, and they called the girl for her and that aunt on the stage. That’s the worst of it. Named for an actress! It’s pronounced A-l-double e-t-h.”

“Yes, I know—Aleeth. It’s a pretty name, and she is pretty, too,” Paul said, admiring the picture, whose large brown eyes looked at him as steadily and intelligently as if they were living eyes and could read his thoughts.

Some of the great-grandmother’s French blood had been transmitted to her descendant, who showed it in her features and in the pose of her head, covered with short curls, which made her look younger than she was. The nose was slightly retroussé and the mouth rather wide, but taken as a whole the face was charming. The dress was countrified and old-fashioned, and you knew at a glance that the artist was countrified, too, and not at all like the one to whom Clarice had sat. Every curve and line of her graceful figure showed to advantage, while Elithe’s position was cramped and awkward. Her hands were placed just where they looked large and stiff. Her boots, which showed under her short dress, were square-toed instead of pointed like those of Clarice, who was standing with her hands behind her in an attitude “for all the world like a play-actor,” Miss Hansford thought, mentally giving the preference to Elithe. Unconsciously Paul did the same. He did not think of Elithe’s boots or dress or hands. He saw only the lovely face, which held and mastered him with a power he could not define.

“Elithe,” he said, as if speaking to her in the flesh. “I know you are a nice girl with no nonsense in you.” Then to Miss Hansford: “Why don’t you have her come here to visit you?”

“It’s too expensive, for I should have to pay carfare both ways,” Miss Hansford replied; “and then she can’t be spared. There’s four more children, all boys,—little savages, I dare say. Lucy is weakly and the brunt of everything falls on Elithe, who works like a dog.”

“More reason why she should have an outing. Poor little Elithe! Let’s see how she’d look beside Clarice,” Paul said, and slipping his own picture from the case, he put Elithe’s in its place side by side with the proud beauty who seemed to look with disdain upon her humble neighbor.

Elithe, however, did not lose by the comparison. She only represented a different type of girlhood, and most people would have looked at her first and longest.

“They are both beauties and no mistake,” Paul said, following Miss Hansford into the sitting room, where she heard a blind banging. “Keep them here, where you can see them every day,” he continued, placing them on the mantel with Miss Hansford’s Bible and hymn book and spectacle case, a card of sea mosses, a conch shell and a plaster bust of John Wesley.

Returning to the kitchen, he sat down again by the stove and plied Miss Hansford with questions concerning Elithe, who interested him greatly. Miss Hansford could only tell him what Roger had written of her, but she had a good deal to say of Roger and Lucy Potter and the Potters generally, whose blood was not as good as that of the Hansfords. At this Paul laughed. He had suspected that one of Miss Hansford’s objections to Clarice was the thinness of the Percy blood compared with the Ralston’s. For himself he didn’t care a picayune for the color of any one’s blood, and it amused him greatly to hear this peculiar old lady vaunting the superiority of her family and his over the Percys and Potters. For a time he listened patiently, and then, as it was growing late, he returned to the real object of his visit, the refusal of her rooms for August and possibly a part of July,—he would let her know in time. The rooms were promised and then he arose to go, after one more look at the photographs.

“I don’t believe Elithe has much Potter blood in her,” he said, “and I’d send for her if I were you. I’d like to see her myself.”

The next morning Miss Hansford took down the morocco case and looked long and critically at Elithe. Paul’s admiration of her was having its influence. The French name, the actress aunt and the Potter blood did not seem quite so obnoxious to her, and she began to feel a longing to see the girl whose eyes held her as they had held Paul Ralston.

“I s’pose an outing would do her good, and I can afford it, too,” she said. “What am I saving my money for? To give to the Methodists, I suppose, and they don’t need it half as much as Roger.”

The idea of sending for Elithe was beginning to take definite shape, and the more she thought about it the more surprised she grew to find how lonesome she was and how much she wanted the girl whose eyes followed her so persistently and seemed to say, “Send for me; send for me.” From an economical standpoint it might be well to do so, for if Miss Hansford’s rooms were full of lodgers she would need help, and colored servants were out of the question. Martha Ann, the best she had ever employed, had decamped with three napkins, two silver spoons and a fruit knife. Her would-be successor had come to the front door in a silk dress and big hat, and, introducing herself as Mrs. Helena Jackson, had asked if Miss Hansford wished to hire either a wash-lady or a lady to do general housework. She was told that Miss Hansford wanted neither a wash-lady nor a nigger, and the door slammed in her face.

“No more darkies for me,” she said, and as she must have some one she began to wonder if Elithe would not do. “I don’t s’pose she’d be much more than a teacup wiper, though if what Roger says is true, she is capable of doing more than that; and then I feel it in my bones that I ought to send for her.”

For a week or more Miss Hansford kept up this style of conversation with herself, while her bones clamored more and more for Elithe. At last she made up her mind and wrote to Roger inviting Elithe to spend the summer with her, and as much longer time as she chose, if she proved the right kind of a girl, and didn’t make more trouble than her company was worth.

“One thing I may as well mention now,” she wrote, “I can’t have her gadding nights to concerts and rides on the water and clambakes and the Casino and the like. She must be in by nine, or half-past at the latest, as I keep early hours. I can’t have her slat her things round everywhere. I can’t have her sing and whistle in the house. I ain’t used to it. I like to be still and meditate. I don’t want you to think she isn’t to have any privileges, for she is. I shall use her well, and I inclose money for her fare and a little more, as she may want to buy a dress or two. Let me know when to expect her.—Phebe Hansford.”

“P. S.—Give my regards to Lucy and a dollar to each of the boys. I’ve allowed for that.”

“There, I’ve done my duty,” Miss Hansford thought, as she posted the letter, and then rather anxiously awaited the result.

CHAPTER VII.
IN SAMONA.

If Miss Hansford could have seen the Rectory in Samona she would hardly have likened it to bedlam. It was a small wooden structure without much architectural symmetry, but with its coat of white paint, its green blinds and its well-kept plot of ground around it, it looked very homelike and cozy, and was regarded as one of the finest houses in the little mountain town. The gate was not off the hinges, nor was there any unsightly object obtruding from a broken window, as had been the case in the Potter House in Ridgefield. Indoors there was perfect neatness and order, notwithstanding that four active boys were constantly running in and out, making a great deal of work, and care, too, for the delicate mother and Elithe, on the latter of whom the most of the burden fell. As Roger had written to his aunt, Elithe was the right hand and left hand and both hands of the family,—the one to whom he went for counsel and comfort, just as the boys went to her for help in every emergency, from the mending of a kite or ball to the mastering of a lesson hard to be learned. Between Elithe and her mother the natural relations seemed to be reversed. Elithe was the mother and Lucy the child. A very dainty, pretty child, whom her husband loved as devotedly as he had done when, in the face of bitter opposition, he had made her his wife. He had been told that she was not a helpmeet for a poor clergyman,—that she would be sickly and inefficient, and as the years went by and she proved the truth of all this he gave no sign that he knew it, and bore his lot uncomplainingly. Indeed, he was very happy in his Western home. The miners, to whom he preached every four weeks in Deep Gulch, and with whom he often came in contact, worshiped him. He was hail fellow well met with them at times, talking and laughing familiarly with them, eating their coarse fare and joining in whatever interested them most. Again, he was their pastor and spiritual teacher, dignified as became his office, sympathizing with them in their joys and sorrows, reproving them when they deserved it, and striving to lead them up to a higher life and nobler manhood than is common in mining districts.

If he were popular, Elithe was more so. In fine weather she often rode with her father to Deep Gulch when he officiated there. Horses in that vicinity were not very plenty, and as Mr. Hansford had but one, Elithe at first rode behind him in their excursions to the mines.

“It is a shame for our parson’s daughter to come to visit us this way. Can’t we club together and get her a pony?” Bill Stokes, one of the leading miners, said to his comrades, with the result that when, a few weeks after, Elithe rode into the camp behind her father, she found a beautiful chestnut pony, saddled and bridled, and tied to a young sapling, awaiting her.

This Bill Stokes was to present with a speech, which had cost him a great deal of thought and labor and been rehearsed many times to his comrades, each one of whom had some suggestion or criticism both as to his words, his manner of delivering them and the way he stood and held his head and used his hands. After many trials and changes, the speech, which commenced with, “To her gracious highness, our Queen of the Gulch, we, her worshipful admirers, filled with a deep sense of her kindness to us, and the frailties and shortness of life, do hereby give and bequeath,” and so on, was pronounced as perfect in composition as it well could be. A few objected to the “shortness and frailties of life” as sounding like a funeral, while others thought the “give and bequeath” too much like a will. On the whole, however, it had quite a learned sound, and could not be improved, and in their Sunday clothes, with shaven faces and clean hands and sober heads, for it was a point of honor with them not to touch a drop when the parson and Miss Elithe were in the camp, they waited for Mr. Hansford and his daughter.

“Oh, what a beauty!” Elithe cried, springing from her father’s horse and going up to the pony, who, accustomed to be petted, rubbed his head against her sleeve, and gave a little whinny of welcome. “Where did he come from, and whose is he?” she said to Bill Stokes, whose face was on a broad grin.

“Like him?” he asked, and Elithe replied. “Like him! I reckon I do. But whose is he? Is there a lady here?”

She looked around for the owner of the pony, while Bill, forgetting his speech, which he held in his hand, said to her: “He’s yours; we all chipped in and bought him of a trader from Butte, and we give him to you with—with—yours respectfully,” he added, with a gasp, remembering that this was what he was to say last. He had forgotten his speech entirely, and stood mortified and aghast at the jeers and groans of his companions. “The speech, Stokes! the speech! Don’t cheat us out of that,” they yelled, while Elithe drew near to her father in alarm, and the pony, frightened at the din, began to snort and pull at his bridle.

The speech was quite too fine a piece of composition to be lost. Too many had had a hand in it and were waiting to hear how their ideas sounded to be satisfied without it, and after the confusion had subsided and Mr. Hansford began to comprehend the meaning of the hubbub, he suggested that Bill should be given a chance to deliver it as if nothing had occurred, and, mounted on a barrel, Bill delivered it with a great many flourishes of hands and arms and in a voice which one of the miners said reminded him of a leader in the Salvation Army when he wanted to be heard half a mile away. The pony, Bill said, was called Sunshine, because the beautiful lady who was to be his mistress was the sunshine of the camp, the Aurora of the day, who brought the brightness of the morning with her when she came, and left darkness and rain when she went away.

This allusion to Aurora and darkness and rain was thought the most fetching part of the speech, and was the combined effort of the three brainiest men in the camp, one of whom had seen a picture of Aurora in the East. It was received with thunders of applause, during which Elithe began to cry, while the pony broke from the sapling and went curveting around in circles. The men had expected Elithe to cry, and when through her tears she thanked them in the sweet, gracious way natural to her, they were fully satisfied, and felt that their Sunshine was a success. He was soon caught, and, Elithe on his back, galloped several times before her delighted audience, who complimented her by saying she rode as well as a circus rider.

Nearly every four weeks after that while the fine weather lasted Elithe went with her father to Deep Gulch, where she led the singing for the service and played the melodeon which had been bought in Helena and sent to the Gulch for her use. One Sunday morning, about the middle of April, Roger was too ill to rise. He was subject to headache, and a severer one than usual made it almost impossible for him to open his eyes, much less to sit up.

“I am so sorry,” he said, “for the men at the mines will be disappointed. They were anticipating to-day, because I was to take them that music for the Magnificat. I hope they won’t get into mischief. It is three weeks since I was there.”

Elithe, who was bathing his forehead, was silent a moment, and then said: “I’ll take the music and play it for them. Rob can go with me on your horse. I shall be a poor substitute for you, but better than nothing. Shall I go?”

Mr. Hansford hesitated a moment, and then, knowing that she would be just as safe with those rough men as if each were her brother, consented.

“Aren’t you at all afraid?” her mother asked, and Elithe answered, laughingly: “Afraid? No. Why should I be? If I were in a great danger I would go to the miners sooner than to any one else, and then Mrs. Stokes and her mother are there now.”

She was soon ready, looking, as her brother Rob said, “very swell” in her gown of blue flannel and a fanciful little riding cap, trimmed with gilt cord and tassel. It had come in a missionary box the fall previous, and was so becoming to her well-shaped head and short curls that she always wore it to the mines, where the men said she looked like a daisy. It was a glorious day, for the spring was early that year, and both Elithe and Rob felt the exhilaration of the pure mountain air and the fine scenery as they made their way over wild wastes of plains and then struck into the gorge which led to the Deep Gulch, the terminus of their journey.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE STRANGER AT DEEP GULCH.

They found the miners in their Sunday clothes, some sitting on the ground, some on big boulders and piles of debris, some standing, and all smoking and waiting anxiously the arrival of Mr. Hansford. When they saw only Rob, with Elithe, their countenances fell.

“Where’s the parson? Isn’t he coming?” they asked, gathering around Elithe, who told them of her father’s illness, and said she had brought the new music and would play and sing it for them.

This was some consolation, but, evidently, there was something else on their minds, and at last Bill Stokes said, “If we hadn’t expected your father we should have sent for him. There’s a sick fellow here, crazy as a loon by spells, and we don’t know what to do. I s’pose he orto have a doctor.”

“Where is he, and who is he?” Elithe asked, and Stokes replied, “We’ve got him into my cabin, where Lizy Ann can look after him. He did lay on a buffalo skin a spell in one of the boys’ huts, cussin’ and howlin’ with tremens,—snakes, and all that.”

“Oh-h!” Elithe said, with a shudder. “It’s dreadful. Where did he come from? What is his name?”

“John Pennington, he says, though the Lord knows if that’s so. We have so many names here that don’t belong to us, but I reckon this is genuine,” Stokes replied. “His close is marked ‘J. P.’ Lizy Ann has washed his shirts and things,—all store shirts, fine as a fiddle, with gold studs in his cuffs and a diamond collar button, and a big diamond on his little finger. I’ve got the studs and collar button safe. The ring I left on him, for he wouldn’t let me take it off. He came into camp a week ago,—from New York, I reckon, and he wanted to go snucks in a mine to pay a debt of honor. That’s what he told me. Some of us let him go to digging on pay, but, my Lord, he was that shaky in his legs he could hardly stan’; was just gittin’ over a bender, for I put it to him and he owned up, and said it was his last,—he’d sworn off, and was goin’ to reform. Reform! He couldn’t do that, nor work, neither, and in less than three days he was down with the very old Harry, tearin’ and yellin’, so’s we had to hold him to keep the devils he said was after him from gettin’ him. He’s quieter now, but keeps mutterin’ and repeatin’ your father’s name.”

“My father’s name! How did he know it?” Elithe asked, and Stokes replied: “Heard us talkin’ of expectin’ him; there’s no other way. Lizy Ann is great on religion, and she told him the parson was comin’ and as’t if he’d like to see him. He swore awful then that no parson should come near him, and that’s about the size of it as it stan’s. He’s asleep now in Lizy Ann’s bunk.”

“I’d like to see him,” Elithe said. But Stokes hesitated. “I do’ know ‘bout it. He cusses some now, and mebby your father wouldn’t like to have you hear such words. Our cussin’ can’t hold a candle to his’n, which is kind of genteel like and makes you squirm.”

“Still, I’d like to see him,” Elithe persisted, and Stokes led the way into his cabin, the most comfortable one in the camp.

On a cot in a corner of the room a young man lay asleep, with marks of dissipation and suffering on his face, which, in spite of the dissipation, was a handsome one. His hands, on one of which the diamond ring was showing, were lying outside the sheet and were whiter than Elithe’s.

“Them hands never done no work,” Stokes whispered, pointing to them. “He’s a New Yorker sure.”

Elithe’s ideas of New Yorkers were not very clear, but she accepted Stokes’s theory as correct, and sitting down by the bed said to Mrs. Stokes: “You look tired. Go out into the fresh air a while. I will stay here.”

Mrs. Stokes was tired, as she had sat all night by the restless man and was glad of a little change. He would probably sleep for some time, and, accepting the offer, she went out, leaving Elithe alone with the stranger. For a time she sat very still, studying him closely, wondering who he was and feeling a great pity that one so young should have fallen so low. Her father was a gentleman and so were many of the men who lived in Samona, but Elithe felt that this stranger was a different type from them; not half so good, but more polished, perhaps,—more accustomed to polite society, of which she knew so little. Once he stirred in his sleep and muttered something of which she could only catch the word “Mignon.” Who was Mignon? Elithe wondered. His sister, or wife, or sweetheart? Probably the latter, and her interest in him was at once increased. Again he stirred and spoke to Mignon, this time more distinctly, telling her he was sorry and would pay it all in time.

“If you knew what a hole I’m working in and how I have blistered my hands, you would know I am in earnest,” he said, and then relapsed again into a heavy sleep.

The sweetheart theory did not seem quite so likely now. Mignon was some one he owed and was trying to pay, Elithe thought, remembering what he had said to Stokes about a debt of honor. Glancing at his hands, she saw the red blotches on them where the skin had peeled off, and knew that they had been blistered in his efforts to wield the heavy pick-axe.

“Poor fellow, I’m sorry for him,” she thought, just as in the next cabin she heard the jerky sound of the melodeon Rob was trying to play, while those of the miners who could read music were attempting to follow him.

The sound grated harshly on her sensitive ear, but she was not prepared for the effect it had on the sick man, who started from his pillow and said in a thick, husky voice very different from the one in which he had talked to Mignon, “Shtop that d——d discord, I shay.”

Elithe gave an exclamation of dismay, which the man heard, and turning fixed his eyes on her. They were large and dark and bright, with a watery expression, telling of dissipation and of something else which, unused as she was to any world but Samona, Elithe could not define. She liked him better with his eyes shut, and turned her own away from him, but turned them back when he said in a natural voice, “I beg your pardon; I thought you were Lizy Ann. She was here when I went to sleep. I didn’t expect to find a lady in this place.”

He was lying back upon his pillow, with his eyes fastened upon her, a kindling light in them which fascinated her in spite of herself. She had no idea what a lovely picture she made in that humble room with her fresh, young face, her soft brown eyes, her bright color and her short, curly hair with the jaunty riding cap upon it. The sick man noted it all, but seemed at first most struck with the cap.

“I say, where did you get that cap, so much like Mignon’s?” he asked.

Elithe did not think it necessary to explain that it came in a missionary box and simply answered, “It is mine, sir.”

“It looks like one I have seen Mignon wear. Who are you, any way?” he continued.

“I am Miss Hansford,” was Elithe’s reply, given with a slight elevation of her head.

“Hansford? Hansford?” the man repeated, as if trying to recall something. “Oh, yes, I know. Lizy Ann told me he was the parson and was coming here. Are you the parson’s daughter?”

“I am the Rev. Roger Hansford’s daughter,” Elithe replied with dignity and a heightened color.

The word “parson” when applied to her father always grated upon her and doubly so when spoken as this man spoke it. He must have read her thoughts, for he hastened to say: “Excuse me, Miss Hansford; I meant no disrespect. Lizy Ann called him the parson, and I did the same on the principle do as the Romans do when you are among them. Where is he?”

Elithe said that, as he was ill, she came in his stead.

“A deuced good exchange, too,” the stranger replied, “but aren’t you afraid with all these miners? There are some hard cases among them, and your face——”

Something in Elithe’s face checked him suddenly, while she rejoined vehemently: “I am not afraid. The hardest miner here would not see me harmed.”

“I believe you. The man would be a brute who could harm you, but he can’t help thinking,” the stranger replied in a tone of voice which made Elithe wish Mrs. Stokes would come.

The sound of the melodeon had ceased, and after a moment Rob pushed open the door and called to her: “Elithe, Elithe; they want you to play for them. I tried my hand and couldn’t make it go. Mrs. Stokes will sit with him.”

He nodded towards the bed, seeing now for the first time that the sick man was awake. Rob had heard of the snakes and the blue devils which had held high carnival in that room the night before, and he, too, shrank from the eyes fixed upon him. But when the stranger asked, “And who are you, coming in like a whirlwind to take my nurse away,” he answered fearlessly, “She is not your nurse. She’s my sister and I am Robert Hansford.”

“More Hansfords. I should not be surprised if the old one herself appeared pretty soon,” and the man laughed a low, chuckling laugh; then changing suddenly, and still looking at Rob, he continued: “I was once a boy like you, only not half so good, I reckon. Keep good, my lad, and never do what I have done.”

“Get drunk, you mean?” Rob asked with a bluntness which startled Elithe, whose warning hush-h came too late.

The stranger did not seem in the least offended, and answered good-humoredly: “Yes, get drunk, and other things which getting drunk leads to. I have a sister,—not exactly like yours. She would never come among the miners and sit in this place with such as I am. Still she is my sister.”

Here he closed his eyes and seemed to be thinking painful thoughts, for there was a scowl on his forehead and a set look about his lips. Just then Mrs. Stokes appeared, repeating Bob’s message and saying she had come to take Elithe’s place.

“No, no. Don’t go. They’ll come back if you do,” the stranger cried, putting out his hand to restrain Elithe, who had risen to her feet, only too glad to get away. “You are really going?” he said so piteously that Elithe involuntarily took his hot hand in hers and answered soothingly: “I must go for a while. I’ll come back again.”

“You promise?” he asked, clinging to her hands as if in them lay safety for him.

“I promise,” she replied, and releasing herself from him she went with Rob to the next cabin, where her father was accustomed to hold services and where some of the miners were waiting for her and humming the Magnificat.

Sitting down to the instrument, she began to play and sing the opening sentences, the men repeating them after her and catching the tune with a wonderful quickness and accuracy. There were many fine voices among them, and as they became accustomed to the music and the air was filled with melody, the sick man sat upright with a rapt expression on his face as the strains rose louder and higher, Elithe’s voice leading clear and sweet as a bird’s. Suddenly, as the time became broken and difficult, there was a frightful discord, and the singers were startled by a loud call from Stokes’s cabin.

“Idiots, why don’t you keep with Elithe, and not make such an infernal break as that? It’s this way,” and, taking up the words, “He hath showed strength,” the stranger sang in rich, musical tones, while Elithe and the miners listened breathlessly. “That’s the way to do it. Now try it again,” he said, authoritatively.

They began as he told them and sang on, stopping when he bade them stop, repeating when he bade them repeat, until they had a pretty accurate knowledge of half the Magnificat, and knew they had been well drilled. But the driller was exhausted, and relapsed into a state of half delirium, half consciousness, calling for Elithe, who, he insisted, should sit with him instead of “that snuff-colored woman with the big bald spot on the top of her head and that terrible nasal twang,” which he imitated when he spoke of her. This was rather rough on Lizy Ann, who had tired herself out in his behalf. She was very glad, however, to give up her post to Elithe, to whom the stranger said, as she sat down beside him, “We’ve had a first-rate singing-school, haven’t we? We might go through the country giving lessons. It would be easier than digging in the dirt, or nursing either, and I believe we’d make more at it.”

To this Elithe did not reply, but asked if she should read or sing to him.

“What will you read?” he said, and she replied, “How would the Gospel and Epistle for the day do, seeing it is Sunday?”

“Oh, go ’way with your Gospel and Epistle. I had enough of them when I was a boy. Sing something.”

“What shall I sing?” Elithe asked, and, after considering a moment, he said: “‘Anna Rooney’ is pretty good. Know it?”

Elithe was horrified, and showed it in her face.

“Oh, I see,” he continued. “Anna isn’t a Sunday girl. Well, suit yourself: only don’t make it too pious. I’m not that kind.”

Elithe was puzzled till a happy thought came to her like an inspiration, and she began the familiar words,

“Sowing the seed by the wayside fair,

Sowing the seed by the noonday glare.”

The effect was magical. Closing his eyes, the sick man lay perfectly still until she reached the words,