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More Stories of Married Life

Clasp him to her breast

[Page 84]

More Stories of
Married Life

By
Mary Stewart Cutting

New York
McClure, Phillips & Co.
Mcmvi

Copyright, 1906, by
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

Published March, 1906

Copyright, 1903, 1904, 1905, by The S. S. McClure Co.
Copyright, 1902, 1903, by Perry Mason Company
Copyright, 1904, by The Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright, 1906, by The Butterick Publishing Company

Contents

A Little Surprise

A Little Surprise

Anita Gibbons has been waiting outside at the station on the bench nearest the field since twenty minutes of six, and it was now nearly seven as she rose to go. The bright pleasure with which she had started out was fled: he had not come. The sun, wind, and reform of the spring afternoon, in combination with a becoming new suit and hat, had produced their annual effect of inspiring her to surprise her husband by meeting him on his return from town, that they might walk home bridally together in the sweet evening daylight. She had been hitherto undeterred by remembrance of the historic fact that Mr. Gibbons was never known to come on time when thus pleasurably expected; but memory was beginning to chill her now, as well as the wind on her back. She had done all this before!

Yet what business unknown this morning; could have kept him? It was neither the first nor the last of the month, always mysterious days of threatened detention. He had not passed her by unnoticed, for she had risen as each train came in to scan the men who dropped on to the platform and hurried off, some of them looking back to raise their hats to the pretty woman on the platform.

She hurried now as she walked across the field, feeling guiltily amid her disappointment that dinner would be waiting, and that she had left no word of her whereabouts with the maid, having in fact slipped out of the house unseen, to escape the clamouring notice of her only child, who was near his early bed-time.

“Good-evening, Mrs. Gibbons. Coming back from town so late?”

She looked up to see a friend approaching on the foot-path.

“Oh, good-evening, Mr. Ferris! No, I’ve only come from the station; I’ve been looking for my husband.”

He stopped half-way past her.

“Why, he came out in the five-fifteen with me! He slipped off when it slowed up, and jumped down the embankment; he said he was in a hurry to get home. Too bad if you’ve missed him.”

“Yes, it is,” said Mrs. Gibbons, hastily, breaking almost into a run. Arnold, she knew, hated to find her out of the house.

As she went up the steps now, the door opened before she reached it, and an excited voice exclaimed: “Ah, ma’am, it’s yourself at last! It’s the neighbourhood we do be having searched for you!”

“What do you mean, Katy?” Mrs. Gibbons, who had stood arrested on the threshold, pushed her way in. “Where is Mr. Gibbons?”

“He’s gone.”

“Gone!”

“Yes, ma’am, gone back to the city. ’Twas like this: he bid me say that he had to be meeting friends—I disremember the name—on the other side, at the ferry, or he could have telephoned ’em, ma’am. ’Twas a grand dinner they had planned for to-night, unexpected like.”

“Was the name”—Mrs. Gibbons paused that she might have courage to grasp her loss—“Was the name Atterbury?”

“It was, ma’am.”

Her beloved Atterburys! They were to sail for Rio at the end of the week. This was a dinner and a theatre party planned before and postponed. They could not have it without her.

“Mr. Gibbons must have known I’d be home in a minute!”

“Sure, he waited for you, ma’am, till he had to run to the station below to catch the express; but he bid me tell you to be sure and take the seven o’clock train in, and he’d keep the party waiting at the ferry for you.”

Mrs. Gibbons glanced at the clock. It was after seven now! But there was a seven-twenty-five train which reached town almost as soon, and Arnold would surely wait for that, even if the others had gone on to Martin’s, where they would dine. The Atterburys always went to Martin’s. She was accustomed to try and bend fate to her uses with an uncalculating ardour that focussed itself entirely on the impulse of the moment. To the suburbanite a little dinner in town is the height of pleasure, the one perfect feast! And with the Atterburys! She really could not miss it.

“I don’t care for anything to eat. Don’t let the fire out,” she dictated rapidly. “See that Harold doesn’t get uncovered, and don’t bolt the front door. We’ll be home before twelve, but you needn’t sit up for us. Just lie on the lounge in the nursery.” She did not remind forgetful Katy to put the milk tickets in the pail set outside the back door, and only remembered it as she was half-way to the station.

The train was due in town at eight-five, but it was late here, and the extra ten minutes seemed a thousand “prickly seconds.” The spring twilight was coming to a close, and when she stepped into the car in which the lamps gleamed dully over the plush seats, it was like stepping into the long tunnel of the night. Only a few men from further up the road sprawled and dozed wearily on their way. She was unaccustomed to going out thus alone, and for an instant a panic-struck thought of failure seized her, but she lost it in the action of her hurrying brain, which constantly pictured the delightful meeting with her expectant husband and the waiting party. By the inalienable law of travel, which ordains that delay in one mode of locomotion means delay in every other, the ferry-boat could not “hit her slip,” but wobbled up and down crosswise in the current, bumping against the piles at either end, with much ringing of the pilot’s bell, and losing of minutes—and minutes—and minutes. But at last Mrs. Gibbons made her way into the big, lighted waiting-room, the haven of her hopes. It took no more than one glance to reveal that there was neither group nor husband waiting for her. The place was entirely empty, save for a few Italian emigrants, and the clock pointed to twenty minutes of nine.

So vividly had Mrs. Gibbons pictured her own state of mind as that of her husband—a habit of which fell experience could not break her—that even in the shock of not finding him she felt instantly that some provision had been made for this contingency. She could go straight over and join the party at Martin’s, but he might have left some word for her. The man at the news stand might know. She hovered uncertainly around the pictorial exhibit, trying to screw up a suddenly-waning courage, and then found voice to say engagingly:

“I’m looking for my husband.”

“What did you say, lady?” The man stopped in his work of sorting papers.

“I’m looking for my husband. He’s been waiting for me here for a long time—with a party—but he’s gone now. I thought perhaps he had left some message here with you.”

“What kind of looking man was he?” asked the news clerk. He leaned forward companionably.

“He—he’s tall, and clean shaven, with a light overcoat, and blue eyes—and——” She groped around for some distinguishing characteristic to elicit a gleam of response—“a square chin—with a dimple in it.” She felt her own fatuousness. “You—you’d know him if you saw him.”

The clerk turned to a boy who had appeared behind the counter.

“Did you see a man with a light overcoat, and”—a spasm passed over his face—“and a dimple in his chin? Did he leave any message here?” Mrs. Gibbons felt hotly that he was laughing at her, although he looked impassive.

“Naw,” said the boy, “he didn’t leave no message with me.” He added on reflection, “I ain’t seen no one hanging ’round but a chunky feller with a black mustache.”

“He hasn’t seen any one but a stout man with a black mustache,” reported the clerk officially, while two pairs of eyes stared at her in a disconcerting manner.

“Good-evening, Mrs. Gibbons; is there anything we can do for you?”

“Oh, Mrs. Worthington—and Mr. Worthington!” Mrs. Gibbons looked as one who sees a familiar face in the desert. “You don’t know how glad I am to meet you! I’m looking for my husband.”

“Indeed!” said Mrs. Worthington, with a faint chill of surprise. She was a slight woman, elegantly gowned, with a thin expressionless face. Her husband was like unto her, with the overcoat of opulence. They were new neighbours of Mrs. Gibbons, who kept themselves politely aloof from suburban social life, spending most of their time in town, where they seemed to have a large connection. They were perhaps the last persons to whom Mrs. Gibbons would have turned in a dilemma, but she found comfort in their curious attention as she explained the situation, to conclude by saying:

“Of course, I’ll go right over now to Martin’s. If they waited for me here until after eight, they would be hardly more than started at dinner. All I want to know is what car I ought to take.”

Mrs. Worthington’s eyelids flickered a response to her husband.

“Pray allow us to escort you there,” said Mr. Worthington. “It is really quite on our way.”

“Oh, you’re very kind,” said Mrs. Gibbons, following her leaders gratefully, after a moment or two of demur. She had naturally the feeling that when a man took the thing in hand it would be all right.

“I didn’t know it was so dark at night when you were out alone by yourself, until I came off the ferry-boat,” she confided.

Mrs. Worthington’s eyelids flickered assent. She sat in the trolley car in a sort of isolated though subdued richness of attire, her heavy silken skirts folded over decorously to escape contaminating touch, her embossed cloak and large boa held elegantly in place with her white-gloved hand. She seemed to demand a coach and four. The light spring suit which Mrs. Gibbons had thought so fetching in the afternoon looked cheap and thin in comparison. She did not know of the blue intenseness of her eyes and the rich flush on her young cheek which made each man who entered the car turn to look at her.

When Mr. Worthington bent over from the suspending strap to ask, “You are quite sure your husband is at Martin’s?” she answered with her bright, upward glance, “Oh, yes, quite sure!” He would be at a little round table, with John and Agnes Atterbury, in the red-carpeted room, looking out for her, and how glad they would be to see her!

She dashed up the steps ahead of the Worthingtons, and a waiter came deferentially forward. Why should her heart suddenly fail her when she stood looking in upon the lighted scene?

“I’m looking for my husband,” said Mrs. Gibbons. She dashed from one doorway to another, peering in. “No, he isn’t here—perhaps in the other room—I don’t see him here either. It’s very strange, very!”

“What is it Madame desires?” The head waiter was following her rushing movements.

“I’m looking for my husband”—in full torrent of explanation her tone had grown louder. “He came here a little while ago.” She paused, suddenly aware of a whisper sibilating around.

“She’s looking for her husband.” Several people stopped eating. The head waiter regarded her suspiciously.

“Was Monsieur alone?”

“No, oh, no!” said Mrs. Gibbons with eager candour. “No, indeed! There was a lady——”

“Aa—h!” said the head waiter. “Monsieur was with another lady!” An embarrassing murmur of interest made itself felt. He fixed her with a placating eye, as he added, hurriedly, “But Monsieur, as Madame perceives, is not here. He exists not. If the carriage of Madame”—he stopped happily—“But behold now the friends of Madame!”

The wild blaze of happiness died down almost as suddenly as it had risen in Mrs. Gibbons’ breast, as she turned to see the Worthingtons advancing decorously once more to her rescue. Her bright hopes were buried in ashes.

“Oh, I don’t know what to do,” she breathed. “He isn’t here after all—he isn’t here!”

“Will you not go on with us to the opera?” asked Mrs. Worthington. “We would be very glad to have you. We did not care to get in for the first act.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that—you’re so very kind—but I couldn’t really. I must get home at once. Mr. Gibbons will go home early. I want to go home.”

“We will then, of course, return with you,” said Mr. Worthington, resignedly.

“Oh, please, please don’t! It isn’t at all necessary. I couldn’t have you do it. I know the way now, and—please don’t!”

“Mr. Worthington will not allow you to go home alone,” said his wife, with polite weariness of the subject. “The next train does not leave until ten o’clock. Of course, if you really wish so much to return—although Mr. Gibbons is not at all likely to get back before we would—do not hesitate out of consideration for us or our convenience. But I think you would enjoy the opera.”

Mrs. Gibbons stood unhappily irresolute. How could she drag these people home with her, much as she now longed to get there? If they would only let her go alone! After all, if Arnold were off having a good time, why shouldn’t she be gay and have a good time, too?

“Well, if you really want to take me—and it won’t be very late——” She was conscious of her ungraciousness. “Oh, I’ll enjoy it immensely!”

“We will leave whenever you say so,” said Mr. Worthington, with his invariable deference.

So unused was Mrs. Gibbons to going out with any one but her husband that Mr. Worthington’s arm felt startlingly thin and queer and unnatural when her hand rested on it as he helped her across the street. Everything was unnatural. Her acceptance, she found, necessitated his standing in the rear of the house, while she occupied his seat. Mrs. Worthington relinquished her entirely to the promised enjoyment. The music was indeed beautiful, but she still kept hold of the ever-tightening thread of suspense and longing; Arnold might be gay without her, but she couldn’t be gay without him. To think of all she was missing choked her! Mr. Worthington came forward between the acts to ask perfunctorily if Mrs. Gibbons wished to leave, but his wife showed no signs of moving.

It was with the first joy of the evening that she saw the curtain descend, and felt that she could tear at full speed for the elevated road and her own dear ferry and her own dear home. She must get there before Arnold, or he would be wild with anxiety; her desire to meet him in town was nothing to her desire now to head him off at home. But she reckoned without her host, literally. Her entertainers had been met by friends as they passed slowly down amid the crush in the aisle, and after the voluble greetings she was panic-struck by hearing one of the strangers say:

“You’ll come to supper with us now? Just around the corner!”

“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Worthington was almost animated. “If we have time,” she added, turning to her husband.

“Why, we can’t get the twelve o’clock, if we stay, but we will have plenty of time for the twelve-thirty, if Mrs. Gibbons doesn’t object,” said Mr. Worthington.

“We have a friend with us,” said Mrs. Worthington, in languid explanation. “Mrs. Gibbons, Mrs. Freshet, Mr. Freshet.”

“We will, of course, be pleased to have your friend take supper with us,” said Mrs. Freshet.

How could Mrs. Gibbons object? Her eyes pleaded, but her lips were perforce silent; and, comfortably settled in the restaurant, the others talked about matters of common interest, while she sat on the edge of her chair by the gleaming little table, and fumbled at her oysters with her fork, watching the hands of the clock at the end of the room. The Freshets were even more ornately dressed than the Worthingtons, with a floridity of manner that somehow overstepped a certain delicate line.

Once Mrs. Freshet smiled at the guest over her white satin and sables to ask:

“Is this the friend of whose beautiful home I have heard so much?”

“I—I think not,” said Mrs. Gibbons, with a stricken glimpse of the interior of her little dwelling. “I only met the Worthingtons by accident to-night,” she added, impulsively, with a longing for sympathy. “I was looking for my husband.”

“How singular!” said Mrs. Freshet, with a blank stare, and turned at once to continue a conversation on bargains with Mrs. Worthington, while Mrs. Gibbons, trying to make sprightly remarks in response to Mr. Freshet and Mr. Worthington, agonizingly watched the clock. Ten minutes of twelve—five minutes of twelve—she could not have stood it a second longer, when Mr. Worthington rose to hurry them off.

The rushing of the elevated train could not keep up with Mrs. Gibbons’ hastening spirit; but somehow, inexplicably, after a while even the rushing stopped—the train halted—went forward a little—and halted again, between stations.

“Oh, what is the matter?” said Mrs. Gibbons, as Mr. Worthington returned with several men from investigation.

“Oh, nothing to speak of; there’s a fire ahead somewhere, and we’re blocked for a few minutes. Mrs. Gibbons—Madam! Pray keep your seat, you can not get out!”

“They do say as there’s a family yet in the burning house,” suggested a sympathizing listener.

“Naw, they got thim out, but there’s two firemen hurted,” said another.

“What is it, Amelia!” Mr. Worthington turned his attention hastily from Mrs. Gibbons to his wife. “Do you feel faint?”

“A little,” murmured Mrs. Worthington, reproachfully.

Mrs. Gibbons had a sickened feeling. She could have felt faint too, if her husband had been along to sit down by her solicitously, and tell her to lean on him. She would have liked to feel faint. But instead, she was forced, in common decency, to be solicitous too for Mrs. Worthington, although she had begun to hate her. Mr. Worthington looked nervously at his watch until the train started again, and when they got out to walk to the ferry, he hurried his wife along at a pace with which Mrs. Gibbons tried in vain to keep up over the uneven, dirty, dimly lighted pavements in those winding streets near the river. Arnold never let her walk so fast that way; she owned an ankle that had once been sprained, and sometimes now turned under her disastrously. But hurry as she might, they hurried faster, under the impulse of the new fear which made itself felt to her without the need of words. She caught up to the couple, and clutched them as they stood suddenly motionless, inside the ferry-house, facing her.

“What do you stop for? Why don’t you go on?” she demanded fiercely, although she knew too well what the dread answer must be. The supreme stroke of suburban fate had befallen them. They had missed the last train out!

Only the initiated know what this really means. To be cut off inexorably from home, and the children, and the fires, and the incompetent servants or the anxious watchers—it is something subtly feared in every evening journey into town, but only once in a life-time perhaps is it experienced.

“We had better go to a hotel,” said Mrs. Worthington, with agitation. “We will have to go to a hotel, Foster.”

“Perhaps we can get out home some way,” he answered, with the instinct of the man who considers two hours in his own bed worth ten in any other.

Mrs. Gibbons cast the reserve of decency to the winds. They had made her miss this train! Her husband waiting for her—the sleeping Harold uncovered—the milk tickets to be put in the pail to-morrow—“I don’t care what you do; I can’t stay in town to-night. I won’t stay in town, Mr. Worthington! I’ll have to get home to-night if I swim for it!”

“No need to do that,” said a man rapidly coming out with a pipe-smoking group from the ferry-house. “We’re going out on the twelve-forty-five boat on the other road, a couple blocks below here, and take the trolley out. It’s Mrs. Gibbons, isn’t it? I don’t believe you recognize me. I saw your husband an hour or so ago at Weber and Fields.”

“Oh, thank you!” said Mrs. Gibbons. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!” She stumbled after the group over the cobblestones outside of the long wharves, still insanely warbling her gratitude, her protectors sullenly stalking after her. They crushed and wedged themselves into the midst of an unsavoury and strenuous populace on the boat that pushed out slowly into the fog of the river, but that did not matter—they were saved, they were off! They were surely bound for that other side on which lay all that made life worth living. Then there was another mad rush for the trolley car that went their way. Fighting, struggling, pressing, the three snot into seats, exhausted, and whizzed off into the dark night. Mr. Worthington, after a few minutes, went sound asleep, lurching as the car lurched, his wife, poor woman, pale enough as she sat with face averted from Mrs. Gibbons, her lips pressed tightly together, one hand holding mechanically to her raiment, and the other within her husband’s arm. Men sat with their heads on their sweet-hearts’ shoulders, in true early morning trolley-car fashion, and every inch of standing room was packed too thick for the eye to penetrate with a singing, drunken, cat-calling, indecent crowd, the last scum of a great city. It was an offense to delicacy to be there. The lights flared wildly up and then went out at intervals. When they went out, Mrs. Gibbons felt a cold terror. She had always been afraid of drunken men, and she was so used to the protection of love! How sorry Arnold would be when she told him about it all, how tender he would be of her!

Oh, she had never realized before how utterly married she was, how long she had ceased to remember the independence of her girlhood, for what a short distance her little struts and flights were planned! So helpless, so forlorn, so terribly outside of life was she without him, without that individual care which was as much a part of existence as her own ability to raise her food to her mouth, or move one foot before another! She thought of a woman she knew who had lost her husband, and who had said, “I did not know it could be like this.” He had “given his body to the storm” many a time and oft for her dear sake; yet even for her a day might sometime come—like this—when—— Her soft cheek was cold and wet, and even through her thought of him she was also trying to get home and put those milk tickets in the pail so that the child would not be bereft in the morning. One must always remember a little child’s needs.

“Ye’re frightenin’ the lady, ye big bloke.”

“I ain’t frightenin’ of her, ye——”

She shrank painfully at the notice thrust upon her. For hours, and hours, and hours they were jigging off over the dark salt meadows.

Crash, lurch, jam—everything came to a sudden stop. The conductor called, “All out here for the car ahead.”

The sleeping ones awoke. In the scuffle and rush forward Mrs. Gibbons became separated from her friends. The new car was already jammed when she reached it, with fighting in the doorway. With one foot raised to step up she was thrust to one side by a man who leapt from it, followed by several others dashing back across the tracks and down a side street, amid cries of “Catch him! Get the pocketbook! Catch the thief!”

There was a face—could it be her husband’s? She turned wildly to peer after it into the blankness outside of the car lights. The next instant the bell had rung, and the car, with the crowd on the platform all looking one way, was vanishing swiftly down the roadway, while Mrs. Gibbons, unnoticed, stood alone upon the rails. She made a futile step after it, and then stopped, appalled. She was left behind.

Opposite was the long, cavernous opening of a car-house, filled with the stalled cars. Near her was a saloon, ending what seemed a scattered row of small, mean houses and shops, closed and dark. Ahead there was a stretch of empty lots, with a faint, stationary glimmer of light down the road. But the saloon, though by no means brilliant, was the lightest place. There was no sound from within. After some hesitation, Mrs. Gibbons wandered up on the low platform that topped the two steps, watched by a couple of men from the car-house. Her heart was in her mouth as one of them came forward; but he only glanced at her and went in the saloon, to come out again with a wooden chair.

“Better set,” he remarked, laconically, and disappeared across the street. A moment later there were other footsteps from the saloon, and looking up, she saw a policeman wiping his mouth.

“Got left by the car?” he said.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Gibbons, raising her blue and guileless eyes to his. “I didn’t know it was going so soon. I was looking for my husband.”

The policeman’s face changed from solicitude to the cheerful acceptance of a familiar situation.

“Give ye the slip, did he? A lady like you, too! Sure he’s the bad lot, and not wort’ your lookin’ for. Now don’t be frettin’ yourself, the Queen couldn’t be safer. I’m wid you till the car comes. ’Tis an hour away.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Mrs. Gibbons, gratefully.

Of all the chances and changes of this wild Walpurgis night, there could be nothing stranger than this, that she, Nita Gibbons, should be sitting alone amid the dark marshes, in front of a Jersey “gin-mill,” at half-past two o’clock in the morning. It was so entirely past all imagining that frenzy had left her. She would probably never get home again, but she had ceased to struggle against fate. She sat there instead, passive, her slight figure bent against the cold night wind, and her hair half falling down under her battered hat, looking dreamily at the late twinkling stars in the black sky, and the gloomy car-house opposite, and at the policeman who walked up and down through the shadows. He swayed a little unsteadily, but he represented the guardianship of the law. Once he came close to her and asked encouragingly, “Would ye like a doggy?”

“What kind?” said Mrs. Gibbons, with a hazy fear of too large a protective animal.

He pointed over his shoulder towards the stationary light down the road. “The kind they do be havin’ in the Owl Wagon, down there—frankfooties or doggies, ’tis the same. I could get ye wan, wid a roll; they’re cleaned out in the s’loon here.”

“Thank you, I’d rather not eat,” said Mrs. Gibbons in haste, and then started nervously as the noise of footsteps running broke upon the ear. The three men who had followed the thief came in sight from the direction in which they had fled from the car. One called out, “Good-night, I’m going to hoof it home!”

And another voice also called, “Glad you got your pocketbook back again—ought to have got the fellow, too.”

The third said nothing, as he came towards the platform. Mrs. Gibbons turned her head away. The next instant a voice of amazement said, “Nita! You here!” and, looking up, she saw her husband.

“Oh, Arnold, Arnold!” She stopped short in view of his face. “Oh, Arnold, I don’t wonder you’re surprised to see me, dear, but I’ve been looking for you!”

“Looking for me! Nita! Nita! Nita!”

The astonishment in his voice held something ominous in it. She clung to his arm with both hands, as she rose with him, and hardly realized, in her excited explaining and explaining, that she was being borne off down the road without waiting for the car, at a tremendous pace, and still spasmodically explaining to a portentous silence. When he spoke at last it was in a tone that sounded dangerous:

“So the Worthingtons went off and left you?”

“No, no, they were in the car, they——”

“I’ll—I’ll see Worthington to-morrow!” He paused for control, and Mrs. Gibbons had a swift vision of Mr. Worthington’s head rolling off into a basket. “I never heard such a lot of crazy stuff—I never heard of such a thing—I never heard of such a thing! It all comes of your being out of the house when I came home. What on earth you want to go wild-goose chasing for at the very time you know I’m coming home——”

“But, Arnold, I didn’t go wild-goose chasing. I went to the station to surprise you.”

His anger grew.

“To surprise me! Then let me know next time you want to surprise me. I’ve had enough surprise to last me all the rest of my life.”

He broke off with a shudder as if the thought were too much for him.

“Well, you just missed it, not being with us to-night. You’ll never have such another chance, never. The Atterburys won’t be back for five years.”

“And did you enjoy it without me!”

“Enjoy it! Of course I enjoyed it. I’d have been a fool not to. I had a glorious time, the best dinner I ever ate, and Atterbury?—What on earth you wanted to spoil it all for I can’t see. Take care!”—his arm went around her closely. “You’ll turn your ankle.” His touch was ineffably gentle and sure, in spite of the masterful rage of his tone.

“Oh, Arnold, I’ve been so unhappy all the evening. I——”

He went on, remorseless. “I’m glad you were. I hope you were unhappy. It will teach you never to do such a thing again. When you didn’t meet us at the ferry, I was confounded. I couldn’t think what had happened to you. If everything hadn’t been ordered ahead, tickets and all, I’d have come straight home, but I couldn’t leave the Atterburys in the lurch when you had, though I hated to go without you. It just spoiled the whole thing. I’ve been worrying ever since that infernal hold-up in the elevated, thinking of you at home alone, and then I find you gallivanting around at the junction at three o’clock in the morning, after coming out in that outrageous car. If I’d known you were there——! Well, you were just crazy to do such a thing”—he set his teeth—“it makes me wild to think of it. You don’t know what might have happened. I’ll be afraid to go off and leave you home alone. I don’t know what you’ll do. You ought to be looked after like a child. You oughtn’t to be left a minute. What’s the matter?”

He slowed up the pace that was rapidly nearing them to home. His storming voice deepened reluctantly into a distressful tenderness.

“What’s the matter? You mustn’t cry in the street, Nita! You mustn’t, dear.”

“Oh, I’ve had such a horrid, horrid, horrid time!” The tears were blinding her so that she leaned unseeing on the enfolding arm that guided her. “I don’t mind your scolding me. I’m not crying for that. I don’t mind anything you say. I don’t mind even your not having kissed me. Nothing makes any difference to me as long as it’s you. I’m crying because I’m so glad it’s you, and I can hear your voice again. When I was trying to find you it seemed as if it would never end; it seemed—it seemed——” She raised her wet eyes to his.

He took a swift look up and down the empty, lifeless street, laid out straight and stiff in the cold, faint glimmer of the dawn, and then his lips sought hers in deep, deep acknowledgment of the joy, and of the sorrow, to which all love is born—one of those moments stolen in its beautifulness from the life to come.

But his voice was tense again, as he set her down within her own doorway, and he looked at her with stern eyes of jealous care, from which she hid the woman’s smile of love at dear love’s unreason.

“You’re nearly dead! Don’t you stir out of this house to-morrow until I come home—do you hear? Never surprise me again!”

At the Sign of the Rubber Plant

At the Sign of the Rubber Plant

“I wonder what he meant!”

Mrs. Thatcher had risen from the breakfast table from which her husband had departed some time since, after throwing out a mysterious hint about some event in store for her. She had better look out for—what? He had gone before she could question him further.

She went to the front window now, gazing down the street after Bobby, her only child, on his way to the kindergarten. She was a very tall young woman, yet lost none of her femininity by her height; it seemed rather to emphasize it in a willowy droop that always suggested an appealing dependence, in connection with the upward glance of her dark eyes. Her hair was dark, like her eyes, and very thick; her lips were red and curved; her cheeks were usually pale, but there was a faint glow on them now. Nevin had made a terse but complimentary remark about her appearance in that blue cambric morning dress, which she had received with as much innocent surprise as if she had not planned for it. He had also said that he pitied that poor fellow next door whose wife was homely enough to take away his appetite.

Mr. Thatcher’s attitude towards his wife was the subject both of good-natured comment and raillery among her neighbours. His least action towards her was charged, though unobtrusively, with that subtle and intimate attention which one only expects from a lover. He even had a way of helping her up and down the steps that was “different” to the married eye. Patently unintellectual as Mildred Thatcher was, she yet indisputably retained her charm for the man who was intellectual. She had, in fact, that sweet will to be beloved which instinctively foreruns occasion, and makes a place for it in all the little daily matters of life.

“I wonder what he meant! I feel exactly as if somebody would come out from town to-day—it’s such a lovely morning.” She spoke half aloud as she looked down the street through the green feathery foliage of the elms, just out in their spring dress. The sun shone caressingly through them upon the crocuses peeping out in the front grass-plot, and the air, delicately cool, was charged with perfume. There were all the usual adjuncts of spring in the suburbs. A department store wagon was already delivering parcels at a house further down, and several women, fresh and neatly gloved, were alertly stepping trainward to get an early start for the day’s shopping, impelled thither by that soft breeze which woos womankind to the pursuit of clothes. All down the block the palms and rubber plants were being sunned on piazza steps, the former, for the most part, conspicuously brown and withered, but the latter still chunkily green after a winter of furnace heat and dust and gas.

To feel the spring air and not want to spend money was impossible even to Mildred Thatcher, but even if she could have purchased the rug so badly needed for the little drawing-room she would not leave home to-day. She was sure some one would be out from town. She turned now to the maid and gave her orders for luncheon.

“You can make the cold meat into croquettes, Kitty, and we’ll have pop-overs. And I’d like you to wash out the violet centerpiece.”

“Very well, ma’am.”

The hint of a pending pleasure had set its seal on the day. It might be Madge Stanfield who would come, or the Laviers, or her Cousin Lou. She set things to rights, and dusted and arranged daintily, and put fresh violets in the glass vases, and by and by, late in the morning, when all was done, went out on the piazza to listen for the train, while deciding whether or no to send her dwindling palms to the florist. She scrutinized the rubber plant anxiously for some sign of growth. The rubber plant was, in a way, a proof of the demoralizing extremes of Mildred’s nature. For a season she had railed intemperately at rubber plants and their possessors, and then, after moving from a flat to the suburbs, had incontinently gone forth one morning on the spur of the moment and bought one. It somehow didn’t seem as if they were really householders without that green and visible emblem of a much-enduring domesticity. Mrs. Thatcher cherished an idea that her rubber plant would grow with tropical luxuriance, but as yet it had only remained stolidly green.

“Good-morning!”

It was a neighbour, who, deflecting from the pavement, came up, with a paper bag in one hand, to lean familiarly against the post at the foot of the low steps.

“Your plants need water,” she continued, casting an officially critical eye upon them.

“They were watered this morning,” said Mrs. Thatcher.

“It should be done at the same time every day,” said the neighbour, obliviously. “Dear me, it’s getting warm, isn’t it? You look fresh and cool enough. I had to go to the village at the last moment for rolls for lunch. I’m dreadfully tired. Spring weather does make your feet hurt so, doesn’t it? Well—good-bye!”

Mrs. Thatcher still stood looking down the street—a train had come in while they were talking. Yes, there was some one coming—a lady in brown—it must be Madge. No, it was only Mrs. Brereton.

“Back from the city already?” she called, as the figure approached.

“Yes. I only went in to match a sample. Dear me! how warm it is! This weather makes your feet hurt dreadfully. I wanted to stay in town and do something about furnishing the new house, but it takes so long to look at rugs, and I’ve a dressmaker waiting for me at home this moment.” She stopped an instant, leaning against the post, as the other had done. “How dry your plants look! they need water! Mercy! is that Meyer’s wagon stopping before my house? Well, good-bye!”

“Good-bye,” said Mrs. Thatcher, coolly. Not only was Meyer’s wagon standing before Mrs. Brereton’s, but several other wagons from department stores were stopping further up the street, sending forth boys laden up to the chin with fat, brown parcels and long, narrow, brown parcels. Mrs. Thatcher turned around to see yet another friend, who, without her hat, had come out of the house adjoining, and now dropped down beside her on the steps.

“Isn’t it heavenly! I saw you out here and couldn’t resist coming over for a minute. I’ve been sewing so hard on the children’s spring clothes, I’ve hardly had a glimpse of you for a week.—Your plants need water, don’t they?”

“No, they don’t,” said Mrs. Thatcher, with unspeakable exasperation. She controlled herself with an effort as she rose. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go in the house. I’m rather expecting company.”

“The express wagon seems to be coming here,” said the friend detainingly.

“Why, so it is!” cried Mrs. Thatcher, her irritation subsiding before this new interest. The unexpected advent of the express wagon always suggested pleasing and mysterious possibilities to her, until recollection brought to mind the usual case of mineral water, or the box from the tailor’s with her husband’s discarded clothing. This time, however, it was a box of another kind, oblong and wooden. The man who deposited it in the little square hall evidently found it heavy. This, then, was what Nevin had meant.

What could it be? Mrs. Thatcher stubbed her finger with the screw-driver, and hit her own nail lustily with the hammer, in her efforts to open the box. When she finally succeeded, and caught sight of the contents, she pushed it from her with a sharp exclamation of disgust.

Inside were two rows of large, morocco-bound volumes. The gilt lettering on the back showed that they were “Selections from the Literature of All Nations, with Lives of the Authors.”

“Of all things!” said Mrs. Thatcher in a tone of deep disappointment. “What on earth does he want to keep on getting these subscription things for? And he knows we need the money for the rug. He’ll never read these—he’ll never even look at them. I cannot understand it! He never sees a book without wanting to buy it—he says he just likes to have books. Well, he’ll have to find a place to put these, for I can’t.”

“Shall I take the books out of the box, ma’am?” asked Kitty, coming into the hall.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” replied Mrs. Thatcher wearily. “Yes, I suppose you’ll have to; we can’t leave the box here.” She looked over at the tiny drawing-room, with its little spindle-legged mahogany tea-table, the low well-filled bookcase, the rattan sofa with its bright pillows, and the small upright piano, and then at the solid pile of information at her feet. There were thirty volumes—for she had counted them—thirty volumes pressed down and running over with the Literature of All Nations.

“I suppose you’ll have to pile them up in the corner over there. I’m sure I don’t know what to do with them.”

“And shall I put the lunch on now, ma’am?”

“Is it time? Oh, yes; Bobby is coming in. Yes, put it on.”

Croquettes and pop-overs and the violet centerpiece for this arrival by express, indeed! She felt unaccountably defrauded—a sensation that lingered with her throughout the whole afternoon, and tinged her with melancholy, even when she responded to the playful overtures or the needs of Bobby, who kept continually running in from the back yard to have his ball mended, or a string tied to something. He struggled away from her when she wanted to kiss him, and he smelled indescribably of earth. He was of the sex which grew up to have strange ways and alien tastes—he even had them now. Mrs. Thatcher had not wanted a boy, although she loved this one devotedly. She longed inexpressibly sometimes for a dear little gentle, clinging girl, who could be frivolously dressed in soft, white, ruffly things, and have her sweet hair curled.

Mildred Thatcher could never help a mysteriously hurt feeling when her Nevin spent his money for books, or indeed for anything apart from her, of his own volition; there were always so many things needed perennially by “the house,” not to speak of her own wardrobe. Her feminine mind was incapacitated by nature from seeing anything from a man’s point of view—it was from the sheer force of her love alone that she leapt the chasm between them. It was from the heart, not the mind, that she divined what she did of him, as the blind see through feeling finger-tips. And even when she could not perceive how he wanted his own way—nay, when she had protested against it with intensity—after she had once proved herself in the right, she was apt to be overtaken by a sweet, fiercely unreasoning desire that he should have everything he wanted, just because he wanted it, and because he would love her better if he did, and she would grovel, and cringe, and eat her words unblushingly, in her efforts to drive him back into his own path. If she used all her energy now to making him send that wealth of literature back where it came from, she would probably labour still harder the next day to make him get it again.

There was an aloofness in her greeting, when he came home a little earlier than usual, which he was unusually quick to detect. His eyes were agreeably expectant, with none of the deprecation in them which she had looked for. Mr. Thatcher himself was one of Mildred’s inconsistencies. She had sworn that she would never marry any but a very tall man, yet her Nevin, stalwart and broad-shouldered as he was, did not top the highest roll of her dark hair.

“What’s the matter?” His hand lingered on her shoulder. “Don’t you feel well?”

“Oh, yes—pretty well.”

“Did you get the package I sent by express?”

“Yes; what to do with all those volumes I do not know. It is so inconsiderate of you when——”

“Oh, I didn’t mean the books—and I stopped at the carpenter’s; he is going to make shelves for them. But I meant the other package.”

“There wasn’t any other package.”

“Yes, there was”—his arm was still half around her. “I sent you—why here’s the expressman now. Hi! This is the place; yes, bring it here.”

He came back again to his wife. “There was a little debt paid me yesterday. After I got the books, I thought I’d buy a present for you.” He pressed her shoulder gently.

“Oh!”

“Something you’ve been wanting a long time, something you’ll like. It’s the large rug for the parlour.”

“The rug—Nevin, you didn’t get a rug without me?”

“You’ll find it’s all right when you see it. Stand off a moment”—he was disposing of the knotted cords with sharp clicks of his penknife. “I’ll spread it out for you. There—what do you think of that?”

“What did you pay for it?” asked Mrs. Thatcher in an odd voice.

“Not much, considering what it’s worth,” said her husband, still exuberant. “It’s genuine something or other, I forget what. I got it at a bargain at a place down-town where they are selling off. It took my eye the moment I saw it. What’s the matter, Mildred? Don’t you like it?”

“Why, it’s very nice,” said Mrs. Thatcher, trying to keep rein on her feelings. “Only of course, those reds and yellows don’t go with anything that we have; it would look perfectly dreadful with the old rose wallpaper.”

“Why, I don’t see that it would.”

Mr. Thatcher was still lovingly regarding the article in question, stretched out in the hall. “They put all kinds of colours together nowadays. Here, let me set it out where it belongs, and see if you don’t think it looks all right.”

He switched a chair or two out of the way, moved back the tea-table, and stretched the rug down on the open space on the floor. He stood off admiringly. “Now, don’t you think that’s fine? Why don’t you speak?”

“Oh, Nevin, it’s too dreadful! Can’t you see? It’s a disgrace, a perfect disgrace. I wouldn’t have any one I cared for come into the house with that thing on the floor; I don’t know what they’d think of me.” Her voice had gone beyond control, and rose more and more hysterical.

“Oh, how could you be mean enough to go and buy a rug without me—something I’d set my heart on. A rug, of all things, that you have to live with always! And I had been looking forward so to choosing it with you! Why didn’t you tell me about it? It’s so terrible, it’s so common——”

“‘Common!’ Now you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Mr. Thatcher’s confidence in the pleasing powers of his purchase died hard. “It’s genuine—I forget just what, but it is genuine. I thought you’d know.”

“I do know—it’s one of the cheapest kinds there are. Nevin, I can’t have it in here, you must understand that. Why, I couldn’t eat my meals if I had to look in and see it. Can’t you take it back and change it?”

“Change it!”

Mildred had known, even as she spoke, that the suggestion was unforgivable. She could go to town merrily, day after day, exchanging goods, but her husband would have felt like a sneak thief if he had taken anything back to “change it.”

“No, I can not!” His anger was at last aroused, and thoroughly. “If you don’t like the thing you can chuck it out into the street, for all I care. I tried to give you a pleasure, and this is what I get for it. I’ll never buy you another thing as long as I live!”

It was on the tip of Mrs. Thatcher’s tongue to say, “I hope you won’t,” but this time something restrained her. There were but few times that she had seen her husband as angry as this, and never at her, though there might have been more provocative occasions. He had bought many things before which she had not liked, without any real friction between husband and wife—it was one of “his” ways which they had often laughed over. But each day’s path is different from that of yesterday—what has been a convenient stone to rest on before becomes unexpectedly a stumbling-block in the way. Mr. Thatcher’s wrath, indeed, gathered its greatest force from the underlying knowledge that he might have done differently.

The subject was dropped at dinner, but Mrs. Thatcher could not forbear beginning on it again afterwards. Nevin must see how dreadful it was to have that rug, if it was properly put to him. But he stopped her after the first tearful expostulations.

“Never say ‘rug’ to me again,” he commanded briefly. “You’ve said too much already.” He read a magazine all the evening, and after a while she went up-stairs and lay down on the edge of Bobby’s little bed, beside her sleeping child, and wept.

It was unbelievable, unbearable, that he could buy that horrible thing without her! And there was no other place in the tiny house to put it. When she looked at it in the morning it was worse even than she had dreamed—it put her teeth on edge. The home didn’t seem like hers! She averted her face from it patiently at breakfast, and her mouth drooped pathetically, but Nevin only read his paper and kissed her unseeingly when he left. When he was gone, she and Kitty rolled the rug up into a corner. If any one came they could think she was cleaning house.

And on the morrow, and the morrow after, the rug, like a malevolent force, still separated them. She would have given it away if she could have afforded to have done so. As time went on there was a certain change in her own way of regarding it. Still she had that choked sensation when she thought of his going and buying it without her, but she did not think of it as often. She began to discern that she had lost something inconceivably more precious than the sublimated rug of her fancy. It was not only that Nevin had no longer any desire to buy her anything, but there was a subtle reservation of spirit. In that fit of unreasoning passion she had lost some attraction for him, some of that aureole of romance which is at once the most intangible and the dearest possession of the married, for which a woman may indeed keep her most shining thought, her sweetest care. What was any rug compared with her husband’s sentiment for her? Yet it was not a mere rug to her, but one of the symbols of a home. Did she love him ten times more, the sight of that cheap and glaring inconsistency would bring the vexed tears to her eyes. She knew her limitations by instinct—it was no use to try and laugh at being parted by a colour scheme—never could she be heroically strong enough to move and have her being as if the rug were not there.

For nine days Mildred Thatcher lived as her neighbours, a life as thick and solid, as uninformed with the spirit as the rubber plant which stood neglected in the drawing-room by the pile of books—as yet unshelved—and the dusty upright piano. The palms had gone to the florist’s, and she had no heart to take the rubber plant in and out each day. She did not care whether the thing died or not. She did not care for anything. Every night when Nevin came home, she greeted him as calmly and affectionately as he greeted her, and waited, tingling, for developments which never came. The rug, which dominated her every waking moment, had, indeed, been almost forgotten by him—pressed out of sight, as is a man’s wont with disagreeable domestic happenings, only the unpleasant impression remaining. He read or went to sleep on the sofa, and they both spent some evenings out. After a week had passed, and while Mildred was waiting for the change in her husband’s manner, it suddenly came over her with a strange shock that he was not only losing his delicate perception of her, but that he was growing content without it. It is so easy to lapse to the lower level! They were getting into the rut that only grows the deeper with travel.

Then there came a day when Mrs. Thatcher could stand it no longer. She had a consultation with Mrs. Brereton, and the next morning the latter came over and the two talked further with great animation over the rug in the little drawing-room. After that Mrs. Thatcher dressed herself with unusual care. She put on her new dark blue suit and a hat that her husband always admired, although it was not quite in the fashion. She looked at herself again and again in the glass before she started for the train, giving a touch here and a touch there with nervous fingers. She could not wait for her husband to come home, even if she had been less painfully aware of her new powerlessness in the conventional surroundings. She must venture into new scenes if she would gain what she wanted. And she could not stand this a minute longer—she must end it all now.

Yet, her heart was beating painfully as she neared the city, and she was only somewhat reassured by the glimpse in the ferry-boat mirror of a tall, slender-throated woman with soft, pale cheeks and a curved mouth, her dark eyes gazing indifferently before her under a hat whose cherry wreath drooped against her dark hair, and who turned out to be herself. If she really looked like that——

Her hand lingered on the knob of the ground-glass door that led to the office of her husband’s factory. Then she opened it.

“Nevin!”

Her husband, broad and square-shouldered, was standing over another man’s desk, beyond, talking. There were lines of care on his forehead, and a pencil behind his ear—he was the man of business, not her husband.

He looked up amazed as he saw his wife, but came forward at once.

“Why, Mildred!”

“Oh, Nevin, I hope you don’t mind! I’ve been feeling so dreadfully, I couldn’t stand it a moment longer. I’ve something—something to tell you.”

She began to shake a little, her lip trembled, her eyes looked appealingly at him like a child’s. Her husband had always known as a matter of course that she was beautiful, but her beauty came now like a surprise in the dingy surroundings of the factory office, with the whirr of the planing machines beyond. His eyes met the appeal in hers with a smile that set her pulse beating anew, as he said:

“What is it? Hadn’t you better sit down?”

“No, no! Not yet. Maybe you won’t want me to—— Oh, Nevin, I’ve been trying to tell you every night lately how sorry I was—I’d acted so—about the rug—and I couldn’t! You wouldn’t give me a chance.”

The well-known stiffness came over him—a shadow of the past shade.

“That’s of no consequence—don’t let’s talk about it.”

“Yes, please—I must! Oh, Nevin, I hope you won’t mind. I knew I couldn’t be decent while the rug was there. I’m so frightfully narrow-minded—things make me horrid even when I don’t want to be. I’ve—I’ve sold it.”

“Sold it?”

“Yes. Mrs. Brereton bought it for her brother-in-law’s room. She didn’t pay quite as much as you did—you left the price mark on—but she said you were cheated.”

“I don’t care what you do with it. I thought it was a pretty good sort, myself.”

“It was a lovely rug,” said Mrs. Thatcher earnestly, “only it wasn’t in the right place. It was just what Mrs. Brereton wanted—for her brother-in-law. But it seemed so mean of me to sell it—when it was your present—and I’ve been so unhappy lately—Nevin—you can’t think!”

Her eyes brimmed as she gazed at him; the red cherries in her hat shook against the dark hair that framed her soft, pale cheeks.

“Sit down,” said Mr. Thatcher briefly, pushing a wooden armed office chair towards her. He went away momentarily, and then came back. “Have you had your lunch?”

“No,” replied Mrs. Thatcher faintly.

“Well, neither have I. I think you’d be better for something to eat. You wait five minutes and I’ll be ready to go out with you. We’ll have a little lunch together.”

She raised her drooping head to give him the wistfully pleased, half-encouraged look of one dependent on a benign higher power. Her heart was swelling with the joy of triumph.

When he returned to her with his overcoat, he had been brushed clear of the factory dust and looked trim and smiling, hat in hand.

“It’s nearly two o’clock. I think I won’t come back here this afternoon; I’ve got through about all there is to do. It’s a dull day. I’m going to take you around to the Electrographic Club to lunch; they’ve got a new room for ladies. You’d like to see the pictures there. Come on—this way.”

“Oh, how lovely!” said Mrs. Thatcher, with a deep, contented sigh. “How good you are, Nevin! Do I look all right?”

“Oh, you’ll do,” said her husband, with an affectionate squeeze of the arm next him. “See here! You mustn’t look at me in the street that way; people will think we’re engaged.”

“Well, why not?” murmured Mrs. Thatcher. “I don’t care what anybody thinks—Darling!”

“Yes, my husband selected it,” said Mildred. The next door neighbour was standing in Mrs. Thatcher’s little drawing-room with her, and they were both looking down at a dark velvety rug with an Oriental blend of colours in it. “It was a present to me, but he wouldn’t think of getting it alone—though he has such excellent taste. We made quite a little event of buying it yesterday.”

“It is beautiful,” said the neighbour, with a regretful sigh. “How dry that rubber plant looks; it needs water. Why don’t you have it outdoors?”

“Oh, I have it out all the time,” asseverated Mrs. Thatcher hastily. “At least, nearly all the time. Lately I’ve forgotten to see about it. I’ve been so—so busy. Why, I do believe there’s a new green leaf coming out at the top!”

“Rubber plants can stand a great deal,” said the neighbour philosophically, following Mrs. Thatcher, who was lugging the heavy pot out into the wooing breeze of the late afternoon. She was so touchingly happy that she felt as if she could have lifted mountains.

She stood and looked down the elm-shaded street, through which the footsteps of her beloved would soon be hastening to her. The department store wagons were still rattling up and down, delivering relays and relays of parcels at the different houses, and here and there weary, draggled-looking women were returning from town, each carrying by one end the large paper bag which contains an untrimmed hat. You could tell by the way they walked that their feet hurt. Down the block the freshening palms and rubber plants were grouped at intervals. On Mrs. Thatcher’s piazza, the emblem of a much-enduring domesticity once more stood in the sunshine, stolid and green.

The Terminal

The Terminal

It was Saturday night—the married “drummer’s” homesick night. Mr. Martin Prescott, walking into the long, narrow hotel bedroom, felt more than ever the wearing familiarity of the scene that met his eye. There were the same dull carpet, the Michigan pine furniture, the drab striped wallpaper, the windows shaded only by little slatted inside shutters, to which he was used in third-rate towns. There was even the same indefinable chill, dusty smell that was associated with evenings of figuring over sales on the coverless table, under the weak, single-armed gas burner that jutted out from the wall at the side of the bureau. Yet, cheerless as it was, he preferred its seclusion just now to the more convivial bar-room, where the liquor and the jokes and the conversation of “the boys” had all the same jading flavour, and he felt unequal to bracing his spirit sufficiently to receiving the Saturday confidences of the garrulous or the weary. Reticent both by habit and principle as to his intimate affairs, he was no stranger to his kind, and in the top strata of his mind were embedded many curious evidences of other men’s lives.

But to-night he had a matter on his mind that companied him whether he would or no, and he was sore at having to stay over in this little town, from which there was egress once only in twenty-four hours. He had waited for a customer who did not arrive in the place until too late for him to get out of it, and had hereby missed the letter from his wife which was waiting for him some hundred miles further westward. Prescott did not, in a way, dislike travelling as a business; his wife always comforted herself with the thought that there were other modes of earning a living more inherently disagreeable to him, yet there were days and nights of a paucity which he was glad she could not picture. Saturday night away from home in this kind of a town, without a letter—when the last one had been disquieting—reached the limit of endurance. He felt that he had travelled long enough.

He made his preparations for the evening with the wontedness of custom. He locked the door, turned up the gas, and worked over the screw in the lukewarm radiator. Then he drew the cane-bottomed rocking-chair underneath the gas burner, and placed a couple of magazines on the bureau beside him, his lean, bearded face reflected in the shadowy mirror above it. He opened his valise and took from it a folding leather photograph case containing the picture of a woman and three children. Prescott gazed at it hard for a few moments before standing it up beside the magazines. He was trying to find an answer to the question he was debating: if he could manage in some way to supplement by three hundred dollars more the income of a new position offered him, he might be able to accept it and stay at home for ever.

He lit his pipe and, putting his heavily booted feet on a chair, began to cut the leaves of a magazine with his pocket-knife. He had meant to get his slippers out of the bag and make himself comfortable, but somehow, after looking at the photographs, he had forgotten about himself. He had written his daily letter to his wife before the last-going train, and he would not begin a fresh sheet now—no matter what he wrote, she would divine his mood. You have to be very careful what you write in a letter that is read some days after, lest you cloud the sunshine for another when it has brightened again for you.

“What is it?”

He sprang up as a knock came to the door, after first hastily sweeping the photograph case into the valise. He hoped devoutly that it was not a visitor; there was no one in this town whose presence would not be an intrusion to-night. But he gave a glad start of surprise as his eyes fell on the man standing with the bell-boy in the hall.

“Brenner! Well, this is good! I never dreamed of seeing you here.”

“I don’t wonder,” said the stranger, a pleasant, fresh-faced, broad-shouldered young fellow, with a light mustache. “It’s ages since I set eyes on you; I changed my route, and then, two years ago, I married. We only moved here last spring. Jim Halliday told me this afternoon that you were in town. What a soak he is! But don’t let’s waste time here; I want you to come right around and spend the evening at our house; I want you to meet my wife.”

“I’ll be delighted,” said Prescott with alacrity. He locked the bedroom door and the two walked out together, conversing briskly as they went. He and the younger Brenner had been chance companions on several notable trips in former years, drawn together in spite of dissimilarities in taste and education by a certain clear and simple cleanness of mind which unerringly divines its kin. The air had seemed raw and chill earlier, but good fellowship had put its warmth into the winter world with Brenner’s presence.

“So you’re married,” said Prescott presently. “I remember that I heard of it. I’ve wondered at not meeting you anywhere; I didn’t know you’d given up the road.”

“Well, yes, I’ve quit,” said Brenner. “My wife didn’t like me to be away so much, used to get scared nights, and there’s a sight of things to see to when you have a house—the coal, you know, and the plumbing getting out of order, and then after the boy came—oh, yes, I’ve quit it all right. Seems sort of tied down in a way after you’ve been your own boss, but I’m not sorry—I’m pretty well fixed, I guess. Travelling’s all very well for a single man, but it gets to be an awful pull after you’re married. You miss a lot.”

“I’ve been travelling for sixteen years,” said Prescott soberly; “two years before I married—at twenty-four—and fourteen since.”

“That so? It’s a pretty long time.”

“Yes, it is. I’ve been wanting to give it up.” He hesitated, and then continued with rare expansiveness: “The fact is, there’s a position open for me at home now, but I can’t quite see my way clear to taking it. The salary’s nominally all right, but there’s my living to be taken into account, and other things. I figure out that it would mean about three hundred dollars a year less than we have now—and I don’t see how we could live on that. You see, the trouble is it’s away out of the line I’m in now—yet there may be a future in it.”

He went into explanatory detail, led on by Brenner’s questioning interest.

“Couldn’t you make it up in any way by outside commissions?”

Prescott nodded. “Ah, that’s what I’m trying to get at. You’re a wise man to have made the break early, Brenner. Every year I’ve meant to.” Prescott spoke with a bitter patience. “I’ve never thought of my being on the road as anything but temporary, and here I’m at it still. The longer you wait, the harder it gets to change; you don’t know how to take the risk. I haven’t told my wife yet about this offer, for I don’t want to disappoint her. I hoped to have had a letter from her to-night—the last one was rather disquieting—but I’m behind my schedule.”

“Well, I know what that is,” said Brenner heartily. “I had a letter from Mame once after we were first married—she’d cried all over the paper in big blots; she thought she’d die before morning. Well, my train was snowed up in a South Dakota blizzard and I never got another letter for a week. Holy smoke! I never want to go through that kind of a racket again. Then, when I did hear, I found she’d been to a party the next evening as chipper as you please—belle of the ball. I tell you there’s too much seesaw about that sort of thing for a limited nature like mine; but I suppose I’d have got used to teetering on it same as the rest of you, only she made up her mind I was to quit—and quit I did. Mame runs me! I guess she’ll try and run you too; she tries to run most any one that comes to hand. This is my shebang.”

He stopped before a small cottage whose slender piazza was ornamentally fenced in with heavy wooden scroll work, and, opening the front door, ushered the guest into the narrow hall. “Hello, Mame! Here’s Prescott. Prescott—he’s one of ‘the boys,’ you know.”

“We’re so glad to have you here,” said Mrs. Brenner, a stout young woman in a light blue flannel shirt-waist; she had prettily untidy hair, large gentle brown eyes, and small, very soft hands. She brushed the light strands of hair out of the way with a pretty gesture of one hand, while she extended the other to Prescott. He felt an instant sensation of comfort, increased when he found himself finally settled in an armchair in a room that reflected the mistress of it in a sort of warm, attractive disorderliness. A work-basket, with the sewing half out of it, occupied a footstool; the table, lighted by a lamp with a pictorial shade, was piled high with magazines and papers; a banjo sprawled on the sofa amid the tumbled pillows, and a child’s pink worsted sock and a china cat lay in front of the bright little kerosene stove in the middle of the floor.

Mrs. Brenner followed his gaze towards the infant’s belongings and blushed as she laughed.

“Harve won’t let me pick them up! Isn’t it silly of him?”

“I believe she puts them there herself, because she thinks I like it,” said Brenner serenely. “Oh, she’s up to tricks! She sent me for you to-night. Do you remember the evening I spent at your house five years ago? The night I had the cold, and your wife put the mustard plaster on me?”

“Why so she did,” said Prescott delightedly. “I’d forgotten you’d seen my wife and the children. Let me see—there were only two of them—Margaret’s four years old.”

“It was the hottest mustard plaster I ever felt,” said Brenner reminiscently. “I went to sleep with it on. When I woke up—I guess I was sort of dazed—I thought the house was on fire, and started to run down-stairs, but Mrs. Prescott caught on in some way, and sent you to head me off. Hottest mustard plaster I ever felt. Well, your wife was mighty good to me. Not so very rugged-looking though herself, as I remember.”

“Oh, she’s very strong,” said Prescott, with defensive hauteur; “very. She’s never ill.” He turned the conversation towards the Brenner ménage. “And how old is your child?”

But he found himself, later, confiding in Mrs. Brenner, after the cozy little supper in the rag-carpeted dining-room, where she had set out hot mince pie and cheese and cookies, and Brenner had made the coffee. Prescott, who owned the impaired digestion of the travelling man, had long passed the stage of taking whiskey to supplement all deficiencies, arriving at the final attitude of the invariable soft boiled eggs for breakfast and rare roast beef for dinner, but to-night he had recklessly refused to take sickly thought for the morrow. Mame’s pie was good.