Myron was on his feet. He looked portentously large and masterful.
"You better not think o' packin' the chiny," he said, in his ordinary tone of generalship."We can set it into baskets with a mite o' hay, and it'll get as fur as that without any breakages."
His wife slipped out of her chair, and went round the table to him. She laid a hand on his arm. Myron wanted, in the irritation of the moment, to shake it off, but he was a man of dignity, and forbore. His wife was speaking in a very gentle tone, but somehow different from the one he was used to noting.
"Myron, ain't you goin' to hear me?"
"I ain't goin' to listen to any tomfoolery, and I ain't goin' to have anybody dictatin' to me about my own business."
"It ain't your business, Myron, any more'n 'tis mine. Hermie's much my son as he is your'n, and what you bought that place with is as much mine as 'tis your'n. I helped you earn it. Myron, it's comin' up in me. I can feel it."
"What is?"
In spite of all his old dull certainties, he felt the shock of wonder. He looked at her, her scarlet cheeks and widening eyes. Even her pretty hair seemed to have acquired a nervous life, and stood out in a quivering aureole. Myron was much bound to his Caddie in his way of being attached to his own life and breath. A change in her was horrible to him, like the disturbance of illness in an ordered house.
"What is it?" he inquired again. "What is it you feel?"
"It's that," she said, with an added vehemence. "It's my double personality."
Myron Dill could have wept from the surprise of it all, the assault upon his wondering nerves.
"You spread up the bed in the bedroom, Caddie," he bade her, "and go lay down a spell."
"No," said his wife, "I sha'n't lay down, and I sha'n't give up to you. It's riz up in me, the one that's goin' to beat, no matter what comes of it, same as old Abner Kinsman stood up ag'inst the British. Mebbe it'll die fightin', same's he did, and I never'll hear no more from it,—and a good riddance. But Myron, it's goin' to beat."
Her husband was frowning, not harshly now, but from the extremity of his distress. He spoke in a tone of well-considered adjuration.
"Caddie, you know what you're doin' of? You're settin' up your will in place o' mine."
"Oh, no, I ain't, Myron," she responded eagerly, with an earnest motion toward him, as if she besought him to put faith in her. "It ain't me that's doin' it."
"It ain't you? Who is it, then?"
"Why, it's my double personality. Ain't I just told you so?"
Myron stood gazing at her in the futility ofcomprehension he had felt years ago, when Caddie, who had been "a great reader," as the neighbors said, before the avalanche of household cares had overwhelmed her, propounded to him, while he was drawing off his boots for an hour of twilight somnolence before going to bed, problems that, he knew, no man could answer. Neither were they to be illumined by Holy Writ, for he had offered that loophole of exit, and Caddie had shaken her head at him disconsolately, and implied that the prophets would not do. But when she had seemed to forget that interrogative attitude toward life, he had settled down to unquestioning content in knowing he had the best housekeeper in the neighborhood. Now here it was again, the spectre of her queerness rising to distress him.
She looked at him with wide, affrighted eyes.
"You set here with me a spell," she adjured him. "I'll lay down on the sofy, and you take the big rocker. If you see it comin' up in me, you kinder say somethin', and mebbe it'll go away."
Myron, though in extreme unwillingness, did as he was bidden. He wanted to bundle the whole troop of her imaginings out of doors, and plod off, like a sane man, to his fencing; but somehow her earnestness itself forbade. Whenthey were established, she on the sofa, with her bright eyes piercing him, and he seated at an angle where a nurse might easiest wait upon a patient's needs, the absurdity of it all swept over him. The clock was ticking irritatingly behind him. He looked at his watch, and took assurance from the vision of the flying day.
"Now, Caddie," said he, in that specious soothing we accord to children, "you lay right still, and I'll go out a spell and do a few chores, and then mebbe I'll come in and see how you be."
Caddie put out a hand, and fastened it upon his in an inexorable clasp.
"No, Myron," said she, "you ain't goin'. If I should be left here to myself, and it come up in me, I dunno what I might do."
Myron felt himself yielding again, and clutched at confidence as the spent swimmer reaches for a plank.
"What do you think you'd do, Caddie?" he demanded. "That's what I want to know."
"I can't tell, Myron," she returned solemnly. "True as I'm a livin' woman, I can't tell you. Mebbe I'd go over to the Turnbull house and set it a-fire, so 't I shouldn't ever live in it. Mebbe I'd take my bank-book, and go up to the Street, and draw out that money aunt Susan left me, and give it to Hermie, so 's hecould run away, and take Annie with him. If that other one come up in me, I dunno what I'd do."
Myron gazed at her, aghast.
"Why, Caddie," said he, "you can't go round settin' houses a-fire. That's arson."
"Is it?" she inquired. "Well, I dunno what it's called, but if that other one gets the better o' me, mebbe that's what I shall do."
Myron held her hand now with an involuntary fervor of his own, not so much because she bade him, but with the purpose of restraining her. An hour passed, and her blue eyes were fixed upon him with the same imploring force. He fidgeted, and at last longed childishly to see them wink.
"Don't you want to see the doctor?" he ventured.
"No," said Caddie, in the same tone of wild asseveration. "Doctors won't do me a mite o' good. Besides, doctors know all about it, and they'd see what was to pay, and they'd send me off to some kind of a hospital, and there'd be a pretty bill o' costs."
"I don't believe a word of it," Myron ventured, with a grasp at mental liberty. He essayed, at the same time, to draw away his hand, but Caddie seemed to fix him with a sharper eye-gleam, and he forbore.
"There's Hermie," she said. "I hear him in the shed, rattlin' round amongst the tools. You call him in here, and when he's here, you tell him he's goin' to have the Turnbull place, and have it now. Myron, you tell him."
Myron made a slight involuntary movement in his chair, as if he were about to rise and carry out her mandate; but he settled back again, and Herman, having selected the tool he wanted, went off through the shed and, as they both knew, down the garden-path.
The forenoon went on in a strange silence, save for the sound of the birds, and an occasional voice of neighbors calling to Herman as they passed. Myron had still that sickening sense of illness in the house. The breakfast dishes were, he knew, untouched upon the table. The cat came in, looked incidentally at the sofa as if she were accustomed to occupy it at that particular hour, and walked out again. Myron drew forth his watch, and looked at it with a stealthiness he could not explain.
"Why," said he, with a simulated wonder, "it's nigh half after eleven. Hadn't you better see about gettin' dinner?"
"I ain't a-goin' to get any dinner," his wife responded. "I don't know as I shall ever get dinners any more. Myron, it's comin' up in me. I feel it." She dropped his hand and roseto a sitting posture, and for a moment, yielding to the physical relief of the broken clasp, he leaned back in his chair and drew a hearty breath.
"Myron," said his wife. There was something mandatory in her voice, and he came upright again. "Now I'm goin' to do it. I don't know what 'tis, but it's got the better o' me and I'm goin' to do what it says. But 'fore I give way to it, I'm goin' to tell you this. You've got as good a home and as good a son and as good a wife, if I do say it, as any man in the State o' New Hampshire. And you can keep 'em, Myron, jest as they be, jest as good as they always have been, if you'll only hear to reason and give other folks a chance. You've got to give me a chance, and you've got to give Herman a chance. I guess mebbe I'd sell all my chances for the sake of turnin' 'em in with Hermie's. But you've got to do it, and you've got to do it now. And if you don't, somethin' 's goin' to happen. I don't know what it is. I don't know no more'n the dead, for this is the first time I ever really knew I had that terrible creatur' inside of me that's goin' to beat. But I do know it, and you've got to stand from under."
She turned about and walked to the side window, looking on the garden. She was a slight woman, but Myron, watching her in the fascinationof his dread, had momentary remembrance of her father, who had been a man of majestic presence and unflinching will.
"Herman," his wife was calling from the window. "Herman, you come here."
That new mysterious note in her voice evidently affected the young man also. He came, hurrying, and when he had entered stayed upon the threshold, warm-hued with work and bringing with him the odor of the soil. His brown eyes went from one of them to the other, and questioned them.
"What is it?" he inquired. "What's happened?"
Myron got upon his feet. He had a dazed feeling that the two were against him, and he could face them better so. He hated the situation, the abasement that came from a secret self within him which was almost terribly moved by some of the things his wife had spoken out of her long silence. He was a proud man, and it seemed to him dreadful that he should in any way have won such harsh appeal.
"Herman," his wife was beginning, "your father's got somethin' to say to you."
Herman waited, but his father could not speak. Myron was really seeing, as in a homely vision, the peace of the garden where he might at this moment have been expecting the call todinner if he had not been summoned to the bar of judgment.
"I guess he's goin' to let me say it," his wife continued. "Father's goin' to give you a deed o' the Turnbull place. It's goin' to be yours, same as if you'd bought it, and you and Annie are goin' to live there all your days, same 's we're goin' to live here."
Herman turned impetuously upon his father. There was a great rush of life to his face, and his father saw it and understood, in the amazement of it, things he had never stopped to consider about the boy who had miraculously grown to be a man. But Herman was finding something in his father's jaded mien. It stopped him on the tide of happiness, and he spoke impetuously.
"She's dragged it out o' you! Mother's been tellin' you! I don't want it that way, father, not unless it's your own free will. I won't have it no other way."
It was a man's word to a man. Myron straightened himself to his former bearing. In a flash of memory he remembered the day when his father, an old-fashioned man, had given him his freedom suit and shaken hands with him and wished him well. Involuntarily he put out his hand.
"It's my own will, Hermie," he said, in a tonethey had not heard from him since the day, eighteen years behind them, when the boy Hermie was rescued from the "old swimmin'-hole." "We'll have the deeds drawed up to-morrer."
They stood an instant, hands gripped, regarding each other in the allegiance not of blood alone. The clasp broke, and they remembered the woman and turned to her. There she stood, trembling a little, but apparently removed from all affairs too large for her. She had taken a cover from the stove, and was obviously reflecting on the next step in her domestic progress.
"I guess you better bring me in a handful o' that fine kindlin', Hermie," she remarked, in her wonted tone of brisk suggestion, "so 's 't I can brash up the fire. I sha'n't have dinner on the stroke—not 'fore half-past one."
"Yougoin'?" called Isabel Wilde from the road, to Ardelia, sitting forlornly on the front steps.
It was seven o'clock of a wonderful August morning, with all the bloom of summer and the lull of fall. Isabel was a dark, strong young creature who walked with her head in the air, and Ardelia, pretty and frail and perfect in her own small way, looked like a child in comparison. Isabel had been down to carry a frosted cake to her little niece Ellen, for Ellen's share of the picnic at Poole's Woods. It was Fairfax day, when once a year all Fairfax went to the spot where the first settlers drank of the "b'ilin' spring" on their way to a clearing.
"You goin'?" she called again, imperiously, and Ardelia answered, as if from some unwillingness:—
"I guess so."
"Now what do you want to say that for?" rang her mother's voice from an upper window, where, trusting to her distance from the road, she thought she could speak her mind withoutIsabel's hearing. "You know you ain't. Oliver's gone off to work in the acre lot."
Isabel had heard. She stood regarding Ardelia thoughtfully, her black brows drawn together and her teeth set upon one full lip.
"Ardelia," she called softly, after that moment of consideration.
"What is it?" came Ardelia's unwilling voice, the tone of one who has emotion to conceal.
"Come here a minute."
Ardelia rose slowly and came down the path. She was a wisp of a creature, perfectly fashioned and very appealing in her blond prettiness. Isabel eyed her sharply and judged from certain signs that she had at least meant to go. She had on her light-blue dimity with the Hamburg frills, and her sorrowful face indicated that she had donned it to no avail.
"What time you goin', 'Delia?" asked Isabel quietly, over the fence.
Ardelia could not look at her. She stood with bent head, busily arranging a spray of coreopsis that fell out over the path, and Isabel was sure her eyes were wet.
"I don't know," she said evasively; "maybe not very early."
Isabel was looking at her tenderly. It was not a personal tenderness so much as a softness born out of peculiar circumstance. She knewexactly why she was sorry for Ardelia in a way no one else could be. Yet there seemed to be no present means of helping her.
"Well," she said, turning away, "maybe I'll see you there. Say, 'Delia!" A sudden thought was brightening her eyes to even a kinder glow. "If you haven't planned any other way, s'pose you go with us. Jim Bryant's goin' to take me, and he'd admire to have you, too. What say, 'Delia?"
Ardelia's delicate figure straightened, and now she looked at Isabel. There was something new in her gentle glance. It looked like dignity.
"I'm much obliged to you, Isabel," she returned stiffly. "If I go, I've arranged to go another way."
"All right," said Isabel. "Well, I guess I'll be gettin' along."
But before she was half-way to the turning of the road she heard Mrs. Drake's shrill voice from the upper window:—
"He's begun to dig, 'Delia. Oliver's begun to dig. He won't stop for no picnics, I can tell ye that."
It seemed to Isabel as if the world were very much out of tune for delicate girls like 'Delia who wanted pleasure and could not have it. She paused a moment at the crossing of the roads, the frown of consideration again upon her brow."Makes me mad," she said to herself, but half absently, as if that were not the issue at all. Then she turned her back on her own home-road and the house where her starched dress was awaiting her, and where Jim Bryant would presently call to take her to Poole's Woods, and walked briskly down the other way.
Isabel stopped at the acre field, but she had no idea of what she meant to say when she was there. Oliver was digging potatoes, as she knew he would be, and she recognized the bend of the back, the steady stress of one who toiled too long and too unrestingly, so that his very pose spoke like a lifelong purpose. She stood still for a moment or two before he saw her, gazing at him. Old tenderness awoke in her, old angers also. She remembered how he had made her suffer in the obstinate course of his own will, and how free she had felt when at last she had broken their engagement and seen him drift under Ardelia's charm. But he would always mean something to her more than other men, in a fashion quite peculiar to himself. She had agonized too much over him. She had protected him too long against the faults of his own nature, and now she could not be content unless, for his sake, she protected Ardelia a little also. Suddenly he lifted himself to rest his back, and saw her. They stood confronting each other, eachwith a sense of familiarity and pain. Oliver was a handsome fellow, tall, splendidly made, with rich, warm coloring. He looked kindly, but stolidly set in his own way.
"That you, Isabel?" he asked awkwardly.
They had met only for a passing word since the breaking of their troth.
"Yes," said Isabel briefly. "I've got to speak to you. Wait a minute. I'll come in by the bars, and you meet me under the old cherry. It'll be shady there."
She turned back to the bars, ducked deftly under, and, holding her skirts from the rough land, made her way to the cherry in the corner of the lot. Oliver wonderingly followed. She felt again that particular anger she reserved for him, when she saw him stalking along, hoe in hand. It was a settled tread, with little spring in it, and for the moment it seemed to her a prophecy of what it would be when he was an old man, with a staff instead of the hoe. She was waiting for him under the tree.
"Oliver," she began, speaking out of an impulse hardly yet approved by judgment, "you goin' to the picnic?"
Oliver looked at her in wonder.
"Why, no," said he slowly.
"Didn't you promise 'Delia you'd go?"
"No, I guess not. I said mebbe I'd be roundif I had time, but I ain't found the time. These 'taters have got to be dug."
The red had surged into Isabel's full cheeks. She looked an eloquent remonstrance.
"Oliver," she said impetuously, "'Delia's sittin' on the front steps, waitin' for you to come. She'll be terrible disappointed if you put her aside like this."
Oliver took off his hat and passed a hand over his forehead. She noticed, as she had a hundred times, how fine his hair was at the roots, and was angry again because he would not, with his exasperating ways, let any woman love him as she might. He seemed to have nothing to say, but she knew the picture of lone 'Delia sitting on the steps was far from moving him. It did cause him an honest trouble, for he was kind; but not for that would he postpone his work.
"Oliver," she continued, "did you ever know what 'twas that made me tell you we must break off bein'—engaged?"
He was looking at her earnestly. His own mind seemed returning to a past ache and loss.
"I understood," he said at length—"I understood 'twas because you kinder figured it out we shouldn't get along well."
She stood there, a frowning figure, her lipscompressed, her eyes stormy. Then she turned to him, all frankness and candor.
"Oliver," she said, "I never give you any reasons. What's the use? I was terrible fond of you. I was. I don't know 's any girl ought to say that when you're engaged to somebody else, and I'm engaged myself, and happy as the day is long. But what 'twas—what come between us—you never made me have a good time."
He stood leaning upon his hoe, very handsome, very stern in his attention to her, and, as she could see, entirely surprised. The child in her, that rare, ingenuous part she kept in hiding, came out and spoke:—
"Why, Oliver, we never had any fun! You were awful good to me. You'd worry yourself to pieces if I was sick; but we never had more'n one or two good times together, long 's it lasted, and them I planned. And I got terrible tired of it, and I says to myself, 'If it's so now, when we're only goin' together, it'll be a million times worse when we're married.' And then when you took a fancy to 'Delia, I was real pleased. I says to myself. 'Maybe she'll know how to manage him. Maybe 'twas somethin' in me,' I says, 'that made him not want to have a good time with me, and maybe now 'twon't be so.' And when I see you goin' on the same old way, workin' from mornin' till night, I says to myself,'Something' 's got to be done. I ain't goin' to have 'Delia put upon like this.' 'Tain't because it's 'Delia. I ain't so terrible fond of 'Delia, only we went to school together. But don't you see, Oliver, I couldn't say it for myself? No girl could. But I can for 'Delia."
"Well," said Oliver, "well." He was entirely amazed. Then as he looked at the field, a general maxim occurred to him, and he remarked, "The farm's got to be carried on."
"No, it ain't, either," said Isabel, with a passionate earnestness, "not as you do it. Other folks don't work themselves to death the way you do, and you're forehanded too. It's because you like it. You like it better'n anything else. You were born so, and it's just as bad as bein' born with an appetite for drink or anything else."
"I never knew you felt so, Isabel," he said gravely. "I don't see why you didn't speak on 't before when—old times."
"I'd rather have died," she declared passionately. "Any girl would. 'Delia would. Maybe she'll cry all the afternoon if she finds she ain't goin'; but if you call over there Saturday night, butter won't melt in her mouth. She won't tell you how 'shamed she is before folks to think you didn't take the trouble to go with her. Anyways, she won't if she's any kind of a girl."
Oliver had plucked some wisps of grass fromthe edge of turf under the tree, and he was wiping his hoe thoughtfully. Isabel began to laugh. She was trembling all over from old angers and the excitement of her new daring, and she kept on laughing.
"One thing," she said, as she brushed away the tears with an impatient hand, "'Delia's mother's got her spy-glass on us this very minute. What under the sun she thinks I'm here for I don't know and I don't much care. You can tell her anything you're a mind to. Only you come. Come now, Oliver, you come!"
Oliver quite meekly hung up his hoe in the branches and waited for her to lead the way.
"I've got to ketch the colt," he said. "Mother took Dolly to go after aunt Huldy. Mother's always made a good deal o' the picnic."
There was a beat of hoofs upon the road, and Isabel, her present mission stricken from her mind, turned to see. It was Jim Bryant, driving by to call for her.
"My soul!" she said, under her breath.
"What is it, Isabel?" Oliver was asking her, with concern.
She had caught herself up, and she laughed in a sorry mirth.
"Nothin'," she said. "You catch the colt."
They walked out of the field in silence. At the stone wall he paused.
"Isabel," he said solemnly,—and with that double sense she had had all through the interview, she thought this was the look she had seen on his grandfather's face when he led in prayer,—"Isabel, you'd ought to spoke to me before. Why, I've been tryin' to get ahead so 's to make her comfortable, when—we set up housekeepin'."
Isabel was not sure whether he meant her or Ardelia. At any rate, it was the woman to whom he was determined to be loyally kind. She also paused and looked at him with earnest eyes. It was the last moment in all her life to convince and alter him.
"Don't you see, Oliver," she urged, "that's what folks are together for, chiefly, to have a good time. I don't mean they've got to be on the go from mornin' till night. They've got to work hard, too. Why, what's 'Delia marryin' you for, anyways. 'Tain't to stay at home and work, day in, day out. She can do that now, right where she is. 'Tain't so 's she can see you workin'. She can take her mother's spy-glass and have that, too, till she's sick to death of it. You go along, Oliver, and catch the colt."
He looked at her very kindly, gratefully, too, perhaps, and turned away toward the live-oak field. But Isabel, hurrying homeward, stopped and called him.
"Oliver, you say your mother's gone?"
"Yes."
"She lay your things out?"
"No, I guess not. I told her I wa'n't goin'."
"Well, I'll see to it as I run along."
Laying out the things of the men folks of the family was rigidly observed in this household, where Oliver was regarded as the cherished head. He had been brought up to a helpless lack of acquaintance with his best clothes. He knew them only as lendings apt to constrict him a little when he got them on, and to rouse in his mother a tendency to make unwelcome remarks about his personal charms. Where they lived, between those times of warfare, he scarcely knew.
Isabel laughed a little to herself, in a rueful fashion, as she hurried along the road. Her own swain was waiting for her, but not for that would she abjure the quest. She ran up Oliver's driveway and, without pausing, opened the blind where the key, she knew, was hidden, and snatched it forth. She unlocked the door and crossed the kitchen, rigid in its order, with Oliver's cold luncheon set out on the table under wire covers. She made her way upstairs, and in his room, also in beautiful array, stood for a moment looking about her. Isabel gave a little laugh. "I should think I was crazy," she said toherself; and then she opened bureau drawers until she found the careful display of bosomed shirts she knew were there. She laid one on the bed, his collar and necktie beside it, and took down his best suit from the closet. She gave the collar of the coat a little unnecessary brush with her hand. It seemed almost a wifely touch, and she was angry with herself. Yet it was only that this was mating-time, and the tender and the maternal strove blindly in her, and brought forth a largess great enough to touch other lots besides her own.
Then she sped downstairs and went away to her own home. Her mother—a little woman, all energy—met her at the gate. She had on her best bonnet and carried her Paisley shawl. She was shading her eyes with her hand and looking tense in a way Isabel declaimed against, for it made wrinkles in her mother's nice forehead.
"For mercy sake, where you been?" she called. "Ain't you seen Jim?"
"No," said Isabel lightly. "Where is he?"
"Well, I dunno where he is," said her mother reprovingly. "He come here after you, all dressed up, an' I told him you was gone down to Ellen's to carry the cake. So he said he'd go along down an' fetch you up, an' I told him he better stop to Ardelia's an' see if you wasn't there. An' then he come back, ridin' like thewind, an' he said I could tell you Mis' Drake said you's goin' to the picnic with Oliver. She see you through the spy-glass, an' Oliver'd gone to ketch the colt."
"There's father," said Isabel steadily. "He's drivin' out the carriage-house now. You got the cake in the buggy?"
"You do worry me 'most to death," said Mrs. Wilde. Her face had tied itself into a snarl of knots, from which the kindly eyes looked angrily. "Who you goin' with, Isabel? You ain't been an' took up with Oliver again, after all's said an' done?"
Isabel laughed, but her voice shook a little, and not with mirth.
"I'm all right, mother. Don't you say anything to anybody. That's all. Here comes father. Take care your dress. You'll get wheel-grease on it."
Her strong hands were lifting the little creature, and Mrs. Wilde found herself driven away. She was turning a glance over her shoulder to the last, and calling, "Isabel, you tell me—" But father, who had Isabel's masterful purpose, whipped up, and they were gone.
Isabel, still smiling, as if the sun itself could judge her and it was desirable to keep up some appearance before it, went into the house and closed the door behind her. She took off herhat and hung it on its nail in the front hall. Then her muscles seemed to weaken in a strange way, and she went into the darkened parlor where no neighbor would find her, and sat down by the centre-table. She bowed her head upon the great picture-Bible, and unmindful of the cross and anchor in perforated paper below and the green wool mat with its glass beads, began to cry. Isabel hated tears with a fiery scorn. She liked to stand on her two feet and face the world as her father did; yet here she was, sobbing over the centre-table and drawing quick breaths of misery. Even then, in the passion of her grief, it did occur to her that in all the anger she had felt toward Oliver in times past, she had never wanted to cry. Something now had hurt a deeper heart than she knew she had.
She had got over the first tempest of her grief, and sat drying her eyes with a wondering shame, and suddenly there was a sound of a horse driven rapidly. Hope flooded her face with color. She sprang up and slipped to the window and peered out at the side of the curtain. But it was not he. It was Oliver, erect and handsome in his best clothes, and Ardelia beside him. Oliver glanced up at the house as they went by; but he bent to Ardelia again in a way that looked fondness and protection at once. And Ardelia was openly in paradise. She waslooking up to him with no eyes for any face at the window, and as they whirled out of sight Isabel saw her lift a hand and with an intimate, pretty motion brush something from his coat. Then they were gone, and immediately the neighborhood seemed to settle into a quiet. All the town was at Poole's Woods, and Isabel was left behind.
For a long time, it seemed to her, she sat there, trying to still her breath and school herself into her old serenity. Then, with her handkerchief, a little wet ball, tight in one hand, she rose, went to the glass that even in the darkened light showed her a miserable look, made a little face at herself, and walked out into the kitchen. There she stood idly for a moment, debating what she should do. Jim Bryant had not lived long in the town, but she knew him well from these few weeks of intimacy. He was tempestuously devoted to her, in a way that stirred her blood. There was plenty of fire and passion in him; he had a temper, and he would not come back. Isabel set her lips. "I guess," she said to herself, "I'll have the burnfire." She thought of baking pound-cake, but all the day before they had made cake for the picnic. She might wash the blankets, or begin quilting, or clean the cistern. These dramas were hardly exciting enough. The bonfire was better. Shetied on her father's hat and kilted her skirts. Then she brought out the iron rake from the barn and settled the brush-heap anew. It was on the square of land where she had had her perennial bed for three years, and now she had decided to sow it down to grass. The litter of the garden was there, with splinters of shingle and dried weeds, and next week her father meant to burn it.
Isabel touched her match and stood by, watching, while the flames curled and crept. Then they crackled among the brush, and she held them down and got excited over it, and for an instant forgot Poole's Woods. It was a good little fight out-of-doors in the hot sun, with a stream of fire when it caught something dry, and then a column of smoke that made a tang in the air and stirred her blood deliciously. Isabel was like a creature of the earth combating something for the earth's good, and getting hotter and more breathless every minute.
"What you doin' there?" called a voice from the gate.
She forgot the bonfire, remembering her father's hat and her kilted skirts. Jim Bryant threw the gate shut with a clang and came striding across the yard. He was tall and brown and sturdy. Isabel knew exactly how he looked with his brow set and his blue eyes blazing.
"I've got a burnfire," she said, and raked the harder.
Jim came up and took the rake out of her hand. It seemed to be for no purpose save that he had to do something. Isabel put up her head and looked at him. There was hostility in her glance, but it was the challenge of sex that meets and measures.
"I see the smoke comin' up over this way, an' I thought there was the devil to pay," he said harshly. "What you carryin' on like this for?"
"I ain't carryin' on," said Isabel, from tense lips. "This is our land, and I guess I can have a burnfire if I want to."
"Why ain't you at Poole's Woods?" The fire was dying down a little, but one persistent flame moved like a snake in the dry stubble, and he savagely stamped it out. "Why ain't you? I come after you."
"You didn't wait, did you?"
"Old Mis' Drake said you were goin' with Briggs."
"Did I tell you so?"
He weakened a little.
"N-no! But she said you'd been down talkin' it over an' Oliver'd gone to ketch the colt. She offered me the spy-glass."
Isabel's lips had a little line of white about them. She looked full at him now.
"Did you take it, Jim?"
"Take it? No!" he roared at her. "Do you think I'd do a thing like that?"
They stood looking at each other, glance holding glance, their eyes blazing. Suddenly he threw the rake as if he had been throwing down a shield and held out his arms to her. Isabel walked into them, and while they kissed, her father's straw hat slipped back over her shoulders, and she laughed and never missed the fluffy headgear lying in her room upstairs, waiting for Poole's Woods. Suddenly she remembered that they were out in the broad sunlight, in sight of the road, and then she bethought her that all the town had gone to Poole's Woods to leave them the world alone to kiss in. She remembered, too, that old Mrs. Drake's spy-glass might be trained on them at that moment.
"I don't care," she said, and laughed.
"Don't care for what?" asked her lover, his lips at her ear.
"For anything. There! let me go. Here's some more fire in the grass."
They stamped and raked quite soberly for a moment, and then Isabel began to laugh again. She looked wild and beautiful in her fight with the earth and her own heart. Jim laughed a little, too.
"What is it, Bell?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, in the ecstasy of happiness. "I guess I like a burnfire."
When it died still lower, they walked toward the house, hand in hand, and sat there on the steps watching it.
"Well," said Bryant, smiling at her, "you want to go to Poole's Woods?"
Isabel smiled back.
"I guess so," she said. "We can be there by luncheon-time."
"All right. I'll go home an' harness up." Half-way down the path he stopped and turned. "Say, Isabel!"
She answered from the porch on her way in to don the muslin dress.
"What is it?"
"You never told me what you were down there for."
"Where?"
"Down to Oliver's."
She shook her head and laughed.
"No, nor I sha'n't, either." His brows were coming together. "'Twas an errand," she called to him. "It wa'n't mine, either. You got to know?"
Again they stood looking at each other, this time with a steady challenge as if more things were decided than the moment's victory. Thensuddenly, as if in the same breath, they smiled again, and Bryant gave her a little nod.
"Get your things on," he called. "We're goin' to Poole's Woods. That's all I want to know."
Thesummer boarders had gone, and Marshmead was settling down to a peace enhanced by affluence. Though the exodus had come earlier than usual this year, because the Hiltons were sailing for Germany and the Dennys due at the Catskills, not one among their country entertainers had complained. Marshmead approved, from a careless dignity, when people brought money into the town, but it always relapsed into its own customs with a contented sigh after the jolt of inexplicable requirements and imported ways. This year had been an especially fruitful one. The boarders had given a fancy dress party with amateur vaudeville combined, for the benefit of the old church, and Martha Waterman now, as she toiled up the hill to a meeting of the Circle, held the resultant check in one of her plump freckled hands. Martha was chief mover in all capable deeds, a warm, silent woman who called children "lamb," plied them with pears, and knew the inner secrets of rich cookery. She was portly, and her thin skin gave confirmation to her own frequent complaint of feeling the heat; butthough the day had been more sultry than it was, she would not have foregone the pleasure of endowing the Circle with its new accession toward the meeting-house fund.
The Circle had been founded in war time when women scraped lint and sewed with a passionate zeal. Martha was a little girl then, wondering what the excitement was really about, though, since it had lasted through her own brief period, she took it that war was a permanent condition, like bread or weather. Now she often mused over those old days and thought how marvelous it was that she could ever have been young enough to see no significance in that time of blood and pain. In these middle years of hers the Circle was a different affair, but it kept its loyal being. To-day it met in the basement of the church, and there, when Martha went plodding in, nearly all the other members were assembled. Sometimes they sewed for sufferers from varying disasters, but to-day their hands were idle, and a buzz of talk saluted her. They looked up as one woman when she entered.
"There she is," called two or three, and Lydia Vesey, the little dressmaker, as sharp and unexpected as the slash of her own too-impulsive scissors, came forward with a run.
"You got it?" she inquired.
Mrs. Waterman laughed richly, and set herumbrella in the corner. Then, still holding one hand closed upon the check, she untied her hat and fanned herself with it during the relief of sinking into a seat.
"Do let me get my breath," she besought, yet as if she prolonged the moment for the sake of the dramatic weight the tale demanded. "Seems if I never experienced such a day as this. It's hotter'n any fall I ever see."
"You look very warm, Martha," said Ellen Bayliss, in her gentle way. She was sitting by the window, bending over an embroidered square, the sun on her soft curls and delicate cheek unveiling the look of middle life, yet doing something kindly, too; for though he showed the withered texture of her skin, he brought out the last fleck of gold in her hair, and balanced sadness with some bloom. Ellen had been accounted a beauty, and her niece Nellie was a beauty now, of a more radiant type. She was the rose of life, but aunt Ellen had the fragrance of roses in a jar.
"You sewin', Ellen?" Martha inquired, as if she were willing to shift the topic from what would exact continued speech from her, and at least defer her colleagues' satisfaction. "You're the only one that's brought their thimble, I'll be bound."
"It's only this same centrepiece," Ellen answered,holding it up. "Mrs. Hilton told me if I'd send it after her, she'd give me three dollars for it. I thought I could turn the money into the fund."
"You got it?" Lydia Vesey cried again, as if she could not possibly crowd her interest under, and this time she had reënforcements from without. Mrs. Daniel Pray, who was almost a giantess and bent laboriously over to accommodate her height to her husband's, took off her glasses and laid them on her declivitous lap, the better to fix Martha with her dull, small eyes.
"I'll be whipped if I believe you've got it, after all," she offered discontentedly. "Mebbe they're goin' to send by mail."
Martha looked at her a moment, apparently in polite consideration, but really wondering, as she often did, if anything would thicken the hair at Mrs. Pray's parting. She frequently, out of the strength of her address and capability, had these moments of musing over what could be done.
"Speak up, Marthy, can't ye?" ended Mrs. Pray irritably, now putting on her glasses again as if, having tried one way, she would essay another. "Didn't you see Mis' Hilton at the last, or didn't they give it to you?"
Martha unclosed her hand and extended it tothem impartially, the check, face uppermost, held between thumb and finger. They bent forward to peer. Some rose and looked over the shoulders of the nearer ones, and glasses were sought and hastily mounted upon noses.
"Well, there," said Mrs. Hanscom, the wife of the grain-dealer who always stipulated for cash payment before he would deliver a bag at the barn door, "it ain't bills, as I see."
"It's just as good." Ellen Bayliss looked up from her sewing to throw this in, with her air of deprecating courtesy. "A check's the same as money any day. I have two, twice a year, from my stock. All you have to do is to write your name on the back and turn 'em into the bank."
"Well, all I want to know is, what's it come to?" Lydia Vesey said. "Course it's just the same as money. I've had checks myself, days past. Once I done over Miss Tenny's black mohair an' sent it after her, an' she mailed me back a check,—same day, I guess it was. How much's it come to, Marthy?"
"See for yourself," said Martha. She laid it, still face upward, on the table. "It's as much yours as 'tis mine, I guess, if I be treasurer. Forty-three dollars an' twenty-seven cents."
There was a chorused sigh.
"Well, I call that a good haul," said AnnBartlett, whose father had been sexton for thirty-eight years, and who, in consequence, looked upon herself as holding some subtly intimate relation with the church, so that when the old carpet was "auctioned off" she insisted on darning the breadths before they were put up for sale. "What money can do! Just one evenin', an' them few folks dressed up to kill an' payin' that in for their ice-cream an' tickets at the door."
"We made the ice-cream," said Martha, as one stating a fact to be justly remembered.
"We paid ourselves in, too," said Lydia sharply. "I guess our money's good as anybody's, an' I guess it'll count up as quick an' go as fur."
"Course it will," said Martha, in a mollifying tone. "But 'tis an easy way of makin' a dollar, just as Ann says. There they got up a fancy-dress party an' enjoyed themselves, an' it's brought in all this. 'Twa'n't hard work for 'em. 'Twas a kind o' play."
"Well, I guess they did enjoy it," said Mrs. Pray gloomily. She had settled her glasses on her nose again, and now, with her finger, went following the bows round under her hair, to be sure they "canted right." "I guess they wouldn't ha' done it if they hadn't."
"There's one thing Mis' Hilton says to me when she passed me the check," Martha broughtout, in sudden recollection. "'Now here's this money we made for you,' she says. 'Use it anyways you want, so 's you use it for the church. But,' she says, 'why don't you make up your minds now you'll give some kind of an entertainment after we're gone, a harvest festival,' she says, 'or the like o' that? Then you could do your paintin',' she says, 'an' get you a new melodeon for the Sunday School, or whatever 'tis you want. We've showed you the way,' she says. 'Now you go ahead an' see what you can do.'"
Lydia Vesey looked as if she might, in another instant, cap the suggestion by a satirical climax, and Ellen Bayliss rested her sewing hand on her knee and glanced thoughtfully about as if to ask, in her still, earnest way, what her own part could be in such an enterprise. But a step came hurrying down the stairs, the step of a heavy body lightly carried, and Caddie Musgrave came in at a flying pace. It was Caddie who, with the help of her silent husband, kept the big boarding-house on the hill. No need to talk to her about summer boarders, she was wont to say. She knew 'em, egg an' bird. Take 'em as folks an' nobody was better, but 'twas boarders she meant. They might seem different, fust sight, but shake 'em up in a peck measure, an' you couldn't tell t'other from which.
"I guess you're tired," said Ellen Bayliss, in her gentle fashion, taking a stolen glance from the embroidery and returning again at once to her careful stitches.
"Tired!" said Caddie. She dropped into a chair and leaned her head back with ostentatious weariness. "I guess I be. An' yet I told Charlie 'fore they went I never'd say I was tired again in all my born days, only let me get rid of 'em this time."
"How'd you manage with 'em this season?" asked Mrs. Pray, as if her question concerned the importation of some alien plant.
Caddie opened her eyes and came to a posture more adapted to sustaining her end of the conversational burden.
"Why, they're all right," she owned, "good as gold, take 'em on their own ground. I found out they were good as gold that winter I went up an' passed Sunday with Mis' Denny. But take 'em together, boardin', an' what one don't think of t'other will. This summer 'twas growin' fleshy, an' if they didn't harp on that one string—well, suz!"
Mrs. Pray nodded her head solemnly.
"I said that," she returned. "I said that to Jonathan when I come home from the Circle the day they was here talkin' over the fund an' settlin' what they'd do. I come home an' says toJonathan wipin' his hands on the roller-towel there by the back door, I says, 'What's everybody got ag'inst growin' old, an' growin' hefty, too, for that matter?' I says. 'Seems if folks don't talk about nothin' else.'"
Martha put in her assuaging word.
"Well, I guess human natur' ain't changed much. I guess nobody ever hankered after gettin' stiff j'ints an' losin' their eyesight an' so. 'Twould be a queer kind of a shay that was lookin' for'ard to goin' to pieces while 'twas travelin' along. Mis' Denny's niece that reads in public read me that piece once. I thought 'twas about the cutest that ever was."
Ellen Bayliss had laid her sewing on her knee, and now she looked up in an impulsive haste, the color in her cheeks and a quick moving note in her voice.
"It isn't growing old that's the trouble. It's talking about it. Why, the night after that meeting of the Circle—" She stopped here, and her eyes, widening and growing darker in a way they had, gave her face almost a look of terror.
"What is it, Ellen?" asked Martha Waterman kindly. "You tell it right out."
"Why," said Ellen, "this is all 'twas. That night at supper, my Nellie kept staring at me across the table. 'What is 't, Nellie?' I says, at last. Then she colored up and says, not as if shewanted to, but as if she couldn't help it, 'I hope I shall look like you sometime, aunt Ellen.' You see how 'twas. She meant, when she was old. She never in her life had thought anything about me being old, and they'd put it into her head."
A pained look settled upon her face, and before she took up her sewing again she glanced from one to another as if to ask them if they really understood. There was a little warm murmur of assent. Ellen was beloved, and there was, besides, a concurrent strain of sympathy through the assembly who had known all her past. They remembered how Colonel Hadley had "gone with her" awhile when she was teaching school at District Number Four, and how Ellen had faded out, the summer he was married to Kate Leighton, of the Leightons on the hill. Now his nephew, Clyde, was going with Ellen's niece in a way that vividly mirrored the old time, and they had heard that the colonel, when he came for one of his brief visits in the summer, had somehow put a check to love's beginning. At least, Clyde had seen Nellie only once after his uncle went away, and had speedily closed the old house and followed him.
"There, Ellen," said Lydia Vesey, from a rare softness. "I guess nobody'd ever say 't you was growin' old. They'd only think you wassort o' palin' out, that's all, same 's a white dress is different from a pink one."
"Well, now, I'll say my say, an' done with it," remarked Caddie Musgrave, with her accustomed violence. "I'm ready to grow old when my time comes, an' if I get there by the road some have took before me, I guess I sha'n't be put under the sod by any vote o' town-meetin'. As I look back, seems to me 'most all them that's gone before us has had their uses to the last. Think o' gramma Jakes! Why, she hadn't chick nor child of her own left to bless her, an' see how she was looked up to, an' how every little tot in town thought he's made if he could be sent to gramma Jakes's to do an arrant, an' she give him a pep'mint or a cooky. 'Twa'n't the pep'mint though. 'Twas because she was a real sweet nice old lady, that's what 'twas."
"Yes, I remember gramma Jakes," said Anna Dutton, from the corner. She was a round, pink, near-sighted little person, who had tried to cure herself of stammering by speaking very slowly, and now scarcely talked at all because she had found how unwilling her more robust and loquacious neighbors were to give her the right of way in her hindering course. "Seems if I could see her now standin' there on her front porch, her little handkercher round her neck—"
Caddie broke in upon this reminiscence, according to a custom so established that Anna Dutton only kept her mouth open for an instant, as if the opportunity for speech might return to her, and then quite calmly settled back with an air of pleased attention.
"They're afraid o' gettin' old an' they're afraid o' gettin' fleshy," Caddie announced. "Well, there's no crime in gettin' old, now is there? An' if there is, you can't put a stop to 't in any court o' law. An' as for bein' fleshy, if you be you be, an' you might as well turn to an' have your clo'es made bigger an' say no more."
Mrs. Pray presented her mite with her accustomed severity of gloom, as if she had selected the words most carefully and wished to have it understood that they were the choicest she had to offer.
"I was fryin' doughnuts, a week ago Saturday, an' Mis' Denny come along with that lady friend o' hers that's down here over Sunday. I offered 'em each a warm doughnut, an' they was possessed to take it. They'd been walkin' quite a spell, an' they'd called for a drink o' water. They said 'twas the time in the forenoon when they drinked. But they looked at the doughnuts good an' hard, an' they says: 'No. It's fattenin',' says they. 'It's fattenin'.'"
"Yes," said Caddie, with a scornful cadence,"I'll warrant they did. That's what they said about two things out o' three, soon 's the hands moved round to meal-time. 'It's fattenin'!' Oh, I'm sick an' tired to death of it! I ain't goin' to be dead till I be dead, thinkin' about it all the time, not if I can keep my thoughts inside o' me an' my tongue in my head. So there!"
"Well, now," said Martha Waterman, with the mildness calculated to smooth a troubled situation, "hadn't we better be gettin' round to thinkin' what we'll do to earn us a mite more money for the fund? Seems if, now they've done so well by us, we'd ought to up an' show what we can do—a harvest festival, mebbe, or a sociable for all, an' charge for tickets."
One woman had not spoken. She was a thin, dark-eyed creature, with a gypsy face and a quantity of gray hair wound about on the top of her head. This was Isabel Martin, who was allowed her erratic way because she took it, and because, it had always been said, "You never could tell what Isabel would do next, only she never meant the least o' harm." She had come softly in while the others were talking, and drawn Ellen's work out of her hand, with a swift, pretty smile at her. "Rest your eyes," she had whispered her, and sat by, taking quick, deft stitches, while Ellen, unconscious until then of being tired, had dropped her lids and leanedher head against the casing, with a faint smile of pleasant restfulness. Now Isabel put the work back into Ellen's hand with an accurate haste, and looked up at the group about her.
"I'll tell you what to do," she said. Her voice thrilled with urging and suggestive mischief. It was a compelling voice, and they turned at once.
"If there ain't Isabel," said Martha Waterman. "I didn't see you come in."
"Le' 's give a fancy dress party of our own," said Isabel.
"Dress ourselves up to the nines, an' put on paint an' powder, an' send off to the stores to hire clo'es an' wigs?" inquired Caddie. "No, sir, none o' that for me. I've seen what it comes to, money an' labor, too. I've just been through it, lookin' on, an' I wouldn't do it not if the church never see a brush o' paint nor a shingle, an' we had to play on a jew's-harp 'stead of a melodeon. No!"
Ann Bartlett gave a little murmur here.
"I never heard of anybody's bringin' a jew's-harp into the meetin'-house," she said, as a kind of official protest. "I guess we could get us some kind of a melodeon, 'fore we done such a thing as that."
Isabel was going on in that persuasive voice; it seemed to call the town to her to do her bidding.
"No, we ain't goin' to do it their way. We're goin' to do it our way. They've set out to see how young they can be. Le' 's see 'f we can't beat 'em seein' how old we can be. Le' 's dress up like the oldest that ever was, an' act as if we liked it."
The electrifying meaning ran over them like a wave. They caught the splendid significance of it. They were to offer, in the guise of jesting, their big protest against the folly of sickening over youth by showing how fearlessly they were dancing on toward age. It was more than bravado, more than repudiation of the cowards who hesitated at the onward step. It was loyal and passionate upholding of the state of those who were already old, and of those who had continued their beneficent lives into the time when there is no pleasure in the years, and yet had given honor and blessing through them all. They fell to laughing together, and two or three cried a little on the heels of merriment.
"I dunno what mother'd say," whispered Hannah Call, whose mother, old and yet regnant as the best housekeeper in town and a repository of all the most valuable recipes, had died that year. "I guess she'd say we was possessed."
"We be," said Isabel recklessly. "That's the only fun there is, bein' possessed. If you ain'tone way, you'd better be another. It's the way's the only thing to see to."
"I said I was sick o' paint an' powder," said Caddie. "Well, so I be, but I'll put flour in my hair so 't's as white as the drifted snow. I've got aunt Hope's gre't horn spe'tacles."
"I guess I could borrer one o' gramma Ellsworth's gounds," said Mrs. Pray. A light rarely seen there had come into her dull eyes. Isabel, with that prescience she had about the minds of people, knew what it meant. Mrs. Pray, though she was contemplating the garb of eld, was unconsciously going back to youth and the joy of playing. "She ain't quite my figger, but I guess 'twill do."
Lydia Vesey gave her a kindly look, yet scathing in its certainty of professional strictures.
"There ain't nobody that ever I see that's anywhere near your figger," she said, in the neighborly ruthlessness that was perfectly understood among them. "But you hand the gound over to me, an' I can fix it."
"Everybody flour their hair," cried Isabel, with the mien of inciting them deliriously.
"Everybody that's got plates, take 'em out," added Martha, the administrative, catching the infection and going a step beyond.
"Why, we can borrer every stitch we want,"said Lydia Vesey. "Borrer of the dead an' borrer of the livin'. I know every rag o' clo'es that's been made in this town, last thirty years. There's enough laid away in camphire, of them that's gone, to fit out three-four old ladies' homes."
"It'll be like the resurrection," said Ellen Bayliss, with that little breathless catch in her voice.
"What you mean by that, Ellen?" asked Martha gently.
"I know what she means," said Isabel, while Ellen, the blood running into her cheeks, looked helplessly as if she wished she had not spoken. "She means we're goin' to dress ourselves up in the things of them that's gone, a good many of 'em, an' we can't help takin' on the ways of folks that wore 'em. We can't anyways help glancin' back an' kinder formin' ourselves on old folks we've looked up to. Seems if the dead would walk."
Sometimes people shuddered at Isabel's queer sayings, but at this every one felt moved in a solemn way. It seemed beautiful to have the dead walk, so it was in the remembrance of the living.
"Shall we let the men in?" asked Caddie anxiously. "I dunno what they'll say 'f we don't." Her silent husband was the close partner of her life. To Marshmead it seemed as if hemight as well have been born dumb, but Caddie never omitted tribute to his great qualities.
"Mercy, yes," said Isabel, "if they'll dress up. Not else. They've got to be gran'ther Graybeards every one of 'em, or they don't come. You tell 'em so."
"You going home, aunt Ellen?" came a fresh voice from the doorway. "I've been staying after school, and I thought maybe you'd be tired and like me to call for you."
It was Nellie Lake, a vision of youth and sweet unconsciousness. She stood there in the doorway, hat and parasol in hand, crowned by her yellow hair, and in the prettiest pose of deprecating grace. Aunt Ellen smiled at her with loving pride, and yet wistfully, too. Nellie had called for her many times, just to walk home together, but never because aunt Ellen might be tired. The infection of age was in the air, and Nellie Lake had caught it.
"Come in, Nellie," she said. "No, I don't feel specially tired, but maybe I'll go along in a minute."
"Want to come to an old folks' party?" called Isabel, who was reading all these thoughts as swiftly as if they were signals to herself alone. "Want to dress up, an' flour your hair, an' put on spe'tacles, an' come an' play with us old folks?"
The girl's face creased up delightfully.
"A fancy dress!" she said. "What can I be?"
"You'll be an old lady," said Isabel, "or you won't come."
"Is it for the fund?" asked Nellie.
"Well, yes, I suppose it's for the fund, some," Isabel conceded. "But take it by an' large, it's for fun."
Thenight of the masquerade was soft and still, lighted by the harvest moon. Everywhere the fragrance of grapes enriched the air, and the dusty bitterness of things ripening. The little town hall was gay with lights, a curious blending of the west and east; for the boarders had left Japanese lanterns behind them, and their grotesque prettiness contrasted strangely with bowery goldenrod and asters and the red of maple leaves. Colonel Hadley, standing a moment at the doorway in his evening walk, this first night of his stay, when he had come with his nephew to look out some precious old books in the attic, and perhaps the more actually to draw Clyde away again after the errand was done, thought he had never seen such abandonment to a wild pleasure, even in his early days at Marshmead. For it was pleasure, though it seemed to be the festival of the old. Men andwomen bent with years and yet straightening themselves when their muscles ached, were promenading the hall, not sedately, according to the wont of Marshmead social gatherings, to fulfill a terrifying rite, but gayly, as if only by premeditation did they withstand the beckoning of the dance.
At the end of the hall, in a bower of light and greenery, sat a row of others who were apparently set apart for some honor or special service. From time to time the ranks broke, and one group after another stayed to talk with them, and always with the air of giving pleasure by their deference and heartening. Suddenly the colonel's eyes smarted with the sudden tears of a recognition which seemed to touch not only life as it innocently rioted here to-night, but all life, his own in the midst of it. At once he knew. These were the very old, and those who had lived through their fostering were paying them beautiful tribute.
At that moment his nephew, boyishly changed, but not disguised, in old Judge Hadley's coat and knee-breeches, stepped out of the moving line, a lady with him, and came to him. Clyde, too, was flushed with the strangeness of it all, and the joyous certainty that now for an evening, if only that, Nellie Lake was with him. The colonel looked at her and looked again, andshe dropped her eyes in a pretty, serious modesty.
"Ellen!" he said involuntarily.
Then she laughed.
"That's my aunt," she told him. "I'm Elinor. I'm Nell. I tried to look like auntie. I guess I do."
"No," said the colonel sharply, "you don't look like Ellen Bayliss. You've made up too old."
Yet she had not, and he knew it. She had only put a little powder on her hair and drawn its curling richness into a seemly knot. She had whitened the bloom of her cheeks, and taken on that little pathetic droop of the shoulders he remembered in Ellen Bayliss the day he saw her in his last hurried trip to Marshmead. He had not spoken to her then. She had passed the station as he was driving away, and he had felt a pang he deadened with some anodyne of grim endurance, to see how youth could wilt into a dowerless middle age.
"I guess you haven't seen aunt Ellen," said Nellie innocently. "I'm just as she is every day, but she's made up to-night to be like grandma, or the picture of aunt Sue that died."
There she was. She had left the moving line for a moment, and the minister, in robe and bands of an ancient time, devised by Ann Bartlettand made by Lydia Vesey, had bowed and left her for some of his multifarious social claims. A chair was beside her, but she only rested one hand on the back of it and leaned her head against the wall. She was in a faded brocade unearthed from some dark corner Lydia Vesey knew the secret of, and she was age itself, beautiful, delicate, acquiescent age, all sadness and a wistful grace. The colonel looked at her, savagely almost, with the pain of it, and then back again at the girl who seemed to be picturing the first sad stage of undefended maidenhood. At that moment he knew he had put something wonderful away from him, those years ago, when he ceased to court the look in Ellen's eyes and turned to a robuster fortune. At the time, he had told himself, in his way of escaping the difficult issue, that the pang of leaving her was his alone. She, in her innocence of love, could hardly feel the death of what lived so briefly. Now, as it sometimes happened when his anodyne ceased to work, he knew he had snipped the blossom of her life and she had borne no fruit of ecstasy; and in the instant of sharp regret it came upon him that no other woman, through him, should tread the way of love denied. He stooped to Nellie, standing there before him, and kissed her on the cheek. Whether in this blended love and pain he waskissing Ellen or the girl, he did not know, but he saw how Clyde started and grew luminous, and what it meant to both of them.
"How did you know it?" Clyde was asking. "We are engaged. I wrote to her to-day. I was going to tell you, but I couldn't. You knew it, didn't you? You're a brick."
The girl flushed through her powder, and her eyes sent him a starry gratitude. But now the colonel hardly cared whether they had acted without his knowledge or whether they were grateful for his sanction. He and they and Ellen Bayliss seemed to be in a world alone, bound together by ties that might last—would last, he knew; but the mist cleared away from his eyes, and the vision of life to come faded, and he saw things as they were before, and chiefly Ellen standing there unconscious of him. He walked over to her.
"Ellen," he said bluffly, holding out his hand, "I've got only a minute, but I want to speak to you if I don't to anybody else."
She straightened and gazed at him, startled out of her part into a life half joy, half terror. He had taken her hand and held it warmly.
"Ellen," he said, "they're engaged, that boy and girl. Did you know it?"
"No," she answered faintly, but with candor."No. I've discouraged it. I thought of you." She paused, too kind to him for more.
"I didn't know," he said. "I hadn't seen her. How should I know she was like you? How should I know if he lost her he mightn't be making a mistake? Yes, they're engaged. I sha'n't be at the wedding. I'm going abroad, but I shall send my blessing. To you, too, Ellen. Good-by. God bless you."
Then he had walked out of the hall, as alien, with his middle-aged robustness, as the mortal in fairy revelry; and Ellen, knowing her towns-people were looking at her in kindly interest, stood with dignity and yet a curious new consciousness of treasured happiness, as if she had a secret to think over, and a solving of perplexities.