Standing with reluctant feetWhere the brook and river meet.
Standing with reluctant feetWhere the brook and river meet.
Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet.
She was, without doubt, a girl still, despite her height of five feet two inches, despite the coiled beauty of her coppery hair and the wise young glance of her blue eyes. The three freckles about her nose, the dimples when she smiled, the faint colour in her cheeks, and the slender straightness of her body were wholly girlish; so was her general attitude toward older people. It was only when she was with certain boys slightly her seniors that a sort of womanliness seemed her predominant quality. The nature of this grown-up atmosphere varied. With Guy Vanton, who was twenty-two, Mermaid wouldhave appeared to most onlookers to be rather sisterly. With Tommy Lupton, who was twenty, she was simply an attractive young person of the other sex. But in her attitude toward seventeen-to-eighteen-year-old Richard Hand the girl alternated the rôle of comrade and equal with that of motherly management. These variations were not a matter of ages but of personalities. They were determined by the fact that Guy Vanton, from a lonely boyhood, was developing into a lonely young man; that Tommy Lupton was perfectly normal and a healthy youth who was Mermaid’s senior by an interval which, between a boy and a girl or a man and a woman, is without significance; by the further fact that Dickie Hand needed special treatment and looking after.
For Dickie was a gifted boy who was always on a seesaw. He had his ups and downs of which his grasping old father was but seldom aware, and could have viewed with nothing but contempt. Nor was Dickie likely to get much good of his mother’s philosophy. All her life Mrs. Hand had supposed that everything was for the best; and this opiate of age is no drug to feed to youth. Dickie, whose spirits were either aloft in the air or bumping the ground, could not play seesaw alone. Mermaid recognized as much and seated herself on the other end of the plank. Occasionally Dickie would forget the equilibrium necessary and would make more or less horizontal advances toward her. To restore thebalance Mermaid had to meet him halfway, but she seized the first opportunity to remind him that his place was at a distance.
At sixteen Mermaid was halfway through High School at Patchogue. The question of her future remained undecided. Cap’n Smiley, her Dad, and his sister, Keturah, quarrelled mildly about it. The keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station did not like the notion of losing sight of his adopted daughter except for holidays. Keturah thought the girl ought to go away to school.
“Don’t be a fool, John,” she counselled the keeper. “The child will be home two months or more in summer. You won’t be on duty on the beach then, and we can all four—you and she and Hosea and myself—be together. She’s got to have something in her life besides Blue Port, and she’s got to have something in her life besides those three boys. They’re all right as boys go,” she added in qualification, “but I don’t suppose you want her to stay here and spend her life as your daughter and my niece, the Vanton boy’s sister, Tommy Lupton’s sweetheart, and Dickie Hand’s mother!”
“Seems to me, Keturah,” interjected her new husband, Ho Ha, “being all those things would be considerable.”
“It isn’t anything to be somebody,” his wife answered. “On the other hand, there’s a lot of tomfoolery in thetalk of ‘doing’ this and that. There’s no sense in doing anything unless it’s going to enable you to be somebody, and there’s no sense in being somebody unless it enables you to do something.”
“Hold on, hold on,” protested Ho Ha. “You go too fast for me to follow you. I didn’t marry you for your philosophy.”
“Well, you have to take my philosophy along with the rest,” said Keturah, briskly. “I didn’t marry you to bake pancakes every morning of my life, but I guess I’ll have to.”
“There’s a lot of philosophy in pancakes,” asserted Ho Ha. “They go flip-flop, and that’s the way life goes.”
“That’s why these people who can turn somersaults gracefully always get along well, eh?” said Cap’n Smiley with a grin.
“To stick to the subject and not to the griddle,” resumed Keturah, “the child ought to go away this fall. She likes chemistry and she likes cooking and she mixes all sorts of messes in both. I live in constant dread that she’ll serve me some good-tasting poison by accident or that the baked potatoes will explode. I don’t know anything about this scientific cookery you hear so much about, but Mermaid might as well get what there is in it. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, though I must say that the job of filling his stomach is about all a woman could beexpected to handle.” She looked at Ho Ha, a notable eater.
“Well, then, I think she might spend this summer on the beach with me—with all of us,” amended Cap’n Smiley. “I’ll be there anyway this year. You and Hosea and Mermaid can take the Biggles house, or something more sizable if you want; there’s plenty of little houses within a quarter of a mile of the station.”
Mermaid, entering, had heard her Dad’s suggestion and clapped her hands in applause.
“That’ll be splendid!” she cried. “Captain Vanton has taken a little bungalow, and Guy is going to be over there; Tommy Lupton and Dickie Hand are going to spend August camping on the beach; so we’ll have company all summer!”
The three adults exchanged amused glances.
Any girl of sixteen fond of chemistry and cooking can have a first-rate time on the Great South Beach in summer. Any girl of sixteen companioned by from one to three youths slightly older than herself, and of nicely differentiated ages and temperaments, can have a good time in summer anywhere. Mermaid was as happy on the beach as if she had been born there as, indeed, for all practical purposes, she had. She was not “as happy as if she had lived there all her life,” because no one can be happy in a place that has not gained some charm bycontrast with other places. The girl collected shells and sea creatures, drifting from chemistry into biology and back again; she analyzed sea weed and admired it; she divided with Keturah Smiley the labour of cooking meals to which the salt air gave inimitable savour; she boated, she swam, waded, tramped the dunes, and sunned herself on the sands. She read everything from the habits of jellyfish to the loves of Maurice Hewlett’s heroes and heroines, moving against mediæval backgrounds as rich and varied as the scenes in old tapestries. She flirted; and once she found herself in a game of hearts.
Twenty-two-year-old Guy Vanton, rather short, snub-nosed, with black hair and attractive eyes, had gone into the surf with her and, with the ignorance of those unacquainted with that shore, had ventured too far out. The huge curl of a breaker caught him, for a southeast wind was blowing and the ocean was beginning to show whitecaps. Guy was struck on the shoulder by the full force of the falling wave, knocked down, buried, washed about, and dragged out as the tons of water flung upon the sloping sand shingle receded with a baffled roar. Mermaid, higher up on the slope, saw him fall. She breasted the water and, as the bottom sank away from under her feet, struck out, swimming.
Diving head first through the next huge sea she lifted her head and caught sight of Guy struggling a few yardsaway. She got up to him just as another breaker, a colossal wall of a dark glassiness, towered for a second above them and then toppled down with a noise like Niagara. Mermaid forced herself and Guy beneath the water, which carried them some distance up the beach, and just then he began to clutch her with the grip of one drowning. She broke his hold and, half swimming, tugging with all her might, got him to a place where she could touch bottom. Then she worked forward until she stood, partly supporting him, in a boiling sea waist high. She was nearly exhausted when she finally dragged him up on the beach beyond the wash of the sea. It happened that there was no one near by; evidently they had not been observed from higher up on the shore, so Mermaid began the task of resuscitation. Fortunately Guy Vanton opened his eyes almost immediately under her wearied ministrations.
He did not say anything as he gradually recovered himself. The two sat beside each other on the empty beach. Mermaid, shivering, had thrown sweaters about herself and Guy. At length young Vanton turned and looked in her eyes with the curious, shy, wild-animal look that everyone noticed in his own. At the same time he seized her hand.
“Mermaid, you saved my life—mylife.”
He spoke in wonder, as if there were something inexplicable about it. Mermaid smiled at him, white and tired and anxious.
“You’re all right, Guy?”
His fingers tightened on her hand. There was something steady in the fire of his look.
“I owe you so much,” he said, brokenly. “Almost everything. You were my first friend. Five years ago. I—I’ve never been able to make it up to you, and now I never shall. I’ve—I’ve loved you all this time. I—won’t you let me kiss you?”
The last words were perhaps laughable, but something that was not a drop of salt water from his black hair rolled down his cheek. Mermaid’s own eyes glistened.
“Of course—this once, Guy,” she murmured. His lips brushed her wet cheek. She rose to her feet a little unsteadily and reaching down her arm half pulled him to his. “They’ll be frightened if we don’t get back soon,” she explained. “You—you mustn’t put your arm about me, Guy. Can you walk all right? See here, I’ll put my arm about you.” She was matter-of-fact. They went unhurriedly along the shore to where a boardwalk at the edge of the dunes led to the house Captain Vanton had rented for the summer. There they parted, with the appearance of unconcern. Keturah Hand met Mermaid at the door of their cottage.
“Child, is it necessary for you to hug that Vanton boy publicly?” she inquired. Mermaid explained.
“How did you bring him to?” asked her aunt.
“I kissed him. Now, Aunt Keturah, it’s all right. There was nobody around and he doesn’t know.”
Tommy Lupton was a great, tall, strapping youth with everything indeterminate about him, from the colour of his hair and eyes to his behaviour. He had no visible ambitions beyond becoming a bayman like his father and ultimately a surfman in one of the Coast Guard Stations on the beach, preferably the one at Lone Cove where John Smiley was keeper and his father a member of the crew. Since the day, some years earlier, when Guy Vanton had thrown Tommy around in a pine-needled clearing in the woods about Blue Port, Tommy and Guy had been good friends, so far as too utterly unlike young men can be fast friends. Neither fully understood the other. Mermaid, who liked them both, had constantly to be explaining Guy to Tommy and interpreting Tommy to Guy.
“Tommy likes you but thinks he ought not to,” she told Guy. “Tommy is the sort of boy that thinks he ought not to like anybody unless he can admire him, too. If Tommy’s best friend were running against—oh, well, say Colonel Roosevelt—for some office, Tommy would vote for Roosevelt. You see, he’dadmireRoosevelt.”
“It’s a principle,” elucidated Guy.
“It’s unreasonable,” elucidated Mermaid.
“It is better than just voting for a man because he’s a friend of yours.”
“Of course. But to have to admire a person in order to like him comfortably is just like—like a boy!” exclaimed the young lady. “Like alittleboy,” she added.
To the hero-worshipping Tommy she had something else to say.
“You’ll never see how much there is in Guy Vanton if you keep looking for what isn’t there,” she admonished him. Tommy looked at her, cloudily.
“I suppose it takes a girl to see what there is in him,” he surmised, jealously. “You—I don’t suppose Guy sees anything in me. I guess you don’t, either. I guess there isn’t anything much in me,” went on poor young Mr. Lupton, pathetically. “I sha’n’t ever amount to a lot. I’ve never been anywhere, and I can’t jabber French, and I never wrote poetry except on a valentine. I hate school and I’m glad I’m through with it. And I’d rather be a Coast Guard than write a book, as Guy’s doing, or become a great chemical engineer, as you say Dickie may some day. I’ll never be rich and I’ll never be famous, and you can’t make me either.”
Mermaid was building things in the sand. She brushed her hands and looked at him with a smile.
“I don’t want to make you anything, Tommy,” she said. “Go on and be a Coast Guard. My Dad’s aCoast Guard. Your father’s a Coast Guard. Being a Coast Guard is just as good as anything else and better than most. It all depends upon theman.”
“Well, I’m a man,” avowed Mr. Lupton. “And, anyway, you say that now, but after you’ve been away at school and all that you’ll look down on me. You won’t want anything to do with me, much. You won’t want me around. And I won’tbearound,” he concluded. Mermaid looked at him, briefly, and then glanced away. A slight uneasiness beset her. It was justified when Tommy suddenly reached over for her hand, taking it roughly.
“Mermaid,” he said. He stopped, and then went on, stammering a little: “You—you must know I love you—like everything,” he finished, helplessly. “You—of course I can’t expect you feel the same way——”
Mermaid, much disturbed, cut in: “No, I don’t, Tommy.”
“You oughtn’t to interrupt like that.” Mr. Lupton’s voice was boyishly irritated. “You—you wouldn’t interrupt Guy Vanton! I can’t expect you to listen to me, I suppose. Maybe I haven’t any right to speak.” He was immediately astonishingly grown-up again. “You’ve got to hear me—at least, I hope you’ll hear me,” he went on, imploringly. “I told you you couldn’t make anything of me but you could help me make something of myself.”
A sixteen-year-old girl, listening to such words, canhardly be blamed for a slight sense of self-importance. It is part of a girl’s education, or ought to be. Perhaps not at sixteen; but Mermaid had already experienced the self-importance that comes from handling rather risky material, even though it was only inert powder or colourless acid. This was one of those situations where there is no danger if the substances are not brought near to a spark. She therefore dampened her sympathy before mixing it with Tommy’s unreserve. She felt self-importance, but she did not abate her caution. More than one explosion in the laboratory had taught her humility. It is fair to say that she was not consciously experimenting and she was not heartless when she answered the boy.
“I don’t want to help you make something of yourself, Tommy. I don’t want to make anything of anybody exceptmyself. I’ll have all I can do, maybe, to do that,” she continued. “I—I like you, and that’s all. No, it isn’t; I’ll let you alone. There—that’s a good deal, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be, from a girl.”
Poor Tommy was in no condition to jest. He picked himself up, unhappily, from the sand. For a moment Mermaid’s mind ran back curiously to the story that, as a very little girl, she had heard her Uncle Ho tell of his boyhood. Nightly, through the pane of a little attic window high up in the hills of the middle of Long Island, he had seen the flash of the Fire Island Lighthouse,many miles distant, a beacon inviting the youngster to adventures in the great world whose shores it guarded. Mermaid, who was imaginative, had often re-lived those childish hours in the dark attic invaded by the beckoning ray. As she stood up now, gathering up her sweater and one or two books from the beach, it came home to her that Tommy Lupton, who was twenty, would never undergo such an experience. Poor Tommy was not imaginative; for him no beacon flamed anywhere; his whole idea of life was work well-performed, a wife and children (probably), and a comfortable home to visit in his hours off duty. And once, if fortune brought it about, once in a long lifetime of work and play and peacefulness, an heroic moment, one deed worthy of admiration, a single act of bravery or courage or devotion that would show the stuff that was in him—all the rest would be background. If the moment never came that would not matter. The only thing that mattered was to be ready for it if it should come.
Whereas Mermaid must be forever seeking moments and doing her part, when she was ready, to create them. There was a profound difference. Tommy stood on guard, his back to the rock; she would be advancing—retreating, too, sometimes, no doubt—but constantly gaining ground. There was young Dickie Hand with his unquestionable gifts; he would go forward, and go far if—if—he had the right incentive. And Guy Vanton.... Mermaid paused with a pang. In thisprocess of definition it struck upon her for the first time that Guy would neither go forward like herself or Dickie Hand nor stand steadfast like Tommy; he would shrink back. He would conduct a well-covered withdrawal, a leisurely, unobtrusive withdrawal; and it would be a retreat!
The pang was caused by the knowledge that of the three she most nearly loved Guy.
The summer spent itself with no further eventfulness except in the matter of ghosts.
Many people, perhaps most, do not believe in ghosts, but Mermaid did and so did her Dad. Uncle Ho was well acquainted with the principal ghosts peopling the beach. Keturah Hand ridiculed the idea of their existence. In general, those who had lived on the beach for any length of time were believers or of open mind; those whose visits to the beach had been confined chiefly to all-day picnics thought the legends nonsense.
“Captain Kidd,” stated Keturah, “may have buried a chest of treasure in the bald-headed dune with the very steep slope. I know my father used to tell of people digging there to recover it. Kidd was certainly round about here in theQuedagh Merchantor theAntonio; and everybody knows that he stopped at Gardiner’s Island and got supplies and presented Mrs. Gardiner with a bolt of—calico, wasn’t it? If he burieda chest in that dune over there, he, or his crew, certainly may have killed a gigantic negro, spilling his blood over the chest so that his wraith would guard the treasure. I think it likely that the crew did it. Seamen are always so superstitious.” Here she looked pointedly at her husband, an ex-sailor. “Hosea here, just because they used to cut a cross in the mast to bring a fair wind, started carving the bedpost the other day so the wind would blow from the southwest instead of the north. Kidd was, or had been, too much of a gentleman to entertain such low ideas; and if his crew killed the negro and spilled his blood I fancy he washed his hands of it.”
“Of the blood?” interpolated Ho Ha, innocently. His wife looked at him sharply and, without answering, went on:
“But when it comes to that negro’s spirit guarding the treasure, and when it comes to dark, swarthy Spanish ghosts with rings in their ears; and drowned sailors in flapping dungaree trousers, and ghosts of old sea captains, lost passengers, and Heaven knows who else, I, for one, don’t take the least stock in them.”
“Don’t you believe in the Duneswoman, Aunt Keturah?” inquired Mermaid.
“No, not in a Dunesman, nor in the Dunes children, unless you mean those eighteen children of old Jacob Biggles that were named after wrecks and ragged as ghosts,” Mrs. Hand retorted.
“But, Aunt, I’ve seen the Duneswoman,” protested Mermaid. “So has Dad.”
“All you’ve seen is a face and an arm,” corrected Mrs. Hand. “And I can’t find any one else who has seen as much as that. A face and an arm are not a ghost. They’re a—I don’t know what,” she finished.
“A hallucination,” Mermaid offered.
“A hallelujah. That’s what you say when you see one. You say ‘Hallelujah!’” came from Ho Ha.
“When I see one I may say something even more remarkable,” his wife responded, grimly.
It was several nights later when she awoke and uttered a long-drawn scream of terror.
“Hosea!” she cried, clutching her pillow. “Hosea, there’s someone at the window!”
Ho Ha leaped up manfully, went to the window, stuck his head through the netting which was tacked on as a screen, and drew it in again.
“Nonsense, Keturah,” he said, gently. “No one in sight except Captain Vanton standing on the dune in front of his house.” The Vanton cottage was a dune away, but a valley lay between. “You—why, you must have seen a ghost. Oh, ho-ho-ho!”
He communicated the nature of the disturbance to Mermaid in the next room, and when Cap’n Smiley, who slept at the station, came over for breakfast next morning, there was some chaffing about the ghost Keturah had seen.
“I certainly saw something,” said Mrs. Hand, emphatically. “And if it was a ghost it was the ghost of a live man. It had sidewhiskers exactly like Captain Vanton! You all know he prowls around at night. There’s something mighty queer about it; but then, everything about that man is queer. When it comes to his looking in my bedroom window, though, I think I shall do something.”
“Oh, pshaw, Keturah,” said her brother. “Vanton may be a peculiar fellow, but it’s not likely he walks by your windows. At two in the morning, anyway.”
“You seem to think I have nothing he might covet, John, but I have a few trinkets that anybody would set a value to!”
“Is that why you hugged your pillow?” inquired her husband, innocently. Keturah gave a little jump and looked about her nervously, a performance entirely contrary to her nature. As if she realized that she had betrayed herself she said, finally: “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything about it but I did bring my stones over here. I felt it wasn’t safe to leave ’em in Blue Port, and of course I sleep with ’em under my head.”
“Stones?” exclaimed Mermaid in mystification. “You don’t mean jewels, do you, Aunt Keturah?”
“Of course I mean jewels,” replied Mrs. Hand, with some asperity. “I’ve never told you anything about them—young people get their heads turned with such things—but I have every one of the stones that belongedto my aunt, Keturah Hawkins, Captain Hawkins’s wife; and I also have the stones that belong in settings in the curios and things in our parlour. There’s quite a lot of them, and if I weren’t used to a hard pillow I daresay I’d not be able to sleep a wink.”
“Oh, Aunt, may I see them?”
“I suppose you may, though it’s a lot of trouble to get them out. It’s risky, too, for some of the littler ones might roll away and get lost,” commented Mrs. Hand.
After breakfast she brought out her pillow and exposed the contents to the two men and the girl. John Smiley had seen the jewels, though not for many years. Ho Ha knew of their existence, but had never seen them and had supposed them secreted in Blue Port. To Mermaid their very existence was a revelation, and their beauty a greater one.
All kinds of jewels seemed to be represented, and there were also Eastern stones which none of the four could name. Sapphires were especially abundant, very large ones, of darkest blue. They had been Keturah Hawkins’s favourites, but Mermaid worshipped the emeralds which she knew she could have worn in her hair, and the diamonds which would have been no more brilliant than her blue eyes. There were wonderful pearls which needed to be worn to regain their finest lustre, and there were rubies of as dark a hue as the blood that must have been shed for them. The majorityof the gems were loose; the pearls were roped, however, and there were a few bracelets and other simple ornaments. All the settings were old and Eastern, suggestive of bare arms and bare necks—bare ankles, too. At least one of the ornaments was an anklet, they conjectured. Where Captain Hawkins had got them Keturah Hand was unable to say. He had, she supposed, picked them up at various times and in many places. He had visited, in his career, every port from Bombay to Tientsin; Ceylon, Madagascar, and South Africa; Peru he had touched at more than once. And he had sometimes done business by barter.
After they had admired the jewels Keturah, with Mermaid’s help, checked them off on a list she had and restored them to their hiding place.
The next night, after they had spent the day on the bay in Cap’n Smiley’s small sailboat, pillow and all were gone.
The loss of the jewels affected Keturah Hand strangely. At first it made her ill, but soon she was not only well, but better than she had been for a long time. She declared herself actually relieved, in a sense, to be rid of the stones. They had been a constant worriment for years. Now she did not have the care and anxiety of them—and she knew they were in safe hands.
“Any one who steals them is going to take pretty goodcare of them,” she declared. “And I think I know who stole them, and why.”
“Was it the ghost of one of Kidd’s pirates?” asked Mermaid, upon whom the theft of the jewels had seemed to have a more persistently depressing effect than it had had upon her aunt.
“He may have been one of Kidd’s pirates in a previous incarnation, and he may have been Kidd himself in an earlier life,” responded Keturah. “At present he’s a retired sea captain whose story wouldn’t look pretty in print, I suspect. Not that it will ever get printed,” she added. “He took them because——” She broke off. “I don’t know as I’m called upon to air my guesses,” she explained. “I’m not a detective in a detective story and I’ll not do any deducing out loud.”
Both Ho Ha and John Smiley were much upset by the disappearance of the stones, though both felt called upon to remonstrate with Keturah when she said, quite calmly, that Captain Vanton had got what he was after.
“If there’s the slightest shred of evidence that Captain Vanton took them, Hosea and I can handle him,” her brother told her. “You won’t let the theft be known, and you won’t hire a detective. You won’t tell us anything that points to Vanton.”
“Because I can’t,” cut in Keturah. “I’m not like a good many women. I don’t mistake my intuitions for evidence. I justfeelthat he has them—and I don’t much care if he has. I also feel that he won’t break themup and sell them, and that eventually they will get where they belong, as nearly as possible. Jewels aren’t like any other kind of property, and everybody who has much to do with them knows it. I’m not superstitious, but you don’t have to be superstitious to believe that a sort of curse attends the possession of most really valuable gems whenever they’re not in the right hands. They don’t rightly belong to me, never did. As I say, it’s no use to hand down jewels like other property. My aunt, to whom they belonged as rightfully as any one else, had no more sense than to leave them to me along with her land and furniture. I’ve always known they weren’t for me, but what could I do about it? Nothing, except wait for them to get into the right hands or throw them in the bay. Maybe they’ve got into the right hands now. If they haven’t, they’ll make whoever’s got ’em trouble enough until they do. If they belong to him it won’t matter how he came by them, or whether he deserves ’em, or whether he is a good man or a devil; but if they don’t belong in his hands, he may be a living saint and still be sorrier than the worst sinner.”
Ho Ha and Cap’n Smiley affected to treat this argument as foolishness, but something in it appealed to the mysticism in Mermaid. It fitted in with what she had observed of the illogicality of life, and she was readier than many an older person to believe that the world is ruled as much by sentiment as by law, and that life is aseries of compromises only for those who can’t accept its contradictions, and go on with their work.
She expressed this view to Guy Vanton without mentioning the loss of the stones.
It was Mermaid’s last day on the beach. In a week she would be in New York, taking special courses at Columbia and perhaps elsewhere. She was going in for cooking and chemistry, the chemistry of foods, and later she might take some medical courses leading to a study of the chemistry of digestion.
“The chemistry of the human body,” she said to Guy, “is a job for the next fifty years.”
Guy considered, lazily. “If you like it, I suppose,” he said, reflectively. “I wish I knew enough chemistry to analyze my father, for instance. Not his digestion, which is perfect, but his mind. But I think the best approach to the mind is still alchemy. The philosopher’s stone probably exists, only we’ve always been on the wrong track in hunting it. It would be an idea that would transmute base-mindedness to rare-mindedness, and not base metals to gold. My father needs that kind of a philosopher’s stone; perhaps I do, too. We’re very unlike, you know; often it seems to me as if he weren’t my father at all. Sometimes I think he hates me, but even if he did—there are ties hate can’t break.” His voice lowered and his queer eyes looked into the distance. “Some day,” he said, “some day, Mermaid, I’ll tell you, maybe—— You pulled me out once, youknow.” He looked at her with a painful appeal. His eyes were those of a wild fawn. An almost overpowering desire to answer that appeal swept through the girl, met the solid wall of her final doubt of him, and was broken to pieces. She gave his hand a friendly squeeze. “Good-bye,” she said, and left him.