Amzi was uncomfortable. It was not to hear her speak of drawn blinds in houses of the dead that he had summoned Phil for this interview. His sisters had asked him to reason with her, as they had often appealed to him before in their well-meant but tactless efforts to correct her faults, but she had evinced an accession of reasonableness that made him uneasy. She had changed from the impulsive, exasperating young creature he knew into an anxious, depressed woman in a mackintosh, whom he did not know at all! He breathed hard for a few minutes, angry at his sisters for bringing this situation to pass. It was absurd to tame a girl of Phil's spirit. He had enjoyed, more than anything in his life, his confidential relations with Phil. It was more for the fun of the thing than because there was any cause for it that a certain amount of mystery was thrown about such interviews as this. There was no reason on earth why Phil shouldn't have entered by the front door in banking-hours, or visited him in her grandfather's house where he lived. But he liked the joke of it. He liked all their jokes, and entered zestfully into all manner of conspiracies with her, to thediscomfiture of the aunts, to thwart their curbing of her liberties. He prided himself upon his complete self-control, and it was distinctly annoying to find that Phil's future, seen against a background plastered with her father's unpaid bills, caused a sudden hot anger to surge in his heart. Within the range of his ambitions and desires he did as he liked; and he had a hardened bachelor's fondness for having his way. He walked to the window and stared out at the street. It grew late and the rain was gathering volume as though preparing for a night of it.
A truck heavily loaded with boxes and crates of furniture moved slowly through Franklin Street toward the railway. Amzi was at once alert. He read much current history in the labels on passing freight, and often formed the basis for credits therefrom. Was it possible that one of the bank's customers was feloniously smuggling merchandise out of town to avoid writs of attachment? Such evils had been known. Phil jumped from the table and joined him at the window. She knew her Uncle Amzi's mental processes much better than he imagined; suspicion was writ large on his countenance.
"Humph!" she said. "That's only the stuff from the Samuel Holton house. Charlie and Ethel are moving to Indianapolis. That's some of the furniture they had in their town house here. I saw the crates in the yard this morning."
"I believe you're right, Phil; I believe you're right."
His eyes opened and shut several times quickly, as he assimilated this information. Then he recurred to Phil's affairs.
"Speaking of money, Phil, we'll have to do something about those unpaid bills. In a town like this everybody knows everybody's business—except yours and mine. We can't have your father's bills piling up; they've got to be paid. And this brings me to something I've meant to speak to you about for some time. In fact, I've just been waiting for a chance, but you're so confoundedly hard to catch. There's—a—some money—er—that is to say, Phil, as executorof your grandfather's estate, I hold some money, that—er—"
He coughed furiously, blew his nose, and made a fresh start.
"I'm going to open an account for you—your own money, understand!—and you can pay those bills yourself. We'll start with, say, five hundred dollars and you can depend on a hundred a month. It will be strictly—er—your money. Understand? You needn't say anything to your father about it. That's all of that."
He feigned sudden interest in the wet street, but Phil, whose eyes had not left him, tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
"Oh, no, you don't! You haven't a cent that belongs to me, and you know it, you splendid old fraud. And don't you try that game on me again or I'll stop speaking to you."
"Do you mean—" he began to bluster; "do you mean to say that I don't know my own business? Do you think I'm going to steal money from your grandfather's estate to give you? Why—"
"You weren't born to adorn the front row of successful liars, Amy. And even if you had a million or two lying round loose, you couldn't give me a cent of it; I wouldn't take it. It wouldn't be square to daddy; daddy's a gentleman, you know, and I couldn't do anything meaner than to take your money to pay his debts with. So there, you old dear, I've a good notion to muss you up, after all."
He again put the table between them, and stood puffing from the unwonted haste with which he had eluded her grasp. He had managed the matter badly, and as his hand, thrust into his coat pocket, touched a check he had written and placed there as a preliminary to this interview, a sheepish expression crossed his face.
"Well," he blurted, "I'd like to know what in thunder you're going to do! I tell you it's yours by right. I ought to have given it to you long ago."
"I'm skipping," said Phil, reaching down to button her raincoat. "We're going to Rose's for tea."
"Tea?"
Amzi's emphasis implied that in tea lay the sole importance of Phil's announcement; and yet, subjected to even the most superficial analysis, Mr. Montgomery's sensations were not in the least attributable to the thought of tea. Tea in the sense intended by Phil was wholly commonplace,—a combination of cold meat, or perhaps of broiled chicken, with hot biscuits, and honey or jam, or maybe canned peaches with cream. Considered either as a beverage or as a meal, tea contained no thrill; and yet perhaps the thought of tea at Miss Rose Bartlett's aroused in Amzi Montgomery's breast certain emotions which were concealed by his explosive emphasis. Phil, turning up the collar of her mackintosh, reaffirmed the fact of tea.
"You never come to my house for just tea, but you go to Rose's. You're always going to Rose's for tea," boomed Amzi.
"Daddy likes to go," added Phil, moving toward the door.
"I suppose he does," remarked Amzi, a little absently.
"By-by, Amy. Thanks, just the same, anyhow."
"Good-night, Phil!"
Phil lingered, her hand on the knob.
"Come over yourself, after tea. There may be music. Daddy keeps his 'cello over there, you know."
"His 'cello?"
It seemed that 'cello, like tea, was a word of deep significance. Amzi glared at Phil, who raised her head and laughed.
"Nonsense!" he ejaculated, though it was not clear just wherein the nonsense lay.
"Oh, your old flute is over there, too," said Phil, not without scorn.
Having launched this she laughed again and the door closed upon her with a bang. She hammered the glass withher knuckles to attract his attention, flung back her head as she laughed again, and vanished.
Amzi stared at the door's rain-splashed pane. The world was empty now that Phil had gone. He drew down the shabby green blind with a jerk and prepared to go home.
The Bartlett sisters lived in Buckeye Lane, a thoroughfare that ran along the college campus. Most of the faculty dwelt there, and the Bartlett girls (every one said "the Bartlett girls" just as every one said "the Montgomery girls": it was established local usage) were daughters of a professor who had died long ago.
Rose was the housekeeper, and a very efficient one she was, too. In all business transactions, from the purchase of vegetables to the collection of the dividends on their small inheritance, Rose was the negotiator and active agent. She was, moreover, an excellent cook; her reputation in this department of domestic science was the highest. And as two women can hardly be expected to exist on something like four hundred dollars a year (the sum reluctantly yielded by their patrimony), Miss Rose commercialized her genius by baking cakes, cookies, jumbles, and pies, if demanded. In Montgomery, where only Mrs. William Holton had ever kept more than one servant (though Fanny Fosdick had attempted higher flights), Miss Rose was an ever-ready help in times of domestic adversity to distracted housekeepers who found the maintenance of even one servant attended with the gravest difficulties.
Miss Nan was an expert needlewoman, and, like her sister, augmented their income by the labor of her hands. Her contributions to the pot were, indeed, much larger than Rose's. The clients she served were chiefly women of fastidious taste in these matters who lived in surrounding cities. Her exhibitions of cross-stitching, hemstitching, and drawn-work were so admirable as to establish a broad field for her enterprises. Her designs were her own, and she served ladies wholiked novel and exclusive patterns. These employments had proved in no wise detrimental to the social standing of the Bartlett girls. If Rose baked a cake for a wedding supper, this did not militate in the least against her eligibility as a guest of the occasion. And likewise Nan could unfold a napkin she had herself hemstitched for a consideration, without the slightest fear that any one would make invidious comments upon the fact.
In the matter of the respective ages of the sisters no stranger was ever informed of the exact fact, although every one knew. Judge Walters had established an unchangeable age for both of them. They were, the judge said, twenty-nine; though as they were not twins, and as he had persisted in this fallacy for almost a decade, it is difficult to see how they could both be permanently twenty-nine.
Not all the time of these ladies was spent in cooking and needlework. Miss Rose was a musician, who played the organ at Center Church and was usually the sympathetic accompanist at all concerts given by local talent. And, as though not to be outdone, Miss Nan quietly exercised the pen conjointly with the needle. Several editors in New York were quite familiar with the neat backhand of a lady they had never seen who sent them from an unheard-of town in Indiana the drollest paragraphs, the most amusing dialogues, and the merriest of jingles. Now and then Nancy Bartlett's name was affixed to an amusing skit in which various Montgomery people found their foibles published to the world, though with a proper discretion, and so amiably that no one could take offense. With the perversity of such communities, many declared that Miss Rose was more talented than Miss Nan, and that she could have written much better things than her sister if she had chosen. But what could have been more ridiculous than any attempt to arouse rivalry between sisters who dwelt together so contentedly, and who were the busiest and happiest women in town!
The Bartlett girls were the best friends the college boys had. If one of these ladies undertook, in the absence of amanservant, to drive the mower across their fifty feet of lawn, some youngster invariably appeared to relieve her of this task. Or if wood or coal were observed lying upon the walk in front of the Bartlett gate, it was always a question whether the Sigma Chis or the Phi Gamma Deltas would see the fuel first and hasten to conceal anything so monstrous, so revolting to the soul of young Greeks, in the Bartlett cellar. Amid all their vocations and avocations, the Bartletts moved tranquilly in an atmosphere of luxurious leisure. They were never flustered; their employments were a kind of lark, it seemed, never to be referred to except in the most jocular fashion. When Rose had entrusted to the oven a wedding-cake or a pan of jumbles she would repair to the piano for a ten-minute indulgence in Chopin. Similarly indifferent to fate, Nan at intervals in the day drew a tablet and fountain-pen from her sewing-table and recorded some whimsicality which she had seemingly found embedded in the mesh of a shopping-bag she was embellishing. And when, in due course, a funny-looking, canary-colored envelope carried this fragment to the desk of some bored phlegmatic editor, he would, as like as not, grin and scribble an order to the cashier for two dollars (or some such munificent sum) and pin it to the stamped "return" canary envelope, which would presently reach Number 98 Buckeye Lane, Montgomery, Indiana.
Phil Kirkwood hardly remembered a time when Number 98 had not been a safe port in the multitudinous squalls that beset her youth. The Bartletts were wholly human, as witness their pantry and garret—veritable magazines of surprises! Miss Rose was a marvel at cutting out silhouettes; Miss Nan would, with the slightest provocation, play bear or horse, crawling over the floor with Phil perched on her back blowing a horn. It was no wonder that Phil's vagrant steps turned instinctively toward Number 98. In the beginning her father used to seek her there; and having by this means learned the way, it was the most natural thing in the world for father and daughter to visit the Bartletts together.A man whose wife divorces him is entitled to some social consolations, and if tea and jam at the house of two maiden ladies of irreproachable character satisfies him, the community should be satisfied also. The gossips had never been able to decide which of the Bartlett girls was likelier to assume the rôle of Phil's stepmother. There were those who favored Rose. As Kirkwood played the 'cello, Rose to some observers seemed more plausible by reason of her musical talent. Others believed that it would be Nan, as Nan was "literary" and Kirkwood was a scholar, suspected of "writing," though just what he wrote no one was able to say. It had been said thousands of times that Amzi Montgomery must eventually marry one of the Bartletts, but here, too, opinion was divided as to which one would probably be so favored. Amzi had fluted in the Schumann Quartette, devoted to chamber music, but his asthma had broken up the club, and he now rarely essayed the instrument. Still, Amzi loved his joke, and Nan was a joker. So it was clear that either Kirkwood or Montgomery might with propriety marry either Rose or Nan. Whenever a drought seemed imminent in local gossip, these oases bubbled.
Phil's aunts were not unaware of the high favor in which their niece held the Bartletts; nor had they failed to speculate upon the chances of Kirkwood's remarrying. They resented the idea, chiefly because such action would cause a revival of the old scandal involving their sister, which they were pardonably anxious to have forgotten. Then, too, it was their solemn duty to keep their hands on Phil, who was a Montgomery and entitled to their consideration and oversight, and if Kirkwood should remarry, Phil would be relinquished to the care of a stepmother, a grievous thought at all times.
On this rainy October evening, tea was dispatched in the gayest humor in the little Bartlett dining-room. Rose and Phil disappeared in the kitchen to "do" the dishes while Nan and Kirkwood communed in the book-lined living-room.
"You've had a talking with Phil," said Kirkwood.
"Yes; she came in this morning, when Rose was out and I said several things to her that I ought to have said long ago. It wasn't easy to say them. But it's time for her to sober down a little, though I wish in my heart she could go on forever just as she is. It doesn't seem possible that she's a woman, with a future to think about."
"Phil's future—" murmured Kirkwood pensively.
"Your future and hers are bound up together; there's no escaping that."
"I'm afraid that's so! There are a thousand things I know should be done for her, but I don't grasp them. I seem unable to get hold of anything these days."
He looked at his hands, as though wondering at their impotence. They were bronzed and rough from the camp, but his sensitive nature was expressed in them. The gray showed in his beard and hair. Where the short beard did not hide his cheeks they were tanned. His blue serge suit had been freshly pressed; a polka-dot scarf was neatly tied under the points of a white-wing collar. He suggested an artist who had just returned from a painting trip in the open—a town man who wasn't afraid of the sun. If an artist one might have assumed that he was none too prosperous; his white cuffs were perceptibly frayed. Nan Bartlett scrutinized him closely, and there came into her eyes the look of one about to say something, long withheld and difficult to say.
She was a small, fair woman, with a becoming roundness of figure. Her yellow hair, parted evenly in the middle, curled prettily on her forehead. A blue shirt-waist with a turnover collar and a ready-made skirt spoke for a severe taste in dress. A gold-wire bracelet on her left wrist and a stickpin in her four-in-hand tie were her only ornaments. She had a fashion of raising her arm and shaking the bracelet back from her hand. When she did this, it was to the accompaniment of a slight turning of the head to one side and a dreamy look came into her large blue eyes. It was a pretty, graceful trick. She did not hesitate now that her mind was made up, but spoke quickly and crisply.
"You don't work hard enough; you are not making your time count. It isn't fair to Phil; it isn't fair to yourself."
"That's true; I know it," he replied, meeting her eyes quickly.
"And now's the time for you to change; Phil needs you. Phil's going to need a lot of things—money, for example. And you've reached a time of life when it's now or never."
The bracelet flashed back under her cuff. She looked at her wrist wonderingly as if surprised that the trinket had disappeared; then she glanced at Kirkwood, casually, as though she were in the habit of saying such things to him, which was not, however, the fact.
He straightened himself and his hands clenched as though to do battle at her behest.
"Mine's a wasted life; for years everything has seemed futile. I'm glad you spoke to me. I need to be brought up short."
Nan nodded. This was not a debatable question; undeniably he did need to be brought up with a sharp turn. It was in her mind that perhaps she had said enough; but she wished to make sure of it.
"Nobody can touch you at your best; it's your best that you've got to put into the struggle. It mustn't be said of you that you neglect business, and even refuse cases; and they do say that of you."
"I've grown careless and indifferent," he confessed; "but it's time for me to wake up. I can't see Phil heading for the poorhouse and that's where we're going."
"No doubt of it!" she assented. "Phil's aunts complain of you, and say that if you won't care for her you ought to turn her over to them. That's funny, on one side, and on the other it isn't. There's a good deal to support their attitude. Phil's needs are those of a girl ready to meet the world, and she will need money. And I've noticed that money is a shy commodity; it doesn't just come rolling uphill to anybody's doorstep."
Kirkwood knew perfectly well the elusiveness of money; itseemed less so now from Nan's way of stating the fact. When one needed a dollar one should go and find it; this was clearly Miss Nan's philosophy, and in her own affairs he knew that she had demonstrated its efficacy.
He lowered his voice as though about to touch upon a matter even more confidential than any that had engaged their attention. It was evidently something wholly pleasant that he wished to speak of; his eye brightened and his face flushed slightly. The look he bent upon her was of unmistakable liking.
"'The Gray Knight of Picardy' is booming. I saw a stack of him at Crosby's to-day: half a dozen people have asked me if I read it. It was put out so late in the spring that it's astonishing how it's carried through the summer. Some of the papers are just reviewing it—and the more deliberate journals are praising it. And when we were speaking of money matters a bit ago, I clean forgot that I have a check from the publisher that I'm going to hand you now."
He drew from his pocket a draft which she took eagerly and glanced at.
It was for two thousand dollars, payable to Nancy Bartlett. Nan slipped it quickly into the drawer of her sewing-table. As she drew her hand away, he caught and held it an instant. Nan did not look at him as she quietly freed herself. She ignored the act, though her cheek flushed scarlet. She minimized the incident by shaking down her bracelet.
"Half of that is yours," she said. "I will deposit it to-morrow and give you my check. You ought to have made the contract in your own name, but I never thought they would take it—much less that it would sell, or I should have insisted in the beginning."
"Well, I had faith in your three quarters of the work; mine is the poorest part of it."
"Your half made it possible,—the form and the planning. I never could have done a long-sustained thing like that; I'm a paragrapher, that's all."
"You're a humorist of a high order," he said warmly."It's the huge joke of the thing that is making people like it. Let me see, the publisher is advertising a quotation from some paper that has called it the funniest book in ten years."
"That's a stock phrase of the critics," said Nan; "they merely change the title of the book from year to year. But it's been fun doing a book that way and putting it out anonymously. Judge Walters spoke to me of it yesterday; said he had stayed up all night to finish it."
"It's going to take more ingenuity than I possess to hide the authorship; that's why I want you to carry the burden. The publisher says the public demand to know who Merlin Shepperd is. And three magazines want a short story by the author of 'The Gray Knight of Picardy.' I'll send you the letters. That enterprising Phil has an uncomfortable habit of running through my desk and I'm likely to forget to lock up these things. She thought I was working on a brief all last winter when I was doing my part of the 'Gray Knight.' But I turn the partnership over to you now—with all the assets and liabilities and the firm name and style. You are Merlin Shepperd and I am Kirkwood, attorney and counselor at law, over Bernstein's. You see," he added, smiling, "your lecture led right up to that. No more literary ventures for me!"
"Well, I'd forgotten the 'Gray Knight' for the moment; but in spite of him I believe you had better stick to the law."
"There's this, Nan," he said earnestly, looking at her with an intentness that caused her to move uneasily; "it would seem quite natural for a partnership like this to be extended further. This world would be a pretty bleak place without you. You know and understand that. And there is Phil; Phil needs you just as I do. I mean to start afresh at the law; I mean to make myself count. And I need you."
He rose and looked down at her. It was as though by this act he presented himself as a rehabilitated Thomas Kirkwood; a man ready to grapple with the world afresh for hersake. He bent over and touched lightly her hands clasped quietly upon her knee.
"Dear Nan: I love you, Nan," he said softly, and stepped back, waiting for her to speak.
She raised her head and their eyes met.
"Tom," she said, "you are the dearest of men; but that is not for you and me. It will never be for you and me. And please, Tom, because you are the finest of men, never speak of this again. You will promise, won't you?"
"No," he said, shaking his head slowly; "I will not promise. You have reasons and I think I know what they are. I want to talk to you soon, for this has been in my heart a long time. I meant to speak to you last spring. But now the need is greater. I not only need you, but Phil needs you."
She smiled at the mention of Phil.
"That's a poor argument. Phil really doesn't need any one but you. I should be afraid of spoiling dear, splendid Phil."
It was upon this that Rose and Phil came in from the kitchen. Rose was taller than her sister, a slender, handsome woman, with an air of distinction which dishwashing in no wise abated. She was one of those American women who wear an apron like a vestment—who, thevestis domesticaflung aside, adorn the parlor as charmingly as they grace the kitchen.
Phil began to whistle a tune, which Rose tried to identify for her by striking the chords.
"What are you two talking about?" asked Phil, turning from the piano.
"Discussing the origin of the pyramids," replied Nan, rising. "You and Rose must have settled something in all the time you took to the dishes. It was a noisy session, too. You must have been playing drop the teacup."
Phil clasped her hands dramatically, reciting:—
"A moment then,She poised upon the dishpan's utmost vergeThe heirloom teapot old, with flowers bedight.And with a cry—"
She paused, feigning forgetfulness. Her father rose quickly and caught up the imaginary fragment:—
"And with a cryAs when some greedy wight, on porridge keen,Gulps it, and bawleth loud to find it hot,—Screams for the cook and tuggeth at his sword—"
"Familiar," observed Rose dreamily from the piano. "Is it 'Pelleas and Etarre' or 'The Passing of Arthur'?"
"Nope. 'The Bold Buccaneer,' by the Honest Iceman of Mazoopa," answered Phil.
"And here he is now," said Nan as the front door boomed and rattled.
There was no bell at the Bartletts': but from the door hung a bass-drumstick, with which visitors were expected to thump. This had been a part of the equipment of a local band that had retired from business. In the dispersion of its instruments the drum had reached a second-hand store. Nan, with a keen eye for such chances, had bought and dismantled the drum, and used the frame as a stockade for fresh chirpers from her incubator. The drumstick seemed to have been predestined of all time to serve as a knocker.
"It's Amy. I told him to come," said Phil.
Her father's face fell almost imperceptibly. The company was complete as it was and much as he liked Amzi he resented his appearance at this hour. Rose went to the door.
"It may be Judge Walters. He's been trying to get over for some time to talk about that new book on hypnotism," said Nan.
It proved, however, to be Amzi. They heard him telling Rose in the entry that he was just passing and thought he would drop in.
"That will do for that, Amy," called Phil. "You told me you were coming."
"I told you nothing of the kind!" blustered Amzi.
"Then, sir, you didn't; youdid not!"
Amzi glared at them all fiercely. His cherubic countenancewas so benevolent, the kind eyes behind his spectacles so completely annulled his ferocity, that his assumed fierceness was absurd.
He addressed them all by their first names, and drew out a cigar. Kirkwood was smoking his pipe. Phil held a match for her uncle and placed a copper ash-tray on the table at his elbow. Rose continued her search for a piece of music, and Nan curled herself on the corner of a davenport that occupied one side of the room under the open bookshelves.
"This looks like a full session; first we've had for some time," remarked Amzi. "Been playing, Rose?"
"No; Phil's trying to remember a tune. Whistle it, Phil."
Phil whistled it, her eyes twinkling.
"Sounds like a dead march done in ragtime," suggested Nan, whose ear was said to be faulty.
"All the great masters will be done over pretty soon by the raggists," declared Phil.
"Spoken like the Philistine you are not, Phil," said Kirkwood. "What you were trying to whistle is the 'Lucia Sextette' upside down. Rose, let's have the 'Mozart Minuet' we used to play. We haven't had it for moons."
She played it, Phil turning the music. Then Kirkwood was reminded of the existence of his 'cello. Amzi watched him tuning it, noted the operation restlessly, and then rose demanding:—
"Nan, where's my flute? Seems to me I left it here the last time we played."
This was a joke. It had been in the house at least six years. Phil whistled a few bars from a current light opera, and pretended to be absorbed in an old etching of Beethoven that hung over the piano. She glanced covertly at her uncle, who knew perfectly well that Phil was laughing at him. Nan, meanwhile, produced the flute. It was in this fashion that the trio was usually organized.
"Bad night for asthma, but let's tackle some of the good old ones," said Amzi.
This, too, was part of a familiar formula, and Rose foundthe music. Soon Amzi's cheeks were puffing with the exertion of fluting the "Minuet," while Kirkwood bent to the 'cello. Nan and Phil became an attentive audience on the davenport, as often before. When Amzi dropped out (as he always did), Phil piped in with her whistle, and that, too, was the usual procedure. She whistled a fair imitation of the flute; she had a "good ear"; Rose said her "ear" was too good, and that this explained her impatience of systematic musical instruction. Amzi abused the weather and incidentally the flute; they essayed the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria" and the "Träumerei," with like failure on Amzi's part. Then Rose played, number after number, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, without pause. It was clear that the woman loved her music; that it meant a very great deal to her. Its significance was in the fine lines of her face, beautifully grave, but lighting wonderfully through passages that spoke to her with special meaning. Her profile was toward Kirkwood. He had, indeed, taken a seat that gave him a particular view that he fancied and his eyes wandered from her hands to her lovely, high-bred face. No one spoke between the numbers, or until Rose, sitting quiet a moment at the end, while the last chord died away, found her own particular seat by the white wooden mantel.
"I guess those chaps knew their business," observed Amzi. "And I guess you know yours, Rose. I don't know that you ever brought out that nocturne quite so well before. Eh, Tom?"
Kirkwood agreed with him. Rose had surpassed herself, in the opinion of the lawyer. Both men found pleasure in paying tribute to her talents. Amzi turned to Nan, who nodded acquiescence. The banker really loved music, and slipped away several times every winter to Chicago, to hear concerts or the opera. On occasions he had taken Kirkwood and Phil and they had made a great lark of it.
"What's this rumor about the Sycamore Traction being in trouble?" asked Nan.
Amzi rubbed his head. He had not come to the Bartletts'to discuss business, and the topic was not, moreover, one that interested him at the moment.
"There are a lot of papers on your desk about that, daddy," Phil remarked. "But I suppose those are office secrets."
There was, indeed, a telegram from a New York lawyer asking why Kirkwood had not replied to a certain letter. He glanced at her quickly, apparently disturbed that the matter had been mentioned. Her father's inattention to the letter of the New York lawyer had, independently of Nan Bartlett's reference to the traction company, caused Phil to make certain resolutions touching both her father and herself.
"I've got my hand on that, Phil. I've answered."
Phil saw that the subject of this correspondence, whose import she had scarcely grasped, was not to be brought into the conversation. She turned away as Amzi addressed her father in a low tone.
"Tom, as I remember, you made a report on that scheme before the bonds were sold. Do you mind telling me whether that was for the same crowd that finally took it up?"
"Yes; but they cut down the amount they undertook to float. Sam Holton sold a lot of the bonds along the line; a good many of them are held right here in this county."
"They are, indeed. It seemed a plausible thing for the home folks to own the securities of a company that was going to do so much for the town; they pulled that string hard. It was a scheme to draw the coin out of the old stocking under the fireplace. If it was good for widows and orphans out in Seattle and Bangor, why wasn't it good for 'em at home? And itisgood for the people at home if it's played straight. I've had an idea that these cross-country trolleys will have about the same history the steam roads had,—a good many of 'em will bust and the original investors will see their securities shrink; and there will be smash-ups and shake-downs and then in time the lines will pay. Just what's the trouble here, Tom, if you don't mind?"
"There's an apprehension that the November interestwon't be paid. The company's had some hard luck—a wreck that's piled up a lot of damage suits, for one thing; and in one or two counties the commissioners are trying to make them pay for new bridges—a question of the interpretation of the franchise. I gave warning of that possibility."
"Thunder! I hope it won't come to the worst. I didn't know you were keeping track of it."
"One of my old classmates at Williams is counsel for the Desbrosses Trust and Guaranty Company which is the trustee for the bondholders. I passed on the mortgage for them as to its local aspects. I'm going over to Indianapolis to meet him in a few days to determine what to do in event the interest is defaulted. The management has been unsatisfactory, and after five years the replacements are running ahead of the estimates."
"I wonder—" began Amzi; then he paused and rubbed his scalp. "I suppose my neighbor Bill is already out from under."
"I don't know," said Kirkwood soberly. "It was Sam who was the chief promoter."
"Sam was a smooth proposition. Thunder! I lost money when Sam died. I'd made a bet with myself that they'd pin something on him before he got through, but he died just out of spite to make me lose. Thunder! Bill makes strong statements."
The strength of the statements made by the First National Bank did not, however, seem to disturb Amzi. What he had learned from Kirkwood had not been in the nature of fresh information, but it had confirmed certain suspicions touching the Sycamore Traction Company. The Bartletts and Phil were talking quietly in a corner. Amzi rose and pulled down his percale waistcoat and buttoned the top button of his cutaway coat, in which he looked very much like a fat robin. He advanced toward the group in the corner.
"Nan," he said, "you didn't buy a Sycamore bond that time I told you not to, did you?"
Rose beat time for her sister mockingly, and they answered in singsong.
"We did not! We did not! But," Nan added, dropping her hands to her sides tragically, "but if we had, oh, sir!"
"If you had I should have bought it of you at a premium. It's hard work being a banker for women: they all want ten per cent a month."
"Paul Fosdick's things were all guaranteed ten per cent a year," remarked Rose.
They all waited for the explosion that must follow the mention of this particular brother-in-law. Nowhere else in town would any one have dared to bring Fosdick, who was believed to be his pet abomination, into a conversation. Even in Hastings he found a kind of joy; the presence of a retired Hamlet among the foliage of the family tree was funny now that he had got used to it; and Amzi had a sense of humor. This little company expected him to explode and he must not disappoint them. The color mounted to his bald dome and his eyes bulged.
"Thunder! Rose, play that jiggly funeral march of a marionette!"
"I refuse," said Rose, spreading her skirts on the divan, "to do anything so cruel!"
"And besides," said Nan, "I bought a share of stock in his brickyard."
"Nan Bartlett," said Amzi, planting himself before her, "I will give you a peck of parsnips for that share."
"Couldn't take advantage of you, Amzi; and we never eat parsnips. They're bad for the complexion."
"Thunder!" he snorted contemptuously.
"Thunder" was his favorite, almost his only, expletive, but his thunder was only a single boom without reverberations. His four auditors understood him perfectly, however. Fosdick was always "starting" something. He had even attempted to organize a new cemetery association, which, as Greenlawn was commodious, and as any amount of land adjacent made possible its indefinite expansion, Amziregarded as an absurd and unholy project. With Fosdick, Amzi had no business relations of any kind. He belonged to the Commercial Club, to be sure, but this was a concession on his part; he never attended any of its meetings. And he had, it was said, requested his enterprising brother-in-law to withdraw his patronage from the Montgomery Bank for reasons never wholly clear to the curious. Fosdick had talked about it in bitterness of spirit; Amzi had not. Amzi never talked of his business. He rarely lost a customer; and if a citizen transferred his account to the First or the Citizens' National, it was assumed that Amzi no longer cared particularly to have that individual on his ledgers. Such a transfer aroused in cautious minds a degree of suspicion, for horses rarely died in Amzi's stable.
"Thunder! It's time to go home. Guess the rain's stopped."
Amzi set out for home with the Kirkwoods. He was in capital spirits, and kept up a steady give and take with Phil. Just before reaching his own gate they passed Kirkwood's former home. Amzi's sisters persistently demanded that something be done about the abandoned house, which, with its neglected garden, was a mournful advertisement of their sister's ill-doings. It had been a shock to them to discover, a few years after her flight, that it had passed from her to Amzi and from him to Kirkwood. The consideration had been adequate; the county records told the story plainly. There was, of course, no reason why Lois should continue to own a house for which she had no use; but there was less reason why her former husband should acquire the property merely, as it seemed, from motives of sentiment. Every weed in the garden—and the crop was abundant—called attention to the blot on the Montgomery 'scutcheon. And if Kirkwood was silly enough to cling to the old home, while living in a rented house in a less agreeable neighborhood, there was no reason why he should refuse to lease it and devote the income to Phil's upbringing.
It was not a cheerful item of the urban landscape and thesorrow of Amzi's sisters that it should remain dolefully at their own thresholds was pardonable. The moon looked down at it soberly through dispersing clouds as though grieved by its disrepair. The venerable forest trees that gave distinction to the "old Montgomery place" had shaken their leaves upon this particular part and parcel of the elder Amzi's acres, and piled them upon the veranda steps. The gate, fastened to the post by a chain and padlock, sagged badly, and bulged upon the public walk.
Amzi stopped and pushed it back, causing the chain to rattle dolorously. Kirkwood watched him indifferently. Phil lent her uncle a hand. Amzi, panting from his efforts, ejaculated: "Thunder!" and a moment later they bade each other good-night under the gas lamp at his own gate.
Phil was not visible the next morning when at seven o'clock Kirkwood glanced about the house for her. She had indulged herself in the matter of rising since the high-school bell no longer regulated her habits, and her father had hardly expected to see her. There was no morning newspaper to read—he took a Chicago daily at his office—and he opened the windows and doors to admit the air. Domestic affairs interested Thomas Kirkwood little. During the years in which Phil was passed from aunt to aunt he had lived at the Morton House, and after establishing the new home that he might have her with him, one or another of the aunts had supervised his household, and at times, to his discomfiture, all had taken a hand at it.
This rented cottage where the Kirkwoods lived was in the least fashionable part of Main Street, beyond the commercial district and near the railroad. Trains thundered through a cut not far from the rear fence, and the cars of the Sycamore Traction Company rumbled by at intervals. The cottage was old but comfortable, and it was remarked that Kirkwood had probably chosen it for the reason that he could go to and from his office without passing his abandoned home. Phil liked living on Main Street. Her devotion to that thoroughfare had been a source of great pain to her aunts. Even as her Uncle Amzi absorbed local color from the steps of his bank, Phil was an alert agent in the field, on nodding terms with the motormen of the interurban cars, and with the jehus, who, cigarette in mouth and hat tipped on one side, drove the village hacks. Captain Joshua Wilson, who had been recorder of his county continuously since he lost a leg at Missionary Ridge, and who wrote a poem every yearfor the reunion of his regiment, had written certain lines for the "Evening Star" in which "P. K." was addressed as the Diana of Main Street. As to the soundness of his mythology there might be debate, but there was no question as to Phil's thorough identification with Main Street, all the way from her father's house, past the court-house, shops, and banks, out to the old Sugar Creek Bridge where the town became country without any warning whatever.
It was Judge Walters who first called her "Otherwise Phyllis." This was in Phil's school days before she passed from her aunts' custody. The judge delighted in Phil's battles with the aunts. Whenever his wife began to recount a day's occurrences at the supper-table, and the recital opened promisingly, it was the judge's habit to cut short her prefaces with, "Otherwise Phyllis—" and bid her hurry on to the catastrophe, sparing no tragic detail.
Kirkwood had never, from the day his wife left him, offered himself in the market-place as an object of sympathy. He had been a man of reserves at all times, and the sudden termination of his married life had merely driven him in further upon himself. If he was broken-hearted, the fragments were well hidden. He felt that he was a failure, and he saw men of less ability passing him in the race. Now and then he had roused himself under stress and demonstrated his unusual gifts by striking successes; but after one of these spurts he would relapse into an indifference to which he seemed increasingly ready to yield.
He had risen this morning with a new resolution, attributable to his talk with Nan Bartlett the night before. Even if he did not care for himself, there was always Phil to consider. And Phil was very much to consider. She had decided for herself that the high school had given her all the education she needed. Kirkwood had weighed the matter carefully and decided that she would not profit greatly by a college course—a decision which Phil had stoutly supported. Her aunts favored a year at a finishing school to tone down her rough edges, but having laid their plan before their brotherAmzi that gentleman had sniffed at it. What was the use of spoiling Phil? he demanded. "Thunder!" And there was no reason in the world why Phil should be spoiled.
Phil was not, in any view of the case, an ignorant person. She knew a great many things that were not embraced in the high-school curriculum. Her father harbored an old-fashioned love of the poets; which is not merely to say that at some time in his life he had run through them, but that he read poetry as one ordinarily reads novels, quite naturally and without shame. Something of his own love of poetry had passed to his daughter. He had so trained her that literature meant to Phil not printed pages, but veritable nature and life. Books were a matter of course, to be taken up and put down as the reader pleased, and nothing to grow priggish about. She had caught from him an old habit, formed in his undergraduate days, of a light, whimsical use of historical and literary allusions. She entered zestfully into the spirit of this kind of fooling; and, to his surprise, she had developed an astonishing knack of imitation and parody. Sometimes Kirkwood without preluding, would utter a line for Phil to cap; they even composed sonnets in this antiphonal fashion and pronounced them superior to the average magazine product. Phil had not only learned much from her father, but she had absorbed a great deal of lore at the Bartletts', where everything bookish was vitalized and humanized.
Kirkwood, hearing the creak of the swinging door between the pantry and dining-room,—a familiar breakfast signal,—chose with care a volume of Bagehot and carried it to the table which had been set, he imagined, by the "girl" selected by his sisters-in-law to carry on his establishment during the winter.
He helped himself to grapes, and was eating with his eye on a page of Bagehot when the door swung again and Phil piped a cheerful good-morning. She was an aproned young Phil and her face was flushed from recent proximity to the range. She described her entrance in lines she had fashioned for the purpose:—
"She cameWhile yet the jocund day was young, and fetchedIn hands but lightly singed upon the stoveThe coffee-pot, with muddy contents filled—"
Kirkwood, concealing his surprise at seeing her, took his cue:—
"And he, toying meanwhile with fruitage of the vine,To-wit the mellow grape, scarce breathed to seeThe nut-brown maid, and gasped, 'Where is the cook?'"
"Oh, the cook has went, to come down to the plain prose of it, daddy. There was one here yesterday, but one's dynastic aunts had picked her for her powers of observation and ready communication, so I fired her hence. And with that careless grace which I hope you find becoming in me I decided to run the shop all by my lonesome for a while. I thought I'd start with breakfast so that any poisons that may creep into the victuals will have time to work while the drug-stores are open. How long do you cook an egg, is it two minutes or two weeks?"
"This will never do," said Kirkwood gravely, watching her pour the coffee. "You shouldn't have discharged one cook until you had another."
"Tut! There's not enough to do in this house for two able-bodied women—and I'm one! Rose taught me how to make coffee yesterday, and toast and eggs are easy. Just look at that coffee! Real amber? It's an improvement for looks on what you've been brewing for yourself in camp. And I've been watching your winning ways with the camp frying-pan. Rose gave me a cook-book that is full of perfectly adorable ideas. Come up for lunch and I'll show you some real creations."
She slipped away into the kitchen and reappeared with toast and boiled eggs. She had cooked the eggs by the watch as Rose had instructed her. Her father relaxed the severity of his countenance to commend them. But he did not like Phil in this new rôle. The casting forth of the cook provided by the aunts would be regarded as an offense not lightly tobe passed by those ladies; but Phil had never appeared so wholly self-possessed. She poured coffee for herself, diluted it with hot water, buttered a slice of toast with composure, tasted it and complained that the grocer had sent rancid butter.
Kirkwood pushed aside his Bagehot. He did not know just how to deal with a daughter who, without the slightest warning, dispatched her cook and took upon herself the burden of the household. The coffee was to his liking; it was indubitably better than he had been used to; but the thing would not do. He must show Phil the error of her ways and lose no time about it.
"I'm sorry you didn't like the girl they sent you; but you must find another. There's no reason, of course, why you shouldn't choose for yourself; but it's not easy to find help in a town like this. I can't have you doing the housework. That must be understood, Phil."
"You're not having me; I'm having me, which is a very different thing. If you had driven me into the kitchen with loud, furious words, I should have rebelled—screamed, and made a terrible scene. But you did nothing of the kind. It happened in this wise. Glancing up quite by chance, as it were, you beheld me pouring coffee of my own brewing. Fatherly pride extinguished any feeling of shock or chagrin. You have smothered any class feeling that may linger in your aristocratic soul and are making a good bluff at enjoying the eating of your breakfast with the lady who cooked it. Could anything be more beautiful? The ayes seem to have it; the ayes have it, as I used to be fond of saying when I was boss of the Philomathean. I wish now I'd taken the domestic science course more seriously and spent less time in the gymnasium. But thus it is we live and learn."
Phil's tone made rebuke difficult. He loved her foolishness just as her Uncle Amzi did—just as every one did except her aunts, for whom the affected stiltedness of her speech was merely a part of her general deplorable unconventionality.
"Well, Phil, the idea of your cooking the meals for this establishment isn't debatable. You're overruled and the debate closed."
"Still harping on my daughter's cooking! Please, in current idiom, cut it out. Try marmalade on that too, too perfect toast."
He accepted marmalade and returned to the attack.
"You see, Phil, everything's different now. You've got to wake up to your social responsibilities."
"And be a perfect lady? I know. Amy got me into the back room of the bank yesterday and told me. One's aunts had bullied the old dear into springing the sad intelligence. Then Nan had already given me a session. And now you, too, Brutus, are about to lay the matter before me in a few crisp sentences. But why all this assumption that I'm not a real lady? There's a good deal of loose thinking on that subject, to use one of your own best phrases. If there is nothing more before the house—"
Phil had been studiously stuccoing her toast with marmalade, and she bit into it before looking at her father.
"You know perfectly well what I mean, Phil. This is a serious time in your life. You've got to adapt yourself to the ways of the world—the world of convention. You must consider yourself as a member of society. It's only in a limited sense that we can be individualists. And I can't have my daughter weighed down with such cares as these you threaten to assume. It would hurt me more than I can tell you if I believed it necessary. But it isn't necessary. None the less I know perfectly well that if it were necessary you would be equal to it—you are equal to anything you undertake. But I can't have you wasting yourself on such things."
"Daddy dear, this is getting terribly philosophical. Let us be really serious for a little bit. You know, we haven't much money, have we? Not very much, anyhow."
She had broached the matter as delicately as possible. It had been in her mind that she must speak to her fatherabout their affairs, but she had not thought the opportunity would offer so quickly. It was hard to say to him that she had undertaken to manage the housekeeping as an economical measure; that she knew he owed money that he had no immediate prospect of paying.
The hurt look that she had seen in his eyes sometimes was heartbreaking. When Phil was younger, she used to ask about her mother, but later she had never referred to her. Her aunts had, after their fashion, not been above using her mother to point a moral. In their lack of appreciation of the keenness of the child's intuitions or her eager imagination, they had established in her a belief that her mother was a bad woman: the facts spoke for themselves. And having had a bad mother it was incumbent upon Phil to choose her path with a particular care and to walk in it circumspectly.
Phil had, by this time, considered the case from the changing viewpoints natural to the young mind. In that rosy light through which a girl of fifteen is apt to view life,—the first realizations of sex, the age of the first novels,—Phil had not been free from the contemplation of her mother as a romantic figure. For a woman to forsake a husband for a lover was not without precedents. Phil had dreamed over this a good deal, in an impersonal sort of way, and the unknown mother had been glorified in scenes of renunciation, following nobly the high call of a greater love. By a swift transition her father assumed the sympathetic rôle in the domestic drama. She chanced upon novels in which the spurned husband was exalted to the shame of the dishonorable wife. Her father fitted well into this picture. She even added herself to thedramatis personæ, not without a sense of her value in the scene. But these were only passing phases. There was no morbid strain in Phil. Her father was the best of companions, and she was quick to recognize his fineness and gentleness and to appreciate his cultivation with its background of solid learning.
Phil's question startled her father. Money had never beendiscussed in the household, and this new gravity in his daughter's eyes troubled him. Phil's needs had been few; her demands had burdened him little. Her aunts had bought her clothes and sent him the bills. When he gave her money to spend, he never asked for an accounting, though he was often amused by the uses to which she put it; and sometimes he had been touched by her gifts at Christmas or on his birthdays, which ranged from a reckless investment in gay neckties to a set of some author whose definitive edition he had coveted—Shelley or Landor or Matthew Arnold. No; money was not a subject that had interested Phil, and her father found her direct question disconcerting.
"No, Phil. We are not rich—far from it. It's hardly possible for a lawyer to grow rich in a town like this. But I haven't been doing as well as I could lately. I've got to do better and I must be about it."
He drew himself up in his chair and glanced at his watch. It had stopped, and as the court-house clock boomed eight he set it. It was quite like him to allow his watch to run down.
"I was in your office yesterday, daddy, and I hope you won't mind, but I was straightening your desk and I couldn't help seeing some old bills. Several of them had been there a long time. My graduating dress hasn't been paid for—and some things like that. We must economize until those bills are paid. And I was thinking that you ought to get more money out of the building. Rents are going up on Main Street. I heard Paul Fosdick say so. You ought to raise the clothing store rent right away. I don't know of any easier way of getting money," she added drolly, "than by wringing it from the tenants."
She laughed, to make it easier for him.
"Yes; that's one way of doing it; only Bernstein had a long lease that expires—I'm not sure when it does expire—" he concluded, and the color deepened in his dark cheeks. It was his business to know when the lease on the property expired, and as though reminded by this lapse ofsimilar failures in other directions, he drew out his watch again and made sure that he had wound it.
"It expires," said Phil, "on the last day of this next December. I looked it up yesterday afternoon in that little memorandum book you keep in your desk."
"I guess that's right. I'm glad you mentioned it. I'll see Bernstein right away and ask him if he wants to renew the lease. I suppose I ought to coax a higher rent out of him, but he's been there a long time."
"Oh, he'll stand another fifty and be glad of it. His sign is on all the fences in the country—'Bernstein's—The Same Old Place.' It would cost him some money to change that. And you could cheer him up by painting the front of the building. The interurban is bringing a lot more business to Montgomery. I've been thinking we ought to do something about that third floor room where the photograph shop used to be. Bernstein has an upstairs room in the next building where his tailor imparts that final deft touch that adjusts ready-made garments to the most difficult figure. It would be handier for him to conduct the sartorial transformations in the chamber over his own gate, wouldn't it? And I don't think we need wait for that photographer to come back from the penitentiary or wherever he languisheth."
She was minimizing the significance of these suggestions—a significance that lay, she knew, in the fact of their coming from her—by lapsing into the absurdities with which she embellished her familiar talk. She pronounced "languisheth" with a prolongation of the last syllable that gave to it a characteristic touch of mockery.
"I'd been hoping he'd show up again and cart off his rubbish. But we've had some fun out of the gallery. If we rent it to Bernstein for his retouching mysteries, we shan't have any place to develop our negatives."
"That's so; but maybe we can retouch Bernstein for enough extra to get them done for us. It's the ducats, my lord, that move my fancy. The Bernsteins have grown almost disagreeably rich at the same old stand and it's abouttime the Kirkwoods were thrusting their talons into the treasure chest."
Sounds of disaster in the kitchen caused Phil to rise hastily and disappear through the swing doors. She returned calmly a moment later.
"Only the tea-kettle playing at being a geyser. When we get rich I'm going to have a gas range. They say it's the only way to cook and cook and be a lady still."
"That brings us back to cooking—" began her father.
"Not at all, daddy. The subject is dismissed forever. I'm going to have that Ethiop who does chores for us clean up the photograph gallery. I'll be down after while, to see how it looks."
She bade him good-bye at the front door, and went whistling about the further business of the morning. The sky was blue and the air warmed as the sun climbed into the heavens. Phil felt that she had conveyed to her father a sense of their imperative needs without wounding him. She was resolved to help him if she could. Her pride had been pricked by her Uncle Amzi's proffered aid, which she had carefully avoided mentioning to her father. She knew that it would have hurt him, and she had reasoned, much in the fashion of Nan Bartlett, that her father owed it to himself to exercise his unquestioned gifts to reëstablish himself in his profession. As he left her and walked toward the street, she was aware that he strode away more quickly than was his wont.
Phil's morning was not eventless. The telephone jingled three times, as three aunts demanded to know why she had parted with the maid-of-all-work they had installed in the Kirkwood kitchen. Aunt Josie was censorious and Aunt Fanny mildly remonstrative; Aunt Kate sought light as to the reason for the cook's early passing, as she was anxious to try her herself. Phil disposed of these calls with entire good humor. Then a senior, between lectures at the college, asked her if she would go driving with him Sunday afternoon. The senior, in the security of his fraternity house, prolonged theconversation. As this was Thursday and there was never any imperative need in Montgomery for making engagements so far ahead, the senior was exercising unjustifiable precaution. Phil declined the invitation. Her aunts had repeatedly warned her against college boys. A daughter of the house of Montgomery was not to waste herself upon students, a lawless body of whom no one knew anything in particular save that they seized every opportunity to murder sleep for reputable citizens.
Phil employed the telephone to order of the grocer and butcher, made beds, swept rooms, and sat down with a new magazine, dropped at the door by the postman, to run her eyes over the pictures. One or two things she was sure her father would like; a sketch of Massenet she must call to Rose Bartlett's attention. She planned luncheon and began the peeling of potatoes with a page of Keats propped on the table beside her—a trick she had learned at the Bartletts'. "Endymion" need suffer nothing from proximity to potatoes, though it should be said that Phil's paring would have distressed a frugal housekeeper.
While thus employed a step sounded on the brick walk, and a young man knocked at the open door without glancing in. He chewed a straw as he observed the chimneys of the adjoining house, and Phil, sitting by the kitchen table, paused in her paring to make sure of his identity. Then she placed her pan of potatoes on the table and crossed quickly to the door.
"Good-morning, madam. Would you like—"
He extended two apples as samples. Phil glanced at them with interest. They were not the best of apples, as any one could see. Fred Holton removed his hat and pulled the straw from his mouth.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Kirkwood," he said, with a gravity that was not mitigated by a slight quivering of Phil's lips as she continued to ignore their earlier acquaintance. "I didn't know this was your house or I shouldn't have come in."
"Then it's a good thing you didn't know," replied Phil. "If you're selling apples you have to try all the houses you come to. Not to go into every gate wouldn't be business."
"Well, I suppose that's so," observed Holton doubtfully, letting one of the apples fall. Phil picked it up with the quick reach of a shortstop. She ignored his apologies for failing to recover it himself, and examined the apple critically.
"If you haven't any better apples in your wagon than this, you're not likely to sell many," Phil commented. "This one's spotted and it's a safe guess that a worm nestles within. You ought to pick out the best for samples."
"They're not a very good lot," confessed Holton. "It's an old orchard and it hasn't had any attention. I'm going to put out some new trees next year."
"That's a good idea," Phil observed reflectively. "I've noticed that they've been planting pears and apples in several places around there. Uncle Amy got a good first crop this year from his young orchard. But he had a man spray the bugs off. There are a lot of things to do to an orchard. The land Uncle Amy turned into an orchard runs right up to your place, and it must be the same kind of land. But it isn't as easy as it looks—apples isn't."
"Apples isn't?" he repeated soberly.
"Oh, cheer up, that's a joke! I know applesaren't!"
The young man smiled.
"Mineisn't, I'm afraid, from what you say about them."
"I think maybe that speck isn't a wormhole, after all," said Phil, subjecting the apple she still held to another scrutiny. "You might give us a half a bushel of these. My ambitions lead me toward apple pie, and if it doesn't come out well I can blame your apples."
He smiled again, and frank admiration shone in his eyes as they surveyed Phil with more assurance.
"If you really want some of these I'll bring them in. Half a bushel?"
"That will be enough," replied Phil succinctly. She rubbed the apple with the corner of her blue-and-white apron, chose a spot that inspired confidence, and bit into it. She waited for the effect absently and puckered her lips. "It's a cooker. What's the name of the brand?"
"Give it up."
"Then I'll tell you. It's a 'Liza Browning. You'd better learn the names of apples before you go much further in the business. Any farmhand can tell you. Uncle Amy's taught me about twenty. What's the price of this precious fruit?"
"Oh, I couldn't charge you for these, you know. You see—"
"Then I won't take them—nary an apple! You bring in those apples and I'll pay you just the same price you ask everybody else."
Her attention was attracted by a black cat moving along the alley fence with noble unconcern. Phil stepped out upon the brick walk, drew back her arm and threw the apple. It struck the fence immediately beneath the cat, which vanished on the alley side.
"Good shot. You almost got him!"
"Almost nothing!" said Phil scornfully. "You didn't suppose I wanted to hit the wretch, did you? He's an old pal of mine and would be lonesome if I didn't scare him to death occasionally."
Holton brought the apples in a sack which he emptied into a basket Phil found for the purpose. His absence had been prolonged. To measure half a bushel of apples is not ordinarily a serious matter, but in this instance the vendor chose fastidiously. The fruit that went into the sack was beyond question the best in the wagon.
"How much?" asked Phil, surveying her purchase, purse in hand.
"Oh, about a quarter."
She handed him a fifty cent piece.
"Please don't try that again—not here! I've beentelephoning the grocery and apples about like those are a dollar a bushel. Good-morning!"
"Good-morning, Miss Kirkwood."
He looked at her intently, laughed, threw the sack over his shoulder and went out, holding the coin in his hand.