When the company had gone,—"I thought they neverwouldgo!" Nannie said—she rushed at her brother. "Blair!"
The boy flung up his head proudly. "She told you, did she?"
"You're engaged!" cried Nannie, ecstatically.
Blair started. "Why!" he said. "So I am! I never thought of it." And when he got his breath, the radiant darkness of his eyes sparkled into laughter. "Yes,I'm engaged!" He put his hands into his pockets and strutted the length of the room; a minute later he stopped beside the piano and struck a triumphant chord; then he sat down and began to play uproariously, singing to a crashing accompaniment:
"'… lived a miner, a forty-niner, With his daughter Clementine! Oh my darling, oh mydarling—'"
—the riotous, beautiful voice rang on, the sound overflowing through the long rooms, across the hall, even into the dining-room. Harris, wiping dishes in the pantry, stopped, tea-towel in hand, and listened; Sarah Maitland, at her desk, lifted her head, and the pen slipped from her fingers. Blair, spinning around on the piano-stool, caught his sister about her waist in a hug that made her squeak. Then they both shrieked with laughter.
"But Blair!" Nannie said, getting her breath; "shall you tell Mamma to-night?"
Blair's face dropped. "I guess I won't tell anybody yet," he faltered; "oh, that awful dinner!"
As the mortification of an hour ago surged back upon him, he added to the fear of telling his mother a resentment that would retaliate by secrecy. "I won't tell her at all," he decided; "and don't you, either."
"I!" said Nannie. "Well, I should think not. Gracious!"
But though Blair did not tell his mother, he could not keep the great news to himself; he saw David the next afternoon, and overflowed.
David took it with a gasp of silence, as if he had been suddenly hit below the belt; then in a low voice he said, "You—kissedher. Did she kiss you?"
Blair nodded. He held his head high, balancing it a little from side to side; his lips were thrust out, his eyes shone. He was standing with his feet well apart, his hands deep in his pockets; he laughed, reddening to his forehead, but he was not embarrassed. For once David's old look of silent, friendly admiration did not answer him; instead there was half-bewildered dismay. David wanted to protest that it wasn't—well, it wasn'tfair. He did not say it; and in not saying it he ceased to be a boy.
"I suppose it was when you and she went off after dinner? You needn't have been so darned quiet about it! What's the good of being so—mum about everything? Why didn't you come back and tell? You're not ashamed of it, are you?"
"A man doesn't tell a thing like that," Blair said scornfully.
"Well!" David snorted, "I suppose some time you'll be married?"
Blair nodded again. "Right off."
"Huh!" said David; "your mother won't let you. You are only sixteen.Don't be an ass."
"I'll be seventeen next May."
"Seventeen! What's seventeen? I'm pretty near eighteen, and I haven't thought of being married;—at least to anybody in particular."
"You couldn't," Blair said coldly; "you haven't got the cash."
David chewed this bitter fact in silence; then he said, "I thought you and Elizabeth were kind of off at dinner. You didn't talk to each other at all. I thought you were both huffy; and instead of that—" David paused.
"That damned dinner!" Blair said, dropping his love-affair for his grievance. Blair's toga virilis, assumed in that hot moment in the hall, was profanity of sorts. "David, I'm going to clear out. I can't stand this sort of thing. I'll go and live at a hotel till I go to college; I'll—"
"Thought you were going to get married?" David interrupted him viciously.
Blair looked at him, and suddenly understood,—David was jealous! "Gorry!" he said blankly. He was honestly dismayed. "Look here," he began, "I didn't know thatyou—"
"I don't know what you're talking about," David broke in contemptuously; "if you thinkIcare, one way or the other, you're mistaken. It's nothing to me. 'By"; and he turned on his heel.
It was a hot July afternoon; the sun-baked street along which they had been walking was deep with black dust and full of the clamor of traffic. Four big gray Flemish horses, straining against their breastplates, were hauling a dray loaded with clattering iron rods; the sound, familiar enough to any Mercer boy, seemed to David at that moment intolerable. "I'll get out of this cursed noise," he said to himself, and turned down a narrow street toward the river. It occurred to him that he would go over the covered bridge, and maybe stop and get a tumbler of ice-cream at Mrs. Todd's. Then he would strike out into the country and take a walk; he had nothing else to do. This vacation business wasn't all it was cracked up to be; a man had better fun at school; he was sick of Mercer, anyhow.
He had reached Mrs. Todd's saloon by that time, and through the white palings of the fence he had glimpses of happy couples sitting at marble-topped tables among the marigolds and coreopsis, taking slow, delicious spoonfuls of ice-cream, and gazing at each other with languishing eyes. David felt a qualm of disgust; for the first time in his life he had no desire for ice-cream. A boy like Blair might find it pleasant to eat ice-cream with a lot of fellows and girls out in the garden of a toll-house, with people looking in through the palings; but he had outgrown such things. The idea of Blair, at his age, talking about being in love! Blair didn't know whatlovemeant. And as for Elizabeth, how could she fall in love with Blair? He was two months younger than she, to begin with. "No woman ought to marry a man younger than she is," David said; he himself, he reflected, was much older than Elizabeth. That was how it ought to be. The girl should always be younger than the fellow. And anyway, Blair wasn't the kind of man for a girl like Elizabeth to marry. "He wouldn't understand her. Elizabeth goes off at half-cock sometimes, and Blair wouldn't know how to handle her. I understand her, perfectly. Besides that, he's too selfish. A woman ought not to marry a selfish man," said David. However, it made no difference to him whom she married. If Elizabeth liked that sort of thing, if she found Blair—who was only a baby anyhow—the kind of man she could love, why then he was disappointed in Elizabeth. That was all. He was not jealous, or anything like that; he was just disappointed; he was sorry that Elizabeth was that kind of girl. "Very, very sorry," David said to himself; and his eyes stung…. (Ah, well; one may smile; but the pangs are real enough to the calf! The trouble with us is we have forgotten our own pangs, so we doubt his.) … Yes, David was sorry; but the whole darned business was nothing to him, because, unlike Blair, he was not a boy, and he could not waste time over women; he had his future to think of. In fact, he felt that to make the most of himself he must never marry.
Then suddenly these bitter forecastings ceased. He had come upon some boys who were throwing stones at the dust-grimed windows of an unused foundry shed. Along the roof of the big, gaunt building, dilapidated and deserted, was a vast line of lights that had long been a target for every boy who could pick up a pebble. Glass lay in splinters on the slope of sheet-iron below the sashes, and one could look in through yawning holes at silent, shadowy spaces that had once roared with light from swinging ladles and flowing cupolas; but there were a few whole panes left yet. At the sound of crashing glass, David, being a human boy, stopped and looked on, at first with his hands in his pockets; then he picked up a stone himself. A minute later he was yelling and smashing with the rest of them; but when he had broken a couple of lights, curiously enough, desire failed; he felt a sudden distaste for breaking windows,—and for everything else! It was a sort of spiritual nausea, and life was black and bitter on his tongue. He was conscious of an actual sinking below his breast-bone. "I'm probably coming down with brain fever," he told himself; and he had a happy moment of thinking how wretched everybody would be when he died. Elizabeth would beverywretched! David felt a wave of comfort, and on the impulse of expected death, he turned toward home again…. However, if he should by any chance recover, marriage was not for him. It occurred to him that this would be a bitter surprise to Elizabeth, whose engagement would of course be broken as soon as she heard of his illness; and again he felt happier. No, he would never marry. He would give his life to his profession—it had long ago been decided that David was to be a doctor. But it would be a lonely life. He looked ahead and saw himself a great physician—no common doctor, like that old Doctor King who came sometimes to see his mother; but a great man, dying nobly in some awful epidemic. When Elizabeth heard of his magnificent courage, she'd feel pretty badly. Rather different from Blair. How much finer than to be merely looking forward to a lot of money that somebody else had made! But perhaps that was why Elizabeth liked Blair; because he was going to have money? And yet, how could she compare Blair with,—well,anyfellow who meant to work his own way? Here David touched bottom abruptly. "How can a fellow take money he hasn't earned?" he said to himself. David's feeling about independence was unusual in a boy of his years, and it was not altogether admirable; it was, in fact, one of those qualities that is a virtue, unless it becomes a vice.
When he was half-way across the bridge, he stopped to look down at the slow, turbid river rolling below him. He stood there a long time, leaning on the hand-rail. On the dun surface a sheen of oil gathered, and spread, and gathered again. He could hear the wash of the current, and in the railing under his hand he felt the old wooden structure thrill and quiver in the constant surge of water against the pier below him. The sun, a blood-red disk, was slipping into the deepening haze, and on either side of the river the city was darkening into dusk. All along the shore lights were pricking out of the twilight and sending wavering shafts down into the water. The coiling smoke from furnace chimneys lay level and almost motionless in the still air; sometimes it was shot with sparks, or showed, on its bellying black curves, red gleams from hidden fires below.
David, staring at the river with absent, angry eyes, stopped his miserable thoughts to watch a steamboat coming down the current. Its smoke-stacks were folded back for passing under the bridge, and its great paddlewheel scarcely moved except to get steerageway. It was pushing a dozen rafts, all lashed together into a spreading sheet. The smell of the fresh planks pierced the acrid odor of soot that was settling down with the night mists. On one of the rafts was a shanty of newly sawed pine boards; it had no windows, but it was evidently a home, for a stove-pipe came through its roof, and there was a woman sitting in its little doorway, nursing her baby. David, looking down, saw the downy head, and a little crumpled fist lying on the white, bare breast. The woman, looking up as they floated below him, caught his eye, and drew her blue cotton dress across her bosom. David suddenly put his hand over his lips to hide their quiver. The abrupt tears were on his cheeks. "Oh—Elizabeth!" he said. The revolt, the anger, the jealousy, were all gone. He sobbed under his breath. He had forgotten that he had said it made no difference to him,—"not the slightest difference." It did make a difference! All the difference in the world…. "Oh, Elizabeth!"… The barges had slid farther and farther under the bridge; the woman and the child were out of sight; the steamboat with its folded smoke-stacks slid after them, leaving a wake of rocking, yellow foam; the water splashed loudly against the piers. It was nearly dark there on the footpath, and quite deserted. David put his head down on his arms on the railing and stood motionless for a long moment.
When he reached home, he found his mother in the twilight, in the little garden behind the house. David, standing behind her, said carelessly, "I have some news for you, Materna."
"Yes?" she said, absorbed in pinching back her lemon verbena.
"Blair is—is spoony over Elizabeth. Here, I'll snip that thing for you."
Mrs. Richie faced him in amazement. "What! Why, but they are both children, and—" she stopped, and looked at him. "Oh—David!" she said.
And the boy, forgetting the spying windows of the opposite houses, dropped his head on her shoulder. "Materna—Materna," he said, in a stifled voice.
Nobody except David took the childish love-affair very seriously, not even the principals—especially not Elizabeth. . . .
David did not see her for a day or two, except out of the corner of his eye when, during the new and still secret rite of shaving—for David was willing to shed his blood to prove that he was a man—he looked out of his bedroom window and saw her down in the garden helping her uncle feed his pigeons. He did not want to see her. He was younger than his years, this honest-eyed, inexpressive fellow of seventeen, but for all his youth he was hard hit. He grew abruptly older that first week; he didn't sleep well; he even looked a little pale under his freckles, and his mother worried over his appetite. When she asked him what was the matter, he said, listlessly, "Nothing." They were very intimate friends these two, but that moment on the bridge marked the beginning of the period—known to all mothers of sons—of the boy's temporary retreat into himself. . . . When a day or two later David saw Elizabeth, or rather when she, picking a bunch of heliotrope in her garden, saw him through the open door in the wall, and called to him to come "right over! as fast as your legs can carry you!"—he was, she thought, "very queer." He came in answer to the summons, but he had nothing to say. She, however, was bubbling over with talk. She took his hand, and, running with him into the arbor, pulled him down on the seat beside her.
"David! Where on earth have you been all this time? David,have you heard?"
"I suppose you mean—about you and Blair?" he said. He did not look at her, but he watched a pencil of sunshine, piercing the leaves overhead, faintly gilding the bunches of green grapes that had a film of soot on their greenness, and then creeping down to rest on the heliotrope in her lap.
"Yes!" said Elizabeth. "Isn't it the most exciting thing you ever heard? David, I want to show you something." She peered out through the leaves to make sure that they were unobserved. "It's a terrific secret!" she said, her eyes dancing. Her fingers were at her throat, fumbling with the fastening of her dress, which caught, and had to be pulled open with a jerk; then she drew half-way from her young bosom a ring hanging on a black silk thread. She bent forward a little, so that he might see it. "I keep it down in there so Cherry-pie won't know," she whispered. "Look!"
David looked—and looked away.
Elizabeth, with a blissful sigh, dropped the ring back again into the warm whiteness of that secret place. "Isn't it perfectly lovely? It's my engagement ring! I'm so excited!"
David was silent.
"Why, David Richie! You don't care a bit!"
"Why, yes, I do," he said. He took a grape from a bunch beside him, rubbed the soot off on his trousers, and ate it; then blinked wryly. "Gorry, that's sour."
"You—don't—like—my engagement!" Elizabeth declared slowly. Reproachful tears stood in her eyes; she fastened her dress with indignant fingers. "I think you are perfectly horrid not to be sympathetic. It's very important to a girl to get engaged and have a ring."
"It's very pretty," David managed to say.
"Pretty? I should say it was pretty! It cost fifty dollars! Blair said so. David, what on earth is the matter! Don't you like me being engaged?"
"Oh, it's all right," he evaded. He shut his eyes, which were still watering from that sour grape, but even with closed eyes he saw again that soft place where Blair's ring hung, warm and secret; the pain below his own breast-bone was very bad for a minute, and the hot fragrance of the heliotrope seemed overpowering. He swallowed hard, then looked at one of Mr. Ferguson's pigeons, walking almost into the arbor. The pigeon stopped, hesitated, cocked a ruby eye on the two humans on the wooden seat, and fluttered back into the sunny garden.
"Why, youmind!" Elizabeth said, aghast.
"Oh, it's nothing to me," David managed to say; "course, I don't care. Only I didn't know you liked Blair so much; so it was a—a surprise," he said miserably.
Elizabeth's consternation was beyond words. There was a perceptible moment before she could find anything to say. "Why, I never dreamed you'd mind! David, truly, I like you best of any boy I know;—only, of course now, being engaged to Blair, I have to like him best?"
"Yes that's so," David admitted.
"Truly, I like you dreadfully, David. If I'd supposed you'd mind—But, oh, David, it's so interesting to be engaged. I really can't stop. I'd have to give him back my ring!" she said in an agonized voice. She pressed her hand against her breast, and poor David's eyes followed the ardent gesture.
"It's all right," he said with a gulp.
Elizabeth was ready to cry; she dropped her head on his shoulder and began to bemoan herself. "Why on earth didn't yousaysomething? How could I know? How stupid you are, David! If I'd known you minded, I'd just as lief have been engaged to—" Elizabeth stopped short. She sat up very straight, and put her hand to the neck of her dress to make sure it was fastened. At that moment a new sense was born in her; for the first time since they had known each other, her straightforward eyes—the sexless eyes of a child—faltered, and refused to meet David's. "I think maybe Cherry-pie wants me now," she said shyly, and slipped away, leaving David mournfully eating green grapes in the arbor. This was the last time that Elizabeth, uninvited, put her head on a boy's shoulder.
A week later she confided to Miss White the great fact of her engagement; but she was not so excited about it by that time. For one thing, she had received her uncle's present of a locket, so the ring was not her only piece of jewelry; and besides that, since her talk with David, being "engaged" had seemed less interesting. However, Miss White felt it her duty to drop a hint of what had happened to Mr. Ferguson: had it struck him that perhaps Blair Maitland was—was thinking about Elizabeth?
"Thinking what about her?" Mr. Ferguson said, lifting his head from his papers with a fretted look.
"Why," said Miss White, "as I am always at my post, sir, I have opportunities for observing; in fact, I shouldn't wonder if they were—attached." Cherry-pie would have felt that a more definite word was indelicate. "Of course I don't exactlyknowit," said Miss White, faithful to Elizabeth's confidence, "but I recall that when I was a young lady, young gentlemen did become attached—to other young ladies."
"Love-making? At her age? I won't have it!" said Robert Ferguson. The old, apprehensive look darkened in his face; his feeling for the child was so strangely shadowed by his fear that "Life would play another trick on him," and Elizabeth would disappoint him some way, that he could not take Cherry-pie's information with any appreciation of its humor. "Send her to me," he said.
"Mr. Ferguson," poor old Miss White ventured, "if I might suggest, it would be well to be very kind, because—"
"Kind?" said Robert Ferguson, astonished; he gave an angry thrust at the black ribbon of his glasses that brought them tumbling from his nose. "Was I unkind? I will see her in the library after supper."
Miss White nibbled at him speechlessly. "If he is severe with her, I don't know what shewon'tdo," she said to herself.
But Mr. Ferguson did not mean to be severe. When Elizabeth presented herself in his library, the interview began calmly enough. Her uncle was brief and to the point, but he was not unkind. She and Blair were too young to be engaged,—"Don't think of it again," he commanded.
Elizabeth looked tearful, but she did not resent his dictum;—David's lack of sympathy had been very dampening to romance. It was just at the end that the gunpowder flared.
"Now, remember, I don't want you to be foolish Elizabeth."
"I don't think being in love is foolish, Uncle."
"Love! What do you know about love? You are nothing but a silly little girl."
"I don't think I'm very little; and Blair is in love with me."
"Blair is as young and as foolish as you are. Even if you were older, I wouldn't allow it. He is selfish and irresponsible, and—"
"I think," interrupted Elizabeth, "that you are very mean to abuse Blair behind his back. It isn't fair." Her uncle was perfectly dumfounded; then he went into harsh reproof. Elizabeth grew whiter and whiter and the dimple in her cheek lengthened into a long, hairline. "I wish I didn't live with you. I wish my mother were alive.Shewould be good to me!"
"Your mother?" said Robert Ferguson; his involuntary grunt of cynical amusement touched the child like a whip. Her fury was appalling. She screamed at him that she hated him! She loved her mother! She was going to marry Blair the minute she was grown up! Then she whirled out of the room, almost knocking over poor old Miss White, whose "post" had been anxiously near the key-hole.
Up-stairs, her rage scared her governess nearly to death: "My lamb! You'll get overheated, and take cold. When I was a young lady, it was thought unrefined to speak so—emphatically. And your dear uncle didn't mean to be severe; he—"
'"Dear uncle'?" said Elizabeth, "dear devil! He hurt my feelings. He made fun of my mother!" As she spoke, she leaped at a photograph of Robert Ferguson which stood on her bureau, and, doubling her hand, struck the thin glass with all her force. It splintered, and the blood spurted from her cut knuckles on to her uncle's face.
Miss White began to cry. "Oh, my dear, my dear, try to control yourself, or you'll do something dreadful some day!" Cherry-pie's efforts to check Elizabeth's temper were like the protesting twitterings of a sparrow in a thunder-storm. When she reproved her now, the furious little creature, wincing and trying to check the bleeding with her handkerchief, did not even take the trouble to reply. Later, of course, the inevitable moment of penitence came; but it was not because she had lost her temper; loss of temper was always a trifling matter to Elizabeth; it was because she had been disrespectful to her uncle's picture. That night, when all the household was in bed, she slipped down-stairs, candle in hand, to the library. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of herself; she took it out of the frame, tore it into little bits, stamped on it, grinding her heel down on her own young face; then she took off the locket Mr. Ferguson had given her,—a most simple affair of pearls and turquoise; kissed it with passion, and looked about her: where should it be offered up? The ashes in the fireplace? No; the house-maid would find it there. Then she had an inspiration—the deep well of her uncle's battered old inkstand! Oh, to blacken the pearls, to stain the heavenly blue of the turquoise! It was almost too frightful. But it was right. She had hurt his feelings by saying she wished she didn't have to live with him, and she had insulted his dear, dear,dearpicture! So, with a tearful hiccup, she dropped the locket into the ink-pot that stood between the feet of a spattered bronze Socrates, and watched it sink into a black and terrible grave. "I'm glad not to have it," she said, and felt that she had squared matters with her conscience.
As for Robert Ferguson, he did not notice that the photograph had disappeared, nor did he plunge his pen deep enough to find a pearl, nor understand the significance of the bound-up hand, but the old worry about her came back again. Her mother had defended her own wicked love-affair, with all the violence of a selfish woman; and in his panic of apprehension, poor little Elizabeth's defense of Blair seemed to be of the same nature. He was so worried over it that he was moved to do a very unwise thing. He would, he said to himself, put Mrs. Maitland on her guard about this nonsense between the two children.
The next morning when he went into her office at the Works, he found the place humming with business. As he entered he met a foreman, just taking his departure with, so to speak, his tail between his legs. The man was scarlet to his forehead under the lash of his employer's tongue. It had been administered in the inner room; but the door was open into the large office, and as Mrs. Maitland had not seen fit to modulate her voice, the clerks and some messenger-boys and a couple of traveling-men had had the benefit of it. Ferguson, reporting at that open door, was bidden curtly to come in and sit down. "I'll see you presently," she said, and burst out into the large office. Instantly the roomful of people, lounging about waiting their turn, came to attention. She rushed in among them like a gale, whirling away the straws and chaff before her, and leaving only the things that were worth while. She snapped a yellow envelope from a boy's hand, and even while she was ripping it open with a big forefinger, she was reading the card of an astonished traveling-man: "No, sir; no, sir; your bid was one-half of one per cent, over Heintz. Your people been customers so long that they thought that I—? I never mix business and friendship!" She stood still long enough to run her eye over the drawing of a patent, and toss it back to the would-be inventor. "No, I don't care to take it up with you. Cast it for you? Certainly. I'll cast anything for anybody"; and the man found his blueprint in his hand before he could begin his explanation. "What? Johnson wants to know where to get the new housing to replace the one that broke yesterday? Tell Johnson that's what I pay him to decide. I have no time to do his business for him—my own is all I can attend to! Mr. Ferguson!" she called out, as she came banging back into the private office, "what about that ore that came in yesterday?" She sat down at her desk and listened intently to a somewhat intricate statement involving manufacturing matters dependent upon the quality of certain shipments of ore. Then, abruptly she gave her orders.
Robert Ferguson, making notes as rapidly as he could, smiled with satisfaction at the power of it all. It was as ruthless and as admirable as a force of nature. She would not pause, this woman, for flesh and blood; she was as impersonal as one of her own great shears that would bite off a "bloom" or a man's head with equal precision, and in doing so would be fulfilling the law of its being. Assuredly she would stop Blair's puppy-love in short order!
Business over, Sarah Maitland leaned back in her chair and laughed. "Did you hear me blowing Dale up? I guess he'll stay put for a while now! But I'm afraid I was angry," she confessed sheepishly; "and there is nothing on earth so foolish as to be angry at a fool."
"There is nothing on earth so irritating as a fool," he said.
"Yes, but it's absurd to waste your temper on 'em. I always say to myself, 'Sarah Maitland, if he had your brains, he'd have your job.' That generally keeps me cool; but I'm afraid I shall never learn to suffer Mr. Doestick's friends, gladly. Read your Bible, and you'll know where that comes from! I tell you, friend Ferguson, you ought to thank God every day that you weren't born a fool; and so ought I. Well what can I do for you?"
"I am bothered about Elizabeth and Blair."
She looked at him blankly for a moment. "Elizabeth? Blair? What aboutElizabeth and Blair?"
"It appears," Robert Ferguson said, and shoved the door shut with his foot, "it appears that there has been some love-making."
"Love-making?" she repeated, bewildered.
"Blair has been talking to Elizabeth," he explained. "I believe they call themselves engaged."
Mrs. Maitland flung her head back with a loud laugh. At the shock of such a sound in such a place, one of the clerks in the other room spun round on his stool, and Mrs. Maitland, catching sight of him through the glass partition, broke the laugh off in the middle. "Well, upon my word!" she said.
"Of course it's all nonsense, but it must be stopped."
"Why?" said Mrs. Maitland. And her superintendent felt a jar of astonishment.
"They are children."
"Blair is sixteen," his mother said thoughtfully; "if he thinks he is in love with Elizabeth, it will help to make a man of him. Furthermore, I'd rather have him make love than make pictures;—that is his last fancy," she said, frowning. "I don't know how he comes by it. Of course, my husband did paint sometimes, I admit; but he never wanted to make a business of it. He was no fool, I can tell you, if he did make pictures!"
Robert Ferguson said dryly that he didn't think she need worry about Blair. "He has neither industry nor humility," he said, "and you can't be an artist without both of 'em. But as for this love business, they are children!"
Mrs. Maitland was not listening. "To be in love will be steadying him while he's at college. If he sticks to Elizabeth till he graduates, I sha'n't object."
"I shall object."
But she did not notice his protest.
"She has more temper than is quite comfortable," she ruminated; "but, after all, to a young man being engaged is like having a dog; one dog does as well as another; one girl does as well as another. And it isn't as if Blair had to consider whether his wife would be a 'good manager,' as they say; he'll have enough to waste, if he wants to. He'll have more than he knows what to do with!" There was a little proud bridling of her head. She, who had never wasted a cent in her life, had made it possible for her boy to be as wasteful as he pleased. "Yes," she said, with the quick decision which was so characteristic of her, "yes, he can have her."
"No, he can't," said Elizabeth's uncle.
"What?" she said, in frank surprise.
"Blair will have too much money. Inherited wealth is the biggest handicap a man can have."
"Too much money?" she chuckled; "your bearings are getting hot, ain't they? Come, come! I'm not so sure you need thank God. How can a man have too much money? That's nonsense!" She banged her hand down on the call-bell on her desk. "Evans! Bring me the drawings for those channels."
"I tell you I won't have it," Robert Ferguson repeated.
"I mean the blue-prints!" Mrs. Maitland commanded loudly; "you have no sense, Evans!" Ferguson got up; she had a way of not hearing when she was spoken to that made a man hot along his backbone. Robert Ferguson was hot, but he meant to have the last word; he paused at the door and looked back.
"I shall not allow it."
"Good-day, Mr. Ferguson," said his employer, deep in the blue-prints.
Elizabeth's uncle need not have concerned himself so seriously about the affairs of Elizabeth's heart. The very next day the rift between the lovers began:
"What on earth have you done to your hand?" asked Blair.
"I cut it. I was angry at Uncle, and broke his picture, and—"
Blair shouted with laughter. "Oh, Elizabeth, what a goose you are! That's just the way you used to bite your arm when you were mad. You always did cut off your nose to spite your face! Where is your locket?"
"None of your business!" said Elizabeth savagely. It was easy to be savage with Blair, because David's lack of interest in her affairs had taken the zest out of "being engaged" in the most surprising way. But she had no intention of not being engaged! Romance was too flattering to self-love to be relinquished; nevertheless, after the first week or two she lapsed easily, in moments of forgetfulness, into the old matter-of-fact squabbling and the healthy unreasonableness natural to lifelong acquaintance. The only difference was that now, when she and Blair squabbled, they made up again in new ways; Blair, with gusts of what Elizabeth, annoyed and a little disgusted, called "silliness"; Elizabeth, with strange, half-scared, wholly joyous moments of conscious power. But the "making-up" was far less personal than the fallings-out; these, at least, meant individual antagonisms, whereas the reconciliations were something larger than the girl and boy—something which bore them on its current as a river bears straws upon its breast. But they played with that mighty current as thoughtlessly as all young creatures play with it. Elizabeth used to take her engagement ring from the silk thread about her neck, and, putting it on her finger, dance up and down her room, her right hand on her hip, her left stretched out before her so that she could see the sparkle of the tiny diamond on her third finger. "I'm engaged!" she would sing to herself.
"'Oh, isn't it joyful, joyful, joyful!'
"Blair's in love with me!" The words were so glorious that she rarely remembered to add, "I'm in love with Blair." The fact was, Blair was merely a necessary appendage to the joy of being engaged. When he irritated her by what she called "silliness," she was often frankly disagreeable to him.
As for Blair, he, too, had his ups and downs. He swaggered, and threw his shoulders back, and cast appraising eyes on women generally, and thought deeply on marriage. But of Elizabeth he thought very little. Because she was a girl, she bored him quite as often as he bored her. It was because she was a woman that there came those moments when he offended her; and in those moments she had but little personality to him. In fact, their love-affair, so far as they understood it, apart from its elemental impulses which they did not understand, was as much of a play to them as the apple-tree housekeeping had been.
So Mr. Ferguson might have spared himself the unpleasant interview with Blair's mother. He recognized this himself before long, and was even able to relax into a difficult smile when Mrs. Richie ventured a mild pleasantry on the subject. For Mrs. Richie had spoken to Blair, and understood the situation so well that she could venture a pleasantry. She had sounded him one evening in the darkness of her narrow garden.
David was not at home, and Blair was glad of the chance to wait for him—so long as Mrs. Richie let him lounge on the grass at her feet. His adoration of David's mother, begun in his childhood, had strengthened with his years; perhaps because she was all that his own mother was not.
"Blair," she said, "of course you and I both realize that Elizabeth is only a child, and you are entirely too wise to talk seriously about being engaged to her. She is far too young for that sort of thing. Of courseyouunderstand that?"
And Blair, feeling as though the sword of manhood had been laid on his shoulder, and instantly forgetting the smaller pride of being "engaged," said in a very mature voice, "Oh, certainlyIunderstand."
If, in the dusk of stars and fireflies, with the fragrance of white stocks blossoming near the stone bench that circled the old hawthorn-tree in the middle of the garden—if at that moment Mrs. Richie had demanded Elizabeth's head upon a charger, Blair would have rejoiced to offer it. But this serene and gentle woman was far too wise to wring any promise from the boy, although, indeed, she had no opportunity, for at that moment Mr. Ferguson knocked on the green door between the two gardens and asked if he might come in and smoke his cigar in his neighbor's garden. "I'll smoke the aphids off your rose-bushes," he offered. "You are very careless about your roses!"
"A 'bad tenant'?" said Mrs. Richie, smiling. And poor Blair picked himself up, and went sulkily off.
But Mrs. Richie's flattering assumption that Blair and she looked at things in the same way, and David's apparent indifference to Elizabeth's emotions, made the childish love-affair wholesomely commonplace on both sides. By mid-September it was obvious that the prospect of college was attractive to Blair, and that the moment of parting would not be tragic to Elizabeth. The romance did not come to a recognized end, however, until a day or two before Blair started East. The four friends, and Miss White, had gone out to Mrs. Todd's, where David had stood treat, and after their tumblers of pink and brown and white ice-cream had been emptied, and Mrs. Todd had made her usual joke about "good-looking couples," they had taken two skiffs for a slow drift down the river to Willis's.
When they were rowing home again, the skiffs at first kept abreast, but gradually, in spite of Miss White's desire to be "at her post," and David's entire willingness to hold back, Blair and Elizabeth appropriately fell behind, with only a little shaggy dog, which Elizabeth had lately acquired, to play propriety. In the yellow September afternoon the river ran placidly between the hills and low-lying meadows; here and there, high on a wooded hillside, a maple flamed among the greenness of the walnuts and locusts, or the chestnuts showed the bronze beginnings of autumn. Ahead of them the sunshine had melted into an umber haze, which in the direction of Mercer deepened into a smudge of black. Elizabeth was twisting her left hand about to get different lights on her ring, which she had managed to slip on her finger when Cherry-pie was not looking. Blair, with absent eyes, was singing under his breath:
"'Oh! I came to a river, an' I couldn't get across;Sing "Polly-wolly-doodle" all the day!An' I jumped upon a nigger, an' I thought he was a hoss;Sing Polly-wolly—'
"Horrid old hole, Mercer," he broke off, resting on his oars and letting the boat slip back on the current.
"I like Mercer!" Elizabeth said, ceasing to admire the ring. "Since you've come home from boarding-school you don't like anything but the East." She began to stroke her puppy's head violently. Blair was silent; he was looking at a willow dipping its swaying finger-tips in the water.
"Blair! why don't you answer me?"
Blair, plainly bored, said, "Well, I don't like hideousness and dirt."
"David likes Mercer."
"I bet Mrs. Richie doesn't," Blair murmured, and began to row lazily.
"Oh, Mrs. Richie!" cried Elizabeth; "you think whatever she thinks is about perfect."
"Well, isn't it?"
Elizabeth's lip hardened. "I suppose you think she's perfect too?"
"I do," Blair said.
"She thinks I'm dreadful because, sometimes, I—get provoked,"Elizabeth said angrily.
"Well, you are," Blair agreed calmly.
"If I am so wicked, I wonder you want to be engaged to me!"
"Can't I like anybody but you?" Blair said, and yawned.
"You can like everybody, for all I care," she retorted. Blair whistled, upon which Elizabeth became absorbed in petting her dog, kissing him ardently between his eyes.
"I hate to see a girl kiss a dog," Blair observed;
"'Sing Polly-wolly-doo—'"
"Don't look, then," said Elizabeth, and kissed Bobby again.
Blair sighed, and gave up his song. Bobby, obviously uncomfortable, scrambled out of Elizabeth's lap and began to stretch himself on the uncertain floor of the skiff.
"Lie down!" Blair commanded, and poked the little creature, not ungently, with his foot. Bobby yelped, gave a flying nip at his ankle, and retreated to the shelter of his mistress's skirts. "Confound that dog!" cried Blair.
"You are a horrid boy!" she said, consoling her puppy with frantic caresses. "I'm glad he bit you!"
Blair, rubbing his ankle, said he'd like to throw the little wretch overboard.
Well, of course, Elizabeth being Elizabeth, the result was inevitable. The next instant the ring lay sparkling in the bottom of the boat. "I break my engagement! Take your old ring! You are a cruel, wicked boy, and I hate you—so there!" "I must say I don't see why you should expect me to enjoy being bitten," Blair said hotly. "Well, all right; throw me over, if you want to. I shall never trust a woman again as long as I live!" He began to row fiercely. "I only hope that darned pup isn't going mad."
"I hope heisgoing mad," said Elizabeth, trembling all over, "and I hope you'll go mad, too. Put me on shore this instant!"
"Considering the current, I fear you will have to endure my society for several instants," Blair said.
"I'd rather be drowned!" she cried furiously, and as she spoke, even before he could raise his hand to stop her, with Bobby in her arms she sprang lightly over the side of the boat into the water. There was a terrific splash—but, alas! Elizabeth, in preferring death to Blair's society, had not calculated upon the September shallows, and even before the horrified boy could drop his oars and spring to her assistance, she was on her feet, standing knee-deep in the muddy current.
The water completely extinguished the fires of wrath. In the hubbub that followed, the ejaculations and outcries, Nannie's tears, Miss White's terrified scolding, Blair's protestations to David that it wasn't his fault—through it all, Elizabeth, wading ashore, was silent. Only at the landing of the toll-house, when poor distracted Cherry-pie bade the boys get a carriage, did she speak:
"I won't go in a carriage. I am going to walk home."
"My lamb! you'll take cold! You mustn't!"
"You look like the deuce," Blair told her anxiously; and David blurted out, "Elizabeth, you can't walk home; you're a perfect object!" Elizabeth, through the mud trickling over her eyes, flashed a look at him:
"That'swhy I'm going to walk!" And walk she did—across the bridge, along the street, a dripping little figure stared at by passers-by, and followed by the faithful but embarrassed four—by five, indeed, for Blair had fished Bobby out of the water, and even stopped, once in a while when no one was looking, to give the maker of all this trouble a furtive and apologetic pat. At Elizabeth's door, in a very scared frame of mind lest Mr. Ferguson should come out and catch him, Blair attempted to apologize.
"Don't be silly," Elizabeth said, muddy and shivering, but just; "it wasn't your fault. But we're not engaged any more." And that was the end of the love-story!
Elizabeth told Cherry-pie that she had "broken with Blair Maitlandforever!" Miss White, when she went to make her report of the dreadful event to Mr. Ferguson, added that she felt assured the young people had got over their foolishness. Elizabeth's uncle, telling the story of the ducking to David's horrified mother, said that he was greatly relieved to know that Elizabeth had come to her senses.
But with all the "tellings" that buzzed between the three households, nobody thought of telling Mrs. Maitland. Why should they? Who would connect this woman of iron and toil and sweat, of noise and motion, with the sentimentalities of two children? She had to find it out for herself.
At breakfast on the morning of the day Blair was to start East, his mother, looking over the top of her newspaper at him, said abruptly:
"Blair, I have something to say to you before you go. Be at my office at the Works at ten-fifteen." She looked at him amiably, then pushed back her chair. "Nannie! Get my bonnet. Come! Hurry! I'm late!"
Nannie, running, brought the bonnet, a bunch of rusty black crepe, with strings frayed with many tyings. "Oh, Mamma," she said softly, "do let me get you a new bonnet?"
But Mrs. Maitland was not listening. "Harris!" she called loudly, "tellWatson to have those roller figures for me at eleven. And I want thelinen tracing—Bates will know what I mean—at noon without fail.Nannie, see that there's boiled cabbage for dinner."
A moment later the door banged behind her. The abrupt silence was like a blow. Nannie and Harris caught their breaths; it was as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the air; there was a minute before any one breathed freely. Then Blair flung up his arms in a wordless protest; he actually winced with pain. He glanced around the unlovely room; at the table, with its ledgers and clutter of unmatched china—old Canton, and heavy white earthenware, and odd cups and saucers with splashing decorations which had pleased Harris's eye; at the files of newspapers on the sideboard, the grimy walls, the untidy fireplace. "Thank Heaven! I'm going off to-day. I wish I need never come back," he said.
"Oh, Blair, that is a dreadful thing to say!"
"It may be dreadful, but that's the way I feel. I can't help my feelings, can I? The further mother and I are apart, the better we love each other. Well! I suppose I've got to go and see her bossing a lot of men, instead of sitting at home, like a lady;—and I'll get a dreadful blowing up. Of course she knows about the engagement now, thanks to Elizabeth's craziness."
"I don't believe she knows anything about it," Nannie tried to encourage him.
"Oh, you bet old Ferguson has told her," Blair said, gloomily. "Say, Nannie, if Elizabeth doesn't look out she'll get into awful hot water one of these days with her devil of a temper—and she'll get other people into it, too," he ended resentfully. Blair hated hot water, as he hated everything that was unbeautiful. "Mother is going to take my head off, of course," he said.
But Sarah Maitland, entirely ignorant of what had happened, had no such intention; she had gone over to her office in a glow of personal pleasure that warmed up the details of business. She intended to take Blair that morning through the Works,—not as he had often gone before, tagging after her, a frightened child, a reluctant boy—but as the prince, formally looking over the kingdom into which he was so soon to come! He was in love: therefore he would wish to be married; therefore he would be impatient to get to work! It was all a matter of logical and satisfactory deduction. How many times in this hot summer, when very literally she was earning her son's bread by the sweat of her brow, had she looked at Elizabeth and Blair, and found enjoyment in these deductions! Nobody would have imagined it, but the big, ungainly womandreamed!Dreamed of her boy, of his business success, of his love, of his wife,—and, who knows? perhaps those grimy pink baby socks began to mean something more personal than the missionary barrel. It was her purpose, on this particular morning, to tell him, after they had gone through the Works, just where, when he graduated, he was to begin. Not at the bottom!—that was Ferguson's idea. "He ought to start at the bottom, if he is ever to get to the top," Ferguson had barked. No, Blair need not start at the bottom; he could begin pretty well up at the top; and he should have a salary. What an incentive that would be! First she would tell him that now, when he was going to college, she meant to increase his allowance; then she would tell him about the salary he would have when he got to work. How happy he would be! For a boy to be in love, and have all the pocket-money he wanted, and a great business to look forward to; to have work—work! the finest thing in the world!—all ready to his hand,—what more could a human being desire? At the office, she swept through the morning business with a speed that took her people off their feet. Once or twice she glanced at the clock; Blair was always unpunctual. "He'll getthatknocked out of him when he gets into business," she thought, grimly.
It was eleven before he came loitering across the Yards. His mother, lifting her head for a moment from her desk, and glancing impatiently out of the dirt-begrimed office window, saw him coming, and caught the gleam of his patent-leather shoes as he skirted a puddle just outside the door. "Well, Master Blair," she said to herself, flinging down her pen, "you'll forget those pretty boots when you get to walking around your Works!"
Blair, dawdling through the outer office, found his way to her sanctum, and sat down in a chair beside her desk. He glanced at her shrinkingly, and looked away. Her bonnet was crooked; her hair was hanging in wisps at the back of her neck; her short skirt showed the big, broad-soled foot twisted round the leg of her chair. Blair saw the muddy sole of that shoe, and half closed his eyes. Then remembering Elizabeth, he felt a little sick; "she's going to row about it!" he thought, and quailed.
"You're late," she said; then, without stopping for his excuses, she proceeded with the business in hand. "I'm going to increase your allowance."
Blair sat up in astonishment.
"I mean while you're at college. After that I shall stop the allowance entirely, and you will go to work. You will go on a salary, like any other man." Her mouth clicked shut in a tight line of satisfaction.
The color flew into Blair's face. "Why!" he said. "You are awfully good, Mother. Really, I—"
"I know all about this business of your engagement to Elizabeth," Mrs. Maitland broke in, "though you didn't see fit to tell me about it yourself." There was something in her voice that would have betrayed her to any other hearer; but Blair, who was sensitive to Mrs. Richie's slightest wish, and careful of old Cherry-pie's comfort, and generously thoughtful even of Harris—Blair, absorbed in his own apprehensions, heard no pain in his mother's voice. "I know all about it," Mrs. Maitland went on. "I won't have you call yourselves engaged until you are out of college, of course. But I have no objection to your looking forward to being engaged, and married, too. It's a good thing for a young man to expect to be married; keeps him clean."
Blair was struck dumb. Evidently, though she did not know what had happened, she did know that he had been engaged. Yet she was not going to take his head off! Instead she was going to increase his allowance because, apparently, she approved of him!
"So I want to tell you," she went on, "though you have not seen fit to tell me anything, that I'm willing you should marry Elizabeth, as soon as you can support her. And you can do that as soon as you graduate, because, as I say, when you are in the Works, I shall pay you"—her iron face lighted—"I shall pay youa salary!a good salary."
More money! Blair laughed with satisfaction; the prospect soothed the sting of Elizabeth's "meanness"—which was what he called it, when he did not remember to name it, darkly, "faithlessness." He was so comforted that he had, for the first time in his life, an impulse to confide in his mother; "Elizabeth got provoked at me"—there was a boyish demand for sympathy in his tone; "and—"
But Mrs. Maitland interrupted him. "Come along," she said, chuckling. She got up, pulled her bonnet straight, and gave her son a jocose thrust in the ribs that made him jump. "I can't waste time over lovers' quarrels. Patch it up! patch it up! You can afford to, you know, before you get married. You'll get your innings later, my boy!" Still chuckling at her own joke, she slammed down the top of her desk and tramped into the outer office.
Blair turned scarlet with anger. The personal familiarity extinguished his little friendly impulse to blurt out his trouble with Elizabeth, as completely as a gust of wind puts out a scarcely lighted candle. He got up, his teeth set, his hands clenched in his pockets, and followed his mother through the Yards—vast, hideous wastes, scorching in the September heats, full of endless rows of pig, piles of scrap, acres, it seemed to Blair, of slag. The screeching clamor of the place reeked with the smell of rust and rubbish and sour earth, and the air was vibrant with the clatter of the "buggies" on the narrow-gauge tracks that ran in a tangled network from one furnace to another. Blair, trudging along behind his mother, cringing at the ugliness of everything about him, did not dare to speak; he still felt that dig in the ribs, and was so angry he could not have controlled his voice.
Mrs. Maitland walked through her Iron Works as some women walk through a garden:—lovingly. She talked to her son rapidly; this was so and so; there was such and such a department; in that new shed she meant to put the draftsmen; over there the timekeeper;—she paused. Blair had left her, and was standing in an open doorway of the foundry, watching, breathlessly, a jibcrane bearing a great ladle full of tons of liquid metal that shimmered above its white-hot expanse with the shifting blue flames of escaping gas. Seething and bubbling, the molten iron slopped in a flashing film over the side of the caldron, every drop, as it struck the black earth, rebounding in a thousand exploding points of fire. Above the swaying ladle, far up in the glooms under the roof, the shadows were pierced by the lurching dazzle of arc-lamps; but when the ladle tipped, and with a crackling roar the stream of metal flowed into a mold, the sizzling violet gleam of the lamps was abruptly extinguished by the intolerable glare of light.
"Oh," Blair said breathlessly, "how wonderful!"
"Itiswonderful," his mother said. "Thomas, here, can move the lever that tips the ladle with his two fingers—and out comes the iron as neatly as cream out of a jug!"
Blair was so entirely absorbed in the fierce magnificence of light, and in the glowing torsos of the molders, planted as they were against the profound shadows of the foundry, that when she said, "Come on!" he did not hear her. Mrs. Maitland, standing with her hands on her hips, her feet well apart, held her head high; she was intensely gratified by his interest. "If his father had only lived to see him!" she said to herself. In her pride, she almost swaggered; she nodded, chuckling, to the molder at her elbow:
"He takes to it like a duck to water, doesn't he, Jim?" "And," said Jim, telling the story afterward, "I allowed I'd never seen a young feller as knowing about castings as him. She took it down straight. You can't pile it on too thick for a woman, about her young 'un."
"Somebody ought to paint it," Blair said, under his breath.
Mrs. Maitland's face glowed; she came and stood beside him a moment in silence, resting her big, dirty hand on his shoulder. Then she said, half sheepishly, "I call that ladle the 'cradle of civilization.' Think what's inside of it! There are rails, that will hold New York and San Francisco together, and engines and machines for the whole world; there are telegraph wires that will bring—think of all the kinds of news they will bring, Blair,—wars, and births of babies! There are bridges in it, and pens that may write—well, maybe love-letters," she said, with sly and clumsy humor, "or even write, perhaps, the liberty of a race, as Lincoln's pen wrote it. Yes!" she said, her face full of luminous abstraction, "the cradle of civilization!"
He could hardly hear her voice in the giant tumult of exploding metal and the hammering and crashing in the adjacent mill; but when she said that, he looked round at her with the astonishment of one who sees a familiar face where he has supposed he would see a stranger. He forgot his shame in having a mother who ran an iron-mill; he even forgot that impudent thrust in the ribs; a spark of sympathy leaped between them as real in its invisibility as the white glitter of the molten iron sputtering over their heads. "Yes," he said, "it's all that, and it is magnificent, too!"
"Come on!" she said, with a proud look. Over her shoulder she flung back at him figures and statistics; she told him of the tons of bridge materials on the books; the rail contract she had just taken was a big thing, very big! "We've never handled such an order, but we can do it!"
They were walking rapidly from the foundry to the furnaces; Sarah Maitland was inspecting piles of pig, talking to puddlers, all the while bending and twisting between her strong fingers, with their blackened nails, a curl of borings, perhaps biting on it, thoughtfully, while she considered some piece of work, then blowing the crumbs of iron out from between her lips and bursting into quick directions or fault-finding. She stood among her men, in her short skirt, her gray hair straggling out over her forehead from under her shabby bonnet, and gave her orders; but for the first time in her life she was self-conscious—Blair was looking on! listening! thinking, no doubt, that one of these days he would be doing just what she was doing! For the moment she was as vain as a girl; then, abruptly, her happy excitement paused. She stood still, flinching and wincing, and putting a hand up to her eye.
"Ach!" she said; "a filing!" she looked with the other sympathetically watering eye at her son. "Here, take this thing out."
"I?" Blair said, dismayed. "Oh, I might hurt you." Then, in his helplessness and concern—for, ignorant as he was, he knew enough of the Works to know that an iron filing in your eye is no joke—he turned, with a flurried gesture, to one of the molders. "Get a doctor, can't you? Don't stand there staring!"
"Doctor?" said Mrs. Maitland. She gave her son a look, and laughed. "He's afraid he'll hurt me!" she said, with a warm joyousness in her voice; "Jim, got a jack-knife? Just dig this thing out." Jim came, dirty and hesitating, but prepared for a very common emergency of the Works. With a black thumb and forefinger he raised the wincing lid, and with the pointed blade of the jack-knife lifted, with delicacy and precision, the irritating iron speck from the eyeball. "'Bliged," Mrs. Maitland said. She clapped a rather grimy handkerchief over the poor red eye, and turned to Blair. "Come on!" she said, and struck him on the shoulder so heartily that he stumbled. Her cheek was blackened by the molder's greasy fingers, and so smeared with tears from the still watering eye that he could not bear to look at it. He hesitated, then offered her his handkerchief, which at least had the advantage of being clean. She took it, glanced at its elaborate monogram, and laughed; then she dabbed her eye with it. "I guess I'll have to put some of that cologne of yours on this fancy thing. Remember that green bottle with the calendar and the red ribbons on it, that you gave me when you were a little fellow? I've never had anything of my own fine enough to use the stuff on!"
When they got back to the office again she was very brief and business-like with him. She had had a fine morning, but she couldn't waste any more time! "You can keep all this that you have seen in your mind. I don't know just where I shall put you. If you have a preference, express it." Then she told him what his salary would be when he got to work, and what allowance he was to have for the present.
"Now, clear out, clear out!" she said; "good-by"; and turned her cheek toward him for their semi-annual parting. Blair, with his eyes shut, kissed her.
"Good-by, Mother. It has been awfully interesting. And I am awfully obliged to you about the allowance." On the threshold of the office he halted. "Mother," he said,—and his voice was generous even to wistfulness; "Mother, that cradle thing was stunning."
Mrs. Maitland nodded proudly; when he had gone, she folded his handkerchief up, and with a queer, shy gesture, slipped it into the bosom of her dress. Then she rang her bell. "Ask Mr. Ferguson to step here." When her superintendent took the chair beside her desk, she was all business; but when business was over and he got up, she stopped him: "Tell the bookkeeper to double Blair's allowance, beginning to-day."
Ferguson made a memorandum.
"And Mr. Ferguson, I have told Blair that I consent to his engagement with Elizabeth, and I shall make it possible for them to be married as soon as he graduates—"
"But—"
"I do this," she went on, her satisfaction warm in her voice, "because I think he needs the incentive that comes to a young man when he wants to get married. It is natural and proper. And I will see that things are right for them."
"In the first place," said Robert Ferguson, "I would not permitElizabeth to marry Blair; but fortunately we need not discuss that.They have quarreled, and there is no longer any question of such athing."
"Quarreled! but only this morning, not an hour ago, he let me suppose—" She paused. "Well, I'm sorry." She paused again, and made aimless marks with her pen on the blotter. "That's all this morning, Mr. Ferguson." And though he lingered to tell her, with grim amusement, of Elizabeth's angry bath, she made no further comment.
When he had left the office she got up and shut the door. Then she went back to her chair, and leaning an elbow on her desk, covered her lips with her hand. After she had sat thus for nearly ten minutes, she suddenly rang for an office-boy. "Take this handkerchief up to the house to my son," she said; "he forgot it."