Chapter XXII

I'll study hard and try to do you credit

“I have no doubt as to your doing your best, my dear,” she said, “and it gives me great pleasure to do this for you.”

With that, said with a graceful softness which was charming, she made as if to rise, but Ellen still stood before her. She had something more to say. “If ever I am able,” she said—“and I shall be able some day if I have my health—I will repay you.” Ellen spoke with the greatest sweetness, yet with an inflexibility of pride evident in her face. Cynthia smiled. “Very well,” she said, “if you feel better to leave it in that way. If ever you are able you shall repay me; in the mean time I consider that I am amply paid in the pleasure it gives me to do it.” Cynthia held out her slender hand to Ellen, who took it gratefully, yet a little constrainedly.

In the opposite corner the doll sat staring at them with eyes of blank blue and her vacuous smile. A vague sense of injury was over Ellen, in spite of her delight and her gratitude—a sense of injury which she could not fathom, and for which she chided herself. However, Andrew felt it also.

After this surprising benefactress and Robert had gone, after repeated courtesies and assurances of obligation on both sides, Andrew turned to Fanny. “What does she do it for?” he asked.

“Hush; she'll hear you.”

“I can't help it. What does she do it for? Ellen isn't anything to her.”

Fanny looked at him with a meaning smile and nod which made her tear-stained face fairly grotesque.

“What do you mean lookin' that way?” demanded Andrew.

“Oh, you wait and see,” said Fanny, with meaning, and would say no more. She was firm in her conclusion that Cynthia was educating their girl to marry her favorite nephew, but that never occurred to Andrew. He continued to feel, while supremely grateful and overwhelmed with delight at this good fortune for Ellen, the distrust and resentment of a proud soul under obligation for which he sees no adequate reason, and especially when it is directed towards a beloved one to whom he would fain give of his own strength and treasure.

As for Ellen, she was in a tumult of wonder and delight, but when she looked at the doll in her corner there came again that vague sense of injury, and she felt again as if in some way she were being robbed instead of being made the object of benefit.

After Ellen had gone to bed that night she wondered if she ought to go to college, and maybe gain thereby a career which was beyond anything her own loved ones had known, and if it were not better for her to go to work in the shop after all.

When Mrs. Zelotes was made acquainted with the plan for sending Ellen to Vassar she astonished Fanny. Fanny ran over the next morning, after Andrew had gone to work, to tell her mother-in-law. She sat a few minutes in the sitting-room, where the old lady was knitting, before she unfolded the burden of her errand.

“Cynthia Lennox came to our house last night with Robert Lloyd,” she said, finally.

“Did they?” remarked Mrs. Zelotes, who had known perfectly well that they had come, having recognized the Lennox carriage in the moonlight, and having been ever since devoured with curiosity, which she would have died rather than betray.

“Yes, they did,” said Fanny. Then she added, after a pause which gave wonderful impressiveness to the news, “Cynthia Lennox wants to send Ellen to college—to Vassar College.”

Then she jumped, for the old woman seemed to spring at her like released wire.

“Send her to college!” said she. “What does she want to send her to college for? What right has Cynthia Lennox got to send Ellen Brewster anywhere?”

Fanny stared at her dazedly.

“What right has she got interfering?” demanded Mrs. Zelotes again.

“Why,” replied Fanny, stammering, “she thought Ellen was so smart. She heard her valedictory, and the school-teacher had talked about her, what a good scholar she was, and she thought it would be nice for her to go to college, and she should be very much obliged herself, and feel that we were granting her a great pleasure and privilege if we allowed her to send Ellen to Vassar.”

All unconsciously Fanny imitated to the life Cynthia's soft elegance of speech and language.

“Pshaw!” said Mrs. Zelotes; but still she said it not so much angrily as doubtfully. “It's the first time I ever heard of Cynthia Lennox doing such a thing as that,” said she. “I never knew she was given to sending girls to college. I never heard of her giving anything to anybody.”

Fanny looked mysteriously at her mother-in-law with sudden confidence. “Look here,” she said.

“What?”

The two women looked at each other, and neither said a word, but the meaning of one flashed to the other like telegraphy.

“Do you s'pose that's it?” said Mrs. Zelotes, her old face relaxing into half-shamed, half-pleased smiles.

“Yes, I do,” said Fanny, emphatically.

“You do?”

“Yes, I 'ain't a doubt of it.”

“He did act as if he couldn't take his eyes off her at the exhibition,” agreed Mrs. Zelotes, reflectively; “mebbe you're right.”

“I know I'm right just as well as if I'd seen it.”

“Well, mebbe you are. What does Andrew say?”

“Oh, he wishes he was the one to do it.”

“Of course he does—he's a Brewster,” said his mother.

“But he's got sense enough to be pleased that Ellen has got the chance.”

“He ain't any more pleased than I be at anything that's a good chance for Ellen,” said the grandmother; but all the same, after Fanny had gone, her joy had a sharp sting for her. She was not one who could take a gift to heart without feeling its sharp edge.

Had Ellen's sentiment been analyzed, she felt in something the same way that her grandmother did. However, she had begun to dream definitely about Robert, and the reflection had come, too, that this might make her more his equal, as nearly his equal as Maud Hemingway.

Maud Hemingway went to college, and so would she. Of the minor accessories of wealth she thought not so much. She looked at her hands, which were very small and as delicately white as flowers, and reflected with a sense of comfort, of which she was ashamed, that she would not need ever to stain them with leather now. She looked at the homeward stream of dingy girls from the shops, and thought with a sense of escape that she would never have to join them; but she was conscious of loving Abby better, and Maria, who had also entered Lloyd's. Abby, when she heard the news about Vassar, had looked at her with a sort of fierce exultation.

“Thank the Lord, you're out of it, anyhow!” she cried, fervently, as a soul might in the midst of flames.

Maria had smiled at her with the greatest sweetness and a certain wistfulness. Maria was growing delicate, and seemed to inherit her father's consumptive tendencies.

“I am so glad, Ellen,” she said. Then she added, “I suppose we sha'n't see so much of you.”

“Of course we sha'n't, Maria Atkins,” interposed Abby, “and it won't be fitting we should. It won't be best for Ellen to associate with shop-girls when she's going to Vassar College.”

But Ellen had cast an impetuous arm around a neck of each.

“If ever I do such a thing as that!” said she. “If ever I turn a cold shoulder to either of you for such a reason as that! What's Vassar College to hearts? That's at the bottom of everything in this world, anyhow. I guess you'll see it won't make any difference unless you keep on thinking such things. If you do—if you think I can do anything like that—I won't love you so much.”

Ellen faced them both with gathering indignation. Suddenly this ignoble conception of herself in the minds of her friends stung her to resentment. But Abby seized her in two wiry little arms.

“I never did, I never did!” she cried. “Don't I know what you are made of, Ellen Brewster? Don't you think I know? But after all, it might be better for you if you were worse. That was all I meant.”

Ellen, one afternoon, set out in her pretty challis, a white ground with long sprays of blue flowers running over it, and a blue ribbon at her neck and waist, and her leghorn hat with white ribbons, and a knot of forget-me-nots under the brim. She wore her one pair of nice gloves, too, but those she did not put on until she reached the corner of the street where Cynthia lived. Then she rubbed them on carefully, holding up her challis skirts under one arm.

Cynthia was at home, seated on the back veranda, in a rattan chair, with a book which she was not reading. Ellen stood before her, in her cheap attire, which she wore with an air which seemed to make it precious, such faith she had in it. Ellen regarded her coarse blue-flowered challis with an innocent admiration which seemed almost able to glorify it into silk. Cynthia took in at a glance the exceeding commonness of it all; she saw the hat, the like of which could be seen in the milliners' windows at fabulously low prices; the foam of spurious lace and the spray of wretched blue flowers made her shudder. “The poor child, she must have something better than that,” she thought, and insensibly she also thought that the girl must lose her evident faith in the splendor of such attire; must change her standard of taste. She rose and greeted Ellen sweetly, though somewhat reservedly. When the two were seated opposite each other, Cynthia tried to talk pleasantly, but all the time with a sub-consciousness as one will have of some deformity which must be ignored. The girl looked so common to her in this array that she began to have a hopeless feeling of disgust about it all. Was it not manifestly unwise to try to elevate a girl who took such evident satisfaction in a gown like that, in a hat like that? Ellen wore her watch and chain ostentatiously. The watch was too large for a chatelaine, but she had looped the heavy chain across her bosom, and pinned it with the brooch which Abby Atkins had given her, so it hung suspended. Cynthia riveted her eyes helplessly upon that as she talked.

“I hope you are having a pleasant vacation,” said she, as she looked at the watch, and all at once Ellen knew.

Ellen replied that she was having a very pleasant vacation, then she plunged at once into the subject of her call, though with inward trembling.

“Miss Lennox,” said she—and she followed the lines of a little speech which she had been rehearsing to herself all the way there—“I am very grateful to you for what you propose doing for me. It will make a difference to me during my whole life. I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am.”

“I am very grateful to be allowed to do it,” replied Cynthia, with her unfailing refrain of gentle politeness, but a kindly glance was in her eyes. Something in the girl's tone touched her. It was exceedingly earnest, with the simple earnestness of childhood. Moreover, Ellen was regarding her with great, steadfast, serious eyes, like a baby's who shrinks and yet will have her will of information.

“I wanted to say,” Ellen continued—and her voice became insensibly hushed, and she cast a glance around at the house and the leafy grounds, as if to be sure that no one was within hearing—“that I should never under any circumstances have said anything regarding what happened so long ago. That I never have and never should have, that I never thought of doing such a thing.”

Then the elder woman's face flushed a burning red, and she knew at once what the girl had suspected. “You might proclaim it on the house-tops if it would please you,” she cried out, vehemently. “If you think—if you think—”

“Oh, I do not!” cried Ellen, in an agony of pleading. “Indeed, I do not. It was only that—I—feared lest you might think I would be mean enough to tell.”

“I would have told, myself, long ago if there had been only myself to consider,” said Cynthia, still red with anger, and her voice strained. All at once she seemed to Ellen more like the woman of her childhood. “Yes, I would,” said she, hotly—“I will now.”

“Oh, I beg you not!” cried Ellen.

“I will go with you this minute and tell your mother,” Cynthia said, rising.

Ellen sprang up and moved towards her as if to push her back in her chair. “Oh, please don't!” she cried. “Please don't. You don't know mother; and it would do no good. It was only because I wondered if you could have thought I would tell, if I would be so mean.”

“And you thought, perhaps, I was bribing you not to tell, with Vassar College,” Cynthia said, suddenly. “Well, you have suspected me of something which was undeserved.”

“I am very sorry,” Ellen said. “I did not suspect, really, but I do not know why you do this for me.” She said the last with her steady eyes of interrogation on Cynthia's face.

“You know the reasons I have given.”

“I do not think they were the only ones,” Ellen replied, stoutly. “I do not think my valedictory was so good as to warrant so much, and I do not think I am so smart as to warrant so much, either.”

Cynthia laughed. She sat down again. “Well,” she said, “you are not one to swallow praise greedily.” Then her tone changed. “I owe it to you to tell you why I wish to do this,” she said, “and I will. You are an honest girl, with yourself as well as with other people—too honest, perhaps, and you deserve that I should be honest with you. I am not doing this for you in the least, my dear.”

Ellen stared at her.

“No, I am not,” repeated Cynthia. “You are a very clever, smart girl, I am sure, and it will be a nice thing for you to have a better education, and be able to take a higher place in the world, but I am not doing it for you. When you were a little child I would have done everything, given my life almost, for you, but I never care so much for children when they grow up. I am not doing this for you, but for your mother.”

“My mother?” said Ellen.

“Yes, your mother. I know what agony your mother must have been in, that time when I kept you, and I want to atone in some way. I think this is a good way. I don't think you need to hesitate about letting me do it. You also owe a little atonement to your mother. It was not right for you to run away, in the first place.”

“Yes, I was very naughty to run away,” Ellen said, starting. She rose, and held out her hand. “I hope you will forgive me,” she said. “I am very grateful, and it will make my father and mother happier than anything else could, but indeed I don't think—it is so long ago—that there was any need—”

“I do, for the sake of my own distress over it,” Cynthia said, shortly. “Suppose, now, we drop the subject, my dear. There is a taint in the New England blood, and you have it, and you must fight it. It is a suspicion of the motives of a good deed which will often poison all the good effect from it. I don't know where the taint came from. Perhaps the Pilgrim Fathers', being necessarily always on the watch for the savage behind his gifts, have affected their descendants. Anyway, it is there. I suppose I have it.”

“I am very sorry,” said Ellen.

“I also am sorry,” said Cynthia. “I did you a wrong, and your mother a wrong, years ago. I wonder at myself now, but you don't know the temptation. You will never know how you looked to me that night.”

Cynthia's voice took on a tone of ineffable tenderness and yearning. Ellen saw again the old expression in her face; suddenly she looked as before, young and beautiful, and full of a boundless attraction. The girl's heart fairly leaped towards her with an impulse of affection. She could in that minute have fallen at her feet, have followed her to the end of the world. A great love and admiration which had gotten its full growth in a second under the magic of a look and a tone shook her from head to foot. She went close to Cynthia, and leaned over her, putting her round, young face down to the elder woman's. “Oh, I love you, I love you,” whispered Ellen, with a fervor which was strange to her.

But Cynthia only kissed her lightly on her cheek, and pushed her away softly. “Thank you, my dear,” she said. “I am glad you came and spoke to me frankly, and I am glad we have come to an understanding.”

Ellen, after she had taken her leave, was more in love than she had ever been in her life, and with another woman. She thought of Cynthia with adoration; she dreamed about her; the feeling of receiving a benefit from her hand became immeasurably sweet.

Ellen, under the influence of that old fascination which Cynthia had exerted over her temporarily in her childhood, and which had now assumed a new lease of life, would have loved to see her every day, but along with the fascination came a great timidity and fear of presuming. She felt instinctively that the fascination was an involuntary thing on Cynthia's part. She kept repeating to herself what she had said, that she was not sending her to Vassar because she loved her. Strangely enough, this did not make Ellen unhappy in the least, she was quite content to do all the loving and adoring herself. She made a sort of divinity of the older woman, and who expects a divinity to step down from her marble heights, and love and caress? Ellen began to remember all Cynthia's ways and looks, as a scholar remembers with a view to imitation. She became her disciple. She began to move like Cynthia, and to speak like her, though she did not know it. Her imitation was totally unconscious; indeed, it was hardly to be called imitation; it was rather the following out of the leading of that image of Cynthia which was always present before her mind. Ellen saw Cynthia very seldom. Once or twice she arrayed herself in her best and made a formal call of gratitude, and once Fanny went with her. Ellen saw the incongruity of her mother in Cynthia's drawing-room with a torture which she never forgot. Going home she clung hard to her mother's arm all the way. She was fairly fierce with love and loyalty. She was so indignant with herself that she had seen the incongruity. “I think our parlor is enough sight prettier than hers,” she said, defiantly, when they reached home and the hideous lamp was lighted. Ellen looked around the ornate room, and then at her mother, as with a challenge in behalf of loyalty, and of that which underlies externals.

“I rather guess it is,” agreed Fanny, happily, “and I don't s'pose it cost half so much. I dare say that mat on her hearth cost as much as all our plush furniture and the carpet, and it is a dreadful dull, homely thing.”

“Yes, it is,” said Ellen.

“I wish I'd been able to keep my hands as white as Miss Lennox's, an' I wish I'd had time to speak so soft and slow,” said Fanny, wistfully. Then Ellen had her by both shoulders, and was actually shaking her with a passion to which she very seldom gave rein.

“Mother,” she cried—“mother, you know better, you know there is nobody in the whole world to me like my own mother, and never will be. It isn't being beautiful, nor speaking in a soft voice, nor dressing well, it's the being you—you. You know I love you best, mother, you know, and I love my own home best, and everything that is my own best, and I always will.” Ellen was almost weeping.

“You silly child,” said Fanny, tenderly. “Mother knows you love her best, but she wishes for your sake, and especially since you are going to have advantages that she never had, that she was a little different.”

“I don't, I don't,” said Ellen, fiercely. “I want you just as you are, just exactly as you are, mother.”

Fanny laughed tearfully, and rubbed her coarse black head against Ellen's lovingly with a curious, cat-like motion, then bade her run away or she would not get her dress done. A dressmaker was coming for a whole week to the Brewster house to make Ellen's outfit. Mrs. Zelotes had furnished most of the materials, and Andrew was to pay the dressmaker. “You can take a little more of that money out of the bank,” Fanny said. “I want Ellen to go looking so she won't be ashamed before the other girls, and I don't want Cynthia Lennox thinking she ain't well enough dressed, and we ought to have let her do it. As for being beholden to her for Ellen's clothes, I won't.”

“I rather guess not,” said Andrew, but he was sick at heart. Only that afternoon the man from whom he had borrowed the money to buy Ellen's watch and chain had asked him for it. He had not a cent in advance for his weekly pay; he could not see where the money for Ellen's clothes was coming from. It was long since the “Golden Hope” had been quoted in the stock-list, but the next morning Andrew purchased a morning paper. He had stopped taking one regularly. He put on his spectacles, and spread out the paper in his shaking hands, and scrutinized the stock-list eagerly, but he could not find what he wanted. The “Golden Hope” had long since dropped to a still level below all record of fluctuations. A young man passing to his place at the bench looked over his shoulder. “Counting up your dividends, Brewster?” he asked, with a grin.

Andrew folded up the paper gloomily and made no reply.

“Irish dividends, maybe,” said the man, with a chuckle at his own wit, and a backward roll of a facetious eye.

“Oh, shut up, you're too smart to live,” said the man who stood next at the bench. He was a young fellow who had been a school-mate of Ellen in the grammar-school. He had left to go to work when she had entered the high-school. His name was Dixon. He was wiry and alert, with a restless sparkle of bright eyes in a grimy face, and he cut the leather with lightning-like rapidity. Dixon had always thought Ellen the most beautiful girl in Rowe. He looked after Andrew with a sharp pain of sympathy when he went away with the roll of newspaper sticking out of his pocket.

“Poor old chap,” he said to the facetious man, thrusting his face angrily towards him. “He has had a devil of a time since he begun to grow old. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Wait till you begin to drop behind. It's what's bound to come to the whole boiling of us.”

“Mind your jaw,” said the first man, with a scowl.

“You'd better mind yours,” said Dixon, slashing furiously at the leather.

That noon Dixon offered Andrew, shamefacedly, taking him aside lest the other men see, a piece of pie of a superior sort which his mother had put into his dinner bag, but Andrew thanked him kindly and refused it. He could eat nothing whatever that noon. He kept thinking about the dressmaker, and how Fanny would ask him again to take some of that money out of the bank to pay her, and how the money was already taken out.

That evening, when he sat down to the tea-table furnished with the best china and frosted cake in honor of the dressmaker, and heard the radiant talk about Ellen's new frills and tucks, he had a cold feeling at his heart. He was ashamed to look at the dressmaker.

“You won't know your daughter when we get her fixed up for Vassar,” she told Andrew, with a smirk which covered her face with a network of wrinkles under her blond fluff of hair.

“Do have some more cake, Miss Higgins,” said Fanny. She was radiant. The image of her daughter in her new gowns had gone far to recompense her for all her disappointments in life, and they had not been few. “What, after all, did it matter?” she asked herself, “if a woman was growing old, if she had to work hard, if she did not know where the next dollar was coming from, if all the direct personal savor was fast passing out of existence, when one had a daughter who looked like that?” Ellen, in a new blue dress, was ravishing. The mother looked at her when she was trying it on, with the possession of love, and the dressmaker as if she herself had created her.

After supper Ellen had to try on the dress again for her father, and turn about slowly that he might see all its fine points.

“There, what do you think of that, Andrew?” asked Fanny, triumphantly.

“Ain't she a lady?” asked the dressmaker.

“It is very pretty,” said Andrew, smiling with gloomy eyes. Then he heaved a great sigh, and went out of the south door to the steps. “Your father is tired to-night,” Fanny said to Ellen with a meaning of excuse for the dressmaker.

The dressmaker reflected shrewdly on Andrew's sigh when she was on her way home. “Men don't sigh that way unless there's money to pay,” she thought. “I don't believe but he has been speculating.” Then she wondered if there was any doubt about her getting her pay, and concluded that she would ask for it from day to day to make sure.

So the next night after tea she asked, with one of her smirks of amiability, if it would be convenient for Mrs. Brewster to pay her that night. “I wouldn't ask for it until the end of the week,” said she, “but I have a bill to pay.” She said “bill” with a murmur which carried conviction of its deception. Fanny flushed angrily. “Of course,” said she, “Mr. Brewster can pay you just as well every night if you need it.” Fanny emphasized the “need” maliciously. Then she turned to Andrew. “Andrew,” said she, “Miss Higgins needs the money, if you can pay her for yesterday and to-day.”

Andrew turned pale. “Yes, of course,” he stammered. “How much?”

“Six dollars,” said Fanny, and in her tone was unmistakable meaning of the dearness of the price. The dressmaker was flushed, but her thin mouth was set hard. It was as much as to say, “Well, I don't care so long as I get my money.” She was unmarried, and her lonely condition had worked up her spirit into a strong attitude of defiance against all masculine odds. She had once considered men from a matrimonial point of view. She had wondered if this one and that one wanted to marry her. Now she was past that, and considered with equal sharpness if this one or that one wanted to cheat her. She had missed men's love through some failing either of theirs or hers. She did not know which, but she was determined that she would not lose money. So she bore Fanny's insulting emphasis with rigidity, and waited for her pay.

Andrew pulled out his old pocket-book, and counted the bills. Miss Higgins saw that he took every bill in it, unless there were some in another compartment, and of that she could not be quite sure. But Andrew knew. He would not have another penny until the next week when he received his pay. In the meantime there was a bill due at the grocery store, and one at the market, and there was the debt for Ellen's watch. However, he felt as if he would rather owe every man in Rowe than this one small, sharp woman. He felt the scorn lurking within her like a sting. She seemed to him like some venomous insect. He went out to the doorstep again, and wondered if she would want her pay the next night when she went home.

Ellen had a flower-garden behind the house, and a row of sweet-peas which was her pride. It had occurred to her that she might venture, although Cynthia Lennox had her great garden and conservatories, to carry her a bunch of these sweet-peas. She had asked her mother what she thought about it. “Why, of course, carry her some if you want to,” said Fanny. “I don't see why you shouldn't. I dare say she's got sweet-peas, but yours are uncommon handsome, and, anyway, it ought to please her to have some given her. It ain't altogether what's given, it's the giving.”

So Ellen had cut a great bouquet of the delicate flowers, selecting the shades carefully, and set forth. She was as guiltily conscious as a lover that she was making an excuse to see Miss Lennox. She hurried along in delight and trepidation, her great bouquet shedding a penetrating fragrance around her, her face gleaming white out of the dusk. She had to pass Granville Joy's house on her way, and saw with some dismay, as she drew near, a figure leaning over the gate.

He pushed open the gate when she drew near, and stood waiting.

“Good-evening, Ellen,” he said. He was mindful not to say “Hullo” again. He bowed with a piteous imitation of Robert Lloyd, but Ellen did not notice it.

“Good-evening,” she returned, rather stiffly, then she added, in a very gentle voice, to make amends, that it was a beautiful night.

The young man cast an appreciative glance at the crescent moon in the jewel-like blue overhead, and at the soft shadows of the trees.

“Yes, beautiful,” he replied, with a sort of gratitude, as if the girl had praised him instead of the night.

“May I walk along with you?” he asked, falling into step with her.

“I am going to take these sweet-peas to Miss Lennox,” said Ellen, without replying directly.

She was in terror lest Granville should renew his appeal of a few weeks before, and she was in terror of her own pity for him, and also of that mysterious impulse and longing which sometimes seized her to her own wonder and discomfiture. Sometimes, in thinking of Granville Joy, and his avowal of love, and the touch of his hand on hers, and his lips on hers, she felt, although she knew she did not love him, a softening of her heart and a quickening of her pulse which made her wonder as to her next movement, if it might be something which she had not planned. And always, after thinking of Granville, she thought of Robert Lloyd; some mysterious sequence seemed to be established between the two in the girl's mind, though she was not in love with either.

Ellen was just at that period almost helpless before the demands of her own nature. No great stress in her life had occurred to awaken her to a stanchness either of resistance or yielding. She was in the full current of her own emotions, which, added to a goodly flood inherited from the repressed passion of New England ancestors, had a strong pull upon her feet. Sooner or later she would be given that hard shake of life which precipitates and organizes in all strong natures, but just now she was in a ferment. She walked along under the crescent moon, with the young man at her side whose every thought and imagination was dwelling upon her with love. She was conscious of a tendency of her own imagination in his direction, or rather in the direction of the love and passion which he represented, and all the time her heart was filled with the ideal image of another woman. She was prostrated with that hero-worship which belongs to young and virgin souls, and yet she felt the drawing of that other admiration which is more earthly and more fascinating, as it shows the jewel tints in one's own soul as well as in the other.

As for Granville Joy, who had scrubbed his hands and face well with scented soap to take away the odor of the leather, and put on a clean shirt and collar, being always prepared for the possibility of meeting this dainty young girl whom he loved, he walked along by her side, casting, from time to time, glances which were pure admiration at the face over the great bunch of sweet-peas.

“Don't you want me to carry them for you?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” replied Ellen. “They are nothing to carry.”

“They're real pretty flowers,” said Granville, timidly.

“Yes, I think they are.”

“Mother planted some, but hers didn't come up. Mother has got some beautiful nasturtiums. Perhaps you would like some,” he said, eagerly.

“No, thank you, I have some myself,” Ellen said, rather coldly. “I'm just as much obliged to you.”

Granville quivered a little and shrank as a dog might under a blow. He saw this dainty girl-shape floating along at his side in a flutter of wonderful draperies, one hand holding up her skirts with maddening revelations of whiteness. If a lily could hold up her petals out of the dust she might do it in the same fashion as Ellen held her skirts, with no coarse clutching nor crumpling, not immodestly, but rather with disclosures of modesty itself. Ellen's wonderful daintiness was one of her chief charms. There was an immaculateness about her attire and her every motion which seemed to extend to her very soul, and hedged her about with the lure of unapproachableness. It was more that than her beauty which roused the imagination and quickened the pulses of a young man regarding her.

Granville Joy did not feel the earth beneath his feet as he walked with Ellen. The scent of the sweet-peas came in his face, he heard the soft rustle of Ellen's skirts and his own heart-beats. She was very silent, since she did not wish him to go with her, though she was all the time reproaching herself for it. Granville kept casting about for something to say which should ingratiate him with her. He was resolved to say nothing of love to her.

“It is a beautiful night,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” agreed Ellen, and she looked at the moon. She felt the boy's burning, timid, worshipful eyes on her face. She trembled, and yet she was angry and annoyed. She felt in an undefined fashion that she herself was the summer night and the flowers and the crescent moon, and all that was fair and beautiful in the whole world to this other soul, and shame seized her instead of pride. He seemed to force her to a sight of her own pettiness, as is always the case when love is not fully returned. She made an impatient motion with the shoulder next Granville, and walked faster.

“You said you were going to Miss Lennox's,” he remarked, anxiously, feeling that in some way he had displeased her.

“Yes, to carry her some sweet-peas.”

“She must have been real good-looking when she was young,” Granville said, injudiciously.

“When she was young,” retorted Ellen, angrily. “She is beautiful now. There is not another woman in Rowe as beautiful as she is.”

“Well, she is good-looking enough,” agreed Granville, with unreasoning jealousy. He had not heard of Ellen's good fortune. His mother had not told him. She was a tenderly sentimental woman, and had always had her fancies with regard to her son and Ellen Brewster. When she heard the news she reflected that it would perhaps remove the girl from her boy immeasurably, that he would be pained, so she said nothing. Every night when he came home she had watched his face to see if he had heard.

Now Ellen told him. “You know what Miss Cynthia Lennox is going to do for me,” she said, abruptly, almost boastfully, she was so eager in her partisanship of Cynthia.

Granville looked at her blankly. They were coming into the crowded, brilliantly lighted main street of the city, and their two faces were quite plain to each other's eyes.

“No, I don't,” said he. “What is it, Ellen?”

“She is going to send me to Vassar College.”

Granville's face whitened perceptibly. There was a queer sound in his throat.

“To Vassar College!” he repeated.

“Yes, to Vassar College. Then I shall be able to get a good school, and teach, and help father and mother.”

Granville continued to look at her, and suddenly an intense pity sprang into life in the girl's heart. She felt as if she were looking at some poor little child, instead of a stalwart young man.

“Don't look so, Granville,” she said, softly.

“Of course I am glad at any good fortune which can come to you, Ellen,” Granville said then, huskily. His lips quivered a little, but his eyes on her face were brave and faithful. Suddenly Ellen seemed to see in this young man a counterpart of her own father. Granville had a fine, high forehead and contemplative outlook. He had been a good scholar. Many said that it was a pity he had to leave school and go to work. It had been the same with her father. Andrew had always looked immeasurably above his labor. She seemed to see Granville Joy in the future just such a man, a finer animal harnessed to the task of a lower, and harnessed in part by his own loving faithfulness towards others. Ellen had often reflected that, if it hadn't been for her and her mother, her father would not have been obliged to work so hard. Now in Granville she saw another man whom love would hold to the ploughshare. A great impulse of loyalty as towards her own came over her.

“It won't make any difference between me and my old friends if I do go to Vassar College,” she said, without reflecting on the dangerous encouragement of it.

“You can't get into another track of life without its making a difference,” returned Granville, soberly. “But I am glad. God knows I'm glad, Ellen. I dare say it is better for you than if—” He stopped then and seemed all at once to see projected on his mirror of the future this dainty, exquisite girl, with her fine intellect, dragging about a poor house, with wailing children in arm and at heel, and suddenly a great courage of renunciation came over him.

“Itisbetter, Ellen,” he said, in a loud voice, like a hero's, as if he were cheering his own better impulses on to victory over his own passions. “It is better for a girl like you, than to—”

Ellen knew that he meant to say, “to marry a fellow like me.” Ellen looked at him, the sturdy backward fling of his head and shoulders, and the honest regard of his pained yet unflinching eyes, and a great weakness of natural longing for that which she was even now deprecating nearly overswept her. She was nearer loving him that moment than ever before. She realized something in him which could command love—the renunciation of love for love's sake.

“I shall never forget my old friends, whatever happens,” she said, in a trembling voice, and it might have all been different had they not then arrived at Cynthia Lennox's.

“Shall I wait and go home with you, Ellen?” Granville asked, timidly.

“No, thank you. I don't know how long I shall stay,” Ellen replied. “You are real kind, but I am not a bit afraid.”

“It is sort of lonesome going past the shops.”

“I can take a car,” Ellen said. She extended her hand to Granville, and he grasped it firmly.

“Good-night, Ellen; I am always glad of any good fortune that may come to you,” he said.

But Granville Joy, going alone down the brilliant street, past the blaze of the shop-windows and the knots of loungers on the corners, reflected that he had seen the fiery tip of a cigar on the Lennox veranda, that it might be possible that young Lloyd was there, since Miss Lennox was his aunt, and that possibly the aunt's sending Ellen to Vassar might bring about something in that quarter which would not otherwise have happened, and he writhed at the fancy of that sort of good fortune for Ellen, but held his mind to it resolutely as to some terrible but necessary grindstone for the refinement of spirit. “It would be a heap better for her,” he said to himself, quite loud, and two men whom he was passing looked at him curiously. “Drunk,” said one to the other.

When he was on his homeward way he overtook a slender girl struggling along with a kerosene-can in one hand and a package of sugar in the other, and, seeing that it was Abby Atkins, he possessed himself of both. She only laughed and did not start. Abby Atkins was not of the jumping or screaming kind, her nerves were so finely balanced that they recovered their equilibrium, after surprises, before she had time for manifestations. There was a curious healthfulness about the slender, wiry little creature who was overworked and under-fed, a healthfulness which seemed to result from the action of the mind upon a meagre body.

“Hullo, Granville Joy!” she said, in her good-comrade fashion, and the two went on together. Presently Abby looked up in his face.

“Know about Ellen?” said she. Granville nodded.

“Well, I'm glad of it, aren't you?” Abby said, in a challenging tone.

“Yes, I am,” replied Granville, meeting her look firmly.

Suddenly he felt Abby's little, meagre, bony hand close over the back of his, holding the kerosene-can. “You're a good fellow, Granville Joy,” said she.

Granville marched on and made no response. He felt his throat fill with sobs, and swallowed convulsively. Along with this womanly compassion came a compassion for himself, so hurt on his little field of battle. He saw his own wounds as one might see a stranger's.

“Think of Ellen dogging around to a shoe-shop like me and the other girls,” said Abby, “and think of her draggin' around with half a dozen children and no money. Thank the Lord she's lifted out of it. It ain't you nor me that ought to grudge her fortune to her, nor wish her where she might have been otherwise.”

“That's so,” said the young man.

Abby's hand tightened over the one on the kerosene-can. “You are a good fellow, Granville Joy,” she said again.

Robert Lloyd was sitting on the veranda behind the green trail of vines when Ellen came up the walk. He never forgot the girl's face looking over her bunch of sweet-peas. There was in it something indescribably youthful and innocent, almost angelic. The light from the window made her hair toss into gold; her blue eyes sought Cynthia with the singleness of blue stars. It was evident whom she had come to see. She held out her flowers towards her with a gesture at once humble and worshipful, like that of some devotee at a shrine.

She said “Good-evening” with a shy comprehensiveness, then, to Cynthia, like a child, “I thought maybe you would like some of my sweet-peas.”

Both gentlemen rose, and Risley looked curiously from the young girl to Cynthia, then placed his chair for her, smiling kindly.

“The sweet-peas are lovely,” Cynthia said. “Thank you, my dear. They are much prettier than any I have had in my garden this year. Please sit down,” for Ellen was doubtful about availing herself of the proffered chair. She had so hoped that she might find Cynthia alone. She had dreamed, as a lover might have done, of a tête-à-tête with her, what she would say, what Cynthia would say. She had thought, and trembled at the thought, that possibly Cynthia might kiss her when she came or went. She had felt, with a thrill of spirit, the touch of Cynthia's soft lips on hers, she had smelt the violets about her clothes. Now it was all spoiled. She remembered things which she had heard about Mr. Risley's friendship with Cynthia, how he had danced attendance upon her for half a lifetime, and thought that she did not like him. She looked at his smiling, grizzled, blond face with distrust. She felt intuitively that he saw straight through her little subterfuge of the flowers, that he divined her girlish worship at the shrine of Cynthia, and was making fun of her.

“Do you object to a cigar, Miss Brewster?” asked Robert, and Risley looked inquiringly at her.

“Oh, no,” replied Ellen, with the eager readiness of a child to fit into new conditions. She thought of the sitting-room at home, blue with the rank pipe-smoke of Nahum Beals and his kind. She pictured them to herself sitting about on these warm evenings in their shirt-sleeves, and she saw the two gentlemen in their light summer clothes with their fragrant cigars at their lips, and all of a sudden she realized that between these men and the others there was a great gulf, and that she was trying to cross it. She did not realize, as later, that the gulf was one of externals, and of width rather than depth, but it seemed to her then that from one shore she could only see dimly the opposite. A great fear and jealousy came over her as to her own future accessibility to those of the other kind among whom she had been brought up, like her father and Granville.

Ellen felt all this as she sat beside Cynthia, who was casting about in her mind, in rather an annoyed fashion, for something to say to this young beneficiary of hers which should not have anything to do with the benefit.

Finally she inquired if she were having a pleasant vacation, and Ellen replied that she was. Risley looked at her beautiful face with the double radiance of the electric-light and the lamp-light from the window on it, giving it a curious effect. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder why everybody seemed to have such an opinion as to the talents of this girl. Why did Cynthia consider that her native ability warranted this forcible elevation of her from her own sphere and setting her on a height of education above her kind? She looked and spoke like an ordinary young girl. She had a beautiful face, it is true, and her shyness seemed due to the questioning attitude of a child rather than to self-consciousness, but, after all, why did she give people that impression? Her valedictory had been clever, no doubt, and there was in it a certain fire of conviction, which, though crude, was moving; but, after all, almost any bright girl might have written it. She had been a fine scholar, no doubt, but any girl with a ready intelligence might have done as well. Whence came this inclination of all to rear the child upon a pedestal? Risley wondered, looking at her, narrowing his keen, light eyes under reflective brows, puffing at his cigar; then he admitted to himself that he was one with the crowd of Ellen's admirers. There was somehow about the girl that which gave the impression of an enormous reserve out of all proportion to any external evidence. “The child says nothing remarkable,” he told Cynthia, after she had gone that evening, “but somehow she gives me an impression of power to say something extraordinary, and do something extraordinary. There is electricity and steel behind that soft, rosy flesh of hers. But all she does which is evident to the eye of man is to worship you, Cynthia.”

“Worship me?” repeated Cynthia, vaguely.

“Yes, she has one of those aberrations common to her youth and her sex. She is repeating a madness of old Greece, and following you as a nymph might a goddess.”

“It is only because she is grateful,” returned Cynthia, looking rather annoyed.

“Gratitude may be a factor in it, but it is very far from being the whole of the matter. It is one of the spring madnesses of life; but don't be alarmed, it will be temporary in the case of a girl like that. She will easily be led into her natural track of love. Do you know, Cynthia, that she is one of the most normal, typical young girls I ever saw, and that makes me wonder more at this impression of unusual ability which she undoubtedly gives. She has all the weaknesses of her age and sex, she is much younger than some girls of her age, and yet there is the impression which I cannot shake off.”

“I have it, too,” said Cynthia, rather impatiently.

“Cynthia Lennox, I don't believe you care in the least for this young devotee of yours, for all you are heaping benefits upon her,” Risley said, looking at her quizzically.

“I am not sure that I do,” replied Cynthia, calmly.

“Then why on earth—?”

Suddenly Cynthia began speaking rapidly and passionately, straightening herself in her chair. “Oh, Lyman, do you think I could do a thing like that, and not repent it and suffer remorse for it all these years?” she cried.

“A thing like that?”

“Like stealing that child,” Cynthia replied, in a whisper.

“Stealing the child? You did not steal the child.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why, it was only a few hours that you kept her.”

“What difference does it make whether you steal anything for a few hours or a lifetime? I kept her, and she was crying for her mother, and her mother was suffering tortures all that time. Then I kept it secret all these years. You didn't know what I have suffered, Lyman.”

Cynthia regarded him with a wan look.

Risley half laughed, then checked himself. “My poor girl, you have the New England conscience in its worst form,” he said.

“You yourself told me it was a serious thing I was doing,” Cynthia said, half resentfully. “One does not wish one's sin treated lightly when one has hugged its pricks to one's bosom for so long—it detracts from the dignity of suffering.”

“So I did, but all those years ago!”

“If you don't leave me my remorse, how can I atone for the deed?”

“Cynthia, you are horribly morbid.”

“Maybe you are right, maybe it is worse than morbid. Sometimes I think I am unnatural, out of drawing, but I did not make myself, and how can I help it?” Cynthia spoke with a pathetic little laugh.

She leaned her head back in her chair, and looked at a star through a gap in the vines. The shadows of the leaves played over her long, white figure. Again to Risley, gazing at her, came the conviction as of subtle spiritual deformity in the woman; she was unnatural in something the same fashion that an orchid is unnatural, and it was worse, because presumably the orchid does not know it is an orchid and regret not being another, more evenly developed, flower, and Cynthia had a full realization and a mental mirror clear enough to see the twist in her own character.

Risley had never kissed her in his life, but that night, when they parted, he laid a hand on her soft, gray hair, and smoothed it back with a masculine motion of tenderness, leaving her white forehead, which had a candid, childish fulness about the temples, bare. Then he put his lips to it.

“You are a silly girl, Cynthia,” he said.

“I wish I were different, Lyman,” she responded, and, he felt, with a double meaning.

“I don't,” he said, and stroked her hair with a great tenderness, which seemed for the time to quite fill and satisfy his heart. He was a man of measureless patience, born to a firm conviction of the journey's end.

“There are worse things than loving a good woman your whole life and never having her,” he said to himself as he went home, but he said it without its full meaning. Risley's “nerves” were always lighted by the lamp of his own hope, which threw a gleam over unknown seas.

Robert Lloyd accompanied Ellen home, though she had said timidly that she was not in the least afraid, that she would not trouble any one, that she could take a car. Cynthia herself had insisted that Robert should escort her.

“It's too late for you to be out alone,” she said, and the girl seemed to perceive dimly a hedge of conventionality which she had not hitherto known. She had often taken a car when she was alone of an evening, without a thought of anything questionable. Some of the conductors lived near Ellen, and she felt as if she were under personal friendly escort. “I know the conductor on that car, and it would take me right home, and I am not in the least afraid,” she said to Robert, as the car came rocking down the street when they emerged from Cynthia's grounds.

“It's a lovely night,” Robert said, speaking quickly as they paused on the sidewalk. “I am not going to let you go alone, anyway. We will take the car if you say so, but what do you say to walking? It's a lovely night.”

It actually flashed through Ellen's mind—to such small issues of finance had she been accustomed—that the young man might insist upon paying her car-fare if he went with her on the car.

“I would like to walk, but I am sorry to put you to so much trouble,” she said, a little awkwardly.

“Oh, I like to walk,” returned Robert. “I don't walk half enough,” and they went together down the lighted street. Suddenly to Ellen there came a vivid remembrance, so vivid that it seemed almost like actual repetition of the time when she, a little child, maddened by the sudden awakening of the depths of her nature, had come down this same street. She saw that same brilliant market-window where she had stopped and stared, to the momentary forgetfulness of her troubles in the spectacular display of that which was entirely outside them. Curiously enough, Robert drew her to a full stop that night before the same window. It was one of those strange cases of apparent telepathy which one sometimes notices. When Ellen looked at the market-window, with a flash of reminiscence, Robert immediately drew her to a stop before it. “That is quite a study in color,” he said. “I fancy there are a good many unrecognized artists among market-men.”

“Yes, it is really beautiful,” agreed Ellen, looking at it with eyes which had changed very little from their childish outlook. Again she saw more than she saw. The window differed materially from that before which she had stood fascinated so many years ago, for that was in a different season. Instead of frozen game and winter vegetables, were the products of summer gardens, and fruits, and berries. The color scheme was dazzling with great heaps of tomatoes, and long, emerald ears of corn, and baskets of apples, and gold crooks of summer squashes, and speckled pods of beans.

“Suppose,” said Robert, as they walked on, “that all the market-men who had artistic tastes had art educations and set up studios and painted pictures, who would keep the markets?”

He spoke gayly. His manner that night was younger and merrier than Ellen had ever seen it. She was naturally rather grave herself. What she had seen of life had rather disposed her to a hush of respect than to hilarity, but somehow his mood began to infect her.

“I don't know,” she answered, laughing, “I suppose somebody would keep the markets.”

“Yes, but they would not be as good markets. That is, they would not do as artistic markets, and they would not serve the higher purpose of catering to the artistic taste of man, as well as to his bodily needs.”

“Perhaps a picture like that is just as well and better than it would be painted and hung on a wall,” Ellen admitted, reflectively.

“Just so—why is it not?” Robert said, in a pleased voice.

“Yes, I think it is,” said Ellen. “I do think it is better, because everybody can see it there. Ever so many people will see it there who would not go to picture-galleries to see it, and then—”

“And then it may go far to dignify their daily needs,” said Robert. “For instance, a poor man about to buy his to-morrow's dinner may feel his soul take a little fly above the prices of turnips and cabbages.”

“Maybe,” said Ellen, but doubtfully.

“Don't you think so?”

“The prices of turnips and cabbages may crowd other things out,” Ellen replied, and her tone was sad, almost tragic. “You see I am right in it, Mr. Lloyd,” she said, earnestly.

“You mean right in the midst of the kind of people whom necessity forces to neglect the æsthetic for the purely useful?”

“Yes,” said Ellen. Then she added, in an indescribably pathetic voice, “People have to live first before they can see, and they can't think until they are fed, and one needs always to have had enough turnips and cabbages to eat without troubling about the getting them, in order to see in them anything except food.”

Lloyd looked at her curiously. “Decidedly this child can think,” he reflected. He shrugged his arm, on which Ellen's hand lay, a little closer to his side.

Just then they were passing the great factories—Lloyd's, and Briggs's, and Maguire's. Many of the windows in Briggs's and Maguire's reflected light from the moon and the electric-lamps on the street. Lloyd's was all dark except for one brilliant spark of light, which seemed to be threading the building like a will-o'-the-wisp. “That is the night-watchman,” said Robert. “He must have a dull time of it.”

“I should think he might be afraid,” said Ellen.

“Afraid of what?”

“Of ghosts.”

“Ghosts in a shoe-shop?” asked Robert, laughing.

“I don't believe there has been another building in the whole city which has held so many heart-aches, and I always wondered if they didn't make ghosts instead of dead people,” Ellen said.

“Do you think they have such a hard time?”

“I know they do,” said Ellen. “I think I ate the knowledge along with my first daily bread.”

Robert Lloyd looked down at the light, girlish figure on his arm, and again the resolution that he would not talk on such topics with a young girl like this came over him. He felt a reluctance to do so which was quite apart from his masculine scorn of a girl's opinion on such matters. Somehow he did not wish to place Ellen Brewster on the same level of argument on which another man might have stood. He felt a jealousy of doing so. She seemed more within his reach, and infinitely more for his pleasure, where she was. He looked admiringly down at her fair face fixed on his with a serious, intent expression. He was quite ready to admit that he might fall in love with her. He was quite ready to ask now why he should not. She was a beautiful girl, an uncommon girl. She was going to be thoroughly educated. It would probably be quite possible to divorce her entirely from her surroundings. He shuddered when he thought of her mother and aunt, but, after all, a man, if he were firm, need not marry the mother or aunt. And all this was in spite of a resolution which he had formed on due consideration after his last call upon Ellen. He had said to himself that it would not in any case be wise, that he had better not see more of her than he could help. Instead of going to see her, he had gone riding with Maud Hemingway, who lived near his uncle's, in an old Colonial house which had belonged to her great-grandfather. The girl was a good comrade, so good a comrade that she shunted, as it were, love with flings of ready speech and friendly greeting, and tennis-rackets and riding-whips and foils. Robert had been teaching Maud to fence, and she had fenced too well. Still, Robert had said to himself that he might some day fall in love with her and marry her. He charged his memory with the fact that this was a much more rational course than visiting a girl like Ellen Brewster, so he stayed away in spite of involuntary turnings of his thoughts in that direction. However, now when the opportunity had seemed to be fairly forced upon him, what was he to do? He felt that he was stirred as he had never been before. The girl's very soul seemed to meet his when she looked up at him with those serious blue eyes of hers. He knew that there had never been any like her for him, but he felt as if in another minute, if they did not drop topics which he might as well have discussed with another man, this butterfly of femininity which so delighted him would be beyond his hand. He wanted to keep her to her rose.

“But the knowledge must not imbitter your life,” he said. “It is not for a little, delicate girl to worry herself over the problems which are too much for men.”

In spite of himself a tenderness had come into his voice. Ellen looked down and away from him. She trembled.

“It seems to me that the problems of life, like those in the algebra we studied at school, are for everybody who can read them, whether men or women,” said she, but her voice was unsteady.

“Some of them are for men to read and struggle with for the sake of the women,” said Robert. His voice had a tender inflection. They were passing a garden full of old-fashioned flowers, bordered with box. The scent of the box seemed fairly to clamor over the garden fence, drowning out the smaller fragrances of the flowers, like the clamor of a mob. Even the sweetness of the mignonette was faintly perceived.

“How strong the box is,” said Ellen, imperceptibly shrinking a little from Robert.

When they reached the Brewster house Robert said, as kindly as Granville Joy might have done, “Cannot we get better acquainted, Miss Brewster? May I call upon you sometimes?”

“I shall be happy to see you,” Ellen said, repeating the formula of welcome like a child, but she knew when she repeated it that it was very true. After she had parted from young Lloyd, she went into the sitting-room where were her mother and father, her mother sewing on a wrapper, her father reading the paper. Both of them looked up as the girl entered, and both stared at her in a bewildered way without rightly knowing why. Ellen's cheeks were a wonderful color, her eyes fairly blazed with blue light, her mouth was smiling in that ineffable smile of a simple overflow of happiness.

“Did you ride home on the car?” asked Fanny. “I didn't hear it stop.”

“No, mother.”

“Did you come home alone?” asked Andrew, abruptly.

“No,” said Ellen, blinking before the glare of the lamp. Fanny looked at Andrew. “Who did come home with you?” she asked, in a foolish, fond voice.

“Mr. Robert Lloyd. He was sitting on the piazza when I got there. I told Miss Lennox I had just as soon come on the cars alone, but she wouldn't let me, and then he said it would be pleasant to walk, and—”

“Oh, you needn't make so many excuses,” said Fanny, laughing.

Ellen colored until her face was a blaze of roses, she blinked harder, and turned her head away impatiently.

“I am not making excuses,” said she, as if her modesty were offended. “I wish you wouldn't talk so, mother. I couldn't help it.”

“Of course you couldn't,” her mother called out jocularly, as Ellen went into the other room to get her lamp to go to bed.

Fanny was radiant with delight. After Ellen had gone up-stairs, she kept looking at Andrew, and longing to confide in him her anticipation with regard to Ellen and young Lloyd, but she refrained, being doubtful as to how he would take it. Andrew looked very sober. The girl's beautiful, metamorphosed face was ever before his eyes, and it was with him as if he were looking after the flight of a beloved bird into a farther blue which was sacred, even from the following of his love.

Ellen's first impulse, when she really began to love Robert Lloyd, was not yielding, but flight; her first sensation, not happiness, but shame. When he left her that night she realized, to her unspeakable dismay and anger, that he had not left her, that he would never in her whole life, or at least it seemed so, leave her again. Everywhere she looked she saw his face projected by her memory before her with all the reality of life. His face came between her and her mother's and father's, it came between her and her thoughts of other faces. When she was alone in her chamber, there was the face. She blew out the lamp in a panic of resentment and undressed in the dark, but that made no difference. When she lay in bed, although she closed her eyes resolutely, she could still see it.

“I won't have it; I won't have it,” she said, quite aloud in her shame and rebellion. “I won't have it. What does this mean?”

In spite of herself the sound of his voice was in her ears, and she resented that; she fought against the feeling of utter rapture which came stealing over her because of it. She felt as if she wanted to spring out of bed and run, run far away into the freedom of the night, if only by so doing she could outspeed herself. Ellen began to realize the tyranny of her own nature, and her whole soul arose in revolt.

But the girl could no more escape than a nymph of old the pursuit of the god, and there was no friendly deity to transform her into a flower to elude him. When she slept at last she was overtaken in the innocent passion of dreams, and when she awoke it was, to her angry sensitiveness, not alone.

When she went down-stairs all her rosy radiance of the night before was eclipsed. She looked pale and nervous. She recoiled whenever her mother began to speak. It seemed to her that if she said anything, and especially anything congratulatory about Robert Lloyd, she would fly at her like a wild thing. Fanny kept looking at her with loving facetiousness, and Ellen winced indescribably; still, she did not say anything until after breakfast, when Andrew had gone to work. Andrew was unusually sober and preoccupied that morning. When he went out he passed close to Ellen, as she sat at the table, and tilted up her face and kissed her. “Father's blessin',” he whispered, hoarsely, in her ear. Ellen nestled against him. This natural affection, before which she need not fly nor be ashamed, which she had always known, seemed to come before her like a shield against all untried passion. She felt sheltered and comforted. But Andrew passed Eva Tenny coming to the house on his way out of the yard, and when she entered Fanny began at once:

“Who do you s'pose came home with Ellen last night?” said she. She looked at Eva, then at Ellen, with a glance which seemed to uncover a raw surface of delicacy. Ellen flushed angrily.

“Mother, I do wish—” she began; but Fanny cut her short.

“She's pretendin' she don't like it,” she said, almost hilariously, her face glowing with triumph, “but she does. You ought to have seen her when she came in last night.”

“I guess I know who it was,” said Eva, but she echoed her sister's manner half-heartedly. She was looking very badly that morning, her face was stained, and her eye hard with a look as if tears had frozen in them. She had come in a soiled waist, too, without any collar.

“For Heaven's sake, Eva Tenny, what ails you?” Fanny cried.

Eva flung herself for answer on the floor, and fairly writhed. Words were not enough expression for her violent temperament. She had to resort to physical manifestations or lose her reason. As she writhed, she groaned as one might do who was dying in extremity of pain.

Ellen, when she heard her aunt's groans, stopped, and stood in the entry viewing it all. She thought at first that her aunt was ill, and was just about to call out to know if she should go for the doctor, all her grievances being forgotten in this evidently worse stress, when her mother fairly screamed again, stooping over her sister, and trying to raise her.

“Eva Tenny, you tell me this minute what the matter is.”

Then Eva raised herself on one elbow, and disclosed a face distorted with wrath and woe, like a mask of tragedy.

“He's gone! he's gone!” she shrieked out, in an awful, shrill voice, which was like the note of an angry bird. “He's gone!”

“For God's sake, not—Jim?”

“Yes, he's gone! he's gone! Oh, my God! my God! he's gone!”

All at once the little Amabel appeared, slipping past Ellen silently. She stood watching her mother. She was vibrating from head to foot as if strung on wires. She was not crying, but she kept catching her breath audibly; her little hands were twitching in the folds of her frock; she winked rapidly, her lids obscuring and revealing her eyes until they seemed a series of blue sparks. She was no paler than usual—that was scarcely possible—but her skin looked transparent, pulses were evident all over her face and her little neck.

“You don't mean he's gone with—?” gasped Fanny.

Suddenly Eva raised herself with a convulsive jerk from the floor to her feet. She stood quite still. “Yes, he has gone,” she said, and all the passion was gone from her voice, which was much more terrible in its calm.

“You don't mean with—?”

“Yes; he has gone with Aggie.” Eva spoke in a voice like a deaf-mute's, quite free from inflections. There was something dreadful about her rigid attitude. Little Amabel looked at her mother's eyes, then cowered down and began to cry aloud. Ellen came in and took her in her arms, whispering to her to soothe her. She tried to coax her away, but the child resisted violently, though she was usually so docile with Ellen.

Eva did not seem to notice Amabel's crying. She stood in that horrible inflexibility, with eyes like black stones fixed on something unseeable.

Fanny clutched her violently by the arm and shook her.

“Eva Tenny,” said she, “you behave yourself. What if he has run away? You ain't the first woman whose husband has run away. I'd have more pride. I wouldn't please him nor her enough. If he's as bad as that, you're better off rid of him.”

Eva turned on her sister, and her calm broke up like ice under her fire of passion.

“Don't you say one word against him, not one word!” she shrieked, throwing off Fanny's hand. “I won't hear one word against my husband.”

Then little Amabel joined in. “Don't you say one word against my papa!” she cried, in her shrill, childish treble. Then she sobbed convulsively, and pushed Ellen away. “Go away!” she said, viciously, to her. She was half mad with terror and bewilderment.

“Don't you say one word against Jim,” said Eva again. “If ever I hear anybody say one word against him I'll—”

“You don't mean you're goin' to stan' up for him, Eva Tenny?”

“As long as I draw the breath of life, and after, if I know anything,” declared Eva. Then she straightened herself to her full height, threw back her shoulders, and burst into a furious denunciation like some prophetess of wrath. The veins on her forehead grew turgid, her lips seemed to swell, her hair seemed to move as she talked. The others shrank back and looked at her; even little Amabel hushed her sobs and stared, fascinated. “Curses on the grinding tyranny that's brought it all about, and not on the poor, weak man that fell under it!” she cried. “Jim ain't to blame. He's had bigger burdens put on his shoulders than the Lord gave him strength to bear. He had to drop 'em. Jim has tried faithful ever since we were married. He worked hard, and it wa'n't never his fault that he lost his place, but he kept losin' it. They kept shuttin' down, or dischargin' him for no reason at all, without a minute's warnin'. An' it wa'n't because he drank. Jim never drank when he had a job. He was just taken up and put down by them over him as if he was a piece on a checker-board. He lost his good opinion of himself when he saw others didn't set any more by him than to shove him off or on the board as it suited their play. He began to think maybe he wa'n't a man, and then he began to act as if he wasn't a man. And he was ashamed of his life because he couldn't support me and Amabel, ashamed of his life because he had to live on my little earnin's. He was ashamed to look me in the face, and ashamed to look his own child in the face. It was only night before last he was talkin' to me, and I didn't know what he meant then, but I know now. I thought then he meant something else, but now I know what he meant. He sat a long time leanin' his head on his hands, whilst I was sewin' on wrappers, after Amabel had gone to bed, and finally he looks up and says, ‘Eva, you was right and I was wrong.’

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