"I am glad to see your appetite so good, Miss Aitken," he observed, lowering his voice a little, "at this rate we shall have no excuse for keeping you much longer."
"You have had none for six months," she replied curtly.
"I am sorry you feel so bitterly," he said, "but you know I can not agree with you there.You will think more kindly of me some day, I hope, when time has freed your mind of its prejudice."
"When will that be?" she asked, meeting his eyes full for a moment.
"I wrote only this morning to your uncle, stating your gradual but steady improvement, and assuring him that in my opinion—subject, of course, to circumstances—it would be a matter of a few months more only," he said. "Does not that make your feelings a little—only a little more tender—"
"What did you say?" a shrill voice interrupted, "say that again, please."
Caroline had beguiled the woman next her, a frail, anemic little creature with pathetic eyes, into a halting conversation.
"I said," she repeated, buttering her roll thickly and appreciatively with fresh, clover-scented butter, "I said that no weather was too hot for me. I love it."
("Now, really, Iampleased," the big doctor murmured to the girl beside him. "Mrs. Du Long hasn't seemed so interested for days. Infact, she's been quite silent; I was alarmed about her. It's the child's influence.")
"—Uncle Joe said," Caroline went on, the roll at her mouth, "and he said I was a regular little snake."
She heard a guttural, growling sound beside her, lifted her eyes innocently, and for one flashing, doubtful second beheld the swollen, distorted face, the bulging eyes, the back-drawn snarling lips beside her. She did not see the plunging fork above her head, so quickly did Joan's arm intervene between her and it; she did not hear its impact against the big doctor's plate nor the gurgling voice of what had been the sad-eyed little woman beside her, for her head was buried in Joan's stifling skirt.
"Kill the snake! Kill the snake!" some one—or something—yelled, and then a grip of iron caught her arm and the voice of Bluelegs said sternly:
"Look straight ahead of you—don't turn your head! Don't turn, Miss Aitken—you can do nothing—they have her safe. The guards are here."
The room, indeed, seemed full of gardeners; a bell rang noisily near by.
"But the others—the others!" Joan gasped.
"They are all right—it won't trouble them," he answered quietly; and as Caroline and the girl looked fearfully where they were bidden, they saw the men and women eating placidly, talking with each other or sitting listless, staring idly at four liveried men who fought furiously with one small, snarling creature. Like the cruel witnesses in dreams, they sat, and the waiters served them swiftly and handed the dishes between their shoulders, as deaf as they. And suddenly they became terrible to Caroline, and the castle menacing, a thing to flee from.
"Step out this way," said Bluelegs, when the sounds of struggle had died away, "and take the child through the grounds, will you, please? Try to occupy her thoughts, and your own, too, if you can. This is one of the unfortunate things that rarely happen, but when they do—Yes, indeed, Mr. Ogden, it was certainly fine asparagus—I am glad you enjoyed it. No, she was only a little indisposed—she'll soon be well again.The heat of the sun, undoubtedly. Don't be alarmed, Miss Arliss, she will have every attention."
The gardeners had vanished from the steps where they went down, and none were seen in the grounds. Joan of Arc clutched Caroline's waist.
"Now—now!" she said, between her teeth; "now is the time not to faint! I never fainted—never. Come and show me that hole in the fence. There is no one about. But don't run."
They hurried across the sunlit, smiling terrace.
"What was the matter?" Caroline queried fearfully, "was she—was she—"
"Yes," said Joan brusquely. "Yes. Don't think about it. Don't run and don't think. Only find the hole."
They stood beside it. No one was near them; no one called to them. Silently Caroline slid under the sharp prongs. Joan of Arc put her hands under her skirt a moment and a white ruffled petticoat slipped around her feet. She adjusted it over her dress and pulled herself with difficulty through. As she stood erect in the soiled, stained petticoat, Caroline saw herknees, tremble under it, and she drooped against the fence, white-cheeked.
"Don't faint," she said severely to Caroline.
With shaking hands she tied the petticoat under her dress again and they crouched through the underbrush to the outer walk. Caroline reached for her wheel and the two peered fearfully up and down the empty road.
"I can't—I can't," the girl moaned, "my dress is so black—they can see it from the hill. Oh, what shall I do? I thought I could, and I can't!"
The measured trot of a pair of horses sounded on the road. An empty station wagon came rapidly toward them; groom and driver regarded them curiously.
The girl straightened herself and raised her hand with a pretty, imperious gesture.
"One moment, please," she said, "but are you going to the village?"
"Yes, Miss," said the driver, "to the station. Was there anything—"
She opened a bag at her side and took out carelessly a small gold piece.
"My little friend here," she said, in an even, low voice, "was showing me this beautiful building and grounds and I utterly neglected to note the time. I fear I have lost my train, if we try to walk back. If you could take us—"
"Certainly, Miss," said the driver. "William, put the young lady's wheel on top. Was it the express you wanted, Miss? I'm to meet it—the 2.08. Party from Boston."
They climbed in, the bicycle settled noisily into the trunk-rack on top, and the big chestnuts pounded down the hill.
Joan stared straight before her. Presently she drew a pair of black gloves from her little bag and put them on. Her lips moved steadily, and Caroline knew from her closed eyes that she was praying.
They drew into the neat station as the train Snorted itself in. The girl handed the gold piece to the driver.
"Divide it, please," she said calmly. "I am much obliged."
She walked to the drawing-room car, and signaled the black porter.
"I shall be safe to-night," she said softly, to the child by her side, "and I won't tell you my name, because it will not be mine much longer. But what is yours? Tell me quick!"
"Allaboard! Next stop One Hund' Twent'-fifthStreet!" some one called, hoarsely.
Caroline looked dazed. She tried to speak sensibly, but her tongue played tricks with her, and the tension of her feelings was too much for her. As the girl paused a second on the platform, and the train shuddered for its start, Caroline called above the escaping steam:
"I'm Mary Queen of Scots—I am! I am!"
The white face of Joan of Arc broke into a wavering smile.
"You dear little idiot," she called, chokingly, "I'll find you out yet! You'll see! Good-by—God bless your Majesty."
And while she might, Caroline ran beside the window, waving her hand at that tearful, happy face.
T
hevillage clock boomed out the first strokes of eleven. Solemn and mellow, the waves of sound flowed over the sleeping streets; the aftertones vibrated plaintively. Caroline stirred restlessly, tossing off the sheet and muttering in her dreams. The tears had dried on her hot cheeks; her brows were still knitted.
"Four! Five! Six!" the big bell tolled.
Caroline sat up in bed and dropped her bare, pink legs over the edge. Her eyes were open now, but set in a fixed, unseeing stare.
"Seven! Eight!"
She fumbled with her toes for her leather barefoot sandals and slipped her feet under the ankle straps.
"Nine! Ten!" moaned the bell.
She moved forward, vaguely, in the broad path of moonlight that poured through the wide-openwindow, and ran her hands like a blind girl over the warm sill, lifting her knee to its level.
"Eleven!"
Before the murmuring aftertones had lost themselves in the night, Caroline was out of the window. She stole lightly along the tin roof, warm yet with the first intense heat of June, dropped easily to the level of the kitchen-ell, and, slipping down onto the massive trunk of the old wistaria, fitted accustomed feet into its curled niches and clambered down among the warm, fragrant clusters. Steeped in the full moon, it sent out its cloying perfume like a visible cloud; her white nightgown glistened ghostlike through the leaves.
She paused a moment in the shadow of the vine, and a great tawny cat, his orange markings distinct in the moonlight, stole to her, brushing against her bare ankles caressingly. As he curled and uncurled his soft tail about her little feet, a sudden impulse caught her, and she started swiftly through the wide backyard, bending to a broken gap in the privet hedge, cutting diagonally across the neighboring grounds, and emerginginto a pleasant country road on the outskirts of the little village, with sleeping houses sprinkled along its length, well back, mostly, from its edge, showing here and there a light.
She struck into the soft, dusty road at a quick, swinging pace, the fruit of much walking, and the big yellow cat pattered at her side.
The night was almost windless; sweet, nameless odors poured up from the heated summer soil; the shadows of the grasses were outlined like Japanese pictures on the white roadway. Except for the child and the cat, no living being moved, as far as the eye could see; only the burdocks and mulleins swayed almost imperceptibly with breezes so delicate that the leaf tips of the trees could not feel them.
A great white moth, blundering against a heavy thistle head, tumbled against Caroline's elbow and fluttered clumsily into her face. She started, blinked, drew a long breath, and woke with a frightened gasp. Before her stretched the pale, curving road; above her the spangled sky throbbed and glittered; the earth, drenched in moonlight, beautiful as all lovely creatures caught sleeping,breathed softly into her face and with every breath put courage into her heart.
She looked down and saw the yellow cat, stopping, with one lifted paw, his green, lamplike eyes fixed unwaveringly on hers.
"Why, it's you, Red Rufus!" she whispered, "when did we come here? I don't remember—"
A bat whirred by: the cat pricked his ears.
"I don't believe we're here at all, Red Rufus," she whispered again. "We're just dreaming—at least, I am. I s'pose you're only in my dream. If I was really here, I'd be frightened to death, prob'ly, but if it's just a dream, I think it's lovely. Let's go on. I never had a dream like this—it seems so real, doesn't it, Rufus?"
They went on aimlessly up the road. Quaint little night sounds began now to make themselves heard: now and then a drowsy twitter from the sleeping nests, now and then a distant owl hoot. A sudden gust of honeysuckle, so strong that it was like a friendly, fragrant body flung against her, halted her for a moment, and while she paused, sniffing ecstatically, the low murmur of voices caught her ear.
The honeysuckle ran riot over an old stone wall, followed an arching gateway at the foot of a winding path that led to a lighted house on a knoll above, and flung screening tendrils over an entwined pair that paused just inside the gate. The girl's white, loose sleeves fell back from her round arms as she flung them up about her tall lover's neck; his dark head bent low over hers, their lips met, and they hung entranced in the bowery archway.
For a moment Caroline watched them with frank curiosity. Then something woke and stirred in her, faint and vague, but alive now, and she turned away her eyes, blushing hot in the cool moonlight.
The soft tones of their good-night died into broken whispers; parted from his white lady, he started on for a few, irresolute steps, then flung about suddenly and walked back toward the house, after a low, happy protest. The cooing of some drowsy pigeons in the stable on the other side of the road carried on the lovers' language long after they were out of earshot, and confused itself with them in Caroline's mind.
She wandered on, intoxicated with the mild, spacious night, the dewy freedom of the fields, the delicious pressure of the warm, velvet air against her body. Red Rufus purred as he went, rejoicing with his vagabond comrade. Just how or when she began to know that she was not asleep, just why the knowledge did not alarm her, it would be hard to say. But when the truth came to her, the friendly, powdered stars had been above her long enough to accustom her to their winking; the tiny, tentative noises of the night had sounded in her ears till they comforted and reassured her; the vast and empty field stretches meant only freedom and exhilaration. In a sudden delirium of joy she slipped between the bars of a rolling meadow and ran at full speed down its long, grassy slope, her nightgown streaming behind her, her slender, childish legs white as ivory against the greenish-black all around her. Beside her bounded the great cat with shining, gemlike eyes. They rolled down the last reaches of the slope, and all the Milky Way wondered at them, but never a sound broke the solemn quiet of the night: the ecstasy was noiseless.
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Her face buried in sweet clover, she panted, prone on the grass.
"Let's go right on, Rufus, and run away, and do just as we please!" she whispered to the nestling cat. "If I can't do like the boys do, I don't want to stay home—the fellows laugh at me! I'd rather be whipped than sent to bed like a girl. Iwon'tbe a young lady—Iwon't!"
Rufus purred approvingly.
"If I only had some trousers!" she mourned, softly; "a boy can doanything!"
Across the quiet night there cut a thin, shrill cry: a little, fretful pipe that brought instantly before the mind some hushed, white room with a shaded light and a tiny basket bed. Caroline sat up and stared about her: such cries did not come from open fields. Hardly a stone's throw from her there was a small knoll, and behind it what might have been a large, projecting boulder suddenly flashed into red light and showed itself for a dormer window; a cottage had evidently hidden behind the little hill. Curiously Caroline approached it and walked softly up the knoll.
Almost on the top she paused and peered intothe unshaded window. These householders had no fear of peeping neighbors, for only the moon and the night moths found them out, and the simple bedroom was framed like some old naïve interior, realistic with the tremendous realism of the Great Artist.
The high, old-fashioned footboard of the bed faced the dormer window, and Caroline could see only the upper portion of the woman's figure as she leaned over a small crib beside her, her heavy dark hair falling across her cheek, and lifted up with careful slowness the tiny creature that wailed in it. Beside her, as he supported himself anxiously on his elbow, the broad chest and shoulders of her young husband rose above the screening footboard. The mother gazed hungrily at the doll-like, writhing object, passed her hand over its downy forehead, smiled with relief into its opening eyes, and gave it her breast.
Instantly the wail ceased. A slow, placid smile—and yet, not quite a smile—it was rather an elemental content, a gratified drifting into the warm current of the stream of this world's being—spread over the woman's face; the man's longarm wrapped around his wealth, at once protecting and defiant; his head flung back against the world, while his eyes studied humbly the mystery that he grasped. The night lamp behind them threw a halo around the mother and her child, and the great trinity of all times and all faiths gleamed immortal upon the canvas of the simple room—its only spectator a child.
In her, malleable to all the influences of the revealing night, fairly disembodied, in her detached and flitting presence, the scene woke dim, coiled memories of an infancy that stirred and pained her even as it left her forever, and frightened longing for the motherhood that life was holding for her. No longer an infant, not yet a woman, this creature that was both felt the helplessness of one, the yearning of the other, and as she pressed the nestling cat tightly to her little breast two great, eager tears slipped down her hot cheeks, and a gulping sob, half loneliness, half pure excitement, broke into the gentle stillness of the lighted room.
"Who's there?"
The man's voice rang like a sudden pistol shotin the night; before Caroline's fascinated gaze the gleaming, softly colored picture faded and vanished into the engulfing darkness, as the lamp went out and a dark, scudding mackerel cloud flew over the moon. Instinctively she fled softly down the knoll, instinctively she dropped behind a bush at the bottom. She heard the rattle of the window pane as the man pushed himself half out of the window; she heard him call back to the waiting room behind him!
"It's a cat, dear—I saw it, plain. It's pretty bright out here. But I thought I saw something white beside it, too. I guess I'll take a look around outside."
There was a sound of movement behind the window, and, caught in an ecstasy of terror, Caroline turned at right angles from the fields and ran to the road that gleamed white, far on the other side of the cottage. Panting, she won it, crossed it, and fairly safe behind the low growth of wayside brushes that fringed its other side, she dashed along, farther and farther from the cottage, more and more frightened with every gasping breath.
On and on she flew, light as a skimming leafin the wind, the cat bounding in easy, flexible curves beside her. Now a little brown cottage in its plot of land sent them into the road for a moment; now some tiny pond, a mirror for the sprinkled heavens, broke into their course, and they skirted it more slowly, peering continuously into its jeweled depths. With them their hurrying shadows, black on the road, fainter on the grass, fled ceaselessly, hardly more quiet than they. A very intoxication of fear, a panic terror almost delicious, drove Caroline through the night, though after a while she ran more slowly. Utterly ignorant of where she was, reckless of where she might go, she swung along under the streaming moon, no white moth or whispering leaf more wholly a part of the night than she.
Whatever idea of going back she might have had was lost long ago; however little she might have meant to range so far, she was now beyond any turning. No wood creature, no skipping faun or startled dryad dancing under the moon could have belonged more utterly than she to the fragrant, mysterious world around her. The bright, bustling life of every day, its clatter offood and drink, its smarts and fatigues, its settled routine of work and play, all seemed as far behind her as some old tale of another life, half forgotten now.
Just as her pace subsided into a little skipping trot, a thick hedge sprang up across their path, driving them into the road, and continued, stiff and tall, along its edge. The pure pleasure of conquering its prickly stiffness sent Caroline through it, tearing one sleeve from her nightgown and dragging a great rent in one side of it. Emerging into a magnificent sweep of clipped turf, where wide, leafy boughs spread dappled moon shadows, they made for a whispering, clucking fountain that threw a diamond column straight toward the stars, only to break at the top into a beaded mist and clink musically back to its marble basin. Its rhythmic tinkle, the four ball-shaped box trees at either corner, the carved whiteness of the marble basin, and the massive pillar-fronted stone house beyond it, all spread a glamour of fairyland and foreign courts. Caroline bowed gravely to the cat, and, seizing his feathery paws, danced, bowing and posturing,in a bewitched abandon around the tinkling, glistening fountain. The plumy tail of Red Rufus flew behind him as he twirled, his little feet pattered furiously after Caroline's twinkling sandals. Stooping over the fountain, she threw a silvery handful high in the air and ran to catch it on her head.
As she stood at last, panting and dazed with her mad circling, she was aware of the low murmur of a voice, rising and falling in a steady measure, reaching out of the dim bulk of the great house, dark and sunk in sleep before her. For a moment a chill fear struck to the bottom of her little heart: was some weird spell aimed at her, some malignant eye spying on her? She stood frozen to the spot, the tiny drops of sweat cooling on her forehead, while the droning sounded in her ears. Then, out of the very core of her terror, some inexplicable impulse urged her on to face it, and she crept, step by step, the cat tight in her nervous grasp, around the corner of the great house, toward the sound.
This corner was a wing, set at right angles to the main building, and as she rounded it she found herself at the edge of an inner court. In theopposite wing, looking straight across the court, was a lighted room with a long French window opening directly on the shaven turf, and in the center of this window there sat in a high, carved chair a very old woman. She was carefully dressed in deep black, with pure white ruffles at her neck and around her shrunken wrists, and a lace cap on her thin, white hair. Her feet were on a carved foot-stool, and a quaint silver lamp, set on a slender table at her side, threw a stream of light across the court. Her face, lined with countless wrinkles, was bent upon a large book in her lap; from its pages she read in a low, steady voice—the passionless, almost terrifying voice of great and weary age:
"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations."Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hast formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God."
"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
"Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hast formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God."
Caroline stared, fascinated, down the path of lamplight. It marked a bed of yellow tulips with a broad band; they stood motionless, as if carved in ivory.
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"For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."
"For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."
The grave, steady voice flowed out and mingled with the silver lamplight; the marble sill of the long window was white like the sill of a tomb.
"We spend our years as a tale that is told."The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
"We spend our years as a tale that is told.
"The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
The hot excitement of this magic night cooled slowly; over Caroline's bubbling spirit there fell a mild, strange calm. A breath from the very caverns of the infinite stole out along the path of that silver lamp, and in the grave, surrendered voice there sounded for the child upon life's threshold echoes of the final tolling.
Entranced by the measured cadences, Caroline stepped forward unconsciously and stood, white against the gray stone, full in the path of the lamp. The heavy, wrinkled lids raised themselves from the deep-set eyes, and the aged reader gazed calmly at the little figure across the court. The withered old hands clasped each other.
"Jemmy! OJemmy!"
Caroline never moved.
"Itisyou, Jemmy!"
The faded eyes devoured the little white figure.
"I thought you'd never come, Jemmy—but I knew they'd send you. I'm all ready. Don't you think I'm afraid, Jemmy: I'm eighty-four years old, and I want to go."
Caroline hardly breathed; a nameless awe held her motionless and silent.
"You see, I don't sleep much any more, Jemmy," the old, toneless voice went on, "and hardly any at night. They're very kind, all of them, but I'm—I'm eighty-four years old, and I want to go."
The ivory tulips gleamed under the stars; the silver lamp, burned lower and lower: its oil was nearly gone.
"And you brought your yellow kitty, too, Jemmy! To think of that! Did they think I wouldn't know my baby? It's only fifty years, ... shall I come now, Jemmy?"
The silver lamp went out. In the starlight Caroline saw the lace cap droop forward, as thethe old woman's head settled gently on her breast. Her hands lay clasped on the great volume; her deep-set eyes were closed. She read no more from the book, and the child, awed and sober, stole like a shadow behind the gray wall and left the quiet figure in the carved chair.
Her feet fell into a tiny graveled path, and she drifted aimlessly along it, musing on the meaning of what she had heard. Almost she had persuaded herself that the gray stone building was an enchanted palace, and herself a fairy messenger sent to break the spell, when the delight of pushing through a tiny turnstile and finding a running brook with a waterfall in it close at hand, drove everything else from her mind. The grounds had completely changed their character by now: the turnstile marked the end of cultivation, and the little path, no longer graveled, wound through the wild woodland. Here and there a boulder blocked the way; the undergrowth became dense; great clumps of fern and rhododendron sent out their heavy, rank odors. Now and again the spicy scent of warm pines and cedars prepared the ear for the gentle, ceaseless rustle oftheir stiff foliage; little scufflings and chitterings at the ground level told of wood-people wakened by the presence of Red Rufus.
A strange whitish bulk that glimmered through the thinning foreground, too big for even a big boulder, too symmetrical and quiet for a waterfall, tempted Caroline on, and she pressed forward hastily, lost in speculation, when a sudden odor foreign to the woods stopped her short at the very edge of a little glade, and she paused, sniffing curiously.
A man, bareheaded, with grizzled curly hair, turned suddenly, not ten feet from her, and stared dumfounded at her, his twisted, brown cigar an inch from his lips.
The torn-out sleeve of her nightgown had bared one side to her waist: the great rent that slit the lower half of the garment left one slender leg uncovered above her white knee. A spray of wild azalea wreathed her dark tumbled hair, and Rufus, his plumy tail curled around her feet in the shadow, and his green eyes flaming, might have been a baby panther. She leaned one hand on the rough bark of a chestnut and gazed withstartled eyes at the man; it seemed that the forest must swallow her at a breath from a human throat.
He lifted one hand and pinched the back of the other with it till his face contorted with the pain.
"Then therearesuch things!" he said softly; "well, why not?"
He moved forward almost imperceptibly.
"If I were younger, I should know you were not possible," he muttered, "but now I know that I have never doubted you—really."
Again he took a small step. Caroline, paralyzed with fear and embarrassment, for she thought he was merely teasing her a little before he punished her—his pleasant, low voice and whimsical manners brought her back suddenly to the ordinary world and the stern facts of her escapade—shivered slightly, but did not attempt flight.
"It was this extraordinary night that brought you out, of course," he went on, again slightly shortening the distance between them, "you and the little cub. It was a moon out of five thousand, I admit. Do you live in that chestnut?"
With a sudden agile bound he covered the space between them and seized her by the shoulder.
"Aha!" he cried, "I have—good heavens, itisa child!"
"Of course I am—I'm Caroline," she murmured writhing under his grasp.
He pulled her out into the little glade.
"Oh! you're Caroline, are you?" he repeated, thoughtfully; "dear me, you gave me quite a turn, Caroline. Where did you come from—the big house?"
"I came from a long way," she said briefly. "I was—I was taking a walk. Where do you live? Don't you ever to go bed?"
The man chuckled.
"I have been feeling adventures in my bones all day," he said, "and here they are; a child and a cat. If you will come with me, Mademoiselle, I will show you where I live."
He led the way gravely to the dim, white object, and Caroline perceived it to be a tent, pitched by the side of a spring that poured through a tiny pipe set into the rock. The tent flap was tied back, and she saw inside it a narrow cot,covered with a coarse blue blanket, a roughly made table, spread with a game of solitaire, and a small leather trunk. On the further side of the tent there smoked, in a rude, improvised oven of stones, a dying fire. Above it, under a shelf nailed to the tree, hung a few simple utensils; two or three large stumps had been hacked into the semblance of seats.
To one of these stumps the man led Caroline, and, seating her, he turned to the shelf above the fire and fumbled among the pots and pans there, producing finally a buttered roll, a piece of maple sugar, and a small fruit tart.
"You must be hungry," he said simply, and Caroline ate greedily. After he had brought her a tin cup of the spring water, he selected a brown pipe from a half dozen on the shelf and began filling it from a leather pouch that hung on the tree.
"Now let's hear all about it," he said easily.
"I am running away," said Caroline abruptly. At that moment it really seemed that she had planned her flight from the hour that left her, tear-stained and disgraced, in her little bed.
"They didn't treat you well?" he suggested, picking out a red ember from the coals on the point of a knife and applying it to the pipe.
"I'm not to wear my knickers any more," Caroline said, with a gulp, "and my bathing suit has to have a skirt. I've got to stop p-playing with the b-boys—so much, that is," she added, honestly.
The man turned his head slightly.
"That seems hard," he said; "what's the reason?"
"I'm 'most twelve," said Caroline; "you have to be a young lady, then."
"I see," the man said. He looked at her thoughtfully. "I suppose youwouldlook larger in more clothes," he added.
"That's it," she assured him, "I do. That's just it."
"And so you expect to avoid all this by running away?" he asked, settling into his own stump seat. "I am afraid you can't do it."
Caroline set her teeth. He regarded her quizzically.
"See here," he went on, "I wish you'd take my advice in this matter."
They confronted each other in the starlight, a strange pair before the dying fire. The moon had gone, and the stars, though bright, seemed less solid and less certainly gold than before. A cool breeze swept through the wood and Caroline shivered in her torn nightdress. The man stepped into the tent and returned with a long army cloak. This he wrapped round her and resumed his seat, with Rufus on his knee.
"My name," he said, "is Peter. Everybody calls me that—just Peter. I don't know exactly why it is, but a lot of people—all over—have got into the way of taking my advice. Perhaps because I've knocked about all over the world more or less, and haven't got any wife or children or brothers and sisters of my own to advise, so I take it out on everybody else. Perhaps because I try to put myself in the other fellow's place before I advise him. Perhaps because I've had a little trouble of my own, here and there, and haven't forgotten it. Anyhow, I get used to talking things over."
A gentle stirring seemed to pass through the woods: the birds spoke softly back and forth, a squirrel chattered. Again that cool wind swept over the trees.
"Now, take it this week," the man went on, puffing steadily; "you wouldn't believe the people just about here who've asked for my advice. I usually camp up here for a week or so in the summer—the people who own the property like to have me here—and the first day I unpacked, up comes a nice girl—I used to make birch whistles for her mother—to tell me all about her young man. She brought me that spray of honeysuckle over the pipes—grows over the front gate. She wants to marry him before her father gets to like him, but she hates to run away. 'Would you advise me to, Peter?' she says. And I advised her to wait.
"Then there's my friend the blacksmith. He lives in a queer little house with dormer windows under a hill, just off the county road. He's got a new baby, and he was afraid it wouldn't pull through. He knew I'd seen a lot of babies—black and red and yellow—andhewanted myadvice. 'Peter, what'll I do?' he says, 'what'll I do?'
"'Why, just wait, Harvey. He'll live. Just wait,' I told him."
Caroline listened with interest. He might have been talking to his equal in years, from his tone.
"Then, oddly enough," he continued, "here's my old friend in the big house up yonder—and sheisold—and what do you think she's worried about? She's afraid shewon'tdie! 'Oh, Peter,' she says to me—she's fond of me because I'm the same age as a little boy of hers that died—'it seems to me that I can't wait, Peter! What shall I do?' she says. And I tellherto wait. 'Dear old friend,' said I to her last night, 'it will come. It's bound to come. Just be patient.'"
He paused and knocked his pipe empty.
"Now, as to your case," he said, "I know how you feel. I'm sorry for you—by the Lord, I'm sorry for you! But what's the use of running away? You'll keep on growing up, you know. It's one of the things that doesn't stop. Youcan't beat the game by wearing knickers, you know. And then, there'd come a time when you'd want to quit, anyhow."
She shook her head.
"Really, you would," he assured her, persuasively. "They all do."
"That's what Uncle Joe says," she admitted, "and Aunt Edith. She changed her mind, she says—"
"Are you talking about Joe Holt?" Peter demanded.
"Yes—do you know him? He lives in a big white house with wistaria on the side," Caroline cried joyfully.
"I was a senior when he was a freshman," said Peter. "Then he's taken the Washburn house."
"Do you know Aunt Edith, too?" asked Caroline.
"Yes," said Peter, after a pause, "yes, I know Aunt Edith—or used to. But I didn't know she—they were up in this country. I haven't seen her—them for a good while. Does—does she sing yet?"
"Oh, yes, but not on the stage any more, you know," Caroline explained.
"I see. Does she sing, I wonder, a song about—Oh, something about 'my heart'?"
"'My heart's own heart,' you mean," Caroline said importantly; "yes, indeed. It's her encore song."
"I see," said Peter again.
He looked into the fire, and there was a long silence. After a while he shook his shoulders like a water-dog.
"Now, Caroline," he said briskly, "here's the way of this business. You can't wear knickers until you're one of the boys, and you can't be one of the boys until you wear knickers. Do you see? So you don't get anywhere."
Caroline looked puzzled. She was suddenly overcome with sleep, and the old familiar names and ways tasted of home and comfort to her soul.
"You're too nice to be a boy, Caroline," said Peter, leaning over her and brushing her azalea-crowned hair tenderly with his lips. "If you persist in this plan of running away to be a boy, some boy, growing up anxiously, somewhere,will never forgive you! Take my advice, and wait—will you? Say 'Yes, Peter.'"
"Yes, Peter," Caroline murmured, drowsily.
"Good girl! Then I'll take you home with my little donkey. I don't believe they've missed you yet. You've come four miles, though, you little gypsy!"
He disappeared behind the trees, and Caroline nodded. Later she woke sufficiently to find herself and Rufus on the blue blanket on the bottom of a little donkey cart; Peter stood by the gentle, long-eared head.
"Thank you, Peter," she murmured, half asleep, "and you'll see Aunt Edith, won't you?"
"I don't believe so," he said, very low. "Not yet. Tell her Peter brought you back. Just Peter. But he can't come yet. Get up, Jenny!"
They wound out by an old wood road. A cool spiciness flowed though the green aisles, and as the tiny donkey struck into a dog trot, the man striding easily at her head, a far-away cock crowed shrilly and the dawn gleamed white.
C
aroline!" Henry D. Thoreau cocked one brindled ear cannily and rapped sharply with his tail on the piazza floor, but there was no other answer to the call. "Caroline!" The insistent voice rang louder; it was a very determined voice. A sleepy Angora cat scowled reprovingly at its violence; a gray and pink parrot mimicked its hortatory note, but after that the midsummer silence settled down again. Only the bees droned heavily among the heavy August roses.
"Don't nag her, dear; it doesn't do any good," a sleepy contralto, rich as creamy chocolate, crooned out of a scarlet-fringed hammock.
"That's all very well for you, Edith, you don't have the responsibility of her. Her father wants her to read a little history every day, and this is the best time—it's too hot for anything else."
"Rather hot for history, dear?"
"It's not too hot for the Moonstone, I notice! She's been at that since breakfast, steadily. Not a word for any one."
"'Moonstone' sounds cool, anyhow," drawled the contralto appeasingly.
"Oh, Edith! You're as bad as the child herself!"
"She's fourteen, dear."
"Fourteen! What is that?"
"Anything but a child, when it's you, Sis. You talk to her as if she were ten."
"You'd think she was, if you saw her riding that donkey—a great girl like her!"
"There it is, dear! One moment she's a baby, the next she's a great girl! It's hard on her, Sis."
"But, Edith—that donkey!"
"Poor Rose-Marie! I rode him myself—bareback and standing up!—when I was fifteen—at a circus. Do you remember?"
The voice chuckled unwillingly. "You always were a tomboy, Deedee! Do you remember Joe's bull fight?"
Illus320
"And the lemonade stand!" Contralto cried, with a rich swoop of laughter. Their voices took up a happy canon of gold memories; there were no more cries for Caroline.
She was not a hundred yards away from the sister aunts, sheltering under a heavy arbor vitæ, flat on her stomach, her nose glued to the reprehensible Moonstone: that she had heard the calls and resented them the scowl between her eyebrows exhibited. Behind her, patiently at graze, a small, mouse-colored donkey stood, shifting a pair of quaint panniers from side to side and wagging his scarlet ear tassels thoughtfully.
The chapter ended, Caroline rose, peered across to the piazza, nodded to herself at the flow of voices and shrugged her shoulders.
"Good old Aunt Deedee!" she muttered, "she choked her off! Now, for heaven's sake, don't bray, Rose-Marie, and perhaps we can get away. I wouldn't dare get over to the house for a luncheon; we'll have to get along with sweet-boughs."
She slipped the book into one pannier, a cushion into the other and threw a worn steamer rugover the little beast's back; Caroline was a luxurious lounger and rarely traveled without her sumpter mule and his impedimenta. She led him with practiced quiet away from the house and paused under the gnarled old sweet-bough tree: the greenish-yellow, almost translucent globes dotted the lush, warm grass, their languorous sweet filled the air. Selecting a dozen thoughtfully, she added them to the donkey's load, and they went on at a foot pace, through the slowly reddening Baldwins and seek-no-furthers, the tiny lady-apples and the king-of-Tompkins-counties, through the belt of dead, warped fruit trees, blighted and gray—"like those Doré pictures," she murmured to Rose-Marie—down three, crumbling brick steps, where the little fellow picked his way as daintily as a careful lady, and across the dusty road into a pasture trail that led to a wood stretch, sparse at first, thicker as one plunged in deeper. The sun filtered through in delicious diamonds; here and there a resinous pine, steeped in heat, threw out a cloud of balmy odor; a chipmunk scuttered across their path, clicking nervously, only to squat on his haunches and stare beadily atRose-Marie, taut with quivering curiosity. Caroline scowled at him.
"Rise of the Dutch Republic!" she muttered angrily. "I think not!"
The chipmunk winked sympathetically.
"Your father says it's as interesting as any novel" (with startling mimicry of the piazza voice). "I noticetheydon't read it!"
The chipmunk's place was empty; only a slight stir among the leaves marked his path.
Caroline's eyes widened, grew dreamy. She leaned her sharp elbows on Rose-Marie's hairy back and threw her weight on him thoughtfully: he checked and stood like a table.
"Do you suppose there really are regular roads through the trees, like the monkeys took Mowgli on?" she queried.
Rose-Marie waved his long, hairy ears meditatively, but said nothing.
"I don't mean in any fairy way," she explained hastily, "but just scientifically. It might be. Corners and turns and short-cuts—why not? they all know them. He may be running home by a back way, now, to call his children to lookat Rose-Marie; it's as good as a whole circus parade to them, I suppose. And they talk to each other...."
Held in a muse, she leaned against the donkey; the moments slipped by. She lost all count of time. Her eyes stared emptily at some sunny flicker, some dappled pattern of leaf work; her ears were filled with the forest drone, the mysterious murmur made up of so many nameless instruments that only the Great Conductor can classify and number them. Time ceased to be.
At length she woke with a start, shook herself coltishly, and they pushed on. The wood grew thicker; now and then Rose-Marie had to force his way along the tiny trail; his red tassels caught on the twigs.
"I'll tell you what," Caroline began, suddenly, "I'm going to try that wood track to-day and see where it goes, to the very end. It must go somewhere. Where do they haul the wood from, if there isn't some place at the end? Come on, Rose-Marie!"
At a point where the trail forked she led the donkey along the wider and less interesting way.It was ridged and rutty, and Rose-Marie sniffed disgustedly as he slipped among the gnarled roots; the apples bumped and slid in the pannier. After a while Caroline stopped under a tree, ate three of the apples, gave the donkey two, and resting in an artfully constructed nest of rug and pillow, dipped refreshingly into the Moonstone.
"That's a kind of luncheon," she remarked philosophically, "and now we'll start again. I'll go to the end of this, if it takes all day!"
They settled down to a dogged pace and after an hour, during which the wood grew thinner by imperceptible degrees, found themselves on a relatively easy track that forked suddenly into a genuine country road, stretching far to left and right of them. It was a new country to Caroline; she found no landmarks whatever. The road glared with heat, the dust was powdery, the shade nowhere, once they had cleared the wood. She sighed with fatigue and emptiness; it seemed a long pull, and the harbor far from worth the voyage, when all was said and done.
"Whatdidwe want to get to this nasty hot road for, Rose-Marie?" she cried pettishly, shiftingfrom one long leg to the other, shrugging a nervous, bony shoulder. "Oh, what's the sense of anything, anyway?"
Rose-Marie turned a patient, clear brown eye toward her and shook his head vaguely. Gnats buzzed about his flexible ears, and with a swishing fanning motion he displaced them.
"If my back aches," she warned him callously, "you'll have to take me home, you know! Tired or not. It feels as if it might, any minute. I never used to get tired, this way."
A half mile along the road, set off to the left, among cool trees and behind a great well sweep, she perceived suddenly a white farm house. It stood alone, neighborless and well up on a drained, southerly slope; smoke rose languidly from one of its chimneys.
"Perhaps they'll give us some milk, Rose-Marie," said Caroline, "and farms usually have cookies. If there are any children there, you can give 'em rides to pay for it!"
Rose-Marie nodded and they went on with some spirit. As they turned into the deep front yard Caroline almost wept with comfort and a patheticsense of the wayworn wanderer on the edge of home and rest, so the place breathed of these. Clear and white with the faded whiteness of old New England white shingles, it drowsed under its elms; a fire of nasturtiums smoldered along the broken, flagged path that led to it; phlox and "Bouncing Bets" crowded up among the once formal bed of larkspur on each side the sagging flagstone steps, beneath the simple entrance porch. Old-fashioned green paper shades hung evenly half way down the clean windows; the door stood hospitably ajar.
"Just wait there, Rose-Marie, till I find out about things," said Caroline, tapping lightly on the door. The house was perfectly silent. She tapped again, and it seemed that something heavy moved across the floor in a farther room, but there was no answer. Pushing the door open gently, she stepped in and stood surprised, for she found herself not in the stiff, unused country "parlor" she had expected, but a neat bedroom. A quaint four-poster with a fluted valance, a polished mahogany chest of drawers, a stand by the bed with a Bible worn to a soft gray and a night lampon it, some faded photographs tacked to the white walls—this was an odd reception room. She hesitated, and again the faint rumbling sound pointed to some person stirring and she went into the next room.
Here was a clean, kindly kitchen of the best; a swept floor, a freshly blackened cooking stove, a row of bright tins. It was carpeted with faded oilcloth, but rag rugs, washed dim and soft-toned, lay here and there, and the room was so large that the spread table, standing in an ell, made only a pleasant episode in it, a certainty of restoring food at needful times.
It was evidently a sitting room as well, in the primitive, clear fashion that groups all domestic life about the central fire that feeds it; a stand with books, a sewing basket, oil lamps for evening reading, all not too far from brick-shaped pans where unmistakable bread rose under a clean, folded, red cloth. The whole place seemed waiting, quietly, hospitably waiting, for just such an empty, discouraged pilgrim as Caroline.
She sank gratefully into a high-backed arm-chair, stuffed to just the hollow of her tired back,covered with a clean, homely patchwork, and drew out the faithful Moonstone from under her elbow.
"Someone'll come soon," she assured herself, and slipped into the story as a hot swimmer slips off his sunny rock into the waiting blue. Another world, a delicious, smooth element—Romance itself—received her, and of hunger and heat, thirst and the fatigue of the road, she knew no more than the blessed dead themselves....
A sharp tap at the farther door disturbed her, and instinctively she called, "Come in!"
A swift, swishing step brushed across the bedroom and a slender, angry-eyed young woman poised like a gull before her.
"Can I get something to eat here?"
Her voice was at once imperious, irritated, unsure of itself. It could not be that the owner of this voice, dressed with that insolent simplicity that need not consider the costly patience of the work-women, ringed like a dowager with great audacious squares of ruby and white diamond, booted and hatted as one who wears and throws away, with a bag of golden mesh on her wristto pay the price of any whim—it could not be that she doubted what answer she should receive. And yet she did—did, and had before this: so much was evident at first sight. She was a curious gypsyish type, for all herRue de la Paixcurvings and slim, inevitable folds and pleats; a full, drooping mouth in a slender dark face, great brown eyes and heavy waves of black hair. She looked discontented and ready to make some one suffer for it.
"Well—can I?" she repeated, as Caroline stared. "I'm ready to pay, of course."
"I don't know—I don't live here," said Caroline shortly. She felt untidy and badly dressed beside this graceful thing standing in a faint cloud of subtle perfume of her own; her sleeves were too short and her heavy shoes knobby and worn. She wanted furiously to smell sweet like that; and the golden bag—oh, to feel it, powerful and careless, on her wrist!
"Can you find out?" said the girl, eyeing the room attentively; "my car broke down—the man left it in the road and went to Ogdenville for gasoline. I've got to rest somewhere."
"I don't know anything about it," Caroline said coldly. "I'm waiting for someone to come, myself. There's nobody here. I don't live here at all."
With that, and because she was embarrassed and cross and hungry, she opened her book ostentatiously and affected to read busily. The girl frowned angrily a moment, then gave a foreign little shrug of her shoulder and settled herself in a low rocking chair near the bread, her hands loose in her lap. The old clock ticked reprovingly through the hot and conscious silence of the room, but there was no other sound. Caroline could not have lifted her eyes to save her life, and the older girl's lips curled scornfully: her eyelids were sullen.
After a few moments of this intolerable stillness the same low rumbling sound was heard again, this time moving nearer. Something was advancing to the kitchen from a farther room, and as they looked instinctively at the door it pushed open slowly and a sort of foot rest upon wheels appeared; two large wheels followed, and a woman pushed her chair into the kitchen.She was a large, good-looking woman, middle-aged, and not weak, evidently, for she managed her chair easily with one hand; the other held a slice of pink ham on a white platter in her lap. Her face, under a placid parting of grayish fair hair, was rather high colored than of an invalid pallor, her chest broad and deep, her blue eyes at once kind and keen. She wore a neat dress of dark-blue print with a prim, old-fashioned linen collar and a blue bow, a white apron around her plump waist almost covered the patchwork quilt that wrapped her from the hips down: a shell comb showed slightly above her crisp hair. As she faced her two angry guests a smile of unmistakable sincerity and delight greeted them.
"Well, of all things!" she cried eagerly; "how long, 'you been here?"
Caroline waited sulkily for her social superior; the girl was undoubtedly a "young lady." Her errand was soon explained, her question asked.
"Something to eat?" echoed their delighted hostess. "Well, I should think so! I'm just getting my dinner. Of course I'm all alone, this time o' day, but I always say if I'm goodenough to cook it well, I'm good enough to eat it comfortable, and I sit down to table just's if the family was all here. There's some that believe in a bite and a bit, when the men folks are out, but I never did. And then—" she blushed shyly like a girl—"I always want to feel ready in case anyone should come. Just in case. He says it's foolishness, but look at you two, now! How'd I feel if I wasn't prepared! And once—in April, 'twas—a sewing-machine man came. I had ham then, too."
She beamed on them, frankly overjoyed in their company, and in the mellow warmth of that honest pleasure the fog and anger in the room rolled back like mist under a noon sun, and Caroline unbent, named herself, and mentioned her donkey and their woodland journey.
"You don't say!"
Quick as a flash their hostess was across the room and peering through the window.
"Well, of all the funny little fellows! I never saw one before, that I remember. Aren't those red tossels neat, though! I s'pose he's tame?"
Caroline put him through his paces, as hecame like a dog at her call, and she of the wheel chair applauded like a child at a Punch and Judy.
"We saw so many of those in Italy," said the older girl. "I rode one in the Alps."
The woman's face flushed a deep, quick red; she gripped the arms of her chair and stared at the nervous little jeweled creature before her as if she were a vision of the night.
"Have you been to Italy?" she cried eagerly, "not really!"
"Me? Oh, yes, I've been all over Europe," said the girl indifferently. "Why? Do you like it?"
Now it was the woman who echoed, "Me?"
She flashed a whimsical look at Caroline; instinct taught her that they were two to one, here.
"Why, dear, I've never been out of Lockwood's Corners in my life!"
Simple, rude incredulity pushed out the girl's lip.
"Nonsense!" she said brusquely, "that's ridiculous!"
"Maybe it is," her hostess answered quietly, "but it's true, all the same. I never have."Gold-bag did not blush for her rudeness, for the simple reason that she did not realize it, and Caroline suddenly felt less embarrassed by her. Girls of that age were too old to talk so pettishly to people not in their own families, and she twiddled her fingers too much, anyway, and stared too much, or else, again, she didn't look at one enough.
"You've been to New York, haven't you?" she asked abruptly.
"Never," said the woman. "I've been this way since I was seventeen. I'm a pretty heavy woman, you know, and they couldn't put me on a train very well. So—"
"There's plenty of room in a drawing-room car."
"I guess we couldn't afford that," said the woman simply.
There was an awkward pause; Caroline blushed furiously. How horrid it all was! But their hostess brushed it away in a moment.
"And here you are hungry!" she cried; "the idea! I'll get this ham right on and fry up some potatoes—I'll do them French! I've got somefresh raised-doughnuts—I got the prize for them at the county fair, years ago, so I know they're all right—and some summer apple sauce; 'tain't much, with summer apples, but I put in lemon peel and a taste o' last year's cider—it makes a relish, anyhow; and I've got some fine sweet-pickled watermelon rind. I could have had sponge cakes, if I'd only known! Would you care to try a cut pie? The sewing-machine man said he hadn't tasted anything like my squash pie in years. It was cut, too."
With incredible swiftness she rolled from table to buttery, from stove to larder. As the pink ham curled and sputtered in its savory juices, she turned an earnest face to the girl who watched her curiously.
"Can't you tell us a little about Italy, while we're waiting?" she begged.
"It's full of fleas," said the traveler carelessly, "and moldy old places—it's awfully cold, too. I wore my furs a lot of the time. It smells bad nearly everywhere. Do you stay here in the winter, too?"
"I've stayed here forty-five winters"—sheturned the ham capably—"and I expect to stay as many more as the Lord spares my life! I was born here. So was father. Grandfather was born right in the Corners. In eighty-eight we were snowed up a week here. Mr. Winterpine—that's my husband—had bronchitis, and he couldn't get out to tend to the stock. Edgar—that was the hired man's name—was only twenty, and I had to help with one of the cows; I went out in my chair through a snow tunnel!"
She chuckled reminiscently and her guests listened, fascinated.
"We were caught in a bad storm outside of St. Petersburg, once," Gold-bag volunteered. "If it hadn't been for J. G. we'd have gone out, probably. As it was, the driver lost a finger."
"St. Petersburg, Russia?" the woman inquired respectfully, her skillet full of potatoes colored like autumn beech leaves.
The girl nodded. "J. G. swore at the man, so he didn'tdaredie," she continued, with a hard little grin; "and we just about pulled through."
"Who is J. G.?" asked Caroline abruptly.
"J. G. Terwilliger," she answered simply. It was as if one had said "Edward Seventh" or "Adelina Patti" or "P. T. Barnum."
"Who's he?"
"He's my father, for one thing. I suppose you know who he is as well as anybody else."
"I never heard of him," Caroline said carelessly, "are you all ready, now, Mrs. Winterpine?"
"He is the greatest mining expert in the world," the girl declared emphatically, "and I don't know where you've lived not to know it. You—" with a look at the woman, "you know him, of course?"
"I don't know anybody of that name, no," the woman admitted; "but then, you know, we don't know much, 'way off here, about city people."
"There hasn't been a daily paper for ten days that hasn't had his name in it," the girl remarked dryly.
Mrs. Winterpine wiped her face, flanked the ham with the potatoes, assembled an incredible array of sweets and relishes in odd, thick little glass dishes, and with a wave of her hand indicated her guests' places.
"We take theLockwood's Corners Clarion," she explained pacifically.
They addressed themselves to the meal, a strange trio. Caroline, usually a hopeless chatterbox, fell somehow and inevitably into the listener's seat. Their hostess could no longer be denied: her thirst gleamed in her eyes, and flesh and blood could not have withstood her plea for tidings of those distant, rosy lands whose laden wharves she could never see, nor ever glimpse their tiled roofs under foreign sunsets, their white spires beneath mysterious moons. Their clothes: was it true that the French wore wooden shoes? She had read that men in Italy walked in gay capes, colored like birds. Was there water in the streets, and were boats really their carriages? Did soldiers, red-coated, demand passports? Had her guest seen the snow tops of green slopes? Did dogs drag milk carts for white-capped women?
The girl, sulky at first, yielded finally, and in quick, nervous phrases poured out of her full budget. Taken from her convent school in California at fifteen, she had roamed the worldwith the tireless "J. G." From Panama to Alaska, from Cairo to Christiania, with her uncreased Paris frocks and the discontented line between her dark eyes, she had steamed and sailed and ridden; she had ridden a camel in Algeria, a gelding in Hyde Park, a broncho on the Western plains.
"Why do you call your father 'J. G.'?" Caroline demanded suddenly.
"Do you like 'Klondike Jim' any better? That's his other name," Gold-bag shot at her defiantly.
Then came strange tales of a flaring, glaring mining camp: lights and liquor and bared knives, rough men and rougher words, and in the midst a thin, big-eyed little creature in the hand of a burly, red-shirted miner, with the very gift of gold under his matted hair, the scent for it in his blunt nostrils, the feel for it in his callous finger tips. Klondike Jim! He had made for his Klondike as a bloodhound makes for the quarry; he could not be mistaken. Night and day she had been with him, his first claim named for her—the Madeline—his first earnings a gold belt for her childish waist!
And then, money and money and more money. Rivers of it, ponds of it.
"If J. G. said there was copper under Fifth Avenue, they'd dig it up to-morrow!"
"You must be real proud of him," said Mrs. Winterpine genially.
"I used to be," the girl answered, with her mouth a little awry.
"My dear, my dear!"
"Oh, yes," she cried angrily, pushing back her chair and facing them; "all very well, but who are we? Who was my mother? Who was my grandfather? Where did we come from? Will a sapphire bracelet answer me that, do you think? Who knows us? 'Miss Maddy Money Bags'! How long do you think I'd stay in that convent? Who does J. G. know? Hotelmen and barkeeps and presidents of things! If you could see the counts he wanted me to marry! If you could hear the couriers laugh at him!"
"But think of all the traveling you've done, dear! What things to remember! How happy—"
"Happy! I hate it. As J. G. says, I hate it like—well, I just hate it," she concluded, with propriety, if a little lamely.
Something in the look she cast around the warm, clean kitchen struck the woman suddenly. "You don't mean you'd rather live here—here?" she exclaimed amazedly.
"Don't you like it?" queried Madeline sharply.
Mrs. Winterpine considered a moment. "You see, it's my home," she began. The girl's dry laugh interrupted her.
"That's just it. It's your home," she repeated. "We haven't any. That's the idea. What's the use of traveling if you can't come home? And we can't, ever. Unless we go back to the Klondike," she added satirically.
There was a long pause. It seemed that the girl was slowly undressing herself before them: travel and money and gold bag and scented linings slipped from her like so many petticoats and left her thin and cold between them, warm as they were in their solid homespun of kin and hearth. Lean and empty, a houseless, flitting, little shadow, she had scoured the world andsat now, envious, by a kitchen fire. How strange!
Mrs. Winterpine gathered the dishes with accustomed hands and piled them by a pan of hot, soapy water. Caroline, sobered, rose to help her with the instinctive courtesy of the home-trained child, but drew back at her shaken head and waving finger, and followed her glance toward her other guest, who stared morosely into the dooryard, her chin in her ringed, brown hand. She was evidently not far from tears—in a nervous crisis.