initial commit of ebook 18605HEADmain

9 files changed, 25440 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/18605-8.txt b/18605-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6762da1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/18605-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8440 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Pair of Patient Lovers, by William Dean
+Howells
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: A Pair of Patient Lovers
+
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 16, 2006  [eBook #18605]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David Edwards, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/) from scanned
+images of public domain material generously made available by the Google
+Books Library Project
+(http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/library.html)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      the the Google Books Library Project. See
+      http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00647020&id
+
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS
+
+by
+
+W. D. Howells
+
+Author of "The Landlord at Lion's Head" "Ragged Lady" etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York and London
+Harper & Brothers Publishers
+1901
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   A Pair of Patient Lovers
+
+   The Pursuit of the Piano
+
+   A Difficult Case
+
+   The Magic of a Voice
+
+   A Circle in the Water
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+We first met Glendenning on the Canadian boat which carries you down the
+rapids of the St. Lawrence from Kingston and leaves you at Montreal.
+When we saw a handsome young clergyman across the promenade-deck looking
+up from his guide-book toward us, now and again, as if in default of
+knowing any one else he would be very willing to know us, we decided
+that I must make his acquaintance. He was instantly and cordially
+responsive to my question whether he had ever made the trip before, and
+he was amiably grateful when in my quality of old habitué of the route I
+pointed out some characteristic features of the scenery. I showed him
+just where we were on the long map of the river hanging over his knee,
+and I added, with no great relevancy, that my wife and I were renewing
+the fond emotion of our first trip down the St. Lawrence in the
+character of bridal pair which we had spurned when it was really ours. I
+explained that we had left the children with my wife's aunt, so as to
+render the travesty more lifelike; and when he said, "I suppose you miss
+them, though," I gave him my card. He tried to find one of his own to
+give me in return, but he could only find a lot of other people's cards.
+He wrote his name on the back of one, and handed it to me with a smile.
+"It won't do for me to put 'reverend' before it, in my own chirography,
+but that's the way I have it engraved."
+
+"Oh," I said, "the cut of your coat bewrayed you," and we had some
+laughing talk. But I felt the eye of Mrs. March dwelling upon me with
+growing impatience, till I suggested, "I should like to make you
+acquainted with my wife, Mr. Glendenning."
+
+He said, Oh, he should be so happy; and he gathered his dangling map
+into the book and came over with me to where Mrs. March sat; and, like
+the good young American husband I was in those days, I stood aside and
+left the whole talk to her. She interested him so much more than I could
+that I presently wandered away and amused myself elsewhere. When I came
+back, she clutched my arm and bade me not speak a word; it was the most
+romantic thing in the world, and she would tell me about it when we were
+alone, but now I must go off again; he had just gone to get a book for
+her which he had been speaking of, and would be back the next instant,
+and it would not do to let him suppose we had been discussing him.
+
+
+II.
+
+I was sometimes disappointed in Mrs. March's mysteries when I came up
+close to them; but I was always willing to take them on trust; and I
+submitted to the postponement of a solution in this case with more than
+my usual faith. She found time, before Mr. Glendenning reappeared, to
+ask me if I had noticed a mother and daughter on the boat, the mother
+evidently an invalid, and the daughter very devoted, and both decidedly
+ladies; and when I said, "No. Why?" she answered, "Oh, nothing," and
+that she would tell me. Then she drove me away, and we did not meet till
+I found her in our state-room just before the terrible mid-day meal they
+used to give you on the _Corinthian_, and called dinner.
+
+She began at once, while she did something to her hair before the morsel
+of mirror: "Why I wanted to know if you had noticed those people was
+because they are the reason of his being here."
+
+"Did he tell you that?"
+
+"Of course not. But I knew it, for he asked if I had seen them, or could
+tell him who they were."
+
+"It seems to me that he made pretty good time to get so far as that."
+
+"I don't say he got so far himself, but you men never know how to take
+steps for any one else. You can't put two and two together. But to my
+mind it's as plain as the nose on his face that he's seen that girl
+somewhere and is taking this trip because she's on board. He said he
+hadn't decided to come till the last moment."
+
+"What wild leaps of fancy!" I said. "But the nose on his face is
+handsome rather than plain, and I sha'n't be satisfied till I see him
+with the lady."
+
+"Yes, he's quite Greek," said Mrs. March, in assent to my opinion of his
+nose. "Too Greek for a clergyman, almost. But he isn't vain of it. Those
+beautiful people are often quite modest, and Mr. Glendenning is very
+modest."
+
+"And I'm very hungry. If you don't hurry your prinking, Isabel, we shall
+not get any dinner."
+
+"I'm ready," said my wife, and she continued with her eyes still on the
+glass: "He's got a church out in Ohio, somewhere; but he's a
+New-Englander, and he's quite wild to get back. He thinks those people
+are from Boston: I could tell in a moment if I saw them. Well, now, I
+_am_ ready," and with this she really ceased to do something to her
+hair, and came out into the long saloon with me where the table was set.
+Rows of passengers stood behind the rows of chairs, with a detaining
+grasp on nearly all of them. We gazed up and down in despair. Suddenly
+Mrs. March sped forward, and I found that Mr. Glendenning had made a
+sign to her from a distant point, where there were two vacant chairs for
+us next his own. We eagerly laid hands on them, and waited for the gong
+to sound for dinner. In this interval an elderly lady followed by a
+young girl came down the saloon toward us, and I saw signs, or rather
+emotions, of intelligence pass between Mr. Glendenning and Mrs. March
+concerning them.
+
+The older of these ladies was a tall, handsome matron, who bore her
+fifty years with a native severity qualified by a certain air of wonder
+at a world which I could well fancy had not always taken her at her own
+estimate of her personal and social importance. She had the effect of
+challenging you to do less, as she advanced slowly between the wall of
+state-rooms and the backs of the people gripping their chairs, and eyed
+them with a sort of imperious surprise that they should have left no
+place for her. So at least I read her glance, while I read in that of
+the young lady coming after, and showing her beauty first over this
+shoulder and then over that of her mother, chiefly a present amusement,
+behind which lay a character of perhaps equal pride, if not equal
+hardness. She was very beautiful, in the dark style which I cannot help
+thinking has fallen into unmerited abeyance; and as she passed us I
+could see that she was very graceful. She was dressed in a lady's
+acceptance of the fashions of that day, which would be thought so
+grotesque in this. I have heard contemporaneous young girls laugh at the
+mere notion of hoops, but in 1870 we thought hoops extremely becoming;
+and this young lady knew how to hold hers a little on one side so as to
+give herself room in the narrow avenue, and not betray more than the
+discreetest hint of a white stocking. I believe the stockings are black
+now.
+
+They both got by us, and I could see Mr. Glendenning following them with
+longing but irresolute eyes, until they turned, a long way down the
+saloon, as if to come toward us again. Then he hurried to meet them, and
+as he addressed himself first to one and then to the other, I knew him
+to be offering them his chair. So did my wife, and she said, "You must
+give up your place too, Basil," and I said I would if she wished to see
+me starve on the spot. But of course I went and joined Glendenning in
+his entreaties that they would deprive us of our chances of dinner (I
+knew what the second table was on the _Corinthian_); and I must say that
+the elder lady accepted my chair in the spirit which my secret grudge
+deserved. She made me feel as if I ought to have offered it when they
+first passed us; but it was some satisfaction to learn afterwards that
+she gave Mrs. March, for her ready sacrifice of me, as bad a half-hour
+as she ever had. She sat next to my wife, and the young lady took
+Glendenning's place, and as soon as we had left them she began trying to
+find out from Mrs. March who he was, and what his relation to us was.
+The girl tried to check her at first, and then seemed to give it up, and
+devoted herself to being rather more amiable than she otherwise might
+have been, my wife thought, in compensation for the severity of her
+mother's scrutiny. Her mother appeared disposed to hold Mrs. March
+responsible for knowing little or nothing about Mr. Glendenning.
+
+"He seems to be an Episcopal clergyman," she said, in a haughty summing
+up. "From his name I should have supposed he was Scotch and a
+Presbyterian." She began to patronize the trip we were making, and to
+abuse it; she said that she did not see what could have induced them to
+undertake it; but one had to get back from Niagara somehow, and they had
+been told at the hotel there that the boats were very comfortable. She
+had never been more uncomfortable in her life; as for the rapids, they
+made her ill, and they were obviously so dangerous that she should not
+even look at them again. Then, from having done all the talking and most
+of the eating, she fell quite silent, and gave her daughter a chance to
+speak to my wife. She had hitherto spoken only to her mother, but now
+she asked Mrs. March if she had ever been down the St. Lawrence before.
+
+When my wife explained, and asked her whether she was enjoying it, she
+answered with a rapture that was quite astonishing, in reference to her
+mother's expressions of disgust: "Oh, immensely! Every instant of it,"
+and she went on to expatiate on its peculiar charm in terms so
+intelligent and sympathetic that Mrs. March confessed it had been part
+of our wedding journey, and that this was the reason why we were now
+taking the trip.
+
+The young lady did not seem to care so much for this, and when she
+thanked my wife in leaving the table with her mother, and begged her to
+thank the gentlemen who had so kindly given up their places, she made no
+overture to further acquaintance. In fact, we had been so simply and
+merely made use of that, although we were rather meek people, we decided
+to avoid our beneficiaries for the rest of the day; and Mr. Glendenning,
+who could not, as a clergyman, indulge even a just resentment, could as
+little refuse us his sympathy. He laughed at some hints of my wife's
+experience, which she dropped before she left us to pick up a meal from
+the lukewarm leavings of the _Corinthian's_ dinner, if we could. She
+said she was going forward to get a good place on the bow, and would
+keep two camp-stools for us, which she could assure us no one would get
+away from her.
+
+We were somewhat surprised then to find her seated by the rail with the
+younger lady of the two whom she meant to avoid if she meant anything by
+what she said. She was laughing and talking on quite easy terms with her
+apparently, and "There!" she triumphed as we came up, "I've kept your
+camp-stools for you," and she showed them at her side, where she was
+holding her hand on them. "You had better put them here."
+
+The girl had stiffened a little at our approach, as I could see, but a
+young girl's stiffness is always rather amusing than otherwise, and I
+did not mind it. Neither, that I could see, did Mr. Glendenning, and it
+soon passed. It seemed that she had left her mother lying down in her
+state-room, where she justly imagined that if she did not see the rapids
+she should suffer less alarm from them; the young lady had come frankly
+to the side of Mrs. March as soon as she saw her, and asked if she might
+sit with her. She now talked to me for a decent space of time, and then
+presently, without my knowing how, she was talking to Mr. Glendenning,
+and they were comparing notes of Niagara; he was saying that he thought
+he had seen her at the Cataract House, and she was owning that she and
+her mother had at least stopped at that hotel.
+
+
+III.
+
+I have no wish, and if I had the wish I should not have the art, to keep
+back the fact that these young people were evidently very much taken
+with each other. They showed their mutual pleasure so plainly that even
+I could see it. As for Mrs. March, she was as proud of it as if she had
+invented them and set them going in their advance toward each other,
+like two mechanical toys.
+
+I confess that with reference to what my wife had told me of this young
+lady's behavior when she was with her mother, her submissiveness, her
+entire self-effacement, up to a certain point, I did not know quite what
+to make of her present independence, not to say freedom. I thought she
+might perhaps have been kept so strictly in the background, with young
+men, that she was rather disposed to make the most of any chance at them
+which offered. If the young man in this case was at no pains to hide his
+pleasure in her society, one might say that she was almost eager to show
+her delight in his. If it was a case of love at first sight, the
+earliest glimpse had been to the girl, who was all eyes for Glendenning.
+It was very pretty, but it was a little alarming, and perhaps a little
+droll, even. She was actually making the advances, not consciously, but
+helplessly; fondly, ignorantly, for I have no belief, nor had my wife (a
+much more critical observer), that she knew how she was giving herself
+away.
+
+I thought perhaps that she was in the habit from pride, or something
+like it, of holding herself in check, and that this blameless excess
+which I saw was the natural expansion from an inner constraint. But what
+I really knew was that the young people got on very rapidly, in an
+acquaintance that prospered up to the last moment I saw them together.
+This was just before the _Corinthian_ drew up to her landing at
+Montreal, when Miss Bentley (we had learned her name) came to us from
+the point where she was standing with Glendenning and said that now she
+must go to her mother, and took a sweet leave of my wife. She asked
+where we were going to stay in Montreal and whether we were going on to
+Quebec; and said her mother would wish to send Mrs. March her card.
+
+When she was gone, Glendenning explained, with rather superfluous
+apology, that he had offered to see the ladies to a hotel, for he was
+afraid that at this crowded season they might not find it easy to get
+rooms, and he did not wish Mrs. Bentley, who was an invalid, to have any
+anxieties about it. He bade us an affectionate, but not a disconsolate
+adieu, and when we had got into the modest conveyance (if an omnibus is
+modest) which was to take us to the Ottawa House, we saw him drive off
+to the St. Lawrence Hall (it was twenty-five years ago) in one of those
+vitreous and tinkling Montreal landaus, with Mrs. and Miss Bentley and
+Mrs. Bentley's maid.
+
+We were still so young as to be very much absorbed in the love affairs
+of other people; I believe women always remain young enough for that;
+and Mrs. March talked about the one we fancied we had witnessed the
+beginning of pretty much the whole evening. The next morning we got
+letters from Boston, telling us how the children were and all that they
+were doing and saying. We had stood it very well, as long as we did not
+hear anything about them, and we had lent ourselves in a sort of
+semi-forgetfulness of them to the associations of the past when they
+were not; but now to learn that they were hearty and happy, and that
+they sent love and kisses, was too much. With one mind we renounced the
+notion of going on to Quebec; we found that we could just get the
+ten-o'clock train that would reach Boston by eleven that night, and we
+made all haste and got it. We had not been really at peace, we
+perceived, till that moment since we had bidden the children good-bye.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Perhaps it was because we left Montreal so abruptly that Mrs. March
+never received Mrs. Bentley's card. It may be at the Ottawa House to
+this day, for all I know. What is certain is that we saw and heard
+nothing more of her or her daughter. Glendenning called to see us as he
+passed through Boston on his way west from Quebec, but we were neither
+of us at home and we missed him, to my wife's vivid regret. I rather
+think we expected him to find some excuse for writing after he reached
+his place in northern Ohio; but he did not write, and he became more and
+more the memory of a young clergyman in the beginning of a love-affair,
+till one summer, while we were still disputing where we should spend the
+hot weather within business reach, there came a letter from him saying
+that he was settled at Gormanville, and wishing that he might tempt us
+up some afternoon before we were off to the mountains or seaside. This
+revived all my wife's waning interest in him, and it was hard to keep
+the answer I made him from expressing in a series of crucial inquiries
+the excitement she felt at his being in New England and so near Boston,
+and in Gormanville of all places. It was one of the places we had
+thought of for the summer, and we were yet so far from having
+relinquished it that we were recurring from time to time in hope and
+fear to the advertisement of an old village mansion there, with ample
+grounds, garden, orchard, ice-house, and stables, for a very low rental
+to an unexceptionable tenant. We had no doubt of our own qualifications,
+but we had misgivings of the village mansion; and I am afraid that I
+rather unduly despatched the personal part of my letter, in my haste to
+ask what Glendenning knew and what he thought of the Conwell place.
+However, the letter seemed to serve all purposes. There came a reply
+from Glendenning, most cordial, even affectionate, saying that the
+Conwell place was delightful, and I must come at once and see it. He
+professed that he would be glad to have Mrs. March come too, and he
+declared that if his joy at having us did not fill his modest rectory to
+bursting, he was sure it could stand the physical strain of our
+presence, though he confessed that his guest-chamber was tiny.
+
+"He wants _you_, Basil," my wife divined from terms which gave me no
+sense of any latent design of parting us in his hospitality. "But,
+evidently, it isn't a chance to be missed, and you must go--instantly.
+Can you go to-morrow? But telegraph him you're coming, and tell him to
+hold on to the Conwell place; it may be snapped up any moment if it's so
+desirable."
+
+I did not go till the following week, when I found that no one had
+attempted to snap up the Conwell place. In fact, it rather snapped me
+up, I secured it with so little trouble. I reported it so perfect that
+all my wife's fears of a latent objection to it were roused again. But
+when I said I thought we could relinquish it, her terrors subsided; and
+I thought this the right moment to deliver a stroke that I had been
+holding in reserve.
+
+"You know," I began, "the Bentleys have their summer place there--the
+old Bentley homestead. It's their ancestral town, you know."
+
+"Bentleys? What Bentleys?" she demanded, opaquely.
+
+"Why, those people we met on the _Corinthian_, summer before last--you
+thought he was in love with the girl--"
+
+A simultaneous photograph could alone reproduce Mrs. March's tumultuous
+and various emotions as she seized the fact conveyed in my words. She
+poured out a volume of mingled conjectures, assertions, suspicions,
+conclusions, in which there was nothing final but the decision that we
+must not dream of going there; that it would look like thrusting
+ourselves in, and would be in the worst sort of taste; they would all
+hate us, and we should feel that we were spies upon the young people;
+for of course the Bentleys had got Glendenning there to marry him, and
+in effect did not want any one to witness the disgraceful spectacle.
+
+I said, "That may be the nefarious purpose of the young lady, but, as I
+understood Glendenning, it is no part of her mother's design."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Miss Bentley may have got him there to marry him, but Mrs. Bentley
+seems to have meant nothing more than an engagement at the worst."
+
+"What _do_ you mean? They're not engaged, are they?"
+
+"They're not married, at any rate, and I suppose they're engaged. I did
+not have it from Miss Bentley, but I suppose Glendenning may be trusted
+in such a case."
+
+"Now," said my wife, with a severity that might well have appalled me,
+"if you will please to explain, Basil, it will be better for you."
+
+"Why, it is simply this. Glendenning seems to have made himself so
+useful to the mother and pleasing to the daughter after we left them in
+Montreal that he was tolerated on a pretence that there was reason for
+his writing back to Mrs. Bentley after he got home, and, as Mrs. Bentley
+never writes letters, Miss Bentley had the hard task of answering him.
+This led to a correspondence."
+
+"And to her moving heaven and earth to get him to Gormanville. I see! Of
+course she did it so that no one knew what she was about!"
+
+"Apparently. Glendenning himself was not in the secret. The Bentleys
+were in Europe last summer, and he did not know that they had a place at
+Gormanville till he came to live there. Another proof that Miss Bentley
+got him there is the fact that she and her mother are Unitarians, and
+that they would naturally be able to select the rector of the Episcopal
+church."
+
+"Go on," said Mrs. March, not the least daunted.
+
+"Oh, there's nothing more. He is simply rector of St. Michael's at
+Gormanville; and there is not the slightest proof that any young lady
+had a hand in getting him there."
+
+"As if I cared in the least whether she had! I suppose you will allow
+that she had something to do with getting engaged to him, and that is
+the _great_ matter."
+
+"Yes, I must allow that, if we are to suppose that young ladies have
+anything to do with young men getting engaged to them; it doesn't seem
+exactly delicate. But the novel phase of this great matter is the
+position of the young lady's mother in regard to it. From what I could
+make out she consents to the engagement of her daughter, but she don't
+and won't consent to her marriage." My wife glared at me with so little
+speculation in her eyes that I felt obliged to disclaim all
+responsibility for the fact I had reported. "Thou canst not say _I_ did
+it. _They_ did it, and Miss Bentley, if any one, is to blame. It seems,
+from what Glendenning says, that the young lady and he wrote to each
+other while she was abroad, and that they became engaged by letter. Then
+the affair was broken off because of her mother's opposition; but since
+they have met at Gormanville, the engagement has been renewed. So much
+they've managed against the old lady's will, but apparently on condition
+that they won't get married till she says."
+
+"Nonsense! How could she stop them?"
+
+"She couldn't, I dare say, by any of the old romantic methods of a
+convent or disinheritance; but she is an invalid; she wants to keep her
+daughter with her, and she avails with the girl's conscience by being
+simply dependent and obstructive. The young people have carried their
+engagement through, and now such hope as they have is fixed upon her
+finally yielding in the matter of their marriage, though Glendenning was
+obliged to confess that there was no sign of her doing so. They
+agree--Miss Bentley and he--that they cannot get married as they got
+engaged, in spite of her mother--it would be unclerical if it wouldn't
+be unfilial--and they simply have to bide their time."
+
+My wife asked abruptly, "How many chambers are there in the Conwell
+place?"
+
+I said, and then she asked, "Is there a windmill or a force-pump?" I
+answered proudly that in Gormanville there was town water, but that if
+this should give out there were both a windmill and a force-pump on the
+Conwell place.
+
+"It is very complete," she sighed, as if this had removed all hope from
+her, and she added, "I suppose we had better take it."
+
+
+V.
+
+We certainly did not take it for the sake of being near the Bentleys,
+neither of whom had given us particular reason to desire their further
+acquaintance, though the young lady had agreeably modified herself when
+apart from her mother. In fact, we went to Gormanville because it was an
+exceptional chance to get a beautiful place for a very little money,
+where we could go early and stay late. But no sooner had we acted from
+this quite personal, not to say selfish, motive than we were rewarded
+with the sweetest overtures of neighborliness by the Bentleys. They
+waited, of course, till we were settled in our house before they came to
+call upon Mrs. March, but they had been preceded by several hospitable
+offerings from their garden, their dairy, and their hen-house, which
+were very welcome in the days of our first uncertainty as to
+trades-people. We analyzed this hospitality as an effect of that sort of
+nature in Mrs. Bentley which can equally assert its superiority by
+blessing or banning. Evidently, since chance had again thrown us in her
+way, she would not go out of it to be offensive, but would continue in
+it, and make the best of us.
+
+No doubt Glendenning had talked us into the Bentleys; and this my wife
+said she hated most of all; for we should have to live up to the notion
+of us imparted by a young man from the impressions of the moment when he
+saw us purple in the light of his dawning love. In justice to
+Glendenning, however, I must say that he did nothing, by a show of his
+own assiduities, to urge us upon the Bentleys after we came to
+Gormanville. If we had not felt so sure of him, we might have thought he
+was keeping his regard for us a little too modestly in the background.
+He made us one cool little call, the evening of our arrival, in which he
+had the effect of anxiety to get away as soon as possible; and after
+that we saw him no more until he came with Miss Bentley and her mother a
+week later. His forbearance was all the more remarkable because his
+church and his rectory were just across the street from the Conwell
+place, at the corner of another street, where we could see their wooden
+gothic in the cold shadow of the maples with which the green in front of
+them was planted.
+
+During all that time Glendenning's personal elevation remained invisible
+to us, and we began to wonder if he were not that most lamentable of
+fellow-creatures, a clerical snob. I am not sure still that he might not
+have been so in some degree, there was such a mixture of joy that was
+almost abject in his genuine affection for us when Mrs. Bentley openly
+approved us on her first visit. I dare say he would not have quite
+abandoned us in any case; but he must have felt responsible for us, and
+it must have been such a load off him when she took that turn with us.
+
+She called in the afternoon, and the young people dropped in again the
+same evening, and took the trouble to win back our simple hearts. That
+is, Miss Bentley showed herself again as frank and sweet as she had been
+on the boat when she joined my wife after dinner and left her mother in
+her state-room. Glendenning was again the Glendenning of our first
+meeting, and something more. He fearlessly led the way to intimacies of
+feeling with an expansion uncommon even in an accepted lover, and we
+made our conclusions that however subject he might be to his
+indefinitely future mother-in-law, he would not be at all so to his
+wife, if she could help it. He took the lead, but because she gave it
+him; and she displayed an aptness for conjugal submissiveness which
+almost amounted to genius. Whenever she spoke to either of us, it was
+with one eye on him to see if he liked what she was saying. It was so
+perfect that I doubted if it could last; but my wife said a girl like
+that could keep it up till she dropped. I have never been sure that she
+liked us as well as he did; I think it was part of her intense loyalty
+to seem to like us a great deal more.
+
+She was deeply in love, and nothing but her ladylike breeding kept her
+from being openly fond. I figured her in a sort of impassioned
+incandescence, such as only a pure and perhaps cold nature could burn
+into; and I amused myself a little with the sense of Glendenning's
+apparent inadequacy. Sweet he was, and admirably gentle and fine; he had
+an unfailing good sense, and a very ready wisdom, as I grew more and
+more to perceive. But he was an inch or so shorter than Miss Bentley,
+and in his sunny blondness, with his golden red beard and hair, and his
+pinkish complexion, he wanted still more the effect of an emotional
+equality with her. He was very handsome, with features excellently
+regular; his smile was celestially beautiful; innocent gay lights danced
+in his blue eyes, through lashes and under brows that were a lighter
+blond than his beard and hair.
+
+
+VI.
+
+The next morning, which was of a Saturday, when I did not go to town, he
+came over to us again from the shadow of his sombre maples, and fell
+simply and naturally into talk about his engagement. He was much fuller
+in my wife's presence than he had been with me alone, and told us the
+hopes he had of Mrs. Bentley's yielding within a reasonable time. He
+seemed to gather encouragement from the sort of perspective he got the
+affair into by putting it before us, and finding her dissent to her
+daughter's marriage so ridiculous in our eyes after her consent to her
+engagement that a woman of her great good sense evidently could not
+persist in it.
+
+"There is no personal objection to myself," he said, with a modest
+satisfaction. "In fact, I think she really likes me, and only dislikes
+my engagement to Edith. But she knows that Edith is incapable of
+marrying against her mother's will, or I of wishing her to do so; though
+there is nothing else to prevent us."
+
+My wife allowed herself to say, "Isn't it rather cruel of her?"
+
+"Why, no, not altogether; or not so much so as it might be in different
+circumstances. I make every allowance for her. In the first place, she
+is a great sufferer."
+
+"Yes, I know," my wife relented.
+
+"She suffers terribly from asthma. I don't suppose she has lain down in
+bed for ten years. She sleeps in an easy-chair, and she's never quite
+free from her trouble; when there's a paroxysm of the disease, her
+anguish is frightful. I've never seen it, of course, but I have heard
+it; you hear it all through the house. Edith has the constant care of
+her. Her mother has to be perpetually moved and shifted in her chair,
+and Edith does this for her; she will let no one else come near her;
+Edith must look to the ventilation, and burn the pastilles which help
+her to breathe. She depends upon her every instant." He had grown very
+solemn in voice and face, and he now said, "When I think of what she
+endures, it seems to me that it is I who am cruel even to dream of
+taking her daughter from her."
+
+"Yes," my wife assented.
+
+"But there is really no present question of that We are very happy as it
+is. We can wait, and wait willingly till Mrs. Bentley wishes us to wait
+no longer; or--"
+
+He stopped, and we were both aware of something in his mind which he put
+from him. He became a little pale, and sat looking very grave. Then he
+rose. "I don't know whether to say how welcome you would be at St.
+Michael's to-morrow, for you may not be--"
+
+"_We_ are Unitarians, too," said Mrs. March. "But we are coming to hear
+_you_."
+
+"I am glad you are coming _to church_," said Glendenning, putting away
+the personal tribute implied with a gentle dignity that became him.
+
+
+VII.
+
+We waited a discreet time before returning the call of the Bentley
+ladies, but not so long as to seem conscious. In fact, we had been
+softened towards Mrs. Bentley by what Glendenning told us of her
+suffering, and we were disposed to forgive a great deal of patronage and
+superiority to her asthma; they were not part of the disease, but still
+they were somehow to be considered with reference to it in her case.
+
+We were admitted by the maid, who came running down the hall stairway,
+with a preoccupied air, to the open door where we stood waiting. There
+were two great syringa-bushes on each hand close to the portal, which
+were in full flower, and which flung their sweetness through the doorway
+and the windows; but when we found ourselves in the dim old-fashioned
+parlor, we were aware of this odor meeting and mixing with another which
+descended from the floor above--the smell of some medicated pastille.
+There was a sound of anxious steps overhead, and a hurried closing of
+doors, with the mechanical sound of labored breathing.
+
+"We have come at a bad time," I suggested.
+
+"Yes, _why_ did they let us in?" cried my wife in an anguish of
+compassion and vexation. She repeated her question to Miss Bentley, who
+came down almost immediately, looking pale, indeed, but steady, and
+making a brave show of welcome.
+
+"My mother would have wished it," she said, "and she sent me as soon as
+she knew who it was. You mustn't be distressed," she entreated, with a
+pathetic smile. "It's really a kind of relief to her; anything is that
+takes her mind off herself for a moment. She will be so sorry to miss
+you, and you must come again as soon as you can."
+
+"Oh, we will, we will!" cried my wife, in nothing less than a passion of
+meekness; and Miss Bentley went on to comfort her.
+
+"It's dreadful, of course, but it isn't as bad as it sounds, and it
+isn't nearly so bad as it looks. She is used to it, and there is a great
+deal in that. Oh, _don't_ go!" she begged, at a movement Mrs. March made
+to rise. "The doctor is with her just now, and I'm not needed. It will
+be kind if you'll stay; it's a relief to be out of the room with a good
+excuse!" She even laughed a little as she said this; she went on to lead
+the talk away from what was so intensely in our minds, and presently I
+heard her and my wife speaking of other things. The power to do this is
+from some heroic quality in women's minds that we do not credit them
+with; we think it their volatility, and I dare say I thought myself much
+better, or at least more serious in my make, because I could not follow
+them, and did not lose one of those hoarse gasps of the sufferer
+overhead. Occasionally there came a stifling cry that made me jump,
+inwardly if not outwardly, but those women had their drama to play, and
+they played it to the end.
+
+Miss Bentley came hospitably to the door with us, and waited there till
+she thought we could not see her turn and run swiftly up-stairs.
+
+"Why _did_ you stay, my dear?" I groaned. "I felt as if I were
+personally smothering Mrs. Bentley every moment we were there."
+
+"I _had_ to do it. She wished it, and, as she said, it was a relief to
+have us there, though she was wishing us at the ends of the earth all
+the time. But what a ghastly life!"
+
+"Yes; and can you wonder that the poor woman doesn't want to give her
+up, to lose the help and comfort she gets from her? It's a wicked thing
+for that girl to think of marrying."
+
+"What are you talking about, Basil? It's a wicked thing for her _not_ to
+think of it! She is wearing her life out, _tearing_ it out, and she
+isn't doing her mother a bit of good. Her mother would be just as well,
+and better, with a good strong nurse, who could lift her this way and
+that, and change her about, without feeling her heart-strings wrung at
+every gasp, as that poor child must. Oh, I _wish_ Glendenning was man
+enough to make her run off with him, and get married, in spite of
+everything. But, of course, that's impossible--for a clergyman! And her
+sacrifice began so long ago that it's become part of her life, and
+she'll simply have to keep on."
+
+
+VIII.
+
+When her attack passed off, Mrs. Bentley sent and begged my wife to come
+again and see her. She went without me, while I was in town, but she was
+so circumstantial in her report of her visit, when I came home, that I
+never felt quite sure I had not been present. What most interested us
+both was the extreme independence which the mother and daughter showed
+beyond a certain point, and the daughter's great frankness in expressing
+her difference of feeling. We had already had some hint of this, the
+first day we met her, and we were not surprised at it now, my wife at
+first hand, or I at second hand. Mrs. Bentley opened the way for her
+daughter by saying that the worst of sickness was that it made one such
+an affliction to others. She lived in an atmosphere of devotion, she
+said, but her suffering left her so little of life that she could not
+help clinging selfishly to everything that remained.
+
+My wife perceived that this was meant for Miss Bentley, though it was
+spoken to herself; and Miss Bentley seemed to take the same view of the
+fact. She said: "We needn't use any circumlocution with Mrs. March,
+mother. She knows just how the affair stands. You can say whatever you
+wish, though I don't know why you should wish to say anything. You have
+made your own terms with us, and we are keeping them to the letter. What
+more can you ask? Do you want me to break with Mr. Glendenning? I will
+do that too, if you ask it. You have got everything _but_ that, and you
+can have that at any time. But Arthur and I are perfectly satisfied as
+it is, and we can wait as long as you wish us to wait."
+
+Her mother said: "I'm not allowed to forget that for a single hour," and
+Miss Bentley said, "I never remind you of it unless you make me, mother.
+You may be thinking of it all the time, but it isn't because of anything
+I say."
+
+"Or that you _do_?" asked Mrs. Bentley; and her daughter answered, "I
+can't help existing, of course."
+
+My wife broke off from the account she was giving me of her visit: "You
+can imagine how pleasant all this was for me, Basil, and how anxious I
+was to prolong my call!"
+
+"Well," I returned, "there were compensations. It was extremely
+interesting; it was life. You can't deny that, my dear."
+
+"It was more like death. Several times I was on the point of going, but
+you know when there's been a painful scene you feel so sorry for the
+people who've made it that you can't bear to leave them to themselves. I
+did get up to go, once, in mere self-defence, but they both urged me to
+stay, and I couldn't help staying till they could talk of other things.
+But now tell me what you think of it all. Which should your feeling be
+with the most? That is what I want to get at before I tell you mine."
+
+"Which side was I on when we talked about them last?"
+
+"Oh, when did we talk about them _last_? We are always talking about
+them! I am getting no good of the summer at all. I shall go home in the
+fall more jaded and worn out than when I came. To think that we should
+have this beautiful place, where we could be so happy and comfortable,
+if it were not for having this abnormal situation under our nose and
+eyes all the time!"
+
+"Abnormal? I don't call it abnormal," I began, and I was sensible of my
+wife's thoughts leaving her own injuries for my point of view so swiftly
+that I could almost hear them whir.
+
+"Not abnormal!" she gasped.
+
+"No; only too natural. Isn't it perfectly natural for an invalid like
+that to want to keep her daughter with her; and isn't it perfectly
+natural for a daughter, with a New England sense of duty, to yield to
+her wish? You might say that she could get married and live at home, and
+then she and Glendenning could both devote themselves--"
+
+"No, no," my wife broke in, "that wouldn't do. Marriage is marriage; and
+it puts the husband and wife with each other first; when it doesn't,
+it's a miserable mockery."
+
+"Even when there's a sick mother in the case?"
+
+"A thousand sick mothers wouldn't alter the case. And that's what they
+all three instinctively know, and they're doing the only thing they can
+do."
+
+"Then I don't see what we're complaining of."
+
+"Complaining of? We're complaining of its being all wrong and--romantic.
+Her mother has asked more than she had any right to ask, and Miss
+Bentley has tried to do more than she can perform, and that has made
+them hate each other."
+
+"Should you say _hate_, quite?"
+
+"It must come to that, if Mrs. Bentley lives."
+
+"Then let us hope she--"
+
+"My dear!" cried Mrs. March, warningly.
+
+"Oh, come, now!" I retorted. "Do you mean to say that you haven't
+thought how very much it would simplify the situation if--"
+
+"Of course I have! And that is the wicked part of it. It's that that is
+wearing me out. It's perfectly hideous!"
+
+"Well, fortunately we're not actively concerned in the affair, and we
+needn't take any measures in regard to it. We are mere spectators, and
+as I see it the situation is not only inevitable for Mrs. Bentley, but
+it has a sort of heroic propriety for Miss Bentley."
+
+"And Glendenning?"
+
+"Oh, Glendenning isn't provided for in my scheme."
+
+"Then I can tell you that your scheme, Basil, is worse than worthless."
+
+"I didn't brag of it, my dear," I said, meekly enough. "I'm sorry for
+him, but I can't help him. He must provide for himself out of his
+religion."
+
+
+IX.
+
+It was, indeed, a trying summer for our emotions, torn as we were
+between our pity for Mrs. Bentley and our compassion for her daughter.
+We had no repose, except when we centred our sympathies upon
+Glendenning, whom we could yearn over in tender regret without doing any
+one else wrong, or even criticising another. He was our great stay in
+that respect, and though a mere external witness might have thought that
+he had the easiest part, we who knew his gentle and affectionate nature
+could not but feel for him. We never concealed from ourselves certain
+foibles of his; I have hinted at one, and we should have liked it better
+if he had not been so sensible of the honor, from a worldly point, of
+being engaged to Miss Bentley. But this was a very innocent vanity, and
+he would have been willing to suffer for her mother and for herself, if
+she had let him. I have tried to insinuate how she would not let him,
+but freed him as much as possible from the stress of the situation, and
+assumed for him a mastery, a primacy, which he would never have assumed
+for himself. We thought this very pretty of her, and in fact she was
+capable of pretty things. What was hard and arrogant in her, and she was
+not without something of the kind at times, was like her mother; but
+even she, poor soul, had her good points, as I have attempted to
+suggest. We used to dwell upon them, when our talk with Glendenning grew
+confidential, as it was apt to do; for it seemed to console him to
+realize that her daughter and he were making their sacrifice to a not
+wholly unamiable person.
+
+He confided equally in my wife and myself, but there were times when I
+think he rather preferred the counsel of a man friend. Once when we had
+gone a walk into the country, which around Gormanville is of the
+pathetic Mid-Massachusetts loveliness and poverty, we sat down in a
+hillside orchard to rest, and he began abruptly to talk of his affair.
+Sometimes, he said, he felt that it was all an error, and he could not
+rid himself of the fear that an error persisted in was a wrong, and
+therefore a species of sin.
+
+"That is very interesting," I said. "I wonder if there is anything in
+it? At first blush it looks so logical; but is it? Or are you simply
+getting morbid? What is the error? What is your error?"
+
+"You know," he said, with a gentle refusal of my willingness to make
+light of his trouble. "It is surely an error to allow a woman to give
+her word when she can promise nothing more, and to let her hold herself
+to it."
+
+I could have told him that I did not think the error in this case was
+altogether or mainly his, or the persistence in it; for it had seemed to
+me from the beginning that the love between him and Miss Bentley was
+fully as much her affair as his, and that quite within the bounds of
+maidenly modesty she showed herself as passionately true to their
+plighted troth. But of course this would not do, and I had to be content
+with the ironical suggestion that he might try offering to release Miss
+Bentley.
+
+"Don't laugh at me," he implored, and I confess his tone would have
+taken from me any heart to do so.
+
+"My dear fellow," I said, "I see your point. But don't you think you are
+quite needlessly adding to your affliction by pressing it? You two are
+in the position which isn't at all uncommon with engaged people, of
+having to wait upon exterior circumstances before you get married.
+Suppose you were prevented by poverty, as often happens? It would be a
+hardship as it is now; but in that case would your engagement be any
+less an error than it is now? I don't think it would, and I don't
+believe you think so either."
+
+"In that case we should not be opposing our wills to the will of some
+one else, who has a better claim to her daughter's allegiance than I
+have. It seems to me that our error was in letting her mother consent to
+our engagement if she would not or could not consent to our marriage.
+When it came to that we ought both to have had the strength to say that
+then there should be no engagement. It was my place to do that. I could
+have prevented the error which I can't undo."
+
+"I don't see how it could have been easier to prevent than to undo your
+error. I don't admit it's an error, but I call it so because you do.
+After all, an engagement is nothing but an open confession between two
+people that they are in love with each other and wish to marry. There
+need be no sort of pledge or promise to make the engagement binding, if
+there is love. It's the love that binds."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It bound you from your first acknowledgment of it, and unless you could
+deny your love now, or hereafter, it must always bind you. If you own
+that you still love each other, you are still engaged, no matter how
+much you release each other. Could you think of loving her and marrying
+some one else? Could she love you and marry another? There isn't any
+error, unless you've mistaken your feeling for each other. If you have,
+I should decidedly say you couldn't break your engagement too soon. In
+fact, there wouldn't be any real engagement to break."
+
+"Of course you are right," said Glendenning, but not so strenuously as
+he might.
+
+I had a feeling that he had not put forward the main cause of his
+unhappiness, though he had given a true cause; that he had made some
+lesser sense of wrong stand for a greater, as people often do in
+confessing themselves; and I was not surprised when he presently added:
+"It is not merely the fact that she is bound in that way, and that her
+young life is passing in this sort of hopeless patience, but
+that--that--I don't know how to put the ugly and wicked thing into
+words, but I assure you that sometimes when I think--when I'm aware that
+I know--Ah, I can't say it!"
+
+"I fancy I understand what you mean, my dear boy," I said, and in the
+right of my ten years' seniority I put my hand caressingly on his
+shoulder, "and you are no more guilty than I am in knowing that if Mrs.
+Bentley were not in the way there would be no obstacle to your
+happiness."
+
+"But such a cognition is of hell," he cried, and he let his face fall
+into his hands and sobbed heartrendingly.
+
+"Yes," I said, "such a cognition is of hell; you are quite right. So are
+all evil concepts and knowledges; but so long as they are merely things
+of our intelligence, they are no part of us, and we are not guilty of
+them."
+
+"No; I trust not, I trust not," he returned, and I let him sob his
+trouble out before I spoke again; and then I began with a laugh of
+unfeigned gayety. Something that my wife had hinted in one of our talks
+about the lovers freakishly presented itself to my mind, and I said,
+"There is a way, and a very practical way, to put an end to the anomaly
+you feel in an engagement which doesn't imply a marriage."
+
+"And what is that?" he asked, not very hopefully; but he dried his eyes
+and calmed himself.
+
+"Well, speaking after the manner of men, you might run off with Miss
+Bentley."
+
+All the blood in his body flushed into his face. "Don't!" he gasped, and
+I divined that what I had said must have been in his thoughts before,
+and I laughed again. "It wouldn't do," he added, piteously. "The
+scandal--I am a clergyman, and my parish--"
+
+I perceived that no moral scruple presented itself to him; when it came
+to the point, he was simply and naturally a lover, like any other man;
+and I persisted: "It would only be a seven days' wonder. I never heard
+of a clergyman's running away to be married; but they must have
+sometimes done it. Come, I don't believe you'd have to plead hard with
+Miss Bentley, and Mrs. March and I will aid and abet you to the limit of
+our small ability. I'm sure that if I wrap up warm against the night
+air, she will let me go and help you hold the rope-ladder taut."
+
+
+X.
+
+It was not very reverent to his cloth, or his recent tragical mood, but
+Glendenning was not offended; he laughed with a sheepish pleasure, and
+that evening he came with Miss Bentley to call upon us. The visit passed
+without unusual confidences until they rose to go, when she said
+abruptly to me: "I feel that we both owe you a great deal, Mr. March.
+Arthur has been telling me of your talk this afternoon, and I think that
+what you said was all so wise and true! I don't mean," she added, "your
+suggestion about putting an end to the anomaly!" and she and Glendenning
+both laughed.
+
+My wife said, "That was very wicked, and I have scolded him for thinking
+of such a thing." She had, indeed, forgotten that she had put it in my
+head, and made me wholly responsible for it.
+
+"Then you must scold me too a little, Mrs. March," said the girl, "for
+I've sometimes wondered if I couldn't work Arthur up to the point of
+making me run away with him," which was a joke that wonderfully amused
+us all.
+
+I said, "I shouldn't think it would be so difficult;" and she retorted:
+
+"Oh, you've no idea how obdurate clergymen are;" and then she went on,
+seriously, to thank me for talking Glendenning out of his morbid mood.
+With the frankness sometimes characteristic of her she said that if he
+had released her, it would have made no difference--she should still
+have felt herself bound to him; and until he should tell her that he no
+longer cared for her, she should feel that he was bound to her. I saw no
+great originality in this reproduction of my own ideas. But when Miss
+Bentley added that she believed her mother herself would be shocked and
+disappointed if they were to give each other up, I was aware of being in
+the presence of a curious psychological fact. I so wholly lost myself in
+the inquiry it invited that I let the talk flow on round me unheeded
+while I questioned whether Mrs. Bentley did not derive a satisfaction
+from her own and her daughter's mutual opposition which she could never
+have enjoyed from their perfect agreement. She had made a certain
+concession in consenting to the engagement, and this justified her to
+herself in refusing her consent to the marriage, while the ingratitude
+of the young people in not being content with what she had done formed a
+grievance of constant avail with a lady of her temperament. From what
+Miss Bentley let fall, half seriously, half jokingly, as well as what I
+observed, I divined a not unnatural effect of the strained relations
+between her and her mother. She concentrated whatever resentment she
+felt upon Miss Bentley, insomuch that it seemed as though she might
+altogether have withdrawn her opposition if it had been a question
+merely of Glendenning's marriage. So far from disliking him, she was
+rather fond of him, and she had no apparent objection to him except as
+her daughter's husband. It had not always been so; at first she had an
+active rancor against him; but this had gradually yielded to his
+invincible goodness and sweetness.
+
+"Who could hold out against him?" his betrothed demanded, fondly, when
+these facts had been more or less expressed to us; and it was not the
+first time that her love had seemed more explicit than his. He smiled
+round upon her, pressing the hand she put in his arm; for she asked this
+when they stood on our threshold ready to go, and then he glanced at us
+with eyes that fell bashfully from ours.
+
+"Oh, of course it will come right in time," said my wife when they were
+gone, and I agreed that they need only have patience. We had all talked
+ourselves into a cheerful frame concerning the affair; we had seen it in
+its amusing aspects, and laughed about it; and that seemed almost in
+itself to dispose of Mrs. Bentley's opposition. My wife and I decided
+that this could not long continue; that by-and-by she would become tired
+of it, and this would happen all the sooner if the lovers submitted
+absolutely, and did nothing to remind her of their submission.
+
+
+XI.
+
+The Conwells came home from Europe the next summer, and we did not go
+again to Gormanville. But from time to time we heard of the Bentleys,
+and we heard to our great amaze that there was no change in the
+situation, as concerned Miss Bentley and Glendenning. I think that later
+it would have surprised us if we had learned that there was a change.
+Their lives all seemed to have adjusted themselves to the conditions,
+and we who were mere spectators came at last to feel nothing abnormal in
+them.
+
+Now and then we saw Glendenning, and now and then Miss Bentley came to
+call upon Mrs. March, when she was in town. Her mother had given up her
+Boston house, and they lived the whole year round at Gormanville, where
+the air was good for Mrs. Bentley without her apparently being the
+better for it; again, we heard in a roundabout way that their
+circumstances were not so fortunate as they had been, and that they had
+given up their Boston house partly from motives of economy.
+
+There was no reason why our intimacy with the lovers' affairs should
+continue, and it did not. Miss Bentley made mention of Glendenning, when
+my wife saw her, with what Mrs. March decided to be an abiding fealty,
+but without offer of confidence; and Glendenning, when we happened to
+meet at rare intervals, did not invite me to more than formal inquiry
+concerning the well-being of Mrs. Bentley and her daughter.
+
+He was undoubtedly getting older, and he looked it. He was one of those
+gentle natures which put on fat, not from self-indulgence, but from want
+of resisting force, and the clerical waistcoat that buttoned black to
+his throat swayed decidedly beyond a straight line at his waist. His
+red-gold hair was getting thin, and though he wore it cut close all
+round, it showed thinner on the crown than on the temples, and his pale
+eyebrows were waning. He had a settled patience of look which would have
+been a sadness, if there had not been mixed with it an air of resolute
+cheerfulness. I am not sure that this kept it from being sad, either.
+
+Miss Bentley, on her part, was no longer the young girl she was when we
+met on the _Corinthian_. She must then have been about twenty, and she
+was now twenty-six, but she looked thirty. Dark people show their age
+early, and she showed hers in cheeks that grew thinner if not paler, and
+in a purple shadow under her fine eyes. The parting of her black hair
+was wider than it once was, and she wore it smooth in apparent disdain
+of those arts of fluffing and fringing which give an air of vivacity, if
+not of youth. I should say she had always been a serious girl, and now
+she showed the effect of a life that could not have been gay for any
+one.
+
+The lovers promised themselves, as we knew, that Mrs. Bentley would
+relent, and abandon what was more like a whimsical caprice than a
+settled wish. But as time wore on, and she gave no sign of changing, I
+have wondered whether some change did not come upon them, which affected
+them towards each other without affecting their constancy. I fancied
+their youthful passion taking on the sad color of patience, and
+contenting itself more and more with such friendly companionship as
+their fate afforded; it became, without marriage, that affectionate
+comradery which wedded love passes into with the lapse of as many years
+as they had been plighted. "What," I once suggested to my wife, in a
+very darkling mood--"what if they should gradually grow apart, and end
+in rejoicing that they had never been allowed to join their lives?
+Wouldn't that be rather Hawthornesque?"
+
+"It wouldn't be true," said Mrs. March, "and I don't see why you should
+put such a notion upon Hawthorne. If you can't be more cheerful about
+it, Basil, I wish you wouldn't talk of the affair at all."
+
+"Oh, I'm quite willing to be cheerful about it, my dear," I returned;
+"and, if you like, we will fancy Mrs. Bentley coming round and ardently
+wishing their marriage, and their gayly protesting that after having
+given the matter a great deal of thought they had decided it would be
+better not to marry, but to live on separately for their own sake, just
+as they have been doing for hers so long. Wouldn't that be cheerful?"
+
+Mrs. March said that if I wished to tease it was because I had no ideas
+on the subject, and she would advise me to drop it. I did so, for the
+better part of the evening, but I could not relinquish it altogether.
+"Do you think," I asked, finally, "that any sort of character will stand
+the test of such a prolonged engagement?"
+
+"Why not? Very indifferent characters stand the test of marriage, and
+that's indefinitely prolonged."
+
+"Yes, but it's not indefinite itself. Marriage is something very
+distinct and permanent; but such an engagement as this has no sort of
+future. It is a mere motionless present, without the inspiration of a
+common life, and with no hope of release from durance except through a
+chance that it will be sorrow instead of joy. I should think they would
+go to pieces under the strain."
+
+"But as you see they don't, perhaps the strain isn't so great after
+all."
+
+"Ah," I confessed, "there is that wonderful adaptation of the human soul
+to any circumstances. It's the one thing that makes me respect our
+fallen nature. Fallen? It seems to me that we ought to call it our risen
+nature; it has steadily mounted with the responsibility that Adam took
+for it--or Eve."
+
+"I don't see," said my wife, pursuing her momentary advantage, "why they
+should not be getting as much pleasure or happiness out of life as most
+married people. Engagements are supposed to be very joyous, though I
+think they're rather exciting and restless times, as a general thing. If
+they've settled down to being merely engaged, I've no doubt they've
+decided to make the best of being merely engaged as long as her mother
+lives."
+
+"There is that view of it," I assented.
+
+
+XII.
+
+By the following autumn Glendenning had completed the seventh year of
+his engagement to Miss Bentley, and I reminded my wife that this seemed
+to be the scriptural length of a betrothal, as typified in the service
+which Jacob rendered for Rachel. "But _he_ had a prospective
+father-in-law to deal with," I added, "and Glendenning a mother-in-law.
+That may make a difference."
+
+Mrs. March did not join me in the humorous view of the affair which I
+took. She asked me if I had heard anything from Glendenning lately; if
+that were the reason why I mentioned him.
+
+"No," I said; "but I have some office business that will take me to
+Gormanville to-morrow, and I did not know but you might like to go too,
+and look the ground over, and see how much we have been suffering for
+them unnecessarily." The fact was that we had now scarcely spoken of
+Glendenning or the Bentleys for six months, and our minds were far too
+full of our own affairs to be given more than very superficially to
+theirs at any time. "We could both go as well as not," I suggested, "and
+you could call upon the Bentleys while I looked after the company's
+business."
+
+"Thank you, Basil, I think I will let you go alone," said my wife. "But
+try to find out how it is with them. Don't be so terribly
+straightforward, and let it look as if that was what you came for. Don't
+make the slightest advance towards their confidence. But do let them
+open up if they will."
+
+"My dear, you may depend upon my asking no leading questions whatever,
+and I shall behave with far more discretion than if you were with me.
+The danger is that I shall behave with too much, for I find that my
+interest in their affair is very much faded. There is every probability
+that unless Glendenning speaks of his engagement it won't be spoken of
+at all."
+
+This was putting it rather with the indifference of the past six months
+than with the feeling of the present moment. Since I had known that I
+was going to Gormanville, the interest I denied had renewed itself
+pretty vividly for me, and I was intending not only to get everything
+out of Glendenning that I decently could, but to give him as much good
+advice as he would bear. I was going to urge him to move upon the
+obstructive Mrs. Bentley with all his persuasive force, and I had
+formulated some arguments for him which I thought he might use with
+success. I did not tell my wife that this was my purpose, but all the
+same I cherished it, and I gathered energy for the enforcement of my
+views for Glendenning's happiness from the very dejection I was cast
+into by the outward effect of the Gormanville streets. They were all in
+a funeral blaze of their shade trees, which were mostly maples, but were
+here and there a stretch of elms meeting in arches almost consciously
+Gothic over the roadway; the maples were crimson and gold, and the elms
+the pale yellow that they affect in the fall. A silence hung under their
+sad splendors which I found deepen when I got into what the inhabitants
+called the residential part. About the business centre there was some
+stir, and here in the transaction of my affairs I was in the thick of it
+for a while. Everybody remembered me in a pleasant way, and I had to
+stop and pass the time of day, as they would have said, with a good many
+whom I could not remember at once. It seemed to me that the maples in
+front of St. Michael's rectory were rather more depressingly gaudy than
+elsewhere in Gormanville; but I believe they were only thicker. I found
+Glendenning in his study, and he was so far from being cast down by
+their blazon that I thought him decidedly cheerfuller than when I saw
+him last. He met me with what for him was ardor; and as he had asked me
+most cordially about my family, I thought it fit to inquire how the
+ladies at the Bentley place were.
+
+"Why, very well, very well indeed," he answered, brightly. "It's very
+odd, but Edith and I were talking about you all only last night, and
+wishing we could see you again. Edith is most uncommonly well. During
+the summer Mrs. Bentley had some rather severer attacks than usual, and
+the care and anxiety told upon Edith, but since the cooler weather has
+come she has picked up wonderfully." He did not say that Mrs. Bentley
+had shared this gain, and I imagined that he had a reluctance to confess
+she had not. He went on, "You're going to stay and spend the night with
+me, aren't you?"
+
+"No," I said; "I'm obliged to be off by the four-o'clock train. But if I
+may be allowed to name the hospitality I could accept, I should say
+luncheon."
+
+"Good!" cried Glendenning, gayly. "Let us go and have it at the
+Bentleys'."
+
+"Far be it from me to say where you shall lunch me," I returned. "The
+question isn't where, but when and how, with me."
+
+He got his hat and stick, and as we started out of his door he began:
+"You'll be a little surprised at the informality, perhaps, but I'm glad
+you take it so easily. It makes it easier for me to explain that I'm
+almost domesticated at the Bentley homestead; I come and go very much as
+if it were my own house."
+
+"My dear fellow," I said, "I'm not surprised at anything in your
+relation to the Bentley homestead, and I won't vex you with any glad
+inferences."
+
+"Why," he returned, a little bashfully, "there's no explicit change. The
+affair is just where it has been all along. But with the gradual decline
+in Mrs. Bentley--I'm afraid you'll notice it--she seems rather to want
+me about, and at times I'm able to be of use to Edith, and so--"
+
+He stopped, and I said, "Exactly."
+
+He went on: "Of course it's rather anomalous, and I oughtn't to let you
+get the impression that she has actually conceded anything. But she
+shows herself much more--er, shall I say?--affectionate, and I can't
+help hoping there may be a change in her mood which will declare itself
+in an attitude more favorable to--"
+
+I said again, "Exactly," and Glendenning resumed:
+
+"In spite of Edith's not having been quite so well as usual--she's
+wonderfully well now--it's been a very happy summer with us, on account
+of this change. It seems to have come about in a very natural way with
+Mrs. Bentley, and out of a growing regard which I can't specifically
+account for, as far as anything I've done is concerned."
+
+"I think I could account for it," said I. "She must be a stonier-hearted
+old lady than I imagine if she hasn't felt your goodness, all along,
+Glendenning."
+
+"Why, you're very kind," said the gentle creature. "You tempt me to
+repeat what she said, at the only time she expressed a wish to have me
+oftener with them: 'You've been very patient with a contrary old woman.
+But I sha'n't make you wait much longer.'"
+
+"Well, I think that was very encouraging, my dear fellow."
+
+"Do you?" he asked, wistfully. "I thought so too, at first, but when I
+told Edith she could not take that view of it. She said that she did not
+believe her mother had changed her mind at all, and that she only meant
+she was growing older."
+
+"But, at any rate," I argued, "it was pleasant to have her make an open
+recognition of your patience."
+
+"Yes, that was pleasant," he said, cheerfully again, "And it was the
+beginning of the kind of relation that I have held ever since to her
+household. I am afraid I am there a good half of my time, and I believe
+I dine there oftener than I do at home. I am quite on the footing of a
+son, with her."
+
+"There are some of the unregenerate, Glendenning," I made bold to say,
+"who think it is your own fault that you weren't on the footing of a
+son-in-law with her long ago. If you'll excuse my saying so, you have
+been, if anything, too patient. It would have been far better for all if
+you had taken the bit in your teeth six or seven years back--"
+
+He drew a deep breath. "It wouldn't have done; it wouldn't have done!
+Edith herself would never have consented to it."
+
+"Did you ever ask her?"
+
+"No," he said, innocently. "How could I?"
+
+"And of course _she_ could never ask _you_," I laughed. "My opinion is
+that you have lost a great deal of time unnecessarily. I haven't the
+least doubt that if you had brought a little pressure to bear with Mrs.
+Bentley herself, it would have sufficed."
+
+He looked at me with a kind of dismay, as if my words had carried
+conviction, or had roused a conviction long dormant in his heart. "It
+wouldn't have done," he gasped.
+
+"It isn't too late to try, yet," I suggested.
+
+"Yes, it's too late. We must wait now." He hastened to add, "Until she
+yields entirely of herself."
+
+He gave me a guilty glance when he drew near the Bentley place and we
+saw a buggy standing at the gate. "The doctor!" he said, and he hurried
+me up the walk to the door.
+
+The door stood open and we heard the doctor saying to some one within:
+"No, no, nothing organic at all, I assure you. One of the commonest
+functional disturbances."
+
+Miss Bentley appeared at the threshold with him, and she and Glendenning
+had time to exchange a glance of anxiety and of smiling reassurance,
+before she put out her hand in greeting to me, a very glad and cordial
+greeting, apparently. The doctor and I shook hands, and he got himself
+away with what I afterwards remembered as undue quickness, and left us
+to Miss Bentley.
+
+Glendenning was quite right about her looking better. She looked even
+gay, and there was a vivid color in her checks such as I had not seen
+there for many years; her lips were red, her eyes brilliant. Her face
+was still perhaps as thin as ever, but it was indescribably younger.
+
+I cannot say that there were the materials of a merrymaking amongst us,
+exactly, and yet I remember that luncheon as rather a gay one, with some
+laughing. I had not been till now in discovering that Miss Bentley had a
+certain gift of humor, so shy and proud, if I may so express it, that it
+would not show itself except upon long acquaintance, and I distinctly
+perceived now that this enabled her to make light of a burden that might
+otherwise have been intolerable. It qualified her to treat with
+cheerfulness the grimness of her mother, which had certainly not grown
+less since I saw her last, and to turn into something like a joke her
+valetudinarian austerities of sentiment and opinion. She made a pleasant
+mock of the amenities which passed between her mother and Glendenning,
+whose gingerliness in the acceptance of the old lady's condescension
+would, I confess, have been notably comical without this gloss. It was
+perfectly evident that Mrs. Bentley's favor was bestowed with a mental
+reservation, and conditioned upon his forming no expectations from it,
+and poor Glendenning's eagerness to show that he took it upon these
+terms was amusing as well as touching. I do not know how to express that
+Miss Bentley contrived to eliminate herself from the affair, or to have
+the effect of doing that, and to abandon it to them. I can only say that
+she left them to be civil to each other, and that, except when she
+recurred to them in playful sarcasm from time to time, she devoted
+herself to me.
+
+Evidently, Mrs. Bentley was very much worse than she had been; her
+breathing was painfully labored. But if her daughter had any anxiety
+about her condition, she concealed it most effectually from us. I
+decided that she had perhaps been asking the doctor as to certain
+symptoms that had alarmed her, and it was in the rebound from her
+anxiety that her spirits had risen to the height I saw. Glendenning
+seized the moment of her absence after luncheon, when she helped her
+mother up to her room, to impart to me that this was his conclusion too.
+He said that he had not seen her so cheerful for a long time, and when I
+praised her in every way he basked in my appreciation of her as if it
+had all been flattery for himself. She came back directly, and then I
+had a chance to see what she might have been under happier stars. She
+could not, at any moment, help showing herself an intellectual and
+cultivated woman, but her opportunities to show herself a woman of rare
+social gifts had been scanted by circumstances and perhaps by
+conscience. It seemed to me that even in devoting herself to her mother
+as she had always done she need not have enslaved herself, and that it
+was in this excess her inherited puritanism came out. She might
+sometimes openly rebel against her mother's domination, as my wife and I
+had now and again seen her do; but inwardly she was almost passionately
+submissive. Here I thought that Glendenning, if he had been a different
+sort of man, might have been useful to her; he might have encouraged her
+in a little wholesome selfishness, and enabled her to withhold sacrifice
+where it was needless. But I am not sure; perhaps he would have made her
+more unhappy, if he had attempted this; perhaps he was the only sort of
+man whom, in her sense of his own utter unselfishness, she could have
+given her heart to in perfect peace. She now talked brilliantly and
+joyously to me, but all the time her eye sought his for his approval and
+sympathy; he, for his part, was content to listen in a sort of beatific
+pride in her which he did not, in his simple-hearted fondness, make any
+effort to mask.
+
+When we came away he made himself amends for his silence by a long hymn
+in worship of her, and I listened with all the acquiescence possible. He
+asked me questions--whether I had noticed this thing or that about her,
+or remembered what she had said upon one point or another, and led up to
+compliments of her which I was glad to pay. In the long ordeal they had
+undergone they had at least kept all the freshness of their love.
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Glendenning and I went back to the rectory, and sat down in his study,
+or rather he made me draw a chair to the open door, and sat down himself
+on a step below the threshold. The day was one of autumnal warmth; the
+haze of Indian summer blued the still air, and the wind that now and
+then stirred the stiff panoply of the trees was lullingly soft. This
+part of Gormanville quite overlooked the busier district about the
+mills, where the water-power found its way, and it was something of a
+climb even from the business street of the old hill village, which the
+rival prosperity of the industrial settlement in the valley had thrown
+into an aristocratic aloofness. From the upper windows of the rectory
+one could have seen only the red and yellow of the maples, but from the
+study door we caught glimpses past their boles of the outlying country,
+as it showed between the white mansions across the way. One of these, as
+I have already mentioned, was the Conwell place; and after we had talked
+of the landscape awhile, Glendenning said: "By the way! Why don't you
+buy the Conwell place? You liked it so much, and you were all so well in
+Gormanville. The Conwells want to sell it, and it would be just the
+thing for you, five or six months of the year."
+
+I explained, almost compassionately, the impossibility of a poor
+insurance man thinking of a summer residence like the Conwell place, and
+I combated as well as I could the optimistic reasons of my friend in its
+favor. I was not very severe with him, for I saw that his optimism was
+not so much from his wish to have me live in Gormanville as from the new
+hope that filled him. It was by a perfectly natural, if not very logical
+transition that we were presently talking of this greater interest
+again, and Glendenning was going over all the plans that it included. I
+encouraged him to believe, as he desired, that a sea-voyage would be the
+thing for Mrs. Bentley, and that it would be his duty to take her to
+Europe as soon as he was in authority to do so. They should always, he
+said, live in Gormanville, for they were greatly attached to the place,
+and they should keep up the old Bentley homestead in the style that he
+thought they owed to the region where the Bentleys had always lived. It
+is a comfort to a man to tell his dreams, whether of the night or of the
+day, and I enjoyed Glendenning's pleasure in rehearsing these fond
+reveries of his.
+
+He interrupted himself to listen to the sound of hurried steps, and
+directly a man in his shirt-sleeves came running by on the sidewalk
+beyond the maples. In a village like Gormanville any passer is of
+interest to the spectator, and a man running is of thrilling moment.
+Glendenning started to his feet, and moved forward for a better sight of
+the flying passer. He called out to the man, who shouted back something
+I could not understand, and ran on.
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"I don't know." Glendenning's face as he turned to me again was quite
+white. "It is Mrs. Bentley's farmer," he added, feebly, and I could see
+that it was with an effort he kept himself from sinking. "Something has
+happened."
+
+"Oh, I guess not, or not anything serious," I answered, with an effort
+to throw off the weight I suddenly felt at my own heart. "People have
+been known to run for a plumber. But if you're anxious, let us go and
+see what the matter is."
+
+I turned and got my hat; Glendenning came in for his, but seemed unable
+to find it, though he stood before the table where it lay. I had to
+laugh, though I felt so little like it, as I put it in his hand.
+
+"Don't leave me," he entreated, as we hurried out through the maples to
+the sidewalk. "It has come at last, and I feel, as I always knew I
+should, like a murderer."
+
+"What rubbish!" I retorted. "You don't know that anything has happened.
+You don't know what the man's gone for."
+
+"Yes, I do," he said. "Mrs. Bentley is--He's gone for the doctor."
+
+As he spoke a buggy came tearing down the street behind us; the doctor
+was in it, and the man in shirt-sleeves beside him. We did not try to
+hail them, but as they whirled by the farmer turned his face, and again
+called something unintelligible to Glendenning.
+
+We made what speed we could after them, but they were long out of sight
+in the mile that it seemed to me we were an hour in covering before we
+reached the Bentley place. The doctor's buggy stood at the gate, and I
+perceived that I was without authority to enter the house, on which some
+unknown calamity had fallen, no matter with what good-will I had come; I
+could see that Glendenning had suffered a sudden estrangement, also,
+which he had to make a struggle against. But he went in, leaving me
+without, as if he had forgotten me.
+
+I could not go away, and I walked down the path to the gate, and waited
+there, in case I should be in any wise wanted. After a very long time
+the doctor came bolting over the walk towards me, as if he did not see
+me, but he brought himself up short with an "Oh!" before he actually
+struck against me. I had known him during our summer at the Conwell
+place, where we used to have him in for our little ailments, and I would
+never have believed that his round, optimistic face could look so
+worried. I read the worst in it; Glendenning was right; but I asked the
+doctor, quite as if I did not know, whether there was anything serious
+the matter.
+
+"Serious--yes," he said. "Get in with me; I have to see another patient,
+but I'll bring you back." We mounted into his buggy, and he went on.
+"She's in no immediate danger, now. The faint lasted so long I didn't
+know whether we should bring her out of it, at one time, but the most
+alarming part is over for the present. There is some trouble with the
+heart, but I don't think anything organic."
+
+"Yes, I heard you telling her daughter so, just before lunch. Isn't it a
+frequent complication with asthma?"
+
+"Asthma? Her daughter? Whom are you talking about?"
+
+"Mrs. Bentley. Isn't Mrs. Bentley--"
+
+"No!" shouted the doctor, in disgust, "Mrs. Bentley is as well as ever.
+It's Miss Bentley. I wish there was a thousandth part of the chance for
+her that there is for her mother."
+
+
+XIV.
+
+I stayed over for the last train to Boston, and then I had to go home
+without the hope which Miss Bentley's first rally had given the doctor.
+My wife and I talked the affair over far into the night, and in the
+paucity of particulars I was almost driven to their invention. But I
+managed to keep a good conscience, and at the same time to satisfy the
+demand for facts in a measure by the indulgence of conjectures which
+Mrs. March continually took for them. The doctor had let fall, in his
+talk with me, that he had no doubt Miss Bentley had aggravated the
+affection of the heart from which she was suffering by her exertions in
+lifting her mother about so much; and my wife said that it needed only
+that touch to make the tragedy complete.
+
+"Unless," I suggested, "you could add that her mother had just told her
+she would not oppose her marriage any longer, and it was the joy that
+brought on the access of the trouble that is killing her."
+
+"Did the doctor say that?" Mrs. March demanded, severely.
+
+"No. And I haven't the least notion that anything like it happened. But
+if it had--"
+
+"It would have been too tawdry. I'm ashamed of you for thinking of such
+a thing, Basil."
+
+Upon reflection, I was rather ashamed myself; but I plucked up courage
+to venture: "It would be rather fine, wouldn't it, when that poor girl
+is gone, if Mrs. Bentley had Glendenning come and live with her, and
+they devoted themselves to each other for her daughter's sake?"
+
+"Fine! It would be ghastly. What are you thinking of, my dear? How would
+it be fine?"
+
+"Oh, I mean dramatically," I apologized, and, not to make bad worse, I
+said no more.
+
+The next day, which was Sunday, a telegram came for me, which I decided,
+without opening it, to be the announcement of the end. But it proved to
+be a message from Mrs. Bentley, begging in most urgent terms that Mrs.
+March and I would come to her at once, if possible. These terms left the
+widest latitude for surmise, but none for choice, in the sad
+circumstances, and we looked up the Sunday trains for Gormanville, and
+went.
+
+We found the poor woman piteously grateful, but by no means so
+prostrated as we had expected. She was rather, as often happens, stayed
+and held upright by the burden that had been laid upon her, and it was
+with fortitude if not dignity that she appealed to us for our counsel,
+and if possible our help, in a matter about which she had already
+consulted the doctor. "The doctor says that the excitement cannot hurt
+Edith; it may even help her, to propose it. I should like to do it, but
+if you do not think well of it, I will not do it. I know it is too late
+now to make up to her for the past," said Mrs. Bentley, and here she
+gave way to the grief she had restrained hitherto.
+
+"There is no one else," she went on, "who has been so intimately
+acquainted with the facts of my daughter's engagement--no one else that
+I can confide in or appeal to."
+
+We both murmured that she was very good; but she put our politeness
+somewhat peremptorily aside.
+
+"It is the only thing I can do now, and it is useless to do that now. It
+will be no reparation for the past, and it will be for myself and not
+for her, as all that I have done in the past has been; but I wish to
+know what you think of their getting married now."
+
+I am afraid that if we had said what we thought of such a tardy and
+futile proof of penitence we should have brought little comfort to the
+mother's heart, but we looked at each other in the disgust we both felt
+and said there would be a sacred fitness in it.
+
+She was apparently much consoled.
+
+It was touching enough, and I at least was affected by her tears; I am
+not so sure my wife was. But she had instantly to consider how best to
+propose the matter to Miss Bentley, and to act upon her decision.
+
+After all, as she reported the fact to me later, it was very simple to
+suggest her mother's wish to the girl, who listened to it with a perfect
+intelligence in which there was no bitterness.
+
+"They think I am going to die," she said, quietly, "and I can understand
+how she feels. It seems such a mockery; but if she wishes it; and
+Arthur--"
+
+It was my part to deal with Glendenning, and I did not find it so easy.
+
+"Marriage is for life and for earth," he said, solemnly, and I thought
+very truly. "In the resurrection we shall be one another's without it. I
+don't like to go through the form of such a sacrament idly; it seems
+like a profanation of its mystery."
+
+"But if Miss Bentley--"
+
+"She will think whatever I do; I shall feel as she does," he answered,
+with dignity.
+
+"Yes, I know," I urged. "It would not be for her; it would not certainly
+be for yourself. But if you could see it as the only form of reparation
+which her mother can now offer you both, and the only mode of expressing
+your own forgiveness--Recollect how you felt when you thought that it
+was Mrs. Bentley's death; try to recall something of that terrible
+time--"
+
+"I don't forget that," he relented. "It was in mercy to Edith and me
+that our trial is what it is: we have recognized that in the face of
+eternity. I can forgive anything in gratitude for that."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have often had to criticise life for a certain caprice with which she
+treats the elements of drama, and mars the finest conditions of tragedy
+with a touch of farce. No one who witnessed the marriage of Arthur
+Glendenning and Edith Bentley had any belief that she would survive it
+twenty-four hours; they themselves were wholly without hope in the
+moment which for happier lovers is all hope. To me it was like a
+funeral, but then most weddings are rather ghastly to look upon; and the
+stroke that life had in reserve perhaps finally restored the lost
+balance of gayety in this. At any rate, Mrs. Glendenning did live, and
+she is living yet, and in rather more happiness than comes to most
+people under brighter auspices. After long contention among many
+doctors, the original opinion that her heart trouble was functional, not
+organic, has been elected final, and upon these terms she bids fair to
+live as long as any of us.
+
+I do not know whether she will live as long as her mother, who seems to
+have taken a fresh lease of years from her single act of self-sacrifice.
+I cannot say whether Mrs. Bentley feels herself deceived and defrauded
+by her daughter's recovery; but I have made my wife observe that it
+would be just like life if she bore the young couple a sort of grudge
+for unwittingly outwitting her. Certainly, on the day we lately spent
+with them all at Gormanville, she seemed, in the slight attack of asthma
+from which she suffered, to come as heavily and exactingly upon both as
+she used to come upon her daughter alone. But I was glad to see that
+Glendenning eagerly bore the greater part of the common burden. He grows
+stouter and stouter, and will soon be the figure of a bishop.
+
+
+
+
+THE PURSUIT OF THE PIANO.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Hamilton Gaites sat breakfasting by the window of a restaurant looking
+out on Park Square, in Boston, at a table which he had chosen after
+rejecting one on the Boylston Street side of the place because it was
+too noisy, and another in the little open space, among evergreens in
+tubs, between the front and rear, because it was too chilly. The wind
+was east, but at his Park Square window it tempered the summer morning
+air without being a draught; and he poured out his coffee with a content
+in his circumstance and provision which he was apt to feel when he had
+taken all the possible pains, even though the result was not perfect.
+But now, he had real French bread, as good as he could have got in New
+York, and the coffee was clear and bright. A growth of crisp green
+watercress embowered a juicy steak, and in its shade, as it were, lay
+two long slices of bacon, not stupidly broiled to a crisp, but
+delicately pink, and exemplarily lean. Gaites had already had a
+cantaloupe, whose spicy fragrance lingered in the air and mingled with
+the robuster odors of the coffee, the steak, and the bacon.
+
+He owned to being a fuss, but he contended that he was a cheerful fuss,
+and when things went reasonably well with him, he was so. They were
+going well with him now, not only in the small but in the large way. He
+was sitting there before that capital breakfast in less than half an
+hour after leaving the sleeping-car, where he had passed a very good
+night, and he was setting out on his vacation, after very successful
+work in the June term of court. He was in prime health; he had a good
+conscience in leaving no interests behind him that could suffer in his
+absence; and the smile that he bent upon the Italian waiter as he
+retired, after putting down the breakfast, had some elements of a
+benediction.
+
+There was a good deal of Gaites's smile, when it was all on: he had a
+generous mouth, full of handsome teeth, very white and even, which all
+showed in his smile. His whole face took part in the smile, and it was a
+charming face, long and rather quaintly narrow, of an amiable
+aquilinity, and clean-shaven. His figure, tall and thin, comported well
+with his style of visage, and at a given moment, when he suddenly rose
+and leaned from the window, eagerly following something outside with his
+eye, he had an alert movement that was very pleasant.
+
+The thing outside which had caught, and which now kept, his eye as long
+as he could see it, was a case in the shape of an upright piano, on the
+end of a long, heavy-laden truck, making its way with a slow, jolting
+progress among the carts, carriages, and street cars, out of the square
+round the corner toward Boylston Street. On the sloping front of the
+case was inscribed an address, which seemed to gaze at Gaites with the
+eyes of the girl whom it named and placed, and to whom in the young
+man's willing fancy it attributed a charming quality. Nothing, he felt,
+could be more suggestive, more expressive of something shy, something
+proud, something pure, something pastoral yet patrician, something
+unaffected and yet _chic_, in an unknown personality, than the legend:
+
+     Miss Phyllis Desmond,
+     Lower Merritt,
+     New Hampshire.
+
+     Via S. B. & H. C. R. R.
+
+Like most lawyers, he had a vein of romance, and this now opened in
+pleasing conjectures concerning the girl. He knew just where Lower
+Merritt was, and so well what it was like that a vision of its white
+paint against the dark green curtain of the wooded heights around it
+filled his sense as agreeably as so much white marble. There was the
+cottage of some summer people well above the village level, among pines
+and birches, and overlooking the foamiest rush of the Saco, to which he
+instantly destined the piano of Phyllis Desmond. He had never known that
+these people's name was Desmond, and he had certainly never supposed
+that they had a daughter called Phyllis; but he divined these facts in
+losing sight of the truck; and he imagined with as logical probability
+that one of the little girls whom he used to see playing on the
+hill-slope before the cottage had grown up into the young lady whose
+name the piano bore. There was quite time enough for this
+transformation; it was seven years since Gaites had run up into the
+White Mountains for a month's rest after his last term in the Harvard
+Law School, and before beginning work in the office of the law firm in
+New York where he had got a clerkship, and where he had now a junior
+partnership. The little girl was then just ten years old, and now, of
+course, the young lady was seventeen, or would be when the piano reached
+Lower Merritt, for it was clearly meant to arrive on her birthday; it
+was a birthday-present and a surprise. He had always liked the way those
+nice people let their children play about barefoot; it would be in
+character with them to do a fond, pretty thing like that; and Gaites
+smiled for pleasure in it, and then rather blushed in relating the brown
+legs of the little girl, as he remembered seeing them in her races over
+her father's lawn, to the dignified young lady she had now become.
+
+He amused himself in mentally following the piano on its way to the Sea
+Board & Hill Country R. R. freight-depot, which he was quite able to do
+from a habit of Boston formed during his four years in the academic
+course and his three years in the law-school at Harvard. He knew that it
+would cross Boylston into Charles Street, and keep along that level to
+Cambridge; then it would turn into McLane Street, and again into Lynde,
+by this means avoiding the grades as much as possible, and arriving
+through Causeway Street at the long, low freight-depot of the S. B. & H.
+C., where it would be the first thing unloaded from the truck. It would
+stand indefinitely on the outer platform; and then, when the men in
+flat, narrow-peaked silk caps and grease-splotched overalls got round to
+it, with an air of as much personal indifference as if they were mere
+mechanical agencies, it would be pulled and pushed into the dimness of
+the interior, cool, and pleasantly smelling of pine, and hemp, and
+flour, and dried fruit, and coffee, and tar, and leather, and fish.
+There it would abide, indefinitely again, till in the same large
+impersonal way it was pulled and pushed out on the platform beside the
+track, where a freight-car marked for the Hill Country division of the
+road, with devices intelligible to the train-men, had been shunted down
+by a pony engine in obedience to mystical semaphoric gesticulations,
+from the brakeman risking his life for the purpose among the rails,
+addressed to the engineer keeping his hand on the pulse of the
+locomotive, and his head out of the cab window to see how near he could
+come to killing the brakeman without doing it.
+
+Gaites witnessed the whole drama with an interest that held him
+suspended between the gulps and morsels of his breakfast, and at times
+quite arrested the processes of mastication and deglutition. That pretty
+girl's name on the slope of the piano-case continued to look at him from
+the end of the truck; it smiled at him from the outer platform of the
+freight-house; it entreated him with a charming trepidation from the dim
+interior; again it smiled on the inner platform; and then, from the
+safety of the car, where the case found itself ensconced among freight
+of a neat and agreeable character, the name had the effect of intrepidly
+blowing him a kiss as the train-man slid the car doors together and
+fastened them. He drew a long breath when the train had backed and
+bumped down to the car, and the couplers had clashed together, and the
+maniac, who had not been mashed in dropping the coupling-pin into its
+socket, scrambled out from the wheels, and frantically worked his arms
+to the potential homicide in the locomotive cab, and the train had
+jolted forward on the beginning of its run.
+
+That was the last of the piano, and Gaites threw it off his mind, and
+finished his breakfast at his leisure. He was going to spend his
+vacation at Kent Harbor, where he knew some agreeable people, and where
+he knew that a young man had many chances of a good time, even if he
+were not the youngest kind of young man. He had spent two of his Harvard
+vacations there, and he knew this at first hand. He could not and did
+not expect to do so much two-ing on the rocks and up the river as he
+used; the zest of that sort of thing was past, rather; but he had
+brought his golf stockings with him, and a quiverful of the utensils of
+the game, in obedience to a lady who had said there were golf-links at
+Kent, and she knew a young lady who would teach him to play.
+
+He was going to stop off at Burymouth, to see a friend, an old Harvard
+man, and a mighty good fellow, who had rather surprised people by giving
+up New York, and settling in the gentle old town on the Piscatamac. They
+accounted for it as well as they could by his having married a Burymouth
+girl; and since he had begun, most unexpectedly, to come forward in
+literature, such of his friends as had seen him there said it was just
+the place for him. Gaites had not yet seen him there, and he had a
+romantic curiosity, the survival of an intensified friendship of their
+Senior year, to do so. He got to thinking of this good fellow rather
+vividly, when he had cleared his mind of Miss Desmond's piano, and he
+did not see why he should not take an earlier train to Burymouth than he
+had intended to take; and so he had them call him a coupé from the
+restaurant, and he got into it as soon as he left the breakfast-table.
+
+He gave the driver the authoritative address, "Sea Board Depot," and
+left him to take his own way, after resisting a rather silly impulse to
+bid him go through Charles Street.
+
+The man drove up Beacon, and down Temple through Staniford, and
+naturally Gaites saw nothing of Miss Desmond's piano, which had come
+into his mind again in starting. He did not know the colonnaded
+structure, with its stately _porte-cochère_, where his driver proposed
+to leave him, instead of the formless brick box which he remembered as
+the Sea Board Depot, and he insisted upon that when the fellow got down
+to open the door.
+
+"Ain't no Sibbod Dippo, now," the driver explained, contemptuously.
+"Guess Union Dippo'll do, though;" and Gaites, a little overcome with
+its splendor, found that it would. He faltered a moment in passing the
+conductor and porter at the end of the Pullman car on his train, and
+then decided that it would be ridiculous to take a seat in it for the
+short run to Burymouth. In the common coach he got a very good seat on
+the shady side, where he put down his hand-bag. Then he looked at his
+watch, and as it was still fifteen minutes before train-time, he
+indulged a fantastic impulse. He left the car and hurried back through
+the station and out through the electrics, hacks, herdics, carts, and
+string-teams of Causeway Street, and up the sidewalk of the street
+opening into it, as far as the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot. On the way
+he bet himself five dollars that Miss Desmond's piano would not be
+there, and lost; for at the moment he came up it was unloading from the
+end of the truck which he had seen carrying it past the window of his
+restaurant.
+
+The fact amused him quite beyond the measure of anything intrinsically
+humorous in it, and he staid watching the exertions of the heated
+truckman and two silk-capped, sarcastic-faced freight-men, till the
+piano was well on the platform. He was so intent upon it that his
+interest seemed to communicate itself to a young girl coming from the
+other quarter, with a suburban, cloth-sided, crewel-initialed bag in her
+hand, as if she were going to a train. She paused in the stare she gave
+the piano-case, and then slowed her pace with a look over her shoulder
+after she got by. In this her eyes met his, and she blushed and hurried
+on; but not so soon that he had not time to see she had a thin face of a
+pathetic prettiness, gentle brown eyes with wistful brows, under
+ordinary brown hair. She was rather little, and was dressed with a sort
+of unaccented propriety, which was as far from distinction as it was
+from pretension.
+
+When Gaites got back to his car, a few minutes before the train was to
+start, he found the seat where he had left his hand-bag and light
+overcoat more than half full of a bulky lady, who looked stupidly up at
+him, and did not move or attempt any excuse for crowding him from his
+place. He had to walk the whole length of the car before he came to a
+vacant seat. It was the last of the transverse seats, and at the moment
+he dropped into it, the girl who had watched the unloading of the piano
+with him passed him, and took the sidewise seat next the door.
+
+She took it with a weary resignation which somehow made Gaites ashamed
+of the haste with which he had pushed forward to the only good place,
+and he felt as guilty of keeping her out of it as if he had known she
+was following him. He kept a remorseful eye upon her as she arranged her
+bag and umbrella about her, with some paper parcels which she must have
+had sent to her at the station. She breathed quickly, as if from final
+hurry, but somewhat also as if she were delicate; and tried to look as
+if she did not know he was watching her. She had taken off one of her
+gloves, and her hand, though little enough, showed an unexpected vigor
+with reference to her face, and had a curious air of education.
+
+When the train pulled out of the station into the clearer light, she
+turned her face from him toward the forward window, and the corner of
+her mouth, which her half-averted profile gave him, had a kind of
+piteous droop which smote him to keener regret. Once it lifted in an
+upward curve, and a gay light came into the corner of her eye; then the
+mouth drooped again, and the light went out.
+
+Gaites could bear it no longer; he rose and said, with a respectful bow:
+"Won't you take my seat? That seems such a very inconvenient place for
+you, with the door opening and shutting."
+
+The girl turned her face promptly round and up, and answered, with a
+flush in her thin cheek, but no embarrassment in her tone, "No, I thank
+you. This will do quite well," and then she turned her face away as
+before.
+
+He had not meant his politeness for an overture to her acquaintance, but
+he felt as justly snubbed as if he had; and he sank back into his seat
+in some disorder. He tried to hide his confusion behind the newspaper he
+opened between them; but from time to time he had a glimpse of her round
+the side of it, and he saw that the hand which clutched her bag all the
+while tightened upon it and then loosened nervously.
+
+
+II.
+
+"Ah, I see what you mean," said Gaites, with a kind of finality, as his
+friend Birkwall walked him homeward through the loveliest of the lovely
+old Burymouth streets. Something equivalent had been in his mind and on
+his tongue at every dramatic instant of the afternoon; and, in fact,
+ever since he had arrived from the station at Birkwall's door, where
+Mrs. Birkwall met them and welcomed him. He had been sufficiently
+impressed with the aristocratic quiet of the vast square white old
+wooden house, standing behind a high white board fence, in two acres of
+gardened ground; but the fine hallway with its broad low stairway, the
+stately drawing-room with its carving, the library with its panelling
+and portraits, and the dining-room with its tall wainscoting, united to
+give him a sense of the pride of life in old Burymouth such as the raw
+splendors of the millionaire houses in New York had never imparted to
+him.
+
+"They knew how to do it, they knew how to do it!" he exclaimed, meaning
+the people who had such houses built; and he said the same thing of the
+other Burymouth houses which Birkwall showed him, by grace of their
+owners, after the mid-day dinner, which Gaites kept calling luncheon.
+
+"Be sure you get back in good time for _tea_," said Mrs. Birkwall for a
+parting charge to her husband; and she bade Gaites, "Remember that it
+_is_ tea, please; _not_ dinner;" and he was tempted to kiss his hand to
+her with as much courtly gallantry as he could; for, standing under the
+transom of the slender-pillared portal to watch them away, she looked
+most distinctly descended from ancestors, and not merely the daughter of
+a father and mother, as most women do. Gaites said as much to Birkwall,
+and when they got home Birkwall repeated it to his wife, without
+injuring Gaites with her. If he saw what Birkwall had meant in marrying
+her, and settling down to his literary life with her in the atmosphere
+of such a quiet place as Burymouth, when he might have chosen money and
+unrest in New York, she on her side saw what her husband meant in liking
+the shrewd, able fellow who had such a vein of gay romance in his
+practicality, and such an intelligent and respectful sympathy with her
+tradition and environment.
+
+She sent and asked several of her friends to meet him at tea; and if in
+that New England disproportion of the sexes which at Burymouth is
+intensified almost to a pure gynocracy these friends were nearly all
+women, he found them even more agreeable than if they had been nearly
+all men. It seemed to him that he had never heard better talk than that
+of these sequestered ladies, who were so well bred and so well read, so
+humorous and so dignified, who loved to laugh and who loved to think. It
+was all like something in a pleasant book, and Gaites was not altogether
+to blame if it went to his head, and after the talk had been of
+Burymouth, in which he professed so acceptable an interest, and then of
+novels, of which he had read about as many as they, he confided to the
+whole table his experience with Miss Phyllis Desmond's piano. He managed
+the psychology of the little incident so well that he imparted the very
+quality he meant them to feel in it.
+
+"How perfectly charming!" said one of the ladies. "I don't wonder you
+fell in love with the name. It's fit for a shepherdess of high degree."
+
+"If _I_ were a man," said the girl across the table who was not less
+sweetly a girl because she would never see thirty-nine again, "I should
+simply drop everything and follow that piano to Phyllis Desmond's door."
+
+"It's quite what I should like to do," Gaites responded, with a
+well-affected air of passionate regret. "But I'm promised at Kent
+Harbor--"
+
+She did not wait for him to say more, but submitted, "Oh, well, if
+you're going to Kent _Harbor_, of course!" as if that would excuse and
+explain any sort of dereliction; and then the talk went on about Kent
+Harbor till Mrs. Birkwall asked, generally, as if it were part of the
+Kent Harbor inquiry, "Didn't I hear that the Ashwoods were going to
+their place at Upper Merritt, this year?"
+
+Then there arose a dispute, which divided the company into nearly equal
+parties; as to whether the Ashwoods had got home from Europe yet. But it
+all ended in bringing the talk back to Phyllis Desmond's piano again,
+and in urging its pursuit upon Gaites, as something he owed to romance;
+at least he ought to do it for their sake, for now they should all be
+upon pins and needles till they knew who she was, and what she _could_
+be doing at Lower Merritt, N. H.
+
+At one time he had it on his tongue to say that there seemed to be
+something like infection in his interest in that piano, and he was going
+to speak of the young girl who seemed to share it, simply because she
+saw him staring at it, and who faltered so long with him before the
+freight-depot that she came near getting no seat in the train for
+Burymouth. But just at that moment the dispute about the Ashwoods
+renewed itself upon some fresh evidence which one of the ladies
+recollected and offered; and Gaites's chance passed. When it came again
+he had no longer the wish to seize it. A lingering soreness from his
+experience with that young girl made itself felt in his nether
+consciousness. He forbore the more easily because, mixed with this pain,
+was a certain insecurity as to her quality which he was afraid might
+impart itself to those patrician presences at the table. They would be
+nice, and they would be appreciative,--but would they feel that she was
+a lady, exactly, when he owned to the somewhat poverty-stricken
+simplicity of her dress in some details, more especially her thread
+gloves, which he could not consistently make kid? He was all the more
+bound to keep her from slight because he felt a little, a very little
+ashamed of her.
+
+He woke next morning in a wide, low, square chamber to the singing of
+robins in the garden, from which at breakfast he had luscious
+strawberries, and heaped bowls of June roses. When he started for his
+train, he parted with Mrs. Birkwall as old friends as he was with her
+husband; and he completed her conquest by running back to her from the
+gate, and asking, with a great air of secrecy, but loud enough for
+Birkwall to hear, whether she thought she could find him another girl in
+Burymouth, with just such a house and garden, and exactly like herself
+in every way.
+
+"Hundreds!" she shouted, and stood a graceful figure between the fluted
+pillars of the portal, waving her hand to them till they were out of
+sight behind the corner of the high board fence, over which the garden
+trees hung caressingly, and brushed Gaites's shoulder in a shy, fond
+farewell.
+
+It had all been as nice as it could be, and he said so again and again
+to Birkwall, who _would_ go to the train with him, and who would _not_
+let him carry his own hand-bag. The good fellow clung hospitably to it,
+after Gaites had rechecked his trunk for Kent Harbor, and insisted upon
+carrying it as they walked up and down the platform together at the
+station. It seemed that the train from Boston which the Kent Harbor
+train was to connect with was ten minutes late, and after some turns
+they prolonged their promenade northward as far as the freight-depot,
+Birkwall in the abstraction of a plot for a novel which he was seizing
+these last moments to outline to his friend, and Gaites with a secret
+shame for the hope which was springing in his breast.
+
+On a side track stood a freight-car, from which the customary men in
+silk caps were pulling the freight, and standing it about loosely on the
+platform. The car was detached from the parent train, which had left it
+not only orphaned on this siding, but apparently disabled; for Gaites
+heard the men talking about not having cut it out a minute too soon. One
+of them called, in at the broad low door, to some one inside, "All out?"
+and a voice from far within responded, "Case here, yet; _I_ can't handle
+it alone."
+
+The others went into the car, and then, with an interval for some heavy
+bumping and some strong language, they reappeared at the door with the
+case, which Gaites was by this time not surprised to find inscribed with
+the name and address of Miss Phyllis Desmond. He remained watching it,
+while the men got it on the platform, so wholly inattentive to
+Birkwall's plot that the most besotted young author could not have
+failed to feel his want of interest. Birkwall then turned his vision
+outward upon the object which engrossed his friend, and started with an
+"Oh, hello!" and slapped him on the back.
+
+Gaites nodded in proud assent, and Birkwall went on: "I thought you were
+faking the name last night; but I didn't want to give you away. It was
+the real thing, wasn't it, after all."
+
+"The real thing," said Gaites, with his most toothful smile, and he
+laughed for pleasure in his friend's astonishment.
+
+"Well," Birkwall resumed, "she seems to be following _you_ up, old
+fellow. This will be great for Polly, and for Miss Seaward, who wanted
+you to follow _her_ up; and for all Burymouth, for that matter. Why,
+Gaites, you'll be the tea-table talk for a week; you'll be married to
+that girl before you know it. What is the use of flying in the face of
+Providence? Come! There's time enough to get a ticket, and have your
+check changed from Kent Harbor to Lower Merritt, and the Hill Country
+express will be along here at nine o'clock. You can't let that poor
+thing start off on her travels alone again!"
+
+Gaites flushed in a joyful confusion, and put the joke by as well as he
+could. But he was beginning to feel it not altogether a joke; it had
+acquired an element of mystery, of fatality, which flattered while it
+awed him; and he could not be easy till he had asked one of the
+freight-handlers what had happened to the car. He got an answer--flung
+over the man's shoulder--which seemed willing enough, but was wholly
+unintelligible in the clang and clatter of a passenger-train which came
+pulling in from the southward.
+
+"Here's the Hill Country express now!" said Birkwall. "You won't change
+your mind? Well, your Kent Harbor train backs down after this goes out.
+Don't worry about the piano. I'll find out what's happened to the car it
+was in, and I'll see that it's put into a good strong one, next time."
+
+"Do! That's a good fellow!" said Gaites, and in repeated promises,
+demanded and given, to come again, they passed the time till the Hill
+Country train pulled out and the Kent Harbor train backed down.
+
+
+III.
+
+Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and
+after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent
+Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss
+Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has
+outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in
+plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired
+fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more
+remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed;
+at half past one o'clock he dined at somebody's cottage, and afterwards
+sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time
+to go to afternoon tea at somebody else's cottage, where he chatted
+about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for
+seven or eight o'clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.
+
+There was a great deal more society than there had been in his old
+college-vacation days, when the Kent Harbor House reigned sole in a
+perhaps somewhat fabled despotism; but the society was of not less
+simple instincts, and the black coat which Gaites put on for supper was
+never of the evening-dress convention. Once when he had been out
+canoeing on the river very late, his hostess made him go "just as he
+was," and he was consoled on meeting their bachelor host to find that he
+had had the inspiration to wear a flannel shirt of much more outing type
+than Gaites himself had on.
+
+The thing that he had to guard against was not to praise the river
+sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the
+river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy
+to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well
+that he told people he was never going away.
+
+He had arrived at this extreme before he received the note from Mrs.
+Birkwall, which she made his prompt bread-and-butter letter the excuse
+of writing him. She wrote mainly to remind him of his promise to stay
+another day with her husband on his way home through Burymouth; and she
+alleged an additional claim upon him because of what she said she had
+made Birkwall do for him. She had made him go down to the freight-depot
+every day, and see what had become of Phyllis Desmond's piano; and she
+had not dared write before, because it had been most unaccountably
+delayed there for the three days that had now passed. Only that morning,
+however, she had gone down herself with Birkwall; and it showed what a
+woman could do when she took anything in hand. Without knowing of her
+approach except by telepathy, the railroad people had bestirred
+themselves, and she had seen them with her own eyes put the piano-case
+into a car, and had waited till the train had bumped and jolted off with
+it towards Mewers Junction. All the ladies of her supper party, she
+declared, had been keenly distressed at the delay of the piano in
+Burymouth, and she was now offering him the relief which she had shared
+already with them.
+
+He laughed aloud in reading this letter at breakfast, and he could not
+do less than read it to his hostess, who said it was charming, and at
+once took a vivid interest in the affair of the piano. She accepted in
+its entirety his theory of its being a birthday-present for the young
+girl with that pretty name; and she professed to be in a quiver of
+anxiety at its retarded progress.
+
+"And, by-the-way," she added, with the logic of her sex, "I'm just going
+to the station to see what's become of a trunk myself that I ordered
+expressed from Chicago a week ago. If you're not doing anything this
+morning--the tide isn't in till noon, and there'll be little or no
+bathing to look at before that--you'd better drive down with me. Or
+perhaps you're canoeing up the river with somebody?"
+
+Gaites said he was not, and if he were he would plead a providential
+indisposition rather than miss driving with her to the station.
+
+"Well, anyway," she said, tangentially, "I can get June Alber to go too,
+and you can take her canoeing afterwards."
+
+But Miss Alber was already engaged for canoeing, and Gaites was obliged
+to drive off with his hostess alone. She said she did pity him, but she
+pitied him no longer than it took to get at the express agent. Then she
+began to pity herself, and much more energetically if not more
+sincerely, for it seemed that the agent had not been able to learn
+anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning
+it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as
+combining all the searching effects of a Röntgen-ray examination and the
+earlier procedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which
+he seemed to have formed, toward the freight-house.
+
+He amused himself thinking what he should do if he found Phyllis
+Desmond's piano there, but he was wholly unprepared to do anything when
+he actually found it standing on the platform, as if it had just been
+put out of the freight-car which was still on the siding at the door. He
+passed instantly from the mood of gay conjecture in which he was playing
+with the improbable notion of its presence to a violent indignation.
+
+"Why, look here!" he almost shouted to a man in a silk cap and greased
+overalls who was contemplating the inscription on the slope of its
+cover, "what's that piano doing _here_?"
+
+The man seemed to accept him as one having authority to make this
+demand, and responded mildly, "Well, that's just what I was thinking
+myself."
+
+"That piano," Gaites went on with unabated violence, "started from
+Boston at the beginning of the week; and I happen to know that it's been
+lying two or three days at Burymouth, instead of going on to Lower
+Merritt, as it ought to have done at once. It ought to have been in
+Lower Merritt Wednesday afternoon at the latest, and here it is at Kent
+Harbor Saturday morning!"
+
+The man in the silk cap scanned Gaites's figure warily, as if it might
+be that of some official whale in disguise, and answered in a tone of
+dreamy suggestion: "Must have got shifted into the wrong car at Mewers
+Junction, somehow. Or maybe they started it wrong from Burymouth."
+
+Mrs. Maze was coming rapidly down the platform toward them, leaving the
+express agent to crawl flaccidly into his den at the end of the
+passenger-station, with the air of having had all his joints started.
+
+"Just look at this, Mrs. Maze," said Gaites when she drew near enough to
+read the address on the piano-case. She did look at it; then she looked
+at Gaites's face, into which he had thrown a sort of stony calm; and
+then she looked back at the piano-case.
+
+"No!" she exclaimed and questioned in one.
+
+Gaites nodded confirmation.
+
+"Then it won't be there in time for the poor thing's birthday?"
+
+He nodded again.
+
+Mrs. Maze was a woman who never measured her terms, perhaps because
+there was nothing large enough to measure them with, and perhaps because
+in their utmost expansion they were a tight fit for her emotions.
+
+"Well, it's an abominable outrage!" she began. She added: "It's a
+burning shame! They'll never get over it in the world; and when it comes
+lagging along after everything's over, she won't care a pin for it! How
+did it happen?"
+
+Gaites mutely referred her, with a shrug, to the man in the silk cap,
+and he again hazarded his dreamy conjecture.
+
+"Well, it doesn't matter!" she said, with a bitterness that was a great
+comfort to Gaites. "What are you going to do about it?" she asked him.
+
+"I don't know what _can_ be done about it," he answered, referring
+himself to the man in the silk cap.
+
+The man said, "No freight out, now, till Monday."
+
+Mrs. Maze burst forth again: "If I had the least confidence in the world
+in any human express company, I would send it by express and pay the
+expressage myself."
+
+"Oh, I couldn't let you do that, Mrs. Maze," Gaites protested. "Besides,
+I don't suppose they'd allow us to take it out of the freight, here,
+unless we had the bill of lading."
+
+"Well," cried Mrs. Maze, passionately, "I can't bear to think of that
+child's suspense. It's perfectly heart-sickening. Why shouldn't they
+telegraph? They ought to telegraph! If they let things go wandering
+round the earth at this rate, the least they can do is to telegraph and
+relieve people's minds. We'll go and make the station-master telegraph!"
+
+But even when the station-master was found, and made to understand the
+case, and to feel its hardship, he had his scruples. "I don't think I've
+got any right to do that," he said.
+
+"Of coarse I'll pay for the telegram," Mrs. Maze interpolated.
+
+"It ain't that exactly," said the station-master. "It might look as if I
+was meddling myself. I rather not, Mrs. Maze."
+
+She took fire. "Then _I'll_ meddle myself!" she blazed. "There's nothing
+to hinder my telegraphing, I suppose!"
+
+"_I_ can't hinder you," the station-master admitted.
+
+"Well, then!" She pulled a bunch of yellow telegraph blanks toward her,
+and consumed three of them in her comprehensive despatch:
+
+     _Miss Phyllis Desmond,
+
+     Lower Merritt, N. H.
+
+     Piano left Boston Monday P. M. Broke down on way to Burymouth,
+     where delayed four days. Sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers
+     Junction. Forwarded to Lower Merritt Monday._
+
+"There! How will that do?" she asked Gaites, submitting the telegram to
+him.
+
+"That seems to cover the ground," he said, not so wholly hiding the
+misgiving he began to feel but that she demanded,
+
+"It explains everything, doesn't it?"
+
+"Yes--"
+
+"Very well; sign it, then!"
+
+"I?"
+
+"Certainly. She doesn't know me."
+
+"She doesn't know me, either," said Gaites. He added: "And a man's
+name--"
+
+"To be sure! Why didn't I think of that?" and she affixed a signature in
+which the baptismal name gave away her romantic and impulsive
+generation--Elaine W. Maze. "_Now_," she triumphed, as Gaites
+helped her into her trap--"_now_ I shall have a little peace of my
+life!"
+
+
+IV.
+
+Mrs. Maze had no great trouble in making Gaites stay over Sunday. The
+argument she used was, "No freight out till Monday, you know." The
+inducement was June Alber, whom she said she had already engaged to go
+canoeing with Gaites Sunday afternoon.
+
+That afternoon was exquisite. The sky was cloudless, and of one blue
+with the river and the girl's eyes, as Gaites noted while she sat facing
+him from the bow of the canoe. But the day was of the treacherous
+serenity of a weather-breeder, and the next morning brought a storm of
+such violence that Mrs. Maze declared it would be a foolhardy risk of
+his life for Gaites to go; and again she enforced her logic with Miss
+Alber, whom she said she had asked to one-o'clock dinner, with a few
+other friends.
+
+Gaites stayed, of course, but he atoned for his weakness by starting
+early Tuesday morning, so as to get the first Hill Country train from
+Boston at Burymouth. He had decided that to get in as much change of air
+as possible he had better go to Craybrooks for the rest of his vacation.
+
+His course lay through Lower Merritt, and perhaps he would have time to
+run out from the train and ask the station-master (known to him from his
+former sojourn) who Miss Phyllis Desmond was. His mind was not so full
+of Miss June Alber but that he wished to know.
+
+It was still raining heavily, and on the first cut beyond Porchester
+Junction his train was stopped by a flagman, sent back from a
+freight-train. There was a wash-out just ahead, and the way would be
+blocked for several hours yet, if not longer. The express backed down to
+Porchester, and there seemed no choice for Gaites, if he insisted upon
+going to Craybrooks, but to take the first train up the old Boston and
+Montreal line to Wells River and across by the Wing Road through
+Fabyans; and this was what he did, arriving very late, but quite in time
+for all he had to do at Craybrooks.
+
+The next day the weather cleared up cold, after the storm, and the fat
+old ladies, who outnumber everybody but the thin young girls at summer
+hotels, made the landlord put the steam on in the corridors, and toasted
+themselves before the log fires on the spectacular hall hearth. Gaites
+walked all day, and at night he lounged by the lamp, trying to read, and
+wished himself at Kent Harbor. The blue eyes of June Alber made
+themselves one with the sky and the river again, and all three laughed
+at him for his folly in leaving the certain delight they embodied for
+the vague good of a whim fulfilled. Was this the change he had come to
+the mountains for? He could throw his hat into the clouds that hung so
+low in the defile where the hotel lurked, and that was something; but it
+was not so much to the purpose, now that he had it, as June Alber and
+the sky and the river, which he had no longer. As he drowsed by the fire
+in a break of the semicircle of old ladies before it, he suddenly ceased
+to think of June Alber and the Kent sky and river, and found himself as
+it were visually confronted with that pale, delicate girl in thread
+gloves; she was facing him from the bow of a canoe in the train at
+Boston, where he had first met her, and some one was saying, "Oh, she's
+a Desmond, through and through."
+
+He woke to the sound of a quick snort, in which he suspected a terminal
+character when he glanced round the semicircle of old ladies and found
+them all staring at him. From the pain in his neck he knew that his head
+had been hanging forward on his breast, and, in the strong belief that
+he had been publicly disgracing himself, he left the place, and went out
+on the piazza till his shame should be forgotten. Of course, the sound
+of the name Desmond had been as much a part of his dream as the sight of
+that pale girl's face; but he felt, while he paced the veranda, the pull
+of a strong curiosity to make sure of the fact. From time to time he
+looked in through the window, without courage to return. At last, when
+the semicircle was reduced to the bulks of the two ladies who had sat
+nearest him, he went in, and took a place with a newspaper at the lamp
+just behind them.
+
+They stopped their talk and recognized him with an exchange of
+consciousness. Then, as if compelled by an irresistible importance in
+their topic, they began again; that is, one of them began to talk again,
+and the other to listen, and Gaites from almost the first word joined
+the listener with all his might, though he diligently held up his paper
+between himself and the speaker and pretended to be reading.
+
+"Yes," she said, "they must have had their summer home there nearly
+twenty years. Lower Merritt was one of the first places opened up in
+that part of the mountains, and I guess the Desmonds built the first
+cottage there."
+
+The date given would make the young lady whom he remembered from her
+childhood romps on her father's lawn somewhat older than he imagined,
+but not too old for the purposes of his romance.
+
+The speaker began to collect her needlework into the handkerchief on her
+lap as she went on, and he listened with an intensified abandon.
+
+"I guess," she continued, "that they pass most of the year there. After
+he lost his money, he had to give up his house in town, and I believe
+they have no other home now. They did use to travel some, winters, but I
+guess they don't much any more; if they don't stay there the whole
+winter through, I don't believe they get much farther now than Portland,
+or Burymouth, at the furthest. It seems to me as if I heard that one of
+the girls was going to Boston last winter to take piano lessons at the
+Conservatory, so as to teach; but--"
+
+She stopped with a definite air, and rolled her knitting up into her
+handkerchief. Gaites made a merit to himself of rising abruptly and
+closing his paper with a clash, as if he had been trying to read and had
+not been able for the talking near him. The ladies looked round
+conscience-stricken; when they saw who it was, they looked indignant.
+
+
+V.
+
+In the necessity, which we all feel, of making practical excuses to
+ourselves for a foolish action, he pretended that he had been at
+Craybrooks long enough, and that now, since he had derived all the
+benefit to be got from the west-side air, it was best to begin his
+homestretch on the other slope of the hills. His real reason was that he
+wished to stop at Lower Merritt and experience whatever fortuities might
+happen to him from doing so. He wished, in other words, to see Phyllis
+Desmond, or, failing this, to find out whether her piano had reached
+her.
+
+It had now a pathos for him which had been wanting earlier in his
+romance. It was no longer a gay surprise for a young girl's birthday; it
+was the sober means of living to a woman who must work for her living.
+But he found it not the less charming for that; he had even a more
+romantic interest in it, mingled with the sense of patronage, of
+protection, which is so agreeable to a successful man.
+
+He began to long for some new occasion of promoting the arrival of the
+piano in Lower Merritt, and he was so far from regretting his former
+interventions that at the first junction where his train stopped he
+employed the time in exploring the freight-house in the vain hope of
+finding it there, and urging the road to greater speed in its delivery
+to Miss Desmond. He was now not at all ashamed of the stand he had taken
+in the matter at former opportunities, and he was not abashed when a man
+in a silk cap demanded, across the twilight of the freight-house, in
+accents of the semi-sarcasm appropriate in addressing a person
+apparently not minding his own business, "Lost something?"
+
+"Yes, I have," answered Gaites with just effrontery. "I've lost an
+upright piano. I started with it from Boston ten days or a fortnight
+ago, and I've found it everywhere I've stopped, and sometimes where I
+didn't stop. How long, in the course of nature, ought an upright piano
+to take in getting to this point from Boston, anyway?"
+
+The man obviously tasted the sarcasm in Gaites's tone, and dropped it
+from his own, but he was sulkier if more respectful than before in
+answering: "'D ought a come right through in a couple of days. 'D ought
+a been here a week ago."
+
+"Why isn't it here now, then?"
+
+"Might 'a' got off on some branch road, by mistake, and waited there
+till it was looked up. You see," the man continued, resting an elbow on
+the tall casing of a chest of drawers, and dropping to a more
+confidential level in his manner, "an upright piano ain't like a
+passenger. It don't kick if it's shunted off on the wrong line. As a
+gene'l rule, freight don't complain of the route it travels by, and it
+ain't in a hurry to arrive."
+
+"Oh!" said Gaites, with a sympathetic sneer.
+
+"But it ain't likely," said the man, who now pushed his hat far back on
+his head, in the interest of self-possession, "that it's gone wrong.
+With all these wash-outs and devilments, the last fo't-night, it might
+a' been travellin' straight and not got the'a, yet. What d'you say was
+the address?"
+
+"Lower Merritt," said Gaites, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.
+
+"Name?" persisted the man.
+
+"Miss Phyllis Desmond," Gaites answered, now feeling really silly, but
+unable to get away without answering.
+
+"That ain't your name?" the man suggested, with reviving sarcasm.
+
+"No, it isn't!" Gaites retorted, angrily, aware that he was giving
+himself away in fine shape.
+
+"Oh, I see," the man mocked. "Friend o' the family. Well, I guess you'll
+find your piano at Lower Merritt, all right, in two-three weeks." He was
+now openly offensive, as with a sense of having Gaites in his power.
+
+A locomotive-bell rang, and Gaites started toward the doorway. "Is that
+my train?"
+
+The man openly laughed. "Guess it is, if you're goin' to Lower Merritt."
+As Gaites shot through the doorway toward his train, he added, in an
+insolent drawl, "Miss--Des--mond!"
+
+Gaites was so furious when he got back to the smoking-room of the
+parlor-car that he was sorry for several miles that he had not turned
+back and kicked the man, even if it lost him his train. But this was
+only while he was under the impression that he was furious with the man.
+When he discovered that he was furious with himself, for having been all
+imaginable kinds of an ass, he perceived that he had done the wisest
+thing he could in leaving the man to himself, and taking up the line of
+his journey again. What remained mortifying was that he had bought his
+ticket and checked his bag to Lower Merritt, which he wished never to
+hear of again, much less see.
+
+He rang for the porter and consulted him as to what could be done toward
+changing the check on his bag from Lower Merritt to Middlemount
+Junction; and as it appeared that this was quite feasible, since his
+ticket would have carried him two stations beyond the Junction, he had
+done it. He knew the hotel at Middlemount, and he decided to pass the
+night there, and the next day to go back to Kent Harbor and June Alber,
+and let Lower Merritt and Phyllis Desmond take care of themselves from
+that time forward.
+
+While the driver of the Middlemount House barge was helping the
+station-master-and-baggage-man (they were one) put the arriving
+passengers' trunks into the wagon for the Middlemount House, Gaites
+paced up and down the long platform in the remnant of his excitement,
+and vowed himself to have nothing more to do with Miss Desmond's piano,
+even if it should turn up then and there and personally appeal to him
+for help. In this humor he was not prepared to have anything of the kind
+happen, and he stood aghast, in looking absently into a freight-car
+standing on the track, to read, "Miss Phyllis Desmond, Lower Merritt, N.
+H.," on the slope of the now familiar case just within the open doorway.
+It was as if the poor girl were personally there pleading for his help
+with the eyes whose tenderness he remembered.
+
+The united station-master-and-baggage-man, who appeared also to be the
+freight agent, came lounging down the platform toward him. He was so
+exactly of the rustic railroad type that he confused Gaites with a doubt
+as to which functionary, of the many he now knew, this was.
+
+"Go'n' to walk over to the hotel?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," Gaites faltered, and the man abruptly turned, and made the
+gesture for starting a locomotive to the driver of the Middlemount
+stage.
+
+"All right, Jim!" he shouted, and the stage drove off.
+
+"What time can I get a train for Lower Merritt this afternoon?" asked
+Gaites.
+
+"Four o'clock," said the man. "This freight goes out first;" and now
+Gaites noticed that up on a siding beyond the station an engine with a
+train of freight-cars was fretfully fizzing. The engineer put a
+silk-capped head out of the cab window and looked back at the
+station-master, who began to work his arms like a semaphore telegraph.
+Then the locomotive tooted, the bell rang, and the freight-train ran
+forward on the switch to the main track, and commenced backing down to
+where they stood. Evidently it was going to pick up the car with Phyllis
+Desmond's piano in it.
+
+"When does this freight go out?" Gaites palpitated.
+
+"'Bout ten minutes," said the station-master.
+
+"Does it stop at Lower Merritt?"
+
+"Leaves this cah the'a," said the man, as if surprised into the
+admission.
+
+"Can I go on her?" Gaites pursued, breathlessly.
+
+"Well, I guess you'll have to talk to this man about that," and the
+station-master indicated, with a nod of his head, the freight conductor,
+who was swinging himself down from the caboose, now come abreast of them
+on the track. A brakeman had also jumped down, and the train fastened on
+to the waiting car, under his manipulation, with a final cluck and jolt.
+
+The conductor and station-master exchanged large oblong Manila-paper
+envelopes, and the station-master said, casually, "Here's a man wants to
+go to Lower Merritt with you, Bill."
+
+The conductor looked amused and interested. "Eva travel in a caboose?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, I guess you can stand it fo' five miles, anyway."
+
+He turned and left Gaites, who understood this for permission, and
+clambered into the car, where he found himself in a rude but far from
+comfortless interior. There was a sort of table or desk in the middle,
+with a heavy chair or two before it; round the side of the car were some
+leather-covered benches, suitable for the hard naps which seemed to be
+taken on them, if he could guess from the man in overalls asleep on one.
+
+The conductor came in, after the train started, and seemed disposed to
+be sociable. He had apparently gathered from the station-master so much
+of Gaites's personal history as had accumulated since he left the
+express train at Middlemount.
+
+"Thought you'd try a caboose for a little change from a pahla-cah," he
+suggested, humorously.
+
+"Well, yes," Gaites partially admitted. "I did intend to stay over at
+Middlemount when I left the express there, but I changed my mind and
+decided to go on. It's very good of you to let me come with you."
+
+"'Tain't but a little way to Lowa Merritt," the conductor explained,
+defensively. "Eva been the'a?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I passed a week or so there once, after I left college. Are
+you acquainted there?"
+
+"I'm _from_ the'a. Used to wo'k fo' the Desmonds--got that summa place
+up the side of the mountain--before I took to the ro-ad."
+
+"Oh, yes! Have they still got it?"
+
+"Yes. Or it's got _them_. Be glad to sell it, I guess, since the old man
+lost his money. But Lowa Merritt's kind o' gone down as a summa roso't.
+Tryin' ha'd to bring it up, though. Know the Desmonds?"
+
+"No, not personally."
+
+"Nice fo-aks," said the conductor, providing himself for conversational
+purposes with a splinter from the floor. He put it between his teeth and
+continued: "I took ca' thei' hosses, one while, as long's they _had_
+any, before I went on the ro-ad. Old gentleman kep' up a show till he
+died; then the fam'ly found out that they hadn't much of anything but
+the place left. Girls had to do something, and one of 'em got a place in
+a school out West--smaht, _all_ of 'em; the second one kind o' runs the
+fahm; and the youngest, here, 's been fittin' for a music-teacha. Why,
+I've got a piano for her in this cah that we picked up at Middlemount,
+_now_. Been two wintas at the Conservatory in Boston. Got talent enough,
+they tell _me_. Undastand 't she means to go to Pohtland in the fall and
+try to get pupils, _the'a_."
+
+"Not if _I_ can help it!" thought Gaites, with a swelling heart; and
+then he blushed for his folly.
+
+
+VI.
+
+Gaites found some notable changes in the hotel at Lower Merritt since he
+had last sojourned there. It no longer called itself a Hotel, but an
+Inn, and it had a brand-new old-fashioned swinging sign before its door;
+its front had been cut up into several gables, and shingled to the
+ground with shingles artificially antiquated, so that it looked much
+grayer than it naturally ought. Within it was equipped for electric
+lighting; and there was a low-browed æsthetic parlor, where, when Gaites
+arrived and passed to a belated dinner in the dining-room, an orchestra,
+consisting of a lady pianist and a lady violinist, was giving the
+closing piece of the afternoon concert. The dining-room was painted a
+self-righteous olive-green; it was thoroughly netted against the flies,
+which used to roost in myriads on the cut-paper around the tops of the
+pillars, and a college-student head waiter ushered Gaites through the
+gloom to his place with a warning and hushing hand which made him feel
+as if he were being shown to a pew during prayers.
+
+He escaped as soon as possible from the refection which, from the soup
+to the ice-cream, had hardly grown lukewarm, and went out to walk by a
+way that he knew well, and which had for him now a romantically pathetic
+interest. It was, of course, the way past the Desmond cottage, which,
+when he came in sight of it round the shoulder of upland where it stood,
+was curiously strange, curiously familiar. It needed painting badly, and
+the grounds had a sadly neglected air. The naked legs of little girls no
+longer twinkled over the lawn, which was grown neglectedly up to
+low-bush blackberries.
+
+Gaites hurried past with a lump in his throat, and returned by another
+road to the Inn, where his long ramble ended just as the dining-room
+doors were opened behind their nettings for supper. At this cheerfuler
+moment he found the head waiter much more conversible than at the hour
+of his retarded dinner, and Gaites made talk with him, as the young
+follow lingered beside his chair, with one eye on the door for the
+behoof of other guests.
+
+Gaites said he had found great changes in Lower Merritt since he had
+been there some years before, and he artfully led the talk up to the
+Desmonds. The head waiter was rather vague about their past; but he was
+distinct enough about their present, and said the young ladies happened
+all to be at home. "I don't know," he added, "whether you noticed our
+lady orchestra when you came in to dinner to-day?"
+
+"Yes, I did," said Gaites. "I was very much interested. I thought they
+played charmingly, and I was sorry that I got in only for the close of
+the last piece."
+
+"Well," the head waiter consoled him, "you'll have a chance to hear them
+again to-night; they're going to play for the hop. I don't know," he
+added again, "whether you noticed the lady at the piano."
+
+"I noticed that she had a pretty head, which she carried gracefully, but
+it was against the window, and I couldn't make out the face."
+
+"That," said the head waiter, with pride either in the fact or for the
+effect it must produce, "was Miss Phyllis Desmond."
+
+Gaites started as satisfactorily as could be wished. "Indeed?"
+
+"Yes; she's engaged to play here the whole summer." The head waiter
+fumbled with the knife and fork at the place opposite, and blushed. "But
+you'll hear her to-night yourself," he ended incoherently, and hurried
+away, to show another guest to his, or rather her, place.
+
+Gaites wondered why he felt suddenly angry; why he resented the head
+waiter's blush as an impertinence and a liberty. After all, the fellow
+was a student and probably a gentleman; and if he chose to help himself
+through college by taking that menial rôle during the summer, rather
+than come upon the charity of his friends or the hard-earned savings of
+a poor old father, what had any one to say against it? Gaites had
+nothing to say against it; and yet that blush, that embarrassment of a
+man who had pulled out his chair for him, in relation to such a girl as
+Miss Phyllis Desmond, incensed him so much that he could not enjoy his
+supper. He did not bow to the head waiter when he held the netting-door
+open for him to go out, and he felt the necessity of taking the evening
+air in another stroll to cool himself off.
+
+Of course, if the poor girl was reduced to playing in the hotel
+orchestra for the money it would give her, she had come down to the
+level of the head waiter, and they must meet as equals. But the thought
+was no less intolerable for that, and Gaites set out with the notion of
+walking away from it. At the station, however, which was in friendly
+proximity to the Inn, his steps were stayed by the sound of girlish
+voices, rising like sweetly varied pipes from beyond the freight-depot.
+Their youth invited his own to look them up, and he followed round to
+the back of the depot, where he came upon a sight which had, perhaps
+from the waning light, a heightened charm. Against the curtain of low
+pines which had been gradually creeping back upon the depot ever since
+the woods were cut away to make room for it, four girls were posed in
+attitudes instinctively dramatic and vividly eager, while as many men
+were employed in getting what Gaites at once saw to be Miss Phyllis
+Desmond's piano into the wagon backed up to the platform of the depot.
+Their work was nearly accomplished, but at every moment of what still
+remained to be done the girls emitted little shrieks, laughs, and moans
+of intense interest, and fluttered in their light summer dresses against
+the background of the dark evergreens like anxious birds.
+
+At last the piano was got into the middle of the wagon, the inclined
+planks withdrawn and loaded into it, and the tail-board snapped to.
+Three of the men stepped aside, and one of them jumped into the front of
+the wagon and gathered up the reins from the horses' backs. He called
+with mocking challenge to the group of girls, "Nobody goin' to git up
+here and keep this piano from tippin' out?"
+
+A wild clamor rose from the girls, settling at last into staccato cries.
+
+"You've got to _do_ it, Phyl!"
+
+"Yes, Phyllis, you _must_ get in!"
+
+"It's _your_ piano, Phyl. You've got to keep it from tipping out!"
+
+"No, no! I won't! I can't! I'm not going to!" one voice answered to all,
+but apparently without a single reference to the event; for in the end
+the speaker gave her hand to the man in the wagon, and with many small
+laughs and squeaks was pulled up over the hub and tire of a front wheel,
+and then stood staying herself against the piano-case, with a final
+lamentation of "Oh, it's a shame! I'll never speak to any of you again!
+How perfectly mean! _Oh!_" The last exclamation signalized the start of
+the horses at a brisk mountain trot, which the driver presently sobered
+to a walk. The three remaining girls followed, mocking and cheering, and
+after them lounged the three remaining men, at a respectful distance,
+marking the social interval between them, which was to be bridged only
+in some such moment of supreme excitement as the present.
+
+It was no question with Gaites whether he should bring up the end of the
+procession; he could not think of any consideration that would have
+stayed him. He scarcely troubled himself to keep at a fit remove from
+the rest; and as he followed in the deepening twilight he felt a sweet,
+unselfish gladness of heart that the poor girl whom he had seen so wan
+and sad in Boston should be the gay soul of this pretty triumph.
+
+The wagon drove into the grounds of the Desmond cottage, and backed up
+to the edge of the veranda. Lights appeared, and voices came from
+within. One of the men, despatched to the barn for a hatchet, came
+flickering back with a lantern also; lamps brought out of the house were
+extinguished by the evening breeze (in spite of luminous hands held near
+the chimney to shelter them), amidst the joyful applause of all the
+girls and the laughter of the men. A sound of hammering rose, and then a
+sound of boards rending from the clutch of nails, and then a sound of
+pieces thrown loosely into a pile. There was a continual flutter of
+women's dresses and emotions, and this did not end even when the piano,
+disclosed from its casing and all its wraps, was pushed indoors, and
+placed against the parlor wall, where a flash of lamp-light revealed it
+to Gaites in final position.
+
+He lingered still, in the shelter of some barberry-bushes at the cottage
+gate, and not till the last cry of gratitude had been answered by the
+unanimous disclaimer of the men rattling away in the wagon did he feel
+that his pursuit of the piano had ended.
+
+
+VII.
+
+"Can you tell me, madam," asked Gaites of an obviously approachable
+tabby next the chimney-corner, "which of the musicians is Miss Desmond?"
+
+He had hurried back to the Inn, and got himself early into a dress suit
+that proved wholly inessential, and was down among the first at the hop.
+This function, it seemed, was going on in the parlor, which summed in
+itself the character of ball-room as well as drawing-room. The hop had
+now begun, and two young girl couples were doing what they could to
+rebuke the sparse youth of Lower Merritt Inn for their lack of eagerness
+in the evening's pleasure by dancing alone. Gaites did not even notice
+them, he was so intent upon the ladies of the orchestra, concerning whom
+he was beginning to have a troubled mind, not to say a dark misgiving.
+
+"Oh," the approachable tabby answered, "it's the one at the piano. The
+violinist is Miss Axewright, of South Newton. They were at the
+Conservatory together in Boston, and they are such friends! Miss Desmond
+would never have played here--intends to take pupils in Portland in the
+winter--if Miss Axewright hadn't come," and the pleasant old tabby
+purred on, with a velvety pat here, and a delicate scratch there. But
+Gaites heard with one ear only; the other was more devotedly given to
+the orchestra, which also claimed both his eyes. While he learned, as
+with the mind of some one else, that the Desmonds had been very much
+opposed to Phyllis's playing at the Inn, but had consented partly with
+their poverty, because they needed everything they could rake and scrape
+together, and partly with their will, because Miss Axewright was such a
+nice girl, he was painfully adjusting his consciousness to the fact that
+the girl at the piano was not the girl whom he had seen at Boston and
+whom he had so rashly and romantically decided to be Miss Phyllis
+Desmond. The pianist was indeed Miss Desmond, but to no purpose, if the
+violinist was some one else; it availed as little that the violinist was
+the illusion that had lured him to Lower Merritt in pursuit of Miss
+Desmond's piano, if she were really Miss Axewright of South Newton.
+
+What remained for him to do was to arrange for his departure by the
+first train in the morning; and he was subjectively accounting to the
+landlord for his abrupt change of mind after he had engaged his room for
+a week, while he was intent with all his upper faculties upon the
+graceful poses and movements of Miss Axewright. There was something so
+appealing in the pressure of her soft chin as it held the violin in
+place against her round, girlish throat that Gaites felt a lump in his
+own larger than his Adam's-apple would account for to the spectator; the
+delicately arched wrist of the hand that held the bow, and the
+rhythmical curve and flow of her arm in playing, were means of the spell
+which wove itself about him, and left him, as it were, bound hand and
+foot. It was in this helpless condition that he rose at the urgence of a
+friendly young fellow who had chosen himself master of ceremonies, and
+took part in the dancing; and at the end of the first half of the
+programme, while the other dancers streamed out on the verandas and
+thronged the stairways, he was aware of dangling his chains as he
+lounged toward the ladies of the orchestra. The volunteer master of
+ceremonies had half shut himself across the piano in his eager talk with
+Miss Desmond, and he readily relinquished Miss Axewright to Gaites, who
+willingly devoted himself to her, after Miss Desmond had risen in
+acknowledgment of his bow. He had then perceived that she was not nearly
+so tall as she had seemed when seated; and a woman who sat tall and
+stood low was as much his aversion as if his own abnormally long legs
+did not render him guilty of the opposite offence.
+
+Miss Desmond must have had other qualities and characteristics, but in
+his absorption with Miss Axewright's he did not notice them. He saw
+again the pretty, pathetic face, the gentle brown eyes, the ordinary
+brown hair, the sentient hands, the slight, graceful figure, the whole
+undistinguished, unpretentious presence, which had taken his fancy at
+Boston, and which he now perceived had kept it, under whatever erring
+impressions, ever since.
+
+"I think we have met before, Miss Axewright," he said boldly, and he had
+the pleasure of seeing her pensive little visage light up with a
+responsive humor.
+
+"I think we have," she replied; and Miss Desmond, whose habitual state
+seemed to be intense inattention to whatever directly addressed itself
+to her, cut in with the cry:
+
+"You have met _before_!"
+
+"Yes. Two weeks ago, in Boston," said Gaites. "Miss Axewright and I
+stopped at the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot to see that your piano
+started off all right."
+
+He explained himself further, and, "Well, I don't see what you did to
+it," Miss Desmond pouted. "It just got here this afternoon."
+
+"Probably they 'throwed a spell' on it, as the country people say,"
+suggested the master of ceremonies. "But all's well that end's well. The
+great thing is to have your piano, Miss Phyllis. I'm coming up to-morrow
+morning to see if it's got here in good condition."
+
+"That's _some_ compensation," said the girl ironically; and she added,
+with the kind of repellent lure with which women know how to leave men
+the responsibility of any reciprocal approach, "I don't know whether it
+won't need tuning first."
+
+"Well, I'm a piano-tunist myself," the young fellow retorted, and their
+banter took a course that left Miss Axewright and Gaites to themselves.
+The dancers began to stray in again from the stairways and verandas.
+
+"Dear me!" said Miss Desmond, "it's time already;" and as she dropped
+upon the piano-stool she called to Miss Axewright with an authority of
+tone which Gaites thought augured well for her success as a teacher,
+"Millicent!"
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The next morning when Gaites came down to breakfast he had a question
+which solved itself contrary to his preference as he entered the
+dining-room. He was so early that the head waiter had to jump from his
+own unfinished meal, and run to pull out his chair; and Gaites saw that
+he left at his table the landlord's family, the clerk, the housekeeper,
+and Miss Axewright. It appeared that she was not only staying in the
+hotel, but was there on terms which indeed held her above the servants,
+but separated her from the guests.
+
+He hardly knew how to dissemble the feeling of humiliation mixed with
+indignation which flashed up in him, and which, he was afterwards
+afraid, must have made him seem rather curt in his response to the head
+waiter's civilities. Miss Axewright left the dining-room first, and he
+hurried out to look her up as soon as he had despatched the coffee and
+steak which formed his breakfast, with a wholly unreasoned impulse to
+offer her some sort of reparation for the slight the conditions put upon
+her. He found her sitting on the veranda beside the friendly tabby of
+his last night's acquaintance, and far, apparently, from feeling the
+need of reparation through him. She was very nice, though, and after
+chatting a little while she rose, and excused herself to the tabby, with
+a politeness that included Gaites, upon the ground of a promise to Miss
+Desmond that she would come up, the first thing after breakfast, and see
+how the piano was getting along.
+
+When she reappeared, in her hat, at the front of the Inn, Gaites
+happened to be there, and he asked her if he might walk with her and
+make his inquiries too about the piano, in which, he urged, they were
+mutually interested. He had a notion to tell her all about his pursuit
+of Miss Desmond's piano, as something that would peculiarly interest
+Miss Desmond's friend; but though she admitted the force of his
+reasoning as to their common concern in the fate of the piano, and had
+allowed him to go with her to rejoice over its installation, some subtle
+instinct kept him from the confidence he had intended, and they walked
+on in talk (very agreeable talk, Gaites found it) which left the subject
+of the piano altogether intact.
+
+This was fortunate for Miss Desmond, who wished to talk of nothing else.
+The piano had arrived in perfect condition. "But I don't know where the
+poor thing _hasn't_ been, on the way," said the girl. "It left Boston
+fully two weeks ago, and it seems to have been wandering round to the
+ends of the earth ever since. The first of last week, I heard from it at
+Kent Harbor, of all places! I got a long despatch from there, from some
+unknown female, telling me it had broken down on the way to Burymouth,
+and been sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Have you
+ever been at Kent Harbor, Mr. Gaites?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Gaites. This was the moment to come out with the history
+of his relation to the piano; but he waited.
+
+"And can you tell me whether they happen to have a female freight agent
+there?"
+
+"Not to my knowledge," said Gaites, with a mystical smile.
+
+"Then _do_ you know anybody there by the name of Elaine W. Maze?"
+
+"Mrs. Maze? Yes, I know Mrs. Maze. She has a cottage, there."
+
+"And can you tell me _why_ Mrs. Maze should be telegraphing me about my
+piano?"
+
+There was a note of resentment in Miss Desmond's voice, and it silenced
+the laughing explanation which Gaites had almost upon his tongue. He
+fell very grave in answering, "I can't, indeed, Miss Desmond."
+
+"Perhaps she found out that it had been a long time on the way, and did
+it out of pure good-nature, to relieve your anxiety."
+
+This was what Miss Axewright conjectured, but it seemed to confirm Miss
+Desmond's worst suspicions.
+
+"That is what I should like to be _sure_ of," she said.
+
+Gaites thought of all his own anxieties and interferences in behalf of
+the piano of this ungrateful girl, and in her presence he resolved that
+his lips should be forever sealed concerning them. She never would take
+them in the right way. But he experimented with one suggestion. "Perhaps
+she was taken with the beautiful name on the piano-case, and couldn't
+help telegraphing just for the pleasure of writing it."
+
+"Beautiful?" cried Miss Desmond. "It was my grandmother's name; and I
+wonder they didn't call me for my great-grandmother, Daphne, and be done
+with it."
+
+The young man who had chosen himself master of ceremonies at the hop the
+night before now proposed from the social background where he had
+hitherto kept himself, "_I_ will call you Daphne."
+
+"_You_ will call me Miss Desmond, if you please, Mr. Ellett." The owner
+of the name had been facing her visitors from the piano-stool with her
+back to the instrument. She now wheeled upon the stool, and struck some
+chords. "I wish you'd thought to bring your fiddle, Millicent. I should
+like to try this piece." The piece lay on the music-rest before her.
+
+"I will go and get it for her," said the ex-master of ceremonies.
+
+"Do," said Miss Desmond.
+
+"No, no," Gaites protested. "I brought Miss Axewright, and I have the
+first claim to bring her fiddle."
+
+"I'm afraid you couldn't either of you find it," Miss Axewright began.
+
+"We'll both try," said the ex-master of ceremonies. "Where do you think
+it is?"
+
+"Well, it's in the case on the piano."
+
+"That doesn't sound very intricate," said Gaites, and they all laughed.
+
+As soon as the two men were out of the house, the ex-master of
+ceremonies confided: "That name is a very tender spot with Miss Desmond.
+She's always hated it since I knew her, and I can't remember when I
+_didn't_ know her."
+
+"Yes, I could see that--too late," said Gaites. "But what I can't
+understand is, Miss Axewright seemed to hate it, too."
+
+Mr. Ellett appeared greatly edified. "Did _you_ notice that?"
+
+"I think I did."
+
+"Well, now I'll tell you just what I think. There aren't any two girls
+in the world that like each other better than those two. But that shows
+just how it is. Girls are terribly jealous, the best of them. There
+isn't a girl living that really likes to have another girl praised by a
+man, or anything about her, I don't care who the man is. It's a fact,
+whether you believe it or not, or whether you respect it. I don't
+respect it myself. It's narrow-minded. I don't deny it: they _are_
+narrow-minded. All the same, we can't _help_ ourselves. At least, _I_
+can't."
+
+Mr. Ellett broke into a laugh of exhaustive intelligence and clapped
+Gaites on the back.
+
+
+IX.
+
+Gaites, if he did not wholly accept Ellett's philosophy of the female
+nature, acted in the light it cast upon the present situation. From that
+time till the end of his stay at Lower Merritt, which proved to be
+coeval with the close of the Inn for the season, and with the retirement
+of the orchestra from duty, he said nothing more of Miss Phyllis
+Desmond's beautiful name. He went further, and altogether silenced
+himself concerning his pursuit of her piano; he even sought occasions of
+being silent concerning her piano in every way, or so it seemed to him,
+in his anxious avoidance of the topic. In all this matter he was
+governed a good deal by the advice of Mr. Ellett, to whom he had
+confessed his pursuit of Miss Desmond's piano in all its particulars,
+and who showed a highly humorous appreciation of the facts. He was a
+sort of second (he preferred to say second-hand) cousin of Miss Desmond,
+and, so far as he could make out, had been born engaged to her; and he
+showed an intuition in the gingerly handling of her rather uncertain
+temper which augured well for his future happiness. His future happiness
+seemed to be otherwise taken care of, for though he was a young man of
+no particular prospects, and no profession whatever, he had a generous
+willingness to liberate his affianced to an artistic career; or, at
+least, there was no talk of her giving up her scheme of teaching the
+piano-forte because she was engaged to be married, he was exactly fitted
+to become the husband of a wage-earning wife, and was so far from being
+offensive in this quality that everybody (including Miss Desmond, rather
+fitfully) liked him; and he was universally known as Charley Ellett.
+
+After he had quite converted Gaites to his theory of silence concerning
+his outlived romance, he liked to indulge himself, when he got Gaites
+alone with the young ladies, in speculations as to the wanderings of
+Miss Desmond's piano. He could always get a rise out of Miss Desmond by
+referring to the impertinent person who had telegraphed her about it
+from Kent Harbor, and he could put Gaites into a quiver of anxiety by
+asking him whether he had heard Mrs. Maze speak of the piano when he was
+at Kent Harbor, or whether he had happened to see anything of it at any
+of the junctions on his way to Lower Merritt. To these questions Gaites
+felt himself obliged to respond with lies point-blank, though there were
+times when he was tempted to come out with the truth, Miss Axewright
+seemed so amiably indifferent, or so sympathetically interested, when
+Ellett was airing his conjectures or pushing his investigations.
+
+Still Gaites clung to the refuge of his lies, and upon the whole it
+served him well, or at least enabled him to temporize in safety, while
+he was making the progress in Miss Axewright's affections which, if he
+had not been her lover, he never would have imagined difficult. They
+went every day, between the afternoon and evening concerts, to walk in
+the Cloister, a colonnade of pines not far from the Inn, which differed
+from some other cloisters in being so much devoted to love-making. She
+was in love with him, as he was with her; but in her proud maiden soul
+she did not dream of bringing him to the confession she longed for. This
+came the afternoon of the last day they walked in the Cloister, when it
+seemed as if they might go on walking there forever, and never emerge
+from their fond, delicious, tremulous, trusting doubt of each other.
+
+She cried upon his shoulder, with her arms round his neck, and owned
+that she had loved him from the first moment she had seen him in front
+of the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot in Boston; and Gaites tried to make
+his passion antedate this moment. To do so, he had to fall back upon the
+notion of pre-existence, but she gladly admitted his hypothesis.
+
+The next morning brought another mood, a mood of sweet defiance, in
+which she was still more enrapturing. By this time the engagement was
+known to their two friends, and Miss Desmond came to the cars with
+Charley Ellett to see her off. As Gaites was going to Boston on the same
+train, they made it the occasion of seeing him off, too. Millicent
+openly declared that they two were going together, that in fact she was
+taking him home to show him to her family in South Newton and see
+whether they liked him.
+
+Ellett put this aspect of the affair aside. "Well, then," he said, "if
+you're going to be in Boston together, I think you ought to see the S.
+B. & H. C. traffic-manager, and find out all about what kept Phyl's
+piano so long on the road. _I_ think they owe her an explanation, and
+Gaites is a lawyer, and he's just the man to get it, with damages."
+
+Gaites saw in Ellett's impudent, amusing face that he divined
+Millicent's continued ignorance of his romance, and was bent on
+mischief. But the girl paid no heed to his talk, and Gaites could not
+help laughing. He liked the fellow; he even liked Miss Desmond, who was
+so much softened by the occasion that she had all the thorny allure of a
+ripened barberry in his fancy. They both hung about the seat, where he
+stood ready to take his place beside Millicent, till the conductor
+shouted, "All aboard!" Then they ran out, and waved to the lovers
+through the window till the car started.
+
+When they could be seen no longer, Millicent let Gaites arrange their
+hand-baggage together on the seat in front of them. It was a warm day,
+and she said she did believe she would take her hat off; and she gave it
+to him, odorous of her pretty hair, to put in the rack overhead. After
+he had done this, and sat down definitively, she shrank unconsciously
+closer to him, knitting her fingers in those of his hand on the seat
+between them.
+
+"Now," she said, "tell me all about yourself."
+
+"About myself?"
+
+"Yes. About Phyllis Desmond's piano, and why you were so interested in
+it."
+
+
+
+
+A DIFFICULT CASE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was in the fervor of their first married years that the Ewberts came
+to live in the little town of Hilbrook, shortly after Hilbrook
+University had been established there under the name of its founder,
+Josiah Hilbrook. The town itself had then just changed its name, in
+compliance with the conditions of his public benefactions, and in
+recognition of the honor he had done it in making it a seat of learning.
+Up to a certain day it had been called West Mallow, ever since it was
+set off from the original town of Mallow; but after a hundred and
+seventy years of this custom it began on that day to call itself
+Hilbrook, and thenceforward, with the curious American acquiescence in
+the accomplished fact, no one within or without its limits called it
+West Mallow again.
+
+The memory of Josiah Hilbrook himself began to be lost in the name he
+had given the place; and except for the perfunctory mention of its
+founder in the ceremonies of Commencement Day, the university hardly
+remembered him as a man, but rather regarded him as a locality. He had,
+in fact, never been an important man in West Mallow, up to the time he
+had left it to seek his fortune in New York; and when he died, somewhat
+abruptly, and left his money, as it were, out of a clear sky, to his
+native place in the form of a university, a town hall, a soldiers'
+monument, a drinking-fountain, and a public library, his
+fellow-townsmen, in making the due civic acknowledgment and acceptance
+of his gifts, recalled with effort the obscure family to which he
+belonged.
+
+He had not tried to characterize the university by his peculiar
+religious faith, but he had given a church building, a parsonage, and a
+fund for the support of preaching among them at Hilbrook to the small
+body of believers to which his people adhered. This sect had a name by
+which it was officially known to itself; but, like the Shakers, the
+Quakers, the Moravians, it early received a nickname, which it passively
+adopted, and even among its own members the body was rarely spoken of or
+thought of except as the Rixonites.
+
+Mrs. Ewbert fretted under the nickname, with an impatience perhaps the
+greater because she had merely married into the Rixonite church, and had
+accepted its doctrine because she loved her husband rather than because
+she had been convinced of its truth. From the first she complained that
+the Rixonites were cold; and if there was anything Emily Ewbert had
+always detested, it was coldness. No one, she once testified, need talk
+to her of their passive waiting for a sign, as a religious life; if
+there were not some strong, central belief, some rigorously formulated
+creed, some--
+
+"Good old herb and root theology," her husband interrupted.
+
+"Yes!" she heedlessly acquiesced. "Unless there is something like
+_that_, all the waiting in the world won't"--she cast about for some
+powerful image--"won't keep the cold chills from running down _my_ back
+when I think of my duty as a Christian."
+
+"Then don't think of your duty as a Christian, my dear," he pleaded,
+with the caressing languor which sometimes made her say, in reprobation
+of her own pleasure in it, that _he_ was a Rixonite, if there ever _was_
+one. "Think of your duty as a woman, or even as a mortal."
+
+"I believe you're thinking of making a sermon on that," she retorted;
+and he gave a sad, consenting laugh, as if it were quite true, though in
+fact he never really preached a sermon on mere femininity or mere
+mortality. His sermons were all very good, however; and that was another
+thing that put her out of patience with his Rixonite parishioners--that
+they should sit there Sunday after Sunday, year in and year out, and
+listen to his beautiful sermons, which ought to melt their hearts and
+bring tears into their eyes, and not seem influenced by them any more
+than if they were so many dry chips.
+
+"But think how long they've had the gospel," he suggested, in a pensive
+self-derision which she would not share.
+
+"Well, one thing, Clarence," she summed up, "I'm not going to let you
+throw yourself away on them; and unless you see some of the university
+people in the congregation, I want you to use your old sermons from this
+out. They'll never know the difference; and I'm going to make you take
+one of the old sermons along every Sunday, so as to be prepared."
+
+
+II.
+
+One good trait of Mrs. Ewbert was that she never meant half she
+said--she could not; but in this case there was more meaning than usual
+in her saying. It really vexed her that the university families, who had
+all received them so nicely, and who appreciated her husband's spiritual
+and intellectual quality as fully as even she could wish, came some of
+them so seldom, and some of them never, to hear him at the Rixonite
+church. They ought, she said, to have been just suited by his preaching,
+which inculcated with the peculiar grace of his gentle, poetic nature a
+refinement of the mystical theology of the founder. The Rev. Adoniram
+Rixon, who had seventy years before formulated his conception of the
+religious life as a patient waiting upon the divine will, with a
+constant reference of this world's mysteries and problems to the world
+to come, had doubtless meant a more strenuous abeyance than Clarence
+Ewbert was now preaching to a third generation of his followers. He had
+doubtless meant them to be eager and alert in this patience, but the
+version of his gospel which his latest apostle gave taught a species of
+acquiescence which was foreign to the thoughts of the founder. He put as
+great stress as could be asked upon the importance of a realizing faith
+in the life to come, and an implicit trust in it for the solution of the
+problems and perplexities of this life; but so far from wishing his
+hearers to be constantly taking stock, as it were, of their spiritual
+condition, and interrogating Providence as to its will concerning them,
+he besought them to rest in confidence of the divine mindfulness, secure
+that while they fulfilled all their plain, simple duties toward one
+another, God would inspire them to act according to his purposes in the
+more psychological crises and emergencies, if these should ever be part
+of their experience.
+
+In maintaining, on a certain Sunday evening, that his ideas were much
+more adapted to the spiritual nourishment of the president, the dean,
+and the several professors of Hilbrook University than to that of the
+hereditary Rixonites who nodded in a slumbrous acceptance of them, Mrs.
+Ewbert failed as usual to rouse her husband to a due sense of his
+grievance with the university people.
+
+"Well," he said, "you know I can't _make_ them come, my dear."
+
+"Of course not. And I would be the last to have you lift a finger. But I
+know that you feel about it just as I do."
+
+"Perhaps; but I hope not so much as you _think_ you feel. Of course, I'm
+very grateful for your indignation. But I know you don't undervalue the
+good I may do to my poor sheep--they're _not_ an intellectual flock--in
+trying to lead them in the ways of spiritual modesty and
+unconsciousness. How do we know but they profit more by my preaching
+than the faculty would? Perhaps our university friends are spiritually
+unconscious enough already, if not modest."
+
+"I see what you mean," said Mrs. Ewbert, provisionally suspending her
+sense of the whimsical quality in his suggestion. "But you need never
+tell me that they wouldn't appreciate you more."
+
+"More than old Ransom Hilbrook?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I hope _he_ isn't coming here to-night, again!" she implored, with
+a nervous leap from the point in question. "If he's coming here every
+Sunday night"--
+
+As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook's having
+come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a
+habit of it.
+
+"But he _stayed_ so late!" she insisted from the safety of her real
+belief that he was not coming.
+
+"He came very early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which
+her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion.
+
+"I shall tell him you're not well," she went on: "I shall tell him you
+are lying down. You ought to be, now. You're perfectly worn out with
+that long walk you took." She rose, and beat up the sofa pillows with a
+menacing eye upon him.
+
+"Oh, I'm very comfortable here," he said from the depths of his
+easy-chair. "Hilbrook won't come to-night. It's past the time."
+
+She glanced at the clock with him, and then desisted. "If he does, I'm
+determined to excuse you somehow. You ought never to have gone near him,
+Clarence. You've brought it upon yourself."
+
+Ewbert could not deny this, though he did not feel himself so much to
+blame for it as she would have liked to make out in her pity of him. He
+owned that if he had never gone to see Hilbrook the old man would
+probably never have come near them, and that if he had not tried so much
+to interest him when he did come Hilbrook would not have stayed so long;
+and even in this contrite mind he would not allow that he ought not to
+have visited him and ought not to have welcomed him.
+
+
+III.
+
+The minister had found his parishioner in the old Hilbrook homestead,
+which Josiah Hilbrook, while he lived, suffered Ransom Hilbrook to
+occupy, and when he died bequeathed to him, with a sufficient income for
+all his simple wants. They were cousins, and they had both gone out into
+the world about the same time: one had made a success of it, and
+remained; and the other had made a failure of it, and come back. They
+were both Rixonites, as the families of both had been in the generation
+before them. It could be supposed that Josiah Hilbrook, since he had
+given the money for a Rixonite church and the perpetual pay of a
+Rixonite minister in his native place, had died in the faith; and it
+might have been supposed that Ransom Hilbrook, from his constant
+attendance upon its services, was living in the same faith. What was
+certain was that the survivor lived alone in the family homestead on the
+slope of the stony hill overlooking the village. The house was gray with
+age, and it crouched low on the ground where it had been built a century
+before, and anchored fast by the great central chimney characteristic of
+the early New England farmhouse. Below it staggered the trees of an
+apple orchard belted in with a stone wall, and beside it sagged the
+sheds whose stretch united the gray old house to the gray old barn, and
+made it possible for Hilbrook to do his chores in rain or snow without
+leaving cover. There was a dooryard defined by a picket fence, and near
+the kitchen door was a well with a high pent roof, where there had once
+been a long sweep.
+
+These simple features showed to the village on the opposite slope with a
+distinctness that made the place seem much lonelier than if it had been
+much more remote. It gained no cheerfulness from its proximity, and when
+the windows of the house lighted up with the pale gleam of the sunset,
+they imparted to the village a sense of dreary solitude which its own
+lamps could do nothing to relieve.
+
+Ransom Hilbrook came and went among the villagers in the same sort of
+inaccessible contiguity. He did not shun passing the time of day with
+people he met; he was in and out at the grocer's, the meat man's, the
+baker's, upon the ordinary domestic occasions; but he never darkened any
+other doors, except on his visits to the bank where he cashed the checks
+for his quarterly allowance. There had been a proposition to use him
+representatively in the ceremonies celebrating the acceptance of the
+various gifts of Josiah Hilbrook; but he had not lent himself to this,
+and upon experiment the authorities found that he was right in his guess
+that they could get along without him.
+
+He had not said it surlily, but sadly, and with a gentle deprecation of
+their insistence. While the several monuments that testified to his
+cousin's wealth and munificence rose in the village beyond the brook, he
+continued in the old homestead without change, except that when his
+housekeeper died he began to do for himself the few things that the
+ailing and aged woman had done for him. How he did them was not known,
+for he invited no intimacy from his neighbors. But from the extent of
+his dealings with the grocer it was imagined that he lived mainly upon
+canned goods. The fish man paid him a weekly visit, and once a week he
+got from the meat man a piece of salt pork, which it was obvious to the
+meanest intelligence was for his Sunday baked beans. From his purchase
+of flour and baking powder it was reasonably inferred that he now and
+then made himself hot biscuit. Beyond these meagre facts everything was
+conjecture, in which the local curiosity played somewhat actively, but,
+for the most part, with a growing acquiescence in the general ignorance
+none felt authorized to dispel. There had been a time when some
+fulfilled a fancied duty to the solitary in trying to see him. But the
+visitors who found him out of doors were not asked within, and were
+obliged to dismiss themselves, after an interview across the pickets of
+the dooryard fence or from the trestles or inverted feed pails on which
+they were invited to seats in the barn or shed. Those who happened to
+find their host more ceremoniously at home were allowed to come in, but
+were received in rooms so comfortless from the drawn blinds or fireless
+hearths that they had not the spirits for the task of cheering him up
+which they had set themselves, and departed in greater depression than
+that they left him to.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Ewbert felt all the more impelled to his own first visit by the fame of
+these failures, but he was not hastened in it. He thought best to wait
+for some sign or leading from Hilbrook; but when none came, except the
+apparent attention with which Hilbrook listened to his preaching, and
+the sympathy which he believed he detected at times in the old eyes
+blinking upon him through his sermons, he felt urged to the visit which
+he had vainly delayed.
+
+Hilbrook's reception was wary and non-committal, but it was by no means
+so grudging as Ewbert had been led to expect. After some ceremonious
+moments in the cold parlor Hilbrook asked him into the warm kitchen,
+where apparently he passed most of his own time. There was something
+cooking in a pot on the stove, and a small room opened out of the
+kitchen, with a bed in it, which looked as if it were going to be made,
+as Ewbert handsomely maintained. There was an old dog stretched on the
+hearth behind the stove, who whimpered with rheumatic apprehension when
+his master went to put the lamp on the mantel above him.
+
+In describing the incident to his wife Ewbert stopped at this point, and
+then passed on to say that after they got to talking Hilbrook seemed
+more and more gratified, and even glad, to see him.
+
+"Everybody's glad to see _you_, Clarence," she broke out, with tender
+pride. "But why do you say, 'After we got to talking'? Didn't you go to
+talking at once?"
+
+"Well, no," he answered, with a vague smile; "we did a good deal of
+listening at first, both of us. I didn't know just where to begin, after
+I got through my excuses for coming, and Mr. Hilbrook didn't offer any
+opening. Don't you think he's a very handsome old man?"
+
+"He has a pretty head, and his close-cut white hair gives it a neat
+effect, like a nice child's. He has a refined face; such a straight nose
+and a delicate chin. Yes, he is certainly good-looking. But what"--
+
+"Oh, nothing. Only, all at once I realized that he had a sensitive
+nature. I don't know why I shouldn't have realized it before. I had
+somehow taken it for granted that he was a self-conscious hermit, who
+lived in a squalid seclusion because he liked being wondered at. But he
+did not seem to be anything of the kind. I don't know whether he's a
+good cook, for he didn't ask me to eat anything; but I don't think he's
+a bad housekeeper."
+
+"With his bed unmade at eight o'clock in the evening!"
+
+"He may have got up late," said Ewbert. "The house seemed very orderly,
+otherwise; and what is really the use of making up a bed till you need
+it!"
+
+Mrs. Ewbert passed the point, and asked, "What did you talk about when
+you got started?"
+
+"I found he was a reader, or had been. There was a case of good books in
+the parlor, and I began by talking with him about them."
+
+"Well, what did he say about them?"
+
+"That he wasn't interested in them. He had been once, but he was not
+now."
+
+"I can understand that," said Mrs. Ewbert philosophically. "Books _are_
+crowded out after your life fills up with other interests."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yes, what?" Mrs. Ewbert followed him up.
+
+"So far as I could make out, Mr. Hilbrook's life hadn't filled up with
+other interests. He did not care for the events of the day, as far as I
+tried him on them, and he did not care for the past. I tempted him with
+autobiography; but he seemed quite indifferent to his own history,
+though he was not reticent about it. I proposed the history of his
+cousin in the boyish days which he said they had spent together; but he
+seemed no more interested in his cousin than in himself. Then I tried
+his dog and his pathetic sufferings, and I said something about the pity
+of the poor old fellow's last days being so miserable. That seemed to
+strike a gleam of interest from him, and he asked me if I thought
+animals might live again. And I found--I don't know just how to put it
+so as to give you the right sense of his psychological attitude."
+
+"No matter! Put it any way, and I will take care of the right sense. Go
+on!" said Mrs. Ewbert.
+
+"I found that his question led up to the question whether men lived
+again, and to a confession that he didn't or couldn't believe they did."
+
+"Well, upon my word!" Mrs. Ewbert exclaimed. "I don't see what business
+he has coming to church, then. Doesn't he understand that the idea of
+immortality is the very essence of Rixonitism! I think it was personally
+insulting to _you_, Clarence. What did you say?"
+
+"I didn't take a very high hand with him. You know I don't embody the
+idea of immortality, and the church is no bad place even for
+unbelievers. The fact is, it struck me as profoundly pathetic. He wasn't
+arrogant about it, as people sometimes are,--they seem proud of not
+believing; but he was sufficiently ignorant in his premises. He said he
+had seen too many dead people. You know he was in the civil war."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yes,--through it all. It came out on my asking him if he were going to
+the Decoration Day services. He said that the sight of the first great
+battlefield deprived him of the power of believing in a life hereafter.
+He was not very explanatory, but as I understood it the overwhelming
+presence of death had extinguished his faith in immortality; the dead
+riders were just like their dead horses"--
+
+"Shocking!" Mrs. Ewbert broke in.
+
+"He said something went out of him." Ewbert waited a moment before
+adding: "It was very affecting, though Hilbrook himself was as apathetic
+about it as he was about everything else. He was not interested in not
+believing, even, but I could see that it had taken the heart out of life
+for him. If our life here does not mean life elsewhere, the interest of
+it must end with our activities. When it comes to old age, as it has
+with poor Hilbrook, it has no meaning at all, unless it has the hope of
+more life in it. I felt his forlornness, and I strongly wished to help
+him. I stayed a long time talking; I tried to interest him in the fact
+that he was not interested, and"--
+
+"Well, what?"
+
+"If I didn't fatigue Hilbrook, I came away feeling perfectly exhausted
+myself. Were you uneasy at my being out so late?"
+
+
+V.
+
+It was some time after the Ewberts had given up expecting him that old
+Hilbrook came to return the minister's visit. Then, as if some excuse
+were necessary, he brought a dozen eggs in a paper bag, which he said he
+hoped Mrs. Ewbert could use, because his hens were giving him more than
+he knew what to do with. He came to the back door with them; but Mrs.
+Ewbert always let her maid of all work go out Sunday evening, and she
+could receive him in the kitchen herself. She felt obliged to make him
+the more welcome on account of his humility, and she showed him into the
+library with perhaps exaggerated hospitality.
+
+It was a chilly evening of April, and so early that the lamp was not
+lighted; but there was a pleasant glow from the fire on the hearth, and
+Ewbert made his guest sit down before it. As he lay back in the
+easy-chair, stretching his thin old hands toward the blaze, the delicacy
+of his profile was charming, and that senile parting of the lips with
+which he listened reminded Ewbert of his own father's looks in his last
+years; so that it was with an affectionate eagerness he set about making
+Hilbrook feel his presence acceptable, when Mrs. Ewbert left them to
+finish up the work she had promised herself not to leave for the maid.
+It was much that Hilbrook had come at all, and he ought to be made to
+realize that Ewbert appreciated his coming. But Hilbrook seemed
+indifferent to his efforts, or rather, insensible to them, in the
+several topics that Ewbert advanced; and there began to be pauses, in
+which the minister racked his brain for some new thing to say, or found
+himself saying something he cared nothing for in a voice of hollow
+resolution, or falling into commonplaces which he tried to give vitality
+by strenuousness of expression. He heard his wife moving about in the
+kitchen and dining room, with a clicking of spoons and knives and a
+faint clash of china, as she put the supper things away, and he wished
+that she would come in and help him with old Hilbrook; but he could not
+very well call her, and she kept at her work, with no apparent purpose
+of leaving it.
+
+Hilbrook was a farmer, so far as he was anything industrially, and
+Ewbert tried him with questions of crops, soils, and fertilizers; but he
+tried him in vain. The old man said he had never cared much for those
+things, and now it was too late for him to begin. He generally sold his
+grass standing, and his apples on the trees; and he had no animals about
+the place except his chickens,--they took care of themselves. Ewbert
+urged, for the sake of conversation, even of a disputative character,
+that poultry were liable to disease, if they were not looked after; but
+Hilbrook said, Not if there were not too many of them, and so made an
+end of that subject. Ewbert desperately suggested that he must find them
+company,--they seemed sociable creatures; and then, in his utter dearth,
+he asked how the old dog was getting on.
+
+"Oh, he's dead," said Hilbrook, and the minister's heart smote him with
+a pity for the survivor's forlornness which the old man's apathetic tone
+had scarcely invited. He inquired how and when the old dog had died, and
+said how much Hilbrook must miss him.
+
+"Well, I don't know," Hilbrook returned. "He wa'n't much comfort, and
+he's out of his misery, anyway." After a moment he added, with a gleam
+of interest: "I've been thinkin', since he went, of what we talked about
+the other night,--I don't mean animals, but men. I tried to go over what
+you said, in my own mind, but I couldn't seem to make it."
+
+He lifted his face, sculptured so fine by age, and blinked at Ewbert,
+who was glad to fancy something appealing in his words and manner.
+
+"You mean as to a life beyond this?"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Well, let us see if we can't go over it together."
+
+Ewbert had forgotten the points he had made before, and he had to take
+up the whole subject anew, he did so at first in an involuntarily
+patronizing confidence that Hilbrook was ignorant of the ground; but
+from time to time the old man let drop a hint of knowledge that
+surprised the minister. Before they had done, it appeared that Hilbrook
+was acquainted with the literature of the doctrine of immortality from
+Plato to Swedenborg, and even to Mr. John Fiske. How well he was
+acquainted with it Ewbert could not quite make out; but he had
+recurrently a misgiving, as if he were in the presence of a doubter
+whose doubt was hopeless through his knowledge. In this bleak air it
+seemed to him that he at last detected the one thing in which the old
+man felt an interest: his sole tie with the earth was the belief that
+when he left it he should cease to be. This affected Ewbert as most
+interesting, and he set himself, with all his heart and soul, to
+dislodge Hilbrook from his deplorable conviction. He would not perhaps
+have found it easy to overcome at once that repugnance which Hilbrook's
+doubt provoked in him, if it had been less gently, less simply owned. As
+it was, it was not possible to deal with it in any spirit of mere
+authority. He must meet it and overcome it in terms of affectionate
+persuasion.
+
+It should not be difficult to overcome it; but Ewbert had not yet
+succeeded in arraying his reasons satisfactorily against it when his
+wife returned from her work in the kitchen, and sat down beside the
+library table. Her coming operated a total diversion, in which Hilbrook
+lapsed into his apathy, and was not to be roused from it by the
+overtures to conversation which she made. He presently got to his feet
+and said he mast be going, against all her protests that it was very
+early. Ewbert wished to walk home with him; but Hilbrook would not
+suffer this, and the minister had to come back from following him to the
+gate, and watching his figure lose itself in the dark, with a pang in
+his heart for the solitude which awaited the old man under his own roof.
+He ran swiftly over their argument in his mind, and questioned himself
+whether he had used him with unfailing tenderness, whether he had let
+him think that he regarded him as at all reprobate and culpable. He gave
+up the quest as he rejoined his wife with a long, unconscious sigh that
+made her lift her head.
+
+"What is it, Clarence?"
+
+"Nothing"--
+
+"You look perfectly exhausted. You look worried. Was it something you
+were talking about?"
+
+Then he told her, and he had trouble to keep her resentment in bounds.
+She held that, as a minister, he ought to have rebuked the wretched
+creature; that it was nothing short of offensive to him for Hilbrook to
+take such a position. She said his face was all flushed, and that she
+knew he would not sleep, and she should get him a glass of warm milk;
+the fire was out in the stove, but she could heat it over the lamp in a
+tin cup.
+
+
+VI.
+
+Hilbrook did not come again till Ewbert had been to see him; and in the
+meantime the minister suffered from the fear that the old man was
+staying away because of some hurt which he had received in their
+controversy. Hilbrook came to church as before, and blinked at him
+through the two sermons which Ewbert preached on significant texts, and
+the minister hoped he was listening with a sense of personal appeal in
+them. He had not only sought to make them convincing as to the doctrine
+of another life, but he had dealt in terms of loving entreaty with those
+who had not the precious faith of this in their hearts, and he had
+wished to convey to Hilbrook an assurance of peculiar sympathy.
+
+The day following the last of his sermons, Ewbert had to officiate at
+the funeral of a little child whose mother had been stricken to the
+earth by her bereavement. The hapless creature had sent for him again
+and again, and had clung about his very soul, beseeching him for
+assurance that she should see her child hereafter, and have it hers,
+just as it was, forever, he had not had the heart to refuse her this
+consolation, and he had pushed himself, in giving it, beyond the bounds
+of imagination. When she confessed her own inability to see how it could
+be, and yet demanded of him that it should be, he answered her that our
+inability to realize the fact had nothing to do with its reality. In the
+few words he said over the little one, at the last, he recurred to this
+position, and urged it upon all his hearers; but in the moment of doing
+so a point that old Hilbrook had made in their talk suddenly presented
+itself. He experienced inwardly such a collapse that he could not be
+sure he had spoken, and he repeated his declaration in a voice of such
+harsh defiance that he could scarcely afterwards bring himself down to
+the meek level of the closing prayer.
+
+As they walked home together, his wife asked, "Why did you repeat
+yourself in that passage, Clarence, and why did you lift your voice so?
+It sounded like contradicting some one. I hope you were not thinking of
+anything that wretched old man said?"
+
+With the mystical sympathy by which the wife divines what is in her
+husband's mind she had touched the truth, and he could not deny it.
+"Yes, yes, I was," he owned in a sort of anguish, and she said:--
+
+"Well, then, I wish he wouldn't come about any more. He has perfectly
+obsessed you. I could see that the last two Sundays you were preaching
+right at him." He had vainly hoped she had not noticed this, though he
+had not concealed from her that his talk with Hilbrook had suggested his
+theme. "What are you going to do about him?" she pursued relentlessly.
+
+"I don't know,--I don't know, indeed," said Ewbert; and perhaps because
+he did not know, he felt that he must do something, that he must at
+least not leave him to himself. He hoped that Hilbrook would come to
+him, and so put him under the necessity of doing something; but Hilbrook
+did not come, and after waiting a fortnight Ewbert went to him, as was
+his duty.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The spring had advanced so far that there were now days when it was
+pleasant to be out in the soft warmth of the afternoons. The day when
+Ewbert climbed to the Hilbrook homestead it was even a little hot, and
+he came up to the dooryard mopping his forehead with his handkerchief,
+and glad of the southwestern breeze which he caught at this point over
+the shoulder of the hill. He had expected to go round to the side door
+of the house, where he had parted with Hilbrook on his former visit; but
+he stopped on seeing the old man at his front door, where he was looking
+vaguely at a mass of Spanish willow fallen dishevelled beside it, as if
+he had some thought of lifting its tangled spray. The sun shone on his
+bare head, and struck silvery gleams from his close-cropped white hair;
+there was something uncommon in his air, though his dress was plain and
+old-fashioned; and Ewbert wished that his wife were there to share his
+impression of distinction in Hilbrook's presence.
+
+He turned at Ewbert's cheerful hail, and after a moment of apparent
+uncertainty as to who he was, he came down the walk of broken brick and
+opened the gate to his visitor.
+
+"I was just out, looking round at the old things," he said, with an
+effort of apology. "This sort of weather is apt to make fools of us. It
+gets into our heads, and before we know we feel as if we had something
+to do with the season."
+
+"Perhaps we have," said the minister. "The spring is in us, too."
+
+The old man shook his head. "It was once, when we were children; now
+there's what we remember of it. We like to make believe about
+it,--that's natural; and it's natural we should make believe that there
+is going to be a spring for us somewhere else like what we see for the
+grass and bushes, here, every year; but I guess not. A tree puts out its
+leaves every spring; but by and by the tree dies, and then it doesn't
+put out its leaves any more."
+
+"I see what you mean," said Ewbert, "and I allow that there is no real
+analogy between our life and that of the grass and bushes; yet somehow I
+feel strengthened in my belief in the hereafter by each renewal of the
+earth's life. It isn't a proof, it isn't a promise; but it's a
+suggestion, an intimation."
+
+They were in the midst of a great question, and they sat down on the
+decaying doorstep to have it out; Hilbrook having gone in for his hat
+and come out again, with its soft wide brim shading his thin face,
+frosted with half a week's beard.
+
+"But character," the minister urged at a certain point,--"what becomes
+of character? You may suppose that life can be lavished by its Origin in
+the immeasurable superabundance which we see in nature. But
+character,--that is a different thing; that cannot die."
+
+"The beasts that perish have character; my old dog had. Some are good
+and some bad; they're kind and they're ugly."
+
+"Ah, excuse me! That isn't character; that's temperament. Men have
+temperament, too; but the beasts haven't character. Doesn't that fact
+prove something,--or no, not prove, but give us some reasonable
+expectation of a hereafter?"
+
+Hilbrook did not say anything for a moment. He broke a bit of fragrant
+spray from the flowering currant--which guarded the doorway on his side
+of the steps; Ewbert sat next the Spanish willow--and softly twisted the
+stem between his thumb and finger.
+
+"Ever hear how I came to leave Hilbrook,--West Mallow, as it was then?"
+he asked at last.
+
+Ewbert was forced to own that he had heard a story, but he said, mainly
+in Hilbrook's interest, that he had not paid much attention to it.
+
+"Thought there wa'n't much in it? Well, that's right, generally
+speakin'. Folks like to make up stories about a man that lives alone
+like me, here; and they usually get in a disappointment. I ain't goin'
+to go over it. I don't care any more about it now than if it had
+happened to somebody else; but it did happen. Josiah got the girl, and I
+didn't. I presume they like to make out that I've grieved over it ever
+since. Sho! It's forty years since I gave it a thought, that way." A
+certain contemptuous indignation supplanted the wonted gentleness of the
+old man, as if he spurned the notion of such sentimental folly. "I've
+read of folks mournin' all their lives through, and in their old age
+goin' back to a thing like that, as if it still meant somethin'. But it
+ain't true; I don't suppose I care any more for losin' her now than
+Josiah would for gettin' her if he was alive. It did make a difference
+for a while; I ain't goin' to deny that. It lasted me four or five
+years, in all, I guess; but I was married to somebody else when I went
+to the war,"--Ewbert controlled a start of surprise; he had always taken
+it for granted that Hilbrook was a bachelor,--"and we had one child. So
+you may say that I was well over that first thing. _It wore out_; and if
+it wa'n't that it makes me mad to have folks believin' that I'm
+sufferin' from it yet, I presume I shouldn't think of it from one year's
+end to another. My wife and I always got on well together; she was a
+good woman. She died when I was away at the war, and the little boy died
+after I got back. I was sorry to lose her, and I thought losin' _him_
+would kill me. It didn't. It appeared one while as if I couldn't live
+without him, and I was always contrivin' how I should meet up with him
+somewhere else. I couldn't figure it out."
+
+Hilbrook stopped, and swallowed dryly. Ewbert noticed how he had dropped
+more and more into the vernacular, in these reminiscences; in their
+controversies he had used the language of books and had spoken like a
+cultivated man, but now he was simply and touchingly rustic.
+
+"Well," he resumed, "that wore out, too. I went into business, and I
+made money and I lost it. I went through all that experience, and I got
+enough of it, just as I got enough of fightin'. I guess I was no worse
+scared than the rest of 'em, but when it came to the end I'd 'bout made
+up my mind that if there was another war I'd go to Canady; I was sick of
+it, and I was sick of business even before I lost money. I lost pretty
+much everything. Josiah--he was always a good enough friend of
+mine--wanted me to start in again, and he offered to back me, but I said
+no. I said if he wanted to do something for me, he could let me come
+home and live on the old place, here; it wouldn't cost him anything like
+so much, and it would be a safer investment. He agreed, and here I be,
+to make a long story short."
+
+Hilbrook had stiffened more and more, as he went on, in the sort of
+defiance he had put on when he first began to speak of himself, and at
+the end of his confidence Ewbert did not venture any comment. His
+forbearance seemed to leave the old man freer to resume at the point
+where he had broken off, and he did so with something of lingering
+challenge.
+
+"You asked me just now why I didn't think character, as we call it, gave
+us some right to expect a life after this. Well, I'll try to tell you. I
+consider that I've been the rounds, as you may say, and that I've got as
+much character as most men. I've had about everything in my life that
+most have, and a great deal more than some. I've seen that everything
+wears out, and that when a thing's worn out it's for good and all. I
+think it's reasonable to suppose that when I wear out it will be for
+good and all, too. There isn't anything of us, as I look at it, except
+the potentiality of experiences. The experiences come through the
+passions that you can tell on the fingers of one hand: love, hate, hope,
+grief, and you may say greed for the thumb. When you've had them, that's
+the end of it; you've exhausted your capacity; you're used up, and so's
+your character,--that often dies before the body does."
+
+"No, no!" Ewbert protested. "Human capacity is infinite;" but even while
+he spoke this seemed to him a contradiction in terms. "I mean that the
+passions renew themselves with new occasions, new opportunities, and
+character grows continually. You have loved twice, you have grieved
+twice; in battle you hated more than once; in business you must have
+coveted many times. Under different conditions, the passions, the
+potentiality of experiences, will have a pristine strength. Can't you
+see it in that light? Can't you draw some hope from that?"
+
+"Hope!" cried Ransom Hilbrook, lifting his fallen head and staring at
+the minister. "Why, man, you don't suppose I _want_ to live hereafter?
+Do you think I'm anxious to have it all over again, or _any_ of it? Is
+that why you've been trying to convince me of immortality? I know
+there's something in what you say,--more than what you realize. I've
+argued annihilation up to this point and that, and almost proved it to
+my own mind; but there's always some point that I can't quite get over.
+If I had the certainty, the absolute certainty, that this was all there
+was to be of it, I wouldn't want to live an hour longer, not a minute!
+But it's the uncertainty that keeps me. What I'm afraid of is, that if I
+get out of it here, I might wake up in my old identity, with the
+potentiality of new experiences in new conditions. That's it I'm tired.
+I've had enough. I want to be let alone. I don't want to do anything
+more, or have anything more done to me. I want to _stop_."
+
+Ewbert's first impression was that he was shocked; but he was too honest
+to remain in this conventional assumption. He was profoundly moved,
+however, and intensely interested. He realized that Hilbrook was
+perfectly sincere, and he could put himself in the old man's place, and
+imagine why he should feel as he did. Ewbert blamed himself for not
+having conceived of such a case before; and he saw that if he were to do
+anything for this lonely soul, he must begin far back of the point from
+which he had started with him. The old man's position had a kind of
+dignity which did not admit of the sort of pity Ewbert had been feeling
+for him, and the minister had before him the difficult and delicate task
+of persuading Hilbrook, not that a man, if he died, should live again,
+but that he should live upon terms so kind and just that none of the
+fortuities of mortal life should be repeated in that immortality. He
+must show the immortal man to be a creature so happily conditioned that
+he would be in effect newly created, before Hilbrook would consent to
+accept the idea of living again. He might say to him that he would
+probably not be consulted in the matter, since he had not been consulted
+as to his existence here; but such an answer would brutally ignore the
+claim that such a man's developed consciousness could justly urge to
+some share in the counsels of omnipotence. Ewbert did not know where to
+begin, and in his despair he began with a laugh.
+
+"Upon my word," he said, "you've presented a problem that would give any
+casuist pause, and it's beyond my powers without some further thought.
+Your doubt, as I now understand it, is not of immortality, but of
+mortality; and there I can't meet you in argument without entirely
+forsaking my own ground. If it will not seem harsh, I will confess that
+your doubt is rather consoling to me; for I have so much faith in the
+Love which rules the world that I am perfectly willing to accept
+reëxistence on any terms that Love may offer. You may say that this is
+because I have not yet exhausted the potentialities of experience, and
+am still interested in my own identity; and one half of this, at least,
+I can't deny. But even if it were otherwise, I should trust to find
+among those Many Mansions which we are told of some chamber where I
+should be at rest without being annihilated; and I can even imagine my
+being glad to do any sort of work about the House, when I was tired of
+resting."
+
+
+VIII.
+
+"I am _glad_ you said that to him!" cried Ewbert's wife, when he told
+her of his interview with old Hilbrook. "That will give him something to
+think about. What did he say?"
+
+Ewbert had been less and less satisfied with his reply to Hilbrook, in
+which it seemed to him that he had passed from mockery to reproof, with
+no great credit to himself; and his wife's applause now set the seal to
+his displeasure with it.
+
+"Oh, he said simply that he could understand a younger person feeling
+differently, and that he did not wish to set himself up as a censor. But
+he could not pretend that he was glad to have been called out of
+nonentity into being, and that he could imagine nothing better than
+eternal unconsciousness."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I told him that his very words implied the refusal of his being to
+accept nonentity again; that they expressed, or adumbrated, the
+conception of an eternal consciousness of the eternal unconsciousness he
+imagined himself longing for. I'm not so sure they did, now."
+
+"Of _course_ they did. And _then_ what did he say?"
+
+"He said nothing in direct reply; he sighed, and dropped his poor old
+head on his breast, and seemed very tired; so that I tried talking of
+other things for a while, and then I came away. Emily, I'm afraid I
+wasn't perfectly candid, perfectly kind, with him."
+
+"I don't see how you could have been more so!" she retorted, in tender
+indignation with him against himself. "And I think what he said was
+terrible. It was bad enough for him to pretend to believe that he was
+not going to live again, but for him to tell you that he was _afraid_ he
+was!" An image sufficiently monstrous to typify Hilbrook's wickedness
+failed to present itself to Mrs. Ewbert, and she went out to give the
+maid instructions for something unusually nourishing for Ewbert at their
+mid-day dinner. "You look fairly fagged out, Clarence," she said, when
+she came back; "and I insist upon your not going up to that dreadful old
+man's again,--at least, not till you've got over this shock."
+
+"Oh, I don't think it has affected me seriously," he returned lightly.
+
+"Yes, it has! yes, it has!" she declared. "It's just like your thinking
+you hadn't taken cold, the other day when you were caught in the rain;
+and the next morning you got up with a sore throat, and it was Sunday
+morning, too."
+
+Ewbert could not deny this, and he had no great wish to see Hilbrook
+soon again. He consented to wait for Hilbrook to come to him, before
+trying to satisfy these scruples of conscience which he had hinted at;
+and he reasonably hoped that the painful points would cease to rankle
+with the lapse of time, if there should be a long interval before they
+met.
+
+That night, before the Ewberts had finished their tea, there came a ring
+at the door, from which Mrs. Ewbert disconsolately foreboded a premature
+evening call. "And just when I was counting on a long, quiet, restful
+time for you, and getting you to bed early!" she lamented in undertone
+to her husband; to the maid who passed through the room with an
+inquiring glance, to the front door, she sighed, still in undertone, "Oh
+yes, of course we're at _home_."
+
+They both listened for the voice at the door, to make out who was there;
+but the voice was so low that they were still in ignorance while the
+maid was showing the visitor into the library, and until she came back
+to them.
+
+"It's that old gentleman who lives all alone by himself on the hill over
+the brook," she explained; and Mrs. Ewbert rose with an air of
+authority, waving her husband to keep his seat.
+
+"Now, Clarence, I am simply not going to _let_ you go in. You are sick
+enough as it is, and if you are going to let that _awful_ old man spend
+the whole evening here, and drain the life out of you! _I_ will see him,
+and tell him"--
+
+"No, no, Emily! It won't do. I _must_ see him. It isn't true that I'm
+sick. He's old, and he has a right to the best we can do for him. Think
+of his loneliness! I shall certainly not let you send him away." Ewbert
+was excitedly gulping his second cup of tea; he pushed his chair back,
+and flung his napkin down as he added, "You can come in, too, and see
+that I get off alive."
+
+"I shall not come near you," she answered resentfully; but Ewbert had
+not closed the door behind him, and she felt it her duty to listen.
+
+
+IX.
+
+Mrs. Ewbert heard old Hilbrook begin at once in a high senile key
+without any form of response to her husband's greeting: "There was one
+thing you said to-day that I've been thinkin' over, and I've come down
+to talk with you about it."
+
+"Yes?" Ewbert queried submissively, though he was aware of being quite
+as fagged as his wife accused him of being, after he spoke.
+
+"Yes," Hilbrook returned. "I guess I ha'n't been exactly up and down
+with myself. I guess I've been playing fast and loose with myself. I
+guess you're right about my wantin' to have enough consciousness to
+enjoy my unconsciousness," and the old gentleman gave a laugh of rather
+weird enjoyment. "There are things," he resumed seriously, "that are
+deeper in us than anything we call ourselves. I supposed I had gone to
+the bottom, but I guess I hadn't. All the while there was something down
+there that I hadn't got at; but you reached it and touched it, and now I
+know it's there. I don't know but it's my Soul that's been havin' its
+say all the time, and me not listenin'. I guess you made your point."
+
+Ewbert was still not so sure of that. He had thrown out that hasty
+suggestion without much faith in it at the time, and his faith in it had
+not grown since.
+
+"I'm glad," he began, but Hilbrook pressed on as if he had not spoken.
+
+"I guess we're built like an onion," he said, with a severity that
+forbade Ewbert to feel anything undignified in the homely illustration.
+"You can strip away layer after layer till you seem to get to nothing at
+all; but when you've got to that nothing you've got to the very thing
+that had the life in it, and that would have grown again if you had put
+it in the ground."
+
+"Exactly!" said Ewbert.
+
+"You made a point that I can't get round," Hilbrook continued, and it
+was here that Ewbert enjoyed a little instant of triumph. "But that
+ain't the point with _me_. I see that I can't prove that we shan't live
+again any more than you can prove that we shall. What I want you to do
+_now_ is to convince me, or to give me the least reason to believe, that
+we shan't live again on exactly the same terms that we live now. I don't
+want to argue immortality any more; we'll take that for granted. But how
+is it going to be any different from mortality with the hope of death
+taken away?"
+
+Hilbrook's apathy was gone, and his gentleness; he had suddenly an air
+and tone of fierce challenge. As he spoke he brought a clenched fist
+down on the arm of his chair; he pushed his face forward and fixed
+Ewbert with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him
+terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if
+he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of
+the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of
+Frankenstein's. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one
+insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not
+forsake him or deny him.
+
+"I don't know how far you accept or reject the teachings of Scripture on
+this matter," he began rather vaguely, but Hilbrook stopped him.
+
+"You didn't go to the Book for the point you made _against_ me. But if
+you go to it now for the point I want you to make _for_ me, what are you
+going to find? Are you going to find the promise of a life any different
+from the life we have here? I accept it all,--all that the Old Testament
+says, and all that the New Testament says; and what does it amount to on
+this point?"
+
+"Nothing but the assurance that if we live rightly here we shall be
+happy in the keeping of the divine Love there. That assurance is
+everything to me."
+
+"It isn't to me!" cried the old man. "We are in the keeping of the
+divine Love here, too, and are we happy? Are those who live rightly
+happy? It's because we're not conditioned for happiness here; and how
+are we going to be conditioned differently there? We are going to suffer
+to all eternity through our passions, our potentialities of experience,
+there just as we do here."
+
+"There may be other passions, other potentialities of experience,"
+Ewbert suggested, casting about in the void.
+
+"Like what?" Hilbrook demanded. "I've been trying to figure it, and I
+can't. I should like you to try it. You can't imagine a new passion in
+the soul any more than you can imagine a new feature in the face. There
+they are: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin; love, hate, greed, hope, fear!
+You can't add to them or take away from them." The old man dropped from
+his defiance in an entreaty that was even more terrible to Ewbert. "I
+wish you could. I should like to have you try. Maybe I haven't been over
+the whole ground. Maybe there's some principle that I've missed." He
+hitched his chair closer to Ewbert's, and laid some tremulous fingers on
+the minister's sleeve. "If I've got to live forever, what have I got to
+live for?"
+
+"Well," said Ewbert, meeting him fully in his humility, "let us try to
+make it out together. Let us try to think. Apparently, our way has
+brought us to a dead wall; but I believe there's light beyond it, if we
+can only break through. Is it really necessary that we should discover
+some new principle? Do we know all that love can do from our experience
+of it here?"
+
+"Have you seen a mother with her child?" Hilbrook retorted.
+
+"Yes, I know. But even that has some alloy of selfishness. Can't we
+imagine love in which there is no greed,--for greed, and not hate, is
+the true antithesis of love which is all giving, while greed is all
+getting,--a love that is absolutely pure?"
+
+"_I_ can't," said the old man. "All the love I ever felt had greed in
+it; I wanted to keep the thing I loved for myself."
+
+"Yes, because you were afraid in the midst of your love. It was fear
+that alloyed it, not greed. And in easily imaginable conditions in which
+there is no fear of want, or harm, or death, love would be pure; for it
+is these things that greed itself wants to save us from. You can imagine
+conditions in which there shall be no fear, in which love casteth out
+fear?"
+
+"Well," said Hilbrook provisionally.
+
+Ewbert had not thought of these points himself before, and he was
+pleased with his discovery, though afterwards he was aware that it was
+something like an intellectual juggle. "You see," he temporized, "we
+have got rid of two of the passions already, fear and greed, which are
+the potentialities of our unhappiest experience in this life. In fact,
+we have got rid of three, for without fear and greed men cannot hate."
+
+"But how can we exist without them?" Hilbrook urged. "Shall we be made
+up of two passions,--of love and hope alone?"
+
+"Why not?" Ewbert returned, with what he felt a specious brightness.
+
+"Because we should not be complete beings with these two elements
+alone."
+
+"Ah, as we know ourselves here, I grant you," said the minister. "But
+why should we not be far more simply constituted somewhere else? Have
+you ever read Isaac Taylor's Physical Theory of another Life? He argues
+that the immortal body would be a far less complex mechanism than the
+mortal body. Why should not the immortal soul be simple, too? In fact,
+it would necessarily be so, being one with the body. I think I can put
+my hand on that book, and if I can I must make you take it with you."
+
+He rose briskly from his chair, and went to the shelves, running his
+fingers along the books with that subtlety of touch by which the student
+knows a given book in the dark. He had heard Mrs. Ewbert stirring about
+in the rooms beyond with an activity in which he divined a menacing
+impatience; and he would have been glad to get rid of old Hilbrook
+before her impatience burst in an irruption upon them. Perhaps because
+of this distraction he could not find the book, but he remained on foot,
+talking with an implication in his tone that they were both preparing to
+part, and were now merely finishing off some odds and ends of discourse
+before they said good-night.
+
+Old Hilbrook did not stir. He was far too sincere a nature, Ewbert saw,
+to conceive of such inhospitality as a hint for his departure, or he was
+too deeply interested to be aware of it. The minister was obliged to sit
+down again, and it was eleven o'clock before Hilbrook rose to go.
+
+
+X.
+
+Ewbert went out to the gate with the old man, and when he came back to
+his study, he found his wife there looking strangely tall and monumental
+in her reproach. "I supposed you were in bed long ago, my dear," he
+attempted lightly.
+
+"You _don't_ mean that you've been out in the night air without your hat
+on!" she returned. "Well, this is too _much_!" Her long-pent-up
+impatience broke in tears, and he strove in vain to comfort her with
+caresses. "Oh, what a fatal day it was when you stirred that wretched
+old creature up! _Why_ couldn't you leave him alone!"
+
+"To his apathy? To his despair? Emily!" Ewbert dropped his arms from the
+embrace in which he had folded her woodenly unresponsive frame, and
+regarded her sadly.
+
+"Oh yes, of course," she answered, rubbing her handkerchief into her
+eyes. "But you don't know that it was despair; and he was quite happy in
+his apathy; and as it is, you've got him on your hands; and if he's
+going to come here every night and stay till morning, it will kill you.
+You know you're not strong; and you get so excited when you sit up
+talking. Look how flushed your cheeks are, now, and your eyes--as big!
+You won't sleep a wink to-night,--I know you won't."
+
+"Oh yes, I shall," he answered bravely. "I believe I've done some good
+work with poor old Hilbrook; and you mustn't think he's tired me. I feel
+fresher than I did when he came."
+
+"It's because you're excited," she persisted. "I know you won't sleep."
+
+"Yes, I shall. I shall just stay here, and read my nerves down a little.
+Then I'll come."
+
+"Oh yes!" Mrs. Ewbert exulted disconsolately, and she left him to his
+book. She returned to say: "If you _must_ take anything to make you
+sleepy, I've left some warm milk on the back of the stove. Promise me
+you won't take any sulphonal! You know how you feel the next day!"
+
+"No, no, I won't," said Ewbert; and he kept his word, with the effect of
+remaining awake all night. Toward morning he did not know but he had
+drowsed; he was not aware of losing consciousness, and he started from
+his drowse with the word "consciousness" in his mind, as he had heard
+Hilbrook speaking it.
+
+
+XI.
+
+Throughout the day, under his wife's watchful eye, he failed of the naps
+he tried for, and he had to own himself as haggard, when night came
+again, as the fondest anxiety of a wife could pronounce a husband. He
+could not think of his talk with old Hilbrook without an anguish of
+brain exhaustion; and yet he could not help thinking of it. He realized
+what the misery of mere weakness must be, and the horror of not having
+the power to rest. He wished to go to bed before the hour when Hilbrook
+commonly appeared, but this was so early that Ewbert knew he should
+merely toss about and grow more and more wakeful from his premature
+effort to sleep. He trembled at every step outside, and at the sound of
+feet approaching the door on the short brick walk from the gate, he and
+his wife arrested themselves with their teacups poised in the air.
+Ewbert was aware of feebly hoping the feet might go away again; but the
+bell rang, and then he could not meet his wife's eye.
+
+"If it is that old Mr. Hilbrook," she said to the maid in transit
+through the room, "tell him that Mr. Ewbert is not well, but _I_ shall
+be glad to see him," and now Ewbert did not dare to protest. His
+forebodings were verified when he heard Hilbrook asking for him, but
+though he knew the voice, he detected a difference in the tone that
+puzzled him.
+
+His wife did not give Hilbrook time to get away, if he had wished,
+without seeing her; she rose at once and went out to him. Ewbert heard
+her asking him into the library, and then he heard them in parley there;
+and presently they came out into the hall again, and went to the front
+door together. Ewbert's heart misgave him of something summary on her
+part, and he did not know what to make of the cheerful parting between
+them. "Well, I bid you good-evening, ma'am," he heard old Hilbrook say
+briskly, and his wife return sweetly, "Good-night, Mr. Hilbrook. You
+must come soon again."
+
+"You may put your mind at rest, Clarence," she said, as she reëntered
+the dining room and met his face of surprise. "He didn't come to make a
+call; he just wanted to borrow a book,--Physical Theory of another
+Life."
+
+"How did you find it?" asked Ewbert, with relief.
+
+"It was where it always was," she returned indifferently. "Mr. Hilbrook
+seemed to be very much interested in something you said to him about it.
+I do believe you _have_ done him good, Clarence; and now, if you can
+only get a full night's rest, I shall forgive him. But I hope he won't
+come _very_ soon again, and will never stay so late when he does come.
+Promise me you won't go near him till he's brought the book back!"
+
+
+XII.
+
+Hilbrook came the night after he had borrowed the book, full of talk
+about it, to ask if he might keep it a little longer. Ewbert had slept
+well the intervening night, and had been suffered to see Hilbrook upon
+promising his wife that he would not encourage the old man to stay; but
+Hilbrook stayed without encouragement. An interest had come into his
+apathetic life which renewed it, and gave vitality to a whole dead world
+of things. He wished to talk, and he wished even more to listen, that he
+might confirm himself from Ewbert's faith and reason in the conjectures
+with which his mind was filled. His eagerness as to the conditions of a
+future life, now that he had begun to imagine them, was insatiable, and
+Ewbert, who met it with glad sympathy, felt drained of his own spiritual
+forces by the strength which he supplied to the old man. But the case
+was so strange, so absorbing, so important, that he could not refuse
+himself to it. He could not deny Hilbrook's claim to all that he could
+give him in this sort; he was as helpless to withhold the succor he
+supplied as he was to hide from Mrs. Ewbert's censoriously anxious eye
+the nervous exhaustion to which it left him after each visit that
+Hilbrook paid him. But there was a drain from another source of which he
+would not speak to her till he could make sure that the effect was not
+some trick of his own imagination.
+
+He had been aware, in twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a
+certain perfunctory quality in his performance. It was as if the truth,
+so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the
+repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a
+hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly
+against the old man's doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of
+question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in
+belief he himself waned. The conviction of a life hereafter was not
+something which he was _sharing_ with Hilbrook; he was _giving_ it
+absolutely, and with such entire unreserve that he was impoverishing his
+own soul of its most precious possession.
+
+So it seemed to him in those flaccid moods to which Hilbrook's visits
+left him, when mind and body were both spent in the effort he had been
+making. In the intervals in which his strength renewed itself, he put
+this fear from him as a hypochondriacal fancy, and he summoned a
+cheerfulness which he felt less and less to meet the hopeful face of the
+old man. Hilbrook had renewed himself, apparently, in the measure that
+the minister had aged and waned. He looked, to Ewbert, younger and
+stronger. To the conventional question how he did, he one night answered
+that he never felt better in his life. "But you," he said, casting an
+eye over the face and figure of the minister, who lay back in his
+easy-chair, with his hands stretched nerveless on the arms, "_you_, look
+rather peaked. I don't know as I noticed it before, but come to think, I
+seemed to feel the same way about it when I saw you in the pulpit
+yesterday."
+
+"It was a very close day," said Ewbert. "I don't know why I shouldn't be
+about as well as usual."
+
+"Well, that's right," said Hilbrook, in willing dismissal of the trifle
+which had delayed him from the great matter in his mind.
+
+Some new thoughts had occurred to him in corroboration of the notions
+they had agreed upon in their last meeting. But in response Ewbert found
+himself beset by a strange temptation,--by the wish to take up these
+notions and expose their fallacy. They were indeed mere toys of their
+common fancy which they had constructed together in mutual supposition,
+but Ewbert felt a sacredness in them, while he longed so strangely to
+break them one by one and cast them in the old man's face. Like all
+imaginative people, he was at times the prey of morbid self-suggestions,
+whose nature can scarcely be stated without excess. The more monstrous
+the thing appeared to his mind and conscience, the more fascinating it
+became. Once the mere horror of such a conception as catching a comely
+parishioner about the waist and kissing her, when she had come to him
+with a case of conscience, had so confused him in her presence as to
+make him answer her wildly, not because he was really tempted to the
+wickedness, but because he realized so vividly the hideousness of the
+impossible temptation. In some such sort he now trembled before old
+Hilbrook, thinking how dreadful it would be if he were suddenly to begin
+undoing the work of faith in him, and putting back in its place the
+doubts which he had uprooted before. In a swift series of dramatic
+representations he figured the old man's helpless amaze at the
+demoniacal gayety with which he should mock his own seriousness in the
+past, the cynical ease with which he should show the vanity of the hopes
+he had been so fervent in awakening. He had throughout recognized the
+claim that all the counter-doubts had upon the reason, and he saw how
+effective he could make these if he were now to become their advocate.
+He pictured the despair in which he could send his proselyte tottering
+home to his lonely house through the dark.
+
+He rent himself from the spell, but the last picture remained so real
+with him that he went to the window and looked out, saying, "Is there a
+moon?"
+
+"It ain't up yet, I guess," said old Hilbrook, and from something in his
+manner, rather than from anything he recollected of their talk, Ewbert
+fancied him to have asked a question, and to be now waiting for some
+answer. He had not the least notion what the question could have been,
+and he began to walk up and down, trying to think of something to say,
+but feeling his legs weak under him and the sweat cold on his forehead.
+All the time he was aware of Hilbrook following him with an air of
+cheerful interest, and patiently waiting till he should take up the
+thread of their discourse again.
+
+He controlled himself at last, and sank into his chair. "Where were we?"
+he asked. "I had gone off on a train of associations, and I don't just
+recall our last point."
+
+Hilbrook stated it, and Ewbert said, "Oh, yes," as if he recognized it,
+and went on from it upon the line of thought which it suggested. He was
+aware of talking rationally and forcibly; but in the subjective
+undercurrent paralleling his objective thought he was holding discourse
+with himself to an effect wholly different from that produced in
+Hilbrook.
+
+"Well, sir," said the old man when he rose to go at last, "I guess
+you've settled it for me. You've made me see that there can be an
+immortal life that's worth living; and I was afraid there wa'n't! I
+shouldn't care, now, if I woke up any morning in the other world. I
+guess it would be all right; and that there would be new conditions
+every way, so that a man could go on and be himself, without feelin'
+that he was in any danger of bein' wasted. You've made me want to meet
+my boy again; and I used to dread it; I didn't think I was fit for it. I
+don't know whether you expect me to thank you; I presume you don't; but
+I"--he faltered, and his voice shook in sympathy with the old hand that
+he put trembling into Ewbert's--"I _bless_ you!"
+
+
+XIII.
+
+The time had come when the minister must seek refuge and counsel with
+his wife. He went to her as a troubled child goes to its mother, and she
+heard the confession of his strange experience with the motherly
+sympathy which performs the comforting office of perfect intelligence.
+If she did not grasp its whole significance, she seized what was perhaps
+the main point, and she put herself in antagonism to the cause of his
+morbid condition, while administering an inevitable chastisement for the
+neglect of her own prevision.
+
+"That terrible old man," she said, "has simply been draining the life
+out of you, Clarence. I saw it from the beginning, and I warned you
+against it; but you wouldn't listen to me. _Now_ I suppose you _will_
+listen, after the doctor tells you that you're in danger of nervous
+prostration, and that you've got to give up everything and rest. _I_
+think you've been in danger of losing your reason, you've overworked it
+so; and I sha'n't be easy till I've got you safely away at the seaside,
+and out of the reach of that--that _vampire_."
+
+"Emily!" the minister protested. "I can't allow you to use such
+language. At the worst, and supposing that he has really been that drain
+upon me which you say (though I don't admit it), what is my life for but
+to give to others?"
+
+"But _my_ life isn't for you to give to others, and _your_ life _is_
+mine, and I think I have some right to say what shall be done with it,
+and I don't choose to have it used up on old Hilbrook." It passed
+through Ewbert's languid thought, which it stirred to a vague amusement,
+that the son of an older church than the Rixonite might have found in
+this thoroughly terrestrial attitude of his wife a potent argument for
+sacerdotal celibacy; but he did not attempt to formulate it, and he
+listened submissively while she went on: "_One_ thing: I am certainly
+not going to let you see him again till you've seen the doctor, and I
+hope he won't come about. If he does, _I_ shall see him."
+
+The menace in this declaration moved Ewbert to another protest, which he
+worded conciliatingly: "I shall have to let you. But I know you won't
+say anything to convey a sense of responsibility to him. I couldn't
+forgive myself if he were allowed to feel that he had been preying upon
+me. The fact is, I've been overdoing in every way, and nobody is to
+blame for my morbid fancies but myself. I _should_ blame myself very
+severely if you based any sort of superstition on them, and acted from
+that superstition."
+
+"Oh, you needn't be afraid!" said Mrs. Ewbert. "I shall take care of his
+feelings, but I shall have my own opinions, all the same, Clarence."
+
+Whether a woman with opinions so strong as Mrs. Ewbert's, and so
+indistinguishable from her prejudices, could be trusted to keep them to
+herself, in dealing with the matter in hand, was a question which her
+husband felt must largely be left to her goodness of heart for its right
+solution.
+
+When Hilbrook came that night, as usual, she had already had it out with
+him in several strenuous reveries before they met, and she was able to
+welcome him gently to the interview which she made very brief. His face
+fell in visible disappointment when she said that Mr. Ewbert would not
+be able to see him, and perhaps there was nothing to uplift him in the
+reasons she gave, though she obscurely resented his continued dejection
+as a kind of ingratitude. She explained that poor Mr. Ewbert was quite
+broken down, and that the doctor had advised his going to the seaside
+for the whole of August, where he promised everything from the air and
+the bathing. Mr. Ewbert merely needed toning up, she said; but to
+correct the impression she might be giving that his breakdown was a
+trifling matter, she added that she felt very anxious about it, and
+wanted to get him away as soon as possible. She said with a confidential
+effect, as of something in which Hilbrook could sympathize with her:
+"You know it isn't merely his church work proper; it's his giving
+himself spiritually to all sorts of people so indiscriminately. He can't
+deny himself to any one; and sometimes he's perfectly exhausted by it.
+You must come and see him as soon as he gets back, Mr. Hilbrook. He will
+count upon it, I know; he's so much interested in the discussions he has
+been having with you."
+
+She gave the old man her hand for good-by, after she had artfully stood
+him up, in a double hope,--a hope that he would understand that there
+was some limit to her husband's nervous strength, and a hope that her
+closing invitation would keep him from feeling anything personal in her
+hints.
+
+Hilbrook took his leave in the dreamy fashion age has with so many
+things, as if there were a veil between him and experience which kept
+him from the full realization of what had happened; and as she watched
+his bent shoulders down the garden walk, carrying his forward-drooping
+head at a slant that scarcely left the crown of his hat visible, a fear
+came upon her which made it impossible for her to recount all the facts
+of her interview to her husband. It became her duty, rather, to conceal
+what was painful to herself in it, and she merely told him that Mr.
+Hilbrook had taken it all in the right way, and she had made him promise
+to come and see them as soon as they got back.
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Events approved the wisdom of Mrs. Ewbert's course in so many respects
+that she confidently trusted them for the rest. Ewbert picked up
+wonderfully at the seaside, and she said to him again and again that it
+was not merely those interviews with old Hilbrook which had drained his
+vitality, but it was the whole social and religious keeping of the
+place. Everybody, she said, had thrown themselves upon his sympathies,
+and he was carrying a load that nobody could bear up under. She
+addressed these declarations to her lingering consciousness of Ransom
+Hilbrook, and confirmed herself, by their repetition, in the belief that
+he had not taken her generalizations personally. She now extended these
+so as to inculpate the faculty of the university, who ought to have felt
+it their duty not to let a man of Ewbert's intellectual quality stagger
+on alone among them, with no sign of appreciation or recognition in the
+work he was doing, not so much for the Rixonite church as for the whole
+community. She took several ladies at the hotel into her confidence on
+this point, and upon study of the situation they said it was a shame.
+After that she felt more bitter about it, and attributed her husband's
+collapse to a concealed sense of the indifference of the university
+people, so galling to a sensitive nature.
+
+She suggested this theory to Ewbert, and he denied it with blithe
+derision, but she said that he need not tell _her_, and in confirming
+herself in it she began to relax her belief that old Ransom Hilbrook had
+preyed upon him. She even went so far as to say that the only
+intellectual companionship he had ever had in the place was that which
+he found in the old man's society. When she discovered, after the fact,
+that Ewbert had written to him since they came away, she was not so
+severe with him as she might have expected herself to be in view of an
+act which, if not quite clandestine, was certainly without her privity.
+She would have considered him fitly punished by Hilbrook's failure to
+reply, if she had not shared his uneasiness at the old man's silence.
+But she did not allow this to affect her good spirits, which were
+essential to her husband's comfort as well as her own. She redoubled her
+care of him in every sort, and among all the ladies who admired her
+devotion to him there was none who enjoyed it as much as herself. There
+was none who believed more implicitly that it was owing to her foresight
+and oversight that his health mended so rapidly, and that at the end of
+the bathing season she was, as she said, taking him home quite another
+man. In her perfect satisfaction she suffered him his small joke about
+not feeling it quite right to go with her if that were so; and though a
+woman of little humor, she even professed to find pleasure in his joke
+after she fully understood it.
+
+"All that I ask," she said, as if it followed, "is that you won't spoil
+everything by letting old Hilbrook come every night and drain the life
+out of you again."
+
+"I won't," he retorted, "if you'll promise to make the university people
+come regularly to my sermons."
+
+He treated the notion of Hilbrook's visits lightly; but with his return
+to the familiar environment he felt a shrinking from them in an
+experience which was like something physical. Yet when he sat down the
+first night in his study, with his lamp in its wonted place, it was with
+an expectation of old Hilbrook in his usual seat so vivid that its
+defeat was more a shock than its fulfilment upon supernatural terms
+would have been. In fact, the absence of the old man was spectral; and
+though Ewbert employed himself fully the first night in answering an
+accumulation of letters that required immediate reply, it was with
+nervous starts from time to time, which he could trace to no other
+cause. His wife came in and out, with what he knew to be an accusing
+eye, as she brought up those arrears of housekeeping which always await
+the housewife on the return from any vacation; and he knew that he did
+not conceal his guilt from her.
+
+They both ignored the stress which had fallen back upon him, and which
+accumulated, as the days of the week went by, until the first Sunday
+came.
+
+Ewbert dreaded to look in the direction of Hilbrook's pew, lest he
+should find it empty; but the old man was there, and he sat blinking at
+the minister, as his custom was, through the sermon, and thoughtfully
+passing the tip of his tongue over the inner edge of his lower lip.
+
+Many came up to shake hands with the minister after church, and to tell
+him how well he was looking, but Hilbrook was not among them. Some of
+the university people who had made a point of being there that morning,
+out of a personal regard for Ewbert, were grouped about his wife, in the
+church vestibule, where she stood answering their questions about his
+health. He glimpsed between the heads and shoulders of this gratifying
+group the figure of Hilbrook dropping from grade to grade on the steps
+outside, till it ceased to be visible, and he fancied, with a pang, that
+the old man had lingered to speak with him, and had then given up and
+started home.
+
+The cordial interest of the university people was hardly a compensation
+for the disappointment he shared with Hilbrook; but his wife was so
+happy in it that he could not say anything to damp her joy. "Now," she
+declared, on their way home, "I am perfectly satisfied that they will
+keep coming. You never preached so well, Clarence, and if they have any
+appreciation at all, they simply won't be able to keep away. I wish you
+could have heard all the nice things they said about you. I guess
+they've waked up to you, at last, and I do believe that the idea of
+losing you has had a great deal to do with it. And _that_ is something
+we owe to old Ransom Hilbrook more than to anything else. I saw the poor
+old fellow hanging about, and I couldn't help feeling for him. I knew he
+wanted to speak with you, and I'm not afraid that he will be a burden
+again. It will be such an inspiration, the prospect of having the
+university people come every Sunday, now, that you can afford to give a
+little of it to him, and I want you to go and see him soon; he evidently
+isn't coming till you do."
+
+
+XV.
+
+Ewbert had learned not to inquire too critically for a logical process
+in his wife's changes of attitude toward any fact. In her present mood
+he recognized an effect of the exuberant good-will awakened by the
+handsome behavior of the university people, and he agreed with her that
+he must go to see old Hilbrook at once. In this good intention his
+painful feeling concerning him was soothed, and Ewbert did not get up to
+the Hilbrook place till well into the week. It was Thursday afternoon
+when he climbed through the orchard, under the yellowing leaves which
+dappled the green masses of the trees like intenser spots of the
+September sunshine. He came round by the well to the side door of the
+house, which stood open, and he did not hesitate to enter when he saw
+how freely the hens were coming and going through it. They scuttled out
+around him and between his legs, with guilty screeches, and left him
+standing alone in the middle of the wide, low kitchen. A certain
+discomfort of the nerves which their flight gave him was heightened by
+some details quite insignificant in themselves. There was no fire in the
+stove, and the wooden clock on the mantel behind it was stopped; the
+wind had carried in some red leaves from the maple near the door, and
+these were swept against the farther wall, where they lay palpitating in
+the draft.
+
+The neglect in all was evidently too recent to suggest any supposition
+but that of the master's temporary absence, and Ewbert went to the
+threshold to look for his coming from the sheds or the barn. But these
+were all fast shut, and there was no sign of Hilbrook anywhere. Ewbert
+turned back into the room again, and saw the door of the old man's
+little bedroom standing slightly ajar. With a chill of apprehension he
+pushed it open, and he could not have experienced a more disagreeable
+effect if the dark fear in his mind had been realized than he did to see
+Hilbrook lying in his bed alive and awake. His face showed like a fine
+mask above the sheet, and his long, narrow hands rested on the covering
+across his breast. His eyes met those of Ewbert not only without
+surprise, but without any apparent emotion.
+
+"Why, Mr. Hilbrook," said the minister, "are you sick?"
+
+"No, I am first-rate," the old man answered.
+
+It was on the point of the minister's tongue to ask him, "Then what in
+the world are you doing in bed?" but he substituted the less
+authoritative suggestion, "I am afraid I disturbed you--that I woke you
+out of a nap. But I found the door open and the hens inside, and I
+ventured to come in"--
+
+Hilbrook replied calmly, "I heard you; I wa'n't asleep."
+
+"Oh," said Ewbert, apologetically, and he did not know quite what to do;
+he had an aimless wish for his wife, as if she would have known what to
+do. In her absence he decided to shut the door against the hens, who
+were returning adventurously to the threshold, and then he asked, "Is
+there something I can do for you? Make a fire for you to get up by"--
+
+"I ha'n't got any call to get up," said Hilbrook; and, after giving
+Ewbert time to make the best of this declaration, he asked abruptly,
+"What was that you said about my wantin' to be alive enough to know I
+was dead?"
+
+"The consciousness of unconsciousness?"
+
+"Ah!" the old man assented, as with satisfaction in having got the
+notion right; and then he added, with a certain defiance: "There ain't
+anything _in_ that. I got to thinking it over, when you was gone, and
+the whole thing went to pieces. That idea don't prove anything at all,
+and all that we worked out of it had to go with it."
+
+"Well," the minister returned, with an assumption of cosiness in his
+tone which he did not feel, and feigning to make himself easy in the
+hard kitchen chair which he pulled up to the door of Hilbrook's room,
+"let's see if we can't put that notion together again."
+
+"_You_ can, if you want to," said the old man, dryly "I got no interest
+in it any more; 'twa'n't nothing but a metaphysical toy, anyway." He
+turned his head apathetically on the pillow, and no longer faced his
+visitor, who found it impossible in the conditions of tacit dismissal to
+philosophize further.
+
+"I was sorry," Ewbert began, "not to be able to speak with you after
+church, the other day. There were so many people"--
+
+"That's all right," said Hilbrook unresentfully. "I hadn't anything to
+say, in particular."
+
+"But _I_ had," the minister persisted. "I thought a great deal about you
+when I was away, and I went over our talks in my own mind a great many
+times. The more I thought about them, the more I believed that we had
+felt our way to some important truth in the matter. I don't say final
+truth, for I don't suppose that we shall ever reach that in this life."
+
+"Very likely," Hilbrook returned, with his face to the wall. "I don't
+see as it makes any difference; or if it does, I don't care for it."
+
+Something occurred to Ewbert which seemed to him of more immediate
+usefulness than the psychological question. "Couldn't I get you
+something to eat, Mr. Hilbrook? If you haven't had any breakfast to-day,
+you must be hungry."
+
+"Yes, I'm hungry," the old man assented, "but I don't want to eat
+anything."
+
+Ewbert had risen hopefully in making his suggestion, but now his heart
+sank. Here, it seemed to him, a physician rather than a philosopher was
+needed, and at the sound of wheels on the wagon track to the door his
+imagination leaped to the miracle of the doctor's providential advent.
+He hurried to the threshold and met the fish-man, who was about to
+announce himself with the handle of his whip on the clapboarding. He
+grasped the situation from the minister's brief statement, and confessed
+that he had expected to find the old gentleman _dead_ in his bed some
+day, and he volunteered to send some of the women folks from the farm up
+the road. When these came, concentrated in the person of the farmer's
+bustling wife, who had a fire kindled in the stove and the kettle on
+before Ewbert could get away, he went for the doctor, and returned with
+him to find her in possession of everything in the house except the
+owner's interest. Her usefulness had been arrested by an invisible but
+impassable barrier, though she had passed and re-passed the threshold of
+Hilbrook's chamber with tea and milk toast. He said simply that he saw
+no object in eating; and he had not been sufficiently interested to turn
+his head and look at her in speaking to her.
+
+With the doctor's science he was as indifferent as with the farm-wife's
+service. He submitted to have his pulse felt, and he could not help
+being prescribed for, but he would have no agency in taking his
+medicine. He said, as he had said to Mrs. Stephson about eating, that he
+saw no object in it.
+
+The doctor retorted, with the temper of a man not used to having his
+will crossed, that he had better take it, if he had any object in
+living, and Hilbrook answered that he had none. In his absolute apathy
+he did not even ask to be let alone.
+
+"You see," the baffled doctor fumed in the conference that he had with
+Ewbert apart, "he doesn't really need any medicine. There's nothing the
+matter with him, and I only wanted to give him something to put an edge
+to his appetite. He's got cranky living here alone; but there _is_ such
+a thing as starving to death, and that's the only thing Hilbrook's in
+danger of. If you're going to stay with him--he oughtn't to be left
+alone"--
+
+"I can come up, yes, certainly, after supper," said Ewbert, and he
+fortified himself inwardly for the question this would raise with his
+wife.
+
+"Then you must try to interest him in something. Get him to talking, and
+then let Mrs. Stephson come in with a good bowl of broth, and I guess we
+may trust Nature to do the rest."
+
+
+XVI.
+
+When we speak of Nature, we figure her as one thing, with a fixed
+purpose and office in the universal economy; but she is an immense
+number of things, and her functions are inexpressibly varied. She
+includes decay as well as growth; she compasses death as well as birth.
+We call certain phenomena unnatural; but in a natural world how can
+anything be unnatural, except the supernatural? These facts gave Ewbert
+pause in view of the obstinate behavior of Ransom Hilbrook in dying for
+no obvious reason, and kept him from pronouncing it unnatural. The old
+man, he reflected, had really less reason to live than to die, if it
+came to reasons; for everything that had made the world home to him had
+gone out of it, and left him in exile here. The motives had ceased; the
+interests had perished; the strong personality that had persisted was
+solitary amid the familiar environment grown alien.
+
+The wonder was that he should ever have been roused from his apathetic
+unfaith to inquiry concerning the world beyond this, and to a certain
+degree of belief in possibilities long abandoned by his imagination.
+Ewbert had assisted at the miracle of this resuscitation upon terms
+which, until he was himself much older, he could not question as to
+their beneficence, and in fact it never came to his being quite frank
+with himself concerning them. He kept his thoughts on this point in that
+state of solution which holds so many conjectures from precipitation in
+actual conviction.
+
+But his wife had no misgivings. Her dread was that in his devotion to
+that miserable old man (as she called him, not always in compassion) he
+should again contribute to Hilbrook's vitality at the expense, if not
+the danger, of his own. She of course expressed her joy that Ewbert had
+at last prevailed upon him to eat something, when the entreaty of his
+nurse and the authority of his doctor availed nothing; and of course she
+felt the pathos of his doing it out of affection for Ewbert, and merely
+to please him, as Hilbrook declared. It did not surprise her that any
+one should do anything for the love of Ewbert, but it is doubtful if she
+fully recognized the beauty of this last efflorescence of the aged life;
+and she perceived it her duty not to sympathize entirely with Ewbert's
+morbid regret that it came too late. She was much more resigned than he
+to the will of Providence, and she urged a like submissiveness upon him.
+
+"Don't talk so!" he burst out. "It's horrible!" It was in the first
+hours after Ewbert's return from Hilbrook's death-bed, and his spent
+nerves gave way in a gush of tears.
+
+"I see what you mean," she said, after a pause in which he controlled
+his sobs. "And I suppose," she added, with a touch of bitterness, "that
+you blame _me_ for taking you away from him here when he was coming
+every night and sapping your very life. You were very glad to have me do
+it at the time! And what use would there have been in your killing
+yourself, anyway? It wasn't as if he were a young man with a career of
+usefulness before him, that might have been marred by his not believing
+this or that. He had been a complete failure every way, and the end of
+the world had come for him. What did it matter whether such a man
+believed that there was another world or not?"
+
+"Emily! Emily!" the minister cried out. "What are you saying?"
+
+Mrs. Ewbert broke down in her turn. "I don't know _what_ I'm saying!"
+she retorted from behind her handkerchief. "I'm trying to show you that
+it's your duty to yourself--and to me--and to people who can know how to
+profit by your teaching and your example, not to give way as you're
+doing, simply because a wornout old agnostic couldn't keep his hold on
+the truth. I don't know what your Rixonitism is for if it won't let you
+wait upon the divine will in such a thing, _too_. You're more
+conscientious than the worst kind of Congregationalist. And now for you
+to blame me"--
+
+"Emily, I don't blame _you_," said her husband. "I blame myself."
+
+"And you see that that's the same thing! You ought to thank me for
+saving your life; for it was just as if you were pouring your heart's
+blood into him, and I could see you getting more anæmic every day. Even
+now you're not half as well as when you got home! And yet I do believe
+that if you could bring old Hilbrook back into a world that he was sick
+and tired of, you'd give your own life to do it."
+
+
+XVII.
+
+There was reason and there was justice in what she said, though they
+were so chaotic in form, and Ewbert could not refuse to acquiesce.
+
+After all, he had done what he could, and he would not abandon himself
+to a useless remorse. He rather set himself to study the lesson of old
+Hilbrook's life, and in the funeral sermon that he preached he urged
+upon his hearers the necessity of keeping themselves alive through some
+relation to the undying frame of things, which they could do only by
+cherishing earthly ties; and when these were snapped in the removal of
+their objects, by attaching the broken threads through an effort of the
+will to yet other objects: the world could furnish these inexhaustibly.
+He touched delicately upon the peculiarities, the eccentricities, of the
+deceased, and he did cordial justice to his gentleness, his blameless,
+harmless life, his heroism on the battlefields of his country. He
+declared that he would not be the one to deny an inner piety, and
+certainly not a steadfast courage, in Hilbrook's acceptance of whatever
+his sincere doubts implied.
+
+The sermon apparently made a strong impression on all who heard it. Mrs.
+Ewbert was afraid that it was rather abstruse in certain passages, but
+she felt sure that all the university people would appreciate these. The
+university people, to testify their respect for their founder, had come
+in a body to the obsequies of his kinsman; and Mrs. Ewbert augured the
+best things for her husband's future usefulness from their presence.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGIC OF A VOICE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+There was a full moon, and Langbourne walked about the town, unable to
+come into the hotel and go to bed. The deep yards of the houses gave out
+the scent of syringas and June roses; the light of lamps came through
+the fragrant bushes from the open doors and windows, with the sound of
+playing and singing and bursts of young laughter. Where the houses stood
+near the street, he could see people lounging on the thresholds, and
+their heads silhouetted against the luminous interiors. Other houses,
+both those which stood further back and those that stood nearer, were
+dark and still, and to these he attributed the happiness of love in
+fruition, safe from unrest and longing.
+
+His own heart was tenderly oppressed, not with desire, but with the
+memory of desire. It was almost as if in his faded melancholy he were
+sorry for the disappointment of some one else.
+
+At last he turned and walked back through the streets of dwellings to
+the business centre of the town, where a gush of light came from the
+veranda of his hotel, and the druggist's window cast purple and yellow
+blurs out upon the footway. The other stores were shut, and he alone
+seemed to be abroad. The church clock struck ten as he mounted the steps
+of his hotel and dropped the remnant of his cigar over the side.
+
+He had slept badly on the train the night before, and he had promised
+himself to make up his lost sleep in the good conditions that seemed to
+offer themselves. But when he sat down in the hotel office he was more
+wakeful than he had been when he started out to walk himself drowsy.
+
+The clerk gave him the New York paper which had come by the evening
+train, and he thanked him, but remained musing in his chair. At times he
+thought he would light another cigar, but the hand that he carried to
+his breast pocket dropped nervelessly to his knee again, and he did not
+smoke. Through his memories of disappointment pierced a self-reproach
+which did not permit him the perfect self-complacency of regret; and yet
+he could not have been sure, if he had asked himself, that this pang did
+not heighten the luxury of his psychological experience.
+
+He rose and asked the clerk for a lamp, but he turned back from the
+stairs to inquire when there would be another New York mail. The clerk
+said there was a train from the south due at eleven-forty, but it seldom
+brought any mail; the principal mail was at seven. Langbourne thanked
+him, and came back again to beg the clerk to be careful and not have him
+called in the morning, for he wished to sleep. Then he went up to his
+room, where he opened his window to let in the night air. He heard a dog
+barking; a cow lowed; from a stable somewhere the soft thumping of the
+horses' feet came at intervals lullingly.
+
+
+II.
+
+Langbourne fell asleep so quickly that he was aware of no moment of
+waking after his head touched the fragrant pillow. He woke so much
+refreshed by his first sound, soft sleep that he thought it must be
+nearly morning. He got his watch into a ray of the moonlight and made
+out that it was only a little after midnight, and he perceived that it
+must have been the sound of low murmuring voices and broken laughter in
+the next room which had wakened him. But he was rather glad to have been
+roused to a sense of his absolute comfort, and he turned unresentfully
+to sleep again. All his heaviness of heart was gone; he felt curiously
+glad and young; he had somehow forgiven the wrong he had suffered and
+the wrong he had done. The subdued murmuring went on in the next room,
+and he kept himself awake to enjoy it for a while. Then he let himself
+go, and drifted away into gulfs of slumber, where, suddenly, he seemed
+to strike against something, and started up in bed.
+
+A laugh came from the next room. It was not muffled, as before, but
+frank and clear. It was woman's laughter, and Langbourne easily inferred
+girlhood as well as womanhood from it. His neighbors must have come by
+the late train, and they had probably begun to talk as soon as they got
+into their room. He imagined their having spoken low at first for fear
+of disturbing some one, and then, in their forgetfulness, or their
+belief that there was no one near, allowed themselves greater freedom.
+There were survivals of their earlier caution at times, when their
+voices sank so low as scarcely to be heard; then there was a break from
+it when they rose clearly distinguishable from each other. They were
+never so distinct that he could make out what was said; but each voice
+unmistakably conveyed character.
+
+Friendship between girls is never equal; they may equally love each
+other, but one must worship and one must suffer worship. Langbourne read
+the differing temperaments necessary to this relation in the differing
+voices. That which bore mastery was a low, thick murmur, coming from
+deep in the throat, and flowing out in a steady stream of indescribable
+coaxing and drolling. The owner of that voice had imagination and humor
+which could charm with absolute control her companion's lighter nature,
+as it betrayed itself in a gay tinkle of amusement and a succession of
+nervous whispers. Langbourne did not wonder at her subjection; with the
+first sounds of that rich, tender voice, he had fallen under its spell
+too; and he listened intensely, trying to make out some phrase, some
+word, some syllable. But the talk kept its sub-audible flow, and he had
+to content himself as he could with the sound of the voice.
+
+As he lay eavesdropping with all his might he tried to construct an
+image of the two girls from their voices. The one with the crystalline
+laugh was little and lithe, quick in movement, of a mobile face, with
+gray eyes and fair hair; the other was tall and pale, with full, blue
+eyes and a regular face, and lips that trembled with humor; very demure
+and yet very honest; very shy and yet very frank; there was something
+almost mannish in her essential honesty; there was nothing of feminine
+coquetry in her, though everything of feminine charm. She was a girl who
+looked like her father, Langbourne perceived with a flash of divination.
+She dressed simply in dark blue, and her hair was of a dark mahogany
+color. The smaller girl wore light gray checks or stripes, and the
+shades of silver.
+
+The talk began to be less continuous in the next room, from which there
+came the sound of sighs and yawns, and then of mingled laughter at
+these. Then the talk ran unbrokenly on for a while, and again dropped
+into laughs that recognized the drowse creeping upon the talkers.
+Suddenly it stopped altogether, and left Langbourne, as he felt,
+definitively awake for the rest of the night.
+
+He had received an impression which he could not fully analyze. With
+some inner sense he kept hearing that voice, low and deep, and rich with
+whimsical suggestion. Its owner must have a strange, complex nature,
+which would perpetually provoke and satisfy. Her companionship would be
+as easy and reasonable as a man's, while it had the charm of a woman's.
+At the moment it seemed to him that life without this companionship
+would be something poorer and thinner than he had yet known, and that he
+could not endure to forego it. Somehow he must manage to see the girl
+and make her acquaintance. He did not know how it could be contrived,
+but it could certainly be contrived, and he began to dramatize their
+meeting on these various terms. It was interesting and it was
+delightful, and it always came, in its safe impossibility, to his
+telling her that he loved her, and to her consenting to be his wife. He
+resolved to take no chance of losing her, but to remain awake, and
+somehow see her before she could leave the hotel in the morning. The
+resolution gave him calm; he felt that the affair so far was settled.
+
+Suddenly he started from his pillow; and again he heard that mellow
+laugh, warm and rich as the cooing of doves on sunlit eaves. The sun was
+shining through the crevices of his window-blinds; he looked at his
+watch; it was half-past eight. The sound of fluttering skirts and flying
+feet in the corridor shook his heart. A voice, the voice of the mellow
+laugh, called as if to some one on the stairs, "I must have put it in my
+bag. It doesn't matter, anyway."
+
+He hurried on his clothes, in the vain hope of finding his late
+neighbors at breakfast; but before he had finished dressing he heard
+wheels before the veranda below, and he saw the hotel barge drive away,
+as if to the station. There were two passengers in it; two women, whose
+faces were hidden by the fringe of the barge-roof, but whose slender
+figures showed themselves from their necks down. It seemed to him that
+one was tall and slight, and the other slight and little.
+
+
+III.
+
+He stopped in the hall, and then, tempted by his despair, he stepped
+within the open door of the next room and looked vaguely over it, with
+shame at being there. What was it that the girl had missed, and had come
+back to look for? Some trifle, no doubt, which she had not cared to
+lose, and yet had not wished to leave behind. He failed to find anything
+in the search, which he could not make very thorough, and he was going
+guiltily out when his eye fell upon an envelope, perversely fallen
+beside the door and almost indiscernible against the white paint, with
+the addressed surface inward.
+
+This must be the object of her search, and he could understand why she
+was not very anxious when he found it a circular from a nursery-man,
+containing nothing more valuable than a list of flowering shrubs. He
+satisfied himself that this was all without satisfying himself that he
+had quite a right to do so; and he stood abashed in the presence of the
+superscription on the envelope somewhat as if Miss Barbara F. Simpson,
+Upper Ashton Falls, N. H., were there to see him tampering with her
+correspondence. It was indelicate, and he felt that his whole behavior
+had been indelicate, from the moment her laugh had wakened him in the
+night till now, when he had invaded her room. He had no more doubt that
+she was the taller of the two girls than that this was her name on the
+envelope. He liked Barbara; and Simpson could be changed. He seemed to
+hear her soft throaty laugh in response to the suggestion, and with a
+leap of the heart he slipped the circular into his breast pocket.
+
+After breakfast he went to the hotel office, and stood leaning on the
+long counter and talking with the clerk till he could gather courage to
+look at the register, where he knew the names of these girls must be
+written. He asked where Upper Ashton Falls was, and whether it would be
+a pleasant place to spend a week.
+
+The clerk said that it was about thirty miles up the road, and was one
+of the nicest places in the mountains; Langbourne could not go to a
+nicer; and there was a very good little hotel. "Why," he said, "there
+were two ladies here overnight that just left for there, on the
+seven-forty. Odd you should ask about it."
+
+Langbourne owned that it was odd, and then he asked if the ladies lived
+at Upper Ashton Falls, or were merely summer folks.
+
+"Well, a little of both," said the clerk. "They're cousins, and they've
+got an aunt living there that they stay with. They used to go away
+winters,--teaching, I guess,--but this last year they stayed right
+through. Been down to Springfield, they said, and just stopped the night
+because the accommodation don't go any farther. Wake you up last night?
+I had to put 'em into the room next to yours, and girls usually talk."
+
+Langbourne answered that it would have taken a good deal of talking to
+wake him the night before, and then he lounged across to the time-table
+hanging on the wall, and began to look up the trains for Upper Ashton
+Falls.
+
+"If you want to go to the Falls," said the clerk, "there's a through
+train at four, with a drawing-room on it, that will get you there by
+five."
+
+"Oh, I fancy I was looking up the New York trains," Langbourne returned.
+He did not like these evasions, but in his consciousness of Miss Simpson
+he seemed unable to avoid them. The clerk went out on the veranda to
+talk with a farmer bringing supplies, and Langbourne ran to the
+register, and read there the names of Barbara F. Simpson and Juliet D.
+Bingham. It was Miss Simpson who had registered for both, since her name
+came first, and the entry was in a good, simple hand, which was like a
+man's in its firmness and clearness. He turned from the register decided
+to take the four-o'clock train for Upper Ashton Falls, and met a
+messenger with a telegram which he knew was for himself before the boy
+could ask his name. His partner had fallen suddenly sick; his recall was
+absolute, his vacation was at an end; nothing remained for him but to
+take the first train back to New York. He thought how little prescient
+he had been in his pretence that he was looking the New York trains up;
+but the need of one had come already, and apparently he should never
+have any use for a train to Upper Ashton Falls.
+
+
+IV.
+
+All the way back to New York Langbourne was oppressed by a sense of loss
+such as his old disappointment in love now seemed to him never to have
+inflicted. He found that his whole being had set toward the unseen owner
+of the voice which had charmed him, and it was like a stretching and
+tearing of the nerves to be going from her instead of going to her. He
+was as much under duress as if he were bound by a hypnotic spell. The
+voice continually sounded, not in his ears, which were filled with the
+noises of the train, as usual, but in the inmost of his spirit, where it
+was a low, cooing, coaxing murmur. He realized now how intensely he must
+have listened for it in the night, how every tone of it must have
+pervaded him and possessed him. He was in love with it, he was as
+entirely fascinated by it as if it were the girl's whole presence, her
+looks, her qualities. The remnant of the summer passed in the fret of
+business, which was doubly irksome through his feeling of injury in
+being kept from the girl whose personality he constructed from the sound
+of her voice, and set over his fancy in an absolute sovereignty. The
+image he had created of her remained a dim and blurred vision throughout
+the day, but by night it became distinct and compelling. One evening,
+late in the fall, he could endure the stress no longer, and he yielded
+to the temptation which had beset him from the first moment he renounced
+his purpose of returning in person the circular addressed to her as a
+means of her acquaintance. He wrote to her, and in terms as dignified as
+he could contrive, and as free from any ulterior import, he told her he
+had found it in the hotel hallway and had meant to send it to her at
+once, thinking it might be of some slight use to her. He had failed to
+do this, and now, having come upon it among some other papers, he sent
+it with an explanation which he hoped she would excuse him for troubling
+her with.
+
+This was not true, but he did not see how he could begin with her by
+saying that he had found the circular in her room, and had kept it by
+him ever since, looking at it every day, and leaving it where he could
+see it the last thing before he slept at night and the first thing after
+he woke in the morning. As to her reception of his story, he had to
+trust to his knowledge that she was, like himself, of country birth and
+breeding, and to his belief that she would not take alarm at his
+overture. He did not go much into the world and was little acquainted
+with its usages, yet he knew enough to suspect that a woman of the world
+would either ignore his letter, or would return a cold and snubbing
+expression of Miss Simpson's thanks for Mr. Stephen M. Langbourne's
+kindness.
+
+He had not only signed his name and given his address carefully in hopes
+of a reply, but he had enclosed the business card of his firm as a token
+of his responsibility. The partner in a wholesale stationery house ought
+to be an impressive figure in the imagination of a village girl; but it
+was some weeks before any answer came to Langbourne's letter. The reply
+began with an apology for the delay, and Langbourne perceived that he
+had gained rather than lost by the writer's hesitation; clearly she
+believed that she had put herself in the wrong, and that she owed him a
+certain reparation. For the rest, her letter was discreetly confined to
+an acknowledgment of the trouble he had taken.
+
+But this spare return was richly enough for Langbourne; it would have
+sufficed, if there had been nothing in the letter, that the handwriting
+proved Miss Simpson to have been the one who had made the entry of her
+name and her friend's in the hotel register. This was most important as
+one step in corroboration of the fact that he had rightly divined her;
+that the rest should come true was almost a logical necessity. Still, he
+was puzzled to contrive a pretext for writing again, and he remained
+without one for a fortnight. Then, in passing a seedsman's store which
+he used to pass every day without thinking, he one day suddenly
+perceived his opportunity. He went in and got a number of the catalogues
+and other advertisements, and addressed them then and there, in a
+wrapper the seedsman gave him, to Miss Barbara F. Simpson, Upper Ashton
+Falls, N. H.
+
+Now the response came with a promptness which at least testified of the
+lingering compunction of Miss Simpson. She asked if she were right in
+supposing the seedsman's catalogues and folders had come to her from
+Langbourne, and begged to know from him whether the seedsman in question
+was reliable: it was so difficult to get garden seeds that one could
+trust.
+
+The correspondence now established itself, and with one excuse or
+another it prospered throughout the winter. Langbourne was not only
+willing, he was most eager, to give her proof of his reliability; he
+spoke of stationers in Springfield and Greenfield to whom he was
+personally known; and he secretly hoped she would satisfy herself
+through friends in those places that he was an upright and trustworthy
+person.
+
+Miss Simpson wrote delightful letters, with that whimsical quality which
+had enchanted him in her voice. The coaxing and caressing was not there,
+and could not be expected to impart itself, unless in those refuges of
+deep feeling supposed to lurk between the lines. But he hoped to provoke
+it from these in time, and his own letters grew the more earnest the
+more ironical hers became. He wrote to her about a book he was reading,
+and when she said she had not seen it, he sent it her; in one of her
+letters she casually betrayed that she sang contralto in the choir, and
+then he sent her some new songs, which he had heard in the theatre, and
+which he had informed himself from a friend were contralto. He was
+always tending to an expression of the feeling which swayed him; but on
+her part there was no sentiment. Only in the fact that she was willing
+to continue this exchange of letters with a man personally unknown to
+her did she betray that romantic tradition which underlies all our young
+life, and in those unused to the world tempts to things blameless in
+themselves, but of the sort shunned by the worldlier wise. There was no
+great wisdom of any kind in Miss Simpson's letters; but Langbourne did
+not miss it; he was content with her mere words, as they related the
+little events of her simple daily life. These repeated themselves from
+the page in the tones of her voice and filled him with a passionate
+intoxication.
+
+Towards spring he had his photograph taken, for no reason that he could
+have given; but since it was done he sent one to his mother in Vermont,
+and then he wrote his name on another, and sent it to Miss Simpson in
+New Hampshire. He hoped, of course, that she would return a photograph
+of herself; but she merely acknowledged his with some dry playfulness.
+Then, after disappointing him so long that he ceased to expect anything,
+she enclosed a picture. The face was so far averted that Langbourne
+could get nothing but the curve of a longish cheek, the point of a nose,
+the segment of a crescent eyebrow. The girl said that as they should
+probably never meet, it was not necessary he should know her when he saw
+her; she explained that she was looking away because she had been
+attracted by something on the other side of the photograph gallery just
+at the moment the artist took the cap off the tube of his camera, and
+she could not turn back without breaking the plate.
+
+Langbourne replied that he was going up to Springfield on business the
+first week in May, and that he thought he might push on as far north as
+Upper Ashton Falls. To this there came no rejoinder whatever, but he did
+not lose courage. It was now the end of April, and he could bear to wait
+for a further verification of his ideal; the photograph had confirmed
+him in its evasive fashion at every point of his conjecture concerning
+her. It was the face he had imagined her having, or so he now imagined,
+and it was just such a long oval face as would go with the figure he
+attributed to her. She must have the healthy palor of skin which
+associates itself with masses of dark, mahogany-colored hair.
+
+
+V.
+
+It was so long since he had known a Northern spring that he had
+forgotten how much later the beginning of May was in New Hampshire; but
+as his train ran up from Springfield he realized the difference of the
+season from that which he had left in New York. The meadows were green
+only in the damp hollows; most of the trees were as bare as in
+midwinter; the willows in the swamplands hung out their catkins, and the
+white birches showed faint signs of returning life. In the woods were
+long drifts of snow, though he knew that in the brown leaves along their
+edges the pale pink flowers of the trailing arbutus were hiding their
+wet faces. A vernal mildness overhung the landscape. A blue haze filled
+the distances and veiled the hills; from the farm door-yards the smell
+of burning leaf-heaps and garden-stalks came through the window which he
+lifted to let in the dull, warm air. The sun shone down from a pale sky,
+in which the crows called to one another.
+
+By the time he arrived at Upper Ashton Falls the afternoon had waned so
+far towards evening that the first robins were singing their vespers
+from the leafless choirs of the maples before the hotel. He indulged the
+landlord in his natural supposition that he had come up to make a timely
+engagement for summer board; after supper he even asked what the price
+of such rooms as his would be by the week in July, while he tried to
+lead the talk round to the fact which he wished to learn.
+
+He did not know where Miss Simpson lived; and the courage with which he
+had set out on his adventure totally lapsed, leaving in its place an
+accusing sense of silliness. He was where he was without reason, and in
+defiance of the tacit unwillingness of the person he had come to see;
+she certainly had given him no invitation, she had given him no
+permission to come. For the moment, in his shame, it seemed to him that
+the only thing for him was to go back to New York by the first train in
+the morning. But what then would the girl think of him? Such an act must
+forever end the intercourse which had now become an essential part of
+his life. That voice which had haunted him so long, was he never to hear
+it again? Was he willing to renounce forever the hope of hearing it?
+
+He sat at his supper so long, nervelessly turning his doubts over in his
+mind, that the waitress came out of the kitchen and drove him from the
+table with her severe, impatient stare.
+
+He put on his hat, and with his overcoat on his arm he started out for a
+walk which was hopeless, but not so aimless as he feigned to himself.
+The air was lullingly warm still as he followed the long village street
+down the hill toward the river, where the lunge of rapids filled the
+dusk with a sort of humid uproar; then he turned and followed it back
+past the hotel as far as it led towards the open country. At the edge of
+the village he came to a large, old-fashioned house, which struck him as
+typical, with its outward swaying fence of the Greek border pattern, and
+its gate-posts topped by tilting urns of painted wood. The house itself
+stood rather far back from the street, and as he passed it he saw that
+it was approached by a pathway of brick which was bordered with box.
+Stalks of last year's hollyhocks and lilacs from garden beds on either
+hand lifted their sharp points, here and there broken and hanging down.
+It was curious how these details insisted through the twilight.
+
+He walked on until the wooden village pathway ended in the country mud,
+and then again he returned up upon his steps. As he reapproached the
+house he saw lights. A brighter radiance streamed from the hall door,
+which was apparently open, and a softer glow flushed the windows of one
+of the rooms that flanked the hall.
+
+As Langbourne came abreast of the gate the tinkle of a gay laugh rang
+out to him; then ensued a murmur of girls' voices in the room, and
+suddenly this stopped, and the voice that he knew, the voice that seemed
+never to have ceased to sound in his nerves and pulses, rose in singing
+words set to the Spanish air of _La Paloma_.
+
+It was one of the songs he had sent to Miss Simpson, but he did not need
+this material proof that it was she whom he now heard. There was no
+question of what he should do. All doubt, all fear, had vanished; he had
+again but one impulse, one desire, one purpose. But he lingered at the
+gate till the song ended, and then he unlatched it and started up the
+walk towards the door. It seemed to him a long way; he almost reeled as
+he went; he fumbled tremulously for the bell-pull beside the door, while
+a confusion of voices in the adjoining room--the voices which had waked
+him from his sleep, and which now sounded like voices in a dream--came
+out to him.
+
+The light from the lamp hanging in the hall shone full in his face, and
+the girl who came from that room beside it to answer his ring gave a
+sort of conscious jump at sight of him as he uncovered and stood
+bare-headed before her.
+
+
+VI.
+
+She must have recognized him from the photograph he had sent, and in
+stature and figure he recognized her as the ideal he had cherished,
+though her head was gilded with the light from the lamp, and he could
+not make out whether her hair was dark or fair; her face was, of course,
+a mere outline, without color or detail against the luminous interior.
+
+He managed to ask, dry-tongued and with a heart that beat into his
+throat, "Is Miss Simpson at home?" and the girl answered, with a high,
+gay tinkle:
+
+"Yes, she's at home. Won't you walk in?"
+
+He obeyed, but at the sound of her silvery voice his heart dropped back
+into his breast. He put his hat and coat on an entry chair, and prepared
+to follow her into the room she had come out of. The door stood ajar,
+and he said, as she put out her hand to push it open, "I am Mr.
+Langbourne."
+
+"Oh, yes," she answered in the same high, gay tinkle, which he fancied
+had now a note of laughter in it.
+
+An elderly woman of a ladylike village type was sitting with some
+needlework beside a little table, and a young girl turned on the
+piano-stool and rose to receive him. "My aunt, Mrs. Simpson, Mr.
+Langbourne," said the girl who introduced him to these presences, and
+she added, indicating the girl at the piano, "Miss Simpson."
+
+They all three bowed silently, and in the hush the sheet on the music
+frame slid from the piano with a sharp clash, and skated across the
+floor to Langbourne's feet. It was the song of _La Paloma_ which she had
+been singing; he picked it up, and she received it from him with a
+drooping head, and an effect of guilty embarrassment.
+
+She was short and of rather a full figure, though not too full. She was
+not plain, but she was by no means the sort of beauty who had lived in
+Langbourne's fancy for the year past. The oval of her face was squared;
+her nose was arched; she had a pretty, pouting mouth, and below it a
+deep dimple in her chin; her eyes were large and dark, and they had the
+questioning look of near-sighted eyes; her hair was brown. There was a
+humorous tremor in her lips, even with the prim stress she put upon them
+in saying, "Oh, thank you," in a thick whisper of the voice he knew.
+
+"And I," said the other girl, "am Juliet Bingham. Won't you sit down,
+Mr. Langbourne!" She pushed towards him the arm-chair before her, and he
+dropped into it. She took her place on the hair-cloth sofa, and Miss
+Simpson sank back upon the piano-stool with a painful provisionality,
+while her eyes sought Miss Bingham's in a sort of admiring terror.
+
+Miss Bingham was easily mistress of the situation; she did not try to
+bring Miss Simpson into the conversation, but she contrived to make Mrs.
+Simpson ask Langbourne when he arrived at Upper Ashton Falls; and she
+herself asked him when he had left New York, with many apposite
+suppositions concerning the difference in the season in the two
+latitudes. She presumed he was staying at the Falls House, and she said,
+always in her high, gay tinkle, that it was very pleasant there in the
+summer time. He did not know what he answered. He was aware that from
+time to time Miss Simpson said something in a frightened undertone. He
+did not know how long it was before Mrs. Simpson made an errand out of
+the room, in the abeyance which age practises before youthful society in
+the country; he did not know how much longer it was before Miss Bingham
+herself jumped actively up, and said, Now she would run over to Jenny's,
+if Mr. Langbourne would excuse her, and tell her that they could not go
+the next day.
+
+"It will do just as well in the morning," Miss Simpson pitifully
+entreated.
+
+"No, she's got to know to-night," said Miss Bingham, and she said she
+should find Mr. Langbourne there when she got back. He knew that in
+compliance with the simple village tradition he was being purposely left
+alone with Miss Simpson, as rightfully belonging to her. Miss Bingham
+betrayed no intentionality to him, but he caught a glimpse of mocking
+consciousness in the sidelong look she gave Miss Simpson as she went
+out; and if he had not known before he perceived then, in the vanishing
+oval of her cheek, the corner of her arched eyebrow, the point of her
+classic nose, the original of the photograph he had been treasuring as
+Miss Simpson's.
+
+
+VII.
+
+"It was _her_ picture I sent you," said Miss Simpson. She was the first
+to break the silence to which Miss Bingham abandoned them, but she did
+not speak till her friend had closed the outer door behind her and was
+tripping down the brick walk to the gate.
+
+"Yes," said Langbourne, in a dryness which he could not keep himself
+from using.
+
+The girl must have felt it, and her voice faltered a very little as she
+continued. "We--I--did it for fun. I meant to tell you. I--"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Langbourne. "I had no business to expect
+yours, or to send you mine." But he believed that he had; that his
+faithful infatuation had somehow earned him the right to do what he had
+done, and to hope for what he had not got; without formulating the fact,
+he divined that she believed it too. Between the man-soul and the
+woman-soul it can never go so far as it had gone in their case without
+giving them claims upon each other which neither can justly deny.
+
+She did not attempt to deny it. "I oughtn't to have done it, and I ought
+to have told you at once--the next letter--but I--you said you were
+coming, and I thought if you did come--I didn't really expect you to;
+and it was all a joke,--off-hand."
+
+It was very lame, but it was true, and it was piteous; yet Langbourne
+could not relent. His grievance was not with what she had done, but what
+she was; not what she really was, but what she materially was; her
+looks, her figure, her stature, her whole presence, so different from
+that which he had been carrying in his mind, and adoring for a year
+past.
+
+If it was ridiculous, and if with her sense of the ridiculous she felt
+it so, she was unable to take it lightly, or to make him take it
+lightly. At some faint gleams which passed over her face he felt himself
+invited to regard it less seriously; but he did not try, even
+provisionally, and they fell into a silence that neither seemed to have
+the power of breaking.
+
+It must be broken, however; something must be done; they could not sit
+there dumb forever. He looked at the sheet of music on the piano and
+said, "I see you have been trying that song. Do you like it?"
+
+"Yes, very much," and now for the first time she got her voice fairly
+above a whisper. She took the sheet down from the music-rest and looked
+at the picture of the lithographed title. It was of a tiled roof lifted
+among cypresses and laurels with pigeons strutting on it and sailing
+over it.
+
+"It was that picture," said Langbourne, since he must say something,
+"that I believe I got the song for; it made me think of the roof of an
+old Spanish house I saw in Southern California."
+
+"It must be nice, out there," said Miss Simpson, absently staring at the
+picture. She gathered herself together to add, pointlessly, "Juliet says
+she's going to Europe. Have you ever been?"
+
+"Not to Europe, no. I always feel as if I wanted to see my own country
+first. Is she going soon?"
+
+"Who? Juliet? Oh, no! She was just saying so. I don't believe she's
+engaged her passage yet."
+
+There was invitation to greater ease in this, and her voice began to
+have the tender, coaxing quality which had thrilled his heart when he
+heard it first. But the space of her variance from his ideal was between
+them, and the voice reached him faintly across it.
+
+The situation grew more and more painful for her, he could see, as well
+as for him. She too was feeling the anomaly of their having been
+intimates without being acquaintances. They necessarily met as strangers
+after the exchange of letters in which they had spoken with the
+confidence of friends.
+
+Langbourne cast about in his mind for some middle ground where they
+could come together without that effect of chance encounter which had
+reduced them to silence. He could not recur to any of the things they
+had written about; so far from wishing to do this, he had almost a
+terror of touching upon them by accident, and he felt that she shrank
+from them too, as if they involved a painful misunderstanding which
+could not be put straight.
+
+He asked questions about Upper Ashton Falls, but these led up to what
+she had said of it in her letters; he tried to speak of the winter in
+New York, and he remembered that every week he had given her a full
+account of his life there. They must go beyond their letters or they
+must fall far back of them.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+In their attempts to talk he was aware that she was seconding all his
+endeavors with intelligence, and with a humorous subtlety to which he
+could not pretend. She was suffering from their anomalous position as
+much as he, but she had the means of enjoying it while he had not. After
+half an hour of these defeats Mrs. Simpson operated a diversion by
+coming in with two glasses of lemonade on a tray and some slices of
+sponge-cake. She offered this refreshment first to Langbourne and then
+to her niece, and they both obediently took a glass, and put a slice of
+cake in the saucer which supported the glass. She said to each in turn,
+"Won't you take some lemonade? Won't you have a piece of cake?" and then
+went out with her empty tray, and the air of having fulfilled the duties
+of hospitality to her niece's company.
+
+"I don't know," said Miss Simpson, "but it's rather early in the season
+for _cold_ lemonade," and Langbourne, instead of laughing, as her tone
+invited him to do, said:
+
+"It's very good, I'm sure." But this seemed too stiffly ungracious, and
+he added: "What delicious sponge-cake! You never get this out of New
+England."
+
+"We have to do something to make up for our doughnuts," Miss Simpson
+suggested.
+
+"Oh, I like doughnuts too," said Langbourne. "But you can't get the
+right kind of doughnuts, either, in New York."
+
+They began to talk about cooking. He told her of the tamales which he
+had first tasted in San Francisco, and afterward found superabundantly
+in New York; they both made a great deal of the topic; Miss Simpson had
+never heard of tamales. He became solemnly animated in their exegesis,
+and she showed a resolute interest in them.
+
+They were in the midst of the forced discussion, when they heard a quick
+foot on the brick walk, but they had both fallen silent when Miss
+Bingham flounced elastically in upon them. She seemed to take in with a
+keen glance which swept them from her lively eyes that they had not been
+getting on, and she had the air of taking them at once in hand.
+
+"Well, it's all right about Jenny," she said to Miss Simpson. "She'd a
+good deal rather go day after to-morrow, anyway. What have you been
+talking about? I don't want to make you go over the same ground. Have
+you got through with the weather? The moon's out, and it feels more like
+the beginning of June than the last of April. I shut the front door
+against dor-bugs; I couldn't help it, though they won't be here for six
+weeks yet. Do you have dor-bugs in New York, Mr. Langbourne?"
+
+"I don't know. There may be some in the Park," he answered.
+
+"We think a great deal of our dor-bugs in Upper Ashton," said Miss
+Simpson demurely, looking down. "We don't know what we should do without
+them."
+
+"Lemonade!" exclaimed Miss Bingham, catching sight of the glasses and
+saucers on the corner of the piano, where Miss Simpson had allowed
+Langbourne to put them. "Has Aunt Elmira been giving you lemonade while
+I was gone? I will just see about that!" She whipped out of the room,
+and was back in a minute with a glass in one hand and a bit of
+sponge-cake between the fingers of the other. "She had kept some for me!
+Have you sung _Paloma_ for Mr. Langbourne, Barbara?"
+
+"No," said Barbara, "we hadn't got round to it, quite."
+
+"Oh, do!" Langbourne entreated, and he wondered that he had not asked
+her before; it would have saved them from each ether.
+
+"Wait a moment," cried Juliet Bingham, and she gulped the last draught
+of her lemonade upon a final morsel of sponge-cake, and was down at the
+piano while still dusting the crumbs from her fingers. She struck the
+refractory sheet of music flat upon the rack with her palm, and then
+tilted her head over her shoulder towards Langbourne, who had risen with
+some vague notion of turning the sheets of the song. "Do you sing?"
+
+"Oh, no. But I like--"
+
+"Are you ready, Bab?" she asked, ignoring him; and she dashed into the
+accompaniment.
+
+He sat down in his chair behind the two girls, where they could not see
+his face.
+
+Barbara began rather weakly, but her voice gathered strength, and then
+poured full volume to the end, where it weakened again. He knew that she
+was taking refuge from him in the song, and in the magic of her voice he
+escaped from the disappointment he had been suffering. He let his head
+drop and his eyelids fall, and in the rapture of her singing he got back
+what he had lost; or rather, he lost himself again to the illusion which
+had grown so precious to him.
+
+Juliet Bingham sounded the last note almost as she rose from the piano;
+Barbara passed her handkerchief over her forehead, as if to wipe the
+heat from it, but he believed that this was a ruse to dry her eyes in
+it: they shone with a moist brightness in the glimpse he caught of them.
+He had risen, and they all stood talking; or they all stood, and Juliet
+talked. She did not offer to sit down again, and after stiffly thanking
+them both, he said he must be going, and took leave of them. Juliet gave
+his hand a nervous grip; Barbara's touch was lax and cold; the parting
+with her was painful; he believed that she felt it so as much as he.
+
+The girls' voices followed him down the walk,--Juliet's treble, and
+Barbara's contralto,--and he believed that they were making talk
+purposely against a pressure of silence, and did not know what they were
+saying. It occurred to him that they had not asked how long he was
+staying, or invited him to come again: he had not thought to ask if he
+might; and in the intolerable inconclusiveness of this ending he
+faltered at the gate till the lights in the windows of the parlor
+disappeared, as if carried into the hall, and then they twinkled into
+darkness. From an upper entry window, which reddened with a momentary
+flush and was then darkened, a burst of mingled laughter came. The girls
+must have thought him beyond hearing, and he fancied the laugh a burst
+of hysterical feeling in them both.
+
+
+IX.
+
+Langbourne went to bed as soon as he reached his hotel because he found
+himself spent with the experience of the evening; but as he rested from
+his fatigue he grew wakeful, and he tried to get its whole measure and
+meaning before him. He had a methodical nature, with a necessity for
+order in his motions, and he now balanced one fact against another none
+the less passionately because the process was a series of careful
+recognitions. He perceived that the dream in which he had lived for the
+year past was not wholly an illusion. One of the girls whom he had heard
+but not seen was what he had divined her to be: a dominant influence, a
+control to which the other was passively obedient. He had not erred
+greatly as to the face or figure of the superior, but he had given all
+the advantages to the wrong person. The voice, indeed, the spell which
+had bound him, belonged with the one to whom he had attributed it, and
+the qualities with which it was inextricably blended in his fancy were
+hers; she was more like his ideal than the other, though he owned that
+the other was a charming girl too, and that in the thin treble of her
+voice lurked a potential fascination which might have made itself
+ascendently felt if he had happened to feel it first.
+
+There was a dangerous instant in which he had a perverse question of
+changing his allegiance. This passed into another moment, almost as
+perilous, of confusion through a primal instinct of the man's by which
+he yields a double or a divided allegiance and simultaneously worships
+at two shrines; in still another breath he was aware that this was
+madness.
+
+If he had been younger, he would have had no doubt as to his right in
+the circumstances. He had simply corresponded all winter with Miss
+Simpson; but though he had opened his heart freely and had invited her
+to the same confidence with him, he had not committed himself, and he
+had a right to drop the whole affair. She would have no right to
+complain; she had not committed herself either: they could both come off
+unscathed. But he was now thirty-five, and life had taught him something
+concerning the rights of others which he could not ignore. By seeking
+her confidence and by offering her his, he had given her a claim which
+was none the less binding because it was wholly tacit. There had been a
+time when he might have justified himself in dropping the affair; that
+was when she had failed to answer his letter; but he had come to see her
+in defiance of her silence, and now he could not withdraw, simply
+because he was disappointed, without cruelty, without atrocity.
+
+This was what the girl's wistful eyes said to him; this was the reproach
+of her trembling lips; this was the accusation of her dejected figure,
+as she drooped in vision before him on the piano-stool and passed her
+hand soundlessly over the key-board. He tried to own to her that he was
+disappointed, but he could not get the words out of his throat; and now
+in her presence, as it were, he was not sure that he was disappointed.
+
+
+X.
+
+He woke late, with a longing to put his two senses of her to the proof
+of day; and as early in the forenoon as he could hope to see her, he
+walked out towards her aunt's house. It was a mild, dull morning, with a
+misted sunshine; in the little crimson tassels of the budded maples
+overhead the bees were droning.
+
+The street was straight, and while he was yet a good way off he saw the
+gate open before the house, and a girl whom he recognized as Miss
+Bingham close it behind her. She then came down under the maples towards
+him, at first swiftly, and then more and more slowly, until finally she
+faltered to a stop. He quickened his own pace and came up to her with a
+"Good-morning" called to her and a lift of his hat. She returned neither
+salutation, and said, "I was coming to see you, Mr. Langbourne." Her
+voice was still a silver bell, but it was not gay, and her face was
+severely unsmiling.
+
+"To see _me_?" he returned. "Has anything--"
+
+"No, there's nothing the matter. But--I should like to talk with you."
+She held a little packet, tied with blue ribbon, in her intertwined
+hands, and she looked urgently at him.
+
+"I shall be very glad," Langbourne began, but she interrupted,--
+
+"Should you mind walking down to the Falls?"
+
+He understood that for some reason she did not wish him to pass the
+house, and he bowed. "Wherever you like. I hope Mrs. Simpson is well?
+And Miss Simpson?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly," said Miss Bingham, and they fenced with some questions
+and answers of no interest till they had walked back through the village
+to the Falls at the other end of it, where the saw in a mill was
+whirring through a long pine log, and the water, streaked with sawdust,
+was spreading over the rocks below and flowing away with a smooth
+swiftness. The ground near the mill was piled with fresh-sawed, fragrant
+lumber and strewn with logs.
+
+Miss Bingham found a comfortable place on one of the logs, and began
+abruptly:
+
+"You may think it's pretty strange, Mr. Langbourne, but I want to talk
+with you about Miss Simpson." She seemed to satisfy a duty to convention
+by saying Miss Simpson at the outset, and after that she called her
+friend Barbara. "I've brought you your letters to her," and she handed
+him the packet she had been holding. "Have you got hers with you?"
+
+"They are at the hotel," answered Langbourne.
+
+"Well, that's right, then. I thought perhaps you had brought them. You
+see," Miss Bingham continued, much more cold-bloodedly than Langbourne
+thought she need, "we talked it over last night, and it's too silly.
+That's the way Barbara feels herself. The fact is," she went on
+confidingly, and with the air of saying something that he would
+appreciate, "I always thought it was some _young_ man, and so did
+Barbara; or I don't believe she would ever have answered your first
+letter."
+
+Langbourne knew that he was not a young man in a young girl's sense; but
+no man likes to have it said that he is old. Besides, Miss Bingham
+herself was not apparently in her first quarter of a century, and
+probably Miss Simpson would not see the earliest twenties again. He
+thought none the worse of her for that; but he felt that he was not so
+unequally matched in time with her that she need take the attitude with
+regard to him which Miss Bingham indicated. He was not the least gray
+nor the least bald, and his tall figure had kept its youthful lines.
+
+Perhaps his face manifested something of his suppressed resentment. At
+any rate, Miss Bingham said apologetically, "I mean that if we had known
+it was a _serious_ person we should have acted differently. I oughtn't
+to have let her thank you for those seedsman's catalogues; but I thought
+it couldn't do any harm. And then, after your letters began to come, we
+didn't know just when to stop them. To tell you the truth, Mr.
+Langbourne, we got so interested we couldn't _bear_ to stop them. You
+wrote so much about your life in New York, that it was like a visit
+there every week; and it's pretty quiet at Upper Ashton in the winter
+time."
+
+She seemed to refer this fact to Langbourne for sympathetic
+appreciation; he said mechanically, "Yes."
+
+She resumed: "But when your picture came, I said it had _got_ to stop;
+and so we just sent back my picture,--or I don't know but what Barbara
+did it without asking me,--and we did suppose that would be the last of
+it; when you wrote back you were coming here, we didn't believe you
+really would unless we said so. That's all there is about it; and if
+there is anybody to blame, I am the one. Barbara would never have done
+it in the world if I hadn't put her up to it."
+
+In those words the implication that Miss Bingham had operated the whole
+affair finally unfolded itself. But distasteful as the fact was to
+Langbourne, and wounding as was the realization that he had been led on
+by this witness of his infatuation for the sake of the entertainment
+which his letters gave two girls in the dull winter of a mountain
+village, there was still greater pain, with an additional embarrassment,
+in the regret which the words conveyed. It appeared that it was not he
+who had done the wrong; he had suffered it, and so far from having to
+offer reparation to a young girl for having unwarrantably wrought her up
+expect of him a step from which he afterwards recoiled, he had the duty
+of forgiving her a trespass on his own invaded sensibilities. It was
+humiliating to his vanity; it inflicted a hurt to something better than
+his vanity. He began very uncomfortably: "It's all right, as far as I'm
+concerned. I had no business to address Miss Simpson in the first
+place--"
+
+"Well," Miss Bingham interrupted, "that's what I told Barbara; but she
+got to feeling badly about it; she thought if you had taken the trouble
+to send back the circular that she dropped in the hotel, she couldn't do
+less than acknowledge it, and she kept on so about it that I had to let
+her. That was the first false step."
+
+These words, while they showed Miss Simpson in a more amiable light, did
+not enable Langbourne to see Miss Bingham's merit so clearly. In the
+methodical and consecutive working of his emotions, he was aware that it
+was no longer a question of divided allegiance, and that there could
+never be any such question again. He perceived that Miss Bingham had not
+such a good figure as he had fancied the night before, and that her eyes
+were set rather too near together. While he dropped his own eyes, and
+stood trying to think what he should say in answer to her last speech,
+her high, sweet voice tinkled out in gay challenge, "How do, John?"
+
+He looked up and saw a square-set, brown-faced young man advancing
+towards them in his shirt-sleeves; he came deliberately, finding his way
+in and out among the logs, till he stood smiling down, through a heavy
+mustache and thick black lashes, into the face of the girl, as if she
+were some sort of joke. The sun struck into her face as she looked up at
+him, and made her frown with a knot between her brows that pulled her
+eyes still closer together, and she asked, with no direct reference to
+his shirt-sleeves,--"A'n't you forcing the season?"
+
+"Don't want to let the summer get the start of you," the young man
+generalized, and Miss Bingham said,--
+
+"Mr. Langbourne, Mr. Dickery." The young man silently shook hands with
+Langbourne, whom he took into the joke of Miss Bingham with another
+smile; and she went on: "Say, John, I wish you'd tell Jenny I don't see
+why we shouldn't go this afternoon, after all."
+
+"All right," said the young man.
+
+"I suppose you're coming too?" she suggested.
+
+"Hadn't heard of it," he returned.
+
+"Well, you have now. You've got to be ready at two o'clock."
+
+"That so?" the young fellow inquired. Then he walked away among the
+logs, as casually as he had arrived, and Miss Bingham rose and shook
+some bits of bark from her skirt.
+
+"Mr. Dickery is owner of the mills," she explained, and she explored
+Langbourne's face for an intelligence which she did not seem to find
+there. He thought, indifferently enough, that this young man had heard
+the two girls speak of him, and had satisfied a natural curiosity in
+coming to look him over; it did not occur to him that he had any
+especial relation to Miss Bingham.
+
+She walked up into the village with Langbourne, and he did not know
+whether he was to accompany her home or not. But she gave him no sign of
+dismissal till she put her hand upon her gate to pull it open without
+asking him to come in. Then he said, "I will send Miss Simpson's letters
+to her at once."
+
+"Oh, any time will do, Mr. Langbourne," she returned sweetly. Then, as
+if it had just occurred to her, she added, "We're going after
+May-flowers this afternoon. Wouldn't you like to come too?"
+
+"I don't know," he began, "whether I shall have the time--"
+
+"Why, you're not going away to-day!"
+
+"I expected--I--But if you don't think I shall be intruding--"
+
+"Why, _I_ should be delighted to have you. Mr. Dickery's going, and
+Jenny Dickery, and Barbara. I don't _believe_ it will rain."
+
+"Then, if I may," said Langbourne.
+
+"Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne!" she cried, and he started away. But he
+had gone only a few rods when he wheeled about and hurried back. The
+girl was going up the walk to the house, looking over her shoulder after
+him; at his hurried return she stopped and came down to the gate again.
+
+"Miss Bingham, I think--I think I had better not go."
+
+"Why, just as you feel about it, Mr. Langbourne," she assented.
+
+"I will bring the letters this evening, if you will let me--if Miss
+Simpson--if you will be at home."
+
+"We shall be very happy to see you, Mr. Langbourne," said the girl
+formally, and then he went back to his hotel.
+
+
+XI.
+
+Langbourne could not have told just why he had withdrawn his acceptance
+of Miss Bingham's invitation. If at the moment it was the effect of a
+quite reasonless panic, he decided later that it was because he wished
+to think. It could not be said, however, that he did think, unless
+thinking consists of a series of dramatic representations which the mind
+makes to itself from a given impulse, and which it is quite powerless to
+end. All the afternoon, which Langbourne spent in his room, his mind was
+the theatre of scenes with Miss Simpson, in which he perpetually evolved
+the motives governing him from the beginning, and triumphed out of his
+difficulties and embarrassments. Her voice, as it acquiesced in all, no
+longer related itself to that imaginary personality which had inhabited
+his fancy. That was gone irrevocably; and the voice belonged to the
+likeness of Barbara, and no other; from her similitude, little, quaint,
+with her hair of cloudy red and her large, dim-sighted eyes, it played
+upon the spiritual sense within him with the coaxing, drolling, mocking
+charm which he had felt from the first. It blessed him with intelligent
+and joyous forgiveness. But as he stood at her gate that evening this
+unmerited felicity fell from him. He now really heard her voice, through
+the open doorway, but perhaps because it was mixed with other
+voices--the treble of Miss Bingham, and the bass of a man who must be
+the Mr. Dickery he had seen at the saw mills--he turned and hurried back
+to his hotel, where he wrote a short letter saying that he had decided
+to take the express for New York that night. With an instinctive
+recognition of her authority in the affair, or with a cowardly shrinking
+from direct dealing with Barbara, he wrote to Juliet Bingham, and he
+addressed to her the packet of letters which he sent for Barbara.
+Superficially, he had done what he had no choice but to do. He had been
+asked to return her letters, and he had returned them, and brought the
+affair to an end.
+
+In his long ride to the city he assured himself in vain that he was
+doing right if he was not sure of his feelings towards the girl. It was
+quite because he was not sure of his feeling that he could not be sure
+he was not acting falsely and cruelly.
+
+The fear grew upon him through the summer, which he spent in the heat
+and stress of the town. In his work he could forget a little the despair
+in which he lived; but in a double consciousness like that of the
+hypochondriac, the girl whom it seemed to him he had deserted was
+visibly and audibly present with him. Her voice was always in his inner
+ear, and it visualized her looks and movements to his inner eye.
+
+Now he saw and understood at last that what his heart had more than once
+misgiven him might be the truth, and that though she had sent back his
+letters, and asked her own in return, it was not necessarily her wish
+that he should obey her request. It might very well have been an
+experiment of his feeling towards her, a mute quest of the impression
+she had made upon him, a test of his will and purpose, an overture to a
+clearer and truer understanding between them. This misgiving became a
+conviction from which he could not escape.
+
+He believed too late that he had made a mistake, that he had thrown away
+the supreme chance of his life. But was it too late? When he could bear
+it no longer, he began to deny that it was too late. He denied it even
+to the pathetic presence which haunted him, and in which the magic of
+her voice itself was merged at last, so that he saw her more than he
+heard her. He overbore her weak will with his stronger will, and set
+himself strenuously to protest to her real presence what he now always
+said to her phantom. When his partner came back from his vacation,
+Langbourne told him that he was going to take a day or two off.
+
+
+XII.
+
+He arrived at Upper Ashton Falls long enough before the early autumnal
+dusk to note that the crimson buds of the maples were now their crimson
+leaves, but he kept as close to the past as he could by not going to
+find Barbara before the hour of the evening when he had turned from her
+gate without daring to see her. It was a soft October evening now, as it
+was a soft May evening then; and there was a mystical hint of unity in
+the like feel of the dull, mild air. Again voices were coming out of the
+open doors and windows of the house, and they were the same voices that
+he had last heard there.
+
+He knocked, and after a moment of startled hush within Juliet Bingham
+came to the door. "Why, Mr. Langbourne!" she screamed.
+
+"I--I should like to come in, if you will let me," he gasped out.
+
+"Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne," she returned.
+
+He had not dwelt so long and so intently on the meeting at hand without
+considering how he should account for his coming, and he had formulated
+a confession of his motives. But he had never meant to make it to Juliet
+Bingham, and he now found himself unable to allege a word in explanation
+of his presence. He followed her into the parlor. Barbara silently gave
+him her hand and then remained passive in the background, where Dickery
+held aloof, smiling in what seemed his perpetual enjoyment of the Juliet
+Bingham joke. She at once put herself in authority over the situation;
+she made Langbourne let her have his hat; she seated him when and where
+she chose; she removed and put back the lampshades; she pulled up and
+pulled down the window-blinds; she shut the outer door because of the
+night air, and opened it because of the unseasonable warmth within. She
+excused Mrs. Simpson's absence on account of a headache, and asked him
+if he would not have a fan; when he refused it she made him take it, and
+while he sat helplessly dangling it from his hand, she asked him about
+the summer he had had, and whether he had passed it in New York. She was
+very intelligent about the heat in New York, and tactful in keeping the
+one-sided talk from falling. Barbara said nothing after a few faint
+attempts to take part in it, and Langbourne made briefer and briefer
+answers. His reticence seemed only to heighten Juliet Bingham's
+satisfaction, and she said, with a final supremacy, that she had been
+intending to go out with Mr. Dickery to a business meeting of the
+book-club, but they would be back before Langbourne could get away; she
+made him promise to wait for them. He did not know if Barbara looked any
+protest,--at least she spoke none,--and Juliet went out with Dickery.
+She turned at the door to bid Barbara say, if any one called, that she
+was at the book-club meeting. Then she disappeared, but reappeared and
+called, "See here, a minute, Bab!" and at the outer threshold she
+detained Barbara in vivid whisper, ending aloud, "Now you be sure to do
+both, Bab! Aunt Elmira will tell you where the things are." Again she
+vanished, and was gone long enough to have reached the gate and come
+back from it. She was renewing all her whispered and out-spoken charges
+when Dickery showed himself at her side, put his hand under her elbow,
+and wheeled her about, and while she called gayly over her shoulder to
+the others, "Did you ever?" walked her definitively out of the house.
+
+Langbourne did not suffer the silence which followed her going to
+possess him. What he had to do he must do quickly, and he said, "Miss
+Simpson, may I ask you one question?"
+
+"Why, if you won't expect me to answer it," she suggested quaintly.
+
+"You must do as you please about that. It has to come before I try to
+excuse myself for being here; it's the only excuse I can offer. It's
+this: Did you send Miss Bingham to get back your letters from me last
+spring?"
+
+"Why, of course!"
+
+"I mean, was it your idea?"
+
+"We thought it would be better."
+
+The evasion satisfied Langbourne, but he asked, "Had I given you some
+cause to distrust me at that time?"
+
+"Oh, no," she protested. "We got to talking it over, and--and we thought
+we had better."
+
+"Because I had come here without being asked?"
+
+"No, no; it wasn't that," the girl protested.
+
+"I know I oughtn't to have come. I know I oughtn't to have written to
+you in the beginning, but you had let me write, and I thought you would
+let me come. I tried always to be sincere with you; to make you feel
+that you could trust me. I believe that I am an honest man; I thought I
+was a better man for having known you through your letters. I couldn't
+tell you how much they had been to me. You seemed to think, because I
+lived in a large place, that I had a great many friends; but I have very
+few; I might say I hadn't any--such as I thought I had when I was
+writing to you. Most of the men I know belong to some sort of clubs; but
+I don't. I went to New York when I was feeling alone in the world,--it
+was from something that had happened to me partly through my own
+fault,--and I've never got over being alone there. I've never gone into
+society; I don't know what society is, and I suppose that's why I am
+acting differently from a society man now. The only change I ever had
+from business was reading at night: I've got a pretty good library.
+After I began to get your letters, I went out more--to the theatre, and
+lectures, and concerts, and all sorts of things--so that I could have
+something interesting to write about; I thought you'd get tired of
+always hearing about me. And your letters filled up my life, so that I
+didn't seem alone any more. I read them all hundreds of times; I should
+have said that I knew them by heart, if they had not been as fresh at
+last as they were at first. I seemed to hear you talking in them." He
+stopped as if withholding himself from what he had nearly said without
+intending, and resumed: "It's some comfort to know that you didn't want
+them back because you doubted me, or my good faith."
+
+"Oh, no, indeed, Mr. Langbourne," said Barbara compassionately.
+
+"Then why did you?"
+
+"I don't know. We--"
+
+"No; _not_ 'we.' _You!_"
+
+She did not answer for so long that he believed she resented his
+speaking so peremptorily and was not going to answer him at all. At last
+she said, "I thought you would rather give them back." She turned and
+looked at him, with the eyes which he knew saw his face dimly, but saw
+his thought clearly.
+
+"What made you think that?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Didn't you want to?"
+
+He knew that the fact which their words veiled was now the first thing
+in their mutual consciousness. He spoke the truth in saying, "No, I
+never wanted to," but this was only a mechanical truth, and he knew it.
+He had an impulse to put the burden of the situation on her, and press
+her to say why she thought he wished to do so; but his next emotion was
+shame for this impulse. A thousand times, in these reveries in which he
+had imagined meeting her, he had told her first of all how he had
+overheard her talking in the room next his own in the hotel, and of the
+power her voice had instantly and lastingly had upon him. But now, with
+a sense spiritualized by her presence, he perceived that this, if it was
+not unworthy, was secondary, and that the right to say it was not yet
+established. There was something that must come before this,--something
+that could alone justify him in any further step. If she could answer
+him first as he wished, then he might open his whole heart to her, at
+whatever cost; he was not greatly to blame, if he did not realize that
+the cost could not be wholly his, as he asked, remotely enough from her
+question, "After I wrote that I was coming up here, and you did not
+answer me, did you think I was coming?"
+
+She did not answer, and he felt that he had been seeking a mean
+advantage. He went on: "If you didn't expect it, if you never thought
+that I was coming, there's no need for me to tell you anything else."
+
+Her face turned towards him a very little, but not so much as even to
+get a sidelong glimpse of him; it was as if it were drawn by a magnetic
+attraction; and she said, "I didn't know but you would come."
+
+"Then I will tell you why I came--the only thing that gave me the right
+to come against your will, if it _was_ against it. I came to ask you to
+marry me. Will you?"
+
+She now turned and looked fully at him, though he was aware of being a
+mere blur in her near-sighted vision.
+
+"Do you mean to ask it now?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And have you wished to ask it ever since you first saw me?"
+
+He tried to say that he had, but he could not; he could only say, "I
+wish to ask it now more than ever."
+
+She shook her head slowly. "I'm not sure how you want me to answer you."
+
+"Not sure?"
+
+"No. I'm afraid I might disappoint you again."
+
+He could not make out whether she was laughing at him. He sat, not
+knowing what to say, and he blurted out, "Do you mean that you won't?"
+
+"I shouldn't want you to make another mistake."
+
+"I don't know what you"--he was going to say "mean," but he
+substituted--"wish. If you wish for more time, I can wait as long as you
+choose."
+
+"No, I might wish for time, if there was anything more. But if there's
+nothing else you have to tell me--then, no, I cannot marry you."
+
+Langbourne rose, feeling justly punished, somehow, but bewildered as
+much as humbled, and stood stupidly unable to go. "I don't know what you
+could expect me to say after you've refused me--"
+
+"Oh, I don't expect anything."
+
+"But there _is_ something I should like to tell you. I know that I
+behaved that night as if--as if I hadn't come to ask you--what I have; I
+don't blame you for not trusting me now. But it is no use to tell you
+what I intended if it is all over."
+
+He looked down into his hat, and she said in a low voice, "I think I
+ought to know. Won't you--sit down?"
+
+He sat down again. "Then I will tell you at the risk of--But there's
+nothing left to lose! You know how it is, when we think about a person
+or a place before we've seen them: we make some sort of picture of them,
+and expect them to be like it. I don't know how to say it; you do look
+more like what I thought than you did at first. I suppose I must seem a
+fool to say it; but I thought you were tall, and that you
+were--well!--rather masterful--"
+
+"Like Juliet Bingham?" she suggested, with a gleam in the eye next him.
+
+"Yes, like Juliet Bingham. It was your voice made me think--it was your
+voice that first made me want to see you, that made me write to you, in
+the beginning. I heard you talking that night in the hotel, where you
+left that circular; you were in the room next to mine; and I wanted to
+come right up here then; but I had to go back to New York, and so I
+wrote to you. When your letters came, I always seemed to hear you
+speaking in them."
+
+"And when you saw me you were disappointed. I knew it."
+
+"No; not disappointed--"
+
+"Why not? My voice didn't go with my looks; it belonged to a tall,
+strong-willed girl."
+
+"No," he protested. "As soon as I got away it was just as it always had
+been. I mean that your voice and your looks went together again."
+
+"As soon as you got away?" the girl questioned.
+
+"I mean--What do you care for it, anyway!" he cried, in self-scornful
+exasperation.
+
+"I know," she said thoughtfully, "that my voice isn't like me; I'm not
+good enough for it. It ought to be Juliet Bingham's--"
+
+"No, no!" he interrupted, with a sort of disgust that seemed not to
+displease her, "I can't imagine it!"
+
+"But we can't any of us have everything, and she's got enough as it is.
+She's a head higher than I am, and she wants to have her way ten times
+as bad."
+
+"I didn't mean that," Langbourne began. "I--but you must think me enough
+of a simpleton already."
+
+"Oh, no, not near," she declared. "I'm a good deal of a simpleton myself
+at times."
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said desperately; "I love you."
+
+"Ah, that belongs to the time when you thought I looked differently."
+
+"I don't want you to look differently. I--"
+
+"You can't expect me to believe that now. It will take time for me to do
+that."
+
+"I will give you time," he said, so simply that she smiled.
+
+"If it was my voice you cared for I should have to live up to it,
+somehow, before you cared for me. I'm not certain that I ever could. And
+if I couldn't? You see, don't you?"
+
+"I see that I was a fool to tell you what I have," he so far asserted
+himself. "But I thought I ought to be honest."
+
+"Oh, you've been _honest_!" she said.
+
+"You have a right to think that I am a flighty, romantic person," he
+resumed, "and I don't blame you. But if I could explain, it has been a
+very real experience to me. It was your nature that I cared for in your
+voice. I can't tell you just how it was; it seemed to me that unless I
+could hear it again, and always, my life would not be worth much. This
+was something deeper and better than I could make you understand. It
+wasn't merely a fancy; I do not want you to believe that."
+
+"I don't know whether fancies are such very bad things. I've had some of
+my own," Barbara suggested.
+
+He sat still with his hat between his hands, as if he could not find a
+chance of dismissing himself, and she remained looking down at her skirt
+where it tented itself over the toe of her shoe. The tall clock in the
+hall ticked second after second. It counted thirty of them at least
+before he spoke, after a preliminary noise in his throat.
+
+"There is one thing I should like to ask: If you had cared for me, would
+you have been offended at my having thought you looked differently?"
+
+She took time to consider this. "I might have been vexed, or hurt, I
+suppose, but I don't see how I could really have been offended."
+
+"Then I understand," he began, in one of his inductive emotions; but she
+rose nervously, as if she could not sit still, and went to the piano.
+The Spanish song he had given her was lying open upon it, and she struck
+some of the chords absently, and then let her fingers rest on the keys.
+
+"Miss Simpson," he said, coming stiffly forward, "I should like to hear
+you sing that song once more before I--Won't you sing it?"
+
+"Why, yes," she said, and she slipped laterally into the piano-seat.
+
+At the end of the first stanza he gave a long sigh, and then he was
+silent to the close.
+
+As she sounded the last notes of the accompaniment Juliet Bingham burst
+into the room with somehow the effect to Langbourne of having lain in
+wait outside for that moment.
+
+"Oh, I just _knew_ it!" she shouted, running upon them. "I bet John
+anything! Oh, I'm so happy it's come out all right; and now I'm going to
+have the first--"
+
+She lifted her arms as if to put them round his neck; he stood dazed,
+and Barbara rose from the piano-stool and confronted her with nothing
+less than horror in her face.
+
+Juliet Bingham was beginning again, "Why, haven't you--"
+
+"_No!_" cried Barbara. "I forgot all about what you said! I just
+happened to sing it because he asked me," and she ran from the room.
+
+"Well, if I ever!" said Juliet Bingham, following her with astonished
+eyes. Then she turned to Langbourne. "It's perfectly ridiculous, and I
+don't see how I can ever explain it. I don't think Barbara has shown a
+great deal of tact," and Juliet Bingham was evidently prepared to make
+up the defect by a diplomacy which she enjoyed. "I don't know where to
+begin exactly; but you must certainly excuse my--manner, when I came
+in."
+
+"Oh, certainly," said Langbourne in polite mystification.
+
+"It was all through a misunderstanding that I don't think _I_ was to
+blame for, to say the least; but I can't explain it without making
+Barbara appear perfectly--Mr. Langbourne, _will_ you tell whether you
+are engaged?"
+
+"No! Miss Simpson has declined my offer," he answered.
+
+"Oh, then it's all right," said Juliet Bingham, but Langbourne looked as
+if he did not see why she should say that. "Then I can understand; I see
+the whole thing now; and I didn't want to make _another_ mistake.
+Ah--won't you--sit down?"
+
+"Thank you. I believe I will go."
+
+"But you have a right to know--"
+
+"Would my knowing alter the main facts?" he asked dryly.
+
+"Well, no, I can't say it would," Juliet Bingham replied with an air of
+candor. "And, as you _say_, perhaps it's just as well," she added with
+an air of relief.
+
+Langbourne had not said it, but he acquiesced with a faint sigh, and
+absently took the hand of farewell which Juliet Bingham gave him. "I
+know Barbara will be very sorry not to see you; but I guess it's
+better."
+
+In spite of the supremacy which the turn of affairs had given her,
+Juliet Bingham looked far from satisfied, and she let Langbourne go with
+a sense of inconclusiveness which showed in the parting inclination
+towards him; she kept the effect of this after he turned from her.
+
+He crept light-headedly down the brick walk with a feeling that the
+darkness was not half thick enough, though it was so thick that it hid
+from him a figure that leaned upon the gate and held it shut, as if
+forcibly to interrupt his going.
+
+"Mr. Langbourne," said the voice of this figure, which, though so
+unnaturally strained, he knew for Barbara's voice, "you have got to
+_know_! I'm ashamed to tell you, but I should be more ashamed not to,
+after what's happened. Juliet made me promise when she went out to the
+book-club meeting that if I--if you--if it turned out as _you_ wanted, I
+would sing that song as a sign--It was just a joke--like my sending her
+picture. It was my mistake and I am sorry, and I beg your pardon--I--"
+
+She stopped with a quick catch in her breath, and the darkness round
+them seemed to become luminous with the light of hope that broke upon
+him within.
+
+"But if there really was no mistake," he began. He could not get
+further.
+
+She did not answer, and for the first time her silence was sweeter than
+her voice. He lifted her tip-toe in his embrace, but he did not wish her
+taller; her yielding spirit lost itself in his own, and he did not
+regret the absence of the strong will which he had once imagined hers.
+
+
+
+
+A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+The sunset struck its hard red light through the fringe of leafless
+trees to the westward, and gave their outlines that black definition
+which a French school of landscape saw a few years ago, and now seems to
+see no longer. In the whole scene there was the pathetic repose which we
+feel in some dying day of the dying year, and a sort of impersonal
+melancholy weighed me down as I dragged myself through the woods toward
+that dreary November sunset.
+
+Presently I came in sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because
+of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the
+cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its
+space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late
+as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I
+had supposed from the crimson glare in the west. I threw myself down on
+one of the grassy gradines of the amphitheatre, and comforted myself
+with the antiquity of the work, which was so great as to involve its
+origin in a somewhat impassioned question among the local authorities.
+Whether it was a Norse work, a temple for the celebration of the
+earliest Christian, or the latest heathen, rites among the first
+discoverers of New England, or whether it was a cockpit where the
+English officers who were billeted in the old tavern near by fought
+their mains at the time of our Revolution, it had the charm of a ruin,
+and appealed to the fancy with whatever potency belongs to the
+mouldering monuments of the past. The hands that shaped it were all
+dust, and there was no record of the minds that willed it to prove that
+it was a hundred, or that it was a thousand, years old. There were young
+oaks and pines growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all
+sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to
+the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water
+some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror
+their tracery in its steely surface. But of the life that the thing
+inarticulately recorded, there was not the slightest impulse left.
+
+I began to think how everything ends at last. Love ends, sorrow ends,
+and to our mortal sense everything that is mortal ends, whether that
+which is spiritual has a perpetual effect beyond these eyes or not. The
+very name of things passes with the things themselves, and
+
+    "Glory is like a circle in the water,
+     Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
+     Till by broad spreading, it disperse to naught."
+
+But if fame ended, did not infamy end, too? If glory, why not shame?
+What was it, I mused, that made an evil deed so much more memorable than
+a good one? Why should a crime have so much longer lodgment in our
+minds, and be of consequences so much more lasting than the sort of
+action which is the opposite of a crime, but has no precise name with
+us? Was it because the want of positive quality which left it nameless,
+characterized its effects with a kind of essential debility? Was evil
+then a greater force than good in the moral world? I tried to recall
+personalities, virtuous and vicious, and I found a fatal want of
+distinctness in the return of those I classed as virtuous, and a lurid
+vividness in those I classed as vicious. Images, knowledges, concepts,
+zigzagged through my brain, as they do when we are thinking, or believe
+we are thinking; perhaps there is no such thing as we call thinking,
+except when we are talking. I did not hold myself responsible in this
+will-less revery for the question which asked itself, Whether, then,
+evil and not good was the lasting principle, and whether that which
+should remain recognizable to all eternity was not the good effect but
+the evil effect?
+
+Something broke the perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite
+shore. A fish had leaped at some unseasonable insect on the surface, or
+one of the overhanging trees had dropped a dead twig upon it, and in the
+lazy doubt which it might be, I lay and watched the ever-widening circle
+fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it
+weakened to nothing in the eye, and, so far as the senses were
+concerned, actually ceased to be. The want of visible agency in it made
+me feel it all the more a providential illustration; and because the
+thing itself was so pretty, and because it was so apt as a case in
+point, I pleased myself a great deal with it. Suddenly it repeated
+itself; but this time I grew a little impatient of it, before the circle
+died out in the wider circle of the pool. I said whimsically to myself
+that this was rubbing it in; that I was convinced already, and needed no
+further proof; and at the same moment the thing happened a third time.
+Then I saw that there was a man standing at the top of the amphitheatre
+just across from me, who was throwing stones into the water. He cast a
+fourth pebble into the centre of the pool, and then a fifth and a sixth;
+I began to wonder what he was throwing at; I thought it too childish for
+him to be amusing himself with the circle that dispersed itself to
+naught, after it had done so several times already. I was sure that he
+saw something in the pool, and was trying to hit it, or frighten it. His
+figure showed black against the sunset light, and I could not make it
+out very well, but it held itself something like that of a workman, and
+yet with a difference, with an effect as of some sort of discipline; and
+I thought of an ex-recruit, returning to civil life, after serving his
+five years in the army; though I do not know why I should have gone so
+far afield for this notion; I certainly had never seen an ex-recruit,
+and I did not really know how one would look. I rose up, and we both
+stood still, as if he were abashed in his sport by my presence. The man
+made a little cast forward with his hand, and I heard the rattle as of
+pebbles dropped among the dead leaves.
+
+Then he called over to me, "Is that you, Mr. March?"
+
+"Yes," I called back, "what is wanted?"
+
+"Oh, nothing. I was just looking for you." He did not move, and after a
+moment I began to walk round the top of the amphitheatre toward him.
+When I came near him I saw that he had a clean-shaven face, and he wore
+a soft hat that seemed large for his close-cropped head; he had on a
+sack coat buttoned to the throat, and of one dark color with his loose
+trousers. I knew him now, but I did not know what terms to put my
+recognition in, and I faltered. "What do you want with me?" I asked, as
+if I did not know him.
+
+"I was at your house," he answered, "and they told me that you had
+walked out this way." He hesitated a moment, and then he added, rather
+huskily, "You don't know me!"
+
+"Yes," I said. "It is Tedham," and I held out my hand, with no definite
+intention, I believe, but merely because I did know him, and this was
+the usual form of greeting between acquaintances after a long
+separation, or even a short one, for that matter. But he seemed to find
+a special significance in my civility, and he took my hand and held it
+silently, while he was trying to speak. Evidently, he could not, and I
+said aimlessly, "What were you throwing at?"
+
+"Nothing. I saw you lying down, over there, and I wanted to attract your
+attention." He let my hand go, and looked at me apologetically.
+
+"Oh! was that all?" I said. "I thought you saw something in the water."
+
+"No," he answered, as if he felt the censure which I had not been able
+to keep out of my voice.
+
+
+II.
+
+I do not know why I should have chosen to take this simple fact as proof
+of an abiding want of straight-forwardness in Tedham's nature. I do not
+know why I should have expected him to change, or why I should have felt
+authorized at that moment to renew his punishment for it. I certainly
+had said and thought very often that he had been punished enough, and
+more than enough. In fact, his punishment, like all the other
+punishments that I have witnessed in life, seemed to me wholly out of
+proportion to the offence; it seemed monstrous, atrocious, and when I
+got to talking of it I used to become so warm that my wife would warn me
+people would think I wanted to do something like Tedham myself if I went
+on in that way about him. Yet here I was, at my very first encounter
+with the man, after his long expiation had ended, willing to add at
+least a little self-reproach to his suffering. I suppose, as nearly as I
+can analyse my mood, I must have been expecting, in spite of all reason
+and experience, that his anguish would have wrung that foible out of
+him, and left him strong where it had found him weak. Tragedy befalls
+the light and foolish as well as the wise and weighty natures, but it
+does not render them wise and weighty; I had often made this sage
+reflection, but I failed to apply it to the case before me now.
+
+After waiting a little for the displeasure to clear away from my face,
+Tedham smiled as if in humorous appreciation, and I perceived, as
+nothing else could have shown me so well, that he was still the old
+Tedham. There was an offer of propitiation in this smile, too, and I did
+not like that, either; but I was touched when I saw a certain hope die
+out of his eye at the failure of his appeal to me.
+
+"Who told you I was here?" I asked, more kindly. "Did you see Mrs.
+March?"
+
+"No, I think it must have been your children. I found them in front of
+your house, and I asked them for you, without going to the door."
+
+"Oh," I said, and I hid the disappointment I felt that he had not seen
+my wife; for I should have liked such a leading as her behavior toward
+him would have given me for my own. I was sure she would have known him
+at once, and would not have told him where to find me, if she had not
+wished me to be friendly with him.
+
+"I am glad to see you," I said, in the absence of this leading; and then
+I did not know what else to say. Tedham seemed to me to be looking very
+well, but I could not notify this fact to him, in the circumstances; he
+even looked very handsome; he had aged becomingly, and a clean-shaven
+face suited him as well as the full beard he used to wear; but I could
+speak of these things as little as of his apparent health. I did not
+feel that I ought even to ask him what I could do for him. I did not
+want to have anything to do with him, and, besides, I have always
+regarded this formula as tantamount to saying that you cannot, or will
+not, do anything for the man you employ it upon.
+
+The silence which ensued was awkward, but it was better than anything I
+could think of to say, and Tedham himself seemed to feel it so. He said,
+presently, "Thank you. I was sure you would not take my coming to you
+the wrong way. In fact I had no one else to come to--after I----" Tedham
+stopped, and then, "I don't know," he went on, "whether you've kept run
+of me; I don't suppose you have; I got out to-day at noon."
+
+I could not say anything to that, either; there were very few openings
+for me, it appeared, in the conversation, which remained one-sided as
+before.
+
+"I went to the cemetery," he continued. "I wanted to realize that those
+who had died were dead, it was all one thing as long as I was in there;
+everybody was dead; and then I came on to your house."
+
+The house he meant was a place I had taken for the summer a little out
+of town, so that I could run in to business every day, and yet have my
+mornings and evenings in the country; the fall had been so mild that we
+were still eking out the summer there.
+
+"How did you know where I was staying?" I asked, with a willingness to
+make any occasion serve for saying something.
+
+Tedham hesitated. "Well, I stopped at the office in Boston on my way
+out, and inquired. I was sure nobody would know me there." He said this
+apologetically, as if he had been taking a liberty, and explained: "I
+wanted to see you very much, and I was afraid that if I let the day go
+by I should miss you somehow."
+
+"Oh, all right," I said.
+
+We had remained standing at the point where I had gone round to meet
+him, and it seemed, in the awkward silence that now followed, as if I
+were rooted there. I would very willingly have said something leading,
+for my own sake, if not for his, but I had nothing in mind but that I
+had better keep there, and so I waited for him to speak. I believed he
+was beating about the bush in his own thoughts, to find some indirect or
+sinuous way of getting at what he wanted to know, and that it was only
+because he failed that he asked bluntly, "March, do you know where my
+daughter is?"
+
+"No, Tedham, I don't," I said, and I was glad that I could say it both
+with honesty and with compassion. I was truly sorry for the man; in a
+way, I did pity him; at the same time I did not wish to be mixed up in
+his affairs; in washing my hands of them, I preferred that there should
+be no stain of falsehood left on them.
+
+"Where is my sister-in-law?" he asked next, and now at least I could not
+censure him for indirection.
+
+"I haven't met her for several years," I answered. "I couldn't say from
+my own knowledge where she was."
+
+"But you haven't heard of her leaving Somerville?"
+
+"No, I haven't."
+
+"Do you ever meet her husband?"
+
+"Yes, sometimes, on the street; but I think not lately; we don't often
+meet."
+
+"The last time you saw _her_, did she speak of me?"
+
+"I don't know--I believe--yes. It was a good many years ago."
+
+"Was she changed toward me at all?"
+
+This was a hard question to answer, but I thought I had better answer it
+with the exact truth. "No, she seemed to feel just the same as ever
+about it."
+
+I do not believe Tedham cared for this, after all, though he made a show
+of having to collect himself before he went on. "Then you think my
+daughter is with her?"
+
+"I didn't say that. I don't know anything about it."
+
+"March," he urged, "don't _you_ think I have a right to see my
+daughter?"
+
+"That's something I can't enter into, Tedham."
+
+"Good God!" said the man. "If you were in my place, wouldn't you want to
+see her? You know how fond I used to be of her; and she is all that I
+have got left in the world."
+
+I did indeed remember Tedham's affection for his daughter, whom I
+remembered as in short frocks when I last saw them together. It was
+before my own door in town. Tedham had driven up in a smart buggy behind
+a slim sorrel, and I came out, at a sign he made me through the
+bow-window with his whip, and saw the little maid on the seat there
+beside him. They were both very well dressed, though still in mourning
+for the child's mother, and the whole turnout was handsomely set up.
+Tedham was then about thirty-five, and the child looked about nine. The
+color of her hair was the color of his fine brown beard, which had as
+yet no trace of gray in it; but the light in her eyes was another light,
+and her smile, which was of the same shape as his, was of another
+quality, as she leaned across him and gave me her pretty little gloved
+hand with a gay laugh. "I should think you would be afraid of such a
+fiery sorrel dragon as that," I said, in recognition of the colt's
+lifting and twitching with impatience as we talked.
+
+"Oh, I'm not afraid with papa!" she said, and she laughed again as he
+took her hand in one of his and covered it out of sight.
+
+I recalled, now, looking at him there in the twilight of the woods, how
+happy they had both seemed that sunny afternoon in the city square, as
+they flashed away from my door and glanced back at me and smiled
+together. I went into the house and said to my wife with a formulation
+of the case which pleased me, "If there is anything in the world that
+Tedham likes better than to ride after a good horse, it is to ride after
+a good horse with that little girl of his." "Yes," said my wife, "but a
+good horse means a good deal of money; even when a little girl goes with
+it." "That is so," I assented, "but Tedham has made a lot lately in real
+estate, they say, and I don't know what better he could do with his
+money; or, I don't believe _he_ does." We said no more, but we both
+felt, with the ardor of young parents, that it was a great virtue, a
+saving virtue, in Tedham to love his little girl so much; I was
+afterward not always sure that it was. Still, when Tedham appealed to me
+now in the name of his love for her, he moved my heart, if not my
+reason, in his favor; those old superstitions persist.
+
+"Why, of course, you want to see her. But I couldn't tell you where she
+is."
+
+"You could find out for me."
+
+"I don't see how," I said; but I did see how, and I knew as well as he
+what his next approach would be. I felt strong against it, however, and
+I did not perceive the necessity of being short with him in a matter not
+involving my own security or comfort.
+
+"I could find out where Hasketh is," he said, naming the husband of his
+sister-in-law; "but it would be of no use for me to go there. They
+wouldn't see me." He put this like a question, but I chose to let it be
+its own answer, and he went on. "There is no one that I can ask to act
+for me in the matter but you, and I ask _you_, March, to go to my
+sister-in-law for me."
+
+I shook my head. "That I can't do, Tedham."
+
+"Ah!" he urged, "what harm could it do you?"
+
+"Look here, Tedham!" I said. "I don't know why you feel authorized to
+come to me at all. It is useless your saying that there is no one else.
+You know very well that the authorities, some of them--the
+chaplain--would go and see Mrs. Hasketh for you. He could have a great
+deal more influence with her than any one else could, if he felt like
+saying a good word for you. As far as I am concerned, you have expiated
+your offence fully; but I should think you yourself would see that you
+ought not to come to me with this request; or you ought to come to me
+last of all men."
+
+"It is just because of that part of my offence which concerned you that
+I come to you. I knew how generous you were, and after you told me that
+you had no resentment--I acknowledge that it is indelicate, if you
+choose to look at it in that light, but a man like me can't afford to
+let delicacy stand in his way. I don't want to flatter you, or get you
+to do this thing for me on false pretences. But I thought that if you
+went to Mrs. Hasketh for me, she would remember that you had overlooked
+something, and she would be more disposed to--to--be considerate."
+
+"I can't do it, Tedham," I returned. "It would be of no use. Besides, I
+don't like the errand. I'm not sure that I have any business to
+interfere. I am not sure that you have any right to disturb the shape
+that their lives have settled into. I'm sorry for you, I pity you with
+all my heart. But there are others to be considered as well as you.
+And--simply, I can't."
+
+"How do you know," he entreated, "that my daughter wouldn't be as glad
+to see me as I to see her?"
+
+"I don't know it. I don't know anything about it. That's the reason I
+can't have anything to do with it. I can't justify myself in meddling
+with what doesn't concern me, and in what I'm not sure but I should do
+more harm than good. I must say good-night. It's getting late, and they
+will be anxious about me at home." My heart smote me as I spoke the last
+word, which seemed a cruel recognition of Tedham's homelessness. But I
+held out my hand to him for parting, and braced myself against my inward
+weakness.
+
+He might well have failed to see my hand. At any rate he did not take
+it. He turned and started to walk out of the woods by my side. We came
+presently to some open fields. Beyond them was the road, and after we
+had climbed the first wall, and found ourselves in a somewhat lighter
+place, he began to speak again.
+
+"I thought," he said, "that if you had forgiven me, I could take it as a
+sign that I had suffered enough to satisfy everybody."
+
+"We needn't dwell upon my share in the matter, Tedham," I answered, as
+kindly as I could. "That was entirely my own affair."
+
+"You can't think," he pursued, "how much your letter was to me. It came
+when I was in perfect despair--in those awful first days when it seemed
+as if I could _not_ bear it, and yet death itself would be no relief.
+Oh, they don't _know_ how much we suffer! If they did, they would
+forgive us anything, everything! Your letter was the first gleam of hope
+I had. I don't know how you came to write it!"
+
+"Why, of course, Tedham, I felt sorry for you--"
+
+"Oh, did you, did you?" He began to cry, and as we hurried along over
+the fields, he sobbed with the wrenching, rending sobs of a man. "I
+_knew_ you did, and I believe it was God himself that put it into your
+heart to write me that letter and take off that much of the blame from
+me. I said to myself that if I ever lived through it, I would try to
+tell you how much you had done for me. I don't blame you for refusing to
+do what I've asked you now. I can see how you may think it isn't best,
+and I thank you all the same for that letter. I've got it here." He took
+a letter out of his breast-pocket, and showed it to me. "It isn't the
+first time I've cried over it."
+
+I did not say anything, for my heart was in my throat, and we stumbled
+along in silence till we climbed the last wall, and stood on the
+sidewalk that skirted the suburban highway. There, under the
+street-lamp, we stopped a moment, and it was he who now offered me his
+hand for parting. I took it, and we said, together, "Well, good-by," and
+moved in different directions. I knew very well that I should turn back,
+and I had not gone a hundred feet away when I faced about. He was
+shambling off into the dusk, a most hapless figure. "Tedham!" I called
+after him.
+
+"Well?" he answered, and he halted instantly; he had evidently known
+what I would do as well as I had.
+
+We reapproached each other, and when we were again under the lamp I
+asked, a little awkwardly, "Are you in need of money, Tedham?"
+
+"I've got my ten years' wages with me," he said, with a lightness that
+must have come from his reviving hope in me. He drew his hand out of his
+pocket, and showed me the few dollars with which the State inhumanly
+turns society's outcasts back into the world again.
+
+"Oh, that won't do." I said. "You must let me lend you something."
+
+"Thank you," he said, with perfect simplicity. "But you know I can't
+tell when I shall be able to pay you."
+
+"Oh, that's all right." I gave him a ten-dollar note which I had loose
+in my pocket; it was one that my wife had told me to get changed at the
+grocery near the station, and I had walked off to the old temple, or the
+old cockpit, and forgotten about it.
+
+Tedham took the note, but he said, holding it in his hand, "I would a
+million times rather you would let me go home with you and see Mrs.
+March a moment."
+
+"I can't do that, Tedham," I answered, not unkindly, I hope. "I know
+what you mean, and I assure you that it wouldn't be the least use. It's
+because I feel so sure that my wife wouldn't like my going to see Mrs.
+Hasketh, that I--"
+
+"Yes, I know that," said Tedham. "That is the reason why I should like
+to see Mrs. March. I believe that if I could see her, I could convince
+her."
+
+"She wouldn't see you, my dear fellow," said I, strangely finding myself
+on these caressing terms with him. "She entirely approved of what I did,
+the letter I wrote you, but I don't believe she will ever feel just as I
+do about it. Women are different, you know."
+
+"Yes," he said, drawing a long, quivering breath.
+
+We stood there, helpless to part. He did not offer to leave me, and I
+could not find it in my heart to abandon him. After a most painful time,
+he drew another long breath, and asked, "Would you be willing to let me
+take the chances?"
+
+"Why, Tedham," I began, weakly; and upon that he began walking with me
+again.
+
+
+III.
+
+I went to my wife's room, after I reached the house, and faced her with
+considerable trepidation. I had to begin rather far off, but I certainly
+began in a way to lead up to the fact. "Isabel," I said, "Tedham is out
+at last." I had it on my tongue to say poor Tedham, but I suppressed the
+qualification in actual speech as likely to prove unavailing, or worse.
+
+"Is that what kept you!" she demanded, instantly. "Have you seen him?"
+
+"Yes," I admitted. I added, "Though I am afraid I was rather late,
+anyway."
+
+"I knew it was he, the moment you spoke," she said, rising on the lounge
+where she had been lying, and sitting up on it; with the book she had
+been reading shut on her thumb, she faced me across the table where her
+lamp stood. "I had a presentiment when the children said there was some
+strange-looking man here, asking for you, and that they had told him
+where to find you. I couldn't help feeling a little uneasy about it.
+What did he want with you, Basil?"
+
+"Well, he wanted to know where his daughter was."
+
+"You didn't tell him!"
+
+"I didn't know. Then he wanted me to go to Mrs. Hasketh and find out."
+
+"You didn't say you would?"
+
+"I said most decidedly I wouldn't," I returned, and I recalled my
+severity to Tedham in refusing his prayer with more satisfaction than it
+had given me at the time. "I told him that I had no business to
+interfere, and that I was not sure it would be right even for me to
+meddle with the course things had taken." I was aware of weakening my
+case as I went on; I had better left her with a dramatic conception of a
+downright and relentless refusal.
+
+"I don't see why you felt called upon to make excuses to him, Basil. His
+impudence in coming to you, of all men, is perfectly intolerable. I
+suppose it was that sentimental letter you wrote him."
+
+"You didn't think it sentimental at the time, my dear. You approved of
+it."
+
+"I didn't approve of it, Basil; but if you felt so strongly that you
+ought to do it, I felt that I ought to let you. I have never interfered
+with your sense of duty, and I never will. But I am glad that you didn't
+feel it your duty to that wretch to go and make more trouble on his
+account. He has made quite enough already; and it wasn't his fault that
+you were not tried and convicted in his place."
+
+"There wasn't the slightest danger of that--"
+
+"He tried to put the suspicion on you, and to bring the disgrace on your
+wife and children."
+
+"Well, my dear, we agreed to forget all that long ago. And I don't
+think--I never thought--that Tedham would have let the suspicion rest on
+me. He merely wanted to give it that turn, when the investigation began,
+so as to gain time to get out to Canada."
+
+My wife looked at me with a glance in which I saw tender affection
+dangerously near contempt. "You are a very forgiving man, Basil," she
+said, and I looked down sheepishly. "Well, at any rate, you have had the
+sense not to mix yourself up in his business. Did he pretend that he
+came straight to you, as soon as he got out? I suppose he wanted you to
+believe that he appealed to you before he tried anybody else."
+
+"Yes, he stopped at the Reciprocity office to ask for my address, and
+after he had visited the cemetery he came on out here. And, if you must
+know, I think Tedham is still the old Tedham. Put him behind a good
+horse, with a pocketful of some one else's money, in a handsome suit of
+clothes, and a game-and-fish dinner at Tafft's in immediate prospect,
+and you couldn't see any difference between the Tedham of to-day and the
+Tedham of ten years ago, except that the actual Tedham is clean-shaved
+and wears his hair cut rather close."
+
+"Basil!"
+
+"Why do you object to the fact? Did you imagine he had changed
+inwardly?"
+
+"He must have suffered."
+
+"But does suffering change people? I doubt it. Certain material
+accessories of Tedham's have changed. But why should that change Tedham?
+Of course, he has suffered, and he suffers still. He threw out some
+hints of what he had been through that would have broken my heart if I
+hadn't hardened it against him. And he loves his daughter still, and he
+wants to see her, poor wretch."
+
+"I suppose he does!" sighed my wife.
+
+"He would hardly take no for an answer from me, when I said I wouldn't
+go to the Haskeths for him; and when I fairly shook him off, he wanted
+me to ask you to go."
+
+"And what did you say?" she asked, not at all with the resentment I had
+counted upon equally with the possible pathos; you never can tell in the
+least how any woman will take anything, which is perhaps the reason why
+men do not trust women more.
+
+"I told him that it would not be the smallest use to ask you; that you
+had forgiven that old affair as well as I had, but that women were
+different, and that I knew you wouldn't even see him."
+
+"Well, Basil, I don't know what right you had to put me in that odious
+light," said my wife.
+
+"Why, good heavens! _Would_ you have seen him?"
+
+"I don't know whether I would or not. That's neither here nor there. I
+don't think it was very nice of you to shift the whole responsibility on
+me."
+
+"How did I do that? It seems to me that I kept the whole responsibility
+myself."
+
+"Yes, altogether too much. What became of him, then?"
+
+"We walked along a little farther, and then--"
+
+"Then, what? Where is the man?"
+
+"He's down in the parlor," I answered hardily, in the voice of some one
+else.
+
+My wife stood up from the lounge, and I rose, too, for whatever penalty
+she chose to inflict.
+
+"Well, Basil, that is what I call a very cowardly thing."
+
+"Yes, my dear, it is; I ought to have protected you against his appeal.
+But you needn't see him. It's practically the same as if he had not come
+here. I can send him away."
+
+"And you call that practically the same! No, _I_ am the one that will
+have to do the refusing now, and it is all off your shoulders. And you
+knew I was not feeling very well, either! Basil, how could you?"
+
+"I don't know. The abject creature drove me out of my senses. I suppose
+that if I had respected him more, or believed in him more, I should have
+had more strength to refuse him. But his limpness seemed to impart
+itself to me, and I--I gave way. But really you needn't see him, Isabel.
+I can tell him we have talked it over, and I concluded, entirely of
+myself, that it was best for you not to meet him, and--"
+
+"He would see through that in an instant. And if he is still the false
+creature you think he is, we owe him the truth, more than any other kind
+of man. You must understand _that_, Basil!"
+
+"Then you are going to--"
+
+"Don't speak to me, Basil, please," she said, and with an air of high
+offence she swept out of the room, and out to the landing of the stairs.
+There she hesitated a moment, and put her hand to her hair,
+mechanically, to feel if it were in order, and then she went on
+downstairs without further faltering. It was I who descended slowly, and
+with many misgivings.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in,
+and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked,
+with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like
+some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental
+suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom
+exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of
+the hospital. His eyes were deep in their sockets, and showed fine
+shadows in the overhead light, and I must say he looked very
+interesting.
+
+At the threshold my wife paused again; then she went forward, turning
+the gas up full as she passed under the chandelier, and gave him her
+hand, where he had risen from his chair.
+
+"I am glad to see you, Mr. Tedham," she said; and I should have found my
+astonishment overpowering, I dare say, if I had not felt that I was so
+completely in the hands of Providence, when she added, "Won't you come
+out to dinner with us? We were just going to sit down, when Mr. March
+came in. I never know when he will be back, when he starts off on these
+Saturday afternoon tramps of his."
+
+The children seemed considerably mystified at the appearance of our
+guest, but they had that superior interest in the dinner appropriate to
+their years, and we got through the ordeal, in which, I believe, I
+suffered more than any one else, much better than I could have hoped. I
+could not help noting in Tedham a certain strangeness to the use of a
+four-pronged fork, at first, but he rapidly overcame this; and if it had
+not been for a terrible moment when, after one of the courses, he began,
+mechanically, to scrape his plate with his knife, there would not have
+been anything very odd in his behavior, or anything to show that it was
+the first dinner in polite society that he had taken for so many years.
+
+The man's mind had apparently stiffened more than his body. It used to
+be very agile, if light, but it was not agile now. It worked slowly
+toward the topics which we found with difficulty, in our necessity of
+avoiding the only topics of real interest between us, and I could
+perceive that his original egotism, intensified by the long years in
+which he had only himself for company, now stood in the way of his
+entering into the matters brought forward, though he tried to do so.
+They were mostly in the form of reminiscences of this person and that
+whom we had known in common, and even in this shape they had to be very
+carefully handled so as not to develop anything leading. The thing that
+did most to relieve the embarrassment of the time was the sturdy hunger
+Tedham showed, and his delight in the cooking; I suppose that I cannot
+make others feel the pathos I found in this.
+
+After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with
+us in the parlor.
+
+My wife began at once to say, "Mr. March has told me why you wanted to
+see me, Mr. Tedham."
+
+"Yes," he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure
+his cause.
+
+"I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs.
+Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not
+seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me."
+
+Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily,
+"Won't you try?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, most unexpectedly to me, "I will try to see her.
+But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your
+daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come
+from you, and for you."
+
+"I thought," Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, "that
+perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me."
+
+"No, I couldn't do that," my wife said.
+
+He went on as if he had not heard her: "If she did not know that the
+inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my
+daughter was with her."
+
+There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham's old insinuation, but
+coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something
+like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my
+surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his
+suggestion in the way I had thought she would.
+
+"No," she said, "that wouldn't do. She has kept account of the time, you
+may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your
+behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth."
+
+"I didn't know," he returned, "but you might evade the point, somehow.
+So much being at stake," he added, as if explaining.
+
+Still my wife was not severe with him. "I don't understand, quite," she
+said.
+
+"Being the turning-point in my life, I can't begin to do anything, to be
+anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don't know where to find
+myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should
+know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that."
+
+"But, of course, there is another point of view."
+
+"My daughter's?"
+
+"Mrs. Hasketh's."
+
+"I don't care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the
+child's sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time--the only
+thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to."
+
+He continued: "I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is
+no sense in the whole thing, if I haven't. They might as well have let
+me go in the beginning. Don't you think that ten years out of my life is
+enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a
+thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried
+to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is
+the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be
+rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could
+condone--"
+
+"Oh, you mustn't reason from us," my wife broke in. "We are very silly
+people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have
+got to reckon with the world at large."
+
+"I _have_ reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the
+reckoning. But why shouldn't my daughter look at this thing as you do?"
+
+Instead of answering, my wife asked, "When did you hear from her last?"
+
+Tedham took a few thin, worn letters from his breast-pocket "There is
+Mr. March's letter," he said, laying one on his knee. He handed my wife
+another.
+
+She read it, and asked, "May Mr. March see it?"
+
+Tedham nodded, and I took the little paper in turn. The letter was
+written in a child's stiff, awkward hand. It was hardly more than a
+piteous cry of despairing love. The address was Mrs. Hasketh's, in
+Somerville, and the date was about three months after Tedham's
+punishment began. "Is that the last you have heard from her?" I asked.
+
+Tedham nodded as he took the letter from me.
+
+"But surely you have heard something more about her in all this time?"
+my wife pursued.
+
+"Once from Mrs. Hasketh, to make me promise that I would leave the child
+to her altogether, and not write to her, or ask to see her. When I went
+to the cemetery to-day, I did not know but I should find her grave,
+too."
+
+"Well, it is cruel!" cried my wife. "I will go and see Mrs. Hasketh,
+but--you ought to feel yourself that it's hopeless."
+
+"Yes," he admitted. "There isn't much chance unless she should happen to
+think the same way you do: that I had suffered enough, and that it was
+time to stop punishing me."
+
+My wife looked compassionately at him, and she began with a sympathy
+that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, "If it
+were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your
+daughter were so situated that it would be--disadvantageous to her to
+have it known that you were her father?"
+
+"You mean that I have no right to mend my broken-up life--what there is
+left of it--by spoiling hers? I have said that to myself. But then, on
+the other hand, I have had to ask myself whether I had any right to keep
+her from choosing for herself about it. I sha'n't force myself on her. I
+expect to leave her free. But if the child cares for me, as she used to,
+hasn't that love--not mine for her, but hers for me--got some rights
+too?"
+
+His voice sank almost to a hush, and the last word was scarcely more
+than a breathing. "All I want is to know where she is, and to let her
+know that I am in the world, and where she can find me. I think she
+ought to have a chance to decide."
+
+"I am afraid Mrs. Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake,
+_not_ to have the chance," my wife sighed, and she turned her look from
+Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer.
+
+"The only way to find out is to ask her," I answered, non-committally,
+and rather more lightly than I felt about it. In fact, the turn the
+affair had taken interested me greatly. It involved that awful mystery
+of the ties by which, unless we are born of our fathers and mothers for
+nothing more than the animals are, we are bound to them in all the
+things of life, in duty and in love transcending every question of
+interest and happiness. The parents' duty to the children is obvious and
+plain, but the child's duty to its parents is something subtler and more
+spiritual. It is to be more delicately, more religiously, regarded. No
+one, without impiety, can meddle with it from the outside, or interfere
+in its fulfilment. This and much more I said to my wife when we came to
+talk the matter over after Tedham left us. Above all, I urged something
+that came to me so forcibly at the moment that I said I had always
+thought it, and perhaps I really believed that I had. "Why should we try
+to shield people from fate? Isn't that always wrong? One is fated to be
+born the child of a certain father, and one can no more escape the
+consequences of his father's misdeeds than the doer himself can. Perhaps
+the pain and the shame come from the wish and the attempt to do so, more
+than from the fact itself. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon
+the children. But the children are innocent of evil, and this visitation
+must be for their good, and will be, if they bear it willingly."
+
+"Well, don't try to be that sort of blessing to _your_ children, Basil,"
+said my wife, personalizing the case, as a woman must.
+
+After that we tried to account to each other for having consented to do
+what Tedham asked us. Perhaps we accused each other somewhat for doing
+it.
+
+"I didn't know, my dear, but you were going to ask him to come and stay
+with us," I said.
+
+"I did want to," she replied. "It seemed so forlorn, letting him go out
+into the night, and find a place for himself, when we could just as well
+have let him stay as not. Why shouldn't we have offered him a bed for
+the night, as we would any other acquaintance?"
+
+"Well, you must allow that the circumstances were peculiar!"
+
+"But if he was sentenced to pay a certain penalty, and has paid it, why,
+as he said, shouldn't we stop punishing him?"
+
+"I suppose we can't. There seems to be an instinctive demand for eternal
+perdition, for hell, in the human heart," I suggested.
+
+"Well, then, I believe that your instinct, Basil--"
+
+"Oh, _I_ don't claim it, exclusively!"
+
+"Is a survival of savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better.
+How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but all faded in--or out."
+
+"Yes, he affected me like an etching of himself from a wornout plate.
+Still, I'm afraid there's likeness enough left to make trouble, yet. I
+hope you realize what you have gone in for, Isabel?"
+
+She answered from the effort that I could see she was making, to brace
+herself already for the work before us:
+
+"Well, we must do this because we can't help doing it, and because,
+whatever happens, we had no right to refuse. You must come with me,
+Basil!"
+
+"I? To Mrs. Hasketh's?"
+
+"Certainly. I will do the talking, but I shall depend upon your moral
+support. We will go over to Somerville to-morrow afternoon. We had
+better not lose any time."
+
+"To-morrow is Sunday."
+
+"So much the better. They will be sure to be at home, if they're there
+at all, yet."
+
+She said they, but I knew that she did not expect poor old Hasketh
+really to count in the matter, any more than she expected me to do so.
+
+
+V.
+
+The Haskeths lived in a house that withdrew itself behind tall garden
+trees in a large lot sloping down the hillside, in one of the quieter
+old streets of their suburb. The trees were belted in by a board fence,
+painted a wornout white, as far as it was solid, which was to the height
+of one's shoulder; there it opened into a panel work of sticks crossed
+X-wise, which wore a coat of aged green; the strip above them was set
+with a bristling row of rusty nails, which were supposed to keep out
+people who could perfectly well have gone in at the gate as we did.
+There was a brick walk from the gate to the door, which was not so far
+back as I remembered it (perhaps because the leaves were now off the
+trees), and there was a border of box on either side of the walk.
+Altogether there was an old-fashioned keeping in the place which I
+should have rather enjoyed if I had been coming on any other errand; but
+now it imparted to me a notion of people set in their ways, of something
+severe, something hopelessly forbidding.
+
+I do not think there had ever been much intimacy between the Tedhams and
+the Haskeths, before Tedham's calamity came upon him. But Mrs. Hasketh
+did not refuse her share of it. She came forward, and probably made her
+husband come forward, in Tedham's behalf, and do what hopelessly could
+be done to defend him where there was really no defence, and the only
+thing to be attempted was to show circumstances that might perhaps tend
+to the mitigation of his sentence. I do not think they did. Tedham had
+confessed himself and had been proven such a thorough rogue, and the
+company had lately suffered so much through operations like his, that,
+even if it could have had mercy, as an individual may, mercy was felt to
+be bad morals, and the case was unrelentingly pushed. His sentence was
+of those sentences which an eminent jurist once characterized as rather
+dramatic; it was pronounced not so much in relation to his particular
+offence, as with the purpose of striking terror into all offenders like
+him, who were becoming altogether too common. He was made to suffer for
+many other peculators, who had been, or were about to be, and was given
+the full penalty. I was in court when it was pronounced with great
+solemnity by the judge, who read him a lecture in doing so; I could have
+read the judge another, for I could not help feeling that it was, more
+than all the sentences I had ever heard pronounced, wholly out of
+keeping with the offence. I met Hasketh coming out of the court-room,
+and I said that I thought it was terribly severe. He agreed with me, and
+as I knew that he and Tedham had never liked each other, I inferred a
+kindliness in him which made me his friend, in the way one is the friend
+of a man one never meets. He was a man of few words, and he now simply
+said, "It was unjust," and we parted.
+
+For several months after Tedham's conviction, I did not think we ought
+to intrude upon the Haskeths; but then my wife and I both felt that we
+ought, in decency, to make some effort to see them. They seemed pleased,
+but they made us no formal invitation to come again, and we never did.
+That day, however, I caught a glimpse of Tedham's little girl, as she
+flitted through the hall, after we were seated in the parlor; she was in
+black, a forlorn little shadow in the shadow; and I recalled now, as we
+stood once more on the threshold of the rather dreary house, a certain
+gentleness of bearing in the child, which I found infinitely pathetic,
+at that early moment of her desolation. She had something of poor
+Tedham's own style and grace, too, which had served him so ill, and this
+heightened the pathos for me. In that figure I had thought of his
+daughter ever since, as often as I had thought of her at all; which was
+not very often, to tell the truth, after the first painful impression of
+Tedham's affair began to die away in me, or to be effaced by the
+accumulating cares and concerns of my own life. But now that we had
+returned into the presence of that bitter sorrow, as it were, the little
+thing reappeared vividly to me in just the way I had seen her so long
+ago. My sense of her forlornness, of her most hapless orphanhood, was
+intensified by the implacable hate with which Mrs. Hasketh had then
+spoken of her father, in telling us that the child was henceforth to
+bear her husband's name, and had resentfully scorned the merit Tedham
+tried to make of giving her up to them. "And if I can help it," she had
+ended, with a fierceness I had never forgotten, "she shall not hear him
+mentioned again, or see him as long as I live."
+
+My wife and I now involuntarily dropped our voices, or rather they sank
+into our throats, as we sat waiting in the dim parlor, after the maid
+took our cards to Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh. We tried to make talk, but we
+could not, and we were funereally quiet, when Hasketh came pottering and
+peering in, and shook hands with both of us. He threw open half a blind
+at one of the windows, and employed himself in trying to put up the
+shade, to gain time, as I thought, before he should be obliged to tell
+us that his wife could not see us. Then he came to me, and asked, "Won't
+you let me take your hat?" as such people do, in expression of a vague
+hospitality; and I let him take it, and put it mouth down on the marble
+centre-table, beside the large, gilt-edged, black-bound family Bible. He
+drew a chair near me, in a row with my wife and myself, and said, "It is
+quite a number of years since we met, Mrs. March," and he looked across
+me at her.
+
+"Yes, I am almost afraid to think how many," she answered.
+
+"Family well?"
+
+"Yes, our children are both very well, Mr. Hasketh. You seem to be
+looking very well, too."
+
+"Thank you, I have nothing to complain of. I am not so young as I was.
+But that is about all."
+
+"I hope Mrs. Hasketh is well?"
+
+"Yes, thank you, she is quite well, for her. She is never very strong.
+She will be down in a moment."
+
+"Oh, I shall be so glad to see her."
+
+The conversation, which might be said to have flagged from the
+beginning, stopped altogether at this point, and though I was prompted
+by several looks from my wife to urge it forward, I could think of
+nothing to do so with, and we sat without speaking till we heard the
+stir of skirts on the stairs in the hall outside, and then my wife said,
+"Ah, that is Mrs. Hasketh."
+
+I should have known it was Mrs. Hasketh without this sort of
+anticipation, I think, even if I had never seen her before, she was so
+like my expectation of what that sort of woman would be in the lapse of
+time, with her experience of life. The severity that I had seen come and
+go in her countenance in former days was now so seated that she had no
+other expression, and I may say without caricature that she gave us a
+frown of welcome. That is, she made us feel, in spite of a darkened
+countenance, that she was really willing to see us in her house, and
+that she took our coming as a sign of amity. I suppose that the
+induration of her spirit was the condition of her being able to bear at
+all what had been laid on her to bear, and her burden had certainly not
+been light.
+
+At her appearance her husband, without really stirring at all, had the
+effect of withdrawing into the background, where, indeed, I tacitly
+joined him; and the two ladies remained in charge of the drama, while he
+and I conversed, as it were, in dumb show. Apart from my sympathy with
+her in the matter, I was very curious to see how my wife would play her
+part, which seemed to me far the more difficult of the two, since she
+must make all the positive movements.
+
+After some civilities so obviously perfunctory that I admired the force
+of mind in the women who uttered them, my wife said, "Mrs. Hasketh, we
+have come on an errand that I know will cause you pain, and I needn't
+say that we haven't come willingly."
+
+"Is it about Mr. Tedham?" asked Mrs. Hasketh, and I remembered now that
+she had always used as much ceremony in speaking of him; it seemed
+rather droll now, but still it would not have been in character with her
+to call him simply Tedham, as we did, in speaking of him.
+
+"Yes," said my wife. "I don't know whether you had kept exact account of
+the time. It was a surprise to us, for we hadn't. He is out, you know."
+
+"Yes--at noon, yesterday. I wasn't likely to forget the day, or the
+hour, or the minute." Mrs. Hasketh said this without relaxing the
+severity of her face at all, and I confess my heart went down.
+
+But my wife seemed not to have lost such courage as she had come with,
+at least. "He has been to see us--"
+
+"I presumed so," said Mrs. Hasketh, and as she said nothing more, Mrs.
+March took the word again.
+
+"I shall have to tell you why he came--why _we_ came. It was something
+that we did not wish to enter into, and at first my husband refused
+outright. But when I saw him, and thought it over, I did not see how we
+could refuse. After all, it is something you must have expected, and
+that you must have been expecting at once, if you say--"
+
+"I presume," Mrs. Hasketh said, "that he wished you to ask after his
+daughter. I can understand why he did not come to us." She let one of
+those dreadful silences follow, and again my wife was forced to speak.
+
+"It is something that we didn't mean to press at all, Mrs. Hasketh, and
+I won't say anything more. Only, if you care to send any word to him he
+will be at our house this evening again, and I will give him your
+message." She rose, not in resentment, as I could see (and I knew that
+she had not come upon this errand without making herself Tedham's
+partisan in some measure) but with sincere good feeling and appreciation
+of Mrs. Hasketh's position. I rose with her, and Hasketh rose too.
+
+"Oh, don't go!" Mrs. Hasketh broke out, as if surprised. "You couldn't
+help coming, and I don't blame you at all. I don't blame Mr. Tedham
+even. I didn't suppose I should ever forgive him. But there! that's all
+long ago, and the years do change us. They change us all, Mrs. March,
+and I don't feel as if I had the right to judge anybody the way I used
+to judge _him_. Sometimes it surprises me. I did hate him, and I don't
+presume I've got very much love for him now, but I don't want to punish
+him any more. That's gone out of me. I don't know how it came to go, but
+it went. I wish he hadn't ever got anything more to do with us, but I'm
+afraid we haven't had all our punishment yet, whatever _he_ has. It
+seems to me as if the sight of Mr. Tedham would make me sick."
+
+I found such an insufficiency in this statement of feeling that I wanted
+to laugh, but I perceived that it did not appeal to my wife's sense of
+humor. She said, "I can understand how you feel about it, Mrs. Hasketh."
+
+Mrs. Hasketh seemed grateful for the sympathy. "I presume," she went on,
+and I noted how often she used the quaint old-fashioned Yankee word,
+"that you feel as if you had almost as much right to hate him as I had,
+and that if you could overlook what he tried to do to you, I might
+overlook what he did do to his own family. But as I see it, the case is
+different. He failed when he tried to put the blame on Mr. March, and he
+succeeded only too well in putting the shame on his own family. You
+could forgive it, and it would be all the more to your credit because
+you forgave it, but his family might have forgiven it ten times over,
+and still they would be in disgrace through him. That is the way I
+looked at it."
+
+"And I assure you, Mrs. Hasketh, that is the way I looked at it, too,"
+said my wife.
+
+"So, when it seems hard that I should have taken his child from him,"
+the woman continued, as if still arguing her case, and she probably was
+arguing it with herself, "and did what I could to make her forget him, I
+think it had better be considered whose sake I was doing it for, and
+whether I had any right to do different. I did not think I had at the
+time, or when I had to begin to act. I knew how I felt toward Mr.
+Tedham; I never liked him; I never wanted my sister to marry him; and
+when his trouble came, I told Mr. Hasketh that it was no more than I had
+expected all along. He was that kind of a man, and he was sure to show
+it, one way or other, sooner or later; and I was not disappointed when
+he did what he did. I had to guard against my own feeling, and to put
+myself out of the question, and that was what I tried to do when I got
+him to give up the child to us and let her take our name. It was the
+same as a legal adoption, and he freely consented to it, or as freely as
+he could, considering where he was. But he knew it was for her good as
+well as we did. There was nobody for her to look to but us, and he knew
+that; his own family had no means, and, in fact, he _had_ no family but
+his father and mother, and when they died, that same first year, there
+was no one left to suffer from him but his child. The question was how
+much she ought to be allowed to suffer, and whether she should be
+allowed to suffer at all, if it could be helped. If it was to be
+prevented, it was to be by deadening her to him, by killing out her
+affection for him, and much as I hated Mr. Tedham, I could not bring
+myself to do that, though I used to think I would do it. He was very
+fond of her, I don't deny that; I don't think it was any merit in him to
+love such a child, but it was the best thing about him, and I was
+willing it should count. But then there was another thing that I
+couldn't bring myself to, and that was to tell the child, up and down,
+all about it; and I presume that there I was weak. Well, you may say I
+_was_ weak! But I couldn't, I simply couldn't. She was only between
+seven and eight when it happened--"
+
+"I thought she was older," I ventured to put in, remembering my
+impressions as to her age the last time I saw her with her father.
+
+"No," said Mrs. Hasketh, "she always appeared rather old for her age,
+and that made me all the more anxious to know just how much of the
+trouble she had taken in. I suppose it was all a kind of awful mystery
+to her, as most of our trials are to children; but when her father was
+taken from her, she seemed to think it was something she mustn't ask
+about; there are a good many things in the world that children feel that
+way about--how they come into it, for one thing, and how they go out of
+it; and by and by she didn't speak of it. She had some of his lightness,
+and I presume that helped her through; I was afraid it did sometimes.
+Then, at other times, I thought she had got the notion he was in for
+life, and that was the reason she didn't speak of him; she had given him
+up. Then I used to wonder whether it wasn't my duty to take her to see
+him--where he was. But when I came to find out that you had to see them
+through the bars, and with the kind of clothes they wear, I felt that I
+might as well kill the child at once; it was for her sake I didn't take
+her. You may be sure I wasn't anxious for the responsibility of _not_
+doing it either, the way I knew I felt toward Mr. Tedham."
+
+I did not like her protesting so much as this; but I saw that it was a
+condition of her being able to deal with herself in the matter, and I
+had no doubt she was telling the truth.
+
+"You never can know just how much of a thing children have taken in, or
+how much they have understood," she continued, repeating herself, as she
+did throughout, "and I had to keep this in mind when I had my talks with
+Fay about her father. She wanted to write to him at first, and of course
+I let her--"
+
+My wife and I could not forbear exchanging a glance of intelligence,
+which Mrs. Hasketh intercepted.
+
+"I presume he told you?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," I said, "he showed us the letter."
+
+"Well, it was something that had to be done. As long as she questioned
+me about him, I put her off the best way I could, and after a while she
+seemed to give up questioning me of her own accord. Perhaps she really
+began to understand it, or some of the cruel little things she played
+with said something. I was always afraid of the other children throwing
+it up to her, and that was one reason we went away for three or four
+years and let our place here."
+
+"I didn't know you were gone," I said toward Hasketh, who cleared his
+throat to explain:
+
+"I had some interests at that time in Canada. We were at Quebec."
+
+"It shows what a rush our life is," I philosophized, with the
+implication that Hasketh and I had been old friends, and I ought to have
+noticed that I had not met him during the time of his absence. The fact
+was we had never come so near intimacy as when we exchanged confidences
+concerning the severity of Tedham's sentence in coming out of the
+court-room together.
+
+"_I_ hadn't any interest in Canada, except to get the child away," said
+Mrs. Hasketh. "Sometimes it seemed strange _we_ should be in Canada, and
+not Mr. Tedham! She got acquainted with some little girls who were going
+to a convent school there as externes--outside pupils, you know," Mrs.
+Hasketh explained to my wife. "She got very fond of one of them--she is
+a child of very warm affections. I never denied that Mr. Tedham had warm
+_affections_--and when her little girl friend went into the convent to
+go on with her education there, Fay wanted to go too, and--we let her.
+That was when she was twelve, and Mr. Hasketh felt that he ought to come
+back and look after his business here; and we left her in the convent.
+Just as soon as she was out of the way, and out of the question, it
+seemed as if I got to feeling differently toward Mr. Tedham. I don't
+mean to say I ever got to like him, or that I do to this day; but I saw
+that he had some rights, too, and for years and years I wanted to take
+the child and tell her when he was coming out. I used to ask myself what
+right I even had to keep the child from the suffering. The suffering was
+hers by rights, and she ought to go through it. I got almost crazy
+thinking it over. I got to thinking that her share of her father's shame
+might be the very thing, of all things, that was to discipline her and
+make her a good and useful woman; and that's much more than being a
+happy one, Mrs. March; we can't any of us be truly happy, no matter
+what's done for us. I tried to make believe that I was sparing her
+alone, but I knew I was sparing myself, too, and that made it harder to
+decide." She suddenly addressed herself to us both: "What would _you_
+have done?"
+
+My wife and I looked at each other in a dismay in which a glance from
+old Hasketh assured us that we had his sympathy. It would have been far
+simpler if Mrs. Hasketh had been up and down with us as Tedham's
+emissaries, and refused to tell us anything of his daughter, and left us
+to report to him that he must find her for himself if he found her at
+all. This was what we had both expected, and we had come prepared to
+take back that answer to Tedham, and discharge our whole duty towards
+him in its delivery. This change in the woman who had hated him so
+fiercely, but whose passion had worn itself down to the underlying
+conscience with the lapse of time, certainly complicated the case. I was
+silent; my wife said: "I don't know _what_ I should have done, Mrs.
+Hasketh;" and Mrs. Hasketh resumed:
+
+"If I did wrong in trying to separate her life from her father's, I was
+punished for it, because when I wanted to undo my work, I didn't know
+how to begin; I presume that's the worst of a wrong thing. Well, I never
+did begin; but now I've got to. The time's come, and I presume it's as
+easy now as it ever could be; easier. He's out and it's over, as far as
+the law is concerned; and if she chooses she can see him. I'll prepare
+her for it as well as I can, and he can come if she wishes it."
+
+"Do you mean that he can see her _here_?" my wife asked.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Hasketh, with a sort of strong submission.
+
+"At once? To-day?"
+
+"No," Mrs. Hasketh faltered. "I didn't want him to see her just the
+first day, or before I saw him; and I thought he might try to. She's
+visiting at some friends in Providence; but she'll be back to-morrow. He
+can come to-morrow night, if she says so. He can come and find out. But
+if he was anything of a man he wouldn't want to."
+
+"I'm afraid," I ventured, "he isn't anything of _that_ kind of man."
+
+
+VI.
+
+"Now, how unhandsome life is!" I broke out, at one point on our way
+home, after we had turned the affair over in every light, and then
+dropped it, and then taken it up again. "It's so graceless, so
+tasteless! Why didn't Tedham die before the expiration of his term and
+solve all this knotty problem with dignity? Why should he have lived on
+in this shabby way and come out and wished to see his daughter? If there
+had been anything dramatic, anything artistic in the man's nature, he
+would have renounced the claim his mere paternity gives him on her love,
+and left word with me that he had gone away and would never be heard of
+any more. That was the least he could have done. If he had wanted to do
+the thing heroically--and I wouldn't have denied him that
+satisfaction--he would have walked into that pool in the old cockpit and
+lain down among the autumn leaves on its surface, and made an end of the
+whole trouble with his own burdensome and worthless existence. That
+would truly have put an end to the evil he began."
+
+"I wouldn't be--impious, Basil," said my wife, with a moment's
+hesitation for the word. Then she sighed and added, "Yes, it seems as if
+that would be the only thing that could end it. There doesn't really
+seem to be any provision in life for ending such things. He will have to
+go on and make more and more trouble. Poor man! I feel almost as sorry
+for him as I do for her. I guess he hasn't expiated his sin yet, as
+fully as he thinks he has."
+
+"And then," I went on, with a strange pleasure I always get out of the
+poignancy of a despair not my own, "suppose that this isn't all. Suppose
+that the girl has met some one who has become interested in her, and
+whom she will have to tell of this stain upon her name?"
+
+"Basil!" cried my wife, "that is cruel of you! You _knew_ I was keeping
+away from that point, and it seems as if you tried to make it as
+afflicting as you could--the whole affair."
+
+"Well, I don't believe it's as bad as that. Probably she hasn't met any
+one in that way; at any rate, it's pure conjecture on my part, and my
+conjecture doesn't make it so."
+
+"It doesn't unmake it, either, for you to say that now," my wife
+lamented.
+
+"Well, well! Don't let's think about it, then. The case is bad enough as
+it stands, Heaven knows, and we've got to grapple with it as soon as we
+get home. We shall find Tedham waiting for us, I dare say, unless
+something has happened to him. I wonder if anything can have been good
+enough to happen to Tedham, overnight."
+
+I got a little miserable fun out of this, but my wife would not laugh;
+she would not be placated in any way; she held me in a sort responsible
+for the dilemma I had conjectured, and inculpated me in some measure for
+that which had really presented itself.
+
+When we reached home she went directly to her room and had a cup of tea
+sent to her there, and the children and I had rather a solemn time at
+the table together. A Sunday tea-table is solemn enough at the best,
+with its ghastly substitution of cold dishes or thin sliced things for
+the warm abundance of the week-day dinner; with the gloom of Mrs.
+March's absence added, this was a very funereal feast indeed.
+
+We went on quite silently for a while, for the children saw I was
+preoccupied; but at last I asked, "Has anybody called this afternoon?"
+
+"I don't know exactly whether it was a call or not," said my daughter,
+with a nice feeling for the social proprieties which would have amused
+me at another time. "But that strange person who was here last night,
+was here again."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"He said he would come in the evening. I forgot to tell you. Papa, what
+kind of person is he?"
+
+"I don't know. What makes you ask?"
+
+"Why, we think he wasn't always a workingman. Tom says he looks as if he
+had been in some kind of business, and then failed."
+
+"What makes you think that, Tom?" I asked the boy.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. He speaks so well."
+
+"He always spoke well, poor fellow," I said with a vague amusement. "And
+you're quite right, Tom. He was in business once and he failed--badly."
+
+I went up to my wife's room and told her what the children had said of
+Tedham's call, and that he was coming back again.
+
+"Well, then, I think I shall let you see him alone, Basil. I'm
+completely worn out, and besides there's no reason why I should see him.
+I hope you'll get through with him quickly. There isn't really anything
+for you to say, except that we have seen the Haskeths, and that if he is
+still bent upon it he can find his daughter there to-morrow evening. I
+want you to promise me that you will confine yourself to that, Basil,
+and not say a single word more. There is no sense in our involving
+ourselves in the affair. We have done all we could, and more than he had
+any right to ask of us, and now I am determined that he shall not get
+anything more out of you. Will you promise?"
+
+"You may be sure, my dear, that I don't wish to get any more involved in
+this coil of sin and misery than you do," I began.
+
+"That isn't promising," she interrupted. "I want you to promise you'll
+say just that and no more."
+
+"Oh, I'll promise fast enough, if that's all you want," I said.
+
+"I don't trust you a bit, Basil," she lamented. "Now, I will explain to
+you all about it. I've thought the whole thing over."
+
+She did explain, at much greater length than she needed, and she was
+still giving me some very solemn charges when the bell rang, and I knew
+that Tedham had come. "Now, remember what I've told you," she called
+after me, as I went to the door, "and be sure to tell me, when you come
+back, just how he takes it and every word he says. Oh, dear, I know
+you'll make the most dreadful mess of it!"
+
+By this time I expected to do no less, but I was so curious to see
+Tedham again that I should have been willing to do much worse, rather
+than forego my meeting with him. I hope that there was some better
+feeling than curiosity in my heart, but I will, for the present, call it
+curiosity.
+
+I met him in the hall at the foot of the stairs, and put a witless
+cheeriness into the voice I bade him good-evening with, while I gave him
+my hand and led the way into the parlor.
+
+The twenty-four hours that had elapsed since I saw him there before had
+estranged him in a way that I find it rather hard to describe. He had
+shrunk from the approach to equality in which we had parted, and there
+was a sort of consciousness of disgrace in his look, such as might have
+shown itself if he had passed the time in a low debauch. But undoubtedly
+he had done nothing of the kind, and this effect in him was from a
+purely moral cause. He sat down on the edge of a chair, instead of
+leaning back, as he had done the night before.
+
+"Well, Tedham," I began, "we have seen your sister-in-law, and I may as
+well tell you at once that, so far as she is concerned, there will be
+nothing in the way of your meeting your daughter. The Haskeths are
+living at their old place in Somerville, and your daughter will be with
+them there to-morrow night--just at this moment she is away--and you can
+find her there, then, if you wish."
+
+Tedham kept those deep eye-hollows of his bent upon me, and listened
+with a passivity which did not end when I ceased to speak. I had said
+all that my wife had permitted me to say in her charge to me, and the
+incident ought to have been closed, as far as we were concerned. But
+Tedham's not speaking threw me off my guard. I could not let the matter
+end so bluntly, and I added, in the same spirit one makes a scrawl at
+the bottom of a page, "Of course, it's for you to decide whether you
+will or not."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Tedham, feebly, but as if he were physically
+laying hold of me for help.
+
+"Why, I mean--I mean--my dear fellow, you know what I mean! Whether you
+had better do it." This was the very thing I had not intended to do, for
+I saw how wise my wife's plan was, and how we really had nothing more to
+do with the matter, after having satisfied the utmost demands of
+humanity.
+
+"You think I had better not," said Tedham.
+
+"No," I said, but I felt that I was saying it too late, "I don't think
+anything about it."
+
+"I have been thinking about it, too," said Tedham, as if I had confessed
+and not denied having an opinion in the matter. "I have been thinking
+about it ever since I saw you last night, and I don't believe I have
+slept, for thinking of it. I know how you and Mrs. March feel about it,
+and I have tried to see it from your point of view, and now I believe I
+do. I am not going to see my daughter; I am going away."
+
+He stood up, in token of his purpose, and at the same moment my wife
+entered the room. She must have been hurrying to do so from the moment I
+left her, for she had on a fresh dress, and her hair had the effect of
+being suddenly, if very effectively, massed for the interview from the
+dispersion in which I had lately seen it. She swept me with a glance of
+reproach, as she went up to Tedham, in the pretence that he had risen to
+meet her, and gave him her hand. I knew that she divined all that had
+passed between us, but she said:
+
+"Mr. March has told you that we have seen Mrs. Hasketh, and that you can
+find your daughter at her house to-morrow evening?"
+
+"Yes, and I have just been telling him that I am not going to see her."
+
+"That is very foolish--very wrong!" my wife began.
+
+"I know you must say so," Tedham replied, with more dignity and force
+than I could have expected, "and I know how kind you and Mr. March have
+been. But you must see that I am right--that she is the only one to be
+considered at all."
+
+"Right! How are you right? Have _you_ been suggesting that, my dear?"
+demanded my wife, with a gentle despair of me in her voice.
+
+It almost seemed to me that I had, but Tedham came to my rescue most
+unexpectedly.
+
+"No, Mrs. March, he hasn't said anything of the kind to me; or, if he
+has, I haven't heard it. But you intimated, yourself, last night, that
+she might be so situated--"
+
+"I was a wicked simpleton," cried my wife, and I forebore to triumph,
+even by a glance at her; "to put my doubts between you and your daughter
+in any way. It was romantic, and--and--disgusting. It's not only your
+right to see her, it's your _duty_. At least it's your duty to let her
+decide whether she will let you see her. What nonsense! Of course she
+will! She must bear her part in it. She ought not to escape it, even if
+she could. Now you must just drop all idea of going away, and you must
+stay, and you must go to see your daughter. There is no other way to
+do."
+
+Tedham shook his head stubbornly. "She has borne her share, already, and
+I won't inflict my penalty on her innocence--"
+
+"Innocence? It's _because_ she is innocent that it must be inflicted
+upon her! That is what innocence is in the world for!"
+
+Tedham looked back at her in a dull bewilderment. "I can't get back to
+that. It seemed so once; but now it looks selfish, and I'm afraid of it.
+I am not the one to take that ground. It might do for you--"
+
+"Well, then, let it do for me!" I confess that I was astonished at this
+turn, or should have been, if I could be astonished at any turn a woman
+takes. "I will see her for you, if you wish, and I will tell her just
+how it is with you, and then she can decide for herself. You have
+certainly no right to decide for her, whether she will see you or not,
+have you?"
+
+"No," Tedham admitted.
+
+"Well, then, sit down and listen."
+
+He sat down, and my wife reasoned it all out with him. She convinced me,
+perfectly, so that what Tedham proposed to do seemed not only
+sentimental and foolish, but unnatural and impious. I confess that I
+admired her casuistry, and gave it my full support. She was a woman who,
+in the small affairs of the tastes and the nerves and the prejudices
+could be as illogical as the best of her sex, but with a question large
+enough to engage the hereditary powers of her New England nature she
+showed herself a dialectician worthy of her Puritan ancestry.
+
+Tedham rose when she had made an end; and when we both expected him to
+agree with her and obey her, he said, "Very likely you are right. I once
+saw it all that way myself, but I don't see it so now, and I can't do
+it. Perhaps we shouldn't care for each other; at any rate, it's too much
+to risk, and I can't do it. Good-by." He began sidling toward the door.
+
+I would have detained him, but my wife made me a sign not to interfere.
+"But surely, Mr. Tedham," she pleaded, "you are going to leave some word
+for her--or for Mrs. Hasketh to give her?"
+
+"No," he answered, "I don't think I will. If I don't appear, then she
+won't see me, and that will be all there is of it."
+
+"Yes, but Mrs. Hasketh will probably tell her that you have asked about
+her, and will prepare her for your coming, and then if you don't come--"
+
+"What time is it, March?" Tedham asked.
+
+I took out my watch. "It's nine o'clock." I was surprised to find it no
+later.
+
+"I can get over to Somerville before ten, can't I? I'll go and tell Mrs.
+Hasketh I am not coming."
+
+We could not prevent his getting away, by force, and we had used all the
+arguments we could have hoped to detain him with. As he opened the door
+to go out into the night, "But, Tedham!" I called to him, "if anything
+happens, where are we to find you, hear of you?"
+
+He hesitated. "I will let you know. Well, good-night."
+
+"I suppose this isn't the end, Isabel," I said, after we had turned from
+looking blankly at the closed door, and listening to Tedham's steps,
+fainter and fainter on the board-walk to the gate.
+
+"There never is an end to a thing like this!" she returned, with a
+passionate sigh of pity. "Oh, what a terrible thing an evil deed is! It
+_can't_ end. It has to go on and on forever. Poor wretch! He thought he
+had got to the end of his misdeed, when he had suffered the punishment
+for it, but it was only just beginning then! Now, you see, it has a
+perfectly new lease of life. It's as if it had just happened, as far as
+the worst consequences are concerned."
+
+"Yes," I assented. "By the way, that was a great idea of yours about the
+office of innocence in the world, Isabel!"
+
+"Why, Basil!" she cried, "you don't suppose I believed in such a
+monstrous thing as that, do you?"
+
+"You made me believe in it."
+
+"Well, then, I can tell you that I merely said it so as to convince him
+that he ought to let his daughter decide whether she would see him or
+not, and it had nothing whatever to do with the matter. Do you think you
+could find me anything to eat, dear? I'm perfectly famishing, and it
+doesn't seem as if I could stir a step till I've had a bite of
+something."
+
+She sank down on the sofa in the hall in proof of her statement, and I
+went out into the culinary regions (deserted of their dwellers after our
+early tea) and made her up a sandwich along with the one I had the
+Sunday-night habit of myself. I found some half-bottles of ale on the
+ice, and I brought one of them, too. Before we had emptied it we
+resigned ourselves to what we could not help in Tedham's case; perhaps
+we even saw it in a more hopeful light.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The next day was one of those lax Mondays which come before the Tuesdays
+and Wednesdays when business has girded itself up for the week, and I
+got home from the office rather earlier than usual. My wife met me with,
+"Why, what has happened?"
+
+"Nothing," I said; "I had a sort of presentiment that something had
+happened here."
+
+"Well, nothing at all has happened, and you have had your presentiment
+for your pains, if that's what you hurried home for."
+
+I justified myself as well as I could, and I added, "That wretched
+Tedham has been in my mind all day. I think he has made a ridiculous
+mistake. As if he could stop the harm by taking himself off! The harm
+goes on independently of him; it is hardly his harm any more."
+
+"That is the way it has seemed to me, too, all day," said my wife. "You
+don't suppose he has been out of my mind either? I wish we had never had
+anything to do with him."
+
+A husband likes to abuse his victory, when he has his wife quite at his
+mercy, but the case was so entirely in my favor that for once I forbore.
+I could see that she was suffering for having put into Tedham's head the
+notion which had resulted in this error, and I considered that she was
+probably suffering enough. Besides, I was afraid that if I said anything
+it would bring out the fact that I had myself intimated the question
+again which his course had answered so mistakenly. I could well imagine
+that she was grateful for my forbearance, and I left her to this
+admirable state of mind while I went off to put myself a little in shape
+after my day's work and my journey out of town. I kept thinking how
+perfectly right in the affair Tedham's simple, selfish instinct had
+been, and how our several consciences had darkened counsel; that quaint
+Tuscan proverb came into ray mind: _Lascia fare Iddio, ch' è un buon
+vecchio_. We had not been willing to let God alone, or to trust his
+leading; we had thought to improve on his management of the case, and to
+invent a principle for poor Tedham that should be better for him to act
+upon than the love of his child, which God had put into the man's heart,
+and which was probably the best thing that had ever been there. Well, we
+had got our come-uppings, as the country people say, and however we
+might reason it away we had made ourselves responsible for the event.
+
+There came a ring at the door that made my own heart jump into my mouth.
+I knew it was Tedham come back again, and I was still in the throes of
+buttoning on my collar when my wife burst into my room. I smiled round
+at her as gayly as I could with the collar-buttoning grimace on my face.
+"All right, I'll be down in a minute. You just go and talk to him
+till--"
+
+"_Him_?" she gasped back; and I have never been quite sure of her syntax
+to this day. "_Them!_ It's Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh, and some young lady! I
+saw them through the window coming up the walk."
+
+"Good Lord! You don't suppose it's Tedham's daughter?"
+
+"How do I know? Oh, how _could_ you be dressing at a time like this!"
+
+It did seem to me rather heinous, and I did not try to defend myself,
+even when she added, from her access of nervousness, in something like a
+whimper, "It seems to me you're _always_ dressing, Basil!"
+
+"I'll be right with you, my dear," I answered, penitently; and, in fact,
+by the time the maid brought up the Haskeths' cards I was ready to go
+down. We certainly needed each other's support, and I do not know but we
+descended the stairs hand in hand, and entered the parlor leaning upon
+each other's shoulders. The Haskeths, who were much more deeply
+concerned, were not apparently so much moved. We shook hands with them,
+and then Mrs. Hasketh said to us in succession, "My niece, Mrs. March;
+Mr. March, my niece."
+
+The young girl had risen, and stood veiled before us, and a sort of
+heart-breaking appeal expressed itself in the gentle droop of her
+figure, which did the whole office of her hidden face. The Haskeths were
+dressed, as became their years, in a composite fashion of no particular
+period; but I noticed at once, with the fondness I have for what is
+pretty in the modes, that Miss Tedham wore one of the latest costumes,
+and that she was not only a young girl, but a young lady, with all that
+belongs to the outward seeming of one of the gentlest of the kind. It
+struck me as the more monstrous, therefore, that she should be involved
+in the coil of her father's inexpiable offence, which entangled her
+whether he stayed or whether he went. It was well enough that the
+Haskeths should still be made miserable through him; it belonged to
+their years and experience; they would soon end, at any rate, and it did
+not matter whether their remnant of life was dark or bright. But this
+child had a right to a long stretch of unbroken sunshine. As I stood and
+looked at her I felt the heart-burning, the indefinable indignation that
+we feel in the presence of death when it is the young and fair who have
+died. Here is a miscalculation, a mistake. It ought not to have been.
+
+I thought that my wife, in the effusion of sympathy, would have perhaps
+taken the girl in her arms; but probably she knew that the dropped veil
+was a sign that there was to be no embracing. She put out her hand, and
+the girl took it with her gloved hand; but though the outward forms of
+their greeting were so cold, I fancied an instant understanding and
+kindness between them.
+
+"My niece," Mrs. Hasketh explained, when we were all seated, "came home
+this afternoon, instead of this morning, when we expected her."
+
+My wife said, "Oh, yes," and after a moment, a very painful moment, in
+which I think we all tried to imagine something that would delay the
+real business, Mrs. Hasketh began again.
+
+"Mrs. March," she said, in a low voice, and with a curious, apologetic
+kind of embarrassment, "we have come--Fay wanted we should come and ask
+if you knew about her father--"
+
+"Why, didn't he come to you last night?" my wife began.
+
+"Yes, he did," said Mrs. Hasketh, in a crest-fallen sort, "But we
+thought--we thought--you might know where he was. And Fay--Did he tell
+you what he was going to do?"
+
+"Yes," my wife gasped back.
+
+The young girl put aside her veil in turning to my wife, and showed a
+face which had all the ill-starred beauty of poor Tedham, with something
+more in it that she never got from that handsome reprobate--conscience,
+soul--whatever we choose to call a certain effluence of heaven which
+blesses us with rest and faith whenever we behold it in any human
+countenance. She was very young-looking, and her voice had a wistful
+innocence.
+
+"Do you think my father will be here again to-night? Oh, I must see him!"
+
+I perceived that my wife could not speak, and I said, to gain time,
+"Why, I've been expecting him to come in at any moment;" and this was
+true enough.
+
+"I guess he's not very far off," said old Hasketh. "I don't believe but
+what he'll turn up." Within the comfort these words were outwardly
+intended to convey to the anxious child, I felt an inner contempt of
+Tedham, a tacit doubt of the man's nature, which was more to me than the
+explicit faith in his return. For some reason Hasketh had not trusted
+Tedham's decision, and he might very well have done this without
+impugning anything but the weakness of his will.
+
+My wife now joined our side, apparently because it was the only theory
+of the case that could be openly urged. "Oh, yes, I am sure. In fact he
+promised my husband to let him know later where he was. Didn't you
+understand him so, my dear?"
+
+I had not understood him precisely to this effect, but I answered, "Yes,
+certainly," and we began to reassure one another more and more. We
+talked on and on to one another, but all the time we talked at the young
+girl, or for her encouragement; but I suppose the rest felt as I did,
+that we were talking provisionally, or without any stable ground of
+conviction. For my part, though I indulged that contempt of Tedham, I
+still had a lurking fear that the wretch had finally and forever
+disappeared, and I had a vision, very disagreeable and definite, of
+Tedham lying face downward in the pool of the old cockpit and shone on
+by the stars in the hushed circle of the woods. Simultaneously I heard
+his daughter saying, "I can't understand why he shouldn't have come to
+us, or should have put it off. He couldn't think I didn't wish to see
+him." And now I looked at my wife aghast, for I perceived that the
+Haskeths must have lacked the courage to tell her that her father had
+decided himself not to see her again, and that they had brought her to
+us that we might stay her with some hopes, false or true, of meeting him
+soon. "I don't know what they mean," she went on, appealing from them to
+us, "by saying that it might be better if I never saw him again!"
+
+"I don't say that any more, child," said Mrs. Hasketh, with affecting
+humility. "I'm sure there isn't any one in the whole world that I would
+bless the sight of half as much."
+
+"I could have come before, if I'd known where he was; or, if I had only
+known, I might have been here Saturday!" She broke into a piteous
+lamentation, with tears and sobs that wrung my heart and made me feel
+like one of a conspiracy of monsters. "But he couldn't--he
+couldn't--have thought I didn't _want_ to see him!"
+
+It was a very trying moment for us all, and I think that if we had, any
+of us, had our choice, we should have preferred to be in her place
+rather than our own. We miserably did what we could to comfort her, and
+we at last silenced her with I do not know what pretences. The affair
+was quite too much for me, and I made a feint of having heard the
+children calling me, and I went out into the hall. I felt that there was
+a sort of indecency in my witnessing that poor young thing's emotion;
+women might see it, but a man ought not. Perhaps old Hasketh felt the
+same; he followed me out, and when we were beyond hearing, even if he
+had spoken aloud, he dropped his voice to a thick murmur and said, "This
+has all been a mistake. We have had to get out of it with the girl the
+best we could; and we don't dare to let her know that Tedham isn't
+coming back any more. You noticed from what she said that my wife tried
+to make believe it might be well if he didn't; but she had to drop
+_that_; it set the girl wild. She hasn't got anything but the one idea:
+that she and her father belong to each other, and that they must be
+together for the rest of their lives. A curious thing about it is," and
+Hasketh sank his voice still lower to say this, "that she thinks that if
+he's taken the punishment that was put upon him he has atoned for what
+he did; and if any one tries to make him suffer more he does worse than
+Tedham did, and he's flying in the face of Providence. Perhaps it's so.
+I'm afraid," Hasketh continued, with the satisfaction men take in
+blaming their wives under the cover of sympathy, "that Mrs. Hasketh is
+going to feel it more and more, as time goes on, unless Tedham turns up.
+I was never in favor of trying to have the child forget him, or be
+separated from him in any way. That kind of thing can't be made to work,
+and I don't suppose, when you come to boil it down, that it's
+essentially right. This universe, I take it, isn't an accident in any
+particular, and if she's his daughter it's because she was meant to be,
+and to bear and share with him. You see it was a great mistake not to
+prepare the child for it sooner, and tell her just when Tedham would be
+out, so that if she wanted to see him she could. She thinks she ought to
+have been there at the prison waiting to speak to him the first one. I
+thought it was a mistake to have her away, and I guess that's the way
+Mrs. Hasketh looks at it herself, now."
+
+A stir of garments made itself heard from the parlor at last, and we
+knew the ladies had risen. In a loud voice Hasketh began to say that
+they had a carriage down at the gate, and I said they had better let me
+show them the way down; and as my wife followed the others into the
+hall, I pulled open the outer door for them. On the threshold stood a
+man about to ring, who let his hand drop from the bell-pull. "Why,
+Tedham!" I shouted, joyfully.
+
+The light from the hall-lamp struck full on his face; we all
+involuntarily shrank back, except the girl, who looked, not at the man
+before her, but first at her aunt and then at her uncle, timorously, and
+murmured some inaudible question. They did not answer, and now Tedham
+and his daughter looked at each other, with what feeling no one can ever
+fully say.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+It always seemed to me as if we had witnessed something like the return
+of one from the dead, in this meeting. We were talking it over one
+evening some weeks later, and "It would be all very well," I
+philosophized, "if the dead came back at once, but if one came back
+after ten years, it would be difficult."
+
+"It was worse than coming back from the dead," said my wife. "But I hope
+that is the end of it so far as we are concerned. I am sure I am glad to
+be out of it, and I don't wish to see any of them ever again."
+
+"Why, I don't know about that," I returned, and I began to laugh. "You
+know Hubbell, our inspector of agencies?"
+
+"What has he got to do with it?"
+
+"Hubbell has had a romantic moment. He thinks that in view of the
+restitution Tedham made as far as he could, and his excellent
+record--elsewhere--it would be a fine thing for the Reciprocity to
+employ him again in our office, and he wanted to suggest it to the
+actuary."
+
+"Basil! You didn't allow him to do such a cruel thing as that?"
+
+"No, my dear, I am happy to say that I sat upon that dramatic climax."
+
+This measurably consoled my wife, but she did not cease to denounce the
+idea for some moments. When she ended, I asked her if she would allow
+the company to employ Tedham in a subordinate place in another city, and
+when she signified that this might be suffered, I said that this was
+what would probably be done. Then I added, seriously, that I thoroughly
+liked the notion of it, and that I took it for a testimony that poor old
+Tedham was right, and that he had at last fully expiated his offence
+against society.
+
+His daughter continued to live with her aunt and uncle, but Tedham used
+to spend his holidays with them, and, however incongruously, they got on
+together very well, I believe. The girl kept the name of Hasketh, and I
+do not suppose that many people knew her relation to Tedham. It appeared
+that our little romantic supposition of a love affair, which the reunion
+of father and child must shatter, was for the present quite gratuitous.
+But if it should ever come to that, my wife and I had made up our minds
+to let God manage. We said that we had already had one narrow escape in
+proposing to better the divine way of doing, and we should not interfere
+again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire
+confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through
+the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married
+there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident
+apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to
+wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was
+married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom she
+told all about her unhappy family history before she permitted herself
+to accept him.
+
+During the one brief interview I had with him, for the purpose of
+further blackening her father's character (for so I understood her
+insistence that I should see the young man), he seemed not only wholly
+unmoved by the facts, but was apparently sorry that poor Tedham had not
+done much worse things, and many more of them, that he might forgive him
+for her sake.
+
+They went to live abroad after they were married; and by and by Tedham
+joined them. So far now as human vision can perceive, the trouble he
+made, the evil he did, is really at an end. Love, which can alone arrest
+the consequences of wrong, had ended it, and in certain luminous moments
+it seemed to us that we had glimpsed, in our witness of this experience,
+an infinite compassion encompassing our whole being like a sea, where
+every trouble of our sins and sorrows must cease at last like a circle
+in the water.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 18605-8.txt or 18605-8.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/6/0/18605
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://www.gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/18605-8.zip b/18605-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..43c1966
--- /dev/null
+++ b/18605-8.zip
diff --git a/18605-h.zip b/18605-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a7bb5a8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/18605-h.zip
diff --git a/18605-h/18605-h.htm b/18605-h/18605-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..54ad6a9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/18605-h/18605-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,8544 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Pair of Patient Lovers, by William Dean Howells</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .pagenum  {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
+               padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em;
+               float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em;
+               font-size: smaller; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;}
+
+    .bb       {border-bottom: solid 2px;}
+    .bl       {border-left: solid 2px;}
+    .bt       {border-top: solid 2px;}
+    .br       {border-right: solid 2px;}
+    .bbox     {border: solid 2px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+    .u        {text-decoration: underline;}
+
+    .caption  {font-weight: bold;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figleft     {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top:
+                 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figright    {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;
+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .footnotes        {border: dashed 1px;}
+    .footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+    .fnanchor         {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em;}
+    .poem span.i1     {display: block; margin-left: 1em;}
+    hr.full { width: 100%; }
+	pre		{font-size: 75%;}
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Pair of Patient Lovers, by William Dean
+Howells</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: A Pair of Patient Lovers</p>
+<p>Author: William Dean Howells</p>
+<p>Release Date: June 16, 2006  [eBook #18605]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by David Edwards, Mary Meehan,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (<a href="http://www.pgdp.net/">http://www.pgdp.net/</a>)<br />
+    from scanned images of public domain material<br />
+    generously made available by the Google Books Library Project<br />
+    (<a href="http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/library.html">http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/library.html</a>)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;" cellpadding="10">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+	  the the Google Books Library Project. See
+      <a href="http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00647020&amp;id">
+	  http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00647020&amp;id</a>
+	</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>A Pair of Patient Lovers</h1>
+
+<h2>by W. D. Howells</h2>
+
+<h3>Author of "The Landlord at Lion's Head" "Ragged Lady" etc.</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>New York and London<br />
+Harper &amp; Brothers Publishers<br />
+1901</h4>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+<a href="#A_PAIR_OF_PATIENT_LOVERS"><b>A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_PURSUIT_OF_THE_PIANO"><b>THE PURSUIT OF THE PIANO.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#A_DIFFICULT_CASE"><b>A DIFFICULT CASE.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_MAGIC_OF_A_VOICE"><b>THE MAGIC OF A VOICE.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#A_CIRCLE_IN_THE_WATER"><b>A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.</b></a>
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="A_PAIR_OF_PATIENT_LOVERS" id="A_PAIR_OF_PATIENT_LOVERS"></a>A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>We first met Glendenning on the Canadian boat which carries you down the
+rapids of the St. Lawrence from Kingston and leaves you at Montreal.
+When we saw a handsome young clergyman across the promenade-deck looking
+up from his guide-book toward us, now and again, as if in default of
+knowing any one else he would be very willing to know us, we decided
+that I must make his acquaintance. He was instantly and cordially
+responsive to my question whether he had ever made the trip before, and
+he was amiably grateful when in my quality of old habitu&eacute; of the route I
+pointed out some characteristic features of the scenery. I showed him
+just where we were on the long map of the river hanging over his knee,
+and I added, with no great relevancy, that my wife and I were renewing
+the fond emotion of our first trip down the St. Lawrence in the
+character of bridal pair which we had spurned when it was really ours. I
+explained that we had left the children with my wife's aunt, so as to
+render the travesty more lifelike; and when he said, "I suppose you miss
+them, though," I gave him my card. He tried to find one of his own to
+give me in return, but he could only find a lot of other people's cards.
+He wrote his name on the back of one, and handed it to me with a smile.
+"It won't do for me to put 'reverend' before it, in my own chirography,
+but that's the way I have it engraved."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," I said, "the cut of your coat bewrayed you," and we had some
+laughing talk. But I felt the eye of Mrs. March dwelling upon me with
+growing impatience, till I suggested, "I should like to make you
+acquainted with my wife, Mr. Glendenning."</p>
+
+<p>He said, Oh, he should be so happy; and he gathered his dangling map
+into the book and came over with me to where Mrs. March sat; and, like
+the good young American husband I was in those days, I stood aside and
+left the whole talk to her. She interested him so much more than I could
+that I presently wandered away and amused myself elsewhere. When I came
+back, she clutched my arm and bade me not speak a word; it was the most
+romantic thing in the world, and she would tell me about it when we were
+alone, but now I must go off again; he had just gone to get a book for
+her which he had been speaking of, and would be back the next instant,
+and it would not do to let him suppose we had been discussing him.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>I was sometimes disappointed in Mrs. March's mysteries when I came up
+close to them; but I was always willing to take them on trust; and I
+submitted to the postponement of a solution in this case with more than
+my usual faith. She found time, before Mr. Glendenning reappeared, to
+ask me if I had noticed a mother and daughter on the boat, the mother
+evidently an invalid, and the daughter very devoted, and both decidedly
+ladies; and when I said, "No. Why?" she answered, "Oh, nothing," and
+that she would tell me. Then she drove me away, and we did not meet till
+I found her in our state-room just before the terrible mid-day meal they
+used to give you on the <i>Corinthian</i>, and called dinner.</p>
+
+<p>She began at once, while she did something to her hair before the morsel
+of mirror: "Why I wanted to know if you had noticed those people was
+because they are the reason of his being here."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he tell you that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not. But I knew it, for he asked if I had seen them, or could
+tell him who they were."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me that he made pretty good time to get so far as that."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't say he got so far himself, but you men never know how to take
+steps for any one else. You can't put two and two together. But to my
+mind it's as plain as the nose on his face that he's seen that girl
+somewhere and is taking this trip because she's on board. He said he
+hadn't decided to come till the last moment."</p>
+
+<p>"What wild leaps of fancy!" I said. "But the nose on his face is
+handsome rather than plain, and I sha'n't be satisfied till I see him
+with the lady."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he's quite Greek," said Mrs. March, in assent to my opinion of his
+nose. "Too Greek for a clergyman, almost. But he isn't vain of it. Those
+beautiful people are often quite modest, and Mr. Glendenning is very
+modest."</p>
+
+<p>"And I'm very hungry. If you don't hurry your prinking, Isabel, we shall
+not get any dinner."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm ready," said my wife, and she continued with her eyes still on the
+glass: "He's got a church out in Ohio, somewhere; but he's a
+New-Englander, and he's quite wild to get back. He thinks those people
+are from Boston: I could tell in a moment if I saw them. Well, now, I
+<i>am</i> ready," and with this she really ceased to do something to her
+hair, and came out into the long saloon with me where the table was set.
+Rows of passengers stood behind the rows of chairs, with a detaining
+grasp on nearly all of them. We gazed up and down in despair. Suddenly
+Mrs. March sped forward, and I found that Mr. Glendenning had made a
+sign to her from a distant point, where there were two vacant chairs for
+us next his own. We eagerly laid hands on them, and waited for the gong
+to sound for dinner. In this interval an elderly lady followed by a
+young girl came down the saloon toward us, and I saw signs, or rather
+emotions, of intelligence pass between Mr. Glendenning and Mrs. March
+concerning them.</p>
+
+<p>The older of these ladies was a tall, handsome matron, who bore her
+fifty years with a native severity qualified by a certain air of wonder
+at a world which I could well fancy had not always taken her at her own
+estimate of her personal and social importance. She had the effect of
+challenging you to do less, as she advanced slowly between the wall of
+state-rooms and the backs of the people gripping their chairs, and eyed
+them with a sort of imperious surprise that they should have left no
+place for her. So at least I read her glance, while I read in that of
+the young lady coming after, and showing her beauty first over this
+shoulder and then over that of her mother, chiefly a present amusement,
+behind which lay a character of perhaps equal pride, if not equal
+hardness. She was very beautiful, in the dark style which I cannot help
+thinking has fallen into unmerited abeyance; and as she passed us I
+could see that she was very graceful. She was dressed in a lady's
+acceptance of the fashions of that day, which would be thought so
+grotesque in this. I have heard contemporaneous young girls laugh at the
+mere notion of hoops, but in 1870 we thought hoops extremely becoming;
+and this young lady knew how to hold hers a little on one side so as to
+give herself room in the narrow avenue, and not betray more than the
+discreetest hint of a white stocking. I believe the stockings are black
+now.</p>
+
+<p>They both got by us, and I could see Mr. Glendenning following them with
+longing but irresolute eyes, until they turned, a long way down the
+saloon, as if to come toward us again. Then he hurried to meet them, and
+as he addressed himself first to one and then to the other, I knew him
+to be offering them his chair. So did my wife, and she said, "You must
+give up your place too, Basil," and I said I would if she wished to see
+me starve on the spot. But of course I went and joined Glendenning in
+his entreaties that they would deprive us of our chances of dinner (I
+knew what the second table was on the <i>Corinthian</i>); and I must say that
+the elder lady accepted my chair in the spirit which my secret grudge
+deserved. She made me feel as if I ought to have offered it when they
+first passed us; but it was some satisfaction to learn afterwards that
+she gave Mrs. March, for her ready sacrifice of me, as bad a half-hour
+as she ever had. She sat next to my wife, and the young lady took
+Glendenning's place, and as soon as we had left them she began trying to
+find out from Mrs. March who he was, and what his relation to us was.
+The girl tried to check her at first, and then seemed to give it up, and
+devoted herself to being rather more amiable than she otherwise might
+have been, my wife thought, in compensation for the severity of her
+mother's scrutiny. Her mother appeared disposed to hold Mrs. March
+responsible for knowing little or nothing about Mr. Glendenning.</p>
+
+<p>"He seems to be an Episcopal clergyman," she said, in a haughty summing
+up. "From his name I should have supposed he was Scotch and a
+Presbyterian." She began to patronize the trip we were making, and to
+abuse it; she said that she did not see what could have induced them to
+undertake it; but one had to get back from Niagara somehow, and they had
+been told at the hotel there that the boats were very comfortable. She
+had never been more uncomfortable in her life; as for the rapids, they
+made her ill, and they were obviously so dangerous that she should not
+even look at them again. Then, from having done all the talking and most
+of the eating, she fell quite silent, and gave her daughter a chance to
+speak to my wife. She had hitherto spoken only to her mother, but now
+she asked Mrs. March if she had ever been down the St. Lawrence before.</p>
+
+<p>When my wife explained, and asked her whether she was enjoying it, she
+answered with a rapture that was quite astonishing, in reference to her
+mother's expressions of disgust: "Oh, immensely! Every instant of it,"
+and she went on to expatiate on its peculiar charm in terms so
+intelligent and sympathetic that Mrs. March confessed it had been part
+of our wedding journey, and that this was the reason why we were now
+taking the trip.</p>
+
+<p>The young lady did not seem to care so much for this, and when she
+thanked my wife in leaving the table with her mother, and begged her to
+thank the gentlemen who had so kindly given up their places, she made no
+overture to further acquaintance. In fact, we had been so simply and
+merely made use of that, although we were rather meek people, we decided
+to avoid our beneficiaries for the rest of the day; and Mr. Glendenning,
+who could not, as a clergyman, indulge even a just resentment, could as
+little refuse us his sympathy. He laughed at some hints of my wife's
+experience, which she dropped before she left us to pick up a meal from
+the lukewarm leavings of the <i>Corinthian's</i> dinner, if we could. She
+said she was going forward to get a good place on the bow, and would
+keep two camp-stools for us, which she could assure us no one would get
+away from her.</p>
+
+<p>We were somewhat surprised then to find her seated by the rail with the
+younger lady of the two whom she meant to avoid if she meant anything by
+what she said. She was laughing and talking on quite easy terms with her
+apparently, and "There!" she triumphed as we came up, "I've kept your
+camp-stools for you," and she showed them at her side, where she was
+holding her hand on them. "You had better put them here."</p>
+
+<p>The girl had stiffened a little at our approach, as I could see, but a
+young girl's stiffness is always rather amusing than otherwise, and I
+did not mind it. Neither, that I could see, did Mr. Glendenning, and it
+soon passed. It seemed that she had left her mother lying down in her
+state-room, where she justly imagined that if she did not see the rapids
+she should suffer less alarm from them; the young lady had come frankly
+to the side of Mrs. March as soon as she saw her, and asked if she might
+sit with her. She now talked to me for a decent space of time, and then
+presently, without my knowing how, she was talking to Mr. Glendenning,
+and they were comparing notes of Niagara; he was saying that he thought
+he had seen her at the Cataract House, and she was owning that she and
+her mother had at least stopped at that hotel.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+
+<p>I have no wish, and if I had the wish I should not have the art, to keep
+back the fact that these young people were evidently very much taken
+with each other. They showed their mutual pleasure so plainly that even
+I could see it. As for Mrs. March, she was as proud of it as if she had
+invented them and set them going in their advance toward each other,
+like two mechanical toys.</p>
+
+<p>I confess that with reference to what my wife had told me of this young
+lady's behavior when she was with her mother, her submissiveness, her
+entire self-effacement, up to a certain point, I did not know quite what
+to make of her present independence, not to say freedom. I thought she
+might perhaps have been kept so strictly in the background, with young
+men, that she was rather disposed to make the most of any chance at them
+which offered. If the young man in this case was at no pains to hide his
+pleasure in her society, one might say that she was almost eager to show
+her delight in his. If it was a case of love at first sight, the
+earliest glimpse had been to the girl, who was all eyes for Glendenning.
+It was very pretty, but it was a little alarming, and perhaps a little
+droll, even. She was actually making the advances, not consciously, but
+helplessly; fondly, ignorantly, for I have no belief, nor had my wife (a
+much more critical observer), that she knew how she was giving herself
+away.</p>
+
+<p>I thought perhaps that she was in the habit from pride, or something
+like it, of holding herself in check, and that this blameless excess
+which I saw was the natural expansion from an inner constraint. But what
+I really knew was that the young people got on very rapidly, in an
+acquaintance that prospered up to the last moment I saw them together.
+This was just before the <i>Corinthian</i> drew up to her landing at
+Montreal, when Miss Bentley (we had learned her name) came to us from
+the point where she was standing with Glendenning and said that now she
+must go to her mother, and took a sweet leave of my wife. She asked
+where we were going to stay in Montreal and whether we were going on to
+Quebec; and said her mother would wish to send Mrs. March her card.</p>
+
+<p>When she was gone, Glendenning explained, with rather superfluous
+apology, that he had offered to see the ladies to a hotel, for he was
+afraid that at this crowded season they might not find it easy to get
+rooms, and he did not wish Mrs. Bentley, who was an invalid, to have any
+anxieties about it. He bade us an affectionate, but not a disconsolate
+adieu, and when we had got into the modest conveyance (if an omnibus is
+modest) which was to take us to the Ottawa House, we saw him drive off
+to the St. Lawrence Hall (it was twenty-five years ago) in one of those
+vitreous and tinkling Montreal landaus, with Mrs. and Miss Bentley and
+Mrs. Bentley's maid.</p>
+
+<p>We were still so young as to be very much absorbed in the love affairs
+of other people; I believe women always remain young enough for that;
+and Mrs. March talked about the one we fancied we had witnessed the
+beginning of pretty much the whole evening. The next morning we got
+letters from Boston, telling us how the children were and all that they
+were doing and saying. We had stood it very well, as long as we did not
+hear anything about them, and we had lent ourselves in a sort of
+semi-forgetfulness of them to the associations of the past when they
+were not; but now to learn that they were hearty and happy, and that
+they sent love and kisses, was too much. With one mind we renounced the
+notion of going on to Quebec; we found that we could just get the
+ten-o'clock train that would reach Boston by eleven that night, and we
+made all haste and got it. We had not been really at peace, we
+perceived, till that moment since we had bidden the children good-bye.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV.</h3>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was because we left Montreal so abruptly that Mrs. March
+never received Mrs. Bentley's card. It may be at the Ottawa House to
+this day, for all I know. What is certain is that we saw and heard
+nothing more of her or her daughter. Glendenning called to see us as he
+passed through Boston on his way west from Quebec, but we were neither
+of us at home and we missed him, to my wife's vivid regret. I rather
+think we expected him to find some excuse for writing after he reached
+his place in northern Ohio; but he did not write, and he became more and
+more the memory of a young clergyman in the beginning of a love-affair,
+till one summer, while we were still disputing where we should spend the
+hot weather within business reach, there came a letter from him saying
+that he was settled at Gormanville, and wishing that he might tempt us
+up some afternoon before we were off to the mountains or seaside. This
+revived all my wife's waning interest in him, and it was hard to keep
+the answer I made him from expressing in a series of crucial inquiries
+the excitement she felt at his being in New England and so near Boston,
+and in Gormanville of all places. It was one of the places we had
+thought of for the summer, and we were yet so far from having
+relinquished it that we were recurring from time to time in hope and
+fear to the advertisement of an old village mansion there, with ample
+grounds, garden, orchard, ice-house, and stables, for a very low rental
+to an unexceptionable tenant. We had no doubt of our own qualifications,
+but we had misgivings of the village mansion; and I am afraid that I
+rather unduly despatched the personal part of my letter, in my haste to
+ask what Glendenning knew and what he thought of the Conwell place.
+However, the letter seemed to serve all purposes. There came a reply
+from Glendenning, most cordial, even affectionate, saying that the
+Conwell place was delightful, and I must come at once and see it. He
+professed that he would be glad to have Mrs. March come too, and he
+declared that if his joy at having us did not fill his modest rectory to
+bursting, he was sure it could stand the physical strain of our
+presence, though he confessed that his guest-chamber was tiny.</p>
+
+<p>"He wants <i>you</i>, Basil," my wife divined from terms which gave me no
+sense of any latent design of parting us in his hospitality. "But,
+evidently, it isn't a chance to be missed, and you must go&mdash;instantly.
+Can you go to-morrow? But telegraph him you're coming, and tell him to
+hold on to the Conwell place; it may be snapped up any moment if it's so
+desirable."</p>
+
+<p>I did not go till the following week, when I found that no one had
+attempted to snap up the Conwell place. In fact, it rather snapped me
+up, I secured it with so little trouble. I reported it so perfect that
+all my wife's fears of a latent objection to it were roused again. But
+when I said I thought we could relinquish it, her terrors subsided; and
+I thought this the right moment to deliver a stroke that I had been
+holding in reserve.</p>
+
+<p>"You know," I began, "the Bentleys have their summer place there&mdash;the
+old Bentley homestead. It's their ancestral town, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Bentleys? What Bentleys?" she demanded, opaquely.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, those people we met on the <i>Corinthian</i>, summer before last&mdash;you
+thought he was in love with the girl&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A simultaneous photograph could alone reproduce Mrs. March's tumultuous
+and various emotions as she seized the fact conveyed in my words. She
+poured out a volume of mingled conjectures, assertions, suspicions,
+conclusions, in which there was nothing final but the decision that we
+must not dream of going there; that it would look like thrusting
+ourselves in, and would be in the worst sort of taste; they would all
+hate us, and we should feel that we were spies upon the young people;
+for of course the Bentleys had got Glendenning there to marry him, and
+in effect did not want any one to witness the disgraceful spectacle.</p>
+
+<p>I said, "That may be the nefarious purpose of the young lady, but, as I
+understood Glendenning, it is no part of her mother's design."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Bentley may have got him there to marry him, but Mrs. Bentley
+seems to have meant nothing more than an engagement at the worst."</p>
+
+<p>"What <i>do</i> you mean? They're not engaged, are they?"</p>
+
+<p>"They're not married, at any rate, and I suppose they're engaged. I did
+not have it from Miss Bentley, but I suppose Glendenning may be trusted
+in such a case."</p>
+
+<p>"Now," said my wife, with a severity that might well have appalled me,
+"if you will please to explain, Basil, it will be better for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it is simply this. Glendenning seems to have made himself so
+useful to the mother and pleasing to the daughter after we left them in
+Montreal that he was tolerated on a pretence that there was reason for
+his writing back to Mrs. Bentley after he got home, and, as Mrs. Bentley
+never writes letters, Miss Bentley had the hard task of answering him.
+This led to a correspondence."</p>
+
+<p>"And to her moving heaven and earth to get him to Gormanville. I see! Of
+course she did it so that no one knew what she was about!"</p>
+
+<p>"Apparently. Glendenning himself was not in the secret. The Bentleys
+were in Europe last summer, and he did not know that they had a place at
+Gormanville till he came to live there. Another proof that Miss Bentley
+got him there is the fact that she and her mother are Unitarians, and
+that they would naturally be able to select the rector of the Episcopal
+church."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," said Mrs. March, not the least daunted.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there's nothing more. He is simply rector of St. Michael's at
+Gormanville; and there is not the slightest proof that any young lady
+had a hand in getting him there."</p>
+
+<p>"As if I cared in the least whether she had! I suppose you will allow
+that she had something to do with getting engaged to him, and that is
+the <i>great</i> matter."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I must allow that, if we are to suppose that young ladies have
+anything to do with young men getting engaged to them; it doesn't seem
+exactly delicate. But the novel phase of this great matter is the
+position of the young lady's mother in regard to it. From what I could
+make out she consents to the engagement of her daughter, but she don't
+and won't consent to her marriage." My wife glared at me with so little
+speculation in her eyes that I felt obliged to disclaim all
+responsibility for the fact I had reported. "Thou canst not say <i>I</i> did
+it. <i>They</i> did it, and Miss Bentley, if any one, is to blame. It seems,
+from what Glendenning says, that the young lady and he wrote to each
+other while she was abroad, and that they became engaged by letter. Then
+the affair was broken off because of her mother's opposition; but since
+they have met at Gormanville, the engagement has been renewed. So much
+they've managed against the old lady's will, but apparently on condition
+that they won't get married till she says."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense! How could she stop them?"</p>
+
+<p>"She couldn't, I dare say, by any of the old romantic methods of a
+convent or disinheritance; but she is an invalid; she wants to keep her
+daughter with her, and she avails with the girl's conscience by being
+simply dependent and obstructive. The young people have carried their
+engagement through, and now such hope as they have is fixed upon her
+finally yielding in the matter of their marriage, though Glendenning was
+obliged to confess that there was no sign of her doing so. They
+agree&mdash;Miss Bentley and he&mdash;that they cannot get married as they got
+engaged, in spite of her mother&mdash;it would be unclerical if it wouldn't
+be unfilial&mdash;and they simply have to bide their time."</p>
+
+<p>My wife asked abruptly, "How many chambers are there in the Conwell
+place?"</p>
+
+<p>I said, and then she asked, "Is there a windmill or a force-pump?" I
+answered proudly that in Gormanville there was town water, but that if
+this should give out there were both a windmill and a force-pump on the
+Conwell place.</p>
+
+<p>"It is very complete," she sighed, as if this had removed all hope from
+her, and she added, "I suppose we had better take it."</p>
+
+
+<h3>V.</h3>
+
+<p>We certainly did not take it for the sake of being near the Bentleys,
+neither of whom had given us particular reason to desire their further
+acquaintance, though the young lady had agreeably modified herself when
+apart from her mother. In fact, we went to Gormanville because it was an
+exceptional chance to get a beautiful place for a very little money,
+where we could go early and stay late. But no sooner had we acted from
+this quite personal, not to say selfish, motive than we were rewarded
+with the sweetest overtures of neighborliness by the Bentleys. They
+waited, of course, till we were settled in our house before they came to
+call upon Mrs. March, but they had been preceded by several hospitable
+offerings from their garden, their dairy, and their hen-house, which
+were very welcome in the days of our first uncertainty as to
+trades-people. We analyzed this hospitality as an effect of that sort of
+nature in Mrs. Bentley which can equally assert its superiority by
+blessing or banning. Evidently, since chance had again thrown us in her
+way, she would not go out of it to be offensive, but would continue in
+it, and make the best of us.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt Glendenning had talked us into the Bentleys; and this my wife
+said she hated most of all; for we should have to live up to the notion
+of us imparted by a young man from the impressions of the moment when he
+saw us purple in the light of his dawning love. In justice to
+Glendenning, however, I must say that he did nothing, by a show of his
+own assiduities, to urge us upon the Bentleys after we came to
+Gormanville. If we had not felt so sure of him, we might have thought he
+was keeping his regard for us a little too modestly in the background.
+He made us one cool little call, the evening of our arrival, in which he
+had the effect of anxiety to get away as soon as possible; and after
+that we saw him no more until he came with Miss Bentley and her mother a
+week later. His forbearance was all the more remarkable because his
+church and his rectory were just across the street from the Conwell
+place, at the corner of another street, where we could see their wooden
+gothic in the cold shadow of the maples with which the green in front of
+them was planted.</p>
+
+<p>During all that time Glendenning's personal elevation remained invisible
+to us, and we began to wonder if he were not that most lamentable of
+fellow-creatures, a clerical snob. I am not sure still that he might not
+have been so in some degree, there was such a mixture of joy that was
+almost abject in his genuine affection for us when Mrs. Bentley openly
+approved us on her first visit. I dare say he would not have quite
+abandoned us in any case; but he must have felt responsible for us, and
+it must have been such a load off him when she took that turn with us.</p>
+
+<p>She called in the afternoon, and the young people dropped in again the
+same evening, and took the trouble to win back our simple hearts. That
+is, Miss Bentley showed herself again as frank and sweet as she had been
+on the boat when she joined my wife after dinner and left her mother in
+her state-room. Glendenning was again the Glendenning of our first
+meeting, and something more. He fearlessly led the way to intimacies of
+feeling with an expansion uncommon even in an accepted lover, and we
+made our conclusions that however subject he might be to his
+indefinitely future mother-in-law, he would not be at all so to his
+wife, if she could help it. He took the lead, but because she gave it
+him; and she displayed an aptness for conjugal submissiveness which
+almost amounted to genius. Whenever she spoke to either of us, it was
+with one eye on him to see if he liked what she was saying. It was so
+perfect that I doubted if it could last; but my wife said a girl like
+that could keep it up till she dropped. I have never been sure that she
+liked us as well as he did; I think it was part of her intense loyalty
+to seem to like us a great deal more.</p>
+
+<p>She was deeply in love, and nothing but her ladylike breeding kept her
+from being openly fond. I figured her in a sort of impassioned
+incandescence, such as only a pure and perhaps cold nature could burn
+into; and I amused myself a little with the sense of Glendenning's
+apparent inadequacy. Sweet he was, and admirably gentle and fine; he had
+an unfailing good sense, and a very ready wisdom, as I grew more and
+more to perceive. But he was an inch or so shorter than Miss Bentley,
+and in his sunny blondness, with his golden red beard and hair, and his
+pinkish complexion, he wanted still more the effect of an emotional
+equality with her. He was very handsome, with features excellently
+regular; his smile was celestially beautiful; innocent gay lights danced
+in his blue eyes, through lashes and under brows that were a lighter
+blond than his beard and hair.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI.</h3>
+
+<p>The next morning, which was of a Saturday, when I did not go to town, he
+came over to us again from the shadow of his sombre maples, and fell
+simply and naturally into talk about his engagement. He was much fuller
+in my wife's presence than he had been with me alone, and told us the
+hopes he had of Mrs. Bentley's yielding within a reasonable time. He
+seemed to gather encouragement from the sort of perspective he got the
+affair into by putting it before us, and finding her dissent to her
+daughter's marriage so ridiculous in our eyes after her consent to her
+engagement that a woman of her great good sense evidently could not
+persist in it.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no personal objection to myself," he said, with a modest
+satisfaction. "In fact, I think she really likes me, and only dislikes
+my engagement to Edith. But she knows that Edith is incapable of
+marrying against her mother's will, or I of wishing her to do so; though
+there is nothing else to prevent us."</p>
+
+<p>My wife allowed herself to say, "Isn't it rather cruel of her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, no, not altogether; or not so much so as it might be in different
+circumstances. I make every allowance for her. In the first place, she
+is a great sufferer."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know," my wife relented.</p>
+
+<p>"She suffers terribly from asthma. I don't suppose she has lain down in
+bed for ten years. She sleeps in an easy-chair, and she's never quite
+free from her trouble; when there's a paroxysm of the disease, her
+anguish is frightful. I've never seen it, of course, but I have heard
+it; you hear it all through the house. Edith has the constant care of
+her. Her mother has to be perpetually moved and shifted in her chair,
+and Edith does this for her; she will let no one else come near her;
+Edith must look to the ventilation, and burn the pastilles which help
+her to breathe. She depends upon her every instant." He had grown very
+solemn in voice and face, and he now said, "When I think of what she
+endures, it seems to me that it is I who am cruel even to dream of
+taking her daughter from her."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," my wife assented.</p>
+
+<p>"But there is really no present question of that We are very happy as it
+is. We can wait, and wait willingly till Mrs. Bentley wishes us to wait
+no longer; or&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, and we were both aware of something in his mind which he put
+from him. He became a little pale, and sat looking very grave. Then he
+rose. "I don't know whether to say how welcome you would be at St.
+Michael's to-morrow, for you may not be&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>We</i> are Unitarians, too," said Mrs. March. "But we are coming to hear
+<i>you</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad you are coming <i>to church</i>," said Glendenning, putting away
+the personal tribute implied with a gentle dignity that became him.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VII.</h3>
+
+<p>We waited a discreet time before returning the call of the Bentley
+ladies, but not so long as to seem conscious. In fact, we had been
+softened towards Mrs. Bentley by what Glendenning told us of her
+suffering, and we were disposed to forgive a great deal of patronage and
+superiority to her asthma; they were not part of the disease, but still
+they were somehow to be considered with reference to it in her case.</p>
+
+<p>We were admitted by the maid, who came running down the hall stairway,
+with a preoccupied air, to the open door where we stood waiting. There
+were two great syringa-bushes on each hand close to the portal, which
+were in full flower, and which flung their sweetness through the doorway
+and the windows; but when we found ourselves in the dim old-fashioned
+parlor, we were aware of this odor meeting and mixing with another which
+descended from the floor above&mdash;the smell of some medicated pastille.
+There was a sound of anxious steps overhead, and a hurried closing of
+doors, with the mechanical sound of labored breathing.</p>
+
+<p>"We have come at a bad time," I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, <i>why</i> did they let us in?" cried my wife in an anguish of
+compassion and vexation. She repeated her question to Miss Bentley, who
+came down almost immediately, looking pale, indeed, but steady, and
+making a brave show of welcome.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother would have wished it," she said, "and she sent me as soon as
+she knew who it was. You mustn't be distressed," she entreated, with a
+pathetic smile. "It's really a kind of relief to her; anything is that
+takes her mind off herself for a moment. She will be so sorry to miss
+you, and you must come again as soon as you can."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we will, we will!" cried my wife, in nothing less than a passion of
+meekness; and Miss Bentley went on to comfort her.</p>
+
+<p>"It's dreadful, of course, but it isn't as bad as it sounds, and it
+isn't nearly so bad as it looks. She is used to it, and there is a great
+deal in that. Oh, <i>don't</i> go!" she begged, at a movement Mrs. March made
+to rise. "The doctor is with her just now, and I'm not needed. It will
+be kind if you'll stay; it's a relief to be out of the room with a good
+excuse!" She even laughed a little as she said this; she went on to lead
+the talk away from what was so intensely in our minds, and presently I
+heard her and my wife speaking of other things. The power to do this is
+from some heroic quality in women's minds that we do not credit them
+with; we think it their volatility, and I dare say I thought myself much
+better, or at least more serious in my make, because I could not follow
+them, and did not lose one of those hoarse gasps of the sufferer
+overhead. Occasionally there came a stifling cry that made me jump,
+inwardly if not outwardly, but those women had their drama to play, and
+they played it to the end.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bentley came hospitably to the door with us, and waited there till
+she thought we could not see her turn and run swiftly up-stairs.</p>
+
+<p>"Why <i>did</i> you stay, my dear?" I groaned. "I felt as if I were
+personally smothering Mrs. Bentley every moment we were there."</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>had</i> to do it. She wished it, and, as she said, it was a relief to
+have us there, though she was wishing us at the ends of the earth all
+the time. But what a ghastly life!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and can you wonder that the poor woman doesn't want to give her
+up, to lose the help and comfort she gets from her? It's a wicked thing
+for that girl to think of marrying."</p>
+
+<p>"What are you talking about, Basil? It's a wicked thing for her <i>not</i> to
+think of it! She is wearing her life out, <i>tearing</i> it out, and she
+isn't doing her mother a bit of good. Her mother would be just as well,
+and better, with a good strong nurse, who could lift her this way and
+that, and change her about, without feeling her heart-strings wrung at
+every gasp, as that poor child must. Oh, I <i>wish</i> Glendenning was man
+enough to make her run off with him, and get married, in spite of
+everything. But, of course, that's impossible&mdash;for a clergyman! And her
+sacrifice began so long ago that it's become part of her life, and
+she'll simply have to keep on."</p>
+
+
+<h3>VIII.</h3>
+
+<p>When her attack passed off, Mrs. Bentley sent and begged my wife to come
+again and see her. She went without me, while I was in town, but she was
+so circumstantial in her report of her visit, when I came home, that I
+never felt quite sure I had not been present. What most interested us
+both was the extreme independence which the mother and daughter showed
+beyond a certain point, and the daughter's great frankness in expressing
+her difference of feeling. We had already had some hint of this, the
+first day we met her, and we were not surprised at it now, my wife at
+first hand, or I at second hand. Mrs. Bentley opened the way for her
+daughter by saying that the worst of sickness was that it made one such
+an affliction to others. She lived in an atmosphere of devotion, she
+said, but her suffering left her so little of life that she could not
+help clinging selfishly to everything that remained.</p>
+
+<p>My wife perceived that this was meant for Miss Bentley, though it was
+spoken to herself; and Miss Bentley seemed to take the same view of the
+fact. She said: "We needn't use any circumlocution with Mrs. March,
+mother. She knows just how the affair stands. You can say whatever you
+wish, though I don't know why you should wish to say anything. You have
+made your own terms with us, and we are keeping them to the letter. What
+more can you ask? Do you want me to break with Mr. Glendenning? I will
+do that too, if you ask it. You have got everything <i>but</i> that, and you
+can have that at any time. But Arthur and I are perfectly satisfied as
+it is, and we can wait as long as you wish us to wait."</p>
+
+<p>Her mother said: "I'm not allowed to forget that for a single hour," and
+Miss Bentley said, "I never remind you of it unless you make me, mother.
+You may be thinking of it all the time, but it isn't because of anything
+I say."</p>
+
+<p>"Or that you <i>do</i>?" asked Mrs. Bentley; and her daughter answered, "I
+can't help existing, of course."</p>
+
+<p>My wife broke off from the account she was giving me of her visit: "You
+can imagine how pleasant all this was for me, Basil, and how anxious I
+was to prolong my call!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," I returned, "there were compensations. It was extremely
+interesting; it was life. You can't deny that, my dear."</p>
+
+<p>"It was more like death. Several times I was on the point of going, but
+you know when there's been a painful scene you feel so sorry for the
+people who've made it that you can't bear to leave them to themselves. I
+did get up to go, once, in mere self-defence, but they both urged me to
+stay, and I couldn't help staying till they could talk of other things.
+But now tell me what you think of it all. Which should your feeling be
+with the most? That is what I want to get at before I tell you mine."</p>
+
+<p>"Which side was I on when we talked about them last?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, when did we talk about them <i>last</i>? We are always talking about
+them! I am getting no good of the summer at all. I shall go home in the
+fall more jaded and worn out than when I came. To think that we should
+have this beautiful place, where we could be so happy and comfortable,
+if it were not for having this abnormal situation under our nose and
+eyes all the time!"</p>
+
+<p>"Abnormal? I don't call it abnormal," I began, and I was sensible of my
+wife's thoughts leaving her own injuries for my point of view so swiftly
+that I could almost hear them whir.</p>
+
+<p>"Not abnormal!" she gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"No; only too natural. Isn't it perfectly natural for an invalid like
+that to want to keep her daughter with her; and isn't it perfectly
+natural for a daughter, with a New England sense of duty, to yield to
+her wish? You might say that she could get married and live at home, and
+then she and Glendenning could both devote themselves&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," my wife broke in, "that wouldn't do. Marriage is marriage; and
+it puts the husband and wife with each other first; when it doesn't,
+it's a miserable mockery."</p>
+
+<p>"Even when there's a sick mother in the case?"</p>
+
+<p>"A thousand sick mothers wouldn't alter the case. And that's what they
+all three instinctively know, and they're doing the only thing they can
+do."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I don't see what we're complaining of."</p>
+
+<p>"Complaining of? We're complaining of its being all wrong and&mdash;romantic.
+Her mother has asked more than she had any right to ask, and Miss
+Bentley has tried to do more than she can perform, and that has made
+them hate each other."</p>
+
+<p>"Should you say <i>hate</i>, quite?"</p>
+
+<p>"It must come to that, if Mrs. Bentley lives."</p>
+
+<p>"Then let us hope she&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear!" cried Mrs. March, warningly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come, now!" I retorted. "Do you mean to say that you haven't
+thought how very much it would simplify the situation if&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I have! And that is the wicked part of it. It's that that is
+wearing me out. It's perfectly hideous!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, fortunately we're not actively concerned in the affair, and we
+needn't take any measures in regard to it. We are mere spectators, and
+as I see it the situation is not only inevitable for Mrs. Bentley, but
+it has a sort of heroic propriety for Miss Bentley."</p>
+
+<p>"And Glendenning?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Glendenning isn't provided for in my scheme."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I can tell you that your scheme, Basil, is worse than worthless."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't brag of it, my dear," I said, meekly enough. "I'm sorry for
+him, but I can't help him. He must provide for himself out of his
+religion."</p>
+
+
+<h3>IX.</h3>
+
+<p>It was, indeed, a trying summer for our emotions, torn as we were
+between our pity for Mrs. Bentley and our compassion for her daughter.
+We had no repose, except when we centred our sympathies upon
+Glendenning, whom we could yearn over in tender regret without doing any
+one else wrong, or even criticising another. He was our great stay in
+that respect, and though a mere external witness might have thought that
+he had the easiest part, we who knew his gentle and affectionate nature
+could not but feel for him. We never concealed from ourselves certain
+foibles of his; I have hinted at one, and we should have liked it better
+if he had not been so sensible of the honor, from a worldly point, of
+being engaged to Miss Bentley. But this was a very innocent vanity, and
+he would have been willing to suffer for her mother and for herself, if
+she had let him. I have tried to insinuate how she would not let him,
+but freed him as much as possible from the stress of the situation, and
+assumed for him a mastery, a primacy, which he would never have assumed
+for himself. We thought this very pretty of her, and in fact she was
+capable of pretty things. What was hard and arrogant in her, and she was
+not without something of the kind at times, was like her mother; but
+even she, poor soul, had her good points, as I have attempted to
+suggest. We used to dwell upon them, when our talk with Glendenning grew
+confidential, as it was apt to do; for it seemed to console him to
+realize that her daughter and he were making their sacrifice to a not
+wholly unamiable person.</p>
+
+<p>He confided equally in my wife and myself, but there were times when I
+think he rather preferred the counsel of a man friend. Once when we had
+gone a walk into the country, which around Gormanville is of the
+pathetic Mid-Massachusetts loveliness and poverty, we sat down in a
+hillside orchard to rest, and he began abruptly to talk of his affair.
+Sometimes, he said, he felt that it was all an error, and he could not
+rid himself of the fear that an error persisted in was a wrong, and
+therefore a species of sin.</p>
+
+<p>"That is very interesting," I said. "I wonder if there is anything in
+it? At first blush it looks so logical; but is it? Or are you simply
+getting morbid? What is the error? What is your error?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know," he said, with a gentle refusal of my willingness to make
+light of his trouble. "It is surely an error to allow a woman to give
+her word when she can promise nothing more, and to let her hold herself
+to it."</p>
+
+<p>I could have told him that I did not think the error in this case was
+altogether or mainly his, or the persistence in it; for it had seemed to
+me from the beginning that the love between him and Miss Bentley was
+fully as much her affair as his, and that quite within the bounds of
+maidenly modesty she showed herself as passionately true to their
+plighted troth. But of course this would not do, and I had to be content
+with the ironical suggestion that he might try offering to release Miss
+Bentley.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't laugh at me," he implored, and I confess his tone would have
+taken from me any heart to do so.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear fellow," I said, "I see your point. But don't you think you are
+quite needlessly adding to your affliction by pressing it? You two are
+in the position which isn't at all uncommon with engaged people, of
+having to wait upon exterior circumstances before you get married.
+Suppose you were prevented by poverty, as often happens? It would be a
+hardship as it is now; but in that case would your engagement be any
+less an error than it is now? I don't think it would, and I don't
+believe you think so either."</p>
+
+<p>"In that case we should not be opposing our wills to the will of some
+one else, who has a better claim to her daughter's allegiance than I
+have. It seems to me that our error was in letting her mother consent to
+our engagement if she would not or could not consent to our marriage.
+When it came to that we ought both to have had the strength to say that
+then there should be no engagement. It was my place to do that. I could
+have prevented the error which I can't undo."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how it could have been easier to prevent than to undo your
+error. I don't admit it's an error, but I call it so because you do.
+After all, an engagement is nothing but an open confession between two
+people that they are in love with each other and wish to marry. There
+need be no sort of pledge or promise to make the engagement binding, if
+there is love. It's the love that binds."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"It bound you from your first acknowledgment of it, and unless you could
+deny your love now, or hereafter, it must always bind you. If you own
+that you still love each other, you are still engaged, no matter how
+much you release each other. Could you think of loving her and marrying
+some one else? Could she love you and marry another? There isn't any
+error, unless you've mistaken your feeling for each other. If you have,
+I should decidedly say you couldn't break your engagement too soon. In
+fact, there wouldn't be any real engagement to break."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you are right," said Glendenning, but not so strenuously as
+he might.</p>
+
+<p>I had a feeling that he had not put forward the main cause of his
+unhappiness, though he had given a true cause; that he had made some
+lesser sense of wrong stand for a greater, as people often do in
+confessing themselves; and I was not surprised when he presently added:
+"It is not merely the fact that she is bound in that way, and that her
+young life is passing in this sort of hopeless patience, but
+that&mdash;that&mdash;I don't know how to put the ugly and wicked thing into
+words, but I assure you that sometimes when I think&mdash;when I'm aware that
+I know&mdash;Ah, I can't say it!"</p>
+
+<p>"I fancy I understand what you mean, my dear boy," I said, and in the
+right of my ten years' seniority I put my hand caressingly on his
+shoulder, "and you are no more guilty than I am in knowing that if Mrs.
+Bentley were not in the way there would be no obstacle to your
+happiness."</p>
+
+<p>"But such a cognition is of hell," he cried, and he let his face fall
+into his hands and sobbed heartrendingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said, "such a cognition is of hell; you are quite right. So are
+all evil concepts and knowledges; but so long as they are merely things
+of our intelligence, they are no part of us, and we are not guilty of
+them."</p>
+
+<p>"No; I trust not, I trust not," he returned, and I let him sob his
+trouble out before I spoke again; and then I began with a laugh of
+unfeigned gayety. Something that my wife had hinted in one of our talks
+about the lovers freakishly presented itself to my mind, and I said,
+"There is a way, and a very practical way, to put an end to the anomaly
+you feel in an engagement which doesn't imply a marriage."</p>
+
+<p>"And what is that?" he asked, not very hopefully; but he dried his eyes
+and calmed himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, speaking after the manner of men, you might run off with Miss
+Bentley."</p>
+
+<p>All the blood in his body flushed into his face. "Don't!" he gasped, and
+I divined that what I had said must have been in his thoughts before,
+and I laughed again. "It wouldn't do," he added, piteously. "The
+scandal&mdash;I am a clergyman, and my parish&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I perceived that no moral scruple presented itself to him; when it came
+to the point, he was simply and naturally a lover, like any other man;
+and I persisted: "It would only be a seven days' wonder. I never heard
+of a clergyman's running away to be married; but they must have
+sometimes done it. Come, I don't believe you'd have to plead hard with
+Miss Bentley, and Mrs. March and I will aid and abet you to the limit of
+our small ability. I'm sure that if I wrap up warm against the night
+air, she will let me go and help you hold the rope-ladder taut."</p>
+
+
+<h3>X.</h3>
+
+<p>It was not very reverent to his cloth, or his recent tragical mood, but
+Glendenning was not offended; he laughed with a sheepish pleasure, and
+that evening he came with Miss Bentley to call upon us. The visit passed
+without unusual confidences until they rose to go, when she said
+abruptly to me: "I feel that we both owe you a great deal, Mr. March.
+Arthur has been telling me of your talk this afternoon, and I think that
+what you said was all so wise and true! I don't mean," she added, "your
+suggestion about putting an end to the anomaly!" and she and Glendenning
+both laughed.</p>
+
+<p>My wife said, "That was very wicked, and I have scolded him for thinking
+of such a thing." She had, indeed, forgotten that she had put it in my
+head, and made me wholly responsible for it.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you must scold me too a little, Mrs. March," said the girl, "for
+I've sometimes wondered if I couldn't work Arthur up to the point of
+making me run away with him," which was a joke that wonderfully amused
+us all.</p>
+
+<p>I said, "I shouldn't think it would be so difficult;" and she retorted:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you've no idea how obdurate clergymen are;" and then she went on,
+seriously, to thank me for talking Glendenning out of his morbid mood.
+With the frankness sometimes characteristic of her she said that if he
+had released her, it would have made no difference&mdash;she should still
+have felt herself bound to him; and until he should tell her that he no
+longer cared for her, she should feel that he was bound to her. I saw no
+great originality in this reproduction of my own ideas. But when Miss
+Bentley added that she believed her mother herself would be shocked and
+disappointed if they were to give each other up, I was aware of being in
+the presence of a curious psychological fact. I so wholly lost myself in
+the inquiry it invited that I let the talk flow on round me unheeded
+while I questioned whether Mrs. Bentley did not derive a satisfaction
+from her own and her daughter's mutual opposition which she could never
+have enjoyed from their perfect agreement. She had made a certain
+concession in consenting to the engagement, and this justified her to
+herself in refusing her consent to the marriage, while the ingratitude
+of the young people in not being content with what she had done formed a
+grievance of constant avail with a lady of her temperament. From what
+Miss Bentley let fall, half seriously, half jokingly, as well as what I
+observed, I divined a not unnatural effect of the strained relations
+between her and her mother. She concentrated whatever resentment she
+felt upon Miss Bentley, insomuch that it seemed as though she might
+altogether have withdrawn her opposition if it had been a question
+merely of Glendenning's marriage. So far from disliking him, she was
+rather fond of him, and she had no apparent objection to him except as
+her daughter's husband. It had not always been so; at first she had an
+active rancor against him; but this had gradually yielded to his
+invincible goodness and sweetness.</p>
+
+<p>"Who could hold out against him?" his betrothed demanded, fondly, when
+these facts had been more or less expressed to us; and it was not the
+first time that her love had seemed more explicit than his. He smiled
+round upon her, pressing the hand she put in his arm; for she asked this
+when they stood on our threshold ready to go, and then he glanced at us
+with eyes that fell bashfully from ours.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course it will come right in time," said my wife when they were
+gone, and I agreed that they need only have patience. We had all talked
+ourselves into a cheerful frame concerning the affair; we had seen it in
+its amusing aspects, and laughed about it; and that seemed almost in
+itself to dispose of Mrs. Bentley's opposition. My wife and I decided
+that this could not long continue; that by-and-by she would become tired
+of it, and this would happen all the sooner if the lovers submitted
+absolutely, and did nothing to remind her of their submission.</p>
+
+
+<h3>XI.</h3>
+
+<p>The Conwells came home from Europe the next summer, and we did not go
+again to Gormanville. But from time to time we heard of the Bentleys,
+and we heard to our great amaze that there was no change in the
+situation, as concerned Miss Bentley and Glendenning. I think that later
+it would have surprised us if we had learned that there was a change.
+Their lives all seemed to have adjusted themselves to the conditions,
+and we who were mere spectators came at last to feel nothing abnormal in
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then we saw Glendenning, and now and then Miss Bentley came to
+call upon Mrs. March, when she was in town. Her mother had given up her
+Boston house, and they lived the whole year round at Gormanville, where
+the air was good for Mrs. Bentley without her apparently being the
+better for it; again, we heard in a roundabout way that their
+circumstances were not so fortunate as they had been, and that they had
+given up their Boston house partly from motives of economy.</p>
+
+<p>There was no reason why our intimacy with the lovers' affairs should
+continue, and it did not. Miss Bentley made mention of Glendenning, when
+my wife saw her, with what Mrs. March decided to be an abiding fealty,
+but without offer of confidence; and Glendenning, when we happened to
+meet at rare intervals, did not invite me to more than formal inquiry
+concerning the well-being of Mrs. Bentley and her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>He was undoubtedly getting older, and he looked it. He was one of those
+gentle natures which put on fat, not from self-indulgence, but from want
+of resisting force, and the clerical waistcoat that buttoned black to
+his throat swayed decidedly beyond a straight line at his waist. His
+red-gold hair was getting thin, and though he wore it cut close all
+round, it showed thinner on the crown than on the temples, and his pale
+eyebrows were waning. He had a settled patience of look which would have
+been a sadness, if there had not been mixed with it an air of resolute
+cheerfulness. I am not sure that this kept it from being sad, either.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bentley, on her part, was no longer the young girl she was when we
+met on the <i>Corinthian</i>. She must then have been about twenty, and she
+was now twenty-six, but she looked thirty. Dark people show their age
+early, and she showed hers in cheeks that grew thinner if not paler, and
+in a purple shadow under her fine eyes. The parting of her black hair
+was wider than it once was, and she wore it smooth in apparent disdain
+of those arts of fluffing and fringing which give an air of vivacity, if
+not of youth. I should say she had always been a serious girl, and now
+she showed the effect of a life that could not have been gay for any
+one.</p>
+
+<p>The lovers promised themselves, as we knew, that Mrs. Bentley would
+relent, and abandon what was more like a whimsical caprice than a
+settled wish. But as time wore on, and she gave no sign of changing, I
+have wondered whether some change did not come upon them, which affected
+them towards each other without affecting their constancy. I fancied
+their youthful passion taking on the sad color of patience, and
+contenting itself more and more with such friendly companionship as
+their fate afforded; it became, without marriage, that affectionate
+comradery which wedded love passes into with the lapse of as many years
+as they had been plighted. "What," I once suggested to my wife, in a
+very darkling mood&mdash;"what if they should gradually grow apart, and end
+in rejoicing that they had never been allowed to join their lives?
+Wouldn't that be rather Hawthornesque?"</p>
+
+<p>"It wouldn't be true," said Mrs. March, "and I don't see why you should
+put such a notion upon Hawthorne. If you can't be more cheerful about
+it, Basil, I wish you wouldn't talk of the affair at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm quite willing to be cheerful about it, my dear," I returned;
+"and, if you like, we will fancy Mrs. Bentley coming round and ardently
+wishing their marriage, and their gayly protesting that after having
+given the matter a great deal of thought they had decided it would be
+better not to marry, but to live on separately for their own sake, just
+as they have been doing for hers so long. Wouldn't that be cheerful?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. March said that if I wished to tease it was because I had no ideas
+on the subject, and she would advise me to drop it. I did so, for the
+better part of the evening, but I could not relinquish it altogether.
+"Do you think," I asked, finally, "that any sort of character will stand
+the test of such a prolonged engagement?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? Very indifferent characters stand the test of marriage, and
+that's indefinitely prolonged."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but it's not indefinite itself. Marriage is something very
+distinct and permanent; but such an engagement as this has no sort of
+future. It is a mere motionless present, without the inspiration of a
+common life, and with no hope of release from durance except through a
+chance that it will be sorrow instead of joy. I should think they would
+go to pieces under the strain."</p>
+
+<p>"But as you see they don't, perhaps the strain isn't so great after
+all."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," I confessed, "there is that wonderful adaptation of the human soul
+to any circumstances. It's the one thing that makes me respect our
+fallen nature. Fallen? It seems to me that we ought to call it our risen
+nature; it has steadily mounted with the responsibility that Adam took
+for it&mdash;or Eve."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see," said my wife, pursuing her momentary advantage, "why they
+should not be getting as much pleasure or happiness out of life as most
+married people. Engagements are supposed to be very joyous, though I
+think they're rather exciting and restless times, as a general thing. If
+they've settled down to being merely engaged, I've no doubt they've
+decided to make the best of being merely engaged as long as her mother
+lives."</p>
+
+<p>"There is that view of it," I assented.</p>
+
+
+<h3>XII.</h3>
+
+<p>By the following autumn Glendenning had completed the seventh year of
+his engagement to Miss Bentley, and I reminded my wife that this seemed
+to be the scriptural length of a betrothal, as typified in the service
+which Jacob rendered for Rachel. "But <i>he</i> had a prospective
+father-in-law to deal with," I added, "and Glendenning a mother-in-law.
+That may make a difference."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. March did not join me in the humorous view of the affair which I
+took. She asked me if I had heard anything from Glendenning lately; if
+that were the reason why I mentioned him.</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said; "but I have some office business that will take me to
+Gormanville to-morrow, and I did not know but you might like to go too,
+and look the ground over, and see how much we have been suffering for
+them unnecessarily." The fact was that we had now scarcely spoken of
+Glendenning or the Bentleys for six months, and our minds were far too
+full of our own affairs to be given more than very superficially to
+theirs at any time. "We could both go as well as not," I suggested, "and
+you could call upon the Bentleys while I looked after the company's
+business."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Basil, I think I will let you go alone," said my wife. "But
+try to find out how it is with them. Don't be so terribly
+straightforward, and let it look as if that was what you came for. Don't
+make the slightest advance towards their confidence. But do let them
+open up if they will."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, you may depend upon my asking no leading questions whatever,
+and I shall behave with far more discretion than if you were with me.
+The danger is that I shall behave with too much, for I find that my
+interest in their affair is very much faded. There is every probability
+that unless Glendenning speaks of his engagement it won't be spoken of
+at all."</p>
+
+<p>This was putting it rather with the indifference of the past six months
+than with the feeling of the present moment. Since I had known that I
+was going to Gormanville, the interest I denied had renewed itself
+pretty vividly for me, and I was intending not only to get everything
+out of Glendenning that I decently could, but to give him as much good
+advice as he would bear. I was going to urge him to move upon the
+obstructive Mrs. Bentley with all his persuasive force, and I had
+formulated some arguments for him which I thought he might use with
+success. I did not tell my wife that this was my purpose, but all the
+same I cherished it, and I gathered energy for the enforcement of my
+views for Glendenning's happiness from the very dejection I was cast
+into by the outward effect of the Gormanville streets. They were all in
+a funeral blaze of their shade trees, which were mostly maples, but were
+here and there a stretch of elms meeting in arches almost consciously
+Gothic over the roadway; the maples were crimson and gold, and the elms
+the pale yellow that they affect in the fall. A silence hung under their
+sad splendors which I found deepen when I got into what the inhabitants
+called the residential part. About the business centre there was some
+stir, and here in the transaction of my affairs I was in the thick of it
+for a while. Everybody remembered me in a pleasant way, and I had to
+stop and pass the time of day, as they would have said, with a good many
+whom I could not remember at once. It seemed to me that the maples in
+front of St. Michael's rectory were rather more depressingly gaudy than
+elsewhere in Gormanville; but I believe they were only thicker. I found
+Glendenning in his study, and he was so far from being cast down by
+their blazon that I thought him decidedly cheerfuller than when I saw
+him last. He met me with what for him was ardor; and as he had asked me
+most cordially about my family, I thought it fit to inquire how the
+ladies at the Bentley place were.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, very well, very well indeed," he answered, brightly. "It's very
+odd, but Edith and I were talking about you all only last night, and
+wishing we could see you again. Edith is most uncommonly well. During
+the summer Mrs. Bentley had some rather severer attacks than usual, and
+the care and anxiety told upon Edith, but since the cooler weather has
+come she has picked up wonderfully." He did not say that Mrs. Bentley
+had shared this gain, and I imagined that he had a reluctance to confess
+she had not. He went on, "You're going to stay and spend the night with
+me, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said; "I'm obliged to be off by the four-o'clock train. But if I
+may be allowed to name the hospitality I could accept, I should say
+luncheon."</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" cried Glendenning, gayly. "Let us go and have it at the
+Bentleys'."</p>
+
+<p>"Far be it from me to say where you shall lunch me," I returned. "The
+question isn't where, but when and how, with me."</p>
+
+<p>He got his hat and stick, and as we started out of his door he began:
+"You'll be a little surprised at the informality, perhaps, but I'm glad
+you take it so easily. It makes it easier for me to explain that I'm
+almost domesticated at the Bentley homestead; I come and go very much as
+if it were my own house."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear fellow," I said, "I'm not surprised at anything in your
+relation to the Bentley homestead, and I won't vex you with any glad
+inferences."</p>
+
+<p>"Why," he returned, a little bashfully, "there's no explicit change. The
+affair is just where it has been all along. But with the gradual decline
+in Mrs. Bentley&mdash;I'm afraid you'll notice it&mdash;she seems rather to want
+me about, and at times I'm able to be of use to Edith, and so&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, and I said, "Exactly."</p>
+
+<p>He went on: "Of course it's rather anomalous, and I oughtn't to let you
+get the impression that she has actually conceded anything. But she
+shows herself much more&mdash;er, shall I say?&mdash;affectionate, and I can't
+help hoping there may be a change in her mood which will declare itself
+in an attitude more favorable to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I said again, "Exactly," and Glendenning resumed:</p>
+
+<p>"In spite of Edith's not having been quite so well as usual&mdash;she's
+wonderfully well now&mdash;it's been a very happy summer with us, on account
+of this change. It seems to have come about in a very natural way with
+Mrs. Bentley, and out of a growing regard which I can't specifically
+account for, as far as anything I've done is concerned."</p>
+
+<p>"I think I could account for it," said I. "She must be a stonier-hearted
+old lady than I imagine if she hasn't felt your goodness, all along,
+Glendenning."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you're very kind," said the gentle creature. "You tempt me to
+repeat what she said, at the only time she expressed a wish to have me
+oftener with them: 'You've been very patient with a contrary old woman.
+But I sha'n't make you wait much longer.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I think that was very encouraging, my dear fellow."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you?" he asked, wistfully. "I thought so too, at first, but when I
+told Edith she could not take that view of it. She said that she did not
+believe her mother had changed her mind at all, and that she only meant
+she was growing older."</p>
+
+<p>"But, at any rate," I argued, "it was pleasant to have her make an open
+recognition of your patience."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that was pleasant," he said, cheerfully again, "And it was the
+beginning of the kind of relation that I have held ever since to her
+household. I am afraid I am there a good half of my time, and I believe
+I dine there oftener than I do at home. I am quite on the footing of a
+son, with her."</p>
+
+<p>"There are some of the unregenerate, Glendenning," I made bold to say,
+"who think it is your own fault that you weren't on the footing of a
+son-in-law with her long ago. If you'll excuse my saying so, you have
+been, if anything, too patient. It would have been far better for all if
+you had taken the bit in your teeth six or seven years back&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He drew a deep breath. "It wouldn't have done; it wouldn't have done!
+Edith herself would never have consented to it."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever ask her?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, innocently. "How could I?"</p>
+
+<p>"And of course <i>she</i> could never ask <i>you</i>," I laughed. "My opinion is
+that you have lost a great deal of time unnecessarily. I haven't the
+least doubt that if you had brought a little pressure to bear with Mrs.
+Bentley herself, it would have sufficed."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at me with a kind of dismay, as if my words had carried
+conviction, or had roused a conviction long dormant in his heart. "It
+wouldn't have done," he gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't too late to try, yet," I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it's too late. We must wait now." He hastened to add, "Until she
+yields entirely of herself."</p>
+
+<p>He gave me a guilty glance when he drew near the Bentley place and we
+saw a buggy standing at the gate. "The doctor!" he said, and he hurried
+me up the walk to the door.</p>
+
+<p>The door stood open and we heard the doctor saying to some one within:
+"No, no, nothing organic at all, I assure you. One of the commonest
+functional disturbances."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bentley appeared at the threshold with him, and she and Glendenning
+had time to exchange a glance of anxiety and of smiling reassurance,
+before she put out her hand in greeting to me, a very glad and cordial
+greeting, apparently. The doctor and I shook hands, and he got himself
+away with what I afterwards remembered as undue quickness, and left us
+to Miss Bentley.</p>
+
+<p>Glendenning was quite right about her looking better. She looked even
+gay, and there was a vivid color in her checks such as I had not seen
+there for many years; her lips were red, her eyes brilliant. Her face
+was still perhaps as thin as ever, but it was indescribably younger.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot say that there were the materials of a merrymaking amongst us,
+exactly, and yet I remember that luncheon as rather a gay one, with some
+laughing. I had not been till now in discovering that Miss Bentley had a
+certain gift of humor, so shy and proud, if I may so express it, that it
+would not show itself except upon long acquaintance, and I distinctly
+perceived now that this enabled her to make light of a burden that might
+otherwise have been intolerable. It qualified her to treat with
+cheerfulness the grimness of her mother, which had certainly not grown
+less since I saw her last, and to turn into something like a joke her
+valetudinarian austerities of sentiment and opinion. She made a pleasant
+mock of the amenities which passed between her mother and Glendenning,
+whose gingerliness in the acceptance of the old lady's condescension
+would, I confess, have been notably comical without this gloss. It was
+perfectly evident that Mrs. Bentley's favor was bestowed with a mental
+reservation, and conditioned upon his forming no expectations from it,
+and poor Glendenning's eagerness to show that he took it upon these
+terms was amusing as well as touching. I do not know how to express that
+Miss Bentley contrived to eliminate herself from the affair, or to have
+the effect of doing that, and to abandon it to them. I can only say that
+she left them to be civil to each other, and that, except when she
+recurred to them in playful sarcasm from time to time, she devoted
+herself to me.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently, Mrs. Bentley was very much worse than she had been; her
+breathing was painfully labored. But if her daughter had any anxiety
+about her condition, she concealed it most effectually from us. I
+decided that she had perhaps been asking the doctor as to certain
+symptoms that had alarmed her, and it was in the rebound from her
+anxiety that her spirits had risen to the height I saw. Glendenning
+seized the moment of her absence after luncheon, when she helped her
+mother up to her room, to impart to me that this was his conclusion too.
+He said that he had not seen her so cheerful for a long time, and when I
+praised her in every way he basked in my appreciation of her as if it
+had all been flattery for himself. She came back directly, and then I
+had a chance to see what she might have been under happier stars. She
+could not, at any moment, help showing herself an intellectual and
+cultivated woman, but her opportunities to show herself a woman of rare
+social gifts had been scanted by circumstances and perhaps by
+conscience. It seemed to me that even in devoting herself to her mother
+as she had always done she need not have enslaved herself, and that it
+was in this excess her inherited puritanism came out. She might
+sometimes openly rebel against her mother's domination, as my wife and I
+had now and again seen her do; but inwardly she was almost passionately
+submissive. Here I thought that Glendenning, if he had been a different
+sort of man, might have been useful to her; he might have encouraged her
+in a little wholesome selfishness, and enabled her to withhold sacrifice
+where it was needless. But I am not sure; perhaps he would have made her
+more unhappy, if he had attempted this; perhaps he was the only sort of
+man whom, in her sense of his own utter unselfishness, she could have
+given her heart to in perfect peace. She now talked brilliantly and
+joyously to me, but all the time her eye sought his for his approval and
+sympathy; he, for his part, was content to listen in a sort of beatific
+pride in her which he did not, in his simple-hearted fondness, make any
+effort to mask.</p>
+
+<p>When we came away he made himself amends for his silence by a long hymn
+in worship of her, and I listened with all the acquiescence possible. He
+asked me questions&mdash;whether I had noticed this thing or that about her,
+or remembered what she had said upon one point or another, and led up to
+compliments of her which I was glad to pay. In the long ordeal they had
+undergone they had at least kept all the freshness of their love.</p>
+
+
+<h3>XIII.</h3>
+
+<p>Glendenning and I went back to the rectory, and sat down in his study,
+or rather he made me draw a chair to the open door, and sat down himself
+on a step below the threshold. The day was one of autumnal warmth; the
+haze of Indian summer blued the still air, and the wind that now and
+then stirred the stiff panoply of the trees was lullingly soft. This
+part of Gormanville quite overlooked the busier district about the
+mills, where the water-power found its way, and it was something of a
+climb even from the business street of the old hill village, which the
+rival prosperity of the industrial settlement in the valley had thrown
+into an aristocratic aloofness. From the upper windows of the rectory
+one could have seen only the red and yellow of the maples, but from the
+study door we caught glimpses past their boles of the outlying country,
+as it showed between the white mansions across the way. One of these, as
+I have already mentioned, was the Conwell place; and after we had talked
+of the landscape awhile, Glendenning said: "By the way! Why don't you
+buy the Conwell place? You liked it so much, and you were all so well in
+Gormanville. The Conwells want to sell it, and it would be just the
+thing for you, five or six months of the year."</p>
+
+<p>I explained, almost compassionately, the impossibility of a poor
+insurance man thinking of a summer residence like the Conwell place, and
+I combated as well as I could the optimistic reasons of my friend in its
+favor. I was not very severe with him, for I saw that his optimism was
+not so much from his wish to have me live in Gormanville as from the new
+hope that filled him. It was by a perfectly natural, if not very logical
+transition that we were presently talking of this greater interest
+again, and Glendenning was going over all the plans that it included. I
+encouraged him to believe, as he desired, that a sea-voyage would be the
+thing for Mrs. Bentley, and that it would be his duty to take her to
+Europe as soon as he was in authority to do so. They should always, he
+said, live in Gormanville, for they were greatly attached to the place,
+and they should keep up the old Bentley homestead in the style that he
+thought they owed to the region where the Bentleys had always lived. It
+is a comfort to a man to tell his dreams, whether of the night or of the
+day, and I enjoyed Glendenning's pleasure in rehearsing these fond
+reveries of his.</p>
+
+<p>He interrupted himself to listen to the sound of hurried steps, and
+directly a man in his shirt-sleeves came running by on the sidewalk
+beyond the maples. In a village like Gormanville any passer is of
+interest to the spectator, and a man running is of thrilling moment.
+Glendenning started to his feet, and moved forward for a better sight of
+the flying passer. He called out to the man, who shouted back something
+I could not understand, and ran on.</p>
+
+<p>"What did he say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know." Glendenning's face as he turned to me again was quite
+white. "It is Mrs. Bentley's farmer," he added, feebly, and I could see
+that it was with an effort he kept himself from sinking. "Something has
+happened."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I guess not, or not anything serious," I answered, with an effort
+to throw off the weight I suddenly felt at my own heart. "People have
+been known to run for a plumber. But if you're anxious, let us go and
+see what the matter is."</p>
+
+<p>I turned and got my hat; Glendenning came in for his, but seemed unable
+to find it, though he stood before the table where it lay. I had to
+laugh, though I felt so little like it, as I put it in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't leave me," he entreated, as we hurried out through the maples to
+the sidewalk. "It has come at last, and I feel, as I always knew I
+should, like a murderer."</p>
+
+<p>"What rubbish!" I retorted. "You don't know that anything has happened.
+You don't know what the man's gone for."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I do," he said. "Mrs. Bentley is&mdash;He's gone for the doctor."</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke a buggy came tearing down the street behind us; the doctor
+was in it, and the man in shirt-sleeves beside him. We did not try to
+hail them, but as they whirled by the farmer turned his face, and again
+called something unintelligible to Glendenning.</p>
+
+<p>We made what speed we could after them, but they were long out of sight
+in the mile that it seemed to me we were an hour in covering before we
+reached the Bentley place. The doctor's buggy stood at the gate, and I
+perceived that I was without authority to enter the house, on which some
+unknown calamity had fallen, no matter with what good-will I had come; I
+could see that Glendenning had suffered a sudden estrangement, also,
+which he had to make a struggle against. But he went in, leaving me
+without, as if he had forgotten me.</p>
+
+<p>I could not go away, and I walked down the path to the gate, and waited
+there, in case I should be in any wise wanted. After a very long time
+the doctor came bolting over the walk towards me, as if he did not see
+me, but he brought himself up short with an "Oh!" before he actually
+struck against me. I had known him during our summer at the Conwell
+place, where we used to have him in for our little ailments, and I would
+never have believed that his round, optimistic face could look so
+worried. I read the worst in it; Glendenning was right; but I asked the
+doctor, quite as if I did not know, whether there was anything serious
+the matter.</p>
+
+<p>"Serious&mdash;yes," he said. "Get in with me; I have to see another patient,
+but I'll bring you back." We mounted into his buggy, and he went on.
+"She's in no immediate danger, now. The faint lasted so long I didn't
+know whether we should bring her out of it, at one time, but the most
+alarming part is over for the present. There is some trouble with the
+heart, but I don't think anything organic."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I heard you telling her daughter so, just before lunch. Isn't it a
+frequent complication with asthma?"</p>
+
+<p>"Asthma? Her daughter? Whom are you talking about?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Bentley. Isn't Mrs. Bentley&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No!" shouted the doctor, in disgust, "Mrs. Bentley is as well as ever.
+It's Miss Bentley. I wish there was a thousandth part of the chance for
+her that there is for her mother."</p>
+
+
+<h3>XIV.</h3>
+
+<p>I stayed over for the last train to Boston, and then I had to go home
+without the hope which Miss Bentley's first rally had given the doctor.
+My wife and I talked the affair over far into the night, and in the
+paucity of particulars I was almost driven to their invention. But I
+managed to keep a good conscience, and at the same time to satisfy the
+demand for facts in a measure by the indulgence of conjectures which
+Mrs. March continually took for them. The doctor had let fall, in his
+talk with me, that he had no doubt Miss Bentley had aggravated the
+affection of the heart from which she was suffering by her exertions in
+lifting her mother about so much; and my wife said that it needed only
+that touch to make the tragedy complete.</p>
+
+<p>"Unless," I suggested, "you could add that her mother had just told her
+she would not oppose her marriage any longer, and it was the joy that
+brought on the access of the trouble that is killing her."</p>
+
+<p>"Did the doctor say that?" Mrs. March demanded, severely.</p>
+
+<p>"No. And I haven't the least notion that anything like it happened. But
+if it had&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It would have been too tawdry. I'm ashamed of you for thinking of such
+a thing, Basil."</p>
+
+<p>Upon reflection, I was rather ashamed myself; but I plucked up courage
+to venture: "It would be rather fine, wouldn't it, when that poor girl
+is gone, if Mrs. Bentley had Glendenning come and live with her, and
+they devoted themselves to each other for her daughter's sake?"</p>
+
+<p>"Fine! It would be ghastly. What are you thinking of, my dear? How would
+it be fine?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I mean dramatically," I apologized, and, not to make bad worse, I
+said no more.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, which was Sunday, a telegram came for me, which I decided,
+without opening it, to be the announcement of the end. But it proved to
+be a message from Mrs. Bentley, begging in most urgent terms that Mrs.
+March and I would come to her at once, if possible. These terms left the
+widest latitude for surmise, but none for choice, in the sad
+circumstances, and we looked up the Sunday trains for Gormanville, and
+went.</p>
+
+<p>We found the poor woman piteously grateful, but by no means so
+prostrated as we had expected. She was rather, as often happens, stayed
+and held upright by the burden that had been laid upon her, and it was
+with fortitude if not dignity that she appealed to us for our counsel,
+and if possible our help, in a matter about which she had already
+consulted the doctor. "The doctor says that the excitement cannot hurt
+Edith; it may even help her, to propose it. I should like to do it, but
+if you do not think well of it, I will not do it. I know it is too late
+now to make up to her for the past," said Mrs. Bentley, and here she
+gave way to the grief she had restrained hitherto.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no one else," she went on, "who has been so intimately
+acquainted with the facts of my daughter's engagement&mdash;no one else that
+I can confide in or appeal to."</p>
+
+<p>We both murmured that she was very good; but she put our politeness
+somewhat peremptorily aside.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the only thing I can do now, and it is useless to do that now. It
+will be no reparation for the past, and it will be for myself and not
+for her, as all that I have done in the past has been; but I wish to
+know what you think of their getting married now."</p>
+
+<p>I am afraid that if we had said what we thought of such a tardy and
+futile proof of penitence we should have brought little comfort to the
+mother's heart, but we looked at each other in the disgust we both felt
+and said there would be a sacred fitness in it.</p>
+
+<p>She was apparently much consoled.</p>
+
+<p>It was touching enough, and I at least was affected by her tears; I am
+not so sure my wife was. But she had instantly to consider how best to
+propose the matter to Miss Bentley, and to act upon her decision.</p>
+
+<p>After all, as she reported the fact to me later, it was very simple to
+suggest her mother's wish to the girl, who listened to it with a perfect
+intelligence in which there was no bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>"They think I am going to die," she said, quietly, "and I can understand
+how she feels. It seems such a mockery; but if she wishes it; and
+Arthur&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>It was my part to deal with Glendenning, and I did not find it so easy.</p>
+
+<p>"Marriage is for life and for earth," he said, solemnly, and I thought
+very truly. "In the resurrection we shall be one another's without it. I
+don't like to go through the form of such a sacrament idly; it seems
+like a profanation of its mystery."</p>
+
+<p>"But if Miss Bentley&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"She will think whatever I do; I shall feel as she does," he answered,
+with dignity.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know," I urged. "It would not be for her; it would not certainly
+be for yourself. But if you could see it as the only form of reparation
+which her mother can now offer you both, and the only mode of expressing
+your own forgiveness&mdash;Recollect how you felt when you thought that it
+was Mrs. Bentley's death; try to recall something of that terrible
+time&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't forget that," he relented. "It was in mercy to Edith and me
+that our trial is what it is: we have recognized that in the face of
+eternity. I can forgive anything in gratitude for that."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I have often had to criticise life for a certain caprice with which she
+treats the elements of drama, and mars the finest conditions of tragedy
+with a touch of farce. No one who witnessed the marriage of Arthur
+Glendenning and Edith Bentley had any belief that she would survive it
+twenty-four hours; they themselves were wholly without hope in the
+moment which for happier lovers is all hope. To me it was like a
+funeral, but then most weddings are rather ghastly to look upon; and the
+stroke that life had in reserve perhaps finally restored the lost
+balance of gayety in this. At any rate, Mrs. Glendenning did live, and
+she is living yet, and in rather more happiness than comes to most
+people under brighter auspices. After long contention among many
+doctors, the original opinion that her heart trouble was functional, not
+organic, has been elected final, and upon these terms she bids fair to
+live as long as any of us.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know whether she will live as long as her mother, who seems to
+have taken a fresh lease of years from her single act of self-sacrifice.
+I cannot say whether Mrs. Bentley feels herself deceived and defrauded
+by her daughter's recovery; but I have made my wife observe that it
+would be just like life if she bore the young couple a sort of grudge
+for unwittingly outwitting her. Certainly, on the day we lately spent
+with them all at Gormanville, she seemed, in the slight attack of asthma
+from which she suffered, to come as heavily and exactingly upon both as
+she used to come upon her daughter alone. But I was glad to see that
+Glendenning eagerly bore the greater part of the common burden. He grows
+stouter and stouter, and will soon be the figure of a bishop.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_PURSUIT_OF_THE_PIANO" id="THE_PURSUIT_OF_THE_PIANO"></a>THE PURSUIT OF THE PIANO.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>Hamilton Gaites sat breakfasting by the window of a restaurant looking
+out on Park Square, in Boston, at a table which he had chosen after
+rejecting one on the Boylston Street side of the place because it was
+too noisy, and another in the little open space, among evergreens in
+tubs, between the front and rear, because it was too chilly. The wind
+was east, but at his Park Square window it tempered the summer morning
+air without being a draught; and he poured out his coffee with a content
+in his circumstance and provision which he was apt to feel when he had
+taken all the possible pains, even though the result was not perfect.
+But now, he had real French bread, as good as he could have got in New
+York, and the coffee was clear and bright. A growth of crisp green
+watercress embowered a juicy steak, and in its shade, as it were, lay
+two long slices of bacon, not stupidly broiled to a crisp, but
+delicately pink, and exemplarily lean. Gaites had already had a
+cantaloupe, whose spicy fragrance lingered in the air and mingled with
+the robuster odors of the coffee, the steak, and the bacon.</p>
+
+<p>He owned to being a fuss, but he contended that he was a cheerful fuss,
+and when things went reasonably well with him, he was so. They were
+going well with him now, not only in the small but in the large way. He
+was sitting there before that capital breakfast in less than half an
+hour after leaving the sleeping-car, where he had passed a very good
+night, and he was setting out on his vacation, after very successful
+work in the June term of court. He was in prime health; he had a good
+conscience in leaving no interests behind him that could suffer in his
+absence; and the smile that he bent upon the Italian waiter as he
+retired, after putting down the breakfast, had some elements of a
+benediction.</p>
+
+<p>There was a good deal of Gaites's smile, when it was all on: he had a
+generous mouth, full of handsome teeth, very white and even, which all
+showed in his smile. His whole face took part in the smile, and it was a
+charming face, long and rather quaintly narrow, of an amiable
+aquilinity, and clean-shaven. His figure, tall and thin, comported well
+with his style of visage, and at a given moment, when he suddenly rose
+and leaned from the window, eagerly following something outside with his
+eye, he had an alert movement that was very pleasant.</p>
+
+<p>The thing outside which had caught, and which now kept, his eye as long
+as he could see it, was a case in the shape of an upright piano, on the
+end of a long, heavy-laden truck, making its way with a slow, jolting
+progress among the carts, carriages, and street cars, out of the square
+round the corner toward Boylston Street. On the sloping front of the
+case was inscribed an address, which seemed to gaze at Gaites with the
+eyes of the girl whom it named and placed, and to whom in the young
+man's willing fancy it attributed a charming quality. Nothing, he felt,
+could be more suggestive, more expressive of something shy, something
+proud, something pure, something pastoral yet patrician, something
+unaffected and yet <i>chic</i>, in an unknown personality, than the legend:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Miss Phyllis Desmond,</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Lower Merritt,</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">New Hampshire.</span></p>
+
+<p>Via S. B. &amp; H. C. R. R.</p></div>
+
+<p>Like most lawyers, he had a vein of romance, and this now opened in
+pleasing conjectures concerning the girl. He knew just where Lower
+Merritt was, and so well what it was like that a vision of its white
+paint against the dark green curtain of the wooded heights around it
+filled his sense as agreeably as so much white marble. There was the
+cottage of some summer people well above the village level, among pines
+and birches, and overlooking the foamiest rush of the Saco, to which he
+instantly destined the piano of Phyllis Desmond. He had never known that
+these people's name was Desmond, and he had certainly never supposed
+that they had a daughter called Phyllis; but he divined these facts in
+losing sight of the truck; and he imagined with as logical probability
+that one of the little girls whom he used to see playing on the
+hill-slope before the cottage had grown up into the young lady whose
+name the piano bore. There was quite time enough for this
+transformation; it was seven years since Gaites had run up into the
+White Mountains for a month's rest after his last term in the Harvard
+Law School, and before beginning work in the office of the law firm in
+New York where he had got a clerkship, and where he had now a junior
+partnership. The little girl was then just ten years old, and now, of
+course, the young lady was seventeen, or would be when the piano reached
+Lower Merritt, for it was clearly meant to arrive on her birthday; it
+was a birthday-present and a surprise. He had always liked the way those
+nice people let their children play about barefoot; it would be in
+character with them to do a fond, pretty thing like that; and Gaites
+smiled for pleasure in it, and then rather blushed in relating the brown
+legs of the little girl, as he remembered seeing them in her races over
+her father's lawn, to the dignified young lady she had now become.</p>
+
+<p>He amused himself in mentally following the piano on its way to the Sea
+Board &amp; Hill Country R. R. freight-depot, which he was quite able to do
+from a habit of Boston formed during his four years in the academic
+course and his three years in the law-school at Harvard. He knew that it
+would cross Boylston into Charles Street, and keep along that level to
+Cambridge; then it would turn into McLane Street, and again into Lynde,
+by this means avoiding the grades as much as possible, and arriving
+through Causeway Street at the long, low freight-depot of the S. B. &amp; H.
+C., where it would be the first thing unloaded from the truck. It would
+stand indefinitely on the outer platform; and then, when the men in
+flat, narrow-peaked silk caps and grease-splotched overalls got round to
+it, with an air of as much personal indifference as if they were mere
+mechanical agencies, it would be pulled and pushed into the dimness of
+the interior, cool, and pleasantly smelling of pine, and hemp, and
+flour, and dried fruit, and coffee, and tar, and leather, and fish.
+There it would abide, indefinitely again, till in the same large
+impersonal way it was pulled and pushed out on the platform beside the
+track, where a freight-car marked for the Hill Country division of the
+road, with devices intelligible to the train-men, had been shunted down
+by a pony engine in obedience to mystical semaphoric gesticulations,
+from the brakeman risking his life for the purpose among the rails,
+addressed to the engineer keeping his hand on the pulse of the
+locomotive, and his head out of the cab window to see how near he could
+come to killing the brakeman without doing it.</p>
+
+<p>Gaites witnessed the whole drama with an interest that held him
+suspended between the gulps and morsels of his breakfast, and at times
+quite arrested the processes of mastication and deglutition. That pretty
+girl's name on the slope of the piano-case continued to look at him from
+the end of the truck; it smiled at him from the outer platform of the
+freight-house; it entreated him with a charming trepidation from the dim
+interior; again it smiled on the inner platform; and then, from the
+safety of the car, where the case found itself ensconced among freight
+of a neat and agreeable character, the name had the effect of intrepidly
+blowing him a kiss as the train-man slid the car doors together and
+fastened them. He drew a long breath when the train had backed and
+bumped down to the car, and the couplers had clashed together, and the
+maniac, who had not been mashed in dropping the coupling-pin into its
+socket, scrambled out from the wheels, and frantically worked his arms
+to the potential homicide in the locomotive cab, and the train had
+jolted forward on the beginning of its run.</p>
+
+<p>That was the last of the piano, and Gaites threw it off his mind, and
+finished his breakfast at his leisure. He was going to spend his
+vacation at Kent Harbor, where he knew some agreeable people, and where
+he knew that a young man had many chances of a good time, even if he
+were not the youngest kind of young man. He had spent two of his Harvard
+vacations there, and he knew this at first hand. He could not and did
+not expect to do so much two-ing on the rocks and up the river as he
+used; the zest of that sort of thing was past, rather; but he had
+brought his golf stockings with him, and a quiverful of the utensils of
+the game, in obedience to a lady who had said there were golf-links at
+Kent, and she knew a young lady who would teach him to play.</p>
+
+<p>He was going to stop off at Burymouth, to see a friend, an old Harvard
+man, and a mighty good fellow, who had rather surprised people by giving
+up New York, and settling in the gentle old town on the Piscatamac. They
+accounted for it as well as they could by his having married a Burymouth
+girl; and since he had begun, most unexpectedly, to come forward in
+literature, such of his friends as had seen him there said it was just
+the place for him. Gaites had not yet seen him there, and he had a
+romantic curiosity, the survival of an intensified friendship of their
+Senior year, to do so. He got to thinking of this good fellow rather
+vividly, when he had cleared his mind of Miss Desmond's piano, and he
+did not see why he should not take an earlier train to Burymouth than he
+had intended to take; and so he had them call him a coup&eacute; from the
+restaurant, and he got into it as soon as he left the breakfast-table.</p>
+
+<p>He gave the driver the authoritative address, "Sea Board Depot," and
+left him to take his own way, after resisting a rather silly impulse to
+bid him go through Charles Street.</p>
+
+<p>The man drove up Beacon, and down Temple through Staniford, and
+naturally Gaites saw nothing of Miss Desmond's piano, which had come
+into his mind again in starting. He did not know the colonnaded
+structure, with its stately <i>porte-coch&egrave;re</i>, where his driver proposed
+to leave him, instead of the formless brick box which he remembered as
+the Sea Board Depot, and he insisted upon that when the fellow got down
+to open the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't no Sibbod Dippo, now," the driver explained, contemptuously.
+"Guess Union Dippo'll do, though;" and Gaites, a little overcome with
+its splendor, found that it would. He faltered a moment in passing the
+conductor and porter at the end of the Pullman car on his train, and
+then decided that it would be ridiculous to take a seat in it for the
+short run to Burymouth. In the common coach he got a very good seat on
+the shady side, where he put down his hand-bag. Then he looked at his
+watch, and as it was still fifteen minutes before train-time, he
+indulged a fantastic impulse. He left the car and hurried back through
+the station and out through the electrics, hacks, herdics, carts, and
+string-teams of Causeway Street, and up the sidewalk of the street
+opening into it, as far as the S. B. &amp; H. C. freight-depot. On the way
+he bet himself five dollars that Miss Desmond's piano would not be
+there, and lost; for at the moment he came up it was unloading from the
+end of the truck which he had seen carrying it past the window of his
+restaurant.</p>
+
+<p>The fact amused him quite beyond the measure of anything intrinsically
+humorous in it, and he staid watching the exertions of the heated
+truckman and two silk-capped, sarcastic-faced freight-men, till the
+piano was well on the platform. He was so intent upon it that his
+interest seemed to communicate itself to a young girl coming from the
+other quarter, with a suburban, cloth-sided, crewel-initialed bag in her
+hand, as if she were going to a train. She paused in the stare she gave
+the piano-case, and then slowed her pace with a look over her shoulder
+after she got by. In this her eyes met his, and she blushed and hurried
+on; but not so soon that he had not time to see she had a thin face of a
+pathetic prettiness, gentle brown eyes with wistful brows, under
+ordinary brown hair. She was rather little, and was dressed with a sort
+of unaccented propriety, which was as far from distinction as it was
+from pretension.</p>
+
+<p>When Gaites got back to his car, a few minutes before the train was to
+start, he found the seat where he had left his hand-bag and light
+overcoat more than half full of a bulky lady, who looked stupidly up at
+him, and did not move or attempt any excuse for crowding him from his
+place. He had to walk the whole length of the car before he came to a
+vacant seat. It was the last of the transverse seats, and at the moment
+he dropped into it, the girl who had watched the unloading of the piano
+with him passed him, and took the sidewise seat next the door.</p>
+
+<p>She took it with a weary resignation which somehow made Gaites ashamed
+of the haste with which he had pushed forward to the only good place,
+and he felt as guilty of keeping her out of it as if he had known she
+was following him. He kept a remorseful eye upon her as she arranged her
+bag and umbrella about her, with some paper parcels which she must have
+had sent to her at the station. She breathed quickly, as if from final
+hurry, but somewhat also as if she were delicate; and tried to look as
+if she did not know he was watching her. She had taken off one of her
+gloves, and her hand, though little enough, showed an unexpected vigor
+with reference to her face, and had a curious air of education.</p>
+
+<p>When the train pulled out of the station into the clearer light, she
+turned her face from him toward the forward window, and the corner of
+her mouth, which her half-averted profile gave him, had a kind of
+piteous droop which smote him to keener regret. Once it lifted in an
+upward curve, and a gay light came into the corner of her eye; then the
+mouth drooped again, and the light went out.</p>
+
+<p>Gaites could bear it no longer; he rose and said, with a respectful bow:
+"Won't you take my seat? That seems such a very inconvenient place for
+you, with the door opening and shutting."</p>
+
+<p>The girl turned her face promptly round and up, and answered, with a
+flush in her thin cheek, but no embarrassment in her tone, "No, I thank
+you. This will do quite well," and then she turned her face away as
+before.</p>
+
+<p>He had not meant his politeness for an overture to her acquaintance, but
+he felt as justly snubbed as if he had; and he sank back into his seat
+in some disorder. He tried to hide his confusion behind the newspaper he
+opened between them; but from time to time he had a glimpse of her round
+the side of it, and he saw that the hand which clutched her bag all the
+while tightened upon it and then loosened nervously.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>"Ah, I see what you mean," said Gaites, with a kind of finality, as his
+friend Birkwall walked him homeward through the loveliest of the lovely
+old Burymouth streets. Something equivalent had been in his mind and on
+his tongue at every dramatic instant of the afternoon; and, in fact,
+ever since he had arrived from the station at Birkwall's door, where
+Mrs. Birkwall met them and welcomed him. He had been sufficiently
+impressed with the aristocratic quiet of the vast square white old
+wooden house, standing behind a high white board fence, in two acres of
+gardened ground; but the fine hallway with its broad low stairway, the
+stately drawing-room with its carving, the library with its panelling
+and portraits, and the dining-room with its tall wainscoting, united to
+give him a sense of the pride of life in old Burymouth such as the raw
+splendors of the millionaire houses in New York had never imparted to
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"They knew how to do it, they knew how to do it!" he exclaimed, meaning
+the people who had such houses built; and he said the same thing of the
+other Burymouth houses which Birkwall showed him, by grace of their
+owners, after the mid-day dinner, which Gaites kept calling luncheon.</p>
+
+<p>"Be sure you get back in good time for <i>tea</i>," said Mrs. Birkwall for a
+parting charge to her husband; and she bade Gaites, "Remember that it
+<i>is</i> tea, please; <i>not</i> dinner;" and he was tempted to kiss his hand to
+her with as much courtly gallantry as he could; for, standing under the
+transom of the slender-pillared portal to watch them away, she looked
+most distinctly descended from ancestors, and not merely the daughter of
+a father and mother, as most women do. Gaites said as much to Birkwall,
+and when they got home Birkwall repeated it to his wife, without
+injuring Gaites with her. If he saw what Birkwall had meant in marrying
+her, and settling down to his literary life with her in the atmosphere
+of such a quiet place as Burymouth, when he might have chosen money and
+unrest in New York, she on her side saw what her husband meant in liking
+the shrewd, able fellow who had such a vein of gay romance in his
+practicality, and such an intelligent and respectful sympathy with her
+tradition and environment.</p>
+
+<p>She sent and asked several of her friends to meet him at tea; and if in
+that New England disproportion of the sexes which at Burymouth is
+intensified almost to a pure gynocracy these friends were nearly all
+women, he found them even more agreeable than if they had been nearly
+all men. It seemed to him that he had never heard better talk than that
+of these sequestered ladies, who were so well bred and so well read, so
+humorous and so dignified, who loved to laugh and who loved to think. It
+was all like something in a pleasant book, and Gaites was not altogether
+to blame if it went to his head, and after the talk had been of
+Burymouth, in which he professed so acceptable an interest, and then of
+novels, of which he had read about as many as they, he confided to the
+whole table his experience with Miss Phyllis Desmond's piano. He managed
+the psychology of the little incident so well that he imparted the very
+quality he meant them to feel in it.</p>
+
+<p>"How perfectly charming!" said one of the ladies. "I don't wonder you
+fell in love with the name. It's fit for a shepherdess of high degree."</p>
+
+<p>"If <i>I</i> were a man," said the girl across the table who was not less
+sweetly a girl because she would never see thirty-nine again, "I should
+simply drop everything and follow that piano to Phyllis Desmond's door."</p>
+
+<p>"It's quite what I should like to do," Gaites responded, with a
+well-affected air of passionate regret. "But I'm promised at Kent
+Harbor&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She did not wait for him to say more, but submitted, "Oh, well, if
+you're going to Kent <i>Harbor</i>, of course!" as if that would excuse and
+explain any sort of dereliction; and then the talk went on about Kent
+Harbor till Mrs. Birkwall asked, generally, as if it were part of the
+Kent Harbor inquiry, "Didn't I hear that the Ashwoods were going to
+their place at Upper Merritt, this year?"</p>
+
+<p>Then there arose a dispute, which divided the company into nearly equal
+parties; as to whether the Ashwoods had got home from Europe yet. But it
+all ended in bringing the talk back to Phyllis Desmond's piano again,
+and in urging its pursuit upon Gaites, as something he owed to romance;
+at least he ought to do it for their sake, for now they should all be
+upon pins and needles till they knew who she was, and what she <i>could</i>
+be doing at Lower Merritt, N. H.</p>
+
+<p>At one time he had it on his tongue to say that there seemed to be
+something like infection in his interest in that piano, and he was going
+to speak of the young girl who seemed to share it, simply because she
+saw him staring at it, and who faltered so long with him before the
+freight-depot that she came near getting no seat in the train for
+Burymouth. But just at that moment the dispute about the Ashwoods
+renewed itself upon some fresh evidence which one of the ladies
+recollected and offered; and Gaites's chance passed. When it came again
+he had no longer the wish to seize it. A lingering soreness from his
+experience with that young girl made itself felt in his nether
+consciousness. He forbore the more easily because, mixed with this pain,
+was a certain insecurity as to her quality which he was afraid might
+impart itself to those patrician presences at the table. They would be
+nice, and they would be appreciative,&mdash;but would they feel that she was
+a lady, exactly, when he owned to the somewhat poverty-stricken
+simplicity of her dress in some details, more especially her thread
+gloves, which he could not consistently make kid? He was all the more
+bound to keep her from slight because he felt a little, a very little
+ashamed of her.</p>
+
+<p>He woke next morning in a wide, low, square chamber to the singing of
+robins in the garden, from which at breakfast he had luscious
+strawberries, and heaped bowls of June roses. When he started for his
+train, he parted with Mrs. Birkwall as old friends as he was with her
+husband; and he completed her conquest by running back to her from the
+gate, and asking, with a great air of secrecy, but loud enough for
+Birkwall to hear, whether she thought she could find him another girl in
+Burymouth, with just such a house and garden, and exactly like herself
+in every way.</p>
+
+<p>"Hundreds!" she shouted, and stood a graceful figure between the fluted
+pillars of the portal, waving her hand to them till they were out of
+sight behind the corner of the high board fence, over which the garden
+trees hung caressingly, and brushed Gaites's shoulder in a shy, fond
+farewell.</p>
+
+<p>It had all been as nice as it could be, and he said so again and again
+to Birkwall, who <i>would</i> go to the train with him, and who would <i>not</i>
+let him carry his own hand-bag. The good fellow clung hospitably to it,
+after Gaites had rechecked his trunk for Kent Harbor, and insisted upon
+carrying it as they walked up and down the platform together at the
+station. It seemed that the train from Boston which the Kent Harbor
+train was to connect with was ten minutes late, and after some turns
+they prolonged their promenade northward as far as the freight-depot,
+Birkwall in the abstraction of a plot for a novel which he was seizing
+these last moments to outline to his friend, and Gaites with a secret
+shame for the hope which was springing in his breast.</p>
+
+<p>On a side track stood a freight-car, from which the customary men in
+silk caps were pulling the freight, and standing it about loosely on the
+platform. The car was detached from the parent train, which had left it
+not only orphaned on this siding, but apparently disabled; for Gaites
+heard the men talking about not having cut it out a minute too soon. One
+of them called, in at the broad low door, to some one inside, "All out?"
+and a voice from far within responded, "Case here, yet; <i>I</i> can't handle
+it alone."</p>
+
+<p>The others went into the car, and then, with an interval for some heavy
+bumping and some strong language, they reappeared at the door with the
+case, which Gaites was by this time not surprised to find inscribed with
+the name and address of Miss Phyllis Desmond. He remained watching it,
+while the men got it on the platform, so wholly inattentive to
+Birkwall's plot that the most besotted young author could not have
+failed to feel his want of interest. Birkwall then turned his vision
+outward upon the object which engrossed his friend, and started with an
+"Oh, hello!" and slapped him on the back.</p>
+
+<p>Gaites nodded in proud assent, and Birkwall went on: "I thought you were
+faking the name last night; but I didn't want to give you away. It was
+the real thing, wasn't it, after all."</p>
+
+<p>"The real thing," said Gaites, with his most toothful smile, and he
+laughed for pleasure in his friend's astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Birkwall resumed, "she seems to be following <i>you</i> up, old
+fellow. This will be great for Polly, and for Miss Seaward, who wanted
+you to follow <i>her</i> up; and for all Burymouth, for that matter. Why,
+Gaites, you'll be the tea-table talk for a week; you'll be married to
+that girl before you know it. What is the use of flying in the face of
+Providence? Come! There's time enough to get a ticket, and have your
+check changed from Kent Harbor to Lower Merritt, and the Hill Country
+express will be along here at nine o'clock. You can't let that poor
+thing start off on her travels alone again!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaites flushed in a joyful confusion, and put the joke by as well as he
+could. But he was beginning to feel it not altogether a joke; it had
+acquired an element of mystery, of fatality, which flattered while it
+awed him; and he could not be easy till he had asked one of the
+freight-handlers what had happened to the car. He got an answer&mdash;flung
+over the man's shoulder&mdash;which seemed willing enough, but was wholly
+unintelligible in the clang and clatter of a passenger-train which came
+pulling in from the southward.</p>
+
+<p>"Here's the Hill Country express now!" said Birkwall. "You won't change
+your mind? Well, your Kent Harbor train backs down after this goes out.
+Don't worry about the piano. I'll find out what's happened to the car it
+was in, and I'll see that it's put into a good strong one, next time."</p>
+
+<p>"Do! That's a good fellow!" said Gaites, and in repeated promises,
+demanded and given, to come again, they passed the time till the Hill
+Country train pulled out and the Kent Harbor train backed down.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+
+<p>Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and
+after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent
+Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss
+Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has
+outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in
+plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired
+fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more
+remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed;
+at half past one o'clock he dined at somebody's cottage, and afterwards
+sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time
+to go to afternoon tea at somebody else's cottage, where he chatted
+about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for
+seven or eight o'clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.</p>
+
+<p>There was a great deal more society than there had been in his old
+college-vacation days, when the Kent Harbor House reigned sole in a
+perhaps somewhat fabled despotism; but the society was of not less
+simple instincts, and the black coat which Gaites put on for supper was
+never of the evening-dress convention. Once when he had been out
+canoeing on the river very late, his hostess made him go "just as he
+was," and he was consoled on meeting their bachelor host to find that he
+had had the inspiration to wear a flannel shirt of much more outing type
+than Gaites himself had on.</p>
+
+<p>The thing that he had to guard against was not to praise the river
+sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the
+river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy
+to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well
+that he told people he was never going away.</p>
+
+<p>He had arrived at this extreme before he received the note from Mrs.
+Birkwall, which she made his prompt bread-and-butter letter the excuse
+of writing him. She wrote mainly to remind him of his promise to stay
+another day with her husband on his way home through Burymouth; and she
+alleged an additional claim upon him because of what she said she had
+made Birkwall do for him. She had made him go down to the freight-depot
+every day, and see what had become of Phyllis Desmond's piano; and she
+had not dared write before, because it had been most unaccountably
+delayed there for the three days that had now passed. Only that morning,
+however, she had gone down herself with Birkwall; and it showed what a
+woman could do when she took anything in hand. Without knowing of her
+approach except by telepathy, the railroad people had bestirred
+themselves, and she had seen them with her own eyes put the piano-case
+into a car, and had waited till the train had bumped and jolted off with
+it towards Mewers Junction. All the ladies of her supper party, she
+declared, had been keenly distressed at the delay of the piano in
+Burymouth, and she was now offering him the relief which she had shared
+already with them.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed aloud in reading this letter at breakfast, and he could not
+do less than read it to his hostess, who said it was charming, and at
+once took a vivid interest in the affair of the piano. She accepted in
+its entirety his theory of its being a birthday-present for the young
+girl with that pretty name; and she professed to be in a quiver of
+anxiety at its retarded progress.</p>
+
+<p>"And, by-the-way," she added, with the logic of her sex, "I'm just going
+to the station to see what's become of a trunk myself that I ordered
+expressed from Chicago a week ago. If you're not doing anything this
+morning&mdash;the tide isn't in till noon, and there'll be little or no
+bathing to look at before that&mdash;you'd better drive down with me. Or
+perhaps you're canoeing up the river with somebody?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaites said he was not, and if he were he would plead a providential
+indisposition rather than miss driving with her to the station.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, anyway," she said, tangentially, "I can get June Alber to go too,
+and you can take her canoeing afterwards."</p>
+
+<p>But Miss Alber was already engaged for canoeing, and Gaites was obliged
+to drive off with his hostess alone. She said she did pity him, but she
+pitied him no longer than it took to get at the express agent. Then she
+began to pity herself, and much more energetically if not more
+sincerely, for it seemed that the agent had not been able to learn
+anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning
+it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as
+combining all the searching effects of a R&ouml;ntgen-ray examination and the
+earlier procedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which
+he seemed to have formed, toward the freight-house.</p>
+
+<p>He amused himself thinking what he should do if he found Phyllis
+Desmond's piano there, but he was wholly unprepared to do anything when
+he actually found it standing on the platform, as if it had just been
+put out of the freight-car which was still on the siding at the door. He
+passed instantly from the mood of gay conjecture in which he was playing
+with the improbable notion of its presence to a violent indignation.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, look here!" he almost shouted to a man in a silk cap and greased
+overalls who was contemplating the inscription on the slope of its
+cover, "what's that piano doing <i>here</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>The man seemed to accept him as one having authority to make this
+demand, and responded mildly, "Well, that's just what I was thinking
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>"That piano," Gaites went on with unabated violence, "started from
+Boston at the beginning of the week; and I happen to know that it's been
+lying two or three days at Burymouth, instead of going on to Lower
+Merritt, as it ought to have done at once. It ought to have been in
+Lower Merritt Wednesday afternoon at the latest, and here it is at Kent
+Harbor Saturday morning!"</p>
+
+<p>The man in the silk cap scanned Gaites's figure warily, as if it might
+be that of some official whale in disguise, and answered in a tone of
+dreamy suggestion: "Must have got shifted into the wrong car at Mewers
+Junction, somehow. Or maybe they started it wrong from Burymouth."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Maze was coming rapidly down the platform toward them, leaving the
+express agent to crawl flaccidly into his den at the end of the
+passenger-station, with the air of having had all his joints started.</p>
+
+<p>"Just look at this, Mrs. Maze," said Gaites when she drew near enough to
+read the address on the piano-case. She did look at it; then she looked
+at Gaites's face, into which he had thrown a sort of stony calm; and
+then she looked back at the piano-case.</p>
+
+<p>"No!" she exclaimed and questioned in one.</p>
+
+<p>Gaites nodded confirmation.</p>
+
+<p>"Then it won't be there in time for the poor thing's birthday?"</p>
+
+<p>He nodded again.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Maze was a woman who never measured her terms, perhaps because
+there was nothing large enough to measure them with, and perhaps because
+in their utmost expansion they were a tight fit for her emotions.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's an abominable outrage!" she began. She added: "It's a
+burning shame! They'll never get over it in the world; and when it comes
+lagging along after everything's over, she won't care a pin for it! How
+did it happen?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaites mutely referred her, with a shrug, to the man in the silk cap,
+and he again hazarded his dreamy conjecture.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it doesn't matter!" she said, with a bitterness that was a great
+comfort to Gaites. "What are you going to do about it?" she asked him.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what <i>can</i> be done about it," he answered, referring
+himself to the man in the silk cap.</p>
+
+<p>The man said, "No freight out, now, till Monday."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Maze burst forth again: "If I had the least confidence in the world
+in any human express company, I would send it by express and pay the
+expressage myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I couldn't let you do that, Mrs. Maze," Gaites protested. "Besides,
+I don't suppose they'd allow us to take it out of the freight, here,
+unless we had the bill of lading."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," cried Mrs. Maze, passionately, "I can't bear to think of that
+child's suspense. It's perfectly heart-sickening. Why shouldn't they
+telegraph? They ought to telegraph! If they let things go wandering
+round the earth at this rate, the least they can do is to telegraph and
+relieve people's minds. We'll go and make the station-master telegraph!"</p>
+
+<p>But even when the station-master was found, and made to understand the
+case, and to feel its hardship, he had his scruples. "I don't think I've
+got any right to do that," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Of coarse I'll pay for the telegram," Mrs. Maze interpolated.</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't that exactly," said the station-master. "It might look as if I
+was meddling myself. I rather not, Mrs. Maze."</p>
+
+<p>She took fire. "Then <i>I'll</i> meddle myself!" she blazed. "There's nothing
+to hinder my telegraphing, I suppose!"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> can't hinder you," the station-master admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then!" She pulled a bunch of yellow telegraph blanks toward her,
+and consumed three of them in her comprehensive despatch:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Miss Phyllis Desmond,</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Lower Merritt, N. H.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Piano left Boston Monday P. M. Broke down on way to Burymouth,
+where delayed four days. Sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers
+Junction. Forwarded to Lower Merritt Monday.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>"There! How will that do?" she asked Gaites, submitting the telegram to
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"That seems to cover the ground," he said, not so wholly hiding the
+misgiving he began to feel but that she demanded,</p>
+
+<p>"It explains everything, doesn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Very well; sign it, then!"</p>
+
+<p>"I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly. She doesn't know me."</p>
+
+<p>"She doesn't know me, either," said Gaites. He added: "And a man's
+name&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"To be sure! Why didn't I think of that?" and she affixed a signature in
+which the baptismal name gave away her romantic and impulsive
+generation&mdash;<span class="smcap">Elaine W. Maze</span> "<i>Now</i>," she triumphed, as Gaites
+helped her into her trap&mdash;"<i>now</i> I shall have a little peace of my
+life!"</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV.</h3>
+
+<p>Mrs. Maze had no great trouble in making Gaites stay over Sunday. The
+argument she used was, "No freight out till Monday, you know." The
+inducement was June Alber, whom she said she had already engaged to go
+canoeing with Gaites Sunday afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon was exquisite. The sky was cloudless, and of one blue
+with the river and the girl's eyes, as Gaites noted while she sat facing
+him from the bow of the canoe. But the day was of the treacherous
+serenity of a weather-breeder, and the next morning brought a storm of
+such violence that Mrs. Maze declared it would be a foolhardy risk of
+his life for Gaites to go; and again she enforced her logic with Miss
+Alber, whom she said she had asked to one-o'clock dinner, with a few
+other friends.</p>
+
+<p>Gaites stayed, of course, but he atoned for his weakness by starting
+early Tuesday morning, so as to get the first Hill Country train from
+Boston at Burymouth. He had decided that to get in as much change of air
+as possible he had better go to Craybrooks for the rest of his vacation.</p>
+
+<p>His course lay through Lower Merritt, and perhaps he would have time to
+run out from the train and ask the station-master (known to him from his
+former sojourn) who Miss Phyllis Desmond was. His mind was not so full
+of Miss June Alber but that he wished to know.</p>
+
+<p>It was still raining heavily, and on the first cut beyond Porchester
+Junction his train was stopped by a flagman, sent back from a
+freight-train. There was a wash-out just ahead, and the way would be
+blocked for several hours yet, if not longer. The express backed down to
+Porchester, and there seemed no choice for Gaites, if he insisted upon
+going to Craybrooks, but to take the first train up the old Boston and
+Montreal line to Wells River and across by the Wing Road through
+Fabyans; and this was what he did, arriving very late, but quite in time
+for all he had to do at Craybrooks.</p>
+
+<p>The next day the weather cleared up cold, after the storm, and the fat
+old ladies, who outnumber everybody but the thin young girls at summer
+hotels, made the landlord put the steam on in the corridors, and toasted
+themselves before the log fires on the spectacular hall hearth. Gaites
+walked all day, and at night he lounged by the lamp, trying to read, and
+wished himself at Kent Harbor. The blue eyes of June Alber made
+themselves one with the sky and the river again, and all three laughed
+at him for his folly in leaving the certain delight they embodied for
+the vague good of a whim fulfilled. Was this the change he had come to
+the mountains for? He could throw his hat into the clouds that hung so
+low in the defile where the hotel lurked, and that was something; but it
+was not so much to the purpose, now that he had it, as June Alber and
+the sky and the river, which he had no longer. As he drowsed by the fire
+in a break of the semicircle of old ladies before it, he suddenly ceased
+to think of June Alber and the Kent sky and river, and found himself as
+it were visually confronted with that pale, delicate girl in thread
+gloves; she was facing him from the bow of a canoe in the train at
+Boston, where he had first met her, and some one was saying, "Oh, she's
+a Desmond, through and through."</p>
+
+<p>He woke to the sound of a quick snort, in which he suspected a terminal
+character when he glanced round the semicircle of old ladies and found
+them all staring at him. From the pain in his neck he knew that his head
+had been hanging forward on his breast, and, in the strong belief that
+he had been publicly disgracing himself, he left the place, and went out
+on the piazza till his shame should be forgotten. Of course, the sound
+of the name Desmond had been as much a part of his dream as the sight of
+that pale girl's face; but he felt, while he paced the veranda, the pull
+of a strong curiosity to make sure of the fact. From time to time he
+looked in through the window, without courage to return. At last, when
+the semicircle was reduced to the bulks of the two ladies who had sat
+nearest him, he went in, and took a place with a newspaper at the lamp
+just behind them.</p>
+
+<p>They stopped their talk and recognized him with an exchange of
+consciousness. Then, as if compelled by an irresistible importance in
+their topic, they began again; that is, one of them began to talk again,
+and the other to listen, and Gaites from almost the first word joined
+the listener with all his might, though he diligently held up his paper
+between himself and the speaker and pretended to be reading.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "they must have had their summer home there nearly
+twenty years. Lower Merritt was one of the first places opened up in
+that part of the mountains, and I guess the Desmonds built the first
+cottage there."</p>
+
+<p>The date given would make the young lady whom he remembered from her
+childhood romps on her father's lawn somewhat older than he imagined,
+but not too old for the purposes of his romance.</p>
+
+<p>The speaker began to collect her needlework into the handkerchief on her
+lap as she went on, and he listened with an intensified abandon.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess," she continued, "that they pass most of the year there. After
+he lost his money, he had to give up his house in town, and I believe
+they have no other home now. They did use to travel some, winters, but I
+guess they don't much any more; if they don't stay there the whole
+winter through, I don't believe they get much farther now than Portland,
+or Burymouth, at the furthest. It seems to me as if I heard that one of
+the girls was going to Boston last winter to take piano lessons at the
+Conservatory, so as to teach; but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped with a definite air, and rolled her knitting up into her
+handkerchief. Gaites made a merit to himself of rising abruptly and
+closing his paper with a clash, as if he had been trying to read and had
+not been able for the talking near him. The ladies looked round
+conscience-stricken; when they saw who it was, they looked indignant.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V.</h3>
+
+<p>In the necessity, which we all feel, of making practical excuses to
+ourselves for a foolish action, he pretended that he had been at
+Craybrooks long enough, and that now, since he had derived all the
+benefit to be got from the west-side air, it was best to begin his
+homestretch on the other slope of the hills. His real reason was that he
+wished to stop at Lower Merritt and experience whatever fortuities might
+happen to him from doing so. He wished, in other words, to see Phyllis
+Desmond, or, failing this, to find out whether her piano had reached
+her.</p>
+
+<p>It had now a pathos for him which had been wanting earlier in his
+romance. It was no longer a gay surprise for a young girl's birthday; it
+was the sober means of living to a woman who must work for her living.
+But he found it not the less charming for that; he had even a more
+romantic interest in it, mingled with the sense of patronage, of
+protection, which is so agreeable to a successful man.</p>
+
+<p>He began to long for some new occasion of promoting the arrival of the
+piano in Lower Merritt, and he was so far from regretting his former
+interventions that at the first junction where his train stopped he
+employed the time in exploring the freight-house in the vain hope of
+finding it there, and urging the road to greater speed in its delivery
+to Miss Desmond. He was now not at all ashamed of the stand he had taken
+in the matter at former opportunities, and he was not abashed when a man
+in a silk cap demanded, across the twilight of the freight-house, in
+accents of the semi-sarcasm appropriate in addressing a person
+apparently not minding his own business, "Lost something?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I have," answered Gaites with just effrontery. "I've lost an
+upright piano. I started with it from Boston ten days or a fortnight
+ago, and I've found it everywhere I've stopped, and sometimes where I
+didn't stop. How long, in the course of nature, ought an upright piano
+to take in getting to this point from Boston, anyway?"</p>
+
+<p>The man obviously tasted the sarcasm in Gaites's tone, and dropped it
+from his own, but he was sulkier if more respectful than before in
+answering: "'D ought a come right through in a couple of days. 'D ought
+a been here a week ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Why isn't it here now, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Might 'a' got off on some branch road, by mistake, and waited there
+till it was looked up. You see," the man continued, resting an elbow on
+the tall casing of a chest of drawers, and dropping to a more
+confidential level in his manner, "an upright piano ain't like a
+passenger. It don't kick if it's shunted off on the wrong line. As a
+gene'l rule, freight don't complain of the route it travels by, and it
+ain't in a hurry to arrive."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said Gaites, with a sympathetic sneer.</p>
+
+<p>"But it ain't likely," said the man, who now pushed his hat far back on
+his head, in the interest of self-possession, "that it's gone wrong.
+With all these wash-outs and devilments, the last fo't-night, it might
+a' been travellin' straight and not got the'a, yet. What d'you say was
+the address?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lower Merritt," said Gaites, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.</p>
+
+<p>"Name?" persisted the man.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Phyllis Desmond," Gaites answered, now feeling really silly, but
+unable to get away without answering.</p>
+
+<p>"That ain't your name?" the man suggested, with reviving sarcasm.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it isn't!" Gaites retorted, angrily, aware that he was giving
+himself away in fine shape.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I see," the man mocked. "Friend o' the family. Well, I guess you'll
+find your piano at Lower Merritt, all right, in two-three weeks." He was
+now openly offensive, as with a sense of having Gaites in his power.</p>
+
+<p>A locomotive-bell rang, and Gaites started toward the doorway. "Is that
+my train?"</p>
+
+<p>The man openly laughed. "Guess it is, if you're goin' to Lower Merritt."
+As Gaites shot through the doorway toward his train, he added, in an
+insolent drawl, "Miss&mdash;Des&mdash;mond!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaites was so furious when he got back to the smoking-room of the
+parlor-car that he was sorry for several miles that he had not turned
+back and kicked the man, even if it lost him his train. But this was
+only while he was under the impression that he was furious with the man.
+When he discovered that he was furious with himself, for having been all
+imaginable kinds of an ass, he perceived that he had done the wisest
+thing he could in leaving the man to himself, and taking up the line of
+his journey again. What remained mortifying was that he had bought his
+ticket and checked his bag to Lower Merritt, which he wished never to
+hear of again, much less see.</p>
+
+<p>He rang for the porter and consulted him as to what could be done toward
+changing the check on his bag from Lower Merritt to Middlemount
+Junction; and as it appeared that this was quite feasible, since his
+ticket would have carried him two stations beyond the Junction, he had
+done it. He knew the hotel at Middlemount, and he decided to pass the
+night there, and the next day to go back to Kent Harbor and June Alber,
+and let Lower Merritt and Phyllis Desmond take care of themselves from
+that time forward.</p>
+
+<p>While the driver of the Middlemount House barge was helping the
+station-master-and-baggage-man (they were one) put the arriving
+passengers' trunks into the wagon for the Middlemount House, Gaites
+paced up and down the long platform in the remnant of his excitement,
+and vowed himself to have nothing more to do with Miss Desmond's piano,
+even if it should turn up then and there and personally appeal to him
+for help. In this humor he was not prepared to have anything of the kind
+happen, and he stood aghast, in looking absently into a freight-car
+standing on the track, to read, "Miss Phyllis Desmond, Lower Merritt, N.
+H.," on the slope of the now familiar case just within the open doorway.
+It was as if the poor girl were personally there pleading for his help
+with the eyes whose tenderness he remembered.</p>
+
+<p>The united station-master-and-baggage-man, who appeared also to be the
+freight agent, came lounging down the platform toward him. He was so
+exactly of the rustic railroad type that he confused Gaites with a doubt
+as to which functionary, of the many he now knew, this was.</p>
+
+<p>"Go'n' to walk over to the hotel?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Gaites faltered, and the man abruptly turned, and made the
+gesture for starting a locomotive to the driver of the Middlemount
+stage.</p>
+
+<p>"All right, Jim!" he shouted, and the stage drove off.</p>
+
+<p>"What time can I get a train for Lower Merritt this afternoon?" asked
+Gaites.</p>
+
+<p>"Four o'clock," said the man. "This freight goes out first;" and now
+Gaites noticed that up on a siding beyond the station an engine with a
+train of freight-cars was fretfully fizzing. The engineer put a
+silk-capped head out of the cab window and looked back at the
+station-master, who began to work his arms like a semaphore telegraph.
+Then the locomotive tooted, the bell rang, and the freight-train ran
+forward on the switch to the main track, and commenced backing down to
+where they stood. Evidently it was going to pick up the car with Phyllis
+Desmond's piano in it.</p>
+
+<p>"When does this freight go out?" Gaites palpitated.</p>
+
+<p>"'Bout ten minutes," said the station-master.</p>
+
+<p>"Does it stop at Lower Merritt?"</p>
+
+<p>"Leaves this cah the'a," said the man, as if surprised into the
+admission.</p>
+
+<p>"Can I go on her?" Gaites pursued, breathlessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I guess you'll have to talk to this man about that," and the
+station-master indicated, with a nod of his head, the freight conductor,
+who was swinging himself down from the caboose, now come abreast of them
+on the track. A brakeman had also jumped down, and the train fastened on
+to the waiting car, under his manipulation, with a final cluck and jolt.</p>
+
+<p>The conductor and station-master exchanged large oblong Manila-paper
+envelopes, and the station-master said, casually, "Here's a man wants to
+go to Lower Merritt with you, Bill."</p>
+
+<p>The conductor looked amused and interested. "Eva travel in a caboose?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I guess you can stand it fo' five miles, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>He turned and left Gaites, who understood this for permission, and
+clambered into the car, where he found himself in a rude but far from
+comfortless interior. There was a sort of table or desk in the middle,
+with a heavy chair or two before it; round the side of the car were some
+leather-covered benches, suitable for the hard naps which seemed to be
+taken on them, if he could guess from the man in overalls asleep on one.</p>
+
+<p>The conductor came in, after the train started, and seemed disposed to
+be sociable. He had apparently gathered from the station-master so much
+of Gaites's personal history as had accumulated since he left the
+express train at Middlemount.</p>
+
+<p>"Thought you'd try a caboose for a little change from a pahla-cah," he
+suggested, humorously.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes," Gaites partially admitted. "I did intend to stay over at
+Middlemount when I left the express there, but I changed my mind and
+decided to go on. It's very good of you to let me come with you."</p>
+
+<p>"'Tain't but a little way to Lowa Merritt," the conductor explained,
+defensively. "Eva been the'a?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; I passed a week or so there once, after I left college. Are
+you acquainted there?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm <i>from</i> the'a. Used to wo'k fo' the Desmonds&mdash;got that summa place
+up the side of the mountain&mdash;before I took to the ro-ad."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes! Have they still got it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Or it's got <i>them</i>. Be glad to sell it, I guess, since the old man
+lost his money. But Lowa Merritt's kind o' gone down as a summa roso't.
+Tryin' ha'd to bring it up, though. Know the Desmonds?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not personally."</p>
+
+<p>"Nice fo-aks," said the conductor, providing himself for conversational
+purposes with a splinter from the floor. He put it between his teeth and
+continued: "I took ca' thei' hosses, one while, as long's they <i>had</i>
+any, before I went on the ro-ad. Old gentleman kep' up a show till he
+died; then the fam'ly found out that they hadn't much of anything but
+the place left. Girls had to do something, and one of 'em got a place in
+a school out West&mdash;smaht, <i>all</i> of 'em; the second one kind o' runs the
+fahm; and the youngest, here, 's been fittin' for a music-teacha. Why,
+I've got a piano for her in this cah that we picked up at Middlemount,
+<i>now</i>. Been two wintas at the Conservatory in Boston. Got talent enough,
+they tell <i>me</i>. Undastand 't she means to go to Pohtland in the fall and
+try to get pupils, <i>the'a</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Not if <i>I</i> can help it!" thought Gaites, with a swelling heart; and
+then he blushed for his folly.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI.</h3>
+
+<p>Gaites found some notable changes in the hotel at Lower Merritt since he
+had last sojourned there. It no longer called itself a Hotel, but an
+Inn, and it had a brand-new old-fashioned swinging sign before its door;
+its front had been cut up into several gables, and shingled to the
+ground with shingles artificially antiquated, so that it looked much
+grayer than it naturally ought. Within it was equipped for electric
+lighting; and there was a low-browed &aelig;sthetic parlor, where, when Gaites
+arrived and passed to a belated dinner in the dining-room, an orchestra,
+consisting of a lady pianist and a lady violinist, was giving the
+closing piece of the afternoon concert. The dining-room was painted a
+self-righteous olive-green; it was thoroughly netted against the flies,
+which used to roost in myriads on the cut-paper around the tops of the
+pillars, and a college-student head waiter ushered Gaites through the
+gloom to his place with a warning and hushing hand which made him feel
+as if he were being shown to a pew during prayers.</p>
+
+<p>He escaped as soon as possible from the refection which, from the soup
+to the ice-cream, had hardly grown lukewarm, and went out to walk by a
+way that he knew well, and which had for him now a romantically pathetic
+interest. It was, of course, the way past the Desmond cottage, which,
+when he came in sight of it round the shoulder of upland where it stood,
+was curiously strange, curiously familiar. It needed painting badly, and
+the grounds had a sadly neglected air. The naked legs of little girls no
+longer twinkled over the lawn, which was grown neglectedly up to
+low-bush blackberries.</p>
+
+<p>Gaites hurried past with a lump in his throat, and returned by another
+road to the Inn, where his long ramble ended just as the dining-room
+doors were opened behind their nettings for supper. At this cheerfuler
+moment he found the head waiter much more conversible than at the hour
+of his retarded dinner, and Gaites made talk with him, as the young
+follow lingered beside his chair, with one eye on the door for the
+behoof of other guests.</p>
+
+<p>Gaites said he had found great changes in Lower Merritt since he had
+been there some years before, and he artfully led the talk up to the
+Desmonds. The head waiter was rather vague about their past; but he was
+distinct enough about their present, and said the young ladies happened
+all to be at home. "I don't know," he added, "whether you noticed our
+lady orchestra when you came in to dinner to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I did," said Gaites. "I was very much interested. I thought they
+played charmingly, and I was sorry that I got in only for the close of
+the last piece."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," the head waiter consoled him, "you'll have a chance to hear them
+again to-night; they're going to play for the hop. I don't know," he
+added again, "whether you noticed the lady at the piano."</p>
+
+<p>"I noticed that she had a pretty head, which she carried gracefully, but
+it was against the window, and I couldn't make out the face."</p>
+
+<p>"That," said the head waiter, with pride either in the fact or for the
+effect it must produce, "was Miss Phyllis Desmond."</p>
+
+<p>Gaites started as satisfactorily as could be wished. "Indeed?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; she's engaged to play here the whole summer." The head waiter
+fumbled with the knife and fork at the place opposite, and blushed. "But
+you'll hear her to-night yourself," he ended incoherently, and hurried
+away, to show another guest to his, or rather her, place.</p>
+
+<p>Gaites wondered why he felt suddenly angry; why he resented the head
+waiter's blush as an impertinence and a liberty. After all, the fellow
+was a student and probably a gentleman; and if he chose to help himself
+through college by taking that menial r&ocirc;le during the summer, rather
+than come upon the charity of his friends or the hard-earned savings of
+a poor old father, what had any one to say against it? Gaites had
+nothing to say against it; and yet that blush, that embarrassment of a
+man who had pulled out his chair for him, in relation to such a girl as
+Miss Phyllis Desmond, incensed him so much that he could not enjoy his
+supper. He did not bow to the head waiter when he held the netting-door
+open for him to go out, and he felt the necessity of taking the evening
+air in another stroll to cool himself off.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, if the poor girl was reduced to playing in the hotel
+orchestra for the money it would give her, she had come down to the
+level of the head waiter, and they must meet as equals. But the thought
+was no less intolerable for that, and Gaites set out with the notion of
+walking away from it. At the station, however, which was in friendly
+proximity to the Inn, his steps were stayed by the sound of girlish
+voices, rising like sweetly varied pipes from beyond the freight-depot.
+Their youth invited his own to look them up, and he followed round to
+the back of the depot, where he came upon a sight which had, perhaps
+from the waning light, a heightened charm. Against the curtain of low
+pines which had been gradually creeping back upon the depot ever since
+the woods were cut away to make room for it, four girls were posed in
+attitudes instinctively dramatic and vividly eager, while as many men
+were employed in getting what Gaites at once saw to be Miss Phyllis
+Desmond's piano into the wagon backed up to the platform of the depot.
+Their work was nearly accomplished, but at every moment of what still
+remained to be done the girls emitted little shrieks, laughs, and moans
+of intense interest, and fluttered in their light summer dresses against
+the background of the dark evergreens like anxious birds.</p>
+
+<p>At last the piano was got into the middle of the wagon, the inclined
+planks withdrawn and loaded into it, and the tail-board snapped to.
+Three of the men stepped aside, and one of them jumped into the front of
+the wagon and gathered up the reins from the horses' backs. He called
+with mocking challenge to the group of girls, "Nobody goin' to git up
+here and keep this piano from tippin' out?"</p>
+
+<p>A wild clamor rose from the girls, settling at last into staccato cries.</p>
+
+<p>"You've got to <i>do</i> it, Phyl!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Phyllis, you <i>must</i> get in!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's <i>your</i> piano, Phyl. You've got to keep it from tipping out!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no! I won't! I can't! I'm not going to!" one voice answered to all,
+but apparently without a single reference to the event; for in the end
+the speaker gave her hand to the man in the wagon, and with many small
+laughs and squeaks was pulled up over the hub and tire of a front wheel,
+and then stood staying herself against the piano-case, with a final
+lamentation of "Oh, it's a shame! I'll never speak to any of you again!
+How perfectly mean! <i>Oh!</i>" The last exclamation signalized the start of
+the horses at a brisk mountain trot, which the driver presently sobered
+to a walk. The three remaining girls followed, mocking and cheering, and
+after them lounged the three remaining men, at a respectful distance,
+marking the social interval between them, which was to be bridged only
+in some such moment of supreme excitement as the present.</p>
+
+<p>It was no question with Gaites whether he should bring up the end of the
+procession; he could not think of any consideration that would have
+stayed him. He scarcely troubled himself to keep at a fit remove from
+the rest; and as he followed in the deepening twilight he felt a sweet,
+unselfish gladness of heart that the poor girl whom he had seen so wan
+and sad in Boston should be the gay soul of this pretty triumph.</p>
+
+<p>The wagon drove into the grounds of the Desmond cottage, and backed up
+to the edge of the veranda. Lights appeared, and voices came from
+within. One of the men, despatched to the barn for a hatchet, came
+flickering back with a lantern also; lamps brought out of the house were
+extinguished by the evening breeze (in spite of luminous hands held near
+the chimney to shelter them), amidst the joyful applause of all the
+girls and the laughter of the men. A sound of hammering rose, and then a
+sound of boards rending from the clutch of nails, and then a sound of
+pieces thrown loosely into a pile. There was a continual flutter of
+women's dresses and emotions, and this did not end even when the piano,
+disclosed from its casing and all its wraps, was pushed indoors, and
+placed against the parlor wall, where a flash of lamp-light revealed it
+to Gaites in final position.</p>
+
+<p>He lingered still, in the shelter of some barberry-bushes at the cottage
+gate, and not till the last cry of gratitude had been answered by the
+unanimous disclaimer of the men rattling away in the wagon did he feel
+that his pursuit of the piano had ended.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VII.</h3>
+
+<p>"Can you tell me, madam," asked Gaites of an obviously approachable
+tabby next the chimney-corner, "which of the musicians is Miss Desmond?"</p>
+
+<p>He had hurried back to the Inn, and got himself early into a dress suit
+that proved wholly inessential, and was down among the first at the hop.
+This function, it seemed, was going on in the parlor, which summed in
+itself the character of ball-room as well as drawing-room. The hop had
+now begun, and two young girl couples were doing what they could to
+rebuke the sparse youth of Lower Merritt Inn for their lack of eagerness
+in the evening's pleasure by dancing alone. Gaites did not even notice
+them, he was so intent upon the ladies of the orchestra, concerning whom
+he was beginning to have a troubled mind, not to say a dark misgiving.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," the approachable tabby answered, "it's the one at the piano. The
+violinist is Miss Axewright, of South Newton. They were at the
+Conservatory together in Boston, and they are such friends! Miss Desmond
+would never have played here&mdash;intends to take pupils in Portland in the
+winter&mdash;if Miss Axewright hadn't come," and the pleasant old tabby
+purred on, with a velvety pat here, and a delicate scratch there. But
+Gaites heard with one ear only; the other was more devotedly given to
+the orchestra, which also claimed both his eyes. While he learned, as
+with the mind of some one else, that the Desmonds had been very much
+opposed to Phyllis's playing at the Inn, but had consented partly with
+their poverty, because they needed everything they could rake and scrape
+together, and partly with their will, because Miss Axewright was such a
+nice girl, he was painfully adjusting his consciousness to the fact that
+the girl at the piano was not the girl whom he had seen at Boston and
+whom he had so rashly and romantically decided to be Miss Phyllis
+Desmond. The pianist was indeed Miss Desmond, but to no purpose, if the
+violinist was some one else; it availed as little that the violinist was
+the illusion that had lured him to Lower Merritt in pursuit of Miss
+Desmond's piano, if she were really Miss Axewright of South Newton.</p>
+
+<p>What remained for him to do was to arrange for his departure by the
+first train in the morning; and he was subjectively accounting to the
+landlord for his abrupt change of mind after he had engaged his room for
+a week, while he was intent with all his upper faculties upon the
+graceful poses and movements of Miss Axewright. There was something so
+appealing in the pressure of her soft chin as it held the violin in
+place against her round, girlish throat that Gaites felt a lump in his
+own larger than his Adam's-apple would account for to the spectator; the
+delicately arched wrist of the hand that held the bow, and the
+rhythmical curve and flow of her arm in playing, were means of the spell
+which wove itself about him, and left him, as it were, bound hand and
+foot. It was in this helpless condition that he rose at the urgence of a
+friendly young fellow who had chosen himself master of ceremonies, and
+took part in the dancing; and at the end of the first half of the
+programme, while the other dancers streamed out on the verandas and
+thronged the stairways, he was aware of dangling his chains as he
+lounged toward the ladies of the orchestra. The volunteer master of
+ceremonies had half shut himself across the piano in his eager talk with
+Miss Desmond, and he readily relinquished Miss Axewright to Gaites, who
+willingly devoted himself to her, after Miss Desmond had risen in
+acknowledgment of his bow. He had then perceived that she was not nearly
+so tall as she had seemed when seated; and a woman who sat tall and
+stood low was as much his aversion as if his own abnormally long legs
+did not render him guilty of the opposite offence.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Desmond must have had other qualities and characteristics, but in
+his absorption with Miss Axewright's he did not notice them. He saw
+again the pretty, pathetic face, the gentle brown eyes, the ordinary
+brown hair, the sentient hands, the slight, graceful figure, the whole
+undistinguished, unpretentious presence, which had taken his fancy at
+Boston, and which he now perceived had kept it, under whatever erring
+impressions, ever since.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we have met before, Miss Axewright," he said boldly, and he had
+the pleasure of seeing her pensive little visage light up with a
+responsive humor.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we have," she replied; and Miss Desmond, whose habitual state
+seemed to be intense inattention to whatever directly addressed itself
+to her, cut in with the cry:</p>
+
+<p>"You have met <i>before</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Two weeks ago, in Boston," said Gaites. "Miss Axewright and I
+stopped at the S. B. &amp; H. C. freight-depot to see that your piano
+started off all right."</p>
+
+<p>He explained himself further, and, "Well, I don't see what you did to
+it," Miss Desmond pouted. "It just got here this afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>"Probably they 'throwed a spell' on it, as the country people say,"
+suggested the master of ceremonies. "But all's well that end's well. The
+great thing is to have your piano, Miss Phyllis. I'm coming up to-morrow
+morning to see if it's got here in good condition."</p>
+
+<p>"That's <i>some</i> compensation," said the girl ironically; and she added,
+with the kind of repellent lure with which women know how to leave men
+the responsibility of any reciprocal approach, "I don't know whether it
+won't need tuning first."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm a piano-tunist myself," the young fellow retorted, and their
+banter took a course that left Miss Axewright and Gaites to themselves.
+The dancers began to stray in again from the stairways and verandas.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me!" said Miss Desmond, "it's time already;" and as she dropped
+upon the piano-stool she called to Miss Axewright with an authority of
+tone which Gaites thought augured well for her success as a teacher,
+"Millicent!"</p>
+
+
+<h3>VIII.</h3>
+
+<p>The next morning when Gaites came down to breakfast he had a question
+which solved itself contrary to his preference as he entered the
+dining-room. He was so early that the head waiter had to jump from his
+own unfinished meal, and run to pull out his chair; and Gaites saw that
+he left at his table the landlord's family, the clerk, the housekeeper,
+and Miss Axewright. It appeared that she was not only staying in the
+hotel, but was there on terms which indeed held her above the servants,
+but separated her from the guests.</p>
+
+<p>He hardly knew how to dissemble the feeling of humiliation mixed with
+indignation which flashed up in him, and which, he was afterwards
+afraid, must have made him seem rather curt in his response to the head
+waiter's civilities. Miss Axewright left the dining-room first, and he
+hurried out to look her up as soon as he had despatched the coffee and
+steak which formed his breakfast, with a wholly unreasoned impulse to
+offer her some sort of reparation for the slight the conditions put upon
+her. He found her sitting on the veranda beside the friendly tabby of
+his last night's acquaintance, and far, apparently, from feeling the
+need of reparation through him. She was very nice, though, and after
+chatting a little while she rose, and excused herself to the tabby, with
+a politeness that included Gaites, upon the ground of a promise to Miss
+Desmond that she would come up, the first thing after breakfast, and see
+how the piano was getting along.</p>
+
+<p>When she reappeared, in her hat, at the front of the Inn, Gaites
+happened to be there, and he asked her if he might walk with her and
+make his inquiries too about the piano, in which, he urged, they were
+mutually interested. He had a notion to tell her all about his pursuit
+of Miss Desmond's piano, as something that would peculiarly interest
+Miss Desmond's friend; but though she admitted the force of his
+reasoning as to their common concern in the fate of the piano, and had
+allowed him to go with her to rejoice over its installation, some subtle
+instinct kept him from the confidence he had intended, and they walked
+on in talk (very agreeable talk, Gaites found it) which left the subject
+of the piano altogether intact.</p>
+
+<p>This was fortunate for Miss Desmond, who wished to talk of nothing else.
+The piano had arrived in perfect condition. "But I don't know where the
+poor thing <i>hasn't</i> been, on the way," said the girl. "It left Boston
+fully two weeks ago, and it seems to have been wandering round to the
+ends of the earth ever since. The first of last week, I heard from it at
+Kent Harbor, of all places! I got a long despatch from there, from some
+unknown female, telling me it had broken down on the way to Burymouth,
+and been sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Have you
+ever been at Kent Harbor, Mr. Gaites?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," said Gaites. This was the moment to come out with the history
+of his relation to the piano; but he waited.</p>
+
+<p>"And can you tell me whether they happen to have a female freight agent
+there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not to my knowledge," said Gaites, with a mystical smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Then <i>do</i> you know anybody there by the name of Elaine W. Maze?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Maze? Yes, I know Mrs. Maze. She has a cottage, there."</p>
+
+<p>"And can you tell me <i>why</i> Mrs. Maze should be telegraphing me about my
+piano?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a note of resentment in Miss Desmond's voice, and it silenced
+the laughing explanation which Gaites had almost upon his tongue. He
+fell very grave in answering, "I can't, indeed, Miss Desmond."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps she found out that it had been a long time on the way, and did
+it out of pure good-nature, to relieve your anxiety."</p>
+
+<p>This was what Miss Axewright conjectured, but it seemed to confirm Miss
+Desmond's worst suspicions.</p>
+
+<p>"That is what I should like to be <i>sure</i> of," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Gaites thought of all his own anxieties and interferences in behalf of
+the piano of this ungrateful girl, and in her presence he resolved that
+his lips should be forever sealed concerning them. She never would take
+them in the right way. But he experimented with one suggestion. "Perhaps
+she was taken with the beautiful name on the piano-case, and couldn't
+help telegraphing just for the pleasure of writing it."</p>
+
+<p>"Beautiful?" cried Miss Desmond. "It was my grandmother's name; and I
+wonder they didn't call me for my great-grandmother, Daphne, and be done
+with it."</p>
+
+<p>The young man who had chosen himself master of ceremonies at the hop the
+night before now proposed from the social background where he had
+hitherto kept himself, "<i>I</i> will call you Daphne."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> will call me Miss Desmond, if you please, Mr. Ellett." The owner
+of the name had been facing her visitors from the piano-stool with her
+back to the instrument. She now wheeled upon the stool, and struck some
+chords. "I wish you'd thought to bring your fiddle, Millicent. I should
+like to try this piece." The piece lay on the music-rest before her.</p>
+
+<p>"I will go and get it for her," said the ex-master of ceremonies.</p>
+
+<p>"Do," said Miss Desmond.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," Gaites protested. "I brought Miss Axewright, and I have the
+first claim to bring her fiddle."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid you couldn't either of you find it," Miss Axewright began.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll both try," said the ex-master of ceremonies. "Where do you think
+it is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's in the case on the piano."</p>
+
+<p>"That doesn't sound very intricate," said Gaites, and they all laughed.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the two men were out of the house, the ex-master of
+ceremonies confided: "That name is a very tender spot with Miss Desmond.
+She's always hated it since I knew her, and I can't remember when I
+<i>didn't</i> know her."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I could see that&mdash;too late," said Gaites. "But what I can't
+understand is, Miss Axewright seemed to hate it, too."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ellett appeared greatly edified. "Did <i>you</i> notice that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think I did."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now I'll tell you just what I think. There aren't any two girls
+in the world that like each other better than those two. But that shows
+just how it is. Girls are terribly jealous, the best of them. There
+isn't a girl living that really likes to have another girl praised by a
+man, or anything about her, I don't care who the man is. It's a fact,
+whether you believe it or not, or whether you respect it. I don't
+respect it myself. It's narrow-minded. I don't deny it: they <i>are</i>
+narrow-minded. All the same, we can't <i>help</i> ourselves. At least, <i>I</i>
+can't."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ellett broke into a laugh of exhaustive intelligence and clapped
+Gaites on the back.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IX.</h3>
+
+<p>Gaites, if he did not wholly accept Ellett's philosophy of the female
+nature, acted in the light it cast upon the present situation. From that
+time till the end of his stay at Lower Merritt, which proved to be
+coeval with the close of the Inn for the season, and with the retirement
+of the orchestra from duty, he said nothing more of Miss Phyllis
+Desmond's beautiful name. He went further, and altogether silenced
+himself concerning his pursuit of her piano; he even sought occasions of
+being silent concerning her piano in every way, or so it seemed to him,
+in his anxious avoidance of the topic. In all this matter he was
+governed a good deal by the advice of Mr. Ellett, to whom he had
+confessed his pursuit of Miss Desmond's piano in all its particulars,
+and who showed a highly humorous appreciation of the facts. He was a
+sort of second (he preferred to say second-hand) cousin of Miss Desmond,
+and, so far as he could make out, had been born engaged to her; and he
+showed an intuition in the gingerly handling of her rather uncertain
+temper which augured well for his future happiness. His future happiness
+seemed to be otherwise taken care of, for though he was a young man of
+no particular prospects, and no profession whatever, he had a generous
+willingness to liberate his affianced to an artistic career; or, at
+least, there was no talk of her giving up her scheme of teaching the
+piano-forte because she was engaged to be married, he was exactly fitted
+to become the husband of a wage-earning wife, and was so far from being
+offensive in this quality that everybody (including Miss Desmond, rather
+fitfully) liked him; and he was universally known as Charley Ellett.</p>
+
+<p>After he had quite converted Gaites to his theory of silence concerning
+his outlived romance, he liked to indulge himself, when he got Gaites
+alone with the young ladies, in speculations as to the wanderings of
+Miss Desmond's piano. He could always get a rise out of Miss Desmond by
+referring to the impertinent person who had telegraphed her about it
+from Kent Harbor, and he could put Gaites into a quiver of anxiety by
+asking him whether he had heard Mrs. Maze speak of the piano when he was
+at Kent Harbor, or whether he had happened to see anything of it at any
+of the junctions on his way to Lower Merritt. To these questions Gaites
+felt himself obliged to respond with lies point-blank, though there were
+times when he was tempted to come out with the truth, Miss Axewright
+seemed so amiably indifferent, or so sympathetically interested, when
+Ellett was airing his conjectures or pushing his investigations.</p>
+
+<p>Still Gaites clung to the refuge of his lies, and upon the whole it
+served him well, or at least enabled him to temporize in safety, while
+he was making the progress in Miss Axewright's affections which, if he
+had not been her lover, he never would have imagined difficult. They
+went every day, between the afternoon and evening concerts, to walk in
+the Cloister, a colonnade of pines not far from the Inn, which differed
+from some other cloisters in being so much devoted to love-making. She
+was in love with him, as he was with her; but in her proud maiden soul
+she did not dream of bringing him to the confession she longed for. This
+came the afternoon of the last day they walked in the Cloister, when it
+seemed as if they might go on walking there forever, and never emerge
+from their fond, delicious, tremulous, trusting doubt of each other.</p>
+
+<p>She cried upon his shoulder, with her arms round his neck, and owned
+that she had loved him from the first moment she had seen him in front
+of the S. B. &amp; H. C. freight-depot in Boston; and Gaites tried to make
+his passion antedate this moment. To do so, he had to fall back upon the
+notion of pre-existence, but she gladly admitted his hypothesis.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning brought another mood, a mood of sweet defiance, in
+which she was still more enrapturing. By this time the engagement was
+known to their two friends, and Miss Desmond came to the cars with
+Charley Ellett to see her off. As Gaites was going to Boston on the same
+train, they made it the occasion of seeing him off, too. Millicent
+openly declared that they two were going together, that in fact she was
+taking him home to show him to her family in South Newton and see
+whether they liked him.</p>
+
+<p>Ellett put this aspect of the affair aside. "Well, then," he said, "if
+you're going to be in Boston together, I think you ought to see the S.
+B. &amp; H. C. traffic-manager, and find out all about what kept Phyl's
+piano so long on the road. <i>I</i> think they owe her an explanation, and
+Gaites is a lawyer, and he's just the man to get it, with damages."</p>
+
+<p>Gaites saw in Ellett's impudent, amusing face that he divined
+Millicent's continued ignorance of his romance, and was bent on
+mischief. But the girl paid no heed to his talk, and Gaites could not
+help laughing. He liked the fellow; he even liked Miss Desmond, who was
+so much softened by the occasion that she had all the thorny allure of a
+ripened barberry in his fancy. They both hung about the seat, where he
+stood ready to take his place beside Millicent, till the conductor
+shouted, "All aboard!" Then they ran out, and waved to the lovers
+through the window till the car started.</p>
+
+<p>When they could be seen no longer, Millicent let Gaites arrange their
+hand-baggage together on the seat in front of them. It was a warm day,
+and she said she did believe she would take her hat off; and she gave it
+to him, odorous of her pretty hair, to put in the rack overhead. After
+he had done this, and sat down definitively, she shrank unconsciously
+closer to him, knitting her fingers in those of his hand on the seat
+between them.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," she said, "tell me all about yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"About myself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. About Phyllis Desmond's piano, and why you were so interested in
+it."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="A_DIFFICULT_CASE" id="A_DIFFICULT_CASE"></a>A DIFFICULT CASE.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>It was in the fervor of their first married years that the Ewberts came
+to live in the little town of Hilbrook, shortly after Hilbrook
+University had been established there under the name of its founder,
+Josiah Hilbrook. The town itself had then just changed its name, in
+compliance with the conditions of his public benefactions, and in
+recognition of the honor he had done it in making it a seat of learning.
+Up to a certain day it had been called West Mallow, ever since it was
+set off from the original town of Mallow; but after a hundred and
+seventy years of this custom it began on that day to call itself
+Hilbrook, and thenceforward, with the curious American acquiescence in
+the accomplished fact, no one within or without its limits called it
+West Mallow again.</p>
+
+<p>The memory of Josiah Hilbrook himself began to be lost in the name he
+had given the place; and except for the perfunctory mention of its
+founder in the ceremonies of Commencement Day, the university hardly
+remembered him as a man, but rather regarded him as a locality. He had,
+in fact, never been an important man in West Mallow, up to the time he
+had left it to seek his fortune in New York; and when he died, somewhat
+abruptly, and left his money, as it were, out of a clear sky, to his
+native place in the form of a university, a town hall, a soldiers'
+monument, a drinking-fountain, and a public library, his
+fellow-townsmen, in making the due civic acknowledgment and acceptance
+of his gifts, recalled with effort the obscure family to which he
+belonged.</p>
+
+<p>He had not tried to characterize the university by his peculiar
+religious faith, but he had given a church building, a parsonage, and a
+fund for the support of preaching among them at Hilbrook to the small
+body of believers to which his people adhered. This sect had a name by
+which it was officially known to itself; but, like the Shakers, the
+Quakers, the Moravians, it early received a nickname, which it passively
+adopted, and even among its own members the body was rarely spoken of or
+thought of except as the Rixonites.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ewbert fretted under the nickname, with an impatience perhaps the
+greater because she had merely married into the Rixonite church, and had
+accepted its doctrine because she loved her husband rather than because
+she had been convinced of its truth. From the first she complained that
+the Rixonites were cold; and if there was anything Emily Ewbert had
+always detested, it was coldness. No one, she once testified, need talk
+to her of their passive waiting for a sign, as a religious life; if
+there were not some strong, central belief, some rigorously formulated
+creed, some&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Good old herb and root theology," her husband interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes!" she heedlessly acquiesced. "Unless there is something like
+<i>that</i>, all the waiting in the world won't"&mdash;she cast about for some
+powerful image&mdash;"won't keep the cold chills from running down <i>my</i> back
+when I think of my duty as a Christian."</p>
+
+<p>"Then don't think of your duty as a Christian, my dear," he pleaded,
+with the caressing languor which sometimes made her say, in reprobation
+of her own pleasure in it, that <i>he</i> was a Rixonite, if there ever <i>was</i>
+one. "Think of your duty as a woman, or even as a mortal."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you're thinking of making a sermon on that," she retorted;
+and he gave a sad, consenting laugh, as if it were quite true, though in
+fact he never really preached a sermon on mere femininity or mere
+mortality. His sermons were all very good, however; and that was another
+thing that put her out of patience with his Rixonite parishioners&mdash;that
+they should sit there Sunday after Sunday, year in and year out, and
+listen to his beautiful sermons, which ought to melt their hearts and
+bring tears into their eyes, and not seem influenced by them any more
+than if they were so many dry chips.</p>
+
+<p>"But think how long they've had the gospel," he suggested, in a pensive
+self-derision which she would not share.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, one thing, Clarence," she summed up, "I'm not going to let you
+throw yourself away on them; and unless you see some of the university
+people in the congregation, I want you to use your old sermons from this
+out. They'll never know the difference; and I'm going to make you take
+one of the old sermons along every Sunday, so as to be prepared."</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>One good trait of Mrs. Ewbert was that she never meant half she
+said&mdash;she could not; but in this case there was more meaning than usual
+in her saying. It really vexed her that the university families, who had
+all received them so nicely, and who appreciated her husband's spiritual
+and intellectual quality as fully as even she could wish, came some of
+them so seldom, and some of them never, to hear him at the Rixonite
+church. They ought, she said, to have been just suited by his preaching,
+which inculcated with the peculiar grace of his gentle, poetic nature a
+refinement of the mystical theology of the founder. The Rev. Adoniram
+Rixon, who had seventy years before formulated his conception of the
+religious life as a patient waiting upon the divine will, with a
+constant reference of this world's mysteries and problems to the world
+to come, had doubtless meant a more strenuous abeyance than Clarence
+Ewbert was now preaching to a third generation of his followers. He had
+doubtless meant them to be eager and alert in this patience, but the
+version of his gospel which his latest apostle gave taught a species of
+acquiescence which was foreign to the thoughts of the founder. He put as
+great stress as could be asked upon the importance of a realizing faith
+in the life to come, and an implicit trust in it for the solution of the
+problems and perplexities of this life; but so far from wishing his
+hearers to be constantly taking stock, as it were, of their spiritual
+condition, and interrogating Providence as to its will concerning them,
+he besought them to rest in confidence of the divine mindfulness, secure
+that while they fulfilled all their plain, simple duties toward one
+another, God would inspire them to act according to his purposes in the
+more psychological crises and emergencies, if these should ever be part
+of their experience.</p>
+
+<p>In maintaining, on a certain Sunday evening, that his ideas were much
+more adapted to the spiritual nourishment of the president, the dean,
+and the several professors of Hilbrook University than to that of the
+hereditary Rixonites who nodded in a slumbrous acceptance of them, Mrs.
+Ewbert failed as usual to rouse her husband to a due sense of his
+grievance with the university people.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "you know I can't <i>make</i> them come, my dear."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not. And I would be the last to have you lift a finger. But I
+know that you feel about it just as I do."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps; but I hope not so much as you <i>think</i> you feel. Of course, I'm
+very grateful for your indignation. But I know you don't undervalue the
+good I may do to my poor sheep&mdash;they're <i>not</i> an intellectual flock&mdash;in
+trying to lead them in the ways of spiritual modesty and
+unconsciousness. How do we know but they profit more by my preaching
+than the faculty would? Perhaps our university friends are spiritually
+unconscious enough already, if not modest."</p>
+
+<p>"I see what you mean," said Mrs. Ewbert, provisionally suspending her
+sense of the whimsical quality in his suggestion. "But you need never
+tell me that they wouldn't appreciate you more."</p>
+
+<p>"More than old Ransom Hilbrook?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I hope <i>he</i> isn't coming here to-night, again!" she implored, with
+a nervous leap from the point in question. "If he's coming here every
+Sunday night"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook's having
+come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a
+habit of it.</p>
+
+<p>"But he <i>stayed</i> so late!" she insisted from the safety of her real
+belief that he was not coming.</p>
+
+<p>"He came very early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which
+her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall tell him you're not well," she went on: "I shall tell him you
+are lying down. You ought to be, now. You're perfectly worn out with
+that long walk you took." She rose, and beat up the sofa pillows with a
+menacing eye upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm very comfortable here," he said from the depths of his
+easy-chair. "Hilbrook won't come to-night. It's past the time."</p>
+
+<p>She glanced at the clock with him, and then desisted. "If he does, I'm
+determined to excuse you somehow. You ought never to have gone near him,
+Clarence. You've brought it upon yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert could not deny this, though he did not feel himself so much to
+blame for it as she would have liked to make out in her pity of him. He
+owned that if he had never gone to see Hilbrook the old man would
+probably never have come near them, and that if he had not tried so much
+to interest him when he did come Hilbrook would not have stayed so long;
+and even in this contrite mind he would not allow that he ought not to
+have visited him and ought not to have welcomed him.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+
+<p>The minister had found his parishioner in the old Hilbrook homestead,
+which Josiah Hilbrook, while he lived, suffered Ransom Hilbrook to
+occupy, and when he died bequeathed to him, with a sufficient income for
+all his simple wants. They were cousins, and they had both gone out into
+the world about the same time: one had made a success of it, and
+remained; and the other had made a failure of it, and come back. They
+were both Rixonites, as the families of both had been in the generation
+before them. It could be supposed that Josiah Hilbrook, since he had
+given the money for a Rixonite church and the perpetual pay of a
+Rixonite minister in his native place, had died in the faith; and it
+might have been supposed that Ransom Hilbrook, from his constant
+attendance upon its services, was living in the same faith. What was
+certain was that the survivor lived alone in the family homestead on the
+slope of the stony hill overlooking the village. The house was gray with
+age, and it crouched low on the ground where it had been built a century
+before, and anchored fast by the great central chimney characteristic of
+the early New England farmhouse. Below it staggered the trees of an
+apple orchard belted in with a stone wall, and beside it sagged the
+sheds whose stretch united the gray old house to the gray old barn, and
+made it possible for Hilbrook to do his chores in rain or snow without
+leaving cover. There was a dooryard defined by a picket fence, and near
+the kitchen door was a well with a high pent roof, where there had once
+been a long sweep.</p>
+
+<p>These simple features showed to the village on the opposite slope with a
+distinctness that made the place seem much lonelier than if it had been
+much more remote. It gained no cheerfulness from its proximity, and when
+the windows of the house lighted up with the pale gleam of the sunset,
+they imparted to the village a sense of dreary solitude which its own
+lamps could do nothing to relieve.</p>
+
+<p>Ransom Hilbrook came and went among the villagers in the same sort of
+inaccessible contiguity. He did not shun passing the time of day with
+people he met; he was in and out at the grocer's, the meat man's, the
+baker's, upon the ordinary domestic occasions; but he never darkened any
+other doors, except on his visits to the bank where he cashed the checks
+for his quarterly allowance. There had been a proposition to use him
+representatively in the ceremonies celebrating the acceptance of the
+various gifts of Josiah Hilbrook; but he had not lent himself to this,
+and upon experiment the authorities found that he was right in his guess
+that they could get along without him.</p>
+
+<p>He had not said it surlily, but sadly, and with a gentle deprecation of
+their insistence. While the several monuments that testified to his
+cousin's wealth and munificence rose in the village beyond the brook, he
+continued in the old homestead without change, except that when his
+housekeeper died he began to do for himself the few things that the
+ailing and aged woman had done for him. How he did them was not known,
+for he invited no intimacy from his neighbors. But from the extent of
+his dealings with the grocer it was imagined that he lived mainly upon
+canned goods. The fish man paid him a weekly visit, and once a week he
+got from the meat man a piece of salt pork, which it was obvious to the
+meanest intelligence was for his Sunday baked beans. From his purchase
+of flour and baking powder it was reasonably inferred that he now and
+then made himself hot biscuit. Beyond these meagre facts everything was
+conjecture, in which the local curiosity played somewhat actively, but,
+for the most part, with a growing acquiescence in the general ignorance
+none felt authorized to dispel. There had been a time when some
+fulfilled a fancied duty to the solitary in trying to see him. But the
+visitors who found him out of doors were not asked within, and were
+obliged to dismiss themselves, after an interview across the pickets of
+the dooryard fence or from the trestles or inverted feed pails on which
+they were invited to seats in the barn or shed. Those who happened to
+find their host more ceremoniously at home were allowed to come in, but
+were received in rooms so comfortless from the drawn blinds or fireless
+hearths that they had not the spirits for the task of cheering him up
+which they had set themselves, and departed in greater depression than
+that they left him to.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV.</h3>
+
+<p>Ewbert felt all the more impelled to his own first visit by the fame of
+these failures, but he was not hastened in it. He thought best to wait
+for some sign or leading from Hilbrook; but when none came, except the
+apparent attention with which Hilbrook listened to his preaching, and
+the sympathy which he believed he detected at times in the old eyes
+blinking upon him through his sermons, he felt urged to the visit which
+he had vainly delayed.</p>
+
+<p>Hilbrook's reception was wary and non-committal, but it was by no means
+so grudging as Ewbert had been led to expect. After some ceremonious
+moments in the cold parlor Hilbrook asked him into the warm kitchen,
+where apparently he passed most of his own time. There was something
+cooking in a pot on the stove, and a small room opened out of the
+kitchen, with a bed in it, which looked as if it were going to be made,
+as Ewbert handsomely maintained. There was an old dog stretched on the
+hearth behind the stove, who whimpered with rheumatic apprehension when
+his master went to put the lamp on the mantel above him.</p>
+
+<p>In describing the incident to his wife Ewbert stopped at this point, and
+then passed on to say that after they got to talking Hilbrook seemed
+more and more gratified, and even glad, to see him.</p>
+
+<p>"Everybody's glad to see <i>you</i>, Clarence," she broke out, with tender
+pride. "But why do you say, 'After we got to talking'? Didn't you go to
+talking at once?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, no," he answered, with a vague smile; "we did a good deal of
+listening at first, both of us. I didn't know just where to begin, after
+I got through my excuses for coming, and Mr. Hilbrook didn't offer any
+opening. Don't you think he's a very handsome old man?"</p>
+
+<p>"He has a pretty head, and his close-cut white hair gives it a neat
+effect, like a nice child's. He has a refined face; such a straight nose
+and a delicate chin. Yes, he is certainly good-looking. But what"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, nothing. Only, all at once I realized that he had a sensitive
+nature. I don't know why I shouldn't have realized it before. I had
+somehow taken it for granted that he was a self-conscious hermit, who
+lived in a squalid seclusion because he liked being wondered at. But he
+did not seem to be anything of the kind. I don't know whether he's a
+good cook, for he didn't ask me to eat anything; but I don't think he's
+a bad housekeeper."</p>
+
+<p>"With his bed unmade at eight o'clock in the evening!"</p>
+
+<p>"He may have got up late," said Ewbert. "The house seemed very orderly,
+otherwise; and what is really the use of making up a bed till you need
+it!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ewbert passed the point, and asked, "What did you talk about when
+you got started?"</p>
+
+<p>"I found he was a reader, or had been. There was a case of good books in
+the parlor, and I began by talking with him about them."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what did he say about them?"</p>
+
+<p>"That he wasn't interested in them. He had been once, but he was not
+now."</p>
+
+<p>"I can understand that," said Mrs. Ewbert philosophically. "Books <i>are</i>
+crowded out after your life fills up with other interests."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, what?" Mrs. Ewbert followed him up.</p>
+
+<p>"So far as I could make out, Mr. Hilbrook's life hadn't filled up with
+other interests. He did not care for the events of the day, as far as I
+tried him on them, and he did not care for the past. I tempted him with
+autobiography; but he seemed quite indifferent to his own history,
+though he was not reticent about it. I proposed the history of his
+cousin in the boyish days which he said they had spent together; but he
+seemed no more interested in his cousin than in himself. Then I tried
+his dog and his pathetic sufferings, and I said something about the pity
+of the poor old fellow's last days being so miserable. That seemed to
+strike a gleam of interest from him, and he asked me if I thought
+animals might live again. And I found&mdash;I don't know just how to put it
+so as to give you the right sense of his psychological attitude."</p>
+
+<p>"No matter! Put it any way, and I will take care of the right sense. Go
+on!" said Mrs. Ewbert.</p>
+
+<p>"I found that his question led up to the question whether men lived
+again, and to a confession that he didn't or couldn't believe they did."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, upon my word!" Mrs. Ewbert exclaimed. "I don't see what business
+he has coming to church, then. Doesn't he understand that the idea of
+immortality is the very essence of Rixonitism! I think it was personally
+insulting to <i>you</i>, Clarence. What did you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't take a very high hand with him. You know I don't embody the
+idea of immortality, and the church is no bad place even for
+unbelievers. The fact is, it struck me as profoundly pathetic. He wasn't
+arrogant about it, as people sometimes are,&mdash;they seem proud of not
+believing; but he was sufficiently ignorant in his premises. He said he
+had seen too many dead people. You know he was in the civil war."</p>
+
+<p>"No!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes,&mdash;through it all. It came out on my asking him if he were going to
+the Decoration Day services. He said that the sight of the first great
+battlefield deprived him of the power of believing in a life hereafter.
+He was not very explanatory, but as I understood it the overwhelming
+presence of death had extinguished his faith in immortality; the dead
+riders were just like their dead horses"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Shocking!" Mrs. Ewbert broke in.</p>
+
+<p>"He said something went out of him." Ewbert waited a moment before
+adding: "It was very affecting, though Hilbrook himself was as apathetic
+about it as he was about everything else. He was not interested in not
+believing, even, but I could see that it had taken the heart out of life
+for him. If our life here does not mean life elsewhere, the interest of
+it must end with our activities. When it comes to old age, as it has
+with poor Hilbrook, it has no meaning at all, unless it has the hope of
+more life in it. I felt his forlornness, and I strongly wished to help
+him. I stayed a long time talking; I tried to interest him in the fact
+that he was not interested, and"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I didn't fatigue Hilbrook, I came away feeling perfectly exhausted
+myself. Were you uneasy at my being out so late?"</p>
+
+
+<h3>V.</h3>
+
+<p>It was some time after the Ewberts had given up expecting him that old
+Hilbrook came to return the minister's visit. Then, as if some excuse
+were necessary, he brought a dozen eggs in a paper bag, which he said he
+hoped Mrs. Ewbert could use, because his hens were giving him more than
+he knew what to do with. He came to the back door with them; but Mrs.
+Ewbert always let her maid of all work go out Sunday evening, and she
+could receive him in the kitchen herself. She felt obliged to make him
+the more welcome on account of his humility, and she showed him into the
+library with perhaps exaggerated hospitality.</p>
+
+<p>It was a chilly evening of April, and so early that the lamp was not
+lighted; but there was a pleasant glow from the fire on the hearth, and
+Ewbert made his guest sit down before it. As he lay back in the
+easy-chair, stretching his thin old hands toward the blaze, the delicacy
+of his profile was charming, and that senile parting of the lips with
+which he listened reminded Ewbert of his own father's looks in his last
+years; so that it was with an affectionate eagerness he set about making
+Hilbrook feel his presence acceptable, when Mrs. Ewbert left them to
+finish up the work she had promised herself not to leave for the maid.
+It was much that Hilbrook had come at all, and he ought to be made to
+realize that Ewbert appreciated his coming. But Hilbrook seemed
+indifferent to his efforts, or rather, insensible to them, in the
+several topics that Ewbert advanced; and there began to be pauses, in
+which the minister racked his brain for some new thing to say, or found
+himself saying something he cared nothing for in a voice of hollow
+resolution, or falling into commonplaces which he tried to give vitality
+by strenuousness of expression. He heard his wife moving about in the
+kitchen and dining room, with a clicking of spoons and knives and a
+faint clash of china, as she put the supper things away, and he wished
+that she would come in and help him with old Hilbrook; but he could not
+very well call her, and she kept at her work, with no apparent purpose
+of leaving it.</p>
+
+<p>Hilbrook was a farmer, so far as he was anything industrially, and
+Ewbert tried him with questions of crops, soils, and fertilizers; but he
+tried him in vain. The old man said he had never cared much for those
+things, and now it was too late for him to begin. He generally sold his
+grass standing, and his apples on the trees; and he had no animals about
+the place except his chickens,&mdash;they took care of themselves. Ewbert
+urged, for the sake of conversation, even of a disputative character,
+that poultry were liable to disease, if they were not looked after; but
+Hilbrook said, Not if there were not too many of them, and so made an
+end of that subject. Ewbert desperately suggested that he must find them
+company,&mdash;they seemed sociable creatures; and then, in his utter dearth,
+he asked how the old dog was getting on.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he's dead," said Hilbrook, and the minister's heart smote him with
+a pity for the survivor's forlornness which the old man's apathetic tone
+had scarcely invited. He inquired how and when the old dog had died, and
+said how much Hilbrook must miss him.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know," Hilbrook returned. "He wa'n't much comfort, and
+he's out of his misery, anyway." After a moment he added, with a gleam
+of interest: "I've been thinkin', since he went, of what we talked about
+the other night,&mdash;I don't mean animals, but men. I tried to go over what
+you said, in my own mind, but I couldn't seem to make it."</p>
+
+<p>He lifted his face, sculptured so fine by age, and blinked at Ewbert,
+who was glad to fancy something appealing in his words and manner.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean as to a life beyond this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, let us see if we can't go over it together."</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert had forgotten the points he had made before, and he had to take
+up the whole subject anew, he did so at first in an involuntarily
+patronizing confidence that Hilbrook was ignorant of the ground; but
+from time to time the old man let drop a hint of knowledge that
+surprised the minister. Before they had done, it appeared that Hilbrook
+was acquainted with the literature of the doctrine of immortality from
+Plato to Swedenborg, and even to Mr. John Fiske. How well he was
+acquainted with it Ewbert could not quite make out; but he had
+recurrently a misgiving, as if he were in the presence of a doubter
+whose doubt was hopeless through his knowledge. In this bleak air it
+seemed to him that he at last detected the one thing in which the old
+man felt an interest: his sole tie with the earth was the belief that
+when he left it he should cease to be. This affected Ewbert as most
+interesting, and he set himself, with all his heart and soul, to
+dislodge Hilbrook from his deplorable conviction. He would not perhaps
+have found it easy to overcome at once that repugnance which Hilbrook's
+doubt provoked in him, if it had been less gently, less simply owned. As
+it was, it was not possible to deal with it in any spirit of mere
+authority. He must meet it and overcome it in terms of affectionate
+persuasion.</p>
+
+<p>It should not be difficult to overcome it; but Ewbert had not yet
+succeeded in arraying his reasons satisfactorily against it when his
+wife returned from her work in the kitchen, and sat down beside the
+library table. Her coming operated a total diversion, in which Hilbrook
+lapsed into his apathy, and was not to be roused from it by the
+overtures to conversation which she made. He presently got to his feet
+and said he mast be going, against all her protests that it was very
+early. Ewbert wished to walk home with him; but Hilbrook would not
+suffer this, and the minister had to come back from following him to the
+gate, and watching his figure lose itself in the dark, with a pang in
+his heart for the solitude which awaited the old man under his own roof.
+He ran swiftly over their argument in his mind, and questioned himself
+whether he had used him with unfailing tenderness, whether he had let
+him think that he regarded him as at all reprobate and culpable. He gave
+up the quest as he rejoined his wife with a long, unconscious sigh that
+made her lift her head.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Clarence?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You look perfectly exhausted. You look worried. Was it something you
+were talking about?"</p>
+
+<p>Then he told her, and he had trouble to keep her resentment in bounds.
+She held that, as a minister, he ought to have rebuked the wretched
+creature; that it was nothing short of offensive to him for Hilbrook to
+take such a position. She said his face was all flushed, and that she
+knew he would not sleep, and she should get him a glass of warm milk;
+the fire was out in the stove, but she could heat it over the lamp in a
+tin cup.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI.</h3>
+
+<p>Hilbrook did not come again till Ewbert had been to see him; and in the
+meantime the minister suffered from the fear that the old man was
+staying away because of some hurt which he had received in their
+controversy. Hilbrook came to church as before, and blinked at him
+through the two sermons which Ewbert preached on significant texts, and
+the minister hoped he was listening with a sense of personal appeal in
+them. He had not only sought to make them convincing as to the doctrine
+of another life, but he had dealt in terms of loving entreaty with those
+who had not the precious faith of this in their hearts, and he had
+wished to convey to Hilbrook an assurance of peculiar sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>The day following the last of his sermons, Ewbert had to officiate at
+the funeral of a little child whose mother had been stricken to the
+earth by her bereavement. The hapless creature had sent for him again
+and again, and had clung about his very soul, beseeching him for
+assurance that she should see her child hereafter, and have it hers,
+just as it was, forever, he had not had the heart to refuse her this
+consolation, and he had pushed himself, in giving it, beyond the bounds
+of imagination. When she confessed her own inability to see how it could
+be, and yet demanded of him that it should be, he answered her that our
+inability to realize the fact had nothing to do with its reality. In the
+few words he said over the little one, at the last, he recurred to this
+position, and urged it upon all his hearers; but in the moment of doing
+so a point that old Hilbrook had made in their talk suddenly presented
+itself. He experienced inwardly such a collapse that he could not be
+sure he had spoken, and he repeated his declaration in a voice of such
+harsh defiance that he could scarcely afterwards bring himself down to
+the meek level of the closing prayer.</p>
+
+<p>As they walked home together, his wife asked, "Why did you repeat
+yourself in that passage, Clarence, and why did you lift your voice so?
+It sounded like contradicting some one. I hope you were not thinking of
+anything that wretched old man said?"</p>
+
+<p>With the mystical sympathy by which the wife divines what is in her
+husband's mind she had touched the truth, and he could not deny it.
+"Yes, yes, I was," he owned in a sort of anguish, and she said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I wish he wouldn't come about any more. He has perfectly
+obsessed you. I could see that the last two Sundays you were preaching
+right at him." He had vainly hoped she had not noticed this, though he
+had not concealed from her that his talk with Hilbrook had suggested his
+theme. "What are you going to do about him?" she pursued relentlessly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know,&mdash;I don't know, indeed," said Ewbert; and perhaps because
+he did not know, he felt that he must do something, that he must at
+least not leave him to himself. He hoped that Hilbrook would come to
+him, and so put him under the necessity of doing something; but Hilbrook
+did not come, and after waiting a fortnight Ewbert went to him, as was
+his duty.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VII.</h3>
+
+<p>The spring had advanced so far that there were now days when it was
+pleasant to be out in the soft warmth of the afternoons. The day when
+Ewbert climbed to the Hilbrook homestead it was even a little hot, and
+he came up to the dooryard mopping his forehead with his handkerchief,
+and glad of the southwestern breeze which he caught at this point over
+the shoulder of the hill. He had expected to go round to the side door
+of the house, where he had parted with Hilbrook on his former visit; but
+he stopped on seeing the old man at his front door, where he was looking
+vaguely at a mass of Spanish willow fallen dishevelled beside it, as if
+he had some thought of lifting its tangled spray. The sun shone on his
+bare head, and struck silvery gleams from his close-cropped white hair;
+there was something uncommon in his air, though his dress was plain and
+old-fashioned; and Ewbert wished that his wife were there to share his
+impression of distinction in Hilbrook's presence.</p>
+
+<p>He turned at Ewbert's cheerful hail, and after a moment of apparent
+uncertainty as to who he was, he came down the walk of broken brick and
+opened the gate to his visitor.</p>
+
+<p>"I was just out, looking round at the old things," he said, with an
+effort of apology. "This sort of weather is apt to make fools of us. It
+gets into our heads, and before we know we feel as if we had something
+to do with the season."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps we have," said the minister. "The spring is in us, too."</p>
+
+<p>The old man shook his head. "It was once, when we were children; now
+there's what we remember of it. We like to make believe about
+it,&mdash;that's natural; and it's natural we should make believe that there
+is going to be a spring for us somewhere else like what we see for the
+grass and bushes, here, every year; but I guess not. A tree puts out its
+leaves every spring; but by and by the tree dies, and then it doesn't
+put out its leaves any more."</p>
+
+<p>"I see what you mean," said Ewbert, "and I allow that there is no real
+analogy between our life and that of the grass and bushes; yet somehow I
+feel strengthened in my belief in the hereafter by each renewal of the
+earth's life. It isn't a proof, it isn't a promise; but it's a
+suggestion, an intimation."</p>
+
+<p>They were in the midst of a great question, and they sat down on the
+decaying doorstep to have it out; Hilbrook having gone in for his hat
+and come out again, with its soft wide brim shading his thin face,
+frosted with half a week's beard.</p>
+
+<p>"But character," the minister urged at a certain point,&mdash;"what becomes
+of character? You may suppose that life can be lavished by its Origin in
+the immeasurable superabundance which we see in nature. But
+character,&mdash;that is a different thing; that cannot die."</p>
+
+<p>"The beasts that perish have character; my old dog had. Some are good
+and some bad; they're kind and they're ugly."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, excuse me! That isn't character; that's temperament. Men have
+temperament, too; but the beasts haven't character. Doesn't that fact
+prove something,&mdash;or no, not prove, but give us some reasonable
+expectation of a hereafter?"</p>
+
+<p>Hilbrook did not say anything for a moment. He broke a bit of fragrant
+spray from the flowering currant&mdash;which guarded the doorway on his side
+of the steps; Ewbert sat next the Spanish willow&mdash;and softly twisted the
+stem between his thumb and finger.</p>
+
+<p>"Ever hear how I came to leave Hilbrook,&mdash;West Mallow, as it was then?"
+he asked at last.</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert was forced to own that he had heard a story, but he said, mainly
+in Hilbrook's interest, that he had not paid much attention to it.</p>
+
+<p>"Thought there wa'n't much in it? Well, that's right, generally
+speakin'. Folks like to make up stories about a man that lives alone
+like me, here; and they usually get in a disappointment. I ain't goin'
+to go over it. I don't care any more about it now than if it had
+happened to somebody else; but it did happen. Josiah got the girl, and I
+didn't. I presume they like to make out that I've grieved over it ever
+since. Sho! It's forty years since I gave it a thought, that way." A
+certain contemptuous indignation supplanted the wonted gentleness of the
+old man, as if he spurned the notion of such sentimental folly. "I've
+read of folks mournin' all their lives through, and in their old age
+goin' back to a thing like that, as if it still meant somethin'. But it
+ain't true; I don't suppose I care any more for losin' her now than
+Josiah would for gettin' her if he was alive. It did make a difference
+for a while; I ain't goin' to deny that. It lasted me four or five
+years, in all, I guess; but I was married to somebody else when I went
+to the war,"&mdash;Ewbert controlled a start of surprise; he had always taken
+it for granted that Hilbrook was a bachelor,&mdash;"and we had one child. So
+you may say that I was well over that first thing. <i>It wore out</i>; and if
+it wa'n't that it makes me mad to have folks believin' that I'm
+sufferin' from it yet, I presume I shouldn't think of it from one year's
+end to another. My wife and I always got on well together; she was a
+good woman. She died when I was away at the war, and the little boy died
+after I got back. I was sorry to lose her, and I thought losin' <i>him</i>
+would kill me. It didn't. It appeared one while as if I couldn't live
+without him, and I was always contrivin' how I should meet up with him
+somewhere else. I couldn't figure it out."</p>
+
+<p>Hilbrook stopped, and swallowed dryly. Ewbert noticed how he had dropped
+more and more into the vernacular, in these reminiscences; in their
+controversies he had used the language of books and had spoken like a
+cultivated man, but now he was simply and touchingly rustic.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he resumed, "that wore out, too. I went into business, and I
+made money and I lost it. I went through all that experience, and I got
+enough of it, just as I got enough of fightin'. I guess I was no worse
+scared than the rest of 'em, but when it came to the end I'd 'bout made
+up my mind that if there was another war I'd go to Canady; I was sick of
+it, and I was sick of business even before I lost money. I lost pretty
+much everything. Josiah&mdash;he was always a good enough friend of
+mine&mdash;wanted me to start in again, and he offered to back me, but I said
+no. I said if he wanted to do something for me, he could let me come
+home and live on the old place, here; it wouldn't cost him anything like
+so much, and it would be a safer investment. He agreed, and here I be,
+to make a long story short."</p>
+
+<p>Hilbrook had stiffened more and more, as he went on, in the sort of
+defiance he had put on when he first began to speak of himself, and at
+the end of his confidence Ewbert did not venture any comment. His
+forbearance seemed to leave the old man freer to resume at the point
+where he had broken off, and he did so with something of lingering
+challenge.</p>
+
+<p>"You asked me just now why I didn't think character, as we call it, gave
+us some right to expect a life after this. Well, I'll try to tell you. I
+consider that I've been the rounds, as you may say, and that I've got as
+much character as most men. I've had about everything in my life that
+most have, and a great deal more than some. I've seen that everything
+wears out, and that when a thing's worn out it's for good and all. I
+think it's reasonable to suppose that when I wear out it will be for
+good and all, too. There isn't anything of us, as I look at it, except
+the potentiality of experiences. The experiences come through the
+passions that you can tell on the fingers of one hand: love, hate, hope,
+grief, and you may say greed for the thumb. When you've had them, that's
+the end of it; you've exhausted your capacity; you're used up, and so's
+your character,&mdash;that often dies before the body does."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" Ewbert protested. "Human capacity is infinite;" but even while
+he spoke this seemed to him a contradiction in terms. "I mean that the
+passions renew themselves with new occasions, new opportunities, and
+character grows continually. You have loved twice, you have grieved
+twice; in battle you hated more than once; in business you must have
+coveted many times. Under different conditions, the passions, the
+potentiality of experiences, will have a pristine strength. Can't you
+see it in that light? Can't you draw some hope from that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hope!" cried Ransom Hilbrook, lifting his fallen head and staring at
+the minister. "Why, man, you don't suppose I <i>want</i> to live hereafter?
+Do you think I'm anxious to have it all over again, or <i>any</i> of it? Is
+that why you've been trying to convince me of immortality? I know
+there's something in what you say,&mdash;more than what you realize. I've
+argued annihilation up to this point and that, and almost proved it to
+my own mind; but there's always some point that I can't quite get over.
+If I had the certainty, the absolute certainty, that this was all there
+was to be of it, I wouldn't want to live an hour longer, not a minute!
+But it's the uncertainty that keeps me. What I'm afraid of is, that if I
+get out of it here, I might wake up in my old identity, with the
+potentiality of new experiences in new conditions. That's it I'm tired.
+I've had enough. I want to be let alone. I don't want to do anything
+more, or have anything more done to me. I want to <i>stop</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert's first impression was that he was shocked; but he was too honest
+to remain in this conventional assumption. He was profoundly moved,
+however, and intensely interested. He realized that Hilbrook was
+perfectly sincere, and he could put himself in the old man's place, and
+imagine why he should feel as he did. Ewbert blamed himself for not
+having conceived of such a case before; and he saw that if he were to do
+anything for this lonely soul, he must begin far back of the point from
+which he had started with him. The old man's position had a kind of
+dignity which did not admit of the sort of pity Ewbert had been feeling
+for him, and the minister had before him the difficult and delicate task
+of persuading Hilbrook, not that a man, if he died, should live again,
+but that he should live upon terms so kind and just that none of the
+fortuities of mortal life should be repeated in that immortality. He
+must show the immortal man to be a creature so happily conditioned that
+he would be in effect newly created, before Hilbrook would consent to
+accept the idea of living again. He might say to him that he would
+probably not be consulted in the matter, since he had not been consulted
+as to his existence here; but such an answer would brutally ignore the
+claim that such a man's developed consciousness could justly urge to
+some share in the counsels of omnipotence. Ewbert did not know where to
+begin, and in his despair he began with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Upon my word," he said, "you've presented a problem that would give any
+casuist pause, and it's beyond my powers without some further thought.
+Your doubt, as I now understand it, is not of immortality, but of
+mortality; and there I can't meet you in argument without entirely
+forsaking my own ground. If it will not seem harsh, I will confess that
+your doubt is rather consoling to me; for I have so much faith in the
+Love which rules the world that I am perfectly willing to accept
+re&euml;xistence on any terms that Love may offer. You may say that this is
+because I have not yet exhausted the potentialities of experience, and
+am still interested in my own identity; and one half of this, at least,
+I can't deny. But even if it were otherwise, I should trust to find
+among those Many Mansions which we are told of some chamber where I
+should be at rest without being annihilated; and I can even imagine my
+being glad to do any sort of work about the House, when I was tired of
+resting."</p>
+
+
+<h3>VIII.</h3>
+
+<p>"I am <i>glad</i> you said that to him!" cried Ewbert's wife, when he told
+her of his interview with old Hilbrook. "That will give him something to
+think about. What did he say?"</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert had been less and less satisfied with his reply to Hilbrook, in
+which it seemed to him that he had passed from mockery to reproof, with
+no great credit to himself; and his wife's applause now set the seal to
+his displeasure with it.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he said simply that he could understand a younger person feeling
+differently, and that he did not wish to set himself up as a censor. But
+he could not pretend that he was glad to have been called out of
+nonentity into being, and that he could imagine nothing better than
+eternal unconsciousness."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"I told him that his very words implied the refusal of his being to
+accept nonentity again; that they expressed, or adumbrated, the
+conception of an eternal consciousness of the eternal unconsciousness he
+imagined himself longing for. I'm not so sure they did, now."</p>
+
+<p>"Of <i>course</i> they did. And <i>then</i> what did he say?"</p>
+
+<p>"He said nothing in direct reply; he sighed, and dropped his poor old
+head on his breast, and seemed very tired; so that I tried talking of
+other things for a while, and then I came away. Emily, I'm afraid I
+wasn't perfectly candid, perfectly kind, with him."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how you could have been more so!" she retorted, in tender
+indignation with him against himself. "And I think what he said was
+terrible. It was bad enough for him to pretend to believe that he was
+not going to live again, but for him to tell you that he was <i>afraid</i> he
+was!" An image sufficiently monstrous to typify Hilbrook's wickedness
+failed to present itself to Mrs. Ewbert, and she went out to give the
+maid instructions for something unusually nourishing for Ewbert at their
+mid-day dinner. "You look fairly fagged out, Clarence," she said, when
+she came back; "and I insist upon your not going up to that dreadful old
+man's again,&mdash;at least, not till you've got over this shock."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't think it has affected me seriously," he returned lightly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it has! yes, it has!" she declared. "It's just like your thinking
+you hadn't taken cold, the other day when you were caught in the rain;
+and the next morning you got up with a sore throat, and it was Sunday
+morning, too."</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert could not deny this, and he had no great wish to see Hilbrook
+soon again. He consented to wait for Hilbrook to come to him, before
+trying to satisfy these scruples of conscience which he had hinted at;
+and he reasonably hoped that the painful points would cease to rankle
+with the lapse of time, if there should be a long interval before they
+met.</p>
+
+<p>That night, before the Ewberts had finished their tea, there came a ring
+at the door, from which Mrs. Ewbert disconsolately foreboded a premature
+evening call. "And just when I was counting on a long, quiet, restful
+time for you, and getting you to bed early!" she lamented in undertone
+to her husband; to the maid who passed through the room with an
+inquiring glance, to the front door, she sighed, still in undertone, "Oh
+yes, of course we're at <i>home</i>."</p>
+
+<p>They both listened for the voice at the door, to make out who was there;
+but the voice was so low that they were still in ignorance while the
+maid was showing the visitor into the library, and until she came back
+to them.</p>
+
+<p>"It's that old gentleman who lives all alone by himself on the hill over
+the brook," she explained; and Mrs. Ewbert rose with an air of
+authority, waving her husband to keep his seat.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Clarence, I am simply not going to <i>let</i> you go in. You are sick
+enough as it is, and if you are going to let that <i>awful</i> old man spend
+the whole evening here, and drain the life out of you! <i>I</i> will see him,
+and tell him"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, Emily! It won't do. I <i>must</i> see him. It isn't true that I'm
+sick. He's old, and he has a right to the best we can do for him. Think
+of his loneliness! I shall certainly not let you send him away." Ewbert
+was excitedly gulping his second cup of tea; he pushed his chair back,
+and flung his napkin down as he added, "You can come in, too, and see
+that I get off alive."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall not come near you," she answered resentfully; but Ewbert had
+not closed the door behind him, and she felt it her duty to listen.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IX.</h3>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ewbert heard old Hilbrook begin at once in a high senile key
+without any form of response to her husband's greeting: "There was one
+thing you said to-day that I've been thinkin' over, and I've come down
+to talk with you about it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?" Ewbert queried submissively, though he was aware of being quite
+as fagged as his wife accused him of being, after he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Hilbrook returned. "I guess I ha'n't been exactly up and down
+with myself. I guess I've been playing fast and loose with myself. I
+guess you're right about my wantin' to have enough consciousness to
+enjoy my unconsciousness," and the old gentleman gave a laugh of rather
+weird enjoyment. "There are things," he resumed seriously, "that are
+deeper in us than anything we call ourselves. I supposed I had gone to
+the bottom, but I guess I hadn't. All the while there was something down
+there that I hadn't got at; but you reached it and touched it, and now I
+know it's there. I don't know but it's my Soul that's been havin' its
+say all the time, and me not listenin'. I guess you made your point."</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert was still not so sure of that. He had thrown out that hasty
+suggestion without much faith in it at the time, and his faith in it had
+not grown since.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad," he began, but Hilbrook pressed on as if he had not spoken.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess we're built like an onion," he said, with a severity that
+forbade Ewbert to feel anything undignified in the homely illustration.
+"You can strip away layer after layer till you seem to get to nothing at
+all; but when you've got to that nothing you've got to the very thing
+that had the life in it, and that would have grown again if you had put
+it in the ground."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly!" said Ewbert.</p>
+
+<p>"You made a point that I can't get round," Hilbrook continued, and it
+was here that Ewbert enjoyed a little instant of triumph. "But that
+ain't the point with <i>me</i>. I see that I can't prove that we shan't live
+again any more than you can prove that we shall. What I want you to do
+<i>now</i> is to convince me, or to give me the least reason to believe, that
+we shan't live again on exactly the same terms that we live now. I don't
+want to argue immortality any more; we'll take that for granted. But how
+is it going to be any different from mortality with the hope of death
+taken away?"</p>
+
+<p>Hilbrook's apathy was gone, and his gentleness; he had suddenly an air
+and tone of fierce challenge. As he spoke he brought a clenched fist
+down on the arm of his chair; he pushed his face forward and fixed
+Ewbert with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him
+terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if
+he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of
+the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of
+Frankenstein's. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one
+insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not
+forsake him or deny him.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how far you accept or reject the teachings of Scripture on
+this matter," he began rather vaguely, but Hilbrook stopped him.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't go to the Book for the point you made <i>against</i> me. But if
+you go to it now for the point I want you to make <i>for</i> me, what are you
+going to find? Are you going to find the promise of a life any different
+from the life we have here? I accept it all,&mdash;all that the Old Testament
+says, and all that the New Testament says; and what does it amount to on
+this point?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing but the assurance that if we live rightly here we shall be
+happy in the keeping of the divine Love there. That assurance is
+everything to me."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't to me!" cried the old man. "We are in the keeping of the
+divine Love here, too, and are we happy? Are those who live rightly
+happy? It's because we're not conditioned for happiness here; and how
+are we going to be conditioned differently there? We are going to suffer
+to all eternity through our passions, our potentialities of experience,
+there just as we do here."</p>
+
+<p>"There may be other passions, other potentialities of experience,"
+Ewbert suggested, casting about in the void.</p>
+
+<p>"Like what?" Hilbrook demanded. "I've been trying to figure it, and I
+can't. I should like you to try it. You can't imagine a new passion in
+the soul any more than you can imagine a new feature in the face. There
+they are: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin; love, hate, greed, hope, fear!
+You can't add to them or take away from them." The old man dropped from
+his defiance in an entreaty that was even more terrible to Ewbert. "I
+wish you could. I should like to have you try. Maybe I haven't been over
+the whole ground. Maybe there's some principle that I've missed." He
+hitched his chair closer to Ewbert's, and laid some tremulous fingers on
+the minister's sleeve. "If I've got to live forever, what have I got to
+live for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Ewbert, meeting him fully in his humility, "let us try to
+make it out together. Let us try to think. Apparently, our way has
+brought us to a dead wall; but I believe there's light beyond it, if we
+can only break through. Is it really necessary that we should discover
+some new principle? Do we know all that love can do from our experience
+of it here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Have you seen a mother with her child?" Hilbrook retorted.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know. But even that has some alloy of selfishness. Can't we
+imagine love in which there is no greed,&mdash;for greed, and not hate, is
+the true antithesis of love which is all giving, while greed is all
+getting,&mdash;a love that is absolutely pure?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> can't," said the old man. "All the love I ever felt had greed in
+it; I wanted to keep the thing I loved for myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, because you were afraid in the midst of your love. It was fear
+that alloyed it, not greed. And in easily imaginable conditions in which
+there is no fear of want, or harm, or death, love would be pure; for it
+is these things that greed itself wants to save us from. You can imagine
+conditions in which there shall be no fear, in which love casteth out
+fear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Hilbrook provisionally.</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert had not thought of these points himself before, and he was
+pleased with his discovery, though afterwards he was aware that it was
+something like an intellectual juggle. "You see," he temporized, "we
+have got rid of two of the passions already, fear and greed, which are
+the potentialities of our unhappiest experience in this life. In fact,
+we have got rid of three, for without fear and greed men cannot hate."</p>
+
+<p>"But how can we exist without them?" Hilbrook urged. "Shall we be made
+up of two passions,&mdash;of love and hope alone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" Ewbert returned, with what he felt a specious brightness.</p>
+
+<p>"Because we should not be complete beings with these two elements
+alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, as we know ourselves here, I grant you," said the minister. "But
+why should we not be far more simply constituted somewhere else? Have
+you ever read Isaac Taylor's Physical Theory of another Life? He argues
+that the immortal body would be a far less complex mechanism than the
+mortal body. Why should not the immortal soul be simple, too? In fact,
+it would necessarily be so, being one with the body. I think I can put
+my hand on that book, and if I can I must make you take it with you."</p>
+
+<p>He rose briskly from his chair, and went to the shelves, running his
+fingers along the books with that subtlety of touch by which the student
+knows a given book in the dark. He had heard Mrs. Ewbert stirring about
+in the rooms beyond with an activity in which he divined a menacing
+impatience; and he would have been glad to get rid of old Hilbrook
+before her impatience burst in an irruption upon them. Perhaps because
+of this distraction he could not find the book, but he remained on foot,
+talking with an implication in his tone that they were both preparing to
+part, and were now merely finishing off some odds and ends of discourse
+before they said good-night.</p>
+
+<p>Old Hilbrook did not stir. He was far too sincere a nature, Ewbert saw,
+to conceive of such inhospitality as a hint for his departure, or he was
+too deeply interested to be aware of it. The minister was obliged to sit
+down again, and it was eleven o'clock before Hilbrook rose to go.</p>
+
+
+<h3>X.</h3>
+
+<p>Ewbert went out to the gate with the old man, and when he came back to
+his study, he found his wife there looking strangely tall and monumental
+in her reproach. "I supposed you were in bed long ago, my dear," he
+attempted lightly.</p>
+
+<p>"You <i>don't</i> mean that you've been out in the night air without your hat
+on!" she returned. "Well, this is too <i>much</i>!" Her long-pent-up
+impatience broke in tears, and he strove in vain to comfort her with
+caresses. "Oh, what a fatal day it was when you stirred that wretched
+old creature up! <i>Why</i> couldn't you leave him alone!"</p>
+
+<p>"To his apathy? To his despair? Emily!" Ewbert dropped his arms from the
+embrace in which he had folded her woodenly unresponsive frame, and
+regarded her sadly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, of course," she answered, rubbing her handkerchief into her
+eyes. "But you don't know that it was despair; and he was quite happy in
+his apathy; and as it is, you've got him on your hands; and if he's
+going to come here every night and stay till morning, it will kill you.
+You know you're not strong; and you get so excited when you sit up
+talking. Look how flushed your cheeks are, now, and your eyes&mdash;as big!
+You won't sleep a wink to-night,&mdash;I know you won't."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, I shall," he answered bravely. "I believe I've done some good
+work with poor old Hilbrook; and you mustn't think he's tired me. I feel
+fresher than I did when he came."</p>
+
+<p>"It's because you're excited," she persisted. "I know you won't sleep."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I shall. I shall just stay here, and read my nerves down a little.
+Then I'll come."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes!" Mrs. Ewbert exulted disconsolately, and she left him to his
+book. She returned to say: "If you <i>must</i> take anything to make you
+sleepy, I've left some warm milk on the back of the stove. Promise me
+you won't take any sulphonal! You know how you feel the next day!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, I won't," said Ewbert; and he kept his word, with the effect of
+remaining awake all night. Toward morning he did not know but he had
+drowsed; he was not aware of losing consciousness, and he started from
+his drowse with the word "consciousness" in his mind, as he had heard
+Hilbrook speaking it.</p>
+
+
+<h3>XI.</h3>
+
+<p>Throughout the day, under his wife's watchful eye, he failed of the naps
+he tried for, and he had to own himself as haggard, when night came
+again, as the fondest anxiety of a wife could pronounce a husband. He
+could not think of his talk with old Hilbrook without an anguish of
+brain exhaustion; and yet he could not help thinking of it. He realized
+what the misery of mere weakness must be, and the horror of not having
+the power to rest. He wished to go to bed before the hour when Hilbrook
+commonly appeared, but this was so early that Ewbert knew he should
+merely toss about and grow more and more wakeful from his premature
+effort to sleep. He trembled at every step outside, and at the sound of
+feet approaching the door on the short brick walk from the gate, he and
+his wife arrested themselves with their teacups poised in the air.
+Ewbert was aware of feebly hoping the feet might go away again; but the
+bell rang, and then he could not meet his wife's eye.</p>
+
+<p>"If it is that old Mr. Hilbrook," she said to the maid in transit
+through the room, "tell him that Mr. Ewbert is not well, but <i>I</i> shall
+be glad to see him," and now Ewbert did not dare to protest. His
+forebodings were verified when he heard Hilbrook asking for him, but
+though he knew the voice, he detected a difference in the tone that
+puzzled him.</p>
+
+<p>His wife did not give Hilbrook time to get away, if he had wished,
+without seeing her; she rose at once and went out to him. Ewbert heard
+her asking him into the library, and then he heard them in parley there;
+and presently they came out into the hall again, and went to the front
+door together. Ewbert's heart misgave him of something summary on her
+part, and he did not know what to make of the cheerful parting between
+them. "Well, I bid you good-evening, ma'am," he heard old Hilbrook say
+briskly, and his wife return sweetly, "Good-night, Mr. Hilbrook. You
+must come soon again."</p>
+
+<p>"You may put your mind at rest, Clarence," she said, as she re&euml;ntered
+the dining room and met his face of surprise. "He didn't come to make a
+call; he just wanted to borrow a book,&mdash;Physical Theory of another
+Life."</p>
+
+<p>"How did you find it?" asked Ewbert, with relief.</p>
+
+<p>"It was where it always was," she returned indifferently. "Mr. Hilbrook
+seemed to be very much interested in something you said to him about it.
+I do believe you <i>have</i> done him good, Clarence; and now, if you can
+only get a full night's rest, I shall forgive him. But I hope he won't
+come <i>very</i> soon again, and will never stay so late when he does come.
+Promise me you won't go near him till he's brought the book back!"</p>
+
+
+<h3>XII.</h3>
+
+<p>Hilbrook came the night after he had borrowed the book, full of talk
+about it, to ask if he might keep it a little longer. Ewbert had slept
+well the intervening night, and had been suffered to see Hilbrook upon
+promising his wife that he would not encourage the old man to stay; but
+Hilbrook stayed without encouragement. An interest had come into his
+apathetic life which renewed it, and gave vitality to a whole dead world
+of things. He wished to talk, and he wished even more to listen, that he
+might confirm himself from Ewbert's faith and reason in the conjectures
+with which his mind was filled. His eagerness as to the conditions of a
+future life, now that he had begun to imagine them, was insatiable, and
+Ewbert, who met it with glad sympathy, felt drained of his own spiritual
+forces by the strength which he supplied to the old man. But the case
+was so strange, so absorbing, so important, that he could not refuse
+himself to it. He could not deny Hilbrook's claim to all that he could
+give him in this sort; he was as helpless to withhold the succor he
+supplied as he was to hide from Mrs. Ewbert's censoriously anxious eye
+the nervous exhaustion to which it left him after each visit that
+Hilbrook paid him. But there was a drain from another source of which he
+would not speak to her till he could make sure that the effect was not
+some trick of his own imagination.</p>
+
+<p>He had been aware, in twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a
+certain perfunctory quality in his performance. It was as if the truth,
+so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the
+repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a
+hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly
+against the old man's doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of
+question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in
+belief he himself waned. The conviction of a life hereafter was not
+something which he was <i>sharing</i> with Hilbrook; he was <i>giving</i> it
+absolutely, and with such entire unreserve that he was impoverishing his
+own soul of its most precious possession.</p>
+
+<p>So it seemed to him in those flaccid moods to which Hilbrook's visits
+left him, when mind and body were both spent in the effort he had been
+making. In the intervals in which his strength renewed itself, he put
+this fear from him as a hypochondriacal fancy, and he summoned a
+cheerfulness which he felt less and less to meet the hopeful face of the
+old man. Hilbrook had renewed himself, apparently, in the measure that
+the minister had aged and waned. He looked, to Ewbert, younger and
+stronger. To the conventional question how he did, he one night answered
+that he never felt better in his life. "But you," he said, casting an
+eye over the face and figure of the minister, who lay back in his
+easy-chair, with his hands stretched nerveless on the arms, "<i>you</i>, look
+rather peaked. I don't know as I noticed it before, but come to think, I
+seemed to feel the same way about it when I saw you in the pulpit
+yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>"It was a very close day," said Ewbert. "I don't know why I shouldn't be
+about as well as usual."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's right," said Hilbrook, in willing dismissal of the trifle
+which had delayed him from the great matter in his mind.</p>
+
+<p>Some new thoughts had occurred to him in corroboration of the notions
+they had agreed upon in their last meeting. But in response Ewbert found
+himself beset by a strange temptation,&mdash;by the wish to take up these
+notions and expose their fallacy. They were indeed mere toys of their
+common fancy which they had constructed together in mutual supposition,
+but Ewbert felt a sacredness in them, while he longed so strangely to
+break them one by one and cast them in the old man's face. Like all
+imaginative people, he was at times the prey of morbid self-suggestions,
+whose nature can scarcely be stated without excess. The more monstrous
+the thing appeared to his mind and conscience, the more fascinating it
+became. Once the mere horror of such a conception as catching a comely
+parishioner about the waist and kissing her, when she had come to him
+with a case of conscience, had so confused him in her presence as to
+make him answer her wildly, not because he was really tempted to the
+wickedness, but because he realized so vividly the hideousness of the
+impossible temptation. In some such sort he now trembled before old
+Hilbrook, thinking how dreadful it would be if he were suddenly to begin
+undoing the work of faith in him, and putting back in its place the
+doubts which he had uprooted before. In a swift series of dramatic
+representations he figured the old man's helpless amaze at the
+demoniacal gayety with which he should mock his own seriousness in the
+past, the cynical ease with which he should show the vanity of the hopes
+he had been so fervent in awakening. He had throughout recognized the
+claim that all the counter-doubts had upon the reason, and he saw how
+effective he could make these if he were now to become their advocate.
+He pictured the despair in which he could send his proselyte tottering
+home to his lonely house through the dark.</p>
+
+<p>He rent himself from the spell, but the last picture remained so real
+with him that he went to the window and looked out, saying, "Is there a
+moon?"</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't up yet, I guess," said old Hilbrook, and from something in his
+manner, rather than from anything he recollected of their talk, Ewbert
+fancied him to have asked a question, and to be now waiting for some
+answer. He had not the least notion what the question could have been,
+and he began to walk up and down, trying to think of something to say,
+but feeling his legs weak under him and the sweat cold on his forehead.
+All the time he was aware of Hilbrook following him with an air of
+cheerful interest, and patiently waiting till he should take up the
+thread of their discourse again.</p>
+
+<p>He controlled himself at last, and sank into his chair. "Where were we?"
+he asked. "I had gone off on a train of associations, and I don't just
+recall our last point."</p>
+
+<p>Hilbrook stated it, and Ewbert said, "Oh, yes," as if he recognized it,
+and went on from it upon the line of thought which it suggested. He was
+aware of talking rationally and forcibly; but in the subjective
+undercurrent paralleling his objective thought he was holding discourse
+with himself to an effect wholly different from that produced in
+Hilbrook.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir," said the old man when he rose to go at last, "I guess
+you've settled it for me. You've made me see that there can be an
+immortal life that's worth living; and I was afraid there wa'n't! I
+shouldn't care, now, if I woke up any morning in the other world. I
+guess it would be all right; and that there would be new conditions
+every way, so that a man could go on and be himself, without feelin'
+that he was in any danger of bein' wasted. You've made me want to meet
+my boy again; and I used to dread it; I didn't think I was fit for it. I
+don't know whether you expect me to thank you; I presume you don't; but
+I"&mdash;he faltered, and his voice shook in sympathy with the old hand that
+he put trembling into Ewbert's&mdash;"I <i>bless</i> you!"</p>
+
+
+<h3>XIII.</h3>
+
+<p>The time had come when the minister must seek refuge and counsel with
+his wife. He went to her as a troubled child goes to its mother, and she
+heard the confession of his strange experience with the motherly
+sympathy which performs the comforting office of perfect intelligence.
+If she did not grasp its whole significance, she seized what was perhaps
+the main point, and she put herself in antagonism to the cause of his
+morbid condition, while administering an inevitable chastisement for the
+neglect of her own prevision.</p>
+
+<p>"That terrible old man," she said, "has simply been draining the life
+out of you, Clarence. I saw it from the beginning, and I warned you
+against it; but you wouldn't listen to me. <i>Now</i> I suppose you <i>will</i>
+listen, after the doctor tells you that you're in danger of nervous
+prostration, and that you've got to give up everything and rest. <i>I</i>
+think you've been in danger of losing your reason, you've overworked it
+so; and I sha'n't be easy till I've got you safely away at the seaside,
+and out of the reach of that&mdash;that <i>vampire</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Emily!" the minister protested. "I can't allow you to use such
+language. At the worst, and supposing that he has really been that drain
+upon me which you say (though I don't admit it), what is my life for but
+to give to others?"</p>
+
+<p>"But <i>my</i> life isn't for you to give to others, and <i>your</i> life <i>is</i>
+mine, and I think I have some right to say what shall be done with it,
+and I don't choose to have it used up on old Hilbrook." It passed
+through Ewbert's languid thought, which it stirred to a vague amusement,
+that the son of an older church than the Rixonite might have found in
+this thoroughly terrestrial attitude of his wife a potent argument for
+sacerdotal celibacy; but he did not attempt to formulate it, and he
+listened submissively while she went on: "<i>One</i> thing: I am certainly
+not going to let you see him again till you've seen the doctor, and I
+hope he won't come about. If he does, <i>I</i> shall see him."</p>
+
+<p>The menace in this declaration moved Ewbert to another protest, which he
+worded conciliatingly: "I shall have to let you. But I know you won't
+say anything to convey a sense of responsibility to him. I couldn't
+forgive myself if he were allowed to feel that he had been preying upon
+me. The fact is, I've been overdoing in every way, and nobody is to
+blame for my morbid fancies but myself. I <i>should</i> blame myself very
+severely if you based any sort of superstition on them, and acted from
+that superstition."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you needn't be afraid!" said Mrs. Ewbert. "I shall take care of his
+feelings, but I shall have my own opinions, all the same, Clarence."</p>
+
+<p>Whether a woman with opinions so strong as Mrs. Ewbert's, and so
+indistinguishable from her prejudices, could be trusted to keep them to
+herself, in dealing with the matter in hand, was a question which her
+husband felt must largely be left to her goodness of heart for its right
+solution.</p>
+
+<p>When Hilbrook came that night, as usual, she had already had it out with
+him in several strenuous reveries before they met, and she was able to
+welcome him gently to the interview which she made very brief. His face
+fell in visible disappointment when she said that Mr. Ewbert would not
+be able to see him, and perhaps there was nothing to uplift him in the
+reasons she gave, though she obscurely resented his continued dejection
+as a kind of ingratitude. She explained that poor Mr. Ewbert was quite
+broken down, and that the doctor had advised his going to the seaside
+for the whole of August, where he promised everything from the air and
+the bathing. Mr. Ewbert merely needed toning up, she said; but to
+correct the impression she might be giving that his breakdown was a
+trifling matter, she added that she felt very anxious about it, and
+wanted to get him away as soon as possible. She said with a confidential
+effect, as of something in which Hilbrook could sympathize with her:
+"You know it isn't merely his church work proper; it's his giving
+himself spiritually to all sorts of people so indiscriminately. He can't
+deny himself to any one; and sometimes he's perfectly exhausted by it.
+You must come and see him as soon as he gets back, Mr. Hilbrook. He will
+count upon it, I know; he's so much interested in the discussions he has
+been having with you."</p>
+
+<p>She gave the old man her hand for good-by, after she had artfully stood
+him up, in a double hope,&mdash;a hope that he would understand that there
+was some limit to her husband's nervous strength, and a hope that her
+closing invitation would keep him from feeling anything personal in her
+hints.</p>
+
+<p>Hilbrook took his leave in the dreamy fashion age has with so many
+things, as if there were a veil between him and experience which kept
+him from the full realization of what had happened; and as she watched
+his bent shoulders down the garden walk, carrying his forward-drooping
+head at a slant that scarcely left the crown of his hat visible, a fear
+came upon her which made it impossible for her to recount all the facts
+of her interview to her husband. It became her duty, rather, to conceal
+what was painful to herself in it, and she merely told him that Mr.
+Hilbrook had taken it all in the right way, and she had made him promise
+to come and see them as soon as they got back.</p>
+
+
+<h3>XIV.</h3>
+
+<p>Events approved the wisdom of Mrs. Ewbert's course in so many respects
+that she confidently trusted them for the rest. Ewbert picked up
+wonderfully at the seaside, and she said to him again and again that it
+was not merely those interviews with old Hilbrook which had drained his
+vitality, but it was the whole social and religious keeping of the
+place. Everybody, she said, had thrown themselves upon his sympathies,
+and he was carrying a load that nobody could bear up under. She
+addressed these declarations to her lingering consciousness of Ransom
+Hilbrook, and confirmed herself, by their repetition, in the belief that
+he had not taken her generalizations personally. She now extended these
+so as to inculpate the faculty of the university, who ought to have felt
+it their duty not to let a man of Ewbert's intellectual quality stagger
+on alone among them, with no sign of appreciation or recognition in the
+work he was doing, not so much for the Rixonite church as for the whole
+community. She took several ladies at the hotel into her confidence on
+this point, and upon study of the situation they said it was a shame.
+After that she felt more bitter about it, and attributed her husband's
+collapse to a concealed sense of the indifference of the university
+people, so galling to a sensitive nature.</p>
+
+<p>She suggested this theory to Ewbert, and he denied it with blithe
+derision, but she said that he need not tell <i>her</i>, and in confirming
+herself in it she began to relax her belief that old Ransom Hilbrook had
+preyed upon him. She even went so far as to say that the only
+intellectual companionship he had ever had in the place was that which
+he found in the old man's society. When she discovered, after the fact,
+that Ewbert had written to him since they came away, she was not so
+severe with him as she might have expected herself to be in view of an
+act which, if not quite clandestine, was certainly without her privity.
+She would have considered him fitly punished by Hilbrook's failure to
+reply, if she had not shared his uneasiness at the old man's silence.
+But she did not allow this to affect her good spirits, which were
+essential to her husband's comfort as well as her own. She redoubled her
+care of him in every sort, and among all the ladies who admired her
+devotion to him there was none who enjoyed it as much as herself. There
+was none who believed more implicitly that it was owing to her foresight
+and oversight that his health mended so rapidly, and that at the end of
+the bathing season she was, as she said, taking him home quite another
+man. In her perfect satisfaction she suffered him his small joke about
+not feeling it quite right to go with her if that were so; and though a
+woman of little humor, she even professed to find pleasure in his joke
+after she fully understood it.</p>
+
+<p>"All that I ask," she said, as if it followed, "is that you won't spoil
+everything by letting old Hilbrook come every night and drain the life
+out of you again."</p>
+
+<p>"I won't," he retorted, "if you'll promise to make the university people
+come regularly to my sermons."</p>
+
+<p>He treated the notion of Hilbrook's visits lightly; but with his return
+to the familiar environment he felt a shrinking from them in an
+experience which was like something physical. Yet when he sat down the
+first night in his study, with his lamp in its wonted place, it was with
+an expectation of old Hilbrook in his usual seat so vivid that its
+defeat was more a shock than its fulfilment upon supernatural terms
+would have been. In fact, the absence of the old man was spectral; and
+though Ewbert employed himself fully the first night in answering an
+accumulation of letters that required immediate reply, it was with
+nervous starts from time to time, which he could trace to no other
+cause. His wife came in and out, with what he knew to be an accusing
+eye, as she brought up those arrears of housekeeping which always await
+the housewife on the return from any vacation; and he knew that he did
+not conceal his guilt from her.</p>
+
+<p>They both ignored the stress which had fallen back upon him, and which
+accumulated, as the days of the week went by, until the first Sunday
+came.</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert dreaded to look in the direction of Hilbrook's pew, lest he
+should find it empty; but the old man was there, and he sat blinking at
+the minister, as his custom was, through the sermon, and thoughtfully
+passing the tip of his tongue over the inner edge of his lower lip.</p>
+
+<p>Many came up to shake hands with the minister after church, and to tell
+him how well he was looking, but Hilbrook was not among them. Some of
+the university people who had made a point of being there that morning,
+out of a personal regard for Ewbert, were grouped about his wife, in the
+church vestibule, where she stood answering their questions about his
+health. He glimpsed between the heads and shoulders of this gratifying
+group the figure of Hilbrook dropping from grade to grade on the steps
+outside, till it ceased to be visible, and he fancied, with a pang, that
+the old man had lingered to speak with him, and had then given up and
+started home.</p>
+
+<p>The cordial interest of the university people was hardly a compensation
+for the disappointment he shared with Hilbrook; but his wife was so
+happy in it that he could not say anything to damp her joy. "Now," she
+declared, on their way home, "I am perfectly satisfied that they will
+keep coming. You never preached so well, Clarence, and if they have any
+appreciation at all, they simply won't be able to keep away. I wish you
+could have heard all the nice things they said about you. I guess
+they've waked up to you, at last, and I do believe that the idea of
+losing you has had a great deal to do with it. And <i>that</i> is something
+we owe to old Ransom Hilbrook more than to anything else. I saw the poor
+old fellow hanging about, and I couldn't help feeling for him. I knew he
+wanted to speak with you, and I'm not afraid that he will be a burden
+again. It will be such an inspiration, the prospect of having the
+university people come every Sunday, now, that you can afford to give a
+little of it to him, and I want you to go and see him soon; he evidently
+isn't coming till you do."</p>
+
+
+<h3>XV.</h3>
+
+<p>Ewbert had learned not to inquire too critically for a logical process
+in his wife's changes of attitude toward any fact. In her present mood
+he recognized an effect of the exuberant good-will awakened by the
+handsome behavior of the university people, and he agreed with her that
+he must go to see old Hilbrook at once. In this good intention his
+painful feeling concerning him was soothed, and Ewbert did not get up to
+the Hilbrook place till well into the week. It was Thursday afternoon
+when he climbed through the orchard, under the yellowing leaves which
+dappled the green masses of the trees like intenser spots of the
+September sunshine. He came round by the well to the side door of the
+house, which stood open, and he did not hesitate to enter when he saw
+how freely the hens were coming and going through it. They scuttled out
+around him and between his legs, with guilty screeches, and left him
+standing alone in the middle of the wide, low kitchen. A certain
+discomfort of the nerves which their flight gave him was heightened by
+some details quite insignificant in themselves. There was no fire in the
+stove, and the wooden clock on the mantel behind it was stopped; the
+wind had carried in some red leaves from the maple near the door, and
+these were swept against the farther wall, where they lay palpitating in
+the draft.</p>
+
+<p>The neglect in all was evidently too recent to suggest any supposition
+but that of the master's temporary absence, and Ewbert went to the
+threshold to look for his coming from the sheds or the barn. But these
+were all fast shut, and there was no sign of Hilbrook anywhere. Ewbert
+turned back into the room again, and saw the door of the old man's
+little bedroom standing slightly ajar. With a chill of apprehension he
+pushed it open, and he could not have experienced a more disagreeable
+effect if the dark fear in his mind had been realized than he did to see
+Hilbrook lying in his bed alive and awake. His face showed like a fine
+mask above the sheet, and his long, narrow hands rested on the covering
+across his breast. His eyes met those of Ewbert not only without
+surprise, but without any apparent emotion.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Mr. Hilbrook," said the minister, "are you sick?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I am first-rate," the old man answered.</p>
+
+<p>It was on the point of the minister's tongue to ask him, "Then what in
+the world are you doing in bed?" but he substituted the less
+authoritative suggestion, "I am afraid I disturbed you&mdash;that I woke you
+out of a nap. But I found the door open and the hens inside, and I
+ventured to come in"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Hilbrook replied calmly, "I heard you; I wa'n't asleep."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Ewbert, apologetically, and he did not know quite what to do;
+he had an aimless wish for his wife, as if she would have known what to
+do. In her absence he decided to shut the door against the hens, who
+were returning adventurously to the threshold, and then he asked, "Is
+there something I can do for you? Make a fire for you to get up by"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I ha'n't got any call to get up," said Hilbrook; and, after giving
+Ewbert time to make the best of this declaration, he asked abruptly,
+"What was that you said about my wantin' to be alive enough to know I
+was dead?"</p>
+
+<p>"The consciousness of unconsciousness?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" the old man assented, as with satisfaction in having got the
+notion right; and then he added, with a certain defiance: "There ain't
+anything <i>in</i> that. I got to thinking it over, when you was gone, and
+the whole thing went to pieces. That idea don't prove anything at all,
+and all that we worked out of it had to go with it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," the minister returned, with an assumption of cosiness in his
+tone which he did not feel, and feigning to make himself easy in the
+hard kitchen chair which he pulled up to the door of Hilbrook's room,
+"let's see if we can't put that notion together again."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> can, if you want to," said the old man, dryly "I got no interest
+in it any more; 'twa'n't nothing but a metaphysical toy, anyway." He
+turned his head apathetically on the pillow, and no longer faced his
+visitor, who found it impossible in the conditions of tacit dismissal to
+philosophize further.</p>
+
+<p>"I was sorry," Ewbert began, "not to be able to speak with you after
+church, the other day. There were so many people"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right," said Hilbrook unresentfully. "I hadn't anything to
+say, in particular."</p>
+
+<p>"But <i>I</i> had," the minister persisted. "I thought a great deal about you
+when I was away, and I went over our talks in my own mind a great many
+times. The more I thought about them, the more I believed that we had
+felt our way to some important truth in the matter. I don't say final
+truth, for I don't suppose that we shall ever reach that in this life."</p>
+
+<p>"Very likely," Hilbrook returned, with his face to the wall. "I don't
+see as it makes any difference; or if it does, I don't care for it."</p>
+
+<p>Something occurred to Ewbert which seemed to him of more immediate
+usefulness than the psychological question. "Couldn't I get you
+something to eat, Mr. Hilbrook? If you haven't had any breakfast to-day,
+you must be hungry."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I'm hungry," the old man assented, "but I don't want to eat
+anything."</p>
+
+<p>Ewbert had risen hopefully in making his suggestion, but now his heart
+sank. Here, it seemed to him, a physician rather than a philosopher was
+needed, and at the sound of wheels on the wagon track to the door his
+imagination leaped to the miracle of the doctor's providential advent.
+He hurried to the threshold and met the fish-man, who was about to
+announce himself with the handle of his whip on the clapboarding. He
+grasped the situation from the minister's brief statement, and confessed
+that he had expected to find the old gentleman <i>dead</i> in his bed some
+day, and he volunteered to send some of the women folks from the farm up
+the road. When these came, concentrated in the person of the farmer's
+bustling wife, who had a fire kindled in the stove and the kettle on
+before Ewbert could get away, he went for the doctor, and returned with
+him to find her in possession of everything in the house except the
+owner's interest. Her usefulness had been arrested by an invisible but
+impassable barrier, though she had passed and re-passed the threshold of
+Hilbrook's chamber with tea and milk toast. He said simply that he saw
+no object in eating; and he had not been sufficiently interested to turn
+his head and look at her in speaking to her.</p>
+
+<p>With the doctor's science he was as indifferent as with the farm-wife's
+service. He submitted to have his pulse felt, and he could not help
+being prescribed for, but he would have no agency in taking his
+medicine. He said, as he had said to Mrs. Stephson about eating, that he
+saw no object in it.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor retorted, with the temper of a man not used to having his
+will crossed, that he had better take it, if he had any object in
+living, and Hilbrook answered that he had none. In his absolute apathy
+he did not even ask to be let alone.</p>
+
+<p>"You see," the baffled doctor fumed in the conference that he had with
+Ewbert apart, "he doesn't really need any medicine. There's nothing the
+matter with him, and I only wanted to give him something to put an edge
+to his appetite. He's got cranky living here alone; but there <i>is</i> such
+a thing as starving to death, and that's the only thing Hilbrook's in
+danger of. If you're going to stay with him&mdash;he oughtn't to be left
+alone"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I can come up, yes, certainly, after supper," said Ewbert, and he
+fortified himself inwardly for the question this would raise with his
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you must try to interest him in something. Get him to talking, and
+then let Mrs. Stephson come in with a good bowl of broth, and I guess we
+may trust Nature to do the rest."</p>
+
+
+<h3>XVI.</h3>
+
+<p>When we speak of Nature, we figure her as one thing, with a fixed
+purpose and office in the universal economy; but she is an immense
+number of things, and her functions are inexpressibly varied. She
+includes decay as well as growth; she compasses death as well as birth.
+We call certain phenomena unnatural; but in a natural world how can
+anything be unnatural, except the supernatural? These facts gave Ewbert
+pause in view of the obstinate behavior of Ransom Hilbrook in dying for
+no obvious reason, and kept him from pronouncing it unnatural. The old
+man, he reflected, had really less reason to live than to die, if it
+came to reasons; for everything that had made the world home to him had
+gone out of it, and left him in exile here. The motives had ceased; the
+interests had perished; the strong personality that had persisted was
+solitary amid the familiar environment grown alien.</p>
+
+<p>The wonder was that he should ever have been roused from his apathetic
+unfaith to inquiry concerning the world beyond this, and to a certain
+degree of belief in possibilities long abandoned by his imagination.
+Ewbert had assisted at the miracle of this resuscitation upon terms
+which, until he was himself much older, he could not question as to
+their beneficence, and in fact it never came to his being quite frank
+with himself concerning them. He kept his thoughts on this point in that
+state of solution which holds so many conjectures from precipitation in
+actual conviction.</p>
+
+<p>But his wife had no misgivings. Her dread was that in his devotion to
+that miserable old man (as she called him, not always in compassion) he
+should again contribute to Hilbrook's vitality at the expense, if not
+the danger, of his own. She of course expressed her joy that Ewbert had
+at last prevailed upon him to eat something, when the entreaty of his
+nurse and the authority of his doctor availed nothing; and of course she
+felt the pathos of his doing it out of affection for Ewbert, and merely
+to please him, as Hilbrook declared. It did not surprise her that any
+one should do anything for the love of Ewbert, but it is doubtful if she
+fully recognized the beauty of this last efflorescence of the aged life;
+and she perceived it her duty not to sympathize entirely with Ewbert's
+morbid regret that it came too late. She was much more resigned than he
+to the will of Providence, and she urged a like submissiveness upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk so!" he burst out. "It's horrible!" It was in the first
+hours after Ewbert's return from Hilbrook's death-bed, and his spent
+nerves gave way in a gush of tears.</p>
+
+<p>"I see what you mean," she said, after a pause in which he controlled
+his sobs. "And I suppose," she added, with a touch of bitterness, "that
+you blame <i>me</i> for taking you away from him here when he was coming
+every night and sapping your very life. You were very glad to have me do
+it at the time! And what use would there have been in your killing
+yourself, anyway? It wasn't as if he were a young man with a career of
+usefulness before him, that might have been marred by his not believing
+this or that. He had been a complete failure every way, and the end of
+the world had come for him. What did it matter whether such a man
+believed that there was another world or not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Emily! Emily!" the minister cried out. "What are you saying?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ewbert broke down in her turn. "I don't know <i>what</i> I'm saying!"
+she retorted from behind her handkerchief. "I'm trying to show you that
+it's your duty to yourself&mdash;and to me&mdash;and to people who can know how to
+profit by your teaching and your example, not to give way as you're
+doing, simply because a wornout old agnostic couldn't keep his hold on
+the truth. I don't know what your Rixonitism is for if it won't let you
+wait upon the divine will in such a thing, <i>too</i>. You're more
+conscientious than the worst kind of Congregationalist. And now for you
+to blame me"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Emily, I don't blame <i>you</i>," said her husband. "I blame myself."</p>
+
+<p>"And you see that that's the same thing! You ought to thank me for
+saving your life; for it was just as if you were pouring your heart's
+blood into him, and I could see you getting more an&aelig;mic every day. Even
+now you're not half as well as when you got home! And yet I do believe
+that if you could bring old Hilbrook back into a world that he was sick
+and tired of, you'd give your own life to do it."</p>
+
+
+<h3>XVII.</h3>
+
+<p>There was reason and there was justice in what she said, though they
+were so chaotic in form, and Ewbert could not refuse to acquiesce.</p>
+
+<p>After all, he had done what he could, and he would not abandon himself
+to a useless remorse. He rather set himself to study the lesson of old
+Hilbrook's life, and in the funeral sermon that he preached he urged
+upon his hearers the necessity of keeping themselves alive through some
+relation to the undying frame of things, which they could do only by
+cherishing earthly ties; and when these were snapped in the removal of
+their objects, by attaching the broken threads through an effort of the
+will to yet other objects: the world could furnish these inexhaustibly.
+He touched delicately upon the peculiarities, the eccentricities, of the
+deceased, and he did cordial justice to his gentleness, his blameless,
+harmless life, his heroism on the battlefields of his country. He
+declared that he would not be the one to deny an inner piety, and
+certainly not a steadfast courage, in Hilbrook's acceptance of whatever
+his sincere doubts implied.</p>
+
+<p>The sermon apparently made a strong impression on all who heard it. Mrs.
+Ewbert was afraid that it was rather abstruse in certain passages, but
+she felt sure that all the university people would appreciate these. The
+university people, to testify their respect for their founder, had come
+in a body to the obsequies of his kinsman; and Mrs. Ewbert augured the
+best things for her husband's future usefulness from their presence.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_MAGIC_OF_A_VOICE" id="THE_MAGIC_OF_A_VOICE"></a>THE MAGIC OF A VOICE.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>There was a full moon, and Langbourne walked about the town, unable to
+come into the hotel and go to bed. The deep yards of the houses gave out
+the scent of syringas and June roses; the light of lamps came through
+the fragrant bushes from the open doors and windows, with the sound of
+playing and singing and bursts of young laughter. Where the houses stood
+near the street, he could see people lounging on the thresholds, and
+their heads silhouetted against the luminous interiors. Other houses,
+both those which stood further back and those that stood nearer, were
+dark and still, and to these he attributed the happiness of love in
+fruition, safe from unrest and longing.</p>
+
+<p>His own heart was tenderly oppressed, not with desire, but with the
+memory of desire. It was almost as if in his faded melancholy he were
+sorry for the disappointment of some one else.</p>
+
+<p>At last he turned and walked back through the streets of dwellings to
+the business centre of the town, where a gush of light came from the
+veranda of his hotel, and the druggist's window cast purple and yellow
+blurs out upon the footway. The other stores were shut, and he alone
+seemed to be abroad. The church clock struck ten as he mounted the steps
+of his hotel and dropped the remnant of his cigar over the side.</p>
+
+<p>He had slept badly on the train the night before, and he had promised
+himself to make up his lost sleep in the good conditions that seemed to
+offer themselves. But when he sat down in the hotel office he was more
+wakeful than he had been when he started out to walk himself drowsy.</p>
+
+<p>The clerk gave him the New York paper which had come by the evening
+train, and he thanked him, but remained musing in his chair. At times he
+thought he would light another cigar, but the hand that he carried to
+his breast pocket dropped nervelessly to his knee again, and he did not
+smoke. Through his memories of disappointment pierced a self-reproach
+which did not permit him the perfect self-complacency of regret; and yet
+he could not have been sure, if he had asked himself, that this pang did
+not heighten the luxury of his psychological experience.</p>
+
+<p>He rose and asked the clerk for a lamp, but he turned back from the
+stairs to inquire when there would be another New York mail. The clerk
+said there was a train from the south due at eleven-forty, but it seldom
+brought any mail; the principal mail was at seven. Langbourne thanked
+him, and came back again to beg the clerk to be careful and not have him
+called in the morning, for he wished to sleep. Then he went up to his
+room, where he opened his window to let in the night air. He heard a dog
+barking; a cow lowed; from a stable somewhere the soft thumping of the
+horses' feet came at intervals lullingly.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>Langbourne fell asleep so quickly that he was aware of no moment of
+waking after his head touched the fragrant pillow. He woke so much
+refreshed by his first sound, soft sleep that he thought it must be
+nearly morning. He got his watch into a ray of the moonlight and made
+out that it was only a little after midnight, and he perceived that it
+must have been the sound of low murmuring voices and broken laughter in
+the next room which had wakened him. But he was rather glad to have been
+roused to a sense of his absolute comfort, and he turned unresentfully
+to sleep again. All his heaviness of heart was gone; he felt curiously
+glad and young; he had somehow forgiven the wrong he had suffered and
+the wrong he had done. The subdued murmuring went on in the next room,
+and he kept himself awake to enjoy it for a while. Then he let himself
+go, and drifted away into gulfs of slumber, where, suddenly, he seemed
+to strike against something, and started up in bed.</p>
+
+<p>A laugh came from the next room. It was not muffled, as before, but
+frank and clear. It was woman's laughter, and Langbourne easily inferred
+girlhood as well as womanhood from it. His neighbors must have come by
+the late train, and they had probably begun to talk as soon as they got
+into their room. He imagined their having spoken low at first for fear
+of disturbing some one, and then, in their forgetfulness, or their
+belief that there was no one near, allowed themselves greater freedom.
+There were survivals of their earlier caution at times, when their
+voices sank so low as scarcely to be heard; then there was a break from
+it when they rose clearly distinguishable from each other. They were
+never so distinct that he could make out what was said; but each voice
+unmistakably conveyed character.</p>
+
+<p>Friendship between girls is never equal; they may equally love each
+other, but one must worship and one must suffer worship. Langbourne read
+the differing temperaments necessary to this relation in the differing
+voices. That which bore mastery was a low, thick murmur, coming from
+deep in the throat, and flowing out in a steady stream of indescribable
+coaxing and drolling. The owner of that voice had imagination and humor
+which could charm with absolute control her companion's lighter nature,
+as it betrayed itself in a gay tinkle of amusement and a succession of
+nervous whispers. Langbourne did not wonder at her subjection; with the
+first sounds of that rich, tender voice, he had fallen under its spell
+too; and he listened intensely, trying to make out some phrase, some
+word, some syllable. But the talk kept its sub-audible flow, and he had
+to content himself as he could with the sound of the voice.</p>
+
+<p>As he lay eavesdropping with all his might he tried to construct an
+image of the two girls from their voices. The one with the crystalline
+laugh was little and lithe, quick in movement, of a mobile face, with
+gray eyes and fair hair; the other was tall and pale, with full, blue
+eyes and a regular face, and lips that trembled with humor; very demure
+and yet very honest; very shy and yet very frank; there was something
+almost mannish in her essential honesty; there was nothing of feminine
+coquetry in her, though everything of feminine charm. She was a girl who
+looked like her father, Langbourne perceived with a flash of divination.
+She dressed simply in dark blue, and her hair was of a dark mahogany
+color. The smaller girl wore light gray checks or stripes, and the
+shades of silver.</p>
+
+<p>The talk began to be less continuous in the next room, from which there
+came the sound of sighs and yawns, and then of mingled laughter at
+these. Then the talk ran unbrokenly on for a while, and again dropped
+into laughs that recognized the drowse creeping upon the talkers.
+Suddenly it stopped altogether, and left Langbourne, as he felt,
+definitively awake for the rest of the night.</p>
+
+<p>He had received an impression which he could not fully analyze. With
+some inner sense he kept hearing that voice, low and deep, and rich with
+whimsical suggestion. Its owner must have a strange, complex nature,
+which would perpetually provoke and satisfy. Her companionship would be
+as easy and reasonable as a man's, while it had the charm of a woman's.
+At the moment it seemed to him that life without this companionship
+would be something poorer and thinner than he had yet known, and that he
+could not endure to forego it. Somehow he must manage to see the girl
+and make her acquaintance. He did not know how it could be contrived,
+but it could certainly be contrived, and he began to dramatize their
+meeting on these various terms. It was interesting and it was
+delightful, and it always came, in its safe impossibility, to his
+telling her that he loved her, and to her consenting to be his wife. He
+resolved to take no chance of losing her, but to remain awake, and
+somehow see her before she could leave the hotel in the morning. The
+resolution gave him calm; he felt that the affair so far was settled.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he started from his pillow; and again he heard that mellow
+laugh, warm and rich as the cooing of doves on sunlit eaves. The sun was
+shining through the crevices of his window-blinds; he looked at his
+watch; it was half-past eight. The sound of fluttering skirts and flying
+feet in the corridor shook his heart. A voice, the voice of the mellow
+laugh, called as if to some one on the stairs, "I must have put it in my
+bag. It doesn't matter, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>He hurried on his clothes, in the vain hope of finding his late
+neighbors at breakfast; but before he had finished dressing he heard
+wheels before the veranda below, and he saw the hotel barge drive away,
+as if to the station. There were two passengers in it; two women, whose
+faces were hidden by the fringe of the barge-roof, but whose slender
+figures showed themselves from their necks down. It seemed to him that
+one was tall and slight, and the other slight and little.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+
+<p>He stopped in the hall, and then, tempted by his despair, he stepped
+within the open door of the next room and looked vaguely over it, with
+shame at being there. What was it that the girl had missed, and had come
+back to look for? Some trifle, no doubt, which she had not cared to
+lose, and yet had not wished to leave behind. He failed to find anything
+in the search, which he could not make very thorough, and he was going
+guiltily out when his eye fell upon an envelope, perversely fallen
+beside the door and almost indiscernible against the white paint, with
+the addressed surface inward.</p>
+
+<p>This must be the object of her search, and he could understand why she
+was not very anxious when he found it a circular from a nursery-man,
+containing nothing more valuable than a list of flowering shrubs. He
+satisfied himself that this was all without satisfying himself that he
+had quite a right to do so; and he stood abashed in the presence of the
+superscription on the envelope somewhat as if Miss Barbara F. Simpson,
+Upper Ashton Falls, N. H., were there to see him tampering with her
+correspondence. It was indelicate, and he felt that his whole behavior
+had been indelicate, from the moment her laugh had wakened him in the
+night till now, when he had invaded her room. He had no more doubt that
+she was the taller of the two girls than that this was her name on the
+envelope. He liked Barbara; and Simpson could be changed. He seemed to
+hear her soft throaty laugh in response to the suggestion, and with a
+leap of the heart he slipped the circular into his breast pocket.</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast he went to the hotel office, and stood leaning on the
+long counter and talking with the clerk till he could gather courage to
+look at the register, where he knew the names of these girls must be
+written. He asked where Upper Ashton Falls was, and whether it would be
+a pleasant place to spend a week.</p>
+
+<p>The clerk said that it was about thirty miles up the road, and was one
+of the nicest places in the mountains; Langbourne could not go to a
+nicer; and there was a very good little hotel. "Why," he said, "there
+were two ladies here overnight that just left for there, on the
+seven-forty. Odd you should ask about it."</p>
+
+<p>Langbourne owned that it was odd, and then he asked if the ladies lived
+at Upper Ashton Falls, or were merely summer folks.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, a little of both," said the clerk. "They're cousins, and they've
+got an aunt living there that they stay with. They used to go away
+winters,&mdash;teaching, I guess,&mdash;but this last year they stayed right
+through. Been down to Springfield, they said, and just stopped the night
+because the accommodation don't go any farther. Wake you up last night?
+I had to put 'em into the room next to yours, and girls usually talk."</p>
+
+<p>Langbourne answered that it would have taken a good deal of talking to
+wake him the night before, and then he lounged across to the time-table
+hanging on the wall, and began to look up the trains for Upper Ashton
+Falls.</p>
+
+<p>"If you want to go to the Falls," said the clerk, "there's a through
+train at four, with a drawing-room on it, that will get you there by
+five."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I fancy I was looking up the New York trains," Langbourne returned.
+He did not like these evasions, but in his consciousness of Miss Simpson
+he seemed unable to avoid them. The clerk went out on the veranda to
+talk with a farmer bringing supplies, and Langbourne ran to the
+register, and read there the names of Barbara F. Simpson and Juliet D.
+Bingham. It was Miss Simpson who had registered for both, since her name
+came first, and the entry was in a good, simple hand, which was like a
+man's in its firmness and clearness. He turned from the register decided
+to take the four-o'clock train for Upper Ashton Falls, and met a
+messenger with a telegram which he knew was for himself before the boy
+could ask his name. His partner had fallen suddenly sick; his recall was
+absolute, his vacation was at an end; nothing remained for him but to
+take the first train back to New York. He thought how little prescient
+he had been in his pretence that he was looking the New York trains up;
+but the need of one had come already, and apparently he should never
+have any use for a train to Upper Ashton Falls.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV.</h3>
+
+<p>All the way back to New York Langbourne was oppressed by a sense of loss
+such as his old disappointment in love now seemed to him never to have
+inflicted. He found that his whole being had set toward the unseen owner
+of the voice which had charmed him, and it was like a stretching and
+tearing of the nerves to be going from her instead of going to her. He
+was as much under duress as if he were bound by a hypnotic spell. The
+voice continually sounded, not in his ears, which were filled with the
+noises of the train, as usual, but in the inmost of his spirit, where it
+was a low, cooing, coaxing murmur. He realized now how intensely he must
+have listened for it in the night, how every tone of it must have
+pervaded him and possessed him. He was in love with it, he was as
+entirely fascinated by it as if it were the girl's whole presence, her
+looks, her qualities. The remnant of the summer passed in the fret of
+business, which was doubly irksome through his feeling of injury in
+being kept from the girl whose personality he constructed from the sound
+of her voice, and set over his fancy in an absolute sovereignty. The
+image he had created of her remained a dim and blurred vision throughout
+the day, but by night it became distinct and compelling. One evening,
+late in the fall, he could endure the stress no longer, and he yielded
+to the temptation which had beset him from the first moment he renounced
+his purpose of returning in person the circular addressed to her as a
+means of her acquaintance. He wrote to her, and in terms as dignified as
+he could contrive, and as free from any ulterior import, he told her he
+had found it in the hotel hallway and had meant to send it to her at
+once, thinking it might be of some slight use to her. He had failed to
+do this, and now, having come upon it among some other papers, he sent
+it with an explanation which he hoped she would excuse him for troubling
+her with.</p>
+
+<p>This was not true, but he did not see how he could begin with her by
+saying that he had found the circular in her room, and had kept it by
+him ever since, looking at it every day, and leaving it where he could
+see it the last thing before he slept at night and the first thing after
+he woke in the morning. As to her reception of his story, he had to
+trust to his knowledge that she was, like himself, of country birth and
+breeding, and to his belief that she would not take alarm at his
+overture. He did not go much into the world and was little acquainted
+with its usages, yet he knew enough to suspect that a woman of the world
+would either ignore his letter, or would return a cold and snubbing
+expression of Miss Simpson's thanks for Mr. Stephen M. Langbourne's
+kindness.</p>
+
+<p>He had not only signed his name and given his address carefully in hopes
+of a reply, but he had enclosed the business card of his firm as a token
+of his responsibility. The partner in a wholesale stationery house ought
+to be an impressive figure in the imagination of a village girl; but it
+was some weeks before any answer came to Langbourne's letter. The reply
+began with an apology for the delay, and Langbourne perceived that he
+had gained rather than lost by the writer's hesitation; clearly she
+believed that she had put herself in the wrong, and that she owed him a
+certain reparation. For the rest, her letter was discreetly confined to
+an acknowledgment of the trouble he had taken.</p>
+
+<p>But this spare return was richly enough for Langbourne; it would have
+sufficed, if there had been nothing in the letter, that the handwriting
+proved Miss Simpson to have been the one who had made the entry of her
+name and her friend's in the hotel register. This was most important as
+one step in corroboration of the fact that he had rightly divined her;
+that the rest should come true was almost a logical necessity. Still, he
+was puzzled to contrive a pretext for writing again, and he remained
+without one for a fortnight. Then, in passing a seedsman's store which
+he used to pass every day without thinking, he one day suddenly
+perceived his opportunity. He went in and got a number of the catalogues
+and other advertisements, and addressed them then and there, in a
+wrapper the seedsman gave him, to Miss Barbara F. Simpson, Upper Ashton
+Falls, N. H.</p>
+
+<p>Now the response came with a promptness which at least testified of the
+lingering compunction of Miss Simpson. She asked if she were right in
+supposing the seedsman's catalogues and folders had come to her from
+Langbourne, and begged to know from him whether the seedsman in question
+was reliable: it was so difficult to get garden seeds that one could
+trust.</p>
+
+<p>The correspondence now established itself, and with one excuse or
+another it prospered throughout the winter. Langbourne was not only
+willing, he was most eager, to give her proof of his reliability; he
+spoke of stationers in Springfield and Greenfield to whom he was
+personally known; and he secretly hoped she would satisfy herself
+through friends in those places that he was an upright and trustworthy
+person.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Simpson wrote delightful letters, with that whimsical quality which
+had enchanted him in her voice. The coaxing and caressing was not there,
+and could not be expected to impart itself, unless in those refuges of
+deep feeling supposed to lurk between the lines. But he hoped to provoke
+it from these in time, and his own letters grew the more earnest the
+more ironical hers became. He wrote to her about a book he was reading,
+and when she said she had not seen it, he sent it her; in one of her
+letters she casually betrayed that she sang contralto in the choir, and
+then he sent her some new songs, which he had heard in the theatre, and
+which he had informed himself from a friend were contralto. He was
+always tending to an expression of the feeling which swayed him; but on
+her part there was no sentiment. Only in the fact that she was willing
+to continue this exchange of letters with a man personally unknown to
+her did she betray that romantic tradition which underlies all our young
+life, and in those unused to the world tempts to things blameless in
+themselves, but of the sort shunned by the worldlier wise. There was no
+great wisdom of any kind in Miss Simpson's letters; but Langbourne did
+not miss it; he was content with her mere words, as they related the
+little events of her simple daily life. These repeated themselves from
+the page in the tones of her voice and filled him with a passionate
+intoxication.</p>
+
+<p>Towards spring he had his photograph taken, for no reason that he could
+have given; but since it was done he sent one to his mother in Vermont,
+and then he wrote his name on another, and sent it to Miss Simpson in
+New Hampshire. He hoped, of course, that she would return a photograph
+of herself; but she merely acknowledged his with some dry playfulness.
+Then, after disappointing him so long that he ceased to expect anything,
+she enclosed a picture. The face was so far averted that Langbourne
+could get nothing but the curve of a longish cheek, the point of a nose,
+the segment of a crescent eyebrow. The girl said that as they should
+probably never meet, it was not necessary he should know her when he saw
+her; she explained that she was looking away because she had been
+attracted by something on the other side of the photograph gallery just
+at the moment the artist took the cap off the tube of his camera, and
+she could not turn back without breaking the plate.</p>
+
+<p>Langbourne replied that he was going up to Springfield on business the
+first week in May, and that he thought he might push on as far north as
+Upper Ashton Falls. To this there came no rejoinder whatever, but he did
+not lose courage. It was now the end of April, and he could bear to wait
+for a further verification of his ideal; the photograph had confirmed
+him in its evasive fashion at every point of his conjecture concerning
+her. It was the face he had imagined her having, or so he now imagined,
+and it was just such a long oval face as would go with the figure he
+attributed to her. She must have the healthy palor of skin which
+associates itself with masses of dark, mahogany-colored hair.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V.</h3>
+
+<p>It was so long since he had known a Northern spring that he had
+forgotten how much later the beginning of May was in New Hampshire; but
+as his train ran up from Springfield he realized the difference of the
+season from that which he had left in New York. The meadows were green
+only in the damp hollows; most of the trees were as bare as in
+midwinter; the willows in the swamplands hung out their catkins, and the
+white birches showed faint signs of returning life. In the woods were
+long drifts of snow, though he knew that in the brown leaves along their
+edges the pale pink flowers of the trailing arbutus were hiding their
+wet faces. A vernal mildness overhung the landscape. A blue haze filled
+the distances and veiled the hills; from the farm door-yards the smell
+of burning leaf-heaps and garden-stalks came through the window which he
+lifted to let in the dull, warm air. The sun shone down from a pale sky,
+in which the crows called to one another.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he arrived at Upper Ashton Falls the afternoon had waned so
+far towards evening that the first robins were singing their vespers
+from the leafless choirs of the maples before the hotel. He indulged the
+landlord in his natural supposition that he had come up to make a timely
+engagement for summer board; after supper he even asked what the price
+of such rooms as his would be by the week in July, while he tried to
+lead the talk round to the fact which he wished to learn.</p>
+
+<p>He did not know where Miss Simpson lived; and the courage with which he
+had set out on his adventure totally lapsed, leaving in its place an
+accusing sense of silliness. He was where he was without reason, and in
+defiance of the tacit unwillingness of the person he had come to see;
+she certainly had given him no invitation, she had given him no
+permission to come. For the moment, in his shame, it seemed to him that
+the only thing for him was to go back to New York by the first train in
+the morning. But what then would the girl think of him? Such an act must
+forever end the intercourse which had now become an essential part of
+his life. That voice which had haunted him so long, was he never to hear
+it again? Was he willing to renounce forever the hope of hearing it?</p>
+
+<p>He sat at his supper so long, nervelessly turning his doubts over in his
+mind, that the waitress came out of the kitchen and drove him from the
+table with her severe, impatient stare.</p>
+
+<p>He put on his hat, and with his overcoat on his arm he started out for a
+walk which was hopeless, but not so aimless as he feigned to himself.
+The air was lullingly warm still as he followed the long village street
+down the hill toward the river, where the lunge of rapids filled the
+dusk with a sort of humid uproar; then he turned and followed it back
+past the hotel as far as it led towards the open country. At the edge of
+the village he came to a large, old-fashioned house, which struck him as
+typical, with its outward swaying fence of the Greek border pattern, and
+its gate-posts topped by tilting urns of painted wood. The house itself
+stood rather far back from the street, and as he passed it he saw that
+it was approached by a pathway of brick which was bordered with box.
+Stalks of last year's hollyhocks and lilacs from garden beds on either
+hand lifted their sharp points, here and there broken and hanging down.
+It was curious how these details insisted through the twilight.</p>
+
+<p>He walked on until the wooden village pathway ended in the country mud,
+and then again he returned up upon his steps. As he reapproached the
+house he saw lights. A brighter radiance streamed from the hall door,
+which was apparently open, and a softer glow flushed the windows of one
+of the rooms that flanked the hall.</p>
+
+<p>As Langbourne came abreast of the gate the tinkle of a gay laugh rang
+out to him; then ensued a murmur of girls' voices in the room, and
+suddenly this stopped, and the voice that he knew, the voice that seemed
+never to have ceased to sound in his nerves and pulses, rose in singing
+words set to the Spanish air of <i>La Paloma</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It was one of the songs he had sent to Miss Simpson, but he did not need
+this material proof that it was she whom he now heard. There was no
+question of what he should do. All doubt, all fear, had vanished; he had
+again but one impulse, one desire, one purpose. But he lingered at the
+gate till the song ended, and then he unlatched it and started up the
+walk towards the door. It seemed to him a long way; he almost reeled as
+he went; he fumbled tremulously for the bell-pull beside the door, while
+a confusion of voices in the adjoining room&mdash;the voices which had waked
+him from his sleep, and which now sounded like voices in a dream&mdash;came
+out to him.</p>
+
+<p>The light from the lamp hanging in the hall shone full in his face, and
+the girl who came from that room beside it to answer his ring gave a
+sort of conscious jump at sight of him as he uncovered and stood
+bare-headed before her.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI.</h3>
+
+<p>She must have recognized him from the photograph he had sent, and in
+stature and figure he recognized her as the ideal he had cherished,
+though her head was gilded with the light from the lamp, and he could
+not make out whether her hair was dark or fair; her face was, of course,
+a mere outline, without color or detail against the luminous interior.</p>
+
+<p>He managed to ask, dry-tongued and with a heart that beat into his
+throat, "Is Miss Simpson at home?" and the girl answered, with a high,
+gay tinkle:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, she's at home. Won't you walk in?"</p>
+
+<p>He obeyed, but at the sound of her silvery voice his heart dropped back
+into his breast. He put his hat and coat on an entry chair, and prepared
+to follow her into the room she had come out of. The door stood ajar,
+and he said, as she put out her hand to push it open, "I am Mr.
+Langbourne."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," she answered in the same high, gay tinkle, which he fancied
+had now a note of laughter in it.</p>
+
+<p>An elderly woman of a ladylike village type was sitting with some
+needlework beside a little table, and a young girl turned on the
+piano-stool and rose to receive him. "My aunt, Mrs. Simpson, Mr.
+Langbourne," said the girl who introduced him to these presences, and
+she added, indicating the girl at the piano, "Miss Simpson."</p>
+
+<p>They all three bowed silently, and in the hush the sheet on the music
+frame slid from the piano with a sharp clash, and skated across the
+floor to Langbourne's feet. It was the song of <i>La Paloma</i> which she had
+been singing; he picked it up, and she received it from him with a
+drooping head, and an effect of guilty embarrassment.</p>
+
+<p>She was short and of rather a full figure, though not too full. She was
+not plain, but she was by no means the sort of beauty who had lived in
+Langbourne's fancy for the year past. The oval of her face was squared;
+her nose was arched; she had a pretty, pouting mouth, and below it a
+deep dimple in her chin; her eyes were large and dark, and they had the
+questioning look of near-sighted eyes; her hair was brown. There was a
+humorous tremor in her lips, even with the prim stress she put upon them
+in saying, "Oh, thank you," in a thick whisper of the voice he knew.</p>
+
+<p>"And I," said the other girl, "am Juliet Bingham. Won't you sit down,
+Mr. Langbourne!" She pushed towards him the arm-chair before her, and he
+dropped into it. She took her place on the hair-cloth sofa, and Miss
+Simpson sank back upon the piano-stool with a painful provisionality,
+while her eyes sought Miss Bingham's in a sort of admiring terror.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingham was easily mistress of the situation; she did not try to
+bring Miss Simpson into the conversation, but she contrived to make Mrs.
+Simpson ask Langbourne when he arrived at Upper Ashton Falls; and she
+herself asked him when he had left New York, with many apposite
+suppositions concerning the difference in the season in the two
+latitudes. She presumed he was staying at the Falls House, and she said,
+always in her high, gay tinkle, that it was very pleasant there in the
+summer time. He did not know what he answered. He was aware that from
+time to time Miss Simpson said something in a frightened undertone. He
+did not know how long it was before Mrs. Simpson made an errand out of
+the room, in the abeyance which age practises before youthful society in
+the country; he did not know how much longer it was before Miss Bingham
+herself jumped actively up, and said, Now she would run over to Jenny's,
+if Mr. Langbourne would excuse her, and tell her that they could not go
+the next day.</p>
+
+<p>"It will do just as well in the morning," Miss Simpson pitifully
+entreated.</p>
+
+<p>"No, she's got to know to-night," said Miss Bingham, and she said she
+should find Mr. Langbourne there when she got back. He knew that in
+compliance with the simple village tradition he was being purposely left
+alone with Miss Simpson, as rightfully belonging to her. Miss Bingham
+betrayed no intentionality to him, but he caught a glimpse of mocking
+consciousness in the sidelong look she gave Miss Simpson as she went
+out; and if he had not known before he perceived then, in the vanishing
+oval of her cheek, the corner of her arched eyebrow, the point of her
+classic nose, the original of the photograph he had been treasuring as
+Miss Simpson's.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VII.</h3>
+
+<p>"It was <i>her</i> picture I sent you," said Miss Simpson. She was the first
+to break the silence to which Miss Bingham abandoned them, but she did
+not speak till her friend had closed the outer door behind her and was
+tripping down the brick walk to the gate.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Langbourne, in a dryness which he could not keep himself
+from using.</p>
+
+<p>The girl must have felt it, and her voice faltered a very little as she
+continued. "We&mdash;I&mdash;did it for fun. I meant to tell you. I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's all right," said Langbourne. "I had no business to expect
+yours, or to send you mine." But he believed that he had; that his
+faithful infatuation had somehow earned him the right to do what he had
+done, and to hope for what he had not got; without formulating the fact,
+he divined that she believed it too. Between the man-soul and the
+woman-soul it can never go so far as it had gone in their case without
+giving them claims upon each other which neither can justly deny.</p>
+
+<p>She did not attempt to deny it. "I oughtn't to have done it, and I ought
+to have told you at once&mdash;the next letter&mdash;but I&mdash;you said you were
+coming, and I thought if you did come&mdash;I didn't really expect you to;
+and it was all a joke,&mdash;off-hand."</p>
+
+<p>It was very lame, but it was true, and it was piteous; yet Langbourne
+could not relent. His grievance was not with what she had done, but what
+she was; not what she really was, but what she materially was; her
+looks, her figure, her stature, her whole presence, so different from
+that which he had been carrying in his mind, and adoring for a year
+past.</p>
+
+<p>If it was ridiculous, and if with her sense of the ridiculous she felt
+it so, she was unable to take it lightly, or to make him take it
+lightly. At some faint gleams which passed over her face he felt himself
+invited to regard it less seriously; but he did not try, even
+provisionally, and they fell into a silence that neither seemed to have
+the power of breaking.</p>
+
+<p>It must be broken, however; something must be done; they could not sit
+there dumb forever. He looked at the sheet of music on the piano and
+said, "I see you have been trying that song. Do you like it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, very much," and now for the first time she got her voice fairly
+above a whisper. She took the sheet down from the music-rest and looked
+at the picture of the lithographed title. It was of a tiled roof lifted
+among cypresses and laurels with pigeons strutting on it and sailing
+over it.</p>
+
+<p>"It was that picture," said Langbourne, since he must say something,
+"that I believe I got the song for; it made me think of the roof of an
+old Spanish house I saw in Southern California."</p>
+
+<p>"It must be nice, out there," said Miss Simpson, absently staring at the
+picture. She gathered herself together to add, pointlessly, "Juliet says
+she's going to Europe. Have you ever been?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not to Europe, no. I always feel as if I wanted to see my own country
+first. Is she going soon?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who? Juliet? Oh, no! She was just saying so. I don't believe she's
+engaged her passage yet."</p>
+
+<p>There was invitation to greater ease in this, and her voice began to
+have the tender, coaxing quality which had thrilled his heart when he
+heard it first. But the space of her variance from his ideal was between
+them, and the voice reached him faintly across it.</p>
+
+<p>The situation grew more and more painful for her, he could see, as well
+as for him. She too was feeling the anomaly of their having been
+intimates without being acquaintances. They necessarily met as strangers
+after the exchange of letters in which they had spoken with the
+confidence of friends.</p>
+
+<p>Langbourne cast about in his mind for some middle ground where they
+could come together without that effect of chance encounter which had
+reduced them to silence. He could not recur to any of the things they
+had written about; so far from wishing to do this, he had almost a
+terror of touching upon them by accident, and he felt that she shrank
+from them too, as if they involved a painful misunderstanding which
+could not be put straight.</p>
+
+<p>He asked questions about Upper Ashton Falls, but these led up to what
+she had said of it in her letters; he tried to speak of the winter in
+New York, and he remembered that every week he had given her a full
+account of his life there. They must go beyond their letters or they
+must fall far back of them.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VIII.</h3>
+
+<p>In their attempts to talk he was aware that she was seconding all his
+endeavors with intelligence, and with a humorous subtlety to which he
+could not pretend. She was suffering from their anomalous position as
+much as he, but she had the means of enjoying it while he had not. After
+half an hour of these defeats Mrs. Simpson operated a diversion by
+coming in with two glasses of lemonade on a tray and some slices of
+sponge-cake. She offered this refreshment first to Langbourne and then
+to her niece, and they both obediently took a glass, and put a slice of
+cake in the saucer which supported the glass. She said to each in turn,
+"Won't you take some lemonade? Won't you have a piece of cake?" and then
+went out with her empty tray, and the air of having fulfilled the duties
+of hospitality to her niece's company.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said Miss Simpson, "but it's rather early in the season
+for <i>cold</i> lemonade," and Langbourne, instead of laughing, as her tone
+invited him to do, said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's very good, I'm sure." But this seemed too stiffly ungracious, and
+he added: "What delicious sponge-cake! You never get this out of New
+England."</p>
+
+<p>"We have to do something to make up for our doughnuts," Miss Simpson
+suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I like doughnuts too," said Langbourne. "But you can't get the
+right kind of doughnuts, either, in New York."</p>
+
+<p>They began to talk about cooking. He told her of the tamales which he
+had first tasted in San Francisco, and afterward found superabundantly
+in New York; they both made a great deal of the topic; Miss Simpson had
+never heard of tamales. He became solemnly animated in their exegesis,
+and she showed a resolute interest in them.</p>
+
+<p>They were in the midst of the forced discussion, when they heard a quick
+foot on the brick walk, but they had both fallen silent when Miss
+Bingham flounced elastically in upon them. She seemed to take in with a
+keen glance which swept them from her lively eyes that they had not been
+getting on, and she had the air of taking them at once in hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's all right about Jenny," she said to Miss Simpson. "She'd a
+good deal rather go day after to-morrow, anyway. What have you been
+talking about? I don't want to make you go over the same ground. Have
+you got through with the weather? The moon's out, and it feels more like
+the beginning of June than the last of April. I shut the front door
+against dor-bugs; I couldn't help it, though they won't be here for six
+weeks yet. Do you have dor-bugs in New York, Mr. Langbourne?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. There may be some in the Park," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>"We think a great deal of our dor-bugs in Upper Ashton," said Miss
+Simpson demurely, looking down. "We don't know what we should do without
+them."</p>
+
+<p>"Lemonade!" exclaimed Miss Bingham, catching sight of the glasses and
+saucers on the corner of the piano, where Miss Simpson had allowed
+Langbourne to put them. "Has Aunt Elmira been giving you lemonade while
+I was gone? I will just see about that!" She whipped out of the room,
+and was back in a minute with a glass in one hand and a bit of
+sponge-cake between the fingers of the other. "She had kept some for me!
+Have you sung <i>Paloma</i> for Mr. Langbourne, Barbara?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Barbara, "we hadn't got round to it, quite."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, do!" Langbourne entreated, and he wondered that he had not asked
+her before; it would have saved them from each ether.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait a moment," cried Juliet Bingham, and she gulped the last draught
+of her lemonade upon a final morsel of sponge-cake, and was down at the
+piano while still dusting the crumbs from her fingers. She struck the
+refractory sheet of music flat upon the rack with her palm, and then
+tilted her head over her shoulder towards Langbourne, who had risen with
+some vague notion of turning the sheets of the song. "Do you sing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no. But I like&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you ready, Bab?" she asked, ignoring him; and she dashed into the
+accompaniment.</p>
+
+<p>He sat down in his chair behind the two girls, where they could not see
+his face.</p>
+
+<p>Barbara began rather weakly, but her voice gathered strength, and then
+poured full volume to the end, where it weakened again. He knew that she
+was taking refuge from him in the song, and in the magic of her voice he
+escaped from the disappointment he had been suffering. He let his head
+drop and his eyelids fall, and in the rapture of her singing he got back
+what he had lost; or rather, he lost himself again to the illusion which
+had grown so precious to him.</p>
+
+<p>Juliet Bingham sounded the last note almost as she rose from the piano;
+Barbara passed her handkerchief over her forehead, as if to wipe the
+heat from it, but he believed that this was a ruse to dry her eyes in
+it: they shone with a moist brightness in the glimpse he caught of them.
+He had risen, and they all stood talking; or they all stood, and Juliet
+talked. She did not offer to sit down again, and after stiffly thanking
+them both, he said he must be going, and took leave of them. Juliet gave
+his hand a nervous grip; Barbara's touch was lax and cold; the parting
+with her was painful; he believed that she felt it so as much as he.</p>
+
+<p>The girls' voices followed him down the walk,&mdash;Juliet's treble, and
+Barbara's contralto,&mdash;and he believed that they were making talk
+purposely against a pressure of silence, and did not know what they were
+saying. It occurred to him that they had not asked how long he was
+staying, or invited him to come again: he had not thought to ask if he
+might; and in the intolerable inconclusiveness of this ending he
+faltered at the gate till the lights in the windows of the parlor
+disappeared, as if carried into the hall, and then they twinkled into
+darkness. From an upper entry window, which reddened with a momentary
+flush and was then darkened, a burst of mingled laughter came. The girls
+must have thought him beyond hearing, and he fancied the laugh a burst
+of hysterical feeling in them both.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IX.</h3>
+
+<p>Langbourne went to bed as soon as he reached his hotel because he found
+himself spent with the experience of the evening; but as he rested from
+his fatigue he grew wakeful, and he tried to get its whole measure and
+meaning before him. He had a methodical nature, with a necessity for
+order in his motions, and he now balanced one fact against another none
+the less passionately because the process was a series of careful
+recognitions. He perceived that the dream in which he had lived for the
+year past was not wholly an illusion. One of the girls whom he had heard
+but not seen was what he had divined her to be: a dominant influence, a
+control to which the other was passively obedient. He had not erred
+greatly as to the face or figure of the superior, but he had given all
+the advantages to the wrong person. The voice, indeed, the spell which
+had bound him, belonged with the one to whom he had attributed it, and
+the qualities with which it was inextricably blended in his fancy were
+hers; she was more like his ideal than the other, though he owned that
+the other was a charming girl too, and that in the thin treble of her
+voice lurked a potential fascination which might have made itself
+ascendently felt if he had happened to feel it first.</p>
+
+<p>There was a dangerous instant in which he had a perverse question of
+changing his allegiance. This passed into another moment, almost as
+perilous, of confusion through a primal instinct of the man's by which
+he yields a double or a divided allegiance and simultaneously worships
+at two shrines; in still another breath he was aware that this was
+madness.</p>
+
+<p>If he had been younger, he would have had no doubt as to his right in
+the circumstances. He had simply corresponded all winter with Miss
+Simpson; but though he had opened his heart freely and had invited her
+to the same confidence with him, he had not committed himself, and he
+had a right to drop the whole affair. She would have no right to
+complain; she had not committed herself either: they could both come off
+unscathed. But he was now thirty-five, and life had taught him something
+concerning the rights of others which he could not ignore. By seeking
+her confidence and by offering her his, he had given her a claim which
+was none the less binding because it was wholly tacit. There had been a
+time when he might have justified himself in dropping the affair; that
+was when she had failed to answer his letter; but he had come to see her
+in defiance of her silence, and now he could not withdraw, simply
+because he was disappointed, without cruelty, without atrocity.</p>
+
+<p>This was what the girl's wistful eyes said to him; this was the reproach
+of her trembling lips; this was the accusation of her dejected figure,
+as she drooped in vision before him on the piano-stool and passed her
+hand soundlessly over the key-board. He tried to own to her that he was
+disappointed, but he could not get the words out of his throat; and now
+in her presence, as it were, he was not sure that he was disappointed.</p>
+
+
+<h3>X.</h3>
+
+<p>He woke late, with a longing to put his two senses of her to the proof
+of day; and as early in the forenoon as he could hope to see her, he
+walked out towards her aunt's house. It was a mild, dull morning, with a
+misted sunshine; in the little crimson tassels of the budded maples
+overhead the bees were droning.</p>
+
+<p>The street was straight, and while he was yet a good way off he saw the
+gate open before the house, and a girl whom he recognized as Miss
+Bingham close it behind her. She then came down under the maples towards
+him, at first swiftly, and then more and more slowly, until finally she
+faltered to a stop. He quickened his own pace and came up to her with a
+"Good-morning" called to her and a lift of his hat. She returned neither
+salutation, and said, "I was coming to see you, Mr. Langbourne." Her
+voice was still a silver bell, but it was not gay, and her face was
+severely unsmiling.</p>
+
+<p>"To see <i>me</i>?" he returned. "Has anything&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, there's nothing the matter. But&mdash;I should like to talk with you."
+She held a little packet, tied with blue ribbon, in her intertwined
+hands, and she looked urgently at him.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be very glad," Langbourne began, but she interrupted,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Should you mind walking down to the Falls?"</p>
+
+<p>He understood that for some reason she did not wish him to pass the
+house, and he bowed. "Wherever you like. I hope Mrs. Simpson is well?
+And Miss Simpson?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, perfectly," said Miss Bingham, and they fenced with some questions
+and answers of no interest till they had walked back through the village
+to the Falls at the other end of it, where the saw in a mill was
+whirring through a long pine log, and the water, streaked with sawdust,
+was spreading over the rocks below and flowing away with a smooth
+swiftness. The ground near the mill was piled with fresh-sawed, fragrant
+lumber and strewn with logs.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bingham found a comfortable place on one of the logs, and began
+abruptly:</p>
+
+<p>"You may think it's pretty strange, Mr. Langbourne, but I want to talk
+with you about Miss Simpson." She seemed to satisfy a duty to convention
+by saying Miss Simpson at the outset, and after that she called her
+friend Barbara. "I've brought you your letters to her," and she handed
+him the packet she had been holding. "Have you got hers with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"They are at the hotel," answered Langbourne.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's right, then. I thought perhaps you had brought them. You
+see," Miss Bingham continued, much more cold-bloodedly than Langbourne
+thought she need, "we talked it over last night, and it's too silly.
+That's the way Barbara feels herself. The fact is," she went on
+confidingly, and with the air of saying something that he would
+appreciate, "I always thought it was some <i>young</i> man, and so did
+Barbara; or I don't believe she would ever have answered your first
+letter."</p>
+
+<p>Langbourne knew that he was not a young man in a young girl's sense; but
+no man likes to have it said that he is old. Besides, Miss Bingham
+herself was not apparently in her first quarter of a century, and
+probably Miss Simpson would not see the earliest twenties again. He
+thought none the worse of her for that; but he felt that he was not so
+unequally matched in time with her that she need take the attitude with
+regard to him which Miss Bingham indicated. He was not the least gray
+nor the least bald, and his tall figure had kept its youthful lines.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps his face manifested something of his suppressed resentment. At
+any rate, Miss Bingham said apologetically, "I mean that if we had known
+it was a <i>serious</i> person we should have acted differently. I oughtn't
+to have let her thank you for those seedsman's catalogues; but I thought
+it couldn't do any harm. And then, after your letters began to come, we
+didn't know just when to stop them. To tell you the truth, Mr.
+Langbourne, we got so interested we couldn't <i>bear</i> to stop them. You
+wrote so much about your life in New York, that it was like a visit
+there every week; and it's pretty quiet at Upper Ashton in the winter
+time."</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to refer this fact to Langbourne for sympathetic
+appreciation; he said mechanically, "Yes."</p>
+
+<p>She resumed: "But when your picture came, I said it had <i>got</i> to stop;
+and so we just sent back my picture,&mdash;or I don't know but what Barbara
+did it without asking me,&mdash;and we did suppose that would be the last of
+it; when you wrote back you were coming here, we didn't believe you
+really would unless we said so. That's all there is about it; and if
+there is anybody to blame, I am the one. Barbara would never have done
+it in the world if I hadn't put her up to it."</p>
+
+<p>In those words the implication that Miss Bingham had operated the whole
+affair finally unfolded itself. But distasteful as the fact was to
+Langbourne, and wounding as was the realization that he had been led on
+by this witness of his infatuation for the sake of the entertainment
+which his letters gave two girls in the dull winter of a mountain
+village, there was still greater pain, with an additional embarrassment,
+in the regret which the words conveyed. It appeared that it was not he
+who had done the wrong; he had suffered it, and so far from having to
+offer reparation to a young girl for having unwarrantably wrought her up
+expect of him a step from which he afterwards recoiled, he had the duty
+of forgiving her a trespass on his own invaded sensibilities. It was
+humiliating to his vanity; it inflicted a hurt to something better than
+his vanity. He began very uncomfortably: "It's all right, as far as I'm
+concerned. I had no business to address Miss Simpson in the first
+place&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Miss Bingham interrupted, "that's what I told Barbara; but she
+got to feeling badly about it; she thought if you had taken the trouble
+to send back the circular that she dropped in the hotel, she couldn't do
+less than acknowledge it, and she kept on so about it that I had to let
+her. That was the first false step."</p>
+
+<p>These words, while they showed Miss Simpson in a more amiable light, did
+not enable Langbourne to see Miss Bingham's merit so clearly. In the
+methodical and consecutive working of his emotions, he was aware that it
+was no longer a question of divided allegiance, and that there could
+never be any such question again. He perceived that Miss Bingham had not
+such a good figure as he had fancied the night before, and that her eyes
+were set rather too near together. While he dropped his own eyes, and
+stood trying to think what he should say in answer to her last speech,
+her high, sweet voice tinkled out in gay challenge, "How do, John?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked up and saw a square-set, brown-faced young man advancing
+towards them in his shirt-sleeves; he came deliberately, finding his way
+in and out among the logs, till he stood smiling down, through a heavy
+mustache and thick black lashes, into the face of the girl, as if she
+were some sort of joke. The sun struck into her face as she looked up at
+him, and made her frown with a knot between her brows that pulled her
+eyes still closer together, and she asked, with no direct reference to
+his shirt-sleeves,&mdash;"A'n't you forcing the season?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't want to let the summer get the start of you," the young man
+generalized, and Miss Bingham said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Langbourne, Mr. Dickery." The young man silently shook hands with
+Langbourne, whom he took into the joke of Miss Bingham with another
+smile; and she went on: "Say, John, I wish you'd tell Jenny I don't see
+why we shouldn't go this afternoon, after all."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," said the young man.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you're coming too?" she suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Hadn't heard of it," he returned.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you have now. You've got to be ready at two o'clock."</p>
+
+<p>"That so?" the young fellow inquired. Then he walked away among the
+logs, as casually as he had arrived, and Miss Bingham rose and shook
+some bits of bark from her skirt.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Dickery is owner of the mills," she explained, and she explored
+Langbourne's face for an intelligence which she did not seem to find
+there. He thought, indifferently enough, that this young man had heard
+the two girls speak of him, and had satisfied a natural curiosity in
+coming to look him over; it did not occur to him that he had any
+especial relation to Miss Bingham.</p>
+
+<p>She walked up into the village with Langbourne, and he did not know
+whether he was to accompany her home or not. But she gave him no sign of
+dismissal till she put her hand upon her gate to pull it open without
+asking him to come in. Then he said, "I will send Miss Simpson's letters
+to her at once."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, any time will do, Mr. Langbourne," she returned sweetly. Then, as
+if it had just occurred to her, she added, "We're going after
+May-flowers this afternoon. Wouldn't you like to come too?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," he began, "whether I shall have the time&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you're not going away to-day!"</p>
+
+<p>"I expected&mdash;I&mdash;But if you don't think I shall be intruding&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, <i>I</i> should be delighted to have you. Mr. Dickery's going, and
+Jenny Dickery, and Barbara. I don't <i>believe</i> it will rain."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, if I may," said Langbourne.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne!" she cried, and he started away. But he
+had gone only a few rods when he wheeled about and hurried back. The
+girl was going up the walk to the house, looking over her shoulder after
+him; at his hurried return she stopped and came down to the gate again.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Bingham, I think&mdash;I think I had better not go."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, just as you feel about it, Mr. Langbourne," she assented.</p>
+
+<p>"I will bring the letters this evening, if you will let me&mdash;if Miss
+Simpson&mdash;if you will be at home."</p>
+
+<p>"We shall be very happy to see you, Mr. Langbourne," said the girl
+formally, and then he went back to his hotel.</p>
+
+
+<h3>XI.</h3>
+
+<p>Langbourne could not have told just why he had withdrawn his acceptance
+of Miss Bingham's invitation. If at the moment it was the effect of a
+quite reasonless panic, he decided later that it was because he wished
+to think. It could not be said, however, that he did think, unless
+thinking consists of a series of dramatic representations which the mind
+makes to itself from a given impulse, and which it is quite powerless to
+end. All the afternoon, which Langbourne spent in his room, his mind was
+the theatre of scenes with Miss Simpson, in which he perpetually evolved
+the motives governing him from the beginning, and triumphed out of his
+difficulties and embarrassments. Her voice, as it acquiesced in all, no
+longer related itself to that imaginary personality which had inhabited
+his fancy. That was gone irrevocably; and the voice belonged to the
+likeness of Barbara, and no other; from her similitude, little, quaint,
+with her hair of cloudy red and her large, dim-sighted eyes, it played
+upon the spiritual sense within him with the coaxing, drolling, mocking
+charm which he had felt from the first. It blessed him with intelligent
+and joyous forgiveness. But as he stood at her gate that evening this
+unmerited felicity fell from him. He now really heard her voice, through
+the open doorway, but perhaps because it was mixed with other
+voices&mdash;the treble of Miss Bingham, and the bass of a man who must be
+the Mr. Dickery he had seen at the saw mills&mdash;he turned and hurried back
+to his hotel, where he wrote a short letter saying that he had decided
+to take the express for New York that night. With an instinctive
+recognition of her authority in the affair, or with a cowardly shrinking
+from direct dealing with Barbara, he wrote to Juliet Bingham, and he
+addressed to her the packet of letters which he sent for Barbara.
+Superficially, he had done what he had no choice but to do. He had been
+asked to return her letters, and he had returned them, and brought the
+affair to an end.</p>
+
+<p>In his long ride to the city he assured himself in vain that he was
+doing right if he was not sure of his feelings towards the girl. It was
+quite because he was not sure of his feeling that he could not be sure
+he was not acting falsely and cruelly.</p>
+
+<p>The fear grew upon him through the summer, which he spent in the heat
+and stress of the town. In his work he could forget a little the despair
+in which he lived; but in a double consciousness like that of the
+hypochondriac, the girl whom it seemed to him he had deserted was
+visibly and audibly present with him. Her voice was always in his inner
+ear, and it visualized her looks and movements to his inner eye.</p>
+
+<p>Now he saw and understood at last that what his heart had more than once
+misgiven him might be the truth, and that though she had sent back his
+letters, and asked her own in return, it was not necessarily her wish
+that he should obey her request. It might very well have been an
+experiment of his feeling towards her, a mute quest of the impression
+she had made upon him, a test of his will and purpose, an overture to a
+clearer and truer understanding between them. This misgiving became a
+conviction from which he could not escape.</p>
+
+<p>He believed too late that he had made a mistake, that he had thrown away
+the supreme chance of his life. But was it too late? When he could bear
+it no longer, he began to deny that it was too late. He denied it even
+to the pathetic presence which haunted him, and in which the magic of
+her voice itself was merged at last, so that he saw her more than he
+heard her. He overbore her weak will with his stronger will, and set
+himself strenuously to protest to her real presence what he now always
+said to her phantom. When his partner came back from his vacation,
+Langbourne told him that he was going to take a day or two off.</p>
+
+
+<h3>XII.</h3>
+
+<p>He arrived at Upper Ashton Falls long enough before the early autumnal
+dusk to note that the crimson buds of the maples were now their crimson
+leaves, but he kept as close to the past as he could by not going to
+find Barbara before the hour of the evening when he had turned from her
+gate without daring to see her. It was a soft October evening now, as it
+was a soft May evening then; and there was a mystical hint of unity in
+the like feel of the dull, mild air. Again voices were coming out of the
+open doors and windows of the house, and they were the same voices that
+he had last heard there.</p>
+
+<p>He knocked, and after a moment of startled hush within Juliet Bingham
+came to the door. "Why, Mr. Langbourne!" she screamed.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I should like to come in, if you will let me," he gasped out.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne," she returned.</p>
+
+<p>He had not dwelt so long and so intently on the meeting at hand without
+considering how he should account for his coming, and he had formulated
+a confession of his motives. But he had never meant to make it to Juliet
+Bingham, and he now found himself unable to allege a word in explanation
+of his presence. He followed her into the parlor. Barbara silently gave
+him her hand and then remained passive in the background, where Dickery
+held aloof, smiling in what seemed his perpetual enjoyment of the Juliet
+Bingham joke. She at once put herself in authority over the situation;
+she made Langbourne let her have his hat; she seated him when and where
+she chose; she removed and put back the lampshades; she pulled up and
+pulled down the window-blinds; she shut the outer door because of the
+night air, and opened it because of the unseasonable warmth within. She
+excused Mrs. Simpson's absence on account of a headache, and asked him
+if he would not have a fan; when he refused it she made him take it, and
+while he sat helplessly dangling it from his hand, she asked him about
+the summer he had had, and whether he had passed it in New York. She was
+very intelligent about the heat in New York, and tactful in keeping the
+one-sided talk from falling. Barbara said nothing after a few faint
+attempts to take part in it, and Langbourne made briefer and briefer
+answers. His reticence seemed only to heighten Juliet Bingham's
+satisfaction, and she said, with a final supremacy, that she had been
+intending to go out with Mr. Dickery to a business meeting of the
+book-club, but they would be back before Langbourne could get away; she
+made him promise to wait for them. He did not know if Barbara looked any
+protest,&mdash;at least she spoke none,&mdash;and Juliet went out with Dickery.
+She turned at the door to bid Barbara say, if any one called, that she
+was at the book-club meeting. Then she disappeared, but reappeared and
+called, "See here, a minute, Bab!" and at the outer threshold she
+detained Barbara in vivid whisper, ending aloud, "Now you be sure to do
+both, Bab! Aunt Elmira will tell you where the things are." Again she
+vanished, and was gone long enough to have reached the gate and come
+back from it. She was renewing all her whispered and out-spoken charges
+when Dickery showed himself at her side, put his hand under her elbow,
+and wheeled her about, and while she called gayly over her shoulder to
+the others, "Did you ever?" walked her definitively out of the house.</p>
+
+<p>Langbourne did not suffer the silence which followed her going to
+possess him. What he had to do he must do quickly, and he said, "Miss
+Simpson, may I ask you one question?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, if you won't expect me to answer it," she suggested quaintly.</p>
+
+<p>"You must do as you please about that. It has to come before I try to
+excuse myself for being here; it's the only excuse I can offer. It's
+this: Did you send Miss Bingham to get back your letters from me last
+spring?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, of course!"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean, was it your idea?"</p>
+
+<p>"We thought it would be better."</p>
+
+<p>The evasion satisfied Langbourne, but he asked, "Had I given you some
+cause to distrust me at that time?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," she protested. "We got to talking it over, and&mdash;and we thought
+we had better."</p>
+
+<p>"Because I had come here without being asked?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no; it wasn't that," the girl protested.</p>
+
+<p>"I know I oughtn't to have come. I know I oughtn't to have written to
+you in the beginning, but you had let me write, and I thought you would
+let me come. I tried always to be sincere with you; to make you feel
+that you could trust me. I believe that I am an honest man; I thought I
+was a better man for having known you through your letters. I couldn't
+tell you how much they had been to me. You seemed to think, because I
+lived in a large place, that I had a great many friends; but I have very
+few; I might say I hadn't any&mdash;such as I thought I had when I was
+writing to you. Most of the men I know belong to some sort of clubs; but
+I don't. I went to New York when I was feeling alone in the world,&mdash;it
+was from something that had happened to me partly through my own
+fault,&mdash;and I've never got over being alone there. I've never gone into
+society; I don't know what society is, and I suppose that's why I am
+acting differently from a society man now. The only change I ever had
+from business was reading at night: I've got a pretty good library.
+After I began to get your letters, I went out more&mdash;to the theatre, and
+lectures, and concerts, and all sorts of things&mdash;so that I could have
+something interesting to write about; I thought you'd get tired of
+always hearing about me. And your letters filled up my life, so that I
+didn't seem alone any more. I read them all hundreds of times; I should
+have said that I knew them by heart, if they had not been as fresh at
+last as they were at first. I seemed to hear you talking in them." He
+stopped as if withholding himself from what he had nearly said without
+intending, and resumed: "It's some comfort to know that you didn't want
+them back because you doubted me, or my good faith."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, indeed, Mr. Langbourne," said Barbara compassionately.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why did you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. We&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No; <i>not</i> 'we.' <i>You!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>She did not answer for so long that he believed she resented his
+speaking so peremptorily and was not going to answer him at all. At last
+she said, "I thought you would rather give them back." She turned and
+looked at him, with the eyes which he knew saw his face dimly, but saw
+his thought clearly.</p>
+
+<p>"What made you think that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know. Didn't you want to?"</p>
+
+<p>He knew that the fact which their words veiled was now the first thing
+in their mutual consciousness. He spoke the truth in saying, "No, I
+never wanted to," but this was only a mechanical truth, and he knew it.
+He had an impulse to put the burden of the situation on her, and press
+her to say why she thought he wished to do so; but his next emotion was
+shame for this impulse. A thousand times, in these reveries in which he
+had imagined meeting her, he had told her first of all how he had
+overheard her talking in the room next his own in the hotel, and of the
+power her voice had instantly and lastingly had upon him. But now, with
+a sense spiritualized by her presence, he perceived that this, if it was
+not unworthy, was secondary, and that the right to say it was not yet
+established. There was something that must come before this,&mdash;something
+that could alone justify him in any further step. If she could answer
+him first as he wished, then he might open his whole heart to her, at
+whatever cost; he was not greatly to blame, if he did not realize that
+the cost could not be wholly his, as he asked, remotely enough from her
+question, "After I wrote that I was coming up here, and you did not
+answer me, did you think I was coming?"</p>
+
+<p>She did not answer, and he felt that he had been seeking a mean
+advantage. He went on: "If you didn't expect it, if you never thought
+that I was coming, there's no need for me to tell you anything else."</p>
+
+<p>Her face turned towards him a very little, but not so much as even to
+get a sidelong glimpse of him; it was as if it were drawn by a magnetic
+attraction; and she said, "I didn't know but you would come."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I will tell you why I came&mdash;the only thing that gave me the right
+to come against your will, if it <i>was</i> against it. I came to ask you to
+marry me. Will you?"</p>
+
+<p>She now turned and looked fully at him, though he was aware of being a
+mere blur in her near-sighted vision.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to ask it now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And have you wished to ask it ever since you first saw me?"</p>
+
+<p>He tried to say that he had, but he could not; he could only say, "I
+wish to ask it now more than ever."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head slowly. "I'm not sure how you want me to answer you."</p>
+
+<p>"Not sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I'm afraid I might disappoint you again."</p>
+
+<p>He could not make out whether she was laughing at him. He sat, not
+knowing what to say, and he blurted out, "Do you mean that you won't?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't want you to make another mistake."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what you"&mdash;he was going to say "mean," but he
+substituted&mdash;"wish. If you wish for more time, I can wait as long as you
+choose."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I might wish for time, if there was anything more. But if there's
+nothing else you have to tell me&mdash;then, no, I cannot marry you."</p>
+
+<p>Langbourne rose, feeling justly punished, somehow, but bewildered as
+much as humbled, and stood stupidly unable to go. "I don't know what you
+could expect me to say after you've refused me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't expect anything."</p>
+
+<p>"But there <i>is</i> something I should like to tell you. I know that I
+behaved that night as if&mdash;as if I hadn't come to ask you&mdash;what I have; I
+don't blame you for not trusting me now. But it is no use to tell you
+what I intended if it is all over."</p>
+
+<p>He looked down into his hat, and she said in a low voice, "I think I
+ought to know. Won't you&mdash;sit down?"</p>
+
+<p>He sat down again. "Then I will tell you at the risk of&mdash;But there's
+nothing left to lose! You know how it is, when we think about a person
+or a place before we've seen them: we make some sort of picture of them,
+and expect them to be like it. I don't know how to say it; you do look
+more like what I thought than you did at first. I suppose I must seem a
+fool to say it; but I thought you were tall, and that you
+were&mdash;well!&mdash;rather masterful&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Like Juliet Bingham?" she suggested, with a gleam in the eye next him.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, like Juliet Bingham. It was your voice made me think&mdash;it was your
+voice that first made me want to see you, that made me write to you, in
+the beginning. I heard you talking that night in the hotel, where you
+left that circular; you were in the room next to mine; and I wanted to
+come right up here then; but I had to go back to New York, and so I
+wrote to you. When your letters came, I always seemed to hear you
+speaking in them."</p>
+
+<p>"And when you saw me you were disappointed. I knew it."</p>
+
+<p>"No; not disappointed&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? My voice didn't go with my looks; it belonged to a tall,
+strong-willed girl."</p>
+
+<p>"No," he protested. "As soon as I got away it was just as it always had
+been. I mean that your voice and your looks went together again."</p>
+
+<p>"As soon as you got away?" the girl questioned.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean&mdash;What do you care for it, anyway!" he cried, in self-scornful
+exasperation.</p>
+
+<p>"I know," she said thoughtfully, "that my voice isn't like me; I'm not
+good enough for it. It ought to be Juliet Bingham's&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" he interrupted, with a sort of disgust that seemed not to
+displease her, "I can't imagine it!"</p>
+
+<p>"But we can't any of us have everything, and she's got enough as it is.
+She's a head higher than I am, and she wants to have her way ten times
+as bad."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mean that," Langbourne began. "I&mdash;but you must think me enough
+of a simpleton already."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, not near," she declared. "I'm a good deal of a simpleton myself
+at times."</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't matter," he said desperately; "I love you."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that belongs to the time when you thought I looked differently."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want you to look differently. I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You can't expect me to believe that now. It will take time for me to do
+that."</p>
+
+<p>"I will give you time," he said, so simply that she smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"If it was my voice you cared for I should have to live up to it,
+somehow, before you cared for me. I'm not certain that I ever could. And
+if I couldn't? You see, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I see that I was a fool to tell you what I have," he so far asserted
+himself. "But I thought I ought to be honest."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you've been <i>honest</i>!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"You have a right to think that I am a flighty, romantic person," he
+resumed, "and I don't blame you. But if I could explain, it has been a
+very real experience to me. It was your nature that I cared for in your
+voice. I can't tell you just how it was; it seemed to me that unless I
+could hear it again, and always, my life would not be worth much. This
+was something deeper and better than I could make you understand. It
+wasn't merely a fancy; I do not want you to believe that."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know whether fancies are such very bad things. I've had some of
+my own," Barbara suggested.</p>
+
+<p>He sat still with his hat between his hands, as if he could not find a
+chance of dismissing himself, and she remained looking down at her skirt
+where it tented itself over the toe of her shoe. The tall clock in the
+hall ticked second after second. It counted thirty of them at least
+before he spoke, after a preliminary noise in his throat.</p>
+
+<p>"There is one thing I should like to ask: If you had cared for me, would
+you have been offended at my having thought you looked differently?"</p>
+
+<p>She took time to consider this. "I might have been vexed, or hurt, I
+suppose, but I don't see how I could really have been offended."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I understand," he began, in one of his inductive emotions; but she
+rose nervously, as if she could not sit still, and went to the piano.
+The Spanish song he had given her was lying open upon it, and she struck
+some of the chords absently, and then let her fingers rest on the keys.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Simpson," he said, coming stiffly forward, "I should like to hear
+you sing that song once more before I&mdash;Won't you sing it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes," she said, and she slipped laterally into the piano-seat.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the first stanza he gave a long sigh, and then he was
+silent to the close.</p>
+
+<p>As she sounded the last notes of the accompaniment Juliet Bingham burst
+into the room with somehow the effect to Langbourne of having lain in
+wait outside for that moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I just <i>knew</i> it!" she shouted, running upon them. "I bet John
+anything! Oh, I'm so happy it's come out all right; and now I'm going to
+have the first&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her arms as if to put them round his neck; he stood dazed,
+and Barbara rose from the piano-stool and confronted her with nothing
+less than horror in her face.</p>
+
+<p>Juliet Bingham was beginning again, "Why, haven't you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>No!</i>" cried Barbara. "I forgot all about what you said! I just
+happened to sing it because he asked me," and she ran from the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if I ever!" said Juliet Bingham, following her with astonished
+eyes. Then she turned to Langbourne. "It's perfectly ridiculous, and I
+don't see how I can ever explain it. I don't think Barbara has shown a
+great deal of tact," and Juliet Bingham was evidently prepared to make
+up the defect by a diplomacy which she enjoyed. "I don't know where to
+begin exactly; but you must certainly excuse my&mdash;manner, when I came
+in."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, certainly," said Langbourne in polite mystification.</p>
+
+<p>"It was all through a misunderstanding that I don't think <i>I</i> was to
+blame for, to say the least; but I can't explain it without making
+Barbara appear perfectly&mdash;Mr. Langbourne, <i>will</i> you tell whether you
+are engaged?"</p>
+
+<p>"No! Miss Simpson has declined my offer," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, then it's all right," said Juliet Bingham, but Langbourne looked as
+if he did not see why she should say that. "Then I can understand; I see
+the whole thing now; and I didn't want to make <i>another</i> mistake.
+Ah&mdash;won't you&mdash;sit down?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you. I believe I will go."</p>
+
+<p>"But you have a right to know&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Would my knowing alter the main facts?" he asked dryly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, no, I can't say it would," Juliet Bingham replied with an air of
+candor. "And, as you <i>say</i>, perhaps it's just as well," she added with
+an air of relief.</p>
+
+<p>Langbourne had not said it, but he acquiesced with a faint sigh, and
+absently took the hand of farewell which Juliet Bingham gave him. "I
+know Barbara will be very sorry not to see you; but I guess it's
+better."</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the supremacy which the turn of affairs had given her,
+Juliet Bingham looked far from satisfied, and she let Langbourne go with
+a sense of inconclusiveness which showed in the parting inclination
+towards him; she kept the effect of this after he turned from her.</p>
+
+<p>He crept light-headedly down the brick walk with a feeling that the
+darkness was not half thick enough, though it was so thick that it hid
+from him a figure that leaned upon the gate and held it shut, as if
+forcibly to interrupt his going.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Langbourne," said the voice of this figure, which, though so
+unnaturally strained, he knew for Barbara's voice, "you have got to
+<i>know</i>! I'm ashamed to tell you, but I should be more ashamed not to,
+after what's happened. Juliet made me promise when she went out to the
+book-club meeting that if I&mdash;if you&mdash;if it turned out as <i>you</i> wanted, I
+would sing that song as a sign&mdash;It was just a joke&mdash;like my sending her
+picture. It was my mistake and I am sorry, and I beg your pardon&mdash;I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped with a quick catch in her breath, and the darkness round
+them seemed to become luminous with the light of hope that broke upon
+him within.</p>
+
+<p>"But if there really was no mistake," he began. He could not get
+further.</p>
+
+<p>She did not answer, and for the first time her silence was sweeter than
+her voice. He lifted her tip-toe in his embrace, but he did not wish her
+taller; her yielding spirit lost itself in his own, and he did not
+regret the absence of the strong will which he had once imagined hers.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="A_CIRCLE_IN_THE_WATER" id="A_CIRCLE_IN_THE_WATER"></a>A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The sunset struck its hard red light through the fringe of leafless
+trees to the westward, and gave their outlines that black definition
+which a French school of landscape saw a few years ago, and now seems to
+see no longer. In the whole scene there was the pathetic repose which we
+feel in some dying day of the dying year, and a sort of impersonal
+melancholy weighed me down as I dragged myself through the woods toward
+that dreary November sunset.</p>
+
+<p>Presently I came in sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because
+of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the
+cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its
+space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late
+as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I
+had supposed from the crimson glare in the west. I threw myself down on
+one of the grassy gradines of the amphitheatre, and comforted myself
+with the antiquity of the work, which was so great as to involve its
+origin in a somewhat impassioned question among the local authorities.
+Whether it was a Norse work, a temple for the celebration of the
+earliest Christian, or the latest heathen, rites among the first
+discoverers of New England, or whether it was a cockpit where the
+English officers who were billeted in the old tavern near by fought
+their mains at the time of our Revolution, it had the charm of a ruin,
+and appealed to the fancy with whatever potency belongs to the
+mouldering monuments of the past. The hands that shaped it were all
+dust, and there was no record of the minds that willed it to prove that
+it was a hundred, or that it was a thousand, years old. There were young
+oaks and pines growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all
+sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to
+the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water
+some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror
+their tracery in its steely surface. But of the life that the thing
+inarticulately recorded, there was not the slightest impulse left.</p>
+
+<p>I began to think how everything ends at last. Love ends, sorrow ends,
+and to our mortal sense everything that is mortal ends, whether that
+which is spiritual has a perpetual effect beyond these eyes or not. The
+very name of things passes with the things themselves, and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"Glory is like a circle in the water,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Till by broad spreading, it disperse to naught."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But if fame ended, did not infamy end, too? If glory, why not shame?
+What was it, I mused, that made an evil deed so much more memorable than
+a good one? Why should a crime have so much longer lodgment in our
+minds, and be of consequences so much more lasting than the sort of
+action which is the opposite of a crime, but has no precise name with
+us? Was it because the want of positive quality which left it nameless,
+characterized its effects with a kind of essential debility? Was evil
+then a greater force than good in the moral world? I tried to recall
+personalities, virtuous and vicious, and I found a fatal want of
+distinctness in the return of those I classed as virtuous, and a lurid
+vividness in those I classed as vicious. Images, knowledges, concepts,
+zigzagged through my brain, as they do when we are thinking, or believe
+we are thinking; perhaps there is no such thing as we call thinking,
+except when we are talking. I did not hold myself responsible in this
+will-less revery for the question which asked itself, Whether, then,
+evil and not good was the lasting principle, and whether that which
+should remain recognizable to all eternity was not the good effect but
+the evil effect?</p>
+
+<p>Something broke the perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite
+shore. A fish had leaped at some unseasonable insect on the surface, or
+one of the overhanging trees had dropped a dead twig upon it, and in the
+lazy doubt which it might be, I lay and watched the ever-widening circle
+fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it
+weakened to nothing in the eye, and, so far as the senses were
+concerned, actually ceased to be. The want of visible agency in it made
+me feel it all the more a providential illustration; and because the
+thing itself was so pretty, and because it was so apt as a case in
+point, I pleased myself a great deal with it. Suddenly it repeated
+itself; but this time I grew a little impatient of it, before the circle
+died out in the wider circle of the pool. I said whimsically to myself
+that this was rubbing it in; that I was convinced already, and needed no
+further proof; and at the same moment the thing happened a third time.
+Then I saw that there was a man standing at the top of the amphitheatre
+just across from me, who was throwing stones into the water. He cast a
+fourth pebble into the centre of the pool, and then a fifth and a sixth;
+I began to wonder what he was throwing at; I thought it too childish for
+him to be amusing himself with the circle that dispersed itself to
+naught, after it had done so several times already. I was sure that he
+saw something in the pool, and was trying to hit it, or frighten it. His
+figure showed black against the sunset light, and I could not make it
+out very well, but it held itself something like that of a workman, and
+yet with a difference, with an effect as of some sort of discipline; and
+I thought of an ex-recruit, returning to civil life, after serving his
+five years in the army; though I do not know why I should have gone so
+far afield for this notion; I certainly had never seen an ex-recruit,
+and I did not really know how one would look. I rose up, and we both
+stood still, as if he were abashed in his sport by my presence. The man
+made a little cast forward with his hand, and I heard the rattle as of
+pebbles dropped among the dead leaves.</p>
+
+<p>Then he called over to me, "Is that you, Mr. March?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I called back, "what is wanted?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, nothing. I was just looking for you." He did not move, and after a
+moment I began to walk round the top of the amphitheatre toward him.
+When I came near him I saw that he had a clean-shaven face, and he wore
+a soft hat that seemed large for his close-cropped head; he had on a
+sack coat buttoned to the throat, and of one dark color with his loose
+trousers. I knew him now, but I did not know what terms to put my
+recognition in, and I faltered. "What do you want with me?" I asked, as
+if I did not know him.</p>
+
+<p>"I was at your house," he answered, "and they told me that you had
+walked out this way." He hesitated a moment, and then he added, rather
+huskily, "You don't know me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said. "It is Tedham," and I held out my hand, with no definite
+intention, I believe, but merely because I did know him, and this was
+the usual form of greeting between acquaintances after a long
+separation, or even a short one, for that matter. But he seemed to find
+a special significance in my civility, and he took my hand and held it
+silently, while he was trying to speak. Evidently, he could not, and I
+said aimlessly, "What were you throwing at?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. I saw you lying down, over there, and I wanted to attract your
+attention." He let my hand go, and looked at me apologetically.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! was that all?" I said. "I thought you saw something in the water."</p>
+
+<p>"No," he answered, as if he felt the censure which I had not been able
+to keep out of my voice.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>I do not know why I should have chosen to take this simple fact as proof
+of an abiding want of straight-forwardness in Tedham's nature. I do not
+know why I should have expected him to change, or why I should have felt
+authorized at that moment to renew his punishment for it. I certainly
+had said and thought very often that he had been punished enough, and
+more than enough. In fact, his punishment, like all the other
+punishments that I have witnessed in life, seemed to me wholly out of
+proportion to the offence; it seemed monstrous, atrocious, and when I
+got to talking of it I used to become so warm that my wife would warn me
+people would think I wanted to do something like Tedham myself if I went
+on in that way about him. Yet here I was, at my very first encounter
+with the man, after his long expiation had ended, willing to add at
+least a little self-reproach to his suffering. I suppose, as nearly as I
+can analyse my mood, I must have been expecting, in spite of all reason
+and experience, that his anguish would have wrung that foible out of
+him, and left him strong where it had found him weak. Tragedy befalls
+the light and foolish as well as the wise and weighty natures, but it
+does not render them wise and weighty; I had often made this sage
+reflection, but I failed to apply it to the case before me now.</p>
+
+<p>After waiting a little for the displeasure to clear away from my face,
+Tedham smiled as if in humorous appreciation, and I perceived, as
+nothing else could have shown me so well, that he was still the old
+Tedham. There was an offer of propitiation in this smile, too, and I did
+not like that, either; but I was touched when I saw a certain hope die
+out of his eye at the failure of his appeal to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Who told you I was here?" I asked, more kindly. "Did you see Mrs.
+March?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I think it must have been your children. I found them in front of
+your house, and I asked them for you, without going to the door."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," I said, and I hid the disappointment I felt that he had not seen
+my wife; for I should have liked such a leading as her behavior toward
+him would have given me for my own. I was sure she would have known him
+at once, and would not have told him where to find me, if she had not
+wished me to be friendly with him.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad to see you," I said, in the absence of this leading; and then
+I did not know what else to say. Tedham seemed to me to be looking very
+well, but I could not notify this fact to him, in the circumstances; he
+even looked very handsome; he had aged becomingly, and a clean-shaven
+face suited him as well as the full beard he used to wear; but I could
+speak of these things as little as of his apparent health. I did not
+feel that I ought even to ask him what I could do for him. I did not
+want to have anything to do with him, and, besides, I have always
+regarded this formula as tantamount to saying that you cannot, or will
+not, do anything for the man you employ it upon.</p>
+
+<p>The silence which ensued was awkward, but it was better than anything I
+could think of to say, and Tedham himself seemed to feel it so. He said,
+presently, "Thank you. I was sure you would not take my coming to you
+the wrong way. In fact I had no one else to come to&mdash;after I&mdash;&mdash;" Tedham
+stopped, and then, "I don't know," he went on, "whether you've kept run
+of me; I don't suppose you have; I got out to-day at noon."</p>
+
+<p>I could not say anything to that, either; there were very few openings
+for me, it appeared, in the conversation, which remained one-sided as
+before.</p>
+
+<p>"I went to the cemetery," he continued. "I wanted to realize that those
+who had died were dead, it was all one thing as long as I was in there;
+everybody was dead; and then I came on to your house."</p>
+
+<p>The house he meant was a place I had taken for the summer a little out
+of town, so that I could run in to business every day, and yet have my
+mornings and evenings in the country; the fall had been so mild that we
+were still eking out the summer there.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you know where I was staying?" I asked, with a willingness to
+make any occasion serve for saying something.</p>
+
+<p>Tedham hesitated. "Well, I stopped at the office in Boston on my way
+out, and inquired. I was sure nobody would know me there." He said this
+apologetically, as if he had been taking a liberty, and explained: "I
+wanted to see you very much, and I was afraid that if I let the day go
+by I should miss you somehow."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, all right," I said.</p>
+
+<p>We had remained standing at the point where I had gone round to meet
+him, and it seemed, in the awkward silence that now followed, as if I
+were rooted there. I would very willingly have said something leading,
+for my own sake, if not for his, but I had nothing in mind but that I
+had better keep there, and so I waited for him to speak. I believed he
+was beating about the bush in his own thoughts, to find some indirect or
+sinuous way of getting at what he wanted to know, and that it was only
+because he failed that he asked bluntly, "March, do you know where my
+daughter is?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, Tedham, I don't," I said, and I was glad that I could say it both
+with honesty and with compassion. I was truly sorry for the man; in a
+way, I did pity him; at the same time I did not wish to be mixed up in
+his affairs; in washing my hands of them, I preferred that there should
+be no stain of falsehood left on them.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is my sister-in-law?" he asked next, and now at least I could not
+censure him for indirection.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't met her for several years," I answered. "I couldn't say from
+my own knowledge where she was."</p>
+
+<p>"But you haven't heard of her leaving Somerville?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I haven't."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you ever meet her husband?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sometimes, on the street; but I think not lately; we don't often
+meet."</p>
+
+<p>"The last time you saw <i>her</i>, did she speak of me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know&mdash;I believe&mdash;yes. It was a good many years ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Was she changed toward me at all?"</p>
+
+<p>This was a hard question to answer, but I thought I had better answer it
+with the exact truth. "No, she seemed to feel just the same as ever
+about it."</p>
+
+<p>I do not believe Tedham cared for this, after all, though he made a show
+of having to collect himself before he went on. "Then you think my
+daughter is with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't say that. I don't know anything about it."</p>
+
+<p>"March," he urged, "don't <i>you</i> think I have a right to see my
+daughter?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's something I can't enter into, Tedham."</p>
+
+<p>"Good God!" said the man. "If you were in my place, wouldn't you want to
+see her? You know how fond I used to be of her; and she is all that I
+have got left in the world."</p>
+
+<p>I did indeed remember Tedham's affection for his daughter, whom I
+remembered as in short frocks when I last saw them together. It was
+before my own door in town. Tedham had driven up in a smart buggy behind
+a slim sorrel, and I came out, at a sign he made me through the
+bow-window with his whip, and saw the little maid on the seat there
+beside him. They were both very well dressed, though still in mourning
+for the child's mother, and the whole turnout was handsomely set up.
+Tedham was then about thirty-five, and the child looked about nine. The
+color of her hair was the color of his fine brown beard, which had as
+yet no trace of gray in it; but the light in her eyes was another light,
+and her smile, which was of the same shape as his, was of another
+quality, as she leaned across him and gave me her pretty little gloved
+hand with a gay laugh. "I should think you would be afraid of such a
+fiery sorrel dragon as that," I said, in recognition of the colt's
+lifting and twitching with impatience as we talked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm not afraid with papa!" she said, and she laughed again as he
+took her hand in one of his and covered it out of sight.</p>
+
+<p>I recalled, now, looking at him there in the twilight of the woods, how
+happy they had both seemed that sunny afternoon in the city square, as
+they flashed away from my door and glanced back at me and smiled
+together. I went into the house and said to my wife with a formulation
+of the case which pleased me, "If there is anything in the world that
+Tedham likes better than to ride after a good horse, it is to ride after
+a good horse with that little girl of his." "Yes," said my wife, "but a
+good horse means a good deal of money; even when a little girl goes with
+it." "That is so," I assented, "but Tedham has made a lot lately in real
+estate, they say, and I don't know what better he could do with his
+money; or, I don't believe <i>he</i> does." We said no more, but we both
+felt, with the ardor of young parents, that it was a great virtue, a
+saving virtue, in Tedham to love his little girl so much; I was
+afterward not always sure that it was. Still, when Tedham appealed to me
+now in the name of his love for her, he moved my heart, if not my
+reason, in his favor; those old superstitions persist.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, of course, you want to see her. But I couldn't tell you where she
+is."</p>
+
+<p>"You could find out for me."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how," I said; but I did see how, and I knew as well as he
+what his next approach would be. I felt strong against it, however, and
+I did not perceive the necessity of being short with him in a matter not
+involving my own security or comfort.</p>
+
+<p>"I could find out where Hasketh is," he said, naming the husband of his
+sister-in-law; "but it would be of no use for me to go there. They
+wouldn't see me." He put this like a question, but I chose to let it be
+its own answer, and he went on. "There is no one that I can ask to act
+for me in the matter but you, and I ask <i>you</i>, March, to go to my
+sister-in-law for me."</p>
+
+<p>I shook my head. "That I can't do, Tedham."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" he urged, "what harm could it do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Tedham!" I said. "I don't know why you feel authorized to
+come to me at all. It is useless your saying that there is no one else.
+You know very well that the authorities, some of them&mdash;the
+chaplain&mdash;would go and see Mrs. Hasketh for you. He could have a great
+deal more influence with her than any one else could, if he felt like
+saying a good word for you. As far as I am concerned, you have expiated
+your offence fully; but I should think you yourself would see that you
+ought not to come to me with this request; or you ought to come to me
+last of all men."</p>
+
+<p>"It is just because of that part of my offence which concerned you that
+I come to you. I knew how generous you were, and after you told me that
+you had no resentment&mdash;I acknowledge that it is indelicate, if you
+choose to look at it in that light, but a man like me can't afford to
+let delicacy stand in his way. I don't want to flatter you, or get you
+to do this thing for me on false pretences. But I thought that if you
+went to Mrs. Hasketh for me, she would remember that you had overlooked
+something, and she would be more disposed to&mdash;to&mdash;be considerate."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't do it, Tedham," I returned. "It would be of no use. Besides, I
+don't like the errand. I'm not sure that I have any business to
+interfere. I am not sure that you have any right to disturb the shape
+that their lives have settled into. I'm sorry for you, I pity you with
+all my heart. But there are others to be considered as well as you.
+And&mdash;simply, I can't."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know," he entreated, "that my daughter wouldn't be as glad
+to see me as I to see her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know it. I don't know anything about it. That's the reason I
+can't have anything to do with it. I can't justify myself in meddling
+with what doesn't concern me, and in what I'm not sure but I should do
+more harm than good. I must say good-night. It's getting late, and they
+will be anxious about me at home." My heart smote me as I spoke the last
+word, which seemed a cruel recognition of Tedham's homelessness. But I
+held out my hand to him for parting, and braced myself against my inward
+weakness.</p>
+
+<p>He might well have failed to see my hand. At any rate he did not take
+it. He turned and started to walk out of the woods by my side. We came
+presently to some open fields. Beyond them was the road, and after we
+had climbed the first wall, and found ourselves in a somewhat lighter
+place, he began to speak again.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought," he said, "that if you had forgiven me, I could take it as a
+sign that I had suffered enough to satisfy everybody."</p>
+
+<p>"We needn't dwell upon my share in the matter, Tedham," I answered, as
+kindly as I could. "That was entirely my own affair."</p>
+
+<p>"You can't think," he pursued, "how much your letter was to me. It came
+when I was in perfect despair&mdash;in those awful first days when it seemed
+as if I could <i>not</i> bear it, and yet death itself would be no relief.
+Oh, they don't <i>know</i> how much we suffer! If they did, they would
+forgive us anything, everything! Your letter was the first gleam of hope
+I had. I don't know how you came to write it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, of course, Tedham, I felt sorry for you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, did you, did you?" He began to cry, and as we hurried along over
+the fields, he sobbed with the wrenching, rending sobs of a man. "I
+<i>knew</i> you did, and I believe it was God himself that put it into your
+heart to write me that letter and take off that much of the blame from
+me. I said to myself that if I ever lived through it, I would try to
+tell you how much you had done for me. I don't blame you for refusing to
+do what I've asked you now. I can see how you may think it isn't best,
+and I thank you all the same for that letter. I've got it here." He took
+a letter out of his breast-pocket, and showed it to me. "It isn't the
+first time I've cried over it."</p>
+
+<p>I did not say anything, for my heart was in my throat, and we stumbled
+along in silence till we climbed the last wall, and stood on the
+sidewalk that skirted the suburban highway. There, under the
+street-lamp, we stopped a moment, and it was he who now offered me his
+hand for parting. I took it, and we said, together, "Well, good-by," and
+moved in different directions. I knew very well that I should turn back,
+and I had not gone a hundred feet away when I faced about. He was
+shambling off into the dusk, a most hapless figure. "Tedham!" I called
+after him.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" he answered, and he halted instantly; he had evidently known
+what I would do as well as I had.</p>
+
+<p>We reapproached each other, and when we were again under the lamp I
+asked, a little awkwardly, "Are you in need of money, Tedham?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've got my ten years' wages with me," he said, with a lightness that
+must have come from his reviving hope in me. He drew his hand out of his
+pocket, and showed me the few dollars with which the State inhumanly
+turns society's outcasts back into the world again.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that won't do." I said. "You must let me lend you something."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," he said, with perfect simplicity. "But you know I can't
+tell when I shall be able to pay you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's all right." I gave him a ten-dollar note which I had loose
+in my pocket; it was one that my wife had told me to get changed at the
+grocery near the station, and I had walked off to the old temple, or the
+old cockpit, and forgotten about it.</p>
+
+<p>Tedham took the note, but he said, holding it in his hand, "I would a
+million times rather you would let me go home with you and see Mrs.
+March a moment."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't do that, Tedham," I answered, not unkindly, I hope. "I know
+what you mean, and I assure you that it wouldn't be the least use. It's
+because I feel so sure that my wife wouldn't like my going to see Mrs.
+Hasketh, that I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know that," said Tedham. "That is the reason why I should like
+to see Mrs. March. I believe that if I could see her, I could convince
+her."</p>
+
+<p>"She wouldn't see you, my dear fellow," said I, strangely finding myself
+on these caressing terms with him. "She entirely approved of what I did,
+the letter I wrote you, but I don't believe she will ever feel just as I
+do about it. Women are different, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, drawing a long, quivering breath.</p>
+
+<p>We stood there, helpless to part. He did not offer to leave me, and I
+could not find it in my heart to abandon him. After a most painful time,
+he drew another long breath, and asked, "Would you be willing to let me
+take the chances?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Tedham," I began, weakly; and upon that he began walking with me
+again.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+
+<p>I went to my wife's room, after I reached the house, and faced her with
+considerable trepidation. I had to begin rather far off, but I certainly
+began in a way to lead up to the fact. "Isabel," I said, "Tedham is out
+at last." I had it on my tongue to say poor Tedham, but I suppressed the
+qualification in actual speech as likely to prove unavailing, or worse.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that what kept you!" she demanded, instantly. "Have you seen him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I admitted. I added, "Though I am afraid I was rather late,
+anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"I knew it was he, the moment you spoke," she said, rising on the lounge
+where she had been lying, and sitting up on it; with the book she had
+been reading shut on her thumb, she faced me across the table where her
+lamp stood. "I had a presentiment when the children said there was some
+strange-looking man here, asking for you, and that they had told him
+where to find you. I couldn't help feeling a little uneasy about it.
+What did he want with you, Basil?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he wanted to know where his daughter was."</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't tell him!"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know. Then he wanted me to go to Mrs. Hasketh and find out."</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't say you would?"</p>
+
+<p>"I said most decidedly I wouldn't," I returned, and I recalled my
+severity to Tedham in refusing his prayer with more satisfaction than it
+had given me at the time. "I told him that I had no business to
+interfere, and that I was not sure it would be right even for me to
+meddle with the course things had taken." I was aware of weakening my
+case as I went on; I had better left her with a dramatic conception of a
+downright and relentless refusal.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why you felt called upon to make excuses to him, Basil. His
+impudence in coming to you, of all men, is perfectly intolerable. I
+suppose it was that sentimental letter you wrote him."</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't think it sentimental at the time, my dear. You approved of
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't approve of it, Basil; but if you felt so strongly that you
+ought to do it, I felt that I ought to let you. I have never interfered
+with your sense of duty, and I never will. But I am glad that you didn't
+feel it your duty to that wretch to go and make more trouble on his
+account. He has made quite enough already; and it wasn't his fault that
+you were not tried and convicted in his place."</p>
+
+<p>"There wasn't the slightest danger of that&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He tried to put the suspicion on you, and to bring the disgrace on your
+wife and children."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my dear, we agreed to forget all that long ago. And I don't
+think&mdash;I never thought&mdash;that Tedham would have let the suspicion rest on
+me. He merely wanted to give it that turn, when the investigation began,
+so as to gain time to get out to Canada."</p>
+
+<p>My wife looked at me with a glance in which I saw tender affection
+dangerously near contempt. "You are a very forgiving man, Basil," she
+said, and I looked down sheepishly. "Well, at any rate, you have had the
+sense not to mix yourself up in his business. Did he pretend that he
+came straight to you, as soon as he got out? I suppose he wanted you to
+believe that he appealed to you before he tried anybody else."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he stopped at the Reciprocity office to ask for my address, and
+after he had visited the cemetery he came on out here. And, if you must
+know, I think Tedham is still the old Tedham. Put him behind a good
+horse, with a pocketful of some one else's money, in a handsome suit of
+clothes, and a game-and-fish dinner at Tafft's in immediate prospect,
+and you couldn't see any difference between the Tedham of to-day and the
+Tedham of ten years ago, except that the actual Tedham is clean-shaved
+and wears his hair cut rather close."</p>
+
+<p>"Basil!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you object to the fact? Did you imagine he had changed
+inwardly?"</p>
+
+<p>"He must have suffered."</p>
+
+<p>"But does suffering change people? I doubt it. Certain material
+accessories of Tedham's have changed. But why should that change Tedham?
+Of course, he has suffered, and he suffers still. He threw out some
+hints of what he had been through that would have broken my heart if I
+hadn't hardened it against him. And he loves his daughter still, and he
+wants to see her, poor wretch."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose he does!" sighed my wife.</p>
+
+<p>"He would hardly take no for an answer from me, when I said I wouldn't
+go to the Haskeths for him; and when I fairly shook him off, he wanted
+me to ask you to go."</p>
+
+<p>"And what did you say?" she asked, not at all with the resentment I had
+counted upon equally with the possible pathos; you never can tell in the
+least how any woman will take anything, which is perhaps the reason why
+men do not trust women more.</p>
+
+<p>"I told him that it would not be the smallest use to ask you; that you
+had forgiven that old affair as well as I had, but that women were
+different, and that I knew you wouldn't even see him."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Basil, I don't know what right you had to put me in that odious
+light," said my wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, good heavens! <i>Would</i> you have seen him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know whether I would or not. That's neither here nor there. I
+don't think it was very nice of you to shift the whole responsibility on
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"How did I do that? It seems to me that I kept the whole responsibility
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, altogether too much. What became of him, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"We walked along a little farther, and then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Then, what? Where is the man?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's down in the parlor," I answered hardily, in the voice of some one
+else.</p>
+
+<p>My wife stood up from the lounge, and I rose, too, for whatever penalty
+she chose to inflict.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Basil, that is what I call a very cowardly thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my dear, it is; I ought to have protected you against his appeal.
+But you needn't see him. It's practically the same as if he had not come
+here. I can send him away."</p>
+
+<p>"And you call that practically the same! No, <i>I</i> am the one that will
+have to do the refusing now, and it is all off your shoulders. And you
+knew I was not feeling very well, either! Basil, how could you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. The abject creature drove me out of my senses. I suppose
+that if I had respected him more, or believed in him more, I should have
+had more strength to refuse him. But his limpness seemed to impart
+itself to me, and I&mdash;I gave way. But really you needn't see him, Isabel.
+I can tell him we have talked it over, and I concluded, entirely of
+myself, that it was best for you not to meet him, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He would see through that in an instant. And if he is still the false
+creature you think he is, we owe him the truth, more than any other kind
+of man. You must understand <i>that</i>, Basil!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then you are going to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't speak to me, Basil, please," she said, and with an air of high
+offence she swept out of the room, and out to the landing of the stairs.
+There she hesitated a moment, and put her hand to her hair,
+mechanically, to feel if it were in order, and then she went on
+downstairs without further faltering. It was I who descended slowly, and
+with many misgivings.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV.</h3>
+
+<p>Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in,
+and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked,
+with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like
+some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental
+suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom
+exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of
+the hospital. His eyes were deep in their sockets, and showed fine
+shadows in the overhead light, and I must say he looked very
+interesting.</p>
+
+<p>At the threshold my wife paused again; then she went forward, turning
+the gas up full as she passed under the chandelier, and gave him her
+hand, where he had risen from his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad to see you, Mr. Tedham," she said; and I should have found my
+astonishment overpowering, I dare say, if I had not felt that I was so
+completely in the hands of Providence, when she added, "Won't you come
+out to dinner with us? We were just going to sit down, when Mr. March
+came in. I never know when he will be back, when he starts off on these
+Saturday afternoon tramps of his."</p>
+
+<p>The children seemed considerably mystified at the appearance of our
+guest, but they had that superior interest in the dinner appropriate to
+their years, and we got through the ordeal, in which, I believe, I
+suffered more than any one else, much better than I could have hoped. I
+could not help noting in Tedham a certain strangeness to the use of a
+four-pronged fork, at first, but he rapidly overcame this; and if it had
+not been for a terrible moment when, after one of the courses, he began,
+mechanically, to scrape his plate with his knife, there would not have
+been anything very odd in his behavior, or anything to show that it was
+the first dinner in polite society that he had taken for so many years.</p>
+
+<p>The man's mind had apparently stiffened more than his body. It used to
+be very agile, if light, but it was not agile now. It worked slowly
+toward the topics which we found with difficulty, in our necessity of
+avoiding the only topics of real interest between us, and I could
+perceive that his original egotism, intensified by the long years in
+which he had only himself for company, now stood in the way of his
+entering into the matters brought forward, though he tried to do so.
+They were mostly in the form of reminiscences of this person and that
+whom we had known in common, and even in this shape they had to be very
+carefully handled so as not to develop anything leading. The thing that
+did most to relieve the embarrassment of the time was the sturdy hunger
+Tedham showed, and his delight in the cooking; I suppose that I cannot
+make others feel the pathos I found in this.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with
+us in the parlor.</p>
+
+<p>My wife began at once to say, "Mr. March has told me why you wanted to
+see me, Mr. Tedham."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure
+his cause.</p>
+
+<p>"I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs.
+Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not
+seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me."</p>
+
+<p>Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily,
+"Won't you try?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered, most unexpectedly to me, "I will try to see her.
+But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your
+daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come
+from you, and for you."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought," Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, "that
+perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I couldn't do that," my wife said.</p>
+
+<p>He went on as if he had not heard her: "If she did not know that the
+inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my
+daughter was with her."</p>
+
+<p>There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham's old insinuation, but
+coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something
+like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my
+surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his
+suggestion in the way I had thought she would.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said, "that wouldn't do. She has kept account of the time, you
+may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your
+behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know," he returned, "but you might evade the point, somehow.
+So much being at stake," he added, as if explaining.</p>
+
+<p>Still my wife was not severe with him. "I don't understand, quite," she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"Being the turning-point in my life, I can't begin to do anything, to be
+anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don't know where to find
+myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should
+know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that."</p>
+
+<p>"But, of course, there is another point of view."</p>
+
+<p>"My daughter's?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Hasketh's."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the
+child's sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time&mdash;the only
+thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to."</p>
+
+<p>He continued: "I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is
+no sense in the whole thing, if I haven't. They might as well have let
+me go in the beginning. Don't you think that ten years out of my life is
+enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a
+thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried
+to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is
+the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be
+rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could
+condone&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you mustn't reason from us," my wife broke in. "We are very silly
+people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have
+got to reckon with the world at large."</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>have</i> reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the
+reckoning. But why shouldn't my daughter look at this thing as you do?"</p>
+
+<p>Instead of answering, my wife asked, "When did you hear from her last?"</p>
+
+<p>Tedham took a few thin, worn letters from his breast-pocket "There is
+Mr. March's letter," he said, laying one on his knee. He handed my wife
+another.</p>
+
+<p>She read it, and asked, "May Mr. March see it?"</p>
+
+<p>Tedham nodded, and I took the little paper in turn. The letter was
+written in a child's stiff, awkward hand. It was hardly more than a
+piteous cry of despairing love. The address was Mrs. Hasketh's, in
+Somerville, and the date was about three months after Tedham's
+punishment began. "Is that the last you have heard from her?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>Tedham nodded as he took the letter from me.</p>
+
+<p>"But surely you have heard something more about her in all this time?"
+my wife pursued.</p>
+
+<p>"Once from Mrs. Hasketh, to make me promise that I would leave the child
+to her altogether, and not write to her, or ask to see her. When I went
+to the cemetery to-day, I did not know but I should find her grave,
+too."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it is cruel!" cried my wife. "I will go and see Mrs. Hasketh,
+but&mdash;you ought to feel yourself that it's hopeless."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he admitted. "There isn't much chance unless she should happen to
+think the same way you do: that I had suffered enough, and that it was
+time to stop punishing me."</p>
+
+<p>My wife looked compassionately at him, and she began with a sympathy
+that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, "If it
+were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your
+daughter were so situated that it would be&mdash;disadvantageous to her to
+have it known that you were her father?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that I have no right to mend my broken-up life&mdash;what there is
+left of it&mdash;by spoiling hers? I have said that to myself. But then, on
+the other hand, I have had to ask myself whether I had any right to keep
+her from choosing for herself about it. I sha'n't force myself on her. I
+expect to leave her free. But if the child cares for me, as she used to,
+hasn't that love&mdash;not mine for her, but hers for me&mdash;got some rights
+too?"</p>
+
+<p>His voice sank almost to a hush, and the last word was scarcely more
+than a breathing. "All I want is to know where she is, and to let her
+know that I am in the world, and where she can find me. I think she
+ought to have a chance to decide."</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid Mrs. Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake,
+<i>not</i> to have the chance," my wife sighed, and she turned her look from
+Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer.</p>
+
+<p>"The only way to find out is to ask her," I answered, non-committally,
+and rather more lightly than I felt about it. In fact, the turn the
+affair had taken interested me greatly. It involved that awful mystery
+of the ties by which, unless we are born of our fathers and mothers for
+nothing more than the animals are, we are bound to them in all the
+things of life, in duty and in love transcending every question of
+interest and happiness. The parents' duty to the children is obvious and
+plain, but the child's duty to its parents is something subtler and more
+spiritual. It is to be more delicately, more religiously, regarded. No
+one, without impiety, can meddle with it from the outside, or interfere
+in its fulfilment. This and much more I said to my wife when we came to
+talk the matter over after Tedham left us. Above all, I urged something
+that came to me so forcibly at the moment that I said I had always
+thought it, and perhaps I really believed that I had. "Why should we try
+to shield people from fate? Isn't that always wrong? One is fated to be
+born the child of a certain father, and one can no more escape the
+consequences of his father's misdeeds than the doer himself can. Perhaps
+the pain and the shame come from the wish and the attempt to do so, more
+than from the fact itself. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon
+the children. But the children are innocent of evil, and this visitation
+must be for their good, and will be, if they bear it willingly."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, don't try to be that sort of blessing to <i>your</i> children, Basil,"
+said my wife, personalizing the case, as a woman must.</p>
+
+<p>After that we tried to account to each other for having consented to do
+what Tedham asked us. Perhaps we accused each other somewhat for doing
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know, my dear, but you were going to ask him to come and stay
+with us," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"I did want to," she replied. "It seemed so forlorn, letting him go out
+into the night, and find a place for himself, when we could just as well
+have let him stay as not. Why shouldn't we have offered him a bed for
+the night, as we would any other acquaintance?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you must allow that the circumstances were peculiar!"</p>
+
+<p>"But if he was sentenced to pay a certain penalty, and has paid it, why,
+as he said, shouldn't we stop punishing him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose we can't. There seems to be an instinctive demand for eternal
+perdition, for hell, in the human heart," I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I believe that your instinct, Basil&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>I</i> don't claim it, exclusively!"</p>
+
+<p>"Is a survival of savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better.
+How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but all faded in&mdash;or out."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he affected me like an etching of himself from a wornout plate.
+Still, I'm afraid there's likeness enough left to make trouble, yet. I
+hope you realize what you have gone in for, Isabel?"</p>
+
+<p>She answered from the effort that I could see she was making, to brace
+herself already for the work before us:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we must do this because we can't help doing it, and because,
+whatever happens, we had no right to refuse. You must come with me,
+Basil!"</p>
+
+<p>"I? To Mrs. Hasketh's?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly. I will do the talking, but I shall depend upon your moral
+support. We will go over to Somerville to-morrow afternoon. We had
+better not lose any time."</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow is Sunday."</p>
+
+<p>"So much the better. They will be sure to be at home, if they're there
+at all, yet."</p>
+
+<p>She said they, but I knew that she did not expect poor old Hasketh
+really to count in the matter, any more than she expected me to do so.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V.</h3>
+
+<p>The Haskeths lived in a house that withdrew itself behind tall garden
+trees in a large lot sloping down the hillside, in one of the quieter
+old streets of their suburb. The trees were belted in by a board fence,
+painted a wornout white, as far as it was solid, which was to the height
+of one's shoulder; there it opened into a panel work of sticks crossed
+X-wise, which wore a coat of aged green; the strip above them was set
+with a bristling row of rusty nails, which were supposed to keep out
+people who could perfectly well have gone in at the gate as we did.
+There was a brick walk from the gate to the door, which was not so far
+back as I remembered it (perhaps because the leaves were now off the
+trees), and there was a border of box on either side of the walk.
+Altogether there was an old-fashioned keeping in the place which I
+should have rather enjoyed if I had been coming on any other errand; but
+now it imparted to me a notion of people set in their ways, of something
+severe, something hopelessly forbidding.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think there had ever been much intimacy between the Tedhams and
+the Haskeths, before Tedham's calamity came upon him. But Mrs. Hasketh
+did not refuse her share of it. She came forward, and probably made her
+husband come forward, in Tedham's behalf, and do what hopelessly could
+be done to defend him where there was really no defence, and the only
+thing to be attempted was to show circumstances that might perhaps tend
+to the mitigation of his sentence. I do not think they did. Tedham had
+confessed himself and had been proven such a thorough rogue, and the
+company had lately suffered so much through operations like his, that,
+even if it could have had mercy, as an individual may, mercy was felt to
+be bad morals, and the case was unrelentingly pushed. His sentence was
+of those sentences which an eminent jurist once characterized as rather
+dramatic; it was pronounced not so much in relation to his particular
+offence, as with the purpose of striking terror into all offenders like
+him, who were becoming altogether too common. He was made to suffer for
+many other peculators, who had been, or were about to be, and was given
+the full penalty. I was in court when it was pronounced with great
+solemnity by the judge, who read him a lecture in doing so; I could have
+read the judge another, for I could not help feeling that it was, more
+than all the sentences I had ever heard pronounced, wholly out of
+keeping with the offence. I met Hasketh coming out of the court-room,
+and I said that I thought it was terribly severe. He agreed with me, and
+as I knew that he and Tedham had never liked each other, I inferred a
+kindliness in him which made me his friend, in the way one is the friend
+of a man one never meets. He was a man of few words, and he now simply
+said, "It was unjust," and we parted.</p>
+
+<p>For several months after Tedham's conviction, I did not think we ought
+to intrude upon the Haskeths; but then my wife and I both felt that we
+ought, in decency, to make some effort to see them. They seemed pleased,
+but they made us no formal invitation to come again, and we never did.
+That day, however, I caught a glimpse of Tedham's little girl, as she
+flitted through the hall, after we were seated in the parlor; she was in
+black, a forlorn little shadow in the shadow; and I recalled now, as we
+stood once more on the threshold of the rather dreary house, a certain
+gentleness of bearing in the child, which I found infinitely pathetic,
+at that early moment of her desolation. She had something of poor
+Tedham's own style and grace, too, which had served him so ill, and this
+heightened the pathos for me. In that figure I had thought of his
+daughter ever since, as often as I had thought of her at all; which was
+not very often, to tell the truth, after the first painful impression of
+Tedham's affair began to die away in me, or to be effaced by the
+accumulating cares and concerns of my own life. But now that we had
+returned into the presence of that bitter sorrow, as it were, the little
+thing reappeared vividly to me in just the way I had seen her so long
+ago. My sense of her forlornness, of her most hapless orphanhood, was
+intensified by the implacable hate with which Mrs. Hasketh had then
+spoken of her father, in telling us that the child was henceforth to
+bear her husband's name, and had resentfully scorned the merit Tedham
+tried to make of giving her up to them. "And if I can help it," she had
+ended, with a fierceness I had never forgotten, "she shall not hear him
+mentioned again, or see him as long as I live."</p>
+
+<p>My wife and I now involuntarily dropped our voices, or rather they sank
+into our throats, as we sat waiting in the dim parlor, after the maid
+took our cards to Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh. We tried to make talk, but we
+could not, and we were funereally quiet, when Hasketh came pottering and
+peering in, and shook hands with both of us. He threw open half a blind
+at one of the windows, and employed himself in trying to put up the
+shade, to gain time, as I thought, before he should be obliged to tell
+us that his wife could not see us. Then he came to me, and asked, "Won't
+you let me take your hat?" as such people do, in expression of a vague
+hospitality; and I let him take it, and put it mouth down on the marble
+centre-table, beside the large, gilt-edged, black-bound family Bible. He
+drew a chair near me, in a row with my wife and myself, and said, "It is
+quite a number of years since we met, Mrs. March," and he looked across
+me at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am almost afraid to think how many," she answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Family well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, our children are both very well, Mr. Hasketh. You seem to be
+looking very well, too."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, I have nothing to complain of. I am not so young as I was.
+But that is about all."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope Mrs. Hasketh is well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, thank you, she is quite well, for her. She is never very strong.
+She will be down in a moment."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I shall be so glad to see her."</p>
+
+<p>The conversation, which might be said to have flagged from the
+beginning, stopped altogether at this point, and though I was prompted
+by several looks from my wife to urge it forward, I could think of
+nothing to do so with, and we sat without speaking till we heard the
+stir of skirts on the stairs in the hall outside, and then my wife said,
+"Ah, that is Mrs. Hasketh."</p>
+
+<p>I should have known it was Mrs. Hasketh without this sort of
+anticipation, I think, even if I had never seen her before, she was so
+like my expectation of what that sort of woman would be in the lapse of
+time, with her experience of life. The severity that I had seen come and
+go in her countenance in former days was now so seated that she had no
+other expression, and I may say without caricature that she gave us a
+frown of welcome. That is, she made us feel, in spite of a darkened
+countenance, that she was really willing to see us in her house, and
+that she took our coming as a sign of amity. I suppose that the
+induration of her spirit was the condition of her being able to bear at
+all what had been laid on her to bear, and her burden had certainly not
+been light.</p>
+
+<p>At her appearance her husband, without really stirring at all, had the
+effect of withdrawing into the background, where, indeed, I tacitly
+joined him; and the two ladies remained in charge of the drama, while he
+and I conversed, as it were, in dumb show. Apart from my sympathy with
+her in the matter, I was very curious to see how my wife would play her
+part, which seemed to me far the more difficult of the two, since she
+must make all the positive movements.</p>
+
+<p>After some civilities so obviously perfunctory that I admired the force
+of mind in the women who uttered them, my wife said, "Mrs. Hasketh, we
+have come on an errand that I know will cause you pain, and I needn't
+say that we haven't come willingly."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it about Mr. Tedham?" asked Mrs. Hasketh, and I remembered now that
+she had always used as much ceremony in speaking of him; it seemed
+rather droll now, but still it would not have been in character with her
+to call him simply Tedham, as we did, in speaking of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said my wife. "I don't know whether you had kept exact account of
+the time. It was a surprise to us, for we hadn't. He is out, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;at noon, yesterday. I wasn't likely to forget the day, or the
+hour, or the minute." Mrs. Hasketh said this without relaxing the
+severity of her face at all, and I confess my heart went down.</p>
+
+<p>But my wife seemed not to have lost such courage as she had come with,
+at least. "He has been to see us&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I presumed so," said Mrs. Hasketh, and as she said nothing more, Mrs.
+March took the word again.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall have to tell you why he came&mdash;why <i>we</i> came. It was something
+that we did not wish to enter into, and at first my husband refused
+outright. But when I saw him, and thought it over, I did not see how we
+could refuse. After all, it is something you must have expected, and
+that you must have been expecting at once, if you say&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I presume," Mrs. Hasketh said, "that he wished you to ask after his
+daughter. I can understand why he did not come to us." She let one of
+those dreadful silences follow, and again my wife was forced to speak.</p>
+
+<p>"It is something that we didn't mean to press at all, Mrs. Hasketh, and
+I won't say anything more. Only, if you care to send any word to him he
+will be at our house this evening again, and I will give him your
+message." She rose, not in resentment, as I could see (and I knew that
+she had not come upon this errand without making herself Tedham's
+partisan in some measure) but with sincere good feeling and appreciation
+of Mrs. Hasketh's position. I rose with her, and Hasketh rose too.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't go!" Mrs. Hasketh broke out, as if surprised. "You couldn't
+help coming, and I don't blame you at all. I don't blame Mr. Tedham
+even. I didn't suppose I should ever forgive him. But there! that's all
+long ago, and the years do change us. They change us all, Mrs. March,
+and I don't feel as if I had the right to judge anybody the way I used
+to judge <i>him</i>. Sometimes it surprises me. I did hate him, and I don't
+presume I've got very much love for him now, but I don't want to punish
+him any more. That's gone out of me. I don't know how it came to go, but
+it went. I wish he hadn't ever got anything more to do with us, but I'm
+afraid we haven't had all our punishment yet, whatever <i>he</i> has. It
+seems to me as if the sight of Mr. Tedham would make me sick."</p>
+
+<p>I found such an insufficiency in this statement of feeling that I wanted
+to laugh, but I perceived that it did not appeal to my wife's sense of
+humor. She said, "I can understand how you feel about it, Mrs. Hasketh."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hasketh seemed grateful for the sympathy. "I presume," she went on,
+and I noted how often she used the quaint old-fashioned Yankee word,
+"that you feel as if you had almost as much right to hate him as I had,
+and that if you could overlook what he tried to do to you, I might
+overlook what he did do to his own family. But as I see it, the case is
+different. He failed when he tried to put the blame on Mr. March, and he
+succeeded only too well in putting the shame on his own family. You
+could forgive it, and it would be all the more to your credit because
+you forgave it, but his family might have forgiven it ten times over,
+and still they would be in disgrace through him. That is the way I
+looked at it."</p>
+
+<p>"And I assure you, Mrs. Hasketh, that is the way I looked at it, too,"
+said my wife.</p>
+
+<p>"So, when it seems hard that I should have taken his child from him,"
+the woman continued, as if still arguing her case, and she probably was
+arguing it with herself, "and did what I could to make her forget him, I
+think it had better be considered whose sake I was doing it for, and
+whether I had any right to do different. I did not think I had at the
+time, or when I had to begin to act. I knew how I felt toward Mr.
+Tedham; I never liked him; I never wanted my sister to marry him; and
+when his trouble came, I told Mr. Hasketh that it was no more than I had
+expected all along. He was that kind of a man, and he was sure to show
+it, one way or other, sooner or later; and I was not disappointed when
+he did what he did. I had to guard against my own feeling, and to put
+myself out of the question, and that was what I tried to do when I got
+him to give up the child to us and let her take our name. It was the
+same as a legal adoption, and he freely consented to it, or as freely as
+he could, considering where he was. But he knew it was for her good as
+well as we did. There was nobody for her to look to but us, and he knew
+that; his own family had no means, and, in fact, he <i>had</i> no family but
+his father and mother, and when they died, that same first year, there
+was no one left to suffer from him but his child. The question was how
+much she ought to be allowed to suffer, and whether she should be
+allowed to suffer at all, if it could be helped. If it was to be
+prevented, it was to be by deadening her to him, by killing out her
+affection for him, and much as I hated Mr. Tedham, I could not bring
+myself to do that, though I used to think I would do it. He was very
+fond of her, I don't deny that; I don't think it was any merit in him to
+love such a child, but it was the best thing about him, and I was
+willing it should count. But then there was another thing that I
+couldn't bring myself to, and that was to tell the child, up and down,
+all about it; and I presume that there I was weak. Well, you may say I
+<i>was</i> weak! But I couldn't, I simply couldn't. She was only between
+seven and eight when it happened&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought she was older," I ventured to put in, remembering my
+impressions as to her age the last time I saw her with her father.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Mrs. Hasketh, "she always appeared rather old for her age,
+and that made me all the more anxious to know just how much of the
+trouble she had taken in. I suppose it was all a kind of awful mystery
+to her, as most of our trials are to children; but when her father was
+taken from her, she seemed to think it was something she mustn't ask
+about; there are a good many things in the world that children feel that
+way about&mdash;how they come into it, for one thing, and how they go out of
+it; and by and by she didn't speak of it. She had some of his lightness,
+and I presume that helped her through; I was afraid it did sometimes.
+Then, at other times, I thought she had got the notion he was in for
+life, and that was the reason she didn't speak of him; she had given him
+up. Then I used to wonder whether it wasn't my duty to take her to see
+him&mdash;where he was. But when I came to find out that you had to see them
+through the bars, and with the kind of clothes they wear, I felt that I
+might as well kill the child at once; it was for her sake I didn't take
+her. You may be sure I wasn't anxious for the responsibility of <i>not</i>
+doing it either, the way I knew I felt toward Mr. Tedham."</p>
+
+<p>I did not like her protesting so much as this; but I saw that it was a
+condition of her being able to deal with herself in the matter, and I
+had no doubt she was telling the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"You never can know just how much of a thing children have taken in, or
+how much they have understood," she continued, repeating herself, as she
+did throughout, "and I had to keep this in mind when I had my talks with
+Fay about her father. She wanted to write to him at first, and of course
+I let her&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>My wife and I could not forbear exchanging a glance of intelligence,
+which Mrs. Hasketh intercepted.</p>
+
+<p>"I presume he told you?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said, "he showed us the letter."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it was something that had to be done. As long as she questioned
+me about him, I put her off the best way I could, and after a while she
+seemed to give up questioning me of her own accord. Perhaps she really
+began to understand it, or some of the cruel little things she played
+with said something. I was always afraid of the other children throwing
+it up to her, and that was one reason we went away for three or four
+years and let our place here."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know you were gone," I said toward Hasketh, who cleared his
+throat to explain:</p>
+
+<p>"I had some interests at that time in Canada. We were at Quebec."</p>
+
+<p>"It shows what a rush our life is," I philosophized, with the
+implication that Hasketh and I had been old friends, and I ought to have
+noticed that I had not met him during the time of his absence. The fact
+was we had never come so near intimacy as when we exchanged confidences
+concerning the severity of Tedham's sentence in coming out of the
+court-room together.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> hadn't any interest in Canada, except to get the child away," said
+Mrs. Hasketh. "Sometimes it seemed strange <i>we</i> should be in Canada, and
+not Mr. Tedham! She got acquainted with some little girls who were going
+to a convent school there as externes&mdash;outside pupils, you know," Mrs.
+Hasketh explained to my wife. "She got very fond of one of them&mdash;she is
+a child of very warm affections. I never denied that Mr. Tedham had warm
+<i>affections</i>&mdash;and when her little girl friend went into the convent to
+go on with her education there, Fay wanted to go too, and&mdash;we let her.
+That was when she was twelve, and Mr. Hasketh felt that he ought to come
+back and look after his business here; and we left her in the convent.
+Just as soon as she was out of the way, and out of the question, it
+seemed as if I got to feeling differently toward Mr. Tedham. I don't
+mean to say I ever got to like him, or that I do to this day; but I saw
+that he had some rights, too, and for years and years I wanted to take
+the child and tell her when he was coming out. I used to ask myself what
+right I even had to keep the child from the suffering. The suffering was
+hers by rights, and she ought to go through it. I got almost crazy
+thinking it over. I got to thinking that her share of her father's shame
+might be the very thing, of all things, that was to discipline her and
+make her a good and useful woman; and that's much more than being a
+happy one, Mrs. March; we can't any of us be truly happy, no matter
+what's done for us. I tried to make believe that I was sparing her
+alone, but I knew I was sparing myself, too, and that made it harder to
+decide." She suddenly addressed herself to us both: "What would <i>you</i>
+have done?"</p>
+
+<p>My wife and I looked at each other in a dismay in which a glance from
+old Hasketh assured us that we had his sympathy. It would have been far
+simpler if Mrs. Hasketh had been up and down with us as Tedham's
+emissaries, and refused to tell us anything of his daughter, and left us
+to report to him that he must find her for himself if he found her at
+all. This was what we had both expected, and we had come prepared to
+take back that answer to Tedham, and discharge our whole duty towards
+him in its delivery. This change in the woman who had hated him so
+fiercely, but whose passion had worn itself down to the underlying
+conscience with the lapse of time, certainly complicated the case. I was
+silent; my wife said: "I don't know <i>what</i> I should have done, Mrs.
+Hasketh;" and Mrs. Hasketh resumed:</p>
+
+<p>"If I did wrong in trying to separate her life from her father's, I was
+punished for it, because when I wanted to undo my work, I didn't know
+how to begin; I presume that's the worst of a wrong thing. Well, I never
+did begin; but now I've got to. The time's come, and I presume it's as
+easy now as it ever could be; easier. He's out and it's over, as far as
+the law is concerned; and if she chooses she can see him. I'll prepare
+her for it as well as I can, and he can come if she wishes it."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean that he can see her <i>here</i>?" my wife asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Mrs. Hasketh, with a sort of strong submission.</p>
+
+<p>"At once? To-day?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," Mrs. Hasketh faltered. "I didn't want him to see her just the
+first day, or before I saw him; and I thought he might try to. She's
+visiting at some friends in Providence; but she'll be back to-morrow. He
+can come to-morrow night, if she says so. He can come and find out. But
+if he was anything of a man he wouldn't want to."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid," I ventured, "he isn't anything of <i>that</i> kind of man."</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI.</h3>
+
+<p>"Now, how unhandsome life is!" I broke out, at one point on our way
+home, after we had turned the affair over in every light, and then
+dropped it, and then taken it up again. "It's so graceless, so
+tasteless! Why didn't Tedham die before the expiration of his term and
+solve all this knotty problem with dignity? Why should he have lived on
+in this shabby way and come out and wished to see his daughter? If there
+had been anything dramatic, anything artistic in the man's nature, he
+would have renounced the claim his mere paternity gives him on her love,
+and left word with me that he had gone away and would never be heard of
+any more. That was the least he could have done. If he had wanted to do
+the thing heroically&mdash;and I wouldn't have denied him that
+satisfaction&mdash;he would have walked into that pool in the old cockpit and
+lain down among the autumn leaves on its surface, and made an end of the
+whole trouble with his own burdensome and worthless existence. That
+would truly have put an end to the evil he began."</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't be&mdash;impious, Basil," said my wife, with a moment's
+hesitation for the word. Then she sighed and added, "Yes, it seems as if
+that would be the only thing that could end it. There doesn't really
+seem to be any provision in life for ending such things. He will have to
+go on and make more and more trouble. Poor man! I feel almost as sorry
+for him as I do for her. I guess he hasn't expiated his sin yet, as
+fully as he thinks he has."</p>
+
+<p>"And then," I went on, with a strange pleasure I always get out of the
+poignancy of a despair not my own, "suppose that this isn't all. Suppose
+that the girl has met some one who has become interested in her, and
+whom she will have to tell of this stain upon her name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Basil!" cried my wife, "that is cruel of you! You <i>knew</i> I was keeping
+away from that point, and it seems as if you tried to make it as
+afflicting as you could&mdash;the whole affair."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't believe it's as bad as that. Probably she hasn't met any
+one in that way; at any rate, it's pure conjecture on my part, and my
+conjecture doesn't make it so."</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't unmake it, either, for you to say that now," my wife
+lamented.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well! Don't let's think about it, then. The case is bad enough as
+it stands, Heaven knows, and we've got to grapple with it as soon as we
+get home. We shall find Tedham waiting for us, I dare say, unless
+something has happened to him. I wonder if anything can have been good
+enough to happen to Tedham, overnight."</p>
+
+<p>I got a little miserable fun out of this, but my wife would not laugh;
+she would not be placated in any way; she held me in a sort responsible
+for the dilemma I had conjectured, and inculpated me in some measure for
+that which had really presented itself.</p>
+
+<p>When we reached home she went directly to her room and had a cup of tea
+sent to her there, and the children and I had rather a solemn time at
+the table together. A Sunday tea-table is solemn enough at the best,
+with its ghastly substitution of cold dishes or thin sliced things for
+the warm abundance of the week-day dinner; with the gloom of Mrs.
+March's absence added, this was a very funereal feast indeed.</p>
+
+<p>We went on quite silently for a while, for the children saw I was
+preoccupied; but at last I asked, "Has anybody called this afternoon?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know exactly whether it was a call or not," said my daughter,
+with a nice feeling for the social proprieties which would have amused
+me at another time. "But that strange person who was here last night,
+was here again."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!"</p>
+
+<p>"He said he would come in the evening. I forgot to tell you. Papa, what
+kind of person is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. What makes you ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, we think he wasn't always a workingman. Tom says he looks as if he
+had been in some kind of business, and then failed."</p>
+
+<p>"What makes you think that, Tom?" I asked the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know. He speaks so well."</p>
+
+<p>"He always spoke well, poor fellow," I said with a vague amusement. "And
+you're quite right, Tom. He was in business once and he failed&mdash;badly."</p>
+
+<p>I went up to my wife's room and told her what the children had said of
+Tedham's call, and that he was coming back again.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I think I shall let you see him alone, Basil. I'm
+completely worn out, and besides there's no reason why I should see him.
+I hope you'll get through with him quickly. There isn't really anything
+for you to say, except that we have seen the Haskeths, and that if he is
+still bent upon it he can find his daughter there to-morrow evening. I
+want you to promise me that you will confine yourself to that, Basil,
+and not say a single word more. There is no sense in our involving
+ourselves in the affair. We have done all we could, and more than he had
+any right to ask of us, and now I am determined that he shall not get
+anything more out of you. Will you promise?"</p>
+
+<p>"You may be sure, my dear, that I don't wish to get any more involved in
+this coil of sin and misery than you do," I began.</p>
+
+<p>"That isn't promising," she interrupted. "I want you to promise you'll
+say just that and no more."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'll promise fast enough, if that's all you want," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't trust you a bit, Basil," she lamented. "Now, I will explain to
+you all about it. I've thought the whole thing over."</p>
+
+<p>She did explain, at much greater length than she needed, and she was
+still giving me some very solemn charges when the bell rang, and I knew
+that Tedham had come. "Now, remember what I've told you," she called
+after me, as I went to the door, "and be sure to tell me, when you come
+back, just how he takes it and every word he says. Oh, dear, I know
+you'll make the most dreadful mess of it!"</p>
+
+<p>By this time I expected to do no less, but I was so curious to see
+Tedham again that I should have been willing to do much worse, rather
+than forego my meeting with him. I hope that there was some better
+feeling than curiosity in my heart, but I will, for the present, call it
+curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>I met him in the hall at the foot of the stairs, and put a witless
+cheeriness into the voice I bade him good-evening with, while I gave him
+my hand and led the way into the parlor.</p>
+
+<p>The twenty-four hours that had elapsed since I saw him there before had
+estranged him in a way that I find it rather hard to describe. He had
+shrunk from the approach to equality in which we had parted, and there
+was a sort of consciousness of disgrace in his look, such as might have
+shown itself if he had passed the time in a low debauch. But undoubtedly
+he had done nothing of the kind, and this effect in him was from a
+purely moral cause. He sat down on the edge of a chair, instead of
+leaning back, as he had done the night before.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Tedham," I began, "we have seen your sister-in-law, and I may as
+well tell you at once that, so far as she is concerned, there will be
+nothing in the way of your meeting your daughter. The Haskeths are
+living at their old place in Somerville, and your daughter will be with
+them there to-morrow night&mdash;just at this moment she is away&mdash;and you can
+find her there, then, if you wish."</p>
+
+<p>Tedham kept those deep eye-hollows of his bent upon me, and listened
+with a passivity which did not end when I ceased to speak. I had said
+all that my wife had permitted me to say in her charge to me, and the
+incident ought to have been closed, as far as we were concerned. But
+Tedham's not speaking threw me off my guard. I could not let the matter
+end so bluntly, and I added, in the same spirit one makes a scrawl at
+the bottom of a page, "Of course, it's for you to decide whether you
+will or not."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" asked Tedham, feebly, but as if he were physically
+laying hold of me for help.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I mean&mdash;I mean&mdash;my dear fellow, you know what I mean! Whether you
+had better do it." This was the very thing I had not intended to do, for
+I saw how wise my wife's plan was, and how we really had nothing more to
+do with the matter, after having satisfied the utmost demands of
+humanity.</p>
+
+<p>"You think I had better not," said Tedham.</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said, but I felt that I was saying it too late, "I don't think
+anything about it."</p>
+
+<p>"I have been thinking about it, too," said Tedham, as if I had confessed
+and not denied having an opinion in the matter. "I have been thinking
+about it ever since I saw you last night, and I don't believe I have
+slept, for thinking of it. I know how you and Mrs. March feel about it,
+and I have tried to see it from your point of view, and now I believe I
+do. I am not going to see my daughter; I am going away."</p>
+
+<p>He stood up, in token of his purpose, and at the same moment my wife
+entered the room. She must have been hurrying to do so from the moment I
+left her, for she had on a fresh dress, and her hair had the effect of
+being suddenly, if very effectively, massed for the interview from the
+dispersion in which I had lately seen it. She swept me with a glance of
+reproach, as she went up to Tedham, in the pretence that he had risen to
+meet her, and gave him her hand. I knew that she divined all that had
+passed between us, but she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. March has told you that we have seen Mrs. Hasketh, and that you can
+find your daughter at her house to-morrow evening?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and I have just been telling him that I am not going to see her."</p>
+
+<p>"That is very foolish&mdash;very wrong!" my wife began.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you must say so," Tedham replied, with more dignity and force
+than I could have expected, "and I know how kind you and Mr. March have
+been. But you must see that I am right&mdash;that she is the only one to be
+considered at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Right! How are you right? Have <i>you</i> been suggesting that, my dear?"
+demanded my wife, with a gentle despair of me in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>It almost seemed to me that I had, but Tedham came to my rescue most
+unexpectedly.</p>
+
+<p>"No, Mrs. March, he hasn't said anything of the kind to me; or, if he
+has, I haven't heard it. But you intimated, yourself, last night, that
+she might be so situated&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I was a wicked simpleton," cried my wife, and I forebore to triumph,
+even by a glance at her; "to put my doubts between you and your daughter
+in any way. It was romantic, and&mdash;and&mdash;disgusting. It's not only your
+right to see her, it's your <i>duty</i>. At least it's your duty to let her
+decide whether she will let you see her. What nonsense! Of course she
+will! She must bear her part in it. She ought not to escape it, even if
+she could. Now you must just drop all idea of going away, and you must
+stay, and you must go to see your daughter. There is no other way to
+do."</p>
+
+<p>Tedham shook his head stubbornly. "She has borne her share, already, and
+I won't inflict my penalty on her innocence&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Innocence? It's <i>because</i> she is innocent that it must be inflicted
+upon her! That is what innocence is in the world for!"</p>
+
+<p>Tedham looked back at her in a dull bewilderment. "I can't get back to
+that. It seemed so once; but now it looks selfish, and I'm afraid of it.
+I am not the one to take that ground. It might do for you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, let it do for me!" I confess that I was astonished at this
+turn, or should have been, if I could be astonished at any turn a woman
+takes. "I will see her for you, if you wish, and I will tell her just
+how it is with you, and then she can decide for herself. You have
+certainly no right to decide for her, whether she will see you or not,
+have you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," Tedham admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, sit down and listen."</p>
+
+<p>He sat down, and my wife reasoned it all out with him. She convinced me,
+perfectly, so that what Tedham proposed to do seemed not only
+sentimental and foolish, but unnatural and impious. I confess that I
+admired her casuistry, and gave it my full support. She was a woman who,
+in the small affairs of the tastes and the nerves and the prejudices
+could be as illogical as the best of her sex, but with a question large
+enough to engage the hereditary powers of her New England nature she
+showed herself a dialectician worthy of her Puritan ancestry.</p>
+
+<p>Tedham rose when she had made an end; and when we both expected him to
+agree with her and obey her, he said, "Very likely you are right. I once
+saw it all that way myself, but I don't see it so now, and I can't do
+it. Perhaps we shouldn't care for each other; at any rate, it's too much
+to risk, and I can't do it. Good-by." He began sidling toward the door.</p>
+
+<p>I would have detained him, but my wife made me a sign not to interfere.
+"But surely, Mr. Tedham," she pleaded, "you are going to leave some word
+for her&mdash;or for Mrs. Hasketh to give her?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he answered, "I don't think I will. If I don't appear, then she
+won't see me, and that will be all there is of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but Mrs. Hasketh will probably tell her that you have asked about
+her, and will prepare her for your coming, and then if you don't come&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What time is it, March?" Tedham asked.</p>
+
+<p>I took out my watch. "It's nine o'clock." I was surprised to find it no
+later.</p>
+
+<p>"I can get over to Somerville before ten, can't I? I'll go and tell Mrs.
+Hasketh I am not coming."</p>
+
+<p>We could not prevent his getting away, by force, and we had used all the
+arguments we could have hoped to detain him with. As he opened the door
+to go out into the night, "But, Tedham!" I called to him, "if anything
+happens, where are we to find you, hear of you?"</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated. "I will let you know. Well, good-night."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose this isn't the end, Isabel," I said, after we had turned from
+looking blankly at the closed door, and listening to Tedham's steps,
+fainter and fainter on the board-walk to the gate.</p>
+
+<p>"There never is an end to a thing like this!" she returned, with a
+passionate sigh of pity. "Oh, what a terrible thing an evil deed is! It
+<i>can't</i> end. It has to go on and on forever. Poor wretch! He thought he
+had got to the end of his misdeed, when he had suffered the punishment
+for it, but it was only just beginning then! Now, you see, it has a
+perfectly new lease of life. It's as if it had just happened, as far as
+the worst consequences are concerned."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I assented. "By the way, that was a great idea of yours about the
+office of innocence in the world, Isabel!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Basil!" she cried, "you don't suppose I believed in such a
+monstrous thing as that, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You made me believe in it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I can tell you that I merely said it so as to convince him
+that he ought to let his daughter decide whether she would see him or
+not, and it had nothing whatever to do with the matter. Do you think you
+could find me anything to eat, dear? I'm perfectly famishing, and it
+doesn't seem as if I could stir a step till I've had a bite of
+something."</p>
+
+<p>She sank down on the sofa in the hall in proof of her statement, and I
+went out into the culinary regions (deserted of their dwellers after our
+early tea) and made her up a sandwich along with the one I had the
+Sunday-night habit of myself. I found some half-bottles of ale on the
+ice, and I brought one of them, too. Before we had emptied it we
+resigned ourselves to what we could not help in Tedham's case; perhaps
+we even saw it in a more hopeful light.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VII.</h3>
+
+<p>The next day was one of those lax Mondays which come before the Tuesdays
+and Wednesdays when business has girded itself up for the week, and I
+got home from the office rather earlier than usual. My wife met me with,
+"Why, what has happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," I said; "I had a sort of presentiment that something had
+happened here."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, nothing at all has happened, and you have had your presentiment
+for your pains, if that's what you hurried home for."</p>
+
+<p>I justified myself as well as I could, and I added, "That wretched
+Tedham has been in my mind all day. I think he has made a ridiculous
+mistake. As if he could stop the harm by taking himself off! The harm
+goes on independently of him; it is hardly his harm any more."</p>
+
+<p>"That is the way it has seemed to me, too, all day," said my wife. "You
+don't suppose he has been out of my mind either? I wish we had never had
+anything to do with him."</p>
+
+<p>A husband likes to abuse his victory, when he has his wife quite at his
+mercy, but the case was so entirely in my favor that for once I forbore.
+I could see that she was suffering for having put into Tedham's head the
+notion which had resulted in this error, and I considered that she was
+probably suffering enough. Besides, I was afraid that if I said anything
+it would bring out the fact that I had myself intimated the question
+again which his course had answered so mistakenly. I could well imagine
+that she was grateful for my forbearance, and I left her to this
+admirable state of mind while I went off to put myself a little in shape
+after my day's work and my journey out of town. I kept thinking how
+perfectly right in the affair Tedham's simple, selfish instinct had
+been, and how our several consciences had darkened counsel; that quaint
+Tuscan proverb came into ray mind: <i>Lascia fare Iddio, ch' &egrave; un buon
+vecchio</i>. We had not been willing to let God alone, or to trust his
+leading; we had thought to improve on his management of the case, and to
+invent a principle for poor Tedham that should be better for him to act
+upon than the love of his child, which God had put into the man's heart,
+and which was probably the best thing that had ever been there. Well, we
+had got our come-uppings, as the country people say, and however we
+might reason it away we had made ourselves responsible for the event.</p>
+
+<p>There came a ring at the door that made my own heart jump into my mouth.
+I knew it was Tedham come back again, and I was still in the throes of
+buttoning on my collar when my wife burst into my room. I smiled round
+at her as gayly as I could with the collar-buttoning grimace on my face.
+"All right, I'll be down in a minute. You just go and talk to him
+till&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Him</i>?" she gasped back; and I have never been quite sure of her syntax
+to this day. "<i>Them!</i> It's Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh, and some young lady! I
+saw them through the window coming up the walk."</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord! You don't suppose it's Tedham's daughter?"</p>
+
+<p>"How do I know? Oh, how <i>could</i> you be dressing at a time like this!"</p>
+
+<p>It did seem to me rather heinous, and I did not try to defend myself,
+even when she added, from her access of nervousness, in something like a
+whimper, "It seems to me you're <i>always</i> dressing, Basil!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be right with you, my dear," I answered, penitently; and, in fact,
+by the time the maid brought up the Haskeths' cards I was ready to go
+down. We certainly needed each other's support, and I do not know but we
+descended the stairs hand in hand, and entered the parlor leaning upon
+each other's shoulders. The Haskeths, who were much more deeply
+concerned, were not apparently so much moved. We shook hands with them,
+and then Mrs. Hasketh said to us in succession, "My niece, Mrs. March;
+Mr. March, my niece."</p>
+
+<p>The young girl had risen, and stood veiled before us, and a sort of
+heart-breaking appeal expressed itself in the gentle droop of her
+figure, which did the whole office of her hidden face. The Haskeths were
+dressed, as became their years, in a composite fashion of no particular
+period; but I noticed at once, with the fondness I have for what is
+pretty in the modes, that Miss Tedham wore one of the latest costumes,
+and that she was not only a young girl, but a young lady, with all that
+belongs to the outward seeming of one of the gentlest of the kind. It
+struck me as the more monstrous, therefore, that she should be involved
+in the coil of her father's inexpiable offence, which entangled her
+whether he stayed or whether he went. It was well enough that the
+Haskeths should still be made miserable through him; it belonged to
+their years and experience; they would soon end, at any rate, and it did
+not matter whether their remnant of life was dark or bright. But this
+child had a right to a long stretch of unbroken sunshine. As I stood and
+looked at her I felt the heart-burning, the indefinable indignation that
+we feel in the presence of death when it is the young and fair who have
+died. Here is a miscalculation, a mistake. It ought not to have been.</p>
+
+<p>I thought that my wife, in the effusion of sympathy, would have perhaps
+taken the girl in her arms; but probably she knew that the dropped veil
+was a sign that there was to be no embracing. She put out her hand, and
+the girl took it with her gloved hand; but though the outward forms of
+their greeting were so cold, I fancied an instant understanding and
+kindness between them.</p>
+
+<p>"My niece," Mrs. Hasketh explained, when we were all seated, "came home
+this afternoon, instead of this morning, when we expected her."</p>
+
+<p>My wife said, "Oh, yes," and after a moment, a very painful moment, in
+which I think we all tried to imagine something that would delay the
+real business, Mrs. Hasketh began again.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. March," she said, in a low voice, and with a curious, apologetic
+kind of embarrassment, "we have come&mdash;Fay wanted we should come and ask
+if you knew about her father&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, didn't he come to you last night?" my wife began.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he did," said Mrs. Hasketh, in a crest-fallen sort, "But we
+thought&mdash;we thought&mdash;you might know where he was. And Fay&mdash;Did he tell
+you what he was going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," my wife gasped back.</p>
+
+<p>The young girl put aside her veil in turning to my wife, and showed a
+face which had all the ill-starred beauty of poor Tedham, with something
+more in it that she never got from that handsome reprobate&mdash;conscience,
+soul&mdash;whatever we choose to call a certain effluence of heaven which
+blesses us with rest and faith whenever we behold it in any human
+countenance. She was very young-looking, and her voice had a wistful
+innocence.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think my father will be here again to-night? Oh, I must see him!"</p>
+
+<p>I perceived that my wife could not speak, and I said, to gain time,
+"Why, I've been expecting him to come in at any moment;" and this was
+true enough.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess he's not very far off," said old Hasketh. "I don't believe but
+what he'll turn up." Within the comfort these words were outwardly
+intended to convey to the anxious child, I felt an inner contempt of
+Tedham, a tacit doubt of the man's nature, which was more to me than the
+explicit faith in his return. For some reason Hasketh had not trusted
+Tedham's decision, and he might very well have done this without
+impugning anything but the weakness of his will.</p>
+
+<p>My wife now joined our side, apparently because it was the only theory
+of the case that could be openly urged. "Oh, yes, I am sure. In fact he
+promised my husband to let him know later where he was. Didn't you
+understand him so, my dear?"</p>
+
+<p>I had not understood him precisely to this effect, but I answered, "Yes,
+certainly," and we began to reassure one another more and more. We
+talked on and on to one another, but all the time we talked at the young
+girl, or for her encouragement; but I suppose the rest felt as I did,
+that we were talking provisionally, or without any stable ground of
+conviction. For my part, though I indulged that contempt of Tedham, I
+still had a lurking fear that the wretch had finally and forever
+disappeared, and I had a vision, very disagreeable and definite, of
+Tedham lying face downward in the pool of the old cockpit and shone on
+by the stars in the hushed circle of the woods. Simultaneously I heard
+his daughter saying, "I can't understand why he shouldn't have come to
+us, or should have put it off. He couldn't think I didn't wish to see
+him." And now I looked at my wife aghast, for I perceived that the
+Haskeths must have lacked the courage to tell her that her father had
+decided himself not to see her again, and that they had brought her to
+us that we might stay her with some hopes, false or true, of meeting him
+soon. "I don't know what they mean," she went on, appealing from them to
+us, "by saying that it might be better if I never saw him again!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't say that any more, child," said Mrs. Hasketh, with affecting
+humility. "I'm sure there isn't any one in the whole world that I would
+bless the sight of half as much."</p>
+
+<p>"I could have come before, if I'd known where he was; or, if I had only
+known, I might have been here Saturday!" She broke into a piteous
+lamentation, with tears and sobs that wrung my heart and made me feel
+like one of a conspiracy of monsters. "But he couldn't&mdash;he
+couldn't&mdash;have thought I didn't <i>want</i> to see him!"</p>
+
+<p>It was a very trying moment for us all, and I think that if we had, any
+of us, had our choice, we should have preferred to be in her place
+rather than our own. We miserably did what we could to comfort her, and
+we at last silenced her with I do not know what pretences. The affair
+was quite too much for me, and I made a feint of having heard the
+children calling me, and I went out into the hall. I felt that there was
+a sort of indecency in my witnessing that poor young thing's emotion;
+women might see it, but a man ought not. Perhaps old Hasketh felt the
+same; he followed me out, and when we were beyond hearing, even if he
+had spoken aloud, he dropped his voice to a thick murmur and said, "This
+has all been a mistake. We have had to get out of it with the girl the
+best we could; and we don't dare to let her know that Tedham isn't
+coming back any more. You noticed from what she said that my wife tried
+to make believe it might be well if he didn't; but she had to drop
+<i>that</i>; it set the girl wild. She hasn't got anything but the one idea:
+that she and her father belong to each other, and that they must be
+together for the rest of their lives. A curious thing about it is," and
+Hasketh sank his voice still lower to say this, "that she thinks that if
+he's taken the punishment that was put upon him he has atoned for what
+he did; and if any one tries to make him suffer more he does worse than
+Tedham did, and he's flying in the face of Providence. Perhaps it's so.
+I'm afraid," Hasketh continued, with the satisfaction men take in
+blaming their wives under the cover of sympathy, "that Mrs. Hasketh is
+going to feel it more and more, as time goes on, unless Tedham turns up.
+I was never in favor of trying to have the child forget him, or be
+separated from him in any way. That kind of thing can't be made to work,
+and I don't suppose, when you come to boil it down, that it's
+essentially right. This universe, I take it, isn't an accident in any
+particular, and if she's his daughter it's because she was meant to be,
+and to bear and share with him. You see it was a great mistake not to
+prepare the child for it sooner, and tell her just when Tedham would be
+out, so that if she wanted to see him she could. She thinks she ought to
+have been there at the prison waiting to speak to him the first one. I
+thought it was a mistake to have her away, and I guess that's the way
+Mrs. Hasketh looks at it herself, now."</p>
+
+<p>A stir of garments made itself heard from the parlor at last, and we
+knew the ladies had risen. In a loud voice Hasketh began to say that
+they had a carriage down at the gate, and I said they had better let me
+show them the way down; and as my wife followed the others into the
+hall, I pulled open the outer door for them. On the threshold stood a
+man about to ring, who let his hand drop from the bell-pull. "Why,
+Tedham!" I shouted, joyfully.</p>
+
+<p>The light from the hall-lamp struck full on his face; we all
+involuntarily shrank back, except the girl, who looked, not at the man
+before her, but first at her aunt and then at her uncle, timorously, and
+murmured some inaudible question. They did not answer, and now Tedham
+and his daughter looked at each other, with what feeling no one can ever
+fully say.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VIII.</h3>
+
+<p>It always seemed to me as if we had witnessed something like the return
+of one from the dead, in this meeting. We were talking it over one
+evening some weeks later, and "It would be all very well," I
+philosophized, "if the dead came back at once, but if one came back
+after ten years, it would be difficult."</p>
+
+<p>"It was worse than coming back from the dead," said my wife. "But I hope
+that is the end of it so far as we are concerned. I am sure I am glad to
+be out of it, and I don't wish to see any of them ever again."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I don't know about that," I returned, and I began to laugh. "You
+know Hubbell, our inspector of agencies?"</p>
+
+<p>"What has he got to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hubbell has had a romantic moment. He thinks that in view of the
+restitution Tedham made as far as he could, and his excellent
+record&mdash;elsewhere&mdash;it would be a fine thing for the Reciprocity to
+employ him again in our office, and he wanted to suggest it to the
+actuary."</p>
+
+<p>"Basil! You didn't allow him to do such a cruel thing as that?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, my dear, I am happy to say that I sat upon that dramatic climax."</p>
+
+<p>This measurably consoled my wife, but she did not cease to denounce the
+idea for some moments. When she ended, I asked her if she would allow
+the company to employ Tedham in a subordinate place in another city, and
+when she signified that this might be suffered, I said that this was
+what would probably be done. Then I added, seriously, that I thoroughly
+liked the notion of it, and that I took it for a testimony that poor old
+Tedham was right, and that he had at last fully expiated his offence
+against society.</p>
+
+<p>His daughter continued to live with her aunt and uncle, but Tedham used
+to spend his holidays with them, and, however incongruously, they got on
+together very well, I believe. The girl kept the name of Hasketh, and I
+do not suppose that many people knew her relation to Tedham. It appeared
+that our little romantic supposition of a love affair, which the reunion
+of father and child must shatter, was for the present quite gratuitous.
+But if it should ever come to that, my wife and I had made up our minds
+to let God manage. We said that we had already had one narrow escape in
+proposing to better the divine way of doing, and we should not interfere
+again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire
+confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through
+the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married
+there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident
+apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to
+wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was
+married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom she
+told all about her unhappy family history before she permitted herself
+to accept him.</p>
+
+<p>During the one brief interview I had with him, for the purpose of
+further blackening her father's character (for so I understood her
+insistence that I should see the young man), he seemed not only wholly
+unmoved by the facts, but was apparently sorry that poor Tedham had not
+done much worse things, and many more of them, that he might forgive him
+for her sake.</p>
+
+<p>They went to live abroad after they were married; and by and by Tedham
+joined them. So far now as human vision can perceive, the trouble he
+made, the evil he did, is really at an end. Love, which can alone arrest
+the consequences of wrong, had ended it, and in certain luminous moments
+it seemed to us that we had glimpsed, in our witness of this experience,
+an infinite compassion encompassing our whole being like a sea, where
+every trouble of our sins and sorrows must cease at last like a circle
+in the water.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS***</p>
+<p>******* This file should be named 18605-h.txt or 18605-h.zip *******</p>
+<p>This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:<br />
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/6/0/18605">http://www.gutenberg.org/1/8/6/0/18605</a></p>
+<p>Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.</p>
+
+<p>Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.</p>
+
+
+
+<pre>
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/license">http://www.gutenberg.org/license)</a>.
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS,' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Each eBook is in a subdirectory of the same number as the eBook's
+eBook number, often in several formats including plain vanilla ASCII,
+compressed (zipped), HTML and others.
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks replace the old file and take over
+the old filename and etext number.  The replaced older file is renamed.
+VERSIONS based on separate sources are treated as new eBooks receiving
+new filenames and etext numbers.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org">http://www.gutenberg.org</a>
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+EBooks posted prior to November 2003, with eBook numbers BELOW #10000,
+are filed in directories based on their release date.  If you want to
+download any of these eBooks directly, rather than using the regular
+search system you may utilize the following addresses and just
+download by the etext year.
+
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/">http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/</a>
+
+    (Or /etext 05, 04, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99,
+     98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90)
+
+EBooks posted since November 2003, with etext numbers OVER #10000, are
+filed in a different way.  The year of a release date is no longer part
+of the directory path.  The path is based on the etext number (which is
+identical to the filename).  The path to the file is made up of single
+digits corresponding to all but the last digit in the filename.  For
+example an eBook of filename 10234 would be found at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/0/2/3/10234
+
+or filename 24689 would be found at:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/6/8/24689
+
+An alternative method of locating eBooks:
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/GUTINDEX.ALL">http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/GUTINDEX.ALL</a>
+
+*** END: FULL LICENSE ***
+</pre>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/18605.txt b/18605.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..301e550
--- /dev/null
+++ b/18605.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8440 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Pair of Patient Lovers, by William Dean
+Howells
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: A Pair of Patient Lovers
+
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 16, 2006  [eBook #18605]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David Edwards, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/) from scanned
+images of public domain material generously made available by the Google
+Books Library Project
+(http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/library.html)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      the the Google Books Library Project. See
+      http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00647020&id
+
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS
+
+by
+
+W. D. Howells
+
+Author of "The Landlord at Lion's Head" "Ragged Lady" etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York and London
+Harper & Brothers Publishers
+1901
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   A Pair of Patient Lovers
+
+   The Pursuit of the Piano
+
+   A Difficult Case
+
+   The Magic of a Voice
+
+   A Circle in the Water
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+We first met Glendenning on the Canadian boat which carries you down the
+rapids of the St. Lawrence from Kingston and leaves you at Montreal.
+When we saw a handsome young clergyman across the promenade-deck looking
+up from his guide-book toward us, now and again, as if in default of
+knowing any one else he would be very willing to know us, we decided
+that I must make his acquaintance. He was instantly and cordially
+responsive to my question whether he had ever made the trip before, and
+he was amiably grateful when in my quality of old habitue of the route I
+pointed out some characteristic features of the scenery. I showed him
+just where we were on the long map of the river hanging over his knee,
+and I added, with no great relevancy, that my wife and I were renewing
+the fond emotion of our first trip down the St. Lawrence in the
+character of bridal pair which we had spurned when it was really ours. I
+explained that we had left the children with my wife's aunt, so as to
+render the travesty more lifelike; and when he said, "I suppose you miss
+them, though," I gave him my card. He tried to find one of his own to
+give me in return, but he could only find a lot of other people's cards.
+He wrote his name on the back of one, and handed it to me with a smile.
+"It won't do for me to put 'reverend' before it, in my own chirography,
+but that's the way I have it engraved."
+
+"Oh," I said, "the cut of your coat bewrayed you," and we had some
+laughing talk. But I felt the eye of Mrs. March dwelling upon me with
+growing impatience, till I suggested, "I should like to make you
+acquainted with my wife, Mr. Glendenning."
+
+He said, Oh, he should be so happy; and he gathered his dangling map
+into the book and came over with me to where Mrs. March sat; and, like
+the good young American husband I was in those days, I stood aside and
+left the whole talk to her. She interested him so much more than I could
+that I presently wandered away and amused myself elsewhere. When I came
+back, she clutched my arm and bade me not speak a word; it was the most
+romantic thing in the world, and she would tell me about it when we were
+alone, but now I must go off again; he had just gone to get a book for
+her which he had been speaking of, and would be back the next instant,
+and it would not do to let him suppose we had been discussing him.
+
+
+II.
+
+I was sometimes disappointed in Mrs. March's mysteries when I came up
+close to them; but I was always willing to take them on trust; and I
+submitted to the postponement of a solution in this case with more than
+my usual faith. She found time, before Mr. Glendenning reappeared, to
+ask me if I had noticed a mother and daughter on the boat, the mother
+evidently an invalid, and the daughter very devoted, and both decidedly
+ladies; and when I said, "No. Why?" she answered, "Oh, nothing," and
+that she would tell me. Then she drove me away, and we did not meet till
+I found her in our state-room just before the terrible mid-day meal they
+used to give you on the _Corinthian_, and called dinner.
+
+She began at once, while she did something to her hair before the morsel
+of mirror: "Why I wanted to know if you had noticed those people was
+because they are the reason of his being here."
+
+"Did he tell you that?"
+
+"Of course not. But I knew it, for he asked if I had seen them, or could
+tell him who they were."
+
+"It seems to me that he made pretty good time to get so far as that."
+
+"I don't say he got so far himself, but you men never know how to take
+steps for any one else. You can't put two and two together. But to my
+mind it's as plain as the nose on his face that he's seen that girl
+somewhere and is taking this trip because she's on board. He said he
+hadn't decided to come till the last moment."
+
+"What wild leaps of fancy!" I said. "But the nose on his face is
+handsome rather than plain, and I sha'n't be satisfied till I see him
+with the lady."
+
+"Yes, he's quite Greek," said Mrs. March, in assent to my opinion of his
+nose. "Too Greek for a clergyman, almost. But he isn't vain of it. Those
+beautiful people are often quite modest, and Mr. Glendenning is very
+modest."
+
+"And I'm very hungry. If you don't hurry your prinking, Isabel, we shall
+not get any dinner."
+
+"I'm ready," said my wife, and she continued with her eyes still on the
+glass: "He's got a church out in Ohio, somewhere; but he's a
+New-Englander, and he's quite wild to get back. He thinks those people
+are from Boston: I could tell in a moment if I saw them. Well, now, I
+_am_ ready," and with this she really ceased to do something to her
+hair, and came out into the long saloon with me where the table was set.
+Rows of passengers stood behind the rows of chairs, with a detaining
+grasp on nearly all of them. We gazed up and down in despair. Suddenly
+Mrs. March sped forward, and I found that Mr. Glendenning had made a
+sign to her from a distant point, where there were two vacant chairs for
+us next his own. We eagerly laid hands on them, and waited for the gong
+to sound for dinner. In this interval an elderly lady followed by a
+young girl came down the saloon toward us, and I saw signs, or rather
+emotions, of intelligence pass between Mr. Glendenning and Mrs. March
+concerning them.
+
+The older of these ladies was a tall, handsome matron, who bore her
+fifty years with a native severity qualified by a certain air of wonder
+at a world which I could well fancy had not always taken her at her own
+estimate of her personal and social importance. She had the effect of
+challenging you to do less, as she advanced slowly between the wall of
+state-rooms and the backs of the people gripping their chairs, and eyed
+them with a sort of imperious surprise that they should have left no
+place for her. So at least I read her glance, while I read in that of
+the young lady coming after, and showing her beauty first over this
+shoulder and then over that of her mother, chiefly a present amusement,
+behind which lay a character of perhaps equal pride, if not equal
+hardness. She was very beautiful, in the dark style which I cannot help
+thinking has fallen into unmerited abeyance; and as she passed us I
+could see that she was very graceful. She was dressed in a lady's
+acceptance of the fashions of that day, which would be thought so
+grotesque in this. I have heard contemporaneous young girls laugh at the
+mere notion of hoops, but in 1870 we thought hoops extremely becoming;
+and this young lady knew how to hold hers a little on one side so as to
+give herself room in the narrow avenue, and not betray more than the
+discreetest hint of a white stocking. I believe the stockings are black
+now.
+
+They both got by us, and I could see Mr. Glendenning following them with
+longing but irresolute eyes, until they turned, a long way down the
+saloon, as if to come toward us again. Then he hurried to meet them, and
+as he addressed himself first to one and then to the other, I knew him
+to be offering them his chair. So did my wife, and she said, "You must
+give up your place too, Basil," and I said I would if she wished to see
+me starve on the spot. But of course I went and joined Glendenning in
+his entreaties that they would deprive us of our chances of dinner (I
+knew what the second table was on the _Corinthian_); and I must say that
+the elder lady accepted my chair in the spirit which my secret grudge
+deserved. She made me feel as if I ought to have offered it when they
+first passed us; but it was some satisfaction to learn afterwards that
+she gave Mrs. March, for her ready sacrifice of me, as bad a half-hour
+as she ever had. She sat next to my wife, and the young lady took
+Glendenning's place, and as soon as we had left them she began trying to
+find out from Mrs. March who he was, and what his relation to us was.
+The girl tried to check her at first, and then seemed to give it up, and
+devoted herself to being rather more amiable than she otherwise might
+have been, my wife thought, in compensation for the severity of her
+mother's scrutiny. Her mother appeared disposed to hold Mrs. March
+responsible for knowing little or nothing about Mr. Glendenning.
+
+"He seems to be an Episcopal clergyman," she said, in a haughty summing
+up. "From his name I should have supposed he was Scotch and a
+Presbyterian." She began to patronize the trip we were making, and to
+abuse it; she said that she did not see what could have induced them to
+undertake it; but one had to get back from Niagara somehow, and they had
+been told at the hotel there that the boats were very comfortable. She
+had never been more uncomfortable in her life; as for the rapids, they
+made her ill, and they were obviously so dangerous that she should not
+even look at them again. Then, from having done all the talking and most
+of the eating, she fell quite silent, and gave her daughter a chance to
+speak to my wife. She had hitherto spoken only to her mother, but now
+she asked Mrs. March if she had ever been down the St. Lawrence before.
+
+When my wife explained, and asked her whether she was enjoying it, she
+answered with a rapture that was quite astonishing, in reference to her
+mother's expressions of disgust: "Oh, immensely! Every instant of it,"
+and she went on to expatiate on its peculiar charm in terms so
+intelligent and sympathetic that Mrs. March confessed it had been part
+of our wedding journey, and that this was the reason why we were now
+taking the trip.
+
+The young lady did not seem to care so much for this, and when she
+thanked my wife in leaving the table with her mother, and begged her to
+thank the gentlemen who had so kindly given up their places, she made no
+overture to further acquaintance. In fact, we had been so simply and
+merely made use of that, although we were rather meek people, we decided
+to avoid our beneficiaries for the rest of the day; and Mr. Glendenning,
+who could not, as a clergyman, indulge even a just resentment, could as
+little refuse us his sympathy. He laughed at some hints of my wife's
+experience, which she dropped before she left us to pick up a meal from
+the lukewarm leavings of the _Corinthian's_ dinner, if we could. She
+said she was going forward to get a good place on the bow, and would
+keep two camp-stools for us, which she could assure us no one would get
+away from her.
+
+We were somewhat surprised then to find her seated by the rail with the
+younger lady of the two whom she meant to avoid if she meant anything by
+what she said. She was laughing and talking on quite easy terms with her
+apparently, and "There!" she triumphed as we came up, "I've kept your
+camp-stools for you," and she showed them at her side, where she was
+holding her hand on them. "You had better put them here."
+
+The girl had stiffened a little at our approach, as I could see, but a
+young girl's stiffness is always rather amusing than otherwise, and I
+did not mind it. Neither, that I could see, did Mr. Glendenning, and it
+soon passed. It seemed that she had left her mother lying down in her
+state-room, where she justly imagined that if she did not see the rapids
+she should suffer less alarm from them; the young lady had come frankly
+to the side of Mrs. March as soon as she saw her, and asked if she might
+sit with her. She now talked to me for a decent space of time, and then
+presently, without my knowing how, she was talking to Mr. Glendenning,
+and they were comparing notes of Niagara; he was saying that he thought
+he had seen her at the Cataract House, and she was owning that she and
+her mother had at least stopped at that hotel.
+
+
+III.
+
+I have no wish, and if I had the wish I should not have the art, to keep
+back the fact that these young people were evidently very much taken
+with each other. They showed their mutual pleasure so plainly that even
+I could see it. As for Mrs. March, she was as proud of it as if she had
+invented them and set them going in their advance toward each other,
+like two mechanical toys.
+
+I confess that with reference to what my wife had told me of this young
+lady's behavior when she was with her mother, her submissiveness, her
+entire self-effacement, up to a certain point, I did not know quite what
+to make of her present independence, not to say freedom. I thought she
+might perhaps have been kept so strictly in the background, with young
+men, that she was rather disposed to make the most of any chance at them
+which offered. If the young man in this case was at no pains to hide his
+pleasure in her society, one might say that she was almost eager to show
+her delight in his. If it was a case of love at first sight, the
+earliest glimpse had been to the girl, who was all eyes for Glendenning.
+It was very pretty, but it was a little alarming, and perhaps a little
+droll, even. She was actually making the advances, not consciously, but
+helplessly; fondly, ignorantly, for I have no belief, nor had my wife (a
+much more critical observer), that she knew how she was giving herself
+away.
+
+I thought perhaps that she was in the habit from pride, or something
+like it, of holding herself in check, and that this blameless excess
+which I saw was the natural expansion from an inner constraint. But what
+I really knew was that the young people got on very rapidly, in an
+acquaintance that prospered up to the last moment I saw them together.
+This was just before the _Corinthian_ drew up to her landing at
+Montreal, when Miss Bentley (we had learned her name) came to us from
+the point where she was standing with Glendenning and said that now she
+must go to her mother, and took a sweet leave of my wife. She asked
+where we were going to stay in Montreal and whether we were going on to
+Quebec; and said her mother would wish to send Mrs. March her card.
+
+When she was gone, Glendenning explained, with rather superfluous
+apology, that he had offered to see the ladies to a hotel, for he was
+afraid that at this crowded season they might not find it easy to get
+rooms, and he did not wish Mrs. Bentley, who was an invalid, to have any
+anxieties about it. He bade us an affectionate, but not a disconsolate
+adieu, and when we had got into the modest conveyance (if an omnibus is
+modest) which was to take us to the Ottawa House, we saw him drive off
+to the St. Lawrence Hall (it was twenty-five years ago) in one of those
+vitreous and tinkling Montreal landaus, with Mrs. and Miss Bentley and
+Mrs. Bentley's maid.
+
+We were still so young as to be very much absorbed in the love affairs
+of other people; I believe women always remain young enough for that;
+and Mrs. March talked about the one we fancied we had witnessed the
+beginning of pretty much the whole evening. The next morning we got
+letters from Boston, telling us how the children were and all that they
+were doing and saying. We had stood it very well, as long as we did not
+hear anything about them, and we had lent ourselves in a sort of
+semi-forgetfulness of them to the associations of the past when they
+were not; but now to learn that they were hearty and happy, and that
+they sent love and kisses, was too much. With one mind we renounced the
+notion of going on to Quebec; we found that we could just get the
+ten-o'clock train that would reach Boston by eleven that night, and we
+made all haste and got it. We had not been really at peace, we
+perceived, till that moment since we had bidden the children good-bye.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Perhaps it was because we left Montreal so abruptly that Mrs. March
+never received Mrs. Bentley's card. It may be at the Ottawa House to
+this day, for all I know. What is certain is that we saw and heard
+nothing more of her or her daughter. Glendenning called to see us as he
+passed through Boston on his way west from Quebec, but we were neither
+of us at home and we missed him, to my wife's vivid regret. I rather
+think we expected him to find some excuse for writing after he reached
+his place in northern Ohio; but he did not write, and he became more and
+more the memory of a young clergyman in the beginning of a love-affair,
+till one summer, while we were still disputing where we should spend the
+hot weather within business reach, there came a letter from him saying
+that he was settled at Gormanville, and wishing that he might tempt us
+up some afternoon before we were off to the mountains or seaside. This
+revived all my wife's waning interest in him, and it was hard to keep
+the answer I made him from expressing in a series of crucial inquiries
+the excitement she felt at his being in New England and so near Boston,
+and in Gormanville of all places. It was one of the places we had
+thought of for the summer, and we were yet so far from having
+relinquished it that we were recurring from time to time in hope and
+fear to the advertisement of an old village mansion there, with ample
+grounds, garden, orchard, ice-house, and stables, for a very low rental
+to an unexceptionable tenant. We had no doubt of our own qualifications,
+but we had misgivings of the village mansion; and I am afraid that I
+rather unduly despatched the personal part of my letter, in my haste to
+ask what Glendenning knew and what he thought of the Conwell place.
+However, the letter seemed to serve all purposes. There came a reply
+from Glendenning, most cordial, even affectionate, saying that the
+Conwell place was delightful, and I must come at once and see it. He
+professed that he would be glad to have Mrs. March come too, and he
+declared that if his joy at having us did not fill his modest rectory to
+bursting, he was sure it could stand the physical strain of our
+presence, though he confessed that his guest-chamber was tiny.
+
+"He wants _you_, Basil," my wife divined from terms which gave me no
+sense of any latent design of parting us in his hospitality. "But,
+evidently, it isn't a chance to be missed, and you must go--instantly.
+Can you go to-morrow? But telegraph him you're coming, and tell him to
+hold on to the Conwell place; it may be snapped up any moment if it's so
+desirable."
+
+I did not go till the following week, when I found that no one had
+attempted to snap up the Conwell place. In fact, it rather snapped me
+up, I secured it with so little trouble. I reported it so perfect that
+all my wife's fears of a latent objection to it were roused again. But
+when I said I thought we could relinquish it, her terrors subsided; and
+I thought this the right moment to deliver a stroke that I had been
+holding in reserve.
+
+"You know," I began, "the Bentleys have their summer place there--the
+old Bentley homestead. It's their ancestral town, you know."
+
+"Bentleys? What Bentleys?" she demanded, opaquely.
+
+"Why, those people we met on the _Corinthian_, summer before last--you
+thought he was in love with the girl--"
+
+A simultaneous photograph could alone reproduce Mrs. March's tumultuous
+and various emotions as she seized the fact conveyed in my words. She
+poured out a volume of mingled conjectures, assertions, suspicions,
+conclusions, in which there was nothing final but the decision that we
+must not dream of going there; that it would look like thrusting
+ourselves in, and would be in the worst sort of taste; they would all
+hate us, and we should feel that we were spies upon the young people;
+for of course the Bentleys had got Glendenning there to marry him, and
+in effect did not want any one to witness the disgraceful spectacle.
+
+I said, "That may be the nefarious purpose of the young lady, but, as I
+understood Glendenning, it is no part of her mother's design."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Miss Bentley may have got him there to marry him, but Mrs. Bentley
+seems to have meant nothing more than an engagement at the worst."
+
+"What _do_ you mean? They're not engaged, are they?"
+
+"They're not married, at any rate, and I suppose they're engaged. I did
+not have it from Miss Bentley, but I suppose Glendenning may be trusted
+in such a case."
+
+"Now," said my wife, with a severity that might well have appalled me,
+"if you will please to explain, Basil, it will be better for you."
+
+"Why, it is simply this. Glendenning seems to have made himself so
+useful to the mother and pleasing to the daughter after we left them in
+Montreal that he was tolerated on a pretence that there was reason for
+his writing back to Mrs. Bentley after he got home, and, as Mrs. Bentley
+never writes letters, Miss Bentley had the hard task of answering him.
+This led to a correspondence."
+
+"And to her moving heaven and earth to get him to Gormanville. I see! Of
+course she did it so that no one knew what she was about!"
+
+"Apparently. Glendenning himself was not in the secret. The Bentleys
+were in Europe last summer, and he did not know that they had a place at
+Gormanville till he came to live there. Another proof that Miss Bentley
+got him there is the fact that she and her mother are Unitarians, and
+that they would naturally be able to select the rector of the Episcopal
+church."
+
+"Go on," said Mrs. March, not the least daunted.
+
+"Oh, there's nothing more. He is simply rector of St. Michael's at
+Gormanville; and there is not the slightest proof that any young lady
+had a hand in getting him there."
+
+"As if I cared in the least whether she had! I suppose you will allow
+that she had something to do with getting engaged to him, and that is
+the _great_ matter."
+
+"Yes, I must allow that, if we are to suppose that young ladies have
+anything to do with young men getting engaged to them; it doesn't seem
+exactly delicate. But the novel phase of this great matter is the
+position of the young lady's mother in regard to it. From what I could
+make out she consents to the engagement of her daughter, but she don't
+and won't consent to her marriage." My wife glared at me with so little
+speculation in her eyes that I felt obliged to disclaim all
+responsibility for the fact I had reported. "Thou canst not say _I_ did
+it. _They_ did it, and Miss Bentley, if any one, is to blame. It seems,
+from what Glendenning says, that the young lady and he wrote to each
+other while she was abroad, and that they became engaged by letter. Then
+the affair was broken off because of her mother's opposition; but since
+they have met at Gormanville, the engagement has been renewed. So much
+they've managed against the old lady's will, but apparently on condition
+that they won't get married till she says."
+
+"Nonsense! How could she stop them?"
+
+"She couldn't, I dare say, by any of the old romantic methods of a
+convent or disinheritance; but she is an invalid; she wants to keep her
+daughter with her, and she avails with the girl's conscience by being
+simply dependent and obstructive. The young people have carried their
+engagement through, and now such hope as they have is fixed upon her
+finally yielding in the matter of their marriage, though Glendenning was
+obliged to confess that there was no sign of her doing so. They
+agree--Miss Bentley and he--that they cannot get married as they got
+engaged, in spite of her mother--it would be unclerical if it wouldn't
+be unfilial--and they simply have to bide their time."
+
+My wife asked abruptly, "How many chambers are there in the Conwell
+place?"
+
+I said, and then she asked, "Is there a windmill or a force-pump?" I
+answered proudly that in Gormanville there was town water, but that if
+this should give out there were both a windmill and a force-pump on the
+Conwell place.
+
+"It is very complete," she sighed, as if this had removed all hope from
+her, and she added, "I suppose we had better take it."
+
+
+V.
+
+We certainly did not take it for the sake of being near the Bentleys,
+neither of whom had given us particular reason to desire their further
+acquaintance, though the young lady had agreeably modified herself when
+apart from her mother. In fact, we went to Gormanville because it was an
+exceptional chance to get a beautiful place for a very little money,
+where we could go early and stay late. But no sooner had we acted from
+this quite personal, not to say selfish, motive than we were rewarded
+with the sweetest overtures of neighborliness by the Bentleys. They
+waited, of course, till we were settled in our house before they came to
+call upon Mrs. March, but they had been preceded by several hospitable
+offerings from their garden, their dairy, and their hen-house, which
+were very welcome in the days of our first uncertainty as to
+trades-people. We analyzed this hospitality as an effect of that sort of
+nature in Mrs. Bentley which can equally assert its superiority by
+blessing or banning. Evidently, since chance had again thrown us in her
+way, she would not go out of it to be offensive, but would continue in
+it, and make the best of us.
+
+No doubt Glendenning had talked us into the Bentleys; and this my wife
+said she hated most of all; for we should have to live up to the notion
+of us imparted by a young man from the impressions of the moment when he
+saw us purple in the light of his dawning love. In justice to
+Glendenning, however, I must say that he did nothing, by a show of his
+own assiduities, to urge us upon the Bentleys after we came to
+Gormanville. If we had not felt so sure of him, we might have thought he
+was keeping his regard for us a little too modestly in the background.
+He made us one cool little call, the evening of our arrival, in which he
+had the effect of anxiety to get away as soon as possible; and after
+that we saw him no more until he came with Miss Bentley and her mother a
+week later. His forbearance was all the more remarkable because his
+church and his rectory were just across the street from the Conwell
+place, at the corner of another street, where we could see their wooden
+gothic in the cold shadow of the maples with which the green in front of
+them was planted.
+
+During all that time Glendenning's personal elevation remained invisible
+to us, and we began to wonder if he were not that most lamentable of
+fellow-creatures, a clerical snob. I am not sure still that he might not
+have been so in some degree, there was such a mixture of joy that was
+almost abject in his genuine affection for us when Mrs. Bentley openly
+approved us on her first visit. I dare say he would not have quite
+abandoned us in any case; but he must have felt responsible for us, and
+it must have been such a load off him when she took that turn with us.
+
+She called in the afternoon, and the young people dropped in again the
+same evening, and took the trouble to win back our simple hearts. That
+is, Miss Bentley showed herself again as frank and sweet as she had been
+on the boat when she joined my wife after dinner and left her mother in
+her state-room. Glendenning was again the Glendenning of our first
+meeting, and something more. He fearlessly led the way to intimacies of
+feeling with an expansion uncommon even in an accepted lover, and we
+made our conclusions that however subject he might be to his
+indefinitely future mother-in-law, he would not be at all so to his
+wife, if she could help it. He took the lead, but because she gave it
+him; and she displayed an aptness for conjugal submissiveness which
+almost amounted to genius. Whenever she spoke to either of us, it was
+with one eye on him to see if he liked what she was saying. It was so
+perfect that I doubted if it could last; but my wife said a girl like
+that could keep it up till she dropped. I have never been sure that she
+liked us as well as he did; I think it was part of her intense loyalty
+to seem to like us a great deal more.
+
+She was deeply in love, and nothing but her ladylike breeding kept her
+from being openly fond. I figured her in a sort of impassioned
+incandescence, such as only a pure and perhaps cold nature could burn
+into; and I amused myself a little with the sense of Glendenning's
+apparent inadequacy. Sweet he was, and admirably gentle and fine; he had
+an unfailing good sense, and a very ready wisdom, as I grew more and
+more to perceive. But he was an inch or so shorter than Miss Bentley,
+and in his sunny blondness, with his golden red beard and hair, and his
+pinkish complexion, he wanted still more the effect of an emotional
+equality with her. He was very handsome, with features excellently
+regular; his smile was celestially beautiful; innocent gay lights danced
+in his blue eyes, through lashes and under brows that were a lighter
+blond than his beard and hair.
+
+
+VI.
+
+The next morning, which was of a Saturday, when I did not go to town, he
+came over to us again from the shadow of his sombre maples, and fell
+simply and naturally into talk about his engagement. He was much fuller
+in my wife's presence than he had been with me alone, and told us the
+hopes he had of Mrs. Bentley's yielding within a reasonable time. He
+seemed to gather encouragement from the sort of perspective he got the
+affair into by putting it before us, and finding her dissent to her
+daughter's marriage so ridiculous in our eyes after her consent to her
+engagement that a woman of her great good sense evidently could not
+persist in it.
+
+"There is no personal objection to myself," he said, with a modest
+satisfaction. "In fact, I think she really likes me, and only dislikes
+my engagement to Edith. But she knows that Edith is incapable of
+marrying against her mother's will, or I of wishing her to do so; though
+there is nothing else to prevent us."
+
+My wife allowed herself to say, "Isn't it rather cruel of her?"
+
+"Why, no, not altogether; or not so much so as it might be in different
+circumstances. I make every allowance for her. In the first place, she
+is a great sufferer."
+
+"Yes, I know," my wife relented.
+
+"She suffers terribly from asthma. I don't suppose she has lain down in
+bed for ten years. She sleeps in an easy-chair, and she's never quite
+free from her trouble; when there's a paroxysm of the disease, her
+anguish is frightful. I've never seen it, of course, but I have heard
+it; you hear it all through the house. Edith has the constant care of
+her. Her mother has to be perpetually moved and shifted in her chair,
+and Edith does this for her; she will let no one else come near her;
+Edith must look to the ventilation, and burn the pastilles which help
+her to breathe. She depends upon her every instant." He had grown very
+solemn in voice and face, and he now said, "When I think of what she
+endures, it seems to me that it is I who am cruel even to dream of
+taking her daughter from her."
+
+"Yes," my wife assented.
+
+"But there is really no present question of that We are very happy as it
+is. We can wait, and wait willingly till Mrs. Bentley wishes us to wait
+no longer; or--"
+
+He stopped, and we were both aware of something in his mind which he put
+from him. He became a little pale, and sat looking very grave. Then he
+rose. "I don't know whether to say how welcome you would be at St.
+Michael's to-morrow, for you may not be--"
+
+"_We_ are Unitarians, too," said Mrs. March. "But we are coming to hear
+_you_."
+
+"I am glad you are coming _to church_," said Glendenning, putting away
+the personal tribute implied with a gentle dignity that became him.
+
+
+VII.
+
+We waited a discreet time before returning the call of the Bentley
+ladies, but not so long as to seem conscious. In fact, we had been
+softened towards Mrs. Bentley by what Glendenning told us of her
+suffering, and we were disposed to forgive a great deal of patronage and
+superiority to her asthma; they were not part of the disease, but still
+they were somehow to be considered with reference to it in her case.
+
+We were admitted by the maid, who came running down the hall stairway,
+with a preoccupied air, to the open door where we stood waiting. There
+were two great syringa-bushes on each hand close to the portal, which
+were in full flower, and which flung their sweetness through the doorway
+and the windows; but when we found ourselves in the dim old-fashioned
+parlor, we were aware of this odor meeting and mixing with another which
+descended from the floor above--the smell of some medicated pastille.
+There was a sound of anxious steps overhead, and a hurried closing of
+doors, with the mechanical sound of labored breathing.
+
+"We have come at a bad time," I suggested.
+
+"Yes, _why_ did they let us in?" cried my wife in an anguish of
+compassion and vexation. She repeated her question to Miss Bentley, who
+came down almost immediately, looking pale, indeed, but steady, and
+making a brave show of welcome.
+
+"My mother would have wished it," she said, "and she sent me as soon as
+she knew who it was. You mustn't be distressed," she entreated, with a
+pathetic smile. "It's really a kind of relief to her; anything is that
+takes her mind off herself for a moment. She will be so sorry to miss
+you, and you must come again as soon as you can."
+
+"Oh, we will, we will!" cried my wife, in nothing less than a passion of
+meekness; and Miss Bentley went on to comfort her.
+
+"It's dreadful, of course, but it isn't as bad as it sounds, and it
+isn't nearly so bad as it looks. She is used to it, and there is a great
+deal in that. Oh, _don't_ go!" she begged, at a movement Mrs. March made
+to rise. "The doctor is with her just now, and I'm not needed. It will
+be kind if you'll stay; it's a relief to be out of the room with a good
+excuse!" She even laughed a little as she said this; she went on to lead
+the talk away from what was so intensely in our minds, and presently I
+heard her and my wife speaking of other things. The power to do this is
+from some heroic quality in women's minds that we do not credit them
+with; we think it their volatility, and I dare say I thought myself much
+better, or at least more serious in my make, because I could not follow
+them, and did not lose one of those hoarse gasps of the sufferer
+overhead. Occasionally there came a stifling cry that made me jump,
+inwardly if not outwardly, but those women had their drama to play, and
+they played it to the end.
+
+Miss Bentley came hospitably to the door with us, and waited there till
+she thought we could not see her turn and run swiftly up-stairs.
+
+"Why _did_ you stay, my dear?" I groaned. "I felt as if I were
+personally smothering Mrs. Bentley every moment we were there."
+
+"I _had_ to do it. She wished it, and, as she said, it was a relief to
+have us there, though she was wishing us at the ends of the earth all
+the time. But what a ghastly life!"
+
+"Yes; and can you wonder that the poor woman doesn't want to give her
+up, to lose the help and comfort she gets from her? It's a wicked thing
+for that girl to think of marrying."
+
+"What are you talking about, Basil? It's a wicked thing for her _not_ to
+think of it! She is wearing her life out, _tearing_ it out, and she
+isn't doing her mother a bit of good. Her mother would be just as well,
+and better, with a good strong nurse, who could lift her this way and
+that, and change her about, without feeling her heart-strings wrung at
+every gasp, as that poor child must. Oh, I _wish_ Glendenning was man
+enough to make her run off with him, and get married, in spite of
+everything. But, of course, that's impossible--for a clergyman! And her
+sacrifice began so long ago that it's become part of her life, and
+she'll simply have to keep on."
+
+
+VIII.
+
+When her attack passed off, Mrs. Bentley sent and begged my wife to come
+again and see her. She went without me, while I was in town, but she was
+so circumstantial in her report of her visit, when I came home, that I
+never felt quite sure I had not been present. What most interested us
+both was the extreme independence which the mother and daughter showed
+beyond a certain point, and the daughter's great frankness in expressing
+her difference of feeling. We had already had some hint of this, the
+first day we met her, and we were not surprised at it now, my wife at
+first hand, or I at second hand. Mrs. Bentley opened the way for her
+daughter by saying that the worst of sickness was that it made one such
+an affliction to others. She lived in an atmosphere of devotion, she
+said, but her suffering left her so little of life that she could not
+help clinging selfishly to everything that remained.
+
+My wife perceived that this was meant for Miss Bentley, though it was
+spoken to herself; and Miss Bentley seemed to take the same view of the
+fact. She said: "We needn't use any circumlocution with Mrs. March,
+mother. She knows just how the affair stands. You can say whatever you
+wish, though I don't know why you should wish to say anything. You have
+made your own terms with us, and we are keeping them to the letter. What
+more can you ask? Do you want me to break with Mr. Glendenning? I will
+do that too, if you ask it. You have got everything _but_ that, and you
+can have that at any time. But Arthur and I are perfectly satisfied as
+it is, and we can wait as long as you wish us to wait."
+
+Her mother said: "I'm not allowed to forget that for a single hour," and
+Miss Bentley said, "I never remind you of it unless you make me, mother.
+You may be thinking of it all the time, but it isn't because of anything
+I say."
+
+"Or that you _do_?" asked Mrs. Bentley; and her daughter answered, "I
+can't help existing, of course."
+
+My wife broke off from the account she was giving me of her visit: "You
+can imagine how pleasant all this was for me, Basil, and how anxious I
+was to prolong my call!"
+
+"Well," I returned, "there were compensations. It was extremely
+interesting; it was life. You can't deny that, my dear."
+
+"It was more like death. Several times I was on the point of going, but
+you know when there's been a painful scene you feel so sorry for the
+people who've made it that you can't bear to leave them to themselves. I
+did get up to go, once, in mere self-defence, but they both urged me to
+stay, and I couldn't help staying till they could talk of other things.
+But now tell me what you think of it all. Which should your feeling be
+with the most? That is what I want to get at before I tell you mine."
+
+"Which side was I on when we talked about them last?"
+
+"Oh, when did we talk about them _last_? We are always talking about
+them! I am getting no good of the summer at all. I shall go home in the
+fall more jaded and worn out than when I came. To think that we should
+have this beautiful place, where we could be so happy and comfortable,
+if it were not for having this abnormal situation under our nose and
+eyes all the time!"
+
+"Abnormal? I don't call it abnormal," I began, and I was sensible of my
+wife's thoughts leaving her own injuries for my point of view so swiftly
+that I could almost hear them whir.
+
+"Not abnormal!" she gasped.
+
+"No; only too natural. Isn't it perfectly natural for an invalid like
+that to want to keep her daughter with her; and isn't it perfectly
+natural for a daughter, with a New England sense of duty, to yield to
+her wish? You might say that she could get married and live at home, and
+then she and Glendenning could both devote themselves--"
+
+"No, no," my wife broke in, "that wouldn't do. Marriage is marriage; and
+it puts the husband and wife with each other first; when it doesn't,
+it's a miserable mockery."
+
+"Even when there's a sick mother in the case?"
+
+"A thousand sick mothers wouldn't alter the case. And that's what they
+all three instinctively know, and they're doing the only thing they can
+do."
+
+"Then I don't see what we're complaining of."
+
+"Complaining of? We're complaining of its being all wrong and--romantic.
+Her mother has asked more than she had any right to ask, and Miss
+Bentley has tried to do more than she can perform, and that has made
+them hate each other."
+
+"Should you say _hate_, quite?"
+
+"It must come to that, if Mrs. Bentley lives."
+
+"Then let us hope she--"
+
+"My dear!" cried Mrs. March, warningly.
+
+"Oh, come, now!" I retorted. "Do you mean to say that you haven't
+thought how very much it would simplify the situation if--"
+
+"Of course I have! And that is the wicked part of it. It's that that is
+wearing me out. It's perfectly hideous!"
+
+"Well, fortunately we're not actively concerned in the affair, and we
+needn't take any measures in regard to it. We are mere spectators, and
+as I see it the situation is not only inevitable for Mrs. Bentley, but
+it has a sort of heroic propriety for Miss Bentley."
+
+"And Glendenning?"
+
+"Oh, Glendenning isn't provided for in my scheme."
+
+"Then I can tell you that your scheme, Basil, is worse than worthless."
+
+"I didn't brag of it, my dear," I said, meekly enough. "I'm sorry for
+him, but I can't help him. He must provide for himself out of his
+religion."
+
+
+IX.
+
+It was, indeed, a trying summer for our emotions, torn as we were
+between our pity for Mrs. Bentley and our compassion for her daughter.
+We had no repose, except when we centred our sympathies upon
+Glendenning, whom we could yearn over in tender regret without doing any
+one else wrong, or even criticising another. He was our great stay in
+that respect, and though a mere external witness might have thought that
+he had the easiest part, we who knew his gentle and affectionate nature
+could not but feel for him. We never concealed from ourselves certain
+foibles of his; I have hinted at one, and we should have liked it better
+if he had not been so sensible of the honor, from a worldly point, of
+being engaged to Miss Bentley. But this was a very innocent vanity, and
+he would have been willing to suffer for her mother and for herself, if
+she had let him. I have tried to insinuate how she would not let him,
+but freed him as much as possible from the stress of the situation, and
+assumed for him a mastery, a primacy, which he would never have assumed
+for himself. We thought this very pretty of her, and in fact she was
+capable of pretty things. What was hard and arrogant in her, and she was
+not without something of the kind at times, was like her mother; but
+even she, poor soul, had her good points, as I have attempted to
+suggest. We used to dwell upon them, when our talk with Glendenning grew
+confidential, as it was apt to do; for it seemed to console him to
+realize that her daughter and he were making their sacrifice to a not
+wholly unamiable person.
+
+He confided equally in my wife and myself, but there were times when I
+think he rather preferred the counsel of a man friend. Once when we had
+gone a walk into the country, which around Gormanville is of the
+pathetic Mid-Massachusetts loveliness and poverty, we sat down in a
+hillside orchard to rest, and he began abruptly to talk of his affair.
+Sometimes, he said, he felt that it was all an error, and he could not
+rid himself of the fear that an error persisted in was a wrong, and
+therefore a species of sin.
+
+"That is very interesting," I said. "I wonder if there is anything in
+it? At first blush it looks so logical; but is it? Or are you simply
+getting morbid? What is the error? What is your error?"
+
+"You know," he said, with a gentle refusal of my willingness to make
+light of his trouble. "It is surely an error to allow a woman to give
+her word when she can promise nothing more, and to let her hold herself
+to it."
+
+I could have told him that I did not think the error in this case was
+altogether or mainly his, or the persistence in it; for it had seemed to
+me from the beginning that the love between him and Miss Bentley was
+fully as much her affair as his, and that quite within the bounds of
+maidenly modesty she showed herself as passionately true to their
+plighted troth. But of course this would not do, and I had to be content
+with the ironical suggestion that he might try offering to release Miss
+Bentley.
+
+"Don't laugh at me," he implored, and I confess his tone would have
+taken from me any heart to do so.
+
+"My dear fellow," I said, "I see your point. But don't you think you are
+quite needlessly adding to your affliction by pressing it? You two are
+in the position which isn't at all uncommon with engaged people, of
+having to wait upon exterior circumstances before you get married.
+Suppose you were prevented by poverty, as often happens? It would be a
+hardship as it is now; but in that case would your engagement be any
+less an error than it is now? I don't think it would, and I don't
+believe you think so either."
+
+"In that case we should not be opposing our wills to the will of some
+one else, who has a better claim to her daughter's allegiance than I
+have. It seems to me that our error was in letting her mother consent to
+our engagement if she would not or could not consent to our marriage.
+When it came to that we ought both to have had the strength to say that
+then there should be no engagement. It was my place to do that. I could
+have prevented the error which I can't undo."
+
+"I don't see how it could have been easier to prevent than to undo your
+error. I don't admit it's an error, but I call it so because you do.
+After all, an engagement is nothing but an open confession between two
+people that they are in love with each other and wish to marry. There
+need be no sort of pledge or promise to make the engagement binding, if
+there is love. It's the love that binds."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It bound you from your first acknowledgment of it, and unless you could
+deny your love now, or hereafter, it must always bind you. If you own
+that you still love each other, you are still engaged, no matter how
+much you release each other. Could you think of loving her and marrying
+some one else? Could she love you and marry another? There isn't any
+error, unless you've mistaken your feeling for each other. If you have,
+I should decidedly say you couldn't break your engagement too soon. In
+fact, there wouldn't be any real engagement to break."
+
+"Of course you are right," said Glendenning, but not so strenuously as
+he might.
+
+I had a feeling that he had not put forward the main cause of his
+unhappiness, though he had given a true cause; that he had made some
+lesser sense of wrong stand for a greater, as people often do in
+confessing themselves; and I was not surprised when he presently added:
+"It is not merely the fact that she is bound in that way, and that her
+young life is passing in this sort of hopeless patience, but
+that--that--I don't know how to put the ugly and wicked thing into
+words, but I assure you that sometimes when I think--when I'm aware that
+I know--Ah, I can't say it!"
+
+"I fancy I understand what you mean, my dear boy," I said, and in the
+right of my ten years' seniority I put my hand caressingly on his
+shoulder, "and you are no more guilty than I am in knowing that if Mrs.
+Bentley were not in the way there would be no obstacle to your
+happiness."
+
+"But such a cognition is of hell," he cried, and he let his face fall
+into his hands and sobbed heartrendingly.
+
+"Yes," I said, "such a cognition is of hell; you are quite right. So are
+all evil concepts and knowledges; but so long as they are merely things
+of our intelligence, they are no part of us, and we are not guilty of
+them."
+
+"No; I trust not, I trust not," he returned, and I let him sob his
+trouble out before I spoke again; and then I began with a laugh of
+unfeigned gayety. Something that my wife had hinted in one of our talks
+about the lovers freakishly presented itself to my mind, and I said,
+"There is a way, and a very practical way, to put an end to the anomaly
+you feel in an engagement which doesn't imply a marriage."
+
+"And what is that?" he asked, not very hopefully; but he dried his eyes
+and calmed himself.
+
+"Well, speaking after the manner of men, you might run off with Miss
+Bentley."
+
+All the blood in his body flushed into his face. "Don't!" he gasped, and
+I divined that what I had said must have been in his thoughts before,
+and I laughed again. "It wouldn't do," he added, piteously. "The
+scandal--I am a clergyman, and my parish--"
+
+I perceived that no moral scruple presented itself to him; when it came
+to the point, he was simply and naturally a lover, like any other man;
+and I persisted: "It would only be a seven days' wonder. I never heard
+of a clergyman's running away to be married; but they must have
+sometimes done it. Come, I don't believe you'd have to plead hard with
+Miss Bentley, and Mrs. March and I will aid and abet you to the limit of
+our small ability. I'm sure that if I wrap up warm against the night
+air, she will let me go and help you hold the rope-ladder taut."
+
+
+X.
+
+It was not very reverent to his cloth, or his recent tragical mood, but
+Glendenning was not offended; he laughed with a sheepish pleasure, and
+that evening he came with Miss Bentley to call upon us. The visit passed
+without unusual confidences until they rose to go, when she said
+abruptly to me: "I feel that we both owe you a great deal, Mr. March.
+Arthur has been telling me of your talk this afternoon, and I think that
+what you said was all so wise and true! I don't mean," she added, "your
+suggestion about putting an end to the anomaly!" and she and Glendenning
+both laughed.
+
+My wife said, "That was very wicked, and I have scolded him for thinking
+of such a thing." She had, indeed, forgotten that she had put it in my
+head, and made me wholly responsible for it.
+
+"Then you must scold me too a little, Mrs. March," said the girl, "for
+I've sometimes wondered if I couldn't work Arthur up to the point of
+making me run away with him," which was a joke that wonderfully amused
+us all.
+
+I said, "I shouldn't think it would be so difficult;" and she retorted:
+
+"Oh, you've no idea how obdurate clergymen are;" and then she went on,
+seriously, to thank me for talking Glendenning out of his morbid mood.
+With the frankness sometimes characteristic of her she said that if he
+had released her, it would have made no difference--she should still
+have felt herself bound to him; and until he should tell her that he no
+longer cared for her, she should feel that he was bound to her. I saw no
+great originality in this reproduction of my own ideas. But when Miss
+Bentley added that she believed her mother herself would be shocked and
+disappointed if they were to give each other up, I was aware of being in
+the presence of a curious psychological fact. I so wholly lost myself in
+the inquiry it invited that I let the talk flow on round me unheeded
+while I questioned whether Mrs. Bentley did not derive a satisfaction
+from her own and her daughter's mutual opposition which she could never
+have enjoyed from their perfect agreement. She had made a certain
+concession in consenting to the engagement, and this justified her to
+herself in refusing her consent to the marriage, while the ingratitude
+of the young people in not being content with what she had done formed a
+grievance of constant avail with a lady of her temperament. From what
+Miss Bentley let fall, half seriously, half jokingly, as well as what I
+observed, I divined a not unnatural effect of the strained relations
+between her and her mother. She concentrated whatever resentment she
+felt upon Miss Bentley, insomuch that it seemed as though she might
+altogether have withdrawn her opposition if it had been a question
+merely of Glendenning's marriage. So far from disliking him, she was
+rather fond of him, and she had no apparent objection to him except as
+her daughter's husband. It had not always been so; at first she had an
+active rancor against him; but this had gradually yielded to his
+invincible goodness and sweetness.
+
+"Who could hold out against him?" his betrothed demanded, fondly, when
+these facts had been more or less expressed to us; and it was not the
+first time that her love had seemed more explicit than his. He smiled
+round upon her, pressing the hand she put in his arm; for she asked this
+when they stood on our threshold ready to go, and then he glanced at us
+with eyes that fell bashfully from ours.
+
+"Oh, of course it will come right in time," said my wife when they were
+gone, and I agreed that they need only have patience. We had all talked
+ourselves into a cheerful frame concerning the affair; we had seen it in
+its amusing aspects, and laughed about it; and that seemed almost in
+itself to dispose of Mrs. Bentley's opposition. My wife and I decided
+that this could not long continue; that by-and-by she would become tired
+of it, and this would happen all the sooner if the lovers submitted
+absolutely, and did nothing to remind her of their submission.
+
+
+XI.
+
+The Conwells came home from Europe the next summer, and we did not go
+again to Gormanville. But from time to time we heard of the Bentleys,
+and we heard to our great amaze that there was no change in the
+situation, as concerned Miss Bentley and Glendenning. I think that later
+it would have surprised us if we had learned that there was a change.
+Their lives all seemed to have adjusted themselves to the conditions,
+and we who were mere spectators came at last to feel nothing abnormal in
+them.
+
+Now and then we saw Glendenning, and now and then Miss Bentley came to
+call upon Mrs. March, when she was in town. Her mother had given up her
+Boston house, and they lived the whole year round at Gormanville, where
+the air was good for Mrs. Bentley without her apparently being the
+better for it; again, we heard in a roundabout way that their
+circumstances were not so fortunate as they had been, and that they had
+given up their Boston house partly from motives of economy.
+
+There was no reason why our intimacy with the lovers' affairs should
+continue, and it did not. Miss Bentley made mention of Glendenning, when
+my wife saw her, with what Mrs. March decided to be an abiding fealty,
+but without offer of confidence; and Glendenning, when we happened to
+meet at rare intervals, did not invite me to more than formal inquiry
+concerning the well-being of Mrs. Bentley and her daughter.
+
+He was undoubtedly getting older, and he looked it. He was one of those
+gentle natures which put on fat, not from self-indulgence, but from want
+of resisting force, and the clerical waistcoat that buttoned black to
+his throat swayed decidedly beyond a straight line at his waist. His
+red-gold hair was getting thin, and though he wore it cut close all
+round, it showed thinner on the crown than on the temples, and his pale
+eyebrows were waning. He had a settled patience of look which would have
+been a sadness, if there had not been mixed with it an air of resolute
+cheerfulness. I am not sure that this kept it from being sad, either.
+
+Miss Bentley, on her part, was no longer the young girl she was when we
+met on the _Corinthian_. She must then have been about twenty, and she
+was now twenty-six, but she looked thirty. Dark people show their age
+early, and she showed hers in cheeks that grew thinner if not paler, and
+in a purple shadow under her fine eyes. The parting of her black hair
+was wider than it once was, and she wore it smooth in apparent disdain
+of those arts of fluffing and fringing which give an air of vivacity, if
+not of youth. I should say she had always been a serious girl, and now
+she showed the effect of a life that could not have been gay for any
+one.
+
+The lovers promised themselves, as we knew, that Mrs. Bentley would
+relent, and abandon what was more like a whimsical caprice than a
+settled wish. But as time wore on, and she gave no sign of changing, I
+have wondered whether some change did not come upon them, which affected
+them towards each other without affecting their constancy. I fancied
+their youthful passion taking on the sad color of patience, and
+contenting itself more and more with such friendly companionship as
+their fate afforded; it became, without marriage, that affectionate
+comradery which wedded love passes into with the lapse of as many years
+as they had been plighted. "What," I once suggested to my wife, in a
+very darkling mood--"what if they should gradually grow apart, and end
+in rejoicing that they had never been allowed to join their lives?
+Wouldn't that be rather Hawthornesque?"
+
+"It wouldn't be true," said Mrs. March, "and I don't see why you should
+put such a notion upon Hawthorne. If you can't be more cheerful about
+it, Basil, I wish you wouldn't talk of the affair at all."
+
+"Oh, I'm quite willing to be cheerful about it, my dear," I returned;
+"and, if you like, we will fancy Mrs. Bentley coming round and ardently
+wishing their marriage, and their gayly protesting that after having
+given the matter a great deal of thought they had decided it would be
+better not to marry, but to live on separately for their own sake, just
+as they have been doing for hers so long. Wouldn't that be cheerful?"
+
+Mrs. March said that if I wished to tease it was because I had no ideas
+on the subject, and she would advise me to drop it. I did so, for the
+better part of the evening, but I could not relinquish it altogether.
+"Do you think," I asked, finally, "that any sort of character will stand
+the test of such a prolonged engagement?"
+
+"Why not? Very indifferent characters stand the test of marriage, and
+that's indefinitely prolonged."
+
+"Yes, but it's not indefinite itself. Marriage is something very
+distinct and permanent; but such an engagement as this has no sort of
+future. It is a mere motionless present, without the inspiration of a
+common life, and with no hope of release from durance except through a
+chance that it will be sorrow instead of joy. I should think they would
+go to pieces under the strain."
+
+"But as you see they don't, perhaps the strain isn't so great after
+all."
+
+"Ah," I confessed, "there is that wonderful adaptation of the human soul
+to any circumstances. It's the one thing that makes me respect our
+fallen nature. Fallen? It seems to me that we ought to call it our risen
+nature; it has steadily mounted with the responsibility that Adam took
+for it--or Eve."
+
+"I don't see," said my wife, pursuing her momentary advantage, "why they
+should not be getting as much pleasure or happiness out of life as most
+married people. Engagements are supposed to be very joyous, though I
+think they're rather exciting and restless times, as a general thing. If
+they've settled down to being merely engaged, I've no doubt they've
+decided to make the best of being merely engaged as long as her mother
+lives."
+
+"There is that view of it," I assented.
+
+
+XII.
+
+By the following autumn Glendenning had completed the seventh year of
+his engagement to Miss Bentley, and I reminded my wife that this seemed
+to be the scriptural length of a betrothal, as typified in the service
+which Jacob rendered for Rachel. "But _he_ had a prospective
+father-in-law to deal with," I added, "and Glendenning a mother-in-law.
+That may make a difference."
+
+Mrs. March did not join me in the humorous view of the affair which I
+took. She asked me if I had heard anything from Glendenning lately; if
+that were the reason why I mentioned him.
+
+"No," I said; "but I have some office business that will take me to
+Gormanville to-morrow, and I did not know but you might like to go too,
+and look the ground over, and see how much we have been suffering for
+them unnecessarily." The fact was that we had now scarcely spoken of
+Glendenning or the Bentleys for six months, and our minds were far too
+full of our own affairs to be given more than very superficially to
+theirs at any time. "We could both go as well as not," I suggested, "and
+you could call upon the Bentleys while I looked after the company's
+business."
+
+"Thank you, Basil, I think I will let you go alone," said my wife. "But
+try to find out how it is with them. Don't be so terribly
+straightforward, and let it look as if that was what you came for. Don't
+make the slightest advance towards their confidence. But do let them
+open up if they will."
+
+"My dear, you may depend upon my asking no leading questions whatever,
+and I shall behave with far more discretion than if you were with me.
+The danger is that I shall behave with too much, for I find that my
+interest in their affair is very much faded. There is every probability
+that unless Glendenning speaks of his engagement it won't be spoken of
+at all."
+
+This was putting it rather with the indifference of the past six months
+than with the feeling of the present moment. Since I had known that I
+was going to Gormanville, the interest I denied had renewed itself
+pretty vividly for me, and I was intending not only to get everything
+out of Glendenning that I decently could, but to give him as much good
+advice as he would bear. I was going to urge him to move upon the
+obstructive Mrs. Bentley with all his persuasive force, and I had
+formulated some arguments for him which I thought he might use with
+success. I did not tell my wife that this was my purpose, but all the
+same I cherished it, and I gathered energy for the enforcement of my
+views for Glendenning's happiness from the very dejection I was cast
+into by the outward effect of the Gormanville streets. They were all in
+a funeral blaze of their shade trees, which were mostly maples, but were
+here and there a stretch of elms meeting in arches almost consciously
+Gothic over the roadway; the maples were crimson and gold, and the elms
+the pale yellow that they affect in the fall. A silence hung under their
+sad splendors which I found deepen when I got into what the inhabitants
+called the residential part. About the business centre there was some
+stir, and here in the transaction of my affairs I was in the thick of it
+for a while. Everybody remembered me in a pleasant way, and I had to
+stop and pass the time of day, as they would have said, with a good many
+whom I could not remember at once. It seemed to me that the maples in
+front of St. Michael's rectory were rather more depressingly gaudy than
+elsewhere in Gormanville; but I believe they were only thicker. I found
+Glendenning in his study, and he was so far from being cast down by
+their blazon that I thought him decidedly cheerfuller than when I saw
+him last. He met me with what for him was ardor; and as he had asked me
+most cordially about my family, I thought it fit to inquire how the
+ladies at the Bentley place were.
+
+"Why, very well, very well indeed," he answered, brightly. "It's very
+odd, but Edith and I were talking about you all only last night, and
+wishing we could see you again. Edith is most uncommonly well. During
+the summer Mrs. Bentley had some rather severer attacks than usual, and
+the care and anxiety told upon Edith, but since the cooler weather has
+come she has picked up wonderfully." He did not say that Mrs. Bentley
+had shared this gain, and I imagined that he had a reluctance to confess
+she had not. He went on, "You're going to stay and spend the night with
+me, aren't you?"
+
+"No," I said; "I'm obliged to be off by the four-o'clock train. But if I
+may be allowed to name the hospitality I could accept, I should say
+luncheon."
+
+"Good!" cried Glendenning, gayly. "Let us go and have it at the
+Bentleys'."
+
+"Far be it from me to say where you shall lunch me," I returned. "The
+question isn't where, but when and how, with me."
+
+He got his hat and stick, and as we started out of his door he began:
+"You'll be a little surprised at the informality, perhaps, but I'm glad
+you take it so easily. It makes it easier for me to explain that I'm
+almost domesticated at the Bentley homestead; I come and go very much as
+if it were my own house."
+
+"My dear fellow," I said, "I'm not surprised at anything in your
+relation to the Bentley homestead, and I won't vex you with any glad
+inferences."
+
+"Why," he returned, a little bashfully, "there's no explicit change. The
+affair is just where it has been all along. But with the gradual decline
+in Mrs. Bentley--I'm afraid you'll notice it--she seems rather to want
+me about, and at times I'm able to be of use to Edith, and so--"
+
+He stopped, and I said, "Exactly."
+
+He went on: "Of course it's rather anomalous, and I oughtn't to let you
+get the impression that she has actually conceded anything. But she
+shows herself much more--er, shall I say?--affectionate, and I can't
+help hoping there may be a change in her mood which will declare itself
+in an attitude more favorable to--"
+
+I said again, "Exactly," and Glendenning resumed:
+
+"In spite of Edith's not having been quite so well as usual--she's
+wonderfully well now--it's been a very happy summer with us, on account
+of this change. It seems to have come about in a very natural way with
+Mrs. Bentley, and out of a growing regard which I can't specifically
+account for, as far as anything I've done is concerned."
+
+"I think I could account for it," said I. "She must be a stonier-hearted
+old lady than I imagine if she hasn't felt your goodness, all along,
+Glendenning."
+
+"Why, you're very kind," said the gentle creature. "You tempt me to
+repeat what she said, at the only time she expressed a wish to have me
+oftener with them: 'You've been very patient with a contrary old woman.
+But I sha'n't make you wait much longer.'"
+
+"Well, I think that was very encouraging, my dear fellow."
+
+"Do you?" he asked, wistfully. "I thought so too, at first, but when I
+told Edith she could not take that view of it. She said that she did not
+believe her mother had changed her mind at all, and that she only meant
+she was growing older."
+
+"But, at any rate," I argued, "it was pleasant to have her make an open
+recognition of your patience."
+
+"Yes, that was pleasant," he said, cheerfully again, "And it was the
+beginning of the kind of relation that I have held ever since to her
+household. I am afraid I am there a good half of my time, and I believe
+I dine there oftener than I do at home. I am quite on the footing of a
+son, with her."
+
+"There are some of the unregenerate, Glendenning," I made bold to say,
+"who think it is your own fault that you weren't on the footing of a
+son-in-law with her long ago. If you'll excuse my saying so, you have
+been, if anything, too patient. It would have been far better for all if
+you had taken the bit in your teeth six or seven years back--"
+
+He drew a deep breath. "It wouldn't have done; it wouldn't have done!
+Edith herself would never have consented to it."
+
+"Did you ever ask her?"
+
+"No," he said, innocently. "How could I?"
+
+"And of course _she_ could never ask _you_," I laughed. "My opinion is
+that you have lost a great deal of time unnecessarily. I haven't the
+least doubt that if you had brought a little pressure to bear with Mrs.
+Bentley herself, it would have sufficed."
+
+He looked at me with a kind of dismay, as if my words had carried
+conviction, or had roused a conviction long dormant in his heart. "It
+wouldn't have done," he gasped.
+
+"It isn't too late to try, yet," I suggested.
+
+"Yes, it's too late. We must wait now." He hastened to add, "Until she
+yields entirely of herself."
+
+He gave me a guilty glance when he drew near the Bentley place and we
+saw a buggy standing at the gate. "The doctor!" he said, and he hurried
+me up the walk to the door.
+
+The door stood open and we heard the doctor saying to some one within:
+"No, no, nothing organic at all, I assure you. One of the commonest
+functional disturbances."
+
+Miss Bentley appeared at the threshold with him, and she and Glendenning
+had time to exchange a glance of anxiety and of smiling reassurance,
+before she put out her hand in greeting to me, a very glad and cordial
+greeting, apparently. The doctor and I shook hands, and he got himself
+away with what I afterwards remembered as undue quickness, and left us
+to Miss Bentley.
+
+Glendenning was quite right about her looking better. She looked even
+gay, and there was a vivid color in her checks such as I had not seen
+there for many years; her lips were red, her eyes brilliant. Her face
+was still perhaps as thin as ever, but it was indescribably younger.
+
+I cannot say that there were the materials of a merrymaking amongst us,
+exactly, and yet I remember that luncheon as rather a gay one, with some
+laughing. I had not been till now in discovering that Miss Bentley had a
+certain gift of humor, so shy and proud, if I may so express it, that it
+would not show itself except upon long acquaintance, and I distinctly
+perceived now that this enabled her to make light of a burden that might
+otherwise have been intolerable. It qualified her to treat with
+cheerfulness the grimness of her mother, which had certainly not grown
+less since I saw her last, and to turn into something like a joke her
+valetudinarian austerities of sentiment and opinion. She made a pleasant
+mock of the amenities which passed between her mother and Glendenning,
+whose gingerliness in the acceptance of the old lady's condescension
+would, I confess, have been notably comical without this gloss. It was
+perfectly evident that Mrs. Bentley's favor was bestowed with a mental
+reservation, and conditioned upon his forming no expectations from it,
+and poor Glendenning's eagerness to show that he took it upon these
+terms was amusing as well as touching. I do not know how to express that
+Miss Bentley contrived to eliminate herself from the affair, or to have
+the effect of doing that, and to abandon it to them. I can only say that
+she left them to be civil to each other, and that, except when she
+recurred to them in playful sarcasm from time to time, she devoted
+herself to me.
+
+Evidently, Mrs. Bentley was very much worse than she had been; her
+breathing was painfully labored. But if her daughter had any anxiety
+about her condition, she concealed it most effectually from us. I
+decided that she had perhaps been asking the doctor as to certain
+symptoms that had alarmed her, and it was in the rebound from her
+anxiety that her spirits had risen to the height I saw. Glendenning
+seized the moment of her absence after luncheon, when she helped her
+mother up to her room, to impart to me that this was his conclusion too.
+He said that he had not seen her so cheerful for a long time, and when I
+praised her in every way he basked in my appreciation of her as if it
+had all been flattery for himself. She came back directly, and then I
+had a chance to see what she might have been under happier stars. She
+could not, at any moment, help showing herself an intellectual and
+cultivated woman, but her opportunities to show herself a woman of rare
+social gifts had been scanted by circumstances and perhaps by
+conscience. It seemed to me that even in devoting herself to her mother
+as she had always done she need not have enslaved herself, and that it
+was in this excess her inherited puritanism came out. She might
+sometimes openly rebel against her mother's domination, as my wife and I
+had now and again seen her do; but inwardly she was almost passionately
+submissive. Here I thought that Glendenning, if he had been a different
+sort of man, might have been useful to her; he might have encouraged her
+in a little wholesome selfishness, and enabled her to withhold sacrifice
+where it was needless. But I am not sure; perhaps he would have made her
+more unhappy, if he had attempted this; perhaps he was the only sort of
+man whom, in her sense of his own utter unselfishness, she could have
+given her heart to in perfect peace. She now talked brilliantly and
+joyously to me, but all the time her eye sought his for his approval and
+sympathy; he, for his part, was content to listen in a sort of beatific
+pride in her which he did not, in his simple-hearted fondness, make any
+effort to mask.
+
+When we came away he made himself amends for his silence by a long hymn
+in worship of her, and I listened with all the acquiescence possible. He
+asked me questions--whether I had noticed this thing or that about her,
+or remembered what she had said upon one point or another, and led up to
+compliments of her which I was glad to pay. In the long ordeal they had
+undergone they had at least kept all the freshness of their love.
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Glendenning and I went back to the rectory, and sat down in his study,
+or rather he made me draw a chair to the open door, and sat down himself
+on a step below the threshold. The day was one of autumnal warmth; the
+haze of Indian summer blued the still air, and the wind that now and
+then stirred the stiff panoply of the trees was lullingly soft. This
+part of Gormanville quite overlooked the busier district about the
+mills, where the water-power found its way, and it was something of a
+climb even from the business street of the old hill village, which the
+rival prosperity of the industrial settlement in the valley had thrown
+into an aristocratic aloofness. From the upper windows of the rectory
+one could have seen only the red and yellow of the maples, but from the
+study door we caught glimpses past their boles of the outlying country,
+as it showed between the white mansions across the way. One of these, as
+I have already mentioned, was the Conwell place; and after we had talked
+of the landscape awhile, Glendenning said: "By the way! Why don't you
+buy the Conwell place? You liked it so much, and you were all so well in
+Gormanville. The Conwells want to sell it, and it would be just the
+thing for you, five or six months of the year."
+
+I explained, almost compassionately, the impossibility of a poor
+insurance man thinking of a summer residence like the Conwell place, and
+I combated as well as I could the optimistic reasons of my friend in its
+favor. I was not very severe with him, for I saw that his optimism was
+not so much from his wish to have me live in Gormanville as from the new
+hope that filled him. It was by a perfectly natural, if not very logical
+transition that we were presently talking of this greater interest
+again, and Glendenning was going over all the plans that it included. I
+encouraged him to believe, as he desired, that a sea-voyage would be the
+thing for Mrs. Bentley, and that it would be his duty to take her to
+Europe as soon as he was in authority to do so. They should always, he
+said, live in Gormanville, for they were greatly attached to the place,
+and they should keep up the old Bentley homestead in the style that he
+thought they owed to the region where the Bentleys had always lived. It
+is a comfort to a man to tell his dreams, whether of the night or of the
+day, and I enjoyed Glendenning's pleasure in rehearsing these fond
+reveries of his.
+
+He interrupted himself to listen to the sound of hurried steps, and
+directly a man in his shirt-sleeves came running by on the sidewalk
+beyond the maples. In a village like Gormanville any passer is of
+interest to the spectator, and a man running is of thrilling moment.
+Glendenning started to his feet, and moved forward for a better sight of
+the flying passer. He called out to the man, who shouted back something
+I could not understand, and ran on.
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"I don't know." Glendenning's face as he turned to me again was quite
+white. "It is Mrs. Bentley's farmer," he added, feebly, and I could see
+that it was with an effort he kept himself from sinking. "Something has
+happened."
+
+"Oh, I guess not, or not anything serious," I answered, with an effort
+to throw off the weight I suddenly felt at my own heart. "People have
+been known to run for a plumber. But if you're anxious, let us go and
+see what the matter is."
+
+I turned and got my hat; Glendenning came in for his, but seemed unable
+to find it, though he stood before the table where it lay. I had to
+laugh, though I felt so little like it, as I put it in his hand.
+
+"Don't leave me," he entreated, as we hurried out through the maples to
+the sidewalk. "It has come at last, and I feel, as I always knew I
+should, like a murderer."
+
+"What rubbish!" I retorted. "You don't know that anything has happened.
+You don't know what the man's gone for."
+
+"Yes, I do," he said. "Mrs. Bentley is--He's gone for the doctor."
+
+As he spoke a buggy came tearing down the street behind us; the doctor
+was in it, and the man in shirt-sleeves beside him. We did not try to
+hail them, but as they whirled by the farmer turned his face, and again
+called something unintelligible to Glendenning.
+
+We made what speed we could after them, but they were long out of sight
+in the mile that it seemed to me we were an hour in covering before we
+reached the Bentley place. The doctor's buggy stood at the gate, and I
+perceived that I was without authority to enter the house, on which some
+unknown calamity had fallen, no matter with what good-will I had come; I
+could see that Glendenning had suffered a sudden estrangement, also,
+which he had to make a struggle against. But he went in, leaving me
+without, as if he had forgotten me.
+
+I could not go away, and I walked down the path to the gate, and waited
+there, in case I should be in any wise wanted. After a very long time
+the doctor came bolting over the walk towards me, as if he did not see
+me, but he brought himself up short with an "Oh!" before he actually
+struck against me. I had known him during our summer at the Conwell
+place, where we used to have him in for our little ailments, and I would
+never have believed that his round, optimistic face could look so
+worried. I read the worst in it; Glendenning was right; but I asked the
+doctor, quite as if I did not know, whether there was anything serious
+the matter.
+
+"Serious--yes," he said. "Get in with me; I have to see another patient,
+but I'll bring you back." We mounted into his buggy, and he went on.
+"She's in no immediate danger, now. The faint lasted so long I didn't
+know whether we should bring her out of it, at one time, but the most
+alarming part is over for the present. There is some trouble with the
+heart, but I don't think anything organic."
+
+"Yes, I heard you telling her daughter so, just before lunch. Isn't it a
+frequent complication with asthma?"
+
+"Asthma? Her daughter? Whom are you talking about?"
+
+"Mrs. Bentley. Isn't Mrs. Bentley--"
+
+"No!" shouted the doctor, in disgust, "Mrs. Bentley is as well as ever.
+It's Miss Bentley. I wish there was a thousandth part of the chance for
+her that there is for her mother."
+
+
+XIV.
+
+I stayed over for the last train to Boston, and then I had to go home
+without the hope which Miss Bentley's first rally had given the doctor.
+My wife and I talked the affair over far into the night, and in the
+paucity of particulars I was almost driven to their invention. But I
+managed to keep a good conscience, and at the same time to satisfy the
+demand for facts in a measure by the indulgence of conjectures which
+Mrs. March continually took for them. The doctor had let fall, in his
+talk with me, that he had no doubt Miss Bentley had aggravated the
+affection of the heart from which she was suffering by her exertions in
+lifting her mother about so much; and my wife said that it needed only
+that touch to make the tragedy complete.
+
+"Unless," I suggested, "you could add that her mother had just told her
+she would not oppose her marriage any longer, and it was the joy that
+brought on the access of the trouble that is killing her."
+
+"Did the doctor say that?" Mrs. March demanded, severely.
+
+"No. And I haven't the least notion that anything like it happened. But
+if it had--"
+
+"It would have been too tawdry. I'm ashamed of you for thinking of such
+a thing, Basil."
+
+Upon reflection, I was rather ashamed myself; but I plucked up courage
+to venture: "It would be rather fine, wouldn't it, when that poor girl
+is gone, if Mrs. Bentley had Glendenning come and live with her, and
+they devoted themselves to each other for her daughter's sake?"
+
+"Fine! It would be ghastly. What are you thinking of, my dear? How would
+it be fine?"
+
+"Oh, I mean dramatically," I apologized, and, not to make bad worse, I
+said no more.
+
+The next day, which was Sunday, a telegram came for me, which I decided,
+without opening it, to be the announcement of the end. But it proved to
+be a message from Mrs. Bentley, begging in most urgent terms that Mrs.
+March and I would come to her at once, if possible. These terms left the
+widest latitude for surmise, but none for choice, in the sad
+circumstances, and we looked up the Sunday trains for Gormanville, and
+went.
+
+We found the poor woman piteously grateful, but by no means so
+prostrated as we had expected. She was rather, as often happens, stayed
+and held upright by the burden that had been laid upon her, and it was
+with fortitude if not dignity that she appealed to us for our counsel,
+and if possible our help, in a matter about which she had already
+consulted the doctor. "The doctor says that the excitement cannot hurt
+Edith; it may even help her, to propose it. I should like to do it, but
+if you do not think well of it, I will not do it. I know it is too late
+now to make up to her for the past," said Mrs. Bentley, and here she
+gave way to the grief she had restrained hitherto.
+
+"There is no one else," she went on, "who has been so intimately
+acquainted with the facts of my daughter's engagement--no one else that
+I can confide in or appeal to."
+
+We both murmured that she was very good; but she put our politeness
+somewhat peremptorily aside.
+
+"It is the only thing I can do now, and it is useless to do that now. It
+will be no reparation for the past, and it will be for myself and not
+for her, as all that I have done in the past has been; but I wish to
+know what you think of their getting married now."
+
+I am afraid that if we had said what we thought of such a tardy and
+futile proof of penitence we should have brought little comfort to the
+mother's heart, but we looked at each other in the disgust we both felt
+and said there would be a sacred fitness in it.
+
+She was apparently much consoled.
+
+It was touching enough, and I at least was affected by her tears; I am
+not so sure my wife was. But she had instantly to consider how best to
+propose the matter to Miss Bentley, and to act upon her decision.
+
+After all, as she reported the fact to me later, it was very simple to
+suggest her mother's wish to the girl, who listened to it with a perfect
+intelligence in which there was no bitterness.
+
+"They think I am going to die," she said, quietly, "and I can understand
+how she feels. It seems such a mockery; but if she wishes it; and
+Arthur--"
+
+It was my part to deal with Glendenning, and I did not find it so easy.
+
+"Marriage is for life and for earth," he said, solemnly, and I thought
+very truly. "In the resurrection we shall be one another's without it. I
+don't like to go through the form of such a sacrament idly; it seems
+like a profanation of its mystery."
+
+"But if Miss Bentley--"
+
+"She will think whatever I do; I shall feel as she does," he answered,
+with dignity.
+
+"Yes, I know," I urged. "It would not be for her; it would not certainly
+be for yourself. But if you could see it as the only form of reparation
+which her mother can now offer you both, and the only mode of expressing
+your own forgiveness--Recollect how you felt when you thought that it
+was Mrs. Bentley's death; try to recall something of that terrible
+time--"
+
+"I don't forget that," he relented. "It was in mercy to Edith and me
+that our trial is what it is: we have recognized that in the face of
+eternity. I can forgive anything in gratitude for that."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have often had to criticise life for a certain caprice with which she
+treats the elements of drama, and mars the finest conditions of tragedy
+with a touch of farce. No one who witnessed the marriage of Arthur
+Glendenning and Edith Bentley had any belief that she would survive it
+twenty-four hours; they themselves were wholly without hope in the
+moment which for happier lovers is all hope. To me it was like a
+funeral, but then most weddings are rather ghastly to look upon; and the
+stroke that life had in reserve perhaps finally restored the lost
+balance of gayety in this. At any rate, Mrs. Glendenning did live, and
+she is living yet, and in rather more happiness than comes to most
+people under brighter auspices. After long contention among many
+doctors, the original opinion that her heart trouble was functional, not
+organic, has been elected final, and upon these terms she bids fair to
+live as long as any of us.
+
+I do not know whether she will live as long as her mother, who seems to
+have taken a fresh lease of years from her single act of self-sacrifice.
+I cannot say whether Mrs. Bentley feels herself deceived and defrauded
+by her daughter's recovery; but I have made my wife observe that it
+would be just like life if she bore the young couple a sort of grudge
+for unwittingly outwitting her. Certainly, on the day we lately spent
+with them all at Gormanville, she seemed, in the slight attack of asthma
+from which she suffered, to come as heavily and exactingly upon both as
+she used to come upon her daughter alone. But I was glad to see that
+Glendenning eagerly bore the greater part of the common burden. He grows
+stouter and stouter, and will soon be the figure of a bishop.
+
+
+
+
+THE PURSUIT OF THE PIANO.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Hamilton Gaites sat breakfasting by the window of a restaurant looking
+out on Park Square, in Boston, at a table which he had chosen after
+rejecting one on the Boylston Street side of the place because it was
+too noisy, and another in the little open space, among evergreens in
+tubs, between the front and rear, because it was too chilly. The wind
+was east, but at his Park Square window it tempered the summer morning
+air without being a draught; and he poured out his coffee with a content
+in his circumstance and provision which he was apt to feel when he had
+taken all the possible pains, even though the result was not perfect.
+But now, he had real French bread, as good as he could have got in New
+York, and the coffee was clear and bright. A growth of crisp green
+watercress embowered a juicy steak, and in its shade, as it were, lay
+two long slices of bacon, not stupidly broiled to a crisp, but
+delicately pink, and exemplarily lean. Gaites had already had a
+cantaloupe, whose spicy fragrance lingered in the air and mingled with
+the robuster odors of the coffee, the steak, and the bacon.
+
+He owned to being a fuss, but he contended that he was a cheerful fuss,
+and when things went reasonably well with him, he was so. They were
+going well with him now, not only in the small but in the large way. He
+was sitting there before that capital breakfast in less than half an
+hour after leaving the sleeping-car, where he had passed a very good
+night, and he was setting out on his vacation, after very successful
+work in the June term of court. He was in prime health; he had a good
+conscience in leaving no interests behind him that could suffer in his
+absence; and the smile that he bent upon the Italian waiter as he
+retired, after putting down the breakfast, had some elements of a
+benediction.
+
+There was a good deal of Gaites's smile, when it was all on: he had a
+generous mouth, full of handsome teeth, very white and even, which all
+showed in his smile. His whole face took part in the smile, and it was a
+charming face, long and rather quaintly narrow, of an amiable
+aquilinity, and clean-shaven. His figure, tall and thin, comported well
+with his style of visage, and at a given moment, when he suddenly rose
+and leaned from the window, eagerly following something outside with his
+eye, he had an alert movement that was very pleasant.
+
+The thing outside which had caught, and which now kept, his eye as long
+as he could see it, was a case in the shape of an upright piano, on the
+end of a long, heavy-laden truck, making its way with a slow, jolting
+progress among the carts, carriages, and street cars, out of the square
+round the corner toward Boylston Street. On the sloping front of the
+case was inscribed an address, which seemed to gaze at Gaites with the
+eyes of the girl whom it named and placed, and to whom in the young
+man's willing fancy it attributed a charming quality. Nothing, he felt,
+could be more suggestive, more expressive of something shy, something
+proud, something pure, something pastoral yet patrician, something
+unaffected and yet _chic_, in an unknown personality, than the legend:
+
+     Miss Phyllis Desmond,
+     Lower Merritt,
+     New Hampshire.
+
+     Via S. B. & H. C. R. R.
+
+Like most lawyers, he had a vein of romance, and this now opened in
+pleasing conjectures concerning the girl. He knew just where Lower
+Merritt was, and so well what it was like that a vision of its white
+paint against the dark green curtain of the wooded heights around it
+filled his sense as agreeably as so much white marble. There was the
+cottage of some summer people well above the village level, among pines
+and birches, and overlooking the foamiest rush of the Saco, to which he
+instantly destined the piano of Phyllis Desmond. He had never known that
+these people's name was Desmond, and he had certainly never supposed
+that they had a daughter called Phyllis; but he divined these facts in
+losing sight of the truck; and he imagined with as logical probability
+that one of the little girls whom he used to see playing on the
+hill-slope before the cottage had grown up into the young lady whose
+name the piano bore. There was quite time enough for this
+transformation; it was seven years since Gaites had run up into the
+White Mountains for a month's rest after his last term in the Harvard
+Law School, and before beginning work in the office of the law firm in
+New York where he had got a clerkship, and where he had now a junior
+partnership. The little girl was then just ten years old, and now, of
+course, the young lady was seventeen, or would be when the piano reached
+Lower Merritt, for it was clearly meant to arrive on her birthday; it
+was a birthday-present and a surprise. He had always liked the way those
+nice people let their children play about barefoot; it would be in
+character with them to do a fond, pretty thing like that; and Gaites
+smiled for pleasure in it, and then rather blushed in relating the brown
+legs of the little girl, as he remembered seeing them in her races over
+her father's lawn, to the dignified young lady she had now become.
+
+He amused himself in mentally following the piano on its way to the Sea
+Board & Hill Country R. R. freight-depot, which he was quite able to do
+from a habit of Boston formed during his four years in the academic
+course and his three years in the law-school at Harvard. He knew that it
+would cross Boylston into Charles Street, and keep along that level to
+Cambridge; then it would turn into McLane Street, and again into Lynde,
+by this means avoiding the grades as much as possible, and arriving
+through Causeway Street at the long, low freight-depot of the S. B. & H.
+C., where it would be the first thing unloaded from the truck. It would
+stand indefinitely on the outer platform; and then, when the men in
+flat, narrow-peaked silk caps and grease-splotched overalls got round to
+it, with an air of as much personal indifference as if they were mere
+mechanical agencies, it would be pulled and pushed into the dimness of
+the interior, cool, and pleasantly smelling of pine, and hemp, and
+flour, and dried fruit, and coffee, and tar, and leather, and fish.
+There it would abide, indefinitely again, till in the same large
+impersonal way it was pulled and pushed out on the platform beside the
+track, where a freight-car marked for the Hill Country division of the
+road, with devices intelligible to the train-men, had been shunted down
+by a pony engine in obedience to mystical semaphoric gesticulations,
+from the brakeman risking his life for the purpose among the rails,
+addressed to the engineer keeping his hand on the pulse of the
+locomotive, and his head out of the cab window to see how near he could
+come to killing the brakeman without doing it.
+
+Gaites witnessed the whole drama with an interest that held him
+suspended between the gulps and morsels of his breakfast, and at times
+quite arrested the processes of mastication and deglutition. That pretty
+girl's name on the slope of the piano-case continued to look at him from
+the end of the truck; it smiled at him from the outer platform of the
+freight-house; it entreated him with a charming trepidation from the dim
+interior; again it smiled on the inner platform; and then, from the
+safety of the car, where the case found itself ensconced among freight
+of a neat and agreeable character, the name had the effect of intrepidly
+blowing him a kiss as the train-man slid the car doors together and
+fastened them. He drew a long breath when the train had backed and
+bumped down to the car, and the couplers had clashed together, and the
+maniac, who had not been mashed in dropping the coupling-pin into its
+socket, scrambled out from the wheels, and frantically worked his arms
+to the potential homicide in the locomotive cab, and the train had
+jolted forward on the beginning of its run.
+
+That was the last of the piano, and Gaites threw it off his mind, and
+finished his breakfast at his leisure. He was going to spend his
+vacation at Kent Harbor, where he knew some agreeable people, and where
+he knew that a young man had many chances of a good time, even if he
+were not the youngest kind of young man. He had spent two of his Harvard
+vacations there, and he knew this at first hand. He could not and did
+not expect to do so much two-ing on the rocks and up the river as he
+used; the zest of that sort of thing was past, rather; but he had
+brought his golf stockings with him, and a quiverful of the utensils of
+the game, in obedience to a lady who had said there were golf-links at
+Kent, and she knew a young lady who would teach him to play.
+
+He was going to stop off at Burymouth, to see a friend, an old Harvard
+man, and a mighty good fellow, who had rather surprised people by giving
+up New York, and settling in the gentle old town on the Piscatamac. They
+accounted for it as well as they could by his having married a Burymouth
+girl; and since he had begun, most unexpectedly, to come forward in
+literature, such of his friends as had seen him there said it was just
+the place for him. Gaites had not yet seen him there, and he had a
+romantic curiosity, the survival of an intensified friendship of their
+Senior year, to do so. He got to thinking of this good fellow rather
+vividly, when he had cleared his mind of Miss Desmond's piano, and he
+did not see why he should not take an earlier train to Burymouth than he
+had intended to take; and so he had them call him a coupe from the
+restaurant, and he got into it as soon as he left the breakfast-table.
+
+He gave the driver the authoritative address, "Sea Board Depot," and
+left him to take his own way, after resisting a rather silly impulse to
+bid him go through Charles Street.
+
+The man drove up Beacon, and down Temple through Staniford, and
+naturally Gaites saw nothing of Miss Desmond's piano, which had come
+into his mind again in starting. He did not know the colonnaded
+structure, with its stately _porte-cochere_, where his driver proposed
+to leave him, instead of the formless brick box which he remembered as
+the Sea Board Depot, and he insisted upon that when the fellow got down
+to open the door.
+
+"Ain't no Sibbod Dippo, now," the driver explained, contemptuously.
+"Guess Union Dippo'll do, though;" and Gaites, a little overcome with
+its splendor, found that it would. He faltered a moment in passing the
+conductor and porter at the end of the Pullman car on his train, and
+then decided that it would be ridiculous to take a seat in it for the
+short run to Burymouth. In the common coach he got a very good seat on
+the shady side, where he put down his hand-bag. Then he looked at his
+watch, and as it was still fifteen minutes before train-time, he
+indulged a fantastic impulse. He left the car and hurried back through
+the station and out through the electrics, hacks, herdics, carts, and
+string-teams of Causeway Street, and up the sidewalk of the street
+opening into it, as far as the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot. On the way
+he bet himself five dollars that Miss Desmond's piano would not be
+there, and lost; for at the moment he came up it was unloading from the
+end of the truck which he had seen carrying it past the window of his
+restaurant.
+
+The fact amused him quite beyond the measure of anything intrinsically
+humorous in it, and he staid watching the exertions of the heated
+truckman and two silk-capped, sarcastic-faced freight-men, till the
+piano was well on the platform. He was so intent upon it that his
+interest seemed to communicate itself to a young girl coming from the
+other quarter, with a suburban, cloth-sided, crewel-initialed bag in her
+hand, as if she were going to a train. She paused in the stare she gave
+the piano-case, and then slowed her pace with a look over her shoulder
+after she got by. In this her eyes met his, and she blushed and hurried
+on; but not so soon that he had not time to see she had a thin face of a
+pathetic prettiness, gentle brown eyes with wistful brows, under
+ordinary brown hair. She was rather little, and was dressed with a sort
+of unaccented propriety, which was as far from distinction as it was
+from pretension.
+
+When Gaites got back to his car, a few minutes before the train was to
+start, he found the seat where he had left his hand-bag and light
+overcoat more than half full of a bulky lady, who looked stupidly up at
+him, and did not move or attempt any excuse for crowding him from his
+place. He had to walk the whole length of the car before he came to a
+vacant seat. It was the last of the transverse seats, and at the moment
+he dropped into it, the girl who had watched the unloading of the piano
+with him passed him, and took the sidewise seat next the door.
+
+She took it with a weary resignation which somehow made Gaites ashamed
+of the haste with which he had pushed forward to the only good place,
+and he felt as guilty of keeping her out of it as if he had known she
+was following him. He kept a remorseful eye upon her as she arranged her
+bag and umbrella about her, with some paper parcels which she must have
+had sent to her at the station. She breathed quickly, as if from final
+hurry, but somewhat also as if she were delicate; and tried to look as
+if she did not know he was watching her. She had taken off one of her
+gloves, and her hand, though little enough, showed an unexpected vigor
+with reference to her face, and had a curious air of education.
+
+When the train pulled out of the station into the clearer light, she
+turned her face from him toward the forward window, and the corner of
+her mouth, which her half-averted profile gave him, had a kind of
+piteous droop which smote him to keener regret. Once it lifted in an
+upward curve, and a gay light came into the corner of her eye; then the
+mouth drooped again, and the light went out.
+
+Gaites could bear it no longer; he rose and said, with a respectful bow:
+"Won't you take my seat? That seems such a very inconvenient place for
+you, with the door opening and shutting."
+
+The girl turned her face promptly round and up, and answered, with a
+flush in her thin cheek, but no embarrassment in her tone, "No, I thank
+you. This will do quite well," and then she turned her face away as
+before.
+
+He had not meant his politeness for an overture to her acquaintance, but
+he felt as justly snubbed as if he had; and he sank back into his seat
+in some disorder. He tried to hide his confusion behind the newspaper he
+opened between them; but from time to time he had a glimpse of her round
+the side of it, and he saw that the hand which clutched her bag all the
+while tightened upon it and then loosened nervously.
+
+
+II.
+
+"Ah, I see what you mean," said Gaites, with a kind of finality, as his
+friend Birkwall walked him homeward through the loveliest of the lovely
+old Burymouth streets. Something equivalent had been in his mind and on
+his tongue at every dramatic instant of the afternoon; and, in fact,
+ever since he had arrived from the station at Birkwall's door, where
+Mrs. Birkwall met them and welcomed him. He had been sufficiently
+impressed with the aristocratic quiet of the vast square white old
+wooden house, standing behind a high white board fence, in two acres of
+gardened ground; but the fine hallway with its broad low stairway, the
+stately drawing-room with its carving, the library with its panelling
+and portraits, and the dining-room with its tall wainscoting, united to
+give him a sense of the pride of life in old Burymouth such as the raw
+splendors of the millionaire houses in New York had never imparted to
+him.
+
+"They knew how to do it, they knew how to do it!" he exclaimed, meaning
+the people who had such houses built; and he said the same thing of the
+other Burymouth houses which Birkwall showed him, by grace of their
+owners, after the mid-day dinner, which Gaites kept calling luncheon.
+
+"Be sure you get back in good time for _tea_," said Mrs. Birkwall for a
+parting charge to her husband; and she bade Gaites, "Remember that it
+_is_ tea, please; _not_ dinner;" and he was tempted to kiss his hand to
+her with as much courtly gallantry as he could; for, standing under the
+transom of the slender-pillared portal to watch them away, she looked
+most distinctly descended from ancestors, and not merely the daughter of
+a father and mother, as most women do. Gaites said as much to Birkwall,
+and when they got home Birkwall repeated it to his wife, without
+injuring Gaites with her. If he saw what Birkwall had meant in marrying
+her, and settling down to his literary life with her in the atmosphere
+of such a quiet place as Burymouth, when he might have chosen money and
+unrest in New York, she on her side saw what her husband meant in liking
+the shrewd, able fellow who had such a vein of gay romance in his
+practicality, and such an intelligent and respectful sympathy with her
+tradition and environment.
+
+She sent and asked several of her friends to meet him at tea; and if in
+that New England disproportion of the sexes which at Burymouth is
+intensified almost to a pure gynocracy these friends were nearly all
+women, he found them even more agreeable than if they had been nearly
+all men. It seemed to him that he had never heard better talk than that
+of these sequestered ladies, who were so well bred and so well read, so
+humorous and so dignified, who loved to laugh and who loved to think. It
+was all like something in a pleasant book, and Gaites was not altogether
+to blame if it went to his head, and after the talk had been of
+Burymouth, in which he professed so acceptable an interest, and then of
+novels, of which he had read about as many as they, he confided to the
+whole table his experience with Miss Phyllis Desmond's piano. He managed
+the psychology of the little incident so well that he imparted the very
+quality he meant them to feel in it.
+
+"How perfectly charming!" said one of the ladies. "I don't wonder you
+fell in love with the name. It's fit for a shepherdess of high degree."
+
+"If _I_ were a man," said the girl across the table who was not less
+sweetly a girl because she would never see thirty-nine again, "I should
+simply drop everything and follow that piano to Phyllis Desmond's door."
+
+"It's quite what I should like to do," Gaites responded, with a
+well-affected air of passionate regret. "But I'm promised at Kent
+Harbor--"
+
+She did not wait for him to say more, but submitted, "Oh, well, if
+you're going to Kent _Harbor_, of course!" as if that would excuse and
+explain any sort of dereliction; and then the talk went on about Kent
+Harbor till Mrs. Birkwall asked, generally, as if it were part of the
+Kent Harbor inquiry, "Didn't I hear that the Ashwoods were going to
+their place at Upper Merritt, this year?"
+
+Then there arose a dispute, which divided the company into nearly equal
+parties; as to whether the Ashwoods had got home from Europe yet. But it
+all ended in bringing the talk back to Phyllis Desmond's piano again,
+and in urging its pursuit upon Gaites, as something he owed to romance;
+at least he ought to do it for their sake, for now they should all be
+upon pins and needles till they knew who she was, and what she _could_
+be doing at Lower Merritt, N. H.
+
+At one time he had it on his tongue to say that there seemed to be
+something like infection in his interest in that piano, and he was going
+to speak of the young girl who seemed to share it, simply because she
+saw him staring at it, and who faltered so long with him before the
+freight-depot that she came near getting no seat in the train for
+Burymouth. But just at that moment the dispute about the Ashwoods
+renewed itself upon some fresh evidence which one of the ladies
+recollected and offered; and Gaites's chance passed. When it came again
+he had no longer the wish to seize it. A lingering soreness from his
+experience with that young girl made itself felt in his nether
+consciousness. He forbore the more easily because, mixed with this pain,
+was a certain insecurity as to her quality which he was afraid might
+impart itself to those patrician presences at the table. They would be
+nice, and they would be appreciative,--but would they feel that she was
+a lady, exactly, when he owned to the somewhat poverty-stricken
+simplicity of her dress in some details, more especially her thread
+gloves, which he could not consistently make kid? He was all the more
+bound to keep her from slight because he felt a little, a very little
+ashamed of her.
+
+He woke next morning in a wide, low, square chamber to the singing of
+robins in the garden, from which at breakfast he had luscious
+strawberries, and heaped bowls of June roses. When he started for his
+train, he parted with Mrs. Birkwall as old friends as he was with her
+husband; and he completed her conquest by running back to her from the
+gate, and asking, with a great air of secrecy, but loud enough for
+Birkwall to hear, whether she thought she could find him another girl in
+Burymouth, with just such a house and garden, and exactly like herself
+in every way.
+
+"Hundreds!" she shouted, and stood a graceful figure between the fluted
+pillars of the portal, waving her hand to them till they were out of
+sight behind the corner of the high board fence, over which the garden
+trees hung caressingly, and brushed Gaites's shoulder in a shy, fond
+farewell.
+
+It had all been as nice as it could be, and he said so again and again
+to Birkwall, who _would_ go to the train with him, and who would _not_
+let him carry his own hand-bag. The good fellow clung hospitably to it,
+after Gaites had rechecked his trunk for Kent Harbor, and insisted upon
+carrying it as they walked up and down the platform together at the
+station. It seemed that the train from Boston which the Kent Harbor
+train was to connect with was ten minutes late, and after some turns
+they prolonged their promenade northward as far as the freight-depot,
+Birkwall in the abstraction of a plot for a novel which he was seizing
+these last moments to outline to his friend, and Gaites with a secret
+shame for the hope which was springing in his breast.
+
+On a side track stood a freight-car, from which the customary men in
+silk caps were pulling the freight, and standing it about loosely on the
+platform. The car was detached from the parent train, which had left it
+not only orphaned on this siding, but apparently disabled; for Gaites
+heard the men talking about not having cut it out a minute too soon. One
+of them called, in at the broad low door, to some one inside, "All out?"
+and a voice from far within responded, "Case here, yet; _I_ can't handle
+it alone."
+
+The others went into the car, and then, with an interval for some heavy
+bumping and some strong language, they reappeared at the door with the
+case, which Gaites was by this time not surprised to find inscribed with
+the name and address of Miss Phyllis Desmond. He remained watching it,
+while the men got it on the platform, so wholly inattentive to
+Birkwall's plot that the most besotted young author could not have
+failed to feel his want of interest. Birkwall then turned his vision
+outward upon the object which engrossed his friend, and started with an
+"Oh, hello!" and slapped him on the back.
+
+Gaites nodded in proud assent, and Birkwall went on: "I thought you were
+faking the name last night; but I didn't want to give you away. It was
+the real thing, wasn't it, after all."
+
+"The real thing," said Gaites, with his most toothful smile, and he
+laughed for pleasure in his friend's astonishment.
+
+"Well," Birkwall resumed, "she seems to be following _you_ up, old
+fellow. This will be great for Polly, and for Miss Seaward, who wanted
+you to follow _her_ up; and for all Burymouth, for that matter. Why,
+Gaites, you'll be the tea-table talk for a week; you'll be married to
+that girl before you know it. What is the use of flying in the face of
+Providence? Come! There's time enough to get a ticket, and have your
+check changed from Kent Harbor to Lower Merritt, and the Hill Country
+express will be along here at nine o'clock. You can't let that poor
+thing start off on her travels alone again!"
+
+Gaites flushed in a joyful confusion, and put the joke by as well as he
+could. But he was beginning to feel it not altogether a joke; it had
+acquired an element of mystery, of fatality, which flattered while it
+awed him; and he could not be easy till he had asked one of the
+freight-handlers what had happened to the car. He got an answer--flung
+over the man's shoulder--which seemed willing enough, but was wholly
+unintelligible in the clang and clatter of a passenger-train which came
+pulling in from the southward.
+
+"Here's the Hill Country express now!" said Birkwall. "You won't change
+your mind? Well, your Kent Harbor train backs down after this goes out.
+Don't worry about the piano. I'll find out what's happened to the car it
+was in, and I'll see that it's put into a good strong one, next time."
+
+"Do! That's a good fellow!" said Gaites, and in repeated promises,
+demanded and given, to come again, they passed the time till the Hill
+Country train pulled out and the Kent Harbor train backed down.
+
+
+III.
+
+Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and
+after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent
+Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss
+Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has
+outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in
+plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired
+fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more
+remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed;
+at half past one o'clock he dined at somebody's cottage, and afterwards
+sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time
+to go to afternoon tea at somebody else's cottage, where he chatted
+about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for
+seven or eight o'clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.
+
+There was a great deal more society than there had been in his old
+college-vacation days, when the Kent Harbor House reigned sole in a
+perhaps somewhat fabled despotism; but the society was of not less
+simple instincts, and the black coat which Gaites put on for supper was
+never of the evening-dress convention. Once when he had been out
+canoeing on the river very late, his hostess made him go "just as he
+was," and he was consoled on meeting their bachelor host to find that he
+had had the inspiration to wear a flannel shirt of much more outing type
+than Gaites himself had on.
+
+The thing that he had to guard against was not to praise the river
+sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the
+river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy
+to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well
+that he told people he was never going away.
+
+He had arrived at this extreme before he received the note from Mrs.
+Birkwall, which she made his prompt bread-and-butter letter the excuse
+of writing him. She wrote mainly to remind him of his promise to stay
+another day with her husband on his way home through Burymouth; and she
+alleged an additional claim upon him because of what she said she had
+made Birkwall do for him. She had made him go down to the freight-depot
+every day, and see what had become of Phyllis Desmond's piano; and she
+had not dared write before, because it had been most unaccountably
+delayed there for the three days that had now passed. Only that morning,
+however, she had gone down herself with Birkwall; and it showed what a
+woman could do when she took anything in hand. Without knowing of her
+approach except by telepathy, the railroad people had bestirred
+themselves, and she had seen them with her own eyes put the piano-case
+into a car, and had waited till the train had bumped and jolted off with
+it towards Mewers Junction. All the ladies of her supper party, she
+declared, had been keenly distressed at the delay of the piano in
+Burymouth, and she was now offering him the relief which she had shared
+already with them.
+
+He laughed aloud in reading this letter at breakfast, and he could not
+do less than read it to his hostess, who said it was charming, and at
+once took a vivid interest in the affair of the piano. She accepted in
+its entirety his theory of its being a birthday-present for the young
+girl with that pretty name; and she professed to be in a quiver of
+anxiety at its retarded progress.
+
+"And, by-the-way," she added, with the logic of her sex, "I'm just going
+to the station to see what's become of a trunk myself that I ordered
+expressed from Chicago a week ago. If you're not doing anything this
+morning--the tide isn't in till noon, and there'll be little or no
+bathing to look at before that--you'd better drive down with me. Or
+perhaps you're canoeing up the river with somebody?"
+
+Gaites said he was not, and if he were he would plead a providential
+indisposition rather than miss driving with her to the station.
+
+"Well, anyway," she said, tangentially, "I can get June Alber to go too,
+and you can take her canoeing afterwards."
+
+But Miss Alber was already engaged for canoeing, and Gaites was obliged
+to drive off with his hostess alone. She said she did pity him, but she
+pitied him no longer than it took to get at the express agent. Then she
+began to pity herself, and much more energetically if not more
+sincerely, for it seemed that the agent had not been able to learn
+anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning
+it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as
+combining all the searching effects of a Roentgen-ray examination and the
+earlier procedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which
+he seemed to have formed, toward the freight-house.
+
+He amused himself thinking what he should do if he found Phyllis
+Desmond's piano there, but he was wholly unprepared to do anything when
+he actually found it standing on the platform, as if it had just been
+put out of the freight-car which was still on the siding at the door. He
+passed instantly from the mood of gay conjecture in which he was playing
+with the improbable notion of its presence to a violent indignation.
+
+"Why, look here!" he almost shouted to a man in a silk cap and greased
+overalls who was contemplating the inscription on the slope of its
+cover, "what's that piano doing _here_?"
+
+The man seemed to accept him as one having authority to make this
+demand, and responded mildly, "Well, that's just what I was thinking
+myself."
+
+"That piano," Gaites went on with unabated violence, "started from
+Boston at the beginning of the week; and I happen to know that it's been
+lying two or three days at Burymouth, instead of going on to Lower
+Merritt, as it ought to have done at once. It ought to have been in
+Lower Merritt Wednesday afternoon at the latest, and here it is at Kent
+Harbor Saturday morning!"
+
+The man in the silk cap scanned Gaites's figure warily, as if it might
+be that of some official whale in disguise, and answered in a tone of
+dreamy suggestion: "Must have got shifted into the wrong car at Mewers
+Junction, somehow. Or maybe they started it wrong from Burymouth."
+
+Mrs. Maze was coming rapidly down the platform toward them, leaving the
+express agent to crawl flaccidly into his den at the end of the
+passenger-station, with the air of having had all his joints started.
+
+"Just look at this, Mrs. Maze," said Gaites when she drew near enough to
+read the address on the piano-case. She did look at it; then she looked
+at Gaites's face, into which he had thrown a sort of stony calm; and
+then she looked back at the piano-case.
+
+"No!" she exclaimed and questioned in one.
+
+Gaites nodded confirmation.
+
+"Then it won't be there in time for the poor thing's birthday?"
+
+He nodded again.
+
+Mrs. Maze was a woman who never measured her terms, perhaps because
+there was nothing large enough to measure them with, and perhaps because
+in their utmost expansion they were a tight fit for her emotions.
+
+"Well, it's an abominable outrage!" she began. She added: "It's a
+burning shame! They'll never get over it in the world; and when it comes
+lagging along after everything's over, she won't care a pin for it! How
+did it happen?"
+
+Gaites mutely referred her, with a shrug, to the man in the silk cap,
+and he again hazarded his dreamy conjecture.
+
+"Well, it doesn't matter!" she said, with a bitterness that was a great
+comfort to Gaites. "What are you going to do about it?" she asked him.
+
+"I don't know what _can_ be done about it," he answered, referring
+himself to the man in the silk cap.
+
+The man said, "No freight out, now, till Monday."
+
+Mrs. Maze burst forth again: "If I had the least confidence in the world
+in any human express company, I would send it by express and pay the
+expressage myself."
+
+"Oh, I couldn't let you do that, Mrs. Maze," Gaites protested. "Besides,
+I don't suppose they'd allow us to take it out of the freight, here,
+unless we had the bill of lading."
+
+"Well," cried Mrs. Maze, passionately, "I can't bear to think of that
+child's suspense. It's perfectly heart-sickening. Why shouldn't they
+telegraph? They ought to telegraph! If they let things go wandering
+round the earth at this rate, the least they can do is to telegraph and
+relieve people's minds. We'll go and make the station-master telegraph!"
+
+But even when the station-master was found, and made to understand the
+case, and to feel its hardship, he had his scruples. "I don't think I've
+got any right to do that," he said.
+
+"Of coarse I'll pay for the telegram," Mrs. Maze interpolated.
+
+"It ain't that exactly," said the station-master. "It might look as if I
+was meddling myself. I rather not, Mrs. Maze."
+
+She took fire. "Then _I'll_ meddle myself!" she blazed. "There's nothing
+to hinder my telegraphing, I suppose!"
+
+"_I_ can't hinder you," the station-master admitted.
+
+"Well, then!" She pulled a bunch of yellow telegraph blanks toward her,
+and consumed three of them in her comprehensive despatch:
+
+     _Miss Phyllis Desmond,
+
+     Lower Merritt, N. H.
+
+     Piano left Boston Monday P. M. Broke down on way to Burymouth,
+     where delayed four days. Sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers
+     Junction. Forwarded to Lower Merritt Monday._
+
+"There! How will that do?" she asked Gaites, submitting the telegram to
+him.
+
+"That seems to cover the ground," he said, not so wholly hiding the
+misgiving he began to feel but that she demanded,
+
+"It explains everything, doesn't it?"
+
+"Yes--"
+
+"Very well; sign it, then!"
+
+"I?"
+
+"Certainly. She doesn't know me."
+
+"She doesn't know me, either," said Gaites. He added: "And a man's
+name--"
+
+"To be sure! Why didn't I think of that?" and she affixed a signature in
+which the baptismal name gave away her romantic and impulsive
+generation--Elaine W. Maze. "_Now_," she triumphed, as Gaites
+helped her into her trap--"_now_ I shall have a little peace of my
+life!"
+
+
+IV.
+
+Mrs. Maze had no great trouble in making Gaites stay over Sunday. The
+argument she used was, "No freight out till Monday, you know." The
+inducement was June Alber, whom she said she had already engaged to go
+canoeing with Gaites Sunday afternoon.
+
+That afternoon was exquisite. The sky was cloudless, and of one blue
+with the river and the girl's eyes, as Gaites noted while she sat facing
+him from the bow of the canoe. But the day was of the treacherous
+serenity of a weather-breeder, and the next morning brought a storm of
+such violence that Mrs. Maze declared it would be a foolhardy risk of
+his life for Gaites to go; and again she enforced her logic with Miss
+Alber, whom she said she had asked to one-o'clock dinner, with a few
+other friends.
+
+Gaites stayed, of course, but he atoned for his weakness by starting
+early Tuesday morning, so as to get the first Hill Country train from
+Boston at Burymouth. He had decided that to get in as much change of air
+as possible he had better go to Craybrooks for the rest of his vacation.
+
+His course lay through Lower Merritt, and perhaps he would have time to
+run out from the train and ask the station-master (known to him from his
+former sojourn) who Miss Phyllis Desmond was. His mind was not so full
+of Miss June Alber but that he wished to know.
+
+It was still raining heavily, and on the first cut beyond Porchester
+Junction his train was stopped by a flagman, sent back from a
+freight-train. There was a wash-out just ahead, and the way would be
+blocked for several hours yet, if not longer. The express backed down to
+Porchester, and there seemed no choice for Gaites, if he insisted upon
+going to Craybrooks, but to take the first train up the old Boston and
+Montreal line to Wells River and across by the Wing Road through
+Fabyans; and this was what he did, arriving very late, but quite in time
+for all he had to do at Craybrooks.
+
+The next day the weather cleared up cold, after the storm, and the fat
+old ladies, who outnumber everybody but the thin young girls at summer
+hotels, made the landlord put the steam on in the corridors, and toasted
+themselves before the log fires on the spectacular hall hearth. Gaites
+walked all day, and at night he lounged by the lamp, trying to read, and
+wished himself at Kent Harbor. The blue eyes of June Alber made
+themselves one with the sky and the river again, and all three laughed
+at him for his folly in leaving the certain delight they embodied for
+the vague good of a whim fulfilled. Was this the change he had come to
+the mountains for? He could throw his hat into the clouds that hung so
+low in the defile where the hotel lurked, and that was something; but it
+was not so much to the purpose, now that he had it, as June Alber and
+the sky and the river, which he had no longer. As he drowsed by the fire
+in a break of the semicircle of old ladies before it, he suddenly ceased
+to think of June Alber and the Kent sky and river, and found himself as
+it were visually confronted with that pale, delicate girl in thread
+gloves; she was facing him from the bow of a canoe in the train at
+Boston, where he had first met her, and some one was saying, "Oh, she's
+a Desmond, through and through."
+
+He woke to the sound of a quick snort, in which he suspected a terminal
+character when he glanced round the semicircle of old ladies and found
+them all staring at him. From the pain in his neck he knew that his head
+had been hanging forward on his breast, and, in the strong belief that
+he had been publicly disgracing himself, he left the place, and went out
+on the piazza till his shame should be forgotten. Of course, the sound
+of the name Desmond had been as much a part of his dream as the sight of
+that pale girl's face; but he felt, while he paced the veranda, the pull
+of a strong curiosity to make sure of the fact. From time to time he
+looked in through the window, without courage to return. At last, when
+the semicircle was reduced to the bulks of the two ladies who had sat
+nearest him, he went in, and took a place with a newspaper at the lamp
+just behind them.
+
+They stopped their talk and recognized him with an exchange of
+consciousness. Then, as if compelled by an irresistible importance in
+their topic, they began again; that is, one of them began to talk again,
+and the other to listen, and Gaites from almost the first word joined
+the listener with all his might, though he diligently held up his paper
+between himself and the speaker and pretended to be reading.
+
+"Yes," she said, "they must have had their summer home there nearly
+twenty years. Lower Merritt was one of the first places opened up in
+that part of the mountains, and I guess the Desmonds built the first
+cottage there."
+
+The date given would make the young lady whom he remembered from her
+childhood romps on her father's lawn somewhat older than he imagined,
+but not too old for the purposes of his romance.
+
+The speaker began to collect her needlework into the handkerchief on her
+lap as she went on, and he listened with an intensified abandon.
+
+"I guess," she continued, "that they pass most of the year there. After
+he lost his money, he had to give up his house in town, and I believe
+they have no other home now. They did use to travel some, winters, but I
+guess they don't much any more; if they don't stay there the whole
+winter through, I don't believe they get much farther now than Portland,
+or Burymouth, at the furthest. It seems to me as if I heard that one of
+the girls was going to Boston last winter to take piano lessons at the
+Conservatory, so as to teach; but--"
+
+She stopped with a definite air, and rolled her knitting up into her
+handkerchief. Gaites made a merit to himself of rising abruptly and
+closing his paper with a clash, as if he had been trying to read and had
+not been able for the talking near him. The ladies looked round
+conscience-stricken; when they saw who it was, they looked indignant.
+
+
+V.
+
+In the necessity, which we all feel, of making practical excuses to
+ourselves for a foolish action, he pretended that he had been at
+Craybrooks long enough, and that now, since he had derived all the
+benefit to be got from the west-side air, it was best to begin his
+homestretch on the other slope of the hills. His real reason was that he
+wished to stop at Lower Merritt and experience whatever fortuities might
+happen to him from doing so. He wished, in other words, to see Phyllis
+Desmond, or, failing this, to find out whether her piano had reached
+her.
+
+It had now a pathos for him which had been wanting earlier in his
+romance. It was no longer a gay surprise for a young girl's birthday; it
+was the sober means of living to a woman who must work for her living.
+But he found it not the less charming for that; he had even a more
+romantic interest in it, mingled with the sense of patronage, of
+protection, which is so agreeable to a successful man.
+
+He began to long for some new occasion of promoting the arrival of the
+piano in Lower Merritt, and he was so far from regretting his former
+interventions that at the first junction where his train stopped he
+employed the time in exploring the freight-house in the vain hope of
+finding it there, and urging the road to greater speed in its delivery
+to Miss Desmond. He was now not at all ashamed of the stand he had taken
+in the matter at former opportunities, and he was not abashed when a man
+in a silk cap demanded, across the twilight of the freight-house, in
+accents of the semi-sarcasm appropriate in addressing a person
+apparently not minding his own business, "Lost something?"
+
+"Yes, I have," answered Gaites with just effrontery. "I've lost an
+upright piano. I started with it from Boston ten days or a fortnight
+ago, and I've found it everywhere I've stopped, and sometimes where I
+didn't stop. How long, in the course of nature, ought an upright piano
+to take in getting to this point from Boston, anyway?"
+
+The man obviously tasted the sarcasm in Gaites's tone, and dropped it
+from his own, but he was sulkier if more respectful than before in
+answering: "'D ought a come right through in a couple of days. 'D ought
+a been here a week ago."
+
+"Why isn't it here now, then?"
+
+"Might 'a' got off on some branch road, by mistake, and waited there
+till it was looked up. You see," the man continued, resting an elbow on
+the tall casing of a chest of drawers, and dropping to a more
+confidential level in his manner, "an upright piano ain't like a
+passenger. It don't kick if it's shunted off on the wrong line. As a
+gene'l rule, freight don't complain of the route it travels by, and it
+ain't in a hurry to arrive."
+
+"Oh!" said Gaites, with a sympathetic sneer.
+
+"But it ain't likely," said the man, who now pushed his hat far back on
+his head, in the interest of self-possession, "that it's gone wrong.
+With all these wash-outs and devilments, the last fo't-night, it might
+a' been travellin' straight and not got the'a, yet. What d'you say was
+the address?"
+
+"Lower Merritt," said Gaites, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.
+
+"Name?" persisted the man.
+
+"Miss Phyllis Desmond," Gaites answered, now feeling really silly, but
+unable to get away without answering.
+
+"That ain't your name?" the man suggested, with reviving sarcasm.
+
+"No, it isn't!" Gaites retorted, angrily, aware that he was giving
+himself away in fine shape.
+
+"Oh, I see," the man mocked. "Friend o' the family. Well, I guess you'll
+find your piano at Lower Merritt, all right, in two-three weeks." He was
+now openly offensive, as with a sense of having Gaites in his power.
+
+A locomotive-bell rang, and Gaites started toward the doorway. "Is that
+my train?"
+
+The man openly laughed. "Guess it is, if you're goin' to Lower Merritt."
+As Gaites shot through the doorway toward his train, he added, in an
+insolent drawl, "Miss--Des--mond!"
+
+Gaites was so furious when he got back to the smoking-room of the
+parlor-car that he was sorry for several miles that he had not turned
+back and kicked the man, even if it lost him his train. But this was
+only while he was under the impression that he was furious with the man.
+When he discovered that he was furious with himself, for having been all
+imaginable kinds of an ass, he perceived that he had done the wisest
+thing he could in leaving the man to himself, and taking up the line of
+his journey again. What remained mortifying was that he had bought his
+ticket and checked his bag to Lower Merritt, which he wished never to
+hear of again, much less see.
+
+He rang for the porter and consulted him as to what could be done toward
+changing the check on his bag from Lower Merritt to Middlemount
+Junction; and as it appeared that this was quite feasible, since his
+ticket would have carried him two stations beyond the Junction, he had
+done it. He knew the hotel at Middlemount, and he decided to pass the
+night there, and the next day to go back to Kent Harbor and June Alber,
+and let Lower Merritt and Phyllis Desmond take care of themselves from
+that time forward.
+
+While the driver of the Middlemount House barge was helping the
+station-master-and-baggage-man (they were one) put the arriving
+passengers' trunks into the wagon for the Middlemount House, Gaites
+paced up and down the long platform in the remnant of his excitement,
+and vowed himself to have nothing more to do with Miss Desmond's piano,
+even if it should turn up then and there and personally appeal to him
+for help. In this humor he was not prepared to have anything of the kind
+happen, and he stood aghast, in looking absently into a freight-car
+standing on the track, to read, "Miss Phyllis Desmond, Lower Merritt, N.
+H.," on the slope of the now familiar case just within the open doorway.
+It was as if the poor girl were personally there pleading for his help
+with the eyes whose tenderness he remembered.
+
+The united station-master-and-baggage-man, who appeared also to be the
+freight agent, came lounging down the platform toward him. He was so
+exactly of the rustic railroad type that he confused Gaites with a doubt
+as to which functionary, of the many he now knew, this was.
+
+"Go'n' to walk over to the hotel?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," Gaites faltered, and the man abruptly turned, and made the
+gesture for starting a locomotive to the driver of the Middlemount
+stage.
+
+"All right, Jim!" he shouted, and the stage drove off.
+
+"What time can I get a train for Lower Merritt this afternoon?" asked
+Gaites.
+
+"Four o'clock," said the man. "This freight goes out first;" and now
+Gaites noticed that up on a siding beyond the station an engine with a
+train of freight-cars was fretfully fizzing. The engineer put a
+silk-capped head out of the cab window and looked back at the
+station-master, who began to work his arms like a semaphore telegraph.
+Then the locomotive tooted, the bell rang, and the freight-train ran
+forward on the switch to the main track, and commenced backing down to
+where they stood. Evidently it was going to pick up the car with Phyllis
+Desmond's piano in it.
+
+"When does this freight go out?" Gaites palpitated.
+
+"'Bout ten minutes," said the station-master.
+
+"Does it stop at Lower Merritt?"
+
+"Leaves this cah the'a," said the man, as if surprised into the
+admission.
+
+"Can I go on her?" Gaites pursued, breathlessly.
+
+"Well, I guess you'll have to talk to this man about that," and the
+station-master indicated, with a nod of his head, the freight conductor,
+who was swinging himself down from the caboose, now come abreast of them
+on the track. A brakeman had also jumped down, and the train fastened on
+to the waiting car, under his manipulation, with a final cluck and jolt.
+
+The conductor and station-master exchanged large oblong Manila-paper
+envelopes, and the station-master said, casually, "Here's a man wants to
+go to Lower Merritt with you, Bill."
+
+The conductor looked amused and interested. "Eva travel in a caboose?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, I guess you can stand it fo' five miles, anyway."
+
+He turned and left Gaites, who understood this for permission, and
+clambered into the car, where he found himself in a rude but far from
+comfortless interior. There was a sort of table or desk in the middle,
+with a heavy chair or two before it; round the side of the car were some
+leather-covered benches, suitable for the hard naps which seemed to be
+taken on them, if he could guess from the man in overalls asleep on one.
+
+The conductor came in, after the train started, and seemed disposed to
+be sociable. He had apparently gathered from the station-master so much
+of Gaites's personal history as had accumulated since he left the
+express train at Middlemount.
+
+"Thought you'd try a caboose for a little change from a pahla-cah," he
+suggested, humorously.
+
+"Well, yes," Gaites partially admitted. "I did intend to stay over at
+Middlemount when I left the express there, but I changed my mind and
+decided to go on. It's very good of you to let me come with you."
+
+"'Tain't but a little way to Lowa Merritt," the conductor explained,
+defensively. "Eva been the'a?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I passed a week or so there once, after I left college. Are
+you acquainted there?"
+
+"I'm _from_ the'a. Used to wo'k fo' the Desmonds--got that summa place
+up the side of the mountain--before I took to the ro-ad."
+
+"Oh, yes! Have they still got it?"
+
+"Yes. Or it's got _them_. Be glad to sell it, I guess, since the old man
+lost his money. But Lowa Merritt's kind o' gone down as a summa roso't.
+Tryin' ha'd to bring it up, though. Know the Desmonds?"
+
+"No, not personally."
+
+"Nice fo-aks," said the conductor, providing himself for conversational
+purposes with a splinter from the floor. He put it between his teeth and
+continued: "I took ca' thei' hosses, one while, as long's they _had_
+any, before I went on the ro-ad. Old gentleman kep' up a show till he
+died; then the fam'ly found out that they hadn't much of anything but
+the place left. Girls had to do something, and one of 'em got a place in
+a school out West--smaht, _all_ of 'em; the second one kind o' runs the
+fahm; and the youngest, here, 's been fittin' for a music-teacha. Why,
+I've got a piano for her in this cah that we picked up at Middlemount,
+_now_. Been two wintas at the Conservatory in Boston. Got talent enough,
+they tell _me_. Undastand 't she means to go to Pohtland in the fall and
+try to get pupils, _the'a_."
+
+"Not if _I_ can help it!" thought Gaites, with a swelling heart; and
+then he blushed for his folly.
+
+
+VI.
+
+Gaites found some notable changes in the hotel at Lower Merritt since he
+had last sojourned there. It no longer called itself a Hotel, but an
+Inn, and it had a brand-new old-fashioned swinging sign before its door;
+its front had been cut up into several gables, and shingled to the
+ground with shingles artificially antiquated, so that it looked much
+grayer than it naturally ought. Within it was equipped for electric
+lighting; and there was a low-browed aesthetic parlor, where, when Gaites
+arrived and passed to a belated dinner in the dining-room, an orchestra,
+consisting of a lady pianist and a lady violinist, was giving the
+closing piece of the afternoon concert. The dining-room was painted a
+self-righteous olive-green; it was thoroughly netted against the flies,
+which used to roost in myriads on the cut-paper around the tops of the
+pillars, and a college-student head waiter ushered Gaites through the
+gloom to his place with a warning and hushing hand which made him feel
+as if he were being shown to a pew during prayers.
+
+He escaped as soon as possible from the refection which, from the soup
+to the ice-cream, had hardly grown lukewarm, and went out to walk by a
+way that he knew well, and which had for him now a romantically pathetic
+interest. It was, of course, the way past the Desmond cottage, which,
+when he came in sight of it round the shoulder of upland where it stood,
+was curiously strange, curiously familiar. It needed painting badly, and
+the grounds had a sadly neglected air. The naked legs of little girls no
+longer twinkled over the lawn, which was grown neglectedly up to
+low-bush blackberries.
+
+Gaites hurried past with a lump in his throat, and returned by another
+road to the Inn, where his long ramble ended just as the dining-room
+doors were opened behind their nettings for supper. At this cheerfuler
+moment he found the head waiter much more conversible than at the hour
+of his retarded dinner, and Gaites made talk with him, as the young
+follow lingered beside his chair, with one eye on the door for the
+behoof of other guests.
+
+Gaites said he had found great changes in Lower Merritt since he had
+been there some years before, and he artfully led the talk up to the
+Desmonds. The head waiter was rather vague about their past; but he was
+distinct enough about their present, and said the young ladies happened
+all to be at home. "I don't know," he added, "whether you noticed our
+lady orchestra when you came in to dinner to-day?"
+
+"Yes, I did," said Gaites. "I was very much interested. I thought they
+played charmingly, and I was sorry that I got in only for the close of
+the last piece."
+
+"Well," the head waiter consoled him, "you'll have a chance to hear them
+again to-night; they're going to play for the hop. I don't know," he
+added again, "whether you noticed the lady at the piano."
+
+"I noticed that she had a pretty head, which she carried gracefully, but
+it was against the window, and I couldn't make out the face."
+
+"That," said the head waiter, with pride either in the fact or for the
+effect it must produce, "was Miss Phyllis Desmond."
+
+Gaites started as satisfactorily as could be wished. "Indeed?"
+
+"Yes; she's engaged to play here the whole summer." The head waiter
+fumbled with the knife and fork at the place opposite, and blushed. "But
+you'll hear her to-night yourself," he ended incoherently, and hurried
+away, to show another guest to his, or rather her, place.
+
+Gaites wondered why he felt suddenly angry; why he resented the head
+waiter's blush as an impertinence and a liberty. After all, the fellow
+was a student and probably a gentleman; and if he chose to help himself
+through college by taking that menial role during the summer, rather
+than come upon the charity of his friends or the hard-earned savings of
+a poor old father, what had any one to say against it? Gaites had
+nothing to say against it; and yet that blush, that embarrassment of a
+man who had pulled out his chair for him, in relation to such a girl as
+Miss Phyllis Desmond, incensed him so much that he could not enjoy his
+supper. He did not bow to the head waiter when he held the netting-door
+open for him to go out, and he felt the necessity of taking the evening
+air in another stroll to cool himself off.
+
+Of course, if the poor girl was reduced to playing in the hotel
+orchestra for the money it would give her, she had come down to the
+level of the head waiter, and they must meet as equals. But the thought
+was no less intolerable for that, and Gaites set out with the notion of
+walking away from it. At the station, however, which was in friendly
+proximity to the Inn, his steps were stayed by the sound of girlish
+voices, rising like sweetly varied pipes from beyond the freight-depot.
+Their youth invited his own to look them up, and he followed round to
+the back of the depot, where he came upon a sight which had, perhaps
+from the waning light, a heightened charm. Against the curtain of low
+pines which had been gradually creeping back upon the depot ever since
+the woods were cut away to make room for it, four girls were posed in
+attitudes instinctively dramatic and vividly eager, while as many men
+were employed in getting what Gaites at once saw to be Miss Phyllis
+Desmond's piano into the wagon backed up to the platform of the depot.
+Their work was nearly accomplished, but at every moment of what still
+remained to be done the girls emitted little shrieks, laughs, and moans
+of intense interest, and fluttered in their light summer dresses against
+the background of the dark evergreens like anxious birds.
+
+At last the piano was got into the middle of the wagon, the inclined
+planks withdrawn and loaded into it, and the tail-board snapped to.
+Three of the men stepped aside, and one of them jumped into the front of
+the wagon and gathered up the reins from the horses' backs. He called
+with mocking challenge to the group of girls, "Nobody goin' to git up
+here and keep this piano from tippin' out?"
+
+A wild clamor rose from the girls, settling at last into staccato cries.
+
+"You've got to _do_ it, Phyl!"
+
+"Yes, Phyllis, you _must_ get in!"
+
+"It's _your_ piano, Phyl. You've got to keep it from tipping out!"
+
+"No, no! I won't! I can't! I'm not going to!" one voice answered to all,
+but apparently without a single reference to the event; for in the end
+the speaker gave her hand to the man in the wagon, and with many small
+laughs and squeaks was pulled up over the hub and tire of a front wheel,
+and then stood staying herself against the piano-case, with a final
+lamentation of "Oh, it's a shame! I'll never speak to any of you again!
+How perfectly mean! _Oh!_" The last exclamation signalized the start of
+the horses at a brisk mountain trot, which the driver presently sobered
+to a walk. The three remaining girls followed, mocking and cheering, and
+after them lounged the three remaining men, at a respectful distance,
+marking the social interval between them, which was to be bridged only
+in some such moment of supreme excitement as the present.
+
+It was no question with Gaites whether he should bring up the end of the
+procession; he could not think of any consideration that would have
+stayed him. He scarcely troubled himself to keep at a fit remove from
+the rest; and as he followed in the deepening twilight he felt a sweet,
+unselfish gladness of heart that the poor girl whom he had seen so wan
+and sad in Boston should be the gay soul of this pretty triumph.
+
+The wagon drove into the grounds of the Desmond cottage, and backed up
+to the edge of the veranda. Lights appeared, and voices came from
+within. One of the men, despatched to the barn for a hatchet, came
+flickering back with a lantern also; lamps brought out of the house were
+extinguished by the evening breeze (in spite of luminous hands held near
+the chimney to shelter them), amidst the joyful applause of all the
+girls and the laughter of the men. A sound of hammering rose, and then a
+sound of boards rending from the clutch of nails, and then a sound of
+pieces thrown loosely into a pile. There was a continual flutter of
+women's dresses and emotions, and this did not end even when the piano,
+disclosed from its casing and all its wraps, was pushed indoors, and
+placed against the parlor wall, where a flash of lamp-light revealed it
+to Gaites in final position.
+
+He lingered still, in the shelter of some barberry-bushes at the cottage
+gate, and not till the last cry of gratitude had been answered by the
+unanimous disclaimer of the men rattling away in the wagon did he feel
+that his pursuit of the piano had ended.
+
+
+VII.
+
+"Can you tell me, madam," asked Gaites of an obviously approachable
+tabby next the chimney-corner, "which of the musicians is Miss Desmond?"
+
+He had hurried back to the Inn, and got himself early into a dress suit
+that proved wholly inessential, and was down among the first at the hop.
+This function, it seemed, was going on in the parlor, which summed in
+itself the character of ball-room as well as drawing-room. The hop had
+now begun, and two young girl couples were doing what they could to
+rebuke the sparse youth of Lower Merritt Inn for their lack of eagerness
+in the evening's pleasure by dancing alone. Gaites did not even notice
+them, he was so intent upon the ladies of the orchestra, concerning whom
+he was beginning to have a troubled mind, not to say a dark misgiving.
+
+"Oh," the approachable tabby answered, "it's the one at the piano. The
+violinist is Miss Axewright, of South Newton. They were at the
+Conservatory together in Boston, and they are such friends! Miss Desmond
+would never have played here--intends to take pupils in Portland in the
+winter--if Miss Axewright hadn't come," and the pleasant old tabby
+purred on, with a velvety pat here, and a delicate scratch there. But
+Gaites heard with one ear only; the other was more devotedly given to
+the orchestra, which also claimed both his eyes. While he learned, as
+with the mind of some one else, that the Desmonds had been very much
+opposed to Phyllis's playing at the Inn, but had consented partly with
+their poverty, because they needed everything they could rake and scrape
+together, and partly with their will, because Miss Axewright was such a
+nice girl, he was painfully adjusting his consciousness to the fact that
+the girl at the piano was not the girl whom he had seen at Boston and
+whom he had so rashly and romantically decided to be Miss Phyllis
+Desmond. The pianist was indeed Miss Desmond, but to no purpose, if the
+violinist was some one else; it availed as little that the violinist was
+the illusion that had lured him to Lower Merritt in pursuit of Miss
+Desmond's piano, if she were really Miss Axewright of South Newton.
+
+What remained for him to do was to arrange for his departure by the
+first train in the morning; and he was subjectively accounting to the
+landlord for his abrupt change of mind after he had engaged his room for
+a week, while he was intent with all his upper faculties upon the
+graceful poses and movements of Miss Axewright. There was something so
+appealing in the pressure of her soft chin as it held the violin in
+place against her round, girlish throat that Gaites felt a lump in his
+own larger than his Adam's-apple would account for to the spectator; the
+delicately arched wrist of the hand that held the bow, and the
+rhythmical curve and flow of her arm in playing, were means of the spell
+which wove itself about him, and left him, as it were, bound hand and
+foot. It was in this helpless condition that he rose at the urgence of a
+friendly young fellow who had chosen himself master of ceremonies, and
+took part in the dancing; and at the end of the first half of the
+programme, while the other dancers streamed out on the verandas and
+thronged the stairways, he was aware of dangling his chains as he
+lounged toward the ladies of the orchestra. The volunteer master of
+ceremonies had half shut himself across the piano in his eager talk with
+Miss Desmond, and he readily relinquished Miss Axewright to Gaites, who
+willingly devoted himself to her, after Miss Desmond had risen in
+acknowledgment of his bow. He had then perceived that she was not nearly
+so tall as she had seemed when seated; and a woman who sat tall and
+stood low was as much his aversion as if his own abnormally long legs
+did not render him guilty of the opposite offence.
+
+Miss Desmond must have had other qualities and characteristics, but in
+his absorption with Miss Axewright's he did not notice them. He saw
+again the pretty, pathetic face, the gentle brown eyes, the ordinary
+brown hair, the sentient hands, the slight, graceful figure, the whole
+undistinguished, unpretentious presence, which had taken his fancy at
+Boston, and which he now perceived had kept it, under whatever erring
+impressions, ever since.
+
+"I think we have met before, Miss Axewright," he said boldly, and he had
+the pleasure of seeing her pensive little visage light up with a
+responsive humor.
+
+"I think we have," she replied; and Miss Desmond, whose habitual state
+seemed to be intense inattention to whatever directly addressed itself
+to her, cut in with the cry:
+
+"You have met _before_!"
+
+"Yes. Two weeks ago, in Boston," said Gaites. "Miss Axewright and I
+stopped at the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot to see that your piano
+started off all right."
+
+He explained himself further, and, "Well, I don't see what you did to
+it," Miss Desmond pouted. "It just got here this afternoon."
+
+"Probably they 'throwed a spell' on it, as the country people say,"
+suggested the master of ceremonies. "But all's well that end's well. The
+great thing is to have your piano, Miss Phyllis. I'm coming up to-morrow
+morning to see if it's got here in good condition."
+
+"That's _some_ compensation," said the girl ironically; and she added,
+with the kind of repellent lure with which women know how to leave men
+the responsibility of any reciprocal approach, "I don't know whether it
+won't need tuning first."
+
+"Well, I'm a piano-tunist myself," the young fellow retorted, and their
+banter took a course that left Miss Axewright and Gaites to themselves.
+The dancers began to stray in again from the stairways and verandas.
+
+"Dear me!" said Miss Desmond, "it's time already;" and as she dropped
+upon the piano-stool she called to Miss Axewright with an authority of
+tone which Gaites thought augured well for her success as a teacher,
+"Millicent!"
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The next morning when Gaites came down to breakfast he had a question
+which solved itself contrary to his preference as he entered the
+dining-room. He was so early that the head waiter had to jump from his
+own unfinished meal, and run to pull out his chair; and Gaites saw that
+he left at his table the landlord's family, the clerk, the housekeeper,
+and Miss Axewright. It appeared that she was not only staying in the
+hotel, but was there on terms which indeed held her above the servants,
+but separated her from the guests.
+
+He hardly knew how to dissemble the feeling of humiliation mixed with
+indignation which flashed up in him, and which, he was afterwards
+afraid, must have made him seem rather curt in his response to the head
+waiter's civilities. Miss Axewright left the dining-room first, and he
+hurried out to look her up as soon as he had despatched the coffee and
+steak which formed his breakfast, with a wholly unreasoned impulse to
+offer her some sort of reparation for the slight the conditions put upon
+her. He found her sitting on the veranda beside the friendly tabby of
+his last night's acquaintance, and far, apparently, from feeling the
+need of reparation through him. She was very nice, though, and after
+chatting a little while she rose, and excused herself to the tabby, with
+a politeness that included Gaites, upon the ground of a promise to Miss
+Desmond that she would come up, the first thing after breakfast, and see
+how the piano was getting along.
+
+When she reappeared, in her hat, at the front of the Inn, Gaites
+happened to be there, and he asked her if he might walk with her and
+make his inquiries too about the piano, in which, he urged, they were
+mutually interested. He had a notion to tell her all about his pursuit
+of Miss Desmond's piano, as something that would peculiarly interest
+Miss Desmond's friend; but though she admitted the force of his
+reasoning as to their common concern in the fate of the piano, and had
+allowed him to go with her to rejoice over its installation, some subtle
+instinct kept him from the confidence he had intended, and they walked
+on in talk (very agreeable talk, Gaites found it) which left the subject
+of the piano altogether intact.
+
+This was fortunate for Miss Desmond, who wished to talk of nothing else.
+The piano had arrived in perfect condition. "But I don't know where the
+poor thing _hasn't_ been, on the way," said the girl. "It left Boston
+fully two weeks ago, and it seems to have been wandering round to the
+ends of the earth ever since. The first of last week, I heard from it at
+Kent Harbor, of all places! I got a long despatch from there, from some
+unknown female, telling me it had broken down on the way to Burymouth,
+and been sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Have you
+ever been at Kent Harbor, Mr. Gaites?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Gaites. This was the moment to come out with the history
+of his relation to the piano; but he waited.
+
+"And can you tell me whether they happen to have a female freight agent
+there?"
+
+"Not to my knowledge," said Gaites, with a mystical smile.
+
+"Then _do_ you know anybody there by the name of Elaine W. Maze?"
+
+"Mrs. Maze? Yes, I know Mrs. Maze. She has a cottage, there."
+
+"And can you tell me _why_ Mrs. Maze should be telegraphing me about my
+piano?"
+
+There was a note of resentment in Miss Desmond's voice, and it silenced
+the laughing explanation which Gaites had almost upon his tongue. He
+fell very grave in answering, "I can't, indeed, Miss Desmond."
+
+"Perhaps she found out that it had been a long time on the way, and did
+it out of pure good-nature, to relieve your anxiety."
+
+This was what Miss Axewright conjectured, but it seemed to confirm Miss
+Desmond's worst suspicions.
+
+"That is what I should like to be _sure_ of," she said.
+
+Gaites thought of all his own anxieties and interferences in behalf of
+the piano of this ungrateful girl, and in her presence he resolved that
+his lips should be forever sealed concerning them. She never would take
+them in the right way. But he experimented with one suggestion. "Perhaps
+she was taken with the beautiful name on the piano-case, and couldn't
+help telegraphing just for the pleasure of writing it."
+
+"Beautiful?" cried Miss Desmond. "It was my grandmother's name; and I
+wonder they didn't call me for my great-grandmother, Daphne, and be done
+with it."
+
+The young man who had chosen himself master of ceremonies at the hop the
+night before now proposed from the social background where he had
+hitherto kept himself, "_I_ will call you Daphne."
+
+"_You_ will call me Miss Desmond, if you please, Mr. Ellett." The owner
+of the name had been facing her visitors from the piano-stool with her
+back to the instrument. She now wheeled upon the stool, and struck some
+chords. "I wish you'd thought to bring your fiddle, Millicent. I should
+like to try this piece." The piece lay on the music-rest before her.
+
+"I will go and get it for her," said the ex-master of ceremonies.
+
+"Do," said Miss Desmond.
+
+"No, no," Gaites protested. "I brought Miss Axewright, and I have the
+first claim to bring her fiddle."
+
+"I'm afraid you couldn't either of you find it," Miss Axewright began.
+
+"We'll both try," said the ex-master of ceremonies. "Where do you think
+it is?"
+
+"Well, it's in the case on the piano."
+
+"That doesn't sound very intricate," said Gaites, and they all laughed.
+
+As soon as the two men were out of the house, the ex-master of
+ceremonies confided: "That name is a very tender spot with Miss Desmond.
+She's always hated it since I knew her, and I can't remember when I
+_didn't_ know her."
+
+"Yes, I could see that--too late," said Gaites. "But what I can't
+understand is, Miss Axewright seemed to hate it, too."
+
+Mr. Ellett appeared greatly edified. "Did _you_ notice that?"
+
+"I think I did."
+
+"Well, now I'll tell you just what I think. There aren't any two girls
+in the world that like each other better than those two. But that shows
+just how it is. Girls are terribly jealous, the best of them. There
+isn't a girl living that really likes to have another girl praised by a
+man, or anything about her, I don't care who the man is. It's a fact,
+whether you believe it or not, or whether you respect it. I don't
+respect it myself. It's narrow-minded. I don't deny it: they _are_
+narrow-minded. All the same, we can't _help_ ourselves. At least, _I_
+can't."
+
+Mr. Ellett broke into a laugh of exhaustive intelligence and clapped
+Gaites on the back.
+
+
+IX.
+
+Gaites, if he did not wholly accept Ellett's philosophy of the female
+nature, acted in the light it cast upon the present situation. From that
+time till the end of his stay at Lower Merritt, which proved to be
+coeval with the close of the Inn for the season, and with the retirement
+of the orchestra from duty, he said nothing more of Miss Phyllis
+Desmond's beautiful name. He went further, and altogether silenced
+himself concerning his pursuit of her piano; he even sought occasions of
+being silent concerning her piano in every way, or so it seemed to him,
+in his anxious avoidance of the topic. In all this matter he was
+governed a good deal by the advice of Mr. Ellett, to whom he had
+confessed his pursuit of Miss Desmond's piano in all its particulars,
+and who showed a highly humorous appreciation of the facts. He was a
+sort of second (he preferred to say second-hand) cousin of Miss Desmond,
+and, so far as he could make out, had been born engaged to her; and he
+showed an intuition in the gingerly handling of her rather uncertain
+temper which augured well for his future happiness. His future happiness
+seemed to be otherwise taken care of, for though he was a young man of
+no particular prospects, and no profession whatever, he had a generous
+willingness to liberate his affianced to an artistic career; or, at
+least, there was no talk of her giving up her scheme of teaching the
+piano-forte because she was engaged to be married, he was exactly fitted
+to become the husband of a wage-earning wife, and was so far from being
+offensive in this quality that everybody (including Miss Desmond, rather
+fitfully) liked him; and he was universally known as Charley Ellett.
+
+After he had quite converted Gaites to his theory of silence concerning
+his outlived romance, he liked to indulge himself, when he got Gaites
+alone with the young ladies, in speculations as to the wanderings of
+Miss Desmond's piano. He could always get a rise out of Miss Desmond by
+referring to the impertinent person who had telegraphed her about it
+from Kent Harbor, and he could put Gaites into a quiver of anxiety by
+asking him whether he had heard Mrs. Maze speak of the piano when he was
+at Kent Harbor, or whether he had happened to see anything of it at any
+of the junctions on his way to Lower Merritt. To these questions Gaites
+felt himself obliged to respond with lies point-blank, though there were
+times when he was tempted to come out with the truth, Miss Axewright
+seemed so amiably indifferent, or so sympathetically interested, when
+Ellett was airing his conjectures or pushing his investigations.
+
+Still Gaites clung to the refuge of his lies, and upon the whole it
+served him well, or at least enabled him to temporize in safety, while
+he was making the progress in Miss Axewright's affections which, if he
+had not been her lover, he never would have imagined difficult. They
+went every day, between the afternoon and evening concerts, to walk in
+the Cloister, a colonnade of pines not far from the Inn, which differed
+from some other cloisters in being so much devoted to love-making. She
+was in love with him, as he was with her; but in her proud maiden soul
+she did not dream of bringing him to the confession she longed for. This
+came the afternoon of the last day they walked in the Cloister, when it
+seemed as if they might go on walking there forever, and never emerge
+from their fond, delicious, tremulous, trusting doubt of each other.
+
+She cried upon his shoulder, with her arms round his neck, and owned
+that she had loved him from the first moment she had seen him in front
+of the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot in Boston; and Gaites tried to make
+his passion antedate this moment. To do so, he had to fall back upon the
+notion of pre-existence, but she gladly admitted his hypothesis.
+
+The next morning brought another mood, a mood of sweet defiance, in
+which she was still more enrapturing. By this time the engagement was
+known to their two friends, and Miss Desmond came to the cars with
+Charley Ellett to see her off. As Gaites was going to Boston on the same
+train, they made it the occasion of seeing him off, too. Millicent
+openly declared that they two were going together, that in fact she was
+taking him home to show him to her family in South Newton and see
+whether they liked him.
+
+Ellett put this aspect of the affair aside. "Well, then," he said, "if
+you're going to be in Boston together, I think you ought to see the S.
+B. & H. C. traffic-manager, and find out all about what kept Phyl's
+piano so long on the road. _I_ think they owe her an explanation, and
+Gaites is a lawyer, and he's just the man to get it, with damages."
+
+Gaites saw in Ellett's impudent, amusing face that he divined
+Millicent's continued ignorance of his romance, and was bent on
+mischief. But the girl paid no heed to his talk, and Gaites could not
+help laughing. He liked the fellow; he even liked Miss Desmond, who was
+so much softened by the occasion that she had all the thorny allure of a
+ripened barberry in his fancy. They both hung about the seat, where he
+stood ready to take his place beside Millicent, till the conductor
+shouted, "All aboard!" Then they ran out, and waved to the lovers
+through the window till the car started.
+
+When they could be seen no longer, Millicent let Gaites arrange their
+hand-baggage together on the seat in front of them. It was a warm day,
+and she said she did believe she would take her hat off; and she gave it
+to him, odorous of her pretty hair, to put in the rack overhead. After
+he had done this, and sat down definitively, she shrank unconsciously
+closer to him, knitting her fingers in those of his hand on the seat
+between them.
+
+"Now," she said, "tell me all about yourself."
+
+"About myself?"
+
+"Yes. About Phyllis Desmond's piano, and why you were so interested in
+it."
+
+
+
+
+A DIFFICULT CASE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was in the fervor of their first married years that the Ewberts came
+to live in the little town of Hilbrook, shortly after Hilbrook
+University had been established there under the name of its founder,
+Josiah Hilbrook. The town itself had then just changed its name, in
+compliance with the conditions of his public benefactions, and in
+recognition of the honor he had done it in making it a seat of learning.
+Up to a certain day it had been called West Mallow, ever since it was
+set off from the original town of Mallow; but after a hundred and
+seventy years of this custom it began on that day to call itself
+Hilbrook, and thenceforward, with the curious American acquiescence in
+the accomplished fact, no one within or without its limits called it
+West Mallow again.
+
+The memory of Josiah Hilbrook himself began to be lost in the name he
+had given the place; and except for the perfunctory mention of its
+founder in the ceremonies of Commencement Day, the university hardly
+remembered him as a man, but rather regarded him as a locality. He had,
+in fact, never been an important man in West Mallow, up to the time he
+had left it to seek his fortune in New York; and when he died, somewhat
+abruptly, and left his money, as it were, out of a clear sky, to his
+native place in the form of a university, a town hall, a soldiers'
+monument, a drinking-fountain, and a public library, his
+fellow-townsmen, in making the due civic acknowledgment and acceptance
+of his gifts, recalled with effort the obscure family to which he
+belonged.
+
+He had not tried to characterize the university by his peculiar
+religious faith, but he had given a church building, a parsonage, and a
+fund for the support of preaching among them at Hilbrook to the small
+body of believers to which his people adhered. This sect had a name by
+which it was officially known to itself; but, like the Shakers, the
+Quakers, the Moravians, it early received a nickname, which it passively
+adopted, and even among its own members the body was rarely spoken of or
+thought of except as the Rixonites.
+
+Mrs. Ewbert fretted under the nickname, with an impatience perhaps the
+greater because she had merely married into the Rixonite church, and had
+accepted its doctrine because she loved her husband rather than because
+she had been convinced of its truth. From the first she complained that
+the Rixonites were cold; and if there was anything Emily Ewbert had
+always detested, it was coldness. No one, she once testified, need talk
+to her of their passive waiting for a sign, as a religious life; if
+there were not some strong, central belief, some rigorously formulated
+creed, some--
+
+"Good old herb and root theology," her husband interrupted.
+
+"Yes!" she heedlessly acquiesced. "Unless there is something like
+_that_, all the waiting in the world won't"--she cast about for some
+powerful image--"won't keep the cold chills from running down _my_ back
+when I think of my duty as a Christian."
+
+"Then don't think of your duty as a Christian, my dear," he pleaded,
+with the caressing languor which sometimes made her say, in reprobation
+of her own pleasure in it, that _he_ was a Rixonite, if there ever _was_
+one. "Think of your duty as a woman, or even as a mortal."
+
+"I believe you're thinking of making a sermon on that," she retorted;
+and he gave a sad, consenting laugh, as if it were quite true, though in
+fact he never really preached a sermon on mere femininity or mere
+mortality. His sermons were all very good, however; and that was another
+thing that put her out of patience with his Rixonite parishioners--that
+they should sit there Sunday after Sunday, year in and year out, and
+listen to his beautiful sermons, which ought to melt their hearts and
+bring tears into their eyes, and not seem influenced by them any more
+than if they were so many dry chips.
+
+"But think how long they've had the gospel," he suggested, in a pensive
+self-derision which she would not share.
+
+"Well, one thing, Clarence," she summed up, "I'm not going to let you
+throw yourself away on them; and unless you see some of the university
+people in the congregation, I want you to use your old sermons from this
+out. They'll never know the difference; and I'm going to make you take
+one of the old sermons along every Sunday, so as to be prepared."
+
+
+II.
+
+One good trait of Mrs. Ewbert was that she never meant half she
+said--she could not; but in this case there was more meaning than usual
+in her saying. It really vexed her that the university families, who had
+all received them so nicely, and who appreciated her husband's spiritual
+and intellectual quality as fully as even she could wish, came some of
+them so seldom, and some of them never, to hear him at the Rixonite
+church. They ought, she said, to have been just suited by his preaching,
+which inculcated with the peculiar grace of his gentle, poetic nature a
+refinement of the mystical theology of the founder. The Rev. Adoniram
+Rixon, who had seventy years before formulated his conception of the
+religious life as a patient waiting upon the divine will, with a
+constant reference of this world's mysteries and problems to the world
+to come, had doubtless meant a more strenuous abeyance than Clarence
+Ewbert was now preaching to a third generation of his followers. He had
+doubtless meant them to be eager and alert in this patience, but the
+version of his gospel which his latest apostle gave taught a species of
+acquiescence which was foreign to the thoughts of the founder. He put as
+great stress as could be asked upon the importance of a realizing faith
+in the life to come, and an implicit trust in it for the solution of the
+problems and perplexities of this life; but so far from wishing his
+hearers to be constantly taking stock, as it were, of their spiritual
+condition, and interrogating Providence as to its will concerning them,
+he besought them to rest in confidence of the divine mindfulness, secure
+that while they fulfilled all their plain, simple duties toward one
+another, God would inspire them to act according to his purposes in the
+more psychological crises and emergencies, if these should ever be part
+of their experience.
+
+In maintaining, on a certain Sunday evening, that his ideas were much
+more adapted to the spiritual nourishment of the president, the dean,
+and the several professors of Hilbrook University than to that of the
+hereditary Rixonites who nodded in a slumbrous acceptance of them, Mrs.
+Ewbert failed as usual to rouse her husband to a due sense of his
+grievance with the university people.
+
+"Well," he said, "you know I can't _make_ them come, my dear."
+
+"Of course not. And I would be the last to have you lift a finger. But I
+know that you feel about it just as I do."
+
+"Perhaps; but I hope not so much as you _think_ you feel. Of course, I'm
+very grateful for your indignation. But I know you don't undervalue the
+good I may do to my poor sheep--they're _not_ an intellectual flock--in
+trying to lead them in the ways of spiritual modesty and
+unconsciousness. How do we know but they profit more by my preaching
+than the faculty would? Perhaps our university friends are spiritually
+unconscious enough already, if not modest."
+
+"I see what you mean," said Mrs. Ewbert, provisionally suspending her
+sense of the whimsical quality in his suggestion. "But you need never
+tell me that they wouldn't appreciate you more."
+
+"More than old Ransom Hilbrook?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I hope _he_ isn't coming here to-night, again!" she implored, with
+a nervous leap from the point in question. "If he's coming here every
+Sunday night"--
+
+As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook's having
+come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a
+habit of it.
+
+"But he _stayed_ so late!" she insisted from the safety of her real
+belief that he was not coming.
+
+"He came very early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which
+her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion.
+
+"I shall tell him you're not well," she went on: "I shall tell him you
+are lying down. You ought to be, now. You're perfectly worn out with
+that long walk you took." She rose, and beat up the sofa pillows with a
+menacing eye upon him.
+
+"Oh, I'm very comfortable here," he said from the depths of his
+easy-chair. "Hilbrook won't come to-night. It's past the time."
+
+She glanced at the clock with him, and then desisted. "If he does, I'm
+determined to excuse you somehow. You ought never to have gone near him,
+Clarence. You've brought it upon yourself."
+
+Ewbert could not deny this, though he did not feel himself so much to
+blame for it as she would have liked to make out in her pity of him. He
+owned that if he had never gone to see Hilbrook the old man would
+probably never have come near them, and that if he had not tried so much
+to interest him when he did come Hilbrook would not have stayed so long;
+and even in this contrite mind he would not allow that he ought not to
+have visited him and ought not to have welcomed him.
+
+
+III.
+
+The minister had found his parishioner in the old Hilbrook homestead,
+which Josiah Hilbrook, while he lived, suffered Ransom Hilbrook to
+occupy, and when he died bequeathed to him, with a sufficient income for
+all his simple wants. They were cousins, and they had both gone out into
+the world about the same time: one had made a success of it, and
+remained; and the other had made a failure of it, and come back. They
+were both Rixonites, as the families of both had been in the generation
+before them. It could be supposed that Josiah Hilbrook, since he had
+given the money for a Rixonite church and the perpetual pay of a
+Rixonite minister in his native place, had died in the faith; and it
+might have been supposed that Ransom Hilbrook, from his constant
+attendance upon its services, was living in the same faith. What was
+certain was that the survivor lived alone in the family homestead on the
+slope of the stony hill overlooking the village. The house was gray with
+age, and it crouched low on the ground where it had been built a century
+before, and anchored fast by the great central chimney characteristic of
+the early New England farmhouse. Below it staggered the trees of an
+apple orchard belted in with a stone wall, and beside it sagged the
+sheds whose stretch united the gray old house to the gray old barn, and
+made it possible for Hilbrook to do his chores in rain or snow without
+leaving cover. There was a dooryard defined by a picket fence, and near
+the kitchen door was a well with a high pent roof, where there had once
+been a long sweep.
+
+These simple features showed to the village on the opposite slope with a
+distinctness that made the place seem much lonelier than if it had been
+much more remote. It gained no cheerfulness from its proximity, and when
+the windows of the house lighted up with the pale gleam of the sunset,
+they imparted to the village a sense of dreary solitude which its own
+lamps could do nothing to relieve.
+
+Ransom Hilbrook came and went among the villagers in the same sort of
+inaccessible contiguity. He did not shun passing the time of day with
+people he met; he was in and out at the grocer's, the meat man's, the
+baker's, upon the ordinary domestic occasions; but he never darkened any
+other doors, except on his visits to the bank where he cashed the checks
+for his quarterly allowance. There had been a proposition to use him
+representatively in the ceremonies celebrating the acceptance of the
+various gifts of Josiah Hilbrook; but he had not lent himself to this,
+and upon experiment the authorities found that he was right in his guess
+that they could get along without him.
+
+He had not said it surlily, but sadly, and with a gentle deprecation of
+their insistence. While the several monuments that testified to his
+cousin's wealth and munificence rose in the village beyond the brook, he
+continued in the old homestead without change, except that when his
+housekeeper died he began to do for himself the few things that the
+ailing and aged woman had done for him. How he did them was not known,
+for he invited no intimacy from his neighbors. But from the extent of
+his dealings with the grocer it was imagined that he lived mainly upon
+canned goods. The fish man paid him a weekly visit, and once a week he
+got from the meat man a piece of salt pork, which it was obvious to the
+meanest intelligence was for his Sunday baked beans. From his purchase
+of flour and baking powder it was reasonably inferred that he now and
+then made himself hot biscuit. Beyond these meagre facts everything was
+conjecture, in which the local curiosity played somewhat actively, but,
+for the most part, with a growing acquiescence in the general ignorance
+none felt authorized to dispel. There had been a time when some
+fulfilled a fancied duty to the solitary in trying to see him. But the
+visitors who found him out of doors were not asked within, and were
+obliged to dismiss themselves, after an interview across the pickets of
+the dooryard fence or from the trestles or inverted feed pails on which
+they were invited to seats in the barn or shed. Those who happened to
+find their host more ceremoniously at home were allowed to come in, but
+were received in rooms so comfortless from the drawn blinds or fireless
+hearths that they had not the spirits for the task of cheering him up
+which they had set themselves, and departed in greater depression than
+that they left him to.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Ewbert felt all the more impelled to his own first visit by the fame of
+these failures, but he was not hastened in it. He thought best to wait
+for some sign or leading from Hilbrook; but when none came, except the
+apparent attention with which Hilbrook listened to his preaching, and
+the sympathy which he believed he detected at times in the old eyes
+blinking upon him through his sermons, he felt urged to the visit which
+he had vainly delayed.
+
+Hilbrook's reception was wary and non-committal, but it was by no means
+so grudging as Ewbert had been led to expect. After some ceremonious
+moments in the cold parlor Hilbrook asked him into the warm kitchen,
+where apparently he passed most of his own time. There was something
+cooking in a pot on the stove, and a small room opened out of the
+kitchen, with a bed in it, which looked as if it were going to be made,
+as Ewbert handsomely maintained. There was an old dog stretched on the
+hearth behind the stove, who whimpered with rheumatic apprehension when
+his master went to put the lamp on the mantel above him.
+
+In describing the incident to his wife Ewbert stopped at this point, and
+then passed on to say that after they got to talking Hilbrook seemed
+more and more gratified, and even glad, to see him.
+
+"Everybody's glad to see _you_, Clarence," she broke out, with tender
+pride. "But why do you say, 'After we got to talking'? Didn't you go to
+talking at once?"
+
+"Well, no," he answered, with a vague smile; "we did a good deal of
+listening at first, both of us. I didn't know just where to begin, after
+I got through my excuses for coming, and Mr. Hilbrook didn't offer any
+opening. Don't you think he's a very handsome old man?"
+
+"He has a pretty head, and his close-cut white hair gives it a neat
+effect, like a nice child's. He has a refined face; such a straight nose
+and a delicate chin. Yes, he is certainly good-looking. But what"--
+
+"Oh, nothing. Only, all at once I realized that he had a sensitive
+nature. I don't know why I shouldn't have realized it before. I had
+somehow taken it for granted that he was a self-conscious hermit, who
+lived in a squalid seclusion because he liked being wondered at. But he
+did not seem to be anything of the kind. I don't know whether he's a
+good cook, for he didn't ask me to eat anything; but I don't think he's
+a bad housekeeper."
+
+"With his bed unmade at eight o'clock in the evening!"
+
+"He may have got up late," said Ewbert. "The house seemed very orderly,
+otherwise; and what is really the use of making up a bed till you need
+it!"
+
+Mrs. Ewbert passed the point, and asked, "What did you talk about when
+you got started?"
+
+"I found he was a reader, or had been. There was a case of good books in
+the parlor, and I began by talking with him about them."
+
+"Well, what did he say about them?"
+
+"That he wasn't interested in them. He had been once, but he was not
+now."
+
+"I can understand that," said Mrs. Ewbert philosophically. "Books _are_
+crowded out after your life fills up with other interests."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yes, what?" Mrs. Ewbert followed him up.
+
+"So far as I could make out, Mr. Hilbrook's life hadn't filled up with
+other interests. He did not care for the events of the day, as far as I
+tried him on them, and he did not care for the past. I tempted him with
+autobiography; but he seemed quite indifferent to his own history,
+though he was not reticent about it. I proposed the history of his
+cousin in the boyish days which he said they had spent together; but he
+seemed no more interested in his cousin than in himself. Then I tried
+his dog and his pathetic sufferings, and I said something about the pity
+of the poor old fellow's last days being so miserable. That seemed to
+strike a gleam of interest from him, and he asked me if I thought
+animals might live again. And I found--I don't know just how to put it
+so as to give you the right sense of his psychological attitude."
+
+"No matter! Put it any way, and I will take care of the right sense. Go
+on!" said Mrs. Ewbert.
+
+"I found that his question led up to the question whether men lived
+again, and to a confession that he didn't or couldn't believe they did."
+
+"Well, upon my word!" Mrs. Ewbert exclaimed. "I don't see what business
+he has coming to church, then. Doesn't he understand that the idea of
+immortality is the very essence of Rixonitism! I think it was personally
+insulting to _you_, Clarence. What did you say?"
+
+"I didn't take a very high hand with him. You know I don't embody the
+idea of immortality, and the church is no bad place even for
+unbelievers. The fact is, it struck me as profoundly pathetic. He wasn't
+arrogant about it, as people sometimes are,--they seem proud of not
+believing; but he was sufficiently ignorant in his premises. He said he
+had seen too many dead people. You know he was in the civil war."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yes,--through it all. It came out on my asking him if he were going to
+the Decoration Day services. He said that the sight of the first great
+battlefield deprived him of the power of believing in a life hereafter.
+He was not very explanatory, but as I understood it the overwhelming
+presence of death had extinguished his faith in immortality; the dead
+riders were just like their dead horses"--
+
+"Shocking!" Mrs. Ewbert broke in.
+
+"He said something went out of him." Ewbert waited a moment before
+adding: "It was very affecting, though Hilbrook himself was as apathetic
+about it as he was about everything else. He was not interested in not
+believing, even, but I could see that it had taken the heart out of life
+for him. If our life here does not mean life elsewhere, the interest of
+it must end with our activities. When it comes to old age, as it has
+with poor Hilbrook, it has no meaning at all, unless it has the hope of
+more life in it. I felt his forlornness, and I strongly wished to help
+him. I stayed a long time talking; I tried to interest him in the fact
+that he was not interested, and"--
+
+"Well, what?"
+
+"If I didn't fatigue Hilbrook, I came away feeling perfectly exhausted
+myself. Were you uneasy at my being out so late?"
+
+
+V.
+
+It was some time after the Ewberts had given up expecting him that old
+Hilbrook came to return the minister's visit. Then, as if some excuse
+were necessary, he brought a dozen eggs in a paper bag, which he said he
+hoped Mrs. Ewbert could use, because his hens were giving him more than
+he knew what to do with. He came to the back door with them; but Mrs.
+Ewbert always let her maid of all work go out Sunday evening, and she
+could receive him in the kitchen herself. She felt obliged to make him
+the more welcome on account of his humility, and she showed him into the
+library with perhaps exaggerated hospitality.
+
+It was a chilly evening of April, and so early that the lamp was not
+lighted; but there was a pleasant glow from the fire on the hearth, and
+Ewbert made his guest sit down before it. As he lay back in the
+easy-chair, stretching his thin old hands toward the blaze, the delicacy
+of his profile was charming, and that senile parting of the lips with
+which he listened reminded Ewbert of his own father's looks in his last
+years; so that it was with an affectionate eagerness he set about making
+Hilbrook feel his presence acceptable, when Mrs. Ewbert left them to
+finish up the work she had promised herself not to leave for the maid.
+It was much that Hilbrook had come at all, and he ought to be made to
+realize that Ewbert appreciated his coming. But Hilbrook seemed
+indifferent to his efforts, or rather, insensible to them, in the
+several topics that Ewbert advanced; and there began to be pauses, in
+which the minister racked his brain for some new thing to say, or found
+himself saying something he cared nothing for in a voice of hollow
+resolution, or falling into commonplaces which he tried to give vitality
+by strenuousness of expression. He heard his wife moving about in the
+kitchen and dining room, with a clicking of spoons and knives and a
+faint clash of china, as she put the supper things away, and he wished
+that she would come in and help him with old Hilbrook; but he could not
+very well call her, and she kept at her work, with no apparent purpose
+of leaving it.
+
+Hilbrook was a farmer, so far as he was anything industrially, and
+Ewbert tried him with questions of crops, soils, and fertilizers; but he
+tried him in vain. The old man said he had never cared much for those
+things, and now it was too late for him to begin. He generally sold his
+grass standing, and his apples on the trees; and he had no animals about
+the place except his chickens,--they took care of themselves. Ewbert
+urged, for the sake of conversation, even of a disputative character,
+that poultry were liable to disease, if they were not looked after; but
+Hilbrook said, Not if there were not too many of them, and so made an
+end of that subject. Ewbert desperately suggested that he must find them
+company,--they seemed sociable creatures; and then, in his utter dearth,
+he asked how the old dog was getting on.
+
+"Oh, he's dead," said Hilbrook, and the minister's heart smote him with
+a pity for the survivor's forlornness which the old man's apathetic tone
+had scarcely invited. He inquired how and when the old dog had died, and
+said how much Hilbrook must miss him.
+
+"Well, I don't know," Hilbrook returned. "He wa'n't much comfort, and
+he's out of his misery, anyway." After a moment he added, with a gleam
+of interest: "I've been thinkin', since he went, of what we talked about
+the other night,--I don't mean animals, but men. I tried to go over what
+you said, in my own mind, but I couldn't seem to make it."
+
+He lifted his face, sculptured so fine by age, and blinked at Ewbert,
+who was glad to fancy something appealing in his words and manner.
+
+"You mean as to a life beyond this?"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Well, let us see if we can't go over it together."
+
+Ewbert had forgotten the points he had made before, and he had to take
+up the whole subject anew, he did so at first in an involuntarily
+patronizing confidence that Hilbrook was ignorant of the ground; but
+from time to time the old man let drop a hint of knowledge that
+surprised the minister. Before they had done, it appeared that Hilbrook
+was acquainted with the literature of the doctrine of immortality from
+Plato to Swedenborg, and even to Mr. John Fiske. How well he was
+acquainted with it Ewbert could not quite make out; but he had
+recurrently a misgiving, as if he were in the presence of a doubter
+whose doubt was hopeless through his knowledge. In this bleak air it
+seemed to him that he at last detected the one thing in which the old
+man felt an interest: his sole tie with the earth was the belief that
+when he left it he should cease to be. This affected Ewbert as most
+interesting, and he set himself, with all his heart and soul, to
+dislodge Hilbrook from his deplorable conviction. He would not perhaps
+have found it easy to overcome at once that repugnance which Hilbrook's
+doubt provoked in him, if it had been less gently, less simply owned. As
+it was, it was not possible to deal with it in any spirit of mere
+authority. He must meet it and overcome it in terms of affectionate
+persuasion.
+
+It should not be difficult to overcome it; but Ewbert had not yet
+succeeded in arraying his reasons satisfactorily against it when his
+wife returned from her work in the kitchen, and sat down beside the
+library table. Her coming operated a total diversion, in which Hilbrook
+lapsed into his apathy, and was not to be roused from it by the
+overtures to conversation which she made. He presently got to his feet
+and said he mast be going, against all her protests that it was very
+early. Ewbert wished to walk home with him; but Hilbrook would not
+suffer this, and the minister had to come back from following him to the
+gate, and watching his figure lose itself in the dark, with a pang in
+his heart for the solitude which awaited the old man under his own roof.
+He ran swiftly over their argument in his mind, and questioned himself
+whether he had used him with unfailing tenderness, whether he had let
+him think that he regarded him as at all reprobate and culpable. He gave
+up the quest as he rejoined his wife with a long, unconscious sigh that
+made her lift her head.
+
+"What is it, Clarence?"
+
+"Nothing"--
+
+"You look perfectly exhausted. You look worried. Was it something you
+were talking about?"
+
+Then he told her, and he had trouble to keep her resentment in bounds.
+She held that, as a minister, he ought to have rebuked the wretched
+creature; that it was nothing short of offensive to him for Hilbrook to
+take such a position. She said his face was all flushed, and that she
+knew he would not sleep, and she should get him a glass of warm milk;
+the fire was out in the stove, but she could heat it over the lamp in a
+tin cup.
+
+
+VI.
+
+Hilbrook did not come again till Ewbert had been to see him; and in the
+meantime the minister suffered from the fear that the old man was
+staying away because of some hurt which he had received in their
+controversy. Hilbrook came to church as before, and blinked at him
+through the two sermons which Ewbert preached on significant texts, and
+the minister hoped he was listening with a sense of personal appeal in
+them. He had not only sought to make them convincing as to the doctrine
+of another life, but he had dealt in terms of loving entreaty with those
+who had not the precious faith of this in their hearts, and he had
+wished to convey to Hilbrook an assurance of peculiar sympathy.
+
+The day following the last of his sermons, Ewbert had to officiate at
+the funeral of a little child whose mother had been stricken to the
+earth by her bereavement. The hapless creature had sent for him again
+and again, and had clung about his very soul, beseeching him for
+assurance that she should see her child hereafter, and have it hers,
+just as it was, forever, he had not had the heart to refuse her this
+consolation, and he had pushed himself, in giving it, beyond the bounds
+of imagination. When she confessed her own inability to see how it could
+be, and yet demanded of him that it should be, he answered her that our
+inability to realize the fact had nothing to do with its reality. In the
+few words he said over the little one, at the last, he recurred to this
+position, and urged it upon all his hearers; but in the moment of doing
+so a point that old Hilbrook had made in their talk suddenly presented
+itself. He experienced inwardly such a collapse that he could not be
+sure he had spoken, and he repeated his declaration in a voice of such
+harsh defiance that he could scarcely afterwards bring himself down to
+the meek level of the closing prayer.
+
+As they walked home together, his wife asked, "Why did you repeat
+yourself in that passage, Clarence, and why did you lift your voice so?
+It sounded like contradicting some one. I hope you were not thinking of
+anything that wretched old man said?"
+
+With the mystical sympathy by which the wife divines what is in her
+husband's mind she had touched the truth, and he could not deny it.
+"Yes, yes, I was," he owned in a sort of anguish, and she said:--
+
+"Well, then, I wish he wouldn't come about any more. He has perfectly
+obsessed you. I could see that the last two Sundays you were preaching
+right at him." He had vainly hoped she had not noticed this, though he
+had not concealed from her that his talk with Hilbrook had suggested his
+theme. "What are you going to do about him?" she pursued relentlessly.
+
+"I don't know,--I don't know, indeed," said Ewbert; and perhaps because
+he did not know, he felt that he must do something, that he must at
+least not leave him to himself. He hoped that Hilbrook would come to
+him, and so put him under the necessity of doing something; but Hilbrook
+did not come, and after waiting a fortnight Ewbert went to him, as was
+his duty.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The spring had advanced so far that there were now days when it was
+pleasant to be out in the soft warmth of the afternoons. The day when
+Ewbert climbed to the Hilbrook homestead it was even a little hot, and
+he came up to the dooryard mopping his forehead with his handkerchief,
+and glad of the southwestern breeze which he caught at this point over
+the shoulder of the hill. He had expected to go round to the side door
+of the house, where he had parted with Hilbrook on his former visit; but
+he stopped on seeing the old man at his front door, where he was looking
+vaguely at a mass of Spanish willow fallen dishevelled beside it, as if
+he had some thought of lifting its tangled spray. The sun shone on his
+bare head, and struck silvery gleams from his close-cropped white hair;
+there was something uncommon in his air, though his dress was plain and
+old-fashioned; and Ewbert wished that his wife were there to share his
+impression of distinction in Hilbrook's presence.
+
+He turned at Ewbert's cheerful hail, and after a moment of apparent
+uncertainty as to who he was, he came down the walk of broken brick and
+opened the gate to his visitor.
+
+"I was just out, looking round at the old things," he said, with an
+effort of apology. "This sort of weather is apt to make fools of us. It
+gets into our heads, and before we know we feel as if we had something
+to do with the season."
+
+"Perhaps we have," said the minister. "The spring is in us, too."
+
+The old man shook his head. "It was once, when we were children; now
+there's what we remember of it. We like to make believe about
+it,--that's natural; and it's natural we should make believe that there
+is going to be a spring for us somewhere else like what we see for the
+grass and bushes, here, every year; but I guess not. A tree puts out its
+leaves every spring; but by and by the tree dies, and then it doesn't
+put out its leaves any more."
+
+"I see what you mean," said Ewbert, "and I allow that there is no real
+analogy between our life and that of the grass and bushes; yet somehow I
+feel strengthened in my belief in the hereafter by each renewal of the
+earth's life. It isn't a proof, it isn't a promise; but it's a
+suggestion, an intimation."
+
+They were in the midst of a great question, and they sat down on the
+decaying doorstep to have it out; Hilbrook having gone in for his hat
+and come out again, with its soft wide brim shading his thin face,
+frosted with half a week's beard.
+
+"But character," the minister urged at a certain point,--"what becomes
+of character? You may suppose that life can be lavished by its Origin in
+the immeasurable superabundance which we see in nature. But
+character,--that is a different thing; that cannot die."
+
+"The beasts that perish have character; my old dog had. Some are good
+and some bad; they're kind and they're ugly."
+
+"Ah, excuse me! That isn't character; that's temperament. Men have
+temperament, too; but the beasts haven't character. Doesn't that fact
+prove something,--or no, not prove, but give us some reasonable
+expectation of a hereafter?"
+
+Hilbrook did not say anything for a moment. He broke a bit of fragrant
+spray from the flowering currant--which guarded the doorway on his side
+of the steps; Ewbert sat next the Spanish willow--and softly twisted the
+stem between his thumb and finger.
+
+"Ever hear how I came to leave Hilbrook,--West Mallow, as it was then?"
+he asked at last.
+
+Ewbert was forced to own that he had heard a story, but he said, mainly
+in Hilbrook's interest, that he had not paid much attention to it.
+
+"Thought there wa'n't much in it? Well, that's right, generally
+speakin'. Folks like to make up stories about a man that lives alone
+like me, here; and they usually get in a disappointment. I ain't goin'
+to go over it. I don't care any more about it now than if it had
+happened to somebody else; but it did happen. Josiah got the girl, and I
+didn't. I presume they like to make out that I've grieved over it ever
+since. Sho! It's forty years since I gave it a thought, that way." A
+certain contemptuous indignation supplanted the wonted gentleness of the
+old man, as if he spurned the notion of such sentimental folly. "I've
+read of folks mournin' all their lives through, and in their old age
+goin' back to a thing like that, as if it still meant somethin'. But it
+ain't true; I don't suppose I care any more for losin' her now than
+Josiah would for gettin' her if he was alive. It did make a difference
+for a while; I ain't goin' to deny that. It lasted me four or five
+years, in all, I guess; but I was married to somebody else when I went
+to the war,"--Ewbert controlled a start of surprise; he had always taken
+it for granted that Hilbrook was a bachelor,--"and we had one child. So
+you may say that I was well over that first thing. _It wore out_; and if
+it wa'n't that it makes me mad to have folks believin' that I'm
+sufferin' from it yet, I presume I shouldn't think of it from one year's
+end to another. My wife and I always got on well together; she was a
+good woman. She died when I was away at the war, and the little boy died
+after I got back. I was sorry to lose her, and I thought losin' _him_
+would kill me. It didn't. It appeared one while as if I couldn't live
+without him, and I was always contrivin' how I should meet up with him
+somewhere else. I couldn't figure it out."
+
+Hilbrook stopped, and swallowed dryly. Ewbert noticed how he had dropped
+more and more into the vernacular, in these reminiscences; in their
+controversies he had used the language of books and had spoken like a
+cultivated man, but now he was simply and touchingly rustic.
+
+"Well," he resumed, "that wore out, too. I went into business, and I
+made money and I lost it. I went through all that experience, and I got
+enough of it, just as I got enough of fightin'. I guess I was no worse
+scared than the rest of 'em, but when it came to the end I'd 'bout made
+up my mind that if there was another war I'd go to Canady; I was sick of
+it, and I was sick of business even before I lost money. I lost pretty
+much everything. Josiah--he was always a good enough friend of
+mine--wanted me to start in again, and he offered to back me, but I said
+no. I said if he wanted to do something for me, he could let me come
+home and live on the old place, here; it wouldn't cost him anything like
+so much, and it would be a safer investment. He agreed, and here I be,
+to make a long story short."
+
+Hilbrook had stiffened more and more, as he went on, in the sort of
+defiance he had put on when he first began to speak of himself, and at
+the end of his confidence Ewbert did not venture any comment. His
+forbearance seemed to leave the old man freer to resume at the point
+where he had broken off, and he did so with something of lingering
+challenge.
+
+"You asked me just now why I didn't think character, as we call it, gave
+us some right to expect a life after this. Well, I'll try to tell you. I
+consider that I've been the rounds, as you may say, and that I've got as
+much character as most men. I've had about everything in my life that
+most have, and a great deal more than some. I've seen that everything
+wears out, and that when a thing's worn out it's for good and all. I
+think it's reasonable to suppose that when I wear out it will be for
+good and all, too. There isn't anything of us, as I look at it, except
+the potentiality of experiences. The experiences come through the
+passions that you can tell on the fingers of one hand: love, hate, hope,
+grief, and you may say greed for the thumb. When you've had them, that's
+the end of it; you've exhausted your capacity; you're used up, and so's
+your character,--that often dies before the body does."
+
+"No, no!" Ewbert protested. "Human capacity is infinite;" but even while
+he spoke this seemed to him a contradiction in terms. "I mean that the
+passions renew themselves with new occasions, new opportunities, and
+character grows continually. You have loved twice, you have grieved
+twice; in battle you hated more than once; in business you must have
+coveted many times. Under different conditions, the passions, the
+potentiality of experiences, will have a pristine strength. Can't you
+see it in that light? Can't you draw some hope from that?"
+
+"Hope!" cried Ransom Hilbrook, lifting his fallen head and staring at
+the minister. "Why, man, you don't suppose I _want_ to live hereafter?
+Do you think I'm anxious to have it all over again, or _any_ of it? Is
+that why you've been trying to convince me of immortality? I know
+there's something in what you say,--more than what you realize. I've
+argued annihilation up to this point and that, and almost proved it to
+my own mind; but there's always some point that I can't quite get over.
+If I had the certainty, the absolute certainty, that this was all there
+was to be of it, I wouldn't want to live an hour longer, not a minute!
+But it's the uncertainty that keeps me. What I'm afraid of is, that if I
+get out of it here, I might wake up in my old identity, with the
+potentiality of new experiences in new conditions. That's it I'm tired.
+I've had enough. I want to be let alone. I don't want to do anything
+more, or have anything more done to me. I want to _stop_."
+
+Ewbert's first impression was that he was shocked; but he was too honest
+to remain in this conventional assumption. He was profoundly moved,
+however, and intensely interested. He realized that Hilbrook was
+perfectly sincere, and he could put himself in the old man's place, and
+imagine why he should feel as he did. Ewbert blamed himself for not
+having conceived of such a case before; and he saw that if he were to do
+anything for this lonely soul, he must begin far back of the point from
+which he had started with him. The old man's position had a kind of
+dignity which did not admit of the sort of pity Ewbert had been feeling
+for him, and the minister had before him the difficult and delicate task
+of persuading Hilbrook, not that a man, if he died, should live again,
+but that he should live upon terms so kind and just that none of the
+fortuities of mortal life should be repeated in that immortality. He
+must show the immortal man to be a creature so happily conditioned that
+he would be in effect newly created, before Hilbrook would consent to
+accept the idea of living again. He might say to him that he would
+probably not be consulted in the matter, since he had not been consulted
+as to his existence here; but such an answer would brutally ignore the
+claim that such a man's developed consciousness could justly urge to
+some share in the counsels of omnipotence. Ewbert did not know where to
+begin, and in his despair he began with a laugh.
+
+"Upon my word," he said, "you've presented a problem that would give any
+casuist pause, and it's beyond my powers without some further thought.
+Your doubt, as I now understand it, is not of immortality, but of
+mortality; and there I can't meet you in argument without entirely
+forsaking my own ground. If it will not seem harsh, I will confess that
+your doubt is rather consoling to me; for I have so much faith in the
+Love which rules the world that I am perfectly willing to accept
+reexistence on any terms that Love may offer. You may say that this is
+because I have not yet exhausted the potentialities of experience, and
+am still interested in my own identity; and one half of this, at least,
+I can't deny. But even if it were otherwise, I should trust to find
+among those Many Mansions which we are told of some chamber where I
+should be at rest without being annihilated; and I can even imagine my
+being glad to do any sort of work about the House, when I was tired of
+resting."
+
+
+VIII.
+
+"I am _glad_ you said that to him!" cried Ewbert's wife, when he told
+her of his interview with old Hilbrook. "That will give him something to
+think about. What did he say?"
+
+Ewbert had been less and less satisfied with his reply to Hilbrook, in
+which it seemed to him that he had passed from mockery to reproof, with
+no great credit to himself; and his wife's applause now set the seal to
+his displeasure with it.
+
+"Oh, he said simply that he could understand a younger person feeling
+differently, and that he did not wish to set himself up as a censor. But
+he could not pretend that he was glad to have been called out of
+nonentity into being, and that he could imagine nothing better than
+eternal unconsciousness."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I told him that his very words implied the refusal of his being to
+accept nonentity again; that they expressed, or adumbrated, the
+conception of an eternal consciousness of the eternal unconsciousness he
+imagined himself longing for. I'm not so sure they did, now."
+
+"Of _course_ they did. And _then_ what did he say?"
+
+"He said nothing in direct reply; he sighed, and dropped his poor old
+head on his breast, and seemed very tired; so that I tried talking of
+other things for a while, and then I came away. Emily, I'm afraid I
+wasn't perfectly candid, perfectly kind, with him."
+
+"I don't see how you could have been more so!" she retorted, in tender
+indignation with him against himself. "And I think what he said was
+terrible. It was bad enough for him to pretend to believe that he was
+not going to live again, but for him to tell you that he was _afraid_ he
+was!" An image sufficiently monstrous to typify Hilbrook's wickedness
+failed to present itself to Mrs. Ewbert, and she went out to give the
+maid instructions for something unusually nourishing for Ewbert at their
+mid-day dinner. "You look fairly fagged out, Clarence," she said, when
+she came back; "and I insist upon your not going up to that dreadful old
+man's again,--at least, not till you've got over this shock."
+
+"Oh, I don't think it has affected me seriously," he returned lightly.
+
+"Yes, it has! yes, it has!" she declared. "It's just like your thinking
+you hadn't taken cold, the other day when you were caught in the rain;
+and the next morning you got up with a sore throat, and it was Sunday
+morning, too."
+
+Ewbert could not deny this, and he had no great wish to see Hilbrook
+soon again. He consented to wait for Hilbrook to come to him, before
+trying to satisfy these scruples of conscience which he had hinted at;
+and he reasonably hoped that the painful points would cease to rankle
+with the lapse of time, if there should be a long interval before they
+met.
+
+That night, before the Ewberts had finished their tea, there came a ring
+at the door, from which Mrs. Ewbert disconsolately foreboded a premature
+evening call. "And just when I was counting on a long, quiet, restful
+time for you, and getting you to bed early!" she lamented in undertone
+to her husband; to the maid who passed through the room with an
+inquiring glance, to the front door, she sighed, still in undertone, "Oh
+yes, of course we're at _home_."
+
+They both listened for the voice at the door, to make out who was there;
+but the voice was so low that they were still in ignorance while the
+maid was showing the visitor into the library, and until she came back
+to them.
+
+"It's that old gentleman who lives all alone by himself on the hill over
+the brook," she explained; and Mrs. Ewbert rose with an air of
+authority, waving her husband to keep his seat.
+
+"Now, Clarence, I am simply not going to _let_ you go in. You are sick
+enough as it is, and if you are going to let that _awful_ old man spend
+the whole evening here, and drain the life out of you! _I_ will see him,
+and tell him"--
+
+"No, no, Emily! It won't do. I _must_ see him. It isn't true that I'm
+sick. He's old, and he has a right to the best we can do for him. Think
+of his loneliness! I shall certainly not let you send him away." Ewbert
+was excitedly gulping his second cup of tea; he pushed his chair back,
+and flung his napkin down as he added, "You can come in, too, and see
+that I get off alive."
+
+"I shall not come near you," she answered resentfully; but Ewbert had
+not closed the door behind him, and she felt it her duty to listen.
+
+
+IX.
+
+Mrs. Ewbert heard old Hilbrook begin at once in a high senile key
+without any form of response to her husband's greeting: "There was one
+thing you said to-day that I've been thinkin' over, and I've come down
+to talk with you about it."
+
+"Yes?" Ewbert queried submissively, though he was aware of being quite
+as fagged as his wife accused him of being, after he spoke.
+
+"Yes," Hilbrook returned. "I guess I ha'n't been exactly up and down
+with myself. I guess I've been playing fast and loose with myself. I
+guess you're right about my wantin' to have enough consciousness to
+enjoy my unconsciousness," and the old gentleman gave a laugh of rather
+weird enjoyment. "There are things," he resumed seriously, "that are
+deeper in us than anything we call ourselves. I supposed I had gone to
+the bottom, but I guess I hadn't. All the while there was something down
+there that I hadn't got at; but you reached it and touched it, and now I
+know it's there. I don't know but it's my Soul that's been havin' its
+say all the time, and me not listenin'. I guess you made your point."
+
+Ewbert was still not so sure of that. He had thrown out that hasty
+suggestion without much faith in it at the time, and his faith in it had
+not grown since.
+
+"I'm glad," he began, but Hilbrook pressed on as if he had not spoken.
+
+"I guess we're built like an onion," he said, with a severity that
+forbade Ewbert to feel anything undignified in the homely illustration.
+"You can strip away layer after layer till you seem to get to nothing at
+all; but when you've got to that nothing you've got to the very thing
+that had the life in it, and that would have grown again if you had put
+it in the ground."
+
+"Exactly!" said Ewbert.
+
+"You made a point that I can't get round," Hilbrook continued, and it
+was here that Ewbert enjoyed a little instant of triumph. "But that
+ain't the point with _me_. I see that I can't prove that we shan't live
+again any more than you can prove that we shall. What I want you to do
+_now_ is to convince me, or to give me the least reason to believe, that
+we shan't live again on exactly the same terms that we live now. I don't
+want to argue immortality any more; we'll take that for granted. But how
+is it going to be any different from mortality with the hope of death
+taken away?"
+
+Hilbrook's apathy was gone, and his gentleness; he had suddenly an air
+and tone of fierce challenge. As he spoke he brought a clenched fist
+down on the arm of his chair; he pushed his face forward and fixed
+Ewbert with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him
+terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if
+he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of
+the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of
+Frankenstein's. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one
+insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not
+forsake him or deny him.
+
+"I don't know how far you accept or reject the teachings of Scripture on
+this matter," he began rather vaguely, but Hilbrook stopped him.
+
+"You didn't go to the Book for the point you made _against_ me. But if
+you go to it now for the point I want you to make _for_ me, what are you
+going to find? Are you going to find the promise of a life any different
+from the life we have here? I accept it all,--all that the Old Testament
+says, and all that the New Testament says; and what does it amount to on
+this point?"
+
+"Nothing but the assurance that if we live rightly here we shall be
+happy in the keeping of the divine Love there. That assurance is
+everything to me."
+
+"It isn't to me!" cried the old man. "We are in the keeping of the
+divine Love here, too, and are we happy? Are those who live rightly
+happy? It's because we're not conditioned for happiness here; and how
+are we going to be conditioned differently there? We are going to suffer
+to all eternity through our passions, our potentialities of experience,
+there just as we do here."
+
+"There may be other passions, other potentialities of experience,"
+Ewbert suggested, casting about in the void.
+
+"Like what?" Hilbrook demanded. "I've been trying to figure it, and I
+can't. I should like you to try it. You can't imagine a new passion in
+the soul any more than you can imagine a new feature in the face. There
+they are: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin; love, hate, greed, hope, fear!
+You can't add to them or take away from them." The old man dropped from
+his defiance in an entreaty that was even more terrible to Ewbert. "I
+wish you could. I should like to have you try. Maybe I haven't been over
+the whole ground. Maybe there's some principle that I've missed." He
+hitched his chair closer to Ewbert's, and laid some tremulous fingers on
+the minister's sleeve. "If I've got to live forever, what have I got to
+live for?"
+
+"Well," said Ewbert, meeting him fully in his humility, "let us try to
+make it out together. Let us try to think. Apparently, our way has
+brought us to a dead wall; but I believe there's light beyond it, if we
+can only break through. Is it really necessary that we should discover
+some new principle? Do we know all that love can do from our experience
+of it here?"
+
+"Have you seen a mother with her child?" Hilbrook retorted.
+
+"Yes, I know. But even that has some alloy of selfishness. Can't we
+imagine love in which there is no greed,--for greed, and not hate, is
+the true antithesis of love which is all giving, while greed is all
+getting,--a love that is absolutely pure?"
+
+"_I_ can't," said the old man. "All the love I ever felt had greed in
+it; I wanted to keep the thing I loved for myself."
+
+"Yes, because you were afraid in the midst of your love. It was fear
+that alloyed it, not greed. And in easily imaginable conditions in which
+there is no fear of want, or harm, or death, love would be pure; for it
+is these things that greed itself wants to save us from. You can imagine
+conditions in which there shall be no fear, in which love casteth out
+fear?"
+
+"Well," said Hilbrook provisionally.
+
+Ewbert had not thought of these points himself before, and he was
+pleased with his discovery, though afterwards he was aware that it was
+something like an intellectual juggle. "You see," he temporized, "we
+have got rid of two of the passions already, fear and greed, which are
+the potentialities of our unhappiest experience in this life. In fact,
+we have got rid of three, for without fear and greed men cannot hate."
+
+"But how can we exist without them?" Hilbrook urged. "Shall we be made
+up of two passions,--of love and hope alone?"
+
+"Why not?" Ewbert returned, with what he felt a specious brightness.
+
+"Because we should not be complete beings with these two elements
+alone."
+
+"Ah, as we know ourselves here, I grant you," said the minister. "But
+why should we not be far more simply constituted somewhere else? Have
+you ever read Isaac Taylor's Physical Theory of another Life? He argues
+that the immortal body would be a far less complex mechanism than the
+mortal body. Why should not the immortal soul be simple, too? In fact,
+it would necessarily be so, being one with the body. I think I can put
+my hand on that book, and if I can I must make you take it with you."
+
+He rose briskly from his chair, and went to the shelves, running his
+fingers along the books with that subtlety of touch by which the student
+knows a given book in the dark. He had heard Mrs. Ewbert stirring about
+in the rooms beyond with an activity in which he divined a menacing
+impatience; and he would have been glad to get rid of old Hilbrook
+before her impatience burst in an irruption upon them. Perhaps because
+of this distraction he could not find the book, but he remained on foot,
+talking with an implication in his tone that they were both preparing to
+part, and were now merely finishing off some odds and ends of discourse
+before they said good-night.
+
+Old Hilbrook did not stir. He was far too sincere a nature, Ewbert saw,
+to conceive of such inhospitality as a hint for his departure, or he was
+too deeply interested to be aware of it. The minister was obliged to sit
+down again, and it was eleven o'clock before Hilbrook rose to go.
+
+
+X.
+
+Ewbert went out to the gate with the old man, and when he came back to
+his study, he found his wife there looking strangely tall and monumental
+in her reproach. "I supposed you were in bed long ago, my dear," he
+attempted lightly.
+
+"You _don't_ mean that you've been out in the night air without your hat
+on!" she returned. "Well, this is too _much_!" Her long-pent-up
+impatience broke in tears, and he strove in vain to comfort her with
+caresses. "Oh, what a fatal day it was when you stirred that wretched
+old creature up! _Why_ couldn't you leave him alone!"
+
+"To his apathy? To his despair? Emily!" Ewbert dropped his arms from the
+embrace in which he had folded her woodenly unresponsive frame, and
+regarded her sadly.
+
+"Oh yes, of course," she answered, rubbing her handkerchief into her
+eyes. "But you don't know that it was despair; and he was quite happy in
+his apathy; and as it is, you've got him on your hands; and if he's
+going to come here every night and stay till morning, it will kill you.
+You know you're not strong; and you get so excited when you sit up
+talking. Look how flushed your cheeks are, now, and your eyes--as big!
+You won't sleep a wink to-night,--I know you won't."
+
+"Oh yes, I shall," he answered bravely. "I believe I've done some good
+work with poor old Hilbrook; and you mustn't think he's tired me. I feel
+fresher than I did when he came."
+
+"It's because you're excited," she persisted. "I know you won't sleep."
+
+"Yes, I shall. I shall just stay here, and read my nerves down a little.
+Then I'll come."
+
+"Oh yes!" Mrs. Ewbert exulted disconsolately, and she left him to his
+book. She returned to say: "If you _must_ take anything to make you
+sleepy, I've left some warm milk on the back of the stove. Promise me
+you won't take any sulphonal! You know how you feel the next day!"
+
+"No, no, I won't," said Ewbert; and he kept his word, with the effect of
+remaining awake all night. Toward morning he did not know but he had
+drowsed; he was not aware of losing consciousness, and he started from
+his drowse with the word "consciousness" in his mind, as he had heard
+Hilbrook speaking it.
+
+
+XI.
+
+Throughout the day, under his wife's watchful eye, he failed of the naps
+he tried for, and he had to own himself as haggard, when night came
+again, as the fondest anxiety of a wife could pronounce a husband. He
+could not think of his talk with old Hilbrook without an anguish of
+brain exhaustion; and yet he could not help thinking of it. He realized
+what the misery of mere weakness must be, and the horror of not having
+the power to rest. He wished to go to bed before the hour when Hilbrook
+commonly appeared, but this was so early that Ewbert knew he should
+merely toss about and grow more and more wakeful from his premature
+effort to sleep. He trembled at every step outside, and at the sound of
+feet approaching the door on the short brick walk from the gate, he and
+his wife arrested themselves with their teacups poised in the air.
+Ewbert was aware of feebly hoping the feet might go away again; but the
+bell rang, and then he could not meet his wife's eye.
+
+"If it is that old Mr. Hilbrook," she said to the maid in transit
+through the room, "tell him that Mr. Ewbert is not well, but _I_ shall
+be glad to see him," and now Ewbert did not dare to protest. His
+forebodings were verified when he heard Hilbrook asking for him, but
+though he knew the voice, he detected a difference in the tone that
+puzzled him.
+
+His wife did not give Hilbrook time to get away, if he had wished,
+without seeing her; she rose at once and went out to him. Ewbert heard
+her asking him into the library, and then he heard them in parley there;
+and presently they came out into the hall again, and went to the front
+door together. Ewbert's heart misgave him of something summary on her
+part, and he did not know what to make of the cheerful parting between
+them. "Well, I bid you good-evening, ma'am," he heard old Hilbrook say
+briskly, and his wife return sweetly, "Good-night, Mr. Hilbrook. You
+must come soon again."
+
+"You may put your mind at rest, Clarence," she said, as she reentered
+the dining room and met his face of surprise. "He didn't come to make a
+call; he just wanted to borrow a book,--Physical Theory of another
+Life."
+
+"How did you find it?" asked Ewbert, with relief.
+
+"It was where it always was," she returned indifferently. "Mr. Hilbrook
+seemed to be very much interested in something you said to him about it.
+I do believe you _have_ done him good, Clarence; and now, if you can
+only get a full night's rest, I shall forgive him. But I hope he won't
+come _very_ soon again, and will never stay so late when he does come.
+Promise me you won't go near him till he's brought the book back!"
+
+
+XII.
+
+Hilbrook came the night after he had borrowed the book, full of talk
+about it, to ask if he might keep it a little longer. Ewbert had slept
+well the intervening night, and had been suffered to see Hilbrook upon
+promising his wife that he would not encourage the old man to stay; but
+Hilbrook stayed without encouragement. An interest had come into his
+apathetic life which renewed it, and gave vitality to a whole dead world
+of things. He wished to talk, and he wished even more to listen, that he
+might confirm himself from Ewbert's faith and reason in the conjectures
+with which his mind was filled. His eagerness as to the conditions of a
+future life, now that he had begun to imagine them, was insatiable, and
+Ewbert, who met it with glad sympathy, felt drained of his own spiritual
+forces by the strength which he supplied to the old man. But the case
+was so strange, so absorbing, so important, that he could not refuse
+himself to it. He could not deny Hilbrook's claim to all that he could
+give him in this sort; he was as helpless to withhold the succor he
+supplied as he was to hide from Mrs. Ewbert's censoriously anxious eye
+the nervous exhaustion to which it left him after each visit that
+Hilbrook paid him. But there was a drain from another source of which he
+would not speak to her till he could make sure that the effect was not
+some trick of his own imagination.
+
+He had been aware, in twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a
+certain perfunctory quality in his performance. It was as if the truth,
+so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the
+repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a
+hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly
+against the old man's doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of
+question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in
+belief he himself waned. The conviction of a life hereafter was not
+something which he was _sharing_ with Hilbrook; he was _giving_ it
+absolutely, and with such entire unreserve that he was impoverishing his
+own soul of its most precious possession.
+
+So it seemed to him in those flaccid moods to which Hilbrook's visits
+left him, when mind and body were both spent in the effort he had been
+making. In the intervals in which his strength renewed itself, he put
+this fear from him as a hypochondriacal fancy, and he summoned a
+cheerfulness which he felt less and less to meet the hopeful face of the
+old man. Hilbrook had renewed himself, apparently, in the measure that
+the minister had aged and waned. He looked, to Ewbert, younger and
+stronger. To the conventional question how he did, he one night answered
+that he never felt better in his life. "But you," he said, casting an
+eye over the face and figure of the minister, who lay back in his
+easy-chair, with his hands stretched nerveless on the arms, "_you_, look
+rather peaked. I don't know as I noticed it before, but come to think, I
+seemed to feel the same way about it when I saw you in the pulpit
+yesterday."
+
+"It was a very close day," said Ewbert. "I don't know why I shouldn't be
+about as well as usual."
+
+"Well, that's right," said Hilbrook, in willing dismissal of the trifle
+which had delayed him from the great matter in his mind.
+
+Some new thoughts had occurred to him in corroboration of the notions
+they had agreed upon in their last meeting. But in response Ewbert found
+himself beset by a strange temptation,--by the wish to take up these
+notions and expose their fallacy. They were indeed mere toys of their
+common fancy which they had constructed together in mutual supposition,
+but Ewbert felt a sacredness in them, while he longed so strangely to
+break them one by one and cast them in the old man's face. Like all
+imaginative people, he was at times the prey of morbid self-suggestions,
+whose nature can scarcely be stated without excess. The more monstrous
+the thing appeared to his mind and conscience, the more fascinating it
+became. Once the mere horror of such a conception as catching a comely
+parishioner about the waist and kissing her, when she had come to him
+with a case of conscience, had so confused him in her presence as to
+make him answer her wildly, not because he was really tempted to the
+wickedness, but because he realized so vividly the hideousness of the
+impossible temptation. In some such sort he now trembled before old
+Hilbrook, thinking how dreadful it would be if he were suddenly to begin
+undoing the work of faith in him, and putting back in its place the
+doubts which he had uprooted before. In a swift series of dramatic
+representations he figured the old man's helpless amaze at the
+demoniacal gayety with which he should mock his own seriousness in the
+past, the cynical ease with which he should show the vanity of the hopes
+he had been so fervent in awakening. He had throughout recognized the
+claim that all the counter-doubts had upon the reason, and he saw how
+effective he could make these if he were now to become their advocate.
+He pictured the despair in which he could send his proselyte tottering
+home to his lonely house through the dark.
+
+He rent himself from the spell, but the last picture remained so real
+with him that he went to the window and looked out, saying, "Is there a
+moon?"
+
+"It ain't up yet, I guess," said old Hilbrook, and from something in his
+manner, rather than from anything he recollected of their talk, Ewbert
+fancied him to have asked a question, and to be now waiting for some
+answer. He had not the least notion what the question could have been,
+and he began to walk up and down, trying to think of something to say,
+but feeling his legs weak under him and the sweat cold on his forehead.
+All the time he was aware of Hilbrook following him with an air of
+cheerful interest, and patiently waiting till he should take up the
+thread of their discourse again.
+
+He controlled himself at last, and sank into his chair. "Where were we?"
+he asked. "I had gone off on a train of associations, and I don't just
+recall our last point."
+
+Hilbrook stated it, and Ewbert said, "Oh, yes," as if he recognized it,
+and went on from it upon the line of thought which it suggested. He was
+aware of talking rationally and forcibly; but in the subjective
+undercurrent paralleling his objective thought he was holding discourse
+with himself to an effect wholly different from that produced in
+Hilbrook.
+
+"Well, sir," said the old man when he rose to go at last, "I guess
+you've settled it for me. You've made me see that there can be an
+immortal life that's worth living; and I was afraid there wa'n't! I
+shouldn't care, now, if I woke up any morning in the other world. I
+guess it would be all right; and that there would be new conditions
+every way, so that a man could go on and be himself, without feelin'
+that he was in any danger of bein' wasted. You've made me want to meet
+my boy again; and I used to dread it; I didn't think I was fit for it. I
+don't know whether you expect me to thank you; I presume you don't; but
+I"--he faltered, and his voice shook in sympathy with the old hand that
+he put trembling into Ewbert's--"I _bless_ you!"
+
+
+XIII.
+
+The time had come when the minister must seek refuge and counsel with
+his wife. He went to her as a troubled child goes to its mother, and she
+heard the confession of his strange experience with the motherly
+sympathy which performs the comforting office of perfect intelligence.
+If she did not grasp its whole significance, she seized what was perhaps
+the main point, and she put herself in antagonism to the cause of his
+morbid condition, while administering an inevitable chastisement for the
+neglect of her own prevision.
+
+"That terrible old man," she said, "has simply been draining the life
+out of you, Clarence. I saw it from the beginning, and I warned you
+against it; but you wouldn't listen to me. _Now_ I suppose you _will_
+listen, after the doctor tells you that you're in danger of nervous
+prostration, and that you've got to give up everything and rest. _I_
+think you've been in danger of losing your reason, you've overworked it
+so; and I sha'n't be easy till I've got you safely away at the seaside,
+and out of the reach of that--that _vampire_."
+
+"Emily!" the minister protested. "I can't allow you to use such
+language. At the worst, and supposing that he has really been that drain
+upon me which you say (though I don't admit it), what is my life for but
+to give to others?"
+
+"But _my_ life isn't for you to give to others, and _your_ life _is_
+mine, and I think I have some right to say what shall be done with it,
+and I don't choose to have it used up on old Hilbrook." It passed
+through Ewbert's languid thought, which it stirred to a vague amusement,
+that the son of an older church than the Rixonite might have found in
+this thoroughly terrestrial attitude of his wife a potent argument for
+sacerdotal celibacy; but he did not attempt to formulate it, and he
+listened submissively while she went on: "_One_ thing: I am certainly
+not going to let you see him again till you've seen the doctor, and I
+hope he won't come about. If he does, _I_ shall see him."
+
+The menace in this declaration moved Ewbert to another protest, which he
+worded conciliatingly: "I shall have to let you. But I know you won't
+say anything to convey a sense of responsibility to him. I couldn't
+forgive myself if he were allowed to feel that he had been preying upon
+me. The fact is, I've been overdoing in every way, and nobody is to
+blame for my morbid fancies but myself. I _should_ blame myself very
+severely if you based any sort of superstition on them, and acted from
+that superstition."
+
+"Oh, you needn't be afraid!" said Mrs. Ewbert. "I shall take care of his
+feelings, but I shall have my own opinions, all the same, Clarence."
+
+Whether a woman with opinions so strong as Mrs. Ewbert's, and so
+indistinguishable from her prejudices, could be trusted to keep them to
+herself, in dealing with the matter in hand, was a question which her
+husband felt must largely be left to her goodness of heart for its right
+solution.
+
+When Hilbrook came that night, as usual, she had already had it out with
+him in several strenuous reveries before they met, and she was able to
+welcome him gently to the interview which she made very brief. His face
+fell in visible disappointment when she said that Mr. Ewbert would not
+be able to see him, and perhaps there was nothing to uplift him in the
+reasons she gave, though she obscurely resented his continued dejection
+as a kind of ingratitude. She explained that poor Mr. Ewbert was quite
+broken down, and that the doctor had advised his going to the seaside
+for the whole of August, where he promised everything from the air and
+the bathing. Mr. Ewbert merely needed toning up, she said; but to
+correct the impression she might be giving that his breakdown was a
+trifling matter, she added that she felt very anxious about it, and
+wanted to get him away as soon as possible. She said with a confidential
+effect, as of something in which Hilbrook could sympathize with her:
+"You know it isn't merely his church work proper; it's his giving
+himself spiritually to all sorts of people so indiscriminately. He can't
+deny himself to any one; and sometimes he's perfectly exhausted by it.
+You must come and see him as soon as he gets back, Mr. Hilbrook. He will
+count upon it, I know; he's so much interested in the discussions he has
+been having with you."
+
+She gave the old man her hand for good-by, after she had artfully stood
+him up, in a double hope,--a hope that he would understand that there
+was some limit to her husband's nervous strength, and a hope that her
+closing invitation would keep him from feeling anything personal in her
+hints.
+
+Hilbrook took his leave in the dreamy fashion age has with so many
+things, as if there were a veil between him and experience which kept
+him from the full realization of what had happened; and as she watched
+his bent shoulders down the garden walk, carrying his forward-drooping
+head at a slant that scarcely left the crown of his hat visible, a fear
+came upon her which made it impossible for her to recount all the facts
+of her interview to her husband. It became her duty, rather, to conceal
+what was painful to herself in it, and she merely told him that Mr.
+Hilbrook had taken it all in the right way, and she had made him promise
+to come and see them as soon as they got back.
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Events approved the wisdom of Mrs. Ewbert's course in so many respects
+that she confidently trusted them for the rest. Ewbert picked up
+wonderfully at the seaside, and she said to him again and again that it
+was not merely those interviews with old Hilbrook which had drained his
+vitality, but it was the whole social and religious keeping of the
+place. Everybody, she said, had thrown themselves upon his sympathies,
+and he was carrying a load that nobody could bear up under. She
+addressed these declarations to her lingering consciousness of Ransom
+Hilbrook, and confirmed herself, by their repetition, in the belief that
+he had not taken her generalizations personally. She now extended these
+so as to inculpate the faculty of the university, who ought to have felt
+it their duty not to let a man of Ewbert's intellectual quality stagger
+on alone among them, with no sign of appreciation or recognition in the
+work he was doing, not so much for the Rixonite church as for the whole
+community. She took several ladies at the hotel into her confidence on
+this point, and upon study of the situation they said it was a shame.
+After that she felt more bitter about it, and attributed her husband's
+collapse to a concealed sense of the indifference of the university
+people, so galling to a sensitive nature.
+
+She suggested this theory to Ewbert, and he denied it with blithe
+derision, but she said that he need not tell _her_, and in confirming
+herself in it she began to relax her belief that old Ransom Hilbrook had
+preyed upon him. She even went so far as to say that the only
+intellectual companionship he had ever had in the place was that which
+he found in the old man's society. When she discovered, after the fact,
+that Ewbert had written to him since they came away, she was not so
+severe with him as she might have expected herself to be in view of an
+act which, if not quite clandestine, was certainly without her privity.
+She would have considered him fitly punished by Hilbrook's failure to
+reply, if she had not shared his uneasiness at the old man's silence.
+But she did not allow this to affect her good spirits, which were
+essential to her husband's comfort as well as her own. She redoubled her
+care of him in every sort, and among all the ladies who admired her
+devotion to him there was none who enjoyed it as much as herself. There
+was none who believed more implicitly that it was owing to her foresight
+and oversight that his health mended so rapidly, and that at the end of
+the bathing season she was, as she said, taking him home quite another
+man. In her perfect satisfaction she suffered him his small joke about
+not feeling it quite right to go with her if that were so; and though a
+woman of little humor, she even professed to find pleasure in his joke
+after she fully understood it.
+
+"All that I ask," she said, as if it followed, "is that you won't spoil
+everything by letting old Hilbrook come every night and drain the life
+out of you again."
+
+"I won't," he retorted, "if you'll promise to make the university people
+come regularly to my sermons."
+
+He treated the notion of Hilbrook's visits lightly; but with his return
+to the familiar environment he felt a shrinking from them in an
+experience which was like something physical. Yet when he sat down the
+first night in his study, with his lamp in its wonted place, it was with
+an expectation of old Hilbrook in his usual seat so vivid that its
+defeat was more a shock than its fulfilment upon supernatural terms
+would have been. In fact, the absence of the old man was spectral; and
+though Ewbert employed himself fully the first night in answering an
+accumulation of letters that required immediate reply, it was with
+nervous starts from time to time, which he could trace to no other
+cause. His wife came in and out, with what he knew to be an accusing
+eye, as she brought up those arrears of housekeeping which always await
+the housewife on the return from any vacation; and he knew that he did
+not conceal his guilt from her.
+
+They both ignored the stress which had fallen back upon him, and which
+accumulated, as the days of the week went by, until the first Sunday
+came.
+
+Ewbert dreaded to look in the direction of Hilbrook's pew, lest he
+should find it empty; but the old man was there, and he sat blinking at
+the minister, as his custom was, through the sermon, and thoughtfully
+passing the tip of his tongue over the inner edge of his lower lip.
+
+Many came up to shake hands with the minister after church, and to tell
+him how well he was looking, but Hilbrook was not among them. Some of
+the university people who had made a point of being there that morning,
+out of a personal regard for Ewbert, were grouped about his wife, in the
+church vestibule, where she stood answering their questions about his
+health. He glimpsed between the heads and shoulders of this gratifying
+group the figure of Hilbrook dropping from grade to grade on the steps
+outside, till it ceased to be visible, and he fancied, with a pang, that
+the old man had lingered to speak with him, and had then given up and
+started home.
+
+The cordial interest of the university people was hardly a compensation
+for the disappointment he shared with Hilbrook; but his wife was so
+happy in it that he could not say anything to damp her joy. "Now," she
+declared, on their way home, "I am perfectly satisfied that they will
+keep coming. You never preached so well, Clarence, and if they have any
+appreciation at all, they simply won't be able to keep away. I wish you
+could have heard all the nice things they said about you. I guess
+they've waked up to you, at last, and I do believe that the idea of
+losing you has had a great deal to do with it. And _that_ is something
+we owe to old Ransom Hilbrook more than to anything else. I saw the poor
+old fellow hanging about, and I couldn't help feeling for him. I knew he
+wanted to speak with you, and I'm not afraid that he will be a burden
+again. It will be such an inspiration, the prospect of having the
+university people come every Sunday, now, that you can afford to give a
+little of it to him, and I want you to go and see him soon; he evidently
+isn't coming till you do."
+
+
+XV.
+
+Ewbert had learned not to inquire too critically for a logical process
+in his wife's changes of attitude toward any fact. In her present mood
+he recognized an effect of the exuberant good-will awakened by the
+handsome behavior of the university people, and he agreed with her that
+he must go to see old Hilbrook at once. In this good intention his
+painful feeling concerning him was soothed, and Ewbert did not get up to
+the Hilbrook place till well into the week. It was Thursday afternoon
+when he climbed through the orchard, under the yellowing leaves which
+dappled the green masses of the trees like intenser spots of the
+September sunshine. He came round by the well to the side door of the
+house, which stood open, and he did not hesitate to enter when he saw
+how freely the hens were coming and going through it. They scuttled out
+around him and between his legs, with guilty screeches, and left him
+standing alone in the middle of the wide, low kitchen. A certain
+discomfort of the nerves which their flight gave him was heightened by
+some details quite insignificant in themselves. There was no fire in the
+stove, and the wooden clock on the mantel behind it was stopped; the
+wind had carried in some red leaves from the maple near the door, and
+these were swept against the farther wall, where they lay palpitating in
+the draft.
+
+The neglect in all was evidently too recent to suggest any supposition
+but that of the master's temporary absence, and Ewbert went to the
+threshold to look for his coming from the sheds or the barn. But these
+were all fast shut, and there was no sign of Hilbrook anywhere. Ewbert
+turned back into the room again, and saw the door of the old man's
+little bedroom standing slightly ajar. With a chill of apprehension he
+pushed it open, and he could not have experienced a more disagreeable
+effect if the dark fear in his mind had been realized than he did to see
+Hilbrook lying in his bed alive and awake. His face showed like a fine
+mask above the sheet, and his long, narrow hands rested on the covering
+across his breast. His eyes met those of Ewbert not only without
+surprise, but without any apparent emotion.
+
+"Why, Mr. Hilbrook," said the minister, "are you sick?"
+
+"No, I am first-rate," the old man answered.
+
+It was on the point of the minister's tongue to ask him, "Then what in
+the world are you doing in bed?" but he substituted the less
+authoritative suggestion, "I am afraid I disturbed you--that I woke you
+out of a nap. But I found the door open and the hens inside, and I
+ventured to come in"--
+
+Hilbrook replied calmly, "I heard you; I wa'n't asleep."
+
+"Oh," said Ewbert, apologetically, and he did not know quite what to do;
+he had an aimless wish for his wife, as if she would have known what to
+do. In her absence he decided to shut the door against the hens, who
+were returning adventurously to the threshold, and then he asked, "Is
+there something I can do for you? Make a fire for you to get up by"--
+
+"I ha'n't got any call to get up," said Hilbrook; and, after giving
+Ewbert time to make the best of this declaration, he asked abruptly,
+"What was that you said about my wantin' to be alive enough to know I
+was dead?"
+
+"The consciousness of unconsciousness?"
+
+"Ah!" the old man assented, as with satisfaction in having got the
+notion right; and then he added, with a certain defiance: "There ain't
+anything _in_ that. I got to thinking it over, when you was gone, and
+the whole thing went to pieces. That idea don't prove anything at all,
+and all that we worked out of it had to go with it."
+
+"Well," the minister returned, with an assumption of cosiness in his
+tone which he did not feel, and feigning to make himself easy in the
+hard kitchen chair which he pulled up to the door of Hilbrook's room,
+"let's see if we can't put that notion together again."
+
+"_You_ can, if you want to," said the old man, dryly "I got no interest
+in it any more; 'twa'n't nothing but a metaphysical toy, anyway." He
+turned his head apathetically on the pillow, and no longer faced his
+visitor, who found it impossible in the conditions of tacit dismissal to
+philosophize further.
+
+"I was sorry," Ewbert began, "not to be able to speak with you after
+church, the other day. There were so many people"--
+
+"That's all right," said Hilbrook unresentfully. "I hadn't anything to
+say, in particular."
+
+"But _I_ had," the minister persisted. "I thought a great deal about you
+when I was away, and I went over our talks in my own mind a great many
+times. The more I thought about them, the more I believed that we had
+felt our way to some important truth in the matter. I don't say final
+truth, for I don't suppose that we shall ever reach that in this life."
+
+"Very likely," Hilbrook returned, with his face to the wall. "I don't
+see as it makes any difference; or if it does, I don't care for it."
+
+Something occurred to Ewbert which seemed to him of more immediate
+usefulness than the psychological question. "Couldn't I get you
+something to eat, Mr. Hilbrook? If you haven't had any breakfast to-day,
+you must be hungry."
+
+"Yes, I'm hungry," the old man assented, "but I don't want to eat
+anything."
+
+Ewbert had risen hopefully in making his suggestion, but now his heart
+sank. Here, it seemed to him, a physician rather than a philosopher was
+needed, and at the sound of wheels on the wagon track to the door his
+imagination leaped to the miracle of the doctor's providential advent.
+He hurried to the threshold and met the fish-man, who was about to
+announce himself with the handle of his whip on the clapboarding. He
+grasped the situation from the minister's brief statement, and confessed
+that he had expected to find the old gentleman _dead_ in his bed some
+day, and he volunteered to send some of the women folks from the farm up
+the road. When these came, concentrated in the person of the farmer's
+bustling wife, who had a fire kindled in the stove and the kettle on
+before Ewbert could get away, he went for the doctor, and returned with
+him to find her in possession of everything in the house except the
+owner's interest. Her usefulness had been arrested by an invisible but
+impassable barrier, though she had passed and re-passed the threshold of
+Hilbrook's chamber with tea and milk toast. He said simply that he saw
+no object in eating; and he had not been sufficiently interested to turn
+his head and look at her in speaking to her.
+
+With the doctor's science he was as indifferent as with the farm-wife's
+service. He submitted to have his pulse felt, and he could not help
+being prescribed for, but he would have no agency in taking his
+medicine. He said, as he had said to Mrs. Stephson about eating, that he
+saw no object in it.
+
+The doctor retorted, with the temper of a man not used to having his
+will crossed, that he had better take it, if he had any object in
+living, and Hilbrook answered that he had none. In his absolute apathy
+he did not even ask to be let alone.
+
+"You see," the baffled doctor fumed in the conference that he had with
+Ewbert apart, "he doesn't really need any medicine. There's nothing the
+matter with him, and I only wanted to give him something to put an edge
+to his appetite. He's got cranky living here alone; but there _is_ such
+a thing as starving to death, and that's the only thing Hilbrook's in
+danger of. If you're going to stay with him--he oughtn't to be left
+alone"--
+
+"I can come up, yes, certainly, after supper," said Ewbert, and he
+fortified himself inwardly for the question this would raise with his
+wife.
+
+"Then you must try to interest him in something. Get him to talking, and
+then let Mrs. Stephson come in with a good bowl of broth, and I guess we
+may trust Nature to do the rest."
+
+
+XVI.
+
+When we speak of Nature, we figure her as one thing, with a fixed
+purpose and office in the universal economy; but she is an immense
+number of things, and her functions are inexpressibly varied. She
+includes decay as well as growth; she compasses death as well as birth.
+We call certain phenomena unnatural; but in a natural world how can
+anything be unnatural, except the supernatural? These facts gave Ewbert
+pause in view of the obstinate behavior of Ransom Hilbrook in dying for
+no obvious reason, and kept him from pronouncing it unnatural. The old
+man, he reflected, had really less reason to live than to die, if it
+came to reasons; for everything that had made the world home to him had
+gone out of it, and left him in exile here. The motives had ceased; the
+interests had perished; the strong personality that had persisted was
+solitary amid the familiar environment grown alien.
+
+The wonder was that he should ever have been roused from his apathetic
+unfaith to inquiry concerning the world beyond this, and to a certain
+degree of belief in possibilities long abandoned by his imagination.
+Ewbert had assisted at the miracle of this resuscitation upon terms
+which, until he was himself much older, he could not question as to
+their beneficence, and in fact it never came to his being quite frank
+with himself concerning them. He kept his thoughts on this point in that
+state of solution which holds so many conjectures from precipitation in
+actual conviction.
+
+But his wife had no misgivings. Her dread was that in his devotion to
+that miserable old man (as she called him, not always in compassion) he
+should again contribute to Hilbrook's vitality at the expense, if not
+the danger, of his own. She of course expressed her joy that Ewbert had
+at last prevailed upon him to eat something, when the entreaty of his
+nurse and the authority of his doctor availed nothing; and of course she
+felt the pathos of his doing it out of affection for Ewbert, and merely
+to please him, as Hilbrook declared. It did not surprise her that any
+one should do anything for the love of Ewbert, but it is doubtful if she
+fully recognized the beauty of this last efflorescence of the aged life;
+and she perceived it her duty not to sympathize entirely with Ewbert's
+morbid regret that it came too late. She was much more resigned than he
+to the will of Providence, and she urged a like submissiveness upon him.
+
+"Don't talk so!" he burst out. "It's horrible!" It was in the first
+hours after Ewbert's return from Hilbrook's death-bed, and his spent
+nerves gave way in a gush of tears.
+
+"I see what you mean," she said, after a pause in which he controlled
+his sobs. "And I suppose," she added, with a touch of bitterness, "that
+you blame _me_ for taking you away from him here when he was coming
+every night and sapping your very life. You were very glad to have me do
+it at the time! And what use would there have been in your killing
+yourself, anyway? It wasn't as if he were a young man with a career of
+usefulness before him, that might have been marred by his not believing
+this or that. He had been a complete failure every way, and the end of
+the world had come for him. What did it matter whether such a man
+believed that there was another world or not?"
+
+"Emily! Emily!" the minister cried out. "What are you saying?"
+
+Mrs. Ewbert broke down in her turn. "I don't know _what_ I'm saying!"
+she retorted from behind her handkerchief. "I'm trying to show you that
+it's your duty to yourself--and to me--and to people who can know how to
+profit by your teaching and your example, not to give way as you're
+doing, simply because a wornout old agnostic couldn't keep his hold on
+the truth. I don't know what your Rixonitism is for if it won't let you
+wait upon the divine will in such a thing, _too_. You're more
+conscientious than the worst kind of Congregationalist. And now for you
+to blame me"--
+
+"Emily, I don't blame _you_," said her husband. "I blame myself."
+
+"And you see that that's the same thing! You ought to thank me for
+saving your life; for it was just as if you were pouring your heart's
+blood into him, and I could see you getting more anaemic every day. Even
+now you're not half as well as when you got home! And yet I do believe
+that if you could bring old Hilbrook back into a world that he was sick
+and tired of, you'd give your own life to do it."
+
+
+XVII.
+
+There was reason and there was justice in what she said, though they
+were so chaotic in form, and Ewbert could not refuse to acquiesce.
+
+After all, he had done what he could, and he would not abandon himself
+to a useless remorse. He rather set himself to study the lesson of old
+Hilbrook's life, and in the funeral sermon that he preached he urged
+upon his hearers the necessity of keeping themselves alive through some
+relation to the undying frame of things, which they could do only by
+cherishing earthly ties; and when these were snapped in the removal of
+their objects, by attaching the broken threads through an effort of the
+will to yet other objects: the world could furnish these inexhaustibly.
+He touched delicately upon the peculiarities, the eccentricities, of the
+deceased, and he did cordial justice to his gentleness, his blameless,
+harmless life, his heroism on the battlefields of his country. He
+declared that he would not be the one to deny an inner piety, and
+certainly not a steadfast courage, in Hilbrook's acceptance of whatever
+his sincere doubts implied.
+
+The sermon apparently made a strong impression on all who heard it. Mrs.
+Ewbert was afraid that it was rather abstruse in certain passages, but
+she felt sure that all the university people would appreciate these. The
+university people, to testify their respect for their founder, had come
+in a body to the obsequies of his kinsman; and Mrs. Ewbert augured the
+best things for her husband's future usefulness from their presence.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGIC OF A VOICE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+There was a full moon, and Langbourne walked about the town, unable to
+come into the hotel and go to bed. The deep yards of the houses gave out
+the scent of syringas and June roses; the light of lamps came through
+the fragrant bushes from the open doors and windows, with the sound of
+playing and singing and bursts of young laughter. Where the houses stood
+near the street, he could see people lounging on the thresholds, and
+their heads silhouetted against the luminous interiors. Other houses,
+both those which stood further back and those that stood nearer, were
+dark and still, and to these he attributed the happiness of love in
+fruition, safe from unrest and longing.
+
+His own heart was tenderly oppressed, not with desire, but with the
+memory of desire. It was almost as if in his faded melancholy he were
+sorry for the disappointment of some one else.
+
+At last he turned and walked back through the streets of dwellings to
+the business centre of the town, where a gush of light came from the
+veranda of his hotel, and the druggist's window cast purple and yellow
+blurs out upon the footway. The other stores were shut, and he alone
+seemed to be abroad. The church clock struck ten as he mounted the steps
+of his hotel and dropped the remnant of his cigar over the side.
+
+He had slept badly on the train the night before, and he had promised
+himself to make up his lost sleep in the good conditions that seemed to
+offer themselves. But when he sat down in the hotel office he was more
+wakeful than he had been when he started out to walk himself drowsy.
+
+The clerk gave him the New York paper which had come by the evening
+train, and he thanked him, but remained musing in his chair. At times he
+thought he would light another cigar, but the hand that he carried to
+his breast pocket dropped nervelessly to his knee again, and he did not
+smoke. Through his memories of disappointment pierced a self-reproach
+which did not permit him the perfect self-complacency of regret; and yet
+he could not have been sure, if he had asked himself, that this pang did
+not heighten the luxury of his psychological experience.
+
+He rose and asked the clerk for a lamp, but he turned back from the
+stairs to inquire when there would be another New York mail. The clerk
+said there was a train from the south due at eleven-forty, but it seldom
+brought any mail; the principal mail was at seven. Langbourne thanked
+him, and came back again to beg the clerk to be careful and not have him
+called in the morning, for he wished to sleep. Then he went up to his
+room, where he opened his window to let in the night air. He heard a dog
+barking; a cow lowed; from a stable somewhere the soft thumping of the
+horses' feet came at intervals lullingly.
+
+
+II.
+
+Langbourne fell asleep so quickly that he was aware of no moment of
+waking after his head touched the fragrant pillow. He woke so much
+refreshed by his first sound, soft sleep that he thought it must be
+nearly morning. He got his watch into a ray of the moonlight and made
+out that it was only a little after midnight, and he perceived that it
+must have been the sound of low murmuring voices and broken laughter in
+the next room which had wakened him. But he was rather glad to have been
+roused to a sense of his absolute comfort, and he turned unresentfully
+to sleep again. All his heaviness of heart was gone; he felt curiously
+glad and young; he had somehow forgiven the wrong he had suffered and
+the wrong he had done. The subdued murmuring went on in the next room,
+and he kept himself awake to enjoy it for a while. Then he let himself
+go, and drifted away into gulfs of slumber, where, suddenly, he seemed
+to strike against something, and started up in bed.
+
+A laugh came from the next room. It was not muffled, as before, but
+frank and clear. It was woman's laughter, and Langbourne easily inferred
+girlhood as well as womanhood from it. His neighbors must have come by
+the late train, and they had probably begun to talk as soon as they got
+into their room. He imagined their having spoken low at first for fear
+of disturbing some one, and then, in their forgetfulness, or their
+belief that there was no one near, allowed themselves greater freedom.
+There were survivals of their earlier caution at times, when their
+voices sank so low as scarcely to be heard; then there was a break from
+it when they rose clearly distinguishable from each other. They were
+never so distinct that he could make out what was said; but each voice
+unmistakably conveyed character.
+
+Friendship between girls is never equal; they may equally love each
+other, but one must worship and one must suffer worship. Langbourne read
+the differing temperaments necessary to this relation in the differing
+voices. That which bore mastery was a low, thick murmur, coming from
+deep in the throat, and flowing out in a steady stream of indescribable
+coaxing and drolling. The owner of that voice had imagination and humor
+which could charm with absolute control her companion's lighter nature,
+as it betrayed itself in a gay tinkle of amusement and a succession of
+nervous whispers. Langbourne did not wonder at her subjection; with the
+first sounds of that rich, tender voice, he had fallen under its spell
+too; and he listened intensely, trying to make out some phrase, some
+word, some syllable. But the talk kept its sub-audible flow, and he had
+to content himself as he could with the sound of the voice.
+
+As he lay eavesdropping with all his might he tried to construct an
+image of the two girls from their voices. The one with the crystalline
+laugh was little and lithe, quick in movement, of a mobile face, with
+gray eyes and fair hair; the other was tall and pale, with full, blue
+eyes and a regular face, and lips that trembled with humor; very demure
+and yet very honest; very shy and yet very frank; there was something
+almost mannish in her essential honesty; there was nothing of feminine
+coquetry in her, though everything of feminine charm. She was a girl who
+looked like her father, Langbourne perceived with a flash of divination.
+She dressed simply in dark blue, and her hair was of a dark mahogany
+color. The smaller girl wore light gray checks or stripes, and the
+shades of silver.
+
+The talk began to be less continuous in the next room, from which there
+came the sound of sighs and yawns, and then of mingled laughter at
+these. Then the talk ran unbrokenly on for a while, and again dropped
+into laughs that recognized the drowse creeping upon the talkers.
+Suddenly it stopped altogether, and left Langbourne, as he felt,
+definitively awake for the rest of the night.
+
+He had received an impression which he could not fully analyze. With
+some inner sense he kept hearing that voice, low and deep, and rich with
+whimsical suggestion. Its owner must have a strange, complex nature,
+which would perpetually provoke and satisfy. Her companionship would be
+as easy and reasonable as a man's, while it had the charm of a woman's.
+At the moment it seemed to him that life without this companionship
+would be something poorer and thinner than he had yet known, and that he
+could not endure to forego it. Somehow he must manage to see the girl
+and make her acquaintance. He did not know how it could be contrived,
+but it could certainly be contrived, and he began to dramatize their
+meeting on these various terms. It was interesting and it was
+delightful, and it always came, in its safe impossibility, to his
+telling her that he loved her, and to her consenting to be his wife. He
+resolved to take no chance of losing her, but to remain awake, and
+somehow see her before she could leave the hotel in the morning. The
+resolution gave him calm; he felt that the affair so far was settled.
+
+Suddenly he started from his pillow; and again he heard that mellow
+laugh, warm and rich as the cooing of doves on sunlit eaves. The sun was
+shining through the crevices of his window-blinds; he looked at his
+watch; it was half-past eight. The sound of fluttering skirts and flying
+feet in the corridor shook his heart. A voice, the voice of the mellow
+laugh, called as if to some one on the stairs, "I must have put it in my
+bag. It doesn't matter, anyway."
+
+He hurried on his clothes, in the vain hope of finding his late
+neighbors at breakfast; but before he had finished dressing he heard
+wheels before the veranda below, and he saw the hotel barge drive away,
+as if to the station. There were two passengers in it; two women, whose
+faces were hidden by the fringe of the barge-roof, but whose slender
+figures showed themselves from their necks down. It seemed to him that
+one was tall and slight, and the other slight and little.
+
+
+III.
+
+He stopped in the hall, and then, tempted by his despair, he stepped
+within the open door of the next room and looked vaguely over it, with
+shame at being there. What was it that the girl had missed, and had come
+back to look for? Some trifle, no doubt, which she had not cared to
+lose, and yet had not wished to leave behind. He failed to find anything
+in the search, which he could not make very thorough, and he was going
+guiltily out when his eye fell upon an envelope, perversely fallen
+beside the door and almost indiscernible against the white paint, with
+the addressed surface inward.
+
+This must be the object of her search, and he could understand why she
+was not very anxious when he found it a circular from a nursery-man,
+containing nothing more valuable than a list of flowering shrubs. He
+satisfied himself that this was all without satisfying himself that he
+had quite a right to do so; and he stood abashed in the presence of the
+superscription on the envelope somewhat as if Miss Barbara F. Simpson,
+Upper Ashton Falls, N. H., were there to see him tampering with her
+correspondence. It was indelicate, and he felt that his whole behavior
+had been indelicate, from the moment her laugh had wakened him in the
+night till now, when he had invaded her room. He had no more doubt that
+she was the taller of the two girls than that this was her name on the
+envelope. He liked Barbara; and Simpson could be changed. He seemed to
+hear her soft throaty laugh in response to the suggestion, and with a
+leap of the heart he slipped the circular into his breast pocket.
+
+After breakfast he went to the hotel office, and stood leaning on the
+long counter and talking with the clerk till he could gather courage to
+look at the register, where he knew the names of these girls must be
+written. He asked where Upper Ashton Falls was, and whether it would be
+a pleasant place to spend a week.
+
+The clerk said that it was about thirty miles up the road, and was one
+of the nicest places in the mountains; Langbourne could not go to a
+nicer; and there was a very good little hotel. "Why," he said, "there
+were two ladies here overnight that just left for there, on the
+seven-forty. Odd you should ask about it."
+
+Langbourne owned that it was odd, and then he asked if the ladies lived
+at Upper Ashton Falls, or were merely summer folks.
+
+"Well, a little of both," said the clerk. "They're cousins, and they've
+got an aunt living there that they stay with. They used to go away
+winters,--teaching, I guess,--but this last year they stayed right
+through. Been down to Springfield, they said, and just stopped the night
+because the accommodation don't go any farther. Wake you up last night?
+I had to put 'em into the room next to yours, and girls usually talk."
+
+Langbourne answered that it would have taken a good deal of talking to
+wake him the night before, and then he lounged across to the time-table
+hanging on the wall, and began to look up the trains for Upper Ashton
+Falls.
+
+"If you want to go to the Falls," said the clerk, "there's a through
+train at four, with a drawing-room on it, that will get you there by
+five."
+
+"Oh, I fancy I was looking up the New York trains," Langbourne returned.
+He did not like these evasions, but in his consciousness of Miss Simpson
+he seemed unable to avoid them. The clerk went out on the veranda to
+talk with a farmer bringing supplies, and Langbourne ran to the
+register, and read there the names of Barbara F. Simpson and Juliet D.
+Bingham. It was Miss Simpson who had registered for both, since her name
+came first, and the entry was in a good, simple hand, which was like a
+man's in its firmness and clearness. He turned from the register decided
+to take the four-o'clock train for Upper Ashton Falls, and met a
+messenger with a telegram which he knew was for himself before the boy
+could ask his name. His partner had fallen suddenly sick; his recall was
+absolute, his vacation was at an end; nothing remained for him but to
+take the first train back to New York. He thought how little prescient
+he had been in his pretence that he was looking the New York trains up;
+but the need of one had come already, and apparently he should never
+have any use for a train to Upper Ashton Falls.
+
+
+IV.
+
+All the way back to New York Langbourne was oppressed by a sense of loss
+such as his old disappointment in love now seemed to him never to have
+inflicted. He found that his whole being had set toward the unseen owner
+of the voice which had charmed him, and it was like a stretching and
+tearing of the nerves to be going from her instead of going to her. He
+was as much under duress as if he were bound by a hypnotic spell. The
+voice continually sounded, not in his ears, which were filled with the
+noises of the train, as usual, but in the inmost of his spirit, where it
+was a low, cooing, coaxing murmur. He realized now how intensely he must
+have listened for it in the night, how every tone of it must have
+pervaded him and possessed him. He was in love with it, he was as
+entirely fascinated by it as if it were the girl's whole presence, her
+looks, her qualities. The remnant of the summer passed in the fret of
+business, which was doubly irksome through his feeling of injury in
+being kept from the girl whose personality he constructed from the sound
+of her voice, and set over his fancy in an absolute sovereignty. The
+image he had created of her remained a dim and blurred vision throughout
+the day, but by night it became distinct and compelling. One evening,
+late in the fall, he could endure the stress no longer, and he yielded
+to the temptation which had beset him from the first moment he renounced
+his purpose of returning in person the circular addressed to her as a
+means of her acquaintance. He wrote to her, and in terms as dignified as
+he could contrive, and as free from any ulterior import, he told her he
+had found it in the hotel hallway and had meant to send it to her at
+once, thinking it might be of some slight use to her. He had failed to
+do this, and now, having come upon it among some other papers, he sent
+it with an explanation which he hoped she would excuse him for troubling
+her with.
+
+This was not true, but he did not see how he could begin with her by
+saying that he had found the circular in her room, and had kept it by
+him ever since, looking at it every day, and leaving it where he could
+see it the last thing before he slept at night and the first thing after
+he woke in the morning. As to her reception of his story, he had to
+trust to his knowledge that she was, like himself, of country birth and
+breeding, and to his belief that she would not take alarm at his
+overture. He did not go much into the world and was little acquainted
+with its usages, yet he knew enough to suspect that a woman of the world
+would either ignore his letter, or would return a cold and snubbing
+expression of Miss Simpson's thanks for Mr. Stephen M. Langbourne's
+kindness.
+
+He had not only signed his name and given his address carefully in hopes
+of a reply, but he had enclosed the business card of his firm as a token
+of his responsibility. The partner in a wholesale stationery house ought
+to be an impressive figure in the imagination of a village girl; but it
+was some weeks before any answer came to Langbourne's letter. The reply
+began with an apology for the delay, and Langbourne perceived that he
+had gained rather than lost by the writer's hesitation; clearly she
+believed that she had put herself in the wrong, and that she owed him a
+certain reparation. For the rest, her letter was discreetly confined to
+an acknowledgment of the trouble he had taken.
+
+But this spare return was richly enough for Langbourne; it would have
+sufficed, if there had been nothing in the letter, that the handwriting
+proved Miss Simpson to have been the one who had made the entry of her
+name and her friend's in the hotel register. This was most important as
+one step in corroboration of the fact that he had rightly divined her;
+that the rest should come true was almost a logical necessity. Still, he
+was puzzled to contrive a pretext for writing again, and he remained
+without one for a fortnight. Then, in passing a seedsman's store which
+he used to pass every day without thinking, he one day suddenly
+perceived his opportunity. He went in and got a number of the catalogues
+and other advertisements, and addressed them then and there, in a
+wrapper the seedsman gave him, to Miss Barbara F. Simpson, Upper Ashton
+Falls, N. H.
+
+Now the response came with a promptness which at least testified of the
+lingering compunction of Miss Simpson. She asked if she were right in
+supposing the seedsman's catalogues and folders had come to her from
+Langbourne, and begged to know from him whether the seedsman in question
+was reliable: it was so difficult to get garden seeds that one could
+trust.
+
+The correspondence now established itself, and with one excuse or
+another it prospered throughout the winter. Langbourne was not only
+willing, he was most eager, to give her proof of his reliability; he
+spoke of stationers in Springfield and Greenfield to whom he was
+personally known; and he secretly hoped she would satisfy herself
+through friends in those places that he was an upright and trustworthy
+person.
+
+Miss Simpson wrote delightful letters, with that whimsical quality which
+had enchanted him in her voice. The coaxing and caressing was not there,
+and could not be expected to impart itself, unless in those refuges of
+deep feeling supposed to lurk between the lines. But he hoped to provoke
+it from these in time, and his own letters grew the more earnest the
+more ironical hers became. He wrote to her about a book he was reading,
+and when she said she had not seen it, he sent it her; in one of her
+letters she casually betrayed that she sang contralto in the choir, and
+then he sent her some new songs, which he had heard in the theatre, and
+which he had informed himself from a friend were contralto. He was
+always tending to an expression of the feeling which swayed him; but on
+her part there was no sentiment. Only in the fact that she was willing
+to continue this exchange of letters with a man personally unknown to
+her did she betray that romantic tradition which underlies all our young
+life, and in those unused to the world tempts to things blameless in
+themselves, but of the sort shunned by the worldlier wise. There was no
+great wisdom of any kind in Miss Simpson's letters; but Langbourne did
+not miss it; he was content with her mere words, as they related the
+little events of her simple daily life. These repeated themselves from
+the page in the tones of her voice and filled him with a passionate
+intoxication.
+
+Towards spring he had his photograph taken, for no reason that he could
+have given; but since it was done he sent one to his mother in Vermont,
+and then he wrote his name on another, and sent it to Miss Simpson in
+New Hampshire. He hoped, of course, that she would return a photograph
+of herself; but she merely acknowledged his with some dry playfulness.
+Then, after disappointing him so long that he ceased to expect anything,
+she enclosed a picture. The face was so far averted that Langbourne
+could get nothing but the curve of a longish cheek, the point of a nose,
+the segment of a crescent eyebrow. The girl said that as they should
+probably never meet, it was not necessary he should know her when he saw
+her; she explained that she was looking away because she had been
+attracted by something on the other side of the photograph gallery just
+at the moment the artist took the cap off the tube of his camera, and
+she could not turn back without breaking the plate.
+
+Langbourne replied that he was going up to Springfield on business the
+first week in May, and that he thought he might push on as far north as
+Upper Ashton Falls. To this there came no rejoinder whatever, but he did
+not lose courage. It was now the end of April, and he could bear to wait
+for a further verification of his ideal; the photograph had confirmed
+him in its evasive fashion at every point of his conjecture concerning
+her. It was the face he had imagined her having, or so he now imagined,
+and it was just such a long oval face as would go with the figure he
+attributed to her. She must have the healthy palor of skin which
+associates itself with masses of dark, mahogany-colored hair.
+
+
+V.
+
+It was so long since he had known a Northern spring that he had
+forgotten how much later the beginning of May was in New Hampshire; but
+as his train ran up from Springfield he realized the difference of the
+season from that which he had left in New York. The meadows were green
+only in the damp hollows; most of the trees were as bare as in
+midwinter; the willows in the swamplands hung out their catkins, and the
+white birches showed faint signs of returning life. In the woods were
+long drifts of snow, though he knew that in the brown leaves along their
+edges the pale pink flowers of the trailing arbutus were hiding their
+wet faces. A vernal mildness overhung the landscape. A blue haze filled
+the distances and veiled the hills; from the farm door-yards the smell
+of burning leaf-heaps and garden-stalks came through the window which he
+lifted to let in the dull, warm air. The sun shone down from a pale sky,
+in which the crows called to one another.
+
+By the time he arrived at Upper Ashton Falls the afternoon had waned so
+far towards evening that the first robins were singing their vespers
+from the leafless choirs of the maples before the hotel. He indulged the
+landlord in his natural supposition that he had come up to make a timely
+engagement for summer board; after supper he even asked what the price
+of such rooms as his would be by the week in July, while he tried to
+lead the talk round to the fact which he wished to learn.
+
+He did not know where Miss Simpson lived; and the courage with which he
+had set out on his adventure totally lapsed, leaving in its place an
+accusing sense of silliness. He was where he was without reason, and in
+defiance of the tacit unwillingness of the person he had come to see;
+she certainly had given him no invitation, she had given him no
+permission to come. For the moment, in his shame, it seemed to him that
+the only thing for him was to go back to New York by the first train in
+the morning. But what then would the girl think of him? Such an act must
+forever end the intercourse which had now become an essential part of
+his life. That voice which had haunted him so long, was he never to hear
+it again? Was he willing to renounce forever the hope of hearing it?
+
+He sat at his supper so long, nervelessly turning his doubts over in his
+mind, that the waitress came out of the kitchen and drove him from the
+table with her severe, impatient stare.
+
+He put on his hat, and with his overcoat on his arm he started out for a
+walk which was hopeless, but not so aimless as he feigned to himself.
+The air was lullingly warm still as he followed the long village street
+down the hill toward the river, where the lunge of rapids filled the
+dusk with a sort of humid uproar; then he turned and followed it back
+past the hotel as far as it led towards the open country. At the edge of
+the village he came to a large, old-fashioned house, which struck him as
+typical, with its outward swaying fence of the Greek border pattern, and
+its gate-posts topped by tilting urns of painted wood. The house itself
+stood rather far back from the street, and as he passed it he saw that
+it was approached by a pathway of brick which was bordered with box.
+Stalks of last year's hollyhocks and lilacs from garden beds on either
+hand lifted their sharp points, here and there broken and hanging down.
+It was curious how these details insisted through the twilight.
+
+He walked on until the wooden village pathway ended in the country mud,
+and then again he returned up upon his steps. As he reapproached the
+house he saw lights. A brighter radiance streamed from the hall door,
+which was apparently open, and a softer glow flushed the windows of one
+of the rooms that flanked the hall.
+
+As Langbourne came abreast of the gate the tinkle of a gay laugh rang
+out to him; then ensued a murmur of girls' voices in the room, and
+suddenly this stopped, and the voice that he knew, the voice that seemed
+never to have ceased to sound in his nerves and pulses, rose in singing
+words set to the Spanish air of _La Paloma_.
+
+It was one of the songs he had sent to Miss Simpson, but he did not need
+this material proof that it was she whom he now heard. There was no
+question of what he should do. All doubt, all fear, had vanished; he had
+again but one impulse, one desire, one purpose. But he lingered at the
+gate till the song ended, and then he unlatched it and started up the
+walk towards the door. It seemed to him a long way; he almost reeled as
+he went; he fumbled tremulously for the bell-pull beside the door, while
+a confusion of voices in the adjoining room--the voices which had waked
+him from his sleep, and which now sounded like voices in a dream--came
+out to him.
+
+The light from the lamp hanging in the hall shone full in his face, and
+the girl who came from that room beside it to answer his ring gave a
+sort of conscious jump at sight of him as he uncovered and stood
+bare-headed before her.
+
+
+VI.
+
+She must have recognized him from the photograph he had sent, and in
+stature and figure he recognized her as the ideal he had cherished,
+though her head was gilded with the light from the lamp, and he could
+not make out whether her hair was dark or fair; her face was, of course,
+a mere outline, without color or detail against the luminous interior.
+
+He managed to ask, dry-tongued and with a heart that beat into his
+throat, "Is Miss Simpson at home?" and the girl answered, with a high,
+gay tinkle:
+
+"Yes, she's at home. Won't you walk in?"
+
+He obeyed, but at the sound of her silvery voice his heart dropped back
+into his breast. He put his hat and coat on an entry chair, and prepared
+to follow her into the room she had come out of. The door stood ajar,
+and he said, as she put out her hand to push it open, "I am Mr.
+Langbourne."
+
+"Oh, yes," she answered in the same high, gay tinkle, which he fancied
+had now a note of laughter in it.
+
+An elderly woman of a ladylike village type was sitting with some
+needlework beside a little table, and a young girl turned on the
+piano-stool and rose to receive him. "My aunt, Mrs. Simpson, Mr.
+Langbourne," said the girl who introduced him to these presences, and
+she added, indicating the girl at the piano, "Miss Simpson."
+
+They all three bowed silently, and in the hush the sheet on the music
+frame slid from the piano with a sharp clash, and skated across the
+floor to Langbourne's feet. It was the song of _La Paloma_ which she had
+been singing; he picked it up, and she received it from him with a
+drooping head, and an effect of guilty embarrassment.
+
+She was short and of rather a full figure, though not too full. She was
+not plain, but she was by no means the sort of beauty who had lived in
+Langbourne's fancy for the year past. The oval of her face was squared;
+her nose was arched; she had a pretty, pouting mouth, and below it a
+deep dimple in her chin; her eyes were large and dark, and they had the
+questioning look of near-sighted eyes; her hair was brown. There was a
+humorous tremor in her lips, even with the prim stress she put upon them
+in saying, "Oh, thank you," in a thick whisper of the voice he knew.
+
+"And I," said the other girl, "am Juliet Bingham. Won't you sit down,
+Mr. Langbourne!" She pushed towards him the arm-chair before her, and he
+dropped into it. She took her place on the hair-cloth sofa, and Miss
+Simpson sank back upon the piano-stool with a painful provisionality,
+while her eyes sought Miss Bingham's in a sort of admiring terror.
+
+Miss Bingham was easily mistress of the situation; she did not try to
+bring Miss Simpson into the conversation, but she contrived to make Mrs.
+Simpson ask Langbourne when he arrived at Upper Ashton Falls; and she
+herself asked him when he had left New York, with many apposite
+suppositions concerning the difference in the season in the two
+latitudes. She presumed he was staying at the Falls House, and she said,
+always in her high, gay tinkle, that it was very pleasant there in the
+summer time. He did not know what he answered. He was aware that from
+time to time Miss Simpson said something in a frightened undertone. He
+did not know how long it was before Mrs. Simpson made an errand out of
+the room, in the abeyance which age practises before youthful society in
+the country; he did not know how much longer it was before Miss Bingham
+herself jumped actively up, and said, Now she would run over to Jenny's,
+if Mr. Langbourne would excuse her, and tell her that they could not go
+the next day.
+
+"It will do just as well in the morning," Miss Simpson pitifully
+entreated.
+
+"No, she's got to know to-night," said Miss Bingham, and she said she
+should find Mr. Langbourne there when she got back. He knew that in
+compliance with the simple village tradition he was being purposely left
+alone with Miss Simpson, as rightfully belonging to her. Miss Bingham
+betrayed no intentionality to him, but he caught a glimpse of mocking
+consciousness in the sidelong look she gave Miss Simpson as she went
+out; and if he had not known before he perceived then, in the vanishing
+oval of her cheek, the corner of her arched eyebrow, the point of her
+classic nose, the original of the photograph he had been treasuring as
+Miss Simpson's.
+
+
+VII.
+
+"It was _her_ picture I sent you," said Miss Simpson. She was the first
+to break the silence to which Miss Bingham abandoned them, but she did
+not speak till her friend had closed the outer door behind her and was
+tripping down the brick walk to the gate.
+
+"Yes," said Langbourne, in a dryness which he could not keep himself
+from using.
+
+The girl must have felt it, and her voice faltered a very little as she
+continued. "We--I--did it for fun. I meant to tell you. I--"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Langbourne. "I had no business to expect
+yours, or to send you mine." But he believed that he had; that his
+faithful infatuation had somehow earned him the right to do what he had
+done, and to hope for what he had not got; without formulating the fact,
+he divined that she believed it too. Between the man-soul and the
+woman-soul it can never go so far as it had gone in their case without
+giving them claims upon each other which neither can justly deny.
+
+She did not attempt to deny it. "I oughtn't to have done it, and I ought
+to have told you at once--the next letter--but I--you said you were
+coming, and I thought if you did come--I didn't really expect you to;
+and it was all a joke,--off-hand."
+
+It was very lame, but it was true, and it was piteous; yet Langbourne
+could not relent. His grievance was not with what she had done, but what
+she was; not what she really was, but what she materially was; her
+looks, her figure, her stature, her whole presence, so different from
+that which he had been carrying in his mind, and adoring for a year
+past.
+
+If it was ridiculous, and if with her sense of the ridiculous she felt
+it so, she was unable to take it lightly, or to make him take it
+lightly. At some faint gleams which passed over her face he felt himself
+invited to regard it less seriously; but he did not try, even
+provisionally, and they fell into a silence that neither seemed to have
+the power of breaking.
+
+It must be broken, however; something must be done; they could not sit
+there dumb forever. He looked at the sheet of music on the piano and
+said, "I see you have been trying that song. Do you like it?"
+
+"Yes, very much," and now for the first time she got her voice fairly
+above a whisper. She took the sheet down from the music-rest and looked
+at the picture of the lithographed title. It was of a tiled roof lifted
+among cypresses and laurels with pigeons strutting on it and sailing
+over it.
+
+"It was that picture," said Langbourne, since he must say something,
+"that I believe I got the song for; it made me think of the roof of an
+old Spanish house I saw in Southern California."
+
+"It must be nice, out there," said Miss Simpson, absently staring at the
+picture. She gathered herself together to add, pointlessly, "Juliet says
+she's going to Europe. Have you ever been?"
+
+"Not to Europe, no. I always feel as if I wanted to see my own country
+first. Is she going soon?"
+
+"Who? Juliet? Oh, no! She was just saying so. I don't believe she's
+engaged her passage yet."
+
+There was invitation to greater ease in this, and her voice began to
+have the tender, coaxing quality which had thrilled his heart when he
+heard it first. But the space of her variance from his ideal was between
+them, and the voice reached him faintly across it.
+
+The situation grew more and more painful for her, he could see, as well
+as for him. She too was feeling the anomaly of their having been
+intimates without being acquaintances. They necessarily met as strangers
+after the exchange of letters in which they had spoken with the
+confidence of friends.
+
+Langbourne cast about in his mind for some middle ground where they
+could come together without that effect of chance encounter which had
+reduced them to silence. He could not recur to any of the things they
+had written about; so far from wishing to do this, he had almost a
+terror of touching upon them by accident, and he felt that she shrank
+from them too, as if they involved a painful misunderstanding which
+could not be put straight.
+
+He asked questions about Upper Ashton Falls, but these led up to what
+she had said of it in her letters; he tried to speak of the winter in
+New York, and he remembered that every week he had given her a full
+account of his life there. They must go beyond their letters or they
+must fall far back of them.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+In their attempts to talk he was aware that she was seconding all his
+endeavors with intelligence, and with a humorous subtlety to which he
+could not pretend. She was suffering from their anomalous position as
+much as he, but she had the means of enjoying it while he had not. After
+half an hour of these defeats Mrs. Simpson operated a diversion by
+coming in with two glasses of lemonade on a tray and some slices of
+sponge-cake. She offered this refreshment first to Langbourne and then
+to her niece, and they both obediently took a glass, and put a slice of
+cake in the saucer which supported the glass. She said to each in turn,
+"Won't you take some lemonade? Won't you have a piece of cake?" and then
+went out with her empty tray, and the air of having fulfilled the duties
+of hospitality to her niece's company.
+
+"I don't know," said Miss Simpson, "but it's rather early in the season
+for _cold_ lemonade," and Langbourne, instead of laughing, as her tone
+invited him to do, said:
+
+"It's very good, I'm sure." But this seemed too stiffly ungracious, and
+he added: "What delicious sponge-cake! You never get this out of New
+England."
+
+"We have to do something to make up for our doughnuts," Miss Simpson
+suggested.
+
+"Oh, I like doughnuts too," said Langbourne. "But you can't get the
+right kind of doughnuts, either, in New York."
+
+They began to talk about cooking. He told her of the tamales which he
+had first tasted in San Francisco, and afterward found superabundantly
+in New York; they both made a great deal of the topic; Miss Simpson had
+never heard of tamales. He became solemnly animated in their exegesis,
+and she showed a resolute interest in them.
+
+They were in the midst of the forced discussion, when they heard a quick
+foot on the brick walk, but they had both fallen silent when Miss
+Bingham flounced elastically in upon them. She seemed to take in with a
+keen glance which swept them from her lively eyes that they had not been
+getting on, and she had the air of taking them at once in hand.
+
+"Well, it's all right about Jenny," she said to Miss Simpson. "She'd a
+good deal rather go day after to-morrow, anyway. What have you been
+talking about? I don't want to make you go over the same ground. Have
+you got through with the weather? The moon's out, and it feels more like
+the beginning of June than the last of April. I shut the front door
+against dor-bugs; I couldn't help it, though they won't be here for six
+weeks yet. Do you have dor-bugs in New York, Mr. Langbourne?"
+
+"I don't know. There may be some in the Park," he answered.
+
+"We think a great deal of our dor-bugs in Upper Ashton," said Miss
+Simpson demurely, looking down. "We don't know what we should do without
+them."
+
+"Lemonade!" exclaimed Miss Bingham, catching sight of the glasses and
+saucers on the corner of the piano, where Miss Simpson had allowed
+Langbourne to put them. "Has Aunt Elmira been giving you lemonade while
+I was gone? I will just see about that!" She whipped out of the room,
+and was back in a minute with a glass in one hand and a bit of
+sponge-cake between the fingers of the other. "She had kept some for me!
+Have you sung _Paloma_ for Mr. Langbourne, Barbara?"
+
+"No," said Barbara, "we hadn't got round to it, quite."
+
+"Oh, do!" Langbourne entreated, and he wondered that he had not asked
+her before; it would have saved them from each ether.
+
+"Wait a moment," cried Juliet Bingham, and she gulped the last draught
+of her lemonade upon a final morsel of sponge-cake, and was down at the
+piano while still dusting the crumbs from her fingers. She struck the
+refractory sheet of music flat upon the rack with her palm, and then
+tilted her head over her shoulder towards Langbourne, who had risen with
+some vague notion of turning the sheets of the song. "Do you sing?"
+
+"Oh, no. But I like--"
+
+"Are you ready, Bab?" she asked, ignoring him; and she dashed into the
+accompaniment.
+
+He sat down in his chair behind the two girls, where they could not see
+his face.
+
+Barbara began rather weakly, but her voice gathered strength, and then
+poured full volume to the end, where it weakened again. He knew that she
+was taking refuge from him in the song, and in the magic of her voice he
+escaped from the disappointment he had been suffering. He let his head
+drop and his eyelids fall, and in the rapture of her singing he got back
+what he had lost; or rather, he lost himself again to the illusion which
+had grown so precious to him.
+
+Juliet Bingham sounded the last note almost as she rose from the piano;
+Barbara passed her handkerchief over her forehead, as if to wipe the
+heat from it, but he believed that this was a ruse to dry her eyes in
+it: they shone with a moist brightness in the glimpse he caught of them.
+He had risen, and they all stood talking; or they all stood, and Juliet
+talked. She did not offer to sit down again, and after stiffly thanking
+them both, he said he must be going, and took leave of them. Juliet gave
+his hand a nervous grip; Barbara's touch was lax and cold; the parting
+with her was painful; he believed that she felt it so as much as he.
+
+The girls' voices followed him down the walk,--Juliet's treble, and
+Barbara's contralto,--and he believed that they were making talk
+purposely against a pressure of silence, and did not know what they were
+saying. It occurred to him that they had not asked how long he was
+staying, or invited him to come again: he had not thought to ask if he
+might; and in the intolerable inconclusiveness of this ending he
+faltered at the gate till the lights in the windows of the parlor
+disappeared, as if carried into the hall, and then they twinkled into
+darkness. From an upper entry window, which reddened with a momentary
+flush and was then darkened, a burst of mingled laughter came. The girls
+must have thought him beyond hearing, and he fancied the laugh a burst
+of hysterical feeling in them both.
+
+
+IX.
+
+Langbourne went to bed as soon as he reached his hotel because he found
+himself spent with the experience of the evening; but as he rested from
+his fatigue he grew wakeful, and he tried to get its whole measure and
+meaning before him. He had a methodical nature, with a necessity for
+order in his motions, and he now balanced one fact against another none
+the less passionately because the process was a series of careful
+recognitions. He perceived that the dream in which he had lived for the
+year past was not wholly an illusion. One of the girls whom he had heard
+but not seen was what he had divined her to be: a dominant influence, a
+control to which the other was passively obedient. He had not erred
+greatly as to the face or figure of the superior, but he had given all
+the advantages to the wrong person. The voice, indeed, the spell which
+had bound him, belonged with the one to whom he had attributed it, and
+the qualities with which it was inextricably blended in his fancy were
+hers; she was more like his ideal than the other, though he owned that
+the other was a charming girl too, and that in the thin treble of her
+voice lurked a potential fascination which might have made itself
+ascendently felt if he had happened to feel it first.
+
+There was a dangerous instant in which he had a perverse question of
+changing his allegiance. This passed into another moment, almost as
+perilous, of confusion through a primal instinct of the man's by which
+he yields a double or a divided allegiance and simultaneously worships
+at two shrines; in still another breath he was aware that this was
+madness.
+
+If he had been younger, he would have had no doubt as to his right in
+the circumstances. He had simply corresponded all winter with Miss
+Simpson; but though he had opened his heart freely and had invited her
+to the same confidence with him, he had not committed himself, and he
+had a right to drop the whole affair. She would have no right to
+complain; she had not committed herself either: they could both come off
+unscathed. But he was now thirty-five, and life had taught him something
+concerning the rights of others which he could not ignore. By seeking
+her confidence and by offering her his, he had given her a claim which
+was none the less binding because it was wholly tacit. There had been a
+time when he might have justified himself in dropping the affair; that
+was when she had failed to answer his letter; but he had come to see her
+in defiance of her silence, and now he could not withdraw, simply
+because he was disappointed, without cruelty, without atrocity.
+
+This was what the girl's wistful eyes said to him; this was the reproach
+of her trembling lips; this was the accusation of her dejected figure,
+as she drooped in vision before him on the piano-stool and passed her
+hand soundlessly over the key-board. He tried to own to her that he was
+disappointed, but he could not get the words out of his throat; and now
+in her presence, as it were, he was not sure that he was disappointed.
+
+
+X.
+
+He woke late, with a longing to put his two senses of her to the proof
+of day; and as early in the forenoon as he could hope to see her, he
+walked out towards her aunt's house. It was a mild, dull morning, with a
+misted sunshine; in the little crimson tassels of the budded maples
+overhead the bees were droning.
+
+The street was straight, and while he was yet a good way off he saw the
+gate open before the house, and a girl whom he recognized as Miss
+Bingham close it behind her. She then came down under the maples towards
+him, at first swiftly, and then more and more slowly, until finally she
+faltered to a stop. He quickened his own pace and came up to her with a
+"Good-morning" called to her and a lift of his hat. She returned neither
+salutation, and said, "I was coming to see you, Mr. Langbourne." Her
+voice was still a silver bell, but it was not gay, and her face was
+severely unsmiling.
+
+"To see _me_?" he returned. "Has anything--"
+
+"No, there's nothing the matter. But--I should like to talk with you."
+She held a little packet, tied with blue ribbon, in her intertwined
+hands, and she looked urgently at him.
+
+"I shall be very glad," Langbourne began, but she interrupted,--
+
+"Should you mind walking down to the Falls?"
+
+He understood that for some reason she did not wish him to pass the
+house, and he bowed. "Wherever you like. I hope Mrs. Simpson is well?
+And Miss Simpson?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly," said Miss Bingham, and they fenced with some questions
+and answers of no interest till they had walked back through the village
+to the Falls at the other end of it, where the saw in a mill was
+whirring through a long pine log, and the water, streaked with sawdust,
+was spreading over the rocks below and flowing away with a smooth
+swiftness. The ground near the mill was piled with fresh-sawed, fragrant
+lumber and strewn with logs.
+
+Miss Bingham found a comfortable place on one of the logs, and began
+abruptly:
+
+"You may think it's pretty strange, Mr. Langbourne, but I want to talk
+with you about Miss Simpson." She seemed to satisfy a duty to convention
+by saying Miss Simpson at the outset, and after that she called her
+friend Barbara. "I've brought you your letters to her," and she handed
+him the packet she had been holding. "Have you got hers with you?"
+
+"They are at the hotel," answered Langbourne.
+
+"Well, that's right, then. I thought perhaps you had brought them. You
+see," Miss Bingham continued, much more cold-bloodedly than Langbourne
+thought she need, "we talked it over last night, and it's too silly.
+That's the way Barbara feels herself. The fact is," she went on
+confidingly, and with the air of saying something that he would
+appreciate, "I always thought it was some _young_ man, and so did
+Barbara; or I don't believe she would ever have answered your first
+letter."
+
+Langbourne knew that he was not a young man in a young girl's sense; but
+no man likes to have it said that he is old. Besides, Miss Bingham
+herself was not apparently in her first quarter of a century, and
+probably Miss Simpson would not see the earliest twenties again. He
+thought none the worse of her for that; but he felt that he was not so
+unequally matched in time with her that she need take the attitude with
+regard to him which Miss Bingham indicated. He was not the least gray
+nor the least bald, and his tall figure had kept its youthful lines.
+
+Perhaps his face manifested something of his suppressed resentment. At
+any rate, Miss Bingham said apologetically, "I mean that if we had known
+it was a _serious_ person we should have acted differently. I oughtn't
+to have let her thank you for those seedsman's catalogues; but I thought
+it couldn't do any harm. And then, after your letters began to come, we
+didn't know just when to stop them. To tell you the truth, Mr.
+Langbourne, we got so interested we couldn't _bear_ to stop them. You
+wrote so much about your life in New York, that it was like a visit
+there every week; and it's pretty quiet at Upper Ashton in the winter
+time."
+
+She seemed to refer this fact to Langbourne for sympathetic
+appreciation; he said mechanically, "Yes."
+
+She resumed: "But when your picture came, I said it had _got_ to stop;
+and so we just sent back my picture,--or I don't know but what Barbara
+did it without asking me,--and we did suppose that would be the last of
+it; when you wrote back you were coming here, we didn't believe you
+really would unless we said so. That's all there is about it; and if
+there is anybody to blame, I am the one. Barbara would never have done
+it in the world if I hadn't put her up to it."
+
+In those words the implication that Miss Bingham had operated the whole
+affair finally unfolded itself. But distasteful as the fact was to
+Langbourne, and wounding as was the realization that he had been led on
+by this witness of his infatuation for the sake of the entertainment
+which his letters gave two girls in the dull winter of a mountain
+village, there was still greater pain, with an additional embarrassment,
+in the regret which the words conveyed. It appeared that it was not he
+who had done the wrong; he had suffered it, and so far from having to
+offer reparation to a young girl for having unwarrantably wrought her up
+expect of him a step from which he afterwards recoiled, he had the duty
+of forgiving her a trespass on his own invaded sensibilities. It was
+humiliating to his vanity; it inflicted a hurt to something better than
+his vanity. He began very uncomfortably: "It's all right, as far as I'm
+concerned. I had no business to address Miss Simpson in the first
+place--"
+
+"Well," Miss Bingham interrupted, "that's what I told Barbara; but she
+got to feeling badly about it; she thought if you had taken the trouble
+to send back the circular that she dropped in the hotel, she couldn't do
+less than acknowledge it, and she kept on so about it that I had to let
+her. That was the first false step."
+
+These words, while they showed Miss Simpson in a more amiable light, did
+not enable Langbourne to see Miss Bingham's merit so clearly. In the
+methodical and consecutive working of his emotions, he was aware that it
+was no longer a question of divided allegiance, and that there could
+never be any such question again. He perceived that Miss Bingham had not
+such a good figure as he had fancied the night before, and that her eyes
+were set rather too near together. While he dropped his own eyes, and
+stood trying to think what he should say in answer to her last speech,
+her high, sweet voice tinkled out in gay challenge, "How do, John?"
+
+He looked up and saw a square-set, brown-faced young man advancing
+towards them in his shirt-sleeves; he came deliberately, finding his way
+in and out among the logs, till he stood smiling down, through a heavy
+mustache and thick black lashes, into the face of the girl, as if she
+were some sort of joke. The sun struck into her face as she looked up at
+him, and made her frown with a knot between her brows that pulled her
+eyes still closer together, and she asked, with no direct reference to
+his shirt-sleeves,--"A'n't you forcing the season?"
+
+"Don't want to let the summer get the start of you," the young man
+generalized, and Miss Bingham said,--
+
+"Mr. Langbourne, Mr. Dickery." The young man silently shook hands with
+Langbourne, whom he took into the joke of Miss Bingham with another
+smile; and she went on: "Say, John, I wish you'd tell Jenny I don't see
+why we shouldn't go this afternoon, after all."
+
+"All right," said the young man.
+
+"I suppose you're coming too?" she suggested.
+
+"Hadn't heard of it," he returned.
+
+"Well, you have now. You've got to be ready at two o'clock."
+
+"That so?" the young fellow inquired. Then he walked away among the
+logs, as casually as he had arrived, and Miss Bingham rose and shook
+some bits of bark from her skirt.
+
+"Mr. Dickery is owner of the mills," she explained, and she explored
+Langbourne's face for an intelligence which she did not seem to find
+there. He thought, indifferently enough, that this young man had heard
+the two girls speak of him, and had satisfied a natural curiosity in
+coming to look him over; it did not occur to him that he had any
+especial relation to Miss Bingham.
+
+She walked up into the village with Langbourne, and he did not know
+whether he was to accompany her home or not. But she gave him no sign of
+dismissal till she put her hand upon her gate to pull it open without
+asking him to come in. Then he said, "I will send Miss Simpson's letters
+to her at once."
+
+"Oh, any time will do, Mr. Langbourne," she returned sweetly. Then, as
+if it had just occurred to her, she added, "We're going after
+May-flowers this afternoon. Wouldn't you like to come too?"
+
+"I don't know," he began, "whether I shall have the time--"
+
+"Why, you're not going away to-day!"
+
+"I expected--I--But if you don't think I shall be intruding--"
+
+"Why, _I_ should be delighted to have you. Mr. Dickery's going, and
+Jenny Dickery, and Barbara. I don't _believe_ it will rain."
+
+"Then, if I may," said Langbourne.
+
+"Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne!" she cried, and he started away. But he
+had gone only a few rods when he wheeled about and hurried back. The
+girl was going up the walk to the house, looking over her shoulder after
+him; at his hurried return she stopped and came down to the gate again.
+
+"Miss Bingham, I think--I think I had better not go."
+
+"Why, just as you feel about it, Mr. Langbourne," she assented.
+
+"I will bring the letters this evening, if you will let me--if Miss
+Simpson--if you will be at home."
+
+"We shall be very happy to see you, Mr. Langbourne," said the girl
+formally, and then he went back to his hotel.
+
+
+XI.
+
+Langbourne could not have told just why he had withdrawn his acceptance
+of Miss Bingham's invitation. If at the moment it was the effect of a
+quite reasonless panic, he decided later that it was because he wished
+to think. It could not be said, however, that he did think, unless
+thinking consists of a series of dramatic representations which the mind
+makes to itself from a given impulse, and which it is quite powerless to
+end. All the afternoon, which Langbourne spent in his room, his mind was
+the theatre of scenes with Miss Simpson, in which he perpetually evolved
+the motives governing him from the beginning, and triumphed out of his
+difficulties and embarrassments. Her voice, as it acquiesced in all, no
+longer related itself to that imaginary personality which had inhabited
+his fancy. That was gone irrevocably; and the voice belonged to the
+likeness of Barbara, and no other; from her similitude, little, quaint,
+with her hair of cloudy red and her large, dim-sighted eyes, it played
+upon the spiritual sense within him with the coaxing, drolling, mocking
+charm which he had felt from the first. It blessed him with intelligent
+and joyous forgiveness. But as he stood at her gate that evening this
+unmerited felicity fell from him. He now really heard her voice, through
+the open doorway, but perhaps because it was mixed with other
+voices--the treble of Miss Bingham, and the bass of a man who must be
+the Mr. Dickery he had seen at the saw mills--he turned and hurried back
+to his hotel, where he wrote a short letter saying that he had decided
+to take the express for New York that night. With an instinctive
+recognition of her authority in the affair, or with a cowardly shrinking
+from direct dealing with Barbara, he wrote to Juliet Bingham, and he
+addressed to her the packet of letters which he sent for Barbara.
+Superficially, he had done what he had no choice but to do. He had been
+asked to return her letters, and he had returned them, and brought the
+affair to an end.
+
+In his long ride to the city he assured himself in vain that he was
+doing right if he was not sure of his feelings towards the girl. It was
+quite because he was not sure of his feeling that he could not be sure
+he was not acting falsely and cruelly.
+
+The fear grew upon him through the summer, which he spent in the heat
+and stress of the town. In his work he could forget a little the despair
+in which he lived; but in a double consciousness like that of the
+hypochondriac, the girl whom it seemed to him he had deserted was
+visibly and audibly present with him. Her voice was always in his inner
+ear, and it visualized her looks and movements to his inner eye.
+
+Now he saw and understood at last that what his heart had more than once
+misgiven him might be the truth, and that though she had sent back his
+letters, and asked her own in return, it was not necessarily her wish
+that he should obey her request. It might very well have been an
+experiment of his feeling towards her, a mute quest of the impression
+she had made upon him, a test of his will and purpose, an overture to a
+clearer and truer understanding between them. This misgiving became a
+conviction from which he could not escape.
+
+He believed too late that he had made a mistake, that he had thrown away
+the supreme chance of his life. But was it too late? When he could bear
+it no longer, he began to deny that it was too late. He denied it even
+to the pathetic presence which haunted him, and in which the magic of
+her voice itself was merged at last, so that he saw her more than he
+heard her. He overbore her weak will with his stronger will, and set
+himself strenuously to protest to her real presence what he now always
+said to her phantom. When his partner came back from his vacation,
+Langbourne told him that he was going to take a day or two off.
+
+
+XII.
+
+He arrived at Upper Ashton Falls long enough before the early autumnal
+dusk to note that the crimson buds of the maples were now their crimson
+leaves, but he kept as close to the past as he could by not going to
+find Barbara before the hour of the evening when he had turned from her
+gate without daring to see her. It was a soft October evening now, as it
+was a soft May evening then; and there was a mystical hint of unity in
+the like feel of the dull, mild air. Again voices were coming out of the
+open doors and windows of the house, and they were the same voices that
+he had last heard there.
+
+He knocked, and after a moment of startled hush within Juliet Bingham
+came to the door. "Why, Mr. Langbourne!" she screamed.
+
+"I--I should like to come in, if you will let me," he gasped out.
+
+"Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne," she returned.
+
+He had not dwelt so long and so intently on the meeting at hand without
+considering how he should account for his coming, and he had formulated
+a confession of his motives. But he had never meant to make it to Juliet
+Bingham, and he now found himself unable to allege a word in explanation
+of his presence. He followed her into the parlor. Barbara silently gave
+him her hand and then remained passive in the background, where Dickery
+held aloof, smiling in what seemed his perpetual enjoyment of the Juliet
+Bingham joke. She at once put herself in authority over the situation;
+she made Langbourne let her have his hat; she seated him when and where
+she chose; she removed and put back the lampshades; she pulled up and
+pulled down the window-blinds; she shut the outer door because of the
+night air, and opened it because of the unseasonable warmth within. She
+excused Mrs. Simpson's absence on account of a headache, and asked him
+if he would not have a fan; when he refused it she made him take it, and
+while he sat helplessly dangling it from his hand, she asked him about
+the summer he had had, and whether he had passed it in New York. She was
+very intelligent about the heat in New York, and tactful in keeping the
+one-sided talk from falling. Barbara said nothing after a few faint
+attempts to take part in it, and Langbourne made briefer and briefer
+answers. His reticence seemed only to heighten Juliet Bingham's
+satisfaction, and she said, with a final supremacy, that she had been
+intending to go out with Mr. Dickery to a business meeting of the
+book-club, but they would be back before Langbourne could get away; she
+made him promise to wait for them. He did not know if Barbara looked any
+protest,--at least she spoke none,--and Juliet went out with Dickery.
+She turned at the door to bid Barbara say, if any one called, that she
+was at the book-club meeting. Then she disappeared, but reappeared and
+called, "See here, a minute, Bab!" and at the outer threshold she
+detained Barbara in vivid whisper, ending aloud, "Now you be sure to do
+both, Bab! Aunt Elmira will tell you where the things are." Again she
+vanished, and was gone long enough to have reached the gate and come
+back from it. She was renewing all her whispered and out-spoken charges
+when Dickery showed himself at her side, put his hand under her elbow,
+and wheeled her about, and while she called gayly over her shoulder to
+the others, "Did you ever?" walked her definitively out of the house.
+
+Langbourne did not suffer the silence which followed her going to
+possess him. What he had to do he must do quickly, and he said, "Miss
+Simpson, may I ask you one question?"
+
+"Why, if you won't expect me to answer it," she suggested quaintly.
+
+"You must do as you please about that. It has to come before I try to
+excuse myself for being here; it's the only excuse I can offer. It's
+this: Did you send Miss Bingham to get back your letters from me last
+spring?"
+
+"Why, of course!"
+
+"I mean, was it your idea?"
+
+"We thought it would be better."
+
+The evasion satisfied Langbourne, but he asked, "Had I given you some
+cause to distrust me at that time?"
+
+"Oh, no," she protested. "We got to talking it over, and--and we thought
+we had better."
+
+"Because I had come here without being asked?"
+
+"No, no; it wasn't that," the girl protested.
+
+"I know I oughtn't to have come. I know I oughtn't to have written to
+you in the beginning, but you had let me write, and I thought you would
+let me come. I tried always to be sincere with you; to make you feel
+that you could trust me. I believe that I am an honest man; I thought I
+was a better man for having known you through your letters. I couldn't
+tell you how much they had been to me. You seemed to think, because I
+lived in a large place, that I had a great many friends; but I have very
+few; I might say I hadn't any--such as I thought I had when I was
+writing to you. Most of the men I know belong to some sort of clubs; but
+I don't. I went to New York when I was feeling alone in the world,--it
+was from something that had happened to me partly through my own
+fault,--and I've never got over being alone there. I've never gone into
+society; I don't know what society is, and I suppose that's why I am
+acting differently from a society man now. The only change I ever had
+from business was reading at night: I've got a pretty good library.
+After I began to get your letters, I went out more--to the theatre, and
+lectures, and concerts, and all sorts of things--so that I could have
+something interesting to write about; I thought you'd get tired of
+always hearing about me. And your letters filled up my life, so that I
+didn't seem alone any more. I read them all hundreds of times; I should
+have said that I knew them by heart, if they had not been as fresh at
+last as they were at first. I seemed to hear you talking in them." He
+stopped as if withholding himself from what he had nearly said without
+intending, and resumed: "It's some comfort to know that you didn't want
+them back because you doubted me, or my good faith."
+
+"Oh, no, indeed, Mr. Langbourne," said Barbara compassionately.
+
+"Then why did you?"
+
+"I don't know. We--"
+
+"No; _not_ 'we.' _You!_"
+
+She did not answer for so long that he believed she resented his
+speaking so peremptorily and was not going to answer him at all. At last
+she said, "I thought you would rather give them back." She turned and
+looked at him, with the eyes which he knew saw his face dimly, but saw
+his thought clearly.
+
+"What made you think that?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Didn't you want to?"
+
+He knew that the fact which their words veiled was now the first thing
+in their mutual consciousness. He spoke the truth in saying, "No, I
+never wanted to," but this was only a mechanical truth, and he knew it.
+He had an impulse to put the burden of the situation on her, and press
+her to say why she thought he wished to do so; but his next emotion was
+shame for this impulse. A thousand times, in these reveries in which he
+had imagined meeting her, he had told her first of all how he had
+overheard her talking in the room next his own in the hotel, and of the
+power her voice had instantly and lastingly had upon him. But now, with
+a sense spiritualized by her presence, he perceived that this, if it was
+not unworthy, was secondary, and that the right to say it was not yet
+established. There was something that must come before this,--something
+that could alone justify him in any further step. If she could answer
+him first as he wished, then he might open his whole heart to her, at
+whatever cost; he was not greatly to blame, if he did not realize that
+the cost could not be wholly his, as he asked, remotely enough from her
+question, "After I wrote that I was coming up here, and you did not
+answer me, did you think I was coming?"
+
+She did not answer, and he felt that he had been seeking a mean
+advantage. He went on: "If you didn't expect it, if you never thought
+that I was coming, there's no need for me to tell you anything else."
+
+Her face turned towards him a very little, but not so much as even to
+get a sidelong glimpse of him; it was as if it were drawn by a magnetic
+attraction; and she said, "I didn't know but you would come."
+
+"Then I will tell you why I came--the only thing that gave me the right
+to come against your will, if it _was_ against it. I came to ask you to
+marry me. Will you?"
+
+She now turned and looked fully at him, though he was aware of being a
+mere blur in her near-sighted vision.
+
+"Do you mean to ask it now?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And have you wished to ask it ever since you first saw me?"
+
+He tried to say that he had, but he could not; he could only say, "I
+wish to ask it now more than ever."
+
+She shook her head slowly. "I'm not sure how you want me to answer you."
+
+"Not sure?"
+
+"No. I'm afraid I might disappoint you again."
+
+He could not make out whether she was laughing at him. He sat, not
+knowing what to say, and he blurted out, "Do you mean that you won't?"
+
+"I shouldn't want you to make another mistake."
+
+"I don't know what you"--he was going to say "mean," but he
+substituted--"wish. If you wish for more time, I can wait as long as you
+choose."
+
+"No, I might wish for time, if there was anything more. But if there's
+nothing else you have to tell me--then, no, I cannot marry you."
+
+Langbourne rose, feeling justly punished, somehow, but bewildered as
+much as humbled, and stood stupidly unable to go. "I don't know what you
+could expect me to say after you've refused me--"
+
+"Oh, I don't expect anything."
+
+"But there _is_ something I should like to tell you. I know that I
+behaved that night as if--as if I hadn't come to ask you--what I have; I
+don't blame you for not trusting me now. But it is no use to tell you
+what I intended if it is all over."
+
+He looked down into his hat, and she said in a low voice, "I think I
+ought to know. Won't you--sit down?"
+
+He sat down again. "Then I will tell you at the risk of--But there's
+nothing left to lose! You know how it is, when we think about a person
+or a place before we've seen them: we make some sort of picture of them,
+and expect them to be like it. I don't know how to say it; you do look
+more like what I thought than you did at first. I suppose I must seem a
+fool to say it; but I thought you were tall, and that you
+were--well!--rather masterful--"
+
+"Like Juliet Bingham?" she suggested, with a gleam in the eye next him.
+
+"Yes, like Juliet Bingham. It was your voice made me think--it was your
+voice that first made me want to see you, that made me write to you, in
+the beginning. I heard you talking that night in the hotel, where you
+left that circular; you were in the room next to mine; and I wanted to
+come right up here then; but I had to go back to New York, and so I
+wrote to you. When your letters came, I always seemed to hear you
+speaking in them."
+
+"And when you saw me you were disappointed. I knew it."
+
+"No; not disappointed--"
+
+"Why not? My voice didn't go with my looks; it belonged to a tall,
+strong-willed girl."
+
+"No," he protested. "As soon as I got away it was just as it always had
+been. I mean that your voice and your looks went together again."
+
+"As soon as you got away?" the girl questioned.
+
+"I mean--What do you care for it, anyway!" he cried, in self-scornful
+exasperation.
+
+"I know," she said thoughtfully, "that my voice isn't like me; I'm not
+good enough for it. It ought to be Juliet Bingham's--"
+
+"No, no!" he interrupted, with a sort of disgust that seemed not to
+displease her, "I can't imagine it!"
+
+"But we can't any of us have everything, and she's got enough as it is.
+She's a head higher than I am, and she wants to have her way ten times
+as bad."
+
+"I didn't mean that," Langbourne began. "I--but you must think me enough
+of a simpleton already."
+
+"Oh, no, not near," she declared. "I'm a good deal of a simpleton myself
+at times."
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said desperately; "I love you."
+
+"Ah, that belongs to the time when you thought I looked differently."
+
+"I don't want you to look differently. I--"
+
+"You can't expect me to believe that now. It will take time for me to do
+that."
+
+"I will give you time," he said, so simply that she smiled.
+
+"If it was my voice you cared for I should have to live up to it,
+somehow, before you cared for me. I'm not certain that I ever could. And
+if I couldn't? You see, don't you?"
+
+"I see that I was a fool to tell you what I have," he so far asserted
+himself. "But I thought I ought to be honest."
+
+"Oh, you've been _honest_!" she said.
+
+"You have a right to think that I am a flighty, romantic person," he
+resumed, "and I don't blame you. But if I could explain, it has been a
+very real experience to me. It was your nature that I cared for in your
+voice. I can't tell you just how it was; it seemed to me that unless I
+could hear it again, and always, my life would not be worth much. This
+was something deeper and better than I could make you understand. It
+wasn't merely a fancy; I do not want you to believe that."
+
+"I don't know whether fancies are such very bad things. I've had some of
+my own," Barbara suggested.
+
+He sat still with his hat between his hands, as if he could not find a
+chance of dismissing himself, and she remained looking down at her skirt
+where it tented itself over the toe of her shoe. The tall clock in the
+hall ticked second after second. It counted thirty of them at least
+before he spoke, after a preliminary noise in his throat.
+
+"There is one thing I should like to ask: If you had cared for me, would
+you have been offended at my having thought you looked differently?"
+
+She took time to consider this. "I might have been vexed, or hurt, I
+suppose, but I don't see how I could really have been offended."
+
+"Then I understand," he began, in one of his inductive emotions; but she
+rose nervously, as if she could not sit still, and went to the piano.
+The Spanish song he had given her was lying open upon it, and she struck
+some of the chords absently, and then let her fingers rest on the keys.
+
+"Miss Simpson," he said, coming stiffly forward, "I should like to hear
+you sing that song once more before I--Won't you sing it?"
+
+"Why, yes," she said, and she slipped laterally into the piano-seat.
+
+At the end of the first stanza he gave a long sigh, and then he was
+silent to the close.
+
+As she sounded the last notes of the accompaniment Juliet Bingham burst
+into the room with somehow the effect to Langbourne of having lain in
+wait outside for that moment.
+
+"Oh, I just _knew_ it!" she shouted, running upon them. "I bet John
+anything! Oh, I'm so happy it's come out all right; and now I'm going to
+have the first--"
+
+She lifted her arms as if to put them round his neck; he stood dazed,
+and Barbara rose from the piano-stool and confronted her with nothing
+less than horror in her face.
+
+Juliet Bingham was beginning again, "Why, haven't you--"
+
+"_No!_" cried Barbara. "I forgot all about what you said! I just
+happened to sing it because he asked me," and she ran from the room.
+
+"Well, if I ever!" said Juliet Bingham, following her with astonished
+eyes. Then she turned to Langbourne. "It's perfectly ridiculous, and I
+don't see how I can ever explain it. I don't think Barbara has shown a
+great deal of tact," and Juliet Bingham was evidently prepared to make
+up the defect by a diplomacy which she enjoyed. "I don't know where to
+begin exactly; but you must certainly excuse my--manner, when I came
+in."
+
+"Oh, certainly," said Langbourne in polite mystification.
+
+"It was all through a misunderstanding that I don't think _I_ was to
+blame for, to say the least; but I can't explain it without making
+Barbara appear perfectly--Mr. Langbourne, _will_ you tell whether you
+are engaged?"
+
+"No! Miss Simpson has declined my offer," he answered.
+
+"Oh, then it's all right," said Juliet Bingham, but Langbourne looked as
+if he did not see why she should say that. "Then I can understand; I see
+the whole thing now; and I didn't want to make _another_ mistake.
+Ah--won't you--sit down?"
+
+"Thank you. I believe I will go."
+
+"But you have a right to know--"
+
+"Would my knowing alter the main facts?" he asked dryly.
+
+"Well, no, I can't say it would," Juliet Bingham replied with an air of
+candor. "And, as you _say_, perhaps it's just as well," she added with
+an air of relief.
+
+Langbourne had not said it, but he acquiesced with a faint sigh, and
+absently took the hand of farewell which Juliet Bingham gave him. "I
+know Barbara will be very sorry not to see you; but I guess it's
+better."
+
+In spite of the supremacy which the turn of affairs had given her,
+Juliet Bingham looked far from satisfied, and she let Langbourne go with
+a sense of inconclusiveness which showed in the parting inclination
+towards him; she kept the effect of this after he turned from her.
+
+He crept light-headedly down the brick walk with a feeling that the
+darkness was not half thick enough, though it was so thick that it hid
+from him a figure that leaned upon the gate and held it shut, as if
+forcibly to interrupt his going.
+
+"Mr. Langbourne," said the voice of this figure, which, though so
+unnaturally strained, he knew for Barbara's voice, "you have got to
+_know_! I'm ashamed to tell you, but I should be more ashamed not to,
+after what's happened. Juliet made me promise when she went out to the
+book-club meeting that if I--if you--if it turned out as _you_ wanted, I
+would sing that song as a sign--It was just a joke--like my sending her
+picture. It was my mistake and I am sorry, and I beg your pardon--I--"
+
+She stopped with a quick catch in her breath, and the darkness round
+them seemed to become luminous with the light of hope that broke upon
+him within.
+
+"But if there really was no mistake," he began. He could not get
+further.
+
+She did not answer, and for the first time her silence was sweeter than
+her voice. He lifted her tip-toe in his embrace, but he did not wish her
+taller; her yielding spirit lost itself in his own, and he did not
+regret the absence of the strong will which he had once imagined hers.
+
+
+
+
+A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+The sunset struck its hard red light through the fringe of leafless
+trees to the westward, and gave their outlines that black definition
+which a French school of landscape saw a few years ago, and now seems to
+see no longer. In the whole scene there was the pathetic repose which we
+feel in some dying day of the dying year, and a sort of impersonal
+melancholy weighed me down as I dragged myself through the woods toward
+that dreary November sunset.
+
+Presently I came in sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because
+of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the
+cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its
+space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late
+as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I
+had supposed from the crimson glare in the west. I threw myself down on
+one of the grassy gradines of the amphitheatre, and comforted myself
+with the antiquity of the work, which was so great as to involve its
+origin in a somewhat impassioned question among the local authorities.
+Whether it was a Norse work, a temple for the celebration of the
+earliest Christian, or the latest heathen, rites among the first
+discoverers of New England, or whether it was a cockpit where the
+English officers who were billeted in the old tavern near by fought
+their mains at the time of our Revolution, it had the charm of a ruin,
+and appealed to the fancy with whatever potency belongs to the
+mouldering monuments of the past. The hands that shaped it were all
+dust, and there was no record of the minds that willed it to prove that
+it was a hundred, or that it was a thousand, years old. There were young
+oaks and pines growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all
+sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to
+the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water
+some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror
+their tracery in its steely surface. But of the life that the thing
+inarticulately recorded, there was not the slightest impulse left.
+
+I began to think how everything ends at last. Love ends, sorrow ends,
+and to our mortal sense everything that is mortal ends, whether that
+which is spiritual has a perpetual effect beyond these eyes or not. The
+very name of things passes with the things themselves, and
+
+    "Glory is like a circle in the water,
+     Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
+     Till by broad spreading, it disperse to naught."
+
+But if fame ended, did not infamy end, too? If glory, why not shame?
+What was it, I mused, that made an evil deed so much more memorable than
+a good one? Why should a crime have so much longer lodgment in our
+minds, and be of consequences so much more lasting than the sort of
+action which is the opposite of a crime, but has no precise name with
+us? Was it because the want of positive quality which left it nameless,
+characterized its effects with a kind of essential debility? Was evil
+then a greater force than good in the moral world? I tried to recall
+personalities, virtuous and vicious, and I found a fatal want of
+distinctness in the return of those I classed as virtuous, and a lurid
+vividness in those I classed as vicious. Images, knowledges, concepts,
+zigzagged through my brain, as they do when we are thinking, or believe
+we are thinking; perhaps there is no such thing as we call thinking,
+except when we are talking. I did not hold myself responsible in this
+will-less revery for the question which asked itself, Whether, then,
+evil and not good was the lasting principle, and whether that which
+should remain recognizable to all eternity was not the good effect but
+the evil effect?
+
+Something broke the perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite
+shore. A fish had leaped at some unseasonable insect on the surface, or
+one of the overhanging trees had dropped a dead twig upon it, and in the
+lazy doubt which it might be, I lay and watched the ever-widening circle
+fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it
+weakened to nothing in the eye, and, so far as the senses were
+concerned, actually ceased to be. The want of visible agency in it made
+me feel it all the more a providential illustration; and because the
+thing itself was so pretty, and because it was so apt as a case in
+point, I pleased myself a great deal with it. Suddenly it repeated
+itself; but this time I grew a little impatient of it, before the circle
+died out in the wider circle of the pool. I said whimsically to myself
+that this was rubbing it in; that I was convinced already, and needed no
+further proof; and at the same moment the thing happened a third time.
+Then I saw that there was a man standing at the top of the amphitheatre
+just across from me, who was throwing stones into the water. He cast a
+fourth pebble into the centre of the pool, and then a fifth and a sixth;
+I began to wonder what he was throwing at; I thought it too childish for
+him to be amusing himself with the circle that dispersed itself to
+naught, after it had done so several times already. I was sure that he
+saw something in the pool, and was trying to hit it, or frighten it. His
+figure showed black against the sunset light, and I could not make it
+out very well, but it held itself something like that of a workman, and
+yet with a difference, with an effect as of some sort of discipline; and
+I thought of an ex-recruit, returning to civil life, after serving his
+five years in the army; though I do not know why I should have gone so
+far afield for this notion; I certainly had never seen an ex-recruit,
+and I did not really know how one would look. I rose up, and we both
+stood still, as if he were abashed in his sport by my presence. The man
+made a little cast forward with his hand, and I heard the rattle as of
+pebbles dropped among the dead leaves.
+
+Then he called over to me, "Is that you, Mr. March?"
+
+"Yes," I called back, "what is wanted?"
+
+"Oh, nothing. I was just looking for you." He did not move, and after a
+moment I began to walk round the top of the amphitheatre toward him.
+When I came near him I saw that he had a clean-shaven face, and he wore
+a soft hat that seemed large for his close-cropped head; he had on a
+sack coat buttoned to the throat, and of one dark color with his loose
+trousers. I knew him now, but I did not know what terms to put my
+recognition in, and I faltered. "What do you want with me?" I asked, as
+if I did not know him.
+
+"I was at your house," he answered, "and they told me that you had
+walked out this way." He hesitated a moment, and then he added, rather
+huskily, "You don't know me!"
+
+"Yes," I said. "It is Tedham," and I held out my hand, with no definite
+intention, I believe, but merely because I did know him, and this was
+the usual form of greeting between acquaintances after a long
+separation, or even a short one, for that matter. But he seemed to find
+a special significance in my civility, and he took my hand and held it
+silently, while he was trying to speak. Evidently, he could not, and I
+said aimlessly, "What were you throwing at?"
+
+"Nothing. I saw you lying down, over there, and I wanted to attract your
+attention." He let my hand go, and looked at me apologetically.
+
+"Oh! was that all?" I said. "I thought you saw something in the water."
+
+"No," he answered, as if he felt the censure which I had not been able
+to keep out of my voice.
+
+
+II.
+
+I do not know why I should have chosen to take this simple fact as proof
+of an abiding want of straight-forwardness in Tedham's nature. I do not
+know why I should have expected him to change, or why I should have felt
+authorized at that moment to renew his punishment for it. I certainly
+had said and thought very often that he had been punished enough, and
+more than enough. In fact, his punishment, like all the other
+punishments that I have witnessed in life, seemed to me wholly out of
+proportion to the offence; it seemed monstrous, atrocious, and when I
+got to talking of it I used to become so warm that my wife would warn me
+people would think I wanted to do something like Tedham myself if I went
+on in that way about him. Yet here I was, at my very first encounter
+with the man, after his long expiation had ended, willing to add at
+least a little self-reproach to his suffering. I suppose, as nearly as I
+can analyse my mood, I must have been expecting, in spite of all reason
+and experience, that his anguish would have wrung that foible out of
+him, and left him strong where it had found him weak. Tragedy befalls
+the light and foolish as well as the wise and weighty natures, but it
+does not render them wise and weighty; I had often made this sage
+reflection, but I failed to apply it to the case before me now.
+
+After waiting a little for the displeasure to clear away from my face,
+Tedham smiled as if in humorous appreciation, and I perceived, as
+nothing else could have shown me so well, that he was still the old
+Tedham. There was an offer of propitiation in this smile, too, and I did
+not like that, either; but I was touched when I saw a certain hope die
+out of his eye at the failure of his appeal to me.
+
+"Who told you I was here?" I asked, more kindly. "Did you see Mrs.
+March?"
+
+"No, I think it must have been your children. I found them in front of
+your house, and I asked them for you, without going to the door."
+
+"Oh," I said, and I hid the disappointment I felt that he had not seen
+my wife; for I should have liked such a leading as her behavior toward
+him would have given me for my own. I was sure she would have known him
+at once, and would not have told him where to find me, if she had not
+wished me to be friendly with him.
+
+"I am glad to see you," I said, in the absence of this leading; and then
+I did not know what else to say. Tedham seemed to me to be looking very
+well, but I could not notify this fact to him, in the circumstances; he
+even looked very handsome; he had aged becomingly, and a clean-shaven
+face suited him as well as the full beard he used to wear; but I could
+speak of these things as little as of his apparent health. I did not
+feel that I ought even to ask him what I could do for him. I did not
+want to have anything to do with him, and, besides, I have always
+regarded this formula as tantamount to saying that you cannot, or will
+not, do anything for the man you employ it upon.
+
+The silence which ensued was awkward, but it was better than anything I
+could think of to say, and Tedham himself seemed to feel it so. He said,
+presently, "Thank you. I was sure you would not take my coming to you
+the wrong way. In fact I had no one else to come to--after I----" Tedham
+stopped, and then, "I don't know," he went on, "whether you've kept run
+of me; I don't suppose you have; I got out to-day at noon."
+
+I could not say anything to that, either; there were very few openings
+for me, it appeared, in the conversation, which remained one-sided as
+before.
+
+"I went to the cemetery," he continued. "I wanted to realize that those
+who had died were dead, it was all one thing as long as I was in there;
+everybody was dead; and then I came on to your house."
+
+The house he meant was a place I had taken for the summer a little out
+of town, so that I could run in to business every day, and yet have my
+mornings and evenings in the country; the fall had been so mild that we
+were still eking out the summer there.
+
+"How did you know where I was staying?" I asked, with a willingness to
+make any occasion serve for saying something.
+
+Tedham hesitated. "Well, I stopped at the office in Boston on my way
+out, and inquired. I was sure nobody would know me there." He said this
+apologetically, as if he had been taking a liberty, and explained: "I
+wanted to see you very much, and I was afraid that if I let the day go
+by I should miss you somehow."
+
+"Oh, all right," I said.
+
+We had remained standing at the point where I had gone round to meet
+him, and it seemed, in the awkward silence that now followed, as if I
+were rooted there. I would very willingly have said something leading,
+for my own sake, if not for his, but I had nothing in mind but that I
+had better keep there, and so I waited for him to speak. I believed he
+was beating about the bush in his own thoughts, to find some indirect or
+sinuous way of getting at what he wanted to know, and that it was only
+because he failed that he asked bluntly, "March, do you know where my
+daughter is?"
+
+"No, Tedham, I don't," I said, and I was glad that I could say it both
+with honesty and with compassion. I was truly sorry for the man; in a
+way, I did pity him; at the same time I did not wish to be mixed up in
+his affairs; in washing my hands of them, I preferred that there should
+be no stain of falsehood left on them.
+
+"Where is my sister-in-law?" he asked next, and now at least I could not
+censure him for indirection.
+
+"I haven't met her for several years," I answered. "I couldn't say from
+my own knowledge where she was."
+
+"But you haven't heard of her leaving Somerville?"
+
+"No, I haven't."
+
+"Do you ever meet her husband?"
+
+"Yes, sometimes, on the street; but I think not lately; we don't often
+meet."
+
+"The last time you saw _her_, did she speak of me?"
+
+"I don't know--I believe--yes. It was a good many years ago."
+
+"Was she changed toward me at all?"
+
+This was a hard question to answer, but I thought I had better answer it
+with the exact truth. "No, she seemed to feel just the same as ever
+about it."
+
+I do not believe Tedham cared for this, after all, though he made a show
+of having to collect himself before he went on. "Then you think my
+daughter is with her?"
+
+"I didn't say that. I don't know anything about it."
+
+"March," he urged, "don't _you_ think I have a right to see my
+daughter?"
+
+"That's something I can't enter into, Tedham."
+
+"Good God!" said the man. "If you were in my place, wouldn't you want to
+see her? You know how fond I used to be of her; and she is all that I
+have got left in the world."
+
+I did indeed remember Tedham's affection for his daughter, whom I
+remembered as in short frocks when I last saw them together. It was
+before my own door in town. Tedham had driven up in a smart buggy behind
+a slim sorrel, and I came out, at a sign he made me through the
+bow-window with his whip, and saw the little maid on the seat there
+beside him. They were both very well dressed, though still in mourning
+for the child's mother, and the whole turnout was handsomely set up.
+Tedham was then about thirty-five, and the child looked about nine. The
+color of her hair was the color of his fine brown beard, which had as
+yet no trace of gray in it; but the light in her eyes was another light,
+and her smile, which was of the same shape as his, was of another
+quality, as she leaned across him and gave me her pretty little gloved
+hand with a gay laugh. "I should think you would be afraid of such a
+fiery sorrel dragon as that," I said, in recognition of the colt's
+lifting and twitching with impatience as we talked.
+
+"Oh, I'm not afraid with papa!" she said, and she laughed again as he
+took her hand in one of his and covered it out of sight.
+
+I recalled, now, looking at him there in the twilight of the woods, how
+happy they had both seemed that sunny afternoon in the city square, as
+they flashed away from my door and glanced back at me and smiled
+together. I went into the house and said to my wife with a formulation
+of the case which pleased me, "If there is anything in the world that
+Tedham likes better than to ride after a good horse, it is to ride after
+a good horse with that little girl of his." "Yes," said my wife, "but a
+good horse means a good deal of money; even when a little girl goes with
+it." "That is so," I assented, "but Tedham has made a lot lately in real
+estate, they say, and I don't know what better he could do with his
+money; or, I don't believe _he_ does." We said no more, but we both
+felt, with the ardor of young parents, that it was a great virtue, a
+saving virtue, in Tedham to love his little girl so much; I was
+afterward not always sure that it was. Still, when Tedham appealed to me
+now in the name of his love for her, he moved my heart, if not my
+reason, in his favor; those old superstitions persist.
+
+"Why, of course, you want to see her. But I couldn't tell you where she
+is."
+
+"You could find out for me."
+
+"I don't see how," I said; but I did see how, and I knew as well as he
+what his next approach would be. I felt strong against it, however, and
+I did not perceive the necessity of being short with him in a matter not
+involving my own security or comfort.
+
+"I could find out where Hasketh is," he said, naming the husband of his
+sister-in-law; "but it would be of no use for me to go there. They
+wouldn't see me." He put this like a question, but I chose to let it be
+its own answer, and he went on. "There is no one that I can ask to act
+for me in the matter but you, and I ask _you_, March, to go to my
+sister-in-law for me."
+
+I shook my head. "That I can't do, Tedham."
+
+"Ah!" he urged, "what harm could it do you?"
+
+"Look here, Tedham!" I said. "I don't know why you feel authorized to
+come to me at all. It is useless your saying that there is no one else.
+You know very well that the authorities, some of them--the
+chaplain--would go and see Mrs. Hasketh for you. He could have a great
+deal more influence with her than any one else could, if he felt like
+saying a good word for you. As far as I am concerned, you have expiated
+your offence fully; but I should think you yourself would see that you
+ought not to come to me with this request; or you ought to come to me
+last of all men."
+
+"It is just because of that part of my offence which concerned you that
+I come to you. I knew how generous you were, and after you told me that
+you had no resentment--I acknowledge that it is indelicate, if you
+choose to look at it in that light, but a man like me can't afford to
+let delicacy stand in his way. I don't want to flatter you, or get you
+to do this thing for me on false pretences. But I thought that if you
+went to Mrs. Hasketh for me, she would remember that you had overlooked
+something, and she would be more disposed to--to--be considerate."
+
+"I can't do it, Tedham," I returned. "It would be of no use. Besides, I
+don't like the errand. I'm not sure that I have any business to
+interfere. I am not sure that you have any right to disturb the shape
+that their lives have settled into. I'm sorry for you, I pity you with
+all my heart. But there are others to be considered as well as you.
+And--simply, I can't."
+
+"How do you know," he entreated, "that my daughter wouldn't be as glad
+to see me as I to see her?"
+
+"I don't know it. I don't know anything about it. That's the reason I
+can't have anything to do with it. I can't justify myself in meddling
+with what doesn't concern me, and in what I'm not sure but I should do
+more harm than good. I must say good-night. It's getting late, and they
+will be anxious about me at home." My heart smote me as I spoke the last
+word, which seemed a cruel recognition of Tedham's homelessness. But I
+held out my hand to him for parting, and braced myself against my inward
+weakness.
+
+He might well have failed to see my hand. At any rate he did not take
+it. He turned and started to walk out of the woods by my side. We came
+presently to some open fields. Beyond them was the road, and after we
+had climbed the first wall, and found ourselves in a somewhat lighter
+place, he began to speak again.
+
+"I thought," he said, "that if you had forgiven me, I could take it as a
+sign that I had suffered enough to satisfy everybody."
+
+"We needn't dwell upon my share in the matter, Tedham," I answered, as
+kindly as I could. "That was entirely my own affair."
+
+"You can't think," he pursued, "how much your letter was to me. It came
+when I was in perfect despair--in those awful first days when it seemed
+as if I could _not_ bear it, and yet death itself would be no relief.
+Oh, they don't _know_ how much we suffer! If they did, they would
+forgive us anything, everything! Your letter was the first gleam of hope
+I had. I don't know how you came to write it!"
+
+"Why, of course, Tedham, I felt sorry for you--"
+
+"Oh, did you, did you?" He began to cry, and as we hurried along over
+the fields, he sobbed with the wrenching, rending sobs of a man. "I
+_knew_ you did, and I believe it was God himself that put it into your
+heart to write me that letter and take off that much of the blame from
+me. I said to myself that if I ever lived through it, I would try to
+tell you how much you had done for me. I don't blame you for refusing to
+do what I've asked you now. I can see how you may think it isn't best,
+and I thank you all the same for that letter. I've got it here." He took
+a letter out of his breast-pocket, and showed it to me. "It isn't the
+first time I've cried over it."
+
+I did not say anything, for my heart was in my throat, and we stumbled
+along in silence till we climbed the last wall, and stood on the
+sidewalk that skirted the suburban highway. There, under the
+street-lamp, we stopped a moment, and it was he who now offered me his
+hand for parting. I took it, and we said, together, "Well, good-by," and
+moved in different directions. I knew very well that I should turn back,
+and I had not gone a hundred feet away when I faced about. He was
+shambling off into the dusk, a most hapless figure. "Tedham!" I called
+after him.
+
+"Well?" he answered, and he halted instantly; he had evidently known
+what I would do as well as I had.
+
+We reapproached each other, and when we were again under the lamp I
+asked, a little awkwardly, "Are you in need of money, Tedham?"
+
+"I've got my ten years' wages with me," he said, with a lightness that
+must have come from his reviving hope in me. He drew his hand out of his
+pocket, and showed me the few dollars with which the State inhumanly
+turns society's outcasts back into the world again.
+
+"Oh, that won't do." I said. "You must let me lend you something."
+
+"Thank you," he said, with perfect simplicity. "But you know I can't
+tell when I shall be able to pay you."
+
+"Oh, that's all right." I gave him a ten-dollar note which I had loose
+in my pocket; it was one that my wife had told me to get changed at the
+grocery near the station, and I had walked off to the old temple, or the
+old cockpit, and forgotten about it.
+
+Tedham took the note, but he said, holding it in his hand, "I would a
+million times rather you would let me go home with you and see Mrs.
+March a moment."
+
+"I can't do that, Tedham," I answered, not unkindly, I hope. "I know
+what you mean, and I assure you that it wouldn't be the least use. It's
+because I feel so sure that my wife wouldn't like my going to see Mrs.
+Hasketh, that I--"
+
+"Yes, I know that," said Tedham. "That is the reason why I should like
+to see Mrs. March. I believe that if I could see her, I could convince
+her."
+
+"She wouldn't see you, my dear fellow," said I, strangely finding myself
+on these caressing terms with him. "She entirely approved of what I did,
+the letter I wrote you, but I don't believe she will ever feel just as I
+do about it. Women are different, you know."
+
+"Yes," he said, drawing a long, quivering breath.
+
+We stood there, helpless to part. He did not offer to leave me, and I
+could not find it in my heart to abandon him. After a most painful time,
+he drew another long breath, and asked, "Would you be willing to let me
+take the chances?"
+
+"Why, Tedham," I began, weakly; and upon that he began walking with me
+again.
+
+
+III.
+
+I went to my wife's room, after I reached the house, and faced her with
+considerable trepidation. I had to begin rather far off, but I certainly
+began in a way to lead up to the fact. "Isabel," I said, "Tedham is out
+at last." I had it on my tongue to say poor Tedham, but I suppressed the
+qualification in actual speech as likely to prove unavailing, or worse.
+
+"Is that what kept you!" she demanded, instantly. "Have you seen him?"
+
+"Yes," I admitted. I added, "Though I am afraid I was rather late,
+anyway."
+
+"I knew it was he, the moment you spoke," she said, rising on the lounge
+where she had been lying, and sitting up on it; with the book she had
+been reading shut on her thumb, she faced me across the table where her
+lamp stood. "I had a presentiment when the children said there was some
+strange-looking man here, asking for you, and that they had told him
+where to find you. I couldn't help feeling a little uneasy about it.
+What did he want with you, Basil?"
+
+"Well, he wanted to know where his daughter was."
+
+"You didn't tell him!"
+
+"I didn't know. Then he wanted me to go to Mrs. Hasketh and find out."
+
+"You didn't say you would?"
+
+"I said most decidedly I wouldn't," I returned, and I recalled my
+severity to Tedham in refusing his prayer with more satisfaction than it
+had given me at the time. "I told him that I had no business to
+interfere, and that I was not sure it would be right even for me to
+meddle with the course things had taken." I was aware of weakening my
+case as I went on; I had better left her with a dramatic conception of a
+downright and relentless refusal.
+
+"I don't see why you felt called upon to make excuses to him, Basil. His
+impudence in coming to you, of all men, is perfectly intolerable. I
+suppose it was that sentimental letter you wrote him."
+
+"You didn't think it sentimental at the time, my dear. You approved of
+it."
+
+"I didn't approve of it, Basil; but if you felt so strongly that you
+ought to do it, I felt that I ought to let you. I have never interfered
+with your sense of duty, and I never will. But I am glad that you didn't
+feel it your duty to that wretch to go and make more trouble on his
+account. He has made quite enough already; and it wasn't his fault that
+you were not tried and convicted in his place."
+
+"There wasn't the slightest danger of that--"
+
+"He tried to put the suspicion on you, and to bring the disgrace on your
+wife and children."
+
+"Well, my dear, we agreed to forget all that long ago. And I don't
+think--I never thought--that Tedham would have let the suspicion rest on
+me. He merely wanted to give it that turn, when the investigation began,
+so as to gain time to get out to Canada."
+
+My wife looked at me with a glance in which I saw tender affection
+dangerously near contempt. "You are a very forgiving man, Basil," she
+said, and I looked down sheepishly. "Well, at any rate, you have had the
+sense not to mix yourself up in his business. Did he pretend that he
+came straight to you, as soon as he got out? I suppose he wanted you to
+believe that he appealed to you before he tried anybody else."
+
+"Yes, he stopped at the Reciprocity office to ask for my address, and
+after he had visited the cemetery he came on out here. And, if you must
+know, I think Tedham is still the old Tedham. Put him behind a good
+horse, with a pocketful of some one else's money, in a handsome suit of
+clothes, and a game-and-fish dinner at Tafft's in immediate prospect,
+and you couldn't see any difference between the Tedham of to-day and the
+Tedham of ten years ago, except that the actual Tedham is clean-shaved
+and wears his hair cut rather close."
+
+"Basil!"
+
+"Why do you object to the fact? Did you imagine he had changed
+inwardly?"
+
+"He must have suffered."
+
+"But does suffering change people? I doubt it. Certain material
+accessories of Tedham's have changed. But why should that change Tedham?
+Of course, he has suffered, and he suffers still. He threw out some
+hints of what he had been through that would have broken my heart if I
+hadn't hardened it against him. And he loves his daughter still, and he
+wants to see her, poor wretch."
+
+"I suppose he does!" sighed my wife.
+
+"He would hardly take no for an answer from me, when I said I wouldn't
+go to the Haskeths for him; and when I fairly shook him off, he wanted
+me to ask you to go."
+
+"And what did you say?" she asked, not at all with the resentment I had
+counted upon equally with the possible pathos; you never can tell in the
+least how any woman will take anything, which is perhaps the reason why
+men do not trust women more.
+
+"I told him that it would not be the smallest use to ask you; that you
+had forgiven that old affair as well as I had, but that women were
+different, and that I knew you wouldn't even see him."
+
+"Well, Basil, I don't know what right you had to put me in that odious
+light," said my wife.
+
+"Why, good heavens! _Would_ you have seen him?"
+
+"I don't know whether I would or not. That's neither here nor there. I
+don't think it was very nice of you to shift the whole responsibility on
+me."
+
+"How did I do that? It seems to me that I kept the whole responsibility
+myself."
+
+"Yes, altogether too much. What became of him, then?"
+
+"We walked along a little farther, and then--"
+
+"Then, what? Where is the man?"
+
+"He's down in the parlor," I answered hardily, in the voice of some one
+else.
+
+My wife stood up from the lounge, and I rose, too, for whatever penalty
+she chose to inflict.
+
+"Well, Basil, that is what I call a very cowardly thing."
+
+"Yes, my dear, it is; I ought to have protected you against his appeal.
+But you needn't see him. It's practically the same as if he had not come
+here. I can send him away."
+
+"And you call that practically the same! No, _I_ am the one that will
+have to do the refusing now, and it is all off your shoulders. And you
+knew I was not feeling very well, either! Basil, how could you?"
+
+"I don't know. The abject creature drove me out of my senses. I suppose
+that if I had respected him more, or believed in him more, I should have
+had more strength to refuse him. But his limpness seemed to impart
+itself to me, and I--I gave way. But really you needn't see him, Isabel.
+I can tell him we have talked it over, and I concluded, entirely of
+myself, that it was best for you not to meet him, and--"
+
+"He would see through that in an instant. And if he is still the false
+creature you think he is, we owe him the truth, more than any other kind
+of man. You must understand _that_, Basil!"
+
+"Then you are going to--"
+
+"Don't speak to me, Basil, please," she said, and with an air of high
+offence she swept out of the room, and out to the landing of the stairs.
+There she hesitated a moment, and put her hand to her hair,
+mechanically, to feel if it were in order, and then she went on
+downstairs without further faltering. It was I who descended slowly, and
+with many misgivings.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in,
+and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked,
+with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like
+some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental
+suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom
+exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of
+the hospital. His eyes were deep in their sockets, and showed fine
+shadows in the overhead light, and I must say he looked very
+interesting.
+
+At the threshold my wife paused again; then she went forward, turning
+the gas up full as she passed under the chandelier, and gave him her
+hand, where he had risen from his chair.
+
+"I am glad to see you, Mr. Tedham," she said; and I should have found my
+astonishment overpowering, I dare say, if I had not felt that I was so
+completely in the hands of Providence, when she added, "Won't you come
+out to dinner with us? We were just going to sit down, when Mr. March
+came in. I never know when he will be back, when he starts off on these
+Saturday afternoon tramps of his."
+
+The children seemed considerably mystified at the appearance of our
+guest, but they had that superior interest in the dinner appropriate to
+their years, and we got through the ordeal, in which, I believe, I
+suffered more than any one else, much better than I could have hoped. I
+could not help noting in Tedham a certain strangeness to the use of a
+four-pronged fork, at first, but he rapidly overcame this; and if it had
+not been for a terrible moment when, after one of the courses, he began,
+mechanically, to scrape his plate with his knife, there would not have
+been anything very odd in his behavior, or anything to show that it was
+the first dinner in polite society that he had taken for so many years.
+
+The man's mind had apparently stiffened more than his body. It used to
+be very agile, if light, but it was not agile now. It worked slowly
+toward the topics which we found with difficulty, in our necessity of
+avoiding the only topics of real interest between us, and I could
+perceive that his original egotism, intensified by the long years in
+which he had only himself for company, now stood in the way of his
+entering into the matters brought forward, though he tried to do so.
+They were mostly in the form of reminiscences of this person and that
+whom we had known in common, and even in this shape they had to be very
+carefully handled so as not to develop anything leading. The thing that
+did most to relieve the embarrassment of the time was the sturdy hunger
+Tedham showed, and his delight in the cooking; I suppose that I cannot
+make others feel the pathos I found in this.
+
+After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with
+us in the parlor.
+
+My wife began at once to say, "Mr. March has told me why you wanted to
+see me, Mr. Tedham."
+
+"Yes," he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure
+his cause.
+
+"I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs.
+Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not
+seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me."
+
+Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily,
+"Won't you try?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, most unexpectedly to me, "I will try to see her.
+But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your
+daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come
+from you, and for you."
+
+"I thought," Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, "that
+perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me."
+
+"No, I couldn't do that," my wife said.
+
+He went on as if he had not heard her: "If she did not know that the
+inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my
+daughter was with her."
+
+There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham's old insinuation, but
+coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something
+like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my
+surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his
+suggestion in the way I had thought she would.
+
+"No," she said, "that wouldn't do. She has kept account of the time, you
+may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your
+behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth."
+
+"I didn't know," he returned, "but you might evade the point, somehow.
+So much being at stake," he added, as if explaining.
+
+Still my wife was not severe with him. "I don't understand, quite," she
+said.
+
+"Being the turning-point in my life, I can't begin to do anything, to be
+anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don't know where to find
+myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should
+know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that."
+
+"But, of course, there is another point of view."
+
+"My daughter's?"
+
+"Mrs. Hasketh's."
+
+"I don't care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the
+child's sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time--the only
+thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to."
+
+He continued: "I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is
+no sense in the whole thing, if I haven't. They might as well have let
+me go in the beginning. Don't you think that ten years out of my life is
+enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a
+thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried
+to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is
+the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be
+rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could
+condone--"
+
+"Oh, you mustn't reason from us," my wife broke in. "We are very silly
+people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have
+got to reckon with the world at large."
+
+"I _have_ reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the
+reckoning. But why shouldn't my daughter look at this thing as you do?"
+
+Instead of answering, my wife asked, "When did you hear from her last?"
+
+Tedham took a few thin, worn letters from his breast-pocket "There is
+Mr. March's letter," he said, laying one on his knee. He handed my wife
+another.
+
+She read it, and asked, "May Mr. March see it?"
+
+Tedham nodded, and I took the little paper in turn. The letter was
+written in a child's stiff, awkward hand. It was hardly more than a
+piteous cry of despairing love. The address was Mrs. Hasketh's, in
+Somerville, and the date was about three months after Tedham's
+punishment began. "Is that the last you have heard from her?" I asked.
+
+Tedham nodded as he took the letter from me.
+
+"But surely you have heard something more about her in all this time?"
+my wife pursued.
+
+"Once from Mrs. Hasketh, to make me promise that I would leave the child
+to her altogether, and not write to her, or ask to see her. When I went
+to the cemetery to-day, I did not know but I should find her grave,
+too."
+
+"Well, it is cruel!" cried my wife. "I will go and see Mrs. Hasketh,
+but--you ought to feel yourself that it's hopeless."
+
+"Yes," he admitted. "There isn't much chance unless she should happen to
+think the same way you do: that I had suffered enough, and that it was
+time to stop punishing me."
+
+My wife looked compassionately at him, and she began with a sympathy
+that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, "If it
+were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your
+daughter were so situated that it would be--disadvantageous to her to
+have it known that you were her father?"
+
+"You mean that I have no right to mend my broken-up life--what there is
+left of it--by spoiling hers? I have said that to myself. But then, on
+the other hand, I have had to ask myself whether I had any right to keep
+her from choosing for herself about it. I sha'n't force myself on her. I
+expect to leave her free. But if the child cares for me, as she used to,
+hasn't that love--not mine for her, but hers for me--got some rights
+too?"
+
+His voice sank almost to a hush, and the last word was scarcely more
+than a breathing. "All I want is to know where she is, and to let her
+know that I am in the world, and where she can find me. I think she
+ought to have a chance to decide."
+
+"I am afraid Mrs. Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake,
+_not_ to have the chance," my wife sighed, and she turned her look from
+Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer.
+
+"The only way to find out is to ask her," I answered, non-committally,
+and rather more lightly than I felt about it. In fact, the turn the
+affair had taken interested me greatly. It involved that awful mystery
+of the ties by which, unless we are born of our fathers and mothers for
+nothing more than the animals are, we are bound to them in all the
+things of life, in duty and in love transcending every question of
+interest and happiness. The parents' duty to the children is obvious and
+plain, but the child's duty to its parents is something subtler and more
+spiritual. It is to be more delicately, more religiously, regarded. No
+one, without impiety, can meddle with it from the outside, or interfere
+in its fulfilment. This and much more I said to my wife when we came to
+talk the matter over after Tedham left us. Above all, I urged something
+that came to me so forcibly at the moment that I said I had always
+thought it, and perhaps I really believed that I had. "Why should we try
+to shield people from fate? Isn't that always wrong? One is fated to be
+born the child of a certain father, and one can no more escape the
+consequences of his father's misdeeds than the doer himself can. Perhaps
+the pain and the shame come from the wish and the attempt to do so, more
+than from the fact itself. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon
+the children. But the children are innocent of evil, and this visitation
+must be for their good, and will be, if they bear it willingly."
+
+"Well, don't try to be that sort of blessing to _your_ children, Basil,"
+said my wife, personalizing the case, as a woman must.
+
+After that we tried to account to each other for having consented to do
+what Tedham asked us. Perhaps we accused each other somewhat for doing
+it.
+
+"I didn't know, my dear, but you were going to ask him to come and stay
+with us," I said.
+
+"I did want to," she replied. "It seemed so forlorn, letting him go out
+into the night, and find a place for himself, when we could just as well
+have let him stay as not. Why shouldn't we have offered him a bed for
+the night, as we would any other acquaintance?"
+
+"Well, you must allow that the circumstances were peculiar!"
+
+"But if he was sentenced to pay a certain penalty, and has paid it, why,
+as he said, shouldn't we stop punishing him?"
+
+"I suppose we can't. There seems to be an instinctive demand for eternal
+perdition, for hell, in the human heart," I suggested.
+
+"Well, then, I believe that your instinct, Basil--"
+
+"Oh, _I_ don't claim it, exclusively!"
+
+"Is a survival of savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better.
+How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but all faded in--or out."
+
+"Yes, he affected me like an etching of himself from a wornout plate.
+Still, I'm afraid there's likeness enough left to make trouble, yet. I
+hope you realize what you have gone in for, Isabel?"
+
+She answered from the effort that I could see she was making, to brace
+herself already for the work before us:
+
+"Well, we must do this because we can't help doing it, and because,
+whatever happens, we had no right to refuse. You must come with me,
+Basil!"
+
+"I? To Mrs. Hasketh's?"
+
+"Certainly. I will do the talking, but I shall depend upon your moral
+support. We will go over to Somerville to-morrow afternoon. We had
+better not lose any time."
+
+"To-morrow is Sunday."
+
+"So much the better. They will be sure to be at home, if they're there
+at all, yet."
+
+She said they, but I knew that she did not expect poor old Hasketh
+really to count in the matter, any more than she expected me to do so.
+
+
+V.
+
+The Haskeths lived in a house that withdrew itself behind tall garden
+trees in a large lot sloping down the hillside, in one of the quieter
+old streets of their suburb. The trees were belted in by a board fence,
+painted a wornout white, as far as it was solid, which was to the height
+of one's shoulder; there it opened into a panel work of sticks crossed
+X-wise, which wore a coat of aged green; the strip above them was set
+with a bristling row of rusty nails, which were supposed to keep out
+people who could perfectly well have gone in at the gate as we did.
+There was a brick walk from the gate to the door, which was not so far
+back as I remembered it (perhaps because the leaves were now off the
+trees), and there was a border of box on either side of the walk.
+Altogether there was an old-fashioned keeping in the place which I
+should have rather enjoyed if I had been coming on any other errand; but
+now it imparted to me a notion of people set in their ways, of something
+severe, something hopelessly forbidding.
+
+I do not think there had ever been much intimacy between the Tedhams and
+the Haskeths, before Tedham's calamity came upon him. But Mrs. Hasketh
+did not refuse her share of it. She came forward, and probably made her
+husband come forward, in Tedham's behalf, and do what hopelessly could
+be done to defend him where there was really no defence, and the only
+thing to be attempted was to show circumstances that might perhaps tend
+to the mitigation of his sentence. I do not think they did. Tedham had
+confessed himself and had been proven such a thorough rogue, and the
+company had lately suffered so much through operations like his, that,
+even if it could have had mercy, as an individual may, mercy was felt to
+be bad morals, and the case was unrelentingly pushed. His sentence was
+of those sentences which an eminent jurist once characterized as rather
+dramatic; it was pronounced not so much in relation to his particular
+offence, as with the purpose of striking terror into all offenders like
+him, who were becoming altogether too common. He was made to suffer for
+many other peculators, who had been, or were about to be, and was given
+the full penalty. I was in court when it was pronounced with great
+solemnity by the judge, who read him a lecture in doing so; I could have
+read the judge another, for I could not help feeling that it was, more
+than all the sentences I had ever heard pronounced, wholly out of
+keeping with the offence. I met Hasketh coming out of the court-room,
+and I said that I thought it was terribly severe. He agreed with me, and
+as I knew that he and Tedham had never liked each other, I inferred a
+kindliness in him which made me his friend, in the way one is the friend
+of a man one never meets. He was a man of few words, and he now simply
+said, "It was unjust," and we parted.
+
+For several months after Tedham's conviction, I did not think we ought
+to intrude upon the Haskeths; but then my wife and I both felt that we
+ought, in decency, to make some effort to see them. They seemed pleased,
+but they made us no formal invitation to come again, and we never did.
+That day, however, I caught a glimpse of Tedham's little girl, as she
+flitted through the hall, after we were seated in the parlor; she was in
+black, a forlorn little shadow in the shadow; and I recalled now, as we
+stood once more on the threshold of the rather dreary house, a certain
+gentleness of bearing in the child, which I found infinitely pathetic,
+at that early moment of her desolation. She had something of poor
+Tedham's own style and grace, too, which had served him so ill, and this
+heightened the pathos for me. In that figure I had thought of his
+daughter ever since, as often as I had thought of her at all; which was
+not very often, to tell the truth, after the first painful impression of
+Tedham's affair began to die away in me, or to be effaced by the
+accumulating cares and concerns of my own life. But now that we had
+returned into the presence of that bitter sorrow, as it were, the little
+thing reappeared vividly to me in just the way I had seen her so long
+ago. My sense of her forlornness, of her most hapless orphanhood, was
+intensified by the implacable hate with which Mrs. Hasketh had then
+spoken of her father, in telling us that the child was henceforth to
+bear her husband's name, and had resentfully scorned the merit Tedham
+tried to make of giving her up to them. "And if I can help it," she had
+ended, with a fierceness I had never forgotten, "she shall not hear him
+mentioned again, or see him as long as I live."
+
+My wife and I now involuntarily dropped our voices, or rather they sank
+into our throats, as we sat waiting in the dim parlor, after the maid
+took our cards to Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh. We tried to make talk, but we
+could not, and we were funereally quiet, when Hasketh came pottering and
+peering in, and shook hands with both of us. He threw open half a blind
+at one of the windows, and employed himself in trying to put up the
+shade, to gain time, as I thought, before he should be obliged to tell
+us that his wife could not see us. Then he came to me, and asked, "Won't
+you let me take your hat?" as such people do, in expression of a vague
+hospitality; and I let him take it, and put it mouth down on the marble
+centre-table, beside the large, gilt-edged, black-bound family Bible. He
+drew a chair near me, in a row with my wife and myself, and said, "It is
+quite a number of years since we met, Mrs. March," and he looked across
+me at her.
+
+"Yes, I am almost afraid to think how many," she answered.
+
+"Family well?"
+
+"Yes, our children are both very well, Mr. Hasketh. You seem to be
+looking very well, too."
+
+"Thank you, I have nothing to complain of. I am not so young as I was.
+But that is about all."
+
+"I hope Mrs. Hasketh is well?"
+
+"Yes, thank you, she is quite well, for her. She is never very strong.
+She will be down in a moment."
+
+"Oh, I shall be so glad to see her."
+
+The conversation, which might be said to have flagged from the
+beginning, stopped altogether at this point, and though I was prompted
+by several looks from my wife to urge it forward, I could think of
+nothing to do so with, and we sat without speaking till we heard the
+stir of skirts on the stairs in the hall outside, and then my wife said,
+"Ah, that is Mrs. Hasketh."
+
+I should have known it was Mrs. Hasketh without this sort of
+anticipation, I think, even if I had never seen her before, she was so
+like my expectation of what that sort of woman would be in the lapse of
+time, with her experience of life. The severity that I had seen come and
+go in her countenance in former days was now so seated that she had no
+other expression, and I may say without caricature that she gave us a
+frown of welcome. That is, she made us feel, in spite of a darkened
+countenance, that she was really willing to see us in her house, and
+that she took our coming as a sign of amity. I suppose that the
+induration of her spirit was the condition of her being able to bear at
+all what had been laid on her to bear, and her burden had certainly not
+been light.
+
+At her appearance her husband, without really stirring at all, had the
+effect of withdrawing into the background, where, indeed, I tacitly
+joined him; and the two ladies remained in charge of the drama, while he
+and I conversed, as it were, in dumb show. Apart from my sympathy with
+her in the matter, I was very curious to see how my wife would play her
+part, which seemed to me far the more difficult of the two, since she
+must make all the positive movements.
+
+After some civilities so obviously perfunctory that I admired the force
+of mind in the women who uttered them, my wife said, "Mrs. Hasketh, we
+have come on an errand that I know will cause you pain, and I needn't
+say that we haven't come willingly."
+
+"Is it about Mr. Tedham?" asked Mrs. Hasketh, and I remembered now that
+she had always used as much ceremony in speaking of him; it seemed
+rather droll now, but still it would not have been in character with her
+to call him simply Tedham, as we did, in speaking of him.
+
+"Yes," said my wife. "I don't know whether you had kept exact account of
+the time. It was a surprise to us, for we hadn't. He is out, you know."
+
+"Yes--at noon, yesterday. I wasn't likely to forget the day, or the
+hour, or the minute." Mrs. Hasketh said this without relaxing the
+severity of her face at all, and I confess my heart went down.
+
+But my wife seemed not to have lost such courage as she had come with,
+at least. "He has been to see us--"
+
+"I presumed so," said Mrs. Hasketh, and as she said nothing more, Mrs.
+March took the word again.
+
+"I shall have to tell you why he came--why _we_ came. It was something
+that we did not wish to enter into, and at first my husband refused
+outright. But when I saw him, and thought it over, I did not see how we
+could refuse. After all, it is something you must have expected, and
+that you must have been expecting at once, if you say--"
+
+"I presume," Mrs. Hasketh said, "that he wished you to ask after his
+daughter. I can understand why he did not come to us." She let one of
+those dreadful silences follow, and again my wife was forced to speak.
+
+"It is something that we didn't mean to press at all, Mrs. Hasketh, and
+I won't say anything more. Only, if you care to send any word to him he
+will be at our house this evening again, and I will give him your
+message." She rose, not in resentment, as I could see (and I knew that
+she had not come upon this errand without making herself Tedham's
+partisan in some measure) but with sincere good feeling and appreciation
+of Mrs. Hasketh's position. I rose with her, and Hasketh rose too.
+
+"Oh, don't go!" Mrs. Hasketh broke out, as if surprised. "You couldn't
+help coming, and I don't blame you at all. I don't blame Mr. Tedham
+even. I didn't suppose I should ever forgive him. But there! that's all
+long ago, and the years do change us. They change us all, Mrs. March,
+and I don't feel as if I had the right to judge anybody the way I used
+to judge _him_. Sometimes it surprises me. I did hate him, and I don't
+presume I've got very much love for him now, but I don't want to punish
+him any more. That's gone out of me. I don't know how it came to go, but
+it went. I wish he hadn't ever got anything more to do with us, but I'm
+afraid we haven't had all our punishment yet, whatever _he_ has. It
+seems to me as if the sight of Mr. Tedham would make me sick."
+
+I found such an insufficiency in this statement of feeling that I wanted
+to laugh, but I perceived that it did not appeal to my wife's sense of
+humor. She said, "I can understand how you feel about it, Mrs. Hasketh."
+
+Mrs. Hasketh seemed grateful for the sympathy. "I presume," she went on,
+and I noted how often she used the quaint old-fashioned Yankee word,
+"that you feel as if you had almost as much right to hate him as I had,
+and that if you could overlook what he tried to do to you, I might
+overlook what he did do to his own family. But as I see it, the case is
+different. He failed when he tried to put the blame on Mr. March, and he
+succeeded only too well in putting the shame on his own family. You
+could forgive it, and it would be all the more to your credit because
+you forgave it, but his family might have forgiven it ten times over,
+and still they would be in disgrace through him. That is the way I
+looked at it."
+
+"And I assure you, Mrs. Hasketh, that is the way I looked at it, too,"
+said my wife.
+
+"So, when it seems hard that I should have taken his child from him,"
+the woman continued, as if still arguing her case, and she probably was
+arguing it with herself, "and did what I could to make her forget him, I
+think it had better be considered whose sake I was doing it for, and
+whether I had any right to do different. I did not think I had at the
+time, or when I had to begin to act. I knew how I felt toward Mr.
+Tedham; I never liked him; I never wanted my sister to marry him; and
+when his trouble came, I told Mr. Hasketh that it was no more than I had
+expected all along. He was that kind of a man, and he was sure to show
+it, one way or other, sooner or later; and I was not disappointed when
+he did what he did. I had to guard against my own feeling, and to put
+myself out of the question, and that was what I tried to do when I got
+him to give up the child to us and let her take our name. It was the
+same as a legal adoption, and he freely consented to it, or as freely as
+he could, considering where he was. But he knew it was for her good as
+well as we did. There was nobody for her to look to but us, and he knew
+that; his own family had no means, and, in fact, he _had_ no family but
+his father and mother, and when they died, that same first year, there
+was no one left to suffer from him but his child. The question was how
+much she ought to be allowed to suffer, and whether she should be
+allowed to suffer at all, if it could be helped. If it was to be
+prevented, it was to be by deadening her to him, by killing out her
+affection for him, and much as I hated Mr. Tedham, I could not bring
+myself to do that, though I used to think I would do it. He was very
+fond of her, I don't deny that; I don't think it was any merit in him to
+love such a child, but it was the best thing about him, and I was
+willing it should count. But then there was another thing that I
+couldn't bring myself to, and that was to tell the child, up and down,
+all about it; and I presume that there I was weak. Well, you may say I
+_was_ weak! But I couldn't, I simply couldn't. She was only between
+seven and eight when it happened--"
+
+"I thought she was older," I ventured to put in, remembering my
+impressions as to her age the last time I saw her with her father.
+
+"No," said Mrs. Hasketh, "she always appeared rather old for her age,
+and that made me all the more anxious to know just how much of the
+trouble she had taken in. I suppose it was all a kind of awful mystery
+to her, as most of our trials are to children; but when her father was
+taken from her, she seemed to think it was something she mustn't ask
+about; there are a good many things in the world that children feel that
+way about--how they come into it, for one thing, and how they go out of
+it; and by and by she didn't speak of it. She had some of his lightness,
+and I presume that helped her through; I was afraid it did sometimes.
+Then, at other times, I thought she had got the notion he was in for
+life, and that was the reason she didn't speak of him; she had given him
+up. Then I used to wonder whether it wasn't my duty to take her to see
+him--where he was. But when I came to find out that you had to see them
+through the bars, and with the kind of clothes they wear, I felt that I
+might as well kill the child at once; it was for her sake I didn't take
+her. You may be sure I wasn't anxious for the responsibility of _not_
+doing it either, the way I knew I felt toward Mr. Tedham."
+
+I did not like her protesting so much as this; but I saw that it was a
+condition of her being able to deal with herself in the matter, and I
+had no doubt she was telling the truth.
+
+"You never can know just how much of a thing children have taken in, or
+how much they have understood," she continued, repeating herself, as she
+did throughout, "and I had to keep this in mind when I had my talks with
+Fay about her father. She wanted to write to him at first, and of course
+I let her--"
+
+My wife and I could not forbear exchanging a glance of intelligence,
+which Mrs. Hasketh intercepted.
+
+"I presume he told you?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," I said, "he showed us the letter."
+
+"Well, it was something that had to be done. As long as she questioned
+me about him, I put her off the best way I could, and after a while she
+seemed to give up questioning me of her own accord. Perhaps she really
+began to understand it, or some of the cruel little things she played
+with said something. I was always afraid of the other children throwing
+it up to her, and that was one reason we went away for three or four
+years and let our place here."
+
+"I didn't know you were gone," I said toward Hasketh, who cleared his
+throat to explain:
+
+"I had some interests at that time in Canada. We were at Quebec."
+
+"It shows what a rush our life is," I philosophized, with the
+implication that Hasketh and I had been old friends, and I ought to have
+noticed that I had not met him during the time of his absence. The fact
+was we had never come so near intimacy as when we exchanged confidences
+concerning the severity of Tedham's sentence in coming out of the
+court-room together.
+
+"_I_ hadn't any interest in Canada, except to get the child away," said
+Mrs. Hasketh. "Sometimes it seemed strange _we_ should be in Canada, and
+not Mr. Tedham! She got acquainted with some little girls who were going
+to a convent school there as externes--outside pupils, you know," Mrs.
+Hasketh explained to my wife. "She got very fond of one of them--she is
+a child of very warm affections. I never denied that Mr. Tedham had warm
+_affections_--and when her little girl friend went into the convent to
+go on with her education there, Fay wanted to go too, and--we let her.
+That was when she was twelve, and Mr. Hasketh felt that he ought to come
+back and look after his business here; and we left her in the convent.
+Just as soon as she was out of the way, and out of the question, it
+seemed as if I got to feeling differently toward Mr. Tedham. I don't
+mean to say I ever got to like him, or that I do to this day; but I saw
+that he had some rights, too, and for years and years I wanted to take
+the child and tell her when he was coming out. I used to ask myself what
+right I even had to keep the child from the suffering. The suffering was
+hers by rights, and she ought to go through it. I got almost crazy
+thinking it over. I got to thinking that her share of her father's shame
+might be the very thing, of all things, that was to discipline her and
+make her a good and useful woman; and that's much more than being a
+happy one, Mrs. March; we can't any of us be truly happy, no matter
+what's done for us. I tried to make believe that I was sparing her
+alone, but I knew I was sparing myself, too, and that made it harder to
+decide." She suddenly addressed herself to us both: "What would _you_
+have done?"
+
+My wife and I looked at each other in a dismay in which a glance from
+old Hasketh assured us that we had his sympathy. It would have been far
+simpler if Mrs. Hasketh had been up and down with us as Tedham's
+emissaries, and refused to tell us anything of his daughter, and left us
+to report to him that he must find her for himself if he found her at
+all. This was what we had both expected, and we had come prepared to
+take back that answer to Tedham, and discharge our whole duty towards
+him in its delivery. This change in the woman who had hated him so
+fiercely, but whose passion had worn itself down to the underlying
+conscience with the lapse of time, certainly complicated the case. I was
+silent; my wife said: "I don't know _what_ I should have done, Mrs.
+Hasketh;" and Mrs. Hasketh resumed:
+
+"If I did wrong in trying to separate her life from her father's, I was
+punished for it, because when I wanted to undo my work, I didn't know
+how to begin; I presume that's the worst of a wrong thing. Well, I never
+did begin; but now I've got to. The time's come, and I presume it's as
+easy now as it ever could be; easier. He's out and it's over, as far as
+the law is concerned; and if she chooses she can see him. I'll prepare
+her for it as well as I can, and he can come if she wishes it."
+
+"Do you mean that he can see her _here_?" my wife asked.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Hasketh, with a sort of strong submission.
+
+"At once? To-day?"
+
+"No," Mrs. Hasketh faltered. "I didn't want him to see her just the
+first day, or before I saw him; and I thought he might try to. She's
+visiting at some friends in Providence; but she'll be back to-morrow. He
+can come to-morrow night, if she says so. He can come and find out. But
+if he was anything of a man he wouldn't want to."
+
+"I'm afraid," I ventured, "he isn't anything of _that_ kind of man."
+
+
+VI.
+
+"Now, how unhandsome life is!" I broke out, at one point on our way
+home, after we had turned the affair over in every light, and then
+dropped it, and then taken it up again. "It's so graceless, so
+tasteless! Why didn't Tedham die before the expiration of his term and
+solve all this knotty problem with dignity? Why should he have lived on
+in this shabby way and come out and wished to see his daughter? If there
+had been anything dramatic, anything artistic in the man's nature, he
+would have renounced the claim his mere paternity gives him on her love,
+and left word with me that he had gone away and would never be heard of
+any more. That was the least he could have done. If he had wanted to do
+the thing heroically--and I wouldn't have denied him that
+satisfaction--he would have walked into that pool in the old cockpit and
+lain down among the autumn leaves on its surface, and made an end of the
+whole trouble with his own burdensome and worthless existence. That
+would truly have put an end to the evil he began."
+
+"I wouldn't be--impious, Basil," said my wife, with a moment's
+hesitation for the word. Then she sighed and added, "Yes, it seems as if
+that would be the only thing that could end it. There doesn't really
+seem to be any provision in life for ending such things. He will have to
+go on and make more and more trouble. Poor man! I feel almost as sorry
+for him as I do for her. I guess he hasn't expiated his sin yet, as
+fully as he thinks he has."
+
+"And then," I went on, with a strange pleasure I always get out of the
+poignancy of a despair not my own, "suppose that this isn't all. Suppose
+that the girl has met some one who has become interested in her, and
+whom she will have to tell of this stain upon her name?"
+
+"Basil!" cried my wife, "that is cruel of you! You _knew_ I was keeping
+away from that point, and it seems as if you tried to make it as
+afflicting as you could--the whole affair."
+
+"Well, I don't believe it's as bad as that. Probably she hasn't met any
+one in that way; at any rate, it's pure conjecture on my part, and my
+conjecture doesn't make it so."
+
+"It doesn't unmake it, either, for you to say that now," my wife
+lamented.
+
+"Well, well! Don't let's think about it, then. The case is bad enough as
+it stands, Heaven knows, and we've got to grapple with it as soon as we
+get home. We shall find Tedham waiting for us, I dare say, unless
+something has happened to him. I wonder if anything can have been good
+enough to happen to Tedham, overnight."
+
+I got a little miserable fun out of this, but my wife would not laugh;
+she would not be placated in any way; she held me in a sort responsible
+for the dilemma I had conjectured, and inculpated me in some measure for
+that which had really presented itself.
+
+When we reached home she went directly to her room and had a cup of tea
+sent to her there, and the children and I had rather a solemn time at
+the table together. A Sunday tea-table is solemn enough at the best,
+with its ghastly substitution of cold dishes or thin sliced things for
+the warm abundance of the week-day dinner; with the gloom of Mrs.
+March's absence added, this was a very funereal feast indeed.
+
+We went on quite silently for a while, for the children saw I was
+preoccupied; but at last I asked, "Has anybody called this afternoon?"
+
+"I don't know exactly whether it was a call or not," said my daughter,
+with a nice feeling for the social proprieties which would have amused
+me at another time. "But that strange person who was here last night,
+was here again."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"He said he would come in the evening. I forgot to tell you. Papa, what
+kind of person is he?"
+
+"I don't know. What makes you ask?"
+
+"Why, we think he wasn't always a workingman. Tom says he looks as if he
+had been in some kind of business, and then failed."
+
+"What makes you think that, Tom?" I asked the boy.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. He speaks so well."
+
+"He always spoke well, poor fellow," I said with a vague amusement. "And
+you're quite right, Tom. He was in business once and he failed--badly."
+
+I went up to my wife's room and told her what the children had said of
+Tedham's call, and that he was coming back again.
+
+"Well, then, I think I shall let you see him alone, Basil. I'm
+completely worn out, and besides there's no reason why I should see him.
+I hope you'll get through with him quickly. There isn't really anything
+for you to say, except that we have seen the Haskeths, and that if he is
+still bent upon it he can find his daughter there to-morrow evening. I
+want you to promise me that you will confine yourself to that, Basil,
+and not say a single word more. There is no sense in our involving
+ourselves in the affair. We have done all we could, and more than he had
+any right to ask of us, and now I am determined that he shall not get
+anything more out of you. Will you promise?"
+
+"You may be sure, my dear, that I don't wish to get any more involved in
+this coil of sin and misery than you do," I began.
+
+"That isn't promising," she interrupted. "I want you to promise you'll
+say just that and no more."
+
+"Oh, I'll promise fast enough, if that's all you want," I said.
+
+"I don't trust you a bit, Basil," she lamented. "Now, I will explain to
+you all about it. I've thought the whole thing over."
+
+She did explain, at much greater length than she needed, and she was
+still giving me some very solemn charges when the bell rang, and I knew
+that Tedham had come. "Now, remember what I've told you," she called
+after me, as I went to the door, "and be sure to tell me, when you come
+back, just how he takes it and every word he says. Oh, dear, I know
+you'll make the most dreadful mess of it!"
+
+By this time I expected to do no less, but I was so curious to see
+Tedham again that I should have been willing to do much worse, rather
+than forego my meeting with him. I hope that there was some better
+feeling than curiosity in my heart, but I will, for the present, call it
+curiosity.
+
+I met him in the hall at the foot of the stairs, and put a witless
+cheeriness into the voice I bade him good-evening with, while I gave him
+my hand and led the way into the parlor.
+
+The twenty-four hours that had elapsed since I saw him there before had
+estranged him in a way that I find it rather hard to describe. He had
+shrunk from the approach to equality in which we had parted, and there
+was a sort of consciousness of disgrace in his look, such as might have
+shown itself if he had passed the time in a low debauch. But undoubtedly
+he had done nothing of the kind, and this effect in him was from a
+purely moral cause. He sat down on the edge of a chair, instead of
+leaning back, as he had done the night before.
+
+"Well, Tedham," I began, "we have seen your sister-in-law, and I may as
+well tell you at once that, so far as she is concerned, there will be
+nothing in the way of your meeting your daughter. The Haskeths are
+living at their old place in Somerville, and your daughter will be with
+them there to-morrow night--just at this moment she is away--and you can
+find her there, then, if you wish."
+
+Tedham kept those deep eye-hollows of his bent upon me, and listened
+with a passivity which did not end when I ceased to speak. I had said
+all that my wife had permitted me to say in her charge to me, and the
+incident ought to have been closed, as far as we were concerned. But
+Tedham's not speaking threw me off my guard. I could not let the matter
+end so bluntly, and I added, in the same spirit one makes a scrawl at
+the bottom of a page, "Of course, it's for you to decide whether you
+will or not."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Tedham, feebly, but as if he were physically
+laying hold of me for help.
+
+"Why, I mean--I mean--my dear fellow, you know what I mean! Whether you
+had better do it." This was the very thing I had not intended to do, for
+I saw how wise my wife's plan was, and how we really had nothing more to
+do with the matter, after having satisfied the utmost demands of
+humanity.
+
+"You think I had better not," said Tedham.
+
+"No," I said, but I felt that I was saying it too late, "I don't think
+anything about it."
+
+"I have been thinking about it, too," said Tedham, as if I had confessed
+and not denied having an opinion in the matter. "I have been thinking
+about it ever since I saw you last night, and I don't believe I have
+slept, for thinking of it. I know how you and Mrs. March feel about it,
+and I have tried to see it from your point of view, and now I believe I
+do. I am not going to see my daughter; I am going away."
+
+He stood up, in token of his purpose, and at the same moment my wife
+entered the room. She must have been hurrying to do so from the moment I
+left her, for she had on a fresh dress, and her hair had the effect of
+being suddenly, if very effectively, massed for the interview from the
+dispersion in which I had lately seen it. She swept me with a glance of
+reproach, as she went up to Tedham, in the pretence that he had risen to
+meet her, and gave him her hand. I knew that she divined all that had
+passed between us, but she said:
+
+"Mr. March has told you that we have seen Mrs. Hasketh, and that you can
+find your daughter at her house to-morrow evening?"
+
+"Yes, and I have just been telling him that I am not going to see her."
+
+"That is very foolish--very wrong!" my wife began.
+
+"I know you must say so," Tedham replied, with more dignity and force
+than I could have expected, "and I know how kind you and Mr. March have
+been. But you must see that I am right--that she is the only one to be
+considered at all."
+
+"Right! How are you right? Have _you_ been suggesting that, my dear?"
+demanded my wife, with a gentle despair of me in her voice.
+
+It almost seemed to me that I had, but Tedham came to my rescue most
+unexpectedly.
+
+"No, Mrs. March, he hasn't said anything of the kind to me; or, if he
+has, I haven't heard it. But you intimated, yourself, last night, that
+she might be so situated--"
+
+"I was a wicked simpleton," cried my wife, and I forebore to triumph,
+even by a glance at her; "to put my doubts between you and your daughter
+in any way. It was romantic, and--and--disgusting. It's not only your
+right to see her, it's your _duty_. At least it's your duty to let her
+decide whether she will let you see her. What nonsense! Of course she
+will! She must bear her part in it. She ought not to escape it, even if
+she could. Now you must just drop all idea of going away, and you must
+stay, and you must go to see your daughter. There is no other way to
+do."
+
+Tedham shook his head stubbornly. "She has borne her share, already, and
+I won't inflict my penalty on her innocence--"
+
+"Innocence? It's _because_ she is innocent that it must be inflicted
+upon her! That is what innocence is in the world for!"
+
+Tedham looked back at her in a dull bewilderment. "I can't get back to
+that. It seemed so once; but now it looks selfish, and I'm afraid of it.
+I am not the one to take that ground. It might do for you--"
+
+"Well, then, let it do for me!" I confess that I was astonished at this
+turn, or should have been, if I could be astonished at any turn a woman
+takes. "I will see her for you, if you wish, and I will tell her just
+how it is with you, and then she can decide for herself. You have
+certainly no right to decide for her, whether she will see you or not,
+have you?"
+
+"No," Tedham admitted.
+
+"Well, then, sit down and listen."
+
+He sat down, and my wife reasoned it all out with him. She convinced me,
+perfectly, so that what Tedham proposed to do seemed not only
+sentimental and foolish, but unnatural and impious. I confess that I
+admired her casuistry, and gave it my full support. She was a woman who,
+in the small affairs of the tastes and the nerves and the prejudices
+could be as illogical as the best of her sex, but with a question large
+enough to engage the hereditary powers of her New England nature she
+showed herself a dialectician worthy of her Puritan ancestry.
+
+Tedham rose when she had made an end; and when we both expected him to
+agree with her and obey her, he said, "Very likely you are right. I once
+saw it all that way myself, but I don't see it so now, and I can't do
+it. Perhaps we shouldn't care for each other; at any rate, it's too much
+to risk, and I can't do it. Good-by." He began sidling toward the door.
+
+I would have detained him, but my wife made me a sign not to interfere.
+"But surely, Mr. Tedham," she pleaded, "you are going to leave some word
+for her--or for Mrs. Hasketh to give her?"
+
+"No," he answered, "I don't think I will. If I don't appear, then she
+won't see me, and that will be all there is of it."
+
+"Yes, but Mrs. Hasketh will probably tell her that you have asked about
+her, and will prepare her for your coming, and then if you don't come--"
+
+"What time is it, March?" Tedham asked.
+
+I took out my watch. "It's nine o'clock." I was surprised to find it no
+later.
+
+"I can get over to Somerville before ten, can't I? I'll go and tell Mrs.
+Hasketh I am not coming."
+
+We could not prevent his getting away, by force, and we had used all the
+arguments we could have hoped to detain him with. As he opened the door
+to go out into the night, "But, Tedham!" I called to him, "if anything
+happens, where are we to find you, hear of you?"
+
+He hesitated. "I will let you know. Well, good-night."
+
+"I suppose this isn't the end, Isabel," I said, after we had turned from
+looking blankly at the closed door, and listening to Tedham's steps,
+fainter and fainter on the board-walk to the gate.
+
+"There never is an end to a thing like this!" she returned, with a
+passionate sigh of pity. "Oh, what a terrible thing an evil deed is! It
+_can't_ end. It has to go on and on forever. Poor wretch! He thought he
+had got to the end of his misdeed, when he had suffered the punishment
+for it, but it was only just beginning then! Now, you see, it has a
+perfectly new lease of life. It's as if it had just happened, as far as
+the worst consequences are concerned."
+
+"Yes," I assented. "By the way, that was a great idea of yours about the
+office of innocence in the world, Isabel!"
+
+"Why, Basil!" she cried, "you don't suppose I believed in such a
+monstrous thing as that, do you?"
+
+"You made me believe in it."
+
+"Well, then, I can tell you that I merely said it so as to convince him
+that he ought to let his daughter decide whether she would see him or
+not, and it had nothing whatever to do with the matter. Do you think you
+could find me anything to eat, dear? I'm perfectly famishing, and it
+doesn't seem as if I could stir a step till I've had a bite of
+something."
+
+She sank down on the sofa in the hall in proof of her statement, and I
+went out into the culinary regions (deserted of their dwellers after our
+early tea) and made her up a sandwich along with the one I had the
+Sunday-night habit of myself. I found some half-bottles of ale on the
+ice, and I brought one of them, too. Before we had emptied it we
+resigned ourselves to what we could not help in Tedham's case; perhaps
+we even saw it in a more hopeful light.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The next day was one of those lax Mondays which come before the Tuesdays
+and Wednesdays when business has girded itself up for the week, and I
+got home from the office rather earlier than usual. My wife met me with,
+"Why, what has happened?"
+
+"Nothing," I said; "I had a sort of presentiment that something had
+happened here."
+
+"Well, nothing at all has happened, and you have had your presentiment
+for your pains, if that's what you hurried home for."
+
+I justified myself as well as I could, and I added, "That wretched
+Tedham has been in my mind all day. I think he has made a ridiculous
+mistake. As if he could stop the harm by taking himself off! The harm
+goes on independently of him; it is hardly his harm any more."
+
+"That is the way it has seemed to me, too, all day," said my wife. "You
+don't suppose he has been out of my mind either? I wish we had never had
+anything to do with him."
+
+A husband likes to abuse his victory, when he has his wife quite at his
+mercy, but the case was so entirely in my favor that for once I forbore.
+I could see that she was suffering for having put into Tedham's head the
+notion which had resulted in this error, and I considered that she was
+probably suffering enough. Besides, I was afraid that if I said anything
+it would bring out the fact that I had myself intimated the question
+again which his course had answered so mistakenly. I could well imagine
+that she was grateful for my forbearance, and I left her to this
+admirable state of mind while I went off to put myself a little in shape
+after my day's work and my journey out of town. I kept thinking how
+perfectly right in the affair Tedham's simple, selfish instinct had
+been, and how our several consciences had darkened counsel; that quaint
+Tuscan proverb came into ray mind: _Lascia fare Iddio, ch' e un buon
+vecchio_. We had not been willing to let God alone, or to trust his
+leading; we had thought to improve on his management of the case, and to
+invent a principle for poor Tedham that should be better for him to act
+upon than the love of his child, which God had put into the man's heart,
+and which was probably the best thing that had ever been there. Well, we
+had got our come-uppings, as the country people say, and however we
+might reason it away we had made ourselves responsible for the event.
+
+There came a ring at the door that made my own heart jump into my mouth.
+I knew it was Tedham come back again, and I was still in the throes of
+buttoning on my collar when my wife burst into my room. I smiled round
+at her as gayly as I could with the collar-buttoning grimace on my face.
+"All right, I'll be down in a minute. You just go and talk to him
+till--"
+
+"_Him_?" she gasped back; and I have never been quite sure of her syntax
+to this day. "_Them!_ It's Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh, and some young lady! I
+saw them through the window coming up the walk."
+
+"Good Lord! You don't suppose it's Tedham's daughter?"
+
+"How do I know? Oh, how _could_ you be dressing at a time like this!"
+
+It did seem to me rather heinous, and I did not try to defend myself,
+even when she added, from her access of nervousness, in something like a
+whimper, "It seems to me you're _always_ dressing, Basil!"
+
+"I'll be right with you, my dear," I answered, penitently; and, in fact,
+by the time the maid brought up the Haskeths' cards I was ready to go
+down. We certainly needed each other's support, and I do not know but we
+descended the stairs hand in hand, and entered the parlor leaning upon
+each other's shoulders. The Haskeths, who were much more deeply
+concerned, were not apparently so much moved. We shook hands with them,
+and then Mrs. Hasketh said to us in succession, "My niece, Mrs. March;
+Mr. March, my niece."
+
+The young girl had risen, and stood veiled before us, and a sort of
+heart-breaking appeal expressed itself in the gentle droop of her
+figure, which did the whole office of her hidden face. The Haskeths were
+dressed, as became their years, in a composite fashion of no particular
+period; but I noticed at once, with the fondness I have for what is
+pretty in the modes, that Miss Tedham wore one of the latest costumes,
+and that she was not only a young girl, but a young lady, with all that
+belongs to the outward seeming of one of the gentlest of the kind. It
+struck me as the more monstrous, therefore, that she should be involved
+in the coil of her father's inexpiable offence, which entangled her
+whether he stayed or whether he went. It was well enough that the
+Haskeths should still be made miserable through him; it belonged to
+their years and experience; they would soon end, at any rate, and it did
+not matter whether their remnant of life was dark or bright. But this
+child had a right to a long stretch of unbroken sunshine. As I stood and
+looked at her I felt the heart-burning, the indefinable indignation that
+we feel in the presence of death when it is the young and fair who have
+died. Here is a miscalculation, a mistake. It ought not to have been.
+
+I thought that my wife, in the effusion of sympathy, would have perhaps
+taken the girl in her arms; but probably she knew that the dropped veil
+was a sign that there was to be no embracing. She put out her hand, and
+the girl took it with her gloved hand; but though the outward forms of
+their greeting were so cold, I fancied an instant understanding and
+kindness between them.
+
+"My niece," Mrs. Hasketh explained, when we were all seated, "came home
+this afternoon, instead of this morning, when we expected her."
+
+My wife said, "Oh, yes," and after a moment, a very painful moment, in
+which I think we all tried to imagine something that would delay the
+real business, Mrs. Hasketh began again.
+
+"Mrs. March," she said, in a low voice, and with a curious, apologetic
+kind of embarrassment, "we have come--Fay wanted we should come and ask
+if you knew about her father--"
+
+"Why, didn't he come to you last night?" my wife began.
+
+"Yes, he did," said Mrs. Hasketh, in a crest-fallen sort, "But we
+thought--we thought--you might know where he was. And Fay--Did he tell
+you what he was going to do?"
+
+"Yes," my wife gasped back.
+
+The young girl put aside her veil in turning to my wife, and showed a
+face which had all the ill-starred beauty of poor Tedham, with something
+more in it that she never got from that handsome reprobate--conscience,
+soul--whatever we choose to call a certain effluence of heaven which
+blesses us with rest and faith whenever we behold it in any human
+countenance. She was very young-looking, and her voice had a wistful
+innocence.
+
+"Do you think my father will be here again to-night? Oh, I must see him!"
+
+I perceived that my wife could not speak, and I said, to gain time,
+"Why, I've been expecting him to come in at any moment;" and this was
+true enough.
+
+"I guess he's not very far off," said old Hasketh. "I don't believe but
+what he'll turn up." Within the comfort these words were outwardly
+intended to convey to the anxious child, I felt an inner contempt of
+Tedham, a tacit doubt of the man's nature, which was more to me than the
+explicit faith in his return. For some reason Hasketh had not trusted
+Tedham's decision, and he might very well have done this without
+impugning anything but the weakness of his will.
+
+My wife now joined our side, apparently because it was the only theory
+of the case that could be openly urged. "Oh, yes, I am sure. In fact he
+promised my husband to let him know later where he was. Didn't you
+understand him so, my dear?"
+
+I had not understood him precisely to this effect, but I answered, "Yes,
+certainly," and we began to reassure one another more and more. We
+talked on and on to one another, but all the time we talked at the young
+girl, or for her encouragement; but I suppose the rest felt as I did,
+that we were talking provisionally, or without any stable ground of
+conviction. For my part, though I indulged that contempt of Tedham, I
+still had a lurking fear that the wretch had finally and forever
+disappeared, and I had a vision, very disagreeable and definite, of
+Tedham lying face downward in the pool of the old cockpit and shone on
+by the stars in the hushed circle of the woods. Simultaneously I heard
+his daughter saying, "I can't understand why he shouldn't have come to
+us, or should have put it off. He couldn't think I didn't wish to see
+him." And now I looked at my wife aghast, for I perceived that the
+Haskeths must have lacked the courage to tell her that her father had
+decided himself not to see her again, and that they had brought her to
+us that we might stay her with some hopes, false or true, of meeting him
+soon. "I don't know what they mean," she went on, appealing from them to
+us, "by saying that it might be better if I never saw him again!"
+
+"I don't say that any more, child," said Mrs. Hasketh, with affecting
+humility. "I'm sure there isn't any one in the whole world that I would
+bless the sight of half as much."
+
+"I could have come before, if I'd known where he was; or, if I had only
+known, I might have been here Saturday!" She broke into a piteous
+lamentation, with tears and sobs that wrung my heart and made me feel
+like one of a conspiracy of monsters. "But he couldn't--he
+couldn't--have thought I didn't _want_ to see him!"
+
+It was a very trying moment for us all, and I think that if we had, any
+of us, had our choice, we should have preferred to be in her place
+rather than our own. We miserably did what we could to comfort her, and
+we at last silenced her with I do not know what pretences. The affair
+was quite too much for me, and I made a feint of having heard the
+children calling me, and I went out into the hall. I felt that there was
+a sort of indecency in my witnessing that poor young thing's emotion;
+women might see it, but a man ought not. Perhaps old Hasketh felt the
+same; he followed me out, and when we were beyond hearing, even if he
+had spoken aloud, he dropped his voice to a thick murmur and said, "This
+has all been a mistake. We have had to get out of it with the girl the
+best we could; and we don't dare to let her know that Tedham isn't
+coming back any more. You noticed from what she said that my wife tried
+to make believe it might be well if he didn't; but she had to drop
+_that_; it set the girl wild. She hasn't got anything but the one idea:
+that she and her father belong to each other, and that they must be
+together for the rest of their lives. A curious thing about it is," and
+Hasketh sank his voice still lower to say this, "that she thinks that if
+he's taken the punishment that was put upon him he has atoned for what
+he did; and if any one tries to make him suffer more he does worse than
+Tedham did, and he's flying in the face of Providence. Perhaps it's so.
+I'm afraid," Hasketh continued, with the satisfaction men take in
+blaming their wives under the cover of sympathy, "that Mrs. Hasketh is
+going to feel it more and more, as time goes on, unless Tedham turns up.
+I was never in favor of trying to have the child forget him, or be
+separated from him in any way. That kind of thing can't be made to work,
+and I don't suppose, when you come to boil it down, that it's
+essentially right. This universe, I take it, isn't an accident in any
+particular, and if she's his daughter it's because she was meant to be,
+and to bear and share with him. You see it was a great mistake not to
+prepare the child for it sooner, and tell her just when Tedham would be
+out, so that if she wanted to see him she could. She thinks she ought to
+have been there at the prison waiting to speak to him the first one. I
+thought it was a mistake to have her away, and I guess that's the way
+Mrs. Hasketh looks at it herself, now."
+
+A stir of garments made itself heard from the parlor at last, and we
+knew the ladies had risen. In a loud voice Hasketh began to say that
+they had a carriage down at the gate, and I said they had better let me
+show them the way down; and as my wife followed the others into the
+hall, I pulled open the outer door for them. On the threshold stood a
+man about to ring, who let his hand drop from the bell-pull. "Why,
+Tedham!" I shouted, joyfully.
+
+The light from the hall-lamp struck full on his face; we all
+involuntarily shrank back, except the girl, who looked, not at the man
+before her, but first at her aunt and then at her uncle, timorously, and
+murmured some inaudible question. They did not answer, and now Tedham
+and his daughter looked at each other, with what feeling no one can ever
+fully say.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+It always seemed to me as if we had witnessed something like the return
+of one from the dead, in this meeting. We were talking it over one
+evening some weeks later, and "It would be all very well," I
+philosophized, "if the dead came back at once, but if one came back
+after ten years, it would be difficult."
+
+"It was worse than coming back from the dead," said my wife. "But I hope
+that is the end of it so far as we are concerned. I am sure I am glad to
+be out of it, and I don't wish to see any of them ever again."
+
+"Why, I don't know about that," I returned, and I began to laugh. "You
+know Hubbell, our inspector of agencies?"
+
+"What has he got to do with it?"
+
+"Hubbell has had a romantic moment. He thinks that in view of the
+restitution Tedham made as far as he could, and his excellent
+record--elsewhere--it would be a fine thing for the Reciprocity to
+employ him again in our office, and he wanted to suggest it to the
+actuary."
+
+"Basil! You didn't allow him to do such a cruel thing as that?"
+
+"No, my dear, I am happy to say that I sat upon that dramatic climax."
+
+This measurably consoled my wife, but she did not cease to denounce the
+idea for some moments. When she ended, I asked her if she would allow
+the company to employ Tedham in a subordinate place in another city, and
+when she signified that this might be suffered, I said that this was
+what would probably be done. Then I added, seriously, that I thoroughly
+liked the notion of it, and that I took it for a testimony that poor old
+Tedham was right, and that he had at last fully expiated his offence
+against society.
+
+His daughter continued to live with her aunt and uncle, but Tedham used
+to spend his holidays with them, and, however incongruously, they got on
+together very well, I believe. The girl kept the name of Hasketh, and I
+do not suppose that many people knew her relation to Tedham. It appeared
+that our little romantic supposition of a love affair, which the reunion
+of father and child must shatter, was for the present quite gratuitous.
+But if it should ever come to that, my wife and I had made up our minds
+to let God manage. We said that we had already had one narrow escape in
+proposing to better the divine way of doing, and we should not interfere
+again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire
+confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through
+the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married
+there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident
+apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to
+wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was
+married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom she
+told all about her unhappy family history before she permitted herself
+to accept him.
+
+During the one brief interview I had with him, for the purpose of
+further blackening her father's character (for so I understood her
+insistence that I should see the young man), he seemed not only wholly
+unmoved by the facts, but was apparently sorry that poor Tedham had not
+done much worse things, and many more of them, that he might forgive him
+for her sake.
+
+They went to live abroad after they were married; and by and by Tedham
+joined them. So far now as human vision can perceive, the trouble he
+made, the evil he did, is really at an end. Love, which can alone arrest
+the consequences of wrong, had ended it, and in certain luminous moments
+it seemed to us that we had glimpsed, in our witness of this experience,
+an infinite compassion encompassing our whole being like a sea, where
+every trouble of our sins and sorrows must cease at last like a circle
+in the water.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 18605.txt or 18605.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/6/0/18605
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://www.gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/18605.zip b/18605.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..368edc8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/18605.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d8382c9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #18605 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18605)