IF Leroy Brainard had not had such a
respect for literature, he would have
written a book.

As it was, he played at being an architect
– and succeeded in being a charming fellow.
My sister Jessica never lost an opportunity
of laughing at his endeavors as an architect.

“You can build an enchanting villa, but
what would you do with a cathedral?”

“I shall never have a chance at a cathedral,” he would reply. “And, besides, it
always seems to me so material and so impertinent to build a little structure of stone
and wood in which to worship God!”

You see what he was like? He was frivolous, yet one could never tell when he would
become eloquently earnest.

Brainard went off suddenly Westward one
day. I suspected that Jessica was at the
bottom of it, but I asked no questions; and
I did not hear from him for months. Then I
got a letter from Colorado.

“I have married a mountain woman,” he
wrote. “None of your puny breed of modern
femininity, but a remnant left over from the
heroic ages, — a primitive woman, grand and
vast of spirit, capable of true and steadfast
wifehood. No sophistry about her; no
knowledge even that there is sophistry.
Heavens! man, do you remember the ron-
deaux and triolets I used to write to those
pretty creatures back East? It would take
a Saga man of the old Norseland to write
for my mountain woman. If I were an
artist, I would paint her with the north star
in her locks and her feet on purple cloud.
I suppose you are at the Pier. I know you
usually are at this season. At any rate, I
shall direct this letter thither, and will follow
close after it. I want my wife to see something of life. And I want her to meet your
sister.”

“Dear me!” cried Jessica, when I read
the letter to her; “I don’t know that I care
to meet anything quite so gigantic as that
mountain woman. I’m one of the puny breed
of modern femininity, you know. I don’t
think my nerves can stand the encounter.”

“Why, Jessica!” I protested. She blushed
a little.

“Don’t think bad of me, Victor. But, you
see, I’ve a little scrap-book of those triolets
upstairs.” Then she burst into a peal of
irresistible laughter. “I’m not laughing
because I am piqued,” she said frankly.
“Though any one will admit that it is
rather irritating to have a man who left
you in a blasted condition recover with
such extraordinary promptness. As a philanthropist, one of course rejoices, but as a
woman, Victor, it must be admitted that one
has a right to feel annoyed. But, honestly,
I am not ungenerous, and I am going to do
him a favor. I shall write, and urge him
not to bring his wife here. A primitive
woman, with the north star in her hair,
would look well down there in the Casino
eating a pineapple ice, wouldn’t she? It’s
all very well to have a soul, you know; but
it won’t keep you from looking like a guy
among women who have good dressmakers.
I shudder at the thought of what the poor
thing will suffer if he brings her here.”

Jessica wrote, as she said she would; but,
for all that, a fortnight later she was walking
down the wharf with the “mountain woman,”
and I was sauntering beside Leroy. At
dinner Jessica gave me no chance to talk
with our friend’s wife, and I only caught
the quiet contralto tones of her voice now
and then contrasting with Jessica’s vivacious
soprano. A drizzling rain came up from
the east with nightfall. Little groups of
shivering men and women sat about in the
parlors at the card-tables, and one blond
woman sang love songs. The Brainards
were tired with their journey, and left us
early. When they were gone, Jessica burst
into eulogy.

“That is the first woman,” she declared,
“I ever met who would make a fit heroine
for a book.”

“Then you will not feel under obligations
to educate her, as you insinuated the other
day?”

“Educate her! I only hope she will
help me to unlearn some of the things I
know. I never saw such simplicity. It is
antique!”

“You’re sure it’s not mere vacuity?”
“Victor! How can you? But you haven’t
talked with her. You must to-morrow.
Good-night.” She gathered up her trailing skirts and started down the corridor.
Suddenly she turned back. “For Heaven’s
sake!” she whispered, in an awed tone,
“I never even noticed what she had on!”

The next morning early we made up a
riding party, and I rode with Mrs. Brainard.
She was as tall as I, and sat in her saddle
as if quite unconscious of her animal. The
road stretched hard and inviting under our
horses’ feet. The wind smelled salt. The
sky was ragged with gray masses of cloud
scudding across the blue. I was beginning
to glow with exhilaration, when suddenly my
companion drew in her horse.

“If you do not mind, we will go back,”
she said.

Her tone was dejected. I thought she
was tired.

“Oh, no!” she protested, when I apologized for my thoughtlessness in bringing her
so far. “I’m not tired. I can ride all day.
Where I come from, we have to ride if
we want to go anywhere; but here there
seems to be no particular place to — to
reach.”

“Are you so utilitarian?” I asked, laughingly. “Must you always have some reason
for everything you do? I do so many things
just for the mere pleasure of doing them,
I’m afraid you will have a very poor opinion
of me.”

“That is not what I mean,” she said,
flushing, and turning her large gray eyes on
me. “You must not think I have a reason
for everything I do.” She was very earnest,
and it was evident that she was unacquainted
with the art of making conversation. “But
what I mean,” she went on, “is that there is
no place — no end — to reach.” She looked
back over her shoulder toward the west,
where the trees marked the sky line, and an
expression of loss and dissatisfaction came
over her face. “You see,” she said, apologetically, “I’m used to different things — to
the mountains. I have never been where I
could not see them before in my life.”

“Ah, I see! I suppose it is odd to look
up and find them not there.”

“It’s like being lost, this not having anything around you. At least, I mean,” she
continued slowly, as if her thought could
not easily put itself in words, — “I mean
it seems as if a part of the world had been
taken down. It makes you feel lonesome,
as if you were living after the world had
begun to die.”

“You’ll get used to it in a few days. It
seems very beautiful to me here. And then
you will have so much life to divert you.”

“Life? But there is always that everywhere.”

“I mean men and women.”

“Oh! Still, I am not used to them. I
think I might be not — not very happy with
them. They might think me queer. I
think I would like to show your sister the
mountains.”

“She has seen them often.”

“Oh, she told me. But I don’t mean
those pretty green hills such as we saw coming here. They are not like my mountains.
I like mountains that go beyond the clouds,
with terrible shadows in the hollows, and
belts of snow lying in the gorges where the
sun cannot reach, and the snow is blue in
the sunshine, or shining till you think it is
silver, and the mist so wonderful all about
it, changing each moment and drifting up
and down, that you cannot tell what name
to give the colors. These mountains of
yours here in the East are so quiet; mine
are shouting all the time, with the pines and
the rivers. The echoes are so loud in the
valley that sometimes, when the wind is
rising, we can hardly hear a man talk unless
he raises his voice. There are four cataracts
near where I live, and they all have different
voices, just as people do; and one of them
is happy — a little white cataract — and it falls
where the sun shines earliest, and till night
it is shining. But the others only get the
sun now and then, and they are more noisy
and cruel. One of them is always in the
shadow, and the water looks black. That
is partly because the rocks all underneath
it are black. It falls down twenty great
ledges in a gorge with black sides, and a
white mist dances all over it at every leap.
I tell father the mist is the ghost of the
waters. No man ever goes there; it is too
cold. The chill strikes through one, and
makes your heart feel as if you were dying.
But all down the side of the mountain,
toward the south and the west, the sun shines
on the granite and draws long points of
light out of it. Father tells me soldiers
marching look that way when the sun strikes
on their bayonets. Those are the kind of
mountains I mean, Mr. Grant.”

She was looking at me with her face transfigured, as if it, like the mountains she told
me of, had been lying in shadow, and waiting for the dazzling dawn.

“I had a terrible dream once,” she went
on; “the most terrible dream ever I had.
I dreamt that the mountains had all been
taken down, and that I stood on a plain to
which there was no end. The sky was burning up, and the grass scorched brown from
the heat, and it was twisting as if it were in
pain. And animals, but no other person
save myself, only wild things, were crouching and looking up at that sky. They could
not run because there was no place to which
to go.”

“You were having a vision of the last
man,” I said. “I wonder myself sometimes
whether this old globe of ours is going to
collapse suddenly and take us with her, or
whether we will disappear through slow
disastrous ages of fighting and crushing,
with hunger and blight to help us to the
end. And then, at the last, perhaps, some
luckless fellow, stronger than the rest, will
stand amid the ribs of the rotting earth and
go mad.”

The woman’s eyes were fixed on me,
large and luminous. “Yes,” she said; “he
would go mad from the lonesomeness of it.
He would be afraid to be left alone like that
with God. No one would want to be taken
into God’s secrets.”

“And our last man,” I went on, “would
have to stand there on that swaying wreck
till even the sound of the crumbling earth
ceased. And he would try to find a voice
and would fail, because silence would have
come again. And then the light would go
out –”

The shudder that crept over her made
me stop, ashamed of myself.

“You talk like father,” she said, with a
long-drawn breath. Then she looked up
suddenly at the sun shining through a rift
in those reckless gray clouds, and put out
one hand as if to get it full of the headlong
rollicking breeze. “But the earth is not
dying,” she cried. “It is well and strong,
and it likes to go round and round among
all the other worlds. It likes the sun and
moon; they are all good friends; and it
likes the people who live on it. Maybe it
is they instead of the fire within who keep
it warm; or maybe it is warm just from
always going, as we are when we run. We
are young, you and I, Mr. Grant, and Leroy,
and your beautiful sister, and the world is
young too!” Then she laughed a strong
splendid laugh, which had never had the
joy taken out of it with drawing-room restrictions; and I laughed too, and felt that
we had become very good companions
indeed, and found myself warming to the
joy of companionship as I had not since I
was a boy at school.

That afternoon the four of us sat at a
table in the Casino together. The Casino,
as every one knows, is a place to amuse
yourself. If you have a duty, a mission, or
an aspiration, you do not take it there with
you, it would be so obviously out of place;
if poverty is ahead of you, you forget it; if
you have brains, you hasten to conceal them;
they would be a serious encumbrance.

There was a bubbling of conversation, a
rustle and flutter such as there always is
where there are many women. All the
place was gay with flowers and with gowns
as bright as the flowers. I remembered the
apprehensions of my sister, and studied
Leroy’s wife to see how she fitted into this
highly colored picture. She was the only
woman in the room who seemed to wear
draperies. The jaunty slash and cut of
fashionable attire were missing in the long
brown folds of cloth that enveloped her
figure. I felt certain that even from Jessica’s
standpoint she could not be called a guy.
Picturesque she might be, past the point of
convention, but she was not ridiculous.

“Judith takes all this very seriously,” said
Leroy, laughingly. “I suppose she would
take even Paris seriously.”

His wife smiled over at him. “Leroy
says I am melancholy,” she said, softly;
“but I am always telling him that I am
happy. He thinks I am melancholy because I do not laugh. I got out of the way
of it by being so much alone. You only
laugh to let some one else know you are
pleased. When you are alone there is no
use in laughing. It would be like explaining something to yourself.”

“You are a philosopher, Judith. Mr.
Max Müller would like to know you.”

“Is he a friend of yours, dear?”

Leroy blushed, and I saw Jessica curl
her lip as she noticed the blush. She laid
her hand on Mrs. Brainard’s arm.

“Have you always been very much
alone?” she inquired.

“I was born on the ranch, you know;
and father was not fond of leaving it. Indeed, now he says he will never again go
out of sight of it. But you can go a long
journey without doing that; for it lies on a
plateau in the valley, and it can be seen
from three different mountain passes.
Mother died there, and for that reason and
others — father has had a strange life — he
never wanted to go away. He brought a
lady from Pennsylvania to teach me. She
had wonderful learning, but she didn’t
make very much use of it. I thought if I
had learning I would not waste it reading
books. I would use it to — to live with.
Father had a library, but I never cared for
it. He was forever at books too. Of
course,” she hastened to add, noticing the
look of mortification deepen on her husband’s face, “I like books very well if there
is nothing better at hand. But I always
said to Mrs. Windsor — it was she who
taught me — why read what other folk have
been thinking when you can go out and
think yourself? Of course one prefers one’s
own thoughts, just as one prefers one’s own
ranch, or one’s own father.”

“Then you are sure to like New York
when you go there to live,” cried Jessica;
“for there you will find something to make
life entertaining all the time. No one need
fall back on books there.”

“I’m not sure. I’m afraid there must be
such dreadful crowds of people. Of course
I should try to feel that they were all like
me, with just the same sort of fears, and
that it was ridiculous for us to be afraid of
each other, when at heart we all meant to
be kind.”

Jessica fairly wrung her hands. “Heavens!” she cried. “I said you would like
New York. I am afraid, my dear, that it
will break your heart!”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Brainard, with what was
meant to be a gentle jest, “no one can
break my heart except Leroy. I should
not care enough about any one else, you
know.”

The compliment was an exquisite one.
I felt the blood creep to my own brain in
a sort of vicarious rapture, and I avoided
looking at Leroy lest he should dislike to
have me see the happiness he must feel.
The simplicity of the woman seemed to
invigorate me as the cool air of her mountains might if it blew to me on some bright
dawn, when I had come, fevered and sick
of soul, from the city.

When we were alone, Jessica said to me:
“That man has too much vanity, and he
thinks it is sensitiveness. He is going to
imagine that his wife makes him suffer.
There’s no one so brutally selfish as your
sensitive man. He wants every one to live
according to his ideas, or he immediately
begins suffering. That friend of yours
hasn’t the courage of his convictions. He
is going to be ashamed of the very qualities
that made him love his wife.”

There was a hop that night at the hotel,
quite an unusual affair as to elegance, given
in honor of a woman from New York, who
wrote a novel a month.

Mrs. Brainard looked so happy that night
when she came in the parlor, after the
music had begun, that I felt a moisture
gather in my eyes just because of the beauty
of her joy, and the forced vivacity of the
women about me seemed suddenly coarse
and insincere. Some wonderful red stones,
brilliant as rubies, glittered in among the
diaphanous black driftings of her dress.
She asked me if the stones were not very
pretty, and said she gathered them in one
of her mountain river-beds.

“But the gown?” I said. “Surely, you
do not gather gowns like that in river-beds,
or pick them off mountain-pines?”

“But you can get them in Denver. Father
always sent to Denver for my finery. He
was very particular about how I looked.
You see, I was all he had –” She broke
off, her voice faltering.

“Come over by the window,” I said, to
change her thought. “I have something to
repeat to you. It is a song of Sydney
Lanier’s. I think he was the greatest poet
that ever lived in America, though not
many agree with me. But he is my dear
friend anyway, though he is dead, and I
never saw him; and I want you to hear
some of his words.”

I led her across to an open window. The
dancers were whirling by us. The waltz
was one of those melancholy ones which
speak the spirit of the dance more eloquently than any merry melody can. The
sound of the sea booming beyond in the
darkness came to us, and long paths of
light, now red, now green, stretched toward
the distant light-house. These were the
lines I repeated: –

"What heartache -- ne'er a hill!
Inexorable, vapid, vague, and chill
The drear sand levels drain my spirit low.
With one poor word they tell me all they know;
Whereat their stupid tongues, to tease my pain,
Do drawl it o'er and o'er again.
They hurt my heart with griefs I cannot name;
   Always the same -- the same."

But I got no further. I felt myself moved
with a sort of passion which did not seem to
come from within, but to be communicated
to me from her. A certain unfamiliar happiness pricked through with pain thrilled
me, and I heard her whispering, –

“Do not go on, do not go on! I cannot
stand it to-night!”

“Hush,” I whispered back; “come out
for a moment!” We stole into the dusk
without, and stood there trembling. I
swayed with her emotion. There was a
long silence. Then she said: “Father may
be walking alone now by the black cataract.
That is where he goes when he is sad. I
can see how lonely he looks among those
little twisted pines that grow from the rock.
And he will be remembering all the evenings
we walked there together, and all the things
we said.” I did not answer. Her eyes
were still on the sea.

“What was the name of the man who
wrote that verse you just said to me?”

I told her.

“And he is dead? Did they bury him
in the mountains? No? I wish I could
have put him where he could have heard
those four voices calling down the canyon.”

“Come back in the house,” I said; “you
must come, indeed,” I said, as she shrank
from re-entering.

Jessica was dancing like a fairy with Leroy. They both saw us and smiled as we
came in, and a moment later they joined us.
I made my excuses and left my friends to
Jessica’s care. She was a sort of social
tyrant wherever she was, and I knew one
word from her would insure the popularity
of our friends — not that they needed the
intervention of any one. Leroy had been
a sort of drawing-room pet since before he
stopped wearing knickerbockers.

“He is at his best in a drawing-room,”
said Jessica, “because there he deals with
theory and not with action. And he has
such beautiful theories that the women, who
are all idealists, adore him.”

The next morning I awoke with a conviction that I had been idling too long. I
went back to the city and brushed the dust
from my desk. Then each morning, I, as
Jessica put it, “formed public opinion”
to the extent of one column a day in the
columns of a certain enterprising morning
journal.

Brainard said I had treated him shabbily
to leave upon the heels of his coming. But
a man who works for his bread and butter
must put a limit to his holiday. It is different when you only work to add to your
general picturesqueness. That is what I
wrote Leroy, and it was the unkindest thing
I ever said to him; and why I did it I do
not know to this day. I was glad, though,
when he failed to answer the letter. It gave
me a more reasonable excuse for feeling
out of patience with him.

The days that followed were very dull.
It was hard to get back into the way of
working. I was glad when Jessica came
home to set up our little establishment and
to join in the autumn gayeties. Brainard
brought his wife to the city soon after, and
went to housekeeping in an odd sort of a
way.

“I couldn’t see anything in the place save
curios,” Jessica reported, after her first call
on them. “I suppose there is a cooking-
stove somewhere, and maybe even a pantry
with pots in it. But all I saw was Alaska
totems and Navajo blankets. They have
as many skins around on the floor and
couches as would have satisfied an ancient
Briton. And everybody was calling there.
You know Mr. Brainard runs to curios in
selecting his friends as well as his furniture.
The parlors were full this afternoon of abnormal people, that is to say, with folks one
reads about. I was the only one there who
hadn’t done something. I guess it’s because I am too healthy.”

“How did Mrs. Brainard like such a
motley crew?”

“She was wonderful — perfectly wonderful! Those insulting creatures were all
studying her, and she knew it. But her
dignity was perfect, and she looked as proud
as a Sioux chief. She listened to every one,
and they all thought her so bright.”

“Brainard must have been tremendously
proud of her.”

“Oh, he was — of her and his Chilcat
portières.”

Jessica was there often, but — well, I was
busy. At length, however, I was forced to
go. Jessica refused to make any further
excuses for me. The rooms were filled with
small celebrities.

“We are the only nonentities,” whispered
Jessica, as she looked around; “it will make
us quite distinguished.”

We went to speak to our hostess. She
stood beside her husband, looking taller
than ever; and her face was white. Her
long red gown of clinging silk was so peculiar as to give one the impression that she
was dressed in character. It was easy to
tell that it was one of Leroy’s fancies. I
hardly heard what she said, but I know she
reproached me gently for not having been
to see them. I had no further word with
her till some one led her to the piano, and
she paused to say, –

“That poet you spoke of to me — the one
you said was a friend of yours — he is my
friend now too, and I have learned to sing
some of his songs. I am going to sing one
now.” She seemed to have no timidity at
all, but stood quietly, with a half smile,
while a young man with a Russian name
played a strange minor prelude. Then she
sang, her voice a wonderful contralto, cold at
times, and again lit up with gleams of passion. The music itself was fitful, now full
of joy, now tender, and now sad:

"Look off, dear love, across the sallow sands,
   And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea,
How long they kiss in sight of all the lands,
   Ah! longer, longer we."

“She has a genius for feeling, hasn’t
she?” Leroy whispered to me.

“A genius for feeling!” I repeated,
angrily. “Man, she has a heart and a soul
and a brain, if that is what you mean! I
shouldn’t think you would be able to look
at her from the standpoint of a critic.”

Leroy shrugged his shoulders and went
off. For a moment I almost hated him for
not feeling more resentful. I felt as if he
owed it to his wife to take offence at my
foolish speech.

It was evident that the “mountain woman”
had become the fashion. I read reports in
the papers about her unique receptions. I
saw her name printed conspicuously among
the list of those who attended all sorts of
dinners and musicales and evenings among
the set that affected intellectual pursuits.
She joined a number of women’s clubs of
an exclusive kind.

“She is doing whatever her husband tells
her to,” said Jessica. “Why, the other day
I heard her ruining her voice on ‘Siegfried’!”

But from day to day I noticed a difference
in her. She developed a terrible activity.
She took personal charge of the affairs of
her house; she united with Leroy in keeping the house filled with guests; she got
on the board of a hospital for little children,
and spent a part of every day among the
cots where the sufferers lay. Now and then
when we spent a quiet evening alone with
her and Leroy, she sewed continually on
little white night-gowns for these poor babies.
She used her carriage to take the most extraordinary persons riding.

“In the cause of health,” Leroy used to
say, “I ought to have the carriage fumigated after every ride Judith takes, for she
is always accompanied by some one who looks
as if he or she should go into quarantine.”

One night, when he was chaffing her in
this way, she flung her sewing suddenly
from her and sprang to her feet, as if she
were going to give way to a burst of girlish
temper. Instead of that, a stream of tears
poured from her eyes, and she held out her
trembling hands toward Jessica.

“He does not know,” she sobbed. “He
cannot understand.”

One memorable day Leroy hastened over
to us while we were still at breakfast to say
that Judith was ill, — strangely ill. All night
long she had been muttering to herself as if
in a delirium. Yet she answered lucidly all
questions that were put to her.

“She begs for Miss Grant. She says
over and over that she ‘knows,’ whatever
that may mean.”

When Jessica came home she told me she
did not know. She only felt that a tumult
of impatience was stirring in her friend.

“There is something majestic about her, –
something epic. I feel as if she were making me live a part in some great drama, the
end of which I cannot tell. She is suffering,
but I cannot tell why she suffers.”

Weeks went on without an abatement in
this strange illness. She did not keep her
bed. Indeed, she neglected few of her usual
occupations. But her hands were burning,
and her eyes grew bright with that wild
sort of lustre one sees in the eyes of those
who give themselves up to strange drugs or
manias. She grew whimsical, and formed
capricious friendships, only to drop them.

And then one day she closed her house
to all acquaintances, and sat alone continually in her room, with her hands clasped
in her lap, and her eyes swimming with the
emotions that never found their way to her
tongue.

Brainard came to the office to talk with
me about her one day. “I am a very miserable man, Grant,” he said. “I am afraid I
have lost my wife’s regard. Oh, don’t tell me
it is partly my fault. I know it well enough.
And I know you haven’t had a very good
opinion of me lately. But I am remorseful
enough now, God knows. And I would give
my life to see her as she was when I found
her first among the mountains. Why, she
used to climb them like a strong man, and
she was forever shouting and singing. And
she had peopled every spot with strange
modern mythological creatures. Her father
is an old dreamer, and she got the trick from
him. They had a little telescope on a great
knoll in the centre of the valley, just where
it commanded a long path of stars, and they
used to spend nights out there when the
frost literally fell in flakes. When I think
how hardy and gay she was, how full of
courage and life, and look at her now, so
feverish and broken, I feel as if I should go
mad. You know I never meant to do her
any harm. Tell me that much, Grant.”

“I think you were very egotistical for a
while, Brainard, and that is a fact. And
you didn’t appreciate how much her nature
demanded. But I do not think you are responsible for your wife’s present condition.
If there is any comfort in that statement,
you are welcome to it.”

“But you don’t mean –” he got no
further.

“I mean that your wife may have her
reservations, just as we all have, and I am
paying her high praise when I say it. You
are not so narrow, Leroy, as to suppose for
a moment that the only sort of passion a
woman is capable of is that which she entertains for a man. How do I know what
is going on in your wife’s soul? But it is
nothing which even an idealist of women,
such as I am, old fellow, need regret.”

How glad I was afterward that I spoke
those words. They exercised a little restraint, perhaps, on Leroy when the day
of his terrible trial came. They made him
wrestle with the demon of suspicion that
strove to possess him. I was sitting in my
office, lagging dispiritedly over my work
one day, when the door burst open and
Brainard stood beside me. Brainard, I say,
and yet in no sense the man I had known,
– not a hint in this pale creature, whose
breath struggled through chattering teeth,
and whose hands worked in uncontrollable
spasms, of the nonchalant elegant I had
known. Not a glimpse to be seen in those
angry and determined eyes of the gayly
selfish spirit of my holiday friend.

“She’s gone!” he gasped. “Since yesterday. And I’m here to ask you what
you think now? And what you know.”

A panorama of all shameful possibilities
for one black moment floated before me.
I remember this gave place to a wave, cold
as death, that swept from head to foot;
then Brainard’s hands fell heavily on my
shoulders.

“Thank God at least for this much,” he
said, hoarsely; “I didn’t know at first but
I had lost both friend and wife. But I see
you know nothing. And indeed in my
heart I knew all the time that you did not.
Yet I had to come to you with my anger.
And I remembered how you defended her.
What explanation can you offer now?”

I got him to sit down after a while and
tell me what little there was to tell. He
had been away for a day’s shooting, and
when he returned he found only the perplexed servants at home. A note was left
for him. He showed it to me.

“There are times,” it ran, “when we must
do as we must, not as we would. I am going to do something I have been driven to
do since I left my home. I do not leave
any message of love for you, because you
would not care for it from a woman so weak
as I. But it is so easy for you to be happy
that I hope in a little while you will forget
the wife who yielded to an influence past
resisting. It may be madness, but I am
not great enough to give it up. I tried to
make the sacrifice, but I could not. I tried
to be as gay as you, and to live your sort of
life; but I could not do it. Do not make
the effort to forgive me. You will be happier if you simply hold me in the contempt
I deserve.”

I read the letter over and over. I do not
know that I believe that the spirit of inanimate things can permeate to the intelligence
of man. I am sure I always laughed at
such ideas. Yet holding that note with its
shameful seeming words, I felt a consciousness that it was written in purity and love.
And then before my eyes there came a scene
so vivid that for a moment the office with its
familiar furniture was obliterated. What I
saw was a long firm road, green with midsummer luxuriance. The leisurely thudding
of my horse’s feet sounded in my ears. Beside me was a tall, black-robed figure. I
saw her look back with that expression of
deprivation at the sky line. “It’s like living after the world has begun to die,” said
the pensive minor voice. “It seems as if
part of the world had been taken down.”

“Brainard,” I yelled, “come here! I
have it. Here’s your explanation. I can
show you a new meaning for every line of
this letter. Man, she has gone to the mountains. She has gone to worship her own
gods!”

Two weeks later I got a letter from Brainard, dated from Colorado.

“Old man,” it said, “you’re right. She
is here. I found my mountain woman here
where the four voices of her cataracts had
been calling to her. I saw her the moment
our mules rounded the road that commands
the valley. We had been riding all night
and were drenched with cold dew, hungry
to desperation, and my spirits were of lead.
Suddenly we got out from behind the granite wall, and there she was, standing, where I
had seen her so often, beside the little waterfall that she calls the happy one. She was
looking straight up at the billowing mist
that dipped down the mountain, mammoth
saffron rolls of it, plunging so madly from
the impetus of the wind that one marvelled
how it could be noiseless. Ah, you do not
know Judith! That strange, unsophisticated, sometimes awkward woman you saw
bore no more resemblance to my mountain
woman than I to Hercules. How strong and
beautiful she looked standing there wrapped
in an ecstasy! It was my primitive woman
back in her primeval world. How the blood
leaped in me! All my old romance, so different from the common love-histories of
most men, was there again within my reach!
All the mystery, the poignant happiness
were mine again. Do not hold me in contempt because I show you my heart. You
saw my misery. Why should I grudge you
a glimpse of my happiness? She saw me
when I touched her hand, not before, so
wrapped was she. But she did not seem
surprised. Only in her splendid eyes there
came a large content. She pointed to the
dancing little white fall. ‘I thought something wonderful was going to happen,’ she
whispered, ‘for it has been laughing so.’

“I shall not return to New York. I am
going to stay here with my mountain woman, and I think perhaps I shall find out
what life means here sooner than I would
back there with you. I shall learn to see
large things large and small things small.
Judith says to tell you and Miss Grant that
the four voices are calling for you every
day in the valley.

“Yours in fullest friendship,

“LEROY BRAINARD.”

THE winter nights up at Sault Ste.
Marie are as white and luminous as
the Milky Way. The silence which
rests upon the solitude appears to
be white also. Even sound has been included
in Nature’s arrestment, for, indeed, save the
still white frost, all things seem to be obliterated.
The stars have a poignant brightness,
but they belong to heaven and not to earth,
and between their immeasurable height and
the still ice rolls the ebon ether in vast, liquid
billows.

In such a place it is difficult to believe that
the world is actually peopled. It seems as if
it might be the dark of the day after Cain
killed Abel, and as if all of humanity’s remainder
was huddled in affright away from
the awful spaciousness of Creation.

The night Ralph Hagadorn started out for
Echo Bay — bent on a pleasant duty — he
laughed to himself, and said that he did not
at all object to being the only man in the
world, so long as the world remained as unspeakably
beautiful as it was when he buckled
on his skates and shot away into the solitude.
He was bent on reaching his best friend in
time to act as groomsman, and business had
delayed him till time was at its briefest. So
he journeyed by night and journeyed alone,
and when the tang of the frost got at his
blood, he felt as a spirited horse feels when it
gets free of bit and bridle. The ice was as
glass, his skates were keen, his frame fit, and
his venture to his taste! So he laughed, and
cut through the air as a sharp stone cleaves the
water. He could hear the whistling of the
air as he cleft it.

As he went on and on in the black stillness,
he began to have fancies. He imagined himself
enormously tall — a great Viking of the
Northland, hastening over icy fiords to his love.
And that reminded him that he had a love
– though, indeed, that thought was always
present with him as a background for other
thoughts. To be sure, he had not told her
that she was his love, for he had seen her only
a few times, and the auspicious occasion had
not yet presented itself. She lived at Echo
Bay also, and was to be the maid of honor to
his friend’s bride — which was one more
reason why he skated almost as swiftly as the
wind, and why, now and then, he let out a
shout of exultation.

The one cloud that crossed Hagadorn’s sun
of expectancy was the knowledge that Marie
Beaujeu’s father had money, and that Marie
lived in a house with two stories to it, and
wore otter skin about her throat and little
satin-lined mink boots on her feet when she
went sledding. Moreover, in the locket in
which she treasured a bit of her dead mother’s
hair, there was a black pearl as big as a pea.
These things made it difficult — perhaps impossible –
for Ralph Hagadorn to say more
than, “I love you.” But that much he meant
to say though he were scourged with chagrin
for his temerity.

This determination grew upon him as he
swept along the ice under the starlight.
Venus made a glowing path toward the west
and seemed eager to reassure him. He was
sorry he could not skim down that avenue of
light which flowed from the love-star, but he
was forced to turn his back upon it and face
the black northeast.

It came to him with a shock that he was
not alone. His eyelashes were frosted and
his eyeballs blurred with the cold, so at first
he thought it might be an illusion. But when
he had rubbed his eyes hard, he made sure
that not very far in front of him was a long
white skater in fluttering garments who sped
over the ice as fast as ever werewolf went.

He called aloud, but there was no answer.
He shaped his hands and trumpeted through
them, but the silence was as before — it was
complete. So then he gave chase, setting his
teeth hard and putting a tension on his firm
young muscles. But go however he would,
the white skater went faster. After a time,
as he glanced at the cold gleam of the north
star, he perceived that he was being led from
his direct path. For a moment he hesitated,
wondering if he would not better keep to his
road, but his weird companion seemed to
draw him on irresistibly, and finding it sweet
to follow, he followed.

Of course it came to him more than once
in that strange pursuit, that the white skater
was no earthly guide. Up in those latitudes
men see curious things when the hoar frost is
on the earth. Hagadorn’s own father — to
hark no further than that for an instance!
– who lived up there with the Lake Superior
Indians, and worked in the copper mines, had
welcomed a woman at his hut one bitter
night, who was gone by morning, leaving wolf
tracks on the snow! Yes, it was so, and John
Fontanelle, the half-breed, could tell you
about it any day — if he were alive. (Alack,
the snow where the wolf tracks were, is melted
now!)

Well, Hagadorn followed the white skater
all the night, and when the ice flushed pink
at dawn, and arrows of lovely light shot up into
the cold heavens, she was gone, and Hagadorn
was at his destination. The sun climbed
arrogantly up to his place above all other
things, and as Hagadorn took off his skates
and glanced carelessly lakeward, he beheld a
great wind-rift in the ice, and the waves
showing blue and hungry between white fields.
Had he rushed along his intended path,
watching the stars to guide him, his glance
turned upward, all his body at magnificent
momentum, he must certainly have gone into
that cold grave.

How wonderful that it had been sweet to
follow the white skater, and that he followed!

His heart beat hard as he hurried to his
friend’s house. But he encountered no wedding
furore. His friend met him as men
meet in houses of mourning.

“Is this your wedding face?” cried Hagadorn.
Why, man, starved as I am, I look
more like a bridegroom than you!”

“There’s no wedding to-day!”

“No wedding! Why, you’re not –”

“Marie Beaujeu died last night –”

“Marie –”

“Died last night. She had been skating
in the afternoon, and she came home chilled
and wandering in her mind, as if the frost
had got in it somehow. She grew worse and
worse, and all the time she talked of you.”

“Of me?”

“We wondered what it meant. No one
knew you were lovers.”

“I didn’t know it myself; more’s the pity.
At least, I didn’t know –”

“She said you were on the ice, and that
you didn’t know about the big breaking-up,
and she cried to us that the wind was off shore
and the rift widening. She cried over and
over again that you could come in by the old
French creek if you only knew –”

“I came in that way.”

“But how did you come to do that? It’s
out of the path. We thought perhaps –”

But Hagadorn broke in with his story and
told him all as it had come to pass.

That day they watched beside the maiden,
who lay with tapers at her head and at her
feet, and in the little church the bride who
might have been at her wedding said prayers
for her friend. They buried Marie Beaujeu
in her bridesmaid white, and Hagadorn was
before the altar with her, as he had intended
from the first! Then at midnight the lovers
who were to wed whispered their vows in the
gloom of the cold church, and walked together
through the snow to lay their bridal wreaths
upon a grave.

Three nights later, Hagadorn skated back
again to his home. They wanted him to go
by sunlight, but he had his way, and went
when Venus made her bright path on the ice.

The truth was, he had hoped for the companionship
of the white skater. But he did
not have it. His only companion was the
wind. The only voice he heard was the baying
of a wolf on the north shore. The world
was as empty and as white as if God had just
created it, and the sun had not yet colored
nor man defiled it.

BABETTE had gone away for the
summer; the furniture was in its
summer linens; the curtains were
down, and Babette’s husband, John
Boyce, was alone in the house. It was the
first year of his marriage, and he missed
Babette. But then, as he often said to himself,
he ought never to have married her. He
did it from pure selfishness, and because he
was determined to possess the most illusive,
tantalizing, elegant, and utterly unmoral little
creature that the sun shone upon. He wanted
her because she reminded him of birds, and
flowers, and summer winds, and other exquisite
things created for the delectation of
mankind. He neither expected nor desired
her to think. He had half-frightened her into
marrying him, had taken her to a poor man’s
home, provided her with no society such as
she had been accustomed to, and he had no
reasonable cause of complaint when she
answered the call of summer and flitted away,
like a butterfly in the morning sunshine, to
the place where the flowers grew.

He wrote to her every evening, sitting in
the stifling, ugly house, and poured out his
soul as if it were a libation to a goddess.
She sometimes answered by telegraph, sometimes
by a perfumed note. He schooled himself
not to feel hurt. Why should Babette
write? Does a goldfinch indict epistles; or
a humming-bird study composition; or a
glancing, red-scaled fish in summer shallows
consider the meaning of words?

He knew at the beginning what Babette was
– guessed her limitations — trembled when
he buttoned her tiny glove — kissed her dainty
slipper when he found it in the closet after
she was gone — thrilled at the sound of her
laugh, or the memory of it! That was all.
A mere case of love. He was in bonds.
Babette was not. Therefore he was in the
city, working overhours to pay for Babette’s
pretty follies down at the seaside. It was
quite right and proper. He was a grub in
the furrow; she a lark in the blue. Those
had always been and always must be their
relative positions.

Having attained a mood of philosophic
calm, in which he was prepared to spend his
evenings alone — as became a grub — and to
await with dignified patience the return of
his wife, it was in the nature of an inconsistency
that he should have walked the floor of
the dull little drawing-room like a lion in
cage. It did not seem in keeping with the
position of superior serenity which he had
assumed, that, reading Babette’s notes, he
should have raged with jealousy, or that, in
the loneliness of his unkempt chamber, he
should have stretched out arms of longing.
Even if Babette had been present, she would
only have smiled her gay little smile and coquetted
with him. She could not understand.
He had known, of course, from the first moment,
that she could not understand! And
so, why the ache, ache, ache of the heart!
Or WAS it the heart, or the brain, or the
soul?

Sometimes, when the evenings were so hot
that he could not endure the close air of the
house, he sat on the narrow, dusty front porch
and looked about him at his neighbors. The
street had once been smart and aspiring, but
it had fallen into decay and dejection. Pale
young men, with flurried-looking wives, seemed
to Boyce to occupy most of the houses. Sometimes
three or four couples would live in one
house. Most of these appeared to be childless.
The women made a pretence at fashionable
dressing, and wore their hair elaborately
in fashions which somehow suggested boarding
houses to Boyce, though he could not
have told why. Every house in the block
needed fresh paint. Lacking this renovation,
the householders tried to make up for it by
a display of lace curtains which, at every
window, swayed in the smoke-weighted breeze.
Strips of carpeting were laid down the front
steps of the houses where the communities of
young couples lived, and here, evenings, the
inmates of the houses gathered, committing
mild extravagances such as the treating of each
other to ginger ale, or beer, or ice-cream.

Boyce watched these tawdry makeshifts at
sociability with bitterness and loathing. He
wondered how he could have been such a
fool as to bring his exquisite Babette to this
neighborhood. How could he expect that
she would return to him? It was not reasonable.
He ought to go down on his knees
with gratitude that she even condescended to
write him.

Sitting one night till late, — so late that the
fashionable young wives with their husbands
had retired from the strips of stair carpeting,
– and raging at the loneliness which ate at
his heart like a cancer, he heard, softly creeping
through the windows of the house adjoining
his own, the sound of comfortable melody.

It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of
consolation, speaking of peace, of love which
needs no reward save its own sweetness, of
aspiration which looks forever beyond the
thing of the hour to find attainment in that
which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper
these things, so delicately did the simple
and perfect melodies creep upon the spirit –
that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the
first listened as one who listens to learn, or
as one who, fainting on the hot road, hears, far
in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a spring.

Then came harmonies more intricate: fair
fabrics of woven sound, in the midst of which
gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of
sound, multi-tinted, gallant with story and
achievement, and beautiful things. Boyce,
sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees
jambed against the balustrade, and his chair
back against the dun-colored wall of his
house, seemed to be walking in the cathedral
of the redwood forest, with blue above him,
a vast hymn in his ears, pungent perfume in
his nostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting
themselves to heaven, proud and erect as pure
men before their Judge. He stood on a
mountain at sunrise, and saw the marvels of
the amethystine clouds below his feet, heard
an eternal and white silence, such as broods
among the everlasting snows, and saw an eagle
winging for the sun. He was in a city, and
away from him, diverging like the spokes of
a wheel, ran thronging streets, and to his sense
came the beat, beat, beat of the city’s heart.
He saw the golden alchemy of a chosen race;
saw greed transmitted to progress; saw that
which had enslaved men, work at last to their
liberation; heard the roar of mighty mills,
and on the streets all the peoples of earth
walking with common purpose, in fealty and
understanding. And then, from the swelling
of this concourse of great sounds, came a
diminuendo, calm as philosophy, and from
that, nothingness.

Boyce sat still for a long time, listening to
the echoes which this music had awakened
in his soul. He retired, at length, content,
but determined that upon the morrow he
would watch — the day being Sunday — for
the musician who had so moved and taught
him.

He arose early, therefore, and having prepared
his own simple breakfast of fruit and
coffee, took his station by the window to
watch for the man. For he felt convinced
that the exposition he had heard was that of
a masculine mind. The long, hot hours of
the morning went by, but the front door
of the house next to his did not open.

“These artists sleep late,” he complained.
Still he watched. He was too much afraid
of losing him to go out for dinner. By three
in the afternoon he had grown impatient. He
went to the house next door and rang the
bell. There was no response. He thundered
another appeal. An old woman with
a cloth about her head answered the door.
She was very deaf, and Boyce had difficulty
in making himself understood.

“The family is in the country,” was all she
would say. “The family will not be home
till September.”

“But there is some one living here?”
shouted Boyce.

“_I_ live here,” she said with dignity, putting
back a wisp of dirty gray hair behind
her ear. “It is my house. I sublet to the
family.”

“What family?”

But the old creature was not communicative.

The family that lives here,” she said.

“Then who plays the piano in this house?”
roared Boyce. “Do you?”

He thought a shade of pallor showed itself
on her ash-colored cheeks. Yet she smiled a
little at the idea of her playing.

“There is no piano,” she said, and she put
an enigmatical emphasis to the words.

“Nonsense,” cried Boyce, indignantly. “I
heard a piano being played in this very house
for hours last night!”

“You may enter,” said the old woman,
with an accent more vicious than hospitable.

Boyce almost burst into the drawing-room.
It was a dusty and forbidding place, with ugly
furniture and gaudy walls. No piano nor any
other musical instrument stood in it. The
intruder turned an angry and baffled face to
the old woman, who was smiling with illconcealed
exultation.

“I shall see the other rooms,” he announced.
The old woman did not appear to
be surprised at his impertinence.

“As you please,” she said.

So, with the hobbling creature, with her
bandaged head, for a guide, he explored every
room of the house, which being identical with
his own, he could do without fear of leaving
any apartment unentered. But no piano did
he find!

“Explain,” roared Boyce at length, turning
upon the leering old hag beside him. “Explain!
For surely I heard music more beautiful
than I can tell.”

“I know nothing,” she said. “But it is
true I once had a lodger who rented the
front room, and that he played upon the
piano. I am poor at hearing, but he must
have played well, for all the neighbors used
to come in front of the house to listen, and
sometimes they applauded him, and sometimes
they were still. I could tell by
watching their hands. Sometimes little children
came and danced. Other times young
men and women came and listened. But the
young man died. The neighbors were angry.
They came to look at him and said he had
starved to death. It was no fault of mine.
I sold his piano to pay his funeral expenses –
and it took every cent to pay for
them too, I’d have you know. But since
then, sometimes — still, it must be nonsense,
for I never heard it — folks say that he
plays the piano in my room. It has kept me
out of the letting of it more than once. But
the family doesn’t seem to mind — the family
that lives here, you know. They will be back
in September. Yes.”

Boyce left her nodding her thanks at what
he had placed in her hand, and went home to
write it all to Babette — Babette who would
laugh so merrily when she read it!

AFTER being dead twenty years, he
walked out into the sunshine.

It was as if the bones of a bleached skeleton should join themselves on some forgotten
plain, and look about them for the vanished
flesh.

To be dead it is not necessary to be in
the grave. There are places where the
worms creep about the heart instead of the
body.

The penitentiary is one of these.
David Culross had been in the penitentiary
twenty years. Now, with that worm-eaten
heart, he came out into liberty and looked
about him for the habiliments with which
he had formerly clothed himself, — for
hope, self-respect, courage, pugnacity, and
industry.

But they had vanished and left no trace,
like the flesh of the dead men on the plains,
and so, morally unapparelled, in the hideous
skeleton of his manhood, he walked on down
the street under the mid-June sunshine.

You can understand, can you not, how a
skeleton might wish to get back into its
comfortable grave? David Culross had not
walked two blocks before he was seized
with an almost uncontrollable desire to beg
to be shielded once more in that safe and
shameful retreat from which he had just
been released. A horrible perception of the
largeness of the world swept over him.
Space and eternity could seem no larger
to the usual man than earth — that snug
and insignificant planet — looked to David
Culross.

“If I go back,” he cried, despairingly,
looking up to the great building that arose
above the stony hills, “they will not take
me in.” He was absolutely without a refuge,
utterly without a destination; he did not
have a hope. There was nothing he desired
except the surrounding of those four narrow
walls between which he had lain at night
and dreamed those ever-recurring dreams, –
dreams which were never prophecies or
promises, but always the hackneyed history
of what he had sacrificed by his crime, and
relinquished by his pride.

The men who passed him looked at him
with mingled amusement and pity. They
knew the “prison look,” and they knew the
prison clothes. For though the State gives
to its discharged convicts clothes which are
like those of other men, it makes a hundred
suits from the same sort of cloth. The
police know the fabric, and even the citizens
recognize it. But, then, were each man
dressed in different garb he could not be
disguised. Every one knows in what dull
school that sidelong glance is learned, that
aimless drooping of the shoulders, that
rhythmic lifting of the heavy foot.

David Culross wondered if his will were
dead. He put it to the test. He lifted up
his head to a position which it had not held
for many miserable years. He put his hands
in his pockets in a pitiful attempt at nonchalance, and walked down the street with
a step which was meant to be brisk, but
which was in fact only uncertain. In his
pocket were ten dollars. This much the
State equips a man with when it sends him
out of its penal halls. It gives him also
transportation to any point within reasonable
distance that he may desire to reach. Culross had requested a ticket to Chicago. He
naturally said Chicago. In the long colorless days it had been in Chicago that all
those endlessly repeated scenes had been
laid. Walking up the street now with that
wavering ineffectual gait, these scenes came
back to surge in his brain like waters ceaselessly tossed in a wind-swept basin.

There was the office, bare and clean, where
the young stoop-shouldered clerks sat writing. In their faces was a strange resemblance, just as there was in the backs of the
ledgers, and in the endless bills on the
spindles. If one of them laughed, it was
not with gayety, but with gratification at
the discomfiture of another. None of them
ate well. None of them were rested after
sleep. All of them rode on the stuffy one-
horse cars to and from their work. Sundays they lay in bed very late, and ate more
dinner than they could digest. There was
a certain fellowship among them, — such fellowship as a band of captives among cannibals might feel, each of them waiting with
vital curiosity to see who was the next to be
eaten. But of that fellowship that plans in
unison, suffers in sympathy, enjoys vicariously, strengthens into friendship and communion of soul they knew nothing. Indeed,
such camaraderie would have been disapproved of by the Head Clerk. He would
have looked on an emotion with exactly the
same displeasure that he would on an error
in the footing of the year’s accounts. It was
tacitly understood that one reached the
proud position of Head Clerk by having no
emotions whatever.

Culross did not remember having been
born with a pen in his hand, or even with one
behind his ear; but certainly from the day he
had been let out of knickerbockers his constant companion had been that greatly overestimated article. His father dying at a time
that cut short David’s school-days, he went
out armed with his new knowledge of double-
entry, determined to make a fortune and a
commercial name. Meantime, he lived in a
suite of three rooms on West Madison Street
with his mother, who was a good woman,
and lived where she did that she might
be near her favorite meeting-house. She
prayed, and cooked bad dinners, principally
composed of dispiriting pastry. Her idea
of house-keeping was to keep the shades
down, whatever happened; and when David
left home in the evening for any purpose of
pleasure, she wept. David persuaded himself that he despised amusement, and went
to bed each night at half-past nine in a
folding bedstead in the front room, and, by
becoming absolutely stolid from mere vegetation, imagined that he was almost fit to be
a Head Clerk.

Walking down the street now after the
twenty years, thinking of these dead but innocent days, this was the picture he saw; and as
he reflected upon it, even the despoiled and
desolate years just passed seemed richer by
contrast.

He reached the station thus dreaming, and
found, as he had been told when the warden
bade him good-by, that a train was to be at
hand directly bound to the city. A few
moments later he was on that train. Well
back in the shadow, and out of sight of the
other passengers, he gave himself up to the
enjoyment of the comfortable cushion. He
would willingly have looked from the window, — green fields were new and wonderful;
drifting clouds a marvel; men, houses, horses,
farms, all a revelation, — but those haunting
visions were at him again, and would not
leave brain or eye free for other things.

But the next scene had warmer tints. It
was the interior of a rich room, — crimson
and amber fabrics, flowers, the gleam of a
statue beyond the drapings; the sound of a
tender piano unflinging a familiar melody,
and a woman. She was just a part of all the
luxury.

He himself, very timid and conscious of
his awkwardness, sat near, trying barrenly
to get some of his thoughts out of his brain
on to his tongue.

“Strange, isn’t it,” the woman broke in
on her own music, “that we have seen each
other so very often and never spoken? I’ve
often thought introductions were ridiculous.
Fancy seeing a person year in and year
out, and really knowing all about him, and
being perfectly acquainted with his name
– at least his or her name, you know — and
then never speaking! Some one comes
along, and says, ‘Miss Le Baron, this is Mr.
Culross,’ just as if one didn’t know that all
the time! And there you are! You cease
to be dumb folks, and fall to talking, and
say a lot of things neither of you care about,
and after five or six weeks of time and sundry meetings, get down to honestly saying
what you mean. I’m so glad we’ve got
through with that first stage, and can say
what we think and tell what we really like.”

Then the playing began again, — a harp-
like intermingling of soft sounds. Zoe Le
Baron’s hands were very girlish. Everything about her was unformed. Even her
mind was so. But all promised a full completion. The voice, the shoulders, the smile,
the words, the lips, the arms, the whole
mind and body, were rounding to maturity.

“Why do you never come to church in
the morning?” asks Miss Le Baron, wheeling around on her piano-stool suddenly.
“You are only there at night, with your
mother.”

“I go only on her account,” replies David,
truthfully. “In the morning I am so tired
with the week’s work that I rest at home.
I ought to go, I know.”

“Yes, you ought,” returns the young
woman, gravely. “It doesn’t really rest
one to lie in bed like that. I’ve tried it at
boarding-school. It was no good whatever.”

“Should you advise me,” asks David,
in a confiding tone, “to arise early on
Sunday?”

The girl blushes a little. “By all means!”
she cries, her eyes twinkling, “and — and
come to church. Our morning sermons are
really very much better than those in the
evening.” And she plays a waltz, and what
with the music and the warmth of the room
and the perfume of the roses, a something
nameless and mystical steals over the poor
clerk, and swathes him about like the fumes
of opium. They are alone. The silence is
made deeper by that rhythmic unswelling
of sound. As the painter flushes the bare
wall into splendor, these emotions illuminated his soul, and gave to it that high courage that comes when men or women suddenly
realize that each life has its significance, –
their own lives no less than the lives of
others.

The man sitting there in the shadow in
that noisy train saw in his vision how the
lad arose and moved, like one under a spell,
toward the piano. He felt again the enchantment of the music-ridden quiet, of the
perfume, and the presence of the woman.

“Knowing you and speaking with you
have not made much difference with me,”
he whispers, drunk on the new wine of
passion, “for I have loved you since I saw
you first. And though it is so sweet to hear
you speak, your voice is no more beautiful
than I thought it would be. I have loved
you a long time, and I want to know –”

The broken man in the shadow remembered how the lad stopped, astonished at his
boldness and his fluency, overcome suddenly
at the thought of what he was saying. The
music stopped with a discord. The girl
arose, trembling and scarlet.

“I would not have believed it of you,”
she cries, “to take advantage of me like
this, when I am alone — and — everything.
You know very well that nothing but trouble
could come to either of us from your telling
me a thing like that.”

He puts his hands up to his face to keep
off her anger. He is trembling with
confusion.

Then she broke in penitently, trying to
pull his hands away from his hot face:
“Never mind! I know you didn’t mean
anything. Be good, do, and don’t spoil the
lovely times we have together. You know
very well father and mother wouldn’t let us
see each other at all if they — if they thought
you were saying anything such as you said
just now.”

“Oh, but I can’t help it!” cries the boy,
despairingly. “I have never loved anybody
at all till now. I don’t mean not another
girl, you know. But you are the first being
I ever cared for. I sometimes think mother
cares for me because I pay the rent. And
the office — you can’t imagine what that is
like. The men in it are moving corpses.
They’re proud to be that way, and so was I
till I knew you and learned what life was like.
All the happy moments I have had have
been here. Now, if you tell me that we are
not to care for each other –”

There was some one coming down the
hall. The curtain lifted. A middle-aged
man stood there looking at him.

“Culross,” said he, “I’m disappointed in
you. I didn’t mean to listen, but I couldn’t
help hearing what you said just now. I
don’t blame you particularly. Young men
will be fools. And I do not in any way
mean to insult you when I tell you to stop
your coming here. I don’t want to see you
inside this door again, and after a while you
will thank me for it. You have taken a
very unfair advantage of my invitation. I
make allowances for your youth.”

He held back the curtain for the lad to
pass out. David threw a miserable glance
at the girl. She was standing looking at
her father with an expression that David
could not fathom. He went into the hall,
picked up his hat, and walked out in
silence.

David wondered that night, walking the
chilly streets after he quitted the house, and
often, often afterward, if that comfortable
and prosperous gentleman, safe beyond the
perturbations of youth, had any idea of
what he had done. How COULD he know
anything of the black monotony of the life
of the man he turned from his door? The
“desk’s dead wood” and all its hateful
slavery, the dull darkened rooms where his
mother prosed through endless evenings,
the bookless, joyless, hopeless existence
that had cramped him all his days rose up
before him, as a stretch of unbroken plain
may rise before a lost man till it maddens
him.

The bowed man in the car-seat remembered with a flush of reminiscent misery
how the lad turned suddenly in his walk
and entered the door of a drinking-room
that stood open. It was very comfortable
within. The screens kept out the chill of
the autumn night, the sawdust-sprinkled
floor was clean, the tables placed near
together, the bar glittering, the attendants
white-aproned and brisk.

David liked the place, and he liked better
still the laughter that came from a room
within. It had a note in it a little different
from anything he had ever heard before in
his life, and one that echoed his mood. He
ventured to ask if he might go into the
farther room.

It does not mean much when most young
men go to a place like this. They take
their bit of unwholesome dissipation quietly
enough, and are a little coarser and more
careless each time they indulge in it, perhaps.
But certainly their acts, whatever gradual
deterioration they may indicate, bespeak no
sudden moral revolution. With this young
clerk it was different. He was a worse man
from the moment he entered the door, for
he did violence to his principles; he killed
his self-respect.

He had been paid at the office that night,
and he had the money — a week’s miserable
pittance — in his pocket. His every action
revealed the fact that he was a novice in
recklessness. His innocent face piqued the
men within. They gave him a welcome
that amazed him. Of course the rest of the
evening was a chaos to him. The throat
down which he poured the liquor was as
tender as a child’s. The men turned his
head with their ironical compliments. Their
boisterous good-fellowship was as intoxicating to this poor young recluse as the liquor.

It was the revulsion from this feeling,
when he came to a consciousness that the
men were laughing at him and not with
him, that wrecked his life. He had gone
from beer to whiskey, and from whiskey to
brandy, by this time, at the suggestion of
the men, and was making awkward lunges
with a billiard cue, spurred on by the mocking applause of the others. One young
fellow was particularly hilarious at his
expense. His jokes became insults, or so
they seemed to David.

A quarrel followed, half a jest on the part
of the other, all serious as far as David was
concerned. And then — Well, who could
tell how it happened? The billiard cue was
in David’s hand, and the skull of the jester
was split, a horrible gaping thing, revoltingly animal.

David never saw his home again. His
mother gave it out in church that her heart
was broken, and she wrote a letter to David
begging him to reform. She said she
would never cease to pray for him, that
he might return to grace. He had an
attorney, an impecunious and very aged
gentleman, whose life was a venerable
failure, and who talked so much about his
personal inconveniences from indigestion
that he forgot to take a very keen interest
in the concerns of his client. David’s trial
made no sensation. He did not even have
the cheap sympathy of the morbid. The
court-room was almost empty the dull
spring day when the east wind beat against
the window, jangling the loose panes all
through the reading of the verdict.

Twenty years!

Twenty years in the penitentiary!

David looked up at the judge and smiled.
Men have been known to smile that way
when the car-wheel crashes over their legs,
or a bullet lets the air through their lungs.

All that followed would have seemed
more terrible if it had not appeared to be
so remote. David had to assure himself
over and over that it was really he who was
put in that disgraceful dress, and locked in
that shameful walk from corridor to work-
room, from work-room to chapel. The work
was not much more monotonous than that
to which he had been accustomed in the
office. Here, as there, one was reproved
for not doing the required amount, but never
praised for extraordinary efforts. Here, as
there, the workers regarded each other with
dislike and suspicion. Here, as there, work
was a penalty and not a pleasure.

It is the nights that are to be dreaded in
a penitentiary. Speech eases the brain of
free men; but the man condemned to eternal silence is bound to endure torments.
Thought, which might be a diversion, becomes a curse; it is a painful disease which
becomes chronic. It does not take long to
forget the days of the week and the months
of the year when time brings no variance.
David drugged himself on dreams. He
knew it was weakness, but it was the wine
of forgetfulness, and he indulged in it. He
went over and over, in endless repetition,
every scene in which Zoe Le Baron had
figured.

He learned by a paper that she had gone
to Europe. He was glad of that. For there
were hours in which he imagined that his
fate might have caused her distress — not
much, of course, but perhaps an occasional
hour of sympathetic regret. But it was
pleasanter not to think of that. He preferred to remember the hours they had
spent together while she was teaching him
the joy of life.

How lovely her gray eyes were! Deep,
yet bright, and full of silent little speeches.
The rooms in which he imagined her as
moving were always splendid; the gowns
she wore were of rustling silk. He never in
any dream, waking or sleeping, associated
her with poverty or sorrow or pain. Gay
and beautiful, she moved from city to city,
in these visions of David’s, looking always
at wonderful things, and finding laughter in
every happening.

It was six months after his entrance into
his silent abode that a letter came for him.

“By rights, Culross,” said the warden, “I
should not give this letter to you. It isn’t
the sort we approve of. But you’re in for
a good spell, and if there is anything that
can make life seem more tolerable, I don’t
know but you’re entitled to it. At least,
I’m not the man to deny it to you.”

This was the letter: –

“MY DEAR FRIEND, — I hope you do not
think that all these months, when you have
been suffering so terribly, I have been thinking of other things! But I am sure you
know the truth. You know that I could
not send you word or come to see you, or
I would have done it. When I first heard of
what you had done, I saw it all as it happened, — that dreadful scene, I mean, in the
saloon. I am sure I have imagined everything just as it was. I begged papa to help
you, but he was very angry. You see,
papa was so peculiar. He thought more
of the appearances of things, perhaps, than
of facts. It infuriated him to think of me
as being concerned about you or with you.
I did not know he could be so angry, and
his anger did not die, but for days it cast
such a shadow over me that I used to wish
I was dead. Only I would not disobey him,
and now I am glad of that. We were in
France three months, and then, coming home,
papa died. It was on the voyage. I wish
he had asked me to forgive him, for then
I think I could have remembered him with
more tenderness. But he did nothing of
the kind. He did not seem to think he had
done wrong in any way, though I feel that
some way we might have saved you. I am
back here in Chicago in the old home. But
I shall not stay in this house. It is so large
and lonesome, and I always see you and
father facing each other angrily there in the
parlor when I enter it. So I am going to
get me some cosey rooms in another part of
the city, and take my aunt, who is a sweet
old lady, to live with me; and I am going
to devote my time — all of it — and all of my
brains to getting you out of that terrible
place. What is the use of telling me that
you are a murderer? Do I not know you
could not be brought to hurt anything?
I suppose you must have killed that poor
man, but then it was not you, it was that
dreadful drink — it was Me! That is what
continually haunts me. If I had been a
braver girl, and spoken the words that were
in my heart, you would not have gone into
that place. You would be innocent to-day.
It was I who was responsible for it all. I
let father kill your heart right there before
me, and never said a word. Yet I knew
how it was with you, and — this is what I
ought to have said then, and what I must
say now — and all the time I felt just as
you did. I thought I should die when I
saw you go away, and knew you would
never come back again. Only I was so
selfish, I was so wicked, I would say nothing.

“I have no right to be comfortable and
hopeful, and to have friends, with you shut
up from liberty and happiness. I will not
have those comfortable rooms, after all.
I will live as you do. I will live alone
in a bare room. For it is I who am guilty!
And then I will feel that I also am being
punished.

“Do you hate me? Perhaps my telling
you now all these things, and that I felt
toward you just as you did toward me, will
not make you happy. For it may be that
you despise me.

“Anyway, I have told you the truth now.
I will go as soon as I hear from you to a
lawyer, and try to find out how you may be
liberated. I am sure it can be done when
the facts are known.

“Poor boy! How I do hope you have
known in your heart that I was not forgetting you. Indeed, day or night, I have
thought of nothing else. Now I am free to
help you. And be sure, whatever happens,
that I am working for you.

“ZOE LE BARON.”

That was all. Just a girlish, constrained
letter, hardly hinting at the hot tears that
had been shed for many weary nights, coyly
telling of the impatient young love and all
the maidenly shame.

David permitted himself to read it only
once. Then a sudden resolution was born –
a heroic one. Before he got the letter he
was a crushed and unsophisticated boy;
when he had read it, and absorbed its full
significance, he became suddenly a man,
capable of a great sacrifice.

“I return your letter,” he wrote, without
superscription, “and thank you for your
anxiety about me. But the truth is, I had
forgotten all about you in my trouble. You
were not in the least to blame for what happened. I might have known I would come
to such an end. You thought I was good,
of course; but it is not easy to find out the
life of a young man. It is rather mortifying
to have a private letter sent here, because
the warden reads them all. I hope you will
enjoy yourself this winter, and hasten to
forget one who had certainly forgotten you
till reminded by your letter, which I return.

“Respectfully,

“DAVID CULROSS.”

That night some deep lines came into
his face which never left it, and which made
him look like a man of middle age.

He never doubted that his plan would
succeed; that, piqued and indignant at his
ingratitude, she would hate him, and in a
little time forget he ever lived, or remember
him only to blush with shame at her past
association with him. He saw her happy,
loved, living the usual life of women, with
all those things that make life rich.

For there in the solitude an understanding of deep things came to him. He who
thought never to have a wife grew to know
what the joy of it must be. He perceived
all the subtle rapture of wedded souls. He
learned what the love of children was, the
pride of home, the unselfish ambition for
success that spurs men on. All the emotions passed in procession at night before
him, tricked out in palpable forms.

A burst of girlish tears would dissipate
whatever lingering pity Zoe felt for him.
How often he said that! With her sensitiveness she would be sure to hate a man
who had mortified her.

So he fell to dreaming of her again as
moving among happy and luxurious scenes,
exquisitely clothed, with flowers on her
bosom and jewels on her neck; and he saw
men loving her, and was glad, and saw her
at last loving the best of them, and told
himself in the silence of the night that
it was as he wished.

Yet always, always, from weary week to
weary week, he rehearsed the scenes. They
were his theatre, his opera, his library, his
lecture hall.

He rehearsed them again there on the
cars. He never wearied of them. To be
sure, other thoughts had come to him at
night. Much that to most men seems complex and puzzling had grown to appear
simple to him. In a way his brain had
quickened and deepened through the years
of solitude. He had thought out a great
many things. He had read a few good
books and digested them, and the visions in
his heart had kept him from being bitter.

Yet, suddenly confronted with liberty,
turned loose like a pastured colt, without
master or rein, he felt only confusion and
dismay. He might be expected to feel exultation. He experienced only fright. It
is precisely the same with the liberated colt.

The train pulled into a bustling station,
in which the multitudinous noises were
thrown back again from the arched iron
roof. The relentless haste of all the people
was inexpressibly cruel to the man who
looked from the window wondering whither
he would go, and if, among all the thousands
that made up that vast and throbbing city,
he would ever find a friend.

For a moment David longed even for
that unmaternal mother who had forgotten
him in the hour of his distress; but she had
been dead for many years.

The train stopped. Every one got out.
David forced himself to his feet and followed.
He had been driven back into the world.
It would have seemed less terrible to have
been driven into a desert. He walked
toward the great iron gates, seeing the
people and hearing the noises confusedly.

As he entered the space beyond the grating some one caught him by the arm. It
was a little middle-aged woman in plain
clothes, and with sad gray eyes.

“Is this David?” said she.

He did not speak, but his face answered
her.

“I knew you were coming to-day. I’ve
waited all these years, David. You didn’t
think I believed what you said in that letter
did you? This way, David, — this is the
way home.”

THEY called it the room of the Evil
Thought. It was really the pleasantest
room in the house, and
when the place had been used as
the rectory, was the minister’s study. It
looked out on a mournful clump of larches,
such as may often be seen in the old-fashioned
yards in Michigan, and these threw a
tender gloom over the apartment.

There was a wide fireplace in the room,
and it had been the young minister’s habit
to sit there hours and hours, staring ahead of
him at the fire, and smoking moodily. The
replenishing of the fire and of his pipe, it
was said, would afford him occupation all
the day long, and that was how it came about
that his parochial duties were neglected so
that, little by little, the people became dissatisfied
with him, though he was an eloquent
young man, who could send his congregation
away drunk on his influence. However, the
calmer pulsed among his parish began to
whisper that it was indeed the influence of
the young minister and not that of the Holy
Ghost which they felt, and it was finally
decided that neither animal magnetism nor
hypnotism were good substitutes for religion.
And so they let him go.

The new rector moved into a smart brick
house on the other side of the church, and
gave receptions and dinner parties, and was
punctilious about making his calls. The
people therefore liked him very much — so
much that they raised the debt on the church
and bought a chime of bells, in their enthusiasm.
Every one was lighter of heart than
under the ministration of the previous rector.
A burden appeared to be lifted from the community.
True, there were a few who confessed
the new man did not give them the
food for thought which the old one had done,
but, then, the former rector had made them
uncomfortable! He had not only made them
conscious of the sins of which they were
already guilty, but also of those for which
they had the latent capacity. A strange and
fatal man, whom women loved to their sorrow,
and whom simple men could not understand!
It was generally agreed that the parish
was well rid of him.

“He was a genius,” said the people in
commiseration. The word was an uncomplimentary
epithet with them.

When the Hanscoms moved in the house
which had been the old rectory, they gave
Grandma Hanscom the room with the fireplace.
Grandma was well pleased. The
roaring fire warmed her heart as well as her
chill old body, and she wept with weak joy
when she looked at the larches, because they
reminded her of the house she had lived in
when she was first married. All the forenoon
of the first day she was busy putting things
away in bureau drawers and closets, but by
afternoon she was ready to sit down in her
high-backed rocker and enjoy the comforts of
her room.

She nodded a bit before the fire, as she
usually did after luncheon, and then she
awoke with an awful start and sat staring
before her with such a look in her gentle,
filmy old eyes as had never been there before.
She did not move, except to rock slightly,
and the Thought grew and grew till her face
was disguised as by some hideous mask of
tragedy.

By and by the children came pounding at
the door.

“Oh, grandma, let us in, please. We
want to see your new room, and mamma
gave us some ginger cookies on a plate, and
we want to give some to you.”

The door gave way under their assaults, and
the three little ones stood peeping in, waiting
for permission to enter. But it did not
seem to be their grandma — their own dear
grandma — who arose and tottered toward
them in fierce haste, crying:

“Away, away! Out of my sight! Out of
my sight before I do the thing I want to do!
Such a terrible thing! Send some one to me
quick, children, children! Send some one
quick!”

They fled with feet shod with fear, and
their mother came, and Grandma Hanscom
sank down and clung about her skirts and
sobbed:

“Tie me, Miranda. Make me fast to the
bed or the wall. Get some one to watch me.
For I want to do an awful thing!”

They put the trembling old creature in bed,
and she raved there all the night long and
cried out to be held, and to be kept from
doing the fearful thing, whatever it was — for
she never said what it was.

The next morning some one suggested taking
her in the sitting-room where she would
be with the family. So they laid her on the
sofa, hemmed around with cushions, and
before long she was her quiet self again,
though exhausted, naturally, with the tumult
of the previous night. Now and then, as the
children played about her, a shadow crept
over her face — a shadow as of cold remembrance –
and then the perplexed tears
followed.

When she seemed as well as ever they put
her back in her room. But though the fire
glowed and the lamp burned, as soon as ever
she was alone they heard her shrill cries ringing
to them that the Evil Thought had come
again. So Hal, who was home from college,
carried her up to his room, which
she seemed to like very well. Then he went
down to have a smoke before grandma’s
fire.

The next morning he was absent from breakfast.
They thought he might have gone for
an early walk, and waited for him a few minutes.
Then his sister went to the room that
looked upon the larches, and found him
dressed and pacing the floor with a face set
and stern. He had not been in bed at all,
as she saw at once. His eyes were bloodshot,
his face stricken as if with old age or sin or
– but she could not make it out. When he
saw her he sank in a chair and covered his
face with his hands, and between the trembling
fingers she could see drops of perspiration on
his forehead.

“Hal!” she cried, “Hal, what is it?”

But for answer he threw his arms about the
little table and clung to it, and looked at her
with tortured eyes, in which she fancied she
saw a gleam of hate. She ran, screaming,
from the room, and her father came and went
up to him and laid his hands on the boy’s
shoulders. And then a fearful thing happened.
All the family saw it. There could
be no mistake. Hal’s hands found their way
with frantic eagerness toward his father’s
throat as if they would choke him, and the
look in his eyes was so like a madman’s that
his father raised his fist and felled him as he
used to fell men years before in the college
fights, and then dragged him into the sittingroom
and wept over him.

By evening, however, Hal was all right, and
the family said it must have been a fever, –
perhaps from overstudy, — at which Hal covertly
smiled. But his father was still too
anxious about him to let him out of his sight,
so he put him on a cot in his room, and thus
it chanced that the mother and Grace concluded
to sleep together downstairs.

The two women made a sort of festival of
it, and drank little cups of chocolate before
the fire, and undid and brushed their brown
braids, and smiled at each other, understandingly,
with that sweet intuitive sympathy
which women have, and Grace told her
mother a number of things which she had
been waiting for just such an auspicious occasion
to confide.

But the larches were noisy and cried out
with wild voices, and the flame of the fire
grew blue and swirled about in the draught
sinuously, so that a chill crept upon the two.
Something cold appeared to envelop them –
such a chill as pleasure voyagers feel when
a berg steals beyond Newfoundland and
glows blue and threatening upon their ocean
path.

Then came something else which was not
cold, but hot as the flames of hell — and they
saw red, and stared at each other with maddened
eyes, and then ran together from the
room and clasped in close embrace safe
beyond the fatal place, and thanked God
they had not done the thing that they dared
not speak of — the thing which suddenly came
to them to do.

So they called it the room of the Evil
Thought. They could not account for it.
They avoided the thought of it, being healthy
and happy folk. But none entered it more.
The door was locked.

One day, Hal, reading the paper, came
across a paragraph concerning the young minister
who had once lived there, and who had
thought and written there and so influenced
the lives of those about him that they remembered
him even while they disapproved.

“He cut a man’s throat on board ship for
Australia,” said he, “and then he cut his own,
without fatal effect — and jumped overboard,
and so ended it. What a strange thing!”

Then they all looked at one another with
subtle looks, and a shadow fell upon them
and stayed the blood at their hearts.

The next week the room of the Evil Thought
was pulled down to make way for a pansy bed,
which is quite gay and innocent, and blooms
all the better because the larches, with their
eternal murmuring, have been laid low and
carted away to the sawmill.

TIM O’CONNOR — who was descended
from the O’Conors with
one N — started life as a poet
and an enthusiast. His mother
had designed him for the priesthood, and at
the age of fifteen, most of his verses had an
ecclesiastical tinge, but, somehow or other,
he got into the newspaper business instead,
and became a pessimistic gentleman, with a
literary style of great beauty and an income
of modest proportions. He fell in with men
who talked of art for art’s sake, — though
what right they had to speak of art at all
nobody knew, — and little by little his view
of life and love became more or less profane.
He met a woman who sucked his
heart’s blood, and he knew it and made no
protest; nay, to the great amusement of the
fellows who talked of art for art’s sake, he
went the length of marrying her. He could
not in decency explain that he had the traditions
of fine gentlemen behind him and
so had to do as he did, because his friends
might not have understood. He laughed at
the days when he had thought of the priesthood,
blushed when he ran across any of
those tender and exquisite old verses he had
written in his youth, and became addicted
to absinthe and other less peculiar drinks,
and to gaming a little to escape a madness
of ennui.

As the years went by he avoided, with
more and more scorn, that part of the world
which he denominated Philistine, and consorted
only with the fellows who flocked about
Jim O’Malley’s saloon. He was pleased with
solitude, or with these convivial wits, and with
not very much else beside. Jim O’Malley
was a sort of Irish poem, set to inspiring
measure. He was, in fact, a Hibernian
Mæcenas, who knew better than to put bad
whiskey before a man of talent, or tell a trite
tale in the presence of a wit. The recountal
of his disquisitions on politics and other current
matters had enabled no less than three
men to acquire national reputations; and a
number of wretches, having gone the way of
men who talk of art for art’s sake, and dying
in foreign lands, or hospitals, or asylums,
having no one else to be homesick for, had
been homesick for Jim O’Malley, and wept
for the sound of his voice and the grasp of
his hearty hand.

When Tim O’Connor turned his back upon
most of the things he was born to and took
up with the life which he consistently lived
till the unspeakable end, he was unable to
get rid of certain peculiarities. For example,
in spite of all his debauchery, he continued
to look like the Beloved Apostle. Notwithstanding
abject friendships he wrote limpid
and noble English. Purity seemed to dog his
heels, no matter how violently he attempted
to escape from her. He was never so drunk
that he was not an exquisite, and even his
creditors, who had become inured to his
deceptions, confessed it was a privilege to
meet so perfect a gentleman. The creature
who held him in bondage, body and soul,
actually came to love him for his gentleness,
and for some quality which baffled her, and
made her ache with a strange longing which
she could not define. Not that she ever defined
anything, poor little beast! She had
skin the color of pale gold, and yellow eyes
with brown lights in them, and great plaits
of straw-colored hair. About her lips was a
fatal and sensuous smile, which, when it got
hold of a man’s imagination, would not let
it go, but held to it, and mocked it till the
day of his death. She was the incarnation
of the Eternal Feminine, with all the wifeliness
and the maternity left out — she was
ancient, yet ever young, and familiar as joy
or tears or sin.

She took good care of Tim in some ways:
fed him well, nursed him back to reason after
a period of hard drinking, saw that he put
on overshoes when the walks were wet, and
looked after his money. She even prized
his brain, for she discovered that it was a
delicate little machine which produced gold.
By association with him and his friends, she
learned that a number of apparently useless
things had value in the eyes of certain convenient
fools, and so she treasured the autographs
of distinguished persons who wrote to
him — autographs which he disdainfully tossed
in the waste basket. She was careful with
presentation copies from authors, and she
went the length of urging Tim to write a
book himself. But at that he balked.

“Write a book!” he cried to her, his gentle
face suddenly white with passion. “Who
am I to commit such a profanation?”

She didn’t know what he meant, but she
had a theory that it was dangerous to excite
him, and so she sat up till midnight to cook
a chop for him when he came home that night.

He preferred to have her sitting up for him,
and he wanted every electric light in their
apartments turned to the full. If, by any
chance, they returned together to a dark
house, he would not enter till she touched the
button in the hall, and illuminated the room.
Or if it so happened that the lights were
turned off in the night time, and he awoke to
find himself in darkness, he shrieked till the
woman came running to his relief, and, with
derisive laughter, turned them on again. But
when she found that after these frights he lay
trembling and white in his bed, she began to
be alarmed for the clever, gold-making little
machine, and to renew her assiduities, and to
horde more tenaciously than ever, those valuable
curios on which she some day expected to
realize when he was out of the way, and no
longer in a position to object to their barter.

O’Connor’s idiosyncrasy of fear was a
source of much amusement among the boys
at the office where he worked. They made
open sport of it, and yet, recognizing him
for a sensitive plant, and granting that genius
was entitled to whimsicalities, it was their
custom when they called for him after work
hours, to permit him to reach the lighted corridor
before they turned out the gas over his
desk. This, they reasoned, was but a slight
service to perform for the most enchanting
beggar in the world.

“Dear fellow,” said Rick Dodson, who
loved him, “is it the Devil you expect to see?
And if so, why are you averse? Surely the
Devil is not such a bad old chap.”

“You haven’t found him so?”

“Tim, by heaven, you know, you ought to
explain to me. A citizen of the world and
a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to
know what there is to know! Now you’re a
man of sense, in spite of a few bad habits –
such as myself, for example. Is this fad of
yours madness? — which would be quite to
your credit, — for gadzooks, I like a lunatic!
Or is it the complaint of a man who has gathered
too much data on the subject of Old
Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something more
occult, and therefore more interesting?”

“Rick, boy,” said Tim, “you’re too — inquiring!”
And he turned to his desk with a
look of delicate hauteur.

It was the very next night that these two
tippling pessimists spent together talking about
certain disgruntled but immortal gentlemen,
who, having said their say and made the world
quite uncomfortable, had now journeyed on
to inquire into the nothingness which they
postulated. The dawn was breaking in the
muggy east; the bottles were empty, the cigars
burnt out. Tim turned toward his friend with
a sharp breaking of sociable silence.

“Rick,” he said, “do you know that Fear
has a Shape?”

“And so has my nose!”

“You asked me the other night what I
feared. Holy father, I make my confession
to you. What I fear is Fear.”

“That’s because you’ve drunk too much –
or not enough.

“‘Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your winter garment of repentance fling –’”

“My costume then would be too nebulous
for this weather, dear boy. But it’s true what
I was saying. I am afraid of ghosts.”

“For an agnostic that seems a bit –”

“Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic
that I do not even know that I do not know!
God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts
– no — no things which shape themselves?
Why, there are things I have done –”

“Don’t think of them, my boy! See,
‘night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund
day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain
top.’”

Tim looked about him with a sickly smile.
He looked behind him and there was nothing
there; stared at the blank window, where the
smoky dawn showed its offensive face, and
there was nothing there. He pushed away
the moist hair from his haggard face — that
face which would look like the blessed St.
John, and leaned heavily back in his chair.

“‘Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I,’”
he murmured drowsily, “‘it is some meteor
which the sun exhales, to be to thee this
night –’”

The words floated off in languid nothingness,
and he slept. Dodson arose preparatory
to stretching himself on his couch. But first
he bent over his friend with a sense of tragic
appreciation.

“Damned by the skin of his teeth!” he muttered.
A little more, and he would have
gone right, and the Devil would have lost a
good fellow. As it is” — he smiled with his
usual conceited delight in his own sayings,
even when they were uttered in soliloquy — “he
is merely one of those splendid gentlemen one
will meet with in hell.” Then Dodson had a
momentary nostalgia for goodness himself,
but he soon overcame it, and stretching himself
on his sofa, he, too, slept.

That night he and O’Connor went together
to hear “Faust” sung, and returning to the
office, Dodson prepared to write his criticism.
Except for the distant clatter of telegraph
instruments, or the peremptory cries of
“copy” from an upper room, the office was
still. Dodson wrote and smoked his interminable
cigarettes; O’ Connor rested his head
in his hands on the desk, and sat in perfect
silence. He did not know when Dodson finished,
or when, arising, and absent-mindedly
extinguishing the lights, he moved to the
door with his copy in his hands. Dodson
gathered up the hats and coats as he passed
them where they lay on a chair, and called:

“It is done, Tim. Come, let’s get out of
this.”

There was no answer, and he thought Tim
was following, but after he had handed his
criticism to the city editor, he saw he was
still alone, and returned to the room for his
friend. He advanced no further than the
doorway, for, as he stood in the dusky corridor
and looked within the darkened room,
he saw before his friend a Shape, white, of
perfect loveliness, divinely delicate and pure
and ethereal, which seemed as the embodiment
of all goodness. From it came a soft
radiance and a perfume softer than the wind
when “it breathes upon a bank of violets
stealing and giving odor.” Staring at it,
with eyes immovable, sat his friend.

It was strange that at sight of a thing so
unspeakably fair, a coldness like that which
comes from the jewel-blue lips of a Muir
crevasse should have fallen upon Dodson, or
that it was only by summoning all the manhood
that was left in him, that he was able
to restore light to the room, and to rush to
his friend. When he reached poor Tim he
was stone-still with paralysis. They took
him home to the woman, who nursed him out
of that attack — and later on worried him into
another.

When he was able to sit up and jeer at
things a little again, and help himself to the
quail the woman broiled for him, Dodson,
sitting beside him, said:

“Did you call that little exhibition of yours
legerdemain, Tim, you sweep? Or are you
really the Devil’s bairn?”

“It was the Shape of Fear,” said Tim, quite
seriously.

“But it seemed mild as mother’s milk.”

“It was compounded of the good I might
have done. It is that which I fear.”

He would explain no more. Later — many
months later — he died patiently and sweetly
in the madhouse, praying for rest. The little
beast with the yellow eyes had high mass celebrated
for him, which, all things considered,
was almost as pathetic as it was amusing.

Dodson was in Vienna when he heard of it.

“Sa, sa!” cried he. “I wish it wasn’t so
dark in the tomb! What do you suppose Tim
is looking at?”

As for Jim O’Malley, he was with difficulty
kept from illuminating the grave with
electricity.

WILLIAM PERCY CECIL happened
to be a younger son, so he left home
– which was England — and went
to Kansas to ranch it. Thousands
of younger sons do the same, only their destination
is not invariably Kansas.

An agent at Wichita picked out Cecil’s
farm for him and sent the deeds over to England
before Cecil left. He said there was a
house on the place. So Cecil’s mother fitted
him out for America just as she had fitted
out another superfluous boy for Africa, and
parted from him with an heroic front and big
agonies of mother-ache which she kept to
herself.

The boy bore up the way a man of his
blood ought, but when he went out to the
kennel to see Nita, his collie, he went to
pieces somehow, and rolled on the grass with
her in his arms and wept like a booby. But
the remarkable part of it was that Nita wept
too, big, hot dog tears which her master
wiped away. When he went off she howled
like a hungry baby, and had to be switched
before she would give any one a night’s sleep.

When Cecil got over on his Kansas place
he fitted up the shack as cosily as he could,
and learned how to fry bacon and make soda
biscuits. Incidentally, he did farming, and
sunk a heap of money, finding out how not
to do things. Meantime, the Americans
laughed at him, and were inclined to turn
the cold shoulder, and his compatriots, of
whom there were a number in the county,
did not prove to his liking. They consoled
themselves for their exiled state in fashions
not in keeping with Cecil’s traditions. His
homesickness went deeper than theirs, perhaps,
and American whiskey could not make
up for the loss of his English home, nor flirtations
with the gay American village girls
quite compensate him for the loss of his
English mother. So he kept to himself and
had nostalgia as some men have consumption.

At length the loneliness got so bad that he
had to see some living thing from home, or
make a flunk of it and go back like a cry
baby. He had a stiff pride still, though he
sobbed himself to sleep more than one night,
as many a pioneer has done before him. So
he wrote home for Nita, the collie, and got
word that she would be sent. Arrangements
were made for her care all along the line, and
she was properly boxed and shipped.

As the time drew near for her arrival, Cecil
could hardly eat. He was too excited to
apply himself to anything. The day of her
expected arrival he actually got up at five
o’clock to clean the house and make it look
as fine as possible for her inspection. Then
he hitched up and drove fifteen miles to get
her. The train pulled out just before he
reached the station, so Nita in her box was
waiting for him on the platform. He could
see her in a queer way, as one sees the purple
centre of a revolving circle of light; for, to
tell the truth, with the long ride in the morning
sun, and the beating of his heart, Cecil
was only about half-conscious of anything.
He wanted to yell, but he didn’t. He kept
himself in hand and lifted up the sliding
side of the box and called to Nita, and she
came out.

But it wasn’t the man who fainted, though
he might have done so, being crazy homesick
as he was, and half-fed and overworked
while he was yet soft from an easy life. No,
it was the dog! She looked at her master’s
face, gave one cry of inexpressible joy, and
fell over in a real feminine sort of a faint,
and had to be brought to like any other lady,
with camphor and water and a few drops of
spirit down her throat. Then Cecil got up
on the wagon seat, and she sat beside him
with her head on his arm, and they rode home
in absolute silence, each feeling too much for
speech. After they reached home, however,
Cecil showed her all over the place, and she
barked out her ideas in glad sociability.

After that Cecil and Nita were inseparable.
She walked beside him all day when he was
out with the cultivator, or when he was mowing
or reaping. She ate beside him at table
and slept across his feet at night. Evenings
when he looked over the Graphic from
home, or read the books his mother sent him,
that he might keep in touch with the world,
Nita was beside him, patient, but jealous.
Then, when he threw his book or paper down
and took her on his knee and looked into her
pretty eyes, or frolicked with her, she fairly
laughed with delight.

In short, she was faithful with that faith of
which only a dog is capable — that unquestioning
faith to which even the most loving
women never quite attain.

However, Fate was annoyed at this perfect
friendship. It didn’t give her enough to do,
and Fate is a restless thing with a horrible
appetite for variety. So poor Nita died one
day mysteriously, and gave her last look to
Cecil as a matter of course; and he held her
paws till the last moment, as a stanch friend
should, and laid her away decently in a
pine box in the cornfield, where he could be
shielded from public view if he chose to go
there now and then and sit beside her grave.

He went to bed very lonely, indeed, the
first night. The shack seemed to him to be
removed endless miles from the other habitations
of men. He seemed cut off from the
world, and ached to hear the cheerful little
barks which Nita had been in the habit of
giving him by way of good night. Her amiable
eye with its friendly light was missing,
the gay wag of her tail was gone; all her
ridiculous ways, at which he was never tired
of laughing, were things of the past.

He lay down, busy with these thoughts,
yet so habituated to Nita’s presence, that
when her weight rested upon his feet, as
usual, he felt no surprise. But after a moment
it came to him that as she was dead the
weight he felt upon his feet could not be
hers. And yet, there it was, warm and comfortable,
cuddling down in the familiar way.
He actually sat up and put his hand down
to the foot of the bed to discover what was
there. But there was nothing there, save
the weight. And that stayed with him that
night and many nights after.

It happened that Cecil was a fool, as men
will be when they are young, and he worked
too hard, and didn’t take proper care of himself;
and so it came about that he fell sick
with a low fever. He struggled around for a
few days, trying to work it off, but one morning
he awoke only to the consciousness of
absurd dreams. He seemed to be on the sea,
sailing for home, and the boat was tossing
and pitching in a weary circle, and could
make no headway. His heart was burning
with impatience, but the boat went round and
round in that endless circle till he shrieked
out with agony.

The next neighbors were the Taylors, who
lived two miles and a half away. They were
awakened that morning by the howling of a
dog before their door. It was a hideous
sound and would give them no peace. So
Charlie Taylor got up and opened the door,
discovering there an excited little collie.

“Why, Tom,” he called, “I thought Cecil’s
collie was dead!”

“She is,” called back Tom.

“No, she ain’t neither, for here she is,
shakin’ like an aspin, and a beggin’ me to
go with her. Come out, Tom, and see.”

It was Nita, no denying, and the men, perplexed,
followed her to Cecil’s shack, where
they found him babbling.

But that was the last of her. Cecil said he
never felt her on his feet again. She had
performed her final service for him, he said.
The neighbors tried to laugh at the story at
first, but they knew the Taylors wouldn’t take
the trouble to lie, and as for Cecil, no one
would have ventured to chaff him.

VIRGIL HOYT is a photographer’s
assistant up at St. Paul, and enjoys
his work without being consumed
by it. He has been in search of the
picturesque all over the West and hundreds
of miles to the north, in Canada, and can
speak three or four Indian dialects and put a
canoe through the rapids. That is to say,
he is a man of adventure, and no dreamer.
He can fight well and shoot better, and swim
so as to put up a winning race with the Indian
boys, and he can sit in the saddle all day
and not worry about it to-morrow.

Wherever he goes, he carries a camera.

“The world,” Hoyt is in the habit of saying
to those who sit with him when he smokes
his pipe, “was created in six days to be photographed.
Man — and particularly woman –
was made for the same purpose. Clouds are
not made to give moisture nor trees to cast
shade. They have been created in order to
give the camera obscura something to do.”

In short, Virgil Hoyt’s view of the world
is whimsical, and he likes to be bothered
neither with the disagreeable nor the mysterious.
That is the reason he loathes and detests
going to a house of mourning to photograph
a corpse. The bad taste of it offends him,
but above all, he doesn’t like the necessity of
shouldering, even for a few moments, a part
of the burden of sorrow which belongs to
some one else. He dislikes sorrow, and
would willingly canoe five hundred miles up
the cold Canadian rivers to get rid of it.
Nevertheless, as assistant photographer, it is
often his duty to do this very kind of thing.

Not long ago he was sent for by a rich Jewish
family to photograph the remains of the
mother, who had just died. He was put out,
but he was only an assistant, and he went.
He was taken to the front parlor, where the
dead woman lay in her coffin. It was evident
to him that there was some excitement in the
household, and that a discussion was going on.
But Hoyt said to himself that it didn’t concern
him, and he therefore paid no attention
to it.

The daughter wanted the coffin turned on
end in order that the corpse might face the
camera properly, but Hoyt said he could overcome
the recumbent attitude and make it appear
that the face was taken in the position
it would naturally hold in life, and so they
went out and left him alone with the dead.

The face of the deceased was a strong and
positive one, such as may often be seen among
Jewish matrons. Hoyt regarded it with some
admiration, thinking to himself that she was a
woman who had known what she wanted, and
who, once having made up her mind, would
prove immovable. Such a character appealed
to Hoyt. He reflected that he might have
married if only he could have found a woman
with strength of character sufficient to disagree
with him. There was a strand of hair out of
place on the dead woman’s brow, and he
gently pushed it back. A bud lifted its head
too high from among the roses on her breast
and spoiled the contour of the chin, so he
broke it off. He remembered these things
later with keen distinctness, and that his hand
touched her chill face two or three times in
the making of his arrangements.

Then he took the impression, and left the
house.

He was busy at the time with some railroad
work, and several days passed before he found
opportunity to develop the plates. He took
them from the bath in which they had lain
with a number of others, and went energetically
to work upon them, whistling some very
saucy songs he had learned of the guide in
the Red River country, and trying to forget
that the face which was presently to appear
was that of a dead woman. He had used
three plates as a precaution against accident,
and they came up well. But as they developed,
he became aware of the existence of
something in the photograph which had not
been apparent to his eye in the subject. He
was irritated, and without attempting to face
the mystery, he made a few prints and laid
them aside, ardently hoping that by some
chance they would never be called for.

However, as luck would have it, — and
Hoyt’s luck never had been good, — his employer
asked one day what had become of
those photographs. Hoyt tried to evade
making an answer, but the effort was futile,
and he had to get out the finished prints and
exhibit them. The older man sat staring at
them a long time.

“Hoyt,” he said, “you’re a young man, and
very likely you have never seen anything like
this before. But I have. Not exactly the same
thing, perhaps, but similar phenomena have
come my way a number of times since I went in
the business, and I want to tell you there are
things in heaven and earth not dreamt of –”

“Oh, I know all that tommy-rot,” cried
Hoyt, angrily, “but when anything happens I
want to know the reason why and how it is
done.”

“All right,” answered his employer, “then
you might explain why and how the sun rises.”

But he humored the young man sufficiently
to examine with him the baths in which the
plates were submerged, and the plates themselves.
All was as it should be; but the mystery
was there, and could not be done away
with.

Hoyt hoped against hope that the friends
of the dead woman would somehow forget
about the photographs; but the idea was unreasonable,
and one day, as a matter of
course, the daughter appeared and asked to
see the pictures of her mother.

“Well, to tell the truth,” stammered Hoyt,
“they didn’t come out quite — quite as well
as we could wish.”

“But let me see them,” persisted the lady.
“I’d like to look at them anyhow.”

“Well, now,” said Hoyt, trying to be
soothing, as he believed it was always best
to be with women, — to tell the truth he was
an ignoramus where women were concerned,
– “I think it would be better if you didn’t
look at them. There are reasons why –”
he ambled on like this, stupid man that he
was, till the lady naturally insisted upon seeing
the pictures without a moment’s delay.

So poor Hoyt brought them out and placed
them in her hand, and then ran for the water
pitcher, and had to be at the bother of bathing
her forehead to keep her from fainting.

For what the lady saw was this: Over face
and flowers and the head of the coffin fell a
thick veil, the edges of which touched the
floor in some places. It covered the features
so well that not a hint of them was
visible.

“There was nothing over mother’s face!”
cried the lady at length.

“Not a thing,” acquiesced Hoyt. “I
know, because I had occasion to touch her
face just before I took the picture. I put
some of her hair back from her brow.”

“What does it mean, then?” asked the
lady.

“You know better than I. There is no explanation
in science. Perhaps there is some
in — in psychology.”

“Well,” said the young woman, stammering
a little and coloring, “mother was a good
woman, but she always wanted her own way,
and she always had it, too.”

“Yes.”

“And she never would have her picture
taken. She didn’t admire her own appearance.
She said no one should ever see a
picture of her.”

“So?” said Hoyt, meditatively. “Well,
she’s kept her word, hasn’t she?”

The two stood looking at the photographs
for a time. Then Hoyt pointed to the open
blaze in the grate.

“Throw them in,” he commanded. “Don’t
let your father see them — don’t keep them
yourself. They wouldn’t be agreeable things
to keep.”

“That’s true enough,” admitted the lady.
And she threw them in the fire. Then Virgil
Hoyt brought out the plates and broke
them before her eyes.

And that was the end of it — except that
Hoyt sometimes tells the story to those who
sit beside him when his pipe is lighted.

THERE had always been strange
stories about the house, but it
was a sensible, comfortable sort
of a neighborhood, and people
took pains to say to one another that there
was nothing in these tales — of course not!
Absolutely nothing! How could there be?
It was a matter of common remark, however,
that considering the amount of money the
Nethertons had spent on the place, it was
curious they lived there so little. They were
nearly always away, — up North in the summer
and down South in the winter, and over
to Paris or London now and then, — and when
they did come home it was only to entertain
a number of guests from the city. The place
was either plunged in gloom or gayety. The
old gardener who kept house by himself in
the cottage at the back of the yard had things
much his own way by far the greater part of
the time.

Dr. Block and his wife lived next door to
the Nethertons, and he and his wife, who
were so absurd as to be very happy in each
other’s company, had the benefit of the beautiful
yard. They walked there mornings when
the leaves were silvered with dew, and evenings
they sat beside the lily pond and listened
for the whip-poor-will. The doctor’s wife
moved her room over to that side of the
house which commanded a view of the yard,
and thus made the honeysuckles and laurel
and clematis and all the masses of tossing
greenery her own. Sitting there day after
day with her sewing, she speculated about the
mystery which hung impalpably yet undeniably
over the house.

It happened one night when she and her
husband had gone to their room, and were
congratulating themselves on the fact that he
had no very sick patients and was likely to
enjoy a good night’s rest, that a ring came at
the door.

“If it’s any one wanting you to leave
home,” warned his wife, “you must tell them
you are all worn out. You’ve been disturbed
every night this week, and it’s too much!”

The young physician went downstairs. At
the door stood a man whom he had never
seen before.

“My wife is lying very ill next door,” said
the stranger, “so ill that I fear she will not
live till morning. Will you please come to
her at once?”

“Next door?” cried the physician. “I
didn’t know the Nethertons were home!”

“Please hasten,” begged the man. “I must
go back to her. Follow as quickly as you
can.”

The doctor went back upstairs to complete
his toilet.

“How absurd,” protested his wife when she
heard the story. “There is no one at the
Nethertons’. I sit where I can see the front
door, and no one can enter without my knowing
it, and I have been sewing by the window
all day. If there were any one in the house,
the gardener would have the porch lantern
lighted. It is some plot. Some one has
designs on you. You must not go.”

But he went. As he left the room his wife
placed a revolver in his pocket.

The great porch of the mansion was dark,
but the physician made out that the door was
open, and he entered. A feeble light came
from the bronze lamp at the turn of the stairs,
and by it he found his way, his feet sinking
noiselessly in the rich carpets. At the head
of the stairs the man met him. The doctor
thought himself a tall man, but the stranger
topped him by half a head. He motioned
the physician to follow him, and the two went
down the hall to the front room. The place
was flushed with a rose-colored glow from
several lamps. On a silken couch, in the
midst of pillows, lay a woman dying with
consumption. She was like a lily, white,
shapely, graceful, with feeble yet charming
movements. She looked at the doctor appealingly,
then, seeing in his eyes the involuntary
verdict that her hour was at hand,
she turned toward her companion with a
glance of anguish. Dr. Block asked a few
questions. The man answered them, the
woman remaining silent. The physician administered
something stimulating, and then
wrote a prescription which he placed on the
mantel-shelf.

“The drug store is closed to-night,” he
said, “and I fear the druggist has gone home.
You can have the prescription filled the first
thing in the morning, and I will be over
before breakfast.”

After that, there was no reason why he
should not have gone home. Yet, oddly
enough, he preferred to stay. Nor was it
professional anxiety that prompted this delay.
He longed to watch those mysterious persons,
who, almost oblivious of his presence,
were speaking their mortal farewells in their
glances, which were impassioned and of unutterable
sadness.

He sat as if fascinated. He watched the
glitter of rings on the woman’s long, white
hands, he noted the waving of light hair
about her temples, he observed the details of
her gown of soft white silk which fell about
her in voluminous folds. Now and then the
man gave her of the stimulant which the doctor
had provided; sometimes he bathed her
face with water. Once he paced the floor
for a moment till a motion of her hand
quieted him.

After a time, feeling that it would be more
sensible and considerate of him to leave, the
doctor made his way home. His wife was
awake, impatient to hear of his experiences.
She listened to his tale in silence, and when
he had finished she turned her face to the
wall and made no comment.

“You seem to be ill, my dear,” he said.
“You have a chill. You are shivering.”

“I have no chill,” she replied sharply.
“But I — well, you may leave the light
burning.”

The next morning before breakfast the doctor
crossed the dewy sward to the Netherton
house. The front door was locked, and no
one answered to his repeated ringings. The
old gardener chanced to be cutting the grass
near at hand, and he came running up.

“What you ringin’ that door-bell for, doctor?”
said he. “The folks ain’t come home
yet. There ain’t nobody there.”

“Yes, there is, Jim. I was called here last
night. A man came for me to attend his
wife. They must both have fallen asleep that
the bell is not answered. I wouldn’t be surprised
to find her dead, as a matter of fact.
She was a desperately sick woman. Perhaps
she is dead and something has happened to
him. You have the key to the door, Jim.
Let me in.”

But the old man was shaking in every limb,
and refused to do as he was bid.

“Don’t you never go in there, doctor,”
whispered he, with chattering teeth. “Don’t
you go for to ‘tend no one. You jus’ come
tell me when you sent for that way. No, I
ain’t goin’ in, doctor, nohow. It ain’t part
of my duties to go in. That’s been stipulated
by Mr. Netherton. It’s my business to look
after the garden.”

Argument was useless. Dr. Block took the
bunch of keys from the old man’s pocket and
himself unlocked the front door and entered.
He mounted the steps and made his way to
the upper room. There was no evidence of
occupancy. The place was silent, and, so far
as living creature went, vacant. The dust lay
over everything. It covered the delicate
damask of the sofa where he had seen the
dying woman. It rested on the pillows. The
place smelled musty and evil, as if it had not
been used for a long time. The lamps of the
room held not a drop of oil.

But on the mantel-shelf was the prescription
which the doctor had written the night
before. He read it, folded it, and put it in
his pocket.

As he locked the outside door the old gardener
came running to him.

“Don’t you never go up there again, will
you?” he pleaded, “not unless you see all the
Nethertons home and I come for you myself.
You won’t, doctor?”

“No,” said the doctor.

When he told his wife she kissed him, and
said:

“Next time when I tell you to stay at home,
you must stay!”

THE first time one looked at Elsbeth,
one was not prepossessed.
She was thin and brown, her nose
turned slightly upward, her toes
went in just a perceptible degree, and her
hair was perfectly straight. But when one
looked longer, one perceived that she was a
charming little creature. The straight hair
was as fine as silk, and hung in funny little
braids down her back; there was not a flaw
in her soft brown skin, and her mouth was
tender and shapely. But her particular charm
lay in a look which she habitually had, of
seeming to know curious things — such as it
is not allotted to ordinary persons to know.
One felt tempted to say to her:

“What are these beautiful things which
you know, and of which others are ignorant?
What is it you see with those wise and pellucid
eyes? Why is it that everybody loves
you?”

Elsbeth was my little godchild, and I knew
her better than I knew any other child in the
world. But still I could not truthfully say
that I was familiar with her, for to me her
spirit was like a fair and fragrant road in the
midst of which I might walk in peace and
joy, but where I was continually to discover
something new. The last time I saw her
quite well and strong was over in the woods
where she had gone with her two little
brothers and her nurse to pass the hottest
weeks of summer. I followed her, foolish old
creature that I was, just to be near her, for I
needed to dwell where the sweet aroma of her
life could reach me.

One morning when I came from my room,
limping a little, because I am not so young as
I used to be, and the lake wind works havoc
with me, my little godchild came dancing to
me singing:

“Come with me and I’ll show you my
places, my places, my places!”

Miriam, when she chanted by the Red Sea
might have been more exultant, but she could
not have been more bewitching. Of course
I knew what “places” were, because I had
once been a little girl myself, but unless you
are acquainted with the real meaning of
“places,” it would be useless to try to explain.
Either you know “places” or you do
not — just as you understand the meaning of
poetry or you do not. There are things in
the world which cannot be taught.

Elsbeth’s two tiny brothers were present,
and I took one by each hand and followed
her. No sooner had we got out of doors in
the woods than a sort of mystery fell upon
the world and upon us. We were cautioned
to move silently, and we did so, avoiding the
crunching of dry twigs.

“The fairies hate noise,” whispered my
little godchild, her eyes narrowing like a
cat’s.

“I must get my wand first thing I do,” she
said in an awed undertone. “It is useless to
try to do anything without a wand.”

The tiny boys were profoundly impressed,
and, indeed, so was I. I felt that at last, I
should, if I behaved properly, see the fairies,
which had hitherto avoided my materialistic
gaze. It was an enchanting moment, for
there appeared, just then, to be nothing
commonplace about life.

There was a swale near by, and into
this the little girl plunged. I could see her
red straw hat bobbing about among the
tall rushes, and I wondered if there were
snakes.

“Do you think there are snakes?” I asked
one of the tiny boys.

“If there are,” he said with conviction,
“they won’t dare hurt her.”

He convinced me. I feared no more.
Presently Elsbeth came out of the swale. In
her hand was a brown “cattail,” perfectly
full and round. She carried it as queens
carry their sceptres — the beautiful queens we
dream of in our youth.

“Come,” she commanded, and waved the
sceptre in a fine manner. So we followed,
each tiny boy gripping my hand tight. We
were all three a trifle awed. Elsbeth led us
into a dark underbrush. The branches, as
they flew back in our faces, left them wet
with dew. A wee path, made by the girl’s
dear feet, guided our footsteps. Perfumes
of elderberry and wild cucumber scented the
air. A bird, frightened from its nest, made
frantic cries above our heads. The underbrush
thickened. Presently the gloom of the
hemlocks was over us, and in the midst of
the shadowy green a tulip tree flaunted its
leaves. Waves boomed and broke upon the
shore below. There was a growing dampness
as we went on, treading very lightly. A little
green snake ran coquettishly from us. A fat
and glossy squirrel chattered at us from a safe
height, stroking his whiskers with a complaisant
air.

At length we reached the “place.” It was
a circle of velvet grass, bright as the first
blades of spring, delicate as fine sea-ferns.
The sunlight, falling down the shaft between
the hemlocks, flooded it with a softened light
and made the forest round about look like
deep purple velvet. My little godchild stood
in the midst and raised her wand impressively.

“This is my place,” she said, with a sort of
wonderful gladness in her tone. “This is
where I come to the fairy balls. Do you see
them?”

“See what?” whispered one tiny boy.

“The fairies.”

There was a silence. The older boy pulled
at my skirt.

“Do YOU see them?” he asked, his voice
trembling with expectancy.

“Indeed,” I said, “I fear I am too old and
wicked to see fairies, and yet — are their hats
red?”

“They are,” laughed my little girl. “Their
hats are red, and as small — as small!” She
held up the pearly nail of her wee finger to
give us the correct idea.

“And their shoes are very pointed at the
toes?”

“Oh, very pointed!”

“And their garments are green?”

“As green as grass.”

“And they blow little horns?”

“The sweetest little horns!”

“I think I see them,” I cried.

“We think we see them too,” said the tiny
boys, laughing in perfect glee.

“And you hear their horns, don’t you?” my
little godchild asked somewhat anxiously.

“Don’t we hear their horns?” I asked the
tiny boys.

“We think we hear their horns,” they cried.
“Don’t you think we do?”

“It must be we do,” I said. “Aren’t we
very, very happy?”

We all laughed softly. Then we kissed
each other and Elsbeth led us out, her wand
high in the air.

And so my feet found the lost path to
Arcady.

The next day I was called to the Pacific
coast, and duty kept me there till well into
December. A few days before the date set
for my return to my home, a letter came from
Elsbeth’s mother.

“Our little girl is gone into the Unknown,”
she wrote — “that Unknown in which she
seemed to be forever trying to pry. We knew
she was going, and we told her. She was
quite brave, but she begged us to try some
way to keep her till after Christmas. ‘My
presents are not finished yet,’ she made moan.
‘And I did so want to see what I was going
to have. You can’t have a very happy Christmas
without me, I should think. Can you
arrange to keep me somehow till after then?’
We could not ‘arrange’ either with God in
heaven or science upon earth, and she is
gone.”

She was only my little godchild, and I am
an old maid, with no business fretting over
children, but it seemed as if the medium of
light and beauty had been taken from me.
Through this crystal soul I had perceived
whatever was loveliest. However, what was,
was! I returned to my home and took up a
course of Egyptian history, and determined to
concern myself with nothing this side the
Ptolemies.

Her mother has told me how, on Christmas
eve, as usual, she and Elsbeth’s father filled
the stockings of the little ones, and hung
them, where they had always hung, by the fireplace.
They had little heart for the task,
but they had been prodigal that year in
their expenditures, and had heaped upon the
two tiny boys all the treasures they thought
would appeal to them. They asked themselves
how they could have been so insane
previously as to exercise economy at Christmas
time, and what they meant by not getting
Elsbeth the autoharp she had asked for the
year before.

“And now –” began her father, thinking
of harps. But he could not complete this
sentence, of course, and the two went on passionately
and almost angrily with their task.
There were two stockings and two piles of
toys. Two stockings only, and only two piles
of toys! Two is very little!

They went away and left the darkened
room, and after a time they slept — after a
long time. Perhaps that was about the time
the tiny boys awoke, and, putting on their
little dressing gowns and bed slippers, made
a dash for the room where the Christmas
things were always placed. The older one
carried a candle which gave out a feeble
light. The other followed behind through the
silent house. They were very impatient and
eager, but when they reached the door of the
sitting-room they stopped, for they saw that
another child was before them.

It was a delicate little creature, sitting in
her white night gown, with two rumpled
funny braids falling down her back, and she
seemed to be weeping. As they watched, she
arose, and putting out one slender finger as
a child does when she counts, she made sure
over and over again — three sad times — that
there were only two stockings and two piles
of toys! Only those and no more.

The little figure looked so familiar that the
boys started toward it, but just then, putting
up her arm and bowing her face in it, as
Elsbeth had been used to do when she wept
or was offended, the little thing glided away
and went out. That’s what the boys said.
It went out as a candle goes out.

They ran and woke their parents with the
tale, and all the house was searched in a
wonderment, and disbelief, and hope, and
tumult! But nothing was found. For nights
they watched. But there was only the silent
house. Only the empty rooms. They told
the boys they must have been mistaken. But
the boys shook their heads.

“We know our Elsbeth,” said they. “It
was our Elsbeth, cryin’ ’cause she hadn’t no
stockin’ an’ no toys, and we would have given
her all ours, only she went out — jus’ went
out!”

Alack!

The next Christmas I helped with the little
festival. It was none of my affair, but I asked
to help, and they let me, and when we were
all through there were three stockings and
three piles of toys, and in the largest one was
all the things that I could think of that my
dear child would love. I locked the boys’
chamber that night, and I slept on the divan
in the parlor off the sitting-room. I slept but
little, and the night was very still — so windless
and white and still that I think I must
have heard the slightest noise. Yet I heard
none. Had I been in my grave I think my
ears would not have remained more unsaluted.

Yet when daylight came and I went to unlock
the boys’ bedchamber door, I saw that
the stocking and all the treasures which I had
bought for my little godchild were gone.
There was not a vestige of them remaining!

Of course we told the boys nothing. As
for me, after dinner I went home and buried
myself once more in my history, and so interested
was I that midnight came without my
knowing it. I should not have looked up at
all, I suppose, to become aware of the time,
had it not been for a faint, sweet sound as of
a child striking a stringed instrument. It
was so delicate and remote that I hardly
heard it, but so joyous and tender that I
could not but listen, and when I heard it a
second time it seemed as if I caught the echo
of a child’s laugh. At first I was puzzled.
Then I remembered the little autoharp I had
placed among the other things in that pile of
vanished toys. I said aloud:

“Farewell, dear little ghost. Go rest.
Rest in joy, dear little ghost. Farewell,
farewell.”

That was years ago, but there has been
silence since. Elsbeth was always an obedient
little thing.