The dance at the Willow Roads Country Club took place the night before Terry O'Brien's trial. Watts, with some feeling of wanting the life pulses of the Minga Bunch about him, went leisurely down the mountain road clad in the golf tweeds against which a club dance would not discriminate. As he looked in through the long windows that opened on the river, the lawyer was thinking that the indiscretions and bold franchises of the youth of the day were somehow, though coarser, a less harmful thing than the evasions and concealments of earlier days. One thing the man, staring in upon the throngs watching the little cubs of the "stag line" with their important faces, noting the calm, inexpressive faces of the girls, would have asked for—enthusiasm. Watts reviewed the whole history of the dance, Bacchante and stately minuet and folk dance, gigue and morrice, and wondered what good the dance was without the laughing lips, the light of the eyes, the merry face. He saw the young figures of the girls coming down the staircase, faces washed of all human expression, calm, subtle, in some instances of a Cleopatra-like Eastern subtlety, but never gay. The tall, dark man, accustomed to reading faces, wondered if indeed gayety had gone out of the world. "Gayety," thought Watts, "means innocence. Perhaps in a machine-run world there can be no innocence."

Down the staircase they came, scarlet and white satin, blue tulle, black tulle, pretty gold and silver slippers. Little necks filmy with powder, smooth heads, coiled, puffed and banded, long white arms, smooth white sides visible to the waist. Feet and legs devoid of grace, thickened by athletics and crudely pushed and planted in the unlovely strutting dances, yet not so unnatural, not so different, just young things pushed about by the great Energy—Life.

Any ballroom, the lawyer knew, spells but one thing. In spite of its protected, assured air, its look of flowered convention and jeweled dames playing propriety, it is, in all truth, the scene of the play of young blood, the attraction of young creatures. Since the days of the excitement over Byron's "Waltz" the eternal comment of men and women, wall-flowers and chaperons evades this evident truth and registers the same objection to all that is not sentimental convention.

But ballrooms go on existing. Watts, with a smile, wondered how many dances were in full blast along the Hudson River, so many fields of flower-pollen flying that Friday night. His mind wandered back over the fair old stately days of the great mansions of the early Americans. He thought about Colonial dances up and down this river, visualized homes along the great stream, the time of Cooper's "Satanstoe," of Irving's homesteads, of belles of the Revolution and the days of Lincoln. Shipman, with his own peculiar imagination, reviewed the youth and beauty of those days when, we are told, youth was so pure and innocent, beauty so lovely and soft and mild and biddable.

Yet the lawyer, staring at the purple night of river, pondered. If old pictures and old letters told the truth there was always, even in those crinolines, in those little cream and rouge pots and dainty curls and fichus, Revolt. Who, dear indignant Mama, wore those exceedingly dÉcolletÉ ball gowns where half the bosom was exposed? Does not old poetry hint at delicious skins, and curves and fragrances and coiled enticements? Watts grinned. "Funny," the man thought, "it was all a heap more sensuous than those skinny little muscular worldlings in there, only it was unconscious. The Victorian tradition was somehow able to have kisses stolen and little ankles noted and a fervid, tight clasping waltz danced without for one moment facing what the thing meant; so mid-Victorians got by with little censure; but it was far away from frankness and honesty and truth."

The tall, dark man staring through the windows caught sight of Minga, standing alone near the entrance, and he hastened toward her. The girl in the blue gown with its orange butterflies had a curious look of defiance and of being at bay that the lawyer instantly noticed. Watts bent over her with real tenderness. The little bobbed head was held very high.

"All alone?" The lawyer was no habituÉ of stag lines; he did not know that this was a fatal thing to say to a girl of Minga's group. But the music struck up, and he, a lover of music and dancing, felt the answering striking up of his being. "Will you dance?" he asked her, a little awkwardly.

To the man's surprise, Minga, with a curious little catch of the breath, almost flung herself into his clasp. Considering the difference in their height, they went well together. Watts, with a sort of boyish pride, saw the wondering, derisive glance of the important "stag line" as they slid by. The room rapidly filled; the babel and clash of the regulation dance was on.

Shipman loved dancing almost childishly. His head, dappled dark, was picturesque; the curious grim look of his dark face made him conspicuous among the couples that interlaced each other in pacing, gliding, backing measures. Miss Aurelia, seated in a row of commenting elders, noticed Minga, her vivid face laid not too restrainedly along the dark line of the lawyer's arm; she indicated this to Sard, who had brought Tawny Troop up to introduce him.

"My dear!" Miss Aurelia in gray satin and lace was pontifical, "Isn't Minga too familiar, a little conspicuous? Mr. Shipman is such a dignified man. I'm sure he doesn't like it; but, of course, he doesn't know what to do. What man would?"

Sard smiled. "Mr. Shipman always does know what to do. If he thinks Minga oughtn't to do that, he'll tell her so; but I don't believe he thinks so."

"Oh!" breathed Miss Aurelia; she spoke behind her handkerchief to the friend on the other side. "Happy little Sard," she said sentimentally, "so loyal; she quite spoils Minga Gerould," breathed Miss Aurelia.

It was the regular ballroom twaddle. Oceans of this stuff is talked by watching, waiting chaperons, who believe each other's statements with credulity and an unoriginality quite wonderful in the face of what is actually happening before them. Miss Reely turned back to Sard. "I wish you girls,"—she dropped her handkerchief; the exquisite Tawny restored it—"I wish you girls understood what charm delicacy and—er—modesty have for a man." Tawny nodded. "I'm for it myself," he remarked sympathetically.

"But Minga doesn't want to charm a man, especially," said Sard gaily. "She just likes to dance that way because everybody's doing it; she's probably sorry she doesn't reach farther up Shipman's arm because that would look more like the picture in 'Vogue.'" Sard, motioning to the other cheek-to-cheek couples, nodded mischievously at Shipman. Her own first dance had been instantly taken and with a lively glow of color and enthusiasm she was somehow glad to have the lawyer see it to be so. She cast an appreciative eye on Minga's little azure form with its butterfly corsage, the soft arms bare and free.

"Isn't she a darling?" she turned to Tawny Troop. "You don't know how lucky you are."

To her astonishment the youth swept her with raised eyebrows, eyes of nonchalance. "Oh, I say, didn't you know that was off?" said Troop with his best hotel accent.

To his suggestion that they should dance again she took her easy position. Sard was the instinctively high-bred dancer, the kind of a girl who without affectation can give herself and her partner instant distinction, with a poise, an Éclat of rhythmic motion that is very rare. Now as they circled the room she looked up to the smooth face of the elegant Tawny.

"What did you mean about yours and Minga's engagement? Surely you haven't quarreled?"

"I've broken it," announced the youth distastefully. Tawny drew himself up with an air. "I couldn't stand that last fandango of hers," said young Tawny. "Don't want to marry a tough."

The music stopped with a splurge. Sard stood staring at the young fellow. "You've broken it?" her glance went quickly to Minga, who was leaving the ballroom with Shipman,—the dark head bent down to the little curly bob. "Oh-h!" Sard accused him mockingly. "You're jealous! you couldn't mean that about Minga! She's everybody's sweetheart; she always will be. Why, even my father——"

Young Troop stiffened. "I don't mind ordinary things, the game, you know—I——" Tawny had the grace to hesitate, then snapped, quite finally for one of his youth—"I like any line that's decent, but when you see your fiancÉe in the arms of a hired man, a tramp she's spent the whole afternoon with, why you——"

"What do you mean?" asked Sard.

Tawny Troop, a young person of not very fine instinct, had forgotten or did not know the mettle of the girl to whom he spoke.

"Oh, it's nothing against Minga; she can do what she likes, but," with insufferable American swagger, "she's forfeited the Troop jewels; she doesn't wear my brown diamonds any more, that's all." He laid a hand on Sard's arm. "Don't eat the air," he suggested.

Sard switched away from his hand; her eyes hotly repudiated him. "Do you care to explain?" the girl asked coldly. "Minga Gerould is my friend, you understand, visiting me; if you have anything to say I will hear it."

Tawny stood irresolute. He had a grudge against Dunstan Bogart; it was well to make this girl, Dunstan's sister, feel something. The alert young bantam figure of the unformed boy-of-the-world took an unlovely attitude of assured insolence. Tawny smiled, his thick lower lip in a sneer. "I've got the Gang with me," he said in a low tone. "We all know you and Minga hunt in couples; you hang together because you're peculiar in your tastes—what? Only, when that hired man of yours shows his preference for one of you, the lovey-dovey business will crack! See what I mean?"

They stood on the piazza that overhung the river. The night boat, like a great caterpillar, set with golden jewels, forged up midstream. The search-lights with their white eyes probed the bank, moving over palisade and promontory. Now a white ray picked out some millionaire's home on the east bank, now some white temple-like building on the west, now it shot up to the sky, now it rested like the long honey-sucking tube of a great moth on some arbored, flower-like cottage along the rocky shore.

The music had begun again; this time it had an Indian plaint, a long skirling cadence that might have been sung in days gone by among the rocks and trees of these very shores by a red maiden standing wrapped in her blanket on a moonlit crest or staring with great burning eyes into the rising sun. Sard saw Watts and Minga go back into the ballroom; the rose-colored light played over the little face lifted to the man's dark tenderness, Sard looked after them uneasily. "Everyone looks like that at Minga, but—but it would be different if Watts Shipman——" Sard suddenly realized the power of the personality that was shadowing Minga. Before this, the girl had seen Shipman dominate things; did he then guess the thing she herself was just learning? Were there protection and care in the grim face with its look of power and divining? Sard's eyes suddenly filled with quick tears. "I could kill Tawny," the girl told herself. "I could kill him if——" but the "if" that dwelt in her heart Sard would not allow herself to say. She looked out on the river and spoke gently to the boy at her side. She thought suddenly of Colter sitting up there in the room over the garage with his books and magnifying glass. It made her quiet. To be like Colter, calm and patient with things, that was what she must try.

"You mustn't mistake," she said with almost womanly kindness. "Shan't we sit here and talk instead of dancing? I'd like," Sard spoke with her curious motherly little air of concern, "I'd like to know precisely what you meant by that last speech. You mustn't say things like that, you know, it's not done. If you apologize, I can explain to you about Colter, but not unless," said Sard with girlish dignity, "not unless."

Then Troop, the product of unlimited wealth, unlimited license, turned and showed his true blood. All his essential commonness, his cheap values and squalid assumptions leaped to life. Sard looked with the loathing of her true aristocracy of the spirit on the shoddy training of this boy, who had the assurance and ease of a young prince.

"I wasn't born yesterday," Tawny insisted spitefully; the sensuous lines from his nose down to his lip deepened. "What I saw on the Hackensack was enough for me," said Tawny. "My faith! what a girl will do nowadays! Of course—Cinny," he laughed viciously, "but Minga Gerould, who could go anywhere!"

Sard almost giggled; the words gave Tawny away. Young Troop thought still of "going to" places other people were born to. The girl, instinctively disliking him, yet instinctively parleyed with him. Sard, alive to her world, to the quick back-action of the Minga group, thought she could see Gertrude's hand in this. That young person who schemed, who desired things, who had unknown to Minga invited Tawny to the house and to the Hackensack picnic and to this ball. Gertrude was a young person who desired things. Gertrude knew the history of the famous Troop engagement ring and saw no reason why she should not add it to the golden snake collection. Also, there had undoubtedly been aspects of the day on the Hackensack that Gertrude must turn to other than their rightful conclusions. Sard remembered the shrill screaming, the maudlin sounds of gayety; she had questioned Dunstan, who had flushed and turned away growling. "Well,—we didn't find any pearls, that's all; no, I'll say we didn't find any pearls," this with saturnine inflection. Sard sat looking at the opposite river shore strung with blue-gold lights, fruited like long lines of orchards. Suddenly the girl saw the world as in the old days court ladies must have seen it, wanting to cry and bite out their little tongues or the little tongues of other women. The spiteful small messes of intrigue, the contemptible inference and origins of personal slander.

"As far as I can see," came Tawny's drawling, slightly nasal tones, "the girl was off with your hired man chasing around those swamps; why she wanted to jump into a bog with him I don't know, or was it to get away from him? Any old boy would have done, I dare say." Tawny laughed his cracked, old man's laugh. "Of course, you all covered the thing up pretty well. She's vamping that lawyer now! Well, I must say she likes 'em old."

Sard, utterly generous, utterly untainted of mind, could hardly take this fellow in. She leaned forward anxiously. "You mean," she said gravely, "oh, what are you trying to say?"

Young Troop had risen; something craven in him made him aware that it might not be best to stay and face such real emotion. Anger in Sard might be a difficult thing to laugh off. He admired her while he feared her. Now a breezy, heated throng spilled out of the long doors onto the piazza; the girls perched upon the rails and let the river breeze cool their hot faces, while the boys leaned against pillars, hands in pockets, getting off the time-honored persiflage of the young dancing swain. Tawny saw Gertrude, in black net, still entwined by the golden serpents and with a green jade circlet round her dark hair. The great dramatic eyes summoned him. "Thanks, awfully much," he drawled in the silly parlance of the "star" dancer. "I'll say I enjoyed it; that was some little fox trot, what?" Tawny was edging away when Sard Bogart, with a curious gesture of command, stopped him.

"You mustn't think you—you can go on with this sort of thing," the girl said in a low voice. "That inference of yours stops right here; no matter what there is between you and Minga—you—you can't go on saying things." The now rather dismayed Tawny found himself once more against the Bogart directness, and squirmed uncomfortably.

"Oh, forget it—I've 'destroyed the papers,'" he quoted with dramatic raillery. "Minga won't get shown up by me." Again Gertrude looking over her partner's shoulder summoned him.

"Say, but isn't Gert a looker?" breathed Tawny. "I guess she wants to be rushed next dance, things getting a little slow for Gert; I promised to look up a new crowd of cut-ins for her; well, so long!" Tawny bowed with a curious half cross-eyed look of sneaking amusement. His eyes were smouldering with a caddish kind of excitement; he could afford to be good humored.

"Say, I'll cut it out," he pledged. "I'll drop the story; I can't speak for the girls, Cinny and Gert and all, they've been having a lot of fun with Minga in the dressing-room; she took a good deal of guying, they say. Of course," advised Tawny patronizingly, "you ought to let her know it has made a difference in her popularity."

Just then Dunstan came up. He shoved past Troop, ignoring him while he elbowed him. "Sard," he said clearly, "I must ask you to stop talking to this—er—cad. He has been discussing a friend of yours, our friend,—well, I think we don't need him in our vicinity."

"Your friend will need you both all right," muttered Tawny vindictively; "she'll need you both for dance partners and—and everything else!"

As the groups on the piazza filtered back to the ballroom, Sard seized her brother's coat sleeve. "Go and get Minga quickly," she said, "and Mr. Shipman if you can. Oh, quick, before she realizes."

Dunstan looked at her, his eyes quick with passionate fire. "So you've heard," he said wonderingly. "Well, that chap is about the lowest skunk; they don't have hells for that kind," said the boy bitterly, "they just let them stew in their own juice." But his sister would not listen; she was thinking quickly.

"Go get them, dear; tell them to come out here and then order some ice-cream and we'll make a little party of our own."

Hastily Sard devised a way to shield Minga; instinctively she thought of Shipman. "Get Watts, too," she urged. Dunstan saw how dark her eyes were and wondered. He half smiled. "Old Doomsday book and Sard," he half chuckled under his perturbation. "What a couple of old nuts, yet not so bad, either." Then he thought of Colter and bit his lips.

But Dunstan, hurrying for the door and seizing Minga where she stood proud, bewildered, and alone, grabbed her in true "cutting-in" fashion. "Gee, I've been waiting for this chance," he breathed. "I say, Minga, don't you dance with your host even once in the evening?"

She shot a swift look at him. "Dunce," in a low voice, "the Bunch think I'm—not—nice—they've been saying things; it was Gertrude, I think," Minga mocked with her little face. Her red lips quivered, and Dunstan, with a curious look of man determination, steered her into an increasing velocity and brilliancy of step. "Bing! this is good music," breathed the boy. "All right, Minga, old sport, eyes right, head up, what? The rest of them are caterpillars and worms, what? And Tawny Troop is—is—is a butterlion—not even a chocolate pussy in a Christmas stocking!"

The gay rallying brought the bright blood to the vivid little face. Minga threw back her head and her gay laugh pealed out, which was what Dunce wanted. "Where's Shipman?" he asked, lips close to the fluttering little head. Again the face clouded and poor Dunstan, his resources at an end, gave her Sard's message. "Say!" he tried to challenge the girl, tried to help her keep the sweet gay insouciance, the so-called "pep" that was Minga's greatest asset....

"Once more around the room," said Dunce, "once more past Gertrude, the great Human Vampire-steady—once more past the gang of glarers," meaning the chaperons, "steady; and then out that little door to the right. See? and then find old Sard, see? and then a nice long spin out in the moonlight. Who wants to dance this sizzling night?"

"All—right," breathed Minga, "all right. Say, Dunce," but while she smiled and shook her head at him for the benefit of the observing Bunch, Minga's voice was trembling, "say, Dunce, you aren't a good—good sort—or anything like that, are you?"

The boyish arm tightened. "I'm any old thing you want," he said gruffly. "I'm any old thing you need, Minga."

Meanwhile Sard sat waiting for them, the soft summer night cooling the cheeks Tawny had made feverish.

"So that's the way Minga's law works out," thought the girl slowly, "and the law of Minga's Bunch! She never even fancied this Tawny Troop. She took him away from another girl just for the fun of wearing his ring, and now Gertrude plays the same game. And Gertrude, because she works for it, has more power than Minga." Sard, leaning forward, looking into the ballroom, watched Minga and Dunce finish the dance; she saw them throw back their heads and laugh together.

As Dunstan and his partner joined her, Sard rose. "Did you ask Mr. Shipman if he would join us?" she questioned her brother; "where is he?" But Watts, it seemed, could not be found, and to Sard's surprise Minga seemed nearly frenzied as she stood there trembling like a frightened child.

"Sard," the girl urged breathlessly, "the music isn't very good, is it? Do you want to stay very much? Mr. Shipman has g-gone up the mountain; he wanted to—to turn in early on account of the case to-morrow. Sard," Minga gulped, "I think this is a stupid dance, don't you? Shall we go—— Come on!"

Minga's eyes had deep shadows under them; her face, under its not too well put on color, was piteous and woebegone. Dunstan chafed helplessly; no one had ever before seen Minga like this. It was insufferable that any stranger should see it. The youth tucked her arm under his and called up all his powers of gay loquacity.

"You aren't all fed up, Minga—not you. Oh, you little worn out society dame! Music not jazzy enough, and she says 'the floor is gritty'; we'll have to fix that. What!" Dunstan, looking over his partner's head, raised his eyebrows at his sister. He nodded violently and said with deaf-mute's emphasized lips, "Take her home!"

Suddenly Sard understood. Gertrude's propaganda had had its deadly effect. Neither she nor Minga had their usual eager partners. The Tawny Troop stag line of "cut-ins" was being marshaled for Gertrude and one or two cronies. Curiously enough the "Minga Bunch," the devil-may-care, unrestrained crowd had turned and rended its gay little leader. The usual way had been taken. It was not a very new way; the way of gray-haired men and women for other more devoted and more highly inspired leaders, that of unanswerable personal slander.

The girl stood there aghast. Then she smiled a little disdainfully and turned to her brother. "Will you drive us, Dunce?" she asked, "or shall we call a taxi?"

"I had a dance with Cinny," said Dunce, "but she's sitting under the trees with that fellow with the spook glimmers; she's vamping him for his new tennis racket. I'll drive you. But," Dunce shut his teeth hard, "when I leave this bunch I leave it for good and all, you understand; you do too, Sard? You do too, Minga?"

All the way home the three young things were silent. They saw the dark trees slide by, half piteously, wanting to run to them and hide their heads in their soft branches and tell them things. All the kind earth, the hills and the river, seemed maternal, strong to their hot hearts, burning with scorn and contempt. Dunstan knew painfully his own part in the miserable intrigue. Tawny and Gertrude merely revenged themselves, and they had taken it out on little, jolly, happy Minga. As the girls got out, Dunstan stopped his car in a kind of blare of cut-out and racing engine; it was like getting off the blast of his own feelings. The boy groaned "good-bye" and was gone.

Sard undressed in the moonlight. There was no other light in her room, and so she had not pulled the shades down. The trees towered into the white moonlit sky and she saw the orange-colored glow over the garage where Colter sat reading. The man's curious calm life of books and plants, the way he kept aloof yet was ready and effective, above all his patient helplessness before the awful dark of his memory, swept over the girl. Sard looked at her bed. "I can't sleep to-night," she said. "I want to talk, to talk to someone—I want——" Sard went slowly and looked up at the mountain where the organ builder's house loomed back of the sky. She thought of Shipman and smiled a little but lightly shook her head. "No," she said, "he's kind, kind, wonderfully kind and strong, but——" The girl, a white crepe wrapper over her nightgown, looked long and solemnly at Colter's light; suddenly the orange square darkened.... The man was lying now on his narrow bed, the sweep of hair off that forehead Sard knew so well, the long, fine hands lying careless and relaxed, the fine sensitive face swept with its look of suffering, perhaps already drowned in the great black waves of sleep. Did sleep ever bring back to Colter his birthright, did he ever see in dreams familiar faces or hear voices? Sard found herself kneeling at the window watching the dark window, her face flushed. "I wonder, who he is," breathed the girl, "oh, if I could only tell him who he is. If I could bring Light to him!" Sard knelt, staring out into the dark, her face hot, her heart pounding.

"I can't stand this," she muttered. "I—I feel desperate, queer to-night. I might run out into the night, anywhere, to anyone. I wonder! oh, I wonder——"

Suddenly she got up from her crouching position; with tawny hair falling, tossing back from her forehead, she caught up a little pocket flash and holding it before her carefully felt her way down the tower-room stairs to Minga's room. Sard knocked softly. "May I come in? You aren't asleep?"

There was no answer. The older girl gently turned the knob and looked in. The room was in moonlit whiteness. There, still in her rumpled blue and orange, the little butterfly back bare, the arms tossed frantically out, she lay, the whole figure prey to sweeping and tearing things. Minga was curled up on the bed. There was no doubt about the little shivers and shakes, she was sobbing.

"Minga—precious!" Something big and devastating tore through the older girl's senses. She felt suddenly old, like Minga's mother. This motherliness, though Sard did not know it, was a keystone to her being; it was the thing Shipman had half seen, it was the beautiful balance of the Winged Victory. The girl sat quietly down on the bed; so this was another Law for her then; she must know keenly and helplessly the sorrow of others, she must blindly strive to learn how to help. Dora, Colter, and now little gay Minga.

"Minga," urged the girl, pitifully, "don't cry like that—why, it's not that silly Bunch, is it? We don't care for them, we have other friends. Watts Shipman and—and—-" Sard went a little vaguely over a possible list of "other friends." There was no answer, and she leaned down, trying to raise the buried face. "Honey, can't I know?" then urgently, "Minga, don't cry like that, it's—it's self-pity, isn't it?" Sard groped about to give expression to a thought that was hardly formed in her. "I suppose self-pity's one thing we must never, never let ourselves have," the girl said softly.

There was a sudden cessation of sobs, and Minga slowly raising on her elbows turned up in the half light a broken face.

"I can't help ... pitying myself.... I've been so—so crazy; and now," shuddering, "I can't play any more."

"You poor little thing, poor little thing," Sard paused, her hand passed over the tousled head. This young face and hand were inexperienced, but Sard was like a pilot trying to pierce mists. "I guess we've always got to play," she said, "even when we—well, that Punchinello idea, you know. But anyway, Minga, you mustn't cry like that because it's wrong; it does something to your nerves. I remember they said it in the psychology class."

"But I've done an awful thing," wept Minga. She sat up suddenly. "Sard, you don't know what I did to-night," Minga lifted her hand and passed it swiftly over her face as if she would brush away some new look of shame and repeated:

"I've done the awful thing; I wouldn't have cared if it had been anyone else, but I felt wild after I had given Tawny back his ring and I thought I'd take a chance and so, oh, Sard, while we were dancing I told Watts Shipman I loved him, and told him in a silly way, a Cinny, Gertrude way, and that's the awful thing; for you see, Sard, I do love him. Oh, I do, I do," cried poor little Minga. "But I told him in that way, and he doesn't respect me."

Sard, rocked by a surprise that bordered very nearly on hysterical laughter, crept up closer to the little sufferer.

"My hat!" she said in awed tones. Her hair swept over her leaning face; she pushed it back. "My hat!"

Minga fell on her friend, burying her face in this long veil of hair. "I did—I did—I couldn't seem to help it—I was wild, you see, and I needed a friend, a sort of fatherly person, don't you know." Minga lifted her face and looked at her chum helplessly. "He is the only person that ever scolded me and made me mind, and so, you see, I loved him." There was a long silence, then, "I think he's wonderful. I thought maybe he could make me—make me—better."

Sard, with a rush of understanding, threw her arms around the forlorn figure.

"Poor little thing," she crooned.

"No," said Minga with a kind of shudder, "not that any more, Sard. I guess I'm different now; I guess I've got to be a nut or high-brow or something. I've got to grow bigger, you see," with a piteous gesture. "I thought he might grow to care if he knew I did, and I told him. It was out by that fountain, you know, and the—the water seemed like tears." Minga's eyes widened over her own poetic thought. "My goodness," she ejaculated, "I'll always think of that now when I see that fountain." Then she went on, "But when I told him," the young voice broke a little piteously, "he just took my two hands as if he was going to sort of hold me from myself and himself. Oh, a terrible way and then he said ... he just said, 'You are a very dear little thing, you are a very dear little thing'—and it was finished," said Minga with her childish gulp. "I couldn't screech or howl and make him come back. I—I didn't even try. He just walked away from me. It was like a play, only awful; he walked right straight toward the mountain—I saw him in the moonlight and now," said Minga, "I—I have this awful ache."

There was a long silence, Sard trying to understand this change in her friend. She began suddenly to see as if unrolled on a flaming scroll another great law of lives like Minga's, that whoever tries to control them will lose them, but whoever knows how to control them and does not try has them bound fast and submissive. In the new days of the rapid rising of women this fact contains a new challenge for men. There is no reason why women should not rise but there also is no reason why men, once superior, now rapidly being rated as inferior, at least by women, should not look into this challenge. If woman grows more fine, why should not a man also rise and create a new fineness that shall still dominate her and make her happy in that mastery for which she will forever ask.

The moonlight shone through the long luxurious rooms, the silver patterns threw their strange symbols on the floor until almost morning, and the dawn became a steadiness of gray and rose.

When at last they parted, Sard looked thoughtfully at her friend. "The trial's on to-day," she said slowly, "and the Bunch are all mad, so they won't go; and I don't think you ought to go, Minga."

"Just the same, I shall," whispered Minga doggedly. "I'm going with Dunce." Then a thought struck her. "Oh, Sard, did Dunce tell you what Judgie is going to do to Colter?"

The other girl started. "Do to Colter!" Sard paused at the door, her face scared inquiry through the dawn-light.

"Well," Minga was sleepily yawning, "I think Dunce said that Judgie had heard some of all this mess and so he had told Colter to get out. He seems to think it doesn't do to have a gentleman—well, you know what I mean, for a hired man, anyway." Minga, seeing her friend's face, was a little nervous. "That's what Dunce said; you'd better ask him. Imagine!" said little heavy-eyed Minga. "Imagine!"

Something slow, defined, inevitable crept around Sard's heart, with a shiver; the girl tried to face it, tried with her ardent and alert soul to know it for what it was. It was hate, and it was hate of her father. She trembled slightly, for as she looked into her heart and saw that dark shape of Hate lying at its door, she heard a soft whisper again in her ear; little curls tickled her ears, soft whispering came to her and her head was laid on a soft pulsating little breast.

"We aren't afraid of Foddy, little Sard; we love him; he won't put us in prison."

Softly closing the door, softly stumbling up the steps to the tower-room, the girl tried to put these things against that dark shape lying across the threshold of her heart. "Oh, but he has put me in prison," she sobbed, "he has put me in prison—I—I—could never make him understand." Sard threw herself face downward on her bed. The birds were all singing, the sun came with bright morning over the happy sparkle of the river. A girl lay tearless before the dark shape of hate and the memory of love and before a slow dawning of a new feeling she could not name, the old cry came:

"Oh, Mother!" whispered Sard. "Oh, Mother! Mother!"