THE family tree of the Van Nicht family was not the sort of family tree you think I mean, although they had one of that variety too. This was a real tree. It was an elm—the biggest elm and the broadest and the most majestic elm in the entire state, and in the times of its leafage cast the densest shade of any elm to be found anywhere, probably. For more than one hundred years the Van Nicht family had lived in its shadow. That was the principal trouble with them—they did live in the shadow. I'll come to that later.

Every consequential visitor to Schuylerville was taken to see the Van Nicht elm. It was a necessary detail of his tour about town. Either before or after he had viewed the new ten-story skyscraper of the Seaboard National Bank, and the site for the projected Civic Centre, and the monument to Schuyler County's defenders of the Union—1861-'65—with a dropsical bronze figure of a booted and whiskered infantryman on top of the tall column, and the Henrietta Wing Memorial Library, and the rest of it, they took him and they showed him the Van Nicht elm. So doing, it was incumbent upon them to escort him through a street which was beginning to wear that vacillating, uncertain look any street wears while trying to make up its mind whether to keep on being a quiet residential byway in an old-fashioned town or to turn itself into an important thoroughfare of a thriving industrial centre. You know the kind of street I aim to picture—with here an impudent young garage showing its shining morning face of red brick in a side yard where there used to be an orchard, and there a new apartment building which has shouldered its way into a line of ancient dwellings and is driving its cast-iron cornices, like rude elbows, into the clapboarded short ribs of its neighbours upon either side.

At the far, upper end of that street, upon the poll of a gentle eminence, uplifted the Van Nicht elm. It was for sundry months of the year a splendid vast umbrella, green in the spring and summer and yellow in the fall; and in the winter presented itself against the sky line as a great skeleton shape, without a blemish upon it, except for a scar in the bark close down to the earth to show where once there might have been a fissure in its mighty bole. No grass, or at least mighty little grass, grew within the circle of its brandishing limbs. It was as though the roots of the tree sucked up all the nourishment that the soil might hold, leaving none for the humble grass to thrive upon.

It was in the winter that the house, which stood almost directly under the tree, was most clearly revealed as a square, ugly domicile of grey stone, a story and a half in height, lidded over by a hip roof of weathered shingles; with a deeply recessed front door, like a pursed and proper mouth, and, above it, a row of queer little longitudinal windows, half hidden below the overhang of the gables and suggesting so many slitted eyes peering out from beneath a lowering brow. You saw, too, the mould that had formed in streaky splotches upon the stonework of the walls and the green rime of age and dampness that had overspread the curled shingles and the peeling paint, turning to minute scales upon the woodwork of the window casings and the door frames. Also you saw one great crooked bough which stretched across the roof like a menacing black arm, forever threatening to descend and crush its rafters in. This was in winter; in summertime the leaves almost completely hid the house, so that one who halted outside the decrepit fence, with its snaggled and broken panels, must needs stoop low to perceive its outlines at all.

The carriage or the automobile bearing the prominent guest and the chairman of the local reception committee would halt at the end of the street.

“That,” the chairman would say, pointing up grade, “is the Van Nicht elm. Possibly you've heard about it? Round here we call it the Van Nicht family tree. It is said to be the largest elm in this part of the country. In fact, I doubt whether there are any larger than this one, even up in New England. And that's the famous old Van Nicht homestead there, just back of it.

“Its got a history. When Colonel Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht came here right after the Revolutionary War—he was a colonel in the Revolution, you know—he built the house, placing it just behind the tree. The tree must've grown considerably since then, but the house yonder hasn't changed but mighty little all these years. It's the oldest building in Schuyler County. As a matter of fact, the town, with this house for a starter, sort of grew up down here on the flat lands below. The old colonel raised a family here and died here. So did his son and his grandson. They were rich people once—the richest people in the county at one time.

“Why all the land from here clear down to Ossibaw Street—that's six blocks south—used to be included in the Van Nicht estate. It was a farm then, of course, and by all accounts a fine one. But each generation sold off some of the original grant, until all that's left now is that house, with the tree and about an acre of ground more or less. And I guess it's pretty well covered with mortgages.”

This, in substance, was what the guide would tell the distinguished stranger. This, in substance, was what was told to young Olcott on the day after he arrived in Schuylerville to take over the editorial management of the Schuylerville News-Ledger. Mayor T. J. McGlynn was showing him the principal points of interest—so the mayor had put it, when he called that morning with his own car at the Hotel Brain-ard, where Olcott was stopping, and invited the young man to go for a tour of inspection of the city, as a sort of introductory and preparatory course in local education prior to his assuming his new duties.

While the worthy mayor was uttering his descriptive remarks Olcott bent his head and squinted past the thick shield of limbs and leaves. He saw that the door of the house, which was closed, somehow had the look of about always being closed, and that most of the windows were barred with thick shutters.

“Appears rather deserted, doesn't it?” said the newcomer, striving to show a proper appreciation of the courtesy that was being visited upon him. “There isn't any one living there at present, is there?”

“Sure there is,” said Mayor McGlynn. “Old Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th, who's the present head of the family, and his two old-maid sisters, Miss Rachael and Miss Harriet—they all live there together. Miss Rachael is considerably older than Miss Harriet, but they're both regular old maids—guess they always will be. The brother never married, either—couldn't find anybody good enough to share the name, I suppose. Anyhow he's never married. And besides I guess it keeps him pretty busy living up to the job of being the head of the oldest family in this end of the state. That's about all he ever has done.”

“Then he isn't in any regular business or any profession?”

“Business!” Mayor McGlynn snorted. “I should say not! All any one of the Van Nichts has ever done since anybody can remember was just to keep on being a Van Nicht and upholding the traditions and the honours of the Van Nichts—and this one is like all his breed. The poorer he gets the more pompous and the more important acting he gets—that's the funny part of it.”

“Apparently not a very lucrative calling, judging by the general aspect of the ancestral manor,” said Olcott, who was beginning now to be interested. “How do they manage to live?”

“Lord knows,” said the mayor. “How do the sparrows manage to live? I guess there're times when they need a load of coal and a market basket full of victuals to help tide 'em over a hard spell, but naturally nobody would dare to offer to help them. They're proud as Lucifer themselves, and the town is kind of proud of 'em. They're institutions with us, as you might say.”

McGlynn, who, as Olcott was to learn later, was a product of new industrial and new political conditions in the community, spoke with the half-begrudged admiration which the self-made so often have for the ancestor-made.

“We ain't got so very many of the real aristocrats in this section any more, what with all this new blood pouring in since our boom started up; and even if they are as poor as Job's turkey, these Van Nichts still count for a good deal round here. Money ain't everything anyway, is it?... Well, Mr. Olcott, if you've seen enough here, we'll turn round and go see something else.” He addressed his chauffeur: “Jim, suppose you take us by the new hosiery mills next. I want Mr. Olcott to see one of the most prosperous manufacturing plants in the state. Employs nine hundred hands, Mr. Olcott, and hasn't been in operation but a little more than three years. That's the way this town is humping itself. You didn't make any mistake, coming here.”

As the car swung about, Olcott gave the Van Nicht place a backward scrutiny over his shoulder and was impressed by its appearance into saying this:

“It strikes me as having a mighty unhealthy air about it. I'd say offhand it was a first-rate breeding spot for malaria and rheumatism. I wonder why they don't trim up that big old tree and give the sunshine and the light a chance to get in under it.”

“For heaven's sake and your own, don't you suggest that to the old boy when you meet him,” said McGlynn with a grin. “He'd as soon think of cutting off his own leg as to touch a leaf on the family tree. It's sacred to him. It represents all the glory of his breed and he venerates it, the same as some people venerate an altar in a church.”

“Then you think I will be likely to meet him? I'd like to—from what you tell me, he must be rather a unique personality.”

“Yes, he's all of that—unique, I mean. And you're pretty sure to meet him before you've been in town many months. He seems to regard it as his duty to call on certain people, after they've been here a given length of time, and extend to them the freedom of the town that his illustrious great-granddaddy founded. If you're specially lucky—or specially unlucky—he may even invite you to call on him, although that's an honour that doesn't come to very many, even among the older residents. The Van Nichts are mighty exclusive and it isn't often that anybody sees what the inside of their house looks like—let alone a stranger.... Say, Jim, after we've seen the hosiery mills, run us on out past the County Feeble-Minded and Insane Asylum. Mr. Olcott will enjoy that!”

Within a month's time from this time, Mayor McGlynn's prophecy was to come true. On a morning in the early part of the summer 01 Olcott sat behind his desk in his office adjoining the city room on the second floor of the News-Ledger building, when his office boy announced a gentleman calling to see Mr. Olcott personally.

“See who it is, will you, please, Morgan?” said Olcott to his assistant. Morgan had arrived less than a week before, having been sent on by the syndicate which owned a chain of papers, the News-Ledger included, to serve under the new managing editor. The syndicate had a cheery little way of shuffling the cards at frequent intervals and dealing out fresh executives for the six or eight dailies under its control and ownership.

“I'm busy as the dickens,” added Olcott as Morgan got up to obey; “so if it's a pest that's outside, give him the soft answer and steer him off!”

In a minute Morgan was back with a cryptic grin on his face.

“You'd better see him—he's worth seeing, all right,” said Morgan.

“Who is it?” asked Olcott.

“It's somebody right out of a book,” answered Morgan; “somebody giving the name of Something Something Van Nicht. I didn't catch all the first name—I was too busy sizing up its proprietor. Says he must see you privately and in person. I gather from his manner that if you don't see him this paper will never be quite the same again. And honestly, Olcott, he's worth seeing.”

“I think I know who it is,” said Olcott, “and I'll see him. Boy, show the gentleman in!”

“I'll go myself,” said Morgan. “This is a thing that ought to be done in style.”

Olcott reared back in his chair, waiting. The door opened and Morgan's voice was heard making formal and sonorous announcement: “Mr. Van Nicht.” And Olcott, looking over his desk top, saw, framed in the doorway, a figure at once picturesque and pitiable.

The first thing, almost, to catch his eye was a broad black stock collar—the first stock collar Olcott had ever seen worn by a man in daytime. Above it was a long, close-shaven, old face, with a bloodless and unwholesome pallor to it, framed in long, white hair, and surmounted by a broad-brimmed, tall-crowned soft hat which had once been black and now was gangrenous with age. Below it a pair of sloping shoulders merging into a thin, meagre body tightly cased in a rusty frock coat, and below the coat skirts in turn a pair of amazingly thin and rickety legs, ending in slender, well-polish-ed boots with high heels. In an instantaneous appraisal of the queer figure Olcott comprehended these details and, in that same flicker of time, noted that the triangle of limp linen showing in the V of the close-buttoned lapels had a fragile, yellowish look like old ivory, that all the outer garments were threadbare and shiny in the seams, and that the stock collar was decayed to a greenish tinge along its edges. Although the weather was warm, the stranger wore a pair of grey cotton gloves.

“Good morning,” said Olcott, mechanically putting a ceremonious and formal emphasis into the words and getting on his feet.

“Good morning, sir, to you,” returned the visitor in a voice of surprising volume, considering that it issued from so slight a frame. “You are Mr. Olcott?”

“Yes, that's my name.” And Olcott took a step forward, extending his hand.

“Mine, sir, is Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th.” The speaker paused midway of the floor to remove one glove and to shift it and his cane to the left hand. Advancing, with a slight limp, he gave to Olcott a set of fingers that were dry and chilly and fleshless. Almost it was like clasping the articulated bones of a skeleton's hand.

“I have come personally, sir, to pay my respects and, as one representing the—ah—the old rÉgime of our people, to bid you welcome to our midst.”

“Thank you very much,” said Olcott, a bit amused inwardly, and a bit impressed also by the air of mouldy grandeur which the other diffused. “Won't you sit down, Mr. Van Nicht?”

“I shall be able to tarry but a short while.” The big voice boomed out of the little dried-up body as the old man took the chair which Olcott had indicated. He took only part of it. He poised himself on the forward edge of its seat, holding his spine very erect and dramatising his posture with a stiff and stately investure.

Olcott caught himself telling himself Morgan had been right: This personage was not really flesh and blood, but something out of a book—an embodied bit of fiction. Why even his language had the stilted shaping of the characters in most of these old-timey classical novels.

“He wasn't really born at all,” Olcott thought. “Dickens wrote him and then Cruikshank drew him and now here he is, miraculously preserved to posterity. But Charlotte BrontË endowed him with his conversation.” What Olcott said—aloud—was something fatuous and commonplace touching on the state of the weather.

“I have yet other motives in presenting myself to-day, in this, your sanctum,” stated Mr. Van Nicht. “First of all, I wish to congratulate you upon what to me appears to be a very gratifying stroke of journalistic enterprise which has come to light in the columns of your valued organ since your advent into the community and for which, therefore, I assume you are responsible.”

“Well,” said Olcott, “we try to get out a reasonably live sheet.”

“Pardon me,” said Mr. Van Nicht, “but I do not refer to the aspect of your news columns. I am speaking with reference to a feature lately appearing in your Sunday edition, in what I believe is known as your magazine section. I have observed that, beginning two weeks ago, you inaugurated a department devoted to the genealogies of divers of our older and more distinguished American families. As I recall, the subjects of your first two articles were the Adams family, of Massachusetts, and the Lee family, of Virginia. It may interest you to know, sir—I trust indeed that it may please you to know—that I, personally, am most highly pleased that you should seek to inculcate in the minds of our people, through the medium of your columns, a knowledge of those strains of blood to which our nation is particularly indebted for much of its culture, much of its social development, many of its gentler and more graceful influences. It is a most worthy movement indeed, a most commendable undertaking. I repeat, sir, that I congratulate you upon it.”

“Thank you,” said Olcott. “This coming Sunday we are going to run a yarn about the Gordon family, of Georgia, and after that I believe come the Clays, of Kentucky.”

“Quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Van Nicht. “The names you have mentioned are names that are permanently embalmed in the written annals of our national life. But may I ask, sir, whether you have taken any steps as yet to in-corporate into your series an epitome of the achievements of the family of which I have the honour to be the head—the Van Nicht family?”

“Well, you see,” explained Olcott apologetically, “these articles are not written here in the office. They are sent to us in proof sheets as a part of our regular feature service, and we run 'em just as they come to us. Probably—probably”—he hesitated a moment over the job of phrasing tactfully his white lie—“probably a story on your family genealogy will be coming along pretty soon.”

“Doubtlessly so, doubtlessly so.” The assent was guilelessly emphatic. “In any such symposium, in any such compendium, my family, beyond peradventure, will have its proper place in due season. Nevertheless, foreseeing that in the hands of a stranger the facts and the dates might unintentionally be confused or wrongly set down, I have taken upon myself the obligation of preparing an accurate account of the life and work of my illustrious, heroic and noble ancestor, Colonel Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, together with a more or less elaborate rÉsumÉ of the lives of his descendants up to and including the present generation. This article is now completed. In fact I have it upon my person.” Carefully he undid the top button of his coat and reached for an inner breast pocket. “I shall be most pleased to accord you my full permission for its insertion in an early issue of your publication.” He spoke with the air of one bestowing a gift of great value.

Olcott's practised eye appraised the probable length of the manuscript which this volunteer contributor was hauling forth from his bosom and, inside himself, Olcott groaned. There appeared to be a considerable number of sheets of foolscap, all closely written over in a fine, close hand.

“Thank you, Mr. Van Nicht, thank you very much,” said Olcott, searching his soul for excuses. “But I'm afraid we aren't able to pay much for this sort of matter. What I mean to say is we are not in a position to invest very heavily in outside offerings. Er—you see most of our specials—in fact practically all of them except those written here in the office by the staff—come to us as part of a regular syndicate arrangement.”

Here Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th, attained the physically impossible. He erected his spine straighter than before and stiffened his body a mite stiffer than it had been.

“Pray do not misunderstand me, sir,” he stated solemnly. “I crave no honorarium for this work. I expect none. I have considered it a duty incumbent upon me to prepare it, and I regard it as a pleasure to tender it to you, gratis.”

“But—I'd like to be able to offer a little something anyway—”

“One moment, if you please! Kindly hear me out! With me, sir, this has been a labour of love. Moreover, I should look upon it as an impropriety to accept remuneration for such work. To me it would savour of the mercenary—would be as though I sought to capitalise into dollars and cents the reputation of my own people and my own stock. I trust you get my viewpoint?”

“Oh, yes, indeed”—Olcott was slightly flustered—“very creditable of you, I'm sure. Er—is it very long?”

“No longer than a proper appreciation of the topic demands.” The old gentleman spoke with firmness. “Also you may rely absolutely upon the trustworthiness and the accuracy of all the facts, as herein recited. I had access to the papers left by my own revered grandfather, Judge Cecilius Van Nicht, 2d, son and namesake of the founder of our line, locally. I may tell you, too, that in preparing this compilation I was assisted by my sister, Miss Rachael Van Nicht, a lady of wide reading and no small degree of intellectual attainment, although leading a life much aloof from the world—in fact, almost a cloistered life.”

He arose, opened out the sheaf of folded sheets, pressed them flat with a caressing hand and laid them down in front of Olcott. He spoke now with authority, almost in the tone of a superior giving instructions regarding a delicate matter to an underling:

“I feel warranted in the assumption that you will not find it necessary to alter or curtail my statements in any particular. I have had some previous experience in literary endeavours. In all modesty I may say that I am no novice. A signed article from my pen, entitled The Influence of the Holland—Dutch Strain Upon American Public Life, From Peter Stuyvesant to Theodore Roosevelt, was published some years since in the New York Evening Post, afterward becoming the subject of editorial comment in the Springfield Republican, the Hartford Courant and the Boston Transcript. At present I am engaged in a brief history of one of our earlier presidents, the Honourable Martin Van Buren. I have the honour to bid you a very good day, sir.”

Olcott ran the story in his next Sunday issue but one. It stretched the full length of two columns and invaded a third. It was tiresome and long-winded. It was as prosy as prosy could be. To make room for it a smartly done special on the commercial awakening of Schuyler County was crowded out. Olcott's judgment told him he did a sinful thing, but he ran it. He went further than that. Into the editorial page he slipped a paragraph directing attention to “Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht's timely and interesting article, appearing elsewhere in this number.”

He had his reward, though, in the comments of sundry ones of his local subscribers. From these comments, made to him by letter and by word of mouth, he sensed something of the attitude of the community toward the Van Nicht family. As he figured, this sentiment was a compound of several things. It appeared to embody a gentle intolerance for the shell of social exclusiveness in which the present bearers of the name had walled themselves up, together with a sympathy for their poverty and their self-imposed state of lonely and neglected aloofness, and still further down, underlying these emotions and tincturing them, an understanding and an admiration for the importance of this old family as an old family—an admiration which was genuine and avowed on the part of some, and just as genuine but more or less reluctantly bestowed on the part of others. It was as Mayor McGlynn had informed Olcott on their first meeting. The Van Nichts were not so much individuals, having a share in the life of this thriving, striving, overgrown town, as they were historical fixtures and traditional assets. Collectively, they constituted something to be proud of and sorry for.

Soon, too, he had further reward. One afternoon a small and grimy boy invaded his room, without knocking, and laid a note upon his desk.

“Old guy downstairs, with long hair and a gimpy leg, handed me this yere and gimme fi' cents to fetch it up here to you,” stated the messenger.

The note was from Mr. Van Nicht, as a glance at the superscription told Olcott before he opened the envelope. In formal terms Olcott was thanked for giving the writer's offering such prominence in the pages of his valuable paper and was invited, formally, to call upon the undersigned at his place of residence, in order that undersigned might more fully express to Mr. Olcott his sincere appreciation.

On the whole, Olcott was glad of the opportunity to view the inside of that gloomy old house under the big tree out at the end of Putnam Street. He wanted to see more of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, and to see something of the other two dwellers beneath that ancient roof. Olcott had dreams of some day writing a novel; some day when he had the time. Most newspaper men do have such dreams; or else it is a play they are going to write. Meanwhile, pending the coming of that day, he was storing up material for it in his mind. Assuredly the bleached-out, pale, old recluse in the black stock would make copy. Probably his sisters would be types also, and they might make copy too. Olcott answered the note, accepting the invitation for that same evening.

It was a night of crystal-clear moonlight, and Olcott walked up Putnam Street through an alchemistic radiance which was like a path for a Puck to dance along. But the shimmering aisle broke off short, when he had turned in at the broken gate and had come to the edge of the shade of the Van Nicht elm. Under there the shadow lay so thick and dense that, as he groped through it to the small entry porch, finding the way by the feel of his feet upon the irregular, flagged walk, he had the conviction that he might reach out with his hands and gather up folds of the darkness in his arms, like ells of black velvet. The faint glow which came through a curtained front window of the unseen house was like a phosphorescent smear, plastered against a formless background, and only served to make the adjacent darkness darker still. If the moonlight yonder was a fit place for the fairies to trip it, this particular spot, he thought, must be reserved for ghosts to stalk in.

Fumbling with his hands, he searched out the heavy door knocker. Its resounding thump against its heel plate, as he dropped it back in place, made him jump. At once the door opened. Centred in the oblong of dulled light which came from an oil lamp burning upon a table, behind and within, appeared the slender, warped figure of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th. With much ceremony the head of the house bowed the guest in past the portals.

Almost the first object to catch Olcott's eye, as he stepped in, was a portrait which, with its heavy frame, filled up a considerable portion of the wall space across the back breadth of the square hallway into which he had entered. Excepting for this picture and the table with the oil lamp upon it and a tall hat-tree, the hall was quite bare.

Plainly pleased that the younger man's attention had been caught by the painted square of canvas, Mr. Van Nicht promptly turned up the wick of the light, and then Olcott, looking closer, saw staring down at him the close-set black eyes and the heavy-jowled, foreign-look-ing face of an old man, dressed in such garb as we associate with our conceptions of Thomas Jefferson and the elder Adams.

“My famous forbear, sir,” stated Olcott's host, with a great weight of vanity in his words, “the original bearer of the name which I, as his great-grandson, have the honour, likewise, of bearing. To me, sir, it has ever been a source of deep regret that there is no likeness extant depicting him in his uniform as a regimental commander in the Continental armies. If any such likeness existed, it was destroyed prior to the colonel's removal to this place, following the close of the struggle for Independence. This portrait was executed in the later years of the original's life—presumably about the year 1798, by order of his son, who was my grandfather. It was the son who enlarged this house, by the addition of a wing at the rear, and to him also we are indebted for the written records of his father's gallant performances on the field of honour, as well as for the accounts of his many worthy achievements in the lines of civic endeavour. Naturally this portrait and those records are our most precious possessions and our greatest heritages.

“The first Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht was by all accounts a great scholar but not a practised scribe. The second of the name was both. Hence our great debt to him—a debt which I may say is one in which this community itself shares.”

“I'm sure of it,” said Olcott.

“And now, sir, if you will be so good, kindly step this way,” said Mr. Van Nicht. “The light, I fear, is rather indifferent. This house has never been wired for electricity, nor was it ever equipped with gas pipes. I prefer to use lights more in keeping with its antiquity and its general character.”

His tone indicated that he did not in the least hold with the vulgarised and common utilities of the present. He led the way diagonally across the hall to a side door and ushered Olcott into what evidently was the chief living room of the house. It was a large, square room, very badly lighted with candles. It was cluttered, as Olcott instantly perceived, with a jumble of dingy-appearing antique furnishings, and it contained two women who, at his appearance, rose from their seats upon either side of the wide and empty fireplace. Simultaneously his nose informed him' that this room was heavy with a pent, dampish taint.

He decided that what it mainly needed was air and sunshine, and plenty of both.

“My two sisters,” introduced Mr. Van Nicht. “Miss Rachael Van Nicht, Mr. Olcott. Miss Harriet Van Nicht, Mr. Olcott.”

Neither of the two ladies offered her hand to him. They bowed primly, and Olcott bowed back and, already feeling almost as uncomfortable as though he had invaded the privacy of a family group of resident shades in their resident vault, he sat down in a musty-smell-ing armchair near the elder sister.

Considered as such, the conversation which followed was not unqualifiedly a success. The brother bore the burden of it, which meant that at once it took on a stiff and an unnatural and an artificial colouring. It was dead talk, stuffed with big words, and strung with wires. There were semioccasional interpolations by Olcott, who continued to feel most decidedly out of place. Once in a while Miss Rachael Van Nicht slid a brief remark into the grooves which her brother channelled out. Since he was called upon to say so little, Olcott was the better off for an opportunity to study this lady as he sat there.

His first look at her had told him she was of the same warp and texture as her brother; somewhat skimpier in the pattern, but identical in the fabric. Olcott decided though that there was this difference: If the brother had stepped out of Dickens, the sister had escaped from between the hasped lids of an old daguerreotype frame. Her plain frock of some harsh, dead-coloured stuff—her best frock, his intuition told him—the big cameo pin at her throat, the homely arrangement of her grey hair, her hands, wasted and withered-looking as they lay on her lap, even her voice, which was lugubriously subdued and flat—all these things helped out the illusion. Of the other sister, sitting two-thirds of the way across the wide room from him, he saw but little and he heard less. The poor light, and the distance and the deep chair in which she had sunk herself, combined to blot her out as a personality and to efface her from the picture. She scarcely uttered a word.

As Olcott had expected beforehand, the talk dealt, in the main, with the Van Nicht family, which is another way of saying that it went back of and behind, and far beyond, all that might be current and timely and pertinent to the hour. There was no substance to it, for it dealt with what had no substance. As he stayed on, making brave pretense of being interested, he was aware of an interrupting, vaguely irritating sound at his rear and partly to one side of him. Patently the sound was coming from without. It was like a sustained and steady scratching, and it had to do, he figured, with one of the window openings. He took a glance over his shoulder, but he couldn't make out the cause; the window was too heavily shrouded in faded, thick curtains of a sad, dark-green aspect. The thing got on his nerves, it persisted so. Finally he was moved to mention it.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, taking advantage of a pause, “but isn't somebody or something fumbling at the window outside?”

“It is a bough of the family elm,” explained Mr. Van Nicht. “One of the lower boughs has grown forward and downward, until it touches the side of the house. When stirred by the breeze it creates the sound which you hear.” Internally Olcott shivered. Now that the explanation had been vouchsafed the noise made him think of ghostly fingers tapping at the glass panes—as though the spirit of the tree craved admittance to the dismal circle of these human creatures who shared with it the tribal glory.

“Don't you find it very annoying?” he asked innocently. “I should think you would prune the limb back.” He halted then, realising that his tongue had slipped. There was a little silence, which became edged and iced with a sudden hostility.

“No human hand has ever touched the tree to denude it of any part of its majestic beauty,” stated Mr. Van Nicht with a frigid intonation. “Whilst any of this household survives to protect it, no human hand ever shall.”

From the elder sister came a murmur of assent.

The conversation had sagged and languished before; after this it sank to a still lower level and gradually froze to death. After possibly ten minutes more of the longest and bleakest minutes he ever recalled having weathered, Olcott, being mentally chilled through, got up and, making a show of expressing a counterfeit pleasure of having been accorded this opportunity of meeting those present, said really he must be going now.

In their places Miss Rachael Van Nicht and her brother rose, standing stiff as stalagmites, and he knew he was not forgiven. It was the younger sister who showed him out, preceding him silently, as he betook himself from the presence of the remaining two.

Close up, in the better light of the hall, Olcott for the first time perceived that Miss Harriet Van Nicht was not so very old. In fact, she was not old at all. He had assumed somehow that she must be sered and soured and elderly, or at least that she must be middle-aged. With this establishment he could not associate any guise of youth as belonging. But he perceived how wrong he had been. Miss Harriet Van Nicht most assuredly was not old. She could not be past thirty, perhaps she was not more than twenty-five or six. It was the plain and ugly gown she wore, a dun-coloured, sleazy, shabby gown, which had given her, when viewed from a distance, the aspect of age—that and the unbecoming way in which she wore her hair slicked back from her forehead and drawn up from round her ears. She had fine eyes, as now he saw, with a plaintive light in them, and finely arched brows and a delicate oval of a face; and she was small and dainty of figure. He could tell that, too, despite the fit of the ungraceful frock.

At the outer door, which she held ajar for his passage, she spoke, and instantly he was moved by a certain wistfulness in her tones.

“It was a pleasure to have you come to see us, Mr. Olcott,” she said, and he thought she meant it too. “We see so few visitors, living here as we do. Sometimes I think it might be better for us if we kept more in touch with people who live in the outside world and know something of it.”

“Thank you, Miss Van Nicht,” said Olcott, warming. “I'm afraid, though, I made a rather unfortunate suggestion about the tree. Really, I'm very sorry.”

Her face took on a gravity; almost a condemning expression came into it. And when she answered him it was in a different voice.

“A stranger could not understand how we regard the Van Nicht elm,” she said. “No stranger could understand! Good night, Mr. Olcott.”

At the last she had made him feel that he was a stranger. And she had not shaken hands with him either, nor had she asked him to call again.

He made his way out, through the black magic of the tree's midnight gloom, into the pure white chemistry of the moonlight; and having reached the open, he looked back. Except for that faint luminous blotch, like smeared phosphorus, showing through the blackness from beyond the giant tree, nothing testified that a habitation of living beings might be tucked away in that drear hiding place. He shrugged his shoulders as though to shake a load off them and, as he swung down the silvered street in the flawless night, his thoughts thawed out. He decided that assuredly two of the Van Nichts must go into the book which some day, when time served, he meant to write.

They belonged in a book—those two poor, pale, sapless creatures, enduring a grinding poverty for the sake of a vain idolatry; those joint inheritors of a worthless and burdensome fetish, deliberately preferring the shadow of a mouldy past for the substance of the present day. Why, the thing smacked of the Oriental. It wasn't fit and sane for white people—this Mongolian ancestor-worship which shut the door and drew the blind to every healthy and vigorous impulse and every beneficent impulse. Going along alone, Olcott worked himself into quite a brisk little fury of impatience and disgust.

He had it right—they belonged in a book, those two older Van Nichts, not in real life. And into a book they should go—into his book. But the younger girl, now. It was a pitiable life she must lead, hived up there in that musty old house under that terrific big tree with those two grim and touchy hermits. On her account he resented it. He tried to picture her in some more favourable setting. He succeeded fairly well too. Possibly, though, that was because Olcott had the gift of a brisk imagination. At times, during the days which followed, the vision of Harriet Van Nicht, translated out of her present decayed environment, persisted in his thoughts. He wondered why it did persist.

Nearly a month went by, during which he saw no member of that weird household. One day he encountered upon the street the brother and went up to him and, rather against the latter's inclination, engaged him in small talk. It didn't take long to prove that Mr. Van Nicht had very little small talk in stock; also that his one-time air of distant and punctilious regard for the newspaper man had entirely vanished. Mr. Van Nicht was courteous enough, with an aloof and stand-away courteousness, but he was not cordial. Presently Olcott found himself speaking, from a rather defensive attitude, of his own ancestry. He came of good New England stock—a circumstance which he rarely mentioned in company, but which now, rather to his own surprise, he found himself expounding at some length. Afterward he told himself that he had been merely casting about for a subject which might prove congenial to Mr. Van Nicht and had, by chance, hit on that one.

If such were the care, the expedient failed. It did not in the least serve to establish them upon a common footing. The old gentleman listened, but he refused to warm up; and when he bade Olcott good day and limped off, he left Olcott profoundly impressed with the conviction that Mr. Van Nicht did not propose to suffer any element of familiarity to enter into their acquaintanceship. Feeling abashed, as though he had been rebuked after some subtle fashion for presumption and forwardness, Olcott dropped into the handiest bar and had a drink all by himself—something he rarely did. But this time he felt that the social instinct of his system required a tonic and a bracer.

Within the next day or two chance gave him opportunity for still further insight into the estimation in which he was held by other members of the Van Nicht family. This happened shortly before the close of a cool and showery July afternoon. Leaving his desk, he took advantage of a lull in the rain to go for a solitary stroll before dinner. He was briskly traversing a side street, well out of the business district, when suddenly the downpour started afresh. He pulled up the collar of his light raincoat and turned back to hurry to the Hotel Brain-ard, where he lived. Going in the opposite direction a woman pedestrian, under an umbrella, met him; she was heading right into the slanting sheets of rain. In a sidelong glance he recognised the profile of the passer, and instantly he had faced about and was alongside of her, lifting his soaked hat.

“How d'you do, Miss Van Nicht?” he was saying. “I'm afraid you'll make poor headway against this rainstorm. Won't you let me see you safely home?”

It was the younger Miss Van Nicht. Her greeting of him and her smile made him feel that for the moment at least he would not be altogether an unwelcome companion. As he fell in beside her, catching step with her and taking the umbrella out of her hands, he noted with a small throb of pity that her cheap dark skirt was dripping and that the shoes she wore must be insufficient protection, with their thin soles and their worn uppers, against wet weather. He noted sundry other things about her: Seen by daylight she was pretty—undeniably pretty. The dampness had twisted little curls in her primly bestowed hair, and the exertion of her struggle against the storm had put a becoming flush in her cheeks.

“I was out on an errand for my sister,” she said. “I thought I could get home between showers, but this one caught me. And my umbrella—I'm afraid it is leaky.”

Undeniably it was. Already the palm of Olcott's hand was sopping where water, seeping through open seams along the rusted ribs, had run down the handle. Each new gust, drumming upon the decrepit cloth, threatened to make a total wreck of what was already but little better than the venerable ruin of an umbrella.

“You must permit me to see you home then,” he said. He glanced up and down, hoping to see a cab or a taxi. But there was no hireable vehicle in sight and the street cars did not run through this street. “I'm afraid, though, that we'll have to go afoot.”

“And I'm afraid that I am taking you out of your way,” she said. “You were going in the opposite direction, weren't you, when you met me?”

“I wasn't going anywhere in particular,” he lied gallantly; “personally I rather like to take a walk when it's raining.”

For a bit after this neither of them spoke, for the wind all at once blew with nearly the intensity of a small hurricane, buffeting thick rain spray into their faces and spattering it up about their feet. She seemed so small—so defenceless almost, bending forward to brace herself against its rude impetuosity. He was mighty glad it was his hand which clasped her arm, guiding and helping her along; mighty glad it was he who held the leaky old umbrella in front of her and with it fended off some part of the rain from her. They had travelled a block or two so, in company, when the summer storm broke off even more abruptly than it had started. There was an especially violent spatter of especially large drops, and then the wind gave one farewell wrench at the umbrella and was gone, tearing on its way.

In another half minute the setting sun was doing its best to shine out through a welter of shredding black clouds. There were wide patches of blue in the sky when they turned into Putnam Street and came within sight of the Van Nicht elm, rising as a great, green balloon at the head of it. By now they were chatting upon the basis—almost—of a seasoned acquaintanceship. Olcott found himself talking about his work. When a young man tells a young woman about his work, and is himself interested as he tells it, it is quite frequently a sign that he is beginning to be interested in something besides his work, whether he realises it yet or not. And in Miss Van Nicht he was pleased to discern what he took to be a sympathetic understanding, as well as a happy aptness and alertness in the framing of her replies. It hardly seemed possible that this was the second time they had exchanged words. Rather it was as though they had known each other for a considerable period; so he told himself.

But as, side by side, they turned in at the rickety gate of the ancestral dooryard and came under the shadow of the ancestral tree, her manner, her attitude, her voice, all about her seemed to undergo a change. Her pace quickened for these last few steps, and she cast a furtive, almost an apprehensive glance toward the hooded windows of the house.

“I'm afraid I am late—my sister and my brother will be worrying about me,” she said a little nervously. “And I am sorry to have put you to all this trouble on my account.”

“Trouble, Miss Van Nicht? Why, it was—”

“I shan't ask you in,” she said, breaking in on him. “I know you will want to be getting back to the hotel and putting on dry clothes. Good-by, Mr. Olcott, and thank you very much.”

And with that she had left him, and she was hurrying up the porch steps, and she was gone, without a backward look to where he stood, puzzled and decidedly taken aback, in the middle of the seamed flags of the walk.

He was nearly at the gate when he discovered that he had failed to return her umbrella to her; so he went back and knocked at the door. It was the elder sister who answered. She opened the door a scant foot.

“How do you do, sir?” she said austerely.

“I forgot to give your sister her umbrella,” explained Olcott.

“So I perceive,” she replied, speaking through the slit with a kind of sharp impatience, and she took it from him. “'Thank you! We are most grateful to you for your thoughtfulness.”

She waited then, as if for him to speak, providing he had anything to say—her posture and her expression meanwhile most forcibly interpreting the attitude in which he must understand that he stood here. It was plain enough to be sensed. She resented—they all resented—his reappearance in any rÔle at the threshold of their home. She was profoundly out of temper with him and all that might pertain and appertain to him. So naturally there was nothing for him to say except “Good evening,” and he said it.

“Good evening,” she said, and as he bowed and backed away she closed the door.

Outside the fence he halted and looked about him, then he looked back over the gapped and broken palings. Everywhere else the little world of Putnam Street had a washed, cleansed aspect; everywhere else nearly the sun slid its flattened rays along the refreshed and moistened sod and touched the wayside weeds with pure gold; but none of its beams slanted over the side hill and found a way beneath the interlaced, widespread bulk of the family tree. He saw how forlornly the lower boughs, under their load of rain water, drooped almost to the earth, and how the naked soil round about the vast trunk of it was guttered with muddy, yellow furrows where little torrents had coursed down the slope, and how poisonously vivid was the mould upon the trunk. The triangular scar in its lower bark showed as a livid greenish patch. Still farther back in the shadow the outlines of the old grey house half emerged, revealing dimly a space of streaked walls and the sodden, warped shingles upon one outjut-ting gable of the peaked roof.

“It's not an honest elm,” thought Olcott to himself in a little impotent rage. “It's a cursed devil tree, a upas tree, overshadowing and blighting everything pleasant and wholesome that might grow near it. Bats and owls and snails belong back there—not human beings. There ought to be a vigilance committee formed to chop it down and blast its roots out of the ground with dynamite. Oh, damn!”

In his pocket he had a letter from the presiding deity of the organisation that owned the string of papers of which the paper he edited was a part. In that letter he was invited to consider the proposition of surrendering his present berth with the Schuylerville News-Ledger and going off to Europe, as special war correspondent for the syndicate. He had been considering the project for two days now. All of a sudden he made up his mind to accept. While the heat of his petulance and disappointment was still upon him, he went that same evening and wired his acceptance to headquarters. Two days later, with his credentials in his pocket and a weight of sullen resentment against certain animate and inanimate objects in his heart, he was aboard a train out of Schuylerville, bound for New York, and thereafter, by steamer, for foreign parts.

He was away, concerned with trenches, gas bombs, field hospitals and the quotable opinions of sundry high and mighty men of war-craft and statecraft, for upwards of a year. It was a most remarkably busy year, and the job in hand claimed jealous sovereignty of his eyes, his legs and his brain, while it lasted.

He came back, having delivered the goods to the satisfaction of his employers, to find himself promoted to a general supervision of the editorial direction of the papers in his syndicate, with a thumping good salary and a roving commission. He willed it that the first week of his incumbency in his new duties should carry him to Schuylerville. In his old office, which looked much the same as it had looked when he occupied it, he found young Morgan, his former assistant, also looking much the same, barring that now Morgan was in full charge and giving orders instead of taking them. Authority nearly always works a change in a man; it had in this case.

“Say, Olcott,” said Morgan after the talk between them had ebbed and flowed along a little while, “you remember that old geezer, Van Nicht, don't you? You know, the old boy who wrote the long piece about his family, and you ran it?”

“Certainly I do,” said Olcott. “Why—what of him?”

Instead of answering him directly, Morgan put another question:

“And of course you remember the old Van Nicht house, under that big, whopping elm tree, out at the end of Putnam Street, where he used to live with those two freakish sisters of his?”

“Where he used to live? Doesn't he—don't they—live there now?”

“Nope—tree's gone and so is the house.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Gone out of existence—vamoosed. Here's what happened, and it's a peach of a tale too: One night about six months ago there came up a hard thunderstorm—lots of lightning and gobs of thunder, not to mention rain and wind a plenty. In the midst of it a bolt hit the Van Nicht elm—ker-flewie—and just naturally tore it into flinders. When I saw it myself the next day it was converted from a landmark into the biggest whisk broom in the world. The neighbours were saying that it rained splinters round there for ten minutes after the bolt struck. I guess they didn't exaggerate much at that, because—”

“Was the house struck too? Was anybody hurt?” Olcott cut in on him.

“No, the house escaped somehow—had a few shingles ripped off the roof, and some of its windows smashed in by flying scraps; that was all. And nobody about the place suffered anything worse than a stunning. But the fright killed the older sister—Miss Rachael. Anyhow, that's what the doctors think. She didn't have a mark on her, but she died in about an hour, without ever speaking. I guess it was just as well, too, that she did. If she had survived the first shock I judge the second one would just about have finished her.”

“The second shock? You don't mean the lightning?”

“No, no!” Morgan hastened to explain.

“Lightning never plays a return date—never has need to, I take it. I mean the shock of what happened after daylight next morning.

“That was the queerest part of the whole thing—that was what made a really big story out of it. We ran two columns about it ourselves, and the A. P. carried it for more than a column.

“After the storm had died down and it got light enough to see, some of the neighbours were prowling round the place sizing up the damage. Right in the heart of the stump of the elm, which was split wide open—the stump, I mean—they found a funny-looking old copper box buried in what must have been a rot-ted-out place at one time, maybe ninety or a hundred years ago. But the hollow had grown up, and nobody ever had suspected that the tree wasn't solid as iron all the way through, until the lightning came along and just naturally reached a fiery finger down through all that hardwood and probed the old box out of its cache and, without so much as melting a hinge on it, heaved it up into sight, where the first fellow that happened along afterward would be sure to see it. Well, right off they thought of buried treasure, but being honest they called old Van Nicht out of the house, and in his presence they opened her up—the box I mean—and then, lo and behold, they found out that all these years this town had been worshipping a false god!

“Yes, sir, the great and only original Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht was a rank fake. He was as bogus as a lead nickel. There were papers in the box to prove what nobody, and least of all his own flesh and blood, ever suspected before. He wasn't a hero of the Revolution. He wasn't a colonel under George Washington. He wasn't of Holland-Dutch stock. His name wasn't even Van Nicht. His real name was Jake Nix—that's what it was, Nix—and he was just a plain, everyday Hessian soldier—a mercenary bought up, along with the other Hessians, and sent over here by King George to fight against the cause of liberty, instead of for it.

“As near as we can figure it out, he changed his name after the war ended, before he moved here to live, and then after he died—or anyhow when he was an old man—his son, the second Cecilius Jacob, concocted the fairy tale about his father's distinguished services and all the rest of it. The son was the one, it seems, who capitalised the false reputation of the old man. He lived on it, and all the Van Nichts who came after him lived on it too—only they were innocent of practising any deception on the community at large, and the second Van Nicht wasn't. It certainly put the laugh on this town, not to mention the local aristocracy, and the D. A. R.'s and the Colonial Dames and the rest of the blue bloods generally, when the news spread that morning.

“Oh, there couldn't be any doubt about it! The proofs were all right there and dozens of reliable witnesses saw them—letters and papers and the record of old Nix's services in the British army. In fact there was only one phase of the affair that has remained unexplained and a mystery. I mean the presence of the papers in the tree. Nobody can figure out why the son didn't destroy them, when he was creating such a swell fiction character out of his revered parent. One theory is that he didn't know of their existence at all—that the old man, for reasons best known to himself, hid them there in that copper box and that then the tree healed up over the hole and sealed the box in, with nobody but him any the wiser, and nobody ever suspecting anything out of the way, but just taking everything for granted. Why, it was exactly as if the old Nix had come out of the grave after lying there for a century or more, to produce the truth and shame his own offspring, and incidentally scare one of his descendants plumb to death.”

“What a tragedy!” said Olcott. But his main thought when he said it was not for the dead sister but for the living.

“You said it,” affirmed Morgan. “That's exactly what it was—a tragedy, with a good deal of serio-comedy relief to it. Only there wasn't anything very comical about the figure the old man Van Nicht cut when he came walking into this office here about half past ten o'clock that day, with a ragged piece of crÊpe tied round his old high hat. Olcott, you never in your life saw a man as badly broken up as he was. All his vanity, all his bumptiousness was gone—he was just a poor, old, shabby, broken-spirited man. I'd already gotten a tip on the story and I'd sent one of my boys out to find him and get his tale, but it seemed he'd told the reporter he preferred to make a personal statement for publication. And so here he was with his statement all carefully written out and he asked me to print it, insisting that it ought to be given as wide circulation as possible. I'll dig it up for you out of the files in a minute and let you see it.

“Yes, sir, he'd sat down alongside his sister's dead body and written it. He called it A Confession and an Apology, and I ran it that way, just as he'd written it. It wasn't very long, but it was mighty pitiful, when you took everything into consideration. He begged the pardon of the public for unwittingly practicing a deceit upon it all through his life—for living a lie, was the way he phrased it—and he signed it 'Jacob Nix, heretofore erroneously known as Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th.' That signature was what especially got me when I read it—it made me feel that the old boy was literally stripping his soul naked before the ridicule of this town and the ridicule of the whole country. A pretty manly, straightforward thing, I called it, and I liked him better for having done it than I ever had liked him before.

“Well, I told him I would run the card for him and I did run it, and likewise I toned down the story we carried about the exposure too. I'm fairly well calloused, I guess, but I didn't want to bruise the old man and his sister any more than I could help doing. But, of course, I didn't speak to him about that part of it. I did try, in a clumsy sort of way, to express my sympathy for him. I guess I made a fairly sad hash of it, though. There didn't seem to be any words to fit the situation. Or, if there were, I couldn't think of them for the moment. I remember I mumbled something about letting bygones be bygones and not taking it too much to heart and all that sort of thing.

“He thanked me, and then, as he started to go, he stopped and asked me whether by any chance I knew of any opening—any possible job for a person of his age and limitations. I remember his words: 'It is high time that I was casting about to find honourable employment, no matter how humble. I have been trading with a spurious currency for too long. I have spent my life in the imposition of a monumental deceit upon this long-suffering community. I intend now, sir, to go to work to earn a living with my own hands and upon my own merits. I wish to atone for the rÔle I have played.'

“It may have been imagination, but I thought there was a kind of faint hopeful gleam in his eye as he looked at me and said this; and he seemed to flinch a little bit when I broke the news to him that we didn't have any vacancies on the staff at present. I sort of gathered that he rather fancied he had literary gifts. Literary gifts? Can't you just see that poor, forlorn old scout piking round soliciting want ads at twenty cents a line or trying to cover petty assignments on the news end? I told him, though, I'd be on the lookout for something for him, and he thanked me mighty ceremoniously and limped out, leaving me all choked up. Two days later, after the funeral, he telephoned in to ask me not to trouble myself on his account, because he had already established a connection with another concern which he hoped would turn out to be mutually advantageous and personally lucrative; or words to that effect.

“So I did a little private investigating that evening and I found out where the old chap had connected. You see I was interested. A live wire named Garrison, who owned the state rights for selling the World's Great Classics of Prose and Poetry on subscriptions, had landed here about a week before. You know the kind of truck this fellow Garrison was peddling? Forty large, hard, heavy volumes, five dollars down and a dollar a month as long as you live; no blacksmith's fireside complete without the full set; should be in every library; so much for the full calf bindings; so much for the half leather; give your little ones a chance to acquire an education at a trifling cost; come early and avoid the rush of those seeking to take advantage of this unparalleled opportunity; price positively due to advance at the end of a limited period; see also our great clubbing offer in conjunction with Bunkem's Illustrated Magazine—all that sort of guff.

“Well, Garrison had opened up headquarters here. He'd brought some of his agents with him—experts at conning the simple peasantry and the sturdy yeomanry into signing on the dotted line A and paying down the first installment as a binder; but he needed some home talent to fill out his crew, and he advertised with us for volunteers. Old Van Nicht—Nix, I mean—had heard about it, and he had applied for a job as canvasser, and Garrison had taken him on, not on salary, of course, but agreeing to pay him a commission on all his sales. That was what I found out that night.”

Before Olcott's eyes rose a vision of a dried-up, bleak-eyed old man limping from doorstep to doorstep, enduring the rebuffs of fretful housewives and the insolence of annoyed householders—a failure, and a hopeless, predestined failure at that.

“Too bad, wasn't it?” he said.

“What's too bad?” asked Morgan.

“About that poor old man turning book agent at his age, with his lack of experience with the ways of the world.”

“Save your pity for somebody that needs it,” said Morgan, grinning. “That old boy doesn't. Why, Olcott, he was a hit from the first minute. This fellow Garrison was telling me about him only last week. All that stately dignity, all that Sir Walter Raleigh courtesy stuff, all that faculty for using the biggest possible words in stock, was worth money to the old chap when he put it to use. It impressed the simple-minded rustic and the merry villager. It got him a hearing where one of these gabby young canvassers with a striped vest and a line of patter memorised out of a book would be apt to fail. Why, he's the sensation of the book-agent game in these parts. They sick him on to all the difficult prospects out in the country, and he makes good nine times out of ten. He's got four counties in his territory, with all expenses paid, and last month his commissions—so Garrison told me—amounted to a hundred and forty dollars, and this month he's liable to do even better. What's more, according to Garrison, the old scout likes the work and isn't ashamed of it. So what do you know about that?”

As Morgan paused, Olcott asked the question which from the first of this recital had been shaping itself in the back part of his head: “The other sister—what became of her?” He tried to put a casual tone into his inquiry.

“You mean Miss Harriet? Well, say, in her case the transformation was almost as great as it was in her brother's. She came right out of her shell, too—in fact, she seemed downright glad of a chance to come out of it and quit being a recluse. She let it be noised about that she was in the market for any work that she could do, and a lot of people who felt sorry for her, including Mayor McGlynn, who's a pretty good chap, interested themselves in her behalf. Right off, the school board appointed her a substitute teacher in one of the lower grammar grades at the Hawthorne School, out here on West Frobisher Street. She didn't lose any time in delivering the goods either. Say, there must have been mighty good blood in that family, once it got a real chance to circulate. The kiddies in her classes all liked her from the start, and the other teachers and the principal liked her, too, and when the fall term begins in October she goes on as a regular.

“On top of that, when she'd got a little colour in her cheeks and had frizzed her hair out round her face, and when she'd used up her first month's pay in buying herself some good black clothes, it dawned on the town all of a sudden that she was a mighty good-looking, bright, sweet little woman instead of a dowdy, sour old maid. They say she never had a sweetheart before in her life—that no man ever had looked at her the second time; at least that's the current gossip. Be that as it may, she can't complain on that score any more, even if she is still in mourning for her sister.”

“How do you know all this?” demanded Olcott suspiciously. “Are you paying her attentions yourself?”

“Who, me? Lord, man, no! I'm merely an innocent bystander. You see, we live at the same boarding house, take our meals at the same table in fact, and I get a chance to see what's going on. She came there to board—it's Mrs. Gale's house—as soon as she moved out of the historic but mildewed homestead, which was about a month after the night of the storm. The New Diamond Auto Company—that's a concern formed since you left—bought the property and tore down the old house, after blasting the stump of the family tree out of the ground with giant powder; they're putting up their assembling plant on the site. After the mortgage was satisfied and the back taxes had been paid up, there was mighty little left for the two heirs; but about that time Miss Harriet got her job of teaching and she came to Mrs. Gale's to live, and that's where I first met her. Two or three spry young fellows round town are calling on her in the evenings—nearly every night there's some fellow in the parlour, all spruced up and highly perfumed, waiting to see her—not to mention one or two of the unmarried men boarders.”

“Morgan,” said Olcott briskly, “do me a favour! Take me along with you to dinner tonight at your boarding place, will you?”

“Tired of hotels, eh?” asked Morgan. “Well, Mrs. Gale has good home cooking and I'd be glad to have you come.”

“That's it,” said Olcott; “I'm tired of hotel life.”

“You're on,” said Morgan.

“Yes,” said Olcott, “I am—but you're not on—at least not yet.” But Morgan didn't hear that, because Olcott said it to himself.