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CHAPTER I.
Convocation.

Freda returned to her home in Lockwood, advising Mauney to try for a position on the Lockwood Collegiate staff. She told him that the town had its faults, but her father, who was mayor, would be able to help him get the situation. He wrote and applied, and was informed by return mail that he would be considered in due course. Meanwhile he waited in Merlton for Convocation, to receive his academic degree.

Convocation was an impressive function—the great assembly hall filled with begowned and mortar-boarded seniors, and with their admiring relatives and friends; the broad platform crowded with the professors wearing their multi-colored gowns, while rich organ music shook like a solemn presence through the huge auditorium. After the presentation of the diplomas, Richard Garnett, the President, made a short address.

“You are going forth,” he said, “to sow in other soils the seeds you have gathered here.”

The majesty of a university president lends his words an authoritative dignity suitable to such a solemn occasion. The graduate, pausing on the threshold of the world, finds a grandeur in this farewell address. He becomes inspired to catch the ideal. It is he who must carry forth the light. He, and his fellows beside him in the hall, are to be the torch bearers. It is an exquisite moment before the Chancellor’s “Convocatio dimissa est” and the final thunder of the pipe organ as they step forth, citizens of the world.

Mauney took heart again. Denied a position on the university staff, he thought now of those “other soils” where he was needed even more. It would have been pleasant to remain in Merlton, adding his moiety of effort to the distinguished total of a renowned university. In time it might have brought fame. But the ideals of Christianity had been rife during the past four years. No man could go through Merlton without learning that nobility of character lay in service to humanity. The courageous, educational formula of Garnett was responsible for this leaven. It deserved as much praise and received as much as unspectacular courage ever does. A thousand men scoffed at Garnett as a visionary. A thousand fawned upon him for personal reasons. A hundred knew him. There were many thoughtless individuals ready to teach him his function. But there were many also who left Merlton each year inflamed by his idealism and determined to serve humanity’s needs. Garnett might have considered this a tribute much deeper than praise.

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CHAPTER II.
Lockwood.

Lockwood had been called “The Garden of Upper Canada.” This designation, which scarcely over-rated the beauty of the town, originated in the private correspondence of some of its earliest inhabitants. They were discerning people, mostly United Empire Loyalists, who, more than a century since, had selected it for its placid outlook. At Lockwood’s very feet moved the majestic St. Lawrence, that river of rivers. Behind it stood the thick forests of an unexplored hinterland inhabited by deer, bear and cariboo. Through the town, later on, trailed the long York Road with its stage-coaches.

A political friend of John Beverley Robinson had written in a letter: “I have built a home in Lockwood and here with Bessie (his wife), I hope to remain. My house stands on a cliff beside the river. We are almost surrounded by a small forest of pines—cozy and contented and away from the hot-heads.”

That Lockwood should have been chosen by aristocratic members of the Family Compact was not strange, for it furnished these worthy gentlemen with everything they might desire—boating, hunting, and above all, release from the trials of politics. “The Garden of Upper Canada” became an almost exclusive colony for the faithful adherents of Governors-General. They built themselves substantial residences, and founded a picturesque local society. They were the determined rulers of the state, the ultra-Loyalists, the enemies of Mackenzie, brothers in a just and elevated cause. Lockwood in all its beauty was theirs. Lockwood, in spite of its citizens of a different political faith, was solely theirs. They were the suffering, but anointed minority, and the democrats could like it or leave it.

The wealth and high influence of these early settlers gave Lockwood an aristocratic flavor which never quite left it. Their motto, “Keep down the underbrush,” still persisted; although the underbrush, a century later, constituted the prevailing vegetation. The original, exclusive set had long since either sailed for England in disgust at democracy’s progress, or died out. But scions of that early patrician strain remained. Their homes on Queen Street East were, in many cases, the very houses in which the Loyalists had gathered about friendly fireplaces to discuss death to the hot-heads, and “jobbery and snobbery,” for themselves. And even at the present time such fireside discussions were not unknown.

Freda MacDowell’s mother had been a Smith, a name adorned by aristocratic associations. Her great-grandfather had been a full colonel in the British army, active in the Rebellion of ’37, and one of the Family Compact group, who had settled in Lockwood. Mrs. MacDowell could never forget that she had been a Smith, for there were several things to remind her. The house on Queen Street East, where she lived with her husband, George MacDowell, was a very tangible token of her distinguished descent, and her excellent social rating in Lockwood—in spite of present poverty—was an equally pleasant reminder.

The large, square house finished in genuine stucco had aged to as rich a brown as an old meerschaum pipe. From the street only glimpses could be had through a thick screen of pines that filled the grounds and above a high stone wall that rose like the warding hand of the very Smiths, saying to the modern hot-heads and modern rabble: “Thus far, but no further may you come.” At one corner a large gate opened through the wall and a gravel road wound gracefully across the lawn to the house. On closer inspection the building was seen to be quite large, with its verandahed front facing westward, and a deeper verandah on its south side towards the river. As disdainfully as its original owners, it turned its back on the town to look away upon the river, where flowed that majestic peace and solace; while it retained its servant quarters (a long, low wing used now as a garage), next to the street. The southern verandah commanded a remarkable vista of the St. Lawrence, a cool, blue expanse, rimmed by the grey shore of the United States in the distance, and accentuated by a foreground of unhusbanded table-land, which stopped abruptly fifty feet above the water. Wooden steps had been engineered down the precipitous face of the cliff to the boathouse, a white frame building that rested on concrete walls.

The old Smith residence had nothing of the ostentatious magnificence characterizing the homes on either side of it. The latter belonged respectively to the Courtneys and the Beechers. By their ponderous architecture, their elaborate lawns, their marble statues, they stood forth, self-conscious, but awe-inspiring, to emphasize the plainness of their neighbor. But the older home was well-secluded behind the stone wall and pine grove, caring very little for opulent display. The Smith virtue had been blood. The Beechers and Courtneys were new people, who had arrived by wealth. The old aristocracy was rapidly disappearing, and being replaced by a cheap plutocracy—people unknown fifty years ago, who now sought to appropriate and maintain the customs, the very traditions and feelings of the older families.

At present the name “Courtney” and “Beecher” headed Lockwood’s social list. Both families were tremendously wealthy, and hated each other for that very reason. Edward Courtney, senior, who now slept with his fathers after a career doubtlessly tiring, had made his millions in Western Canada at a time when property was a golden investment. He had been a genial, big fellow of simple tastes, but with a sworn fidelity to the game of money-making. It was the game that interested him. At the stage in his career at which most men would have begun taking out life-insurance to cover loss from succession-dues he had started investing earnestly in steel, grain, and what not! Before he died, almost every important industry in Canada was, in some degree, dependent upon him.

Beecher, likewise, dead, had amassed his fortune by a unique combination of common sense and economy. On surveying fields of enterprise at the time of his young manhood, he could see that perfumes constituted not a luxury, but a basic necessity. North America might eventually stop burning coal, but would never demand less, but always more, of the toilet article in question. He became personally an expert perfumer; by the use of French names and phrases he cast over his wares the glamor of a foreign atmosphere and gained a wide market by attractive advertising. This we may term common sense. But Beecher’s economy was parsimony; it was insane fear of poverty. On his death-bed the favorite emotion of his life surged uppermost, and, (it was said), he ordered the light turned off to save power!

Probably, if these two millionaires could have seen the petty feud between their surviving families, Courtney would have laughed at its foolishness and Beecher have snarled at the expense. It cost money thus to vie with each other. A new yacht or motor car for one meant a new yacht or car for the other. If the social columns issued bulletins regarding one family’s journeyings in Europe the rival family were not going to be quietly at home in Lockwood to discuss those glowing items. It was funny. But Lockwood was too obsequious to see the fun of it, too busy seeking favor to dare laugh. Colonel Smith, could he have beheld it, would have scorned it with real Family Compact scorn, and perhaps Mrs. George MacDowell, scion of her departed class, may have had promptings to contempt. Unfortunately she could not afford to heed such promptings. The new plutocracy had usurped the reins of social power. Here she was, wedged in between the Beechers and the Courtneys, accepted on good terms as long as she maintained the old Smith house. But she knew that, hard as it was to keep the place up, her only safe course was to do so. The old aristocracy now found it necessary to battle for position, and their chief weapon was a home on Queen Street East. Those who, by the reason of very limited means, had found it needful to move from this exclusive residential section had very gradually been forgotten.

Mrs. MacDowell resembled her daughter in appearance, save in her coloring. She had the same incisive features, arched nose and expressive lips, and the same half-defiant tilt of the head. But she was a pronounced blond, and her grey-blue eyes were coldly critical. Her mouth had the suggestion of vast, but well-tempered bitterness, so often seen in spirited women who know the importance of continuing attractive under the cruellest of circumstances. To her credit be it admitted that she possessed the shrewd qualities necessary for victory in her particular struggle. She dressed simply, but well. She maintained her home in simple, but attractive good taste. Unable to afford servants she managed capably by herself, and yet her hands remained the envy of her friends. There was not a wrinkle upon her face, for she had commanded that aristocratic staidness of expression that obscures age in those who possess it.

She had, to be sure, much to be thankful for. Her husband was a special comfort. George MacDowell was, in her opinion, an example of a type of man that God no longer saw fit to make. Tall and strong, and as youthful in spirit as the day she had met him, he had never entertained an ambitious thought. He was still the hypnotically attractive chap he had always been, with his black eyes that could freeze or kindle with pleasure at his will. He had swung through life indifferent to everything but Gloria Smith, and his love for her had been just simple, absolute idolatry. He was pre-eminently clever and a born diplomat. His wife accurately described this quality when she said, “George could tell a person to go to hell, and he would do it so smoothly that the person would feel flattered!”

If ever there was a case of a woman robbing the State of a powerful asset this home illustrated it. MacDowell could have made himself Premier of Canada. Whatever he turned his hand to succeeded. But the only thing he had ever seriously accomplished was to love his wife; and even this, to all outward seeming, had never been a very serious matter either. He was always playfully chiding and teasing her. But she was in command. He followed her wishes blindly, yet with a dignity that proclaimed his motive. It was not the thraldom of a weakling, but the conscious surrender of a giant. This clever and able and imposing man could have been anything he chose, but he chose to be only a lover.

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CHAPTER III.
Freda Comes Home.

Freda, as may be surmised, had no sympathy with her mother’s frantic social struggle. Her father, who until five years ago, had been one of Lockwood’s chief business men, was now idle, and, although he managed his idleness with remarkable grace, his wealth was meagre and insufficient to justify his wife’s social ambitions.

He had been general manager of the Lockwood Carpet Corporation until a disastrous fire not only robbed him of the position, but robbed the town of its cardinal industry as well. That big winter fire had blazed so furiously that it melted the icicles on houses for blocks around. It seemed, indeed, to have been the very work of Lockwood’s pursuing Nemesis. MacDowell had stood gaping from a water-drenched alley near by. Not until the large buildings had tottered and collapsed into hopeless ruin did he return to his home. His wife had made him a tasty cup of coffee.

“Lockwood is ruined,” he prophesied, and then added with a sparkling smile, “but this is good coffee.”

His prophesy was true. Hundreds of families left town as soon as it was learned that the Carpet Works would not be rebuilt. The weaving looms had been operated by steam and now the directors planned to rebuild in a place where electrical power was cheap. They offered him his position again, but he refused to leave Lockwood. They could not understand his stubbornness, nor the loyalty that made him “stay with the old town.” He at once blossomed out into the most ardent of local “boosters.” He assured Lockwood of a speedy return of local prosperity. “Gentlemen,” he had said to the Board of Trade, “I could not leave the old town which has had so pleasant a past, and which will have, I am confident, so brilliant a future.” To the undiscerning eye he gained, in his role of perpetual belief in Lockwood, a heroic character. Each New Year’s Day he published in the paper a long letter of cheer, courage and optimism, begging the citizens to be hopeful. It would not be long until some big industry would see the advantages of locating in Lockwood. “We have experienced the mercurial fluctuations of fortune, but the dead past must bury its dead. Here beside us is the great St. Lawrence with its unharnessed energy and its facilities for transportation. Some big industry is going to see the advantages. Here in our midst we have the best schools that money can operate, the finest churches that religion can claim, the highest degree of municipal efficiency in the country, and, as for beauty, have we not been called ‘The Garden of Upper Canada?’ Let us patiently wait, for prosperity will return. It must return.”

Little wonder that George MacDowell was acclaimed the first citizen. He was made mayor the very year of the fire and had remained in that office ever since by repeated acclamations. His tall, serious, reposeful figure struck confidence into the public activities. Such a strong, capable man would never have remained so long in Lockwood unless he believed in Lockwood’s future.

And yet the fact was that George MacDowell was posing all the time. His bluff was such a complete triumph that even Freda failed to see through it. It was merely his way of being graceful. Gloria insisted on remaining in the old Smith house. He would gladly remain with her and, at the same time, make the public think that he was inspired by municipal sentiment.

When Freda returned from Merlton he met her at the train. There was a time when he drove a motor-car, but of late years it was never taken out of the garage except when Freda drove it. He carried her valise across the platform, to be confronted by a mad platoon of taxi-drivers eager for patronage. They chose an old hack that had been on duty forty years. Few other towns would have tolerated the old-fashioned vehicle with its low, commodious seat, the extravagantly graceful curves of its body, its weather-beaten varnish and its quaint side-lamps of brass, designed like the wall-torches of a baronial castle. In most neighboring towns, more imbued with a spirit of progress, this picturesque conveyance would have been relegated long since to some backyard, or broken up for fuel. But Lockwood possessed a conservative cult who admired the symbols of leisure. This antiquated hack frequently moved down Station Street filled with the town’s elite, making no attempt to keep pace with the motors that rushed madly ahead, angry at having to return empty.

“I don’t see a single vacant house, Dad,” remarked Freda, as they started along Station Street.

“Nor do I by gad,” replied her father. “Lockwood is filling up, but with a rummy bunch of people. These houses should be tenanted by industrious workmen. Instead they are occupied by retired shopkeepers, farmers and clergymen from the country districts.”

“Why do you call ’em rummy?” Freda inquired.

“Cause they are rummy, Freda. They’re no good to the town. They retired before the war on enough to keep ’em at six per cent. To-day, even at seven and a half, they’re swamped by increasing taxation and the H.C.L. They’re the growlers. Did you hear about the school fracas?”

“Oh, dear; no!”

“Interested?”

“Terribly.”

“Good! The school was overcrowded; they were holding classes in the basement. Henry Dover came to me and asked if I thought the collegiate could be enlarged. Said he had eleven teachers now and needed room. Did I think it could be done? I said it was as plain as the nose on his face. It had to be done or we’d lose the pupils. But when the Board of Education put it to a vote—wow! What a wail from the retired element! Motion defeated, of course!”

“But you can’t blame them, Dad.”

“No. Admitted! I don’t blame them.”

Presently, as they turned upon Queen Street, MacDowell made a gesture toward the spectacle of broad, tarvia pavement, bulwarked on both sides with cluster lamps and high brick shops.

“Where will you find a better looking main street?” he asked, almost automatically. “And, do you know, our population, by the latest census, shows an increase of three?”

“Oh, surely, not just three!” exclaimed Freda.

“Why, that’s good,” said MacDowell, with a lurking smile of cynicism that his daughter did not notice. “We’re not growing very rapidly. But just you wait. One of these days some big concern is going to see the advantages of locating in Lockwood. As electric power is developed we’re going to get the advantage. Think of that river! Some day we’ll be a city. Just you wait!”

Lockwood had already been waiting for half a century. Freda had heard her father’s words so often that she knew them by heart: “One of these days some big concern—” And her heart that knew the words so well caught her with needless pity for the man she considered so incurably optimistic.

When the hack arrived at their home, Freda was not in the least surprised to discover an afternoon tea in full progress on the rear verandah. She knew just how essential afternoon teas were in Queen Street East, but she could not suppress a certain impatience.

“Heavens, mother is right at the post of duty!” she exclaimed as they drove up near the verandah. “Apparently the home-coming of the prodigal daughter has caused a feast to be set!”

“Never mind,” chuckled MacDowell, good-naturedly. “Your mother never liked your staying at that place on Franklin Street and probably will never forgive you. But she’s glad to see you just the same.”

“Mother is a woman of one idea,” sighed Freda.

“Course she is,” he laughed. “She had planned this tea before she knew when you were coming.”

Mrs. MacDowell gracefully left the verandah to greet Freda with a kiss, and then led her straight back to her guests. Most of them had a word of welcome, with the exception of Mrs. Courtney, who contributed merely a stiff, little nod of her silver-grey head. It was just like Freda to accept this as a challenge. She paused and directed her most obsequious attentions upon the wealthy widow who had long been a thorn in her flesh.

“Oh, Mrs. Courtney,” she said, extending her hand with feigned good-will and adopting at once a Lockwood type of afternoon-tea formality, “How awfully well you look! Are you playing much golf this summer?”

“Child, you know I never play golf,” responded Mrs. Courtney, with evident ill-relish.

“Oh, of course, not. How stupid of me! You must forgive me! I was thinking of Mrs. Beecher.”

Mrs. Courtney flushed and glanced sharply at Freda who, wreathed in smiles, bowed to the others and went into the house. The arrow had found its mark. In the first place, the huge figure of Mrs. Courtney playing golf would have made a screamingly funny and grotesque cartoon. But to be confused in any way whatsoever with her social enemy, Mrs. Beecher, was an unforgivable mistake.

“I do wish,” remarked Mrs. MacDowell, caustically, while she and Freda were later engaged with washing the dinner dishes, “that you would try to use a slight degree of sense. Your faux pas this afternoon offended Mrs. Courtney, visibly.”

“Dear heavens,” laughed Freda, so heartily that she had to drop into a chair; “I’m glad if it did, Mother. She’s one of the most exalted persons I ever heard of.”

“And you, my girl, are one of the most reckless,” quickly rejoined her mother.

“Do you remember,” asked Freda, “how miserable she made things for me about six years ago when she was afraid that I was going to get her darling young Teddie?”

“I do, indeed, Freda.”

“How she cut me, more than once?”

“I remember it, quite,” nodded Mrs. MacDowell. “But such revenge as yours is merely senseless.”

“You think I ought to be more thorough-going, do you?” asked Freda. “Perhaps you think a better revenge would be to marry Ted Courtney, even yet—”

Mrs. MacDowell cast a long, steady look at Freda, a look full of her grey-eyed criticism, full of her tranquil-faced reserve, full of her Family-Compact self-sufficiency; but she said not a word more.

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CHAPTER IV.
The Optimist.

After dinner, Freda was left suddenly alone. Her mother was up the river at a bridge party on Courtney’s elegant yacht, the Cinderella. Her father was at home, but she felt that after her year’s absence it would be necessary to become acquainted with him again. When he finished his paper, he strolled with her about the wide lawn, asking many questions about her work in Merlton. He was very impersonal and almost polite and, although Freda was sure he was not much interested in her work, she admired his consummate smoothness. During all the years of her grown-up life he had been just as impervious and just as winningly polished as to-night. She felt the same attraction as if she were talking with any cultivated and gentlemanly stranger.

“It must be nice, Dad, to be the whole cheese in this town,” she said, teasingly.

“If you’re referring to me,” he replied, “I’ll enquire—before thanking you for the compliment—whether or not you’re seeking municipal favor?”

“Not for myself, but for somebody else,” she answered quickly.

“Who on earth?”

“Will you promise to do something for me?” she asked, taking his arm prettily.

“Yes, I guess so,” he smiled.

“No matter what I ask?”

“Yes, I promise.”

“Listen, Dad, to me,” she said, stopping and looking up into his big, curious, black eyes. “If a young gentleman named Mauney Bard tries to get on the collegiate staff will you tell Henry Dover that he’s one of the brightest boys in Canada, and will you put in a good word with the Board of Education?”

“What’s his name?”

“Mauney Bard.”

“All right. I’ll do it,” agreed MacDowell. “Hum! Brightest boy in Canada, is he? That’s going some. Who is this Mauney Bard?”

“Oh, just a nice chap who boarded at Franklin Street with me.”

“You’re always given to exaggeration, if I may so express myself,” he smiled. “I suppose when you get it all boiled down, Mauney Bard is just a man after a job.”

“No, no, you’re all wrong, Dad. He’s more than that—I’m in love with him.”

“Who? Mauney Bard?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” said MacDowell, complacently. “You’ve been in love before now.”

“You’re wrong again, Dad,” she replied. She wanted to tell her father—or somebody—how she felt about Mauney, but her father’s interest seemed only casual. Freda consequently remained silent and became very unhappy. That silence and unhappiness of Lockwood would always arrive sooner or later. To-night was typical of her home—her mother off to a game of cards and her father chatting just as any interesting, but total, stranger might do.

Lockwood always caused a little flutter in her heart and then a depression. Her mother’s social ambition had constituted a problem which she had solved only by leaving home. Fawning upon the plutocracy was, without exception, the most disgusting practice of which Freda could conceive.

“Are we always going to go on living in this hide-bound community, Dad?” she asked, as they strolled together. “I hate it just like snakes. I could murder that Mrs. Courtney and the whole raft of them.”

“Oh, they’ re all right as far as they go,” he replied lightly, “The Courtneys, Turnbulls, Beechers, Squires and that ilk don’t help Lockwood much. They don’t spend their money here. This is only a pivot for them. They’re off to California, Honolulu or Europe half the time. And they don’t want industries here—they’re afraid of the coal smoke. But, never mind! They won’t always run the town. Some day some big concern is going to see the—”

“Some day,” Freda said, seriously, “you and I, Dad, are both going to be dead. Why can’t we leave Lockwood and live in Merlton?”

“Simply because,” he replied firmly, “we’re not going to forsake the old town. That would be unfaithful.” His black eyes flashed with concealed amusement. “Lockwood will be a city some day. It’s bound to be. Just you wait!”

Freda was deliciously impatient and vexed and sad when she retired that night. From her bed, she gazed at the grey St. Lawrence out under the cliff, and realized at length that she was already lonesome for Mauney.

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CHAPTER V.
Mauney Meets Mrs. MacDowell.

When Mauney arrived in Lockwood, on his way home, he completed certain reflections which had occupied him most of the day by deciding not to call upon Freda. But he found that his brother William, who had driven in for him from Lantern Marsh, had still some shopping to do before returning, and he made up his mind to stroll down Queen Street East, past her home. This little walk had the effect of making him quite unhappy. First of all he passed the Armouries, which recalled his unsuccessful attempt to enlist, eight years ago. In the associations of that memory there was bitterness which still troubled him. In the second place, although he had Freda’s street number, he could not find her house until he made the enquiry of an officious nurse-maid who pushed her baby-carriage no less haughtily than she pointed out the MacDowell residence. He stood still and gazed confusedly at the high stone wall and the forbidding gateway. Was there not some mistake? He had not thought of Freda as belonging to so grand a home. His perplexity, combined with a self-conscious sense of his own ill-groomed appearance after the train journey, strengthened his determination not to call.

It was hard to forego seeing her. Her house and his clothes, however, had little to do with it. The real obstacle was Lee. Why must he consider his old friend so much? Why should Lee’s attachment to Freda, unreciprocated and hopeless, have any influence? Mauney had labored these questions all day, and he had discovered the only possible answer. It was because he himself was constituted as he was.

On his way back to meet his brother in the centre of the town, he kept rehearsing his argument. He wished that he possessed enough indifference to Lee to disregard him. The present situation was characteristic of life as he had learned to know it. Never yet had he longed greatly for anything, but he must face obstacles apparently insuperable. Just now it was his respect for Maxwell Lee that held him back. Lee had not mentioned Freda during the trip to Rockland, but then, Max never mentioned anything that he felt keenly. He even omitted to thank Mauney for his kindness in providing help at a crucial moment.

The only course that Mauney could consider was to wait for events. If Lee recovered, there would no longer be any obstacle in the path that led him to Freda. If he died, the way was even clearer. But it might be months before either fate, and, in the meantime, Mauney determined to be towards Freda friendly at most.

He had not been home many days when a letter of acceptance came from the Lockwood Board of Education, and another letter from the collegiate principal, Henry Dover, requesting an early interview. He drove to town in William’s motor-car and spent an hour with Dover at the school, gaining some idea of his work, which was to begin in September.

Then he paid a call at MacDowell’s, which he was not soon to forget. Freda’s mother answered the door and, as she heard his name, favored him with a long, rude, critical stare that gradually shaded into a supercilious smile as she turned away without a word, leaving him standing in the doorway. Freda chanced to be in the library, close enough apparently to grasp the situation, for she came out at once, speaking calmly, to be sure, but with cheeks a flaming crimson. Mauney, to whom such an encounter was a new experience, was, for a time, too stunned to talk much.

“I’ve been expecting you for days,” Freda said, leading him to the farther verandah and arranging chairs. “Sit down and rest your weary bones, won’t you? Tell me all about what you’ve been doing. Aren’t you going to talk?”

“Yes,” he replied slowly, “I expect to say a few words; but may I enquire if it was your mother who came to the door?”

“Oh, please don’t mind her, Mauney,” said Freda, awkwardly. “You see, mother is quite unreasonable about some things. I’ll explain that all, some day. Tell me—any word about the school?”

While he was talking she sat wondering what difference she noticed in him. He had altered somehow. The smile of his eyes was gone. There was something stubbornly immovable about his big body as he sat with legs crossed and arms folded on his chest, and his eyes only glanced at her before they turned away sadly, as she thought.

“Freda,” he said after a pause. “I can’t place you in this house. There’s some mistake.”

“How do you mean?” she asked with an expression of great interest.

“You won’t mind me being frank?”

“Not one particle, Mauney.”

He unfolded his arms and leaned slowly forward, rubbing his cheek with his hand.

“I never knew I could get so darned worked up over a little thing,” he said, testily. “Your mother froze me in there. I’m beginning to think, Freda, that I can feel just about as snobbish as she does.”

“You said it, Mauney,” she whispered. “I’ve no sympathy at all for her. Please try to grasp that point right now. I told her about you, and she’s just been waiting to make you feel unwelcome.”

“She’s succeeded, too.”

“She succeeds in everything, but managing me,” Freda went on warmly. “Oh, I can’t, simply can’t tell you what I’ve had to put up with, Mauney. I don’t feel one-half as much at home here as I did at Gertrude’s. Listen. My mother—and I’m sorry I have to say it—is an inexcusable snob from the word go. Her ideas aren’t any more like mine than day is like night. So you can understand why I don’t spend much time in Lockwood.”

“Are you going back to Merlton this fall?”

“I don’t know.”

Mauney regarded her in silence for a moment, as their eyes met and did not waver.

“My God, Freda, you’re a comfort,” he said suddenly. With a little laugh he rose and picked up his hat from the table. “I’ve got to be going.”

“And don’t forget,” she said, as she walked beside him to the car, “that there will be somebody here waiting to see you again, soon.”

“I’m not likely to forget it,” he said, giving her arm a gentle pinch. “The fact is, nothing else much suits me, but being around where you are.”

That evening, after Freda had washed the dinner dishes, she remained thoughtfully busy in the kitchen. Presently her mother, as she had been expecting, came out to prepare some grape-fruit for the breakfast, and incidentally, to pass a few remarks about Mauney. She had sunk the blade of her knife into the green fruit before she glanced up to behold Freda, who, in accordance with old custom, was sitting perched on the back of a kitchen chair with her feet resting on its seat. With a thin sigh that expressed her disapproval of the posture, Mrs. MacDowell took up a pair of scissors and proceeded with her work.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” she commenced, in a delicately scornful tone, “that this Bard person is a rather stiffish youth?”

“He’s stiffish all right enough, Mother,” said Freda with an amused chuckle. “I used to always fall for the foppish variety, didn’t I? But I’m getting old, and my taste in men is changing.”

“I’m not so sure, but that he’s related to the Bards of Beulah, who bring turnips to the market,” submitted her mother, calmly, as she snipped away with her scissors.

“I imagine you’re quite right,” Freda said. “Mauney has hoed ’em himself lots of times, and is proud of it.”

“He seems to have practically no social address, no ease of manner.”

“I fancy he’ll carry away an equal contempt for yours. Was that your highest code of manners you were practising on him? As for social address—you’re right. He wasn’t around when they were handing that stuff out. He has never had his spine manicured!”

“Spine!” Mrs. MacDowell scoffed very gently. “What a delightful Franklin Street vocabulary you have acquired! As long as I care to remember, you have never been willing to listen to a word from me.”

“Well, Mother, you never said a word that appealed to me. That’s why.”

Freda rapped with her toes in an aggravating tattoo on the chair seat, and then began teetering back and forth in such a way that the front legs kept dropping noisily against the floor. Mrs. MacDowell worked on quietly for a few moments.

“Freda,” she said at length, without looking up, “I sincerely wish that you, some time or other, will gratify a long-cherished desire of mine by falling flat off that confounded chair.”

“And cracking my skull, I suppose,” added Freda, the meanwhile balancing skilfully on the two back legs. “Well, this is my favorite sport, and it’s worth a skull any time. Do you know, Mother, I’ve a good notion not to go back to Merlton this fall.”

Mrs. MacDowell did not at once reply.

“That is almost the brightest idea that has emerged from your skull since you came home,” she said presently, in a tone of sarcasm. “How would you propose to amuse yourself in Lockwood?”

“I could get a job as private secretary to Ted Courtney. Ted needs somebody to help him look after his money. I was talking to him on the street last night, and asked him if he could give me a job. He jumped right at the idea like a bulldog. Says he’s needed some one for a long time, and, I may say, he offers me a splendid proposition. I said I’d have to take a few days to consider it.”

Mrs. MacDowell gazed on Freda with the expression of one who has learned by experience to credit even the most preposterous of her daughter’s statements. “I trust,” she interrupted seriously, “that there is no truth in what you are saying.”

“Get me a Bible, then,” replied Freda. “I suppose the idea of me working for a Courtney is about the same to you, Mother, as a long drink of twenty percent. Paris Green.”

“Why, it’s so absurd!” mused Mrs. MacDowell, “so utterly absurd!”

“You mean humiliating, don’t you?” asked Freda, tapping thoughtfully now with her toes. “There used to be a time when social position depended on brains, ability, blood, and such personal things. That’s so long ago that Herodotus would have to scratch his dome to remember it. Right now, it depends on how one’s daughter spends her time. If I could float around in a new Packard roadster with a Pekinese pup sitting on a blue cushion beside me, why your dear, old prestige would be as safe as the Bank of England. But I’ve got imbued, Mother, with the thoroughly low-brow idea that a woman of my age—of any age for that matter—is better when she’s at work.”

“And I’m quite sure,” said Mrs. MacDowell, with considerable emphasis, “that your reason for wishing to stay in Lockwood is merely to be near our young turnip-digger.”

Freda’s face flushed, but she disregarded the reference. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised, Mother,” she replied with a growing warmth, “if that had something to do with it. But there is also another reason. I’ve just simply ached, these last six years, to enjoy a little home life, undisturbed, and you’ve given me no chance. I come home and all the time either you are away off somewhere, or else so surrounded by a bunch of darned fools that I never see you.”

“That’s quite enough!” commanded Mrs. MacDowell. “Surely you’re growing irresponsible.”

Freda’s face was crimson and her eyes flashing with a dangerous light. She tried to swallow something that stuck in her throat. Her mother knew these symptoms well enough. They meant rage. They meant that Freda must be left alone for the balance of the evening.

Several minutes after Mrs. MacDowell had gone her husband sauntered into the kitchen, to find his daughter sitting in the same position, but with her face in her hands.

“You women folk astonish me,” he laughed. “There’s nothing in it, Freda; nothing in it. Your mother is a Smith, remember. Enough said. She’s different. There’s nothing in it at all, by gad!”

---

CHAPTER VI.
A Summer at Home.

Until the present summer Mauney had never gone back to the farm at Lantern Marsh, so that now, with his new mental outlook, he was for the first time enjoying it. William was living on his father’s place and renting the old McBratney property to an Englishman. Time had brought about changes. William was no longer the insupportable person he had once been. His wife Evelyn had adapted herself, cheerfully, to her circumstances. She found no time now to indulge her former love of gramophones and motoring. The two were living happily together, while the wonted sombreness of the old home was gratefully relieved by the shrill voices of two healthy children. William, once the scoffer, was now proud of his brother, while Mauney had learned a tolerance that made William’s bad English even lovably picturesque.

“Well, Maun,” William would say, “you’ve got the book learning fer the hull crowd. But while you’ve been a-studyin’ I’ve been raisin’ a family, an’ there ain’t no good o’ us two tryin’ to argue which is the best. But I’ll take the family every time!”

Then Mauney would laugh and reply, “There’s nothing like being happy, Bill, whatever you have to do to get there.”

He felt that he himself was very gradually arriving. Ahead lay the treasures of history to be expounded to a new generation. With his own hands he was to lift before their eyes the ideals which he had won. It took no more than this glorious prospect to make him very content.

There was sadness, though, in every memory of Lantern Marsh. Time after time during the summer months, thoughts rushed unbidden upon him to shake his being—those family sentiments of past scenes, pathetic differences of opinion, once so important, but now so irrevocable and small. The eye of retrospect sees with a tender sight. Mauney kept fancying that his father’s big form must soon appear at the lane entrance carrying a whiffletree, or his harsh voice be heard swearing at his horses. The man had lived up to his light. Experience forgave him his faults. But now Seth Bard, with all his gruffness and strength, was silent and vanished. Once he had seemed the most immovable body on earth, the one great, availing magnitude. But even the winds that blew from unseen quarters across the desolate marsh were more enduring than he.

And Mauney’s sadness found a strange kind of comfort as he gazed upon that never-ending swamp. It had been there always. Since he had known anything he had known that swamp—bleak and horrid and fascinating, as changing as the phases of his own life; never the same for two days in succession, and yet always the same. On sunny afternoons, great, white clouds hung over it and the blue of the sky lay mirrored in the long, narrow strips of water far out. Then would come the disturbing breezes, growing into winds that moved the trees and reed banks, then into the hurricane that transformed it all, till it vibrated like a living and suffering being, its green acres of sedge whipped to a surface like shot silk, its channels churned to a muddy red, the moving sky glaring with storm, and the stunted hemlocks, huddling frantically together along its edges. This old swamp, hated and loved, defeated, but eternal, was relic of all that Mauney regretted in those sad hours that came upon him during the summer months.

But these remembrances were being pushed back farther and farther out of sense, while the vital events of life occupied him more and more. Coming into the house, tired, but satisfied, after the day’s work in the hayfield, he would sit quietly on the kitchen verandah, watching the sun sink beyond the corner of the big, dark barn. The sound of crickets filled the air with a metallic vibration. His contentment was as deep as the gulf of crimson sky above him, and his happiness as much a-quiver as the air. As he sat here, lulled into grateful meditation, perhaps Evelyn would interrupt him.

“I’ll bet a dollar, Maun, you’re in love!” she would venture.

And he would wonder if it was possible that any love was ever quite as wonderful as his for Freda. Never since human life began had any woman been as dear as she was to him. She was so real. There was not an atom of dissimulation about her. Freda—who had flashed upon him like a blinding light, who had believed in him—had become constant in his thoughts. Freda was the great reality. Nothing could daunt him, nothing could make him one little bit unhappy, so long as he knew that ultimately he would possess her.

But he purposely refrained from seeing her much. The few calls that he made at her home were in response to her invitations, and he fancied that she understood well enough the reasons for his restraint.

The hot harvest season passed very tardily. The August sun grew more intense as the long, sultry days drew out. There was never even a cloudy day to remove the accumulating tension of the heat. The grey, baked earth cracked into deep fissures. The wells dried up, and even the waters of the marsh sank, day by day, until at the end of the month they were entirely gone. There was no greenness anywhere; the rushes and sedges were burnt into amber shades, with yellow fuzz that blended dully with the parched meadows. And the creatures of the swamp were either silent or departed. Mauney missed them.

The farmers began to talk ruin. William Henry McBratney, passing the lane on a visit from Beulah, pulled up his horse to discuss the weather with Mauney. His evil face, the more evil because of its senile wasting, was painfully worried, and his mad, dim eyes sparkled in accord with his feelings.

“Well, sir, Maun,” he said, striking his knee with his sprawling, bony palm, “I’ve seed a good many dry spells, but nothing like this. It’s nigh onto fifty years since me and my first missus settled here. But, sir, I tell you what! This here harvest has been the driest ever.”

“But I think we’ll get rain, don’t you?” asked Mauney.

“No, sir, I don’t,” affirmed the old man, with an expression of settled gloom. “Every mornin’ I’ve been a-looking for a cloud or two, but that sky, sir, I tell yuh, couldn’t hold a cloud. It’s too damned hot fer to hold a single cloud! An’, if we don’t get rain the cattle’s goin’ to die.”

“But, my dear sir,” persisted Mauney, “rain is bound to come. Did you ever see it fail?”

“All I’m sayin’ is, that since I come here—me an’ the missus—that there marsh hain’t never onct dried up that way. Yer father, Seth, never seed it like that, I tell yuh. No, sir. An’ if it’s me ye’r askin’ I’d deny that there’ll be any rain. Leastways, I’d hev to see it to believe it!”

Such logic was more depressing than convincing.

---

CHAPTER VII.
The First Day.

On the first of September, when Mauney came to Lockwood to find a boarding-place and to buy a few articles of clothing before the school term began, he found everybody in ill humor. Along Queen Street West, in the shop district, men were sweltering, with handkerchiefs tucked about their collars, carrying their coats and fanning themselves with their hats. In a shoe store the air was humid and suffocating, and the patience of the young clerk seemed dangerously exhausted.

“I don’t know why you don’t like those oxfords,” he said, gruffly, as he unlaced the third shoe he had tried to sell his customer.

“And we’re not going into the reasons for our dislike,” Mauney replied. “I don’t like them, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Well,” sighed the clerk, “we’ve got better shoes in the store; but you’d have to pay twelve-fifty.”

“Have you any objection to me paying twelve-fifty?”

The shoes were fitted.

“You won’t make any mistake if you get those, sir,” affirmed the salesman, more affably. “I just sold a pair of those very shoes to Ted Courtney, not more than an hour ago.”

“And who the devil is Ted Courtney?” asked Mauney.

The clerk surveyed his customer blankly for a moment. “If you don’t know who the Courtneys are,” he mumbled, at length, “you don’t know much about Lockwood.”

“I’ll have to confess that I don’t,” admitted Mauney, with a chuckle to himself, “but these shoes suit me all right.”

He next entered a haberdashery shop and asked for shirts. The clerk was a smartly-dressed man of middle age.

“You don’t care for those,” he commented, as Mauney finished surveying some that were on display. “Well, we haven’t much choice left in the cheaper lines, but I can show you some in a very excellent material. This particular shirt,” he continued, as he selected an example, “is being worn by the best dressers this season. We have had difficulty keeping stocked in it. I may say that I sold a half-dozen of this line to Mr. Ted Courtney, only yesterday.”

Mauney’s hand fell limply on the counter as he began to laugh for no reason apparent to the serious-faced salesman.

“I wish you’d tell me who Ted Courtney is. I haven’t been able to decide as yet whether he is the Beau Nash of Lockwood or a cousin of the Prince of Wales.”

“You’re a stranger in town? Indeed. The Courtneys, of course, are among our wealthiest residents—awfully nice people, with whom it is always a pleasure to deal.”

“In that case,” said Mauney, with an amused expression, “I suppose I had better fall in line.”

Next he proceeded to a tobacconist’s to buy a newspaper and cigarettes. While he was talking to the clerk he realized that he was being gently, but effectively, elbowed sidewise by a stranger, who, in his impatience to capture a newspaper from a pile nearby, reached directly in front of Mauney’s face. In drawing out his copy of the journal he not only upset the pile, but knocked the silver out of Mauney’s hand. Turning in expectation of adjusting what was evidently an unavoidable situation, Mauney was surprised to behold the young man walking quickly away through the door and entering a sumptuous motor-car at the curb. He watched him drive away, then turned to the clerk.

“Did you notice who that fellow was?” he asked.

“You bet I did,” the other snarled, as he brought order once more to the untidy counter, “and I’ve got his number, too. That bird is getting just a wee bit too fresh. Just because his old man happened to make a few dishonest millions out West, he’s got the idea that the rest of us bums just live to wait on him. But I’ll tell you one thing,” he added with a curse, “the next time he tries any rough-house he’s going to get a heavy lid.”

“I wouldn’t blame you much,” said Mauney, picking up his change. “Who is he?”

“Don’t you know him? Why that’s Mister Edward Courtney. Lives in that house down Queen East that looks like a bloody prison. Got about twenty motor-cars, but don’t know when he’s well off. Just let him try that trick again and, so help me Kate, I don’t care if it takes me to the police court, he’s goin’ to get a rocker right on that damned dimple!”

That evening, when talking to Freda, Mauney related the incident and was surprised when she defended Courtney.

“I haven’t any use for the family taken collectively,” she admitted, “but you’d have to know Ted to understand that incident. He’s really not such a bad lot—a most terrible enthusiast over trifles and frightfully absent-minded at times. Probably when he bunted into you he was in a hurry to get to the ball game and didn’t realize what he was doing. I’ve known Ted just about all my life, and I’d put it down to pure thoughtlessness and animal pep. Of course, he’s spoiled and needs a lesson, I know that!”

“You’ll get accustomed to Lockwood ways, perhaps,” she said a little later, as she took Mauney for a spin up the river road, out of town. “And perhaps you won’t. I hate to discourage you, but I’m a little afraid you never will tune up to Lockwood. I never have, and we’re something alike, are we not?”

As they sped along the winding tarvia road, under arching elms, past clusters of willows in the hollows, and groves of pine, with numerous summer residences facing the river, Freda kept nodding to acquaintances in other cars.

“Isn’t that Courtney’s roadster?” asked Mauney, turning to see it disappear behind them.

“Yes, and Ted saw me,” laughed Freda, “and, what’s more exciting, he saw you. I’ll bet anything he’ll turn around and overtake us before we’ve gone much farther. I’ll tell you what, Mauney! We’ll stop at the Country Club. I’m not a member any more, but a lot of the real Lockwood swells hang out there. Of course, I just want to show you off. Mrs. Beecher will see you and then to-morrow at some tea or other she’ll let out the big item of the season. I can just hear her as she makes her announcement: ‘What do you suppose! Freda MacDowell breezed into the club last night with a Mr. Bard, who, I understand, is the new member of the collegiate staff. Hum, hum, now what do you think of that?’”

“And what will they think of it, Freda?” asked Mauney seriously.

“They can’t think. They haven’t got the equipment. It’s just the news they’re after, nothing more. They can’t think anything, anyway. But I want them to know that you were riding in my car. Of course,” chuckled Freda, “if you were a married man, then they’d be happier. They’d have a scandal, then.”

“Is there much scandal in Lockwood?” Mauney asked, carelessly.

“Scandal!” she exclaimed. “Why, these people live on it. I just wish I could smuggle you into a real bona fide afternoon tea. It’s a very tame tea that doesn’t succeed in executing at least one hitherto unblemished reputation. It’s love affairs they prefer, of course. But—am I boring you?”

“On the contrary I’m quite interested, Freda. Most towns are the same.”

“But Lockwood has developed it to something like a fine art,” she replied, with the certainty of tone of an expert who has studied the matter in hand. Then she proceeded to give a characteristically accurate summary of the entire subject.

“There were afternoon teas in Lockwood before there were churches, and even to-day they are better attended. Church, with these people, is an occasional business, but teas are a constant necessity. Some of these fat society dames have reached the sublime stage of existence where their enfeebled brains can deal with only the simplest data. They can’t read books that require any thought. They don’t have to read, so for that very reason they don’t read. But they do have to go to afternoon teas, because it’s there they find the exact food they’re in need of. I don’t mean cookies and cakes, either, because most of them have been requested by their M.D.’s to cut down on carbo-hydrates. What they need, Mauney, is scandal. If the scandal deals with a love affair, why then it’s an A1 scandal. Anything racy and illicit holds them like nothing else. Now, just why these bloated excuses for womanhood—and many of them have had turbulent enough youths themselves—should get to the stage where only vicarious experiences can stir their vanishing passions, is a question that revolts me. I leave that for the morbid psychologists to settle.”

“I’ll tell you something, Mauney,” she went on, as she looked before her along the road. “These afternoon teas are no joke with me. I hate them as I hate anything that’s noisy and empty. They had a lot to do with my leaving home.”

“But did you ever think, Freda,” asked Mauney, “that gossip unconsciously cleanses society? People, fearing scandal, are more likely to be careful how they act.”

“Ah, yes,” she replied. “There’s something in that argument, too. If these old gossipers in Lockwood were conscientiously trying to reform society by means of publicity campaigns I’d give them credit. In the first place, however, they don’t give a continental about morals, public or private, and in the second place, they’re very corruptible.”

“Corruptible?”

“Yes; they grant exemptions. There are people in Lockwood who can get away with murder just because they’ve got money. There are people who are never discussed because the scandal-mongers fear to lose their favor. No; I put no stock in that cleansing business at all. I’ve told you exactly what I think of the whole bunch.”

“But why take them so seriously, Freda?” asked Mauney. “It’s almost an adage that women will gossip just as men will smoke.”

“I suppose it’s because of the way I’m constituted,” she replied. “We had a wash-woman who used to say to me, ‘Freda, everything all depends on just how it is with you.’ And I’ll tell you just how it is with me, Mauney. I’ve got a serious streak somewhere in my system.”

“I think you’re the most serious girl I know,” interrupted Mauney.

“Thanks. I admire your insight, young man. I really do want to thank you for just that, Mauney. But I was going to tell you that I went through hell, almost literally, six years ago, just before I went to college. The real hard-boiled fact of the case was that I lost my respect for my own mother, and the main reason I lost it was because, apparently, she could live and thrive and be entirely satisfied on the mental diet of afternoon-tea scandals. So, although, as you say, gossiping may be considered as part of the day’s work, it sometimes has unforeseen results. And once or twice I’ve seen people rendered extremely unhappy, by scandals they didn’t deserve. The ladies aren’t a bit accurate.”

“I think,” said Mauney, “you ought to write a book on scandal-mongery as well as one on a university.”

“Oh, but I was going to tell you the hidden irony of this scandal-mongery in Lockwood. It will show you just how insincere they are. The persons scandalized become popular, provided their misdeeds are not merely stupid. They become actually heroes. They are admired secretly all the time. They gain an importance never before enjoyed. But they don’t know this, and they suffer needlessly under the lash of women’s tongues. I tell you, Mauney, these women will excuse a person for anything. All they ask is the vicarious fun of it for themselves. I knew a merchant in town who never had much of a business until after it was reported that he had for years been running another home up in Merlton. Apparently they admired, not only his personal cleverness, but his business ability to be able to afford it. He became popular at once and has had a good trade ever since.”

Freda was now turning down a side road to the river, where on the level bank stood the Country Club House, a long, low bungalow finished in shingles of British Columbia cedar. On the wide verandahs which surrounded it many young and middle-aged people were sitting at tables, drinking or standing in groups engaged in conversation.

They left the car at the end of a long line on the side of the road and walked towards the verandah. They could hear the tones of the piano within the pavilion, and as they came nearer could see the moving figures of people dancing. As Freda guided Mauney about the verandah, nodding to several of the guests, he noticed that the constant buzz of conversation was concerned chiefly with golf. Mauney was introduced to some of the members, and as he talked with them found himself slightly ill at ease, because he had never learned to play golf. After a few minutes he began to be conscious of many curious eyes turned in his direction, some of them friendly enough, others merely curious, and a few intensely critical. The conversation was growing less. He felt awkward until he suddenly realized that all these people had been waiting for something, when at last a roadster, which had now become familiar to Mauney, glided quickly up to the verandah, uncomfortably filled with men. As they alighted, carrying musical instruments, it became clear that Courtney had motored to town after an orchestra. An impromptu dance immediately followed.

It had no sooner begun than Courtney, finding Freda at a table with Mauney, came up to speak to her. Gracefully tall, wearing flannels, bare-headed and completely at ease, he appeared to be not older than twenty-five. His black hair was scrupulously barbered and glossy. His flashing, black eyes seemed to know the world, and there was an air of mild superiority, not only in his confident carriage, but in the exclusive smile of black moustachios, red lips, and very white, perfect teeth, with which he greeted Freda.

“Hello, Fly-away,” he said in a deep, musical voice. “I swear you were doing fifty when I passed you.”

“Mr. Courtney,” said Freda, turning towards Mauney, who had risen, “meet Mr. Bard, my friend.”

“How do you do?” said Courtney, with a stiff nod; then devoted himself quickly to Freda once more.

“Awful night for a dance,” he admitted. “But everybody wanted it, so I blew down for Pinkerton’s Harmony Hounds. Lockwood must be agreeing with you, Freda. I never saw you look more captivating.”

“Thanks for those few kind words, Ted,” she replied dryly, although she blushed and wished in a queer flash that Mauney could occasionally say such flattering things.

“Are you dancing?” Courtney inquired.

“Really, Ted, it’s too warm, thank you; and Mr. Bard and I will be leaving soon, anyhow.”

“Indeed!” he said, with a quick side-glance in Mauney’s direction. Then he turned towards him. “Staying in town long, Mr. Bard, may I ask?”

“Quite a little while,” said Mauney. “I’m billed to appear every morning at nine—at the collegiate, in the role of plain teacher.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Courtney with evident surprise. “Teacher! Oh, indeed! I don’t envy you the job of trying to pound knowledge into some of the local skulls, but I hope you like the town.”

“So far I’ve found it unusually interesting,” replied Mauney, with a twinkle of mischievous light in his eyes. “I think the word ‘variegated’ would describe my first impressions—some skulls much thicker than others, as you can readily imagine.”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course,” said Courtney, a trifle puzzled at Mauney’s apparent innuendo. “I’m damned if I quite grasp what you mean, though.”

“Well, you see, it’s like this,” smiled Mauney, with sudden decision to soften his own manner to the meaningless vapidity of Courtney’s, “I’ve really been here only one day as yet and, no matter how shrewd an observer I was, one could hardly expect me to know the place, could one?”

“Of course not,” readily admitted Courtney, with a glance toward Freda, who was quite preoccupied. “Well, Freda,” he said, turning to leave, “I trust you will be more careful about speeding in future. I hear Pinkerton’s outfit getting into their stride; so, cheerio!” With a little wave of his hand he left, without again looking at Mauney.

---

Mauney found a boarding-house on Church Street, directly opposite the collegiate institute, a plain unit, in a plain brick terrace set close to the sidewalk. He engaged the down-stairs front room, which looked directly upon the thoroughfare by a wide window. He liked the room chiefly because of this window, for it afforded a generous view of the street and promised an excellent point of vantage. The landlady was a gigantic Irish woman whose husband worked in a foundry. It seemed to Mauney that their occupations ought to have been interchanged, for the husband was a puny, sickly fellow, thoroughly subdued by his wife’s temper. He had a way of moving quietly and guiltily through the house, as if expecting her to pounce on his back at any moment.

The first morning of Mauney’s occupancy, Mrs. Hudson came into his room, gowned in her collarless, blue, print dress, broom in hand. As school would not open for a day or two, Mauney was engaged in arranging his books.

“Oh! and it’s a scholar ye are, is it?” she asked.

“Teacher, Mrs. Hudson,” he explained.

“Indade, an’ sure I t’ought, all the time, ye were a commarcial trovler,” she said, surveying the volumes he was taking from his trunk. “I knew ye were a sangle mon. But I t’ought ye were a commarcial trovler. An’ which schule, might I be asking, are ye goin’ to be teaching at?”

“That one,” he said, pointing through the window at the grey stone mass across the street.

“Poor mon,” she sighed, as books still continued to come forth from the trunk. “It must keep ye busy. I’m glad ye’re a quiet mon.”

“Do I look quiet?” laughed Mauney.

“Ay, ye do thot, an’ imogine me thinkin’ ye were a commarcial trovler, now. Well, the saints rest ye, when are ye ging to rade all thim books?”

“In the evenings, I suppose.”

“Imogine, now. Poor mon! Have ye no friends in town?”

“Oh, yes, a few.”

“That’s a good thing,” she said, starting towards the hall, “and ye’ll not be throubled with noise, onyway. ’Tis a very, very quiet house. An’ I’m afther thinking ye’ll need plenty o’ quietness for to read so mony books. Poor mon, an’ me thinkin’ ye were a commarcial trovler. Imagine, now!”

After she had gone, Mauney stood, idly watching an old man in a faded navy-blue suit, as he made his way slowly up the street. The senile curve of his figure was accentuated by a long, white beard, that flopped in front of his body as he jogged along. With each determined, but feeble, step he struck the pavement a sharp rap with his thick, metal-tipped cane. At regular intervals of about ten paces he invariably paused and turned slowly about to gaze backward, as though he were proudly calculating the extent of his efforts.

Mauney hardly saw the old fellow. His thoughts were running busily along with plans for his work soon to begin. Then he suddenly thought of Freda and his bosom burned, while the day seemed to expand and brighten. He had dreamed of her in the night, and she came upon his consciousness now with that unspeakable dearness, which dreams, though half-forgotten, lend to our waking thoughts. Her dark eyes were before him like infinite comfort; the sound of her voice formed a music in his mind. He wanted nothing more than Freda. He prayed that heaven would refuse him all other gifts, but her. When he opened his eyes slowly, there was the old man just in the act of turning to gaze back along the sultry street.

From the other edge of the window he espied the quicker figure of Henry Dover, the collegiate principal, on his way to his office. Although dressed in a grey, flannel suit, and a straw hat, his appearance was not lightsome. Of medium height, he walked with a pensive inclination of his head, but with an energetic and measured stride, while his arms, curved at the elbows, swung rhythmically beside him. Here was a careful, strong, man, thoroughly accustomed to the harness of office. Henry Dover, dressed in a Prussian general’s uniform, and following in the cortege of a field-marshal’s funeral, would perform the part with great credit.

Later in the morning, as Mauney sat idly by the window, he was conscious that the room was all at once illuminated by reflected sunlight. He looked up quickly at the figure who was passing and saw, under the shadow of her hat, and at a very near view, the face of Jean Byrne. With an instinctive turn of her head she at once recognized him, hesitated and then stopped.

“Mauney Bard! Where did you come from?”

“Wait till I get my hat,” replied Mauney.

“Well, Mrs. Poynton,” he said as he joined her on the street and shook hands with her. “It’s a great pleasure to see such an old friend, again.”

“The same to you,” she said, as they walked along, and favored him with the close scrutiny permitted to old friends on meeting. “You’ve changed some way or other, Mauney, but I’d know you anywhere. Your hair has lost its brilliance, and you look like a man of affairs. After reading your book I didn’t know what you’d be like. I heard a few days ago that you were going to teach here; so you see you’ve taken my advice after all.”

Her voice and manner were the same, although Mauney fancied she was more animated, an impression possibly due to her extravagant, but tasteful, costume.

“I’ve nearly lost track of you,” he admitted. “I’d like to talk over old times. Are you on your way down town?”

“Just to the post office. Will you come along?”

“Thank you,” he nodded. “Where do you live, may I ask?”

“Just a little way up Church Street, the second house past the Baptist Church. We used to live on Queen Street East, but when Charles went out West this spring—by the way, did you know that the doctor had left Lockwood?”

“No, I hadn’t heard that.”

“He found the town so conservative and stodgy that he thought he’d prefer things out there, and I felt that until he got settled I’d better stay here with mother. She’s getting old, you know, and is practically an invalid with rheumatism.”

As they were coming out of the post office, Mauney noticed one of the middle-aged women whom he had met the previous evening at the club, sitting in a motor car at the curb. She bowed affably, then glanced quickly at Mrs. Poynton.

“Do you know Mrs. Squires?” Jean asked as they walked along.

“Yes, met her only last night.”

Before leaving Jean at her home he accepted her invitation to come up for dinner that evening. Her mother was then discovered to be a woman prematurely aged by a morose and taciturn disposition, which seemed to account for her daughter’s surprising animation. Jean made good to Mauney what her mother’s manner lacked in friendliness. And, indeed, the home was all in distinct contrast with the impression of affluence which Jean’s street appearance had so unquestionably made.

Dinner finished, Mrs. Byrne at once settled herself in a chair by a western window, and, adjusting a second pair of glasses, reached a Bible from the window-sill. Mauney thought this might herald a session of family worship, and was relieved when his hostess led him to the parlor. With a Bohemian grace that was foreign to his conception of his former country-school teacher, Jean opened for him a silver box of cigarettes, and selecting one for herself pressed it neatly into a pearl holder.

“Times have changed, since Lantern Marsh days,” she said, smiling gently, “and I hope you have learned by this time to excuse women for their little follies.”

“I am free and easy,” laughed Mauney. “I’ve been living for the last few years in a house where cigarette-smoke was the prevailing perfume.”

“And about five years on Queen Street East,” Jean said, “have made these things almost essential to me. I started smoking at bridges in self-defence, and now my meals don’t digest without them. Charles always hated me to smoke. But I presume he realized the environment was to blame.”

For perhaps an hour they talked of Beulah and its inhabitants, of deaths and marriages, of careers which had justified their early promise, and of others which had not. Mauney briefly outlined his college experiences, but noticed that she said almost nothing about her own married life. All girlishness had departed from her face, and gone, too, was a certain carelessness of appearance which had formerly been quite refreshing. She was now, as nearly as he could judge, possessed of a dormant bitterness, never expressed, but as ugly as she was attractive. He found himself not a little curious to learn her philosophy, but even now he felt the same unexplainable distaste in her presence as he had felt during a certain evening drive, seven years ago. To be sure Jean had lost the directness which had then displeased him. She had become more subtle, more complex. But in this quiet parlor a mental hand was reaching towards him with the same emotional intent.

“Well,” she said at length, “you’re a sly fox. You’ve told me all about your life just as if there hadn’t been a single woman in it. Now, please confess, as I am desperately curious.”

For some reason Mauney preserved a guarded attitude. The last thing he could have discussed, or even mentioned, was his love for Freda MacDowell.

“I am not much of a ladies’ man,” he smiled. “I’ve been told that I was a woman-hater. I guess my early upbringing was against me that way.”

He soon left the house, feeling that old friendships did not necessarily improve with years, and that he himself, free and easy as he might be, was not attracted by a home where Bible-reading and cigarette-smoking were indulged by different members at the same time. It was not artistic. As for Jean, she was not an admirable person, nor even winning. He felt that he did not care if they should never meet again.

---

CHAPTER IX.
Seen at the Market.

During the first week of September Freda saw nothing of Mauney. Each day she kept expecting that he would either call or telephone. She tried to explain his delinquency by the excuse of work; but no excuse could justify it, especially when she might be returning to Merlton at the end of the month. Her impatience increased daily. She was remaining quietly at home, assisting in the house work, and systematically declining invitations. She was prompted on Saturday morning to telephone him and find out what was the matter. On second thought she decided not to make any overtures whatever. She had planned going to the market.

That was one thing about Lockwood that Freda loved. Saturday morning, she insisted on going to market for her mother. Long before sunrise the quietness of Queen Street was disturbed by the creaking wheels of farmers’ wagons coming into town, and by eight o’clock River Street Square presented a varied assembly of picturesque conveyances, each backed accurately to the cement walk that surrounded the enclosure. In the centre of the square stood a fountain, well covered by a generous canopy of faded maroon canvas, under which the farmers’ horses were allowed to stand while their owners presided, for three busy hours, beside their wagon-loads of produce.

It was a turbulent market, invaded with throngs of bargain-seeking citizens, and defended by shrewd, rustic salesmen, who withheld all bargains until the last possible moment. On certain days—no one knew why—a spirit of great conservatism reigned, when the farmers ill-temperedly refused to lower prices, and the customers with equal stubbornness, refused to buy. At other times a happier contact prevailed, and citizens captured what seemed stupendous bargains until, on walking further along the rows of wagons, they discovered, too late, the advantages of caution.

On this Saturday, early in September, Freda set out for River Street Square to indulge her great Lockwood affection. A woman could wear any kind of clothes at market, and Freda accordingly donned a yellow silk sweater, and set forth bareheaded. Carrying a large market basket, she walked leisurely along Queen Street, enjoying the spectacle of other folk arriving, similarly equipped.

On reaching the edge of the square, she almost collided with one, Fenton Bramley, a tall, ill-groomed, but strong-featured man of possibly sixty. Although slightly stooped, his carriage suggested the British army as unerringly as his polite manner betrayed the fundamental gentleman that he was. Bramley’s lines had fallen in barren places, but he was in direct descent from English nobility and could have been a knight even now, if he had possessed the necessary funds to clarify his title. Every one liked and tolerated “Fen.” He was a Lockwood fixture. In conversation he maintained the off-handed ease and abruptness of introduction characteristic of his thorough self-possession. He spoke to every one and every one spoke to him.

“Freda,” he commenced in a quiet, conversational tone, as if he had been talking with her continually for the past hour, “I see where that cove that murdered the bank teller’s got his sentence. Did ye see that?”

“Why, no, Fen,” she laughed; “I’m afraid I missed the item.”

“It was an item all right,” he continued. “And I had a letter yesterday from Frank Booth. He’s away up in the Yukon an’ says things are boomin’.”

“Frank Booth,” repeated Freda, trying to place the name.

“Maybe you don’t remember him,” admitted Bramley, scowling down attentively into her face. “You’re lookin’ the picture of health, Freda. And I’m not so bad myself. It’s a big market to-day. Some time when you’re passing the house, slip in tu see my furnitoor. Yer feyther was lookin’ it over and said he liked it. Did ye see where they arrested the head of the drug ring in Merlton?”

She nodded.

“I had a letter last week from Mac Tupper,” continued Bramley in his discursive way. “He’s down in New York, an’ says since prohibition came in they—”

“Tupper?” interrupted Freda.

“Maybe he was before your time. A great man wi’ the billiard cue was Mac! How’s yer feyther?”

“Oh, he’s fine.”

“An’ yer mother?”

“She’s well too.”

“And yerself?”

“Dandy.”

“Good-bye.” Bramley plucked off his cap, bowed and walked quickly away.

“How, much are your eggs?” Freda asked a farmer.

“The cheapest they’ll be this here autumn, lady,” he answered indifferently, with scarcely a look at his intending customer.

“But that gives me very little idea of the price,” she replied.

“Strictly fresh, them eggs is, too,” he said. “Picked right out o’ the hay last night. It’s one thing to get fresh eggs, but it’s a different thing to get strictly fresh!”

He picked up one of the eggs and balanced it on the points of his fingers.

“Look at that!” he invited. “Nice, clean, white egg. D’ye notice the shape of that egg?”

“Yes.”

“Then notice them in the basket,” he said, pointing to the wagon. “They’s all the same shape. You can depend on ’em lady.”

“Suppose I put it this way,” smiled Freda. “What are they worth a dozen?”

“I’m not saying what they’re worth, lady, but—”

At this juncture the dialogue was interrupted by a short, florid-faced woman, with big, wide, blue eyes, who recognized Freda and came waddling toward her.

“Well, well, Freda,” she began, putting down her basket. “I don’t know when I’ve seen you. I always like to see you. It always makes me think of poor Jennie. Poor Jennie always liked you, poor child! Even when she could hardly sit up she’d always talk about you. Poor Jennie! She always sat next to you in school, didn’t she? She liked you because you said she was so pretty; and she was a pretty child, too. Just think of her and you sitting there together. Ain’t it strange how as it’s always the beautiful are taken?”

Freeing herself as soon as possible from the garrulous mother of the departed Jennie, Freda began to market in earnest. A wagon-load of meat attracted her attention first. When the farmer had finished with a group of customers, she pointed to some choice-looking mutton.

“How much is the lamb?” she enquired.

“Gawd knows ’tis little enough,” he replied in a rasping, sorrowful tone, while he made gestures of innocence “Gawd knows I’m not tryin’ to flace dacent people like yourself. Gawd bless ye. And when ye see the rubbitch as yon jackeen does be haulin’ t’ town”—he nodded towards his nearest opposition—“and see the rediculeus price he does be afther askin’ fer it, Gawd knows, woman, ’tis little enough that I shud ask ony twinty-foive cints.”

“Still,” objected Freda, “it seems a little high, doesn’t it?”

“High!” he exclaimed. “Wirra, woman, ye misjidge me! Gawd knows ye’d pay nigh double the price at the butcher’s shop. An’ I’m afther thinkin’ that it’s dodderin’ little that a pretty, young lady ass yerself does be knowin’ o’ the price o’ butcher’s mate, so it is. Gawd bless ye!”

“Gawd know’s that’s done it,” laughed Freda, placing her order. “I’d buy it now even if I didn’t want it.”

While the farmer was carefully weighing the meat, Freda was surprised by the sudden appearance of Edward Courtney, walking through the crowd toward her.

“Girl,” he said, in his deep voice, “how much more do you intend to buy?”

“Not much, Ted,” she replied. “Why?”

“Nothing. I was waiting to spin you home and maybe play you a game of cribbage before lunch. Like it?”

“Um-hum,” she nodded.

“But don’t hurry,” he said. “I’m idle to-day as usual, and totally at your service.”

“Aren’t you an obliging person! Do you want to take my basket?”

“Pardon, how stupid of me!”

Marketing eventually finished, although not nearly so well finished as might have been, they wound their circuitous way to Queen Street, and, depositing the basket in the back of Courtney’s car, climbed quickly in and motored home.

Courtney had a way of making himself swiftly at home with people he wished to befriend. He carried Freda’s purchases boldly into her house, through the dining room and into the kitchen, where Mrs. MacDowell was peeling potatoes.

“I rescued your daughter just as she was finishing,” he announced. He was pressing her wet hand, obdurate to her excuses, and bowing as punctiliously as at a drawing-room reception. “I hope you’re quite well, Mrs. MacDowell. Freda and I are going to have a game of cribbage before lunch.”

On the verandah they arranged chairs by the small table and began playing.

“The old town does bear down pretty heavily, Freda—what?” he enquired as he dealt the cards. “The mater is slipping down to New York and Phily for a short duty call, and I’m wondering what wild schemes I can perpetrate during her regretted absence. I had thought of a foursome up the river in the big boat to-morrow night, but unfortunately the skipper has been graciously granted a week’s shore-leave. Damn! The mater takes this generous tack merely as a curb on my propensities.”

“Hard luck, Edward.”

“But mark my vow, Freda—some time before I’m eighty, I’m going to stage a buster aboard the gentle Cinderella. However, I’ve got the launch in shape and all I need now is a personnel for this proposed voyage. What say?”

“Ted, I simply couldn’t go.”

He smiled while his eyes wandered over her fingers.

“I don’t notice either a diamond or a frat-pin,” he replied, teasingly.

“No; but, nevertheless, Ted, I’m practically engaged.”

“What, ho!” he exclaimed, in a low tone of surprise. “Freda, girl, are you genuine?”

“I really mean it, Ted.”

“Dear heavens!” he mused. “Incidentally, though, my congratulations! Is it a secret?”

“Yes, just at present.”

“Then, I’ll regard it so. But to think of the partner of my youthful adventures being no longer available. Well,” he added in a voice unusually serious for him, “Somebody’s lucky.”

“Why! You know you don’t care,” she rejoined offhandedly.

Courtney’s face was sufficiently mask-like to hide whatever feelings he experienced, and accustomed enough to all contingencies to smile with its usual ease.

“Tell me, then,” he presently inquired, “aren’t you going to come dancing with me any more?”

“Possibly.”

“There’s going to be a bon affair at the Country Club in the shape of an informal free-for-all for clubbers and guests. It’s on Wednesday. You’d better come.”

“Well, Ted,” she sighed, after a moment’s hesitation, “I’m on. What time?”

“Expect me at nine—and thanks awfully.”

The cribbage game was soon finished and Courtney, with a final bon mot, was striding towards his car, while Freda in an idle mood was thinking that, for all his shallow opulence and apparent emptiness, he possessed a social grace that was admittedly worth while.

---

CHAPTER X.
The Reliable Man.

Next day, Freda was agreeably surprised to be called on the telephone, about ten in the morning.

“Are you going to church?” asked Mauney.

“No, are you?” she asked.

“I’m too fed up, Freda, to bother. It’s going to be a warm day and I think we ought to get out in the country, up the river some place. I’ve got a lot to talk about.”

They motored to Shadow Bay, a dozen miles west of Lockwood, and had dinner together at the Chalet, a summer place, which, owing to the auspicious weather, was still open.

“I’m beginning to understand Lockwood better,” Mauney said, as they sat on a shaded cliff after dinner. “I don’t remember ever having put in a more disagreeable week in my life.”

“What’s wrong?” she enquired, with no suggestion in her voice that her own past week had been the most unpleasant she could recall.

“Just everything,” he said. “I’m foolish to mind it at all. But the staff of the collegiate are the hardest people to get acquainted with. They’re all capable, unusually so, but terribly stand-offish.”

“That, my dear boy, is the key-note of Lockwood,” she interrupted. “They’ve just naturally acquired that manner.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he nodded. “But I wish they’d get over it. They seem to think I’m a high-brow, or something just as bad. Inadvertently I heard a couple of the men discussing my book, knocking it to beat the deuce.”

“And do you actually care, Mauney Bard?” she asked in a surprised tone.

“Yes, I do,” he replied. “I’ve always been damnably lonesome for pals, for good fellows, who, like Max Lee, could see the motive behind the act. Freda, you know the motive behind my book. You know it was merely a wish of mine to warm up the subject of history a little bit. Well, these chaps agreed that it was mere nonsense.”

“That,” sneered Freda, “was mere jealousy. They haven’t tried to write a book. If they had they’d be more lenient. But really,” she added, looking Mauney seriously in the eye, “I think you must be tired, for I never saw you so down in the mouth, before.”

She wanted to pillow his head in her lap, and tell him that his book was the best one ever written. She longed to comfort him and change his loneliness. There were great allowances, after all, which she would gladly make for him. She knew all about his life now. She knew him, too—just how stimulating a little praise was to him, just how diffident he was about himself, and how hard it was for anyone to reach his real open self. As she sat there beside him and watched his strong, splendid profile, while he gazed at the river, she knew that she could never pity him. He was too big and strong. To-day was but a passing mood in his strong life. Rather than comfort him she would prefer to cast her inmost self upon his support and be comforted. But he was too immovable either to come to her or to receive her.

“I’ve got a bone to pick, Mauney,” she said.

“All right. What is it?” he asked pleasantly.

“Can’t you imagine?”

“Possibly, but I’d prefer that you present the bone.”

“Why didn’t you call me up all week?”

“My easiest excuse would be that I did not think you cared.”

“But,” she answered, “as we happen to be sensible people of the twentieth century, and as you know I cared, tell me your real reason.”

“Would work be a decent excuse?” he laughed.

“With anyone else but you, Mauney, it would do fine. But you must remember that I’ve only got three more weeks, perhaps, to stay in Lockwood.”

“But three weeks is a long time, too, Freda,” he said, seriously. “Just think how terribly much can happen in three weeks.”

“I suppose you’re thinking of history, are you?” she asked in a delicate tone of mockery.

“No, Freda,” he replied, quickly. “I’m thinking of you. I’m thinking of you all the time, all this week. Please do me the honor to believe me.”

“Sorry,” she said, dropping her hand suddenly on his.

Her week of impatience quickly melted from her thoughts, and in the silence, as they sat so close together, she could have wept. Why had she used that little, mocking tone? If he could realize how she felt he would take her hand in his and not leave it just where she had dropped it. But there he sat looking away toward the river, so very self-contained.

“And I was going to tell you,” he said presently, “about the young people I’m teaching. I like them all right and I think they have unusual ability. But they have no enthusiasm, except a very few of them. I decided that I’d like to start a seminary for one of the classes where we could get right down to business and have open discussions. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”

“Yes, Mauney, splendid,” she replied, lifting her hat carefully from her head, and tossing it on the grass. “Why don’t you do it?”

“Just one reason. Dover, when I put it up to him, didn’t think it could be done. I talked it over with him in his office, Friday night. He’s a good fellow and capable and has got a line on Lockwood that I wish you’d heard. He impressed on me that his words were confidential, but I’m going to tell you. He approved of the round-table idea immediately, but said it had once been tried out, and failed. They had to be held after regular classes, you see, and a lot of the wealthy people objected to their children being kept in. They sent doctor’s certificates and raised the devil. Of course, once robbed of its spontaneity, the seminaries proved a failure.”

“Enthusiasm,” said Freda, “is one word that dear old Lockwood will never learn. They hate enthusiasm.”

“You should have seen Dover,” laughed Mauney. “When he grows warm under the collar he always gets on those two feet of his and hikes all over the room, like a madman looking for a hole by which to escape from his cell.”

“He was just the same when I went,” she nodded.

“I had touched a tender spot when I mentioned seminaries,” Mauney continued. “It got him off on a general criticism of Lockwood. After he had paced the floor for a moment or two he stopped and said in his slow, nasal, sarcastic way: ‘Mr. Bard, I’ve lived here for twenty-five years. That’s exactly a quarter of a century, and I’m going to tell you that it’s been exactly a quarter of a century too long. I don’t know what’s wrong with Lockwood, because I’ve been much too busy to try to find out.’”

“That sounds just like him!” laughed Freda.

“‘But, there’s something wrong, I can assure you. A teacher who teaches in this town, is just a paid servant of the community. He has no social status, whatever. His wife has none either. His planetary orbit reaches as far as school at nine in the morning, and as far as bed at nine in the evening. If he tries to do more than he’s paid for he becomes unpopular. They want uniformity, here in Lockwood and, by George, they’re going to get it. That’s why seminaries won’t work, Mister Bard.’”

“Oh, well,” Freda said, “you mustn’t be discouraged, boy.”

Mauney shook his head slowly while the muscles of his jaw hardened. “I’m far from being discouraged,” he said quietly. “I’ve started in on this work, and I’m going to stay with it.”

There, in that simple statement of his, Freda felt that his whole reliable character showed itself. Born of parents who had dug their living out of the ground, Mauney would persist in whatever task he undertook—obdurate, stubborn, steadfast and gloriously reliable.

They had supper at the Chalet and then returned to their nook under the trees. Freda had, by this time, attuned herself to the quiet and dispirited mood which seemed to possess Mauney. It would pass, she felt, but it was lasting unusually long.

“I couldn’t come to see you this week,” he said awkwardly. “I got a letter from the nurse at Rockland, and Max is dying.”

“Dying!” she exclaimed.

He nodded his head slowly several times. That was all the explanation he could give for his conduct during the past week, and it had taken him all day to give it. They drove home in the twilight and later, on the verandah at MacDowell’s, as he was bidding her good-night, the illumination of a red moon shining through a hot, smoky, sky showed him her face. Never would he forget the quietness of that moment, disturbed only by the wind in the pines, as he looked down upon her features, and suffered to clasp the vision in his arms. But he did not.

And when he had gone, Freda, unable to understand his restraint, suffered, too. Idealization was a bogey cast out of heaven years ago. She coveted actuality and the simple, sweet rewards of affection, and, in a pang of loneliness, she wished that Mauney was less immovable and self-contained and reliable.

---

CHAPTER XI.
The Music of Silence and of Drum.

There was a depth in Freda’s nature which she was sure no one would ever discover. A delicate fear occasionally separated her from people for an hour of tranquil meditation, in which she reached back through time and down through obstructions to regain touch with it herself. Sometimes she would paddle slowly along the shore near her home, or, beaching the canoe on the meagre shelf by the cliff’s feet, sit in passive enjoyment of the simple natural objects about her. She never took a book on these solitary excursions, because of a characteristic impulse toward actuality. The flat, round stones and pebbles, rendered smooth by years of the river’s polishing, may have been very uninteresting and inanimate things, indeed, but she loved the amazing variation in their color, all dim, composite shades of purples, greens and nameless greys. There was a silence, not encroached upon by the monotonous murmur of the persistent shore waters, and a solitude unaffected by distant freighters moving slowly in the midstream. She would stretch supinely to gaze at the nervous phantoms of reflected light that pendulated upon the cavernous, stratified face of the cliffs, or to watch a fisher-bird perched attentively on a bare, protruding root, far up at the grassy edge above.

Her ears, attuned to disregard the soft sounds that formed about her an atmospheric velvet, began at length to hear that wondrous roaring silence that ever widened and thrilled with the very mystery of all mysteries. And she knew, but could never have explained, what else she found then. It was strength and rare forgetfulness of self, and belief in a vast Something that could never henceforth be doubted.

This, however, constituted for Freda merely that ultimate spiritual experience, painfully unapproachable by friends, which it is the strange lot of all mortals to know less or more. Men and women cling to it, hunger for it, recover it or lose it, but for ever treasure it. The gratifications of a hundred vaunted pursuits dissipate into shadow-play before it. And yet it is what? So elusive, so stupendous, so readily forgotten. The trammelling events of a world constantly with us, march upon us, swoop us into their caravanserie, and we are no longer the living strength of that incomparable hour. We are but the dutiful perpetuators of age-old customs and follies.

Back to life, as it was, and with an impetuous relish, went Freda, on the night of the dance.

It was no disloyalty to Mauney. Her nature surged energetically on both sides of the line of average experience. If there were moments of spiritual joy, there were also moments of blinder joy, when music inspired the sinews and the blood warmed. Life was so large that it could not remember from hour to hour its past occupations. Eyes that loved soft, verdant light at the river’s edge, must love, too, the carnival display of garish crimsons and yellows; ears that had listened into the silence heard now the barbaric tune of drum and trumpet with enhanced sensation. This gaiety was not disloyalty to Mauney. It was merely life—her life—that craved the thrills. She thought, as she pirouetted with Courtney, that the delectable exercise was indeed a necessary training. It made her love Mauney more. Taught by its care-free spirit, she would be better able to cheer that dependable man, who lived a life curbed constantly to the line of average emotions. With a fresher attraction she would decoy him from the inevitable, but wearing, sombreness of his lonely existence.

And then, too, as she half-meditated, the while her feet were gliding in accurate rhythm with her partner, Mauney could not really blame her. He had stubbornly withheld the final declarations and demands that would have made her his fiancÉe. And he had left her alone for a whole week. Reason, noble reason he had, no doubt. But she would value love that broke past all reasons; and now, if he learned that she had gone dancing with Courtney, the discovery might rouse him, by jealousy or caution, to that pitch of emotion where she longed to behold him. And, if he disapproved, he had only to discipline, to satisfy her.

Many of Lockwood’s elite thought that Freda and Courtney made a striking pair, and said so. He was well known to have many attractions, some of them popular, some not. As a matrimonial prize he had been variously encouraged by several ambitious mothers; then given up, but never scorned. He enjoyed that kind of popularity which is inspired by wealth and ease, enhanced by a pleasant enough personality, but which is restrained by an envious bitterness seldom expressed. The wealthy are aware of such bitterness, but have learned to disregard it.

As for Freda, she was now practically a visitor in Lockwood society. A few years before she had been a beautiful and popular debutante, with an influential father. She was now a university woman, and her people, though not so influential as before, were still definitely well considered. To-night she was merely an admittedly beautiful and acceptable young lady. Society was not keenly interested in her.

“I think,” said Mrs. Turnbull to Mrs. Squires, as they watched the dancing from the verandah, “that Miss MacDowell looks so graceful with Ted.”

“He knows a good dancer,” replied Mrs. Squires with a supercilious expression. “But you know, of course, that his mother, who is in New York, would scarcely approve if she were here.”

“Why not?” enquired Mrs. Turnbull, with the seriousness due to a most important issue.

“No reason, except that the MacDowell’s are scarcely—ah—what they were once, you know. And besides, I presume that Ted is expected to aim higher.”

“Is he serious about Freda MacDowell?” Mrs. Turnbull asked in surprise.

“He was once, my dear, and Mrs. Courtney is known to have cut Freda rather cruelly on several occasions.”

Freda, had she heard such remarks, would have been quite indifferent. The dance was the thing. It was the glory of movement and sound and color that charmed her. Courtney was but a means to an end—an impersonal partner who lived up to the character with his customary gentility. But Courtney was not quite impregnable. The intoxication of Freda’s proximity had been making inroads on his polite reserve, and gradually culminated in a little outburst as they stood alone on a deserted part of the verandah during a number.

“Girl, I love you!” he whispered passionately and tried to embrace her. But she pushed him back steadily.

“Ted, you do not,” she replied angrily. “You just imagine it, and I don’t like your arms on me, either! You may take me home, please!”

He bowed and went so directly for his car that Freda half forgave him. He told her on the way home that his only regret over the incident was her displeasure. He hoped that she might soon give him some slight reason to be less unhappy than he was just then. If she could not in any case entertain his serious bid for love, he would gladly content himself with the consolation of her friendship. Would she not, at least, forgive him for to-night?

“I don’t know, Ted,” she replied, as he was about to leave her. “I didn’t like it one little bit.”

Nor did she.

In her room she engaged in an intense mood of self-despising, and anger and regret. Ah! She wanted Mauney’s arms just then. Her sense of guilt melted into one of weakness and dependence. In his strong, clean arms she would be at last peaceful and safe. She ought not to have gone with Courtney. That was plain. But she had promised. Now she would confess to Mauney and accept his chastisement with delicious satisfaction.

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CHAPTER XII.
The St. Lawrence Hears a Dialogue.

The next evening Mauney called at MacDowell’s and had his first encounter with Freda’s father. He found him comfortably seated with a newspaper on the verandah. As Mauney approached, MacDowell’s sharp, black eye surveyed him over the corner of his journal. Then he removed his feet from the low wicker table.

“Good evening, sir,” he said politely, rising and extending his hand. “Come right up. I ought to have met you before, Mr. Bard,” he continued with a mischievous smile, “but better late than not at all. It’s warm, isn’t it? There’s a chair. I don’t know what’s going to happen if it doesn’t soon rain. We usually have a breath of air from the river here, but this last week, I’ve been sweltering.”

“And what has surprised me, Mr. MacDowell,” said Mauney, “is the general impression that Lockwood is such ‘a cool, breezy, summer resort.’”

“So it is,” MacDowell affirmed. “This is exceptional heat. You can go a long piece before you’ll find a town whose situation, general lay-out, and climate can even compare with this wonderful little town.”

“It’s funny, though,” rejoined Mauney, “how many knockers are to be found among its citizens. I’ve been here only a couple of weeks, and I’ve noticed that the lower and middle classes—for I think the divisions are pretty distinct—are constantly fault-finding and grouching.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” MacDowell nodded, while his face reassumed the special enthusiastic expression which he always wore when praising his town. “Let them talk! But I’m going to tell you, Mr. Bard, that this town, out of the whole province, has, without exception, the most brilliant future before it. Some day you’re going to see that river alive with commerce and our harbor crowded with freighters. The population is going to jump up, internal trade will flourish, the community will become permanently prosperous. And all this, once some big industry sees the advantage of locating here. It’s no myth. It’s bound to come.”

Mauney liked the big man for his enthusiasm. He was inspired, as most people were who talked with MacDowell, by a new belief in Lockwood. After all, why should it not grow and prosper and become a city? There was the river, indeed; that great, potential artery of commerce, with its undeveloped water-power. And here was Lockwood, sure enough, strategically situated, and upon the very brink of an undeniably great future. Some personal magnetism of his host had conjured up the vision before him and taught him faith. He felt all at once a deep respect for the masterly man who, at this moment, although unnoticed, was smiling slyly at Mauney’s serious face. MacDowell was at last clear to him: he was remaining in Lockwood because of his faith. He was tied to the old town by invisible bonds of strong affection and belief. Let them talk! Here was an heroic figure, a man of brave judgment and great dreams. Mauney could not have been persuaded, just then, that his hero’s dream was simply a lifelong adoration of Gloria Smith, and that his skilful role was but the disguise of a private loyalty. Later he would learn, perhaps, that MacDowell was, of all municipal students, the most confirmed pessimist, but that would never hinder him from liking the genial man and feeling that in some degree he redeemed Freda’s home from hopeless frigidity.

At last Freda came out of the house, and seemed surprised to see Mauney. While they were talking her father interrupted good-naturedly.

“Look here, you folks, why don’t you take out the canoe for a paddle along the shore?”

“You have a very fertile imagination, Dad,” said Freda.

“Yes,” he agreed dryly, “and a desperate determination not to be ousted from this verandah.”

His suggestion was adopted, and together they crossed the rough tableland to the steps leading down to the boat-house, exchanging not a word as they went.

“I telephoned last night, Freda,” Mauney said as he began to follow her down the steps.

“What time did you ’phone?” she asked, pausing as she reached the first landing.

“I think it was about nine, and your mother said you had gone to a dance.”

Freda stood by the railing, looking away to the river as he reached the landing. She said nothing, but displeasure was written openly on her face. She had been looking forward to making her own confession of the gentle guilt. She had imagined herself saying: “I was a very wayward girl last night, Mauney,” and him listening, thoroughly vexed. But he had spoiled that anticipation by knowing all about it.

“Well,” she said, with a haughty elevation of her brows, “wasn’t that all right?”

“Of course, it was all right, Freda,” he replied. “But I had heard nothing about the dance, you see.”

“Hadn’t you really!” she exclaimed with more sarcasm than she felt.

“No,” he replied quietly, but with a puzzled glance at her cheek which, though turned away, was suddenly very red. “I have no authority over what you do, Freda, and even if I had, I wouldn’t use it.”

“I don’t suppose you would, Mauney. I suppose you’d always just let me do as I wanted to.”

“You’re quite right. But I was surprised last night, and a little bit hurt.”

“Well, I knew you would be,” she admitted, turning slightly towards him.

“And I just want to know,” he continued, “if you’re always going to do things that hurt.”

“How do I know?” she retorted, facing him. “If you don’t like things I do, why then, you’ve got to discipline me.”

“Discipline you!” he exclaimed. “Why I hadn’t even thought of disciplining you.”

“Because,” she interrupted without heeding his words, “I don’t know what it is that sometimes plays the devil with me, and I’ve got to be disciplined. I’ve been like a boat without a rudder. My greatest need has been for some one to steer me.”

“Tell me, Freda, who were you with at the dance?”

“Ted Courtney,” she quickly answered.

His eyes opened wide, then grew thoughtful. “Do you mean that he—that Courtney took you to the dance?”

“Yes.”

He was silent a moment, studying the palm of his hand. “But I never dreamed that you even liked him,” he said at length.

“I don’t either, Mauney.”

“I suppose,” he said in a lower tone, as he leaned his hips against the railing and folded his arms on his breast, “I suppose it’s really your business and not mine. Don’t imagine that I’m trying to interfere in your affairs.”

“Oh, goodness, no,” she almost jeered. “I’m afraid there’s not much danger of your ever interfering the least bit! Why, Mauney, I don’t mind if you give me the very devil for going to that dance!”

“Only tell me. Why did you go with Courtney?” he asked with a deliberation that provoked her.

“There are just about forty-seven reasons,” she stated with thin grace. “First, because I knew I shouldn’t, second, because at the time he asked me I was furious with you for not calling me up for a whole week, third because I wanted to do something to relieve my fury.”

“But, I told you,” he interrupted in a quiet, polite tone, “I told you why I didn’t call you up.”

“You told me after I had promised to go to the dance.”

“Yes, but you don’t understand,” he said, gently, taking off his straw hat and turning the rim slowly around between his hands. “It was not the dance. Can’t you understand my feelings?”

“I understand them only too well.” Her dark eyes were now burning almost savagely, and her hands tightly gripping the balustrade. She spoke in an unnaturally restrained tone. “It’s Max Lee, of course, I’ve tried to feel sorry about him being ill. Perhaps I ought to be trying to comfort you. If so—too bad. I’m just being true to my feelings, that’s all. You had to be so thoughtful of that man, didn’t you, Mauney? Had to let him down so very, very easily. You couldn’t let him die like a man, unhappy and miserable, but like a man you had to smooth out his path for him. Even if he did love me, which I doubt, he knew I didn’t love him. What difference did he make anyway? Why allow your care for him to make you slight me? Even if Lee is dying,” she concluded emphatically, “that’s not half as dramatic as it looks. There are other people who are living—or trying to!”

“But he’s been my pal, my friend, Freda,” he answered very calmly, “and I’m afraid that you’d have to be a man to quite appreciate my feelings.”

It was nothing apparently. Mauney seemed quite unperturbed. As Freda stood regarding his reposeful figure she wondered what she could possibly do to stir him up. Even rudeness to a dying man—for it was that—had not brought the storm she expected. Even scorn of his solicitude for a dying friend—for her words had been that, too—had failed to budge him an inch. And now he was there before her, leaning against the railing, reflectively flipping his finger at the lining of his hat, as if she had merely remarked upon the brilliance of the sinking sun, or the character of the weather.

“Why don’t you curse me?” she asked presently. “I doubt if you have any feelings. Why don’t you simply kill me for what I said?”

“In the first place,” he smiled, “I don’t think you quite meant it.”

“Oh, but I did,” she affirmed. “I really did.”

“Come on,” he said in a lighter tone, catching her hand and starting down the second flight of steps. “If I were to kill you, Freda MacDowell, it would be a tough little world for me to go on living in.”

“Anyway,” he added, drawing her gently along as she made to grasp the railing. “I certainly did use you rottenly last week. I can see now how you felt, and as for that dance and our friend, Courtney, well—I’m not going to be so miserably jealous any more.”

The edge of Freda’s knife-like mood was dulled a little by his words, and she followed him with a sense of defeat. It was becoming her ambition to see this big fellow angry. Why a woman should desire such a sight, and desire it like a fetish, is one of the obscure phenomena of feminine psychology. To say that anger reveals new qualities of the man is to give but a paltry explanation. During the little canoe journey along under the eastern shore of Lockwood, Freda kept thinking of Gertrude Manton’s apothegm: “We don’t know why our love makes us hurt them. They are only men, but we are women.” But had Gertrude really managed to hurt them? That was the question. If so, unbounded praise! As for herself, Freda was ignobly defeated. The man at whose sure stroke her canoe glided so sleekly under the shadowy cliffs was surely incapable of anger.

---

CHAPTER XIII.
Distress.

It would always require a longer time for Mauney to become roused than for most people, in any vital matter. He would be sure to react very slowly to the irritating stimuli. He would gain cognizance of issues very tardily, and keep on half-doubting things that he hated to believe.

Friday, at noon, he crossed Church Street, from the collegiate to his boarding house, conscious of only one thing, that the morning’s work had been utterly unsatisfactory. Just why his discipline over his classes had weakened he was not ready even now to enquire. The faces of half a hundred students can be very unfriendly at times. They can act as a unified mirror to throw back at a teacher the gloom, the uncertainty, the desperate undercurrent of his own mood. There had been slight lapses of memory when those inquisitive faces had roused him to complete the phrases almost escaped. No doubt he had appeared to them stupidly absent-minded. In the principal’s office there had been a queer conversation, too. Dover had only been explaining some detail of routine, but he had worn an expression of impatient emphasis, as though he were trying to impress an idiot. That, too, had been due, no doubt, to Mauney’s own preoccupation.

Noon recess on this Friday marked the end of the week’s work. A half-holiday had been granted for some reason or other—preparation for field-day, now that he thought of it. He entered his room with a grateful sense of finding at last shelter and opportunity to think.

He knew that these bright days, with streets flooded by dry, hard sunlight were important and sombre days. Other people seemed to be free of care. Field sports and picnics up the river, and long, refreshing drives along the river road—these enjoyments were not, and could not be, for him. Nor was this September so much different from all his past autumns. Each fall had found him enmeshed in difficulties. He was beginning to perceive that his life lay just outside the border of the sunlight. And that, unprofitable though all his problems might be, they were, nevertheless, undeniably with him. He could not shirk them. Perhaps some strength might be gained in the effort to solve them. At any rate he realized quite clearly, as he removed his coat and tossed it on the bed, that the problem to-day was Freda MacDowell.

First of all he would shave. He had no sooner poured a little water into the basin on the washstand than the landlady knocked on his door.

“Come in, Mrs. Hudson,” he said wearily.

As she entered, clothed as usual in her plain, print gown, his eyes focused on a yellow envelope in her hand.

“It’s a telegraph,” she announced officiously, but without proffering it. “And it’s afther coming while ye were at the schule, Mister Bard. Poor mon! I due hope as it is nothin’ alarming. It’s the sight of a telegraph that I due dhread, Mister Bard. For wanse, several years ago, I did receive wan meself.”

“But it may be nothing,” said Mauney cheerfully, as he reached for it.

“Ah, but it’s a telegraph, mind!” she insisted, while her eyes keenly studied her boarder’s face as he tore it open and began reading. She preserved silence until he had finished, but her curiosity kept her standing, huge and peering, by the open door. She noticed his blue eyes scan the message hurriedly, then again several times more slowly. Finally he looked up over the edge of the paper with wide, blank eyes. He was conscious of her enormous body beside him and was irked by it.

“It’s nothing much, after all, Mrs. Hudson,” he said in a low tone, starting once more to read it.

“Imogine, now!” she replied, “Indade, but sure, I t’ought it would be afther bein’ a—”

Mauney, ignoring her presence, went to the window and stood looking out on the street. Mrs. Hudson, after a final assertion that “a telegraph” was never a very welcome kind of missive, left and closed the door angrily.

“Patient failed to regain consciousness; died quietly six this morning.” That, with the nurse’s signature, was the whole message. Mauney stood pensively by the window wondering why he received the news so apathetically. It was unreal. It was unquestionably true. But the external objects of this bright, Friday noon wore a casual appearance that denied the occurrence of death. Church Street was just the same innocent, familiar thoroughfare. There were the groups of collegiate students hurrying along with books in their arms, laughing and talking. There was the doubled old man, white-bearded and feeble, plodding down the walk, rapping the cement sharply with his metal-headed stick, and nearby, in the shade of a maple, lay the neighbor’s familiar Airedale, mouth open and tongue protruding, as he panted in the heat.

Turning back into the room he slowly walked to his trunk and opened it. Then he folded the telegram quickly and put it in one of the compartments of the tray. As he closed the lid slowly he cleared his throat, and then set to work shaving. He tried, as faithfully as possible, to take an interest in his personal toilet, but found it quite a boring procedure. There was a new grey suit, hanging on the back of the door, to be worn for the first time to-day, and although it was very becoming, he took no pleasure in it. He was going down to the MacDowell’s this afternoon to hear some expert piano music. Freda had telephoned him before school that Betty Doran, home from New York, was going to give a private recital to a few friends. Just who Betty Doran was he neither knew nor cared. What she was going to play he had not heard, nor was he in the least curious.

In fact, only one thing mattered—to-day, to-morrow or at any time—that he could conceive. That particular, important thing was a long talk with Freda, a talk which would have consequences. It would definitely end all misunderstandings, and rob her, once and for all, of any doubt about his love.

When he arrived at the MacDowell’s he found himself a neglected member of a gathering of thirty. Betty Doran, a spoiled young person of eighteen with Dutch-cut hair, sat at the piano rendering Chopin brilliantly and smiling affectedly at the frequent applause of the audience who filled the drawing-room. There was cake and coffee to be served afterwards, but Freda, who had taken a vow never to assist her mother with afternoon refreshments, stubbornly refused now, much to the remarked surprise of guests who saw her talking quietly with Mauney just outside in the hallway.

“This is about the last place I should have wished to come to-day,” he was saying to her in a low tone. “Get me out of it, Freda. And, if you can get away this evening, I’m crazy to take you for a long drive out in the country. Are you free?”

She gladly agreed.

After the recital was finished and the last loquacious woman had finally bade the hostess good-bye, she turned quickly from the door and sought her daughter.

“It’s simply terrible,” she said with evident feeling, “that this Bard person should have been asked to our home to-day, and I must and do insist that in future, if you are so foolish as to see him at all—”

“Now, Mother,” said Freda with some curiosity, “what on earth have the dear ladies been telling you?”

“Everybody knows it!” exclaimed Mrs. MacDowell. “He has been seen on the street with Mrs. Poynton and was also noticed coming out of her house.”

“Well, anything else?” Freda coolly enquired.

“I think that’s almost enough,” smiled her mother. “No one is laboring under any delusions about Mrs. Poynton, surely.”

“Perhaps not, Mother,” Freda almost hissed, as, blushing red, she drew quickly back with hatred in her eyes. “Perhaps Mrs. Poynton was guilty of a sin you and Mrs. Beecher will not forgive her for. Perhaps it was a sin her husband will not forgive. I know nothing about her. I want to know nothing. But of one thing I am absolutely certain!”

“And of what, my girl, are you so certain?” asked her mother.

“That if Mauney Bard called at her home he did it in innocence,” replied Freda, defiantly.

“Ha,” gently laughed the proud scion of Family-Compact glory, “Your credulity is quite amazing. If you care to believe what you say, you are, of course, at liberty to do so. You have always been full of strange and reckless impulses.”

“I believe in him so much,” said Freda, with emphasis that caused her voice to break, “that I’d stake everything—yes, my life, on him. And you, Mother, without even inquiring into it, are ready, just like the rest of these fools, to throw your harpoon into an innocent man.

“All I say,” replied her mother, haughtily, and with an aggravating smile, “is that this home—my home—is now closed to your glorious hero. I trust that is quite plain?”

Freda could not speak. Her face suddenly grew white as she stood in the middle of the dining-room floor fastening vengeful eyes upon her mother.

“It was even reported,” continued Mrs. MacDowell, turning to arrange some flowers in a vase on the buffet, “that Mr. Bard spent the night at Mrs. Poynton’s.”

“It’s a lie—a damned lie!” burst forth Freda. “Oh, tell me who said that!”

“No, I shall do nothing of the sort. Possibly you can imagine that it was told me in a kindly spirit.”

“When—did they say he—did that?”

“Last week, of course,” she replied. “When you were wondering what had become of him.”

“Mother,” Freda said more calmly, “Mauney will deny this for me. I know it’s all a hopeless lie, one of the big, black lies that they love so much. You don’t know him, Mother. You don’t even want to know him. But let me tell you one thing, that you are as bad as the rest of them!”

“Indeed,” smiled Mrs. MacDowell, turning from the vase of flowers.

“You are worse than a murderer,” suddenly said Freda, while her face quivered with new rage.

Mrs. MacDowell’s composure suffered a noticeable weakening. “My girl, I shall not tolerate such language!” she warned. “Be very careful.”

“You are capable of a crime more dastardly than murder, because it requires no courage—”

“Enough!”

“No,” fumed Freda. “It’s not enough. You’re going to hear it all for once. You have made me hate you.”

Something of latent power in her daughter’s manner put Mrs. MacDowell on guard.

“Why, Freda,” she exclaimed. “What on earth. I only meant to—”

“It’s what you’ve done that counts, Mother. I know he’s innocent. My God, he must be innocent!”

Just a moment later George MacDowell came into the room and found Freda in a chair with her head clasped in her hands, weeping, and his wife standing, evidently distressed. He looked from one to the other regretfully. Sadness was in his black eyes as he looked accusingly at his wife.

“Gloria,” he said. “I’m surprised. I’ve heard both sides of this case. I couldn’t miss it, by Gad. Look what you’ve done. You’ve broken her heart. Are you proud of your job? You women aren’t sports, I tell you. Give her a fighting chance. Don’t stand there gloating over it. This business of afternoon-tea scandals has gone too far.”

“Why, George,” she said nervously, “I only meant to warn her of—”

“But you’ve broken her up, completely. Now, look here,” he said more seriously than she had ever heard him speak. “This is no small matter. Let’s get a little British fair play into this business. Do you know what I’m going to do?”

He brought his fist sharply into his opened palm.

“I’m going to get Mauney Bard. If he’s a man he’ll stand his trial and either deny it or not.” He started for the door, picking up his hat from a table nearby. Then before leaving he turned. “Ladies,” he said. “I will request you both to wait my return.”

“But, George,” said Mrs. MacDowell, “I think such a thing is absurd.”

“And I don’t want it either,” said Freda.

“Well, you’re both a fine lot, by Gad,” said MacDowell, impatiently tossing his hat to the table. “All right. But one thing I insist on, Gloria, and that is that you immediately govern your tongue. This is your house, but it is my home and this is my daughter.”

MacDowell sauntered slowly back to the library, while his wife somewhat informed as to new qualities in her married partner, departed quickly for the kitchen and began making unnecessary noise with the dishes. Freda proceeded to her room and was not seen again until eight in the evening, when she came down and passed through, without speaking, on her way to the garage. They heard the rumble of the motor-car and both watched, from different vantage points, as it sped quickly between the pine trees on its way to Queen Street. During the evening, while MacDowell in the library, as Mayor of Lockwood, gave audience to some business men from Merlton, his wife sat playing solitaire on the southern verandah.

---

Freda was so quiet as she and Mauney drove along the river road and so unusually unresponsive to his remarks, that he began to wonder if he had discovered her in another of her unpredictable moods. For some time he, too, was silent.

“Well, Freda,” he said at length, with forced cheerfulness, “suppose we both loosen up for a change. That musicale was pretty nearly too much for me, and I suppose it affected you in the same way. These last two weeks have been about the least satisfactory passage in my life, so far, and if I were to give in to my feelings I would be a rare study in despondency.”

“Lockwood blues!” said Freda, dismally, as she slowly stopped the car by the side of the road. “It’s bound to get you. However, we’ve got to go on living, and I hear that you’ve been showing some attentions to a married woman.”

“Indeed,” laughed Mauney, good-naturedly, “and who is the favored lady?”

“This isn’t such a laughing matter as it looks, Mauney,” she replied with some severity. “My mother’s wild about it.”

“About what?”

For an instant she tugged at her gloves and removed them. “I wish,” she said, “that I were feeling a little happier than I am. I’ll tell you what it’s all about. You were said to have been seen on the street with Mrs. Poynton, and also leaving her house one evening.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” admitted Mauney as he waited for her to continue.

“Then you were with her?” asked Freda quickly.

“Yes, why not?” he asked with a puzzled frown. “Isn’t she all right?”

“God knows whether she’s all right or not, but she’s got a horrible reputation.”

“Jean Byrne!” exclaimed Mauney, incredulously.

“Yes,” she nodded impatiently. “Mrs. Poynton has been very injudicious. I have never really interested myself in the details and I hate saying such things about anyone, but I simply couldn’t believe that you had associated yourself with her in any way. But now that you admit it I suppose I am obliged to tell you more. It’s all over town that you stayed at her house all night.”

Mauney’s mouth opened to speak. Then his face suddenly grew pale and he gazed in silence past her head into the woods that rose at the side of the road.

“Well, aren’t you going to deny it?” she asked in a tone of surprise.

“Surely I don’t need to?” he said a little angrily. “Surely you don’t believe them?”

“If I were eighteen I’d say no. But I’m twenty-six, unfortunately. And still more unfortunately, some things are true no matter how much we don’t believe them. I think,” she added precisely, “it’s only a fair proposition that you should either deny it or make some intelligent explanation.”

Mauney’s face, as it lowered slightly towards his breast, was that of a man for whom the light of the world had suddenly gone out.

“And I’m afraid,” he said calmly, but with clear decision, “that I will never do either.”

“But, don’t you see,” she asked with perceptible concern, “that I would not demand it, except that it has been put up to me strongly?”

“I can see nothing,” he replied slowly, “but an unbeautiful lack of faith.”

Freda had turned her head away, so that Mauney did not see the dawning light of wide-eyed fear, nor the quiver of infinite regret.

For a moment she remained thus, and when roused by the shuffling of his feet she turned again, he was stepping from the car.

“I know you will pardon me,” he said. “But under the circumstances, and with this scandal over my head, I cannot allow you to be seen with me in public.”

“Oh, don’t!” She tried to speak, but further words would not come. She saw him lift his hat and, turning away, walk slowly down the road. It had all happened so quickly that she could scarcely believe her eyes. What had she done?

For a moment she watched his retreating figure. Then, with decision to turn the car after him, she settled behind the wheel and adjusted the spark lever preparatory to starting the engine. But her hands, obeying some vague instinct, dropped to her lap. His leave-taking had been so final—and she was a woman! She turned again in the seat and watched him as he went. How could he leave her so abruptly. Surely the trouble between them had been entirely upon the surface. Surely he misunderstood her. This superficial mood of hers, that demanded explanations, was but a vexatious billow. Underneath lay the sea of her love. She did not believe a word of the wretched scandal. Neither now, nor before. He was innocent, of course. What had she done?

A car was approaching and Freda automatically started her engine and turned her motor to the road. Slowly she moved along the smooth tarvia surface, crawling like a guilty thing farther away from Lockwood. She wanted to turn about, drive quickly back, and, drawing up beside him, make amends. But her car seemed to be possessed of a will of its own. It kept straight on into the country, while Freda put forth a futile effort to wring decision from the jumbled thoughts in her mind. Above all considerations, a new fear was possessing her.

“I know; I know it,” something said within her. He had turned away from her with an air of finality—that man who was so hard to move. During the past week he had stubbornly resisted her whimsical tantalizations. Facing her conscious weapons of provocation, he had remained self-contained. But to-night, almost without knowing it, she had moved him, indeed. And Mauney, with his great inertia, once moved, would maintain an irrevocable motion. It was thus, she felt.

Her knowledge of his personal difficulties had taught her a glorious admiration that now changed to a quite tender pity; and the thought of having added to them brought up self-hate that tortured her almost intolerably.

Yet, although it would be seemingly simple enough now to double back on her course and assure him of her trust, she realized how strangely paralyzed her will power had become. One emotion will lead to definite action. But she was now possessed of a dozen sharp emotions that baffled her and rendered her uniquely powerless to act. As she drove on very slowly, unconscious of time, there occurred a gradual balancing and checking off of these various feelings, until, at length, she knew only that, by her own words and attitude, she had killed love in the man she reverenced, and that he was now suffering. Finally, when she turned about and drove homeward, her mind had clarified her feelings until nothing remained but a wild regret. Half stupefied she entered her father’s gateway and ran the car into the garage.

When she walked into the house, she found her father sitting in the library, reading.

“Where’s Mother?” she asked.

“She’s over at Beecher’s,” he replied. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing.”

She stood in the library door, stupidly looking at him huddled behind his newspaper. The house was very quiet. He was engrossed with the journal. She heard the ticking of a clock in a bedroom upstairs. Her father sat with one foot crossed over the other in such a way that his trouser leg was pulled to reveal his grey sock. She noticed that the design on the sock, woven there with black thread, was broken and that some of the threads were standing at loose ends.

Suddenly the rattle of the newspaper startled her. “What’s wrong?” he asked, glancing up.

“Nothing, Dad,” she said, turning towards the hallway.

“Did you want your mother?”

“No.”

She walked quickly to the telephone, raised her hand to take down the receiver, then hesitated. She knew that it would be a simple matter to telephone to Mauney. It was only ten o’clock. And so much depended, it seemed, on her telephoning to him just now. Dropping upon the telephone stool she placed her hand again on the receiver and kept it there. She was quite unconscious of her father’s presence nearby. The only thought in her mind was that Mauney was suffering. It would be so easy to say: “Please come down; I want to see you.” But her hand slowly relaxed and fell into her lap. Her will power had strangely left her.

“I’m going to bed,” announced her father, coming out into the hallway, yawning. As he reached the foot of the staircase he paused. “By the way,” he said. “There were a couple of important people down from Merlton this evening, Freda!”

“Anything promising?” she asked vacantly.

“Nothing to the public, mind!” he smiled, raising his hand in a gesture of caution. “But, between friends, I’ll drop a word of cheer. These gentlemen are looking for a site for a really big concern. They’ve got a factory in their minds that covers ten acres and I let ’em know that Lockwood had that much ground for them, too. Aren’t you tickled?”

“Oh, yes,” nodded Freda automatically, although she did not know what he had said. When he had gone to his bedroom, she rose from the stool knowing that she was quite incapable of telephoning to Mauney.

The house seemed quieter than it had ever been before. Removing her sweater-coat, she literally pitched it into a corner and went out on the verandah. Careless of all but the wild regret that was torturing her she dropped into a hammock and clasped her head with her hands. Whenever she glanced between her fingers she saw the lawn with its dismal pines and a faint mist that curled up over the edge of the cliff nearby. The lights of the United States shore, usually so bright, were shut out by a fog.

Presently, from the gateway next the street, two pencils of brilliant light quivered against the pine trunks, and, slowly swerving, illuminated the house, as a motor car softly approached. The man who drove it saw the verandah clearly and the form of a woman reclining in the hammock. She had evidently thrown herself down very carelessly, for her black stocking stood out in bold contrasts with the yellow hammock. Edward Courtney followed down the graceful lines to her ankle and to the neat patent-leather Oxford, whose tip barely rested on the floor. Having finished his admiring inspection he sounded his horn blatantly and touched into silence the soft purr of the motor as he drew near and stopped.

Freda sat quickly up.

“Want a spin?” he asked, turning toward her over the side of the car.

“No, Ted,” she replied, “I don’t feel like it, thanks.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

Courtney got out and came up on the verandah.

“I suppose,” he remarked, helping himself to a chair, “a person has to speak ahead these days, eh?”

“Oh, I’m not in such demand as all that, Ted,” she replied. “But I’m blue to-night.”

“Blue! Good Lord, girl, that’s tough. You need cheering. And I’m an awfully good cheerer, too.”

As he spoke he leaned back in his chair so that the light from the dining-room window struck fair upon his long, pleasant face. Freda, whose first wish had been that Courtney might just now find himself in hell or any other place, but her verandah, suddenly felt that, even in her present mood, human company was a relief.

“Ted,” she said. “I wonder if you ever have a serious thought in that head of yours.”

“Very seldom, Freda. This head has never ached with an idea. Why should it? I’d rather have it ache with sloe gin or curaÇoa. An idea is so liable to turn out to be weak-kneed, or revolutionary, or expensive, and sloe gin is so simple and reliable.”

“I believe you’ve had some to-night,” she remarked dryly. “Something has made you unusually bright.”

“I’ve had a thimbleful, I confess.”

“And you have the nerve to come over here to a perfectly dry house without bringing some with you!”

“How stupid of me,” he smiled, slyly. “I thought drinking was one of your pet aversions—”

“So it is; but I—”

“I almost hesitated to come on that account,” he interrupted. “Bill Squires told me I was ‘canned,’ and Betty Doran told me I was disqualified for polite society. They’re over home, there, now, discussing the New York theatre season with the mater. She landed in to-day with a raft of new jazz stuff and a confounded jumping-jack that won’t jump. Some beggar on Bryant Square stuck her a quarter for it. Did I understand you to say, Freda, that you would like a drink?”

Courtney produced a bottle from his coat pocket and set it on the table near him.

“I didn’t bring any glasses,” he ventured.

“Never mind,” she said, rising. “That part is easy. I think a drink will do me good this evening. I’ve been half sick all day.”

The comfort that Freda derived from both Courtney and the spirits was very meagre. He rambled on lightly for a time, glass in hand, explaining how bored he had become with Lockwood, and what a necessity existed for some excitement or other.

Freda found that his essential vapidity was no solace, but an irritant, and that her few draughts of sloe gin, so far from wooing her away from the present woe, seemed to clarify and emphasize it. While he talked, she constantly reviewed her recent episode with Mauney, and the flush of her cheeks, so vivid in the glare of Courtney’s matches, depended less on gin than on a growing mood of expostulation against the nature of things. He, of course, would have been incapable, even in his soberest moments, to divine or even recognize her spiritual state, and could, therefore, be excused, at present, for failing. When she began talking in a happier-sounding tone, he did not know that a veritable blaze of irresponsible temper had kindled. Thick of ear, he missed the irony of her voice. Thicker of brain, he took her words at their face value, unconscious of the tremendous discount that existed.

“You’re a regular old dear, Ted,” she said. “What would I ever do without you? You and your sloe gin! You and your nice cars, Ted, and your yachts. Aren’t you a darling old thing!”

“Glad to get a little appreciation,” he laughed. “Ever since the dance I’ve been waiting to see you.” He paused a moment. “Have you forgiven me yet, girl?” he asked more seriously.

“You stupid boy! A woman always forgives a man for falling in love with her. In fact,” she added thoughtfully, “a woman will forgive anything in the world, but suppression.”

“I couldn’t suppress it, Freda!” he replied, leaning toward her and resting his hand on hers. “I had to tell you I loved you.”

“Really, Ted!” she answered flippantly. “Please go on.”

“But you’re such a firebrand I never know how to take you,” he confessed, “I never know what will please. If I don’t warm up I think your eyes are despising me, and if I do you suddenly teach me my place. And then you tell me you’re practically engaged. Ah, well!” he sighed, dropping his hand reluctantly to his side. “I’ll try to be a platonic friend, though it’s a damned hopeless business. What do you say to a moonlight trip among the islands?”

“There’s no moon, Edward.”

“But we have strong imaginations.”

“Yes, too strong, I’m afraid. How would we go?”

“On the launch.”

For an instant Freda sipped from her glass, reflectively.

“You probably think I’m afraid to take you up on that, Ted,” she said very calmly. “But you’re wrong Go and get your launch and I’ll be waiting for you on the steps of our boathouse.”

Courtney smoked quietly a moment without speaking. As he rose, stretched himself, and walked toward his roadster, Freda sat watching him. Not until he had driven to the gate did she move a muscle. Then, with a short, spasmodic sigh, she rose from the hammock and entered the house. She had donned a sweater and a coat and was just coming out again to the verandah, when her mother’s step was heard crunching the pebble path.

“Where are you going?” she asked, as she came up.

“For a breeze up the river,” Freda said, ill-temperedly.

“With whom?”

“Ted Courtney.”

“Well, are you aware of the time?”

“No, not very much.”

“And it’s a dark, foggy night,” continued Mrs. MacDowell, with a glance towards the river. “It’s much too late to—”

“Why, Mother,” laughed Freda, “it’s never late. That’s just a conventional idea. Maybe the fog will blow away in an hour or so, and the stars come out and even the moon, too, for all we know.”

“But I don’t want you to go, my girl,” she continued, stepping nearer Freda, and peering critically into her face.

“I haven’t worried much about your consent, Mother, during the past few years, have I?” she asked crisply. “Do you think I would begin to do so now—to-night?”

There was almost studied scorn in Freda’s carriage as she stepped widely past her mother and left the verandah, while Mrs. MacDowell stood watching her disappear in the direction of the river.

Down at the boathouse, under the high cliff, she presently awaited Ted’s coming. There were sights and sounds here to beguile her impetuous thoughts. The night was warm and her prophecy of moonlight came true. From above the opposite shore the great, yellow orb lifted with delicate tremblings, as if its sphere were made of elastic substance. Its golden light caressed the whimsical clouds of mist that scurried like steam above the dull, green water. The waves lifted and fell, but never broke, as if, on such a night, they were anxious to be so gentle.

She sat perfectly still, knowing it was all madness, but as determined as she ever had been about anything. Then she turned her head thinking she heard the sound of his launch. But she had not heard it. It came with silent engines, like a sleek, white ghost, long and graceful, emerging from the fog and slowing down as it bent its course to sidle noiselessly closer and closer. She stood up, shrinking back, half afraid, as if this trim craft were not guided by human hands, but was approaching like an event, exquisite, but inevitable. She sprang then to the landing to clasp his hands as he drew her aboard. “Freda, you’re wonderful,” she heard him say, as the boathouse grew smaller, and the nose of the launch bore out into the broad, grey, depths of river and moon and mist.

No one knows how beautiful Lockwood is until he sees it from a boat on a bright night. There are broad, grey buildings whose massive stone faces shine like frost. Lines of glimmering lamps stretch far along the level thoroughfares and mark the streets that climb steeply upward from the water. In the midst, clusters of generous trees, motionless and black, send up, somewhere from their indefinite mass, dark spires into the soft, grey sky, while a tall clock-tower gazes with its yellow eyes east and south and west. At midnight, town and river are silent, save for the mournful chime of the clock marking a new day. And one who hears the message from the river finds a wistful, unspeakable sadness in its tone.

The mists cleared to reveal a white craft floating aimlessly in mid-stream. The moon threw into bold sculpture a man and a woman who lounged in silence there. Both were as still as the becalmed night, their restlessness appeased as by a magic from the golden moon. There were no words. In the woman’s heart there was no happiness. It had not been love. It had been wild regret and mad despair.

---

CHAPTER XV.
What Was Inevitable.

By the window of her room, opened to the river, Freda remained all the rest of the night. There was no soul near her. She watched the grey river until the moon sank, and until the sun rose slowly from behind the opposite shore. No one would ever understand it. It was not the kind of sorrow that could be confessed and forgotten. Something irrevocable had controlled her fate. Now, so long as the world stood, her heart would find no friend to learn its bitterness. Deep in its inscrutable recesses suffering would call to suffering and receive no answer. Alone, desperately alone, she must stumble bravely before the inevitable current that bears towards to-morrow.

But these night thoughts gradually surrendered their poignancy to the bald light of growing day.

In the middle of the forenoon Mauney came to the house.

She took him into the library, and pointed to a chair beside the large French window that let in a blinding shaft of sunshine.

“I hope I’ll be pardoned,” he said, “for coming down so early.”

She made no reply, but watched him as he leaned forward to gaze at the sunlight on the rug.

“I still can’t think that you were honest last night, Freda,” he continued. “I can’t think that you believe this confounded scandal.”

“No, Mauney,” she answered sadly. “I never believed it.”

“I can understand how you felt,” he admitted, “And I ought not to have been so precipitate. I ought to have denied it for you. I deny it now thoroughly and completely. Jean Byrne was an old school teacher of mine.”

“Oh, Mauney, you don’t need to explain. My faith in you never faltered a minute at any time. I was only afraid that I had hurt you.”

“You did, too,” he said, “But being hurt didn’t alter the fact that I loved you, and that I love you right now more than any thing on earth.”

He rose and walked to her chair.

“Freda,” he said tenderly, “I can’t go on living without you. You are necessary to me. Tell me that you care as little as I do about this scandal!”

“It’s nothing—just nothing,” she replied, rising and walking to the window.

He followed her, and as he saw her white gown rimmed with the strong sunshine, and her black hair caught in a fringe of golden light his heart bounded. Here before him was the living woman he loved. She was his treasure.

“I have waited long enough,” he said, taking her hand. “I have been a fool long enough, Freda. Our love is deeper than such a petty misunderstanding.”

“Yes,” she said very softly, without turning from the window, “It is deeper.”

With his hand on her shoulder he turned her face to him, but as he was about to draw her close he noticed a sadness in her eyes that puzzled him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked gently.

“Tell me what’s right!” she replied, as she bit the tip of her handkerchief. “I’m sure I’ll kill you when I confess—and yet, I must tell you, so you can know what I’m like.”

“What do you mean?”

“Last night I promised to marry Ted Courtney.”

Mauney stared incredulously.

“Courtney!” he stammered. “But—Freda—why?”

Her eyes, as they turned toward the window, were dry and possessed of a bitter calmness.

“I don’t understand,” Mauney said, and paused. “You promised to marry Courtney. Do you mean that?”

“Yes—unfortunately.”

“But surely—” he began. “You’re not going to—to do it.”

“Yes, Mauney,” she said, “I’m going to be his wife. Will you let me explain?”

He stared at her mystified.

“Remember me for one virtue, will you?” she asked, as she turned to fondle his coat lapels.

“Remember that I never deceived you. How can I tell you? Last night,” she continued in a lower tone, as her eyes shifted to the pine branches beyond the window, “I couldn’t have been quite myself. I tried to fight against my feelings, but I was crazy with regret, and weak.”

“But, Freda.”

“Sometime,” she interrupted. “You may be able to understand. I’m afraid you couldn’t now.”

“But think,” he said. “You can break your promise. You must!” He drew her impetuously to him.

“Don’t, please don’t,” she implored. “I can’t let you.”

His arms were trembling and on his face she read dismay. “But have you never loved me?” he demanded, “all these months?”

“I am an impatient person, Mauney,” she replied, freeing herself from his arms. “With me love must be romance or nothing. I must be taken when the fire burns in my heart. I can’t control it. All I know is that somehow you missed it. And now I cannot—come to you.”

Mauney, plunging his hands into his pockets, wheeled suddenly towards the window and stood for a long moment in puzzled meditation.

“Do you love Courtney?” he asked suddenly, glancing towards her.

“That question,” she replied, “seems somehow to be outside the rights of our present conversation.”

Her face, which had been pale, flushed a little. “If you are going to demand too many explanations, then I’ll ask you how it was possible for you to put Max Lee between us?”

“Why, Freda,” he began.

“And don’t you think,” she interrupted, “that, if you are quite frank with yourself, you’ll admit that you played with me a little longer than I could be expected to stand?”

He did not reply.

“Mauney,” she said, seating herself with all appearance of complacency in a deep chair. “Let’s not insist on rebelling against what is inevitable.”

“But why should it be inevitable?” he asked. “I think I am sufficiently intelligent to grasp any reasonable explanation.”

He walked quickly towards her. “Look here,” he said, folding his arms on his chest and fastening her gaze, “if you don’t love Courtney, why the devil will you marry him?”

For a moment her dark eyes seemed to expand with her effort to capture a fit reply. Then she said, slowly and softly, as if, in any event, her realistic nature could find some solace in things as they are: “I am going to marry him because he loves me, and because I was weak enough to give myself to him.”

---

CHAPTER XVI.
Gypsies’ Fire.

Like a flash the situation dawned on Mauney. It dawned so flashingly that he tried to hide from it all afternoon. Her impetuous nature! His own tardiness and his own misinterpreted duty to Maxwell Lee. While he had maintained loyalty to Lee, this woman, this Freda, whose very likeness had been burned into his soul, had been slipping from his fingers. And now, torn between self-blame and an effort to excuse her most recent fault, he began to recognize just how ultimate and hopeless the whole matter was.

He met Mr. Fitch, of Lantern Marsh, on the street and accepted a ride to the farm with him. Perhaps he would never have thought of going home had Fitch not suggested it. There was nothing at Lantern Marsh to go for, either. But he craved solitude, and at least his old home would afford him that. The old swamp would somehow understand him, he felt. There would be a queer kind of sympathy in that old swamp.

When he reached home he found a visitor, one he had almost forgotten and one whom he was not overjoyed at meeting in his present chaotic mood. David McBratney had been in Merlton for eight years and was only now, after so long an absence, refreshing his acquaintance with the people of his youth. It was fortunate, according to Dave, that Mauney had just happened in when he was there. But Mauney felt that the most unfortunate fact in the world was that he should have to converse politely with any one to-night. They were all just ready to sit down at the supper table—William with his shirt sleeves rolled up on his sun-burned arms, Evelyn placing her two red-faced little boys on stools, and McBratney being shown a place beside Mauney on the opposite side. When they were seated, William, carving knife in one hand and a long, serving fork in the other, looked up lazily from the crisply-browned roast on the platter toward his wife and made an awkward, snuffling sound. Mrs. Bard caught the hint.

“Mr. McBratney,” she announced, “will ask the blessing. Bow your heads, you kids!”

“Bless, O Lord, we beseech Thee, this food, forgive our sins, and guide us ever in the light of thy countenance. This we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

An amused smile flickered over William’s face as he winked unnoticed to Evelyn, his wife. Then, plunging his fork into the juicy meat, he proceeded to slice it.

“Dave,” he asked. “How’s your appetite?”

“Pretty good, Bill,” responded McBratney. “It’s a long time since I had a meal off o’ this old table, isn’t it?”

Evelyn Bard, opposite her husband, was busy spreading butter on thick slices of bread for her boys. They stared in silence at the visitor, interrupting their occupation only long enough to accept the buttered bread and to begin chewing it.

McBratney had lost nothing of his swarthy complexion. His dark eyes were just as sharp, but more serious, than formerly. He wore a threadbare, yet neat, grey suit and a plain, blue four-in-hand necktie. Broad of shoulder, he lounged against the edge of the table, gazing half-meditatively at the children.

“Well, Dave,” remarked William, as they all fell to eating, “you hain’t never been back since you went away have you?”

“This is the first time, Bill. I got kind of lonesome to see the old folks; so I thought I’d come down for a few days. My mother tells me that dad has never been satisfied since he sold the farm. She says he drives down here about once a week, just to see how things are going.”

“Yep,” nodded William, “at least once a week, don’t he, Evelyn?”

She nodded. “The poor old chap can’t stay away,” she explained. “He never should have sold out, I always think. When a man gets attached to a place it’s foolish to leave, at his age, anyway.”

William was chewing his food thoughtfully, with an expression of narrow-eyed meditation.

“Dave,” he ventured, at length. “I always thought your old man never forgave you for leavin’ home. Course, I never said a word to him, understand. It takes all kinds of people to make up the world, and I’m not sayin’ you didn’t do the right thing, neither. Maybe some people might say you was wrong, but I got enough to do without tendin’ to other people’s business.” William’s eye quickly took in McBratney’s business suit, while a look of curiosity came over his face. “Of course,” he said, in a tone that challenged explanation, “I always had an idea as you had gone into preachin’.”

“I studied at it awhile,” McBratney admitted, good-naturedly, “and then I suddenly quit it.”

“What made you quit it, Dave?” persisted William. “Was it costin’ too much?”

“No, it don’t cost too much, but I couldn’t see much head nor tail to it,” confessed McBratney. “I went on with it till they started talking about the Trinity, and—”

“Trinity, eh, Dave?”

“Yes, and a lot of other theories that don’t count. When they began splitting hairs about baptism and sacraments, I said to myself, ‘This isn’t pitching hay!’”

“That’s a fact, too, Dave,” nodded William, sagely.

“’Twasn’t what I was cut out for anyway,” said McBratney. “I couldn’t see how baptism nor sacraments, nor any such like, was going to save the world. I saw people every day in Merlton, who were so deep in sin that they were pretty near hopeless, and, although I don’t know much, I reckoned that these fine points of doctrine were all twaddle.”

“That’s what I always thought, Dave. You didn’t make no mistake there, I tell yuh.”

“No, Bill,” he replied. “All I knew was that something big and strong had taken hold of me. I knew that I had the love of God in my heart and that every ounce of muscle in my body was going to be used up helping some of these poor beggars on to their feet.”

“That’s right, Dave—that’s the only religion there is,” commented William. “You didn’t make no mistake there.”

“And so I just pitched those Hebrew books about as far as I could heave, and settled down into steady work at the settlement.”

“Good for you, Dave. What kind of settlement do you mean?”

“A settlement, Bill, is a kind of organization supported by various people for reclaiming bums and no-goods,” said McBratney. “We take in the riff-raff, without a word, give ’em clothes and grub, and get ’em work to do. We start them off in life again and give them a second chance to go straight. Our idea is to reclaim damaged goods, Bill, we try to—”

“Um-hum!” interjected William, “I can see the sense in that, Dave. What’s your work?”

“I’m on the employment department. I keep a list of jobs, and fit these bums into them. After they get started I go around and see how they’re doing. If they’re falling down on the job I brace them up a little or change their job for them.”

“Do you get much salary, Dave?”

“No. It isn’t the money I’m after, Bill. What I like about it is the game. Some of these bums have to be handled pretty carefully, and that’s my work. I never was afraid of anybody, and I’ve got to meet the man yet that can handle me.”

McBratney’s eyes sparkled with keen pleasure, and he squared his shoulders unconsciously as he spoke. Fighting the worst in men was his occupation. It was an energetic business of consecrated brawn. It was muscular Christianity of the most earnest and pugnacious type. Mauney felt that here beside him at the table sat a kind of modern crusader. One had to be good if McBratney was about, or otherwise be able to defeat him in a pugilistic contest.

For two or three hours Mauney found no alternative, but to sit and talk with him. At any other time the occupation would have been bearable or even pleasant, for he discovered many admirable, and almost lovable, qualities—if one could dare to feel so tenderly toward a modern Sir Galahad. But Mauney was too full of his own troubles to-night to be otherwise than indifferent to McBratney. His heart seemed to be breaking beneath these troubles. He wanted to leave his brother and the others, and walk alone by himself by that old swamp in front of the house. McBratney had changed, William and Evelyn had changed, he himself was changing in some indefinite way, while all the universe seemed in flux. What existed without change?

Some one came walking up the lane and opened the kitchen door. It was the Englishman who rented the old McBratney farm. His face was mildly excited.

“Did you see the fire?” he asked.

“Where, Joe?” asked William, uneasily.

He stepped back on the verandah and looked towards the road, and Mauney saw a dull, red reflection on his face. In a moment they were all walking toward the road. By some means a fire had started among the dried grasses of the swamp, and was spreading rapidly, with nervous little flashes of flame shooting up through heavy, grey clouds of smoke. There was no wind to fan the fire, but the light grass carried it swiftly along in a curve like an enlarging wave.

“It’s going to get into them cedars, too,” said William.

“Well, let ’em go,” said McBratney. “The barn’s safe as long as there’s no wind. There’s nothing you can do, anyway.”

“I wonder how it got started?” queried William. “I seen some gypsies in that end o’ the field over there last night. Maybe they left some live coals.”

“That may be,” admitted Joe, the Englishman. “But I’ve heard as how a bog like this here sometimes generates its own fire by spontaneous combustion, I have.”

Their faces were all well lit up now by the reflection. Mauney glanced at the house. Its red bricks were illuminated by a ghastly, unnatural glow, while the window-panes began flashing spasmodically, one after the other, as if some one inside the house were going with a light from room to room. The fire ran swiftly toward the edge of the swamp, and the cedar boughs burst quickly into flame as if they were composed of explosive substance. Among a dozen trees the flame spread savagely until the appearance was that of huge, black torches, perched together to give a warning to the sky.

Held by the fascination which fire always possesses, they stood for two hours watching its ravages. From shore to shore the crimson, liquid wave crossed and rebounded until at last the cedars and hemlocks were all ablaze, forming a wide and brilliant fringe for a central, smoke-obscured space. It was not like the same place. It was not like the Lantern Marsh. Later, when the yellow flames had all gone out and the rising moon showed only the constant clouds of smudgy smoke rising and disappearing, Mauney sat alone on the front steps of the farmhouse, watching it with mute fascination. At last his marsh was completely defeated, ruined and blotted out. But a whimsical comfort possessed him. It was not defeated. Winter and then spring—and the unfailing reservoirs of the deep earth would pour water into the scorched basin again. Grass and trees would eventually grow up where now there was only ashes, to proclaim that life had gained the victory over death—that there was no death, but only life.

THIS BOOK IS A PRODUCTION OF
THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO, CANADA

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