Louise, still bound by the discipline of school, was not a late sleeper. As early as seven o'clock on the morning following Langdon Jesse's call she was lying awake, striving to dispel, by the process of optimistic reasoning, the sinister nimbus that seemed to be enshrouding her, when the telephone bell in her dressing room began to ring persistently. Louise sprang up to answer the call.

"I know it is a barbarous hour, dear," Laura's cheerful contralto came over the wire, "but I've just been aroused from my juvenile slumbers by the telephone, and of course I must have revenge upon somebody. Listen, dear: I know that it only takes you about fifteen minutes to dress—of course you are not dressed yet? Well, begin this instant. Put on something for tramping and fussing around in the country. You must be over here by eight o'clock. We are going to have a romping day in the country. Now, hurry, won't you?"

"Just you and I, Laura?" asked Louise, delighted. A day in the country! Open fields to dispel vapors! The thought of it made her eager and excited.

"No, there'll be another," replied Laura. "I disregard the axiom, you know, that 'Three is a crowd.' Three needn't be a crowd if one of the three has a little tact and—and the knack of opportunely vanishing," and Louise heard her soft laughter. "A man I know has what he calls a little tumbledown place, with some ground around it, over in Jersey. He calls it Sullen Manor, because he says he always goes over there, in preference to all other places, when he feels the imperative need to sulk. Now, there is not another moment to be wasted in 'phoning. Start to dress this very instant! Will you solemnly promise me to be here on the stroke of eight? Very well. I shall be waiting. Goodbye."

Louise, "very trig and complete," as Laura remarked, in a suit of grey with a matching fur-trimmed grey toque, was with the astonished Laura a good quarter of an hour before eight.

"Heaven knows how you do it," said Laura, still in the hands of her maid. "Go into the dining-room and have some coffee, dear. I shall be with you directly."

Louise, humming happily at the thought of the care-free day ahead of her, sped into the bright dining room. John Blythe, sipping coffee at the table, rose to meet her. He looked fine and upstanding in his fresh, rough tweeds, his close-shaven face ruddy and his clear grey eyes showing an agate sparkle from the brisk walk to Laura's apartment from his own.

Louise halted abruptly in her astonishment when she saw him. But she was extremely glad to see him and said so frankly, resting her hand in his muscular but gentle clasp for a moment.

"Laura packed me off here to take some coffee," she said. "Does she know you are here? And how early you are abroad in the world. We are stirring about at this sunrise hour because we are going for a day in the country—and I am mad to get there! In my previous incarnation I must have been a milkmaid, for I dearly love the country." Then she added, with a little air of disappointment: "I do wish you were coming with us!"

"That," replied Blythe, smiling his wide smile as he poured coffee for her, "is precisely what I am going to do."

Louise, in the act of taking the cup from him, looked into his face with an expression of pleased mystification on her own.

"Why, what is—how can—" She broke off suddenly and rose from her chair in the intensity of a pleasure which she herself, at that moment, could scarcely have analyzed. "Surely," she went on in a lower tone, her face irradiated by a smile which it thrilled him to observe, "Surely you are not the man who sulks?"

"One of Laura's agreeable fictions," he pronounced. "She calls my little place Sullen Manor, and declares that it is my sulking cave, because I've not had her over there to see it. I've had no chance to ask her until now. Do you mean to say she did not tell you that I was the organizer of this expedition?"

"The secretive creature did not even hint at such a thing," declared Louise, not very successfully pretending to be miffed.

"Now I call that downright neglect of orders," said Blythe, also striving to show a serious face. "I particularly charged Laura to tell you who the party of the third part was to be in order that you might have the privilege of refusing to accompany the expedition in case you so desired. A shocking departure from discipline on Laura's part."

"Then it was you," said Louise, lighter in spirits than she had been for a long time, "who invited me?"

"My dear, don't you know he would say so to you no matter whether it were true or not?" said Laura, who had caught Louise's question, breezing into the dining-room at that moment. "Come on, children. Your antique chaperone is impatient to be on her disregarded way. Louise, have you had your coffee? And some toast? Finish them this instant! Even so ascetic and imaginative a person as Mr. Blythe knows that a girl must have a little breakfast before venturing upon an expedition into the jungles of Jersey."

Laura, perfect in a walking suit of shepherd's plaid and tan walking shoes, had, on this morning, the animation as well as the beauty of a girl. Blythe compared the two as they stood side by side, hastily sipping coffee. Laura, with her Judith-black, glossy hair and fresh, youthful color, and Louise with her thick coils of vivid, velvety auburn and glowing ivory pallor—Blythe thought, studying them for a moment over the rim of his cup, that he had never seen so splendid a contrast.

"Allons!" Laura broke in upon his reflection. "Are we to dawdle here until luncheon time? Already it is," looking at her watch, "twenty-four seconds past eight!"

Blythe, slipping into his greatcoat, turned a solemn face upon Laura when they had reached the hall, outward-bound.

"There is one thing, Laura, in connection with this expedition, that I am keenly sorry for," he said, assuming a sepulchral tone.

"Why, what is that?" asked Laura, a little alarmedly, taken off her guard.

"Well," replied Blythe, still solemn, "you'll only be away from here for about fifteen hours, and how are you possibly going to have your apartment completely redecorated, from forepeak to mizzen, alow and aloft, in that space of time?"

"Tush!" laughed Laura. "There will be plenty of time to have the place done over—and it really does sorely need it, now doesn't it?" this with a wistfulness at which Blythe and Louise laughed, "—when I take Louise to Europe with me in May—less than three months off."

"Am I to go to Europe with you, dear—really?" asked Louise, surprised and pleased; for Laura had said nothing about it before.

"Most assuredly you are," replied Laura, entirely in earnest. "If, that is, you can make up your mind to be burdened by the companionship of one so aged."

The topic was lost in the excitation of their arranging themselves in Laura's car, which was to take them to the ferry. But the thought of it recurred to Louise several times during the ride to the ferry. It was an alluring prospect, barring the obstacles. How could she leave her mother, even for a short time, now that she had rejoined her after a separation of years? Finally she was able to dismiss such cogitations and yield herself to the enjoyment of the day ahead.

It was one of those unseasonably mild days in late February that occasionally "drop in" to point an accusing finger at the harshness of winter. A brilliant sun swam in a cloudless sky, and the soft yet invigorating balminess of late April was, as they noticed when they sped by the Park, deluding the buds of tree and hedge into swelling prematurely and even seducing the willows into a vague, timidly displayed elusive green. Hardy, pioneering robins, advance couriers sent forth to investigate the senile endurance of winter, hopped about the Park sward. School-ward bound boys, out of sight of their homes, were doffing their irksome overcoats, and thrusting them, blanket-wise, at demure little schoolgirls who, in turn, were carrying their stuffy jackets over their arms. Motormen and truckmen were smothering yawns that denoted a premature spring fever. Business-bound men, going more slowly than usual, glancing occasionally at the sky of sapphire, and feeling on their cheeks gusty little zephyrs from the South, thought of fishing "where the wild stream sings." Belated shopgirls, sensing the morning's benign balm as they hurried through crowds, thought of hats and furbelows for the season that, they surmised, was almost upon them.

In the ferry-bound automobile, John Blythe was thinking about a letter hid in the pocket of his coat and wondering how the person whom the letter most concerned would regard its contents. Louise was wondering if her mother would be annoyed over the word she had left with her maid that she would be with Laura for the entire day and part of the evening; occasionally she glanced sidelongwise at John Blythe, when there was no possibility of his catching her at it, and strove vaguely to analyze the sense of power, mingled with kindliness, which his presence diffused. Laura, leaning back, emitting an occasional absurdity, studied them both and wondered, her eyes a little dreamy, if matters ever actually turned out in real life as they did in novels.

They stood on the ferryboat's prow, bathing in the sun's relenting glow and blinking at the gold-tipped river crests; and it was only ten o'clock when, after half an hour's ride on the slam-bang little accommodation train, they debarked at the spick-and-span little station, at the side of which Blythe's care-taker, a grinning but stolid German, had drawn up a fine and comfortable, if old-fashioned, surrey to which was hitched a pair of glossy, mettlesome sorrels.

Louise and Laura felt like clapping their hands when, after the two-mile drive through woodlands and past neat, well-cared-for little farms the clean, sweet-smelling soil of which already was being turned up, they drove on a firm, natural road through a wide wooden gate and came in sight of the pretty Colonial house, with four bright yellow pillars, topped by a balcony of snowy white, with wide-open shutters of an intense green, and a big white double door at the sides of which were little grooved columns surmounted by the inevitable Corinthian capitals. The house, fresh and smart in its old-fashioned way, was roomier than it looked from the front. It was divided by a wide hall which ran its entire length on the ground floor; and a wide stairway ran from the hall in front to the second floor, where, after the Colonial fashion, the balcony gave upon sleeping rooms.

"Sullen Manor," announced Laura, assuming the megaphonic utterance of the sight-seeing car's expounder. "But doesn't it beautifully belie its name and its owner's doldrumish use of it? Why, it is as pretty and cheerful as a pigeon-cote snuggling under sifting cherry blossoms! How much ground is there around the place, John?"

"Twenty acres," replied Blythe, smiling a little gravely. "I suppose I know every foot of the twenty acres, too, though I left here—it is where I was born, you know—when I was seven years old. My father lost the place, you see, through bad investments and what not, when I was at that age. We moved to New Orleans, and a year later both my father and mother were swept off by yellow fever. I only remember them in a shadowy way. Oddly enough, I remember this old place much better than I do my parents; its corners, clumps of trees, and that sort of thing. I had a chance to get the place back a couple of years ago, and I seized it. A good deal of the gear that was here when I was a tyke is still here, stowed in the attic; for the place has not been often occupied since we left it. I've refurnished it in a sort of a way. I hope you'll not find it so bad, Laura; but I'm prepared right now to wilt under your superior, and, I might say, your inveterate knowledge of interior decoration."

Blythe looked a bit self-disdainful over what had been rather a long speech for him, particularly when he observed that Louise had been waiting to ask him something.

"You will not think me inquisitive, Mr. Blythe?" she prefaced. "But what you said about the—the carrying away of your people by yellow fever not only touched me but aroused my curiosity. You were only a child then, of course. What did you do then? Were you taken in hand by relatives? You are not annoyed because I ask?"

"Why should I be?" Blythe laughed. "Particularly when the reply is so simple. I have no relatives—had none then. When my people died I was on the streets. I believe I hold the record yet for the number of New Orleans Picayunes and Times-Democrats sold in a given time. Whatever else I became later, I certainly was a hustling newsboy. Then I came up here and I've been working ever since. My annals, you see, Miss Treharne, are distinctly dry."

"But your education?" Louise asked, her eyes alight with an interest which caused Laura to smile.

"Well," said Blythe, "there are plenty of people living in Princeton yet, I think, who will tell you, if ever you take the pains to inquire, that I was an exceptionally successful furnace-tender, tinker, chore-doer, and all-round roustabout. Oh, yes, I forget. I was a persuasive peddler of soap and starch before the Lord, too. Likewise, I acquired the knack of mending umbrellas. Not to overlook the fact that, odd times, I drove a village hack. At Princeton, in short, I was virtually everything and anything you can think of except a barber and a policeman. I shied at those two occupations."

"And you took your degree?" inquired Louise.

"Just squeezed through," replied Blythe.

"Don't you believe anything of the sort, Louise," put in Laura. "He was valedictorian of his class, and, worse than that, he played full-back with his eleven, and a sensational full-back too. I ought to know. I am old enough, woe is me, to have been a woman grown the year John Blythe contributed a good three-fifths to the Tigers' victory over Yale."

Blythe, flushing embarrassedly, was holding up a protesting hand when the surrey drew up in front of the clean, scrubbed porch and the care-taker's wife, a freshly-ginghamed, bright-eyed German woman of middle age, appeared to receive them. Then, from around the left side of the house, a terrific yipping began. Two hysterically joyous fox terriers, scenting their master, came tearing around the porch and literally leaped upon Blythe. Then they "side-wheeled" in circles over the lawn, first listing precariously over on starboard legs and then on port, whimpering in their sheer delight as they tore around. A huge Angora cat, as they entered the hall, made two bounds of it from the huge fireplace, from which a pair of smouldering logs diffused a red glow that contrasted oddly with the streaming sunlight, to rub her sides, purring almost vociferously as she did so, against Blythe's trousers legs. Later in the day, she was solemnly to conduct Blythe and his guests to the cellar for the purpose of exhibiting a litter which kept the women chained around the basket for nearly an hour.

In the lives of most men and women there are days—usually unanticipated days—so encompassed, aureoled, by a memorable happiness that, ever afterward, in hours of retrospection, they mark the beginning or denote the closing of the eventful periods.

This was such a day for Blythe and Louise and Laura. They rambled through miles of field and forest, chattering and laughing like children a-berrying; the women's hair blowing free or tumbling down altogether, their skirts caught by brambles, their deadliest fears aroused by the inevitable ruminative cow. They climbed fences, while Blythe pretended that something had just dropped out of his pocket back of him. They romped with the dogs, they tossed pebbles at a mark in a garrulous little just-thawed stream, they even sat down on an inviting little mound, beneath an old elm, and played at mumblety-peg with Blythe's jack-knife and quarrelled laughingly over the score of the game.

When they returned to the house in mid-afternoon, they found the German woman preparing a meal for them. Laura and Louise insisted upon helping her. In fact, they banished her from the kitchen altogether and did it all themselves. Louise announced, her features set rather determinedly, that she was going to make some biscuits, whereupon Blythe, asking her if she'd learned that in the cooking class at Miss Mayhew's school, incontinently fled in well-simulated alarm. But he came back to the spotless kitchen to watch the two women, aproned to the neck, and their arms bared to the shoulders, breeze about with their preparations. He was repaid for his inquisitiveness by being swaddled in an apron and set to peel the potatoes.

The meal was an unqualified success, including the biscuits, which, to Louise's intense surprise, were superb, although Blythe impertinently maintained that the German woman really had made them and that Louise had merely heated them over. The light began to fall as they chatted around the table, and Blythe, having no great liking for oil lamps, tossed logs on to the dining-room fireplace for the flickering glow of their light. Blythe lighted a cigar with his coffee and fell into a silence of content when Louise and Laura began to hum, very low, snatches of old songs in unison; Laura in her deep, moving contralto, with an appealing little "break" in it, and Louise in a clear, sweet soprano—she had been the honor girl of her school for her singing.

"More," Blythe would give the repressed command when they ceased; and they would willingly obey. After a while, darkness having quite fallen, Laura went to another part of the house for her after-dinner cigarette. She made it a practice not to take her cigarettes in the presence of quite young women.

Blythe, silent enough now, and his silence tacitly concurred in by Louise, who also had become preoccupied, under the spell of the flickering fire-light and her nearness, alone, to a man who made a strong appeal to her imagination, brought up a deep leather chair before the logs and motioned to Louise to take it. But she pulled an old-fashioned three-legged footstool before the fire, and Blythe himself had to take the chair. Thus they sat silent for a while, listening to the sputtering of the green logs.

"Louise."

It was the first time he had called her that. But she did not even turn her head. She was sitting near him on the low stool, chin in palm, her face illumined by the fire's glow. It was agreeable to hear him call her Louise. He knew her father. She had been thinking of her father while she and Laura were singing softly.

"Yes," she said, quietly.

"I am to be your guardian, Louise. Does that please you?"

Blythe, leaning back in the deep chair, did not take his eyes from the murmuring logs. Louise, chin still in palm, turned to look at him calmly. Then she gazed back into the fire.

"Yes," she replied, no surprise in her tone. Perhaps, she thought whimsically, the dancing, leaping flames had hypnotized her. But she was not surprised. She was, instead, swept by a surge of deep gladness. "You have a letter from my father?"

"Two," said Blythe. "One of them is for you."

She moved her little stool close to his chair and he handed her the packet. The letter for her was under cover of the letter addressed to Blythe. Louise studied, in the fire's glow, the bold, clear address on the envelope. It was the first time she had ever seen her father's handwriting. Her eyes became slightly suffused at that thought. Her letter dropped out of the larger envelope.

"If you care to, read the one addressed to me first, Louise," said Blythe.

Louise, turning a bit the better to catch the fire's glow, read her father's letter addressed to Blythe—as far as she could read it. She was nearly at the end when her unshed tears blinded her. Blythe's hand, which she then felt, without surprise, softly clasping both of her own as they rested in her lap, felt very cool and soothing to her.

After a while, nothing having been said by either, she broke the envelope and read her father's letter to her. It was not a long letter, but it took her a long time to read it; the tears would blot out the words, try as she would to crowd them back.

Her father's letter to Blythe was couched in the tone a man assumes in addressing his lawyer who also is his friend. It bore the postmark of Lahaina, Island of Maui, Hawaii—George Treharne's sugar plantations were on that island of the Hawaiian group. The letter concerned Louise wholly. He was tied to his plantations, owing to labor troubles with the Japanese, and there was no possibility of his visiting the States for some time. He had been surprised to hear that Louise had left school. She was now a woman grown. He had looked forward to the time when, he hoped, she might feel an impulse to come to him. If that time had not yet come he trusted implicitly to Blythe to see that she should be properly bestowed, placed in a fitting environment, and shielded from baneful influences. He knew that Blythe, the young partner of his old lawyer, now dead, would not fail him in this. He desired that Blythe should apply immediately for a court order appointing him his daughter's legal guardian. He inclosed the necessary papers for the accomplishment of that purpose. He was eager to see his daughter, and hoped to see her within a year. In the meantime he confidently committed her to Blythe's watchful guardianship.

His letter to Louise bespoke a deep and solicitous affection. He told her of Blythe, adverting to him in terms of praise as a man of exalted honor ("Poor father! as if I did not know that," thought Louise, when she came to that passage), and beseeching her to follow Blythe's advice in all matters in which his large experience would be invaluable to her. He added that he felt that she would not find Blythe's suggestions irksome. He inclosed a draft on a Honolulu bank for five thousand dollars, which would suffice for her needs until she heard from him again. He hoped to see her within a year. And he was hoping that she would be glad to see her "always-affectionate father, George Treharne."

At length Louise conquered her tears and turned a fire-illumined smile upon Blythe.

"I am glad," she said simply. "Even before you told me, this had been the happiest day of my life. Now it is beautiful. I cannot even begin to tell you how beautiful it is."

"Then I shall apply for the guardianship, Louise," said Blythe. "I wish I could say how it pleases me to know you are willing that I should."

"Willing?" said Louise. "Do you know that, aside from Laura, you are the only—" She had been close to saying "friend;" but she could not leave her mother out in that way;—"the only adviser I have?"

Blythe, glancing from the logs into her eyes as she said that, longed to take her in his arms.

Laura, at the piano in the music room on the other side of the hall, began softly to play the barcarole from "The Tales of Hoffmann." They listened for a little while, and then Blythe said, smiling gravely:

"As your father says, I shall not be, I hope, an exacting guardian. There are many things upon which I shall not touch at all. I shall not affect to believe that you do not know what I mean."

"I know," said Louise.

"Your duty is that to which your heart prompts you—I know that," said Blythe. "It is not for me, nor for anyone else, to seek to alter your conception of your duty. All that I ask is that you call upon me in your time of need, if that time should ever come; and I hope it never shall. For the rest, nothing is to be changed at my suggestion. The scroll is in your hands, Louise. Only when you need me—I shall not fail you then."

"Would it be unworthy," she asked him after a pause, "if I were not to tell my father—just yet—that I am living with my mother?"

Blythe knew what a hard question that had been for her to ask.

"Not unworthy, or anything like it, I think," he replied promptly, "when the motive is so pure and fine."

Impulsively she rose and held out both of her hands and he took them in his.

"Call Laura," she said. "I want to tell her. I want my guardian angel to meet my guardian."

Laura came into the room as she spoke. She walked over to Louise and placed an arm around her.

"I knew it, dear," she said to Louise. "John told me last night. That is why we are over here. He thought, and I agreed with him, that it would be better to tell you at the close of a happy day. And was there ever such a happy day since the world began?"

Blythe looked at his watch and whistled.

"We've half an hour to make the last New York train tonight, and a two-mile drive to the station," he said. "If we miss the train we'll have to stay here all night."

Laura gathered up her skirts and raced for her hat, Louise after her.

"Stay here all night!" gasped Laura. "You are making a glorious beginning as a guardian, aren't you!"

It was past ten o'clock when Louise, in Laura's car, which had been waiting at the ferry, reached the house on the Drive, Laura having been dropped at her apartment. The sheer happiness of the day still absorbed her. Up to the moment when the car pulled up at the curb she had been going over and over, since parting with Blythe and Laura, the incidents of the day that had made it such an oasis of happiness.

But it all disappeared like a suddenly-vanishing mirage when, upon stepping to the pavement, she saw Langdon Jesse's car drawn up at the curb.