MR. BROOKTON RIVERS watched the spark at the end of his cigar as he held the short stub between his thumb and forefinger. It was going out. While he had had that cigar to smoke his mind had been at rest, for he knew that he was going to sit in that particular angle in the piazza until he finished it, which would be about half-past eight. After that—what?

He threw away the cigar and leaned meditatively forward to catch a glimpse of the moon as it rose over the patch of straggling woods next to the Queen Anne cottage opposite him. It showed a deserted piazza, and a man and his wife and two small children walking past it. The man walked with the heavy, shuffling steps of a laborer, and the woman, in a white shirt-waist and a dragging skirt, held one child by the hand, while the other, in tiny trousers, toddled bow-leggedly behind. As they vanished down the street, two silent men on bicycles sped past, their little lamps twinkling in the shadows; then half a dozen more, laughing and calling to each other, then a swiftly driven buggy that sent the dust flying up on the vines that were already laden with it. The prevailing smell of the humid night was of damp weeds. It was also very hot.

There were no lights in the house opposite, nor in the one next to it, or in the one next to that, nor were there any, as he knew without seeing, in either of the houses next to his own. From farther down the street came the sound of a jangling piano, obstructed intermittently by the loud, unvaried barking of a melancholy dog. From nearer by the persistent wail of a very young infant, protesting already against existence in such a hot world, became more and more unbearable each instant. Mr. Rivers absent-mindedly killed three feasting mosquitoes at a blow, and rose to his feet with determination. He could stay here no longer. Should he go out, or retire to his room in the doubtful comfort of extreme negligee, and read?

It will, of course, be evident to the meanest suburban intelligence that the month was August, and that Mrs. Rivers was away, as were most of her immediate neighbors, enjoying a holiday by either mountains or seashore. Rivers could see in imagination how glorious this moonlight became as the waves rolled into its path and broke there on the wet sands into a delicious rush and swirl of silvery sparkling foam. He could smell the very perfume of the sea, and feel the cold breath that the water exhales with one’s face close down by it, no matter how warm the night. It had been a pretty bad day in town. He was glad, very glad, that Elizabeth had the change. She needed it. He had said this stoutly to himself many times in the last six weeks, and knew that it was true. She had protested against going, and only yielded at last for the children’s sake and in wifely obedience to lawful masculine authority. He had insisted on sleeping in the house alone, in defiance of her pleading, alleging an affinity for his own bed, his own belongings, and an individual bath tub. A woman came once a week to sweep and straighten up the house. He had repeatedly declared there would be really nothing to do after business hours but to go around and enjoy himself. He had made her almost envious of these prospective joys. He would take little trips to Manhattan Beach with “the boys” and go to Bronxville to see Tom Westfield, as he had been meaning to for five years, and visit the roof garden with the Danas, who were on from St. Louis, and take dinner at the CafÉ Ruritania. On the between nights he would visit the neighbors. All these things he had done, more or less disappointingly, but what should he do to-night?

“I beg your pardon, Rivers, but have you any paregoric in the house? We’ve got to get something to quiet the baby.”

A tall, thin, wearied-looking young man had come up the steps, hidden by the vines in which dwellers in a mosquito country are wont to picturesquely embower themselves, defiant of results.

“Why, how are you, Parker?” said Rivers cordially. “Paregoric is it that you want? Come inside, and we’ll have a look for it, old man.” He led the way, scratching matches as he went to relieve the darkness, dropping them on the floor as they went out, and finally lighting the gas in the butler’s pantry.

“My wife keeps the medicines on the top shelf here to be out of the way of the children,” he explained. “I don’t know about the paregoric, though. I seem to remember that she didn’t believe much in using it for babies.”

“We’ve had a fight with the nurse about it,” said the other man, gnawing at a very light mustache as he leaned against the door, “but Great Scott, Rivers, we’ve got to do something. I would have murdered anybody whose child cried like this one. We’ve been complained of as it is. That’s paregoric, isn’t it?”

“It was, but the bottle’s empty,” said Rivers, who was standing on the rung of a chair, holding out a vial now and then from an inner recess to read the name on it. “That’s another empty bottle—and here’s another empty bottle—and, this is—another. Bottle of sewing machine oil. Prescription for neuralgia, 178, 902, empty. Bottle of glycerine—confound the thing! the cork was out of it; get my handkerchief for me out of my pocket, will you? Prescription for hair tonic; empty bottle—another empty prescription bottle—dregs of cough medicine. What in thunder does Bess want with all these empty bottles? I’m awfully sorry, Parker, but we don’t seem to have the stuff you want, or any other, for that matter.”

“Never mind,” said Parker. “I’ll ride down to the village and get some. I’d have gone there first, but the tire of my wheel wants blowing up.”

“I’d lend you my wheel, but it’s at the shop,” called Rivers as they disappeared out of the door.

He put the bottles back, upsetting, as he did so, a package of some white powder, out of which ran three cockroaches. As he stooped to gather it up again in the paper he disturbed a half-eaten peach which he remembered leaving there the night before, and a small colony of ants that had made their dwelling in it scuttled cheerily around. He uttered an exclamation of disgust, and shut the door of the butler’s pantry upon them. The whole house seemed given up to a plague of insects, utterly unknown in the reign of its careful mistress. In spite of screens, small stinging mosquitoes whizzed out from everything he touched; spiders hung down from webs in the ceiling, and a moth had flown from his closet that very morning. He kept the blinds and windows closed while he was away all day; he had begun by leaving them open, but a slanting shower had made havoc in his absence and also flooded the cellar through the open cellar door. It had not dried up since, and he was sure that there were fleas down there.

There was a deadly hot damp and silence in the dining-room and parlor as he came through them, and the same unnatural atmosphere in the rooms above as he drearily invaded them for a clean collar. Every place was shut up and in order; the tops of the dressing tables even were bare save for the clean towel laid over each. His own room was in an ugly, disheveled confusion, and though his windows were open, no air came through the wire screens. He opened a closet door inadvertently, and the sight of a pink kimono of his wife’s, and the hats of the two little boys hanging up neatly beside it, emphasized his solitude. His latent idea of spending the rest of the evening at home was gone from him—he felt that he could not get out of this accursed house quickly enough, although he had not made up his mind where to go; he did not feel up to cheering the sick man in the next street, or equal to a gentle literary conversation with the two elderly ladies beyond who had known his mother. He wanted to go somewhere where he could smoke and have some pleasing light drink for refreshment, and be cheered and amused himself.

The Callenders! If he only had his wheel—it was nine o’clock now, and the place was away over on the other side of town. Never mind, he would go, and chance their being at home and out of bed when he got there. Anything to get away from this loathsome place, although coming back to it again seemed suddenly an impossible horror. He wondered if he were getting ill. The night before—

As he walked, the shadows of the moonlight lengthened his long legs, and their dragging strides. His face, with its short brown beard and the hollows under his dark eyes, was bent forward. He figured out anew the income there would be from his insurance money, and how it might be supplemented for Bess and the children. Clearly, he would have to earn more before he died. And oh, the burden, the burden, the burden was his! The thought leaped out like a visible thing. Her sweet presence, her curling hair, her dimples, her loving feminine inconsequence, with the innocent, laughing faces of the little boys, overlaid the daily care for him, but with these appointed Lighteners of Life away it loomed up into a hideously exaggerated specter that seemed to have always had its hand upon his fearsome heart, and only pressed a little closer upon him now in this hot windless night. Even his wilted collar partook of the tragic; he might as well have kept on the first one.

“Hello! Hello! Where are you going? This is the place.” A shout of laughter accompanied the words. “Come up, brother, we’ve been waiting for you!”

He looked up to see that he was in front of Callender’s house, and that the piazza, a large square end of which was screened off into a room, held a company in jovial mood, under moonlight as bright as day. The women were in white, with half bare neck and arms, rocking and fanning themselves, and the men in tennis shirts and belts, two of them smoking pipes, and the other a cigar. A tray, holding a large crystal bowl and glasses, stood on a bamboo table at one side, half shielded by jars of palms whose spiked shadows carpeted the floor and projected themselves across the white dress and arms of Mrs. Callender, while she held the door open with one hand, and half welcomed, half dragged him in with the other, amid a chorus of voices,

“Come in, come in, you’re one of us.”

“If you let a mosquito in—Take that chair by Mrs. Weir if you feel up to it; she wants to be entertained.”

“I feel up to anything—now,” said Rivers, taking with alacrity the seat allotted to him, after shaking hands with pretty Mrs. Waring, who lived next door, and her cousin, Mrs. Weir. “Same old crowd, I see.”

The laughter broke out anew as his wandering eyes took tally of the group, and he said, “Where’s Callender? and Weir? What’s the joke?”

“Oh, don’t ask for any woman’s husband or any man’s wife,” said Mrs. Callender despairingly, with her graceful figure reclining back in the low chair. “Can’t you see that we’re all detached?” Her charming smile suddenly broke forth. “It’s really too absurd.”

“No!” said Rivers, a light dawning on him. “Nichols, you don’t mean that you are on the waiting list too?”

Mr. Nichols, a large man with a grizzled head, nodded and helped himself to the contents of the suggestive bowl. “The missus and the kids went off last week; I’m detained for a while longer. As for Callender; he got a summons from the company, and he’s half way to Chicago by this time, I hope. I came over on purpose to tell his last words to his wife, who didn’t want them.”

“Ned had already brought them,” said Mrs. Callender, turning to the tall, quiet man of the cigar, Mr. Atwood, who was her brother. “It’s such a mercy that he happened to come on, or I’d have been here all alone.”

“Looks like it,” said Mr. Porter, a stout fair gentleman with a cool gray eye, a bald head, and a gurgling laugh. “What do you think, Rivers, these girls here”—he waved his hand—“had been counting on seeing the whole lot of us to-night, and brewed that lemonade on purpose.”

“Everyone has come now but the Martindales,” said Mrs. Weir, a little woman with loosely piled dark hair, and a gentle, winning voice, occasionally diversified with a surprising shriek of laughter.

“The Martindales! Why, they only returned this evening—I met them on the boat,” said Rivers.

“Yes, we know that, but one of them will be over here just the same,” said Mrs. Callender placidly. “They’ll want to see what we’re doing. Do somebody pay a little attention to Mrs. Waring; she hasn’t said a word for half an hour. I believe she’s hoping that Henry’ll be too homesick to stay away.”

“Not quite,” said Mrs. Waring with a little tremble of her lower lip.

“Nice, kind little woman you are,” said Porter severely. “Want to enjoy yourself thinking how unhappy Waring is. Well, I’m glad he went, and I hope he’ll stay until he’s well; if any man needed a change, he did.”

“He would have taken me with him if I could have left the children,” murmured Mrs. Waring.

“Yes, the children win every time,” said Porter with easy philosophy. “You think you’re important, my brothers, until you’re confronted with your own offspring, and then you’re not in it.”

“I don’t see,” said Mr. Nichols, filling his pipe again, “why a man’s family should stay in town and broil because he has to. It wouldn’t be any satisfaction to me, I know that. My little girls write to me every day.”

“I remember,” said Rivers, leaning forward, “once when Bess and I took a trip together we had to come home just when the fishing was at its height, because she imagined what it would be like if a menagerie broke loose and a tiger got at little Brook when he was asleep in his crib. She said she knew it was perfectly absurd, but she couldn’t stand it a moment longer. So we came home.”

He laughed tenderly at the reminiscence, and the other men laughed with him, but the women, even Mrs. Callender, who had no children, were serious, and Mrs. Weir said, as if speaking for the rest,

“Yes, one does feel that way sometimes.”

The men looked at each other and nodded, as in the presence of something known of old, something to be smiled at, and yet reverenced. The fierce maternal impulses of his wife were divine to Rivers, he loved her the more for her foolishness; it seemed fitting, and all he could expect, that the children should be her passion, as she was his. If he had once dreamed that it would be otherwise, he knew better now. Women were to be taken care of and loved for their very limitations, even if one bore a little sense of loss and soreness forever in one’s own heart. What could they know?

“Why don’t you take a vacation, Mr. Rivers?” asked Mrs. Weir later as the others had fallen into general conversation. “You look as if you needed it. Mr. Nichols says it was dreadful in town to-day; forty-seven heat prostrations.”

“Oh, I can’t get off,” said Rivers with unconscious weariness in his voice. “It makes an awful lot of difference when you’re running the business yourself. If I were working for somebody else I’d take my little two weeks the way my own clerks do, without caring a hang what became of the concern in my absence. I thought I was going to get up to Maine over the Fourth, and after all I couldn’t leave in time. It’s quite a journey, you know. Bess and the boys were as disappointed as I was,” he added conscientiously. “But they’re getting along finely. Sam and Jack are learning to swim, she says—pretty good for little shavers of five and six! They’re as brown as Indians. She says—” he began to laugh as he repeated confidentially some anecdotes of their prowess to which Mrs. Weir apparently listened with the deeply interested attention that is balm to the family exile, only asking him after a while irrelevantly, as he pushed back the hair from his forehead,

“How did you get that ugly cut on your temple?”

Even in the moonlight she could see his face flush.

“Oh, come, Rivers,” said Atwood, who was passing, “make up some story, for the credit of mankind.”

“Then you might as well have the truth, I suppose,” said Rivers, laughing, yet embarrassed. “It’s really nothing, though; I felt dizzy and queer when I went to bed last night. I suppose it was just the heat, and I have had a good deal to carry in a business way lately. I found myself at daylight this morning lying on the floor with my head by the edge of the bureau, and I don’t know in the least how I got there. I have a faint memory that I started to go for some water. I’m all right to-day, though; it hasn’t bothered me a bit.”

“No, of course not,” said Mrs. Weir encouragingly. “And you don’t mind staying alone?” she dropped her voice.

“Oh, no, not at all. Only—I don’t mind telling you—” he looked at her with strange eyes—“I hate the house! It’s got all the plagues of Egypt in it. And all the hours I’ve spent alone there are shut up in it too. I know just how it’s going to be when I open that front door and walk in.”

“Stay here to-night,” said Mrs. Weir smoothly. “Stay here with Mr. Atwood; Mrs. Callender will be delighted to have you.”

“Oh, I can’t, possibly,” said Rivers with decision. “I didn’t even lock the front door when I came away. I only remembered it a moment ago. And I won’t really mind a bit after I’m once back there—it’s only the plunge. You’re awfully good to me, Mrs. Weir,” he added gratefully; but he wanted his wife—he did not want to be confidential with anyone but her. No matter what enjoyment he had in this brief hour, it was bound to fail him at the end. One of the dearest pleasures of married life is the going home together after the outside pleasuring is over.

As they all trooped into the dining-room for the crabs and salad Mrs. Callender told of as in the ice-box, the figure of Elizabeth in her pink kimono seemed to weave in and out among the others, but in another moment he was laughing and talking uproariously with the men, while the women, on Mrs. Callender’s assertion that the servants were in bed, tucked up their gowns and descended the cellar stairs for the provisions, refusing all masculine assistance.

“I think it’s an eternal shame,” said Mrs. Callender as the three held an excited conclave in cellared seclusion by the open refrigerator. “It’s just as Celeste says, he’s ill—anyone can see it. Why, he starts whenever he’s spoken to. He told Mr. Callender the other day that he’d been horribly worried about business. He’s a nervous kind of a fellow, and he takes everything too hard. He ought not to be left alone in this way.”

“I think somebody ought to write to her,” said Mrs. Waring solemnly, resting the dish of salad on the top of the ice-box. “I think it’s perfectly heartless of her to go on enjoying herself when he’s ill.”

“She doesn’t know it,” interrupted Mrs. Callender with rare justice.

“That’s what I say, somebody ought to tell her. She never seems to think about anything but herself, though—or the children, or clothes. If I thought that Henry—but I’d never leave him this way, never; I wouldn’t have a bit of comfort. He’s so devoted to his home, just like Mr. Rivers.”

“Do you know—I have a dreadful feeling that something is going to happen to him to-night?”

“If you had heard him talk—” said Mrs. Weir with tragic impressiveness.

The three women looked at each other silently.

“Are we to have anything to eat to-night, or are you girls going to talk until morning?” came the steady tones of Porter from the head of the stairs. “It’s after eleven now.”

“Goodness!” said Mrs. Callender, hastily completing her preparations. “Yes! we’re coming. You can send Ned down now to crack some more ice, and then we’ll be ready.”

But she turned to say, “I think someone ought to go home with him.”

“This is what I call comfort,” said Porter as they sat hilariously around the Flemish oak table, eating the cool viands and drinking anew from the iced bowl, a lacy square of white linen and a glass vase of scarlet nasturtiums gracing the center of the board. “Clear, clear comfort!”

“I feel at peace with all mankind—even with Atwood, who believes in an imperial policy.”

“Hush,” said Mrs. Callender, “who is that on the piazza?”

The door opened, a head was thrust in, and a shout arose.

“Martindale! Martindale, by all that’s holy! Come in, we’re expecting you.”

“That’s mighty good of you,” said the intruder, who seemed to be all red hair and smiles. “All the same, you don’t seem to have left me much of anything to eat.” He drew up a chair to the table and sat down.

“Where’s your wife?” asked Mrs. Weir.

“Oh, she had a headache this evening. I went out for a ride, and when I came back I saw you were on deck over here, so I thought I’d look in and see what was up.” He stopped, oblivious of the renewed laughter, and stared at Rivers. “Why, when did you get here? I saw a light in your house ten minutes ago. I nearly dropped in on you.”

“A light in my house!” exclaimed Rivers. He rose, and the others instinctively rose also, with startled glances at each other.

“Perhaps your family has come home,” suggested Mrs. Waring.

Rivers shook his head. “No, I had a letter from Bess to-day saying she had taken the rooms for two weeks more. It might have been Parker, but I don’t think so. Are you sure you saw a light?”

“On the lower floor,” asseverated Martindale. “Was the door locked when you came out?”

“No.”

“All right,” said Atwood briskly. “Porter and I’ll go back with you, Rivers. No, we don’t need you, Nichols, you’re tired. Come upstairs and choose from Callender’s arsenal.”

“Each of those women begged me secretly not to let him get shot,” whispered Porter to his companion as they set off at a jog trot down the street, Rivers a little ahead. “I suppose they could sing our requiems with pleasure.”

“I know. They pounded it into me, too. They’ve got some kind of an idea between ’em that he’s coming to harm. Anything for an excitement. We’ll get ahead of him when we’re a little nearer to the house.”

It looked very dark and still as they reached it. The moon had set, and the patch of straggling woods stretched out weird and formless. The piano, the infant, the yelping dog had given place to an oppressive silence save for the dismal chirping of insects and the shuddering of a train of coal cars as it backed far off down the track. “There is no light now,” said Porter.

The three were drawn up in a line outside the house, and even while he spoke the gas flared up bright in the second story. The edge of a shadow wavered toward the back of the room; then it came forward and disappeared. The next moment the shade of the front window was partly drawn up and pulled down again by a round white arm, half clad in the loose sleeve of a pink kimono.