But the day came at last when Josie must say good-bye, and then Rose's essential loneliness swept back upon her in a bitter flood. That night she walked her room in her naked feet, with her handkerchief stifling her sobs, so that John might not hear. She fought it out there (she supposed) and ended at last by determining to sacrifice herself to her father.

He could not be deserted, he needed her so, now that he was growing old and a little weaker. She must put away her vague, ambitious dreams of success, and apply herself to making him happy.

And yet to what end was all her study, she thought, during these later years? Could it be applied to doing him good? Her indifferent talent as a musician seemed the only talent which gave him joy. He cared nothing—knew nothing, of the things she loved and thought about!

Was her life, like his, to come down to the raising of cattle and the breeding of sheep? Was not his office served in educating her? Should not the old be sacrificed to the young?

All these devilish questions came into her mind like flashes of lurid light, but they all paled and faded before this one unchangeable radiance; he was her father, tender, loving, simple, laborious and old.

She fell asleep after hours of writhing agony, worn out, yet triumphant—she imagined.

But she was not. Day followed day, each one seemingly more hopeless than the other. This consideration beat like a knell into her brain, love could never come to her. Marriage with these young men was no longer possible. Love was out there, somewhere in the great world, in the city among artists and music-lovers, and men of great thought and great deeds. Her powerful physical, mental and emotional womanhood rebelled at this thought of lovelessness; like the prisoner of old bound in a sunless cavern where the drip-drop of icy water fell upon his brain, she writhed and seemed like to go mad.

This was the age of cities. The world's thought went on in the great cities. The life in these valleys was mere stagnant water, the great stream of life swept by far out and down there, where men and women met in millions. To live here was to be a cow, a tad-pole! Grass grew here, yes—but she could not live on grass. The birds sang here, yes—but there were Patti, and Duse, and Bernhardt out there in the world.

Here you could arise at five o'clock to cook breakfast and wash dishes, and get dinner, and sweep and mend, and get supper, and so on, till you rotted, like a post stuck in the mud. Your soul would rot. She felt change going on all the time. She was slipping back into shiftlessness, into minute untidiness—into actual slovenliness. There was no stimulus in these surroundings, she told herself; everything was against her higher self.

Once she had read a sentence from Lowell which flamed upon her mind now each time she mused upon her lot.

"The wilderness is all right for a vacation, but all wrong for a life-time."

She considered the coulÉ a wilderness. It had nothing for her but nature, and nature palls upon a girl of twenty, with red blood in her veins, and splendid dreams in her heart.

Out there was her ideal. "Out there is the man who is to fill out my life," she uttered to herself softly, so that only her inner ear heard.

So she argued, fought, wept, surrendered, and went to battle again. While all about her, John and his sister, moved tranquilly to their daily duties, calm as the cattle in the meadows. To the discerning eye it was a wonderful sight to see that dark, gloomy, restless girl seated opposite those serene, almost stolid faces, to whom "the world" was a breeze blowing in the tree-tops. She had the bearing of a rebellious royal captive—a duchess in exile. Mrs. Diehl and the hired man were the peasants who waited upon her, but ate with her—and her father was the secure free-holder, to whom kings were obscure, world-distant diseases.

Then the equinoctial storms came on, and days of dull, cold, unremitting rain confined her to the house. The birds fell silent, the landscape, blurred with gray mist, looked grim and threatening, and there was prophecy of winter in the air. The season seemed to have rushed into darkness, cold and decay, in one enormous bound. The hills no longer lifted buoyant crests to heaven; they grew cheerless and dank as prison walls.

One night Rose spoke. She had always been chary of caresses; even when a child she sat erect upon her father's knee, with a sober little face, and when she grew sleepy she seldom put hands to his neck, but merely laid her head on his breast and went to sleep. John understood her in all this, for was he not of the same feeling? Love that babbled spent itself, his had no expression.

His heart was big with pride and affection when his splendid girl came over and put her arms about his neck, and put her forehead down on his shoulder.

"O pappa John, you're so good to me—I'm ashamed—I don't deserve this new house!"

"O yes y' do, daughter." His voice when he said "daughter" always made her cry, it was deep and tender like the music of water. It stood for him in the place of "dear" and "darling," and he very, very seldom spoke it. All this made it harder for her to go on.

"No, I don't, father—O, father, I can't stay here—I can't bear to stay here now!"

"Why not, Rosie?"

"O because it's so lonesome for me. There is nobody for me to talk to" (she had to use phrases he could understand) "and I want to go on with my studies."

John considered a moment.

"But, Rosie, seems to me you've got enough; you're graduated."

Rose saw the hopelessness of making him understand that, so she went back.

"It's so lonesome for me here, pappa John!"

He considered again. "I 'spose it is. Well, you can go to the Siding every day if you want to. Hitch up old Doll every day—"

"I don't care for the Siding; it's just as lonesome there for me. I want to go to Chicago."

John grew rigid. "Chicago! What you want to do there?"

"I want to study, pappa. I want to go on with my work. I'll come home summers just the same. I'll come home Christmas if you want me to. It won't cost much, I'll live just as cheap as I can——"

"'Tain't that, 'tain't that, Rose," he said. Then he lifted his head and looked around.

She read his thought and the tears came to her eyes in blinding rush.

"I know, pappa. It's terrible to go now, when you've built this nice home for me, but what can I do? It's so lonesome here! I thought maybe I'd get used to it, but it gets worse. I can't stay here this winter. You must let me go. I'll go crazy if I stay here all winter. I must go out into the world. I want to be an artist. I want to see great people. I can't stay here, pappa John!"

The terrible earnestness of every sentence stabbed John Dutcher's heart like a poniard thrust. He put her away and rose stiffly.

"Well, well, Rosie, if you want to go——"

He did not finish, but turned tremblingly and walked out. She remained on the floor near his chair and watched him go, her soul sick with wretchedness.

Why was the world so ordered? Why must she torture that beautiful, simple soul? Why was it that all her high thoughts, her dreams, her ambitions, her longings, seemed to carry her farther away from him?

She could have beaten her head against the wall in her suffering. She rose at last and crawled slowly to her room, and abandoned herself to black, rayless hopelessness.

John Dutcher went out to the hedgerow and sat down on a stool. Around him bees were humming in the wet clover. The calves thrust their inquiring noses through the fence and called to him. The rain-clouds were breaking up, and the sun was striking under the flying canopy at the West.

It was the bitterest moment of his life, since his wife's death. His eyes were opened to his fate; he saw what he had done; he had educated his daughter out of his world. Never again would she be content in the coolly beside him. He saw how foolish he had been all these years, to suppose he could educate and keep her. For a moment he flamed with resentment and said to himself:

"I wish she had never seen a book."

Then he grew tender. He saw her again in her little blue apron with its pockets full of wheat—he saw her blowing hair, her sunny face; he heard again the wind-tossed chatter of her cunning lips. He ran swiftly over her development—how tall she grew and how splendid she was now, the handsomest girl in the coolly, and he softened. She was right. Who was there of the young farmers or even in Tyre good enough for her?

So he rose to a conception which had never come to him before, and even now it was formlessly vast; he felt the power of the outside world, and reached to a divination of the fatality of it all. It had to be, for it was a part of progress. He was old and bent and dull. She was young, gloriously young. The old must give way to the young, while she was the one to be bowed down to. She was queen and he was subject.

With these conceptions in his mind he went back and looked for her. He called her softly, but she did not hear, she was sobbing deep into her pillow. He came up the stairs and saw her lying face downward on her bed. His heart rose in his throat, because it was a terrible thing to see his imperious girl weep.

"Rosie, old pappa John surrenders. You're right and he's an old dummy."

She turned her face upon him.

"No, you're right. We won't be separated."

"But we ain't going to be." He came over and sat down on the edge of the bed.

"You'll come home summers, and maybe I'll go to Chicago winters."

Her face flashed into a smile. She flung her arms about him again.

"O will you, pappa John?"

"Course I will. Wait till you see me in a spike-tail coat and a boiled shirt. I'll astonish the city dudes."

Rose laughed a little wildly, and tightened her clasp about his neck.

"You're my dear old pappa John."

She went at once to her desk and wrote a letter to Mary Compton, an old schoolmate who had gone to Chicago and whose guidance to bed and board now seemed valuable.

That night John Dutcher did not go to sleep at once, as he usually did on entering his room. He went to his bureau—the old bureau he had bought for his wife thirty years before. In it he kept his pictures. There were several tin-types of Rose, in awkward, scared poses, and there too was the last picture of his wife which had been taken with Rose as a babe in her arms.

Dutcher sat for a long time looking at it, and the tears ran down his face unheeded, pitiful to see.

When he got up at last he moved stiffly as if he had suddenly grown ten years older, and in his sleep his sister heard him groan and talk. In the morning he said he had a touch of rheumatism, but it would most probably pass off as the sun came out.