Mr. Wayt availed himself of an early opportunity to make known his intention to take no vacation that year. He “doubted the expediency of midsummer absences on the part of suburban pastors.” While many residents of Fairhill went abroad and to fashionable resorts in America in July and August, a respectable minority was content to remain at home, and some of the vacated cottages and villas were taken by city people, to whom the breezy heights and shaded lawns were a blessed relief from miles of scorching stone and brick. He “foresaw both foreign and domestic missionary work in his own parish,” he said to his session in explaining his plans for the summer campaign.

The resolution was politic and strengthened his hold upon his new charge. Not to be outdone in generosity, the people redoubled their affectionate attentions to their spiritual leader. Fruits, flowers, and all manner of table dainties poured into the parsonage; carriages came daily to offer airings to Mrs. Wayt and the children, and on the Fourth of July a pretty phaËton and gentle horse were sent as “a gift to the mistress of the manse,” from a dozen prominent parishioners.

“Verily, my cup runneth over.”

A real tear dropped upon Mr. Wayt’s shirt front as he uttered it falteringly on the afternoon of the holiday. Yet he had been repeating the words at seasonable intervals, and more or less moistly, since the hour of the presentation.

The Gilchrists were upon the eastern veranda, the embowering vines of which were beginning to rustle in the sea breeze. All had arisen at the pastor’s appearance, and March set a chair for him.

“I have thought, sometimes, that I had some command of language,” he continued unctuously. “To-day I have no words save those laid to my use by the Book of books—‘My cup runneth over.’ It is not one of my foibles to expatiate upon the better ‘days that are no more.’ The trick is common and cheap. But to you, my best friends, I may venture to confide that my dear wife and I were brought up in what I have since been disposed to characterize as ‘mistaken luxury.’ Since the unselfish saint joined her blameless lot with mine she has never had a carriage of her own until to-day. I can receive favors done to myself with a manly show of gratitude. Appreciation of my wife makes a baby of me.”

“By this time he should be in his second childhood, then, for everybody likes mamma,” piped a familiar voice from within the French window of the library. Glancing around with a start that was not theatrical, he espied his eldest born established at her ease in a low chair. Her feet were on a stool; she wore a white gown, and May’s white Chudda shawl covered her from the waist downward; her hair was a mesh of gold thread that drew to it all the light of the dying day. May sat on a cushion in the window and linked Hester in her comparative retirement with the veranda group.

“Ah, little one, are you there?” said the fond parent playfully. “I missed you from the dinner table and might have guessed that you could be nowhere but here.”

Profound silence ensued, and lasted for a minute. Hester shrank into herself with a blush visible even in the shadowy interior.

March and May had gone through orchard and gardens to fetch her an hour ago. Her father had eaten his evening meal at the same table with her. In the circumstances there was nothing to say, a fact comprehended by all except the unconscious offender.

“I think Mrs. Wayt will find her horse gentle,” said Judge Gilchrist, in formal civility too palpable to his wife.

With intelligent apprehension of the truth, too often overlooked, that confidence in the truth bearer must precede obedience to his message, she desired that her husband and son should like Mr. Wayt. To March she had confessed her fear that some of the family were “peculiar,” and he might infer the inclusion of the nominal head in the category. Further than this she would not go. With pious haste she picked the fly out of the ointment, and with holy duplicity beguiled others into approval of the article that bore the trade mark of “The Church.”

Ah, the Church!—in every age and, despite lapses and shortcomings and stains, the custodian of the Ark of God—her debt to such devout and loyal souls as this woman’s will never be estimated until the Master shall make acknowledgment of it in the great day of reckoning.

When the judge’s turn of the subject and the “horsey” talk that followed granted his wife leisure to reconsider the matter, she discovered that there was no cause for discomfiture. Mr. Wayt was absent-minded, as were all students of deep things. Only, her husband was quick of sight and wit, and neither March nor May had much to say, of late, of the new preacher who was doing such excellent work in the congregation. March went regularly to church and sat beside his mother through prayer and hymn and sermon, and afterward refrained from adverse criticism. This may have been out of respect to the girl he hoped to make his wife. Yet she had dared fancy that the graver tenderness of his behavior to herself and the unusual periods of thoughtfulness that occurred in their conversations had to do with the dawning of spiritual life in his soul. However much certain of Mr. Wayt’s mannerisms might offend her taste, there was no question of his ability and eloquence. That these might be the divinely appointed nets for the ingathering into the Church of her best beloved was a burden that weighted every petition.

March had not spoken openly of his love for Hetty Alling since the evening on which he first avowed it to his mother, but, in her opinion, there was nothing significant in this reserve. The Gilchrists were delicate in their dealings with one another, never asking inconvenient questions, or pushing communication beyond the voluntary stage. If May divined the drift of her brother’s affections, she did not intimate it by word or look. When the fruit of confidence was ripe it would be dropped into her lap. She did note what Mrs. Gilchrist had not the opportunity of seeing—how seldom Hetty had leisure to receive March or his sister. She was getting ready the wardrobe of the twin boys, who were to go to boarding school the 1st of October. Through Hester’s talk May had learned incidentally that the Wayts employed neither dressmaker nor seamstress.

“Hetty is miraculously skillful with her needle,” was Hester’s way of putting it, “and so swift that it would drive her wild to see her work done by the ‘young lady who goes out by the day.’ I work buttonholes and hem ruffles and such like, and mamma gives her all the time she can spare from baby—and other things. But our Hetty is the motor of the household machine. I don’t believe there is another like her in the world. The mold in which she was cast was broken.”

She had said this in a chat held with her favorite this evening while the others were engaged with other themes outside of the window. May encouraged her to go on by remarking:

“You love her as dearly as if she were really your sister, don’t you?”

“‘As well!’ The love I have for mother, sisters, and brothers is a drop in the ocean compared with what I feel for Hetty! See here, Miss May!” showing her perfectly formed hands. “These were as helpless as my feet. Hetty rubbed me, bathed me, flexed the muscles for an hour every morning and an hour every night. She tempted me to eat; obliged me to take exercise; carried me up and down stairs, and sat with me in her arms out of doors until she had saved fifty dollars out of her allowance to have my chair built. Hetty educated me—made me over! She is my brain, the blood of my heart—I don’t believe I should have a soul but for Hetty!”

The warm water stood in May’s eyes. But the weak voice, thrilling with excitement, reminded her of the danger of an excess of feeling upon the disjointed system. She spoke lightly:

“Oh, your father would have looked out for your soul!”

“Would he?”

The accent of intensest acrimony shocked the listener, corroborated as it was by the bitterness of scorn that wrung the small face.

In a second Hester caught herself up.

“They say that cobblers’ wives go barefoot. Ministers have so little time to spare for the souls of their families that their children are paganed. If it wasn’t for their wives and their wives’ sisters, the forlorn creatures would not know who made them.”

It was a plausible evasion, but it did not efface from May’s mind the disdainful outburst and the black look that went with it. Both seemed so unnatural, even revolting, to a girl whose father stood with her as the synonym for nobility of manhood, that she could not get away from the recollection for the rest of the evening. This was before Mr. Wayt’s arrival, and sharpened May’s appreciation of the little by-play between Hester and her parent.

His departure at nine o’clock was succeeded by Hester’s at ten, and, as was their habit, March and his sister took her home by the path across the orchard. The night was sultry; the moon lay languid under swathes of gray mist. She looked warm, and the stars near her faint and tired. Low down upon the horizon were flashes of purple sheet lightning. The town had kept the Fourth patriotically, and the odor of burned paper and gunpowder tainted the stirless air.

“The grass is perfectly dry,” said May, stopping to lay her hand upon the mown sward. “That should be a sign of a shower.”

“There is always rain on the night of the Fourth of July,” returned March abstractedly.

Hester said not a word. As she looked up at the sick moon her eyes showed large and dark; her face was corpselike in the wan radiance. She was weary, and she had been indiscreet. She could not sleep without confessing to Hetty her lapse of temper and tongue, and Hetty had enough to bear already. She had not been so strong and bright as was her wont for a month past. It might be only excessive drudgery over sewing machine and household duties, but she looked fagged and sad at times. The phaËton and horse would benefit mamma and the children—when the vacant place beside the mistress of the Manse was not occupied by their lord and master. He got the lion’s share of every luxury. Poor Hester’s conscience and heart were raw, and the heat of the wounds inflamed her imagination. The evening at the judge’s had not rested her. That was strange, or would have been had not the long, black shadow of her father lain across the memory of it.

The back door of the parsonage stood wide open, and the house was so still that, as March stooped to lift Hester from her carriage at the foot of the steps, he caught the sound of what was scarcely louder than an intermittent sigh in the upper story, but continuous as a violent fit of weeping. The arm that lay over his shoulder twitched convulsively; Hester shuddered sharply, then laughed aloud:

“Oh, Mr. Gilchrist! I thought I was falling! It is too bad to put you to all this trouble. I hope Tony hasn’t blown himself up. He ought to have come for me.”

“Didn’t I promise your mother to bring you home safely?” said March reassuringly. And, as they reached the hall—“May I carry you upstairs?”

The offer seemed to terrify her.

“Oh, no, no! Just lay me on the settee there! Somebody will be down directly. Don’t trouble yourself to bring the chair in. Tony will attend to that. Thank you! Good-night, Mr. Gilchrist! Good-night, Miss May!”

While she hurried all this out, a stumble on the back stairs was the precursor of Homer’s appearance in the dim recesses of the hall. He alighted at the bottom of the flight on all-fours, picked himself up and shambled forward, one hand on his head, the other on his elbow, an imbecile grin spreading his jaws.

“Now, I a’most broke me nake on them stairs!”

March had deposited Hester upon the hall lounge, and although perceiving her anxiety to get rid of him, hesitated to commit her to the keeping of a man who was, apparently, but half awake.

“Let me carry you up!” he insisted to Hester. “He may fall again.”

“Oh, Tony is all right!” in the same strained key as before. “He never lets anything but himself drop.”

A rustle and swift step sounded above stairs. Someone ran down. It was Hetty. Her white wrapper was begirt with a ribbon loosely knotted; her rust-brown hair was breaking from constraint and tumbling upon her shoulders.

March’s first pained thought was: “She knew I would be in, yet did not mean to see me again to-night!”

A second glance at the colorless face and wild eyes awakened unselfish concern.

“What is the matter? Who is hurt?” she queried anxiously. Hester’s reply was a shriek of laughter.

“Nothing! Nobody! Only Tony has broken his neck again, and Mr. Gilchrist did not know that it is an hourly occurrence in our family life, so he insisted upon taking me upstairs himself.”

“Mr. Gilchrist is very kind!” Hetty’s tone was deadly mechanical; in speaking she looked at nobody. “I sent Homer down when I heard you coming. I am sorry he was not in time.”

May had joined the group.

“I hope,” she said in her cheery way, “that none of the rest of your household have come to grief to-day?”

Hetty turned to her with eyes that questioned silently—almost defiantly.

“I mean, of course, did the boys bring home the proper quantum of eyes and fingers?”

“Yes! oh, yes! thank you! they went to bed tired, but whole, I believe.”

“That is fortunate, but remarkable for a Fourth of July report,” said March. “Come, May! Good-night!”

He had seen, without comprehending, the intense relief that flooded the girl’s visage at his sister’s second sentence, also that she was feverishly anxious to have them go. And the sound above stairs, hushed by Hester’s shrill tones—was it low, anguished weeping? The mourner was not Hetty, yet her dry eyes were full of misery. His big, soft heart ached with futile sympathy. By what undiscovered track could he fare near enough to her to make her conscious of this and of a love the greatness of which ought to help her bear her load of trouble?

“Hetty looks dreadfully!” broke out May at the garden gate. “She is worked and worried to death! I am amazed that Mrs. Wayt allows it. To reduce a girl like that to the level of a household drudge is barbarous. She has no time for society or recreation of any kind. It is toil, toil, toil, from morning until night. Mary Ann—the cook mamma got for them—says she ‘never saw such another young lady for sweetness and kindness to servants as Miss Hetty,’ but that she ‘carries all the house on them straight little shoulders of hern.’ Hester tells the same story in better English.”

She repeated what she had heard that evening.

March stopped to listen under the king apple tree, where he had begun to love the subject of the eulogy. While May declaimed he reached up for a cluster of green apples and leaves and pulled it to pieces, his face grave, his fingers lingering.

“Heaven knows, May”—she was not prepared for the emotion with which it was uttered—“that I would risk my life to make hers happy. I hoped once—but you see for yourself how she avoids me. I could fancy sometimes that she is afraid of me!”

“Perhaps she is afraid of herself.”

He looked up eagerly.

“Is that a chance remark? You women understand one another. Have you seen anything——”

“Nothing I could or would repeat, my dear boy! But there is a mystery somewhere, and I can’t believe it is the phenomenon of such a sensible girl’s failure to appreciate my brother. May I say something, March, dear?”

“Whatever you like—after what has gone before!”

“Maybe it ought not to have gone before—or after, either. For, brother, this is not just the sort of connection that you should form. To speak plainly, you might look higher. ‘Strike—but hear!’ Hetty is all that I have said, and more. But there is a Bohemian flavor about the household. We will whisper it—even at half-past ten o’clock at night, in the orchard—and never hint it to ‘the people,’ or to mamma! They are nomads from first to last—why, I cannot say. They have lived everywhere, and nowhere long. Mrs. Wayt is a refined gentlewoman, but her eyes are sad and anxious. You know how fond I am of Hester, poor child! Still a nameless something clings to them as a whole—not quite a taint, but a tang! Especially to Mr. Wayt. There! it is out! Let us hope the apple trees are discreet! I distrust him, March! He doesn’t ring true. He is always on pose. He is a sanctimonious (which doesn’t mean sanctified) self-lover. Such men ought to remain celibate.”

March tried to laugh, but not successfully.

“I dissent from and agree to nothing you say. But——” He waited so long that May finished the sentence for him.

“But you love Hetty?”

“Yes! She suits me, May! As no other woman ever did. As no other woman ever will. I have tried to reason myself out of the persuasion, but get deeper in. She suits me—every fiber and every impulse of my nature. I seem to have known her forever and always to have missed her.”

With all her pride in her family and ambition for her brother May had a romantic side to her character. Had she liked Hetty less, she would yet have pledged her support to the lover. She told him this while they strolled homeward, and then around and around the graveled drive in front of the Gilchrist portico, and had, in return, the full story of his passion.

“When I marry, my wife will have all there is of me,” he had said, long ago, to his sister.

He reminded her of it to-night.

“She is not a brilliant society woman. Not beautiful, perhaps. I am not a competent judge of that at this date. She has not the prestige of wealth or station. But she is my counterpart.”

He always returned to that.

When his sister had gone into the house he tarried on the lawn with his cigar. What freshness the fierce sun had left to the air was all to be found out of doors. As the gray swathes continued to smother the light out of the moon the heat became more oppressive. The gravel walks were hot to his feet; the bricks of the house radiated caloric. With a half-laugh at the whim, he entered the now silent and darkened dwelling, sought and procured a carriage rug, and pulling the door shut after him, whistled for Thor, and retraced his steps to the orchard. He spread the rug upon the grass kept cool by the down-leaning branches of the arbor and cast himself upon it. He meant to make a night of it.

“I have camped out, many a July night, in far less luxurious quarters,” he muttered. “And this place is sacred.”

When the mosquitoes began to hum in his ears, he lighted another cigar. He was the more glad to do it, as he fancied, once in a while, that the young apples or the wilting leaves had a peculiar and not pleasant odor, as of some gum or essence, that hung long in the atmosphere. He had noticed it when he pulled down a branch to get the spray he had torn apart, while May talked. The air was full of foreign scents to-night, and this might be an olfactory imagination.

As twelve o’clock struck from the nearest church spire, he was staring into the formless shadows overhead and living over the apple-blossom week, the symphony in pink and white. The young robins were full fledged and had flitted from the parent nest. The young hope, born of what stood with him for all the poetry of his six-and-twenty years of life, spread strong wings toward a future he was not to enjoy alone.

Thor was uneasy. He should have found his share of the rug laid upon elastic turf as comfortable as the mat on the piazza floor, which was his usual bed, yet he arose to his haunches, once and again, and, although at his master’s touch or word, he lay down obediently, the outline of his big head, as March could make it out in the gloom, was alert.

“What is it, old boy?” said he presently. “What is going on?”

Thor whined and beat the ground with his tail, both tentatively, as asking information in return.

In raising his own head from the yielding and soft rustling grasses, March became aware of a sound, iterative and teasing, that vexed the languid night. It was like the ticking of a clock, or of an uncommonly strenuous deathwatch. While he listened it seemed to gather force and become rhythmic.

“Click! click! clack! click! click! clack! clicketty click! clicketty, clicketty clack! click! click! click! clicketty clack! ting!”

Somebody was working a typewriter on this stifling night, presumably by artificial light, in the most aristocratic quarter of Fairhill.

Thor knew the incident to be unprecedented. The rhythmic iteration made his master nervous; the sharp warning of the bell at the end of each line pierced his ear like the touch of a fine wire.

He sat up and looked about him.

An aperture in the foliage let through a single ray of light. It came from the direction of the parsonage.

“Tony’s pet hallucination is of a wandering light in the garden and orchard, a sort of ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ affair, which it is his duty to look after,” Hester had said that evening. “He rushes downstairs at all hours of the evening to see who is carrying it. I told him last night that burglars were too clever to care to enter a clergyman’s house, but he cannot be convinced that somebody, bent upon mischief, doesn’t prowl about the premises. He is half blind, you know, and has but three-fourths of his wits within call.”

Recollecting this, March arose cautiously, whispered to Thor to “trail,” and stole noiselessly up the easy grade.

The light was in the wing of the parsonage and shone from the wide window of the pastor’s study on the first floor. The shutters were open; a wire screen excluded insects, and just within this sat a woman at a typewriter—Hetty!

Across the shallow garden he could see that her hair was combed to the crown of her head for coolness, and coiled loosely there. Now that he was nearer to the house, he distinguished another voice, also a woman’s, dictating, or reading, as the flying fingers manipulated the keys. Drawing out his repeater, he struck it. Half-past twelve!

“I have been sorely interrupted in my pulpit preparation this week,” Mr. Wayt had informed Mrs. Gilchrist, on taking leave that night. “I fear the sunlight will extinguish my midnight argand burner. ‘The labor we delight in physicks pain,’ and, with me, takes the place of slumber, meat, and drink.”

Impressed by an undefined sense of trouble, March stood, his hand upon the gate, almost decided to go up to the house and inquire if aught were amiss. While he cast about in his mind for some form of words that might account for his intrusion, Mrs. Wayt’s figure came forward, and offered, with one hand, a glass of water to her sister. In the other she held a paper. Without taking her fingers from the typewriter Hetty raised her head, Mrs. Wayt put the glass to her lips, and, while she drank, dictated a sentence from the sheet in her hand. In the breezeless hush of the July night a clause was audible to the spectator.

“Who has not heard the story of the drummer boy of Gettysburg?”

“Click-click-clack! Click-click-clack!” recommenced the noisy rattle.

While Hetty’s fingers flew her sister fanned her gently, but the eyes of one were riveted to the machine, those of the other never left the paper in her hand.

March went back to his orchard camp, Thor at his heels.

It was close cloudy; the purple play of lightning was whitening and concentrating in less frequent lines and lances. When these came, it could be seen that thunderheads were lifting themselves in the west. But the night remained windless, and the iterative click still teased the ears of the watcher. It was an odd vigil, even for an anxious lover, to lie there, gazing into the black abysses of shade, seeing naught except by livid flashes that left deeper blackness, and knowing whose vital forces were expended in the unseasonable toil.

What could it mean? Did the overladen girl add copying for pay to the list of her labors? And could the sister who seemed to love her, aid and abet the suicidal work? Where was Mr. Wayt? The play of questions took the measure and beat of the type keys, until he was wild with speculation and hearkening.

At half-past two the rattle ceased suddenly. Almost beside himself with nervous restlessness, he sprang up and looked through the gap in the boughs. The light went out, and, at the same instant, the delayed storm burst in roar and rain.