AN Indian summer day, idle and tender, lay over hills and woods, meadows, river. The quaint little Old Town of Oldbridge, set among apple orchards and gardens and avenues of elms, received this last Benediction of Nature with an agreeable ouf! of respite from imminent grim winter approaches.

It is difficult to account, by any utilitarian motive on the part of our “brown and green old Mother Earth,” for her November caprice of a New England Indian summer, though I make no doubt the scientists will have some prosaic reason to give which we are asked to take upon faith. But since fruit, in New England, is garnered in September, and the toughest plants are burned to a crimson glory by October frosts, no ripened fruit or renewal of leaves defend the vagary. And so—will-he nill-he, we praise Heaven which made our “bounteous mother” feminine forsooth; we gratefully credit the enchanted fortnight to her bountiful illogical womanhood.

The Old Town of Oldbridge, then, basking under the Indian summer's morning blandishment while it sipped its mocha and partook of grape-fruit towards eight of the clock, pushed an agreeable ouf!—awake to agreeable titillations of excitement. General Adgate's niece, lovely and rich, admirable combination—Miss Adgate (Ruth Adgate, they already called her, didn't she belong to them?) had arrived. The event, discreetly mentioned in the Oldbridge Morning Herald, stared them in the face. Some boasted a glimpse of her, the day before, seated in the brougham beside her uncle; a pretty girl with reddish brown hair. Others had seen of her nothing but her outward manifestations on the luggage cart—two big brass-bound cork trunks, a cabin trunk, precisely similar, a square hat-box, a dressing case and a dark-eyed Italian maid.

The man of all work, Jo, brought this luggage into the house, with the gardener's assistance, and up to Ruth's rooms. Now he wiped the perspiration from his face. Arms akimbo, brows warped in puzzled frown, he glared at the encumbrances.

“Well, I be durned!” he burst forth. “Glad I ain't got any of them things to carry round when I go a travelling. One carpet bag's big enough for me, when I visit my folks, to Falls Junction.”

“Lucky you're glad,” Martha, the efficient, the tart, the very tart housemaiden snapped, and put him instantly in his place. “Not likely soon, we'll catch you towering it with a valet and trunks.”

II

As to the unconscious subject of comment and curiosity, Miss Ruth Adgate,—Miss Adgate was ecstatic. Her heart in its rapture wanted to, did, engulf the house, and the land and the hill, and the inmates of the Old Adgate place, and the entire town of Oldbridge. Something new, something strange had indeed happened for her joy had begun to bubble and ferment from the moment her foot passed the threshold of the house. No—from the hour the train, on its sideline to Oldbridge, had begun to move beside the river, bearing her for thirty minutes from one little way-station to another.

The sentiment of an autumnal New England landscape spread beneath clean thoughtless blue skies,—vistas of grey rocks and sedges by the river at the one hand,—where the dark green savins, reminding her of cypresses in Italy, sprang through the grey clefts;—and across the river, hills, low, wooded, interspersed with green and brown and orange pastures, through which cropped the same venerable grey New England rock,—harmonious and austere,—this perspective, enchanting in its tonic beauty, was grievously, alas! debased and disfigured.

Ignoble little wooden packing cases liberally dotted by the way screamed with the crudest colours, 'the crudest rainbow scale disgorges on the palate.' Gigantic hoardings, flaunting ridiculous local remedies and foods for every prevalent disease or dyspeptic stomach insolently stared at one;—the very backs and sides of barns and packing cases were decorated with their insignia!

“They need a Thames Conservancy, a County Council, something,” Ruth protested to her outraged sense of beauty, “to save this splendid river, control such unpuritanical abandonments to colour and commerce.”

Miss Adgate, you perceive, was naÏvely confident—oh, serene British confidence! that taste governs the world, that the world rays and rules so soon as the world discovers it is acting in bad taste.

But these blemishes were, after all, insignificant affairs—details incidental to an untutored modern public. What Miss Adgate's inward vision vividly perceived through the windows of the shabby long car with its soiled velvet cushions, and air of unworldliness,—which pleased her,—its smell of stale apples and anthracite coal smoke which didn't please her,—was the land. The land without a flaw of commerce! Hidden lives that took her blood back three hundred years, led her imagination.

Undeniably, the effect of this country was not one of abundance.... It was not varied and enhanced by a thousand fair human touches; the neglected land was uncouthly rough.... Nor was it in the least suggestive of the poetry, art, emotion,—the loves, the hates—of nineteen hundred vanished sumptuous years. (One might have likened it rather to the starved and simple beggar-maid waiting for the King.) But it was hers, it was hers!... She was of it!... Miss Adgate was deliciously cognisant that this fact filled her heart to overflowing with sweet content.

“This land saw my forbears!... This land for three hundred years gave them all they asked of life.... It opened its heart to them, therefore I love it, therefore I love it!” she repeated softly to herself. “And if this elation is patriotism—the mere patriotism dubbed Reflex Egotism by the cynics,—well—poor dears! What dear poor dears the cynics be!”

Miss Ruth Adgate gave a pleased sigh and turned her eyes again upon the view. They fell upon a bit of grey rock, a group of savins and scarlet barberry bushes loitering beside a piece of water... a composition Diaz would have thankfully imprinted, for reproduction, on his retina. The little pool, from brink to brink, coyly reflected these and the clear blue sky, and in the foreground twenty feet of hoarding bore the legend: “Try Grandpa Luther's Syrup of Winter-green for your Baby's Tantrums.”

Ruth fell back with rather a rueful laugh.

III

“Next station?—O—Oldbridge,” sang out the cherubic faced conductor and Ruth's heart began to palpitate.

“I will smile,” she said, “I won't be absurd.” And she fixed her gaze resolutely on the landscape, arrested, at once, by some subtle change in it.

Perceptibly, the meadows displayed a softer, more velvety grass; the trees grew, more finely luxuriant, the cliffs rose boldly. A hint of human intention, the touch of elegance, a something thoroughbred, spoke aloud.... The few last miles through which Miss Adgate jolted gave symptoms of civilisation.

“O—O—ldbridge!”

The guard intoned it nasally, with complete resignation,—a twenty years' fatiguing habit; and an intimation too, in his voice, that the goal of human travel had been reached. The train slackened.... One saw, spanning the river, a black bridge latticing the green and the blue; one caught glimpses of a town, white houses scattered up the slopes of wooded hills.

Several trim white yachts rested on the water; small sailboats glided, hither and yon, and little skiffs and slim rowboats floated by to a leisurely motion, manned by a single young oarsman, a girl seated hatless, in the bow. The gay scene under the yellow sunlight, the rippling, the smiling river, the warm waning afternoon—alive, sparkling, seemed an invitation to her full of promise.

“Come, Paolina,” said Ruth, with inward trepidation. “Come, Paolina.”

Miss Adgate summoned her courage as the train stopped with a jerk.

She passed—heroic effort—through the car to the platform, while Paolina took the dressing-case and followed, moved like her mistress and as tremulous.

Ruth scanned the faces in the friendly brick station. The white head, the features, familiar from photograph presentment, were—not there! But a hand, extended at the last step to help her descend, caused her to turn. Her arms in an instant had flung themselves impulsively about a figure which stood at her side.

“Uncle!” cried Ruth. Her heart ceased to pound, her nervousness gave way to an immense inward satisfaction. Tears sprang to her eyes—but, what did it matter? My heroine would be less charming were she less impressionable and one does not gather upon every bush, an uncle in loco parentis.

“Well, well, my dear!—we've got you here at last, Ruth,” said the tall, thin, old man. He looked down at her fondly, a good face full of kindly scrutiny.

“You've brought belongings of sorts?” General Adgate enquired as he conducted Ruth towards the carriage whilst the young girl felt half a dozen pairs of curious eyes fixed upon her.

“If that's your maid tell her there's a seat for her in the luggage cart near Jobias,” said General Adgate. He handed his niece into the brougham, Paolina received her instructions, they drove off.

IV

And for a moment they sped in silence, up a side street, into an open square of shops and brick buildings, for all the world like the High Street of any English Provincial town.

“But how English it looks!” Ruth exclaimed.

“Does it? Why not?” said General Adgate. “However,” he added, “we pride ourselves, further on, that we're distinctively American.”

The brick buildings surely enough dissolved into avenues set with superb elms. Big comfortable houses encircled by verandas,—many adorned with those fluted Corinthian columns, mark in Oldbridge of the early nineteenth century,—all snugly set back among flower gardens and lawns, emanated peace, prosperity, good will.

“This place must be Arcady in summer.... How charming it is,” Ruth cried, delighted. “These gardens in flower, these trees in leaf——”

“It's not so bad,” said General Adgate, dryly. “Longfellow christened it the Rose of New England.”

“But———,” he added, “we call this the City of Oldbridge, a modern matter. You, Ruth, belong to the Court End of the town—you are of what we call the Old Town.”

Vastly amused at the distinction, a Yankee Faubourg Saint Germain, Ruth plied him with questions. In five minutes the agreeable news that she,—the last of the house of Adgate in America, Ruth Adgate verily the salt of the earth, tracing a clean English ancestry back to the crusades, to mistier periods beyond, here held her Yankee acres in grant first from an English Sovereign, and, without a drop of blood-shed from Indian Sachems,—gave to her humourous sense of proportion somewhat to smile over.

On they went,—under endless prospects of arching elm trees, whose branches threw oblique attenuated shadows among the rays of the descending sun. A few soft clouds at the horizon were tinted rosy and red. Then the very blue, blue sky, suffused with violet and rose, suddenly flared. Far and wide, from earth to zenith, far and wide the sky burst into a glorious scarlet conflagration.

The city lay behind, meadows stretched broadly at either side, and to the right a pretty line of hill and wood etched itself against the blushing clouds.

“The beginning of your acres, my dear,” said the old man, bowing his head. “There they lie, untouched, just as James the First ceded them to your forefathers, just as the Indian Sachems of the Mohegan Tribe confirming the gift, withdrew from 'em. The bit of wood there is known to this day as the Wigwam and the last Indian hut in this State disappeared when it was destroyed by fire a hundred years ago.”

They had passed a road that wandered into the woodland, they were rolling smartly by stone walls that shut in a goodly reach of close-cut lawn all seamed and scarred by grey jutments of rock, which rising, mounting, reached a hill through terraced gardens trimly laid and skirting the summit. The carriage took a sharp sweep upward into a gravelled drive, rolled on a few paces, stopped abruptly before a brown, rambling house,—Miss Adgate had reached the end of her journey.

“Welcome home,” said General Adgate, as he helped Ruth to alight. He bent down, kissed her, and led her up the steps into the house.

V

It was morning. It was nine of the clock. Miss Adgate walked, alone, through a path that penetrated to the Wigwam. Almost hidden by a thicket of sweet fern, juniper, barberry and briar which grew at either side, which clung too affectionately to her skirts and from which she had difficulty in disengaging herself, the path, she thought, might have led her to the Palace of The Sleeping Beauty.

It was morning, as I have said, and it was the morning of her first day, and early abroad, Miss Adgate strolled in a pleasant sort of reverie,—thinking of nothing, perhaps, or thinking of a number of things. The Indian summer sunshine filtered upon her through half-bare branches not quite denuded of their yellow and purple and scarlet leafage; and every now and then a leaf came fluttering down in the light breeze. A squirrel, now and then, darted out along a branch, paused—and like an Italian lizard, all a-gleam and a-whisk, gleamed, whisked, and disappeared. But Ruth knew two little black beadlike eyes still watched her, as she went, from behind the lattice-screen of twigs.

Every now and then she passed a formidable, a monumental boulder; moss-grown; covered with grey lichen; dropped there by some glacier, Æons since, unless Heaven, it occurred to her, had placed it where it stood, and why not? for picturesque intent?... Every now and then a tardy bluejay flitted by, lighted upon a branch and sent forth his imperious cha, cha, cha!... Or a woodpecker, in the distance, made his tapping noise as he sounded the trees for his meal. A dry twig would break, suddenly,—come tumbling head foremost down, down through a rustle of leaves, and all these sounds struck upon Miss Adgate's ears in her reverie, gave her exquisite pleasure. She enjoyed the romance and the solitude of this wild wood; she delighted in the knowledge that she was walking safely through her own preserves; and treve de compliments, her uncle had left her upon a brief good-bye after an early breakfast. Ruth burned to discover alone, he knew, her domain—General Adgate had divined it without a hint.

“You'll want to take a walk this morning through your woods, Ruth,” said he. “Cross the hill,—you'll find a road to the right leading by a brook,—follow the road,—it takes you over the brook by a bridge and soon becomes a path. No one will molest you, it's yours.”

“What, the brook as well?” queried she, feeling, somehow, like a very little girl in his presence.

“Yes, and the brook as well. You can't get away from your preserves,—they stretch on for miles.”

So it was that Miss Adgate, abroad at nine o'clock, happened to be off for a matutinal stroll through paths wet and dewy, glad of her freedom, glad to be alone in a new world, surrender herself to the romance of a new train of thought.

She came, presently, to a clearing in the wood. The path ended, abruptly, at a flat bed of rock which descended for some hundred feet to another opening in the wood. There were bayberry and barberry and fern along the way, slashed scarlet by the frosts; there were fifty plants she promised to herself to learn the names of, which gave forth strong, sweet scents in the hot sun. Ruth sat down. A swish, through the dry leaves, a stir of the brown grass, told of the frightened escape of some little living thing, and set her heart to palpitating unaccountably with love for it.

Her mood had become a trifle exalted, her perceptions quickened by her promenade. Each insect, bird, bush she came upon began to assume a personality; claimed the privilege to live upon her land. She was the suzerain of their little lives; she could have held a court of justice; she could have dispensed favours, played their games, ruled them, thrown herself into their griefs and joys, with heart and soul. Seated here, in the warm sun, on the warm stone checked with patches of green and brown club-moss, she inhaled the crisp fragrance of the bushes under the sun's kisses; she looked afar, on to the trees below and over their heads at the vivid sky, and upon faraway violet hills, and upon green and orange, brown and guileless meadows. The world seemed good and wonderful, and she felt exceedingly content.

“The Ruth Adgate who spent twenty years of her life in Europe is no more,” she thought, lightly. “The young person who has tasted most of the sweets of European civilisation, walked in marble halls, refused a Duke, run away from the outrage offered her dignity by the offer of a morganatic marriage with a Crown Prince,—the lovesick girl who wandered through the moonlight at the Lido, floated upon the silent lagoons of Venice, discoursed with wits in lovely gardens in Florence, and herself the cause of wit in others, hung upon their discourse—that was quite another person! That was but an early incarnation, never the real Miss Adgate. This is the real Miss Adgate! In spite of every influence to the contrary,—the product of her native land.”

Lucilla, Pontycroft—Pontycroft, Lucilla! How far away they seemed.... Their names stirred her heart as she pronounced them. But even so—was not this best? The present Miss Adgate in a short skirt, a blue, soft felt hat, tip-tilted over her eyes, a stick in her hand, her thoughts for all society; Miss Adgate with this hardy New England nature for background,—Ruth Adgate taking a solitary walk upon her own land, with the feeling that good will and satisfaction smiled at her because of her presence there, was not this the Real person who had found her true niche in the world?

“How singular,” she reflected. “The transformation has taken place overnight. It is almost as though I had been here forever! And to-day I feel as though I had a destiny—as though Fate had something up her sleeve here for me. I've begun like one of Henry Harland's heroines and I'm convinced that whatever the Powers are preparing for me—I shall accept it here,—just as I accept all this—gratefully, gaily, without demur.”

Ruth glanced at the violet hills and the guileless meadows and a thrill passed through her. She jumped up, a white hand held to shade her face.

“Basta! I've rested long enough, the sun here is too hot,” said Miss Adgate. “I think I'll discover what lies beyond, in the heart of that wood there,” and off she started, blushing at her emotion.

A company of crows in a distant field caw-cawed, querulously, at her. Their raucous voices fitted the rough woodland, the vigorous autumn smells, the haze of the mellow golden morning. She came again to the little brown brook gurgling quietly over its bed of brown stones and leaves and the fancy took her to follow its course. Wet feet were of no consequence, determined to see all of her possessions Ruth skirted its purling side and discovered presently that here the brook, lifted from the earth by hand of artifice, was confined to a long, shallow, wooden aqueduct, an aqueduct open to the air and to the tracery of boughs above and to blue skies reflected in the water. Through this conduit the little brook bubbled and bounded, clear as crystal; icy cold to the touch as she dipped her hand in and let the water run along her wrist.

“Ah,” thought the young lady, “this must be our famous spring!—I've reached the headquarters of the Nile or I'm very near them.” And through the trees in truth, she perceived, further on, a rough hut, built to protect the stream's source from inroads of man and beasts.

She sat herself on a fallen tree trunk, leaned back and gazed with half-closed eyelids into the network of branches—oaks, larches, birch, hazel, maple,—nearly bare of foliage. Here again, the ground, checkered with green moss-patches was interspersed with little plants, “which must be all a-flower in the spring,” thought Ruth and she vowed that when spring came she would return to pluck them.

Then—presto!... Without a note of warning—the agreeable independence of her mood vanished. Lucilla, Pontycroft!... Her mind, her heart, her very soul yearned for them. And a homesick longing for the finished, for the humanly beautiful, the artistically beautiful,—an intense craving and desire for a familiar European face—smote her.

“But,——-” she puzzled, “would they, those I want most to see, could they endure this wilderness? No—not Lucilla! Not Lucilla with her love of luxury and her disdain of short skirts.” She laughed. “Pontycroft? Perhaps,” her heart fluttered. She knew he doted upon old, formal gardens, well-clipped lawns; had delight in the glorious army of letters and of art,—that he found in the society too, of princes, entertainment. Still, it might be possible.... He would, at all events, have some whimsical thing to say about it all. She began to fancy that she heard his voice.

“If he were here,” Ruth told herself, “I should ask him to interpret the horrid vision I had last night.” Ruth shivered as she recalled it; rapidly she began an imaginary conversation.

“I was lying in the big, carved, four-post family bedstead in my bedroom,” Ruth informed him. “I was half asleep and half awake and I saw myself coming up the steps into the house just as I did when I arrived. As I came, the house door opened, quickly, from within, and four people rushed towards me, with open arms. One was my father.—He clasped me tenderly and said: 'Welcome, welcome home!'... Behind him, a tall, large, old man clasped me in his arms and he cried: 'Welcome, welcome home!' Then came another and with the same words bade me welcome; I felt very happy, and so glad that I had come! But running down the stairs of the house arrived a tiny, meagre, old lady, whose corkscrew curls bobbed at either side her face. She cried: 'Welcome, welcome!' in a shrill, high voice, seizing me in her embrace. 'Welcome!' she cried again, 'but look out!—We can bite!' And as she said it her two sharp white teeth went through my lips till I screamed with pain and started up—all a-tremble—and then I fell back onto the bed and shook for an hour.”

“My sweet child!” the sane amused voice of Pontycroft made reply. “These old four-post family bedsteads are dangerous affairs to sleep in. Quant-À-moi, I've always avoided 'em.... I'll have nothing whatever to do with them. If my great-aunt, from whom I inherited Pontycroft, had not been of my way o' thinking I should have sold those at Pontycroft to the old furniture dealer in the village. Fortunately, that fearless lady lifted the obloquy of the act from my shoulders by disposing of them herself. One day, while my uncle, her husband, scoured the high seas under Nelson, she got rid of all the old family four-posters. When he returned from the war and asked what had become of 'em she acknowledged she'd discovered a preference for bronze beds and had sent to France for a dozen. But he was far too thankful to be at home again. 'Peace now, at any price,' said he. And he never mentioned four-posters to his lady-wife again, but slept and snored contentedly, for forty odd years, in a red-gold, steel enamelled affair, free of family traditions. You'd better follow my aunt's example, Ruth. Send to Boston for a nice new white enamelled bedstead with a nice new wire mattress and let no more family ghosts worry your ingenuous small head.”

“But, what did it mean? After all, it happened, or I'm mad,” Ruth laughing, heard herself insist.

“Oh,” said Pontycroft,—he gave her one of his droll glances—“if you want your midnight vision interpreted you must ask some older sage, even, than I, to do it. I should say, were it not too obvious to be true, that apple pie with an under crust....”

“Nonsense,” interrupted Ruth.

“The sort invented by your French ancestress, Priscilla Mulline Alden (I've heard she was a rare cordon bleu)” went on Pontycroft, unperturbed, “together with New England brown bread—but—that's all too obvious to be true... what are you laughing at?” he queried, artlessly.

“I'm laughing at the Brown Bread,” retorted Ruth, and she laughed aloud, “there wasn't any.”

“There should have been,” said Ponty, with a deprecating lift of the eyebrows. “It's de rigueur with baked beans.”

“But your little story,” he continued, lighting his cigarette, “belongs probably to those mysterious reflex actions of ancestry acting on a sensitive nervous organisation. You can't expect me to explain them. See, though, that you do look out. Don't, manifestly, offend your ancestors and they won't offend you, and there's my interpretation.”

Again Ruth laughed aloud, gleefully, at the tones of Ponty's voice and again a little thrill of pain and hope pierced her breast. She looked at her watch. It was almost noon and she turned towards home through the glade, by the path along the brook.

VI

But the adventure of her walk had not come to an end yet.

The path widened into a grass-grown road. The day was so hot she regretted she hadn't brought her sunshade, but she walked with light buoyant steps, unreflecting,—amused by the antics of two blue, belated butterflies who, not perished with the summer, convinced it had come back a little, danced ahead of her chasing the shadows; they fluttered to the right and to the left, and came at last to rest upon a withered mullen stalk a few yards in advance of her. Ruth watched them while they sought greedily, making a rapid tour of the dried stem, for some lone flower upon which to replenish their hungry attenuated little stomachs. She almost held her breath, as she paused to watch the quest and she wished she might, by a wave of her stick, restore fresh succulence to the weeds, when—

“Halt, stop!” cried a voice.

Instinctively, Ruth shrank back.

“There's a snake ahead of you—there—just across the path. Don't move!” cried the voice.

Miss Adgate stood perfectly still. She saw a man run by her; she heard the sharp report of a gun. The smell of gunpowder filled her nostrils and the terror of the sudden cry made her feel sick.

“There he is!” cried the owner of the voice.

An excited young man presented upon the muzzle of his gun a viscous two feet of snake, an object that limply resembled the straight, flat limb of a tree. “A copperhead. 'Tis the only deadly dangerous beast in these harmless woods. As I'm alive, if you had put your foot on him you would, indeed, have found him deadly.”

He extended the flabby thing for Ruth's inspection, but the young lady looked away—her arm instinctively went out to clutch at something.

“No cause for fright, Miss Adgate,” said the young chap. He proffered a hand to steady her. “I'm afraid I gave you a terrible scare,” he added, apologetic, and he looked at her with concern, “but that was better than the bite. You're quite white; sit down a moment. You'll soon feel better.”

Ruth covered her face with her hands.

“Thank God!” she said, with an involuntary shudder, but she did not sit down.

“Are there many of those creatures in the woods?” she asked, but she felt ashamed of her weakness.

“No, especially not at this time of year. The warm sun brought this one out. You should never walk about here in low shoes, though, Miss Adgate.”

“You know my name,” Ruth said, surprised.

“I take it for granted you're General Adgate's niece, having a walk through your woods. The whole town knows you arrived last night,” answered the young man, with a bow, smiling at her.

His smile was pleasant, he looked at her with friendly interest. In shabby tweeds and a pair of leggings, a game-bag slung over his shoulder, he was evidently out for a day's shooting.

“Don't think I'm a trespasser, though I can't show you my permit. But your uncle and I are old friends,” he vouchsafed. “I'm privileged, I must tell you, to shoot here when I like. In fact, I rather fancy the quail you sat down to at supper last night was the product of my game-bag.”

It occurred to Ruth that this remark came somehow with bad taste—the speaker's eyes shone, however, with so kindly a light she hadn't the heart to resent it.

“You are a marvellous shot,” was all she said.

“I served under your uncle in the Cuban War,” the young man told her. “We had sharp fighting then, Miss Adgate. But we're well drilled, here in Oldbridge—not a man jack of us but can pick an ace on a playing card at fifty paces. That's all due to your uncle who supervises the rifle-practice at the Armoury, to say nothing of coaching us in military tactics, which he's past master in.”

“Ah!” said Ruth, interested. “I supposed he was the most peaceable of retired military men.”

“Peaceable and retired if you like. But in times of peace, prepare for war.... The way we are made to answer up to call on drill nights would cause your blood to freeze, Miss Adgate.”

“Ma chÉ! I thought I'd come to a quiet, sleepy New England town where all was love and peace! The day after I arrive I learn I am in a hotbed of militarism,” laughed Ruth.

“You're right,” the young man replied seriously, striding beside her. “General Adgate, you see, has been through two wars. He received his brevet of General in the war between the North and the South. He realises the importance of preparing for emergencies, now that we've taken our place among the nations. He's a splendid chap. Not one of us but would walk or fight our way to death for him.... And it's always been so. Why, they tell this story when he was just a Captain, in the War of Secession. The enemy was pouring bomb and shell into his entrenchments. He ordered his soldiers on their bellies, and in the midst of the cannonading up he got, stood,—coolly lighting a cigarette: 'Now, my men,' said he, 'rush for them!' The men rose in a body, leapt the entrenchments, fell upon the enemy. Of course the enemy was routed! we captured and brought back guns and ammunition with cheers to camp. Then it was, I believe, he was breveted General Adgate.”

Ruth had a shiver of pride as she listened. “But now,” continued her informant, “worse luck, in these cowardly moneyed times, there's no fun to be got out of war! You stand up, of course, to be slaughtered wholesale. Now—the best shot has little hope of bringing down his man—there's nothing to practise on but quail and partridge in the old General's woods.”

“And snakes,” put in Ruth, laughing.

“Snakes,” repeated the young fellow, with a merry laugh. “Thrice blessed copperheads!” went his mental reservation,—so quickly is youth inflamed in America. “But a bounty's on every one of these wretches, Miss Adgate,” he said aloud (and Ruth, fortunately, perhaps, was not a mind reader.) “They've almost disappeared. Truth is, like the rest of us, this one came out to welcome you, poor devil, and he's met with a sad end! Since the new law a snake may not look at a lady.”

They had reached, as they strolled, the foot of the Adgate hill. As they neared the gate the young man paused.

“I must bid you good-bye,” said he, lifting his hat, “it's long past noon,—almost your luncheon hour.”

“Oh,” Ruth suggested, “since you and my uncle are friends won't you come in to us for lunch? You shall go back to your shooting, your rescuing of damsels, when we've refreshed you. I dare say there's some of that quail left,” she added, with an occult smile.

“Miss Adgate,”—the young man visibly struggled with temptation.... “Miss Adgate,” he looked into the pretty flushed face and he felt himself smitten to the heart's core. “That's very good of you; I'm afraid, though, you don't know our New England customs. You've a hospitable, beautiful English habit, but you've not been here long enough to know that we don't ask folk unexpected-like to lunch; not unless they're blood relatives or bosom friends. Tradition, ceremony, convention forbid it and a gorgon more awful still. Her name is—Maria-Jane!”

“Oh!...” Ruth laughed. “But she's paid for that! It is part of her duty....”

“Ah, dear Miss Adgate, you won't find it easy. Love won't buy them, money won't purchase them, though I dare say,—you'll have a way with you will make them see black white. But if you risk asking me, I won't, and for your sake—accept—though I'm horribly tempted to. Besides, think of it, tradition, ceremony, convention.”

Ruth felt herself getting angry. Here was a youth she didn't care twopence for, who had done her more than a civility, but who presumed to instruct her in a provincial code of manners. She would show him she was mistress of her household—then be done with him.

“What ceremony, what convention?” she demanded coldly.

“Oh,” the young man replied undaunted, “no one wants his neighbour to know he sits down to a joint, a couple of vegetables and apple pie for his midday meal. We make such a lot of fuss here when we ask people to eat with us.”

“But that's precisely the staple of every one's luncheon in England, from Commoner to Lord,” cried Ruth. “No one makes a secret of it—it's called the children's dinner. Whatever frills may be added, there or here, the joint, the vegetables and the pudding, which amounts to the pie, are invariably present and the most patronised. I assure you it's the luncheon every one ought to eat. And now,” she commanded, “open the gate and shut it behind you, and be satisfied to partake of our vegetables, our joint and our pudding without further ado.”

“I accept,” said the delighted young fellow. “But if General Adgate turns me out-o'-doors, I shall bend to the New England custom I was brought up in and not hold you responsible for my discomfiture.”

They ascended the hill, over the softest, greenest turf; they went under the apple trees despoiled of apples,—passed through the rustic gate, and entered the garden. To the youth, the garden was all fragrant of blossoms which must have burst into flower over night. Such delusive things have a trick of happening, in New England, to an old garden, to welcome the desired person, and Ruth, though she didn't suspect it, had already become the desired person in the eyes of her victim. The syringa tree under which they went spread for them a miraculous white canopy; the white pinks threw forth aromatic scents which penetrated by the door into the house as Ruth brought her companion to General Adgate, seated before a rousing wood fire reading his newspapers in the drawing-room.

VII

Miss Adgate preceded her companion.

“Uncle,” she boldly proclaimed, “I've brought a friend of yours to luncheon.” General Adgate looked up from his book. “Why—Rutherford! glad to see you,” he said, shaking hands none too cordially. “So,” he smiled as he pushed a chair forward for Ruth, “my niece waylaid you, did she?”

“No,” Ruth told him. “I was waylaid by a serpent in our woods. Mr. Rutherford happened by at the right moment to rescue me.” Then Ruth went to the ancient gilt mirror above the fireplace and withdrew the pins from her hat and rang for Paolina.

“So you saved the lady's life,” General Adgate chuckled. “Well done, Rutherford, my son—a plausible opening to the story to please the matter-of-fact public. As though the public were matter-of-fact!—Nothing is really improbable enough for the public, provided life's in the telling. We're ready to swallow the most unconscionable lies! But though you've lost no time in making the opening ordinary, Rutherford, we shall see what may be done to reward you.”

“Oh,” objected Rutherford, with happy laughter,—“you of all men should know it—the service of Beauty brings its own reward to those lucky enough to serve it?”

“Lunch is served, Miss,” announced Martha patly, putting her head in at the door.

“Oh, a plate, please, Martha, for this gentleman,” said Ruth.

A shade (was it a look of displeasure?) crept into Martha's face; the reply came meekly. “Yes, Miss,” she answered—and disappeared.

Miss Adgate threw a gay glance at Rutherford, he returned it with one he meant to make eloquent of his admiration. But Ruth was saying, in that ravishing voice of hers: “Shall we go in?” She swept by him into the low-ceilinged, white-panelled dining-room with an air of dignity in her slim, young figure which Rutherford thought suited it to perfection.

VIII

Poor old Rutherford is fond of recalling that memorable luncheon to this day. Ruth's joyous soul frothed into fun which sounded at times so exactly like Pontycroft that he seemed to be at her elbow. For a reason not hard to seek, to sophisticated minds, General Adgate, too, seemed in high spirits. Rutherford—well—we know what infatuated young men are—excellent company because they laugh at a word, could applaud the dullest saw. Neither Ruth nor General Adgate spoke in saws; by a saw we mean the easy pert phrase, la phrase toute faite which passes so readily for wit in any land. General Adgate was an accomplished raconteur. He could tell a story with an economy of language, a grace worthy the subtlest story-writers; the point, unexpected when it came, brought the house down. Ruth listened—astonished, and led him on. Rutherford's haww-hawws, more appreciative than musical, provided the essential base to the trio.

When lunch was over Ruth ordered coffee to be served in the drawing-room. “You're a daring creature! I've never had the courage to ask Martha to do that,” objected General Adgate.

“But don't you always have coffee after luncheon?” she asked.

“Yes, but I must e'en drink it where it's brought to me, at table.”

“Poor dear! You see the advantage of having a woman by who fears nothing.”

“I see the advantage of having a fair niece to minister to my poor human wants,” gallantly responded the General. “And to make life extremely worth while, hey Rutherford?”

“Miss Adgate is an adorable hostess. If I don't envy you as her uncle, General, it is because I find her perfect as Lady of Barracks Hill,” said Rutherford. He said it with a flush and with the fear upon him that he had said too much.

But Martha just then had entered bearing the coffee; Ruth, indicating the Japanese tea-table, took no notice of his speech. The table, the shining silver Georgian service on its silver tray were placed before her.

“Where did you get this old service, Uncle?” Ruth asked as she lifted the elongated, graceful coffee-pot by its ebony handle and began to pour the coffee.

“Martha must have unearthed that from the cupboard upstairs,” answered her uncle. “The salver has been put away for years. It belonged to your great-grandmother. But how did they manage to give it such a polish?”

“Miss Adgate's maid helped me, sir,” Martha vouchsafed in her primmest voice. “We tried that new powder. It took no time at all.”

She left the room with her chin up as who should say: “We know the proper thing to do, when there's someone at hand who knows we ought to know it.”

“Well!” exclaimed Rutherford, confounded.

“Ruth's a mistress as gives satisfaction,” General Adgate laughed softly while Martha's footsteps receded towards the kitchen. “I believe, Rutherford, we'll be having our afternoon tea here yet, in the British fashion.”

“Ma, da vero! come si fa?” cried Ruth, lapsing into Italian in her surprise, “don't you always have afternoon tea?”

“We have tea, Miss Adgate,” Rutherford answered merrily, “tea with cold meat, stewed fruit and cake at six o'clock. Not a minute later, mind you. Martha and Bridget have something better to do than to be serving even you all day. By seven of the clock one is off with one's young man or running over to mother's.... You need not inquire at what hour we get back, we have the latch-key, and your breakfast's generally served on time.” Ruth cast a wild look at General Adgate.

He bowed his diminished head: “I'm afraid it's true,” he murmured.

“Is it—a—universal habit,—in Oldbridge?” asked Ruth, her eyes dancing.

“It has to be the universal habit,” answered Rutherford. “We simply can't help ourselves. We could get no one at all to wait upon us if we didn't conform to it. The—the—and the—are the only people in town who are known to have late dinners and that's because, hopelessly Europeanised, they don't care what they pay their girls, and keep a butler. Even they are obliged to dine at seven;—besides,” laughed Rutherford, “late dinners ain't 'ealthy!”

“After all,” said Ruth, thoughtfully, “the custom is primitive, not to say Puritan; I think it suits Oldbridge. Our forefathers had to do with less service I suppose. And as you say, late dinners ain't 'ealthy. But Paolina shall give us our afternoon tea, at four, Uncle. It will make her feel at home to serve it to us. But aren't you famished for some music? I want to try the Steinway. This morning when I came down I raised the lid and saw the name.”

She rose from her corner of the sofa and seated herself at the piano. Oft have I travelled in those Realms of Gold... Presently she had started her two companions, travelling, journeying in those Realms of Gold which Chopin opens to the least of musicians. Chopin's austerity of perfect beauty wrought in a sad sincerity,—entered the New England drawing-room. To General Adgate's ears the music seemed to lend voice at last,—give expression, at last,—to holy, self-repressed, patient lives,—lives of the dead and the gone—particles of whose spirit still clung, perhaps, to the panelled walls, pervaded, perhaps, the air of the old room. To Ruth, this incomplete New England world, which something more than herself and less than herself was, for the nonce, infatuated with, possessed by,—which yet, to certain of her perceptions,—revealed itself as a milieu approaching to semi-barbarism, Oldbridge, melted away. At her own magic touch, Italian landscapes, rich in dreams, rich in love, abundant; decked forth in fair realities, intellectual joys,—complete and vibrant of absolute beauty, harmonious, suggestive,—rose, took shape before her.

“I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls, among pink fragrant oleanders,” she repeated, smiling to her thoughts as she played and forgot the present.

Rutherford, Rutherford,—oh,—of course—Rutherford found in those heavenly chords and melodies what every lover finds in Chopin.

Ruth turned around upon her piano stool.

“Have you had enough?” she asked, smiling.

“Enough?” exclaimed the lovesick youth. “I, for one could never have enough.”

“Toujours perdrix!” said Ruth and lifted up a warning finger.

“Play us something else, child,” said her uncle in a matter-of-fact tone intended to disperse sentimentality. “Let us hear your Russians and a little Schubert.”

And so Ruth played the Valse Lente from the Fifth Tschaikowsky Symphony and the famous Rachmaninoff which, I believe, everybody plays, and finished at last with the Fourth Fugue of the immortal Bach.

“There!” she exclaimed, “I'm tired.”

“And so am I,” said the transcriber, laying down the pen.

IX

Young Rutherford bounded from his chair. The tall clock in the hall, as though loth to mark the passage of Time,—Time,—who had been its friend for something more than a hundred and fifty years,—the steadfast old clock began to mark three very slow, slow notes.

“Miss Adgate, forgive me! I suppose I ought to go, you should be left to rest!” he held out his hand. “I've never known any pleasure comparable to this afternoon's. May I come again? The whole of Oldbridge shall envy me to-day,—I'm too vain not to tell them where I've lunched. Good-bye, goodbye,” he repeated. He gave Ruth a furtive glance and flushed, very red.

“Good-bye, Rutherford,” said General Adgate. He smiled indulgence to the young man who still malingered. “We'll see you to-night,” he reassured him, with a nod. “Ruth, you're to make yourself splendid tonight. I'm to take you to dine at the Wetherbys. They are giving a dinner party in your honour, for knowing you were not ridden yet with engagements I accepted for you. There will be some sort of a reception afterwards—you'd call it At Home wouldn't you? Everyone's coming. Everybody wants to meet Miss Adgate.” He laughed, as though well pleased.

“I believe he's proud of me,” thought Miss Adgate, gratefully.

The door at last closed on Rutherford. Niece and uncle stood together in the hall, where the voice of the family time-piece, its brass face marking the phases of the sun and moon, underlined the pervading stillness of the house with an austere, admonitative, solemn “tick-tack!”

“Ruth,” said her uncle abruptly, “why did you come to America?”

“Why?—To see you, of course,” Ruth said, her tone one of innocent surprise, but she felt a little guilty catch at her heart.

“Oh,—me!” her uncle said. “You young witch, you never crossed the seas to look at an old man. It was as much my business to cross them to look after you. Come,” said he, with a look of raillery, “there was some precipitating cause. You came in a hurry. Something happened—for you might have put your journey off for another year. Something occurred, to induce you—to come—in a hurry.”

Ruth hesitated. She gave a light laugh—then she looked away. “Shall I really tell you?” she asked.

“The sooner you tell me,” said the old General, “the better,—for then we'll understand one another.”

“I left Europe,”—Ruth said, embarrassed, “because—because—I wanted to see—my uncle—and have a look at my ancestral acres!” she still prevaricated, yet dimpling with amusement.

“Your ancestral acres!”—repeated her uncle, sceptically. “Well?” he encouraged.

“Oh—well—because,—if you must have another reason still, well—because—well—I felt sore.”

“Why?” said General Adgate.

“Why?” said Ruth with a persistent and feminine reluctance to reveal her real self, speak her true reasons: “Uncle,—I wish—you wouldn't ask me!”

“Out with it,” said her uncle.

“Bertram, Crown Prince of Altronde, wanted me to marry him morganatically. I felt outraged, though they told me it would be a legal marriage. Harry Pontycroft and Lucilla sympathised with my disgust and packed me off. And—that is why.”

The old man looked grave. “Damned European whelps,” he muttered. “No wonder your Puritan ancestors shook that dust from their souls. You did well,” he said, patting Ruth on the back.

X

Ruth went upstairs without another word. The upper hall was lined with bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. “I must add a library to this dear place,” she said to herself while she sought for a book. She was tired,—she wanted to lie down, she wanted to wash from her mind the impressions of the day; she felt completely fagged.

General Adgate came upstairs behind her while she was peering along the shelves of calf-bound books. The shelves seemed to hold only a monotonous row on row of histories and works of philosophy.

“Take this,” he said as he passed her, and, pausing, he removed a book from an upper shelf and handed it to her.

This was a volume of Governor Bradford's History of New England.

“But,” Ruth weakly objected, “I wanted a novel!”

“You'll find that more interesting than any novel,” General Adgate threw over his shoulder as he proceeded on to his own apartments.

O Reflex Egotism! Ruth found the book more interesting than any novel.

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