MISS ADGATE accepted the Bolingbrokes' invitation. She spent six weeks of gaiety in Washington. Indeed it was refreshing to live in the world again, to mix with people of the world; to have cogent reasons for dressing exquisitely every night for dinner, to be taken in to dinner by a facetious attachÉ, by, even, a complacent, redundant railway magnate; or, happy compromise, by a Member of the Cabinet, for it is well known that a Cabinet Minister may be amusing. Through the interchange of frivolities and banter one could rise, not to more important matters,—is anything much more important to the world than the light touch and a witty conversation? But Miss Adgate found refreshment in living again among people whose thoughts were sometimes occupied by questions impersonal, of more or less consequence to the world's history.

Someone possessed of a grain of humour has assured us that the “World is a good old Chum.”

Miss Adgate found the world at Washington a very good old chum during those six weeks. “In all but the aesthetic sense,” she reflected, “America is an interesting land to live in.” Plentiful wherever she went, tittle-tattle, supplemented by her own observations, helped her to form an idea of how this unwieldy bulk of a nation calling itself The United States of America was being rescued from fatuous chaos, a mass of political corruption and a superfluity of wealth, and lifted into an arrogant, resolute Power. But a Power whose outlook was as far removed from the simple hardy traditions of Puritan America as Earth is from Heaven.

An oligarchy of able men,—a handful,—chosen, directed, inspired by a man yet abler, more audacious than they,—these were moulding, had already changed the destiny, the policy of the United States.

Miss Adgate recognised the efforts of the Man at the Helm. He had followed a fixed idea, and the idea was the Greater Glory of his Country; he had secured with his henchmen indisputable prestige to the Nation, and, thanks to his star, his tenacity, his temerity, America,—feared to-day if not honoured, was powerful. But not alas approved of! “Damn approval!” (the worm will turn,—the watchword passed through the land). “We are ourselves.”

The “ourselves” went very far. This at least was the modest, unexpressed opinion of Miss Adgate,—it was shared, apparently, by the Man at the Helm. He lectured the Nation like a father. The Nation knowing itself to be unwholesome, inchoate, something ruthless, listened meekly.

“But,” Ruth reflected from the vantage of a calm and sympathetic observation: “So many religions, no Faith! Where every man, in disobedience to Christ, chooses to be his own Pope. Yet the Holy Father has dedicated America to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.... But the very elements in America, so violent and so ferocious,—the burning Summers, the cruel Winters, the appalling cataclysms of Nature, if these are reproduced in the violent characters of the people, inclined to rape and rapine on a big or a little scale—at what end, left to its own devices, will the American character issue? Will it,” she wondered, “become, inflated with power, the great Master Robber of the World? Or will it perish utterly, hoist by its own petard?”

“Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Convertere ad Dominum Deum.”... Mournful and tender, in the melodious, yearning, touching accents of Tenebrae, the phrase filled her ears.

“No man at the Helm,” she sorrowfully said to herself, “shall save us for more than his few years of tenure. The race cries for direction, a sane outlet to its emotions. The sole influence which holds anarchy at bay is Holy Mother Church, wise men tell us. Yes, the Divine Authority!.. The sweet miracle of the Catholic Faith may save our people from ending as a nation of brutes; may open to us the gates of Humility and show to us the road to the 'Greater Glory of God.'”

And then, Miss Adgate woke with a start from her musings. She shook her pretty head. She returned to the practice of light banter and witty causerie, the only efficacious methods within reach, she reflected, of furthering the millennium her fancy painted for her native land.

II

“My little dear Ruth,” Lucilla wrote, “we're coming on the most important mission to America. Namely, to see you. Yes, and haven't I a bagful of news for your Royal Highness!

“We sail by the Cedric on the fifteenth of April, Harry can't leave until then. To confess the truth, he is in Altronde. Civillo,—of course you've seen it by the papers,—Civillo is gone to a greater Principality, Bertram is King.

“I want to see you—oh! And Ruth, I burn with curiosity to look on that New England of yours. Harry, I'm convinced, is prepared to settle there. He says, so pathetically, that at his time of life he feels the need of planting cabbages and that the Upper Gardener at Pontycroft gives notice when he tries to. He's heard that in New England gardeners are kind, don't mind a bit; they just let you plant, right down; are affable; make you settle right down and become one of 'em. But Harry says, too, he pines at first hand to solve the inwardness of a land destined to dominate us all.

“Ruth, between you and me, in confidence, if America is to be the future of Europe—well—then I'm glad I shall be dead.

“But between you and me, my dear, what Henry Pontycroft wants is not so much to plant cabbages neither is it to study politics... What he truly-truly wants is a glimpse of the Young Person. He's missed you! Ah! I have news. Your devoted, Lucilla.”

Over this flippant missive Ruth grew hot, then cold, then faint. And she sat, for a long moment in a state of emotional upheaval, of senseless vacuity—the while her head whirled and her heart went thump, thump, thump! It was an entire quarter of an hour before this commotion subsided, and left her with soft flutterings at her throat.

“They're coming, they're coming, they're coming! He's coming... I shall hear his voice, I shall see him. Oh, what has happened? Is it possible that he's free? Oh, my God, my God, help me to wait,” she cried. She began to cry and to sob like a little child. She craved, wanted, longed for, unendurably, overwhelmingly, that he should take her in his arms, caress and fondle her, and, like a veritable little girl pat her cheek and soothe her, let her unburden her woes, let her lie, her head in his breast, while he said to her, “There, little child, there, don't cry.” And it was in Pontycroft's voice that the words fell upon her ears, and it was on Harry Pontycroft's breast that she dried her eyes. And they were Pontycroft's eyes into which her eyes smiled, when, presently, mocking him through her tears, but in oh, such heaven of bliss! she repeated the trite refrain of the tritest, the most foolish of Ballads.

“In God's hands!” said Ruth; she dried her eyes. “Like everything else....”

She put her hat and jacket on and went for a walk. When she reached the house an hour later, she had found her peace, and though her eyes were singularly bright and her manner curiously vivacious, this contributed the more to her success of the evening at the Bolingbrokes'.

“Ruth—” Mrs. Bolingbroke rushed at her, enfolded her in an impetuous hug, “you're delicious! Stay in Washington. Stay in Washington for ever—”

“Come to Barracks Hill with me,” answered the young lady. “I must be flitting almost at once.”

“No, no, no....” protested Mrs. Bolingbroke. But it was peaceably arranged at last that the Bolingbrokes, having a congÉ at Easter, should come, then, to Barracks Hill.

And so, on the fifteenth day of March, Ruth bade farewell to Washington and travelled back to Oldbridge.

III

One long month and one entire week to wait. If Time was interminable, Miss Adgate resolved to make Time bear fruit. She took herself in hand. She tried to quell the little tremors of joy which kept welling up in her throat when she thought of the end of those five weeks.

“They'll probably not come. They'll change their minds. If they do come—it's more than likely some nonsense of Lucilla's!... Well.... Besides I've other businesses to attend to,” the lady said with a most determined air.

As the least profitless way of passing those interminable days, Ruth set herself to the task of enhancing the natural beauties of Barracks Hill. She caused paths to be cut through the woods; she enlarged the flower gardens; she prepared the Morris House for her June visitors. As to the library and the music-room they had long since been ready for occupation. And in the interim of labour Miss Adgate gave a series of children's parties, calling Jackie Enderfield to her assistance. Her invitations vested in that young gentleman's hands, he became cock-of-the-walk among the girls and boys of Oldbridge and Rutherford was thus kept at bay. Yet notwithstanding these spartan derivatives, Ruth walked on clouds, smiling at love.

“She breathes roses and lilies,” Miss Deborah Massington declared with enthusiasm.

Eighty, thereabout, Miss Deborah was sister to Mrs. Leffingwell and her junior by ten years.

“She has charm,” Mrs. Leffingwell answered, discreetly, while they watched Ruth's erect young buoyant figure disappear beyond the lindens. “She makes one feel that everything's all right—better to come. I wonder...”

Ruth liked an hour spent in these ladies' bow-window; gay and fragrant window, all vivid of sunshine, filled with blossoming geranium and heliotrope. While she entertained them with tales of Italy, which they could never hear enough about, Ruth Adgate reflected that the lives of her grandmothers must have been just such quiet, such repressed, contented lives as these.

Mrs. Leffingwell and Miss Massington, types of New England's most exquisite product—the old lady. The old lady who, with all her gentle unworldliness, is a patrician to her finger tips. As the perfume of rose-leaves is preserved in a fine porcelain jar—so the hushed fragrance of these temperate lives emanates, yet stays, to the end. White, ethereal, peaceful—and pictorially the replicas of Whistler's mother, these two ladies were waited upon by a black servant, whose gorgeous head-gear was the red, blue, and yellow bandanna. Each lady had her window in the low-ceilinged, white-panelled drawing-room; each was clad in good black silk; on each white head a cap reposed of fine Honiton lace—and their gowns were finished with a transparent lace collar and cuffs. Both ladies were slightly deaf; both were omnivorous readers, both were eager listeners; both had the sense of humour; and both were indulgent amused lookers-on at the small games of life which they were no longer privileged to take part in; and if gracious patience be a virtue these ladies may well be considered beautiful products of a fast vanishing Puritan tradition.

Easter fell on the twenty-third of April. The Bolingbrokes arrived at Barracks Hill the day before Easter, but on the morning of their arrival came a disastrous piece of news. Almost the whole of Ruth's fortune had been swept out of existence overnight in one of those cataclysmic melodramas which melodramatic Nature loves to enact in the United States. On Good Friday, the twenty-first of April, nineteen hundred and eight, the town of Wyoming was annihilated by a tornado. The merry monster chose the small hours before midnight, when, giving rein to his pranksome cubfulness, he swept men, women, children into Eternity with hardly a warning.... The mines—they formed the raison d'Être of the town—caved in, flooded by a water spout. The entire district was reduced to desolation.

Seated at breakfast, in the crispest of white morning confections, Ruth became informed of this and of her losses through the medium of the Oldbridge Morning Herald, whose items she was reading aloud, a concession, to her uncle.

General Adgate, far more than his lovely niece, was affected by the news. Had he not enjoyed vicariously the sense of her wealth? It had tickled his fancy as well as his family pride to see her squander with a lavish hand, without so much as a thought of the value of money. It had pleased his sense of the incongruous that notwithstanding the obvious joy she took in opening her fingers, in letting the gold slide through them, she had acquiesced in, nay adopted, many of the Spartan habits of New England; New England—which has never been purse-proud because she has never, until lately, had very much money in her purse. Ruth, indeed, had all she could do to cheer General Adgate.

“If all is lost, save honour,” she consoled, “I have still some investments in England by the mercy of which I shall not be poverty stricken. I've as much as three thousand safe pounds a year coming from there, you old darling,” she cooed. “Harry Pontycroft invested it for me long ago. That ought to be enough for any woman with economical tastes,” she assured him. “And I've a lot in the bank,—Heaven knows how much! I've never spent anything like my income for I had nothing which seemed worth spending it upon,—since, ugh!—I detest automobiles, and you know it. We can still keep open house this summer and never trouble.”

Of a truth, Miss Adgate experienced relief,—why?—she did not try to fathom—at the thought of her diminished fortunes. She might, possibly, this blithe adventuress, or had she not been expecting guests, she might, even, have tried to persuade General Adgate to lead her to the scene of the disaster. I doubt, though, if she would have succeeded.

A fat cheque went instead by the Red Cross Society to the relief of the sufferers. And lo! the diminishing days were dwindled to a pinpoint.

IV

When Mrs. Bolingbroke heard that Henry Pontycroft and Lucilla Dor were on the sea, bound for America, she could not contain herself.

“Good gracious, Ruth, what are they comin' for?” she exclaimed, wide-eyed, gazing at Ruth.

“Don't know,” said Ruth, putting her nose into a bowlful of fresh roses from Rutherford's hot-houses. “Oddly enough, to see me, perhaps?” she added, laughing, and she made an effort to look her friend squarely and jocosely in the face.

“Richard,” said Mrs. Bolingbroke penetratedly to her husband, “Ruth Adgate is either the most consummate actress or the most innocent dove the good God has ever, in His ability, wrought from the dust of which we are made. If the Pontycrofts are on the sea it's for some extraordinary reason. Ruth either suspects that reason, or she doesn't. But she looked at me with those clear guileless eyes of hers, when she mentioned their coming, and I, for one, can imagine any man telling her he'd burn Troy Town for such a glance. Yet there's that Mr. Rutherford—crazily in love with her, I'm told,—a splendid match as Americans go. She could marry him and his money to-morrow if she liked. And since she's so daft about New England, she could send him into politics and have quite a life. It will be interesting to see how the Pontycrofts will act when they find the sources of her income are swept away.”

“That's not a proper remark for you to make, my dear,” replied the Honourable Richard Bolingbroke, in a tone of unexpected severity. “Henry Pontycroft's a sensitive, quixotic, high-minded, honourable English gentleman. He's rich, moreover. Money plays no part in his coming. Lady Dor I've known since I was a boy. She was a delightful girl, just as now she's a charming woman. They'll be admirable additions to the house party, and that's all that concerns you or me. Pontycroft will keep us in roars of laughter and I'm curious to meet him in New England. You may be sure he'll like this wonderful old place. He'll feel all the arid romance of this aristocratic passionate bleak land. Who knows? He may be the Prince come to wake it, humanise it, with a kiss. Oldbridge will not have looked upon his like—it won't have heard anything to compare with him, either, in its three hundred years of existence; never will again; I hope it may make the best of its opportunity to give him a royal welcome.”

“I feel crushed,” pouted Mrs. Bolingbroke. “How should I, who've never met Henry Pontycroft—know he's the paragon of wit and chivalry?”

“That's precisely what Henry Pontycroft is,” her husband answered gravely, “He is the paragon of wit and chivalry!”

These young folk were pacing side by side in the moonlit garden after the excellent New England repast, called supper; while Miss Adgate and her uncle were busy with callers, upon the veranda. The night was the first of a long series of warm May nights, the moon hung, majestic and round, over the fringes of wood termed the Wigwam. A rustic bench stood invitingly under the big syringa, now a perfumed canopy of white. As they stood on the upper terrace it was easy to distinguish descending terraces marked by rows of silvery budding irises swollen or in bloom.... The magic smells of white and purple lilac were touched with a whiff of apple blossoms from the hill and beyond—below—the Mantic gleamed in the moonlight amid trees all a feathery, spring incrustation of minute green foliage.

“This is a divine spot,” said Bolingbroke, suddenly kissing his wife, “but we must rejoin the others.”

Lucilla Dor and Harry Pontycroft arrived the following day and were installed in the Morris House at the other side of the hill, where two neat Irish girls waited upon them under the enlightening, tempered instruction of Pontycroft's man and of Lucilla's maid.

V

Spring was abroad in her witchery. She had come with a rush, with a good will, with an—abundance, 'and all of a sudden-like'—as she has, after many days of dallying, a way of doing in New England. She had been coy; she had flirted; she had tantalised—a day here, a day there—with dewy warmth of soft blue skies, her robes diaphanous April cloud. Then she had veiled her face, vexed for one knew not what offences,—had turned her coldest shoulder, shed her most frigid tears. She had looked forth, wreathed again in smiles, while she put wonder-working fingers to shrubs and branches... and again she had withdrawn herself in deepest greyest dudgeon.

But now, she was come, come. The birds were building and calling and fluttering, in all the emotion, the refreshing joy of an ever-renewed bridalhood. A young male wren who had discovered a bird-house, fixed on the off-chance of so happy an event as to entice him there—by Jobias, to the top of a rustic pole in the rose garden—tore his throat open in the rapture of telling the world what a place for a nest he had found, and how sweet she was.

“Shameless uxorious creature,” Ponty said, as he came over the hill and paused to listen to him.

Unaccountably enough, Ruth, as he came into the garden, Ruth issued from the house dressed in white; dressed in white, without a hat, a watteau sunshade in her hand.

“Good morning, my pretty maid,” said Pontycroft, “you're not going a-milking in that costume, are you?” He eyed her sharply with the quizzical glint she knew well.

“Good morning,” Ruth answered, in perfect composure. Yet at the anticipation of seeing Pontycroft alone, she had many times felt the earth quake under her,—“I'm going to call upon Lucilla,” she vouchsafed.

“Oh, Lucilla's knocked up. I came with a message from her. She wants me to say she's had her breakfast in bed and won't rise until luncheon. Lucilla's tired from the journey. You two women must have talked yourselves weary, if a mere man may judge of such matter. Oh, the hour at which I caught sight of Paolina conducting you over the hill last night!” said Ponty.

“It was a beautiful moonlit night,” said Ruth, inhaling the morning air with delight, “and so,—why not?”

“Why not, indeed,” he agreed. “What a surprise it was, though, to find the Bolingbrokes here. He's a decent chap.”

“Yes, I like them very much,” Ruth said, absently.

“And your uncle,” Ponty proceeded, “I like him very much,” he paraphrased. “We held an uproarious pow-wow in the library, the three of us, last night, while you women discussed chiffons in the music-room. By-the-bye, that was rather a nice thing that somebody played,” and Ponty hummed the first bars of the Valse Lente. “You were the musician, I suspect.”

“I suppose so,” Ruth said, negligently. They were standing beside the flight of stone steps which leads from the rose-garden to the hill.

“Where are the Bolingbrokes?” enquired Pontycroft.

“Gone for the day, with the Wetherbys, on their yacht. It's a party of twelve and they expect to come back by moonlight.”

“And why, pray, were not the rest of us included?” he asked.

Ruth began to laugh. “They did include the rest of us,” she answered. “What is the use of beating about the bush in this fashion? You've something to tell me, I hear. Say it.” And leaving Pontycroft to consider her suggestion Ruth ran up the steps and fled lightly over the carpet woven of white saxifrage and violets thickly strewn among the turf, to the bench under the big oak at the summit of the hill. Here she sat herself, opened her blush-rose sunshade and defiantly watched Pontycroft stroll towards her.

He followed. He stood, deliberating before her for a moment. Then, bending a knee:

“Your Royal Highness, will your Royal Highness accept the Crown of Altronde from the hands of the King's unworthy Ambassador?” he asked.

Ruth caught her breath.

“What do you mean?” she queried, in a most violent disappointment of surprise.

“Your gracious Majesty,” answered Pontycroft, “I mean,—that I am come all the way from Europe and from a certain small but not-to-be-sneezed-at Principality called Altronde in order to ask you to wear with King Bertram, the ermine and the purple.... If we must put it bluntly, the King implores you to share his throne, his heart and his crown.”

“Oh,” Ruth said, “how very absurd.”

“Not at all absurd,” said Pontycroft; he still knelt, one knee to earth.

“And he looks every inch Ambassador and not in the least ridiculous,” Ruth thought smiling to herself, “in this superlatively ridiculous posture.”

“The Queen Mama is more than anxious to welcome you with wide-open arms,” continued Pontycroft.

“Ah?” Ruth slightly raised her eyebrows.

“Yes. It's true she kicked a bit,” said Ponty. He got to his feet and with his handkerchief flapped a straw or two from his knee. “But Bertram made a devil of a row; there was no standing it she explained to me with tears in her eyes. The Queen Mama has had to capitulate, and Bertram's counting these very moments as ever are, pining to hear you have accepted him. I'm to go de ce pas to the telegraph office and wire 'yes'—so soon as you've made your haughty little mind up that you'll have him.”

“Ah,” Ruth said. “It is very interesting——”

But suddenly she felt her heart leap into her throat. She trembled, yet she spoke resolutely. “Harry,” she said, “Harry—you've told me something startling and—not very important. But why don't you tell me that the woman who wrote the letter—is dead?”

An unaccountable stillness fell for an instant over the landscape. Ruth left her bench under the oak and walked off, walked away to where the rocks come cropping up along the brow of the hill. The panorama spread before her was one of fresh, palely verdant meadows and woods; the Mantic, turbulent from spring freshets, was bordered with trees in the early paleness of their green leaves; the green frail rondures of the Wigwam foliage in delicate and varied shades,—these were dappled with sunlight and blue sky. A far panoply of purple hills, marking the borderland, shutting away the boisterous outer world as by a charmed circle, enclosed the small, the joyous world of the little inland town, the valley and the seven hills of Oldbridge.

Pontycroft approached mechanically, slowly. He stood by Ruth's side, he looked off with her at this exquisite efflorescence of spring in the new world.

“It's a beautiful view,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, “Europe could scarcely do better.... And so Lucilla told you?” he queried, carelessly. “Put not thy trust in woman. She vowed by her most sacred vows she'd never say a word until I told her to.”

“I dare say I wormed it out of her,” Ruth replied, laughing, and,—it was too apparent,—she was laughing at him.

“I don't quite gather what it is that makes you so merry this morning,” said Pontycroft; “unless it is this heavenly Spring day, and that's enough for twenty hopes and fears to rap and knock and enter in our souls.... But please do recollect that while you loiter, considering the indisputably lovely landscape, there's a chap in Altronde waiting—impatient's no word for it—for a wire. Kindly give your attention to the Royal Incident, the real question of actuality, for a moment, and let me be off as soon as possible to the Post Office.”

“Long ago, I seem to remember,” Ruth said, slowly, “long ago, I seem to hear myself saying in a garden in Florence, that the Royal Incident was closed. It is closed. I haven't changed my mind, on the contrary. If you must of your will leave my hill at this perfect hour and—and be sending messages to the other side of the world—then, you needs must! But—pray remember your own favourite saw, that 'opportunity comes once in a lifetime.' Jobias goes home at noon, can't he take your message? If Prince, I beg his pardon, King,—if Bertram has to live in suspense for a few hours, let that be my little revenge. 'If it feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge,'” laughed Ruth.

Having given expression to this heartless sentiment, she began to tread, cautiously, among the flowers—the saxifrage, the violets, the little green-golden buttercups between,—her light steps responding with love to what she was pleased to think was their caress. From the plain and from the woods mounted gentle homely sounds, the hautbois of the New England Spring—the blows of a distant axe, the felling of trees, a carpenter's hammer taptapping,—and children's cries resounding as they romped at play; all mounted together, in a joyous choiring, with birds' songs and twitterings which fell about them from every tree far and near; the earth, the sky—musical, alive with carols and thanksgiving.

“I bring a garland for your head of flowers fresh and fair,” Ruth hummed, pacing a little ahead of Pontycroft, and her foot rhythmically touched ground at each stress of the song.

“'I had, once, a double double grandmother,' my friend Jack Enderfield is fond of saying,” said Ruth, as she continued her walk to the measure of the verse. “A great, great, so great Meregrand! She was French. Her name was Priscilla. Priscilla Mulline. She's rather a person in New England History—you'll forgive my mentioning her. When the man she cared for came, as emissary from the man she didn't care for, to ask her to marry him—do you remember what she answered?” Ruth kept her eyes fixed upon the tips of her toes, and they, like little mice, little white mice, went in and out, below the flounces of her gown.

Pontycroft gasped,—took a step towards her. But his lean and bony face, which for a moment had betrayed him, assumed again the look of disillusion.

“Oh,” he rejoined, “the foolish girl made hash of her future, perpetrated a mot which, no doubt, she lived to repent. A mot which one of your American poets has quite suitably recorded. By it, Miss Priscilla Mulline lost her chance of making a very good match. She lost her golden opportunity. She cut off her chances of having a jolly good time in a big, jolly world.”

“You're abominable,” Ruth said, and permitted herself two actions very much at variance,—she stamped her foot and she smiled obliquely at the object of her wrath. “You're abominable. I want you to tell me what she answered.”

“Oh, you've forgotten it?” said he. “I've well-nigh forgotten it myself.... I believe, though, she did ask the chap Alden why the deuce (pardon the expletive) he didn't speak for himself. Am I right?”

“Well, why didn't he?” enquired Ruth, impatiently.

“Because he was a duffer, I suppose,” said Ponty, with a fine effect of ending the discussion. “But now, my dear young one, be serious. Here's your chance....” Pontycroft's voice became argumentative. “I've crossed the ocean to lay a crown at your feet. A crown from which you may get considerable fun and splendour. Bertram's rich, you're rich. You are, both of you, handsome, virtuous, clever, and at the mating age. You can make of your little Principality, your Kingdom, the centre of the enlightenment and art of Europe. Find me a philosopher, an artist, or a man of wit who doesn't appreciate a King! Under your wise encouragement Art, at last, will come into her own.... Oh, think of the poor devils of hangers-on of Genius you'll be able to lift from Purgatories of obscurity into the light!”

“You've made one trifling mistake,” interrupted Ruth; “there's something I have not told you, an element you must omit from the equation of that Castle in Altronde you are building for me. I'm not rich.... The Town of Wyoming, let me tell you, is no more. My millions, and a good thing too—have collapsed. They've shrunken to the few thousands you invested, ages ago, do you remember? in British Consols? On them I shall run this dear old place,—I shall dress, modestly——”

“Ruth, Ruth, Ruth!” interrupted Pontycroft, aghast.

“Yes, it all occurred about a week ago while you were at sea, and that, I suppose, is why you didn't hear of it. These accidents, here in America, happen so often. Marconi didn't find the item of sufficient importance, I dare say, to give it a place.”

“Well.... Here's a kettle of fish! Whew!” whistled Pontycroft. “You young limb of mischief, why didn't you tell me? Ouf” cried he, with a great pant of relief. “Ouf,—poor Bertram! He has no luck.” They had been sauntering, backwards and forward, over a grassy road which runs up hill and down dale through the green-sward planted with apple trees. Pontycroft leaned, now, against a tree. He gazed at Ruth without a word. A rosy-tipped cluster of apple blossoms nodded just above his head. He reached up, plucked it; and offered it to the lady with the crimson sunshade who stood in the sunlight before him.

“'Oh, Fairy Godmother! Feel my heart,'” Ruth whispered, under her breath. “I should like to show you my Riviera,” she said hastily, reddening under his gaze, and she stuck the apple blossoms into her belt.

Ruth skirted the grey rocks which crop above the brow of the hill to the left. She led Pontycroft down a green bank to a patch of brighter green nestling for quite a distance under the shelter of the overhanging cliffs. Here were eglantine, here were violets in profusion; Solomon's seal, red and purple columbine; and the purple liverwort, and a shower of those frail white wind-flowers called anemones, although in no wise do they resemble their European cousins. Young ferns, pale green fronds, sprang vigorously from the clefts in the rocks, juniper and barberry bushes and a savin lent here and there a hardy note and an added shelter to the scattering of spring blossoms.

“It's so exclusive here,” laughed Ruth, taking a lichen-covered seat formed in the grey stone. “These canny flowers have discovered the place for themselves after the habit of the land.... Sit down,” she invited him. She crossed her hands in her lap, she looked towards him; a mischievous light glanced bewitchingly in her dark eyes.

“Dear child,” Pontycroft began—he was trying, very hard, to resume his paternal air.

“Please don't 'dear child' me any more—I haven't brought you here for that,” petulantly cried Ruth. “I won't have you for a father and I've already got an uncle, and I don't think you'd make, for me, a satisfactory brother.”

“Miss Adgate,” said Pontycroft, he possessed himself of one of her hands, and examining it carefully (it was, as we know a very white hand with slim and rosy fingers), “Miss Adgate, I have a proposition to make to you. Since my schemes, since all my weary plottings and plannings for a Royal End for you, do, it seems, gang aft agley,—though, and mark my words, Bertram is no stickler for lucre; but since they've been knocked flat on the head by a blow of chance, let me suggest that we make a fresh start, let us consider a new alliance for you.

“Here,” he said—he laid a large bony hand tightly, as though afraid of its escape, over the little hand he held in his,—“here is a novel, international situation, a situation, free, thank goodness, of any blessed complications. Shall you and I,”—he lifted the hand to his lips again, he touched his lips tenderly to each finger-tip, and Ruth looked on—“shall you and I get married? Shall we run this dear place together? Shall we love it, live in it? I had dreamed, for you, infant, of a royal end. What will you? Heaven mercifully disposes.... But I had dreamed for you a Royal End!”

“I do not like being proposed to in this manner,” said Ruth, rounding upon him with a smiling face.

“Oh, my dear, blessed angel little Ruth!” cried Pontycroft, letting himself go. “Ruth... Hopelessly, hopelessly, denied me—found at last. Little Lady Precious Ruth! Ruth whom I love, Ruth whom I dote on—Ruth whom I've worshipped ever since she was a toddling child in her father's house... Ruth!” Miss Adgate could feel the beating of Pontycroft's heart as she stayed against his side.

“Shall we live here together?” he asked presently. “You—you—of course you love this old place! I love it because you do. And Thou, singing beside me in the Wilderness! It needs us, doesn't it? This peaceful Wilderness, this New England Garden of Eden!”

“Eden, from which William Rutherford has killed the snake,” laughed Ruth blinking a crystal tear that rolled down her cheek.

“Rutherford?” Pontycroft frowned, “who is William Rutherford?”

“Oh, nobody. No one in particular,” Ruth hastened to reply. “A mere mighty hunter before the Lord.” And Pontycroft did not pursue the subject of William Rutherford.

“But,” said Ruth a trifle anxiously, in a moment, “we must go abroad from time to time? We could never forsake Pontycroft.

“Oh, hang Pontycroft. Lucilla shall have it for her kids.”

“I want it for mine,” said Ruth. Then she looked away and blushed crimson—and then she laughed.

“What is the motto, Harry, of your house?” she queried, irrelevantly. “I've forgotten.”

“It once was,” Pontycroft said, and he smiled at her: “Super mare, super fluvia.”

“Once?” said Ruth, a little shyly, “once? And now?”

“Constantia, now, henceforth,” he whispered with a throbbing of the heart.... “But will your uncle be pleased at all this?” he enquired.

“My uncle?” said Ruth, waking from a reverie. “Oh—he would have liked me to marry Rutherford, I imagine. But if you're awfully nice to him, and if you let him see how infatuated you are with Barracks Hill—he'll end, I know, by giving me and you his blessing. But I won't give up England—and I want Italy, too,—Venice, Rome!” wilfully persisted Ruth.

“You precious little piece of covetous cosmopolitanism! Haven't you learned that if in Heaven, may be, it is given us to be everywhere—in this life: One Paradise, one Eden? In this world one Eden shall suffice, for things learned on earth may or may not be practised in Heaven; but love is, ever was, the language of repetition. In this life the lesson is to be contented with a single Paradise.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Miss Adgate, laying her hand on Ponty's mouth. “Oh, middle-aged sentiment... not in the Catechism. Don't, I beg, say it again!”

He seized the hand, he pressed his lips to it, he pressed it against his breast.

“Even an infant like you,” he whispered, “let alone a world-worn chap like the man you propose to take as a husband, can't stand perpetual motion.”

“Very well,” Ruth compromised, “shall we alternate with a year in England, one here, one in Italy, Jobias and Paolina to pack for us. That will make it easy.”

“Ah,” laughed Pontycroft, “you shall see! The pendulum is bound to narrow its oscillations! We'll earn a well-needed rest,—here.”

“Oh me!” sighed Ruth, “ah me!” cried Ruth. “In that event how charmed our ancestors will be. But, I forgot! You haven't heard the story.” Ruth told it gaily and waited, curious to see what Harry Pontycroft would say.

“Dear young one, these old four-posters,” he began—“are the most dangerous things to sleep in,” and Ruth was seized with laughter.

“But I'll never sell them to the nearest dealer in old bric-a-brac. Rather,” she concluded, “we'll do as you advised, we'll take the greatest care not to offend our forbears. But——-” her forefinger went up impressively, “but a destiny was in preparation for us—I felt it, Harry, on the very day after I reached here. Harry, I felt, I knew, Destiny had something up her sleeve. The day I went for a walk alone,” said Ruth, with a serious air. “It is a delicious destiny... to be married in the little Parish church by that Saint of a Priest and to live here, 'forever afterwards'!” (with a malicious nod,) “with a break now and then to Europe.”

“Moreover and because journeys end in lovers' meeting, we'll probably have a June wedding,” Pontycroft unexpectedly suggested, wise in his generation.

“A June wedding!... I've built better than I knew,” exclaimed Ruth. “I've asked a house party of friends, friends of yours, Lucilla's and mine, to come here in June. Let them haste to the wedding—I'll have Jackie Enderfield for page and he shall carry my train.”

“Another admirer,” Ponty said resigned.

“The merest bit of a boy of twelve. Without him, without my uncle, these wits like as not had perished utterly. Jack when he's a man intends to marry a woman with a low voice and a red glint in her hair. He will turn Catholic with my consent and go abroad and write. He doesn't believe either in Divorce—in other words, you perceive he is an intellectual. But,” she said, rising, “we've forgotten—oh, we've forgotten to send that message by Jobias to poor King Bertram! We shall have to take it ourselves.”

Henry Pontycroft and Ruth descended the hill along the violet-sprinkled road.

“Ruth,” he urged, as they went their way, “for conscience sake, consider,—consider, little Ruth,” he said, “ah, consider.... It is not yet too late, infant, and I had dreamed for Ruth Adgate of a Royal End!”

“Ah,” Miss Adgate replied; a little happy sigh escaped from her lips; she looked down at the apple blossoms in her belt,—strange to say, the apple blossoms were fresh as though just plucked.

“Harry,” she replied, with a little quizzical look, “I, too, had dreamed for Ruth Adgate of a Royal End.... Both our dreams have come true! Love is the Royal End.”