LATER, engaged in repairing a shelf—at a super-union scale—for his mother, he heard the steam shriek of a calliope announcing the parade. From a window he could see the thronged sidewalks, the crudely fantastic figures of the clowns, enveloped in a dusty haze of light. His thoughts withdrew from that vapid spectacle to the rapt contemplation of Eliza Dreen. He pictured Eliza and himself in the dramatic situations which diversified the moving pictures of his nightly attendance: he rescued her from the wiles of Mexicans, counts, weirdly-wicked Hindoos; now he dragged her from the chimney into which she had been bricked by a Brotherhood of Blood; now, driving a monoplane above the hurtling express that bore her toward a fiendish revenge, he descended to halt the train at a river's brink while the bridge sank dynamited into the swirling stream—“Mercy, Tony!” his mother's practical voice rent the resplendent vision; “don't crush your greatuncle's epaulets.”

After the midday meal a minute review of the places where Eliza might be found discovered the Ellerton Country Club to hold the greatest possibility. Anthony was a virtual stranger to that focus of the newer Ellerton; except for the older enthusiasts who played golf every afternoon that it was humanly possible to remain outside it was the stronghold of the species Anthony had encountered in the dressing room at the Dreens' dance. The space at the back of the drugstore where he had lounged held unbroken the elder tradition of Ellerton. There he had cultivated a mild contempt for the studied urbanity, the formally organized converse and games, of the Club. But as a setting for Eliza it gained a compelling attraction. And, in his freshly-ironed flannels, he ordered his steps toward that goal. The Club House overhung the rolling green of the golf links; from a place of vantage he saw that Eliza was not on the veranda; at one end a group of young men were drinking—teal Beyond his father and three companions, followed by caddies, rose above a hill. His father grasped a club and bent over the turf; the club described a short arc, the ball flashed whitely through the air, and the group trotted eagerly forward, mingling explanation, chagrin and prediction with heated and simple sums in arithmetic.

Then he saw Eliza... she was on the tennis court, playing with a vigorous girl with a bare and stalwart forearm. He divined that the latter was winning, and conceived a sweeping distaste for her flushed, perspiring countenance and thickset ankles. “How beautiful you look!” Eliza called, as he propped himself against the wire netting that, overrun with honeysuckle, enclosed the courts. He watched her fleeting form, heard her breathless exclamations, with warm stirs of delight. When her opponent played the ball beyond her reach his dislike for that efficiency became an obsession. The flying shadows lengthened on the rolled, yellow surface of the court; the group on the porch emptied their teacups and moved away; and the final set of games won by the “beefsteak.”

Eliza slipped into a formless chocolate-colored coat: racket in hand she smiled at him. “I'm rather done,” she admitted. She hesitated, then: “I wonder—are you doing anything?—if you would drive me home?” He assured her upon that point with a celerity that wrought a momentary confusion upon them. “The Meadowbrook and roan at the sheds,” she directed. In the basketlike cart they swung easily over the road toward Hydrangea House. Checked relentlessly into a walk the roan stepped in a dainty fume.

Eliza's countenance was as tenderly hued as the pearly haze that overlay the far hills; faint, mauve shadows deepened the blueness of her eyes; her mouth, slightly parted, held the fragile pink of coral; a tinge of weariness upon her bore an infinite appeal—her relaxed, drooping body filled him with a gusty longing to put his arms about her shoulders and hold her secure against all fatigue, against the assaults of time itself.

He had never before driven such an impatient and hasty animal; at the slightest slackening of the reins the horse broke into a sharp trot; and, beyond doubt, he could walk faster than any other brute alive. Already they were at the entrance to the driveway; the house appeared to hurry forward to intercept them. Eliza pressed a button, and a man crossed the grass to the roan's head. They descended, and she lingered on the steps with a murmur of gratitude. “Mrs. Dreen telephoned Ranke to meet the eight-forty,” a servant in the doorway replied to Eliza's query; “she's having dinner in town with Mr. Dreen.”

Eliza turned with a gesture of appeal. “Save me from a solitary pudding,” she petitioned Anthony; “you can go back with Ranke.... On the porch, such fun—father detests candles.” The voicing of his acceptance he felt to be an absurd formality. “Then if you can amuse yourself,” she announced, “I'll vanish for a little... cigars in the library and victrola in the hall.”

He crossed the sod to the porch on the other face of the house, and sat watching the day fade from the valley below. A violet blur of smoke overhung the chimney of the Ellerton Waterworks, printed thinly on the sky. A sense of detachment from that familiar scene enveloped him—the base ball field, the defunct garage, places and details, customary, normal, retreated into the distance, it seemed into the past, gathering upon the horizon of his thoughts as the roofs of Ellerton huddled beyond the hills, vanishing into shadows that inexorably deepened, blotted out the old aspects, stilled the accustomed voices, sounds.

A servant appeared, and placed a table upon the tiles, spreading a blanched cloth, gleaming crystal and silver. A low bowl of shadowy wood violets was ranged in the centre, and hooded candles lighted, spilling over the table, the flowers, a pale, auriferous pool of light in the purpling dusk. When Eliza followed, in filmy white, she seemed half materialized from the haunting vision of poignant beauty at the back of his brain. She was like moonlight, still and yet disturbing, veiled in illusion, in strange, ethereal influences that set athrill within him emotions immaterial, potent, snowy longing, for which he had no name.

The last plate removed, Anthony stirred his coffee in a state of dreamy happiness. The candlelight spread a wan gold veil over Eliza's delicate countenance, it slid over the pearls about her slim throat, and fell upon her fragile wrists. “It's been wonderful,” he pronounced solemnly.

“I've been terribly rude,” she told him, “I have hardly spoken. I have been busy studying you.”

“There's not much to study,” he disclaimed; “Mrs. Bosbyshell thinks I'm marked for failure.” In reply to her demand he gave a brief and diffident account of that eccentric old woman. “But,” Eliza discerned among the meagre details, “she trusts you, she lets you into her house. And you are perfect to her, of course.

“Any one could trust you, I think. Yet you are not a particle tiresome; most trustworthy people are so—so unexciting. But monotony is far as possible from your vicinity. What did you do, for instance, this morning?” He described to her the advent of the circus, the labor in the obscurity. “I was surprised to see the old thing up,” he ended: “it seemed so hopeless at first.”

“How wonderfully poetic!” she cried.

Until that moment poetry had occupied in his thoughts a place analogous to tea.—In his brief passage through the last school he had been forcibly fed with Gray's Elegy, discovering it unmitigated and sickening rot. When now, in view of her obvious pleasure, he would have to reconsider his judgment.

“That blind effort,” she continued, leaning forward, flushed with the warmth of her image, “all those men struggling, building in the dark, unable to see what they were accomplishing, or what part the others had. And then—oh! don't you see!—the great, snowy tent in the morning sun—a figure of the success, the reward, of all labor, all living.”

“How about the ones that loafed—didn't pull, or were drunk?”

“For all,” she insisted, “sober and drunk and shrinking. Can you think that any supreme judgment would be cheaply material, or in need of any of our penny abilities? do you suppose the supreme beauty has no standard higher than those practical minds that hold out heaven as a sort of reward for washed faces? Anthony,” it was the first time she had called him that, and it rang in his brain in a long peal of rapture, “if there isn't a heaven for every one, there isn't any at all. You, singing an idle song, must be as valuable as the greatest apostle to any supreme love, or else it isn't supreme, it isn't love.”

“You are so wonderfully good,” he muttered, “that you think every one else is good too.”

“But I'm hardly a bit good,” she assured him, “and I wouldn't be good if I could—in the Christian kind of way.” She gazed about with an affectation of secretiveness, then leaned across her coffee cup. “It would bore me horribly,” she confided, “that 'other cheek' thing; I'm not a grain humble; and I spend a criminal amount of money on my clothes. I have even put a patch upon my cheek to be a gin and stumbling-block to a young man.”

She had!

He surveyed with absurd pleasure that minute black crescent on the pale rose of her countenance. If she had been good before she was adorable now: her confession had drawn her out of the transplendid cloud where he had elevated her down to his side; she was infinitely more desirable, more warmly and delightfully human.

“I have been asking about you,” she told him later, with a slight frown; “the accounts are, well—various. I don't mind your—your friends of the stables, Anthony; they are, what Ellerton will never learn, the careless choice of a born aristocrat; I don't care a Tecla pearl whether you are 'a steady young man' or not. And one doesn't hear a whisper of meanness about you anywhere. But I have an exaggerated affection for things that are beautiful, I suppose it's a weakness, really, and ugly people or surroundings, harsh voices even, terrify me. The thought of cruelty makes me cold. And, since you will come into my thoughts, and smile your funny little smile at me out of walls and other impossible places, I should like to picture you, not in pool rooms, but on the hills that you know so well. I should like to think of your mind echoing with the rush of those streams, the hunting of those owls, you told me about, and not sounding with coarse and silly and brutal words and ideas.”

“It echoes with you,” he replied, “and you are more beautiful than hills and streams.”

For a moment she held his gaze full in the blue depths of her vision; then, with a troubled smile, evaded it. “I'm a patched jade,” she announced.

Ranke, the servant informed them, was ready to meet the train.

“You're going... Elbe's affair on the Wingohocking?”

“Absolutely.” She stood illusive against the saffron blur of the candles, the sweeping hem of night.

“I'll remember,” he blundered; “whatever you would wish... you have changed everything. The dinner was—I don't remember what it was,” he confessed; “but I remember an olive.”

He left the automobile at the edge of Ellerton, and proceeded on foot, passing the dully-shinning bulk of the circus tent. He heard the brassy dissonance of the band within, the monotonous thud of horses' hoofs on the tanbark; a raucous voice rose at the entrance to the side-show dwelling unctuously on the monstrosities to be viewed within for the price of a dime, of a dime, a dime. He recalled the spent lioness in her painted cage, the haggard and sick hyena, the abject trot of the wolves to nowhere.—A sudden exhalation of hatred swept over him for the hideous inhumanity of circuses and men. Eliza had lifted him from the meaningless babble of trivial and hard voices into a high and immaculate region of shining space and quietude. He didn't want to come down again, he protested, to this.

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