---

The cottage had been vacant almost four months, an economic waste that cut deeply into Lavinia Trench’s pin-money. Not that David stinted her in the matter of funds. The purse strings had always lain loosely in David’s hands. But her penurious soul, bent on making the best possible showing of whatever resources came within her reach, rebelled at the insolent idleness of invested capital. Vine Cottage had been hers, to do with as she pleased, since the completion of the big Colonial mansion that housed the remnant of the Trench family. There were not half-a-dozen furnished residences to let in Springdale, and that this one should have been unoccupied since the middle of November was inexplicable.

“You haven’t half way tried to rent it,” the woman charged, her eyes shifting from her husband’s face to the cottage beyond the low stone wall, with its sullenly drawn blinds and its air of insensate content. Her glance rested appraisingly on the broad veranda, now banked with wet February snow; the little glass-enclosed breakfast room that had been her own conservatory, in the years gone by; the sturdy-throated chimney, that would never draw—but that none the less served as one of the important talking points of the cottage. An attractive set of gas logs did away with the danger of stale wood smoke in the library; but the chimney remained—moss-covered at the corners, near the ground, a hardy ampelopsis tracing a pattern of brown lace against its dull red bricks. There were eight rooms and a capacious attic. The furniture was excellent. There was a garage, too, with living quarters for the servants. In the year of grace, nineteen hundred and nine, there were not many residences in Springdale with garages.

“I heard at church, Sunday, that Mrs. Marksley is looking for a house. You know, Vine, their place on Grant Drive is for sale—against the building of the new house in Marksley’s Addition. Do you want me to—”

“Mrs. Marksley! Humph!” Lavinia’s black eyes snapped. It would be to her liking to have the wife of the richest man in town as her tenant. Still ... the situation had its disadvantages, not the least of which was that they would be moving out again in a few months, and the same old problem to be faced afresh.

“Do as you like about speaking to Mr. Marksley. But remember, David, I don’t recommend it.”

“It’s your house, my dear. You blamed me for offering the place to Sylvia when she was married. I told you, last fall, I’d have nothing more to do with it.”

He bent to kiss her, a kiss that was part of the compulsory daily routine, and hurriedly left the house. Lavinia turned his words over in her mind, and her gorge rose. David was always that way. You could never make him shoulder responsibility. True, she had wanted Sylvia next door, where she could watch over her daughter’s blundering beginnings at housekeeping. And anyone would say it was an honour to have Professor Penrose in the family—even if his salary was small. But another lessee—with the boon of a commercial position in Detroit at four times the amount he received from the little denominational college in Springdale—would have been held to the strict interpretation of the lease. David would not hear of Oliver and Sylvia paying rent for a house they did not occupy, a sentiment promptly seconded by his daughter. Sylvia never failed to perceive her own advantage—a fact at once gratifying and maddening to her mother. What if David had been like that? What if.... She always put David aside. Why bother about the inevitable?

II

Mr. Trench did not go at once to the office of Trench & Son, architects and general building contractors. It was important to his domestic peace that some definite step be taken towards the renting of the cottage. He would stop, he thought, at the office of the Argus, and insert a three-time advertisement. He could bring the matter up with Henry Marksley, for whom he always had some construction work on hand. But second thought deterred him. It might be disastrous to have young Hal Marksley next door, if only for a few months. Hal was a senior in the Presbyterian college. His recent attentions to Eileen Trench, just approaching her sixteenth birthday, had been disquieting to her father, none the less because of her mother’s unconcealed approval.

Eileen was impressionable. A youth of Hal Marksley’s—David searched his mind for the word. Disposition? He was more than amiable. Principles? Not quite that, either. In short, there was nothing he could urge against the young man that had not been set at naught by Eileen’s mother. Money had lifted the Marksleys above the restrictions imposed upon common people. Their life had been unconventional, at times positively scandalous. Eileen’s iconoclastic spirit would grasp at anything to justify her revolt against the conventional trammels of her home, the puritanical regulations which served Lavinia in lieu of religion. There was enough friction in that quarter already.

As he passed the college campus, with its motley group of buildings—dingy red brick of forty years’ standing, and the impudent modernity of Bedford stone with trimmings of terra cotta and Carthage marble—he caught sight of Dr. Schubert’s mud-bespattered buggy. The grey mare, these ten years a stranger to the restraining tether, nosed contentedly in the snow for the succulent sprigs that were already making their appearance among the exposed roots of the huge old elms. From the opposite side of the street the family physician waved a driving glove.

“Wait a minute, David.” He made his way cautiously through the ooze of the crudely paved avenue. “I was on my way out to your house. Stopped to look in on a pneumonia that kept me up nearly all night. Does Mrs. Trench still want to rent the cottage? Or is it true that Sylvia and Penrose are coming back?”

“They are well pleased with Detroit. And my wife is most anxious for a tenant. You know, Doctor, she draws the line on children and dogs.”

“We ought to be able to close a very satisfactory deal. My old friend, Griffith Ramsay, spent the night with us. He’s out here from New York—some legal business connected with the mines at Olive Hill, for a client of his, a Mrs. Ascott. The lady is recently widowed, and in need of some kind of diversion. I had been telling him about my experiments, my need for a competent assistant in the laboratory, and he arrived at the conclusion that these two needs would neutralize each other. Mrs. Ascott, having a large financial stake in the mines, would be interested in the possibility of increasing the value of soft coal. The more he though about it, the greater his enthusiasm. The one thing in the way, he thought, would be a suitable place for her to live. That was when Vine Cottage popped into my mind. I’ll send him around to the office to talk over the details of the lease with you.”

---

Mrs. Ascott had an early appointment with her attorney. An early appointment necessitated her catching the nine-fifteen train for the city. That, again, implied the disruption of the entire household regimen, and Judith Ascott had learned not to try her mother’s patience too far. She was the unpleasant note in an otherwise satisfactory family. True, her mother had stood by her through all the scandal and unpleasantness. But the changing of the breakfast hour was quite another matter.

As she slipped into the pantry of the big suburban home and set the coffee machine going, she turned over in her mind another reason for her care not to disturb the family slumber. She did not know why her attorney wished to see her—was not even sure which member of the firm would be awaiting her, that still March morning. The long-distance message conveyed the bare information that the business was urgent. Might there be another delay in the divorce? She had been assured that the decree would be in her hands by the end of the week; but gruff old Sanderson, the senior partner, was not so sure. Any reference to the “distasteful affair” threw her mother into a nervous chill. A note on the breakfast table, informing the family that she had caught the early express for a morning at the art gallery, would suffice as well as any other explanation.

All the way in, between the snow-decked New York fields and the dreary waste of the Sound, she dwelt moodily on the unpleasant possibilities of the coming interview. But when she emerged from the confusion of the Grand Central station, already in the turmoil of reconstruction, she thought only of the relative merits of the taxicab and the subway. She had schooled herself, in times of stress, to take refuge in irrelevant trifles. She had learned, too, that the more she worried before the ordeal the less occasion she found for worry when the actual conditions confronted her. In view of her sleepless night, she would probably find roses and Griff Ramsay instead of thorns and Donald Sanderson.

II

The attorney had thought it all out, had decided just how he was going to break the news. But when he found his client confronting him, across the unaccustomed barrier of his desk, his assurance forsook him.

“Judith, what are you going to do, now that you are free?”

“What am I going to do, Griff? That, as usual, depends on mamma. You know I have never planned anything—vital—in my life. When she lays too much stress on the ‘must’ I do the opposite. She says that I am going to sail with her and the boys on the fifth of April, a month from to-day. Ben is going on with his architecture at the Beaux Arts and Jack is wild about airplanes. Paris has hideous memories—but there’s no other place for me.”

“You are not going to Paris.”

The woman started. “No?”

“Not if you have the qualities I believe you have. Judith, may I for once talk cold unpleasant facts? You are twenty-seven years old and the life you have made for yourself is a failure.” Mrs. Ascott deprecated the finality of the word, but she let it pass. “Going to Paris would only be temporizing. Your mother’s influence has always been bad. You and your father are scarcely acquainted. Your brothers are too young to count. Laura and I have been your only intimates, since your return to New York. I need not remind you of our staunch friendship for you.”

“Griff—tell me what you have in mind. I promise not to cry out, if I do squirm a little.”

He told her of Springdale, the kindly old physician who had a theory that soft coal could be transformed, at the mines, into clean fuel and a whole retinue of valuable by-products—of his need for a secretary and laboratory assistant, to keep his records and assist him with experiments. He told her of Vine Cottage, its wide garden and fruit trees. “The house faces south. Get that solidly established in your mind,” he admonished. He knew how important it was for Judith Ascott to be properly oriented. Other details of the place he painted, graphic and engaging. She would take with her her old nurse, Nanny. For servants he had leased Jeff Dutton and wife, who occupied the rooms above the garage. As an afterthought he added that she would spend four mornings a week in Dr. Schubert’s laboratory. Her compensation—a large block of treasury stock in the corporation that would result from the evolving of a process for the cleansing of soft coal.

“Where is this Springdale—this Utopia? What has it to do with Sutton and Olive Hill, where the mines are located?”

“As little as possible. You’ll note that Springdale draws its virtuous white skirts away from those filthy towns, with an air so smug that it would disgust you if it were not so amusingly naÏve. It claims ten thousand inhabitants—when the census taker isn’t within hearing. There is a denominational college—co-ed, I believe—with a conservatory of music and a school of dramatic art. The President isn’t the lean sycophant in a shabby Prince Albert coat that you might expect. I met him—a singularly spruce-minded successor to that old Presbyterian war-horse, Thomas Henderson, who built the college out of Illinois dirt.”

“Sounds interesting, Griff. Is there any more?”

“Yes, ever so much. The college isn’t the whole show, by any means. At one end of the town is a Bible Institute and at the other an asylum for the feeble-minded. There is a manual training school for deaf-mutes and a sanitarium for drug fiends and booze fighters. On the whole, quite an intellectual centre. It is under no circumstances to be confused with Springfield, the capital of the state. You are sentenced to live there for a year. At the end of your term you may come back to New York—if you haven’t found yourself.”

“Only last night I was wishing that I could run away—somewhere—anywhere—to a place I had never heard of. Do you think I can do the work?”

“Oh, that part of it.... My only concern is for your mother. I’ll send Laura down to Pelham to help persuade her.”

Judith Ascott’s finely modelled shoulders came up in an almost imperceptible shrug. “Mamma will be so relieved. Don’t trouble Laura. I was only going to Paris because there was no convenient pigeonhole to stow me away ‘till wanted.’ Mamma, of course, hopes that I will marry. She wouldn’t want me tagging around after her, the rest of her life. You know that I am done with men.”“By-the-way,” Ramsay interrupted, “I led those people to suppose your husband was dead. It’s that kind of town. Not the old doctor, understand. His sympathy’s as wide as humanity. But your next-door neighbours—excellent people, though with small-town limitations. You’ll have to depend on them for such social life as your gregarious nature demands. How soon can you be ready to go west?”

“As soon as I can bring Nanny from Vermont. I ought to be on my way in a week.”

III

Later in the day, when she found herself alone in a quiet corner of the Metropolitan, Mrs. Ascott turned the preposterous proposition over in her mind. No doubt the Ramsays were as tired of her eternal flopping from one untenable situation to another as her own people were. In Springdale she would be safely off their hands ... at least until the sensation of her divorce had subsided. Would her late husband marry the nonchalant co-respondent? Would Herbert Faulkner, with whom she had all but eloped, while Raoul Ascott and the girl were in Egypt.... But she was not interested in Herbert Faulkner, and she cared not a straw whether Raoul married or pursued his butterfly career, free from the stimulating restrictions of domestic life. Was Griff afraid she would disturb the farcical relations of her late impassioned admirer and the stern-lipped woman who bore his name and made free with his check-book to further her aberrant social ambition? Was it for this that she had been banished to the coal fields of western Illinois—to save Maida Faulkner the annoyance of a divorce and consequent loss of income? Whatever the actuating motive, the thing was done. She had acquiesced without a murmur of protest. This was in keeping with her whole nondescript life. Nothing had been worth the effort of opposition. She had never known the stinging contact of human suffering. Oh, to burn her fingers with the flame of living! But Springdale—a hide-bound college town, where divorce is reckoned among the cardinal sins....

---

Lavinia stood in the sun-room, staring perplexedly across the lawn in the direction of Vine Cottage. She was trying to decide a ponderous question. To call on the new tenant ... or to wait the prescribed two weeks? David and the children felt that a neighbourly visit was already overdue. Probably, Larimore had said at breakfast, Mrs. Ascott knew nothing of the silly custom which prevailed in Springdale, and would think her landlady either hostile or rude. For once in her life Lavinia Trench was uncertain. The new tenant was a woman of the world. Ominous distinction. How could one gauge a neighbour who had crossed the ocean sixteen times and had lived in every European capital from London to Constantinople? She did not wear black. Incomprehensible for a widow. Likely as not, she held Springdale unworthy the display of her expensive weeds. Or perhaps she was saving them for some adequate occasion. Just going to Dr. Schubert’s laboratory to work ... one’s old clothes would serve for that. Besides, there were so many new fads about mourning. It might be that taupe was the correct thing. She would write and ask Sylvia about it.

Sylvia was the one member of the family whose opinion was accorded a meed of respect—now that she had gone to Detroit to live. It was too bad that she should have moved to another city, just when a woman who might have been of service to her had come to Springdale. It was always that way. Life offered the great desideratum—after the wish or need for it had gone by. Life, Lavinia Trench’s life, was an endless chain of disappointments. Of this there was no shadow of doubt. David and the children had heard the statement reiterated with such consistent regularity that they failed now to hear it at all—like the noise of the trolley cars on Sherman Avenue, behind the Trench home, that at first made such a deafening clatter.

“You seem to get everything you ask for,” her second son, Robert, had once reminded her. “That’s more than you can say for the rest of us.” Whereat she reeled off such a catalogue of woes that even Bob was silenced.

II

There was something abnormal about the Trench children. Nothing ever went right with them. Sylvia was the college beauty, an exact replica of her mother, and she had been forced in sheer desperation to marry, at twenty-four, the baldheaded professor of chemistry and physics, whom half the girls in town had refused. Larimore was a successful architect, had taken honours at Cornell; but he detested girls and boys. Had his nose in a book most of the time. He might have done things for his sister, if he had not been so steeped in his own morbid fancies. Bob would have brought eligible young men to the house, if he had been the next one in age to Sylvia. Mrs. Trench shuddered when she thought about Bob. It was the culminating tragedy of her badly ordered life.

A good many things made her shudder ... horrible patches of the past, that had been lived through, somehow. There were the first few years of her married life at Olive Hill, when David worked as a carpenter, and two babies invaded the three-room cottage before her second anniversary. She had not considered the possibility of children when, after an engagement lasting less than a month, she and David had been married. A little daughter—three weeks older than Ellen’s first child! Lavinia made it an occasion for rejoicing. Sent dainty announcements to Bromfield, tied with blue ribbon. But when, after fourteen months, a boy came, she began to question the leap she had made, that tempestuous October day.

The boy was called Larimore, in protest against the unmistakable lineaments of the Trenches that revealed themselves in his pathetic baby face. He was an anaemic child, given to wailing softly when in pain—a sharp contrast to Sylvia’s insistent screams. As he grew into boyhood he was quiet and studious, as David had been. Seldom gave his mother cause for anxiety, glutted her maternal pride with his achievements at school, and yet she never quite overcame the feeling that he was an interloper in her family. There were three years of immunity, and then came Robert, the child whom everybody else regarded as a stray. But Lavinia saw in his thick black hair and virile body the materialization of her contempt for David’s softness, as it had perpetuated itself in her first son.

There was nothing about Bob that was soft but his skin. And that was another Trench anomaly. Between Lary’s curling blond locks and Bob’s peach bloom complexion, Sylvia had a desperate time of it, before the period of adolescence when her own sallow cheeks began to clear. Those were the dim prehistoric days when, in Springdale, rouge and lip sticks carried all the sinister implication which had attached, in the Bromfield of Lavinia’s day, to the suggested idea that a “nice” girl wanted to marry. There was implicit in each the stigma of the wanton, and Lavinia had taught her children that, before all else, they must be respectable. Her own powder box was closely guarded, its existence denied with oaths that would have condemned a less righteous soul to perdition.

After David removed to Springdale, as junior member of the firm that had the contract for two new buildings on the college campus, and Vine Cottage had been erected beyond the residence district of the town, three other babies arrived—at perfectly decent intervals. They were all girls. Isabel, like Lary, was given an unequivocal Larimore name, because she was so exactly like her father. She was four years younger than Bob, and the death of these two made a strange break in the family continuity. Mrs. Ascott heard about the Trench children in a manner at once vivid and enlightening.

III

It was the ninth day of her tenancy at Vine Cottage, and she and Dr. Schubert were already old friends. With the exception of a reference to Eileen, whom the quality rather than the content of his allusion marked as his favourite, he had studiously avoided any comment on the Trenches that would serve to divert the free flow of her own sensitive perception. Larimore and Sydney Schubert were of about the same age—had been intimate friends from boyhood. Syd’s affection for Lary, at one period of his youth, had overflowed and engulfed Sylvia. But Mrs. Trench had set her face sternly against any such alliance. “The obstacle seems to have been that intangible thing, a discrepancy in age—on the wrong side of the ledger,” the physician explained. “There is one woman,” he stressed the first word extravagantly, his eyes twinkling, “who has the whole scheme of life crystallized. With most of us, certain problems remain fluid. Mrs. Trench knows. The eternal verities don’t admit of argument. My boy was only a medical student when he went mooning after Sylvia, but his prospects were good. If he had been born the day before—instead of lagging a stupid sixteen months after the girl—it would have been all right for her to wait ten years for him. As it was, he simply wouldn’t do. Mrs. Trench objected to Walter Marksley on entirely different grounds. Mrs. Trench is strong for the moral code, and Walter kept a fairly luxuriant crop of wild oats in his front yard.... But my dear, my dear, I’m developing the garrulity that is a sure harbinger of old age. Don’t let a word I’ve been saying serve to bias you in your estimate of your landlady. I assure you, she’s a trump.”

IV

Judith reflected, on the way home that morning, that if she wanted to get on with Mrs. Trench, she must guard her own questionable past with double zeal. It came to her, with a curious feeling of separation, that she might care what Mrs. Trench thought. The concept was a new one, and she inspected it with interest. But then ... she had been so desperately lonely, so remote from everything she had known in the past. And she was, as Griff Ramsay suggested, a gregarious animal—recognizing only in its absence her need of the herd. For the sake of Griff and Laura she would endure her exile to the end, and she was, it seemed, dependent on the morally austere woman in the great Colonial house for such human contact as Springdale might offer—human contact which for the first time in her life she craved with poignant longing.

Nanny met her at the door, her face red with laughter, her ample sides shaking. There had been a gravel fight between Jeff Dutton and one of the Trench children. It appeared to be one of the regular institutions of Vine Cottage.

“You must hurry with your luncheon, Miss Judith, so as not to miss the next round. The little girl was furious. She said Dutton muffed his play, and that was against the rules. She’s coming back to settle with him.”

Nanny had prepared an unusually tempting repast, in the tiny breakfast room that looked out, with many windows, on the stretch of lawn that separated the two houses, on the little wicket gate in the low stone wall, and the ample kitchen garden beyond the wall, brown and scarred with the first spring spading. The lonely woman viewed, with chill apprehension, the imposing faÇade of the house, the crisp white curtains that served, with their thin opacity, to conceal all the activity of the Trench home life. A sugar-coated sphinx, that house, guarding its secret soul with a subtle reticence that belied its seeming candour. Larimore Trench had drawn the plans for the new home. Was he that sort of man—or was this another expression of the ubiquitous Lavinia, whom Dutton had characterized as “running the hull ranch”?

There was a commotion in the hall that led from the kitchen to the breakfast room, and Nanny opened the door. She was plainly perplexed. Miss Judith was still a child to her, but she was too instinctively a servant to venture upon the prerogative of her mistress.

“You let me by,” a shrill voice piped. “I’m going to tell her, myself.”

The housekeeper yielded to a vicious pinch in the rotund cushion of her thigh, and a small parcel of humanity slid adroitly into Mrs. Ascott’s field of vision. Her head was set defiantly on one side, but the dark eyes were inscrutable. A moment only she faltered, tucking in her long under lip and shifting her slight bulk from one foot to the other.

“I broke a window in your garage. It was Jeff’s fault. He had no business ducking. How did he know I had a rock in that handful of gravel? Just gravel wouldn’t have broken the window. I’m willing to shoulder the blame, and pay for the glass out of my allowance—if you’ll make Jeff put it in. I can swipe that much putty from my papa’s shop. And—and don’t let Jeff Dutton snitch on me—to Lary.”

She finished with an excited gasp, and stood awaiting the inevitable.

“Come here, little girl. Don’t mind about the pane. Are you Eileen Trench?”

“Me? Mercy, no!” Astonishment dissolved into mirth, mirth that savoured of derision. The next instant the laugh died and the high forehead was puckered in a frown of swift displeasure. She came a step nearer, her thin brown hand plucking at her skirt. “I shouldn’t have laughed that way, as if you’d said something silly. It goes hard with me to say I’m sorry—because—usually I’m not. I hate lying, just to be polite. Eileen’ll take a lickin’ any day, before she’ll say she’s sorry. But Sylvia says it’s better to apologize and be done with it. And I guess it does save time.”

The ideas appeared chaotic, as if the child were in the throes of a mighty change in ethical standards. Judith looked at her, a whimsical fancy taking possession of her mind that she was watching some fantastic mime—that this was no flesh-and-blood child, but an owl masquerading in wren’s attire.“My dear old doctor mentioned Sylvia and Lary and Eileen. Would you mind telling me your name?”

“Theodora.”

“Theodora—the gift of God.”

“Yes, and it was a rummy gift. Jeff Dutton says the Lord hung a lemon on my mother’s Christmas tree. I was supposed to come a boy—there’d been too many girls already—and they were going to name me after my uncle Theodore. Jeff thinks I cried so much because I was disappointed at being just a girl. I guess I cried, all right. My brother, Bob, named me ‘Schubert’s Serenade’ because he and Lary had me ’neath their casement every night till two o’clock. Mamma’s room was where your library is now. I like this house lots better than ours.”

“Do you remember this one? I thought the new house was built five years ago.”

Theodora turned questioning eyes upon her. Then, in a flash, she understood.

“Dear me, you have an idea I’m about six years old. Strangers always do. I can’t help it that I never grow any bigger. I was twelve last Christmas, and I’m first year Prep. It’s horrid to be so little. People never have any respect for you. Eileen’s tall as a broom—but nobody has much respect for her, either.”

“Tell me about Eileen. Dr. Schubert is fond of her, I believe.”

“Yes, he sees good in her. He’s about the only one who does. She was sixteen last Sunday, and she’s third year Prep. Goes into college next fall, if she don’t flunk again. She’s getting too big for mamma’s slipper, and I don’t know what is going to become of her. She’s been ugly as sin, ever since mamma heard a Chautauqua lecturer say you had to go in for technique. You know, Eileen plays the violin. And when mamma shuts her up and makes her practice—she gets even by making her fiddle swear. It says ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ and some worse ones, just as plain. And when she’s mad, her eyes get as yellow as cat’s eyes. You never saw yellow eyes, did you?”

“My own look that way, at times—when I’m ill or out of sorts.”

“But they’re the loveliest—like gray violets!” She looked deep into Mrs. Ascott’s eyes, and her own kindled with admiration. “Dr. Schubert told us yours were like Lary’s. But they aren’t, a bit. His are light brown. That barely saves him from being a Trench.”

Manifestly Lavinia had impressed on her family the advantage of looking like the Larimores. And yet, Judith thought she had never seen a finer looking man than David Trench—not so well groomed as his son, and with the gait of a man perennially tired, but with a face that Fra Angelico would have loved to paint.

V

When the elfin child had gone, in response to the ringing of a great bell on the distant campus, Mrs. Ascott sat a long while in smiling silence. Not in years had she been so entertained. Bit by bit she added the child’s revelations to the broken comments of her garrulous gardener. The Duttons had been neighbours of the Trenches in Olive Hill, when Jeff and Dave were fellow workmen, and before Jeff’s baleful visit to the “Jag Institoot” that robbed him of his prowess as a brick mason, along with the appetite for undiluted whiskey. Mrs. Dutton “wasn’t very friendly” because her fortunes had declined until she was compelled to serve as laundress and house-maid to Mrs. Trench’s tenants. But there was a time when she and her husband were glad of a refuge in the rooms above the garage. This small brick structure, it transpired, had been David’s work shop, and here Lary had made his first architectural drawings.

Theodora’s prattle fairly bristled with Lary. Whatever his mother might think of him, in his little sister’s eyes he was the one flawless being. It was he who had supervised the furnishing of Vine Cottage, for a certain Professor Ferguson, a testy little Scot in charge of the department of biology at the college. And Lary and his mother had almost broken heads over some of the details.

Everything about the house was exquisite. Judith thought she knew what Lary would be like—the man who could limit himself to a single dull blue and yellow vase for the library mantel. The external appearance of the cottage had promised fustian ... the fish-scale ornament above the bay-window, the elaborate carvings between the veranda pillars, the somewhat fussy pergola that covered the gravel walk from the kitchen to the garage.

Bare vines were everywhere, swelling with sap and viridescent with eager buds that strove with their armour of winter scales, although it was not yet the end of March. Beds of narcissus and tulips gave promise of early bloom, and already the yellow and white crocus blossoms were starring the withered bluegrass of the front lawns. There was an unwritten law that the lattice which screened the vegetable garden must never carry anything but cypress and Japanese morning glories, and that potatoes must be planted east of the pergola. There were other unwritten “musts” that came to light, day by day, all of them having to do with the garden, over which apparently Mrs. Trench had retained control.“But, Lordee, you don’t have to pay no attention to her,” Dutton sniffed, when a rather arbitrary ruling was undergoing vicarious transmission. “Treat her like Ferguson did, the fust time she butted in. It’s your house.”

Between Dutton and Theodora, it would not be long until all the Trench skeletons had been dragged from their closets and set dancing in hilarious abandon, for the amusement of the new tenant. They were not real people, the Duttons and the Trenches, with their unfamiliar life-experience. She had never envisaged anyone like them. It was all a part of the dream she had cherished—a place she had never heard of, where she could lose herself ... and forget....

---

In the pigeonholes of her memory, Mrs. Ascott had stowed a collection of unanswered questions, neatly tabulated and reserved for possible solution. Why had her marriage with Raoul been the inevitable failure she knew it must be, almost from the beginning? Would they have found each other if there had been children? Would her own life have been more satisfactory, had her mother married for love and not for social position? And now she added another, trivial as compared with these, yet quite as elusive: Would Mrs. Trench have waited the prescribed two weeks for a first call on a new neighbour, had her small daughter failed to report the broken window—and other things?

Whatever the answer, the stubborn fact remained that Mrs. David Trench did call, on Friday afternoon. She left a correctly engraved card on the vestibule table, and sat erect on the edge of her chair. She wore an austere tailored suit, patent leather boots that called attention to the trim shape of her feet, and a flesh-tinted veil of fine silk net with flossy black dots. In the full light of the south window, she might have passed for thirty-six. Barring a conspicuous hardness of the mouth, her features were excellent. The hair that lay in palpably artificial curls along the line of her velvet hat was as black as it is possible for Caucasian hair to be, and the eyes were coldly piercing—as if appraisal were their chief function. But her speech.... Cloying sweetness trickled through her words, as she assured her tenant that they were destined to be friends. She would come and care for Mrs. Ascott if she should fall ill—so far from home and mother. She was a famous nurse. Dr. Schubert would bear her witness. Her heart ached as she thought how desolate must be the life of a young widow.

“Yet,” she added, “it is an enviable state, after all—when one has passed the first shock of grief. Like everything in life, it has its compensations. You don’t have to bother with a man, and there is no danger of your being an old maid.” She pronounced the last words as if she were referring to the plague or small-pox. “The West must look strange to you,” she hurried on, “a little town, too, after spending all your life in New York and the great cities of Europe.”

“I have spent very little time in New York,” her tenant corrected. “When I was married I went to Philadelphia to live—such time as we were not travelling. And I was scarcely away from Rochester until I was fifteen.”

“Rochester! You don’t tell me! We went to Rochester for shopping and the theatre, as people in Springdale go to St. Louis. What a little world it is, after all. Did you ever hear of a town called Bromfield?”

Judith searched her memory. At last she had it. She had driven to that village more than once with her grandfather, Dr. Holden. She recalled one visit, when the sleigh was insecurely anchored in front of a house on Main Street, while she curled up for a nap in the great fur robes on the seat. The horse, arriving at the mental state which demanded dinner, before the physician was ready to leave the house, had untied the hitching strap and cantered unconcernedly to the livery stable where he was in the habit of being fed.

“You don’t mean that you were the little girl in the sleigh!” Mrs. Trench’s eyes were scintillating with astonished interest. “I’ll show you the account of it—in the Bromfield Sentinel. I have a complete file of the little home paper. And it will surprise you to know that the man your grandfather was calling on was Robert Larimore, my father. He died of brain hemorrhage, that same night. All the Larimores go that way—suddenly. Dr. Holden was called, when my father’s mother died, but it was all over before the telegram reached him. And your grandmother ... she must have been the Mrs. Holden who did so much work among the poor.”

“Yes, my parents left Rochester to escape from her pets. That, of course, is only a family joke. My father spent a good many years in South America, and I was left with my grandparents. One of my brothers was born in Bolivia and the other in the Argentine. I didn’t see them until they were six and ten years old.”

Mrs. Trench was not listening. Should she ... or should she not? In the end, she did. “Mrs. Ascott, I know it sounds like a foolish question—a city the size of Rochester—but you said a moment ago that as a child you knew everybody. Did you ever hear of a family named Fournier?”

“The people who kept the delicatessen, around the corner from my grandfather’s private sanitarium? Yes, I knew them well.”

“Was there a daughter—Lettie or Arletta—some such name? She’d be a woman of about forty-five by this time, I should think.”“No, she was the niece, a wild, highstrung girl who gave them a good deal of trouble. She ran away and was married, at sixteen—some worthless fellow from up-state, who afterward tried to get out of it.”

“Worthless?” Mrs. Trench bristled unaccountably.

“That was the way Lettie’s people regarded him. Their little boy and I played together, as children. My grandmother took a lively interest in Lettie, as she did in all wayward girls who found no sympathy at home. I remember she devoted a good deal of her time to the patching up of quarrels between Lettie and her husband—and keeping peace in the family, when he was in Rochester with them.”

“Was there anything—peculiar—about their marriage?”

“Lettie was romantic. I believe that was all. It happened before I was born; but I remember that there was always talk. Grandma Holden compelled her to confess her marriage, to save her good name. And the foolish part of it was that she and the youth were married under assumed names—”

“The boy—how old is he?”

“By a very amusing coincidence, I happen to know that, too. I couldn’t tell you the ages of my brothers, with any degree of certainty. But Fournier Stone and I were born the same night, in adjoining rooms of Dr. Holden’s sanitarium. He arrived early in the evening, and I a little before dawn. By that much I escaped the ‘April Fool’ that was so offensive to him. I shall be twenty-seven next Friday.”

Mrs. Trench made swift mental calculation, and her stiffly pursed lips uttered one inexplicable sentence:

“Thank God, my people have always been respectable.”

II

Lavinia went home, her whole being in turmoil. She had not seen Bromfield since the day when she and David packed their scant belongings and turned to seek oblivion or happiness in Olive Hill. With the exception of the Sentinel and her sister-in-law’s verbose letters, she knew little of the course of events in that quiet back-water that had environed her stagnant girlhood. And Ellen left large gaps in the village news, gaps that could be filled, inadequately, by inference or imagination. That Calvin had a child, this much she knew. That he had spent most of his time in Rochester, prior to his father’s long illness and death, this, too, had been conveyed to her by a random personal notice now and then. But that he and Lettie had gotten on badly—had quarreled.... Cruel joy burned in her eyes. They had had recourse to the neighbours, to smooth out their family affairs. Whatever unpleasantness she had had, within the four walls of her own home, none of the neighbours had been permitted to suspect that her life was not all she wished it to be. The neighbours. What kind of woman was Mrs. Stone, that she would.... But Lavinia knew, at last, what kind of woman Mrs. Stone was. She reflected that Lettie’s marriage certificate probably had not been framed in gold, as hers was, and conspicuously displayed on the wall of her bedroom. The past ten years, the Stones had prospered, and Calvin had succeeded his father as president of the bank. Ellen and Lettie were on calling terms. She would write Ellen....

In memory she went back to the days when Vine Cottage was new, when to her fell the task of choosing a line of social progress in the clique-ridden town of Springdale. She had three small children, ample excuse for a little dalliance. And the cottage, with two hundred feet of ground to be transformed into a marvellous garden, was a little way out—a double reason for delay, when David urged her to return the calls of the Eastern Star ladies, who had been most gracious. “I don’t want to make any mistake,” she told him. “If you once get in with the wrong set....” David didn’t know what she meant.

III

Society in Springdale, such society as counted for anything, was divided by a clearly marked line of cleavage, with Mrs. Henry Marksley dominating one stratum and Mrs. Thomas Henderson the other. The Hendersons were leaders in the intellectual life of the community and staunch pillars in the Presbyterian church. Lavinia was glad that David had been brought up a Presbyterian—or rather, that that happened to be the fashionable church in Springdale. When it came to matters of principle, it was not easy to manipulate David.

The Marksleys seldom went to church. On the other hand, Mr. Marksley stood ready with three contracts, before David had finished the work on the campus, contracts which enabled him to reap the benefit of his labour, instead of delivering two-thirds of the profits into the hand of the senior partner. Mrs. Marksley was particularly anxious to rally to her standard the best looking and aggressive young women of the town. She was trying to live down the latest escapades of her husband and her eldest daughter, Adelaide. Such a woman as Mrs. David Trench would be of service to her—and she could make the association correspondingly profitable. But at the psychological moment Mrs. Marksley went into temporary social exile, ceasing all activity until after the birth of a son. The hiatus, together with certain whispered stories concerning Adelaide, drove Lavinia to Mrs. Henderson and the Browning Club. It was a step she never regretted. Within a year she was able to send to the Bromfield Sentinel an account of a spirited business meeting, at which “young Mrs. Trench” had been elected secretary, over the heads of two rival candidates whose husbands were in the college faculty. Mrs. Henderson was perpetual president, and membership in the club gave just the right intellectual and cultural stamp.

Years afterward, Tom Henderson and Walter Marksley began an exciting race for Sylvia’s favour—courtship that came to nothing, as all Sylvia’s courtship did. And now, the boy whose advent had settled, once and for all, Mrs. Trench’s social destiny, was playing around with Eileen, taking her to and from school in his car and ruining her digestion with parfait and divinity. David and Larimore—to his mother he was always Larimore, never Lary—had set their faces stubbornly against this flattering attachment. There had been no scandal in the Marksley family in recent years, and no other objection that a sensible person could name. But how to persuade them.... Mrs. Ascott! To be sure. It was providential that she had come to Springdale at such an opportune time. She would see things in their true light—being a woman of the world. If only Larimore could be induced to call on her. She was—m-m-m, yes, nineteen months older than Larimore. That made it safe. A young widow.... But Larimore Trench had never been interested in any woman. She would trump up some reason for sending him over, that very evening. She must have Mrs. Ascott’s assistance. Eileen’s future—her own future, for reasons as yet but dimly apprehended—was at stake.

IV

But Theodora spared her the trouble. Judith was finishing her lonely dinner when the telephone rang. “I’m bringing my brother over to see you. I told him you wanted some changes made in the living-room.” In a muffled whisper she added: “Of course you didn’t; but I’ll explain. We’ll be there in a minute.” Before she could reply, the receiver had clicked into its hook, and the two were seen emerging from the house.

“Mrs. Ascott, this is Lary. It’s the lamp shade, the one on the newel post—you know—that’s the colour of ripe apricots.”

She darted from the vestibule into the wide living-room, from which a stairway ascended to the floor above, and turned on the light, although the day was not yet gone.

“You don’t like it?” Larimore Trench, asked. “This colour scheme, I know, is a bit personal.”

“Why, child, when did I say such a thing? I don’t recall discussing the lamp shade with you.”

“I didn’t exactly tell him you said that you objected to it. I said I thought you did. You see, mamma told us at dinner that you agreed with her in everything. And she has always said that for this room the lamp shade must be rose pink.”

“I’m sorry to disagree with your mother, but I should not like rose pink.”

“Mrs. Ascott,” Lary began, his clear brown eyes mock-serious, “I must warn you that Miss Theodora Trench is a conscienceless little fibber. It isn’t her only fault, but it is her most serious one.”

“Lary! To think of you—giving me a black eye, right before Lady Judith! When I haven’t had a chance to make good with her. If mamma or Eileen.... But you!”

“I couldn’t make either of them any blacker than they already are, dearie. And I didn’t mean to humiliate you. But you mustn’t begin by fibbing to Mrs. Ascott.”

She hung her head, crimson blotches staining the sallow cheeks. After a moment she looked up, and the angry fire had been extinguished by shining tears.

“I guess it’s better this way. Now Lady Judith knows what kind of a family we are. You can’t get disappointed in people if you know the worst of them first.”

V

It transpired that within the Trench home the new tenant had already been established as “Lady Judith,” a name which Theodora afterward explained, with documentary and graphic evidence to substantiate her none too credible word. A long time ago Lary had given her a book of fairy tales, the heroine of which was Lady Judith Dinglewood—beloved of all the bold knights, but destined for the favour of the king’s son. Lary had adorned the title-page with a miniature of the beautiful lady, and had added a colophon showing her in the robes of a royal bride. Theodora could recite every word of the romantic tale before she was old enough to read. She had gone to sleep with that book in her arms, as Sylvia had insisted on taking her best wax doll to bed. The moment she espied the name, Judith Ascott, on the lease that Griffith Ramsay had signed, she decided that her Lady Judith had come true.

It mattered little that the new occupant of the name bore not the slightest resemblance to the two little water colour drawings. Lary could paint a new Lady Judith, now that he knew what she really looked like. It was not his fault that he had made the eyes black. He had to do that, to appease mamma and Sylvia—whose standards of beauty were rigidly fixed. But eyes that could be blue or grey, or flecked with brown, as they were this evening.... How much more interesting than eyes that were always the same colour! The hair, in that new picture which Lary must paint, would be pale chestnut, with golden glints where the light fell on it. And the mouth—the sweetest mouth! She told Lary about it as they went home, through the close dark of a wonderful spring night. Had he noticed Mrs. Ascott’s mouth? He had.

---

April brought a break in the stolid serenity of Elm Street. The big house across from the Trench property began to manifest signs of awakening life. For almost a year it had stood vacant, with only a caretaker to guard it against the depredations of Springdale’s budding youth. Paint and pruning shears had scarcely achieved the miracle of external transformation when a consignment of furniture arrived, via the Oriental express and San Francisco. This much Theodora discovered as she risked her fragile bones among the packing cases in the reception hall. She had contrived to make out four letters, N-I-M-S, in great smears of glossy black ink on several of the boxes. That hardly sounded like a name.

“Mamma says it will be time enough to find out about them when they move in,” she complained to Mrs. Ascott. “I heard her ask the agent—and she was mad as hops when he refused to tell her.”

“Delightfully mysterious, Theo. Perhaps some European monarch has grown tired of his crown, and is coming to live across the street from us.”

“Maybe it’s the Emperor of China. I saw the loveliest great red dragon—where one of the cases had broken open and the burlap was torn off. Oh—” in sudden fright, “don’t let Lary know I pried.”

She had perceived her brother’s approach, by some subtle sense that bound them. He and Eileen were crossing the lawn with noiseless steps and Theodora’s back was turned. When they reached the front gate, Mrs. Ascott gave greeting:

“What does one do in Springdale, these glorious spring evenings?”

“One goes to the show, if one has an amiable brother.” To Eileen’s suggestion, Larimore added: “Won’t you come along, Mrs. Ascott? Vaudeville and pictures—not much of an attraction; but it might amuse you. My mother is entertaining the ladies of the missionary society this evening, and she doesn’t want us around.”

“Yes,” Theodora added, “and Mrs. Stevens is coming. She and Eileen don’t speak, since the ‘ossified episode.’ You know, Lady Judith, that’s all that saved you from being invited to join the Self Culture Club. Mamma belongs. She was one of the charter members—reads the magazine, like it was the Bible—and she meant it for a compliment to offer your name for membership. But Mrs. Stevens was so furious at Eileen that she tabled all the names mamma submitted.”

“You wouldn’t have gone in for that rubbish anyway,” Eileen defended herself. “Mrs. Stevens makes me tired. She hasn’t a thing in her library but reference works. And mamma holds her up to Theo and me as a bright example. Tells us that we can’t expect to get culture unless we look things up. Ina Stevens does that, and she has facts hanging all over her. She’s as prissy as her mother.”

“But what was the ‘ossified episode’?” Judith asked, recognizing one of Larimore Trench’s expressions, wherewith Theodora’s speech was frequently adorned.

“Humph, I got caught on the word, in rhetoric class. Thought it meant something about kissing, and the whole class hooted at me. Ina was at home, sick, that day, and Theo and I went over in the evening to take her credit card. Her marks were loads better’n mine, and Mrs. Stevens swelled up so about it that I couldn’t help telling her that my grandfather was expected to die, because all his bones had ossified. And, Mrs. Ascott, both of them—Ina and her mother—fell for it. Mrs. Stevens said it was a dreadful disease, but she had known one old lady who lived three years in that condition. I looked blank as a grindstone; but Theo had to go and snigger. And after we went home, Mrs. Stevens looked it up—and ’phoned mamma that I had to apologize, or she wouldn’t let Ina chum with me any more. I don’t care. I like Kitten Henderson best, any way.”

She turned to look anxiously up the street, as if she were more than half expecting some one, while Judith went into the house to get her hat.

II

The performance had been going on for an hour when the four entered the theatre, groping their way down the dark aisle to a row of unoccupied seats at the left side. The stage was being set for a troupe of Japanese tumblers, and the interval was bridged by news films and an animated cartoon. To Judith this form of entertainment was new. Raoul could tolerate nothing but the sprightliest comedy. With the Ramsays and Herbert Faulkner she had tried to find surcease in grand opera and the symphony. Once in London she and her mother had taken refuge from the rain in a cinema theatre where, on a wide screen, a company of fat French women chased a terrified little man—who had loved not wisely but too often—through the familiar streets of the Latin Quarter, overturning flower stands and vegetable carts, falling in scrambled heaps that writhed with a brave showing of lingerie, untangling themselves and scampering to fresh disaster, when they discovered that the object of their jealous rage had somehow slipped unhurt from the mass. Mrs. Denslow was disgusted. Judith was only bored.

But this bit of screen craft was different. On an expanse of dazzling white a single black dot appeared, paused a breathless moment and went tripping about in a zigzag dance, spilling smaller dots as it went. These resolved themselves into figures that stalked about with the jerky motion of automata. A ghostly hand passed over the picture, and it stood revealed a plenum of regularly arranged dots. With another wave of the wraithlike hand, the dots began to move slowly to and fro, advancing and retreating until they assumed the outlines of a great picture, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Other pictures were produced by means of those same dots. But Mrs. Ascott, who had never before watched the vibrant changes of an animated cartoon, found it necessary to close her eyes to relieve the strain. And then ... some one was leaning over her shoulder, heavy with the odour of a spent cigar, and a full, authoritative voice was saying:

“Come on, Eileen. The whole bunch is down in front. Ina and Jimmy are there, and Kitten and Dan.”

“Hal Marksley, if you can’t come to the house for me—” the girl said petulantly, but she stepped to the seat of her chair and vaulted nimbly over the back. Theodora moved to the vacant place beside her. Lady Judith and the play went on.

III

At the gate, Lary kissed his little sister and sent her home, going into the house with Mrs. Ascott. There was no need of so much as a nod to assure him that the evening was not yet finished. She wanted to ask him about Dr. Schubert—the tragedy that had mellowed and sweetened him. But the revelation would come in due time. Instead, she demanded to know the significance of Indian Summer. Only that morning the old physician had remarked—when she told him of Dutton’s warning—“We hop from snow to sweat, out here in Illinois,”—that one could endure the heat if one kept constantly in mind that after frost there would be Indian Summer.

Indian Summer. She had read a sentimental essay, years ago.... April—the arrogant, reckless abundance of Youth. August—the passionate heat of Love. October—the killing frost of Sorrow. And after that, the golden peace of Indian Summer. In her part of the world there was no such division of seasons. Yet the figures had attached themselves to the walls of her memory by tenacious tentacles. For her there had been neither sorrow nor peace ... just the bald monotony of a life that had been regulated by the artificial standards of her mother or her husband. She was so deadly tired of it all. And her work at the laboratory had not proved absorbing. It was too easy ... the copying of formulÆ and an occasional hand at an experiment that might be dangerous. But she knew that none of them would be dangerous. Dr. Schubert was too cautious to permit her even that zest. Sydney Schubert, the son, who specialized in diseases of children, she hardly knew. An epidemic of scarlet fever was raging in the mining towns of Sutton and Olive Hill, and he was away from home most of the time.

“In order to appreciate Syd, you must know the tragedy of his boyhood,” Lary began. “It was more terrible for his parents, of course. But to a sensitive boy who had an instinctive love of beauty—quite aside from his natural devotion to his mother.... Mrs. Schubert was without doubt the most beautiful woman either of us had ever seen. Not the type my mother admires. And it may not have been the kind that would last. She was too fair and exquisite.”

“And she died, while the bloom was still fresh?” Judith asked.

“No, she lived eight years. We never knew how the thing happened ... a breeze that ruffled her clothing too close to the grate, or it may have been that her veil caught fire from an exposed gas flame. She was dressed to go out, and was waiting for the doctor in the great hall of their house, when she discovered that her clothing was ablaze. She wrapped herself in a carriage robe that happened to be lying on the settle; but she was horribly burned. One side of her face was disfigured beyond recognition. Fortunately the eyes were saved. It was after her recovery that Dr. Schubert had the pipe organ installed in the hall, to occupy her time, for she never went out, and at home she always covered her scars with a veil of white chiffon. Syd and Bob and I took turns at pumping the organ for her, before the days of electric motors, and she taught all of us music. One afternoon, three years ago, they found her at the organ ... her head resting on the upper manual. They thought at first she was asleep.”

“I’m glad she went that way,” Judith said, her throat tight with emotion.

Lary might have resumed, but he was arrested by boisterous laughter, out on the street. Eileen and her friends were going by, and young Marksley was saying, with a good-natured sneer: “Cornell—nix on Cornell for mine. The kid and I have this college business all doped out. She’s going to cut this little Presbyterian joint, next fall, and we’re both going to Valparaiso University. Greatest college on earth! Place where they teach you to dissolve the insoluble, to transmute the immutable and unscrew the inscrutable. I’m going to take commercial law, and Eileen can go on with her music....” The voices died away, as the group turned the corner beyond Vine Cottage.

“I wish my sister wouldn’t—” Lary checked himself, colouring.

“I shouldn’t take it too seriously. Such school boy and girl affairs seldom come to anything. Eileen’s a stubborn child. I wouldn’t oppose her ... openly.”

IV

It proved a mistake, letting Eileen go away with Hal and the others. At midnight she tried to let herself in noiselessly at the side door, found it unaccountably locked, and was forced to ring the bell. There was a scene at the breakfast table, reported to Mrs. Ascott by Theodora, with dramatic touches. Scenes were not uncommon, but this one was different. It developed along unexpected lines. No one had taken into account the possibility of Mrs. Trench as a bulwark of defence for Eileen. But that wary ally was not wont to fight in the open. She was so accustomed to storming the postern gate, that she was likely to creep around to the rear of her objective, when the front portal stood open, undefended. This morning she had for subterfuge the highly practical business advantage of cultivating Hal Marksley’s friendship. Hal’s father, as the whole town knew, was preparing to build a palatial mansion in the parklike addition he had recently laid out, at the western limit of Springdale’s residential section. Six architects had been invited to compete for the plans. It was important that Larimore Trench be the victor. This would place the contract for construction automatically in David’s hands. But David and Lary wanted to eliminate themselves from the competition, and admonish Hal that it would be advisable for him to take his affection elsewhere. At this, Lavinia forgot her prudence—delivered a direct assault on her husband, which might have been but an echo of the thing she had been saying to him at regular intervals for twenty-eight years:

“Yes, and you’d insult Hal—spoil Eileen’s chance, the way my father spoiled mine—just because a young man has money and knows how to show a girl a good time! I don’t intend to go through another such experience as I had with Sylvia.”

The reference to Sylvia was beside the mark. She had not intended to betray her eagerness for an early marriage for her second daughter.

---

Lavinia was finding her tenant increasingly useful—the wicket gate an open sesame to many of the difficult problems for which she had been wont to search in vain the pages of the Self Culture Magazine. A development watched by her son with incredulous wonder. Hitherto Lavinia Trench had believed nothing that was conveyed to her by word of mouth. “She’s a pure visuel,” Dr. Schubert had sought to explain. “She gets her mental concepts through her eyes.” But Lary knew that that was not all of it. His mother held an enormous respect for the printed word. She wanted one of her sons to be a writer. That would reflect real credit on the family. Her own inability to form fluid sentences only increased her admiration for those unseen masters whose thoughts and experiences had received the accolade of printer’s ink. True, she had many times appeared over her own signature, in the clumsily edited columns of the Bromfield Sentinel—when there was a chance to weave into the story some reference to Larimore’s triumphs at Cornell, Sylvia’s social conquests or Bob’s athletic achievements. But to get things published ... and paid for.... This last comment always sent Lary flying from the room. She would probably not take any stock in the things he wrote, even if she read them in print. They were so at variance with all her established convictions.

On a certain Thursday morning she made occasion to call on Mrs. Ascott, the newly arrived copy of the Sentinel in her hand. Her dark sallow cheeks showed hectic splotches, and her eyes flared and dimmed with the emotion she was trying to conceal. She had not written the story on the front page of the Bromfield paper. Her fancy’s most ingenious flight could not have fabricated anything one half so ... gratifying. So terrible, she amended, to her own soul. But the real, the usually submerged Lavinia, knew that the former word was the right one.

“You remember the boy, Fournier Stone, that you used to play with when you were a little girl in Rochester,” she began tensely. “Read that.”

The story was told with all the crass vulgarity and offensiveness of small town journalism. The bank examiner had paid an unexpected visit to the Bromfield National bank—because of certain stories that had been circulated concerning young Stone’s extravagance in Rochester and Buffalo. It was found that a large gap between the bank’s records and the actual cash on hand had been bridged by spurious paper that implied the additional crime of forgery. This, it transpired, was not Fournier Stone’s first offence. In the past he had fled to his mother for assistance; but now Mrs. Stone was critically ill, and he had not dared to tell her of his dilemma.

“To think of a mother shielding her son in such rascality!” to which Lavinia added, with snapping satisfaction, “But what could you expect of such a mother?”

The account closed with the statement that Mrs. Stone had suffered a relapse, because of the shock of her son’s arrest, and for several hours her life was despaired of. The culprit was released, under heavy bond, and was constantly at his mother’s bedside.

II

Saturday brought a letter from Ellen Larimore, with further details. Fournier Stone had disappeared—walked out of the house, in the clothes of one of the servants, right past the secret service man who was there to trap him. It was thought that he had gone to Canada. His mother was in a desperate condition. “Of course,” Ellen added, “we don’t know a thing for certain. I talked to Calvin this morning, and the poor man is distracted. But most people here think he might have set the boy a better example. I never forgot the day you told me it was too risky to marry a man who drank and gambled. What if it was Larimore that was a fugitive from justice! Aren’t you thankful that you married David instead of Calvin? I’ve had an idea for a long time that you got wind of the affair with Lettie, and threw Calvin over, in a jealous huff. Now I see your wisdom. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you that when they came to look up Fournier’s records, in Rochester, it came out that he is six months older than we thought he was. There are a lot of things about Calvin Stone’s marriage that some of us older people would like to find out about.” Lavinia set her teeth hard, and a yellow pallor replaced the flush of indignant pleasure that had accompanied the reading of the letter ... up to this point. She had intended to show the letter to David; but when she came to the mention of her wisdom in the choice of a husband, she wavered. That last sentence brought her to an abrupt decision. She burned the letter—and repeated such parts of it as would fit in with a half formed plan in her own mind.

David was profoundly sorry for the Stones. Their misfortunes helped to ease the pain in his own heart, a pain that had never been lulled since the black day when Bob Trench’s dripping body was taken from the river. It was his mother who had urged him to compete for one more trophy at the annual college field meet. To David it seemed that his wife cared more for Bob’s ribbons and foolish little silver cups than for all Lary’s scholarships and medals. He had never connected these spectacular mementoes with the boastings in the Bromfield Sentinel, and their possible effect on certain of the old friends, whose children had not distinguished themselves. Providence, it now appeared, had been kind in the untimely taking off of his son. Such disgrace as Fournier Stone had brought upon his parents would be harder to bear. In David’s limited vocabulary respectability had no place. But principle loomed large. It was the thing Fournier Stone had done, not the newspaper account of it, that mattered.

---

Mrs. Ascott went out into the garden after breakfast to watch the transfer of tomato plants from the cold frames beside the garage to the loamy bed that bordered the west wall. Dutton had explained to her that nothing would thrive against the high board fence that shut the grounds from the street, at the east side of the garden—on account of the afternoon sun—and that these tomatoes would grow six feet high and would disport their fruit above the stone wall ... if the suckers were kept picked off. She wondered what suckers were, and how the afternoon sun had acquired such a sinister reputation.

She had not slept, and the April air was cool and refreshing. Mamma and the boys were safely installed in a Paris apartment. Papa had closed the big house at Pelham, taking two of the best trained servants with him to the city establishment on Riverside Drive, and was happily engrossed in the Wall Street fight for further millions—secure from the annoyance of family intrusion. She had several letters and one cablegram. How remote it all seemed, how like the hazy memory of another existence! Two months ago she was trying to forget Raoul, his amiable as well as his maddeningly offensive side. Now she seldom thought of him at all. His personality had lost its definite line and mass. Even his form was growing nebulous. She could not remember what it was that he particularly disliked for breakfast ... and whether he was growing alarmingly stout or thin when he went away to Egypt with Hilda Travers.

It was strange that she should have forgotten. Her life with him had been made up of just such things as these. She searched herself for an explanation, as the gardener rambled on, his words scarce reaching her consciousness. Slowly the imponderable thoughts assembled themselves, fashioning for her a shadow picture of her remote childhood. She was in the old kitchen at Rochester and her grandmother Holden was baking cookies for the slum children. There on the marble slab lay the great mass of yellow dough that so tempted her eager fingers. More than once she had seized a breathless opportunity, while grandma’s back was turned, to thrust an index finger far down into its golden softness. And behold! The mass had come together, leaving scarce a trace of the deep impression she had made.

Was she as plastic as dough, and had her husband gone from her life without leaving an impression? There must be something more ... something that had not worked out with precision in their case. Did not that same yielding substance take on the fairly permanent shapes of lions and camels, dancing girls and roosters with arching tails? Perhaps Raoul had neglected to bake the dough. Was she still an impressionable girl, for all her tragic experience?

II

The wicket gate opened and Eileen came towards her. The slim shoulders drooped carelessly and there was a sullen look about the too voluptuous mouth. Mrs. Ascott noticed for the first time that Eileen’s mouth was like her mother’s. All the rest of her was, as Theodora put it, “pure, unadulterated Trench” ... excepting, of course, the eyes, which were amber or vicious yellow, according to her mood. Lary had his father’s mouth; but had compromised with his mother on the question of eyes. Lavinia abhorred compromises, albeit she had learned to accept them as if they had been of her own choosing.

The girl stood in rebellious indecision, a few feet from the tomato bed. Then, as if she had made up her mind to do the thing ... and take the consequences, she came swiftly forward, put an arm around Judith’s waist and kissed her full on the mouth. It had been so long since any one had kissed her! The lips were speaking now, the tone low and vibrant with pleading.

“You don’t mind, do you? If you only knew how I adore you! I have sat at my window and watched you—and wondered about you—and wanted to kiss you, till my mouth ached.”

A thrill went through the woman’s usually tranquil body. Here was passion, susceptibility, imagination. She had not dreamed of such intensity in a girl so young. And this was the girl Larimore Trench had begged her to influence, to mould into some shape of his choosing—a shape that would be utterly displeasing to her mother.

“Can you come into the house with me? It’s only a little after eight. You won’t be late for chapel if you start at half-past.”

“I’m in no hurry. Hal’s coming by for me with the car. He’ll be on the campus five minutes before he started, if our old moth-eaten policeman happens to be looking the other way. I framed up the best looking excuse for a morning call ... and now I don’t need it. You invited me in—just like that! It’s always the way. If I have my gun loaded, there isn’t any bear.”

“Did you think you needed a pretext?”“I couldn’t be sure. And with you ... it’s too important to take chances. I’ve been feeling my way, ever since you came. I can’t go dancing in, as Theo does. She is like mamma. You simply can’t snub that kid.”

The pretext was the revelation of the mystery-house across the way. Hal had told her all about it, after they left Ina and Kitten and their escorts. The owner of the carved dragon was Hal’s sister, Adelaide Nims. There had been a former marriage, about the time of Hal’s birth, a most unsavoury affair. Adelaide was seventeen at the time, and the reluctant husband was the divorced partner of one of Henry Marksley’s affinities. The Marksleys, pÈre and mÈre, had been separated three times. Eileen and Hal agreed that it was indecent for people who despised each other to live together. Still, if his parents had not made up that last time, there would have been no Hal. This would have been calamity for Eileen.

The present Mrs. Nims was little known in Springdale, having lived abroad for almost twenty years. Her first husband, in Eileen’s piquant phrase, “had chucked her” after a few months—as a man usually does when he is dragooned into a distasteful marriage. There had been other marriages, “without benefit of clergy,” the details of which were suppressed in Springdale. Indeed coming to light only in connection with a divorce or two wherein Adelaide had figured as the reprehensible other woman. She had hair like polished mahogany and melting brown eyes, a skin like the petals of a Victoria Regia, at dawn of the morning after the lily’s opening, before the sun has tinged its creamy white with the faint rose that is destined to run the colour gamut to rich purplish red. She and Syd Schubert vied with each other in the number of instruments they could play; but she had made her great success with the ’cello, an instrument whose playing revealed to the best possible advantage the slim sensual grace of her body.

It was in a London music hall that Reginald Nims, younger son of a peer, had fallen beneath the weight of her manifold charms and had married her—to the dismay of his family. Eileen knew what she looked like. Not from Hal’s description, but because Springdale had seen her portrait. Just before she and her husband left England for China, they had sent it home for safe keeping ... the magnificent portrait that Sargent had painted. Mrs. Henderson gave a talk on it, in the reading room of the college library. Red hair, coppery in the high lights, eyes that would turn an anchorite from the path of duty, skin texture that was unsurpassed in the far reach of Sargent’s marvellous texture painting, a chiffon gown that reminded you of a cloud of flame-shot smoke, and a bit of still-life that was definitely, though not insistently, turquoise.

“Mrs. Henderson said that when she read a description of the picture, she supposed it was going to look like a Henner; but it was nothing of the sort. I had to go on the Q. T. to hear her talk. Of course you know, mamma belongs to the Art Study Club; but she was scandalized at Mrs. Henderson getting up there and talking about Adelaide Marksley. Lary tried to make her see that it was Sargent ... but what’s the use? You can’t get that kind of an idea into my mother’s head.”

The Browning Club had long since gone the way of Browning. But Mrs. Henderson, after the death of her husband, was constrained to seek new means of holding her grip on the social and intellectual leadership of the town. Fortunately Mrs. Clarkson, wife of the new Dean, was not aggressive. She was glad to be enrolled, along with Mrs. David Trench, as a member of the Art Study Club. Being a late comer in the town, she knew no reason why she should withdraw her moral support from the club, after its shocking display of the Sargent picture.

“But I hope the poor girl is at last happily married,” Mrs. Ascott hastened to say. She wondered if Eileen was always quite fair to her mother.

“That’s just what she isn’t. And thereby hangs the tale of their coming here to live for a couple of years. Hal said his father wanted to rent Vine Cottage for them—and in that case they wouldn’t have brought their furniture. But your Mr. Ramsay got ahead of him. I’m glad he did. But mamma would have turned them out, lease or no lease, if she ever got her eyes on an English paper published in Hong Kong, that Hal showed me, last night. It was the rippingest account you ever read, of Adelaide’s elopement with a member of the military band. It started in a sort of musical flirtation ... and ended in a miserable little hotel in Fu Chau. The writer said your sympathy would be with Mrs. Nims if you looked at the shape of Reginald Nims, and remembered that his wife was fond of dancing. Hal doesn’t know what that means—because he never saw his brother-in-law. He must be either a cripple or fat. It won’t be long till we know. They sail from Honolulu to-morrow.”

“Then she’s reconciled to her husband?”

“Had to be! She’s trying to make the best of a bad mess. The musician soured on his bargain....” The amber eyes flamed yellow. “Left her in the room at the hotel, and gave her husband the key. How did he know Nims wouldn’t kill her? I should think he would—if he had any spirit. They’re coming here till the scandal blows over and they can go back to London. Adelaide loathes China, and adores England. Hal said he guessed that Nims couldn’t bear to part with a wife who had red hair, even if he had to do the reversed Mormon stunt once in a while.”

Mrs. Ascott experienced a swift revulsion—not at the story Eileen was telling. She had heard many such. But in the bald discussion of sex encounters there lurked a definite element of danger. For another, and less serious reason, Hal Marksley ought not to be telling this story in Springdale, where his sister expected to live. But Eileen hastened to explain that she alone was in the secret, and she ... “was part of the family.”

“Really, my dear? I hadn’t suspected.”

“Yes, Lady Judith, and if you’ll let me, I’m coming back after school to tell you what I actually came to tell you this morning. May I? I’ll have to chase home and get my books. Hal’s honking for me, this minute.”

III

It was three o’clock when Eileen came home from school, tossed her things on the settee in the living-room and curled herself up contentedly on a hassock at Mrs. Ascott’s feet. Her cheeks were flushed and her low brow was framed in little caressing ringlets. She looked amazingly like Lary. Happiness fairly exuded from her being.

“I can’t beat around the bush, Lady Judith. When I have anything to say ... I have to go to it with both feet. Will you take care of this for me?”

She drew a shining gold chain from somewhere within the harbouring crispness of her piquÉ collar, wound the pliant links around her slender forefinger, and brought to light a ring set with a huge diamond. Hal had given it to her that morning. She had known about it for some time. The stone was one of many that belonged to his father ... and would never be missed. There was a good handful of them in a box in the office safe, and Adelaide would coax them all away from her father. He, Hal, might as well get his—while the getting was good. He had taken this one, and another for a scarf pin for himself, to St. Louis to be mounted the day after he and Eileen became engaged.

“You haven’t told your mother?” Mrs. Ascott interrupted.

“I can’t! I can’t! If you knew mamma better.... It would take all the sacredness—all the meaning out of it ... to have mamma preen herself because her daughter is going to marry the son of the richest man in town.”

“And your father, Eileen?”

The fair face went gray, and pain quivered the sensitive lips. “I can’t make that as clear as the other; but I’m the most unfortunate person in the world. You don’t know how I have dreamt of the time when I could go to my darling old daddy and hide my blushes in his shoulder, while I told him that the greatest thing in life had come to me. And now that it’s come ... he wouldn’t understand ... or approve. And mamma, who hasn’t a mortal bit of use for me, would take it as a personal triumph. Rush off to that silly little Bromfield Sentinel with an announcement of my engagement, and all about who the Marksleys are, and how much money they have. I just can’t give her that gratification. I’d choke.”

Sixteen! and she had life’s irony at her finger ends. The amber eyes filled with tears that glistened a moment on the long lashes and went trickling down the pale checks to make little welts on the stiffly starched piquÉ collar. Mrs. Ascott felt no impulse to smile. Here was a little hurt child, whose quivering lips might have been pleading for the life of a puppy condemned to be drowned. And it was all so deadly serious to her. Love? She might experience a dozen such heart-burnings before the dawning of the great passion.

“My dear, there is a touchstone given to each one of us, before we reach the years of discretion and judgment. Mine was my grandmother. Yours, I believe, is your father. I hid my engagement to Raoul Ascott from Grandma Holden. Only because I knew she would not approve. And, Eileen, my marriage turned out wretchedly. My husband was much older than I. And, do you know, dear, the immature mind is keenly flattered by the attention of the mature one. Hal is a college senior, almost five years older than you. If you could be sure your vanity isn’t involved—”

“No, that has nothing to do with it. Hal loves me. You can’t understand what that means to me ... because ... you don’t know how my people regard me. The only thing I ever wanted is love. Not the kind that papa gives me. That’s too general. He loves everything and everybody—including my mother, when she treats him like a dog. But I don’t want to think about them, now. It hurts ... to think about my father. I can stand it, because I’m not very lovable. He couldn’t be unkind if he tried. He would go on loving his children, if we did the worst thing in the world. I used to wish Lary would love me ... he’s so much like papa in some ways. But you couldn’t tell anybody that what you wanted was love. They’d think you were stalling—that you were after something else, and used that for a blind. Why, even Bob didn’t really know me—and he was the best friend I ever had. I used to steal matches for him, when he was learning to smoke, and I’ve taken many a lickin’ to keep him out of trouble. I got mean and hateful after he was drowned. Talk about an all-wise Providence! I couldn’t have any respect for a God that would kill Bob and leave me alive.”

“But Dr. Schubert—”

“Yes, he and Syd....” Her lips tightened. “They wouldn’t approve of Hal either. He has a reputation for being ... well, rather loose in his ideas. He isn’t a bit worse than the other boys in college. But he happens not to be the psalm-singing kind. I hate the tight ideas I was brought up on. But that isn’t what makes me love Hal. Lady Judith, if you had been told all your life that you were ugly and cross and good-for-nothing ... and somebody came along who thought you were sweet and clever and beautiful—” She laughed shortly. “Yes, all of that! I know I’m built according to the architecture of an ironing board; but Hal says my form is perfect. He twists my hair around his fingers by the hour, and he just loves to stroke my cheeks, because my skin is soft—like Lary’s, and papa’s. Don’t you see? Being loved like that—”

“Yes, Eileen, I see. How soon are you going to be married?”

“Not for years and years. I persuaded Hal, last night, to go to Pratt Institute, instead of that third rate college where he was going to take finance. I want him to do that—so that Lary’ll respect him. He doesn’t intend to settle down in this dried-up village. He hates it as much as I do.” She fell silent a moment. “There’s only one drawback to living away from Springdale.”

“Leaving your father?”“No, he wouldn’t mind that, and neither would I—after I had a family of my own. But if one of my children should get sick—very sick—and I couldn’t reach Syd—I’d be frantic! Syd’s the only doctor who knows what’s the matter with a baby.”

“You love children, Eileen?”

“I adore them.” She hugged her breast ecstatically. “I hope I’ll have six. Hal loves them, too. That’s only one of the tastes we have in common. He wants a home ... he’d even be willing to let Lary build it, and select the furniture. And that’s a lot ... the way my brother treats him. I hope you’ll try to see his fine side, to like him ... for my sake. You know what it’s going to mean to me.”

---

Hal Marksley called regularly in his car to take the two girls to school. Theo, in the rÔle of chaperone, was novel, to say the least. Occasionally he and Eileen went for long rides in the country when classes were over. Once they were delayed by the amusing annoyance of three punctures, and it was dinner time when they neared home. Hal took the precaution to leave the roadster on Grant Drive, traversing the three short blocks to Elm Street on foot. On other occasions, when there was no danger of encountering the men-folk of the family, Mrs. Trench would invite him in for lemonade and cake, after which she would command Eileen to play her latest violin piece—usually a bravura of technique, quite as incomprehensible to Mrs. Trench’s accustomed ears as to Hal’s—during which the youth would drum the window sill with impatient fingers.

It was understood between the young people that Mrs. Ascott alone was in the secret, and that the engagement ring had been placed with some of her valuables in Dr. Schubert’s vault, against the time when it would be safe to display it. There was one drop of bitter in Eileen’s great happiness. Her father. Even since her talk with Judith, she had been conscious of something essentially dishonourable in her conduct. She was beginning to look at her father with awakened eyes. He had always been a person of little consequence in his home. Lavinia was the dynamo that drove the plant. David was a belt or a fly-wheel, a driving rod or some such nonessential—easily replaced if he should break or rust. But David Trench would never rust. His wife kept him going at such a rate that a high polish was his only alternative. Rust gathers on unused metal. Eileen wondered what her father was like—inside. What her mother was like, for that matter. David talked little and Lavinia talked all the time, and the revelation of silence was, if anything, more informing than that of incessant chatter.

Mrs. Ascott might win Lary over to a reluctant acceptance of the engagement; but that would have small bearing on the problem of her father. It was the way with pliant natures. You can bend them without in the least influencing their ultimate resistance. Lavinia might be shattered by a well directed blow, whereas David would yield courteous response. There might be a dent in his feelings, but his convictions would remain as they were.

II

One Friday afternoon, as April lingered tiptoe on the threshold of May, Dr. Schubert sent for Lary to assist him with a peculiarly difficult experiment, one calling for strong nerves and a quick perception. When it was finished, Lary and Judith walked home together, crossing the campus to avoid the thoroughfare that connected the old residence quarter with the fashionable section that had rooted itself in the once fertile farms of Springdale’s newer society.

“Would you mind going a little out of your way?” the man asked, consulting his watch. “It’s early, and I have a troublesome problem. You know women—I don’t.”

“An estimate of a possible Mrs. Trench? Take my advice, Lary. Have her sized up for you by a man—never by another woman. Women can’t be just to each other when they meet on ... mating ground. Besides, no woman ever tells a man quite what she thinks of another woman. The other woman’s secret is, in part, her own. She must guard it—as you guarded the silly secrets of your college fraternity. If you ever saw the inside of one of us, you’d know how little there is to conceal. But the mystery ... that’s the important thing. Still, I’ll do my best. I’m old enough to be your mother, and ought to trust my judgment.”

“There is no potential Mrs. Trench in this problem. The thing that’s worrying me is the inglenook in a house I’m building in Roosevelt Place. The woman—who has exceptionally definite ideas of architecture—has changed her mind three times. Now she’s as dissatisfied with her own planning as she is with mine. We’re at our wits’ end, and I must find—”

“Look, Lary, those birds! They’re fighting!”

The woman seized his arm and whirled him about. They were nearing the end of the campus walk, where the maples cast slow-dancing shadows on the hard gravel. Larimore Trench almost lost his footing, as the pebbles scurried across the grass. He looked at his companion in astonishment. She was not one to go off her head at trifles, yet her tone revealed genuine alarm. In the grass, not ten feet away, two chesty robins were battling like miniature game cocks, their cries denoting a grotesque kind of rage.

“La femme in the case is over there on that syringa,” Lary told her, “estimating the prospects for the posterity she expects to mother. I have never been satisfied with the age I have to live in. But I’m glad I wasn’t born a troglodyte, in a world crying for population.”As he spoke, his back to the street, Hal and Eileen whisked by in their car and disappeared around the corner. The two watched the birds a moment. Then they resumed their walk. The easy confidence that had grown, quite unnoticed, between them was interrupted. Strive as they would they could find no common ground. Judith was vexed with Eileen. Why should she come along, with her crashing discord, at just that moment? And again, why did it matter whether she and Larimore Trench had a pleasant walk or a sullen one? They had long since discussed every problem under the sun—and had found all of them hopelessly old. As they turned from Grant Drive and were entering Roosevelt Place, she paused to lay an arresting hand on his arm.

“Lary, there are three houses here under construction. The one near the middle of the block is yours. You haven’t even a bowing acquaintance with the other two.”

The man—not the architect—flushed with pleasure. He had never talked shop to Mrs. Ascott, and her recognition of one of his ideas, simply rendered in rough concrete and blue-green tile, pleased him. She would help him to compromise with Mrs. Morton about that inglenook. But the inglenook was only a subterfuge. He wanted to talk to her about his sister. She alone could make Eileen see that her admirer was uncouth, a good-looking animal devoid of a single quality to survive the honeymoon.

III

As they picked their way cautiously between paint cans and piles of building refuse, Lary discovered that the workmen had erected a barricade between the front hall and the living-room, and the angle of the stairway shut the chimney corner from view. On the second floor there was another obstacle. The floors had been newly waxed, and a stern “Verboten” flaunted its impotent arrogance in their path. They continued their climb to the third floor, where children, servants, billiards, and winter garments would be harboured. Judith paused in the door to the nursery, crossed the room and sank, exhausted, in the wide window seat. Lary found place beside her, as he told her of the clever girl who had done the Peter Pan frieze above the yellow painted wall.

“Are you fond of children, Lary?” She was thinking of Eileen.

“No, I detest them.”

“You— But how can you say such a thing? Your understanding with Theodora is perfect. You kindle, you glow, when you are telling her stories from the classics.”

“That’s because she isn’t a child. I believe she never was. But my affection for her didn’t begin when she was.... The first few months, I believe I hated her. I may tell you about it some time. When I lose patience with my mother—and other women—I think about that hideous afternoon, twelve years ago last December. I don’t believe any child—or anything else that men and women are at such a bother to create and leave behind them—is worth all that suffering.”

Mrs. Ascott withdrew, ever so little. She did not like Larimore Trench when his tone revealed that peculiar timbre, that quality of boyish cynicism. He had seen so much of books, so little of life. And then it came to her that he viewed everything in the sordid world—the world outside his imagination—through the distorting lenses of his mother’s personality, her limitations and her prejudices. In his most violent opposition he was, nevertheless, directed by her. He would go to the south pole ... because she stood obstinately at the north. It was she who shaped his course, determined his stand. Her insistence on the fundamental importance of material progress drove him early to the post of disinterested onlooker. That he did his work, and did it well, was a reflex of his inner nature, the nature that came to him when David’s fineness and Lavinia’s dynamic ardour were fused, in a moment of unthinking contact. And it was the penalty of such fusing, that neither of his parents comprehended the nature they had given him.

IV

The silence towered, opaque and forbidding, between them. But they had come with a purpose, groping their way to the same objective, neither one guessing what was in the other’s mind. By a devious path, that was nevertheless essentially feminine, Judith approached:

“Lary, do you want to tell me about your brother? It would have made such a difference in Eileen’s life—if he had lived.”

“You would have enjoyed Bob—a tremendous fellow, every phase of him. He played half-back on the college team when he was sixteen. And at that, he took the state cup in the half mile dash. He had medals for hammer throwing and pole vault. There is a whole case of his cups and ribbons in the college library. He’s the only one of us who inherited my mother’s energy. Oh, Sylvia, of course. She can rattle around and make a great showing—and she does actually accomplish things when she has a definite purpose ... something she wants to do. The rest of us are a listless pack. We’d rather climb a tree and watch the parade go by. But Bob was in everything, for the sheer fun of living. It looks to me like a stupid blunder ... to cut off such virility before it had perpetuated itself.”

“Eileen told me she had lost her respect for God, since her brother was drowned. She was so naÏve and in such deadly earnest.”

“Eileen was a born doubter. I was sixteen when I revolted against the idea of a Deity with the duties of an ordinary stockroom clerk—and it was one of Eileen’s searching questions that set me thinking. Not bad for six years old. Mamma holds to the old orthodox belief as one of the hallmarks of respectability. In her day, and town, the iconoclasts were pool-room keepers and saloon bums. The catechism was drilled into us as soon as we could talk. My mother would have been a great ritualist, if she had had the luck to be born an Anglican. There isn’t much in her church to hang your hat on.”

“But your father, Lary—religion means something to him.”

“Yes ... it’s about all he has. Eileen breaks his heart with her irreverent flings. I spare him. Not because I am more considerate than she. More selfish, perhaps. I can’t take the consequences of inflicting pain. You’ll call it crass spiritual weakness—a flaw in the casting. I’ve tried to overcome it. I couldn’t have endured....” His voice wavered, “Last night I heard my father praying for Eileen. It was ghastly. I wanted to tell her how she is torturing him. But it would only provoke a fresh outburst of scoffing.”

“Lary, will you give Eileen into my hands—stop worrying about her—you and your father? Will you persuade him that I have been sent ‘from on high’ to guide her through this wilderness? I may fail; but I have her confidence.”

“Papa was afraid, because you were rich, that you would share her mother’s view. Oh, not that Eileen took refuge in your sympathy. She’s too proud, too good a sport, for that. She only told him that money, per se, was no obstacle—vide Mrs. Ascott. Before she was through with it, she told him that if he kept on, she would go to the devil with Hal Marksley. It was after that that he carried his trouble to the God who is said to answer prayers.”

“As a substitute for the Deity.... But at least, Lary, I know the premises. And at the worst, it is only the working out of her own nature. No one can live Eileen’s life for her, not even her father. But there’s the tower clock, striking six. You will be late for dinner—and we haven’t looked at that inglenook.”

---

From her vine-screened retreat in the summer house, Judith Ascott looked out on the fairest May Day she had ever known. It was the morning after ... and the promise she had made to Lary hung sinister and foreboding over her spirit. Everything around her was vibrant with coming summer. At home the buds would be opening timorously, while here the perennial climbers were in full leaf. An aureate splendour, seductive as Danae’s rain, rippled through the open structure of the pergola, transmuting the pebble walk to a pavement of costly gems; but within the widening of the arbour—that David had converted into an outdoor living-room—the frightened shadows sought refuge from the shafts that would presently destroy them. To the cool umbrageous corner nearest the house, where the light was faint, the woman had taken her world-weary body, yearning for the relaxation her bed had denied her.

It was all so insistent, this new life that had come to her, its music keyed to a pitch she had never realized, a tempo beyond the reach of her experience. The Trenches. Were there other families in the universe like this one? Before her coming to Springdale she had viewed the world through a thick forest of people, most of them intolerably tiresome. In the main they were contented ... such contentment as is to be derived from a favourable turn in the market or the balm of Bermuda to beguile a winter’s day. Happy lives, she had read, make uninteresting biographies. Her life had been far from happy, and her biography would be utterly stupid. Mrs. Trench was—she realized with a stab of astonishment—a desperately unhappy woman, and her life story was made up of a propitious marriage and six abnormally interesting children. And then ... Theo appeared at the other side of the garden wall, discerned the white-clad figure among the verdant shadows of the summer house, and scaled the low barrier with the nimbleness of a squirrel. In the folds of her skirt she held something, and a furtive air pervaded her small person.

II

“Dear Lady Judith, may I have the honour of a morning call?”

“Do come, you little ray of sunshine. Your Lady Judith’s sky is overcast, and she is in sore need of cheer.”

“Don’t you go bothering Mrs. Ascott this morning,” Theo’s mother cried sharply from the pantry window. “You ought to know enough not to wear out your welcome.”

“No danger,” Judith assured her. She did not perceive the look of sharp displeasure on the older woman’s face, but the voice affected her disagreeably, and she turned for relief to the anomalous reproduction of Lavinia, who was already nestling confidently at her side, on the oaken settle. The child spread upon her knee two sheets of paper, on which many lines had been written. A casual glance betrayed the agony of composition. Words had been discarded by the device of an impatient pen stroke. Others had been consigned to oblivion by means of carefully drawn lines. Phrases had been transposed and rhyming terminals changed.

“It’s a poem. I thought it would help to cheer you up. Mamma wouldn’t like it, and neither would Mrs. Stevens—because it doesn’t hop along on nice little iambic feet. It has to say ‘te-tum, te-tum, te-tum,’ or they think it isn’t poetry. Eileen writes some that are wilder than this one; but she never lets mamma see them. She wrote one on Love, last Sunday morning, when she ought to have been listening to the sermon, and ... what do you think! Left it in the hymn book! And Kitten Henderson found it, and sent it to Dan Vincel as her own composition.”

Mrs. Ascott took the copy, scanning the first page with crescent interest. She had not thought of Eileen as a poet. Yet such intense musical feeling.... The musician is seldom a poet of marked quality or distinction. The godlike gifts of rhythm, cadence, imagery, these may not flow with equal volume in double channels. Yet the verses, however crude, would shed another light on a nature too complex for ready analysis. There was no title, no clue to the impulse that promoted the writing. There was no need of such. A girl in Eileen’s rhapsodic mental state would not go far in search of inspiration.

Theo sat breathless, a flush of expectation staining her dark skin, as the first page was laid aside and the second came to view. Before the remaining stanzas were finished, her heart was beating visibly through the thin morning dress, as her lips fashioned soundlessly the lines she had memorized at the second reading:

“Theodora, are you sure that Eileen wrote these verses?”

“Eileen? Goodness, no! She scrawls all over the paper. You never saw her write a neat little hand like that.”

“Then who did write it?”

“Why ... Lary, of course. I thought you knew he was the poet—the real poet of the family. He wrote it last night. I saw his light burning at four o’clock this morning. I couldn’t sleep, either. Mine was ear-ache. His was another kind. He says you always have to agonize when you write anything worth while. And I think this poem is ... worth while ... don’t you?”

The solid ground of assurance was, somehow, slipping from beneath her feet. Lady Judith was not pleased. Her usually pale cheeks burned red, and there was an unfamiliar look in her eyes.

“Eileen told you to bring this to me?”

“Humph! You don’t think I’d show her Lary’s poem? He lets me see lots of things he writes, that mamma and the rest of them don’t know anything about—till they’re published. And if the stupid editors send them back—I never do tell. I wouldn’t ... for the world.”

“He gave you this to read?”

“N-n-not exactly. He left the desk unlocked. Didn’t put the top quite all the way down, and one corner of the paper was sticking out. I had to see what it was, so that if it was something the others oughtn’t to see, I could put it under the blotter, out of sight.”

An expression of Dutton’s flashed through Mrs. Ascott’s mind: “Theo’s the spit of her mother. She’ll do the dirtiest tricks, and explain ’em on high moral grounds.” She caught and held the dark, troubled eyes.

“Theodora, do you know that you have done something almost unpardonable?”

“But, Lady Judith, when anybody feels the way Lary does, and you love him as much as I do—don’t you see, the sooner there’s an understanding, the better? It was that way with the Lady Judith in the story. And if it hadn’t been for the meddlesome fairy, that found the drawing of the two hearts, interlocked, the Prince wouldn’t have known, till it was too late.”

“Theo,” the woman interrupted sharply, “take these two sheets of paper back to your brother’s room, and lay them exactly as you found them, so that he won’t know they have been moved or seen.”

Fear puckered the thin little face, fear and chagrin. With sparrow-like motion she turned and darted in the direction of the wicket gate. Midway she stopped, arrested by the timbre of Mrs. Ascott’s voice—a sternness she had not deemed possible.

“Come back, Theodora, if you want me ever to care for you again.”

A moment the lithe body wavered, the mind irresolute. Then she set her head impishly on one side, looked at the angry, frightened woman with a scold-me-if-you-can expression, and slowly retraced her steps, dragging her toes in the gravel and swaying her straight hips from side to side. It was pure bravado. At the entrance to the summer house, her spirit broke. In another instant she was in Mrs. Ascott’s lap and great sobs were shaking her agitated bosom.

“There, precious, I didn’t mean to hurt you. But, can’t you realize, dearie? You must be made to realize, no matter how it hurts.”

“No, you are the one who must be made to realize. I knew it, all along.”

“Knew what, Theo?”

“That Lary’s crazy about you. He never cared for anybody—not even puppy-dog love, when he was a boy. He was glad when Sylvia married, so he wouldn’t have to take her girl friends home—when they hung around so late that they were afraid to go home by themselves. I’ve been waiting to tell you about him for ever so long. You couldn’t know how good he is—how good—and wonderful.” The smothered voice was full of adoration. “He has the dearest ways, when you are all alone with him. And he never misses the point of a joke. Mamma can say witty things; but she almost never sees the other fellow’s joke. And his hands are so gentle—not strong and rough, like Bob’s. If you only knew.... But Lary wouldn’t ever tell you the nice side of him.”

Hungry arms pressed her close.

“Ah!” the advocate stopped her pleading, to sigh with infinite relief. “You won’t be angry with me. But, Lady Judith, I had to do it ... if you hadn’t ever forgiven me. Lary is teaching me to stand things like a stoic. And when so much depends on it—” The eyes flamed with an idea. “You know, like walking along in the dark, and all at once somebody strikes a match to light a cigar, and you see that there is a hole in the road that you would have fallen into. If no one had struck a match, how would you know the hole was there?”

“And you can keep this secret—never let your brother suspect?”

“He’s the last person in the world that I’d tell. He’d be more angry than you were. And there’s another reason. I’m not quite sure that Lary knows what’s the matter with him. Of course he says—in the last stanza of the poem. He’s written love poetry before, when it was only a woman he imagined, and so he might not think it was serious. Mrs. Ferguson said that if her husband had suspected that he was falling in love with her, he would have taken the first train out of town. Afterward ... he was glad he didn’t know.”

“Theodora! Are you sixty years old, and have you settled the marriage problems of a dozen unpromising daughters and granddaughters? Where did you get such ideas?”

“I heard mamma and Mrs. Ferguson talking about it, before Sylvia was married. I never forget anything I hear; but it’s an awful long time before I get light on some things. When I read Lary’s poem, this morning—and came to that last line—and remembered how pale you looked when you came out in the yard before breakfast—why, all at once the ideas came tumbling together, and I knew that Lary mustn’t know he was in love till he was so far in, he wouldn’t want to ever get out.”

It was adorable, the way she took Mrs. Ascott’s attitude and response for granted. No woman, not even the enshrined Lady Judith, would fail to be honoured by Lary’s love.

III

“Theo-do-ra!” Drusilla’s broad cadence issued from the pantry window. Drusilla was the coffee-coloured maid of all work, who was serving temporarily as mouthpiece for Mrs. Trench. “Come home this minute, honey. You got to do an errand befoh lunch.”

Theodora reflected that there was time for twenty such errands. And her perplexity grew when, after a few minutes, she saw Eileen pass through the wicket gate to take Mrs. Ascott an embroidery pattern from an old number of the Self Culture magazine. She remembered distinctly that Mrs. Ascott had said she did not care particularly about it. That was a week ago. Why had mamma dragged it out now, and sent it over by Eileen?

With all her wizard penetration, the child had never glimpsed the deep windings of her mother’s mind. Mrs. Ascott could not be counted on to take a lively interest in two of the Trench children, and for the present Eileen was the focal point of her mother’s concern. More and more the conviction grew that this woman from the great outside world had been sent by Divine Providence to aid in bringing to swift climax what otherwise might have been a long drawn out affair.

Long engagements were dangerous. Sylvia had been engaged to Tom Henderson for two years. If she, Lavinia Larimore, had listened to Calvin, when he begged her to run away and be married, the night he proposed to her.... It was when she reached this stage in her silent soliloquy that she determined to have Drusilla call Theodora home, and send Eileen to Vine Cottage in her stead.

---

It is improbable that Bromfield’s weekly paper would have yielded its meagre space for the chronicling of Eileen Trench’s engagement, had that important fact been divulged at home. There were other, more momentous things going on. The entire front page of each issue was plastered with the Stone sensation, which grew by melodramatic leaps to something like an international affair. Fournier Stone had been captured in Montreal, had broken from his captor and leaped into the river. At first it was thought that he had been drowned; but he was an agile swimmer, and it was reported that a man answering his description had been seen near Longueuil, an hour or two after his escape.

From Mrs. Stone’s darkened bedroom came bulletins of one collapse after another. The news that her darling had perished in the treacherous waters beneath the Victoria bridge affected her so profoundly that the physician resorted to nitroglycerine injections to restore her. Lavinia read the accounts with emotions that surged from exultation to a species of envy. The part she had been called upon to play was such a drab one, that Lettie Stone’s colourful rÔle stung her. To ease her mind, she fell back on one passage of Scripture after another. She might have known all along that the marriage would end in something like this. It was right that it should end this way ... right that an immoral, unprincipled woman should suffer. And Calvin? No doubt he was suffering, too. But what was the good of going over that ground—ground that she had long since stripped bare of every sprig of comfort or misery?

At last came the startling denouement. Mrs. Calvin Stone was dead. There had been a simple private funeral—attended by everybody in Bromfield. That night Fournier had slipped stealthily into town, and out to the cemetery, where he had ended his life on his mother’s grave. The account of the double tragedy was not news to Lavinia. Ellen Larimore had sent a telegram ... just why, it was difficult to explain. The message came Sunday morning, while David and the girls were at church and Lary was at the office getting out some rush specifications. It conveyed only the bare information that Fournier Stone had shot himself, the night after his mother’s funeral.

“Dead ... Calvin free!” the woman muttered, staring in a daze at the words. And, after a moment of strangling emotion: “But what difference does it make—now? I can’t be there to see it. I wouldn’t go, if I could.”

At this juncture Lavinia’s thoughts took an unexpected turn. She was always thinking things she had no intention of harbouring within her consciousness—as if she had a whole cellar full of ideas she did not know she possessed. The one that came up to her now nauseated her. To see Calvin weeping over the body of his dead wife! Oh, the insolent superiority of the dead! You have no words with which to confront them. All their failings, all their sins are lifted above your most virtuous attack. It would be like this if David should die, and she could no longer upbraid him. No, it was better for people to go on living. You could at least speak your mind, without galling self-reproach.

II

Lavinia was determined to put Calvin Stone definitely and permanently from her thought. He had been amply punished for his monstrous treatment of her. The incident was closed, and at last she could have peace. And then something came to divert all her thinking into a channel that must have been present in the dark valley of her being all the while—unrecognized, because the need for it had been so hazily remote. A story—one of Larimore’s foolish stories. She seldom listened to them; but this one she could not escape. Eileen had gone home with Hal Marksley and had met his sister. It was Wednesday, and the outcome of the Stone imbroglio was still locked in her heart, the telegram having been burned in the kitchen range, Sunday morning, while Drusilla was on the second floor, doing up the bedrooms.

After dinner the Trench family had gravitated, one by one, to Mrs. Ascott’s summer house. David was there, laughing boyishly at something Eileen was telling. What were they talking about? Lavinia’s sharp ears caught a sentence now and then. It was not her wont to be out of things, the things that concerned her family. Her tenant seldom invited her—specifically. But then she never invited Mrs. Ascott, either. Going to the pantry, she filled a plate with raisin muffins, from the afternoon’s baking. Eileen would approach that shrine, armed with a sensational story; but her mother carried breakfast rolls.

III

When Nanny had taken the plate into the house, Judith made room for Mrs. Trench on the settle at her side. David leaned against the solid beam that he had set, seven years ago, to support the arch of the doorway. His blue eyes were full of unwonted content. Theodora was perched on the afternoon tea table, folded now to look like a packing case, steadying herself by a brown hand on her father’s arm. Eileen was on the other bench with Lary. She resumed the narrative that had been interrupted by her mother’s arrival:

“Yes, he’s the most unspeakable beast I ever saw. Oh, by-the-way, mamma, I was telling them about meeting Mr. and Mrs. Nims, this afternoon. Kitten and Hal and I had to go over to the house to get some rugs and things for the play, in the college chapel, and Adelaide opened the door for us.”

“You don’t mean— How did she treat you?”

“Oh, all right. She didn’t know me from anybody else.... But she’s coming to help coach us, the night of dress rehearsal. Mrs. Henderson said, in her talk, that most of the charm in that Sargent portrait was the technique—brush work and colour arrangement. But Adelaide Nims doesn’t need Johnny Sargent or any other artist to tell her how to colour up. She had on an embroidered Chinese robe—the kind the Mandarin women wear in the house—pinkish tan, with a wide band of blue around the sleeves and neck—the kind of blue that fairly made her hair flame. I wanted to eat her, she was so beautiful. And just then I got a glimpse of her husband, through the window. He was sprawled all over a lawn bench that was built to hold three decent-sized people, and his stomach came out like the side of the rain barrel. I was trying to get a good look at his face, when he began to yawn—you know, the kind of a yawn that ate up all the rest of his features. I wanted to giggle ... or scream! And when he finally came into the house, and Kitten and I met him, I couldn’t think of a thing but that awful cavern inside his mouth. Gee! I’d hate to have to live with a man who looks like a hogshead, split down the middle, and an Edam cheese for a head—and no neck at all.”

“I didn’t suppose the nobility looked like that,” Mrs. Trench snapped.

“Humph! He’s only a younger son—and nine brothers and nephews between him and a handle to his name. Adelaide must have been in an awful tight pinch to have married him, money or no money.”

“He may not have been so stout when he courted her,” David ventured. “When your mother married me, no one would have thought of calling me her ‘better three-quarters’—and look at us now.”

“Other three-quarters,” Lavinia corrected. “I never could see the justice in calling a man his wife’s ‘better’ half.”

“There’s historical warrant for your objection, mamma,” Lary said, hoping to avert the revelation his mother was all too prone to make—her callous contempt for David in particular and men as a class.

“You don’t mean the tiresome old story of Adam and the rib,” Eileen demurred.

“Nothing like that. I found the story in some elective Greek we were reading, my third year in college. And as you describe this Mr. Nims, he seems to fit the original model. Seven of us were selected to translate the Symposium of Plato, and I had the story Aristophanes was said to have told at that memorable banquet. It was in response to the toast, ‘The Origin of Love.’ As the gods planned the world, there was no such thing as love. But they had created a race of terribly efficient mortals—hermaphroditic beings, man and woman in one body, their faces looking in opposite directions. They had four legs and a double pair of arms, and when they wanted to go somewhere in a hurry, they rolled over and over, like an exaggerated cart wheel, touching all their hands and feet to the ground in succession. They could see what was going on behind them, and could throw missiles in two directions at the same time.

“As long as they didn’t realize their advantage, it was all right. But one day a leader was born among them. I suspect it was the female half of him who discovered that they were superior to the gods. If they went about it right, they could capture Olympus, and send the gods to earth to toil and offer sacrifices. The one thing the gods cared about was having their vanity fed, by the smoke from countless altars. It was for this service that man was created, in the beginning. So, when it was reported on Mount Olympus that mortals aspired to be gods, Zeus conceived a way to avert the disaster, and at the same time have twice as many creatures on earth to offer sacrifices.

“He made a great feast, and invited all the insolent race of man. And when he had them at his mercy, so that they couldn’t escape, he had them brought to him, one at a time, and cleft them in two, vertically, so that they could look only in one direction, and run on only two feet—”

“O-wee-woo!” Theodora squirmed. “Didn’t they bleed ... terribly?”

“Hush, Theo, it’s only a story,” Mrs. Trench exclaimed, irritably.

“And that’s how a man and his other half came to be separated,” David said, drawing Theodora to him and stroking her pain-puckered brow.

“Yes, the gods thought they had destroyed man, when they cleft him in two,” Lary went on, his brown eyes shining. “But in that act of ruthlessness they sowed the seeds of their own destruction. When they hurled the mutilated creatures out of Paradise, most of the halves became separated. Then began the endless search for their other halves. The men realized that they couldn’t live up to their full capacity, with the feminine side of themselves gone. And when they did find each other, they experienced a rapture that surpassed the highest emotional possibility of the immortals. That thrill was love. The gods heard about it, and condescended to mate with mortals, in the hope of experiencing the thrill. But it was useless. They had not been separated from their other halves.”

“But how did they sow the seeds of their own destruction?” Judith asked.

“It’s the old story of the apple in the Garden of Eden. The thing they couldn’t get became the ultimate desideratum. They devoted all their energy to the quest of love. They deserted all their old godlike pursuits—and in the end, the Greek deities crumbled and were destroyed by the more vigorous gods of the barbarians.”

Theodora pondered the tale. She could not be satisfied by the application to Mr. and Mrs. Nims. The tub-like man, who was far more tublike in her imagination than Eileen’s exaggerated description should have warranted, was undoubtedly the man who was married to Hal’s sister. But Mrs. Nims was thin. And he was her second husband. Manifestly something was wrong.

“But Lary, suppose when those men tried to find their other halves, they couldn’t.... Their right halves had died, or had got tired of waiting and had gone off with some one else....”

“There wouldn’t be any thrill of love, and the man couldn’t do his best, because he lacked the right person to urge him on,” David told her.“Humph!” this from Eileen, “I guess the woman would be in as bad a fix as the man. Poor Adelaide Nims has had two tries at her other half, and missed it both times. She’s terribly unhappy, for all that she puts up such a good front. Lady Judith, don’t you think she ought to keep on trying till she does find the right one? Or is there a right one for all of us?”

“Yes ... unless we rush off into an alliance that prevents us from recognizing our true mate,” Mrs. Ascott said pointedly.

The girl flushed. The shaft had gone home. She shifted her gaze from the clear gray eyes ... and surprised an inexplicable expression on her mother’s face.

IV

Lavinia had listened, without interest, to the story. But the application—she had been brought up on stories with a Moral at the end. “Unless we rush off into an alliance....” Her face grew hard, a yellow pallor spreading from neck to brow. That was what she had done. That was what Calvin had done. It was his fault, not hers, that she had erred. She ignored the years of waiting, before Calvin had known Lettie. And those two had been mismated, had lived apart most of the time, the first few years of their married life, had quarreled violently when they were together. There must have been a right partner for Calvin. She choked with emotion as she realized—she had never been sure of it, in all those years—that Lettie was not the right one. She would like to see Calvin Stone again, now that it was all over. But what was the use? There was David, forty-eight, and ridiculously healthy. That night she lay awake, into the gray of dawn, thinking, thinking....

---

Late Thursday afternoon Mrs. Trench crossed the lawn with tottering steps. She looked incredibly old, with the bloodless lips and the greenish pallor of her sunken cheeks. “No wonder her children are temperamental,” Judith thought, remembering the crispness of her step and the full flush of her dark skin as she crossed that same stretch of grass the previous evening, the plate of rolls in her hand. She came now with no offering of good will. There was set purpose in her eyes. And her mouth ... Judith wondered how she could have thought Eileen’s mouth looked like that. A sleepless night and the bald revelation of Calvin Stone’s sorrow—discussed at the luncheon table as the Bromfield paper was handed about—had reduced her resistive power to its lowest point. When her life stream was full, she had little difficulty concealing the slimy bed of her being. But now, with all her animation ebbed away, she groped within her own turbid depths, blinded by resentment and self-pity until even prudence forsook her. In any other state of mind, she would not have flung down the gauntlet to the one woman on whom she must depend for the furthering of her plans.

“Mrs. Ascott, would you mind going inside? I can’t stand this sunshine. I never could see why David put a door in the west side of this summer house, where the afternoon sun can shine right in your face. But David always bungles things.”

“You are ill. I am so sorry.”

“It’s nothing. I’ll be myself after I’ve had a night’s rest. The fact is, I want to have a plain talk with you.” Judith led the way to the library. With rigid lips, that marred her usual sharp enunciation, she began bluntly. “I feel that it’s my Christian duty to tell you some nasty truths about that Mrs. Nims.”

“Village gossip. I’m sure, Mrs. Trench, I’m not in the least interested.”

An ugly purplish red crept along Lavinia’s corded neck and up over the cheeks to the line of straight black hair.

“But you and Eileen are planning all sorts of intimacy—musical trio with you at the piano, playing accompaniments for the violin and ’cello—and Larimore and his father are terribly vexed. Of course you couldn’t be expected to know anything about the woman ... being a newcomer in the town. And you couldn’t know how important it is to me, right now, not to have my husband displeased.”

It transpired that Eileen had talked too much, at breakfast, that morning ... too many details of her call at the Marksleys’ home, the play the Dramatic Club was putting on, for the benefit of the laboratory fund, in which Hal Marksley had to kiss her, beneath the pale glow of a marvellously devised stage moon.

“The trio was only a tentative suggestion. If Mr. Trench—”

“It isn’t so much his opposition as Larimore’s. He never had any use for the Marksley family—and this big competition coming on. Villa residence, keeper’s lodge, garage and barns. It will mean a great deal to my son to win that commission. And the contract for the construction will be the biggest thing Mr. Trench has had since he put up the new Science Hall.

“I should think being kind to Mrs. Nims would be a help rather than a hindrance,” Mrs. Ascott said, perplexed.

“It would, if I had reasonable men to deal with. The fact is—if I must speak plainly—young Mr. Marksley is very much in love with Eileen. I wouldn’t have anything come between them for the world. You are a married woman. You ought to know Eileen’s type. She isn’t the least bit like me. If she resembles any of my family, it is my sister Isabel—and we were thankful to get her safely married at seventeen.”

“But Mr. Marksley, they told me, is going to Pratt when he is graduated from the college, here. It will be four or five years before—”

“Some more of Eileen’s foolishness. What use has he for more education—with all that money? And she knows as well as I do that he can go into business with his brother Alfred, in St. Louis, the day after commencement. He doesn’t have to depend on his father, who detests him. I suppose Eileen has told you that fact, too.”

Mrs. Ascott shook her head, irritation mounting to anger, as her caller’s tone divested itself of that modicum of reserve that had been the inculcated habit of years. In all her experience she had never met a woman like Lavinia Trench. From their second meeting, there had been an undercurrent of hostility, which Lavinia was at great pains to subdue or conceal. A rich woman was a person to be envied ... and conciliated. In her normal state she would not have jeopardized the fragile bond of surface friendship that bound them.

II

Not that the interview reached the disgusting level of a quarrel. Yet Judith was betrayed into the fatal error of attempting to reason with a woman whose mental processes had never recognized the inevitable link between cause and effect. She did not know how to deal with the mind that leaped from one vantage point to another, with all the nimbleness and none of the objectivity of a circus acrobat. Dutton had once said of Mrs. Trench: “You can’t nail that woman down. When you trap her square, on her own proposition—she’s over yonder, on an entirely different subject, crowing over you. If she can’t make her point, she talks about something else.” But Judith gave little heed to Dutton’s mumblings.

The one thing Mrs. Trench had made unequivocally plain was that Larimore and his father must not be antagonized. This could be accomplished only by keeping Eileen’s fondness for Hal in the background, and avoiding any public contact with his highly immoral sister. It was in connection with Mrs. Nims that Judith blundered. She could not believe that either David or Larimore Trench would cast a stone at the woman who had sinned and was unhappy because of her sin.

“You mean Mary Magdalene, and all that? Well, I don’t believe Christ expects me to associate with the woman who ran away from two husbands—travelled with the first one for three weeks before they were married at all. There’s no reforming a woman like Adelaide Marksley. She’s bad, through and through.”

“There may have been extenuating circumstances. What do you and I know about her inside life? Until we have been tempted, as she was, we have no moral right to set up our code—”“You think I have never been tempted? I could tell you a story ... if I was a-mind to. It was only my sense of honour and duty. And that ought to be enough for Adelaide Nims or any other woman.”

“She may not have had a very clear conception of the meaning of ‘honour’ and ‘duty.’ Do you think those terms mean the same thing to all women? Do they mean the same thing to any woman, at all times? You don’t know anything about the inner life of the girl who grows up in a loveless home, or is trapped in a childless home of her own, with a man who doesn’t love her. Your life has been crowded with responsibility and affection. You have a husband whose devotion to you is the most beautiful—”

“You think David is a paragon. You haven’t had to live with him for almost twenty-eight years. You haven’t had to drive him, every step he took, for fear he would sit down on you, and let the family starve. And as for the children ... what has that got to do with it? Why—it was when Isabel was so sick that—that the minister kept calling and calling. All the women in the church were crazy about him. I never dreamt he was in love with me till the night before the baby died. But I showed him his place, quick enough, when he told me he could see that David didn’t understand or appreciate me.” Her eyes gleamed with pride, as if she would have gloated: “There! You didn’t know I had been tempted—and by the minister, too!”

“For all that, Mrs. Trench, you can’t draw the line between the woman who sins and the one who is saved from sinning by some fortuitous accident. Your baby died, the next day. If she had lived ... and you had seized the chance for the happiness you had missed, I would have no condemnation for you. I know. I was almost in sight of that treacherous snare—when the axle of our motor car broke, and my father overtook us and—brought me to my senses. We were within a mile of the pier where his yacht was anchored—the man who was as unhappy in his loveless home as I was in mine. We were going to Italy, to hunt for what we both had missed. My husband had gone to Egypt with another woman. I told myself that my marriage vow was an empty mockery....” She stopped, a sickening wave of self-disgust overwhelming her. Why had she bared her soul to this woman?

Lavinia? She made no effort to conceal her horror. So this was why Mrs. Ascott did not wear mourning!

“And he, your husband—divorced you?”

“No, I divorced him. In New York there is only one cause for divorce, and in the eyes of the law, I had committed no offence. Mrs. Nims, with her bringing up—with the family environment that surrounds her and her brother—”

“Oh, with men it is different. You don’t expect morality in them. David says that Hal is fast. That’s at the bottom of the whole trouble. I wish I hadn’t said anything about the affair. I might have known you wouldn’t see it as I do. But then, I hadn’t suspected—” She checked herself. There were some things Lavinia wouldn’t say, even when she was indignant to the core.

III

When she went home, a few minutes later, she resolved to padlock the wicket gate—to secure it with hammer and nails, if need be. She would not have her family subjected to such an influence. Eileen was completely bewitched. It was “Mrs. Ascott this” and “Lady Judith that” from morning till night. Theo was even worse. David was getting to look like a boy, since he had been chatting across the wall with that designing woman. And Larimore! He was already in her clutches. How could a mother have been so blind? If the gate were closed, with obvious intent, Mrs. Ascott would take the hint, and move away.

Then she remembered the months that Vine Cottage had stood idle. It was a poor time to rent a furnished cottage, with vacation coming on, and ever so many of the faculty houses eager to be leased for the summer months. Besides ... Mrs. Ascott had her redeeming points. She was never at a loss which forks to put on the table, and how to add that chic effect to a costume. If Eileen were to shine as Mrs. Henry Marksley, Junior, she would need much coaching. And, after all, what had Mrs. Ascott done? She might have gone to Italy in a yacht. A flight in a motor car—pursuit—a broken axle—capture! There had never been anything like that in Lavinia Trench’s life. Then, too, her husband had deserted her ... had run away with another woman. It was always, in these cases, “running.” One could not conceive of a leisurely departure from the confines of the moral code. No doubt Mr. Ascott had abused her. Men usually did, when they were casting amorous eyes at some one else. That made a different case of it. Her father had taken her back. It could not have resulted in a public scandal. Probably the facts never leaked out. Mrs. Ascott had certainly been received by the best society in New York and Pelham before coming to Springdale.

Moreover ... this thing of nailing up gates did not always turn out the way one expected. She had nailed up one gate in her life that she would have given the whole world to open. And this was such a friendly little gate. Who could tell but that some day she, Vine—the self-sufficient—might need a friend? Mrs. Ascott was—potent phrase—“a woman of the world.” She made the women of Springdale look pitifully gauche. It was not a bad idea to have such a woman as a neighbour. Not too much intimacy. She would look to that. She might mention.... But what was there to tell? Mrs. Ascott had not sinned, as Adelaide Marksley had. Herein lay the crux of the whole matter. Still ... she was a dangerous woman. Larimore must be watched.

---

The day following her illuminating talk with her non-conformist neighbour, Mrs. Trench remained in bed. To some women a headache is a godsend. It obviates the necessity for explanation. When she emerged from the darkened room, she brought with her all the marks of physical illness, to account for the rasped state of her nerves; but to her son, at least, the evidence was not convincing. He had witnessed too many narrow brushes with Death, when Lavinia had something important to attain or conceal. Had she waited, she might have seized on a ready-made cause for a period of bad humour ... the outcome of the Marksley building competition. On Saturday afternoon the contest was settled, and Larimore Trench was not the winner. The prize had gone to a Chicago architect. That was not the worst of it. Mrs. Marksley wrote Lary a letter, informing him that his plans were too stiff and old-fashioned; but that she would like to buy from him the design for the cow barn, which was better in some respects than the one the up-to-date architect had made.

“You remember, Larimore, that was what I said, all along.” Lavinia’s voice cut both ways. “And if you had gone on, the way you did the cow barn.... I don’t believe you have forgotten that you put the ornament on the barn, to please me.”“No, I haven’t forgotten. I designed the house for people, not for cows.”

II

Judith heard about it, in a burst of fierce indignation, from Theodora. It was Monday, and the atmosphere of her home was still so forbidding that she dreaded to enter the house, when she came from school. Mrs. Ascott might want her to do an errand, she argued. At least, it would do no harm to ask. But Mrs. Ascott did not want an errand. She wanted the very information Theo was only too eager to offer. From Eileen she had had a shaft of unpleasant illumination: “Lary has crawled in his hole and pulled the hole in after him.” There was no iron in his nature, nothing with which to fend himself against such clumsy insults. But Theodora inadvertently revealed the deep cause of his hurt. It was not the Marksleys, but his mother’s attitude, that offended him.

“To think, Lady Judith, of those stupid Marksley judges, turning down all Lary’s beautiful plans in favour of—” She gasped, her cheeks burning. “I wish you could see the front elevation of the house. It looks for all the world like a frumpy old woman. There’s a gable that reminds you of a poke bonnet, and under the gable are two round windows ... like staring eyes. If I’d gone that far, I would have had the nerve to put in a nose and a mouth. But, no, he has a door between those windows, opening out on a ledge. You don’t have a third story door opening on a ledge, unless you want some one to walk out there, in the dark, and get his neck broken. It ought to have been a balcony. Hm-m-m, I guess he used up all the balconies the law allows. He has them at both sides ... like the big hips that were in style when mamma was a bride. And a coat of arms above the door—the Marksleys never had a coat of arms.”

“How did you come to see the plans, Theo?”

“Hal smuggled them over, last night, to show mamma why Lary missed out. And she didn’t do a thing but roast him again, this morning ... because they took the cow barn, that he did to please her, and cut out the classical part, that he did to please himself. That wasn’t the only ruction we had at breakfast. But there’s no living with my mother, these days. Papa said he wouldn’t figure on the contract—after the way they treated Lary. And she nearly raised the roof. I guess my daddy’ll put in a bid, all right.”

III

More than once, in the weeks that followed, Judith’s mind swung back to the words: “There’s no living with my mother, these days.” Once she asked Dr. Schubert about it. Might not Mrs. Trench be, in fact, a very sick woman—keeping herself out of bed by sheer force of her indomitable will? To which Lavinia’s physician replied, with a none too sympathetic smile: “Yes, she is a very sick woman ... but there is nothing in my materia medica that will reach her case. I am looking for a return of her old trouble—a hardening of the fluid in the gall duct. She has passed through two sieges of jaundice. And at another time the hardening reached the stage of well solidified stones, that yielded to large and persistent doses of olive oil—a remedy that Mrs. Trench took as a peculiarly cruel and unnecessary punishment.”

“I’m glad to know it’s purely physical,” Mrs. Ascott breathed. “I was afraid it was ... spleen.”

Dr. Schubert’s eyes twinkled.

“Your neighbour’s liver trouble originates in her spleen. You’ll say my anatomy is defective; but Mrs. Trench’s body is the victim of an abnormal mind. To be physically unfit always infuriates her. Her passionate outbursts always react on that highly important gland, that nature designed for the cleansing of the physical body. Result? A clogged liver and a worse fit of temper. Poor David! He is so fine. Life ought to have given him velvet instead of gravel.”

At no time did Lavinia take to her bed for more than a few hours, and then only when some personal triumph was to be gained by a direct appeal to the sympathy of her family. If she harboured a feeling of ill-will against her neighbour, it was in effect to class her with those of her own household. She seldom glanced into the garden across the low stone barrier, and when she walked from the kitchen stoop to David’s shop, at the lower end of her own domain, she went with head inclined, as if she were battling against a furious northern gale. Even Theodora was beginning to practice caution, and a less amiable maid than Drusilla would have given notice, long ago.

Larimore and his mother were icily polite, as was their wont when no other form of civil intercourse was possible. The coldness began the day after Mrs. Trench taunted her son with his failure to win the Marksley commission. But her smug “I told you so” had little to do with the prolonged siege. Lary would have forgiven her. His father had schooled him not to hold her accountable for the bitter things she said. You could reason with Theodora; but Lavinia....

No, the rancour was not on this side. His had been the triumph. His mother had sought to deliver a blow that must shatter his dearest idol—and the blow had missed the mark. Dutton was wont to say that nobody ever got ahead of Vine Trench. And in this case it was Lavinia who defeated herself. So much the worse for Larimore, who had parried the thrust with a foreknowledge that staggered and infuriated her.

IV

It was the Friday following the close of the competition, and there were indications of a coming thaw in the big Colonial house. The girls had betaken themselves to Mrs. Ascott’s arbour, as soon as dinner was over. They spent every available minute at Vine Cottage—to make up for their mother’s open hostility. And their mother, seeing how happy they were, had dispatched Larimore to tell them that they were to accompany her to Mrs. Henderson’s on some inconsequential errand. When they had gone, Lary let himself wearily down on the bench at Mrs. Ascott’s side. All the boyishness was gone from his face and his eyes were deeply circled and dull. No word passed between them. The man reflected, feeling the warm presence so close to him, that most women chattered, preached or philosophized without cessation, as if the one thing demanded of femininity were an unbroken flow of talk. Judith Ascott knew when speech was obtrusive. She knew, too, when to break the thread of Lary’s morbid musings.

“Have you been watching that sunset? Theo called my attention to it, before you came out. She saw, in those clouds, the form of a woman with streaming red curls. ‘The red-haired wife of the sun,’ she called it. Now the locks are straight and almost gray. I never saw such sunsets as you have here, not even in Italy.”

“I didn’t know what bewitching colour effects we had, until I began to sit here on this bench with you. My father has often called us to enjoy a peculiarly beautiful sky with him. Mamma usually spoils it by reminding him that all the wealth of tints is produced by particles of dirt in the atmosphere. She hates dirt, even when it reveals itself in a form that doesn’t menace her housekeeping. If she had gone on living in Olive Hill, I believe she would have died of disgust.”

“Does the town—the immediate environment—make any difference, Lary? Olive Hill or Springdale, Florence or Pelham. I have been as wretchedly unhappy and ... alone ... in a crowded Paris cafÉ as ever I was on the deck of a steamer, in mid-ocean, when I wanted to climb overboard and end it, in the inviting black water.”

“You? Judith! I thought your life had been eminently satisfactory--barring the one sorrow.”

“You must not think I have been a happy woman. I have only been a coward—shutting the trap door on my failures. But I don’t want to talk about myself. I have a favour to ask. Will you—” Her voice took on the quality of appeal.

“What is it, Judith? A favour?”

She drew from its envelope a letter that had come, that afternoon, from her attorney. His partner, Mr. Sanderson, was planning to build a home on Long Island, as a wedding gift to his only daughter. She knew the girl’s taste. She wanted to send the plans that Mrs. Marksley had rejected. With such entrÉe as the Sandersons could give him, Larimore Trench ought to find success in New York. He was wasting his talents in Springdale.

“It’s good of you, my dear. But that kind of success—or failure—doesn’t mean much to me.”

“Then what would satisfy you, Lary? You have so much ability.”

“A little of the right kind of recognition—perhaps. I used to think I would experience the thrill at the acceptance of a poem or essay by some discriminating editor. The first time such an acceptance came, it left me numb and cold with disappointment ... in myself, I mean—my inability to rise to the occasion.”

“May I tell you what you want—what you demand of life?” Some one had struck a match in her darkness.

“I—wish you would.”

“The thing you have attained, Lary, the height you have reached ... is under your feet. You—you are superior to it. The only thing that could satisfy you is—” she paused, a fervid instant—“the unattainable.”

Larimore Trench turned and looked into her eyes.

Dusk had settled on the garden, but Luna’s fire illuminated her face. His body stiffened, and a dull anguish smote him.

“Judith—God help me—the unattainable is ... you!”

V

Judith Ascott had dreamed of the time when love should come, not such love as Raoul had given her in her romantic girlhood. Nor that other love, that had marched with slow musical cadence into the discord of her early maturity. It must be the masterful love, austere and tender, a discipline and a refuge for her unruly spirit. And now it was come ... the only love that had ever mattered to her—the only man she had known whose very faults and weaknesses were precious, and she had but one impulse—to fold him in her arms and soothe his aching spirit. Was this love? Or mayhap the thwarted motherhood within her, that perceived in Lary and Eileen the void left by the rebellious aversion of the woman who was their mother in the flesh? A long moment she scrutinized, challenged the stranger that had arisen, unheralded and undesired, in her own heart. Then she said, resolutely:

“No, Lary. I am the unattainable, only so long as I retain the wisdom to hold myself beyond your reach. I should prove as disappointing as all the others—the achievements that were to give you joy. The real Judith is not the peerless being your imagination has fashioned. Would you shrink from me in repugnance and horror if I should tell you that my husband is not dead?”

“You are another man’s wife?”

“I was. The divorce was granted a few days before I came to Springdale, less than three months ago.”

Lary breathed a sigh so sharp that it cut him like a knife.

“But that isn’t all. There was another man ... a man I fancied I loved. Perhaps I pitied him. Most of all, I pitied myself. I was more than willing to listen to his arguments. We would go to some place where no one knew us. We had not the courage to brush away the falsehoods and conventions of society. I faced all the consequences. It was no impulse of youth. I was twenty-five, and had been married almost seven years. We both knew what we were doing when I told him I would go.”

All at once she felt the man at her side shrink—involuntarily, she was sure. It was as if his body had repulsed her, while his mind was striving to be just, even magnanimous. She had thought it all out, after Theodora’s revelation, knowing that some day Lary would come to her with the pure white offering of his love. And she had resolved to tell him of Herbert Faulkner—not the fiasco, but the fact of her elopement. Perhaps it was this submerged thought that had leaped to the surface, in her talk with Lary’s mother. With him she would not take refuge in the timely intervention of a broken axle and a prudent father. Her sin was as complete as if she had carried elopement to its inevitable conclusion. He must hear the story in all its sordid aspect. She waited for him to speak. The clear outline of his face cut the shadow, incisive and still as an Egyptian profile in stone. Not a quiver of the lips betrayed his emotion. Yet Judith Ascott knew she had dealt him the cruelest blow of his life.

“You won’t let it interfere with our friendship, Lary?” It was a stupid, girlish question, such as Eileen or Kitten Henderson might have asked. She felt incredibly young and inexperienced. When the man spoke, his voice was hoarse with pain.

“I don’t want friendship. I want, oh, God! the unattainable. Judith, it is not what you have done. I am not such a cad as to judge you. I long since freed myself from the tyranny of an absolute thing called virtue. That isn’t the—the obstacle. At bottom I am a selfish brute, jealous and unreasonable. If there is another man in the world who has meant that much to you.... Oh, not that I blame him. If I had known you when you were another man’s wife, I wouldn’t have scrupled to take you from him. You are my other self. I have known it—from the moment I looked into your eyes, under the little apricot lamp. All my life I have been heart-hungry, wanting something I couldn’t find. Zeus cleft us apart, in the beginning of time. And now that you are here—” He set his teeth hard and his frame shook.

A long, long time they sat silent. The night settled about them and clouds covered the face of the moon. In the great house next door, lights gleamed here and there as the family came home and prepared for bed. Mrs. Trench had arrived in Hal Marksley’s touring car, with the girls. Apparently they had been for a ride. As she went to the back door, to be sure Drusilla had put out the milk bottles, she caught sight of the two motionless figures in the summer house. She went to the sun room and turned on a light that shimmered faintly through the Venetian blinds. Judith saw, without perceiving it. The whole irony of life lay between her and that impatient light.

The tower clock chimed eleven, when, like a stage illumination, the garden was bathed in golden glory. With a single impulse the two on the settee turned and looked up through the roof of the summer house, where the vines were thin. And there, in a little clear blue lake, piled high around the marge with mountains of sombre clouds, the yellow moon floated, serene and detached. Lary took the fevered hands between his cold, moist palms.

“Will you wait for me ... wait till I can search myself? Perhaps there is a man, hidden somewhere in the husk of me. If I find him ... I will come and lay him at your feet.”

VI

Mrs. Trench was waiting for her son. She had dallied too long with that warning. She was in the door of the sun room at the first sound of his key in the lock.

“Larimore!” as he crossed the hall and made for the stairs.

“Yes, mamma. Why aren’t you in bed?”

“I have something to say to you. I don’t often meddle in your affairs; but there come times when it is a mother’s duty to speak. I wish you would be a little more careful in your associations with that Mrs. Ascott. She isn’t the pure, virtuous woman we thought her. She told me—in the most brazen way—that her husband ran away to Africa with another woman. Though what anybody would want to go to Africa for— But he wasn’t entirely to blame for leaving her. She had an affair with another man. A low scoundrel who pretended to be her husband’s friend. She told me, without the least bit of shame, that the only thing that saved her from breaking her marriage vow was—her father catching up with them, when the axle of their automobile broke—before they reached the yacht that they were going to Italy in ... alone ... not a touring party. Alone!”

The words poured forth in a disorderly phalanx. Larimore stood patiently waiting until the need for breath stopped her utterance. Then he said incisively:

“So there was a broken axle.”

And in a flash Lavinia knew that she had lifted a load of doubt and misery from her son’s mind—had destroyed, with her revelation, the barrier that stood between him and Judith Ascott. He could hear the grinding of her sharp teeth as he turned and ascended the stairs.

---

Mrs. Ascott and Theodora were up in the attic searching through trunks and boxes for a fan that would harmonize with Eileen’s graduating dress. Lavinia had made a special trip to St. Louis in quest of accessories, and had returned with a marvel of lacquer sticks and landscape, befitting a mandarin’s banquet board—and Lary had said things that threw the family into a superlative state of stress.

“Mamma and my brother don’t gee worth a cent,” the child lamented, peering with eager eyes into the shadowy recesses of a chest that ought to yield treasure. “For the last month, they’re on each other’s nerves all the time. It’s mostly Lary’s fault ... and ... I believe he does it to save papa. My poor daddy can’t do a blessed thing the way it ought to be. And you know, mamma gets good and mad at only one of us at a time. Eileen says, if she felt that way about her people, she’d clean up the whole bunch at once, and get it out of her ‘cistern.’ But mamma’s just naturally economical, and this way she can make her grouches go farther. We thought Drusilla would quit us, last week, because mamma laid her out so hard—when she scorched the bottom layer of a short cake. So I guess it was a good thing Lary said what he did about the fan.”

“Lightning rod for Drusilla,” Larimore Trench called, from the foot of the narrow stairway. “You don’t mind if I come up? I’d like to see the old attic again.” His face was beaming and his gesture catlike as he mounted the steep stairs. “Bob and Syd and I used to have some wild times up here. I wonder if the ghosts of our youth ever disturb your slumbers, sweet Lady Judith. We were a rough trio, in our day.”

“You and Sydney Schubert rough! I wonder what you would call my two incorrigible brothers.”

“Yes, but they were,” Theo broke in. “Bob could get them to do anything. We got awful quiet at our house after he went away. Come over here, Lary, where you can get the breeze. I’ll let you have half of my box to sit on.” With a wisp of paper she wiped the dust from the top of a packing case that bore in bold black letters the legend: “Books—Keep Dry.”

“Look at this, Lady Judith!” The small frame shook with reminiscent mirth. “It belongs to mamma ... twenty volumes of general information, in doses to match the monthly payments. ‘Keep Dry!’ You couldn’t wet ’em with a fire hose. We had to leave them here, because Lary planned the book-cases, in the other house, so that they wouldn’t quite go in. And mamma had one awful set-to with Professor Ferguson when he had the nerve to use her box of canned culture to lay out his herbarium specimens for mounting. Sylvia said it taught mamma a lesson. If she wanted to rent Vine Cottage, she couldn’t go on deciding how often the silver must be polished, and what the tenant could do with the old plunder she left in the attic. Plunder! Think of it!”

“She has been an exemplary ‘landlord’ since I have been here,” Judith said, ignoring Lary and his too evident embarrassment. “I don’t in the least mind her ordering Dutton around. It saves my humiliating myself in the eyes of my gardener. How was I to know that you can’t grow sweet potatoes from seed, and that Brussels sprouts aren’t good until after frost?”

II

Down on the street there was a harsh grinding of brakes and an excited cry, as Hal Marksley’s car stopped so abruptly as to precipitate Eileen from her seat. Theodora darted to the window, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted:

“Come on up. Mrs. Ascott’s got three fans for you to choose from.”

A moment later, two pairs of feet were heard ascending the stairs. A swift sense of impending disaster sent Theo’s glance from the face of her hostess to that of her brother. She wondered how she ought to have worded her invitation so that Hal could not have assumed it to include him. A young man of fine breeding would not need to be told that she was not asking him to Mrs. Ascott’s attic, when Mrs. Ascott had never invited him to her reception room. He just didn’t know how to discriminate. Lately Eileen didn’t seem to discriminate, either. She should have told Hal not to come. He would be terribly embarrassed, meeting Lary. But of course neither of them knew Lary was there.

If young Marksley knew he was not welcome in the sultry store room of Vine cottage, he gave no token. Eileen’s breathless condition, when she reached the top of the steep stair, gave him a momentary conversational advantage.

“I’m going over to my sister’s to dinner, this evening, and the kid and I were wondering how we’d put in the time till the rest of the folks arrive.”

“You don’t mean you’re going to eat again—just coming from Ina’s graduation party!” Theodora gasped. “What did she serve?”

“Oh, the usual sumptuous Stevens spread. What did she have, Eileen? All I can remember is that Kitten said she borrowed the microtome from the lab. to cut the sandwiches. I believe there was an olive apiece, by actual count.”

“Don’t you remember, Hal? The feast began with frappÉd essence of rose fragrance, served in cocktail glasses, with hearts of doughnuts. Then there was a salad of last year’s ambitions and next year’s hopes. And something to drink that had a reminiscent flavour of coffee. But her china was lovely. She borrowed most of it from Mrs. Marksley. That’s how Hal came to be invited with the preps. Gee, when I ask a bunch of hungry kids to my house, I feed ’em. But then, I know how to cook. And I don’t have to be so desperately dainty, for fear of blundering in the menu.”

“You might have waited for some one else to say that,” Larimore rebuked.

“Huh! it’s a poor dog that can’t wag its own tail. Besides, I can’t remember when you or any of my family made me duck to keep from being pelted with praise. That poor boy is almost starved. He pretended he didn’t like olives, so that I could have two. And he was about to smuggle another sandwich when Mrs. Stevens told what they charge for a beef tongue, and how it shrinks in cooking.”

“Yes,” the youth roared, “when you go to Ina’s for a meal, your oesophagus rings a bell every time you swallow. Her mother makes you feel as if you were eating the grocery bill. We eat like pigs at our house—all but sister, and she’s sure no recommendation for the Æsthetic diet. She’d be a stunner, with a little more meat on her bones.”

Eileen flushed and changed the subject. A few minutes later, Hal lounged across the room to where Lary and Theo sat silently side by side. He began, in a tone that sought to be intimate:

“I say, old man, it was a rotten shame about those plans. I was just as sorry as could be. But my mother—”

“One doesn’t speak of such things,” Larimore said curtly.

Judith saved the situation by the timely intervention of the fan—a woman’s device that evoked from Lary gratitude, from Theo worship. An exclamation of delight, a moment’s perplexed comparison, a hasty choice, and Eileen and her uncouth cavalier were gone.

III

When Theodora looked from the window, some minutes later, the two were crossing the street in the direction of the Nims’ house. A full minute she stood, perplexed. Then her chest heaved with futile indignation. In that minute, the scattered troubles of the past six weeks had danced into form, like iron filings on the glass disc, when Sydney drew his violin bow across its vibrating edge. She understood. Mamma had given permission for Eileen to go with Hal to Mrs. Nims’—to dinner. After all she had said about Mrs. Nims! A quarrel with papa was inevitable. Mamma wanted to provoke a quarrel with papa. There was no other explanation. Things had gone from bad to worse, with only an occasional rift in her mother’s lowering sky. Whatever the cause of her displeasure, it had reached a climax. Something must be done to protect papa—done quickly. Lary was not always tactful—when people acted that way. And mamma always took it out on papa, when Lary got the best of her.

“Lady Judith, couldn’t you call her to come right back here ... eat dinner with you?” The plea tumbled from the inchoate depth of her distress. Mrs. Ascott and Lary interrupted a flow of intimate talk, to look at the pale face and the preternaturally bright eyes.

“What, darling?”

“Eileen! I think my mother has gone crazy. First she says Mrs. Nims isn’t fit for a decent woman to speak to—when papa talked about Christian charity—and now she lets Eileen go over there to dinner.”

“How do you know that, baby?”

“Well, Lary Trench, look for yourself. I guess I can put two and two together. If I didn’t want papa to think Mrs. Nims was a dangerous woman—I wouldn’t tell him that Christ himself couldn’t save her. Either my mother hasn’t got any system at all ... or ... she wants to have one awful row with my father.”

“We might as well face a sickeningly unpleasant situation,” Larimore said to Judith. “You are seeing my mother at her absolute worst. Something has occurred to annoy her, desperately. And we can’t even surmise what it is. The baby and I have laid plots to trap her into betraying the cause of her hurt. But only last night we acknowledged ourselves beaten.”

“May I confess that I have been trying, too, at Dr. Schubert’s suggestion? He tells me that this state of her mind may lead to serious consequences. Some obscure liver trouble, I believe.”

“Not obscure,” Lary amended. “Dr. Schubert understands its pathological aspect. It is the mental cause that baffles all of us. Gall stones are not uncommon in women of my mother’s temperament. She has too much energy for the small engine she has to operate. Her physician has tried to impress on her the need for keeping herself tranquil. He might as well advise a tornado to be calm and rational.”

“Yet she does take advice from him—if he makes it specific and definite.”

“You have the index to my mother’s mind—that cost me years of search. She learns one thing at a time. She has no faculty for making logical deductions. When she tries to apply a known principle to a new set of conditions the chances are nine to one that she will go wrong.”

As he spoke, the woman’s eyes turned to Theodora ... impelled by some unrecognized attraction. The little head was nodding in sage approval. She was only half conscious of what those two were saying. The fact that it was intimate—confidential—sufficed. Things were coming on, entirely to her liking. It was almost the end of June, and she wanted to be sure there would be no backslidings, while she and her mother were in Minneapolis, the following month. She had never been anywhere—excepting the week in St. Louis for the Exposition, when she was seven—and a trip up the river on a steamer had been particularly alluring. Now she would almost rather not go. She might be needed. Oh, not to patch up a quarrel! Lary and Lady Judith were too wellbred for that. But Lary did need to have his courage bucked up, now and then.

She was only a child, she reflected, but she knew that when people were in love, they had no business mooning around in the dark—in separate yards. She could go over the wall without touching anything but her hands. And Lary was much more athletic than she. Besides, the gate was there—even if mamma did padlock it, one morning. What if Lady Judith should try to go through that gate—and have her feelings hurt!

IV

Theodora glanced up from her troubled musings to perceive that she was quite alone in the attic. They had gone and left her. They had forgotten all about her. She sprang from the packing case and danced for joy. It was the first time in all her life that Lary had forgotten her. It was the best omen of all. They were standing at the foot of the stairs—and they weren’t saying a word. She paused, on tiptoe, afraid to breathe lest she break the witching spell. What did people think about, when they were all alone in that kind of heaven? Now she heard their feet on the lower stairs. She hurried to the window to see them go down to the grassy plot before the house, where her father joined them.

The rosy picture was obscured, in an instant, as if she had spilled the ink bottle over it, and daddy’s danger loomed before her. She trudged wearily down to join them on the grass. Things never were what you thought they were going to be. When she reached the edge of the veranda, a pair of strong arms caught her in a yearning embrace.

“Aren’t you going to congratulate your papa?”

“If there’s any reason. Did you get the Marksley contract?”

David’s transparent face darkened.

“Yes ... but that’s not a matter for congratulation. I figured so high that I counted on escaping. I didn’t want it at any price.”

“Then what is it?”

“You know, this was the annual meeting of the college Board—and they elected your papa treasurer. When Dr. Clarkson made his nominating speech, I didn’t dream he was talking about me.”

“Mamma said this morning that they’d shove it off on you—after the way the last two treasurers handled the funds. She couldn’t see why you would want to do all that work, just to be called the most honest man on the Board.”

“Mamma and I don’t always look at things alike. Come, my dears, she is at the door, and dinner may be waiting.”

“Eileen went to a party, over at Ina’s,” Theo cried, mindful of danger. To herself she added: “Well, she did. I didn’t tell him she wasn’t there still.” Daddy must not find out that she was right across the street. There had been too many disagreements, and it never did daddy any good to fight back. He always got the worst of it, and it made him sick. She wanted to ask Mrs. Ascott to come with them, and eat dinner in Eileen’s place. Mamma would hardly raise a scene before company. As the invitation took shape on her lips, it was halted by her mother’s curt voice:

“I suppose you like your victuals cold, the way you stand there and gossip.”

The three Trenches stepped over the wall, which at the front was little more than an ornamental coping, and Judith went in to her lonely meal.

V

Dinner was scarcely over when the room was plunged in a glare of fire, the startling illumination followed almost instantly by thunder that crackled and smote. Then the storm, that had hovered all afternoon in the sultry air, broke with the fury of explosively released wind and rain. Nanny called for help, as the deluge poured through the screens at three sides of the cottage in quick succession. Before the east windows had been closed, the rain was driving straight from the south—and the attic window wide open. Nanny’s bulk halted at the foot of the breath-exhausting stairs, and her mistress ran past her, to make good the publisher’s injunction, “Keep Dry.” When the sash had been lowered, Judith went to the rear of the attic and looked down into the garden, tossing in the summer storm.

Sharp, hissing flames heralded the detonation of thunder such as she had heard nowhere save in the Alps or the tropics. The earth, a moment ago black with the pall of midnight, leaped into the semblance of a stage set with dancing marionets, that vanished in the ensuing darkness to rise again with the next purple flash. Now the wind swooned, lay panting and breathless against the palpitating bosom of the earth. And now it leaped with renewed ardour, gripped the pear tree and shook it as an ill-controlled mother shakes an unruly child. One of the trellises at the east side of the lawn went over with a crash, carrying in its wake a shower of Prairie Queen roses. The Dorothy Perkins looked on with serene security from the shoulder of the garage, her petals draggled, but exultant in the garish light.

The air was clearing now. Gradually the tender green corn slumped down in the softened loam and a disconsolate toad hopped mournfully across the white gravel walk. This was too much even for a toad. With a long, soul-sickening lunge he disappeared in the shrubbery, as the thunder rumbled its retreat behind the western horizon. Out of its dying reverberation, music came floating up through the moist air ... marvellous strains. Judith crossed the attic and threw open the window. Yes, her surmise was right. Eileen and Mrs. Nims were playing Debussy’s matchless tone picture, “Garden in the Rain,” the ’cello blending exquisitely with the piano. Would David hear? Would he recognize his daughter’s touch? But Eileen had never played like this. The tones came, moist and meaningful, lulling the conscious mind to dreams, steeping the senses in the drowsy calm that follows the delirium of summer heat.

Judith Ascott felt her soul at one with the garden ... arid clay, whose thirst had been quenched. She had played Debussy’s imagist arrangement, and had rejected it because it failed to symbolize a prosaic natural phenomenon. Now she knew that it was not the rain, but the garden, which the composer had in mind. She had approached the theme from overhead, just as a moment ago she had looked down on her own garden. With a thrill she perceived Debussy’s thought in all its naked, elemental beauty—the primitive consciousness of maternal Earth, glad and grateful for the benison of summer rain.

Had something new come into Eileen’s playing? Was it Adelaide Marksley’s ’cello that made the elusive thought tangible? Was it, rather, something that had come into her own soul? She had been so long athirst. Must one faint beneath the heat, brave the wind and the lightning’s terror, in order to drink in at last the bountiful rain? Was there any price one would not pay for such peace as had found habitation within her soul?

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In the morning the mistress of Vine Cottage went out to inspect the havoc the storm had wrought. Dutton was down on his knees, righting the vivid green corn stalks and banking them in with the soft soil. Theodora stood on the gravel walk, watching him with elfin curiosity—his shins protected by huge pads of faded brussels carpet, his fingers so packed with mud that they resembled a sculptor’s model in the rough. When she caught sight of Mrs. Ascott she crossed the intervening lawn on dainty toes, like a kitten afraid of the wet.

“We didn’t have any trouble about Eileen,” she began in a whisper pregnant with meaning. “I fixed it.”

“You were a good little angel. Have you a kiss for me this morning?”

“A million of them ... but only one, now.” She pursed her lips with strigine solemnity. The kiss was a rite—not to be taken frivolously. “I have to tell you about it. I don’t think it was half bad—for a kid like me. It didn’t look as if it would work, when I started in. But if you are in as tight a pinch as that, you have to jump where there looks like an opening. Then I had to see it through. There wasn’t any chance to back out.” The sentence was somewhat chaotic, but the meaning was plain.

“When we started in the house, I let mamma and Lary get clear inside the hall. Then I pulled papa back and whispered in his ear—that Eileen was over at Mrs. Nims’ and for him not to let on that he missed her. He asked me why, and I told him that if he was any sport at all, he’d do as I said, and not ask any questions. And what do you think, Lady Judith ... he was game! Mamma threw out one hook after another, to make him ask where Eileen was. And every time he turned and looked at me—and I gave him the most awful glances, behind my napkin. The only thing he could think of, right quick, was getting made treasurer of the college trustees. And I don’t know why mamma didn’t smell something, because it isn’t the least bit like my daddy to boast.”

“And then the storm may have helped.”

“Yes, papa said that was sent by Divine Providence. It gave me a chance to explain to him—while mamma was chasing all over the house, putting down windows, and screaming at Drusilla as if the house was on fire. I told him that mamma was mad as a wet hen—and just bound and determined to start something, with him ... and he mustn’t fall for it. Lady Judith, I wish my daddy had more sand. He choked up—like he was about to cry—and said he didn’t know what was wrong with mamma. He tried every way to please her and make her happy. He asked me if I knew why she was so cross all the time ... and I fibbed an awful fib. I told him Dr. Schubert said she had rocks in her liver and that would make a saint cross.”

Her eyes danced with roguish mirth, then fell. When she raised them again to the woman’s face, they were full of obstinate purpose.

“I guess it was a sin and God will punish me. Well, let Him ... if He feels that way about it. I’d take a whipping any day, to keep my daddy from getting one. If your soul is so nice that you can’t fib once in a while, to help a fellow out of trouble—” She battled with the futility of language to convey the situation as she perceived it. “Still, I wouldn’t want you to think it was wrong ... telling a story, to keep some one out of a scolding—some one that never did a mean thing in his whole life. Do you—do you think it is?”

“You darling!” Aching arms encircled her. “I don’t know how to answer you. We both know that it is wrong, in the abstract, to tell lies.”

“Yes, but I never tell them in the abstract. It’s only when there isn’t any other way.” The explanation threatened to assume the solemnity of a lecture on pragmatism. “I have wanted to tell you—ever since Lary said I was a conscienceless fibber. It’s one thing I can’t make him understand, and he knows everything else without being told. When you want a thing to be a certain way, and it isn’t that way at all, you can’t use the facts. They don’t fit. And what good does it do—to keep saying a thing over, the way you don’t want it to be?”

“A popular religion was founded on that premise, dearie.”

“What I’m talking about hasn’t got anything to do with religion. Bob used to say, ‘A lie is an abomination in the sight of the Lord, and a very present help in time of trouble.’ But I would never fib to keep myself out of trouble. You have to save them ... till there’s something important. If I hadn’t told Lary you didn’t like the apricot lamp shade, he wouldn’t have thought of going over to call on you—till Syd Schubert or some other man fell in love with you.”

Lavinia Trench’s strident voice rasped the sweet morning air. Theo was having altogether too pleasant a time, over there in Mrs. Ascott’s garden. That which she had related would have stung her mother to madness. But Theo’s afterthought was a little outcropping of Lavinia herself. In Dutton’s phrase: “That woman’ll have something stickin’ in her craw for years—and she’ll have to fetch it out, in spite of the devil. If you ever make her sore, or do her a bad turn—you might think she forgot it—but the time’ll come when she lets you hear about it.”

II

When the child had gone, Dutton untied the pads from his knees and approached his mistress. The wind had wrecked the frail framework which he had constructed of lath and the refuse from David Trench’s shop, to support the rank growth of tomato vines, over there by the wall. He admitted, shamefacedly, that he “knowed them end supports was too weak,” when he put them in. He wondered if Mrs. Ascott would mind helping him. Mrs. Dutton was in a bad humour, on account of some words she had had with Mrs. Trench. And Nanny was no good for carpenter work.

“I’m not much of a carpenter—”

“Oh, it ain’t work. It’s just that Nanny’s feet’s too big. She gets in the way. I thought I might call Dave over to he’p me; but he’s been out in the shop runnin’ the scroll saw for dear life, since right after breakfast. The old boy’s goin’ through his hells again. I tell you, ma’am, it’s an awful mistake to call a girl ‘Vine’ and then give her no mind to cling. When she’s in one o’ her tantrums, she wouldn’t see the Lord Jesus Christ if she met Him in the middle of the road—and she sets a heap o’ store by the Lord.”

There was only one way to handle Jeff Dutton. An open rebuke was invariably followed by a day of insolent idleness. Mrs. Ascott had heard him quarrel with Lavinia Trench in a manner to indicate that one of them, at least, had not forgotten their former state of social equality. The pointed ignoring of his familiar gossip usually proved efficacious. He followed his mistress to the loamy bed in the sheltered angle between the garage and the wall, where downy leaved vines and splintered lath lay in a hopeless tangle on the ground. A while they worked, side by side, the sullen silence broken only by the whirring of David’s saw. Judith’s fingers were verde and odorous, and the hem of her skirt was adorned with a batik pattern of grotesque figures in the harmonious hues of earth and vine. Nanny would scold. But what was the good of a garden, if one must only be a disinterested onlooker? Suddenly Dutton yelled:

“There! Grab ’er quick! This end—can’t you see?”

The next moment he offered profuse apology. But his mistress was ready for the emergency. It was necessary for him to go into the garage and cut another support to take the place of the one that had snapped.

“Better put this ’ere pad on the ground, under your right foot, while you hold ’er up. Them slippers is mighty thin. I won’t be gone a minute.”

III

Dutton’s minute was always a variable quantity, and this time it lengthened itself until the woman’s arms and shoulders ached, from the unwonted strain. But she was glad of the interval—glad that only she was forced to hear snatches of the conversation that took place in the shop at the other side of the wall. One of the voices was low and appealing, the other raucous with purposeful anger:

“I can’t see, my dear, why you want to go to Bromfield this summer, when you have all your plans made to take the trip to St. Paul on the boat. You have always refused to visit Bromfield.”

“That’s just it. You never want me to go anywhere—have any pleasure—or even a vacation when you see that the work is killing me. You gad around as much as you like. You’ve been away five times this spring.”

“I certainly don’t go for pleasure, my dear.”

“Oh, don’t ‘my dear’ me! I’m sick and tired of it. That’s all I ever get. You expect me to slave and stint myself and stay at home, so that you and the children can make a big showing. And I’m supposed to be happy and contented on your everlasting ‘my dears.’ I tell you, there’s got to be a change in this family.”

“Who is there in Bromfield that you want to see?”

“I should think I might want to see my brother. And a daughter might want to put flowers on her parents’ graves.”

“That isn’t it, Vine. Why don’t you tell me the truth? I would give you anything in my power, that would make you happy. It’s this underhanded way you have, that hurts me. I don’t care where you go or what you do, if you’ll only—”

At that moment Dutton came from the garage, to be greeted by a volley of questions and suggestions. Fortunately, as he worked, his deaf ear was turned towards David Trench’s shop. Scarcely had the last nail been driven when Mrs. Trench emerged from the building and strode triumphantly towards the back stoop. For her the universe was a straight line. Everything above, beneath and beside it had melted into oblivion. The line ended in a point on the map of New York, known to the initiate as Bromfield.

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