1

When Louise opened her eyes she stared dreamily up at the slight abrasion in the shingle roof through which morning blinked. There were not many of these informal skylights, for the roof was not an old one. But there were a few, as there are likely to be in most summer cottages. When there was a violent downpour one had to hustle around distributing pans and kettles to catch an often ambitious drip. But this morning there was no rain. Louise's pretty face was not in danger of an unsolicited bath. It was a radiant summer dawn.

For a moment she wondered how she had happened to wake so early. The July birds were all chattering in the woods. But why should she waken out of deep slumber unsummoned? Presently, however, the reason for this phenomenon flashed vividly. Downstairs in the cottage living room, on the chimney-piece, stood an old Dutch clock. This clock possessed a kind of wiry, indignant tick, and a voice, when it was time to speak, full of a jerky, twanging spite. Louise could hear the sharp ticking. Then there came a little whirr—like a very wheeze of decrepitude—followed by an angry striking. One, two, three, four. And at the very first stroke she knew why she was awake at so almost grotesque an hour. The remembrance brought its half whimsical shock. In an hour Leslie would be cranking the engine of his little launch, and they would be chugging toward Beulah.

However, even this did not impel the girl to spring out of bed. Indeed, she arose quite deliberately and only after a brief relapse into a dreaminess which was cousin to slumber itself. She allowed her mind to explore, quite fantastically and not a little extravagantly, the probable courses of the day just springing. She knew beyond any question that it was to be a day packed full of importance for her. Yet she proceeded with that air of cool possession which young persons often elect to display when they feel that the reins are snugly in their hands. As she looked up at the tiny point of aurora in the roof, Louise smiled. There was almost no trace left of the old trouble—that well borne but sufficiently poignant wound, which though her own, had added new lines to the Rev. Needham's already pictorial face. Richard? Oh, Richard was almost forgotten at length. This was as it should be. Defiantly, but also a little slyly (because it could hardly be reckoned a good Christian sentiment), Louise wished that Richard might somehow be here now to observe her triumph; above all—for the wound had still a slight sting—to see how finely calm she had learned to be in these matters.

There was a light step outside on the turf of the hillside. One unalert might not have noted it, or might not have known it for a human tread, where there was such a patter of squirrel and chipmunk scampering. But Louise was alert. She might be calm, but she was also alert. And she knew it was no squirrel out there. That was Leslie. He was lingering about under her window, undecided whether he ought to risk pebbles or a judicious whistle by way of making sure she was awake. At the faint sound of his foot she raised her head quickly from the pillow.

"Louise!" he whispered.

You might have thought it some mere passing sibilance of wind. But you could not be expected to know Leslie's voice as she knew it.

The girl slipped softly out of bed. She did not want to rouse her sister. Hilda was sleeping with her. Hilda had given her own room to Aunt Marjie.

When Louise stepped out on to the bare cottage floor, her feet encountered cool little hillocks of sand, the residue of sundry bed-time shoe dumpings. One could not live up here beside Lake Michigan without coming to reckon sand as intimately and legitimately entering into almost every phase of existence. Indeed, she trod on sand more or less all the way across to the single little window; then dropped lightly on to her knees before the window and peered down through the screen.

"I'm awake, Leslie," she whispered.

And the lad who had been eagerly gazing at this very window, vacant till now, smiled faintly, nodded, and made motions signifying that he would wait for her in the little rustic "tea-house." However, his smile was very brief; and his manner, as he went away toward the specified rendezvous, was manifestly dejected.

When Louise turned back from the window, Hilda was stirring. Hilda lifted herself up on to an elbow and welcomed her sister with bright eyes.

"Who's out there?" she asked.

"Sh-h-h! It's Les. Go back to sleep, Hilda."

"Is he going with you?" the younger girl persisted.

"Only part of the way."

"As far as Beulah?"

"Yes."

"Why doesn't he go all the way?"

"Because I would rather go alone," replied the older girl with a quite fascinating fusion of firmness and mystery.

But the manifest dignity of this response was slighted by Hilda, who merely remarked, in an unemotional yet still significant tone: "Oh, I see."

"Well, isn't it natural?"

"Isn't what natural, Lou?"

"Isn't it natural I should want to be alone when I meet Lynndal?"

"Oh, yes! I didn't just stop to think how it would be."

"Not that it would really matter about Les," the other continued, slipping quickly into her clothes. "Les is only a boy, after all."

"Oh, do you think so, Lou?"

"Why, of course. Leslie isn't more than twenty, if he's that," she concluded rather doubtfully, twisting up her dark hair and fixing it loosely in place.

"Oh, he is!" protested Hilda as vigorously as whisper-talk would allow.

"Is what?"

"Les is twenty."

Louise had turned away from the larger mirror in the dresser and was trying to focus the back of her head with the aid of a small hand mirror, as women do who are particularly concerned about appearing at their best. She looked across oddly at her sister, who in turn blushed, lowering her eyes.

"Well, then, as you say. You seem to be pretty sure."

"Les told me he was," cried Hilda, as though vaguely to shift some sort of responsibility.

Louise relinquished the mirrors and sat down on the edge of the bed for the purpose of tying her shoes. "Listen, Hilda," she said; "you ought to go straight back to sleep. It's only four o'clock. Papa would be mad if he heard us."

"Oh, but he can't," replied Hilda, with the air of one who knows very accurately the acoustic properties of the house in which she dwells.

"But Aunt Marjie might," the other suggested.

"Oh, she wouldn't tell. Aunt Marjie's a sport! Besides," she added, as though to place the matter altogether beyond dispute, "listen!"

Both girls did. They gazed in silence toward the three-quarters partition beyond which Aunt Marjie was established. It was quite true. There were unmistakable dulcet sounds from that direction. Aunt Marjie had warned them she was a heavy sleeper. She had not deemed it urgent to be more specific.

"Safe!" admitted Louise, with a sigh of mock-relief, adding, however: "Even so, you ought to go back to sleep."

Hilda dropped on to her pillow, seeming without comment about to comply. But she was right up again with an earnest question: "Where's he now?"

"Who?"

"Les."

"Sh-h-h! He's waiting for me outside."

"Oh, Louise—I wish you'd let me go with you!" The emphasis implied that the petition had been put hitherto—perhaps persistently. "Please do let me go along—only as far as Beulah!"

The person so earnestly addressed was dusting her face and neck with powder, which signified that she was about ready to depart. She flipped open her handkerchief box with a scene from Dresden on its cover and tucked a fresh handkerchief into her blouse. "Now be good and don't tease," she pleaded a little petulantly. Louise took a certain elder-sisterly attitude towards Hilda which had in it something of selfish authority.

Once more Hilda dropped obediently back. But as she lay there, very wide awake indeed, she couldn't help sighing: "Oh, how I should love to go to Beulah!" And there was another sigh to set it off.

Now, it might be supposed, from the fervour of the young girl's tone, that this Beulah, of which both had repeatedly spoken, must be a wonderfully and peculiarly charming place. Yes, it must indeed possess rare attributes to make a girl beg to be allowed to abandon her nice snug nest at dawn for a mere sight of it. And yet, curiously enough, Beulah was hardly charming in any actual sense: just a tiny, poky, dull little hole of a town, a poor speck on a minor railroad. All things considered, Louise's advice sounded very sensible: "You know you're better off here on the Point."

However, Hilda by no means thought so, and she shook her head with stolid vehemence.

"And I thought," her sister continued, paying very little attention to her own words, "I thought there was to be a tennis match this morning."

"Yes, there is," admitted Hilda.

"Well, you know they couldn't possibly play without you."

She forgot her phrases as fast as she uttered them. She was ploughing through her jewellery case for a certain brooch. It was one which Richard had given her, and which had somehow been overlooked when the other gifts had been sent back to him at the Rev. Needham's firm request. She meant, if she could find it, to wear the brooch this morning. It might be Lynndal would show himself too sure of her. She might want to impress upon him the fact that her life had not been loveless. At length she found the ornament and put it on, with a little toss of coquetry. Of course Louise didn't mean really to hold off any regarding their engagement. Ah, no. That was a settled thing, as a glance at the correspondence must amply prove. Nevertheless, she decided on the brooch. Richard, with his faithlessness, had hacked two years right out of her life. But Louise had a new lover! The earlier affair was remote enough to stand a little harmless commercializing now.

Hilda modestly deprecated the enviable light in which her tennis playing had been put by her sister.

"You know that's not true!" she said.

"What isn't true?"

"What you said about them not being able to play the match without me. Besides," she concluded with a leap of thought which gave the words themselves a queer stamp of irrelevance, "he's going to play in it, too."

"Who is?" asked Louise blankly, brushing some strayed powder off her skirt.

"Leslie."

"Leslie? Well, I don't get the connection."

Hilda nodded quite violently. Her sleep-tossed hair lay richly about her shoulders. One shoulder was bare, where the nightgown fell away from it. She was fresh and pretty. Perhaps not so pretty as Louise. But Hilda was only fifteen, just swinging into the earliest bloom of her womanhood.

"Yes," she explained, "Les is going to play in the match. He told me he would have to get back in time for that. So you see, if it's only the tennis you're thinking about, you might just as well let me go along as far as Beulah."

"Oh, he did?" asked her sister, rather sharply, it must be confessed, for one who had been so abstracted a moment before. "He said he'd have to get back?"

"Yes, Lou. Why? What's the matter?"

"Nothing." She thrust a pin into her hat.

Hilda regarded her sister's back a moment in silence—as though a back might somehow reveal, if one but looked hard enough, what new emotion was passing through a heart. But when she spoke it was casually, and without further adherence to the theme.

"My, Lou," she said, "you look grand this morning!"

"Ha! My street suit!"

"I know, but all our city clothes look grand up here in the woods."

"Well, I guess Lynndal wouldn't recognize me in a jumper. Remember, he hasn't seen me since last winter," observed Louise, with an evident seriousness of tone which might almost lead one to suspect she really meant it was necessary to dress up in order to be recognized.

"Yes, but you've written every day," Hilda reminded her, renouncing the subject of clothes and skipping light-heartedly along the way of digression which had thus been opened up.

"It isn't so!" her sister assured her.

"Well, then, three times a week."

"That's a very different matter." Suddenly she thought of Richard, and the fecund diligence, on her side at least, of their correspondence. She scowled. And then she went and bent over the girl in bed. "Can you see any powder on my face?"

Hilda said she thought she could see just a tiny little bit of rouge. So Louise rubbed her face vigorously with a towel, by way of destroying any possible trace of artificiality, and bringing thus a heightened natural bloom.

There really was very little artificiality about the Needham girls. The Rev. Needham was always nervously on the lookout for that. His great horror was such episodes as are dear to the hearts of novelists: episodes in which soul-rending moral issues appear. And he believed, and often quite eloquently gave expression to the belief, that a subtle germ of artificiality lay at the root of all emotional excesses. Louise's unhappy affair with Richard, the Rev. Needham was pleased to lay almost squarely at the door of Eastern Culture. To be perfectly candid, the Rev. Needham did not know a great deal about this so-called Eastern Culture. But he was persuaded—as are perhaps many more good souls in the Middle West—that it was something covertly if not patently inimical to those standards of sane, quiet living to which he almost passionately subscribed. Why had they ever sent her East at all? "It was that fashionable school that did all the harm," he would say, with a sigh in which there was more than a hint of indignation. Louise herself, whatever she might think of the Culture, admitted that half the girls in the school were deep in love affairs, most of which bore every promise of turning out badly. The school was in that paradise of schools, the nation's capital. It was a finishing school, and a judicious indulgence in social activities was admittedly—even a bit arrogantly—one of the features of the curriculum.

Ah, yes. That was just where all the mischief began. If she had stayed home instead and received young men in her mother's own Middle Western parlour, she might have been spared—they might all have been spared—that terrible ordeal of the heart, with its gloomy envelope of humiliation. In plain terms, Richard had simply turned her down. One might argue about it, but one could not, in the end, really deceive oneself. He had turned her down, thrown her over, jilted her, after flirting desperately and wickedly—though in a manner which the Rev. Needham strongly suspected was looked upon as innocent and even rather proper by the decadence of that East he was always harping upon.

Louise, artless and unworldly, as she had been trained to be from the cradle, found herself but poorly equipped to combat such allurements as the dreadful Richard exhibited. It was an old tale, but none the less terrible for all that. She believed everything he said to her, fatally misconstrued his abundant enough ardour, fell madly in love, and wanted to throw herself in the river when she realized at length that her beautiful dream was shattered. Naturally, the Rev. Needham was shocked. He was horrified when his daughter wrote of throwing herself in the river. He did not definitely visualize the Potomac, which he had never seen; it was the convulsing generality that gripped him.

Mrs. Needham's conduct, at that time, had proved much more practical, if less eloquent, than her husband's. She went straight to her daughter, determined to bring her back home; and she left a distracted minister to make what progress he could with the Sunday sermon—agonized, as he was, by fevered visions of his child's body, gowned in an indefinite but poetically clinging garment, her hair tangled picturesquely with seaweed, floating upon the surface of a composite stream in the moonlight. Necessarily in the moonlight. The effect was more ghastly that way. And certain immortal lines of verse would ripple moaningly through his thoughts:

The Rev. Needham was not himself a poet, but there was poetry in the family. A brother had written poetry and gone to the devil. The Rev. Needham didn't even read poetry very often any more (for of course he never thought of looking upon King James's Version as a poem). In fact, the Rev. Needham had almost a kind of sentiment against poetry, since brother Will had disgraced them all. But it was curious to observe that at times of intense inner tumult, appropriate metrical interlinings had a way of insinuating themselves out of the vast anthology of his youth. Thus, while Mrs. Needham was away looking after their broken-hearted daughter, the clergyman, struggling to evolve his sermon, had to combat such tragic dirges as:

And by the time the poor man got to those inhumanly personal stanzas:

he would be pacing the floor and not getting on one bit with his sermon. Mrs. Needham had the good sense to wire back that Louise was all right, and that she was bringing her home. The sermon was somehow completed. But its text was "Vanity, vanity!" and there were allusions in it to Culture which his congregation never truly grasped.

"Good-bye!" whispered Louise. She gave one last flying peep into the mirror.

"'Bye, Lou," her sister returned, presenting her lips for a kiss. "I hope he'll come all right," she added, while Louise crossed the sanded floor as noiselessly as she could. "And—I'm just dying to see him!"

The other girl nodded back hurriedly from the door, and was off downstairs.

Hilda lay down again. She even closed her eyes. But she did not sleep any more. A horrid little fear clutched at her heart: What if he should not come?

What if Lynndal Barry should turn out to be another Richard, after all?

2

Down in the kitchen Louise adjusted the generator of a small oil stove on which most of the household cooking was done. There was an old wood range in the kitchen also, but that was used only for baking. It generally smoked and occasionally went out—sometimes almost miraculously.

Louise turned up the wicks of the stove burners, made sure that the fuel began soaking freely up into them, and finally applied the flame of a match. Then she put on the teakettle and fetched a frying pan from a hook nearby. Not even young ladies flying grandly off to meet their lovers ought to go without breakfast.

Louise, though she might, perhaps, have been pardoned for overlooking so merely sensible a detail as this, was really treating the whole situation most rationally. It was part of her fine, mature calmness—the calmness she so wished Richard might behold. Playing now—and very convincingly, too—the rÔle of cook, she measured coffee, got out eggs, cut some bread. Yes, all this was part of her magnificent calmness. It was indeed a pity Richard couldn't be here to see how altered she was—how unlike the impulsive, unschooled, hyper-romantic girl who had submitted to his fickle attractions. Her cheeks would burn, even now, with inextinguishable chagrin, when she reflected how painfully one-sided the wretched affair had been. Ah, it had constantly been he who did the attracting, she who fluttered about like a silly, puzzled moth. She would have gone without her breakfast every day in the week for Richard. But with Lynndal, thank heaven, all was quite different. Now it was obviously and admittedly she who was doing the attracting. Of course she admired Lynndal tremendously, and loved him. Oh, of course she loved him. She even loved him very much, else would she be engaged? No, but the point was that this time her eyes were open. They were wide open, as eyes should be. She wasn't, this time, blinded by a fatal glitter of wit and the subtle persuasion of manners other and more exquisite than any she had hitherto encountered. Lynndal was totally unlike Richard. Lynndal steadfastly adored her. He even worshipped her. He said so, though with homely and restrained rhetoric, in his letters. Yes, she knew that Lynndal was deeply and lastingly in love with her. So this affair couldn't, it was plain to be seen, turn out the way the other had.

She sang, though very judiciously, under her breath, as she sped about preparing the hurried meal. The water boiled in the kettle. She poured it on the coffee grounds, tossed in an eggshell, left the pot to simmer. Louise was really quite a skilful cook. Even the Rev. Needham had to admit that this much, at any rate, had been gained from the unfortunate Eastern schooling. She set some cups, saucers, and plates on the kitchen table. Then she slipped out the back door of the cottage and along a path to a little rustic pavilion which they called a "tea-house"—though, as a matter of fact, tea never figured in its usefulness. In the "tea-house" Leslie now was waiting. The path leading to it had been blazed through thick forest growth. Dewy shoots and leaf clusters brushed her as she skipped by. The sun was already up, but under the trees, and especially down in the little hollow she had to cross, all was dusky and still night-touched.

Leslie saw her coming and jumped up. He waited for her in the rustic doorway.

"Good morning!" she called to him out of the tiny valley. "We mustn't wake the cottagers," she cautioned, coming to him and dropping for a moment, rather breathless, on one of the rustic benches.

"People ought to get up earlier," observed Leslie in a voice he just noticeably wanted to keep quite as usual. "They don't know what they miss."

"It is lovely, isn't it?" the girl agreed, abruptly turning and looking off to sea.

The view from this perch was quite extensive. It was a nook particularly popular with admirers of sunsets. At this early hour the sun was not high enough to touch the smooth beach below, but it lighted the sky, in a lustrous, haunting way, and flashed against the wings of skimming gulls.

However, exquisite though the morning undeniably was, it did not seem the proper occasion for any rhapsodising. Indeed, the occasion did not afford even space for decent enjoyment at all. To Louise the morning appeared busy rather than fair. She was still sufficiently young, for all her esteemed calmness, to look upon life, and in this case especially the operations of the natural world, with intensely personal eyes. Nature was rather an adjunct, even a casual one at that, than something infinitely greater than herself. She and her interests must come first. If convenience permitted, the glory of the sunrise might be saluted in passing. It could be said of Miss Needham that she had a bowing acquaintance with the universe.

"I'm getting us a bite of breakfast, Les," she told him. "You don't mind eating in the kitchen?"

"Hardly!" replied her companion, with the reckless air of one who would possibly like to explain that even kitchens would lose any customary odium which might attach to them, were she to grace them with her presence. Of course Leslie didn't voice any such sentimental and flamboyant thought. There was surprisingly little mawkishness about Leslie, despite his dangerous age. He seemed a serious fellow, though not perhaps exceptionally so. It was a seriousness which embraced all the lighter moods. Leslie was the sort of chap who could converse intelligently with older people, yet lure out the best laughs, too, from a juvenile crowd. It was this fortunate poise that guarded him, generally, against pitfalls of the heroic.

"I suppose we might have been able to get some breakfast in Beulah," he said doubtfully.

But he smiled with Louise as she shook her head. Breakfast would be more reliable in the Needham kitchen. And she rose and led the way back down the path.

"You're sure the boat's in good condition for the run?" she asked anxiously over her shoulder.

"Oh, yes."

"It would be awful to break down half way over and miss the train."

"It won't, Louise. You won't miss your train." He spoke a little bitterly.

As a matter of fact, Leslie had been up half the night tinkering with his engine—which accounted for his fine assurance. Louise was painfully aware that the engine couldn't be consistently banked on. It didn't, as a general thing, receive the most scrupulous sort of care. The Leslian poise had its lapses.

They crept with admirable stealthiness into the kitchen, whose habitual odour of spices and damp cereal products was now broken by the livelier aroma of steaming coffee. There was only one chair in the kitchen. When Eliza the cook received her young man, who was the porter of a resort hotel in Beulah, it was invariably in what the Rev. Needham liked to call God's Great Out-of-Doors—that most capacious and in many respects best furnished of receiving parlours, after all. Invariably—that is, of course, except when it rained. When it rained Eliza and her young man had an entrancing way of conceiving the single chair sufficient.

Louise signified with a wave of the hand that Leslie was to go into the dining room, ever so quietly, and fetch another chair. He did so, and set both chairs beside the kitchen table, at the places marked out already with plates, cups, and imitation silver. Then he sat down, thrust his elbows on the oilcloth, and gazed ruefully between his fists at the young lady who, still in the guise of cook, was fluttering about in the manner of young ladies who do not perhaps feel quite at home in their work, yet who would defy you to point out one single item not accomplished according to the very best methods. He watched her with a mournful intensity, which, had it possessed a little less positive feeling, would surely be called a fixed stare. She turned round presently and discovered his attitude.

"For goodness' sake," she whispered, "what makes you look at me that way?"

He shifted his gaze to the still trees outside and began humming.

"I didn't know I was looking at you any special way. And anyhow, if I was, you know why," he told her, with a slight effect of baffled yet defiant contradiction which was immediately muffled by a renewed humming.

"Leslie, you know we talked it all over yesterday."

"I know, I know."

"And you said it was all right. You said you understood. There wasn't going to be any kind of misunderstanding...."

"There isn't any misunderstanding. Why do you jump on me? I didn't begin talking about it."

This was manifestly true. However, she handled it deftly. "You don't have to talk when you look that way."

"Sorry!" snapped Leslie, who began moodily tapping with his fingers on the oilcloth. Without realizing it, he was tapping the same tune he had just been humming.

She flushed a little, and felt a brief angriness toward him. Had she given words to what was, for a moment, really in her mind, she would have maintained, and not without honest warmth, that a man you have jilted hasn't any right to feel hurt. But a moment later this conception did not seem quite so honest. No, it didn't honour her. She knew it didn't. And ere she had drawn three breaths she was thinking of Leslie with considerably more tenderness. However, in this connection, as with the momentary impatience, sentiment did not spend itself in words. She merely asked him, in a very kindly way, how he liked his eggs best.

"I don't care," he replied, employing the colourless masculine non-assertiveness usual in such cases.

"Do you like them scrambled?"

He nodded drearily.

"Then we'll have them scrambled," she announced with a cheerful smile, breaking several eggs across the edge of a bowl, adding a little milk, as carefully measured off as though it were vanilla for a cake, and proceeding slightly to beat the combination. There seemed something ungraspably and very subtly characteristic in the decision to scramble them....

In no time the two were seated at breakfast.

She grew chatty. "I'm sorry there isn't any toast, Les. We can't make decent toast over an oil fire. We've tried it," she expanded with labelled significance, spreading butter on a rather dry slice of bread.

The bread that was dry today might be soggy tomorrow. It should be noted in passing that up here in the woods the supplies showed a tendency to grow either very soggy or very dry. In fact, the bread and pastry boxes were often the most infallible of barometers.

Leslie perjured himself with an assurance that the bread was delicious.

"In town," she went on, pouring the coffee, "we have an electric toaster. We have it on the table and make toast as we want it. I wish we had it up here!"

"Could you make it work with oil?" asked her companion with sweet maliciousness.

"Of course not," she sighed. "I always forget. I wish they'd run wires out here to the Point. I have an electric curler at home, too. It's such a bother sticking your iron down the chimney of a lamp."

"I should think it would be," agreed Leslie, stirring his coffee and shepherding such of the grounds as floated upon the surface over to the edge of the cup, where they were scooped up and deposited on the saucer.

They conversed for a time on casual and every-day topics, as people, even involved in mighty issues, have rather a way of doing, after all. She kept warning him, with pretty, prohibitive gestures, not to speak above the safe pitch established upon their entry. The warning was more picturesque than really necessary, however, for Leslie, just then, happened to be in a mood far from boisterous.

"Oh, dear! I forgot to dash cold water into the pot before I took it off!" she cried in some dismay, as she observed his slightly exaggerated preoccupation with the floating intruders. "It boiled the last thing. I thought the fire was turned out under it, but it wasn't."

"What difference does it make?" the lad protested with lugubrious gallantry.

And he desisted from his efforts and drank his coffee down, grounds and all, in rather impolite gulps.

Louise, just at this stage, turned her attention to her own cup. There was one lonesome ground drifting aimlessly and forlornly round and round in obedience to the impetus of a current set in motion by the recent stirring. She had poured her own cup last, which explained its being so much clearer than his.

"Oh, look here, Les!" she exclaimed, following the solitary coffee ground in the air with the tip of her spoon. "There's just one. That means a visitor, doesn't it?" She coloured a little, and lifted the oracle up gently.

Leslie shrugged, conspicuously bored, and devoted himself moodily to what remained of his share of the eggs. "I don't know," he said.

But she couldn't be swayed from her zeal. She was determined to be agreeable—especially when it was possible to come upon such agreeable speculations as this. "There's something about finding money on top of your coffee," she embroidered, "though you can always make some come if you hold the pot high enough as you pour. But you see you can't make a visitor unless there is one."

And Leslie heroically refrained from suggesting that even visitors might be warded off if one didn't forget the dash of cold water. However, he did remind her that there needed no signs to tell her there was a visitor on the way. And he added, with rather juvenile petulance: "I guess he'd come if there weren't any grounds in the pot!"

But this riled her. "I don't mean to sit here and listen to you speaking disrespectfully of Mr. Barry! He's much older, and you can't treat him as you would one of the boys."

"I don't want to," her friend returned, vaguely, yet still somehow pointedly.

She smiled, erasing the friction from their talk. "In the case of the coffee grounds, as I understand it, if it seems soft it's a lady, and if it's hard it's a man. Am I all wrong? Is it tea leaves I'm thinking of? At any rate, we'll experiment!" She eyed her companion with coy and almost vicious pleasure. "Perhaps this one's only Aunt Marjie, who's already here."

She carried the problematical atom to her teeth. The test, which she strove to make momentous, was one to which Leslie brought only a melancholy interest. She set her teeth firmly together. There was a little brittle crack. The indisputable fact that it was Lynndal Barry thrust between them a short silence.

3

It was a subject to which they had come round, almost automatically, at intervals, ever since the letter arrived.

Ah, the letter, the fateful letter! The letter advising her that the man to whom she was virtually engaged would put in an appearance on such and such a day!

Upon its receipt Louise had proceeded with real candour. The letter, or rather the important implication it contained, was discussed at once. Oh, yes. She went at once to Leslie with her sinister yet thrilling confession. Louise Needham was fundamentally an honest, an even straight-forward young person. Fundamentally: though the roots were not, it is true, always called upon. The mistakes she made were rather faults of judgment than altogether of a slumbering conscience. Indeed, there had been numerous occasions when her life would have moved much more smoothly had she been less blunt, or had her personal psychology possessed a few more curves. But this type of downrightness had been sternly inculcated. It was in the blood. The Rev. Needham maintained that a square, simple, stalwart attitude toward the world was the very cornerstone of security and peaceful living; and he had quotations out of the Scriptures to back it up. Yes, Louise had gone to Leslie at once. True, she hadn't just happened to speak about Lynndal before—that is, she hadn't quite painted the relationship in its true colours, which naturally amounted to the same thing. As for this silence—well, she would argue that it was in no real sense a deception, because the engagement (there was no ring as yet) wasn't public property. No, it was strictly an affair existing between herself and Lynndal. In a way, Leslie ought to consider himself honoured to be consulted at all.

"Well, he'll be here in a few hours now," mourned the honoured individual as they walked along together through the woods toward Crystal Lake and the little launch. "Then goodnight for me!"

"Les, please don't talk like that. You'd think we couldn't even be friends any more."

"Friends!" He had been suffered to call her more endearing names throughout the span of the past few weeks.

"I'm sure we'll always be the best sort of friends, Leslie."

But he couldn't see it. "I'm going back to the city!" It was about as close to heroics as he ever verged.

And following this highly dramatic climax there was a little space of silence. They walked on, side by side. Louise began to realize how unwise she had been.

This walk through the forest of Betsey was ordinarily a very wonderful experience. Of course, however, upon this occasion, neither of the young persons concerned was in any mood to appreciate it. For her part, if consulted, Louise would reply that she had no time. Still, for all that, the experience was (potentially) a delight; for here one discovered a true, unspoiled natural loveliness, even a kind of sylvan grandeur. The way, all underneath greenery thickly arched, wound up and down. From every eminence the neighbouring valleys appeared sunk to an almost ghostly declivity; but from the valleys themselves, the uplands, with their rich tangled approaches, soared grandly toward a heaven invisible for leafy vaulting. At this early hour the summits were a little dusky, while the depressions slept in deep shade. The full, fair rays of the uprising sun shot across the exposed tops of the higher levels of forest, and here and there even the loftier stretches of path would be dappled with furtive annunciatory splashes. In the forest it was cool and buoyantly fresh, though heat was already quivering up off the open stretches of sand skirting the smaller lake. It promised to be one of the warm days of a rather grudging season.

"Les," she said finally, "why do you talk about going back to the city?"

"Because I don't care to stay up here and...." If concluded, the sentence would have run: "and see you together." But he thought better of it. Poise saved him. He compressed his lips.

"Oh, Les, don't make it so hard for me!"

"You didn't spare me!" he replied grimly.

"What do you mean?" Her eyes were a little wide.

"H'm...."

"Tell me, Les. We can't go on this way." She meant that she would find it uncomfortable—a cloud for her present satisfaction with life.

"You knew how I felt. You knew all about it. Yet you didn't send me packing, or try to drop me. You didn't even give me a hint of how things were. Do you call that sparing a fellow?"

His arraignment was almost bewildering in its complexity. But she chose one indictment and grappled with it valiantly. "Of course I didn't try to drop you. I never treated any man that way!"

"Well," he replied dryly, "I wish you had."

"You wish I hadn't had anything to do with you?" Such a proposition struck her as unpleasant, to a marked degree—even almost grotesque.

He countered without replying: "Didn't you know how much I cared?"

"Yes, but my goodness, Les, must a girl entirely shun a man to prevent his falling—I mean, to keep him from caring too much?"

"Oh, no," he answered with a sharp sigh. "Don't mind me. Don't mind anything I've said. I guess I'll get over it—especially since it seems that you didn't feel at all the way I did, and I was merely making a fool of myself." It was a cup of highly flavoured bitterness.

"Oh, please don't say such a thing as that! You know I told you all along, Leslie, that I—that I had a friend in Arizona, and I—well, you see I somehow felt you'd understand. I didn't know the things we did—I mean I didn't realize our being together so much meant anything except that we—well, that we liked each other and wanted to be together...."

She felt it was just a little lame, and began laying about for more forcible expression. Meanwhile, Leslie muttered: "No, those things never do mean any more, I guess."

"But Leslie, dear—"

She spoke unwisely. At the familiar word of affection, which had thrilled him so often during the unmolested weeks—that wonderful span shattered by the arrival of the letter from Arizona—Leslie momentarily forgot about his dark humiliation. He forgot everything but the fact of the woman beside him. He seized her swinging hand; gripped it. And then they paused, further progress along the sun-flecked way seeming inhibited by some subtle agent in league with the emotion which swept over them both.

Oh, Eros! Are your agents everywhere?

From gripping her hand he unexpectedly and rather bafflingly had her in his arms. And she presented, for just that charged moment, no resistance, but relaxed there with a little inarticulate, troubled, withal surrendering cry.

"Louise!"

"Oh, Les!"

When they had kissed he broke the curious spell by demanding, with considerable passion, why, if she really did care, she was so willing to throw him over for another man. It seemed a pivotal question. It seemed an unanswerable one, even, in the light of what had just occurred. But Miss Needham, now the spell was broken and she could breathlessly begin getting hold of herself again, proved magnificently equal to it. The beauty of the Needham logic was just that it could always find an answer to every question, however pivotal—some kind of answer, that is.

"Oh, Leslie!" she cried. "Don't you see? I'm not throwing you over. Not the way you want to make it seem. I care for you just the same as—yes, as I ever did! Why shouldn't I?" she demanded, with vague defiance. "Only I—I suppose some of the things we've done—what we just did.... Well, and the other times, aren't—I suppose they wouldn't be quite right if I'm to be formally engaged. But you see I—I've looked upon this engagement—I mean I've looked upon it as not quite settled yet...." She faltered and spoke more thickly, as though getting down to cold facts somehow made the whole business a little tawdry. "I'm not wearing any ring yet, you see," she went on, waving her hand before them a trifle awkwardly, and laughing with constraint. "And as long as Mr. Barry and I aren't really engaged—not quite in the usual way yet, I mean—I didn't see—I don't see now what harm there is in making—well, new friends."

It was an amazing speech. It was a wonderful speech. He offered no immediate reply to it. What could he say? The fact is, he had never heard just such a speech as this in his life, and found himself, not perhaps unreasonably, a little bit bewildered by it. None of the lessons in feminine psychology he had learned thus far had just prepared Leslie for such a speech as this. As abruptly as they had paused, the two now resumed their walk. And from this moment his attitude toward her was also altered.

Louise started slightly, as though for the first time fully realizing what had just taken place. She glanced at her wrist watch. It was ten minutes to five by the tiny dial.

"I hope we can make it," she said anxiously. The return to her former preoccupations might have struck a disinterested observer as bizarre, though of course Louise wasn't conscious of anything like that. She was not conscious of anything bizarre at all. It was really extraordinary, at times, how free from any blemish of self-consciousness she seemed to be. This was her way: giving herself over entirely to one thing at a time. Curiously enough, it even had something to do with what has (carefully weighing values) been called her fundamental honesty; though here, as so often with her, the true spring was not involved. Concentration was one of the sturdy precepts expounded by the Rev. Alfred Needham. The influence of this father was very strongly marked in the daughter. But as for Leslie, he was keenly conscious, walking beside her through the lovely forest of Betsey, of a shift which seemed to him untimely and again humiliating. He grew reserved and cold; walked along in silence. However, his thoughts were busy. And the more he thought of it, the more convinced he was that that phrase of hers: "I don't see what harm there is in making new friends," sounded a warning which he must heed! Louise glanced again at her watch to make quite sure she had read the hour aright.

"Les," she demanded, wholly consumed now with the apprehension lest she miss her train, "is your watch with mine?"

"I have five minutes to five," he answered coldly, pressing open the case of his old-fashioned heirloom watch and quickly snapping it shut again. He snapped it as quickly as he could because he did not want to let his eyes rest on the picture pasted inside the case.

"Do you think we can make it?"

"I've made it in less time, a good deal."

"Les," she entreated wanderingly as they emerged from the forest and scudded through the sand to the boathouse where he kept his little launch, "we simply must be friends, whatever happens."

She studied, though abstractedly, the settling look of antipathy on his face. She did not know what it meant, but instinctively she shuddered at it just a little.

"Les, dear, you must let me be...."

His curiosity was aroused, and he broke with a heavy bluntness into the groping silence. "What?"

"Why, I was just going to say you must let me be"—the inevitable could not be restrained—"be like a sister to you...." And she smiled, even through her troubled abstraction. She laid a hand on his arm. "I know that sounds as though it came out of a book, but it expresses my thought as well as I know how. You know—you see I'm a little older than you—though I never think of that...."

Leslie dropped his arm, and her hand slid off. It fell to her side in a limp way. She hardly noticed the fact, though. Her mind was swimming with the strange contending forces which seemed, so inexplicably, to compose her life. She seemed all at once not to see anything very clearly....

They entered the boathouse, but Leslie had not replied to the generous suggestion, and went with a moody briskness about the task of making the small craft ready for the nine-mile voyage. Then he helped her in; arranged a cushion or two. When he touched her there was a mitigated flash of the old thrill. But the thrill seemed subtly palpitating, now, with something else. It was a new and, oddly enough, a not altogether disagreeable sensation. For the first time, though Leslie didn't as yet clearly realize this, he was looking at Miss Needham critically. He had certainly never looked at her this way before. He noticed a tiny dash of powder she hadn't brushed off the collar of her jacket; observed a very faint and unobtrusive hint of the Roman in her nose. As for her nose, he merely wondered, as he coaxed the engine into activity, that he hadn't marked the true line of the bridge before....

It took nearly an hour to reach Beulah, at the other end of Crystal Lake. Louise, it fortunately developed, would make her train easily. Leslie moored the launch, which had behaved surprisingly well, and escorted his passenger through the tiny village to the railroad station. Little talk sped between them. He asked at what hour the expected steamer was due. Eight o'clock, she told him. He remarked that there would be a good bit of time to consume after she arrived in Frankfort, and she replied, in a mildly distracted way, that she didn't mind. But she added, all the same, with a little petitioning, blind burst: "I wish you were going the rest of the way with me!"

"I will if you want me to," he answered listlessly. Or was he feigning listlessness by way of retrieving his rather severely damaged pride?

"Oh, no!" she cried, merely voicing the instinctive contradiction which rose most naturally to her lips. The train was heard whistling in the distance. Then she remembered something, and spoke with greater assurance than had been displayed on her part since they left the forest of Betsey. "You're expected back, you know, to play tennis. You promised." She seemed almost relieved, in a way; yet she could not resist, too, the little muffled dig. And there was also something dark lurking beneath both the relief and the dig.

"I promised?"

"Didn't you tell Hilda you'd be back in time for the match?"

"Oh—yes," he admitted.

"So you see," she laughed, "you had no thought of going on any farther than Beulah!"

His just expressed willingness to accompany her the rest of the way had depended directly upon her own sufficiently vehement exclamation: "I wish you were going!" But the way she laughed seemed to imply a kind of duplicity in him which brought a flush to his face. And he reminded her, with glacial tones: "You told me all along I could only take you as far as Beulah. You were very positive about it." The kindling distrust did not die out of his eyes.

"Yes, I understand, Les. It's all right. Hilda will be watching for you."

Suddenly the train came into view around a bend. Louise unconsciously straightened her hat and tugged at her gloves, as though Lynndal Barry were to be met aboard the cars instead of emerging, ever so much later, from the boat in Frankfort.

"Good-bye, Les," she said warmly.

"Good-bye."

"Thank you so much for bringing me."

He nodded away the obligation. Then the train started, and Leslie turned back toward his launch.

A feeling of great and wholly unexpected tenderness came upon Louise. She leaned far out of the car window to wave. He looked back, saw her, and waved also; then sauntered coolly on toward the dock.

4

When Louise and Leslie walked together through the forest of Betsey they had not as a matter of fact passed entirely unobserved.

Hilda, after her sister had gone downstairs, didn't remain long in bed. Right on the heels of that cloudy fear lest Mr. Barry fail to arrive and Louise's heart be a second time broken, there flashed, for Hilda, a fine little campaign in her own behalf. Hilda's education in the great school of love was already quite well launched. Of course she was as yet graded rather intermediately. But Hilda was an alert and ambitious young student. She told herself it would be very much worth while to observe how an engaged lady behaved in the company of other men. Louise was a pattern for her in so many ways—both papa and mama kept insisting. Why not in this also? She might very possibly have need of the lesson some day. However, the real, specific, if not exactly admitted impulse behind her nimble relinquishment of bed was the plain desire just to see Leslie.

It did not take Hilda long to dress. For one thing, of course, she dressed very simply up here in the wilderness. Louise dressed simply also, but not so simply as Hilda. However, there was a reason for this—a reason of which Hilda was fully cognisant, and one to which she was perforce reconciled. Age made all the difference in the world. She consoled herself with enormous bows on her jumpers, but also with the promise that there would come a day when she, too, would dress less simply, even in the wilderness.

Hilda was listening at the head of the stairs when her sister went up to the "tea-house" to summon Leslie. While the lower part of the cottage was thus momentarily vacant, the girl stole down, making comical faces of deprecatory concern at each separate creak. Then she sped quickly out of the house and off through the thicket in a direction oblique with the path which Louise and Leslie were later to take. Hilda's little by-way struck over two low hills and spilled itself recklessly into the broader road used by the cottagers of Betsey, at a point about a quarter of a mile along, toward Crystal Lake.

She was an odd, inquisitive child, and had a genuine passion for watching the great world spin. Wherever was the most going on, there you would generally find Hilda, an earnest observer, if age or circumstance unfortunately forbade her active participation. She knew far more about the people who summered at Point Betsey than any one dreamed. Hilda had a hammock strung up in an invisible bower just beyond the spot where the little path lost itself. There was only a dust-powdered screen of boughs and bushes between it and the road. The hammock, handed down to her when the Rev. Needham invested in a fine new one for the cottage, had seen more than a season of unroofed service, and was consequently rather inclined to be stringy. It was, in point of fact, a very dilapidated hammock indeed. But Hilda esteemed it highly. She thought it a very estimable hammock—had a real affection for it. Hers was happily the age when rags are royal raiment—without the solemn, limiting balance of that sublime and classic exclamation.

She reached this secret nook quite out of breath. Of course there was no real need for all this haste. She knew there wasn't. But youth does not loiter on such errands. She flung herself down in the hammock and for a time lay still. It was cool here, and hazy with dawn. To one side of her the scrub thicket, sprinkled with sturdier growth, lay almost stygian; to the other side was the Betsey road, a bright, tortuous band of morning, threading the Betsey woods as though it were the path of some exploring courier of Sol. Through the flimsy faÇade of leaves the light of morning streamed into Hilda's bower with a mistily tempered shine. Though ample, this screen afforded plenty of peepholes; and naturally Hilda knew them all. If a storm threshed through the forest and wrenched wisps of woodbine into a different position, or whipped the heavier undergrowth into a new pattern, temporary or permanent as the case might be, the girl was quick to perceive the new order of things and to train her eye to the altered scope of vision. She lay now in the hammock, regaining her breath, and swung herself gently back and forth with the aid of a stout wild grape tendon.

There was a great deal of wild life all about her: birds and squirrels and chipmunks and queer little humming, whirring, chirping insects. Some seasons certain of the cottagers brought up household cats with them from town, when it might be observed that the birds and squirrels were much less in evidence—much more wary and reserved in their deportment. But as it chanced, this year there wasn't a cat on the Point, and the woods were full of day-long frolic.

Hilda had some time to wait. The two persons on whom her innocent espionage was designed, loitered, as we have seen, through their breakfast; and the little girl was almost ready to persuade herself that Louise and Leslie must have taken the much longer, circuitous northern route, when suddenly she heard their voices.

They appeared to be talking softly, as though still imbued with dawn-cautiousness, even where there was no longer the possibility of disturbing any one's slumber. Hilda, lying there so still and expectant, saw them walking together along the road. Leslie's eyes pursued the ground he was treading, but Louise was glancing anxiously up at him.

"You would think we couldn't even be friends any more," she was saying.

And then Hilda heard the lad beside her mutter: "Friends!"—in that tone that appeared to embody so much....

"I'm sure we'll always be the best sort of friends, Leslie," Louise said warmly.

And then they were almost beyond hearing. However, Hilda caught Leslie's thick communication about going back to the city, and it troubled her a good deal. She slipped out of the hammock and peeped through the shielding leaves. She thought to herself: "How well they look together!" And she seemed suddenly full of a vague unhappiness. Out of a subsequent observation: "Louise always looks well with men," Hilda did not for some reason or other, glean the poor ounce of consolation, regarding Leslie, that might appear nestling there.

She left her bower and returned to the cottage in a rather soberer mood, along the open road they had so recently traversed.

The summer rising of the parent Needhams regularly occurred about seven. In town, during the season of lengthened nights, the household was suffered to slumber perhaps a half hour longer; but matinal "dawdling," as the Rev. Needham put it, was a symptom of decadence to be scrupulously shunned. The Rev. Needham had a rather definite persuasion that all the people in the East inclined towards late rising. He had a theory that a day well begun was bound to end well. It didn't, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned—at least there was nothing at all dependable about it; but these collapses, these drab failures of the real to coincide with the ideal, these sloughings off from a kind of Platonic scheme of perfection, constituted what stood as perhaps the reverend gentleman's most distinguishing quality. Here was a man marked for a kind of almost rhythmic disaster. The wheel of life never ran smoothly, but kept bumping over sly pebbles of chagrin and disappointment. The Rev. Needham was like a Middle Age (or perhaps early Chinese) delinquent, strung up for chastisement, his arms pinioned to a beam overhead, and the mere points of his toes permitted to touch the ground. An inch or a few inches relaxed, and he would be all right. If he could only get his heels down! But that, alas, was just the trouble with the Rev. Needham: however dignified and calm he might appear externally, there never was, there never could seem to be, an entire and sincere consciousness of solid ground under his feet. Sometimes he would sigh: "Ah, at last!" But anon there would be a devilish tingling in the heels, which would remind him that they were still upreared. The poor man's destiny seemed eternally a thing suspended. It dangled and flopped, like a rope's end in nervous, persistent gusts.

Anna Needham relinquished sleep at the hour specified by her spouse cheerfully, as a rule, though there were also occasions when raillery and even discreet rib-proddings entered into the program. Mrs. Needham was, of course, well inured to these regularities of routine, just as her very fibre was toughened and moulded to the ministerial caliber generally. Fundamentally, she was a person of slightly less strenuous tendencies than her husband. Anna Needham was the type of woman whose life is very largely shaped, as is her destiny largely determined, by the man with whom she lives. Her nature was naturally somewhat more amenable than his. Still, she had her distinct rebellions, too. She could take a stand of her own in an hour of crisis. The Rev. Needham's was a nature that did not weather storms any too well. Yes, in time of storms Anna was the more seaworthy. For one thing, perhaps, she had fewer ideals. Thus she did not experience quite such blasting shocks over upheavals and cataclysms. But it must be confessed that this apparent stability was touched, perhaps one might say, rather, a little diluted by a few parts moral or intellectual laziness. Comparative criticism of the Needhams, husband and wife, usually fell into two major divisions. There were, in other words, two factions: those who maintained she was less profound than he, and those who would insist that she had more common sense. But that they were economically well-mated seemed pretty generally accepted. It was a coalition in which appeared the very minimum of waste, since one was always ready (or in her case perhaps merely inclined) to shut off the spigot of the other's temperamental excesses.

On this particular July morning there wasn't a hint of friction over the proposition of getting up. The Rev. Needham began his brisk, determined stretching at the first stroke of seven. Anna lay passive till the last stroke; but as the strident and spiteful clangour of the Dutch clock downstairs resolved back again into a monotonous though hardly less crabbed tick-tock, tick-tock, the lady yawned deeply and with just a concluding gurgle of relish. There was a guest already in the house, another guest on the way. Hostesses, however soft the bed, aren't likely to surrender to tempting inertia under such circumstances.

As a matter of fact, the bed was not a very soft one. Or rather, it was very soft in places and very hard in others. Perhaps one of the enduring charms of small resort cottage life is the amusing inequality of things. The best and the worst hobnob. Lo, here is a true democracy! And virtues utterly commonplace in your urban mÉnage may very easily be given a most heavenly lustre in the wilderness.

"Well, Anna," he said, in his best tone of fresh, early morning cheerfulness, "I guess it's time to get up."

"Alf, you don't mean to tell me that was seven!"

She had counted the strokes; but it was customary to have a little conversation about the time of day before arising: a sort of pleasant, innocuous tongue-limbering, a lubrication of the way to more important themes later on. Such gentle, indirect prevarications may perhaps be looked upon indulgently, even when, as in this case, they crop out in clerical families.

The Rev. Needham proceeded to dress and shave.

He was in a good, confident, substantial mood today; rose singing. The Rev. Needham was very apt to arise with song in his mouth, bravely defying the chance of his going to bed with a wail. This morning the selection was that fine old Laudes Domini which seemed peculiarly appropriate, both fitting the hour and reflecting the joyous state of the singer's heart.

The Rev. Needham had a tenor voice of fair quality, though not altogether true of pitch. In the wilderness, so far from pipe organs, pitch however, dwindled to comparative unimportance. It was the spirit of song that counted.

Now, one might observe that in this hymn the Rev. Needham would come out very full and strong on the more purely ecstatic lines (such, for instance, as depict the spread of morning across the heavens, the awaking of a fervent heart, etc.), and that, almost invariably, those more climactic, particularly the more ecclesiastical, lines would issue a little muffled, as the singer found it urgent to immerse his head in the washbowl's morning plunge, or apply a towel vigorously, or perhaps bend suddenly over to lace up his shoes—by this movement naturally cutting down the egress of breath. They were subtly odd, these mufflings. It was almost as though Fate had determined sedulously to deny to this unfortunate man an indulgence in his very life-mission: praising his Maker! For another than he the intervals of competition might very easily have fallen less saliently. Yes, another would have found it possible to cloud over, if necessary, the heavenly gilding and would have been suffered to come out free, triumphant, on the diviner phrases. But not the Rev. Needham. No, alas, not he. It was a part of the Rev. Needham's destiny that the better and more satisfying arrangement of life must be withheld, or temporarily awarded only to be broken rudely off. Inquiry ought to pause here. Yes, it delicately and righteously and above all humanely ought. No, it ought not to lead one away, fiendishly to lure one on to a certain door in one of the three-quarters partitions, beyond which the slumber of a human being was giving place, at this stage, to the more irregular sounds signifying a return to consciousness. Ah, better to leave out altogether the thought of any mortal responsibility for the muffling; better to cling decently just to the adverseness of an obdurate Fate. And yet, the tenor of the conversation which now ensued between the Rev. Needham and his wife might favour the suspicion—let us call it by no stronger name—that the person beyond that door in the three-quarters partition had something to do, however slightly, with the matter of vocal emphasis.

"Anna," he asked softly, "do you suppose your sister's awake yet?"

"I don't know, Alf. Perhaps I'd better go tap on her door."

"Oh, well, I wouldn't disturb her just yet. Eliza is always late with breakfast." He sighed as he beat up the lather in his mug. "We can't expect things to run along quite as smoothly as when we're just by ourselves."

"I told Marjie we made a practice of getting up at seven," said Mrs. Needham a little anxiously. She slipped a coloured silk petticoat over her head and tied its tape strings round her waist. Mrs. Needham was growing a bit stout. "She told me if I didn't hear her moving around I'd better tap on her door."

"It's this air, I suppose, makes people sleep so," he remarked. And then he added, displaying a strong touch of nervousness in his tone: "I think, Anna, your sister is changed, somehow."

"You think so, Alf? How?"

"Well, I don't know. Perhaps it's our not being used to her after so many years."

"You may be right, Alf. But she talked real sensibly to me yesterday. We had quite a long talk in the afternoon, while you and Hilda were out after berries. She seems real sensible, Alf. Of course she does say things—"

"Yes, she makes remarks, Anna, that I could rather prefer our girls not to hear."

"You mean like what she said at dinner about the natives of Tahulamaji?"

"Yes—things like that." And then he confessed with a nervous little gesture: "I can't seem to figure out where Marjory stands any more. She talks with a freedom.... Anna, I don't think I ever heard any one talk just the way Marjory does."

"You mean—about religion, Alf?"

"Well," he resumed, "it may be her way. But I can't say I ever knew a woman to talk like that. I think Marjory's very good-hearted. She no doubt means the best in the world. But somehow...." He turned toward his mate, poising the razor in the air. He looked, without of course suspecting it, almost terrible. But he went on with merely the same inflection of nervous timidity: "Anna, there are times when I suspect she doesn't believe the way we do any more."

"Oh, Alf—do you mean—is it as though she'd gone into some other church?"

"Well, I don't know." He resumed his shaving in a troubled, fidgety way.

"Alf," she said solemnly, standing in the centre of the room with her hands on her hips, where they paused in the act of adjusting the band of her skirt, "Alf, you—you don't think she isn't a Christian any more?"

The Rev. Needham nervously cut himself a little. He laid down the razor with a startled sigh.

"Anna," said he, "how do I know? If it is true, then it's one of the things I've always dreaded so—having atheism break out right in the family!"

"Oh, Marjory can't be one of those people!" her sister cried earnestly. "Alf, we ought not to judge her so harshly. She's lived in foreign countries so long that I suppose she's kind of gotten into new ways of speaking. She talked so sensibly yesterday, Alf—I kept wishing you could have been there to have heard."

"Well, Anna," he said quietly, "Marjory's your sister, and, whatever the facts, naturally I've nothing to say."

"You try and have a good talk with her, Alf. I never felt you two understood each other very well. She don't talk so flippantly when there aren't other people around. I'll fix it so you two can be alone together. Oh, Alf," she concluded, almost piteously, "Marjie may have gone into another church, but I can't believe she's drifted any farther!"

"I hope not, Anna." He tried to speak with an air of charitable calm; but the impression conveyed seemed rather that a disturbance of his own convictions was troubling his heart than that he was primarily moved with concern over his sister-in-law's spiritual well-being.

All persons with whom he came in contact influenced the Rev. Needham. They influenced him one way or another, however transiently. In fact, when it came to that, there was seldom what one would call any really permanent influence exerted. Contacts with life merely kept him hopping back and forth or up and down. They augmented, were perhaps more largely than anything else responsible for, the poor man's perpetual inner unrest. He could not seem to settle down to cool, steady views; could not feel his soul impregnably at peace. But then, in this regard he seemed, though perhaps in a rather acutely pointed fashion, logical fruit of his time.

To be, for the moment, quite ruthless in one's musing upon him, what would the world say if it could really pry into the tumultuous inner consciousness of the Rev. Needham? Might the world call him melodramatic, stagy? Could it actually be brought against this minister that he was, in a sense, theatrical? What a blow—and at the same time what a terrific coup of irony; for the Rev. Needham would be the very first himself to cry out against any such trait as staginess! Staginess, he would say, must certainly have something to do with the so-called "culture." But the world could never bring this charge against the Rev. Needham, because the world, one realizes with an instinctively grateful sigh, was denied the license of prying inside. No, to the world this minister appeared a being not essentially removed from the usual run of beings. The world by no means thought of him as a Chinese or Dark Age delinquent strung up for punishment in such a manner that his heels were perpetually off the floor. He might not, perhaps, strike people as a man of intense and dynamic, of unfailingly clean-cut personal persuasions about religion—or, for that matter, perhaps, about anything else in life. Nevertheless, he scarcely stood out as vivid or eccentric; scarcely like a sore thumb; because nobody realized what he was really like inside.

But now, to return to cases, here was Marjory, his wife's own sister, lodged right under his roof; and she baffled him. He couldn't deny it—could not get away from it. Yes, she baffled him. He felt nervous in her presence. Sometimes when she would laugh, or look at him in a certain way, it seemed to him—it seemed to him—why, as though he didn't know where he stood any more....

Marjory Whitcom was his sister-in-law, one of the family; and at his own hearthside, somehow, he could not feel quite free. He could not feel cheery and at ease. And dimly it troubled the Rev. Needham to realize that he felt this way.

5

That Miss Whitcom was indeed up and stirring became evident. They heard her gaily calling out to Hilda, who was coming up the stairs.

"Dear child, see here a minute!"

Two doors opened then: hers, briskly wide; the Rev. Needham's a furtive crack.

"Yes, Aunt Marjie?"

"Honey, there isn't any water in my pitcher—would you mind ...?"

"Oh, I'll fill it right away for you, Aunt Marjie!"

"Only half full, honey. I'd slip out myself to the pump, only I'm afraid of shocking Eliza with my wrapper!"

"I won't be gone a minute, Aunt Marjie!"

She took the pitcher, extended by means of a plump bare arm, and sped off with it.

"Alf," said Mrs. Needham, "I forgot to tell Eliza the pitcher would have to be filled every day."

"I suspect Marjory is a bit wasteful of water," he observed.

Here at the Point there was water, water everywhere; yet the Needhams employed far less of the fluid in their daily toilets than they did in the town. This is perhaps not infrequently the case at summer resorts of the more primitive kind, where one attains the frugal attitude generally. Then, too, having to go out to a pump for water alters its preciousness. Besides, as all the Needhams would argue: "We go in bathing so often." So the pitchers weren't refilled every day. They were generally refilled about two or three times a week. Miss Whitcom's pitcher, however, would have to be put in a class by itself. That was only too clear.

The Rev. Needham tied his cravat before the dresser glass. A few tiny drops of perspiration stood out on his forehead. "Yes," he sighed, "it does upset things some."

"What say, Alf?" asked Anna, who was bending over an ancient trunk in which clean linen was kept.

"I say, Eliza will just have to get used to filling her pitcher every morning."

"I guess so," agreed Mrs. Needham, straightening, her face flushed.

She held a fresh towel in her hand, which he eyed with glancing suspicion.

"I got to thinking," explained his wife. "Perhaps she's used to having a clean towel every morning, too."

The minister compressed his lips almost imperceptibly as she went to her sister's door, the towel over her arm. Hilda, with the pitcher of water, arrived at the same moment, so that mother and daughter stood with their respective burdens on Aunt Marjie's threshold, and even spoke together, like rival hucksters proclaiming their wares.

"Gracious!" cried the favoured lady, opening her door and accepting the alms. "Such magnificent service! Anna," she added, "don't you let me put you out. I can easily live on the view. You really don't know what this means, after being cooped up in a place like Tahulamaji!"

Miss Whitcom was tall, and rather fine looking. She was a trifle taller, for instance, than her brother-in-law, and had a way, when any discussion with him was in progress, of standing up quite close to the minister, so that she created the illusion, a little, of towering over him. She was not, of course, actually a great deal taller, but how one could make the sly inch count at such times! Her sister looked almost dumpy beside her.

"I suppose," observed Mrs. Needham, "you do feel kind of cooped up in those foreign places." That phrase of hers "foreign places," was in the nature of a stock term. It was expansive, elastic, comprehensive. She spoke of foreign places a little as her husband spoke of the East or of "culture." Neither had travelled any to speak of. In a sort of whimsical way it seemed to Mrs. Needham that one might expect to find Bombay and Peking supporting much the same conditions of life. Or even Dublin and Rome, for that matter. "I don't suppose," she added, "there's anything like this where you've been."

"I should emphatically say not," her sister assured her. "At Rato-muh—that's the capital, you know—we've nothing but a dirty little river. I'm dying for a glorious swim!"

"We go bathing nearly every afternoon, Aunt Marjie," Hilda announced.

"You do? Well, I'm with you!" She was just a trifle loud. "Do there happen to be any convenient islands one could swim out to?"

"Oh, no, Aunt Marjie, there aren't," replied the girl regretfully, almost with a touch of naÏve apology.

"Well, no matter. You can always swim round in a circle, of course. Only I do like having a definite goal."

And then she paused a moment, even suspending her toilet; for having a goal—hadn't that been, with almost amusing steadfastness, her aim all through life? Of course, it was quite true: there had been perhaps a hundred goals, all told; but each, in its own way, and at its own time, had seemed the golden, final one. And always so incorrigibly definite. She had gone vibrantly and humorously on from one pursuit to another, determination taking multiple form. And yet there appeared now to have been, all along, just one permanent and unswerving determination: not to marry O'Donnell.

Miss Whitcom sighed briefly and went on hooking herself up.

"Speaking of swimming," she continued. "I won a gold medal once. Yep. A very long time ago."

"A medal for swimming, Aunt Marjie?"

The aunt nodded. "I entered a five-mile endurance and time. Entered against thirteen men, and got there first!"

"Oh, how wonderful!" cried Hilda admiringly.

"Yes, it was wonderful," the other admitted; then frowned. "The only trouble was that I had my subsequent doubts of its being really fair."

Mrs. Needham, who had been standing in the doorway, a faint and musing smile on her lips, received the news of the swimming match with a hurried comment about having to go down and see how Eliza was getting on with breakfast. She was always, and especially with Alfred in mind, mildly shocked at the glib way in which her sister talked about men.

"How do you mean it wasn't fair, Aunt Marjie?" demanded little Hilda, sitting down eagerly on the edge of the bed.

"Came to suspect one of them."

"One of the men?"

"Um-hm."

"Of cheating, Aunt Marjie?"

"Um. Turning lazy at the finish."

"You mean he let you win?"

"Afraid so, Hilda."

"But I've heard papa say that women ought to be treated...."

"That men ought to go lazy at the finish and let you pull in ahead?"

"Of course papa never put it that way. I don't believe he knows about women going into regular contests like that, with men."

"I daresay not, Hilda. Such things wouldn't conspicuously have entered into Alfred's training."

"What did you do when you found out about it, Aunt Marjie?"

"What do you mean—when I'd convinced myself he hadn't played fair?"

"Yes."

"Sent him the medal." She shrugged.

"You did!"

"Um. It belonged to him, not me. Yes, sir—it went right straight off to him, with a polite note. The note was terribly polite. I told him I hoped he'd get just lots of comfort out of it. Real, solid comfort." And she snorted with wrath.

"Then what did he say, Aunt Marjie?"

"Then he said—say, look here, Hilda, what is your capacity for asking questions?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Aunt Marjie! I didn't realize how many I was asking."

And she really was sorry. Nevertheless, her eyes continued to shine very brightly. Aunt Marjie had a stimulating effect on Hilda—Hilda being just at the age of hero-worship. This age, in the life of the individual, is somewhat akin to the prehistoric age in human history; it bristles with ever such fabulous things. And the only natural thing to do when one encounters fabulous things is to ask as many questions about them as one can think of.

But Marjory Whitcom hadn't, as a matter of fact, spoken with any dominant impatience. She had asked Hilda's capacity for questions in a spirit of ridicule which, in a conscious sense of boomerang satire, amply included her own loquacious self. And yet, for all that, there was a slight flush on her face. What brought the flush there? Ah, there are deep things in the human heart. The flush lasted quite a long time. Indeed, it had hardly faded out altogether when she was seated with the family at breakfast.

The Rev. Needham asked the blessing in a faintly grim manner. He spoke it off with a defiant assurance. His sister-in-law, he had just been deciding, wasn't to intimidate him at his own table. He kept his eyes tight shut and spoke on almost doggedly. There were a number of graces in the minister's repertory. He was in the habit of using now one, now another. This morning, though the choice was, of course, as always, entirely spontaneous and unconscious, he chose the shortest of them all.

Breakfast was simple and bountiful. The Needhams were rather hearty eaters. There was no stomach trouble in the family, although very strong emotions had, naturally, the same effect on them as on most people. Following Louise's affair with Richard, as they remembered it, the unhappy girl had eaten almost nothing for months—or it certainly was weeks—and had grown extremely thin. In fact, during the first week following the sad climax none of the Needhams had eaten quite normally, except little Hilda. She, only a child of twelve then, came up regularly enough for second helpings, despite her sister's trouble and the general depression of the household. Childhood is, when not perverted, a blessed span, the heart seeming to stand entirely out of touch with any of the homelier and more prosaic organs.

This morning there were wild raspberries—early ones, and not very large—which the Rev. Needham and his younger daughter had themselves gathered in the woods and along the sunny roadways the afternoon previous, while Marjory was conversing sensibly with her sister. After the fruit came a cooked cereal, which Mrs. Needham was annoyed to find a trifle lumpy. And then after that there followed pancakes—pancakes, pancakes—hundreds, it seemed, coming in three at a time, which was the griddle's limit.

Just subsequent to the blessing, Aunt Marjie occasioned a very slight flurry in the domestic arrangements by asking Anna if she might have a glass of hot water.

"I'm supposed to drink it now," she explained, "before each meal. It's living so long in the tropics, I suppose."

Mrs. Needham tinkled the bell for Eliza, and glanced, half unconsciously, at her husband. The Rev. Needham, it is to be feared, was growing rather opinionated about his wife's sister. There is, when one stops to view the matter wholly without passion, nothing really criminal in the request for a glass of hot water, just as there is nothing essentially felonious about using all the water you want up in your room. Of course, in such places as deserts it may often be essential to employ circumspection; but scarcely on Point Betsey, where there lay the vast resources of Lake Michigan behind even an extravagant indulgence. And as for having the water hot, well, what are kettles for? One poises the issue. Still, of course, such implications as these are hardly fair to the Rev. Needham, who was animated by no real spirit of parsimoniousness at all, but who merely disliked seeing vaguely devastated the quiet, orderly routine of the house. To tell the truth, while he didn't honestly grudge her the water, the clergyman looked upon his sister-in-law as something of an intruder. However legitimate it might be—and of course nobody could possibly deny that Marjory had a perfect right to be here in their midst—intrusion still was intrusion. The trouble was, he distrusted—all but feared her. And when men fear others, they will often be found taking exception to minor failings, real or fancied, which a sometimes surprisingly acute vigilance discovers in those who inspire their fear. The Rev. Needham, however, said nothing: merely pressed his lips together, as he had previously done before the mirror upstairs when informed that his relative would have to have her pitcher refilled every morning. It was these repressions which permitted the world at large no too salient suspicion of what was really going on inside.

A pleasant, wholly unremarkable conversation was kept up. It wasn't the sort of talk to invite preservation, but was, on the contrary, just a normal and uneventful flow. True, there seemed an unwonted excitement in the air. The day upon which Mr. Barry was to arrive must necessarily be considered a red-letter day, and might even be expected, in a sense, to deliver up talk of some special brilliance. But to tell the truth, the great event had already been discussed in all its possible phases and from all conceivable angles, there remaining at length absolutely nothing but for Mr. Barry to put in an appearance.

Throughout breakfast the Rev. Needham maintained as consistent an attitude of dignified prosperity, beneficence, common sense, and scrupulously informal godliness as possible. Above all, he tried in his demeanour to emphasize an unobtrusive yet firm head-of-the-house bearing—and indeed succeeded, for the most part, so well as almost to persuade himself that he was master of his destiny, after all; that his life was growing more solid, more dependable now.

Hilda, of course, chattered a great deal, after her wont, acquainting her hearers, for one thing, with as full an account of Louise's early departure as seemed politic. She blushed, mentioning Leslie. Miss Whitcom noted that: noted it and sighed. It was obvious the blush was no accident. Another young thing, just starting out; the rough and not always so romantic world ahead of her—and boy-crazy! Marjory Whitcom sighed again. So futile, she told herself. But another valuation just slipped in: so sweet!

Toward the end of the meal, the pancake process, hitherto quite smooth and regular, hitched very badly. No fresh cakes came in, and the supply on the table dwindled alarmingly. The Rev. Needham affected not to notice this. The management of the household, thank heaven! was not on his shoulders. His burdens were the weightier and more important family matters—aside, that is, from the business of tending to his own rather unmanageable soul and looking after his flock. There was a great difference between household matters and family matters; pancakes were not in his department; so that, not being himself responsible for the present embarrassment, he could afford to keep up a very good and cheerful front indeed, even when his eyes assured him the kitchen door hadn't opened for fully five minutes.

Mrs. Needham flushed. She always grew more or less excited when there was a break like this in the table service. As concerned her own plate, she, of course, stopped eating, directly it began to look as though the supply of cakes on the table could not possibly survive till there was a reinforcement from the griddle. She nibbled heroically at the cake already unavoidably on her plate, and suddenly began talking with great animation.

Anna had always felt, obscurely yet unhappily, that her sister did not consider her a really expert housekeeper. In the old days, before weddings and deaths had disintegrated the family, it had always been Marjory who could do things best and most handily. She had seemed a very prize of domestic efficiency. Every one said Marjory would be married off first. There were even unkind asides to the effect that Anna would probably linger on and perhaps eventually run into perpetual maidenhood. Ah, the queer pranks of life! Anna had been carried off first, after all; and Marjory, the acknowledged flower, had gone all these years unplucked.

Anna Needham was always anxious to make a good household impression on her sister. Of course, many sorts of allowances would be made up here at the Point. Still, there seemed no valid reason why the cakes should cease coming in. At last she tinkled her bell. She tinkled it resolutely. Her husband had just helped Miss Whitcom to the last cake. Hilda still had unmistakably a hungry look.

Eliza opened the kitchen door and thrust in her head.

"Did you ring, ma'am?"

"Yes, Eliza, I did. We would like some more cakes."

"Yes, ma'am."

Eliza withdrew her head and closed the door. But while it yet remained within their view, the face of Eliza had something dark and ominous in it.

They heard her making desperate sounds about the stove. One minute, two. Mrs. Needham grew more and more excited. She talked loudly and steadily. The Rev. Needham sat with his hands on the arms of his chair, like a statue of patience. Presently, however, he began to drum with his fingers. Miss Whitcom, realizing the dilemma, adjusted herself to it—made the last cake go a wonderfully long way.

Finally Mrs. Needham pushed back her chair, excused herself hurriedly, and went out into the kitchen, the retreat being valiantly covered by her sister, who began telling her brother-in-law fresh tribal characteristics of the people of Tahulamaji.

Out in the smudge of the kitchen Anna Needham faced her cook.

"What is the matter, Eliza?"

Eliza was hot and hopeless. She pointed to the griddle upon which were three cakes, still quite pasty, and which had obviously ceased baking.

"What is the matter with the stove, Eliza?"

"It must be the oil is all gone, ma'am."

"But I thought there was plenty to last until the morning delivery from the store."

"Well, ma'am, when I came down I found two burners going, and there was the remains of breakfast on the table. Did Louise go away somewhere early?"

Eliza called the Needham girls quite simply by their first names. She might have honoured them by saying Miss Louise and Miss Hilda. But she hadn't begun that way. She hadn't done that at her last place, nor at any of the other places which constituted her Middle Western retrospect as a domestic; and Anna, in such comparatively unimportant matters as this, found it less frictional to let instruction slide.

Louise had flown, leaving the burners on; there would be no more pancakes for the remaining Needhams and their guest.

The Rev. Needham sighed, and somehow felt that the day was not beginning so very well. However, Marjory began laughing in a singularly hearty way.

"It reminds me," she grinned, "of something in an old melodrama I saw years and years ago at an impossible little theatre. The 'comic relief' was a tramp, whose weakness was the flask. He pretended, as I recall it, to have palpitations of the heart, or something like that, and at one stage of the proceedings went into a series of alarming spasms, each of which would be instantly allayed by a swig from a flask belonging to one of the other characters. The other character dared not refuse the flask, for fear of fatal consequences, but eyed its diminishing contents with profound regret. How well do I remember! At length the tramp, in one of his worst spasms, was informed that the whiskey was all gone; whereupon he very decently revived, looked out at the audience soberly, and said, in his most mirth-provoking tones: 'Thank heavens there was just enough!'"

The Rev. Needham, as they left the table, looked at her in a half startled way. These stories of hers were never in actually questionable taste, yet they somehow contrived to upset him. There seemed to be always something just behind them which might, as it were, spring out. It was such he seemed to fear most of all: the things in life that might spring out.

"Hilda," said Aunt Marjie, still chuckling over the whole affair, "did you tell me Louise had a young man in the kitchen with her?"

"Yes, it was Leslie. But Aunt Marjie ...!"

"Ah, then that explains it!"

"Oh, but Aunt Marjie, Leslie isn't the one. You see, Louise is engaged!"

"She is?" demanded the lady more seriously, yet mockingly, too, as though the communication represented fresh news. "Well, then"—for Miss Whitcom refused to be daunted—"the empty burners are no doubt all the better accounted for, Hilda." She laughed again. Then she put her hands on Hilda's young shoulders. "Hilda," she said with great solemnity, "are you quite sure Leslie isn't the one?"

Hilda blushed, and did not look squarely at her aunt, but instead a little bit beyond her.

"Oh, yes!" she cried softly.

6

The first sunlit hours of the day fully realized the brave promise of the dawn. The air was fresh and delicious, though inclined to sultriness as one travelled inland away from the coast. The song of the locust was shrill in the trees.

Louise's way took her a good distance from sea and then brought her back to it again, circumlocutionary travel being one of the features of Point Betsey existence. It might fantastically resolve itself into a paradox: to go an inch you must go a mile. Her destination was the town of Frankfort, situated about four miles south of the great stone light-house and the cottages on the Point. The distance could easily be covered on foot, the pedestrian taking his way along the smooth curving beach of the "Big Lake." But Louise was rather a poor walker. She preferred to lie in a hammock, or, if ground must be covered, to depend as largely as possible upon artificial locomotion. Those who declined to walk and had no motor, must, to reach Frankfort, enlist the respective conveyance of boat and train—an almost complicated journey. There was a regular passenger ferry running on Crystal Lake, back and forth between the resorts on the west shore and the village of Beulah. This ferry boat, propelled by gasoline, was called the Pathfinder—a name always preparing passengers new to the route for unimagined nautical adventure. Passengers seemed cheerfully and nonchalantly asked quite to take their lives in their hands, or rather, which might be even worse, to sign them over entirely into the precarious keeping of the boat's owner-pilot-engineer-and-fare-collector. And yet, after all, there was nothing so very terrifying about a trip from one end of Crystal Lake to the other. On the Pathfinder Louise would doubtless have travelled this morning but for the fact that the official ferry service was never to be depended upon at so early an hour. Absence of competition had led to a really deplorable state of independence, so that Leslie's little boat was indeed a blessing at such times, in spite of its general decrepitude. He escorted her, as we have seen, the first nine miles of her journey, due east, away from Lake Michigan. Then the train carried her nine miles back again, though somewhere in the proceeding the four miles separating Frankfort and Point Betsey were annihilated. The journey consumed something like an hour and a half.

Louise stepped out of the dilapidated coach. The station stood within a few rods of the seashore—a situation once accommodating the convenience of an enormous summer hotel, which a few years previous had taken fire and vanished in smoke. With it had vanished also the fondest hopes of the town. However, the ornate railroad terminus still stood just where it had stood during the days of glory. Thank God it was spared, for it had about it a relative magnificence which the impoverished hamlet could ill afford to lose. It might, of course, be more centrally located; still, there was a kind of grace in its sad vigil.

Miss Needham, with considerable time to waste, surveyed the age-softened ruins of the vast hotel and quite cheerfully revived, for her amusement, memories of the time when she was Hilda's age and used to come here to dancing parties and occasional dinners with her family. She paced up and down upon what had once been the walk leading grandly to the hotel from the wharves and the railroad station. Now the way was rank with grass and weeds.

Ah, yes. She had promenaded here in that long-ago time, nor had she walked alone, as she was walking now. Oh, no. And a slight flush, even after all these years, crept into her face as she remembered Harold Gates. Yes, he had walked beside her here, and they had talked together of many things, and laughed a great deal. How she had laughed in the old days! How gay they were! And over there on the channel pier, close to the bowling alley, she had let Harold kiss her, also. Before the summer was over she had let him kiss her rather a good many times. Of course they did not really love each other. They were only just awfully good friends. Harold was residing in the hotel with his parents. Louise only saw him when the Rev. Needham decided they would go in to town and dine. Harold kept promising that he would come out to the Point some day and see her, but he never came. Oh, yes—how memories swarm back, once the tide of their return has set in! Yes, once he did come; but it was only as a member of a picnic party from the hotel. They brought baskets with them and had a fine revel on the beach, quite near the Needham cottage. In the evening they built a fire. But Louise saw her hero only for a moment on that occasion, after all. They walked down the dark beach a little way, and he put his arm around her, and she let him kiss her; but when he said he had to go back to the fire again, there was naturally nothing to do but let him go. The trouble was, he seemed to have a special girl in the picnic party on whom his attentions must be lavished. So young, yet already such a dashing man of the world! But for Louise it wasn't very satisfying.

"What a fool I was!" she cried to herself, almost angrily, even at this comfortable distance. And then she laughed: "What a silly little fool!"

Harold Gates was all nicely married and settled down now; a Chicago girl, and they had a baby. Harold had mailed her a postcard with the baby's picture on it, and across the bottom of the picture he had written, in his firm business hand: "Merry Christmas from the three Gates." Was it not strongly to be doubted whether Harold at length even remembered how lover-like they had been that summer, he and she? Well, it was rather to be hoped he didn't remember; and yet, with a queer little pang for just a moment, Louise thought she couldn't endure his having entirely forgotten....

Well, she had certainly been free enough with her affections in those days! Yes, she had been very free. As Louise quitted the ruins (which had an odd, symbolic aspect this morning) and wandered off along the beach, snatches of the prodigality of her past flared up, distressing her, thrilling her a little, filling her heart with gloomy though not exactly acute aversion. Ah, she thought, the kisses that had been spent in vain! And yet they had not seemed entirely in vain at the time—not all of them, at any rate.

From a glancing inventory of those more trifling indulgences of her early days, she soared to the vastly more vital affair with Richard. That, indeed, was different. Yes, that was another matter altogether. Richard was her first real lover. The others were mere boy-sweet-hearts, or they were, like Harold Gates, just awfully good friends. Richard had always seemed mature to her: a man. She had always felt herself a woman in his presence. Their affair, wretchedly as it had turned out, was undeniably animated by the love that flashes between men and women. It had a new tenseness, a new dizziness, a new depth. It was magnificent and gripping; had the true ring of authority and surrender in it. Yes, it was a thing of intense intoxication, and maintained, so far, at least, as she was concerned, an unfaltering white heat.

"And yet—for him," she told herself as she walked close beside the little waves, "it wasn't like that. No, it couldn't have been, even—even during those wonderful times, when we...." And she flushed, as though not even solitude were an utterly dependable guardian of her crimson thoughts. She lowered her eyes, lest impartial nature suddenly be caught up into an impersonation which should cry shame against her.

Oh, yes. She had given her whole heart to Richard. Almost, almost.... She shuddered. "What a terrible thing it is!" she told herself. "What a terrible thing, being deceived in a man! But how is one to know? How can one always tell?"

Ah, how indeed? She went on a little way, thinking darkly and arriving nowhere.

"And yet," she wavered, a look of intenser and clearer pain drifting into her eyes, "he was—so dear! Ah...."

If Richard were suddenly to come toward her out of the past; if he were to come toward her here, along this brown beach; if he should hold out his arms to her and bid her to come back.... No, no! She clasped her hands, for it was all so real. "No, no," she whispered. "I would not go back. I would not dare go back." She had seen him coming toward her many times in fancy, stretching out his arms to her, speaking to her after his wont. And she had learned to play out her prohibiting side of the terrible ordeal so faithfully, so often, that at length the only emotion she felt was that sense of dullness that goes with things which are irrevocable.

"No, Richard," she would say. "I gave myself to you once. You might have had me then. But not now. It is too late."

She would dismiss him, calmly and sorrowfully; would permit her tongue to utter no words other than these. And yet.... She walked slowly along, pondering her life.

What changes had come with the years! What changes! Now her heart was given to another man. This was another sort of love, another sort altogether. Lynndal and Richard were so unlike! Louise wondered whether the love of any two men could be so strikingly unlike as she saw the love of Richard and of Lynndal to be. Indeed, it rather pleased her, as she set them off, one against the other, that the distinction should be so great. It seemed to argue an indeterminate yet quite thrilling variety in herself—not of course, a mere vulgar facility in shifting or adapting herself to types as chance flitted them across her horizon—ah, no!—but a real sense of understanding, a genius for grasping the salient elements in many men, a cleverness in appraising their worth. She bolstered her troubled and ghost-ridden heart.

Lynndal was the opposite of Richard, in every way—in every way, that is, except that he, too, loved her. No, she would say in every way, for she knew now that Richard had never really cared, while Lynndal, that was certain, cared very deeply and enduringly.

Her heart quickened now as she thought of her lover. She began reviving, in a happy, drifting way, the slender accumulation of noteworthy items in their romance, hers and Lynndal's: thought of their first meeting, in the lobby of the hotel in Arizona, when she was with her father on one of his infrequent "business" trips. The Rev. Needham owned a little property in the great dry-farming district of Arizona. "This is my good friend Mr. Barry," her father had said. And she had said she was pleased to make his acquaintance, and she had given him her gloved hand. She had thought little about him at the time. And that, perhaps more tellingly than anything else, argued the palpable differences. For Richard she had loved at first sight. He had captured her, madly and hopelessly, alas, quite at the outset. Not so Lynndal. Oh, no.

Louise was much given to musing and contemplation of this sort, which often took, as now, an odd conversational expression.

"I didn't love Lynndal at all, in the first place," she told herself, as though this were the first really definite understanding of the case. "I didn't begin to care until the week was half over. But I saw he cared. I knew that I attracted him from the beginning."

And then she left the beach and strolled up into the village.

Three couples passed by, arm in arm, youth and maiden, going for a promenade on the pier. They deported themselves in just the customary Middle Western summer resort manner. The couple ahead would confer in whispers. Then a simultaneous laugh would disturb the lazy stillness of the street. And then it might be that the girl would turn as she walked and whisper something in the ear of the girl behind her, who would laugh out also, at whatever it was the young man ahead had originally confided to his partner. And the companion of this second young lady would look bored and very much left out, while perhaps the young man behind him might mockingly exclaim that secrets in company weren't polite. Then the next minute all six would be singing the chorus of some contemporary rag. And when that was done there would be another chorus. Or else the young lady ahead would shout back to the young lady in the rear and demand of her in tones of such vehemence that they could be shared by all the town, whether she'd heard from John yet—or Harry or Jim or Robert, as the case might be. Whereupon the young man in the middle, who had been mocked by the young man in the rear, would very likely turn and grin, feeling, if rather obscurely, that the frivolous odds of the hour were now more evenly distributed.

Louise glanced at these careless, gay young persons as they passed, and a feeling of comfortable security crept into her heart.

"Well, I'm glad I'm past all that!" she thought with a sigh. "They all act this way at one time or another, and it's certainly a blessing when it's over!"

She turned and looked after the noisy spooners as they bent their steps toward the pier. Suddenly, it seemed for no reason at all, she thought of Leslie. He seemed, quite vividly, to be right here beside her for a moment. It was ever so curious. She wondered why she should think of him so vividly just at this moment. Presently it occurred to her the reason was simply that Leslie, though so young, wasn't boisterous and silly, like the hoodlums she had just passed. No, she could not fancy his ever having behaved like that in his life. Nor could she conceive of his having yet to go through any such gauche, vapid period. With her he had always been very serious. Of course, she was a little older. But Leslie's whole nature was serious, she argued, and somehow—somehow deep. She was in the mood now, perversely, to do him the most elaborate justice. Yes, she thought he might be called, in a way, really deep. Certainly she had never known any one like him. She did not, just then, consider that she had never known any one just like Richard, either, when it came to that—or even any one like Harold Gates. All she could seem to think of, for the moment, was that Leslie had come to fill a unique place in her life.

A feeling of tenderness crept upon her. Yes, they had grown intimate during the short span of their acquaintance. She had been rather lavish. It was Leslie's first summer on the Point. Vaguely she wished it might all have been otherwise, that he might have come into her life sooner, or that.... Ah, what was it she wanted?

His voice seemed suddenly ringing in her ears, as it had rung when he cried: "Friends!"

And she sighed.

Oh, Eros, wicked god! She is waiting for one lover, and you torment her with others! You revive for her sweet, irrevocable loves of the past, when one would think the present love enough....

7

Louise looked at her watch. It was half past seven. The day was clear and beautiful. Out against the marine horizon stood a ship. That must be Lynndal's. It would be in at eight. She decided she would stroll down the length of the main street and then return to the wharf.

Although the hour was still so early, the little town displayed about as much life as it ever did. There were women with baskets on their arms, examining produce displayed in the few shops where supplies were procurable. There were carefree resorters already about, enjoying a freshness which must soon evaporate under the scourge of the mounting sun. The main street boasted a good many quaint little curio shops, which somehow managed to do a living business. A typical drowsy Northern Michigan small town—not much of a town, yet of course infinitely better than no town at all.

Louise, as she walked down the one business street of the place, scarcely looked to right or left. She knew every nook and angle of the town—at least so she believed. Having come up now so many summers, wasn't it reasonable to suppose that one would eventually exhaust all the slender resources of a place like this? And yet, had her eyes been really open she would perhaps have been amazed to behold spread about her a wealth of life undreamed of. Something rich and new in Frankfort? Yes, possibly even here. For those individuals in aprons, weighing out sugar and measuring potatoes so humbly, are not, as a matter of fact, mere shop fixtures, as they have always seemed. The clerk at the soda fountain, who will cheerfully dish up ice cream for the hoodlums when they return hot and famished from their walk on the pier, has, after all, other interests in life than syrups and fizz—unimportant, it may be, yet interests, nevertheless. Yon fat and shabby patriarch, who sits so calmly all day long tilted back in a red armchair outside the drygoods store, is something more, at least potentially, than a painted barber's pole. Inside the drygoods store, although Miss Needham has overlooked her, is the old man's grand-daughter, busily working, dreaming. She works hard all summer so she can go to school winters in Grand Rapids. She has a sweetheart in Grand Rapids, who is taking a business course; they are planning to be married sometime in the sweet by-and-bye.

But one with the enormous and stirring preoccupations of Louise Needham could hardly be expected to look on life with open eyes, or, so to say, analytically. Appreciations must bow and conform. A breezy, impressionistic sort of synthesis is the background such a mentally and emotionally active person seems inevitably to evolve. As it was with the sunrise, so was it also with the people of the world not personally bound up in her destiny. It really wasn't a deliberate narrowness, but simply a sensible recognition of time's limitations. Certainly the living of one's own personal life must always count first.

Reminiscent and dreaming, she passed down the street, while out at sea the steamer drew closer and closer. In one gaily decorated shop window was displayed an array of summer fiction: alluring titles, with often most astonishing jackets—all the season's best sellers, backed up by certain surviving relics of bygone seasons. There were actually volumes in this window (though now badly faded and of course occupying appropriately inferior positions) which had been the avowed, the lauded best sellers during that summertime, long flown, when Louise and Harold Gates indulged in so free an interchange of kisses. There had been, as a matter of fact, rather a profusion of kisses in the best sellers that year, also: how true they were, after all, to life—that best of all best sellers!

Miss Needham paused before the window. Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to examine the miscellany, fruitage of so many seasons, badges of so much smart selling. In the midst of the conglomeration she spied a certain volume, modest in title and hue as compared with some of the others, though still extravagant enough of text, which Leslie had been telling her about. It was a long historical novel, and Leslie had expressed himself as well pleased with it. He hadn't, as a matter of downright fact, read the book all through, but had skimmed along, omitting all descriptions and the pages where the author philosophized about life. But he had captured the gist of the story, and had retold it to Louise one afternoon while they strolled together in delicious solitude through Lovers' Lane. And she had promised him she would read the book some time and give him her opinion—it going without saying that her opinion, at least to him, would be of moment. Louise was no great reader—certainly not an inveterate reader of long historical novels. Nevertheless, as her eye now encountered it nestling there in the window, a sudden caprice swept her right inside the shop. It was a most amazing thing, but the next moment she found herself telling the clerk she wished to purchase the volume. And then—he fished it out.

The clerk, it must be communicated—a man, by the way, with all sorts of interesting and even enthralling human complexes which Louise did not dream of suspecting, since she knew the town so well—was rather surprised that his early morning customer should desire this particular book rather than some of the more gripping things: Diana's Secret, for instance, which was easily one of the most successful works ever exploited in Frankfort. However, since he had long ago given up all hope of ever selling the historical romance, and since he expected to run out of Diana copies before the season was ended, the clerk naturally offered no comment upon her choice. Covertly blowing a little dust off the book she had asked for, he wrapped it up, and handed it over the counter.

Louise was by this time mildly self-reproachful. "How silly of me to walk right in like that and buy it!" she sighed. "With the money—let's see. What could I have bought instead ...?"

But however nimbly her mind might exert itself in estimating the complete badness of her bargain, the book went under her arm. Just a kind of giddy, final fling, she argued.

As she proceeded on her way, the girl kept assuring herself that the embrace of the historic romance was decidedly more playful than serious. It would be amusing later on—oh, perhaps a great deal later on—to show Leslie she had been as good as her word. Possibly she might actually read the book—who could tell?—just to please him. Poor Les! After all, he was only a boy. She was two years his senior. It would be foolish of them to think of each other, even were her heart perfectly free.

"Of course it's all right," she said, "for us to be the finest sort of friends; but it must stop there. If I'd guessed how serious a thing it was going to turn out for him I'd have seen it wasn't right to let him think he had any chance...."

This, to tell the truth, tended to put it all rather more satisfactorily than had hitherto seemed possible. She was quite pleased, in fact, for it left her in the attitude of repeating "Poor Les!"

Well, yes, she had thrown him over, she admitted—in a certain sense. But only in a sense; and anyway it had to be so. However shallow her reasoning might often appear to others—however often it might fail of horizon—Miss Needham was herself seldom conscious of the slightest insincerity at the time. She had inherited, it is true, a certain intellectual shiftiness from the parent most afflicted with a similar disorder; but however often she might fluctuate to a new point of view, so long as she actually held to it the conception possessed for her all the earmarks of probity and permanence.

"Poor Les! No, no.... I shouldn't have encouraged him so much...." But she hadn't thought at first that Lynndal was coming. And Arizona is very, very far away—especially on fine summer nights, when one isn't wearing any ring....

Yet presently the book under her arm began to appear a somewhat awkward possession. However easy it might be for her to tell Leslie they must be merely friends now, and however blithely she might ask him, after an ancient and at best pretty hackneyed ideal, to look upon her as a sister, it was going to be very hard—for him. Wasn't it? Could it be otherwise than hard for him? Wouldn't her having bought the book, even, especially if he learned she had bought it, make it all still harder?

Louise was naturally so quick in her sympathies that it troubled her when others couldn't attain as convenient solutions for their problems as she generally did for her own. And being herself party to another's unhappiness would, of course, tend to add certain pricks of conscience to any of the more abstract, though still altruistic, sentiments she might feel. "Well," she admitted, "I guess I shouldn't have bought the book, after all—at least not just now." But of course she could keep it hidden. "I needn't show it to Les right away." For that matter, need she ever show it to him? "I suppose—I really suppose I might drop it into the harbour, and be forever rid of it!"

As though, indeed, determined to act upon this dramatic impulse, Louise turned and walked down amongst some fishermen's huts at the water's edge. Most of the fishermen were out at sea, having not yet brought in the morning's haul from the nets. The rude little huts, where the fish were cleaned and packed in ice for shipping, and where the nets were washed, stood idly open. The early sunshine lay across their doorsteps. Some children were at play, running in and out; and before one of the huts a very old woman sat mending a net, working her hard fingers in a quick, intelligent way.

Louise walked out upon a little plank dock which was flung, at this point, into the harbour. The fishermen used the dock when they unloaded their cargoes of fish. It did not extend a great way; but from its extremity, as she faced westward, she perceived the approach of a steamer, still out in the "Big Lake," but nearing the harbour channel. It was probably Lynndal's boat, though it might possibly be one of the Ann Arbor car ferries from across Lake Michigan. She must hurry to the wharf. Still, the notion of throwing the book away persisted. She must rid herself of every vestige of the past. She must come to Lynndal—and it was quite thrilling to put it that way—empty-handed! This would seem to be a formal, a conclusive, even a rather grand way of marking a close to this surreptitious, this unfortunate, yet this of course sufficiently innocent little affair with Leslie—poor Les! Yes, it would be the fitting mark of conclusion; after that her heart would be swept clean. She grasped the book. At first she thought she would fling it far out; then that she would just quietly drop it in. But after all, she slipped the book under her arm again, and made her way hurriedly back to the village street.

Her mind was busy with explanation and a readjustment not, a moment ago, foreseen. "It would have been foolish and stagy to have done that. No, it wouldn't have been right! Perhaps—" yes, perhaps Hilda would want to read it some day. She brightened. "Leslie said there was much instructive reading in it." Why, yes—the book would do for Hilda, if not for her. Mightn't Hilda even do for Leslie, now that she had thrown him over? Ah, it might be so! The idea occurred to Louise at first as a mere flash of whimsy; however, second thought made the possibility rather too possible to be altogether agreeable....

"Why, I should think it would be the most natural thing in the world," she assured herself. "Of course Hilda's awfully young, but I should think it would be perfectly splendid if they came to care for each other in time. I'm sure it would make it ever so much easier for me." She remembered how oddly her sister had behaved earlier in the day, whenever Leslie was mentioned; how Leslie himself had promised Hilda he would be back in time to play in the tennis tournament with her. "I think it would be just splendid!" she thought. "I'll encourage it, of course, all I can!"

At last, she felt, there was a real solution in sight for poor Les. It would be the very thing! She was so pleased that she laughed aloud as she passed the fat and shabby patriarch tilted back in his red armchair before the drygoods store. But it is possible that even the patriarch, in a philosophy of age as opposed to that of youth, merely thought, as he saw her go by: "Another of the resorters." Indeed, it is even possible that he did not see her at all.

The steamer drew in through the channel. It was the coast steamer from Ludington, and connected with the Milwaukee line. Louise stood eagerly beside the freight house, peering up at the passengers on the deck. Naturally she was very much excited, and experienced a swift, enveloping sense of joyous romance in being there to welcome the man she expected some day to marry.

To marry!

Suddenly it occurred to her that, after all, she had hardly thought of it once that way! Yes, Lynndal was the man who would be her husband. Marrying him—no, she had somehow barely thought of that part.... Nevertheless, though the discovery was a little staggering, she strained her eyes quite gaily for a first glimpse of him; wondered if he would look to her just the way he looked during those few days when they had been together in Arizona. But just how, by the way, did he look then? All at once she thought of Lynndal Barry as an almost absolute stranger! It was an inexplicable but quite vivid, a rather terrifying sensation. It made the roots of her hair faintly prickle. No, for the life of her she couldn't think of any one's being a more perfect stranger than Lynndal!

Louise wasn't mystically inclined. Yet what she felt seemed almost a kind of foreboding. Then she laughed to herself, a gay little nervous laugh. And she told herself it was only natural one should feel this way, and that it was all a part of her charming, her really absorbing romance.

8

He was standing by the rail on the upper deck of the steamer, beside a man with whom he appeared to be in conversation. She had no difficulty, after all, in recognizing him. Barry was still the tallish, brown-moustached, quiet-eyed man who had so generously exerted himself to make her brief stay in Arizona agreeable.

She saw him first, the advantage giving her time to look away again before his eyes discovered her. Just why she should want to look away was in the nature of a mystery; yet avert her eyes she certainly did, as she might have done in the case of a stranger whose presence had casually attracted her notice. The feeling that, despite what had passed between them under the discreet propulsion of government postage, she did not really know this man, returned stronger than ever. She smiled a little—she had to—at her own manifest perversity; and flushed vaguely, too.

As soon as Lynndal Barry discovered Miss Needham down on the dock his face lighted, and he grasped the arm of the man standing beside him.

"There she is!" he cried.

His companion looked, but was a moment or two trying to decide which of the several very possible young ladies standing about near the freight house might prove to be she. To facilitate the other's search, Barry pointed. And Louise, observing the gesture out of the corner of an eye, coloured and turned still more away, maintaining, after all, though she had been just on the point of abandoning it, the pretense that she had not yet seen the man to welcome whom she had risen so early and come so far.

Somehow, a wrong note had been struck. Even the Rev. Needham—and his views on culture were widely known—had often cautioned his girls against pointing at persons or things in public. Lynndal ought not to have pointed. Yes, it was a wrong note—and a wrong note just at the most critical time. Of course in poising this action of his, Louise, it is quite patent, now failed to consider one thing; she failed, because perversely and momentarily she was out of mood, to consider that a young man who has travelled hundreds of miles to see a young lady he expects to marry would rather naturally be so carried away at the first sight of her that manners wouldn't count for the full weight of their every-day prestige. Great events sanction great exceptions. But Louise, now, was not prepared to make the requisite allowances. She had thought that her heart was swept clean; but it wasn't. What demon was it which had lured her into thinking so long about Richard and Leslie and—and all the others while she waited for the boat to come in?

Yes, to her it really seemed that a wrong note had been struck. Miss Needham found herself in an oddly cool and critical mood—certainly not the mood she had anticipated. The next moment it softened; a feeling of shy warmth stole upon her. Still, she half wished that she had decided, after all, not to come to Frankfort, but had been content to await him quietly at home. That would have given her, if nothing else, a certain reserve of dignity, which she felt now was somehow sacrificed. Did not her being here on the wharf to meet him make her appear too eager? Would it not have been much better to come forward gracefully out of a romantic nowhere, perhaps even after keeping him waiting a few minutes? Then, at least, she needn't have undergone the minor humiliation—wasn't it almost that?—of being pointed at. She pressed the book under her arm. Suddenly she thought of Richard and his exquisite manners....

Lynndal was waving his hat now, trying desperately to attract her attention. The captain of the vessel was making rather a poor landing, and the sharp little reverse and forward signals in the engine-room kept sounding repeatedly. A strip of water still lay between the ship and the wharf, though crew huskies stood ready to heave out the gang-plank as soon as it became possible to establish shore connections. Louise interested herself in the rougher activities aboard ship, and did not yet raise her eyes to the man who now stood almost directly above her. She felt conscious of a sum of stares in her direction. All the girls on the wharf had taken full note of the pointed finger and the waving hat. Each knew—and some, perhaps, not without regret—that these demonstrations did not apply to her. A quick inventory of wharf possibilities had convinced all present that it must be Miss Needham who was the impetuously favoured individual. He had seemed to look quite squarely at her, and she alone had not bestowed on his pains the gaze of unfortunately lacking acquaintance.

At length one of the younger girls, standing near her, touched Louise's arm. "Some one's trying to catch your eye," she said. And she nodded up toward Barry.

He observed the girl's action and called down: "Louise, dear, here I am—up here!"

And then it was that she relented, at last—thrilled a little—raised her face coyly to him, and smiled.

No, she would not appear too eager. Let him not think he was winning her too cheaply. "Did you have a pleasant trip across?" she asked.

Just the faintest shade of disappointment crossed his face. "Oh, yes," he replied. "Smooth as glass. How are you, dear?"

She merely nodded. The historical novel slipped out from under her arm and fell to the ground. She stooped hurriedly and picked it up.

"My, it's good to see you!" he communicated through a hubbub which really made it difficult to be heard.

But she was again prevented, or spared, a reply, by having to step quickly aside as the gang-plank was run out. The ship was at last securely moored. Barry's grey-haired companion called his attention to this fact, and then the two men seized their bags and hurried down.

Louise stepped aside to wait; realized an augmenting sense of strangeness and quandary—her heart in a kind of flutter. She felt now hot, now cold. An odd, frantic resolve raced through her brain: "He mustn't kiss me!" And yet—for there was a conflicting after-flash—to have him make no attempt would constitute the very essence itself of pique! In the midst of this rather extraordinary mood, Louise recoiled, as it were, and shook herself. She called her mental turmoil silly and maudlin; she even called it wicked. Then Lynndal came, and the terrible moment passed, leaving her banners waving. Emphatically it had been in his mind to kiss her; any one could plainly see that; the act itself, however (for he must not feel too sure), she forestalled by a very delicate but at the same time unmistakable gesture of repulsion, unto which he bowed with a graceful disappointment that, for the time being, very materially lightened the prospect. She had won in the first skirmish; and the knowledge of victory, the delicious sense of power in her it seemed to emphasize, put her in an easier, more cheerful frame of mind.

Instead of kissing Lynndal, she held out her hand to him with shy cordiality. She fancied, in a whimsical flash, that she was meeting him all over again, for the first time. A subtle sense of romance in this new aspect of their relationship quickened her heart....

Barry's shipboard companion was still at his side. Or rather not quite at his side, either, but holding discreetly back—even courteously discovering a sudden optical interest in another quarter of the compass. From this thoughtful detachment he was recalled and introduced as Mr. Barrett O'Donnell.

Miss Needham was delighted to make his acquaintance—Miss Needham would have welcomed, just then, an acquaintance with the man in the moon, no matter how outlandish he might prove. For the moment, if in a way delightful, was also complex and curiously taut. O'Donnell jollied things up. His was a ready tongue, with, now and then, just a whisper of Irish; his smile was droll and cheering, though perhaps rather too facile—too facile, that is (for it was perfectly sincere), to be ever quite enveloping. Louise walked between them, and the three made their way to the railroad station, where the locomotive of a "resort special" was puffing quite prodigiously, and pretending, after the manner of locomotives, to be ever on the verge of pulling right out, mindless of schedule.

Miss Needham skipped with hectic and perverse coquetry. She stimulated herself anew upon the assurance that it was great fun having a lover to meet. And it was really fine, for another thing, to be able so perfectly to dominate the scene, disposing all according to her whim—best of all, to have another man right there on the spot to behold these palpable wonders! She remembered, with a tiny obscure pang, how she had wished Richard might be present to see what amazing progress she had made. Richard she could not have; but fortune provided a substitute in the unsuspecting person of jolly Mr. O'Donnell.

Louise's mood of almost saucy pleasure was sufficiently generous to overflow in Barry's favour, else the poor man would surely have shivered himself to death ere this. She smiled up at him with more artlessness than really consorted with her triumph.

"Hilda was afraid you might not come," she chatted pleasantly, flirting a little with the corners of her mouth.

"She was?"

"Yes, she was dreadfully worried—you know how children are. She'll be awfully relieved when she sees you."

"But you," he asked, half jestingly and half in faint earnest, "—you weren't afraid?"

"I? Oh, no!" She laughed along with the denial. "Not I."

The locomotive was coughing and wheezing and snorting, with an air of absurd importance. All at once there was a tremendous exhaust which sent steam geysering in considerable volume to either side. They were so close that the roar brought a tightening to the girl's throat. Barry touched her arm, gently insinuating her out of the path of the steam's dominion. She felt the momentary pressure of his fingers. And through the hiss and dizzy vibration in the air it was as though he were saying to her: "You are mine, all mine! You are mine forever and ever! You can belong henceforth to no one but me!" She trembled and felt faint. Her heart was beset with goblins and ghosts....

When they had settled for the diminutive journey, Louise was more than ever glad of Mr. O'Donnell's presence. But now it was no longer so much that he might behold the brilliance of her autocracy as that she might lean upon him while striving to adjust herself to the almost alarming situation Barry's arrival had precipitated. And O'Donnell, for his own part, was not a little flattered at being so deluged with attention from a pretty woman—especially since she had a real, live lover sitting right beside her! The lover himself took everything in a perfectly philosophical manner. Naturally she didn't want to reveal her heart to the wide world, his comfortable acquiescence seemed to say. She was reserving all that for him alone. And in the meantime it was very decent and intelligent of her to be nice to his friend. As a matter of fact, Miss Needham's conduct wasn't by any means so sheer and vivid as the complex which produced it; she was not behaving nearly so strangely as she felt.

The journey back to Beulah, disproportionately lengthy if measured on the dial of one's watch, was under way. All the coaches were packed with resorters plying off in search of adventure—adventure which, in its most substantial form, could they but know it, they were to discover inside those mysterious covered baskets stowed away under seats and, sometimes rather precariously, on the metal racks overhead. For eating is, after all, the Great Adventure in Middle Western resort life. One might perhaps hesitate about putting it ahead of canoes in the moonlight, and that indispensable adjunct of every resort that ever was, the Lovers' Lane. But whereas the latter phenomena appeal to only a single age or mood of society, the adventure of filling the stomach appeals to everyone alike, old and young, mighty and humble. So far as the present excursionists were concerned, the furtive covers were soon flapping; and the air grew tropical with the persuasive aroma of bananas.

Louise sat beside her lover in the midst of these not unfamiliar scenes; and the outcome of her half agreeable, half harrowing mental complex was a slightly hysterical gaiety. So long as Mr. O'Donnell was with them, she felt secure. But why was this? Why was it she suddenly dreaded the thought of finding herself for the first time alone with Lynndal? Phantoms swarmed. In her letters she had given him every promise. Yet now he was with her again, she dared not let herself go. Phantoms of old delight; phantoms, too, projected into the scope of an imagined future.... The words she had seemed to hear while the steam brought that queer stuffiness to her throat, still echoed troublingly: "You are mine, all mine! You can belong henceforth to no one—but to me!" Her mind was all charged with a brooding unrest. Externally she sparkled and was blithe; but within lurked a vague fever of apprehension....

Things like this may conceivably be going on in almost any one's mind at almost any time; but they are never shown. We are adepts when it comes to guarding our guilty struggles.

The train was winding its way through dismal swamp country. Stark trunks of trees, stripped of verdure, with the life in them long extinct, stood knee-deep in brackish water. Though the day was quite bright, an impenetrable veil of melancholy lay over the swamplands—a gloom never lifted, which seemed the child of silence and stagnation. The sad blight of the landscape seeped into her heart. She was twisting her life this way and that, absorbed, as usual, in the mystery of her own fascinating if at present rather menaced ego.

Lynndal Barry and his companion, chatting, seemed unaware of the girl's momentary absorption; her curious, almost breathless, detachment. Although detached, she was nevertheless looking at Barry with serious, half-seeing eyes. And all at once she found herself thinking of him respectfully, even tenderly. There was something conspicuously ordered and kindly and calm about him. She seemed, abruptly, conscious of a great patience in this man who had come to her out of the West; had scarcely discovered in his letters how essentially mature he was. But the next moment this vaguely annoyed her. She seemed to miss in him the thrill of fire and passion which her nature craved. He seemed to be relaxed upon the snug hearth-rug of life—yes, in slippers! Barry was, actually, not much above thirty; but his seemed to her now a poise unwelcome. She fingered the book in her lap with nervous, groping fingers; even shuddered a little as she gazed off across the swamp.

Barry, however, seemed aware of none of the girl's emotional fluxes. Why should he be? How could he be? Barry didn't even in the least suspect that she had any such things as emotional fluxes in her make-up; nor, for that matter, was it likely he would quite know an emotional flux if he should meet it. This must not, however, be taken to signify that Barry wasn't sensitive, for he was. And he had a way, too, of biding his time, which sometimes deceived people into thinking him invulnerable to the finer antennÆ of feelings. However, though his ear was not entirely deaf to the unstrummed music of life, he did not as yet suspect—or if so, not more than just glancingly—that there was to be a flaw in his eager little romance.

"Oh, yes, it will surprise her completely, of course," O'Donnell was saying.

"You haven't written at all, then?"

"You see, I've only just learned she was back from Tahulamaji. I learned about it in town. I may say I learned of it only yesterday!"

"It's queer, isn't it," remarked Barry, with almost a flash of imagination, "we should have happened to come up on the same steamer?"

And then, being just a delightful, sane, normal individual, O'Donnell said what had to be said—what is always said when talk reaches such a point: He said that the world was small.

Louise came back to them with an effort. The train was beginning to draw up out of the swamp region, and on to a plain better adapted to rural uses. The sunshine lay very bright upon the grass. An emotion of hope stirred in her heart. Everything was bound to turn out for the best—her best, she thought. Of course it would! She felt all at once radiantly, boundlessly happy. And she forgot the words in the steam, when his fingers had touched her arm.

The subject of this miraculous meeting of Barry and O'Donnell still animated a conversation which she entered with almost desperate eagerness.

"You weren't acquainted before you met on the boat?"

"Never laid eyes on each other," laughed the Irishman. "We began talking about dry-farming in the gentlemen's lounge, and from that, gradually...."

"The fact is," put in Barry, who wanted to see what little mystery there was cleared up as quickly as possible, "we found we were both on our way to—"

"—to besiege ladies living under the same roof!" concluded the other's readier tongue.

Barry coloured a bit at the bluntness, but rather with pleasure than embarrassment.

"I guess I don't quite understand," remarked Louise a little coolly.

"Well, you see, the fact is we're very old friends, Miss Whitcom and I—"

"Aunt Marjie!"

"Yes—Marjie...." He repeated the name slowly, and with the sly relish of one who is not quite sure whether he would dare perpetrate such an indulgence in the presence of the adored herself.

"Why, how perfectly romantic!" cried Louise. And she ceased entirely, for the moment, to be concerned about the puzzling and rather tangled romance of her own life.

"You say you haven't seen each other for years?"

"Five years," he nodded.

"Oh, how surprised she will be! I do certainly want to be there when she first sees you!"

For of course it went without saying that they were lovers. Only fancy! Well—as much had been said outright. He was coming to besiege Aunt Marjie, just as Lynndal....

Her heart clouded a little with the mist of perplexity which seemed, now, to have begun settling the moment she heard Leslie's step outside on the hillside at dawn....

But O'Donnell went on nonchalantly enough: "Oh, but there'll be nothing remarkable at all. Miss Whitcom, if you'll pardon my speaking quite freely of your relative, has the most extraordinary control. Perhaps you've noticed it. I can tell you just what she'll do. She'll talk about the new wall paper in the throne room of the Queen of Tahulamaji's palace. Or else it will be still some perfectly commonplace remark about a tiresome old swimming medal. But exclamations in the true sense? No, there won't be any, Miss Needham, I assure you."

Oh, Eros! Here, sitting all perplexed beside the man she has promised to marry—all besieged by ghosts of her past loves, and the ghost of one scarce passed as yet—is a woman. And yonder in a cottage, covering the unlucky shortage of pancakes with mundane chuckles, is another woman who has been pursued for twenty years by one dauntless lover, and who, when he comes, will talk about the paper on the wall.

The journey drew to a screeching and bumping close; the brakes whistled, and the locomotive fell a-panting most lustily, as though to proclaim that it had done a mighty thing indeed in hauling a few laden coaches a dozen miles across the swamp-lands.

The intrepid Pathfinder lay at the dock, waiting. All Beulah had turned out, it really seemed, to welcome the train; and now all Beulah swarmed down to bid those who would embark farewell.

There was the mayor—or so one fancied; and there were aldermen—could not one fairly see them sitting in solemn council? There was the Methodist minister in his half-clerical week-day togs; there were all the old men of the town, and all the old ladies; all the boys and girls and babies; together with just as many others as could possibly be spared from conducting the business of the town. The dock was quite crowded. Yet Louise and her two companions were the only passengers the Pathfinder was to bear away.

There always seemed something vaguely symbolic about these important departures of the Pathfinder. The townsfolk seemed to gaze off with a kind of wistful regret—yes, from the mayor down to the tiniest babe. It always was so: as though the Pathfinder were bound for free, large spaces of ocean; for ports in Europe, or the Indies. And the townspeople could only assemble on the shore and silently watch this ship's glorious westward flight. So life went.

Many are called, but few are chosen!