1

Leslie had some trouble with his engine on the return trip. It sputtered and it balked. The never very regular rhythm grew more and more broken, till at length there was no rhythm left at all. Finally the thing simply stopped dead; it wouldn't budge. The little craft rippled forward a few paces on momentum, then swung into a choppy trough and began edging dismally back toward Beulah. Leslie was glad then that Louise wasn't aboard. Yes, he was very glad indeed there were no ladies present. He sat down in the bottom of the boat and took the engine to pieces. Then he put it together again. And tossed and tossed. And drifted. And cursed like a man.

When at last he limped up to the dock at Crystalia, missing fire horribly, and having to help along by poling as soon as the water was sufficiently shallow, he found Hilda waiting for him. She smiled very brightly. And somehow he felt the unpleasantness of the voyage fading into a plain sense of satisfaction over being back. It seemed a singularly long time since he had set out with Louise....

"Good morning!" Hilda called to him from the dock.

He nodded and grinned; and poled, perhaps, the more vigorously. With his foot he desperately prodded the almost exhausted engine.

"Why Les, what's the matter?" she cried. For he was, in truth, a sight.

"Stalled two miles out," he replied bluntly, though not curtly, giving the engine a final kick by way of advising it that its labours for the day were at an end.

"Why, Les—how dreadful! Oh, I can't help laughing. Your face is so funny!"

He made a grimace and rubbed his cheeks with the sleeve of his flannel shirt, not particularly improving matters thereby.

"I don't want the old thing any more—it's just so much junk!" He stepped out on the dock and moored the naughty little craft, though without any great enthusiasm, and rather as though he hoped a strong wind would come and carry the miscreant irrevocably to sea. Then he added: "Hilda, I've got an idea! I'll auction it off and turn over the proceeds to your father's missionary fund!"

Her laugh rang.

"Don't you think that would be a good idea?"

"Oh, Les—you're so funny!"

She laughed a great deal as they walked along together through the hot white sand toward the Crystalia cottages, occupied mostly by Chicago-Oak Park people, and forming no part of what was generally known as the religious colony. Leslie was by this time entirely over his maritime grouch. He conceived, always in his elusively serious way, a delight in being quite as "funny" as he could. An outsider might have registered the impression that, even at his funniest, Leslie wasn't honestly amusing enough to elicit such frequent, rich, joyous peals of laughter; but Hilda was very happy—happy!—so happy that she needed no deliberate stimulus to mirth; so happy she could with the utmost ease shift her mood from grave to gay, or from gay to grave, matching the mood of her companion.

"I know you've forgotten," she said, swinging along beside him and occasionally flashing up a most captivating glance.

"Forgotten what?"

"I'll never tell!"

"Then how can I know what I've forgotten, if you don't remind me?" Though gossamer at best, it had an effect of logic—perhaps a rather graspable masculine logic, at that.

"Maybe you'll remember—when it's too late." Her eyes sparkled.

"Oh, you mean the tournament?"

She nodded.

"I hadn't forgotten it."

"Well, you see I was afraid you had."

He smiled. She was really quite delightful.

"I'm so glad, Les. There'll be time for you to get into light things. Oh, I'm so glad your memory didn't really fail!"

He looked at her quietly a moment, but her gaze was now all on the sun-patterned turf. They had entered the forest of Betsey, and were pursuing the winding road toward the Point.

"Oh, that's nothing," he said solemnly. "I never forget appointments with ladies."

She laughed again, then ventured: "Tell me. Didn't you forget, just the tiniest little bit, when you were taking Louise across, or," she rather hurried on, "when you were out there in the middle of the lake and the engine was acting up? Please be ever so honest!"

Leslie looked down again at the girl beside him. Odd he had never noticed how intelligent and shyly grown-up Hilda was! She had been merely Louise's little sister; all at once she became Hilda, a self-sufficient entity, perfectly capable of standing alone. Also she looked very fresh and charming this morning in her cool white jumper and skirt. He looked at Hilda in a kind of searching way; then, pleasantly meeting her eyes, he answered her question. "No, not even the tiniest little bit."

Their walk together through the forest was enlivened with gay and unimportant chatter. As they passed the hidden bower where Hilda, at an earlier hour, had crouched to spy and listen, the girl almost danced at the thought of having so delightfully usurped her sister's place. And the best part of it was that it was perfectly all right; because Louise had gone to meet her own true lover. Leslie didn't belong to Louise; it seemed almost too wonderful to be true that he didn't!

As it happened, Louise entered the lad's thoughts also as he and Hilda walked side by side along the sylvan path. Perhaps something of the same odd transposition weighed, even with him. He had gone this identical way with some one else, only a few eternities ago. He had held her in his arms a moment, and then.... Then what was it she had said? Friends! First she had said she cared, and after that she had said she wanted.... Did she really know what she wanted? For weeks they had gone around together constantly. The moon had been wonderful. Then the letter had come from the West, and she had decided she had better begin being a nice, harmless sister. Still, she had let him kiss her once, even after the advent of the fatal epistle—a sort of passionate farewell surrender—wanted to let him down as easy as possible. Ugh! He was in no mood to spare her now. And then Leslie came slowly back; back to the bright, rare summer morning; back to the forest of Betsey, with its hopeful glints of sunshine; back—to Hilda. He sighed. At least he had learned something more about women.

They came to Beachcrest Cottage, and, since Leslie's cottage was further along, in the direction of the lighthouse, it was here they parted. Before he ran off, however, to make himself presentable, Leslie underwent the ordeal (pleasant rather than not as it turned out), of being introduced to Miss Whitcom.

She was seated on the second step of the flight leading up to the screened porch, seemed in very good spirits, and was writing a letter—employing a last year's magazine as base of operations. The ink bottle balanced itself just on the edge of the next step up: a key, if one please, to Marjory Whitcom's whole character. Had she been writing at the cottage desk in the living room, where everything was convenient, then she would never, never have spent her life doing wild and impossible things. And had the ink bottle been placed firmly instead of upon the ragged edge, then, having eluded Barrett O'Donnell all these years, she would not now be writing to him.

"Aunt Marjie," said Hilda, her eyes shining and her cheeks flushed, "this is Leslie."

He was pleased to meet Miss Whitcom, but assured her he must deny himself the pleasure of shaking hands. Look at them! He had had his engine all to pieces. He was going to auction off the boat now and give the Rev. Needham's missionary fund the first real boost in a decade.

"Leslie!" hushed Hilda in great dismay. How did they know but the Rev. Needham might be within hearing distance?

But Miss Whitcom laughed delightedly, whether or no, and said that after hearing such a gallant expression of religious zeal she simply must shake his hand, grime and all. And she did so. She had a way of winning young men completely.

"And did you pilot my elder niece over to Beulah before we sleepyheads here at home were even stirring?"

"Yes, Aunt Marjie. It was Leslie. You know!" And Hilda blushed at her very vagueness, which swept back so quaintly to embrace the pancake catastrophe.

"Oh, yes," replied Miss Whitcom with dreadful pointedness. "I know—oh, yes. I know very well indeed! And I know of a certain young lady who departed and forgot to turn off the burners of the stove, so that plain, humdrum mortals must quit the table hungry—positively hungry!"

Leslie somehow managed to establish connections. "Whatever happened, I'm afraid I was partly to blame, Miss Whitcom."

"Aha! Only partly?" For she fancied his chivalry carried along with it a tone, so far as he was concerned, of extenuation.

"Well, I suppose having me there, talking, helped to make her forget."

"H'm!" She eyed him in her odd, sharp way. But he looked back with a half understanding defiance. "So you won't take all the blame?"

Leslie smote the lower step with his foot, then shyly glanced at Hilda. Hilda laughed and coloured.

So Miss Whitcom said, looking drolly off to sea: "The plot thickens!"

And she was right; there were greater doings ahead.

Leslie sprang off along the ridge to get into tennis garb. He decided, as was only natural, that the one infallible way of cleansing himself was to plunge into the sea. He was consequently in his little cottage bedroom about two minutes, and then emerged in swimming apparel.

Leslie was well-formed and sun-browned. He sped off over the sand to the shore, and thence dived straight out of sight.

"Swims rather well," commented Miss Whitcom. "That crawl stroke isn't by any means the easiest to master."

"Yes, Leslie's the best swimmer on the Point," said Hilda proudly.

Miss Whitcom dipped her pen, but the ink went dry on it, and the letter lay uncompleted.

"I do believe he's forgotten all about you and is going to swim straight across!" she declared. For Leslie was, indeed, streaking out in fine style, making the water splash in the sun, and occasionally tossing his head as though keenly conscious of life's delightfulness.

"He'll turn back," said Hilda quietly.

"You think so?"

"I know he will!" she laughed.

"Oh, you know?"

"Why how ridiculous! Nobody could swim clear across, Aunt Marjie. It's seventy miles!"

"Really?"

"Did you ever hear of anybody swimming as far as that?"

"I'm not sure I ever did," the other admitted. They were silent a little, both watching the swimmer. Then the lady remarked in a dreamy way: "They always look so fine and free when they're young, and the sun flashes over the water, and they make straight out, as though they never meant to stop at all."

Hilda was a little at a loss to know how this rather curious speech should be taken. She felt dimly that there was something below the surface, as so frequently there seemed to be when Aunt Marjie spoke; but at first she couldn't imagine what it was.

"So fine and free," Miss Whitcom repeated in the same tone. "They make straight out. But they always turn back."

And then Hilda asked, giving voice to a sudden bold dart of intuitive understanding: "You mean men, Aunt Marjie?"

Whereupon her aunt laughed away the odd impulse of symbolism. "Yes, the men, Hilda. They try to carry us off our feet in the beginning. They want us to believe they're young gods. And they can't understand why some of us are coming to grow sceptical, and why we're beginning to want to try our hand at a few things ourselves."

"He's turning around now!" cried Hilda, who was not paying the very best sort of attention.

"Yes, poor dears," the other persisted. "The other shore would be too far off."

"Oh, much too far!" agreed Hilda, jumping up to wave her hand.

Whatever Aunt Marjie might be getting at, Hilda, for her part, was ever so glad of the sea's prohibitive vastness.

2

The Rev. and Mrs. Needham came out on to the porch, he preceding her through the doorway; there was just the faintest evidence of her shoving him on a little.

Her whispered "Yes, Alf, yes!" might, of course, represent an exclamation apropos of almost anything. For instance, the words might form the tail-end of almost any sort of domestic conversation—or perhaps a talk about holding a Sunday School rally in the fall. The incomplete phrase might, in one's imagination, expand itself into something like this: "Yes, we really must. Nothing like a well-planned rally to stir up the interest of the young folks. Yes, Alf, yes!" But as a matter of fact, Mrs. Needham and her husband had not been discussing any such matters. The authentic conversation, to go back a little, which had just antedated egress from the cottage living room, ran, in fact, as follows:

"Alf, I do want you two to get better acquainted!"

"What?"

"More intimate, and not...."

"Well, Anna?"

"Not quite so—so stiff, somehow...."

"H'm-m-m!"

"Alf, she's so good-hearted. If it's true she has changed any way, who knows but you might have an influence ...?"

He sighed heavily. They stood facing each other. It became a little formal.

"Alf, this would be a splendid chance. She's right out there on the steps!"

"Oh, well—really! Not this morning. No, not just now, when we're all keyed up about Barry. In the course of time, I daresay...."

"Oh, now, Alf," she coaxed, in a very low, throaty, persuasive contralto. "Oh, do go out there now! I'll call Hilda in for something. There's—there's some mending—ought to be done right away," she quickly added, as the suspicion hovered between them that Hilda would be called in on mere pretense.

"Anna, maybe this afternoon."

"Now! Oh, Alf—now!"

"Anna, I—"

"Yes, Alf, yes!"

And so he was gently pushed on to the porch.

Hilda and Marjory looked up. There was a barricade of mosquito netting between them and the emerged pair. Hilda was flushed. She had just been waving to some one in the water. Marjory's eyes kindled with indefinite mirth, and at this kindling the minister's heart quaked a little. There was something about his wife's sister—yes, he thoroughly admitted it now; there was something about her. She was strange and incompatible. Had she, indeed, become inclined to be atheistical in her beliefs? Was that what made him feel so uncomfortable, always, in her presence? He a man of the pulpit, it would be natural that the ungodly should fill him with distrust; natural they should make him wary and cautious. Was it that in Marjory? Was it that?

"Hilda, see here a minute," said Mrs. Needham; and she beckoned discreetly. Hilda followed her mother into the cottage.

This left the Rev. Needham on one side of the screening and Miss Whitcom on the other. Miss Whitcom still sat on the second step with the pen in her hand. She had dipped the pen a good many times, but the letter was no further advanced. She turned to watch Leslie get in the last full strokes and crawl out. He lay in the hot sand a moment or so before racing indoors.

The Rev. Needham had sunk into the nearest chair, and sat there rocking, with just perceptible nervousness, clearing his throat from time to time in a manner which appeared to afford that portion of his anatomy no appreciable relief. It seemed a kind of moral clearing. It was the vague articulation of incertitude.

As a matter of fact, Marjory had forgotten all about her brother-in-law. She was musing. At length a more desperate laryngeal disturbance than any that had preceded brought her back to contemporary consciousness.

"Ho!" she cried. "I didn't know you were there, Alfred!" There were times when he thought her almost coarse.

"I thought I'd just come out here a few minutes," he said. "It's quite cool on this side, till the sun gets round." The minister sighed. He had an uncomfortable inner feeling that he hadn't quite justified his presence. It was, to be sure, his own porch; but that did not make any difference. Dimly he hoped his relation would not relinquish her position on the second step.

Marjory dipped her pen again, but the letter was doomed. With a gesture of languid, smiling despair the task was conclusively abandoned.

"No, it's no use," she muttered, rather unintelligibly. "I never can concentrate at a resort."

"Beg pardon, Marjory?"

"I just want to dream and dream all day. Isn't it dreadfully delightful?"

"Yes—we like it up here," he replied, the least bit stiffly.

"Alfred, how did you ever happen to come so far?"

"So far?"

"Yes; aren't there any resorts in Ohio?"

"Well, you see it was, to begin with, on account of the Summer Assembly...."

She didn't fully fathom it until he had explained: "We're a sort of religious colony here on the Point."

"Oh-h-h!" cried the lady then, with the air of one who is vastly—perhaps a little satirically—enlightened. "I understand now what Anna meant yesterday when she spoke about 'visiting clergymen.' You hold meetings, I presume, and then have some refreshments at the end?"

"No refreshments," he replied, in a rather dry tone, reproving her at the same time, with an almost sharp glance.

"Well," she agreed, with a touch of apology, "I suppose you wouldn't. I was thinking of some of our Tahulamaji pow-wows."

To this he made no reply; but the somewhat chill dignity of the silence which ensued provoked, alas, an even more unfortunate question.

"Alfred, I know you'll consider me perfectly awfully impossible, but it's been such a long time.... I've forgotten—I really have.... It—it isn't Methodist, is it ...?"

"Methodist, Marjory?"

"What I mean is, you're not.... Oh, Alfred, for heaven's sake before I simply explode with chagrin, do quickly tell me what you are!"

"My denomination?" he asked unhappily.

"That's the word! Do please forgive a poor creature who's lived so long in out-of-the-way places that she's half forgotten how to be civilized!"

"There are certain things," the Rev. Needham told himself icily, "one never quite forgets, unless one...." He started a little, raised his eyes wanly to hers, but shifted them quickly to the landscape. "I am a Congregational minister, Marjory," he said.

"Oh, dear me! Of course! I'm sure I remembered subconsciously. Don't you think such a thing is possible?"

"You mean ...?" He seemed unable fully to concentrate, either—though not primarily because this was a resort.

"I mean remembering subconsciously. But you see it's all because in Tahulamaji we get so fearfully lax about everything."

Was this his cue? He fidgeted, glanced sidewise to see whether his wife were within range of his voice.

"I presume there's a great deal of laxness in Tahulamaji...."

"Well," she pondered, accepting his wider implication. "Yes, I'm afraid so. Still, of course, one must never lose sight of the missionaries."

"Yes!" brightened her brother-in-law. "We help support a missionary in Tahulamaji. Perhaps you—"

"No, Alfred, no. I'm afraid I've never had that pleasure. You see I've been so busy, and the missionary seems always so busy, too."

"There's much to be done," he reminded her simply.

She was quite serious and respectful. He began to grow more at ease; more expansive; told her a great deal about what missionaries do in foreign lands, and especially what the missionary in Tahulamaji was doing. His talk grew really interesting. Then there was a shift which brought them round to the activities of the church in America.

"We're trying to broaden out all we can," he told her. "Every year new opportunities seem to be opening up. We have to keep abreast of the times. For instance, there's the parish house—"

Leslie's arrival interrupted them. He was now dressed in white and wore a purple tie. Hilda came skipping across the porch and ran down the steps to him.

"You must wish us luck!" she called back over her shoulder.

"Just bushels of it!" Miss Whitcom called loudly after them.

Mrs. Needham had come to the door of the cottage. She stood surveying the situation so laboriously contrived. Having Marjory out there on the second step and her husband above in the rocker, with a wall of netting between them, did not somehow seem very auspicious. But she sighed and quickly withdrew; it was better than no situation at all. She thought of a text her husband had used once: "Be ye content with what the Lord giveth"—or something to that effect.

The Rev. Needham cleared his throat, again privately a little nervous. For no reason at all there had seemed to him a godless twang to her gracious, full-voiced "just bushels of it!"

Miss Whitcom recovered the threads for him. "Yes, yes, Alfred. Quite so. You were saying something about a parish house."

"We hope to build one, in the spring ... if we can," he went on. "The money's partly raised. Of course it takes a long time—money doesn't seem very plentiful just now. But the parish house, when we get it"—his eyes lighted softly—"will add so much to our practical facilities."

She noted this softness, and it touched her a little. All the same she had some not very soothing things to say.

"Yes, I've no doubt. I'm quite amazed—I may say almost frightened, Alfred—at the development of the common-sense idea in America. You notice it especially, I suppose, coming in like this from a long absence. The change, I may say, quite smites one. It's baffling—it's bewildering! Good gracious, all the old, moony Victorianism gone! The whole ecclesiastical life of the community made over into something so dashing and up-to-date that I tell you frankly, Alfred, I'd be almost afraid to go into a church, for fear I might no longer know how to behave! It's amazing, Alfred—it really is—how 'practical' religion has grown. I tell you I never would have dreamed the church had such a future! I come back from my long sojourn in heathendom, and what do I find? I find religion all slicked up on to a strict business basis. At last the church of God has reached an appreciation of the value and importance of money! Everywhere you read of mammoth campaigns to raise millions of dollars. You have to have a real business head on your shoulders nowadays—don't you find it so, Alfred?—to be a minister. It's wonderful simply beyond belief! If Christ were to walk in suddenly I know he would have to show his card at the door. I know they would ask him what he came about and how long the interview would take. Practical Christianity, you call it, don't you, Alfred?"

"Marjory, I...."

"Ah—now I've shocked you! Yes, I see I have. You mustn't mind my speaking out so bluntly. It's a way I've rather fallen into of late, I'm afraid. And when I say the new Christianity seems baffling to me, I mean it's quite splendidly baffling. Practical Christianity—what a fine idea it was! I wonder who thought of it. Yes, the church was always too exclusive. There can be no doubt of it. Practical Christianity—practical philanthropy—with the elaborate social service bureaus—they've just simply transformed everything. What a hustle and bustle—and what undreamed-of efficiency! Just think how efficiently the church stood back of the war! And yet—you must pardon me—I somehow can't help feeling that even with all its slogans and its hail-fellow slaps across your shoulders.... You know"—she interrupted herself, in a way, but it was to pursue the same trend of thought—"I had quite an adventure on the train, coming from New York. I watched a Bishop retire! Oh, don't look so scandalized, Alfred. Of course it was quite all right."

"I hope so, Marjory," he murmured limply.

"I must tell you about the Bishop, Alfred. He was just the kind of man you would expect a Protestant bishop to be—his face, I mean. Calm—so very calm—and so gently yet firmly ecclesiastic! He wore an unobtrusive but stylish clerical costume of soft grey, and a little gold cross hung round his neck—you know. It struck me as never before how close the Episcopacy is snuggling up to Rome.... Oh, but I must tell you about the Bishop's going to bed!"

The Rev. Needham sat there almost breathless on his screened porch. His dismay might have struck one as speechless—at any rate, he was speechless.

"The Bishop," continued Miss Whitcom, "seemed very weary. There was a quiet, tired look in his eyes. He had his dinner early, sitting all alone at one of the little tables on the shady side. I ate my dinner at another of the little tables, and was quite fascinated. There was something so patrician about him. He was so subtly sleek! I didn't see him again until his berth was made up. But the making up, Alfred, was what fascinated me more than the Bishop himself! The porter was just fitting things together when I came in from my simple dinner. He spread down one mattress, and then—Alfred, I gasped to see it—he spread down another right on top of it!"

"Another, Marjory?" The minister appeared quite absorbed, almost fascinated.

"Had he taken the whole section?" she demanded.

To this no reply was ventured, and she continued:

"Or did he get them both as a kind of divine dispensation? Anyway, the bed, I must say, looked almost royal. There were four pillows instead of two, and they were given little special pats and caresses. All of a sudden I thought of Jacob's stone, Alfred. Wasn't it funny? I couldn't help it. And then I thought about 'the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head'—wasn't it curious? And then, only then, Alfred (you see how slow I am), it occurred to me that this must be a part of the new order of things! It came to me almost like an inspiration that the bed of the Bishop must have something to do with Practical Christianity. But I'm forgetting the last appealing touch, Alfred. The Bishop had a huge bag of golf sticks with him. They reposed all night in the upper berth!"

She ended her rather long story about the Bishop; and its precise interpretation remained a thing of doubt for the minister. Was she serious? Or was she only laughing? His bearing now argued a preparedness for either mood. But whatever her motive, in a moment Miss Whitcom appeared to have forgotten all about the Bishop and to be busy with other matters. The Rev. Needham sat on his own side of the netting and didn't know just what he ought to do or say. What was to be done, what said? Fortunately, at this vaguely uncomfortable juncture, there came another, and this time a really important, interruption.

Steps were heard on the sparse planking which served for sidewalk between Beachcrest and the road to Crystalia.

The minister, rising quickly, began rubbing his hands together. "It must be Mr. Barry," he said.

Mrs. Needham appeared at the cottage door, as though bidden by some psychic intelligence. "Are they here?" she asked excitedly.

"I can't see yet, for the shrubbery. But I think I hear Louise's voice."

"I see her," Miss Whitcom advised them from her position on the steps. "And what's more," she added, while her sister hastily patted and preened herself, "I see him also!"

"Mr. Barry?"

"Um. Rather tall. Not exactly bad looking.... But," she added darkly, "they're walking ever so far apart!"

What did she mean by that? The Rev. Needham glanced a little nervously at his wife and unconsciously began humming the Invocation.

They arrived. Lynndal was presented to Mrs. Needham, then to Miss Whitcom. He was, of course, very warmly greeted by the minister.

Louise looked troubled....

The Dutch clock in the cottage living room set up a spiteful striking: one, two, three, four (each stroke tart and inimical), five, six, seven, eight (as though from the very depths of its mechanism it would cry out against the terrific irony of life), nine, ten....

Lynndal had come all the way from Arizona.

3

"My gracious!" cried Miss Whitcom loudly and cordially, "I've been in Arizona!"

"You have?"

"Rather! I started a cactus candy business there before you were...." She paused, then wholeheartedly laughed a defiance at the very notion of grey hairs. "No, I won't say it. I won't go back so far as that. For I do believe you're thirty, sir, if you're a day."

"I'm thirty-three," confessed Barry, looking older, for just a wistful moment, than his wont.

"Well, then, when you were a youngster, we'll say, Marjory Whitcom was working fourteen long hours a day in an absurd little factory on the fringe of the desert—slaving like all possessed to make a go of it. The idea was a good one."

"Yes," he agreed, "for we're turning out wonderful cactus candy now."

"I know it. The idea was corking. Alas, so many of my ideas have been corking! But every one at that time said it was absurd to think of making candy out of cactus, and no one would believe the Toltec legend which gave us our receipt. Ah, yes—there's many a slip...."

In her almost brazen way she cornered the new hero of Point Betsey—actually got between him and the others. But Miss Whitcom was shrewder, even, than she was brazen. You couldn't possibly deceive her when she had her reliable antennÆ out. Had she not seen the landscape between them? Distinctly seen it? Suspecting the imminence of a rather taut situation, this was her way of clearing the air.

Louise did not altogether fathom her aunt's subtlety; but she was grateful, seizing the occasion to disappear. She flew up to her room, flung herself on the bed, and nervously cried a little.

Lynndal was here. The long anticipated event had actually come to pass. But it wasn't the kind of event she had conceived. What was the trouble? Was he not as she remembered him? Yes, but with phantoms to dictate the pattern, how she had idealized him in the interim, and how the correspondence had served to build up in her mind a being of romance and fire which flesh and blood could never hope to challenge! Well, he had come, this stranger—with his quiet kindliness, his somehow sensed aura of patience, where she looked for passion.

Ghosts of the past played havoc with her heart, and she thought: "Can I give myself to this man? Can I be his, all his? Can I be his for ever and ever? Can I belong henceforth to him and no one else?"

The mood was one of general relaxation, however—though a relaxation she had, at an early hour, been far enough from anticipating. She reviewed the events of the day thus far. She had waked at flush of dawn; had risen full of a gay expectation, and had gone out to meet her lover. He had come; she had met him and had forestalled his kiss. Now he was here. Ten o'clock. And her heart was in a curious state of panic.

But Barry, meanwhile, still down on the screened porch, was finding his fiancÉe's relative an intelligent and really engaging person. For her part, it had not taken long—with the cactus candy as bait—to lure him into enthusiasm over his dry-farming. She knew, it developed, very nearly as much about dry-farming as he did, and Barry, of course, knew nearly as much about it as there was to know.

The Rev. and Mrs. Needham, having gone on into the cottage living room, expecting that Barry, momentarily arrested, would follow, stood a moment conferring in discreet tones.

"What do you think of him, Anna?"

"He seems like a real nice sort, Alf. What do you think?"

"I've always admired Barry," he said proudly, a bit complaisantly. "During several years of business connection...."

"Yes, Alf he's certainly looked after our interests out West."

Sly little wrinkles of worry just etched themselves across the Rev. Needham's florid brow. Those interests in the West—heaven knew how much they meant! They kept the wolf from the door—a mild wolf, of course, and one that wouldn't really bite; but still a wolf. Yes, they sustained the Needham establishment in a kind of grand way—certainly in a way which wouldn't be possible on ministerial salary alone. And it was Lynndal Barry's initiative which had built the dam: the dam generated electricity and paid dividends. Yes, they certainly owed a great deal—though of course it was all on a sufficiently regular business basis—to Mr. Barry.

"He's a fine, fine man—one of God's own noblemen, Anna. It's only to be hoped...."

"Hoped, Alf?" Anna was seldom able to supply, off-hand, what one groped for in one's perplexity.

"That Louise," he began a little impatiently, "—that Louise...."

"Why, where is she?" asked Mrs. Needham, looking suddenly around.

Ah, where indeed?

The Rev. Needham experienced an uncomfortable shivery sensation in his stomach. Still, there was no reason other than what Marjory had said about their walking rather far apart. What did she mean? What did she ever mean? Ah, Marjory....

They looked at her. Yes, she had certainly captured Mr. Barry. Poor Marjory had a way....

"I wonder," sighed the Rev. Needham—a little ponderously to conceal an inner breathlessness. "I wonder...."

"What, Alf?"

He shook himself, looking dimly horrified. "Nothing, Anna." What he wondered was whether his wife's sister had ever fallen by the wayside....

"Alf," whispered Anna, on the point of slipping upstairs to make sure for the last time that the visitor's room was quite ready, "how did you two get on?"

"I can't say very well," he answered with an inflection of nervous vagueness. "It was almost all about a Bishop on the train. Anna, I'm—I'm afraid it's no use. You know there are people in the world that seem destined never to understand each other...."

"Oh, Alf—she's so good-hearted!"

"That may be true," he replied, "but in Tahulamaji I'm beginning to be convinced she led—that she may almost have led...."

"Oh, Alf!"

"And she'd forgotten...."

"What?"

He spoke with troubled petulance: "My denomination!"

When Miss Whitcom learned, as she did directly, that Mr. O'Donnell was at the Elmbrook Inn, down at Crystalia, she emphatically changed colour. However much she might like to deny it, a fact was a fact. And in addition to that, her talk, for at least ten seconds, was utterly incoherent. She simply mixed the words all up, and nothing she said made any sense at all. Of course she quickly regained her equilibrium and made a playful remark about "having had all that letterwriting trouble for nothing." But it must very plainly and unequivocally be set down that throughout those first ten seconds her colour was high, her coherence at zero.

The ensuing hour at Beachcrest passed quietly, despite the fact that every one seemed moving at a high rate of tension.

Mrs. Needham spent a considerable portion of the time in conference with Eliza. The advent of the grocer's boy occasioned the usual excitement. It must be understood that these arrivals mean ever so much more in the wilderness than they do in town. In town, supposing there is a certain item missing, you merely step to the phone and give your tradesman polite hell. But on Point Betsey there were no such resources possible. They did not even have electric lights, and it was merely possible, when things went wrong, to explode to the boy (which never did any good), or to explode in a grander yet still quite as futile way to the world at large. Fortunately, this morning (the morning of this most momentous day!) the supplies arrived in relatively excellent condition.

The Rev. Needham, pacing up and down alone in the living room, paused nervously now and then to heed the muffled sounds issuing from sundry quarters of the cottage: the squeaky opening or closing of doors, which might somehow have a meaning in his life; the shuffle of steps (maybe portentous) across the sanded boards.... And most especially he pricked his ears—those small, alert ears of his, that were perpetually prepared for the worst—when the things came from the store. It would be horrible, with guests in the house, to have a short supply; although of course here again, as in the case of the pancakes, he was concerning himself outside his own department. But even if these responsibilities of the kitchen didn't really rest on his shoulders, nevertheless the Rev. Needham listened as each item was pronounced, upon its emergence from the huge market basket.

Coffee, cheese, eggs—eggs, ah! we must look at them. One broken? Well, we should be thankful for eleven sound ones. Housekeeping, especially housekeeping in a cottage, develops a wonderful and luminous patience. This patience—like mercy, an attribute of God Himself—may even sometimes lead one to the tracing of quite Biblical applications. There were twelve disciples in the beginning, yet one of them, in the stress of events....

Bread, celery, carrots, frosted cookies. Where was the roast? The Rev. Needham's heart stood still. He halted, petrified with horrid fear. The roast, the roast! Thank God they found it, down at the bottom of the basket. Oh, thank God! The pacing was resumed.

Up and down, up and down. One would have perceived here, so far as externals went, merely a quiet, middle-aged clergyman strolling in his home. Yet in the cottage living room this clergyman and this angry Dutch clock together synthesized contemporary events. "Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble!" ticked the clock sharply. And each step in the Rev. Needham's pacing seemed a question. As the years crept by, broadening vision seemed not very materially to be quieting the good man's fidgets and perturbations. It seemed merely to give them longer tether; for his unsettled state was organic. It would never be really otherwise. Religion, science, feeling, thought, reason—all alike, in their several directions, seemed impotent to anchor him. The sea was too deep. He might, of course, call himself anchored; but alas, the cruel little demons of doubt and quandary were bound, sooner or later, to insinuate themselves back into his heart. His walk was groping, indecisive. Each step was a question: "Whither? Why? How long? What is best? What is best? What is best?"

Miss Whitcom stood meditatively before the somewhat wavy mirror in her little room. She was pondering past, present, future. Also, she was acknowledging that grey hairs had perceptibly multiplied since O'Donnell last saw her. Would he notice them? And if he did? Well? She contemplated herself and her life in the wavy mirror.

Beyond his own three-quarters partition, Barry happened at the same moment to be standing before a mirror also—as men do sometimes, who would be sure to deny the charge were it publicly preferred against them. Yes, he was getting along. Not in any sense old, of course. To some a man of thirty-three seems still a young man. He tried to look at it that way. Still thirty-three was thirty-three. And Louise.... She was young, so young—and fresh, and sweet, and adorable.... His quiet eyes misted a moment as he thought of her. And for her sake he could wish himself one of those fabulous princes we read of in childhood. Ah, yes—a kind of prince—just for her sake! He regarded himself in the glass solemnly and critically. There were undeniable lines of salient maturity in his face; and princes, that was sure, never had any lines at all. So young, so sweet, so charming! He sighed and went about unpacking his things. That he should win her—that he should win this dear girl for his wife ...!

"I have done nothing to deserve such happiness as this," he said softly. "In all my life, nothing, nothing!"

And then he took a ring out of a little box and gazed at it. And when he had gazed at it a long time, he put it back in the box and put the box in his pocket.

Louise, in the seclusion of her room, no longer wept, though she still lay on the bed. Tears had relieved the strain, and her heart was not so burdened. Slowly reviving, she lay in a sort of half pleasant lethargy—not thinking, exactly, nor even actually feeling, for the moment. Tears are like suave drugs: under their mystic persuasion life may assume the lovely softness of a mirage. But the softness is fleeting. It rests and it is gone. It is like false dawn. Or it is like a dream of light when the night is blackest.

4

Marjory and Anna met outside the cottage in a little rustic bower where there was a hammock, and where the Rev. Needham had constructed, with his own hands, a clumsy and rather unstable rustic bench. It had taken him nearly all one summer to build this bench. The clergyman had perspired a great deal, and gone about with a dogged look. They were all mightily relieved when the task was at last completed. It seemed to simplify life.

Mrs. Needham sat on the rustic bench now, fanning herself with her white apron. Her face was flushed, her manner a little wild. She and Eliza had reached the agonizing conclusion that the raisins, indispensable to the Indian meal pudding, hadn't come, only to discover the little package lying out on the path where it had slipped from the grocer boy's basket. The pudding was saved, but what a shock to one's whole system!

"Well, Anna," said her sister, dropping fearlessly into the hammock. None but newcomers possessed that sublime faith in hammock ropes!

"I declare!" returned Anna. "Whew!"—her apron moving rapidly—"So warm!"

"Well, have you been charging up hillsides, or racing Alfred on the beach?"

Mrs. Needham looked a little startled at the irreverent allusion. "Oh, no, only planning with Eliza, and—"

"You find Eliza a treasure, don't you?"

"Yes, she's very capable."

"I suppose a maid's capability must take on a special lustre in the wilderness. Don't you sometimes fancy you see a faint halo over Eliza's head? You people in this luxurious country have become so dependent, I don't know what you would do if there should ever be a general strike!"

"No, I don't know either," admitted Mrs. Needham. "Eliza talks of going back. It's so quiet up here—girls don't like it. We've raised her twice. I really don't know what's going to be the end of the help question. And wages ...!" She raised her eyes to the heavens.

A short silence followed. Marjory swung gently back and forth in the hammock. She might have been pronounced an eloquent embodiment of perfect calm; and yet her heart was curiously bumping about.

"Anna," she asked slowly, "do you remember Barrett O'Donnell?"

Her sister looked at her queerly a moment. "Some friend, Marjory?" For Marjory had had, in her time, so many friends!

"You'll remember him, I know, when you see him," she nodded. And then she continued: "He's here."

"Here?"

"Well," her sister laughed, "not quite on the Point, but at Crystalia."

"Really?"

"Dear old Barrett! I wonder...."

"Marjory," the other asked, with an odd effect of conscious shrewdness, "is he—is Mr. O'Donnell the man?"

"For goodness sake, what man, Anna?"

"Why, I always felt," her sister replied quaintly, "that there was one man, all through the years—'way from the time we stopped telling each other secrets...."

Marjory laughed loudly. But she seemed touched also. "It's a long time, isn't it, since we stopped telling secrets?"

And Anna sighed, for perhaps her retrospect, if less exciting, was even longer than her sister's.

The two sat, after that, a little while without speaking. Then Anna's large round face assumed a truly brilliant expression.

"Marjory!" she cried.

"Well?"

"You say he's here?"

"Um, though it seems impossible to credit such a thing. Perhaps it's all a myth. He's at the Elmbrook Inn. Is there," she whimsically faltered, "—is there honestly such a place?"

"Marjie, I mean to have him up!"

"Anna—you mean here?"

"For luncheon!"

In their excitement the two ladies were really all but shouting at each other. They realized it and smiled; sank to quieter attitudes both of bearing and speech.

"You think he'd come, don't you Marjie?"

"Come? Rather! Did you ever hear of a travelling man turning down a chance at home cooking?"

"Then I'm going to send right over and invite him. It will be real fun! I suppose," she embroidered, with as great an effect of roguery as she could enlist, "I suppose he's followed you up!"

"Obviously!" her sister replied, not apparently flustered in the least.

"Think of it!"

"Yes, it is rather dreadful, isn't it—especially at our ages!"

"I think it's kind of splendid, Marjie."

"Er—Alfred never was much of what you'd call the 'following' kind, was he Anna?"

"Well, I can't seem to remember. It seems to me once...."

"Oh, they'll nearly always follow once. It's keeping right on that seems hard. Of course," she added, "marriage puts a stop to all that sort of thing, doesn't it?"

"Yes, I suppose, in a sense...."

"Anna, there's just one way to keep 'em going: don't marry! Well, you see for yourself how it is."

"Yes, but it seems kind of dreadful to put it that way, don't it?"

"Dreadful? Oh, yes. Yes, of course it's dreadful. Still, it's rather nice."

"M-m-m," murmured Anna.

The philosophy of man's pursuit proved baffling. Here were two sisters who knew its bitters and its sweets. Yet it is doubtful if for either the bitter was all bitter and the sweet all sweet....

Hilda and Leslie came back from the tennis tournament. They were hot and in high spirits.

"Who won?" asked Mrs. Needham cheerily.

"We did, mama!"

"Three cheers!" cried Miss Whitcom, sitting up enthusiastically in the hammock.

"You never saw such excitement!" cried Hilda. "Most of the games were deuce for both sides before anybody got it!"

"Very close," was Leslie's simpler version.

Louise crept to her window and peered down into the bower. Hilda and Leslie were holding one racquet between them. It was his racquet and she was twining her fingers playfully in and out among the strings. A feeling of suffocation closed suddenly upon Louise's throat.

And just then Barry walked into the bower. He had been exploring the delightful wild endroit, and hoping that Louise might suddenly appear, with some lovely tangle of wood and vine for background. For he hailed from a country where trees are scarce, and one's backgrounds from childhood are sand, desert sand. His life had grown suddenly so rich....

Barry was welcomed. Mrs. Needham made room for him beside her on the rustic bench. She looked at him a little shyly, but with the ecstatic admiration, also, of one who would say: "This is the man we're giving our daughter to!"

But where was Louise? Her mother had scarcely seen her since the return from Frankfort. How strangely she was behaving.

"I believe she's lying down," said Barry, his tone warm with shielding tenderness and apology. "She got up so early to meet the boat. It was wonderful of her!"

The two young champions were giving Aunt Marjie a fuller account of the tennis combat. They still held the racquet between them. Both were flushed, keen-eyed, ridiculously happy. How soon he had recovered! Louise, up at her window, remembered Leslie's mood at an earlier hour. At dawn she might have had him. Now it was too late. "Oh, the injustice of it!" she cried, her hands crushing her breast. But as she looked down into his glowing face, she realized a swift sense of humiliation. "He didn't care after all," she told herself.

Hilda and Leslie evinced great willingness to convey the luncheon invitation to Barrett O'Donnell. Leslie, of course, volunteered to go, and Hilda, of course, said she simply would go too. So off they raced, still holding the tennis racquet between them.

Louise watched them go. In her hand was the book she had bought in Frankfort. Suddenly, under stress of very violent emotion, she pressed it against her cheek.

Barry watched them out of sight. He was thinking of Louise. She had not yet kissed him. In his pocket was a little box, and inside the little box was a ring.

Marjory also watched them go. She sighed even as she smiled: "Another young thing, just starting out—boy-crazy. So futile." But she smiled more radiantly in spite of herself, and the other valuation would slip in: "So sweet!"

The portiÈres between the dining room and the living room at Beachcrest are carefully drawn. The whole company is assembled, waiting. It is one o'clock, the vitriolic Dutch timepiece on the mantel having just snapped out the hungry truth.

The clock, with its quenchless petulance and spite, is lord of the mantel. And what an entourage of vessels! Close up against it huddles a bottle of peroxide. Then, although disposed in some semblance of neatness and order, one discovers a fish stringer, an old pipe, several empty cigar boxes, heaps of old letters, a book opened and turned down, a number of rumpled handkerchiefs, some camera films, a bottle of red ink. There are two odd candlesticks, without any candles, a metal dish containing a vast miscellany of pins, collar buttons, rubber bands, and who knows what? Lo, on the other side of the clock loiter a curious pebble, a laundry list, a box of candy, some loose change and a little paper money, a pocket flash which no longer works, matches in a broken crockery receiver, perfumes, sandpaper, a writing tablet and some yellowing envelopes. And one glimpses, emerging from chaos, the frayed handle of a whisk broom which has seen immeasurably better days. Some woven grass baskets, too. Anything else? Yes, yonder is a box of tacks, and beside it a little pile of the Rev. Needham's socks, nicely darned. Also, strewn here and there, are various rail and steamship timetables, most of which bear the dates of seasons long gone by. An immortal miscellany! Oh, and one must not miss that curious creature squatting in a dim corner and peering ever alertly around with his little beady eyes: yes, a sad and much dilapidated Teddy Bear.

One o'clock!

There is a tendency on the part of every pair of eyes—even those of the Rev. Needham, or perhaps especially those—to direct from time to time a wholly unconscious glance of hope mingled with mild anxiety toward the tantalizing green portiÈres, beyond which Eliza moves about with maddening deliberateness.

One o'clock, snapping like a dry forest twig under the tread of some wild creature. Then an angry tick-tock, tick-tock. On and on and on, forever.

Out in the kitchen Eliza was prodding the kettle of soup. She was dreamily thinking of the porter at the hotel in Beulah. Would he get over this evening? Oh, love is so wonderful! Eliza was quite gauche and unlettered; yet love, for her, was a thing which could rouse brilliant orgies of the imagination. Love, even for her, was something which transcended all the ineffable promised glories of Heaven itself. Yes, it was better than the streets of pearl and the gates of amethyst—or was it the gates of pearl and the streets of gold?

When the soup was ready she served it, then thrust asunder the portiÈres. "Lunch is served, ma'am," she announced, with a degree of majesty which would simply have terrorized the Beulah porter.

They responded promptly—not exactly crowding ahead of each other, but stepping along with irreproachable briskness. Appetites beside the sea are like munition factories in wartime.

There was a cheerful rattle of chairs and much scraping of feet under the table. Then a solemn silence, while the minister prayed. The Rev. Needham, of course, sat at the head of the table. Mrs. Needham sat opposite him at the foot. To the minister's right was Miss Whitcom, who found herself delightfully sandwiched in between a knight of the church and a knight of the grip. Needless to say, the latter was Mr. O'Donnell, looking his very nicest and smelling of soap like the Brushwood Boy. Next came Hilda, who flashed quite dazzling smiles across at her sister, smiles more subdued and shy at Mr. Barry. There was a flurry of conversation at first, while the paper napkins were being opened up and disposed where they would afford the most protection—not a great deal, it is to be feared, at best. And then—well, then there was almost no talk at all until after the soup. As they say in theatre programs: "The curtain will be lowered one minute to denote a lapse of time."

Miss Whitcom and Mr. O'Donnell had employed quite as little formality in their meeting as the latter had prophesied during the trip up to Beulah. She hadn't, as a matter of fact, referred to the wall paper in the throne room of the Queen's palace. Instead she had remarked: "You know, it's curious. I was just dropping you a note. Yes. I wanted, for one thing, to express my regret over the unlikelihood of our seeing each other this trip, since you see I'm going right back. Jolly you should have happened along like this—and a postage stamp saved into the bargain!" While he, swallowing his disappointment over the prospect of her immediate return to Tahulamaji, had replied in like spirit: "How fortunate—about the stamp, I mean. It has been a long while, hasn't it?"

And now they were sitting side by side at the table, rather monopolizing the conversation—having a beautiful time, yet never quite descending from that characteristic, mutually assumed tone of banter.

"I suppose you're still travelling, Mr. O'Donnell?"

"Still travelling, Miss Whitcom."

"Same firm?"

"Same firm."

It had been the same firm almost as far back as memory went. It always would be the same firm. There was little of change and perhaps nothing at all of adventure in this destiny. But there was a rather substantial balance in the bank, which, after all, is a kind of adventure, too.

"Babbit & Babbit," she mused.

"Members of the O. A. of C."

"True. I'm afraid I'd forgotten the letters at the end."

He nibbled at his celery. "And you, Miss Whitcom?"

"Still mostly travelling, Mr. O'Donnell."

"Same firm?"

"Oh, dear no! There the interesting parallel must cease. One has to be progressive, you know. One must keep abreast of the times." She gave her brother-in-law a dreadful, broad wink. "What was I doing last?"

O'Donnell grinned. "I believe—wasn't it piloting tourists through Europe?"

"Do you mean to tell me it's been as long as that since I've seen you?"

"As I recollect it—something of the sort."

"Yes, yes. So it was. But that was before the war. You knew, of course, that I'd gone to Tahulamaji."

"You answered several of my letters," he reminded her sweetly.

"Ah, of course I did. And you should have felt highly flattered, for I may say I made no point of keeping up any sort of correspondence at all down there."

"I should say not!" put in Mrs. Needham, laughing.

"Oh, yes. I was flattered—flattered even if they were only postcards. But I haven't yet got it straight what you were doing in Tahulamaji. Was it the same sort of thing there?"

"What! Piloting tourists?" She had a hearty laugh. Her brother-in-law started a little. One of Marjory's hearty laughs was always like an unexpected slap on the back.

"You mean there aren't any sights to show?" asked O'Donnell meekly. "I don't even know where Tahulamaji is, and I haven't the faintest idea what it's like."

"Oh," she laughed, "there are plenty of sights. It's ever so much better than Europe!"

"Then why not pilot?"

"There aren't any tourists."

"Not any at all?"

"None, at least, who require piloting. You see, we haven't been sufficiently exploited yet. For some reason we've escaped so far, though I expect any day to hear that we've been discovered. Those who come are bent on plain, stern business. Most of them get away again the next day. Those who don't get off the next day, or at most the day after that, you may depend upon it have come to stay—like me."

"So you are quite determined to go back again."

"Quite. Why not?"

They gazed quietly at each other a moment, while the minister began dispensing dried-beef-in-cream-on-toast—a special Beachcrest dish; French-fried potatoes. Mrs. Needham watched with quaking heart until it was patent there would be enough to go round. Then she began pouring the tea.

There was always, at any rate, plenty of tea. But Miss Whitcom nearly occasioned a panic by asking for lemon. The rest took cream, if for no better reason than that it was right there on the table. The demand had been, like everything Miss Whitcom did, unpremeditated, and was immediately withdrawn. She tossed her head and laughed. Wasn't it absurd to ask for lemon in the wilderness? But Anna Needham rose to the occasion. It was a crisis.

She tinkled the bell in a breathless yet resolute way; she so wanted to impress her sister as being a competent housekeeper. It amounted almost to a passion. Perhaps living so long with Alfred had rather tended to weaken belief in her own abilities.

Eliza was gone a good while. But she triumphantly returned with the lemon. Mr. O'Donnell looked at Miss Whitcom's tea a little wistfully. He had already taken cream. Possibly he preferred lemon too. But it requires real genius to ask for what one doesn't see before one in this law-of-least-resistance world.

This slight tension removed, the Rev. Needham resumed a quiet conversation with Barry about the affairs in the West. Everything, it seemed, was going finely. It began to look as though they might all grow positively rich off the desert! And it was owing to Barry—entirely to him. Well, Barry was a fine young man—so completely satisfactory. If the Needhams had had a son, Alfred would have wished him to be like Barry. Sure, patient, untiring, generous—generous to a fault, yet with such solid faculties for business! And now, here he was, about to step right into the family. It was too good to be true. Yes, much too good. The Rev. Needham swelled with pride and beamed with affection. He beamed on Barry, and never noted how his daughter sat there beside this paragon, eating little, talking almost not at all....

Hilda was another member of the party who talked little. Her deportment, however, was quite different. Her cheeks were highly coloured, and her eyes sparkled. Aunt Marjie, who seemed somehow never too engrossed in anything to give good heed to everything else, looked curiously from Hilda to Louise, to Barry, from Barry on to her brother-in-law. Then she looked at Hilda again, recalling Leslie, and smiled. She looked at Louise again, also, then at Barry, and her expression grew more serious. She looked at Louise a third time, still with Leslie in the back of her mind, and thought of the forgotten stove burners....

Why was it, she asked herself, that men had to make such baffling differences in women's lives?

6

After luncheon the company broke up. The Rev. Needham announced, just a little stiffly (for he felt the upsetting gaze of his sister-in-law) that it was customary at Beachcrest to spend a quiet hour, at this point of the day's span, napping. He wanted to create an easy home atmosphere, and the most effective way seemed to be to impress outsiders with the fact that everything was really running along just as though none but the immediate family was present.

Miss Whitcom yawned at once. "Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "I'm horribly sleepy. Never would have dreamed what was the matter with me, Alfred, if you hadn't come to the rescue. I am grateful!"

And then—and then the Rev. Needham did a tremendous, a revolutionary, a gigantic and unforgettable thing. He simply overwhelmed himself and everybody else by making an almost low bow!

Mrs. Needham uttered a tiny gasp—she really couldn't help it. What had gotten into Alfred? Then she laughed, a little too shrilly, as by way of heralding to all the Point the glorious, glad tidings that there was, at last, a genuine, wholesome, jolly home atmosphere established.

Yes, the bow was inspired. There was no other way of looking at it. The bow was an inspired bow.

And what had come over the Rev. Needham was this: He had suddenly, in a sort of buoyant flare, determined that Marjory's manner would have to be played up to! It was simply ridiculous—scandalous—to allow himself to be disturbed and even secretly harassed by his wife's own sister. Yes, it was little short of a scandal! And now, rather tardily, it may be admitted, the Rev. Needham had attained salvation. It was simply to make a low bow. How clever—and how exquisitely subtle! He laughed aloud with the rest. His feet were squarely on the ground, after all. Of course they were. And splendidly, magnificently he defied the prickly feeling to come again into his heels!

The Rev. Needham was, in truth, privately so captivated with this curious and unforeseen twist in his fortunes that he forgot all about his own customary fatigue: forgot that this was the hour of quiet at Beachcrest—rendered so by immemorial precedent. He swaggered a little, without, of course, quite losing the ministerial poise; and spoke up, as his wife afterward phrased it, "real brisk and hearty." Cigars were passed to Barry and O'Donnell. The Rev. Needham bit into one himself. It is altogether possible he might, under the influence of this new heroic emotion, have distributed cigarettes, had there been anything so devilish on the premises.

As the box went blithely back on to the mantel, Miss Whitcom, who was greatly enjoying what she perfectly fathomed, perceived an irresistible obligation to suggest that he had gone only half way around. The Rev. Needham looked perhaps just a shade startled. Could he bow again? And if not, how else was her manner to be played up to? Had he already struck a snag? Obviously it would be going a little too far to take her at her word and offer her a cigar.

"One wants to be sociable, you know," she said, her eyes sparkling.

"I know of a lady poet in the East who smokes cigars," volunteered O'Donnell.

He spoke quite easily, as though for Miss Whitcom's special benefit, and to convey the impression that he had quite grown accustomed or reconciled to such dainty feminine indulgence. Indeed, he looked at her with shy sprightliness.

"Oh, yes," she replied, "and, if you remember, a lady novelist started the custom."

He didn't remember, but he chuckled. And she went on: "As a matter of fact, and just amongst ourselves, why shouldn't women smoke if they want to? And why shouldn't they want to? Isn't it perfectly natural they should? I'm not, strictly speaking, championing the habit, for it's expensive and rather silly. But if half the human race wants to turn itself into portable smoke stacks, then by all means let the other half follow suit. So you see, Alfred, you'd really better let me have one. For you hear for yourself, Mr. O'Donnell knows of a poet who smokes. Of course," she admitted, "I'm not a poet."

But O'Donnell was certainly in a romantic mood today. He wouldn't let her admission stand. "Yes, you are," he began, with an odd impulsiveness, adding in a quieter though quite as fervent tone: "—a kind of poet...."

They eyed each other steadily a moment, as they had done once or twice before, that day. It was surely another O'Donnell than the O'Donnell of long ago—the O'Donnell, for instance, who had eased up at the finish and let her win the race. Was she, also, in a way, another Marjory? A Marjory, after all, rather less insistent upon, or who had grown just a tiny bit weary of, doing things simply to be independent—simply for the joy of doing them gloriously and daringly alone?

When the gentlemen had repaired to the porch to smoke and to discuss, as is the custom at such times, matters too deep to be grasped by the feminine intellect, Miss Whitcom succeeded in confronting Louise.

"Now," she said, with a warm, inviting firmness which brought a flash of tears to the girl's eyes.

She laid an arm around Louise's shoulders, and they stood thus together a few moments in the middle of the cottage living room. Could the Rev. Needham have looked in upon this affecting picture, and could those small eager ears of his have partaken of the subsequent talk which passed between them, the cigar of confidence and authority would have dropped from his fingers, its brave spark dimmed forever. Yes, he would have forgotten completely the brilliant bow which had seemed to smooth away all of life's snarls by giving him, marvellously, in an instant, a positive, almost Nietzschean philosophy. But for the present he was safe.

"How could things have gone so far without your realizing?"

"I don't know."

"But you must know how you feel toward him!" Louise shook her head miserably. "I thought I cared.... Perhaps I still do."

"But aren't you sure?"

"I—I don't believe I know. I don't seem sure of anything."

"But, my dear child—"

"I thought I was sure."

"And all those letters—"

"Yes, yes," cried Louise tensely. "You see it was all letters, Aunt Marjie. And when I came suddenly to see him again...."

"Oh, come, child, we don't fall in love with men's hats and the twist of their profiles. You must still love whatever it was you loved all those long months you were apart. Isn't it reasonable?"

"I—I...." Oh, what was the use of asking her to be reasonable? What has a heart full of ghosts to do with reason? And Leslie....

She felt like crying. She began looking upon herself as almost a person who has been somehow wronged. Her emotion grew thicker. She drew shyly away.

Aunt Marjie, as she let her go from her, realizing that words just now would get them nowhere, was thinking that in the midst of a universe full of souls and wheeling planets, one poor heartache was like a grain of dust. Well, perhaps she was a kind of poet. But in a moment the impersonal millions, both of souls and of stars, vanished away, and this girl's problem ascended to a position of tremendous importance, if not quite of majesty.

At length, after he had smoked his cigar, the Rev. Needham did retire to the couch of his wonted siesta, leaving the household, as he thought, pleasantly and profitably disposed.

Of course, the fact that the host proposed to take a nap did not mean that all the others had to follow suit. It was just part of the device for making every one feel that nothing was being upset because of "company." It did not mean that O'Donnell, for instance, would have to subject himself to the rather embarrassing alternative of curling up on the short living room sofa. Miss Whitcom and Mr. O'Donnell happily repaired to the rustic bower. Hilda skipped off singing into the woods. Mrs. Needham—well, Mrs. Needham was still in the kitchen with Eliza. The latter was stolidly eating her luncheon of left-overs on the very table to which Louise and Leslie had sat down at dawn. Mrs. Needham stood solemnly before Eliza as she ate, her hands on her hips, her face growing flushed again, talking endlessly—about dinner. Louise and Lynndal Barry were on the porch. Lovers were so brazen, nowadays, they didn't mind at all if the partitions between their embraces and the outside world were mere mosquito gauze. The Rev. Needham, slyly recognizing this great truth, chuckled over it, in his new mood of sublime assurance, all the way upstairs. Each step cracked, and all the way up he was telling himself contentedly: "A fine young man—one of God's own noblemen!" And as gentle slumber wafted his soul into a peace which, especially on a full stomach, so often passeth understanding, he whispered dreamily: "Coming right into the family...."

Thank God the Western interests were forever safeguarded!

But meanwhile, out on the porch, the situation grew from moment to moment more poignant.

Louise seemed suddenly to be sparring for time. She had decided—as well as her giddy little brain was capable, just now, of deciding anything at all—that the whole crux of the matter was her disappointment over the way Lynndal had turned out.... But what Aunt Marjie had said about not loving his hat and the twist of his profile anyhow had rather upset her again. Once she almost flung herself into his arms with a great, comfortable, forgiving, beseeching, surrendering cry. What a haven his arms might seem! But something in her heart, she imagined, warned her: "You cannot yet! Dare you? Remember—it would be irrevocable!"

Time, time! There was obviously an issue to be faced. But with all the vital eloquence of desperation Louise reasoned that bitterness deferred might somehow lose a degree of its sting. Feeble logic, and logic not very profound; but she was scarcely in a frame of mind to evolve, at the present moment, any logic more substantial. Her problem was delicate, tenuous, like the sheen on the wings of a butterfly. Her tragedy was a thing of shades and of shadows—a thing wellnigh ungraspable. But it was none the less real. Oh, it was very real to her! In an orgy of the maÑana spirit she abandoned herself to eventualities as they should develop. Her fate—whatever it was going to prove—would rush on and overtake her; she would not go out to meet it half way. Dared not.

"I'm afraid you'll think me not very cordial," she said desperately, "but I have a headache, Lynndal, and I'm going to ask if you'd mind if I went up to my room for a little while...."

"Oh," he cried, in real and honest distress, "I'm so sorry! Why didn't you tell me before? Perhaps the smoke has been annoying you?"

"Oh, it's nothing," she answered, smiling in the wan way common to invalids for whom the end is in sight. "These headaches come on, quite suddenly sometimes. If I lie down for an hour, it will be gone, I think."

"I'm sorry, dear," he repeated, touching her elbow as she turned to leave him. The contact emboldened him and he slipped an arm round her waist and bent over her a little as he walked with her toward the door. "You shouldn't have tried to meet me this morning, dear. It was too much."

"I wanted to," she murmured huskily.

"Will you come out again later?" he pleaded, content, under the circumstances, that she should leave him now.

Louise nodded and passed into the cottage.

"Couldn't we take a little walk on the beach later, if your head is better? Later on, when the sun isn't quite so hot?"

She turned and murmured: "Yes." There was another impulse to throw herself into his arms; she longed to go to him and cry against his heart. But at the same moment she remembered Leslie—how close he had held her in the morning, how they had kissed.... The impulse was stifled.

When she was gone from him, Barry sat down again on the porch to finish his cigar. It was the cigar which the Rev. Needham had given him after luncheon. It was a good cigar, for the Rev. Needham knew what was what, despite his intense holiness.

Barry was one of those rare individuals who have never really loved before. Curiously, the insatiable god Eros had passed him largely by till now. But ah—the tardy fevers! They may be more virulent than those of timelier visitation.... His eye swept the curve of the white beach, ablaze with the mid-day sun. Later they would be strolling there together, he and she. He would be walking out there beside this dear girl whose love had thrilled to the dull roots of his bachelordom. And then he would tell her how he adored her; would open the little box and slip the ring on her finger....

It was so wonderful, after dwelling in the desert all his life!

7

She really did have a very little headache; though this was the least of her troubles.

There sounded a whistle outside. In the midst of her wretchedness, Louise lifted her head and listened. Low and sustained, it had saluted her ear when dawn's pink flush was in the sky; but now it seemed far more eager; it seemed to glint through the sunshine.

Springing to her window, Louise crouched there. The historical novel lay on the sill, where she had left it. Her fingers closed tensely about it, although she did not at first realize what it was she was clutching. Leslie was outside. She could see him coming on through the forest, and caught her breath in a little hysterical gasp of joy. Leslie! She couldn't let him go! She loved him! She had never, she felt, loved anybody as she loved Leslie. Oh, the injustice of it! That he must be denied her, though it was he she loved the best! But there must be a way. Somehow, somehow she must contrive.... She must contrive, whatever it might cost, to keep him.... But she faltered. Wasn't it too late?

His hands were in his pockets; his face was richly animated; his eyes were full of light. Leslie was almost handsome—ah, strangely more beautiful now than when she had wanted to be his friend. His brightness dazzled her; and she looked out at him through her perplexed tears.

He had held her for a moment in his arms as they stood, so deeply enthralled, on that dappled forest road. Would he ever hold her in his arms again?

"Leslie!" she murmured.

He halted, looking quickly about.

"I'm here," she continued, in the same unhappy tone, "—up here!" They were the very words Lynndal had used when he stood above her on the deck of the steamer.

And it was plain, too painfully plain, Leslie had not been searching her window. At first he appeared a little embarrassed. An indefinite numbness closed about her heart. It seemed, all at once, as though retrospect embodied no mutual past for these two. Intimate strangers! For all at once Leslie seemed as essentially unknown and aloof from her destiny as Lynndal had seemed during that first curious, bewildering moment when his steamer was coming in. Leslie—merely a lad passing by outside, under her window. And she blushed at the thought of having dared to speak to him....

"Do you know where Hilda is?" he enquired, trying to throw a great deal of carelessness into both tone and posture.

Louise miserably shook her head.

"I was to meet her," Leslie explained simply. And, smiling, he turned with abruptness and began strolling off. He could be cool enough when it pleased him.

"Leslie!" she cried out, though discreetly. For she dared not let Lynndal hear her. In volume her voice by no means matched its almost terrible intensity.

The tone arrested him. "What?" And he stopped and looked bluntly back at the window.

"Wait, Leslie, I think I know where Hilda is."

"Where?"

"Wait just a minute. I'm coming down. Will you come around to the back door?"

He nodded, too indifferent to voice the curiosity he might normally be expected to feel over her desire to emerge from the back rather than from the front door of the cottage.

As she flew, a sudden determination swayed her. Both men, she argued, were strangers again. She must win Leslie back!

When she stole out to him a moment later, he was loitering casually in the vicinity of a little shed where driftwood was kept. The Rev. Needham always made a point of talking about the rare quality of surf-wood blazes. The Rev. Needham had constructed this shed also with his own hands, just as he had constructed the remarkable rustic bench; only the shed had taken another summer, of course. This shed was really a Beachcrest institution; so was likewise the perennial lugging up of driftwood for storage therein recognized to be an almost religious adjunct of Point life. There was an informal rule—of ancient standing, playfully enough conceived, and of course playfully laid down—that no one should come in from the beach without at least one piece of driftwood. Much preferably, of course, a respectable, staggering armful. The rule was wholly playful; and yet, should several days pass with no contribution at all to the shed, Mrs. Needham and the girls would be troubled, and perhaps even a trifle frightened, to behold the minister himself tottering in with a colossal load. He would cast reproachful glances their way. And it would sometimes be a long while before he regained any sort of serenity. Yet it was a favourite maxim with the Rev. Needham that they came up here to the cottage for sheer relaxation and amusement.

Leslie had selected from the shed a smooth splinter, once part of a ship's spar. He had taken out his knife and was busy whittling. And he kept at this self-imposed task quite doggedly, seeming to find in it a certain sanctuary. His eyes scrupulously followed the slashings of the blade. Thus they avoided hers—for the most part without too deliberately seeming to do so. Louise was herself dimly grateful for the distraction.

"What do you think I found in Frankfort this morning?" she demanded, trying to smile with something of the old bewitchment. The historical novel was clasped behind her. She had certainly not meant to show it to him; yet here it was.

"I give up," he replied, accentuating the final word with a particularly telling stroke on the spar splinter.

Then she drew the book slowly round into sight and half extended it, as though it were an offering that might effect a return, somehow, to that golden relationship which Lynndal's coming had broken off.

"A book?" He went on whittling.

"You haven't even read the title!" she cried, half pleadingly.

"Something new?"

"Why, Les...."

Glancing back at the book, he merely muttered: "Oh."

"You remember you were telling me about it. I happened to see it in a window." She spoke a little hysterically, and began wishing she had not come down. "Only think—in a town like Frankfort, of all places! I was so surprised that I walked right in and bought it! I—I expect to enjoy it very much," she ended miserably.

Leslie whittled, still stubbornly taciturn. If he would ask about Lynndal—if he would only show some kind of emotion: anything would be better than this awful silence. Finally, since he thus forced her hand, Louise reminded him that she had previously intimated a knowledge of her sister's whereabouts.

"Do you know where she is?" he looked at her with a furtive flash of interest.

"I think she's gone to the tree-house."

"Alone?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Long ago?"

"No, not so very long."

Leslie began humming, and shifted restlessly.

"I think you'd find her there, Les, if you wanted to find her. But if...." She left it dumbly in the air.

Still the boy hummed, his eyes never leaving the spar.

"Are you two going for a hike, or something?"

He stirred and looked up quickly at a little red squirrel chattering on a bough above them. "We're going to cut sticks for the roast tonight."

"Is there to be a roast?"

"The mid-summer Assembly Roast," he explained, a little pointedly. There seemed no reason for one's forgetting so important an event as the Assembly Roast.

"Oh, yes," she replied. "I'd forgotten all about it, for the moment. Will it be over beyond the lighthouse?"

"Yes, clear around the Point."

"Sticks, you mean, for marshmallows?" How obvious it all sounded!

"Marshmallows and wienies," he told her. "There will have to be at least three dozen sticks, so I guess I'd better...."

The little squirrel chattered brazenly on above them. A locust was shrilling somewhere across the dazzling sand. She told herself she had given him every chance.

"You mustn't let me keep you, Les."

"Oh, that's all right."

She had given him every chance. He did not care, after all. She had been deceived in him. Oh, the injustice of it all!

"I must go find Mr. Barry," she said. "He'll wonder what's become of me!" And she forced a brief little laugh. "It will be lots of fun. I'd forgotten all about the mid-summer roast! I'll—we'll see you there...."

"Yes," he answered.

Their eyes suddenly met. She flushed, and her throat ached. He turned slowly away.

"Good-bye, Les."

"Good-bye," he answered.

Louise reËntered the cottage by the back door. Eliza was singing over her work at the sink. And Leslie, smiling in a kind of baffling way, strolled off, still whittling the broken spar.

And Eros skipped beside him. Eros knew well enough where the tree-house was. He didn't have to be shown, for as a matter of fact he had helped construct it, up in the crotch of a giant oak: had subsequently climbed nimbly to the tiny empire of its seclusion in the interest of many a summer twain. Yes, Eros knew the way quite well. However, for the sheer sake of companionship, he chose to skip along by the side of a lad who was whittling a broken spar and smiling in a kind of baffling way.

8

"The Queen of Tahulamaji," admitted Miss Whitcom, "was really a most amazing creature."

"I should think it likely."

They were sitting together on the rustic bench. At first he had been on the rustic bench alone. She had flung herself in the hammock. But the interest of their talk had brought her first to a sitting posture, then to a standing posture, and finally to a rustic bench posture.

"Ah, but you mustn't think just because she was amazing that she wasn't also perfectly human—sometimes almost desperately so, O'Donnell!"

"Yes, I suppose so. I can somehow picture her—especially the desperate times."

"Well, of course she did have her eccentricities. For instance, her temper. To the last it remained most alarmingly and deliciously undependable."

"To the last?"

"Ah, yes—poor Tessie!"

"Tessie?"

"I always called her that. It wasn't strictly Tahulamajian, but she adored the name."

"So the Queen is dead?"

"Yes, Queen Tess died early in the spring. She was terribly old, but game right up to the last minute. You never saw such gameness. The funeral was immensely impressive."

"Whole populace turned out, of course?"

"Rather. Ostracism threatened against any who stayed away without a valid excuse! And they carried her along, all dressed up in her robes of state, and even with a crown on. Poor, dear Tessie! How often she used to say to me in private, when the mats were all snug over the doors: 'You know there are times,' she'd say, 'when I have my doubts about all this sovereign divinity business. It's down in the state books that I'm one of the direct line, descended from Mentise-huhu and the gods of the Sea Foam. But there are times when I have my doubts,' she used to say. 'There are times when I seem to be just Tessie, and between you and me, I'm coming to suspect that there never were any gods of the Sea Foam at all!'"

O'Donnell smiled at her look of momentary abstraction. What a life Marjory's had been—what a life! Here he found her, at last, in the heart of a religious colony. But at one time she had sold bonds in Wall Street; she had been an agent for a Pacific steamship line; she had been a political organizer in the North-west; and she had once served as associate editor of a newspaper. Yes, she had always struck O'Donnell—himself so simple and homely of nature—as most violently revolutionary. He remembered how, in the early days, she used to march in suffrage parades. She had taken up Socialism and dropped it; had smoked; and he distinctly recalled her having used, in her time, quite sporty language. Once she had had something to do with the races, and had worn a derby. And yet....

"Well," he mused, "after all it's the same Marjory."

"You think so?" She was amused.

"Yes, the same old Marjory. I wonder if there ever was a time when you weren't 'advanced.'"

"You call me advanced? My dear fellow, I must refer you—"

"I know, I know," he protested. "You forget I've come to know them all. Perhaps," he added slyly, "I'm growing just a little advanced myself!"

"You?"

"Can you imagine?"

"Oh, well—"

"In my old age—fancy that!"

"True, I'd forgotten the poet."

"Well," he admitted, "one lives and learns."

"We all do that, you know."

"Oh, yes."

"Well, but do you mean we've nothing left to quarrel about? Has it really come to such a pass?"

"I do." He spoke almost solemnly. It was a little like the "I do" of the marriage rite.

"Barrett! Good heavens! What's the world coming to?"

"I don't know," he replied naÏvely. "I only know there are no grounds left. I've capitulated, you see, at every point."

"Tut, tut!"

"Every point!" he insisted. No compromise would do. It might amaze her, might snatch the ground from under her feet; he would admit, at last, no compromise.

She grew whimsical, then a new earnestness creeping into her voice: "You know," she said, "I've come to suspect some of this talk of being 'advanced.' I mean"—for she felt his enquiring gaze—"I've come at length to suspect that in just going ahead.... Barrett, for heaven's sake help me out!" For once in her life—and it was surely a portentous symptom—Miss Whitcom was groping.

"Well," she went on at last, still speaking earnestly, if fumblingly, "I'm not sure I can express at all what I feel. It's what I've been coming to feel more and more—no doubt a gradual development up out of the cocksure attitude of one's—Barrett, I've begun using a dreadful and ruthless word—one's immaturity ...!" She tossed her head. "It doesn't mean I don't still believe in all the fine, big movements. You know"—her voice for a moment grew almost tender—"I always looked upon myself as one of the first of the 'new' women. I wasn't going at things blindly. I was always following an ideal, Barrett, even when the things I did seemed most wild and inexplicable. But as I look back I seem to have been following strange roads in an effort to reach it! How strange! And now—yes, only fancy, as you say: in one's old age!—I'm afraid I see in a way that 'progress' can be overdone. That is, I've come to see that progress is something you can't force. Yet there have to be pioneers in the world, don't there, Barrett? People who are reckless, and pay the price, and aren't afraid of going too far.... Yes, I realize that, as I've always realized it. But oh, Barrett, Barrett—I'm afraid I'm getting to be very, very selfish. I've been a pioneer so long, and after all I don't quite want to be a pioneer to the very end of my days. I—I somehow feel I want to stop being one before—oh, Barrett, before it's quite too late ...!"

"I think," said O'Donnell slowly, his voice just a little shaken, "if the time has come for plain speaking like this, you'd better let me hold your hand. Do you mind?"

"Listen to him!" she said, in one of her richest tones of banter.

All the same, she let him have it.

While these important events were proceeding, Louise, who had not gone to find Mr. Barry, after all, but who had returned to her room instead, slept a little. She was unused to such early rising, and she had been through a great deal since dawn.

She slept, and had a dream. She dreamed that she and Leslie were to be married. She seemed to be very much excited, and to be surrounded by a crowd of indefinite persons, some of them friends she now possessed, and some of them friends she had known in her early girlhood. And all the while she was happily arguing: "I know I'm a little bit older, but we love each other so much that just a mere couple of years don't count."

Waking with a start to problems more sinister than merely that involving a conventional disagreement of ages, Louise perceived that it had drawn to the golden midst of afternoon. Lynndal was waiting for her. As the curious, almost hypnotic quality of the dream wore off, she responded to another flash of new purpose. The dream still haunted and oppressed her; at first it had made her sad; but as it faded into a renewed appreciation of that humiliating conversation beside the driftwood shed, a mood of rebellion came upon her.

She tossed her head haughtily: Leslie should be allowed to make no further difference to her. She would thrust him entirely out of her life. He ought never really to have entered it. No, she shouldn't have given herself to Leslie, even temporarily. It had produced an unpleasant situation, and afforded him an opportunity now to fling all her kindness back in her face. He had, indeed, treated her shamefully—not at all as he had treated her earlier in the day. At dawn.... But she murmured angrily: "This is the return one gets for trying to be nice to a man!"

The new mood inclined her, in a subtle way, toward Lynndal—as abruptly as it had hardened her heart against Leslie. The emotion of the moment illuminated the former in an almost rosy manner. She began thinking of Lynndal warmly and romantically—as she had thought of him during those long months when they were far apart. Her attitude again became the attitude she had maintained throughout the period of their increasingly affectionate correspondence. And the sense of his nearness seemed no longer to distract or terrify her. Excitement stirred in her breast. It leapt to her eyes and trembled upon her lips. She had never loved Lynndal so almost tempestuously. Strong emotion of this sort always had a beautifying effect upon Miss Needham. Her face glowed as she encouraged the rekindling passion. She fanned the flame of her love for Lynndal, and at the same time a soft sense of steadfastness and assurance snuffed out the dismal quandary which had wracked and tortured her soul from the moment she saw him up on the deck of the steamer. Some mad whim, she argued feverishly, had filled her with a panic of indecision and dread; but that was gone now. She whipped the purging passion into new and fantastic fervour. Her laugh had a touch of wildness in it. Even Richard had never moved her like this!

Suddenly, a little chill seized her heart. What if already it were too late? What if, by her coldness and aloofness, she had already created in Lynndal's heart a havoc which could not be rescinded? Was it not wholly conceivable that she had killed his love for her? Had she not shown herself perverse, cruel, and irredeemably fickle? Perhaps now the tables would be turned, and he would draw away from her, even as she had shrunk from him. The thought had a maddening influence: she felt momentarily faint and distracted. Then a new energy of determination blazed in her eyes. It must not be too late. She must win him back, however far her wretched conduct may have driven him.

Louise dressed with elaborate care, giving heed to every eloquent detail of her toilette. She tore off the brooch Richard had given her and flung it into her jewel box with a gesture of gay scorn. No more toying and trifling! She was ready now to give herself completely and for all time—the more ready because of that uneasy little tremor of doubt lest she had killed his love. Yes, it was a wonderful moment—a moment so packed with the frenzy of giving that there remained no other thought at all in her mind. She lived for the moment alone. She made herself radiant for Lynndal, the emotion which swayed her growing more and more riotous. She surrendered herself to it. He was waiting for her. And she went down to him hopefully, wistfully, yet withal triumphantly.

"Which way?" asked Lynndal as they descended the short bluff and reached the hard, surf-packed shore.

"I don't care," she laughed up at him. "Shall we go this way?"

It didn't matter to Barry. All ways were equal to him, since he was really and truly in love and spent no great amount of attention upon the scenery. He looked at her adoringly. His quiet eyes were dazzled.

They strolled along close beside the little waves. It was rather a picture. She was charmingly gowned, and carried a small plum parasol.

"Let me take your coat, dear," he suggested.

She gave him the light silk wrap, and he carried it on his arm, crooked almost pathetically for the purpose.

"I don't wonder you like it up here," he said, looking off over the sparkling water. "If we had this in the centre of the desert...."

"I suppose it would make a difference." All at once she pictured the desert. She pictured herself living in the midst of the desert with Lynndal.

Then the dry-farming expert went on to explain, at some length, just what would happen were this sea to be transported to the parched heart of Arizona. The words began falling a little dully on her ears. She was vaguely troubled. But she could not tell just why it should be so.

There was a silence. They walked along slowly side by side. A wave of happiness stole upon the man; his hand, encountering hers, closed over it tenderly.

She caught her breath a little. "Lynndal," she cautioned, "you mustn't...."

But he clung to her hand. He had come so far! And again she seemed to hear those terrible words booming in her ears: "You are mine, all mine!"

Slowly his arm crept round her waist. There was nothing overwhelming about the action: Barry was not an overwhelming man, and had not an overwhelming way with him. His was, rather, a kind of gentle, furtive passion, which displayed itself in a very slight trembling, an occasional queer huskiness of voice.

All at once Louise grew alarmed. It seemed to her that a terrible and inevitable moment had come. She wasn't entirely prepared. She must have more time ...!

"Please take your arm away, Lynndal," she said tensely.

"But why, dear?"

"Please! The cottagers...."

"But Louise, dear, there isn't a cottage in sight." They had, indeed, proceeded by this time well around the Point. "There's no one to see, and besides...."

She glanced up shyly. His face was kind. His eyes were pleading and full of quiet reassurance. Did he suspect a little the turmoil within her? There was no reason why his arm shouldn't be about her; yet her mind went on groping. It was like being in a thick wood. Could she give herself to him entirely? Could she give herself to anyone entirely?

"Louise, I love you," he murmured, bending down so that his lips were close to her cheek.

She trembled. But she told herself that he had come to her out of the desert; that he was her lover; and that she must give herself to him without any more restraint. Why had she led him on and on if she didn't intend to give herself fully at last?

"Louise, dearest.... Louise!"

"Yes, Lynndal...."

"I love you so much!"

The old panic surged again, but she fought it back. "For ever and ever—nobody but me...." Yet there were so many others.... Chaos again enveloped the girl.

"Won't you kiss me?"

His arms were adoringly about her. His lips came close to hers. It was time, now, to give herself. She raised her lips.

They kissed.

But a great cry was in her heart: "I can't!" It was almost as though he had heard it, for he let her slip way; and she stood there before him, her head lowered, her hands desperately covering her face.

Louise thought blindly of Richard—what their first kiss had been like ...! And then she remembered how, afterward, she had longed for death. With what completeness the situation now was reversed! Now she was loved, and it was she who would break her lover's heart. Yet still the same swift longing for death....

They walked on slowly. Barry's head was lowered. Finally he asked thickly: "Don't you love me, then?"

She bent her head lower and could not answer. The fault was her own, and he must suffer for it. Yet stealthy colour crept back into her cheeks; her mood grew muddy and subtly defiant. Was not he making her suffer?

It wasn't, she blindly felt, so much that she didn't love him, as that, strangely and tragically, he must be all to her—and she could not face it.

How strange it was! How unpremeditated and utterly tragic! In his pocket huddling against the little box with its precious prisoner, was a letter in which the amplest and most ardent affection was expressed. It was a letter which expressed an earnest desire for his coming—so eager. Barry was bewildered. What did such lightning-swift changes of heart signify? Had she only imagined herself in love? What was this that had come to him? Had he come out of the desert for nothing after all? Was all the promise of new life sheer illusion?

They walked on a little way and then turned slowly back.

---