The winter was so open, so mild and warm, that a few pale roses clung to their stems through half of December. Christmas proved a green Christmas; neither snow nor ice, but soft, Indian summer weather. Eglantine always gave two weeks' holiday at Christmas. It was a great place for holidays. Right and left went the girls. Those whose own homes were too far away went with roommates or bosom friends to theirs; hardly a pupil was left to mope in the rooms that grew so still. Most of the teachers went away. The scattering was general.

But Hagar remained at Eglantine. Gilead Balm was a good long way off. She had gone home last Christmas and the Christmas before, but this year—she hardly knew how—she had missed it. In the most recently received of his rare letters her grandfather had explicitly stated that, though he was prepared to pay for her schooling and to support her until she married, she must, on her side, get along with as little money as possible. It was criminal that he had so little nowadays, but such was the melancholy fact. The whole world was going to the dogs. He sometimes felt a cold doubt as to whether he could hold Gilead Balm. He wished to die there, at any rate. Hagar had been very unhappy over that letter, and it set her to wondering more strongly than ever about money, and to longing to make it. In her return letters he suggested that she stay at Eglantine this Christmas, and so save travelling expenses. And in order that Gilead Balm might not feel that she would be too dreadfully disappointed, she said that it was very pleasant at Eglantine, and that several of the girls were going to stay, and that she would be quite happy and wouldn't mind it much, though of course she wanted to see them all at Gilead Balm. The plan was of her suggesting, but she had not realized that they might fall in with it. When her grandmother answered at length, explaining losses that the Colonel had sustained, and agreeing that this year it might be best for her to stay at Eglantine, she tried not to feel desperately hurt and despondent. She loved Gilead Balm, loved it as much as her mother had hated it. Old Miss's letter had shown her own disappointment, but—"You are getting to be a woman and must consider the family. Ashendyne and Coltsworth women, I am glad to say, have always known their duty to the family and have lived up to it." The last half of the letter had a good deal to say of Ralph Coltsworth who was at the University.

Hagar was here at Eglantine, and it was two days before Christmas, and most of the girls were gone. Sylvie was gone. The teacher whom she liked best—Miss Gage—was gone. Mrs. LeGrand, who liked holidays, too, was going. Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford and the housekeeper were not going, and they and the servants would look after Eglantine. Besides these there would be left the books in the book-room, and Hagar would have leave to be out of doors, in the winding walks and beneath the trees, alone and whenever she pleased. The weather was dreamy still; everywhere a warm amethyst haze.

This morning had come a box from Gilead Balm. Her grandmother had filled it with good things to eat and the Colonel sent his love and a small gold-piece. There was a pretty belt from Captain Bob and a hand-painted plate and a soft pink wool, shell-pattern, crocheted "fascinator" from Miss Serena. Mrs. Green sent a hemstitched handkerchief, and the servants sent a Christmas card. Through the box were scattered little sprays from the Gilead Balm cedars, and there was a bunch of white and red and button chrysanthemums. Hagar, sitting on the hearth-rug, unpacked everything; then went off into a brown study, the chrysanthemums in her lap.

Later in the morning she arranged upon the hand-painted plate some pieces of home-made candy, several slices of fruitcake, three or four lady apples, and a number of Old Miss's exquisitely thin and crisp wafers, and with it in her hand went downstairs to Mrs. LeGrand's room, knocked at the door, and was bidden to enter. Mrs. LeGrand half-raised herself from a flowery couch near the fire, put the novel that she was reading behind her pillow, and stretched out her hand. "Ah, Hagar!—Goodies from Gilead Balm? How nice! Thank you, my dear!" She took a piece of cocoanut candy, then waved the hand-painted plate to the round table. "Put it there, dear child! Now sit down for a minute and keep me company."

Hagar took the straight chair on the other side of the hearth. The bright, leaping flame was between the two. It made a kind of softer daylight, and full in the heart of it showed Mrs. LeGrand's handsome, not yet elderly countenance, the ripe fullness of her bust, covered by a figured silk dressing-sacque, and her smooth, well-shaped, carefully tended hands. Hagar conceived that it was her duty to think well and highly of Mrs. LeGrand, who was such an old friend of the family, and who, she knew, out of these same friendly considerations, was keeping her at Eglantine on the easiest of terms. Yes, it was certainly her duty to love and admire Mrs. LeGrand. That she did not do so caused her qualms of conscience. Many of the girls raved about Mrs. LeGrand, and so did Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford. Hagar supposed with a sigh that there was something wrong with her own heart. To-day, as she sat in the straight chair, her hands folded in her lap, she experienced a resurgence of an old childhood dislike. She saw again the Gilead Balm library, and the pool of sunlight on the floor and the "Descent of Man," and heard again Mrs. LeGrand telling the Bishop that she—Hagar—was reading an improper book. Time between then and now simply took itself away like a painted drop-scene. Six years rolled themselves up as with a spring, and that hour seamlessly adjoined this hour.

"I'm afraid," said Mrs. LeGrand, "that you'll be a little lonely, dear child, but it won't be for long. Time flies so!"

"I don't exactly get lonely," said Hagar gravely. "You are going down the river, aren't you?"

"Yes, for ten days. My dear friends at Idlewood won't hear of my not coming. They were my dear husband's dearest cousins. Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford, together with Mrs. Brown, will take, I am sure, the best of care of things here."

"Yes, of course. We'll get on beautifully," said Hagar. "Mr. Laydon is not going away either. His mother is ill and he will not leave her. He says that if we like to listen, he will come over in the evenings and read aloud to us."

Mr. Laydon was teacher of Belles-Lettres at Eglantine, a well-looking young gentleman, with a good voice, and apparently a sincere devotion to the best literature. Eglantine and Mr. Laydon alike believed in the future of Mr. Laydon. It was understood that his acceptance of a position here was of the nature of a makeshift, a mere pot-boiler on his road to high places. He and his mother were domiciled with a cousin from whose doorstep you might toss a pebble into the Eglantine grounds. In the past few years the neighbouring town had begun to grow; it had thrown out a street which all but touched the osage-orange hedge.

Mrs. LeGrand made a slight motion with her hand on which was her wedding-ring, with an old pearl ring for guard. "I shall tell Mrs. Lane not to let him do that too often. I have a great esteem for Mr. Laydon, but Eglantine cannot be too careful. No one with girls in their charge can be too careful!—What is the Gilead Balm news?"

"The letter was from grandmother. She is well, and so is grandfather. They have had a great deal of company. Uncle Bob has had rheumatism, but he goes hunting just the same. The Hawk Nest Coltsworths are coming for Christmas—all except Ralph. He is going home with a classmate. Grandmother says he is the handsomest man at the University, and that if I hear tales of his wildness I am not to believe them. She says all men are a little wild at first. Aunt Serena is learning how to illuminate texts. Mrs. Green has gone to see her daughter, who has something the matter with her spine. Thomasine's uncle in New York is going to have her visit him, and grandmother thinks he means to get Thomasine a place in a store. Grandmother says no girl ought to work in a store, but Thomasine's people are very poor, and I don't see what she can do. She's got to live. Corker has a place, but he isn't doing very well. Car'line and Isham have put a porch to their cabin, and Mary Magazine has gotten religion."

"Girls of Thomasine's station," said Mrs. LeGrand, "are beginning more and more, I'm sorry to see, to leave home to work for pay. It's spreading, too; it's not confined to girls of her class. Only yesterday I heard that a bright, pretty girl that I used to know at the White had gone to Philadelphia to study to be a nurse, and there's Nellie Wynne trying to be a journalist! A journalist! There isn't the least excuse for either of those cases. One of those girls has a brother and the other a father quite able to support them."

"But if there really isn't any one?" said Hagar wistfully. "And if you feel that you are costing a lot—" Her dreams at night were beginning to be shot with a vague but insistent "If I could write—if I could paint or teach—if I could earn money—"

"There is almost always some one," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "And if a girl knows how to make the best of herself, there inevitably arrives her own establishment and the right man to take care of her. If"—she shrugged—"if she doesn't know how to make the best of herself, she might as well go work in a store. No one would especially object. That is, they would not object except that when that kind of thing creeps up higher in the scale of society, and girls who can perfectly well be supported at home go out and work for pay, it makes an unfortunate kind of precedent and reacts and reflects upon those who do know how to make the best of themselves."

Hagar spoke diffidently. "But a lot of women had to work after the war. Mrs. Lane and General ——'s daughters, and you yourself—"

"That is quite different," said Mrs. LeGrand. "Gentlewomen in reduced circumstances may have to battle alone with the world, but they do not like it, and it is only hard fate that has put them in that position. It's an unnatural one, and they feel it as such. What I am talking of is that nowadays you see women—young women—actually choosing to stand alone, actually declining support, and—er—refusing generally to make the best of themselves. It's part of the degeneracy of the times that you begin to see women—women of breeding—in all kinds of public places, working for their living. It's positively shocking! It opens the gate to all kinds of things."

"Wrong things?"

"Ideas, notions. Roger Michael's ideas, for instance,—which I must say are extremely wrong-headed. I regretted that I had asked her here. She was hardly feminine." Mrs. LeGrand stretched herself, rubbed her plump, firm arms, from which the figured silk had fallen back, and rose from the couch. "I hope that Eglantine girls will always think of these things as ladies should. And now, my dear, will you tell Mrs. Lane that I want to see her?"

Mrs. LeGrand went away from Eglantine for ten days. Of the women teachers living in the house, all went but Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford. All the girls went but three, and they were, first, Hagar Ashendyne; second, a pale thin girl from the Far South, a martyr to sick headaches; and third, Francie Smythe, a girl apparently without many home people. Francie was sweetly dull, with small eyes and a perpetual smile.

How quiet seemed the great house with its many rooms! They closed the large dining-room and used the small room where Roger Michael had supped. They shut the classrooms and the study-hall and the book-room, and sat in the evenings in the bowery, flowery parlour. Here, the very first evening, and the second, came Mr. Laydon with Browning in one pocket and Tennyson in the other.

Mrs. Lane was knitting an afghan of a complicated pattern. Her lips moved softly, continuously, counting. Mr. Laydon, making an eloquent pause midway of "Tithonous" caught this One—two—three—four—and had a fleeting expression of pain. Mrs. Lane saw the depth to which she had sunk in his esteem and flushed over her delicate, pensive face. For the remainder of the hour she sat with her knitting in her lap. But really the afghan must be finished, and so, the second evening, she placed her chair so as to face not the reader but a shadowy corner, and so knit and counted in peace. Miss Bedford neither knit nor counted; she said that she adored poetry and sighed rapturously where something seemed to be indicated. She also adored conversation and argumentation as to this or that nice point. What did Mr. Laydon think Browning really meant in "Childe Roland," and was Porphyria's lover really mad? Was Amy really to blame in "Locksley Hall"? Miss Bedford made play with her rather fine eyes and teased the fringe of the table-cover. The pale girl from the Far South—Lily was her name—sat by the fire and now rubbed her forehead with a menthol pencil and now stroked Tipsy Parson, Mrs. LeGrand's big black cat. Francie Smythe had a muslin apron full of coloured silks and was embroidering a centre-piece—yellow roses with leaves and thorns. Francie was a great embroiderer. Hagar sat upon a low stool by the hearth, over against Lily, close to the slowly burning logs. She was a Fire-Worshipper. The flames were better to her than jewels, and the glowing alleys and caverns below were treasure caves and temples. She sat listening in the rosy light, her chin in her hands. She thought that Mr. Laydon read very well—very well, indeed.

Midway of the poem she turned a little so that she could see the reader.

He sat in the circle of lamplight, a presentable man, well-formed, dark-eyed, and enthusiastic; fairly presentable within, too, very fairly clean, a good son, filled with not unhonourable ambitions; good, average, human stuff with an individual touch of impressionability and a strong desire to be liked, as he expressed it, "for himself"; young still, with the momentum and emanation of youth. The lamp had a rose and amber shade. It threw a softened, coloured, dreamy light. Everything within its range was subtly altered and enriched.

Hagar sat in her corner, upon the low stool, in the firelight, as motionless as though she were in a trance. Her eyes, large, of a marvellous hazel, beneath straight, well-pencilled brows of deepest brown, were fixed steadily upon the man reading. Slowly, tentatively, something rich and delicate seemed to rise within her, something that clung to soul and body, something strange, sweet and painful, something that, spreading and deepening with great swiftness, suffused her being and made her heart at once ecstatic and sorrowful. She blushed deeply, felt the crimsoning, and wished to drop her head upon her arms and be alone in a balmy darkness. It was as though she were in a strange dream, or in one of her long romances come real.

Laydon put the book down upon the table. While he read, one of the maids, Zinia, had brought a note to Miss Bedford, and that lady had gone away to answer it. Mrs. Lane knitted on, her lips moving, her back to the table and the hearth. Francie Smythe was sorting silks. "That was a lovely piece," she said unemotionally, and went on dividing orange from lemon. The girl with the menthol pencil was more appreciative. "Once, when I was a little girl I went with my father and mother to Rome. We went out on the Campagna. I remember now how it was all green and flat and wide as the sea and still, and there were great arches running away—away—and a mist that they said was fever." Her voice sank. She sighed and rubbed her forehead with the menthol. Her eyes closed.

Edgar Laydon rose and came into the circle of firelight. He was moved by his own reading, shaken with the impulse and rhythm of the poem. He stood by the mantel and faced Hagar. She was one of his pupils, she recited well; of the essays, the "compositions," which were produced under his direction, hers were the best; he had told her more than once that her work was good; in short, he was kindly disposed toward her. To this instant that was all; he was scrupulously correct in his attitude toward the young ladies whom he taught. He had for his work a kind of unnecessary scorn; he felt that he ought to be teaching men, or at the very least should hold a chair in some actual college for women. Eglantine was nothing but a Young Ladies' Seminary. He felt quite an enormous gulf between himself and those around him, and, as a weakness will sometimes quaintly do, this feeling kept him steady. Until this moment he was as indifferent to Hagar Ashendyne, as to any one of the fifty whom he taught, and he was indifferent to them all. He had a picture in his mind of the woman whom some day he meant to find and woo, but she wasn't in the least like any one at Eglantine.

Now, in an instant, came a change. Hagar's eyes, very quiet and limpid, were upon him. Perhaps, deep down, far distant from her conscious self, she willed and exercised an ancient power of her sex and charmed him to her; perhaps—in his lifted mood, the great, sensuous swing of the verse still with him, the written cry of passion faintly drumming within his veins—he would have suddenly linked that diffused emotion to whatever presence, young and far from unpleasing, might have risen at this moment to confront him. However that may be, Laydon's eyes and those of Hagar met. Each gaze held the other for a breathless moment, then the lids fell, the heart beat violently, a colour surged over the face and receded, leaving each face pale. A log, burned through, parted, striking the hearth with a sound like the click of a closing trap.

Mrs. Lane, having come to an easy part in the pattern, turned her face to the rest of the room. "Aren't we going to have some more poetry? Read us some more, Mr. Laydon."

The girl with the menthol pencil spoke dreamily. "Isn't there another piece about the Campagna? I can see it plain—green like the sea and arches and tombs and a mist hanging over it, and a road going on—a road going on—a road going on."