Miss Serena was playing "Silvery Waves." Hagar, kneeling on the hearth-rug, warmed her hands at the fire and studied the illuminated text over the mantel. "Silvery Waves" came to an end, and Miss Serena opened the green music-book at "Santa Anna's March."

"Has Isham gone for the mail?" asked Hagar.

"Yes. He went an hour ago.—You're hoping, I suppose, for a letter from that dreadful man?"

"You know as well as I do," said Hagar, "that I gave my word and he gave his to write only once a month. And he isn't a dreadful man. He's just like everybody else."

"Ha!" said Miss Serena, and brought her hands down upon the opening chord. Hagar, her elbows on her knees, hid her eyes in her hands. Within her consciousness Juliet was speaking as she had spoken that night upon the stage—spoken in the book—spoken in immortal life, youth, love. Not so, she knew with a suddenness and clangour as of a falling city, not so could Juliet have spoken! "Like everybody else"—Was Laydon, then, truly, like everybody else?—A horror of weakness and fickleness came over her. Was there something direfully wrong with her nature, or was it possible for people simply to be mistaken in such a matter? Her head grew tired; she was so unhappy that she wished to creep away and weep and weep.... Miss Serena, having marched with Santa Anna, turned a dozen pages and began "The Mocking Bird. With Variations."

Old Miss's step was heard in the hall, very firm and authoritative. In a moment she entered the room, portly, not perceptibly aged, her hair, beneath her cap, hardly more than powdered with grey, still wearing black stuff gowns and white aprons and heelless low shoes over white stockings. Hagar rose from the rug and pushed the big chair toward the fire.

Old Miss dropped into it—no, not "dropped"—lowered herself with dignity. "Has Isham brought the mail?"

"No, not yet."

"I dreamed last night that there was a letter from Medway. Serena!"

"Yes, mother?"

"The next text you paint I want you to do one for me. Honour thy father and mother that thy days may be long—"

Miss Serena turned on the piano-stool. "I'll do it right away, mother. It would be lovely in blue and gold.... You can't say that I haven't honoured father and mother."

Old Miss had drawn out her knitting and now her needles clicked. "No one honours them as they used to be honoured. No one obeys them as they used to obey. To-day children think that they are wiser than their fathers. They set up to use their own judgment until it's a scandal.... It's true you've been better than most, Serena. Taking you year in and year out, you've obeyed the commandment. It's more than many daughters and grand-daughters that I know have done." Her needles clicked again. "Yes, Serena, you haven't given us much trouble. You were easy to make mind from the beginning." She gave the due praise, but her tone was not without acerbity. It might almost have seemed that such forthright ductility and keeping of the commandment as had been Miss Serena's had its side of annoyance and satiety.

Hagar spoke from the window where she stood, her forehead pressed against the glass. "I see Isham down the road, by the Half-Mile Cedar."

Old Miss turned the heel of the Colonel's sock she was knitting. "Things that from the newspaper and my personal observation happen now in the world could not possibly have occurred when I was young. People defying their betters, women deserting their natural sphere, atheists denying hell and saying that the world wasn't made in six days, young girls talking about independence and their own lives—their own lives! Ha!"

Miss Serena began to play "The Sea in the Shell." "We all know how Hagar came by her disposition, but I must say it is an unfortunate one! When I was her age, no money could have made me act as she has done."

"No money could have made me, either," spoke Hagar at the window.

"Money has nothing to do with it!" said Old Miss. "At least as far as Hagar is concerned, nothing! But fitness, propriety, meekness, and modesty, consultation with those to whom she owes duty, and bowing to what they say—all those have something to do with it! But what could you expect? It was bound to come out some day. From a bush with thorns will come a bush with thorns."

"Here is Isham," said Hagar. "If you've said enough for to-day, grandmother, shall I get the mail?"

She brought the bag to her grandmother. When the Colonel was at home, no one else opened the small leather pouch and distributed its contents; when he was away Old Miss performed the ceremony. To-day he had mounted Selim and ridden to the meeting in the neighbouring town. Mrs. Ashendyne opened the bag and sorted the mail. There was no great amount of it, but—"I said so! I dreamed it. My dreams often come true. There it is!" "It" was a square letter, quite thick, addressed in a rather striking hand and bearing a foreign stamp and postmark. It was addressed to the Colonel, and Mrs. Ashendyne never opened the Colonel's letters—not even when they were from Medway. They were not from him very often. The last, and that thin between the fingers, had been in September. This one was so much thicker than that one! Old Miss gazed at it with greedy eyes.

Miss Serena, too, leaving the piano-stool, came to her mother's side and fingered the letter. "He must have had a lot to write about. From Paris.... I used to want to go to Paris so much!"

"Put it on the mantelpiece," said Old Miss. "It can't be long before the Colonel's home." Even when it was on the mantel-shelf she still sat looking at it with devouring eyes. "I dreamed it was coming—and there it is!" The remainder of the mail waited under her wrinkled hand.

Miss Serena grew mildly impatient. "What else is there, mother? I'm looking for a letter about those embroidery silks. There it is now, I think!" She drew from her mother's lap an envelope with a printed return address in the upper left-hand corner. "No, it isn't it. 'Young People's Home Magazine.' Some advertisement or other—people pay a lot to tell people about things they don't want! Miss Hagar Ashendyne. Here, Hagar! It evidently doesn't know that you are grown up—or think you are! There's my letter, mother,—under the 'Dispatch.'"

Hagar went away with the communication from the "Young People's Home Magazine" in her hand. She went upstairs to her own room. It had been her mother's room. She slept in the four-poster bed on which Maria had died, and she curled herself with a book in the corner of the flowered chintz sofa as Maria had done before her. She curled herself here to-day, though with the letter, not with a book. The letter lay upon her knees. She looked at it with a fixed countenance, hardly breathing. She had thought herself out of a deal of the conventional and materialized religious ideas of her world—not out of religion but out of conventional religion. She did not often pray now for rewards or benefits, or hiatuses in the common law, or for a salvation external to her own being. But at this moment the past reasserted itself. Her lips moved. "O God, let it have been taken! O God, let it have been taken! Let me have won the fifty dollars! Let me have won the third prize. O God, let it have been taken!"

At last, her courage at the sticking-point, she opened the envelope, and unfolded the letter within. The typewritten words swam before her eyes, the "Dear Madam," the page or two that followed, the "With Congratulations, we are faithfully yours." There was an enclosure—a cheque. She touched it with trembling fingers. It said: "Pay to Miss Hagar Ashendyne the Sum of Two Hundred Dollars."

An hour later, the dinner-bell sounding, she went downstairs. The Colonel and Captain Bob were yet at the meeting of Democrats. There was to be a public dinner; they would not be home before dusk. The three women ate alone, Dilsey waiting. Old Miss was preoccupied; the letter on the parlour mantelpiece filled her mind. "From Paris. In September he was at a place called Dinard." Miss Serena had her mind upon a panel—calla lilies and mignonette—which she was painting for the rectory parlour. As for Hagar, she did not talk much, nowadays, at Gilead Balm. If she were more silent than usual to-day, it passed without notice.

Only once Old Miss remarked upon her appearance. "Hagar, you've got a dazed look about the eyes. Are you feeling badly?"

"No, grandmother."

"You're not to get ill, child. I shall make a bottle of tansy bitters to-morrow morning. We've trouble enough in this family without your losing colour and getting circles round your eyes."

That was love and kindness from Old Miss. The water came into Hagar's eyes. She felt a desire to tell her grandmother and Aunt Serena about the letter, but in another moment it was gone. Her whole inner life was by now secret from them, and this seemed of the inner life. Presently, of course, she would deliberately tell them all; she had thought it out and determined that it would be after supper, before Uncle Bob went to bed and grandfather told her to get the chess-table. It seemed so wonderful a thing to her; she was so awed by it that she could not help the feeling that it would be wonderful to them, too.

In the afternoon she put a cape around her, left the home hill and went down the lane, skirted a ploughed field, and, crossing the river road, came immediately to the fringe of sycamores and willows upon the river bank. It was warmer and stiller than it had been in the morning, for the voice of the wind there sounded now the voice of the river; the many boughs above were still against the sky. She made for a great sycamore that she had known from childhood; it had a vast protuberant curving root in whose embrace you could sit as in an armchair. She sat there now and looked at the river that went so swiftly by. It was swollen with the spring rains; it made a deep noise, going by to the distant sea. To Hagar its voice to-day was at once solemn and jubilant, strong and stirred from depth to surface. She had with her the letter; how many times she had read it she could not have told. She could have said it by heart, but still she wanted to read it, to touch it, to become aware of meaning under meaning.... She could write, she could tell stories, she could write books.... She could earn money. It was one of the moments of her life: the moment when she knew of her mother's death—the moment when she changed Gilead Balm for Eglantine—the moment by the fire, Christmas eve—this moment. She was but eighteen; the right-angled turns in her road of this life had not been many; this was one and a main one. Suddenly, to herself, her life achieved purpose, direction. It was as though a rudderless boat had been suddenly mended, or a bewildered helmsman had seen the pole star.

She sat in the embrace of the sycamore, her feet lightly resting on the spring earth, her shoulders just touching the pale bark of the tree, her arms folded, her eyes level; poised, recollected as a young Brahman, conscious of an expanded space, a deeper time. How long she sat there she did not know; the sun slipped lower, touched her knees with gold. She sighed at last, raised her hands and turned her body.

What, perhaps, had roused her was the sound of a horse's hoofs upon the river road. At any rate, she now marked a black horse coming in the distance, down the road, by the speckled sycamores. It came on with a gay sound upon the wind-dried earth, and in its rider she presently recognized her cousin, Ralph Coltsworth.

"What are you doing here?" she asked when he reined in the black horse beside her. "Why aren't you at the University with Blackstone under your arm?"

He dismounted, fastened his horse, and came across to the sycamore root. "It's big enough for two, isn't it?" he asked, and sat down facing her. "You mentioned the University? The University, bless its old heart! doesn't appreciate me."

"Ralph! Have you been expelled?"

"Suspended." Hands behind head, he regarded first the blue sky behind the interlaced bare branches, then the tall and great gnarled trunk, then the brown-clad figure of his cousin, enthroned before him. "The suspense," he said, "is exquisite."

"What did you do?"

He grimaced. "I don't remember. Why talk about it? It wasn't much. Cakes and ale—joie de vivre—chimes at midnight—same old song." He laughed. "I gather that you've been rusticated, too."

Hagar winced. "Don't!... Let's laugh about other things. You'll break your family's hearts at Hawk Nest."

"Old Miss said in a letter which mother showed me that you were breaking hers. What kind of a fellow is he, Hagar?—Like me?"

Hagar looked at him gravely. "Not in the least. How long are you going to stay at Hawk Nest?"

"Oh, a month! I'm coming to see you every other day."

"Are you?"

"I am. If I could draw I'd like to draw you just as you look now—half marquise, half dryad—sitting before your own front door!"

"Well, you can't draw," said Hagar. "And it's getting cold, and the dryad is going home."

"All right," said Ralph. "I'm going, too. I've come to spend the night."

Leading his horse, he walked beside her. In the green lane, a wintry sunset glory over every slope and distant wood, the house between its black cedars rising before them, he halted a moment. "I haven't seen you since August when I rode over to tell Gilead Balm good-bye. You've changed. You've 'done growed.'"

"That may be. I've grown to-day."

"Since I came?"

"No. Before you came. For the first time I suppose in your life, grandmother is going to be sorry to see you. She worships you."

"She was sorry to see you, too, wasn't she? It's rather nice to be companions out of favour."

"Oh!" cried Hagar. "You are and always were the most provoking twister of the truth! I want to say to you that I do not consider that ours are similar cases! And now, if you please, that is the last word I am going to say to you on such a matter."

"All right!" said Ralph. "I was curious, of course. But I acknowledge your right to shut me up."

They passed through the home gate,—where a boy took his horse,—and went up the hill together. Dilsey was lighting the lamps. As they entered the hall Miss Serena came out of the library—Miss Serena looking curiously agitated. "Dilsey, hasn't Miss Hagar come in yet?... Oh, Hagar! I've been searching the place for you—Why, Ralph! Where on earth did you come from? Has the University burned down? Have you got a holiday?"

The library door was ajar. The Colonel's voice made itself heard from within. "Serena! Is that Hagar? Tell her to come here."

The three entered the room together. There was a slight clamour of surprise and greeting from its occupants for Ralph, but it died down in the face, as it were, of things of greater importance.

"What's the matter?" he asked, bringing up at last by Captain Bob in the background.

"A letter from Medway," answered the other. "Shh!"

The evenings falling cold, there was a fire upon the hearth. The reading-lamp was lit; all the room was in a glow that caressed the stiff portraits, the old mahogany and horsehair furniture, the bookcases and the books within. In the smaller of the two great chairs by the hearth sat Old Miss, preternaturally straight, her hands folded on the black silk apron which she donned in the evening, her still comely face and head rising from the narrow, very fine embroidered collar fastened by an oval brooch in which, in a complicated pattern, was wrought the hair of dead Coltsworths and Hardens. Her face wore a look at once softened and fixed. Across from her, in the big chair by the leaf-table, sat Colonel Ashendyne, a little greyer, a little more hawklike of nose, a little sparer in frame as the years went by, but emphatically not a person to whom could be applied the term "old." There breathed from him still an insolent, determined prime, a timelessness, a pictorial quality as of some gallery masterpiece. With the greyish-amber of his yet plentiful hair, his mustache and imperial, the racer set of his head, his well-shaped jaw and long nervous hands, his fine, long, spare figure and his eye in which a certain bladelike keenness and cynicism warred with native sensuousness, he stayed in the memory like such a canvas. His mood always showed through him, though somewhat cloudily like light through a Venetian glass. That it was a mixed and curious mood to-night, Hagar felt the moment she was in the room. She did not always like her grandfather, but she usually understood him. She saw the letter that had rested on the mantelpiece, the letter from Paris, in his hand, and at once there came over her a curious foreboding, she did not know whether of good or evil.

"Sit down," said the Colonel. "I have something to read to you."

For two months and more he had not looked at her without anger in his eyes. To-night the cloud seemed at least partly to have gone by. There was even in the Colonel's tone a touch of blandness, of enjoyment of the situation. She sat down, wondering, her eyes upon the letter. On occasion, when she searched her heart through, she found but a shrivelled love for her father. Except that he had had half-share in giving her life, she really did not know what she had to love him for. Now, however, what power of growth there was in the winter-wrapped root broke the soil. She began to tremble. "What is the matter? Is father ill? Is he coming home?"

"Not immediately," said the Colonel. "No, he is not ill. He appears to be in his usual health and to exhibit his usual good spirits. Your grandmother and I were fortunate in having a son of a disposition so happy that he left all clouds and difficulties, including his own, to other people. At the proper moment he has always been able to find a burden-bearer. No, Medway is well, and apparently happy. He has remarried."

"Remarried!..."

It was the Colonel's intention to read her the letter—indeed, it carried an inclosure for her—as he had already read it, twice, with varying comment, to the others assembled. But he chose to make first, his own introduction. "You've heard of the cat that always falls on its feet? Well, that's your father, Gipsy!"—Even in the whirl of the moment Hagar could not but note that he called her "Gipsy."—"That's Medway! Here's a careless, ungrateful, disobedient son, utterly reckless of his obligations. Is he hanged or struck by lightning? Not he! He goes happily along—Master Lucky-Dog! He makes a disastrous marriage with a penniless remnant of a broken-down family on some lost coast or other and brings her home, and presently there's a child. Does he undertake to support them, stay by his bargain, however poor a one? Not he! He's got a tiny income in his own right, left him by his maternal grandfather—just enough, with care, for one! Off he goes with that in his pocket and a wealthy friend and, from that day to this, we haven't laid eyes on Prince Fortunatus! Well, what happens? Does he come to eating husks with the swine and so at last slink back! Not he! He enjoys life; he's free and footloose; he's put his burden on other folk's backs! Death comes along and unmakes his marriage. His doting mother and his weak father apparently are prepared to charge themselves with the maintenance of his child. Why should he trouble? He doesn't—not in the least! He's got just enough in his own right to let him wander, en garÇon, over creation. If he took the least care of another he couldn't wander, and he likes to wander. Ah, I understand Medway, from hair to heel!—What comes of it all? We used to believe in Nemesis, but that, like other beliefs, is going by the board. Isn't he going to suffer? Not at all! He remains the cat that falls, every time, upon its feet.—This, Gipsy, is the letter."

My dear Father and Mother:—As well as I can remember, I was staying at Dinard when I last wrote you. I was there because of the presence in that charming place of a lady whose acquaintance I had made, the previous year, at Aix-les-Bains. From Dinard I followed her, in November, to Nice, and from Nice to Italy. I spent a portion of February as her guest in her villa near Sorrento, and there matters were brought to a conclusion. I proposed marriage and she accepted. We were married a week ago in Rome, in the English church, before a large company, the American Minister giving her away. There were matters to be arranged with her banker and lawyer in Paris, and so, despite the fact that March is a detestable month in this city, we immediately came on here. Later we shall be in Brittany, and we talk of Norway for the summer.

The lady whom I have married was the widow of —— ——, the noted financier and railroad magnate. She is something under my own age, accomplished, attractive, handsome, and possessed of a boundless good nature and a benevolent heart. We understand each other's nature and expect to be happy together. I need hardly tell you that being who she is, she has extreme wealth. If you read the papers—I do not—you may perhaps recall that ——'s will left his millions to her absolutely without condition. There were no children. To close this matter:—she has been generous to a degree in insisting that certain settlements be made—it leaves me with a personal financial independence and assurance of which, of course, I never dreamed.... I have often regretted that I have been able to do so little for you, or for the upkeep of dear old Gilead Balm. This, in the future, may be rectified. I understand that you have had to raise money upon the place, and I wish you would let me know the amount.

The Colonel's eyes darted cold fire. He let the sheet fall for the moment and turned upon Hagar, sitting motionless on the ottoman by the fire. "Damn your father's impertinence, Gipsy!" he said.

Old Miss spoke in a soft and gentle voice. "Why do you call it that, Colonel? Medway always had a better heart than he's ever been given credit for. Why shouldn't he help now that he can do so? It's greatly to his credit that he should write that way."

"Sarah," said the Colonel, "you are a soft-hearted—mother!"

Captain Bob spoke from beyond the table. Captain Bob did not often speak, nor often with especial weight, but he had been pondering this matter for three quarters of an hour, and he had a certain kind of common sense. "I think Sarah's right. Medway's a curiosity to me, but I've always held that he was born that way. You are, you know; you're born so or you aren't born so. He's pretty consistent. There never was a time when I wouldn't have said that he would come to the fore just as soon as he didn't have to deny himself. Now the time's come, and here he is. I think Sarah's right. Forgive and forget! If he wants to pay his debts—and God knows he owes you and Sarah a lot—I'd let him. And as to Gipsy there—better late than never! Read her what he says."

"I am going to," said the Colonel sardonically. He read the page that remained, then laid the letter on the table, put his hands behind his head and regarded his granddaughter. "The benevolent parent arrived at last upon the scene—a kindly disposed stepmother with millions—and that teacher of surface culture to young ladies at Eglantine! Among the three you ought to be quite ideally provided for! I hope Medway will like the teacher."

Old Miss came, unexpectedly, to her granddaughter's aid. "Don't worry her, Colonel! I haven't thought her looking well to-day. Give her her letter, and let her go and think it out quietly by herself.—If you like, child, Phoebe shall bring you your supper."

Hagar did like—oh, would like that, thank you, grandmother, very much! She took the letter—it was addressed to her in a woman's hand—which her father had enclosed and which her grandfather now held out to her, and went away, feeling somewhat blindly for the door, leaving the others staring after her. Upstairs she lit her lamp and placed it on Maria's table, by Maria's couch. Then, curled there, against the chintz-covered pillows,—they were in a pattern of tulips and roses,—she read the very kind letter which her stepmother had written.