The two rooms in which Ellen Neal had established herself were on the second floor of a house that had gone some decades since into a state of senile decrepitude. But such was the fashion of building in its day that it showed no particular signs of its approaching end beyond a slight tilt to leeward and the rather eczematic effect of its stuccoed brick facade. A high-waisted door surmounted by a fine fan-light and supported by slender columns which had once been white led into a square panelled hall from which curved a staircase of exquisite proportions. These things in a city of larger growth and greater sophistication would have marked the house as the natural abode of artists and their ilk; but in Louisville, where art is yet chiefly a thing to be taken in courses by the elect, it let itself out in rooms for light housekeeping and other humble purposes. The slender columns were defaced by such signs as, "Feather Cleaning and Artificial Flowers,"—"Furniture Upholstered,"—"Plain Dressmaking," etc.

The neighborhood, except for this one decrepit mansion standing well in from the sidewalk with an ancient sycamore for company, had long since forgotten its former claims to fashion; but it was still respectable. Trust Ellen Neal for that! She had the same flair for respectability as had the Misses Darcy for gentility. No doubtful character, whether in house or individual, could fail to yield up its weakness to the corrosive rectitude of Miss Neal's shrewd eye.

Joan liked to come to this house, not only because Ellen and the familiar home furniture were there, but because it carried her romantic fancy back into the Louisville her father sometimes talked about, the old South with all its lost glamour of gallantry and derring-do. "Les belles dames du temps jadis" was a phrase that invariably came to her mind as she entered the graceful, defaced portal. Nearby stood a street-pump where an actress who was one day to make the charm of American women world-famous, used to come each morning to draw water, in her shabby little slippers with a rope of hair over each shoulder—a lovely young Rebekah at the well. Around the corner stood another old mansion, now debased to commercial uses, in front of which the townspeople used to gather daily at a certain hour to watch the languid progress from door to carriage of a beauty so widely heralded that her name and her many love-affairs have become history. Here and there in a neglected fence-corner a ragged rose-bush, or a clump of larkspur bravely in bloom, spoke to a few observers, such as Joan, of gardens which had been the lovely setting of lovely ladies long since dead and dust.

Twilight was the hour for that neighborhood. Joan liked to fancy Ellen's house as the darkness fell, with candle-light streaming from the wide-flung windows, and glimpses within of bells in crinoline and beaux in tight wrinkled trousers, dancing a quadrille. Among them moved negro servitors with trays of frosted silver cups, and syllabub (though she had no slightest notion of what syllabub might be), and black cake, and small, pricked, beaten biscuit with ham in their insides. And there would be carriages stopping constantly at the door, to emit more belles and gallants, girls hoop-skirted and beshawled, who ran lightly up the curve of the long staircase, with apologies to the couples they disturbed in passing....

Always the house brought such fancies to Joan, and so clearly that she sometimes wondered whether they were less fancies than race-memories, souvenirs of Darcys who might have lived and made merry there in the halcyon days when the old gray river-town was at its zenith; truly, as it boasted, the Gateway to the South, stopping-place for all travelers on these floating palaces which no longer ply their leisurely journeys down the Ohio and the Mississippi to the Gulf.

Once she had questioned her father about it. "No, that's not one of our houses, I think," he replied interestedly. "Though it might have been. Your ancestors were very fond of change, Dollykins—as I am myself. We seem to have lived in half the houses in Louisville, at one time or another. But that one has been shabby and tumbledown ever since I can remember. In my boyhood it was a cheap boarding-house, for actors and people of that sort, I believe. I knew no one who lived there."

Joan was disappointed. She would have liked to claim the old mansion as a relative.

As she went wearily homeward from her disastrous interview with her father, Joan suddenly bethought herself of this house, and of Ellen. She was in no mood just then for the cheerful vulgarities of her step-mother. On the impulse, she went into the nearest drug-store and telephoned that she would not be home that night for dinner.

"Ellen shall cook me some pancakes, and I will help her," she decided, comforted by the idea. It must be remembered that Joan was only nineteen.

Inhabitants in suspenders and dressing-sacks, seeking air on the doorstep, stared at the girl inquisitively as she entered; but once within the dimness of the panelled hall she was able to forget these anachronisms. The quaint elegance of an earlier day was proof against even Expert Feather-curling, and Upholstery Done Here.

From above came a sudden tuneless whistling, and then a thump on a door and a man's voice calling, "Say, Mrs. Neal! Here's a bushel of fine assorted socks for you, and if you can get enough out of the lot to keep my feet off the cauld, cauld ground till pay-day, I'll be yours truly."

She heard Ellen's voice replying in more muffled tones, "All right, sir, just dump 'em in the door, will you? My hands are in the dough."

Joan was amused to hear Ellen Neal called "Mrs."—she who was so unmistakably and truculently a spinster; also she was surprised at the politeness of her "sir" in response, for Ellen was not given to the small amenities of social intercourse. The Major himself was rarely "sir" to Ellen.

The whistling resumed itself, coming rapidly nearer; and around the curve of the stairs, which he took two at a time, bounded a young man, who brought himself and his whistling to a full stop just in time to avoid carrying Joan with him in his downward course.

"Whew!—just missed you!" he exclaimed aghast. "You startled me. For a minute I thought you were a ghost!"

"Perhaps I am," murmured Joan, and demurely passed on up the stairs.

He turned and stared after the white ascending figure. She was aware of his eyes following her. Suddenly he chuckled, "I knew I'd find you again. And I found the quotation, too! 'Richard the Second,' by William Shakespeare."

Joan glanced over her shoulder. "I do not know what you are talking about," she said frigidly, "and I do not know you from Adam!" She had brought the impertinence upon herself, but she felt quite able to handle it—particularly with Ellen Neal just a few steps away.

Even as she spoke, however, she was aware that she did know this young man. Something in his voice, in his awkward, deferential manner, brought back to her memory the too-sympathetic drummer on the train. She lifted her eyes from his necktie to his face, remembering past regrets. His ears stuck out.

"Like the Yellow Kid's!" she thought disgustedly.

There is nothing in the least romantic about a man whose ears stick out. He might as well be fat....

"'Sad stories of the death of kings,'" he was explaining eagerly. "I looked it up myself. Sort of sounded like Shakespeare."

"Oh! I thought it was 'Alice in Wonderland'!" Joan was surprised into speech.

"That's a new one on me—'Alice in Wonderland,'"—commented the young man. "Is it good stuff?"

"You've never read 'Alice in Wonderland'? What a queer childhood you must have had!"

"Didn't have any," he replied, smiling up at her. Then he removed the smile, made a respectful little bow, and went on out the door.

Joan found that she was blushing, hotly; and no wonder. She was shocked by herself. She, one of Sister Mary Agnes's best exemplars of decorum, had deliberately started and continued a conversation with a strange young man met by chance on the dark stairway of a house where assuredly gentlemen did not live. ("Unless very poor gentlemen," she amended; for, ears or not, he seemed somehow to belong in the category of gentlehood.) Nor had she even terminated the conversation. It was he who had done that. He had shown more sense of the fitness of things than had she, Joan Darcy!

It was all the effect of the hospitable old hall, Joan decided. The house, like the roof of a friend, had introduced them. But what was he doing in such a house? It was not the sort of abode that would appeal, she fancied, to necktie drummers.

She opened Ellen's door without knocking. "Hello, there! Who's that I met on the stairs, and why does he call you 'Mrs.,' you giddy old fraud?"

A spoon dropped to the floor with a clatter as Ellen turned, beaming. "Land sakes! You might as well kill a person as scare her to death," she complained, far too pleased to admit it. "What you doin' down town this time o' day, all dressed up like lady-come-to-see? What do you want, eh?"

"Pancakes," explained Joan, ripping off her long gloves. "I'm going to stay to supper, Nellen, so get me an apron and let's begin."

Ellen's smile widened. "Pancakes! On a hot night like this?"

Joan nodded. "Um-humm! And lemonade," she said, "and anything else you can think of that's indigestible. Got any pickles?"

"What would a lone woman be doin' keepin' house without pickles?" replied Ellen scornfully, producing them. "And there's a batch of cinnamon rolls in the oven this minute, just as if I was expectin' you."

With a sigh of content, the girl reached down a yellow crockery bowl out of the cupboard—she was on quite intimate terms with Ellen's cupboard—and tying a gingham apron about her neck, proceeded to stir batter. It was the same crockery bowl, and perhaps the same gingham apron, in which she had stirred batter so long ago that she had been obliged to stand on a footstool in order to reach the kitchen-table. There was something substantial and fixed and unchangeable about Ellen Neal and her possessions, something that spelled home, though it was only home for other people.

"But you haven't distracted my mind," said Joan judicially, "from the fact that a young man of your acquaintance calls you 'Mrs.' without correction. You haven't eloped or anything lately?"

Ellen Neal bridled. "How you do go on, Joan! It makes it look better for a lone woman to be livin' by herself if she's called 'Mrs.' Men ain't so apt to get fresh with her."

"No?" murmured Joan. She gazed at Ellen's gaunt unloveliness with twinkling eyes. "Don't tell me men have been getting fresh with you, Nellen!"

The other's jaw snapped. "They have not, and they better not try it."

"Don't you think it's rather a risk darning their socks, then?" murmured the girl wickedly. "It might give them false ideas."

"I only do it for one of 'em, and he pays me good. Anything's proper so long as you get paid for it."

Joan laughed aloud. "Why, Mrs. Neal, Mrs. Neal, you shock me! What a perilous idea!"

"You're awful smart, guyin' me, but I'd be ashamed to think the kind of thoughts you're thinkin' now," said Ellen Neal, unsmiling. "And you a spinster yourself! Thoughts are as bad as deeds, any day—worse, 'cause they come easier. That's one thing I've noticed about you lately, Joan. You seem to know about things that ain't ladylike, somehow. Something's happened to you, child. You ain't the nice little girl you used to be."

"No," admitted Joan, "I'm not. And the world's not the nice little world it used to be, either." She went over and laid her head on her friend's bony shoulder. "Don't scold me to-day, dear. You're right, but—Oh, Nellen, father's lost our money! And there's nothing in the world I can call my own. Just absolutely nothing!"

A silence fell. "So," said the old woman. "You've found out, at last, have you? I've wondered how long it would take. And now what you goin' to do about it?" she demanded suddenly. "Are you goin' to law?"

Joan shook her head. "You know what Mother would say to that."

Ellen sighed. "I suppose she wouldn't hear to it." It was a curious fact that when these two spoke of Mary Darcy, they always spoke as if she were still alive, and near them. "Anyway, you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip—though I must say I'd like to see somethin' squeezed out of them kind of turnips, if it's only insides!" she added quite blood-thirstily. "Oh deary me, deary me! How often I've begged your ma to sneak what there was left out of his reach and put it away where I keep mine."

"Where's that, Nellen?"

"In an old stockin'-fut under my bedtick, where you can bet no man on earth ever laid eyes on it, or ever will!"

The smell of scorching bread suddenly filled the room. "Land sakes, my cinnamon-rolls! And I'd promised that boy to save him some for breakfast."

"Breakfast?" exclaimed Joan, glad enough of a diversion from discussing her undiscussable father. "You mean to tell me you're not only keeping your young man darned, but breakfasted? Nellen, I'm positively jealous!"

"You wouldn't be if you could see him eat," said the other seriously. "Acts like he ain't had enough food to fill him sence he was born. He was gettin' all his meals out to a restaurant before I come, a place he calls 'The Sign of the Dirty Spoon.' Jokin', I suppose—he's a great one for jokes. But he looked so skinny, and was always takin' something for dyspepsy, so I told him I'd give him a good breakfast anyway, just to start the day on. Say, Joan, you ought to see him put it away! He says once, 'I 'spose this is what you call home-cookin', ain't it?' 'Land, sakes,' says I, 'don't you know home-cookin' when you see it?' 'I ain't never seen it before!' he says, laughing."

While she talked Ellen was bustling capably about, laying a cloth, getting out dishes, dropping Joan's batter into a sizzling saucepan, from whence arose dense, pleasing vapors.

"Here, Joan, mix some cinnamon in that sugar, 'less you'd ruther have molasses on 'em. You ought to see the room he's got. Nothin' but books, all over the tables, piled up on the floor, even on the window-sills—"

"Books?" said Joan, pricking up an ear. She had not imagined the wide-eared young man in his dapper clothes a student.

"Whatever people want all them books around for I can't see," said Ellen. "Dust collectors, I call 'em; but he says they're his college career. Always will have his joke! And the dirt—! He had a colored woman in to do for him before I come, and guess what she used to do with her dust?" She paused dramatically, arms akimbo.

Joan admitted her imagination unequal to the task.

"Swept it under the bed and left it there! Land!" said Ellen Neal, "how I do hate a nigger! You can bet I got that place to rights in a jiffy."

"I can indeed," murmured Joan, "and I can also bet he couldn't find a thing belonging to him for a week afterwards."

Ellen grinned. "You've the truth of it. There wasn't a morning for about a week but what he'd thump on the floor and yell down the chimney, 'Mrs. Neal, oh, Mrs. Neal! For heaven's sake where is my blue necktie?' or, 'In the name of Jehoshaphat, what have you done with my other pair of pants?' It kind of reminded me of your pa," she said, sighing. "I been lookin' after him ever sence. There now, ain't you goin' to eat your pancakes now you've got 'em?"

Joan drew up her chair to the oil-cloth covered table, and, despite the heat and her troubles, made such a meal as she had not eaten for weeks at her step-mother's elaborate board. Ellen sat opposite her, with no servant-and-mistress nonsense to complicate the pleasure of hospitality. Sometimes the old woman waited on Joan, and sometimes Joan waited on Ellen, all in a friendly democracy that would have caused Major Darcy's hair to rise on end. It had been his conscientious effort for years to keep Ellen Neal "in her place." The difficulty was in the ups and downs of the Darcy mÉnage to know just what might be considered Ellen's place.

Not troubling themselves with any such niceties of status, the two ate their pancakes and drank their lemonade and otherwise courted indigestion contentedly, meanwhile chatting about the young man from upstairs, who for some reason began to appeal to Joan's imagination. His name, it appeared, was Archibald Blair.

"Archibald Blair! Nellen, how romantic! Like an English novel. Young Lord Toodledeboots ruined at Monte Carlo, hiding his poverty and a broken heart in lodgings. I suppose these might be called lodgings? If only his ears had been made to fit him!"

She no longer thought of him as a necktie drummer. The books made a difference. It seemed unlikely that necktie drummers would be on terms of first-name intimacy with Shakespeare. Moreover, his awkward yet somehow easy and unassuming air, like that of a friendly young dog who takes for granted that the world will be glad to see him, marked him as one not belonging to what her father called "the canile." No, he was a student and a gentleman, stranded by some freak of fortune in this near-slum, a youthful Beloved Vagabond. (It was the year when Locke's great book cast a glamour over all strange men in shabby clothing.) Although Archibald Blair was by no means shabby; on the contrary, rather appallingly dapper.

"I wonder how he happens to be living in a house like this?" she ruminated aloud.

"And why wouldn't he be living here?" demanded Ellen tartly. "It's cheap and decent, and there's some folks that don't like to go forever hoppin' from one place to another, like fleas on a dog's back. He's lived in that same room upstairs ever since he can remember."

"Oh, has he?" Joan's eye kindled. It occurred to her that the young man's history might have some connection with the history of the house itself. "Ellen, I have it! It's the old family mansion, belonged to his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, and of course he wants to go on living in it. I would myself!"

Ellen grinned. "If there's a romantical notion to be found, trust you for finding it. But if you really want to know, folks do say—" She hesitated, under the hallucination (which many virtuous women share) that she disliked to repeat gossip.

"Yes, yes? Do go on, Nellen!"

"Well, they do say that if he's got a father at all it's more than he knows, let alone a grandfather, and great-grandfather. I had it from a woman downstairs (her that curls feathers, and she got it straight from somebody who used to live in the neighborhood when this was a actors' boardin'-house), that he got left here when he was a little boy, by his mother, in hock for her board-bill. And she never come back for him."

Joan gave a gasp. "Oh," she cried. "Oh! poor woman!"

Ellen eyed her curiously. "Poor woman? I should think you'd say 'poor child'!"

"Poor both of them! But can't you see how much greater the tragedy must have been for the woman, who knew—who was to blame? Imagine how she must have dreamed of that pitiful little boy with his nose pressed against the window-pane watching for her—and she not able to come for him! Ellen—That's what he's doing here now! Waiting for his mother to come back!"

"If he is, I hope it's with a club in his hand," muttered the other angrily. "Why wasn't she 'able to come,' I'd like to know?"

"Perhaps she died. Or, she couldn't get enough money, or oh—oh, Ellen, don't you see? She didn't dare to come for him! He was getting too big, noticing things. For his own sake she had to give him up!" There were tears in Joan's eyes, ready to spill over.

Ellen paused and stared at her. "Well!" she said at last. "If I had your imagination, Joan Darcy, I'd go to a hospital and get it cut out. It ain't safe! Here you are blubbering over the troubles of a woman who maybe never lived, and probably was a bad lot if she did—and a'most making me blubber over her myself!"

Joan laughed and jumped up. "Here, let me help with the dishes. You wash and I'll wipe. But what a funny, pitiful little boy he must have been with those stick-out ears and those big, innocent-looking front teeth of his! I wonder why it is that big front teeth always do make a person look so innocent, Ellen?"

"Seems to me you noticed a lot to have seen Mr. Blair only once."

Joan did not think it necessary to mention that she had seen him more than once.

"I always notice things—I can't help it. Anyway, I'm glad you keep the poor thing darned and comfy! It's only charity."

"Charity nothing. He pays me good, and prompter than I ever got paid before in all my life," disclaimed the other rather tactlessly.

While she washed and put away her dishes, the girl made a tour of inspection about the rooms that were so full of associations to her. She smiled and nodded at the two familiar Landseer dogs on the wall, which had been a familiar part of every dining-room she remembered. She patted the worn chairs affectionately, and went in to pay her respects to the shorn four-post bed, which looked more at ease in its present surroundings than in others where she had seen it. The panelled walls, as nearly white as scrubbing could make them, the wide-silled windows with arched casements, the tall mantel-shelf, the finely molded ceiling which years of coal soot and cobwebs and general neglect had not sufficed to rob of dignity, all made a more suitable setting than Ellen guessed for her mistress's household goods; and to Joan these two bare and shabby rooms had become a haven of refuge. Tenement though it was, there was more of genuine beauty in the place where Ellen did plain dressmaking for very humble customers than in all the elaborate establishment with which Richard Darcy had managed to provide his daughter. Joan was very dependent upon beauty.

Later, Ellen walked out with her through the languorous summer evening to the house which she never called home. Nothing more had been said between them of the loss of her independence; but the girl felt soothed and comforted, strengthened as the heart is always strengthened in the presence of a deep though inarticulate devotion. She slipped her hand into the other's thin arm, and so linked they walked along without much talk between them, listening as they passed to pleasant sounds from many a shadowed porch and garden, guitar music, singing, the inevitable hushed murmur of boy and girl voices commingled, which is as natural to a summer gloaming as the twitter of birds in spring.

There came again to Joan, for the first time in weeks, something of the glamour, the sense of promise, which had touched her in the summer past when she walked at night with her father through the strange city where he had once been young. It was as if Romance brushed her in passing with shadowy skirts, and Joan felt that she must catch at them, cling to them, before it was too late. Youth is so short, so short!...

Ellen, too, felt the witchery of the soft night; but to the Ellens, Romance comes only vicariously.

"Joie," she said after a long silence, "ain't it time you was having some steady company yourself, child?"

The girl did not smile at the phrase. It voiced too well her own secret thoughts. There had been something strangely unreal, unnatural, about the past weeks. She had brought nothing out of her experience with life so far, not even a friend—for Stefan Nikolai was merely an inheritance.

"You're right," she said soberly "I suppose I ought to have a 'steady company' at least by this time. That ought to be simple enough!—Marriage is about the only thing left for a girl in my position, isn't it?"

"Who's talking about marriage? You don't have to marry every fellow you walk out with, I should hope," said Ellen surprisingly. "I've walked out with quite a few myself!... But as to gettin' married, Jo—it's about the only thing for a girl in any position, I guess, even if she finds out afterwards that she's picked a lemon. Lemons are better than nothing."

"Why, Mrs. Neal!" laughed Joan. "What sentiments from a confirmed spinster-person!"

To which Ellen replied quietly, "It's the spinsters who know."