A distinguished, foreign-looking gentleman with pointed gray beard got off an interurban car in the vicinity of Louisville, and stood gazing about him uncertainly. It was not the suburban neighborhood he had expected to find, but a distinctly rural one. Here and there smoke was visible above the tree-tops, but the only house within sight was a small farm-cottage of red brick, which had doubtless stood there among its gnarled fruit-trees at a time when the turnpike that passed it was a postroad leading from the metropolis of Middletown (now half a hundred houses strung along the pike) to the little port of Louisville on the Ohio.

There was a big chimney at either end, in the picturesque but impractical early fashion, and a bricked-up terrace across the front overflowing with simple flowers: petunias, snapdragon, larkspur. Upon the lawn grazed a rather stiff-kneed thoroughbred, apparently under convoy of a pair of infants. One of these, the smaller, got about on all fours with astonishing rapidity, and seemed imbued with the spirit of investigation. The other, slightly larger, was extremely black as to color and extremely capable as to manner.

"Tek keer, you Steffum!" Mr. Nikolai heard this one admonish. "Don't you go so near his mouf, you heah me? Dat hawss could snap you up jes' as easy as nippin' off a dandelium!"

The visitor leaned over the fence in sudden interest, "Can you tell me, young person, whether Mrs. Blair lives here?"

At sound of his voice the investigatory infant, in an excess of hospitality, rose to its legs and teetered eagerly toward him, only to come to earth at Mr. Nikolai's feet. Nothing daunted, however, it gazed up at him from this lowly position with a mixture of Archie's grin and the droll, blue, wistful twinkle of Joan.

"Dar you goes, Steffum!" cried the guardian, in hot pursuit. "Dirtyin' up anodder clean dress so's Miss Ellen gwinter whup me good—He's always a-fallin' over on his face dataway," she complained, while maternally repairing damages with the skirt of what appeared to be an only garment. "I b'lieve he goes and does it a-purpose!"

"To gain experience, perhaps?" suggested the visitor.

"I reck'n," assented the other, doubtfully. "Yassuh, Mis' Blair she libs heah, but she's playin' on de type-writer dis mawnin'. Will I run an' tell her comp'ny is came?"

"Heaven forbid!" exclaimed the gentleman. "Not if she is playing on a typewriter."

"Mr. Archie, he libs heah, too, when he ain't a trabelin' on de railroad train," volunteered the black one, "He's out behine, makin' him a little house to put a hawg in. Heah him?"

Mr. Nikolai nodded. There was a good deal of intermittent hammering and whistling going on in the background.

"You need not announce me, thank you. Perhaps my namesake will lead me to him?"

He held out a forefinger to the younger Stefan, who examined it, found it good, and clasped a trusting fist about it. So linked, the two moved off at a pace suitable to experimental footsteps.

In this slow progress they presently came upon a somewhat nondescript figure at work in a potato-patch. It wore blue jeans overall trousers, surmounted by what had once been a leghorn picture-hat, from which straggled a lock or two of sparse gray hair.

Mr. Nikolai stared at this figure for a puzzled moment; and then burst out laughing.

"Why, Ellen Neal! I did not recognize you as a farmerette."

"Land sakes!" She sat down abruptly among the potato-plants, whether out of surprise or for purposes of concealment it is impossible to state.

But her welcome when it came was for once not grudging. Perhaps she recalled a certain timely offer of help; or perhaps this graybeard, with his slight, tired stoop and his lined eyes, no longer seemed to her a menace to the sheepfold. Be that as it may, her greeting was not outdone in warmth even by Archie's.

"I've simply got to tell Joan!" cried Archie. "She'll never forgive me if I don't interrupt her just this once."

"Not when it is coming like that," forbade Nikolai, listening to the rapid click of a typewriter from the house beyond. "Neither battle, murder, nor sudden death must be allowed to interfere with a flow of thought that is coming a hundred words to the minute."

"Well, I suppose you know," conceded the husband, reluctantly—

An hour later, however, Ellen took matters into her own hands. She appeared at the kitchen door (dressed, Nikolai was flattered to observe, in a costume of purple crÊpe with Battenburg touches), and loudly rang a dinner-bell.

"That'll fetch her! Joan ain't ever too much up in the clouds to hear a dinner-bell; and I don't mean to have my jelly-omelette kep' waitin' on no flows of thought," she remarked.

Joan came out to them, a little untidy as to dress and hair (why is it that the Muse can never be pursued in perfect neatness?) and moving vaguely, as if half in a dream. There was a faint vertical wrinkle between her brows which was new to Nikolai, but her pallor had given place to warm tan, and both face and figure showed a slight suggestion of fullness, a little matronly poise that was more charming than her Botticelli maigre had been.

As she passed her son, she swooped down upon him and lifted him with a fine free swing onto her shoulder.

"Hi there, old Dirt-in-the-Face! Where's your Dada?"

Mother and child made a memorable picture as they approached, the long lifting lines of the woman's body, her laughing face upturned to the boy, who straddled her shoulder unafraid of his high position, chuckling and kicking fat legs as she tickled him.

The two men who loved Joan exchanged a sympathetic glance. "Mine!" said each in his heart; the one triumphantly, the other with the little shrug that was habitual to him.

Not until she was close upon them did she realize who waited for her there beside Archie. She stopped short. Then, without a word, she put down her child and went to Nikolai and kissed him.

If that kiss, so impulsive and without self-consciousness, was like a stab in Nikolai's heart, he did not show it. She had not dared to kiss him when they parted.

There came back to him in that moment an echo of a certain prophesy he had once made to Archie: "I must warn you that when she does find her metier, you are more in danger of losing her to it than to me."

Was she lost to both of them, already?...

"Oh, but Stefan, dear, how tired you look!" ("And how old!" her thought finished.) "You've been working too hard over there!"

"One does. It seems the least one can do."

"Too much work and not enough exercise," pronounced Archie, casting a semi-professional eye over him. "Nothing ages a man so quick as to let his muscles sag on him—but you brainy people always forget you've got muscles except in your heads. I'll have to make you hoe the garden and put on the gloves with me now and then, like I do Joan."

"No wonder she is able to hoist fat sons about as if they were feathers!" commented Nikolai.

It was a happy luncheon they had together, and a garrulous one. The Blair family talked all at once, including the youngest, who had three words at his command and liked to practice them. Ellen also joined freely in the conversation as she waited upon them. Nikolai was the only quiet one, seeming content to look and listen.

He had to hear all about the finding of the Farm, as Archie called his two acres and a cottage. When the reunited Blairs had been looking about for a place they could afford to live in—"And raise a family," added Archie happily—they had come across the little place, weed-grown and deserted, and rented it for almost nothing.

"The chickens and the garden alone practically pay the rent," boasted Archie, "and this summer I'm going to set up a hog. Real money in hogs, Mr. Nikolai! Of course the house is pretty old-timey and plain,"—he indicated the low ceilings and deep-set, many-paned windows—"but Joan likes old-timey things. She says this is a country cousin to that old place I used to live in on Poplar Street. Says a house without any ghosts in it is as uninteresting as a house without any books in it." (Archie was always fond of quoting the sayings of his Joan.)

"You do not miss people?" Nikolai asked her, recalling how easily the young American had made her place in what is perhaps the most finished society in the world.

"I have no chance to. We have neighbors enough—nice country women who exchange patterns and recipes and cuttings with me, and even a book now and then. If I want another sort, it is easy enough to run into town—or even on to New York, now that I've the excuse of publishers to be seen! And lately the town has begun to come out to me. Not at first. Emily and the others had a good deal to say about the folly of burying oneself in the country. You see this is not Country Club or golf-course country. But now I notice that they're glad enough to come whenever I ask them—or even when I don't!—Oh, the peace of it, Stefan! At night you can positively hear the silence."

he said.

She nodded. "And no formal callers to interrupt, and no ridiculous competitions with Mrs. Websters—I think people are more themselves in the country, somehow. Kentucky people, at any rate. Your Kentuckian does not run quite true to type herded in masses."

"Hear the wise authorine!" beamed Archie.

"Perhaps that is true of all Anglo-Saxons," she went on, unheeding. "They need to get their roots into the soil."

"Not only of Anglo-Saxons, Joan—of Semitic people, of all people, I think," said Nikolai. "Humanity began in a garden, if we may believe our myths. And with all races the dream of the ultimate Paradise is a garden."

"Why don't you put some roots out yourself?" asked Archie, eagerly. "There's a lot of good land about here for sale cheap. Why don't you buy some and settle down near us?"

"Oh, do!" urged Joan. "What a splendid idea!"

He looked from one to the other, the slight flush that had risen to his face dying away.

"Thank you," he said quietly. "Thank you, my friends. Perhaps—some day."

Joan remembered that he had spoken once of his intention to settle down near her and grow up with her children, "when he was old enough."

Surely, she thought (quite unaware of any cruelty in her thought) he was old enough now!

Her eyes had been making their usual running commentary on the conversation, quick blue flashes, grave or merry or reassuring, that always spoke to Nikolai more clearly than her words. But presently he noticed in them a return of the preoccupation, the vague dreaminess, that had been about her when she first appeared.

"Your mind is at that typewriter," he accused her suddenly.

"Of course it is," complained Archie. "She'd be at the thing all day long, if I didn't drag her out in the fields occasionally to work!"

"Archie thinks writing is not work," she interpolated, "merely an elegant way of passing a lady's leisure, like embroidery or crocheting!—But I'm not always as bad as this, Stefan," she apologized. "It's just that a crisis is on the way, and thoughts seem to come faster than I can get them down.—Luckily for you I've got a public now to spill them onto, instead of you!"

"Do you find the public as responsive?"

"Does she!" cried the proud husband. "Letters in every mail, and requests for autographs—why, she's a public character! The other day in a street-car—Tell him what happened the other day in the street-car, Joan."

She pulled his hair, laughing. "Ain't I the most wonder-fullest boy?—Well, the other day in a street-car, Stefan, a perfectly strange man came up to me and said, 'Aren't you the Mrs. Blair who writes? Say, what business have you got knowing how scared a man is of his grown son? You're only a girl.'"

"I congratulate you," said Nikolai. "Yes, that is response. Taking the world into your circle of intimates—that is the thing that makes the game worth while for people like you and me."

"Don't include me with yourself," she protested in quick deprecation. "I'm not and never shall be 'literary.' Human nature is all I'm after, Stefan. Villains who won't stay villains; heroes with fatal flaws of character; good, fine, noble natures who spread havoc all about 'em—that's the sort of thing I want to do; never 'literature'!"

He smiled, nodding. "Spoken like a true Cobzar!—But at that rate you'll find it difficult to escape literature, my dear." He rose to leave, against protests. "No, no, I have no intention of sharing honors with a Climax. Let me come back to-morrow, when the crisis is out of her system. I know how that is!"

"You always know how things are," murmured Joan gratefully, pressing his hand....

Archie walked with him to the car-station.

"You think she's looking well, sir?" he asked as soon as they were out of earshot.

"Better than well, Blair. Content."

The husband sighed with satisfaction. "I think so myself—though of course it's the kid who's done that, not me—Mr. Nikolai, I've got to talk to you on business. How big a hurry are you in for that money you lent me?"

"None at all," answered the other pleasantly. "I've accumulated a good deal of moss for such a rolling-stone—a racial trait, perhaps! Take your time. You've already paid me more than half, I think."

"Joan's book did most of that, not me," admitted Archie, flushing. "Though of course I'm going to pay her back."

"Don't," said the other.

"Don't! Why not?"

"Our only hold upon such as Joan is—our need of them."

Archie ruminated upon this in silence. "I get you," he said at last. "Let 'em think we're sort of helpless, like—like children, eh? But it's pretty hard accepting money from a woman!"

"Why? When we have consented to accept life itself from a woman—Where there is love there is no debt, Blair!"

"I guess that's right," said Archie slowly. "What's mine is hers of course; and so what's hers is mine—But speaking of the war—"

It happened that they had not been speaking of the war at all, though it hung in the background of their talk, grim and menacing, as it hung in the background of all talk just then.

"Yes, Blair?"

"We're getting into it at last, thank God! And as soon as we do, I'm going."

"Of course," said Nikolai.

Archie turned to him eagerly. "You think I've got a right to go?"

"So much of a right that I've come out here largely to see how I can help you—Of course you know," he added after a moment's hesitation, "that anything I have will go some day to my namesake Stefan?"

"Say, that's great!" cried Archie, beaming. "That makes me mighty easy about the future! And the present's all right, too. I'm pretty sure of getting a commission, and Joan makes more money than I do now. The thing that's been troubling me is wondering how you'd ever get paid back.... I'm pretty tall for the trenches," he explained. "And I seem to get sort of careless when I'm excited—the Irish coming out on me, I reckon. The chances are against my coming back. And in that case all you'd get would be—Joan."

A silence fell.

"And the kid, of course—He's a pretty nice little fellow," Archie added tentatively. "I don't suppose he'd be much of a—drawback?"

"On the contrary," said Nikolai. "I think he might be considered interest on the investment!"

Archie laughed with relief.

"I tell you, it makes me feel pretty comfortable to know that whatever happens to me they'll be safe! And to know that you'll be taking care of her, sir. She needs a good deal of taking care of, too—though she don't know it. Thinks she's as independent as a little pig on ice. But they're none of 'em independent, Mr. Nikolai—take it from me! They've got to be humored, and teased, and exercised, and petted—and the smarter they are the more petting they need. This high-brow business seems to leave people sort of lonesome in their hearts—you know what I mean?"

"Yes," said Nikolai, "I know what you mean—I shall accept your legacy gladly, Blair, if I am here to accept it. But—I am going to the war, myself. Not into the trenches, no. Into Russia."

Archie protested as Joan had. "But I thought Russia was not safe for you!"

"It is not. Nor for anybody else just now. There is something brewing there. You will see. And I think perhaps I can do a little something for both my countries, the new and the old. That is why I have come to America; to arrange my affairs, and to—say good-by."

"I get you," said Archie, simply, and held out his hand. His face had fallen. "Gee, supposing neither of us comes back? What will she do then?"

Nikolai gravely smiled. "Listen!" he said.

Through the hush of the still afternoon came to their ears, faint but distinct, the steady clicking of a typewriter.

"That is what she will do, my friend, with us or without. She has graduated from you and me—from herself as well. She has turned from men to Man; and of him the supply is inexhaustible."

Archie sighed, a little jealously. "You gave her that! You've given her almost everything she values, sir, haven't you?"

"Not quite everything, Blair."

Archie's eyes brightened. He remembered then the thing the other had not given her: their boy.

It was a scene that etched itself upon Nikolai's memory as he stood there waiting for his car, one of those pictures the heart carries with it into far places, and forever; the pleasant, homely cottage among its flowers and gnarled apple-trees, children's voices prattling about, the smell of cooking pickle in the air, Archie's cheery, retreating whistle, and dominating all the eager clicking of a typewriter.

His eyes followed the broad shoulders of the younger man, swinging along the road to the brisk, martial tread all young men have learned latterly.... Nikolai's life had thrown him into contact with all phases of the human problem, low and high. He knew how inextricably the two are mingled. Heroism, self-sacrifice, he had found in the most unlikely places, and thrilled to them as a fighting nature thrills to the drum. It hurt him to realize that the finest heroism, the most exquisite sacrifice, must always be hidden things, hidden often even from the eyes of him who sacrifices. Archibald Blair, failure in all that the world finds important, would have called himself undoubtedly a poor stick. Only to the occasional eye did he loom a hero.

Nikolai looked after him sadly, listening to the steady click of that typewriter. At last he quoted to himself, with a shrug,

Between them, he knew, they would manage to serve Joan's needs to the end.

THE END