As a man thinketh in his heart, so is that man, was the Nazarene’s succinct announcement of a law as ancient and immutable as the correlated principles which govern gravity and motion. From the beginning of things visible, when the thoughts of the great I Am first began to fashion new and strange creations out of the whirling fire mist, until now, the thoughts of a God—of a man, continually and inevitably mould his appearance and the circumstances of his existence. As there can be no question as to the reality of this fundamental principle at the root of all phenomena, so there can be no evasion of its action and effect.

Stephen Jarvis, having successfully achieved wealth by a constant and unremitting application of his powerful ego to the thoughts of money-getting by any and all means, looked the part. No man can do otherwise. Having chosen his rÔle, he proceeds to a make-up more skilful and complete than can be conceived by the bungler in the actor’s dressing-room. Upon the plastic mask of the body his thoughts etch themselves, his habits paint themselves, his character blazons itself, till at middle age, he cannot longer hide himself from the observant eye of the world. He is, in appearance, in reality, what his thoughts have made him.

If it be possible to imagine the havoc which the oft-quoted bull in the china shop would create by a sudden and unpremeditated use of his brute force, one may, perhaps, conceive of the inward tumult, the confusion, the very real loss, and consequent anguish entailed upon a man like Jarvis by the sudden invasion of a genuine passion.

A thousand times he railed at himself, profanely calling himself many varieties of a fool. Once and again he strove to restore to cold, passionless order the seething maelstrom of his thoughts. Why, he demanded fiercely of himself, should he long to possess this girl with every aching fibre of his being? The mere urge and fever of animal passion did not explain the matter; there was something deeper, more elemental still in the fury of the desire which possessed him, which drove him forth out of his comfortable house by night and by day as if pursued by the furies. Because Jarvis was a strong man, his nature hardened by years of stern, unrelaxing self-discipline, the utter rout and confusion of his cold, passionless self was the more complete and disastrous. He hated himself for loving a woman who disdained him, and hating himself, he loved her with a despair akin to torment. That she was poor, helpless, already fast closed in his savage grip, like a bird in a snare, he knew; and yet for the first time he dimly realized the illusive part of her which successfully evaded his grasp, defied his power, despised his threats. He might, if he would, crush her by main force; he could not compel her to love him.

The thought of his own strength, helpless before her weakness, maddened him. Houses, lands, money, had become passively obedient to the power of his will. He controlled these things, did with them as he pleased, in effect an overlord, haughty, unbending, merciless; but this one thing which he had put out his hand to take—carelessly, as one will pluck a ripe apple from the bough at the languid prompting of appetite—this girl, who had for years been no more to him than the birds hopping in the trees outside his window, how and by what means had she suddenly contrived to gain this monstrous ascendency over him? What uncanny power in those clear gray eyes of hers had metamorphosed Stephen Jarvis, cool, middle-aged man of affairs, into the weak creature he had always despised in his saner moments?

During these days of inward tumult he carried on the dull routine of his business, forcing himself to the task with all the powers of a will suddenly turned traitor to its master. In spite of himself he seemed to see her there in his lonely house over against the sombre rows of books, her face vividly alive, defiantly youthful. Despite his resolves she perpetually came between him and the printed page which he strove to read; worst of all, she haunted his restless slumbers by night, now pleading with him; now defying him; mocking him with elfin laughter, as she fled before him, the child in her arms; while he pursued leaden-footed through uncounted miles of shadowy country.

The two did not meet face to face, while the rains and chilling winds of April gradually spent themselves, and the grass, illumined with a thousand cheerful sunbursts of dandelions, grew long under the blossoming trees. The mated birds sang only at dawn now, being too busy with the rapturous labors of nest-building to pause for vocal expression of their gladness. In the fields staid farm-horses indulged in unwonted gambols and nosed their mates with little whinnying cries; grazing cattle lifted their heads from the sweet springing grass to gaze with large wistful eyes at the widespread landscape. Once, long ago, they had roamed the unfenced pastures of the world in May, herded cows and yearlings, and the lordly bulls leading on, while the urge and rapture of the returning sun brooded the earth, compelling it to bring forth after its kind. Though she did not see him, yet none the less Jarvis obtruded his harsh visage into Barbara’s thoughts by day and by night. Nor could a wiser man than Jarvis have guessed that the girl was literally enfolded in cloudy thought forms, projected toward her from his own brain, with all the accuracy and certainty of an electric current traversing the viewless paths of air between wireless stations. That we do not understand these phenomena with any degree of accuracy does not render them the less effective.

It was still early in May when Jarvis drove over to inspect a wood-pulp factory in the neighborhood of Greenfield Centre. Its proprietor had borrowed capital heavily within the past year, and Jarvis had been narrowly watching the gradual ebb of the factory’s output. It was the old story of misapplied energy, paralyzed into inaction by impending failure. Jarvis scored the luckless proprietor mercilessly during their brief interview; later he sought the services of Thomas Bellows, the auctioneer.

“You may sell him out, plant, machinery, and all; reserve nothing,” Jarvis ordered; and, referring to his book of memoranda, added the date.

Another entry that he saw there met his sombre eyes. He stared at it frowningly.

“Anythin’ more in my line in the near future?” Mr. Bellows wanted to know.

He rubbed his hands as he asked the question. The Honorable Stephen Jarvis was, as he put it, “a stiddy customer and a good one,” being constantly in need of Mr. Bellows’ services.

“Yes,” said Jarvis, a dull red flush rising in his sallow face. “The contents of the Preston house, the stock, and implements, must be sold on June first.”

Mr. Bellows struck one hairy fist into the other by way of preface to his words. He was not afraid of Stephen Jarvis, being sufficiently well provided with worldly goods, albeit these were for the most part second-hand, and in the nature of left-overs from many auctions.

“It seems a pity,” quoth Bellows, “to sell her out. Couldn’t you wait till fall, say, and give the little Preston girl a chance? I ain’t what you might call soft m’self; but I’m blamed if I could help feelin’ sorry for the girl when she come in here one day last week t’ engage my professional services.”

“What is Miss Preston proposing to sell?” demanded Jarvis. Something in his voice gave Mr. Bellows a curious sensation. He gave Jarvis a sharp look as he answered.

“Nothing that belongs to you, I reckon.”

“Tell me what it is,” repeated Jarvis. “I’ll be the best judge of that,” His voice shook, and also the hand which held the leather book of fateful dates and occasions.

“I’m sorry; but I guess I can’t ’commodate you,” responded the other. “Perfessional etiquette, you know; in this ’ere case binding.”

“You have no right to refuse,” said Jarvis, and something of the real nature of his secret thoughts flared up in his eyes. “Everything that concerns Miss Preston concerns me.”

Mr. Bellows was puzzled.

“Meanin’, of course, that you hold the lien on her prop’ty,” he hazarded. “But you don’t”—and he paused to chuckle to himself—“hold no lien on what she’s propos in’ to sell to the highest bidder?”

“What do you mean?” demanded Jarvis.

His tone was menacing, and he fixed angry eyes, red from sleeplessness, on the old auctioneer.

“You’ll either explain yourself,” he said, “or—you’ll get no more business from me, to-day or any other day.”

Mr. Bellows expectorated violently in the general direction of the opposite wall.

“I ain’t,” he declared valiantly, “afeard of no threats, nor yet of nobody. But I’m goin’ to tell you, ’cause it’s you that’s drove her to it, an’ you’d ought to know what sort of girl she is. I had three-quarters of a notion to tell you anyhow, an’ I tol’ m’ wife so, when I found it was you that held the lien on her house an’ furniture. Business is business with me as well as any other man; but I’d be ashamed to drive a woman to the point of sellin’ herself.”

“Selling herself!” echoed Jarvis.

The observant eyes of Mr. Bellows were upon him, as he fell back a pace or two and strove to steady himself.

“That’s what I said. Yes, sir; she asked me right here in this shop to sell her at public auction. ‘I’ve lost everythin’,’ she says; ‘but I’ve got myself, an’ I’ll sell that, an’ pay what I owe.’”

“My God!” breathed Jarvis. “I—drove her to it!”

“You’re right, you did,” agreed Mr. Bellows.

“You can’t do it, man. I forbid it!”

“Oh, y’ do; do ye? Wall, I don’t see how you’re going to make out to prevent it. The girl’s got a right to herself, and I’ve got a right to——”

“I shall prevent it,” Jarvis interrupted fiercely. “It’s inhuman—uncivilized, monstrous!”

“Well, that’s the way it struck me—at first,” acquiesced Mr. Bellows; “but the way she put it up t’ me kind of won me over. She’s a takin’ sort of girl, kind o’ good-lookin’, an’ innercent. W’y, Lord bless you, she’s no more idee of the way a man—like you, for instance—might look at it than a child. She wants to work out—for a matter o’ four or five years, she says; an’ she thinks she c’n get some fool woman to bid twelve hunderd dollars spot cash fer bein’ sure of a hired girl all that time—‘W’y,’ I says to her, ‘you might up an’ die,’ ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘so might a horse; but folks hes to hev horses!’ I tell you she’s cute an’ bright, an’ I’m goin’ to sell her to the highest bidder, same’s I agreed to.”

Jarvis was silent for a long minute, his eyes fixed unseeingly on the miscellaneous collection of shabby and broken furniture in the rear of the shop.

“Is it to be a public sale?” he asked coolly.

“Well, as t’ that, I can’t rightly tell you. I left the advertisin’ o’ the goods, an’ the date o’ sale to the young lady. I reelly hope you will call it off. I s’pose you c’n easy fix things up so ’t she——”

“Did she ask you to tell me this?” demanded Jarvis suddenly. “Tell me the facts.”

“Did she ask me—to tell you?” echoed Mr. Bellows wonderingly. “You bet she didn’t! You wasn’t named betwixt us. I asked her who held the lien on her prop’ty, an’ she didn’t answer. Thought it was none o’ my business, likely. I suspicioned it was you, though. You get most of ’em around these parts.”

Jarvis made no reply. He closed the red leather book, slipped it into an inside pocket, then deliberately drew on his driving gloves.

“Can you tell me the date of this—this sale?” he asked.

“What you want t’ know for? Thinkin’ of puttin’ in a bid?” chuckled Mr. Bellows.

Jarvis gave him a terrible look.

“I’d advise you to keep still about this. Don’t attempt to interest anyone else in Miss Preston’s affairs. Do you hear?”

“I ain’t deef,” responded Mr. Bellows in an aggrieved voice. “‘N’ I don’t know’s I see what business ’tis of yours, anyhow. Mebbe she’ll get the money an’ pay you. ’Twouldn’t surprise me if she did. She’s bound she will, an’ where there’s a will there’s a way, I’ve heard tell.”

“The date, man; give me the date!”

“Seein’ I’ve told you so much, I s’pose you might as well know; the sale’s set for the eighteenth.”

“Where?”

“At her house.”

“And you’re actually going to—— No; she’ll never do it. She won’t be able to bring herself to it.”

“Wall, I’ll bet you ten dollars she will; d’ye take me?”

Jarvis turned without another word and left the place. He suddenly felt the need of the outdoor air. Barbara’s desperate expedient convinced him as no words of hers could have done of the hopelessness of his case. “She hates me,” he told himself; and for the first time he looked within for a reason for her aversion.

He drove slowly, his thoughts a mad whirl of fury and despair. For the first time he saw himself as he fancied he must look to her, a man past his first youth, cold, forbidding, harsh, unlovely. He perceived with a flash of prescience that she cared nothing for money, save as it signified the thing she held most dear; nothing for the position, power, and luxury for which he had sold his honor and his manhood. Stripped of these things, what must he appear in her eyes? A monster of selfishness and greed, no less; to be feared, detested, escaped by any means even to the sacrifice of brain and body. He groaned aloud in the scorching flame of his humiliation.

He told himself that he would go to her, beg her forgiveness, offer her all that she had asked for, and more. He would give her the farm free of all indebtedness. Then he realized, with sickening certainty, that she would not accept anything from him. He had told her that he was her master. To escape this slavery she was about to sell herself to another. The thought was insupportable. Even while he perceived her perfect ingenuousness and the practical realization of her own worth which lay beneath this fantastic and seemingly impossible plan of hers, he sensed its frightful danger. In order to attract bidders she would be forced to advertise her plans. Who would respond? Who would buy, and for what purpose?

He whipped his horse to a furious speed and soon reached his house. The newspapers, unread for days, were piled on a table near his desk. He seized one, turned to its advertising columns and rapidly reviewed their contents, then another, and another in rapid succession. At last his devouring eyes lighted and fastened upon a single paragraph, hidden among the miscellaneous advertisements where a puzzled proofreader had doubtless placed it:

“For Sale at Auction [he read]: A young woman in good health, able and willing to do housework and plain sewing; or could teach a little child and care for it, would like to secure a position with a respectable family for a term of years. Her services will be disposed of at private auction to the highest bidder, for a term of three, four, or five years. Please communicate with B., Telegram.”

Jarvis crushed the paper in his hands savagely, as though he would destroy the strange little appeal to an unfriendly world. Then he sought for and read it again, his eyes fixed and frowning.