There is that which works secretly (call it what you will), everywhere transmuting the ugly into the beautiful, the seeming evil into acknowledged good, the mean and worthless into the rare and precious; moving upon the face of vasty deeps, upon inchoate planets; toiling in unknowable abysses, whirling in star-dust and nebulÆ, and no less in the veiled darkness of the holiest place—the soul of man. And here, indeed, this pervasive life principle, this informing Mind, this toiling servant of universes and men (call it what you will), seeks chiefly to manifest its supernal powers. Give it entrance in any fashion; open to it the smallest crevice; entertain its mysterious presence ever so briefly, and in that lodgment it begins at once its wonder-working transmutations. For observe: this unseen, and often unsuspected, worker takes of the common things of life, of its base and ignoble things and turns them into shapes of imperishable beauty. And observe, also: this is accomplished without tumult of manufacture; neither smoke of his burning furnace, nor clang of hammer, nor noise of breaking stone is heard, though one listen with the fine ear of the magician in the fable. And observe for a third time (for all of this has to do with the tale that is told): that the blind desire of the one who is thus wrought upon in some mysterious fashion relates itself to the will of Him who works, so that they are in a way one and indissoluble. For such is the law of growth in all the universe, and such will it ever be.

To Stephen Jarvis, pursuing to all outward appearance the even tenor of a way long trodden, came slight intimation of the changes in himself—the self deep submerged beneath the surface of everyday life. He still loaned money on bond and mortgage, exacting, as was his custom, the highest legal rate of interest. As in the past, he looked sharply after his investments, foreclosing when foreclosure had become due and inevitable, and manipulating such conservative purchases of stocks and bonds as his accumulating capital appeared to require. He was conscious of but one thing, and that was that these procedures no longer afforded him pleasure. They were, on the contrary, in the nature of labor. After a little, the labor became grinding in its demands upon him. Gradually, too, he found that the heavy looks and sad faces of certain of his debtors had the power to hurt him. One day he actually yielded to the importunities of a poor widow, not openly, indeed, but through a trusted agent of his, restoring to her the home she had lost. Once indulged, this folly (as he called it), grew upon him stealthily. More and more frequently he found himself giving; still secretly, because in his mind giving still appeared to him a despicable weakness. Yet he continued to impart (where he must) with that keen discrimination and sound judgment which had always distinguished his operations in finance. As yet no one suspected him. To have incurred a suspicion of benevolence would have shamed him little less than a well-founded conjecture of crime on the part of those who had always known him.

Nevertheless, he who runs may read the legible handwriting of God on the faces of men. The cold, immobile features of the grasping money-getter changed subtly, as was indeed inevitable, into something more human; his eyes looked out from beneath his sternly modelled brows as keenly as ever, yet in their very penetration there was a veiled light not visible before.

Perhaps the creature who might have told the most unbelievable story of the change in Stephen Jarvis was his horse. He no longer drove under the lash and with the cowardly curb-bit. He simply did not care any longer for the sensation afforded by beating down an inferior intelligence with his own brute force. No other reason for this particular change in his habits had as yet occurred to him. He still used fast horses; but he ceased to abuse them.

Nearly two months had elapsed since his last visit to the Preston farm. On that occasion he had entreated Barbara not to shame him before the crowd assembled for the auction; and she had refused to listen. Then he had gone away. Something of what followed had been repeated to him. And since he had learned of the return of David Whitcomb from the West; of his spectacular part in the bidding, and of his subsequent visits to the farm.

It was of David he was thinking as he drove along the country roads on a day in early August. The fields were yellowing to the harvest and a great peace lay upon the face of Nature, veiled lightly with the long continued heat. When, therefore, he overtook the object of his thoughts walking along the dusty road with every appearance of discomfort, he drew up his horse and spoke to him.

“I haven’t seen you to speak with you, since your return, Mr. Whitcomb,” he said civilly. “Won’t you get in and ride with me? I shall be glad to—talk with you.”

David stared with undisguised astonishment; then a derisive gleam shone in his blue eyes.

“Why—er—certainly, Mr. Jarvis,” he said, and sprang in and seated himself with cool assurance. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask you for a ride,” he went on, “but I’m not sorry you offered to give me a lift. It’s deucedly unpleasant walking.”

Jarvis met his inquiring look gravely.

“You are making quite a stay in the East,” he said. “Do you mean to settle here?”

The quick blood rose in David’s face.

“I haven’t made up my mind,” he said. “I’m—er—just looking around a bit.”

Jarvis was silent, casting about in his mind for a suitable opening for what he wished to say.

David spared him the trouble. With his usual sensitiveness to the moods of his companions—a sensitiveness which at times amounted almost to divination—he looked sidewise at Jarvis, a smile wrinkling the corners of his eyes.

“I’ve been to see Miss Preston,” he said confidentially, “at the farm.”

“Yes?” Jarvis observed non-committally.

“You know Miss Preston, I believe?” said David.

Jarvis hesitated.

“I have had business relations with Miss Preston,” he said coolly. He was beginning to feel an exceeding dislike of the well-dressed, smiling young man at his side.

“Yes,” agreed David, shrugging his shoulders. “she’s mentioned the fact to me.”

Jarvis tightened his grasp on the reins after his old choleric fashion, and the mare leaped forward as if expecting the cut of the ready lash.

“I understand Miss Preston has been relieved of—her anxieties somewhat,” he said evenly. “I—was glad to know it.”

David’s lip curled.

“Indeed!” he syllabled with a touch of insolence. “Well, I’ve no doubt Barbara—Miss Preston—will be duly grateful, when—er—I mention the fact of your interest in her affairs.”

“You’ll not mention it, I hope,” Jarvis said. After a brief silence he added, “You understand me, of course.”

“Well, no,” drawled David. “I don’t believe I do.”

He looked whimsically at Jarvis, as if expecting further elucidation.

But the older man was paying strict attention to his horse, his lips set in forbidding lines.

David yielded to one of his sudden impulses.

“Of course,” he burst out; “you won’t care; you’ve got your money out of it; but Barbara is deucedly unhappy.”

“Ah?”

Jarvis’s note of interrogation was barely audible.

“You know, I suppose, for it’s become town-talk long ago, that somebody bid her in—a thundering shame I call it—and then failed to show up. She considers herself bound, since she used the money—or part of it. I’d like mighty well to get hold of the person, male or female, who’s skulking behind the contract—as she persists in regarding it.”

“Why? What’s wrong with the transaction?”

Jarvis’s tone asked for information merely, but David flashed a suspicious look at him.

“Do you know anything about it?” he demanded.

“Do I—know anything about Miss Preston’s affairs?” echoed Jarvis. “Isn’t that a singular question for you to put to me?”

“It would be, if I hadn’t run every possible scent to earth already. I want to find the fellow.”

“For what purpose?” queried Jarvis, leaning forward to watch the even play of his mare’s hoofs.

“I want to pay him back and free the girl. It’s a damned outrage to hold a woman bound in this sneaking, secret fashion. It doesn’t give either of us any show.”

Jarvis appeared to ponder this statement in silence for a while.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said, at last.

“There’s no ‘perhaps’ about it,” said David excitedly. “Of course I’m right! Here I’ve been hanging about for months, waiting for the person—whoever it is—to show up. I’m ready to settle the business by paying back the money.”

He met the other’s sharply inquiring look with a boastful grimace.

“I can do it; don’t make any mistake on that score!”

“And after you’ve made the transfer; what then?”

Jarvis’s tone was icy; his eyes searched the handsome, flushed face at his side mercilessly.

David met his gaze readily enough.

“Why,” he blustered, “you may as well know: I intend to marry Barbara. I’d do it, anyway; contract or no contract, and let that damned dog in the manger gnaw his bone till he’s tired of it; only Barbara—Miss Preston—objects. She’s like all women—sticks at a trifle, and yet is ready to swallow the earth, if you give ’em a chance.”

“Miss Preston doubtless supposes that her honor is involved. I can conceive that she might do so. A trifle, I believe you called it. And if you——”

“Oh, come; what’s the use of talking like that!” David interrupted impatiently. “I’m sick of all that sort of nonsense.” He pulled his hat over his eyes and stared morosely at the landscape. “If I didn’t care as much about the girl as I do, I’d cut the whole thing and go west again. This is no place for a man like me.”

“I’m disposed to agree with you,” observed Jarvis calmly. “Shall I set you down here?”

David recognized his surroundings with a start. They had reached the outskirts of the village, and Jarvis had stopped his horse in front of his own house.

“Oh, I may as well get out here, I suppose,” he said sullenly.

He turned and lifted his hat to Jarvis, with a sweeping bow.

“Much obliged for the delightful ride,” he said, with a sneering upward quirk of the mouth.

Jarvis sat motionless in his carriage watching the easy swing of the arrogantly youthful figure, as it passed down the street. He saw David go in at the front entrance of the Barford Eagle, yet still he sat silent, his brows drawn over brooding eyes.

His man, lounging in front of the stables, caught sight of the waiting equipage, and hurried down the driveway.

“Any orders, sir?” he asked. “Shall I take the horse, sir?”

Jarvis glanced at the man, something of his old irritability flaring up in his look.

“No,” he said shortly. “I’m not coming in now.”

He spoke sharply to his horse, turned abruptly, and drove rapidly away, past the pollarded willows, over the echoing bridge, and on into the country road beyond, muffled with the accumulated dust of a rainless midsummer. Presently he reached and passed the stone gateway of the Preston farm, and its orchards laden with unripe fruit. He looked at both with the sombre, unseeing intentness of a man who is at war with his deeper instincts.

He had been prepared, he supposed, to judge Whitcomb fairly; but his late brief interview with his successful rival had left him bitterly antagonistic to the younger man. David’s very physical beauty infuriated him. He recalled the level glances of his blue eyes, the curve of his lips, the carriage of his handsome head upon his broad shoulders, with a sense of blind, barbaric anger. His frequent references to Barbara, his cool assumption of triumph, his braggart self-assertion, his open disdain of concealment—all were abhorrent, intolerable to Jarvis. But none the less, he fought with and subdued himself.

“I am unjust,” he told himself flatly, “because I am jealous.”

And he despised himself the more, because recognizing the patent fact he still hated David; still longed to fling him out of his path as he had flung many a stronger man in the past. For the first time in all the years of his life he had become dimly aware of the beauty of self-sacrifice, and of its relations to a pure and true affection. Even while the primal man within foamed under his iron grip, he compelled himself to think tenderly of Barbara, of her loveless youth, of her loneliness, of her heroism. Then he remembered with shame his own persecutions of her woman’s weakness; for so it had come to look to him now. He recalled his brutal insistence, his threats, his unrelenting hardness, sparing himself in nothing, compelling his memory to flash before him every picture which contained them both.

He had travelled many miles before he roused to a realization of the lateness of the hour. The long summer twilight had fallen, like a roseate veil, over the rich landscape; the shadows had disappeared with the sun, and the great disk of a silver moon swam in the rosy light reflected from the sunset, which by now burned in crimson and amber splendors behind the misty purple of the hills.

His horse appeared jaded and weary, and Jarvis recalled vaguely that he had been driving at his old furious rate of speed. He leaned back against the cushions with a sigh, conscious of his own exceeding weariness, and allowed the mare to take her own gait. Out of the seething alembic of his thoughts had crystallized a single definite resolution. He would deal with Whitcomb as that son of God who was called Satan was permitted to deal with Job, and later with the recalcitrant apostle. He would sift David as wheat in the close-meshed sieve of his own love for Barbara. He would scrutinize his past, he would examine his present; he would hold him under the lens of purity, of probity, of honor. If Whitcomb stood the test, Jarvis swore by all that he held holy that he would stand back and allow him to marry the woman both loved. If not,—his strong fingers unconsciously tightened on the reins, and the obedient mare quickened her pace.

There was a light twinkling among the dark trees when at last Jarvis again passed the big apple-farm. He got down from his buggy, fastened the horse to a tree, and walked quietly toward the house. The long French windows stood open to the breeze, and within the lamp-lighted room Jarvis caught sight of Barbara. She was sitting close to the table reading aloud; at her side, leaning his yellow head against her knee, sat Jimmy, serious and intent. Barbara’s pleasant voice rang out in the stillness:

“Through all the pleasant meadow-side
The grass grew shoulder high,
Till the shining scythes went far and wide
And cut it down to dry.”

“That’s haying,” observed Jimmy, with satisfaction. “Ours is all in the barn now.”

“Yes,” said Barbara, “listen:

“Those green and sweetly smelling crops
They led in wagons home;
And they piled them here in mountain tops
For mountaineers to roam.
O, what a joy to clamber there,
O, what a place for play,
With the sweet, the dim, the dusty air,
The happy hills of hay!”

Jarvis stepped boldly to the piazza, and tapped on the open sash.

“I guess it’s David!” he heard the child say joyously. And saw the quick blush that rose to Barbara’s cheek.

The blood sprang to his own temples and hammered furiously there for an instant as he looked at her in her diaphanous white dress. Then he entered at her quiet bidding.

“I was passing, and it occurred to me to stop, and—see you,” he said awkwardly.

Jimmy had retreated behind his sister’s chair and was gazing at him with frowning intentness. Manifestly the child was disappointed. Whitcomb would fit into the scene far better than himself, Jarvis was forced to acknowledge. He saw the wonderment in Barbara’s eyes, and mingled with it he fancied he could detect cold dislike and fear.

“You were reading,” he said, his eyes lingering on the hands which held the thin blue volume. “Won’t you——” He hesitated; then went on boldly: “Don’t stop because I am here.”

She would have turned over the leaves and read other pretty trifles if it had been David instead of himself, he thought bitterly. He waited for a cold refusal.

“You wouldn’t like ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses,’” Jimmy said unexpectedly. He had not removed his inquiring brown eyes from Jarvis’s face. Something that he saw there emboldened him. “It’s for little boys, littler than I am; but I like it.”

Jarvis smiled, the singular smile new to his lips and of which he was not at all aware, any more than of the elemental changes in himself.

“Perhaps I’d like it, too,” he said. “Nobody ever reads out loud to me.”

“Read the one about the wind, Barb’ra,” urged Jimmy. “The wind and the kites. I like that.”

Barbara turned over the pages slowly.

“Shall I?” she asked Jarvis.

Her eyes lingered irresolutely on his face for an instant. It was evident that she was wondering at the sight of him there, pale and grave, but with an unfamiliar gentleness in his eyes and about his unsmiling lips.

“If you will,” he said.

Read Barbara:

“I saw you toss the kites on high
And blow the birds about the sky
And all around I heard you pass,
Like ladies’ skirts across the grass—
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
I saw the different things you did,
But always you yourself you hid,
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all—
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!”

Her voice, flowing on like a brook over pebbles, fell to a sudden silence, as the wind of which she had been reading entered with a sudden rush, veering the yellow flame of the lamp to one side.

Jimmy laughed joyously.

“It’s come in here,” he said, turning a sleepily roguish face upon Jarvis, “to hear what you’re saying, Barb’ra.”

She closed the book and laid it quietly upon the table.

“You must go to bed now, Jimmy,” she said.

The little boy whispered in her ear, his hands clasped about her neck. Her arm stole about his small body as she bent her head to listen. Jarvis watched the two hungrily—the child and the woman, and the eternal, unfading beauty of the picture smote him with almost intolerable poignancy. All that was best in life he had missed, blunderingly, blindly, and for what?

“I go to bed all by myself now,” the little boy said proudly.

He walked toward the door; then turned, hesitated, and flung himself upon Barbara.

“I guess I’d better kiss you good-night, Barb’ra,” he cried. “Just think, I pretty near forgot!”

He beamed shyly upon Jarvis.

“Shall I shake hands with you?” he inquired, with a friendly little smile. “I b’lieve I’d like to.”

Jarvis held out his hand and Jimmy laid his own in it gravely. Barbara stirred uneasily in her chair.

“Jimmy, dear!” she murmured softly, deprecatingly.

“I never s’posed I’d be shakin’ hands wiv you,” the child went on calmly. “Did you drive that short-tailed horse?”

“Yes,” said Jarvis, something swelling strangely within him as he looked down into the upturned face of the child, with its candid brown eyes.

“What made you cut his tail off?” demanded Jimmy. “Peg says it’s a mean trick to cut off horses’ tails, ’cause they need their tails to brush off the flies.”

“Jimmy!” called Barbara again, her face crimsoning.

“I didn’t cut it off,” Jarvis replied, with every evidence of sincerity. “I bought the horse just that way. I don’t like it myself.”

He glanced at Barbara with a quiet smile.

“I’m afraid I’m very much in the way,” he said. “But I wanted to talk with you—on a matter of some importance.”