After a few more days in the Morris chair; days during which he was idly contented when Margery was with him, and vaguely dissatisfied when she was not; Griswold was permitted to go below stairs, where he met, for the first time since the Grierson roof had given him shelter, the master of Mereside.

The little visit to Jasper Grierson's library was not prolonged beyond the invalid's strength; but notwithstanding its brevity there were inert currents of antagonism evolved which Margery, present and endeavoring to serve as a lightning-arrester, could neither ground nor turn aside.

For Griswold there was an immediate recrudescence of the unfavorable first impression gained at the Hotel Chouteau supper-table. He recalled his own descriptive formula struck out as a tag for the hard-faced, heavy-browed man at the end of the cafÉ table—"crudely strong, elementally shrewd, with a touch, or more than a touch, of the savage: the gray-wolf type"—and he found no present reason for changing the record.

Thus the convalescent debtor to the Grierson hospitality. And as for the Wahaskan money lord, it is to be presumed that he saw nothing more than a hollow-eyed, impractical story-writer (he had been told of the manuscript found in Griswold's hand-baggage), who chanced to be Margery's latest and least accountable fad.

Griswold took away from the rather constrained ice-breaking in the banker's library a renewed resolve to cut his obligation to Jasper Grierson as short as possible. How he should begin again the mordant struggle for existence was still an unsolved problem. Of the one-thousand-dollar spending fund there remained something less than half: for a few weeks or months he could live and pay his way; but after that.... Curiously enough, the alternative of another attack upon the plutocratic dragon did not suggest itself. That, he told himself, was an experiment tried and found wanting. But in any event, he must not outstay his welcome at Mereside; and with this thought in mind he crept down-stairs daily after the library episode, and would give Margery no peace because she would not let him go abroad in the town.

"Not to-day, but to-morrow," she said, finally, when there was no longer any good reason for denying him. "Wait until to-morrow, and if it's a fine day, I'll drive you in the trap."

"But why not to-day?" he complained.

"'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless'—what shall I say; patient, or guest, or—friend?" she laughed, garbling the quotation to fit the occasion.

"Shakespeare said 'child,'" he suggested mildly.

"And so shall I," she gibed—but the gibe itself was almost a caress. "Sometimes you remind me of an impatient boy who has been promised a peach and can't wait until it ripens. But if you must have a reason why I won't drive you this afternoon, you may. We are going to have a tiny little social function at Mereside this evening, and I want you to be fresh and rested for it."

"Oh, my dear Miss Margery!" protested the convalescent, reluctant to his finger-tips; "not to meet your friends! I am only your poor charity patient, and——"

"That will do," she declared, tyrannizing over him with a fine affectation of austere hostess-ship. "I say you are to come down-stairs this evening to meet a few of our friends. And you will come."

"Certainly, I shall come, if you wish it," he assented, remembering afresh his immense obligation; and when the time was ripe he made himself presentable and felt his way down the dimly lighted library stair, being minded to slip into the social pool by the route which promised the smallest splash and the fewest ripples.

It was a stirring of the Philistine in him that led him to prefigure weariness and banality in the prospect. Without in the least suspecting it, Griswold was a Brahmin of the severest sect on his social side; easily disposed to hold aloof and to criticise, and, as a man Eastern-bred, serenely assured that nothing truly acceptable in the social sense could come out of the Nazareth of the West.

For this cause he was properly humiliated when he entered the spacious double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was immediately able to lose himself—and any lingering trace of self-consciousness—in a company which, if appearances were to be trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map. Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; and Margery's greeting and welcome brought a grateful sense of relief and a certain recovery of self-possession for which, a few minutes earlier, he had thought there could be no possible Wahaskan demand.

"Thank you so much for coming down, and for resolving heroically not to be bored," she began brightly. "And now that you've made your little concession, I'll make mine. I sha'n't ask anything at all of you"—piling the cushions in the corner of a wide window-seat and making him sit down; "you are just to be an invalid this evening, you know, and you needn't meet any more people than you want to."

When she had patted the pillows into place and was gone to welcome still later comers, Griswold had a chance to look around him. The readjusting mechanism was still at work. Beyond question it was all very different, strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the piano, with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not in bad taste—on the contrary, they were in exceedingly good taste. Griswold smiled when he remembered that he had been looking forward to something suggesting a cross between a neighborhood tea-drinking and a church social. He was agreeably disappointed to find that the keynote was distinctly well-mannered, passably urban, undeniably conventional.

And the charming young hostess.... From his corner of the window-seat Griswold had a comprehensive view of the two great rooms, and beyond them through a pillared opening to the candle-lighted dining-room where the refreshments were served. Though the rooms were well filled, there was but a single personality pervading them for the eager student of types. Admitting that there were other women more beautiful, Griswold, groping always for the fitting figure and the apt phrase, told himself that Miss Grierson's crowning gift was an acute sense of the eternal harmonies; she was always "in character."

Hitherto he had known her only as his benefactress and the thoughtful caretaker for his comfort. But now, at this first sight of her in the broader social field, she shone upon and dazzled him. Admitting that the later charm might be subtly sensuous—he refused to analyze it too closely—it was undeniable that it warmed him to a newer and a stronger life; that he could bask in its generous glow like some hibernating thing of the wild answering to the first thrilling of the spring-tide. True, Miss Grierson bore little resemblance to any ideal of his past imaginings. She might even be the Aspasia to Charlotte Farnham's Saint Cecilia. But even so, was not the daughter of Axiochus well beloved of men and of heroes?

It was some little time afterward, and Jasper Grierson, stalking like a grim and rather unwilling master of ceremonies among his guests, had gruffly introduced three or four of the men, when Griswold gladly made room in the window-seat for his transformed and glorified mistress of the fitnesses. As had happened more than once before, her nearness intoxicated him; and while he made sure now that the charm was at least partly physical, its appeal was none the less irresistible.

"Are you dreadfully tired?" she asked; adding quickly: "You mustn't let us make a martyr of you. It's your privilege to disappear whenever you feel like it."

"Indeed, I'm not at all tired," he protested. "It is all very comforting and homelike; so vastly—" he hesitated, seeking thoughtfully for the word which should convey his meaning without laying him open to the charge of patronizing superciliousness, and she supplied it promptly.

"So different from what you were expecting; I know. You have been thinking of us as barbarians—outer barbarians, perhaps—and you find that we are only harmless provincials. But really, you know, we are improving. I wish you could have known Wahaska as it used to be."

"Before you took it in hand?" he suggested. "I can imagine it."

"Can you? I don't have to imagine it—I can remember: how we used to sit around the edges of the room behaving ourselves just as hard as ever we could, and boring one another to extinction. I'm afraid some of them do it yet, sometimes; but I won't let them do it here."

Once more Griswold let his gaze go at large through the stately rooms. He understood now. His prefigurings had not been so wide of the mark, after all. He had merely reckoned without his hostess.

"It is a miracle," he said, giving her full credit. "I'd like to ask how you wrought it, only I mustn't keep you from your duties."

She laughed joyously, with a little toss of the shapely head which was far more expressive than many words.

"I haven't any duties; I have taught them to amuse themselves. And they are doing it very creditably, don't you think?"

"They are getting along," he admitted. "But tell me: how did you go about it?"

"It was simple enough. When we came here we found a lot of good people who had fallen into the bad habit of boring one another, and a few who hadn't; but the few held themselves aloof. We opened our house to the many, and tried to show them that a church sewing-circle isn't precisely the acme of social enjoyment. That is all."

Griswold saw in his mind's eye a sharply etched picture of the rise and progress of a village magnate cleanly struck out in the two terse sentences, and his respect for his companion in the wide window-seat increased in just proportion. Verily, Miss Margery had imagination.

"It is all very grateful and delightful to me," he confessed, at length. "I have been out of the social running for a long time, but I may as well admit that I am shamelessly Epicurean by nature, and an ascetic only when the necessities drive."

"I know," she assented, with quick appreciation. "An author has to be both, hasn't he?—keen to enjoy, and well hardened to endure."

He turned upon her squarely.

"Where did you ever learn how to say such things as that?" he demanded.

It was an opening for mockery and good-natured raillery, but she did not make use of it. Instead, she let him look as deeply as he pleased into the velvety eyes when she said: "It is given to some of us to see and to understand where others have to learn slowly, letter by letter. Surely, your own gift has told you that, Mr. Griswold?"

"It has," he acknowledged. "But I have found few who really do understand."

"Which is to say that you haven't yet found your other self, isn't it? Perhaps that will come, too, if you'll only be patient—and not expect too many other gifts of the gods along with the one priceless gift of perfect sympathy."

"When I find the one priceless gift, I shall confidently expect to find everything else," he asserted, still held a willing prisoner by the bewitching eyes.

She laughed softly. "You'll be disappointed. The gift you demand will preclude some of the others; as the others would certainly preclude it. How can you be an author and not understand that?"

"I am not an author, I am sorry to say," he objected. "I have written but the one book, and I have never been able to find a publisher for it."

"But you are not going to give up?"

"No; I am going to rewrite the book and try again—and yet again, if needful. It is my message to mankind, and I mean to deliver it."

"Bravo!" she applauded, clapping her hands in a little burst of enthusiasm which, if it were not real, was at least an excellent simulation. "It is only the weak ones who say, 'I hope.' For the truly strong hearts there is only the one battle-cry, 'I will!' When you get blue and discouraged you must come to me and let me cheer you. Cheering people is my mission, if I have any."

Griswold's pale face flushed and the blood sang liltingly in his veins. He wondered if she had been tempted to read the manuscript of the book while he was fighting his way back to consciousness and life. If they had been alone together, he would have asked her. The bare possibility set all the springs of the author's vanity upbubbling within him. There and then he promised himself that she should hear the rewriting of the book, chapter by chapter. But what he said was out of a deeper, and worthier, underthought.

"You have many missions, Miss Margery: some of them you choose, and some are chosen for you."

"No," she denied; "nobody has ever chosen for me."

"That may be true, without making me a false prophet. Sometimes when we think we are choosing for ourselves, chance chooses for us; oftener than not, I believe."

She turned on him quickly, and for a single swiftly passing instant the velvety eyes were deep wells of soberness with an indefinable underdepth of sorrow in them. Griswold had a sudden conviction that for the first time in his knowing of her he was looking into the soul of the real Margery Grierson.

"What you call 'chance' may possibly have a bigger and better name," she said, gravely. "Had you ever thought of that?"

"Give it any name you please, so long as you admit that it is something beyond our control," he conceded.

As had happened more than once before, she seemed to be able to read his inmost thought.

"You are thinking of the chain of incidents that brought you here? It is only the details that have 'happened.' You meant to come to Wahaska; you were carrying out a definite purpose of your own that night in St. Louis when you took your ticket. And coming here, sooner or later you would have found your way to this house—to a seat on these cushions. I could tell you more, but my prophetic soul warns me that Agatha Severance is protesting to Mr. Wamble that she can't possibly play the particular song he is asking for without the music. I'm going to convince her that she can."

Some little time after this, Raymer, who had been one of the men introduced by Jasper Grierson, turned up again in the invalid's corner.

"Sit down, won't you?" said Griswold, making a move to share the cushions with the young ironmaster; and it was thus that the door to a friendship was opened. Farther on, when they had gotten safely beyond the commonplaces, Raymer suggested the smoking-room and a cigar, and Griswold went willingly.

"I was wondering if you were like me in that, Mr. Raymer," he said. "I never feel properly acquainted with a man until I have smoked with him."

"Or with a woman until she has made a cup of tea for you?" laughed the native. "That is Miss Margery's try-out. She has taught us the potentialities that lie in a cup of tea well brewed and skilfully sweetened."

From that on, the path to better acquaintance was the easiest of short-cuts, even as the mild cigar which Raymer found in his pocket-case paved the way for a return of the smoker's zest in the convalescent. Without calling himself a reformer, the young ironmaster proved to be a practical sociologist. Wherefore, when Griswold presently mounted his own sociological hobby, he was promptly invited to visit the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, to the end that he might have some of his theories of the universal oppression of wage-earners charitably modified.

"Of course, I don't deny that we're a long way from the Millennium, yet," was Raymer's summing up of the conditions in his own plant. "But I do claim that we are on a present-day, living footing. So far as the men understand loyalty, they are loyal; partly to my father's memory; partly, I hope, to me. We have never had a strike or an approach to one, or a disagreement that could not be adjusted amicably. Whether these conditions can be maintained after we double our capacity and get in a lot of new blood, I can't say. But I hope they can."

"You are enlarging?" said Griswold.

Raymer waited until the only other man in the smoking-den had gone back to the drawing-rooms before he said: "Yes; I caught the fever along with the rest of them a few weeks ago, and I'm already beginning to wish that I hadn't."

"You are afraid of the market?"

"N-no; times are good, and the market—our market, at least—is daily growing stronger. It is rather a matter of finances. I am an engineer, as my father was before me. When it comes to wrestling with the money devil, I'm outclassed from the start."

"There are a good many more of us in the same boat," said Griswold, leaving an opening for further confidences if Raymer chose to make them. But the young ironmaster was looking at his watch, and the confidences were postponed.

"I'm keeping you up, when I daresay you ought to be in bed," he protested; but Griswold held him long enough to ask for a suggestion in a small matter of his own.

Now that he was able to be about, he was most anxious to relieve Miss Grierson and her father of the charge and care of one whose obligation to them was already more than mountain-high: did Raymer happen to know of some quiet household where the obligated one could find lodging and a simple table?

Raymer, taking time to think of it, did know. Mrs. Holcomb, the widow of his father's bookkeeper, owned her own house in Shawnee Street. It was not a boarding-house. The widow rented rooms to two of Mr. Grierson's bank clerks, and she was looking for another desirable lodger. Quite possibly she would be willing to board the extra lodger. Raymer, himself, would go and see her about it.

"It is an exceedingly kind-hearted community this home town of yours, Mr. Raymer," was the convalescent's leave-taking, when he shook hands with the ironmaster at the foot of the stairs; and that was the thought which he took to bed with him after Raymer had gone to make his adieux to the small person who, in Griswold's reckoning, owned the kindest of the kind hearts.