"This was the time the Divil was goin' through Athlone," John McQuade announced, giving the explanation before the fact.

"I remember," Wardwell agreed politely. "He went through 'in standing leaps.'"

McQuade and Jimmie were telling lies in a corner of the sugar house.

It was the first "sugaring off" of the season. McQuade's three sons and two hired men had been in the camp ten days now, breaking roads through the settling snow, scalding out sap buckets and boiling pans, and tapping trees. Jimmie and Augusta, in wonder and ignorance, had watched the men going from tree to tree with augers, boring out a hole in each, into which they drove the wooden spout, and hung the tin bucket beneath. They stood among the bare trees on a southerly slope of the hills where the late March sun of a lovely morning beat warm and strong, and they saw a miracle.

Neither of them had more than half believed that sap would actually run from trees that stood stark and apparently dead. But, as they stood there feeling the drawing warmth of the sun in their own veins, it happened. In the breathless hush of the morning a single drop from a tree near them struck upon the resounding bottom of the dry bucket like the stroke of a little bell. It was a signal.

Up and down the sunny slope another and another and a hundred other echoes of the little bell rang out until the many sounds merged themselves into a single tinkling chorus, and the sap of earth was running free! Mother nature was not dead. She had slept, and now she was stirring to feed the hungry world. Jimmie and Augusta looked at each other half shyly, as though they had spied upon a Mystery.

That was four days ago, and since then, all day long, the deliberate, unworried oxen had wallowed belly deep through the melting snow, only approximately responsive to excited shouts of "jee" and "haw," dragging on the rough low sledges the hogsheads into which the men emptied the buckets of sap from the trees. Night and day the great brick furnace that ran full length down the middle of the sugar house had roared. Jimmie and Augusta had kept open fire in the front of it during the bitterest of the winter, and Jimmie had many times complained that his back was broken carrying wood for it. But where he had carried armfuls, the furnace now demanded cords. It raced and danced and panted in a furious race with the running sap, for the sap must be boiled down to syrup almost as fast as it ran.

Already they had seen the dark, thick syrup poured into the cans and sealed. And having eaten of it, Jimmie and Augusta, used to the article that is sold in bottles in our cities as pure maple syrup, wondered what must become of this kind which they had now tasted. For certainly nobody that they had ever known had been rich enough to buy any of it.

But they had seen what they were told were the best batches of the syrup put aside for the "sugaring off." The term meant nothing to either of them, for they had never heard of it before. But the constant reference to it and the careful timing of everything that went on in the camp with a sole regard for this event soon made them look towards it as eagerly as if they had been a sugar hungry boy and girl in the camp waiting for nothing but the great day. Today McQuade had come for the event. And with him had come Fan McQuade, his wife. She was a tall, slender woman, unmistakably a daughter of women who a hundred years ago and more trailed from Vermont over into our North Country. There was strength and unspent beauty in her face, and in spite of the argument of her three mighty sons she seemed entirely too young to be a mate for John McQuade. Her face was grave and there was a thrifty tidiness about her person and her speech that made you wonder how she had ever come to marry a man like McQuade.

Of course, twenty years after the fact, you have the same wonder as to why almost any woman married her particular man. And most of them will tell you, in what they think are moments of truth telling, that they quarreled with the right man, and just took this one for spite. All of which is probably just as true—and no more so—as it is true that distant fields are greener than the ones we are treading now.

But Augusta did wonder, on sight, how this grave faced woman had given herself to the happy-go-lucky young greenhorn that John McQuade probably had been twenty-five years ago. She wondered, until she heard Fan McQuade laugh. It was a surprised, and surprising, burst of pure merriment, beginning with a startled chuckle and ringing out into a clear peal of sheer joy in fun. Then Augusta understood it all. This girl of a sober race was not herself a fun maker, but she loved to be made laugh. McQuade had made her laugh. And he had then blarneyed his way into her heart, past religious and racial and temperamental differences and barriers that would have stopped a thoughtful man.

However, Augusta reflected, it must have been well with them, for McQuade was still able to make his Fan laugh. She laughed now as she overheard the unfolding of McQuade's tale to Jimmie. "The Divil was lookin' for a man by the name of Barney McGonigle," McQuade stated gravely, while Wardwell listened with the professional interest and envy of a brother artist.

"Now, this man McGonigle, as I understand it, was a man with a weakness. 'Twas known that he tasted spirits. He had been drunk for two weeks. At the latter end of that time, as luck would have it, he was a little bit wide of his bearings. He wandered into an Orange Lodge.

"The stairway going up to the Lodge room was guarded with a drawn sword, of course. But McGonigle came down. He'd been resting on the roof of the place.

"When McGonigle came in the Lodge was on its feet and they were in the solemn act of repeating three times: 'To hell with the Pope.'

"There was some little excitement when McGonigle came in without knockin', and he was fairly on his way to being thrown through the window before the Grand Master could rap for order.

"There was but one of two things to be done. Either McGonigle must be killed outright. Or he must repeat: 'To hell with the Pope,' as they did.

"McGonigle bein' an agreeable man be nature, an' his principles bein' far demoralized in drink, agreed to say it.

"Had they watched him closer they might have seen that he stopped a little before the last word.

"But, after all, McGonigle was a good neighbor, and, barrin' the Seventeenth of March an' the Twelvth of July, a good friend. Along with that, he was the only journeyman farrier in the town. I misdoubt they were only too glad to have him say it any way at all, and be rid of him.

"When McGonigle came down past the drawn sword into the sunshine he was thirsty, for water. He went down to the lough, thinkin' to drink at least the half of it.

"In the middle of the first dhrink, the Divil leapt down to the brink of the lough and stood forninst McGonigle.

"'A word with you, Misther McGonigle,' says the Divil, polite, but firm.

"McGonigle lifted one eye from his dhrinkin' and saw the Divil confrontin him in the shape of a big black horse with saddle and stirrups on him, but no bridle.

"'I need me breath for me dhrinkin',' says McGonigle.

"'Nevertheless,' says the Divil.

"'Gluggle, gluggle, gluggle,' says McGonigle, taking another pull at the lough.

"With that, the Divil lost his temper, an' he stamped an' he lepped till he shook the whole town, an' he shook all the impudence out of poor McGonigle.

"'Get on me back,' commands the Divil.

"An' poor McGonigle, with the courage of the whiskey dead in him, an his belly squishin' full o' lake water, had no more gumption than to do as he was bid.

"Then it was that the Divil went bumping through Athlone in standin' lepps, as you've heard. He was tryin' to frighten McGonigle, for he was not sure whether he had him truly in his power.

"'Ye said it,' accused the Divil, boundin' high around a sharp corner.

"'I said what?' demands McGonigle circumstantial. He knew right well that the Divil would never dare repeat the Orangemen's invocation. For McGonigle in his sober moments was a well read man, and, with a moderate amount of dhrink in him, he was a theologian.

"'Come now, Barney me boy,' says the Divil, wheedlin' snarefully, 'ye said it, an' ye know ye said it, an' I know ye said it. So where's the use o' denyin'?' "'I said,' says McGonigle, speakin' careful an' precise—'To be sure I said part of it under me breath, but I said it—I said: 'To hell with the Anti-pope'.'

"Now the Anti-pope, as you must know," McQuade explained, "the Anti-pope was the Divil himself.

"Then there was a too-ru! The Divil was that mad that he stood still and lepped straight up an' down. An' he was so enraged at McGonigle that he got his foot up into the stirrup beside McGonigle's, as though he was tryin' to come up at him.

"'Glory be!' says McGonigle, lookin' down between prayers. 'Look at the Omadhon tryin' to get on his own back!'

"But, as McGonigle looked down he saw things. He was an expert farrier, an' he knew that that was no proper foot for a right horse. And, at this point, he was enough of a theologian to remember that once a man sees the Divil's cloven hoof he is not lost yet.

"An still the Divil raged, an' stamped, an' struggled with his foot up in the stirrup.

"'That'll do,' says McGonigle, polite but hasty, as he threw his leg free over the saddle, to jump. 'There's no room here for two. If you're goin' to get on, I'm goin' to get off!'"

The youngest of the McQuade boys came and laid a pan of clean packed snow on the table in front of his mother. This was part of the essential rites of the sugaring off. The boys had, of course, barometers and modern polarization tests which told them scientifically when the heavy syrup, the concentration of many boilings of sap, was sufficiently boiled down so that when allowed to cool rapidly it would solidify into a clear brittle cake with a polarization of over ninety-five. Fan McQuade believed in all these things as fully as did her sons. She lived with her boys and never allowed anything in their business, or in new ways of doing old work, to get beyond her. But she—and they too—still trusted her own test as to when a boiling of sugar was ready to set properly.

So, when their thermometer and barometer showed them that the proper point of condensation had been reached, the boys came with a dipper and poured the boiling sugar before her on the smooth surface of the pan of snow. Then they stood gravely around and watched while the long criss-crossed tendrills of sugar which had been made in the pouring hardened over the face of the snow.

Fan McQuade took a little white paddle of polished maple, as hard almost as a piece of steel, and began tapping gently at the hardening, waxy bars of sugar. As the thin tendrils of sugar stiffened into long crystals she struck harder, and they could hear a ringing from them like the twang of distant skates on ice. Then, as the sugar hardened to full brittleness the bars began to break stiffly under her sharp blows, and then to crack and snap and fly apart like live things.

Fan McQuade and her three sons nodded together in solemn appreciation. Science and tradition were for once agreed. They had caught the perfect boiling off point. And the boys rushed away to pour off the contents of the huge boiling pan into the cooling tins.

Now it was McQuade's time to bestir himself as host.

From the dark outside he brought in other pans of clean frozen snow, which he had carefully prepared against this moment. He laid the pans and paddles about the table and inviting everybody to choose a pan of snow he went to bring the wax syrup. To the unitiated it looked like a bare banquet, a pan of snow and a paddle. But the eating of "wax" is the one feast that requires neither condiment nor foil.

"This," said McQuade, settling himself behind a huge pan of wax, "is the one time when I can understand this making of sugar. All the rest of the year I think of these groves of idle trees,—there's nothing in the world so idle as a maple tree—and every one of them worth a pocketful of money, and I wonder at Fan's lack of business sense. Why doesn't she cut the timber down?"

He spoke of her impersonally, as though she might have been, perhaps, a neighbor at home in the next county.

"But," he concluded, "when I sit down with a pan of wax in me arms I can understand it all. She keeps the trees doing nothing the year 'round just to furnish her her pan of wax. And, like the good Yankee that she is, she has all the better of the bargain, at that."

"Hear him!" his wife retorted. "And if I dared to have as much as one live tree of these groves cut down he'd go crazy. I think he's a heathen pagan. I think he comes up in the summer to worship in the groves like the old people did in the Bible."

"They were high thinkin' people, I take it," said McQuade, ready for contention. "But the times were against them."

"I wonder," said Fan McQuade slyly. "Or were they leaving behind a good hard job of haying or something when they ran off up into the groves for their sacrifices?"

"That's right!" complained McQuade. "Go on and tell all the neighbors about me and disgrace me! These two young people don't think bad enough about me. The first time they laid eyes on me they thought I was a bank robber, at the very politest."

Augusta and Jimmie laughed happily over the memory of that amazing evening when they had first seen McQuade, and Augusta was starting to tell Mrs. McQuade about their awakening the morning after, while at the same time she was mechanically prodding about in the snow with her paddle to pick up more wax. She looked down, surprised and disbelieving. McQuade had given her a helping of wax so big that she had not believed that she could eat a quarter of it. And, without thinking or stopping, she had eaten up every bit of it. And she was hungry for more.

She looked up in horror, and exclaimed confusedly:

"I beg everybody's pardon. I never piggied anything up so in my life!"

"Don't apologize, dear," said Fan McQuade, smiling down into Augusta's burning face. "We'd've been disappointed if you hadn't done just as you did. I always distrust people who don't forget themselves when they first eat sugar wax. I think there must be something wrong with them."

Wardwell, who had done exactly as his wife had done, had not even the grace to look guilty. With deliberate optimism, he was making a hopeful estimate on how many times he could repeat the performance.

McQuade was in no wise perturbed.

"Take breath, and we'll begin again fair. It's the one thing," he explained, as he started away to bring more, "that you can take too much of to-night, and wake up wantin' more in the mornin'."

On his way to the fire he was stopped by the sound of singing from outside. A loud, defiant voice broke in above the panting of the furnace, inquiring lustily:

"Where, Oh, where, are the vi-shuns of morning?"

A determined knocking on the door punctuated the song. And then the voice answered its own question laconically:

"Gone like the flow-ers that bloom in the Spring time."

"Jethniah Gamblin's warble!" exclaimed McQuade gleefully, skipping to the door. The door had to be kept bolted on account of the heavy draught of the furnace, so, when McQuade opened it quickly, the stout figure of the postmaster was fairly propelled toward the middle of the floor, while his hat, blown from his head by the force of the draught, made a bee line for the bottom door of the furnace. Wardwell sprang to the rescue, but the old man, with a whoop and a most surprising show of agility, swooped down on the hat as it was about disappearing into the furnace and came up jamming it triumphantly upon his head.

"Just like a post in the mud!" he announced.

McQuade came back from his struggle with the door, and made him welcome.

"Sit in, Jethniah, sit in. Ye know the folks here, and yer as welcome as the flowers ye were sing-songin' about."

Jethniah said "How-dye-do" to everybody and found a place for himself beside Wardwell.

He said nothing, nor was anyone tactless enough to ask him, as to what desperate or devious means he had used in accomplishing his liberty for the evening. But, as he settled his short, fat arms around the pan of snow which McQuade had brought him, there was apparent around his mouth a fine cat-and-canary smile that had its own meaning for every one of his observers.

"I just smelt the sugaring, and invited myself," he explained officially to Fan McQuade.

"I'm sure we would have missed you sincerely," said the hostess earnestly. "But I think John trusted your instincts, for I'm pretty sure he was expecting you to-night."

McQuade came back and criss-crossed everybody's pan of snow with a generous helping of wax, providing a double portion for Jethniah that he might overtake the others.

In the midst of his busy eating, Jethniah was seen to stop and reach hastily into an inner pocket. "Never tell us you've forgot it!" said McQuade in evident alarm.

"Safe as a hollow tooth!" proclaimed Jethniah, withdrawing his hand, reassured, and beginning afresh at his wax. "Just like a post in the mud!"

Augusta and Wardwell looked at each other, guessing what it might be that was as safe as if hidden in a hollow tooth. But they did not ask, knowing that, whatever it was, it would be better to wait and find out at the proper time.

The fact in the matter was not that Jethniah had feared that he had forgotten something. He was afraid that he had been robbed.

Jethniah Gamblin had a vice. It was not a secret vice. But it was the more persuasive, insidious and devastating in that it was encouraged and abetted by the entire community.

During official hours Jethniah was a faithful servant of the People of the United States, and during the same hours he was an honest weigher of sugar and sundries. But when, at eight o'clock in the evening, he had put out the lights and had, in the dark, taken the postage stamps from their place in the drawer and hidden them in an old rubber boot that stood in a corner, Jethniah reverted to the pursuit of his vice.

Jethniah, to say the worst at once, was a leader in song. Wherever there was a gathering of any sort, within possible walking distance, there was Mr. Gamblin to be found in the midst of it. It had to be within walking distance, for many ignominious failures had taught Jethniah that he could not hitch up a horse and drive out of the barn without arousing deadly and effective opposition to his going. So, Jethniah's goings were on foot, with celerity, and without announcement. But go he did, usually. And he was always welcome, because, at the very first hand, the event of his coming or not coming gave an immediate sporting interest to the party. Where people in other less favored communities had to get through the early, dragging moments of every social function talking about the weather and fussing awkardly until the crowd came, the gatherings within Jethniah's range were put at ease immediately by the common interest in the question of whether or not the Postmaster would be able to make his escape from home, and attend. Wagers on the matter were posted freely, with the prevailing odds in Jethniah's favor, this partly through sympathy but largely through faith based on Jethniah's past performances.

Then, when he did appear, he was questioned anxiously as to whether he had brought his tuning fork safe with him. For there had been occasions in local history when Jethniah had arrived at a party without this badge of his calling and authority. On these occasions Mr. Gamblin had explained that he had "somehow missed" the tuning fork. But everybody knew better. Mr. Gamblin had been robbed, temporarily.

In the winter evenings of his young manhood Jethniah had taught singing school in school-houses among the hills. But he had long since given up the professional side of his art, and now devoted himself whole-heartedly to the cultivation and encouragement of song, for song's pure sake.

So, whether it was a wedding anniversary or the aftermath of a quilting or a husking bee or an honest country dance with no excuse whatever, Jethniah and his tuning fork were in demand. For when the riotous edge of the merry-making was dulled people wanted to sing. The songs were mostly sad ones, for people generally get more enjoyment out of sad songs, and there are more of them; but when Jethniah stood up and drew forth his tuning fork, carefully and critically testing it by snapping it with his finger nail, his face grave as that of a very priest of music, his stout old body swaying to the tune that was already humming in his head, he was in those moments a great man.

That men and women loved Jethniah and encouraged him heartily in his weakness is not to be wondered at. For it is a singular fact that, whereas few persons can persuade themselves that they are beautiful, or profoundly wise, or inordinately brave, and only a very few extremely happy folks can delude themselves into believing that they are all three, yet practically all people in their secret hearts believe that they can sing, or, what is the same thing, that they could sing if they were encouraged.

Thus Jethniah, who in the long years had given up the exacting and critical attitude of the teacher and had developed a broad charity in art which looked only to the spirit and good will of the performance, encouraged and gave license to the craving that lies deep in all men's souls, to lift up their heads and howl. Men and women, who, left to themselves, would no more have dared try to sing than they would have attempted to walk a tight rope, shouted themselves hoarse and happy under Jethniah's all-condoning tuning fork.

When McQuade had hoped devoutly that Mr. Gamblin had not forgotten it, he referred, of course, to the justly celebrated tuning fork. Now when Jethniah had eaten all the wax that McQuade could press upon him, and when everyone else had stopped from sheer inability to proceed, McQuade was anxious for further festivities.

But Jethniah was unwontedly reluctant about starting a singing match. He felt half afraid to get upon his feet for he was aware that the centre of gravity in his short, round body had been shifted by the quantities of sugar which he had eaten so that, standing, he would have been in the state which Physics calls unstable equilibrium, and his stomach was so full that, for certain physiological reasons, he was afraid to strain his diaphragm with the effort of singing. He had had a brisk walk against a stiff, cold wind, and the warm, full condition of his stomach and the heated air of the cabin combined to throw a heavy lethargy over him. Jethniah at that point would have given a great deal to be allowed to take a short nap. But McQuade was for immediate action.

"Never tell us ye left your music at home on the piano rack! Ye did not, for ye couldn't, unless ye were to leave your head there too. For it's in that round head o' yours that ye carry the finest ripertor of good tunes and words with them of any man in the country. There's not a postmaster in all these great United States that has the songs an' the music in him that ye have," McQuade cajoled.

"It's right hard on the voice," complained Jethniah, standing on professional grounds, "to sing after heavy eatin'."

"Eatin'?" said McQuade contemptuously. "I don't call that eatin' at all. We'll eat after we've had a song or two. You'll sing, an' I'll sing, an' we'll all sing. Out with the tunin' fork!"

"Can't you tell a few lies, till we get our breath?" Jethniah suggested weakly.

"No. We'll have all the night to tell stories in after the girls are in bed. Now we'll sing," McQuade announced mercilessly.

Jethniah brought out the tuning fork reluctantly, snapping it critically and holding it up to his ear and listening doubtfully to the tone. He seemed to be artistically dissatisfied with the instrument and to be very hopeless as to the success of the whole project of singing. The truth was that he knew he was not in good fettle for singing and he was nervous about Wardwell and Augusta because they were, after all, strangers, and they might laugh.

But when McQuade had cleared away the pans of snow, Jethniah stretched himself as far as he dared and began to take an interest. He struck the tuning fork on the table several times, and as he listened his face became each time a little more hopeful.

Finally he caught the tone satisfactorily and announced, with a rising sweep of his free hand:

"Oh He Hum Ha-a-a-ah," crescendo, and holding the last note while he beamed and nodded hopefully around his audience.

"We will sing 'John Brown's Body' first," Jethniah announced. He arose manfully and smote the tuning fork sharply on the table. And again he gave the key note, this time with authority and confidence.

"All sing!"

It was rather a straggling performance, for the boys and men working around the fires came along two or three notes behind the leaders, and McQuade and Wardwell were so full of sugar that they could hardly do more than grunt. But when Jethniah heard Augusta's voice with him he took mighty heart and together they carried it through to a triumph.

Jethniah now awoke to the possibilities of the occasion. He had come here primarily to eat sugar. But in the prospect of a brilliant singing affair he was willing to forget even the first sugar eating of the season. If only he had not eaten quite so much already!

He next called for "Annie Laurie," and when that went through to a decided success, Jethniah was so carried that he insisted on rendering the "Kerry Dancers," which he had learned on Sundays spent fishing with McQuade. And McQuade returned the compliment in a way that went to Mr. Gamblin's heart.

"Jethniah," he reminisced, in the pause that followed their latest effort, "d' ye mind the day we were fishin' the Racquette away below Forked Lake, and ye made a little song all out of your own head and sang it for me?"

"Does seem to me now," said Jethniah hesitating. McQuade was the best of friends, but he was an inveterate joker and Jethniah was always a little afraid of his humor when there was company. "But I can't just think right now. What about it?" he inquired cautiously. He remembered the little song very well. He had been humming it to himself ever since that day last summer when he had sung it for McQuade, but he had never had the hardihood to bring it out and teach it to people as his own composition. Jethniah was a kindly man, and easily hurt; and in this matter he had all of the fledgling author's fear of ridicule.

"Then it's me that remembers," said McQuade, triumphantly pulling a wallet from his hip pocket. From the wallet he drew out a little account book and found in it the page for which he looked. He handed it, open, to Jethniah, saying:

"There it's for you now. I copied it fair that day an' told you it ought to be in print. Let's hear it now, Jethniah, and we'll all learn it and give it a rousin' send off. Sing up, man! Sing up!"

Mr. Gamblin took the little book and began adjusting his spectacles to his kindling eyes. He was so proud and so pleased with McQuade's graceful thought that his hand shook as he held the little book up to the light of a lantern. Of course he knew the words by heart, but not for worlds would he have foregone the heady delight of reading his own work as it had been copied by some one who had thought well of it. It was almost as good as if he had actually seen it in print. Finally he turned to McQuade and looked up at him over the rims of the spectacles. There was a misty dimness in the kindly, honest old eyes as he silently thanked his friend.

"Sing up, man. Sing up—Or I'll howl it meself!" blustered McQuade.

Jethniah began to hum, and then to sing tentatively. But his enthusiasm quickly mounted above his shyness, and grasping the tuning fork in a stout hand he brought it down sharply on the table. Then taking the fresh tone boldly and beating time with McQuade's little book in one hand and the tuning fork in the other, he struck bravely into his little song.

Sang Jethniah:

Never did poet and songster have a happier audience for his maiden effort, for before he had gotten to the second verse they were joining him in the refrain and assuring him that that was a beautiful thing. And when it was finished McQuade led round after round of applause, while the boys roared and cheered around the fires. "Again!" shouted McQuade. "Let us hear it again, till we learn it, an' we'll sing the roof off with it."

Again Jethniah smote the table with the tuning fork and sang now as though he would burst his stout old heart. And then they all stood about him, the boys towering and blackened like young Vulcans from their work among the fires, and Jethniah led a triumph that roared above the panting of the fires and shook the rafters of the solid old cabin. It was the supreme moment of Jethniah's life. And McQuade, whose heart was big for his friend's glory—and who dearly loved a racket anyway—wanted to fill that moment to the very brim. Again and again they had to sing through the song, until, in very pity for Jethniah, Fan McQuade put a partial stop upon the performance.

"Are you trying to save sugar by making your guests sing all night," she said pointedly to her husband.

McQuade apologized loudly and ran for the snow pans. They sat down again, and, to Wardwell's astonished delight and to Augusta's dismay, they found that their appetite for wax was practically undulled.

But Augusta soon saw that Fan McQuade was very tired—she and McQuade, since sun-rise, had driven fifty miles over the most frightful of roads—and Augusta herself was glad to have this as an excuse for pleading that she and Mrs. McQuade be allowed to retire to their beds in the little camp house, for she knew that as long as she stayed she would inevitably eat more sugar, and, in spite of McQuade's assurances, she was afraid of the consequences.

As McQuade had predicted, they told lies after the "girls" were gone to bed. But it was evident that the singing was not neglected. For, ever and again during the night, Augusta, dozing lightly in her hammock, was awakened to listen sleepily to Jethniah's pleasant philosophy of a future in which he would like to be up and doing and be dozing abed, be working and loafing, all at the same time.

Augusta and Wardwell long remembered this night. It was not that it was marked by any occurrence vital to themselves. It was merely the first night since they had come out upon the road that they had been separated. But it was full of new experiences for them, and somehow it seemed to mark an epoch, to put an end to one thing and to begin another.

McQuade and his Fan left the next day, already anxious to be at home, for Spring on the big dairy farm that was their home was a busy and important time.

Other parties, invited by the McQuade boys, and some that were not invited, came to eat sugar. But Jimmie and Augusta did not join in any of these festivities. Augusta knew that few people had Mr. Gamblin's ready sympathy or McQuade's big, hearty understanding. She did not care to be stared at and questioned as the curiosity that had come into the country in a gypsy wagon and had lived so strangely all winter in the sugar camp. She had learned that a sparsely settled country neighborhood is the most inquisitive and imaginative community in the world. And while she had laughed with Wardwell over the strange stories that were told, and believed, to account for their presence here, yet she did not propose to put herself upon exhibition.

The sugar season was over quickly, for the sap runs only in the brief period while the frost is actually leaving the ground, and it was a matter only of days until the men were hurriedly gathering the buckets and scalding them out and scouring the boiling pans to be stored away for the year under the rafters of the big cabin. Then they loaded their ox carts with the golden garnering of their hard work and drove shouting away down roads that were mere wallows of soft snow and mud. Augusta and Jimmie turned gladly back to the freedom and the quiet of their work. It had been a most wonderful winter for them. There must, in the actual constitution of human nature, have been times when they were both horribly lonesome, when they must have longed for something to happen or for the sight of a new face. But there was very little that was petty or unforgiving in either of them, and love, which came deeper and sweeter to them with every turning day, with growing understanding of each other, with little unthought, unstudied kindnesses, love blessed them with a happiness that was almost fearful.

Their work, too,—for they squabbled desperately over it at times—furnished a ready ground wire to conduct off the too high tension of living so closely and solely with each other. That amazing book, which had been written by a method that had nothing but originality to commend it, had come along so surprisingly that Wardwell, always a grudging critic of his own work, had walked around in violent alternations of feeling. At one moment he was confident that the work was fine, and ten minutes later he would be attacked by a sickening distrust that, after all, they must be "kidding themselves."

Augusta's faith had never wavered. She knew that the book was at all times as good as Jimmie's best, and she wanted nothing more than that. Measured in written words, her own part in it was not great. But Wardwell knew that, from the moment she had come into it, the soul of the book was Augusta's own spirit in it.

When it was finished and Jimmie had waded down through breast-deep January drifts to the railroad station to mail the manuscript, and had come back with empty hands, Augusta sat down and cried bitterly. She had gotten to so love the book that, toward the end, every physical touch that she gave it was a caress. And now that it was gone it seemed almost as though a little fledgling boy of theirs had been driven out into a cold, blustering world to make his way alone.

But Jimmie was crafty in waiting, and wise in ways to disappoint disappointment.

"Don't let them see that we're anxious, darling," he counselled warily. "Let's just keep saying that we don't care a rap, and that we expect it to be rejected anyway. Then maybe it'll get by." He had all of an Ethiopian's superstition that the little gods of mischief were always watching around to snatch away the thing on which one set his heart too openly.

"We'll get right to work on something else," he said, holding Augusta curled up in his lap and petting her, "and pretend that we've forgotten all about it." He remembered grim, waiting days in the past when he had listened to the postman's whistle and had not dared to go down like a man to see what the mail had brought him, but had peeped shame-faced down the stairs at the hall table where the letters were piled, always expecting to see the thick neat packet of manuscript that meant another hope rejected.

Now it was all different, for he had another to think of. And his anxiety was not for the outcome itself so much as it was to save Augusta from the bitterness of a first crushing disappointment. The best that they could expect—he tried to tell her—was that the book might be considered, and, perhaps, if they could make the changes that the publisher would be sure to want, might be finally accepted. But, in any case, it would be at least a year before the book would bring them anything, either advertising or reputation or money, or anything else.

In the very first place they must begin to write some things that might be quickly turned into money. They must do some short stories at once. He had some, Jimmie said, which had been bumping around in his head all the time while he had been busy with the book. Now he would round them up and put them to work. They must make some money right away.

If Augusta wondered at his sudden anxiety about money, she did not ask questions. She was not incurious, but she never pried. She knew that he was sensitive about money, and that he was becoming more so. But she did not know of any new reason for his hurry to make money. She had known vaguely that he must have borrowed money that time when he had bought Donahue back for her, but she knew that he would not wish to be questioned on the matter, and she had refrained from speculating on it.

Wardwell was beginning to know that, in that time, he had done something that in the nature of things was altogether wrong. He did not know just why it was so very wrong. But he knew that it was beginning to bother him a great deal. And, in a man's foolish way of only seeing one thing, he believed that if he could only get money now it would set the whole thing right.

They had gone to work then, gravely pretending to have forgotten all about the ship that had gone to sea. And, to an extent, they did forget it. For Jimmie had some very good ideas for short stories and he fell to work upon them with an energy that surprised himself. And Augusta at first pecking diffidently at the typewriter, and then striking boldly for herself into untried waters, found herself at the end of three days almost hopelessly bewildered and drifting. Her story, which had seemed so easy and simple in the starting, would not go forward. And for three days more she sat futilely writing pages which she knew she would presently tear up. Jimmie sat by and at times he grinned sympathetically, but he offered no help, except to threaten to take Augusta out and roll her in the snow if she persisted in sitting too long and closely at the typewriter. Then, when she was almost ready to cry in despair, the story began somehow to move, and almost before she knew what was happening it ran out to a triumphant conclusion that she had hardly dreamed of.

It was a beautiful little story, wind bitten, sun sweet, like Augusta's own self. And Jimmie knew that it was true work. Though she begged him to re-write it for her as he had done with what she had composed for the book, Jimmie would not touch it. He showed her a few places where her lack of training to the trade had left defects in construction. And when she had copied in her own corrections he took the story and addressed it and carried it proudly down to the railroad station.

After that their waiting and anxiety was all for the fate of Augusta's little story. And when, a full week before there was any reasonable hope for an answer from it, Wardwell went down to the station and actually brought home an acceptance and a check for it, they forgot everything and danced and capered about the fire in Indian glee.

"I shall now," said Jimmie comfortably, sitting down as the excitement subsided a little, "devote myself to the instruction of an appreciative future generation. I'll write for posterity, while my wife writes for bread and bacon."

But Augusta was not there to hear. She had taken the check and run out through the snow, to show it to Donahue.

From that time on through the winter Jimmie's weekly journeyings down to the station were an event. They had agreed to avoid the use of Jethniah's much nearer post office, not because they had anything to conceal from their old friend but because they did not wish to be discussed by the inevitable winter gossips who sat on Jethniah's nail kegs and pilfered his soda crackers, so they had mail only once in the week. And every week now there was something to be hoped for, some manuscript to be heard from which they both said aloud would probably come back rejected, but which in their secret hearts they both thought "might stick," as Jimmie sometimes diffidently phrased it. For Augusta had fallen into Jimmie's way of never voicing the highest hope, lest a jealous power should hear and blast it. And they were for all the world like a pair of old fashioned New England parents who would never dare boast about their offspring, for that would mean that the children would surely come to some bad end.

They were so busy, and so happy in the varying ups and downs of hopes, disappointments and realizations, that when the letter came saying that the publishers were pleased with Wardwell's book and that, if agreeable to him, they would forward him a contract for its publication on the usual royalty basis, it hardly caused any more than the usual weekly excitement. It did not, in fact, reach up to half the importance of Augusta's first little check.

Wardwell was not disappointed, for he had not expected any other proposal than this one that had been made for the book. But he was not exactly satisfied. He would have much preferred to try to get a cash offer for the manuscript. For he was still sensitive to the thought that Augusta had spent on account of him all the little money that had been left from her mother, and that she was now, even though they had both begun to earn some money, practically penniless. He thought that he could not feel right again until he had been able to put into her hands at least the amount of money which she had had in the beginning. It was a little, unworthy way of looking at the matter, compared with the unthought, whole-hearted way in which Augusta had done the thing—and Wardwell knew this. But Jimmie was not, in these days, seeing things with his usual clear vision.

There was another matter—a matter that had been hanging over him since the day when he had telegraphed for money to buy back Donahue—which was hanging over him and spoiling his imagination and his insight. However, there was nothing that he could do except to work on as rapidly as he could.

Now that the noisy interruption of the sugaring had passed they turned back happily to the habits of their work—if indeed their ways of doing things could be called habits, for they worked or played or ate, or did none of these things, very much as the spirit of the moment suggested.

They had been obliged to take Mr. Gamblin into their confidence, for the checks which had been coming were of no practical use to them here, and it was necessary to have a banker.

"Checks" said Jethniah, when Jimmie had shown him the first of their earnings and had asked him to deposit them. "I thought all checks had Boynton & Bailey's name on 'em, and was to pay the farmers for milk."

"You needn't cash them now you know, Mr. Gamblin. If you'll just let them go through your bank down in Tupper, why, you can give us the money any time after they've gone through and so you can't be taking any risk at all."

"Risk!" Jethniah grumbled. "Who said risk? I wouldn't know this here Eagle Publishing Coe from Adam's pet hyena if I met them both face to face, an' this here Bank of Manhattan may be an ingrowin' hole in the ground for all I know. But you've writ your name on the back of one of these checks and your wife's writ hers on t'other. An' that says they're good. So they're good.

"That's me, every time. Just like a post in the mud."

He gave his trousers a premonitory heave, as if to advise them of what was going to happen. And striking down deep into the right fore pocket he pulled forth a good roll of bills and began to count.

"But say?" he queried, in a gentle, wondering tone that invited confidence. "Don't you honestly have to do any work at all—just write down things—and have them send you checks?"

"Not another thing," Jimmie asserted stoutly.

"Gosh all Fish 'ooks!" Jethniah exploded admiringly. "Why don't everybody do it!"

"I don't know," said Wardwell solemnly. "I've always wondered."

As the weeks drew on into the opening Spring, Augusta, sensitive always as a poplar leaf, began to feel that from somewhere a crisis was impending upon them. There was no tangible thing that could be a source of apprehension to them. The question of money, which had once been terrible for them, was now happily resolving itself into the simplest incidental of their work. Jimmie, she was at last sure, could for the rest of his life laugh at the threat of the disease which had driven them out upon the road. The Winter, which had indeed been formidable for them, was past; and for the Summer, which would be coming before very long, they would be as comfortable and as nicely situated as they could wish. They were welcome to stay on here. Or, if they were tired of the solitude and the closeness of the life, they knew that they could now easily earn as much as they needed to live nicely in almost any place.

Materially, it was plain, nothing could threaten them. For they were now as independent as it is possible for two people to be on this earth, where the price of living must always be paid in some kind. Even what is called independent wealth could not have made them more free than they were, because, with that, they would have more things to fear than they now had.

But Augusta well knew that this presentiment, which came treacherously stealing upon her in the dreaming moments when her spirit was wandering alone and unguarded in that border land where dreams and good stories come from, was not warning her against any material happening.

With a prescience as cruel as eye-sight could have been, she knew that this thing would strike at her heart. And, her heart could only be hurt through Jimmie.

Long ago she had foreseen and trembled at this day when love would make a coward of her. And although many times in the year past she had been able to believe that Jimmie loved her truly, the way a man chooses his girl and wants her, and not from any prompting of duty or mere affection, yet the fact remained, unescapable and unanswerable: they had not started fair.

She had taken Jimmie at his word, when pity, and probably affection, and a pretty childish attractiveness, had prompted him to ask her to marry him. But, even then, she had known that it was not fair, for, even then, though neither of them would have believed this, she had been a woman while he was an impulsive boy.

It was true that even in that time she had loved him with a love which he would not have believed her capable of even guessing at. But that made no difference. Jimmie had not been free. Nothing that had since passed had altered that fact. And Augusta had cruelly whipped herself into believing, that even if Jimmie had not cared for her in any way, his quick heart and his kindness for her mother and herself would have made him do just what he had done in the circumstances. (She was able to believe this because she knew that she herself, at that time, would have married the most repulsive man in the world if it had been a necessary condition for getting her mother out of the madhouse.)

All this had lain away covered in her mind through the months of happiness and well being and hopeful, heart-filling work. But it was inevitable, as she had always known, that it would one day come forth and stalk upon her.

The outward signs that the peace of her mind and the safety of her love were being threatened were indeed very slight. Jimmie was restless. Something was troubling him, that much she knew. Once or twice she had felt that he was on the point of speaking out, but the moment had passed and had left her with the dizzy, sinking feeling of a threat suspended.

Sometimes she was able to lull the feeling of foreboding evil by the thought that it was merely the Spring. Everything about them was restless and stirring and shooting forth buds and blades, and all the little rivers of life were running full. It was only to be expected that they themselves, coming out of the close, storm bound life of the Winter, should feel a stirring of unrest, an urge of discontent and energy, towards something new.

Also, she knew that their reading of the war in Europe had been having an unsettling effect upon both of them. In the days of last Summer and Fall, when Jimmie's health was her single thought and when he himself was still subject to recurrent days of feverishness during which the doings of the world lost their interest for him, the first news of the world's tragedy had come dribbling to them through occasional old newspapers borrowed from Mr. Gamblin's store, and it had hardly aroused in them anything more than a puzzled and only half believing wonder. Belgium was mutilated—But Jimmie's temperature must be watched. Later, however, when the shadow was definitely lifted from Wardwell's life, they began to follow the war with an avidity that was proportional to their detachment from the diversions and worries which took up the thoughts of other people more normally situated. They subscribed for a New York daily paper, and when Jimmie came home from the station with a week's papers in a bundle they sat down and devoured them eagerly.

Augusta, all pity and eager partisanship for the innocent and for the right, was disappointed in Jimmie. He, being half boy and whole writing man, thought only of the noise and the whole whaling wonder of the thing, and she wondered that he could take it all so impartially. But now there came a May day when Jimmie came home with his bundle of mail and tramped heavily into the room, without speaking.

He walked over to where she sat at the typewriter. Before her, over the machine, he spread a paper and laid his hand on the broad headlines. They told of the Lusitania horror.

After a little he leaned over her shoulder, as she read in silence, and pointed down a column of the known dead to the name of a man—a writing man—whom he had loved.

He walked slowly over to the table in the corner and dropped the mail quietly. Augusta stole a look at him as he stood there, leaning over slightly, brooding, his big hands, rough and red from work and wind, knuckled down hard on the bare table.

She was struck by a sense of something missing. The boyishness was gone from Jimmie's face. And, with a little shiver, she knew that she would never see it again. Her playboy had vanished. She was looking at a man who had hardened into a mold within the hour.

She had never seen Jimmie angry, for he had practically no temper. And he was not angry now, in any ordinary sense of the word. His face was no study. It was plain, and ugly with a single emotion. The emotion was as plain, and as old, as blood—revenge.

But Augusta knew that it was not the restlessness of Spring that threatened her. And she knew that not even the sullen restiveness of a call of blood could hurt in the way that she was going to be hurt.

She was a woman. And she knew that only through a woman could she be wounded to her heart's depth. That strange prescience, that border land insight which had come to her in other times, and had sometimes been kind to her and sometimes cruel, had lately been turning up pictures to her mind. And although she had not admitted them to her ordinary, self-controlled consciousness, yet fragments of them always remained, and in spite of her will to dissolve them she found them becoming more and more clearly parts of a composite picture of a woman—the tall, black woman whom she had seen that day when the Irish gypsy girl had forced the cards into her hands.

Now this was all in spite of her will. Her good sense, as she called it, fought these things down again and again. She would not let herself be morbid. And yet, all the time, her soul was summoning courage against the blow. When she should know that Jimmie wanted to go from her, she must make him free. That had been in the bond from the beginning. She herself had put it in the vow of her marriage.

On a morning just beyond the middle of May when the plum trees were all in white blossom, which, as all the world knows, is the one elect time for brook fishing, Jimmie went fishing.

Augusta stayed at home with the avowed, and honest, intention of fixing a dress. Their clothes had stood the rough wear remarkably well. But, as good clothes will do, now that they were beginning to go they seemed to give out everywhere at once.

But Augusta never took any pleasure in fixing her own clothes. So by the time she had taken down her good dress and looked it over, and had poked tentatively at several slightly worn places in it, she decided that it was Jimmie's wardrobe that really needed attention.

His one fair coat was not at all what it should be. And she knew there was a rip under the right armhole. She must do that first. She would give it a thorough beating and cleaning and let it hang a while in the sweetening sun. The first thing was to clean out the pockets and turn them wrong side out. He always carried such truck in his pockets! Cigarette papers, loose matches—it was a miracle that he didn't burn himself up, improvised lead sinkers, stubs of lead pencils, a few loose cartridges, letters from publishers, scraps and pieces that had once been white paper and had had parts of stories written on them. She shucked them all out on the table and stood looking down at them with some of the consternation and wonder with which a young mother looks at the amazing contents of her boy's trouser pockets.

Long afterwards it came to Augusta as one of the bitterest things of all that her blow should have come upon her in what might have been the way of cheap and tawdry melodrama. She might have been a snooping wife going jealously through her husband's pockets.

She stood there a long time staring down at a letter that, of its own power it seemed, stood out apart and separated from all the rest. She did not touch the letter. There was no power in her, nor no wish, to turn a page of it. It had no envelope. And it had, with insensate malice, spread out the whole of its front page to her eye. It was a love letter, one link of a chain of established correspondence between a woman and Jimmie Wardwell.

After the first, heart-withering look at the page which gave her this complete, all-embracing intelligence, Augusta did not read. She stood staring dumbly, and then, still keeping her eyes helplessly on the page, she began to back, step by step, cowering away from it.

Creeping backward still, she came against the chair on which she had thrown her dress. Her hand went out mechanically and she grasped the dress, just where she had stuck the forgotten needle in it.

The pain of the piercing needle mercifully took her eyes away from that letter. She pulled the needle from where it had stuck in the palm of her hand, and mechanically brought the hurt up to her lips.

Then she looked at the dress. What was it doing there?

Oh yes! She remembered. She was going away. She had always known that she was going away. Now it was the time.

She took the dress and carried it over behind the little curtain of her hammock bed.

When she was ready to go, she sat down at the typewriter and wrote a line in the middle of a clean sheet of paper.

She was not herself, of course; and we do not know just what was passing in her mind. But she wrote:

We may not live together. We shall not die apart.

As she rose from the typewriter she looked again, because she could not help it, at the letter, and in the lower part of the page that lay open before her she saw clearly the words "your Jean."

She did not need these words to tell her what she already knew, that the letter was from the woman with whom Jimmie had promised to have nothing to do. For she had already seen, in the first moment, a flash of the woman's dark, handsome, discontented face.

But the written words, the written claim, roused in her a swelling, choking anger.

She would not go away! She would stay and fight that women to the death for her love!

Yet all the time she knew that she would go. It was inevitable, as her heart had always somehow told her that this hour would inevitably come.

Except for his broken promise—That was unanswerable—she had no heart to blame Jimmie. She would not go in anger. In her heart she had sworn that, if this day should come, she would free him completely, and without bitterness.

She was going.

Her love was spoiled, tarnished; another had touched it. She could never again have the glory of it. Dear heart of life, how beautiful it had been! And she must go, lest in her weakness she should grovel and bring that one beautiful thing of life down into dust with her.

As she passed the stable, Donahue whinnied lovingly at the sound of her step. But she dared not stop. For she knew that if she stopped now, and broke down and cried with her pet and friend, the miserable end would be that she would run to where Jimmie was and throw herself on her knees to him and beg weakly for his love. And—the shame of it!—he would talk, and talk, and talk, and in the end she would live on with him, to hate herself and him.

So her eyes were dry and her little shoulders bravely set as she trudged on down through the fringe of trees and into the brook path.

She did not know the cross-cuts by which Jimmie went to the station every week—Oh yes, Jimmie went to the station every week!—but she knew the direction fairly well. She would find it. She did not know how many trains there were in the day, but she was quite sure that there would be one before she could be missed and overtaken. Jimmie had gone fishing for the day.

Now this last thing one would rather not tell. Studied design could not have found anything quite so cruel to have done to her. It is, in fact, left for accident and blind, silly coincidence to furnish the most terrible thrusts of life. When Augusta came, still dry-eyed and hurrying, down the dusty road to the little station, she saw a man going away from the station and starting across the fields. He did not see her.

It was Jimmie. He had not gone fishing.

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