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CHAPTER ONE

Immediately after the wedding Alexina and Molly went South. Molly turned petulant at sight of Aden and Alexina could not blame her; indeed, she and Celeste were of a mind with her as they drove from the station to the hotel.

The horses ploughed through loose, greyish sand, the sidewalks along the street, ostensibly the business thoroughfare, were of board, not in the best of repair, and the skyline of the street was varied according as the frame stores had or did not have a sham front simulating a second story. Men sat on tilted chairs beneath awnings along the way and stared at the occupants of the carriage as it passed. It was mid-afternoon, which, in Aden, seemed to be a glaring, shadeless hour and, but for these occasional somnolent starers, a deserted one. Yet people lived here, existed, spent their lives in this crude, poor hideousness, this mean newness; the Leroys lived here! And that their son would let them, would remain himself!

“What did we come for anyhow?” queried Molly. “The world is full of charming places. You do adopt the queerest notions, Malise.”

Malise sat convicted. It had sounded so alluring, so suggestive of charm and languor; the very name of Aden had breathed a sort of magic.

And Alexina had come, too, buoyed up by a large and epic idea of restitution. How foolish, how young, how almost insulting from the Leroys’ standpoint it suddenly seemed.

“We spent two winters in Italy, Jean and I, and one in Algiers,” Molly was saying plaintively. “Heavens, Malise, they’re building that house on stilts, right over a sinkhole of tin cans.”

For that matter there were tin cans everywhere. It was most depressing.

“Even Louisville was better than this,” said Molly grudgingly. “Don’t look so resigned, Malise; it’s not becoming.”

They turned a corner and the driver stopped before a long, two-storied building, painted white, which proved to be the hotel. It stood up from the street on wooden posts, the space between latticed. A railed gallery ran across the front, steps ascending midway of its length. Two giant live-oaks flanked the building either end, the wooden sidewalk cut out to encircle their great roots, and, while handbills and placards were tacked up and down the rugged, seamy trunks, yet grey moss drooped from the branches and swept the gallery posts. The building looked roomy, old-fashioned and reposeful, and Alexina’s spirits rose. She gathered up the wraps, Celeste the satchels—no one ever looked to Molly to gather up anything—and they went in.

The place seemed deserted and asleep, but just inside the doorway, where the hall broadened into an office, a man stood looking through a pile of newspapers. His clothes were black and his vest clerical; below its edge hung a small gold cross. He turned politely, then said he would go and find some one.

“Dear me,” said Molly, brightening, “he’s handsome.” Two days after, they were settled in comfortable rooms overlooking the hotel grounds. A slope down to a small lake boasted some gnarled old live-oaks and pines, and one side was set out with a young orange grove. Across the water one could see several more or less pretentious new houses built around the shore. The breeze tasted of pine and Molly had slept a night through without coughing.

“But, Heavens!” she complained, the second afternoon, lolling back in a wooden arm-chair on the hotel gallery; “isn’t there anything to do?”

Alexina and the young man in clerical garb were her audience. He was the Reverend Harrison Henderson, and had charge of the Episcopal Church of Aden and lived at the hotel. He seemed a definite and earnest man. His blond profile was strong. It was a rather immobile face, perhaps, but it lighted with very evident pleasure as he answered Mrs. Garnier.

“How would you like to go out to Nancy?” he proposed; “it’s quite an affair for a lake down here, and a young fellow out there rents sail-boats.”

“Charming,” agreed Molly, sitting up. “You have ideas; you can’t have been here long.”

Mr. Harrison smiled, though it was an acknowledging rather than a mirthful smile. Life is too earnest for mere laughter, but his zeal to serve Mrs. Garnier was not to be doubted.

“What do you say, Miss Blair?” he asked, turning to that young person.

“Who?—I?” Alexina had been leaning forward with her elbow on the gallery railing, her eyes looking off to a line of pines against the sky. She had been wondering how she should inquire about the Leroys, and if she really wanted to. She came back to the veranda and the present.

“I think it would be charming, too,” she replied.

“Then we’ll go right away. I’ll order the carriage, so as to see the sunset,” he said, and rose. “You will need wraps for Mrs. Garnier.” Somehow a man never thinks the other woman will need anything.

He spoke briskly and went off down the plank sidewalk towards town with a swing. The day was fair, the air was soft, and the blood in the Reverend Henderson, despite the dogmatic taint in it, was red and young.

Out at Lake Nancy Osceola, a young fellow in flannel shirt, knickerbockers and canvas shoes, was scanning the shore from a wooden pier which ran out the extent of shallow water, having just made fast the sail-boat rising and falling with the swell at the pier’s end.

A grove of well grown orange trees stretched up the slope from the water. The trees were heavy with fruit and looked sturdy and well cared for. To the right stood the frame packing sheds, and beyond, amid higher foliage against the cerulean sky, showed a house roof.

But the young fellow on the pier was gazing in the other direction, where, through the straight vistas of the grove, a carriage was being driven under the trees, the top sweeping the fruit laden branches. The young man hallooed as he started in the pier, but a negro digging among the trees had dropped his spade and was running up. The carriage stopped and the young minister of the Aden Episcopal Church got out. Naturally, it was to be supposed that it was some person with no more common sense.

But there were others than the Reverend Mr. Henderson descending—two ladies. Some party from the hotel come for a sail, probably.

It was the duty of coloured Pete to go with sailing parties, but there was work that he should finish this afternoon. The old darky was backing the horse. The minister and the ladies were approaching.

The young fellow was just in from a sail, having been down to the sedge land with his gun, but he would go again. He gave a call. “It’s all right, Pete; go on with the ditching.”

His eyes were indifferent as he watched the approach, though their glance was straight and clear and keen. Suddenly the look changed, intensified, and the young fellow’s shoulders squared.

The minister led the way, talking with the pretty, slight woman, who stopped with protest every step as her feet went down in sand. Behind them came a jaunty-looking girl with light-footed carriage. The wind was ruffling and tossing her hair and she held to her hat as she stopped under the orange trees to look upon the prospect.

But the eyes watching her did not turn, knowing the scene on which she was gazing. It was Lake Nancy, long and lizard-like—its sapphire water shimmering beneath the breeze—stretching westward between curving, twisting, inletted shores, fringed near at hand with the bright green of young oranges and lemons, and farther on by the darker live-oak and pine, while on the opposite side the line of forest stretched heavy and sombre, trailing grey moss hoariness into Nancy’s lapping wave.

And while the girl gazed on Nancy the young man watched her with a curious intentness but with no doubt. Then he walked in the length of the pier to meet them. As the girl’s eyes came round to him she changed to a startled pallor, white as her serge gown, and her eyes dilated, then into them came eagerness.

Except for a tightening pull on muscles about nose and mouth the young fellow stood impassive.

The colour rushed back into the girl’s face. The young man had turned and was shaking hands with Mr. Henderson. The minister was mentioning names, too, but the girl had her back to them and was studying the outstretch. Her head was high.

When she turned again Mr. Henderson was carefully piloting the other lady into the boat. “Malise,” that lady was calling. Malise, forced by this to come and be helped in, found herself in the stern. But her throat, because of a choked-back sob, hurt, and a vast homesickness and sense of futility was upon her.

When presently she could look up and around the little craft was skimming out across the lake to deep water, where it shifted westward and flew into the dying afternoon.

There were billowy puffs of clouds high above, softly flushing into rose with a golden fleeciness to their edges. Her mother’s talk and dulcet-toned laughter reached the girl, punctuated with the serious accents of Mr. Henderson. The two were sitting where the seats, running about, came together at the bow, and he, with an elbow on the rail, was looking at Molly. Such a wistful, pretty child she looked in her white canvas dress, with her wind-blown, gauzy veil fluttering from her hat.

Alexina’s eyes were fixed on them, but she was conscious, too, of a gaze on her, which for all her hot pride and hurt she could not look around and meet. Once, when the sail was shifting and she knew the eyes would, perforce, be concerned therewith, she stole a hurried survey and saw a well-knit figure, quick in its movements, the muscles playing beneath the flannel shirt. A discarded coat was upon the seat near her.

“Down, please,” came in cool, deliberate tones from the owner of the coat and the gaze. The head of the girl went down, while the sail swung about. The boat dipped, righted, then flew ahead, following the curving shores of the lake. The very air seemed flushing, the shimmering water had a thousand tints, the shores slipping by breathed out odours of mould, and leaf and vine. The western sky was triumphing, clouds of purple and of crimson lifting one above another about a golden centre. And they in the boat were speeding into the glory; the very rosiness of the air seemed stealing down upon them and enveloping them. The sense of avoirdupois, of gravitation, was lost; one felt winged, uplifted; it was good all at once, it was good to live, to be.

The eyes and the gaze were on her again; she felt them and turned suddenly and faced them. The look she met was deep and warm, but it changed, holding hers, grew cool, enigmatical, impersonal. Did he not know her then, or did he not want to know her?

This time tears of hurt and pride rushed to her eyes. He was watching, but she could not get her eyes away, even with those hateful tears welling.

The sail shifted, for no reason apparently. “Down, please,” he commanded. But as the boat dipped, shook itself, righted again, and flew on through the rosy light, his head came up near hers and his voice, in the old, boyish way, said: “Really?”

Sudden light shone through the tears in the girl’s eyes. Molly would have wrung her hands with an artist’s anguish, this was the place for coquetry!

“I thought you didn’t want to know me and I was hurt,” said Alexina.

“It was yours to know first,” said Willy Leroy stoutly, but his eyes were laughing.

“Oh,” said Alexina, doubtfully; “why, yes; perhaps it was.” And then she laughed, too, gaily.

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CHAPTER TWO

As Molly, Alexina and Mr. Henderson sat on the front gallery of the hotel the next morning, they were joined by one Mr. Thompson Jonas, a lawyer of Aden, who lived above his office and took his meals at the hotel.

Mr. Jonas was small, wiry and muscular, of Georgia stock, with a fierce little air and a fierce moustache, and quick, bright blue eyes, never still. He had sprung to the aid of Molly and Alexina one morning and flung a door open as they passed from the dining-room, and speedily they were all good friends. It was characteristic of him that he should have flung the door back, not merely opened it. There was something of homage in the act. Within the body of the little man was the chivalrous spirit of a Chevalier Bayard, a Coeur de Lion. The big soul of Mr. Jonas was imprisoned in his pigmy person as the spirit of the genius in the casket.

He was a Nimrod, too, and even now stood in hunting accoutrements, seeming rather to have been shaken into his natty leggings than they to have been drawn onto him, and there was a flare and dip to his wide, soft hat and a jaunty fling to his knotted tie. His dog, a Gordon setter bitch, sat on her haunches by him as he stood, his fingers playing with her silky ears.

“Now, you’d better come go with me, Henderson,” he was urging, “the buggy’s here at the door and you need it—you need this sort of thing more.”

“It’s a busy day with me, thank you,” answered the Reverend Henderson a little coldly, for this Mr. Jonas was a man of no church. His faith, he had frequently assured the young clergyman, would long ago have died for breathing space in any creed he yet had met with.

“When you’re older you’ll understand better what I mean, my dear boy,” the little man had in good part and cheerfulness assured the other. “Come around and use my books any time you like.”

For the soul of Mr. Jonas enthused—or convinced its owner that it did—over Confucius, and further revelled in the belief that it delved in occult knowledge; it also led him to place the volumes of the early Fathers on his book-shelves and the literature of the Saints and of Kant and Comte and Swedenborg; it conducted its owner to the feet of Emerson and Thoreau; it made him talk Darwinism. Jesus Christ and Plato, Mr. Jonas loved to say, made up his ideal philosophy.

Mr. Henderson, on the other hand, spoke of church buildings in Aden other than his own as assembling places. It was inevitable he did not give his approval to Mr. Jonas. His feeling against the little man even made him enumerate the occupations ahead for the day, as if it was a sort of avowal of the faith to thus declare them.

“It’s a busy day with me, thank you. I have a feast day service and a guild meeting, besides my parochial duties and a vestry meeting for the evening.”

“Dear me,” said Molly, looking at him. “To be sure—I’d forgotten you’re a minister.” The young man looked up, instant self-arraignment in his face, for permitting it to be forgotten.

“When do you have service?” Molly was saying. “We must come over, Malise and I.”

He told her gravely.

Mr. Jonas was standing against the gallery railing, rising and falling on his neat little toes, the setter’s eyes following his every movement. He was facing Mrs. Garnier and her daughter, looking from the mother, with her red-brown hair and shadowy lashes, to the girl, quite lovely, also, when she smiled in this sweet, sudden way up at him. She had nice hair, too, something the colour of wild honey.

“Charming women, charming women,” he was summing them up.

Yet could Mr. Jonas have called to mind any women, the old or young, the forlorn or charming, who had not moved him to chivalric emotion in some form?

Alexina was looking up the street. Mr. Jonas turned, too, as a wagonette, drawn by two big, iron-grey mules, swung round the corner, a glitter of brass and a hint of red about the harness. A young fellow on the front seat was driving; a lady sat behind.

“The finest boy and best shot in Jasmine County,” said Mr. Jonas, starting forward as the mules were reined up at the hotel entrance, “and the foolishest, most profoundly wise mother.”

Alexina was going forward, too. “We—that is, I know them,” she told him; “they are old friends, the Leroys.”

For she had known Charlotte in a moment.

A darky boy lounging about came to take the mules and Willy sprang his mother out, as lightly as ever a girl would spring, and brought her up the steps to Alexina.

Charlotte’s embrace was eager and ardent; then she cried a little, with her face against the girl’s shoulder.

“For my youth,” she said the next instant, lifting her head and smiling at the girl. “I’m almost a middle-aged woman, little Mab; I’m nearly forty-five and I don’t want to be.”

Vivacity, as of old, dwelt in Charlotte’s face and animated her lively movements, but her brilliant eyes were somewhat sunken, as happens with women of marked features and dashing beauty; the skin was growing sallow too, and as the cheeks and temples drew in the features stood large.

“I don’t know how to grow old,” said Charlotte, and truthfully, “I don’t know how to let go. I haven’t the resourcefulness, or quiet, or repose, for an old woman.”

Always, ’way back as Charlotte Ransome, she had loved the showy, and she loved it still, as evidenced by the scarlet ribbon from which her fan hung, and the flowered muslin, showing the hand of village dressmaking. But she bore herself with the smiling pleasure of a child in them.

Willy joined them. He had been talking with Mr. Jonas, and evidently had declined the expedition too, for the little man, calling to the setter, went off grumbling and upbraiding the lot of them.

“We came early to avoid the heat,” Charlotte explained, as they went to join Molly and Mr. Henderson.

Molly’s eyes swept Mrs. Leroy’s youthful fineries wonderingly, curiously. It was no credit to Molly that her sixth sense lay in an instinctive selection of the appropriate in the beautiful. She wondered much as a child wonders over the mysterious, at what she more often than not saw on others.

She lolled back now in her simple dress, of which Alexina had reason to know the cost, and she lolled indifferently—Celeste or some one would press out the rumples when need be—then she held out a pretty hand to Charlotte.

But Mrs. Leroy, the greetings over, spread her draperies with some care and absorption as she sat down. She was another type of helpless person, the reverse of Molly, with a carping sense of responsibility.

Molly’s gaze followed her concern with lazy interest in which lurked laughter, for the dress upon which the care was bestowed was so, well— Alexina’s face grew hot; she hated Molly, whose every thought she was reading; and, by the girl’s arrangement, they fell into two groups, Molly and the men making one, King William perched on the railing of the gallery, and Alexina and Mrs. Leroy the other, drawn a little apart. There was so much to say.

“We see the Kentucky papers,” Charlotte told Alexina, “so I know of most of the happenings.” She drew a little breath. “And Austen Blair is married?”

“Yes,” said Alexina, “just before we came.”

Charlotte was regarding her like a child with a secret trembling on its lips. “I was engaged to him once, Alexina, and we broke it.” Light from many sides began to break in upon Alexina.

“Oh,” she said; “Mrs. Leroy!” “It’s odd, isn’t it?” said Charlotte. “He was the only man ever caring for me that I never subjugated—except Willy here—” Her voice brightened, while she nodded, in her near-sighted way, at Mr. Henderson. “As for him, he’s ruled me and browbeat me all his life.” And Charlotte smiled contentedly at the minister.

Alexina reached out and, with a passionate sort of protectingness, took hold of the beringed hand wielding a fan with vivacity and sprightliness.

“I wish we could have given him more advantages,” Mrs. Leroy was continuing; “but he’s had to plan for us somehow instead. I remember he wasn’t eleven years old, though it seemed natural enough he should be doing it at the time, when we came over from St. Louis to Louisville without his father, and Willy had to buy the tickets and check the trunks. I suppose I ought to have realized it, but I never had done such things in my life, and I lost my purse in the depot, I remember, and a gentleman found it, and so Willy took hold.

“We sent him into town here, after we came to Aden, to the Presbyterian minister, who taught him. He wanted to go to college, not that he’d admit it now. Then as soon as he was any size he began at his father about reclaiming the grove. That is, Willy planned and Georges listened. Willy’d got an idea from Mr. Jonas that the railroad was coming through some day, just as it has, but it’s been a long pull and a wait, for this is the first full yield for his trees. He’s been offered seven thousand for the crop as it hangs, but the mortgage is eight thousand on the place, which went for fertilizing and ditching and sheds, and living, you know, so Willy is holding for eight thousand and Mr. Jonas is urging for nine.”

Charlotte’s pride in these statements was beaming.

“As soon as the grove proves itself, the place will sell for several times its old value, and we’re going back to Kentucky, to Woodford. Willy wants to buy back my father’s farm, not that he’ll let me say that he does, he’s so afraid of admitting anything, but when he was nineteen, three years ago, he had the measles—wasn’t it dear and comical, like he was a child again—and he let me hold his hand, in the dark room, you know, and we talked about it, when we would go back.”

The girl was patting Charlotte’s hand softly and winking back tears while she laughed. Why tears? She herself had no idea. Mrs. Leroy had a thousand questions to ask, she said, but somehow she never got to them.

“Dear me,” she said presently, “we have to go and I’ve talked of nothing but my own affairs. In my solitude down here I’ve grown a shameless egotist.”

As if she had been ever anything else, the unconscious soul!

“But to be with one of my own sex—some one linked with the past, too, is extenuation. There’s so much a woman can’t talk of with men, they have such different ways of seeing things, and let her love her men folk never so dearly, if there’s none of her own sex around, a woman’s lonesome, Alexina.”

“Yes,” said Alexina, “she is.” But she said it absently, for she was conscious of King William’s gaze being upon her. She looked up laughing, yet a little confused, for his look was warm.

He slipped along the railing, leaving Mrs. Garnier and the minister chatting. In this blue serge suit and straw hat he looked very like the King William of long ago, dark, keen and impatient.

“What do you think of it, Aden?” he asked.

“I like it,” said Alexina. “Somehow as soon as you are in a thing the scene changes to out of doors. It used to be Indians on the common, or Crusoe in the yard, back there in Louisville.”

“You began by saying you liked it,” he reminded her. Did he think to tease? His eyes were naughty. Here was a zest; this was no Georgy.

“And I do,” she said, standing to it. “I do like it.” Was he always laughing at people, this William Leroy?

“They are coming to spend a day with us this week, Alexina and her mother,” Mrs. Leroy here told her son, at which, for all the imperturbability of his countenance, Alexina was conscious of something a little less happy about the son.

“They’re very good to come,” he responded. The tone might be called guarded.

Certain recollections were crowding upon Alexina. Mrs. Leroy’s management, her housekeeping, even to a child’s comprehension, had been palpably erratic and unexpected.

The girl understood his masculine helplessness. Hers were the eyes that laughed now.

“I’ve set the table in your house before,” she informed him, “while you made toast.” His countenance cleared. He met her gaze solemnly. “It’s a bargain,” he said. “What day, mother?”

That night Alexina was chatting with Mr. Jonas. She liked him. “You said this morning,” she reminded him, “that Mrs. Leroy was the wisest, foolishest mother—what did you mean?”

“Just that,” said Mr. Jonas. “Hasn’t her very incompetency made the boy?”

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CHAPTER THREE

For the next three days Mr. Henderson avoided them. He spoke in the hall or dining-room, to be sure, but joined them no more in plans or on the gallery.

And Molly turned petulant. Why had they ever come to Aden, she moaned. “Can’t you propose something, Malise?” she besought.

Alexina, endeavouring to write letters, felt tired. She had been up at Molly’s call a dozen times in the night.

“We’re going to spend to-morrow with Mrs. Leroy,” she reminded her mother.

“She looks like Mrs. Malaprop,” said Molly crossly. The daughter’s face flushed. Youth is rawly sensitive to ridicule of its friends. Besides, what would they find at Lake Nancy? It would be poor, she expected that, and it might be—pitiful? Not to her, not to her, but Molly was so unable to see behind things. If a thing was poor to Molly it was only poor and she said so. Alexina hoped her mother would not go.

But when Friday came Molly, in feverish, restless state, was ready for anything and even brightened up over it, while it was Alexina who was petulant, and put on one dress and took it off, and tried another, even with William Leroy down-stairs in the wagonette, waiting.

But she felt better as she came out into the sunshine and the dress she had finally decided on seemed to settle on her into sudden jauntiness. William shook hands. There was a comfortable sense of humour about him.

“It’s fair to divide families into component parts on occasions,” he stated, and put Alexina in a place by his own and Molly behind. Molly pouted.

“And, besides, we are going to drop Henderson at a sick parishioner’s on the way,” he said, with a naughty glance at her. “I met him starting to the livery stable just now and stopped him.”

Molly’s face cleared. She met his eyes with insouciance, but, somehow, one felt all at once that she liked him better.

Mr. Henderson came out with a satchel and climbed in. He looked stern and uninviting, Alexina thought, but the note of Molly’s random remarkings promptly brightened. Willy flicked the whip above the big grey span and off they trotted across town, westward. The morning was keen enough that the sun’s warmth was pleasant and quickened the blood. Aden was left behind. Here and there on the outskirts frame houses, crudely and hideously cheap, were building. Land everywhere was being cleared, the felled trees lying about, the whirl of a portable sawmill telling their destiny, while burning stumps filled the air with creosote pungency.

Then the despoilments of progress were left behind and the untouched pine woods closed about them, and trees rose tall, straight, twigless, to where a never-ceasing murmur soughed, and the light came sifting, speckled, and flickering through the gloom, upon the sandy ground and scrub palmetto beneath.

Alexina breathed deep. It was quiet, and peaceful and solemn.

“Isn’t it?” said William sociably. She looked up; she hadn’t spoken.

The trees thinned, grew sparse, and the road came out into the open. A mile farther on they entered a belt of hummock land, a wild growth of live-oak, cypress, magnolias, thicketed, intertwisted, rank. Grey moss trailed and swept their faces as they passed under, vines clambered and swung and festooned, gophers crawled out of the path, and a gleaming snake slid across the road and into the palmetto undergrowth.

He was looking at her as they came out, she flushed and ecstatic.

“But wait,” said he, “until I show it to you after a while in bloom.”

Just beyond the hummock he drew rein at a clearing before an unpainted frame house, even cheaper and more hideous than the most. Mr. Henderson got out, King handing the satchel after him. “It’s a death-bed,” he said under his breath to the two, as the minister went toward the house; “that’s the pitiful part of it down here, people taking all they’ve got to get here, only to die.”

“Don’t—don’t tell about it,” said Molly sharply.

William Leroy touched the mules and they went on. A little later Alexina felt Molly’s hand upon her. “Come back with me, Malise,” she begged. Her face looked drawn and grey.

“But we’re there,” explained King, and a minute after turned in at an old iron gate, flanked by two ancient live-oaks. An osage hedge, cut back upon its woody stock, stretched about the place either side from the gate. Within, the driveway made a sweep off towards buildings in the rear, while a shell path led up to the house, which was of frame, wide, with porches across the front, up-stairs and down. Bermuda grass covered the sandy surface of the yard, which was large and sloped back towards the lake, visible through the grove. Here and there a banana plant reared its ragged luxuriance and a stunted palm or two struggled upward; there was on old rustic seat beneath a gnarled wild orange tree.

As Willy helped them out, Charlotte appeared and came animatedly down the path between the borders of crepe myrtle. Alexina ran ahead to meet her. The girl’s hands were quite cold. Mrs. Leroy’s white dress, relic of bygone fashion, fluttered with rose-coloured ribbons, and suddenly Alexina seemed to see a wide old cottage in a shrub-grown yard, and on its porch a lady in a gauzy dress with rosy ribbons, gathering a little child into her lap. The girl threw her arms about this Charlotte in the old white dress, and then, because her eyes were full of foolish tears, ran on, for the Captain was on the porch, in a cane arm-chair, a line of blue smoke trailing up from the cigar in his fingers. Laughing and breathless she went up the steps and their eyes met. Never a word spoke either, but the hand of the man closed on the girl’s and rested there until the others came up.

“Willy wouldn’t let me do a thing about your coming, Alexina,” Mrs. Leroy began, as she reached them; “he said he’d tend to it himself and wouldn’t let me give a direction. He’s fussy sometimes and notionate, like the time when the surveyors were staying with us, and Mandy set some dishes on a chair. I’d already told him she didn’t know how to clear a table for dessert, and he said I ought to have taught her.” The girl’s eyes danced. “You’re all of you the same, the very same; not one of the three has changed.”

Charlotte beamed. She took it with undisguised pleasure that she had not changed.

King came round the house. He had taken the mules to the stable. “I’m holding you to that bargain,” he reminded Alexina.

Molly looked bored. Such things were only playful and interesting as she was part of them. Then she said she was tired, evidently having no mind for a morning with Mrs. Leroy.

“You shall go up and lie down in my room,” said Charlotte.

The three women went in. The hall dividing the house was wide and high, its floor of boards a foot wide, and bare but for a central strip of carpet; an old mahogany hat-tree stood against one wall, a mahogany sofa against the other, with straight backed chairs flanking both. It was all labouriously clean and primly bare.

The rooms up-stairs were big, with old mahogany furniture set squarely about them.

“They didn’t want me to bring the furniture, Willy and his father, when we came,” Charlotte told Alexina; “it cost more to get it here than to buy new, but I didn’t want new; I wanted this.”

Everything was innocent of covers or hangings, nor were there any pictures. She explained this.

“I don’t know how to drive nails,” she told them, “and Willy and the Captain don’t care. Willy had the house papered this fall in case of people coming about buying, and the papering men took the nails out the walls and he won’t bother to put them in. They’re all in here.”

Charlotte didn’t mean the nails; she threw open a closet door and ancestral Ransomes, neatly set against the walls, peered out of the dark.

Alexina put a hand over Charlotte’s on the door knob. Molly yawned.

“It seems chilly here in my room,” said Charlotte; “the sun isn’t round this side yet. Put your hats on the bed and Mrs. Garnier shall go lie on Willy’s sofa.”

They followed her across the hall. “He has his bed and things in there,” she explained, nodding towards an adjoining room, “and he keeps his books and such in here.”

On the floor, otherwise uncarpeted, lay a bearskin. There was a sofa against the wall and a plain deal table in the centre of the room, piled with papers, books and pipes, about a lamp. There were some chairs; a gun-rack, antlers, an alligator skin and some coloured prints of English hunting scenes on the walls, and an old-fashioned, brass-mounted cellarette hung in an angle. The south window looked out across the grove upon Nancy; between the two east windows stood an old secretary book-case.

Charlotte suggesting that Mrs. Garnier put on a wrapper, the two went back to her bed-room. Alexina stood hesitating. She felt a sense of surreptitiousness and embarrassment, and then took a step to the book-case—any one might do that much—and read the titles of the books.

About orange culture and fertilizing these first seemed to be, and those next were concerned with the breeding of stock. They meant Woodford and the future, probably. She skipped to the other shelves. Buckle’s Introduction to the History of Civilization, Hallam’s Middle Ages, Wealth of Nations, Wilhelm Meister, Poems of Heinrich Heine, several volumes of Spencer and Huxley, Slaves of Paris, Lecocq, the Detective, File No. 118, The Lerouge Case, The Scotland Yard Detective, Carlyle’s French Revolution, Taxidermitology, Renan’s Life of Jesus, Pole on Whist, Hoyle, Tom Sawyer, Past and Present, Pickwick Papers, Herodotus, an unbroken shelf of Walter Scott, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Cousin Pons, Drainage, Pendennis, Small Fruit Culture.

Why, here was a world, within these glass doors, she did not know. Yet she had read diligently among Uncle Austen’s books. She looked back in memory over his shelves; Macaulay, yes, Uncle Austen cared so essentially for Macaulay, and for Bancroft and Prescott, and Whittier and Lowell. There were the standards in fiction and poetry in well-bound sets. Uncle Austen himself admired Alexander Pope, and Franklin’s Autobiography; he liked Charles Reade’s novels, too, bearing on institutional reforms—

Here Mrs. Leroy and Molly came back, Molly in a white wrapper and Charlotte bearing a pillow and a silk quilt.

“Willy’s calling,” Charlotte told Alexina; “he wants you.”

He was at the foot of the stairs, and, waiting for her to get down, watched her hand on the banister. The wood was dark and the hand was white and slender. Then he held out a big, checked apron. She walked into it and looked over her shoulder while he tied the strings behind.

It takes time to set a table when neither is just certain where things are to be found. Hunting together in sideboard, cupboards, and on pantry shelves brings about a feeling of knowing each other very well. There was so much, too, to talk about.

“Do you remember—” it was Alexina pausing with a goblet in hand to ask it.

“Have you forgot—” King, producing a carving set, would rejoin.

Presently she paused. Twice she started to speak, hesitated, then said, “There’s a thing I want to ask you, or, rather, want to say—” Her voice was a little tremulous and breathless.

“Yes.”

“You remember—that is, you haven’t forgot the ‘King William’?”

She was looking away from him and he looking at her, his mouth odd, yet smiling, too. She was an honest and a pleasant thing to look upon. “Yes,” he told her, “as well as I remember the raft we put off on from the desert island and the plains back of the stable—have you forgotten the trackless plains where we sat down to starve in the snow, with never a sign of deer or buffalo for days, or even a thing on wing? We’d just lighted on Hiawatha those days. There was an Indian, by the way, came up from the grass water yesterday and brought us venison for to-day.”

It was evident he did not mean to let her return to the subject.

Presently Alexina untied the apron. “I must see your mother some,” she said.

“But she does not want you,” declared his mother’s son; “she’s overjoyed to think you’re with me. She thinks there is something deficient in her son; she insists I’ve never spoken to a girl since we left you in Louisville. Besides, she’s in the kitchen, I hear her out there now, all fluttered herself and fluttering Aunt Mandy.”

But Alexina would go. “I must call Molly in time for dinner,” she insisted.

---

CHAPTER FOUR

Now William Leroy supposed Mrs. Garnier to be in his mother’s room. A moment later he followed Alexina up the stairs, meaning to get something out of his desk which he wished to show her. He was a most direct youth, considering that he was, by his mother’s confession, a timorous one. There was an odd little smile about his mouth, perhaps because all things looked pleasant right now.

His nature was practical rather than sanguine, and built in general only on things achieved, but to-day the fruit was hanging golden on the trees and the grove was one of the few new ones in bearing. He had anticipated the railroad by several years in planting, and now the grove and house were going to bring a figure larger than he ever had hoped for.

As the Israelites yearned for Canaan, he was looking towards the pastoral lands of Kentucky. To-day, for the once, he would let this new buoyancy, this unanalyzed optimism run warm in his blood; why not? He was young, he was strong, he was master of his circumstances for the first time.

He went up the steps lightly, springily, with a sort of exuberant joy in the mere action. His canvas shoes made no sound. The stairs landed him at his own door. He brought up short.

Alexina was standing midway of the threshold; he thought he heard a sob.

She turned hurriedly, her hands outspread across the doorway as by instinct. “Don’t,” she begged; “please go away.” Then as he wheeled, “No, wait—” She swallowed before she could speak.

“It’s Molly,” she said; “can you send us back to town? she’s—she’s—”

“Not well,” the daughter was trying to say. The boy’s straightforward eyes were fixed on hers inquiringly.

“What’s the use; I can’t lie,” the girl broke down miserably. “I ought not to have come with her.” Her arms dropped from across the doorway. In all perplexity he was waiting. He had a glimpse of Molly within, drooping against the table, and her eyes regarding them with a kind of furtive fear.

His hunting flask from out the cellarette was there on the table.

The girl was speaking with effort. “I’m sorry; she must have felt bad and found it.” She suddenly hid her face in her hands against the casement.

That roused him. He felt dazed. It needed a woman here to feel the way.

“I’ll get mother,” he said.

“Oh,” begged the girl, and quivered; “can’t we get back to town without—must she know?”

King was growing himself again. “Why,” he said, “of all people, yes, mother.”

He went down the steps two at a time. There was no sensitive apprehension in his manner when he brought her back, as there often was concerning his mother; he knew her strength as well as her incompetencies.

She came straight up and hardly noticed Alexina as she passed but went on to Molly, whose eyes, full of shame and fear, were dully watching the scene.

Charlotte put her arms about her, drew her to the sofa, and sat by her. “Poor dear,” she said; “poor dear.”

Molly drooped, trembled, then turned and clung to her, crying piteously. “You’re sorry for me? I did it because I’m afraid. He said they all come down here to die. Malise don’t know, she don’t understand, she’s hard.”

“You go down to your dinner, Alexina,” said Charlotte; “it’s waiting. Oh, yes, yes you will go.” There was finality in the tone, very different from Charlotte’s usually indefinite directions. “Leave your mother to me; oh, you needn’t tell me anything about it; I know. And take that hardness out of your face, Alexina, it’s your own fault if you let this embitter you, it’s ourselves that let things spoil our lives, not the things. I’ll tell you something, that you may believe I know, something that I told Willy at a time his arrogance seemed to need the knowledge. My father, my great, splendid, handsome father, all my life was this way. But he came straight home to my mother, and so she kept him from worse, and held him to his place in the world. Keep on loving them, it’s the only way. Many a time we’ve all cried together like babies, father and mother and I, by her sofa.”

“Willy,” called Charlotte. The boy ran up from below. “Take Alexina down to her dinner and afterwards take her out of doors. No, you’re not going back to the hotel, not to-night. Willy can send Peter in for your woman and your things, for you’re going to stay here till she’s better and you see this thing differently.”

That evening King and Alexina sat on the edge of the pier, the water lapping the posts beneath their swinging feet. He was peeling joints of sugar-cane and handing her sections on the blade of his knife, she trying to convince herself that they were as toothsome as he insisted they were. He could idle like a child.

But the girl’s mind was back there in the house. “According to your mother,” she was saying, “there’s got to be affection back of the doing of a duty.” Poor child, she was putting it so guardedly, so impersonally she thought.

“Well,” said he, dropping his unappreciated bits of cane, piece by piece into the water, “that’s a woman’s way of looking at it.”

“What’s a man’s?” asked the girl, at that, “how does a man do hard things?”

“He just does ’em, I should say, and doesn’t analyze. He’s got to be at something, you know; it’s part of the creed.”

“What creed?” demanded Alexina.

“Mr. Jonas’s.”

“Oh,” said Alexina, “yes, I see.”

---

CHAPTER FIVE

Molly, Alexina and Celeste stayed a week at Nancy with the Leroys. It was a household wherein there was no strain, no tension, though, to be sure, there was small management. One had a comical comprehension that Mandy the cook and Tina the wash-woman kept their families off the gullibility and good faith of their mistress.

Alexina was sent into the sunshine.

“Keep her outdoors,” Charlotte commanded Willy; “the child’s morbid.”

Mr. Jonas drove out with trophies of game as offerings to Mrs. Garnier. One morning Mr. Henderson came with him in the buckboard, and Molly and the two men sat in the sunshine on the porch and talked.

“Did he die?” she asked the minister presently.

“Who?”

“The man at the house where you stopped that day?” She asked it as one driven to know, even while apprehensive of the answer.

Exultation leaped for an instant to the young man’s face, a stern joy. “He died,” he told her, “but in the faith at the end.”

“In what faith?” Molly asked curiously. She was a child in so many things.

“The Church,” he told her, with reproof in his tone.

The click of Mr. Jonas’s incisors upon incisors chopped the air.

But Molly moved a little nearer the minister. “Yes,” she agreed slowly, unwillingly almost; “they all do. Father Bonot used to say it over and over. They all come back to the Church to—to die.”

She was shivering.

There was a quick, snapped off h’ah from Mr. Jonas.

Mr. Henderson looked bewildered. “I did not know; then, Mrs. Garnier, you are—”

“I’m a Catholic,” said Molly, a little in wonder.

“Romanist?” said the other gently.

But Molly wasn’t listening, nor would she have known what the distinction meant, had she been. It was Mr. Jonas who gave forth another sound that was almost a snort, and marched off to where King and Alexina were sitting on the step.

Molly watched him go, then glanced around as if to insure aloofness, and leaned forward, her fingers pulling at the edge of her handkerchief.

“You helped him to die, and you’re a priest—one sort of a priest—and I want to tell you—”

“No,” said the other, “you do not understand; let me make you see.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Molly; “no,” hurriedly, “let me tell you. I want to tell you. It will help me. I take things—I have to; anything that will make me forget and make me sleep. I’m afraid—I take it because I’m afraid to die.”

He looked at her out of dull eyes. She was, self-avowedly, everything he held abhorrent—alien, worldly, and weak. He stammered something—was he asking God to help her, or himself?—and left her. Later, as he and Mr. Jonas drove back to Aden, the eyes of Mr. Jonas snapped. “You’re brewing mischief to your own or somebody else’s peace of mind; you always are when you look like that. Out with it, man.”

Why Mr. Henderson should out with it, he himself knew less than any, but Mr. Jonas had a way.

The minister’s words came forth with effort.

“I’ve been seeking light to know why Mrs. Garnier was sent down here. I’ve never cared for a woman before; I can’t seem to tear it out. But to-day it’s made clear: she was sent to me to be saved.”

“From her faith?” inquired Mr. Jonas.

But the minister was impervious to the sarcasm.

“To the faith,” said Mr. Henderson. The others gone, Alexina, King William and the Captain sat on the porch. The girl who was on the step reached up and put a hand on the locket swinging from the Captain’s fob. “May I?” she asked, “I used to, often, you know.”

The Captain slipped the watch out and handed it to her, the rest depending, and she opened the locket, a large, thin, plain gold affair. “This,” she said, bending over it, then looking up at the Captain archly, “this is Julie Piquet, your mother, wife of Aristide Leroy, refugee and Girondist.”

She recited it like a child proud of knowing its lesson, then regarded him out of the corners of her eyes, laughing.

There answered the faintest flicker of a smile somewhere in the old Roman face.

The girl returned to the study of the dark beauty on the ivory again, its curly tresses fillet bound, its snowy breasts the more revealed than hidden by the short-waisted, diaphanous drapery.

“And because it had been your father’s locket, with you and your mother in it, Mrs. Leroy wouldn’t let you change it to put her in; and so this on the other side is you, young Georges Gautier Hippolyte Leroy—”

“Written G. Leroy in general,” interpolated the gentleman’s son.

“And this is how you looked at twenty, dark and rosy-cheeked, with a handsome aquiline nose. You never were democratic, for all your grand pose at being; do you believe he was?” This to King. “Look at him here; if ever there was an inborn, inbred aristocratic son of a revolutionist—”

“He barricaded the streets of Paris with his fellow-students in his turn, don’t forget,” said King. “Where his papa had sent him for a more cosmopolitan knowledge of life than Louisville could afford,” supplemented Alexina gaily.

“And where he wrote verses to a little dressmaker across the hall,” said William.

“Verses?” said Alexina. “Did he write verses? I never heard about the verses.”

“No?” said the son; “hasn’t he ever written verses to you? Well, since I’ve opened the way to it, I was leading up to it all the while, why I have. I’ll show ’em to you. I’ve had ’em in my pocket waiting the opportunity three days now.” Which was true. He had been going for them that first day.

He produced a small card photograph, somewhat faded, which, taken in Alexina’s hand, showed her a little girl’s serious face, with short-cropped hair.

“She had a nice, straight little nose, anyhow,” said Alexina approvingly, studying the card.

“Turn it over,” said William Leroy. He had a way of commanding people. Some day Alexina intended warring with him about it, but she turned it over now. The lines inscribed on its reverse were in a round and laboured script that, despite effort, staggered down hill.

“I wrote ’em,” said Willy Leroy, “moi—myself, with gulped-down tears at leaving you. I’ve never written any since.”

She was reading them.

“Out loud,” he commanded.

She read them aloud. She was laughing, but she was blushing absurdly, too.

“He thinks, your son does,” said Alexina, addressing herself to the Captain, “that he was a precocious person, whereas he was only—”

“Young,” said the Captain.

“Lamentably egotistical,” said Alexina.

“Give it to me,” said Willy, “my picture and my feelings thereon.”

“No,” said the girl; “I want it.”

“Yes.” He said it with the King William air. She made a little mouth, but gave him the card, which he put back in his wallet and the wallet into his pocket. “You’re welcome to a copy of the lines,” he said.

Alexina, bestowing on him a glance of lofty disdain, departed, high-headed, into the house.

But he ran after her and stooped, that he might look into her face; was he laughing at her? “Oh,” she said, and wheeled upon him, but had to laugh too, such was the high glee behind the sweet gravity on William Leroy’s countenance. Glee there was, yet, too, something else in the dark eyes laughing at her, something unconsciously warm and caressing.

The girl ran quickly up-stairs.

And William Leroy, brought to himself, stood where she left him. The hand on the newel-post suddenly closed hard upon it, then he straightened and walked into the parlour, and, sitting down, stared at the embers of the wood fire, as one bewildered. Then his head lifted as with one who understands. On his face was a strange look and a light.

---

CHAPTER SIX

Alexina went up to her mother and Mrs. Leroy. Molly was lolling in a big chair in the sunshine, idly swinging the tassel of her wrapper to and fro. The shadows about her eyes were other than those lent by the sweep of her childlike lashes, and she looked wan. But she looked at peace, too. In her present state the flow of Mrs. Leroy’s personal chat was entertainment. Now, there was always one central theme to Charlotte’s talk, whatever the variations.

“He hasn’t a bit of false pride, Willy hasn’t,” she was stating. “After his father lost his position, those two years before the trees began paying, there’s nothing Willy wouldn’t turn his hand to. He carried a chain for the surveyors and went as guide for parties hunting and fishing in the glades.”

Molly’s attention sometimes wandered from these maternal confidences.

“You were Charlotte Ransome before you were married, weren’t you?” she asked irrelevantly. “You used to come to New Orleans winters, didn’t you? You were at a party at my Uncle Randolph’s once when I was a girl and you were spoken of as a great beauty, I remember. There was a pompon head-dress too, one winter, called the Charlotte Ransome.”

The Charlotte listening, only the vivacity of smile and eyes left of her beauty, the Charlotte living the obscure life of a little raw Southern town, let her needle fall, the needle she handled with the awkwardness of a craft acquired late. She was darning an old tablecloth, come down from her mother’s day, that day when triumphs and adulation made up life, and when cost or reckoning was a thing she troubled not herself about. She was that Charlotte Ransome again, called up by Mrs. Garnier, the beauty, the fashion, and the belle.

“Oh,” she said, “the joy of youth, the joy! Old Madame d’Arblay, the Louisville milliner, devised that pompon head-dress out of her own cleverness, and I remember my old Aunt Polly Ann Love tried to talk her down on the price. How it comes back, the intoxication of it, and the living. Drink deep, little Mab, it never offers twice. I seemed to have divined it never would be again.”

The girl looked from one woman to the other. Molly still pursued this thing called adulation, and Mrs. Leroy, big-hearted, simple-souled as she was, looked yearningly back on that which was gone.

Was this all, then? Was life forever after empty, except as with Mrs. Leroy, of duties that occupied but did not satisfy? And what of women who are neither beauties nor belles? What has life to offer them?

A vast depression came over the girl. And was this all? Both women bore witness that it was.

“I heard tell in those days,” Molly was saying to Mrs. Leroy, “of a dozen men in the South you might have married. How did you come”—curiously—“in the end to marry Captain Leroy, so much older, and so quiet, and—er—”

Charlotte was too simple to resent the question, which to her meant only affectionate interest. Besides, she was an egotist, and livened under talk of herself. She had no concealment; indeed, had she been cognizant of any skeleton in the family closet, it must speedily have lost its gruesomeness to her, so constantly would she have it out, annotating its anatomy to any who showed interest.

“Because he came to us in our trouble,” said Charlotte, “to mother and me when father died. He was shot, my father, you know, in a political quarrel on the street in Lexington, the year before the war. And Captain Georges came to us. We’d always known him. His father and my Uncle Spottswood Love operated the first brandy distillery in Kentucky. Captain Georges had brought me pretty things from New Orleans and Paris all my life. I meant never to marry, then; I’d been unhappy. But it turned out we were poor, and so when Georges said for me to marry him that he might care for mother and me, why—”

“Oh,” breathed Alexina. It was denunciation. Certain scenes of childhood had burned into her memory, which she had interpreted later. Molly had not loved daddy, either.

“No one was ever so good, so nobly, generously good to a woman as Georges has been to me,” Mrs. Leroy was saying; “and even in our poverty he and Willy have managed, and kept it somehow from me, and long, oh, long ago, I came to love him dearly.”

The young arraigner, hearing, gazed unconvinced. She pushed the weight of her hair back off her forehead, as she always did when impatient. “Came to love him dearly.” With that mere affection which grows from association, and dependence and habit.

The girl sitting on the window-sill in the sunshine drew a long breath. There was more in life than these two had found; all unknowingly, they had proved it.

---

CHAPTER SEVEN

Charlotte kept them with her the week, then Molly turned restless.

“I can’t stand hearing another thing about Willy, Malise,” she declared. “I think he’s a very dictatorial and outspoken person myself.”

So Molly and Alexina and Celeste went back to the hotel, which had filled during the week of their absence. There was life and bustle in the halls as they went in and, from their windows up-stairs, they could see the lake gay with sail-boats.

The talk down-stairs concerned dances, picnics, fishing parties. The somnolent Molly awoke, languor fell from her and she stepped to the centre of the gay little whirl, the embodied spirit of festivity. Mr. Henderson, incongruous element, was there, too, with deliberate election it would seem, for Molly’s eyes did no inviting or encouraging. She did not need him in capacity of attendant or diverter these days, and it was clear that in any other capacity he embarrassed her. But he was not deterred because of that.

“You are coming to church, remember,” he told her on Sunday morning.

Molly did not even play at archness with him now; she looked timid. And at the hour she went, and Alexina with her. They had heard him officiate before, and it seemed the mere performance of the law; but into the dogmatic assertions of his discourse to-day glowed that fire which is called inspiration. The Reverend Henderson was living these days.

Molly, slim and elegant in her finery, moved once or twice in the pew. Alexina could not quite tell if she was listening. But she was. “Dear me,” she said, from under the shadow of her lace parasol, as they walked home, “how wearing it must be to be so—er—intense.” She spoke lightly, but she shivered a little. The Reverend Henderson had laid stress upon his text, “In the midst of life we are in death!”

As they went up the hotel steps Molly turned and looked around her and Alexina turned too, since it was Molly’s mood. The sky was blue, the air breathed with life and glow and sparkle. There was a taste almost of sea about it. On the prim young orange trees about the new houses across the street the fruit hung golden. “He used to reach them for me—Father Bonot did,” said Molly, slowly, “before I was tall enough. They’re sweeter—Louisiana oranges are. I used to run and hide behind his skirts, too, when I was afraid my mother was going to whip me.”

They went in. Half way up the stairs Molly paused. “You Blairs, you’re all like him—not like Father Bonot.”

“Like who?” asked Alexina.

“Like Mr. Henderson. You Blairs and Mr. Henderson would have pulled aside your skirts so my mother could have caught me and whipped me.”

Something like apprehension sprang into Alexina’s eyes. “Oh,” she said anxiously, “no; surely I’m not like that, and Aunt Harriet’s not!”

“Yes, you are,” said Molly stubbornly, “you all of you are. It’s because”—a sort of childish rage seized on her—“it’s because you’re all of you so—so damnably sure of your duty.” And Molly’s foot stamped the landing in her little fury.

It was funny, so funny that Alexina laughed. And perhaps it was true. She could have hugged Molly; she never came so near to being fond of Molly before.

December arrived, Christmas came and went. Life was almost pastoral—no, hardly that; it was more un fete champetre. Each day after breakfast the hotel emptied itself into the sunshine and merriment, emptied itself, that is, of all but the invalids. Molly shunned these. She never even looked the way of one if she could help it.

There was a lake party one night. They took boat at the hotel pier in various small craft and followed the chain of lakes to an island midway of the farthest. The moon was up as they started.

The party was of the gayest, and one might have said that Mr. Henderson was out of his element. Certainly his face was hardly suggestive of hilarity. But he followed Mrs. Garnier into one of the larger boats and took his place with a sort of doggedness. Even in the moonlight the sharpening angle of his cheek-bone was visible, and the deepening of the sockets in which his eyes were set, eyes that followed Mrs. Garnier insistently.

Molly being of the party, it followed that Alexina was, too, but that William Leroy was of it seemed to quicken something in his own sense of humour. His manner with the gay world was perhaps a little stony. He avowed, when thus accused by Alexina and Mr. Jonas, that it was to cover bashfulness. “I hate people,” he declared.

Yet, for a bashful youth, he was singularly deliberate and masterful, seeming to know what he wanted and how to get it. To-night it was that Alexina go with him in a small boat. The others started first, a youth in a striped flannel coat, strumming a guitar.

King put out last. He rowed slowly and often the boat drifted. When they entered the lock connecting the first lake with the next, the other boats had all passed through. The moon scarcely penetrated the dense foliage on the banks above them, and the ripple of the water against the boat seemed only to emphasize the silence, the aloofness. There must have been an early blossom of jasmine about, so sweet was the gloom.

When they passed out into the vaulted space and open water of the next lake, the other boats were far ahead. The tinkling cadence of the guitar floated back to them.

He rowed lazily on. Presently he spoke. “I wonder if you remember how we used to talk, ’way back yonder, about the Land of Colchis?”

“Yes,” said Alexina; “I remember.”

“I believe we are there at last. We closed the contract for our oranges to-day. It’s pretty fair gold, the fruit in Colchis. We pick for delivery on Monday.”

He never had talked to her of personal affairs before, it was Mrs. Leroy who had told her what she knew.

“There are several purchasers looking at the place we are going to sell, for dwellers in Colchis, you know, are only sojourners; they long for home.”

“The Jasons, too?” “This Jason at any rate. He wants four seasons to his year, and to hear his horse’s feet on pike, and to put his seed into loam.”

They slipped through the next lock and out upon the long length of Cherokee, the lake of the island which was their destination. It seemed to bring self-consciousness upon the speaker.

“You are so the same as you used to be,” he said, “I forget. How do I know you want to hear all this?”

“You do know,” said Alexina, honestly.

He did not answer. They were coming up to the other boats now, beached at the island. Lights were flickering up and down the sand and the rosy glare of a beach fire shone out from under the darkness of the trees. Figures were moving between it and them and they could hear voices and laughter. “You do know,” repeated the girl.

They had grounded. He was shipping the oars. Then he got up and held out a hand to steady her. She, standing, put hers into it. They did not look at each other.

“Yes,” he said, “I do know. You’re too honest to pretend.”

He helped her along and out upon the sand. There was a negro boy awaiting to take charge of the boat. They went up the slight declivity. He had not loosed her hand, she had not withdrawn it. The laughter, the chat, the aroma of boiling coffee, the rattle of dishes being unpacked reached them. They stood for a moment in the shadow, then her hand left his and they went to join the others.

The dozen men and women were grouped about the pine-knot fire, for the warmth was grateful. There was badinage and sally, light, foolish stuff, perhaps, but flung like shining nebulÆ along the way by youth in its whirl of mere being. It is good to know how to be frivolous sometimes. Alexina felt the exhilaration of sudden gaiety, daring. She sat down by the youth with the guitar and the striped flannel coat.

warbled the owner to his guitar, making room for her. “Right here, Miss Blair, by me.”

More than one presently stole a look at the tall, rather handsome Miss Blair, hitherto conceded reserved and different from her mother. She was laughing contagiously with the youth, and in the end she gained the guitar over which they were wrangling. She knew a thing or two about a guitar herself, it seemed—Charlotte Leroy could have explained how—as many chords as the owner anyhow. But the young Leroy, it would appear, was sulky, certainly unsociable, sitting there, removed to the outskirts of things, to smoke and stare at the moon. Yet never once did the girl look his way. It was enough that they were to return together.

Nor was she paying attention to Molly either. There are times when the mad leap and rush of one’s own blood absorbs all consciousness.

Molly was gay, too, feverishly gay. Some one had brewed a hot something for the delectation and comforting of the chilly ones, and Molly’s thin little hand was holding out her picnic cup as often as any one would fill it. It was Mr. Jonas who presently took the cup away and tried to wipe a stain off the pretty dress with his handkerchief.

When the start homeward was made, King came over to Alexina.

“I have to ask you to change to the large boat going back,” he said, a little stiffly perhaps; “Mr. Jonas is taking Mrs. Garnier in the small one, and Mr. Henderson says he will see to you.”

When she answered her voice was lightly nonchalant.

“Why not?” she said, absorbed in putting on her jacket.

She took her place in the boat by Mr. Henderson. Evidently the evening had gone wrong with him, for his face was ghastly in the moonlight, and his long, nervous fingers never stopped fingering the little gold cross hanging below the line of his vest. William Leroy did not return with the party at all. Not that she was concerned with that, Alexina assured herself proudly, it was only that she could not help hearing the others wondering at his entering a boat with the negro boy and rowing swiftly away up the lake. It was clear to her. Lake Nancy would have been the next lake on the chain had the channel been cut. He meant to tramp across home to save himself the trouble of going back to town. She did not think he had very good manners at any rate. Yet, when the boats came in at the hotel pier, it was William Leroy who met them. He waited for Alexina and walked with her a little ahead of the others up through the yard.

“Mrs. Garnier is not well,” he told her. “I went home and drove in and Mr. Jonas is putting her in the wagon now. We’ll take her out to mother; she’s all upset over something.”

She stopped short, having forgotten her mother. “I can’t let you,” she declared; “it isn’t right to Mrs. Leroy.”

“Mother’s waiting,” he said. “You’d better go in and say something to somebody, and get Celeste.”

Mrs. Leroy said that people always obeyed the King William tone. Alexina stood, hesitating. He waited.

Then she went.

He was in the wagonette when she and Celeste came out. The place was still and deserted, even Mr. Jonas gone, for which Alexina was grateful.

Molly was on the back seat, and Celeste, gaunt and taciturn, started to mount beside her.

Molly protested. “Not you, mammy; go in front. I want Malise—not the big Malise, you know—the little one.”

The girl, taking the wraps from the old woman, got in by her mother and began to put a shawl about her. The dew was falling heavily. Molly touched her hand. “Once Alexander said to me, ‘Let Malise keep tight hold on you, Molly.’”

William Leroy was flicking the mules travelling briskly through the sandy streets, and talking to the old woman, but she was sullen and the conversation died.

Alexina’s heart was choking her. Her father—daddy—Molly had spoken to her of daddy.

And all the while Molly was talking on, feverishly, incessantly. “You must keep him away, Malise, that minister, he worries me and his eyes make me uncomfortable, following me. He makes me remember things, and I don’t want to. He says it’s his duty. He said to-night I’m not going to get well and that he had to tell me in order to save me from myself. Make him keep away from me, Malise; I’m afraid of him. I took it, that, to-night, to forget what he said; say it isn’t so, Malise—say it.”

Willy leaned back over the seat, talking in steady, everyday fashion. “There’s the moon setting ahead of us; see it, Mrs. Garnier? Everything’s so still, you say? Why, no; it’s not so still. There is a cock crowing somewhere, and that must be a gopher scuttling under the palmetto. Now, look backward. See that line of light? It’s the dawn.”

---

CHAPTER EIGHT

The next evening at Nancy, an hour or two after supper, King William was tapping at Mrs. Garnier’s door, which was ajar.

“She is asleep,” warned Alexina from within.

“Then come on out,” he begged, “the moon’s up.”

“Go on,” Mrs. Leroy told her, “Willy wants you,” which to Charlotte was reason for all things.

“It’s windy,” he called softly, “bring a wrap.”

The girl came, bringing her reefer jacket and her Tam and put them on in the hall. The jacket was blue, the Tam was scarlet, and both were jaunty. He regarded her in them with satisfaction.

“Now, there,” said he, with King William approval, “I like that.”

They went down and out. She was tired, she said, so they sat on the bench under the wild orange. The moss, drooping from the branches, fluttered above them. The wind was fitful, lifting and dying. It was a grey night, with scattered mists lying low over the lake, while a shoal of little clouds were slipping across the face of the moon.

“It’s been too soft and warm,” said he; “it can’t last.”

But Alexina shivered a little, for there was a chill whenever the wind rose.

“Walk down to the pier,” he begged, “and back. Then you shall go in.”

The path led through the grove. Stopping to select an orange for her, he passed his hand almost caressingly up and down a limb of the tree.

“And you begin to pick the oranges Monday?” said Alexina.

“Monday.”

“And this is Thursday.”

They walked on. He was peeling away the yellow rind that she might have a white cup to drink from.

“I won’t be here to see the picking,” said Alexina. “I have to go to Kentucky for two weeks, something about business. Uncle Austen wrote me in the letter you brought out to-day, that it would simplify things if I could come. And Emily—Emily Carringford, you know—Uncle Austen’s wife, wrote too, asking me to stay with them.”

“So,” said he, “you go—”

“Monday. I’ve been talking to your mother, and she’s willing, if Captain Leroy and you are; I came out to ask you—I am always to be asking favors of your family, it seems—if you will let me leave Molly here instead of at the hotel. Celeste can attend to everything.”

“Why not?” asked Willy.

“It’s—it’s a business proposition,” said Alexina. But it took a bit of courage to bring it out.

“Is it?” said he.

“Or I can’t do it, you know.”

They had reached the lake and were sitting like children on the edge of the pier. The water was ruffled, the incoming waves white-crested, and the wind was soughing a little around the boat-house behind them. He was breaking bits off a twig and flinging them out to see them drift in. “Great country this,” he said, “that can’t produce a pebble for a fellow to fling.”

He looked off toward the shining, shadowy distance, where the moon gleamed against the mists. “You are”—then he changed the form of his question—“are you very rich?”

“Leave the very out, and, yes, I suppose I am rich,” said Alexina.

“You are so—well—yourself,” he said, “sometimes I find myself forgetting it.”

The girl swallowed once, twice, as if from effort to speak. She was looking off, too, against the far shore. “Is it a thing to have to be remembered?” then she asked.

“Isn’t it?” said King William, turning on her suddenly. There was a sharp harshness in his tones. “I wish to God it wasn’t.”

She got up, and he sprang up, too, facing her. Suddenly she stamped her foot. The wind, rising to a gale now, was blowing her hair about her face and she was angry. It made her beautiful. She might have been a Valkyr, tall, wind-tossed.

But the sob in her voice was human. “I’ve had Uncle Austen say such things to me in his fear I might let other people forget it, and a girl I cared for at school let it come between us, but I thought you—I had a right to think you were bigger. Your mother is, oh, yes, she is, and your father is. Not that I despise the other, either.” She lifted her head defiantly. “It’s a grand and liberating thing, though it was shackles on me in Uncle Austen’s hands. I don’t despise it; I couldn’t; but that it should have to be remembered—”

“Just so,” said Willy Leroy, in his father’s phrase.

Her head went up again and she looked at him full, straight, then turned and fled towards the house.

He ran after her, came abreast, and after the fashion he had, stooped to see into her face. “Don’t go away, in from me—mad,” he begged. Was he laughing?

“But I am mad,” she returned promptly.

“But don’t go in either way,” he said; “stay, mad if you will, but stay. Oh, I’m not proud,” he was breathing hard again, “that is—only this proud; I shall build onto my little gold of Colchis until we stand at least nearer equal—and then—”

Each looked at the other, with defiance almost. She was as beautiful as Harriet Blair.

“Then,” said the girl, “then you’ll be that far less my equal. Let me go.” And she jerked her sleeve from his hand and ran into the house.

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CHAPTER NINE

The morning after dawned sunless and chill. The sky was a pale leaden, below which darker masses of clouds scurried. The wind blew strong, steady, resistless. At breakfast they all sat shivering.

“Have Pete start fires,” said King William to Charlotte, “and you had better move Mrs. Garnier over to my room before night.” For there were not fire-places in all the rooms.

It was a dreary morning every way. The breakfast was poor and scant. Aunt Mandy defended herself. “Ev’y thing done give out,” she declared. “Mis’ Charlotte been so occapied she done forgot to order things f’om town.”

Convicted, Charlotte looked at Willy, then hastily took the defensive. “Mandy ought to have reminded me,” she declared.

“No, ma’am,” responded Mandy. “I done quit this thing uv tellin’ an’ havin’ you say things give out too soon.”

Willy sat stony. The Captain shivered. One realized all at once that he was an old man. “The thermometer is at forty-six, King,” he remarked.

“Yes,” said the son, “and falling.”

All morning it fell. At noon it registered forty degrees. The wind still swept a gale that whistled and shrieked at the corners of the house, and the three women passed the morning in Charlotte’s room, shivering about the open fire-place. Pete spent his day chopping and bringing in arm-loads of fat pine wood. All the sense of dissatisfaction with Aden returned. Desolate grey sand is a hideous exchange for sward, and orange trees look like toys from a Noah’s ark.

At dinner there was a furrow between King’s straight, dark brows. “It’s thirty-eight,” he told his father, “and falling. It’s clearing, too.”

Afterwards he was talking to Pete in the hall.

“No, sir,” reiterated Pete, “we’s too far below the line, ain’t never heard of sech a thing down here.”

At four o’clock King came in to say he was going to town. “It’s down to thirty-four,” he told his father. “I’m going in and telegraph up the river for reports.”

“And what then, son?” asked the Captain. “What can you do?” It was a hitherto unexperienced danger threatening Aden. But youth cannot sit and wait. Alexina, from the window in Charlotte’s room, saw King William fling himself on his horse at the gate and gallop off. The wind had ceased. The live-oaks on either side of the old iron gate stood motionless, their moss hanging in dreary, sombre lengths. There was no sound of bird or insect. And it was cold—cold. Alexina had a jacket over her woollen dress, for Aden houses are not built for cold, which poured in at casements, beneath doors, at keyholes. Molly, on the couch drawn up to the fire, coughed and coughed again. Alexina went to her. “I’m cold,” she complained; “and how dreary it is.”

It had cleared and the sky was a pale, chilly blue. The sun set in a yellow pallor. The night fell. King came in and warmed his hands at the parlour fire. Alexina and Charlotte had come down now.

“Thirty-two,” he told his father, “and falling.”

Neither the Captain nor his son ate much supper, but near-sighted Charlotte, absorbed in things at hand, seemed unconscious of anything more amiss than discomfort from the cold. After supper the son disappeared.

Molly was coughing sadly. They had moved her bed across to Willy’s sitting-room, and a fire crackled on the stone hearth; but it was to be one of the nights when she would not sleep, or but fitfully, and when Celeste and Alexina would not sleep either. At nine o’clock they persuaded her to bed.

“But talk, Malise, you and mammy talk. I don’t have chance to think when people keep on talking; and, mammy, rub my hands; it helps, to have some one rub them.”

At ten she wanted a drink of water. Alexina went to the window where she had set a tumbler outside. The night was still and clear, the stars glittering. The moon would rise soon now. How large the grove showed itself from this south window, stretching away to the southwest around the curving shores of Nancy. As Alexina opened the window she shivered, despite the heavy wool of her white wrapper. As she took in the glass—was it? Yes, over the surface of the water radiated a ferny, splintery film, which was ice.

Molly, feverish and restless, drank it thirstily, and said it was good, but it roused her so that she began to talk again.

“He said I couldn’t prevent his praying for me,” she was harping on the minister. “For my soul,” she laughed uneasily. “I told him to let my soul alone. It’s perfectly funny, Malise, that I’ve got to be prayed over when I don’t want to be.”

The night wore on. Celeste was nodding, even while her brown hands went on rubbing up and down the slim white wrist and arm.

The wood on the andirons broke and fell apart. The room grew shadowy. “Build it up, Malise,” begged Molly; “I like it light.”

There was no more wood up-stairs. It was past twelve o’clock and the house was still. Alexina opened the door into the hall. A lamp in case of need, because of Molly, was burning on a stand. Alexina had remembered that there was wood piled on the parlour hearth. Her slippers were noiseless.

Down-stairs she paused, then tip-toed to the front door. The big thermometer and barometer in one hung against a side of the recess and could be seen through the glass side-lights. It was bright moonlight now, the shadows of the rose vine clear cut on the porch floor. She looked at the thermometer.

She looked again.

It had come, then, what never had come to Aden before. From the talk of the day she had gleaned enough to know that the fruit hanging on William Leroy’s trees was but so much sodden, worthless pulp.

She turned back towards the parlour where the firelight was flickering out the doorway, then stopped. He was in his father’s chair before the hearth. His elbow was on his knee and the hand on which his chin was propped was clenched. The flame flared up. His face was haggard and harsh. She fled back up-stairs. Molly had fallen asleep, Celeste was nodding.

The girl shut the door and dropped in a little heap on the bearskin before the fire. She was shivering, but in her eyes, fixed on the embers, was a yearning, brooding light that made them beautiful. Then suddenly she hid her face in her hands, her head bowed on her knees, and began to sob.

---

CHAPTER TEN

The Captain, Mrs. Leroy and Alexina, on the gallery, watched King as he trudged across the yard. He was going for his horse that he might take a telegram into Aden for Alexina, who was to leave the following morning.

He trudged sturdily and was whistling under his breath as he went.

“But it’s a debt—I owe it to you,” said the girl suddenly, turning on the Captain. She spoke with vehemence, entreaty, passion.

“We put that aside the other day—discussed,” said the Captain gently. “You did,” declared the girl; “but not—you can’t say I did. And Mrs. Leroy saw the right, the justice of it, when I talked to her up-stairs.”

“But I hadn’t heard Georges then,” Charlotte hastened to say, “and I see now how you’re trying to make a purely business affair a personal one.” Poor Charlotte, she did not see anything of the kind; she was quoting the Captain.

“But it is a debt,” declared the girl, crying a little against her will, “and you have no right to refuse me. The whole transaction was a taking advantage, and hard, and mean; it was the pound of flesh, and you said, Mrs. Leroy, that if the grove could be held a year or two, and not sacrificed right away—”

“The boy will fight that part out,” said the Captain. The words sounded final, but the hand laid on the girlish one clasping the arm of his chair made it right.

“How can he?” she insisted, with stubbornness.

“I don’t know,” said the father.

The three sat silent. King, waving his hat at them as he rode around, stooped from his horse, opened the gate and went through. He was not a person to be offered sympathy. Right now he was absorbingly cheerful.

“But Mrs. Leroy admitted,” Alexina began again, her under lip trembling.

“No, Alexina,” said Charlotte hastily; “I didn’t. Or I ought not to have,” she added honestly. “I’ve never set myself against Georges in things concerning Willy since we came down here. We talked it out then, Georges and I. It’s been hard to see Willy fighting things; he was born imperious, but he’s used to battling now. I see what Georges meant. It’s better for people to learn how to battle. If I had ever been taught—”

The sun was slanting in under the old, wild orange tree on to the gallery. Again the three sat silent. Then out of the silence the Captain spoke. He was an old man who had laid down the burden of labour to lift and carry the heavier load of inaction in silence, as he had carried the other. His tone was impersonal.

“There was a giant wrestler, one AntÆus of Lybia, if I remember my classics, Alexina. King used to lie on the rug when you both were children and read you about him. So many times as this AntÆus was brought to earth, he arose renewed, if I recall. The boy must wrestle with his own fate.”

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

On entering Uncle Austen’s house, self-consciousness and constraint closed in like bars across the door of spontaneity. Alexina had arrived the night before and they were at breakfast. Uncle Austen was facetiously affable, and his sportive sallies, not being natural with him, embarrassed his audience. There is something almost pitiable in the sight of middle-age grown playful.

Emily, Uncle Austen’s wife—embarrassing realization in itself—looked in her plate constrainedly, so that Alexina, if only that his further playfulness might be prevented, threw herself into the conversation and chattered volubly, but in vain, for Uncle Austen found chance to reply.

There was complacency in his facetiousness, too. He had married him a wife, and the pride of the thing coming to him this late made him a little absurd, and yet, Alexina reflected, he was a man of big ability and varied interests, prominent in whatever large enterprises the city boasted, banks, railroads, bridges; a power in the Republican party of his state, his name standing for respectability, wealth, and conservatism.

“I’m taking pretty good care of your old friend Emily, Alexina?” Uncle Austen was demanding playfully, as he arose from the table; “she’s standing transplanting pretty well, eh?”

Emily got up abruptly, so abruptly her chair would have turned over but for his quickness in getting there to catch it, but his good humour was proof even against this, though he ordinarily frowned at awkwardness. He set the chair in place, and taking Emily’s hand as they all went from the room, patted it ostentatiously. Alexina grew hot.

“A pretty hand, a hand for a man to be proud to own, eh, Alexina?”

Emily almost snatched it away and paused at the foot of the stairs.

“Good-by,” she said.

He was finding his overcoat and feeling for his gloves. Then he took a little whisk-broom from the rack drawer and brushed his hat with nicety. He was smiling with high humour. The man’s content was almost fatuous.

“I’m glad to have you here, Alexina,” he said; “very glad. I will feel that Emily is having the companionship she ought to have in my absence.”

The click of the door as he closed it seemed to breathe a brisk and satisfied complacency. Emily had fled up-stairs. Alexina followed her slowly.

How strange it seemed to hear her moving about in what had been Aunt Harriet’s room.

“Come in,” she called.

Alexina went in.

“He might at least have refurnished it, mightn’t he?” said Emily, with a laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh.

“What would you like for dinner?” she asked Alexina, her hand on the bell.

“I don’t care,” said Alexina; “anything.”

“So it doesn’t cost too much,” said Emily, laughing the laugh that was not pleasant.

Later, the conferences with the servants over, she sat down to make certain entries in the ledger, open on the desk. Alexina picked up a magazine.

“He asked me one day,” said Emily, turning, “what had become of an end of roast that ought to have come back made over, and said there must be waste in the kitchen.”

“Don’t,” said Alexina. “I wouldn’t, Emily.”

“Why not? You knew it all before.”

Alexina flushed. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I did. I knew it—before. How are your mother and the little girls, Emily?”

“Mother—oh, all right. He told me to ask Nan and Nell over every Friday from school to supper, and mother and father and Oliver over to Sunday night tea. ‘It ought, in the end,’ he told me, ‘to make an appreciable saving in your mother’s providing, these continued absences from stated meals.’”

“You mustn’t, Emily. Tell me about the winter. Have you been gay?”

“Gay?” Emily wheeled from the desk. She gazed at Alexina almost wildly. Then she laughed again. “Gay! oh, my great Heaven—gay! Then you don’t know? I am going to bear him a child—and, oh, help me somehow; Alexina, I loathe him.”

A child, Uncle Austen and Emily a child! A warmth swept out of Alexina’s very soul and enveloped her. She knew, and she did not know. Other women and girls had taken it for granted always that she knew, and talked on before her. It meant to her something vague, unapproachable, veiled, and a great, overwhelming consciousness stifled and choked her.

“I went out on the platform of the train while we were away,” Emily was saying, Emily who never, even in childhood, had curbed a mood, a dislike, a humour, “and tried to throw myself off, but I was afraid.”

Alexina shrank. “I mustn’t listen—you mustn’t tell me—it’s between you and him, Emily.”

Emily had gotten up and was walking about.

“He offered Oliver a place in the bank, to please me, I thought. Oliver’s nineteen now. The place had been paying eighteen dollars a week, and Oliver had only been making twelve. So he offered it to him at fifteen. ‘To the benefiting of both sides,’ he came home and told me.”

Emily stood still, her eyes tearless and hard. “Put on your wraps, Alexina, and we’ll go drive. It’s like a duty, a task, the exercising of the horses. It hangs over me like a nightmare that I’ve got it to do, until I’ve gone out and gotten it over.”

“Yes,” said Alexina, on familiar ground, “I know. I’ve hated those horses too, before you. But you ought to be like Aunt Harriet, Emily; don’t be like me—tell him so.”

Emily, unlocking the wardrobe door, suddenly flung up her arms against it and hid her face in them. “I’ve tried, I have tried, and I can’t—I can’t; I’m afraid of him, Alexina.”

But the child coming—their child? Perhaps the child would make it right. When it came, Emily would love her child? Perhaps she did; she never talked about it afterwards, and Alexina never saw her with it; it died in the summer, soon after its coming.

When she did see the two again, her uncle and Emily, on her own return to Louisville in the late fall, the embarrassing playfulness had left Uncle Austen. Perhaps the steely coldness of his manner was worse. Had Emily dared—even in her mourning there was something about her that was reckless. But she did not dare. She was twenty-two and he was fifty-two, and she was to live afraid of him, to see him an old man, for he is living now.

---

CHAPTER TWELVE

Harriet laughed at Alexina’s wonder over her. “It took me a time to realize that hospitality means the incidental oftener than the invited,” she confessed. “My guests, you know, Alexina, were formally asked, and the other would have fretted me. That was why, I suppose, I had no intimates.”

Harriet never knew, it would seem, these days, whether the Judge, the Colonel, Father Ryan, the man from the office chatting in the library with the Major, one or all, were going to stay for supper or were not; yet she had come to the place where she could smile in serene and genuine welcome, the while everybody moved up and the coloured housemaid slipped in an extra chair and plate.

And she only laid a hand on the spoon with which little Stevie hammered his plate.

“I’d take it away and spank him myself, you know,” confided Louise, Stevie’s mother, to Alexina; “I do spank William.”

But all of life seemed to be moving for Harriet with serenity. Every trivial happening was swallowed up in the joy that death had spared her her husband. And the Major, whatever the agony, the horror, preceding the acceptation of a maimed life, had not lost the vital grace of humour. Life flowed in and out of the Rathbone home with him for centre as it had used to do in and out of his office. The room where he sat amid his papers and books was a rallying place because the strong will and personality of the man in the wheeled chair made it so.

“He’s been meaning for years to do a series of guerrilla articles a magazine has wanted of him, and now he’s at them,” said Harriet, “and he has given in this far, in his stiff-necked pride, that he’s bought an interest in the paper for me, and it keeps him in touch and absorbed.”

The Major had been watching Alexina. At the end of several days’ observations he leaned back in his chair and addressed her. His eyes were humorous. “There’s an encouraging promise about you, Alexina,” he informed her. Then he caressed his lean chin with his lean, smooth hand. “A promise that gives me hope. You’ve laughed at my jokes since you’ve been here, and not from mere politeness either. Now, Harriet smiles out of the goodness of her heart because she thinks she ought to.”

But he caught at Harriet’s hand even while they all three laughed, for it was patent to everybody that Harriet had no idea what his jokes were about, which was the amusing thing of all, seeing that it was the Major’s humour that she confessed had attracted her.

And yet the eyes of the man often deepened and glowed as he watched her move about the house, for she made even the trivial duties seem beautiful because of her unconscious earnestness and her joy in their doing.

---

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

On the return to Aden, that last hour on the train, Alexina was trembling. She was glad, glad to be back, yet of the actual moment of arrival she was afraid.

It was Peter, and alone, who met her at the station with the wagonette. The high ecstasy of her shrinking fell like collapsing walls beneath her. Life was grey, level, flat.

“Mrs. Garnier’s po’ly this mornin’,” Pete told her as they drove homeward. “Mis’ Cha’lotte wouldn’t leave her to come, and Mr. Willy, he’s been gone for a week now, down to the grasswater with a pahty of gen’l’men, as guide.” She felt strangely tired and quiet. It was going to be hard to seem as glad to be back as she ought. Yet the world, as they drove out to Nancy, was rioting in bud, and new leaf and bloom. Magnolias were uplifting giant ivory cups of heavy sweetness; every tree-trunk, rail and stump bore a clambering weight of yellow jasmine bloom; the tai-tai drooped pendulous fringes of faintest fragrance, and wild convolvulus ran riot over the palmetto. There were bird-song and sunshine and ecstasy everywhere.

And she could not feel glad, she could not feel glad.

Promptly Molly dragged the girl off to their room. She looked slighter and more wistful-eyed and bored to death. “You promised me that we would go early in March, if I stayed out here—you promised, Malise. And I’ve stayed. You promised we’d go to The Bay, where there are people and hotels and it’s gay. And it’s March now. You look so tall and cold, Malise! what’s the matter?”

Alexina, restless and absent, wandered out on the porch to the Captain. She chatted to him about Louisville, but there were sharpening angles about his face that made her heart ache. She went up to Mrs. Leroy’s room.

“I don’t know what we are going to do, Alexina,” Charlotte told her. “Willy said I was not to think or worry about it, I was to put it all aside until he got back. But it hurts. He went off looking so gaunt. I don’t believe he slept a night through after the freeze; all hours I could hear him up, walking around, but he don’t like it if I notice, you know.”

Alexina dropped down and put her head in Charlotte’s lap and cried, and Charlotte patted the girl’s wealth of shining hair and cried too.

But since he could go without a sign to her, Alexina could go too. That day she wrote for rooms at The Bay Hotel. The answer came that she could have what she wanted by the eighth. She told Mrs. Leroy she and Molly would go on that date.

She could leave without a sign too, she had said, but in her heart there was joy that Fate had given her to the eighth. She would not have moved a finger to stay, but since he was to return on the sixth, why—

But the very day the letter from The Bay reached her, a Seminole came up from the glades with game from King and a note. The party was considering making a longer stay, he wrote to his mother, so she need not worry in case he did not return. “I told him in my answer,” said Charlotte, “that you all were going. Dear me, I’ll miss you so.”

Then he would know, he would know, and if he did not come it would be because it was his desire not to.

Molly confessed to a few bills in town. Malise had left money, yet Molly had managed to make accounts at a fruiterer’s, the cafÉ, as it called itself, the drug store, the stationer’s, and the two dry-goods establishments.

“I’m glad you’re not stingy like the Blairs,” Molly told her; “you know, Malise, they’re really mean. Your grandfather Blair carried you out to their gate once to see a hand-organ man and his monkey. You were too pleased for anything, and when the man finally moved away your grandfather told you, ‘Say good-by to the monkey, Alexina.’” Truth to tell, Molly and Charlotte seemed to have had a fine time in the absence of their two youthful monitors. Charlotte was as wax in the naughty Molly’s hands. Even now, with Alexina on the scene, Molly proceeded to put Mrs. Leroy up to a thing that never would have entered that innocent soul’s head.

Charlotte went mysteriously to town one morning, Peter in his best clothes driving her, and came back beaming.

“I’ve asked some of the Aden young people out for the evening before you go,” she told Alexina. “The halls and the parlours are so big, you can dance.”

Charlotte beamed and Molly looked innocent. Alexina gazed at Mrs. Leroy dismayed. What would the Captain, what would King William think? It would never occur to Mrs. Leroy until afterward that she could not afford such a thing.

“I think we ought to do it together,” said Alexina privately to her. “Molly and I owe Aden some return.”

Charlotte was made to see it. Had Willy come along, she would have seen it as speedily after his will, be that what it might.

Whatever the Captain thought, he sat unmoved in the midst of the deluge of water and mopping that suddenly swept about him on the porch. There must have been Dutch in Charlotte somewhere, for hospitality with her meant excess of cleaning.

It was a miserable week altogether to Alexina. The days dragged through to their nights, and the nights to morning. She had never known so hateful a time. She hated the grove, where thousands of oranges, gathered into piles, lay rotting, and where the smiling trees, wherever their buds had escaped injury, were putting out scattered blooms; she hated the lake, and the Cherokee roses in bloom, she hated the crepe myrtles and the camelias in the yard. To walk meant wading through sand; there was nothing in town to make the drive worth while. The shame, the sting was in everything that was beautiful. That she should care!

Mr. Jonas and Mr. Henderson drove out one evening, Mr. Jonas to talk over matters with the Captain. Alexina wandered off by herself.

Presently she heard Mrs. Leroy calling softly. “It’s your mother,” she told Alexina in a whisper, as the girl came back to the house. “I don’t believe Mr. Henderson is good for her.”

Molly was talking to Mr. Jonas rapidly, eagerly, like one defending self, as Alexina reached them. Mr. Henderson was regarding her out of sombre eyes.

“It’s not that I think I’m sick,” Molly was saying, “like he says I am. I’m better, really, much better, only while he was talking about, about things—it’s a dreadful religion his; I’d rather be without any, like Jean, than have one like his—I remembered how Father Bonot used to pull the oranges for me I couldn’t reach. Here’s Malise come back. Malise, let’s not go to The Bay after all; I’m tired; let’s go to Cannes BrulÉe. He’s there, Father Bonot is, they told me in Washington. He’s an old, old man. Let’s go back home there.”

“Why, yes,” said the girl, “if you want, we’ll go.”

“You were a little baby at Cannes BrulÉe—yes,” animatedly, “that’s what we’ll do. We’ll go home to Father Bonot, Malise.” At the touch of Mr. Jonas the minister started. His face was grey. Then he got up and followed the other. On the way in to Aden in the buckboard he hardly spoke until the hotel was reached.

Mr. Jonas stopped the mare before the plank sidewalk. The minister came to himself as out of chaos.

“My God,” he said.

Mr. Jonas turned the wheel. “Only yours?” he rejoined briskly.

The minister, on the sidewalk now, looked up at him dazedly. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Not yet,” returned Mr. Jonas, with cheerful reassurance; “you will, you will, though.”

So again Alexina made plans. They would go on the eighth as before, she and Celeste and Molly, but they would go to Cannes BrulÉe.

Supper was over and the Captain sat smoking in his cane chair on the gallery. If King was coming, it would be to-night; the train from the South came in at seven, and he knew that they were going.

Alexina, sitting on the steps below him, was glad it was the Captain out here with her, rather than the others. It was like the quiet and cover of twilight, the silence of the Captain. Moving a little, she put a hand upon the arm of his chair. His closed upon it and his eyes rested on her young, beautiful profile, though she did not know it.

The moon came up. The clock in the hall struck eight. Molly was lying on the sofa inside, Mrs. Leroy moving about as was her wont, straightening after the servants had gone, and innocently unsystematizing what little system they employed.

Outside sat the man and the girl. There were night calls from birds and insects, but beyond these sounds the girl’s heart listening, heard—

Between where the road emerged from the hummock and the gate to Nancy was a stretch of old corduroy road over a marshy strip. Elsewhere a horse’s hoofs sank into sand. Willy Leroy would ride out, if he came, probably on Mr. Jonas’s mare.

The girl sat, all else abeyant, listening. She heard the first hoof-beat, the first clattering thud on wood. Her hand slipped from the Captain’s; she sat still.

She sat stiller even as Willy rode in and called halloo to the house, while his mother and Molly, and even Celeste, came out. She hardly moved as he touched her hand and went past her with the others into the house, and left her there.

She did not know how long it was they came and went, Pete with the horse to the stable, Mrs. Leroy getting the boy his supper. The talk of the father and mother and son rose and fell within.

She heard them closing shutters, hunting lamps, and moving up the steps. But he came out and sat on the step near her, and yet far away.

They did not look toward each other. And yet he knew how she looked, fair, still, perhaps a little cold; and she knew how he looked, tanned and bronzed, yet good to see in his hunting clothes.

Shy as two young, wild things they sat, and wordless.

Presently he spoke, looking away from her. “Mother wrote me you were going. I came up to say good-by. They’re to wait for me in camp.”

After that they both were silent, how long neither knew. Then the girl stood up.

“It must be late,” she said.

“Oh,” he said, “no—”

“Yes,” she said; “I think you’ll find it is. Good-night.”

---

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In her packing Alexina had left out a muslin dress for Mrs. Leroy’s evening. Going up from the hurried supper to dress, she glanced at it, then drew forth a box from a trunk and pulled the contents therefrom. The dress that came forth shimmered and gleamed and floated; it was a thing that must have enfolded any woman to beautiful lines, and have made any throat, any head, lift. It was a purchase she had been in a way ashamed of, tempted to it in a moment of weakness, urged on by Molly.

Now she laid it forth and dressed with care, grave as some young priestess. Molly watched her curiously. Even at the hotel there had been occasions for only simple clothes.

But the girl even brought forth some leather cases. Generally it was her little pose that she did not care for jewels, but in her heart she loved them, as every woman does, primitive or civilized, young or three-score-and-ten. Now she put on what she had. Of late the fairness of Malise had deepened into abiding beauty, yet to-night it was the garb she was emphasizing it would seem, and what it stood for, not the personality.

“You’re curious,” said Molly. “I would have thought it was a time for the simplest.”

“Should you?” said Alexina.

The evening turned into a really spontaneous little affair. It was the sort of thing the young people of Aden—dwellers in the various frame houses about the town, all sojourners from a common cause, somebody’s health—it was the sort of thing these young people got up about every other night in the year. Two mandolins, a violin, and a harp made music. A college boy with a cough, and a Mexican bar-keeper played the mandolins, the local boot and shoe dealer the violin, an Italian the harp, and the whole called itself a string band.

Charlotte Leroy, in a rejuvenated dress of former splendour, was a beaming soul of delight. That Alexina, Willy and Celeste had really seen to everything Charlotte had no idea, for neither had she sat down that day.

But she beamed now while Molly’s low laughter rose softly.

Alexina rearranged lights and adjusted decorations. She went out to the kitchen and took a reassuring survey. Later, she told the Aden youths who asked, she didn’t believe she meant to dance. They did not press her; perhaps it was the gown, perhaps it was her manner preventing. She laughed, as if it mattered! She talked with Mr. Jonas, but all the time she knew that William Leroy, in his white flannel clothes, was outside, smoking, on the gallery. After a while she went out. He was leaning against a pillar, and turned at her step. The night was flooded as by an ecstasy of moonlight. His eyes swept her bare shoulders and arms, the shimmering dress, the jewels, then turning, he looked away.

“Come and dance,” said Alexina.

“I don’t know how.”

“It’s your own fault,” said the girl as promptly; “you climbed up on back sheds at dancing school so you wouldn’t have to learn.” “It gave me my own satisfaction at the time,” said he.

“There’s so much that’s your own fault,” she returned, “and which you cover up by pretending that you don’t like or want. You’re as human as any one else. You make yourself believe you don’t want things because you’re stubborn and proud, but you do, you do.”

“Under proper conditions,” he admitted largely, “I might, yes.”

“Under any conditions, in your heart you want them, we all want them; you’re not different.”

“Well, and what then?”

“You are not honest, that is what then.”

“Well,” he returned, “and what then?”

She was almost crying. “You exonerate yourself, you condone yourself, you say you would, you could, you will—some day, if—if thus and so. You think some better condition is going to bring the confidence to be what nature meant you to be; yes, you do think it, you do, you do. But it has to grow out of yourself. I can tell you that, and when the time you think for comes, to be what you’d like to be, you’ll have lost the power. I want to say it, I mean to say it, I want to hurt you, I hope my saying it can hurt you, so I can go away glad, glad I’ve hurt you. There, I’ve said it; don’t stop me, don’t; I came to say it and I’m going back now.”

He was breathing hard. “Oh, no,” he said, “you’re not.” He glanced around. Then he stepped down from the gallery and turned. “Come, let yourself go, I’ll steady you.”

She hesitated, brushing some wet from her cheek with her hand. She did not know until then there had been tears. “Come,” he reiterated. It was the tone women, even Molly, obeyed.

She slipped down and he caught her and set her on her feet. “Pick up your dress,” he said, “the grass is wet.”

Everywhere, it seemed, there were couples strolling. Around to the right, by the side door, with its little, vine-covered pent-house, was a bench beneath a tree; Aunt Mandy and Mrs. Leroy aired their crocks and pans thereon. He led the way to it, spread out his handkerchief, and Alexina, gathering up her gleaming dress, sat down. The comical side of it must have occurred to him, the girl gathering up a dress fit for a princess, to sit there. He laughed, not an altogether humorous laugh.

“Illustrative of the true state of things, as it were,” he said. “I proffer my lady a milk-bench.” A sob rose in her throat. “I hate you,” she said hotly.

“That you bestow feeling of any sort, to such degree, is flattering,” said he nastily.

“You’re very rude.”

“It puts us on a sort of equality, and establishes me in my own self-respect, so to speak, to have face to be rude to une grande dame—”

“You’re not honest, and you know it, and it’s hurting you while you’re doing it.”

“Just so,” said William, after the fashion of his father. “Where are you going?”

“To the house.”

“Come back.”

“I won’t. I’ve said what I had to say.”

He came after her. “And now you shall listen.” They stood and looked at each other. Her eyes measured him with some scorn, his met the look squarely. “I care for you as the only thing worth while in life,” he said.

“I’ve not so much pride left you need think you have to say that to save it,” she burst forth.

“You are the one not true now. You know it, you have known it right along. I hadn’t even the arts of your world to know how to conceal it.”

“My world!” said Alexina.

“Very well; let’s both be honest. I’ve fought it because I’ve had enough decency to see the impossibility—oh, my God!—what’s the use being fool enough to talk about it. I haven’t one cent on earth that’s my own; I’m worse than a beggar, if we are going to be quite honest about matters, since I am a debtor.”

“Oh,” said Alexina; “oh, don’t.”

“I fought it out, or thought I had, down there in the glades, and then got up and came back because I couldn’t let you go—without—”

“I’m glad,” said Alexina, “I’m glad.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I do know,” said the girl. “I’m glad, I’m glad—”

“Alexina!”

“I’m glad.”

Her young face was white and solemn in the moonlight, but her eyes came up to his with a splendid courage. “I’m glad,” she repeated.

It might have been a moment, an hour, a day, an Æon, the two looked at each other. Then their hands went out to each other, for very need of human touch in the great awe of it.

When he spoke both were trembling.

“Will you wait?” he asked her. “It may be long.” But the note in his voice was new. The fight even then was begun.

“Yes,” she told him, grave eyes meeting grave eyes, for young love is solemn. Then he drew her to him and sight and sound went out, and the solid round earth was spurned. And yet they were but two of the long, unending line, mounting thus to God and His heaven, for it is for this we are come into the world.

Suddenly Alexina slipped her hands from his and fled.

Molly was on the porch with Mr. Jonas. A toy harness from the cotillion favors jangled on her dress. She had sunk laughing on a bench to get breath.

“Yes,” she told Mr. Jonas, “we go in the morning, to Cannes BrulÉe.”

Alexina was coming up on the porch and to Molly. Straight she slipped to her knees and her arms went around her mother.

“Dear me, Malise,” said Molly.

The head of the girl hid itself in the curve of the mother’s neck and shoulder.

“Dear me, Malise,” said Molly, “you’re such a child.”

THE END

THE McCLURE PRESS, NEW YORK