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CHAPTER ONE

Alexina Blair, at twenty, returned from school to her uncle’s home with but small emotion, as, at fourteen, she had left with little regret, yet the shady streets, the open front doors, the welcomes called from up-stairs windows as she passed—evidences that she was back among her own people in the South—all at once made her glad to be here.

How could she have felt emotion over a mere return to Uncle Austen’s house? She might have felt enthusiasm over Nelly, but Nelly was married to the gardener at her old asylum and a Katy had taken her place. The house was the same. If only its stone faÇade might be allowed to mellow, to grey a little! But, newly cleaned, it stood coldly immaculate in its yard of shaven lawn set about with clipped shrubberies. As for her uncle, Alexina found herself applying the same adjectives to him, shaven, immaculate, cold.

She wondered what he thought of her, but Uncle Austen never made personal remarks.

Aunt Harriet, on joining her niece in the East early in the summer, had looked at her consideringly. She seemed pleased.

“Why,” she said, “Alexina, you are a Tennyson young person, tall and most divinely—you are a little more intense in your colouring than is usual with a Blair. I’m glad.”

The somewhat doubtful smile on the girl’s face deepened as if a sudden radiance leaped into it. She seized her aunt’s hand. “Oh,” she said, “you’re very nice, Aunt Harriet.”

Harriet laughed, rather pleased than not, but she still was studying the girl. “She is impulsive and she doesn’t look set,” the aunt was telling herself—was it gratefully? “perhaps she is less Blair than I thought.”

Austen Blair too, in fact, now viewed his niece with complacency—she fulfilled the Blair requirements—but he talked of other things.

“It is the intention of your aunt and myself,” he told her promptly, “to introduce you at once to what will be your social world, for it is well for everyone to have local attachment.”

As the matter progressed it appeared that social introduction, as Uncle Austen understood it, was largely a matter of expenditure. In all investment it is the expected thing to place where there is likeliest return. Therefore he scanned the invitation list earnestly.

“She can afford to do the thing as it should be done,” he remarked to Harriet.

“She? But Austen—” Harriet hesitated. “I supposed it was ours, this affair; it seems the least—”

Austen looked at her. At first he did not comprehend, then he replied with some asperity. “I have so far kept sentiment and business apart in managing Alexina’s affairs.”

Harriet was silenced. It was becoming less and less wise to oppose Austen. He had his own ideas about the matter. “The thing is to be done handsomely,” he set forth, “but,” as qualification, “judiciously.”

Therefore he stopped an acquaintance on the street a day or two before the affair. “Are we to have the pleasure of seeing you on Tuesday?” he asked, even a little ostentatiously, for the young man had neglected to accept or decline.

Austen reported the result to Harriet. “For there is no use ordering a supper for five hundred if but four hundred and ninety-nine are coming,” he told her.

“No?” said Harriet.

“Exactly,” said her brother.

Alexina, present at the conversation, looked from the one to the other. Uncle Austen was Uncle Austen; there was a slight lift of the girlish shoulders as she admitted this. But Aunt Harriet—

For Harriet had changed. She had been changing these past two summers. She was absent, forgetful, absorbed, even irritable. Aunt Harriet! And recalled, she would colour and look about in startled fashion.

Alexina and Harriet had been always on terms friendly and pleasant, but scarcely to be called intimate; terms that, after a cordial good-night, closed the door between their rooms, and while the girl had been conscious of a fondness for her serene and capable aunt, there were times too, when, met by that same serenity, she had felt she must rebel, and in secret had thrown her young arms out in impotent, passionate protest.

But now Aunt Harriet forgot and neglected and grew cross like any one, and the sententious utterances of Uncle Austen irritated her. Alexina, going into her room one day, found her with her head bowed on the desk. Was she crying? The girl slipped out.

Was Aunt Harriet unhappy? The heart of Alexina warmed to her. The evening of Alexina’s return home Harriet had come to her door. To twenty years thirty-eight seems pitiably far along in life, yet Harriet called up no such feeling in Alexina. No passion of living writ itself on Galatea’s check while she was in marble, and Alexina, opening the door to the tap, thought her aunt beautiful.

“If there are callers to-night,” Harriet said, “I want you to come down. My friends are not too elderly,” she smiled in the old, good-humoured way, “to be nice to you this winter.”

So later Alexina went down to the library, a room long unfurnished, now the only really cheerful room in the house. Was it because Harriet had furnished it?

The girl always had realized in an indefinite way that Harriet was a personage; later, in their summers away together, she discovered that men liked her handsome aunt.

In the library she found a group who, from the conversation, seemed to be accustomed to dropping in thus in casual fashion. They were men of capacity and presence, one felt that, even in the case of that long avowed person of fashion, Mr. Marriot Bland, who was getting dangerously near to that time of life when he would be designated an old beau. He was a personage, too, of his type. Alexina shook hands with him gaily; she had been used to his coming since she first came to live with Aunt Harriet and Uncle Austen. Harriet introduced the others. The girl’s spirits rose; she felt it was nice that she should be knowing them.

And they? What does middle-age feel, looking upon youth, eager-eyed, buoyant, flushed with the first glow from that unknown about to dawn?

Oh, it was a charming evening. The girl showed she thought it so and smiled, and the men smiled too, as they joined Harriet in making her the young centre. Perhaps there was a tender something in the smiles. Was it for their own gone youth?

One, a Major Rathbone, stayed after the others left. He sat building little breastworks on the centre-table out of matches taken from the bronze stand by the lamp, and as he talked he looked over every now and then at Harriet on the other side.

In the soberer reaction following the breaking up of the group, Alexina, too, found time to look at Harriet. It was an Aunt Harriet that she had never seen before. The colour was richly dyeing this Harriet’s cheeks, and the jewel pendant at her throat rose and trembled and fell, and her white lids fell, too, though she had laughed when her eyes met laughter and something else in the brown eyes of the Major fixed on her.

It was of Mr. Marriot Bland the Major was speaking, his smooth, brown hand caressing his clean-shaven chin.

“So cruelly confident are you cold Dianas,” he was saying. “Now, even a Penelope must hold out the lure of her web to an old suitor, but you Dianas—”

Alexina laughed. She had jumped promptly into a liking for this lean, brown man with the keen, humorous eyes and the deliberate yet quick movements, and now absorbed in her thoughts, was unconscious of her steadfast gaze fixed on him, until he suddenly brought his eyes to bear on hers with humorous inquiry.

“Well?” he inquired. Now Alexina, being fair, showed blushes most embarrassingly, but she could laugh too.

“What’s the conclusion?” he demanded; “or would it be wiser not to press inquiry?”

Alexina laughed again. She knew she liked this Major.

“I was wondering,” she confessed. “You are so different from what I expected. I heard Aunt Harriet and Uncle Austen discussing one of your editorials, so I read it. I thought you would be different—fiercer maybe, and—er—more aggressive.”

Alexina began to blush again, for the Major was so edified at something that his enjoyment was suspicious.

“But no man is expected to live down to his editorials, Miss Alexina; I write ’em for a living.”

He stroked his chin as he regarded her, but there was laughter too out of the tail of his eye across at Aunt Harriet, who was laughing also, though she looked teased.

Later Alexina learned more about this Major Rathbone. It was Emily Carringford who told her. Emily came over promptly the day after Alexina’s return and, admitted by Katy, ran up as of old.

Alexina, hearing her name called, turned from a melÉe of unpacking as the other reached the open doorway.

“Oh, Emily,” she said, and stood and gazed.

Emily stood, too, archly, and, meeting Alexina’s look, laughed. Her blush was an acknowledgment; she did not even pretend to misunderstand Alexina’s meaning.

“Aunt Harriet told me how—how lovely you were, and Uncle Austen told me last night that my friend, Miss Emily, he considered an ‘unusually good-looking woman—a handsome woman, in fact.’” The niece had her uncle’s every conciseness of tone as she quoted. “But somehow with it all, I wasn’t prepared—”

She came forward with hands out.

Emily forgot to take the hands. “Did he say that, really, Alexina?”

“Yes; why shouldn’t he? Oh, Emily, it must be joy, or does it frighten you to know you’re so beautiful?”

She was letting her fingers touch, almost with awe, the curve of the other’s check.

Emily laughed, but the crimson on the cheek deepened.

“And your voice?” demanded Alexina. “I want to hear you sing. Did you get the place in the choir you wrote me about?”

“Miss Harriet got it for me; it was she who suggested it—that is, she got Mr. Blair to get it for me. It’s at your church, you know.”

“Uncle Austen? No. Did he, really?”

But the surprise in Alexina’s voice was unfair to her uncle. To help people to the helping of themselves was part of his creed. He looked upon it as a furthering of the general social economy, as indeed he had pointed out more than once to those he was thus assisting.

But Alexina had many things to ask. She pushed Emily into a chair.

“Is it pleasant—the choir?” she began.

“Pleasant? Well,” Emily looked away and coloured, “I like the money; I’ve never been able to have any clothes before. There was a scene at home about it—my singing, I mean, in any but my own church, and for money. It was grandfather, of course; it’s always been grandfather. He says it’s spiritual prostitution, whatever he means by that, taking money for praising the Lord in an alien faith.” She laughed in an off-hand way. “No, I’ll be honest, I’d have to be sooner or later with you, anyhow, I hate it—not the work and rehearsals so much, but the being patronized. When some of those women stop me, with the air of doing the gracious thing, to tell me they have enjoyed my singing, oh, I could—” Again she laughed, but her cheeks were blazing. Then she leaned over and fingered some of the girlish fineries strewing the bed. “I hate it at home, too, when it comes to being honest about things—six of us, with grandfather and Aunt Carrie making eight, in that little house!”

Later, Alexina chanced to refer to Major Rathbone. She spoke enthusiastically, for she either liked people or she did not like them. “Hadn’t you heard about him?” asked Emily in surprise. “He met Miss Harriet two years ago, and he’s been coming ever since. It’s funny, too, that he should. He’s the Major Rathbone, you know—”

But Alexina looked unenlightened.

“Why,” said Emily, “the Major Rathbone who was the Confederate guerrilla—the one who captured and burned a train-load of stuff your grandfather and Mr. Austen had contracted to deliver for the government. I’ve heard people tell about it a dozen different ways since he’s been coming to see Miss Harriet. Anyway, however it was, the government at the time put a price on his head and your grandfather and Mr. Austen doubled it. And now they say he’s in love with Miss Harriet!”

In love! With Aunt Harriet! Alexina grew hot. Aunt Harriet! She felt strange and queer. But Emily was saying more. “Mr. Blair and Major Rathbone aren’t friends even yet; I was here to supper with Miss Harriet one evening last winter, and Mr. Blair was furious over an editorial by Major Rathbone in the paper that day about some political appointments from Washington. Mr. Blair had had something to do with them, had been consulted about them from Washington, it seems. Major Rathbone’s a Catholic, too.”

It rushed upon Alexina that she had spoken to the Major of a family discussion over his editorials.

Emily stayed until dusk. As Alexina went down to the door with her, they met Uncle Austen just coming in. He stopped, shook hands, and asked how matters were in the choir. As Emily ran down the steps he addressed himself to his niece. “A praiseworthy young girl to have gone so practically to work.” Then as Emily at the gate looked back, nodding archly, he repeated it. “A praiseworthy young girl, praiseworthy and sensible,” his gaze following her, “as well as handsome.”

He went in, but Alexina lingered on the broad stone steps. It was October and the twilight was purple and hazy. Chrysanthemums bloomed against the background of the shrubbery; the maples along the street were drifting leaves upon the sidewalk; the sycamores stood with their shed foliage like a cast garment about their feet, raising giant white limbs naked to heaven.

There were lights in the wide brick cottage. Strangers lived there now. A swinging sign above the gate set forth that a Doctor Ransome dwelt therein.

The eddying fall of leaves is depressing. Autumn anyhow is a melancholy time. Alexina, going in, closed the door.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Blair reception to introduce their niece may have been to others the usual matter of lights and flowers and music, but to the niece it was different, for it was her affair.

She and her aunt went down together. The stairway was broad, and to-night its banister trailed roses.

Alexina was radiant. She even marched up and kissed her uncle. Things felt actually festive.

All the little social world was there that evening. Alexina recalled many of the girls and the older women; of the older men she knew a few, but of the younger only one could she remember as knowing.

He was a rosy-cheeked youth with vigorous, curling yellow hair, and he came up to her with a hearty swinging of the body, smiling in a friendly and expectant way, showing nice, square teeth, boyishly far apart. She knew him at once; he had gone to dancing school when she did, and she was glad to see him.

“Why, Georgy,” she said, and held out a hand, just as it was borne in upon her that Georgy wore a young down on his lip and was a man.

“Oh,” she said, blushing, “I hope you don’t mind?”

He was blushing, too, but the smile that showed his nice spaced teeth was honest.

“No,” he said; “I don’t mind.”

Which Alexina felt was good of him and so she smiled back and chatted and tried to make it up. And Georgy lingered and continued to linger and to blush beneath his already ruddy skin until Harriet, turning, sent him away, for Harriet was a woman of the world and Georgy was the rich and only child of the richest mamma present, and the other mammas were watching.

Alexina’s eyes followed him as he went, then wandered across the long room to Emily. She had expected to feel a sense of responsibility about Emily, but Uncle Austen, after a long and precise survey of her from across the room, put his eye-glasses into their case and went to her. His prim air of unbending for the festive occasion was almost comical as he brought up youths to make them known. This done he fell back to his general duties as host.

But Alexina, watching Emily, felt dissatisfaction with her, her archness was overdone, her laughter was anxious.

Why should Emily stoop to strive so? With her milk-white skin and chestnut hair, with her red lips and starry eyes there should have belonged to her a pride and a young dignity. Alexina, youthfully stern, turned away.

It brought her back to the amusing things of earth, however, that Uncle Austen should take Emily home when it was over. Would Emily be arch with Uncle Austen? Picture it!

Several of the older men lingered after the other guests were gone, and they, with Harriet and Alexina, had coffee in the library. The orderliness of the room, compared with the dishevelled appearance elsewhere now the occasion was over, seemed cheerful, and these men friends of Aunt Harriet were interesting. The talk was personal, as among intimates. The local morning paper, opposed to Major Rathbone’s own, it seemed, had taxed the Major with aspiring to be the next nominee of his party for Congress. And this was proving occasion for much banter at his expense by the other men, for the truth was the Major was being considered as a possibility, but a possibility tempered, for one thing, by the fact that his guerrilla past shed a somewhat lurid light upon his exemplary present.

“But why want to keep it secret as if it were something dark and plotting?” insisted Harriet Blair. “Why not come right out and admit your willingness if your party wants you?”

The men laughed in varying degrees of delight at this feminine perspicacity. The Major regarded her with somewhat comical humour, looking a little shamefaced, though he was laughing too. “For the fear my party can’t afford to have me,” he answered. “It takes money. They are casting about for a richer available man first, and, that failing, why—”

Here Austen Blair came in, bringing a breath of the November chill. Or was it his own personality that brought the chill, Alexina wondered. For, to do him justice, there was a distinction, a fine coldness, a bearing about him which distinguished him in any company.

Promptly on his coming the group broke up. The others passed into the hall to hunt overcoats, but the Major paused to address Harriet, who had risen and was looking at him as he spoke. There was colour in her face, and light.

“Friday evening, then,” he was saying, “you will go with me to hear Benton lecture?”

Austen, who had taken a cup of coffee from Alexina, looked up sharply. He put the cup down.

Harriet smiled acquiescence. “Friday evening,” she agreed.

Later, in the hall, as the outer door shut behind the group of departing men, Austen turned on his sister, his nostrils tense with dilation.

“Do you realize what you are doing?” he asked. “Have you utterly lost sight of how this man was regarded by your father, if you prefer to put consideration for me out of the matter?”

Harriet continued to unfasten her long glove. The colour was gone from her face, and the light, but otherwise she stood outwardly serene. “The fight was fair,” she said calmly, “and also mutual.”

Her brother regarded her fixedly, then he spoke. “Though what there is to be gained in thus setting yourself in opposition to my repeatedly expressed wishes I do not”—all at once two steely points seemed to leap into the blue intensity of his gaze—“unless—in Heaven’s name, Harriet, is it possible that you mean to—”

“Mean to what?” she repeated. Harriet was meeting his eyes with a look as unflinching as his. She seemed unconsciously to have drawn herself to her full, superb height, but she had grown white as her gown.

He suddenly resumed his usual manner. “Take the child on to bed,” he said, glancing at Alexina standing startled, looking from one to the other. “This is no time to have the matter out.” “I agree with you quite,” said his sister, and held out a hand to the girl. Alexina took it quickly, impulsively, and held to it as they went up the garlanded stairway, which suddenly looked tawdry and garish. In the hall above the girl lifted Harriet’s hand and put her cheek against it, then almost ran in at her own door.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Blairs met about the breakfast table next morning at the usual time; a matter of four hours for sleep instead of eight would have been insufficient excuse to Austen for further upsetting of routine; and there was none of the chit-chat that would seem natural on a morning following the giving of a large social affair.

Aunt Harriet was dumb and Uncle Austen tense, or so it seemed to the third and youngest Blair about the board. She had been conscious of sharp interchange checked as she entered. Uncle Austen even forgot to look up at her interrogatively as she came in, though she was a moment late. Was the trouble still about the Major? Was Aunt Harriet determined to go with him Friday evening?

Whatever the cause, Friday came, with the strained relations between sister and brother unrelieved.

The town was in the midst of its social season, the Blair reception being one of several crowding each other. On this Friday Harriet and Alexina were to attend an afternoon affair, and later Alexina was to go to an evening occasion with her uncle, who had consented icily, as though to emphasize the fact that it was Harriet’s engagement which made it necessary for him to take the girl.

Alexina, coming down a little before five, found Harriet standing in the parlour, ready, gloves on and wrap on a chair. To be young is to be ardent. Not all youthful things are young. Alexina was young. “You are beautiful, Aunt Harriet,” she declared.

But it was as if Harriet did not hear. Was it premonition, that strained absorption?

“A moment, Alexina,” she was saying. “Listen, was that the bell?”

“John, probably,” said Alexina, “to let us know the carriage is waiting.”

But it was Major Rathbone who came in upon them in his quick fashion a moment later. His overcoat was a cape affair which somehow seemed to suit his personality, and ever after Alexina could see him throwing the cavalier-like drapery back with impatient gesture.

“You are not gone then, Harriet,” he said; “I am glad for that.”

Quickly as the words were spoken, the Harriet on his lips was not lost upon Alexina. She turned to go, quite hot and with impulsive haste, but the Major, putting out a hand, detained her.

“No, Miss Alexina; I’d really rather you would stay if you will be so kind,” he said, then turned to the older woman. “I have just had some words with your brother on the club-house steps and I knocked him down. I came on straight here, preferring you should hear my regret from myself. I lost my temper.”

He was facing Harriet, who had taken a step towards him at his entrance, then had stopped. Looking at her he went on rapidly:

“There is this I want to say. Yesterday I thought never to have the right to say it since I was too poor to ask you to listen. To-night I came here to say that I love you from my soul, and near you or away from you, alive or dead, will go on loving you and wanting you. Had you been poor I would have fought like any man to make you care; as it is I knocked your brother down for saying I was trying to do it because you are rich, to further my political ambition. I knocked him down for that, and for some other, older reasons. There is nothing more to say; no, in the divine bigness of your nature don’t think you have to speak. I cannot come here any more, even if you would permit me, after what has happened, and I can’t expect you to go to-night of course. But if ever I can serve you I am yours, soul and body, and will be while there is life in me. That’s all at last. What,” as he turned, “crying, Miss Alexina? For me? Or for him? I assure you there was little hurt but his arrogance. Dare I ask you to shake hands?”

And he was gone in his abruptly quick fashion and the latch of the outer door was heard clicking behind him.

It aroused Harriet and she came to herself. She was trembling, but on her face was a look of one who has entered Heaven. Then it seemed to come to her that he was gone.

“I must—oh, stop him, Alexina. He must know—”

The girl ran into the hall, but the outer door was heavy, and in her haste she was awkward getting it open. As it gave finally the rush of wind drove her inward. The steady rainfall of the day, freezing as it touched the ground, had changed to finely driven sleet. The steps glared with ice. But already the Major was at the gate, and through the dusk she could see his umbrella lowered against the wind as he turned and started up the street. She called after him impulsively, beseechingly, but realized the futility of it through the fierce rush of wind and sleet. John was just driving out the carriage-way from the stable. Indeterminate, she closed the door and turned back to the parlour.

Harriet had sunk upon a chair, and in her eyes, looking far off, was a light, a smile, or was it tears?

She sprang up and turned, her face one heavenly blush, as Alexina entered. Had she thought it would be he?

“Gone? Oh, Alexina, I must—I have to tell him. Ring the bell. John must go for him. After what has happened I cannot stand it that the knowledge should all be mine.”

But she was already pulling the bell-cord herself, then turned to Alexina blushing and radiant. “I am thirty-eight years old, Alexina; I am not even young, and yet he cares for me.”

The bell had rung; both had heard the far-off sound of it, but no one answered, maid or man-servant.

She rang again. “I had no time, the words would not come, I tried to tell him,” she said pleadingly to Alexina, as if the girl were arraigning her, then suddenly dropped into the chair by the bell-cord, and with her face in her hands against its back went into violent weeping.

Alexina stood hesitant. There are times for silence. She would go and find Katy.

But she met her hurrying from the kitchen towards the parlour, the shawl over her head full of sleet and wet. She was panting and her eyes were large. Alexina was vaguely conscious of the cook, breathing excitement, somewhere back in the length of the hall, and behind her some trades-boy, his basket on his arm, his mouth gaping.

“It’s Major Rathbone,” said Katy, panting; “John ran into him coming out the carriage gate. The horses slipped and he had his umbrella down and didn’t see. I was coming from the grocery.”

“Oh,” said Alexina; “Katy, oh—”

Harriet had heard and was already in the hall and struggling with the outer door. “I can’t—it won’t—oh, Alexina, help me!”

Katy had reached the door too, and put her hand on the knob. “They’ve already started to the infirmary with him, Miss Harriet, John and that young doctor across the street, before I came in. He told them to take him there himself. He was half up, holding to the fence, before John was off the box. ‘Stop the doctor there getting in his buggy,’ he said to John, ‘and get me around to the infirmary.’”

“And the doctor—what did he say?” demanded Alexina.

“He said ‘Good Lord, man!’ and he swore just awful at John being so slow helping get him in the carriage.”

Harriet all at once was herself, perfectly controlled.

“Go get me my long cloak, please, Katy,” she said.

“Oh, Miss Harriet,” from Katy; “you ain’t thinking of goin’ out—it’s sleetin’ awful—without the carriage!”

But Harriet already had reached the stairs going for the wrap herself.

Alexina followed her. “What is it, Aunt Harriet?” she begged. “Where are you going?” Harriet answered back from her own doorway. “To the infirmary.”

Action is the one thing always understood by youth. Alexina entirely approved. “I’ll go, too,” she said, and ran into her room to change her wrap for a darker one.

There was but one infirmary at the time in the city, and that a Catholic institution. They could walk a square and take a car to the door. Alexina, in her haste, never thought of money, but Harriet, as she came down, had her purse.

Neither spoke on the way; it was all they could do to keep umbrellas open in the fierce drive of wind and sleet. Alexina bent her head to catch breath; the sleet whipped and stung her face, the wind seized her loose cape, her light skirts, bellying them out behind her. But Harriet, ahead, tall, poised, went swiftly on, and, in the light from the street gas-post as they waited for a car, her face showed no consciousness of storm or of aught about her. Yet it was Harriet who stopped the car, who made the change, and paid the fares. The ride into town was in silence. It was Harriet who rang the bell before the infirmary building, who led the way over the icy pavement, up the wide brick walk through the grounds; it was Harriet who rang the bell at the big central door, and it was she who entered first past the little Sister who opened that door.

Not that the little Sister meant to permit it—it was against rules, she assured them, visiting hours were over. She could tell them nothing. The doctors were with the gentleman now.

But she let them in. Prison doors must have opened to Harriet that night, she would have put the little Sister aside if need be and walked in, Alexina felt that. Perhaps the little Sister felt it too. She glanced at Harriet furtively, timidly, and, murmuring something about going to see, glided away.

The two stood in the hall, Alexina gazing at the patron Saint of the place, in marble on his pedestal. After a time the little Sister returned and told them the doctor would see them presently and said something about the parlour, but Harriet shook her head.

Again they waited, the woman and the girl sitting in chairs against the painted wall, facing the Saint in his niche. The instincts of long ago arose within Alexina, and unconsciously her lips moved for comfort to herself in a prayer to the benign old Saint before her, there being nothing incongruous to her that she was using a little form of child’s prayer taught her by her Presbyterian aunt. And still they waited, so long that Alexina felt she could not stand the silence longer, or the waiting. She looked at Harriet, who was gazing before her, her face colourless, her eyes unseeing. Alexina began to wonder if the Sister had forgotten they were there.

But at last she came stealing noiselessly back, and, following her, a young man.

Alexina recognized him at once as the young doctor she had seen going in and out the cottage, and whose name she remembered was Ransome.

Harriet arose to meet him. He was young and boyish and looked unnerved. “The others will be down in a moment—the other doctors”—he told her; “when I saw it was bad—you know I’m just beginning—I turned it over.”

His nice blue eyes looked quite distressed.

“How bad?” asked Harriet steadily. He looked at her quite miserably, the boy, then gathered himself together.

“May I ask—I beg pardon—may I know who I am talking to?” though true to tell he knew who she was, living as he did across from her, but in his young embarrassment did not know how to say so.

The tall, beautiful woman stood a moment before him, then a slow colour came up over her throat and face. “I am Miss Blair—Major Rathbone is—”

Alexina had come close to her side and her young eyes were on the doctor’s appealingly.

He understood; doubtless he had heard the two names connected before; the affairs of the wealthy Miss Blair and the somewhat famous editor were likely to be talked over in a city the size of Louisville, or, perhaps, being young, he merely divined. His distress increased; he looked quite wretched. “It’s bad—I’m mighty sorry to be the one to tell you.”

Did she grow taller, whiter? “Are you—are the doctors still—”

“They are through for the present and coming down now.”

“Then I will go to him. Oh, but I must”—this to the horrified little Sister’s upraised hands of protest and headshake of negation.

“It’s against all rules,” ejaculated the little Sister.

Miss Blair addressed herself to the young doctor.

“Kindly take me to the room,” she said.

The abashed young fellow looked from one to the other. But he started. The little Sister, however, hastily interposing herself between Miss Blair and progress, was heard to murmur that name of authority—the Mother.

“Go and bring her,” said Harriet.

The Sister departed in haste, to return speedily with the Mother, her calm face beneath its bands mild, benignant, but inexorable.

“But I am,” returned Harriet to anything she could say. “I am going to him.”

The dominant calmness of the Mother had met its equal. Finally, in her turn, she retreated behind authority and mentioned Father Ryan.

“Oh,” said Harriet, “go and bring him.”

He came, heavy of jowl, keen and humorous of eye, but his manner disturbed, distraught, as with one whose absorption is elsewhere. Suddenly Harriet remembered that he was the intimate, the friend of Major Rathbone. “I am going to him,” said Harriet; “nothing that you can say makes any difference.”

The Father gazed at her thoughtfully. Then he nodded. “No,” he said; “you are right; nothing will.”

Just then the two other physicians came down the stairs.

“A word with you first, gentlemen, please,” said the Father. The four men gathered at the foot of the stairway.

Watching, an outsider would have said that the priest and the young doctor were pleaders with the others for the cause of Miss Blair.

Later, the Mother herself led Harriet up the stairs and along a corridor, the young doctor following with Alexina.

“I think I—do you think I ought to go with her?” Alexina had faltered to him.

The two young things gazed at each other indeterminate. Alexina’s eyes were swimming, like a child’s, with unshed tears. Never has tragedy such epic qualities as in youth. Then he turned and led the way. “Yes,” he told her, “I think if I were you I would.”

Harriet was by the bed when they entered, gazing down on the lean, brown face of the man, whose eyes were closed. The Sister in charge, sitting on the other side, was speaking in a low voice. Had she seen fit to tell what she knew?

For Harriet turned as they entered and looked at them. Her face was set as in marble. It was cold, it was stern; only, the eyes fixed on the young doctor’s face were imploring.

“Will he wake first?” she asked.

The young fellow seemed to shrink before the majesty of her suffering. Alexina put out a hand to touch her and drew it back, afraid. If only she were not so superbly self-controlled.

“Yes, he will most likely awake,” he assured her, and must have done so even if he had not thought it.

She took off her hat, a large, festive affair with plumes and jewelled buckles, and dropped her wrap. There was a low chair near the bed. She drew it close and sat down, her eyes on the face on the pillow. Jewels gleamed in the lace of her gown, and the shining silk of its folds trailed the floor about her.

Alexina stole across to a far and shadowed corner of the room and sat down by a table. She was crying and striving to keep it noiseless.

The doctor stood irresolute, then made a movement. “Do you have to go?” said Harriet, turning.

“No; I expect to be here in the building all night. There might come a—change.”

“Stay, please,” she asked him; “here.”

He sat down by the open fire and she turned again to the face on the pillow.

The night passed. Now and then the Sister moved noiselessly about, or the doctor came to the bedside, lifted the inert hand, laid it down, and went back to the fire.

Alexina moved from her chair to the window or to the fire and back again. Now and again she knew that she must have slept a little, her head against the table. So the night passed.

The square framed by the window sash was turning grey when there came a movement, and the eyelids of the face on the pillow lifted. Harriet was leaning over before the others, the nurse or doctor, got to the bed, and must have been there when the eyes opened. She must have seen consciousness of her presence in them, too, and possibly questioning, for she spoke rapidly, eagerly, like one who had said the thing over and over in readiness for the moment, though her voice shook. “You said you loved me from your soul, and, living or dead, would go on loving and wanting my love?”

There seemed no wonder in the voice replying, only content. There was even the usual touch of humour in his reply. “And will go on wanting your love,” he said.

“But I am here to tell you how I love you,” she returned.

The room was still, like death. Then in the man’s voice: “Is this pity, Harriet?”

Her voice hurried on. “And how, living or dead, I will go on loving and wanting you.” It was no pity that trembled in her voice, it was passion. He moved.

After a time he spoke again. It was to call her name, to say it as to himself. This time he knew it was love this woman was talking of, not pity.

“I could not bear it that you should not know,” she hurried on to tell him. “I made them let me come to you.”

“You know then, Harriet; they have told you?”

She was human; the sound that broke from her was the cry of a rent soul.

The doctor, who had gone back to the mantel, crouched over the fire. The Sister seemed to shrink into the shadows beyond the narrow bed. Alexina clenched her hands, her head on her arms outstretched on the table.

But Harriet had regained herself. “I am here to ask you something. May I be married to you—now—at once, I mean?”

His response was not audible, only her reply. “Oh, surely you will. For the rest of my life—to have been—you will give me this, won’t you?”

There was a quick movement from him, and a sound of warning from the nurse who moved forward out of the shadow.

Material things seemed to come back to Harriet. Alarm sprang into her voice. “Shall I go away?” she asked the nurse, even timidly.

The answer came from him. “No; oh, no. Since it may be for so little time I may ask it of you; stay with me, Harriet.”

She turned to the doctor.

“Stay,” he told her, poor boy, new to these things. “Then give me my way,” Harriet begged, turning back again. She had forgotten the others already. “You said that after what happened between you and Austen you wanted it known how you felt to me. Haven’t I the same right and more, since it was my brother who said it, to want the world to know how I feel to you?”

They could feel the laugh in his reply. “The world, the world, as if you ever cared for what the world—come, be honest, Harriet; you say this in the generous desire of making it up to me.”

“But I do—I do care. I could clap my hands, I could glory to cry it from the house-tops, how I care, how I am here, on my knees, begging you will marry me.”

“You are kneeling? Yes? Kneel then; even that, since it brings you closer. But let’s not talk of this now. I’m not used to the knowledge of the first yet. Will you put your hand in mine, Harriet?”

The girl over in the shadow felt that her heart would break. And this was love. The great, sad thing was love!

He was talking again. “I never thought, surely, to be a stick of a man like this. I could have made a royal lover, Harriet. A man’s blood at forty is like wine at its fulness. My head—won’t lift—God, that it should come to find me like this! yet, kiss me, will you, Harriet?”

But a moment and she returned to her pleading. “They will send me away from you, you know, I have no right to be here—unless you give it to me?”

Was she using this, the inference, to move him?

For he caught it at once. “You came—I see, I see.” But she had fled from her position. “It’s not that, as if I cared, as if you thought I cared, it’s because I want to have been—”

But the other had stuck. “Is the doctor there?” he asked.

The young fellow came to the bed.

“I would like to see Father Ryan,” said the Major.

The priest came. The two were intimates. He listened to the instructions, the exigencies of the case to be met by him. A license was necessary. “And try and get Miss Blair’s brother to accompany you, and to come here with you; you will make it all clear to him.”

Harriet was looking up at the priest, whom she saw as the friend of the man she loved. “And you will come back and marry us yourself, won’t you?” she asked.

He was looking down at her. Even after the long night, in the cold light of a winter dawn, and in the garishness of an evening gown in daylight, she was triumphantly beautiful. With her hand on the smooth brown hand of the Major, she sat and looked up at the cassocked priest. The marble of her face had given way to a divine light and radiance.

He looked down on her.

“I will come,” he told her.

It was some hours before he was back. The young doctor had gone and come. Dawn had broadened into a grey and sullen day. Breakfast was sent up and placed in an adjoining room for Harriet and Alexina. The girl tried to eat, if only to seem grateful to the Sister bringing it, but Harriet wandered about the room, and, when Alexina brought her a cup of coffee, shook her head. She watched the door until the doctors were gone and she might return to him, then went in and sat by him again. His eyes were closed, but his hand, seeking as she sat down, found hers. Later, as the priest returned, the gaze from the pillow turned to the door eagerly. Austen was not with him. The face steeled.

The Mother came in, and at a sign from the priest they gathered around, Alexina, the young doctor, the nurse.

With his hand in Harriet’s the Major followed to the end.

Nor was he going to die. There was deeper knowledge of life yet for the woman by him to learn.

Afterward, Doctor Ransome drove Alexina home in his buggy, where she and the voluble, excited Katy packed some things for Harriet.

“And Miss Harriet never to let us hear a word, and Maggie and me never closing our eyes all the night, Miss Alexina,” Katy said.

And Harriet Blair a person usually so observant and punctilious about everything!

“And Mr. Blair, he asked where you were, Miss Harriet and you, when he came, and then he dressed and went to the party he was going to take you to, as if nothing had happened. And the Father came this morning and talked, but Mr. Blair hardly said a word, and when they left the priest went one way and Mr. Blair he went the other.”

Doctor Ransome came in his buggy and took Alexina back. On reaching the infirmary they found that Major Rathbone’s sister from Bardstown, who had been sent for, had arrived. Alexina had not known that he had a sister until she found her in the room next to the Major’s, with Harriet. She was childlike and small and was looking at Harriet, helpless and frightened. She was, it proved, twenty-three years old, and a widow with two children.

“And Stevie takes care of us,” she explained. “Stevie” was the Major; “us” was herself and the babies.

She had brought both the babies. “I couldn’t leave them and come, you know,” she said.

One of them lay on the bed, asleep, a little chap four years old, his coat unfastened, his hair tumbled. The other, the younger, asleep too, lay on the mother’s knee, Harriet regarding him. He was aquiline, lean and handsome, baby as he was, like a little deer hound.

“His name is Stevie,” said Stephen’s sister.

Harriet looked up from the child to the mother, almost jealously. “Then he is mine, too; I have some part in him too, since his name is Stephen.”

---

CHAPTER FOUR

For two months Austen Blair and his niece lived on in the big house.

Alexina wondered if her uncle were not different from other people, for it must be the abnormal human who would not ask one question about his sister; mere curiosity must have demanded that much, Alexina thought, having a lively curiosity herself. To be sure, Aunt Harriet, from Uncle Austen’s standpoint, had outraged every convention to which they had been bred; she had married a man between whom and her family there had been bitterest enmity, between whom and her brother there had been personal encounter; she had gone from her brother’s roof to be married in a Catholic institution, by a Catholic priest.

It almost made Alexina laugh when she summed up the enormity of the offending. She gloried in it herself; she adored Aunt Harriet and loved her for it.

But the fact that her uncle could thus ignore the whole subject made it harder for Alexina to go to him about a matter which had arisen concerning herself.

A letter had come to her from her mother. Though it was eleven years since she had seen the handwriting, she knew it, as Katy, bringing the mail, handed it to her.

It seemed to Alexina that her pulses stopped and the tide of her blood flowed backward. Katy, closing the door as she went, brought her to herself, and she flung the letter from her the width of the room, her gaze following it. She sat like one stunned with horror. Then rage succeeded. “What right had this—this so-called mother to write to her?”

But she need not read it, and Alexina sprang up and went about her household duties, as if in interviews with grocery-man and butcher, with cook and laundress, she could forget that her mother had written her, that the letter lay up-stairs awaiting her.

She would not read it, she assured herself; but all the while she knew that she would, and when the time came she opened it quietly and read it through. Then she put it in its envelope and threw it from her again across the room, and sat immovable, the lines of her young face setting as though by some steeling process. Suddenly she caught sight of her face in the glass. On it was the look of Uncle Austen.

She sprang up and, dragging forth her cloak and hat and furs, fled from the house. She must turn to some one, she must get away from the horror that was upon her. She would go to Aunt Harriet.

It was a frosty day and a light fall of snow was on the pavements. She met Dr. Ransome and Emily Carringford strolling along as though it were summer. She had introduced him to Emily, and one would say she had done him a good turn. She smiled as they called to her from across the street. He admired Emily and it looked as if Emily—but, then, Emily sparkled and glowed for any man, even for Uncle Austen.

She saw Georgy wave his hat gaily from the platform of a street-car and look as though he meant to swing off and join her. She was seeing a good deal of him these days. She shook her head and pointed with her muff, and a moment later turned in at the Infirmary gate. She had walked rapidly and felt better somehow. The Major was daily growing stronger, though the fear was that he might never walk again, but, rather than accept this verdict, he and Aunt Harriet were going East for advice or, if need be, to Paris.

Paris! The horror surged back upon her. She stopped short in her very turning to close the gate and stood engrossed with the misery of it, for it was from Paris her mother had written to say she was coming to her.

“I have reached the end of my money, ma chere,” she wrote, “as you come into yours, which Austen, being a Blair, will have cared for. I will teach you to love life, now that you are grown. When you were a child you were impossible, you disconcerted and judged me, but it is unfair to let you taste life according to Blair seasoning only. So write me, ma fille, mon enfant, of your whereabouts, in the care of your Uncle Randolph in Washington, for I follow this steamer across.”

And then, as though her mood had changed: “In any case, I shall not trouble you long. It is my lungs, they tell me. It is a curious sensation, may you never know it, having your furniture seized. Le bon Dieu and Celeste have stood between me and much.”

Celeste! Tall, gaunt, and taciturn—negro mammy to Alexina and to Molly before her. Celeste! It all stifled the girl. She hated Celeste. Celeste had chosen to go with the mother, and the child had been left by both.

And where was M. Garnier, the husband—“the promising young French poet,” as Uncle Randolph had termed him to some one, in the child Alexina’s hearing, those years ago? The letter made no mention of him.

Alexina closed the Infirmary gate and walked up the wide pavement to the entrance. The little Sister knew her well now and smiled a welcome as she let her in. Passing along the hall Alexina hesitated before the marble saint in his niche. Hers was no controversial soul; what she wanted was comfort. Perhaps the blend of Presbyterianism and Catholicism may be tolerance. Then she went on through the spotless halls to the second floor.

As the door opened Harriet looked around. She had been writing by the Major’s couch, and he had fallen asleep, his hand on hers, the portfolio lying open on her lap. She smiled at Alexina, then nodded at the hand detaining her. Could it be the same Aunt Harriet, this yearning-eyed woman? Her hair, always beautiful, had loosened and drooped over her temple, and the thought swept upon Alexina, how human, how sweetly dear it made her look, this touch of carelessness because of greater concern. It moved the girl, bending to kiss her, to slip to her knees instead and throw adoring young arms about her.

And then a strange thing happened; the head of the woman drooped for support against the girl’s shoulder and, with a sudden trembling all through her, Harriet began to cry. Only for a moment; then, lifting her head and putting the hand of the sleeper gently on the couch, she arose and drew the girl over to the window.

“You go to-morrow?” asked Alexina.

“Yes; Dr. Ransome has arranged to go with us then. I don’t know why I cry, for he’s better. He’s been dictating an editorial. I’m unnerved, I suppose, and it’s beginning to tell.”

“You are worn out with the two months of strain, Aunt Harriet, and the worry and unhappiness.”

“Unhappiness?” Harriet laughed a little wildly. “Unhappiness? I thought you understood better than that. I’m happy, for the first time in all my easy, prosperous, level life. It’s out of the depths we bring up happiness, Alexina. And come what may, I’ve known, am knowing it—nothing can take the knowledge from me now.”

She was crying again, her head bent against the window pane. “I never knew how to get near to any one; I’ve been alone all my life till now. Maybe you have been lonely all along. I didn’t know. Living with Austen and me—oh, I’m sorry for you, Alexina. I’m going away now with Stephen; but when we come back I mean to make it up to you and see that you have opportunities and friends. Oh, Alexina, we do all require it, the joy of having some one needing us. And you’ll be nice to Louise for me, won’t you, while we’re gone?”

Louise was the sister of Stephen, and she and the babies were to remain in Louisville in the house the Major and Harriet had taken against their return, an unpretentious house on a cross street.

“Stephen has arranged it all,” Harriet was saying; “he won’t let me do a thing. He will not consider for a moment that he isn’t going to be able to keep his position on the paper; they’re filling it for him among themselves still. If he wasn’t so—so fiercely proud! It’s Austen that rankles, you see.” There was a movement on the couch. Harriet went swiftly over to the waker. It is on Olympus they take time for deliberate and stately progression; Harriet had come down to the human world.

“It’s a soporific thing,” quoth the Major, “listening to one’s own editorials. I never heard one through before. You there, Alexina? Where have you been these two days? I hope you’re not holding it against us that Georgy is sending all his flowers to me? It’s his delicate way, you see; reaching round through me via Harriet to you.”

There was a tap and the little Sister entered. It was company. It was always company. The Major’s life had been close to the heart and centre of things. It was laughable to see the reserved Harriet’s pride in his popularity. It was a certain judge this time, and with him an old comrade-at-arms, come up from the Pennyroyal to see him.

“But had you better?” Harriet expostulated.

The Major caught her hand and laughed at her. “But these are fond farewells, you see, dear lady,” he explained.

Was he drawing her to him by the hand he held? For suddenly Harriet bent over and kissed him; nor did Alexina feel any consciousness or shame, and the little Sister went out softly with glistening eyes.

So it came about that Alexina did not open her heart to Harriet after all, and the aunt went away next day without knowing.

Yet Harriet influenced the girl in her decision.

Alexina, standing at her window, watched a sparrow tugging at some morsel that had fallen upon the snow and essaying to fly upward and away with it. She was lonesome; the house was so big; it seemed so empty. She was thinking about Aunt Harriet, who was giving her strength out to some one, who had opened her arms to Louise and the babies, whose days were full of thought and planning, and through whose eyes shone something never there before.

Alexina left the window and re-read the postscript of her letter. “In any case I shall not trouble you long. It is my lungs, they tell me. It is a curious sensation, may you never know it, having your furniture seized. Le bon Dieu and Celeste have stood between me and much.”

It was to her uncle after all that Alexina went with the matter that night. He was in the parlour reading and laid down his paper to give attention. The substance of the letter heard, the two perpendicular lines between his brow relaxed, for it was a case of his judgment being justified, and a man likes to feel he has been right.

“It is what I expected,” he said, “only it has been longer coming. She has her father’s people in Washington, she has no claim on you.” He lifted his paper.

“But—” said Alexina.

He lowered it and waited.

Her mouth grew set. He always made her stubborn. Fingering the upholstery of his chair, she looked at him, though it took courage to look at Austen Blair under some circumstances. She found herself suddenly disposed to defend her mother. “But if I feel a claim, Uncle Austen? I wanted to tell you I think I ought to write to her to come.”

“Come where?” asked Austen Blair. To be sure—where could she write her to come? There fell a silence.

Then he spoke, and curtly. “In three months you will be of age, a fact which no doubt your mother has remembered. Until then I forbid it; after that it is your affair. In the interim, it has been my intention, and I meant to say as much to you, to make you acquainted with your affairs. I had expected you to live on in my house. Under the conditions you propose you will, of course, make your own arrangements.”

Alexina, listening, looked at him. One would have said tears were welling. Had he raised his eyes to hers, put out a hand—

But he returned to his paper.

Her cheeks blazed, her head went up, and something ran like a vivifying flame over her face. It was a pity Austen did not see her then. He demanded beauty in a woman. He should have seen his young niece angry. Then she turned and went up to her room and wrote her mother to come. But, the letter written, she leaned upon the desk and broke into wild and passionate crying.

---

CHAPTER FIVE

Alexina for several years had been made partially acquainted with her affairs.

The evening her uncle chose to go over the whole with her, Alexina, in the midst of it, put a hand timidly on his. “I am grateful, Uncle Austen, you know that,” she said.

The matter of the mother was fresh between them. “I have been paid, as any one else, for my services,” he answered.

She drew her hand back.

The books were a clear record of what had been done year by year.

“Cowan Steamboat Mortgage,” read Alexina from a page of early entries. “What was that?”

“A mortgage held for you on a boat built at the Cowan shipyards.”

“What was the name of the boat?” Alexina’s voice sounded suddenly strained and odd.

“The ‘King William,’” said Austen. “The boat never paid for itself, and the mortgage was foreclosed and the boat sold.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed with curious intentness. As she listened she pushed her hair back with the hand propping her head as if its weight oppressed her. “And then?” she asked. “Here are more entries.”

“I bought the boat in at a figure a little over the mortgage; river affairs were down. Later, a couple of years—you’ll find it there—the boat sold for double the price.”

She closed the book. “That’s enough, I believe,” she said, “for one evening.” But it is doubtful if he was at all aware of anything strange in her tone.

She tripped on her skirts, so impetuous was her flight up the stairs, and, in her room, flung herself upon the bed. Her hands even beat fiercely as she cried, but there was no doll Sally Ann to be gathered in for comfort now.

They had loved her, they had been good to her. Mrs. Leroy had rocked her, the Captain had held her on his knee.

She sprang up and went to bathe her eyes. If she knew where they were, or how to find them, she would go—

She wondered if Emily or her mother had known about this.

She went to the Carringfords’ the next afternoon. She liked to go over to the little brown house and she liked Emily’s strong-featured, outspoken mother; there was a certain homely charm even in the clear-starched fresh calico dresses she wore.

Mrs. Carringford was drawing large loaves of golden-brown bread from the oven as Alexina came in by way of the kitchen door. The smell of it was good.

“Wait a moment, Alexina,” she said, as she rose and turned the loaves out onto a clean crash towel spread upon the table. “I want a word with you before you go up-stairs. It’s about Emily; you know, I suppose, that your uncle is coming over right often to see her?—That big hat looks well on your yellow hair, Alexina—And I’m going to be plain: it’s bad for Emily; she’s discontented with things now, she always has been.”

Alexina’s eyes dilated. “Coming to see Emily? Does—does Emily want him to come?” “Alexina,” called Emily down the stairs; “aren’t you coming up?”

Alexina went up to the room which Emily shared with her two little sisters. It was hard on her. There were various attempts to have it as a girl fancies her room. The airiness of Swiss muslins, however cheap, the sheen of the colour over which the airiness lies, the fluttering of ruffled edges—these seem to be expressions of girlhood. But Emily’s little sisters shared the room with her. They were there when Alexina entered.

“Now go out,” Emily told them; “we want to be alone.”

The little girls looked up. Miss Alexina was tall and fair and friendly, she wore lovely dresses, she went to balls, and they adored her. She felt the flattery and liked it too. “Oh,” she interceded, “no, don’t, Emily.” “Yes,” said Emily; “we want to talk. Go on, Nan—Nell; don’t you hear?”

The little sisters gathered up books and slates with some show of resentment; it was their room too. Emily shut the door behind them.

The breadths of a light-hued silk dress were lying about the room. Emily was ripping on the waist. “It’s a dress Miss Harriet gave mother for a quilt while you were away, but I told her it would be no such thing if I could devise it otherwise.”

She frowned, then threw the waist down. “Not that I don’t hate it—the devising, the scheming.”

“I wouldn’t do it,” said Alexina bluntly.

“Which is easy for you to say,” retorted Emily, her eyes sweeping Alexina from top to toe. Harriet Blair knew how to dress the girl. “Yes,” said Alexina; “I suppose that’s true.” It was part of her hold on Emily, her fairness. “But you’re welcome to anything of mine; I’ve reason somehow to hate ’em all.”

The colour heightened on Emily’s face and she looked eager. Passion expresses itself variously. The stern old grandfather abased and denied the physical and material needs. Emily exulted in the very sheen of rich fabric, in the feel of satin laid to cheek. Was the grandchild but fulfilling the law of reaction? The soul of Emily and the soul of the old preacher saw each other across a vast abyss.

“It’s for the Orbisons’ I need a dress,” said Emily. “Of course, I know it’s because I have a voice I’m asked.”

Yet, knowing that for herself she never would have been asked, there was exultation in Emily’s tone. Alexina got up suddenly. Somehow she didn’t want to discuss the Leroys with Emily after all.

Down-stairs she stopped again in the spotless, shining kitchen, the clean odour where soft-soap is used always lingering. Alexina liked it; all her knowledge of the dear homely details of life she was familiar with, she had gotten here.

“You remember the Leroys?” she asked Mrs. Carringford.

“Why, yes; I sent them milk twice a day.”

“Did you know why they went away?”

“Wasn’t it because they had put everything into that—er—” She stopped.

“Boat?” suggested the girl.

“Boat”—Mrs. Carringford accepted the word—“and so had to, after it was—er—” “Sold,” supplied Alexina. “Did you—did people know who it was held the mortgage?”

The plain-spoken Mrs. Carringford looked embarrassed. “Well, Alexina, you know how it is in a neighbourhood.”

“Then you knew the boat was bought in for me?”

“Why, yes; I did.”

“Did the Leroys know it?”

“Why, naturally, I should suppose so.”

That was all that Alexina wanted to know, yet not all, either. Her colour rose a little. It made her pretty. “Do you know anything of the Leroys since?”

“Not a word,” said Mrs. Carringford.

“What do you hear from Miss Harriet and Major Rathbone?”

“They are still East. Dr. Ransome came back yesterday.” “Yes; I know he did,” said Mrs. Carringford. “He was here to see Emily last night. He’s a nice boy.” There was emphasis in her way of making the statement. Harriet Blair had once remarked that Mrs. Carringford was that anomaly—a sane woman. Yet she opposed the visits of Austen Blair and spoke heartily concerning the other one. “Garrard is a nice boy; I like him.”

---

CHAPTER SIX

Alexina became twenty-one in May. She had found that in the settling of her affairs it would be necessary for her to remain in Louisville and so had written her mother to come to her there. She explained about the change in her life to the Carringfords, to find that they knew all about her mother; probably her little world, Georgy, Dr. Ransome, knew it, too, while these years she had comforted herself with the thought that, at least, it was her secret shame.

Mrs. Carringford put an arm about her and kissed her. There was approval in the action. Emily looked at her, then laughed nervously, while a vivid scarlet rose to the roots of her chestnut hair.

As Alexina passed through the front-room study going home, the old minister glanced up from his writing and called her name. He pushed his spectacles back onto his leonine head, looking up as she came toward him. She was surprised, for he never had seemed conscious even of her comings and goings.

“There are two ties that are not of our making,” he told her; “the spiritual tie between the Creator and the created, and the material tie between the parent and the child. They are ties not of duty but of nature, as indestructible as matter. God go with you.”

She felt strange and choked, though she was not sure she knew what he meant.

A week after she became of age she was dismantling the bay-windowed room of such things as were hers. Little by little it grew as cold and cheerless as the one adjoining, now the personality of Aunt Harriet was gone out of it. What would become of Uncle Austen after both were gone?

She had tried to force from him some expression of feeling, at first wistfully, then determinedly. There is a chance, had he responded, that she would have made other arrangements for her mother. Then she told herself she did not care and went hotly on with her preparations.

She had taken two bedrooms and a parlour at a hotel, and had written her mother to go directly there, but the night of her arrival the girl felt she could not go to meet her. It was too late an hour anyhow, she would wait until morning, but she shrank so from that first moment she could not sleep. She and her uncle met at the breakfast table the next morning. She made one or two attempts at conversation. “I go to-day, Uncle Austen,” she said at last, and, leaning forward, pushed a paper across the table to him. It was the final statement of the household expenditures under her management.

Her board from her first coming had been paid into the general house fund, and, accordingly, she had included against herself charge for these several days in the new month.

Noting it, Austen Blair nodded; it was the first approval accorded her for some time.

She laughed. “I go to-day,” she repeated.

Her uncle, who had risen, put the paper, neatly folded, into his wallet, then crossed to her and put out his hand. “I will not see you again then?” he said, and shook hands.

A moment after she heard the front door close.

There were the servants to bid good-by, and that being done there was no excuse to linger.

It was a warm May day; the magnolia in the yard, the pirus japonicas, the calycanthus, the horse chestnuts, were in bloom. The lawn was green, the edges of the gravel paths were newly cut and trim. Alexina, in her muslin dress and Leghorn hat, turned on the stone flagging and looked back at the home she was leaving. Home?

The girl, pausing in the yard of the big house, glanced across the street to a shabby old brick cottage. Her affection was for it.

The hotel was in the business part of the city near the river. A street-car would have taken her directly there but she walked, as if seeking to put the moment off. The way took her past the house furnished and waiting for Aunt Harriet and the Major. Louise was sitting on an up-stairs window-sill with little Stevie, and caught his small fist and waved it to her. A curtain was fluttering out an opened window and a comfortable looking coloured woman was sweeping the pavement. The place had an air of relaxation, of comfort, already. Aunt Harriet was going to have a home.

The arrangements had been made at the hotel, and the child, for a very child she was, went in at the ladies’ entrance where a sleepy bell-boy sat, always nodding, past the pillared corridor, on up-stairs, and along the crimson-carpeted hallways. She was trembling, her throat was dry.

In the suite she had taken, a bed-room either side opened into a connecting parlour. It was the knob of the parlour door she turned after a tap. Then she went in.

“Why, you tall, charming, baby-faced—! Celeste, Celeste, here’s your baby! Come here to me, Malise. Why the child’s hands are cold!”

How foolish to have dreaded it so! It was all gone—even the constraint. The twelve years were as nothing. She was again the baby child, Malise, so-called by her mother’s people.

And her mother? The linen pillows on the sofa beneath her head looked cool and pleasantly rumpled, and the sheer white wrapper was fine and softly laundered as a baby’s. Her hair, hanging in two plaits over the pillows, had no suggestion of carelessness; it looked fascinating, it looked lovely. The mother, holding her daughter’s hands, was gazing up curiously, interestedly, her lips parted, as pleased interest will part any child’s. There was contagious laughter in the eyes, too, the laugh of expectancy about to be gratified, as with children while the curtain goes up on a new scene. “You are as pretty as you can be, Malise; the Blair features used to look so solemn on a baby!”

“Lil’ missy—”

Alexina looked around. It was Celeste, tall, brown, regarding her with covert eyes as of old. Celeste had never loved her, the child had known that; her love belonged to the mother, her first charge, her Southern born, all her own. The father’s blood in this second child was alien; Celeste had resented it as she had resented that father and all his kind. She had been jealous for the mother against the father and child from the first.

Alexina, drawing a hand from her mother’s, gave it to Celeste. The old woman took it loosely, then let it drop. Things were to be as of old, then, between them.

The girl turned back to her mother. “But, Molly,” the name came naturally, she had known her mother by no other, “your health, you know; tell me about that.”

What did this dilation in Molly’s eyes mean? And she glanced sidewise, secretly, as if at fear of some dreaded thing, lurking.

“Did I write about that? Oh, well, perhaps I was, then, but not now; not at all now.”

The haste to disclaim was feverish, and the look directed by Celeste at Alexina was sullen, even while the old woman’s strong, resistless brown hand was pushing her mistress back onto the pillows.

“Got to res’ lil’ while, p’tite; got to min’ Celeste an’ lay back an’ res’ now.”

Then to her daughter, who suddenly felt herself a little compelled creature again, so was she carried into the past by the old woman’s soft, Creole slurring: “’Tain’, lil’ missy, ’tain’ like Madame Garnier she aire seeck actual, but jus’ she taire, easy like.”

Madame Garnier! That meant Molly! The illusions were all gone. The girl backed from the couch. Twelve years rolled between Molly and herself, years full of resentment. A slow red came up and over the daughter’s face.

But Molly, back upon the pillows, gave no sign. She flung her plaits out of the way and slipped her arms under her head. There is a slenderness that is not meagreness, but delicacy; thus slight, thus pretty, were Molly’s wrists. The arms under her head tilted her face so the light fell on it. It was a narrow, piquant face, with no lines to mar its delicacy. The odd difference in the eyebrows, which had fascinated Alexina as a child, one arched, one straight, lent laughter to it even in repose. Yet the mouth drooped, like a child’s, with pathos and appeal. Could one say no to that mouth, it was so wistful? It was an alluring face, and moved you so to tenderness, to do battle, to give protection, that it hurt.

“Throw off your hat, Malise,” suggested Molly. “Celeste, take her parasol from that chair. There is so much to hear about. I asked la femme de charge, when she was in this morning, if she’d ever heard of the Blairs. Everybody used to know everything about everybody when I was here before and the servants most of all, and, mon Dieu, she knew all about them. ‘Miss Blair is married,’ she told me. ‘I know that,’ said I, for you’d mentioned that much in your letter, Malise. ‘She ran off to get married,’ said she. ‘Oh, hush,’ I told her.”

She had retained her very colloquialisms, this Molly, too unconscious and too indolent to know she had them, probably, or to care.

“So she told me all about it, how tall, cold, proper Harriet had run off from Blair proprieties and Austen, to marry a Southerner and a Catholic! It’s as if the virgin in marble had stepped down and done it!”

Molly was amused. It narrowed her eyes till they laughed through the lashes.

“I never heard anything so funny in my life, Malise, as—as Harriet eloping. What is it Jean Garnier would quote from his adored Shakespeare about Diana and her icicles? Make me stop! It hurts me—to laugh. Oh-o-h, mammy—God, mammy!”

The appeal died in a little choke, and the morsel of handkerchief pressed to her mouth showed a spot of crimson, but Celeste was already there, putting Alexina aside. “You can ring fo’ lil’ ice—yonder,” she told the girl jealously. “Then, efen I were lil’ missy, I’d go in there—that one is yo’ room—an’ I’d shet my do’h. When it’s over with, p’tite won’t want fo’ you to have been in heah.”

But pushed into the adjoining room and with the door shut between, Malise still could hear. She did not want to hear; she tried not to hear. She was awed and frightened.

“Am I going to die this time, Celeste? I’m afraid, mammy; my hands are cold. Don’t rub them with the rings on, you fool; you hurt. No, no; don’t go away, mammy! mammy! I couldn’t sleep last night; that’s why I’m—I’m tired. The night was so long and I was afraid. I see Jean when I try to sleep. I hear him cough. Give me something to make me sleep—oh, mammy, give it to me.”

The girl in the next room stood gazing out the window over the roofs and chimney stacks at the yellow tide of the river sweeping down towards the pier bridge spanning it, but she was not seeing it. She was filled with pity and terror.

It grew quieter in the next room, then still, then the door between opened and closed. It was Celeste, outwardly unmoved and taciturn.

“P’tite’s gone to sleep. Shall I help lil’ missy unpack her things?”

---

CHAPTER SEVEN

Summer in a half-grown Southern city is full of charm; pretty girls in muslin dresses stroll the shopping streets and stop on the sidewalks to chat with each other and with callow youths; picnic parties board the street cars, and in the evenings sounds of music and dancing float out from open doors and windows along the residence streets.

Alexina, chaperoned by Harriet Blair, would have found herself in these things, yet never quite of them.

“Malise,” Molly said quite earnestly, a day or so after her coming, “don’t you think it’s stuffy here?” It was stuffy; hotel rooms in summer are apt to be; Alexina felt as apologetic as if Molly were the one who had given up a spacious, comfortable home to come and live in rooms for her. “I’m sorry,” she said. She had explained the necessity for it before.

“I thought you’d gotten the bank to take charge of your affairs,” Molly reminded her; “so why do we have to stay?”

“I have, but it’s a different thing, very, from having Uncle Austen, personally—”

She stopped; it might seem to be reminding Molly that she had caused the break with Austen Blair.

But Molly never took disagreeable things personally. She threw her arms back of her head. “Can’t you propose something to do?” she entreated.

“We might go round to the stores,” suggested Alexina doubtfully. She hated stores herself.

Molly brightened. “I need some summer things.”

Alexina agreed, yet she wondered. Seven trunks can disgorge a good many clothes; “mere debris from the wreckage of things,” Molly explained, though they didn’t look it. Yet in a way Alexina understood. It wasn’t the actual things Molly wanted; it was the diversion, and so at the suggestion Molly cheered up. “You look pretty in summer clothes, Malise,” she stated with graciousness, as they started. On the way she went in and bought chocolates; not that she wanted them either—it was too hot for candy, she said—but one must be doing something.

Coming out the door they met Georgy, who promptly stopped. He was a beautiful youngster, with a buoyant and splendid heartiness, and now he was flushing ruddily with pleasure up to his yellow hair.

Alexina blushed, too; she hardly knew why, except that he did, and told his name to Molly, who regarded him with smiling eyes and gave him her hand, whereupon he blushed still more and then suggested that he go along with them.

A group of young matrons and their daughters stood at the door of the shop to which they were bound, chatting in easy, warm weather fashion. Alexina knew them slightly but Georgy knew them well, and they were greeted with salutations and laughter.

Molly smiled, too, an interested smile that brightened as she was introduced, and she remembered having known the mother of this one when she, Molly, had lived in Louisville before, and the husband of another one, and all the while she was letting her eyes smile from one to the other of the group, who meanwhile were telling Georgy that they were planning a dance.

Dance? Molly’s eyes grew inquiringly eager. Favors were they speaking of? She had a trunk full of Parisian knick-knacks, she told them. “Come around to the hotel,” she suggested, “all of you: why not now?”

And so it was that the stream of things gayest caught Molly and Molly’s daughter into its swirl. The banks along the way were flowery, the sky was blue, and Alexina began to find the waters of dalliance sweet. Hitherto girlish groups had seemed to make themselves up and leave her out, and there always had been a disconcerting lack of things to talk about in dressing-rooms and strictly feminine assemblies. Now she found herself in the planning and the whirl, happy as any.

There was exhilaration, too, in this sudden realization of what an income meant, which she had not had much opportunity of learning before, and these days she laughed out of very exuberance and sudden joy in living.

“It seems as if I didn’t really know you, sometimes,” said the literal Georgy, out calling with her one evening. “It makes you awful pretty, you know, to be jolly this way,” which was meant to be more complimentary than it sounded.

They were stepping up on the porch of the house to which they were bound. Alexina laughed and caught a handful of rose petals from a blossoming vine clambering the post and cast them on Georgy. There were other swains than Georgy these days, too, and not all of them were youths, either, not that it mattered in the least who they were; for in the beginning it is the homage, not the individual, that counts.

She hung over the offerings which came to her from them with a rapture which was more than any mere joy; it was relief. Suppose such things had been denied her? There are maidens, worthy maidens, who never know them, and so Alexina blushed divinely with relief. Roses to her!

And Molly, watching, would grow peevish—not over the flowers; Molly was too sure of her own charm for that. Alexina really did not know what it was about, and she did not believe Molly quite knew herself.

There was a lazy-eyed personage the young people called Mr. Allie. Their mothers had called him Mr. Randall, but then he had been the contemporary of the mothers.

No daughter of these bygone belles was secure in her place to-day until the seal of Mr. Allie’s half-serious, half-lazy approval was upon her, or so the mothers and the daughters felt. Mr. Allie was perennial, indolently handsome, an idler in the gay little world, yet somehow one believed he could have gone at life in earnest had there been need.

He, too, sent roses to Alexina, and flowers from him meant something subtly flattering, and he came strolling around at places and sat down by her, saying pretty things to make her blush, apparently to watch her doing it. Not that she minded as much as she worried, because she felt she ought to mind, and in her heart she knew she didn’t really. She had gone out with him half a dozen times perhaps, when, one evening at a dance, Mr. Allie, seeking, found her at the far end of a veranda where the side steps went down to the gravel. She and Georgy were sitting there together. Georgy was telling her of his aspirations and, in passing, dwelling on the lack of any civic spirit in the town, the inference seeming to be that Georgy, modest as he was, some day himself meant to supply it.

Mr. Allie told Georgy that a waiting damsel was expecting him, then took Georgy’s place. He did not speak for a while, and Alexina never was talkative.

“Would you rather go in and dance?” at last he asked.

“Why,” said Alexina; “no.” Which was not quite true for she loved to dance these days. She used to be afraid she was not going to have a successive partner and it marred the full enjoyment of the one she had, but now—

Still, any one would be flattered to have Mr. Allie asking, so she said no.

“Then we’ll stay,” he said; which was not brilliant, to be sure, but it was the way in which Mr. Allie said things which made them seem pregnant of many meanings.

After that neither of them spoke, yet Alexina’s pulses began to beat. The big side yard upon which the steps descended was flooded with moonlight, and a mockingbird was sending forth a trial note or two. And it was June.

“For you know, really, you’re the very dearest of them all,” said Mr. Allie, with soft decision, as if he had been arguing about it.

There was not a thing to say, and she could not have said it if there had been. “And I’ve known a good many,” continued Mr. Allie, which probably was true, only Mr. Allie knew how true; “but I’ve never felt just this way about any of them before.”

Then they sat very still, and the bird note rose and fell.

“Maybe you’d rather go in,” said Mr. Allie as the music began again. Was it hurt in his tone?

“Oh,” said Alexina, “no.”

Mr. Allie picked up the end of the scarf which had fallen to the steps and put it about her shoulders again. It brought his face around where he could see hers. Was he laughing? Or were his eyes full of reproach? For what? He did not look a bit like a contemporary of anybody’s mother. Yet perhaps the moustache that drooped over the mouth did hide—lines, and the lazy eyes sometimes did look tired. Youth has its dreams, vague, secret, yet the Prince of the dreams should be no Mr. Allie with eyes that look weary and tired.

“If I thought,” said Mr. Allie softly, oh, so softly; “if I thought that you could care?”

“Oh,” said Alexina, “no, I couldn’t.”

She sobbed. It seemed cruel to Mr. Allie.

Then they talked it over, he so gently, she with self-reproach and little chokes against tears. He even held her hand, she too tender-hearted to know how to take it away, though the remorse eating into her heart was forgotten somewhat in the glow, the wonder that this thing, this sad but beautiful thing should come to her. Presently he took her in. The rest of the evening sped hazily. Going home, she talked to Mr. Allie and Molly as in a dream. Reaching the hotel, and in their own apartment, Alexina sank down on the sofa, her wrap and fan falling unobserved, and sat, chin on palm, shyly remembering, shrinking a little, and blushing. Suddenly conscious, she turned and found Molly in her doorway between, undressing, and looking at her with knowledge and with laughter. She had forgotten Molly, who had been rummaging and had brought out some olives and crackers and wine. Molly lunched at all unheard-of hours.

Alexina sprang up. She turned white, then scarlet.

“‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,’ Jean Garnier would say,” Molly began, unloosing her waist and laughing again. “Mais non, mon enfant, you take these things too seriously; it is time you understood. He has said as much to every pretty girl there, one time and another, and to most of their mothers before them, only they all understood. It’s very charming in you, of course, right now, and to a man like him, irresistible but, still—Malise—”

Alexina looked at Molly. Then up welled a red that rose to her hair and spread down her throat and over her bare young shoulders. She would never misunderstand again. It is a cruel thing, the hotness of shame. But Molly was staring. Malise was beautiful with her head so proudly up and her cheeks flaming.

There was more to understand. They were a gay crowd, the young people and their elders with whom Molly and Alexina and Georgy were going. Things came to Alexina slowly.

“It isn’t just nice,” she told Molly anxiously, an evening at the Willy Fields’; “Georgy says you’ve all been in the pantry opening more champagne. I’m sure they’re acting like there’s been enough, and he thinks, too, we ought to go home.”

“Good Lord,” said Molly. She looked so slender, so childishly innocent standing there where the daughter had drawn her aside, one couldn’t believe she had said it. “This is the way you used to go on when you were a child. One would think you’d had your fill of what people ought to do, living with the Blairs.”

Alexina looked at her. That Molly should dare allude to that past this way! Then she went and found her mother’s wrap and brought it.

“Put it on,” she said.

Molly laughed rebelliously, then waveringly.

“We are going home,” said the daughter. Molly essayed to put it on but didn’t seem able to find the hooks, and Alexina, hardening her heart, would not help her, but went to find Georgy. He was looking stern himself, and forlorn and young, and the fact that she knew why did not serve to make Alexina happier.

The cars had stopped running and they walked home, leaving hilarity behind them. Molly was acting stubbornly, her tones were injured, and her talk incessant. Alexina couldn’t make her stop.

“Jean was just such another clog as Malise,” she told Georgy. “He was forever harping about proprieties, and he wore me out trying to make me tie my money up; Malise isn’t stingy, I’ll say that, though she might have been—she’s a Blair. Jean shivered over spending money. And after there wasn’t any left, he used to sit and cough and cry over his Shakespeare about it. He had thought he was going to be a great poet once, himself, Jean had.”

In the light of the setting moon one could see Molly’s childlike face; and her voice, with its upward cadence, was more plaintive than the face. The very look and the sound of her were sweet, seductively sweet.

“He liked to believe himself a Gascon, too, Jean did, and he loved his Villon too. He wasn’t well ever; he couldn’t always breathe, Jean couldn’t, but, vraiment, he could swagger as well as any.”

The night was still, the streets asleep. Nearing the hotel now, the way led past blocks of warehouses and wholesale establishments. Molly stumbled over a grating. Georgy steadied her. They went on, their footsteps echoing up from the flagging as from a vault. “I’m cold,” complained Molly, “and,” querulously, “you know, Malise, it will make me cough if I take cold. Jean coughed. After he coughed for a year and the money was gone, he raised more on our things. Then they came and seized them, except my trunks; Jean had sent those away. I was sick, too; I took the cough from Jean, and I was afraid after I heard one could take it, so he made me come away. Celeste had some money. He made us come; he said it would be easier to know I was over here, and it would be better for him at the hospital—‘les soeurs sont bonnes,’ Jean said over and over.”

Alexina was hearing it for the first time. People like Molly supply no background, the present is the only moment, and Alexina was not one to ask.

At the hotel entrance, in the ladies’ deserted hallway, even the nodding bell-boy gone, Georgy paused. Molly went and sat down in a chair against the wall. She laughed unsteadily, though there was nothing to laugh about. Her lids were batting and fluttering like a sleepy child’s. “I thought you said it was late, Malise,” she remarked.

“Wait,” entreated Georgy of Alexina, and squared himself between her and her mother. He was a dear, handsome boy. He gazed pleadingly at the tall, fair-haired girl whose eyes were meeting his so apologetically.

“You said to me there, to-night, you couldn’t care for me that way,” he told her, “but couldn’t you marry me anyhow, Alexina, and we’ll take care of her together?”

For he thought she knew what he did. Her eyes, which had lowered, lifted again, doubtfully, wistfully. Was she wishing she could? They met his. Perhaps his were too humble.

A shiver went through the girl. Then came a sobbing utterance. “I can’t, I can’t; but oh, if you only knew how I wish I could!”

She broke down in tears. “Don’t be mad with me, Georgy.”

“Oh,” said Georgy, preparing to go, “it’s not that I’m mad. I reckon you don’t understand these things yet, Alexina.”

---

CHAPTER EIGHT

It seemed all at once as if some wilful perversity seized Molly; at home she was so petulant Alexina dared not cross her, for to anger her was to make her cough; abroad she was gayer than any, almost to recklessness. Celeste, taciturn and secretive, kept herself between mother and daughter insistently, and often the door to Molly’s room was locked until afternoon. Mrs. Garnier must not be disturbed, she said.

One of these times, a day in late July, Alexina went out to the Carringfords’. Emily knew most of the comings and goings of Alexina and her mother. In her heart probably she was envious, though to Alexina she was concerned.

“That picnic of last week is being talked about, Alexina,” she said.

Alexina flushed, but she was honest. “It ought to be,” she said. Gaiety can tread close upon the heels of recklessness. But if Molly went the daughter had to go, for this very reason, though she could not tell Emily this.

So she spoke of other things. “Do you know anything of Uncle Austen?” she asked. “Is he still taking his meals down-town and sleeping at the house?”

Emily looked conscious. “Yes,” she said, “I think he is.”

Somehow Alexina felt that Emily not only knew but wanted it to be felt that she knew. Then why hesitate and say only that she thought so? “How’s Garrard?” Alexina asked suddenly. Garrard was young Doctor Ransome. Emily flushed a little, but she answered unconcernedly, “Well enough, I reckon.”

On Alexina’s return to the hotel, the clerk stopped her in the corridor, looking a little embarrassed under the clear, surprised gaze of the young lady. “It’s about a little matter with Mrs. Garnier; it’s been running two months now.”

A moment after, as she went on blindly up the stairs, a folded paper in her hand, she understood; understood what Georgy had offered to share with her, what the taciturn secretiveness of Celeste meant. She went in through the parlour to her mother’s room, from which of late she had been so much shut out.

“Molly,” she said, her voice sounding strange to herself, as she held out the paper open.

Molly, risen on her pillow, looked at it, at her, her eyes growing big. She was frightened, and cowered a little, crumpling some letters in her lap.

“Don’t look at me like that, Malise,” she said. “I’ve some of the money you gave me left—I’ll help to pay it.”

That she was afraid only because of the bill!

“Oh—” Alexina breathed it rather than uttered it.

Molly, risen from her elbow to sitting posture, was looking at her with big, miserable eyes, her throat, so slight and pretty, swelling with the sobs coming.

But the other came first, and with it came the terror. “Malise, Malise, hold me; hold me. I’m afraid!” Celeste was out.

Alexina, holding her mother, could reach the bell, and rang it, again and again.

“Oh,” she said to the boy when he came; “get a doctor.”

“What one?” he asked.

Alexina remembered Dr. Ransome.

Then she sat and fed ice to Molly and tried to keep her still. It is a fearful thing to feel the close, clinging touch of a person we are shrinking from. It was a hot, drowsy afternoon. The clock on the parlour mantel ticked with maddening reiteration. It seemed hours before Dr. Ransome came. Then a moment later Celeste returned. Molly flung her arms out to the old woman.

“He’s dead, mammy,” she wailed; “Jean’s dead; the letters came after you went—and I’m afraid, I’m afraid of it, I’m afraid to die!” It was to Celeste Molly had to tell it. The daughter listened with a sudden resentment towards Celeste.

Molly was not going to be better right at once, and Alexina and Dr. Garrard Ransome had many opportunities for talk. She stopped him in the parlour, as he was going, one morning. It had been on her mind for a long time to ask him something. “It’s odd, your name being Ransome,” she said. “Mrs. Leroy, who used to live where you do, had been a Miss Ransome.”

“She’s my cousin Charlotte,” said the young fellow; “that’s how my mother came to fancy living where we do, when we came down from Woodford to Louisville. She used to visit the Leroys there you see.”

“Oh,” said Alexina, “really? They were very good to me.”

The blue eyes of the doctor were regarding her intently, but as if thought were concentrated elsewhere. “I wonder if it was you Cousin Charlotte meant? I was down there two winters ago for a month. They live in Florida, at a place called Aden.”

“Yes,” said Alexina, “Aden.”

“And she asked me about some young girl who, she said, lived across from the cottage. Of course I didn’t know.”

“I wasn’t there then,” said Alexina; “I was at school. They were good to me; are they well—and happy?” The eagerness was good to see, so dejected had the girl seemed of late.

“Well, yes, or were when mother last heard. Happy, too, I reckon, as it’s counted with us poor families used to better things.”

“Tell me about them, if you don’t mind. They were the best friends I ever had.”

“Well,” he said, looking rather helpless in the undertaking, “there isn’t much to tell. They’re getting along. The Captain was book-keeper for a steamboat line down there, went home every week, but, somehow, a year ago, they dropped him; he’s getting old, the Captain is.”

“Yes, he must be. And Mrs. Leroy?”

“Cousin Charlotte? Well, she’s Cousin Charlotte. Some ways she’s a real child about things and mighty helpless when it comes to managing, but she never thinks about repining, and it’s funny how she’ll do whatever King tells her.”

“And he?”

“King? Oh, he’s all right. Queer fellow though, some ways, imperturbable as a young owl. Best poker player down there, and that’s saying something. It’s motley, Aden is, like all those small towns since the railroad went through ’em.” The young man happening to glance at Miss Alexina, saw that he had said something wrong. He was the only child of his mother and so knew how ladies feel on certain subjects. Yet, on the other hand, Miss Alexina adored Major Rathbone, and the Major’s poker record, while possibly of a more local character, was scarcely less celebrated than his guerrilla past. Still, ladies are expected to be inconsistent.

“I shouldn’t have told that, I reckon,” he remarked; “you all don’t see these things as we do. He’s a fine fellow, King is. He’s a great shot, too,” cheerfully; “I went on a week’s hunt down in the glades with him. King’s all right.”

Maybe he was, but it sounded as though he was trifling. “Hasn’t he a business?” she asked with condemning brevity.

“I don’t know about calling it a business,” said William Leroy’s cousin; “I know he’s the busiest. It’s a big old place, you see, the grove they own, and he’s reclaiming it. There’s just one subject he’s discursive on, and that’s the best fertilizer for young orange trees.”

Somehow William Leroy did not shine against this background as his well-intending cousin meant he should. “And they’re poor, Mrs. Leroy and the Captain?” asked Miss Blair.

“Well,” admitted Garrard, “they aren’t rich.”

The girl sat thinking. “I’m going down there,” she said suddenly. “Is there a hotel? There is? Then I’m going to take Molly and go down to see them. There’s something I want to tell Mrs. Leroy and the Captain.”

“As good a place as any,” agreed Dr. Garrard. “I told you at the start Mrs. Garnier must not try a winter here.”

“We’ll go,” declared Alexina, then stopped. Maybe they would not be glad to see her. “But don’t mention the possibility if you should be writing,” she begged; “don’t mention knowing me—please. I—I’d like to discover it all for myself.”

After he had gone she went to the piano, near the window looking out over the warehouse roofs to the river, and, softly fingering some little melody, sat thinking.

There was a tap and Alexina turned on the piano stool as Emily Carringford came in. Somehow Emily, so prettily, daintily charming in her fresh white dress, made Alexina cross. She felt wilted and jaded, and who cared if she did? That her present state was brought about by her own choosing only made her crosser. What was it in Emily’s manner? Had she grown more beautiful in a night? She dropped into a chair, and, holding her parasol by either end across her knee, looked over at Alexina on the stool, and, looking, laughed. It was a laugh made of embarrassment and complacency, half shy, half bold.

“Your Uncle Austen last night asked me to marry him, Alexina,” she said.

“Emily—” Alexina sprang from the stool and stood with apprehension rushing to her face in rising colour and dilated gaze. “Oh—Emily!”

Was it foreboding in her eyes as they swept Emily’s girlish loveliness?

“He didn’t seem to mind my being poor,” said Emily; “he said it was my practical and praiseworthy way of going to work that made him first—oh, Alexina,” she coloured and looked at the other, “he didn’t even mind our little house—and mother doing the work.”

A sort of rage against Emily seized Alexina. She stamped her foot.

“Oh,” she cried, “why shouldn’t he the rather go down on his unbending knees in gratitude that you’ll even listen? You’re twenty-one and he’s fifty-one. You have everything, you’re lovely, you’ve your voice, you haven’t begun to live yet—oh, I know he’s my uncle, and I remember all he’s done for me, but I’ve known him years, Emily, years, and I’ve never seen Uncle Austen laugh once.”

What on earth has laughing to do with it? Alexina always was queer. This from Emily. Not that she said it, except in the puzzled, uncomprehending stare at Alexina, while she returned to what she had come to communicate. “We’re going to be married the first day of October,” she said. “Mr. Blair has to go East on some business then.”

Alexina drew herself together with a laugh. What was the use—yet she could not divest herself of a responsibility.

She looked at Emily, who was looking at her. Their eyes met. Alexina looked away.

“Emily,” she said, “there’s a thing”—it took effort to say it—“a thing maybe you haven’t thought of. It came to Aunt Harriet; it comes to everybody, I feel sure. Won’t you be cutting yourself off from any right to it?” The red was waving up to Alexina’s very hair.

Emily showed no resentment at this implication which both seemed to take for granted, but then she was not following Alexina very closely, her own thoughts being absorbing. “The wedding will have to be in our little house,” she said, “so it won’t make much difference about the dress; nobody’ll be there. But for the rest, I’m going to have some clothes. I told mother and father and grandfather so this morning.”

Alexina went over and seized the other’s hands as children do. A softer feeling had come over her. Perhaps Emily was doing this thing to help her people. Besides, she and Emily used to weave wonderful garbs in bygone days, for the wearing to the Prince’s ball. To be sure, one never had pictured an Uncle Austen as the possible Prince, but still Emily should have them, if she wanted them.

Alexina’s gaze fell upon a flower lying on the floor, which had dropped out of Garrard Ransome’s buttonhole. The boy loved flowers as most men from the blue grass country do, and the cottage yard was a wilderness of them. She had almost forgotten Garrard’s share in this. She picked the flower up and handed it to Emily. “Dr. Ransome has been here,” she said, feeling treacherous—for the other man, after all, was her uncle.

Emily took it, and laid it against the lace of her parasol, this way and that.

“I’ve always, as far back as I can remember, meant to be somebody, something,” said Emily. She said it without emotion, as one states a fact. Then she rose and picked up her glove. “Sometimes I’ve thrown my arms out and felt I could scream, it all has seemed so poor and crowded and hateful to me,” which was large unburdening of self for Emily. Then she went. At the door she laid the flower on a chair.

The three weeks of Molly’s illness brought it to the end of August, and, as she convalesced, Alexina began to plan for Aden. In the midst of her preparations the Major and Harriet returned.

She went out to the house the morning of their arrival. The luggage was being unloaded at the curb as she reached the gate, and, hearing voices as she stepped on the porch, she looked in at the parlour window. Harriet, her hat yet on, was bending her head that little Stevie, urged by his mother, might kiss her. The baby was no shyer about it than the woman, yet the woman smiled as the baby’s lips touched her face.

As she rose she saw Alexina and came to the door to meet her. She kissed the girl almost with embarrassment, yet kept hold of her hands, while suddenly her eyes filled with something she tried to laugh away.

“I had your letter,” she was saying, “and resent it, too, that you are going, and so does Stephen.” Her face changed, her voice grew hesitant, hurried. “He’s never going to be better than now”—was it a sob?—“but since I may have him, may keep him, and he is willing now to live so for me, though not at first, not at first— Oh, Alexina, it has been bitter!”

Alexina followed her into the parlour. The Major was there in a wheeled chair, the babies afar off, refusing to obey the maternal pokes and pushes to go to him, and regarding him and his wheeled affair with furtive, wide-eyed suspicion. The eyes of the Major were full of the humour of it.

“Now had I been a gamboling satyr on hoofs they would have accepted me at once,” he assured Alexina. “It’s this mingling of the familiar with the unnatural—”

He was holding the girl’s hand while he spoke and looking up keenly at her pretty, tired face. There had been enough in her letters for them to have divined something of her trouble.

“To some it comes early, to others late, Alexina,” he said quite gently. He had noted the signs—the violet shadows beneath the baffled young eyes, the hint of the tragedy in their depths.

Alexina sat down suddenly and, leaning her face on the arm of the wheeled chair, began to cry, not that she meant to do it at all.

Time was when Harriet would have been at a loss, even now she was embarrassed, though she hovered over the girl, anxious and solicitous, and even touched the pretty, shining hair with her hand.

“Let her alone: let her cry it out,” said the Major.

Alexina, groping for his hand, held to it like a very child and cried on.

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