THE APPROACHING CANOE“Is ums name Fwedwick?” asked Marjorie.

Fulton controlled with difficulty an impulse to laugh at the child’s curious twist of his name, but admitted gravely that such, indeed, was the case.

“Then ums can stay,” said Marjorie in a tone of resignation, and returned to her building.

Marian, who, during his colloquy with Marjorie, had risen and was brushing the sand from her skirt, now spoke for the first time.

“It’s hardly possible you’re looking for me—I’m Miss Agnew.”

He bowed profoundly.

“A distinguished man of letters assured me that I should find him here,” the young man explained as he drew on a blue serge coat he had thrown out of the canoe; “but unless he is hiding in the bushes he has played me false. Such being the case I can’t do less than offer to withdraw if my presence is annoying.”The faint mockery of these sentences was relieved by the mischievous twinkle in his eyes. They were very dark eyes, and his hair was intensely black and brushed back from his forehead smoothly. His face was dark even to swarthiness and his cheek bones were high and a trifle prominent.

He was dressed for the open: white ducks, canvas shoes, and a flannel shirt with soft collar and a scarlet tie.

In spite of his offer to withdraw if his presence proved ungrateful to the established tenants of the cove, it occurred to Marian that he was not, apparently, expecting to be rebuffed. Marjorie, satisfied that the stranger in no way menaced her peace, was addressing herself with new energy to the refashioning of the stable walls along lines recommended by Marian.

“The ways of the Poet are inscrutable,” observed Fulton; “he told me your name and spoke in the highest terms of your kindness of heart and tolerance of stupidity.”

“He was more sparing of facts in warning me of your approach. He said your name would be Frederick, as though the birds would supply the rest of it.”

“Very likely that’s the way of the illustrious—to assume that we are all as famous as themselves; highly flattering, but calculated to deceive. As the birds don’t know me, I will say that my surname is Fulton. A poor and an ill-favored thing, but mine own.”

“It quite suffices,” replied Marian in his own key. “We have built a chÂteau,” she explained, “and the chÂtelaine is even now gazing sadly upon the waters hoping that her true knight will appear. We have mixed metaphor and history most unforgivably—a French chÂteau, set here on an American lake in readiness for the Knights of the Round Table.”

“We mustn’t quibble over details in such matters; it’s the spirit of the thing that counts. I can see that Marjorie isn’t troubled by anachronisms.”

The blue sheets containing, presumably, this young man’s verses, were still in her belt, and their presence there did not add to her comfort. Of course he might not be the real author of those tributes to the lake’s divinities. His appearance did not strongly support the suspicion. The young man who had sent her flowers accompanied by verses on various occasions was an anÆmic young person who would never have entrusted himself to so tricksy a bark as a canoe. Frederick Fulton was of a more heroic mould; she thought it quite likely that he could shoulder his canoe and march off with it if it pleased him to do so. He looked capable of doing many things besides scribbling verses. His manner, as she analyzed it, left nothing to be desired. While he was enjoying this encounter to the full, as his ready smile assured her, he did not presume upon her tolerance, but seemed satisfied to let her prescribe the terms of their acquaintance. This was a lark of some kind, and whether he had connived at the meeting, or whether he was as much in the dark as she as to the Poet’s purpose in bringing them together, remained a mystery.

She found a seat on a log near the engrossed Marjorie, and Fulton settled himself comfortably on the sand.

“This has been a day of strange meetings,” he began. “I really had no intention of coming to Waupegan; and I was astonished to find our friend the Poet on the hotel veranda this morning. He had told me to come;—it was rather odd—”

“Oh, he told you to come!”

“In town, two days ago he suggested it. I wonder if he’s in the habit of doing that sort of thing.”“It would hardly be polite for me to criticize him now that he has introduced us. I fear we shall have to make the best of it!”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of it in that way!”

They regarded each other with searching inquiry and then laughed. Her possession of the verses had already advertised itself to him; she saw his eyes rest upon them carelessly for an instant and then he disregarded them; and this pleased her. If he were their author—if, possibly, he had written them of her—she approved of his good breeding in ignoring them.

“I know this part of the world better than almost any other,” he went on, clasping his hands over his knees. “I was born only ten miles from here on a farm; and I fished here a lot when I was a boy.”

“But, of course, you’ve escaped from the farm into the larger world or the Poet wouldn’t know you.”

“Well, you see, I’m a newspaper reporter down at the capital and reporters know everybody.”

“Oh, the Poet doesn’t know everybody; though everybody knows him. Perhaps we’d better pass that. Tell me some more about your early adventures on the lake.”

“You have heard all that’s worth telling. We farm boys used to come over and fish before the city men filched all the bass and left only sunfish and suckers. Then I grew up and went to the State Agricultural School—to fit me for a literary career!—and I didn’t get here again until last fall when my paper gave me a vacation and I spent a fortnight at the farm and used to ride over here on my bicycle every morning to watch the summer resorters and read books.”

“It’s strange I never saw you,” said Marian, “for I was here last fall. My own memories of the pioneers go back almost to the Indians. My father used to own that red-roofed cottage you see across the lake; and I’ve tumbled into the water from every point in sight.”

“September and June are the best months here, I think. It was all much nicer, though, before the place became so popular.”

“Hardly a gracious remark, seeing that Marjorie and I are here, and all these cottagers are friends of ours!”

“I haven’t the slightest objection to you and Marjorie. You fit into the landscape delightfully—give it tone and color; but I was thinking of the noisy people at the inns down by the village. They seem rather unnecessary. The Poet and I agreed about that this morning while we were looking for a quiet place for an after-breakfast smoke.”

“It must be quite fine to know him—really know him,” she said musingly.

“Yes; but before you grow too envious of my acquaintance I’ll have to confess that I’ve known him less than a week.”“A great deal can happen in a week,” she remarked absently.

“A great deal has!” he returned quickly.

This seemed to be rather leading; but a cry for help from Marjorie provided a diversion.

Fulton jumped up and ran to the perplexed builder’s aid, neatly repaired a broken wall, and when he had received the child’s grave thanks reseated himself at Marian’s feet. The blue onion-skin paper had disappeared from her belt; he caught her in the act of crumpling the sheets into her sleeve.

With their disappearance she felt her courage returning. His confessions as to the farm, the university, the newspaper—created an outline which she meant to encourage him to fill in. Journalism, like war and the labors of those who go down to the sea in ships, suggests romance; and Marian had never known a reporter before.

“I should think it would be great fun working on a newspaper, and knowing things before they happen.”

“And things that never happen!”

She was quick to seize upon this.

“The imagination must enter into all writing—even facts, history. Bryant was a newspaper man, and he wrote poetry, but I heard in school that he was a very good editor, too.”

“I’m not an editor and nobody has called me a poet; but the suggestion pleases me,” he said.

“If our own Poet offered you a leaf of his laurel, that would help establish your claims,—set you up in business, so to speak.”

“I should hasten to return it before it withered! My little experiments in rhyme are not of the wreath-winning kind.”

“Then you do write verses!”

“Yards!” he confessed shamelessly.

She was taken aback by this bold admission. His tone and manner implied that he set no great store by his performances, and this piqued her. It seemed like a commentary on her critical judgment which had found them good. Fulton now became impersonal and philosophical.

“It’s a great thing to have done what our Poet has done—give to the purely local a touch that makes it universal. That’s what art does when it has heart behind it, and there’s the value of provincial literature. Hundreds of men had seen just what he saw,—the same variety of types and individuals against this Western landscape,—but it was left for him to set them forth with just the right stroke. And he has done other things, too, besides the genre studies that make him our own particular Burns; he has sung of days like this when hope rises high, and sung of them beautifully; and he has preached countless little sermons of cheer and contentment and aspiration. And he’s the first poet who ever really understood children—wrote not merely of them but to them. He’s the poet of a thousand scrapbooks! I came up on a late train last night and got to talking to a stranger who told me he was on his way to visit his old home; pulled one of the Poet’s songs of June out of his pocket and asked me to read it; said he’d cut it out of a newspaper that had come to him wrapped round a pair of shoes in some forsaken village in Texas, and that it had made him homesick for a sight of the farm where he was born. The old fellow grew tearful about it, and almost wrung a sob out of me. He was carrying that clipping pinned to his railway ticket—in a way it was his ticket home.”

“Of course our Poet has the power to move people like that,” murmured Marian. “It’s genius, a gift of the gods.”

“He’s been able to do it without ever cheapening himself; there’s never any suggestion of that mawkishness we hear in vaudeville songs that implore us to write home to mother to-night! He takes the simplest theme and makes literature of it.”

Marian was thinking of her talk with the Poet at Mrs. Waring’s garden-party. Strange to say, it seemed more difficult to express her disdain of romance and poetry to this young man than it had been to the Poet. And yet he evidently accepted unquestioningly the Poet’s philosophy of life, which she had dismissed contemptuously, and in which, she assured herself, she did not believe to-day any more than she did a week ago. The incident of a pilgrim from Texas with a poem attached to his railway ticket had its touch of sentiment and pathos, but it did not weigh heavily against the testimony of experience which had proved in her own observation that life is perplexing and difficult, and that poetry and romance are only a lure and mesh to delude and betray the trustful.“Poets have a good deal to fight against these days,” she said, wishing to state her dissent as kindly as possible. “The Bible is full of poetry, but it has lost its hold on the people; it’s like an outworn sun that no longer lights and warms the world. I wish it weren’t so; but unfortunately we’re all pretty helpless when it comes to the iron hoofs of the Time-Spirit.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed, sitting erect, “we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking the Time-Spirit a new invention. We’re lucky to live in the twentieth century when it goes on rubber heels;—when people are living poetry more and talking about it less. Why, the spirit of the Bible has just gone to work! I was writing an account of a new summer camp for children the day before I came up—one of those Sunday supplement pieces around a lot of pictures; and it occurred to me as I watched youngsters, who had never seen green grass before, having the time of their lives, that such philanthropies didn’t exist in the good old days when people dusted their Bibles oftener than they do now. There’s a difference between the Bible as a fetish and as a working plan for daily use. Preaching isn’t left to the men who stand up in pulpits in black coats on Sundays; there’s preaching in all the magazines and newspapers all the time. For example, my paper raises money every summer to send children into the country; and then starts another fund to buy them Christmas presents. The apostles themselves didn’t do much better than that!”

“Of course there are many agencies and a great deal of generosity,” replied Marian colorlessly. The young men she knew were not in the habit of speaking of the Bible or of religion in this fashion. Religion had never made any strong appeal to her and she had dabbled in philanthropy fitfully without enthusiasm. Fulton’s direct speech made some response necessary and she tried to reply with an equally frank confidence.

“I suppose I’m a sort of heathen; I don’t know what a pantheist is, but I think I must be one.”

“Oh, you can be a pantheist without being a heathen! There’s a natural religion that we all subscribe to, whether we’re conscious of it or not. There’s no use bothering about definitions or quarreling with anybody’s church or creed. We’re getting beyond that; it’s the thing we make of ourselves that counts; and when it comes to the matter of worship, I suppose every one who looks up at a blue sky like that, and knows it to be good, is performing a sort of ritual and saying a prayer.”

There was nothing in the breezy, exultant verses she had thrust into her sleeve to prepare her for such statements as these. While he spoke simply and half-smilingly, as though to minimize the seriousness of his statements, his utterances had an undeniable ring of sincerity. He was provokingly at ease—this dark young gentleman who had been cast by the waters upon this tranquil beach. He was not at all like young men who called upon her and made themselves agreeable by talking of the theater or country club dances or the best places to spend vacations. She could not recall that any one had ever spoken to her before of man’s aspirations in the terms employed by this newspaper reporter.

Marjorie, having prepared for the stabling of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, announced her intention of contributing a wing to the chÂteau. This called for a conference in which they all participated. Then, when the addition had been planned in all soberness and the child had resumed her labors, Marian and Fred stared at the lake until the silence became oppressive. Marian spoke first, tossing the ball of conversation into a new direction.

“You have confessed to yards of verses,” she began, gathering up a handful of sand which she let slip through her fingers lingeringly, catching the grains in her palm. “I’ve seen—about a yard of them.”

Clearly flirtation was not one of his accomplishments. His “Oh, I’ve scattered them round rather freely,” ignored a chance to declare gracefully that she had been the inspiration of those lyrics, written in a perfectly legible hand on onion-skin letter-sheets, that were concealed in her sleeve. His indifference to the opening she had made for him piqued her. She was quite dashed by the calm tone in which he added, with no hint of sidling or simpering:—

“I’ve written reams of poems about you.” (He might as well have said that he had scraped the ice off her sidewalk or carried coal into her cellar, for all the thrill she derived from his admission.) “I hope you won’t be displeased; but when I was ranging the lake last September we seemed to find the same haunts and to be interested in the same sort of thing, and it kept me busy dodging you, I can tell you! I exhausted the Classical Dictionary finding names for you; and it wasn’t any trouble at all to make verses about you. I was really astonished to find how necessary you were to the completion of my pen-and-ink sketches of all this,”—a wave of the arm placed the lake shores in evidence,—“I liked you best in action; when the spirit moved you to run or drive your canoe over the water. You do all the outdoor things as though you had never done anything else; it’s a joy to watch you! I was sitting on a fence one day over there in Mrs. Waring’s orchard and you ran by,—so near that I could hear the swish of your skirts,—and you made a high jump for a bough and shook down the apples and ran off laughing like a boy afraid of being caught. I pulled out my notebook and scribbled seven stanzas on that little incident.”

Any admiration that was conveyed by these frankly uttered sentences was of the most impersonal sort conceivable. She was not used to being treated in this fashion. Even his manner of asking her pardon for his temerariousness in apostrophizing her in his verses had lacked, in her critical appraisement of it, the humility a self-respecting young woman had a right to demand of a young poet who observes her without warrant, is pleased to admire her athletic prowess, her ways and her manners, and puts her into his verses as coolly as he might pick a flower from the wayside and wear it in his coat.

“Then you used me merely to give human interest to your poems; any girl running through Mrs. Waring’s orchard and snatching at the apples would have done just as well?”“Oh, I shouldn’t say that,” he replied, unabashed; “but even the poorest worm of a scribbler has to have an ideal and you supplied mine. You were like a model who strolls along just when it occurs to the painter that his landscape needs a figure to set it off. You don’t mind, I hope?”

This made it necessary for her to assure him in as few words as possible that she didn’t in the least object to his view of the matter; and she added, not without a trace of irony, that she was always glad to be of use; that if she could further the cause of art in any way she was ready to do it.

“Please don’t; that hurt a little! By the way, the Poet told me I ought to know you. He recommended you in the noblest terms. I see now what was in his mind; he thought I needed your gentle chastening.”

“It’s more likely he thought it well for you to see your ideal shattered! It’s too bad, for the sake of your ambitions, that I didn’t remain just an unknown girl in an orchard—who suggested Pomona inspecting her crops and then vanished forever.”

“Oh, I had to know you; it was inevitable,” he replied with irritating resignation. “You see I’ve written about you in prose, too; you’ve been immensely provocative and stimulating. My best prose, as well as my only decent jingles, has had you for a subject. I laid myself out to describe you at the tennis tournament last fall. Next to watching you run through an orchard trippingly, like one of Swinburne’s long lines, I like you best when you show your snappy stroke with the racket and make a champion look well to her knitting.”

She turned crimson at this, remembering very well the “Chronicle’s” report of the tennis match, which she had cut out and still treasured in her portfolio. Clearly, her obligations to this impudent young man were increasing rapidly.Marjorie, seized with an ambition to add a new tower to the chÂteau, opportunely demanded their assistance. The architectural integrity of the chÂteau was in jeopardy and the proposed changes called for much debate by the elders. This consumed considerable time, and after the new tower was finished by their joint labors they set Marjorie to work constructing a moat which Fulton declared to be essential.

He got on famously with Marjorie; and this scored heavily in his favor with Marian. His way with the child was informed with the nicest tact and understanding; he entered into the spirit of the chÂteau-building with just the earnestness that her young imagination demanded. He promised to take her canoeing to a place where he thought there might be fairies, though he would not go the length of saying that he had seen them, to be sure, for when people saw fairies they must never tell any one; it wouldn’t be kind to the fairies, who got into the most dreadful predicaments when human folk talked about them. Marjorie listened big-eyed, while he held her sandy little fingers. Yes; there was something pleasing in this young man, who described tennis matches for the sporting page of a newspaper or wrote verses or spoke of religion or fairies all as part of the day’s work.

“The Poet will think I’ve fallen into the lake,” he remarked presently. “The ride to Mrs. Waring’s dock was a great concession on his part and he expressed misgivings as to allowing me to paddle him back to the inn. He’s waiting at this moment on Mrs. Waring’s veranda, hoping that I won’t show up with the canoe so he can take passage on the steamer and reduce the hazards of the journey. The height of the sun proclaims the luncheon hour, and Marjorie must be hungry. Won’t you honor my humble argosy!”Marian could think of no good reason for declining this invitation, particularly after Marjorie had chirruped an immediate and grateful acceptance. Moreover, Mr. Fulton had made himself so agreeable and had contributed so many elements to the morning’s pleasure, that it was not in her heart to be rude to him.

They embarked after a promise had been exacted by Marjorie that “ums” should all meet again on the morrow, to perfect the moat and build a drawbridge.

“I’m glad to have an excuse for staying,” Fulton declared, “and I hope I’m not the man to go off and leave a noble shotum without the finishing touches. We shall meet frequently, maid Marjorie. In fact”—he lifted the paddle and let it drip with a pleasant tinkle into the calm water, while he half-turned toward Marian—“I don’t believe I’ll ever go back to ‘the heat and dust and noise of trades.’ As old Walt says, in effect, the earth, that is sufficient; so why not stay close to it?”

“Ums splashed water on me!” protested Marjorie.

“A thousand pardons, my young realist!”

“The Poet and Elizabeth are waving to us from the landing,” remarked Marian. “Perhaps you’d better save the rest of the peroration until to-morrow.”

“No unkinder word was ever spoken!” cried Fulton cheerfully, and swept the light craft forward with long, splashless strokes.

VI

“It’s beautifully kind of you to want to help; but you see how impossible it is!”

“I don’t like that word,” replied the Poet patiently. “Most things are possible that we really want to do.”

For two hours that morning Mrs. Redfield and he had talked of her troubles, first with a reluctance, a wariness on both sides that yielded gradually to the warmth of his kindness. However, on the whole, the Poet found her easier to talk to than her husband had been. She understood, as Redfield had not, that his appearance in the matter was not merely the assertion of a right inhering in an old friendship, but that it was dictated by something larger,—a resentment of an apostasy touching intimately his own good faith as a public teacher. This attitude had not only its poignancy for her, but it broadened the horizon against which she had been contemplating the broken and distorted structure that had been her life.

“I suppose,” she said bravely, “that we oughtn’t to ask so much! We ought to be prepared for calamity; then we shouldn’t break under it when the blow falls. When I saw other people in just such troubles I used to think, ‘There’s something that will never come to me’: I suppose Miles is right in saying that I have no ambition, that I had become merely a drag on him. And I can see his side of it; there wasn’t much ahead of him but standing behind a bank counter to the end of his days. The novels are full of the conflicts between the man who wants to rise and the woman without wings. It’s my misfortune to be one of the wingless ones.”

She was less bitter than he expected; and he took courage from this fact. He had hoped to avoid any minute dissection of the situation; but she had given him a pretty full account of the whole affair, and he was both dismayed and relieved to find how trivial the details of the dissension proved. She had wept—beyond doubt there had been tears—and Miles on his side had exhausted persuasion before her obstinacy kindled his wrath. The crux had come with his demand that she should do her part toward cultivating acquaintances that he believed to be essential to the success of his new undertaking. She had never known such people, she assured the Poet, feeling that he knew she never had and would sympathize with her position. Miles had no right to ask her to countenance them, and all that.

The Poet preferred to be amused by this. The obnoxious persons were strangers to him; he had merely heard of them; he admitted that he would never deliberately have chosen them for intimate companionship. And yet it was not so egregious a thing to sit at the same table for an hour with a man and woman one wouldn’t care to meet daily.

“If there weren’t such people as the Farnams in the world we’d never know how to appreciate our own kind of folks,” remarked the Poet. “And that fellow can’t be so bad. I heard only recently of an instance of his generosity—he made a very handsome subscription to the new children’s hospital. Men of that stamp frequently grow emotional when they’re touched on the right chord.”

“But you wouldn’t have Miles—the Miles you used to know—become like that, or get down on his knees to such people in the hope of getting some of their money!”

The Poet chuckled.

“If Miles can pry that particular man loose from any of his money I’d say it proved that Miles was right and you were wrong! Farnam doesn’t carry his philanthropy into his business affairs. He’s quite capable of eating your lobster to-night and to-morrow morning exacting the last ounce of flesh from the man who paid for it. It’s possible that Miles will pay dearly for his daring; I understand that this new business is beset with pitfalls.”

“Oh, I want him to succeed! He’s free now to do as he likes and I hope he will prosper. At any rate, Marjorie and I are not dragging him down!”Angry tears came with this; the Poet looked away to the green-fringed shores. When she was calm again he thought it wise to drop the matter for the present. At least it was best to withdraw to safe ground, from which it might, however, be possible to approach the citadel obliquely.

“Marian,” he remarked, “is a charming girl.”

She seconded his praise of her sister ardently, saying that Marian had been splendid throughout her troubles.

“She sees everything so clearly; I don’t know what I should have done without her.”

“She sees things your way, then,” he ventured quietly. “I’m a little afraid we always prefer counselors who tell us we’re doing the right thing.”

“Oh, she reasons things out wonderfully. I hope she will profit by my troubles! Fortunately we’re unlike; she’s much more practical than I am. She has a wider outlook; I think her college training shows there.”

“We must see to it that she doesn’t make mistakes,” said the Poet, his thoughts reverting to his efforts to place some new ideals where Marian might contemplate them without suspecting that he was responsible for putting them in her way. The humorous aspects of his intervention—and particularly his employment of the unconscious Fulton as a missionary—caused him to smile—a smile which Mrs. Redfield detected but failed to understand.

“I can never look on marriage again as I used to,” she ventured. “Most of the good things of life have been spoiled for me.”

“I can’t agree to that: you are less than thirty, which isn’t the age at which we can afford to haul down the flag. If I’d subsided at thirty,—had concluded that the world would never listen to my little tin horn,—I should have missed most of the joy of life. And Marian at twenty-two mustn’t be allowed to say that the world at best is a dreary place. She mustn’t be allowed to form foolish opinions of life and destiny and call to the stage-hands to drop the curtain the first time some actor misses his cue. And do you know,” he continued with the humor glinting through his glasses, “that girl had the bad manners to tell me to my face only a few days ago that there was no substance to all our poetizing—that the romance had been trampled out of life! To think of that—at twenty-two or thirty!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Redfield, a little defiantly, “you must remember that I’ve tried poetry and romance.”

It was clear from her tone that she thought this scored heavily on her side, and offset any blame that might attach to her in his mind. She was surprised by the quickness with which he retorted.“Ah, but have you!”

This was rather discouraging when she had been at such pains to tell him the truth; when she had bared her soul to him. She felt that it was unchivalrous for him to question her fairness when she had been so frank.

“You can hardly say,” he went on, “that you made much of a trial of romance when you dropped it at the first sign of trouble. Please don’t misunderstand me. That letter you wrote me during your honeymoon from this very house was in a sense the declaration of a faith. You meant to live by it always; and if no troubles had ever come it would have been perfectly satisfactory—no doubts, no questions! You were like a mariner who doesn’t question his charts when the sea is calm; but who begins to doubt them when he hears the breakers roaring on hidden reefs. Ideals are no good if we haven’t a tolerably strong faith in them. I’m going to tell you something that may surprise you. You and Miles have been an ideal of mine. Not only was your house with its pretty garden and the hollyhocks a refuge, but it was one of my chief inspirations. A good many of the best things I’ve written came out of that little establishment. I was astonished the other day, in looking over my work of the past half-dozen years, to find how much of you and Miles there is in it. And now I feel that I ought to modify those things—stick in footnotes to say that the ideal home—the ideal of happiness I had derived from you—was all a fraud. Just think how that would look: an asterisk tacked to the end of every stanza, leading the eye down to an admission that my statements were not true, only poetry, romance, a flimsy invention which no one need be deceived by!”

“I hope,” she said despairingly, “that I haven’t lost everything! I’ve got to hold on to something for Marjorie’s sake!”“But Miles,” he persisted, “what about him!”

“That isn’t kind or fair,” she replied, at the point of tears again. “If I’ve lost my ideals he’s responsible! He’s thrown away all of his own!”

“No, not quite! If he had he wouldn’t have been angry at me when I went to him to discuss these matters!”

“So you’ve talked to him! Then, of course, you came to me prejudiced in his favor! I don’t call that being fair. And if he asked you to talk to me—”

Her eyes flashed indignantly.

“It’s rather funny that both of you should be so afraid of that. Nothing is further from the truth!”

“I know you mean to be kind, and I know it wasn’t easy for you to come to me. But you can see that matters have gone too far—after the heartache and the gossip—”

“The heartache is deplorable, and the gossip isn’t agreeable,” he assented readily. “We mustn’t let the chatter of the neighbors worry us. Think how a reconciliation would dull the knives of the expectant cynics and hearten the good people—and they are the majority, after all—who want to see the gospel of happiness and love rule this good old world. As for things having gone too far, nothing’s been done, no irrevocable step taken—”

“You don’t understand, then,—” and there was a note of triumph in this,—“I’ve brought a suit; it will be determined in October.”

“October,” replied the Poet, with his provoking irrelevance, “is a month of delight, ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’ The warmth of summer still hovering; the last flowers challenging the frost to do its worst; plans for the indoor life of winter—the fire, cozy talks that aren’t possible anywhere but at the hearthside; the friendly lamp and the neglected book calling us back. I don’t think you and Miles are going to have a very happy winter of it under different roofs. I’m sure I’ll miss the thought of you, running upstairs on tiptoe when you thought you heard Marjorie. Miles was always reading Kipling aloud and we’d forget ourselves and laugh till you’d hush us and run away in a panic. You know,” he continued, “your cottage wasn’t only a place for you to live in; it was my house of dreams—a house of realities that were dreams come true. I’ve sat by the table many a time when you didn’t know I was there—an intruder stealing in, a cheerful sort of ghost, sensible of an unspoken welcome. Odd, isn’t it, about the spirit of place? Not a great many places really take hold of most of us; but they have a way of haunting us; or maybe it’s the other way round and we haunt them, and without knowing how we get into them. We explore strange frontiers into undiscovered countries; we cross from our own existences into other people’s lives,—lose identity, feel, see as other people do,—and then lift our heads, rub our eyes, and become our old selves again—but not quite. We are likely to be wiser and more just and tolerant. And it’s discouraging,” he went on, “to go to your house of dreams and find it plastered with ‘for rent’ and ‘for sale’ signs—or worse yet, to let yourself in with your old key to find only ghosts there! That’s what I’ve been doing. Your bungalow is empty—doubly empty—for the last tenant didn’t stay long; the ghosts were probably too much for him! But I’m there—in spirit, you might say. If the owner knew how much I loaf there, in a disembodied sort of fashion, he’d begin to charge me rent! But it’s mighty lonesome—nobody around to dig out old songs and play the airs for me, as you used to, while I limped along with Miles’s old banjo.”

He spoke with a certain air of injury, as though after all he were the chief sufferer from the passing of the old familiar faces from his house of dreams. He complained as a guest might who suddenly finds that his hosts have taken their departure without warning, leaving him sitting at their fireside all unconscious of their flight.

Elizabeth was surprised to find that his interposition in this fashion impressed her more than the counsels of other friends who, supporting her cause loyally, urged her to maintain her “stand” and recommended sharp reprisals. She had not recovered from her amazement that this shyest and most unobtrusive of men should have come to her in any guise; and when he spoke of his house of dreams—her house with its old-fashioned garden that contained the flowers he scattered oftenest through his poems—she was half-persuaded that he was really a sad, wistful visitor of this house of dreams—her house—that symbolized for him contentment and peace.His way of stating the case touched her deeply, and seeing this he rose and walked to the veranda rail and scanned the limpid water.

“That looks like the boy I sent to do my fishing for me,” he remarked. “He’s bringing Marian and Marjorie home. A pretty capable boy, that! What do you think of a youngster who pops up out of nowhere and chucks bunches of verses into mail-boxes on crowded corners where any one with any sort of ear, passing along, would hear them singing inside! Let’s go down and meet them.”

On their way to the dock the Poet continued to talk of the young man in the canoe as though he were a great personage. His extravagant praise of Frederick Fulton justified any one in believing that either Shelley or Keats had stolen away from Paradise and was engaged just now in paddling a canoe upon Lake Waupegan. The Poet had risen from the long interview with apparent satisfaction and was now his more familiar amusing self.

“How on earth did Marian get acquainted with this young man?” asked Mrs. Redfield in perplexity, as Fulton skillfully maneuvered the canoe inshore.

“Why assume that I know anything about it? Marian doubtless knows scores of people that I never heard of; she’s not an old friend like you. I dare say he saw her wandering alone on the shore and at once landed and handed her a poem as though it were the advertisement of a ventriloquist billed for one night at Waupegan Town Hall! Very likely, being a girl of discriminating literary taste, she liked his verses and bade him welcome. And what could be more natural than that he should offer to bring her home! The longer I live the more I wonder that people meet who were always destined to meet. We think we’re yielding to chance when we’re really doing things we’ve been rehearsing in our subconsciousness for a thousand years!”

When the party landed he parleyed with Marjorie to make it necessary for Marian to introduce Fulton to Elizabeth. He avoided Marian’s eyes, and warily eluded the combined efforts of the sisters to detain him. The obvious result of his artfulness, so far as Marian and Fulton were concerned, was eminently satisfactory. The most delightful comradeship seemed to have been established between the young people. The Poet was highly pleased with his morning’s work, but having dared so much he was anxious to retire while the spell of mystification was still upon them. Luncheon was offered; Mrs. Waring would soon be home and would be inconsolable if she found they had come in her absence.

“We are very busy—fishing,” said the Poet as he entrusted himself with exaggerated apprehensions to the canoe. “When you have a boy fishing for you you have to watch him. He’ll hide half the fish if you’re not careful.”

“You absurd man!” cried Marian, with an accession of boldness, as Fulton swung the canoe round with sophisticated strokes.

“Ims a cwazy man,” piped Marjorie; “but ims nice!”

VII

The Poet was amusing himself the next afternoon with a book of Scotch ballads when Fulton found him, with his back against a big beech, apparently established for all time. The young man didn’t know that the Poet was rather expecting him—not anxiously or nervously, in the way of people unconsoled by a sound philosophy; but the Poet had nevertheless found in the ballads some hint that possibly Frederick Fulton would appear.

Fulton carried a tennis racket and an old geography with the leaves torn out which served him as a portfolio. These encumbrances seemed in nowise related to each other, a fact which called for a gibe.

“I telephoned down to the office last night and arranged to take my vacation now,” Fulton explained. “In two weeks I can do some new poems to relieve the prose of my story and round it out. The lake’s my scene, you know; I planned it all last September—and a lot of things will occur to me here that I’d never get hold of in town.”

“There’s something in that,” the Poet agreed; “and by putting aside the pen for the racket occasionally you can observe Marian in her golden sandals at short range. And then,” he deliberated, “if she doesn’t prove to be quite up to the mark; if you find that she isn’t as enchanting as you imagined when you admired her at a distance, you can substitute another girl. There are always plenty of girls.”

Fulton met the Poet’s eyes squarely and grinned.“So far my only trouble is my own general incompetence. The scenery and the girl are all right. By the way, you got me into a nice box showing her my verses! I suffered, I can tell you, when I followed your advice and paddled up in my little canoe and found her with those things!”

The Poet discounted his indignation heavily, as Fulton clearly meant that he should.

“Formal introductions bore me, and in your case I thought we’d do something a little different. From the fact that you’re going off now with your scribble-book and racket to find her I judge that my way of bringing you to each other’s attention has been highly successful. Pray don’t let me detain you!” he ended with faint irony.

“I wanted to tell you,” said Fulton, “that I’ve decided not to accept Redfield’s offer; I’ve just written to him.”

The Poet expressed no surprise. He merely nodded and began searching for a knot in the cord attached to his eye-glasses.

“We can usually trust June with our confidences and rely on her judgments,” he remarked pensively. “January is first-rate, too; February and March are tricky and unreliable. April, on the other hand, is much safer than she gets credit for being. But it was lucky that we thought of June as an arbiter in your case. If we would all get out under a June sky like this with our troubles we’d be a good deal happier. It was a bad day for the human race when it moved indoors.”

The Poet, absorbed in the passage of a launch across the lake, had not applauded Fulton’s determination not to ally himself with Redfield, as the young man had expected. Fulton felt that the subject required something more.

“I mean to stick to the newspaper and use every minute I have outside for study and writing,” he persisted earnestly. “I’ve decided to keep trying for five years, whether I ever make a killing or not.”

“That’s good,” said the Poet heartily. “I’m glad you’ve concluded to do that. Your determination carries you halfway to the goal; and I’m glad you see it that way. I didn’t want to influence you about Redfield; but I wanted you to take time to think.”

“Well, I’m sure I should always have regretted it, if I’d gone with him. And now that I’ve met Mrs. Redfield, I’m fully convinced that I’m making no mistake. It doesn’t seem possible—”

He checked himself, and waited for a sign from the Poet before concluding. The Poet drew out and replaced in the ballads the slim ivory paper-cutter he used as a bookmark.

“No, it doesn’t seem possible,” he replied quietly. “It was just as well for you to see her before making up your mind about going in with Redfield.” (His own part in making it possible for Fulton to meet Mrs. Redfield at this juncture was not, he satisfied his conscience, a matter for confession!) “Of course their affairs will straighten out—not because you or I may want them to, but because they really need each other; or if they don’t know it now they will. I’m inclined to think Marian will help a little. Even you and I may be inconspicuous figures in the drama—just walking on and off, saying a word here and there! None of us lives all to himself. All of us who write must keep that in mind;—our responsibility. When I was a schoolboy I found a misspelled word in a book I was reading and I kept misspelling that word for twenty years. We must be careful what we put into print; we never can tell who’s going to be influenced by what we write. Don’t let anybody fool you into thinking that the virile book has to be a nasty one. There’s too much of that sort of thing. They talk about warning the innocent; but there’s not much sense in handing a child the hot end of a poker just to make it dread the fire. There are writers who seem to find a great joy in making mankind out as bad as possible, and that doesn’t help particularly, does it? It doesn’t help you or me any to find that some man we have known and admired has landed with a bump at the bottom of the toboggan. But,” he ended, “when we hear the bump it’s our job to get the arnica bottle and see what we can do for him. By the way, I’m leaving this afternoon.”

“Not going—not to-day!” cried Fulton with unfeigned surprise and disappointment.

“As I never had the slightest intention of coming, it’s time I was moving along. And besides, I’ve accomplished all the objects of my visit. If I remained any longer I might make a muddle of them. I’m a believer in the inevitable hour and the inevitable word. ‘Skip’ was the first word that popped into my head when I woke up this morning. At first I thought Providence was kindly indicating the passing of a prancing buccaneer who began pounding carpets under my window at 5 A.M.; but that was too good to be true. I decided that it was in the stars that I should be the skipper. Unless the innkeeper is an exalted liar my train leaves at four, and I shall be occupied with balladry until the hour arrives. We must cultivate repose and guard against fretfulness. There’s no use in trying to hasten the inevitable hour by moving the dial closer to the sun. If you’re not too busy you might bring Marjorie and Marian over to see me off. It would be a pleasant attention; and besides, I should be much less likely to miss the train.”

VIII

Mrs. Redfield, Marian, and Marjorie were back in town by the first of July. The sisters had taken a small house on a convenient side street and were facing their to-morrows confidently. Mrs. Redfield was to open a kindergarten in October and Marian was to teach Latin in a private school. Fulton still clung to the manuscript of his romance for the revision it constantly invited. Since returning to town he had seen the Poet frequently, and had kept that gentleman informed of the movements and plans of Mrs. Redfield and Marian.

The Poet wandered into the “Chronicle” office one humid afternoon and found the reporter writing an interview with a visiting statesman. On days when every one else complained bitterly of the heat, the Poet was apparently the coolest person in town.

“I hope you have enough raisins in your pudding to spare a few,” he remarked. And then, as Fulton groped for his meaning, he drew an envelope from his pocket. “I took the liberty of purloining a few of those things you gave me a month ago before I passed them on to Marian and here’s the ‘Manhattan Magazine’ kindly inclosing a check for fifty dollars for four of them. I suggested to the editor that they ought to be kept together and printed on one page. If you don’t like the arrangement, you can send back the check. I’d suggest, though, that you exchange it for gold and carry the coins in your pocket for a day or two. The thrill of the first real money you get for poetry comes only once. Of course, if you’re not satisfied and want to send it back—”

He feigned to ignore the surprise and delight with which the young man stared at the slip of paper in his hand while he tried to grasp this astonishing news.

“Send it back!” he blurted, breaking in upon the Poet’s further comments on the joy of a first acceptance. “Send it back! Why, they’ve sent me back dozens of better pieces! And if it hadn’t been for you—Why,” he cried, with mounting elation, “this is the grandest thing that ever happened to me! If I wasn’t afraid of getting arrested I’d yell!”

“Of course,” continued the Poet calmly, “I had to tell the magazine people that you made your sketches from life—and that they might get into a libel suit by printing them. I suppose you’re hardly in a position to ask Miss Agnew’s leave to print! You haven’t been seeing much of her, of course!”

An imaginary speck of mud on his umbrella engaged the Poet’s attention at the moment so that he missed the color that deepened in Fulton’s face.

“Oh, I’ve seen a good deal of Miss Agnew,” he confessed, “both at the lake and since I’ve come home. We do some tennis together every afternoon I can get off. I suppose there might be some question as to using the poems without asking her about it. Very likely no one would ever guess that she inspired them—and yet I have a guilty feeling—”“You know, of course; and she, being, we will say, a person of average intelligence, knows, too, perfectly well. There you have it—a very delicate question! And the fact that she doesn’t care for such foolishness as poetry and romance makes a difference. You’ve got to consider that.”

His insinuations had been of the mildest, but his keen scrutiny marked the flash of resentment in Fulton’s eyes.

“Well, she was very nice about my putting her into the story. It did rather stagger her at first—to know that I had been worshiping from afar, and grinding rhymes about her for a year without ever knowing her.”

“The enchantment wasn’t all a matter of distance, I hope,” the Poet persisted. “I wasn’t quite sure about her. She struck me as being a little bitter; seemed to think life a string of wrong numbers and the girl at the exchange stupid and cross. I should be sorry if you got any such notions from her; it couldn’t fail to make your ideal totter on its pedestal. It would be rough to find that your Pomona, in shaking the boughs in the orchard, was looking for an apple with a worm-mark in its damask cheek. It would argue for an unhappy nature. We must insist that our goddesses have a cheerful outlook; no grumbling when it rains on the picnic!”

“Well,” Fulton admitted, “she did seem a little disdainful and rather generally skeptical about things at first; but I met that by rather overemphasizing the general good that’s lying around everywhere, most of which I got from your books. Her father had lost his money, and her sister’s troubles couldn’t fail to spoil some of her illusions; but she’s going into her school-teaching with the right spirit. She’s been reading the manuscript of my story and has made some bully suggestions. I’ve rewritten one of the chapters and improved it vastly because she pointed out a place where I’d changed the key a little—I must have been tired when I wrote it. I’d rather got off the romantic note I started with and there were a dozen dead, pallid pages right in the middle of the thing.”

“She was afraid the romantic element flagged there?” asked the Poet carelessly.

“Well, I suppose that’s about what it came to. My heroine and the hero had a tiff; and I was giving the girl the best of it and making him out unreasonable; and she said she thought that wasn’t fair; that the trouble was all the girl’s fault. She thought the girl shouldn’t have been so peevish over a small matter when the young orchardist had shown himself chivalrous and generous. It seemed to be Miss Agnew’s idea that when you go in for romance you ought to carry through with it.”

The Poet’s attention seemed to wander, and he suppressed a smile with difficulty. He then began searching his pockets for something, and not finding it, remarked:—

“People who never change their minds aren’t interesting; they really are not.”

“Well, I’m glad enough to change mine,” replied Fulton, not knowing what was in the Poet’s mind; “and I hope I’ll never get to a place where I can’t take criticism in the right spirit.”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of you,” remarked the Poet.

He rose and moved quickly toward the door, as though to escape from Fulton’s renewed thanks for his kind offices in disposing of the verses.

“Don’t work yourself to death,” he warned Fulton in the hall. “I’m glad Marian’s influence is so beneficent. When your proof comes, hold it a day or two: there’s always the chance of bettering a thing.”

As September waned, Fulton heard disquieting news touching Redfield. It was whispered in business circles that the broker had, the previous year, sold stock in a local industrial venture that had already come to grief. Redfield’s friends were saying that he had been misled by the enthusiasm of the men who had promoted the company, but this was not accepted at face value by some of his business rivals. Fortunately the amount was not large—a mitigating circumstance for which he was not responsible; he would have sold more, it was said, if investors had proved less wary. The story was well calculated to injure if it didn’t at once destroy Redfield’s chances of success as a dealer in securities.

Fulton was a good deal disturbed by these reports, which it became his duty to sift for the “Chronicle.” Fulton liked Redfield; Redfield was a likable person, a good fellow. The effect upon his future of this misfortune, attributable to his new-born zeal for money-making, was not to be passed lightly. There was nothing for the papers to print, as the complaining purchasers had been made whole and were anxious to avoid publicity. Fulton had watched matters carefully with a view to protecting Redfield if it became necessary, and he was confident that the sanguine promoters were the real culprits, though it was pretty clear that any scruples the broker might have had had gone down before the promise of a generous commission.

When quite satisfied that Redfield was safe so far as prosecution was concerned, Fulton spoke of Redfield’s difficulties to the Poet on an evening when he called ostensibly to report the completion of his romance. The Poet listened attentively, but the reporter accepted his mild expressions of regret as indicating indifference to Redfield’s fate. The young man’s remark that if it hadn’t been for the Poet he would have shared Redfield’s collapse elicited no comment. The Poet, imaginably preoccupied with less disagreeable speculations, turned at once to Fulton’s manuscript. After the final draft had been discussed and publishers had been considered, the young man left in the cheerful mood he always carried away from his talks with the Poet.

But the Poet spent a restless evening. He listlessly turned over many books without finding any to arrest his interest. He was troubled, deeply troubled, by what Fulton had told him of Redfield. And he was wandering whether there might not be some way of turning his old friend’s humiliation to good account. A man of Redfield’s character and training would feel disgrace keenly; and coming at a time when he believed himself well launched toward success, the shock to his pride would be all the greater.

Nothing in the Poet’s creed was more brightly rubricated than his oft-repeated declarations that the unfortunate, the erring, the humbled, are entitled to mercy and kindness. The Redfields’ plight had roused him to a defense of his theory of life; but Fulton’s story had added a new integer that greatly increased the difficulty of solving this problem. Seemingly Fate was using these old friends to provide illustrations for many of the dicta that were the foundation of his teachings. Inspiration did not visit the quiet street that night. The Poet pondered old poems rather than new ones. “Life is a game the soul can play,” he found in Sill; but the chessmen, he reflected, are sometimes bafflingly obstinate and unreasonable.

“To-morrow is All-Children’s Day,” remarked the Poet a few days later when, seemingly by chance, he met Fulton in the street; and when the young man asked for light the Poet went on to explain. “When Marjorie was born her father and I set apart her birthday to be All-Children’s Day—a crystallization of all children’s birthdays, from the beginning of time, and we meant to celebrate it to the end of our days. It just occurs to me that you and I might make it an excuse for calling on Mrs. Redfield and Marian and Marjorie to-morrow afternoon, the same being Sunday. Very likely you have another engagement—” he ended, with provoking implications that caused Fulton, who was already pledged to visit Marjorie and inferentially Marian and Mrs. Redfield on this very Sunday afternoon, to stammer in the most incriminating fashion.

“Then if you haven’t anything better to do we can call together,” said the Poet.

It would have been clear to less observant eyes than the Poet’s that the reporter was on excellent terms with the household, and even if the elders had tried to mask the cordiality of their welcome, Marjorie’s delight in Fulton was too manifest for concealment. She transparently disclosed the existence of much unfinished business between herself and the young man that pointed irrefutably to many previous and recent interviews.

“Inside is no good for houses,” Marjorie was saying, as the Poet accommodated himself to the friendly atmosphere; “nobody builds houses inside of houses.”

This suggestion of the open was promptly supported by Fulton; and in the most natural manner imaginable Marian was pressed into service to assist in transferring building-materials to the few square yards of lawn at the side of the house. September was putting forth all her pomp and the air was of summer warmth. Marjorie’s merry treble floated in with the laughter of Marian and Fulton. They were engaged with utmost seriousness in endeavoring to reproduce with blocks the elaborate chÂteau of sand, sticks, and stones that had been their rallying-point on the shores of Waupegan.The Poet, left alone with Mrs. Redfield, noted the presence in the tiny parlor of some of the lares and penates that had furnished forth the suburban bungalow and that had survived the transfer to the flat and the subsequent disaster. They seemed curiously wistful in these new surroundings. As though aware that this was in his mind, Mrs. Redfield began speaking of matters as far removed from her own affairs as possible. The Poet understood, and, when the topics she suggested gave opportunity, played upon them whimsically. The trio in the yard were evidently having the best of times; and their happiness stirred various undercurrents of thought in the Poet’s mind. He was not quite sure of his ground. It was one thing to urge charity, mercy, and tolerance in cloistral security; to put one’s self forward as the protagonist of any of these virtues was quite another.

The Poet rose, picked up a magazine from the center table, scanned the table of contents, and then said, very quietly,—

“Miles is in trouble.”

He watched her keenly for the effect of this, and then proceeded quickly:—

“It’s fortunate that the jar came so soon; a few years later and it mightn’t have been possible for him to recover; but I think there’s hope for him.”

“What Miles does or what he becomes is of no interest to me,” she answered sharply. “He didn’t feel that there was any disgrace to him in casting Marjorie and me aside; his pride’s not likely to suffer from anything else that may happen to him.”

“He’s down and out; there’s no possibility of his going on with the brokerage business; he’s got to make a new start. It’s to be said for him that he has made good the losses of the people who charged him with unfair dealing. I’m disposed to think he was carried away by his enthusiasm; he was trying to get on too fast.”

In spite of her flash of anger at the mention of her husband’s name, it was clear that her curiosity had been aroused. Nor was the Poet dismayed by a light in her dark eyes which he interpreted as expressing a sense of triumph and vindication.

“I suppose he’s satisfied now,” she said.

“I fancy his state of mind isn’t enviable,” the Poet replied evenly. “Life, when you come to think of it, is a good deal like writing a sonnet. You start off bravely with your rhyme words scrawled at the top of the page. Four lines may come easily enough; but the words you have counted on to carry you through lead into all manner of complications. You are betrayed into saying the reverse of the thing you started out to say. You begin with spring and after you’ve got the birds to singing, the powers of mischief turn the seasons upside down, and before you know it the autumn leaves are falling; it’s extremely discouraging! If we could only stick to the text—”

His gesture transferred the illustration from the field of literary composition to the ampler domain of life.

She smiled at his feigned helplessness to pursue his argument further.

“But when the rhyme words won’t carry sense, and you have to throw the whole thing overboard—” she ventured.

“No, oh, no! That’s the joy of rhyming—its endless fascination! The discreet and economical poet never throws away even a single line; there’s always a chance that it may be of use.” He was feeling his way back to his illustration of life from the embarrassments of sonneteering, and smiled as his whimsical fancy caught at a clue. “If you don’t forget the text,—if you’re quite sure you have an idea,—or an ideal!—then it’s profitable to keep fussing away at it. If a bad line offend you, pluck it out; or maybe a line gets into the wrong place and has to be moved around until it fits. It’s all a good deal like the work Marjorie’s doing outside—fitting blocks together that have to go in a certain way or the whole structure will tumble. It’s the height of cowardice to give up and persuade yourself that you’ve exhausted the subject in a quatrain. The good craftsman will follow the pattern—perfect his work, make it express the best in himself!”

And this referred to the estrangement of Miles Redfield and his wife or not; just as one might please to take it.

“Miles has gone away, I suppose,” she remarked listlessly.

This made the situation quite concrete again, and any expression of interest, no matter how indifferent, would have caused the Poet’s heart to bound; but his face did not betray him.

“Oh, he will be back shortly, I understand. I rather think he will show himself a man and pull his sonnet together again! There’s a fine courage in Miles; unless I’ve mistaken him, he won’t sit down and cry, even if he has made a pretty bad blunder. A man hardly ever loses all his friends; there’s always somebody around who will hand a tract in at the jail door!”

“You don’t mean,” she exclaimed, “that Miles has come to that!”

“Bless me, no!” the Poet cried, with another heart throb. “The worst is over now; I’m quite satisfied of that!” he answered with an ease that conveyed nothing of the pains he had taken, by ways devious and concealed, to assure himself that Miles had made complete restitution.

“A man of cheaper metal might have taken chances with the law; I’m confident that Miles was less the culprit than the victim. He sold something that wasn’t good, on the strength of statements he wasn’t responsible for. I believe that to be honestly true, and I got it through men who have no interest in him, who might be expected to chortle over his misfortune.”

“In business matters,” she replied, with an emphasis that was eloquent of reservations as to other fields, “Miles was always perfectly honorable. I don’t believe anybody would question that.”

It hadn’t entered into the Poet’s most sanguine speculations that she would defend Miles, or speak even remotely in praise of him. Wisdom dictated an immediate change of topic. He walked to the open window and established communication with the builders outside, who had reproduced the Waupegan chÂteau with added splendors and were anxious to have it admired.

X

Indirection as a method and means to ends has its disadvantages; but it is not to be scorned utterly. A week following Marjorie’s birthday children idling on their way home from school in Marston grew silent and conferred in whispers as a gentleman whose name and fame had been interwoven in their alphabet lounged by. He turned with a smile to lift his hat to an urchin bolder than the rest who shouted his name from a discreet distance.

Within a few days the signs had vanished from the Redfield cottage and the weeds had been cut. As the Poet opened the gate, Fulton came out of the front door: neither seemed surprised to see the other. The odor of fresh paint elicited a sniff of satisfaction from the Poet, a satisfaction that deepened a moment later as he entered the studio and noted its neatness and order.

“Mrs. Waring sent a maid out to do all this, and lent me the things we needed for the tea-table,” Fulton explained. “I had hard work to persuade her this wasn’t one of your jokes. I had harder work to get Mrs. Redfield to come and bring Marjorie; but Marian supported the scheme, and brought Mrs. Redfield round. I fell back heavily on your argument that Marjorie ought to have a final picnic before the turn o’ the year—a last chance to build a shotum ready for knights to come widing.”

“Marian is a persuasive person, I imagine,” the Poet remarked. “By the way, I shall be a little late arriving. Myers, the artist, lives a little farther down Audubon Road and I want to have a look at his summer’s work. Nice fellow; good workman. Redfield promised to meet me there; I want to be sure he doesn’t run away. We don’t want the party spoiled after all the work we’ve done on it.”

“I wonder,” Mrs. Redfield remarked, over the tea-table, “who has bought the place?”

“A trust company, I think,” replied Fulton, glancing through the broad north window of the studio with careful dissimulation. “As I passed the other day I saw that the grounds had been put in order, and decided that this would be just the place for a picnic.”

“This little house would be nice for my playhouse; and we could use that big window to watch ums knights come widing.”

“That chimney used to roar the way you read about,” remarked Marian. “I think every house ought to have a detached place like this, for tea and sewing and children to play in.”

Mrs. Redfield, ill at ease, was attending listlessly to the talk. Fulton’s explanation had not wholly explained. She had agreed to the excursion only after Marjorie had clamorously insisted upon the outing her devoted cavalier had proposed. Marjorie’s comments upon the broad yard, her childish delight in the studio playhouse, touched chords of memory that jangled harshly.Fulton was in high spirits. His romance had been accepted and a representative of the publishing house was coming to confer with him about illustrations.

“They say it won’t break any best-selling records, but it will give me a start. The scoundrels had the cheek to suggest that I cut out some of my jingles, but I scorned such impiousness in an expensive telegram.”

“I should hope so!” cried Marian approvingly. “The story’s only an excuse for the poems. Even the noblest prose wouldn’t express the lake, the orchard, and the fields; if you cut out your verses, there wouldn’t be much left but a young gentleman spraying apple trees and looking off occasionally at the girls paddling across the lake.”

“You do my orchardist hero a cruel injustice,” protested Fulton, “for he saw only one girl—and a very nice girl she was—or is!”

“What on earth are you two talking about?” asked Mrs. Redfield, looking from one to the other, while thwarting Marjorie in a forbidden attack upon the cookies. “It seems to me that you’ve been talking for years about this story, and I don’t know yet what it’s all about.”

“Hims witing books like the funny poetry man, and hims told me if I’m good and nice to you and Aunt Marian he’ll wite a book all about me, and my dollies, and how we builded shotums by the lake and in our yard; and Marian can’t be in any more books, but just be sitting on a wock by the lake, having ums picture painted.”

“Thank you, Marjorie; I knew he was a deceiver and that proves it,” laughed Marian, avoiding her sister’s eyes. “Let’s all go out and see the sun go down.”

Marjorie toddled off along the walk that bisected what had once been a kitchen-garden.

The sun was resting his fiery burden on the dark edge of a wood on the western horizon. The front door of the bungalow was ajar and Mrs. Redfield crossed the piazza and peered in. The place was clean and freshly papered: a fire burned m the fireplace—no mere careless blaze of litter left by workmen, but flaming logs that crackled cheerily. Her memory distributed her own belongings; here had been the table and there the couch and chair; and she saw restored to the bare walls the pictures that now cluttered the attic of the home she had established with Marian, that had once hung here—each with its special meaning for the occupants.

She stood, a girlish figure, with her hands thrust into the pockets of her sweater, staring with unseeing eyes at the mocking flames.

The Poet had spoken of the visits he paid in fancy to his house of dreams, and she half-wondered whether she were not herself a disembodied spirit imprisoned in a house of shadows. A light, furtive step on the piazza startled her, and lifting her eyes with the Poet still in her mind she saw him crossing the room quickly, like a guest approaching his hostess.

“It’s pleasant to find the mistress back in the house of dreams,” he said. “And she brings, oh, so many things with her!”

He glanced about the empty room as though envisaging remembered comforts.

“I might have known,” she murmured, “that this was your plan.”

“No,” he replied, with a smile that brought to his face a rare kindliness and sweetness, “it wasn’t mine; I’m merely an inefficient agent. It’s all born of things hoped for—”

He waved his hand to the bare walls, brought it round and placed something in her palm.

“There’s the key to my house of dreams. As you see, it needs people—its own people—Marjorie and you, for example, to make it home again. I shall be much happier to know you’re back....”