“Mother sent me!—I came down for her and father!” began Helen Carruth abruptly. Then she thought how that sounded—as if she need be supposed to apologize for or explain the circumstance that she happened to find one of her father’s old students sunning himself upon a given portion of the New England coast; and she blushed again. When she saw the sudden, upward motion of Bayard’s heavy eyelids, she could have set her pretty teeth through her tongue, for vexation at her little faux pas. From sheer embarrassment, she laughed it off.

“I haven’t heard anybody laugh like that since I came to Windover,” said Bayard, drawing a long breath. “Do give me an encore!”

“Now, then, you are laughing at me!”

“Upon the word of a poor heretic parson—no. You can’t think how it sounds. It sinks in—like the sun.”

“But I don’t feel like laughing any more. I’ve got all over it. I’m afraid I can’t oblige you.”

“Why not? You used to be good-natured, I thought—in Cesarea, ages ago.”

“You are enough to drive the laugh out of a faun,” said the young lady soberly. “Pray sit down again on your sand sofa. I did not know you had been so ill. Put on your hat, Mr. Bayard. Good society does not require ghosts to stand bareheaded at the seacoast in April.”

“I don’t move in good society any longer. I am not expected to know anything about its customs. Sit down beside me, a minute—and I will. No—stay. Perhaps you will take cold? I wish I had some wraps. My coat”—

“When I take your coat”—began the healthy girl. He had already flung his overcoat upon the dry, warm sand. She gave it back to him. Then she saw the color start into his pale face.

“Oh, forgive me!” she said quickly. “I did not mean—Mr. Bayard, I never was ill in my life.”

“Nor I, either, before now,” pleaded Bayard rather piteously.

“Who called it the ‘insolence of health’? I did not mean to be impertinent, if you will take the trouble to believe me. I fail to grasp the situation, that’s all. I am simply obtuse—blunt—blunt as a clam.”

She waved her sun-umbrella dejectedly towards the beach where a solitary clam-digger, a bent, picturesque old man, was seeking his next chowder.

“The amount of it is,” said Miss Carruth more in her usual manner, “that I was taken a little by surprise. You used to look so—different. You are greatly changed, Mr. Bayard. Being a heretic does not agree with you.”

“I have had a little touch of something they call pneumonia down here,” observed Bayard carelessly. “I’ve been out only a few days.”

She made no answer at first; Bayard was looking at the clam-digger, but he felt that she was looking at him. She had seated herself on the sand beside him; she was now quite her usual self; her momentary embarrassment had disappeared like a sail around the Point—a graceful, vanishing thing of whose motion one thinks afterwards. He did not suppose that she was there to sympathize with him, but he was vaguely aware of a certain unbridged gap in the subject, when she unexpectedly said,—

“You have not asked me what I came to Windover for.”

“Windover does not belong to me, Miss Carruth; nor”—a ray of disused mischief sprang to his eyes. Did he start to say, “Nor you?” He might have been capable of it as far back as Harvard, or even in junior year at Cesarea. That flash of human nonsense changed his appearance to an almost startling extent.

“Why now,” she laughed, “I think I could recognize you without an introduction.”

“But you haven’t told me why you did come to Windover.”

“It doesn’t signify. You exhibit no interest in the subject, sir.”

“You are here,” he answered, looking at her. “That fact preoccupied me.”

This reply was without precedent in her experience of him; and she gave no sign, whether of pleasure or displeasure, of its effect upon her. She looked straight at the clam-digger, who was shouldering his basket laboriously upon his bent back, making a sombre, Millet sketch against the cheerful, afternoon sky.

“I came down to engage our rooms,” she said lightly. “We are coming here, you know, this summer. We board at the Mainsail. I had to have it out with Mrs. Salt about the mosquito bars. Mother wouldn’t come last year because the mosquito bars had holes, and let in hornets and a mouse. You understand,” she added, with something of unnecessary emphasis, “we always come here summers.”

“I understand nothing at all!” said Bayard breathlessly. “You were not here last summer, when I was candidating in the First Church.”

“That, I tell you, was on account of the hornets and the mouse; the mouse clinched it; he waked her walking up her sleeve one morning. So we went to Campo Bello the year after. But we always come to Windover.”

“For instance, how many seasons constitute ‘always’?”

“Three. This will be four. Father likes it above everything. So did mother before the mouse epoch. She got to feeling hornets in her shoes whenever she put them on. I wonder father never told you we always come to Windover.”

“The Professor had other things in his mind when he talked to me,—second probation, and the dangers of modern German exegesis.”

“Yes, I know. Dear papa! Windover isn’t a doctrine.”

“I wonder you never told me you always came to Windover.”

“Oh, I left that to Father,” replied the young lady demurely. “I did come near it, though, once. Do you remember that evening”—

“Yes,” he interrupted; “I remember that evening.”

“I mean, when you had taken me up the Seminary walk to see the cross. When you said good-by that night, I thought I’d mention it. But I changed my mind. You see, you hadn’t had your call, then. I thought—I might—hurt your feelings. But we always do come to Windover. We are coming as soon as Anniversary is over. We have the Flying Jib to ourselves—that little green cottage, you know, on the rocks. What! Never heard of the Flying Jib? You don’t know the summer Windover, do you?”

“Only the winter Windover, you see.”

“Nor the summer people, I suppose?”

“Only the winter people.”

“Father’s hired that old fish-house for a study,” continued Helen with some abruptness. “He says he can’t stand the women on the Mainsail piazzas; you can hear them over at the Flying Jib when the wind sets our way; they discuss the desserts, and pick each other’s characters to pieces, and compare Kensington stitches, and neuralgia. Father is going to bring down his article on ‘The State of the Unforgiven after Death’—There!” she said suddenly, “that Millet sketch is walking into father’s study with his basket on his back. The State of the Unforgiven will be a little—clammy, don’t you think?”

Her eyes rippled like the bed of a brown brook in the sun. Bayard laughed.

“The dear Professor!” he said.

“If father weren’t such an archangel in private life, it wouldn’t be so funny,” observed Helen, jabbing the point of her purple-and-gold changeable silk sun-umbrella into the sand; “I can’t see what he wants the unconverted to be burned up for. Can you?”

“The State of the Unforgiven before Death is more than I can manage,” replied Bayard, smiling; “I have my hands full.”

“Do you like it?” asked Helen, with a pretty, puzzled knot between her smooth brows.

“Like what? I like this.”

He looked at her; as any other man might—like those students who used to come so often, and who suddenly called no more. Helen had never seen that expression in his eyes. She dropped her own. She dug little wells in the fine, white sand with her sun-umbrella before she said,—

“I have to get the six o’clock train; you know I haven’t come to stay, yet.”

“But you are coming!” he exclaimed with irrepressible joyousness.

She made no answer, and Bayard’s sensitive color changed.

“Do I like what?” he repeated in a different tone.

“Heresy and martyrdom,” said Helen serenely.

“I regret nothing, if that is what you mean; no matter what it costs; no matter how it ends—no, not for an hour. I told the truth, and I took the consequences; that is all. How can a man regret standing by his best convictions?”

“He might regret the convictions,” suggested Helen.

“Might he? Perhaps. Mine are so much stronger than they were when I started in, that they race me and drag me like winged horses in a chariot of fire.”

His eyes took on their dazzling look; like fine flash-lights they shot forth a brilliance as burning as it was brief; then their calm and color returned to them. Helen watched the transfiguration touch and pass his face with a sense of something so like reverence that it made her uncomfortable. Like many girls trained as she had been, she had small regard for the priestly office, and none for the priestly assumptions. The recognition of a spiritual superiority which she felt to be so far above her that in the nature of things she could not understand it, gave her strong nature a jar: something within her, hitherto fixed and untroubled, shook before it.

Bayard, without apparent consciousness of the young lady’s thoughts, or indeed of her presence for that moment, went on dreamily:—

“I was a theorizer, a dreamer, a theologic apprentice, a year ago. I knew no more of real life than—that silver sea-gull making for the lighthouse tower. I took notes about sin in the lecture-room. Now I study misery and shame in Angel Alley. The gap between them is as wide as the stride of that angel in Revelation—do you remember him?—who stood with one foot upon the land and one upon the sea. All I mind is, that I have so much more to learn than I need have had—everything, in fact. If I had been taught, if I had been trained—if it had not all come with that kind of shock which benumbs a man’s brain at first, and uses up his vitality so much faster than he can afford to spare it—but I have no convictions that I ought to be talking like this!”

“Go on,” said Helen softly.

“Oh, to what end?” asked Bayard wearily. “That ecclesiastical system which brought me where I am can’t be helped by one man’s rebellion. It’s going to take a generation of us. But there is enough that I can help. It is the can-be’s, not the can’t-be’s, that are the business of men like me.”

“I saw you with that drunken man; he had his arms about you,” said Helen with charming irrelevance. Her untroubled brows still held that little knot, half of perplexity, half of annoyance. It became her, for she looked the more of a woman for it.

“Job Slip? Oh, in Boston that day; yes. I got him home to his wife all right that night. He was sober after that for—for quite a while. I wish you had seen that woman!” he said earnestly. “Mari is the most miserable—and the most grateful—person that I know. I never knew what a woman could suffer till I got acquainted with that family. They have a dear little boy. His father used to beat him over the head with a shovel. Joey comes over to see me sometimes, and goes to sleep on my lounge. We’re great chums.”

“You do like it,” said Helen slowly. She had raised her brown eyes while he was speaking, and watched his face with a veiled look. “Yes; there’s no doubt about it. You do.”

“Wouldn’t you?” asked Bayard, smiling.

“No, I shouldn’t.”

She shook her head with that positiveness so charming in an attractive woman, and so repellent in an ugly one. “When they burn you at the stake you’ll swallow the fire and enjoy it. You’ll say, ‘Forgive them, for they don’t mean it, poor things.’ I should say, ‘Lord, punish them, for they ought to know better.’ That’s just the difference between us. Mother must be right. She always says I am not spiritual.”

“I don’t know but I should like to see that little boy, though,” added Helen reluctantly; “and Mari—if she had on a clean apron.”

“She doesn’t very often. But it might happen. Why, you might go over there with me—sometime—this summer, and see them?” suggested Bayard eagerly.

“So you lay the first little smoking fagot, do you?—For me, too?”

She laughed.

“God forbid!” said Bayard quickly. Helen’s voice had not been as light as her laugh; and her bright face was grave when he turned and regarded it. She gave back his gaze without evasion, now. She seemed to have grown indefinably older and gentler since she had sat there on the sand beside him. Her eyes, for the first time, now, it seemed, intentionally studied him. She took in the least detail of his changed appearance: the shabby coat, the patch on his boot, his linen worn and darned, the fading color of his hat. She remembered him as the best-dressed man in Cesarea Seminary; nothing but rude, real poverty could have so changed that fashionable and easy student into this country parson, rusting and mended and out-of-the-mode, and conscious of it to the last sense, as only the town-bred man of luxurious antecedents can be of the novel deprivation that might have been another’s native air.

“I don’t know that it is necessary to look so pale,” was all she said. “I should think you’d tan here in this glare. I do. See!”

She held out her bare hands, and doubled them up, putting them together to scrutinize the delicate backs of them for the effect of an hour’s Windover sun. Her dark purple gloves and the saxifrage lay in her lap. Bayard held the sun-umbrella over her. It gave him a curious sense of event to perform this little courtesy; it was so long since he had been among ladies, and lived like other gentlemen; he felt as if he had been upon a journey in strange lands and were coming home again. A blossom of the saxifrage fell to the hem of her dress, and over upon the sand. He delicately touched and took it, saying nothing.

“Does Mr. Hermon Worcester come and pour pitch and things on the bonfire?” asked Helen suddenly.

“I thought you knew,” said Bayard, “my uncle has disinherited me. He is not pleased with what I have done.”

“Ah! I did not know. Doesn’t he—excuse me, Mr. Bayard. It is not my business.”

“He writes to me,” said Bayard. “He sent me things when I was sick. He was very kind then. We have not quarreled at all. But it is some time since I have seen him. I am very fond of my uncle. He is an old man, you know. He was brought up so—We mustn’t blame him. He thinks I am on the road to perdition. He doesn’t come to Windover.”

“I see,” said Helen. She leaned her head back against the boulder and looked through half-shut lids at the dashing sea. The wind was rising.

“I must go,” she said abruptly.

“May I take you over to the station?” he asked with boyish anxiety.

“Mr. Salt is going to harness old Pepper,” she answered. Bayard said nothing. He remembered that he could not afford to drive a lady to the station; he could not offer to “take” her in the electric conveyance of the great American people. He might have spent at least three quarters of an hour more beside her. It seemed to him that he had not experienced poverty till now. The exquisite outline of his lip trembled for the instant with that pathos which would have smitten a woman to the heart if she had loved him. Helen was preoccupied with her saxifrage and her purple gloves. She did not, to all appearance, see his face at all, and he was glad of it.

He arose in silence, and walked beside her to the beach and towards the town.

“Mr. Bayard,” said Helen, with her pleasant unexpectedness, “I owe you something.”

All this while she had not mentioned the wreck or the rescue; she alone, of all people whom he had seen since he came out of his sick-room, had not inquired, nor exclaimed, nor commended, nor admired. Something in her manner—it could hardly be said what—reminded him now of this omission; he had not thought of it before.

“I owe you a recognition,” she said.

“I cancel the debt,” he answered, smiling.

“You cannot. I owe you the recognition—of a friend—for that brave and noble deed you did. Accept it, sir!”

She spread out her hands with a pretty gesture, as if she gave him something; she moved her head with a commanding and royal turn, as if her gift had value. He lifted his hat.

“I could have done no less then; but I might do more—now.”

His worn face had lightened delicately. He looked hopeful and happy.

“A man doesn’t put himself where I am, to complain,” he added. “But I don’t suppose you could even guess how solitary my position is. The right thing said in the right way gives me more courage than—people who say it can possibly understand. I have so few friends—now. If you allow me to count you among them, you do me a very womanly kindness; so then I shall owe you”—

“I cancel the debt!” she interrupted, laughing. “Didn’t Father write to you?” she hurried on, “when you were so ill?”

“Oh, yes. The Professor’s note was the first I was allowed to read. He said all sorts of things that I didn’t deserve. He said that in spite of the flaws in my theology I had done honor to the old Seminary.”

“Really? Father will wear a crown and a harp for that concession. Did he give you any message from me, I wonder?”

“He said the ladies sent their regards.”

“Oh! Was that all?”

“That was all.”

“It was not quite all,” said Helen, after a moment’s rather grave reflection. “But never mind. Probably Father thought the exegesis incorrect somewhere.”

“Perhaps he objected to the context?” asked Bayard mischievously.

“More likely he had a quarrel in the Faculty on his mind and forgot it.”

“If you had written it yourself”—suggested Bayard humbly. “But of course you had other things to do.”

Helen gave him an inscrutable look. She made no reply. They passed the fish-house, and the old clam-digger, who was sitting on his overturned basket in the sun, opening clams with a blunt knife, and singing hoarsely:—

“There is Mr. Salt,” said Helen; for the two had come slowly up in silence to the old gate, (fastened with a rope tied in a sailor’s knot), that gave the short cut across the meadow to the Mainsail summer hotel.

“He is watching for me. How sober he looks! Perhaps something dreadful has happened to Mrs. Salt. Wait a minute. Let me run in!”

She tossed her sun-umbrella, gloves, and saxifrage in a heap across Bayard’s arm, and ran like a girl or a collie swaying across the meadow in the wind. In a few minutes she walked back, flushed and laughing.

“Pepper can’t go!” she cried. “He’s got the colic. He’s swallowed a celluloid collar. Mr. Salt says he thought it was sugar. I must go right along and catch the car.”

“You have eight minutes yet,” said Bayard joyously, “and I can go too!”

The car filled up rapidly; they chatted of little things, or sat in silence. Jane Granite came aboard as they passed her mother’s door. Bayard lifted his hat to her cordially; she was at the further end of the car; she got off at a grocery store, to buy prunes, and did not look back. She had only glanced at Helen Carruth. Bayard did not notice when Jane left.

The train came in and went out. Helen stood on the platform leaning over to take her saxifrage: a royal vision, blurring and melting in purple and gold before his eyes.

The train came in and went out; her laughing eyes looked back from the frame of the car window. The train went out. He turned away and went slowly home.

Jane had not returned, and Mrs. Granite was away. The house was deserted, and the evening was coming on cold. He climbed the steep stairs wearily to his rooms, and lighted a fire, for he coughed a good deal. He had to go down into the shed and bring up the wood and coal. He was so tired when this was done that he flung himself upon the old lounge. He looked slowly about his dismal rooms: at the top curl of the iron angel on the ugly stove; at the empty, wooden rocking-chair with the bones; at the paper screen, where the Cupid on the basket of grapes sat forever tasting and never eating impossible fruit; at the study-table, where the subscription list for his quarter’s salary lay across the manuscript notes of his last night’s sermon. The great Saint Michael on the wall eyed him with that absence of curiosity which belongs to remote superiority. Bayard did not return the gaze of the picture. He took something from his vest-pocket and looked at it gently, twisting it about in his thin hands. It was a sprig of saxifrage, whose white blossom was hanging its head over upon the dry, succulent stem. Bayard got up suddenly, and put the flower in a book upon his study-table.

As he did so, a short, soft, broken sound pattered up the stairs. The door opened without the preliminary of a knock, and little Joey Slip walked seriously in. He said he had come to see the minister. He sat down sedately and ceremoniously upon the carpet-lounge. He said Marm said to say Father’s home from Georges’ drunk as a fish. He put out his little fingers and patted Bayard on the cheek, as if the minister had been the child, and Joey the old, old man.

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