Jane Granite came out of the kitchen door, and sat down in the back yard underneath the clothes-lines. She sat on the overturned salt-fish box that she kept to stand on and reach the clothes-pins,—Jane was such a little body. She looked smaller than usual that Monday afternoon, and shrunken, somehow; her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. She cried a good deal on Mondays, after Ben Trawl had come and gone on Sunday evenings.

The minister was quite himself again, and about his business. This fact should have given Jane the keenest gratification; whereas, in proportion as their lodger had grown well and cheerful, Jane had turned pale and sober. When he was really ill, her plain face wore a rapt look. For Captain Hap had remained on duty only a day or two; Mr. Bayard had not been sick enough to need professional nursing, this time, and it had since devolved wholly upon the women of the household to minister to his convalescent needs.

Happy Jane! She ran up and down, she flitted to and fro, she cooked, she ironed, she mended, she sewed, she read aloud, she ran errands, she watched for the faintest flicker in the changes of expression on his face: its dignity, its beauty, and its dearness for that one precious page out of her poor story were hers. All the rest of her life he belonged to other people and to other things: to the drunkards and the fishermen and the services; to his books and his lonely walks and his unapproachable thoughts; to his dreams of the future in which Jane had no more part than the paper Cupid on the screen, forever tasting and never eating impossible fruit; to his memories of a past of which Jane knew that she knew no more than she did of the etiquette at the palace of Kubla Khan in Xanadu.

Jane understood about Kubla Khan (or she thought she did, which answers the same purpose), for she had read the poem aloud to him one day while her mother sat sewing in the wooden rocking-chair. Jane was “educated,” like most respectable Windover girls; she had been through the high school of her native town; she read not at all badly; Mr. Bayard had told her something to this effect, and Jane sang about the house all the rest of the day. Yes; Jane understood Kubla Khan.

Jane watched the luminous patience in the sick man’s eyes,

She repeated the lines mechanically, with the bitter consciousness of the half-educated of being moved by something which it was beyond her power and her province to reconcile with the facts of her life. She sighed when the brilliant eagerness and restlessness of returning health replaced that large and gentle light. Bayard had asked her mother to let Jane keep his copy of that volume; he said he had two sets of Coleridge. He had written her name in it; how could he guess that Jane would lock the book away in her bureau drawer by day, and sleep with it under her pillow at night? He tossed her a rose of common human gratitude; it fell into a girl’s heart,—a burning coal of ravenous longing,—and ate its way.

It was summer in Windover; and Jane’s one beautiful leaf of life had turned. Mr. Bayard had long since been able to take care of himself; coughing still, and delicate enough, but throwing off impatiently, as the gentlest man does, in health, the little feminine restraints and devotions which he found necessary and even agreeable in illness. It would not be too much to say that Jane loved him as unselfishly as any woman ever had, or ever would; but in proportion as his spirits rose, hers sank. She reproached herself, poor child, that it did not make her perfectly happy to have the minister get well. Suffering and helpless, he had needed her. Busy and well, he thought of her no more. For that one time, that cruelly little time, she, Jane Granite, of all the women in the world, had known that precious right. To her, only to her, it had been given to serve his daily, common wants; she had carried up his tray, she had read or written tireless hours as his mood decreed, or she had sat in silent study of his musing face, not one lineament of which did muse of her.

But it was summer in Windover, and the minister was Jane’s no more.

It was one of the last of the days of a celestial June. Bayard had lived the month of blossoms out eagerly and restlessly. His work had grown enormously upon his hands, and required an attention which told on every nerve. He had gone headlong into the depths of one of those dedications which do not give a man time to come up for air. His eye wore an elate, rapt look. His cheeks burned with a fine fever. His personal beauty that summer was something at which the very “dock-rats” on the wharves turned back to look. No woman easily forgot it, and how many secretly dreamed of it, fortunately the young man never knew. The best of men may work his share of heart-break, and the better he is the less he will suspect it.

Bayard was far too busy to think of women. For he did not exactly think of Helen Carruth; he felt her. She did not occupy his mind so far that he experienced the need of communication with her; he had never written her so much as a note of ceremony. After her brief scintillation before him on Windover Point that April afternoon, she had melted from his horizon. Nevertheless, she had changed the tint of it. Now and then in the stress of his prosaic, thankless, yet singularly enthusiastic work, there came to the young preacher that sense of something agreeable about to happen, which makes one wake up singing in the morning of one’s hardest day’s labor, or sends one to rest dreaming quietly in the face of the crudest anxiety. The devotee, in the midst of his orisons, was aware of the footstep of possible pleasure falling lightly, distant, doubtful, towards his cell. Some good men pray the louder for this sweet and perilous prescience. Bayard worked the harder.

And it was summer in Windover. The scanty green carpet of the downs had unrolled to its full, making as much as possible of its meagre proportions, atoning in depth of color for what it lacked in breadth and length: if the cliffs and boulders were grayer for the green, the grass looked greener for the gray. The saxifrage had faded, but among the red-cupped moss the checkerberry shot up tender, reddish leaves, the white violets scented the swamps, and the famous wild roses of the Cape dashed the bayberry thickets with pink. The late apple blossoms had blushed and gone, but the leaf and the hidden fruit responded to the anxious attention of the unenthusiastic farmer who wrenched his living out of the reluctant granite soil. In front of the hotels the inevitable geraniums blazed scarlet in mathematical flower-beds; and the boarding-houses convalesced from housecleaning in striped white scrim curtains and freshly painted blue wooden pumps. The lemonade and candy stores of “the season” sprouted with the white clovers by the wayside; and the express cart of the summer boarder’s luggage blossomed with the lonely and uncomfortable hydrangea, bearing its lot in yellow jars on piazza steps. Windover Point wore a coquettish air of expectation, like a girl in her best dress who waits in a lane for an invisible admirer.

Windover Harbor was alive and alert. The summer fleets were out; the spring fleets were in. Bayard could hear the drop of anchors now, in the night, through his open windows; and the soft, pleasant splash, the home-coming and home-yearning sound which wakened the summer people, only to lull them to sleep again with a sense of poetic pleasure in a picturesque and alien life, gave to the lonely preacher of the winter Windover the little start of anxiety and responsibility which assassinates rest. He thought:—

“Another crew in! Is it Job? Or Bob? Or Jean? Will they go to Trawl’s, or get home straight? I must be off at dawn to see to this.”

On the little beach opposite Mrs. Granite’s cottage the sea sighed in the night to answer him; ebbing, it lapped the pebbles gently, as if it felt sorry for the preacher, who had not known Windover as long as it had; it inhaled and exhaled long, soft breaths, in rhythm with which his own began to grow deep and quiet; and the start from a dream of drowning in the undertow off Ragged Rock would tell him that he had slept. More often, of late, the rising tide had replied nervously; it was fitful and noisy; it panted and seemed to struggle for articulation: for the June sea was restless, and the spring gales had died hard. The tints of the harbor were still a little cool, but the woodland on the opposite shore held out an arm of rich, ripe leaf; and the careening sails warmed to the sunrise and the sunset in rose and ochre, violet and pearl, opening buds of the blossom of midsummer color that was close at hand.

Bayard was in his rooms, resting after one of these unresting nights. He had set forth at daybreak to meet an incoming schooner at the docks. It had become his habit, whenever he could, to see that the fishermen were personally conducted past the dens of Angel Alley, and taken home sober to waking wife and sleeping child. In this laborious task Job Slip’s help had been of incredible value. Job was quite sober now; and in the intervals between trips this converted Saul delighted to play the Paul to Bayard’s little group of apostles. Yet Job did not pose. He was more sincere than most better men. He took to decency as if it had been a new trade; and the novel dignity of missionary zeal sat upon him like a liberal education. The Windover word for what had happened to Job was “re-formation.” Job Slip, one says, is a reformed man. The best way to save a rascal is to give him another one to save; and Job, who was no rascal, but the ruin of a very good fellow, brilliantly illustrated this eternal law.

Bayard had come back, unusually tired, about noon, and had not left the house since his return. He was reading, with his back to the light, and the sea in his ears. The portiÈre of mosquito netting, which hung now at the door between his two rooms, was pushed aside that he might see the photographed Leonardo as he liked to do. The scanty furniture of his sleeping-room had been moved about during his recent illness, so that now the picture was the only object visible from the study where he sat. The mosquito portiÈre was white. Mrs. Granite having ineffectually urged a solferino pink, Bayard regarded this portiÈre with the disproportionate gratitude of escape from evil.

A knock had struck the cottage door, and Jane Granite had run to answer it. She was in her tidy, blue gingham dress, but a little wet and crumply, as was to be expected on a Monday. She had snatched up a white apron, and looked like an excellent parlor-maid. For such, perhaps, the caller took her, for practical tact was not his most obtrusive quality. He was an elderly man, a gentleman; his mouth was stern, and his eyes were kind. He carried a valuable cane, and spoke with a certain air of authority, as of a man well acquainted with this world and the other too. He asked for Mr. Bayard, and would send up his card before intruding upon him; a ceremony which quite upset little Jane, and she stood crimson with embarrassment. Her discomfort was not decreased by the bewildering presence of a carriage at the gate of her mother’s garden. Beyond the rows of larkspur and feverfew, planted for the vase on Mr. Bayard’s study-table, Mr. Salt’s best carryall, splendid in spring varnish, loomed importantly. Pepper, with the misanthropy of a confirmed dyspeptic, drew the carryall, and ladies sat within it. There were two. They were covered by certain strange, rich carriage robes undreamed of by Mr. Salt; dull, silk blankets, not of Windover designs. The ladies were both handsomely dressed. One was old; but one—ah! one was young.

“Mr. Bayard is in, my dear.” The voice of the caller rose over the larkspur to the carryall. “Will you wait, or drive on?”

“We’ll drive on,” replied the younger lady rather hurriedly.

“Helen, Helen!” complained the elder. “Don’t you know that Pepper is afraid of the electric cars? I’ve noticed horses are that live in the same town with them.”

Helen did not laugh at this, but her eyes twinkled irreverently. She wrapped herself in her old-gold silk blanket, and turned to watch the sea. She did not look at Mrs. Granite’s cottage.

The dignified accents of the Professor’s voice were now wafted over the larkspur bed again.

“Mr. Bayard asks if the ladies will not come up to his study, Statira? It is only one short flight. Will you do so?”

Simultaneously Bayard’s eager face flashed out of the doorway; and before Helen could assent or dissent, her mother, on the young man’s arm, was panting up between the feverfew and into the cottage. Helen followed in meek amusement.

The stairs were scarcely more than a ship’s gangway. Mrs. Carruth politely suppressed her sense of horrified inadequacy to the ascent, and she climbed up as bravely as possible. Helen’s cast-down eyes observed the uncarpeted steps of old, stained pine-wood. She was still silent when they entered the study. Bayard bustled about, offering Mrs. Carruth the bony rocking-chair with the turkey-red cushion. The Professor had already ensconced himself in the revolving study-chair, a luxury which had been recently added to the room. There remained for Helen the lounge, and Bayard, perforce, seated himself beside her. He did not remark upon the deficiency of furniture. He seemed as much above an apology for the lack of upholstery as a martyr in prison. His face was radiant with a pleasure which no paltry thought could poison. The simple occasion seemed to him one of high festivity. It would have been impossible for any one of these comfortable people to understand what it meant to the poor fellow to entertain old friends in his lonely quarters.

Helen’s eyes assumed a blank, polite look; she said as little as possible at first; she seemed adjusting herself to a shock. Mrs. Carruth warbled on about the opening of the season at the Mainsail, and the Professor inquired about the effects of the recent gales upon the fishing classes. He avoided all perilous personalities as adroitly as if he had been fencing with a German radical over the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel. It was Bayard himself who boldly approached the dangerous ground.

“You came on Saturday, I suppose? I did not know anything about it till this minute.”

“We did not come till night,” observed Helen hurriedly. “Mother was very tired. We did not go out anywhere yesterday.”

“The Professor did, I’ll be bound,” smiled Bayard. “Went to church, didn’t you, Professor?”

“Ye—es,” replied Professor Carruth, hesitating. “I never omit divine service if I am on my feet.”

“Did you hear Fenton?” asked Bayard with perfect ease of manner.

“Yes,” more boldly from the Professor, “I attended the First Church. I like to recognize The Denomination wherever I may be traveling. I always look up my old boys, of course, too. It seems to be a prosperous parish.”

“It is a prosperous parish,” assented Bayard heartily. “Fenton is doing admirably with it. Did you hear him?”

“Why yes,” replied the Professor, breathing more freely. “I heard Fenton. He did well—quite well. He has not that scope of intellect which—I never considered him our ablest man; but his theology is perfectly satisfactory. He preached an excellent doctrinal sermon. The audience was not so large as I could have wished; but it seemed to be of a superior quality—some of your first citizens, I should say?”

“Oh, yes, our first people all attend that church. You didn’t find many of my crowd there, I presume?”

Bayard laughed easily.

“I did not recognize it,” said the Professor, “as a distinctly fishing community—from the audience; no, not from that audience.”

“Not many of my drunkards, for instance, sir? Not a strong salt-fish perfume in the First Church? Nor a whiff of old New England rum anywhere?”

“The atmosphere was irreproachable,” returned the Professor with a keen look.

Bayard glanced at Helen, who had been sitting quietly on the sofa beside him. Her eyes returned his merriment.

“Father!” she exclaimed, “Mr. Bayard does not recant. He is proud of it. He glories in his heresy. He is laughing at his martyrdom—and at us. I think you’d better ‘let up’ on him awhile.”

“Let up, Helen? Let up?” complained her mother. “That is a very questionable expression. Ask your father, my dear, if it is good English. And I’m sure Mr. Bayard will be a gentlemanly heretic, whatever he is.”

Helen laughed outright, now. Bayard joined her; and the four drew breath and found themselves at their ease.

“For my part,” said Helen unexpectedly, “I should like to see Mr. Bayard’s church—if he would stoop to invite us.... I suppose,” she added thoughtfully, “one reason saints don’t stoop, is for fear the halo should tumble off. It must be so inconvenient! Don’t you ever have a stiff neck, Mr. Bayard?”

“Why, Helen!” cried Mrs. Carruth in genuine horror. She hastened to atone for her daughter’s rudeness to a young man who already had enough to bear. “I will come and bring Helen myself, Mr. Bayard, to hear you preach—that is, if you would like to have us.”

“Pray don’t!” protested Bayard. “The Professor’s hair would turn black again in a single night. It won’t do for you to recognize an outlaw like me, you know. Why, Fenton and I haven’t met since he came here; unless at the post-office. I understand my position. Don’t feel any delicacy about it. I don’t. I can’t stop for that! I am too busy.”

The Professor of Theology colored a little.

“The ladies of my family are quite free to visit any of the places of worship around us,” he observed with some dignity. “They are not bound by the same species of ecclesiastical etiquette”—

“We must be going, Mother,” said Helen abruptly. Her cheeks were blazing; her eyes met Bayard’s with a ray of indignant sympathy which went to his head like wine. He felt the light, quick motion of her breath; the folds of her summer dress—he could not have told what she wore—fell over the carpet lounge; the hem of the dress touched his boot, and just covered the patch on it from sight. He had but glanced at her before. He looked at her now; her heightened color became her richly; her hand—she wore a driving-glove—lay upon the cretonne sofa pillow; she had picked a single flower as she came up Mrs. Granite’s garden walk. Bayard was amused to see that she had instinctively taken a deep purple pansy with a heart of gold.

A little embarrassed, Helen held out the pansy.

“I like them,” she said. “They make faces at me.”

“This one is a royal creature,” said Bayard. “It has the face of a Queen.”

“Mr. Bayard,” asked Mrs. Carruth, with the air of starting a subject of depth and force, “do you find any time to analyze flowers?”

“So far—hardly,” replied Bayard, looking Helen straight in the face.

“I used to study botany when I was a young lady—in New York,” observed Mrs. Carruth placidly; “it seems to me a very wholesome and refining”—

“Papa!” cried Helen, “Pepper is eating a tomato can—No, it’s a piece of—It is an apron—a gingham apron! The menu of that horse, Mr. Bayard, surpasses anything”—

“It is plainly some article belonging to the ladies of the house,” said Bayard, laughing.

He had started to rescue the apron, when Jane Granite was seen to run out and wrench that portion of her wardrobe from Pepper’s voracity.

“That,” observed Mrs. Carruth, “is the maid, I presume?”

“It is Miss Granite, my landlady’s daughter,” replied Bayard with some unnecessary dignity. Poor little Jane, red in the face, and raging at the heart, stood, with the eyes of the visitors upon her, contending with Pepper, who insisted on retaining the apron strings, and had already swallowed one halfway.

Quick to respond to the discomfort of any woman, Bayard ran down to Jane’s relief.

“It blew over from the lines,” said Jane. She lifted to him her sad, grateful eyes. She would have cried, if she had ventured to speak. Helen, from the window, looked down silently.

When Bayard came upstairs again, his visitors had risen to leave, in earnest. Helen avoided his eyes. He felt that hers had taken in every detail of his poor place: the iron angel on the ugly stove; the Cupid and the grapes upon the paper screen; the dreary, darned, brown carpet; the barren shades; the mosquito-net portiÈre; the whole homeless, rude, poverty-smitten thing.

“You have a fine engraving of Guido’s Saint Michael, here,” observed Professor Carruth, taking out his glasses.

“And I notice—don’t I see another good picture through the gauze portiÈre?” asked Mrs. Carruth modestly.

“That is Leonardo’s Christ,” said the Professor promptly, at a look. “It really makes a singular, I may say a beautiful, impression behind that white stuff. I never happened to see it before with such an effect. Look, Helen! It seems like a transparency—or a cloud.”

A devout expression touched Helen’s face, which had grown quite grave. She did not answer, and went downstairs behind her mother, very quietly.

Jane Granite had disappeared. Pepper was engaged in a private conflict with such portions of her wardrobe as he had succeeded in swallowing; Mrs. Carruth mounted heavily into the carryall, and Helen leaped after her. Then it appeared that the Professor had forgotten his cane, and Bayard ran back for it. As he came down, he caught a glimpse of Jane Granite in the sitting-room. She was crying.

“That is my Charter Oak cane,” observed the Professor anxiously; “the one with the handle made from the old ship Constitution. I wouldn’t have mislaid it on any account.”

“Father would rather have mislaid me,” said Helen with an air of conviction. Her mother was inviting Mr. Bayard to call on them at the Flying Jib. Helen said nothing on this point. She smiled and nodded girlishly, and Pepper bore them away.

Bayard came back upstairs three steps at a time. The sitting-room door was shut, and it did not occur to him to open it. He had quite forgotten Jane. He closed his study-door softly, and went and sat down on the carpet lounge; the pansy that she had dropped was there. He looked for it, and looked at it, then laid it gently on his study-table. He took up the cretonne pillow where her hand had lain, then put it softly down.

“I must keep my head,” thought the young man. He passed his hand over his too brilliant eyes, and went, with compressed lips, to his study-table.

But Jane Granite went out in the back yard, and sat down under the clothes-lines, on the salt-fish box. The chewed apron was in her hand. The clothes flapped in the rising wind above her head. She could not be seen from the house. Here she could cry in peace.

She was surprised to find, when she was seated there, that she did not want to cry. Her eyes, her throat, her lips, her head, seemed burning to ashes. Hot, hard, wicked wishes came for the first time in her gentle life to Jane. That purple-and-gold woman swam giddily between her and the summer sky.

Jane had known her at the first look. Her soul winced when she recognized the stranger of the electric car. Mr. Bayard had thought Jane did not notice that lady that April day. Jane had by heart every line and tint and detail of her, from the gold dagger on her bonnet to the dark purple cloth gaiter of her boots; from her pleased brown eyes, with the well-bred motion of their lids, to the pretty gestures that she made with her narrow, gloved hand. Jane looked at her own wash-day dress and parboiled fingers. The indefinable, undeniable fact of the stranger’s personal elegance crushed the girl with the sense of helpless bitterness which only women who have been poor and gone shabby can understand. The language of dress, which is to the half-educated the symbol of superiority, conveyed to Jane, in advance of any finer or truer vocabulary, the full force of the situation.

“She is different,” thought Jane.

These three words said it all. Jane dropped her face in her soaked and wrinkled fingers. The damp clothes flapped persistently about her neat, brown head, as if trying to arouse her with the useless diversion of things that one is quite used to. Jane thought of Ben Trawl, it is true, but without any distinct sense of disloyalty or remorse. She experienced the ancient and always inexplicable emotion not peculiar to Jane: she might have lived on in relative content, not in the least disturbed by any consciousness of her own ties, as long as the calm eyes she worshiped reflected the image of no other woman. Now something in Jane’s heart seemed to snap and let lava through.

Oh, purple and gold, gall and wormwood, beauty and daintiness, heart-ache and fear! Had the Queen come to the palace of Kubla Khan? Let Alph, the sacred river, run! Who was she, Jane Granite, that she should stem the sweeping current?

“... Crying again? This is a nice way to greet a fellar,” said roughly a sudden voice in Jane’s dulled ear.

Ben Trawl lifted the damp clothes, strode through between the poles, and stood beside his promised wife. His face was ominously dark.