When Patsy at last reached Arden she went direct to the post-office and was there confronted by a huge poster occupying an entire wall:

THE SYLVAN PLAYERS
Under the Management of Geo. Travis
Presenting Wm. Shakespeare’s Comedy
“AS YOU LIKE IT”
In the Forest of Arden, on the Estate of Peterson-Jones, Esq.

The date given was Wednesday, the day following; and the cast registered her name opposite Rosalind.

“So that’s the answer to the letter I wrote, and a grand answer it is. And that’s the meaning of Janet Payne’s remarks, and I never guessed it.” She heaved the faintest wisp of a sigh—it might have been pleasure; it might have been a twinge of pain. “And I’m to be playing the Duke’s daughter, after all, at the end of the road.”

She went to the general delivery and asked for mail. The clerk responded with three letters; Patsy almost whistled under her breath. Retiring to a corner, she looked them over and opened first the one from George Travis:

“Aye, they’ll fit,” agreed Patsy, with a chuckle. The second letter was from Felton—dated Monday. He was worried over her continued absence. He had not found her registered at either of the two hotels, and the postal clerk reported her mail uncalled for. Would she come to the Hillcrest Hotel at once. The third was from Janet Payne, expressing her grief over Joseph’s death, and their disappointment at finding her gone the next morning when they motored over to take her to Arden. They were all looking forward to seeing her play on Wednesday.

Patsy returned the letters to their envelopes and marveled that her new-found prosperity should affect her so drearily. Why was she not elated, transported with the surprise and the sudden promise of success? She was free to go now to a good hotel and sign for a room and three regular meals a day. She could wire at once to Miss Gibbs, of the select boarding-house, and have her trunk down in twenty-four hours. In very truth, her days of vagabondage were over, yet the fact brought her no happiness.

She hunted Felton up at the hotel and explained her absence: “Just a week-end at one of the fashionable places. No, not exactly professional. No, not social either. You might call it—providential, like this.”

The morning was spent meeting her fellow-players—going over the text, trying on the St. Regis costumes, adjourning at last to the estate of Peterson-Jones.

Until the middle of the afternoon they were busy with rehearsals: the mental tabulating of new stage business, the adapting of strange stage property, the accustoming of one’s feet to tread gracefully over roots and tangling vines and slippery patches of pine needles instead of a good stage flooring. And through all this maze Patsy’s mind played truant. A score of times it raced off back to the road again, to wait between a stretch of woodland and a grove of giant pines for the coming of a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags.

“Come, come, Miss O’Connell; what’s the matter?” Felton’s usual patience snapped under the strain of her persistent wit-wandering. “I’ve had to tell you to change that entrance three times.”

“Aye—and what is the matter?” Patsy repeated the question remorsefully. “Maybe I’ve acquired the habit of taking the wrong entrance. What can you expect from any one taking seven days to go seven miles. I’m dreadfully sorry. If you’ll only let me off this time I promise to remember to-morrow; I promise!”

The day had been growing steadily hotter and more sultry. By five o’clock every one who was doing anything, and could stop doing it, went slothfully about looking for cool spots and cooler drinks. Burgeman senior, alone with his servants on the largest estate in Arden, ordered one of the nurses to wheel him to the border of his own private lake—a place where breezes blew if there were any about—and leave him there alone until Fitzpatrick, his lawyer, came from town. And there he was sitting, his eyes on nothing at all, when Patsy scrambled up the bank of the lake and dropped breathless under a tree—not three feet from him.

“Merciful Saint Patrick! I never saw you! Maybe I’m trespassing, now?”

“You are,” agreed Burgeman senior in a colorless voice. “But I hardly think any one will put you off the grounds—at least until you have caught your breath.”

“Thank you. Maybe the grounds are yours, now?” she questioned again.

The sick man signified they were by a slight nod.

“Well, ’tis the prettiest place hereabouts.” Patsy offered the information as if she had made the discovery herself and was generously sharing it with him. “I’m a stranger; and when I saw yon bit of cool, gray water, and the pines clustering round, and the wee green faery isle in the midst—with the bridge holding onto it to keep it from disappearing entirely—and the sand so white, and the lawns so green—why, it looked like a Japanese garden set in a great sedge bowl. Do you wonder I had to come closer and see it better?”

Burgeman said nothing; but the ghost of a feeling showed, the greed of possession.

“And it all belongs to you. You bought it all—the lake and the woods and the lawns.” It was not a question, but a statement.

“I own three miles in every direction.”

“Except that one.” Patsy smiled as she pointed a finger upward. “Did you ever think how generous the blessed Lord is to lend a bit of His sky to put over the land men buy and fence in and call ‘private property’? It’s odd how a body can think he owns something because he has paid money for it; and yet the things that make it worth the owning he hasn’t paid for at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you think much of this place if you couldn’t be looking yonder and watching the clouds scud by, all turning to pink and flame color and purple as the sun gathers them in? What would you do if no wild flowers grew for you, or the birds forgot you in the spring and built their nests and sang for your neighbor instead? And can you hire the sun to shine by the day, or order the rain by the hogshead?”

Burgeman senior was contemplating her with genuine amazement. “I do not believe I have ever heard any one put forth such extraordinary theories before. May I ask if you are a socialist?”

“Bless you, no! I am a very ordinary human being, just; principally human.”

“Do you know who I am?”

For an instant Patsy looked at him without speaking; then she answered, slowly: “You have told me, haven’t you? You are the master of the place, and you look a mortal lonely one.”

“I—am.” The words seemed to slip from his lips without his being at all conscious of having spoken.

“And the money couldn’t keep it from you.” There was no mockery in her tone. “’Tis pitifully few comforts you can buy in life, when all’s said and done.”

“Comforts!” The sick man’s eyes grew sharp, attacking, with a force that had not been his for days. “You are talking now like a fool. Money is the only thing that can buy comforts. What comforts have the poor?”

“Are you meaning butlers and limousines, electric vibrators and mud-baths? Those are only cures for the bodily necessities and ills that money brings on a man: the over-feeding and the over-drinking and the—under-living. But what comforts would they bring to a troubled mind and a pinched heart? Tell me that!”

“So! You would prefer to be poor—more pastorally poetic?” Burgeman sneered.

“More comfortable,” corrected Patsy. “Mind you, I’m not meaning starved, ground-under-the-heel poverty, the kind that breeds anarchists and criminals. God pity them, too! I mean the man who is still too poor to reckon his worth to a community in mere money, who, instead, doles kindness and service to his neighbors. Did you ever see a man richer than the one who comes home at day’s end, after eight hours of good, clean work, and finds the wife and children watching for him, happy-eyed and laughing?”

The sick man stirred uneasily. “Well—can’t a rich man find the same happiness?”

“Aye, he can; but does he? Does he even want it? Count up the rich men you know, and how many are there—like that?” No answer being given, Patsy continued: “Take the richest man—the very richest man in all this country—do you suppose in all his life he ever saw his own lad watching for him to come home?”

“What do you know about the richest man—and his son?” The sick man had for a moment become again a fiercely bitter, fighting force, a power given to sweeping what it willed before it. He sat with hands clenched, his eyes burning into the girl’s on the ground beside him. “I know what the world says.”

“The world lies; it has always lied.”

“You are wrong. It is a tongue here and a tongue there that bears false witness; but the world passes on the truth; it has to.”

“You forget”—Burgeman senior spoke with difficulty—“it is the rich who bear the burdens of the world’s cares and troubles, and what do they get for it? The hatred of every one else, even their sons! Every one hates and envies the man richer and more powerful than himself; the more he has the more he is feared. He lives friendless; he dies—lonely.”

Patsy rose to her knees and knelt there, shaking her fist—a composite picture of supplicating Justice and accusing Truth. She had forgotten that the man before her was sick—dying; that he must have suffered terribly in spirit as well as body; and that her words were so many barbed shafts striking at his soul. She remembered nothing save the thing against which she was fighting: the hard, merciless possession of money and the arrogant boast of it.

“And you forget that the burden of trouble which the brave rich bear so nobly are troubles they’ve put into the world themselves. They hoard their money to buy power; and then they use that power to get more money. And so the chain grows—money and power, money and power! I heard of a rich man once who turned a terrible fever loose all over the land because he bribed the health inspectors not to close down his factories. And after death had swept his books clean he gave large sums of money to stamp out the epidemic in the near-by towns. Faith! that was grand—the bearing of that trouble! And why are the rich hated? Why do they live friendless and die lonely? Not because they hold money, not because they give it away or help others with it. No! But because they use it to crush others, to rob those who have less than they have, to turn their power into a curse. That’s the why!”

Patsy, the fanatic, turned suddenly into Patsy, the human, again. The fist that had been beating the air under his nose dropped and spread itself tenderly on the sick man’s knee. “But I’m sorry you’re lonely. If there was anything you wanted—that you couldn’t buy and I could earn for you—I would get it gladly.”

“I believe you would,” and the confession surprised the man himself more than it did Patsy. “Who are you?” he asked at last.

“No one at all, just; a laggard by the roadside—a lass with no home, no kin, and that for a fortune,” and she flung out her two empty hands, palm uppermost, and laughed.

“And you are audacious enough to think you are richer than I.” This time there was no sneer in his voice, only an amused toleration.

“I am,” said Patsy, simply.

“You have youth and health,” he conceded, grudgingly.

“Aye, and trust in other folks; that’s a fearfully rich possession.”

“It is. I might exchange with you—all this,” and his hand swept encompassingly over his great estate, “for that last—trust in other folks—in one’s own folks!”

“Maybe I’d give it to you for nothing—a little of it at any rate. See, you trust me; and here’s—trust in your son.” Patsy’s voice dropped to a whisper; she leaned forward and opened one of the sick man’s hands, then folded the fingers tightly over something that appeared to be invisible—and precious. “Now, you believe in him, no matter what he’s done; you believe he wouldn’t wrong you or himself by doing anything base; you believe that he is coming back to you—to break the loneliness, and that he’ll find a poor, plain man for a father, waiting him. Don’t you remember the prodigal lad—how his father saw him a long way off and went to meet him? Well, you can meet him with a long-distance trust—understanding. And there’s one thing more; don’t you be so blind or so foolish as to crush him with the weight of ‘all this.’ Mind, he has the right to the making of his own life—for a bit at least; and it’s your privilege to give him that right—somehow. You’ve still a chance to keep him from wanting to pitch your money for quoits off the Battery.”

Patsy sprang to her feet; but Burgeman senior had reached forward quickly and caught her skirt, holding it in a marvelously firm grip. “Then you do know who I am; you’ve known it all along.”

“I know you’re the master of all this, and your lad is the Rich Man’s Son; that’s all.”

“And you think—you think I have no right to leave my son the inheritance I have worked and saved for him.”

“I think you have no right to leave him your—greed. ’Tis a mortal poor inheritance for any lad.”

“Your vocabulary is rather blunt.” Burgeman smiled faintly. “But it is very refreshing. It is a long time since naked truth and I met face to face.”

“But will it do you any good—or is it too late?” Patsy eyed him contemplatively.

“Too late for what?”

“Too late for the inheritance—too late to give it away somewhere else—or loan it for a few years till the lad had a chance to find out if he could make some decent use of it himself. There’s many ways of doing it; I have thought of a few this last half-hour. You might loan it to the President to buy up some of the railroads for the government—or to purchase the coal or oil supply; or you might offer it as a prize to the country that will stop fighting first; or it might buy clean politics into some of the cities—or endow a university.” She laughed. “It’s odd, isn’t it, how a body without a cent to her name can dispose of a few score millions—in less minutes?”

“If you please, sir.” A motionless, impersonal figure in livery stood at a respectful distance behind the wheel-chair. Neither of them had been conscious of his presence.

“Well, Parsons?”

“Mr. Billy, sir, has come back, sir. He and Mr. Fitzpatrick came together. Shall I bring them out here or wheel you inside, sir?”

“Inside!” Burgeman senior almost shouted it. Then he turned to Patsy and there was more than mere curiosity in his voice: “Who are you?”

“No one at all, just; a laggard by the roadside,” she repeated, wistfully. And then she added in her own Donegal: “But don’t ye let the lagging count for naught. Promise me that!”

The sick man turned his head for a last look at her. “Such a simple promise—to throw away the fruits of a lifetime!” Bitterness was in his voice again, but Patsy caught the muttering under his breath. “I might think about the boy, though, if the Lord granted me time.”

“Amen!” whispered Patsy.

She scrambled down the bank the way she had come. For a moment she stopped by the lake and skimmed a handful of white pebbles across its mirrored surface. She watched the ripples she had made spread and spread until they lost themselves in the lake itself, leaving behind no mark where they had been.

“Yonder’s the way with the going and coming of most of us, a little ripple and naught else—unless it is one more stone at the bottom.” She heaved a sigh. “Well, the quest is over, and I’ve never laid eyes on the lad once. But it’s ended well, I’m thinking; aye, it’s ended right for him.”