When Rosamond stepped over the threshold she was conscious of motion in the living room. She stood still and strained her eyes into the dusk of the room. She saw a figure emerge from the shadows and, feeling its way about, arrive at the table behind the settee which supported one of Mr. Hibbert Mearely’s genuine antiques—a bronze vase.

“Ah! What’s this?” he muttered, as his fingers felt about its design.

Rosamond knew now that the impossible had occurred: a burglar had come to Roseborough. Her knees evinced a tendency to fold up and let her shaking body find support upon the floor; but her soul was not a coward. She held her breath and tiptoed to the desk. Noiselessly, she pulled out the drawer and closed her clammy fingers about the pistol. The dining room and quarters beyond provided the best channels of escape, if she must flee, so she crept across the room behind the marauder, just as he moved toward the chimney-piece, where the Louis XV snuff-boxes were set all in a row and ticketed.

“Stop!—stop!” She quavered sternly, pointing the pistol at him. He wheeled sharply and exclaimed in surprise:

“Oh! Are you up? er—I beg....”

“Who are you?” she demanded, with an access of courage due to the fact that he had not immediately murdered her. She recalled that, in books, one always firmly and at once asked a masked assassin or highwayman to disclose his identity.

“Ah!” said he, “that is what I was about to ask you.”

“Who—are—you?” She wondered if that high, wavering voice was hers.

A sound came from him which she could not associate with any emotion of fear or shame, proper to a burglarious tramp caught in the act. He removed his hat with a sweep, and bowed.

“Madam, I am a bird of the air, seeking my meat from God.”

Noting his accent, which was that of an educated man, Mrs. Mearely’s alarm decreased, but she did not relax vigilance.

“That is poetic, but vague. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“My biography, in short. Briefly, then, I am a poet out of a job. Second stanza, I entered your home in the hope of finding food. Refrain, I am a hungry, hungry, hungry man.”

This, she thought, was obviously insincere and merited rebuke. “I do not believe you!”

“Well, perhaps not,” cheerfully. “Nevertheless I am hungry. I always prefer to tell the truth, irrespective of people’s beliefs. Allow me to turn on the light.”

“Don’t move! Stay where you are.” She waved the pistol at him, as she saw his hand reach to the mantel.

“I don’t need to move. The globe is here. Allow me.” He turned on the light. In its soft small gleam they regarded each other, and for the first few moments had nothing to say.

Rosamond saw a man who was presumably in his “middle thirties”—a strong, well-built man, with breadth of shoulder and depth of chest, and with face and hands tanned by years of turning them, unprotected, toward all weathers. He had no beard or moustache. His face was lean, and broad at the brow and chin; his eyes large, deep-set, and dark; and his mouth wide—with firmness, humour, and sympathy in the lines about it. His hat was a large battered felt, of weather-stained hue, trimmed with a long, slender feather, dropped on the fields by a pheasant and appropriated by this tramp who had an eye for ornamentation. He wore in his belt a spray of pine, with small cones forming on it. His clothes were brown, rough, and spattered with burrs. The coat—a loose thing, held in by a dark, carved leather belt, must have had half a dozen deep pockets in it. His trouser-legs were rolled up and it was evident that his thick socks and his boots were wet through. His black hair gleamed about his forehead, suggesting that he had had his head, as well as his feet, in the brooks that coursed the fields to spill their crystal into the river. The light was behind him, and she could not see whether his physiognomy bore the marks of a life of crime, as his raiment bore the marks of his profession—a gentleman of the road. Though his speech was peculiar, she noticed, gratefully, that it was clear. While the double pockets on both sides of his coat bulged, their irregular convexity, she saw, was not due to bottles.

In the matter of view, he had the advantage; for the globe sent its rays directly upon her, and she bloomed out of the shadows like some legendary princess arriving from the Kingdom of Nowhere on a shaft of light, wrapped in the silver radiance of the moon and the petals of a rose.

“Why, you are young!” he said at last, in a low tone of such charmed wonder as a wet and burr-bedecked vagabond might naturally feel at the apparition of a fairy princess. “Only a girl. From your voice, so sweet and cold and prim, I judged you to be as old as—as my heart.”

She was unprepared for this mode of address and did not know how to answer it; but she kept prominently in her mind the rules for dealing with bandits, as she had gathered them from her reading, namely, to avoid angering them unduly, and never to show fear. She waggled the pistol at him and said with dignity:

“You see I am not afraid of you.”

She saw that he smiled.

“Are you not? H’m—I am afraid of you.” He looked about him for some time before he spoke again, then said, “Since I have answered your questions so satisfactorily, will you reciprocate by telling what relation you are to this house?”

“I own it.”

He stared about again before answering.

“Do you? Do you indeed? That is very peculiar. Now, if you had said you owned a corner in heaven, or a bit of fairyland, I should have said: ‘Naturally. I believe you.’ But when ‘a rare and radiant maiden’ appears by magic at midnight, in the midst of—of—er—the village museum, and says ‘I own it’—well, you won’t think me impolite, I hope, if I say you are mistaken?”

“This is not the ‘village museum’! It is my home, and I own it all myself.” She spoke heatedly, because the museum character of Villa Rose was secretly a sore subject with her.

“How interesting. Won’t you be seated? No? As you please. No doubt you feel safer standing—with three doors to escape by. And I dare say if I said ‘booh!’ you’d try to dash through all three of ’em at once.” He walked about slowly, taking different views of the museum’s contents. “Some very good things—and some ... not” he murmured.

“You—you must understand that I—I do not wish to shoot you unless it is quite necessary,” she stammered. “But if it is necessary, I—I do know how to shoot. I—I am not helpless.” She drew herself up and straightened her pistol arm. “I have killed—rabbits!”

“Have you?” He chuckled. “Call me Bunny, but, oh, do not shoot!” At that moment his gaze fell upon the landscape hanging over the desk. “Ah!” he cried, “a Turner—a real Turner!” He strode forward to get a better look at it. His movement brought him close to Rosamond, and, suspecting attack, she thrust her weapon at him with a violent gesture. He threw his hands up over his head but continued to enjoy the picture.

“A beautiful thing. A poem in colour. Turner is the poet’s painter. He not only saw Nature, he listened to her and communed with her, as a poet; then he translated what he heard through colour. Can’t you hear the scarlet trumpets blowing across that sunset?” In speaking he moved back and sidewise, trying different angles of vision, still dutifully keeping his hands up. Presently he turned to her. The light was on his face and she saw how warm and merry his smile was. “That is the only real beauty after all—the beauty of truth. Dear lady, I am sorry I alarm you so. Just see how thoroughly at home I feel.”

“I am not alarmed,” she protested.

“It is only terror that is evil enough—or mad enough—to point death at a brother human.”

He put his hand over the pistol, looked into her face, smiling whimsically, then coolly took the pistol from her and tossed it on the table.

“You—you are the strangest tramp I ever saw,” she gasped.

“Tramp? Oh! Am I? Then look well at me—that noble and pathetic figure, the tramp! Madam, the rich world you live in occasionally produces a man like me, but it soon casts him out!” He sighed heavily.

Like most persons who have been lifted above their original station in life, Mrs. Mearely thought others should keep to theirs. So she said, with a degree of pride:

“What do you know of the world I live in?”

“Lady,” he whined, “I’ll tell you my secret. Once I, too, was respectable; but I have lived it down.” He sat down on the arm of an old mahogany chair, as casually as if it were a stump by the woodside, and picked burrs from his stockings. Evidently they had pricked him as his ankles swung together.

“Why did you leave my world—if, indeed, you were ever in it?”

“My biography, revised edition. I left your world because I had no affinity with it. I was born to be a poet. I found, however, that society felt no need of me and my verses. Society does not need poets. Society’s great need is chauffeurs! And I could never stomach the smell of gasolene.”

“But, even so, need you have become a tramp—an outcast? A—a vagabond who enters houses at night for food? Frightening people!” Her indignation rose. “Why don’t you work?”

He looked at her keenly, pointing at her with the burr he had just caught between forefinger and thumb.

“Madam, do you work? Is this house—that gown—a charming gown, too—the result of your labour?”

“No,” she admitted; and, after a brief pause, answering the unworded question she felt those keen eyes were asking, she added: “I married for this house and this gown.”

“Ah! then you, too, do cowardly things. You dared not face life without wealth, so you sold yourself at so much per inch of beauty. Dear lady, you are a parasite—and selfish, withal! What right have you, who married for food, to blame me for taking food without the preliminary of a church ceremony?”

Rosamond’s tone was plaintive and offended.

“You say very unpleasant things. You make very severe criticisms. You have no right to enter my house in the middle of the night and criticise.”

He made a gesture of alarm, and laughed.

“No, no! Heaven forbid! I make no more criticisms. I’ve suffered too much from my critical tongue. Do you know there are places where they put critics in prison?”

“You said you came for food. Did you find it?”

“Not yet,” hopefully. “Occasionally, in my wanderings, I have lived on the back porches of the charitable in the great cities. Also I have dined with princes—at great cost!” He smothered a laugh.

There was a silence; then she asked, a little wistfully:

“Who are you?”

He leaned forward, smiling, frankly charmed by her.

“I’ve told you. I am a bird of passage and I skim over the cities, on my way to places where no cities are. In passing, I stopped but an instant to sup with you. Only an instant, for summer is fleeing, and I must away with her.” “And whither are you and summer going?”

“With summer I turn my back on the crowded marts of men. In the heart of a forest is a hut, built over a stream that laughs and sings to me through storm and sun. And there I live till the snows drive me to the place of humans again. There I write and dream—and dream and write—with none to say me nay. Some day I shall buy that hut—so that others may share my knowledge that it is mine.”

“And never have anything more than that?” thoughtfully.

“What more does a man need? See how your world—with its gowns and houses you married for—has deluded you. You have never found out that it is not things which make one’s life rich and radiant.”

She heard the tone of sympathy for which, it seemed to her, she had waited a very long lifetime, and her answer came with a little outburst of feeling.

“I have found it out. My life is one long boredom. In that respect it is not so different from the other lives I see lived around me.”

“Only other people deceive themselves more successfully?”

“Yes. How you understand!” She smiled, and made a movement of confidence toward him. “Is it true that you are hungry?” “Very true.” He rose and stood beside her, smiling down into her upturned face. “Are you about to offer the vagabond a few crumbs from the rich man’s table?”

“The rich man is gone. But his goods remain; and I can offer you the food that is necessary even to a dreamer. Sit down. I will get it for you.” She went to the tall lamp behind the card table and turned it on.

“The Lord bless ye, kind leddy. It’s a good deed ye are doin’ this day.”

She laughed.

“It’s a fair exchange. You give me a new experience. I give you food.”

“A rare experience to me, if not exactly a new one,” he retorted cheerily. “It will be very wonderful to be waited on by you—to eat your supper—surrounded by these—er—beautiful and priceless—that is to say, high-priced—objets d’art.”

In following her toward the dining-room door, he passed the bookcase with its central ornament, the jade-and-gold Buddha.

“Oh, I say!” he exclaimed. “Here is something!” Catching it up he ran toward the nearest light with it, and thereby re-awakened Rosamond’s fears. She flew for her weapon. He put the Buddha back in its place and came to her.

“And still you fear and doubt,” he chided. “Well, take your little gun, since you believe that your goods are safe only when you have death in your hand.”

“I can’t help it!” She looked at him, ashamed, pathetic, defiant.

“Too bad—too bad.” His eyes twinkled.

The colour flamed to her brow. Her eyes wavered from his. With a sudden, reckless motion, she tossed the little weapon on the table toward him.

“There! And I don’t know who you are!”

Smiling, with open delight in her, he reached for the pistol, drew the charges, and dropped them into a vase on the bookcase.

“Much safer on the whole; don’t you think so, child?”

“Oh!” she cried passionately. “You make me feel like—like—so foolish!” Avoiding his merry eyes, she dashed into the dining room.

“It’s extraordinary,” he muttered, moving about the room. “It should be the house. But, of course, it can’t be. And where did she come from—the little lady curator of the museum?”

He was hampered in his investigations by his hostess. She was in and out with table-cloth, napkins, trays of bread and butter, sandwiches, salad, and whatever she felt would appease a hungry, though refined, tramp’s appetite. At one turn in his peregrinations about the apartment he arrived at the flower-stand behind the settee, and saw the small volume lying there.

“What, Browning?” he exclaimed. “Does she read him? or does he only ornament her table?” He opened it at the flyleaf. “‘From Rosamond Mearely to herself.’ How delicious!” He explored further, unaware that the owner of the book was watching him and straining her ears to hear his self-communings. “Yes, she reads him, and marks her favourite passages like a girl in her teens——. What’s this?”

“Ah ha! ‘Never you cheat yourself.’ With her little pencil she underscores the line, and so confesses to any one who opens the book that she cheated herself when she married Mr. Money-Bags Mearely.” He looked for more self-revelations, and found the passage she had said aloud to herself, there, just before the one bell-note had rolled through the valley.

“Oh, Rosamond Mearely! Oh, merely Rosamond! ‘Who could have comprehended?’”

He laid the book down, saying her name softly to himself.

“It—it’s all ready,” she called, timidly, hoping that her blush would not be noticed. She did not wish even so charming a vagabond as this midnight visitor to see how his reading of her favourite passages had stirred her. In her own heart, she always held that it was the queen of Villa Rose and not the queen of Browning’s “In a Balcony,” who had first uttered those lines.

“The vagabond thanks Mrs. Mearely profoundly for her kindness. You see I have discovered your name among the treasures of this room.” He helped her take the dishes off the tray and arrange them on the table.

“Mrs. Mearely accepts no thanks for pleasing herself,” she replied, colouring again and refusing to let her eyes meet his, lest he should look through them into her mind and find confirmation of what the pencil marks in the book had told him. She pointed to a chair. “Eat, Vagabond!”

“Will you not share the beggar’s crust?” whimsically. “It does make me feel hungry.”

“Good! Sit, then, and I’ll serve you: for, mind you, you are only a guest at this wayside meal. I see just one slice of bread and butter I think I can spare.”

“Oh, stingy!” she cried. A happy little laugh bubbled from her as she slipped into a chair at his side. He helped her; then, proving his earlier assertions, fell to with a will.

“Not stingy,” he mumbled, through bread and butter. “But you have already eaten three big, fat meals to-day.”

“I haven’t!” she protested. This was a most unfair charge. He went on:

“Eating now is a mere—a Mearely—woman’s whim with you. You want this supper just because it is mine!” He attacked the salad, hungrily.

“Well! I gave it to you, didn’t I?” she demanded indignantly.

“And now, womanlike, you want to take it back. Never!—while I have teeth!”—biting into the sandwich he had been waving to emphasize his remarks. “Don’t plume yourself on your charity, either, dear young Baroness of Castle de Junk——”

“Oh!” she scolded.

“Because you know you had to give me something to keep me from robbing the museum.”

“It’s not a museum!” She stamped her foot. He laughed. They supped in silence for several minutes.

“You know,” he said, as he held his cup for coffee, “after all, there is a certain satisfaction in food. Nothing else gives one quite the same feeling of completeness.” She nodded. “By the way, you can probably tell me if this is the only little hillside town like this in the neighbourhood with houses like this. Even a tramp sometimes likes to know where he is—on a dark night.”

“There are the two towns, Roseborough and Poplars Vale. Roseborough is the older. Poplars Vale used to be just a farm and a corner store. Now, you see, it is quite a place. Almost like Roseborough.”

“Well, well; that accounts for it! Poplars Vale, eh?” he muttered. “And I thought it was Roseborough.” Busy with the coffee-pot she did not hear him. He leaned toward her. “Are the two towns comfortably close to each other?”

“What? Oh, yes. An hour’s ride.”

“Only an hour’s separation? What a charming arrangement,” surveying her with pleasure as she dropped two lumps into his cup. “What a queer sugar-bowl?” he lifted it. “Sterling?”

“Oh—no—o. I suppose not.”

He laughed.

“Shame on you for a fibster! you are still a wee mite afraid I may put it in my pocket. And what would I do with a monstrous thing like that—all top-heavy with a row of little deformed cupids. ’Tis cumbersome and unsightly—and quite useless. It reminds me of a royal tea-service I’ve seen—than which nothing could be uglier. A white china bowl would be prettier—and cleaner.” He set it down. “If I took it I would not do so ill as the thief, Ambition, who came into your house of life before me, and robbed you of your faith and the ability to be glad. Believe me, faith—joyous faith—is worth more than many silver bowls—and deformed little cupids,” he smiled.

“True, perhaps,” she said, thoughtfully. Suddenly she was stirred to resentment at life and at him also; for his joyous, impudent freedom seemed to make her feel her caged condition more than ever before. She pushed her plate away, and rose. “And yet—do you suppose I could have been robbed of it if I’d ever possessed a glad faith? It is not for you to criticise me, is it?” She spoke with a trace of haughtiness. “Let us think no more of serious things. Eating, drinking, comfort, and ease—there’s my definition of life, Vagabond. And it seems to agree with yours.” She pointed to his plate. He turned on her suddenly.

“Why do you lie to me and to yourself?”

The severity in his tone startled her.

“Oh!” He went on, more gently, but not inclined to spare her a wholesome truth or two.

“How can you face life if you are insincere? And that pitiful little air of authority—because, forsooth, you still have the money you married for! Fie, for shame! That is not your definition of life. Did I not tell you that I am a poet? Do you think a poet means only a writer of rhymes? The poet is one who sees God walking wherever there is a foothold of earth! What is your poor little mask to me? It is shaped like a dollar-sign and I can see your eyes—and nose—through it. Yes, and more: your heart. And I tell you that your place is not here. Every hour that you lurk here in the shadows, you cheat yourself of life.”

“Why do you say such things to me?” She was perturbed to the point of resistance. “You—a vagabond—and outcast! This is my life.”

“Why do you throw vagabond in my teeth, eh?”

“From scorn!”

“From envy. You envy me because I have dared to be a vagabond. I had my choice once—as you had yours. I could have forsworn my liberty and my poetry and—written the usual magazine trash. Oh, yes, I had an ‘opening’ as they call it, into the world of spurious literature. But, oh, how quickly I shut up that opening! I could also have taught nice young lads to say S’il vous plaÎt, madame—or La donna È mobile—and Nein, das will Ich nicht machen! Not me. I have been ridiculed, condemned. I have known poverty and hunger—and despair. But let me tell you, when men cast me out, God received me. Earth took me to her infinite embrace. She has fed me even in her deserts. She has sheltered me among her hills. She has made me little brother to her rains and her winds. And my despair—do you know what she has done to that? She has taught me to make songs of it! And you—poor coward—how you envy me!”

“Stop,” she commanded, hotly. “How dare you compare me with....”

“With a vagabond? Because you are like me. Yes, you are! You hate the shams as I do. You long for a real life, for a true love—just the emotions and passions of common earth.”

“Be silent.”

He pursued his advantage relentlessly.

“Underneath that air of Madam Rich-and-Haughty, you are as romantic as a schoolgirl, you who think you are cold and shallow! You, who.... Are you crying?” She had dropped into her nook of the settee, with her face hidden on her arm. He went to her.

“I—I—oh, you are very cruel.”

“Yes. It is torture, to really see oneself.” She resisted this, feebly. “Oh, no—I’m not like that. Why should you think...?”

“Because I have read your heart in a book.” He lifted the volume. “How you are longing for love—for a common, warm, human love. If some man, no matter who or what he was, came to you—if even a vagabond were to forget ‘the queen’ and throw himself boldly at your feet—you would ‘stoop and kiss him with your soul.’”

She turned her face up to him, then hid her eyes again from the look in his—a look, searching and tender, that seemed to envelop her like a caress, and to deny the trivialities of station and degree and the opulent solidity of the Mearely house. It spoke from the life in him to the life in her, with promise. He leaned over, near her, but not touching her. “Who could have comprehended?” he whispered, wondering at his own emotion for her, but accepting it with the same faith and reverence with which he accepted sunrise, the falling of a star, or the fragrance of the beneficent pines.

She looked up again and no longer hid the need she felt.

“Oh, don’t—don’t just trifle with me! You are the only man who has ever understood: the only man who has ever....” She could not go on, but her eyes and quivering mouth mutely besought him to say what she longed to hear. “Who has ever loved you?”

The tears filled her eyes again.

“Since you’re only a—a vagabond, and I don’t know you—and you will go away like—like a make-believe prince—it couldn’t be very wrong for you to say you love me—just once? I’ll never have anything real, so can’t we just pretend?”

“Just pretend—you think? No. It couldn’t be very wrong for you to hear me say just once that I love you. Only don’t repent to-morrow that you heard love to-night from the lips of a vagabond.”

“Love will never come again,” sadly.

“I tell you it will. The very same love will come—not as a vagabond in the night, but a love that you can accept.”

“Will it really come again?” wistfully.

“Yes. Now—good-night and good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” blankly. “You are going now? Oh—where?”

He picked up his hat and smoothed its pheasant’s feather, while he smiled at her and said, mysteriously:

“Who knows? On through the woods, over the hills. Autumn is coming, and the vagabond takes the road again.”

She went to him and put her hand in his. So, hand in hand, they walked toward the verandah.

“I shall never forget you.” “That is good,” he said. He stopped her as she was stepping out on the verandah. “Wait. Go back. There is too much light behind you. Who knows what curious eyes may lurk in the darkness below?” He leaped back nimbly and turned off the light from the tall lamp. Pointing to the valley and the river flooded with moonlight, he said, “See how my golden path winds before me. Now, I leave you.” With another nimble movement he had climbed to the railing.

“Oh—not that way,” she urged.

“It’s a quick way. A leap, and I am in the road below. Farewell, Rosamond Mearely. Till love comes again, my merely Rosamond, say good-night, and wish me well.”

“Good-night! I—I do not know your name!”

“A vagabond has no name.” he answered. He bent and swiftly kissed the hand still trying to hold him, unclasped its fingers, and jumped to the road.

“Good-bye, forever and ever, my vagabond.” Rosamond tried to call the words to him, but a sob stopped them.

“Here!” “There!” “Get him!” Two rough voices shouted from below, and there was the noise of tramping feet.

“Nay, nay! Good-night to you!” the vagabond called; his voice sounded as if he were running.

“Hey! he’s off!” One of the rough voices roared. “Halt!” A shot snapped through the air, followed quickly by another.

Rosamond stood motionless, stupefied by terror.

“I winged him,” she heard the same voice say. Then she threw off the spell in which fear had gripped her and rushed out into the garden and down the drive, calling wildly. Guns were as little known in Roseborough as tramps. She had no idea what she should find in the road, or who the men were who had shot at her vagabond and perhaps killed him. No thought of danger to herself crossed her mind. She dashed on recklessly, crying:

“Vagabond! My vagabond! Answer me!”