In the unabashed pursuit of pleasure into which Persis had plunged, Joel was a half-hearted participant. His life-long habit of standing scornfully aloof while his fellow beings strove to enjoy themselves, proved no match for Celia's artless appeals. "Please come, Uncle Joel," she would, coax. "It's lots more fun with you along." And to the open amusement of his neighbors and his sister's ill-concealed wonder, Joel submitted to long automobile rides, to briefer excursions on the river and lake and to eating picnic luncheons with his back against a tree and on his face an expression conveying his unshaken conviction that there were ants in his sandwich. It is unlikely that Joel's presence on these occasions added in any marked degree to the general hilarity, but Celia's satisfaction was unmistakable. She always sat beside him with an air of proprietorship, digging her sharp little elbow into the sparse cushioning of his lean thighs or when weary, dropping her frowsy head against his shoulder with an engaging certainty that it was there for that very purpose. Like many another who has defied capture till after middle life, Joel atoned for past immunity by the thoroughness of his surrender.

But on this particular August morning, when an all-day expedition had been planned to Huckleberry Mountain, Joel revolted. Whether he had really been surfeited with picnics, or only feared that he might grow to enjoy such puerile forms of entertainment, and so lose some of the austere dignity which had hitherto distinguished him, it is certain that he came down to breakfast with his mind made up. Even to Celia's coaxing he was adamant.

"You mustn't tease Uncle Joel any more," Persis finally admonished the child. "You don't want him to go if he wouldn't have a good time." And to her brother she added, "You'd better go to the hotel for your dinner, Joel."

"Oh, I can pick up something that'll do me for a dinner," Joel replied with his old keen relish for playing the martyr. And then Celia, dropping her oatmeal spoon, lurched forward in her chair and imprinted a milky kiss upon his coat sleeve.

"I'll get Uncle Joel's dinner," Celia murmured. "I'll take care of him."

"But you're going on the picnic."

"No, Aunt Persis," Celia resumed an upright position with a suddenness that endangered her half-emptied bowl of porridge. "I don't like picnics 'thout Uncle Joel. I'd rather stay with him."

Joel groped for the toast. The plate was directly in front of him, but he could not see it for a blinding rush of tears. Never in his life had he known such sweet elation, never such humility. There is an irresistible flattery in the preference of a child. Except for the love of his dead mother and for his sister's affection, the latter a curious blending of duty and traditional sentiment which would have kept on working automatically whatever he might have done, Joel had never inspired a single unselfish attachment until Celia came into his life. The thing was overwhelming. His hand shook till his fork clattered against his plate. What was he to have won the heart of a child?

In the two hours that elapsed before their departure, he suffered agonies of apprehension that Celia would change her mind. Scraps of cynical comment on the fickleness of her sex, some of them dating back to Virgil and Juvenal, flitted through his memory and stung like gad-flies. After winning such honor, after Celia had elected to remain with him, he felt himself unable to endure the ignominy of having her reconsider. While Mary made the beds, and Persis packed the luncheon in the kitchen, and the children raced about getting in one another's way, and prolonging the preparations they were desirous of hastening, Joel waited in a cold sweat, half realizing the absurdity of his misgiving, but quite at its mercy. He knew that if Celia changed her mind at the last minute and departed with the others, life would not be worth the living.

But the elf-like little creature showed no signs of vacillation. After rendering valuable assistance in getting the others ready, including the feat of breaking a fruit jar containing the lemon juice and sugar, she came and stood at Joel's side, serenely contemplative and content. Even toward Celia Joel had never been demonstrative. But as the picnic party took possession of the machine, and half a dozen hands waved a farewell, he slipped his arm about the child's shoulders and drew her to him. The day was edged with gold. The warm August sunshine seemed to reach the very depths of his heart. He had a confused impression that he had done life an injustice.

"Tell me a story, Uncle Joel," commanded Celia, nestling closer. "Tell me about Miranda and Ariel and that horrid old Caliban." For to reduce Shakespeare to the juvenile comprehension had been one of the tasks imposed on Joel by his new fealty, nor did it seem to him, as once it might have done, a base perversion of the matchless creations of the English tongue that in diluted and modified form, they should interest and entertain a little maid of six.

The morning was a long rapture for the two strange comrades. Joel told stories till Celia tired of a passive rÔle and entertained him with some of those flights of fancy compared with which the most audacious attempts of the adult imagination seem tame and groveling. Then they took a walk, hand in hand, after which Celia discovered that she was hungry and a raid was made upon the pantry. Perhaps nothing so conclusively proved the completeness of Joel's subordination as the overthrow of his dietetic theories. The first course of their meal was bread and molasses and it wound up with honey and ginger snaps.

By this time the sun had taken full possession of the front piazza, and Joel pulled his chair around to the shady north side of the house and sat there in after-dinner tranquillity while Celia played about on the lawn. Joel's eyes followed every movement of the quaint little figure. He remembered with wonder that other people thought Betty the prettier of the two girls. To him that small piquant face with the unruly hair, the straight black brows and the wonderful kindling eyes, embodied all that was beautiful. His selfish middle-aged heart ached under the strain of accommodating this wealth of sweet swelling tenderness.

Celia had wandered across the grass toward the clump of maples which once had shaded the big barn erected in Joel's youth and never rebuilt after the fire. She turned to kiss her hand, and he kissed his back, the first time in a matter of some five and thirty years that his dignity had so unbent. The realization that the act would prove highly diverting to his neighbors caused him to glance anxiously toward the road. But the white ribbon of dust was undisturbed by vehicles, and his mind relieved, he looked again for Celia.

A full half minute he stared incredulously, looking this way and that, wavering between startled apprehension and a conviction of his own folly. For Celia was nowhere to be seen. The grass over which her little feet had twinkled as he turned his head, rippled in the wind and gave no sign. The child had not had time to reach the trees, behind, whose trunks her slight form might easily be concealed. And then as Joel told himself that he was a fool, a faint wailing cry brought him to his feet.

He was running before he had time to formulate his fear. And then a startling memory spurred him to more desperate haste. He recalled the old well by the barn, boarded over years before and later so concealed by the encroachment of grass and weeds that its very existence had been forgotten. But time had taken its toll even from the stubborn oak, and at last it had yielded under a child's light weight. Joel knew it as he ran, but the sight of the splintered irregular opening, across which the clover heads nodded serenely to one another, gave a poignant anguish to his realization. He tore the rotting planks aside, and looked as it seemed, down into unrelieved blackness. Then his sun-dazzled vision adjusted itself to the gloom and he saw the dank, slime-covered stones that formed the sides of the well, and below the black gleam of water and something pink and white, that struggled and went under, and showed again.

"Celia, Celia!" Joel shouted. "Don't be scared. Uncle Joel's coming."

He had been a coward all his life. In his boyhood he had shrunk away from risks which to Persis were exhilarating and delightful. The ill health of twenty years had tended to confirm and increase that native weakness. Yet at this supreme moment no thought of his own danger crossed his mind, The saving of Celia was all.

He kicked off his slippers and gripping the curb for support, lowered himself into the pit. A rush of cold air like a breath from an open grave enveloped him. Finding foothold in the crevices of the green damp stones, digging his fingers into slimy crannies, panting, slipping, bruising his flesh without feeling the hurt, this frail hypochondriac went to the aid of the child who somehow had blundered into his heart.

The water in the well reached Joel's arm-pits as he stood on its bottom and lifted Celia to his shoulder. She clung to him for a little with a suffocating grip, strangling, sobbing, panic-stricken. And as he strove to soothe her, for the first time fear laid its cold hand upon him. He looked up to the circle of blue sky so terrifyingly distant and it seemed incredible that he could ever have made that precipitous descent. Unencumbered he had accomplished the miracle, but he knew he could never climb back to the warm peace of the upper air with Celia in his arms.

The child's sobs were quieting. She was perched upon his shoulder, her arm wound tightly about his neck. Even at the moment when all the tragic possibilities of the event crowded on his mind, he felt the tremor of her rigid little body and thought anxiously that Celia was in danger of taking cold.

With an effort he took a grip upon realities. Gently he loosened the pressure of the child's encircling arms.

"Celia, honey, don't hold Uncle Joel so tight. He's got to get breath enough to holler, so somebody will come and take us out of this."

He had shouted till he was hoarse before he realized his folly. There were no neighbors near enough to hear his cries. The sensible thing was to husband his strength till some vehicle passed and then call lustily. Again he addressed the child.

"Celia, dearie, keep your ears open. When we hear wheels coming, we'll holler for all we're worth."

They listened till they heard upon the road the rhythmic foot-beats of horses, and the rattle of some farmer's wagon rumbling homeward from the village. Then together they screamed for help. But the hoofs went on beating their tattoo till the sound grew faint, and the rattle of the wagon died in the distance. Again and again the sound which told of human nearness woke hope in their hearts only to die in the ensuing silence.

"Uncle Joel," Celia wailed, "I'm co-old." Her sobs echoed uncannily as if the well were filled with the ghosts of weeping children. Again he gazed at the disk of blue sky overhead. He seemed to himself to be viewing it from some indeterminate half-way house between life and death. And yet of the two, the invisible world seemed nearer than the earth roofed over by that placid sky.

As time passed his suffering became acute. The weight of the child on his shoulder was an increasing torture. The cramped arm raised to hold her secure was racked by intolerable pain. The chill of the water was paralyzing. His heart labored. His breath came with difficulty. Celia seemed to be relapsing into an unnatural drowsiness. Her body sagged lifelessly. He found it necessary to stand close to the side of the well, that the wet stones might help to support her weight.

There was only once he prayed, unless his struggle be counted as one long prayer. But when his appeal found words, it was less a petition than a suggestion. "She's so little, Lord, for it to end here, and she's had a hard time so far. The fun's just beginning." It showed no lack of wisdom, perhaps, that his prayer ended there.

His mind must have wandered a little later. It seemed as if his mother were beside him, encouraging him as she had done long before in his boyhood when he had wrestled with a difficult task. And then he was out in the woods with a crowd of his boyhood companions and the wild geese were flying south. Honk! Honk! Honk! "Guess that's why it's so cold," Joel said, addressing the shadowy assembly. "Winter's coming."

The sound of his own voice brought him back to reality. What he had heard was the horn of Persis' car. She had returned. And the love of life woke in him and gave him strength to scream lustily again and again.

As the children scrambled out upon the grass, all talking at once, Persis lifted an authoritative hand. "Hush! I thought I heard some one call."

"I don't hear nothing, Miss Dale," said Mary tranquilly. Persis again enjoined silence. As her gaze swept uneasily over the peaceful, familiar scene, her eyes were arrested by one of the rotting boards which had formed the cover of the unused well.

Joel, wrenching it from its place, had flung it out into the clover.
It had not been there that morning, Persis knew.

She ran toward it with a conviction of calamity which only took concrete form when she heard her brother's call issuing from the depths of the earth.

"The well," she cried with self-accusing anguish. "The old well." But when she stood by its edge and sent her voice ringing down into its depth, it was steady and strong.

"I'm going for help, Joel. 'Twon't be much of any time now. Just a little longer."

Mary and the children had never seen the Persis who came running toward them. They shrank back from her stern presence, half afraid.

"Mary, take the children into the house and keep them there. Call up the doctor and tell him to get here as quick as he can. And have that coil of new rope that's in the shed ready for me by the time I'm back."

She had leaped into the machine while she was giving her orders. It described a dizzy circle in the grass, shot down the driveway, and sped screaming along the dusty road. Before the trembling Mary had had more than time to discharge her commissions the car was back with half a dozen strong men, harvesters from the farm just below, crowded into the seats. And when Doctor Ballard turned his sweating horse up the drive half an hour later, Joel and Celia were between hot blankets, and stimulants had already stirred their sluggish blood.

It was eight o'clock before the doctor left. "I've got to see the Packard boy, or I wouldn't go. I'll come back and stay the night through."

Persis nodded. "I'd feel easier to have you in the house. There won't be no need for you to lose your sleep. The spare room's all made up."

Some twenty minutes later Joel roused and spoke. His respiration was hurried and articulation difficult.

"Persis—Celia?"

She understood the syncopated sentence.

"Celia's doing fine, the doctor thinks. She's got a little temperature, but a child's likely to have fever for any little thing."

He waited some time before putting the next question, rallying his strength for the ordeal of speech.

"Don't s'pose—'twould do for me—to see her?"

Persis looked at him with a curious tightening of the lips, in her eyes an unaccustomed blending of tenderness and pride.

"You shall see her, if you want to, Joel. 'Tain't going to hurt her—to speak of."

From the room across the hall she brought Celia, a chrysalid child, sleeping heavily, closely wrapped in an old plaid shawl, and laid her on Joel's bed. Celia's thatch of black hair fell untidily across the pillow. The fever gave her olive skin an unwonted color. Joel made an ineffectual effort to lift his arm. Then as he desisted, sighing, his sister gently lifted his hand till it touched the hot fingers of the sleeping child.

"They're—such little—things—Persis." His labored breath made speech fragmentary. "It's funny, how—they fill up—all the room in—a man's heart."

"Yes, I know, Joel. But I guess maybe you'd better not talk."

"Makes me think of—what the Good Book says, Persis. 'A little child—'"

He did not finish the quotation. After Persis was sure that he was asleep, she carried Celia back to her bed and renewed her watch. The doctor came in about ten o'clock and stood for a little with his fingers on his patient's pulse.

"You'd better not lose your sleep, Doctor," Persis suggested, glancing at the weary young face. "You go into the spare room and I'll call you if I need you."

"I'm not tired," the doctor answered. "I'd as soon sit here for a while." But he did not meet her eye.

It was an hour later when the struggling breath lengthened into a sigh, deep-drawn and profound, irresistibly suggestive of untold relief. The doctor was at the bedside instantly, but after a moment he laid the limp hand gently down and turned away.

Persis sank upon her knees, putting her hands over her face down which the tears were streaming, those strange illogical tears which are life's tribute to death, however it may come. Yet even while she wept, phrases of thanksgiving sang melodiously through her brain and echoed in her heart. For to this brother of hers it had been given to redeem a life of weakness and failure by a single heroic sacrifice and to die a man.