Outside, Junior Moreland’s inherent cruelty asserted itself. His face was transformed by anger and astonishment. His fists were clenched and his face distorted as he cried to Mahala: “All right! If you refuse to marry me, it won’t be many days before you’ll be kneeling to my father imploring him for mercy!”

Possessed of spirit far above his own, Mahala laughed at him tauntingly.

“How perfectly true you are to your teachings and environment!” she said. “Why put the dirty work on your father? Why don’t you say that you’ll force me to kneel to you and implore your mercy? Your words and the look on your face this minute prove conclusively the thing I’ve always, deep down in my heart, known about you. Won’t you have the decency to go?”

Mahala stood still, watching Junior down the walk and through the gate, and as he went, dimly she visioned beside him the wraith of the girl she always had been. She lifted her hands and looked at them questioningly. She had made her boasts as to what she could do with them. She thoroughly understood that by the time Junior could reach his father and confide in him, her hour would have come. Again she looked back at her hands, small, delicately shaped, soft and white as a child’s. Unconsciously, she opened and closed them and stretched out her arms to test her strength; then she turned to the door.

On entering the living room, she saw her father, whom she had forgotten in the excitement of her meeting with Junior. Rushing to him, she tried to lift his head, to change his position. One glance at the window told her that he had awakened and had heard. She ran her hands over his set face, then slipped them under his vest to the region of his heart, and to her horror, found that it was still. Then she lost self-control and screamed wildly, and this brought her mother and Jemima, who rushed about summoning help and sending for a doctor.

Leaving the Spellman home, Junior hurried to the bank. He went to his father’s room and told him in detail what had happened. He said that he was convinced that Mahala really disliked him; that she had possessed the courage to tell him what it was in him that she hated; that she had defied him; that she had said she would prefer seeing her father and mother give up their lives with her, rather than to contract a marriage with him. He repeated her use of the expression “your horrible father.” The face of Martin Moreland so reflected the ugly elements in his heart that Junior, staring at him, drew back, half afraid. Suddenly he dimly realized what it might have been that Mahala had seen and which she feared and loathed. But Junior was so like his father that this realization was a momentary thing and it passed, because watching him, Martin Moreland, the astute reader of the faces and hearts of his fellow men, saw that he was allowing too much of his personality to be mirrored by his face. So he covered it for a moment with his hands and made a physical effort to control himself.

There never had been sweeter music to his ears than the voice of his son asking him to start immediately the legal forms of attaching all the Spellman property that they could find. With any other man Martin Moreland might have gone through a pretence of dreading to do this. With his son it was not necessary. He drew his lean hands across each other and moistened his lips. The malevolence of his smile he made no effort to conceal.

“Ten years is a long time,” he said in his cold, incisive voice, “to put into the building up of a structure, and it’s twice as long when it must be put into the tearing down. The care used in building is not necessary in demolition. We will now pull the underpinnings from Mahlon Spellman, his sweet wife, Elizabeth, and the precious darling, and we’ll watch them topple and fall.”

That afternoon father and son, ostentatiously accompanied by the sheriff, went to the dry-goods store. As they approached the door upon which the official was to nail the notice of attachment, they were amazed to see heavy streamers of black crÊpe fluttering from it, and they learned for the first time, that while they had been closeted with their lawyer working out details of the business, Mahlon Spellman had escaped them. They would never have the pleasure of seeing him with his heart broken and his proud body bowed. If they ever saw him again, it would be when the dignity of death had set its ennobling mask upon his features.

The groan that broke from the lips of Martin Moreland was taken by the sheriff to be the product of compassion. He looked at him curiously. He had thought he was a man who would enjoy the business with which he was occupied.

His voice was softened to sympathy as he said: “I supposed you knew. They say it was heart trouble, that he’d been bad with it for a year, but he was too proud to let any one know.”

It was the elder Moreland who reached a detaining hand, saying: “We’d better defer this business till after the funeral.”

It was Junior, his handsome face sharpened to wolf-like lines, who said tersely: “Brace up, Dad. You’ve always told me that business was business. It’s too bad about the old man, but what’s it got to do with us? If this doesn’t turn the trick, nothing will. Nail it up!”

The sheriff was shocked. He protested. Martin Moreland ordered him to tack the notice above the crÊpe on the store door, but to delay placing the one upon the residence until after the funeral.

As they turned away, Junior remarked: “I didn’t think you were so chicken-hearted, Dad. Why don’t you go through with it? Why don’t you give them all that’s coming to them at once?”

Martin Moreland walked in silence for a minute. Then he said quietly: “Junior, did you ever hear of a boomerang? It’s supposed to be a weapon that you throw at some one else with the knowledge that it may miss its mark and return and bury itself in your own heart. There are plenty of people in this town who would be overjoyed at an opportunity to get their arrows into my heart. A wrong move in the present situation would in my judgment be risking the boomerang. It’s better to go slow, to make a pretence of sympathy and let the law, which happens to be inevitable once it starts, and inexorable under headway, do the remainder for us.”

This was why, during the days when Mahlon Spellman lay stretched upon the sofa, an expression of noble dignity on his face and forehead, that his front door bore only a wreath of myrtle and roses with floating ribbons of purple.

For the remainder of the day and during the first night following Mahlon’s passing, Mahala had faced the prospect of meeting life alone. Elizabeth Spellman had been so deeply shocked, so terrified and hurt, that she had succumbed and had gone down to the verge of ultimate collapse. It required the utmost efforts of Jemima, of Doctor Grayson, and friends of the Spellmans who came in flocks, to keep the proud and dainty woman alive. When her inherent strength triumphed over the blow that had been dealt her heart, her brain, and her body, she lay stretched upon her bed, one hand gripping into the coverlet that had been accustomed to covering Mahlon’s heart, the other clutching her own. The friends who attended her were compelled to watch closely in order to discover that she was breathing at all.

By the arrival of the third day the town had talked the matter over. Men had carried home news of the attachment upon the Spellman store. Women in passing had stopped and read it with horrified eyes. It was the talk of the streets and through the homes, that, but for the banker’s decency in the matter, the same attachment would now be decorating the Spellman front door. No one ever had thought of or voiced such a thing before. Mahlon Spellman’s dealings in real estate, the outward and visible sign of prosperity displayed by the Spellman home, the wife and the daughter, the constant attitude of Mahlon himself, had thoroughly convinced the citizens of his town that he was quite as prosperous as he desired every one to think that he was. Now it required the three days, and in some instances, longer, for people to adjust themselves to the idea that what they had thought was a pillar of stone was really one of papiermÂchÉ—a thing that could be picked up, crushed, and broken within an hour. Strictly in accordance with the old manifestations of human nature, the snake tongues of envy and jealousy and greed broke loose. The unconscious Mahlon, lying in inarticulate dignity, became a target. First people exclaimed in horror. They shed tears of sympathy. Very speedily they reached the point where they dissected Mahlon as an expert surgeon would use a knife. They laughed at his weaknesses. They felt for their ties; they flecked their sleeves; they looked at their shoes with exaggerated care. Women who only a week before had supposed themselves to be the dearest friends of Elizabeth Spellman, suddenly discovered that she had been too proud, and that “pride always goes before a fall.” Like a pack of hungry wolves they tore and worried every manifest characteristic of the dainty little woman who lay unconscious on the borderland. They blamed her every extravagance in the furnishing of her home. They pointed out the number of mantles, of shawls, and new gowns, of shoes and of bonnets, that she wore during a year. They sneered at the weakness which had made her spend her time and strength upon dressing and rearing Mahala as she had done. The air was thick with cold-blooded old maxims. Upon each lip there was heard the terse, sneering comment: “The higher you climb, the harder you fall.” Through curiosity they rallied around Mahala with some show of sympathy until her father had been borne to the church, down the aisle of which he had loved to walk in his pride, and then to his final resting place in the Ashwater cemetery out on the River Road, where the birds sang among the maples and the river, in a monotone, accompanied them all day; where in spring the cradle swung through the golden wheat and in fall the lowing of cattle was heard on the hills.

The next day the sheriff decorated the Spellman front door with a copy of the writ of attachment that appeared upon the store. Mahala was told by Albert Rich, the lawyer who knew more of her father’s affairs than any one else, and who had offered his help in her extremity, that there was very little if anything that could be saved, the Moreland claims were so heavy, so numerous. He would search the records diligently, and any possible thing that could be salvaged he would try to secure for her. He told her that the law would allow her to take for her use six hundred dollars’ worth of the household furniture, and looking at him with sick eyes, Mahala had said almost to space instead of to Attorney Rich: “My piano cost fifteen hundred.”

“Yes, I know,” said Albert Rich. “You mustn’t think of pianos to-day, my dear. You must think of a cook stove, a couple of beds, some bedding, dishes, and those things which you absolutely must have.”

From this interview Mahala went to the kitchen and laid her head on the breast of Jemima.

“Jemima,” she said, “now that you’ve had time to think things over, where do you stand? Do you feel toward us as you always did, or have you discovered that we are examples of monumental extravagance, whitened sepulchres who intentionally deceived our friends and neighbours?”

Jemima lifted a stove lid and poked the fire expertly. Then she carefully wiped her hands upon the corner of her apron, and took Mahala into her arms.

“You poor little lamb,” she said. “If I could get at the necks of some of these old hens that have let you hear what they’re saying, I’d wring ’em good and proper! The other day Serena Moulton came nosin’ into my kitchen with her whitened-sepulchre sentiments droolin’ from her lips, and I told her pretty quick to cheese it and get where she belonged among the other cats that was given over to clawin’!”

Mahala gripped her arms around Jemima’s broad shoulders and buried her face in her warm breast and cried until she was exhausted. Jemima sat down in the one easy chair conceded to her idle moments in the kitchen and held the girl closely.

“Don’t you think I don’t understand, honey,” she said, “and don’t you mind. You just cry till you get through, then you wipe up your eyes and pick out what it is that you want to take with you that the law will let you have. I been thinkin’ for you in these days when you haven’t had the time to think for yourself. I’ve had Jimmy Price and his wife clean the stuff out of my house and haul it over to my sister’s in Bluffport. She’s got plenty of room to pack it away. Talkin’ with Jason Peters when he brought in the groceries, I’ve found out that Peter Potter will let him use his delivery wagon to move things for us. Mrs. Price and Jimmy have got the house all clean, and while it’s nothing to compare with here, it’s shelter till you can look around and see what you can do. Fast as you make up enough bundles for a wagonload, Jason will stop and haul ’em over for you free and for nothing.”

Mahala sat up and wiped her eyes.

“Jemima,” she said, “only a week ago I thought I was possessed of what’s commonly spoken of as a ‘host of friends.’ To-day that host has dwindled to you, Albert Rich, Peter Potter, Jason Peters, and possibly Susanna Bowers. Do you realize that Edith Williams has not been here since the day after Papa went? Mrs. Williams hasn’t been but once, and since that writ of attachment is nailed on our front door, you’d think that it read ‘Leprosy’ instead of anything connected merely with dollars and cents.”

“Never mind, honey,” said Jemima. “Put this in your pipe and smoke it. Fair-weather friends ain’t no good anyway. Them as sticks when the storm comes is the only ones that’s worth having. Now you go pick out the things you want Jason to move. I’m goin’ to stay right with you and take care of your Ma and cook for you, and you needn’t bother about payin’ me anything. I’ve been paid too much already. I bought my place with money I earned here. Whatever you do, you’ve got to do with your fingers. It’s all you know. You write out the kind of a sign you want to use and I’ll have Jason paint it like he paints them nice, stylish signs he sticks up fresh every day in Peter Potter’s windows. He’s real expert at it. He’ll fix you a nice one and trim it up fancy, and he’ll put it in the front yard, and then you’ll soon find out whether there’s goin’ to be anything in this town you can do that will furnish us bread and maybe a slatherin’ of butter once in a while.”

Mahala arose, wiped her eyes, and for the first time in her life, she used her hands at work that was essential and not for the beautification of her person or her home. With Jemima’s help she tried conscientiously to make a selection of what would be a fair six hundred dollars’ worth of the things that would be essential in the furnishing of Jemima’s little house that she had rented since her husband’s death and her only son had married and moved to Chicago. Whenever Jason delivered a load of groceries, he drove a few blocks out of his way, and stopping at the Spellman residence, carefully swept out the wagon, spread newspapers over the bottom, and piled in as much furniture and household goods as the horse could draw comfortably, and moved them to Jemima’s house.

Peter Potter had suggested that he should do this.

Coming in after the delivery of a load, Jason said to Peter: “Those women are being too honest. They’re not taking enough to make them comfortable. It’s a crime!”

“It’s worse than a crime,” said Peter. “It’s an outrage. I’ll tell you what let’s do. Let’s take this matter into our own hands. Let’s fix up a plan between us and the night the folks move out, let’s go and get what’s right and fair they should have. We can store it in the upstairs here, or in your room, till they get to the place where they’ve a bigger house and use for it again.”

That plan Jason endorsed with enthusiasm. The evening of a hard day, Jemima hitched up the Spellman horse and she and Mahala helped Elizabeth into the surrey and drove her to her new home, and then gave the keys to Jason. He was to return the horse and in the morning turn over the property to the sheriff. That night was the busiest in the life of Jason and Peter. The tongue of the exhausted delivery horse was almost hanging from its mouth. There were narrow streaks of red in the east when the conspirators sneaked into the alley behind the grocery with the last load that they felt they dared take. Jason spent the day carrying these things to the rooms which Peter Potter had made for him over the grocery.

When the returns from the public auction of the Spellman furnishings were brought to the Moreland bank, Martin Moreland was dumbfounded that they should have been so small. He talked about going to the new Spellman home and taking an inventory of what had been kept, but when he mentioned it at home, Mrs. Moreland said quietly: “Martin, for your own sake and for the boy’s sake, don’t push that matter any further. There’s a reaction against the Spellmans right now because people can begin to see what big fools they were to do such a lot of things they couldn’t afford, but there’s never a wave breaks on the shore but some of the water runs back to the sea. There’s going to be a considerable backwash in this affair. From what I can see and hear, Mahala’s holding up her head and going at this thing so bravely, that by and by there’s bound to be a reaction. If you press things too hard and cut too close, it’ll be worse for you, for the boy, and for me, too, in the long run. Besides that, from the list of property you’ve attached that I read in the papers, it looks to me like you’ve got about three times what you should have had anyway.”

A slow grin overspread the face of Martin Moreland.

“Three times?” he said. “Well, maybe. But in interest I usually aim to get about ten per cent. I don’t know why you’d think in a deal like this that I’d be satisfied merely to triple things.”

Mrs. Moreland stood very still. Then she looked at her husband reflectively.

“Would it be any use for me to ask you,” she said quietly, “to go as light as you can? I don’t often interfere in business. I don’t recall that I ever have before, but I like Mrs. Spellman. I liked Mr. Spellman. I liked all of them. I thought they were fine people, and so did every one else. I can see from the aggregate that you’ve been piling—I mean, Mahlon Spellman’s been piling—up heaps of indebtedness all these years. You shouldn’t have let him do it. His affairs could have been managed——”

“Now right here is where you stop,” said Martin Moreland tersely. “You don’t know a damned thing that you’re talking about. You’re only indulging in guess work. If you feel that you have a conscience that must be satisfied in this matter, you come down to the bank and take a look at the notes, the mortgages, and the loans that I’ve made that poor fool, carrying him along, trying in every way to save his property and to help him out, till it got to the place where I just good naturedly had to get the money out of it or run the risk of smashing myself.”

Mrs. Moreland closed her lips and stood in meditation.

At last she remarked: “They tell me that, stuck up big and white and all painted up fancy as if it were a thing to be proud of, Mahala has got a sign in the front dooryard asking to make over hats and remodel dresses.”

“She has,” said Martin Moreland. “I took the pains to see it myself. It’s very big and the letters are most artistic; there’s a glitter about it and it reads: ‘Miss Mahala Spellman will remodel your last year’s gown and hat in the latest Parisian mode. Let her show you how fashionable an expert needle can make you appear.’”

“For mercy sake!” said Mrs. Moreland, and then a glint came into her eyes and a look of determination to her face. “Well, I call that pretty nervy,” she said, “for a girl that’s been raised as she has, and has been expecting all her life to go to one of the best colleges in the land this fall, for four years more of pampering, I must say I like her pluck!”

Martin Moreland grinned.

“I wonder what you’d think,” he said, “if I should tell you what the young lady you admire so much has to say about your son and about me.” And then he told her what had occurred. But he did not tell her that because it had occurred, the writs of attachment had been issued at that time. He finished by saying: “Since you so greatly admire the young lady, by all means be her first patron. I’ve never seen you when either your gown or your hat wouldn’t have been better for an application of Spellman taste.”

Mrs. Moreland thought the matter over.

“Martin, I wonder at you,” she said slowly. “Of course, it makes me mad to have her treat Junior the lovely way she always has, and then suddenly turn on him like this. I can’t imagine why she did it. I can’t believe she really meant it.”

“Junior believes that she meant it,” he said tersely.

“Anyway,” said Mrs. Moreland, “I couldn’t possibly follow your suggestion since you issued those attachments and made the foreclosure. It wouldn’t look right for me to be the first, or among the first, to go and offer Mahala work.”

Martin Moreland’s laugh was so genuine that he almost convinced his wife of its spontaneity.

“Well, it would look good to me,” he said. “It would look like just exactly the right and proper thing.”

At the new Spellman home, with Jemima and Mahala at the task of ministering to the stricken woman and arranging the house, matters progressed speedily. In a day or two things were in a reasonable state of order. Lying in her own bed in the tiny, dingy room, Elizabeth Spellman kept her eyes shut, because every time she opened them her surroundings struck her dainty, beauty-loving soul a blow that brought into full realization the height and the depth of her loss. It was these shocking, ugly things obtruding themselves that threw her back constantly upon the greater proposition which constituted the loss of Mahlon. She had believed in him; she had loved him; she had waited upon him; she had well nigh worshipped him. He had completely satisfied her every desire and ambition. She had no conception of life that would not allow them to go hand in hand, as they had gone every day since their marriage, down a peaceful path that was supposed to end at the pearly gates. Elizabeth had no vision of Mahlon that did not encompass him marching in full pride, head erect and unchallenged, through these same pearly gates, and even the desire to be with and to help Mahala, could not keep her from wishing that hand in hand with him, she was marching beside him now. She could conceive of no reason in her orderly life as to why she should be challenged entrance. “Sweeping through the gates” with her was a literal proposition. She was sorry in her soul that when Mahlon swept through, she had not been with him, and her deepest wish at the moment was that she might join him as speedily as possible. She felt in her heart that it was impossible for her to survive ugliness and poverty and pity, not to mention the contempt, of her former friends and neighbours. She did not want to see any of them. She was thankful when they remained away. The few who came in order to inventory and report what had been saved, had not been able to control either their eyes or their lips.

Elizabeth Spellman was not mentally brilliant, but she was far from a fool. She could translate what was said to her with accuracy. No matter what was said, so long as she looked into eyes, she saw what the lips would say were they really honest. She asked to see no one and refused whoever called if it were a possible thing. She was not interested in anything. She made no effort. She simply lay still, and what time was not devoted to a dazed summary of her calamity and a struggle to think how and why it had befallen her, she spent upon Mahala.

She decided that she had not known Mahala; that she was not the delicate, sensitive creature she had thought her. She admitted that she had failed miserably in rearing her. How could the girl come into her presence with her curls twisted into a rough knot on the top of her head, her body tied up in one of Jemima’s big kitchen aprons, her hands and arms visibly soiled, at times even her face? She would have had more respect for Mahala if the girl had lain down upon her bed, folded her hands, and announced that the blow was too severe for her. It is quite possible that, in such an event, Elizabeth might have arisen and gone to work herself. She felt in her heart that she would die from the horrible shock she had received; she also felt in her heart that her daughter obviously should be enough of a lady to do the same thing. And obviously, Mahala was not that kind of lady; some days her mother doubted if she were a lady at all.

With the elasticity of youth, Mahala accepted her troubles, faced front, and began striking with all her might in self-defence. She had done what she could to make Jemima’s house as attractive as possible. What they were going to live upon she had not discussed with her mother. She wondered, sometimes, what her mother thought. She decided at last that she must feel that there was some income from some property which would furnish them food, and, in the future, the clothing that would be required when the present supply was exhausted. Mrs. Spellman knew nothing of the glittering sign in the small front dooryard, flanked on one side by lilacs and on the other by snowballs, its feet firmly set in the midst of a great bed of flowing striped grass, its outlines softened by an overhanging mist of asparagus. She did not pay enough attention to know that every minute of spare time in the kitchen, Jemima was ripping up old hats and dresses, pressing material, steaming velvet, putting a fresh edge upon artificial leaves and flowers, and that in the living room Mahala, from early morning till far in the night, was bending over frames and patterns, and with her deft fingers putting a touch upon the dresses and the millinery of the few people who came to them that set a distinctive mark destined to arouse envy in other hearts.

Mahala felt that eventually Ashwater would make its path to her door. She was already talking with Jemima of the time when they would freshly paper the walls and paint the house, and forecasting a time when there would be a bigger and a better house.

Every time Jason, hurt and anxious eyed, delivered a basket of groceries at the back door, he used the opportunity to offer to Jemima to hang pictures or curtains, or do any heavy work entailed by moving. One day, in Jemima’s absence, Mahala unpacked a basket Jason had brought and she found in it several things that she had not ordered. These she returned to the basket.

She said quietly to Jason: “You have made a mistake. I didn’t order those things.”

Jason answered with hardihood: “No, but those things go into the baskets of all of our customers these days. They are samples that are sent to us by factories. They’re new kinds of food that Peter Potter wants all of his customers to try.”

In the face of this Mahala thanked Jason and kept the samples that he had brought. She may have had a doubt that every grocery basket in Ashwater contained the lavish number of samples that came in hers, but she realized that Jason and Peter were two persons out of the whole town who were trying to be generous, to be kind, to conceal their heartfelt pity for the thing that had happened to her and to her mother.

With the empty basket in his hand, Jason stood watching Mahala. He was trying to think of some excuse for remaining. To him she shone like a star in her dark, ugly environment. The boy who never had known a real home or mother love, worshipped her as he would have worshipped an angel. But in the close contact that he had reached with her in the days of her adversity, he had learned that her needs were strictly human. He could not help seeing that even her closest friends of a short time previous were beginning quietly but definitely to desert her. Through the assistance he had been able to give her in moving and settling, he could not keep from observing that none of Mrs. Spellman’s former friends and none of Mahala’s were on the spot to offer either sympathy or help. In his heart the old bitterness and the rebellion against the power of the banker surged up to white heat. Here was another manifestation of what riches could do.

He had watched every day to learn whether Junior was still Mahala’s friend, and he had decided that Junior had deserted her when he discovered that she was not the creature of wealth and influence that she always had been. His heart almost broken for her, he impulsively started toward her.

“Mahala,” he cried, “I wish——”

Mahala turned toward him. The detailed picture of her beauty struck him forcibly. He remembered the culture of her home life, her careful rearing, her mental and physical fineness.

She was smiling on him quietly as she said, in a subdued voice: “You wish what, Jason?”

Realizing the immeasurable distance between them, he found himself unable to say what it was that he wished, so he temporized: “I wish,” he said, “that everything in this world was different.”

Mahala knew that he, too, had been stripped of even the little that he had; that he had lost his mother. She wholly misunderstood.

She asked sympathetically: “Do you never hear anything concerning your mother, Jason?” and this, more than anything else, brought him to quick realization of the distance between them.

Slowly he shook his head.

At last he said: “She never in all her life acted toward me as I have seen other mothers act toward their boys, and since she went away and left me without a word as she did, I am beginning to believe that she was not my real mother.”

When his own ears heard this shameful admission from his lips, he was overwhelmed. He wheeled and hurried from the house precipitately. Mahala followed a step or two to the door and stood looking after him thoughtfully. Then she heard her mother calling and hurried to attend to her wants.