I, with my eyes fastened on the romance of Mrs. Payne and Mr. Sylvester, had noticed nothing; the explanation that Roger had gone off for a few days with friends was enough for me; but it was Alec, with a keener vision, who had seen something wrong.

“What ails Ellen?” he had asked me.

“Why—what should?” I asked.

“Roberta,” said Alec, “is Ellen in love with Roger?”

“How should I know?” said I.

Alec looked down, kicking the dust before him with the gesture of a little boy.

“It would be natural if they cared for each other,” he continued. Then he suddenly flung out his hand and said, “If it’s so, he won’t ever make her happy.”

“Why, Alec, what do you mean?” I said.

“He’s only thinking about himself; he’s interested only in Roger Byington,” Alec declared with vehemence. He filled these next days as full of himself as he could; making Ellen laugh at his fantastic goings-on as he pretended to be the bulletin which announced how far the gossip had reached. With his tender second sight he tried to hide Ellen from herself or whatever it was that was troubling her.

As Ellen said, the trouble couldn’t last forever, and the end came unexpectedly. While we were sitting in the orchard I saw Ellen’s hand go to her heart and her face change color; she sat still a lovely, quivering thing, with all the soul of her running out to meet Roger, and he advanced through the sweet clover, swishing at it with a little cherry wand that he had cut when walking. He had gone away a fairy prince—his only fault had been loving Ellen too much—and he came back a naughty little boy. Even I noticed the change in him. There was an arrogant, willful tilt to his head which belied the lightness of his disarming manner, and one which said: “First I’ll try to coax you into good humor, but beware of my stubbornness if you find fault with me too far.” He was the male that will not admit that he has faults. “Be thankful that I’m back at all,” was what his bearing implied; “and we’ll ignore also that I’ve been away, if you please.”

Ellen, poor child, had no idea of blaming him, any more than she had an instinct of hiding her emotions. Never once had she blamed Roger, even to herself, for going away, and at the sudden end of her suspense uncontrollable tears came to her eyes. Men have written books about the folly of the tears of women. Who knows it better than they, poor things? There are uncontrollable women, of course, who are as spendthrift with tears as some men of anger. Tears like these of Ellen’s are as unexpected and uncontrollable as a sudden storm, and I, knowing what it meant when Ellen cried, left them quickly.

Ellen wrote about it:—

Here, indeed, was a shifting of base; they had been playing the higher harmonies that men and women play together; their spirits had been in perfect unison; even the tragic parting had had its undercurrent of understanding, and now here they were with their feet on earth; Ellen with homesick eyes for the land of lost content and Roger with a little sneer that she should have let him see that she had no pride against him. Her absence of coquetry was her undoing. He knew now he could put her down or take her up at will, and her price was a few tears. Her spirit stood out in that moment of welcome, shining and naked, her little shy spirit, the reflection of whose light alone had been enough for Alec.

From the point of view of age, it is Roger for whom I am sorry, for with all courage and charm and ability and the swift, pulsing flow of life in him, life had tainted him already so that this ultimate gift of herself made him think Ellen too easy of attainment. The situation was one that had been repeated time and time again, sometimes by men and sometimes by women. Roger had had his naughtiness and his lack of consideration and his sudden and impatient vanishing out of a difficult situation treated by tears and reproaches. Poor Ellen, by her very innocence, had trodden a path of the emotion familiar to him, since his way out of difficulties had been a sudden impatient vanishing. If she could have only had the inspired sense to have taken his return in a matter-of-course manner, it would have piqued him, and again Ellen would have won; but how play sorry games like this with the best beloved? One of the sad things of love is that it is in absurd and trivial ways like this that it falls from its highest state and loses its radiance.

From the account of her journal they jogged along a few days at a slack-water; Ellen groping forever for Roger, Roger a little bored at the too-eagerly offered heart; their positions oddly reversed; Roger rather magnificently forgiving Ellen for having annoyed him.

Then suddenly into this doldrums of the emotions burst Miss Grant. A flaming affection is hard to hide. It shines like a light behind a closed door,—let two people walk ever so carefully. Now the eyes of one follow the other and the look is a caress; now some one intercepts an exchange of glances, and that exchange means, to any one whose heart has beat fast for love, a promise of everlasting devotion; you see a girl’s hand steal to her fast-beating heart, or the young man waiting for her with that aching impatience of the young.

So gossip had begun about Roger and Ellen. Some one had seen them walking down the street so absorbed that they had seen no one else; another had noticed Ellen walking across the bridge to the mountain and Roger going before her. Little by little the people who had separately observed these things had talked together until between them they had pieced together from broken fragments the whole story, and then, like a picture thrown unexpectedly on the screen, the gossip of it came to Miss Grant.

I suppose she had gotten bits of it before, hints and innuendoes, of the kind people give who are too pusillanimous to face a woman like Miss Sarah with a point-blank question. The whole thing was focused one afternoon when she had said lightly to Mrs. Snow that she didn’t know where on earth Roger had passed his time in such a quiet little town.

“Well, Sarah, if you spent more time down at Emily’s, perhaps you’d know.”

To Miss Sarah’s hot, “What do you mean?”— “I mean that wherever Ellen is, Roger’s apt to be, and no reason making such big eyes at me; a very nice sort of thing, I think it.”

Miss Sarah merely put on her bonnet and shawl and marched majestically down the hill. She found Ellen on the back porch, in the midst of a foam of ruffles she was hemming for her mother’s gown. She towered above Ellen, an avenging fate, whose gray curls bobbed on each side of her head.

“Ellen, what’s this gossip I hear about you and Roger?” she demanded. Before Ellen had time to reply, as though she read her confession in the color that mounted to her face, “How could you do such a thing, Ellen?” she fumed. “Don’t you know that Roger Byington came here to work and settle down; don’t you know that he has a marriage already planned? Don’t you see the position you’ve put your family in, that of snatching at the fortune of an old friend! A fortune that’s destined elsewhere, and that we were bound, you as well as I, to guard! You’ve been deceiving the whole of us!”

Ellen rose to her feet and faced her, her sewing still in her hands, the blue ruffles around her white frock like a wave of the sea.

“I’ve deceived no one, Aunt Sarah,” said she, with a touch of sternness in her voice, and just here Roger appeared.

He had heard voices, and had heard his and Ellen’s names mentioned, and he had then seen Miss Grant storming down the hill like some aged New England Valkyrie and had followed her. He arrived in time around the side of the house to catch her last words, and the flaming anger that any one should scold his Ellen blew away forever the flatness that had for a moment assailed them.

He threw his arms around Ellen as though he would protect her from everything for all time. “Miss Grant,” he said, “the reason I’m here in this town is Ellen. I walked through here one time and I saw Ellen and talked with her for a few minutes by the roadside, and so I came back. No one else I’ve ever seen in life matters to me—nothing else but Ellen matters. Please remember that if I amount to anything ever, it will be because of Ellen, and if I fail, it will be because I have failed Ellen. Had I had my way Ellen would not have been here now with you; she’d be married to me.”

SHE TOWERED ABOVE ELLEN, AN AVENGING FATE

Ellen wrote:—

The old lady measured the young people with an angry gaze.

“Young man,” said she, “I consider you’ve abused my hospitality; you have put me and my brother and my whole family in a false light before your parents. You entangle yourself in sentimentalities with a married woman, you play false with your sweetheart, and when your father wishes you to reconstruct your life, you throw them both over and place me in the position of having seemed to connive at a marriage with my niece. I shall write your mother my disapproval by the next post, and if Ellen knew as much of your past history as I do, she wouldn’t take this sudden infatuation seriously, and if she had any dignity she would withdraw at once from this false position.”

“Your letter,” Roger replied with some heat, “will reach my mother somewhat after my own. When Ellen’s love for her mother overcame her better judgment and she refused to go with me, I wrote my mother on my return as I told her I would do; and now, permit me, Miss Grant, to withdraw from your house which will save your pride in this matter.”

It was an old-fashioned quarrel that Youth and Age indulged in, and Ellen’s journal gives more of it, full of stately words and innuendo and recriminations cloaked in fine-sounding periods, and I think both Roger and Miss Sarah enjoyed their own rhetoric heartily.

Mrs. Payne heard the noise of the combat, and when Miss Sarah realized that her sister had been, as she said, “an accomplice,” her indignation knew no bounds, though she admitted:—

“I’ll do you justice, Emily; you’ve so little common sense that I don’t suppose for a moment you thought of anything but the sentimentality of this ill-governed young man and your Ellen. You didn’t, I suppose, for a moment consider that Ellen is not the sort of a marriage planned for him by his father.”

Mrs. Payne’s wide-eyed, “Why shouldn’t she be? Ellen’s so sweet and pretty,” collapsed the older lady’s anger like a pricked balloon, as nothing else could have done. Ellen’s picture of her is this: “Aunt Sarah flopped down, she didn’t sit, and gathered her draperies around her like a wounded Roman matron.”

Roger, at Mrs. Payne’s words, again put his arm around Ellen and laughed aloud. He adored their unworldliness. The bad little boy in him vanished; so did the man of the world who cannot bear generosity in the beloved. He spoke truly enough when he said all the best things in him ran out ahead of him to meet Ellen. He said to Miss Sarah gently:—

“You see, we really care for each other, Aunt Sarah, and I’m awfully sorry about putting you in a false position, but that doesn’t count very much compared to Ellen’s and my happiness, does it? Please believe me when I tell you that your side of this never occurred to me and so I’ll take myself away to-night.” The moment of high-sounding periods was over.

“Hadn’t you better stay?” asked Miss Sarah. “Think of the talk, Roger.”

“I want talk,” he said,—“all the talk in the world; I would like everybody to know how I care for Ellen—I welcome gossip.”

During the days when they had been at odds with life, they had taken pains to have me with them; it was the first time that they had shown themselves eager for my company together. I had been confidante first for Ellen and then for Roger, and then again for Ellen, but seldom had I seen them both at once. Now, after this explanation with Miss Grant, they unconsciously thrust me aside with no more regard for me than if I had been a withered flower. I was going to Ellen’s to help with the sewing. I had left her a little lack-luster, a little wistful; Roger had been sulky and inclined to cynicism; and now they swept down on me like a splendid young god and goddess, no longer making any effort to keep the town in ignorance; they took it in in a magnificent gesture, the way they looked at each other; shouted it aloud, and, as though to carry out in very truth the words he had spoken to Miss Grant when he said he would like to shout through the town that he loved Ellen, he took her hand in his when he saw me and swung it to and fro; and in my day such an action as this was one which would cause the quiet windows to bristle with interrogatory eyes. You might be perfectly sure that there would be quiet slippings through back doors and gossiping under grape arbors.

That evening I met Roger coming down the street and he stopped to tell me:—

“We’ve had it out with Aunt Sarah, and both Aunt Sarah and I have written to my mother. Now we’ll soon have an end to this shilly-shallying.”

“And if your parents don’t like it?”

“God help them if they don’t,” he said. “Any parents I have will have to like it.”

And there was so sinister a note in his voice that I shivered. Sometimes when he spoke there was a weight to a light word that seemed like a heavy wind.

It was not long before the town had more to talk about. Mrs. Byington, in her beautiful and fashionable clothes, was as conspicuous as though she had come riding in a palanquin. The city and country were much more apart in those days, and home-made patterns taken from some remote city ones were passed from hand to hand; dolls dressed in Boston still carried the mode somewhat; and in our honest village, loveliness was put by with youth, and lovely was the quality of Mrs. Byington. At fifty she was tall and slender, her hair a little gray, her neck graceful like a girl’s; she walked swayingly, and age was not a quality with which she seemed to have reckoned. With the changing years she had a quality as compelling as youth itself, and this without the slightest attempt at seeming less than her years.

Ellen writes:—

It seemed as though all difficulties were cleared from before them, when Ellen found herself face to face with what really was the first important issue of this time. After all, the things in love that count are not all the obstacles imposed on us from without. It is strange to me why people have always written of these rather than of those far more important moments, as when, for instance, one first sees the beloved face to face as he really is. Love for a moment makes us transcend ourselves, and Roger was a brave lover, and Ellen had known nothing of him except Roger the lover, when suddenly she caught a new glimpse of Roger. She wrote:—