EWING found Kensington like a village dropped from the clouds of stageland, its wide, grass-bordered streets arched with giant elms and flanked by square old houses, drowsing behind their flower gardens and green lawns. The house to which he went was equally a stage house. Only in that land of pretense had he seen its like: a big, square, gray house, its drab slate roof and red chimneys all but hidden by the elms that towered above it like mammoth feather dusters, its wide piazzas screened from the street by a hoary hedge of lilac. The house seemed to drowse in a comfortable lethargy, confident of the rectitude of builders long dead who had roughhewn its beams and joined them with wooden pins before a day of nails. In Ewing's own room, far up between the hunched shoulders of the house, the windows gave closely on one of the elms, so that he could hear its whispers night and morning from his canopied bed of four posts. The other rooms were broad and low of ceiling, and there were long, high-backed sofas, slim-legged chairs, and tables of mahogany or rosewood, desks, cabinets, and highboys of an outlandish grace, that charmed with hints of a mellowed past—of past overlaying past in sleeping strata.

The woman whose house this was seemed to Ewing to be its true spirit. She, too, drowsed anciently, a thing of old lace and lavender, yet of a certain gentle and antique sprightliness, of cheeks preserving a hint of time-worn pink, mellowed like the scrap of her flowered wedding dress shut between the leaves of an "Annual" half a century old.

And Ewing found in the house, too, the girl who had once talked half an hour with him by an exigent tea table. She had been a thing of shy restraint then, showing with an almost old-fashioned simplicity against her background of townish sophistication. Now he found her demurely modern in this huddle of mellowed relics. She it was who interpreted for him the antique mysteries of house and town. She paraded before him the treasures of her aunt, from the pewter plates and silver-gilt candelabra to camphor-scented brocades long hidden in cedar chests in the ghostly attic. But she performed her office with irreverence; as when, in the attic's gloom, she held the festal gown of some departed great-grandmother before her own robust figure to show how tiny were grandmothers in those days, for the yoke but a little more than half spanned her breadth as she smirked above it in scorn of its narrowness.

In that subdued light the girl's skin was flawless, her eyes were shaded to murkiness, and a mote-ridden shaft of sunlight struck her hair to a radiant yellow. But out of doors these matters could be seen to another effect. The hair was only a yellowish brown, the eyes lost their shadows and became the lucid green of sea waves, and the face was spotted with tiny freckles, like a bird's egg. He liked her best out of doors, breathing as she did of wood and field and sky. Skirts she seemed to wear under protest, as a wood nymph might humor, a little awkwardly, the prejudice of an indoor tribe with which she chose to tarry. When she raced over the lawn with her dog, it was not hard to see that clothing was an ungraceful impediment, even the short-skirted gowns she wore by day. In the longer affairs of evening, though she strove to subdue her spirits to them, she still had an air of the open, as if she but played at being a lady and might forget at any moment. Ewing was shyer of her when evening brought this change of habit. At such times he found it easier to talk to Mrs. Laithe, who sat—or, oftener, lay—with her eyes turned from the light, speaking but little.

"I'm glad to be away from town," she said to him, as he sat a moment beside her one day, "and I'm glad you're away. I need to be quiet, and you shall do as you like. Virginia will go about with you and make you gay. Virginia always makes us gay."

Unconsciously her hand had fallen on his sleeve, curling and fastening there, and when he rose he was disturbed to see that he had shaken off so tender a thing.

"I didn't know you were holding me," he said, in apology, and lifted the fallen hand.

"Such foolish hands! Your sister's are tiny, too, but they look as if they could turn a doorknob." He leisurely turned it this way and that to see its lines, and compared the fingernails with his own to show how absurd they were. And all the time it seemed to the woman that her hand had a little heart in it that was beating to suffocation.

"There, Virginia is beckoning to you from the path—perhaps you can finish my hand another time." She laughed. "I hope you're not seriously annoyed about it."

"It's foolish," he insisted, and replaced it with elaborate care. Then he ran to join his ruddy cicerone. He found the girl a good comrade, who helped him to forget those things he wished to forget. Somehow in the quiet air, that nameless secret thing that had been eating his heart drew off a little. Almost he could believe it had all been some hideous mistake.

He tried at first to join Virginia in her sports. Tennis looked foolishly easy, but after sending four of the balls beyond recovery he suspected that the game might demand something more than willingness and strength, and relinquished his racquet to watch the girl. He felt the glow of the sport in following her swift movements, and he envied the young men who could play with her.

Golf looked not only easy but useless; and it was with only half a heart that he essayed it. He splintered a driver at his first attempt, and he did not venture a second. Still, he liked golf better than tennis, he decided, for he could carry the bag of things she played with and hunt lost balls, and wander over the course alone with her. He was never able to believe that a stroke more or less in holing the ball could be a matter of real moment, but the girl was worth watching while she believed it. He had never seen a real girl near before, and he was surprised to find it so fine a sight.

In the canoe he was more successful, contriving to accomplish by sheer strength of arm what the girl did more adroitly. They would paddle far up the little river, to float down in the late afternoon. The river, too, was a stage river, running between low, willow-fringed banks, or winding among hay fields that sloped back to the upland, or lush green meadows where cows were posed effectively. The girl became part of the picture when they turned to float homeward, facing him from the bow, her hair glinting yellow and her skin crystal clear against the crimson cushion she leaned upon.

They rode together, too—he could join her there—over the upland and far into the little hills, between tangled hedge rows, past little farms with orchards of ripening fruit. They passed many deserted places, mournful in their stagnation, overgrown with wild things, the houses forlornly dismantled, perhaps with the roof sunken, the chimney toppled, and the weather-beaten walls in ruinous decay. He was touched by these places. The houses must have been built with high hope, and once have been alive with full-hearted effort. Their walls had enclosed dreams and joyous dramas. Then discouragement had fallen and the search for another place of beginning. He wondered what had become of all the people who had built these homes. He hoped they had begun in another place with undimmed resolve and had found peace. Yet there were sinister hints that their ghosts haunted these spots of their first failures, beseeching of the ruins something of the first freshness of impulse.

He tried to tell Virginia Bartell that he, too, was like a deserted farm, falling into ruin. But this only made her laugh. She could not believe in failure, it seemed. And he laughed with her, after a little. It was not possible, after all, to suppose that he could go on being a ruin forever. These frustrated home makers must have succeeded at last, and so would he. In some manner the girl herself became an assurance of this. Her mere buoyancy uplifted him.

These times alone with the girl were not always to be had for the asking. There abounded other youths who prized her companionship; able, dauntless youths and skilled with accomplishments.

There was one of these, a tall young man, spectacled, of a high shiny forehead, a student of a youth, who haunted the gray house like a malignant wraith of erudition, and condescended to the girl almost as flagrantly as he did to Ewing. His talk, whether of machinery or morals, socialism or chemistry, was meant to instruct. Wherefore the girl slunk from him, not always so skilfully as might have been wished—with far less subtlety, indeed, than her aunt wished.

"I'm almost certain you offended him this afternoon," she remarked on a day when they had fled flagrantly to the river, "though why you should wish to avoid him is beyond me. You know that he's from one of the very oldest families in West Roxbury." The girl's tone was penitent as she answered: "But I'd promised to go in the canoe with Mr. Ewing." There was no penitence, however, in the look she flashed at Ewing over her aunt's shoulder, daring him to prove if he were a man. He nerved himself in the glance.

"But you see, Mrs. Ranley, I'm from one of the very oldest families in Hinsdale County, Colorado." The girl applauded him with her eyes, and the incident was closed with a word of mild gratification from the old lady. She was pleased to observe that he felt a family pride, even though any county in Colorado was, of course, beyond consideration.

Their favorite walk home from the golf links led them through a churchyard, and here they often rested in the cool of the afternoon; not in the new part where monument and mound were obtrusively recent, but up the hill from these, where death was so ancient as to be touched with the grace of the antique. Here, in a pleasant gloom of oak shade, cypress and elm, they loitered among the drab stones that headed mounds worn down and overgrown with sweetbrier, wild rose, and matted grass; and here Mrs. Laithe sometimes joined them for the homeward stroll, walking too much, Ewing thought, like one who had risen from the forgotten multitude under foot. Yet, when he spoke of her health she always responded with her gay assurances, and seemed, indeed, to be more concerned about his welfare than her own. He had not been able to talk to her freely. There was so much about Teevan that he felt she would not understand. Besides, he could not speak to her about Teevan.

At the end of the first week he had written to Teevan to say that he must talk with him. The little man had replied from his favorite sea place, naming a day when he would be back in town.

The prospect depressed Ewing anew. It had been easy to lie on his back in a field, nettled by disgust with himself, and frame speeches of self-mastery. But reflection had brought him doubt. The speeches would have to be made, and yet, in a way, he was Teevan's property; Teevan had invested money in him. This added to his depression. And this was why the girl reported him to her sister as a youth joyful in odd moments of forgetting, but sunk in some black despair when he remembered; a young man she could not at all understand. And Mrs. Laithe, puzzling over his trouble, divining that Teevan would somehow be at the bottom of it, determined on a move to aid him, a move that would take her once more to Teevan himself. She had sought him the night after her talk with Sydenham, but the interview had come to nothing. Teevan had been so plausibly solicitous about Ewing's success that she had found herself unready to tax him with a knowledge of Ewing's identity, or with motives inimical to him. His excessive amiability, his air of unsuspecting sincerity, had disarmed her. But this time, she determined, there would be no more fencing. She would attack straightforwardly.

The day they left the girl lightly bade Ewing farewell with talk of meetings in town. He had not told her of a resolve formed the day before when they had ridden to a hill above the village from which they could see veritable mountains in the distance—his own delectable mountains they had seemed, calling to him. Instantly he had determined to go back to his own. Not in defeat, but for fresh courage. He would stay there working as he could, until Teevan was paid. Then the Rookery would know him again, and the men of the Monastery—know him going his own way.

He was meditating gloomily on his retreat as the train bore him back to town with Mrs. Laithe. And she, alive to the distress that showed in his face, forgot everything but him, the one she had helplessly and irrevocably taken for her own, half her entreating child, half her master, terrible and beloved. She watched his face from half-closed eyes, finding it unutterably sad, and, without her being able to withhold it, her mind constantly repeated the image of an embrace, to soothe and sustain him. Incessantly this unsubstantial enfoldment took place in her inner sense, like some wild drama among ocean-bed things, far below an unrippled surface. Over and over the phantom woman beat down his enemies, encircled him from harm, consoled him against her heart, cherished him like the dear walls of a home. And she could not halt this phantom play. Once she divided her arms and raised them a little, as one in a dream faintly acts his vision. Ewing thought she was drawing her chiffon boa about her, and he replaced it on her shoulders.

Floating about this obsession in her mind was the dismayed thought of Teevan. She was fixed on going to him for the truth, and this disturbed her like a coming battle. She was not used to the feeling of antagonism, she, with her gentle woman's life, but she felt an unknown energy welling up in her—the fierceness of the defender. She would have the truth from Teevan.