Easter came late in April, when, to match man’s mood, it should come; for the world was alive with new vitality. The south winds were infusing their wonder-working heats, and the bluebirds flashing their streaks of color through branches that felt the stir of sap, amid buds that strained to burst. There was the smell of growth where bits of “secret greenness” hid behind the dead leaves of last fall.

On Saturday evening Mrs. Lenox welcomed the same circle that had met at her home the November before, and Lena’s little heart glowed with the soul-satisfying sense of the difference to her. Then she had been a social waif, received on sufferance. Now she was one of them. She could even afford to have her own opinions. The very memory of past discomforts doubled the present blessedness, and Mr. Lenox looked only half the size that he had six months before. It was a long stride to have taken in half a year, and with reason she congratulated herself on her cleverness. In Mr. Lenox’s gravity of manner as he took her in to dinner, she perceived only respect for Mrs. Percival, not knowing that he had in mind the small episode of the Chatterer, which his wife and Miss Elton had agreed to ignore.

“What very sensible people we are!” exclaimed Mrs. Lenox as she surveyed her small table party. “We shall spend to-morrow in hunting for anemones instead of looking at our neighbors’ spring fineries; we shall catch the first robin at his love song, instead of listening to the cut and dried, much-practised church music; and we shall find rest to our souls. Dick, I am sure you need it. You look worn out. I’m afraid politics is proving a hard mistress.”

“I wonder if it is possible to do too much,” said Dick, rousing himself, with manifest languor. “It’s only the way he does it that plays a man out. Here’s Ellery, now, who works like a galley slave and looks as fresh as the proverbial daisy.”

“Well, come, you are criticizing yourself even more severely,” Mr. Lenox said. “You’ll have to learn the secret, Dick, of letting your arms and legs and brain work for you, while your inner man remains at peace. That’s the only way an American man can live in these hustling days; and if you don’t master it, the young men will come in and carry you out by the time that you are fifty.”

“And there are worse things than that,” rejoined Dick. “I suppose it is the universal experience that when one gets out of the freedom of extreme youth and settles down to the jog-trot, harnessed life, the way looks rather long and monotonous. A fellow can’t help feeling tired to think how tired he’ll be before he gets to the end. To-night I feel as old and dry as a mummy. If you touch me, I’ll crumble.”

“Mrs. Lenox and I have been longer in the game than you, Dick,” answered his host whimsically. “We are getting dangerously near the equator; and we do not find ourselves exhausted. On the contrary, I rather think the scenery improves, in some respects, as we go along.”

“You are hardly capable of measuring the common fate. You have had the touchstone of success, and the world has opened up before you. But what depress me and impress me are the sodden people whom I meet by the hundred; and I can’t help reading my fate in the light of theirs. There are such millions of us, obscure and uncounted except on the census.”

“If you will persist in talking serious things,” said Ellery, “isn’t obscurity, after all, an internal and not an external quality? You’ve got to believe that you are a creature that is worth while. There is no bitterness in belonging to the myriads if the myriads are themselves dignified by nature.”

“But are they?” cried Dick, now rousing himself. “I look at every face I pass on the street. I’m always on the search for some ideal quality; and what do I see? Egotism and greed answer me from all their eyes. The ninety and nine have gone astray.”

“Then it belongs to you to be the hundredth who does not go astray; and who gives a satisfactory answer to the same eternal questioning that meets you in the eyes of other men. It’s not given to any man to play a neutral part in the world conflict. In all the magnificent interplay of forces, I doubt if there is any force strong enough to keep one standing still.”

“Yes, my dear Ellery. And it is just that eternal motion that I am complaining about. It is burdensome to the flesh and wearisome to the imagination to look forward to a future of eternal rushing and striving. I have a multitude of experiences every year, and I straightway forget them; and that deepens the impression that all these little affairs of ours, about which we make such an infernal racket at the time, are matters of very small importance in the march of the centuries. The march of the centuries may be majestic, but the waddle of this little ant of a man is not. It’s insignificant.”

“That’s a dangerous state of mind to be in, Dick,” said Lenox.

“And after all, you can’t help being a very important thing to yourself,” said Madeline. “And it must be of eternal significance to you whether your soul is walking with the centuries or against them.”

“My dear Madeline,” answered Dick, “when I am with you and such as you who live on a little remote mountain, eternity seems a very important matter; but when I am with most people, next Wednesday, when taxes are due, looms up and shuts out eternity. And you will permit me to think that you women who are sheltered and who sit with the good things of life heaped about you, don’t know very much about practical conditions.”

“But why isn’t my conscience as practical as my clothes?” persisted Madeline. “And why is the fortune made to-day in Montana mines and lost to-morrow in Wall Street any more practical than this same majestic march of the centuries and the great thoughts that circle about it? ‘Practical’ is such a foolish word, Dick.”

“Undoubtedly, to you,” said Dick with a little sneer. “But to most of the race to which we have the honor to belong it is the word that makes the dictionary heavy. It is because you do not know its meaning that you women, or perhaps I ought to use the despised term, ‘ladies,’ become the very beautiful and useless articles that you are—works of art, which may thrill and charm a man for a moment, when he has time to look at them, but which bear little relation to the stress of life which you can not comprehend.”

“Dick!” Madeline spoke almost with tears in her eyes. “It is not like you to have a fling at women.”

“You see I’m gathering wisdom as I go along.”

“Gathering idiocy, you mean,” interposed Mr. Lenox. “Dick, you young fool, the ideal woman is the goal toward which the rest of humanity must run; and the sooner you bend all your practical faculties in that direction, and there abase the knee, the better for you.”

He nodded down the table toward his wife, and she pursed up her lips and said, “You nice goose! That’s the way to keep us sweet-tempered.”

“I hope you’re not going to turn cynic, Dick,” said Ellery. “The rÔle does not fit you.”

“A cynic,” interposed Mrs. Lenox, “always thinks that he has discovered the sourness of the world. In reality all he has found is his own bad digestion. I should hate to think there was anything on my table to cause acute indigestion, Dick.”

“Perhaps there is a cog loose in his brain so that his wheels do not work together,” added Ellery.

“At any rate, cynicism is self-confessed failure; so don’t give way to it,” Mr. Lenox concluded.

“Oh, I give up. Spare me,” cried Dick.

Mrs. Lenox rose with a little nod, and as Madeline swept past him towards the door, Dick turned for an instant and stopped her laughingly.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I did not mean it. I felt like saying something obnoxious.”

“But you always used to want to be nice, Dick,” she answered.

“Miss Elton,” Mrs. Percival spoke severely, as a matron to a heedless girl, “perhaps the gentlemen would prefer to have their smoke alone. Are you coming to the drawing-room with us?”

Later, much later, Lena, in the privacy of her own room, awaited the coming of her husband who seemed to her to prolong outrageously the game of billiards which made his excuse for sitting up a little longer than herself. She shook out her fluff of hair, and arrayed herself in a bewildering pink dressing-gown from beneath which she toasted some very pink toes before the fire. She knew what arguments told on the masculine intellect. And at last Dick came.

“Sit down over there,” she commanded. “No, you shan’t come near me, Dick, until I’ve said my say. I’m really much displeased, and you need not act as though you thought it was a trifling matter.”

Dick sat humbly in the spot appointed.

“Dick, I don’t want you to say any more horrid little things about women. You’ve done it several times lately. The other day you said something to Mr. Early about his ‘glorious freedom’; and you made a sneering remark to Mr. Preston about women’s small dishonesties.”

“Only jokes, I assure you.”

“Everybody knows that women are a great deal better than men.”

“They must be,” said Dick. “Literature is full of statements to that effect.”

“And marriage is far more desirable than ‘glorious freedom’.”

“It is,” answered Dick. “So long as there are things to disagree about, marriage will not lose its savor.”

“You say that in a perfectly mean way, as though you did not really believe anything nice. But whether you believe it or not, I am going to ask you not to talk so any more,” Mrs. Percival went on with dignity, “because it sounds exactly like a criticism of me, and I think you owe it to me to treat me with respect. What must people think of me when you fling in—what do you call them—innuendoes like that around?”

Mr. Percival looked at his wife in silence; then he picked her up, chair and all, and whirled her around in front of a long pier glass.

“Do you see that?” he demanded.

Lena saw and dimpled.

“Now I propose,” Dick went on, “to carry you down stairs, just as you are! I shall then arouse the whole household by my shouts and gather them around you; and when every man jack of them is there, I shall say ‘Ladies and gentlemen, is it possible for a man whose wife looks like this to utter any serious accusation against femininity?’”

“Dick, don’t be silly,” said Lena, pouting with pleasure, and she glanced again at herself in the glass. “I am nice, am I not?”

“Nice!” ejaculated Dick, “Huyler and Maillard and Whitman and Lowney, all rolled into one big candy man, never dreamed of anything so sweet. Did you really think I was disrespectful? Why, little Lena!”

Easter morning dawned, a God-given splendor of blue and spring softness, and the six stood, after breakfast, on the veranda and looked at the day.

“Time and the world are before you. Choose how you will spend the forenoon,” said Mrs. Lenox.

“I should like to drive,” Lena promptly replied. “Mr. Lenox was telling me last night about his new pair of horses. I know he is pining to show them off.”

She cast one of her most fascinating glances at her unmoved host.

“Just the thing. How shall we divide up?” And Mrs. Lenox looked vaguely around.

“Miss Elton and I,” said Norris boldly, “are going to row, just as we used last summer.”

Madeline glanced sidewise at him with some astonishment, as he made this radical statement, but although she pondered a moment, she offered no objection. Dick also glanced at him longingly as he said “last summer”. Our lives seem made of little bits that have small relation with each other. Things just happen. And yet, when we look back over a long stretch we realize that life is a coherent whole, that it leads somewhere, and Dick’s life had led a long way in the past year. So he too became grave but said nothing, as he resigned himself to a back seat beside Mrs. Lenox and watched Lena perched airily beside her host.

“Now I hope that matter will be amicably settled,” Mrs. Lenox began, looking with a satisfied air at the two unmarried people who were starting toward the boat-house.

“What!” Dick exclaimed with a sudden start.

“Are you a bat that you can not see daylight facts?” she cried, turning upon him.

“I dare say I am.” And he looked very sober. “Yes, I suppose it is all right. Norris is one of those fellows who always knows what he wants, and just plods along until he gets it.”

“I said ‘row’,” Ellery remarked as he pushed the boat out from shore, “but I meant ‘loaf and invite the soul’. The sunlight is too delectable for anything strenuous.”

“But inviting the soul is always a solitary experience,” objected Madeline.

“Perhaps. But it is delightful to know that there is a sister soul also inviting herself close at hand. I hope yours will accept the invitation. ‘At home—the soul of Mr. Ellery Norris, to meet the soul of Miss Madeline Elton’.”

A soft flush rose over Madeline’s face and she devoted herself to the tiller ropes.

“P.S. Please come,” Ellery went on with a laugh. “R.S.V.P.”

“Aren’t you ‘flouting old ends’?” she smiled.

“I hoped I was flouting new beginnings,” he answered soberly, and he rowed languidly in a silence which Madeline rushed to fill.

“I’ve been thinking ever since last night about Dick,” she said. “He is so different from the buoyant creature of last summer. And it is only a year.”

“Well, perhaps this is a phase.” He rested on his oars and looked at her. “Dick is healthy, and joy is his normal state. He ought to be able to recover from his malady.”

“Sometimes I think it is permanent.”

“I am almost afraid, too. But you see you can not get any bargains in the department store of this world. You have to pay full price for everything. If you want self-indulgence, you have to pay your health; if you want health, you have to pay self-control. You never pay less than the value of what you get, and you are often horribly over-charged for a very inferior article. Now Dick wanted Lena Quincy. He bought a little gratification, and paid—”

“What?”

“Everything he had,” answered Norris abruptly. “Do you think I have not watched his courage and ideals wither as if they had been frosted? He is numb. ‘Heavy as frost,’ Wordsworth said, and that’s the weightiest figure he could find. It did not take her a month to begin to change him. In three months she has him well started. Isn’t it a pity that the worse one of the two should have the controlling force? But Dick’s very volatility that we love has laid him open to this thing.”

“I’m glad,” said Madeline slowly, “that he has his political interest.”

“Yes, he’s going into it with a kind of fury.”

“Won’t that give him a big outlet?”

“He may get a lot of satisfaction and do a really creditable thing.”

“Your tone does not sound very hopeful.”

“A single interest in life may accomplish more for the world, but I don’t believe it is very satisfactory for one’s self.”

Madeline looked at him inquiringly.

“God gives us of His own creative power,” he said reverently, and there came into his very practical face that dreamy look which she had seen there once or twice before. “He supplies us with the raw materials of the universe, gold and beauty and food and desire—and love—and He bids us out of these things to build a man. We can’t build a successful man if we use only one ingredient. We get a complete man only when we use them all.”

Madeline stared off across the waters, and Ellery watched her over shipped oars. At last he said, “But are you going to think only of Dick, and Dick, and Dick for ever?”

She turned on him a face flushed but utterly frank.

“I know what you are thinking,” she said. “But you are mistaken, quite mistaken.” And she met his eyes squarely in spite of her heightened color. “At this very moment I was thinking more of you than of him,” she added.

“And what of me?”

“I was thinking how I misread you at first. I thought you a kind of grub.”

“And now?”

“That you are dogged and persistent; and that therefore you stick to your ideals better than he.”

“Do you know how comparatively easy that is, even for a plodder, when his ideals are set up before him in visible form, so that he can not forget them by day or by night? I wonder if you can realize what it means to have a face like yours looking up from every dirty strip of galley-proof, and a voice like yours sounding under the rumble of the big presses. It’s something of a possession for an every-day man.” A soft glow that might have been a trick of the spring sun spread over Madeline’s face. There is no thought more intoxicating to a girl than to feel that she stands to a man for his ideals. A long sweet silence fell between them, while she mused on this thing, and he watched her in tense anxiety.

“Madeline!” he cried, suddenly leaning forward and catching her hands. “I must tell you! You must know, and I must know!”

With the grasp of his fingers, the first physical touch of love, an electric pang seemed to leap through the girl’s body; and in the flash were shown to her new heights and depths in herself, and a thousand dim things in the future. She felt, in the man, the revelation of that mystery by which the body’s passion slips into passion of the soul—that soul-love, which by its very nature can never know lassitude nor revulsion. And what was actual in him, grew radiant with possibility in herself.

She looked up to meet his eager face and his eyes like lamps. “No, no!” she cried. “Don’t tell me.”

“But do you know without telling?”

“I must think.”

“But surely you must have read it long ago.”

“I only glanced at it. I never looked it in the face.”

“Don’t examine it too closely now, or I’m afraid you will find it a poor thing,” he said whimsically. “Take it on impulse, Madeline.”

But she waved him away with her hand, turning her face to one side, and leaned back in her cushions, while Ellery waited, hardly breathing. There was a deep hush on the opal waters under the April morning sky, and no sound but the far-off note of a wood-thrush.

“Madeline!” he cried at last. “Be merciful, and speak to me.”

She gathered her self-possession and turned to face him with smiles and dimples, and one swift look full in the face.

“Mr. Norris,” she said airily, and then laughed as his face fell at the title, “we are in the middle of a big sheet of water, and I do not want you to upset the boat; we are visible from many miles of shore, and the world and his wife are driving and motoring on this most beautiful of days; but over on our right there is a lovely little beach, and a clump of willows that have forced the season a bit. Perhaps, if we went there, I might listen to what you have to say.”

“Oh, Madeline, my Madeline,” he said, “I can never tell you because the words are not made that will hold it, and it will take a lifetime to tell it all. But, if you are willing, we will make a beginning over there by the dipping willows.” He shot a stormy glance at her as he caught the oars, and she met it bravely. “Please don’t trail your fingers in the water,” he said. “You are delaying the progress of the boat.”

“Heaven forbid delay!” she cried in mock horror, and showered him with the drops from her lifted hand.

The keel grated, and Ellery sprang ashore and held out his arms to help her.

“Madeline,” he said, sternly holding her at arm’s length, “this spot is so evidently created for a lovers’ bower, that I suspect you of having had your eye on it for a long time. How did you come to direct me here?”

“Instinct,” she laughed. “That wonderful instinct of woman.”

“Shall we stay here for ever and let the world wag?”

“And live on locusts and wild honey?” she asked.

“Yes, if you will be my wild honey. I’m going to begin to devour you right away.” And he caught her at last.

“Who gave you permission?” she whispered with cheek close to his.

“Who? Haven’t you heard the universe shouting aloud? The sky, and the sun and the lake and the woods. They’ve been crying ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’ for the last ten minutes. You’ll never contradict them, sweetheart?”

“Never,” said she.

For a long moment they looked into each other’s eyes, and she read in his that mastery without tyranny which for some inexplicable reason sets a woman’s heart beating with unimagined bliss.

Ten minutes later, or so it seemed, Madeline pulled his watch from his pocket and started in dismay.

“Ellery,” she cried, “do you know that we have been sitting here for four hours? What will Mrs. Lenox and all the others think?”

“Who cares what they think? Let them think the truth, if their imaginations can soar to that height.”

“We must hurry back.”

“Don’t you think it is a little brutal to invite a man to leave Heaven and go back to earth?”

“Perhaps we need a dose of the world. Medicine is good for one.”

“Not unless he is ill; and I was never well till now.”

“Come, Ellery, we really must go,” she said with severity.

“Well, there’s lunch,” he meditated. “I confess that I can view the prospect of luncheon with something like equanimity. There are certain advantages about the world, Madeline.”

It was long after the driving party had returned when Miss Elton and Mr. Norris strolled up the path from the boat-house, quite indifferent to the fact of their lateness. Dick on the piazza watched their coming and needed no handwriting on the wall. The girl glowed and Ellery reflected her light.

“It would be a perfect woman who should unite her spirit with Lena’s soul-delighting body,” Percival said to himself. “And Ellery chooses the spirit, and I, God help me, love and choose the body. But I can not bear to meet them.”

He was turning to slip away when he met his wife face to face, and stopped half in curiosity to see what she would notice and hear what she would say. Lena, too, gazed at the oblivious advancing pair.

“Well, of all things!” exclaimed Mrs. Percival. “I should think she’d feel pretty cheap.”

“Why?” asked Dick, startled.

“Coming down to a nobody like that!” Lena retorted in scorn. “But I think she has been going off in her looks lately, and I dare say she knows it, and is glad to get even him.”

The billiard room was empty, and Dick went in and shut the door.