When Poppea was nineteen, she became the assistant postmaster at Harley's Mills, with all the legal formality that the name implied, Mr. Oldys having "gone on her bond" as the local saying ran. Not that Gilbert's mental faculties were in any way impaired, but at seventy he was naturally less alert physically, and the long hours told on him. At least Poppea said so, and urged him to spend more time in the garden during pleasant weather in company with his pipe and one of his well-worn books. These, however, had palled upon him, or, as he once told Stephen Latimer, "It seems as if since Poppy grew up and into things, Mr. Plutarch is rather far back, and I don't any more care if Alcibiades returned or not, or much about the siege of Troy, though that's livelier. I want something with more up-to-date flesh and blood in it that'll help me to understand things that come up."

Latimer had suggested Shakespeare as a remedy, at the same time offering to lend Gilbert an edition that had clear print, and yet could be kept in the pocket. So from the day that Latimer brought the books, Gilbert had been under a new spell, while at the same period Miss Emmy had given Poppea the Waverley Novels, which still further changed his emotional horizon, and made him the more willing to leave the office in the warm June days and go to the bench under the widest spreading tree in the old orchard, with clover all about and the brilliant hues and perfumes of what Poppea called her parapet garden showing between the trees.

Satira Pegrim and 'Lisha Potts had finally joined names and farms, though the bustling woman had left her post of vantage at the village with many regrets. When Mrs. Shandy, Philip Angus's erstwhile nurse, had been obliged to leave him at fifteen altogether in the hands of a tutor, she had gladly, for the sake of being near the boy whom she almost worshipped, slipped into Satira's shoes as general caretaker at the post-office house, for Poppea's earnings, with her voice and as Gilbert's assistant, made such a helper possible.

No one in the village ever thought it strange that Poppea should fill a position hitherto occupied by a man. Once Harley's Mills, in the person of its elderly females, would have raised its hands in horror at the thought of a young girl engaging in public business; but the Civil War had changed all that by becoming the origin of the general necessity in North and South alike for the woman's stepping into the man's empty shoes, so that the labor horizon for all time widened for all women.

From John Angus had come the only objection to the innovation. He said openly on several occasions that the charge of the United States mail should not be left in hands that were only fit to tie ribbons or tell a fortune with cards. This superficial criticism was attributed to his old grudge against Gilbert and his evident disgust at not having the chance to dislodge him that a change of postmasters might have rendered easier. As he took no steps toward doing anything in the matter by the usual method of presenting a petition, it was supposed that he had forgotten it, especially as immediately after, Angus went to Europe to be gone six months, on business, his lawyer announced, the truth being that the inscrutable man, jarred and rent by many disappointments and his own unyielding temperament, had received several warnings that he held life by a rather uncertain thread. Too secretive to confess that he was not well by calling in local physicians, he had gone abroad to seek advice under the plea of business.

The last disappointment that he had forced himself to bear with an immovable exterior was concerning Philip. Never from the day that he knew that his only child had the inexorable disease covered by so short a name, had he allowed any one to sympathize with him upon the subject, nor had he admitted by any word or sign that the boy was suffering from any physical limitation. Philip's life was arranged upon the same plan as that of normal children, and nothing by way of affectionate regard or added companionship was allowed to fill the place of all that he must refrain from doing.

Thus the greatest craving that the child had was for the warmth and protection of affection; he saw the fathers of other boys whom he sometimes visited put their arms about the lads' shoulders, draw them to their knees, or make room for them in the great easy-chair, where confidences about the work and play of the day were exchanged. Not so with Philip; the little real love that made him hunger for more had come from the servants and Mrs. Shandy, when they felt that they were out of eye- and ear-shot of the master.

Even this was stopped when Philip was fifteen by Mrs. Shandy's dismissal because John Angus deemed that she was retarding his son's development and keeping him childish. Henceforward a tutor and various teachers of languages were the boy's associates, for Philip must needs go to college and become, if not a lawyer, a man of affairs and politics like his father.

Now Philip loved learning, but on its Æsthetic rather than positive side; beauty of form, color, sound, all appealed to him intensely, and the thought of the beauty shone from his great gray eyes and beautified every feature of his exquisitely modelled face, as though in this Nature had outdone herself.

From the time he was a mere baby he had watched every butterfly and bird and tried to copy them in what Mrs. Shandy called his mud pies; which taste, as he grew, developed itself into a wonderful ability to comprehend both the anatomy of things and their spiritual expression. From time to time, during his winter city life, he had bought small copies of the great statues, for at least he was never at a lack for spending money, and gazed and gazed at them until he knew every curve and line by heart. In short, as boy and youth, Philip's one desire was to be a sculptor; but though John Angus never interfered with his modelling as a recreation, to his appeals to be allowed to enter a studio and study seriously he never made the slightest reply, and the preparations for college were forced on.

One day Philip's brain strength had flagged, suddenly, and, as his father thought, unaccountably. Once again physicians gathered, and this time the word came to John Angus, "If you wish your boy to live, his life must be of the open, and his work, if any, something that he craves and loves."

Then again did John Angus shut himself up for a day and night, to emerge as before and accept the inevitable with a denial of any need of sympathy. In a week he announced that Philip was to study modelling, therefore an outdoor studio was to be built in the garden, and he was to be under the guidance of Clay Howell, a famous sculptor, who not only had studios in Rome and New York, but also a summer home at Westboro. The latest tutor was retained as a companion, and Angus, more ill than he would confess even to himself, set sail at Christmas nominally for a six months' absence.

Philip had as a child a beautiful soprano voice which, by the time he was seventeen, had developed a tenor quality without losing any of its impersonal boyish sweetness. Stephen Latimer had taken great pains in its training, and in his friendship the boy had found the one soul who seemed to understand without spoken words. It was through this companionship that he found that other that seemed to him in his dark hours of self abasement and disappointment, the one light that kept hope alive,—this was Poppea.

As a child he had longed to play with her, and used to watch her by the hour through the port-holes of the parapet, while she was working in the garden that extended from the treasure-trove bank little by little until it finally reached the apple trees. That they might not be playmates Mrs. Shandy made plain to him, though never the reason why. Later on they had met at children's parties at the Feltons' and at the choir practice at St. Luke's, and Poppea had always so sweet and gentle a way with him, that when he used to dream of angels or try to think what his mother must have looked like, Poppea's face was always blended in his visions, for he never felt the stately portrait by Huntington in the library to be his mother.

When at last it was decided that he was not to go to college and life held out an olive branch to Philip, Poppea seemed to be the dove that brought it; Poppea, for whom Stephen Latimer asked Philip to play accompaniments when she went of an afternoon to the Rectory for a singing lesson "between mails," and Jeanne Latimer could not be of the party.

To Latimer, Philip seemed a mere child; it never occurred to him that he might be reckoned with emotionally and sentimentally as a man, and it rejoiced his gentle heart to see the boy so happy.

Any boy is spiritualized and made better by the sympathetic companionship of an older woman if she be of the right mettle, and Latimer believed that this companionship would give Philip the very thing, the conception of the essence of woman's sympathy, that he had lacked all his sad life and that must be realized if he was to grapple successfully with his art. Consequently, he was quite unprepared and almost angry, when after coming into the room one day while they were practising, Jeanne had said:—

"Have a care, Stephen dear, that you do not develop a tragedy in, as you say, cultivating Philip's artistic perceptions. Will it be well, think you, that he falls entirely in love with Poppea?"

Even then Latimer would not understand. "There are many kinds of love that are far removed from tragedy," he answered.

"Yes, but to a sensitive dreamer for a woman like Poppea there is but one love," she had replied almost vehemently.

"You are mistaken, Jeanne, in this. I am with them, and I stand between their thoughts as they pass, and my soul reads them. The safety lies in that Poppea is what she is."

"Time will prove," said Jeanne, half sadly. By the very insistence of certain word combinations this commonplace saying of his wife refused to leave Latimer's memory, and even though it failed in any way to impress him, it left an irritation like the prick of an invisible thorn.

Meanwhile, Poppea and Philip drew nearer together each day.

Howell was finishing a large and important piece of work at his Westboro studio, and for this reason remained there during the summer, and there it was that Philip went every day. The master, to test his creative quality, told him to set about the bit of work he felt he would most like to do, and that he would help him with the technique. Philip's response had been to bring a rough crayon sketch that he had made of Poppea's head and shoulders the last summer when he, looking over the parapet, had seen her pick up a little bird that had fallen from the nest and, after holding it in her hand a moment to still its flutterings, put it back with its brothers. Under the drawing was written Amor Consolatrix.

"Who is it?" the sculptor had asked abruptly. "She will make a good model. I will send for her to come up here if she lives in the neighborhood, as I suppose she does."

"Oh! I couldn't ask her; she isn't a model, but I can remember her face as well as if she were here. Is it not perfect?"

"Head is well set on; forehead, eyes, and chin good; nose a bit too much tipped up for classic proportions." Then, as he saw Philip's face flush and quiver, he added "After all, noses are a matter of taste nowadays when we are getting a long way on the road from Greek placidity, that in the female face expressed little but form, toward the expression of temperament. She'll do, my lad, she'll do; if for no other reason than that you think so.

"Who is she, that is neither a model nor askable?" he inquired a half hour later, as he looked over from his work to where Philip was wrestling mentally and physically with the lump of clay of the size for a bust that the attendant had set upon its block.

"Poppea Gilbert; she lives at the post-office in our town, and there is nobody quite like her," Philip answered, his shyness suddenly rent by the man's offhand air of comradeship, as well as in response to his own need of some one to whom he might speak without restraint.

Howell seldom took pupils, and the price that John Angus had offered him for his services would not alone have tempted him, but the boy had interested him from the first. Now, as he stood there watching the eager face, the light in his eyes, the energy with which he was attacking a well-nigh impossible task, he sighed and said to himself: "So long as he believes there is no one like her, whoever she may be, so long will he be able to work. Her strength will make up for his lack—but if his belief ends—" Here Howell had made an unconscious downward gesture that in its expression of complete destruction knocked the index finger from the outstretched hand of the figure upon which he was impressing the final details.

For Poppea the last year had been rather lonely, so that the post-office work was welcomed as a distraction as much as a necessity. A break had come in the one companionship of her life, for after graduation from college and the law school, Hugh Oldys, to carry out the carefully laid plans of his father, was spending a year in foreign travel before settling in New York, where a niche was waiting for the young man of whose ability and qualities of determination no one who had come in contact with him during his college life had any doubt.

During all this period Hugh had come home at the week ends, so that there had been no absolute break; but when he had finally gone, Poppea felt herself surrounded by a sort of open space wherein the air blew chilly and nothing offered a satisfactory shelter. She did not fully connect cause with effect in all its subtlety, but confessed to herself a loneliness that came simply from the cutting off of her glimpse of the outside world that Hugh had given her. His letters came at regular intervals, but they were largely of things, not people, and least of all himself, so that it was only when she went to see his mother and heard her homely talk that she felt any of the vitality that belonged to the real Hugh.

As for Mrs. Oldys, her eagerness to have Poppea with her was almost pathetic. Locked in her heart, where no one suspected its existence, was the simple mother-vision that so few cherish in its unselfish perfection: in this lay the future of her boy, spent away from her if it was best, and her place supplied by a younger woman to whom the knowledge she had held of his innermost thoughts must be transferred. But in this plan of hers for these many years it had been Poppea who was to be that other woman. Poppea, whom she had watched and brooded over almost as though she had been her own, and to whom now she revealed day by day the devotion with which she had surrounded this only child without in any way letting it hamper his freedom or his manhood.

No word or hint was ever dropped by her, and yet her belief in the outcome was as firmly fixed as if it had been a vital point of religion. Would her faith be shattered? Who could tell or count the pulse beats of a man and a maid, that, being good friends, have temperament and the world before them? Hugh was now trying one with the other. Might it not happen, far away as it seemed, that the change might also lie before Poppea?

It was now May; in August Hugh would return. As for the other traveller from Harley's Mills, John Angus, he was due at almost any moment, and the chill that was settling over his household at the prospect was a tribute to the awe in which he was held that, had he been asked, he doubtless would have preferred to any demonstration of affection.

Philip alone seemed to look forward with pleasure to seeing his father. He was in love with his work; Howell, seeing genius even in his crude efforts, had not only written John Angus, but had told the boy himself all that he dared, knowing that his temperament lay too much on the side of self-abasement to take undue harm from praise. Moreover, Philip had, with his master's help in technique, the expression being all his own, finished the bust of Poppea and had placed it at the window of his garden studio, where the beauty of its modelling was brought out by a background of living green. Surely John Angus must be pleased; must see at last that his son had not so much found his calling as that it had found him.

All about the studio were a score of other attempts of Philip's, very crude, and yet none lacking in a truthful force, and in half of these, what might be called the Poppea motive was visible. This he did not realize, nor would he have thought it strange if he had. Why should he not worship her?

His feeling had been the motive of all art in all ages. So had many a dreaming monk of old in a cloistered garden wrought his thought into a missal's page, his inspiration coming not from his walled-in self, but from the light upon it, shed, it might be, from the ideal of the real Virgin behind her image in the dim-lit shrine.

It chanced that upon the afternoon of John Angus's unheralded return, Poppea and Philip had been bidden to the church to practise a duet which they were to sing on Whitsunday at St. Luke's. This time Stephen Latimer accompanied them on the organ, and the pair standing side by side in the front choir stall facing the empty church, Poppea leaning forward slightly that she might see the music Philip held, with a tender, protective air, made a picture that would have appealed to any painter.

Going to his home to find it empty, Angus felt a quickening of the blood, a desire to see his son for his own sake, perhaps for the first time. Howell's words had pleased him in spite of himself; the crude, early American idea of material progress was now rapidly making way for the realm of literature and art. His life abroad had opened his eyes. To be the father of a famous sculptor had its mitigations, and then too, narrow though he was, he could not but realize the underlying compensation that art deals with the spirit of things and makes as naught any physical defect in its medium. Philip should also travel; he himself would take him.

So on the whole, John Angus was in what might almost be called a genial mood when, on hearing that his son was down at the church with Stephen Latimer, he ordered the carriage (he had walked up from the station) and went to seek him. He also looked in much better physical condition than when he went abroad, and only those who are expert in such matters would have detected the tension at the corners of the nostrils that came from the continual apprehension of the heart condition that had been his for years.

"They are in the church," Jeanne Latimer said, as he greeted her with the polished manner for which he was famous on the doorstep of the Rectory. Then she had fled indoors with the swift sense of foreboding and desire to reach cover that a bird feels when, on a summer day, the wind suddenly changes and the murmur rises of a thunder cloud that as yet but edges the horizon.

Angus, hearing music, opened the door and stepped into the shelter of the very pew that had shielded Poppea that winter night more than six years before. Why he did it he could not have said, but when one is watchful and suspicious by nature, the habit often becomes the dictator. Having turned aside, he waited until the song ended, waited in a condition of mixed rage and pain that amazed him, feelings stirred in him which he believed buried; he seemed in some distant place; he could not account for himself to himself. Even then he did not move at once; the blending of the voices to any other ear had been uplifting. As Philip stepped from the stall to the lower level of the chancel steps and Poppea laid her hand lightly on his shoulder to steady him, John Angus caught the expression of his face, and suspicion, as ever, being his interpreter, he gnashed his teeth.

In another minute he was walking up the aisle masked in the perfect self-control he wore to all outside his household.

"Philip, I have come for you," he said in clearly modulated tones, not realizing that a warmer greeting might be expected after five months of absence.

"Some other day, Mr. Latimer; I've only within an hour returned and wish to see my son," without even a hand clasp, was his reply to the rector's outstretched hand, words of greeting, and invitation to join Mrs. Latimer in a cup of tea in the Rectory.

To Poppea he did not speak; looking toward her, he swept her with a deliberate stare in which dislike and absolute non-recognition were curiously blended. She at first had been impelled to look away, but feeling his glance, she turned and met it proudly, head erect, without either contempt or flinching, and even as she stood thus, John Angus, gathering up the boy's music and the cloak he always wore, hurried him from the church, without time for a word of explanation or good-by.

"Poor Philip," said Poppea, lowering her head, while tears filled the eyes she turned toward Latimer.

"Yes, poor Philip," he echoed; "yet not so poor in any way as John Angus."

Once in the carriage, the man's self-control seemed to dominate him once more. He said nothing about the happenings of the past few minutes, but turned the talk to Philip's work, even before the boy himself had recovered from the suddenness of the meeting with its incomprehensible discordance. The tutor, who had been in Bridgeton, whither he frequently went during Philip's practice afternoons, had returned, and in an agony of apprehension was superintending the arrangements of the tea things on the screened veranda overlooking the garden. He need not have trembled, for John Angus paid no heed to him after a formal greeting, but relaxed unusually in his effort to interest Philip and draw him out, and the boy, warming under his father's rare interest, spoke frankly of his hopes and fears.

"Now will you come to the studio and see it for yourself, father? Of course it's lumpy and out of line in many ways yet, but Howell says that I can do it over and over until it is right, and then, perhaps, you'd have it cut in marble, not because it's good, but because it's the first and I love it so."

Hand in hand father and son crossed the garden, the maids and men-servants peeping from their various windows in amazement until the pair disappeared within the studio door.

"There she is, father. Do you think it is like her?" Philip asked eagerly, pulling the wet cloth from the bust, for every day he saw the need of an added touch here and there.

John Angus had seated himself in a high-backed, carved chair and was gazing at the bust with fierce intensity; whenever he turned his eyes away, it was to see its lineaments in the crude attempts that filled every nook in the long room.

"Like? who is it?" he finally managed to say in well-feigned ignorance.

"Ah, then it can't be, if you do not know, for you saw her singing with me at the church half an hour ago. It is Poppea Gilbert from the post-office house. I suppose it was foolish of me to try to make her as lovely as she really is, though Howell sees the likeness, and yet you did not know."

"Lovely! Know!" John Angus half shouted, jumping to his feet and going toward Philip with an almost threatening gesture. "Do you know who this woman is, this adventuress? She was a waif left on Oliver Gilbert's doorstep; he took her in and bred her up, what for no one knows, unless to harry me; he who with his paltry four acres of ground and his damnable Yankee independence has been the only man who has dared to balk me with success. But now his time has come."

"I only wish she had been left on our doorstep; how different everything might have been," said Philip, who in a moment seemed to have gained bodily height through the sudden development of spirit.

"Yes, so do I!" shrieked John Angus, "and, as you say, everything would have been different, for I should have sent her to the almhouse!

"What do you know of those she came from? Tell me that. What do you know?" continued the man, lashed to frenzy.

"What do I know of you or you of me, either; what we are or may be?" said Philip, in the accents not only of manhood, but of a champion, the words coming from lips that once and for all had ceased to tremble. "But I do know that Poppea is a good woman and that I love her."

With a word that rang in Philip's ears for many a day and night, John Angus turned upon him as if to strike him down, even as long ago he had struck his roseleaf wife the day before she left him. Then as an invisible something stayed his hand, he rushed across the studio, and picking up a chair, brought it down full upon the bust, crashing it outward through the window in many fragments.

For a moment Philip stood with one arm across his eyes as though to shut out what to him seemed murder. Then dropping it to his side, he faced his father, who, his wrath having reached a climax, had sunk back in his chair, clutching his side, while an awful expression of apprehension crossed his face.

"I cannot tell you to leave the room, for it is yours; but I must go," Philip said slowly and clearly, then crossed the studio and closed the door quietly behind him.

For two days no one but the tutor saw John Angus, who remained in his room, to write important letters, the tutor said. Then word went forth that the house would be closed for the summer, as father and son were going yachting for a change of air.