"After all," urged Hepatica, on the homeward way, "we've no right to judge by seeing them under those conditions. Wait till we've had them alone with us. Dahlia told me on the way out that they were planning to come and see us very soon.—I suggested to-morrow night, so they will come then."

"I'll be there," accepted the Philosopher—quite before he was asked.

So on the following evening we saw them, alone with ourselves. The dear Professor seemed to us, more than before, the pitiable victim of a woman in every way unsuited to him. Yet he looked at Dahlia as if he cared for her very much, and was only a trifle bewildered by her manner with other men.

"What dear times we used to have on the river!" said Dahlia to the Philosopher, at a moment when nobody else happened to be speaking. She accompanied this observation by a glance. It was Dahlia's glances which gave life to her remarks.

"I haven't fished in that river for three summers," replied the Philosopher, in his most unsentimental tone.

"You used to have better luck when you went alone," said Dahlia. "Do you remember how we could never stop talking long enough to lure any fish our way?"

"Nevertheless, there has been considerable fishing done on that river, first and last," asserted the Skeptic, with a twinkle at the Philosopher, who looked uncomfortable. The Professor's gentle gaze was fixed upon each speaker in turn, and as he now waited upon the Philosopher's reply I saw the latter person frown slightly.

"I never considered the fishing on that river very good," said he.

"Oh, it didn't need to be," cried Dahlia. "I can shut my eyes now and see the water rippling in the moonlight! Can't you?" She appealed to the Skeptic.

"I can't," said the Skeptic. "I never noticed how it rippled in the moonlight. The big porch is my favourite haunt at the Farm. The smoking is good there—keeps away the midges."

"Midges!" Dahlia gave a little shriek. "There aren't any midges in that part of the country."

"There are some kinds of little, annoying insects that come around in the evening, then," persisted the Skeptic, "just when people want to settle down and have themselves to themselves. The Philosopher was always more annoyed by them than I. He has a sensitive skin."

Once started on this sort of allusive nonsense it was difficult for us to head off the Skeptic. But presently, noting the Professor's kindly face assuming a puzzled expression as he watched his wife's kittenish demeanour, the Skeptic desisted. It did not seem necessary for him to demonstrate to us that, quite as of old, he could attract Dahlia to his side and keep her there. Before the evening was over he found himself occupied—also quite as of old—with keeping out of her way. Altogether, it was certainly not Dahlia's fault if the Professor did not gain the impression that both the Skeptic and the Philosopher were rejected suitors of her own.

When they had gone, and the door had closed upon the last of the bride's backward looks at our two men, the Skeptic dropped into a chair.

"Hepatica, will you kindly mix a few drops of soothing syrup for me?" he requested.

But the Philosopher fell to marching up and down, his hands in his pockets, and a deeper gloom on his brow than we had ever seen there. Although a decade the Philosopher's elder, the Professor had long shared bachelor quarters with him in past days; it had been only within a year or two that the necessities of their occupations had caused them to separate.

"Why did I ever let him go off by himself?" the Philosopher muttered remorsefully. "Why didn't I keep an eye on him?"

"It would have made no difference," the Skeptic offered dismally as consolation. "'Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad!' You couldn't have prevented his madness."

"I could have seen to it that such deadly instruments as marriage licences and irresponsible clergymen were kept out of his way," groaned the Philosopher.

"Come, cheer up!" cried Hepatica, making haste to light the spirit-lamp under her tea-kettle. "I'm going to brew you all a cup of comfort with lemons and sugar and things."

"Look at her!" commanded the Skeptic, rallying, "and tell me if marriage is a failure."

The Philosopher paused. "You know well enough what I think of your marriage," he owned.



II

CAMELLIA AND THE JUDGE

I am ashamed that women are so simple To offer war when they should kneel for peace. —Taming of the Shrew.

"We are invited to spend the week-end with Camellia," announced my hostess at the breakfast-table one morning, glancing up from a note which the hall-boy had just brought to the door.

The Skeptic jumped in his chair. "Those same old sensations come over me," he announced, digging away vengefully at his grapefruit. "What have I to wear? My only consolation now is that Camellia married a man who cares about as much what he wears as I do."

"It's not Camellia's clothes that bother me now," said Hepatica thoughtfully, "so much as the formality of her style of entertaining. My dear, she has a butler."

"How horrible!" I agreed. "Can I hope to please the eye of the butler?"

"Camellia's husband is a downright good fellow," said the Skeptic warmly. "The fuss and feathers of his wife's hospitality can't prevent his giving you the real thing. Even Philo likes to go there—particularly when Camellia is away. I presume Philo's invited now?"

"So she says," assented Hepatica, studying her note again, with a care not to look at me which made me quite as self-conscious as if she had. Why the dear people will all persist in thinking things which do not exist! Of course I was glad the Philosopher was to be there. What enjoyment is not the keener for his friendly sharing of it? But what of that? Has it not been so for many years?—and will be so, I trust, for all to come.

* * * * *

Hepatica and I packed with care, selecting the most expensive things we owned. Hepatica scrutinized the Skeptic's linen critically before she put it in. When we departed we were as correctly attired as time and thought could make us. When we arrived we were doubly glad that this was so, for the sight of the butler, admitting us, gave us much the same feeling of being badly dressed that Camellia's own presence had been wont to do.

Camellia herself was as exquisitely arrayed as ever, but she looked considerably older than I had expected. I wondered if constant engagements with her tailor and dressmaker, to say nothing of incessant interviews with those who see to the mechanism of formal entertaining, had not begun to wear upon her. But she was very cordial with us, and her husband, the Judge, was equally so. He was considerably her senior—quite as much so, I decided, as the Professor was Dahlia's—but on account of Camellia's woman-of-the-world air the contrast was not so pronounced.

We sat through an elaborate dinner, during which I suffered more or less strain of anxiety concerning my forks. But the Judge, at whose right hand I sat, diverted me so successfully by means of his own most interesting personality and delightful powers of conversation, that in time I forgot both forks and butler, and was only conscious of the length of the dinner by the sense, toward its close, of having had more to eat than I wanted.



"They have this sort of thing every night of their unfortunate lives, to a greater or less degree," murmured the Skeptic in my ear, as the men came into the impressively decorated room where Camellia and Hepatica and I were talking over common memories. "The gladdest man to get into his summer camp in Maine is the Judge, and the life of absolute abandon to freedom he lives there ought to teach his wife a thing or two—if she were wise enough to heed it. Why two people—but I've just eaten their salt," he acknowledged in reply to what I suppose must have been my accusing look, and forbore to say more.

"I think I'll give a little dinner for you to-morrow night," said Camellia reflectively, as we sat about. "A very informal one, of course—just some of our neighbours."

I felt my spirits drop. I saw those of Hepatica and the Skeptic and the Philosopher drop, although they made haste to prop their countenances up again.

But the Judge protested. "Why give anything, my dear?" he questioned. "I doubt if our friends would prefer meeting our neighbours, whom they don't know, to visiting with ourselves, whom they do—however egotistic that may sound."

"I want to make things gay for you," explained Camellia; "and the Latimers and the Elliots are very gay."—The Judge only lifted his handsome eyebrows.—"And the Liscombes are lovely," went on Camellia. "Mrs. Liscombe sings."

The Judge ran his hand through the thick, slightly graying locks above his broad forehead. He did not need to tell us that he did not enjoy hearing Mrs. Liscombe sing, and doubted if we should.

"Harry Hodgson recites—we always have him when we want to make things go. Oh, he's not a professional, of course. He only gives readings among his special friends. I believe I'll run and telephone him now. He's so likely to have engagements." Camellia hastened away.

* * * * *

We could hardly tell the Judge we fully agreed with his feeling about to-morrow's proposed festivities, neither could we discuss his wife's tastes with him. He and we talked of other things until Camellia came back, having made her engagement with Mr. Harry Hodgson, and so having sealed our fate for the succeeding evening.

The Skeptic and the Philosopher spent much of the following day—it was a legal holiday—with the Judge in his private den up on the third floor. This, as Camellia showed us once when the men were away, was a big, bare room—this was her characterization—principally fireplace, easy-chairs, books and windows. I liked it better than any other place in the house, for it was unencumbered with useless furniture of any sort, and the view from its windows was much finer than that from below stairs.

"But we're not invited up here, you observe," was Camellia's comment. "I don't come into it once a month. The Judge spends his evenings here—when I don't actually force him to go out with me—and I spend mine down in the pleasanter quarters. I have the Liscombes and the Latimers in very often, but he never comes down if he can avoid it. They understand he's eccentric, and we let it go at that."

She spoke with the air of being a most kindly and forbearing wife. I followed her downstairs, pondering over points of view. Eccentric—because he preferred wide fires and elbow-room and outlook to Camellia's crowded and over-decorated rooms below, and his books to Mrs. Liscombe's music and Mr. Harry Hodgson's "readings." I felt that I knew Mrs. Liscombe and Mr. Hodgson and the rest quite without having seen them.

* * * * *

I found, the next evening, that my imagination had not gone far astray. Camellia's friends were certainly quite as "gay" as she had pictured them, and gorgeously dressed. I felt, as I attempted to maintain my part among them, like a country mouse suddenly precipitated into the society of a company of town-bred squirrels.

Mrs. Liscombe sang for us. I could not make out what it was she sang, being unfamiliar with the music and unable to understand the words. She possessed a voice of some beauty, but was evidently determined to be classed among the sopranos who are able to soar highest, and when she took certain notes I experienced a peculiar and most disagreeable sensation in the back of my neck.

"I wonder if we couldn't bring in a stepladder for her," murmured the Skeptic in my ear. "It gives me a pang to see a woman, alone and unassisted, attempt to reach something several feet above her head!"

Mr. Hodgson recited for us with great fervour. He fought a battle on the drawing-room floor, fought and bled and died, all in a harrowing tenor voice. He was slender and pale, and it seemed a pity that he should have to suffer so much with so many stalwart men at hand. From the first moment, when he drew his sword and leaped into the fray, our sympathies were with him, although he personified a doughty man of battles, and led ten thousand lusty followers. There were moments when one could not quite forget the swinging coat-tails of his evening attire, but on the whole he was an interesting study, and I was much diverted.

"Dear little fellow!"—it was the Skeptic again. "How came they to let him go to war—and he so young and tender?"

I exchanged observations with Mr. Hodgson after his final reading; I can hardly say that I conversed with him, for our patchwork interview could not deserve that name. At the same time I noted with interest the Philosopher's expression as he and Mrs. Liscombe turned over a pile of music. If I had not known him so well I should have been deceived by that grave and interested air of his—a slight frown of concentrated attention between his well-marked eyebrows—into thinking him deeply impressed by the lady's dicta and by her somewhat dashing manner as she delivered them. But, familiar of old with the quizzical expression which at times could be discovered to underlie the exterior of charmed absorption, I understood that the Philosopher was quietly and skilfully classifying a new, if not a rare, specimen.

When the guests had lingeringly departed I saw, as I went to my room, three male forms leaping up the second flight of stairs toward the Judge's den.

"Don't you envy them the chance to soothe their nerves with a pipe beside the fire up there?" I asked Hepatica as, with hair down and trailing, loose garments, she came into my room through the door which we had discovered could be opened between our quarters.

"Indeed I do. They went up those stairs like three dogs loosed from the leash, didn't they? Can one blame them?"

"One cannot."

Hepatica gazed at me. I stared back. But we were under our host's roof.

"Mrs. Liscombe really has quite a voice," said Hepatica, examining the details of the tiny travelling workbag I always carry with me.

"So she has."

"It was a wonderful dinner, wasn't it?"

"It was, indeed. Would you mind having quite specially simple things to eat for a day or two after we go back?"

"I've been planning them," admitted Hepatica.

"Mr. Hodgson's readings were—entirely new to me; were they to you? I had never heard of the authors."

"Few people can have heard of them, I think. Several were original."

"Indeed!"

"Would you mind taking off your society manner?" requested Hepatica, a trifle fractiously. "I'm a little tired of seeing you wear it so incessantly."

"I shall be delighted," I agreed.

I sprang up and she met me half-way, and seizing me about the neck buried her face in my shoulder. I felt her shaking with smothered laughter, and had great difficulty in keeping my own emotions under control.

We went home on Sunday afternoon, the Skeptic pleading the necessity of his being up at an early hour next morning. By unanimous consent we went to the evening service of a church where one goes to hear that which is worth hearing, and invariably hears it. The music there is also worth a long journey, though it is not at all of an elaborate sort.

"There, I feel better after that," declared the Skeptic heartily, as we came out. "It seems to take the taste of last evening out of my mouth."

Nobody said anything directly about our late visit until we had reached home. Then the Skeptic fired up his diminutive gas grate—which is much better than none at all—and turned off the electrics. We sat before the cheery little glow, luxuriating in a sense of relaxation.

"It seems ungracious, somehow to discuss people, when one has just left their hospitality," suggested Hepatica, as the Skeptic showed signs of letting loose the dogs of war.

"Not between ourselves, dear," affirmed the Skeptic. "We four constitute a private Court of Inquiry into the Condition of Our Friends. When I think of the Judge——"

"He has his own way, after all, when it comes to refusing to join in the sort of thing that pleases Camellia," said I.

"Of course he does. He's too much of a man not to have it. But living upstairs while my wife lives downstairs isn't precisely my ideal of married happiness."

The Philosopher shoved his hands far down into his pockets and laid his head back, gazing up at the ceiling. "What puzzles me," he mused, "is the attraction such a woman has, at the start, for such a man."

"Camellia was a most attractive girl," said I.

"You mean her clothes were most attractive," amended the Skeptic. "They even befuddled me for a few brief hours, as I remember—till I discovered that not all is gold that——"

"You didn't discover that yourself," the Philosopher reminded him. "We had to do it for you. You don't mind our recalling his temporary paralysis of intellect?" he questioned Hepatica suddenly. "It was all your fault, anyhow, for retiring to the background and allowing the fireworks to have full play."

Hepatica smiled. The Skeptic put out his hand and got hold of hers and drew it over to his knee, where he retained it. "She knows I never swerved a point off my allegiance to her," he declared with confidence.

"Do you suppose," suggested Hepatica, "if the Judge and Camellia were to lose all their money and had to come down to living in a little home like this, it would help things any?"

The Skeptic shook his head. The Philosopher shook his, thoughtfully. "It's too late," said the latter. "Her ideals are a fixed quantity now, to be reckoned with. So are his. Under any conditions there would be absolute diversity of tastes."

"I don't think there's any ideal more hopelessly fixed than the fine clothes ideal." The Skeptic looked at his wife.

"I like nice clothes," said she, smiling at him.

"So you do," he rejoined; "thank heaven! A woman who doesn't is abnormal. But when we walk down certain streets together you can see something besides the shop-windows."

"I look away so I won't want the things," confessed Hepatica.

The Skeptic laughed, and the Philosopher and I joined him.

"I passed Mrs. Hepatica the other day when she didn't see me," said the Philosopher to me. "She was staring fixedly in at a shop-window. I stole up behind her to see what held such an attraction for her.—It often lets a great light in on a friend's character, if you can see the particular object in a shop-window which fixes his longing attention. When I had discovered what she was looking at I stole away again, chuckling to myself."

"What was it?" I asked.

"I'll wager half I own that the wife of our friend the Judge wouldn't have given that window a second glance," pursued the Philosopher.

"It was probably a bargain sale of paper patterns," guessed the Skeptic. But we knew he didn't think it.

"A bargain sale of groceries, more likely," said Hepatica herself.

"It was no bargain sale of anything," denied the Philosopher. "It was a most expensive edition of the works of Charles Dickens."

"Good for you, Patty!" cried the Skeptic.



III

AZALEA AND THE CASHIER

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive. —S. T. Coleridge.

"I am to spend the day with Azalea to-morrow," I announced, as I said good night, one evening, "and I shall not come back until so late that you mustn't sit up for me. Azalea couldn't ask me to stay all night, on account of using the guest-room for a nursery during the winter, but she's very anxious to have me there in the evening, for it's the only chance I shall have to see her husband."

"Remain late enough to see her husband, by all means," urged the Skeptic. "I want to hear what sort of man had the courage to marry a musical genius who could wipe only one teaspoon at a time."

"Azalea was a lovely girl," said Hepatica warmly. "It couldn't take much courage to marry her."

"All right—we'll hear about it when our guest comes back. And I'll be over to bring you home, if you'll telephone about an hour before you'll be ready to start."

"Thank you—it really won't be necessary for you to come," I replied.

The Skeptic eyed me narrowly. Then he glanced at Hepatica and grinned. "Good night," said I, again, and walked away to my room.

"Good night," the Skeptic called after me. "But don't hesitate to call me if anything should detain Philo."

I arrived at Azalea's home early next morning, having been earnestly asked to come in time to see the babies take their bath. There is nothing I like better than to see a baby take a bath, and to see two at once was a bribe indeed.

Azalea met me at the door of her suburban home, the larger of her two children—the two-year-old—on her arm. He was evidently just ready for his bath, for he was wrapped in a blanket, and one pink foot stuck temptingly out from its folds. Azalea greeted me with enthusiasm, pushing back the loose, curling locks from her forehead as she did so, explaining that Bud had just pulled them down. She did not look in the least like the girl who had sung for us, but it occurred to me that, enveloped in the big flannel bath-apron, she was even more engaging than she had been upon the porch at the Farm.

I don't know when I have enjoyed anything so much as I enjoyed seeing Azalea give that bath. The little baby was asleep in her crib when we went into the nursery—which had been the guest-room before the second baby came—so Azalea gave Bud his splash all by himself. He was plump and dimpled and jolly, and he cried only once—when his mother inadvertently rubbed soap in his eyes while talking with me. When he smiled again he was a cherub of cherubs, but he had waked his small sister, and Azalea gave me permission to take her up while she finished with Bud. She was six months old, and she was afraid of me only for a minute or two, and I held her and cuddled her and wanted to take her away with me so fiercely that I had all I could do to give her over to Azalea for her bath. Boy babies are delightful, but girl babies are heavenly!

* * * * *

We had a busy day—made up of babies, with more or less talk between, which didn't matter in the least. Late in the afternoon Azalea put everything straight in the rooms, more or less upset by Bud during the day; and dressed herself for the evening. She dressed both children, also, making them fresh as rosebuds. I saw her putting flowers on the table in the dining-room, lighting a special reading-lamp at a table in the corner of the living-room, and pulling an easy chair to stand close beside it. There was a small grand piano in the room. It had been closed all day, for Bud's fingers could just reach the keyboard. Azalea opened it.

"You haven't had time to-day," said I, "but I'm looking forward to hearing you sing this evening."

"It's my husband you are to hear sing," said Azalea contentedly. "He has a splendid voice."

"I shall be delighted," I agreed; "but surely you will sing too."

"My voice seems to wake up the children," said she, "Arthur's never does. It's odd, for his voice is much heavier, of course. But I can never take really high notes without hearing a wail from either Bud or Dot. And that's not worth while."

"Won't you sing now, then," I begged, "while they are awake? I really can't go away without hearing you. And you know when the Philosopher comes he will be so anxious to have you sing."

"The babies will go to bed before dinner," she insisted, "so I can't very well sing for the Philosopher. But I'll sing for you now, of course."

She laid little Dot in my lap, but Dot was already sleepy and protested. So Azalea went to the piano with Dot on her arm. Bud, seeing her go, followed and stood by her knee—on her trailing skirts. I don't know how she managed to play her own accompaniment, but she did—at least subdued chords enough to carry the harmony of the song. There were no notes before her on the rack, and she looked down into one or the other of the two small faces as she sang. And, of course, it was a lullaby which fell like notes of pearl and silver from her lips.

When she finished, I could only smile at her through an obscuring mist. Never, in all the times I had heard her sing, had she reached my heart like this. But, somehow, the picture of her, sitting in the half light at the grand piano, with the babies in her arms and at her knee, singing lullabies and leaving the fine music for her husband to sing by and by, was quite irresistible. Somehow, as I listened, I was troubled by no doubts lest she had not learned deftly to wipe ten teaspoons at once.

Her husband came home presently; a tall, thin, young bank cashier, with a face I liked at once. He was plainly weary, but his eyes lit up with satisfaction at sight of the three who met him at the door, and the welcome his young son gave him showed that Bud recognized a play-fellow. I heard the pair romping upstairs as the Cashier made dressing for dinner a game in which the little child could join.



But before we sat down to dinner both babies had been put to bed. The Cashier remained with me while Azalea was busy at this task, but he excused himself toward the last, and went tiptoeing upstairs, where I think he must have offered his services in getting the children tucked away. While he was gone the Philosopher arrived.

I let him in myself, motioning the maid away. It was a small house, and I knew she was needed in the kitchen. "Don't make a bit of noise," I cautioned him, as he came smiling into the little hall. "The babies are going to bed."

"Babies!" whispered the Philosopher, in an awestruck way. "I didn't know there were any babies."

"Of course you knew it," I whispered back, leading him into the room. "If you would only store away really important facts in that capacious mind of yours, instead of limiting it to——"

"Tell me how many babies, and of what sex—quick!" commanded the Philosopher, "or I shall say the wrong thing. And how on earth do they come to know enough to put their babies to bed before they ask a bachelor to dine, anyhow?"

I hastily set him straight upon these points, adding that Azalea had developed wonderfully.

"You mean she can soar to high Q now, I suppose?" interpreted the Philosopher.

"Not at all. I mean that she's——"

But they were coming downstairs together. The Cashier's arm was about his wife's shoulders; he removed it only just in time to save his dignity as he entered.

"I'm disappointed not to see the boy and girl," declared the Philosopher genially. The Cashier took him by the shoulders and turned him toward the light, laughing. "That was bravely said," he answered. "How did you know but we might go and wake them up for you to see?"

The dinner was quite unpretentious, but very good. Evidently Azalea had a capable servant. We talked gaily, the Cashier proving an adept at keeping the ball in the air, and keenly appreciative of others' attempts to meet him at the sport.

By and by, when we were back in the room where the grand piano stood, and conversation had reached a momentary halt, Azalea went to the piano. "Come, Arthur," she said, sitting down at it and patting a pile of music, "I want our friends to hear 'The Toreador.'"

The Cashier looked up protestingly. "You are the one they want to hear, dear," he declared.

She shook her head. "They've heard me often, but never you, I think. Besides, it wakes the babies, you know, for me to sing."

"You don't need to sing high notes, Azalea," I urged. "I'd like nothing so well as the lullaby you sang to the babies."

But she shook her head again. "That's their song," she said. "You were specially privileged to hear it at all. But I can't do it for company. Come, Arthur—please."

So the Cashier sang. The Philosopher and I found it necessary to avoid each other's eyes as he did it. The Cashier could roar 'The Toreador,' no doubt of that. The voice of the bull of Bashan would have been as the summer wind in the trees beside it. Where so much volume came from we could not tell, as we looked at the thin frame of the performer. Why the babies did not wake up will ever remain a mystery. Why Azalea did not desert her accompaniment to press her hands over bursting ear drums I cannot imagine, for it was with difficulty that I surrendered my own to the shock. But Azalea played on to the end, and looked up into the Cashier's flushed face at the last note with a smile of proprietary triumph. Then she turned about to us.

"That fairly takes me off my feet!" cried the Philosopher. I groped hurriedly for a compliment which would match the equivocal fervour of this, but I could not equal it.

"How much you must enjoy singing together," I said, "when the babies are awake,"—and felt annoyed that I could have said it, for I could really not imagine the two voices together.

Azalea glowed. The Cashier grinned. He is as quick-witted as he is good-humoured. "You're a clever pair," he chuckled.

"I've trained him myself," said Azalea. "When I knew him first he'd never thought of singing. I only discovered his voice by accident. It needs much more work with it, of course, but it's powerful, and it has a quality that will improve with cultivation."

The Cashier patted her shoulders. "Now you sing some soft little thing for them, my girl," he commanded—and looking up at him again, Azalea obeyed. She chose an old ballad, one with no chance in it to show the range of her voice. She sang it exquisitely, and the Cashier stood by and turned her music as if he considered it a high privilege. Yet, half-way through, the little Dot woke up. Azalea broke off in the middle of a bar, and fled up the stairs.

"The truth is, I'm afraid," said the Cashier, looking after her with an expression on his face which indicated that he wanted to flee, too, "nothing really counts in this house but the babies."

"They—and something else," suggested the Philosopher gently.

The Cashier looked at him. He nodded. "Yes—and something else," he agreed with his bright smile.

We came away rather late. The Philosopher looked up at the house as the door closed upon the warm farewells which had sent us out into the night. "It's a little bit of a house, isn't it?" he commented.

I looked up, too—at the nursery windows where the faintest of night-lights showed. "Yes, it's very small," I agreed. "Yet quite big enough, although it holds so much."

"One would hardly have said, four years ago, that anything smaller than the biggest musical auditorium in the city would have been big enough to hold Azalea's voice," he mused.

"If you could have heard her sing her lullaby to those babies," I replied, as we walked slowly on, "you would have said her voice would be wasted on a concert audience."

"It seems a pleasant home."

"It is one."

"Somehow, one distrusts the ability of musical prodigies to make pleasant homes."

"I wonder why. Shouldn't the knowledge of any art make one appreciative of other arts?"

"It took some time for a certain exhibition of the domestic art to strike in, at your home, that summer," said the Philosopher. "But I believe Azalea came to envy our Hepatica at the last, didn't she?"

"Indeed she did. And she's never got over envying her her accomplishments. She asked me ever so many questions to-day about Hepatica's housekeeping. I wish I had had a chance before I went to tell her that I was sure her will to succeed would make her home as dear a one as even Hepatica's could be."

"One thing is sure—as long as she lets the Cashier do the singing in the limelight, while she looks after the babies, there'll be no occasion for their friends to demand more music of an evening than is good for her pride of spirit," chuckled the Philosopher. "What—are we at our station already? I say—let's not make a quick trip by train—let's make a slow one, by cab."

"By cab! It would take two hours! No, no—here comes our train."

"This is the first time we've gone anywhere since you've been here without two alert chaperons—younger than myself," grumbled the Philosopher.

"The more reason, then, that we should give them no anxiety on my account."

"I'd like to walk the whole way," said he.

I laughed as I obeyed the signal of an impatient guard and rushed upon the train. "Now, talk to me," said I, as we took our seats.

"My lungs weren't built for the Toreador song," he objected.



IV

ALTHEA AND THE PROMOTER

What an interesting fellow our host is! He is almost more interesting because of the qualities he does not possess, than because of the qualities that he does possess. —Arthur Christopher Benson.

"'Be it ever so humble,'" quoted the Skeptic under his breath to me, "'there's no place like——'"

Hepatica turned and gave him a smiling look which nevertheless conveyed warning. He needed it. The Skeptic was in a mad and merry mood to-night, and no glance shot at him which, being interpreted, meant that we were under our hosts' roof, had thus far been of avail. "We are not under their roof," he argued defiantly, in reply to one of these silent remonstrances. "This isn't their roof. This is the roof of the Hotel Amazon. That's a very different thing. So different that if I lived under it I'd——"

But the Promoter was approaching us again, with the news that dinner had just been announced as served. He immediately led the way with me, Hepatica followed with the Philosopher, and Althea and the Skeptic brought up the rear. It was on the great staircase that the Skeptic, pausing to gaze upward, at a command from the Promoter, who had just bid him observe certain mural decorations done by the distinguished hand of some man of whom I fear none of us had ever heard, murmured the well-known words concerning the humble home.

"I always like to walk down this staircase when I'm not in a hurry," I had heard Althea saying to the Skeptic behind us, "to get the effect from the landing. Isn't it wonderful?"

We all paused upon the landing, which was about thirty feet square. The Skeptic, leaning against the marble balustrade, gazed out over the scene with an air of prostrating himself before a shrine. Awe and wonder dominated his aspect. Only we who were familiar with a certain curving line over his left eyebrow knew that he was longing to break into an apostrophe on the magnificence before him which would have alienated Althea and her husband forevermore.

"These columns are of the purest (something) marble," declared the Promoter, laying his hand upon one of them. He rather mumbled the name, and I think none of us were able to recognize it.

"Indeed!" said the Skeptic, and laid his hand upon the column. "It seems stout."

"It's the same that is used in the Royal Palace at Athens," added the Promoter.

"That must be why it feels so Greece-y to the touch," murmured the Skeptic; but, luckily, nobody heard him but myself.

In due course of time, proceeding across a gorgeous lobby and traversing an impressive corridor, passing lackeys in livery and guests in evening finery, we arrived at the doorway of the most elaborately ornate dining hall I had ever seen. The Promoter paused in the doorway to let the first impression sink in.

"I could have had our dinner served in a private dining-room, of course," said he to us, "but Althea and I decided that you would enjoy this better. There's nothing like it anywhere. It's absolutely cosmopolitan. People from all over the world are dining here to-night—are every night. Every tenth man is worth his millions. Notice the third table on the right as we go by. That's Joseph L. Chrysler, the iron magnate. With his party is a French actress—worshipped on both sides the water. Keep your eyes peeled."

A bowing potentate motioned us forward. A bending waiter put us in our places. Orchids decorated our table. An extraordinarily expensive orchestra celebrated our arrival with strains from a popular opera then raging. People all around glanced at us and immediately away again. I suppose we showed by our appearance that we were the possessors neither of millions nor of world-renowned accomplishments.

The Promoter leaned back in his chair with the demeanour of a large and puffy young frog on the edge of a pool. He settled his white waistcoat and looked from side to side with the superior glance of a man who owns the whole thing. Althea, in her place, also wore a self-conscious air of being hostess to a party which must appreciate the privilege of dining under such auspices.

Our table was a circular one, and the Skeptic sat upon my right. The Promoter at my left occupied himself with Hepatica much of the time—Hepatica had never looked lovelier than to-night, though her simple, white evening frock was not cut half so low as Althea's pink, embroidered one, nor cost half so much as my plain pale-gray. Althea devoted herself to the Philosopher—she and the Skeptic had never got on very well. Meanwhile the Skeptic was saying things into my ear, under cover of the orchestra and the loud hum of talk.

"This is a crowd," he commented. "This certainly is a crowd! Men of millions, and men who don't know how they're going to meet the next note due, but bluffing it through. Somebodies and nobodies. Kingfish and minnows—and some of the kingfish are going to swallow the minnows at the next gulp——What in the name of time is this we're eating now?"

I expressed my ignorance.

"And what's this we're to have with it?" he pursued. "Look out!"

He had known I would thank him for the warning. I shielded my glass from an imminent bottle. It was the third time already, and the dinner was not far on its way. I saw Hepatica shield hers—also for the third time. A tiny flush was beginning to creep up Althea's cheeks. She had refused only the first offering of the waiter.

The Promoter turned and viewed my empty glasses with ill-disguised contempt. "We'll have to get you to stay in town long enough to overcome those notions of yours," said he. "Look around you. I'll wager there's not another in the room."

If I flushed it was not for either of the reasons which caused the brilliant cheeks I saw all about me. "I think you are quite right," said I, as I looked. I saw a garrulous lady at the table on my right, whose high laughter was beginning to carry far; I observed a sleepy one at my left, who had spilled champagne down the front of her elaborate corsage and was nodding over her ices. I glanced at Hepatica. Her pretty head was held high; her eyes, too, sparkled, but not with wine.

The Promoter began to talk of investments, telling stories of great coups made by men who had the daring.

"Not necessary for them to have the money, I suppose?" queried the Philosopher.

"Not at all," agreed the Promoter. "Life's a game of poker. If you're not afraid to sit in, and have the nerve to bluff it through, you can win out with a hand that would make a quitter commit suicide."

Althea listened with pride to her husband's discourse. "He's a man of the world," one could see she was thinking, "who is making the eyes drop out of the heads of these simple people."

"I'm so impressed," said the Skeptic to me, "that I can hardly eat. Think of living in a place like this—having this every day—common, like the dust under your feet. Can I ever eat creamed codfish and johnny-cake again, think you? Hepatica must name the hash by a French name and serve me grape juice with it, or I can't condescend to eat it. I say—the smoke is getting a bit thick here for you ladies, isn't it?"

We had been late in coming down, and at many tables people were nearing the end of the dinner. For some time the odour of expensive cigars had been growing heavier throughout the room; a blue haze hung over the more distant tables.

"I don't think my lungs mind it so much as my feelings," I answered. "I shall never be able to make it seem to me just—just——"

"Try to subdue the expression which dominates your countenance at the present moment," counselled the Skeptic gently, "or you will be quietly led away from the scene as dangerous to your fellow-men."

After what seemed like many hours we reached the end of the dinner. I felt that I should be glad to reach the quiet and comparative purity of air to be found in the room in which our hosts had received us—a private drawing-room. But this was not to be. We were taken from place to place about the hotel, to look in on this or that scene of entertainment, of banqueting, of revelry. Gorgeousness upon gorgeousness was revealed to us. Althea, now very gay and sparkling in manner, her carefully dressed hair a little loosened, her mind full of schemes for our diversion, took the lead, showing off everything with that air of personal possession I have often observed in the frequenters of hostelries like the Amazon.

Hepatica, in spite of evident effort to maintain her part, grew a trifle silent. As I regarded her I was reminded of a white dove in the company of a pair of peacocks. The Philosopher adjusted his eyeglasses from time to time as if they did not fit well; he seemed to feel his vision growing distorted. I became intensely fatigued with it all, and found myself longing for a quiet corner and a book. As for the Skeptic—but the Skeptic was incorrigible.

"How much does it cost, do you say," he inquired of the Promoter, "to buy a postage stamp at the desk here? I want to put one on a letter I have in my pocket. May I slip it into the post-box myself, or do I have to call a flunkey, present him with a dollar, and respectfully request him to insert it in the slit for me?"

The Promoter smiled. "Oh, people make a joke of the Amazon," said he. "But I notice they're the same ones who breathe deep when they go by it, hoping to inhale the atmosphere free of charge."

The Skeptic inflated his lungs. "I'm going to do it here, inside," said he, "where it's more highly charged."

At length they took us to their own rooms. I have forgotten how many floors up they were, but it didn't matter, in a luxurious elevator, padded and mirrored. In one of the mirrors I caught the Philosopher's eye regarding me so steadily that I felt a sudden sense of relief at the realization that some time we should be out and away together in the fresh air again. It seemed to me a long while since I had been able to see things from the Philosopher's point of view.

We looked at our hosts' private apartments with interest. As the Skeptic passed me on his way to inspect a system of electrical devices on the wall, to which the Promoter was calling his attention, he was softly humming an air. It was, "Be it ever so humble," again.

The rooms were very elaborately furnished; the hangings were heavy and sumptuous. A massive oak mantelpiece harboured a fire of gas-logs. There were a few—not many—apparently personal belongings about the rooms; bric-a-brac and photographs—the latter mostly of actors and opera singers. In Althea's bedroom we came upon a dressing-table which reminded me of my own, upon the occasion of Althea's visit to me, a few years before. Althea calmly stirred over everything upon it in the effort to find a small jewel-case whose contents she wished to show me. She found it in the end, although for a time the task seemed hopeless.

We sat down in the outer room and listened again to the Promoter's tales of the great strokes of business he had brought off—"deals," he called them. The stories contained much food for thought in the shape of revelations of character in this or that man of prominence. What we should have talked about if he had not thus held the floor I could not guess. I had noted that there were upon a ponderous table six popular novels, as many magazines, and piles of the great dailies. Nowhere could I descry even a small collection of books of the sort which may furnish material for conversation. I tried to imagine the Philosopher drawing a certain beloved book of essays from his pocket, settling himself comfortably with his back to the drop-light, and beginning to read aloud to us, as he is accustomed to do in the Skeptic's little rooms. Here was not even a drop-light for him to do it by, only electric sconces set high upon the walls, and a fanciful centre electrolier. He must, perforce—for he needs a strong light for reading—have stood close under one of the sconces to read from his book of essays. I tried to fancy Althea and the Promoter politely listening—or appearing to listen. This really drew too heavily upon my imagination, and I gave it up.

At a late hour we escaped. I learned afterward that before we left the Promoter took our men aside and offered them one more thing to drink. This really seemed superfluous, and—judging by the straightforward gait of our escorts, to say nothing of my knowledge of their habits—there is no doubt that it was.

Outside the hotel the Philosopher, looking away from it and from the other great buildings which surrounded us on every side, sent his gaze upward to the starry winter's sky. He drew in deep breaths of the frosty air.

"Getting the Amazon out of your blood?" inquired the Skeptic. "Amazon's a mighty good name for it. It thinks it's sophisticated and refined—but it isn't. It's a great, blowsy, milkmaid of a hotel, with all her best clothes on, perpetually going to a fair."

"I'm not so much re-filling my insulted lungs," said the Philosopher, "as drawing breaths of relief that I got away without buying a block of stock in something, or putting my name down to be one of a company for the development of something else."

"Oh, we were safe enough," the Skeptic declared. "This was a private dinner with ladies present; the Promoter gave us only a delicate sample of what he could do. Wait till he gets you at luncheon with him in the grill-room, all by yourself—then you can find out what he is when he's after game. Unless you're tied to the mast, so to speak, with your ears stopped with wax, you'll land on the shore of the enchanted country he pictures for you. He's deadly, I assure you. That's why he can afford to live at the Amazon."

"I wonder how Althea likes it?" speculated Hepatica.

"Likes it down to the ground—and up to the roof," asserted the Skeptic. "That's plain enough. It saves housekeeping—and picking up her room," he added softly to Hepatica—but I heard him. Hepatica did not reply.

"Let's not stop at this station," proposed the Skeptic as we walked on, "but keep on up to the next. A fast walk will do us all good after that feast of porpoises."

"I suppose they call that living," said the Philosopher, as we turned aside into quieter streets.

"Of course they do, and so does everybody else at those tables to-night—with four exceptions."

"Oh, come," demurred the Philosopher, "possibly there were a few other wise men in that company besides ourselves. Who would have known from your appearance as you sat there gorging with the rest, that you were inwardly protesting, and greatly preferred the simple life? Don't flatter yourself that you had the aspect of an ascetic. There were moments during that meal when any unprejudiced observer who didn't know you would have sworn that you were deeply gratified that no other engagement had prevented you from dining in your favourite haunt."

"Don't throw stones," retorted the Skeptic. "I saw you when you caught sight of some particularly prosperous looking people at another table and bowed convivially to them as one who says, 'You here, too? Of course. Our set, you know!'"

"Quits!" admitted the Philosopher. "Well then—it's the ladies who did succeed in looking like visitants from another world."

This was rather poetical for the Philosopher, and of course it led us to wonder wherein he thought we differed. Hepatica asked anxiously if she really had looked so very old-fashioned in the white evening frock which had been three times made over.

"Hopelessly old-fashioned," assented the Philosopher. "Hopelessly old-fashioned. But not so much in the matter of the frock as in some other things. Heaven forbid that it should be otherwise!"

"Amen!" responded the Skeptic fervently.



V

RHODORA AND THE PREACHER

When the fight begins within himself A man's worth something. —Robert Browning.

The Skeptic brought up the letter with him as he came home to dinner; it had arrived in the last mail. The Philosopher happened to be dining with us that night, so we four were together when the news came upon us. As Hepatica read it aloud we stared at one another, astonished.

The letter was from Grandmother, inviting us to Rhodora's wedding, which was to take place under her roof. Rhodora herself had been practically under Grandmother's roof for four years now, except as she had been sent to a school of Grandmother's selection. Rhodora had no mother. Her father, an absorbed man of business, had, at Grandmother's suggestion, been glad to let her have the girl to bring up—or to finish bringing up—according to her own ideas. When we had first seen Rhodora there could be no question that she sadly needed bringing up by somebody. To that date she had, apparently, only come up by herself.

"I, for one, have never seen her since that none-too-short visit she made you, that summer," said the Skeptic reminiscently. "It has never occurred to me to long to see her again. She was a mere lusty infant then. And now she's to be married. How time gets on! What did you say was the name of the unfortunate chap?"

"'The Reverend Christopher Austen,'" re-read Hepatica from the letter.

"He will need all the fortitude the practice of his profession can have developed in him, if my recollections can be depended upon to furnish a basis for the present outlook," said the Skeptic gloomily.

"You don't know that he will, at all," I disputed. "Rhodora was only a girl when you saw her. She has been four years under Grandmother's influence since then. Can you imagine that has accomplished nothing?"

The Skeptic shook his head. "That would be like a dove attempting the education of a hawk. The girl has probably learned not to break into the conversation of her elders with an axe," he speculated, "nor to walk ahead of Grandmother when she comes into a room. Any girl learns those things—in time—unless she is an idiot. But there are other things to learn. You can't make fine china out of coarse clay."

"But you can make very, very beautiful pottery," cried Hepatica. "And the lump of clay that came into contact with Grandmother's wheel——"

She paused. Metaphors are sometimes difficult things to handle. The Philosopher, musing, did not notice that she had not finished.

"It's rather curious that I should be asked," he said. "I never saw either of them but once."

"You made a great conquest on that one occasion, though," said the Skeptic.

"Nonsense!" The Philosopher coloured like a boy. "That girl——"

"Not that girl," explained the Skeptic. "The Old Lady. She has never ceased to ask after you whenever we have seen her or heard from her. As I remember, you presented her with a bunch of garden flowers as big as your head, and looked at her as if she were eighteen and the beauty she undoubtedly once was.—Well, well—a preacher! What has Rhodora become that she has blinded the eyes of a preacher? Not that their eyes are not easily blinded!"

"Why do you say 'preacher?'" inquired his wife. "Grandmother's letter says a young clergyman."

"He's no clergyman," insisted the Skeptic. "He's not even a minister. He's just a preacher—a raw youth, just out of college—knows as much about women as a puppy about elephant training. Rhodora probably sang a hymn at one of his meetings and finished him. Well, well—I suppose this means another wedding present?" He looked dubiously at Hepatica.

"It does, of course," she admitted.

"Send her a cut-glass punch-bowl," he suggested, preparing savagely to carve a plump, young duck. "Anything less adapted to the use of a preacher's family I can't conceive. And that's the main object in buying wedding gifts, according to my observation."

The day of Rhodora's wedding arrived, and we went down together to Grandmother's lovely old country home—a stately house upon the banks of a wide, frozen river. Our train brought us there two hours before the one set for the ceremony, and we found not only Grandmother but Rhodora and the Preacher in the fine old-time drawing-room to greet us. The wedding was to be a quietly informal one, and such of the other guests as had already arrived were in the room also, having a cup of tea before they should go upstairs to dress.

Rhodora herself was pouring the tea, and the Preacher was helping hand the cups about. It was a beautiful opportunity to observe the pair before their marriage.

Grandmother gave us the welcome only Grandmother knows how to give. In her own home she looks like a fair, little, old queen, receiving everybody's homage, yet giving so much kindness in return that one can never feel one's self out of debt to her hospitality. Her greeting to the Philosopher was an especially cordial one.

"I ventured to ask you," she said to him, "because I have always wanted to see you again—not merely because I have heard of you in the world where you are making a name for yourself. And I wanted, too, in justice to my granddaughter, to have you see her again."

Before the Philosopher could formulate an appropriate reply, Rhodora herself, leaving her tea-table, and crossing the room with a swift and graceful tread, was giving us welcome.

It was amusing to see our two men look at Rhodora. Hepatica and I had been, in a way, prepared to see a transformation, having heard sundry rumours to that effect; but the Skeptic and the Philosopher, having classified Rhodora once and for all, had since received no impression sufficient to efface or modify the original one. I can say for them that to one who did not know them well their surprise would have been undiscoverable, yet to Hepatica and me it was perfectly evident that they considered a miracle had been wrought.

As to personal appearance, Rhodora had developed, as she had promised to do, into a remarkable beauty. If she had kept on as she had begun, she would have become one of those exuberant beauties who look as if they had but lately quitted the stage and must shortly return thither. Even yet, it would have taken but an error in dress, a reversion to a certain type of manner which too often goes with looks like these, to make of the girl that which it had seemed she must become. But, somehow, she had not become that thing.

Rhodora presently turned and beckoned to the Preacher, and putting down his teacups he came to her side. She presented him, and we saw that he was, indeed, no clergyman, no minister even—in the sense that the Skeptic had differentiated these terms—but a preacher—and an embryo one at that—a big, red-cheeked, honest-eyed boy, a straightforward, clean-hearted, large-purposed young fellow, who meant to do all the good in the world, in all the ways that he could bring about. He was but lately graduated from his seminary, had yet to preach his first sermon after the dignities of his ordination, but—one could not tell how—one began to believe in him at once.

"No, I haven't a bit of experience," he owned to me, as we stood talking together, getting acquainted. "Not a bit—except a little mission work a few of us went in for this last year. I'm as raw a recruit as ever put on a uniform and fell in with the rest of the company for his first drill. But—I mean to count one!"

"I'm sure you will," said I, regarding him with growing pleasure in the sight.

"And Rhodora will count two," said he, his eyes following her. "One and two, side by side, you know, stand for twelve."

"So they do," said I. "And seeing Rhodora as she looks now, I should think she would make an efficient comrade."

His face glowed. Together we observed Rhodora, standing close by Grandmother's side. The two, with Hepatica and our two men, made a group, of which not the bride-elect, but Grandmother, was the precise centre. The moment Rhodora had reached Grandmother's side she had put herself in the background. Although she towered above the little old lady she did not overwhelm her, and Grandmother herself had never seemed a more gently dominating figure than now, in her sweeping black gown with its rare laces, her white hair, in soft puffs, framing her delicate face. And as, at a turn in the conversation, Grandmother looked up at Rhodora, and Rhodora, bending a little, smiled back at her, answering in the most deferential way, it was clear to me that the most efficient element in the education of the girl had been her intercourse with this old-time gentlewoman.

"It was seeing those two together," said the Preacher rather shyly, in my ear, "that attracted me first. I never knew that Youth and Age could set each other off like that till I saw them. And I saw at once that a girl who could be such friends with an old lady must be very much worth while herself. They are great chums, you know—it's quite unusual, I think. And it's a mighty fine thing for any one to know Grandmother. I've learned more from Grandmother than from any one I ever knew."

"She's a very rare and adorable old lady," I agreed heartily. "We all worship her—we all feel that to be near her is a special fortune for any one. She has plainly grown very fond of Rhodora—she will miss her."

"No doubt of that," he agreed—but, quite naturally, more with triumph than with sympathy.

We went upstairs presently to make ready for the wedding. When we were dressed, we met, according to previous agreement, in the big, square, upper hall, with its spindled railing making a gallery about the quaint and stately staircase. It was a little too early to go down, and we drew some high-backed chairs together and sat down to look at one another in our wedding garments.

"I'd like to get married myself again to-night," declared the Skeptic, forcibly pulling on his gloves with a man's brutal disregard for the possible instability of seams. He eyed his wife possessively. "Tell me—will the Preacher's bride put her in the shade?"

"Don!" But Hepatica's falling lashes could not quite conceal her pleasure in his pride.

"Not for a minute." The Philosopher's benevolent gaze approved of his friend's wife from the top of her masses of shining hair to the tip of her white-shod foot. "At the same time, I don't feel quite such a dispirited compassion for the Preacher himself as I did on the way down. Can that possibly be the same girl who treated Grandmother as if she were an inconvenient, antique family relic, and the rest of us as if she endured but was horribly bored by us?"

"I have never supposed grandmothers," said the Skeptic thoughtfully, "to be particularly influential members of society. Evidently ours is different. But there must have been other elements in the metamorphosis of Rhodora."

"Miss Eleanor Lockwood's school," suggested Hepatica.

"You mention that with bated breath," said the Skeptic, "precisely as every one, including its graduates, mentions it. I admit that Miss Lockwood's school is a place where rich young savages are turned out polished members of society. But there's been more than that."

"The Preacher himself?" I suggested.

The Skeptic looked at me. "Do you mean to imply," said he, with raised eyebrows, "that any woman would admit the possibility of acquaintanceship with any particular man's having had a formative influence on her character? After school-days, I mean of course."

"Why not?" I inquired. "What influence could be greater?"

The Skeptic looked at the Philosopher, who returned his gaze calmly.

"Did you ever expect to hear that?" asked the Skeptic.

"I should not think of denying the influence of woman upon man," replied the Philosopher. "Why should not the rule work both ways?"

"I never heard it thus flatly formulated before," declared the Skeptic. "It does me good, that's all. So you think the Preacher has had a hand in the reformation?"

"You have seen the Preacher," said I. "You know the family from which he comes—he's of good stock. You've only to hear him speak to see that he's a man of purpose, of action, of training—boy as he looks. How could he fail to have a strong influence upon a girl who cared for him?"

The Skeptic looked at Hepatica. "Do you agree with her?" he inquired.

"Of course I agree with her," responded Hepatica, looking from him to me—and back again. "You are only pretending to doubt us both. It's very clever of you, but we know perfectly that you understand how far—very far—we are affected by your ideals, your judgments, your whole estimate of life. Therefore—you must be very careful how you use your influence with us!"

The Skeptic gave her back the look he saw in her eyes. "Ah, you two belong to the wise ones!" he said. "The wise ones, who, magnifying our hold on you, thus acquire a far more tremendous hold on us! Eh, Philo?"

The Philosopher smiled—inscrutably. Probably he felt that an inscrutable smile was his safest means of navigating waters like these.

We went down to the wedding. The Preacher stood up very straight while he was being married, and though his boyish cheek paled and reddened again as the ceremony proceeded, his responses were clear-cut. Rhodora made a bonny bride. The absurd vision I had had of her, ever since I had heard she was to be married, of her taking the officiating clergyman's book out of his hand and steering the service for herself, melted away before the vision of her serious young beauty as she made her vows, and turned from the clergyman's felicitations, at the conclusion of the service, to take Grandmother into a tender embrace.

"I owe it all to you," she said to Grandmother by and by, in my hearing, as we three happened to be for a little alone together. She turned to me. "I was a barbarian when she took me," she said. "A barbarian of barbarians. If it hadn't been for Grandmother I should be one yet, and he"—her glance went off for an instant toward her young husband—"would never have dreamed of looking at me."

"You were not very different, my dear," said Grandmother, in her gentle way, "from many girls of this day."

"Forgive me, dear," responded Rhodora, "but I was so much worse that only a grandmother like you could have shown me what I was."

"I never tried to show you what you were," said Grandmother. "Only what you could be. And now—I must lose you."

The Preacher came up, the Skeptic by his side. The Philosopher and Hepatica, seeing the old magic circle forming, promptly added themselves.

It fell out, presently, that the Philosopher and I, a step away from the others, were observing them as we talked together. The Philosopher had adjusted his eyeglasses, having carefully polished them. He seemed to want to see things clearly to-day.

"This is a scene I've witnessed a good many times, first and last," said he. "Each time it impresses me afresh with the daring of the participants. Brave young things, setting sail upon a mighty ocean, in a small boat, which may or may not be seaworthy—some of them, it seems, sometimes, with neither chart nor compass—certainly with little knowledge of the crew. It's a trite comparison, I suppose."

"You talk as if you stood safely on the shore," I ventured. "Is life no ocean to you, then—and do you never feel adrift upon it?"

The Philosopher stared curiously at me. It was, I admit, a strange speech for me to make to him, but I had not been thinking of him. I had been thinking of Lad, my big boy, now away at school, and of the day when he should reach this experience for himself, and I should have to give him up—my one near tie. I should surely feel adrift in that day—far adrift.

"Does it seem to you like that?" he asked, very gently, after a minute.

I looked up, and saw a new and quite strange expression in his kindly eyes. "No, no," I said hastily. "How could it—with so many and such good friends?"

I think he would have questioned me further, but the Skeptic at that moment turned my way, and I laid hold upon him—figuratively speaking—and did not let go again till all danger of a discussion with the Philosopher on the subject of my loneliness was past.



VI

WISTARIA—AND THE PHILOSOPHER

Friendship needs delicate handling. —Hugh Black.

"After all this dining and wine-ing of you," said Hepatica suddenly one morning, toward the close of my visit, "you are not to escape without our giving a dinner for you."

"Oh, my dear," I began, "after all you have done for me, surely that isn't necessary. I have had——"

"Yes, I know. You have had dinners and dinners, including the Philosopher's bachelor repast, which might or might not be called by that name, but was certainly great fun. But I want to give you a dinner myself."

"Better let her," advised the Skeptic, who was putting on his overcoat at the time, preparatory to leaving us for the day. "It won't be like anything of that name you have ever tried before. Besides she wants you to meet Wistaria."

"Who is Wistaria?" I asked.

They both looked at me. Then they looked at each other.

"Hasn't Philo told you about Wistaria?" inquired the Skeptic, in evident surprise. "Wasn't she at his——Oh, that's right—she was out of town. Well, she's back, and you must meet her. She's a mighty fine girl—or, if not exactly a girl, woman. Philo admires her rather more than he condescends to admire most women, I should say. Any errands for me, Patty? All right—good-bye, dear."

He kissed her and ran for his car. I stood looking out of the window after him. It struck me rather suddenly that it was a gray day outside, with heavy clouds threatening to make the sky even darker. There was a touch of gloom in the whole outer aspect of things.

Hepatica immediately set about making preparations for her dinner. It would be most informal, she assured me, and as I heard her giving her invitations over the telephone I recognized from their character that it would be so, even though I heard her inviting quite a party, including Camellia and the Judge, Dahlia and the Professor, Althea and the Promoter, and Azalea and the Cashier. A strange man, a Mining Engineer, was included in the list, to make the tale of numbers evenly divided. I judged he was likely to fall to me in the final disposition of the guests at Hepatica's table, and inquired what he was like.

"He's delightful," replied Hepatica enthusiastically. "You'll be sure to like him. He lost his wife about five years ago, but hasn't re-married, and lives mostly at his club, as he has no children. He's devoted to his work, and has a good, big reputation, though he's still in the early forties."

Hepatica would not tell me what she meant to have for her dinner, but on the appointed day shut herself up in her kitchen with a young woman whom she had engaged, and would allow me only to set her table for her. As I laid the required number of forks and spoons I realized that she meant to be true to her word and serve a quite simple dinner. For this I was thankful. For some reason, which I could not just understand myself, I was dreading that dinner more than anything that had happened for a long time.

The evening came. I dressed without enthusiasm, putting on the pale-gray frock which Hepatica had insisted upon, and pinning on a bunch of violets which arrived for me at almost the last moment, without any card in the box. Hepatica had three magnificent red roses at the same time. It was like the Skeptic to be so thoughtful.

The guests arrived—Camellia superbly attired, Althea gorgeously so, Dahlia in youthful pink and white, Azalea in a demurely simple dress whose laces were just a thought rumpled about the neck, and had to be straightened out by my assisting fingers. Little Bud, she explained, had insisted on hugging her violently at the last moment, before he would allow her to come away.

Wistaria came last, so that, as we all stood grouped about the little rooms I had a fine chance to see her arrival. She had to go through the room in which we were to reach Hepatica's bedroom, and I saw a tall and graceful figure, all in black under a white evening cloak, and caught a glimpse of a pair of brilliant dark eyes under the white silken scarf which enveloped her hair. But when she came out, in Hepatica's company, I saw, undisguised, one of the most attractive women I had ever met.

"She's unusual, isn't she?" said the Skeptic in my ear, as, having welcomed the new guest, and watched Hepatica present her to me, he fell back at my side. Wistaria had greeted the Philosopher with the quiet warmth of manner which means assured acquaintance, and the two had remained together while we waited for the serving of the dinner.

"She is very charming," I agreed. "It is her manner, quite as much as her face, isn't it? She must be well worth knowing."

"We think so," said he. He seemed to be regarding me quite steadily. I wondered uneasily if I were not looking well. The rooms seemed rather over-warm. The presence of so many people in such a small space is apt to make the air oppressive. Also I remembered that the effect of pale-gray is not to heighten one's colouring.

Wistaria, all in filmy black, from which her white shoulders rose like a flower, wore one splendid American Beauty rose. Somehow I felt, quite suddenly, that pale-gray is a meaningless tint, the mere shadow of a colour, of less character than white, of immeasurably less beauty than simple black itself. I caught the Philosopher's eye apparently fixed for a moment upon my violets, and I wondered, with a queer little sensation of disquiet, if even they seemed to be without character also.

Then dinner was announced, and I shook myself mentally, and looked up smiling at my Mining Engineer, who was truly a man worth knowing and a most pleasant gentleman besides, and went to dinner with him determined that if I must look characterless I would not be characterless, nor make my companion long to get away.

Wistaria and the Philosopher sat exactly opposite. The Mining Engineer on my one side, and the Judge on my other, kept me too busy to spend much time in noting Wistaria's captivating presence or the Philosopher's absorption. Yet, at moments when some sally of the Skeptic's, who sat upon Wistaria's other side, brought the attention of the whole company to bear upon that quarter of the table, I found myself unable to help noting two things. One was that I had never seen the Philosopher so roused and ready of speech; the other, that I had never quite appreciated how distinguished he has, of late years, grown in appearance. Possibly this was because I had not had the chance to view him under just these conditions; possibly, also, it was because he literally was growing distinguished in the world of scientific research, and his name becoming one cited as an authority in a certain important field.

The dinner itself I cannot describe, for the sufficient reason that I cannot now recall one solitary thing I ate. But the impression remains with me that it was really an extraordinarily simple dinner, that everything was delicious, and that one rose up from it with a sense of having been daintily fed, not stuffed. I'm sure I could not pay it a higher or a rarer compliment.

After dinner the Promoter told stories of "deals," to which the Professor listened curiously, watching the speaker as he might have gently eyed some strange specimen in the world of insects or of birds. The Judge and the Cashier hobnobbed for a while; then the Judge made his way to the side of Wistaria and remained there for an indefinite period, both looking deeply interested in their conversation. The Engineer attempted to make something of Althea, but presently gave it up, spent a few moments with Camellia, and came back to me. By and by Azalea and the Cashier sang a duet for us, and after some persuasion Azalea then sang alone. Altogether, the evening got on somehow—it is all very hazy in my mind, except for one singular fact—I did not spend a moment with the Philosopher. How this happened I do not know, and it was so unusual that it seemed noteworthy. It was not because he was not several times in my immediate vicinity, but I was always at the moment so engaged with whomever happened to be talking with me that I had not time to turn and include the Philosopher in the interview.

When our guests departed they went together, having one and the same car to catch. All but Wistaria, who had come in her own private carriage, which was late in arriving to take her home. The Philosopher had remained with her, and he took her down to her carriage. I cannot remember seeing anything more attractive than Wistaria's personality as she said good night, her sparkling face all winsome cordiality, her white scarf lying lightly upon the masses of her black hair, the crimson rose nodding from the folds of her long, white cloak.

"Pretty fine looking pair, aren't they?" observed the Skeptic, with an expansive grin, the moment the door had closed upon Wistaria and the Philosopher. He threw himself into a chair and yawned mightily. "Wistaria's almost as tall as Philo, isn't she? A superb woman."

"I never saw her looking so well," agreed Hepatica, straightening chairs and settling couch pillows, trailing here and there in her pretty frock with all the energy of the early morning, as if it were not half-after eleven by the little mantel clock. "Didn't you like her, dear?" She threw an eager glance at me. She was in the restless mood of the hostess who wishes to be assured that everything has gone well.

"I was charmed with her," said I—I had not meant to take a seat again; I was weary and wanted to get away to bed—"I never knew how beautiful an American Beauty rose was till I saw it beneath her face."

The Skeptic turned in his chair and looked at me. "Well done!" he cried. "Couldn't have said it better myself. We must tell Philo that speech. He'll be deeply gratified. He has every confidence in your taste."

"The dinner was perfect," I went on. "I never imagined one so cleverly planned. And everybody seemed in great spirits—there wasn't a dull moment."

"You dear thing!" said Hepatica, and came and dropped a kiss upon my hair. "It's fun to do things for you, you're so appreciative. Didn't you enjoy your Mining Engineer?"

"He was so entertaining," said I, "that if it had been any other dinner than that one I shouldn't have known what I was eating."

"Hear, hear!" applauded the Skeptic. "Bouquets for us all! Didn't I make an ideal host?"

"Your geniality was rivalled only by your tact," I declared.

They laughed together. Then the Skeptic sat up. He got up and strode over to the window and peered down. "Philo is taking a disgracefully long time to see the lady into her carriage," he observed. "I supposed he'd be back, to talk it over, as usual. The best of entertaining is the talking your guests over after they've gone—eh, Patty, girl? I don't seem to see the carriage. Perhaps he's gone home with her."

I laid my hand upon the door of my room. "I don't know why I am so sleepy," I apologized. "It only came over me since the door closed. But you must both be tired, too—and we have to be up in the morning at the usual hour."

Hepatica looked regretful, but she did not urge me to remain. I felt guilty at leaving a wide-awake host and hostess who wanted to talk things over, but really I—the perfume from my violets had been stealing away my nerves all the evening. I felt that I must take them off or grow faint at their odour, which seemed stronger as they drooped. I opened my door, turned to smile back at the pair, and shut it upon the inside. A moment later I was standing by my window which I had thrown wide, and the winter wind was lifting the violets which I had already forgotten to take off.

I heard the murmur of voices in the room outside, but it soon ceased. With no third person to praise the feast it was probably dull work congratulating each other on its success. By and by—I don't know when it happened—I heard the electric entrance-bell whirr in the tiny hall, and the Skeptic go to answer it. Then I heard voices again—men's voices. There was an interval. Then came a small knock at my door. I opened it to Hepatica.

"The Philosopher has come back," she whispered. I had not lit my light—I had closed my window and had been sitting by it, my elbows on the sill. Hepatica put out her hand and felt of me. "Oh, you haven't undressed," she said. "Then won't you go out and see him? He seemed so disappointed when Don said you had gone. It seems he's called out of town quite suddenly—he's afraid he may not be back before you go—he says he didn't have a chance to tell you about it this evening."

There was no help for it—I had no excuse. I did not dare to snap on my light and look at myself. I put my hands to my hair to feel if it was still snug; then I went.

Hepatica had mercifully turned off all the lights but the rose-shaded drop-light on the reading-table and two of the electric candles in the dining-room. It was a relief to feel the glare gone. The air from the window had freshened me. The Philosopher stood by the reading-table, upon which he had laid his hat. His overcoat was on a chair. Evidently he was not waiting merely to say good-bye and go.

The Skeptic, upon my entrance, immediately crossed the room to the door of the hall, upon which his own room opened. "You people will excuse me," he said. "I don't know why I am so sleepy." His tone was peculiar, and I recognized that he was quoting my words of a half-hour before. "It only came over me since the door closed on our guests. And I have to be up in the morning at the usual hour. But don't let that hurry you, Philo, old man." And he vanished.

The Philosopher looked as if he did not mean to let it hurry him. He drew his chair near mine, facing me, after a fashion he has, and looked at me in silence for a minute.

"You are tired," he said.

"A little. The rooms were very warm."

"They were. They made the violets droop, I see."

I put up my hand. "Yes. I meant to take them off."

"Perhaps you don't like violets. If I could have found a bunch of sweet-williams to send you instead, like those in your own garden, I should have preferred it. I know what you like among summer flowers, but with these florist's offerings I'm not so familiar. I'm afraid I'm not much versed in the sending of flowers."

"Did you send these?" I put my hand up to them again. They certainly were drooping sadly. Perhaps if they had known who sent them——

"To be sure I did."

"There was no card. I thought it was Don—and forgot to thank him—luckily. Let me thank you now. They have been so sweet all the evening."

"Too sweet, haven't they? You looked a bit pale to-night, I thought."

"It was my frock. Gray always makes people look pale."

"Does it? I've liked that frock so much—and I had an idea gray and purple went together."

"They do—beautifully. And to-morrow, after the violets have been in water, they'll be quite fresh—and so shall I. To tell the honest truth, so many dinners—well, I'm not used to them. I'm just a little bit glad to remember that spring is coming on soon, and I can get out in my old garden and dig and rake, and watch the things come out."

"Yes—you're one of the outdoor creatures," said the Philosopher, leaning back in his chair in the old way—he had been sitting up quite straight. "I understand it—I like gardens myself. And your garden most of all. Do you realize, between your absences and my long stay in Germany, it's three summers since I've strolled about your garden?"

"So long? Yes, it must be."

"But I mean to be at home this summer. Do you?"



"I? Yes, I think so. After so long a winter outing—or inning—I couldn't bear to miss the garden this year. And Lad will be home—his first vacation. He is fond of the old garden, too."

"May I come?" asked the Philosopher rather abruptly.

"To stroll about the garden? Haven't you always been welcome?"

"I want a special welcome—from you—from my friend. When a man has only one friend, that one's welcome means a good deal to him."

"Only one! You have so many."

"Have I? Yes, so I have, and pleasant friends they are, too. But friendship—with only one. Come, Rhexia—you understand that as well as I. Why pretend you don't? That's not like you."

He was looking at me very steadily. He leaned forward, stretching out his hand. I laid mine in it. And so we renewed the old vow.



PART III



I

SIXTEEN MILES TO BOSWELL'S

"One passenger off the five-thirty, coming up the hill," announced Sue Boswell, peering eagerly out of the Inn's office window. "That makes nine for supper. I'll run and tell mother."

"Nine—poor child," murmured Tom Boswell, behind the desk. "That's certainly a great showing for a summer hotel, on the fifteenth day of July. If we don't do better in August—the game's up."

He stared out of the window at the approaching guest, who, escorted by Tom's brother Tim, was climbing the road toward Boswell's Inn at a pace which indicated no pressing anxiety to arrive. As the pair drew nearer, Tom could see that the stranger was a rather peculiar-looking person. Of medium height, as thin as a lath, with a nearly colourless face in which was set a pair of black eyes with dark circles round them, the man had somewhat the appearance of an invalid; yet an air of subdued nervous energy about him in a measure offset the suggestion of ill-health. He was surveying Boswell's Inn as he approached it in a comprehensive way which seemed to take in every feature of its appearance.

Across the desk in the small lobby the newcomer spoke curtly. "Good room and a bath? I want an absolutely quiet room where I get no kitchen noises or ballroom dancing. Windows with a breeze—if you've got such a thing."

"I can't give you the bath," Tom answered regretfully, "because we haven't got one that goes with any room in the house. But you can have plenty of hot and cold, in cans. The room will be quiet, all right. And we always have a breeze up here, if there is one anywhere in the world. Shall I show you?"

"Lead on," assented the stranger. He had not offered to register, though Tom had extended to him a freshly dipped pen.

"He's going to make sure first," thought Tom, recognizing a sign of the experienced traveller. He led the way himself, feeling, for some reason, unwilling to hand young Tim the key and allow him to exploit the rooms. As they mounted the stairs, Tom was rapidly considering. He had brought along three keys—rather an unusual act on his part. It was hard to say why he felt it necessary to bestow any special attention upon this guest, who certainly was by no means of an imposing appearance, and whose hot-weather dress was as careless as his manner.

He opened the door of the first room, and the stranger looked in silently. "I'll show you another before you decide," said Tom hurriedly, without waiting for a comment.

This was not his best empty room, and he felt somehow that the man who wanted a room with a bath and a breeze knew it. He led the way on along the hall to a corner room in the front. This was his second best. Tom always preferred to reserve his choicest for a chance millionaire or a possible wealthy society lady—though Heaven knew that, during the six weeks the Inn had been open, no guest distantly resembling one or the other of those desirable types had approached the little mountain hostelry.

"Anything better?" inquired the thin man, his extraordinarily quick glance covering every detail of the room like lightning, as Tom felt.

"Sure—if you want the bridal suit." Tom pronounced it proudly, as it were a claw-hammer and white waistcoat.

"Bring her on."

Tom marched ahead to the two rooms opening on the little balcony above the side porch, a balcony which belonged to the "bridal suite" alone, and which commanded the finest view into the very heart of the mountains that the house afforded. Seeing his guest—after one look around the spotless room with its pink and white furnishings, and into the small dressing-room beyond—stride toward the outer door, Tom threw it wide. The guest stepped out on to the balcony. Here he pulled off his hat, which he had not before removed, and let the breeze—for there was unquestionably a breeze, even on this afternoon of a day which had been one of the hottest the country had known—drift refreshingly against his damp brow. The zephyr was strong enough even to lift slightly the thick locks of black hair which lay above the white forehead.

"Price for this?" asked the stranger, in his abrupt way, turning back into the room.

Tom mentioned it—with a little inward hesitation. The family had differed a good deal on the question of prices for these best rooms. In his opinion that settled upon for the bridal suite was almost prohibitively high. Not a guest yet but had turned away with a sigh. For a moment he had been tempted to reduce it, but he had promised the others to stick by the decision at least through July. So he mentioned the price firmly.

The guest glanced sharply at him as he did so. There was a queer little contraction of the stranger's thin upper lip. Then he said: "I'll take 'em—for the night, and you may hold 'em for me till to-morrow night. Tell you then whether I'll stay longer."

Tom understood, of course, that it was now a question of a satisfactory table. But here he knew he was strong. Mother Boswell's cooking—there was none better obtainable. He was already in a hurry to prove to this laconic stranger who demanded the best he had of everything, including breezes, that in the matter of food Boswell's Inn could satisfy the most exacting. Not in elaborately dressed viands of rare kitchen product, of course—that was not to be expected off here. But in temptingly cooked everyday food, and in certain extras which were Mother Boswell's specialties, and which the few people now in the Inn called for with ever-increasing zest—though they seldom deigned to send any special word of praise to the anxious cook—Boswell's needed to ask forbearance of nobody.

"I'll send your stuff up right away," said Tom, as the other man cast his straw hat upon a chair and went over to a washstand, where hung several snowy towels. "Have some hot water?"

"Yes—and iced."

"All right." Tom was off on the jump. It was certainly something to have rented the bridal suite even for the night, but he felt more than ordinarily curious to know who his guest was.

"Might be a travelling man," he speculated, when he had given Tim his orders, "though he doesn't exactly seem like one. But he looks like a fellow who's used to getting what he wants."

When the new guest came downstairs, at the peal of a gong through the quiet house, Tom saw him cast one keen-eyed glance in turn at each of the other occupants of the lobby, as they clustered about the door of the dining-room. Seven of these were women, and of that number at least five were elderly. Of the two younger ladies, neither presented any special attractiveness beyond that of entire respectability. The eighth guest was a man—a middle-aged man who was reading a book and who carried the book into the dining-room with him, where he continued to read it at his solitary table.

Tom Boswell was at the elbow of the latest arrival as he entered the dining-room, a long, low, but airy apartment, as spotless and shining in its way as the bedroom upstairs had been. There was no head waiter, and Tom himself piloted the new guest to a small table by a window, looking off into the mountains on the opposite side of the house from that of the bridal suite. The women boarders were all behind him, the solitary man just across the way at a corresponding small table. Certainly the proprietor of Boswell's Inn possessed that great desideratum for such an official—tact.

Sue Boswell, aged fifteen, in a blue-and-white print frock and white apron so crisp that one could not discern a wrinkle in them, waited on the new guest. She did not ask him what he would have, nor present to him a card from which to select his meal. She brought him first a small cup of chicken broth, steaming hot; and though he regarded this at first as if he had no appetite whatever, after the first tentative sip he went on to the bottom of the cup. When this was gone, Sue placed before him a plate of corned-beef hash, an alluring pinkness showing beneath the gratifying upper coat of brown. A small dish of cucumbers—thin, iced cucumbers, with a French dressing—accompanied the hash; and with these he was offered hot rolls so small and delicate and crisp that, after cautiously sampling the butter with what seemed a fastidious palate, the guest took to eating rolls as if he had seldom found anything so well worth consuming.

Something made of red raspberries and cream followed, and then half a large cantaloupe, its golden heart filled with crushed ice, was placed before him. Last appeared a cup of amber coffee. As the guest tasted this beverage, a look of complete satisfaction overspread his pale face, and he drained the cup clear and asked for more.

Presently he strolled out into the lobby. Here Tom awaited him behind the desk. The hotel register was open, and Tom's fingers suggestively held a pen. The guest obeyed the hint. At an inn so small, it certainly would be a pity for any guest not to add his name to the short list.

For it was a very short list. Although a full month had gone by since the first arrival had written her name, the bottom of the page had not been quite reached when this latest one scratched his in characters which looked quite as much like Arabic as English. When Tom came to examine the name later, he made it out to be Perkins, though it might quite as easily have been Tompkins, or Judson, or any other name which had an elevated letter somewhere in the middle. The initials were quite indecipherable. But Perkins it turned out to be, for when Tom tentatively addressed the newcomer by that appellation there was no correction made, and he continued to respond whenever so accosted.

Mr. Perkins spent the evening smoking upon the porch, his head turned toward the mountains. The next morning, when he had eaten a breakfast which included some wonderful browned griddle-cakes and syrup—another of the Inn's specialties—he strolled away into the middle distance and was observed by various of the guests, from time to time, perched about among the rocks, in idle attitudes.

"He's a queer duck," observed Tom in the kitchen that day, describing Mr. Perkins to his mother. Mrs. Boswell seldom appeared beyond her special domain—that of the kitchen—but left the rest of the housekeeping to her daughters Bertha and Sue; the management of the Inn to Tom and Tim. "Silent as an owl. Seems to like his food—nothing strange about that. He doesn't act sick, exactly, but tired, or bored, or used up, somehow. Eyes like coals and sharper than a ferret's. I can't make him out. He won't talk to anybody, except now and then a word or two to Mr. Griffith. Never looks at the ladies, but I tell you they look at him. Every one of 'em has a different notion about him. Anyhow, he's taken the bridal suit for two weeks. Goes down to the post-office for his mail—gave particular orders not to have it sent up here. That's kind of funny, isn't it? Oh, I meant to tell you before: he's paid for his rooms a week in advance."

"It helps a little," said his sister Bertha. She was twenty-five years old, and if any one of this family had the responsibility of the success of Boswell's Inn heavily and anxiously at heart, it was Bertha. "But it can't make up the difference. Here's July half over, and not a dozen people in the house. What can be the matter? Isn't everything all right?"

"Sure it's all right," insisted Tom. "We just haven't got known, that's all."

"But how are we going to get known, if nobody comes? Our advertisement in the city papers costs dreadfully, and it doesn't seem to bring anybody."

"Now see here," said Tom firmly, "don't you go to getting discouraged. This is our first season. We can't expect to do much the first season. We're prepared for that."

But he realized, quite as clearly as his sister, that they had not been prepared for so complete a failure as they were making. Boswell's Inn stood only sixteen miles away from a large city, a great Western railroad centre, into which, early and late, thousands of tourists were pouring. The road out into the mountains was a good one, the trip easy enough for the owners of motor cars, of whom the city held enough to make a continuous procession all the way if only they could be headed in the right direction. But how to head them? That was what Tom couldn't figure out.

On the third evening after Mr. Perkins's arrival, Tom, strolling gloomily out upon the porch to see if any one was lingering there to prevent his closing up, discovered Perkins sitting alone, smoking. There had not been a new arrival that day; worse, one of the elderly ladies had gone away. She had departed reluctantly, but her absence counted just the same, and Tom was missing her as he had never expected to miss any elderly lady with iron-gray curls and a cast in one eye.

"Nice night," observed Tom to Mr. Perkins.

"First-class."

"Getting cooled off a bit up here?"

"Pretty well."

"Are, you—having everything you want?"

Tom asked the question with some diffidence. It was a matter of regret with him that he couldn't afford yet to put young Tim into buttons, but without them he was sure the lad made as alert a bellboy and porter as could be asked.

"Nothing to complain of."

Tom wished Mr. Perkins wouldn't be so taciturn. The proprietor of the Inn That Couldn't Get a Start was feeling so blue to-night that speech with some one besides his depressed family was almost a necessity. He couldn't talk with the women; Mr. Griffith, though kindly enough, had his nose forever buried in a book. Perkins looked as if he could talk if he would, and have something to say, too. Tom tried to think of an observation which would draw this silent man out. But quite suddenly, and greatly to Tom's surprise, Mr. Perkins began to draw Tom out. Even so, his questions were like shots from a gun, so brief and to the point were they.

"Doing any advertising?" broke the silence first, from a corner of the thin mouth. Perkins's cigar had been shifted to the opposite corner. He did not look at Tom, but continued to gaze off toward a certain curious effect of moonlight against the rocky sides of the canyon.

"We have a card in all the city papers."

"Any specials? Write-ups?"

"Well, this is our first season, and we didn't feel as if we could afford to pay for that."

"No pulls, eh?"

"You mean——?"

"No friends among the newspaper men?"

"I don't know one. They don't seem to come up here. I wish they would."

"Ever ask one?"

"I don't know any," repeated Tom.

A short laugh, more like a grunt, was Perkins's reply. Tom didn't see what there was to laugh at in the misfortune of having no acquaintance among the writing fellows. He waited eagerly for the next question. It was worth a good deal to him merely to have this outsider show a spark of interest in the fortunes of Boswell's Inn.

"When did you open up?" It came just as he feared Perkins was going to drop the subject.

"The third of June."

"Own the house?"

"No—lease it, cheap. It's an old place, but we put all we could afford into freshening it up."

"Cook a permanent one?"

The form of the question perplexed Tom for an instant, but it presently resolved itself, and he was grinning as he replied: "Sure she is. It's my mother. Do you like her cooking?"

"A-1."

Ah, Tom would tell his mother that! The young man flushed slightly in the darkness of the porch. It was almost the first compliment that had been paid her, and she worked like a slave, too.

"Little waitress your sister?"

"Yes. Sue's young, but we think she does pretty well."

"Delivers the goods. Housekeeper a member of the family, too?"

"Yes—and Tim's my brother. Oh, it's all in the family. The only trouble is——" he hesitated.

"Lack of patronage?"

"We can't keep open much longer if things don't improve." The moment the words were out Tom regretted them. He didn't know how he had come to speak them. He hadn't meant to give this fact away. Certainly there had been nothing particularly sympathetic in the tone of Perkins's choppy questions. But the other man's next words knocked his regrets out of his mind in a jiffy.

"Could you entertain a dozen men at supper to-morrow night if they came in a bunch without warning?"

"Give us the chance!"

"Chance might happen—better be prepared. I expect to be away over to-morrow night myself, but have the tip that a crowd may be coming out to sample the place. It may be a mistake—don't know."

"We'll be ready. Would they come by train?"

"Don't ask me—none of my picnic. Merely overheard the thing suggested." And Perkins, rising, cast away the close-smoked stub of his cigar. "Good-night," said he, carelessly enough, and strolled in through the wide hall of the old stone house. Tom looked after him as he mounted the stairs. The young innkeeper's spirits had gone up with a bound. A dozen men to supper! Well—he thought they could entertain them. He would go and tell his mother and Bertha on the instant; the prospect would cheer them immensely. He wondered how or where Perkins had overheard this rumour. At the post-office, most likely. It was a gossipy place, the centre of the tiny burg at the foot of the mountain, an eighth of a mile away, where a dozen small shops and half a hundred houses strung along the one small street, at the end of which the two daily trains made their half-minute stops.

* * * * *

The dozen men had come and gone. There were fourteen of them, to be exact, and they had climbed out of a couple of big touring cars with sounds of hilarity which made the elderly ladies jump in their chairs. They had swarmed over the place as if they owned it, had talked and laughed and joked and shouted, all in a perfectly agreeable way which woke up Boswell's as if it were in the centre of somewhere instead of off in the mountains. They had scrawled fourteen vigorous scrawls upon the register and made it necessary to turn the page, this of itself affording the clerk a satisfaction quite out of proportion to the apparent unimportance of the incident. Then they had gone gayly in to supper, had sat about two stainless tables close by the open windows, and had been waited upon by both Sue and Tim in such alert fashion that their plates arrived almost before they had unfurled their napkins.

Out in the kitchen, crimson-cheeked and solicitous, Mrs. Boswell had sent in relays of broiled chicken, young and tender, browned as only artists of her rank can brown them, flanked by potatoes cooked in a way known only to herself. These were two of her "specialties," which the elderly ladies were accustomed to enjoy without mentioning it. Pickles and jellies such as the fourteen men had tasted only in childhood accompanied these dishes, and the little hot rolls came on in piles which melted away before the delighted attacks of the hungry guests; so that the kitchen itself became alarmed, and cut the elderly ladies a trifle short, at which complaints were promptly filed, though it was the first time such a shortage had occurred.