"Uncle, it must be here and now. I cannot go away from this place a liar, as I came. Let me leave it here,—my cowardly, contemptible falsehood,—in this place of your cross. I am longing, like David, for that water they have gone to find, but I will not drink at Pilgrim Station, except with clean lips that have confessed and told you all."

Mr. Withers shrank from these unrestrained and to him indecorous statements of feeling; they shocked him almost as much as would the spectacle of Daphne mutilating her beautiful hair, casting dust upon her head, and rending her garments before him. He believed that her trouble of soul was genuine, but his Puritan reserve in matters of conscience, his scholarly taste, his jealousy for the occasion which had brought them to that spot, all combined to make this unrestrained expression of it offensive to him. However, he no longer tried to repress her.

"Uncle, you don't believe me," she said; "but you must. I am quite myself."

"Except for the prolonged nervous strain you have been suffering; and I am afraid I have not known how to spare you as I might the fatigue, the altitude perhaps, the long journey face to face with these cruel memories. But I will not press it, I will not press it," he concluded hastily, seeing that his words distressed her.

"Press it all you can," she said. "I wish you could press it hard enough for me to feel it; but I feel nothing—I am a stone. At this moment," she reiterated, "I have no feeling of any kind but shame for myself that I should be here at all. Oh, if you only knew what I am!"

"It is not what you are, it is who you are, that brings you here, Daphne."

"Yes, who I am! Who am I? What right had I to come here? I never loved him. I never was engaged to him, but I let you think so. When you wrote me that sweet letter and called me your daughter, why didn't I tell you the truth? Because in that same letter you offered me his money—and—and I wanted the money. I lied to you then, when you were in the first of your grief, to get his money! I have been trying to live up to that He ever since. It has almost killed me; it has killed every bit of truth and decent womanly pride in me. I want you to save me from it before I grow any worse. You must take back the money. It did one good thing: it paid those selfish debts of mine, and it made mother well. What has been spent I will work for and pay back as I can. But I love you, uncle John; there has been no falsehood there."

"This is the language of sheer insanity, Daphne, of mental excitement that passes reason." Mr. Withers spoke in a carefully controlled but quivering voice—as a man who has been struck an unexpected and staggering blow, but considering the quarter it came from, is prepared to treat it as an accident. "The facts, John's own words in his last letter to me, cannot be gainsaid. 'I am coming home to you, dad, and to whom else I need not say. You know that I have never changed, but she has changed, God bless her! How well He made them, to be our thorn, our spur, our punishment, our prevention, and sometimes our cure! I am coming home to be cured,' he said. You have not forgotten the words of that letter, dear? I sent it to you, but first—I thought you would not mind—I copied those, his last words. They were words of such happiness; and they implied a thought, at least, of his Creator, if not that grounded faith"—

"They were hopes, only hopes!" the girl remorsefully disclaimed. "I allowed him to have them because I wanted time to make up my wretched, selfish mind. I had never made him a single promise, never said one word that could give me the right to pose as I did afterwards, to let myself be grieved over as if I had lost my last hope on earth. I had his money all safe enough."

"Daphne, I forbid you to speak in that tone! There are bounds even to confession. If you think well to degrade yourself by such allusions, do not degrade me by forcing me to listen to you. This is a subject too sacred to be discussed in its mercenary bearings; settle that question with yourself as you will, but let me hear no more of it."

Daphne was silenced; for the first time in her remembrance of him she had seen her uncle driven to positive severity, to anger even, in opposition to the truth which his heart refused to accept. When he was calmer he began to reason with her, to uphold her in the true faith, against her seeming self, in these profane and ruthless disclosures.

"You are morbid," he declared, "oversensitive, from dwelling too long on this painful chapter of your life. No one knows better than myself what disorders of the imagination may result from a mood of the soul, a passing mood,—the pains of growth, perhaps. You are a woman now; but let the woman not be too hard upon the girl that she was. After what you have been through quite lately, and for two years past, I pronounce you mentally unfit to cope with your own condition. Say that you did not promise him in words; the promise was given no less in spirit. How else could he have been so exaltedly sure? He never was before. You had never before, I think, given him any grounds for hope?"

"No; I was always honest before," said Daphne humbly. "When I first refused him, when we were both such children, and he went away, I promised to answer his letters if he would let that subject rest. And so I did. But every now and then he would try me again, to see if I had changed, and that letter I would not answer; and presently he would write again, in his usual way. As often as he brought up the old question, just so often I stopped writing; silence was always my answer, till that last winter, when I made my final attempt to do something with my painting and failed so miserably. You don't know, uncle, how hard I have worked, or what it cost me to fail,—to have to own that all had been wasted: my three expensive winters in Boston, my cutting loose from all the little home duties, in the hope of doing something great that would pay for all. And that last winter I did not make my expenses, even. After borrowing every cent that mother could spare (more than she ought to have spared; it was doing without a girl that broke her down) and denying myself, or denying her, my home visit at Christmas; and setting up in a studio of my own, and taking pains to have all the surroundings that are said to bring success,—and then, after all, to fail, and fail, and fail! And spring came, and mother looked so ill, and the doctor said she must have rest, total rest and change; and he looked at me as if he would like to say, 'You did it!' Well, the 'rest' I brought her was my debts and my failure and remorse; and I wasn't even in good health, I was so used up with my winter's struggle. It was then, in the midst of all that trouble and shame and horror at myself, his sweet letter came. No, not sweet, but manly and generous,—utterly generous, as he always was. I ought to have loved him, uncle dear; I always knew it, and I did try very hard! He did not feel his way this time, but just poured out his whole heart once for all; I knew he would never ask me again. And then the fatal word; he said he had grown rich. He could give me the opportunities my nature demanded. You know how he would talk. He believed in me, if nobody else ever did; I could not have convinced him that I was a failure.

"It was very soothing to my wounds. I was absolutely shaken by the temptation. It meant so much; such a refuge from self-contempt and poverty and blame, and such rest and comfort it would bring to mother! I hope that had something to do with it. You see I am looking for a loophole to crawl out of; I haven't strength of mind to face it without some excuse. Well, I answered that letter; and I think the evil one himself must have helped me, for I wrote it, my first careful, deliberate piece of double-dealing, just as easily as if I had been practicing for it all my life. It was such a letter as any man would have thought meant everything; yet if I had wanted, I could have proved by the words themselves that it meant nothing that couldn't be taken back.

"I said to myself, If I can stand it, if I can hold out as I feel now, I will marry him; then let come what may. I knew that some things would come, some things that I wanted very much.

"Then came the strange delay, the silence, the wretched telegrams and letters back and forth. Ah, dear, do I make you cry? Don't cry for him; you have not lost him. Cry for me, the girl you thought was good and pure and true! You know what I did then, when your dear letter came, giving me all he had, calling me your daughter, all that was left you of John! I deceived you in your grief, hating myself and loving you all the time. And here I am, in this place! Do you wonder I had to speak?"

"Your words are literally as blows to me, Daphne," Mr. Withers groaned, covering his face. After a while he said, "All I have in the world would have been yours and your mother's had you come to me, or had I suspected the trouble you were in. I ought to have been more observant. My prepossessions must be very strong; doubtless some of the readier faculties have been left out in my mental constitution. I hear you say these words, but even now they are losing their meaning for me. I can see that your distress is genuine, and I must suppose that you have referred it to its proper cause; but I cannot master the fact itself. You must give me time to realize it. This takes much out of life for me."

"Not my love for you, uncle John; there has been no falsehood there."

"You could not have spared yourself and me this confession?" the old man queried. "But no, God forgive me! You must have suffered grievous things in your young conscience, my dear; this was an ugly spot to hide. But now you have fought your fight and won it, at the foot of the cross. To say that I forgive you, that we both, the living and the dead, forgive you, is the very least that can be said. Come here! Come and be my daughter as before! My daughter!" he repeated. And Daphne, on her knees, put her arms about his neck and hid her face against him.

"Thank Heaven!" he murmured brokenly, "it cannot hurt him now. He has found his 'cure.' As a candle-flame in this broad sunlight, so all those earthly longings"—The old gentleman could not finish his sentence, though a sentence was dear to him almost as the truth from which, even in his love of verbiage, his speech never deviated. "So we leave it here," he said at last. "It is between us and our blessed dead. No one else need know what you have had the courage to tell me. Your confession concerns no other living soul, unless it be your mother, and I see no reason why her heart should be perturbed. As for the money, what need have I for more than my present sufficiency, which is far beyond the measure of my efforts or deserts? I beg you never to recur to the subject, unless you would purposely wish to wound me. This is a question of conscience purely, and you have made yours clean. Are you satisfied?"

"Yes," said Daphne faintly.

"What is the residue? Or is it only the troubled waters still heaving?"

"Yes, perhaps so."

"Well, the peace will come. Promise me, dear, that you will let it come. Do not give yourself the pain and humiliation of repeating to any other person this miserable story of your fault."

"It was more than a fault; you know that, uncle. Your conscience could not have borne it for an hour."

"Your sin, then. A habit of confession is debilitating and dangerous. God has heard you, and I, who alone in this world could have the right to reproach you, have said to you, Go in peace. Peace let it be, and silence, which is the safest seal of a true confession."

"Do you mean that I am never to let myself be known as I am?" asked Daphne. Her face had changed; it wore a look of fright and resistance. "Why, that would mean that I am never to unmask; to go about all my life in my trappings of false widowhood. You read what that paper called me! I cannot play the part any longer."

"Are you speaking with reference to these strangers? But this will soon be over, dear. We shall soon be at home, where no one thinks of us except as they have known us all their lives. It will be painful for a little while, this conspicuousness; but these good people will soon pass out of our lives, and we out of theirs. Idle speculation will have little to do with us, after this."

"There will be always speculation," implored the girl. "It will follow me wherever I go, and all my life I shall be in bondage to this wretched lie. Take back the money, uncle, and give me the price I paid for it,—my freedom, myself as I was before I was tempted!"

"Ah, if that could be!" said the old gentleman. "Is it my poor boy's memory that burdens you so? Is it that which you would be freed from?"

"From doing false homage to his memory," Daphne pleaded. "I could have grieved for him, if I could have been honest; as it is, I am in danger almost of hating him. Forgive me, uncle, but I am! How do you suppose I feel when voices are lowered and eyes cast down, not to intrude upon my 'peculiar, privileged grief? 'Here I and Sorrow sit!' Isn't it awful, uncle? Isn't it ghastly, indecent? I am afraid some day I shall break out and do some dreadful thing,—laugh or say something shocking, when they try to spare my feelings. Feelings! when my heart is as hard, this moment, to everything but myself, myself! I am so sick of myself! But how can I help thinking about myself when I can never for one moment be myself?"

"This is something that goes deeper," said Mr. Withers. "I confess it is difficult for me to follow you here; to understand how a love as meek as that of the dead, who ask nothing, could lay such deadly weights upon a young girl's life."

"Not his love—mine, mine! Is it truly in his grave? If it is not, why do I dare to profess daily that it is, to go on lying every day? I want back my word, that I never gave to any man. Can't one repent and confess a falsehood? And do you call it confessing, when all but one person in the world are still deceived?"

"It is not easy for me to advise you, Daphne," said Mr. Withers wearily. "Your struggle has discovered to me a weakness of my own: verily, an old man's fond jealousy for the memory of his son. Almost I could stoop to entreat you. I do entreat you! So long as we defraud no one else, so long as there is no living person who might justly claim to know your heart, why rob my poor boy's grave of the grace your love bestows, even the semblance that it was? Let it lie there like a mourning wreath, a purchased tribute, we will say," the father added, with a smile of sad irony; "but only a rude hand would rob him of his funereal honors. There seems to be an unnecessary harshness in this effort to right yourself at the cost of the unresisting dead. Since you did not deny him living, must you repudiate him now? Fling away even his memory, that casts so thin a shade upon your life, a faint morning shadow that will shrink as your sun climbs higher. By degrees you will be free. And, speaking less selfishly, would there not be a certain indelicacy in reopening now the question of your past relations to one whose name is very seldom spoken? Others may not be thinking so much of your loss—your supposed loss," the old gentleman conscientiously supplied—"as your sensitiveness leads you to imagine. But you will give occasion for thinking and for talking if you tear open now your girlhood's secrets. Whom does it concern, my dear, to know where or how your heart is bestowed?"

Daphne's cheeks and brow were burning hot; even her little ears were scarlet. Her eyes filled and drooped. "It is only right," she owned. "It is my natural punishment."

"No, no; I would not punish nor judge you. I love you too well. But I know better than you can what a safeguard this will be,—this disguise which is no longer a deception, since the one it was meant to deceive knows all and forgives it. It will rebuke the bold and hasty pretenders to a treasure you cannot safely part with, even by your own gift, as yet. You are still very young in some ways, my dear."

"I am old enough," said Daphne, "to have learned one fearful lesson."

"Do I oppress you with my view? Do I insist too much?"

Perhaps nothing could have lowered the girl in her own eyes more than this humility of the gentle old man in the face of his own self-exposed weakness, his pathetic jealousy for that self above self,—-the child one can do no more than grieve for this side the grave. She had come to herself only to face the consciousness of a secret motive which robbed her confession of all moral value. Repentance, that would annul her base bargain now that the costs began to outweigh the advantages, was gilt edged, was a luxury; she was ashamed to buy back her freedom on such terms.

"Let it be as you say," she assented; "but only because you ask it. It will not be wrong, will it, if I do it for you?"

"I hope not," returned Mr. Withers. "The motive, in a silence of this kind that can harm no one, must make a difference, I should say."

So it was settled; and Daphne felt the weight of her promise, which the irony of justice had fastened upon her, as a millstone round her neck for life; she was still young enough to think that whatever is must last forever. They sat in silence, but neither felt that the other was satisfied. Mr. Withers knew that Daphne was not lightened of her trouble, nor was he in his heart content with the point he had gained. The unwonted touch of self-assertion it had called for rested uneasily on him; and he could not but own that he had made himself Daphne's apologist, which no confessor ought to be, in this disguise by which he named the deception he was now helping her to maintain.

After a time, when Daphne had called his attention to the fact, he agreed that it was indeed strange their companions did not return; they had been gone an hour or more to find a spring said to be not half a mile away.

Daphne proposed to climb the grade and see if they were yet in sight, Mr. Withers consenting. Indeed, under the stress of his thoughts, her absence was a sensible relief.

From the hilltop looking down she could see the way they had gone; the crooked gulch, a garment's crease in the great lap of the table-land, sinking to the river. She saw no one, heard no sound but the senseless hurry and bluster of the winds,—coming from no one knew where, going none cared whither. It blew a gale in the bright sunlight, mocking her efforts to listen. She waved her hand to her uncle's lone figure in the hollow, to signify that she was going down on the other side. He assented, supposing she had seen their fellow travelers returning.

She had been out of sight some moments, long enough for Mr. Withers to have lapsed into his habit of absent musing, when Thane came rattling down the slope of the opposite hill, surprised to see the old gentleman alone. His long, black eyes went searching everywhere while he reported a fruitless quest for the spring. Kinney and he had followed the gulch, which showed nowhere a vestige of water, save in the path of the spring freshets, until they had come in sight of the river; and Kinney had taken the horses on down to drink, riding one and leading the other. It would be nearly three miles to the river from where Thane had left him, but that was where all the deceptive cattle trails were tending. Thane, returning, had made a loop of his track around the hollow, but had failed to round up any spring. Hence, as he informed Mr. Withers, this could not be Pilgrim Station. He made no attempt to express his chagrin at this cruel and unseemly blunder. The old gentleman accepted it with his usual uncomplaining deference to circumstances; still, it was jarring to nerves overstrained and bruised by the home thrust of Daphne's defection. He fell silent and drew within himself, not reproachfully, but sensitively. Thane rightly surmised that no second invocation would be offered when they should come to the true Pilgrim Station; the old gentleman would keep his threnodies to himself after this.

It would have been noticeable to any less celestial-minded observer than Mr. Withers the diffidence with which Thane, in asking after Miss Daphne Lewis, pronounced that young person's name. He did not wait for the old gentleman to finish his explanation of her absence, but having learned the way she had gone, dropped himself at a great pace down the gulch and came upon her unawares, where she had been sitting, overcome by nameless fears and a creeping horror of the place. She started to her feet, for Thane's was no furtive tread that crashed through the thorny greasewood and planted itself, a yard at a bound, amongst the stones. The horror vanished and a flush of life, a light of joy, returned to her speaking face. He had never seen her so completely off her guard. He checked himself suddenly and caught his hat from his head; and without thinking, before he replaced it, he drew the back of his soft leather glove across his dripping forehead. The unconventional action touched her keenly. She was sensitively subject to outward impressions, and "the plastic" had long been her delight, her ambition, and her despair.

"Oh, if I could only have done something simple like that!" the defeated, unsatisfied artist soul within her cried. "That free, arrested stride, how splendid! and the hat crumpled in his hand, and his bare head and strong brows in the sunlight, and the damp points of hair clinging to his temples! No, he is not bald,—that was only a tonsure of white light on the top of his head; still, he must be hard on forty. It is the end of summer with him, too; and here he comes for water, thirsting, to satisfy himself where water was plentiful in spring, and he finds a dry bed of stones. Call it The End of Summer; it is enough. Ah, if I could ever have thought out an action as simple and direct as that—and drawn it! But how can one draw what one has never seen!"

Not all this, but something else, something more that Daphne could not have put into words, spoke in the look which Thane surprised. It was but a flash between long lashes that fell instantly and put it out; but no woman whose heart was in the grave ever looked at a living man in that way, and the living man could not help but know it. It took away his self-possession for a moment; he stood speechless, gazing into her face with a question in his eyes which five minutes before he would have declared an insult to her.

Daphne struggled to regain her mask, but the secret had escaped: shameless Nature had seized her opportunity.

"How did I miss you?" she asked with forced coolness, as they turned up the gulch together. For the moment she had forgotten about the spring.

Thane briefly explained the mistake that had been made, adding, "You will have to put up with another day of us, now,—perhaps two."

"And where do you leave us, then?" asked Daphne stupidly.

"At the same place,—Decker's Ferry, you know." He smiled, indulgent to her crass ignorance of roads and localities. "Only we shall be a day longer getting there. We are still on the south side of the river, you remember?"

"Oh, of course!" said Daphne, who remembered nothing of the kind.

"It was a brutal fake, our springing this place on you for Pilgrim Station," he murmured.

"It has all been a mistake,—our coming, I mean; at least I think so."

It was some comfort to Thane to hear her say it,—he had been so forcibly of that opinion himself all along; but he allowed the admission to pass.

"It must have been a hard journey for you," he exerted himself to say, speaking in a surface voice, while his thoughts were sinking test-pits through layers of crusted consciousness into depths of fiery nature underneath.

She answered in the same perfunctory way: "You have been very kind; uncle has depended on you so much. Your advice and help have been everything to him."

He took her up with needless probity: "Whatever you do, don't thank me! It's bad enough to have Mr. Withers heaping coals of fire on my head. He gives me the place always, in regard to his son, of an intimate friend; which I never was, and God knows I never claimed to be! He took it for granted, somehow,—perhaps because of my letters at first, though any brute would have done as much at a time like that! Afterwards I would have set him right, but I was afraid of thrusting back the friendly imputation in his face. He credits me with having been this and that of a godsend to his son, when as a fact we parted, that last time, not even good friends. Perhaps you can forgive me for saying it? You see how I am placed!"

This iron apology which some late scruple had ground out of Thane seemed to command Daphne's deepest attention. She gave it a moment's silence, then she said, "There is nothing that hurts one, I think, like being unable to feel as people take for granted one must and ought to feel." But her home application of it gave a slight deflection to Thane's meaning which he firmly corrected.

"I felt all right; so did he, I dare say, but we never let each other know how we felt. Men don't, as a rule. Your uncle takes for granted that I knew a lot about him,—his thoughts and feelings; that we were immensely sympathetic. Perhaps we were, but we didn't know it. We knew nothing of each other intimately. He never spoke to me of his private affairs but once, the night before he started. It was at Wood River. Some of us gave him a little supper. Afterwards we had some business to settle and I was alone with him in his room. It was then I made my break; and—well, it ended as I say: we quarreled. It has hurt me since, especially as I was wrong."

"What can men quarrel about when they don't know each other well? Politics, perhaps?" Daphne endeavored to give her words a general application.

"It was not politics with us," Thane replied curtly. Changing the subject, he said, "I wish you could see the valley from that hogback over to the west." He pointed towards the spine of the main divide, which they would cross on their next day's journey. "Will you come up there this evening and take a look at the country? The wind will die down at sunset, I think."

There was a studied commonplaceness in his manner; his eyes avoided hers.

"Thanks; I should like to," she answered in the same defensive tone.

* * * * *

"To go back to what we were saying," Daphne began, when they were seated, that evening, on the hilltop. All around them the view of the world rose to meet the sky, glowing in the west, purple in the east, while the pale planets shone, and below them the river glassed and gleamed in its crooked bed. "I ask you seriously," she said. "What was the trouble between you?" Doubtless she had a reason for asking, but it was not the one that she proceeded to give. "Had you—have you, perhaps—any claims in a business way against him? Because, if you had, it would be most unfair to his father"—The words gave her difficulty; but her meaning, as forced meanings are apt to be, was more than plain.

Thane was not deceived: a woman who yields to curiosity, under however pious an excuse, is, to say the least, normal. Her thoughts are neither in the heavens above nor in the grave beneath. His black eyes flashed with the provocation of the moment. It was instinct that bade him not to spare her.

"We quarreled," he said, "in the orthodox way,—about a woman."

"Indeed!" said Daphne. "Then you must pardon me."

"And her name," he continued calmly.

"I did not ask you her name."

"Still, since we have gone so far"—

"There is no need of our going any farther."

"We may as well,—a little farther. We quarreled, strangely enough, about you,—the first time he ever spoke of you. He would not have spoken then, I think, but he was a little excited, as well he might have been. Excuse me?" He waited.

"Nothing!" said Daphne. She had made an involuntary protesting sound.

"He said he hoped to bring you back with him. I asked how long since he had seen you; and when he told me five years, I remarked that he had better not be too sure. 'But you don't know her,' he said; 'she is truth itself, and courage. By as many times as she has refused to listen to me, I am sure of her now.' I did not gather somehow that you were—engaged to him, else I hope I should not have gone so far. As it was, I kept on persisting—like a cynic who has no one of his own to be sure of—that he had better not be too sure! He might have seen, I thought then, that it was half chaff and half envy with me; but it was a nervous time, and I was less than sympathetic, less than a friend to him. And now I am loaded with friendship's honors, and you have come yourself to prove me in the wrong. You punish me by converting me to the truth."

"What truth?" asked Daphne, so low that Thane had to guess her question.

"Have you not proved to me that some women do have memories?"

Daphne could not meet his eyes; but she suspected him of something like sarcasm. She could not be sure, for his tone was agitating in its tenderness.

"All things considered," she said slowly, "does it not strike you as rather a costly conversion?"

"I don't say I was worth it, nor do I see just how it benefits me personally to have learned my lesson."

He rose, and stood where he could look at her,—an unfair advantage, for his dark face, strong in its immobility, was in silhouette against the flush of twilight which illumined hers, so transparent in its sensitiveness.

"Is it not a good thing to believe, on any terms?" she tried to answer lightly.

"For some persons, perhaps. But my hopes, if I had any, would lie in the direction of disbelief."

"Disbelief?" she repeated confusedly. His keen eyes beat hers down.

"In woman's memory, constancy,—her constancy in youth, say? I am not talking of seasoned timber. I don't deserve to be happy, you see, and I look for no more than my deserts."

If he were mocking her now, only to test her! And if she should answer with a humble, blissful disclaimer? But she answered nothing, disclaimed nothing; suffered his suspicion,—his contempt, perhaps, for she felt that he read her through and through.

A widow is well, and a maid is well; but a maiden widow who trembles and looks down—in God's creation, what is she?

* * * * *

On the north side of the Snake, after climbing out of the canon at Decker's Ferry, the cross-roads branch as per sign-post: "Thirty miles to Shoshone Falls, one mile to Decker's Ferry. Good road." This last assertion must be true, as we have it on no less authority than that of Decker himself. Nothing is said of the road to Bliss,—not even that there is such a Bliss only sixteen miles away. Being a station on the Oregon Short Line, Bliss can take care of itself.

At these cross-roads, on a bright, windy September morning, our travelers had halted for reasons, the chief of which was to say good-by. They had slept over night at the ferry, parted their baggage in the morning, and now in separate wagons by divergent roads were setting forth on the last stage of their journey.

Daphne had left some necessary of her toilet at the ferry, and the driver of Mr. Withers's team had gone back to ask the people at the ferry-house to find it. This was the cause of their waiting at the cross-roads. Mr. Withers and Daphne were on their devoted way like conscientious tourists, though both were deadly weary, to prostrate themselves before the stupendous beauty of the great lone falls at Shoshone. Thane, with Kinney's team, was prosaically bound down the river to examine and report on a placer-mine. But before his business would be finished Mr. Withers and his niece would have returned by railroad via Bliss to Boise, and have left that city for the East; so this was likely to be a long good-by.

If anything could have come of Mr. Withers's project of a memorial fountain at Pilgrim Station, there might have been a future to the acquaintance, for Thane was to have had charge of the execution of the design; but nature had lightly frustrated that fond, beneficent dream.

Mr. Kinney had offered the practical suggestion that the road should go to the fountain, since the fountain could not come to the road. Its course was a mere accident of the way the first wagon-wheels had gone. The wheels were few now, and with such an inducement might well afford to cross the gulch in a new place lower down. But Mr. Withers would have none of this dislocation of the unities. There was but one place—the dismal hollow itself, the scene of his heart's tragedy—where his acknowledgment to God should stand; his mute "Thy will be done!"

Perhaps the whole conception had lost something of its hold on his mind by contact with such harsh realities as Daphne's disavowals and his own consequent struggle with a father's weakness. He had not in his inmost conscience quite done with that question yet.

Thane was touched by the meekness with which the old gentleman resigned his dream. The journey, he suspected, had been a disappointment in other ways,—had failed in impressiveness, in personal significance; had fallen at times below the level of the occasion, at others had overpowered it and swept it out of sight. Thane could have told him that it must be so. There was room for too many mourners in that primeval waste. Whose small special grief could make itself heard in that vast arid silence, the voice of which was God? God in nature, awful, inscrutable, alone, had gained a new meaning for Mr. Withers. Miles of desert, days of desert, like waves of brute oblivion had swept over him. Never before had he felt the oppression of purely natural causes, the force of the physical in conflict with the spiritual law. And now he was to submit to a final illustration of it, perhaps the simplest and most natural one of all.

Daphne was seated at a little distance on her camp-stool, making a drawing of the desert cross-roads with the twin sign-posts pointing separate ways, as an appropriate finish to her Snake River sketch-book. The sun was tremendous, the usual Snake River zephyr was blowing forty miles an hour, and the flinty ground refused to take the brass-shod point of her umbrella-staff. Mr. Kinney, therefore, sat beside her, gallantly steadying her heavy sketching-umbrella against the wind.

Mr. Withers, while awaiting the return of his own team from the ferry, had accepted a seat in Thane's wagon. (It was a bag containing a curling-iron, lamp, and other implements appertaining to "wimples and crisping-pins," that Daphne had forgotten, but she had not described its contents. One bag is as innocent as another, on the outside; it might have held her Prayer Book.)

Thane was metaphorically "kicking himself" because time was passing and he could not find words delicate enough in which to clothe an indelicate request,—one outrageous in its present connection, yet from some points of view, definitively his own, a most urgent and natural one.

"For one shall grasp, and one resign, And God shall make the balance good."

To grasp is a simple act enough; but to do so delicately, reverently, without forcing one's preferences on those of another, may not always be so simple. Thane was not a Goth nor a Vandal; by choice he would have sought to preserve the amenities of life; but a meek man he was not, and the thing he now desired was, he considered, well worth the sacrifice of such small pretensions as his in the direction of unselfishness.

The founding of a family in its earliest stages is essentially an egoistic and ungenerous proceeding. Even Mr. Withers must have been self-seeking once or twice in his life, else had he never had a son to mourn. So, since life in this world is for the living, and his own life was likely to go on many years after Mr. Withers had been gathered to the reward of the righteous, Thane worked himself up to the grasping-point at last.

He was never able to reflect with any pride on the way in which he did it, and perhaps it is hardly fair to report him in a conversation that would have had its difficulties for almost any man; but his way of putting his case was something like the following,—Mr. Withers guilelessly opening the way by asking, "You will be coming East, I hope, before long, Mr. Thane?"

"Possibly," said Thane, "I may run on to New York next winter."

"If you should, I trust you will find time to come a little further East and visit me? I could add my niece's invitation to my own, but she and her mother will probably have gone South for her mother's health. However, I will welcome you for us both,—I and my books, which are all my household now."

"Thanks, sir, I should be very glad to come; though your books, I'm afraid, are the sort that would not have much to say to me."

"Come and see, come and see," Mr. Withers pressed him warmly. "A ripe farewell should always hold the seeds of a future meeting."

"That is very kindly said," Thane responded quickly; "and if you don't mind, I will plant one of those seeds right now."

"So do, so do," the old gentleman urged unsuspiciously.

"Your niece"—Thane began, but could see his way no further in that direction without too much precipitancy. Then he backed down on a line of argument,—"I need not point out the fact," etc.,—and abandoned that as beset with too many pitfalls of logic, for one of his limited powers of analysis. Fewest words and simplest would serve him best. "It is hardly likely," then he said, "that your niece's present state of feeling will be respected as long as it lasts; there will be others with feelings of their own. Her loss will hardly protect her all her life from—she will have suitors, of course! Nature is a brute, and most men, young men, are natural in that respect,—in regard to women, I mean. I don't want to be the first fool who rushes in, but there will be a first. When he arrives, sir, will you let me know? If any man is to be heard, I claim the right to speak to her myself; the right, you understand, of one who loves her, who will make any sacrifice on earth to win her."

Mr. Withers remained silent. He had a sense of suffocation, as of waves of heat and darkness going over him. The wind sang in his ears, shouted and hooted at him. He was stunned. Presently he gasped, "Mr. Thane! you have not surely profaned this solemn journey with such thoughts as these?"

"A man cannot always help his thoughts, Mr. Withers. I have not profaned my thoughts by putting them into words, till now. I cannot do them justice, but I have made them plain. This is not a question of taste or propriety with me, or even decency. It is my life,—all of it I shall ever place at the disposal of any woman. I am not a boy; I know what I want and how much I want it. The secret of success is to be in the right place at the right time: here is where I ask your help."

"I do not question that you know what you want," said Mr. Withers mildly,—"it is quite a characteristic of the men of this region, I infer,—nor do I deny that you may know the way of success in getting it; but that I should open the door to you—be your—I might say accomplice, in this design upon the affections of my niece—why, I don't know how it strikes you, but"—

"It strikes me precisely as it does you,—my part of it," said Thane impatiently. "But her part is different, as I see it. If she were sick, you would not put off the day of her recovery because neither you nor yours could cure her? Whoever can make her forget this shipwreck of her youth, heal her unhappiness, let him do so. Isn't that right? Give him the chance to try. A man's power in these things does not lie in his deserts. All I ask is, when other men come forward I want the same privilege. But I shall not be on the ground. When that time comes, sir, will you remember me?"

For once Mr. Withers seized the occasion for a retort; he advanced upon the enemy's exposed position. "Yes, Mr. Thane, I will remember you,—better than you remember your friends when they are gone."

Thane accepted the reproach as meekly as if his friendship for John Withers had been of the indubitable stuff originally that Mr. Withers had credited him with. He rather welcomed than otherwise an unmerited rebuke from that long-suffering quarter.

But though Thane was silenced as well as answered, there was conscience yet to deal with. Mr. Withers sat and meditated sorely, while the wind buffeted his gray hairs. Conscience demanded that he give up the secret of Daphne's false mourning, which he would have defended with his life. "A silence that can harm no one." "So long as we defraud no living person who might claim a right to know your heart." The condition was plain; it provided for just such cases as the present. Then how could he hesitate? But he was human, and he did.

"I have gone too far, I see. Well, say no more about it," said Thane. "Your generosity tempted me. From those who give easily much shall be asked. Forget it, sir, please. I will look out for myself, or lose her."

"Stop a bit!" exclaimed Mr. Withers. He turned to Thane, placing his hand above his faded eyes to shade them from the glare, and looked his companion earnestly in the face. Thane sought for an umbrella, and raised it over the old gentleman's head; it was not an easy thing to hold it steady in that wind.

"Thanks, thanks! Now I can look at you. Yes, I can look you in the eye, in more senses than one. Listen to me, Mr. Thane, and don't mind if I am not very lucid. In speaking of the affairs of another, and a young woman, I can only deal in outlines. You will be able to surmise and hope the rest. I feel in duty bound to tell you that at the time of my son's death there was a misunderstanding on my part which forced Miss Lewis into a false position in respect to her relations to my son. Too much was assumed by me on insufficient evidence,—a case where the wish, perhaps, was father to the thought. She hesitated at that sore time to rob me of an illusion which she saw was precious to me; she allowed me to retain my erroneous belief that my son, had he lived, would have enjoyed the blessing of her affection. As a fact, she had not given it to him,—could not have given it,—though she owns that her mind, not her heart, was wavering. Had she married him, other motives than love would have influenced her choice. So death has saved my dear boy from a cruel disappointment or a worse mistake, and her from a great danger. Had he lived, he must have had many hours of wretchedness, either with or without that dearest wish of his heart fulfilled.

"This she confessed to me not many days ago, after a long period of remorseful questioning; and I deem it my duty now, in view of what you have just told me, to acquaint you with the truth. I am the only one who knows that she was not engaged to my son, and never really loved him. The fact cut me so deeply, when I learned it first, that I persuaded her, most selfishly, to continue in the disguise she had permitted, sustained so long,—to rest in it, that my boy's memory might be honored through this sacrifice of the truth. Weak, fond old man that I was, and worse! But now you have my confession. As soon as I can speak with her alone I will release her from that promise. She was fain to be free before all the world,—our little part of it,—but I fastened it on her. I see now that I could not have invented a crueler punishment; but it was never my purpose to punish her. I will also tell her that I have opened the true state of the case to you."

"Would you not stop just short of that, Mr. Withers? To know she is free to listen to him,—that is all any man could ask."

"Perhaps you are right; yes, she need not know that I have possessed you with her secret,—all of it that has any bearing on your hopes. I only thought it might save you, in her mind, from any possible imputation of—of want of respect for her supposed condition, akin to widowhood; but no doubt you will wait a suitable time."

"I will wait till we meet in Boise."

"In Boise!" the old gentleman cried, aghast.

"That will be three days from now," answered Thane innocently. Did Mr. Withers imagine that he would wait three years!

"But what becomes of the—the placer-mine?"

"The placer-mine be—the placer-mine will keep! She is shutting up her book; the sketch is finished. Will you hold the umbrella, sir, or shall I put it down?"

Mr. Withers took hold of the umbrella handle; the wind shook it and nearly tugged it out of his grasp. "Put it down, if you please," he murmured resignedly. But by this time Thane was half across the road to where Daphne, with penknife and finger-tips, was trying to strip the top layer of blackened sandpaper from her pencil-scrubber; turning her face aside, because, woman-like, she would insist on casting her pencil-dust to windward.

Thane smiled, and took the scrubber out of her hands, threw away the soiled sheet, sealed up the pad in a clean stamped envelope, which bore across the end the legend, "If not delivered within ten days, return to"—"Robert Henry Thane," he wrote, with his address, and gave her back her property. It was all very childish, yet his hand trembled as he wrote; and Daphne looked on with the solemnity of a child learning a new game.

"May I see the sketch?" he asked.

They bent together over her book, while Daphne endeavored to find the place; the wind fluttered the leaves, and she was so long in finding it that Mr. Kinney had time to pack up her stool and umbrella, and cross the road to say good-by to Mr. Withers.

"Here it is," said Thane, catching sight of the drawing. He touched the book-holder lightly on the arm, to turn her away from the sun. Her shadow fell across the open page; their backs were to the wagon. So they stood a full half-minute,—Thane seeing nothing, hearing his heart beat preposterously in the silence.

"Why don't you praise my sign-posts?" asked Daphne nervously. "See my beautiful distance,—one straight line!"

"I have changed my plans a little," said Thane. Daphne closed the book. "I shall see you again in Boise. This is good-by—for three days. Take care of yourself." He held out his hand. "I shall meet your train at Bliss."

"Bliss! Where is Bliss?"

"You never could remember, could you?" he smiled. The tone of his voice was a flagrant caress. The color flew to Daphne's face. "Bliss," said he, "is where I shall meet you again: remember that, will you?"

Daphne drew down her veil. The man returning from the ferry was in sight at the top of the hill. Mr. Withers was alighting from Thane's wagon. She turned her gray mask towards him, through which he could discern the soft outline of her face, the color of her lips and cheeks, the darkness of her eyes; their expression he could not see.

"I shall meet you at Bliss," he repeated, his fingers closing upon hers.

Daphne did not reply; she did not speak to him nor look at him again, though it was some moments before the wagon started.

Kinney and Thane remained at the cross-roads, discussing with some heat the latter's unexpected change of plan. Mr. Kinney had a small interest in the placer-mine, himself, but it looked large to him just then. He put little faith in Thane's urgent business (that no one had heard of till that moment) calling him to Boise in three days. Of what use was it going down to the placers only to turn round and come back again? So Thane thought, and proposed they drive forward to Bliss.

"Bliss be hanged!" said Mr. Kinney; which shows how many ways there are of looking at the same thing.

Thane's way prevailed; they drove straight on to Bliss. And if the placer-mine was ever reported on by Thane, it must have been at a later time.



PILGRIMS TO MECCA

"Notice the girl on your right, Elsie. That is the thing! You have to see it to understand. Do you understand, dear? Do you see the difference?"

A middle-aged little mother, with a sensitive, care-worn face, leaned across the Pullman section and laid a hand upon her daughter's by way of emphasis—needless, for her voice and manner conveyed all, and much more than the words could possibly carry. Volumes of argument, demonstration, expostulation were implied.

"Can you see her? Do you see what I mean? What, dear?"

The questions followed one another like beads running down a string. Elsie's silence was the knot at the end. She opened her eyes and turned them languidly as directed, but without raising her head from the back of the car-seat.

"I will look presently, mother. I can't see much of anything now."

"Oh, never mind. Forgive me, dear. How is your head? Lie still; don't try to talk."

Elsie smiled, patted her mother's hand, and closed her narrow, sweet, sleepy blue eyes. Mrs. Valentin never looked at them, when her mind was at rest, without wishing they were a trifle larger—wider open, rather. The eyes were large enough, but the lazy lids shut them in. They saw a good deal, however. She also wished, in moments of contemplation, that she could have laid on a little heavier the brush that traced Elsie's eyebrows, and continued them a little longer at the temples. Then, her upper lip was, if anything, the least bit too short. Yet what a sweet, concentrated little mouth it was,—reticent and pure, and not over-ready with smiles, though the hidden teeth were small, flawless, and of baby whiteness! Yes, the mother sighed, just a touch or two,—and she knew just where to put those touches,—and the girl had been a beauty. If nature would only consult the mothers at the proper time, instead of going on in her blindfold fashion!

But, after all, did they want a beauty in the family? On theory, no: the few beauties Mrs. Valentin had known in her life had not been the happiest of women. What they did want was an Elsie—their own Elsie—perfectly trained without losing her naturalness, perfectly educated without losing her health, perfectly dressed without thinking of clothes, perfectly accomplished without wasting her time, and, finally, an Elsie perfectly happy. All that parents, situated on the wrong side of the continent for art and culture, and not over-burdened with money, could do to that end, Mrs. Valentin was resolved should be done. Needless to say, very little was to be left to God.

Mrs. Valentin was born in the East, some forty-odd years before this educational pilgrimage began, of good Unitarian stock,—born with a great sense of personal accountability. She could not have thrown it off and been joyful in the words, "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves."

Elsie had got a headache from the early start and the suppressed agitation of parting from her home and her father. Suppression was as natural to her as expression was to her mother. The father and daughter had held each other silently a moment; both had smiled, and both were ill for hours afterward.

But Mrs. Valentin thought that in Elsie's case it was because she had not sent the girl to bed earlier the night before, and insisted on her eating something at breakfast.

Herself—she had lain sleepless for the greater part of that night and many nights previous. She had anticipated in its difficulties every stage of the getting off, the subsequent journey, the arrival, their reception by Eastern relatives not seen for years, the introduction of her grown-up daughter, the impression she would make, the beginning of life all over again in a strange city. (She had known her Boston once, but that was twenty years ago.) She foresaw the mistakes she would inevitably make in her choice of means to the desired ends—dressmakers, doctors, specialists of all sorts; the horrible way in which school expenses mount up; the trivial yet poignant comparisons of school life, from which, if Elsie suffered, she would be sure to suffer in silence.

After this fatiguing mental rehearsal she had risen at six, while the electric lights were still burning and the city was cloaked in fog. It was San Francisco of a midsummer morning; fog whistles groaning, sidewalks slippery with wet, and the gray-green trees and tinted flower-beds of the city gardens emerging like the first broad washes of a water-color laid in with a full brush.

She had taken a last survey of her dismantled home, given the last directions to the old Chinese servant left in charge, presided haggardly at the last home breakfast——what a ghastly little ceremony it was! Then Mr. Valentin had gone across the Oakland ferry with them and put them aboard the train, muffled up as for winter. They had looked into each other's pale faces and parted for two years, all for Elsie's sake. But what Elsie thought about it—whether she understood or cared for what this sacrifice of home and treasure was to purchase—it was impossible to learn. Still more what her father thought. What he had always said was, "You had better go."

"But do you truly think it is the best thing for the child?"

"I think that, whatever we do, there will be times when we'll wish we had done something different; and there will be other times when we shall be glad we did not. All we can do is the best we know up to date."

"But do you think it is the best?"

"I think, Emmy, that you will never be satisfied until you have tried it, and it's worth the money to me to have you feel that you have done your best."

Mrs. Valentin sighed. "Sometimes I wonder why we do cling to that old fetich of the East. Why can't we accept the fact that we are Western people? The question is, Shall we be the self-satisfied kind or the unsatisfied kind? Shall we be contented and limited, or discontented and grow?"

"I guess we shall be limited enough, either way," Mr. Valentin retorted easily. He had no hankering for the East and no grudge against fate for making him a Western man malgre lui. "I've known kickers who didn't appear to grow much, except to grow cranky," he said.

Up to the moment of actual departure, Mrs. Valentin had continued to review her decision and to agonize over its possibilities of disaster; but now that the journey had begun, she was experiencing the rest of change and movement. She was as responsive as a child to fresh outward impressions, and the hyperbolical imagination that caused her such torture when it wrought in the dark hours on the teased fabric of her own life, could give her compensating pleasures by daylight, on the open roads of the world. There was as yet nothing outside the car windows which they had not known of old,—the marsh-meadows of the Lower Sacramento, tide-rivers reflecting the sky, cattle and wild fowl, with an occasional windmill or a duck-hunter's lodge breaking the long sweeps of low-toned color. The morning sun was drinking up the fog, the temperature in the Pullman steadily rising. Jackets were coming off and shirt-waists blooming out in summer colors, giving the car a homelike appearance.

It was a saying that summer, "By their belts ye shall know them." Shirt-waists no longer counted, since the ready-made ones for two dollars and a half were almost as chic as the tailor-made for ten. But the belts, the real belts, were inimitable. Sir Lancelot might have used them for his bridle—

"Like to some branch of stars we see Hung in the golden galaxy."

Mrs. Valentin had looked with distinct approval on a mother and daughter who occupied the section opposite. Their impedimenta and belongings were "all right," arguing persons with cultivated tastes, abroad for a summer spent in divers climates, who knew what they should have and where to get it. A similarity of judgment on questions of clothes and shops is no doubt a bond between strange women everywhere; but it was the daughter's belt-buckle before which Mrs. Valentin bowed down and humbled herself in silence. The like of that comes only by inheritance or travel. Antique, pale gold—Cellini might have designed it. There was probably not another buckle like that one in existence. An imitation? No more than its wearer, a girl as white as a white camellia, with gray eyes and thin black eyebrows, and thick black lashes that darkened the eyes all round. There was nothing noticeable in her dress except its freshness and a certain finish in lesser details, understood by the sophisticated. "Swell" was too common a word for her supreme and dainty elegance. Her resemblance to the ordinary full-fleshed type of Pacific coast belle was that of a portrait by Romney—possibly engraved by Cole—to a photograph of some reina de la fiesta. This was Mrs. Valentin's exaggerated way of putting it to herself. Such a passionate conservative as she was sure to be prejudiced.

The mother had a more pronounced individuality, as mothers are apt to have, and looked quite fit for the ordinary uses of life. She was of the benignant Roman-nosed Eastern type, daughter of generations of philanthropists and workers in the public eye for the public good; a deep, rich voice, an air of command, plain features, abundant gray hair, imported clothes, wonderful, keen, dark eyes overlapped by a fold of the crumpled eyelid,—a personage, a character, a life, full of complex energies and domineering good sense. With gold eye-glasses astride her high-bridged nose, knees crossed, one large, well-shod foot extended, this mother in Israel sat absorbed like a man in the daily paper, and wroth like a man at its contents. Occasionally she would emit an impatient protest in the deep, maternal tones, and the graceful daughter would turn her head and read over her shoulder in silent assent.

"How trivial, how self-centred we are!" Mrs. Valentin murmured, leaning across to claim a look from Elsie. "I realize it the moment we get outside our own little treadmill. We do nothing but take thought for what we shall eat and drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed. I haven't thought of the country once this morning. I've been wondering if all the good summer things are gone at Hollander's. It may be very hot in Boston the first few weeks. You will be wilted in your cloth suit."

"Oh, mammy, mammy! what a mammy!" purred Elsie, her pretty upper lip curling in the smile her mother loved—with a reservation. Elsie had her father's sense of humor, and had caught his half-caressing way of indulging it at the "intense" little mother's expense.

"Elsie," she observed, "you know I don't mind your way of speaking to me,—as if I were the girl of sixteen and you the woman of forty,—but I hope you won't use it before the aunts and cousins. I shall be sure to lay myself open, but, dear, be careful. It isn't very good form to be too amused with one's mother. Of course there's as much difference in mothers as in girls," Mrs. Valentin acknowledged. "A certain sort of temperament interferes with the profit one ought to get out of one's experience. If you had my temperament I shouldn't waste this two years' experiment on you; I should know that nothing could change your—spots. But you will learn—everything. How is your head, dear—what?"

Elsie had said nothing; she had not had the opportunity.

At a flag station where the train was halted (this overland train was a "local" as far as Sacramento) Mrs. Valentin looked out and saw a colored man in livery climb down from the back seat of a mail-cart and hasten across the platform with a huge paper box. It proved to be filled with magnificent roses, of which he was the bearer to the ladies opposite. A glance at a card was followed by gracious acknowledgments, and the footman retired beaming. He watched the train off, hat in hand, bowing to the ladies at their window as only a well-raised colored servant can bow.

"The Coudert place lies over there," said Mrs. Valentin, pointing to a mass of dark trees toward which the trap was speeding. "They have been staying there," she whispered, "doing the west coast, I suppose, with invitations to all the swell houses."

"Is your daughter not well?" the deep voice spoke across the car.

As Elsie could not ride backward, her mother, to give her room, and for the pleasure of watching her, was seated with her own back to the engine, facing most of the ladies in the car.

"She is a little train-sick; she could not eat this morning, and that always gives her a headache."

Elsie raised her eyelashes in faint dissent.

"She should eat something, surely. Have you tried malted milk? I have some of the lozenges; she can take one without raising her head."

Search was made in a distinguished-looking bag, Mrs. Valentin protesting against the trouble, and beseeching Elsie with her eyes to accept one from the little silver box of pastils that was passed across the aisle.

Elsie said she really could not—thanks very much.

The keen, dark eyes surveyed her with the look of a general inspecting raw troops, and Mrs. Valentin felt as depressed as the company officer who has been "working up" the troops. "Won't you try one, Elsie?" she pleaded.

"I'd rather not, mother," said Elsie.

She did not repeat her thanks to the great authority, but left her mother to cover her retreat.

"The young girls nowadays do pretty much as they please about eating or not eating," observed the Eastern matron, in her large, impersonal way. "They can match our theories with quite as good ones of their own." She smiled again at Elsie, and the overtures on that side ceased.

"I would have eaten any imaginable thing she offered me," sighed Mrs. Valentin, "but Elsie is so hard to impress. I cannot understand how a girl, a baby, who has never been anywhere or seen anything, can be so fearfully posee. It's the Valentin blood. It's the drop of Indian blood away, 'way back. It's their impassiveness, but it's awfully good form—when she grows up to it."

After this, Mrs. Valentin sat silent for such an unnatural length of time that Elsie roused herself to say something encouraging.

"I shall be all right, mother, after Sacramento. We will take a walk. The fresh air is all I need."

She was as good as her word. The cup of tea and the twenty minutes' stroll made such a happy difference that Mrs. Valentin sent a telegram to her husband to say that Elsie's head was better and that she had forgotten her trunk keys, and would he express them to her at once.

So much refreshed was Elsie that her mother handed her the letters which had come to her share of that morning's mail. There were four or five of them, addressed in large, girlish hands, and exhibiting the latest and most expensive fads in stationery. Over one of them Elsie gave a shriek of delight, an outburst so unexpected and out of character with her former self that their distinguished fellow travelers involuntarily looked up,—and Mrs. Valentin blushed for her child.

"Oh, mammy, how rich! How just like Gladys! She kept it for a last surprise! Mother, Gladys is going to Mrs. Barrington's herself."

The mother's face fell.

"Indeed!" she said, forcing a tone of pleasure. "Well, it's a compliment—on both sides. Mrs. Barrington is very particular whom she takes, and the Castants are sparing nothing that money can do for Gladys."

"Oh, what fun!" cried Elsie, her face transformed. "Poor Gladys! she'll have a perfectly awful time too, and we can sympathize."

"Are you expecting to have an 'awful time,' Elsie,"—the mother looked aghast,—"and are you going to throw yourself into the arms of Gladys for sympathy? Then let me say, my daughter, that neither Mrs. Barrington nor any one else can do much for your improvement, and all the money we are spending will be thrown away. If you are going East to ally yourself exclusively with Californian girls, to talk California and think California and set yourself against everything that is not Californian, we might just as well take the first train west at Colfax."

"But am I to be different to Gladys when we meet away from home?" Elsie's sensitive eyes clouded. Her brows went up.

"Of course not. Gladys is a dear, delightful girl. I'm as fond of her as you are. But you can have Gladys all the rest of your life, I hope. I'm not a snob, dear, but I do think we should recognize the fact that some acquaintances are more improving than others."

"And cultivate them for the sake of what they can do for us?"

In Elsie's voice there was an edge of resistance, hearing which her mother, when she was wise, would let speech die and silence do its work. Her influence with the girl was strongest when least insisted upon. She was not wiser than usual that morning, but the noise of the train made niceties of statement impossible. She abandoned the argument perforce, and Elsie, left with her retort unanswered, acknowledged its cheapness in her own quick, strong, wordless way.

The dining-car would not be attached to the train until they reached Ogden. At twilight they stopped "twenty minutes for refreshment," and the Valentins took the refreshment they needed most by pacing the platform up and down,—the tall daughter, in her severely cut clothes, shortening her boyish stride to match her mother's step; the mother, looking older than she need, in a light-gray traveling-cap, with Elsie's golf cape thrown over her silk waist.

The Eastern travelers were walking too. They had their tea out of an English tea-basket, and bread and butter from the buffet, and were independent of supper stations. With the Valentins it was sheer improvidence and want of appetite.

"Please notice that girl's step," said Mrs. Valentin, pressing Elsie's arm. "'Art is to conceal art.' It has taken years of the best of everything, and eternal vigilance besides, to create such a walk as that; but c'est fait. You don't see the entire sole of her foot every time she takes a step."

"Having a certain other person's soles in view, mammy?"

"I'm afraid I should have them in full view if you came to meet me. Not the heel quite so pronounced, dearest."

"Oh, mother, please leave that to Mrs. Barrington! Let us be comrades for these few days."

"Dearest, it would be the happiness of my life to be never anything but a comrade. But who is to nag a girl if not her mother? I very much doubt if Mrs. Barrington will condescend to speak of your boot-soles. She will expect all that to have been attended to long ago."

"It has been—a thousand years ago. Sometimes I feel that I'm all boot-soles."

"The moment I see some result, dear, I shall be satisfied. One doesn't speak of such things for their own sake."

"Can't we get a paper?" asked Elsie. "What is that they are shouting?"

"I don't think it can be anything new. We brought these papers with us on the train. But we can see. No; it's just what we had this morning. They are preparing for a general assault. There will be heavy fighting to-morrow. Why, that is to-day!" Mrs. Valentin held the newspaper at arm's length.

"Is there anything more? I can read only the head-lines."

The girl took the paper and looked at it with a certain reluctance, narrowing her eyelids.

"Mother, there was something else in Gladys's letter. Billy Castant has enlisted with the Rough Riders. He was in that fight at Las Guasimas, while we were packing our trunks. He did badly again in his exams, and he—he didn't go home; he just enlisted."

"The foolish fellow!" Mrs. Valentin exclaimed. A sharp intuition told her there was trouble in the wind, and defensively she turned upon the presumptive cause. "The foolish boy! What he needs is an education. But he won't work for it. It's easier to go off mad and be a Rough Rider."

"I don't think it was easy at Las Guasimas," Elsie said, with a strained little laugh. "You remember the last war, mother; did you belittle your volunteers?"

Mrs. Valentin listened with a catch in her breath. What did this portend? So slight a sign as that in Elsie meant tears and confessions from another girl.

"And did you hear of this only just now, from Gladys's letter?"

"Yes, mother."

"You extraordinary child—your father all over again! I might have known by the way you laughed over that letter that you had bad news to tell—or keep to yourself."

"I don't call that bad news, do you, mother? He does need an education, but he will never get it out of books."

"Well, it's a pretty severe sort of education for his parents—nineteen, an only son, and to go without seeing them again. He might at least have come home and enlisted from his own State."

They were at the far end of the platform, facing the dark of the pine-clad ravines. Deep, odorous breaths of night wind came sighing up the slopes.

"Mother, there was something happened last winter that I never told you," Elsie began again, with pauses. "It was so silly, and there seemed no need to speak of it. But I can't bear not to speak now. I don't know if it has made any difference—with Billy's plans. It seems disloyal to tell you. But you must forget it: he's forgotten, I am sure. He said—those silly things, you know! I couldn't have told you then; it was too silly. And I said that I didn't think it was for him or for me to talk about such things. It was for men and women, not boys who couldn't even get their lessons."

"Elsie!" Mrs. Valentin gave a little choked laugh. "Did you say that? The poor boy! Why, I thought you were such good friends!"

"He wasn't talking friendship, mother, and I was furious with him for flunking his exams. He passed in only five out of seven. He ought to have done better than that. He's not stupid; it's that fatal popularity. He's captain of this and manager of that, and they give him such a lot of money. And they pet him, too; they make excuses for him all the time. I told him he must do something before he began to have feelings. The only feeling he had any right to have was shame for his miserable record."

"And that was all the encouragement you gave him?"

"If you call that 'encouragement,'" said Elsie.

"You did very well, my dear; but I suppose you know it was the most intimate thing you could have said to him, the greatest compliment you could pay him. If he ever does make any sort of a record, you have given him the right to come back to you with it."

"He will never come back to me without it," said the girl. "But it was nothing—nothing! All idleness and nonsense, and the music after supper that went to his head."

"I hope it was nothing more than"—Mrs. Valentin checked herself. There were things she said to her husband which sometimes threatened to slip out inadvertently when his youthful copy was near. "Well, I see nothing to be ashamed of, on your side. But such things are always a pity. They age a girl in spite of herself. And the boys—they simply forget. The rebuke does them good, but they forget to whom they owe it. It's just one of those things that make my girlie older. But oh, how fast life comes!"

Elsie slipped her hand under her mother's cloak, and Mrs. Valentin pressed her own down hard upon it.

"We must get aboard, dear. But I'm so glad you told me! And I didn't mean quite what I said about Billy's 'going off mad.' He has given all he had to give, poor boy; why he gave it is his own affair."

"I hope—what I told you—has made no difference about his coming home. It's stupid of me to think it. But hard words come back, don't they, mother? Hard words—to an old friend!"

"Billy is all right, dear; and it was so natural you should be tried with him! 'For to be wroth with one we'"—Mrs. Valentin had another of her narrow escapes. "Come, there is the porter waiting for us."

"Mother," said Elsie sternly, "please don't misunderstand. I should never have spoken of this if I had been 'wroth' with him—in that way."

"Of course not, dear; I understand. And it would never do, anyway, for father doesn't like the blood."

"Father doesn't like the—what, mother?"

Elsie asked the question half an hour later, as they sat in an adjoining section, waiting for their berths to be made up.

"What, dear?"

"What did you say father doesn't like—in the Castants?"

"Oh, the blood, the family. This generation is all right—apparently. But blood will tell. You are too young to know all the old histories that fathers and mothers read young people by."

"I think we are what we are," said Elsie; "we are not our great-grandfathers."

"In a measure we are, and it should teach us charity. Not as much can be expected of Billy Castant, coming of the stock he does, as you might expect of that ancestry," and Mrs. Valentin nodded toward the formidable Eastern contingent. (Elsie was consciously hating them already.) "The fountain can rise no higher than its source."

"I thought there was supposed to be a source a little higher than the ground—unless we are no more than earth-born fountains."

"'Out of the mouth of babes,'" said Mrs. Valentin, laughing gently. "I own it, dear. Middle age is suspicious and mean and unspiritual and troubled about many things. A middle-aged mother is like an old hen when hawks are sailing around; she can't see the sky."

"Yes," said Elsie, settling cosily against her mother's shoulder. "I always know when mammy speaks as my official mother, and when she is talking 'straight talk.' I shall be so happy when she believes I am old enough to hear only straight talk."

* * * * *

"I've got a surprise for you, Elsie," said Mrs. Valentin, a day and a night eastward of the Sierras. They were on the Great Plains, at that stage of an overland journey which suggests, in the words of a clever woman, the advisability of "taking a tuck in the continent."

Elsie's eyebrows seemed to portend that surprises are not always pleasant.

"I've been talking with our Eastern lady, and imagine! her daughter is one of Mrs. Barrington's girls too. This will be her second year. So there is"—

"An offset to Gladys," Elsie interrupted.

"So there is a chance for you to know one girl, at least, of the type I've always been holding up to you, always believed in, though the individuals are so rare."

Elsie's sentiments, unexpressed, were that she wished they might be rarer. Not that the flower of Eastern culture was not all her mother protested she was; but there are crises of discouragement on the upward climb of trying to realize a mother's ambitions for one's self, when one is only a girl—the only girl, on whom the family experiments are all to be wreaked. Elsie suffered in silence many a pang that her mother never dreamed of—pangs of effort unavailing and unappreciated. She wished to conform to her mother's exigent standard, but she could not, all at once, and be a girl too—a girl of sixteen, a little off the key physically, not having come to a woman's repose of movement; a little stridulous mentally, but pulsing with life's dumb music of aspiration; as intense as her mother in feeling, without her mother's power to throw off the strain in words.

"Well, mother?" she questioned.

"She is older than you, and she will be at home. The advances, of course, must come from her, but I hope, dear, you will not be—you will try to be responsive?"

"I never know, mother, when I am not responsive. It's like wrinkling my forehead; it does itself."

Mrs. Valentin made a gesture expressive of the futility of argument under certain not unfamiliar conditions.

"'You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.' I am leading my Pegasus to the fountain of—what was the fountain?"

Elsie laughed. "Your Pegasus is pretty heavy on the wing, mammy. But I will drink. I will gorge myself, truly I will. The money shall not be spent in vain."

"Oh, the money! Who cares about the money?—if only there were more of it."

They stopped over night in Chicago, and Mrs. Valentin bought some shirt-waists; for the heat had "doubled up on them," as a Kansas farmer on the train remarked.

Elsie trailed about the shops with her mother, not greatly interested in shirt-waists or bargains in French underclothing.

The war pressure seemed to close in upon them as they left the mid-West and drew toward the coast once more. The lists from El Caney were throbbing over the wires, and the country, so long immune from peril and suffering, was awakening to the cost of victory. There was a terrible flippancy in the irrepressible spirit of trade which had seized upon the nation's emblems, freshly consecrated in the blood of her sons, and was turning them to commercial account,—advertising, in symbols of death and priceless devotion, that ribbons or soap or candy were for sale. The flag was, so to speak, dirt-cheap. You could wear it in a hatband or a necktie; you could deface it, or tear it in two, in opening an envelope addressed to you by your bootmaker.

Elsie cast hunted eyes on the bulletin boards. She knew by heart that first list after Las Guasimas. One glance had burned it in forever. It had become one of the indelible scars of a lifetime. Yet those were the names of strangers. If a whiff from an avalanche can fell trees a mile away, how if the avalanche strike you?

They returned to their hotel, exhausted, yet excited, by the heat; and Mrs. Valentin admonished herself of what our boys must be suffering in that "unimaginable climate," and she entered into details, forgetting to spare Elsie, till the girl turned a sickly white.

It was then the bishop's card was sent up—their own late bishop, much mourned and deplored because he had been transferred to an Eastern diocese. There could be no one so invariably welcome, who knew so well, without effort, how to touch the right chord, whether in earnest or in jest that sometimes hid a deeper earnest. His manner at first usually hovered between the two, your own mood determining where the emphasis should rest. He had brought with him the evening paper, but he kept it folded in his hand.

"So you are pilgrims to Mecca," he said, looking from mother to daughter with his gentle, musing smile. "But are you not a little early for the Eastern schools?"

"There are the home visits first, and the clothes," said Mrs. Valentin.

"And where do you stop, and for how long?"

"Boston, for one year, Bishop, and then we go abroad for a year, perhaps."

"Bless me! what has Elsie done that she should be banished from home for two years?"

"She takes her mother with her."

"Yes; that is half of the home. Perhaps that's as much as one girl ought to expect."

"The fathers are so busy, Bishop."

"Yes; the fathers do seem to be busy. So Elsie is going East to be finished? And how old is she now? How does she presume to account for the fact that she is taller than her mother and nearly as tall as her bishop?"

Elsie promptly placed herself at the bishop's side and "measured," glancing over her shoulder at him in the glass. He turned and gravely placed his hand upon her head.

"I thought of writing to you at one time," said Mrs. Valentin, "but of course you cannot keep us all on your mind. We are a 'back number.'"

"She thought I would have forgotten who these Valentins were," said the bishop, smiling.

"No; but you cannot keep the thread of all our troubles—the sheep of the old flock and the lambs of the new. I have had a thousand minds lately about Elsie, but this was the original plan, made years ago, when we were young and sure about things. Don't you think young lives need room, Bishop? Oughtn't we to seek to widen their mental horizons?"

"The horizons widen, they widen of themselves, Mrs. Valentin—very suddenly sometimes, and beyond our ken." The bishop's voice had struck a deeper note; he paused and looked at Elsie with eyes so kind and tender that the girl choked and turned away. "This war is rather a widening business, and California is getting her share. Our boys of the First, for instance,—you see I still call them our boys,—what were they doing a year ago, and what are they doing now? I'll be bound half of them a year ago didn't know how 'Philippines' was spelled."

Mrs. Valentin became restless.

"Is that the evening paper?" she asked.

The bishop glanced at the paper. "And who," said he, "is to open the gates of sunrise for our Elsie? With whom do you intend to place her in Boston?"

"Oh, with Mrs. Barrington."

Mrs. Valentin was watching the bishop, whose eyes still rested upon Elsie.

"She is to be one of the chosen five, is she? The five wise virgins—of the East? But they are all Western virgins this year, I believe."

"If you mean that they are all from the Western States, I think you are mistaken, Bishop."

"Am I? Let us see. There is Elsie, and Gladys Castant, perhaps, and the daughters of my friend Mr. Laws of West Dakota"—

"Bishop!"

"Of West Dakota; that makes four. And then the young lady who was on the train with you, Miss Bigelow, from Los Angeles."

"Bishop! I am certain you are mistaken there. If those people are not Eastern, then I'm from West Dakota myself!"

"We are all from West Dakota virtually, so far as Mecca is concerned. But Mrs. Barrington offers her young ladies those exceptional social opportunities which Western girls are supposed to need. If you want Elsie to be with Eastern girls of the East, let her go to a good Boston Latin school. Did you not go to one yourself, Mrs. Valentin?"

Mrs. Valentin laughed. "That was ages ago, and I was at home. I had the environment—an education in itself. Won't you dine with us, Bishop? We shall have dinner in half an hour."

"In half an hour I must be on the limited express. You seem to have made different connections."

"'The error was, we started wrong,'" said Mrs. Valentin lightly. "We took the morning instead of the evening train. But I was convinced we should be left, and I preferred to get left by the wrong train and have the right one to fall back on." She ceased her babble, as vain words die when there is a sense of no one listening.

Elsie stood at the window looking back into the room. She thought, "Mother doesn't know what she is saying. What is she worried about?"

The bishop was writing with a gold pencil on the margin of the newspaper. He folded it with the writing on top.

"If you had consulted me about that child,"—he looked at Elsie,—"I should have said, 'Do not hurry her—do not hurry her. Her education will come as God sends it.' With experience, as with death, it is the prematureness that hurts."

His beautiful voice and perfect accent filled the silence with heart-warmed cadences.

"Well, good-by, Mrs. Valentin. Remember me to that busy husband."

Mrs. Valentin rose; the bishop took her hand. "Elsie will see me to the elevator. This is the evening paper."

He offered it with the writing toward her. Mrs. Valentin read what he had written: "Billy Castant was killed in the charge at San Juan. Every man in that fight deserves the thanks of the nation."

"Come, Elsie, see me to my carriage," the bishop was saying. He placed the girl's hand on his arm and led her out of the room. At the elevator grating they waited a moment; the cold draft up the shaft fanned the hair back from Elsie's forehead as she stood looking down, watching the ascent of the cage.

"It would be a happy thing," said the bishop, "if parents could always go with their children on these long roads of experience; but there are some roads the boys and the girls will have to take alone. We shall all meet at the other end, though—we shall all meet at the end."

Elsie walked up and down the hall awhile, dreading to go back to the room. A band in the street below was playing an old war-song of the sixties, revived this battle summer of '98,—a song that was sung when the cost of that war was beginning to tell, "We shall meet, but we shall miss him." Elsie knew the music; she had not yet learned the words.

Next morning Mr. Valentin received one of his wife's vague but thrifty telegrams, dated at Chicago, on Sunday night, July 3:

"We cannot go through with it. Expect us home Wednesday."

Mrs. Valentin had spent hours, years, in explaining to Elsie's father the many cogent and crying reasons for taking her East to be finished. It needed not quite five minutes to explain why she had brought her back.

Strangely, none of the friends of the family asked for an explanation of this sudden change of plan. But Elsie envies Gladys her black clothes, and the privilege of crying in public when the bands play and the troops go by.

"Such children—such mere children!" Mrs. Valentin sighs.

But she no longer speaks to Elsie about wrinkling her forehead or showing her boot-soles. It is eye to eye and heart to heart, and only straight talk between them now, as between women who know.



THE HARSHAW BRIDE

[Mrs. Tom Daly, of Bisuka in the Northwest, writes to her invalid sister spending the summer on the coast of Southern California.]

I

You know I am always ready to sacrifice truth to politeness, if the truth is of that poor, stingy upstart variety everybody is familiar with and if the occasion warrants the expense. We all know politeness is not cheap, any more than honesty is politic. But surely I mistook my occasion, one day last winter—and now behold the price!