"We be," said Isabel recklessly. "That's the only fun there is, bein' possessed. If you ain't one way, you'd better be another. It's the way's the only thing to see to."

"I said I was sick o' paint an' powder," said Caddie. "Well, so I be, but I'll put flour in my hair so 't's as white as the drifted snow. I've got aunt Hope's gre't horn spe'tacles."

"I guess I could borrer one o' gramma Ellsworth's gounds," said Mrs. Pray. A light rarely seen there had come into her dull eyes. Isabel, with that prescience she had about the minds of people, knew what it meant. Mrs. Pray, though she was contemplating the garb of eld, was unconsciously going back to youth and the joy of playing. "She ain't quite my figger, but I guess 'twill do."

Lydia Vesey gave her a kindly look, yet scathing in its certainty of professional strictures.

"There ain't nobody that ever I see that's anywhere near your figger," she said, in the neighborly ruthlessness that was perfectly understood among them. "But you hand the gound over to me, an' I can fix it."

"Everybody flour their hair," cried Isabel, with the mien of inciting them deliriously.

"Everybody that's got plates, take 'em out," added Martha, the administrative, catching the infection and going a step beyond.

"Why, we can borrer every stitch we want," said Lydia Vesey. "Borrer of the dead an' borrer of the livin'. I know every rag o' clo'es that's been made in this town, last thirty years. There's enough laid away in camphire, of them that's gone, to fit out three-four old ladies' homes."

"It'll be like the resurrection," said Ellen Bayliss, with that little breathless catch in her voice.

"What you mean by that, Ellen?" asked Martha gently.

"I know what she means," said Isabel, while Ellen, the blood running into her cheeks, looked helplessly as if she wished she had not spoken. "She means we're goin' to dress ourselves up in the things of them that's gone, a good many of 'em, an' we can't help takin' on the ways of folks that wore 'em. We can't anyways help glancin' back an' kinder formin' ourselves on old folks we've looked up to. Seems if the dead would walk."

Sometimes people shuddered at Isabel's queer sayings, but at this every one felt moved in a solemn way. It seemed beautiful to have the dead walk, so it was in the remembrance of the living.

"Shall we let the men in?" asked Caddie anxiously. "I dunno what they'll say 'f we don't." Her silent husband was the close partner of her life. To Marshmead it seemed as if he might as well have been born dumb, but Caddie never omitted tribute to his great qualities.

"Mercy, yes," said Isabel, "if they'll dress up. Not else. They've got to be gran'ther Graybeards every one of 'em, or they don't come. You tell 'em so."

"You going home, aunt Ellen?" came a fresh voice from the doorway. "I've been staying after school, and I thought maybe you'd be tired and like me to call for you."

It was Nellie Lake, a vision of youth and sweet unconsciousness. She stood there in the doorway, hat and parasol in hand, crowned by her yellow hair, and in the prettiest pose of deprecating grace. Aunt Ellen smiled at her with loving pride, and yet wistfully, too. Nellie had called for her many times, just to walk home together, but never because aunt Ellen might be tired. The infection of age was in the air, and Nellie Lake had caught it.

"Come in, Nellie," she said. "No, I don't feel specially tired, but maybe I'll go along in a minute."

"Want to come to an old folks' party?" called Isabel, who was reading all these thoughts as swiftly as if they were signals to herself alone. "Want to dress up, an' flour your hair, an' put on spe'tacles, an' come an' play with us old folks?"

The girl's face creased up delightfully.

"A fancy dress!" she said. "What can I be?"

"You'll be an old lady," said Isabel, "or you won't come."

"Is it for the fund?" asked Nellie.

"Well, yes, I suppose it's for the fund, some," Isabel conceded. "But take it by an' large, it's for fun."

* * * * *

The night of the masquerade was soft and still, lighted by the harvest moon. Everywhere the fragrance of grapes enriched the air, and the dusty bitterness of things ripening. The little town hall was gay with lights, a curious blending of the west and east; for the boarders had left Japanese lanterns behind them, and their grotesque prettiness contrasted strangely with bowery goldenrod and asters and the red of maple leaves. Colonel Hadley, standing a moment at the doorway in his evening walk, this first night of his stay, when he had come with his nephew to look out some precious old books in the attic, and perhaps the more actually to draw Clyde away again after the errand was done, thought he had never seen such abandonment to a wild pleasure, even in his early days at Marshmead. For it was pleasure, though it seemed to be the festival of the old. Men and women bent with years and yet straightening themselves when their muscles ached, were promenading the hall, not sedately, according to the wont of Marshmead social gatherings, to fulfill a terrifying rite, but gayly, as if only by premeditation did they withstand the beckoning of the dance.

At the end of the hall, in a bower of light and greenery, sat a row of others who were apparently set apart for some honor or special service. From time to time the ranks broke, and one group after another stayed to talk with them, and always with the air of giving pleasure by their deference and heartening. Suddenly the colonel's eyes smarted with the sudden tears of a recognition which seemed to touch not only life as it innocently rioted here to-night, but all life, his own in the midst of it. At once he knew. These were the very old, and those who had lived through their fostering were paying them beautiful tribute.

At that moment his nephew, boyishly changed, but not disguised, in old Judge Hadley's coat and knee-breeches, stepped out of the moving line, a lady with him, and came to him. Clyde, too, was flushed with the strangeness of it all, and the joyous certainty that now for an evening, if only that, Nellie Lake was with him. The colonel looked at her and looked again, and she dropped her eyes in a pretty, serious modesty.

"Ellen!" he said involuntarily.

Then she laughed.

"That's my aunt," she told him. "I'm Elinor. I'm Nell. I tried to look like auntie. I guess I do."

"No," said the colonel sharply, "you don't look like Ellen Bayliss. You've made up too old."

Yet she had not, and he knew it. She had only put a little powder on her hair and drawn its curling richness into a seemly knot. She had whitened the bloom of her cheeks, and taken on that little pathetic droop of the shoulders he remembered in Ellen Bayliss the day he saw her in his last hurried trip to Marshmead. He had not spoken to her then. She had passed the station as he was driving away, and he had felt a pang he deadened with some anodyne of grim endurance, to see how youth could wilt into a dowerless middle age.

"I guess you haven't seen aunt Ellen," said Nellie innocently. "I'm just as she is every day, but she's made up to-night to be like grandma, or the picture of aunt Sue that died."

There she was. She had left the moving line for a moment, and the minister, in robe and bands of an ancient time, devised by Ann Bartlett and made by Lydia Vesey, had bowed and left her for some of his multifarious social claims. A chair was beside her, but she only rested one hand on the back of it and leaned her head against the wall. She was in a faded brocade unearthed from some dark corner Lydia Vesey knew the secret of, and she was age itself, beautiful, delicate, acquiescent age, all sadness and a wistful grace. The colonel looked at her, savagely almost, with the pain of it, and then back again at the girl who seemed to be picturing the first sad stage of undefended maidenhood. At that moment he knew he had put something wonderful away from him, those years ago, when he ceased to court the look in Ellen's eyes and turned to a robuster fortune. At the time, he had told himself, in his way of escaping the difficult issue, that the pang of leaving her was his alone. She, in her innocence of love, could hardly feel the death of what lived so briefly. Now, as it sometimes happened when his anodyne ceased to work, he knew he had snipped the blossom of her life and she had borne no fruit of ecstasy; and in the instant of sharp regret it came upon him that no other woman, through him, should tread the way of love denied. He stooped to Nellie, standing there before him, and kissed her on the cheek. Whether in this blended love and pain he was kissing Ellen or the girl, he did not know, but he saw how Clyde started and grew luminous, and what it meant to both of them.

"How did you know it?" Clyde was asking. "We are engaged. I wrote to her to-day. I was going to tell you, but I couldn't. You knew it, didn't you? You're a brick."

The girl flushed through her powder, and her eyes sent him a starry gratitude. But now the colonel hardly cared whether they had acted without his knowledge or whether they were grateful for his sanction. He and they and Ellen Bayliss seemed to be in a world alone, bound together by ties that might last—would last, he knew; but the mist cleared away from his eyes, and the vision of life to come faded, and he saw things as they were before, and chiefly Ellen standing there unconscious of him. He walked over to her.

"Ellen," he said bluffly, holding out his hand, "I've got only a minute, but I want to speak to you if I don't to anybody else."

She straightened and gazed at him, startled out of her part into a life half joy, half terror. He had taken her hand and held it warmly.

"Ellen," he said, "they're engaged, that boy and girl. Did you know it?"

"No," she answered faintly, but with candor. "No. I've discouraged it. I thought of you." She paused, too kind to him for more.

"I didn't know," he said. "I hadn't seen her. How should I know she was like you? How should I know if he lost her he mightn't be making a mistake? Yes, they're engaged. I sha'n't be at the wedding. I'm going abroad, but I shall send my blessing. To you, too, Ellen. Good-by. God bless you."

Then he had walked out of the hall, as alien, with his middle-aged robustness, as the mortal in fairy revelry; and Ellen, knowing her towns-people were looking at her in kindly interest, stood with dignity and yet a curious new consciousness of treasured happiness, as if she had a secret to think over, and a solving of perplexities.

Isabel Martin dropped out of her place, where she had been talking with Andrew Hall, and, forgetting in her haste the consistency of her part, ran over to her. Isabel, out of her abiding mischief, had dressed herself for a dullard's part. She had thought at first of being an old witch-woman and telling fortunes, but instead she had put on pious black alpaca and a portentous cap, and dropped her darting glances. To Andrew Hall, who was a portly Quaker in the dress of uncle Ephraim long since dead, she seemed as sweet as girlhood and as restful as his own mother. Andrew had been her servitor for almost as many years as they had lived; but she had so flouted him, so called upon him for impossible chivalries, out of the wantonness of her fancy, that he had sometimes confided to himself, in the darkest of nights when he woke to think of her, that Isabel Martin was enough to make you hang yourself, and he wished he never had set eyes on her. Yet she was the major part of his life, and Andrew knew it. Now he followed her more slowly, and was by at the instant of her saying,—

"O Ellen, you couldn't go over across the orchard, could you, an' see if Maggie L.'s got the water boilin' for the coffee? I'm 'most afraid to go alone."

Ellen, waking from her dream, looked at her and smiled. She knew Isabel's tender purposes. This was meant to take her away from curious though tolerant eyes and give her a moment to wipe out the world of dreaming for the world of men.

"No," she said softly. "You don't need to."

"You let me go," said Andrew gallantly. "I can see if it's bilin' an' come back an' tell ye."

"You!" said Isabel, abjuring her disguise, to rally him. "You'd be afraid. Come, Ellen."

She linked an arm in Ellen's, and falling at once into her part of sober age, paced with her from the hall. Andrew, constrained in a way he hardly understood himself, was following them, but in their woman's community of silent understanding they took no notice of him. Outside, the night was soft and welcoming, unreal after the light and color, an enchanted wilderness of moonlight splendor. They had crossed the road to the bench under the old poplar, and there Ellen sat down and drew a breath of excitement and gladness to be free to think. The moonlight seemed still brighter, sifting down the sky-spaces, and the two women together looked up at it through the poplar branches and were exalted by that inexplicable sense of the certainty that things come true. Dreams—that was what their minds were seeking passionately—and dreams come true.

"Ain't it wonderful?" Isabel asked softly.

"Yes," said Ellen, in the same hushed tone, "it's wonderful."

"I'll leave you here by yourself an' run acrost the orchard," said Isabel, in her other careless voice. "When I come back, I'll stop here an' we'll go in together. Why, Andrew, you here?"

"You said you was afraid," he answered. "I'll go acrost with you."

"All right," said Isabel, with her kindest laugh, not the teasing one that made him hate her while he thought how bright and dear she was. "Come take gran'ma acrost the orchard. Don't let anything happen to her."

They stepped over the wall and made their way along the little path by the grape arbor. The fragrance of fruit was sweet, and the world seemed filled with it.

"It's a pretty time o' year," said Andrew tremblingly.

"Yes."

"A kind of a time same 's this is to-night makes it seem as if life was pretty short. Be past before you know it."

"Yes."

She, too, spoke tremulously, and his heart went out to her.

"O Isabel," he said, "when you're like this, same as you are to-night, there ain't a livin' creatur' that's as nice as you be."

Isabel laughed. It was an echo of her flouting laugh, yet there was a little catch in the middle of it.

"There!" he said, with discontentment. "Now you're just as you be half the time, an' I could shake you for it. Sometimes seems to me I could kill you."

"Why don't you?" Isabel asked him, softly yet teasingly too, in a way that suddenly made her dearer. "If you don't see no use o' my livin', why don't you kill me?"

"What you cryin' for?" Andrew besought her, in an agony of trouble. "O Isabel, what you cryin' for?"

"I ain't cryin'," she said, "but if I am I guess it's for Ellen Bayliss, an' things—" She had never heard of "the tears of mortal things," and so she could not tell him.

"Ellen Bayliss? What's the matter of Ellen Bayliss?"

"Oh, she gets tired so quick, that's all."

"Don't you get tired," said Andrew. "Don't you let anything happen to you. O Isabel!"

The moonlight and the fragrance and old love constrained them, and they had kissed each other, and each knew they were to live together now, and sharpness would be put away perhaps; or, if it were not quite, Andrew would understand, knowing other things, too, and smile at it.

When they went back to the bench Ellen was gone, but in the hall they found her dancing with Clyde, and almost, it seemed, clad in the flying mantle of her youth.

"It's Virginny reel," cried Andrew, the infection of the night upon him. "There's another set here. Come."

"Wait a minute," said Isabel, her hand upon his arm. "Look at the platform. Where's the old folks gone?"

The platform was deserted. The old folks, too, were dancing. Martha Waterman caught the recognition of it in Isabel's eyes, pointed at the empty seats of eld, and nodded gayly. She sped out of her place and, losing no step, danced up to Isabel and Andrew.

"I dunno which's the youngest, old or young," she cried, "nor they don't either. We're goin' to have some country dancin' an' then serve the coffee an' sing 'Auld Lang Syne,' an' it's my opinion we sha'n't be home 'fore two o'clock. Ain't it just grand!"



A POETESS IN SPRING

Jerry Freelands felt that the day was not suitably ended if, after tidying up the kitchen and practicing "The Harp That Once" and "Oft in the Stilly Night" on his fiddle, he did not go across the fields to Marietta Martin's and compare the moment's mood with her, either in the porch or at her fireside, according to the season. They lived, each alone, in a stretch of meadow land just off the main road, and nobody knew how many of their evenings they spent together, or, at this middle stage in their lives, would have drawn romantic conclusions if the tale of them had been told.

In his youth Jerry had been a solitary, given to wandering "by the river's brim," as he liked to say, thinking of poetry and his fiddle. Marietta, even at that time, had been learning tailoring to support her mother, and she looked upon Jerry with unstinted admiration as too distinctly set apart by high attainments ever to be considered a common earthly swain. But Jerry did all his duties as if he were not gifted. He carried on the small farm, and, after his sister married and went away, nursed his mother until her death—"as handy as a woman," so the neighbors said. Yet he knew that all this tribute to the lower life was only something mysteriously decreed, perhaps to ballast the soul lest it soar too high. The real things were fiddle-playing and writing verse, sometimes inspired by nature and again by love or death, and publishing it in the county paper. Jerry had one consolation, one delight, besides and above Marietta. This was the poetess, Ruth Bellair, and it was of her he was thinking as he crossed the field, this darkening twilight, to Marietta's house. There was a warm spring wind, and frogs were peeping. Jerry knew, although it was too dark to see, that down by the brook the procession of willows walked in a mist of green. It was a broken sky, with here and there a star between soft wafts of cloud, and the newness and beauty of the time smote upon him as he hurried on, and made him young again. He walked faster than usual, a tall, lightly moving figure, his head under his soft felt hat thrown forward and his loose hair blown back by the swiftness of his going. Time seemed to have fallen away from him at the call of some new anticipation. He was not a man nearing fifty as the morning's sun had found him, but a youth with the mountain-top splendidly near and the rising sun to light his steps.

Marietta lived in a little, low-browed, gambrel-roofed house, with a vegetable garden in the back, a flower garden in front, and an orchard at the west side. She had sold the adjoining meadows and also the woodland, because she said it was better to lessen care as you grew older, and she was a poor hand to keep up a farm. Marietta was of those who are perhaps not calm by inheritance, but who have attained serenity because life proves it to be desirable. To-night she saw Jerry coming and met him at the door, a plump, fresh-colored woman with sweet brows, thick white hair, and blue eyes full of a wistful sympathy. She was younger than he, yet her acquired calmness had given her a matronly air and made her the one to assume protection and a gentle way of giving. As she stood there in the doorway, lamp in hand, she looked like a benignant mother waiting to greet a returning child.

"Well, Marietta," said Jerry.

He stopped a moment before her on the doorstone and drew the quick breath of the haste of his coming. Then he took off his hat, stayed for one look at the night behind him, and followed her in. Marietta put the lamp on the high mantel, and moved his chair slightly nearer the hearth. There was no fire, but the act seemed to make him more intimately welcome. Then she seated herself on the sofa between the two side windows and folded her hands for an evening's intercourse. Jerry took out his pipe, held it absently for a moment, and laid it down on the table. Marietta hardly liked that. He must be moved indeed, she knew, if he meant to forego his evening smoke. Jerry sat forward a little in his chair and let his long hands, loosely clasped, hang between his knees. He gazed straight out through the dark window as if he could see the lovely night pulsating there, and his bright gray eyes seemed to hold gleams of an extreme anticipation. Then he remembered the world where he found himself, this clean exquisite room with its homely furnishings, where he had become as familiar as if it were a secondary shell that fitted him so completely he hardly noticed it, and turned to her with an effect of winking his eyes open after a dream.

"Marietta," said he, "who do you suppose has come?"

She shook her head in an attentive interest.

He kept his gaze on her as if it were all incredible.

"Ruth Bellair," he said solemnly.

Now she did start, and her lips parted in the surprise of it.

"Not here?" she insisted. "You don't mean she's come here?"

He shook his head.

"No. She's at Poplar Bridge. The paper said so to-night."

"What's she there for?"

"She's come to board. The paper said so. 'The well-known poetess, Ruth Bellair, has arrived to spend the summer at the commodious boarding establishment of L. H. Moody.'"

He looked at her in a pale triumph, and she stared back at him with all the emotion he could have wished.

"I can't hardly believe it," she said faintly.

"That's it," he nodded at her. "Nobody could believe it. Why, Marietta, do you suppose there's been a night I've sat here that I haven't either read some of her pieces to you, or told you something I'd seen about her in the papers?"

"No," said Marietta, rather wearily, yet with a careful interest, "you haven't talked about anything else scarcely."

He was looking at her out of the same solemn assurance that it had been commendable in him to preserve that romantic loyalty.

"She begun to write about the time I did," he said, tasting the flavor of reminiscence. "I used to see her name in the papers when I never so much as thought I should write a line myself. She's been a great influence in my life, Marietta."

"Yes, course she has," Marietta responded, rising to the height of his emotion. "I guess she's influenced a good many folks."

"Well, I've got my chance. She's here within ten miles of us, and come what may, I'm bound to see her."

Marietta started.

"See her?" she repeated. "How under the sun you going to do that? You don't know her, nor any of her folks. Seems if she'd think 'twas terrible queer."

"She's used to it," said Jerry raptly. "She must be. People with gifts like that—why, of course folks go to see 'em."

He was removed and silent after this, and had scarcely a word for Marietta's late-blooming calla that had held her in suspense through the winter when she had wanted it, to unroll its austere deliciousness now in the spring. She brought him the heavy pot almost timidly, and Jerry put out his hand and touched the snowy texture of the bloom. But he did it absently, and she understood that his mind was not with her, and that there was little likelihood of his inditing a set of verses to the lily, as she had hoped. He got up and carried it to the stand for her, and there he paused for a moment beside it, coming awake, she thought. But after that period of musing he took up his hat from the little table between the windows and stood there holding it.

"Marietta," said he, with a simple and moved directness, "what if I should carry her one of these?"

"One of my lilies?"

"Yes."

She brushed a bit of dust from a smooth green leaf, and the color rose to her face. She seemed to conquer something.

"When you going?" she asked, in a subdued tone.

"I thought I'd go to-morrow."

"Well, you can have the lily, all three of 'em if you want—have 'em and welcome."

He was at the door now, his hand on the latch. Marietta, watching him still with that flush on her cheeks and a suffused look of the calm blue eyes, noted how he stood gazing down, as if already he were planning his trip, and as if the anticipation were affecting to him.

He straightened suddenly and met her glance.

"You're real good, Marietta," he said warmly. "I'll call in the morning and get 'em."

"What time you going?"

"'Long about ten, I guess. Good-night."

When she heard the clang of the gate behind him she went slowly in and stood by her lily for a moment, looking down at it, and not so much thinking in any definite channel as feeling the queerness of things. Marietta often had longings which she did not classify, for what seemed such foolish matters that, unless she kept them under cover, folks might laugh. The lily was not only a lily to her: it suggested a train of bright imaginings. It was like snow, she thought, like a pale lovely princess, like the sweet-smelling field flower that twisted round a stalk in a beautiful swirl. It seemed quite appropriate to her that Jerry should cut the flowers and carry them to Ruth Bellair. He would know, and the poetess also, what wonderful thing to say about anything so lovely, all in measured lines rhyming to perfection. She sighed once or twice when her head was on the pillow. It seemed amazing to her to be gifted as Jerry and his poetess were, and very stupid to be as dull as she.

Jerry, that night, hardly slept at all. He sat by his hearth, fiddle in hand, sometimes caressingly under his chin, sometimes lying across his knees; but he was not playing. He had opened both windows, so that, although the spring air was cool, he could get the feeling of the night and hurry the beating of his excited heart. Jerry was in no habit of remembering how old he was, and to-night age seemed infinitely removed. He was thinking of poetry and of Ruth Bellair. She had always been what he called his guiding star. Once he wrote a set of verses by that title, and put under it, with a hand trembling at its own audacity, "To R. B." That had never been published, but he had read it to Marietta, and she had said it was beautiful. Ruth Bellair had always seemed very far above him, for although he wrote poetry the county paper accepted in prodigious quantities, she did verse of a sort that appeared in loftier journals. She had written "The Hole in the Baby's Shoe," which mothers had cut out and pinned on the window curtain, and children had spoken on Last Day, to the accompaniment of tears from assembled parents. Then there was her sonnet, "Shall I Meet Thee There?" which Jerry had always supposed to have been inspired by a departed lover, and many, many others that touched the heart and were easy to remember, they ran so steadily, with such a constant beat. Jerry knew exactly how she would look. She would have golden hair and blue eyes, and what she had called in one of her poems the "tender gift of tears." He had always, in fancy, seen her dressed in blue, because that was his favorite color, though he reflected that he might as easily find her clad in white.

It was only toward morning that he slept, his fiddle on the table now, but very near, as if they had shared a solemn vigil and it still knew how he might feel in dreams.

It was about ten o'clock when he stopped at Marietta's gate with the light wagon and sober white horse he had borrowed from Lote Purington, "down the road." Marietta was ready at the door, a long white box in her hand.

"I been watching for you," she said. "I went up attic, where I could see you turn the corner. Then I snipped 'em off, and here they are."

Jerry took the box with a grave decorum, as if it represented something precious to him, and disposed it in the back of the wagon under the light robe.

"I'm obliged to you, Marietta," he said. "This'll mean a good deal to me." He stepped into the wagon again and took up the reins. Then the calm and beneficence of the spring day struck him as it had not before, in his hurried preparations, and he looked down at Marietta. They had always had a good deal to say to each other about the weather, and he knew she would understand. "It's spring, Marietta," he said, with a simplicity he had never thought it desirable to put into his verse.

"Yes," she answered, as quietly, yet with a thrill in her voice. "I don't hardly think I ever saw a prettier day."

There was such a mist of green that the earth seemed to be breathing it out in swirls and billows. It was impossible to say whether there were more riot and surge in the budding ground, or in the heavens, where clouds flew swiftly. The birds were singing, all kinds together, in a tumultuous harmony. Jerry felt light-headed with the wonder of it; but Marietta had an ache at her heart, she did not know why, though she was used to that kind of thing when the outside world struck her as being full of tremulous appeals without any answers.

Though Jerry had the reins in his hands, he did not go. Instead, he continued looking at her standing there in her freshness of good health and the candor of her gaze that seemed to him, next to his mother's face, the kindest thing he had ever known. The blue of her eyes and the blue of her dress matched each other in a lovely way. He felt that he had something to say to her, but he could not remember what it was. Suddenly a robin on the fence burst into adjurations of a robust sort, and Marietta, without meaning to, spoke. She had always said since her childhood that a robin bewitched her—he was so happy and so pert.

"Jerry," said she, "what if I should get my hat and ride with you as far as Ferny Woods?"

"So do," said Jerry, with a perfect cordiality. "So do."

"It's a pretty day," Marietta asserted again; but he cut her short, advising her to get ready, and she ran in, a flush on her cheeks and lightness in her step. When she came out she had made no conventional preparations for a drive. She had only pinned on her broad black hat and taken off her apron. She carried a little oblong basket with a cover, and this she set carefully in the back of the wagon, with the lilies. Jerry alighted gallantly to help her in, and when he had started up the horse it was Marietta who began speaking. Usually she was rather silent, following Jerry's lead, but to-day the warmth and beauty and song had liberated something in her spirit, and she had to talk back to the talking earth.

"You know Ferny Woods are much as a mile this side of the Moodys'," she was saying. "You can just leave me there, and then you can go along and make your call."

"It seems pretty mean not to take you with me," Jerry offered haltingly. Yet he knew, as she did, that he had no desire to take her. This was his own sacred pilgrimage.

"Oh, I wouldn't go for anything," she answered eagerly. "You've looked forward to it so long—well, not exactly that, for you didn't know she was coming. But it means a good deal to you. And I don't care a mite. I truly don't, not a mite."

Jerry flicked at the horse's ears and spoke out of his maze of dreamy anticipation.

"Seems if I should know her the minute I put eyes on her."

"Well, I guess you will," she encouraged him. "Maybe she's the only boarder they've got, so far."

"No, no, I don't mean that. Seems if I knew exactly how she ought to look."

"How d' you think, Jerry?" she inquired confidentially, as if his fancies were valuable and delightful to her. That was the tone she always had for him. Jerry would have said, if he had needed to think anything about it, that Marietta was the easiest person to talk to in the whole world. But he never did think about it. She was a part of his interchange with life, as real and as inevitable as his own hungers and satisfactions.

"Well," he said, while the horse slackened into a walk, with the grade of Blossom Hill, "I guess she's light-complexioned. Don't you?"

"Maybe," nodded Marietta kindly. "You can't tell."

"I guess she don't weigh very heavy," said Jerry, in a shamefaced bluntness, as if he wronged the absent goddess through such crudities. "You can't seem to see anybody that's had the thoughts she has and the way she's got of putting 'em—you can't see 'em very big-framed or heavy, can you? I can't, anyways."

"No," said Marietta, looking down at her own plump hands folded on her knee—"no, I don't know 's you can. Only see, Jerry! I always thought this little rise was about the prettiest view there is betwixt us and the Rocky Mountains."

They were on the top of Blossom Hill again, and Jerry drew the horse to a halt before winding down. All the kingdoms of the earth seemed, in Marietta's eyes, to be spread out before them. There was the rolling land of farms and villages, and beyond it the line of haze that meant, they knew, the sea. Tears filled her eyes. Then her gaze came home to an apple-tree by the side of the road.

"You see that tree, Jerry?" she asked. "Well, I've always called that Mother's Tree. Once, the last o' May, we borrowed Lote's team and climbed up here, and here was that tree in full bloom. Mother had a kind of a pretty way of putting things, and she said 'twas like a bride. 'Some trees are all over pink,' she says, 'but this is white as the drifted snow.' And the winter mother died, I rode up over this hill again, to get her some things to be buried in, and I stopped and looked at that tree. It snowed the night before, and 'twas all over white, and sparkling in the sun. I spoke right out loud. 'Mother's Tree,' I says."

"Sho!" said Jerry. "You never mentioned that before. Anybody could almost write something out o' that."

"Could you?" asked Marietta, brightening. "I wish you would. I should admire to have you."

Jerry's excitement of the night before had waned a little. Suddenly he felt tired and chill, and, although the purpose of his journey had not been accomplished, as if the zest of things had gone.

"Marietta," said he, starting on the horse, "do you think much about growing old?"

"I guess I don't," said Marietta brightly, and at once. "That's a terrible foolish thing to do. Least, so it seems to me."

"But you don't feel as you did fifteen years ago, do you, Marietta?" He asked it wistfully.

She was ready with her prompt assurance.

"I don't know 's I do. Don't seem as if 'twould be natural if I did. Take a tree, take that apple-tree back there—I don't know 's you could say it had the same feelings it did when it sprouted up out o' the seeds. We're in a kind of a procession, seems if, marching along towards—well, I don't know what all. But wherever we're going, it's all right, I say. It's all right."

They were silent then for a time, each scanning the roadsides and the vista before them framed in drooping branches and enriched by springing sward.

"You seem to have a good deal of faith, Marietta," said he suddenly. "But you ain't much of a hand to talk about it."

"Course I got faith," she answered. "It ain't any use for anybody to tell me there ain't a good time coming. I don't have to conjure up some kind of a hope. I know."

"How do you know?" asked Jerry.

She gave a sudden irrepressible laugh.

"I guess it's because the sky is so pretty," she said. "Maybe the robins have got something to do with it. Days like this I feel as if I was right inside the pearly gates. I truly do."

They were entering the shade of evergreens that bordered the ravine road, where there were striated cliffs, and little runnels came trickling down to join the stream below.

"I guess there ain't a spot round here that means more to folks in our neighborhood than this," said Marietta. "Remember the time somebody wanted to name it 'Picnic Road'? There were seventeen picnics that summer, if I recollect, all in our set."

"Yes," said Jerry. He remembered his poem about the "awesome amphitheatre nature wrought," and wondered if Marietta also recalled it and would quote some of it. But she only said:—

"That kind of a round where we used to eat our suppers is about the prettiest spot I ever see. That's where I'm going to set up my tent whilst you're making your call. When you come back you can poke right on in there and 'coot,' and I'll answer."

Jerry's mercurial spirits were mounting now. The past few minutes had given him two beautiful subjects for poetry. He could make some four-lined verses, he thought, about the tree that was a bride in spring and the next winter robed for burial. He could hear the cadence of them now, beating through his head in premonitory measures. Then there was the other fancy that life was a procession to an unknown goal. Jerry had read very little, except in the works of Ruth Bellair and her compeers, and the imaginings he wrought in had a way of seeming new and strange. The talk went on, drifting back irresistibly by the familiar way they were taking to the spring of their own lives, not, it seemed, in search of a lost youth, but as if they had it with them, an invisible third, in all their memories.

"Here we are," said Jerry. He drew up at the bars that led into old Blaisdell's sugar-camp, and Marietta, not waiting for him, sprang out over the wheel. "You're as light as a feather," said he admiringly, but with no sense of wonder. They were still in that childhood land where everybody is agile for one long, bright day.

"Light as a bun," returned Marietta flippantly. "Here, you wait a minute till I get me out my basket. When you come back you be sure to coot."

Jerry drove on a step or two, and then drew in the horse. Just as she had set her basket over the bars and was prepared to follow, he called to her:—

"Marietta, I believe I'll leave the team."

Marietta understood. She came back readily.

"Well," she said, "I think 'twould look better, myself."

"I can hitch to the bars, same as we used to," Jerry continued. "Remember how Underhill's old Buckskin used to crib the fence? Here's the very piece of zinc Blaisdell nailed on that summer we were here so much."

He had turned and driven back, and while he tied the horse, Marietta took out the box of lilies.

"I guess you better hold these loose in your hand," she said tentatively. "Seems to me 'twould look more appropriate."

Jerry nodded. They both had a vision of the poet going on foot to the lady of his dreams, his lilies in his hand. Marietta lifted the cover of the box and unrolled them deftly. She looked about her for an instant, and then, finding feasible standing-ground, went to one of the runnels dripping down the cliff and paused there, holding the lily stems in the cool laving of the fall. Jerry, the horse tied, stood watching her and waiting. The bright blue of her dress shone softly against the wet brown and black of the cliff wall, and the pink of her cheeks glowed above it like a rosy light. Marietta had thought her dress far too gay when she bought it, but the dusk of the ravine road had toned it down to a tint the picture needed for full harmony. Jerry, though the familiar spot and her presence in it soothed and pleased him, was running ahead with his eager mind to the farm where Ruth Bellair stood waiting at the gate. Of course she was not really waiting for him, because she did not know he was coming, nor even that he lived at all. When he had mailed her the package of autumn leaves Marietta had pressed, he had not sent his name with them. Yet it seemed to him appropriate that she should be standing, a girlish figure, by the Moodys' gate, to let him in. After that they would walk up the path together, she carrying the lilies; and perhaps in the orchard, where the trees were in bloom, they would pace back and forth together and talk and talk. Jerry knew it was too early for apple-trees to be blossoming, even in this weather, but the orchard where Ruth Bellair walked would be white and pink. So he took his lilies in his hand and strode away, and Marietta watched him. At the turn of the road he stopped and waved his hand to her.

"Good-by!" called Marietta. "Good luck! Good-by!" Then a little sob choked her, and she stamped her foot. "What a fool!" said Marietta, addressing herself, and she walked to the bars with great determination, let down one, "scooched" to go through, and, picking up her basket, went on to the amphitheatre. Jerry need not have wondered whether she remembered his ornate poem. She did, every word of it, and as she walked she said it to herself in a murmuring tone. When she was within the beloved inclosure she paused a moment before setting down her basket, and looked about her. The place was not so grand as her childish eyes had found it, only a great semicircle of ground brown with pine needles and surrounded by ancient trees; but it was beautiful enough. Strangely, she had not visited it for years. Her own mates no longer came, because they were doing quiet things at home, farming and household tasks, and Marietta would have had no mind, if she had been invited, to make one of a serious middle-aged rout taking its annual pleasure with a difference.

"I'd rather by half be alone," she said aloud, as she looked about her, "or maybe with one other that feels as I do."

Then she put down her basket and went, by a path she knew, to the spring cleaned of fallen leaves by the first picnickers of every season. There it was, the little kind pool with its bottom of sand and its fringing grasses, the cress she had planted once with her own hands and now beginning to show brightly green. Marietta knelt and drank from her hollowed palm. The cup was in the basket. When Jerry came back he should have it to slake his thirst; and presently she returned to the amphitheatre and lay down on the pine-needles, to look up through the boughs at glints of sky, and think and think. Perhaps it was not thought, after all. It followed no road, but stayed an instant on a pine bough, as a bird alights and then flies out through the upper branches to the sky itself.

Marietta could not help feeling happy, in a still, unreasoning way. She had not had an easy youth. It had been full of poverty and fears, and her later life had been lived on one monotonous level of satisfying her own bare wants and finding nothing left for luxury. But something, some singing inner voice, was always, in these later days, bidding her take hope. She was not expectant of definite delights; she only cherished an irresponsible certainty. When the door opened to let in spring, it seemed to show her heaven also, and she gave herself up to the gladness of it. If Marietta had been able to scrutinize her inner being, she would probably have owned that she found Jerry Freelands' influence upon her a great and guiding one. It was, she knew, a precious privilege to know a poet, and to see the natural and spiritual worlds through his discerning eyes. It would have seemed to her wonderful to be a poet herself. Ruth Bellair, waiting in unconscious sovereignty for Jerry to seek her out and lay lilies at her feet, was, she knew, the happiest woman in the spring world. Yet the soft air moved the pines to wavelike murmurings, and Marietta too was happy.

It was nearly three o'clock when Jerry came back, and before that Marietta had roused herself to open her basket and spread a napkin on the big flat stone that made the picnic-table. She had laid a pile of fine white bread and butter on the cloth, a paper twist of pickles, because picnickers, according to tradition, are the better for consuming pickles, and some of her own superior sugar gingerbread. The cup was there waiting for Jerry to take it to the spring. Then she listened for him. He did not give the expected coot, but came through the forest glade silently and with a halting step. When Marietta saw him her heart ran forward, before her feet. Jerry looked an older man; his years were so apparent to her that it seemed for a foolish instant as if his father were advancing toward her out of the past where she and Jerry had been young together. She hurried forward.

"What is it?" she besought. "What's happened?"

His dull eyes turned upon her absently. He took off his hat and dropped it at his feet.

"Why," said he, "nothing's happened that I know of."

The part of prudence was to halt, but anxiety hurried her on as if it might have been to the rescue of a child in pain.

"Didn't you see her?" she asked breathlessly.

"Yes, I saw her."

He passed a hand over his forehead and smoothed his hair in a way he had, ending the gesture at the back of his neck.

"How'd she look, Jerry? What was she doing?"

"Why," said Jerry, narrowing his eyes, as if he recalled a picture he had found incredible, "she was playing croquet out in the front yard."

"But how'd she look?"

"Why, she's a kind of a dark-complexioned woman. She wears spe'tacles. She's"—he paused there an instant and caught his breath—"she's pretty fleshy."

"Was she nice to you?"

"Yes, she was nice. She meant to be real nice and kind. She made me"—a spasm twitched his face, and he concluded—"she made me play croquet."

They stood there in the wood loneliness, dapples of sunlight flickering on them through the leaves. Marietta felt a strange wave of something rushing over her. It might have been mirth, or indignation that somebody had destroyed her old friend's paradise; but it threatened to sweep her from her basis of control.

"You sit down, Jerry," she said soberly. "I'm going to the spring to get you a cup of water, and then we'll have our luncheon."

When she returned, bearing the full cup delicately, he lay like a disconsolate boy, face down upon the ground; so she touched him on the shoulder and said, in a tone of the brisk housewife:—

"Luncheon's ready."

Then Jerry sat up, and ate when she put food into his hand and drank from the cup she gave him. Marietta ate only a crumb here and there from her one bit of bread, for, seeing how hungry he was, she suspected that, in his poet's rapture, he had had no breakfast. She tried to rouse him to the things he loved.

"Only look through there," she said, pointing to a vista where a group of birches were shimmering in green. "I don't know 's I ever see a fountain such as they tell about, but this time in the year, before the leaves have fairly come, seems if the green was like a fountain springing up and never falling back. Maybe, though, it's the word I like, the sound of it. I don't know."

Jerry turned his eyes on her in a quick, keen glance.

"Marietta," he said, "you have real pretty thoughts."

"Do I?" asked Marietta, laughing, without consciousness. She was only glad to have beguiled him from the trouble of his mind. "Well, if I do, I guess you put 'em into my head in the first place." The feast was over, and she folded the napkin and swept away the crumbs. "Want some more water?" she asked, pausing as she repacked the basket.

Jerry shook his head.

"Marietta," said he, "seems if it wa'n't a day since you and I used to be here picnicking."

She laughed again whimsically.

"Well," she said, "when I travel back over the seams I've sewed, looks like a good long day. I guess there's miles enough of 'em to stretch from here to State o' Maine."

Jerry seemed to be speaking from a dream.

"And the others have married and got children growing up," he mused. "Seems if we'd missed the best of it."

They had risen and stood facing each other, Marietta with the basket in her hand. Jerry took it gently from her and set it on the ground.

"Marietta," he said, "I guess I'm kind of waked up."

Her face quivered. He thought he had never seen her look exactly that way before.

"I'd work terrible hard," said he. "I guess I could make you have an easier time."

Then his appealing eyes met hers, and Marietta, because she had no wish to deny him anything, gave him her hands, and they kissed soberly.

When they walked back to the road, Jerry drew her aside to the birches on the sunny knoll.

"You mustn't lay it up against me," he said brokenly.

"Lay what up?"

Her lips were full and lovely, and her eyes shone with the one look of happiness.

"It's spring with these." He pointed to the birches. "It ain't with us."

"I don't know." Marietta laughed willfully. "Ain't you ever seen an apple-tree blooming in the fall? or a late rose? Well, I have. So, there!"

To Jerry, looking at her, she seemed like a beautiful stranger, met in the way, and he kissed her again.

When they were driving home in their sober intimacy that had yet an undercurrent of that rushing river of life, Marietta turned suddenly to him.

"Jerry," she said, "when you played croquet, who beat?"

His eyes, meeting hers, took the merry challenge of them and answered it. They both began to laugh, ecstatically, like children.

"She did," said he.



THE MASTER MINDS OF HISTORY

"What's that dry-goods case in the front entry?" asked Elihu Meade.

He had sunk into his particular chair by the kitchen stove, and was drawing off his boots with the luxurious slowness of one whose day's work is done and who may sit by expectant while fragrant warm delights are simmering for supper. His wife, Amarita by name, stood at the stove, piloting apple turnovers in a pool of fat. At a first glance she and her husband seemed an ill-matched pair, he with a thin face and precise patch of whisker at the ear, a noticeable and general meagreness of build, and she dark and small, with a face flashing vivid intelligence. Elihu's mother—a large, loosely made, blond old lady—sat by the window, out of range of the lamplight even, knitting by feeling, and doubling her pleasures through keeping her glance out of the window, where a new moon hung.

While she felt the warmth of indoor comfort wafting about her, Amarita cast up a hesitating yet altogether happy look at her husband. She knew from old habit that she must choose her time of approach, but the warmth and the plenitude of supper and her own inner enchantment with what she had to tell convinced her against reason that the time was now.

"Why," she began, "you see 'twas this way."

Mrs. Meade the elder, known as "old Mis' Meade," gave a majestic clearing of her throat. She brought her gaze indoors and bent a frowning glance on the two at the stove. A shade of vexation passed over her face, grotesquely elongating the downward-dropping lines.

"Rita," she called, in what seemed warning, "you come here a minute. Ain't I dropped a stitch?"

Rita responded at once, bending over the stocking ostentatiously displayed.

"You let me take it to the light," she began; but old Mis' Meade laid thumb and finger on her apron, and having caught her daughter-in-law's eye, made mysterious grimaces at her. Amarita, the knitting in her hand, stared frankly back, and the old lady, forced to be explicit, bade her in a mumbling tone:—

"Wait till he's through his supper. It's no time now. There!" she continued, with a calculated clearness, "you give it back. I guess I didn't drop it, after all. Your fat's burnin'. Ketch it off, Elihu, won't ye?"

The imperiled fat made a diversion, and then supper was on the table, and old Mis' Meade moved away from the window and brought her great bulk over to partake of turnovers. There was a long silence while tea was passed and the turnovers were pronounced upon by the acquisition that is more eloquent than words. But after Elihu had finished his fifth and last, he pushed his cup away with solemn satisfaction and asked his wife across the table:—

"What's that packin'-case out in the front entry?"

Old Mis' Meade gave a smothered ejaculation of discouragement, but Amarita looked up with the brightest eyes.

She was having a moment of perfect domestic peace, when all she did seemed to bear fruitage in the satisfaction of hunger and kindred needs, and it innocently seemed to her as if her compensating pleasure was about to come. She gazed straight at her husband, her eyes darkening with the pleasure in them.

"Why," said she, "that's the 'Master Minds of History.'"

Elihu bent a frowning brow upon her.

"The 'Master Minds of History,'" she repeated. "The agent was here this afternoon—"

"You don't think the mice'll git at them pies up in the blue chist, do ye?" inquired old Mis' Meade, fatuous in a desperate seeking to direct the talk.

Amarita gave her a passing glance of wonder.

"Why, no," she said. "They couldn't get in to save their little souls. You see"—she turned again to Elihu—"the agent was here this afternoon—"

Old Mis' Meade almost groaned, and went away to her bedroom, as if she could not endure the hearing of the coming contest or to see the slain.

"What agent?" asked Elihu.

He had gone back to his seat by the fire, and Amarita, answering, stood with her hand upon the devastated table.

"Why, the book agent. He come in a buggy, and he had this set with him."

"Set o' what?"

"Why, set o' books. He's takin' orders for 'em, and this was a set he brought along under the seat, thinkin' somebody, the minister or somebody that knew what's what, would buy it right out. There's twelve volumes, and they're a dollar and eighty-seven a volume, and there's illustrations, and it's all printed in the clearest type."

She paused, flushed and expectant, and Elihu stared at her.

"A dollar and eighty-seven cents!" he repeated. "You ain't gone and put your name down for twelve books, a dollar and eighty-seven cents apiece?"

"Why, no," said Amarita. "Course I ain't. I didn't have the money, and so I told him. I would, in a minute, if I'd had it."

"Well, what's the packin'-case here for?" inquired Elihu slowly, while his mind labored.

"Why, he was possessed to leave it. 'You look over the volumes,' he says, 'and read 'em all you want to, and if you don't feel to subscribe then, it sha'n't cost you a cent.' And he's comin' along here pretty soon, and he's goin' to call, and if we don't conclude to keep 'em, he'll take 'em right back."

"My king!" said Elihu. He looked at her in complete discouragement, and Amarita returned his gaze with one bespeaking a conviction of her own innocence. "Don't ye know no better'n that? Take 'em away! All the takin' away he'll do'll be in a hog's eye. He'll say you bought 'em, and ain't paid for 'em, and 'long about the first o' the month he'll send in a bill for twelve books at a dollar and eighty-seven cents apiece."

Amarita made a picture of childlike misery. Her eyes had the piteous look of coming tears, and she swallowed once or twice before speech was possible.

"O Elihu," she breathed, "you don't really s'pose that, do you?"

"Course he will," said Elihu. "That's the way they do—come drivin' along a time o' day when there's no menfolks to home, and take in the womenfolks. They know women ain't got no business trainin'. How do they know it? Because they've tried it over 'n' over, and every time they've come out ahead."

The tears were dropping now, and Amarita walked hastily away to conceal them, and got down her dish-pan, although the table was not yet cleared. By the time she had turned from the sink again, a shadow of her hopefulness came wanly back.

"I don't believe he's that kind of a fellow," she faltered. "He talked real fair. I thought I should admire to look 'em over. I thought maybe we could read some out loud in the evenin', while your mother knit."

"'Talk fair!' Course he talked fair," said Elihu. "That's a part on 't. I'll bet a dollar if you's in a court o' law you couldn't remember what he said."

"I could the sense of it."

"That's it! Why, don't ye know, when anything's business, it's got to be jest so and no other way? 'Tain't surprisin' you shouldn't. Womenfolks ain't called on to do brain work, any to speak of—well, keep school they may, and a matter o' that—but when it comes to business—d'ye have any witnesses?"

"No," said Amarita, in a small voice.

"Well, you've done about as bad for yourself as ye could, fur 's I can see. Now, you hearken to me. You leave that packin'-case where he set it, and don't you move it so much as a hair to the right or the left, and don't you lift the cover. And if that feller ever darkens these doors, you come and call me."

Then Elihu rose and took a candle and went off to his desk in the sitting-room, and Amarita cleared the table with swift, sweeping motions, as if she longed to hurl the dishes from her. Old Mis' Meade came heavily back from her bedroom.

"Well," said she, in the scorn sprung from experience, "I never seen sich actions. Terrible time, an' nobody to it! What made ye tell him?"

Amarita returned no answer. She was washing dishes now, with no noise, setting down each article softly, yet with the same air of longing to destroy.

"Witnesses!" old Mis' Meade grumbled, settling to her work by the window. "If Elihu's the size he used to be, I'd show him how much womenfolks knew about business. If you want one o' them books to read to-night, you step into the front entry an' pick ye out one. I'll stand by ye."

Still Amarita made no answer. She was not thinking of the books. Swift as wood-creatures coursing on the track of prey, her mind was racing over the field of her life with Elihu and pinning down the mistakes he had made. She had never seemed to see them, but not one of them had escaped her. There was the day when a traveling salesman had sold him the onion seed that never came up, and the other one when he had bought Old White of the peddler, and seen him go lame after a two-mile drive, and when he dated a note on Sunday and the school-teacher had laughed. At first Amarita had not merely ignored his errors. She had, indeed, shut her eyes upon them and turned quickly away; but as it became apparent that Elihu was keeping a record of her impulsive, random deeds and drawing data from them, so she began to see the list of his, and turned to it now and then, when he found her foolish, to read it over in a passionate self-comparison.

When the dishes were done she sat down to her sewing, outwardly calm, but conscious of that hot flush in her cheeks and of her quickly beating heart. Old Mis' Meade muttered a little as she knit, and cast her son a hostile glance from time to time. But Elihu was happily impervious to criticism. He spread a sheet of paper on the table, and sat down to it with the air of a schoolboy who is about to square his elbows and perhaps put out a rhythmic tongue.

"Where's my two-foot rule?" he inquired of Amarita.

"In your t'other trousers," she answered, sewing swiftly, without looking up.

Elihu glanced at her in a mild surprise, and his mother chuckled. She was devoted to her son, and more or less overshadowed by his prerogative as "menfolks" born to absorb the cream of things; but the elderly good sense in her was alive to the certainty that if Amarita had not been so yielding, Elihu would never have been so bumptious.

After he had risen and gone off rather helplessly to seek his t'other trousers, Amarita did glance after him with a tentative movement from her chair. It almost seemed as if she repented and meant to go on the quest herself. Old Mis' Meade, translating this, held her breath and waited; but Amarita only sighed and took a needleful of thread. Then Elihu returned with the rule and a stubby pencil, and all the evening long he drew lines and held the paper at arm's length and frowned at what he saw. Old Mis' Meade was in the habit of going to bed before the others, and to-night she paused, candle in hand, to interrogate him.

"Elihu!"

"What say?" her son returned. He was again regarding the rectangular patterns on his page, in some dissatisfaction and yet with pleasure, too. It was the look of one who makes.

"What under the sun you doin' of?" asked the old lady. "What you rulin' off? Makes me as nervous as a witch."

Elihu laid down his paper from that removed survey and leaned back in his chair. It seemed to add some richness to his task to have it noticed.

"Well," said he, "there's goin' to be a town meetin' next Wednesday, to take a vote on that money Judge Green left for the Old Folks' Home."

"Yes, yes," said his mother. "I know that. Come, hurry up. This candle's in a draught."

"Well," said Elihu, "we've talked it over, more or less, most on us, and we've come to the conclusion it's only a bill o' cost to go hirin' city architects to plan out the job. All we want's a good square house, and I thought I'd draw out a plan o' one and submit it to the meetin'."

"O Elihu!" said Amarita, in a tone of generous awe. "You think you could?"

"Think?" said Elihu. "No, I don't think. I know it. Mebbe I couldn't draw out a house with cubelows and piazzas and jogs and the like o' that, but that ain't what we've got in mind. It's a good old-fashioned house, and I s'pose any man of us could do it, only nobody's got the nerve to try. So I took it into my head to be the one."

"Well," said his mother skeptically, "mebbe you can an' mebbe you can't. Good-night, all."

But Amarita leaned forward across the table, her eager eyes upon the paper. She had forgotten her resentment. It was happiness to her to see Elihu doing what he liked and succeeding in it.

"O Elihu," said she, "show it to me, won't you? Tell me what the rooms are."

But he was rolling up his work.

"No," he said; "wait till I get a little further along. Then I will. I'm going to the street and buy me a sheet or two o' cardboard to-morrer."

But they talked cozily about it for a half-hour, and when Elihu rose to wind the clock they were both convinced that he was a great man indeed.

All that week Elihu worked over his plan, and when he had at last set it accurately down on the cover of a bandbox, as a preliminary to drafting it out fair and large, he showed it to his wife. They had put their heads together over it at the table, when Elihu caught sight of Simeon Eldridge bringing him a cord of pine limbs.

"You wait a minute," he adjured Amarita. "I got to help him unload. I'll show it to you when I come in."

But Amarita pored over it by herself, and old Mis' Meade, at the window, knit and watched for the passing. It was a bright day, and it seemed reasonable that at least two wagons might go by.

"Don't you want I should bring it over there," said Amarita, at length, "and let you look at it?"

"Law, no!" old Mis' Meade responded, with the ruthlessness of one whose mind is not on futures. "I guess I can wait till they've begun to hew out their underpinnin'."

"Ain't it remarkable he can do a thing like that?"

"He ain't done it yet," said the old lady sagely. "I'll b'lieve it when I'm called to the raisin'."

Amarita flushed.

"I don't see what does make you cry him down so," she declared, with a rare resentment. "Seems if you didn't want to allow he can do the least thing out o' the common."

"Well," said the old lady, "I dunno 's he can. There, Amarita!" She threw caution from her as far as it would fly. "I guess I set by Elihu enough, an' more too, but it does go ag'inst the grain to see you makin' out he's the greatest man that ever stepped. 'Twon't be long before ye can't live with him. Can't either of us!"

Amarita was silent, staring straight at the old lady, who glanced up presently and blinked at her.

"You goin' to let them books set there in the front entry?" she inquired, as if her point of attack had shifted.

"Why, yes, I s'pose so," faltered Amarita.

"Don't ye want to peek into 'em an' see what they be?"

"Why, yes; but I don't want to do anything to get Elihu into trouble about 'em. I s'pose I was kinder foolish to believe what the man said."

"Foolish!" retorted the old lady, with vigor. "Course you was foolish. Everybody's foolish one time out o' three. That's about the only thing there's no patent on."

"Well, I s'pose folks do get into trouble doin' things wrong-end-to," said Amarita.

She felt as if she were defending Elihu in his censorship.

"Why, yes! Nobody says they don't. Let 'em git in an' let 'em git out ag'in. It ain't doin' foolish things or not doin' 'em I complain of. It's Elihu's settin' himself up to be the only human creatur' that never stepped inside of a glass house. Law! if he did but know it, he's got a ninety-nine-year lease o' one, an' if he could git it into his head how plain I can glimpse him through the walls, a surpriseder man you never'd see. Elihu's as good a boy as ever stepped; but if he could be took down a peg—an' I shouldn't care if 'twas before the whole township, too—he'd be worth more by half than he is to-day. Law! you'd ought to seen him a hundred years ago or more, arter I gi'n him a good spankin'. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth."

"Oh, don't! He's comin'," Amarita begged her.

But he was not coming, and for an hour Amarita dwelt upon the plans. Her eyes grew bright and her cheeks flushed. Once she pushed her pretty hair back from her forehead and looked up at the old lady, as if she had impulsive things to say. But she did not speak, and turning back to the plans, she went absorbedly over them again. Old Mis' Meade watched her scornfully, and yet tenderly, too. If ever a woman was a fool over a man, she reasoned, Amarita was that fool; but in her heart she would not have had it otherwise.

Now that the plans were virtually finished, Elihu sat over them at an hour's stretch, testing and measuring in an extreme of accuracy. Amarita watched him, with that bright anticipation in her face; and old Mis' Meade, her eyes intermittently upon them, thought the long thoughts of age, half scornful, half sympathizing, and wondered again how any woman could be so lost in admiration over a man.

At last it was the day appointed for town meeting, and Elihu was at his task for the last time, making a fair copy for his townsmen's eyes. It was about four in the afternoon, and the smell of hot apple-sauce was in the air. Amarita meant to have supper early, so that she could give her mind untrammeled to getting her husband into his bosomed shirt and starting him on his quest. But as she moved back and forth at her tasks she watched him, and her eyes glittered. Old Mis' Meade noted the excitement of her air and the double tinge of color in her cheeks.

"What's the matter, Rita?" she asked kindly, when Amarita stood for a moment by the table between the front windows, frowning with the care she was giving to sewing a button on a wristband. "Ain't you kinder feverish?"

Amarita started—almost, it might have been, with some inner consciousness not to be given away.

"Oh no," said she. "I ain't feverish, mother Meade. Maybe I'm kinder flurried, Elihu's goin' out and all."

"Goin' to take the womenfolks along with ye, Elihu?" called the old lady, a satirical note beating into her voice.

Elihu looked up absently from his paper.

"Why," said he, with a leniency slightly tinctured by the impatience responsive to a foolish question, "it's jest a town meetin', same as any other. We're goin' to take action on the Old Folks' Home."

"Take action?" repeated old Mis' Meade. "Oh, that's it, is it? Well, Rita 'n' I'll stay to home an' take action on the 'Master Minds o' History.' This is as good a night as any. Mebbe there's a few womenfolks in there—enough for pepper 'n' salt—if they ain't bound for town meetin'."

Elihu drew the long breath which is the due of happily completed toil. He began to roll up his plans. Amarita ran to him and looked over his shoulder.

"You got 'em done?" she asked.

The red in her cheeks had heightened. Her voice came huskily. Old Mis' Meade glanced at her, a sharp and quick survey. Elihu indulgently unrolled his paper and spread it on the desk.

"Yes," said he, "I got 'em done."

"O Elihu!" breathed his wife. She bent above the page, and in the fever of her interest seemed to pounce on it and scurry over it. "You goin' to show it to the town meetin'?"

"Course I be," said Elihu, with a modest pride. "That's what I made it for."

Amarita straightened.

"Well," said she. Her voice was hard through what might have been an accepted purpose. "You may as well shave you. We'll have supper early."

Supper was a silent meal that night. Elihu was pondering on his triumph as a valuable citizen, and what Amarita thought no one could at that moment have foretold. She did not eat, but she drank her tea in hasty swallows, and burned her mouth with it. That, the old lady guessed, was why the tears came once or twice into her eyes. Amarita, her mother-in-law judged, had been staying indoors too much through the snowy weather, while Elihu worked on his plans. There had been no sleigh-rides, only the necessary driving to the street.

Old Mis' Meade had a little scheme in view, and now she brought it forth; it was a species of compensation for stay-at-homes during the absence of their lawful head for his two or three hours of civic duty.

"What if you should bring in a good big knot 'fore you go," she adjured him, "an' Rita 'n' I'll have us a fire in the fireplace. I dunno why, but seems if I didn't want to set in the kitchen to-night. Then by the time you come home there'll be a good bed o' coals, an' you can toast your feet 'fore you go to bed."

There was a whirling half-hour of preparation, while old Mis' Meade washed the supper dishes and Amarita flew light-footedly about from kitchen to bedroom to get her lord into his public clothes. Elihu forgot the knot, and brought it in after he had assumed the garb of ceremony; and then he had to be fussily brushed from possible sawdust, while Amarita, an anxious frown on her brow, wondered why mother Meade always would distract him at the most important points. The fire was laid, but Elihu was one of those who believe in their own personal magic over a blaze, and he had to adjust the knot and touch off the kindling and watch the result a minute, to be sure the chimney had not caught. By the time he had harnessed and had appeared again to wash his hands and don his greatcoat, two other sleighs had gone by, bearing town fathers to the trysting-place. Amarita was nervous. She knew Elihu liked to be beforehand with his duties. But at last, his roll of plans in hand, he was proceeding down the path, slipping a little, for the thaw had made it treacherous, to the gate where the horse was hitched, and Amarita, at the sitting-room window, watched him. Old Mis' Meade came up behind her, and she too watched.

Elihu was uncovering the horse. Amarita turned from her mother-in-law with a noiseless rush and flew out of the front door and down the slippery path.

"Elihu!" she called, with all the voice excitement left her. "Elihu, you come here. I've got to speak to you."

Elihu left the horse and came with long strides up the path, taking, as he hurried, glances at the roof.

"Roarin', is it?" he asked. "You think the chimbley's ketched?"

The roll of plans stuck out from his coat pocket. That was all Amarita could see. She laid hands upon him and drew him into the entry. There she shut the door and then stood with her grasp upon the other door, leading into the sitting-room, and held it tight. She was afraid mother Meade might come out to see what was the matter. Amarita leaned against the casing. In spite of the brightness of her eyes, she looked faint and sick. It seemed to be her grasp upon the latch that kept her now from falling.

"O Elihu!" she said. He was questioning her with puzzled eyes. "O Elihu! I've been awful mean to you." Her hold on the latch relaxed, and she sat down on the packing-case between them. "When I told you about the box the man left, and you seemed to think I didn't know enough to come in when it rained, I said next time you made any kind of a mistake I'd let it go, no matter who's goin' to laugh at you. And when it come to your plans"—she stopped here, and Elihu absently put his hand to the roll in his pocket—"when it come to them, I said you might show 'em to the minister and the doctor and everybody else. But, Elihu, there ain't—O Elihu, you ain't put a single closet in that house!"

Elihu stood there in silence, and Amarita sat on the packing-case, feeling her heart beat. It seemed a long time before she heard his voice.

"There! there!" he was saying. "You open that door and I'll look in an' see if the chimbley's ketched."

In a moment Amarita followed him. She heard mother Meade moving about the kitchen, and Elihu was just dropping his roll of paper on the fire. She gave a little cry, but he only said, in what seemed to her a very kind voice, almost the voice of courting days,—

"You run out and fetch me in the hammer and screw-driver, whilst I listen to this chimbley."

When she came droopingly back with the tools, Elihu was explicitly cheerful.

"There!" he said. "That's safe enough. We'll burn it out, come wet weather." Then he strode into the hall, and she heard two or three blows and the splintering of soft wood. "Here's your books," Elihu was calling to her. "You two take 'em out, and if 'tain't too late after I come home, I'll read a page. I guess we can foot the bill when it comes in."

* * * * *

Books by Alice Brown

COUNTRY NEIGHBORS. 12mo, $1.20, net. Postage extra.

THE STORY OF THYRZA. With frontispiece. Large square crown 8vo, $1.35, net. Postpaid, $1.50.

ROSE MACLEOD. With frontispiece. Crown 8vo, $1.50.

THE COUNTY ROAD. 12mo, $1.50.

THE COURT OF LOVE. 12mo, $1.25.

PARADISE. 12mo, $1.50.

HIGH NOON. 12mo, $1.50.

THE MANNERINGS. Crown 8vo, $1.50.

MARGARET WARRENER. 12mo, $1.50.

KING'S END. 12mo, $1.50.

MEADOW GRASS. Tales of New England Life. 16mo, $1.50; paper, 50 cents.

TIVERTON TALES. 12mo, $1.50.

BY OAK AND THORN. A Record of English Days. 16mo, $1.25.

THE DAY OF HIS YOUTH. 16mo, $1.00.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK

* * * * *

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U. S. A