Mr. Carmody gave an uneasy glance over his shoulders to a large desk in the corner, where sat a tall, thin man who seemed absorbed in a game of checkers played with newspaper clippings. Mr. Hanks, the city editor, he explained; nothing that he could say would have any influence on Mr. Hanks. On my insisting, however, he at last consented to sound Mr. Hanks on my behalf; he approached him with something of the caution he would have used in confronting a tiger; he waved his hand to me to assure me that all was well, and when I stood by the big desk he disappeared, and it was many days before I saw him again.

There was nothing repelling in Mr. Hanks. Indeed, he seemed rather a mild man, but when he turned on me a pair of large spectacles I felt suddenly as though I were a curious insect being examined under magnifying-glasses. Mr. Hanks, with his thin, pale face and dishevelled hair, appeared more an entomologist than a militant editor. In a moment, however, I saw him in action. He shot his bare arm across the littered desk, he seemed to try to destroy his brass bell, and with every ring he shouted, "Copy—copy!" Office-boys sprang from the floor and dropped from the ceiling; they tumbled over one another in their hurry to answer the summons. He reprimanded them for being asleep. I thought that they would be ordered to bring Mr. Malcolm a chair, but instead one received from a waving hand a bunch of paper, and they retired as they had come, into the floor and the ceiling. I was under the magnifying-glasses again.

"Well, Mr. Malcolm," said Mr. Hanks, leaning back in his chair and clasping his hands behind his head, "ever done any newspaper work?"

"No, sir," I answered boldly. "I have just graduated from McGraw."

"And where in the devil is McGraw?" he asked in a slow, wondering voice.

How I wished for Doctor Todd! In five minutes this self-confident journalist would blush for his own ignorance. But Doctor Todd not being here to confound him with facts, there was nothing better for me to do than to hand him the letter. His face lighted with a smile as he read it. The effect was so good that I followed it with Mr. Pound's. The effect of Mr. Pound's was so good that I was confident that I should soon be a journalist in fact, for Mr. Hanks read it over twice.

"My boy," he began, regarding me through his spectacles benignly. At that familiar address my heart leaped. "Let me give you some advice." My heart fell. "Take those letters and lock them up to read when you are ten years older. Then start out and go from office to office until you get a place. Don't be discouraged. Some day you'll break in somewhere."

"But I want to work on The Record," I cried. "It's politics agree with mine—it is Republican. It is a respectable paper. It——"

Mr. Hanks was leaning over his desk. "Pile," he said, addressing the fat man who sat across from him, "that was a good beat we had on the Worthing divorce—I see all the evenings are after it hard. We must have a second-day story."

"I am ready," I said a little louder, "to begin with any kind of work."

Mr. Hanks looked up as though surprised that I was still there. "You've come at a bad time," he said brusquely. "Summer—we are letting men go every day. But don't get discouraged. I worked four months for my first job, and I didn't come from McGraw either. Keep going the rounds."

Then he seemed to forget my existence and resumed his game of checkers.

His dismissal was a terrible blow, but I had read enough of great men to know that they had to fight for their opportunities, and I was determined not to be a weakling and go down in the first skirmish. For a moment I stood bewildered at the entrance of The Record building, stunned by the unexpected outcome of my visit there. I was indignant at Boller for having raised my hopes so high. I was indignant at Mr. Carmody for not measuring up to Boller's estimate. I was indignant at Mr. Hanks for not making a searching inquiry into my attainments, for his ignorance of McGraw and his amusement over my precious letters. I vowed that some day Mr. Hanks should be put under my magnifying-glass, to shrivel beneath my burning gaze.

To break in somewhere proved a long task. From Miss Minion's boarding-house on Seventeenth Street, where I established myself, I went forth daily to the siege of Park Row. I was shot up to heaven to editorial rooms beneath gilded domes, and as quickly shot down again. I climbed to editorial rooms less exaltedly placed, up dark, bewildering stairways which seemed devised to make approach by them a peril. I soon knew the faces of all the city editors in town, and all the head office-boys were as familiar with mine. At the end of the first round I began to look more kindly on Mr. Hanks and to realize the wisdom of his advice that I lock away my letters. I recalled the varied receptions they had met, and when I started on my second round they were hidden in my trunk. Repeated rebuffs had a salutary effect. My egotism was reduced to a vanishing-point, my pride was quickened, and with my pride my determination to accomplish my purpose. Even had I lacked pride, I must have been nerved to my dogged persistence by the memory of Gladys Todd with Doctor Todd and the three Miss Minnicks speeding me to my triumphs. Every evening when I came home, tired and discouraged, to Miss Minion's, I found a letter addressed to me in a tall, angular hand—a very fat letter which seemed to promise a wealth of news and encouragement. But Gladys Todd could say less on more paper than I had believed possible. Encouragement she gave me, but never news. News would have spoiled the graceful flow of her sentences. Yet she was wonderfully good in the way she received my accounts of my disappointments. She was prouder than ever of "her knight"; her faith in him was firmer than ever; as she sat in the evening, in the soft light of the lamp, she was thinking of me with lance couched charging again and again against the embattled world.

At first in my replies I found a certain satisfaction in recounting my defeats; for in fighting on I seemed to be proving my superior worth and strength, and I became almost boastful of my repeated failures. But the glamour of defeat wears off as the cause for which one fights becomes more hopeless, and after a month I seemed farther than ever from attaining my desire. I became depressed in the tone of my letters, but as my spirits sank Gladys Todd's seemed to soar.

One particularly fat epistle I found on my bureau on an evening when I was so discouraged that I was beginning to consider heeding my father's appeal that I return home and study for the Middle County bar. I opened it with dread. I wanted no comfort, but here in my hands were twenty pages of Gladys Todd's faith in me and her pride in me. She was sure that I should have the opportunity which I sought, and, having it, would mount to the dizziest heights. She likened me to a crusader who wore her colors and was charging single-handed against the gates of the Holy City and shouting his defiance of the infidels who held it. It was an exalted idea, but I remembered my tilt that afternoon with the ancient office-boy of The Record, and his refusal to take my seventh card to Mr. Hanks. The comparison was so absurd that I laughed as I had not laughed in many days, and with the sudden up-welling of my mirth, lonely mirth though it was, the blood which had grown sluggish quickened, the drooping courage rose, I saw the world through clearer eyes. The next afternoon when I faced the ancient office-boy the remembrance of Gladys Todd's metaphor made me smile, and so overcome was he by this unusual geniality that he did take in my card to Mr. Hanks.

"Again," said Mr. Hanks, leaning back in his chair and surveying me through his magnifying-glasses. "Young man, are you never going to give me a rest?"

"Never," said I, smiling. "You advised me to go the rounds and not to be discouraged."

"Have you got your letters with you?" he asked mildly.

"They are locked away in my trunk," said I.

"You certainly have taken my advice with a vengeance," said he. "I suppose I shall have to do something to protect myself."

He leaned over his desk and became absorbed in his everlasting game of checkers. The smile left my face, for I thought that he had forgotten my presence, as he had forgotten it so many times before. But after a moment he slanted his head, focussed one microscope on me, and said: "Do you think you could cover Abraham Weinberg's funeral this afternoon?"

So it was that Gladys Todd's crusader at last broke down the gates of the Holy City. But I fear that it was to become one of the defending infidels. Doctor Todd, in his letter to whom it might concern, announced that David Malcolm was about to launch himself into journalism. And now, after long waiting, David Malcolm was launched. Just when he was despairing of ever leaving the ways he had shot down them suddenly into the Temple Emanu-El and the funeral of Abraham Weinberg.



CHAPTER XIII

You can well understand the elation with which I announced my success to Gladys Todd. It was magnified by the month of disappointment, and to her I felt that I owed a debt. Though I had come to look with irony on her high-flown expressions of faith in me, I realized that the fear of her equally high-flown scorn had more than once kept me from abandoning my project. With pride I enclosed in my letter my account of the funeral of Mr. Weinberg, though I refrained from marring the trophy with an explanation that this first public production of my pen had been allowed to attain the length of a column because his store covered half a block and his advertisements many pages of The Record. As a trophy Gladys Todd received it. Declaring that she lacked words in which to express her pride in her knight, she flew to greater heights than ever before. She had placed my first journalistic effort in a scrap-book, and all that I wrote was to be preserved in like manner. I must send her every published line that came from my pen. Her knight had triumphed in his first real passage at arms, and she sent to me a chaplet of victory. It came—not a wreath, but a cushion worked with her own hands, mauve and white, the colors of McGraw, with '91 in black on one side and on the other the word "Excelsior."

The scrap-book grew rapidly to alarming proportions, for having now my opportunity I worked hard, and Mr. Hanks was fond of telling me that I was rapidly outgrowing the reputation Doctor Todd and Mr. Pound had made for me on Park Row. Accounts of murders, suicides, yacht-races, robberies, public meetings, railroad accidents—all the varied events which make up a day's news—followed the funeral into Gladys Todd's archives. You can readily imagine that my views of life soon underwent a change. They became rather distorted, as I see them now; and was it a wonder when my day began at noon and ended in the small hours of the morning, carried me through hospitals, police-stations, and courts, from the darkest slums to the stateliest houses on the Avenue, from the sweatshop to the offices of the greatest financiers. To me all men were simply makers of news, and by their news value I judged them. A man's greatness I measured by the probable length of his obituary notice. Indeed, greatness itself was but the costume of a puppet, so often did I see the sawdust stuffing oozing from the gashes in the cloth. When I met one bank cashier simply because he had stolen, I forgot the thousands of others who were plodding away through lives of dull honesty. Because one Sunday-school superintendent sinned, I classed all his kind as sinners. Becoming versed in the devious ways of statesmen, I began to doubt the virtues of my old heroes whose speeches I had often declaimed with so much unction. I became a cynic. At twenty-two my thoughts matched the epigrams of Rochefoucauld and my philosophy that of Schopenhauer. All my old ideas as to the importance of the work I had chosen and of my own value to the world were quickly dissipated. Often I had cause to remember the Professor and his argument that even of our good actions selfishness was the main-spring, and accepting it as true, and laying bare the roots of my own motives and of those around me, I should have moved confusedly in the darkness had I not come to see more clearly what he meant by marching under sealed orders and to realize that I had a duty and that it was to live by the light I had. I did try to do this. I had a conscience, and though I might believe that it was but a group of conceptions as to the nature of right and wrong poured into my mind by my early instruction, it protested as strongly against abuse as did my digestive organs. Sometimes I had to effect strange compromises with it. Sometimes, in my never ceasing search for facts, I found myself causing pain and trouble to those who were innocently brought under the shadow of crime and scandal, but I justified myself by the theory that they suffered for the good of the many. To me the old dictum that the end justifies the means became a useful balm.

You might think that, with so radical a change in my ideas, I should see Gladys Todd in another light than that of my college days. Indeed, looking back, those college days did seem of another age and another world, but in them Gladys Todd had become linked to me by ties as indissoluble as those which bound me to my father and mother. To what I deemed my broader view of life, their ways of living and their ways of thinking were certainly exceedingly narrow, but none the less I thought of them only with reverence and affection. So it was with Gladys Todd. That mirthful outburst over her effusion about the crusader was followed by many of its kind as her daily letters came to me, but this meant simply that I was growing older than she, and she to my mind became a child, but was none the less lovely for her unsophistication. In the turmoil of my daily work, in the unlovely clatter of Miss Minion's boarding-house, I often recalled the vine-clad veranda and our walks in the grass-grown lane, looked back to them regretfully, looked forward yearningly to the renewal of such hours.

Sometimes when my evening was free from my routine duty, and I was working harder than ever I had worked in my college days, I would forget my task to dream of the time when Miss Tucker's piano would no longer be clattering beneath me, and I should be no more disturbed by Mrs. Kittle, who had a habit of jumping her chair around the room next to mine, when somewhere in the city's outskirts I should have a house of my own, a little house in a bit of green, where I could find quiet and peace and Gladys Todd. For the realization of that dream all that I needed was money. By the lack of it I was condemned to Miss Minion's. Even when I had attained to the munificent salary of Mr. Carmody, a figure which Boller had announced to me with so much awe, I was still far from having an income to keep two in the simplest comfort. It was difficult to make this clear to Gladys Todd. Her father and mother had married on eight hundred dollars a year, and even now my salary equalled the doctor's as president of the college. To her my salary read affluence, and in my letters I began to have difficulty to convince her that I had not grown exceedingly worldly and was not putting material comfort in the balance against unselfish and uncomplaining love. On my third biannual visit to Harlansburg I went armed with facts and figures as to house rents and flat rents, the prices of meats per pound, the cost of fuel, light, and clothing. Having in my pocket such a tabulated statement which showed for incidentals a balance of but fifty dollars, I could not but smile ironically at the manner in which Doctor Todd presented me to his friends. Boller was forgotten. Boller's achievements were outshone by those of David Malcolm. Malcolm's success demonstrated the high character of McGraw's system of training. Malcolm was already being heard from!

Malcolm, with the problem which confronted him, was inwardly gauging his success by his bank account, and even the pride of Gladys Todd was a little clouded when she was called upon to use the same measure.

Sitting in the very chair in the shaded lamplight from which she had looked so admiringly on Boller two years before, she now studied the prospectus of our contemplated venture. She was very lovely, but I remember noticing what I had never before noticed, the wisps of hair which floated a little untidily about her ears. And I did what I had never done before—I compared her with another woman, with Miss Tucker, whose piano had so often disturbed my evening labors. Miss Tucker taught mathematics in an uptown girls' school. She was not as pretty as Gladys Todd, but I remembered how wonderfully neat she was, with never a hair blowing loose, and I remembered too that, though she had disturbed me with her music, I never complained of it, for the sake of the picture which she made every morning when she descended the stoop beneath my window, going to her work as cheerfully and daintily as many of her sisters would to a dinner or a dance.

"We shall only have a hundred dollars left for doctor's bills and car-fare then, David," said Gladys Todd, looking up from the paper. There were tears in her eyes, but they did not affect me as much as her way of doing her hair. How I longed for the courage to tell her that it was decidedly bad form!

"But we shall only have to wait a little longer, Gladys," said I, and I moved my chair beside her chair.

"I know," she returned more bravely, putting her hand in mine. "But you don't realize how lonely I am without you. I want to be with you, helping you—to be at your side comforting you when you are tired, cheering you when you are discouraged."

For that moment I forgot the stray wisps and the Langtry knot.

"But it is only a little while longer," I pleaded. "Let us say in June. I shall come for you in June. You will wait for me till June?"

Her hand was on my shoulder, and I forgot all about Miss Tucker. For that moment I was the happiest of men.

"Wait for you till June?" she cried. "Why, David, I'd wait for you to eternity."

"You need not," I replied, laughing. "In June I am coming to take you to a little house on a green hill, with a veranda where we can sit on my holidays, you painting tulips on black plaques, and I—well, I with you, just thinking how wonderful it all is and——"

"How wonderful it will be in June!" said Gladys Todd.



CHAPTER XIV

Fifth Avenue was in those days a favorite resort of mine. Every morning I plunged into the rush downtown I dived from the elevated railway station into the tatterdemalion life of Park Row, and when I raised my head above that ragged human maelstrom and climbed to the editorial room of The Record it seemed as though I lifted my body out of a little muddy stream and plunged my mind into a Charybdis which embraced the whole world. Its centre was the same desk which I had so often approached with trembling in the days when I was breaking spears with the ancient office-boy and Mr. Hanks. I was fixed now in a chair opposite Mr. Hanks. I had become an editor. But I was not hurling my spears against the devils that possess poor man. My principal daily task was to read the newspapers with a microscopic eye, to glean from them every hint of news to come and to be covered, to present the clippings to Mr. Hanks ready for his easy perusal, and though in our province we had to do only with events of a local character, the life of the city was so interwoven with that of the whole world that to me our desk seemed a high lookout tower from which we kept an eye on the very corners of the globe. Did I look from the smutted window at my side, it was into the struggling throng on the pavement below or, over the line of push-carts displaying tawdry wares, into the park where the riff-raff seemed to reign, because the riffraff was always there, dozing on the benches. Did I look to the other hand, it was through the great murky room, through air charged with tobacco smoke and laden heavily with the fumes of ink, molten lead, and paper which filtered from the floors below through every open door. In a distant corner, a gloomy figure in the light of a single lamp, I could see the keeper of the "morgue" cutting his way through piles of papers, filing away his printed references to Brown, or Jones, or Robinson, against that day when Brown might die, Jones commit some crime, or Robinson, perchance, do something virtuous. I could see, in nearer prospect, the rows of little desks and the reporters at them, some writing, some reading, some smoking wearily; some young men fresh from college and keyed high with ambition; some old men shabbily dressed and carelessly groomed who had spent their lives at those little desks and asked nothing more than the privilege of ending them there; some of more corpulent minds, like the great Bob Carmody, who were happy in the attainment of a life's ambition to become authorities on base-ball, foot-ball, or rowing. Wherever I looked I seemed to see nothing but the titanic tread-mill and to hear the clatter of its cogs: within, where the presses rumbled deep in the ground below me, where the telegraph clicked in the adjoining room and overhead the typesetting-machines rattled incessantly; without, in the medley of the street, the cries of the hawkers, the clang of car gongs, and the never-ending shuffle of feet. Uptown life seemed on its surface to be lighter, and the curse of Adam to rest more easily on the shoulders of his children.

Of Fifth Avenue this was especially true. It was not a canyon of brick and stone in those days. Trade had just begun its invasion and had gained a foothold only in the few blocks above and below Twenty-third Street, and for the rest it was still a street of homes, where people moved in a more leisurely fashion than in the crowded thoroughfares downtown. The very air was charged with a healthier life, and here amid the opulence one could forget the near presence of the squalid alley. So it had become a habit of mine always to begin my day with a walk uptown, as a gentle tonic for my body and to give my mind a brief but more cheerful outlook than through the smutted office windows. I never tired of the life which I saw about me. And it was about me and I not of it, for though I might pause at a tailor's to examine his fabrics, it was always through his plate-glass window; beyond the window I could afford to go only in the cheaper Nassau Street; and I might stop in front of a picture-shop, but only to o select prints for that dream-land house on the hill, set on the bit of green. Smart carriages rolled by me, manned by immaculate, haughty servants, drawn by horses stepping high in time with the jingle of their harness. At one time I had planned an equipage such as these for myself; but now, computing, from past experience, my future possibilities in finance, I saw them fascinating as ever, yet as far from me as though they dashed through some Martian city, and their occupants as removed from my ken as the inhabitants of the farthest planets. Indeed, even in the commoner throng about me I knew no one. It was seldom that I was called on to doff my hat, and then to some of the queer old women who were moulding away in the corners of Miss Minion's boarding-house or to Miss Tucker hurrying to her school.

One morning in May, as was my custom, I set out for work by my circuitous route, with the intention of walking to Fifty-eighth Street and taking an elevated train downtown. The day was one of the loveliest of spring. The brightest of suns swept the Avenue. In Madison Square the fresh green had burst from the trees overnight, and I should have liked to drop down on one of the benches there, to look upward through the branches into the clouds and forget the enclosing wall of buildings and the tumultuous streets. But I was late, and I had no mind to hurry on such a day. The languor of the spring was in my veins, and I strolled on, almost unconscious of the life about me. Ahead, at the crest of Murray Hill, the city seemed to end, and I to look through a great gate-way into the blue sky, and I fancied myself standing there in that gate-way, with the valley lying at my feet, my valley awakened from its winter's sleep, its hill-sides decked with blossoming orchards, its mountains carpeted with the soft shadows of the clouds. I saw the ridge, its green slope slashed by the white winding road which crossed it. That was the same road up which I had climbed on a May morning long ago, when I hurried to the Professor's aid, and I followed it now to the clearing; I saw the clearing with the Professor leaning on his hoe studying a fleck of cloud, and Penelope watching him silently, fearing to disturb his important meditations. In these busy years Penelope had been rarely in my thoughts; if at all, it was as a little girl with a blue ribbon in her hair, the companion of a few brief weeks of my boyhood. I dared not picture her as growing up, for I had no faith in the influence of Rufus Blight, whom I had always associated with packages of tea and prizes. Penelope grown, I feared, might have become fat and florid, might speak with a twang and wear gaudy hats and gowns. My life in New York, even though I was but a quiet observer, had made me critical of women, and when I could brood unhappily over Gladys Todd's stray wisps of hair I could have little sympathy with the type of the imaginary Penelope Blight. But this morning, when the far-borne freshness of the woods and fields was in the air, and I longed to feel the soft earth beneath my feet, to break from the enclosing walls and to stride over the open fields, I recalled days like this when the wine of spring was in my veins and I had run through the meadows in a wasteful riot of energy; and then a particular day like this when Penelope and I had ridden out of the woods, had come to the ridge-top and looked over the smiling valley. I seemed to feel Penelope's arms drawn tightly around me as I pointed across the friendly land and promised to take care of her. I had had no fear then that she would ever grow corpulent and florid, and now I found myself asking if my boyish intuition might not have been right, and she fulfilled entirely the promise of her girlhood, defying the insidious generosity of time and the vulgar influence of Rufus Blight. Should I ever know? Should I ever see her?

I must have been looking at the clouds as I asked myself these questions, for I walked right into an elderly woman, a tall, buxom woman who carried in her arms a tiny Pomeranian. The force of our collision made her drop her pet, and for an instant he hung suspended by the leash and choking. I apologized humbly, bowing; but my victim—for such she seemed to think herself—the victim of my premeditated brutality, lifted the frightened dog back to the refuge of her arms, glared at me, turned, and swept on to a modiste's door. Her haughtiness angered me. I held the fault as much hers as mine, for the pavement was not crowded and she seemed to have risen from it just to obstruct my passage. I looked about me to discover whence she had come so suddenly, and in a carriage standing at the curb I found an explanation. I said to myself that if she had emerged from so smart an equipage I had indeed committed lese-majeste, for it was such a turnout as I had dreamed of in my days of opulent dreaming; it was such a turnout as a poor poet could have used without offending his sense of the beauty of simplicity. The high-headed horses with their shining harness, the smart brougham, so spotless that it was hard to imagine its wheels ever touching the street, the men in their unobtrusive livery, spoke of unostentation in its most perfect and most expensive form. The woman of the Pomeranian, I said to myself, must be surely some grande-dame, a leader in that mysterious circle which I knew only by its name "society." My view of that circle in those days was tinged with the cynicism of one who knew nothing of it; and though at the boarding-house table I was prone to rail at it, secretly I had to admit that my raillery was born of envy. So now it was with a mind filled half with awe and half with envy that I turned to look after the imposing woman with the dog.

For the first time I noticed that she had a companion. First, the companion was but a slender figure in black, smartly clad. I could see only her back, and yet as I carried my eye from the dainty boot which rested on the lowest step to the small gloved hand on the railing, to the small black hat with its blue wings airily poised, I found myself making comparisons between this daintiness and the untidy loveliness of Gladys Todd. I was almost angry with Gladys Todd because she did not dress with such simplicity, not knowing that all her wardrobe cost hardly as much as this unobtrusive gown, this masterpiece of a tailor's art.

Gladys Todd was not long in my mind. It was as though the memory of her was swept away by the turn of the blue wings on which my eyes rested. They moved with a majesty that sent my thoughts hurling down into the past to match them. I matched them with a bit of blue ribbon. It had moved as majestically as they. I almost laughed outright. It was absurd to compare the forlorn child of the clearing with this smartly groomed young woman, and remembering Nathan, the white mule, I looked again to the perfectly turned-out carriage at the curb. You must suspect that there was in my mind, born of a wild hope, a suspicion that I was seeing Penelope Blight. True. But from Nathan, the white mule, to this perfect carriage with the haughty footman at the door was so far a cry that I was about to go on. The girl had turned also, and I found myself halted and staring at her. I was sure that she had been studying my back at that moment when I was looking at the carriage, but being discovered in such interest she gave a start, recovered herself, and with an angry toss of her head sprang up the steps and through the door.

In that moment when our eyes met I was sure that I was face to face with Penelope Blight.

The old Florentine writer, Firenzuola, commends nut-brown as the loveliest color for a woman's eyes, declaring that it gives to them a soft, bright, clear and kindly gaze and lends to their movement a mysteriously alluring charm. These eyes were blue, but in that fraction of an instant when I looked into them, their light was soft and bright, clear and kindly; I was sure that they were the same mysteriously alluring eyes that I had first known years before when I had crawled, wet and cold, from the depths of the mountain brook. Knowing no more I should have spoken her name, my hand was rising to my hat, but the soft and kindly light changed suddenly to hostility, and she was gone.

I hesitated, not knowing what step to take next. With hesitation doubt came. I began to argue. The hostile flash of her eyes angered me. She had tacitly charged me with impertinence, with the manners of a common Broadway lounger. Then I said, had this really been Penelope she must have recognized me, for twelve years could not have obliterated all outward traces of the boy whom she had once known as her only friend. Remembering that time, remembering the forlorn cabin in the mountains and the brown, barefooted girl, remembering the promise of later days given by the sleek vulgarity of Rufus Blight, I said that she could not have grown to this faultless picture of young womanhood. Yet the forlorn hope that I might be mistaken would have held me there awaiting her return had it not been for the haughty footman by the carriage door. He had been a silent observer of what had passed, and seeing me now loitering, staring at the modiste's shop, he cast off his expressionless mask and assumed a very threatening and scowling appearance. Evidently he, too, thought me a street lounger who, not satisfied with nearly killing madam, was bent on thrusting his impertinent attentions on the young mistress. I could not explain to him that I had known the young mistress years ago when she lived in a log hut in a mountain valley. His own perfection as a servant made such an explanation the more incredible; and though loath to abandon the opportunity to convince myself that I was mistaken, I saw nothing left for me but to go my way downtown.

As I sat at my desk I was so distrait that Mr. Hanks accused me of being in love, speaking as though I were the victim of a mental derangement which unfitted me for serious labor. After the way of men, I boldly denied his charge. He paid no attention to my protest, but expressed himself freely on the unwisdom of a man allowing himself to fall under the influence of delusions which cost him his mental poise and might disarrange his whole life. Hearing Mr. Hanks, it was difficult for me to believe that he had ever been in love himself. Watching him at his work, with his sharp, restless eyes always alert, and listening to his voice as incisive as his shears, he seemed a man whose whole mind was possessed by the pursuit of news, a man whose brain and body worked with such machine-like accuracy that he could never fall into the puerile errors of his fellows. Now when he was misusing his authority to browbeat me into what he termed sanity, I found comfort in recalling that after all he had once in a moment of forgetfulness confessed to having a home at Mentone Park, with a wife and four daughters of whose accomplishments he spoke almost with boasting. So I troubled no longer with denials, but sat listening to him with a smiling face. Whereupon he brought his fist down on the desk and called me a soft-brained idiot.

"Of course, Malcolm," he said, "I don't know who she is, but my advice to you is, whoever she is and whatever she is, get her out of your mind."

At that very moment Malcolm's mind was occupied with just these questions: Who was she? What was she?

With a sense of duty to Gladys Todd I strove hard to put Penelope Blight out of my thoughts, but I could not. Sometimes I would recall the face of the girl whom I had seen in the morning, and every feature would bring back the child of the mountains. Then I went to directories and searched them for the name of Rufus Blight, but I could get no trace of him. I evolved a theory that Penelope was the guest of the woman with the Pomeranian. The carriage must belong to either the elder or the younger woman. Granting that the younger was Penelope, then the elder could not be her mother. As I had examined many directories and found none that gave her uncle's name as living in the city, I had to conclude that the owner of the Pomeranian was her hostess and that I was the victim of a trick of fate which had allowed her to flash across my path and disappear, which had allowed me to have but this tantalizing glimpse. Then I found consolation in the thought that after all a glimpse was enough for my peace of mind. Indeed, if this really were Penelope, then it had been best that I had never seen her at all, grown to such loveliness.

Considering myself as I sat in my shirt-sleeves amid grimy workaday surroundings, remembering the frayed environment of my life uptown, this Penelope, stepping, daintily booted and gloved, out of that perfect equipage, was indeed a being who moved in higher airs than I. Here was an insuperable difficulty. In the valley, David Malcolm, with the blood of the McLaurins in his veins, might look with contempt on the Blights and their kind. But we were no longer in the valley, and a Blight driving down the Avenue in a brougham, drawn by high-headed horses and manned by haughty servants, would see me not as the head of a wealthy patrician house, but as a young man on his way from his boarding-house to labor for a petty wage. Such a reversal of our relative conditions was so incredible that I found myself arguing that I could not have seen Penelope Blight, and I tried to return to loyal devotion to Gladys Todd.

We were to be married in June. There was no reason why we should not be married in June if we were content to begin our venture in a modest five-room flat in Harlem, abandoning for a while the house on the bit of green. Gladys was not only contented but was enthusiastic over the prospect. In my pocket was her last night's letter asking if I had yet rented the apartment. She had already planned it in her mind—here the piano on which she would play soft accompaniments while I sang "The Minute Guns at Sea"; there by the window her easel, and near it the table where her brilliant husband was to sit at night writing novels and plays and poems which would carry us not only to the green hill but to the Parnassian heights. When in the quiet of my room I had first read her letter, I had been lifted on the wave of her ardor, but now, struggle though I might to look forward to June with contentment, down in my heart I had to confess a strange uneasiness. It seemed to me that we were rushing into matrimony. With my mind revolving such problems over and over, was it a wonder that Mr. Hanks noticed my distraction and pounded the desk and spoke cuttingly of the effect of love on a man's mental balance! All that day I neglected my tasks for the study of my own engrossing business, but when evening came and I started home I was able to say to myself that I had reached a definite and unchanging conclusion—I loved Gladys Todd; like all of us, she had her peccadilloes, and yet I was not worthy of her, but I would try to be; the girl with the blue wings bobbing so majestically in her hat was not Penelope Blight.

Having reached this unchangeable decision, the very next morning, and every morning after that, I walked up Fifth Avenue with but one thought in my mind, and this was to see again a small black hat with blue wings. I became argus-eyed. I peered boldly into passing carriages, watched the foot traffic on both sides of the street, scanned the windows of dwelling-houses, and even developed a habit of looking behind me at fixed intervals that my vigilance might be still more effective. One day I went boldly into the shop which I had seen the stranger enter that day with the woman of the Pomeranian, and asked if I could have Miss Blight's address. A saleswoman, a very blond and very sinuous person who was standing by the door revolving a large hat about on one hand while she caressed its plumes daintily, replied that no Miss Blight was known there. I described her hat with the blue wings, her companion with the Pomeranian, the very hour of her visit, but my persistence brought only the information that hundreds of the shop's patronesses wore blue wings and thousands carried Pomeranians. The sinuous young woman became so cold and biting in her tone that I was sure that she believed that I had been fascinated by her own charms and was using a ruse for the pleasure of this brief interview, so I made a hasty retreat. My only clew to the owner of the blue-winged hat had failed me, and all that was left to me was to patrol the Avenue day after day, forever hoping and forever being disappointed.

June came. The five-room flat was still unrented. My daily letter from Harlansburg breathed devotion and happiness over the approach of a day as yet unset—unset because I had been rather procrastinating about arranging leave of absence from the office. Doctor and Mrs. Todd had wanted a college wedding in the chapel. They had even gone so far as to suggest appropriate music by the glee club and the seniors as ushers, but when that proposal was made to me I had found to my distress that I could not leave New York before the summer vacation had begun. June brought me, too, the very last good fortune I should have asked at that moment, an unexpected increase in my salary, and unless I lowered myself by an act of despicable cunning I could not withhold news of such good import from the future companion of my joys and sorrows. So I went uptown one night struggling hard to imagine myself supremely happy. I knew my duty—it was to be supremely happy. I should write that night to Gladys Todd and announce my coming on the 29th; to-morrow I should find the flat; the next day I should order new clothes and look at diamond pins.

I opened Miss Minion's front door with my pass-key, and as I climbed to my room I seemed to emphasize with my feet the fact that I loved Gladys Todd and was in an ecstasy of happiness. I slammed my hat down on the bureau as I vowed again that I loved Gladys Todd. Then I drew back and stared at my pin-cushion. The usual corpulent letter was not leaning there; its place had been taken by an emaciated telegram.

"Do not rent flat. Have written explanation." Such was the message to me that day.

At that moment I loved Gladys Todd, and I did not have to stamp the floor to prove it. I was sure that I had lost her, and it was the sense of my loss that made my love well up from unfathomable depths to overwhelm me. I was angry. My pride was hurt. I counted over the years of my untiring devotion to her, and they seemed to sum up the best years of my life. That the telegram foreran a more explicit statement there could be no doubt. After all she had written about the flat, her instructions that the furniture which she had inherited from her aunt must fit in, that my table must be near her easel—after all these evidences of her thought—her command could mean only that our romance was at an end and our dreams dissipated into air. There was some other man, I thought—perhaps Boller of '89—and remembering him, his picturesque garb and ridiculous pose, my own vanity was deeply cut. Until late that night I sat smoking violently and turning over in my mind the problem and all its dreadful possibilities. In bed, Sleep, the friend of woe, was long coming with her kindly ministrations, and yet held me so long under her beneficent influence that when I awoke I found lying beside my bed, tossed there through a crack in the door, the corpulent letter addressed in the tall, angular hand.

The first line reassured me. Strangely enough, being reassured, knowing that all the night's fears were silly phantasies born of a jealous mind, I fell back on my pillow and, holding the letter above my eyes, read as I had read a hundred of its fellows. Strangely enough, I said over and over to myself with grim determination that I loved Gladys Todd. From what she had written it was evident that I need have no fear that her love was not altogether mine. She believed that where two persons loved as we did, two persons who possessed each other in such perfect happiness, it was our duty to sacrifice ourselves a little for those less blessed than we were. As we gave so we received, and in giving up our summer of happiness for the happiness of others our winter would be doubly bright. I must confess that while I agreed with her as to the duty of self-sacrifice I was a little irritated when I found that our happiness must be deferred for Judge Bundy's sake. He was the last person in the world whom I had expected could have any influence on a matter so personal as the date of my marriage. Now Gladys called to my mind the recent death of his wife, and she spoke of his being ill, inconsolable, and miserably lonely. His life was at stake unless he could have a change of air and scene. His physicians had ordered for him three months' travel abroad, and he simply would not go unless Doctor and Mrs. Todd went with him. Unfortunately, Doctor and Mrs. Todd could not go without their daughter. Surely David, always self-denying, would understand. On one side was her own happiness; on the other her duty to her parents to whom had come this opportunity to see Europe, their life dream, as guests of this generous friend. It was very hard for her to have to choose. David knew, of course, what she would say were she really free to choose, but, after all, it was only for four months, and all that time I should know that, though she was far away, her eyes were turned over-sea.

I did not read the last five pages. They fluttered to the floor from my listless fingers, and I turned again to my pillow and sought the friend of woe, and again Sleep came to me with her kindly ministrations. And again I walked the Avenue, and by a modiste's door I saw a slender figure, a little, spotless, booted foot upon the step, a little, spotless, gloved hand on the rail, and a small black hat with long blue wings moving majestically.



CHAPTER XV

"Penelope!" I exclaimed, holding out both hands as though her joy at the meeting must match mine and she would spring forward to seize them. Then I checked my ardor, for it was the highest presumption for me to address so familiarly this woman grown, even though in years gone by she had raced with me over the fields and had ridden behind me on such a poor charger as Nathan, the white mule. "Miss Blight," I added, with a formal bow.

"I beg your pardon," she returned, implying that she had not the remotest idea who the man could be who had so boldly spoken, halted her, barred her passage from the brougham to the modiste's door.

"Don't you remember David Malcolm?" I said.

The frown fled from her face. She regarded me a moment with wide eyes. "Of course I remember David Malcolm," she cried, and, smiling, she held out a small gloved hand. "And I have seen you before at this very spot—I was sure it was you. But why didn't you speak to me then?"

"Because I was not sure," I returned, laughing aloud for the joy of this meeting. "You have changed since I saw you last, Penelope. It is hard even now to believe——"

Again I checked myself. I was looking past Penelope to the woman with the Pomeranian. Disapproval of me was so plainly evident in her eyes, she seemed in herself so far removed from mountain cabins, and if Penelope had grown worthy of such distinguished company, discretion bade me be silent.

Penelope divined my thoughts. "And it is equally hard for me to believe that this tall man is the boy I pulled out of the water." Half turning, she addressed her companion. "This is David Malcolm, Mrs. Bannister—an old, old friend of mine."

Mrs. Bannister probably had her own ideas of Penelope's old, old friends, but she was fair enough to examine me from head to foot before she condemned me with the mass of them, and then finding that, to the eyes at least, I presented no glaring crudities, she accepted me on sufferance, inclining her head and parting her lips.

"But tell me, David," said Penelope eagerly, "where have you been all these years and how do you happen to be here?"

Had I told Penelope the truth I should have replied that I happened to be there because for four long months I had been looking for her, whenever I could, walking the streets with eyes alert, even on midsummer days when I had as well searched the Sahara as the deserted town. Perhaps in thus surrendering to the hope that, after all, I should find her, I had laid myself open to a self-accusation of disloyalty to Gladys Todd; but she was far away in those months, and the daily letter had become a weekly and then a semimonthly budget, and though their tone was none the less ardent I had begun to suspect that Europe was a more attractive abiding-place than the little flat with the easel by the window. In one letter she spoke of her longing to be home; she knew that there would be music in every beat of the ship's propeller which carried her nearer me. In her next she announced her parents' decision to prolong their stay abroad on Judge Bundy's account and her regret that she could not leave them. There was something contradictory in these statements, and yet I accepted them complacently. Then postcards supplanted the semimonthly budget, and only by them was I able to follow the movements of the travellers all that autumn. One letter did come in October. It covered many sheets, but said little more than that it had been simply impossible to write oftener, but she would soon be following her heart homeward. Enclosed was a photograph of the party posed on camels with the pyramids in the background, and I noticed with a twinge of jealousy that Judge Bundy's camel had posted himself beside the beast on which Gladys was enthroned, while Doctor and Mrs. Todd had less conspicuous positions to the left and rear. Studying the judge, I laughed at my twinge of jealousy, for knowing him I could not doubt that Doctor and Mrs. Todd kept always to the left and rear, which was but right considering the generosity with which he treated them; but he looked so little the dashing Bedouin in his great derby and his frock-coat, so hot and uncomfortable that even the burning sands, the pyramids, and the curious beast which he straddled could not make of him a romantic figure.

Young Tom Marshall, who honored Miss Minion's with his presence, studying the photograph on my bureau one evening, asked me who was "the beauty with the pugree." And when I replied with pride that she was my fiancee he slapped my back in congratulation.

"And Julius Caesar," he went on—"Caesar visiting his African dominions is, I suppose, her father, and the little fellow in the top-hat his favorite American slave, and——"

With great dignity I explained to young Marshall the relations of the members of this Oriental group. At his suggestion that I had best take the first steamer for Egypt I laughed. The implication was so absurd that I even told Gladys Todd about it in my next letter to her, for I still sat down every Saturday night and wrote to her voluminously of all that I had been doing. Yet I was growing conscious of a sense of her unreality. I seemed to be corresponding with the inhabitant of another planet, and when I looked at the girl on the camel, with the strange pugree flowing from her hat, and the pyramids in the background, it seemed that she could not be the same simple girl who had painted tulips on black plaques.

Penelope Blight was a much more concrete figure. At any moment as I walked the Avenue she might come around the corner, or step from a brougham, or be looking at me from the windows of a brown-stone mansion. Was it a wonder that my eyes were always alert? One morning three lines in a newspaper convinced me at last that the girl with the blue feathers was Penelope Blight. They announced that Rufus Blight, the Pittsburgh steel magnate, had bought a house on Fifth Avenue and would thereafter make New York his home. That night the city seemed more my own home than ever before and the future to hold for me more than the past had promised. The drawn curtains of this house might be hiding Penelope from me; she might be in the dark corner of that smart carriage flying northward; even the slender figure coming toward me through the yellow gloom, with her muff pressed against her face to guard it from the November wind, might be she. And when on the next afternoon—by chance, it seemed, as by chance it seems all our lives are ordered—when at last by the same modiste's shop the same smart brougham drew up at the curb, the same haughty footman opened the door, and I saw the very same blue wings, I knew that I had found Penelope at last and I spoke without fear.

She asked me what I had been doing all these years. I laughed joyfully, but I did not tell her. For all these years I had been working for this moment!

"What have I been doing?" I said. "Why, Penelope, it would take me forever to tell you."

"You must begin telling me right now," she returned quickly. "You must walk home with me to tea and I can hear all about it as we go. To me it seems just yesterday since we went fishing in the meadow. Mrs. Bannister won't mind driving back alone—will you, Mrs. Bannister?"

Mrs. Bannister did mind it very much. She was, I learned afterward, introducing Miss Blight to the right people, and it was a violation of her contract with Rufus Blight to allow his niece to walk in the public eye with a man who might not be the kind of a person Miss Blight should be seen with at a time when her whole future depended on her following the narrow way which leads to the social heaven. Of course she would not mind driving home alone, but what about the hats? Mr. Malcolm would pardon her mentioning such intimate domestic matters, but Miss Blight had been away all summer and had not a hat of any kind fit to be seen in.

"Bother the hats!" said Miss Blight.

She laid a hand on her chaperon's arm and pushed her gently into the carriage. Mrs. Bannister made feeble protests. Penelope was the most wilful girl she had ever seen and knew perfectly well that she had not a thing to wear to the Perkins tea; if she had to go home she objected to being arrested this way and clapped into a prison van. The last was hurled at us as the footman was closing the door, and when Mrs. Bannister fell back in the seat, angry and silent, the Pomeranian projected his head from the window and snapped at us.

"Mrs. Bannister is a good soul," Penelope said when, side by side, we were away on that wonderful walk uptown. "She has to be properly handled though or I should be her slave. Her husband was a broker, or something like that, and died during a panic, and as she was in straitened circumstances she came to us. You see, she knows everybody, and is awfully well connected. You must be very nice to her, David."

She called me David as naturally as though it really had been yesterday that we went fishing in the meadow. My heart beat quicker. I laughed aloud for the sheer joy of living in the same world with her. I vowed that I should be very nice indeed to Mrs. Bannister. Had Penelope asked me to be very nice to her friend Medusa I should have given her my pledge. Subtly, by her admonition, she had conveyed to me the promise that this walk was to be but the first of many walks, the rambles of our childhood over again, but grown older and wiser and more sedate. Under what other circumstances could I be nice to Mrs. Bannister?

Having settled my line of conduct toward the martial woman with the Pomeranian, I began my account of the years missing in our friendship. It was very brief. It is astonishing in how few words a man can sum up his life's accomplishment if he holds to the essential facts. Since that day when she had left the farm with Rufus Blight I had studied under Mr. Pound, spent four years in college and three years working on a newspaper. Was I successful in my work? she asked. Fairly so, I answered modestly. I might have told her that I had gone ahead a little faster than my fellows, but even then seemed to advance at a snail's pace to petty conquests, for if at the end of years I attained to Hanks's place, I was beginning to doubt that it was worth the pains which I was taking to win it. I did not tell her of the ambitions which had led me into my profession, nor how all my fine ideas had been early dissipated and I had settled down to a struggle for mere existence. On one essential fact, too, was I silent. It arose to my mind as I told my brief story and it spread like a cloud darkening this brightest of my days. You know what the shadow was. By her absence, by her remoteness, Gladys Todd had for me a shadow's unreality. At this moment the tie between us was so attenuated that it was hard for me to believe that it existed at all. I knew that it did exist, but I could not surrender myself to be bound by so frail a thread. I was silent. Childlike, I wished the clouds away. Royally, I commanded the sea to stand back.

"And you—what have you been doing all these years?" I asked, turning suddenly to Penelope.

"Just growing up," she answered, laughing. "It's very easy to grow up when one has such a kind uncle as mine. You remember the poverty in which he found me. I was a mere charity child, and he took me——"

"To his lively, pushing town," said I.

"Yes," Penelope went on, "to a big stone house with a green lawn about it dotted with queer figures in iron and marble. They were the most beautiful things I had ever seen—those statues. Now they are all stored in the stable, for we grew up, uncle and I, even in matters of art. But it was like heaven to me then, after the mountains and the smoky cabin, after the clearing and the weeds——"

"After our farm," I broke in with a touch of irony, "and to ride behind the fast trotters compared with our farm wagon——"

"David," returned Penelope in a voice of reproach, "I have never forgotten the mountains, or the cabin, or the farm. In the first days away from them I was terribly homesick for them all. My uncle suffered for it. His patience and his kindness were unfailing, and he softened me at last. There is nothing in the world that I have wanted that he has not given me."

I was silent. The old boyish dislike of Rufus Blight had never died. I could think of him only as a sleek, vulgar man who by the force of his money had taken Penelope from me. His money had raised her far above my reach, and even the cloud which shadowed this day which might have been my brightest seemed to have had its birth in vapors of his gold-giving furnaces. That I had forgotten Penelope and entangled myself in the cords of a foolish sentimentality I charged to him, and Penelope, seeing how I walked, silent, with eyes grimly set ahead, divined that I still nourished the aversion to which in my childish petulance I had given vent so long ago.

"You are still prejudiced against poor Uncle Rufus, I see," she said, smiling. "I remember how badly you treated him that day when he came to take me away."

"Yes, I never have forgiven him," I snapped out. "He may have reason, and justice, and saintliness on his side, yet I never can forgive him."

"Oh, yes, you can," said Penelope with an indulgent laugh. "You will when you come to know him as I do. You must, for my sake."

"Perhaps, for your sake," said I, relenting a little.

"I knew you would for my sake, David," said Penelope. "Why, I owe everything I have in the world to him. Since he has retired, sold his works to a trust, I think they call it, his whole life seems to be to look after me. Pittsburgh isn't much of a place for a man who has no business; so we thought we should try New York for a while, and we bought the house last spring and spent the summer in Bar Harbor. Now we are just settling down."

I was hardly listening as she spoke, for my mind was occupied by Rufus Blight. He had reason and justice on his side. That much I surrendered to him, but I clung obstinately to my dislike. I thought of the Professor flying over the clearing to the hiding of the mountains; I remembered him in the college hall, with his bitter words pointing the way from which his own weakness held him back, the man whose imagination ranged so far while his hands were idle. I pictured his brother grown fat and happy at the trough of gold at which he fed, and even had I not felt a personal feud with Rufus Blight, my sympathy for the under-dog must have aroused my antipathy. But I hated him for my own sake. For every foolish step that I had taken since that day when he had carried Penelope away the fault seemed to have been his as much as mine, and yet I was wise enough to see that if I would hold Penelope's regard it would be very rash to show by word or deed that I nursed any resentment.

"For your sake I will, Penelope," I said.

So soft and satisfied was the smile with which she rewarded me that I vowed to myself that I really would forgive my old archenemy. A moment before it had been on my lips to speak of my confiscated letters, for I had no doubt that Rufus Blight had intercepted them. Now I realized that in them was a mine which I might fire only to shatter our new-found friendship. That treachery, too, I said, I should forgive. When Penelope set the light to the fuse, I with rare presence of mind stamped out the flames and prevented a disaster.

We had passed Fiftieth Street, and I was telling her of my last visit home, of my father and mother, of Mr. Pound, and of all the friends of our younger days, when she suddenly turned to me. It was as though the question had for some time been hanging on her lips. "David, why did you never answer the letters I wrote you?"

"Because." I was playing for time. To carry out my plan of silence, it seemed that I must deceive her, and I hesitated to tell her an untruth.

"Because why?" she insisted.

"Because I never received them," I answered, cheered by the thought that thus far I could tell her the truth. "Did you really write to me?"

"Many times," she said; "until I got tired of writing and receiving no answer. You made me very angry."

"The letters must have been lost in the mail," said I, bent on keeping this disagreeable subject in the background. "Country post-offices are very careless in the way they handle things, and mine to you—my letters—must have gone astray too."

"Then you did write to me as you promised, David?" she exclaimed.

"Until I got tired of receiving no answer," I returned, laughing. "But of course it is too late to complain to the government now."

Penelope was not satisfied. Her brows were knitted. I believed that there lurked in her mind a suspicion that not the government alone was concerned in the interruption of that early correspondence, but I was determined to ignore a subject which, if too closely pressed, might bring about unpleasant consequences. The easiest way was to turn the trend of her thought with a bold question, which had been hanging on my lips through many blocks of the walk. And so, as casually as though I inquired of her about some distant friend or relative, I spoke of her father.

Penelope stopped short and laid a hand upon my arm. Then as suddenly she strode ahead.

"I know nothing of him, David," she said in a voice almost harsh. "I have not seen him since that dreadful day in the clearing. Once I heard from him—a few lines—but that was so long ago that at times I almost forget that I ever had a father."

"What did he write to you, Penelope?"

She seemed not to hear my question, for she was walking very fast, with her eyes set straight ahead of her. "He might pass me at this minute, David, and I should not know him. That might be he, standing by that window, and I should be none the wiser, yet the fault is his. I try always to think of him as I should, but at times it seems as though he had disowned me, abandoned me on his brother's doorstep and then run away. You ask of the letter. It came to me soon after I left the farm. He said that it was best that my uncle should have me, better than to condemn me to shift about the world with him; he said that he had been a lazy, worthless creature, but he was going to do something, to be somebody—those were his words; and some day, when I could be proud of him, he would come back and claim me, and, David, he has never come. Will he ever come, do you think?"

"I think he will," I answered. "For I have seen him."

"You have seen him!" The hand was on my arm again, and, forgetful of the hurrying crowd around us, we stood there face to face, while I told her of the brief glimpse I had had of him four years before. She listened, breathless, and, when I had finished, walked on in silence.

We were crossing the Plaza when she spoke again, half to me, half ruminating. "Poor father! He must have tried and failed. He was going to Tibet, David, you told me; that was four years ago. Where can he be now? Wandering around the world alone, in want, perhaps, and I have everything. Do you suppose he believes that I have forgotten him—as if I could forget those evenings when we sat together and painted pictures of the times when we should be rich! He called me the princess and planned great houses in which we should live, and he would talk of our travels and the wonderful places we should see together. Even then I had faith that our dreams would come true, though it did seem that we were getting poorer and poorer all the time, and father doing nothing to help our plight. The dreams came true, David—for me. Why doesn't he come and share them with me, with me and Uncle Rufus? That is what troubles me; that is what I can never understand."

I said to myself that Rufus Blight, were he so minded, could clear the mystery away. I thought of him as a selfish, arrogant man, who was, perhaps, too well satisfied not to have an undesirable third person in his household to undertake any sincere search for his brother. But these thoughts I concealed. There was something behind it all that we two could not understand, I said, and Penelope looked up to me with clouded eyes.

"But we will find him, Penelope!" My stick hit the pavement as I registered a vow. "We will find him—you and I."

"How like the little David you are," she cried, and then smiling light broke through the clouded eyes. "We shall try to find him, anyway, shall we not—to bring father home. For look, David!" She had halted. The small gloved hand was lifted, and the blue wings in her hat moved with an old-time majesty. "There is the palace we dreamed of!"



CHAPTER XVI

Penelope and I were standing before a great gray-stone house. I carried my eyes from the doors of iron grill-work over the severe breadth of wall, broken only by rank above rank of windows so heavily curtained that one might have suspected those within to live in darkness, fearing even to face the sunlight. I laughed. When I had been searching for the girl with the blue feathers in her hat, I had never given this house more than a passing glance, deeming it altogether too palatial in its size and too severe in its aspect to shield a man of so garish a mind as I attributed to Rufus Blight, judging him from memory alone. I should have placed him rather next door to it, behind the over-ornate Moorish front and had him look out on the world through curtains of elaborately figured lace. But within, I now said to myself, I shall find the expression of the man in a riot of color in walls and hangings and in ill-assorted mobs of furniture. Here again I was wrong. We passed the grilled doors into a place so gray and cold that it might have led us to a cloister. We mounted broad stairs, our footfalls muffled by a heavy carpeting of so unobtrusive a color that I cannot name it. We crossed a white panelled hall, so sparsely furnished that the untutored might have thought that the family were just moving in or just moving out. Penelope pushed through heavy portieres and we stood at last in a room that seemed designed for human habitation. But it was the design of an alien mind, not of the owner. The owner had not been allowed to fit it to himself as he would his clothes. The alien mind had said: You do not know; you must allow me to arrange your habitat. Here I have placed the wonderful old fireplace which I bought for you in France, and above it the Reynolds for which you paid forty thousand dollars; here in the centre is the carved table which I got for you in Florence, and geometrically arranged about its corners are books of travel; with its back to it, a great divan covered with most expensive leather, so that you can lounge in its depths and watch the fire. Around it I have arranged sundry other chairs done in deep-green velour to tone in with the walls, and along the walls are bookcases, fronted with diamond panes and filled with leather-bound volumes—for this, sir, is your library.

The room was so perfect that Mrs. Bannister, seated before the fire, brewing herself a lonely cup of tea, seemed a jarring note. She would have been as much in place in a corner of the Galerie-de-Glace at Versailles, and but for her presence and her domestic occupation I might have said to myself after a languid survey, "So, this is where the king lounged"—then waited to be led on.

Mrs. Bannister was expecting us. She spoke as though in having tea waiting she had acted in the forlorn hope that some time we might return, and as though for hours she had been a prey to the gravest apprehensions, for Penelope's safety. In bringing Penelope back at all I had in some degree allayed the hostility with which she at first regarded me, but though she was now outwardly quite cordial, I was conscious that over the top of her cup she was studying me closely as I sat on the divan stirring my tea and striving to be thoroughly at home. Her subtle scrutiny made me very uncomfortable. She asked me questions with an obvious purpose of putting me at my ease, and I answered in embarrassed monosyllables. Whether I would or no, I seemed constantly to slide to the perilous edge of my seat, and no matter what care I used, I strewed crumbs over the rug until it seemed to me that my bit of cake had a demoniacal power of multiplying itself.

I was angry—this hour, this formal passage of inane conversation, was so different from what I had pictured my first meeting with Penelope to be. I was angry at my weakness in letting this perfect room overpower me, and this woman of the world, with no other weapon than the knowledge of the people one should know, transfix me, silence me, transform me into a dull, bucolic boor. Penelope was annoyed. I knew that she was chagrined at my lack of savoir faire, for in one of the long pauses following an abrupt response of mine I caught a glance of mute despair. She seemed to accuse me of falling short of her expectations by my lamentable lack of the social graces.

I was for flight then. I rose to go. I paused to dispute in my mind whether I must say farewell first to the older or the younger woman, and from the hopelessness of ever solving the question I might have stood there for an hour pulling at my hands had not the portieres opened and Rufus Blight come in.

I should not have known him as Rufus Blight but for Penelope's joyous hail. I had expected to see him as I saw him that day when he came to the farm to take Penelope away—a short, fat, pompous man with a bristling red mustache and a hand that moved interminably; a sleek man in spotless, creaseless clothes who might have stood in his own show-window to inspire his fellows to sartorial perfection. I saw, instead, a small man, rather thin, and slightly bald. The bristling red mustache had turned to gray and drooped. His whole figure drooped. His black clothes hung in many careless creases, and as he came forward it was not with his old quick, all-conquering step, but haltingly, as though Mrs. Bannister owned the room and he doubted if he were welcome. I lost my embarrassment in wonder. I recalled my old fond pictures of Rufus Blight when he should have grown older and fatter, more pompous and more all-commanding. I watched the little dusty man draw Penelope's head down to him and kiss her. I looked around the room, at the great fireplace, at the Reynolds, at the carved table and the costly empty spaces, and I lost myself in the marvel that he should have attained them.

"Uncle Rufus," Penelope said, drawing him toward me, "here is some one you will be glad to see. It's David Malcolm, my old friend David Malcolm."

"Why, David Malcolm—my old friend, too," cried Mr. Blight, his face lighting genially as he took my hand. "The boy who wouldn't let me have Penelope. Upon my word, David, I didn't blame you."

He laughed and shook my hand again and again. He asked after my father and mother as though they were his dearest friends, and I contrasted his cordial mention of them with his once cavalier treatment, but when he made me sit beside him on the divan and meet and answer a rapid fire of questions as to myself and my occupation, the old prejudices began to disappear before his simple, unaffected kindness. Penelope was on his other side, and her hand was in his. I forgave him. I forgot the neglect of long ago. I forgot even the mystery of the letters. I forgot the fat, pompous, all-commanding man. This was a meeting of three rare old friends. Mrs. Bannister, too, had gone from my thoughts. If she still regarded me over the top of her cup, I was unconscious of it, for I was telling how I had come to meet Penelope again, and he was recalling the day when, as a small boy, I had resisted him so vigorously.

"It has all turned out well, eh, David?" Rufus Blight said, laying a hand upon my knee. "Here we are—the three of us—just as if we had never quarrelled—good friends; and it is good to find old friends. We haven't many old friends, Penelope and I. Indeed, but for Mrs. Bannister"—he bowed to the majestic woman—"we should have few new ones. An old one recovered is too precious to lose; and we are not going to lose you again—are we, Penelope?"

The color shot high on Penelope's cheeks as she laughingly assented, and I flattered myself that she had forgotten the boor who a few moments before had shown to such disadvantage under Mrs. Bannister's critical eye.

"You must come to us often," Rufus Blight pursued. "I shall be glad to see you any time. It is good to have an old friend about when time hangs so heavily on one's hands as it does on mine. Never go out of business, David. Take warning from me, and don't let yourself be stranded, with nothing to do but to play golf. Golf is a poor occupation. I was out to-day—couldn't find a soul around the club—had to take on the professional—spoiled my score by getting into the brook on the tenth hole, and came home utterly miserable and dissatisfied with life. But when you get well wetted you appreciate the kitchen stove, as old Bill Hansen, in our town, used to say—eh, Mrs. Bannister?"

From this I surmised that Mr. Blight as well as the ball had gone into the brook, and in the homely aphorism I divined a subtle purpose to bait Mrs. Bannister, which showed an astonishing courage in so mild-mannered a little man. Such was the awe in which I held Mrs. Bannister that I could have loved any one who dared in her presence to acknowledge an acquaintance with old Bill Hansen. If Mrs. Bannister did disapprove, she was careful not to show it. Her lips parted in a half smile and she observed to me that Mr. Blight had a jovial way of quoting Mr. Hansen, as though Mr. Hansen were his dearest friend.

"He is," declared Mr. Blight. "To be sure, I haven't seen him for years, but I always remember him as the wisest man I ever knew. Why, if it wasn't for Penelope I should go back to the valley, just to be near him. It would be better than golf—to sit with him on the store porch on a sunny day listening to the mill rumbling by the creek and the killdee whistling in the meadow, to watch the shadows crawl along the mountains, and now and then to hear Bill Hansen say something. That would be living—eh, David?"

Rufus Blight touched a train of thought which had been often in my mind. Here was a man who had won in the great fight and he seemed to be camping now on the field which he had taken. About him were the spoils—the Reynolds, the fireplace, the perfectly bound books, and the costly spaces of the great room. Yet he was voicing the same longing that I, whose fight was just beginning, had often felt—the longing to step aside from the struggle for vain things, the longing to turn from the smoke and grime of the conflict to the quiet and peace of the valley. Now I voiced that longing too, forgetting Mrs. Bannister and her evident creed that man's chief end was to know the right people.

"It would be living, indeed," I said with enthusiasm. "More than once I have been on the point of going back to stay. I don't suppose you ever knew my old friend Stacy Shunk, did you? When it comes to real wisdom I'd rather talk to Stacy Shunk than——"

Mrs. Bannister had half risen—I thought in horror. It was really the butler who had brought my eulogy of Stacy Shunk to a sudden close, for, appearing in half-drawn portieres, he announced: "Mr. Talcott."

The mere entrance of Mr. Talcott carried us far from the valley and such rude associates as old Bill Hansen and his kind. I think that even Rufus Blight would have been too discreet to refer to them in his presence—for Penelope's sake, if nothing else. He was a slender young man of medium height, clean-shaven, perfectly groomed, and perfectly mannered. He was as much at ease as I had been ill at ease, and I envied him for it. He declined tea because he had just come from the club, and I envied him this delightful way of avoiding cake and embarrassing crumbs. Mrs. Bannister addressed him as Herbert, and I knew at once that he was Edward Herbert Talcott, whose name I had often seen in my paper-reading task. His claim to distinction was descent from the man whose name he bore, a member of the cabinet of one of our early presidents. A dead statesman in a family is always a valuable asset, and the longer dead the better. Statesmen, like wines, must be hidden away in vaults long years to be properly mellowed for social uses. I think that Mr. Secretary Talcott would have been astonished, indeed, could he have measured his influence after a century by the numbers, collateral and direct, who were proud to use his name. There were Talcott Joneses, and Talcott Robinsons, and Talcott Browns by the score in town, but one and all they acknowledged the primacy of this Edward Herbert Talcott, and never lost an opportunity of speaking of him as their cousin. He had written, I learned afterward, a monograph on his great-grandfather, which had given him a certain literary distinction in his own set, and it was generally understood that, while he might easily have earned a livelihood by his pen, he had been relieved of the necessity of doing it by his ancestors' investments in Harlem real estate.

Talcott looked perfectly inoffensive, and yet he had hardly been seated before I conceived a profound aversion to him. Mrs. Bannister's treatment of him did much to arouse it. Here, she seemed to say, is a human being, a sentient creature with ideas in his head, a finished man with an appreciation of the finer things of life. She asked him if he was going to the Martin dance.

Mr. Talcott did not know—he might—he hadn't made up his mind.

"There will probably be a rather mixed crowd," he said, with his lips twitching into a cynical smile.

Rufus Blight, who had moved to a chair by the fire, shook his head in disapproval of mixed crowds, and Mrs. Bannister said that, nevertheless, the Martins were getting along and certainly would get in.

"And sometimes, you know, mixed crowds are rather fun," said Talcott; and turning to Penelope: "I suppose you are not going?"

"I certainly am," Penelope answered heartily. "I love dancing so."

"Well, I shall, then," said Talcott. "You see, I was up awfully late at the Coles's last night—three o'clock when I left. Why did you go so early? I looked for you everywhere. I rather thought I should lay off to-night and rest up for a dinner, the opera, and the Grants to-morrow evening. But I'll go to-night anyway. We'll get up a little crowd of our own for supper. That's the thing about mixed crowds: at least you can have your own little set for supper."

Having settled this problem and taken possession of Penelope for that evening, Talcott went on to outline a jolly little plan of his to take possession of her for an entire day in the near future—as soon as there was skating at Tuxedo. Quite a large party were going up, Bobby This and Willie That, to all of which Penelope assented, while Mrs. Bannister laughed merrily. She understood that Bobby This was not going anywhere this year. Between them they drove me quite mad. A moment ago I had been so much at home; now I should have been more at ease in a company of astronomers talking of the stars, though I knew nothing of the heavens. I could only smile vaguely in a pretence of entering into all that they were saying; and when Talcott looked at me, when he pronounced his dictum that mixed crowds were a bore, I gave a feeble assent. When, to make my presence felt, I boldly asserted that I had never been to Tuxedo, Talcott replied that some time I must go there—I should like it—he was sure that I should like it, though the crowd was getting rather mixed. Having thus quieted me, he reverted to Bar Harbor and the summer, to various persons and events concerning which I was supremely ignorant. I left abruptly perhaps. I had forgotten the problem as to whom I should say my farewell last. Penelope said that I must come again and often. Mrs. Bannister gave me a pleasant but, I thought, a condescending smile, and Rufus Blight followed me down the stairs, talking platitudes about the weather while he called a man to bring my coat and hat.

The grilled door closed behind me, and I walked down the darkening street. I had found Penelope grown lovelier than the loveliest figure of my boyish dreams. Yet it was as though I had found her in another world than mine, and moving among another race. She might remember the boy whom she had dragged from the mountain stream, the boy whom she had carried to the desolation of her humble home; could she long remember the awkward man who sat on the edge of his chair and scattered crumbs, who when he talked could talk only of old Bill Hansen and Stacy Shunk? The longing for the valley was gone. Had the world been mine I would have given it for a card to the dance that night, however mixed the crowd, for then I should be near her. If I would be near her, then her friends must be my friends, and, whether they would or no, I swore that day they should be.

The hall of Miss Minion's house smelled terribly of cooking that night as I passed through it. Standing at last in my own narrow room, I brought my clinched fist down on my table as I registered my vow that I would attain to her world. Then I sank down and covered my face with my hands, for out of the little frame Gladys Todd was looking at me.



CHAPTER XVII

When I sat again on the great divan, I said to myself that, after all, the alien mind who designed this room had worked with cunning; he must have seen in his fancy the very picture that was now so delightful to my eyes—the gray old fireplace with its tall columns wound with vines whose delicate leaves quivered as the firelight fanned them; before it Penelope, a slender figure, softly drawn in the evening's shadow, bent over the low tea-table as she worked with the rebellious lamp; from above, looking down kindly, half smiling, Reynolds's majestic lady, frilled and furbelowed; at her feet a giant white bear, its long claws gripping the polished floor, its jaws distended fiercely as though it stood guard, ready to spring at him who dared to cross the charmed circle drawn by the glowing coals. I sat in the half-darkness, for it was late in the day, and but a single shaded lamp burned in a distant corner. What was new in the room grew old under the wizard touch of shadows. The mahogany bookcases stretched away on either hand, and there were cobwebs on the diamond panes and dust on the ancient tomes. Penelope was in her home! A hundred years ago that majestic lady in frills and furbelows sat by this same fireplace, in that same old carved chair, making tea, and now she smiled with great content as from her frame she looked down on this child of her blood and bone. And the ancestor who had gathered those dusty volumes—what of him? Two hundred years it was, perhaps, since he had burrowed among the cobwebs, now caressing his rare old Horace, now turning the yellow pages of his learned treatise on astrology. He was a distinguished figure in his wig, his velvet coat and smallclothes, and something of his features, refined by intellectual pursuit, I read in the face that now was turned to mine. For blood does tell. Father Time is a reckless artist, clipping and cutting and recasting incessantly, and producing an appalling number of failures; but now and then it would seem that he did take some pains and, studying his models, combine the broad, low brow of this one with another's straight and finely chiselled nose, and still another's smoothly rounded cheek; and sometimes, in his cynical way, he will spoil it all with a pair of coarse hands borrowed from one of his rustic figures or the large, flat feet of some study of peasant life, which we should have thought cast away and forgotten. In Penelope we were offended by none of these grotesque fragments. They must have been long since cleared out of her ancestral line. When she raised herself after her battle with the rebellious lamp, it was with the grace of unconscious pride, with the majesty of the lady in the frame, but finer drawn, thanks to the thin old gentleman of the books, who had overfed his mind and bequeathed to his descendants a legacy of nerves.

This Penelope Blight, daintily clothed in soft black webs woven for her by a hundred toiling human spiders, was not even the Penelope Blight of my wildest boyish dreams. Our dreams are circumscribed by our experience, and in those days it had been inconceivable to me that she should grow more lovely than Miss Mincer, the butcher's daughter, and I had pictured myself walking proudly through the streets of Malcolmville at the side of a tall, slender girl, her head crowned by a glazed black hat, her body incased in a tight-fitting jersey. This Penelope Blight in the carved chair where generations of her grandmothers had made tea before her, by the stately fireplace at which her forebears had warmed their hands and hearts, could have no kin with the barefooted girl who had stood with me at the edge of the clearing and, pointing over the weeds to the forlorn cabin, called it home.

Was it a wonder that my tone was formal; that, overcome by a sense of estrangement, I talked of the weather as I sipped my tea; that I asked her if she had enjoyed last night's dance, speaking as though dancing were my own favorite amusement; that when I pronounced her name it was in a halting, embarrassed undertone? Even speaking, it thus seemed gross presumption. How unlikely, then, that I should refer to by-gone days in her presence when it was incredible that there had ever been days like those! In all probability she would draw herself up and reply that I must be thinking of some other Penelope Blight, that to her I was nothing more than a formal creature whom she had met somewhere, where she could not remember, a man like hundreds of others whom she knew, lay figures for the tailor's art, who spoke only a language limited to the last dance and the one to come. Believing this, I finished my tea, and, putting down my cup, I abandoned my one resource when conversation lagged. Why had I come at all?

I had come to sit with Penelope, just as we were sitting now, in the shadows, in the firelight. At home we had often sat together on the back steps, in the shadows of the valley, in the firelight of the clouds glowing in the last sun flames. Now we should be, as then, good comrades, and freely as I had talked to her then as from our humble perch we watched the departing day, so freely could I talk to her now in the statelier environment. In that short walk uptown I had left a thousand things unsaid. But one special thing I had left unsaid, one vital fact in my life unrevealed, that was of paramount importance. In the excitement of our first meeting my silence had been discretion, but discretion became deception as time passed, and every day was adding to its sum. Sometimes I could forget the vital fact. Sometimes at night in my room, sitting with my book at my side neglected, I would stare vacantly at the wall and treat myself to a feast of dreams, contentedly munch the most delicate morsels of the past and present. And by right of that past and present it was almost fore-ordained that Penelope and I were to go down the years together. Then I would remember. I would start from my chair with a despairing laugh and pace up and down my narrow room, restless and unhappy. I knew that I could not long delay revealing to Penelope the paramount fact, and in revealing it to her I seemed to say that after all she was only a casual friend, that all my life's interest was bound up in Gladys Todd, and my life's ambition expressed in a room with an easel by the window, a bird's-eye-maple mantel, and around the walls a rack for odd lots of china and black-framed prints. It was hard to tell her that, but I knew that I must, and I said that I should talk freely as in the old days of brotherly confidence, as though of all others she would be happiest in hearing of my good fortune. With my mind made up to face boldly this bad situation, I could not crush the consoling hope that in hearing she would give some sign of the pain of the wound that I was making. What a fatuous illusion! In her presence, in an environment which made that which I planned for myself seem so narrow and commonplace, she became a spirit thoroughly alien. I could as easily have talked to some foreign princess of the blood of Mr. Pound or Stacy Shunk. I could as easily have announced to Mrs. Bannister that I was engaged to Gladys Todd. And I must have gone away, fled ignominiously after one cup of tea, had not Penelope, with a sudden impatient movement, turned her chair and leaned forward with her chin cupped in her hands, as she used to sit in the old days on the back steps, with her eyes fixed on mine.

"David," she said, "did you really come here to talk to me about the weather or to tell me things I really want to know—of Mr. Pound, of Miss Spinner and Stacy Shunk. Who drives the stage now?"

I was on the edge of the divan, my hands playing an imaginary game of cat's-cradle when she spoke, and now I pushed back into the comfortable depths and stared at her in surprise. I was amazed at hearing this princess of the blood descend to an interest in such plebeians. She, seeing that I was silent, leaned back too, each small hand gripping an arm of that throne-like chair.

"Well?" she said; and when still I was silent she repeated more insistently: "Well, David?" Then raising her voice a little to a tone of command: "I asked you who drives the stage."

I forgot the carved chair and Reynolds's majestic lady. I forgot the imposing fireplace and the old gentleman in wig and smallclothes. I laughed with the sheer joy of being with Penelope again. I forgot even the great divan and made a futile effort to jump it nearer her in my burst of enthusiasm for our new-born friendship.

"Why, Joe Hicks," I said. "You remember Joe Hicks, Penelope?"

"Joe Hicks," she said, pronouncing the name as though it were that of some dear friend suddenly dragged out of the by-gone years. "Surely not the same Joe Hicks who used to let us ride with him sometimes from Malcolmville out to the farm?"

"The same Joe Hicks," said I, and with a strange disregard for forms and effects I gave way to a natural desire of hunger and dived at the curate's delight, forgetting entirely the crumb-begetting habits of cake. "Try one of those," I went on, indicating the topmost plate, and to my delight she helped herself, almost with avidity. "You remember, Penelope, how we used to loiter near the kitchen when we smelled cake in the oven?"