"Colonel De Willoughby is so flattering," she said; "and he has such a queer way of paying compliments. I'm almost frightened of him."

"I will see that he does not speak to you again," said her partner, with an air of magnificent courage. "He should not have been allowed to come in. You, of course, could not understand, but—the men who are here will protect the ladies who are their guests."

Rupert gave his father a long look and turned on his heel. He went home, and the next time the Terpsichorean Society invited him to a dance he declined to go.

"Nice fellow I am to go to such places," he said to himself. "Liable to bring a drunken lunatic down upon them at any minute. No, the devil take it all, I'm going to stay at home!"

He stayed at home, and gradually dropped out of the young, glowing, innocently frivolous and happy world altogether, and it carried on its festivities perfectly well without him. The selfishness of lovely youth is a guileless, joyous thing, and pathetic inasmuch as maturity realises the undue retribution which befalls it as it learns of life.

When poverty and loneliness fell upon him, the boy had no youthful ameliorations, even though he was so touchingly young. Occasionally some old friend of his grandfather's encountered him somewhere and gave him rather florid good advice; some kindly matron, perhaps, asked him to come and see her; but there was no one in the place who could do anything practical. Delisleville had never been a practical place, and now its day seemed utterly over. Its gentlemanly pretence at business had received blows too heavy to recover from until times had lapsed; in some of the streets tiny tufts of grass began to show themselves between the stones.

As he had walked back in the heat, Rupert had observed these tiny tufts of green with a new sense of their meaning. He was thinking of them as he lay upon the grass, the warm scent of the mock-orange blossoms and roses, mingled with honeysuckle in the air, the booming of the bees among the multiflora blooms was in his ears.

"What can I do?" he said to himself. "There is nothing to be done here. There never was much, and now there is nothing. I can't loaf about and starve. I won't beg from people, and if I would, I haven't a relation left who isn't a beggar himself—and there are few enough of them left."

He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a well-worn greenback. He straightened out its creases cautiously and looked at it.

"I've got two dollars," he said, "and no prospect of getting any more. Even Matt can't make two dollars last long."

The latch of the side gate clicked and the gate opened. Presently Uncle Matt appeared round the rose-bushes. He had his market basket on his arm and wore a thoughtful countenance.

"Uncle Matt!" Rupert called out to him. "I wish you would come here."

Notwithstanding his darkling moods, he was in a subtle way singularly like Delia Vanuxem. He needed love and tenderness, and he was boy enough yet to be unhappy and desolate through lack of them, though without quite knowing why. He knew Uncle Matt loved him, and the affectionate care the old man surrounded him with was like a warm robe wrapped about a creature suffering from chill. He had not analyzed his feeling himself; he only knew that he liked to hear his footsteps as he pottered about the house, and when he was at his dreariest, he was glad to see him come in, and to talk a little to him.

Uncle Matt came towards him briskly. He set his basket down and took off his hat.

"Marse Rupert," he said, "dis hyer's a pow'fle scorcher of a mawnin'. Dem young lawyers as shets up dey office an' comes home to lie in de grass in de shade, dey is follerin' up dey perfession in de profitablest way—what'll be likely to bring 'em de mos' clients, 'cause, sho's yo' bawn, dere's sunstroke an' 'cussion or de brain just lopin' roun' dis town—en a little hot brick office ain't no place for a young man what got any dispect fur his next birfday. Dat's so."

"I haven't much respect for mine," said Rupert; "I've had twenty-two too many—just twenty-two."

"'Scusin' me sayin' it, sah, but dat ain't no way ter talk. A man boun' to have some dispect for his birfday—he boun' to! Birfdays gotter be took keer on. Whar's a man when he runs out of 'em?"

"He'd better run out of them before he runs out of everything else," said Rupert. "Matt, I've just made two dollars this month."

He looked at the old man with a restless appeal in his big, deer-like eyes.

"I'm very sorry, Matt," he said, "I'm terribly sorry, but you know—we can't go on."

Uncle Matthew looked down at the grass with a reflective air.

"Marse Rupert, did you never heah nothin' 'bout your Uncle Marse Thomas De Willoughby?"

Rupert was silent a moment before he answered, but it was not because he required time to search his memory.

"Yes," he said, and then was silent again. He had heard of poor Tom of the big heart from his mother, and there had been that in her soft speech of him which had made the great, tender creature very real. Even in his childhood his mother had been his passion, as he had been hers. Neither of them had had others to share their affection, and they were by nature creatures born to love. His first memory had been of looking up into the soft darkness of the tender eyes which were always brooding over him. He had been little more than a baby when he had somehow known that they were very sorrowful, and had realised that he loved them more because of their sorrow. He had been little older when he found out the reason of their sadness, and from that time he had fallen into the habit of watching them, and knowing their every look. He always remembered the look they wore when she spoke of Tom De Willoughby, and it had been a very touching one.

"Yes," he said to Uncle Matt, "I have heard of him."

"Dar was a time, a long way back, Marse Rupert—'fore you was borned—when I seemed to year a good deal 'bout Marse Thomas. Dat was when he went away in dat curi's fashion. Nobody knowed whar he went, an' nobody knowed quite why. It wus jes' afore ye' maw an' paw wus married. Some said him an' de Jedge qua'lled 'cause Marse Thomas he said he warn't gwine ter be no medical student, an' some said he was in love with some young lady dat wouldn't 'cept of him."

"Did they?" said Rupert.

"Dat dey did," Matt said; "an' a lot moah. But ev'rybody think it mighty strange him a-gwine, an' no one never huntin' him up afterwards. Seemed most like dey didn't keer nothin' 'bout him."

"They didn't, damn them!" said Rupert, with sudden passion. "And he was worth the whole lot."

"Dat what make I say what I gwine ter," said Matt, with some eagerness. "What I heerd about Marse Thomas make me think he must be er mighty fine gen'leman, an' one what'd be a good fren' to anyone. An' dishyer ve'y mawnin' I heerd sump'n mo' about him."

Rupert raised himself upon his elbow.

"About Uncle Tom!" he exclaimed. "You have heard something about Uncle Tom to-day?"

"I foun' out whar he went, Marse Rupert," said Matt, much roused. "I foun' out whar he is dishyer ve'y instep. He's in Hamlin County, keepin' sto' an' post-office at Talbot's Cross-roads; an', frum what I heah, Marse Tom De Willoughby de mos' pop'larist gen'leman an' mos' looked up ter in de county."

"Who—who did you hear it from?" demanded Rupert.

Uncle Matt put his foot upon a rustic seat near and leaned forward, resting his elbow on his knee and making impressive gestures with his yellow-palmed old hand.

"It was dishyer claimin' dat brung it about," he said; "dishyer claimin' an' 'demnification what's been a-settin' pow'fle heavy on my min' fur long 'nuff. Soon's I yeerd tell on it, Marse Rupert, it set me ter steddyin'. I been a-watchin' out an' axin' questions fur weeks, an' when I fin' out——"

"But what has that to do with Uncle Tom?" cried Rupert.

"A heap, Marse Rupert. Him an' you de onliest heirs to de De Willoughby estate; an' ef a little hoosier what's los' a yoke er oxen kin come down on de Guv'ment for 'demnification, why can't de heirs of a gen'leman dat los' what wus gwine ter be de biggest fortune in de South'n States. What's come er dem gold mines, Marse Rupert, dat wus gwine ter make yo' grandpa a millionaire—whar is dey? What de Yankees done with dem gol' mines?"

"They weren't gold mines, Uncle Matt," said Rupert; "they were coal mines; and the Yankees didn't carry them away. They only smashed up the machinery and ruined things generally."

But he laid back upon the grass again with his hands clasped behind his head and his brow drawn down thoughtfully.

"Coal mines er gol' mines," said Uncle Matt. "Guv'ment gotter 'demnify ef things er managed right; en dat what make me think er Marse Thomas De Willoughby when dat little Stamps feller said somep'n dat soun' like his name. 'Now dar's D'Willerby,' he ses, 'big Tom D'Willerby,' en I jest jumped on him. 'Did you say De Willoughby, sah?' I ses, an' from dat I foun' out de rest."

"I should like to see him," said Rupert; "I always thought I should like to know where he was—if he was alive."

"Why doan' you go an' see him, den?" said Matt. "Jest take yo' foot in yo' han' an' start out. Hamlin County ain't fur, Marse Rupert, an' de Cross-roads Pos'-office mighty easy to fin'; and when you fin' it an' yo' uncle settin' in de do', you jest talk ter him 'bout dem gol' mines an' dat claimin' business an' ax his devise 'bout 'em. An' ef yer doan' fin' yo'se'f marchin' on ter Wash'n'ton city an' a-talkin' to de Pres'dent an' de Senators, de whole kit an' bilin' of 'em, Marse Thomas ain't de buz'ness gen'l'man what I believe he is."

Rupert lay still and looked straight before him, apparently at a bluebird balanced on a twig, but it was not the bird he was thinking of.

"You'se young, Marse Rupert, an' it 'ud be purty dang'rous for a onexperienced young gen'l'man ter lan' down in de midst er all dem onprinciple' Yankees with a claim to hundreds of thousan's of dollars. Marse Thomas, he's a settled, stiddy gen'l'man, en, frum what I hears, I guess he's got a mighty 'stablished-lookin' 'pearance."

"I should like to see him," Rupert reflected aloud. "I should like to see him."



CHAPTER XX

The years had passed for the child Sheba so sweetly, and had been so full of simple joys and pleasures, that they seemed a panorama of lovely changing seasons, each a thing of delight. There was the spring, when she trotted by Tom's side into the garden and he showed her the little, pale-green points of the crocuses, hyacinths, and tulips pushing their way up through the moist brown earth, and when he carried her in his big arms into the woods on the hillsides, and they saw the dogwood covered with big white flowers and the wild plum-trees snowed over with delicate blooms, and found the blue violets thick among the wet grass and leaves, and the frail white wind-flowers quivering on their stems. As they went about in this new fairyland, which came every year, and which still seemed always a surprise, it was their habit to talk to each other a great deal. The confidences they had exchanged when the child had not been able to speak, and which Tom had nevertheless understood, were enchanting things when she became older and they strayed about together or sat by the fire. Her child thoughts and fancies might have been those of some little faun or dryad She grew up among green things, with leaves waving above and around her, the sun shining upon her, and the mountains seeming to stand on guard, looking down at her from day to day, from year to year. From behind one mountain the sun rose every morning, and she always saw it; and behind another it sank at night. After the spring came the summer, when the days were golden and drowsy and hot, and there were roses and other flowers everywhere; wild roses in the woods and by the waysides, heavy-headed beauties in their own garden, and all the beds and vines a fine riot of colour. After these there were blackberries thick on their long brambles, and wild grapes in the woods, and presently a delicious snap of cold in the clear air night and morning, and the trees were dropping golden, amber, and scarlet leaves, while under the pale yellow ones which rustled beneath the chestnut-trees, there were brown, glossy nuts, which fell one by one with a delightful suddenness of sound at irregular intervals. There were big chestnut-trees in the woods near their house, and Tom and Sheba used to go before breakfast to look for the nuts which had fallen in the night. Hamlin County always rose at sunrise, or before it, and to go out in the heavenly fresh morning air and walk through the rustling, thickly fallen yellow leaves under the trees, making little darts of joy at the brown, glossy things bursting through their big burrs, was a delicious, exciting thing. Mornin's hot breakfast held keen delights when they returned to it.

When the big wood-fires were lighted and there was snow and rain outside, and yams and chestnuts to roast in the ashes, and stories to be told and talked over in the glow of the red birch-log and snapping, flaming hickory sticks, the child used to feel as if she and Uncle Tom were even nearer together and more comfortable than at any other time.

"Uncle Tom," she said to him, as she was standing in the circle of his arm on one such night, when she was about ten years old. "Uncle Tom, we do love each other in the winter, don't we?"

"Yes, we do, Sheba," answered Tom. "And we're pretty partial to each other even in the summer."

"We love each other at all the times," she said. "And every morning that I get up I love you more than I did when I went to bed—every morning, Uncle Tom."

Tom kissed her. He remembered what he had said one morning in the cabin in Blair's Hollow ten years before.

"Perhaps, if there's no one to come between us, she may be fond of me."

She was fond of him. He was her very little life itself. No one had ever come between—nothing ever could.

She had by that time shot up into a tall, slender slip of a girl-child. She was passing, even with a kind of distinction, through the stage of being all long, slim legs and big eyes. The slim legs were delicately modelled and the big eyes were like pools of gold-brown water, fringed with rushes.

"I never seen a young 'un at thet thar young colty age es was es han'some es thet child o' Big Tom's," Mis' Doty often remarked.

By the frequenters of the Cross-roads Post-office she was considered, as was her protector, a county institution. When she had reached three years old, she had been measured against the wall, and each year her increase of inches was recorded amid lively demonstrations of interest. The smallness of her feet had also been registered, and the thickness and growth of her curling hair ranked as a subject of discussion only second in interest to the development of crops.

But this affection notwithstanding, a curious respect for her existed. She had played among them in the store in her little dusty pinafore; one and all of them had given her rustic offerings, bringing her special gifts of yellow popcorn ears, or abnormal yams unexpectedly developed in their own gardens, or bags of hickory nuts; but somehow they did not think or speak of her as they did of each other's children.

Tom had built a comfortable white house, over whose verandah honeysuckles and roses soon clambered and hung. In time the ground enclosed about it had a curious likeness to the bowery unrestraint of the garden he had played in during his childhood. It was a pleasure to him to lay it out on the old plan and to plant japonicas, flowering almonds, and syringa bushes, as they had grown in the days when he had played under them as a child, or lounged on the grass near them as a boy. He and Sheba planted everything themselves—or, rather, Sheba walked about with him or stood by his side and talked while he worked. In time she knew almost as well as he did the far-away garden he took as his model. She learned to know the place by heart.

"Were you a little boy then, Uncle Tom?" she would say, "when there was a mock-orange and a crape myrtle next to the big yellow rose-bush?"

There were even times when he found her memory was better than his own, and she could correct him.

"Ah! no, Uncle Tom," she would say; "the pansies were not in the little heart-shaped bed; they were all round the one with the pink harp-flower in the middle."

When she was six years old he sent for some books and began seriously to work with a view to refreshing his memory on subjects almost forgotten.

"I'm preparing myself for a nursery governess, Sheba," he said. "What we want is a nursery governess, and I don't know where to find one. I shouldn't know how to manage her if I did find her, so I've got to post up for the position myself."

The child was so happy with him in all circumstances, that it was easy to teach her anything. She had learned to read and write before she discovered that the process she went through to acquire these accomplishments was not an agreeable pastime specially invented by Tom for her amusement. At eleven years old she had become so interested in her work that she was quite an excited little student. By the time she was twelve Tom began to shake his head at her.

"If you go on like this," he said, "I sha'n't be able to keep up with you, and what I've got to do is to keep ahead. If I can't, I shall have to send you to the Academy at Ralston; and how should we stand that?"

She came and sat upon his big knee—a slim little thing, as light as a bird.

"We couldn't stand it, Uncle Tom," she said. "We have to be together. We always have been, haven't we?" And she rubbed her ruffled head against his huge breast.

"Yes, we always have been," answered Tom; "and it would go pretty hard with us to make a change, Sheba."

She was not sent to Ralston. The war broke out and altered the aspect of things even at the Cross-roads. The bank in which Tom's modest savings were deposited was swept away by misfortune; the primitive resources of Hamlin County were depleted, as the resources of all the land were. But for the existence of the white, vine-embowered house and the garden full of scents and bloom, Tom's position at the close of the rebellion was far less fortunate than it had been at the time the mystery of Blair's Hollow had occurred. In those old, happy-go-lucky days the three rooms behind the store and the three meals Mornin cooked for him had been quite sufficient for free and easy peace. He had been able to ensure himself these primitive comforts with so little expenditure that money had scarcely seemed an object. He had taken eggs in exchange for sugar, bacon in exchange for tea, and butter in exchange for everything. Now he had no means of resource but the store, and the people were poorer than they had been. Farms had gone to temporary ruin through unavoidable neglect during the absence of their masters. More than one honest fellow had marched away and never returned, and their widows were left to struggle with the land and their children. The Cross-roads store, which had thriven so wonderfully for a year or two before the breaking out of the war, began to wear a less cheerful aspect. As far as he himself was concerned, Tom knew that life was a simple enough thing, but by his side there was growing up a young goddess. She was not aware that she was a young goddess. There was no one in the vicinity of the Cross-roads who could have informed her that she presented somewhat of that aspect, and that she was youth and happiness and Nature's self at once.

Tom continually indulged in deep reflection on his charge after she was twelve years old. She shot up into the tall suppleness of a lovely young birch, and she was a sweetly glowing thing. A baby had been a different matter; the baby had not been so difficult to manage; but when he found himself day by day confronting the sweetness of child-womanhood in the eyes that were gold-brown pools, and the softening grace of the fair young body, he began to be conscious of something like alarm. He was not at all sure what he ought to do at this crisis, and whether life confining its experiences entirely to Talbot's Cross-roads was all that was required.

"I don't know whether it's right, by thunder," he said. "I don't know whether it's right; and that's what a man who's taken the place of a young mother ought to know."

There came a Sunday when one of the occasional "preachings" was to be held at the log-cabin church a few miles distant, and they were going together, as they always did.

It was a heavenly, warm spring morning, and Sheba, having made herself ready, wandered into the garden to wait among the flowers. The rapturous first scents of the year were there, drawn by the sun and blown by vagrant puffs of wind from hyacinths and jonquils, white narcissus and blue violets. Sheba walked among the beds, every few minutes kneeling down upon the grass to bury her face in pink and yellow and white clusters, inhaling the breath of flowers and the pungent freshness of the sweet brown earth at the same time. She had lived among leaves and growing things until she felt herself in some unexplainable way a part of the world they belonged to. The world beyond the mountains she knew nothing of; but this world, which was the brown earth springing forth into green blades and leaves and little streaked buds, warming into bloom and sun-drenched fragrance, setting the birds singing and nest-building, giving fruits and grain, and yellow and scarlet leaves, and folding itself later in snow and winter sleep—this world she knew as well as she knew herself. The birds were singing and nest-building this morning, and, as she hung over a bed of purple and white hyacinths, kneeling on the grass and getting as close to them as she could, their perfume mounted to her brain and she began to kiss them.

"I love you," she said, dwelling on their sweet coolness with her lips; "I love and love you!" And suddenly she made a little swoop and kissed the brown earth itself. "And, oh! I love you, too!" she said. "I love you, too!"

She looked like young spring's self when she stood up as Tom came towards her. Her smile was so radiant a thing that he felt his heart quake with no other reason than this sight of her happy youth.

"What are you thinking of, Sheba?" he asked.

"I am thinking," she said, as she glanced all about her, the smile growing more entrancing, "I am thinking how happy I am, and how happy the world is, and how I love you, and," with a pretty laugh, "the flowers, and the sun, and the earth—and everything in the world!"

"Yes," said Tom, looking at her tenderly. "It's the spring, Sheba."

She caught his arm and clung to it, laughing again.

"Yes," she answered; "and when it isn't the spring, it is the summer; and when it isn't the summer, it is the autumn; and when it isn't the autumn, it is the winter; and we sit by the fire and know the spring is making its way back every day. Everything is beautiful—everything is happy, Uncle Tom."

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Tom.

"Why do you say that?" Sheba asked. "Why do you look so—so puzzled, Uncle Tom?"

"Well," said Tom, holding her out at arm's length before him, "the truth is, I've suddenly realised something. I'd like to know what I'm to do with this!"

"This?" laughed Sheba. "Am I 'this'? You look at me as if I was 'this'."

"You are," Tom answered, ruefully. "Here you suddenly change to a young woman on a man's hands. Now, what am I to do with a grown-up young woman? I'm used to babies, and teething, and swallowing kangaroos out of Noah's arks—and I know something of measles and letting tucks out of frocks; but when it comes to a beautiful young woman, there you have me!"

He shook his head as he ended, and, though his face wore the affectionate, humorous smile which had never failed her, there was a new element in its kindness which, it must be confessed, bordered on bewilderment.

"A beautiful, grown-up young woman," he said, glancing reflectively over her soft, swaying slimness, her white frock with its purple ribbon and golden jonquils, and up to her tender cheek.

Sheba blushed with sweet delight.

"Am I beautiful, Uncle Tom?" she inquired, with a lovely anxiousness in her eyes.

"Yes, you are," admitted Tom; "and it isn't a drawback to you, Sheba, but it's likely to make trouble for me."

"But why?" she said.

"In novels, and poetry, and sometimes in real life, beautiful young women are fallen in love with, and then trouble is liable to begin," explained Tom with amiable gravity.

"There is no one to fall in love with me at the Cross-roads," said Sheba, sweetly. "I wish there was."

"Good Lord," exclaimed Tom, devoutly. "Come along to church, Sheba, and let's go in for fasting and prayer."

He took her to the "preaching" in the log cabin and noticed the effect of her entry on the congregation as they went in. There were a number of more or less awkward and raw-boned young male creatures whose lives were spent chiefly in cornfields and potato patches. They were uncomely hewers of wood and drawers of water, but they turned their heads to look at her, and their eyes followed her as she went to her seat. When she had sat down, those who could catch glimpses of her involuntarily craned their necks and sat in discomfort until the sermon was over. Tom recognised this fact, and in secret reflected upon it in all its bearings.

"Yes," he found himself saying, mentally; "I'd like to know how I'm going to do my duty by this. I don't believe there's a derned thing about it in 'Advice to Young Mothers.'"

The day wore on to its lovely end, and lost itself in one of the sunsets which seem to flood the sky with a tide of ripples of melted gold, here and there tipped with flame. When this was over, a clear, fair moon hung lighted in the heavens, and, flooding with silver what had been flooded with gold, changed the flame-tips to pearl.

Sheba strayed in the garden among the flowers. Tom, sitting under the vines of the porch, watched her white figure straying in and out among the shrubbery. At last he saw her standing on the grass in the full radiance of the moonlight, her hands hanging clasped behind her and her face turned upward to the sky. As she had wandered about, she had done a fanciful thing. She had made a wreath of white narcissus and laid it on her hair, and she had twisted together a sort of long garland of the same blossoms and cast it loosely round her waist.

"She never did that before," Tom said, as he watched her. "Good Lord! what a picture she is, standing there with her face lifted. I wonder what she's thinking of."

"Uncle Tom," she said, when she sauntered back to him, "does the moonlight make you feel sad without being unhappy at all? That is what it does to me."

"It's the spring, Sheba," he said, as he had said it in the morning; "it's the spring."

She saw that he was looking at her flower garlands, and she broke into a shy little laugh.

"You see what you have done to me, Uncle Tom," she said; "now you have told me I am a beautiful young woman, I shall always be doing things to—to make myself look prettier."

She came on to the verandah to him, and he held out his hand to her.

"That's the spring, too, Sheba," he said.

She yielded as happily and naturally to the enfolding of his big arm in these days as she had done when she was a baby. No one but themselves knew what they were to each other.

They had always talked things over together—their affection, their pleasures, their simple anxieties and responsibilities. They had discussed her playthings in the first years of their friendship and her lessons when she had been a little girl. To-night the subject which began to occupy them had some seriousness of aspect. The changes time and the tide of war had made were bringing Tom face to face with a difficulty his hopeful, easy-going nature had never contemplated with any realising sense—the want of money, even the moderate amount the requirements of their simple lives made necessary.

"It's the taxes that a man can't stand up against," Tom said. "You may cut off all you like, and wear your old clothes, but there's a liveliness about taxes that takes the sand out of you. Talk about the green bay-tree flourishing and increasing, all a tax wants is to be let alone a few years. It'll come to its full growth without any sunning or watering. Mine have had to be left alone for a while, and—well, here we are—another year, and——"

"Will the house be taken?" Sheba asked.

"If I can't pay up, it'll all go—house and store and all," Tom answered. "Then we shall have to go too."

He turned and looked ruefully at the face beneath the wreath of white narcissus.

"I wish it hadn't come on us just now," he said. "There's no particular season that trouble adds a charm to; but it seems to me that it's not entitled to the spring."

When she went upstairs she did not go to bed. The moonlight lured her out into the night again. Outside her window there was a little balcony. It was only of painted wood, as the rest of the house was, but a multiflora rose had climbed over it and hung it with a wonderful drapery, and, as she stood upon it, she unconsciously made herself part of a picture almost strange in its dramatic quality.

She looked out over the sleeping land to the mountains standing guard.

"Where should we go?" she said. "The world is on the other side."

She was not in the mood to observe sound, or she would have heard the clear stroke of a horse's hoofs on the road. She did not even hear the opening of the garden gate. She was lost in the silver beauty of the night, and a vague dreaming which had fallen upon her. On the other side of the purple of the mountains was the world. It had always been there and she had always been here. Presently she found herself sighing aloud, though she could not have told why.

"Ah!" she said as softly as young Juliet. "Ah, me!"

As she could not have told why she sighed, so there was no explanation of the fact that, having done so, she looked downward to the garden path, as if something had drawn her eyes there. It is possible that some attraction had so drawn them, for she found herself looking into a young, upturned face—the dark, rather beautiful face of a youth who stood and looked upward as if he had stopped involuntarily at sight of her.

She drew back with a little start and then bent her Narcissus-crowned head forward.

"Who—who is it?" she exclaimed.

He started himself at the sound of her voice. She had indeed looked scarcely a real creature a few moments ago. He took off his hat and answered:

"I am Rupert De Willoughby," he said. "I beg pardon for disturbing you. It startled me to see you standing there. I came to see Mr. Thomas De Willoughby."

It was a singular situation. Perhaps the moonlight had something to do with it; perhaps the spring. They stood and looked at each other quite simply, as if they did not know that they were strangers. A young dryad and faun meeting on a hilltop or in a forest's depths by moonlight might have looked at each other with just such clear, unstartled eyes, and with just such pleasure in each other's beauty. For, of a truth, each one was thinking the same thing, innocently and with a sudden gladness.

As he had come up the garden-path, Rupert had seen a vision and had stopped unconsciously that instant. And Sheba, looking down, had seen a vision too—a beautiful face as young as her own, and with eyes that glowed.

"You don't know what you looked like standing there," said Rupert, as simply as the young faun might have spoken. "It was as if you were a spirit. The flowers in your hair looked like great white stars."

"Did they?" she said, and stood and softly gazed at him.

How the boy looked up at her young loveliness! He had never so looked at any woman before. And then a thought detached itself from the mists of memory and he seemed to remember.

"Are you Sheba?" he asked.

"Yes, I am Sheba," she answered, rather slowly. "And I remember you, too. You are the boy."

He drew nearer to the balcony, laying his hand upon the multiflora rose creeper.

"Yes, yes," he said, almost tremulous with eagerness. "You bring it all back. You were a little child, and I——"

"You rode away," she said, "over the hill."

"Will you come down to me?" he said.

"Yes," she answered, and that moment disappeared.

He stood in the moonlight, his head bared, his straw hat in his hand. He felt as if he was in a dream. His face had lost its gloom and yearning, and his eyes looked like his mother's.

When he heard a light foot nearing him, he went forward, and they met with strange young smiles and took each other's hands. Nearer than the balcony, she was even a sweeter thing, and the scent of her white flowers floated about her.

As they stood so, smiling, Tom came and joined them. Sheba had called him as she passed his door.

Rupert turned round and spoke, vaguely conscious, as he did so, that his words sounded somewhat like words uttered in a dream and were not such as he had planned.

"Uncle Tom," he said, "I—Delia Vanuxem was my mother."



CHAPTER XXI

The moment ceased to be so fanciful and curiously exalted when his hand was grasped and a big, kind palm laid on his shoulder, though Tom's face was full of emotion.

"I think I should have known it," he said. "Welcome to you. Yes," looking at him with an affection touched with something like reverence. "Yes, indeed—Delia Vanuxem!"

"I've come to you," the young fellow said, with fine simplicity, "because I am the only De Willoughby left except yourself. I am young and I'm lonely—and my mother always said you had the kindest heart she ever knew. I want you to advise me."

"Come in to the porch," said Tom, "and let us sit down and talk it over."

He put his arm about Sheba and kept his hand on Rupert's shoulder, and walked so, with one on either side, to the house. Between their youthful slimness he moved like a protecting giant.

"Where did you come from?" he asked when they sat down.

"From Delisleville," Rupert answered. "I did not think of coming here so late to-night, but it seems I must have missed my road. I was going to ask for lodgings at a place called Willet's Farm. I suppose I took the wrong turning; and when I saw this house before me, I knew it must be yours from what I had heard of it. It seemed as if Fate had brought me here. And when I came up the path I saw Sheba. She was standing on the little verandah in the moonlight with the roses all around her; and she looked so white that I stopped to look up at her."

"Uncle Tom," said Sheba, "we—we knew each other."

"Did you?" said Tom. "That's right."

His middle-aged heart surprised him by giving one quick, soft beat. He smiled to himself after he had felt it.

"The first moment or so I only stood and looked," Rupert said; "I was startled."

"And so was I," said Sheba.

"But when she leaned forward and looked down on me," he went on, "I remembered something——"

"So did I," said Sheba. "I leaned forward like that and looked down at you from the porch at the tavern—all those years ago, when I was a little child."

"And I looked up at you—and afterwards I asked about you," said Rupert. "It all came back when you spoke to-night, and I knew you must be Sheba."

"You knew my name, but I did not know yours," said Sheba. "But, after all," rather as if consoling herself, "Sheba is not my real name. I have another one."

"What is it?" asked the young fellow, quite eagerly. His eyes had scarcely left her face an instant. She was standing by Tom's chair and her hands were on his shoulders.

"It is Felicia," she said. "Uncle Tom gave it to me—because he wanted me to be happy." And she curved a slim arm round Tom's neck and kissed him.

It was the simplest, prettiest thing a man could have seen. Her life had left her nature as pure and translucent as the clearest brook. She had had no one to compare herself with or to be made ashamed or timid by. She knew only her own heart and Tom's love, and she smiled as radiantly into the lighting face before her as she would have smiled at a rose, or at a young deer she had met in the woods. No one had ever looked at her in this way before, but being herself a thing which had grown like a flower, she felt no shyness, and was only glad. Eve might have smiled at Adam so in their first hours.

Big Tom, sitting between them, saw it all. A man cannot live a score of years and more, utterly cut off from the life of the world, without having many a long hour for thought in which he will inevitably find himself turning over the problems which fill the life he has missed. Tom De Willoughby had had many of them. He had had no one to talk to whose mind could have worked with his own. On winter nights, when Sheba had been asleep, he had found himself gazing into the red embers of his wood fire and pondering on the existence he might have led if fate had been good to him.

"There must be happiness on the earth somewhere," he would say. "Somewhere there ought to have been a woman I belonged to, and who belonged to me. It ought all to have been as much nature as the rain falling and the corn ripening in the sun. If we had met when we were young things—on the very brink of it all—and smiled into each other's eyes and taken each other's hands, and kissed each other's lips, we might have ripened together like the corn. What is it that's gone wrong?" All the warm normal affections of manhood, which might have remained undeveloped and been cast away, had been lavished on the child Sheba. She had represented his domestic circle.

"You mayn't know it, Sheba," he had said once to her, "but you're a pretty numerous young person. You're a man's wife and family, and mother and sisters, and at least half a dozen boys and girls."

All his thoughts had concentrated themselves upon her—all his psychological problems had held her as their centre, all his ethical reasonings had applied themselves to her.

"She's got to be happy," he said to himself, "and she's got to be strong enough to stand up under unhappiness, if—if I should be taken away from her. When the great thing that's—that's the meaning of it all—and the reason of it—comes into her life, it ought to come as naturally as summer does. If her poor child of a mother—Good Lord! Good Lord!"

And here he sat in the moonlight, and Delia Vanuxem's son was looking at her with ardent, awakened young eyes.

How she listened as Rupert told his story, and how sweetly she was moved by the pathos of it. Once or twice she made an involuntary movement forward, as if she was drawn towards him, and uttered a lovely low exclamation which was a little like the broken coo of a dove. Rupert did not know that there was pathos in his relation. He made only a simple picture of things, but as he went on Tom saw all the effect of the hot little town left ruined and apathetic after the struggle of war, the desolateness of the big house empty but for its three rooms, its bare floors echoing to the sound of the lonely pair of feet, the garden grown into a neglected jungle, the slatternly negro girl in the kitchen singing wild camp-meeting hymns as she went about her careless work.

"It sounds so lonely," Sheba said, with tender mournfulness.

"That was what it was—lonely," Rupert answered. "It's been a different place since Matt came, but it has always been lonely. Uncle Tom," putting his hand on the big knee near him, as impulsively as a child, "I love that old Matt—I love him!"

"Ah, so do I!" burst forth Sheba. "Don't you, Uncle Tom?" And she put her hand on the other knee.

Rupert looked down at the hand. It was so fair and soft and full of the expression of sympathy—such an adorably womanly little hand, that one's first impulse was to lay one's own upon it. He made a movement and then remembered, and looked up, and their eyes met and rested on each other gently.

When the subject of the claim was broached, Sheba thought it like a fairy tale. She listened almost with bated breath. As Rupert had not realised that he was pathetic in the relation of the first part of his story, so he did not know that he was picturesque in this. But his material had strong colour. The old man on the brink of splendid fortune, the strange, unforeseen national disaster sweeping all before it and leaving only poverty and ruin, the untouched wealth of the mines lying beneath the earth on which battles had been fought—all the possibilities the future might hold for one penniless boy—these things were full of suggestion and excitement.

"You would be rich," said Sheba.

"So would Uncle Tom," Rupert answered, smiling; "and you, too."

Tom had been listening with a reflective look on his face. He tilted his chair back and ran his hand through his hair.

"At all events, we couldn't lose money if we didn't gain any," he said. "That's where we're safe. When a man's got to the place where he hasn't anything to lose, he can afford to take chances. Perhaps it's worth thinking over. Let's go to bed, children. It's midnight."

When they said good-night to each other, the two young hands clung together kindly and Sheba looked up with sympathetic eyes.

"Would you like to be very rich?" she asked.

"To-night I am rich," he answered. "That is because you and Uncle Tom have made me feel as if I belonged to someone. It is so long since I have seemed to belong to anyone."

"But now you belong to us," said Sheba.

He stood silently looking down at her a moment.

"Your eyes look just as they did when you were a little child," he said. He lifted her hand and pressed his warm young lips to it.



CHAPTER XXII

He awoke the next morning with a glow in his heart which should not be new to youth, but was new to him. He remembered feeling something rather like it years before when he had been a little boy and had wakened on the morning of his birthday and found his mother kissing him and his bed strewn with gifts.

He went downstairs and, strolling on to the porch, saw Sheba in the garden. As he went to join her, he found himself in the midst of familiar paths and growths.

"Why," he exclaimed, stopping before her, "it is the old garden!"

"Yes," Sheba answered; "Uncle Tom made it like this because he loved the other one. You and I have played in the same garden. Good-morning," laughing.

"Good-morning," he said. "It is a good-morning. I—somehow I have been thinking that when I woke I felt as I used to do when I was a child and woke on my birthday."

That morning she showed him her domain. To the imaginative boy she led with her, she seemed like a strange young princess, to whom all the land belonged. She loved it so and knew so well all it yielded. She showed him the cool woods where she always found the first spring flowers, the chestnut and walnut trees where she and Tom gathered their winter supply of nuts, the places where the wild grapes grew thickest, and those where the ground was purple-carpeted with violets.

They wandered on together until they reached a hollow in the road, on one side of which a pine wood sloped up a hillside, looking dark and cool.

"I come here very often," she said, quite simply. "My mother is here."

Then he saw that a little distance above the road a deserted log cabin stood, and not far from it two or three pine trees had been cut down so that the sun could shine on a mound over and about which flowers grew. It was like a little garden in the midst of the silent wildness.

He followed her to the pretty spot, and she knelt down by it and removed a leaf or a dead flower here and there. The little mound was a snowy mass of white blossoms standing thick together, and for a yard or so about the earth was starred with the same flowers.

"You see," she said, "Uncle Tom and I plant new flowers for every month. Everything is always white. Sometimes it is all lilies of the valley or white hyacinths, and then it is white roses, and in the autumn white chrysanthemums. Uncle Tom thought of it when I was a little child, and we have done it together ever since. We think she knows."

She stopped, and, still kneeling, looked at him as if suddenly remembering something.

"You have not heard," she said; "she died when I was born, and we do not even know her name."

"Not her name!" Rupert said; but the truth was that he had heard more of the story than she had.

"My father was so stunned with grief, that Uncle Tom said he seemed to think of nothing but that he could not bear to stay. He went away the very night they laid her here. I suppose," she said slowly, and looking at the mass of white narcissus instead of at him, "I suppose when people love each other, and one dies, the other cannot—cannot——"

Rupert saw that she was unconsciously trying to explain something to herself, and he interposed between her and her thoughts with a hurried effort.

"Yes, yes," he said; "it must be so. When they love each other and one is taken, how can the other bear it?"

Then she lifted her eyes from the flowers to his again, and they looked very large and bright.

"You see," she said, in an unsteady little voice, "I had only been alive a few hours when he went away."

Suddenly the brightness in her eyes welled up and fell in two large crystal drops, though a smile quivered on her lips.

"Don't tell Uncle Tom," she said; "I never let him know that it—it hurts my feelings when I think I had only been alive such a few hours—and there was nobody to care. I must have been so little. If—if there had been no Uncle Tom——"

He knelt down by her side and took her hand in his.

"But there was," he said; "there was!"

"Yes," she answered, her sweet face trembling with emotion; "and, oh! I love him so! I love him so!"

She put her free hand on the earth among the white flowers on the mound.

"And I love her, too," she said; "somehow I know she would not have forgotten me."

"No, no, she would not!" Rupert cried; and they knelt together, hand in hand, looking into each other's eyes as tenderly as children.

"I have been lonelier than you," he said; "I have had nobody."

"Your mother died, too, when you were very young?"

"Yes, Sheba," hesitating a moment. "I will tell you something."

"Yes?"

"Uncle Tom loved her. He left his home partly because he could not stay and see her marry a man who—did not deserve her."

"Did she marry someone like that?" she asked.

His forehead flushed.

"She married my father," he said, "and he was a drunken maniac and broke her heart. I saw it break. When I first remember her, she was a lovely young girl with eyes like a gazelle's—and she cried all their beauty away, and grew tired and old and haggard before I was twelve. He is dead, but I hate him!"

"Oh!" she said; "you have been lonely!"

"I have been something worse than that!" he answered, and the gloom came back to his face. "I have been afraid."

"Afraid!" said Sheba. "Of what?"

"That I might end like him. How do I know? It is in my blood."

"Oh, no!" she cried.

"We have nearly all been like that," he said. "He was the maddest of them all, but he was only like many of the others. We grow tall, we De Willoughbys, we have black eyes, we drink and we make ourselves insane with morphine. It's a ghastly thing to think of," he shuddered. "When I am lonely, I think of it night and day."

"You must not," she said. "I—I will help you to forget it."

"I have often wondered if there was anyone who could," he answered. "I think perhaps you might."

When they returned to the Cross-roads there were several customers loitering on the post-office porch, awaiting their arrival, and endeavouring to wear an air of concealing no object whatever. The uneventful lives they led year after year made men and women alike avid for anything of the nature of news or incident. In some mysterious way the air itself seemed to communicate to them anything of interest which might be impending. Big Tom had not felt inclined to be diffuse on the subject of the arrival of his nephew, but each customer who brought in a pail of butter or eggs, a roll of jeans or a pair of chickens, seemed to become enlightened at once as to the position of affairs.

"Ye see," Tom heard Doty confiding to a friend as they sat together outside a window of the store; "ye see, it's this way—the D'Willerbys was born 'ristycrats. I dunno as ye'd think it to look at Tom. Thar's a heap to Tom, but he ain't my idee of a 'ristycrat. My idee is thet mebbe he let out from D'lisleville kase he warn't 'ristycratic enough fur 'em. Thar wus a heap of property in the family, 'pears like. An' now the hull lot of 'em's dead 'cept this yere boy that come last night. Stamps hes seen him in D'lisleville, an' he says he's a-stavin' lookin' young feller, an' thet thar's somethin' about a claim on the Guv'ment thet ef Tom an' him don't foller up, they're blamed fools. Now Tom, he ain't no blamed fool. Fur not bein' a blamed fool, I'll back Tom agin any man in Hamlin."

So, when the two young figures were seen sauntering along the road towards the store, there were lookers-on enough to regard them with interest.

"Now he's my idee of a 'ristycrat," remarked Mr. Doty, with the manner of a connoisseur. "Kinder tall an' slim, an' high-sperrity lookin'; Sheby's a gal, but she's got it too—thet thar sorter racehorse look. Now, hain't she?"

"I want you to see the store and the people in it," Sheba was saying. "It's my home, you know. Uncle Tom took me there the day after I was born. I used to play on the floor behind the counter and near the stove, and all those men are my friends."

Rupert had never before liked anything so much as he liked the simple lovingness of this life of hers. As she knew the mountains, the flowers, and the trees, she knew and seemed known by the very cows and horses and people she saw.

"That's John Hutton's old gray horse," she had said as she caught sight of one rider in the distance. "That is Billy Neil's yoke of oxen," at another time. "Good-morning, Mrs. Stebbins," she called out, with the prettiest possible cheer, to a woman in an orange cotton skirt as she passed on the road. "It seems to me sometimes," she said to Rupert, "as if I belonged to a family that was scattered over miles and lived in scores of houses. They all used to tell Uncle Tom what would disagree with me when I was cutting my teeth."

They mounted the steps of the porch, laughing the light, easy laugh of youth, and the loiterers regarded them with undisguised interest and admiration. In her pink cotton frock, and blooming like a rose in the shade of her frilled pink sunbonnet, Sheba was fair to see. Rupert presented an aspect which was admirably contrasting. His cool pallor and dense darkness of eyes and hair seemed a delightful background to her young tints of bloom.

"Thet thar white linen suit o' his'n," Mr. Doty said, "might hev been put on a-purpose to kinder set off her looks as well as his'n."

It was to Mr. Doty Sheba went first.

"Jake," she said, "this is my cousin Mr. Rupert De Willoughby from Delisleville."

"Mighty glad to be made 'quainted, sir," said Jake. "Tom's mightily sot up at yer comin'."

They all crowded about him and went through the same ceremony. It could scarcely be called a ceremony, it was such a simple and actually affectionate performance. It was so plain that his young good looks and friendly grace of manner reached their hearts at once, and that they were glad that he had come.

"They are glad you have come," Sheba said afterwards. "You are from the world over there, you know," waving her hand towards the blue of the mountains. "We are all glad when we see anything from the outside."

"Would you like to go there?" Rupert asked.

"Yes," she answered, with a little nod of her head. "If Uncle Tom will go—and you."

They spent almost an hour in the store holding a sort of levee. Every newcomer bade the young fellow welcome and seemed to accept him as a sort of boon.

"He's a mighty good-lookin' young feller," they all said, and the women added: "Them black eyes o' his'n an' the way his hair kinks is mighty purty."

"Their feelings will be hurt if you don't stay a little," said Sheba. "They want to look at you. You don't mind it, do you?"

"No," he answered, laughing; "it delights me. No one ever wanted to look at me before. But I should hardly think they would want to look at me when they might look at you instead."

"They have looked at me for eighteen years," she answered. "They looked at me when I had the measles, and saw me turn purple when I had the whooping-cough."

As they were going away, they passed a little man who had just arrived and was hitching to the horse-rail a raw-boned "clay-bank" mare. He looked up as they neared him and smiled peacefully.

"Howdy?" he said to Rupert. "Ye hain't seen me afore, but I seen you when I was to Delisleville. It wuz me as told yer nigger ye'd be a fool if ye didn't get Tom ter help yer to look up thet thar claim. Ye showed horse sense by comin'. Wish ye luck."

"Uncle Tom," said Sheba, as they sat at their dinner and Mornin walked backwards and forwards from the kitchen stove to the dining-room with chicken fried in cream, hot biscuits, and baked yams, "we saw Mr. Stamps and he wished us luck."

"He has a claim himself, hasn't he?" said Rupert. "He told Matt it was for a yoke of oxen."

Tom broke into a melodious roar of laughter.

"Well," he said, "if we can do as well by ours as Stamps will do by his, we shall be in luck. That yoke of oxen has grown from a small beginning. If it thrives as it goes on, the Government's in for a big thing."

"It has grown from a calf," said Sheba, "and it wasn't six weeks old."

"A Government mule kicked it and broke its leg," said Tom. "Stamps made veal of it, and in two months it was 'Thet heifer o' mine'—in six months it was a young steer——"

"Now it's a yoke of oxen," said Rupert; "and they were the pride of the county."

"Lord! Lord!" said Tom, "the United States has got something to engineer."



CHAPTER XXIII

It was doubtless Stamps who explained the value of the De Willoughby claim to the Cross-roads. Excited interest in it mounted to fever heat in a few days. The hitching rail was put to such active use that the horses shouldered each other and occasionally bit and kicked and enlivened the air with squeals. No one who had an opportunity neglected to appear at the post-office, that he or she might hear the news. Judge De Willoughby's wealth and possessions increased each time they were mentioned. The old De Willoughby place became a sort of princely domain, the good looks of the Judge's sons and daughters and the splendour of their gifts were spoken of almost with bated breath. The coal mines became gold mines, the money invested in them something scarcely to be calculated. The Government at Washington, it was even inferred, had not money enough in its treasury to refund what had been lost and indemnify for the injury done.

"And to think o' Tom settin' gassin' yere with us fellers," they said, admiringly, "jest same es if he warn't nothin'. A-settin' in his shirt sleeves an' tradin' fer eggs an' butter. Why, ef he puts thet thar claim through, he kin buy up Hamlin."

"I'd like ter see the way he'd fix up Sheby," said Mis' Doty. "He'd hev her dressed in silks an' satins—an' diamond earrings soon as look."

"Ye'll hev to go ter Washin'ton City sure enough, Tom," was the remark made oftenest. "When do ye 'low to start?"

But Tom was not as intoxicated by the prospect as the rest of them. His demeanour was thoughtful and unexhilarated.

"Whar do ye 'low to build yer house when ye come into yer money, Tom?" he was asked, gravely. "Shall ye hev a cupoly? Whar'll ye buy yer land?"

The instinct of Hamlin County tended towards expressing any sense of opulence by increasing the size of the house it lived in, or by building a new one, and invariably by purchasing land. Nobody had ever become rich in the neighbourhood, but no imagination would have found it possible to extend its efforts beyond a certain distance from the Cross-roads. The point of view was wholly primitive and patriarchal.

Big Tom was conscious that he had become primitive and patriarchal also, though the truth was that he had always been primitive.

As he sat on the embowered porch of his house in the evening and thought things over, while the two young voices murmured near him, his reflections were not greatly joyful. The years he had spent closed in by the mountains and surrounded by his simple neighbours had been full of peace. Since Sheba had belonged to him they had even held more than peace. The end had been that the lonely unhappiness of his youth had seemed a thing so far away that it was rather like a dream. Only Delia Vanuxem was not quite like a dream. Her pitying girlish face and the liquid darkness of her uplifted eyes always came back to him clearly when he called them up in thought. He called them up often during these days in which he was pondering as to what it was best to decide to do.

"It's the boy who brings her back so," he told himself. "Good Lord, how near she seems! The grass has been growing over her for many a year, and I'm an old fellow, but she looks just as she did then."

The world beyond the mountains did not allure him. It was easier to sit and see the sun rise and set within the purple boundary than to face life where it was less simple, and perhaps less kindly. It was from a much less advanced and concentrated civilisation he had fled in his youth, and the years which had passed had not made him more fitted to combat with what was more complex.

"Trading for butter and eggs over the counter of a country store, and discussing Doty's corn crop and Hayworth's pigs hasn't done anything particular towards fitting me to shine in society," he said. "It suits me well enough, but it's not what's wanted at a ball or a cabinet minister's reception." And he shook his head. "I'd rather stay where I am—a darned sight."

But the murmuring voices went on near him, and little bursts of laughter rang out, or two figures wandered about the garden, and his thoughts always came back to one point—a point where the sun seemed to shine on things and surround them with a dazzling radiance.

"Yes, it's all very well for me," he concluded more than once. "It's well enough for me to sit down and spend the rest of my life looking at the mountains and watching summer change into winter; but they are only beginning it all—just beginning."

So one night he left his chair and went out and walked between them in the moonlight, a hand resting on a shoulder of each.

"See," he said, "I want you two to help me to make up my mind."

"About going away?" asked Rupert, looking round at him quickly.

"Yes. Do you know we may have a pretty hard time? We've no money. We should have to live scant enough, and, unless we had luck, we might come back here worse off than we left."

"But we should have tried, and we should have been on the other side of the mountains," said Sheba.

"So we should," said Tom, reflectively. "And there's a good deal in seeing the other side of the mountains when people are young."

Sheba put her hand on his and looked at him with a glowing face.

"Uncle Tom," she said, "oh, let us go!"

"Uncle Tom," said Rupert, "I must go!"

The line showed itself between his black brows again, though it was not a frown. He put his hand in his pocket and held it out, open, with a solitary twenty-dollar bill lying in it.

"That's all I've got," he said, "and that's borrowed. If the claim is worth nothing, I must earn enough to pay it back. All right. We'll all three go," said Tom.

The next day he began to develop the plans he had been allowing to form vaguely as a background to his thoughts. They were not easy to carry out in the existing condition of general poverty. But at Lucasville, some forty miles distant, he was able to raise a mortgage on his land.

"If the worst comes to the worst," he said to Sheba, "after we have seen the other side of the mountains, do you think you could stand it to come back and live with me in the rooms behind the store?"

Sheba sat down upon his knee and put her arms round his neck, as she had done when she was ten years old.

"I could live with you anywhere," she said. "The only thing I couldn't stand would be to have to live away from you."

Tom laughed and kissed her. He laughed that he might smother a sigh. Rupert was standing near and looking at her with the eyes that were so like Delia Vanuxem's.



CHAPTER XXIV

For an imaginative or an untravelled person to approach the city of Washington at sunrise on a radiant morning, is a thing far from unlikely to be remembered, since a white and majestic dome, rising about a white structure set high and supported by stately colonnades, the whole gleaming fair against a background of blue sky, forms a picture which does not easily melt away.

Those who reared this great temple of white stone and set it on a hilltop to rule and watch over the land, builded better than they knew. To the simple and ardent idealist its white stateliness must always suggest something symbolic, and, after all, it is the ardent and simple idealist whose dreams and symbols paint to prosaic human minds the beautiful impossibilities whose unattainable loveliness so allures as to force even the unexalted world into the endeavour to create such reproductions of their forms as crude living will allow.

Tom leaned against the side of the car window and watched the great dome with an air of curious reflection. Sheba and Rupert leaned forward and gazed at it with dreaming eyes.

"It looks as the capitol of a great republic ought to look," Rupert said. "Spotless and majestic, and as if it dominated all it looks down upon with pure laws and dignity and justice."

"Just so," said Tom.

In the various crises of political excitement in Hamlin County he had taken the part of an unbiassed but humorous observer, and in that character had gained much experience of a primitive kind. What he had been led chiefly to remark in connection with the "great republic" was that the majesty and spotlessness of its intentions were not invariably realised by mere human units.

"Well," he said, as he took down his valise from the rack, "we're coming in here pretty well fixed for leaving the place millionaires. If we had only fifteen cents in our pockets, it would be a dead sure thing, according to all the biographers I ever read. The only thing against us is that we have a little more—but it's not enough to spoil our luck, that I'll swear."

He was not without reason in the statement. Few voyagers on the ocean of chance could have dared the journey with less than they had in their possession.

"What we've got to do," he had said to Rupert, "is to take care of Sheba. We two can rough it."

They walked through the awakening city, finding it strange and bare with its broad avenues and streets ill-paved, bearing traces everywhere of the tragedy of war through which it had passed. The public buildings alone had dignity; for the rest, it wore a singularly provincial and uncompleted aspect; its plan was simple and splendid in its vistas and noble spaces, but the houses were irregular and without beauty of form; negro shanties huddled against some of the most respectable, and there were few whose windows or doors did not announce that board and lodging might be obtained within. There was no look of well-being or wealth anywhere; the few equipages in the streets had seen hard service; the people who walked were either plainly dressed or shabby genteel; about the doors of the principal hotels there were groups of men who wore, most of them, dispirited or anxious faces. Ten years later the whole aspect of the place was changing, but at this time it was passing through a period of natural fatigue and poverty, and was not an inspiring spectacle to penniless new-comers.

"It reminds me a little of Delisleville, after all," said Rupert.

Beyond the more frequented quarters of the town, they found broad, unkempt, and as yet unlevelled avenues and streets, where modest houses straggled, perched on high banks with an air of having found themselves there quite by accident. The banks were usually grass-covered, and the white picket fences enclosed bits of ground where scant fruit-trees and disorderly bushes grew; almost every house possessed a porch, and almost every porch was scrambled over by an untidy honeysuckle or climbing rose which did its best to clothe with some grace the dilapidated woodwork and the peeled and blistered paint.

Before one of these houses Tom stopped to look at a lopsided sign in the little garden, which announced that rooms were to be rented within.

"Perhaps we can find something here," he said, "that may suit the first ventures of millionaires. It's the sort of thing that will appeal to the newspaper man who writes the thing up; 'First home of the De Willoughbys when they arrived in Washington to look up their claim.' It'll make a good woodcut to contrast with 'The great De Willoughby mansion in Fifth Avenue. Cost five hundred thousand!'"

They mounted the wooden steps built into the bank and knocked at the door. Rupert and Sheba exchanged glances with a little thrill. They were young enough to feel a sort of excitement even in taking this first modest step.

A lady with a gentle, sallow face and a faded black cotton gown, opened the door. Her hair hung in depressed but genteel ringlets on each side of her countenance; at the back it formed a scant coil upheld by a comb. Tom thought he observed a gleam of hope in her eye when she saw them. She spoke with the accent of Virginia.

"Yes, suh, we have rooms disengaged. Won't you come in?" she said.

She led them into a neat but rather painful little parlour. The walls were decorated with photographs of deceased relatives in oval frames, and encased in glass there was a floral wreath made of hair of different shades and one of white, waxen-looking flowers, with a vaguely mortuary suggestion in their arrangement. There was a basket of wax fruit under a shade on the centre table, a silver ice-water pitcher on a salver, and two photograph albums whose binding had become loosened by much handling. There was also a book with a red and gold cover, bearing in ornate letters the title "Life of General Robert Lee."

"The rooms are not lawge," the lady said, "but they are furnished with the things I brought from my fawther's house in Virginia. My fawther was Judge Burford, of the Burford family of England. There's a Lord Burford in England, we always heard. It is a very old family."

She looked as if she found a vague comfort in the statement, and Tom did not begrudge it to her. She looked very worn and anxious, and he felt it almost possible that during the last few months she might not always have had quite enough to eat.

"I never thawt in the days when I was Judge Burford's dawtah of Burfordsville," she explained, "that I should come to Washington to take boarders. There was a time when it was thawt in Virginia that Judge Burford might reach the White House if he would allow himself to be nominated. It's a great change of circumstances. Did you want board with the rooms?"

"Well——" began Tom.

She interrupted him in some little hurry.

"I'm afraid it wouldn't be convenient for me to board anyone," she said; "I've not been accustomed to providing for boarders, and I'm not conveniently situated. If—if you preferred to economize——"

"We do," said Tom. "We have come to look up a claim, and people on that business are pretty safe to have to economize, I've been told!"

"Ah, a claim!" she ejaculated, with combined interest and reverence. "Indeed, you are quite right about its being necessary to economize. Might I enqu'ah if it is a large one?"

"I believe it is," Tom answered; "and it's not likely to be put through in a month, and we have not money enough to keep us in luxury for much more. Probably we shall be able to make it last longer if we take rooms and buy our own food."

"I'm sure you would, suh," she answered, with a little eager flush on her cheek. "When people provide for themselves, they can sometimes do without—things." She added the last word hurriedly and gave a little cough which sounded nervous.

It was finally agreed that they should take three little rooms she showed them, in one of which there was a tiny stove, upon which they could prepare such simple food as they could provide themselves with. The arrangement was not a luxurious one, but it proved to be peculiarly suitable to the owners of the great De Willoughby claim.

As they had not broken fast, Tom went out to explore the neighbourhood in search of food. He thought he remembered having seen in a side street a little store. When he returned, after some wanderings, a wood fire was crackling in the stove and Sheba had taken off her hat and put on a white apron.

"Hello!" exclaimed Tom.

"I borrowed it from Miss Burford," she said. "I went down to see her. She let us have the wood, too. Rupert made the fire."

She took the paper bags from Tom's hands and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, smiling sweetly at his rather troubled face.

"All my life you have been doing things for me. Now it is my turn," she said. "I have watched Mornin ever since I was born. I am going to be your servant."

In an hour from the time they had taken possession of their quarters, they were sitting at a little table before an open window, making a breakfast of coffee and eggs. Sheba was presiding, and both men were looking at her flushed cheeks adoringly.

"Is the coffee good, Uncle Tom?" she said. "Just tell me it is good."

"Well," said Tom, "for the first effort of a millionairess, I should say it was."



CHAPTER XXV

The year before this Judge Rutherford had been sent to Congress by the Republican Party of Hamlin County. His election had been a wildly exciting and triumphant one. Such fiery eloquence as his supporters displayed had rarely, if ever, been poured forth before. It was proved by each orator that the return of the Democratic candidate would plunge the whole country into the renewal of bloodshed and war. This catastrophe having been avoided by the Judge's election, the nation—as represented by Hamlin County—had settled down with prospects of peace, prosperity, and the righting of all old grievances. The Judge bought a new and shining valise, a new and shining suit of broadcloth, and a silk hat equally shining and new, and went triumphantly to Washington, the sole drawback to his exultation being that he was obliged to leave Jenny behind him with the piano, the parlour furniture, and the children.

"But he'll hev ye thar in the White House, ef ye give him time," said an ardent constituent who called to congratulate.

There seemed no end to a political career begun under such auspices but the executive mansion itself. The confidence of the rural communities in their representatives was great and respectful. It was believed that upon their arrival at the capital, business in both Houses was temporarily postponed until it had been supported by their expression of opinion and approval. It was believed also that the luxury and splendour of a Congressman's life was such as ancient Rome itself might have paled before and envied.

"A man in Washin'ton city with a Congristman's wages has got to be a purty level-headed feller not to get into high-falutin' ways of livin' an' throwin' money about. He's got to keep in his mind that this yere's a republic an' not a 'ristycratic, despotic monarchy."

This was a sentiment often expressed, and Tom De Willoughby himself had had vaguely respectful views of the circumstances and possible surroundings of a representative of his country.

But when he made his first visit to Judge Rutherford, he did not find him installed in a palatial hotel and surrounded by pampered menials. He was sitting in a back room in a boarding-house—a room which contained a folding bedstead and a stove. He sat in a chair which was tilted on its hind legs, and his feet rested on the stove's ornamental iron top. He had just finished reading a newspaper which lay on the floor beside him, and his hands were thrust into his pockets. He looked somewhat depressed in spirits.

When Tom was ushered into the room, the Judge looked round at him, uttered a shout of joy, and sprang to his feet.

"Tom," he cried out, falling upon him and shaking his hand rather as if he would not object to shaking it off and retaining it as an agreeable object forever. "Tom! Old Tom! Jupiter, Tom! I don't know how you got here or where you came from, but—Jupiter! I'm glad to see you."

He went on shaking his hand as he dragged him across the room and pushed him into a dingy armchair by the window; and when he had got him there, he stood over him grasping his shoulder, shaking his hand still. Tom saw that his chin was actually twitching in a curious way which made his goatee move unsteadily.

"The legislation of your country hasn't made you forget home folks, has it?" said Tom.

"Forget 'em!" exclaimed the Judge, throwing himself into a seat opposite and leaning forward excitedly with his hands on his knees. "I never remembered anything in my life as I remember them. They're never out of my mind, night or day. I've got into a way of dreaming I'm back to Barnesville, talking to the boys at the post-office, or listening to Jenny playing 'Home, Sweet Home' or 'The Maiden's Prayer.' I was a bit down yesterday and couldn't eat, and in the night there I was in the little dining-room, putting away fried chicken and hot biscuits as fast as the nigger girl could bring the dishes on the table. Good Lord! how good they were! There's nothing like them in Washington city," he added, and he heaved a big sigh.

"Why, man," said Tom, "you're homesick!"

The Judge heaved another sigh, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets and looking out of the window.

"Yes, by Jingo!" he said; "that's what I am."

He withdrew his gaze from the world outside the window and returned to Tom.

"You see," he said, "I've lived different. When a man has been born and brought up among the mountains and lived a country life among folks that are all neighbours and have neighbourly ways, city life strikes him hard. Politics look different here; they are different. They're not of the neighbourly kind. Politicians ain't joking each other and having a good time. They don't know anything about the other man, and they don't care a damn. What's Hamlin County to them? Why, they don't know anything about Hamlin County, and, as far as I've got, they don't want to. They've got their own precincts to attend to, and they're going to do it. When a new man comes in, if he ain't a pretty big fellow that knows how to engineer things and say things to make them listen to him, he's only another greenhorn. Now, I'm not a big fellow, Tom; I've found that out! and the first two months after I came, blamed if I wasn't so homesick and discouraged that if it hadn't been for seeming to go back on the boys, durned if I don't believe I should have gone home."

Big Tom sat and regarded his honest face thoughtfully.

"Perhaps you're a bigger man than you know," he said. "Perhaps you'll find that out in time, and perhaps other people will."

The Judge shook his head.

"I've not got education enough," he said. "And I'm not an orator. All there is to me is that I'm not going back on the boys and Hamlin. I came here to do the square thing by them and the United States, and blamed if I ain't going to do it as well as I know how."

"Now, look here," said Big Tom, "that's pretty good politics to start with. If every man that came here came to stand by his party—and the United States—and do the square thing by them, the republic would be pretty safe, if they couldn't do another durned thing."

The Judge rubbed his already rather rough head and seemed to cheer up a little.

"Do you think so?" he said.

Big Tom stood up and gave him a slap on his shoulder.

"Think so?" he exclaimed, in his great, cheerful voice. "I'm a greenhorn myself, but, good Lord! I know it. Making laws for a few million people is a pretty big scheme, and it's the fellows who intend to do the square thing who are going to put it through. This isn't ancient Greece, or Sparta, but it's my impression that the men who planned and wrote the Constitution, and did the thinking and orating in those days, had a sort of idea of building up a thing just as ornamental and good to write history about as either one; and, what's more, they counted on just such fellows as you to go on carrying the stones and laying them plumb, long after they were gone."

"Jupiter, Tom!" the Judge said, with something actually like elation in his voice, "it's good to hear you. It brings old Hamlin back and gives a man sand. You're an orator, yourself."

"Am I?" said Tom. "No one ever called my attention to it before. If it's true, perhaps it'll come in useful."

"Now, just think of me sitting here gassing," exclaimed the Judge, "and never asking what you are here for. What's your errand, Tom?"

"Perhaps I'm here to defraud the Government," Tom answered, sitting down again; "or perhaps I've got a fair claim against it. That's what I've come to Washington to find out—with the other claimant."

"A claim!" cried the Judge. "And you've left the Cross-roads—and Sheba?"

"Sheba and the other claimant are in some little rooms we've taken out near Dupont Circle. The other claimant is the only De Willoughby left beside myself, and he is a youngster of twenty-three. He's my brother De Courcy's son."

The Judge glowed with interest. He heard the whole story, and his excitement grew as he listened. The elements of the picturesque in the situation appealed to him greatly. The curiously composite mind of the American contains a strong element of the romantic. In its most mercantile forms it is attracted by the dramatic; when it hails from the wilds, it is drawn by it as a child is drawn by colour and light.

"It's a big thing," the Judge ejaculated at intervals. "When I see you sitting there, Tom, just as you used to sit in your chair on the store-porch, it seems as if it could hardly be you that's talking. Why, man, it'll mean a million!"

"If I get money enough to set the mines at work," said Tom, "it may mean more millions than one."

The dingy square room, with its worn carpet, its turned-up bedstead, shabby chairs, and iron stove, temporarily assumed a new aspect. That its walls should contain this fairy tale of possible wealth and power and magnificence made it seem quite soberly respectable, and that Big Tom, sitting in the second-hand looking armchair, which creaked beneath his weight, should, in matter-of-fact tones, be relating such a story, made Judge Rutherford regard him with a kind of reverent trouble.

"Sheba, now," he said, "Sheba may be one of the biggest heiresses in the States. Lord! what luck it was for her that fellow left her behind!"

"It was luck for me," said Tom. And a faint, contemplative grin showed itself on his countenance. He was thinking, as he often did, of the afternoon when he returned from Blair's Hollow and opened the door of the room behind the store to find the wooden cradle stranded like a small ark in the corner.



CHAPTER XXVI

Naturally Judge Rutherford gravitated towards the little house near Dupont Circle. The first night he mounted the stairs and found himself in the small room confronting the primitive supper he had been invited to share with big Tom and his family, his honest countenance assumed a cheerfulness long a stranger to it.

The room looked such a simple, homely place, with its Virginia made carpet, its neat, scant furnishing, and its table set with the plain little meal. The Judge's homesick heart expanded within him.

He shook hands with Tom with fervour. Rupert he greeted with friendly affection. Sheba—on her entering the room with a plate of hot biscuits which she had been baking in Miss Burford's stove—he almost kissed.

"Now this is something like," he said. "I didn't know there was anything so like Barnesville in all Washington city. And there wasn't till you people brought it. I don't know what it is, but, by thunder, it does a man's heart good."

He sat down with the unconventional air of ease he wore in Barnesville when he established himself in one of Jenny's parlour chairs for the evening.

"Lord, Lord!" he said; "you're home folks, and you've got home ways, that's what it is. A month in one of these fashionable hotels would just about kill me. Having to order things written out on a card and eat 'em with a hundred folks looking on—there's no comfort in it. Give me a place where you can all sit up together round the table and smell the good hot coffee and biscuit cooking and the ham and chicken being fried in the kitchen."

Sheba had cooked the supper in Miss Burford's kitchen. Her hot biscuits and coffee were made after Mornin's most respected recipes, and her housewifely air was tenderly anxious.

"If it is not very good, Judge Rutherford," she said, standing shyly at the head of the table before she took her place, "it is because I am only learning."

"You have learned, Sheba," said the Judge, looking at the plate of light golden brown and cream white biscuit with the sensitive eye of a connoisseur. "That plate of biscuit is Barnesville and Sophrony all over."

Sheba blushed with joy.

"Oh, Uncle Tom," she said; "do you think it is? I should so like to remind him of Barnesville."

"Good Lord!" said the Judge. "Fact is, you've made me feel already as if Tom Scott might break out yelling in the back yard any minute."

After the supper was over and the table clear the party of four sat down to talk business and make plans. The entire inexperience of the claimants was an obstacle in their path, but Judge Rutherford, though not greatly wiser than themselves, had means of gaining information which would be of value. As he looked over the papers and learned the details of the story, the good fellow's interest mounted to excitement. He rubbed his head and grew flushed and bright of eye.

"By Jupiter, Tom!" he exclaimed, "I believe I can be of some use to you—I swear I believe I can. I haven't had much experience, but I've seen something of this claim business, and if I set my wits to work I can find out from other fellows who know more. I'll—" After a moment's reflection. "I'll have a talk with Farquhar to-morrow. That's what I'll do. Great Scott!" in a beaming outburst, "if I could push it through for you, how pleased Jenny would be."

When he went away Tom accompanied him downstairs. Sheba and Rupert followed them, and all three found themselves lured out into the moonlit night to saunter with him a few yards down the light avenue, talking still about their fairy story. The Judge himself was as fascinated by it as if he had been a child.

"Why, it's such a good story to tell," he expatiated; "and there must be a great deal in that. I never heard a better story for gaining sympathy—that fine old Southern aristocrat standing by the Union in a red-hot secessionist town—actually persecuted on account of it. He was persecuted, wasn't he?" he enquired of Rupert.

"Well," Rupert answered, "everybody was furious at him, of course—all his friends. People who had known him all his life passed him in the street without speaking. He'd been very popular, and he felt it terribly. He never was the same man after it began. He was old, and his spirit gave way."

"Just so!" exclaimed the Judge, stopping upon the pavement, elated even to oratory by the picture presented. "Fine old Southern aristocrat—on the brink of magnificent fortune—property turned into money that he may realise it—war breaks out, ruins him—Spartan patriotism—one patriot in a town of rebels hated and condemned by everybody—but faithful to his country. Friends—old friends—refuse to recognise him. Fortune gone—friends lost—heart broken." He snatched Tom's big hand and shook it enthusiastically. "Tom!" he said; "I'd like to make a speech to the House about it myself. I believe they would listen to me. How set up Jenny would be—how set up she'd be."

He left them all in a glow of enthusiasm; they could see him gesticulating a little to himself as he walked down the avenue in the moonlight.

"That's just like him," said Tom; "he'd rather please Jenny than set the House of Representatives on fire. And he'd undertake the whole thing—work to give a man a fortune for mere neighbourliness. We were a neighbourly lot in Hamlin, after all."

The Judge went home to his boarding-house and sat late in his shabby armchair, his legs stretched out, his hands clasped on the top of his rough head. He was thinking the thing out, and as he thought it out his excitement grew. Sometimes he unclasped his hands and rubbed his hair with restless sigh; more than once he unconsciously sprang to his feet, walked across the floor two or three times, and then sat down again. He was not a sharp schemer, he had not even reached the stage of sophistication which would have suggested to him that sharp scheming might be a necessary adjunct in the engineering of such matters as Government claims. From any power or tendency to diplomatise he was as free as the illustrative bull in a china shop. His bucolic trust in the simple justice and honest disinterestedness of the political representatives of his native land (it being granted they were of the Republican party) might have appeared a touching thing to a more astute and experienced person who had realised it to its limits. When he rubbed his hair excitedly or sprang up to walk about, these manifestations were indications, not of doubt or distrust, but of elated motion. It was the emotional aspect of the situation which delighted and disturbed him, the dramatic picturesqueness of it. Here was Tom—good old Tom—all Hamlin knew Tom and his virtues and witticisms—Lord! there wasn't a man in the county who didn't love him—yes, love him. And here was Sheba that Tom had been a father to. And what a handsome little creature she'd grown into—and, but for Tom, the Lord knew what would have become of her. And there was that story of the De Willoughbys of Delisleville—handsome, aristocratic lot, among the biggest bugs in the State—the fine old Judge with his thousands of acres lying uncultivated, and he paying his taxes on them through sheer patriarchal pleasure in being a big landowner. For years the Government had benefited by his tax-paying, while he had gained nothing. And then there was the accidental discovery of the splendid wealth hidden in the bowels of the earth—and the old aristocrat's energy and enterprise. Why, if the war had not brought ruin to him and he had carried out his plans, the whole State would have been the richer for his mines. Capital would have been drawn in, labour would have been in demand—things would have developed—outsiders would have bought land—new discoveries would have been made—the wealth of the country's resources would have opened up—the Government itself would have benefited by the thing. And then the war had ruined all. And yet the old Judge, overwhelmed with disaster as he was, had stood by the Government and had been scorned and deserted, and had died broken-hearted at the end, and here were his sole descendants—good old Tom and his little beauty of a protegee—(no, Sheba wasn't a descendant, but somehow she counted), and this fine young De Willoughby—all of them penniless. Why, the justice of the thing stared a man in the face; a claim like that must go through.

At this juncture of his thought Judge Rutherford was standing upright in the middle of his room. His hair was in high disorder and his countenance flushed. He struck his right fist hard against the palm of his left hand.

"Why, the whole thing's as straight as a string," he said. "It's got to go through. I'll go and see Farquhar to-morrow."

* * * * *

Farquhar was a cleverer man than the representative from Hamlin County. He had been returned several times by his constituents, and his life had been spent in localities more allied to effete civilization than was Barnesville. He knew his Washington and had an astute interest in the methods and characteristics of new members of Congress, particularly perhaps such as the rural districts loomed up behind as a background. Judge Rutherford he had observed at the outset of his brief career, in the days when he had first appeared in the House of Representatives in his new broadcloth with its new creases, and with the uneasy but conscientious expression in his eye.

"There's a good fellow, I should say," he had remarked to the member at the desk next to him. "Doesn't know what to do, exactly—isn't quite sure what he has come for—but means to accomplish it, whatsoever it may turn out to be, to the best of his ability. He'd be glad to make friends. He's used to neighbours and unceremonious intimacies."

He made friends with him himself and found the acquaintance of interest at times. The faithfully reproduced atmosphere of Barnesville had almost a literary colour. Occasionally, though not frequently, he encouraged delineation of Jenny and Tom Scott and Thacker and "the boys." He had even inhaled at a distance vague whiffs of Sophronia's waffles.

On the morning after the evening spent at Dupont Circle Judge Rutherford frankly buttonholed him in the lobby.

"Farquhar," he said, "I'm chock full of a story. It kept me awake half the night. I want to ask your advice about it. It's about a claim."

"You shouldn't have let it keep you awake," replied Farquhar. "Claims are not novel enough. It's my opinion that Washington is more than half populated just now with people who have come to present claims."

Judge Rutherford's countenance fell a little as the countenance of an enthusiast readily falls beneath the breath of non-enthusiasm.

"Well," he said, "I guess there are plenty of them—but there are not many like this. You never heard such a story. It would be worth listening to, even if you were in the humour to walk ten miles to kick a claim."

Farquhar laughed.

"I have been in them, Guv'nor," he said. "The atmosphere is heavy with carpet-baggers who all have a reason for being paid for something by the Government. There's one of them now—that little Hoosier hanging about the doorway. He's from North Carolina, and wants pay for a herd of cattle."

In the hall outside the lobby a little man stood gazing with pale small eyes intent upon the enchanted space within. He wore a suit of blue jeans evidently made in the domestic circle. He scanned each member of Congress who went in or out, and his expression was a combination of furtive eagerness and tentative appeal.

"I believe I've seen him before," remarked Judge Rutherford, "but I don't know him."

"He's been hanging about the place for weeks," said Farquhar. "He's always in the strangers' gallery when claims come up for discussion. He looks as if he'd be likely to get what he has come for, Hoosier as he is."

"I want to talk to you about the De Willoughbys," said Rutherford. "I can't rest until I've told someone about it. I want you to advise me what to do."

Farquhar allowed himself to be led away into a more secluded spot. He was not, it must be confessed, greatly interested, but he was well disposed towards the member from Hamlin and would listen. They sat down together in one of the rooms where such talk might be carried on, and the Judge forthwith plunged into his story.

It was, as his own instincts had told him, a good story. He was at once simple and ornate in the telling—simple in his broad directness, and ornate in his dramatic and emotional touches. He began with the picture of the De Willoughbys of Delisleville—the autocratic and aristocratic Judge, the two picturesque sons, and the big, unpicturesque one who disappeared from his native town to reappear in the mountains of North Carolina and live his primitive life there as the object of general adulation. He unconsciously made Big Tom the most picturesque figure of the lot. Long before he had finished sketching him, Farquhar—who had been looking out of the window—turned his face towards him. He began to feel himself repaid for his amiable if somewhat casual attention. He did not look out of the window again. The history of big Tom De Willoughby alone was worth hearing. Farquhar did not find it necessary to call Judge Rutherford's attention to the fact that Sheba and the mystery of Blair's Hollow were not to be regarded as evidence. He realised that they adorned the situation and seemed to prove things whether it was strictly true that they did so or not. The discovery of the coal, the fortunes and disasters of Judge de Willoughby, the obstinate loyalty abhorred and condemned of his neighbours, his loneliness and poverty and death—his wasted estates, the big, bare, empty house in which his sole known heir lived alone, were material to hold any man's attention, and, enlarged upon by the member from Hamlin, were effective indeed.

"Now," said the Judge, wiping his forehead when he had finished, "what do you think of that? Don't you think these people have a pretty strong claim?"

"That story sounds as if they had," answered Farquhar; "but the Government isn't eager to settle claims—and you never know what will be unearthed. If Judge De Willoughby had not been such a blatantly open old opposer of his neighbour's political opinions these people wouldn't have a shadow of a chance."

"By Jupiter!" exclaimed Rutherford, delightedly; "he was persecuted— persecuted."

"It was a good thing for his relatives," said Farquhar. "Did you say the people had come to Washington?"

"All three of them," answered the Judge, and this time his tone was exultant; "Tom, and Sheba, and Rupert. They've rented some little rooms out near Dupont Circle."

"I should like to be taken to see them," said Farquhar, reflectively. "I should like to have a look at Big Tom De Willoughby."