A vivacious and brilliant state of being flooded him; he felt capable of profoundly witty conversation, and laughed at the solemn absurdities of the Ammidons, at his father attempting to call down a blessing out of the empty sky upon their food, at his sister's lugubrious countenance, the childish emotions of Nettie. What a nonsensical strutting business life was.

The confines of his room were lost in an amber radiance that filled all space; it was at once a light and a perfume and charged with a sense of impending rapture. A sparkling crimson shape floated down from infinite skies—Taou Yuen. She wore a bridal costume, cunningly embroidered with the phoenix, a hood of thin gold plate, and a band of red silk about her brow bore the eight copper figures of the beings who are immortal. Her hair was ornamented by the pure green jade pins of summer, her hanging wrists were heavy with virgin silver, while her face was like the desirous August moon flushed in low vapors.

He raised his bony arms—the wide silk sleeves falling back—his emaciated yellow hands. From under his dark eyelids there was a glitter of vision like the sheen on mica... Taou Yuen floated nearer.

Edward Dunsack woke suddenly, at the darkest ebb of night, and started hurriedly to his feet. A sickening vertigo, a whirling head, sent him lurching across the room. He came in contact with a chest of drawers, and clung to it with the feeling that his legs were shriveling beneath him. His consciousness slowly returned, and with it a pain like ruthless tearing fingers searched his body. The rectangle of the open window, only less dark than the room, promised a relief from the strangled effort of his breathing, and he fell across the ledge, lifting his face to a starless and unstirring heat. Waves of complete physical exhaustion passed over him. An utter horror fastened on his brain.

"Oh, God," he said, with numb lips, "we thank Thee for this, Thy daily blessing—" He broke off with an effort. That was his father pronouncing a grace. "Oh God—" he said again, when it seemed to him that in the darkness he saw the blank placidity of a Buddha carved from gray stone. Tears ran over his sunken cheeks, salt and warm like blood.



VI

The night was so oppressive, continuing such an unusually sultry period for the season, that Sidsall, ordinarily impervious to the effects of weather, was unable to sleep. Although the door between her room and her parents' was shut, she heard her father—his step, at once quick and firm, was easily recognizable moving about beyond. Her restlessness increased and she got up, crossing the floor to the window open on the garden, where she knelt, the thick plait of her hair across her cheek and shoulder, with her arms propped on the ledge. The depths of sky were hidden in a darkness like night made visible; and, in place of moving air, there were slow waves of perfume, now from the lilacs and now from the opening hedge of June roses.

Her brain was filled by a multitude of minor images and speculations, but fixed at their back was the presence of Roger Brevard. She approved of him absolutely. He had exactly the formal manner that gave her a pleasant sense of delicate importance, and his clothes were beautiful, a sprig of rose geranium in a buttonhole and his gloves and boots immaculate. She liked rather slight graceful men, she thought, with the quiet voices of a polite ancestry. Naturally Olive Wibird preferred less restrained companions, although Heaven knew that Olive appeared to make all kinds welcome. Olive's opinion of Roger Brevard would have been very different if he had asked her to dance.

Sidsall recalled the quadrille he had led her through at Lacy's party; he had been a perfect partner, at once light and firm. He had been a habitual caller at Java Head before that occasion, and had come in the same manner since. That is, casually viewed, his visits seemed the same; but in reality there were some small yet significant differences. They were all held in his attitude of the afternoon when he had stayed talking exclusively to her on the steps.

She couldn't say just what the change was; when she attempted to examine it her thoughts became confused and turned to a hundred absurd considerations, such as—at present—the loveliness of the night. The scents of the flowers were overwhelming. He got on, too, better than almost anyone else with her Uncle Gerrit's Manchu wife. She had watched them together until it had dawned on her that the two had some important qualities in common—they both appeared to stand a little aside from the world, as if they were against the wall at a cotillion. She thought this in spite of the fact that it was precisely what Roger Brevard never did; it was true in the mysterious way of so much now that came from ideas over which she had no control.

The subject of Uncle Gerrit's wife—she had not yet been told or decided for herself what to call her—was inexhaustibly enthralling. But, before she was again fairly launched in it, she paused to wonder at the presence of the dreadful Dunsack man on their lawn. His hollow yellow cheeks and staring brown eyes which somehow made her think of pain, his restless hands and speech, all repelled her violently. Taou—Taou Yuen hadn't liked him either: when, after the longest time, he had gone, she replied to a short comment from her, Sidsall's, father:

"Rotten wood cannot be carved."

Some one else had mentioned opium. She had intended to ask more particularly about this, but it slipped from her mind. She remembered that her grandfather made one of his familiar exclamations peppered with an appalling word. He was really very embarrassing, and she was glad that Roger Brevard had left. It was a bad example for Laurel, too, who copied him, and only that morning said "My God" to Miss Gomes. Her mind swung back to the consideration of the Manchu: The latter was the fact upon which Camilla was so insistent, that in this case a Manchu was a noble, almost a princess. Camilla suffered dreadfully from the endless questions put to her outside their house about Uncle Gerrit's wife. She had more than once wept at the public blot laid on them. Laurel was frankly inquisitive and Janet as puzzling as usual.

The clothes of course were enchanting, the richness of the materials and hand embroidery marvellous; her jewelry was never ending. It didn't seem quite like clothing, in the sense of her own tarlatan and crinoline, her waist which Hodie wouldn't properly lace and tulle draping; there was a certain resemblance to the dressing in Van Amburgh's circus; but—in spite of Camilla's private laments—every inch of it was distinguished. The layers of paint upset them, but Uncle Gerrit had explained, a little impatiently, that it was a Manchu custom, adding that the world couldn't be all measured and judged by Salem.

Sidsall liked her rather than not, she decided; and determined to make an effort to know her better. She wanted specially to discover the nature of the bond that held one to the other, and explore, in safety, the depths of love. She could not help feeling that her uncle's affair, extraordinary as it was, must throw light on the whole complicated business of marriage. ... The clock in the hall struck an indeterminate half hour, it appeared to grow lighter outside, and there was a twittering of martins from the stables. From above came the vigorous harsh cawing of crows. Suddenly sleepy she returned to bed and almost immediately the room was flooded with sunlight.

It was an accepted fact now that Taou Yuen, the Garden of Peaches, stayed in her room until long after breakfast; and when Sidsall, rising from the table, found a servant taking up a pot of hot water for tea, she secured it and knocked carefully on the door above. The slurring hesitating voice said "Come in," and she entered with a diffidence covered by a cheerfully polite morning greeting. She found the other in crepe de Chine pantaloons wrapped tightly about her ankles and bound over quilted muslin socks with gay brocaded ribbons and a short floating gown of gray silk worked with willow leaves. Her hair was an undisturbed complication of lustrous black, gold bodkins and flowers massed on either side; and her face, without paint or powder, was as smooth as ivory and the color of very pale coffee and cream.

Sidsall saw that she was at her toilet, and she put down the pot of steaming water, moving toward the door; but Taou Yuen, with a charmingly shy gesture, begged her to stay. She swiftly drew a cup of tea from silvery leaves, filled and lighted the minute bowl of her tobacco pipe, deeply inhaled the smoke; then returned to a mirror.

Fascinated, Sidsall followed every motion.

Taou Yuen polished her face sharply with a hot damp cloth and then dipped her fingers in a jar that held a sticky amber substance. "Honey," she said briefly, rubbing it into her cheeks and palms. Next she attacked her eyebrows, and skillfully wielding a thin silk cord left arches like pencil markings. At times she interrupted her preparations to turn to Sidsall with a little smile so engaging that the girl smiled sympathetically in answer. There were a gilt paper box of rice powder, with which she drenched her countenance, leaves of carmine transferred to her cheeks with a wet finger, and a silver pot of rouge from which she coated her lips. As she gazed approvingly at her reflection Sidsall said:

"It's very beautiful."

Her eyes, drawn up toward her temples, shone gayly; and, close to Sidsall, she touched the latter affectionately on the cheek. The cold sharp contact of the long curving finger guard gave the girl an unpleasant shock. It seemed lifeless, or like the scratching of a beetle. Suddenly the woman's glittering gaze, her expressionless face stiff with paint, the blaze of her barbaric colors, filled Sidsall with a shrinking that was almost dread.

She was even more oppressed by an instinctive feeling of what she could express to herself only as cruelty hidden under the other's scented embroidery. At the same time her curiosity persisted, conquered. She was unable, however, to think of any possible manner of introducing the new subject of her interest, love, and was forced to be content with an indifferent opening.

"We were all quite surprised when Mr. Dunsack called yesterday," she said. "He isn't in the least a friend of the family. Grandfather went to sea with his father, but even they didn't speak for years in Salem. The Dunsacks are a little common."

"I know," Taou Yuen replied. "Mr. Dunsack—a long time in Canton, at the American agents. China is bad for men like him. Black spirits get in them and the ten sins."

"He stared at you in the rudest way."

"He never saw a Manchu lady before. In China the dog would not have passed by the first gate. Here it is nothing to be a Manchu or an honorable wife; it is all like the tea houses and rice villages. Men walk up to you with bold eyes. I tell Gerrit and he laughs. I stay in the room and he brings me shamefully down. This Mr. Dunsack comes and the wise old man talks to him like a son. He touches your mother's hand. He sees the young girls like white candles."

"We wouldn't let him really bother us," Sidsall explained; "probably if he comes again we'll all be out."

Taou Yuen made a comment in Chinese. "A bad thought is a secret knife," she continued; "it is more dangerous than the anger of the Emperor, a sickness that kills with the stink of bodies already dead."

This seemed rather absurd to Sidsall. She considered once more the introduction of the subject of her new concern; but, in spite of Taou Yuen's extravagant appearance, there was a quality of being which made impossible any blunt interrogation. She had a decidedly aloof manner. Her mother, Sidsall recognized, and the older women they knew, had a trace of this; but in the Manchu it was carried infinitely further, a most autocratic disdain. Her feeling for the other shifted rapidly from attitude to attitude.

She watched, she was certain, these same sensations come over her Aunt Caroline Saltonstone, Mrs. Clifford and Mrs. Wibird, who called on Gerrit Ammidon's wife that afternoon. They were sitting with their crinoline widespread against their chairs, gazing with a concerted battery of curiosity at Taou Yuen's shimmering figure in the drawing-room screened against the sun. Mrs. Wibird, Sidsall thought—a woman of fat and faded prettiness, with wine red splotches beneath her eyes, and a voice that went on and on in the relating of various petty emotional disturbances—must have resembled Olive as a girl. It was probable, then, that Olive would look like her mother when in turn she was middle-aged. Mrs. Clifford, unseasonably huddled in her perpetual shawl, more than ever suggested a haggard marble in somberly rich clothes. Aunt Caroline sat with complacent hands and loud inattentive speech. Taou Yuen smiled at them placidly.

"Our men," said Mrs. Clifford, "went out to China for years. It never occurred to them however to marry a Chinese woman; but I dare say they didn't see the right sort."

"Most of the captains like China," Taou Yuen said. "They are so far away from their families—" she made a brief philosophical gesture, and Madra Clifford studied her with a narrowed gaze. "It would be the same," she continued, "if Chinamen came to America." Mrs. Wibird shuddered. "A yellow skin," she cried impetuously; "I can't bide the thought."

"I'm sure we'd be tremendously interested," Mrs. Saltonstone hurriedly put in, "if you'd tell us about your wedding. A Chinese wedding must be—be very gay, with firecrackers and—"

"My marriage with Captain Ammidon was not beautiful—I was a widow and he foreign. The Manchu wedding is very nice. First there is the engagement ceremony. I sit like this," she sank gracefully to the floor, cross-legged, "on the bed with my eyes shut, and, if I am noble, two princesses come and put the ju yi, it's jade and means all joy, on my lap. Two little silk bags hang from the buttons of my gown with gold coins, and two gold rings on my fingers must be marked with Ta hsi, that's great happiness."

"I'm told polygamy is an active practice," Mrs. Wibird remarked with a rising interest.

"Yes?" Taou Yuen asked.

"One man—a lot of wives."

"The Emperor has a great many and some Manchus take a second and third. You think that is wrong here. Who knows! The Chinese women are very good, very modest. The Four Books For Girls teach perfect submission; the five virtues are benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, sincerity. Confucius says, 'The root is filial piety.'"

"Very admirable," Mrs. Wibird nodded, agitating the small dyed ostrich plumes tipped with marabou of her bonnet; but it was clear to Sidsall that this was not the revelation for which she had hoped. A momentary silence, the edge of an uneasiness, enveloped the visitors.

"What lovely satins," Mrs. Saltonstone commented.

"Please—I have a box full; you will let me give you some?"

"Indeed yes, and thank you."

Mrs. Wibird, growing resentful, said that a cousin of her aunt's had been a missionary to China, "and did a very blessed work too."

Taou Yuen smoothly agreed that it was quite possible. "Our poor have a great many wrong and lustful ideas," she acknowledged; "they tell lies and beat their wives and gamble. The higher classes too, the mandarins and princes, use the people for their own security and rob them. Sometimes the law is not honest, and a man with gold gets free when a laborer is put in the bamboo cage."

Mrs. Clifford said very vigorously, "Ha!"

The silence returned intensified.

"I remember," the Manchu went on, "this will amuse you. My father-in-law, who was in the Canton Customs, told me that some boxes of Bibles came out from America, with other objects, and when they were opened at the Mission they were the wrong ones and filled with rum."

There was not, however, any marked appreciation of this on the part of the Salem women. They rose to leave and Taou Yuen sank on her knee. She gazed without a trace of emotion at the three flooding the door with their belled skirts. "They are the same everywhere," she told the girl. The latter moved out into the garden. There she subconsciously picked a rose and fastened it in her hair; her thoughts turned to Roger Brevard. In his place her Uncle Gerrit came out through the drawing-room window. The usual shadow of the house, lengthening with afternoon, was pleasantly enveloping, and they walked slowly over the grass.

"A flower in your hair," he said, "and by yourself. You have been thinking about true love." She blushed vividly at this unexpected angle on her mind and found it impossible to meet his keen blue eyes. "Love must be a remarkable thing." She raised a swift glance to his face and discovered that he had not spoken to her at all, but, hat in hand, was looking away with an expression of abstraction.

"I mean the unreasonable silly divine kind," he specified, now gazing at her quizzically, as if lost in a mood over which he had no control; "the sort that is as long as life and stronger. It is entirely different and ages older than the reasonable logical love, all proper and suitable and civilized; or the love that is the result of a determination, the result of a determination," he repeated, frowning darkly at their feet. Sidsall held her breath, thrilled by the wealth of what she had heard, fearful of diverting what might be yet revealed. But he moved away abruptly, in a manner that enforced solitude, and stood apparently examining the rockery.

Her brain rang with the splendid phrase, "Love as long as life and stronger." It seemed to clarify and state so much of her lately confused being. Hodie, artfully drawn into the consideration of earthly affection, was far less satisfactory than Gerrit Ammidon. She dwelt on the treasure beyond moth or rust, lost in an ecstasy of contemplation expressed in her customary explosive amens. At the same time she admitted that lower unions were blessed of God, and recommended Sidsall to think on "a man who has seen the light and by no means a sea captain." Sidsall replied cuttingly, "I think you must forget where you are."

"I forget nothing," Hodie stoutly maintained; "I'll witness before anyone." She settled the flounces of Sidsall's skirt with a deft hand.

Walking toward the Saltonstones' for tea, with a mulberry silk parasol casting a shifting glow on her expanse of clear madras, Sidsall wondered at the sudden change of almost all her interests and preoccupations. It was very disturbing—she fell into daydreams that carried her fancy away on a search that was a longing, a soft confusion of opening her arms to mystery. This varied with a restless melancholy; the old securities of her life were hidden in a mist of uncertainty in which her consciousness was troubled by nameless pressures; something within her held almost desperately back from further adventuring. But all the time a latent fascination was drawing her on, putting aside the curtain for her better view.

The Saltonstones' dwelling on Chestnut Street was one of a pair—a large solid square of brick—with two identical oval white porticoes and rows of windows keyed in white stone. Within the staircase swept up to a slender pillared opening, through which Lacy, calmly dressing, waved a deliberate hand. Mrs. Saltonstone was seated by the tall gilt framed mirror on a low marble stand between long front windows. "As usual," she said, in connection with her daughter, "Lacy's as cool as a water monkey; gets it from James; they wouldn't hurry if—" She searched in vain for an expression of her family's composure. "Now I am an impetuous woman." She promptly exhibited this quality in the vigor with which she met the wrong canister of tea brought by a servant. She didn't intend to serve Padre Souchong to a lot of people who apparently confused afternoon tea with an invitation to dinner.

In the small press which followed Sidsall stopped in the dining room with Lacy and Olive Wibird. Olive was still discussing men. "He sat holding my hand right on that bench by your hedge, Sidsall, and said that nothing could keep him from coming back for me, but he died of yellow fever in Batavia." She left in the company of a beau of fifty anyhow, with a glistening bald head, a silly smirking bow and flood of compliments. Lacy moved away and Sidsall found herself facing Roger Brevard.

"That looks remarkably like a garden," he said, waving toward an open door. The sun had become obscured in a veil of cloud, drooping until it almost seemed to rest on the bright green foliage; her companion's mood, too, was shadowed. "I thought you'd be here," he added outside, "and looked for you at once."

"There was something special you wanted to say?"

"My dear child," he replied, "can't you guess how absolutely refreshing you are? No, I have nothing special. But you'll soon get used to men around with no more reason than yourself."

She studied this seriously; and, as its complimentary intent emerged, a corresponding color stained her cheeks. Her gaze rested on him for the fleetest moment possible and, to her surprise, she saw that he was frowning.

"I came here just to see you. No," he corrected his period, "only to see you." His manner was surprisingly abrupt and disconcerting. "I can quite realize," he went on, "that I shouldn't say any of this. Yet, on the other hand, it is the most natural thing in the world. I have been listening to the conventional babble of teas and cotillions for so long that you are like a breath of lost youth. Certainly that is appropriate. I think," he told her, "that you are the youngest thing alive." Then he laughed, "So young that I have annoyed you."

"I feel a great deal older than I did, well—last month," she said.

"That is a tragedy." She felt that if he were still amused at her she was furious, but he was even graver than before. "To tell you helps hurry the charm to an end. That is what might be complained against me. Yet flowers will open, you know, and it might as well be in an honest sun."

"I don't understand," she admitted, troubled.

"Why, it means, Sidsall, that I am offering you an experienced hand, that I'm certain I can do you more good than harm—"

"That's silly," she interrupted. "If you mean that we might be friends, really confidential friends, it would help me awfully. But then it's so one-sided."

"You'll have to overlook that," he answered; "probably all that I can give you, experience, isn't worth the smallest of your feelings. Probably you won't need me for an instant. Certainly the pleasure will be mine."

"You didn't understand," she told him, with dignity; "it's the other way round. I am not a particle interesting and everyone agrees that I'm too healthy. But I can't help it if my cheeks are red and mother won't let me have powder." It was obviously impossible to explain about Hodie and the lacing.

"I like it," he insisted. "I'll admit that I am unfashionable there. I think we'll hit on a great deal to share privately." There was a faint patter among the leaves, and a cold drop of rain fell on Sidsall's arm. Others struck Roger Brevard but he continued without apparently noticing them. "You must understand that I am entirely at your service. Sometimes, although they won't come yet, there are things a—a friend can do better than one's family. You'll ask me, Sidsall?"

"Yes," she said solemnly. More rain struck her; she could see it now plainly, falling between them. Roger Brevard's face was dark, the frown still scarred his forehead. Personally she was happier than she remembered ever being before and she wondered at his severity of bearing. "But you must go in at once," he cried, suddenly energetic, his familiar self; "you are getting wetter every minute."

The clouds dissolved into a late sunlight that streamed in long bars through the canopies of elms on the streets. From her windows Sidsall saw a world of flashing greenery and limpid sky. Usually when she was happy she sang unimportant bits of light song, but her present state was serious and inarticulate. The indeterminate questions, the disturbing vague moods, of the past days somehow combined and took on the tangible shape of Roger Brevard. Her curiosity about love was resolved into a sudden inner shrinking from its possibilities and meaning.

She was lost in her aloofness from mundane affairs: Taou Yuen in whispering silk, her grandfather's rotund tones, Laurel and Camilla and her mother, were distant, immaterial. In the evening she sat on the front steps, a web of white, dreamily intent on the shimmering sweep of Washington Square. After a little she was joined by Gerrit Ammidon. He wore linen trousers and a short blue sea jacket; and the wavering delicately lavender trail of smoke from his cheroot was like her floating thoughts.

"Already," he said, "I am full of getting back on my ship."

She smiled at him absently.

"The land doesn't do for a sailor," he continued. "They are always into trouble on shore. I can't say why it should be so but it is. If there's not one kind there is another; rum and such varnish for the able seaman, and—and complications for a master. I suppose that's because there are so confounded many unexpected currents and slants of wind, as you might say. On shipboard everything pretty much is charted; a thing will be followed more or less by a fixed consequence. The waves break so and so on coral or rocks or sand; there is usually the sun for an observation; a good man knows his ship, how many points she'll hold on the wind, how a cargo must be stowed, when to take in the light canvas. You can give the man at the wheel a course and turn in or stay on deck and beat your way through hell. It's exact, you know, but on shore—" he made a hopeless gesture.

"There are no regulations," he observed moodily; "or else nobody follows them: collisions all the time, sinkings and derelicts drifting round, awash and dismasted. But they are everywhere. That fellow, Edward Dunsack—" he stopped, lost in speculation. Then, "He seems harmless enough," he resumed, "even pitiful; but he sticks in your head. I wish I'd never brought his damned chest to Salem. A fool would have known better. I'm worse—a childish fool. A derelict," he said again. "You are smashing over a swell at twelve knots or more, everything spread, when, in a hollow, there it is squarely across your bow. No time to shift the wheel, and a ship's missing, perhaps in a hundred fathom. It might be the best ship afloat, the best master and stoutest crew, but in a minute she's only a salty tangle."

He laughed uneasily at the vividness of his fancy. "If it's hard for us what must it be for Taou Yuen?" he demanded. "Married to me! Here! That's courage for you." He tramped down the steps, across Pleasant Street, with his bare head sunk, and vanished into the obscurity of the Square. She caught a last glimmer of white trousers, a faint rapid gleam where his lighted cheroot described the arc of a passionate gesture on the night.

The spring, like the full buds of the hedge roses in the Ammidons' garden, passed swiftly into early summer. The flowers against the house showed gay perennial colors, the stocks and larkspur and snapdragons succeeded the retreating flood of the lilacs. The days were still yellow pools of heat, or else cooled by the faintly salt sea wind drawing down the elms and chestnuts, followed by purple-green nights of moonlight. They seemed to Sidsall to hold everything in a pause. She saw less and less of Taou Yuen who now scarcely came out of her room except for an occasional ride in the barouche with Mrs. Ammidon or a contemplative hour in the garden, usually at dusk. Apparently content with the elaborate rearrangement of her headdress, she sat for long periods, gazing out over Washington Square, idle except for the regular tap of her pipe emptying the ashes of the minute bowl.

Yet Sidsall's first interest in her had almost completely shifted to Gerrit Ammidon. He evidently preferred her company to that of the other members of his family, and they often took short largely silent walks, usually down to the Salem Marine Railway where the Nautilus was undergoing repairs. His protracted silences were broken by the sudden vehement protests against the generally muddled aspect of affairs or longer monologues of inner questioning and search. He almost never referred to her or made her part of a conversation; she was free to dwell on her own emotions while he, with a corrugated brow, went on in his tortuous and solitary course.

On an afternoon when they had walked to the foot of Briggs Street, and were gazing out over the tranquil water of Collins Cove, Gerrit Ammidon asked abruptly:

"Have you seen Nettie Vollar lately?"

Sidsall was unable to remember exactly when that had been. She rather thought she had caught a glimpse of her in Lawrence Place with books under her arm which she was probably taking from the Athenaeum for her grandfather. Anyone, she told herself privately, could see that Nettie Vollar wouldn't care for books.

Something had occurred, or threatened to occur, between her uncle and Nettie; what it was she had never been told; but she realized that only one thing could really happen between a man and a girl—they must have been in love. In the interest of this she recalled Nettie Vollar's appearance, but was unable to discover any marked attractions. The elder had a good figure, rather full for her age, and totally different from her own square solidity. Her hair was coarse and carelessly arranged, her clothes noticeable for a love of brightness rather than care in the spending of a small sum.

Gerrit Ammidon had the strangest tastes!

He was standing immobile, looking across the Cove as if he were on a quarter-deck searching for a hidden land. His legs were slightly spread, firmly planted in a manner to defeat any sudden lurching. She grew a little impatient at him staring like a block at nothing at all; she felt older than he, superior in the knowledge of life; he seemed hardly more than an absurd boy. Sidsall had a desire to shake him. He was so—so impracticable. "Don't you think we'd better be going?" she asked finally. Gerrit Ammidon turned and followed her obediently.

There were lights in the rope walk on Briggs Street; through a window she could see a man pacing down the long narrow interior laying a strand of hemp from the burden on his shoulders. It made her shudder to think of the monotonous passage forward and back, an eternity of slow-twisting rope. Yet life was something like that—she took the happenings of each day and wove them into a strand dark and bright: a strand, she realized, that grew stronger as it lengthened.... That would be true of everyone—of her companion and grandfather and Hodie.

They reached the house as the family were gathering in the dining room, when Sidsall found Roger Brevard unexpectedly staying for supper. She met his direct greeting and smile with a warm stir of pleasure and sat in a happy silence listening to the voices about the table. Her uncle had brought his wife down and the candles glittering among the lusters on the walls spread their light over the Manchu's strange vivid figure. Everything about life was so confusing, Sidsall thought. The night flowed in at the open windows drenched with magic: here were candles but outside were stars. The port in its engraved glass decanter seemed to burn with a ruby flame. "Bah!" her grandfather was exclaiming. "I'll put a thousand dollars on Gerrit and the Nautilus against any clipper built; but mind, in all weathers."

"Voyage by voyage," William Ammidon insisted, "he would be left in the harbor. The California gold deposits—."

Later a crowd, slowly collecting, recalled the fact that the Salem Band was to play that night in the Square. "Oh, mother, look," Laurel cried; "they've got lamps in their hats." Small wavering flames were being lighted on the musicians' hats; there were melancholy disconnected hoots from bassoons and the silver clear scale of a bugle. "Can't I get nearer, mother?" Laurel implored as usual. "Can't I go and see the little lamps on their heads?"

"Sidsall and I will look after her," Roger Brevard put in, and almost immediately the three were entering Washington Square. The throng was thickest directly behind the band, radiating in thinning numbers to the wooden boundary fence. Laurel led them to an advantageous position, where they could watch the curious effects of the ring of lights above intent faces drawn hollow-cheeked by the vigorous blowing of instruments. The leader, in the center of the flickering smoky illumination, now beat with his arms in one direction, now in another.

A second selection followed, and a third, during which, in surprising pauses, the band shouted a concerted "Hurrah!" Sidsall was infinitely contented. How splendidly erect and calm and distinguished Roger Brevard was! She hated younger men, they were only boys, who kept up a senseless talk about college humor. He saw instantly that the people were crushing her skirts, and firmly conducted them out of the crowd. It was nicer here beyond the wavering dark mass: a waltz flowed about her so tender and gracious that her eyes filled with tears.

But Laurel had to be taken home; and, clasping Mr. Brevard's hand, the little girl talked volubly as they moved away. "And so," she said, "I told her to keep her topsails full."

"What?" he demanded.

"She was falling off, you know—losing way. Hell's hatches—"

"Laurel," Sidsall corrected her sharply. "No, you mustn't laugh at her."

Only Gerrit Ammidon was on the steps, the other men were in the library; her mother had gone up with Janet. Laurel left them, and, without speech, they walked through the house to the lawn. The stars had apparently retreated to new infinities of distance and night, there was a throb of music so faint that it might be only an echoing memory; Roger Brevard's face was pale and strained. He asked:

"Have you forgotten that we are friends?"

"No," she returned seriously, lifting her look to his. He was very close to her and her heart beat unsteadily. She had a choking premonition of what was about to occur, but she stood without the slightest attempt to prevent his kiss. It affected him even more than herself, for he stepped back sharply with his hands clenched. Roger was silent for so long that she said, timidly:

"I didn't mind, so much."

"Thank you," he replied almost harshly. "There's no need for you to regret it. No need, no need. But if it were only a year more—."

"We all grow older," she told him wisely.

"So we do, Sidsall, and we change. But you should stay exactly as you are now, white and young and fragrant. Never the fruit but always the blossom, and always a night in early summer. The afterwards is an indifferent performance."

"I don't understand," her voice was shadowed.

"Sidsall for a moment. Don't move—opening petals, shy pure heart...loveliness...."

"I don't understand," she repeated, but the trouble had vanished. She even smiled at him: she was filled with an absolute security in her vision of Roger Brevard. Why, she had no need to question; it was an instinct beyond search and above knowledge; perhaps, she thought as they turned toward the house, its name was love.



VII

The days, to Nettie Vollar, seemed to be both unutterably dull and colored by a possibility of excitement like an undercurrent of hardly perceptible fever. Her mother, it was true, took on herself most of the duties of Barzil Dunsack's house; but there were still a large number of little things that returned unvaried with every morning, noon and night for the girl's attention. The cause of any impending excitement—except the mere presence of Gerrit Ammidon in Salem, now surely of no moment to her—she was unable to place. The feeling that pervaded her most was the heavy conviction that her life was a complete waste, she had the sensation of being condemned to stay in surroundings, in a service, that never for a moment represented her desire or true capabilities. Her family, as she had grown into maturity, seemed strange, her place there an unhappy accident.

At her brightest periods she pictured being suddenly, arbitrarily, removed into happier appropriate regions. For a time that vision had assumed the tangible shape of Gerrit Ammidon; then this comfortable figure had abruptly left her to an infinitely more seldom return of her faint indefinite hope.

Through the inordinate number of hours when she was potentially alone she had developed a strain of almost painful thought out of keeping with the whole of her naturally unreflective being. In moments such as the present—she was sitting in her room overlooking Hardy Street on its landward reach—she followed the slow turnings of her mind in the manner of a child spelling out a sentence. Two things seemed to her of the first importance—the existence into which she had been forced by the circumstance of her birth, and her unknown father himself: unknown, that is, except for vague promptings and desires which, for need of a better reason, she traced to his personality. That he was superior, in that he had had a distinct measure of gentle blood, she was assured by her mother on one of the rare occasions when the subject was touched between them. To that she credited the greater part of her obscure dissatisfaction with conditions which she described as mean.

The latter evidently didn't disturb her mother or grandfather; she realized that the long-drawn silent severity of the old man had crushed what spirit her mother may have had. It was clear that the elder woman had been very pretty, with wide fluttering eyes which made you think of gray moths, and delicately colored cheeks; but all that had been crushed, too. She was meek in a way that filled her daughter with determined resentment and fear. The resentment sprang from the silent assertion that she wouldn't be worn down like that; the fear followed the realization of the rigid power of the old man and the weight of all that held her powerless to escape. Naturally she was rather cheerful than somber, an involuntary gayety rose from her in the drabbest moments; she even defied Barzil Dunsack with ribbons and flowers on her bonnet.

The prospect from her window offered no relief from the interior; it was true that in the other direction she could catch glimpses of the harbor, by leaning out she could get the comparatively full sweep at the bottom of the street; but there were usually things ugly and restraining between her and the freedom of the horizon. Her favorite place had been at the edge of the grass above the tide; but, since his return, Edward Dunsack had hit upon it too, and his proximity made her increasingly uneasy. For one thing he talked to himself out loud, principally in Chinese, and the sliding unintelligible tongue, accompanied by the sight of his gaunt yellow face, his inattentive fixed eyes, gave her an icy shiver. It was almost worse when he conversed with her in a palpable effort at an effect of sympathy.

She rose and wandered finally to the embankment of the garden. The water shimmered under the full flood of afternoon; she was gazing at the distance in an aimless manner that had lately fastened on her when she heard a stirring of the grass behind her and Edward Dunsack approached. He was livid in the pitiless light, and seemed terribly fragile, a thing that a mere clap of thunder might crumble to nothing; she felt that she could sweep him away with a broom; yet at the same time there were startling gleams of inner violence, a bitter energy, an effect of deepness, that appalled her.

"If you should ask me," he declared, "if my opinion is of any value, I'd say that Ammidon owed you considerable. He led you to expect something better than his running away without a word; I'd have an explanation out of him. Of course, if he had come back married—this affair with a Chinese woman isn't that—it would be all over. But, somehow, with things as they are, I can't believe that it is."

"Do you expect me to go to their house, like you did?" she replied resentfully.

He turned such a malicious face on her that instinctively she moved back. For a moment he was silent, his meager leaden lips drawn tight over dark teeth in a dry grin, his fingers like curved wires; then, relaxing, he cursed the entire house of Ammidon. "The truth is," he ended, "that you were a little fool; you had everything, everything, in your hand and threw it away." His gaze strayed from her to the surface of the water, a short distance from the land. "Threw it away," he repeated; "it can't be got in this country either."

He was, she thought, crazy. However, all that he said about Gerrit lingered in her mind; it fanned to new life the embers of her rebellion. If a chance should come she would let Gerrit Ammidon know something of the wrong he had done her. As her uncle had pointed out, the Chinese woman was different from an American, a white woman. Their entire position, Gerrit's and her own, was peculiar, outside ordinary judgments.

She saw him occasionally from a distance, as she must continue to do while he was in Salem, since no opportunity had been made for them to exchange words. That must come from Gerrit.

Her mother called her, and she went in, finding the elder in the kitchen. "I can't get enough heat to bake," she worried; "you can bear your hand right in the oven. Your grandfather won't have his sponge biscuit for supper." Nettie declared, "I certainly wouldn't let it bother me. Just tell him and let him say what he likes." Her mother turned palpably startled. "But—", she began weakly.

"I know exactly what you're going to say," Nettie cut in, "he has it every night and he'll expect it. How much, I'd like to ask, have you been expecting all your life and getting nothing? And now I am the same. I don't believe we're as wicked as grandfather lets on, and I'm certain he's not so good as he thinks. I don't admit we are going to hell, either; if I did I can tell you I'd be different. I'd have a good time like some other girls I see. I guess it would be good, anyhow, with silk flounces four yards around. I'm what I am because I don't listen to him; I don't pay any attention to the pious old women who make long faces at us."

"You mustn't talk like that, Nettie," her mother protested anxiously. "It has a right hard sound. Your grandfather is a very upright religious man. It's proper for those who sin to suffer in this world that they may be humble for the next."

"I don't want to be humble," Nettie told her. "The Ammidons aren't humble. Mrs. Saltonstone isn't." A pain deepened visibly on the elder's pale countenance. "You mustn't think it doesn't hurt me, Nettie, to—to see you away from all the pleasure. It tears at my heart dreadful. That is part of the punishment." The girl made a vivid gesture, "But you sit back and take it!" she cried. "You talk of it as punishment. I won't! I won't! I'm going to do something different."

"What?" her mother demanded, terrified.

"I don't know," Nettie admitted. "But if I had it to do over I'd kiss Gerrit Ammidon as soon as he looked for it."

"Nettie, do you—do you think he wanted to marry you?"

"Yes," she answered shortly. "He's like that. Whatever you might say against him he's honest."

Her mother began to cry, large slow tears that rolled out of her eyes without a sound. She sat with lax hopeless hands in her lap of cheap worn dress stuff. Nettie Vollar felt no impulse toward crying; she was bright with anger—anger at what Barzil Dunsack had done with her mother, at the harm he had worked in her. "You are a saint compared to Uncle Edward," she asserted. "I don't know what's wrong with him, but there is something."

"I've noticed it too: times his eyes are glazed like, and then his staring at you like a cat. It's a fact he doesn't eat right, and he forgets what's said as soon as a body speaks. Might he have some Chinese disease, do you think?"

"It's not like a real sickness...."

The evening in the dreary sitting room with only the reddish illumination of one lamp was almost unendurable. Her grandfather sat with broad wasted hands gripping his shrunken knees, his eyes gazing stonily out above a nose netted with fine blue veins and harsh mouth almost concealed by the curtain of beard. Edward rose uneasily and returned, casting a swelling and diminishing shadow—obscurely unnatural like himself—over the faded and weather-stained wall paper. Her mother was bowed, speechless. Nettie wanted to scream, to horrify them all with some outrageous remark. She would have liked to knock the lamp from the table, send it crashing over the floor, and see the flames spread out, consume the house, consume... she stopped, horrified at her thoughts.

She didn't want things like that in her mind, she continued, but the echo of dancing, of music, of the Salem Band marching up Essex Street with Mr. Morse playing his celebrated silvery fanfare on the bugle. She wanted to laugh, to talk, yes—to love. Why, she was young, barely twenty-one; and here she was in a house like the old cemetery on Charter Street. Before they went to bed her grandfather would read out from the Bible, but always the Old Testament. Finally he rose and secured the volume, bound in dusty calf, its pages brown along the edges. His voice rang in a slow emphasized fervor:

"'Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken the Lord, thy God, when he led thee by the way?

"'And now what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Sihor? or what hast thou to do in the way of Assyria, to drink the waters of the river?

"'Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee; know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God, and that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord God of hosts.

"'For of old I have broken thy yoke, and burst thy bonds; and thou saidst, I will not transgress; when upon every high hill and under every green tree thou wanderest, playing the harlot.

"'Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?

"'For though thou wash thee with nitre—'"

Nettie was impressed, intimidated, in spite of the contrary resolution in the kitchen: the words seemed to burn into her mother, herself, like boiling fat from a pan; and a great relief flooded her when she could escape again to the temporary relief of her room. It was hot, the windows were up, and she made no light that might attract mosquitoes or force her to draw the close shades. She stood undressed luxuriating in the sense of freedom of body. She was richly white in the gloom: her full young beauty gave her a feeling of contentment and strength, and, equally, a great loneliness. It wasn't corrupt, a "degenerate plant," she thought with a passionate conviction like a cry.

She determined to say no prayer to such a ruthless Being; yet, soon after, in her coarse nightgown, she found herself kneeling by the bed with hard-clasped hands. It was a prayer for which Barzil Dunsack would have had nothing but condemnation: she implored the dark, the mystery of Augustness, for carnal and light things, yes—for waltzes and quadrilles and songs and pleasure, young pleasure, all the aching desires of her health and spirit and nature and years; but most for love. She said the last blindly, in an instinct without definition, with the feeling that it was the key, the door, to everything else; and in her mind rose the image of Gerrit Ammidon. She saw his firm direct countenance, the frosty blue eyes and human warmth. He needn't have come at all, she added, if it had been only to double the dreariness of her existence.

She wondered a little, her emotion subsiding, at the interest her uncle showed in her affairs. It wasn't like what else she had gathered of him; and she searched, but without success, for any hidden reason he might have. He actively blackened the name of Ammidon while he was lost in too great an indifference to be moved by any but extraordinary pressures. Everything left his mind, as her mother had said, almost immediately. Suddenly weary, she gave up all effort at understanding.

A wind moved in from the sea, fluttering the light curtains, and brought her a sense of coolness and release. It came from the immense free sweep of ocean to which her sinking consciousness turned in peaceful recognition and surrender.

Altogether, in the days that followed, she realized a greater degree of mental freedom than before her revolt. She had removed herself, it appeared, a little outside the family, almost as if she were studying them calmly through a window: a large part of the terror her grandfather had possessed for her had disappeared, leaving for her recognition a very old and worn man; she was sorry for her mother with a deep affection mixed with impatience. At first she had tried to put something of her own revived spirit in the older woman but it was like pouring water into a cracked glass: her mother was too utterly broken to hold any resolution whatever.

Nettie's feeling for Edward Dunsack became an instinctive deep distrust. It was almost impossible for her to remain when—as he so often did now—he approached her to talk about the injustice of her mode of life and the debt Gerrit Ammidon owed her. He would stand with his fingers twitching, talking in a rapid sharp voice, blinking continuously against any light brighter than that of a shaded room or dusk. He seldom left the office or went out through the day; his place at the dinner table was far more often empty than not. But after their early supper, in the long late June twilights, he had an inexhaustible desire for her to stroll with him. She occasionally agreed for the reason that they invariably passed in the vicinity of Washington Square and Pleasant Street, and saw the impressive block of the Ammidon mansion. However, they never met any of its inmates. Once they had walked directly by the entrance; some girls, perhaps a woman, certainly two men, were grouped in the doorway: it was growing dark and Nettie couldn't be certain.

Edward Dunsack clearly hesitated before the bricks leading in between the high white fence posts topped with carved twisting flames; and, in a sudden agony at the possibility of his stopping, Nettie hurried on, her cheeks flaming and her heart, she thought, thumping in her throat.

Her uncle followed her. There was a trail of intimate merriment from the portico, a man's voice mingling gayly with those of the girls. "That was the Brevard who's in the Mongolian Marine Insurance Company," Edward Dunsack informed her. "I hear he's a great hand for leading cotillions and balls—the balls you ought to take part in." On and on he went with the familiar recital of her wrongs. It carried them all the way over Pleasant and Essex and Derby Streets home. The next day, however, he was forced to go about the town, and returned for dinner in a state of excitement evident to anyone.

He ate without attention whatever was before him, and extravagantly pleasant, related how he had conversed with Mrs. Gerrit Ammidon in the family carriage in front of the countinghouse of Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone on Liberty Street. Nettie was surprised that his concern was caused by such a commonplace event. "The women of China—." Words failing him, he waved a thin dry hand. His father frowned heavily. Then, abruptly, as if he had been snatched out of his chair by an invisible powerful clutch, he started up and disappeared.

The afternoon passed the full and Nettie, bound in preparation for supper for Redmond's, the Virginia Oysterman's at Derby Wharf, stood waiting for some money. "I can't think where I left my reticule," her mother called, "unless it's in Edward's room where I cleaned this morning. Just run up and see.... He'll be at the office."

Above, Nettie found the door closed, but it opened readily as she turned the knob: she went in without hesitation. The interior she naturally thought was empty; and then, with an unreasoning cold fear, she saw that Edward Dunsack was lying on the bed. Some of his clothes were tumbled on the floor, and he wore his black Chinese gown. The room was permeated with a heavy smooth odor; on a stand at her uncle's hand was a curious collection of strange objects—a little brass lamp with a flickering bluish flame, a black and silver object like a swollen unnatural pipe, stained bodkins, a lump of what she took to be tar—

Her attention was caught by Edward Dunsack's face: it had fallen back with his pinched chin pointing toward the ceiling, it was the color of yellow clay, and through his half-opened eyelids was an empty glimmer of gray-white. She shrank away involuntarily, and the word "Dead" formed just audibly on her trembling lips. In an instant she was in the hall, calling in a panic-stricken voice, her icy hands at her throat; and her grandfather mounted the stair with surprising agility, followed by his daughter Kate.

"Uncle Edward," Nettie articulated, waving toward the room from which she had fled. The two women followed the rigid advance of Barzil Dunsack. As he saw the figure of his son there was a stabbing gasp of his breath. He halted for a moment, and it seemed to Nettie Vollar that suddenly his determined carriage crumbled, his shoulders sagged; then he went forward. The bed had high slender posts that at one time supported a canopy, but now they were bare, and an old hand held to one as he bent over.

"Is he dead?" the older woman asked.

Barzil Dunsack made no immediate reply; his gaze turned from his son to the stand, the fluttering lamp and its accessories. His head moved slowly in the act of sniffing the pungent haze swimming in the interior. Nettie could see his face, and she was appalled by an, expression grimmer than any she remembered; it was both harsh, implacable, and stricken, as empty of blood as the countenance on the bed. The hand on the post tightened until it, too, was linen white. She drew close to her mother's side, putting a supporting arm about the soft shaking shoulders.

"No," said Barzil Dunsack, in a booming voice, "not dead, and yet dead forever. Go downstairs," he commanded. They backed confused to the door. "If Edward is sick—" Kate Vollar began. The old man's face blazed with intolerable pain and anger.

"Woman," he demanded, "can you cure what God has smitten?" His eyes alone, hard and bright in the seamed and hairy face, drove them out into the hall. Below in the sitting room Nettie exclaimed, "He might have told us something!"

"Whatever it is," her mother returned, "it's dreadful bad. I've felt that all along about Edward; he's never been himself this last time." Mechanically she found her reticule beside the painted ostrich egg from Africa. "You'll have to get the oysters anyhow," she told her daughter, maintaining the inevitable pressure of small necessities that defied all tragedy and death.

Nettie escaped with an enormous relief into the sunny normal tranquility of the afternoon. The house had become too horrible to bear; and even on the thronged length of Derby Wharf, like a street robbed of its supports and thrust out into the harbor, she was followed by the vision of Edward Dunsack's peaked clayey face.

She got the oysters, and in an overwhelming reluctance to return walked out to the end of the wharf, where a ship was discharging her cargo—heavy plaited mats of cassia with a delicate scent, red and blue slabs of marble, baskets of granular cakes of gray camphor, rough brown logs of teak, smooth dull yellow rolls of gamboge, bags with sharp conflicting odors, baled silks and half chests of tea wrapped in bamboos and matting painted with the ship's name, Rose and Rosalie.

There Nettie found herself beside a little girl clasping the hand of a bulky old gentleman in pongee and a palm leaf hat and following every operation with a grave critical regard. "I guess," she said to her companion, "it's only the cheap sort of tea, a late picking, or it would be in canisters." She was, Nettie realized, the youngest Ammidon child with her grand-father. The latter looked round and recognized Nettie Vollar. "How's Barzil Dunsack?" he asked immediately.

She was at a loss for an answer, since she could not describe the subject of the inquiry as all right nor explain their unhappy condition. "Intend to stop in," Jeremy Ammidon continued; "last time I was there I went up like a rocket." Laurel—that was the child's name, she remembered—gazed at her intently. "I was saying to grandfather," she repeated precisely, "that this wasn't really much of a cargo. Nothing like the one Uncle Gerrit brought back in the Nautilus. We were having an argument about Salem too. But, of course, all the big cargoes are going into Boston," she sturdily confronted the flushed old man.

"You're William all over again," he asserted, almost annoyed. Both their expressions grew stubborn in a manner that, in view of their great difference in age and experience, Nettie thought quite absurd. What a beautiful dress the child had on—Porto Rico drawn work, with pale yellow ribbons to her bonnet. "I wish you'd stay here a minute with Nettie Vollar," Jeremy told her, "while I see the wharfinger." He went unhurried along the wharf, and Laurel Ammidon drew closer to her.

"She's not much of a ship either," Laurel said, indicating the Rose and Rosalie. "She's built like—like grandfather. They're different now. I went to New York to see the Sea Witch launched, and she's the tallest vessel afloat, with three standing skysail yards and, ringtail and water sails. She's black and has a gilded dragon for a figurehead; and, although she went out in a gale, got to Rio in twenty-five days. I talked to Captain Waterman, too; he commanded the Natchez, you know."

How the child ran on! "You've studied a lot on, ships," Nettie commented. "I know the main truck from a jewel block," Laurel replied complacently. "But Camilla's a frightful lubber. I should think she'd make Uncle Gerrit sick. She does me." Nettie Vollar was seized by the temptation to question Laurel about Gerrit Ammidon, about his wife—anything that touched or concerned him. A wave of emotion swept over her, a loneliness and a desire the cause of which she would not face. She wanted to take Laurel's hand in hers, and with the old ponderous comfortable gentleman go up to the serenity of their gardens and wide happy house. She wanted Gerrit Ammidon to smile at her with his eyes blue like a fair sea... His father was returning.

Laurel again grasped the large hand and they turned to leave. Jeremy Ammidon nodded to Nettie. Nothing remained for her but the place on Hardy Street; then she saw that the others had stopped and were signaling for her. "Captain Dunsack... old friend," the elder said abruptly. "Stubborn as the devil. No worse than me, though, no worse than me. Confounded proud, too. You let me know if there is anything, that is, if you need—" he paused, breathing stormily, glaring at her in an assumed angry impatience.

"Thank you," she answered, "but there's nothing."

What most shocked her on the return home was the manner in which their life callously continued when she felt it should have been shattered by their suffering in Edward Dunsack's room; yet not so much theirs as her grandfather's. He took his place at the head of the table, the grace went up as loudly as ever above their heads; but in spite of that she saw that the old man suddenly looked infinitely spent. His knife slipped insecurely and scraped against the plate in fumbling and palsied hands. All at once she had a feeling of gazing straight into his heart, and finding—like a burning ruby hidden in earth—such an agony beneath his schooled exterior that she choked thinking about it.

Nettie wondered what he would do if she put an affectionate arm about his neck and told him of their sympathy. She knew now that her Uncle Edward had been smoking opium, and that it was a worse vice, more hopeless and destructive, than drink. But she was certain that he'd repel her; he looked on them all, Edward Dunsack, her mother and herself, as sinful, "degenerate plants." Even now, she realized, there was no weakening of his spiritual fibers such as had plainly overtaken his physical being. He had a blasting contempt for the unrighteous flesh.

When they had risen from the table, Edward Dunsack appeared and sinking weakly into a chair demanded a cup of tea. He knew nothing of their discovery, of the fact that they had stood above his revolting insensibility. After the tea he seemed to revive; he lighted a cheroot and said something about going out. It wasn't possible, however; his knees sagged walking the length of the floor; in the sitting room he fell into a leaden apathy. Nettie Vollar's gaze rested on the volume of the life of the missionary who had died at such an early age on the Ile de France. The lamplight spread over the depressing mustard yellow paint of the woodwork with its obviously false graining and deepened the blackness of the fireplace. Throughout the reading of the Scripture Edward Dunsack never shifted his slumped position; his face, with smudged closed eyes, seemed fixed in a skeptical smile. The hollows of his temples were green. The reading finished, old Barzil said:

"I wish to speak to Edward alone."

The latter straightened up. "Eh!" he exclaimed. "What?" He resettled his stock and crossed a knee with a show of ease. Nettie followed her mother from the room. Her last impression was that of a startling resemblance between the young man and old—her uncle's face was as ruined as the other's—between father and son. "I wish he'd go away," her mother surprisingly asserted; "I won't sleep for thinking of him lying there like a corpse."

"He'll not," Nettie replied, musing; "something is holding him we still don't know of."

She had lately begun to realize a great many things of which only a month before she had not been aware—that sudden illuminating grasp of old Barzil's inner pain, of her mother's wasted spirit, and the sense that some unguessed potent motive was at the back of her Uncle Edward's apparently erratic strolling and reiterations. Nettie stopped to wonder a little at the change in herself: she was more alive, more included. There were no reasons that she could see why this should be so; never had the present, the entire future, been darker. With her deeper consciousness, too, came an increased shrinking from life, a greater capacity for injury; and there could be no doubt that it was an older Nettie Vollar who, in her mirror, returned the questioning in the resentful black eyes.

No further mention was made of the opium, no hint escaped from the two men of what Barzil Dunsack had said to his son after the evening reading of the Bible. An evidence of the miserable episode was visible for a while in the difficulty of any attempted general conversation; then that died away and everything was seemingly as it had been before. But the rising gayety and widespread public preparations at the approach of the Fourth of July made her existence drabber than ever. There was, too, unusual planning, for later in the month President Polk was to be in Salem.

The various military organizations drilled incessantly: the Salem Light Infantry, the Mechanic Light Infantry, the Salem Cadets and Independents and a squad of the Salem Artillery might be seen at any hour of the morning or early evening smartly marching and countermarching, led by Flag's or the Salem Band. Strange constructions of light wood climbed in Washington Square—the set pieces of the celebrated pyrotechnist secured at a "staggering expense." Preliminary strings of firecrackers were exploded by impatient boys and the dawn of the holiday was greeted with a sustained uproar of powder.

All this was communicated to Nettie in the form of a determination to forget the dreariness of home and for once anyhow be a part of the careless holiday town. Edward Dunsack opened the day by deprecating what fireworks Salem could show and recalling the extravagant art of China in that particular. No one, he said, of the least moment would be abroad in the rabble; and he intended to spend the day over the invoice of a schooner returned from Curacao. She was glad of this, for it left her free to get an uninterrupted pleasure from the morning parade, the floats and fantasies, the afternoon drilling in Washington Square, and see the last colored disk of the fireworks. Maybe, she told herself, tying the becoming ribbon of her bonnet beneath a round chin with a lurking dimple, maybe she wouldn't come back home once during the entire day! She ignored, in the rush of her spirits, even her mother's lonely labors: for once they'd have to do without her. Nettie took a scarlet merino shawl for the cooler evening, shook forward the little black curls about her face, and hurried away from Hardy Street.

She was swept along in the crowd on Essex Street until, before the office of the Salem Register, she found a place that commanded the parade. There Nettie lost all memory of the dreariness that pressed upon her; she became one of the throng, applauding the members of the East India Marine Society carrying the palanquin from the Museum in native dress, or stood with sentimental tears blurring her vision. The parade ended, and currents of people swept toward dinner; but she stopped at a baker's and got a paper of seed cakes, made in the shape of oak leaves and sat contentedly eating them in the Common.

The thought of Gerritt Ammidon, with all the other deeper aspects of her life, was thrust into the back of her consciousness; she was existing as she breathed—without will; the instinctive lighter qualities had her in full possession. She felt that her cheeks were glowing and hummed the refrains of the music she had heard. One by one the military companies marched into the Square. She was fascinated by the tall leather helmets and silver straps under severe young lips. The Newburyport men were in a new scarlet uniform, that was the Boston Brass Band—it was painted on the bass drum—with the Independents; there were the Beverly Taylor Guards. The massed onlookers filled the broad plain.

The drilling and countermarching proceeded and the afternoon waned. At the disposal of the spectacle, when for an hour or two Washington Square was comparatively deserted, when the sun sank lower and lower over the roofs of Brown Street and the gold haze thickened, turning to blue, Nettie became quieter but no less happy. The time sped; never was she conscious of being lonely, by herself in a multitude composed of grouped families and friends. It was all such a beautiful relief to the other constant dwelling on somber and hopeless facts! Already people were streaming in under the wooden arched gates for the evening display; already she could see a star in the clear-shining green east.

The fireworks, the papers said, were to be in two parts, ending with a bombardment of Vera Cruz, five hundred feet long, and a series of triumphant arches with full-length portraits in colored lights of celebrated Americans. There was a sudden salute of artillery, and a flight of rockets soared upward in long flaming curves, dissolving in showers of liquid emerald and ruby and silver against the night. Bengola lights casting a blue glare over the standing mob and farther house fronts were followed by a great Peruvian Cross, a silvery fountain of water and Grand Representation of Bunker Hill Monument.

With this the first came all too soon to an end, and Nettie was folding the shawl about her shoulders when almost the entire Ammidon family were upon her.... In an instinctive confusion she saw William Ammidon and his wife with their daughters, the old man, Jeremy, and Gerrit.

They stopped before her in an assured, not unkindly inquisitiveness, the girls fresh and bright-faced, with crisp lovely clothes; their mother, in a smart mantle and little bonnet with knots of French flowers, greeted her with a direct question tempered by a smile. William Ammidon, smoking, was unconcerned; while Gerrit stayed obscured outside the group. "Whom are you with, Nettie?" Rhoda Ammidon asked; and when she admitted that she was alone the elder, with visible disapproval, asserted:

"That won't do at all in this rough assembly. I must see that you are taken care of." She hesitated, with a slight frown on her handsome brow. "But you will want to see the rest of the fireworks. Yes, what you must do is to come over to our steps, the view from there is fairly good, and then some one can walk home with you."

They moved resolutely forward, giving Nettie Vollar no opportunity for protest, the expression of what she might prefer; and, with so many determined minds, she dropped silently into their progress. She was beside Rhoda Ammidon, the girls trooped on before, and the men—Gerrit Ammidon—followed. Her peace of mind had been broken into a hundred half-formed doubts and acute questions. She wished that she had declined to go with them: the invitation, no, command, had been a criticism, really. Now, after so long, it wasn't necessary for them to become suddenly responsible for her.

The happiness of the day sank a little, thoughts of her mother and grandfather and Uncle Edward returned. But, at the same time, she realized that she was near Gerrit once more. This made a confusion of her emotions that hid what she most felt about him. It wasn't a proximity that meant anything, however; it had been utterly different when he came to see her before his marriage. Yet, just the fact of his being close behind her, and that she would be on the steps at the Ammidons' with him, undoubtedly had a power to stir her heart.

It brought, like her carefree excursion, a certain momentary glow, a warmth, without relation to what had gone before or might follow; there was the same quality of momentary rest, refreshment, complete and isolated as a jewel in a ring. She didn't analyze it further; but drifted with the vigorous chattering tide of the Ammidons.

They arrived at the impressive entrance open on a high dim interior. Jeremy and William Ammidon went in, Rhoda lingered while a chair was brought for her, and Sidsall and Camilla, Laurel and Janet ranged themselves facing the Square. Gerrit hung silent in the doorway.

"Perhaps Taou Yuen will come down," Rhoda Ammidon suggested, and Nettie's throat was pinched at the possibility of seeing Gerrit's Chinese wife. But he answered shortly in the negative. Taou Yuen preferred to stay in her room; the view from her window was better than this. The latter was easily possible, for here the set pieces were almost unintelligible: an impressive beehive could be seen surrounded by swarming golden bees, a pyramid of Roman candles discharged their rushes of colored balls and streamers; but the bombardment of Vera Cruz was a cause of bitter complaint to the children.

The fireworks had ceased to have the slightest significance for Nettie; she was luxuriating in the suavity of the Ammidon steps and company. It seemed to her that an actual air of ease rolled out over her from within. Seen from her place of vantage the great throng in the Square was without feature, the passersby on Pleasant Street—as Edward Dunsack and herself had been—were unimportant. The massive portico and dignified fence, the sense of spaciousness and gardens and lofty formal ceilings, the feeling of fine silks and round clear direct voices, of servants for everything, everyone, transcended in force all her speculations. She was familiar—who wasn't in Salem?—with the meaning of the house's name, Java Head. It was more, quite heaven.

Thoughts of Gerrit winged in and out of her mind like wayward birds. She turned with studied caution and glanced swiftly but intently at as much of his countenance as she could see. Her memory vividly supplied the rest. There wasn't another like it—one so clear and compelling to read—in the world.

The past in which he had had a part seemed like an impossibly happy dream. She was hardly able to believe that he had been in their sitting room, walked with her in the evening to the grassy edge of the harbor, or held her fingers in his hard cool grasp. Now she wondered if he were contented. She couldn't quite decide from glimpses of his face; but something that had nothing to do with vision disturbed her with the certainty that he was troubled. It might mean unhappiness, but she wasn't sure.

"Now there go the arches!" a young voice exclaimed, "and I just can't see anything. You'd never know at all it was a temple of eight columns. Oh, look—there's a number coming out, 'July fourth, seventeen seventy-six.'" A tide of hand clapping swept over the dark masses. "No," Laurel continued, "that's Salem.... It's Washington, no, General Taylor."

The amazing day, Nettie realized, was over, the people flowed back through the gates like a lake breaking in streams from its bank; there was a stir on the steps. Looking up she saw that the stars were obscured, and a low rumble of thunder sounded from a distance, a flash lit the horizon. Now she must go back, return to Hardy Street, to her bitter grandfather like an iron statue eaten by rust and storms, to Edward Dunsack following her with his dragging feet and thin insinuating voice, to her hopeless mother.

"It's the powder," she heard, about what she had no conception. Rhoda Ammidon turned decidedly to her. "It was nice to have you, Nettie," she declared; "but we must see about getting you safely home. The carriage would be best since it's threatening rain." She didn't, she replied, want to give them so much bother, she often went on errands after supper, she'd, be all right—

"Nonsense," Mrs. Ammidon interrupted impatiently. Then Gerrit advanced from the doorway. "I'll walk down with her," he said almost roughly. "No need to take the horses out so late." Nettie Vollar thought that his sister-in-law's mouth tightened in protest, but he gave them no chance for further argument. He descended the steps with a quick grinding tread, and she was forced to hurry through her acknowledgments in order to overtake him.

The night at once absorbed them.

The air, charged with the fumes of gunpowder and rumbling with low intermittent thunder, was oppressive and disturbing. Gerrit's head was exactly opposite her own, and she could see his profile, pale and still, moving on a changing dark background. He walked with the short firm stride men acquire on the unsteady decks of vessels, swinging his arms but slightly. Neither spoke. The rain, Nettie saw, was hanging off; probably it would not reach Salem, Washington Square was already empty except for a small obscure stir by the scaffolding for the fireworks. A murmur of young voices came from a door on Bath Street. Such minute observations filled her mind; beneath their surface she was conscious of a deep, a fathomless, turmoil. It was a curious sensation, curious because she couldn't tell whether it was happiness or misery. One now exactly resembled the other to Nettie Vollar.

She grasped, however, one difference—it was happiness now, the misery belonged to tomorrow. But suddenly that last unrealized fact—at once immaterial and the most leaden reality of all—lost its weight. The greater freedom she had lately grown into became an absolute indifference, a half willful and half automatic shutting of her eyes to everything but the present, the actuality of Gerrit Ammidon walking by her side. She wanted him to speak, so that she could discover his thoughts, feelings; yet she was reluctant to have their companionship of silence broken: words, almost all the possible terms she could imagine, would only emphasize the distance between them.

She was thinking of one now—a word he had never pronounced, but which she felt had been, however obscurely, at the back of the attention he had paid her: love. It was a queer thing. It seemed to be—everyone agreed that it was—of the greatest, perhaps the first, importance; and yet all sorts of other considerations, some insignificant and others mean and more, yes—cowardly, held it in check, drove it back out of sight, as you might hurriedly shut some shabby object into a closet at the arrival of visitors.

"How have you been?" he demanded in the abrupt voice of the expression of his determination to see her home. Well enough, she assured him, if he meant her health. He glanced at her with somber eyes. "Not altogether," he admitted; "it included your family, things generally."

"They are as bad as possible," she told him. She admitted this frankly, a part of her entire surrender to the moment, careless of how it might affect him. "They would be," he muttered savagely. "It's a habit ... here." The "here," she knew, referred to life on shore; his gloomy attitude toward the management and affairs of the land had caused her a great deal of precious laughter. He had revealed a most astonishing ignorance of necessities that she had understood instinctively when hardly more than a child; and this simplicity had, as much as anything, brought her affection for him to life. At the same time she in particular had felt the justice of a great many of his charges. But no one could reasonably hope for the sort of world—a world as orderly and trim as that of a narrow ship—he thought should be brought about by a mere command. Nettie wished that it could! She sighed, gazing at him.

"Then it's no better than before?" he asked, adding, with a descriptive gesture: "the town and people?"

"I hardly speak to ten in a year, outside the stores and like that. Of course they nod going into church, or a lady, I mean really, your sister-in-law, will say something nice, even do what you saw to-night. Though it's the first time anything like that has happened."

She caught a repressed bitter oath.

"I suppose I'll get used to it," she continued. "No, I won't," she added differently; "never, never, never."

"If you were a man now—" he said with an incredible stupidity.

She wondered angrily if he'd rather have her a man; there had been a time, Nettie reflected, when such a possibility would have stirred him to violent protest. And this brought out the reflection that, while at one time he might have cared for her, now perhaps he was merely sorry for her unhappiness. Yes, this must be it. She had a momentary fatal impulse to throw back at him scornfully any such small kindness. She didn't, she told herself, want condescending sympathy. What silenced her was the sudden knowledge that she did; she wanted anything whatsoever from Gerrit Ammidon. The fact that he had a Chinese wife was powerless to alter her feeling in the smallest degree. On the contrary, she was shocked to find that it had increased immensely, it was growing with every minute.

She wondered drearily if her stubborn love—the term took its place without remark in the procession of her thoughts—for Gerrit didn't, in spite of her protest to the contrary, stamp her as quite bad. Perhaps her grandfather was right about them all—her mother and Uncle Edward and herself, and they were wicked, lost! The energy with which she had combated this charge now faced by the circumstance of her realized affection for a man married to some one else, even Chinese, wavered. All the cheerful influences of the day, rising to the supreme tranquil hour on the Ammidon porch, sank to dejection; it was like the flight of the rockets.

She walked listlessly, her brain was numb; she was terribly tired. Gerrit Ammidon's head was bent and she was unable to see his expression. He might even have forgotten, by the token of his self-absorbed progress, that she was at his side.

"There's going to be a stir in Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone," he said presently, "when my father hears of the new program. Everything is turning to the fastest California runs possible. William and James Saltonstone want me to take command of a clipper. But I find I'm like my father, Nettie; all my experience has been in the East and the China service. I'm used to it. I'd never get on navigating a passenger boat, a packet ship, from Boston to San Francisco and San Francisco to Boston. The other's in my blood, too—running the northeast trades to Brazil and coming up into the southwest passage winds for the Cape of Good Hope. A long reach nearly to Australia and then north again to the Indian Ocean and southeast trades.

"I'm fit for that, for long voyages, a blue-water sailor and all it means; but battering back and forward round the Horn with my deck cluttered up by prospectors and shore crews the mates would have to slam into the rigging—!" His exclamation refused every face of such a possibility. She understood his necessity completely; and the brief account of such far happy journeys, safe from everything that Salem had come to mean for her, filled her with longing.

"I'm beginning to see," he took up again the self-examination, "that I am to blame for a good deal that I've found fault with in others. I mean that I'm a different variety of animal, and, naturally, no judge of the kinds of holes they live in or the way their affairs are managed."

"You are worlds better!" she cried.

He turned to her, obviously startled, and she held for a long breath his unguarded intense gaze. "Not very useful, I am afraid," he replied at last; "not today, anyhow. I belong to a life that is dying, Nettie; mark my words, dying if not already dead. And I'm newfangled to my father. It goes as quickly as that."

This was a fresh mood to all her knowledge of his impatient arrogance, and one that sent her to him in a passionate unperceived emotion. They had arrived at her home and were waiting aimless and silent. Beyond, the gate to the yard was standing open, and Nettie saw that his discovery of the fact had occurred at the identical moment of her own. She made an involuntary movement forward and he followed her through to the blurred tangle of bushes and bare trodden earth. Mutely they turned to the sod spread at the harbor.

The thunder had died away, but pale sheets of reflected lightning hovered at short intervals low in the sky. Directly above them stars shone again. The window of the sitting room still bore the illumination of the lamp within; and Nettie could picture her mother, with stained and rough hands loose on their wrists, opposite Barzil Dunsack's gaunt set countenance.

"You said something about things as bad as possible."

In a level voice she told him about her discovery of Edward Dunsack unconscious in his black wrap on the bed. "I thought he had died," she repeated almost monotonously; "he had such a yellow gone look."

"But that can't be allowed!" he cried. "You mustn't see it. Indecent, worse. The beast will have to be removed. No one will hear of his staying about with two women and a fanatical old man." She was afraid that he would go into the house at once and appear with her uncle, very much in the manner of a dog with a rat. Her sense of a worldly knowledge, a philosophy of realization, far deeper than his own returned. Things couldn't be disposed of in that easy manner; it was probable that they couldn't be disposed of, righted, at all. Her mother, with her help, must continue to keep Barzil's home: there was no other place for Edward Dunsack to go. "He won't hurt us," she said vaguely. "It's principally bad for him. Then, at first, I didn't know. You get used to so much."

He, Gerrit Ammidon, wouldn't have it, he asserted in a heated return of his familiar dictatorial manner. The fellow would be out of there to-morrow. It was a damned unendurable outrage!

She smiled softly and laid a momentary hand on his sleeve. "That's nothing, Gerrit; nothing compared to the rest, to me." He frowned down at her out of the gloom.

"What am I to do?" she asked.

He again cursed Salem and the world with which he had proclaimed himself out of date and sympathy. This, while it communicated to her a certain warm comfort, resolved nothing, made no reply to her question. To-morrow offered precisely the same hopeless outlook of yesterday. No answer from Gerrit, Gerrit married, was possible. She saw that.

"I'm not fit to go around on land blubbering and setting tongues to clapping," he declared. "I ought to be locked in my cabin when the ship's in port, and let out only after sail's made again."