"Blueberry pie," I said hastily, "is very messy, I think, though undoubtedly good. It makes one's mouth so black."

"I know," she murmured reminiscently, "I told Roger that his mouth was stained and I laughed at him. And then he said that mine was worse, because there was some on my chin—why do you scowl so, Jerry? Is that a wrong thing to tell?"

"No, no," I assured her, "of course not."

"I am glad," she said comfortably, "it is very strange that I cannot see the difference, myself. How do you see, Jerry? But I was telling you about the tide, was I not? When Roger said that about my mouth I tried to get the stain off, but I could not, and then Roger said it was no use trying any more and he kissed me."

Here Margarita paused and patted my hand, tapping each finger nail lightly with her own finger-tips.

"You need not be afraid, Jerry," she added encouragingly, "I shall not tell any more things about that."

I drew away my hand irritably. "Well, well, what about the tide?" I said.

Margarita's repulsed fingers lay loosely upcurled on her knees, which she hunched in front of her, like a boy.

"Oh, it was only what you asked me, dear Jerry," she answered softly, "while Roger was kissing me that kiss, the tide did come in!"



CHAPTER VII

I RIDE KNIGHT ERRANT

It is easy to see that I should have made a poor novelist; it has been hard enough for me to give you any idea of scenes I did not myself witness, even though I had Roger and Margarita to help me out and an intimate knowledge of both of them, and when I try to fancy myself composing a tissue of fictitious events "all out of my head," as the children say, my pen drops weakly out of my fingers, in horror at the very thought.

But now, thank heaven, the pull is over. From now on, I need tell only what I knew and saw, in the strange, interwoven life we three have led. Three only? Nay, Harriet of the true heart, Harriet of the tender hand, could we have been three without you? My fingers should wither before they left your name unwritten.

I remember so well the night the telegram came. I had been vexed all day. Everything had gone wrong. Roger, to meet whom I had come back early to town, had neither turned up nor sent me any message; the day had been sickeningly hot, with that mid-September heat that comes to the Eastern States after the first crisp days and wilts everything and everybody. I found my rooms atrociously stale and dusty, and worse than that, perfectly useless, since by some miracle of carelessness I had left my keys behind me at the shore and hadn't so much as a clean collar to look forward to.

The club valet assured me that he had received no call for trunk or bag, but that Roger had assuredly not entered the house for five days. I went into his rooms, but they told me nothing, and I, worse luck, should have been lost in his collar, so I glared angrily at the drawers of linen, wired for my own keys and made for the Turkish bath. There with a thrill of delight I discovered a complete change of clothing; I had, before leaving for the summer, jumped hastily into dinner things, leaving a heap of forgotten garments behind me and they awaited me now, trim and creased, russet shoes polished, and a wine-colored tie, a particular favourite of mine, topping the fresh linen. It seems absurd, but I recall few moments in my life of such pure, heartfelt thanksgiving. The very colour of life seemed changed for me. I wonder if we do well in despising these small thrills as we do? Surely enough of them sedulously preserved in grateful memory must equal in intensity those great, theoretical moments we all regard as our due but so often pass through life, I am sure, without experiencing.

However that may be, the little gratifications of that evening are graven in my mind, undoubtedly, you will say, because of the startling climax for which they were preparing me. The clean tingling of my soapy scrub, the delicious coolness of the plunge, the leisurely, fresh dressing all caressed my nerves delightfully. In the plunge a pleasant enough fellow had accosted me and we had splashed together contentedly. I expected to recall his name every moment, for his face was vaguely familiar, but I could not, and when we met in the hall and went down the steps together, it still escaped me. We hesitated a bit on the pavement, and then before I realised it we were hailing a hansom and bound for dinner together.

It was a pleasant drive up along the river, for a little breeze had sprung up and the watered asphalt smelt cool. We were both comfortably hungry and very placid after our bath and we chatted in a desultory sort of way, I, amused at my utter inability to place the fellow, he quite unconscious, of course, and perfectly certain of me. He asked after Roger, sympathised with our failure to make connections, remarked to my surprise that he had only been out of town for his Sundays (America had not adopted the "week-end" at that time) and asked me, I remember, if I knew anything about a game called basket-ball. It seemed he was anxious to find someone who did. We drew up at last to our white, glistening little table looking out over the water, looked about for possible friends, nodded to the head-waiter and ordered our dinner. It turned out that neither of us had yet celebrated the oyster month, and leaving my unknown to bespeak the blue points, for the more conservative among us clung to the smaller oyster then, I telephoned the club to let Roger know where to find me in case he should appear there.

Over the soup my companion got on to the subject—somehow—of evolution, and talked about it very ably indeed. It is absurd, but I shall never be able to eat jellied consomme as long as I live without connecting it with the Saurian Period! I remember that those quaint and apparently highly important beasts lasted well into our guinea-chick and lettuce-hearts, and I can see him now, his eager, dark face all lighted with enthusiasm while he spread mayonnaise neatly over the crimson quarters of tomato on his plate, and made short nervous mouthfuls, in order to talk the better. Half amused, half interested I listened, trying to place the fellow, but for the life of me I could not. Was he a scientist, a lecturer, a magazine writer, a schoolmaster? We finished with some Port du Salut and Bar-le-duc—an admitted weakness of mine—and I had decided to regularly pump him and find out his name without his guessing my game, when he began as I supposed, to help me out.

"Heavens!" he said with compunction, "you'll think me an awful bore, Jerrolds, but I've been more or less practising on you, haven't I? But you'll remember, perhaps, this used to be a sort of hobby of mine, and I work it into shape nowadays for a young men's club I'm running."

I yawned and lit a cigar and we sipped our coffee in silence. The plates rattled around us, the curacoa in my tiny glass smelled sweet and strong, everything was natural, easy, well fed and well groomed (as the phrase goes now) about me, the day and hour were like any other; and yet from that moment on my life was never to be quite the same, for surprise and change were hurrying toward me, and the man opposite—how curiously!—was to be drawn into the wide net that fate had sunk for me and must have even then been preparing to draw smoothly and effectively to the surface.

We think, when we are young, that we live alone. I recall, as a boy of twenty, certain hot-headed, despairing midnight walks when the horror of my hopeless, unapproachable, unreachable identity surged over me in melancholy waves. Heavens! I would have plunged into a monastery if I had believed that any sort of prayer and fasting could bring me close—really close—to God; for to any human creature, I had learned, I could never be close. After that, we grow into that curious stage of irresponsibility which we deduce from this loneliness, and distress our patient relatives with windy explanations of "matters that concern ourselves alone." And later still, if we have the right kind of women about us, some faint idea of the twisted net we weave—you and I and the other fellow, all together, whether we will or no—comes to us, and we stare awhile and then ... shrug our shoulders or bend our knees or set our jaws, according as we are made.

I like to believe, now, that a dim idea of what was going to happen was in some mysterious way growing on me before I got the telegram. I am certain that when the head-waiter touched my arm and told me I was wanted at the telephone, a curious oppression fell over my hitherto contented after-dinner spirit which grew into a kind of excitement as I made my way to the booth. And yet I expected nothing more than to hear Roger's voice with some reasonable explanation of his failure to meet me. It was the night porter, however, reading me a telegram missent to the shore and returned to the club.

"Shall I read it, sir?"

"Yes, Richard, let's have it."

He mumbled the name of a place I had never heard of and went on in the peculiarly expressionless style consecrated to messages, thus transmitted.

"Please bring bag of clothes and razors here will meet train arriving four thirty Tuesday bring sensible parson don't fail. Roger."

I stared at the receiver stupidly. This was Wednesday.

"That's crazy, Richard," I stammered finally, "bring what? Read it again."

"It's quite plain, sir, except the town," and again the strange message reached me.

"Well," I managed to get out, "it's clear he wants clothes, anyway. Tell Hodgson to pack a complete change for Mr. Bradley and his razors. And see if you can find the name of the place from the chief operator and the correct message. It can't be parson, of course. And look up the next train for that place, if you can, Richard. I'll be down there directly."

I puffed hard at my dying cigar and went slowly back to the veranda, trying to make sense of that telegram.

"No bad news, I hope?" my companion inquired kindly, for I suppose I looked worried.

"No," I said slowly, "only an idiotic sort of telegram from Roger. He wants me to meet him at some place or other at present unknown, and to bring him his razors and a sensible parson."

My unknown friend burst into a chuckle of laughter.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "you get the razors and I'll attend to the parson end of it. Any special denomination?"

I paid for our dinner (he had insisted upon paying the cab) and gathered up my hat and stick.

"It's absurd," I went on, "perhaps he meant 'person,' though what's the point in that? Anyhow I must start directly. There may be a night train. Would you rather stop here a while?"

"No, no, let me see you through," he said good-naturedly. "I'm interested. Perhaps he's going to fight a duel with the razors and wants the parson for the other fellow! Perhaps he's made a bet to shave a parson. Perhaps——"

But I was in no mood for joking. The telegram, so unlike Roger, and yet so unmistakably his, in a way—I have often noted a curious characteristic quality in telegrams—worried me. I wished I had got it in time to make the train he mentioned. I wished I were in that mysterious town. Suppose he had depended on me for it? Suppose he needed me?

We drove down in silence. My man got out with me at the club and smiled at the Gladstone the porter held out to me.

"There are the razors, anyhow," he said.

Richard had the name of the town for me, too (the town I prefer not to tell you) and the next train that would make it: it left in fifteen minutes.

"And it is parson, sir—p-a-r-s-o-n: there's no mistake. Shall I call you a cab, sir?"

I bit through my cigar with irritation.

"In heaven's name," I cried, "how am I to get a sensible parson in fifteen minutes? In the first place, I don't believe there is such a thing!"

"Hold on, there," said my friend suddenly, "there is, Jerrolds, for I'm one, and you know it!"

I started at him. Who in the devil was he? Instinctively I began an apology.

"I—I didn't recall at the moment——"

"Between you and me," he cut me short, "I'm just as well pleased that you didn't, Jerrolds! The sooner we get through with all this white choker and black coat business, the sooner we'll amount to something, in my way of thinking. Well, seriously—will I do? Do you know anybody better? Because I'll go, if you don't."

I grasped his offered hand.

"Heaven bless you," I thought, "whoever you are!" and, "All right," I said shortly, "it's very kind of you. We'll have to hurry, I'm afraid."

We had just time to jump for the last platform. I remember apostrophising the Gladstone rather strongly as I fell on its metal clasp, and glancing apologetically at my companion, but he was tactfully deaf, and we found a seat together, by good luck, and settled down for our hot and tiresome night.

I couldn't very well ask his name by that time, it would have been too absurd. I trusted to Roger to get me out of that difficulty, for he knew Roger, evidently, and me too, though not very well, I judged. He certainly wasn't in my college class, for it would have come up, I was sure, in our talk. Not that we talked much. It was a stuffy, disagreeable ride, and I was alternately vexed with Roger and worried about him. In a hopelessly foolish manner I connected the razors and the parson, too closely for any reasonable inference in regard to the latter. I knew the connection was ridiculous but it was persistent, and as I had lost all hope of placing the man sitting beside me, my mind was altogether in a horrid muddle. Once he asked me abruptly if Roger were an Episcopalian.

"No," I answered, "he—his people are Unitarians."

"I'm a Congregationalist, as you know, of course," he went on, "but if it makes no more difference to Roger than it will to me, there'll be no trouble."

"Anyone would suppose he was going to christen Roger," I thought disgustedly and returned to my troublesome thoughts, replying absently that it would be all right, of course.

We changed cars at S—— and got into a queer little local train filled with young village roughs, whose noisy horseplay annoyed me exceedingly. My mysterious parson, however, was deeply interested in them and related incident after incident in proof of what could be accomplished with this offensive part of the rural population by social organisation under competent direction. He even got out an old letter and proved to me on the back of it, with a stub of a pencil, what a pitiful outlay in money was sufficient to start a practical boys' club, including the rent of a second-hand piano, to be purchased ultimately on the instalment plan. In the midst of this lecture (it was no less) I fell asleep, uncomfortably and rudely, and it was he who shook me awake at last and carried the bag out of the close car.



CHAPTER VIII

THE MISTS OF EDEN

The station lights flared pale in the coming dawn. Behind the barred window of the ticket-office, which contained, as its bright lamp showed, a tumbled cot bed and a dilapidated arm-chair, a tousled young man sat playing Patience in his nightshirt on the telegraph table. We battered on his window, and to our amazement he nodded casually and entirely without surprise at us, reached into a corner of his littered room, grasped a pair of oars, and, pushing up the window, poked them out at us between the bars.

"Mr. Jerrolds, I guess," he remarked. "Mr. Bradley's left the boat for you at the foot of the dock, little ways across the track there. It's kind of a blue boat. You just sight the two reefs and the bell buoy and when you're just opposite of the buoy, turn about and make for the shore. There's a white pole where you land."

"Have you been sitting up—" I began, but he cut me short impatiently.

"No, I have insomnia—it's something dreadful the way I have it," he explained. "I'm always sitting up."

I accepted the oars mechanically.

"And where is Mr. Bradley stopping?" I asked.

"Why, over to Miss Prynne's. He met the afternoon train yest'day and the deaf an' dumb feller rowed over to-day, and when you didn't turn up he left the oars. I tell you, he knows more'n you might think, to look at him."

"Was—is Mr. Bradley well?" I asked.

"He looked to be well enough yest'day," said the insomniac indifferently, "big feller, ain't he?"

I shouldered the oars, and followed by my sensible parson with the bag, made for the untidy wharf through the silent village. The blue boat was not hard to discover in the pale, ghostly light; the bay was hardly rippled; it was to be another hot, sticky day. My companion begged the privilege of the oars.

"My old game, you know," he added apologetically, and swept us out on the black, mysterious water with beautiful, clean strokes. He had soon marked down the buoy and was regretting that it would be only a matter of twenty minutes before we must land.

"Do you know," he added with a boyish sort of smile, "all this is a real adventure to me, Jerrolds, and I can't help enjoying it. It can't be serious, you see—Roger's well. Perhaps"—and he shot a curious glance at me—"perhaps he's going to be married!"

I laughed a little stiffly. It was difficult to explain to this sensible parson that Bradleys did not marry in this fashion; it wasn't quite complimentary to him. Moreover I didn't know whether he would be sensible enough to understand what two or three of Roger's friends knew very well—that he was unlikely to marry so long as Sue Paynter remained above ground. It had been simple enough, that affair: Sue and Roger had been engaged ten years before the time of which I am writing, they were within a few months of the wedding, and Frederick Paynter, her cousin, had come back from Germany, playing Chopin like a demi-god, and had whirled her off her feet in a fortnight. She broke off the engagement in a rather cruel way, it seemed to me—by telephone—and Roger hung up the receiver (I myself heard him answer slowly, "Very well, dear. I see. Good-bye.") and went to Algiers with me. When we came back they were married and he was having a great success, playing before Royalty and all that sort of thing.

I think it took Sue about a month to find out what any of her men friends could have told her in six seconds, and after that she kept him in Europe as much as she could. She kept up pretty well for three or four years, but at last she came back with her two delicate babies and satisfied everybody's sense of propriety by nursing Frederick while he stayed in America and dining out with him twice a season before he returned to Europe. It was all very regrettable and Sarah would discuss it in her tactful way from time to time till, if I had been Roger, I should have choked her. Sue would not listen to a separation, even, and insisted that Frederick sent her plenty of money, which Roger invested for her, and old Madam Bradley had her often with them in Boston. Roger never discussed it; he didn't need to. But I never knew him to be out of Boston or New York if the Paynters were there together, and I remarked that he invariably left word where he could be reached, day or night, when Frederick was playing a series of concerts.

All this ran through my mind as we cut through the water and the sky grew paler by degrees and the stars faded out. We were opposite the buoy now, dark amongst the dark waves, and we turned at right angles and made for the shore. The tide was high and we glided over the inner reef easily. Soon we could see the eaves of the cottage dimly, a cock crowed sleepily, the white pole pointed out some rough steps cut in the rocks ahead.

That sudden sense of excitement grew in me again, a nervous longing to get hold of Roger, to get away from my oarsman, for I was worried out of all reason. He, to my satisfaction, at this moment proposed a separation.

"I haven't had half enough of this," he said suddenly, "why don't you land, Jerrolds, if you feel you ought to—though I don't see how we can descend on Miss Prynne or anybody else at this unearthly hour—and I'll pull about for a while? I don't doubt you'd rather see Roger alone, anyhow, at first. When you want me, just give me a hail—I won't be far. And tell him to have plenty of breakfast, will you?"

I agreed warmly to this and clambered up the slippery steps, still possessed by the same muffled excitement. The beach was hard as a floor under me and I almost ran along it toward the sanded cottage. The merest glance at it showed that no one watched there; the windows were dark. I skirted the rocky wall that protected its back and sides; no one was stirring in stable or outhouse. On the shore side a straggling grass stretch ran down to a sheltered, inland bay; a fair sized vegetable garden, glistening with dew, and a few fruit trees gave a domestic air to the place, utterly unguessed from the forbidding sea front. I wandered toward this little bay and sat in a delightful natural chair of rock to wait for the sunrise.

I must have lost myself for a few minutes, for when I opened my eyes everything before them was changed, as completely as the scene shifters change a stage picture. The little bay was crowded with rolling seas of white, thick mist, like an Alpine lake. Billow on billow it rolled in, faintly luminous here and there, breaking as smoke breaks, on the beach. As I stared, lost in the beauty of it, two great gold arrows from the sun behind me cut into the thickest of it and tore it like a curtain, and in the rent appeared two human figures, walking as it might be on clouds to earth. More than mortal tall they loomed in the mist, and no marbles I have ever seen—not even that Wonder of Melos—is so immortally lovely as they were. The woman wore a veil of crimson vine-leaves that wound about her hips and dropped on one side nearly to her knee, around the man's neck a great lock of her long hair lay loose and on his head a rough wreath of the red leaves shone in the arrow of sunlight. Beside them a monstrous hound appeared suddenly: a trailing vine dripped like blood from his great jowl.

I could not have told what she looked like to save my life: she was what the world means when it says woman—beautiful, certainly, but no one person. One arm was on his shoulder, the other hand lay on the animal's head; the mist covered their feet and they appeared as aerial, as unreal as figures in some Assumption. But they were not through with earth, not they: they were humanity triumphant—the very crown and flower of creation. They came up from the sea with the grave, contented smile of the old gods on their faces. Nature, working patiently at her Saurians, had had this in her mind from the beginning, and I believed in that moment that God had indeed allowed her to perfect her last work in His image! For perhaps three heart-beats I saw them there, framed in the luminous mist, and then it rolled over them, swiftly, silently, and wiped them out, and I stumbled from the rock-seat and ran back across the beach, a great lump stiffening my throat and a hard, frightened jealousy nearly stifling me, to my shame and surprise.

For I had known Roger twenty-five years and yet I had never had the least idea of the man!



PART THREE

IN WHICH THE STREAM JOINS WITH OTHERS AND PLUNGES DOWN A CLIFF

He's left his flocks, his fields, his kine, He's left his folk and friends and all, He's off to watch the cold sea shine, To brew for aye the salt sea brine, The mermaid hath Sir Hugh in thrall.

Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.



CHAPTER IX

MARGARITA MEETS THE ENEMY AND HE IS HERS

I flung myself down on the beach behind a big rock, so that I was completely cut off from the cottage, and stared at the sun rising, though it might as well have been the moon for all my appreciation of it. So this was it! No wonder he wanted a parson—it was high time, I thought virtuously. It cut me that he had never hinted this to me; that we, who had had no secrets from each other for so many years (as I thought) had really been divided by this, for what I inferred had been a long time. And yet a moment's consideration brought home to me the almost certainty that it couldn't have been so very long, after all. There had been, especially in the last year, weeks and even months when Roger and I had not been separated for eight hours at a stretch. He chose to work hard in the typical American fashion; I was obliged to. And I knew his attitude toward the sort of liaison we both despised. He had laboured enough and disgustedly enough at dragging a weak-kneed cousin of his (the black sheep that few large families dispense with) out of a connection of that kind. And anyhow, I knew that people who wore when they were together the look I had seen on those two visions of the mist could never be contented apart!

Well, well, it was a bad quarter of an hour for me, and I had to get over it as best I could, alone. Women are usually credited with a practical monopoly of jealousy of their own sex, but wrongly, I am sure. We learn earlier to conceal it and, better still, realise the necessity for keeping quiet about it and getting over it. The clock continues to strike, and one's friends continue to marry, and one continues to present silver mugs to one's god-children—voila tout!

I suppose the worry and strain of it all, the hot, stuffy, sleepless night and the sudden shock at the last had tired me, for as I lay on the beach, sheltered by the rock, with just enough of the warm sun at my back for comfort, I went off into a doze and lost myself completely. I may have slept two hours, and woke with that perfectly definite sensation of some one's being by and staring at me that disturbs one's deepest dreams.

Sitting Turk fashion on the sand near me was a beautiful young woman with great deep set grey eyes and two braids of long dark hair, one falling over either shoulder. Her skin was dark, nearly olive, and her mouth was of that deep, dark red that has always seemed to me so much more alluring than all the coral lips of poetry and convention. She was oddly attired in a short, faded blue serge skirt and a dull red jacket of the sort called at that sartorial epoch a "jersey." Tied around the neck of this was a black silk handkerchief. Black stockings, generously displayed, and worn white tennis shoes completed her costume—a trying one, certainly, and, one would have supposed, sufficiently prejudicial in my eyes, who have always had a confessed preference for the charm of well-selected clothes, and a certain critical judgment in that direction, I am told.

But Margarita would have moulded a suit of chain-armour, I believe, to her personality. It was quite obvious that she wore no corset, for the tight jersey clung to her round, firm bust and long, supple waist like a glove. Her shoulders were, perhaps, a little shade squared, which only added to the boyishness of the enchanting pose of her head, and the loose handkerchief gave the last touch to the daintily hardy fisher girl she seemed to have chosen for her masquerade. For there was nothing of the peasant about her; race showed in every feature, and the dim, toned colours of her faded clothes appeared the last touch of realistic art.

"You must wake, now," she said gravely, "and tell me if you are Jerry—are you?"

"Yes," I said, "I am. And you are——?"

"I am Margarita," she said. "Did you bring some one who knows how to marry people? Roger said you would."

"I brought him—he's out there," I answered, pointing to the ocean generally.

She followed my arm with interest in her eyes. "Oh! Is that where he will do it?" she asked. "Roger did not tell me that. Is he swimming?"

"I think not," I answered seriously, "I think he is in a boat."

"I am glad of that," she remarked, "because I cannot swim, myself. And I must be with Roger, you know, when we are being married."

"It is usual," I admitted. I was really only half aware of the extraordinary character of our conversation. Every one became primitive in talking with Margarita and fell, more or less, into her style of discourse.

"Have you been married?" she asked placidly, her grave, lovely eyes full on mine. She sat quite motionless, her hands loose in her lap, neither twiddling them aimlessly nor pretending to employ them in the hundred nervous ways common to her sex.

"No."

"Neither have I. Neither has Roger. But many people have. It cannot be hard."

"Oh, no! I believe it is the simplest thing in the world," I said, eyeing her narrowly. Was she teasing me? I wondered.

"So Roger says," she agreed with obvious relief. "It is only talking. I cannot see why Roger could not learn to do it himself. Can you not do it, either?"

I shook my head. I was trying to believe that she was not quite sane, but it was impossible. Her mind, I could have sworn, was as vigorous as my own, though there was a difference, evidently. The precise, beautiful articulation of her English gave me a new direction. She must be a foreigner—Italian, for choice, in spite of her English eyes.

"Marrying people is a business like any other, Miss—I did not hear your last name?" I ventured.

"I have none," she said. "I mean," correcting herself, "Roger says that I must have one, of course, but I do not happen to have heard it," she added calmly.

"Ah, well," I said coldly, "it is a mere detail."

I was seriously vexed with Roger. This young woman passed belief. I decided that she was an actress of the first water and resented being imposed upon.

"It is the same with my age—how old I am," she continued. "Roger thinks I am twenty years of age. Do you? He is going to ask you."

"Really, I can't say," I returned shortly, "I am a poor judge of women's ages—or characters," I added pointedly.

She did not blush nor move. Only her eyes widened slightly and darkened.

"Roger will ask you," she repeated and I felt, unreasonably, as it seemed to me then, that my tone had hurt her, as one's tone, utterly incomprehensible as the words it utters may be, will hurt a child.

She sat in silence for a moment, and I, curiously eager for her next remark and conscious suddenly of that strange, muffled excitement that had oppressed me a few hours before, watched her closely, gathering handfuls of sand and spilling them over my knee.

"Did you ever go to Broadway?" she began again.

"I have, yes."

"I did, too," she assured me eagerly. "I think it is beautiful. I should like to live there, should not you? Perhaps," hopefully, "you do live there?"

"No," I said, still on my guard and uncomfortable, "I don't. Are you planning to live there after you are married?" She shook her head regretfully.

"I am afraid not," she said, and her voice dropped a full third and coloured with a most absurd and exquisite sombre quality, as Duse's used to in La Dame aux Camellias. "Roger would not want to. He will not want me to walk there very much, either. And that is very strange, because there is where I first saw him. But there are places I shall like quite as well, he says, and he will take me there. Will you come, too?"

"I am afraid," I replied drily, "that I might be a little de trop, perhaps. Roger might not care for my society under those circumstances."

Again she answered my tone rather than my words.

"Roger loves you," she said simply.

"He used to," I returned—inexcusably. Oh, yes! utterly inexcusably.

Again her eyes widened and grew dark, and this time the corners of her mouth curved down pitifully, and I felt a strange heaviness at my heart.

"You do not love me, do you, Jerry?" she said, and now her voice dropped a good fifth and thrilled like the plucked string of a violoncello, and my nerves vibrated to it and tingled in my wrists.

"Roger said you would, and I thought you would—and you do not," she said sadly.

I clenched a handful of the moist sand and leaned toward her, my heart pounding furiously.

"Are you sorry?" I muttered unsteadily, fixing my eyes on hers.

She met them fully. Like great grey pools they were, her eyes, honest as mountain springs, clear as rain. They caught me and held me and drenched me in their innocent, warm sweetness; there was not one thought in her head, not one corner in her heart that I was not free to know. Those eyes had never held a secret since they opened into a world that had never, to her knowledge, deceived her. They swam in light, and oh, the depths on depths of love that one could sound there! My last hateful anchor broke clean off and my heart slipped from the stupid rocks of suspicion and self-protection and jealousy, and floated away on the bosom of that sweet, disturbing flood. I forgot Roger, I forgot what had been myself; in that instant, in the utter surrender of her innocent eyes, she became for me all at once the vision I had seen in the mist again, the thing we mean when we say woman—but now she was one single special woman, the vision and the flesh-and-blood reality together.

"Are you sorry?" I said again, and my voice was not my own.

She smiled at me till I caught my breath. "Not now, Jerry," she said softly, "because you do love me, now."

The sand fell, a tightly moulded shape, out of my hand, and I wrenched my eyes away from her. They smarted and stung, but the pain relieved me and cleared my brain, and I knew suddenly what I have known ever since and shall know till I die. There on the beach, before I had so much as touched her hand, I had fallen senselessly and hopelessly and everlastingly in love with Margarita.



CHAPTER X

FATE SPREADS AN ISLAND FEAST

I don't know how long we sat silent on the beach. Such silence was never embarrassing to her, because it seemed perfectly normal and usual, and I was too busy with my thoughts to feel any sense of restraint. And yet they were hardly thoughts: my head whirled in a confusion of regret and desire, and one moment my blood ran warm with the joy of my discovery, and the next a horrid chill crept over me as I saw my empty years—for if she might not fill them, no one else should. At last I drew a long breath.

"Are you hungry?" Margarita asked pleasantly. "When I am hungry I do that very often. If you will come now, we will have our breakfast."

She sprang to her feet with the lithe ease of a boy and held out her hand to me. I took it and we walked thus across the beach to the cottage, and during that walk, with her firm, warm hand fast in mine and her clean, elastic step beside me, I swore to myself that neither she nor Roger should ever regret what she had done to me, nor know it, if I could keep the knowledge from them. The last part of this vow was impossible of fulfillment, finally, but the first, thank God! has never been broken, or even for a moment strained, and I like to hope that this may count a little to my credit, in the ultimate auditing, for she was terribly alluring, this Margarita, and I am no more a stock or a stone than other men, I fancy.

We walked around to the shore side of the cottage and there stood Roger on its weather-beaten veranda, his hand held out to me eagerly, an anxious, an almost wistful look in his honest blue eyes. He was unusually but not unbecomingly dressed in faded blue serge trousers, too tight for the dictates of fashion, but quite telling in their revelation of his magnificent thighs, tucked into very high wading boots and topped by a grey flannel blouse open at the neck for comfort, with a twisted dull green handkerchief by way of a collar. It was really quite picturesque altogether, and suited him excellently, as all rough-and-ready, notably masculine attire has always done. Curiously enough, he combines with this, when in evening clothes, the least resemblance to a head-waiter I have ever observed in an American; the price they pay, I suppose, for being quite the best dressed business and professional men in the world.

I took all this in, of course, in a fraction of the time it takes to write it, and also the fact that old Roger looked ten years younger than when I had last seen him. He had always been a steady, responsible fellow, you see, one of the men people put things on, and not particularly youthful for his age: a great help to him as a budding young lawyer.

But now I saw the eyes we used to see on the football field in New Haven, and even, it seemed to me for a moment, the little worried yet patient intentness I knew so well at school when some one of those tiny climaxes (that seemed so terrible then!) depended on him for a fair solution. They used to say so clearly, those honest eyes, that he hoped you agreed with him and that you felt his way was the best way, but that whether or not you agreed, he would have to do it, all the same.

He had, as I say, his hand out, and I quickly put mine into it, somehow or other not losing Margarita's at the same time. As unconsciously as a child she reached out her other hand to him and we stood like boys and girls in a ring-game, Roger and I looking deep into each other's eyes and holding Margarita tightly.

"Is it all right, Jerry?" he asked me earnestly.

"It's all right if you say so, Roger," I answered promptly. All our friendship was packed into that question and answer, and I like to think that I never asked any explanations and that he never thought of giving any till they were more or less unnecessary, the matter being settled.

"You're not alone, I hope?" he said as we moved, one each side of Margarita, into the house. I dropped her hand abruptly. Up to that moment I had completely forgotten my sensible parson.

"Not unless he's given me up and rowed back to the town," I assured him contritely, "and I hope to heaven you know who he is, for I don't! He's a thoroughly good fellow, anyhow, and he knows us, and from what I've seen of him he strikes me as just about the man we want."

"Thank you for that 'we,' Jerry," said Roger soberly, putting his arm over my shoulder, and I realised suddenly and completely that I had taken the jump and cleared my last ditch: Roger's interest in to-day's event, for good or bad, was mine.

"I'll run and call him," I began, "and mind you mention his name directly, for it's a bit awkward for me all this while." Something struck me and I turned back.

"By the way," I tried to say easily, "do you want me to—to begin any explanations?"

He laughed shortly.

"Good old Jerry!" he said affectionately. "No, I'll manage that when I find out who he is. Hurry him along, for breakfast is ready."

I dashed off to the landing and hailed the boat, now plainly visible on the bright, clear moving sea. She flew in like a swallow, the oarsman coat off and dripping, and evidently royally content.

"Has Roger got a change for me?" he called as he reached the landing. "I won't keep him ten minutes longer, but I'd like to go over the side here, tremendously."

I, too, had begun to be conscious of a wrinkled, cinder-coated feeling, and Roger, who had followed me at a distance, turned at my shout and ran back to the cottage, returning with a white armful of linen and towels just as we had slipped into the blue, cold water. I shall never forget his expression of mingled relief, real pleasure and amusement as he recognised my companion's face, bobbing upon the surface.

"This is mighty good of you, Elder," he said simply, and reached down from the slippery stone to shake the dripping hand held out to him.

Then it came to me in a flash. Tip Elder, of course! He was supposed to have been christened Tyler, but was never known by any other name than Tippecanoe, for reasons clearer in those days than these, the old political war cry in connection with his boating fame having proved too temptingly obvious to the rest of his class crew. He was in Roger's class; I remembered how, even then, he had dragged Roger down to some boys' club of his to give a boxing lesson once to some of his proteges. He and Russell Dodge had a notable and historic quarrel once because Tip had refused to break an engagement in order to take one of Russell's many feminine incumbrances to a dance. Tip had steadily refused to accept the obligation, and had endured very patiently a vast amount of hectoring from Russell, who was then as now a trifle snobbish and unsteady; but had finally been forced (or so we regarded it, at that hot and touchy period) to accept what was practically a challenge, and we were actually on tiptoe for a duel. Feeling ran high about it, and there might have been a very disagreeable scandal had not Tip's clear common sense and persuasive oratory burst out at the last possible minute from this murky thunder-cloud and effectively swept the whole business out of the way.

But none of his prayer meetings, nor the trip to the Holy Land that he made in one long vacation ever deceived anyone who knew the fellow into thinking him a prig. He never pretended that his ideals of practical conduct were a bit higher than those of scores of the men who had none of these interests of his. So marked was this absence of the goody-goody in Tip that I, though I recalled his face and vaguely connected him with something or other in the athletic line, never remembered these other characteristics of his until, at Roger's warm greeting, the years rolled back and Tip Elder, oarsman and philanthropist, took his proper place in my memory again.

We scrambled up the rough landing steps, rubbed down quickly and got into the fresh linen Roger had brought us, talking curt commonplaces, not even embarrassed, in the glow and vigour of that strengthening dip, and I noticed that the underwear, though of the best linen, was somehow a little unfamiliar in its fashion, indescribably antiquated in cut.

"We'll talk at breakfast," said Roger, as we hurried toward the cottage. "I know you're hungry."

He pushed open the door, and we entered, gazing curiously around us. We stood in a large, square room, evidently a dining and living-room, washed with a greyish plaster, at once warm and cool. There was a deep, wide hearth of faded red brick on one side, and an old oak dresser covered with a very good service of gold-rimmed white china and several pieces of handsome Sheffield plate. The few chairs and settees and the one large table in the centre were all of that solid yet graceful Georgian style that our ancestors brought with them; the bare clean floor and the home-made rugs, taken with this furniture, gave an effect more usual now in a summer cottage than it was then. On the walls were eight or ten water-colour sketches framed in rustic wood; a worn wicker chaise-longue with patchwork cushions, struck a curiously exotic note; two spinning-wheels, a large and a small, flanked the fire and bore every evidence of use, not aestheticism; a silver bowl of unmistakable Queen Anne date, beautifully chased, filled with fiery nasturtiums, stood in strange neighbourliness to a cheap American alarum clock; a lovely, tarnished oval mirror reflected a hideous floral calendar, the advertisement of some seedsman. The room turned in a small ell, and this, which was evidently the kitchen corner of it, could be completely hidden from the rest by a quaint screen, very broad and high, of home manufacture, the body of which was composed of several calfskins beautifully marked and adroitly fitted together. This last gave a touch of quaint antiquity, a hint of the bold and primitive that was deliciously satisfying. I thought it then and still think it a room in ten thousand. It had no other door nor any window opening on the beach, and this produced a softened dimness, a richness, so to speak, of lighting and gloom, a sinking into shadow of the hearth and spinning-wheels, a lightness of the dresser and the polished settle near it that struck the eye with the same contented shock one gets from a mellow Dutch interior—the same impression of previous acquaintance, of a once familiar, only half forgotten home.

I have since tried to analyse the charm of that room, its inevitable hold upon every one privileged to enter it (and I suppose few rooms in America have held a greater number of really select souls), and I have decided that its spell consisted in its deeply impersonal character; its utter lack of the characteristics, the idiosyncrasies, the imbecilities, even the fascinations of other, no matter how attractive dwelling places. It had the restful aloofness of a studio, with none of its professional limitations; the domesticity of a home, with none of its fatiguing clutter; the freedom of an inn, with none of its stale sense of over-use. And above and through all this ran the note of almost ascetic cleanliness, a purity fairly conventual. Like most men, I have a concealed passion for perfect cleanliness—concealed, because to the sex so ironically intrusted with the duty of domestic lustration cleanliness appears to mean frightful and devastating upheavals resulting in a nauseating odour of soap and furniture polish. When you shall have learned, dear ladies, to keep your domains clean without so furiously getting them clean, you will have earned, in our eyes, your somewhat dubious title of housekeepers. Meanwhile, continue, in heaven's name, to think us the contentedly dirty sex!

From the kitchen ell delicious odours proceeded, and as we sat down around the shining old table with its fine, much-darned linen, and its delicate china eked out where necessary by cheap, coarse, village crockery, a heavy-faced fellow with dull eyes under a shock of hair served us with what, upon mature consideration, I believe to have been the finest breakfast I have ever eaten. A great fresh fish, broiled with bacon, plenty of those delicious corn-meal muffins (I believe they are locally and truly known as "gems") mealy potatoes fried in bacon fat, and a sort of tart jam or marmalade made of wild plums to top off with, the whole washed down with strong coffee and rich cream, melted before our keen-edged appetites like dew before the hungry sun, and we hardly spoke as we filled ourselves.

Much combined to give a flavour to the meal: the long, worried night, the short, cool plunge, the excitement of our adventure, the mystery of this empty house (for neither Margarita nor any other hostess was present) and in my own case the wild, heady consciousness of that absurd, incredible thing that had just happened to me: the confused yet certain sense that it could never be quite the same with me as it had been before I met that extraordinary girl in the faded red jersey. It was too soon to think about it, I was still stupid from the shock of it, but my blood ran very sweetly through my veins, the delicious, strong air of the beach was in my nostrils and the food was fit for the hunger of the gods.



CHAPTER XI

OUR PARSON PROVES CAPABLE

At last even we could eat no more, and Roger pulled out an old pipe that I had never seen before, pushed a jar of fragrant tobacco toward us, brought us pipes from the chimney-piece and crossed his legs definitely.

"I suppose, Tip," he said, "you're wondering why you're here, eh?"

"A little," said Tip comfortably, "but not too much. To tell you the truth, fellows, I haven't had such a thoroughly good time for—oh, for ten years, I should say! Somehow I feel as if everything but just this actual moment—this breakfast, this pipe, this queer old room—was a sort of dream and these were the only things that mattered."

"I know," Roger answered quietly, "that's the way one feels here. The place is bewitched, I think. Well, Tip, I want to get married, and I'd rather you'd be the one to do the business than any man I know."

"I rather suspected it," Tip said, "and I'll be mighty glad to do it for you, Roger. Who is she?"

There was quite a pause here, and Roger puffed slowly and thoughtfully at the old pipe and looked out of the open door toward the little bay. By and by he spoke, and the concise clearness of what he said was most characteristic of him.

"Of course I needn't go into all this at all," he began, "unless I wanted to. In fact, my original idea was to have a perfect stranger (as I somehow thought Jerry would bring) marry us without his being any the wiser. But the minute I saw you, Tip, I felt that I'd like you to know. But I'd rather you kept it to yourself."

He paused a moment, and Tip nodded gravely.

"Of course you have my word for that," he said.

"The woman I'm going to marry," Roger went on, in his quiet, practical voice, "was born and brought up on this little peninsula. She has never left it but once in her life. Her mother died when she was a baby, her father a few weeks ago, I should say. She does not know her father's name, nor, consequently, her own. It is evident from this house, the furnishings and the books, that he was a gentleman and an educated one. For as long as she can remember they were served and looked after in every way by a woman called Hester Prynne and this half-witted fellow called Caliban. Of course I have no idea what their real names were. The woman died very recently and the girl was left alone. There was a big chest fairly well filled with money under her father's bed, but not a line or word in it to give any clue. Either her father or mother must have been Italian, I should think, both from her name and her general type, but she knows no Italian whatever—only a simple childish sort of French. She is the only woman I should ever marry if I lived a hundred years, and I want you to do it to-day. Will you?"

I drew the long breath I had been holding during this speech and felt a great relief. It was all so simple, after all! I hoped Tip wouldn't spoil it, but I was afraid he would. He wasn't at all what one would call a man of the world: he had always felt a terrible responsibility for other people's actions, and this particular action was, to put it mildly, certainly rather unusual. But I had under-estimated both Tip's keenness and the effect of Roger's big, quiet personality. For Tip stared hard at his pipe a moment, then at Roger, then back at the pipe, and said:

"Surely I will, Roger. And be glad to." And there's Tip Elder for you!

We smoked awhile longer in silence. Finally Tip began again in a casual sort of way, as if, the main question having been settled, this were a mere detail, but one that he might as well mention.

"How about the name, Roger?" he asked. "Won't that be a little awkward? At home, you know. I suppose you couldn't wait till you found it out?"

Roger threw his jaw forward a bit and pursed his mouth, a trick he had when he was bothered but couldn't see any way out of it.

"No, I couldn't," he said thoughtfully. "In the first place, to tell you the truth, I don't much believe there's any chance of finding it out except by pure accident. There's not a scrap of evidence about the place, and it is undoubtedly intentional. I've opened every book in her father's room and there are no collections of old litter in any closet—there's no attic—and not a letter or bill in the house. A doctor came here once or twice, but he never mentioned her father's name in her hearing, and this Hester told her he came from New York. Caliban did the marketing and paid cash for everything. The telegraph operator, who is the only one I've spoken with in the town, represents the attitude of everybody there, probably, and he thinks, evidently, that an eccentric recluse lives here, and that his housekeeper is pretty close-mouthed and 'unsociable,' as he put it. It's rather strange that they aren't more curious, but she must have known how to deal with them, for whatever interest anybody may have felt died out long ago. They know the man had a daughter and that she's grown now, but this fellow told me that he'd heard she went barefoot most of the time, and there was a half rumour that she was feeble-minded, and that was why they kept so close. He thinks I'm boarding here, apparently. I suppose that any curious boys or tramps that might have been tempted over here were frightened off by the dogs—there used to be a pair of them."

He paused to fill his pipe again and Tip nodded comprehendingly.

"I see," he said, "it's an extraordinary situation, isn't it?"

Another pause, and he added with his eyes carefully off Roger's face:

"This housekeeper, now—you don't think it's possible——"

"No, I don't," Roger interrupted shortly. "Both she and the father have told Margarita that she resembled her mother, and that her mother was very good and very beautiful, but that she was not named after her. She died when the child was born, and Hester was with them then. Besides, her father used to correct her for using expressions of Hester's and forbade her to hold her knife and fork as Hester did, and things of that sort. She never ate with them, either. Margarita says that Hester loved her father but was always afraid of him."

Caliban had the table cleared now, and Tip and I stared into our reflections in the beautiful, shining mahogany where our plates had been. I suppose the same thing was in both our minds. What a strange marriage for a Bradley! What an incongruous effect, in steady old Roger's life! When one considered all the Jacksons and Searses and Cabots he might have married—there was one particular red-cheeked, big-waisted Cabot girl that old Madam Bradley had long and openly favoured—one could but gasp at the present situation. A surnameless Miranda, whose only possessions were a chest of money, a few pieces of old mahogany and a brindled hound!

"I haven't seen the young lady yet, you know, Roger," Tip reminded him gently at last, and Roger, coming out of his abstraction with a quick smile, stepped to the foot of the stairs and called, "Margarita! Margarita! Viens, cherie!"

She came, hesitating from stair to stair as a child does, and I caught my breath when I saw her—as I have always done whenever she appeared in a new and different dress. For she had taken off the faded jersey and put on a longer, more womanly frock of some sort of clear blue print. It was faded, too, and much washed, evidently, but its dull, soft tone and simple, scant lines only threw out the more strongly her rich colouring and strong, supple figure. The body of it crossed on itself simply in front, like an old-time kerchief, leaving her throat bare to the little hollow at the base of it; around her waist was a belt of square silver plates heavily chased, linked together with delicate silver links. Her long braids were bound around her beautiful round head, and this fashion of hair-dressing, with its classic parting, brought out the purity of her features and the coin-like regularity of them. I saw at once that she was older than I had thought her on the beach: I had not given her twenty then.

Roger took her hand and led her into the room.

"This is Margarita," he said simply, but his face told all he did not say, and I thanked heaven that neither Elder nor I had been foolish enough to attempt what we should probably have called reasoning with him.

"Is this the man that will marry us?" she inquired gravely, taking his offered hand with a lovely, free gesture.

"Roger is going to give me the pleasure of making him so happy, yes," said Tip, very cordially, I thought, and with more grace than I had believed him capable of. But she did not even smile at him, and it was rather startling, because she had smiled at me, and I hadn't known her long enough to understand that she had absolutely none of the perfunctory motions of lips and eyes that we learn so soon and so unconsciously in this cynical old world. When Margarita didn't feel moved to smile, she didn't, that was all, just as she didn't pretend to look grave at the death of the only woman she had ever known in her life. She had never learned the game, you see.

"I should like it better if you did it," she said to me, and an idiotic joy filled every crease of my heart.

"He can't do it, dear," Roger said gently, "only Mr. Elder can," and the look of appeal he turned on Tip would have touched a harder heart than that dear fellow's.

"You see, old man," he murmured apologetically, "she says just exactly what she thinks, with no frills—she doesn't understand yet...."

And good old Tip smiled back at him and said he understood, if Margarita didn't, and perhaps she would be willing to make his acquaintance a little and walk out on the beach with him?

"I want to be your friend, too, Miss Margarita, as well as Roger's," he ended.

"I will walk with you if Jerry comes too," she said placidly, and so we all laughed—I somewhat unsteadily—and Tip and I took her for a walk.

And right here I must stop and mention a very interesting thing. Though she saw him often after that, for the intimacy renewed there after so many years never has waned since, and he has woven himself strangely and wholesomely into all our lives, Margarita never cared for Tip. For a long time I did not see why, and always attributed his extraordinary invulnerability to her charm to her lack of interest in him, but suddenly one day it came to me (in my bath, I remember; I squeezed a lot of soap into my eye till I thought I should go blind) and I realised all at once what a fool I had been. She did not care for him just because he did not surrender to her. He was the only man but one that ever had anything to do with her, so far as I know, who was not, in one degree or another, in love with her. He admitted her beauty and charm, he admired her talent, he respected her frankness—but he never was the least little bit in love with her, and except for J—n S——t, who failed to make a great picture of her, for the same reason, I believe, he is the only man I know who ever had the opportunity, of whom that can be said.

And from the moment their eyes met, Margarita saw this (or felt it, rather, for she had not had sufficient practice in reading people at that time to be able to see it) and—he simply did not exist for her.

For I must admit it: it was her own particular fault, that. And I must hasten to add that I loved her the more for it. She was heartless in a situation of that sort. It would be folly to deny it. It was as much a part of her enchanting personality, and as little a defect in my indulgent eyes, as the three tiny moles under her chin (true grains de beaute) or her utter refusal to affect an interest in people's affairs or to eat the insides of her rolls and bread-slices. All faults, doubtless—but who would have or love a faultless woman? Not I, at any rate, for I loved her and love her and shall love her till my heart is a handful of dust, and she was far from faultless, my Margarita.

And yet, characteristically enough, it was to Tip that she turned in what was without any doubt the great decision of her life, and Tip that influenced her to it. She knew whom to go to well enough, and she knew that he was the one person qualified to give her absolutely unprejudiced counsel. Oh, yes! she knew. Just as the beasts make for the root or herb or flower that will cure them, she went to him, with an instinct as true as theirs. And I, God forgive me, was a tiny bit jealous of him for that! Men are made of curious clay, my masters, and it's a mad world indeed.

After we came back from our walk, during which she and I talked, and Tip listened quietly, he moved toward Roger and I left Margarita fondling the dog and joined him.

"She is a lovely creature, Roger," he said thoughtfully. "I don't want for a moment to meddle, but on the chance that you haven't thought of it, may I suggest one thing?"

"Fire ahead," said Roger. He had changed his clothes, and appeared in his accustomed business suit; its neat creases and quiet colour made him again the responsible, unromantic lawyer I had known, and took away the last vestige of dramatic oddity from the situation. It all seemed natural and sober enough.

"Had you thought of taking her to your mother and marrying her there, Roger?" Tip went on quietly. "Supposing she were to adopt her, even—you could arrange all that easily—then there would be no awkwardness. As it is, it might be made a little uncomfortable ... it isn't as if you were a nobody, you know, old man, and you don't know her name, you see, and ..."

I will own that this struck me as an extremely practical plan for a moment, and I looked hopefully at Roger. But he shook his head.

"I see what you mean, Tip," said he, "but it's impossible. I wish it weren't. I thought of it, of course. But there are reasons why it won't do. I won't attempt to deny that this will be a blow to my mother. I know her too well to consider for a moment the possibility of her helping me in this way. She—she is very proud and—and she has her own ideas.... My cousin, too—Oh, Lord!" he concluded suddenly, "Jerry'll tell you it wouldn't work."

Of course it wouldn't. In one flash I saw that dark, determined house on the Back Bay, Madam Bradley's cold, bloodless face and Sarah's malicious eyes probing, probing Margarita's crystal unconsciousness. It seemed to me suddenly that Roger's mother might not, and that Sarah certainly would not, forgive this business. I saw his mother in a series of retrospective flashes, as I had been seeing her for twenty-five years: each time a little more impersonal, a little more withdrawn, a little less tolerant. I remembered the quiet, bitter quarrel with the president of the university to which he would naturally have gone, and its result of sending him to Yale, the first of his name to desert Harvard, to the amazement and horror of his kinsfolk. I remembered the cold resentment that followed his decision to go to work in New York, based very sensibly, I thought, on the impossibility of submission to his uncle's great firm—the head of the family—and the inadvisability of working in Boston under his disfavour. I remembered the banishment of his younger sister on her displeasing marriage (the old lady actually read her out of the family with bell and book) and the poor woman's subsequent social death and bitter decline of health and spirit. I remembered the sad death of his second sister, and the stony philosophy of her impenetrable mother. I remembered the eldest daughter, a brilliant beauty, whose career might have brushed the skirts of actual royalty, and whose mysterious renouncement of every triumph and joy possible to woman (one would suppose) and sudden conversion and retirement to a Roman Catholic order convulsed Boston for a long nine days and broke Madam Bradley's heart so that she never smiled again—and never, it was whispered, forgave the God who had allowed such a shipwreck. That she loved Roger, I must believe; that she was proud of him and looked upon him with a sort of stern, fanatical loyalty as the head of her family, I knew. But I could not see her adopting, or even tolerating, Margarita with the unknown name. No, it wouldn't do. And I told Tip so very decidedly.

"But if you wanted to take her to my mother, Roger," I ventured, seeing, in fancy, the dear woman cooing over Roger's mysterious, romantic beauty (she adored him and would, moreover, have adopted a chambermaid if I had begged her to), "it could be arranged, I know...."

"Thank you, Jerry," he interrupted shortly, "but it must be now. I can't have anything happen. Any slip——" I saw his hands clench, and I knew why. Whether Tip knew, I couldn't tell; he never indicated it, then or ever after, good fellow. But he wasn't a fool. "Melez-vous de c'qui vous regarde!" as we used to say at Vevay, and Tip minded his business well.

"That's all right," he said quickly, "I only thought I'd mention it. How about the license in this state?"

They talked a little in low tones, and I looked at Margarita and thought of the odd chances of life, and how we are hurried past this and that and stranded on the other, and skim the rapids sometimes, to be wrecked later in clear shallows, perhaps.

"If you are ready, then?" said Tip, and we all moved across the beach and found ourselves standing on a great, smooth rock that would be cut off in a full high tide, with Caliban, clean and quiet and pathetically attentive, behind us, and with him a curiously familiar stranger, very neatly dressed, with tired eyes. As we grouped ourselves there and Tip pulled a tiny book from his pocket I recollected this stranger's face—it was the telegraph operator! Roger, who forgot nothing, had brought him over for the other witness.

"Dearly beloved," said Tip in a clear, deep voice, and I woke with a start and realised that old Roger was being married. Margarita, in her graceful, faded blue gown, gazed curiously at him, one hand in Roger's; the noon sun streamed down on us from a cloudless, turquoise sky; the little waves ran up the points of rocks, broke, and fell away musically.

To appreciate those quaint sentences of the marriage service, you must hear them out under the heavens, alone, with no bridesmaids, no voice that breathed o'er Eden, no flowers but the great handful of flaming nasturtiums Roger had put in her hands (no maiden lilies grew on that rock!) and a quiet man dressed just as other men are dressed, with only the consciousness of his calling to separate him from the rest of us. They held their own, those quaint old phrases, I assure you! But it was then I learned to respect them.

Nevertheless, Roger had forgotten something.

"Where's the ring?" the telegraph operator motioned to me with his lips. His tired eyes expressed a mild interest. I saw Roger's lips purse; for a moment his eyes left Margarita's face and I knew that he had just remembered it. I looked down vaguely, and my eyes fell upon the worn, thin band on my little finger—my mother's mother's wedding-ring. In one of those lightning flashes of memory I saw myself, a lad again, starting for college, and my mother putting it on my finger.

"She was the best woman, I believe, that ever lived, Jerry—I took it when she died. I want you to wear it, and perhaps you will think—oh, my darling! I know it is hard to be a good man, but will you try?"

My dear, dear mother! I think I tried—I hope so.

I slipped it from my finger—I had taken it off sometimes, but never for so good a reason—and pressed it into Roger's hand. He accepted it as unconsciously as if it had come from heaven—and it was my ring that married Margarita.



CHAPTER XII

I LEAVE EDEN



Clear as I am on a thousand little points that concern my first meeting with Margarita, my mind is a perfect blank when I try to recall the events of the next half hour. We must, of course, have left the rock, for I have a dim recollection of drinking healths in that dear old room and signing our names to something. But on what order we left it, of what we spoke, if we spoke at all, and how we at last found ourselves alone, I do not know. And yet it seems to me that some one—was it I?—discussed remedies for insomnia with some one else, and that some third person assured us that nothing but a complete change of scene could be of any lasting benefit. And my reason assures me that Tip and I and the telegraph operator must have been these three, for I seem to see, as if through a dim haze, a beautiful woman in a blue dress sitting under a fruit tree, with a dog's head in her lap, a flaming handful of nasturtiums in her belt, and a man lying at her feet, with his hand in hers and his eyes fixed on her face. This could hardly have been Roger, one would think, for Roger was not a demonstrative man, and certainly not likely to have been so under these circumstances ... and yet, if not Roger, who could it have been?

After that I remember well enough. Caliban was to row the telegrapher back, as he had brought him over, and as the haggard little fellow advanced to say his good-byes, Margarita and Roger appeared from somewhere to receive them. He shook her hand cordially and tried honestly not to stare too admiringly at her.

"This has been a great pleasure, Mrs. Bradley, a real pleasure to me," he said, "aside from the romance and—and so forth, you understand. It isn't often I can get off like this in the daytime, and I shouldn't wonder if the air and the water and all made me sleep a little to-night! I little thought when Mr. Bradley asked for an hour of my time to-day that I should be going to the wedding of the Miss Prynne I had heard so much about."

Tip and I glanced irrepressibly at each other, wondering if this suggestion would commend itself to Roger. But he, I think, had paid no attention to the words, and his smile was merely kindly and polite. So the sleepless one rowed away, the richer by a box of good cigars, and Tip and I were left to plan our own departure.

For mine, at any rate, Roger seemed in no hurry. When Tip assured him that he must, without fail, catch the next possible train, he got a schedule and arranged for a short drive across country to a tiny station that profited by the summer residence of a railroad magnate, and could connect him with an otherwise impossible express; but me he urged to stop on in terms so unmistakably sincere that I saw he really wanted a few more hours of my company, at least; and as I found that a milk-train stopped at the village at ten that night, and had learned from experience that much might be accomplished with a banknote and a cigar and an obliging brakeman, I was glad enough to stay on, and with a curious feeling of return to the actual world I pushed out across the beach with Roger and Margarita, who dropped on the sand with the great dog at their feet. I joined them quietly and we sat, hardly speaking, for at least three long, golden hours. They drew me, a naturally rather talkative person, into one of their deep peaceful silences, and just because there was so much to say, we wisely left it unsaid, and rested like the animals (or the angels, maybe?) in a rich content.

It was then that I understood the vital principle of the Friends' Meeting House, and realised how much of the heat and vulgarity of life the best Quaker tradition buries under the cool, deep waves of its invaluable Silence. To such artists in life the lack of speech is not repression—far from it. Myself, I have never lived more generously than in that wonderful afternoon, and the few hours that came afterward were mere by-play.

Later Caliban brought us a picnic supper on the beach and then Roger wrote some letters, gave me many instructions for his partner, listed the matters to be put off for a week and those to be sent to him for personal attention (precious few, these!) and agreed to my suggestion that when he returned to town my mother should meet them and take Margarita in charge for the purchases that must be made before the year of travel he intended to take with his wife—lucky fellow, whose lap Fate had filled with all her gifts!

He was to let me know when he would come and I was to forward his mother's answer to the letter he had written her; most of their intercourse of late had been of this sort, for his uncle's recent death had opened again the vexed question of Boston residence and his inability to comply with her unreasonable demands had strained anew relations never very close, humanly considered. The unfortunate early years of family restraint, the lack of all those weak and tender intimacies, not uncommon in New England families, had borne their legitimate fruit, and my mother's gentle passionate heart froze at the mere thought of Madam Bradley's icy reserve, while to me, I own, she was never more than an unpleasant abstraction.

And then the time came and Caliban pulled the boat across and I pressed Margarita's hand and stood up to go. Roger took both my hands and wrung them.

"I couldn't speak about the ring, Jerry," he said, quickly and very low, "it's no use trying. But you understand?"

"That's all right, Roger," I muttered hastily, "it's the best use I'm likely to make of it. Good-bye, old fellow. God bless you, Roger," and I stumbled into the boat.

Caliban pulled hard at the oars and we slid away. I looked at them once. For a full minute—dear fellow—he stared wistfully after me (oh, Roger, you'll never forget, never, I know! Twenty-five years are over and gone to-night, and the close, unrivalled companionship of them, and I am alone from now on—but you'll not forget!) and then they turned to each other and I was no more than a speck on the evening water. "Put your back into it, man; get along, can't you?" I growled to Caliban. We shot ahead and left them to each other, alone under the heavy, yellow moon and the close, secret stars.



PART FOUR

IN WHICH THE STREAM WINDS THROUGH A SULLEN MARSH AND BECOMES A BROOK

Alas for this unlucky womb! Alas the breasts that suckled thee! I would ha' laid thee in thy tomb Or e'er that witch had wived with thee!

Alas my son that grew so strong! Alas those hands I stretched to th' bow! Or e'er thou heardst that wanton's song, I'd shot thee long ago and long, Through the black heart that's shamed me so!

Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.



CHAPTER XIII

STRAWS THAT SHOWED THE WIND

[TO ROGER FROM HIS COUSIN SARAH]

BOSTON, Sept. 7th, 188—

MY DEAR ROGER:

Your mother, I am sorry to say, is not physically able to answer your surprising and most disturbing letter, and has laid upon me the unpleasant task of doing so. It is, as you somewhat brusquely say, unnecessary to discuss at any length what you have done, since it is irrevocable. We can but feel, however, that a thing so hastily entered upon can be productive of no good (if, indeed, the matter has been as sudden as you lead us to suppose).

To a woman of your mother's deep family pride this alliance with a nameless girl from the streets, practically, if I am to read your letter aright, can be nothing short of humiliating. She instructs me to tell you that she can take no cognisance of any such connection with any justice to the family interests, and that although you will always be welcome here, she cannot undertake to extend the welcome further with any sincerity of heart.

I sent, following your suggestions, for Winfred Jerrolds, but I cannot say that his evidently unwilling admissions made the affair any the more palatable—how could they? Some of the inferences I was forced to draw I cannot bring myself to discuss, even with your mother. Winfred's French bringing up and the influence of a weakly affectionate mother have singularly warped his moral perception. It is impossible for us not to feel that had you followed Aunt Miriam's advice and established yourself in Boston, these dreadful results would have been avoided. I try to believe that with the altered standards of the city you have chosen your very fibre has so weakened that you cannot grasp the extent of the mistake you have made.

Winfred Jerrolds may, as you say, have been your best friend, in one sense, but I fear that sense is a very narrow one. He has certainly succeeded beyond anything he could have hoped in his connection with our family. I always thought his attentions to Uncle Winthrop unnatural in so young a boy, but he was always politic. I am informed by Uncle Searsy's partner that nothing can be done about it; you will be pleased, probably.

You will realise, I hope, that living as I do with Aunt Miriam, I cannot with propriety take any course counter to hers in the matter of your marriage. It may be that she will be more reconciled with time—I hope so, for it must be a terrible thought for you that she might die with such feelings as she now has for her only son!

Your affectionate cousin,

SARAH THAYER BRADLEY.

[FROM MY MOTHER]

STRATFORD, CONN.,

Sept. 7th, 188—

MY DARLING BOY:

This is a hasty note to tell you that I am afraid I cannot come to you and help dear Roger's bride (how interesting and beautiful she must be!) for I must stay and nurse poor old Jeanne, who has had a bad fall putting up the new curtains and nearly fractured her hip. She is in a great deal of pain and cannot bear anyone but me about her. I should enjoy helping Roger's wife with her trousseau—how did he happen to go to the island she lives on? Is she one of the Devonshire Prynnes? Your father knew a Colonel Prynne—cavalry, I think. How you will miss Roger—for it will be different, now, Winfred—it must be, you know. Oh, my dear boy, if only I could help your wife! If only I could see you with children of your own! Don't wait too long. Your father and I had but four years together, but I would live my whole life over again with no change, for those four. I must go to Jeanne, now.

Your loving MOTHER.

[FROM ROGER'S SISTER]

NEWTON, MASS.,

Sept. 10th, 188—

DEAR JERRY:

I hope you and Roger will not think me unkind, but Walter will not hear of my looking up Roger's wife, as you ask me. You see Mother has just begun to to be nice to him, and we can't afford to lose her good-will, Winfred—we simply can't. I think Roger has a perfect right to marry whom he chooses and I don't believe a word of the horrid things Sarah says. They are not true, are they? But of course they're not. But why did Roger do it so suddenly? Why not let us meet her first? What will people think? She will hate me, I suppose, but Roger knows what we have suffered from Mother and I hope he will understand. Walter's eyes have been very bad, lately, and Mother is going to get Cousin Wolcott Sears to send him on some confidential business to Germany, the voyage will do him so much good! Do explain to Roger—he will understand. And ask him to write to me, if he will.

Yours always,

ALICE BRADLEY-CARTER.

[FROM ROGER'S UNCLE]

3—— COMMONWEALTH AVE.,

Boston, Mass., Sept. 12th, 188—

MY DEAR ROGER:

Your mother has communicated to me the facts of your marriage, and while I cannot pretend that I feel the haste and apparent mystery surrounding it are entirely satisfactory to your aunt and myself, I have hastened to point out to your mother that a man of your age and known character is beyond question competent to use his judgment in such a matter and that I cannot believe you so unworthy of the family traditions as she feels you to have shown yourself. In any case, I disapprove heartily of any public break or scandal, and in the event of her failing to reverse her decision, which I believe to be too severe and unjustifiable in view of your consistently clean record in all your family relations, I am writing to offer you, in your aunt's name as well as my own, the hospitality of our house as long as you and Mrs. Bradley care to avail yourselves of it.

With every hope that this distressing situation may be quietly and privately adjusted, and regards to Mrs. Bradley from your aunt and myself, believe me,

Yours faithfully,

WOLCOTT SEARS.

[FROM TIP ELDER]

UNIVERSITY CLUB,

NEW YORK, Sept. 13th, 188—

DEAR JERRY:

I can't resist sending you a line to tell you of my encounter with Russell Dodge, just now. You might drop Roger a hint of it if you like, not going into details, of course. I hope it will be for the best. I was so hot at the fellow's impertinence I let myself get caught into a lie, I'm afraid, but like Tom Sawyer's aunt, I can't help feeling "it was a good lie!"

He was dining here with a set of pretty well-known New York men and I had my back to his table. Suddenly I heard Roger's name and a great deal of laughing and in a moment I found myself overhearing (unavoidably) a disgusting and scandalous piece of gossip. In some strange way a garbled account of his marriage has come in from Boston, and Dodge, with that infernally suggestive way of his, was cackling about Roger's "jumping over the broomstick" with a "handsome gypsy" and letting his relatives believe the thing was serious in order to tease his stiff-necked family.

I tell you, it made me hot! I jumped up and looked that fellow Dodge as straight in the eye as anyone can look him, and said, "I beg your pardon for this interruption, Dodge, but you happen to be making more of a fool of yourself than usual. As regards the lady you are speaking of, I married her myself at her father's country place, last week, with Winfred Jerrolds as best man."

He mumbled something or other, but I forced him to apologise plainly, and they all heard him. Then he said that he had understood that no one in Boston even knew what her name was, and I said almost (I hope!) before I thought, "she was a Miss Prynne."

Then I left for the writing-room. My only excuse is that Roger himself did not correct that fellow from the station when he called her that, and, honestly, I couldn't turn on my heel and leave that last remark open. I'm ready to eat dirt, if need be, but for a fire-eating parson I still think I did pretty well! To think of my running against Dodge again after all these years—you remember our famous duel?

What a strange day we had out there! Let me know how Roger feels about it. It's sure to be in the papers now, I suppose. The name, I mean—I've quashed the other part, of course.

Yours faithfully,

TYLER FESSENDEN ELDER.

[FROM SUE PAYNTER]

3—WASHINGTON SQUARE,

Sept. 14th, 188—

JERRY DEAR:

It occurred to me in the middle of the night that you might be excused for thinking me cold and uninterested in your request apropos of Roger's wife, and I can't bear you to think so for a moment. Shall I be quite frank (and how foolish to be anything else with you, dear Win!) and admit that I was just a little hurt that Roger had not told me? It was stupid of me, I know, and I hereby forgive him—before he asks me, par exemple! I do it thus quickly, I am afraid, because of an unusually nasty letter from Sarah. How can a woman be so good and yet so horrid? If Roger has been unwise, all the more reason for us to stand by him!

But apparently he has not, and you are under the same spell that bewitched him—don't attempt to deny it. Madam Bradley threatens us all with excommunication, it seems, but n'importe—she has been kind to me, in her alabaster way, but it is incredible that I should desert Roger after his unspeakable goodness to me.

I will meet you whenever and wherever you say and give the new Mrs. Roger the benefit of whatever good taste Providence has blessed me with—I am a past mistress of the art of a hasty trousseau, I assure you! And I pray she may wear hers more happily than I did mine.

Be sure to let me know the moment I am wanted. Let Roger know how glad I am—if he asks. What friends you two are! I wonder if you know what you are losing? Probably not—men don't foresee, I suppose.

Your friend always,

SUE PAYNTER.

[FROM MY ATTORNEYS]

SEARS, BRADLEY AND SEARS

Attorneys and Counsellors-at-Law

Cable Address, Vellashta

2—COURT STREET, BOSTON, MASS.

Sept. 12th, 188—

WINFRED JERROLDS, ESQ.,

University Club,

New York, N. Y.

DEAR SIR:

We are instructed by the heirs and next-of-kin of the late Mr. Winthrop Bradley and by Mr. Sears Bradley, as his administrator appointed by the Probate Court, to advise you that the will of Mr. Winthrop Bradley, of the existence of which we have so long felt confident, has finally been discovered in an unexpected way and that you are the principal legatee thereunder.

We are further instructed to advise you that its genuineness is unquestioned. We are already taking steps to probate the will here and in North Carolina.

You will see by the will, of which we enclose you copy, that Mr. Winthrop Bradley bequeathed to you $100,000—in bonds of the —— Co., which bear 4-1/2 per cent. interest, and in addition his lands in —— and —— Counties, North Carolina, which aggregate about 12,000 acres, and of which a part has been farmed on shares for a number of years past, bringing in an annual income varying between $75 and $250 above the taxes on the whole tract.

We shall be pleased to receive any instructions you desire to give us in the premises. We remain,

Yours very respectfully,

SEARS, BRADLEY AND SEARS.

[ROGER'S TELEGRAM TO ME]

News of will forwarded in packet from office. More glad than can say, deserve it all. Cold wave here and shall take noon express Thursday. Sail Saturday.

R. B.



CHAPTER XIV

THE ISLAND COTTAGE

I have hitherto said nothing about the Bank, for the best of reasons—I hate it. I hated it, I think, from the day when a letter from one of my father's friends introduced me to it, until the day when the letter from the legal firm of which Roger's uncle had been the brilliant head released me from it. I do not think, however, that many people knew this. I did my work as well as I could, accepted my periodical advances in salary with a becoming gratitude, saved a little each year, and quieted my eruptions of furious disgust with the recollection of my mother's unhindered disposal of her little legacy since the day I left the university.

If anyone had told me that on a day in early autumn I should suddenly come into a thousand pounds a year and freedom, I should have caught my breath at the very idea, and here was the thing, a fact accomplished, and here was I, not only quite self-contained, but sober beyond my wont, and ready to take the Bank and all its stodgy horror upon my shoulders, if with it I might have had one thing—one woman! The world was before me, where to choose, all the far corners and reaches for which I had inherited the hunger with the blood that ran in my veins—and if I might only have been the first to find one lonely, insignificant point on the Atlantic coast, my heart would have journeyed there, content, and ceased (or so I thought) its wanderings. Truly our joys are tempered for us, and no shorn lamb was ever more carefully protected from the winds of heaven than we from too much joy. It is an actual fact that I regarded my resignation from the drudgery of twelve years, the disposal of my rooms and furniture, the heartening preliminaries with the lawyers, and my booking at the steamship company's offices, with less interest than the successful transportation of Margarita's wedding gift.

It was with a real thrill of pleasure that I drew out my small savings—a little over a thousand pounds—and with the breathless assistance of Sue Paynter and a famous actress of her acquaintance selected the most perfect single pearl to be purchased for that money. One of the heads of the great firm whose name has been long associated with American wealth and luxury himself lent a discerning hand to the selection, and for the first time I tasted the snobbish joy of sitting at ease in a dainty private room while respectful officials brought the splendours of the Orient to my lordly knees, and lesser buyers hung unattended over the common counters. Except in the purchase of my first gift for my mother—a tiny diamond sword-hilt, in memory of my father—I have never experienced so much pleasure.

It hung, a great blob of veined, milky whiteness, from a strong but tiny golden chain—a gift for a Rajah, not a bank-official! I had never expended so much, or half so much, upon a single purchase, and the pale, native thrift of Old and New England together glowed and thrilled scarlet in me, and the lucent, moonlike sphere flushed into a ruby before my dazzled eyes: I knew then how an eager chief will toss away a province for an emerald—if he may lay the jewel upon the neck of all the world for him!

I had the clasp engraved with her name—itself a pearl—and slipped the delicate case in my pocket. The great comedienne, whom I have always thought the sweetest of women—but one—talked a moment aside at the smiling request of the master jeweller and then whispered laughingly to Sue with the most artfully artless glance at me. Sue, who was a little drawn and white from her enemy neuralgia, murmured to me in French that I had the honour to render desolate Miss L——n R——l, the reigning stage beauty, who was greatly desirous of precisely that pearl and whose too vacillating admirer would doubtless enjoy his bad little quarter hour a cause de moi. I do not deny that this put a point to my satisfaction. I was, in fact, idiotically gratified—God and man that is born of woman alone know why.

I hurried to the dingy station as a boy hurries to the train that will take him home to the holidays, and the tedious hours were miraculously light, the face of the telegraph operator like the face of my best friend, the rough, damp passage in the blue boat a pleasant incident. Caliban had a friendly, stupid grin for me and rowed his best; the very oars knew how I wanted to get to her!

They stood with a lantern on the landing-steps, in the rough, picturesque clothes I had first seen them in, and we hurried through a thickening drizzle to the warm, light cottage, ridiculously hand-in-hand, the lantern bobbing between us.

Roger had revived his old school accomplishments and had ready a panful of delicious little sausages in a bath of tomatoes and onions and Worcestershire that sent me back to Vevay in the fraction of a second, and we dipped fragments of the crusty French loaf I had brought in the sauce, in the old Vevay fashion, and drank to their voyage in the last Burgundy from the little wine bin. If anything were needed to place Margarita's father in our estimations, that Burgundy would have done it! After the sweet course of jellied pancakes that Roger had taught Caliban, we fell upon the cigars I had brought, and when Margarita, an apt pupil, had sugared my demi-tasse to my liking, I reached into my pocket and drew out the Russia leather case. My fingers trembled like a boy's as I took out the pearl and clasped it around her beautiful neck, above the soft black handkerchief.

"If this is not your first wedding present, Mrs. Bradley, I shall be furiously angry," I said with mock severity, to keep down the lump in my throat, for I was absurdly excited.

"Jerry, you extravagant old donkey, what do you mean by this?" Roger cried huskily, "I never heard of such a thing!" While Margarita, for the first time in our acquaintance a daughter of Eve, ran up to her mirror. She would have been as pleased, I think, with a necklace of iridescent seashells—wherein she differed widely from Miss L——n R——l, as Roger and I agreed.

We talked, of course, of Uncle Winthrop and the old days, of his loving interest in me, the slender little chap with the dead soldier-father, who had taken long walks up and down narrow old Winter Street with him, and mailed his letters, and fenced with his sword, and listened by the hour to his tales of rainy bivouac and last redoubt, of precious drops of brandy to a dying comrade and brave loans of army blankets in the cold dawn. We wondered at the extraordinary chance which had kept the old portfolio, with its worn leather edges that I remembered so well, hidden during the two years that had elapsed since his death, and what secretive instinct had led him to put his last will and testament there. We marvelled at the sagacity which had led him to drop hints as to the existence of such a document so effectively that the family had felt themselves bound to hold the property intact for three years, to give every possible chance of finding it, and had spent many useless dollars in the search for the old servants who were believed (and rightly, as the event proved) to have witnessed it. Our friendship had been more than ordinary in its strength and real sympathy; one of those attractions that laugh at disparity of years and absence of any tie of kinship, and, indeed, up to his death I had been far closer to him than Roger ever was. Dear old Uncle Win! He knew what he would do for me and what it would mean to me, well enough: as a young fellow, he had been tied to his Bank!

I spoke tentatively of Sue Paynter, and Roger flushed and struck the table in his disgusted excitement.

"Good heavens, Jerry—I never once thought——"

Poor Sue! There was nothing more to say.

"The first thing I want you to do for me, Jerry," said Roger, "is to go through the cottage thoroughly and see if you discover any trace of who lived here. I've done it, of course, but I'd like to have some one else do it, too. Go all by yourself, and I won't give you any hint of my idea, and then we'll compare notes."

Nothing, just then, could have interested me more, and I started systematically for the cellar steps, lantern in hand.

The first thing that struck me was the trim neatness of this part of the house, too often—and especially in country districts—neglected. The steps were firm and clean and nearly dustless, the cement floor dry and apparently freshly swept, the walls and ceiling well whitened with lime. Bins of vegetables, a barrel of summer apples, a cask of vinegar on two trestles with a pail thriftily set for the drippings, a wire cupboard with plates of food set there for the cellar coolness, and in one corner a little dairy compartment, built over a spring covered by a wooden trap-door, completed the furnishings of the floor. For the rest, the place was a fairly well-stocked tool-house; a scythe and a grindstone, snow-shovel and ladders were arranged compactly; a watering-pot and rake stood fresh from use by the door.

A low cow-stall came next and beyond this a fowl roost, both these last noticeably clean and sweet, and this in a day when the microbe and the germ were not such prominent factors in our civilisation as they are at present.

I retraced my steps and went through the living-room to the room beyond it, over the shed and dairy. It was a fair-sized study, unmistakably a man's. The end wall held the fireplace, with a large map of the world hung over it. The ocean side of the cottage was windowless and lined with well-used books on pine shelves. These overflowed on the wall which held the entrance door, and where they stopped a sort of trophy of arms was arranged on the wall. An army revolver, a great Western six-shooter, a fine little hunting-piece, a grim Ghoorka knife and an assegai, which I recognised from similar treasures on the barrack wall of an English friend of mine—an infantry major—one or two bayonets, a curious Japanese sword and a curved dagger whose workmanship was quite unknown to me, completed this decoration, which was the only one on the walls. In the centre of the floor stood a large table-desk of well-polished cherry with a heavy glass ink-well, pin-tray, letter-rack, etc., and a fair, clean square of blotting-paper. But none of the customary litter of such a desk was upon it; all was swept and garnished, orderly and bare. The drawers were empty, the ink-well pure, the very pens new. There was not the faintest hint of what work had gone on at that desk.

I crossed the room and took down a book here and there at random from the shelves. From one or two, evidently old ones, the fly leaves had been neatly cut out; others had no mark of any kind. It came over me with a staggering certainty that here was no careless, makeshift impulse; a methodical, definite annihilation had been intended and accomplished. An extraordinary man had arranged this. What was the secret he had concealed so perfectly, and what had been his motive? What his necessity? Three or four comfortable chairs and a light wicker table completed the furniture of the room, which held—for me—the strange fascination of the living-room, that deep, impersonal sense of culture, that rigorous suppression of whim and irrelevant detail. The man (not so long dead, probably) who stood behind that room had stamped it indelibly, inevitably with the very character he had tried to eliminate from it. One wanted to have known him: one felt instinctively what a firm grip, what a level eye he had.

The books were almost as little tell-tale as the rest. A fine set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; histories of all sorts, but only the best in every case; a little standard poetry; the great English novelists—Dickens much worn, Meredith's early works, the unquenchable Charles Reade, who has nursed so many fretful convalescents back to the harness; two or three fine editions of Shakespeare, one, a half-dozen small green volumes, worn loose from their bindings; Darwin, Huxley, and a dozen blazers of that wonderful trail, much underlined and cross-indexed, and a really remarkable collection of the great scientific travellers and explorers, that occupied much space; and a fair collection of French fiction and archaeological research and German scientific and historical work completed my first rough impression of this library. I have gone over it very carefully since, and amused myself with noting its omissions—quite as significant in such cases as the actual contents. No classics but the usual school and college text-books; no recent fiction; almost no American literature except the most reliable of the historians; none of the essayists or belle-lettrists, except Carlyle, Macaulay, and such like heavy artillery; nothing whatever of a religious nature but a small, worn Bible thick with dust, on the top shelf among the school-books. And there was not in the whole library one page or line or word to indicate that its owner was conversant with or interested in Italian or Italy.