"I liked it," Richard said; "all that dead silver with her red hair."

"But it is too—sophisticated, for a young girl. Why, man, she ought to be in white frocks and pearls, and putting cushions behind her mother's back."

"You say that because her mother wore white and pearls, and put cushions behind her mother's back. There aren't many of the white-frocks-and-pearls kind left. It's a new generation. Perhaps dead silver with red hair is an expression of it. And it is we who don't understand."

"Perhaps. But it's a problem." Austin rose. "If you'll excuse me, Brooks, I'll go to my wife. We always read together on Sunday nights."

He sent Marie-Louise out to Richard. She came through the starlight, a shining figure in her silver dress, with a silver Persian kitten hugged up in her arms. She sat on the sun-dial and swung her jade bracelet for the kitten to play with.

"Dad and mother are reading the Bible. He doesn't believe in it, and she gets him to listen once a week. And then she reads the prayers for the day. When I was a little girl I had to listen—but never again!"

"Why not?"

"Why should I listen to things that I don't believe? To-night it is the ten virgins and their lamps. And Dad's pretending that he's interested. I am writing a play about it, but mother doesn't know. The Wise Virgins are Bernard Shaw women who know what they want in the way of husbands and go to it. The Foolish Virgins are the old maids, who think it unwomanly to get ready, and find themselves left in the end!"

The silver kitten clawed at the silver dress, and climbed on her mistress's shoulder.

"All of the parables make good modern plots. Mother would be shocked if she knew I was writing them that way. So I don't tell her. Mother is a dear, but she doesn't understand. I should like to tell things to Dad, but he won't listen. If I were a boy he would listen. But he thinks I ought to be like mother."

She slipped from the sun-dial and came and sat in the chair which her father had vacated. "If I were a boy I should have studied medicine. I wanted to be a trained nurse, but Dad wouldn't let me. He said I'd hate having to do the hard work, and perhaps I should. I like to wear pretty clothes, and a nurse never has a chance."

"Perhaps you'll marry."

"Oh, no. I should hate to be like mother."

"Why?"

"She just lives for Dad. Now I couldn't do that. I am not going to marry. I don't like men. They ask too much. I like books and cats and being by myself. I am never lonesome. Sometimes I talk to Pan over there, and pretend he is playing to me on his pipes, and then I write poetry. Real poetry. I'll read it to you some time. There's one called 'The Rose Garden.' I wrote it about a woman who was a patient of father's. When she knew she was going to die she wrote him a little note and asked him to see that her body was cremated, and that the ashes were strewn over the roses in his garden. He didn't seem to see anything in it but just a sick woman's fancy. But I knew that she was in love with him. And my poem tells that her blessed dust gathered itself into a gentle wraith which lives and breathes near him."

"And you aren't afraid to feel that her gentle wraith is here in the garden?"

"Why should I be? I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe in fairies, either, or Santa Claus. But I like to read about them and write about them, and—and wish that it might be so."

There was something almost wistful in her voice. Richard, aware suddenly of what a child she was, bent forward.

"I think I half believe in fairies, and Christmas wouldn't be anything without Santa Claus, and as for the soul of your gentle lady, I have a feeling that it is finding Heaven in the rose garden."

She was stroking the silver kitten which had curled up in her lap. "I wish I weren't such a—heathen," she said, suddenly. "I know what you mean. But it is only the poetic sense in me that makes me know. I can't believe anything. Not about souls—or prayers. Do you ever pray?"

"Every night. On my knees."

"On your knees? Oh, is it as bad as that?"

* * * * *

Richard, writing to his mother, said of Marie-Louise, "Her mind isn't in a healthy state. It hasn't anything to feed on. Her father is too busy and her mother too ill to realize that she needs companionship of a certain kind. I wish she might have been a pupil at the Crossroads school, with Anne Warfield for her teacher. But no hope of that."

He wrote, too, of his rushing days, and Nancy, answering, hid from him the utter hopelessness of her outlook. Her life began and ended with his letters and the week-ends which he was able to give her. But some of his week-ends had to be spent with Eve; a man cannot completely ignore the fact that he has a fiancee, and Richard would have been less than human if he had not responded to the appeal of youth and beauty. So he motored with Eve and danced with Eve, and did all of the delightful summer things which are possible in the big city near the sea. Aunt Maude went to the North Shore, but Eve stayed with Winifred, and wove about Richard her spells of flattery and of frivolity.

"I want to be near you, Dicky boy. If I'm not you'll work too hard."

"It is work that I like."

"I believe that you like it better than you do me, Dicky."

"Don't be silly, Eve."

"You are always saying that. Do you like your work better than you do me, Dicky?"

"Of course not." But he had no pretty things to say.

The life that he lived with her, however, and with Pip and Winifred and Tony was a heady wine which swept away regrets. He had no time to think. He worked by day and played by night, and often after their play there was work again. Now and then, as the Sunday night when he had first met Marie-Louise, he motored with Austin out to Westchester. Mrs. Austin spent her summers there. Long journeys tired her, and she would not leave her husband. Marie-Louise stayed at "Rose Acres" because she hated big hotels, and found cottage colonies stupid. The great gardens swept down to the river—the wide, blue river with the high bluffs on the sunset side.

The river at Bower's was not blue; it showed in the spring the red of the clay which was washed into it, and now and then a clear green when the rains held off, but it was rarely blue except on certain sapphire days in the fall, when a northwest wind swept all clouds from the sky.

And this was not a singing river. It was too near the sea, and too full of boats, and there was no reason why it should say, "Come and see—come and see—the world," when the world was at its feet!

And so the great Hudson had no song for Richard. Yet now and then, as he walked down to it in the warm darkness, his ears seemed to catch a faint echo of the harmonies which had filled his soul on the day that Anne Warfield had dried her hair on the bank of the old river at Bower's, and had walked with him in the wood.

Except at such moments, however, it must be confessed that he thought little of Anne Warfield. It hurt to think of her. And he was too much of a surgeon to want to turn the knife in the wound.

Marie-Louise, developing a keen interest in his affairs as they grew better acquainted, questioned him about Evelyn.

"Dad says you are going to marry her."

"Yes."

"Is she pretty?"

"Rather more than that."

"Why don't you bring her out?"

"Nobody asked me, sir, she said."

She flashed a smile at him.

"I like your nursery-rhyme way of talking. You are the humanest thing that we have ever had in this house. Mother is a harp of a thousand strings, and Dad is a dynamo. But you are flesh and blood."

"Thank you."

"I wish you'd ask your Evelyn out here, and her friends. For tea and tennis some Saturday afternoon. I want to see you together."

But after she had seen them together, she said, shrewdly, "You are not in love with her."

"I am going to marry her, child. Isn't that proof enough?"

"It isn't any proof at all. The big man is the one who really cares."

"The big man? Pip?"

"Is that what you call him? He looks at her like a dog waiting for a bone. And he brightens when she speaks to him. And her eyes are always on you and yours are never on her."

"Marie-Louise, you are an uncanny creature. Like your little silver cat. She watches mice and you watch me. I have a feeling that you are going to pounce on me."

"Some day I shall pounce," she poked her finger at him, "and shake you as my little cat shakes a mouse, and you'll wake up."

"Am I asleep, Marie-Louise?"

"Yes. You haven't heard Pan pipe." She was leaning on the sun-dial and looking up at the grinning god. "Men who live in cities have no ears to hear."

"Are you a thousand years old, Marie-Louise?"

"I am as old as the centuries," she told him gravely. "I played with Pan when the world was young."

They smiled at each other, and then he said, "My mother wants me to live in the country. Do you think if I were there I should hear Pan pipe?"

"Not if you were there because your mother wished it. It is only when you love it yourself that the river calls and you hear the fluting of the wind in the rushes."

It was an August Saturday, hot and humid. Marie-Louise was in thin white, but it was a white with a difference from the demure summer frocks of a former generation. The modern note was in the white fur which came high up about Marie-Louise's throat. Yet she did not look warm. Her skin was as pale as the pearls in her ears. Her red hair flamed, but without warmth; it rippled back from her forehead to a cool and classic coil.

"If you marry your Eve," she told Richard, "and stay with father, you'll grow rich and fat, and forget the state of your soul."

"I thought you didn't believe in souls."

She flushed faintly. "I believe in yours. But your Eve doesn't. She likes you because you don't care, and everybody else does. And that isn't love."

"What is love?"

She pondered. "I don't know. I've never felt it. And I don't want to feel it. If I loved too much I should die—and if I didn't love enough I should be ashamed."

"You are a queer child, Marie-Louise."

"I am not a child. Dad thinks I am, and mother. But they don't know."

There were day lilies growing about the sun-dial. She gathered a handful of white blooms and laid them at the feet of the piping Pan. "I shall write a poem about it," she said, "of a girl who loved a marble god, and who found it—enough. Every day she laid a flower at his feet. And a human came to woo her, and she told him, 'If I loved you, you would ask more of me than my marble lover. He asks only that I lay flowers at his feet.'"

He could never be sure whether she was in jest or earnest. And now she narrowed her eyes in a quizzical smile and was gone.

He spoke of Marie-Louise to Eve. "She hasn't enough to do. She ought to be busy with her fancy work and her household matters."

"No woman is busy with household matters in this age, Dicky. Nor with fancy work. Is that what you expect of a wife?"

He didn't know what he expected, and he told her so. But he knew he was expecting more than she was prepared to give. Eve had an off-with-the-old-and-on-with-the-new theory of living which left him breathless. She expressed it one night when she said that she shouldn't have "obey" in her marriage service. "I never expect to mind you, Dicky, so what's the use?"

There was no use, of course. Yet he had a feeling that he was being robbed of something sweet and sacred. The quaint old service asked things of men as well as of women. Good and loving and fine things. He was old-fashioned enough to want to promise all that it asked, and to have his wife promise.

Eve laughed, too, at Richard's grace before meat. "You mustn't embarrass me at formal dinners, Dicky. Somehow it won't seem quite in keeping with the cocktails, will it?"

Thus the spirit of Eve, contending with all that made him the son of his mother, meeting his spiritual revolts with material arguments, banking the fires of his flaming aspirations!

Yet he rarely let himself dwell upon this aspect of it. He had set his feet in a certain path, and he was prepared to follow it.

On this path, at every turning, he met Philip. The big man had not been driven from the field by the fact of Eve's engagement. He still asked her to go with him, he still planned pleasures for her. His money made things easy, and while he included Richard in most of his plans, he looked upon him as a necessary evil. Eve refused to go without her young doctor.

Now and then, however, he had her alone. "Dicky's called to an appendicitis case," she informed him ruefully, one night over the telephone, "and I am dead lonesome. Come and cheer me up."

He went to her, and during the evening proposed a week-end yachting trip which should take them to the North Shore and Aunt Maude.

"Is Dicky invited?"

"Of course. But I'm not sure that I want him."

"He wouldn't come if he knew that you felt like that."

"It isn't anything personal. And you know my manner is perfect when I'm with him."

"Yes. Poor Dicky. Pip, we are a pair of deceivers. I sometimes think I ought to tell him."

"There's nothing to tell."

"Nothing tangible,—but he's so straightforward. And he'd hate the idea that I'm letting you—make love to me."

"I don't make love. I have never touched the tip of your finger."

"Pip! Of course not. But your eyes make love, and your manner—and deep down in my heart I am afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"That Fate isn't going to give me what I want. I don't want you, Pip. I want Dicky. And if you loved me—you'd let me alone."

"Tell me to go,—and I won't come back."

"Not ever?"

"Never."

She weakened. "But I don't want you to go away. You see, you are my good friend, Pip."

She should not have let him stay. She knew that. She found it necessary to apologize to Richard. "You see, Pip cares an awful lot."

Richard had little sympathy. "He might as well take his medicine and not hang around you, Eve."

"If you would hang around a little more perhaps he wouldn't."

"I am very busy. You know that."

His voice was stern. "If I am a busy husband, will you make that an excuse for having Pip at your heels?"

"Richard."

"I beg your pardon. I shouldn't have said that. But marriage to me means more than good times. Life means more than good times. When I am here in New York it seems to me sometimes that I am drugged by work and pleasure. That there isn't a moment in which to live in a leisurely thoughtful sense."

"You should have stayed at Crossroads."

"I can't go back. I have burned my bridges. Austin expects things of me, and I must live up to his expectations. And, besides, I like it."

"Really, Dicky?"

"Really. There's a stimulus about the rush of it and the big things we are doing. Austin is a giant. My association with him is the biggest thing that has ever come into my life."

"Bigger than your love for me?"

Thus she brought him back to it. Making always demands upon him which he could not meet. He found himself harassed by her continued harping on the personal point of view, yet there were moments when she swung him into step with her. And one of the moments came when she spoke of the yachting trip. It was very hot, and Richard loved the sea.

"Dicky, I'll keep Pip in the background if you I promise to come."

"How can you keep him in the background when he is our host?"

"He is going to invite Marie-Louise. And he'll have to be nice to her. And you and I——! Dicky, we'll feel the slap of the breeze in our faces, and forget that there's a big city back of us with sick people in it, and slums and hot nights. Dicky—I love you—and I am going to be your wife. Won't you come—because I want you—Dicky?"

There were tears on her cheeks as she made her plea, and he was always moved by her tears. It was his protective sense that had first tied him to her; it was still through his chivalry that she made her most potent appeal.

Marie-Louise was glad to go. "It will be like watching a play."

She and Richard were waiting for Pip's "Mermaid" to make a landing at the pier at Rose Acres. A man-servant with their bags stood near, and Marie-Louise's maid was coated and hatted to accompany her mistress. "It will be like watching a play," Marie-Louise repeated. "The eternal trio. Two men and a girl."

She waved to the quartette on the forward deck. "Your big man looks fine in his yachting things. And your Eve is nice in white."

Marie-Louise was not in white. In spite of the heat she was wrapped to the ears in a great coat of pale buff. On her head was a Chinese hat of yellow straw, with a peacock's feather. Yet in spite of the blueness and yellowness, and the redness of her head, she preserved that air of amazing coolness, as if her blood were mixed with snow and ran slowly.

Arriving on deck, she gave Pip her hand. "I am glad it is clear. I hate storms. I am going to ask Dr. Brooks to pray that it won't be rough. He is a good man, and the gods should listen."



CHAPTER XVII

In Which Fear Walks in a Storm.

THE "Mermaid," having swept like a bird out of the harbor, stopped at Coney Island. Marie-Louise wanted her fortune told. Eve wanted peanuts and pop-corn. "It will make me seem a little girl again."

Marie-Louise, cool in her buff coat, shrugged her shoulders. "I was never allowed to be that kind of a little girl," she said, "but I think I'd like to try it for a day."

Eve and Marie-Louise got on very well together. They spoke the same language. And if Marie-Louise was more artificial in some ways, she was more open than Eve.

"You'd better tell Dr. Brooks," she told the older girl, as the two of them walked ahead of Richard and Pip on the pier. Tony and Winifred had elected to stay on board.

"Tell him what?"

"That you are keeping the big man in reserve."

Eve flushed. "Marie-Louise, you're horrid."

"I am honest," was the calm response.

Pip bought them unlimited peanuts and pop-corn, and Marie-Louise piloted them to the tent of a fat Armenian who told fortunes.

In spite of his fatness, however, he was immaculate in European clothing; he charged exorbitantly and achieved extraordinary results.

"He said the last time that I should marry a poet," Marie-Louise informed them, "which isn't true. I am not going to be married at all. But it amuses me to hear him."

The black eyes of the fat Armenian twinkled. "There will be a time when you will not be amused. You will be married."

He pulled out a chair for her. "Will your friends stay while I tell you the rest?"

"No, they are children; they want to buy peanuts and pop-corn—they want to play."

The others laughed. But the fat Armenian did not laugh. "Your soul is old!"

"You see," she asked the others, "what I mean? He says things like that to me. He told me once that in a former incarnation I had walked beside the Nile and had loved a king."

"A king-poet," the man corrected.

"Will you tell mine?" Eve asked suddenly.

"Certainly, madam."

"I am mademoiselle. You go first, Marie-Louise."

But Marie-Louise insisted on yielding to her. "We will come back for you."

Coming back, they found Eve in an irritable temper. "He told me—nothing."

"I told you what you did not want to hear. But I told you the truth."

"I don't believe in such things." Eve was lofty. Her cold eyes challenged the Oriental. "I don't believe you know anything about it."

"If Mademoiselle will write it down——" He was fat and puffy, but he had a sort of large dignity which ignored her rudeness. "If Mademoiselle will write it down, she will not say—next year—'I do not believe.'"

She shivered. "I wish I hadn't come. Dicky boy, let's go and play. Pip and Marie-Louise can stay if they like it. I don't."

When Marie-Louise had had her imagination once more fed on poets, kings, and previous incarnations, she and Pip went forth to seek the others.

"I wonder what he told Eve?" Pip speculated.

Marie-Louise spoke with shrewdness. "He probably told her that she would marry you—only he wouldn't put it that way. He would say that in reaching for a star she would stumble on a diamond."

"And is Brooks the star?"

She nodded, grinning. "And you are the diamond. It is what she wants—diamonds."

"She wants more than that"—tenderness crept into his voice—"she wants love—and I can give it."

"She wants Dr. Brooks. 'Most any woman would," said Marie-Louise cruelly. "We all know he is different. You know it, and I know it, and Eve knows it. He is bigger in some ways, and better!"

They found Eve and Richard in a pavilion dancing in strange company, to raucous music. Later the four of them rode on a merry-go-round, with Marie-Louise on a dolphin and Eve on a swan, with the two men mounted on twin dragons. They ate chowder and broiled lobster in a restaurant high in a fantastic tower. They swept up painted Alpine slopes in reckless cars, they drifted through dark tunnels in gorgeous gondolas. Eve took her pleasures with a sort of feverish enthusiasm, Marie-Louise with the air of a skeptic trying out a new thing.

"Mother would faint and fade away if she knew I was here," Marie-Louise told Richard as she sat next to him in a movie show, "and so would Dad. He would object to the germs and she would object to the crowd. Mother is like a flower in a sunlighted garden. She can't imagine that a lily could grow with its feet in the mud. But they do. And Dad knows it. But he likes to have mother stay in the sunlighted garden. He would never have fallen in love with her if her roots had been in the mud."

She was murmuring this into Richard's ear. Eve was on the other side of him, with Pip beyond.

"I've never had a day like this," Marie-Louise further confided, "and I am not sure that I like it. It seems so far away from—Pan—and the trees—and the river."

Her voice dropped into silence, and Richard sat there beside her like a stone, seeing nothing of the pictures thrown on the screen. He saw a road which led between spired cedars, he saw an old house with a wide porch. He saw a golden-lighted table, and his mother's face across the candles. He saw a girl in a brown coat scattering food for the birds with a kind little hand—he heard the sound of a bell!

When they reached the yacht, Winifred was dressed for dinner, and Eve and Marie-Louise scurried below to change. They dined on the upper deck by moonlight, and sat late enjoying the still warmth of the night. There was no wind and they seemed to sail through silver waters.

Marie-Louise sang for them. Strange little songs for which she had composed both words and music. They had haunting cadences, and Pip told her "For Heaven's sake, kiddie, cheer up. You are making us cry."

She laughed, and gave them a group of old nursery rhymes. Most of them had to do with things to eat. There was the Dame who baked her pies "on Christmas day in the morning," and the Queen who made the tarts, and Jenny Wren and her currant wine.

"They are what I call appetizing," she said quaintly. "When I was a tiny tot Dad kept me on a diet. I was never allowed to eat pies or tarts or puddings. So I used to feast vicariously on my nursery rhymes."

They laughed, as she had meant they should, and Pip said, "Give us another," so she chanted with increasing dramatic effect the story of King Arthur.

"A bag pudding the king did make, And stuffed it well with plums, And in it put great hunks of fat, As big as my two thumbs——"

"Think of the effect of those hunks of fat," she explained amid their roars of laughter, "on my dieted mind."

"I hate to think of things to eat," Eve said. "And I can't imagine myself cooking—in a kitchen."

"Where else would you cook?" Marie-Louise demanded practically. "I'd like it. I went once with my nurse to her mother's house, and she was cooking ham and frying eggs and we sat down to a table with a red cloth and had the ham and eggs with great slices of bread and strong tea. My nurse let me eat all I wanted, because her mother said it wouldn't hurt me, and it didn't. But my mother never knew. And always after that I liked to think of Lucy's mother and that warm nice kitchen, and the plump, pleasant woman and the ham and eggs and tea."

She was very serious, but they roared again. She was so far away from anything that was homely and housewifely, with her red hair peaked up to a high knot, her thick white coat with its black animal skin enveloping her shoulders, the gleam of silver slippers.

"Dicky," Eve said, "I hope you are not expecting me to cook in Arcadia."

"I don't expect anything."

"Every man expects something," Winifred interposed; "subconsciously he wants a hearth-woman. That's the primitive."

"I don't want a hearth-woman," Pip announced.

Dutton Ames chuckled. "You're a stone-age man, Meade. You'd like to woo with a club, and carry the day's kill to the woman in your tent."

A quick fire lighted Pip's eyes. "Jove, it wouldn't be bad, would it? What do you think, Eve?"

"I like your yacht better, and your chef and your alligator pears, and caviar."

An hour later Eve and Richard were alone on deck. The others had gone down. The lovers had preferred the moonlight.

"Eve, old lady," Richard said, "you know that even with Austin's help I'm not going to be a Croesus. There won't be yachts—and chefs—and alligator pears."

"Jealous, Dicky?"

"No. But you've always had these things, Eve."

"I shall still have them. Aunt Maude won't let us suffer. She's a good old soul."

"Do you think I shall care to partake of Aunt Maude's bounty?"

"Perhaps not. But I am not so stiff-necked. Oh, Ducky Dick, do you think that I am going to let you keep on being poor and priggish and steady-minded?"

"Am I that, Eve?"

"You know you are."

Her laughing eyes challenged him. He would have been less than a man if he had not responded to the appeal of her youth and beauty. "Dicky," she said, "when we are married I am going to give you the time of your young life. All work and no play will make you a dull boy, Dicky."

In the night the clouds came up over the moon, and when the late and lazy party appeared on deck for luncheon, Marie-Louise complained. "I hate it this way. There's going to be a storm."

There was a storm before night. It blew up tearingly from the south and there was menace in it and madness.

Winifred and Eve were good sailors. But Marie-Louise went to pieces. She was frantic with fear, and as the night wore on, Richard found himself much concerned for her.

She insisted on staying on deck. "I feel like a rat in a trap when I am inside. I want to face it."

The wind was roaring about them. The sea was black and the sky was black, a thick velvety black that turned to copper when the lightning came.

"Aren't you afraid?" Marie-Louise demanded; "aren't you?"

"No."

"Why shouldn't you be? Why shouldn't anybody be?"

"My nerves are strong, Marie-Louise."

"It isn't nerves. It's faith. You believe that the boat won't go down, and you believe that if it did go down your soul wouldn't die."

Her white face was close to him. "I wish I could believe like that," she said in a high, sharp voice. Then she screamed as the little ship seemed caught up into the air and flung down again.

"Hush," Richard told her; "hush, Marie-Louise."

She was shaking and shivering. "I hate it," she sobbed.

Pip, like a yellow specter in oilskins, came up to them. "Eve wants you, Brooks," he shouted above the clamor of wind and wave.

"Shall we go in, Marie-Louise?"

"No, no." She cowered against his arm.

Over her head Richard said to Pip, "I shall come as soon as I can."

So Pip went down, and the two were left alone in the tumult and blackness of the night.

As Marie-Louise lay for a moment quiet against his arm, Richard bent down to her. "Are you still afraid?"

"Yes, oh, yes. I keep thinking—if I should die. And I am afraid to die."

"You are not going to die. And if you were there would be nothing to fear. Death is just—falling asleep. Rarely any terror. We doctors know, who see people die. I know it, and your father knows it."

By the light of a blinding flash he saw her white face with its wet red hair.

"Dad doesn't know it as you know," she said, chokingly. "He couldn't say it as you—say it."

"Why not?"

"He's like I am. Dad's afraid."

The storm swept on, leaving the waves rough behind it, and Richard at last put Marie-Louise to bed with a sleeping powder. Then he went to hunt up Eve. He was very tired and it was very late. The night had passed, and the dawn would soon be coming up over the horizon. He found Pip in the smoking room. Eve had gone to bed. Everybody had gone to bed. It had been a terrible storm.

Richard agreed that it had been terrible. He was glad that Eve could sleep. He couldn't understand why Austin had allowed Marie-Louise to take such a trip. Her fear of storms was evidently quite uncontrollable. And she was at all times hysterical and high-strung.

Pip was not interested in Marie-Louise. "Eve lost her nerve at the last."

Richard was solicitous. "I'm sorry. I wanted to come down, but I couldn't leave Marie-Louise. Eve's normal, and she'll be all right as soon as the storm stops. But Marie-Louise may suffer for days. The sooner she gets on shore the better."

He went on deck, and looked out upon a gray wind-swept world.

Then the sun came up, and there was a great light upon the waters.

All the next day Marie-Louise lay in a long chair. "Dad told me not to come," she confessed to Richard. "I've been this way before. But I wouldn't listen."

"If I had been your father," Richard said, "you would have listened, and you would have stayed at home."

She grinned. "You can't be sure. Nobody can be sure. I don't like to take orders."

"Until you learn to take orders you aren't going to amount to much, Marie-Louise."

"I amount to a great deal. And your ideas are—old-fashioned; that's what your Eve says, Dr. Dicky."

She looked at him through her long eyelashes. "What's the matter with your Eve?"

"What do you mean?"

"She is punishing you, but you don't know it. She is down-stairs playing bridge with Pip and Tony and Win, and leaving you alone to meditate on your sins. And you aren't meditating. You are talking to me. I am going to write a poem about a Laggard Lover. I'll make you a shepherd boy who sits on the hills and watches his sheep. And when the girl who loves him calls to him, he refuses to go—he still watches—his sheep."

He looked puzzled. "I don't know in the least what you are talking about."

"You are the shepherd. Your work is the sheep—Eve is the girl. Your work will always be more to you than the woman. Dad's work isn't. He never forgets mother for a minute."

"And you think that I'll forget Eve?"

"Yes. And she'll hate that."

There was a spark in his eye.

"I think that we won't discuss Eve, Marie-Louise."

"Then I'll discuss her in a poem. Lend me a pencil, please."

He gave her the pencil and a prescription pad, and she set to work. She read snatches to him as she progressed. It was remarkably clever, with a constantly recurring refrain.

"Let me watch my sheep," said the lover, "my sheep on the hills."

The verses went on to relate that the girl, finding her shepherd dilatory, turned her attention to another swain, and at last she flouts the shepherd.

"Go watch your sheep, laggard lover, your sheep on the hills."

She laid the verses aside as Tony and Win joined them.

"Three rubbers, and Pip and Eve are ahead."

"Isn't Eve coming?"

"She said she was coming up soon."

But she did not come, and Pip did not come. Marie-Louise, with a great rug spread over her, slept in her chair. Dutton Ames read aloud to his wife. Richard rose and went to look for Eve.

There was a little room which Pip called "The Skipper's own." It was furnished in a man's way as a den, with green leather and carved oak and plenty of books. Its windows gave a forward view of sky and water.

It was here that the four of them had been playing auction. Eve was now shuffling the cards for Solitaire.

Pip, watching her, caught suddenly at her left hand. "Why didn't Brooks give you a better ring?"

"I like my ring. Let go of my hand, Pip."

"I won't. What's the matter with the man that he should dare dream of tying you down to what he can give you? It seems to me that he lacks pride."

"He doesn't lack anything. Let go of my hand, Pip."

But he still held it. "How he could have the courage to ask—until he had made a name for himself."

She blazed. "He didn't ask. I asked him, Pip. I cared enough for that."

He dropped her hand as if it had stung him. "You cared—as much as that?"

She faced him bravely. "As much as that—it pleased me to say what it was my right to say."

"Oh! It was the queen, then, and the—beggar man. Eve, come back."

She was at the door, but she turned. "I'll come back if you will beg my pardon. Richard is not a beggar, and I am not the queen. How hateful you are, Pip."

"I won't beg your pardon. And let's have this out right now, Eve."

"Have what out?"

"Sit down, and I'll tell you."

Once more they were seated with the table between them. Pip's back was to the window, but Eve faced the broad expanse of sky and sea. A faint pink flush was on the waters: a silver star hung at the edge of a crescent moon. There was no sound but the purr of machinery and the mewing of gulls in the distance.

Eve was in pink—a straight linen frock with a low white collar. It gave her an air of simplicity quite unlike her usual elegance. Pip feasted his eyes on her.

"You've got to face it. Brooks doesn't care."

"He does care."

"He didn't care enough to come down last night when you were afraid—and wanted him. And you turned to me, just for one little minute, Eve. Do you think I shall ever forget the thrill of the thought that you turned to me?"

She was staring straight out at the little moon. "Marie-Louise was his patient—he had to stay with her."

"You are saying that to me, but in your heart you know you are resenting the fact that he didn't come when you called. Aren't you, Eve? Aren't you resenting it?"

She told him the truth. "Yes. But I know that when I am his wife, I shall have to let him think about his patients. I ought to be big enough for that."

"You are big enough for anything. But you are not always going to be content with crumbs from the king's table. And that's what you are getting from Brooks. And I have a feast ready. Eve, can't you see that I would give, give, give, and he will take, take, take? Eve, can't you see?"

She did see, and for the moment she was swayed by the force of his passionate eloquence.

She leaned toward him a little. "Pip, dear, I wish—sometimes—that it might have been—you."

It needed only this. He swept the card table aside with his strong arms. He was on his knees begging for love, for life. Her hair swept his cheek.

The little moon shone clear in the quiet sky. There was not much light, but there was enough for a man standing in the door to see two dark figures outlined against the silver space beyond.

And Richard was standing in the door!

Eve saw him first. "Go away, Pip," she said, and stood up. "I—I think I can make him understand."

When they were alone she said to Richard in a strained voice, "It was my fault, Dicky."

"Do you mean that you—let him, Eve?"

"No. But I let him talk about his love for me—and—and—he cares very much."

"He knows that you are engaged to me."

"Yes. But last night when you stayed on deck when I needed you and asked for you, Pip knew that you wouldn't come—and he was sorry for me."

"And he was sorry again this afternoon?"

"Yes."

"And he showed it by making love to you?"

"He thinks I won't be happy with you. He thinks that you don't care. He thinks——"

"I don't care what Meade thinks. I want to know what you think, Eve."

Their voices had come out of the darkness. She pulled the little chain of a wall bracket, and the room was enveloped in a warm wave of light. "I don't know what I think. But I hated to have you with Marie-Louise."

"She was very ill. You knew that. Eve, if we can't trust each other, what possible happiness can there be ahead?"

She had no answer ready.

"Of course I can't stay on Meade's boat after this," he went on; "I'll get them to run in here somewhere and drop me."

She sank back in the chair from which she had risen when Philip left them. His troubled eyes resting upon her saw a blur of pink and gold out of which emerged her white face.

"But I want you to stay."

"You shouldn't want me to stay, Eve. I can't accept his hospitality, after this, and call myself—a man."

"Oh, Dicky—I detest heroics."

She was startled by the tone in which he said, "If that is the way you feel about it, we might as well end it here."

"Dicky——"

"I mean it, Eve. The whole thing is based on the fact that I stayed with a patient when you wanted me. Well, I shall always be staying with patients after we are married, and if you are unable to see why I must do the thing I did last night, then you will never be able to see it. And a doctor's wife must see it."

She came up to him, and in the darkness laid her cheek against his arm. "Dicky, don't joke about a thing like that. I can't stand it. And I'm sorry about—Pip. Dicky, I shall die if you don't forgive me."

He forgave her. He even made himself believe that Pip might be forgiven. He exerted himself to seem at his ease at dinner. He said nothing more about leaving at the next landing.

But late that night he sat alone on deck in the darkness. He was a plain man, and he saw things straight. And this thing was crooked. The hot honor of his youth revolted against the situation in which he saw himself. He felt hurt and ashamed. It was as if the dreams of his boyhood had been dragged in the dust.



CHAPTER XVIII

In Which We Hear Once More of a Sandalwood Fan.

IN the winter which followed Richard often wondered if he were the same man who had ridden his old Ben up over the hills, and had said his solemn grace at his own candle-lighted table.

It had been decided that he and Eve should wait until another year for their wedding. Richard wanted to get a good start. Eve was impatient, but acquiesced.

It was not Richard's engagement, however, which gave to his life the effect of strangeness. It was, rather, his work, which swept him into a maelstrom of new activities. Austin needed rest and he knew it. Richard was young and strong. The older man, using his assistant as a buffer between himself and a demanding public, felt no compunction. His own apprenticeship had been hard.

So Richard in Austin's imposing limousine was whirled through fashionable neighborhoods and up to exclusive doorways. He presided at operations where the fees were a year's income for a poor man. A certain percentage of these fees came to him. He found that he need have no fears for his financial future.

His letters from his mother were his only link with the old life. She wrote that she was well. That Anne Warfield was with her, and Cousin Sulie, and that the three of them and Cousin David played whist. That Anne was such a dear—that she didn't know what she would do without her.

Richard went as often as he could on Sundays to Crossroads. But at such times he saw little of Anne. She felt that no one should intrude on the reunions of mother and son. So she visited at Beulah's or Bower's and came back on Mondays.

Nancy persisted in her refusal to go back to New York. "I know I am silly," she told her son, "but I have a feeling that I shouldn't be able to breathe, and should die of suffocation."

Richard spoke to Dr. Austin of his mother's state of mind. "Queer thing, isn't it?"

"A natural thing, I should say. Your father's death was an awful blow. I often wonder how she lived out the years while she waited for you to finish school."

"But she did live them, so that I might be prepared to practice at Crossroads. As I think of it, it seems monstrous that I should disappoint her."

"Fledglings always leave the nest. Mothers have that to expect. The selfishness of the young makes for progress. It would have been equally monstrous if you had stayed in that dull place wasting your talents."

"Would it have been wasted, sir? There's no one taking my place in the old country. And there are many who could fill it here. There's a chance at Crossroads for big work for the right man. Community water supply—better housing, the health conditions of the ignorant foreign folk who work the small farms. A country doctor ought to have the missionary spirit."

"There are plenty of little men for such places."

"It takes big men. I could make our old countryside bloom like a rose if I could put into it half the effort that I am putting into my work with you. But it would be lean living—and I have chosen the flesh-pots."

"Don't despise yourself because you couldn't go on being poor in a big way. You are going to be rich in a big way, and that is better."

As the days went on, however, Richard wondered if it were really better to be rich in a big way. Sometimes the very bigness and richness oppressed him. He found himself burdened by the splendor of the mansions at which he made his morning calls. He hated the sleekness of the men in livery who preceded him up the stairs, the trimness of the maids waiting on the threshold of hushed boudoirs. Disease and death in these sumptuous palaces seemed divorced from reality as if the palaces were stage structures, and the people in them were actors who would presently walk out into the wings.

It was therefore with some of the feelings which had often assailed him when he had stepped from a dim theater out into the open air that Richard made his way one morning to a small apartment on a down-town side street to call on a little girl who had recently left the charity ward at Austin's hospital. Richard had operated for appendicitis, and had found himself much interested in the child. He had dismissed the limousine farther up. It had seemed out of place in the shabby street.

He stopped at the florist's for a pot of pink posies and at another shop for fruit. Laden with parcels he climbed the high stairs to the top floor of the tenement.

The little girl and her grandmother lived together. The grandmother had a small pension, and sewed by the day for several old customers. They thus managed to pay expenses, but poverty pinched. Richard had from the first, however, been impressed by their hopefulness. Neither the grandmother nor the child seemed to look upon their lot as hard. The grandmother made savory stews on a snug little stove and baked her own sweet loaves. Now and then she baked a cake. Things were spotlessly clean, and there were sunshine and fresh air. To have pitied those two would have been superfluous.

After he had walked briskly out into Fifth Avenue, he was thinking of another grandmother on whom he had called a few days before. She was a haughty old dame, but she was browbeaten by her maid. Her grandchildren were brought in now and then to kiss her hand. They were glad to get away. They had no real need of her. They had no hopes or fears to confide. So in spite of her magnificence and her millions, she was a lonely soul.

Snow had fallen the night before, and was now melting in the streets, but the sky was very blue above the tall buildings. Christmas was not far away, and as Richard went up-town the crowd surged with him, meeting the crowd that was coming down.

He had a fancy to lunch at a little place on Thirty-third Street, where they served a soup with noodles that was in itself a hearty meal. In the days when money had been scarce the little German cafe had furnished many a feast. Now and then he and his mother had come together, and had talked of how, when their ship came in, they would dine at the big hotel around the corner.

And now that his ship was in, and he could afford the big hotel, it had no charms. He hated the women dawdling in its alleys, the men smoking in its corridors, the whole idle crowd, lunching in acres of table-crowded space.

So he set as his goal the clean little restaurant, and swung along toward it with something of his old boyish sense of elation.

And then a strange thing happened. For the first time in months he found his heart marking time to the tune of the song which old Ben's hoofs had beaten out of the roads as they made their way up into the hills—

"I think she was the most beautiful lady, That ever was in the West Country——"

He was even humming it under his breath, unheard amid the hum and stir of the crowded city street.

The shops on either side of him displayed in their low windows a wealth of tempting things. Rugs with a sheen like the bloom of a peach—alabaster in curved and carved bowls and vases, old prints in dull gilt frames—furniture following the lines of Florentine elaborateness—his eyes took in all the color and glow, though he rarely stopped for a closer view.

In front of one broad window, however, he hesitated. The opening of the door had spilled into the frosty air of this alien city the scent of the Orient—the fragrance of incense—of spicy perfumed woods.

In the window a jade god sat high on a teakwood pedestal. A string of scarlet beads lighted a shadowy corner. On an ancient and priceless lacquered cabinet were enthroned two other gods of gold and ivory. A crystal ball reflected a length of blue brocade. A clump of Chinese bulbs bloomed in an old Ming bowl.

Richard went into the shop. Subconsciously, he went with a purpose. But the purpose was not revealed to him until he came to a case in which was set forth a certain marvelous collection. He knew then that the old song and the scents had formed an association of ideas which had lured him away from the streets and into the shop, that he might buy for Anne Warfield a sandalwood fan.

He found what he wanted. A sweet and wonderful bit of wood, carved like lace, with green and purple tassels.

It was when he had it safe in his pocket, in a box that was gay with yellow and green and gold, that he was aware of voices in the back of the shop.

There were tables where tea was served to special customers—at the expense of the management. Thus a vulgar bargain became as it were a hospitality—you bought teakwood and had tea; carved ivories, and were rewarded with little cakes.

In that dim space under a low hung lamp, Marie-Louise talked with the fat Armenian.

He was the same Armenian who had told her fortune at Coney. He stood by Marie-Louise's side while she drank her tea, and spoke to her of the poet-king with whom she had walked on the banks of the Nile.

Richard approaching asked, "How did you happen to come here, Marie-Louise?"

"I often come. I like it. It is next to traveling in far countries." She indicated the fat Armenian. "He tells me about things that happened to me—in the ages—when I lived before."

A slender youth in white silk with a crimson sash brought tea for Richard. But he refused it. "I am on my way to lunch, Marie-Louise. Will you go with me?"

She hesitated and glanced at the fat Armenian. "I've some things to buy."

"I'll wait."

She flitted about the shop with the fat Armenian in her train. He showed her treasures shut away from the public eye, and she bought long lengths of heavy silks, embroideries thick with gold, a moonstone bracelet linked with silver.

The fat Armenian, bending over her, seemed to direct and suggest. Richard, watching, hated the man's manner.

Outside in the sunshine, he spoke of it. "I wouldn't go there alone."

"Why not?"

"I don't like to see you among those people—on such terms. They don't understand, and they're—different."

"I like them because they are different," obstinately.

He shifted his ground. "Marie-Louise, will you lunch with me at a cheap little place around the corner?"

"Why a cheap little place?"

"Because I like the good soup, and the clean little German woman, and the quiet and—the memories."

"What memories?"

"I used to go there when I was poor."

She entered eagerly into the adventure, and ordered her car to wait. Then away they fared around the corner!

Within the homely little restaurant, Marie-Louise's elegance was more than ever apparent. Her long coat of gray velvet with its silver fox winked opulently from the back of her chair at the coarse table-cloth and the paper napkins.

But the soup was good, and the German woman smiled at them, and brought them a special dish of hard almond cakes with their coffee.

"I love it," Marie-Louise said. "It is like Hans Andersen and my fairy books. Will you bring me here again, Dr. Richard?"

"I am glad you like it," he told her. "I wanted you to like it."

"I like it because I like you," she said with frankness, "and you seem to belong in the fairy tale. You are so big and strong and young. I don't feel a thousand years old when I am with you. You are such a change from everybody else, Dr. Dicky."

Richard spoke the next day to Austin of Marie-Louise and the fat Armenian. "She shouldn't be going to such shops alone. She has a romantic streak in her, and they take advantage of it."

"She ought never to go alone," Austin agreed, "and I have told her. But what am I going to do? I can rule a world of patients, Brooks, but I can't rule my woman child," he laughed ruefully. "I've tried having a maid accompany her, but she sends her home."

"I wish she might have gone to the Crossroads school, and have known the Crossroads teacher—Anne Warfield. You remember Cynthia Warfield, sir; this is her granddaughter."

Austin remembered Cynthia, and he wanted to know more of Anne. Richard told him of Anne's saneness and common sense. "I am so glad that she can be with my mother, and that the children have her in the school. She is so wise and good."

He thought more than once in the days that followed of Anne's wisdom and goodness. He decided to send the fan. He expected to go to Crossroads for Christmas, but he was not at all sure that he should see Anne. Something had been said about her going for the holidays to her Uncle Rod.

Was it only a year since he had seen her on the rocks above the river with a wreath in her hand, and in the stable at Bower's, with the lantern shining above her head?



CHAPTER XIX

In Which Christmas Comes to Crossroads.

NANCY'S plans for Christmas were ambitious. She talked it over with Sulie Tyson. "I'll have Anne and her Uncle Rod. If she goes to him they will eat their Christmas dinner alone. Her cousins are to be out of town."

Cousin Sulie agreed. She was a frail little woman, with gray hair drawn up from her forehead above a high-bred face. She spoke with earnestness on even the most trivial subjects. Now and then she had flashes of humor, but they were rare. Her life had been sad, and she had always been dependent. The traditions of her family had made it impossible for her to indulge in any money-making occupation. Hence she had lived in other people's houses. Usually with one or the other of two brothers, in somewhat large households.

Her days, therefore, with Nancy were rapturous ones.

"There's something in the freedom which two women can have when they are alone," she said, "that is glorious. We are ourselves. When men are around we are always acting."

Nancy was not so subtle. "I am myself with Richard."

"No, you're not, Nancy. You are always trying to please him. You make him feel important. You make him feel that he is the head of the house. You know what I mean."

Nancy did know. But she didn't choose to admit it.

"Well, I like to please him." Then with a sudden burst of longing, "Sulie, I want him here all of the time—to please."

"Oh, my dear," Sulie caught Nancy's hands up in her own, "oh, my dear. How mothers love their sons. I am glad I haven't any. I used to long for children. I don't any more. Nothing can hurt me as Richard hurts you, Nancy."

Nancy refused to talk of it. "We will ask David and Brinsley; that will be four men and three women, Sulie."

"Well, I can take care of David if you'll look after Brinsley and Rodman Warfield. And that will leave your Richard for Anne."

Nancy's candid glance met her cousin's. "That is the way I had hoped it might be—Richard and Anne. At first I thought it might be—and then something happened. He went to New York and that was the—end."

"If you had been more of a match-maker," Sulie said, "you might have managed. But you always think that such things are on the knees of the gods. Why didn't you bring them together?"

"I tried," Nancy confessed. "But Eve—I hate to say it, Sulie. Eve was determined."

The two old-fashioned women, making mental estimates of this modern feminine product, found themselves indignant. "To think that any girl could——"

It was lunch time, and Anne came in. She had Diogenes under her arm. "He will come across the road to meet me. And I am afraid of the automobiles. When he brings the white duck and all of the little Diogenes with him he obstructs traffic. He stopped a touring car the other day, and the men swore at him, and Diogenes swore back."

She laughed and set the old drake on his feet. "May I have a slice of bread for him, Mother Nancy?"

"Of course, my dear. Two, if you wish."

Diogenes, having been towed by his beloved mistress out-of-doors, was appeased with the slice of bread. He was a patriarch now, with a lovely mate and a line of waddling offspring to claim his devotion. But not an inch did he swerve from his loyalty to Anne. She had brought him with her from Bower's, and he lived in the barn with his family. Twice a day, however, he made a pilgrimage to the Crossroads school. It was these excursions which Anne deprecated.

"He comes in when I ring for recess and distracts the children. He waddles straight up to my desk—and he is such an old dear."

She laughed, and the two women laughed with her. She was their heart-warming comrade. She brought into their lonely lives something vivid and sparkling, at which they drank for their soul's refreshment.

Nancy spoke of Rodman Warfield. "We want him here for Christmas and the holidays. Do you think he can come?"

Anne flashed her radiance at them. "I don't think. I know. Mother Nancy, you're an angel."

"Richard is coming, of course. It will be just a family party. Not many young people for you, my dear. Just—Richard."

There was holly and crow's-foot up in the hills, and David and Anne hitched big Ben to a cart and went after it. It was a winter of snow, and in the depths of the woods there was a great stillness. David chopped a tall cedar and his blows echoed and reechoed in the white spaces. The holly berries that dropped from the cut branches were like drops of blood on the shining crust.

Nancy and Sulie made up the wreaths and the ropes of green, and fashioned ornaments for the tree. There was to be a bigger tree at the school for the children, but this was to be a family affair and was to be free from tawdry tinsel and colored glass. Nancy liked straight little candles and silver stars. "It shall be an old-fashioned tree," she said, "such as I used to have when I was a child."

Sulie's raptures were almost solemn in their intensity. Richard sent money, plenty of it, and Sulie and Nancy went to Baltimore and spent it. "I never expected," Sulie said, "to go into shops and pick out things that I liked. I've always had to choose things that I needed."

Now and then on Saturdays when Anne went with them, they rushed through their shopping, had lunch at the Woman's Exchange and went to a matinee.

Nancy was always glad to get back home, but Sulie revelled in the excitement of it all. Anne made her buy a hat with a flat pink rose which lay enchantingly against her gray hair.

"I feel sometimes as if I had been born again," Sulie said quaintly; "like a flower that had shriveled up and grown brown, and suddenly found itself blooming in the spring."

Thus the days went on, and Christmas was not far away. Anne coming in one afternoon found Nancy by the library fire with a letter in her hand.

"Richard hopes to get here on Friday, Anne, in time for the tree and the children's festival. Something may keep him, however, until Christmas morning. He is very busy—and there are some important operations."

"How proud you are of him," Anne sank down on the rug, and reached up her hand for Nancy, "and how happy you will be with your big son. Could you ever have loved a daughter as much, Mother Nancy?"

"I'm not sure; perhaps," smiling, "if she had been like you. And a daughter would have stayed with me. Men have wandering natures—they must be up and out."

"Women have wandering natures, too," Anne told her. "Do you know that last Christmas I cried and cried because I was tied to the Crossroads school and to Bower's? I wanted to live in the city and have lovely things. You can't imagine how I hated all Eve Chesley's elegance. I seemed so—clumsy and common."

Nancy stared at her in amazement. "But you surely don't feel that way now."

"Yes, I do. But I am not unhappy any more. It was silly to be unhappy when I had so much in my life. But if I were a man, I'd be a rover, a vagabond—I'd take to the open road rather than be tied to one spot."

There was laughter in her eyes, but the words rang true. "I want to see new things in new people. I want to have new experiences—there must be a bigger, broader world than this."

Nancy gazing into the fire pondered. "It's the spirit of the age. Perhaps it is the youth in you. I wanted to go, too. But oh, my dear, how I wanted to come back!"

There was silence between them, then Anne said, "Perhaps if I could have my one little fling I'd be content. Perhaps it wouldn't be all that I expected. But I'd like to try."

On Thursday Anne met the postman as he drove up. There were two parcels for her. One was square and one was long and narrow. There were parcels also for Nancy and Sulie. Anne delivered them, and took her own treasures to her room. She shut and locked her door. Then she stood very still in the middle of the room. Not since she had seen the writing on the long and narrow parcel had her heart ceased to beat madly.

When at last she sat down and untied the string a faint fragrance assailed her nostrils. Then the gay box with its purple and green and gold was revealed!

The little fan was folded about with many thicknesses of soft paper. But at last she had it out, the dear lovely thing that her love had sent!

In that moment all the barriers which she had built about her thoughts of Richard were beaten down and battered by his remembrance of her. There was not a line from him, not a word. Nothing but the writing on the wrapper, and the memory of their talk together by the big fire at Bower's on the night of Beulah's party when he had said, "You ought to have a little fan—of—sandalwood—with purple and green tassels and smelling sweet."

When she went down her cheeks were red with color. "How pretty you are!" Sulie said, and kissed her.

Anne showed the book which had come in the square parcel. It was Geoffrey Fox's "Three Souls," and it was dedicated to Anne.

She did not show the sandalwood fan. It was hidden in her desk. She had a feeling that Nancy and Sulie would not understand, and that Richard had not meant that she should show it.

Nancy, too, had something which she did not show. One of her letters was from Dr. Austin. He had written without Richard's knowledge. He wished to inquire about Anne Warfield. He had been much impressed by what Richard had said of her. He needed a companion for his daughter Marie-Louise. He wanted a lady, and Cynthia Warfield's grandchild would, of course, be that. He wanted, too, some one who was fearless, and who thought straight. He fancied that from what Richard had said that Anne would be the antidote for his daughter's abnormality. If Nancy would confirm Richard's opinion, he would write at once to Miss Warfield. A woman's estimate in such a matter would, naturally, be more satisfying. He would pay well, and Anne would be treated in every way as one of the family. Marie-Louise might at first be a little difficult. But in the end, no doubt, she would yield to tact and firmness.

And he was always devotedly, her old friend!

It had seemed to Nancy as she read that something gripped at her heart. It was Anne's presence which had kept her from the black despair of loneliness. Sulie was good and true, but she had no power to fill the void made by Richard's absence. If Anne went away, they would be two old women, gazing blankly into an empty future.

Yet it was Anne's opportunity. The opportunity which her soul had craved. "To see new things and new people." And she was young and wanting much to live. It would not be right or fair to hold her back.

She had, however, laid the letter aside. When Richard came she would talk it over with him, and then they could talk to Anne. She tried to forget it in the bustle of preparation, but it lay like a shadow in the back of her mind, dimming the brightness of the days.

Everybody was busy. Milly and Sulie and Nancy seeded and chopped and baked, and polished silver, and got out piles of linen, and made up beds, and were all beautifully ready and swept and garnished when Uncle Rodman arrived from Carroll and Brinsley from Baltimore.

The two old men came on the same train, and David brought them over from Bower's behind big Ben. By the time they reached Crossroads, they had dwelt upon old times and old friends and old loves until they were in the warm and genial state of content which is age's recompense for the loss of youthful ardors.

They were, indeed, three ancient Musketeers, who, untouched now by any flame of great emotion, might adventure safely in a past of sentiment from which they were separated by long years. But there had been a time when passion had burned brightly for them all, even in gentle David, who had loved Cynthia Warfield.

What wonder, then, if to these three Anne typified that past, and all it meant to them, as she ran to meet them with her arms outflung to welcome Uncle Rod.

She had them all presently safe on the hearth with the fire roaring, and with Milly bringing them hot coffee, and Sulie and Nancy smiling in an ecstasy of welcome.

"It is perfect," Anne said, "to have you all here—like this."

Yet deep in her heart she knew that it was not perfect. For youth calls to youth. And Richard was yet to come!

Brinsley had brought hampers of things to eat. He had made epicurean pilgrimages to the Baltimore markets. There were turkeys and ducks and oysters—Smithfield hams, a young pig with an apple in its mouth.

He superintended the unloading of the hampers when Eric brought them over. Uncle Rod shook his head as he saw them opened.

"I can make a jar of honey and a handful of almonds suffice," he said. "I am not keen about butchered birds and beasts."

Brinsley laughed. "Don't rob me of the joy of living, Rod," he said. "Nancy is bad enough. I wanted to send up some wine. But she wouldn't have it. Even her mince pies are innocent. Nancy sees the whole world through eyes of anxiety for her boy. I don't believe she'd care a snap for temperance if she wasn't afraid that her Dicky might drink."

"Perhaps it is the individual mother's solicitude for her own particular child which makes the feminine influence a great moral force," Rodman ventured.

"Perhaps," carelessly. "Now Nancy has a set of wine-glasses that it is a shame not to use." He slapped his hands to warm them. "Let's take a long walk, Rod. I exercise to keep the fat down."

"I exercise because it is a good old world to walk in," and Rodman swung his long lean legs into an easy stride.

They picked David up as they passed his little house. They climbed the hill till they came to the edge of the wood where David had cut the tree.

There was a sunset over the frozen river as they turned to look at it. The river sang no songs to-day. It was as still and silent as their own dead youth. Yet above it was the clear gold of the evening sky.

"The last time we came we were boys," Brinsley said, "and I was in love with Cynthia Warfield. And we were both in love with her, David; do you remember?"

David did remember. "Anne is like her."

Rodman protested. "She is and she isn't. Anne has none of Cynthia's faults."

Brinsley chuckled. "I'll bet you've spoiled her."

"No, I haven't. But Anne has had to work and wait for things, and it hasn't hurt her."

"She's a beauty," Brinsley stated, "and she ought to be a belle."

"She's good," David supplemented; "the children at the little school worship her."

"She's mine," Uncle Rod straightened his shoulders, "and in that knowledge I envy no man anything."

As they sat late that night by Nancy's fire, Anne in a white frock played for them, and sang:

"I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country, But beauty vanishes, beauty passes, However rare, rare it be, And when I am gone, who shall remember That lady of the West Country?"

And when she sang it was of Cynthia Warfield that all of the Old Gentlemen dreamed.

When the last note had died away, she went over and stood behind her uncle. She was little and slim and straight and her soft hair was swept up high from her forehead. Her eyes above Uncle Rod's head met Nancy's eyes. The two women smiled at each other.

"To-morrow," Nancy said, and she seemed to say it straight to Anne, "to-morrow Richard will be here."

Anne caught a quick breath. "To-morrow," she said. "How lovely it will be!"

But Richard did not come on Christmas Eve. A telegram told of imperative demands on him. He would get there in the morning.

"We won't light the tree until he comes," was Nancy's brave decision. "The early train will get him here in time for breakfast."

David drove big Ben down to meet him. Milly cooked a mammoth breakfast. Anne slipped across the road to the Crossroads school to ring the bell for the young master's return. The rest of the household waited in the library. Brinsley was there with a story to tell, but no one listened. Their ears were strained to catch the first sharp sound of big Ben's trot. Sulie was there with a red rose in her hair to match the fires which were warming her old heart. Nancy was there at the window, watching.

Then the telephone rang. Nancy was wanted. Long distance.

It was many minutes before she came back. Yet the message had been short. She had hung up the receiver, and had stood in the hall in a whirling world of darkness.

Richard was not coming.

He had been sorry. Tender. Her own sweet son. Yet he had seemed to think that business was a sufficient excuse for breaking her heart. Surely there were doctors enough in that octopus of a town to take his patients off of his hands. And she was his mother and wanted him.

She had a sense of utter rebellion. She wanted to cry out to the world, "This is my son, for whom I have sacrificed."

And now the bell across the street began to ring its foolish chime—Richard was not coming, ding, dong. She must get through the day without him, ding, dong, she must get through all the years!

When she faced the solicitous group in the library, only her whiteness showed what she was feeling.

"Richard is detained by—an important—operation. And breakfast is—waiting. Sulie, will you call Anne, and light the little tree?"



CHAPTER XX

In Which a Dresden-China Shepherdess and a Country Mouse Meet on Common Ground.

MARIE-LOUISE'S room at Rose Acres was all in white with two tall candlesticks to light it, and a silver bowl for flowers. It was by means of the flowers in the bowl that Marie-Louise expressed her moods. There were days when scarlet flowers flamed, and other days when pale roses or violets or lilies suggested a less exotic state of mind.

On the day when Anne Warfield arrived, the flowers in the bowl were yellow. Marie-Louise stayed in bed all of the morning. She had ordered the flowers sent up from the hothouse, and, dragging a length of silken dressing-gown behind her, she had arranged them. Then she had had her breakfast on a tray.

Her hair was nicely combed under a lace cap; the dressing-gown was faint blue. In the center of the big bed she looked very small but very elegant, as if a Dresden-China Shepherdess had been put between the covers.

She had told her maid that when Anne arrived she was to be shown up at once. Austin had suggested that Marie-Louise go down-town to meet her. But Marie-Louise had refused.

"I don't want to see her. Why should I?"

"She is very charming, Marie-Louise."

"Who told you?"

"Dr. Brooks. And I knew her grandmother."

"Will Dr. Dicky meet her?"

"Yes. And bring her out. I have given him the day."

"You might have asked me if I wanted her, Dad. I don't want anybody to look after me. I belong to myself."

"I don't know to whom you belong, Marie-Louise. You're a changeling."

"I'm not. I'm your child. But you don't like my horns and hoofs."

He gazed at her aghast. "My dear child!"

She began to sob. "I am not your dear child. But I am your child, and I shall hate to have somebody tagging around."

"Miss Warfield is not to tag. And you'll like her."

"I shall hate her," said Marie-Louise, between her teeth.

It was because of this hatred that she had filled her bowl with yellow flowers. Yellow meant jealousy. And she had shrewdly analyzed her state of mind. She was jealous of Anne because Dad and Dr. Richard and everybody else thought that Anne was going to set her a good example.

It was early in January that Anne came. The whole thing had been hurried. Austin had been peremptory in his demand that she should not delay. So Nancy, very white but smiling, had packed her off. Sulie had cried over her, and Uncle Rod had wished her "Godspeed."

Richard met her at the station in the midst of a raging blizzard, and in a sort of dream she had been whirled with him through the gray streets shut in by the veil of the falling snow. They had stopped for tea at a big hotel, which had seemed as they entered to swim in a sea of golden light. And now here she was at last in this palace of a house!

Therese led her straight to Marie-Louise.

The Dresden-China Shepherdess in bed looked down the length of the shadowed room to the door. The figure that stood on the threshold was somehow different from what she had expected. Smaller. More girlish. Lovelier.

Anne, making her way across a sea of polished floor, became aware of the Shepherdess in bed.

"Oh," she said, "I am sorry you are ill."

"I am not ill," said Marie-Louise. "I didn't want you to come."

Anne smiled. "Oh, but if you knew how much I wanted to come."

Marie-Louise sat up. "What made you want to come?"

"Because I am a country mouse, and I wanted to see the world."

"Rose Acres isn't the world."

"New York is. To me. There is so much that I haven't seen. It is going to be a great adventure."

The Dresden-China Shepherdess fell down flat. "So that's what you've come for," she said, dully, "adventures—here."

There was a long silence, out of which Anne asked, "How many miles is it to my room?"

"Miles?"

"Yes. You see, I am not used to such great houses."

"It is down the hall in the west wing."

"If I get lost it will be my first adventure."

Marie-Louise turned and took a good look at this girl who made so much out of nothing. Then she said, "Therese will show you. And you can dress at once for dinner. I am not going down."

"Please do. I shall hate going alone."

"Why?"

"Well, there's your father, you know, and your—mother. And I'm a country mouse."

Their eyes met. Marie-Louise had a sudden feeling that there was no gulf between them of years or of authority.

"What shall I call you?" she asked. "I won't say Miss Warfield."

"Geoffrey Fox calls me Mistress Anne."

"Who is Geoffrey Fox?"

"He writes books, and he is going blind. He wrote 'Three Souls.'"

Marie-Louise stared. "Oh, do you know him? I loved his book."

"Would you like to know how he came to write it?"

"Yes. Tell me."

"Not now. I must go and dress."

Some instinct told Marie-Louise that argument would be useless.

"I'll dress, too, and come down. Is Dr. Dicky going to be at dinner?"

"No. He had to go back at once. He is very busy."

Marie-Louise slipped out of bed. "Therese," she called, "come and dress me, after you have shown Miss Warfield the way."

Anne never forgot the moment of entrance into the great dining-room. There were just four of them. Dr. Austin and his wife, herself and Marie-Louise. But for these four there was a formality transcending anything in Anne's experience. Carved marble, tapestry, liveried servants, a massive table with fruit piled high in a Sheffield basket.

The people were dwarfed by the room. It was as if the house had been built for giants, and had been divorced from its original purpose. Anne, walking with Marie-Louise, wondered whimsically if there were any ceilings or whether the roof touched the stars.

Mrs. Austin was supported by her husband. She was a little woman with gray hair. She wore pearls and silver. Anne was in white. Marie-Louise in a quaint frock of gold brocade. There seemed to be no color in the room except the gold of the fire on the great hearth, the gold of the oranges on the table, and the gold of Marie-Louise's gown.

Mrs. Austin was pale and silent. But she had attentive eyes. Anne was uncomfortably possessed with the idea that the little lady listened and criticized, or at least that she held her opinion in reserve.

Marie-Louise spoke of Geoffrey Fox. "Miss Warfield knows him. She knows how he came to write his book."

Anne told them how he came to write it. Of Peggy ill at Bower's, of the gray plush pussy cat, and of how, coming up the hall with the bowl of soup in her hand, she had found Fox in a despairing mood and had suggested the plot.

Austin, watching her, decided that she was most unusual. She was beautiful, but there was something more than beauty. It was as if she was lighted from within by a fire which gave warmth not only to herself but to those about her.

He was glad that he had brought her here to be with Marie-Louise. For the moment even his wife's pale beauty seemed cold.

"We'll have Fox up," he said, when she finished her story.

Anne was sure that he would be glad to come. She blushed a little as she said it.

Later, when they were having coffee in the little drawing-room, Marie-Louise taxed her with the blush. "Is he in love with you?"

Anne felt it best to be frank. "He thought he was."

"Don't you love him?"

"No, Marie-Louise. And we mustn't talk about it. Love is a sacred thing."

"I like to talk about it. In summer I talk to Pan. But he's out now in the snow and his pipes are frozen."

The little drawing-room seemed to Anne anything but little until she learned that there was a larger one across the hall. Austin and his wife went up-stairs as soon as the coffee had been served, and Marie-Louise led Anne through the shadowy vastness of the great drawing-room to a window which overlooked the river. "You can't see the river, but the light over the doorway shines on my old Pan's head. You can see him grinning out of the snow."

The effect of that white head peering from the blackness was uncanny. The shaft of light struck straight across the peaked chin and twisted mouth. The snow had made him a cap which covered his horns and which gave him the look of a rakish old tipster.

"Oh, Marie-Louise, do you talk to him of love?"

"Yes. Wait till you see him in the spring with the pink roses back of him. He seems to get younger in the spring."

Anne, going to bed that night in a suite of rooms which might have belonged to a princess, wondered if she should wake in the morning and find herself dreaming. To have her own bath, a silk canopy over her head, to know that breakfast would be served when she rang for it, and that her mail and newspapers would be brought—these were unbelievable things. She had a feeling that if she told Uncle Rod he would shake his head over it. He had a theory that luxury tended to cramp the soul.

Yet her last thought was not of Uncle Rod but of Richard. She had come intending to give him a sharp opinion of his neglect of Nancy. But he had been so glad to see her, and had given her such a good time. Yet she had spoken of Nancy's loneliness.

"I hated to leave her," she said, "but it seemed as if I had to come."

"Of course," he agreed, with his eyes on her glowing face, "and anyhow, she has Sulie."

Marie-Louise, in the days that followed, found interest and occupation in showing the Country Mouse the sights of the city.

"If you want to see such things," she said rather grandly, "I shall be glad to go with you."

Anne insisted that they should not be driven in state and style. "People make pilgrimages on foot," she told Marie-Louise gravely, but with a twinkle in her eye. "I don't want to whirl up to Grant's tomb, or to the door of Trinity. And I like the subway and the elevated and the surface cars."

If now and then they compromised on a taxi, it was because distances were too great at times, and other means of transportation too slow. But in the main they stuck to their original plan, and Marie-Louise entered a new world.

"Oh, I love you for it," she said to Anne one night when they came home from the Battery after a day in which they had gazed down into the pit of the Stock Exchange, had lunched at Faunce's Tavern, had circled the great Aquarium, and ended with a ride on top of a Fifth Avenue 'bus in the twilight.

It was from the top of the 'bus that Anne for the first time since she had come to New York saw Evelyn Chesley.

She was coming out of a shop with Richard. It was a great shop with a world-famous name over the door. One bought furniture there of a rare kind and draperies of a rare kind and now and then a picture.

"They are getting things for their apartment," Marie-Louise explained, and her words struck cold against Anne's heart. "Eve is paying for them with Aunt Maude's money."

"When will they be married?"

"Next October. But Eve is buying things as she sees them. I don't want her to marry Dr. Dicky."

"Why not, Marie-Louise?"

"He isn't her kind. He ought to have fallen in love with you."

"Marie-Louise, I told you not to talk of love."

"I shall talk of anything I please."

"Then you'll talk to the empty air. I won't listen. I'll go up there and sit with that fat man in front."

Marie-Louise laughed. "You're such an old dear. Do you know how nice you look in those furs?"

"I feel so elegant that I am ashamed of myself. I've peeped into every mirror. They cost a whole month's salary, Marie-Louise. I feel horribly extravagant—and happy."

They laughed together, and it was then that Marie-Louise said, "I love it."

"Love what?"

"Going with you and being young."

In the days that followed Anne found herself revelling in the elegances of her life, in the excitements. It was something of an experience to meet Evelyn Chesley on equal grounds in the little drawing-room. Anne always took Mrs. Austin's place when there were gatherings of young folks. Marie-Louise refused to be tied, and came and went as the spirit moved her. So it was Anne who in something shimmering and silken moved among the tea guests, and danced later in slippers as shining as anything Eve had ever worn.

It was on this day that Geoffrey Fox came and met Marie-Louise for the first time.

"I can't dance," he told her; "my eyes are bad, and things seem to whirl."

"If you'll talk," she said, "I'll sit at your feet and listen."

She did it literally, perched on a small gold stool.

"Tell me about your book," she said, looking up at him. "Anne Warfield says that you wrote it at Bower's."

"I wrote it because she helped me to write it. But she did more for me than that." His eyes were following the shining figure.

"What did she do?"

"She gave me a soul. She taught me that there was something in me that was not—the flesh and the—devil."

The girl on the footstool understood. "She believes in things, and makes you believe."

"Yes."

"I hated to have her come," Marie-Louise confessed, "and now I should hate to have her go away. She calls herself a country mouse, and I am showing her the sights—we go to corking places—on pilgrimages. We went to Grant's tomb, and she made me carry a wreath. And we ride in the subway and drink hot chocolate in drug stores.

"She says I haven't learned the big lessons of democracy," Marie-Louise pursued, "that I've looked out over the world, but that I have never been a part of it. That I've sat on a tower in a garden and have peered through a telescope."

She told him of the play that she had written, and of the verses that she had read to the piping Pan.

Later she pointed out Pan to him from the window of the big drawing-room. The snow had melted in the last mild days, and there was an icicle on his nose, and the sun from across the river reddened his cheeks.

"And there, everlastingly, he makes music," Geoffrey said, "'on the reed which he tore from the river.'"

"'Yes, half a beast is the great god, Pan, To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, For the reed that grows nevermore again, As a reed with the reeds in the river.'"

His voice died away into silence. "That is the price which the writer pays. He is separated, as it were, from his kind."

"Oh, no," Marie-Louise breathed, "oh, no. Not you. Your writings bring you—close. Your book made me—cry."

She was such a child as she stood there, yet with something in her, too, of womanliness.

"When your three soldiers died," she said, "it made me believe something that I hadn't believed before—about souls marching toward a great—light."

Geoffrey found himself confiding in her. "I don't know whether you will understand. But ever since I wrote that book I have felt that I must live up to it. That I must be worthy of the thing I had written."

Richard, dancing in the music room with Anne, found himself saying, "How different it all is."

"From Bower's?"

"Yes."

"Do you like it?"

"Sometimes. And then sometimes it all seems so big—and useless."

The music stopped, and they made their way back to the little drawing-room.

"Won't you sit here and talk to me?" Richard said. "Somehow we never seem to find time to talk."

She smiled. "There is always so much to do."

But she knew that it was not the things to be done which had kept her from him. It was rather a sense that safety lay in seeing as little of him as possible. And so, throughout the winter she had built about herself barriers of reserve. Yet there had never been a moment when he had dined with them, or when he had danced, or when he had shared their box at the opera, that she had not been keenly conscious of his presence.

"And so you think it is all so big—and useless?" He picked up the conversation where they had dropped it when the dance stopped.

She nodded. "A house like this isn't a home. I told Marie-Louise the other day that a home was a place where there was a little fire, with somebody on each side of it, and where there was a little table with two people smiling across it, and with a pot boiling and a woman to stir it, and with a light in the window and a man coming home."

"And what did Marie-Louise say to that?"

"She wrote a poem about it. A nice healthy sane little poem—not one of those dreadful things about the ashes of dead women which I found her doing when I came."

"How did you cure her?"

"I am giving her real things to think of. When she gets in a morbid mood I whisk her off to the gardener's cottage, and we wash and dress the baby and take him for an airing."

Richard gave a big laugh. "With your head in the stars, you have your feet always firmly on the ground."

"I try to, but I like to know that there are always—stars."

"No one could be near you and not know that," he told her gravely.

It was a danger signal. She rose. "I have a feeling that you are neglecting somebody. You haven't danced yet with Miss Chesley."

"Oh, Eve's all right," easily; "sit down."

But she would not. She sent him from her. His place was by Eve's side. He was going to marry Eve.

* * * * *

It was late that night when Marie-Louise came into Anne's room. "Are you asleep?" she asked, with the door at a crack.

"No."

"Will you mind—if I talk?"

"No."

Anne was in front of her open fire, writing to Uncle Rod. The fire was another of the luxuries in which she revelled. It was such a wonder of a fireplace, with its twinkling brasses, and its purring logs. She remembered the little round stove in her room at Bower's.

Marie-Louise had come to talk of Geoffrey Fox.

"I adore his eye-glasses."

"Oh, Marie-Louise—his poor eyes."

"He isn't poor," the child said, passionately, "not even his eyes. Milton was blind—and—and there was his poetry."

"Dr. Dicky hopes his eyes are getting better."

"He says they are. That he sees things now through a sort of silver rain. He has to have some one write for him. His little sister Mimi has been doing it, but she is going to be married."

"Mimi?"

"Yes. He found out that she had a lover, and so he has insisted. And then he will be left alone."

She sat gazing into the fire, a small humped-up figure in a gorgeous dressing-gown. At last she said, "Why didn't you love him?"

"There was some one else, Marie-Louise."

Marie-Louise drew close and laid her red head on Anne's knee. "Some one that you are going to marry?"

Anne shook her head. "Some one whom I shall never marry. He loves—another girl, Marie-Louise."

"Oh!" There was a long silence, as the two of them gazed into the fire. Then Marie-Louise reached up a thin little hand to Anne's warm clasp. "That's always the way, isn't it? It is a sort of game, with Love always flitting away to—another girl."



CHAPTER XXI

In Which St. Michael Hears a Call.

IT was in April that Geoffrey Fox wrote to Anne.

"When I told you that I was coming back to Bower's, I said that I wanted quiet to think out my new book, but I did not tell you that I fancied I might find your ghost flitting through the halls, or on the road to the schoolhouse. I felt that there might linger in the long front room the glowing spirit of the little girl who sat by the fire and talked to me of my soldiers and their souls.

"And what I thought has come true. You are everywhere, Mistress Anne, not as I last saw you at Rose Acres in silken attire, but fluttering before me in your frock of many flounces, carrying your star of a lantern through the twilight on your way to Diogenes, scolding me on the stairs——! What days, what hours! And always you were the little school-teacher, showing your wayward scholars what to do with life!

"Perhaps I have done with it less than you expected. But at least I have done more with it than I had hoped. I am lining my pockets with money, and Mimi has a chest of silver. That is the immediate material effect of the sale of 'Three Souls.' But there is more than the material effect. The letters which I get from the people who have read the book are like wine to my soul. To think that I, Geoffrey Fox, who have frittered and frivoled, should have put on paper things which have burned into men's consciousness and have made them better. I could never have done it except for you. Yet in all humility I can say that I have done it, and that never while life lasts shall I think again of my talent as a little thing.

"For it is a great thing, Mistress Anne, to have written a book. In all of my pot-boiling days I would never have believed it. A plot was a plot, and presto, the thing was done! The world read and forgot. But the world doesn't forget. Not when we give our best, and when we aim to get below the surface things and the shallow things and call up out of men's hearts that which, in these practical days, they try to hide.

"I suppose Brooks has told you about my eyes, and of how it may happen that I shall, for the rest of my life, be able to see through a glass darkly.