MY DEAR SAMMY [wrote Anthony, with admirable directness]: The boys wanted me to sit in a little game to-night, but the truth is I have been wanting for a long time to speak to you of a certain matter, and to-night seems a good chance to get it off my chest. A man feels pretty rotten writing a letter like this, but I've thought it over for more than a month now, and I feel that no matter how badly you and I both feel, the thing to do is not to let things go too far before we think the thing pretty thoroughly over and make sure that things—

"What the deuce is he getting at?" said Piet, breaking off suddenly.

"Go on!" said Sammy, bright color in her cheeks.

—make sure that things are best for the happiness of all parties [resumed Piet]. You see, Sammy [the letter ran on], as far as I am concerned, I never would have said a word, but I have been talking things over with a party whose name I will tell you in a minute, and they feel as if it would be better to write before you come on. I mean Miss Alma Fay. You don't know her. She is Lucy Barbee's cousin. Lucy and I had a great case years ago, and she and Tom asked me up to their house a few weeks ago, and Alma was staying with Lucy. Well, I took her to the Hallowe'en dance, and it was a keen dance, the swellest we ever had at the hall. Some of us rowed the girls on the river between the dances; we had a keen time. Well, after that I took her riding once or twice. She rides the best of any girl I ever saw; her father has the finest horses in East Wood—I guess he counts for quite a lot up there, he has the biggest department store and runs his own motor. Well, Sammy, I never would of written one word of this to you, but when Alma came to go away we both realized how it was. You know I have often had cases, as the boys call them, and a girl I was engaged to in Petrie told me once she hoped some day I'd get MINE. Well, she would be pleased if she knew that I HAVE. I have not slept since—

"Sammy!" said Piet, suddenly stopping.

"Go on!" said she, again.

But Piet couldn't go on. He glanced at the next page, read, "Now, Sammy, it is up to you to decide," skipped another page or two and read, "Neither Alma nor I would ever be happy if—" glanced at a third; then the leaves fluttered in wild confusion to the floor, and, with something between a sob and a shout, he caught Sammy in his arms.

"My darling," said Piet, an hour later, "if I release your right hand for ten minutes, do you think you could write a line to Mr. Anthony Gayley? I would like to mail it when I go home to dress."

"I was thinking I might wire—" said Sammy, dreamily.



DR. BATES AND MISS SALLY

Sometimes Ferdie's jokes were successful; sometimes they were not. This was one of the jokes that didn't succeed; but as it led to a chain of circumstances that proved eminently satisfactory, Ferdie's wife praised him as highly for his share in it as if he really had done something rather meritorious.

At the time it occurred, however, nobody praised anybody, and feeling even ran pretty high for a time between Ferdie and Elsie, his wife, and her sister Sally, and Dr. Bates.

Dr. Samuel Bates was a rising young surgeon, plain, quiet, and kindly. He was spending a few busy months in California, and writing dutifully home to friends and patients in Boston that he really could not free his hands to return just yet. But Sally knew what that meant; she had known business to keep people in her neighborhood before. So she was studiously unkind to the doctor, excusing herself to Elsie on the ground that nothing on earth would ever make her consider a man with fuzzy red hair and low collars.

Sally was a "daughter" and a "dame"; the doctor was the son of "Bates's Blue-Ribbon Hair Renewer"—awful facts against which the additional fact that he was rich and she was not, counted nothing. Sally talked all the time; the doctor was the most silent of men. Sally was twenty-two, the doctor thirty-five. Sally loved to flirt; the doctor never paid any attention to women. Altogether, it was the most impossible thing ever heard of, and Elsie might just as well stop thinking about it!

"It's a wonderful proof of what he feels," said Elsie, "to have him so gentle when you are rude to him, and so eager to be friends when you get over it!"

"It's a wonderful example of hair-tonic spirit!" Sally responded.

"There's a good deal behind that quiet manner," argued Elsie.

"But NOT the three generations that make a gentleman!" finished Sally.

Sally was out calling one hot Saturday afternoon when Ferdie, as was his habit, brought Dr. Bates home with him to the Ferdies' little awninged and shingled summer home in Sausalito. Elsie, with an armful of delightfully pink and white baby, led them to the cool side porch, and ordered cool things to drink. Sally, she said, as they sank into the deep chairs, would be home directly and join them.

Presently, surely enough, some one ran up the front steps and came into the wide hall, and Sally's voice called a blithe "Hello!" There was a little rattle to show that her parasol was flung down, and then the voice again, this time unmistakably impeded by hat-pins.

"Where's this fam-i-ly? Did the gentlemen come?"

This gave an opening for the sort of thing Ferdie thought he did very well. He grinned at his guest, and raised a warning finger.

"Hello, Sally!" he called back. "Elsie and I are out here! Bates couldn't come—operation last minute!"

"What—didn't come?" Sally called back after an instant's pause. "Well, what has happened to HIM? But, thank goodness, now I can go to the Bevis dinner to-morrow! Operation? I must say it's mannerly to send a message the last minute like that!" She hummed a second, and then added spitefully: "What can you expect of hair-tonic, anyway?" The frozen group on the porch heard her start slowly upstairs. "Well, I might be willing to marry him," added Sally, cheerfully, as she mounted, "but it's a real relief to snatch this glorious afternoon from the burning! Down in a second—keep me some tea!"

Nobody moved on the porch. The doctor's face was crimson, Elsie's kind eyes wide with horror. Sally called a final reflection from the first landing:

"Too bad not to have him see me looking so beautiful!" she sang frivolously. "Operation—h'm! An important operation—I don't believe it!"

She proceeded calmly to her room, and was buttoning herself into a trim linen gown when Elsie burst in, flushed and furious, cast the baby dramatically upon the bed, and hysterically recounted the effects of her recent remarks. Sally, at first making a transparent effort to seem amused, and following it with an equally vain attempt at being dignified, finally became very angry herself.

"When Ferdie does things like this," said Sally, heatedly, "I declare I wonder—I was going to say I wonder he has a friend left in the world! As you say, it's done now, but it makes me so FURIOUS! And I don't think it shows very much savior faire on your part, Elsie. However, we won't discuss it! Ferdie will try one joke too many, one of these days, and then—Now, look here, Elsie," Sally interrupted her tirade to state with deadly deliberation, "unless that man goes home before dinner, as a man of any spirit would do, I'm going over to Mary Bevis's, and you can make whatever apologies you like!"

"Of course he won't go," said Elsie, with spirit. "The only thing to do is to ignore it entirely. And of course you'll come down."

Sally had resumed her ruffled calling costume, and was now pinning on an effective hat. Her mouth was set.

"Please!" pleaded her sister, inserting a gold bracelet tenderly between George's little jaws, without moving her eyes from Sally.

"I will not!" said Sally. "I never want to see him again—superior, big, calm codfish—too lofty to care what any one says about him! I don't like a man you can walk on, anyway!" She began to pack things in a suit-case—beribboned night-wear, slippers, powder, and small jars. Presently, hasping these things firmly in, she went to the door, and opened it a cautious crack.

"Where are they?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Mrs. Ferdie, dispiritedly. "I think you're very mean!"

The bedrooms of the Ferdies' house opened in charming Southern fashion upon open balconies, over whose slender rails one could look straight into the hall below. Sally listened intently.

"What a horrible plan this house is built upon!" she said heartily. "Nothing in the world is more humiliating than to have to sneak about one's own house like a thief, afraid of being seen! Where's the motor—at the side door? Good. I'll run it over to the Bevises' myself, and Billy can come back with it. That is, I will if I can manage to get to the side door. Those idiots of men are apparently looking at Ferd's rods and tackle, right down there in the hall! I can distinctly hear their voices! I wish Ferd had thought of situations like this when he planned this silly balcony business! The minute I open this door they'll look up; and I'll stay up here a week rather than meet them!"

"They'll go out soon," said Elsie, soothingly, as she removed a shoe-horn from contact with George's mouth.

"I knew Ferd would regret this balcony!" pursued Sally, eyes to the crack.

"Ferdie's not regretting it!" tittered her sister.

Sally cast her a withering glance. Elsie devoted herself suddenly to George.

"Go down and lure them into the garden," pleaded Sally, presently.

Elsie obligingly picked up her son and departed, but Sally, watching her go, was infuriated to notice that a mild request from George's nurse, who met them in the hall, apparently drove all thoughts of Sally's predicament from the little mother's mind, for Elsie went briskly toward the nursery, and an absolute silence ensued.

Sally went listlessly to the window, where her eye was immediately caught by a long pruning ladder, leaning against the house a dozen feet away. Alma, the little waitress, quietly mixing a mayonnaise on the kitchen porch, was pressed into service, and five minutes later Sally's suit-case was cautiously lowered, on the end of a Mexican lariat, and Sally was steadying the top of the ladder against her window-sill. Alma was convulsed with innocent mirth, but her big, hard hands were effective in steadying the lower end of the ladder.

Sally, who was desperately afraid of ladders, packed her thin skirts tightly about her, gave a fearful glance below, and began a nervous descent. At every alternate rung she paused, unwound her skirts, shut her eyes, and breathed hard.

"PLEASE don't shake it so!" she said.

"Aye dadden't!" said Alma, merrily.

The ladder slipped an inch, settling a little lower. Sally uttered a smothered scream. She dared not move her eyes from the rung immediately in front of them. Her face was flushed, her hair had slipped back from her damp temples. It seemed to her as if she must already have climbed down several times the length of the ladder. At every step she had to kick her skirts free.

"Permit me!" said a kind voice in the world of reeling brick walks and dwarfed gooseberry bushes below her.

Sally, with a thump at her heart, looked down to see Dr. Bates lay a firm hand upon the rocking ladder.

Speechless, she finished the descent, reeling a little unsteadily against the doctor's shoulder as she faced about on the walk. Her face was crimson. To climb down a ladder, with him looking pleasantly up from below, and then to fall into his very arms! Sally shook out her skirts like a furious hen, and walked, with one chilly inclination of the head for acknowledgment of his courtesy, toward the waiting motor.

"Ferdie has promised Bill Bevis that you will spin me over in the motor," said the doctor, a little timidly, when they reached it.

Sally eyed him stonily.

"Ferd—"

"Why, I had promised Bevis that I would look in to-day," pursued the doctor, uncomfortably; "and when they telephoned about it, a few minutes ago, one of the maids said that she believed that you were going right over, and would bring me."

"I have changed my mind," said Sally. "Perhaps you will drive yourself over?"

"I don't know anything about motors," apologized the doctor, gravely.

"Ferd told one of the maids to say I would?" Sally said pleasantly. "Very well. Will you get in?"

They got in, Sally driving. They swept in silence past the lawns, and into the wide, white highway. A watering-cart had just passed, and the air was fresh and wet. The afternoon was one of exquisite beauty. The steamer from San Francisco was just in, and the road was filled with other motor-cars and smart traps. Sally and the doctor nodded and waved to a score of friends.

"I am as sorry as you are," said the doctor, awkwardly, after the silence had grown very long.

"Don't mention it," said Sally, her face flaming again. "That's my brother's idea of humor. I—I shall stay at the Bevises' overnight."

"I—why, I said I would do that!" said Dr. Bates, hastily. "I just called in to the maid, when she telephoned Bevis, and said, 'Ask him if he can put me up overnight.' You see, I've got my things."

"Well, then, I won't," said Sally. Her tone was cold, but a side glance at his serious face melted her a little. "This is ALL Ferdie!" she burst out angrily.

"Too bad to make it so important," said the doctor, regretfully.

"I don't see why you should stay at the Bevises'," said the girl, fretfully. "It looks very odd—when you had come to us. I—I am going to Glen Ellen early to-morrow, anyway. I would hate to have the Bevises suspect—"

"Then I will go back with you," agreed the doctor, pleasantly.

Sally frowned. She opened her lips, but shut them without speaking. She had turned the car into a wide gateway, and a moment later they stopped at a piazza full of young people. The noisy, joyous Bevis girls and boys swarmed rapturously about them.

After an hour of laughter and shouting, Sally and the doctor rose to go, accompanied to the motor by all the young people.

"Ah, you just got in, doctor?" said gentle Mrs. Bevis, with a glance at the suit-cases.

Sally flushed, but the doctor serenely let the misunderstanding go. There was no good reason to give for the presence of two cases in the car.

"You look quite like an elopement!" said Page Bevis with a joyous shout.

"Put one of the cases in front, Bates, and rest your feet on it," suggested the older boy, Kenneth.

As he spoke, he caught up Sally's case, and gave it a mighty swing from the tonneau to the front seat. In mid-flight, the suit-case opened. Jars and powders, slippers and beribboned apparel scattered in every direction. Small silver articles, undeniably feminine in nature, lay on the grass; a spangled scarf which they had all admired on Sally's slender shoulders had to be tenderly extricated from the brake.

With shrieks of laughter, the Bevis family righted the case and repacked it. Sally was frozen with anger.

"Mother SAID she knew you two would run off and get married quietly some day!" said pretty, audacious Mary Bevis.

"Dearie!" protested her mother. "I only said—I only thought—I said I thought—Mary, that's very naughty of you! Sally, you know how innocently one surmises an engagement, or guesses at things!"

"Oh, mother, you're getting in deeper and deeper!" said her older son. "Never you mind, Sally! You can elope if you want to!"

"San Rafael's the place to go, Sally," said Mary. "All the elopers get married there. The court-house, you know. No delays about licenses!"

"They're very naughty," said their mother, beginning to see how unwelcome this joking was to the visitors. "Are you going straight home, dear?"

"Straight home!" said the doctor.

"Well, speaking of San Rafael," pursued the matron, kindly—"can't you two and Elsie and Ferd go with us all to-night, say about an hour from now, up to Pastori's and have dinner?"

"Oh, thanks!" said Sally, trying to smile naturally. "I'm afraid not to-night. I've got a headache, and I'm going home to turn in."

Amid cheerful good-bys, she wheeled the car, and drove it along rapidly, pursuing thoughts of the Bevis boys hardly short of murderous. The doctor was silent; but Sally, glancing at him, saw his quiet smile change to an apologetic look, and hated both the smile and the apology.

They went more slowly on the steep road from the water front to the hillside. The level light of the sinking sun shone brilliantly on daisies and nasturtiums at the roadside. Boats, riding at anchor, dipped in the wash of another incoming steamer. Dr. Bates hummed; but Sally frowned, and he was immediately hushed.

"Boy looking for you?" he said presently, as a small and dusty boy rose from a boulder at one side of the road and shouted something unintelligible.

"Why, I guess he is for me!" said Sally, in the first natural tone she had used that afternoon.

But the boy, upon being interrogated, said that the telegram was for "the doc that was visiting up to Miss Sally's house."

Dr. Bates read the little message several times, and absently dismissed the messenger with a coin, which Sally thought outrageously large, and a muttered worried word or two.

"Bad news?" she asked.

"In a way," he said quickly. "When's the next train for San Rafael, Miss Sally? I've got to be there to-night—right away! Do we have to stand here? Thank you. There's a case Field and I have been watching; he says that there's got to be an operation at eight—" His voice trailed off into troubled silence, and he drew out his watch. "Eight!" he muttered. "It's on seven now!"

"Oh, and you have to operate—horrible for you!" said Sally, taking the car skilfully toward the railroad station as she spoke. "But I don't see how you CAN! You've missed the six-thirty train, and there's not another until after nine. But you can wire Dr. Field that you will be there the first thing in the morning."

The doctor paid no attention.

"The livery stable is closed, I suppose?" he asked.

"Oh, long ago!"

He ruminated frowningly. Suddenly his face cleared.

"Funny how one thinks of the right solution last!" he said in relief. "How long would it take you to run me up there? Forty minutes?"

"I don't see how I could," said Sally, flushing. "I can take the car home, though, and ask Ferd to do it. But that woman's at the hotel, isn't she? I couldn't go up there and sit outside, with every one I knew coming out and wondering why I brought you instead of Ferd! Elsie wouldn't like it. You must see—"

"It would take us fifteen minutes at least to go up and get Ferd," objected the doctor, seriously; "and he's not much better than I am at running it, anyway!"

"Well, I'm sorry," said Sally, shortly, "but I simply couldn't do it. Dr. Field should have given you more notice. It would look simply absurd for me to go tearing over these country roads at night—Elsie would go mad wondering where I was—"

They were in the village now. Troubled and stubborn, Sally stopped the car, and looked mutinously at her companion. The doctor's rosy face was flushed under his flaming hair, and in his very blue eyes was a look that struck her with an almost panicky sensation of surprise. Sally had never seen any man regard her with an expression of distaste before, but the doctor's look was actually inimical.

"I feared that you would be the sort of woman to fail one utterly, like this," he said quietly. "I've often wondered—I've often said to myself, 'COULD she ever, under any circumstances, throw off that pretty baby way of hers, and forget that this world was made just for flirting and dressing and being admired?' By George, I see you can't! I see you can't! Well! Now, whom can I get to take me up there within the hour?"

He appeared to ponder. Sally sat as if stupefied.

"Don't resent what I say when I'm upset," said the doctor, absently. "You can't help your limitations, I can't help mine. I see a young woman—she's just lost a little boy, and she's all her husband has left—I see her dying because we're too late. You see a few empty-headed women saying that Sally Reade actually went driving alone, without her dinner, for three hours, with a man she hardly knew. I am not blaming you. You have never pretended to be anything but what you are. I blame myself for hoping—thinking—but, by George, you'd be an utter dead weight on a man if it was ever up to you to face an epidemic, or run a risk, or do one-twentieth of the things that those very ancestors of yours, that you're so proud of, used to do!"

Sally set her teeth. She leaned from the car to summon a small girl loitering on the road.

"You're one of the White children, aren't you?" said she to the child. "I want you to go up to Mrs. Ferdie Potter's house, and tell Mrs. Potter that her sister won't be home for several hours, and that I'll explain later. Now," said Sally, turning superbly to the doctor, "pull your hat down tight. We're going FAST!"

They were three miles farther on their way before he saw that her little chin was quivering, and great tears were running down her small face. Time was precious, but for a few memorable moments they stopped the car again.

Miss Sally and Dr. Bates returned to the sleepy and excited Ferdies' at one o'clock that night. The light that never was on land or sea glittered in Sally's wonderful eyes; the doctor was white, shaken, and radiant. Sally flew to her sister's arms.

"We waited to see—and she came out of it—and she has a fair fighting chance!" said Sally, joyously; and the look she gave her doctor made Elsie's heart rise with a bound.

"Runaways," said Elsie, "come in and eat! I never knew a serious operation to have such a cheering effect on any one before!"

"It all went so well," said Sally, contentedly, over chicken and ginger ale. "But, Elsie! Such fun!" she burst out, her dimples suddenly again in view. "I am disgraced forever! After we had done everything to make the Bevis crowd think we were eloping, what did we do but run into the whole crowd at San Anselmo! I wish you could have seen their faces! We had said we couldn't possibly go; and we were going too fast to stop and explain!"

"We'll explain to-morrow," said the doctor, so significantly that Ferdie rose instantly to grasp his hand, and Elsie fell again upon Sally as if she had never kissed her before.

"Not—not really!" gasped Elsie, turning radiantly from one to the other.

"Oh, really!" said Sally, with her prettiest color. "He despises me, but he will take the case, anyway! And he has done nothing but mortify and enrage me all day, but I feel that I should miss it if it stopped! So we are going to sacrifice our lives to each other—isn't it edifying and beautiful of us? We'll tell you all about it to-morrow. Jam—Sam?"



THE GAY DECEIVER

After the meat course, Mrs. Tolley and Min rather languidly removed the main platters and, by reaching backward, piled the dinner plates on the shining new oak sideboard. Thus room was made for the salad, which was always mantled in tepid mayonnaise, whether it was sliced tomatoes, or potatoes, or asparagus. After the salad there was another partial clearance, and then every available inch of the table was needed for peach pies and apple sauce and hot gingerbread and raspberries, or various similar delicacies, and the coffee and yellow cheese and soda-crackers with which the meal concluded.

By the time these appeared, on a hot summer evening, the wheezing clock in the kitchen would have struck six,—dinner was early at Kirkwood,—and the level rays of the sun would be pouring boldly in at the uncurtained western windows. The dining, room was bare, and not entirely free from flies, despite an abundance of new green screening at the windows. Relays of new stiff oak chairs stood against its walls, ready for the sudden need of occasional visitors. On the walls hung framed enlarged photographs of machinery, and factories, and scaffoldings, and the like. There was one of laborers and bosses grouped about great generators and water-wheels in transit, and another of a monster switchboard, with a smiling young operator, in his apron and overalls, standing beside it.

Mrs. Tolley sat at the head of the table—a big, joyous, vigorous widow, who had managed the Company House at Kirkwood ever since its erection two years before, and who had been an employee of the Light and Power Company, in one capacity or another, for some five years before that—or ever since, as she put it, "the juice got pore George." Mrs. Tolley loved every inch of Kirkwood; for her it was the captured dream.

Min Tolley, sitting next to her mother, loved Kirkwood, too, because she was going to marry Harry Garvey, who was one of the shift bosses at the plant. Harry sat next to Min. Then came her brother Roosy, ten years old; and then the Hopps—Mrs. Lou, and little Lou, spattering rice and potato all over himself and his chair, and big Lou, silently, deeply admiring them both. Then there were two empty chairs, for the Chisholms, the resident manager and superintendent and his sister, at the end of the table; and then Joe Vorse, the switchboard operator, and his little wife; and then Monk White, another shift boss; and lastly, at Mrs. Tolley's left, Paul Forster, newly come from New York to be Mr. Chisholm's stenographer and assistant.

Paul was the first to leave the table that night. He drank his coffee in three savage gulps, pushed back his crumpled napkin, and rose. "If you'll excuse me—" he began.

"You're cert'n'y excusable!" said Mrs. Tolley, elegantly—adding, when the door had closed behind him: "And leave me tell you right now that somebody was real fond of children to raise YOU!"

"An' I'm not planning to spend the heyday of my girlhood ironing napkins for you, Pauly Pet!" said Min, reaching for his discarded napkin and folding it severely into a wooden ring.

Paul did not hear these remarks, but he heard the laughter that greeted them, and he scowled as he selected a rocker on the front porch. He put his feet up on the rail, felt in one pocket for tobacco, in another for papers, and in a third for his match-case, and set himself to the congenial task of composing a letter in which he should resign from the employ of the Light and Power Company. It was a question of a broken contract, so it must be diplomatically worded. Paul had spent the five evenings since his arrival at Kirkwood in puzzling over the phrasing of that letter.

Below the porch, the hillside, covered with scrub-oak and chaparral and madrono trees, and the stumps where redwoods had been, dropped sharply to the little river, which came tumbling down from the wooded mountains to plunge roaring into one end of the big power-house, and which foamed out at the other side to continue its mad rush down the valley. The power-house, looming up an immense crude outline in the twilight, rested on the banks of the stream and stood in a rough clearing. A great gash in the woods above it showed whence lumber for buildings and fires came; another ugly gash marked the course of the "pole line" over the mountain. Near the big building stood lesser ones, two or three rough little unpainted cottages perched on the hill above it. There was a "cook-house," and a "bunk-house," and storage sheds, and Mrs. Tolley's locked provision shed, and the rough shack the builders lived in while construction was going on, and where the Hopps lived now, rent free.

Nasturtiums languished here and there, where some of the women had made an effort to fight the unresponsive red clay. Otherwise, even after two years, the power-house and its environs looked unfinished, crude, ugly. On all sides the mountains rose dark and steep, the pointed tops of the redwoods mounting evenly, tier on tier. Except for the lumber slide and the pole line, there was no break anywhere, not even a glimpse of the road that wound somehow out of the canyon—up, up, up, twelve long miles, to the top of the ridge.

And even at the top, Paul reflected bitterly, there was only an unpainted farm-house, where the stage stopped three times a week with mail. From there it was a fifty-mile drive to town—a California country town, asleep in the curve of two sluggish little rivers. And from "town" to San Francisco it was almost a day's trip, and from San Francisco to the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street it was nearly five days more.

Paul shoved his hands in his pockets and began again: "Light and Power Co.—GENTLEMEN."

Night came swiftly to Kirkwood. For a few wonderful moments the last of the sunlight lingered, hot and gold, on the upper branches of the highest trees along the ridge; then suddenly the valley was plunged in soft twilight, and violet shadows began to tangle themselves about the great shafts of the redwoods. The heat of the day dropped from the air like a falling veil. A fine mist spun itself above the river; bats began to wheel on the edge of the clearing.

With the coming of darkness every window in the place was suddenly alight. The Company House blazed with it; the great power-house doorway sent a broad stream of yellow into the deepening shadows of the night; the "cook-house," where Willy Chow Tong cooked for a score of "hands" and oilers, showed a thousand golden cracks in its rough walls. The little cottages on the hill were hidden by the glare from their dangling porch lights. Light was so plentiful, at this factory of light, that even the Hopps' barnlike home blazed with a dozen "thirty-twos."

"Nothing like having a little light on the subject, Mr. Fo'ster," said Mrs. Tolley, coming out to the porch. The Vorses had small children that they could not leave very long alone; so, when Min and her mother had reduced the kitchen to orderly, warm, soap-scented darkness every night, and wound the clock, and hung up their aprons, they went up to the Vorses' to play "five hundred."

"Seems's if I never could get enough light, myself," the matron continued agreeably, descending the porch steps. "Before I come here I never had nothing in my kitchen but an oil lamp and a reflector. Jest as sure as I'd be dishing up dinner, hot nights, that lamp would begin to flicker and suck—well, shucks! I'd look up at it and I'd say, 'Well, why don't you go out? Go ahead!'" Mrs. Tolley laughed joyously. "Well, one night—George—" she was continuing with relish, when Min pulled at her sleeve and, with a sort of affectionate impatience, said, "Oh, f've'vens' sakes ma!"

"Yes, I'm coming," said Mrs. Tolley, recalled. "Wish't you played 'five hundred,' Mr. Fo'ster," she added politely.

"I don't play either that or old maid," said Paul, distinctly. This remark was taken in good part by the Tolleys.

"Old maid's a real comical game," Min conceded mildly.

"Well, you won't be s'lunsum next week when the Chisholms get back," said Mrs. Tolley, unaffectedly, gathering up the skirt of her starched gown to avoid contact with the sudden heavy dews. "He's an awful nice feller, and she—she's twenty-six, but she's as jolly as a girl. I declare, I just love Patricia Chisholm."

"Twenty-six, is she?" said Paul, disgustedly, to himself, when the Tolleys had gone. "Only one woman—of any class, that is—in this forsaken hole, and she twenty-six!" And he had been thinking of this Patricia with a good deal of interest, he admitted resentfully. Paul was twenty-four, and liked slender little girls well under twenty.

"Lord, what a place!" he said, for the hundredth time.

He sat brooding in the darkness, discouraged and homesick. So he had sat for all his nights at Kirkwood.

The men at the cook-house were playing cards, silently, intently. The cook, serene and cool, was smoking in the doorway of his cabin. Above the dull roar of the river Paul could hear Min Tolley's cackle of laughter from the cottages a hundred yards away, and Mrs. Hopps crooning over her baby.

Presently the night shift went down to the powerhouse, the men taking great boyish leaps on the steep trail. Some of the lighted windows were blotted out—the Hopps', the cook-house light. The singing pole line above Paul's head ceased abruptly, and with a little rising whine the opposite pole line took up the buzzing currant. That meant that the copper line had been cut in, and the aluminum one would be "cold" for the night.

Minutes went by, eventless. Half an hour, an hour—still Paul sat staring into the velvet dark and wrestling with bitter discouragement and homesickness.

"Lord, what a PLACE!" he said once or twice under his breath.

Finally, feeling cramped and chilly, he went stiffly indoors, through the hot, bright halls, that smelled of varnish and matting, to his room.

The next day was exactly like the five preceding days—hot, restless, aimless; and the next night Paul sat on the porch again, and listened to the rush of the river, and Min Tolley's laugh at the "five hundred" table, and the Hopps' baby's lullaby. And again he composed his resignation, and calculated that it would take three days for it to reach San Francisco, and another three for him to receive their acceptance of it—another week at least of Kirkwood!

On the seventh day the Chisholms rode down the trail that followed the pole line, and arrived in a hospitable uproar. Alan Chisholm, some five years older than Paul, was a fine-looking, serious, dark youth, a fellow of not many words, being given rather to silent appreciation of his sister's chatter than to speech of his own. Miss Chisholm was very tall, very easy in manner, and powdered just now to her eyelashes with fine yellow dust. Paul thought her too tall and too large for beauty, but he liked her voice, and the fashion she had of crinkling up her eyes when she smiled. He sat on the porch while the Chisholms went upstairs to brush and change, and thought that the wholesome noise of their splashing and calling, opening drawers, and banging doors was a pleasant change from the usual quiet of the house.

Miss Chisholm was the first to reappear. She was followed by Min and Mrs. Tolley, and was asking questions at a rate that kept both answering at once. Had her kodak films come? Was Minnie going to have some little sense and be married in a dress she could get some use out of? How were the guinea-pigs, the ducks, the vegetables, the caged fox, the "boys" generally, Roosy's ear, Consuelo Vorse's lame foot? Did Mrs. Tolley know that she had made a deep impression on the old fellow who drove the stage? "Oh, look at her blush, Min! Well, really!"

She came, delightfully refreshed by toilet waters and crisp linen, to take a deep rocker opposite Paul, and leaned luxuriously back, showing very trim feet shod in white.

"Admit that you've fallen in love with Kirkwood, Mr. Forster," said she.

"I can't admit anything of the sort," said Paul, firmly, but smiling because she was so very good to look at. He had to admit that he had never seen handsomer dark eyes, nor a more tender, more expressive and characterful mouth than the one that smiled so readily and showed so even a line of big teeth.

"Oh, you will!" she assured him easily. "There's no place like Kirkwood, is there, Alan?" she said to her brother, as he came out. He smiled.

"We don't think there is, Forster. My sister's been crazy about the place since we got here—that's eighteen months ago; and I'm crazy about it myself now!"

"Wait until you've slept out on the porch for a while," said Miss Chisholm, "and wait until you've got used to a plunge in the pool before breakfast every morning. Alan, you must take him down to the pool to-morrow, and I'll listen for his shrieks. Where are you going now—the power-house? No, thank you, I won't go. I'm going out to find something special to cook you for your suppers."

The something special was extremely delicious; Paul had a vague impression that there was fried chicken in it, and mushrooms, and cream, and sherry. Miss Chisholm served it from a handsome little copper blazer, and also brewed them her own particular tea, in a Canton tea-pot. Paul found it much pleasanter at this end of the table. To his surprise, no one resented this marked favoritism—Mrs. Tolley observing contentedly that her days of messing for men were over, and Mrs. Vorse remarking that she'd "orghter reely git out her chafing-dish and do some cooking" herself.

Paul found that Miss Chisholm possessed a leisurely gift of fun; she was droll, whether she quite meant to be or not. Everybody laughed. Mrs. Tolley became tearful with mirth.

"Now, this is the nicest part of the day," said Patricia, when they three had carried their coffee out to the porch and were seated. "Did you ever watch the twilight come, sitting here, Mr. Forster?"

"It seems to me I have never done anything else," said Paul. She gave him a keen glance over her lifted teaspoon; then she drank her coffee, set the cup down, and said:

"Well! How is that combination of vaudeville and railway station and zotrope that is known as New York?"

"Oh, the little old berg is all there," said Paul, lightly. But his heart gave a sick throb. He hoped she would go on talking about it. But it was some time before any one spoke, and then it was Alan Chisholm, who took his pipe out of his mouth to say:

"Patricia hates New York."

"I can't imagine any one doing that," Paul said emphatically.

"Well, there was a time when I thought I couldn't live anywhere else," said Alan, good-naturedly; "but there's a lot of the pioneer in any fellow, if he gives it a chance."

"Oh, I had a nice enough time in New York," said Patricia, lazily, "but it just WEARS YOU OUT to live there; and what do you get out of it? Now, HERE—well, one's equal to the situation here!"

"And then some," Paul said; and the brother and sister laughed at his tone.

"But, honestly," said Miss Chisholm, "you take a little place like Kirkwood, and you don't need a Socialist party. We all eat the same; we all dress about the same; and certainly, if any one works hard here, it's Alan, and not the mere hands. Why, last Christmas there wasn't a person here who didn't have a present—even Willy Chow Tong! Every one had all the turkey he could eat; every one a fire, and a warm bed, and a lighted house. Mrs. Tolley gets only fifty dollars a month, and Monk White gets fifty—doesn't he, Alan? But money doesn't make much difference here. You know how the boys adore Monk for his voice; and as for Mrs. Tolley, she's queen of the place! Now, how much of that's true of New York!"

"Oh, well, put it that way—" Paul said, in the tone of an offended child.

"Apropos of Mrs. Tolley's being queen of the place," said Alan to his sister, "it seems she's rubbing it into poor little Mollie Peavy. Len brought Mollie and the baby down from the ranch a week ago, and nobody's been near 'em."

"Who said so?" flashed Miss Chisholm, reddening.

"Why, I saw Len to-night, sort of lurking round the power-house, and he told me he had 'em in that little cottage, across the creek, where the lumbermen used to live. Said Mollie was in agony because nobody came near her."

"Oh, that makes me furious!" said Patricia, passionately. "I'll see about it to-morrow. Nobody went near her? The poor little thing!"

"Who are they?" said Paul.

"Why, she's a little blonde, sickly-looking thing of sixteen," explained Miss Chisholm, "and Len's a lumberman. They have a little blue-nosed, sickly baby; it was born about six weeks ago, at her father's ranch, above here. She was—she had no mother, the poor child—"

"And in fact, my sister escorted the benefit of clergy to them about two months ago," said Alan, "and the ladies of the Company House are very haughty about it."

"They won't be long," predicted Miss Chisholm, confidently. "The idea! I can forgive Mrs. Hopps, because she's only a kid herself; but Mrs. Tolley ought to have been big enough! However!"

"This place honestly can't spare you for ten minutes, Pat," her brother said.

"Well, honestly," she was beginning seriously, when she saw he was laughing at her, and broke off, with a shamefaced, laughing look for Paul. Then she announced that she was going down to the power-house, and, packing her thin white skirts about her, she started off, and they followed.

Paul was not accustomed to seeing a lady in the power-house, and thought that her enthusiasm was rather nice to watch. She flitted about the great barnlike structure like a contented child, insisted upon displaying the trim stock-room to Paul, demanded a demonstration of the switchboard, spread her pretty hands over the whirling water that showed under the glass of the water-wheels, and hung, fascinated, over the governors.

"I never get used to it," said Patricia, above the steady roaring of the river. "Do you realize that you are in one of the greatest force factories of the world? Look at it!" She swept with a gesture the monster machinery that shone and glittered all about them. "Do you realize that people miles and miles away are reading by lights and taking street-cars that are moved by this? Don't talk to me about the subway and the Pennsylvania Terminal!"

"Oh, come, now!" said Paul.

"Well!" she flared. "Do you suppose that anything bigger was ever done in this world than getting these things—these generators and water-wheels and the corrugated iron for the roof, and the door-knobs and tiles and standards and switchboard, and everything else, up to the top of the ridge from Emville and down this side of the ridge? I see that never occurred to you! Why, you don't KNOW what it was. Struggle, struggle, struggle, day after day—ropes breaking, and tackle breaking, and roads giving way, and rain coming! Suppose one of these had slipped off the trail—well, it would have stayed where it fell. But wait—wait!" she said, interrupting herself with her delightful smile. "You'll love it as we do one of these days!"

"Not," said Paul to himself, as they started back to the house.

After that he saw Miss Chisholm every day, and many times a day; and she was always busy and always cheerful. She wanted her brother and Paul to ride with her up to the dam for a swim; she wanted to go to the woods for ferns for Min's wedding; she was going to make candy and they could come in. She packed delicious suppers, to be eaten in cool places by the creek, and to be followed by their smoking and her careless snatches of songs; she played poker quite as well as they; she played old opera scores and sang to them; she had jig-saw puzzles for slow evenings. She could not begin a game of what Mrs. Tolley called "halmy," with that good lady, without somehow attracting the boys to the table, where they hung, championing and criticising. Paul was more amused than surprised to find Mrs. Peavy having tea with the other ladies on the porch less than a week later. The little mother looked scared and shamed; but Mrs. Tolley had the baby, and was bidding him "love his Auntie Gussie," while she kissed his rounding little cheek. One night, some four weeks after his arrival, Patricia decided that Paul's room must be made habitable; and she and Alan and Paul spent an entire busy evening there, discussing photographs and books, and deciding where to cross the oars, and where to hang the Navajo blanket, and where to put the college colors. Miss Chisholm, who had the quality of grace and could double herself up comfortably on the floor like a child, became thoughtful over the class annual.

"The Dicky, and the Hasty Pudding!" she commented. "Weren't you the Smarty?"

Paul, who was standing with a well-worn pillow in his hand, turned and said hungrily:

"Oh, you know Harvard?"

"Why, I'm Radcliffe!" she said simply.

Paul was stupefied.

"Why, but you never SAID so! I thought yours was some Western college like your brother's!"

"Oh, no; I went to Radcliffe for four years," said she, casually. Then, tapping a picture thoughtfully, she went on: "There's a boy whose face looks familiar."

"Well, but—well, but—didn't you love it?" stammered Paul.

"I liked it awfully well," said Patricia. "Alan, you've got that one a little crooked," she added calmly. Paul decided disgustedly that he gave her up. His own heart was aching so for old times and old voices that it was far more pain than pleasure to handle all these reminders: the photographs, the yacht pennant, the golf-clubs, the rumpled and torn dominoes, the tumbler with "Cafe Henri" blown in the glass, the shabby camera, the old Hawaiian banjo. Oh, what fun it had all been, and what good fellows they were!

"It was lovely, of course," said Patricia, in a businesslike tone; "but this is real life! Cheer up, Paul," she went on (they had reached Christian names some weeks before). "I am going to have two darling girls here for two weeks at Thanksgiving, just from Japan. And think of the concert next month, with Harry Garvey and Laurette Hopps in a play, and Mrs. Tolley singing 'What Are the Wild Waves Saying?' Then, if Alan sends you to Sacramento, you can go to the theatre every night you're there, and pretend"—her eyes danced mischievously—"that you're going to step out on Broadway when the curtain goes down, and can look up the street at electric signs of cocoa and ginger beer and silk petticoats—"

"Oh, don't!" said Paul; and, as if she were a little ashamed of herself, she began to busy herself with the book-case, and was particularly sweet for the rest of the evening. But she wouldn't talk Radcliffe, and Paul wondered if her college days hadn't been happy; she seemed rather uneasy when he repeatedly brought up the subject.

But a day or two later, when he and she were taking a long ride and resting their horses by a little stream high up in the hills, she began to talk of the East; and they let an hour, and then another, go by, while they compared notes. Paul did most of the talking, and Miss Chisholm listened, with downcast eyes, flinging little stones from the crumbling bank into the pool the while.

A lazy leaf or two drifted upon the surface of the water, and where gold sunlight fell through the thick leafage overhead and touched the water, brown water-bugs flitted and jerked. Once a great dragon-fly came through on some mysterious journey, and paused for a palpitating bright second on a sunny rock. The woods all about were silent in the tense hush of the summer afternoon; even the horses were motionless, except for an occasional idle lipping of the underbrush. Now and then a breath of pine, incredibly sweet, crept from the forest.

Paul watched his companion as he talked. She was, as always, quite unself-conscious. She sat most becomingly framed by the lofty rise of oak and redwood and maple trees about her. Her sombrero had slipped back on her braids, and the honest, untouched beauty of her thoughtful face struck Paul forcibly. He wondered if she had ever been in love—what her manner would be to the man she loved.

"What did you come for, Paul?" She was ending some long sentence with the question.

"Come here?" Paul said. "Oh, Lord, there seemed to be reasons enough, though I can't remember now why I ever thought I'd stay."

"You came straight from college?"

"No," he said, a little uneasily; "no. I finished three years ago. You see, my mother married an awfully rich old guy named Steele, the last year I was at college; and he gave me a desk in his office. He has two sons, but they're not my kind. Nice fellows, you know, but they work twenty hours a day, and don't belong to any clubs,—they'll both die rich, I guess,—and whenever I was late, or forgot something, or beat it early to catch a boat, they'd go to the old man. And he'd ask mother to speak to me."

"I see," said Patricia.

"After a while he got me a job with a friend of his in a Philadelphia iron-works," said the boy; "but that was a ROTTEN job. So I came back to New York; and I'd written a sketch for an amateur theatrical thing, and a manager there wanted me to work it up—said he'd produce it. I tinkered away at that for a while, but there was no money in it, and Steele sent me out to see how I'd like working in one of the Humboldt lumber camps. I thought that sounded good. But I got my leg broken the first week, and had to wire him from the hospital for money. So, when I got well again, he sent me a night wire about this job, and I went to see Kahn the next day, and came up here."

"I see," she said again. "And you don't think you'll stay?"

"Honestly, I can't, Patricia. Honest—you don't know what it is! I could stand Borneo, or Alaska, or any place where the climate and customs and natives stirred things up once in a while. But this is like being dead! Why, it just makes me sick to see the word 'New York' on the covers of magazines—I'm going crazy here."

She nodded seriously.

"Yes, I know. But you've got to do SOMETHING. And since your course was electrical engineering—! And the next job mayn't be half so easy, you know—!"

"Well, it'll be a little nearer Broadway, believe me. No, I'm sorry. I never knew two dandier people than you and your brother, and I like the work, but—!"

He drew a long breath on the last word, and Miss Chisholm sighed, too.

"I'm sorry," she said, staring at the big seal ring on her finger. "I tell you frankly that I think you're making a mistake. I don't argue for Alan's sake or mine, though we both like you thoroughly, and your being here would make a big difference this winter. But I think you've made a good start with the company, and it's a good company, and I think, from what you've said to-day, and other hints you're given me, that you'd make your mother very happy by writing her that you think you've struck your groove. However!"

She got up, brushed the leaves from her skirt, and went to her horse. They rode home through the columned aisles of the forest almost silently. The rough, straight trunks of the redwoods rose all about them, catching gold and red on their thick, fibrous bark from the setting sun. The horses' feet made no sound on the corduroy roadway.

For several days nothing more was said of Paul's going or staying. Miss Chisholm went her usual busy round. Paul wrote his letter of resignation and carried it to the dinner-table one night, hoping to read it later to her, and win her approval of its finely rounded sentences.

But a heavy mail came down the trail that evening, brought by the obliging doctor from Emville, who had been summoned to dress the wounds of one of the line-men who had got too close to the murderous "sixty thousand" and had been badly burned by "the juice." And after the letters were read, and the good doctor had made his patient comfortable, he proved an excellent fourth hand at the game of bridge for which they were always hungering.

So at one o'clock Paul went upstairs with his letter still unapproved. He hesitated in the dim upper hallway, wondering if Patricia, who had left the men to beer and crackers half an hour earlier, had retired, or was, by happy chance, still gossiping with Mrs. Tolley or Min. While he loitered in the hall, the door of her room swung slowly open.

Paul had often been in this room, which was merely a kind of adjunct to the sleeping-porch beyond. He went to the doorway and said, "Patricia!"

The room, wide and charmingly furnished, was quite empty. On the deep couch letters were scattered in a wide circle, and in their midst was an indentation as if some one had been kneeling on the floor with her elbows there. Paul noticed this with a curious feeling of unease, and then called softly again, "Patricia!"

No answer. He walked hesitatingly to his own room and to the window. Why he should have looked down at the dark path with the expectation of seeing her, he did not know; but it was almost without surprise that he recognized the familiar white ruffles and dark head moving away in the gloom. Paul unhesitatingly followed.

He followed her down the trail as far as he had seen her go, and was standing, a little undecidedly, wondering just which way she had turned, when his heart was suddenly brought into his throat by the sound of her bitter sobbing.

A moment later he saw her. She was sitting on a smooth fallen trunk, and had buried her face in her hands. Paul had never heard such sobs; they seemed to shake her from head to foot. Hardly would they lessen, bringing him the hope that her grief, whatever it was, was wearing itself out, when a fresh paroxysm would shake her, and she would abandon herself to it. This lasted for what seemed a long, long time.

After a while Paul cleared his throat, but she did not hear him. And again he stood motionless, waiting and waiting. Finally, when she straightened up and began to mop her eyes, he said, trembling a little:

"Patricia!"

Instantly she stopped crying.

"Who is that?" she said, with an astonishing control of her voice. "Is that you, Alan? I'm all right, dear. Did I frighten you? Is that you, Alan?"

"It's Paul," the boy said, coming nearer.

"Oh—Paul!" she said, relieved. "Does Alan know I'm here?"

"No," he reassured her; then, affectionately: "What is it, Pat?"

"Just—just that I happen to be a fool!" she said huskily, but with an effort at lightness. Paul sat down, beginning to see in the darkness. "I'm all right now," went on Patricia, hardily. "I just—I suppose I just had the blues." She put out a smooth hand in the darkness, and patted Paul's appreciatively. "I'm ashamed of myself!" said she, catching a little sob, as she spoke, like a child.

"Bad news—in your letters?" he hazarded.

"No, GOOD; that's the trouble!" she said, with her whimsical smile, but with trembling lips. "You see, all my friends are in the East, and some of them happened to be at the same house-party at Newport, and they—they were saying how they missed me," her voice shook a little, "and—and it seems they toasted me, all standing, and—and—" And suddenly she gave up the fight for control, and began to cry bitterly again. "Oh, I'm so HOMESICK!" she sobbed, "and I'm so LONESOME! And I'm so sick, sick, sick of this place! Oh, I think I'll go crazy if I can't go home! I bear it and I BEAR it," said Patricia, in a sort of desperate self-defence, "and then the time comes when I simply CAN'T bear it!" And again she wept luxuriously, and Paul, in an agony of sympathy, patted her hand.

"My heart is just breaking!" she burst out again, her tears and words tumbling over each other. "It—it isn't RIGHT! I want my friends, and I want my youth—I'll never be twenty-six again! I want to put my things into a suit-case and go off with the other girls for country visits—and I want to dance!" She put her head down again, and after a moment Paul ventured a timid, "Patricia, dear, DON'T."

He thought she had not heard him, but after a moment, he was relieved to see her resolutely straighten up again, and dry her eyes, and push up her tumbled hair.

"Well, I really will STOP," she said determinedly. "This will not do! If Alan even suspected! But, you see, I'm naturally a sociable person, and I had—well, I don't suppose any girl ever had such a good time in New York! My aunt did for me just what she did for her own daughters—a dance at Sherry's, and dinners—! Paul, I'd give a year of my life just to drive down the Avenue again on a spring afternoon, and bow to every one, and have tea somewhere, and smell the park—oh, did you ever smell Central Park in the spring?"

Both were silent. After a long pause Paul said:

"Why DO you stay? You've not got to ask a stepfather for a job."

"Alan," she answered simply. "No, don't say that," she interrupted him quickly; "I'm nothing of the sort! But my mother—my mother, in a way, left Alan and me to each other, and I have never done anything for Alan. I went to the Eastern aunt, and he stayed here; and after a while he drifted East—and he had too much money, of course! And I wasn't half affectionate enough; he had his friends and I had mine! Well then he got ill, and first it was just a cold and then it was, suddenly—don't you know?—a question of consultations, and a dry climate, and no dinners or wine or late hours. And Alan refused—refused flat to go anywhere, until I said I'd LOVE to come! I'll never forget the night it came over me that I ought to. I am—I was—engaged, you know?" She paused.

Paul cleared his throat. "No, I didn't know," he said.

"It wasn't announced," said Miss Chisholm. "He's a good deal older than I. A doctor." There was a long silence. "He said he would wait, and he will," she said softly, ending it. "It's not FOREVER, you know. Another year or two, and he'll come for me! Alan's quite a different person now. Another two years!" She jumped up, with a complete change of manner. "Well, I'm over my nonsense for another while!" said she. "And it's getting cold. I can't tell you how I've enjoyed letting off steam this way, Paul!"

"Whenever we feel this way," he said, giving her a steadying hand in the dark, "we'll come out for a jaw. But cheer up; we'll have lots of fun this winter!"

"Oh, lots!" she said contentedly. They entered the dark, open doorway together.

Patricia went ahead of him up the stairs, and at the top she turned, and Paul felt her hand for a second on his shoulder, and felt something brush his forehead that was all fragrance and softness and warmth.

Then she was gone.

Paul went into his room, and stood at the window, staring out into the dark. Only the door of the power-house glowed smoulderingly, and a broad band of light fell from Miss Chisholm's window.

He stood there until this last light suddenly vanished. Then he took a letter from his pocket, and began to tear it methodically to pieces. While he did so Paul began to compose another letter, this time to his mother.



THE RAINBOW'S END

"Well, I am discovered—and lost." Julie, lazily making the announcement after a long silence, shut her magazine with a sigh of sleepy content; and braced herself more comfortably against the old rowboat that was half buried in sand at her back. She turned as she spoke to smile at the woman near her, a frail, keen-faced little woman luxuriously settled in an invalid's wheeled chair.

"Ann—you know you're not interested in that book. Did you hear what I said? I'm discovered."

"Well, it was sure to happen, sooner or later, I suppose." Mrs. Arbuthnot, suddenly summoned from the pages of a novel brought her gaze promptly to the younger woman's face, with the pitifully alert interest of the invalid. "You were bound to be recognized by some one, Ju!"

"Don't worry, a cannon wouldn't wake him!" said Julia, in reference to Mrs. Arbuthnot's lowered voice, and the solicitous look the wife had given a great opened beach umbrella three feet away, under which Dr. Arbuthnot slumbered on the warm sands. "He's forty fathoms deep. No," continued the actress, returning aggrievedly to her own affairs, "I suppose there's no such thing as escaping recognition—even as late in the season as this, and at such an out-of-the-way place. Of course, I knew," she continued crossly, "that various people here had placed me, but I did rather hope to escape actual introductions!"

"Who is it—some one you know?" Mrs. Arbuthnot adjusted the pillow at her back, and settled herself enjoyably for a talk.

"Indirectly; it's that little butterfly of a summer girl—the one Jim calls 'The Dancing Girl'—of all people in the world!" said Julie, locking her arms comfortably behind her head. "You know how she's been haunting me, Ann? She's been simply DETERMINED upon an introduction ever since she placed me as her adored Miss Ives of matinee fame. I imagine she's rather a nice child—every evidence of money—the ambitious type that longs to do something big—and is given to desperate hero worship. She's been under my feet for a week, with a Faithful Tray expression that drives me crazy. I've taken great pains not to see her."

"And now—?" prompted the other, as the actress fell silent, and sat staring dreamily at the brilliant sweep of beach and sea before them.

"Oh—now," Miss Ives took up her narrative briskly. "Well, a new young man arrived on the afternoon boat and, of course, the Dancing Girl instantly captivated him. She has one simple yet direct method with them all," she interrupted herself to digress a little. "She gets one of her earlier victims to introduce him; they all go down for a swim, she fascinates him with her daring and her bobbing red cap, she returns to white linen and leads him down to play tennis—they have tea at the 'Casino,' and she promises him the second two-step and the first extra that evening. He is then hers to command," concluded Julie, bringing her amused eyes back to Mrs. Arbuthnot's face, "for the remainder of his stay!"

"That's exactly what she DOES do," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, laughing, "but I don't see yet—"

"Oh, I forgot to say," Miss Ives amended hastily, "that to-day's young man happens to be an acquaintance of mine; at least his uncle introduced him to me at a tea last winter. She led him by to the tennis courts an hour ago, and, to my disgust, I recognized him. That's all Miss Dancing Girl wants. Now—you'll see! They'll come up to our table in the dining-room to-night, and to-morrow she'll bring up a group of dear friends and he'll bring up another—to be introduced; and—there we'll be!"

"Oh, not so bad as that, Julie!"

"Oh, yes, indeed, Ann!" pursued Miss Ives with morose enjoyment. "You don't know how helpless one is. I'll be annoyed to death for the rest of the month, just so that the Dancing Girl can go back to the city this winter and say, 'Oh, girls, Julia Ives was staying where mamma and I were this summer, and she's just a DEAR! She doesn't make up one bit off the stage, and she dresses just as PLAIN! I saw her every day and got some dandy snapshots. She's just a darling when you know her.'"

"Well! What an unspoiled modest little soul you are, Julie!" interrupted the doctor's admiring voice. He wheeled away the umbrella and, lying luxuriously on his elbows in the sun, beamed at them both through his glasses.

"Jim," said the actress, severely, "it's positively indecent—the habit you're getting of evesdropping on Ann and me!"

"It gives me sidelights on your characters," said the doctor, quite brazenly.

"Ann—don't you call that disgraceful?"

"I certainly do, Ju," his wife agreed warmly. "But Jim has no sense of honor." Ann Arbuthnot, in the fifteen years of her married life, had never been able to keep a thrill of adoration out of her voice when she spoke, however jestingly, of her husband. It trembled there now.

"Well, what's wrong, Julie? Some old admirer turn up?" asked the doctor, sleepily content to follow any conversational lead, in the idle pleasantness of the hour.

"No—no!" she corrected him, "just some silly social complications ahead—which I hate!"

"Be rude," suggested the doctor, pleasantly.

"Now, you know, I'd love that!" said Mrs. Arbuthnot, youthfully. "I'd simply love to be followed and envied and adored!"

"No, you wouldn't, Ann!" Miss Ives assured her promptly. "You'd like it, as I did, for a little while. And then the utter USELESSNESS of it would strike you. Especially from such little complacent, fluffy whirlings as that Dancing Girl!"

"Yes, and that's the kind of a girl I like," persisted the other, smiling.

"That's the kind of a girl you WERE, Ann, I've no doubt," said the actress, vivaciously, "only sweeter. I know she wore white ruffles and a velvet band on her hair, didn't she, Jim? And roses in her belt?"

"She did," said the doctor, reminiscently. "I believe she flirted in her kindergarten days. She was always engaged to ride or dance or row on the river with the other men—and always splitting her dances, and forgetting her promises, and wearing the rings and pins of her adorers."

"And the fun was, Ju," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, girlishly, with bright color in her cheeks, "that when Jim came there to give two lectures, you know, all the older girls were crazy about him—and he was ten years older than I, you know, and I never DREAMED—"

"Oh, you go to, Ann! You never DREAMED!" said Miss Ives, lazily.

"Honestly, I didn't!" Mrs. Arbuthnot protested. "I remember my brother Billy saying, 'Babs, you don't think Dr. Arbuthnot is coming here to see ME, do you?' and then it all came over me! Why, I was only eighteen."

"And engaged to Billy's chum," said the doctor.

"Well," said the wife, naively, "he knew all along it wasn't serious."

"You must have been a rose," said Miss Ives, "and I would have hated you! Now, when I went to dances," she pursued half seriously, "I sat in one place and smiled fixedly, and watched the other girls dance. Or I talked with great animation to the chaperons. Ann, I've felt sometimes that I would gladly die, to have the boys crowd around me just once, and grab my card and scribble their names all over it. I didn't dress very well, or dance very well—and I never could talk to boys." She began to trace a little watercourse in the sand with an exquisite finger tip. "I was the most unhappy girl on earth, I think! I felt every birthday was a separate insult—twenty, and twenty-two, and twenty-four! We were poor, and life was—oh, not dramatic or big!—but just petty and sordid. I used to rage because the dining-room was the only place for the sewing-machine, and rage because my bedroom was really a back parlor. Well!—I joined a theatrical company—came away. And many a night, tired out and discouraged, I've cried myself to sleep because I'd never have any girlhood again!"

She stopped with a half-apologetic laugh. The doctor was watching her with absorbed, bright eyes. Mrs. Arbuthnot, unable to imagine youth without joy and beauty, protested:

"Julie—I don't believe you—you're exaggerating! Do you mean you didn't go on the stage until you were twenty-four!"

"I was twenty-six. I was leading lady my second season, and starred my third," said the actress, without enthusiasm. "I was starred in 'The Jack of Clubs.' It ran a season in New York and gave me my start. Lud, how tired we all got of it!"

"And then I hope you went back home, Ju, and were lionized," said the other woman, vigorously.

"Oh, not then! No, I'd been meaning to go—and meaning to go—all those three years. The little sisters used to write me—such forlorn little letters!—and mother, too—but I couldn't manage it. And then—the very night 'Jack' played the three hundredth time, as it happened—I had this long wire from Sally and Beth. Mother was very ill, wanted me—they'd meet a certain train, they were counting the hours—"

Miss Ives demolished her watercourse with a single sweep of her palm. There was a short silence.

"Well!" she said, breaking it. "Mother got well, as it happened, and I went home two months later. I had the guest room, I remember. Sally was everything to mother then, and I tried to feel glad. Beth was engaged. Every one was very flattering and very kind in the intervals left by engagements and weddings and new babies and family gatherings. Then I came back to 'Jack,' and we went on the road. And then I broke down and a strange doctor in a strange hospital put me together again," she went on with a flashing smile and a sudden change of tone, "and his wholly adorable wife sent me double white violets! And they—the Arbuthnots, not the violets—were the nicest thing that ever happened to me!"

"So that was the way of it?" said the doctor.

"That was the way of it."

"And as the Duchess would say, the moral of THAT is—?"

"The moral is for me. Or else it's for little dancing girls, I don't know which." Miss Ives wiped her eyes openly and, restoring her handkerchief to its place, announced that she perceived she had been talking too much.

Presently the Dancing Girl came down from the tennis-court, with her devoted new captive in tow. The captive, a fat, amiable-looking youth, was warm and wilted, but the girl was fresh and buoyant as ever. They heard her allude to the "second two-step" and something was said of the "supper dance," but her laughing voice stopped as she and her escort came nearer the actress, and she gave Julie her usual look of mute adoration. The boy, flushing youthfully, lifted his hat, and Julie bowed briefly.

They were lingering over their coffee two hours later, when the newly arrived young man made the expected move. He threaded the tables between his own and the doctor's carefully, the eager Dancing Girl in his wake.

"I don't know whether you remember me, Miss Ives—?" he began, when he could extend a hand.

Julie turned her splendid, unsmiling eyes toward him.

"Mr. Polk. How do you do? Yes, indeed, I remember you," she said, unenthusiastically. "How is Mr. Gilbert?"

"Uncle John? Oh, he's fine!" said young Polk, rapturously. "I wonder why he didn't tell me you were spending the summer here!"

"I don't tell any one," said Julie, simply. "My winters are so crowded that I try to get away from people in the summer."

"Oh!" said the boy, a little blankly. There was an instant's pause before he added rather uncomfortably:

"Miss Ives—Miss Carter has been so anxious to meet you—"

"How do you do, Miss Carter?" said Julie, promptly, politely. She gave her young adorer a ready hand. The usually poised Dancing Girl could not recall at the moment one of the things she had planned to say when this great moment came. But she thought of them all as she lay in bed that night, and the conviction that she had bungled the long-wished-for interview made her burn from her heels to the lobes of her ears. What HAD she said? Something about having longed for this opportunity, which the actress hadn't answered, and something about her desperate admiration for Miss Ives, at which Miss Ives had merely smiled. Other things were said, or half said—the girl reviewed them mercilessly in the dark—and then the interview had terminated, rather flatly. Marian Carter writhed at the recollection.

But the morning brought courage. She passed Julie, who was fresh from a plunge in the ocean, and briskly attacking a late breakfast, on her way from the dining-room.

"Good morning, Miss Ives! Isn't it a lovely morning?"

"Oh, good morning, Miss Carter. I beg pardon—?"

"I said, 'Isn't it a lovely morning?'"

"Oh—? Yes, quite delightful."

"Miss Ives—but I'm interrupting you?"

Julie gave her book a glance and raised her eyes expectantly to Miss Carter's face, but did not speak.

"Miss Ives," said Miss Carter, a little confusedly, "mamma was wondering if you've taken the trip to Fletcher's Forest? We've our motor-car here, you know, and they serve a very good lunch at the Inn."

"Oh, thank you, no!" said Julie, positively. "VERY good of you—but I'm with the Arbuthnots, you know. Thank you, no."

"I hoped you would," said Miss Carter, disappointed. "I know you use a motor in town," she answered daringly. "You see I know all about you!"

Miss Ives paid to this confession only the small tribute of raised eyebrows and an absent smile. She was quite at her ease, but in the little silence that followed Miss Carter had time to feel baffled—in the way. "Here is Mrs. Arbuthnot," she said in relief, as Ann came slowly in on the doctor's arm. Before they reached the table the girl had slipped away.

That afternoon she asked Miss Ives, pausing beside the basking group on the sands to do so, if she would have tea informally with mamma and a few friends. Oh—thank you, Miss Ives couldn't, to-day. Thank you. The next day Miss Carter wondered if Miss Ives would like to spin out to the Point to see the sunset? No, thank you so much. Miss Ives was just going in. Another day brought a request for Miss Ives's company at dinner, with just mamma and Mr. Polk and the Dancing Girl herself. Declined. A fourth day found Miss Carter, camera in hand, smilingly confronting the actress as she came out on the porch.

"Will you be very cross if I ask you to stand still just a moment, Miss Ives?" asked the Dancing Girl.

"Oh, I'm afraid I will," said Julie, annoyed. "I DON'T like to be photographed!" But she was rather disarmed at the speed with which Miss Carter shut up her little camera.

"I know I bother you," said the girl, with a wistful sincerity that was most becoming and with a heightened color, "but—but I just can't seem to help it!" She walked down the steps beside Julie, laughing almost with vexation at her own weakness. "I've always admired so—the people who DO things! I've always wanted to do something myself," said Miss Carter, awkwardly. "You don't know how unhappy it makes me. You don't know how I'd love to do something for you!"

"You can, you can let me off being photographed, like a sweet child!" said Julie, lightly. But twenty minutes later when, very trim and dainty in her blue bathing suit and scarlet cap, she came out of the bath-house to join Ann and the doctor on the beach, she reproached herself. She might have met the stammered little confidence with something warmer than a jesting word, she thought with a little shame.

"You're not going in again!" protested Ann. "Oh, CHIL-dren!"

"I am," said Miss Ives, buoyantly. "I don't know about Jim. At Jim's age every step counts, I suppose. These fashionable doctors habitually overeat and oversleep, I understand, and it makes them lazy."

"I AM going in, Ann," said the doctor, with dignity, rising from the sand and pointedly addressing his wife. A few moments later he and Julie joyously breasted the sleepy roll of the low breakers, and pushed their way steadily through the smoother water beyond.

"Oh, that was glorious, Jim!" gasped the actress, as they gained the raft that was always their goal and pulling herself up to sit siren-wise upon it. She was breathless, radiant, bubbling with the joy of sun and air and green water. She took off her cap and let the sunlight beat on her loosened braids.

"How you love the water, Julie!"

"Yes—best of all. I'm never so satisfied as when I'm in it!"

"You never look so happy as when you are," he said.

"Oh, these are happy days!" said Julie. "I wish they could last forever. Just resting and playing—wouldn't you like a year of it, Jim?"

The doctor eyed her quietly.

"I don't know that I would," he said seriously, impersonally.

There was a little silence. Then the girl began to pin up her braids with fingers that trembled a little.

"Ann's waving!" she said presently, and the doctor caught up her scarlet cap to signal back to the far blur on the beach that was Ann. He watched the tiny distant groups a moment.

"Here comes your admirer!" said he.

"Where?" Julie was ready at once to slip into the water.

"Oh—finish your hair—take your time! She's just in the breakers. We'll be off long before she gets here."

"That reminds me, Jim," Miss Ives was quite herself again, "that when I was in the bath-house a few moments ago your Dancing Girl and that pretty little girl who is visiting her came into the next room. You know how flimsy the walls are? I could hear every word they said."

"If you'd been a character in a story, Ju, you'd have felt it your duty to cough!"

"Well, I didn't," grinned Miss Ives; "not that I wanted to hear what they were saying. I didn't even know who they were until I heard little Miss Carter say solemnly, 'Ethel, I used to want mamma to get that Forty-eighth Street house, and I used to want to do Europe, but I think if I had ONE wish now, it would be to do something that would MAKE everybody know me—and everybody talk about me. I'd LOVE to be pointed out wherever I went. I'd love to have people stare at me. I'd like to be just as popular and just as famous as Julia Ives!'"

"She HAS got it badly, Ju!" the doctor observed.

"She has. And it will be fuel on the flames to have me start to swim back to shore while she is swimming as hard as she can to the raft!" said the lady, tucking the last escaping lock under her cap and springing up for the plunge that started the home trip.

It was only a little after midnight that night when Julie, lying wakeful in the sultry summer darkness, was startled by a person in her room.

"It's Emma, Miss Ives," said Mrs. Arbuthnot's maid, stumbling about, "Mrs. Arbuthnot wants you."

"She's ill!" Julie felt rather than said the words, instantly alert and alarmed, and reaching for her wrapper and slippers.

"No, ma'am. But the doctor feels like he ought to go down to the fire, and she's nervous—"

"The fire?"

"Yes'm," said Emma, simply, "the windmill is afire!"

"And I sleeping through it all!" Miss Ives was still bewildered, fastening the sash of her cobwebby black Mandarin robe as she followed Emma through the passage that joined her suite to the Arbuthnots'.

"Ann, dear—Emma tells me the laundry's on fire?" said she, entering the big room. "I had no idea of it!"

"Nor had we," the doctor's wife rejoined eagerly. "The first we knew was from Emma. Jim says there's no danger. Do you think there is?"

"Certainly not, Ann!" Julie laughed. "I'll tell you what we can do," she added briskly. "We'll wheel you down the hall here to the window; you can get a splendid view of the whole thing."

The doctor approving, the ladies took up their station at a wide hall window that commanded the whole scene.

Outside the velvet blackness and silence of the night were shattered. The great mill, ugly tongues of flame bursting from the door and windows at its base, was the centre of a talking, shouting, shrill-voiced crowd that was momentarily, in the mysterious fashion of crowds, gathering size.

"Wonderful sight, isn't it, Ann?"

"Wonderful. Does this cut off our water supply, Emma?"

"No, Mrs. Arbuthnot. They're using the little mill for the engines now."

"What did they use the big mill for, Emma?"

"The laundry, Miss Ives. And there's a sort of flat on the second floor where the laundry woman and her husband—he's the man that drives the 'bus—live."

"Good heavens!" said Ann. "I hope they got out!"

"Oh, sure," said the maid, comfortably. "It was all of an hour ago the fire started. They had lots of time."

The three watched for a while in silence. Ann's eyes began to droop from the bright monotony of the flames.

"I believe I'll wait until the tank falls, Ju? and then go back to my comfortable bed—Julie, what is it—!"

Her voice rose, keen with terror. The actress, her hand on her heart, shook her head without turning her eyes from the mill.

For suddenly above the other clamor there had risen one horrible scream, and now, following it, there was almost a silence.

"Why—what on earth—" panted Miss Ives, looking to Mrs. Arbuthnot for explanation after an endless interval in which neither stirred. But again they were interrupted, this time by such an outbreak of shouting and cries from the watching crowd about the mill as made the night fairly ring.

A moment later the entire top of the mill collapsed, sending a gush of sparks far up into the night. Then at last the faithfully played hoses began to gain control.

"Do run down and find out what the shouting was, Emma," said Julie. Emma gladly obeyed.

"She'd come back, if anything had happened," said Julie, some ten minutes later.

"Who—Emma?" Mrs. Arbuthnot was not alarmed. "Oh, surely!" she yawned, and drew her wraps about her.

"It's all over now. But I suppose it will burn for hours. I think I'll turn in again," she said.

"I've had enough, too!" Julie said, not quite easy herself, but glad to find the other so. "Let's decamp."

She wheeled the invalid carefully back to her room, where both women were still talking when a bell-boy knocked, bringing a message from the doctor. A woman had been hurt; he would be busy with her for an hour.

"Who was it?" Julie asked him, but the boy, obviously frantic to return to the fascinations of the fire, didn't know.

It was more than an hour later that the doctor came in. Julie had been reading to Ann. She shut the book.

"Jim! What on earth has kept you so long?"

"Frighten you, dear?" The doctor was very pale; he looked, between the dirt and disorder of his clothes, and the anxiety of his face, like an old man.

"Some one was hurt?" flashed Julie, solicitous at once.

"Has no one told you about it?" he wondered. "Lord! I should think it would be all over the place by this time!"

He dropped into an easy chair, and sank his head wearily into his hands.

"Lord—Lord—Lord!" he muttered. Then he looked up at his wife with the smile that never failed her.

"Jim—no one was killed?"

"Oh, no, dear! No, I'll tell you." He came over and sat beside her on the bed, patting her hand. The two women watched him with tense, absorbed faces.

"When I got there," said the doctor, slowly, "there was quite a crowd—the lower story of the mill was all aflame—and the firemen were keeping the people back. They'd a ladder up at the second story and firemen were pitching things out of the windows as fast as they could—chairs, rugs, pillows, and so on. Finally the last man came out, smoke coming after him—it was quick work! Now, remember, dear, no one was killed—" he stopped to pat his wife's hand reassuringly. "Well, just then, at the third-story windows—it seems the laundress has children—"

"Children!" gasped Miss Ives. "Oh, NO!"

"Yes, four of 'em—the oldest a little fellow of ten, had the baby in his arms—." The doctor stopped.

"Go ON, Jim!"

"Well, they put the ladder back again, but the sill was aflame then. No use! Just then the mother and father—poor souls—arrived. They'd been at a dance in the village. The woman screamed—"

"We heard."

"Ah? The man had to be held, poor fellow! It was—it was—" Again the doctor stopped, unable to go on. But after a few seconds he began more briskly: "Well! The mill was connected with this house, you know, by a little bridge, from the tank floor of the mill to the roof. No one had thought of it, because every one supposed that there was no one in the mill. Before the crowd had fairly seen that there WERE children caged up there, they left the window, and not a minute later we saw them come up the trap-door by the tank. Lord, how every one yelled."

"They'd thought of it, the darlings!" half sobbed Mrs. Arbuthnot.

"No, they'd never have thought of it—too terrified, poor little things. No. We all saw that there was some one—a woman—with them hurrying them along. I was helping hold the mother or I might have thought it was the mother. They scampered across that bridge like little squirrels, the woman with the baby last. By that time the mill was roaring like a furnace behind them, and the bridge itself burst into flames at the mill end. She—the woman—must have felt it tottering, for she flung herself the last few feet—but she couldn't make it. She threw the baby, by some lucky accident, for she couldn't have known what she was doing, safe to the others, and caught at the rail, but the whole thing gave way and came down.... I got there about the first—she'd only fallen some dozen feet, you know, on the flat roof of the kitchen, but she was all smashed up, poor little girl. We carried her into the housekeeper's room—and then I saw that it was little Miss Carter—your Dancing Girl, Ju!"

"Jim! Dead?"

"Oh, no! I don't think she'll die. She's badly burned, of course—face and hands especially—but it's the spine I'm afraid for. We can tell better to-morrow. We made her as comfortable as we could. I gave her something that'll make her sleep. Her mother's with her. But I'm afraid her dancing days are over."

"Think of it—little Miss Carter!" Julie's voice sounded dazed.

"But, Jim," Ann said, "what was she doing in the mill?"

"Why, that's the point," he said. "She wasn't there when the fire started. She was simply one of the crowd. But when she heard that the children were there, she ran to the back of the mill, where there was a straight up-and-down ladder built against the wall outside, so that the tank could be reached that way. She went up it like a flash—says she never thought of asking any one else to go. She broke a window and climbed in—she says the floor was hot to her feet then—and she and the kids ran up the inside flight to the trap-door. They obeyed her like little soldiers! But the bridge side of the mill was the side the fire was on, and the wood was rotten, you know—almost explosive. Half a minute later and they couldn't have made it at all."

"How do you ACCOUNT for such courage in a girl like that?" marvelled Julie.

"I don't know," he said. "Take it all in all, it was the most extraordinary thing I ever saw. Apparently she never for one second thought of herself. She simply ran straight into that hideous danger—while the rest of us could do nothing but put our hands over our eyes and pray."

"But she'll live, Jim?" the actress asked, and as he nodded a thoughtful affirmative, she added: "That's something to be thankful for, at least!"

"Don't be too sure it is," said Ann.

Ten days later Miss Ives came cheerfully into the sunny, big room where Marian Carter lay. Bandaged, and strapped, and bound, it was a sorry little Dancing Girl who turned her serious eyes to the actress's face. But Julie could be irresistible when she chose, and she chose to be her most fascinating self to-day. Almost reluctantly at first, later with something of her old gayety, the Dancing Girl's laugh rang out. It stirred Julie's heart curiously to hear it, and made the little patient's mother, listening in the next room, break silently into tears.

"But this is what I really came to bring you," said the actress, presently, laying a score or more of newspaper clippings on the bed. "You see you are famous! I had my press-agent watch for these, and they're coming in at a great rate every mail. You see, here's a nattering likeness of you in a New York daily, and here you are again, in a Chicago paper!"