Having relieved her mind somewhat, she was able to attend to the business of the letter with less inward discomfort. The letter was written to George Travis, already known as the manager of Miss St. Regis. He was the head of a well-known theatrical managerial firm in New York, and an old friend and well-wisher of Patsy's. In it she explained, partly, her continued sojourn in America, and frankly confessed to her financial needs. If he had anything anywhere that she could do until the fall bookings with her own company, she would be most humbly grateful. He might address her at Arden; she had great hopes of reaching there—some day. There was a postscript added in good, pure Donegal:

And don't ye be afeared of hurting my pride by offering anything too small. Just at present I'm like old Granny Donoghue's lean pig—hungry for scrapings.

As she sealed the envelope a shadow fell athwart the counter. Patsy looked up to find the tinker peering at her sharply.

"You look clean tuckered out," he announced, baldly; then he laid a coaxing hand on her arm. "I want you to come along with me. Will you, lass? I've found a place for you—a nice place. I've been talkin' to Joseph's mother, an' she's goin' to look after you for the night."

Patsy's face crinkled up all over; the tinker could not have told—even if he had been in possession of all his senses—whether she was going to laugh or cry. As it turned out, she did neither; she just sighed, a tired, contented little sigh, slipping off the stool and dropping the letter into the post-box.

When she faced the tinker again her eyes were misty, and for all her courage she could not keep the quivering from her lips. She reached up impulsive, trusting hands to his shoulders: "Lad—lad—how were ye ever guessing that I'd reached the end o' my wits and was needing some one to think for me? Holy Saint Michael! but won't I be mortial glad to be feeling a respectable, Lebanon feather-bed under me!"

* * * * *

As the tinker led her out of the store the quorum eyed her silently for a moment. For a brief space there was a scraping of chairs and clearing of throats, indicative of some important comment.

"What sort of a lookin' gal did that Green County sheriff say he was after?" inquired the storekeeper at last.

"Small, warn't it?" suggested one of the quorum.

"Yep, guess it was. And what sort o' clothes did he say she wore?"

"Brown!" chorused the quorum.

"Wall, boys"—the storekeeper wagged an accusing thumb in the direction of the recently vacated stool—"she was small, warn't she? An' she's got brown clothes, hain't she? An' she acts queer, doan't she?"

The quorum nodded in solemn agreement.

"But she doan't look like no thief," interceded the youngest of the "boys." He couldn't have been a day over seventy, and it was more than likely that he was still susceptible to youth and beauty!

The rest glowered at him with plain disapproval, while the storekeeper shifted the course of his thumb and wagged it at him instead. "Si Perkins, that's not for you to say—nor me, neither. That's up to Green County; an' I cal'ate I'll 'phone over to the sheriff, come mornin', an' tell him our suspicions. By Jack-a-diamonds! I've got to square my conscience."

The quorum invested their thumbs again and cleared their throats.



VII

THE TINKER PLAYS A PART

There is little of the day's happenings that escapes the ears of a country boy. Every small item of local interest is so much grist for his mill; and there is no more reliable method for a stranger to collect news than a sociable game of "peg" interspersed with a few casual but diplomatic questions. The tinker played "peg" the night after he and Patsy reached Lebanon—on the barn floor by the light of a bleary-eyed lantern with Joseph and his brethren, and thereby learned of the visit of the sheriff.

Afterward he sawed and split the apportioned wood which was to pay for Patsy's lodging, and went to sleep on the hay in a state of complete exhaustion. But, for all that, Patsy was wakened an hour before sun-up by a shower of pebbles on the tin roof of the porch, just under her window. Looking out, she spied him below, a silencing finger against his lips, while he waved a beckoning arm toward the road. Patsy dressed and slipped out without a sound.

"What has happened ye?" she whispered, anxiously, looking him well over for some symptoms of sickness or trouble.

His only reply was a mysterious shake of the head as he led the way down the village street, his rags flapping grotesquely in the dawn wind.

There was nothing for Patsy to do except to follow as fast as she could after his long, swinging strides. Lebanon still slept, close-wrapped in its peaceful respectability; even the dogs failed to give them a speeding bark. They stole away as silently as shadows, and as shadows went forth upon the open road to meet the coming day.

A mile beyond the township stone the tinker stopped to let Patsy catch up with him; it was a very breathless, disgruntled Patsy.

"Now, by Saint Brendan, what ails ye, lad, to be waking a body up at this time of day? Do ye think it's good morals or good manners to be trailing us off on a bare stomach like this—as if a county full of constables was at our heels? What's the meaning of it? And what will the good folk who cared for us the night think to find us gone with never a word of thanks or explanation?"

The tinker scratched his chin meditatively; it was marked by a day's more growth than on the previous morning, which did not enhance his comeliness or lessen his state of vagabondage. There was something about his appearance that made him out less a fool and more an uncouth rascal; one might easily have trusted him as well as pitied him yesterday—but to-day—Patsy's gaze was critical and not over-flattering.

He saw her look and met it, eye for eye, only he still fumbled his chin ineffectually. "Have you forgot?" he asked, a bit sheepishly. "There were the lady's-slippers; you said as how you cared about findin' 'em; and they're not near so pretty an' bright if they're left standin' too long after the dew dries."

Patsy pulled a wry little smile. "Is that so? And ye've been after making me trade a feather-bed and a good breakfast for—for the best color of lady's-slippers. Well, if I was Dan instead of myself, standing here, I'd be likely to tell ye to go to the devil—aye, an' help ye there with my two fists." Her cheeks were flushed and all the comradeship faded quickly from her eyes.

The tinker said never a word, only his lips parted in a coaxing smile which seemed to say, "Please go on believing in me," and his eyes still held hers unwaveringly.

And the tinker's smile won. Bit by bit Patsy's rigid attitude of condemnation relaxed; the comradeship crept back in her eyes, the smile to her lips. "Heigho! 'Tis a bad bargain ye can't make the best of. But mind one thing, Master Touchstone! Ye'll find the right road to Arden this time or ye and the duke's daughter will part company—for all Willie Shakespeare wrote it otherwise."

He nodded. "We can ask the way 's we go. But first we'll be gettin' the lady's-slippers and some breakfast. You'll see—I'll find them both for you, lass"; and he set off with his swinging stride straight across country, wagging his head wisely. Patsy fell in behind him, and the road was soon out of sight and earshot.

* * * * *

It was just about this time that the storekeeper at Lebanon got the Green County sheriff on the 'phone, and squared his conscience. "I cal'ate she's the guilty party," were his closing remarks. "She'd never ha' lighted out o' this 'ere town afore Christian folks were out o' bed ef she hadn't had somethin' takin' her. And what's more, she's keepin' bad company."

And so it came about that all the time the sorrel mare was being harnessed into the runabout the tinker was leading Patsy farther afield. And so it came to pass that when the mare's heels were raising the dust on the road between Lebanon and Arden, they were following a forest brook, deeper and deeper, into the woods.

They found it the most cheery, neighborly, and comfortable kind of a brook, the quiet and well-contained sort that one could step at will from bank to bank, and see with half an eye what a prime favorite it was among its neighbors. Patsy and the tinker marked how close things huddled to it, even creeping on to cover stones and gravel stretches; there were moss and ferns and little, clinging things, like baby's-breath and linnea. The major part of the bird population was bathing in the sunnier pools, soberly or with wild hilarity, according to disposition.

The tinker knew them all, calling to them in friendly fashion, at which they always answered back. Patsy listened silently, wrapped in the delight and beauty of it. On went the brook—dancing here in a broken patch of sunshine—quieting there between the banks of rock-fern and columbine, to better paint their prettiness; and all the while singing one farther and farther into the woods. She was just wondering if there could be anything lovelier than this when the tinker stopped, still and tense as a pointer. She craned her head and looked beyond him—looked to where the woods broke, leaving for a few feet a thinly shaded growth of beech and maple. The sunlight sifted through in great, unbroken patches of gold, falling on the beds of fern and moss and—yes, there they were, the promised lady's-slippers.

A little, indrawn sigh of ecstasy from Patsy caused the tinker to turn about. "Then you're not hatin' gold when you find it growin' green that-a-way?" he chuckled.

Patsy shook her head with vehemence. "Never! And wouldn't it be grand if nature could be gathering it all up from everywhere and spinning it over again into the likes of those! In the name o' Saint Francis, do ye suppose if the English poets had laid their two eyes to anything so beautiful as what's yonder they'd ever have gone so daffy over daffodils?"

"They never would," agreed the tinker.

Patsy studied him with a sharp little look. "And what do ye know about English poets, pray?"

His lower jaw dropped in a dull, foolish fashion. "Nothin'; but I know daff'dils," he explained at last.

And at that moment the call of a thrush came to them from just across the glade. Patsy listened spellbound while he sang his bubbling song of gladness through half a score of times.

"Is it the flowers singing?" she asked at last, her eyes dancing mischievously.

"It might be the souls o' the dead ones." The tinker considered thoughtfully a moment. "Maybe the souls o' flowers become birds, same as ours becomes angels—wouldn't be such a deal o' difference—both takin' to wings and singin'." He chuckled again. "Anyhow, that's the bellbird; and I sent him word yesterday by one o' them tattlin' finches to be on hand just about this time."

"Ye didn't order a breakfast the same way, did ye?"

The tinker threw back his head and laughed. "I did, then," and, before Patsy could strip her tongue of its next teasing remark, he had vanished as quickly and completely as if magic had had a hand in it.

A crescendo of snapping twigs and rustling leaves marked his going, however; and Patsy leaped the brook and settled herself, tailor fashion, in the midst of the sunshine and the lady's-slippers. She unpinned the rakish beaver and tossed it from her; off came the Norfolk jacket, and followed the beaver. She eyed the rest of her costume askance; she would have sorely liked to part with that, too, had she but the Lord's assurance that He would do as well by her as he had by the lilies of the field or the lady's-slippers.

"'Tis surprising how wearisome the same clothes can grow when on the back of a human being—yet a flower can wear them for a thousand years or more and ye never go tired of them. I'm not knowing why, but—somehow—I'd like to be looking gladsome—to-day."

She stretched her arms wide for a minute, in a gesture of intense longing; then the glory of the woods claimed her again and she gave herself over completely to the wonder and enjoyment of them. Her eyes roamed about her unceasingly for every bit of prettiness, her ears caught the symphony of bird and brook and soughing wind. So still did she sit that the tinker, returning, thought for a moment that she had gone, and stood, knee-deep in the brakes, laden to the chin and covered with the misery of poignant disappointment. For him all the music of the place had turned to laughing discord—until he spied her.

"I thought"—his tongue stumbled—"I was thinkin' you had gone—sudden-like—same as you came—down the road yesterday." He paused a moment. "You wouldn't go off by yourself and leave a lad without you said somethin' about it first, would you?"

"I'll not leave ye till we get to Arden."

"An'—an' what then?"

"The road must end for me there, lad. What I came to do will be done, and there'll be no excuse for lingering. But I'll not forget to wish ye 'God-speed' along your way before I go."

A sly look came into the tinker's eyes. Patsy never saw it, for he was bending close over the huge basket he had brought; she only caught a tinge of exultation in his voice as he said, "Then that's a'right, if you'll promise your comp'ny till we fetch up in Arden."

With that he went busily about preparations for breakfast, Patsy watching him, plainly astonished. He gathered bark and brush and kindled a fire on a large flat rock which he had moved against a near-by boulder. About it he fastened a tripod of green saplings, from which he hung a coffee-pot, filled from the brook.

"I'm praying there's more nor water in it," murmured Patsy. And a moment later, as the tinker shook out a small white table-cloth from the basket and spread it at her feet, she clasped her hands and repeated with perfect faith, "'Little goat bleat, table get set'; I smell the coffee."

Out of the basket came little green dishes, a pat of butter, a jug of cream, a bowl of berries, a plate of biscuits. "Riz," was the tinker's comment as he put down the last named; and then followed what appeared to Patsy to be round, brown, sugared buns with holes in them. These he passed twice under her nose with a triumphant flourish.

"And what might they be?" Her curiosity was reaching the breaking-point. "If ye bring out another thing from that basket I'll believe ye're in league with Bodh Dearg himself, or ye've stolen the faeries' trencher of plenty."

For reply the tinker dived once more beneath the cover and brought out a frying-pan full of bacon, and four white eggs. "Think whatever you're mind to, I'm going to fry these." But after he had raked over the embers to his complete satisfaction and placed the pan on them, he came back and, picking up one of the "brown buns," slipped it over Patsy's forefinger. "This is a wishin'-ring," he announced, soberly, "though most folks calls 'em somethin' different. Now if you wish a wish—and eat it—all but the hole, you'll have what you've been wishin' for all your life."

"How soon will ye be having it?"

"In as many days as there are bites."

So Patsy bit while the tinker checked them off on his fingers. "One, two, three, four, five, six. You'll get your wish by the seventh day, sure, or I'm no tinker."



"But are ye?" Patsy shook the de-ringed finger at him accusingly. "I'm beginning to have my doubts as to whether ye're a tinker at all. Ye are foolish one minute, and ye've more wits than I have the next; I've caught ye looking too lonesome and helpless to be allowed beyond reach of our mother's kerchief-end, and yet last night and the day ye've taken care of me as if ye'd been hired out to tend babies since ye were one yourself. As for your language, ye never speak twice the same."

The tinker grinned. "That bacon's burnin'; I—cal'ate I'd better turn it, hadn't I?"

"I—cal'ate you had," and Patsy grinned back at him derisively.

The tinker was master of ceremonies, and he served her as any courtier might have served his liege lady. He shook out the diminutive serviette he had brought for her and spread it across her lap; he poured her coffee and sweetened it according to direction; he even buttered her "riz" biscuits and poured the cream on her berries.

"Are ye laboring under the delusion that the duke's daughter was helpless, entirely?" she asked, at length.

The tinker shook an emphatic negative. "I was just thinkin' she might like things a mite decent—onct in a while."

"Lad—lad—who in the wide world are ye!" Patsy checked her outburst with a warning hand: "No—don't ye be telling me. Ye couldn't turn out anything better nor a tinker—and I'd rather keep ye as I found ye. So if ye have a secret—mind it well; and don't ye be letting it loose to scare the two of us into over-wise, conventional folk. We'll play Willie Shakespeare comedy to the end of the road—please God!"

"Amen!" agreed the tinker, devoutly, as he threw her portion of fried eggs neatly out of the pan into her plate.

It was not until she was served that he looked after his own wants; then they ate in silence, both too hungry and too full of their own thoughts to loosen their tongues.

Once the tinker broke the silence. "Your wish—what was it?" he asked.

"That's telling," said Patsy. "But if ye'll confess to where ye came by this heavenly meal, I might confess to the wish."

He rubbed his chin solemnly for an instant; then he beamed. "I'll tell ye. I picked it off o' the fern-tops and brambles as I came along."

"Of course ye did," agreed Patsy, with fine sarcasm, "and for my wish—I was after thinking I'd marry the king's son."

They looked at each other with the teasing, saucy stare of two children; then they laughed as care-free and as merrily.

"Maybe you'll get your wish," he suggested, soberly.

"Maybe I will," agreed Patsy, with mock solemnity.

A look of shrewdness sprang into the tinker's face. "But you said you hated gold. You couldn't marry a king's son 'thout havin' gold—lots of it."

"Aye—but I could! Couldn't I be making him throw it away before ever I'd marry him?" And Patsy clapped her hands triumphantly.

"An' you'd marry him—poor?" The tinker's eyes kindled suddenly, as he asked it—for all the world as if her answer might have a meaning for him.

Patsy never noticed. She was looking past him—into the indistinguishable wood-tangle beyond. "Sure, we wouldn't be poor. We'd be blessed with nothing—that's all!"

For those golden moments of romancing Patsy's quest was forgotten; they might have reached Arden and despatched her errand, for all the worriment their loitering caused her. As for the tinker, if he had either a mission or a destination he gave no sign for her to reckon by.

They dallied over the breakfast; they dallied over the aftermath of picking up and putting away and stamping out the charred twigs and embers; and then they dallied over the memory of it all. Patsy spun a hundred threads of fancy into tales about the forest, while the tinker called the thickets about them full of birds, and whistled their songs antiphonally with them.

"Do ye know," said Patsy, with a deep sigh, "I'm happier than ye can tell me, and twice as happy as I can tell ye."

"An' this, hereabouts, wouldn't make a bad castle," suggested the tinker, irrelevantly.

What Patsy might have answered is not recorded, for they both happened to look up for the first time in a long space and saw that the sky above their heads had grown a dull, leaden color. They were no longer sitting in the midst of sunlight; the lady's-slippers had lost their golden radiance; the brook sounded plaintive and melancholy, and from the woods fringing the open came the call of the bob-white.

"He's singin' for rain. Won't hurt a mite if we make toward some shelter." The tinker pulled Patsy to her feet and gathered up the basket and left-overs.

"Hurry," said Patsy, with a strange, little, twisted smile on her lips. "Of course I was knowing, like all faery tales, it had to have an ending; but I want to remember it, just as we found it first—sprinkled with sunshine and not turning dull and gray like this."

She started plunging through the woods, and the tinker was obliged to turn her about and set her going right, with the final instruction to follow her nose and he would catch up with her before she had caught up with it. She had reached the road, however, and thunder was grumbling uncomfortably near when the tinker joined her.

"It's goin' to be a soaker," he announced, cheerfully.

"Then we'd better tramp fast as we can and ask the first person we pass, are we on the right road to Arden."

They tramped, but they passed no one. The road was surprisingly barren of shelters, and, strangely enough, of the two houses they saw one was temporarily deserted and the other unoccupied. The wind came with the breaking of the storm—that cold, piercing wind that often comes in June as a reminder that winter has not passed by so very long before. It whipped the rain across their faces and cut down their headway until it seemed to Patsy as if they barely crawled. They came to a tumble-down barn, but she was too cold and wet to stop where there was no fire.

"Any place that's warm," she shouted across to the tinker; and he shouted back, as they rounded the bend of the road.

"See, there it is at last!"

The sight of a house ahead, whose active chimney gave good evidence of a fire within, spurred Patsy's lagging steps. But in response to their knocking, the door was opened just wide enough to frame the narrow face of a timid-eyed, nervous woman who bade them be gone even before they had gathered breath enough to ask for shelter.

"Faith, 'tis a reminder that we are no longer living three hundred years ago," Patsy murmured between tightening lips. "How long in, do ye think, the fashion has been—to shut doors on poor wanderers?"

At the next house, a half-mile beyond, they fared no better. The woman's voice was curter, and the uninviting muzzle of a bull-terrier was thrust out between the door and the woman's skirts. As they turned away Patsy's teeth were chattering; the chill and wet had crept into her bones and blood, turning her lips blue and her cheeks ashen; even the cutting wind failed to color them.

"Curse them!" muttered the tinker, fiercely. "If I only had a coat to put around you—anything to break the wind. Curse them warm and dry inside there!" and he shook his fist at the forbidden door.

Patsy tried to smile, but failed. "Faith! I haven't the breath to curse them; but God pity them, that's all."

Before she had finished the tinker had a firm grip of her arm. "Hang it! If no one will take us in, we'll break in. Cheer up, lass; I'll have you by a crackling good fire if I have to steal the wood."

He hurried her along—somewhere. Weariness and bodily depression closed her eyes; and she let him lead her—whither she neither wondered nor cared. Time and distance ceased to exist for her; she stumbled along, conscious of but two things—a fear that she would be ill again with no one to tend her, and a gigantic craving for heat—heat!

When she opened her eyes again they had stopped and were standing under a shuttered window at what appeared to be the back of a summer cottage; the tinker was prying a rock out of the mud at their feet. In a most business-like manner he used it to smash the fastening of the shutters, and, when these were removed, to break the small, leaded pane of glass nearest the window-fastening. It was only a matter of seconds then before the window was opened and Patsy boosted over the sill into the kitchen beyond.

"Ye'd best stand me in the sink and wring me out, or I'll flood the house," Patsy managed to gasp. "I'd do it myself, but I know, if I once let go of my hands, I'll shake to death."

The tinker followed her advice, working the water out of her dripping garments in much the same fashion that he would have employed had she been a half-drowned cat. In spite of her numbness Patsy saw the grim humor of it all and came perilously near to a hysterical laugh. The tinker unconsciously forestalled it by shouldering her, as if she had been a whole bag of water-soaked cats, and carrying her up the stairs. After looking into three rooms he deposited her on the threshold of a fourth.

"It has the look of women folks; you're sure to find some left-behind clothes o' theirs hanging up somewhere. Come down when you're dry an' I'll have that fire waiting for you."

What followed was all a dream to Patsy's benumbed senses: the search in drawers and closets for things to put on, and the finding of them; the insistent aching of fingers and arms in trying to adjust them, and the persistent refusal of brain to direct them with any degree of intelligence. She came down the stairs a few minutes later, dragging a bundle of wet clothes after her, and found the tinker kneeling by the hearth, still in his dripping rags, and heaping more logs on the already blazing fire.

He rose as she came toward him, took the clothes from her and dropped them on the hearth. He seemed decidedly hazy and remote as he brought a steamer rug from somewhere and wrapped it about her; his voice, as he coaxed her over to the couch, apparently came from miles away. As Patsy sank down, too weary to speak, the figure above her took upon itself once more that suggestion of unearthliness that it had worn when she had discovered it at dawn—hanging to the stump fencing. For an instant the glow of the fire threw the profile into the same shadowy outlines that the rising sun had first marked for her; and the image lingered even after her eyes had closed.

"Sure, he's fading away like Oisiu, Gearoidh Iarla, and all of them in the old tales," she thought, drowsily. "Like as not, when I open my eyes again he'll be clear gone." This was where the dream ended and complete oblivion began.

* * * * *

How long it lasted she could not have told; she only knew she was awake at last and acutely conscious of everything about her; and that she was warm—warm—warm! The room was dark except for the firelight; but whether it was evening or night or midnight, she could not have guessed. She found herself speculating in a hazy fashion where she was, whose house they had broken into, and what the tinker had done with himself. She had a vague, far-away feeling that she ought to be disturbed over something—her complete isolation with a strange companion on a night like this; but the physical contentment, the reaction from bodily torture, drugged her sensibilities. She closed her eyes lazily again and listened to the wind howling outside with the never-ceasing accompaniment of beating rain. She was content to revel in that feeling of luxury that only the snugly housed can know.

A sound in the room roused her. She opened her eyes as lazily as she had closed them, expecting to find the tinker there replenishing the fire; instead—She sat up with a jerk, speechless, rubbing her eyes with two excited fists, intent on proving the unreality of what she had seen; but when she looked again there it was—the clean-cut figure of a man immaculate in white summer flannels.

The blood rushed to Patsy's face; mortification, dread, sank into her very soul; the drug of physical contentment had lost its power. For the first time in her life she was dominated by the dictates of convention. She cursed her irresponsible love of vagabondage along with her freedom of speech and manner and her lack of conservative judgment. These had played her false and shamed her womanhood.

The Patsys of this world are not given to trading on their charm or powers of attraction to win men to them—it is against their creed of true womanhood. Moreover, a man counts no more than a woman in their sum total of daily pleasure, and when they choose a comrade it is for human qualities, not sexualities. And because of this, this particular Patsy felt the more intensely the humiliation and challenge of the moment. She hated herself; she hated the man, whoever he might be; she hated the tinker for his share in it all.

Anger loosened her tongue at last. "Who, in the name of Saint Bridget, are ye?" she demanded.

And the man in white flannels threw back his head and laughed.



VIII

WHEN TWO WERE NOT COMPANY

The laughter would have proved contagious to any except one in Patsy's humor; and, as laughing alone is sorry business, the man soon sobered and looked over at Patsy with the merriment lingering only in his eyes.

"By Willie Shakespeare, it's the duke's daughter in truth!"

The words made little impression on her; it was the laugh and voice that puzzled her; they were unmistakably the tinker's. But there was nothing familiar about face, figure, or expression, although Patsy studied them hard to find some trace of the man she had been journeying with.

With a final bewildered shake of the head her eyes met his coldly, mockingly. "My name is Patricia O'Connell"—her voice was crisp and tart; "it's the Irish for a short temper and a hot one. Now maybe you will have the grace to favor me with yours."

"Just the tinker," he complied, amiably, "and very much at your service." This was accompanied by a sweeping bow.

Patsy had marked that bow on two previous occasions, and it testified undeniably to the man's identity. Yet Patsy's mind balked at accepting it; it was too galling to her pride, too slanderous of her past judgment and perceptibilities. A sudden rush of anger brought her to her feet, and, coming over to the opposite side of the hearth, she faced him, flushed, determined, and very dignified. It is to be doubted if Patsy could have sustained the latter with any degree of conviction if she could have seen herself. Straying strands of still damp hair curled bewitchingly about her face, bringing out the roundness of cheek and chin and the curious, guileless expression of her eyes. Moreover, the coquettish gown she wore was entrancing; it was a light blue, tunic affair with wide baby collar and cuffs, and a Roman girdle; and she had found stockings to match, with white buckskin pumps. It had been blind chance on her part—this making of a toilet, but the effect was none the less adorable—and condemning to dignity.

This was evidently appreciated by the tinker, for his face was an odd mixture of grotesque solemnity and keen enjoyment. Patsy was altogether too flustered to diagnose his expression, but it added considerably to the temperature of the O'Connell temper. In view of the civilized surroundings and her state of dignity Patsy had taken to King's English with barely a hint of her native brogue.

"If you are the tinker—and I presume you are—I should very much appreciate an explanation. Would you mind telling me how you happened to be hanging onto that stump, in rags, and looking half-witted when I—when I came by?"

"Why—just because I was a tinker," he laughed.

"Then what are you now?"

"Once a tinker, always a tinker. I'm just a good-for-nothing; good to mend other people's broken pots, and little else; knowing more about birds than human beings, and poor company for any one saving the very generous-hearted."

Patsy stamped her foot. "Why can't you play fair? Isn't it only decent to tell who you are and what you were doing on the road when I found you?"

"You know as well as I what I was doing—hanging onto the stump and trying to gather my wits. And don't you think it would be nicer if you talked Irish? It doesn't make a lad feel half as comfortable or as much at home when he is addressed in such perfect English."

Patsy snorted. "In a minute I'll not be addressing you at all. Do you think, if I had known you were what you are, I would ever have been so—so brazen as to ask for your company and tramp along with you for—two days—or be here, now? Oh!" she finished, with a groan and a fierce clenching of her fists.

"No, I don't think so. That's why I didn't hurry about gathering up the wits; it seemed more sociable without them. I wouldn't have bothered with them now, only I couldn't stay in those rags any longer; it wouldn't have been kind to the furniture or the people who own it. These togs were the only things that came anywhere near to fitting me; and, somehow, a three-days' beard didn't match them. Lucky for me, Heaven blessed the house with a good razor, and, presto! when the beard and the rags were gone the wits came back. I'm awfully sorry if you don't like them—the wits, I mean."

"Sure, ye must be!" Unconsciously Patsy had stepped back onto her native sod and her tongue fairly dripped with irony. "So ye thought ye'd have a morsel o' fun at the expense of a strange lass, while ye laughed up your sleeve at how clever ye were."

"See here! don't be too hard, please! That foolishness was real enough; I had just been knocked over the head by the kind gentleman from whom I borrowed the rags. I paid him a tidy sum for the use of them, and evidently he thought it was a shame to leave me burdened with the balance of my money. Arguing wouldn't have done any good, so he took the simplest way—just sandbagged me and—"

"Was it much money?"

"Mercy, no! Just a few dollars, hardly worth the anaesthesia."

"And ye were—half-witted, then?"

"Half? A bare sixteenth! It wasn't until afternoon—until we reached the church at the cross-roads—that I really came into full possession—" The sentence trailed off into an inexplicable grin.

"And after that, 'twas I played the fool." Patsy's eyes kindled.

The tinker grew serious; he dug his hands deep into his capacious white flannels as if he were very much in earnest. "Can't you understand? If I hadn't played foolish you would never have let me wander with you—you just said so. I knew that, and I was selfish, lonely—and I didn't want to give you up. You can't blame me. When a man meets with genuine comradeship for the first time in his life—the kind he has always wanted, but has grown to believe doesn't exist—he's bound to win a crumb of it for himself, it costs no more than a trick of foolishness. Surely you understand?"

"Oh, I understand! I'm understanding more and more every minute—'tis the gift of your tongue, I'm thinking—and I'm wondering which of us will be finding it the pleasantest." She flashed a look of unutterable scorn upon him. "If ye were not half-witted, would ye mind telling me how we came to be taking the wrong road at the church?"

The tinker choked.

"Aye, I thought so. Ye lied to me."

"No, not exactly; you see—" he floundered helplessly.

"Faith! don't send a lie to mend a lie; 'tis poor business, I can promise ye."

"Well,"—the tinker's tone grew dogged—"was it such a heinous sin, after all, to want to keep you with me a little longer?"

The fire in Patsy's eyes leaped forth at last. "Sin, did ye say? Faith! 'tis the wrong name ye've given it entirely. 'Twas amusement, ye meant; the fun of trading on a girl's ignorance and simple-heartedness; the trick of getting the good makings of a tale to tell afterward to other fine gentlemen like yourself."

"So you think—"

"Aye, I think 'twas a joke with ye—from first to last. Maybe ye made a wager with some one—or ye were dared to take to the road in rags—or ye did it for copy; ye're not the first man who has done the like for the sake of a new idea for a story. 'Twas a pity, though, ye couldn't have got what ye wanted without making a girl pay with her self-respect."

The tinker winced, reaching out a deprecatory hand. "You are wrong; no one has paid such a price. There are some natures so clear and fine that chance and extremity can put them anywhere—in any company—without taking one whit from their fineness or leaving one atom of smirch. Do you think I would have brought you here and risked your trust and censorship of my honor if you had not been—what you are? A decent man has as much self-respect as a decent woman, and the same wish to keep it."

But Patsy's comprehension was strangely deaf.

"'Tis easy enough trimming up poor actions with grand words. There'd have been no need of risking anything if ye had set me on the right road this morning; I would have been in Arden now, where I belong. But that wasn't your way. 'Twas a grand scheme ye had—whatever it might be; and ye fetch me away afore the town is up and I can ask the road of any one; and ye coax me across pastures and woods, a far cry from passing folk and reliable information; and ye hold me, loitering the day through, till ye have me forgetting entirely why I came, along with the promise laid on me, and the other poor lad—Heaven help him!"

"Oho!" The tinker whistled unconsciously.

"Oho!" mimicked Patsy; "and is there anything so wonderfully strange in a lass looking after a lad? Sure, I'm hating myself for not minding his need better; and, Holy Saint Michael, how I'm hating ye!" She ran out of the room and up the stairway.

The tinker was after her in a twinkling. He reached the foot of the stairs before she was at the top. "Please—please wait a minute," he pleaded. "If there's another—lad, a lad you—love, that I have kept you from—then I hate myself as much as you do. All I can say is that I didn't think—didn't guess; and I'm no end sorry."

Patsy leaned over the banisters and looked down at him through eyes unmistakably wet. "What does it matter to ye if he's the lad I love or not? And can't a body do a kindness for a lad without loving him?"

"Thank Heaven! she can. You have taught me that miracle—and I don't believe the other lad will grudge me these few hours, even if you do. Who knows? My need may have been as great as his."

Patsy frowned. "All ye needed was something soft to dull your wits on; what he's needing is a father—and mother—and sweetheart—and some good 1915 bonds of human trust."

The tinker folded his arms over the newel-post and smiled. "And do you expect to be able to supply them all?"

"God forbid!" Patsy laughed in spite of herself.

And the tinker, scoring a point, took courage and went on: "Don't you suppose I realize that you have given me the finest gift a stranger can have—the gift of honest, unconditional friendship, asking no questions, demanding no returns? It is a rare gift for any man—and I want to keep it as rare and beautiful as when it was given. So please don't mar it for me—now. Please—!" His hands went out in earnest appeal.

The anger was leaving Patsy's face; already the look of comradeship was coming back in her eyes; her lips were beginning to curve in the old, whimsical smile. And the tinker, seeing, doubled his courage. "Now, won't you please forgive me and come down and get some supper?"

She hesitated and, seeing that her decision was hanging in the balance, he recklessly tried his hand at tipping the scales in his favor. "I'm no end of a good forager, and I've rooted out lots of things in tins and jars. You must be awfully hungry; remember, it's hours since our magical breakfast with the lady's-slippers."

Patsy's fist banged the railing with a startling thud. "I'll never break fast with ye again—never—never—never! Ye've blighted the greenest memory I ever had!" And with that she was gone, slamming the door after her by way of dramatic emphasis.

* * * * *

It was a forlorn and dejected tinker that returned alone to the empty hearthside. The bright cheer of the fire had gone; the room had become a place of shadows and haunting memories. For a long time he stood, brutally kicking one of the fire-dogs and snapping his fingers at his feelings; and then, being a man and requiring food, he went out into the pantry where he had been busily preparing to set forth the hospitality of the house when Patsy had wakened.

But before he ate he found a tray and covered it with the best the pantry afforded. He mounted the stairs with it in rather a lagging fashion, being wholly at sea concerning the temperature of his reception. His conscience finally compromised with his courage, and he put the tray down outside Patsy's door.

It was not until he was half-way down the stairs again that he called out, bravely, "Oh—I say—Miss—O'Connell; you'd better change your mind and eat something."

He waited a good many minutes for an answer, but it came at last; the voice sounded broken and wistful as a crying child's. "Thank—you!" and then, "Could ye be after telling me how far it is from here to Arden?"

"Let me see—about—seven miles;" and the tinker laughed; he could not help it.

The next instant Patsy's door opened with a jerk and the tray was precipitated down the stairs upon him. It was the conclusive evidence of the O'Connell temper.

But the tinker never knew that Patsy wept herself remorsefully to sleep; and Patsy never knew that the last thing the tinker did that night was to cut a bedraggled brown coat and skirt and hat into strips and burn them, bit by bit. It was not altogether a pleasant ceremony—the smell of burning wool is not incense to one's nostrils; and the tinker heaved a deep sigh of relief as the last flare died down into a heap of black, smudgy embers.

"That Green County sheriff will have a long way to go now if he's still looking for a girl in a brown suit," he chuckled.

Sleep laid the O'Connell temper. When Patsy awoke her eyes were as serene as the patches of June sky framed by her windows, and she felt at peace with the world and all the tinkers in it.

"'Twould be flattering the lad too much entirely to make up with him before breakfast; but I'll be letting him tramp the road to Arden with me, and we'll part there good friends. Troth, maybe he was a bit lonesome," she added by way of concession.

She sprang out of bed with a glad little laugh; the day had a grand beginning, spilling sunshine and bird-song into every corner of her room, and to Patsy's optimistic soul a good beginning insured a better ending. As she dressed she planned that ending to her own liking and according to the most approved rules of dramatic construction: The tinker should turn out a wandering genius, for in her heart she could not believe the accusations she had hurled against him the night past; when they reached Arden they would come upon the younger Burgeman, contemplating immediate suicide; this would give her her cue, and she would administer trust and a general bracer with one hand as she removed the revolver with the other; in gratitude he would divulge the truth about the forgery—he did it to save the honor of some lady—after which the tinker would sponsor him, tramping him off on the road to take the taste of gold out of his mouth and teach him the real meaning of life.

Patsy had no difficulty with her construction until she came to the final curtain; here she hesitated. She might trail off to find King Midas and square Billy with him, or—the curtain might drop leaving her right center, wishing both lads "God-speed." Neither ending was entirely satisfactory, however; the mental effect of the tinker going off with some one else—albeit it was another lad—was anything but satisfying.

The house was strangely quiet. Patsy stopped frequently in her playmaking to listen for some sounds of human occupancy other than her own, but there was none.

"Poor lad! Maybe I killed him last night when I kicked the tea-things down the stairs after him; or, most likely, the O'Connell temper has him stiffened out with fear so he daren't move hand or foot."

A moment later she came down the stairs humming, "Blow, blow, thou winter wind," her eyes dancing riotously.

Now, by all rights, dramatic or otherwise, the tinker should have been on hand, waiting her entrance. But tinker there was none; nothing but emptiness—and a breakfast-tray, spread and ready for her in the pantry.

Curiosity, uneasiness mastered her pride and she called—once—twice—several times. But there came no answering sound save the quickening of her own heart-beats under the pressure of her held breath.

She was alone in the house.

A feeling of unutterable loneliness swept over Patsy. She came back to the stairs and stood with her hands clasping the newel-post—for all the world like a shipwrecked maiden clinging to the last spar of the ship. No, she did not believe a shipwrecked person could feel more deserted—more left behind than she did; moreover, it was an easier task to face the inevitable when it took the form of blind, impersonal disaster. When it was a matter of deliberate, intentional human motives—it became well-nigh unbearable. Had the tinker gone to be rid of her company and her temper? Had he decided that the road was a better place without her? Maybe he had taken the matter of the other lad too seriously—and, thinking them sweethearts, had counted himself an undesired third, and betaken himself out of their ways. Or—maybe—he was fearsome of constables—and had hurried away to cover his trail and leave her safe.

"Maybe a hundred things," moaned Patsy, disconsolately; "maybe 'tis all a dream and there's no road and no quest and no Rich Man's son and no tinker, and no anything. Maybe—I'll be waking up in another minute and finding myself back in the hospital with the delirium still on me."

She closed her eyes, rubbed them hard with two mandatory fists, then opened them to test the truth of her last remark; and it happened that the first object they fell on was a photograph in a carved wooden frame on the mantel-shelf in the room across the hall. It was plainly visible from where Patsy stood by the stairs—it was also plainly familiar. With a run Patsy was over there in an instant, the photograph in her hands.

"Holy Saint Patrick, 'tis witchcraft!" she cried under her breath. "How in the name of devils—or saints—did he ever get this taken, developed, printed, and framed—between the middle of last night and the beginning of this morning!"

For Patsy was looking down at a picture of the tinker, in white flannels, with head thrown back and laughing.



IX

PATSY ACQUIRES SOME INFORMATION

With the realization that the tinker was gone, the empty house suddenly became oppressive. Patsy put down the photograph with a quick little sigh, and hunted up the breakfast-tray he had left spread and ready for her, carrying it out to the back porch. There in the open and the sunshine she ate, according to her own tabulation, three meals—a left-over supper, a breakfast, and the lunch which she was more than likely to miss later, She was in the midst of the lunch when an idea scuttled out of her inner consciousness and pulled at her immediate attention. She rose hurriedly and went inside. Room after room she searched, closet after closet.

In one she came upon a suit of familiar white flannels; and she passed them slowly—so slowly that her hands brushed them with a friendly little greeting. But the search was a barren one, and she returned to the porch as empty-handed and as mystified as she had left it; the heap of ashes on the hearth held no meaning for her, and consequently told no tales.

"'Tis plain enough what's happened," she said, soberly, to the sparrows who were skirmishing for crumbs. "Just as I said, he was fearsome of those constables, after all, and he's escaped in my clothes!"

The picture of the tinker's bulk trying to disguise itself behind anything so scanty as her shrunken garments proved too irresistible for her sense of humor; she burst into peal after peal of laughter which left her weak and wet-eyed and dispelled her loneliness like fog before a clearing wind.

"Anyhow, if he hasn't worn them he's fetched them away as a wee souvenir of an O'Connell; and if I'm to reach Arden in any degree of decency 'twill have to be in stolen clothes."

But she did not go in the blue frock; the realization came to her promptly that that was no attire for the road and an unprotected state; she must go with dull plumage and no beguiling feathers. So she searched again, and came upon a blue-and-white "middy" suit and a dark-blue "Norfolk." The exchange brought forth the veriest wisp of a sigh, for a woman's a woman, on the road or off it; and what one has not a marked preference for the more becoming frock?

Patsy proved herself a most lawful housebreaker. She tidied up and put away everything; and the shutter having already been replaced over the broken window by the runaway tinker, she turned the knob of the Yale lock on the front door and put one foot over the threshold. It was back again in an instant, however; and this time it was no lawful Patsy that flew back through the hall to the mantel-shelf. With the deftness and celerity of a true housebreaker she de-framed the tinker and stuffed the photograph in the pocket of her stolen Norfolk.

"Sure, he promised his company to Arden," she said, by way of stilling her conscience. Then she crossed the threshold again; and this time she closed the door behind her.

The sun was inconsiderately overhead. There was nothing to indicate where it had risen or whither it intended to set; therefore there was no way of Patsy's telling from what direction she had come or where Arden was most likely to be found. She shook her fist at the sun wrathfully. "I'll be bound you're in league with the tinker; 'tis all a conspiracy to keep me from ever making Arden, or else to keep me just seven miles from it. That's a grand number—seven."

A glint of white on the grass caught her eye; she stooped and found it to be a diminutive quill feather dropped by some passing pigeon. It lay across her palm for a second, and then—the whim taking her—she shot it exultantly into the air. Where it fell she marked the way it pointed, and that was the road she took.

It was beginning to seem years ago since she had sat in Marjorie Schuyler's den listening to Billy Burgeman's confession of a crime for which he had not sounded in the least responsible. That was on Tuesday. It was now Friday—three days—seventy-two hours later. She preferred to think of it in terms of hours—it measured the time proportionally nearer to the actual feeling of it. Strangely enough, it seemed half a lifetime instead of half a week, and Patsy could not fathom the why of it. But what puzzled her more was the present condition of Billy Burgeman, himself. As far as she was concerned he had suddenly ceased to exist, and she was pursuing a Balmacaan coat and plush hat that were quite tenantless; or—at most—they were supported by the very haziest suggestion of a personality. The harder she struggled to make a flesh-and-blood man therefrom the more persistently did it elude her—slipping through her mental grasp like so much quicksilver. She tried her best to picture him doing something, feeling something—the simplest human emotion—and the result was an absolute blank.

And all the while the shadow of a very real man followed her down the road—a shadow in grotesquely flapping rags, with head flung back. A dozen times she caught herself listening for the tramp of his feet beside hers, and flushed hotly at the nagging consciousness that pointed out each time only the mocking echo of her own tread. Like the left-behind cottage, the road became unexpectedly lonely and discouraging.

"The devil take them both!" she sputtered at last. "When one man refuses to be real at all, and the other pesters ye with being too real—'tis time to quit their company and let them fetch up where and how they like."

But an O'Connell is never a quitter; and deep down in Patsy's heart was the determination to see the end of the road for all three of them—if fate only granted the chance.

She came to a cross-roads at length. She had spied it from afar and hailed it as the end of her troubles; now she would learn the right way to Arden. But Patsy reckoned without chance—or some one else. The sign-boards had all been ripped from their respective places on a central post and lay propped up against its base. There was little information in them for Patsy as she read: "Petersham, five miles; Lebanon, twelve miles; Arden, seven miles—"

The last sign went spinning across the road, and Patsy dropped on a near-by stone with the anguish of a great tragedian. "Seven miles—seven miles! I'm as near to it and I know as much about it as when I started three days ago. Sure, I feel like a mule, just, on a treadmill, with Billy Burgeman in the hopper."

A feeling of utter helplessness took possession of her; it was as if her experiences, her actions, her very words and emotions, were controlled by an unseen power. Impulse might have precipitated her into the adventure, but since her feet had trod the first stretch of the road to Arden chance had sat somewhere, chuckling at his own comedy—making, while he pulled her hither and yon, like a marionette on a wire. Verily chance was still chuckling at the incongruity of his stage setting: A girl pursuing a strange man, and a strange sheriff pursuing the girl, and neither having an inkling of the pursuit or the reason for it.

On one thing her mind clinched fast, however: she would at least sit where she was until some one came by who could put her right, once and for all; rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief—she would stop whoever came first.

The arpeggio of an automobile horn brought her to her feet; the next moment the machine careened into sight and Patsy flagged it from the middle of the road, the lines of her face set in grim determination.

"Would you kindly tell me—" she was beginning when a girl in the tonneau cut her short:

"Why, it's Patsy O'Connell! How in the name of your blessed Saint Patrick did you ever get so far from home?"

The car was full of young people, but the girl who had spoken was the only one who looked at all familiar. Patsy's mind groped out of the present into the past; it was all a blind alley, however, and led nowhere.

The girl, seeing her bewilderment, helped her out. "Don't you remember, I was with Marjorie Schuyler in Dublin when you were all so jolly kind to us? I'm Janet Payne—those awful 'Spitsburger Paynes'"—and the girl's laugh rang out contagiously.

The laugh swept Patsy's mind out into the open. She reached out and gripped the girl's hand. "Sure, I remember. But it's a long way from Dublin, and my memory is slower at hearkening back than my heart. A brave day to all of you." And her smile greeted the carful indiscriminately.

"Oh!"—the girl was apologetic—"how beastly rude I am! I'm forgetting that you don't know everybody as well as everybody knows you. Jean Lewis, Mrs. Dempsy Carter, Dempsy Carter, Gregory Jessup, and Jay Clinton—Miss Patricia O'Connell, of the Irish National Players. We are all very much at your service—including the car, which is not mine, but the Dempsy Carters'."

"Shall we kidnap Miss O'Connell?" suggested the owner. "She appears an easy victim."

Janet Payne clapped her hands, but Patsy shook a decided negative. "That's the genius of the Irish," she laughed; "they look easy till you hold them up. I'm bound for Arden, and must make it by the quickest road if you'll point it out to me."

"Why, of course—Arden; that accounts for you perfectly. Stupid that I didn't think of it at once. What part are you playing?" Janet Payne accompanied the question with unmistakable eagerness.

Patsy shot a shrewd glance at the girl. Was she indulging in good-natured banter, or had she learned through Marjorie Schuyler of Patsy's self-imposed quest, and was seeking information in figurative speech? Patsy decided in favor of the former and answered it in kind: "Faith! I'm not sure whether I've been cast for the duke's daughter—or the fool. I can tell ye better after I reach Arden." And she turned abruptly as if she would be gone.

But the girl held her back. "No, you don't. We are not going to lose you like that. We'll kidnap you, as Dempsy suggested, till after lunch; then we'll motor you back to Arden. You'll get there just about as soon."

Patsy had not the slightest intention of yielding; her mind and her feet were braced against any divergence from the straight road now; but the man Janet Payne had called Gregory Jessup said something that scattered her resolutions like so much chaff.

"You've simply got to come, Miss O'Connell." And he leaned over the side of the car in boyish enthusiasm. "Last summer Billy Burgeman used to read to me the parts of Marjorie's letters that told about you, and they were great! We were making up our minds to go to Ireland and see if you were real when your company came to America. After that Marjorie would never introduce us after the plays, just to be contrary. You wouldn't have the heart to grudge us a little acquaintanceship now, would you?"

"Billy Burgeman," repeated Patsy. "Do you know him?"

Dempsy Carter interposed. "They're chums, Miss O'Connell. I'll wager there isn't a soul on earth that knows Billy as well as Greg does."

"That's hard on Marjorie, isn't it?" asked Janet Payne.

"Oh, hang Marjorie!" The sincerity of Gregory Jessup's emotion somewhat excused his outburst.

"Why, I thought they were betrothed!" Patsy looked innocent.

"They were. What they are now—Heaven only knows! Marjorie Schuyler has gone to China, and Billy has dropped off the face of the earth."

A sudden silence fell on the cross-roads. It was Patsy who broke it at last. "Well?" A composite, interrogative stare came from the carful. Patsy laughed bewitchingly. "For a crowd of rascally kidnappers, you are the slowest I ever saw. Troth, in Ireland they'd have it done in half the time."

The next instant Patsy was lifted bodily inside, and, amid a general burst of merriment, the car swung down the road.

* * * * *

It was a picnic lunch—an elaborate affair put up in a hamper, a fireless cooker, and a thermos basket; and it was spread on a tiny, fir-covered peninsula jutting out into a diminutive lake. It was an enchanting spot and a delicious lunch, with good company to boot; but, to her annoyance, Patsy found herself continually comparing it unfavorably with a certain vagabond breakfast garnished with yellow lady's-slippers, musicianed by throstles, and served by a tinker.

"Something is on your mind, or do you find our American manners and food too hard to digest comfortably?" Gregory Jessup had curled up unceremoniously at her feet, balancing a caviar sandwich, a Camembert cheese, and a bottle of ale with extraordinary dexterity.

"I was thinking about—Billy Burgeman."

He cast a furtive look toward the others beyond them. They seemed engrossed for the moment in some hectic discussion over fashions, and he dropped his voice to a confidential pitch: "I can't talk Billy with the others; I'm too much cut up over the whole thing to stand hearing them hold an autopsy over Billy's character and motives." He stopped abruptly and scanned Patsy's face. "I believe a chap could turn his mind inside out with you, though, and you'd keep the contents as faithfully as a safe-deposit vault."

Patsy smiled appreciatively. "Faith! you make me feel like Saint Martin's chest that Satan himself couldn't be opening."

"What did he have in it?"

"Some good Christian souls."

"Contents don't tally—mine are some very un-Christian thoughts." He abandoned the sandwich and cheese, and settled himself to the more serious business of balancing his remarks. "Billy and I work for the same engineering firm; he walked out for lunch Tuesday and no one has seen him since—unless it's Marjorie Schuyler. Couldn't get anything out of the old man when I first went to see him, and now he's too ill to see any one. Marjorie said she really didn't know where he was, and quit town the next day. Now maybe they don't either of them know what's happened any more than I do; but I think it's infernally queer for a man to disappear and say nothing to his father, the girl he's engaged to, or his best friend. Don't you?"

Patsy's past training stood stanchly by her. She played the part of the politely interested listener—nothing more—and merely nodded her head.

"You see," the man went on, "Billy has a confoundedly queer sense of honor; he can stretch it at times to cover nearly everybody's calamities and the fool shortcomings of all his acquaintances. Why, it wasn't a month ago a crowd of us from the works were lunching together, and the talk came around to speculating. Billy's hard against it on principle, but he happened to say that if he was going in for it at all he'd take cotton. What was in Billy's mind was not the money in it, but the chance to give the South a boost. Well, one of the fellows took it as a straight tip to get rich from the old man's son and put in all he had saved up to be married on; lost it and squealed. And Billy—the big chump—claimed he was responsible for it—that, being the son of his father, he ought to know enough to hold his tongue on some subjects. He made it good to the fellow. I happen to know, for it took every cent of his own money and his next month's salary into the bargain—and that he borrowed from me."

"Wouldn't his father have helped him out?"

Gregory Jessup gave a bitter little laugh. "You don't know the old man or you wouldn't ask. He is just about as soft-hearted and human as a Labrador winter. I've known Billy since we were both little shavers—and, talk about the curse of poverty! It's a saintly benediction compared to a fortune like that and life with the man who made it."

"And—himself, Billy—what does he think of money?"

"I'll tell you what he said once. He had dropped in late after a big dinner where he had been introduced to some one as the fellow who was going to inherit sixty millions some day. Phew! but he was sore! He walked miles—in ten-foot laps—about my den, while he cursed his father's money from Baffin Bay to Cape Horn. 'I tell you, Greg,' he finished up with, 'I want enough to keep the cramps out of life, that's all; enough to help the next fellow who's down on his luck; enough to give the woman I marry a home and not a residence to live in, and to provide the father of my kiddies with enough leisure for them to know what real fatherhood means. I bet you I can make enough myself to cover every one of those necessities; as for the millions, I'd like to chuck them for quoits off the Battery.'"

For a moment Patsy's eyes danced; but the next, something tumbled out of her memory and quieted them. "Then why in the name of Saint Anthony did he choose to marry Marjorie Schuyler?"

"That does seem funny, I know, but that's a totally different side of Billy. You see, all his life he's been falling in with people who made up to him just for his money, and his father had a confounded way of reminding him that he was bound to be plucked unless he kept his wits sharp and distrusted every one. It made Billy sick, and yet it had its effect. He's always been mighty shy with girls—reckon his father brought him up on tales of rich chaps and modern Circes. Anyway, when he met Marjorie Schuyler it was different—she had too much money of her own to make his any particular attraction, and he finally gave in that she liked him just for himself. That was a proud day for him, poor old Bill!"

"And did she—could she really love him?" Patsy asked the question of herself rather than the man beside her.

But he answered it promptly: "I don't believe Marjorie Schuyler has anything to love with; it was overlooked when she was made. That's what's worrying me. If he's got into a scrape he'd tell Marjorie the first thing; and she's not the understanding, forgiving kind. He hasn't any money; he wouldn't go to his father; and because he's borrowed from me once, he's that idiotic he wouldn't do it again. If Marjorie has given him his papers he's in a jolly blue funk and perfectly capable of going off where he'll never be heard of again. Hang it all! I don't see why he couldn't have come to me?"

Patsy said nothing while he replenished her plate and helped himself to another sandwich. At last she asked, casually, "Did the two of you ever have a disagreement over Marjorie Schuyler?"

"He asked me once just what I thought of her, and I told him. We never discussed her again."

"No?" Inwardly Patsy was tabulating why Billy Burgeman had not gone to his friend when Marjorie Schuyler failed him. He would hardly have cared to criticize the shortcomings of the girl he loved with the man who had already discovered them.

"What are you two jabbering about?" Janet Payne had left her group and the hectic argument over fashions.

"Sure, we're threshing out whether it's the Irish or the suffragettes will rule England when the war is over."

"Well, which is it?"

"Faith! the answer's so simple I'm ashamed to give it. The women will rule England—that's an easy matter; but the Irish will rule the women."

"Then you are one of the old-fashioned kind who approves of a lord and master?" Gregory Jessup looked up at her quizzically.

"'Tis the new fashion you're meaning; having gone out so long since, 'tis barely coming in yet. I'd not give a farthing for the man who couldn't lead me; only, God help him! if he ever leaves his hands off the halter."

The laugh that followed gave Patsy time to think. There was one more question she must be asking before the others joined them and the conversation became general. She turned to Janet Payne with a little air of anxious inquiry.

"Maybe you'd ask the rascally villain who kidnapped me, when he has it in his mind to keep his promise and fetch me to Arden?"

As the girl left them Patsy turned toward Gregory Jessup again and asked, softly: "Supposing Billy Burgeman has fallen among strangers? If they saw he was in need of friendliness, would it be so hard to do him a kindness?"

The man shook his head. "The hardest thing in the world. Billy Burgeman has been proud and lonely all his life, and it's an infernal combination. You may know he's out and out aching for a bit of sympathy, but you never offer it; you don't dare. We could never get him to own up as a little shaver how neglected and lonely he was and how he hated to stay in that horrible, gloomy Fifth Avenue house. It wasn't until he had grown up that he told me he used to come and play as often as they would let him—just because mother used to kiss him good-by as she did her own boys."

Gregory Jessup looked beyond the firs to the little lake, and there was that in his face which showed that he was wrestling with a treasured memory. When he spoke again his voice sounded as if he had had to grip it hard against a sign of possible emotion.

"You know Billy's father never gave him an allowance; he didn't believe in it—wouldn't trust Billy with a cent. Poor little shaver—never had anything to treat with at school, the way the rest of the boys did; and never even had car-fare—always walked, rain or shine, unless his father took him along with him in the machine. Billy used to say even in those days he liked walking better. Mother died in the winter—snowy time—when Billy was about twelve; and he borrowed a shovel from a corner grocer and cleared stoops all afternoon until he'd made enough to buy two white roses. Father hadn't broken down all day—wouldn't let us children show a tear; but when Billy came in with those roses—well, it was the children who finally had to cheer father up."

Patsy sprang to her feet with a little cry. "I must be going." She turned to the others, a ring of appeal in her voice. "Can't we hurry a bit? There's a deal of work at Arden to be done, and no one but myself to be doing it."

"Rehearsals?" asked Janet Payne.

And Patsy, unheeding, nodded her head.

There was a babel of nonsense in the returning car. Patsy contributed her share the while her mind was busy building over again into a Balmacaan coat and plush hat the semblance of a man.

"Sure, I'm not saying I can make out his looks or the color of his eyes and hair, but he's real, for all that. Holy Saint Patrick, but he's a real man at last, and I'm liking him!" She smiled with deep contentment.



X

JOSEPH JOURNEYS TO A FAR COUNTRY

Having established the permanent reality of Billy Burgeman to her own satisfaction, Patsy's mind went racing off to conjure up all the possible things Billy and the tinker might think of each other as soon as chance should bring them together. Whereas it was perfectly consistent that Billy should shun the consolation and companionship of his own world, he might follow after vagabond company as a thirsty dog trails water; and who could slake that thirst better than the tinker? For a second time that day she pictured the two swinging down the open road together; and for the second time she pulled a wry little smile.

The car was nearing the cross-roads from which Patsy had been originally kidnapped. She looked up to identify it, and saw a second car speeding toward them from the opposite direction, while between the two plodded a solitary little figure, coming toward them, supported by a mammoth pilgrim staff. It was a boy, apparently conscious of but the one car—theirs; and he swerved to their left—straight into the path of the car behind—to let them pass. They sounded their horns, waved their hands, and shouted warnings. It seemed wholly unbelievable that he should not understand or that the other car would not stop. But the unbelievable happened; it does sometimes.

Before Gregory Jessup could jump from their machine the other car had struck and the boy was tossed like a bundle of empty clothing to the roadside beyond. The nightmarish suddenness of it all held them speechless while they gaped at the car's driver, who gave one backward glance and redoubled his speed. Patsy was the first out of the tonneau, and she reached the boy almost as soon as Gregory Jessup.

"Damn them! That's the second time in my life I've seen a machine run some one down and sneak—"

He broke off at Patsy's sharp cry: "Holy Mary keep him! 'Tis the wee lad from Lebanon!"

By this time the rest of the carful had gathered about them; and Dempsy Carter—being a good Catholic—bared his head and crossed himself.

"'Tis wee Joseph of Lebanon," Patsy repeated, dully; and then to Dempsy Carter, "Aye, make a prayer for him; but ye'd best do it driving like the devil for the doctor."

They left at once with her instructions to get the nearest doctor first, and then to go after the boy's parents. Gregory Jessup stayed behind with her, and together they tried to lift the still, little figure onto some rugs and pillows. Then Patsy crept closer and wound her arms about him, chafing his cheeks and hands and watching for some sign of returning life.

The man stood silently beside them, holding the pilgrim staff, while his eyes wandered from Patsy to the child and back to Patsy again, her face full of harboring tenderness and a great suffering as she gathered the little boy into her arms and pressed her warm cheek against the cold one.

Only once during their long wait was the silence broken. "'Tis almost as if he'd slipped over the border," Patsy whispered. "Maybe he's there in the gray dusk—a wee shadow soul waiting for death to loosen its wings and send it lilting into the blue of the Far Country."

"How did you happen to know him?"

"Chance, just. I stopped to tell him a tale of a wandering hero and he—" She broke off with a little moan. "Ochone! poor wee Joseph! did I send ye forth on a brave adventure only to bring ye to this?" Her fingers brushed the damp curls from his forehead. "Laddy, laddy, why didn't ye mind the promise I laid on ye?"

The doctor was kindly and efficient, but professionally non-committal. The boy was badly injured, and he must be moved at once to the nearest house. Somehow they lifted Joseph and held him so as to break the jar of stone and rut as the doctor drove his car as carefully as he could down the road leading to the nearest farm-house.

There they were met with a generous warmth of sympathy and hospitality; the spare chamber was opened, and the farm wife bustled about, turning down the bed and bringing what comforts the house possessed. The doctor stayed as long as he could; but the stork was flying at the other end of the township, and he was forced to leave Patsy in charge, with abundant instructions.

Soon after his leaving the Dempsy Carters returned without Joseph's parents; they had gone to town and were not expected home until "chore time."

"All right," Patsy sighed. "Now ye had best all go your ways and I'll bide till morning."

"But can you?" Janet Payne asked it, wonderingly. "I thought you said you had to be in Arden to-day?"

A smile, whimsical and baffling, crept to the corners of Patsy's mouth. "Sure, life is crammed with things ye think have to be done to-day till they're matched against a sudden greater need. Chance and I started the wee lad on his journey, and 'twas meant I should see him safe to the end, I'm thinking. Good-by."

Gregory Jessup lingered a moment behind the others; his eyes were suspiciously red, and the hands that gripped Patsy's shook the least bit. "I wanted to say something: If—if you should ever happen to run up against Billy Burgeman—anywhere—don't be afraid to do him a kindness. He—he wouldn't mind it from you."

Patsy leaned against the door and watched him go. "There's another good lad. I'd like to be finding him again, too, some day." She pressed her hands over her eyes with a fierce little groan, as if she would blot out the enveloping tragedy along with her surroundings. "Faith! what is the meaning of life, anyway? Until to-day it has seemed such a simple, straight road; I could have drawn a fair map of it myself, marking well the starting-point and tracing it reasonably true to the finish. But to-night—to-night—'tis all a tangle of lanes and byways. There's no sign-post ahead—and God alone knows where it's leading."

She went back to the spare chamber and took up her watching by the bedside; and for the rest of that waning day she sat as motionless as everything else in the room. The farm wife came and went softly, in between her preparations for supper. When it was ready she tried her best to urge Patsy down-stairs for a mouthful.

But the girl refused to stir. "I couldn't. The wee lad might come back while I was gone and find no one to reach him a hand or smile him a welcome."

A little later, as the dark gathered, she begged two candles and stood them on the stand beside the bed. Something in her movements or the flickering light must have pierced his stupor, for Joseph moaned slightly and in a moment opened his eyes.

Patsy leaned over him tenderly; could she only keep him content until the mother came and guard the mysterious borderland against all fear or pain, "Laddy, laddy," she coaxed, "do ye mind me—now?"

The veriest wisp of a smile answered her.

"And were ye for playing Jack yourself, tramping off to find the castle with a window in it for every day in the year?" Her voice was full of gentle, teasing laughter, the voice of a mother playing with a very little child. "I'm hoping ye didn't forget the promise—ye didn't forget to ask for the blessing before ye went, now?"

No sound came; but the boy's lips framed a silent "No." In another moment his eyes were drooping sleepily.

* * * * *

Night had come, and with it the insistent chorus of tree-toad and katydid, interspersed with the song of the vesper sparrow. From the kitchen came the occasional rattle of dish or pan and the far-away murmur of voices. Patsy strained her ears for some sound of car or team upon the road; but there was none.

Again the lids fluttered and opened; this time Joseph smiled triumphantly. "I thought—p'r'aps—I hadn't found you—after all—there was—so many ways—you might ha' went." He moistened his lips. "At the cross-roads—I wasn't quite—sure which to be takin', but I took—the right one, I did—didn't I?"

There was a ring of pride in the words, and Patsy moistened her lips. Something clutched at her throat that seemed to force the words back. "Aye," she managed to say at last.

"An' I've—found you now—you'll have to—promise me not to go back—not where they can get you. Si Perkins said—as how they'd soon forget—if you just stayed away long enough." The boy looked at her happily. "Let's—let's keep on—an' see what lies over the next hill."

To Patsy this was all an unintelligible wandering of mind; she must humor it. "All right, laddy, let's keep on. Maybe we'll be finding a wood full of wild creatures, or an ocean full of ships."

"P'r'aps. But I'd rather—have it a big—big city. I never—saw a city."

"Aye, 'tis a city then"—Patsy's tone carried conviction—"the grandest city ever built; and the towers will be touching the clouds, and the streets will be white as sea-foam; and there will be a great stretch of green meadow for fairs—"

"An' circuses?"

"What else but circuses! And at the entrance there will be a gate with tall white columns—"

The sound Patsy had been listening for came at last through the open windows: the pad-pad-pad of horses' hoofs coming fast.

Joseph looked past Patsy and saw for the first time the candles by his bed. His eyes sparkled. "They are—woppin' big columns—an' at night—they have lighted lamps on top—all shinin'. Don't they?"

"Aye, to point the way in the dark."

"It's dark—now." The boy's voice lagged in a tired fashion.

"Maybe we'd best hurry—then."

A door slammed below, and there was a rustle of tongues.

"Who'll be 'tendin' the city gates?" asked Joseph.

"Who but the gatekeeper?"

Muffled feet crept up the stairs.

"Will he let us in?"

"He'll let ye in, laddy; I might be too much of a stranger."

"But I could speak for you. I—I wouldn't like—goin' in alone in the dark."

"Bless ye! ye'd not be alone." Patsy's voice rang vibrant with gladness. "Now, who do you think will be watching for ye, close to the gate? Look yonder!"

Joseph's eyes went back to the candles, splendid, tall columns they were, with beacon lamps capping each. "Who?"

Dim faces looked at him through the flickering light; but there was only one he saw, and it brought the merriest smile to his lips.

"Why—'course it's mother—sure's shootin'!"

* * * * *

Early the next morning Patsy waited on the braided rug outside the spare chamber for Joseph's mother to come out.

"I've been praying ye'd not hate me for the tale I told the little lad that day, the tale that brought him—yonder. And if it isn't overlate, I'd like to be thanking ye for taking me in that night."

The woman looked at her searchingly through swollen lids. "I cal'ate there's no thanks due; your man paid for your keep; he sawed and split nigh a cord o' wood that night—must ha' taken him 'most till mornin'." She paused an instant. "Didn't—he"—she nodded her head toward the closed door behind her—"never tell you what brought him?"

"Naught but that he wanted to find me."

"He believed in you," the woman said, simply, adding in a toneless voice: "I cal'ate I couldn't hate you. I never saw any one make death so—sweet like—as you done for—him."

Patsy spread her hands deprecatingly. "Why shouldn't it be sweet like? Faith! is it anything but a bit of the very road we've been traveling since we were born, the bit that lies over the hill and out of sight?" She took the woman's work-worn hands in hers. "'Tis terrible, losing a little lad; but 'tis more terrible never having one. God and Mary be with ye!"

When Patsy left the house a few minutes later Joseph's pilgrim staff was in her hands, and she stopped on the threshold an instant to ask the way of Joseph's father.

The good man was dazed with his grief and he directed Patsy in terms of his own home-going: "Keep on, and take the first turn to your right."

So Patsy kept on instead of returning to the cross-roads; and chance scored another point in his comedy and continued chuckling.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Joseph's father went back to the spare chamber.

"'S she gone?" inquired Joseph's mother.

"Yep."

"You know, the boy believed in her."

"Yep, I know."

"Well, I cal'ate we've got to, too."

"Sure thing!"

"Ye'll never say a word, then—about seein' her; nuthin' to give the sheriff a hint where she might be?"

"Why, mother!" The man laid a hand on her shoulder, looking down at her with accusing eyes. "Hain't you known me long enough to know I couldn't tell on any one who'd been good to—" He broke off with a cough. "And what's more, do you think any one who could take our little boy's hand and lead him, as you might say, straight to heaven—would be a thief? No, siree!"

* * * * *

It was a sober, thoughtful Patsy that followed the road, the pilgrim staff gripped tightly in her hand. She clung to it as the one tangible thing left to her out of all the happenings and memories of her quest. The tinker had disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed him, leaving behind no reason for his going, no hope of his coming again; Billy Burgeman was still but a flimsy promise; and Joseph had outstripped them both, passing beyond her farthest vision. Small wonder, then, that the road was lonely and haunted for Patsy, and that she plodded along shorn of all buoyancy.

Her imagination began playing tricks with her. Twice it seemed as if she could feel a little lad's hand, warm and eager, curled under hers about the staff; another time she found herself gazing through half-shut eyes at a strange lad—a lad of twelve—who walked ahead for a space, carrying two great white roses; and once she glanced up quickly and saw the tinker coming toward her, head thrown back and laughing. Her wits had barely time to check her answering laugh and hands outstretching, when he faded into empty winding road.

The morning was uneventful. Patsy stopped but once—to trundle a perambulator laden with washing and twins for its small conductor, a mite of a girl who looked almost too frail to breast the weight of a doll's carriage.

Even Patsy puffed under the strain of the burden. "How do you do it?" she gasped.

"Well, I started when them babies was tiny and the washin' was small; an' they both growed so gradual I didn't notice—much. An' ma don't make me hurry none."

"How many children are there?"

"Nine. Last's just come. Pa says he didn't look on him as no blessin', but ma says the Lord must provide—an' if it's babies, then it's babies." She stopped and clasped her hands after the fashion of an ancient grandmother tottering in the nineties: "Land o' goodness, I do think an empty cradle's an awful dismal thing to have round. Don't you?"

Patsy agreed, and a moment later unloaded the twins and the washing for the child at her doorstep.

Soon after this she caught her first glimpse of the town she was making. "If luck will only turn stage-manager," she thought, "and put Billy Burgeman in the center of the scene—handy, why, I'll promise not to murder my lines or play under."

It was not luck, however, but chance, still pulling the wires; and accordingly he managed Patsy's entrance as he wished.

The town had one main street, like Lebanon, and in front of the post-office in a two-seated car sat a familiar figure. There was the Balmacaan coat and the round plush hat; and to Patsy, impulsive and heart-strong, it sufficed. She ran nearly the length of the street in her eagerness to reach him.



XI

AND CHANCE STAGES MELODRAMA INSTEAD OF COMEDY

"A brave day to ye!" A little bit of everything that made Patsy was wrapped in the smile she gave the man in the Balmacaan coat standing by the wheel-guard of the car before the town post-office, a hand on the front seat. "Maybe ye're not knowing it, but it's a rare good day for us both. If you'll only take me for a spin in your car I'll tell you what brings me—and who I am—if you haven't that guessed already."

Plainly the occupant of the coat and the car was too much taken by surprise to guess. He simply stared; and by that stare conveyed a heart-sinking impression to Patsy. She looked at the puffed eyes and the grim, unyielding line of the mouth, and she wanted to run. It took all the O'Connell stubbornness, coupled with the things Gregory Jessup had told her about his friend, to keep her feet firm to the sidewalk and her resolution.

"Maybe," she thought, "he's just taken on the look of a rascal because he thinks the world has written him down one. That's often the way with a man; and often it takes but a bit of kindness to change it. If I could make him smile—now—"

Her next remark accomplished this, but it did not mend matters a whit. Patsy's heart turned over disconsolately; and she was safety-locking her wits to keep them from scattering when she made her final plea.

"I'm not staying long, and I want to know you; there's something I have to be saying before I go on my way. 'Twould be easiest if you'd take me for a ride in your car; we could talk quieter there."

She tried to finish with a reasonably cheerful look, but it was a tragic failure. The man was looking past her to the post-office beyond, and the things Patsy had seemed to feel in his face suddenly rose to the surface and revealed themselves with an instant's intensity. Patsy followed the look over her shoulder and shrank away perceptibly.

In the doorway of the office stood another man, younger and more—pronounced. It could mean but one thing: Billy Burgeman had lost his self-respect along with Marjorie Schuyler and had fallen in with foul company.

There were natures that crumbled and went to pieces under distrust and failure—natures that allowed themselves to be blown by passion and self-pity until they burned down into charred heaps of humanity. She had met a few of them in her life; but—thank God!—there were only a few.

She found herself praying that she might not have come too late. Just what she would do or say she could not tell; but she must make him understand that he was not the arbiter of his own life, that in spite of what he had found, there were love and trust and disinterested kindness in the world, lots of it. Money might be a curse, but it was a curse that a man could raise for himself; and a little lad who could shovel snow for half a day to earn two white roses for a dead friend was too fine to be lost out of life's credit-sheet.

She did not wait for any invitation; silently, with a white face, she climbed into the car and sat with hands folded about the pilgrim staff. It was as if she had taken him for granted and was waiting for his compliance to her will. And he understood. He moved the starter, and, as the motor began its chugging, he called out to the man in the doorway:

"Better not wait for me. I seem to have a date with—a lady." There was an unpleasant intonation on the last word.

"Please take a quiet road—where there will not be much passing," commanded Patsy.

She did not speak again until the town lay far behind and they were well on that quiet road. Then she turned partly toward him, her hands still clasped, and when she spoke it was still in the best of the king's English—she had neither feeling nor desire for the intimacy of her own tongue.

"I know it must seem a bit odd to have me, a stranger, come to you this way. But when a man's family and betrothed fail him—why, some one must—make it up—"

He turned fiercely. "How did you know that?"

"I—she—Never mind; I know, that's all. And I came, thinking maybe you'd be glad—"

"Of another?" he laughed coarsely, looking her over with an appraising scrutiny. "Well, a fellow might have a worse—substitute."

Patsy crimsoned. It seemed incredible that the man she had listened to that day in Marjorie Schuyler's den, who had then gripped her sympathies and thereby pulled her after him in spite of past illness and all common sense, should be the man speaking now. And yet—what was it Gregory Jessup had said about him? Had he not implied that old King Midas had long ago warped his son's trust in women until he had come to look upon them all as modern Circes? And gradually shame for herself changed into pity for him. What a shabby performance life must seem to such as he!

She had an irresistible desire to take him with her behind the scenes and show him what it really was; to point out how with a change of line here, a new cue there, and a different drop behind; with a choice of fellow-players, and better lights, and the right spirit back of it all—what a good thing he could make of his particular part. But would he see—could she make him understand? It was worth trying.

"You are every bit wrong," she said, evenly. "Look at me. Do I look like an adventuress? And haven't you ever had anybody kind to you simply because they had a preference for kindness?"

The two looked at each other steadily while the machine crawled at minimum speed down the deserted road. Her eyes never flinched under the blighting weight of his, although her heart seemed to stop a hundred times and the soul of her shrivel into nothing.

"Well," she heard herself saying at last, "don't you think you can believe in me?"

The man laughed again, coarsely. "Believe in you? That's precisely what I'm doing this minute—believing in your cleverness and a deuced pretty way with you. Now don't get mad, my dear. You are all daughters of Eve, and your intentions are very innocent—of course."

Pity and sympathy left Patsy like starved pensioners. The eyes looking into his blazed with righteous anger and a hating distrust; they carried to him a stronger, more direct message than words could have done. His answer was to double the speed of the car.

"Stop the car!" she demanded.

"Oh, ho! we're getting scared, are we? Repenting of our haste?" The grim line of his mouth became more sinister. "No man relishes a woman's contempt, and he generally makes her pay when he can. Now I came for pleasure, and I'm going to get it." An arm shot around Patsy and held her tight; the man was strong enough to keep her where he wished her and steer the car down a straight, empty road. "Remember, I can prove you asked me to take you—and it was your choice—this nice, quiet spin!"

She sat so still, so relaxed under his grip that unconsciously he relaxed too; she could feel the gradual loosening of joint and muscle.

"Why didn't you scream?" he sneered at length.

"I'm keeping my breath—till there's need of it."

Silence followed. The car raced on down the persistently empty road; the few houses they passed might have been tenantless for any signs of human life about them. In the far distance Patsy could see a suspension-bridge, and she wished and wished it might be closed for repairs—something, anything to bring to an end this hideous, nightmarish ride. She groaned inwardly at the thought of it all. She—Patricia O'Connell—who would have starved rather than play cheap, sordid melodrama—had been tricked by chance into becoming an actual, living part of one. She wondered a little why she felt no fear—she certainly had nothing but distrust and loathing for the man beside her—and these are breeders of fear. Perhaps her anger had crowded out all other possible emotion; perhaps—back of everything—she still hoped for the ultimate spark of decency and good in him.

Her silence and apparent apathy puzzled the man. "Well, what's in your mind?" he snapped.

"Two things: I was thinking what a pity it was you let your father throw so much filth in your eyes, that you grew up to see everything about you smirched and ugly; and I was wondering how you ever came to have a friend like Gregory Jessup and a fancy for white roses."

"What in thunder are you talking—"

But he never finished. The scream he had looked for came when he had given up expecting it. Patsy had wrenched herself free from his hold and was leaning over the wind-shield, beckoning frantically to a figure mounted on one of the girders of the bridge. It was a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags, a battered cap on the back of its head.

"Good God!" muttered the man in the car, stiffening.

Luckily for the tinker the car was running again at a moderate speed; the man had slowed up when he saw the rough planking over the bridge, and his hand had not time enough to reach the lever when the tinker was upon him. The car came to an abrupt stop.

Patsy sank back on the seat, white and trembling, as she watched the instant's grappling of the two, followed by a lurching tumble over the side of the car to the planking. The fall knocked them apart, and for the space of a few quick breaths they half rose and faced each other—the one almost crazed with fury, the other steady, calm, but terrifyingly determined.

Before Patsy could move they were upon each other again—rolling about in the dust, clutching at each other's throat—now half under the car, now almost through the girders of the bridge, with Patsy's voice crying a warning. Again they were on their feet, grappling and hitting blindly; then down in the dust, rolling and clutching.

It was plain melodrama of the most banal form; and the most convincing part of it all was the evident personal enmity that directed each blow. Somehow it was borne in upon Patsy that her share in the quarrel was an infinitesimal part; it was the old, old scene in the fourth act: the hero paying up the villain for all past scores.

Like the scene in the fourth act, it came to an end at last. The time came when no answering blow met the tinker's, when the hand that gripped his throat relaxed and the body back of it went down under him—breathless and inert. Patsy climbed out of the car to make room for the stowing away of its owner. He was conscious, but past articulate speech and thoroughly beaten; and the tinker kindly turned the car about for him and started him slowly off, so as to rid the road of him, as Patsy said. It looked possible, with a careful harboring of strength and persistence, for him to reach eventually the starting-point and his friend of the post-office. As his trail of dust lengthened between them Patsy gave a sigh of relieved content and turned to the tinker.

"Faith, ye are a sight for a sore heart." Her hand slid into his outstretched one. "I'll make a bargain with ye: if ye'll forgive and forget the unfair things I said to ye that night I'll not stay hurt over your leaving without notice the next morning."

"It's a bargain," but he winced as he said it. "It seems as if our meetings were dependent on a certain amount of—of physical disablement." He smiled reassuringly. "I don't really mind in the least. I'd stand for knockout blows down miles of road, if they would bring you back—every time."

"Don't joke!" Patsy covered her face. "If—if ye only knew—what it means to have ye standing there this minute!" She drew in her breath quickly; it sounded dangerously like a sob. "If ye only knew what ye have saved me from—and what I am owing ye—" Her hands fell, and she looked at him with a sudden shy concern. "Poor lad! Here ye are—a fit subject for a hospital, and I'm wasting time talking instead of trying to mend ye up. Do ye think there might be water hereabouts where we could wash off some of that—grease paint?"

But the tinker was contemplating his right foot; he was standing on the other. "Don't bother about those scratches; they go rather well with the clothes, don't you think? It's this ankle that's bothering me; I must have turned it when I jumped."

"Can't ye walk on it? Ye can lean on this"—she passed him the pilgrim staff—"and we can go slowly. Bad luck to the man! If I had known ye were hurt I'd have made ye leave him in the road and we'd have driven his machine back to Arden for him." She looked longingly after the trail of dust.

"Your ethics are questionable, but your geography is worse. Arden isn't back there."

"What do ye mean? Why, I saw Arden, back yonder, with my own eyes—not an hour ago."

"No, you didn't. You saw Dansville; Arden is over there," and the tinker's hand pointed over his shoulder at right angles to the road.

"Holy Saint Branden!" gasped Patsy. "Maybe ye'll have the boldness, then, to tell me I'm still seven miles from it?"

"You are." But this time he did not laugh—a smile was the utmost he could manage with the pain in his ankle.

Patsy looked as if she might have laughed or cried with equal ease. "Seven miles—seven miles! Tramp the road for four days and be just as near the end as I was at the start—" An expression of enlightenment shot into her face. "Faith, I must have been going in a circle, then."

The tinker nodded an affirmative.

"And who in the name of reason was the man in the car?"

"That's what I'd like to know; the unmitigated nerve of him!" he finished to himself. His chin set itself squarely; his face had grown as white as Patsy's had been and his eyes became doggedly determined. "If it isn't a piece of impertinence, I'd like to ask how you happened to be with him, that way?"

Patsy flushed. "I'm thinking ye've earned the right to an answer. I took him for the lad I was looking for. I thought the place was Arden, and—and the clothes were the same."

"The clothes!" the tinker repeated it in the same bewildered way that had been his when Patsy first found him; then he turned and grasped Patsy's shoulders with a sudden, inexplicable intensity. "What's the name of the lad—the lad you're after?"

"I'll tell you," said Patsy, slowly, "if you'll tell me what you did with my brown clothes that morning before you left."

And the answer to both questions was a blank, baffling stare.



XII

A CHANGE OF NATIONALITY

The railroad ran under the suspension-bridge. Patsy could see the station not an eighth of a mile down the track, and she made for it as being the nearest possible point where water might be procured. The station-master gave her a tin can and filled it for her; and ten minutes later she set about scrubbing the tinker free of all the telltale make-up of melodrama. It was accomplished—after a fashion, and with persistent rebelling on the tinker's part and scolding on Patsy's. And, finally, to prove his own supreme indifference to physical disablement, he tore the can from her administering hands, threw it over the bridge, and started down the road at his old, swinging stride.

"Is it after more lady's-slippers ye're dandering?" called Patsy.

"More likely it's after a pair of those winged shoes of Perseus; I'll need them." But his stride soon broke to a walk and then to a lagging limp. "It's no use," he said at last; "I might keep on for another half-mile, a mile at the most; but that's about all I'd be good for. You'll have to go on to Arden alone, and you can't miss it this time."