Patsy stopped abruptly. "Why don't ye curse me for the trouble I have brought?" She considered both hands carefully for a minute, as if she expected to find in them the solution to the difficulty, then she looked up and away toward the rising woodland that marked Arden.

"Do ye know," she said, wistfully, "I took the road, thinking I could mend trouble for that other lad; and instead it's trouble I've been making for every one—ye, Joseph, and I don't know how many more. And instead of doling kindness—why, I'm begging it. Now what's the meaning of it all? What keeps me failing?"

"'There's a divinity that shapes'—" began the tinker.

But Patsy cut him short. "Ye do know Willie Shakespeare!"

He smiled, guiltily. "I'm afraid I do—known him a good many years."

"He's grand company; best I know, barring tinkers." She turned impulsively and, standing on tiptoe, her fingers reached to the top of his shoulders. "See here, lad, ye can just give over thinking I'll go on alone. If I'm cast for melodrama, sure I'll play it according to the best rules; the villain has fled, the hero is hurt, and if I went now I'd be hissed by the gallery. I've got ye into trouble and I'll not leave ye till I see ye out of it—someway. Oh, there's lots of ways; I'm thinking them fast. Like as not a passing team or car would carry ye to Arden; or we might beg the loan of a horse for a bit from some kind-hearted farmer, and I could drive ye over and bring the horse back; or we'll ask a corner for ye at a farm-house till ye are fit to walk—"

"We are in the wrong part of the country for any of those things to happen. Look about! Don't you see what a very different road it is from the one we took in the beginning?"

Patsy looked and saw. So engrossed had she been in the incidents of the last hour or more that she had not observed the changing country. Here were no longer pastures, tilled fields, houses with neighboring barn-yards, and unclaimed woodland; no longer was the road fringed with stone walls or stump fencing. Well-rolled golf-links stretched away on either hand as far as they could see; and, beyond, through the trees, showed roofs of red tile and stained shingle; and trimmed hedges skirted everything.

"'Tis the rich man's country," commented Patsy.

"It is, and I'd crawl into a hole and starve before I'd take charity from one of them."

"Sure and ye would. When a body's poor 'tis only the poor like himself he'd be asking help of. Don't I know! What's yonder house?" She broke off with a jerk and pointed ahead to a small building, sitting well back from the road, partly hidden in the surrounding clumps of trees.

"It's a stable; house burned down last year and it hasn't been used by any one since."

"And I'll wager it's as snug as a pocket inside—with fresh hay or straw, plenty to make a lad comfortable. Isn't that grand good luck for ye?"

The tinker found it hard to echo Patsy's enthusiasm, but he did his best. "Of course; and it's just the place to leave a lad behind in when a lass has seven miles to tramp before she gets to the end of her journey."

"Is that so?" Patsy's tone sounded suspiciously sarcastic. "Well, talking's not walking; supposing ye take the staff in one hand and lean your other on me, and we'll see can we make it before this time to-morrow."

They made it in another hour, unobserved by the few straggling players on the links.

The stable proved all Patsy had anticipated. She watched the tinker sink, exhausted, on the bedded hay, while she pulled down a forgotten horse-blanket from a near-by peg to throw over him; then she turned in a business-like manner back to the door.

"Are you going to Arden?" came the faint voice of the tinker after her.

"I might—and then again—I mightn't. Was there any word ye might want me to fetch ahead for ye?"

"No; only—perhaps—would you think a chap too everlastingly impertinent to ask you to wait there for him—until he caught up with you?"

"I might—and then again—I mightn't." At the door she stopped, and for the second time considered her hands speculatively. "It wouldn't inconvenience your feelings any to take charity from me, would it, seeing I'm as poor as yourself and have dragged ye into this common, tuppenny brawl by my own foolishness?"

"You didn't drag me in; I had one foot in already."

"I thought so," Patsy nodded, approvingly; her conviction had been correct, then. "And the charity?"

"Yes, I'd take it from you." The tinker rolled over with a little moan composed of physical pain and mental discomfort. But in another moment he was sitting upright, shaking a mandatory fist at Patsy as she disappeared through the door. "Remember—no help from the quality! I hate them as much as you do, and I won't have them coming around with their inquisitive, patronizing, supercilious offers of assistance to a—beggar. I tell you I want to be left alone! If you bring any one back with you I'll burn the stable down about me. Remember!"

"Aye," she called back; "I'll be remembering."

* * * * *

She reached the road again; and for the manyeth time since she left the women's free ward of the City Hospital she marshaled all the O'Connell wits. But even the best of wits require opportunity, and to Patsy the immediate outlook seemed barren of such.

"There's naught to do but keep going till something turns up," she said to herself; and she followed this Micawber advice to the letter. She came to the end of the grounds which had belonged to the burned house and the deserted stable; she passed on, between a stretch of thin woodland and a grove of giant pines; and there she came upon a cross-road. She looked to the right—it was empty. She looked to the left—and behold there was "Opportunity," large, florid, and agitated, coming directly toward her from one of the tile-roofed houses, and puffing audibly under the combined weight of herself and her bag.

"Ze depot—how long ees eet?" she demanded, when she caught sight of Patsy.

The accent was unmistakably French, and Patsy obligingly answered her in her mother-tongue. "I cannot say exactly; about three—four kilometers."

"Opportunity" dropped her bag and embraced her. "Oh!" she burst out, volubly. "Think of Zoe Marat finding a countrywoman in this wild land. Moi—I can no longer stand it; and when madame's temper goes pouffe—I say, it is enough; let madame fast or cook for her guests, as she prefer. I go!"

"Eh, bien!" agreed the outer Patsy, while her subjective consciousness addressed her objective self in plain Donegal: "Faith! this is the maddest luck—the maddest, merriest luck! If yonder Quality House has lost one cook, 'twill be needing another; and 'tis a poor cook entirely that doesn't hold the keys of her own pantry. Food from Quality House needn't be choking the maddest tinker, if it's paid for in honest work."

Having been embraced by "Opportunity," Patsy saw no reason for wasting time in futile sympathy that might better be spent in prompt execution. She despatched the woman to the station with the briefest of directions and herself made straight for Quality House.

She was smiling over her appearance and the incongruities of the situation as she rang the bell at the front door and asked for "Madame" in her best parisien.

The maid, properly impressed, carried the message at once; and curiosity brought madame in surprising haste to the hall, where she looked Patsy over with frank amazement.

"Madame speak French? Ah, I thought so. Madame desires a cook—voila!"

The abruptness of this announcement turned madame giddy. "How did you know? Mine did not leave half an hour ago; there isn't another French cook within five miles; it is unbelievable."

"It is Providence." Patsy cast her eyes devoutly heavenward.

"You have references—"

"References!" Patsy shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. "What would madame do with references? She cannot eat them; she cannot feed them to her guests. I can cook. Is that not sufficient?"

"But—you do not think—It is impossible that I ever employ a servant without references. And you—you look like anything in the world but a French cook."

"Madame is not so foolish as to find fault with the ways of Providence, or judge one by one's clothes? Who knows—at this moment it may be a la mode in Paris for cooks to wear sailor blouses. Besides, madame is mistaken; I am not a servant. I am an artist—a culinary artist."

"You can cook, truly?"

"But yes, madame!"

"Excellent sauces?"

"Mon Dieu—Bechamel—Hollandaise—chaud-froid—maitre d'hotel—Espagnole—Bearnaise—" Patsy completed the list with an ecstatic kiss blown into the air.

Madame sighed and spoke in English: "It is unbelievable—absurd. I shouldn't trust my own eyes or palate if I sat down to-night to the most remarkable dinner in the world; but one must feed one's guests." She looked Patsy over again. "Your trunk?"

"Trunk? Is it toilettes or sauces madame wishes me to make for her guests? Ma foi! Trunks—references—one is as unimportant as the other. Is it not enough for the present if I cook for madame? Afterward—" She ended with the all-expressive shrug.

Evidently madame conceded the point, for without further comment she led the way to the kitchen and presented the bill of fare for dinner.

"'For twelve,'" read Patsy. "And to-morrow is Sunday. Ah, Providence is good to madame, mais-oui?"

But madame's thoughts were on more practical matters. "Your wages?"

"One hundred francs a week, and the kitchen to myself. I, too, have a temper, madame." Patsy gave a quick toss to her head, while her eyes snapped.

* * * * *

That night the week-end guests at Quality House sat over their coffee, volubly commenting on the rare excellence of their dinner and the good fortune of their hostess in her possession of such a cook. Madame kept her own counsel and blessed Providence; but she did not allow that good fortune to escape with her better judgment—or anything else. She ordered the butler, before retiring, to count the silver and lock it in her dressing-room; this was to be done every night—as long as the new cook remained.

And the new cook? Her work despatched, and her kitchen to herself, she was free to get dinner for one more of madame's guests.

"Faith! he'd die of a black fit if he ever knew he was a guest of Quality House—and she'd die of another if she found out whom she was entertaining. But, glory be to Peter! what neither of them knows won't hurt them." And Patsy, unobserved, opened the back door and retraced the road to the deserted stable with a full basket and a glad heart.

She found the tinker under some trees at the back, smoking a disreputable cuddy pipe with a worse accompaniment of tobacco. When he saw her he removed it apologetically.

"It smells horrible, I know. I found it, forgotten, on a ledge of the stable, but it keeps a chap from remembering that he is hungry."

"Poor lad!" Patsy knelt on the ground beside him and opened her basket. "Put your nose into that, just. 'Tis a nine-course dinner and every bit of the best. Faith! 'tis lucky I was found on a Brittany rose-bush instead of one in Heidelberg, Birmingham, or Philadelphia; and if ye can't be born with gold in your mouth the next best thing is a mixing-spoon."

"Meaning?" queried the tinker.

"Meaning—that there's many a poor soul who goes hungry through life because she is wanting the knowledge of how to mix what's already under her nose."

The tinker looked suspiciously from the contents of the basket to Patsy, kneeling beside it, and he dropped into a shameless mimicry of her brogue. "Aye, but how did she come by—what's under her nose? Here's a dinner for a king's son."

"Well, I'll be letting ye play the king's son instead of the fool to-night, just, if ye'll give over asking any more questions and eat."

"But"—he sniffed the plate she had handed him with added suspicion—"roast duck and sherry sauce! Honest, now—have ye been begging?"

"No—nor stealing—nor, by the same token, have I murdered any one to get the dinner from him." There was fine sarcasm in her voice as she returned the tinker's searching look.

"Then where did it come from? I'll not eat a mouthful until I get an honest answer." The tinker put the plate down beside him and folded his arms.

Patsy snorted with exasperation. "Was I ever saying ye could play the king's son? Faith! ye'll never play anything but the fool—first and last." Her voice suddenly took on a more coaxing tone; she was thinking of that good dinner growing cold—spoiled by the man's ridiculous curiosity. "I'll tell ye what—if ye'll agree to begin eating, I'll agree to begin telling ye about it—and we'll both agree not to stop till we get to the end. But Holy Saint Martin! who ever heard of a man before letting his conscience in ahead of his hunger!"

The bargain was made; and while the tinker devoured one plateful after another with a ravenous haste that almost discredited his previous restraint, Patsy spun a fanciful tale of having found a cluricaun under a quicken-tree. With great elaboration and seeming regard for the truth, she explained his magical qualities, and how—if you were clever enough to possess yourself of his cap—you could get almost anything from him.

"I held his cap firmly with the one hand and him by the scruff of the neck with the other; and says I to him, 'Little man, ye'll not be getting this back till ye've fetched me a dinner fit for a tinker.' 'Well, and good,' says he, 'but ye can't find that this side of the King's Hotel, Dublin; and that will take time.' 'Take the time,' says I, 'but get the dinner.' And from that minute till the present I've been waiting under that quicken-tree for him to make the trip there and back."

Patsy finished, and the two of them smiled at each other with rare good humor out under the June stars. Only the tinker's smile was skeptical.

"So—ye are not believing me—" Patsy shammed a solemn, grieved look. "Well—I'll forgive ye this time if ye'll agree that the dinner was good, for I'd hate like the devil to be giving the wee man back his cap for anything but the best."

With laggard grace the tinker stretched his hands over the now empty basket and gripped Patsy's. "Lass, lass—what are you thinking of me? Faith! my manners are more ragged than my clothes—and I'm not fit to be a—tinker. The dinner was the best I ever ate, and—bless ye and the cluricaun!"

Patsy cooked for three days at Quality House, that the tinker might feast night and morning to his heart's content while his ankle slowly mended. But he still persisted questioning concerning his food—where and how Patsy had come by it; she still maintained as persistent a silence.

"I've come by it honestly, and 'tis no charity fare," was the most she would say, adding by way of flavor: "For a sorry tinker ye are the proudest I ever saw. Did ye ever know another, now, who wanted a written certificate of moral character along with every morsel he ate?"

According to wage agreement she had the kitchen to herself; no one entered except on matters of necessity; no one lingered after her work was despatched. Madame came twice daily to confer with Patsy on intricacies of gestation, while she beamed upon her as a probationed soul might look upon the keeper of the keys of Paradise. But the days held more for Patsy than sauces and entrees and pastries; they held gossip as well. Soupcons were served up on loosened tongues, borne in through open window and swinging door—straight from the dining-room and my lady's chamber. Most of it passed her ears, unheeded; it was but a droning accompaniment to her measuring, mixing, rolling, and baking—until news came at last that concerned herself—gossip of the Burgemans, father and son.

The butler and the parlor maid were cleaning the silver in the pantry—and the slide was raised. As transmitters of gossip they were more than usually concerned, for had not the butler at one time served in the house of Burgeman, and the maid dusted next door? Therefore every item of news was well ripened before it dropped from either tongue, and Patsy gathered them in with eager ears.

The master of Quality House happened to be a director of that bank on which the Burgeman check of ten thousand had been drawn. It had been the largest check drawn to cash presented at the bank; and the teller had confessed to the directors that he would never have paid over the money to any one except the old man's son. In fact, he had been so much concerned over it afterward that he had called up the Burgeman office, and had been much relieved to have the assurance of the secretary that the check was certified and perfectly correct. Not a second thought would have been given to the matter had not the secretary's resignation been made public the next day—the day Billy Burgeman disappeared.

Patsy's ears fairly bristled with interest. "That's news, if it is gossip. Where is the secretary now? And which of them has the ten thousand?"

The director had touched on the subject of the check the next day when business had demanded his presence at the Burgeman home. The result had been distinctly baffling. Not that the director could put his finger on any one suspicious point in the behavior of Burgeman, senior; but it left him with the distinct impression that the father was shielding the son.

"Aye, that's what Billy said his father would do—shield him out of pride." Patsy dusted the flour from her arms and stood motionless, thinking.

Burgeman, senior, had offered only one remark to the director, given cynically with a nervous jerking of the shoulders and twitching of the hands: "He was needing pocket-money, a small sum to keep him in shoe-laces and collar-buttons, I dare say. That's the way rich men's sons keep their fathers' incomes from getting too cumbersome."

Burgeman, senior, had been ill then—confined to his room; but the next day his condition had become alarming. He was now dying at his home in Arden and his son could not be found. These last two statements were not merely gossip, but facts.

Patsy listened impatiently to the parlor maid arguing the matter of Billy's guilt with the butler. Their work was finished, and they were passing through the kitchen on their way to the servants' hall.

"Of course he took it"—the maid's tone was positive—"those rich men's sons always are a bad lot."

"'E didn't take it, then. 'Is father's playin' some mean game on 'im—that's what. Hi worked five months hin that 'ouse an' Hi'd as lief work for the devil!" And the butler pounded his fist for emphasis.

It took all Patsy's self-control to refrain from launching into the argument herself, and that in the Irish tongue. She saved herself, however, by resorting to that temper of which she had boasted, and hurled at the two a torrent of words which sounded to them like the most horrible pagan blasphemy, and from which they fled in genuine horror. In reality it was the names of all the places in France that Patsy could recall with rapidity.

When the kitchen was empty once more Patsy systematically gathered together all that she knew and all that she had heard of Billy Burgeman, and weighed it against the bare possible chance she might have of helping him should she continue her quest. And in the end she made her decision unwaveringly.

"Troth! a conscience is a poor bit of property entirely," she sighed, as she stood the pate-shells on the ledge of the range to dry. "It drives ye after a man ye don't care a ha'penny about, and it drives ye from the one that ye do. Bad luck to it!"

* * * * *

That night Patsy sat under the trees with the tinker while he ate his supper. A half-grown moon lighted the feast for them, for Patsy took an occasional mouthful at the tinker's insistence that dining alone was a miserably unsociable affair.

"To watch ye eat that pate de fois gras a body would think ye had been reared on them. Honest, now, have ye ever tasted one before in your life?"

"I have."

"Then—ye have sat at rich men's tables?"

"Or perhaps I have begged at rich men's doors. Maybe that is how I came to have a distaste for their—charity."

"Who are ye? Ye know I'd give the full of my empty pockets to know who ye are, and what started ye tramping the road—in rags."

The tinker considered a moment. "Perhaps I took the road because I believed it led to the only place I cared to find. Perhaps I lost the way to it, as you lost yours to Arden, and in the losing I found—something else. Perhaps—perhaps—oh, perhaps a hundred things; but I'll make another bargain with you. I'll tell you all about it when we reach Arden, if you'll tell me the name of the lad you came to find."

"I'll do more than that—I'll bring ye together and let ye help mend him," and she stretched forth her hand to clinch the bargain.

They sat in silence under the spattering of moonlight that sifted down through the branches; for the moment the tinker had forgotten his hunger.

"Well?" queried Patsy at last. "A ha'penny for them."

"I'm thinking the same old thoughts I've thought a hundred times already—since that first day: What makes you so different from everybody else? What ever sent you out into the world with your gospel of kindness—on your lips and in your hands?"

"Would ye really like to know?" Patsy's fingers stole through the grass about them. "Faith! the world's not so soft and green as this under every one's feet. Ye see 'twas by a thorn I was found hanging to that Killarney rose-bush in Brittany, and I've always remembered the feeling of it."

"I always suspected that the people who fell heir to stinging memories generally went through life hugging their own troubles, and letting the rest of the world hug theirs."

"I don't believe it!" Patsy shook her head fiercely. "What's the use of all the pain and sorrow and trouble scattered about everywhere if it can't put a cure for others into the hands of those who have first tasted it? And what better cure can ye find than kindness; isn't it the best thing in the world?"

"Is it? Can it cure—gold?"

"And why not? If every man had more kindness than he had gold, would neighbor ever have to fear neighbor or childther go hungry for love?" The tinker did not answer, and Patsy went on with a deepening intensity: "I'll tell ye a tale—a foolish tale that keeps repeating itself over and over in my memory like the tick-tick-tick of a clock. Ye know that the Jesuit Fathers say—give them the care of a child till he's ten and nothing afterward matters. Well, it's true; a child can feel all the sweetness or bitterness, hunger or plenty, that life holds before he is that age even."

Patsy stopped. A veery was singing in the woods close by, and she listened for a moment. "Hearken to that bird, now. A good-for-naught lad may have stolen his nest, or a cat filched his young, or his sons and daughters flown away and left him; but he'll sing, for all that. 'Tis a pity the rest of us can't do as well."

"Yes," agreed the tinker, "but the story—"

"Aye, the story. It begins with a wee white cottage in Brittany, fronted by roses and backed by great cliffs and the open sea." Patsy clasped her hands about her knees, while her eyes left the shadow of the trees and traveled to the open where the moonlight spread silvery clear and unbroken. And the tinker, watching, knew that her eyes were seeing the things of which she was telling. "A wee white cottage—the roses and the cliffs," repeated Patsy, "and a great, grim, silent figure of a man sitting there idle all day, watching a little lass at her play. Just the man and the child. And the trouble in his mind that had kept the man silent and idle was an old, old trouble—old as the peopled world itself.

"Long before, he had married a woman who cared for two things—love and gold; and he had but the one to give her. She had been a great actress, a favorite at the Comedie Francaise; but she left her work and all the applause and adulation for him, an expatriated Irishman with naught but a great love, because she thought she cared for love more. They had been wonderfully happy at first; he wrote beautiful verses about her—and his beloved motherland, and she said them for him in that wonderful singing voice of hers that had made her the idol of half of France. And she had made a game of their poverty in the wee white cottage with the roses—until her child was born and poverty could no longer be played at. Then work became drudgery, and love naught. The woman went back to her theater—and another man, a man who had gold a-plenty. And the child grew up playing alone beside the silent, grim Irishman.

"Then one day the child played with no one by to watch her; the man had walked over the cliff and forgot ever to come back. Aye, and the child played on till dark came and she fell asleep—there on the door-sill, under the roses. 'Twas a neighbor, passing, that found her, and carried her home to put to bed with her own children. After that the child was taken away to a convent, and the rich children called her 'la pauvre petite,' shared their saints'-days' gifts with her, and bought her candles that she might make a novena to bring her father back again. But 'twas her mother it brought instead."

Patsy stopped again to listen to the veery; he was not singing alone now, and she smiled wistfully. "See! he's found a friend, a comrade to sing with him. That's grand!" Then she went back to the story:

"The child was taken from the convent in the night and by somber-clad servants who seemed in a great hurry. She was brought a long way to a chateau, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the south of France; and a small, shrivel-faced man in royal clothes met her at the door and carried her up great marble stairs to a chamber lighted by two tall candles, just. They stopped on the threshold for a breath, and the child saw that a woman was lying in the canopied bed—a very, very beautiful woman. To the child she seemed some goddess—or saint.

"'Here is the child,' said the man; and the woman answered: 'Alone, Rene. Remember you promised—alone.'

"After that the man left them together—the dying woman and her child. Ah!—how can I be telling you the way she fondled and caressed her! How starved were the lips that touched the child's hair, cheeks, and eyelids! And when her strength failed she drew the child into her tired arms and whispered fragments of prayers, haunting memories, pitiful regrets. Of all the things she said the child remembered but one: 'Gold buys plenty for the body, but nothing for the heart—nothing—nothing!'

"And that kept repeating itself over and over in the child's mind. She remembered it all through the night after they had taken her away from those lifeless arms and she lay awake alone in a terrifying, dark room; she remembered it all through the long day when she sat beside the gorgeous catafalque that held her mother, and watched the tall candles in the dim chapel burn lower and lower and lower. And that was why she refused to stay afterward—and be taken care of by the shrivel-faced man in that oldest and most beautiful chateau. Instead she slipped out early one morning, before any one was awake to see and mark the way she went. It is unbelievable, sometimes, how children who have the will to do it can lose themselves. And so this child—alone—went out into the world, empty-handed, seeking life."

"But did she go empty-handed?" asked the tinker.

"Aye, but not empty-hearted, thank God!"

"And wherever the child went, she carried with her that hatred of gold," mused the tinker.

"Aye; why not? She had learned how pitifully little it was worth, when all's said and done. 'Twas her father's name she heard last on her mother's lips, and it was their child she prayed for with her dying breath." Patsy sprang to her feet. "Do ye see—the moon will be beating me to bed, and 'twas a poor tale, after all. How is your foot?"

"Better—much better."

"Would ye be able to travel on it to-morrow?"

The tinker shook his head. "The day after, perhaps."

"Well, keep on coaxing it. Good night." And she had picked up her basket and was gone before the tinker could stumble to his feet.

* * * * *

When the tinker woke the next morning the basket stood just inside the stable door, linked through the pilgrim's staff. On investigation it proved to contain his breakfast and an envelope, and the envelope contained a ten-dollar bill and a letter, which read:

DEAR LAD,—I'll be well on the road when you get this; and with a tongue in my head and luck at my heels, please God, I'll reach Arden this time. You need not be afraid to use the money—or too proud, either. It was honestly earned and the charity of no one; you can take it as a loan or a gift—whichever you choose. Anyhow, it will bring you after me faster—which was your own promise.

Yours in advance,

P. O'CONNELL

Surprise, disappointment, indignation, amusement, all battled for the upper hand; but it was a very different emotion from any of these which finally mastered the tinker. He smoothed the bill very tenderly between his hands before he returned it to the envelope; but he did something more than smooth the envelope.

And meanwhile Patsy tramped the road to Arden.



XIII

A MESSAGE AND A MAP

This time there was no mistaking the right road; it ran straight past Quality House to Arden—unbroken but for graveled driveways leading into private estates. Patsy traveled it at a snail's pace. Now that Arden had become a definitely unavoidable goal, she was more loath to reach it than she had been on any of the seven days since the beginning of her quest. However the quest ended—whether she found Billy Burgeman or not, or whether there was any need now of finding him—this much she knew: for her the road ended at Arden. What lay beyond she neither tried nor cared to prophesy. Was it not enough that her days of vagabondage would be over—along with the company of tinkers and such like? There might be an answer awaiting her to the letter sent from Lebanon to George Travis; in that case she could in all probability count on some dependable income for the rest of the summer. Otherwise—there were her wits. The very thought of them wrung a pitiful little groan from Patsy.

"Faith! I've been overworking Dan's legacy long enough, I'm thinking. Poor wee things! They're needing rest and nourishment for a while," and she patted her forehead sympathetically.

Of one thing she was certain—if her wits must still serve her, they should do so within the confines of some respectable community; in other words, she would settle down and work at something that would provide her with bed and board until the fall bookings began. And, the road and the tinker would become as a dream, fading with the summer into a sweet, illusive memory—and a photograph. Patsy felt in the pocket of her Norfolk for the latter with a sudden eagerness. It had been forgotten since she had found the tinker himself; but, now that the road was lengthening between them again, it brought her a surprising amount of comfort.

"There are three things I shall have to be asking him—if he ever fetches up in Arden, himself," mused Patsy as she loitered along. "And, what's more, this time I'll be getting an answer to every one of them or I'm no relation of Dan's. First, I'll know the fate of the brown dress; he hadn't a rag of it about him—that's certain. Next, there's that breakfast with the lady's-slippers. How did he come by it? And, last of all, how ever did this picture come on the mantel-shelf of a closed cottage where he knew the way of breaking in and what clothes would be hanging in the chamber closets? 'Tis all too great a mystery—"

"Why, Miss O'Connell—what luck!"

Patsy had been so deep in her musing that a horse and rider had come upon her unnoticed. She turned quickly to see the rider dismounting just back of her; it was Gregory Jessup.

"The top o' the morning to ye!" She broke into a glad laugh, blessing that luck, herself, which had broken into her disquieting thoughts and provided at least fair company and some news—perhaps. She held out her hand in hearty welcome. "Are ye 'up so early or down so late'?"

"I might ask that, myself. Is it the habit of celebrated Irish actresses to tramp miles between sun-up and breakfast?"

"'Tis a habit more likely to fasten itself on French cooks, I'm thinking," and Patsy smiled.

"Then how is a man to account for you?"

"He'd best not try; I'm a mortial poor person to account for. Maybe I'm up early—getting my lines for the next act."

"Of course. What a stupid duffer I am! You must find us plain, plodding Americans horribly short-witted sometimes. Don't you?"

Patsy shook a contradiction. "It's your turn, now. What fetched ye abroad at this hour?"

Gregory Jessup slipped his arm through the horse's bridle and fell into step with her. "Principally because I like the early morning better than any other part of the day; it's fresh and sweet and unspoiled—like some Irish actresses. There—please don't mind my crude attempt at poetic—simile," for Patsy's eyes had snapped dangerously. "If you only knew how rarely poetry or compliments ever came to roost on this dry tongue, you really wouldn't want to discourage them when it does happen. Besides, there was another reason for my being up—a downright foolish reason."

Gregory Jessup accompanied the remark with a downright foolish smile, and then lapsed into silence. In this fashion they walked to the bend of the road where another graveled driveway branched forth; and here the horse stopped of his own accord and whinnied.

"This is the Dempsy Carters' place—where I'm stopping," Gregory explained.

"Aye, but the other reason?" Patsy reminded him, her eyes friendly once more.

"Oh—the other reason; I told you it was a foolish one." He stood rubbing his horse's nose and looking over the road they had come for some seconds before he finally confessed to it. "It's Billy, you see. Somehow it occurred to me that if he should be in trouble and at the same time knowing his father was sick—dying—he might be hanging around somewhere near here—uncertain just what to do—and not wanting any one to see him. In that case, the best time to run across him would be early morning before the rest of the people were awake and up. Don't you think so?"

"It sounds more sensible than foolish; but I don't think ye'll ever find him that way. If he was clever enough to let the earth swallow him up, he's clever enough to keep swallowed. There's but one way to reach him—and it's been in my mind since yester-eve."

A look of surprise came into Gregory Jessup's face. "Why, Miss O'Connell! I had no idea what I said that day would fasten Billy on your mind like this. It's awfully good of you; and he's a perfect stranger—"

Patsy broke in with a whimsical chuckle. "Aye, I've grown overpartial to strangers of late; but ye hearken to me. Ye'll have to leave a sign by the roadside for him—if ye want to reach him. Otherwise he'll see ye first and be gone before ever ye know he's about."

"What kind of a sign?"

"Faith! I'm not sure of that yet—myself. It must be something that will put trust back in a lad and tell him to come home."

"And where would you put it?"

"Where? On the roadside, just, anywhere along the road he's used to tramping."

Gregory Jessup's face lost its puzzled frown and became suddenly illumined with an inspiration. "I know! By Hec! I've got it! There's that path that runs down from the Burgeman estate to our old cottage. It was a short cut for us kids, and we were almost the only ones to use it. Billy would be far more likely to take that than the highroad—and it leads to the Burgeman farm, too, run by an old couple that simply adore Billy. He might go there when he wouldn't go anywhere else. That's the place for a message. But what message?"

"I know!" Patsy clapped her hands. "Have ye a scrap of paper anywheres about ye—and a pencil?"

Hunting through the pockets of his riding-clothes, Gregory Jessup discovered a business letter, the back of which provided ample writing space, and the stub of a red-ink pencil. "We use 'em in the drafting-room," he explained. "If these will do—here's a desk," and he raised the end of his saddle, supporting it with a large expanse of palm.

Patsy accepted them all with a gracious little nod, and, spreading the paper on the improvised desk, she wrote quickly:

"If it do come to pass That any man turn ass," Thinking the world is blind And trust forsworn mankind, "Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame": Here shall he find Both trust and peace of mind, An he but leave all foolishness behind.

"With apologies to Willie Shakespeare," Patsy chuckled again as she returned paper and pencil to their owner. "Ye put it somewhere he'd be likely to look—furninst something that would naturally take his notice."

"I know just the spot—and they're in blossom now, too. I'll fasten it to a rock, there, wedge it in the cracks. Billy won't miss it if he comes within yards of the place." He grasped Patsy's hand with growing fervor that gave promise of developing suddenly into almost anything. "You're a brick, Miss O'Connell—a solid gold brick of a girl, and I wish—"

"Take care!" warned Patsy. "Ye're not improving as fast in your compliments as ye might—and there's no poetry in gold—for me."

Gregory Jessup looked puzzled, but his fervor did not abate one whit. "I want you to promise me if you ever need a friend—if there is anything I can ever do—"

"Ye can," interrupted Patsy, "and ye can do it now. Take that riding-crop of yours and draw me a map in the dust there of the country hereabouts—ye can make a cross for Arden.... That's grand. Now where would ye put Brambleside Inn? And is it seven miles from there to Arden?"

Gregory nodded an affirmative while he considered Patsy with grave perplexity. Patsy saw it, and smiled reassuringly. "'Tis all right. I've always had a great interest entirely to know the geography of every new country—and I haven't the wits to discover it for myself. Now where would ye put the cross-roads and the Catholic church? And where would Lebanon be? Aye—Did ye ever see an old tabby chasing her tail? Faith! 'tis a very intelligent spectacle, I'm thinking. Now where might ye put the cross-roads where ye picked me up with the Dempsy Carters?... And Dansville?... and the railroad bridge? ... and the golf links, back yonder?"

She stood for many minutes, studying the rough chart in the dust at her feet. The connecting lines of roads between the places named made fully a hundred and twenty degrees of a circle about the cross marking Arden. And as chance would have it, every one of the encircling towns measured approximately seven miles from the central cross. Patsy smiled, and the smile grew to a chuckle—and the chuckle to a long, rippling laugh. Patsy was forced to hold her sides with the ache of it.

"I know ye think I'm crazy—but 'tis the rarest bit of humor this side of Ireland. Willie Shakespeare himself would steal it if he could to put in one of his comedies. There is just one thing I'd like to be knowing—how much of it was chance, and how much was the tricks of a tinker?"

"I don't think I understand," mumbled Gregory Jessup.

"Of course ye don't," agreed Patsy. "I don't, myself. But there's one thing more I'll be telling ye—if ye'll swear never to let it pass your lips?"

Patsy paused for dramatic effect while Gregory Jessup bound himself twice over to secrecy. "Well," she said, at length, "'tis this: If I had the road to travel again I'd pray to Saint Brendan to keep my feet fast to the wrong turn. That's what!"

Patsy left him, still looking after her in a puzzled fashion; and with quickening steps she passed out of sight.

But once again did she stop; and again it was by a graveled driveway. She was deep in green memories when a figure in nurse's uniform coming down the drive caught her attention. She was immediately reminded of two facts: that the Burgeman estate was in Arden, and that Burgeman senior was dying. Impulsively she turned toward the nurse.

"Is Mr. Burgeman any better this morning?"

"We hardly expect that." The nurse's tone was cordial but professionally cautious.

"I know"—Patsy nodded wisely, as if she had been following the case professionally herself—"but there is often a last rallying of strength. Isn't there?"

"Sometimes. I hardly think there will be anything very lasting in Mr. Burgeman's case. There are moments, now, when his strength and will are remarkably vigorous—any other man would be in his bed."

"Oh! Then he is—up?"

"He's taken about on a wheeled chair or cot. He is too restless to stay in any place very long. He seems more contented outdoors, where he can watch—" She broke off abruptly. "Lovely morning—isn't it? Good-by."

She turned about and went up the drive again. Patsy watched her go, a strange, brooding look in her eyes. "So—he likes to be out of doors best—where he can be watching. And if a body chanced to trespass that way—she might come upon him, sudden like, and stay long enough to set him a-thinking. Would it be too late, now, I wonder?"

She resumed her way—and her memories. She passed a half-dozen more driveways and she climbed a hill; and when she came to the top she found herself looking down on a thickly wooded hamlet. Spires and gabled roofs broke the foliage here and there, and on the rising slope beyond towered a veritable forest. Patsy stood on the brink of the hill and gazed down long and thoughtfully; at last she flung out her arms in an impetuous gesture of confirmation, while the old, whimsical smile crept into her lips.

"'Aye, now am I in Arden, the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place—but travelers must be content.'" And taking a firm grip of her memories, her wits, and her courage, she went down the hill.



XIV

ENTER KING MIDAS

When Patsy at last reached Arden she went direct to the post-office and was there confronted by a huge poster occupying an entire wall:

THE SYLVAN PLAYERS

Under the Management of Geo. Travis

Presenting Wm. Shakespeare's Comedy

"AS YOU LIKE IT"

In the Forest of Arden, on the Estate of Peterson-Jones, Esq.

The date given was Wednesday, the day following; and the cast registered her name opposite Rosalind.

"So that's the answer to the letter I wrote, and a grand answer it is. And that's the meaning of Janet Payne's remarks, and I never guessed it." She heaved the faintest wisp of a sigh—it might have been pleasure; it might have been a twinge of pain. "And I'm to be playing the Duke's daughter, after all, at the end of the road."

She went to the general delivery and asked for mail. The clerk responded with three letters; Patsy almost whistled under her breath. Retiring to a corner, she looked them over and opened first the one from George Travis:

DEAR IRISH PATSY,—You are a lucky beggar, and so am I. Here comes the news of Miriam St. Regis's illness and the canceling of all of her summer engagements in the same mail as your letter.

Just think of it! Here you are actually in Arden all ready for me to pick up and put in Miriam's place without having to budge from my desk. The Sylvan Players open with "As You Like It." If the critics like it—and you—as well as I think they will, I'll book you straight through the summer. Felton's managing for me, so please report to him on Monday when he gets there. I may run down myself for a glimpse of your work.

Yours, G. TRAVIS.

P. S. More good luck. We are just in time to get your name on the posters; and unless my memory greatly deceives me, you will be able to walk right into all of Miriam's costumes.

"Aye, they'll fit," agreed Patsy, with a chuckle. The second letter was from Felton—dated Monday. He was worried over her continued absence. He had not found her registered at either of the two hotels, and the postal clerk reported her mail uncalled for. Would she come to the Hillcrest Hotel at once. The third was from Janet Payne, expressing her grief over Joseph's death, and their disappointment at finding her gone the next morning when they motored over to take her to Arden. They were all looking forward to seeing her play on Wednesday.

Patsy returned the letters to their envelopes and marveled that her new-found prosperity should affect her so drearily. Why was she not elated, transported with the surprise and the sudden promise of success? She was free to go now to a good hotel and sign for a room and three regular meals a day. She could wire at once to Miss Gibbs, of the select boarding-house, and have her trunk down in twenty-four hours. In very truth, her days of vagabondage were over, yet the fact brought her no happiness.

She hunted Felton up at the hotel and explained her absence: "Just a week-end at one of the fashionable places. No, not exactly professional. No, not social either. You might call it—providential, like this."

The morning was spent meeting her fellow-players—going over the text, trying on the St. Regis costumes, adjourning at last to the estate of Peterson-Jones.

Until the middle of the afternoon they were busy with rehearsals: the mental tabulating of new stage business, the adapting of strange stage property, the accustoming of one's feet to tread gracefully over roots and tangling vines and slippery patches of pine needles instead of a good stage flooring. And through all this maze Patsy's mind played truant. A score of times it raced off back to the road again, to wait between a stretch of woodland and a grove of giant pines for the coming of a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags.

"Come, come, Miss O'Connell; what's the matter?" Felton's usual patience snapped under the strain of her persistent wit-wandering. "I've had to tell you to change that entrance three times."

"Aye—and what is the matter?" Patsy repeated the question remorsefully. "Maybe I've acquired the habit of taking the wrong entrance. What can you expect from any one taking seven days to go seven miles. I'm dreadfully sorry. If you'll only let me off this time I promise to remember to-morrow; I promise!"

* * * * *

The day had been growing steadily hotter and more sultry. By five o'clock every one who was doing anything, and could stop doing it, went slothfully about looking for cool spots and cooler drinks. Burgeman senior, alone with his servants on the largest estate in Arden, ordered one of the nurses to wheel him to the border of his own private lake—a place where breezes blew if there were any about—and leave him there alone until Fitzpatrick, his lawyer, came from town. And there he was sitting, his eyes on nothing at all, when Patsy scrambled up the bank of the lake and dropped breathless under a tree—not three feet from him.

"Merciful Saint Patrick! I never saw you! Maybe I'm trespassing, now?"

"You are," agreed Burgeman senior in a colorless voice. "But I hardly think any one will put you off the grounds—at least until you have caught your breath."

"Thank you. Maybe the grounds are yours, now?" she questioned again.

The sick man signified they were by a slight nod.

"Well, 'tis the prettiest place hereabouts." Patsy offered the information as if she had made the discovery herself and was generously sharing it with him. "I'm a stranger; and when I saw yon bit of cool, gray water, and the pines clustering round, and the wee green faery isle in the midst—with the bridge holding onto it to keep it from disappearing entirely—and the sand so white, and the lawns so green—why, it looked like a Japanese garden set in a great sedge bowl. Do you wonder I had to come closer and see it better?"

Burgeman said nothing; but the ghost of a feeling showed, the greed of possession.

"And it all belongs to you. You bought it all—the lake and the woods and the lawns." It was not a question, but a statement.

"I own three miles in every direction."

"Except that one." Patsy smiled as she pointed a finger upward. "Did you ever think how generous the blessed Lord is to lend a bit of His sky to put over the land men buy and fence in and call 'private property'? It's odd how a body can think he owns something because he has paid money for it; and yet the things that make it worth the owning he hasn't paid for at all."

"What do you mean?"

"Would you think much of this place if you couldn't be looking yonder and watching the clouds scud by, all turning to pink and flame color and purple as the sun gathers them in? What would you do if no wild flowers grew for you, or the birds forgot you in the spring and built their nests and sang for your neighbor instead? And can you hire the sun to shine by the day, or order the rain by the hogshead?"

Burgeman senior was contemplating her with genuine amazement. "I do not believe I have ever heard any one put forth such extraordinary theories before. May I ask if you are a socialist?"

"Bless you, no! I am a very ordinary human being, just; principally human."

"Do you know who I am?"

For an instant Patsy looked at him without speaking; then she answered, slowly: "You have told me, haven't you? You are the master of the place, and you look a mortal lonely one."

"I—am." The words seemed to slip from his lips without his being at all conscious of having spoken.

"And the money couldn't keep it from you." There was no mockery in her tone. "'Tis pitifully few comforts you can buy in life, when all's said and done."

"Comforts!" The sick man's eyes grew sharp, attacking, with a force that had not been his for days. "You are talking now like a fool. Money is the only thing that can buy comforts. What comforts have the poor?"

"Are you meaning butlers and limousines, electric vibrators and mud-baths? Those are only cures for the bodily necessities and ills that money brings on a man: the over-feeding and the over-drinking and the—under-living. But what comforts would they bring to a troubled mind and a pinched heart? Tell me that!"

"So! You would prefer to be poor—more pastorally poetic?" Burgeman sneered.

"More comfortable," corrected Patsy. "Mind you, I'm not meaning starved, ground-under-the-heel poverty, the kind that breeds anarchists and criminals. God pity them, too! I mean the man who is still too poor to reckon his worth to a community in mere money, who, instead, doles kindness and service to his neighbors. Did you ever see a man richer than the one who comes home at day's end, after eight hours of good, clean work, and finds the wife and children watching for him, happy-eyed and laughing?"

The sick man stirred uneasily. "Well—can't a rich man find the same happiness?"

"Aye, he can; but does he? Does he even want it? Count up the rich men you know, and how many are there—like that?" No answer being given, Patsy continued: "Take the richest man—the very richest man in all this country—do you suppose in all his life he ever saw his own lad watching for him to come home?"

"What do you know about the richest man—and his son?" The sick man had for a moment become again a fiercely bitter, fighting force, a power given to sweeping what it willed before it. He sat with hands clenched, his eyes burning into the girl's on the ground beside him. "I know what the world says."

"The world lies; it has always lied."

"You are wrong. It is a tongue here and a tongue there that bears false witness; but the world passes on the truth; it has to."

"You forget"—Burgeman senior spoke with difficulty—"it is the rich who bear the burdens of the world's cares and troubles, and what do they get for it? The hatred of every one else, even their sons! Every one hates and envies the man richer and more powerful than himself; the more he has the more he is feared. He lives friendless; he dies—lonely."

Patsy rose to her knees and knelt there, shaking her fist—a composite picture of supplicating Justice and accusing Truth. She had forgotten that the man before her was sick—dying; that he must have suffered terribly in spirit as well as body; and that her words were so many barbed shafts striking at his soul. She remembered nothing save the thing against which she was fighting: the hard, merciless possession of money and the arrogant boast of it.

"And you forget that the burden of trouble which the brave rich bear so nobly are troubles they've put into the world themselves. They hoard their money to buy power; and then they use that power to get more money. And so the chain grows—money and power, money and power! I heard of a rich man once who turned a terrible fever loose all over the land because he bribed the health inspectors not to close down his factories. And after death had swept his books clean he gave large sums of money to stamp out the epidemic in the near-by towns. Faith! that was grand—the bearing of that trouble! And why are the rich hated? Why do they live friendless and die lonely? Not because they hold money, not because they give it away or help others with it. No! But because they use it to crush others, to rob those who have less than they have, to turn their power into a curse. That's the why!"

Patsy, the fanatic, turned suddenly into Patsy, the human, again. The fist that had been beating the air under his nose dropped and spread itself tenderly on the sick man's knee. "But I'm sorry you're lonely. If there was anything you wanted—that you couldn't buy and I could earn for you—I would get it gladly."

"I believe you would," and the confession surprised the man himself more than it did Patsy. "Who are you?" he asked at last.

"No one at all, just; a laggard by the roadside—a lass with no home, no kin, and that for a fortune," and she flung out her two empty hands, palm uppermost, and laughed.

"And you are audacious enough to think you are richer than I." This time there was no sneer in his voice, only an amused toleration.

"I am," said Patsy, simply.

"You have youth and health," he conceded, grudgingly.

"Aye, and trust in other folks; that's a fearfully rich possession."

"It is. I might exchange with you—all this," and his hand swept encompassingly over his great estate, "for that last—trust in other folks—in one's own folks!"

"Maybe I'd give it to you for nothing—a little of it at any rate. See, you trust me; and here's—trust in your son." Patsy's voice dropped to a whisper; she leaned forward and opened one of the sick man's hands, then folded the fingers tightly over something that appeared to be invisible—and precious. "Now, you believe in him, no matter what he's done; you believe he wouldn't wrong you or himself by doing anything base; you believe that he is coming back to you—to break the loneliness, and that he'll find a poor, plain man for a father, waiting him. Don't you remember the prodigal lad—how his father saw him a long way off and went to meet him? Well, you can meet him with a long-distance trust—understanding. And there's one thing more; don't you be so blind or so foolish as to crush him with the weight of 'all this.' Mind, he has the right to the making of his own life—for a bit at least; and it's your privilege to give him that right—somehow. You've still a chance to keep him from wanting to pitch your money for quoits off the Battery."

Patsy sprang to her feet; but Burgeman senior had reached forward quickly and caught her skirt, holding it in a marvelously firm grip. "Then you do know who I am; you've known it all along."

"I know you're the master of all this, and your lad is the Rich Man's Son; that's all."

"And you think—you think I have no right to leave my son the inheritance I have worked and saved for him."

"I think you have no right to leave him your—greed. 'Tis a mortal poor inheritance for any lad."

"Your vocabulary is rather blunt." Burgeman smiled faintly. "But it is very refreshing. It is a long time since naked truth and I met face to face."

"But will it do you any good—or is it too late?" Patsy eyed him contemplatively.

"Too late for what?"

"Too late for the inheritance—too late to give it away somewhere else—or loan it for a few years till the lad had a chance to find out if he could make some decent use of it himself. There's many ways of doing it; I have thought of a few this last half-hour. You might loan it to the President to buy up some of the railroads for the government—or to purchase the coal or oil supply; or you might offer it as a prize to the country that will stop fighting first; or it might buy clean politics into some of the cities—or endow a university." She laughed. "It's odd, isn't it, how a body without a cent to her name can dispose of a few score millions—in less minutes?"

"If you please, sir." A motionless, impersonal figure in livery stood at a respectful distance behind the wheel-chair. Neither of them had been conscious of his presence.

"Well, Parsons?"

"Mr. Billy, sir, has come back, sir. He and Mr. Fitzpatrick came together. Shall I bring them out here or wheel you inside, sir?"

"Inside!" Burgeman senior almost shouted it. Then he turned to Patsy and there was more than mere curiosity in his voice: "Who are you?"

"No one at all, just; a laggard by the roadside," she repeated, wistfully. And then she added in her own Donegal: "But don't ye let the lagging count for naught. Promise me that!"

The sick man turned his head for a last look at her. "Such a simple promise—to throw away the fruits of a lifetime!" Bitterness was in his voice again, but Patsy caught the muttering under his breath. "I might think about the boy, though, if the Lord granted me time."

"Amen!" whispered Patsy.

She scrambled down the bank the way she had come. For a moment she stopped by the lake and skimmed a handful of white pebbles across its mirrored surface. She watched the ripples she had made spread and spread until they lost themselves in the lake itself, leaving behind no mark where they had been.

"Yonder's the way with the going and coming of most of us, a little ripple and naught else—unless it is one more stone at the bottom." She heaved a sigh. "Well, the quest is over, and I've never laid eyes on the lad once. But it's ended well, I'm thinking; aye, it's ended right for him."



XV

ARDEN

Summer must have made one day in June purposely as a setting for a pastoral comedy; and chance stole it, like a kindly knave, and gave it to the Sylvan Players. Never did a gathering of people look down from the rise of a natural amphitheater upon a fairer scene; a Forest of Arden, built by the greatest scenic artist since the world began. Birds flew about the trees and sang—whenever the orchestra permitted; a rabbit or two scuttled out from under rhododendron-bushes and skipped in shy ingenue fashion across the stage; while overhead a blue, windless sky spread radiance about players and audience alike.

Shorn of so much of the theatricalism of ordinary stage performances, there was reality and charm about this that warmed the spectators into frequent bursts of spontaneous enthusiasm which were as draughts of elixir to the players. Those who were playing creditably played well; those who were playing well excelled themselves, and Patsy outplayed them all.

She lived every minute of the three hours that spanned the throwing of Charles, the wrestler, and her promise "to make all this matter even." There was no touch of coarseness in her rollicking laughter, no hoydenish swagger in her masquerading; it was all subtly, irresistibly feminine. And George Travis, watching from the obscurity of a back seat, pounded his knee with triumph and swore he would make her the greatest Shakespearean actress of the day.

As Hymen sang her parting song, Patsy scanned the sea of faces beyond the bank of juniper which served instead of footlights. Already she had picked out Travis, Janet Payne and her party, the people from Quality House, who still gaped at her, unbelieving, and young Peterson-Jones, looking more melancholy, myopic, and poetical than before. But the one face she hoped to find was missing, even among the stragglers at the back; and it took all her self-control to keep disappointment and an odd, hurt feeling out of her voice as she gave the epilogue.

On the way to her tent—a half-score of them were used as dressing-rooms behind the stage—George Travis overtook her. "It's all right, girl. You've made a bigger hit than even I expected. I'm going to try you out in—"

Patsy cut him short. "You sat at the back. Did you see a vagabond lad hanging around anywhere—with a limp to him?"

The manager looked at her with amused toleration. "Does a mere man happen to be of more consequence this minute than your success? Oh, I say, that's not like you, Irish Patsy!"

She crimsoned, and the manager teased no more. "We play Greyfriars to-morrow and back to Brambleside the day after; and I've made up my mind to try you out there in Juliet. If you can handle tragedy as you can comedy, I'll star you next winter on Broadway. Oh, your future's very nearly made, you lucky girl!"

But Patsy, slipping into her tent, hardly heard the last. If they played Greyfriars the next day, that meant they would leave Arden on the first train after they were packed; and that meant she was passing once and for all beyond tramping reach of the tinker. There was a dull ache at her heart which she attempted neither to explain nor to analyze; it was there—that was enough. With impatient fingers she tore off Rosalind's wedding finery and attacked her make-up. Then she lingered over her dressing, hoping to avoid the rest of the company and any congratulatory friends who might happen to be browsing around. She wanted to be alone with her memories—to have and to hold them a little longer before they should grow too dim and far away.

A hand scratched at the flap of her tent and Janet Payne's voice broke into her reverie: "Can't we see you, please, for just a moment? We'll solemnly promise not to stay long."

Patsy hooked back the flap and forced the semblance of a welcome into her greeting.

"It was simply ripping!" chorused the Dempsy Carters, each gripping a hand.

Janet Payne looked down upon her with adoring eyes. "It was the best, the very best I've ever seen you or any one else play it. For the first time Rosalind seemed a real girl."

But it was the voice of Gregory Jessup that carried above the others: "Have you heard, Miss O'Connell? Burgeman died last night, and Billy was with him. He's come home."

"Faith! then there's some virtue in signs, after all."

A hush fell on the group. Patsy suddenly put out her hand. "I'm glad for you—I'm glad for him; and I hope it ended right. Did you see him?"

"For a few minutes. There wasn't time to say much; but he looked like a man who had won out. He said he and the old man had had a good talk together for the first time in their lives—said it had given him a father whose memory could never shame him or make him bitter. I wanted to tell you, so you wouldn't have him on your mind any longer."

She smiled retrospectively. "Thank you; but I heaved him off nearly twenty-four hours ago."

Left to herself again, she finished her packing; then tying under her chin a silly little poke-bonnet of white chiffon and corn-flowers, still somewhat crushed from its long imprisonment in a trunk, she went back for a last glimpse of the Forest and her Greenwood tree.

The place was deserted except for the teamsters who had come for the tents and the property trunks. A flash of white against the green of the tree caught her eye; for an instant she thought it one of Orlando's poetic effusions, overlooked in the play and since forgotten. Idly curious, she pulled it down and read it—once, twice, three times:

Where twin oaks rustle in the wind, There waits a lad for Rosalind. If still she be so wond'rous kind, Perchance she'll ease the fretted mind That naught can cure—but Rosalind.

With a glad little cry she crumpled the paper in her hand and fled, straight as a throstle to its mate, to the giant twin oaks which were landmarks in the forest. Her eyes were a-search for a vagabond figure in rags; it was small wonder, therefore, that they refused to acknowledge the man in his well-cut suit of gray who was leaning partly against the hole of a tree and partly on a pilgrim staff. She stood and stared and gave no sign of greeting.

"Well, so the Duke's daughter found her rhyme?"

"I'm not knowing whether I'll own ye or not. Sure, ye've no longer the look of an honest tinker; and maybe we'd best part company now—before we meet at all."

But the tinker had her firmly by both hands. "That's too late now. I would have come in rags if there'd been anything left of them, but they are the only things I intend to part company with. And do you know"—he gripped her hands tighter—"I met an acquaintance as I came this way who told me, with eyes nearly popping out of his head, that the wonderful little person who had played herself straight into hundreds of hearts had actually been his cook for three days. Oh, lass! lass! how could you do it!"

"Troth! God made me a better cook than actress. Ye wouldn't want me to be slighting His handiwork entirely, would ye?"

The tinker shook his head at her. "Do you know what I wanted to say to every one of those people who had been watching you? I wanted to say: 'You think she is a wonderful actress; she is more than that. She is a rare, sweet, true woman, better and finer than any play she may act in or any part she may play in it. I, the tinker, have discovered this; and I know her better than does any one else in the whole world.'"

"Is that so?" A teasing touch of irony crept into Patsy's voice. "'Tis a pity, now, the manager couldn't be hearing ye; he might give ye a chance to understudy Orlando."

"And you think I'd be content to understudy any one! Why, I'm going to pitch Orlando straight out of the Forest of Arden; I'm going to pull Willie Shakespeare out of his grave and make him rewrite the whole play—putting a tinker in the leading role."

"And is it a tragedy ye would have him make it?"

"Would it be a tragedy to take a tinker 'for better—for worse'?"

"Faith! that would depend on the tinker."

"Oh-ho, so it's up to the tinker, is it? Well, the tinker will prove it otherwise; he will guarantee to keep the play running pure comedy to the end. So that settles it, Miss Patricia O'Connell—alias Rosalind, alias the cook—alias Patsy—the best little comrade a lonely man ever found. I am going to marry you the day after to-morrow, right here in Arden."

Patsy looked at him long and thoughtfully from under the beguiling shadow of the white chiffon, corn-flower sunbonnet. "'Tis a shame, just, to discourage anything so brave as a self-made—tinker. But I'll not be here the day after to-morrow. And what's more, a man is a fool to marry any woman because he's lonely and she can cook."

The tinker's eyes twinkled. "I don't know. A man might marry for worse reasons." Then he grew suddenly sober and his eyes looked deep into hers. "But you know and I know that that is not my reason for wanting you, or yours for taking me."

"I didn't say I would take ye." This time it was Patsy's eyes that twinkled. "Do ye think it would be so easy to give up my career—the big success I've hoped and worked and waited for—just—just for a tinker? I'd be a fool to think of it." She was smiling inwardly at her own power of speech, which made what she held as naught sound of such immeasurable consequence.

But the tinker smiled outwardly. "Where did you say you were going to be the day after to-morrow?"

"That's another thing I did not say. If ye are going to marry me 'tis your business to find me." She freed her hands and started off without a backward glance at him.

"Patsy, Patsy!" he called after her, "wouldn't you like to know the name of the man you're going to marry?"

She turned and faced him. Framed in the soft, green fringe of the trees, she seemed to him the very embodiment of young summer—the free, untrammeled spirit of Arden. Ever since the first he had been growing more and more conscious of what she was: a nature vital, beautiful, tender, untouched by the searing things of life—trusting and worthy of trust; but it was not until this moment that he realized the future promise of her. And the realization swept all his smoldering love aflame into his eyes and lips. His arms went out to her in a sudden, passionate appeal.

"Patsy—Patsy! Would the name make any difference?"

"Why should it?" she cried, with saucy coquetry. "I'm marrying the man and not his name. If I can stand the one, I can put up with the other, I'm thinking. Anyhow, 'twill be on the marriage license the day after to-morrow, and that's time enough."

"Do you really mean you would marry a man, not knowing his name or anything about his family—or his income—or—"

"That's the civilized way, isn't it?—to find out about those things first; and afterward it's time enough when you're married to get acquainted with your man. But that's not the way that leads off the road to Arden—and it's not my way. I know my man now—God bless him." And away she ran through the trees and out of sight.

The tinker watched the trees and underbrush swing into place, covering her exit. So tense and motionless he stood, one might have suspected him of trying to conjure her back again by the simple magic of heart and will. It turned out a disappointing piece of conjuring, however; the green parted again, but not to redisclose Patsy. A man, instead, walked into the open, toward the giant oaks, and one glimpse of him swept the tinker's memory back to a certain afternoon and a cross-roads. He could see himself sitting propped up by the sign-post, watching the door of a little white church, while down the road clattered a sorrel mare and a runabout. And the man that drove—the man who was trailing Patsy—was the man that came toward him now, looking for—some one.

"You haven't seen—" he began, but the tinker interrupted him:

"Guess not. I've been watching the company break up. Rather interesting to any one not used to that sort of thing—don't you think?"

The man eyed him narrowly; then cautiously he dropped into an attitude of exaggerated indifference. "It sure is—young feller. Now you hain't been watchin' that there leadin' lady more particularly, have you? I sort o' cal'ate she might have a takin' way with the fellers," and he prodded the tinker with a jocular thumb.

The tinker responded promptly with a foolish grin. "Maybe I have; but the luck was dead against me. Guess she had a lot of friends with her. I saw them carry her off in triumph in a big touring-car—probably they'll dine her at the country club."

The man did not wait for further exchange of pleasantries. He took the direction the tinker indicated, and the tinker watched him go with a suppressed chuckle.

"History positively stutters sometimes. Now if that property-man knew what he was talking about the company will be safe out of Arden before a runabout could make the country club and back." But the tinker's mirth was of short duration. With a shout of derision, he slapped the pocket of his trousers viciously.

"What a confounded fool I am! Why in the name of reason didn't I give them to him and stop this sleuth business before it really gets her into trouble? Of all the idiotic—senseless—" and, leaning on the pilgrim staff, he slowly hobbled in the same direction he had given the man.

* * * * *

One last piece of news concerning Billy Burgeman came to Patsy before she left Arden that afternoon. Gregory Jessup was at the station to see her off, and he took her aside for the few minutes before the train arrived.

"I tried to get Billy to join me—knew it would do him good to meet you; but he wouldn't budge. I rather think he's still a trifle sore on girls. Nothing personal, you understand?"

Patsy certainly did—far better than his friend knew. In her heart she was trying her best to be interested and grateful to the Rich Man's Son for his unconscious part in her happiness. Had it not been for him there would have been no quest, no road; and without the road there would have been no tinker; and without the tinker, no happiness. It was none the less hard to be interested, however, now that her mind had given over the lonely occupation of contemplating memories for that most magical of all mental crafts—future-building. She jerked up her attention sharply as Gregory Jessup began speaking again.

"Billy told me just before I came down why he had gone away; and I wanted to tell you. I don't know how much you know about the old man's reputation, but he was credited with being the hardest master with his men that you could find either side of the water. In the beginning he made his money by screwing down the wages and unscrewing the labor—and no sentiment. That was his slogan. Whether he kept it up from habit or pure cussedness I can't tell, but that's the real reason Billy would never go into his father's business—he couldn't stand his meanness. The old man's secretary forged a check for ten thousand; Billy caught him and cashed it himself—to save the man. He shouldered the guilt so his father wouldn't suspect the man and hound him."

"I know," said Patsy, forgetting that she was supposed to know nothing. "But why in the name of all the saints did the secretary want to forge a check?"

"Why does any one forge? He needs money. When Billy caught him the old fellow went all to pieces and told a pretty tough story. You see, he'd been Burgeman's secretary for almost twenty years, given him the best years of his life—slaved for him—lied for him—made money for him. Billy said his father regarded him as an excellent piece of office machinery, and treated him as if he were nothing more. The poor chap had always had hard luck; a delicate wife, three or four children who were eternally having or needing something, and poor relations demanding help he couldn't refuse. Between doctors' bills and clothing—and the relatives—he had no chance to save. At last he broke down, and the doctor told him it was an outdoor life, with absolute freedom from the strain of serving a man like Burgeman—or the undertaker for him. So he went to Burgeman, asked him to loan him the money to invest in a fruit-farm, and let him pay it off as fast as he could."

"Well?" Patsy was interested at last.

"Well, the old man turned him down—shouted his 'no sentiment' slogan at him, and shrugged his shoulders at what the doctor said. He told him, flat, that a man who hadn't saved a cent in twenty years couldn't in twenty years more; and he only put money into investments that paid. The poor chap went away, frantic, worked himself into thinking he was entitled to that last chance; and when Billy heard the story he thought so, too. In the end, Billy cashed the check, gave the secretary the money, and they both cleared out. He knew, if his father ever suspected the truth, he would have the poor chap followed and dragged back to pay the full penalty of the law—he and all his family with him."

Patsy smiled whimsically. "It sounds so simple and believable when you have it explained; but it would have been rather nice, now, if Billy Burgeman could have known that one person believed in him from the beginning without an explanation."

"Who did?"

"Faith! how should I know? I was supposing, just."

But as Patsy climbed onto the train she muttered under her breath: "We come out even, I'm thinking. If he's missed knowing that, I've missed knowing a fine lad."



XVI

THE ROAD BEGINS ALL OVER AGAIN

On the second day following Patsy played Juliet at Brambleside, and more than satisfied George Travis. While his mind was racing ahead, planning her particular stardom on Broadway, and her mind was pestering her with its fears and uncertainties into a state of "private prostration," the manager of the Brambleside Inn was telephoning the Green County sheriff to come at once—he had found the girl.

So it came about at the final dropping of the curtain, as Patsy was climbing down from her bier, that four eagerly determined men confronted her, each plainly wishful to be the first to gain her attention.

"Well," said the tinker, pointedly, "are you ready?"

"It's all settled." Travis was jubilant. "You'll play Broadway for six months next winter—or I'm no manager."

It was the manager of the Brambleside Inn and the Green County sheriff, however, who gave the greatest dramatic effect. They placed themselves adroitly on either side of Patsy and announced together: "You're under arrest!"

"Holy Saint Patrick!" Patsy hardly knew whether to be amused or angry. With the actual coming of the tinker, and the laying of her fears, her mind seemed strangely limp and inadequate. Her lips quivered even as they smiled. "Maybe I had best go back to my bier; you couldn't arrest a dead Capulet."

But George Travis swept her aside; he saw nothing amusing in the situation. "What do you mean by insulting Miss O'Connell and myself by such a performance? Why should she be under arrest—for being one of the best Shakespearean actresses we've had in this country for many a long, barren year?"

"No! For stealing two thousand dollars' worth of diamonds from a guest in this hotel the night she palmed herself off as Miss St. Regis!" The manager of the Inn bit off his words as if he thoroughly enjoyed their flavor.

"But she never was here," shouted Travis.

"Yes, I was," contradicted Patsy.

"And she sneaked off in the morning with the jewels," growled the manager.

"And I trailed over the country for four days, trying to find the girl in a brown suit that he'd described—said she was on her way to Arden. I'd give a doggoned big cigar to know where you was all that time." And there was something akin to admiration in the sheriff's expression.

But Patsy did not see. She was looking hard at the tinker, with an odd little smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.

The tinker smiled back, while he reached deep into his trousers pocket and brought out a small package which he presented to the sheriff. "Are those what you are looking for?"

They were five unset diamonds.

"Well, I'll be hanged! Did she give them to you?" The manager of the Inn looked suspiciously from the tinker to Patsy.

"No; she didn't know I had them—didn't even know they existed and that she was being trailed as a suspected thief. Why, what's the matter?" For Patsy had suddenly grown white and her lips were trembling past control.

"Naught—naught they could understand. But I'm finding out there was more than one quest on the road to Arden, more than one soul who fared forth to help another in trouble. And my heart is breaking, just, with the memory of it." And Patsy sank back on the bier and covered her face.

"What is it, dear?" whispered a distressed tinker.

"Don't ask—now—here. Sometime I'll be telling ye."

"Well"—the sheriff thumbed the armholes of his vest in a business-like manner—"I cal'ate we've waited about long enough, young man; supposin' you explain how you come to have those stones in your possession; and why you lied to me about her and sent me hiking off to that country club—when you knew durned well where she was."

The tinker laughed in spite of himself. "Certainly; it's very simple. I found these, in a suit of rags which I saw on a tramp the morning you lost the diamonds—and Miss O'Connell. I liked the rags so well that I paid the tramp to change clothes with me; he took mine and gave me his, along with a knockout blow for good measure."

The manager of the Inn interrupted with an exclamation of surprise: "So! You were the young fellow they picked up senseless by the stables that morning. When the grooms saw the other man running, they made out it was you who had struck him first."

"Wish I had. But I squared it off with him a few days later," the tinker chuckled. "At the time I couldn't make out why he struck me except to get the rest of the money I had; but of course he wanted to get the stones he'd sewed up in these rags and forgotten. I began to suspect something when I found you trailing Miss O'Connell."

"See here, young man, and wasn't you the feller that put me on the wrong road twice?" The sheriff laid a hand of the law suggestively against his chest.

The tinker chuckled again. "I certainly was. It would have been pretty discouraging for Miss O'Connell if you'd found her before we had the defense ready; and it would have been awkward for you—to have to take a lady in custody."

"I cal'ate that's about right." And the sheriff relaxed into a grin. Suddenly he turned to the manager of the Inn and pounded his palm with his fist. "By Jupiter! I betcher that there tramp is the feller that's been cleanin' up these parts for the past two years. Hangs round as a tramp at back doors and stables, and picks up what information he needs to break into the house easy. Never hitched him up in my mind to the thefts afore—but I cal'ate it's the one man—and he's it."

"Guess you're right," the tinker agreed. "Last Saturday, when I came upon him again—in an automobile—still in my clothes, we had a final fight for the possession of the rags, which I still wore, and the—" But he never finished.

Patsy had sprung to her feet and was looking at him, bewilderment, accusation, almost fright, showing through her tears. "Your clothes—your clothes! You wore a—Then you are—"

"Hush!" said the tinker. He turned to the others. "I think that is all, gentlemen. I searched the rags after I had finished my score with the thief and found the stones. I brought them over this afternoon to return to their rightful owner. I might have returned them that day after the play—but I forgot until the sheriff had gone. You are entirely welcome. Good afternoon!" He dismissed them promptly, but courteously, as if the stage had been his own drawing-room and the two had suddenly expressed a desire to take their leave.

At the wings he left them and came back direct to George Travis. "There is more thieving to be done this afternoon, and I am going to do it. I am going to steal your future star, right from under your nose; and I shall never return her."

"What do you mean?" Travis stared at him blankly.

"Just what I say; Miss O'Connell and I are to be married this afternoon in Arden."

"That's simply out of the—"

Patsy, who had found her tongue at last, laid a coaxing hand on Travis's arm. "No, it isn't. I wired Miriam yesterday—to see if she was really as sick as you thought. She was sick; but she's ever so much better and her nerves are not going to be nearly as troublesome as she feared. She's quite willing to come back and take her old place, and she'll be well enough next week." Patsy's voice had become vibrant with feeling. "Now don't ye be hard-hearted and think I'm ungrateful. We've all been playing in a bigger comedy than Willie Shakespeare ever wrote; and, sure, we've got to be playing it out to the end as it was meant to be."

"And you mean to give up your career, your big chance of success?" Travis still looked incredulous. "Don't you realize you'll be famous—famous and rich!" he emphasized the last word unduly.

It set Patsy's eyes to blazing. "Aye, I'd no longer be like Granny Donoghue's lean pig, hungry for scrapings. Well, I'd rather be hungry for scrapings than starving for love. I knew one woman who threw away love to be famous and rich, and I watched her die. Thank God she's kept my feet from that road! Sure, I wouldn't be rich—" She choked suddenly and looked helplessly at the tinker.

"Neither would I." And he spoke with a solemn conviction.

In the end Travis gave in. He took his disappointment and his loss like the true gentleman he was, and sent them away with his blessing, mixed with an honest twinge of self-pity. It was not, however, until Patsy turned to wave him a last farewell and smile a last grateful smile from under the white chiffon, corn-flower sunbonnet that he remembered that convention had been slighted.

"Wait a minute," he said, running after them. "If I am not mistaken I have not had the pleasure of meeting your—future husband; perhaps you'll introduce us—"

For once in her life Patsy looked fairly aghast, and Travis repeated, patiently, "His name, Irish Patsy—I want to know his name."

The tinker might have helped her out, but he chose otherwise. He kept silent, his eyes on Patsy's as if he would read her answer there before she spoke it to Travis.

"Well," she said at last, slowly, "maybe I'm not sure of it myself—except—I'm knowing it must be a good tinker name." And then laughter danced all over her face. "I'll tell ye; ye can be reading it to-morrow—in the papers." Whereupon she slipped her arm through the tinker's, and he led her away.

And so it came to pass that once more Patsy and the tinker found themselves tramping the road to Arden; only this time it was down the straight road marked, "Seven Miles," and it was early evening instead of morning.

"Do ye think we'll reach it now?" inquired Patsy.

"We have reached it already; we're just going back."

"And what happened to the brown dress?"

"I burned it that night in the cottage—to fool the sheriff."

"And I thought that night it was me ye had tricked—just for the whim of it. Did ye know who I was—by chance?"

"Of course I knew. I had seen you with the Irish Players many, many times, and I knew you the very moment your voice came over the road to me—wishing me 'a brave day.'" The tinker's eyes deepened with tenderness. "Do you think for a moment if I hadn't known something about you—and wasn't hungering to know more—that I would have schemed and cheated to keep your comradeship?"

"Ye might tell me, then, how ye came to know about the cottage—and how your picture ever climbed to the mantel-shelf?"

"You know—I meant to burn that along with the dress—and I forgot. What did you think when you discovered it?"

"Faith! I thought it was the picture of the truest gentleman God had ever made—and I fetched it along with me—for company."

The tinker threw back his head and laughed as of old. "What will poor old Greg say when he finds it gone? Oh, I know how you almost stole his faithful old heart by being so pitying of his friend—and how you made the sign for him to follow—"

"Aye," agreed Patsy, "but what of the cottage?"

"That belongs to Greg's father; he and the girls are West this summer, so the cottage was closed."

"And the breakfast with the throstles and the lady's-slippers?"

The tinker laid his finger over her lips. "Please, sweetheart—don't try to steal away all the magic and the poetry from our road. You will leave it very barren if you do—'I'm thinking.'"

Silence held their tongues until curiosity again loosened Patsy's. "And what started ye on the road in rags? Ye have never really answered that."

"I have never honestly wanted to; it is not a pleasant answer." He drew Patsy closer, and his hands closed over hers. "Promise you will never think of it again, that you and I will forget that part of the road—after to-day?"

Patsy nodded.

"I borrowed the rags so that it would take a pretty smart coroner to identify the person in it after the train had passed under the suspension-bridge from which he fell—by accident. Don't shudder, dear. Was it so terrible—that wish to get away from a world that held nothing, not even some one to grieve? Remember, when I started there wasn't a soul who believed in me, who would care much one way or another—unless, perhaps, poor old Greg."

"Would ye mind letting me look at the marriage license? I'd like to be seeing it written down."

The tinker produced it, and she read "William Burgeman." Then she added, with a stubborn shake of the head, "Mind, though, I'll not be rich."

"You will not have to be. Father has left me absolutely nothing for ten years; after that I can inherit his money or not, as we choose. It's a glorious arrangement. The money is all disposed of to good civic purpose, if we refuse. I am very glad it's settled that way; for I'm afraid I would never have had the heart to come to you, dear, dragging all those millions after me."

"Then it is a free, open road for the both of us; and, please Heaven! we'll never misuse it." She laughed joyously; some day she would tell him of her meeting with his father; life was too full now for that.

The tinker fell into his old swinging stride that Patsy had found so hard to keep pace with; and silence again held their tongues.

"Do you think we shall find the castle with a window for every day in the year?" the tinker asked at last.

"Aye. Why not? And we'll be as happy as I can tell ye, and twice as happy as ye can tell me. Doesn't every lad and lass find it anew for themselves when they take to the long road with naught but love and trust in their hearts—and their hands together? They may find it when they're young—they may not find it till they're old—but it will be there, ever beckoning them on—with the purple hills rising toward it. And there's a miracle in the castle that I've never told ye: no matter how old and how worn and how stooped the lad and his lass may have grown, there he sees her only fresh and fair and she sees him only brave and straight and strong."

She stopped and faced him, her hands slipping out of his and creeping up to his shoulders and about his neck. "Dear lad—promise me one thing!—promise me we shall never forget the road! No matter how snugly we may be housed, or how close comfort and happiness sit at our hearthside—we'll be faring forth just once in so often—to touch earth again. And we'll help to keep faith in human nature—aye, and simple-hearted kindness alive in the world; and we'll make our friends by reason of that and not because of the gold we may or may not be having."

"And do you still think kindness is the greatest thing in the world?"

"No. There is one thing better; but kindness tramps mortal close at its heels." Patsy's hands slipped from his shoulders; she clasped them together in sudden intensity. "Haven't ye any curiosity at all to know what fetched me after ye?"

"Yes. But there is to-morrow—and all the days after—to tell me."

"No, there is just to-day. The telling of it is the only wedding-gift I have for ye, dear lad. I was with Marjorie Schuyler in the den that day you came to her and told her."

"You heard everything?"

"Aye."

"And you came, believing in me, after all?"

"I came to show you there was one person in the world who trusted you, who would trust you across the world and back again. That's all the wedding-gift I have for ye, dear, barring love."

And then and there—in the open road, still a good three miles from the Arden church—the tinker gathered her close in the embrace he had kept for her so long.



* * * * *



Transcriber's note:

Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and intent.

THE END