"That's mine!" David would cry, pointing to a green china toad behind the plate glass; and Dr. Lavendar would say gravely,

"You may have it, David; you may have it."

"Now it's your turn!" David would instruct him.

"Must I take something in this window?" Dr. Lavendar would plead. And David always said firmly that he must. "Well, then, that's mine," Dr. Lavendar would say.

"Why, that's only a teacup! We have thousands of them at our house!" David boasted. "I should think you would rather have the toad. I'll— I'll give you the toad, sir?"

"Oh, dear me, no," Dr. Lavendar protested; "I wouldn't rob you for the world." And so they sauntered on, hand in hand. When they came to a book-store, Dr. Lavendar apologized for breaking in upon their "game." "I'm going to play mine, in here," he said.

David was quite content to wait at the door and watch the people, and the yellow boxes full of windows, drawn by mules with bells jingling on their harness. Sometimes he looked fearfully back into the shop; but Dr. Lavendar was still playing "mine," so all was well. At last, however, he finished his game and came to the door.

"Come along, David; this is the most dangerous place in town!"

David looked at him with interest. "Why did you skip with your eye when you said that, sir?" he demanded.

At which the clerk who walked beside them laughed loudly, and David grew very red and angry.

But when Dr. Lavendar said, "David, I've got a bone in my arm; won't you carry a book for me?" he was consoled, and immediately began to ask questions. It seemed to Dr. Lavendar that he inquired about everything in heaven and earth and the waters under the earth, and at last the old gentleman was obliged, in self-defence, to resort to the formula which, according to the code of etiquette understood by these two friends, signified "stop talking."

"What is—" David began, and his companion replied glibly:

"Layovers for meddlers and crutches for lame ducks."

And David subsided into giggles, for it was understood that this remark was extremely humorous.

After that they went to dinner with a gentleman who wore a long black coat and no shirt; at least, David could not see any shirt. Dr. Lavendar called him Bishop, and they talked a great deal about uninteresting things. David only spoke twice: His host took occasion to remark that he did not finish all his mashed potato—"Some poor child would be glad of what you waste," said the Bishop. To which David replied, "If I ate it, what then, for the poor child?" And the gentleman with no shirt said in a grave aside to Dr. Lavendar that the present generation was inclined to pertness. His second remark was made when the clergymen pushed their chairs back from the table. But David sat still. "We haven't had the ice-cream yet," he objected, gently. "Hush! Hush!" said Dr. Lavendar. And the gentleman laughed very hard, and said that he had to send all his ice-cream to the heathen. David, reddening, looked at him in stolid silence. In the afternoon there was a pause; they went to church, and listened to another gentleman, who talked a long, long time. Sometimes David sighed, but he kept pretty quiet, considering. After the talk was over, Dr. Lavendar did not seem anxious to get away. David twitched his sleeve once or twice to indicate his own readiness, but it appeared that Dr. Lavendar preferred to speak to the talking gentleman. And the talking gentleman patted David's head and said:

"And what do you think of foreign missions, my little boy?"

David did not answer, but he moved his head from under the large white hand.

"You were very good and quiet," said the talking gentleman. "I saw you, down in the pew with Dr. Lavendar. And I was very much complimented; you never went to sleep." "I couldn't," said David, briefly; "the seats are too hard." The talking gentleman laughed a little, and you might have thought Dr. Lavendar skipped with his eye;—at any rate, he laughed.

"They don't always tell us why they keep awake," he said. And the talking gentleman didn't laugh any more.

At last, however, they stopped wasting time, and took up their round of dissipation again. They went to see Liberty Bell; then they had supper at a marble-topped table, in a room as big as a church! "Ice- cream, suh?" suggested a waiter, and David said "Yes!" Dr. Lavendar looked doubtful, but David had no doubts. Yet, half-way through that pink and white and brown mound on his saucer, he sighed, and opened and shut his eyes as if greatly fatigued.

"Finished?" Dr. Lavendar asked.

"No, sir," David said sadly, and started in with a spurt; but the mound did not seem to diminish, and suddenly his chin quivered. "If you have to pay for what I don't eat, I'll try," he said; "but my breast is cold." Reassured on this point, and furtively rubbing his little chilly stomach, David put down his spoon and slipped out of his chair, ready to make a night of it. For, supper over, they went to see a magician!

"I don't know what Mrs. Richie will say to me," said Dr. Lavendar. "You won't get to bed before ten o'clock!"

"She'll say 'all right,'" said David. Then he added, "The gentleman at dinner tells lies, or else he's foolish. It would melt before the heathen got it."

Dr. Lavendar, singing to himself—

Hither ye faithful, haste with songs of triumph,—

did not hear the morals of his bishop aspersed. He took David's hand, and by and by they were sitting staring open-mouthed at a man who put eggs in a pan, and held it over a fire, and took out live pigeons! Oh, yes, and many other wonders! David never spoke once on his way back to the hotel, and Dr. Lavendar began to be worried for fear the child was overtired. He hustled him to bed as quickly as possible, and then sat down under the far-off chandelier of the hotel bedroom, to glance at a newspaper and wait until David was asleep before he got into his own bed. He did not have to wait long for the soft breathing of childish sleep. It had been poor David's intention to go over in his mind every single thing he saw the magician do, so that he wouldn't leave out anything at recess on Monday. Alas, before he could begin to think, the sun was shining again!

It was Dr. Lavendar who did the thinking before the sunlight came. Twice, in his placid, wakeful night, he rose to make sure the child was all right, to pull up an extra blanket about the small shoulders or to arrange the pillow, punched by David's fist to the edge of the bed. In the morning he let the little boy look out of the window while he packed up their various belongings; and when it was time to start, David could hardly tear himself away from that outlook, which makes such a mystical appeal to most of us—huddling roofs and chimneys under a morning sky. But when he did turn to look at Dr. Lavendar, tucking things into his valise and singing to himself, it was to realize again the immutable past. "No," he said slowly, "you can't get back behind, and begin again." Dr. Lavendar, understanding, chuckled.

"Can God?" said David.

At that Dr. Lavendar's face suddenly shone. "David," he said, "the greatest thing in the world is to know that God is always beginning again!"

But David had turned to the window to watch a prowling cat upon a roof; and then, alas, it was time to start.

"Well," said Dr. Lavendar, as, hand in hand, they walked to the big, roaring place where the cars were, "Well, David, to-morrow we shall be at home again! You sit down here and take care of my bag while I go and get the tickets."

David slid sidewise on to the slippery wooden settee. He had nothing to say; again he felt that bleak sinking right under his little breast-bone; but it stopped in the excitement of seeing Mrs. Richie's brother coming into the waiting-room! There was a young lady at his side, and he piloted her across the big, bare room, to the very settee upon which David was swinging his small legs.

"I must see about the checks, dear," he said, and hurried off without a glance at the little boy who was guarding Dr. Lavendar's valise.

The sun pouring through the high, dusty window, shone into David's eyes. He wrinkled his nose and squinted up at the young lady from under the visor of his blue cap. She smiled down at him, pleasantly, and then opened a book; upon which David said bravely, "You're nineteen. I'm seven, going on eight."

"What!" said the young lady; she put her book down, and laughed. "How do you know I am nineteen, little boy?"

"Mrs. Richie's brother said so."

She looked at him with amused perplexity. "And who is Mrs. Richie's brother?"

David pointed shyly at the vanishing figure at the end of the waiting- room.

"Why, no, dear, that's my father."

"I know," said David; "he's Mr. Pryor, Mrs. Richie's brother. He comes and stays at our house."

"Stays at your house? What on earth are you talking about, you funny little boy! Where is your house?"

"O' Chester," said David.

The young lady laughed and gave him a kind glance. "You've made a mistake, I think. My father doesn't know Mrs. Richie."

David had nothing to say, and she opened her book. When Mr. Pryor returned, hurrying to collect the bags and umbrellas, David had turned his back and was looking out of the window.

It was not until they were in the train that Alice remembered to speak of the incident. "Who in the world is Mrs. Richie?" she demanded gayly, "and where is Old Chester?"

The suddenness of it was like a blow. Lloyd Pryor actually gasped; his presence of mind so entirely deserted him, that before he knew it, he had lied—and no one knew better than Lloyd Pryor that it is a mistake to lie hurriedly.

"I—I don't know! Never heard of either of them."

His confusion was so obvious that his daughter gave him a surprised look. "But I'm told you stay at Mrs. Richie's house, in Old Chester," she said laughing.

"What are you talking about!"

"Why, father," she said blankly; his irritation was very disconcerting.

"I tell you I never heard of such a person!" he repeated sharply; and then realized what he had done. "Damn it, what did I lie for?" he said to himself, angrily; and he began to try to get out of it: "Old Chester? Oh, yes; I do remember. It's somewhere near Mercer, I believe. But I never went there in my life." Then he added in his own mind, "Confound it, I've done it again! What the devil has happened? Who has told her?" Aloud, he asked where she had heard of Old Chester.

She began to tell him about a little boy, who said—"it was too funny!" she interrupted herself, smiling—"who said that you were 'Mrs. Richie's brother,' and you stayed at her house in Old Chester, and—"

"Perfect nonsense!" he broke in. "He mistook me for some one else, I suppose."

"Oh, of course," she agreed, laughing; upon which Mr. Pryor changed the subject by saying that he must look over some papers. "Don't talk now, dear," he said.

Alice subsided into her novel; but after a while she put the book down. No; the little boy had not mistaken him for somebody else; "he's Mr. Pryor," the child had said. But, of course, the rest was all a funny mistake. She took the book up again, but as she read, she began to frown. Old Chester: Where had she heard of Old Chester? Then she remembered. A gentleman who came to call,—King? Yes; that was his name; Dr. King. He said he had come from Old Chester. And he had spoken of somebody—now, who was it? Oh, yes, Richie; Mrs. Richie. And once last spring when her father went to Mercer he said he was going to Old Chester; yet now he said he had never heard of the place.—Why! it almost seemed as if she had blundered upon a secret! Her uneasy smile faded involuntarily into delicate disgust; not because the nature of the secret occurred to her, but because secrecy in itself was repugnant to her, as it is to all nobler minds. She said to herself, quickly, that her father had forgotten Old Chester, that was all. Of course, he had forgotten it!—or else—She did not allow herself to reach the alternative which his confusion so inevitably suggested:—secrecy, protected by a lie. In the recoil from it she was plunged into remorse for a suspicion which she had not even entertained. Truth was so much to this young creature, that even the shadow of an untruth gave her a sense of uneasiness which she could not banish. She looked furtively at her father, sorting out some papers, his lips compressed, his eyebrows drawn into a heavy frown, and assured herself that she was a wicked girl to have wondered, even for a minute, whether he was perfectly frank. He! Her ideal of every virtue! And besides, why should he not be frank? It was absurd as well as wicked to have that uneasy feeling. "I am ashamed of myself!" she declared hotly, and took up her novel....

But David had thrown the smooth stone from the brook!

It was a very little stone; the giant did not know for many a day where he had been hit; yet it had struck him in the one vulnerable point in his armor—his daughter's trust in him. How the wound widened does not belong to this story.

When Dr. Lavendar came bustling back with his tickets, David was absorbed in thought. He had very little to say on the long day's journey over the mountains. When they reached Mercer where they were to spend the night, he had nothing whatever to say: his eyes were closing with fatigue, and he was asleep almost before his little yellow head touched the pillow. In the morning he asked a question:

"Is it a Aunt if you don't know it?" "What?" said Dr. Lavendar, winding his clean stock carefully around his neck.

But David relapsed into silence. He asked so few questions that day that crutches for lame ducks were referred to only once.

They took the afternoon stage for Old Chester. It was a blue, delicious October day, David sat on the front seat between Dr. Lavendar and Jonas, and as Jonas told them all that had happened during their long absence, the child felt a reviving interest in life. Dr. Lavendar's humming broke out into singing; he sang scraps of songs and hymns, and teased David about being sleepy. "I believe he's lost his tongue, Jonas; he hasn't said boo! since we left Mercer. I suppose he won't have a thing to tell Mrs. Richie, not a thing!"

"Well, now, there!" said Jonas, "her George gimme a letter for you, and I'll be kicked if I ain't forgot it!" He thrust his left leg out, so that his cow-hide boot hung over the dashboard, and fumbled in his pocket; then thrust out the right leg and fumbled in another pocket; then dived into two or three coat pockets; finally a very crumpled note, smelling of the stable, came up from the depths and was handed to Dr. Lavendar.

"Slow down these two-forties on a plank road, Jonas, till I get my glasses on." said Dr. Lavendar.

After he read the letter he did not sing any more; his face fell into deeply puzzled lines. "I must ask Willy what it's all about," he said to himself. Certainly the note did not explain itself:

"DEAR DR. LAVENDAR: If it will not inconvenience you, will you let David stay at the rectory tonight?—and perhaps for a few days longer. I am not sure whether I shall be able to keep him. I may have to give him back to you. Will you let him stay with you until I can decide what to do?

"HELENA R."

"I wonder if that brother has interfered?" thought Dr. Lavendar. "Something has happened; that's evident. Keep him? Well, I guess I will!" He looked down at David, his old eyes beaming with pleasure. "Mrs. Richie wants you to stay with me tonight; what do you think of that?"

"I wanted to see the rabbits," said David; "but I don't mind staying— very much."



CHAPTER XXXI

"Perhaps she feels that it would be better for David to be-in different surroundings."

"But Willy! Wednesday night she told me that I must be sure and bring him back to her on Saturday. What has happened between Wednesday and Saturday?"

"Very likely nothing has happened between Wednesday and Saturday. But perhaps she has just made up her mind."

"Ho!" said Dr. Lavendar; and after a while he added, "'Um."

Monday morning he went up to the Stuffed Animal House. But Mrs. Richie sent word down-stairs that she wasn't well; would he be so kind as to excuse her and to keep David a little longer. Sarah, when she gave the message, looked as mystified as Dr. Lavendar felt. "I always thought she was just wrapped up in that there boy," she told Maggie; "and yet she lets him stay away two days after he gets home!" Dr. Lavendar, poking on with Goliath up the hill to Benjamin Wright's, had very much the same feeling: "Queer! I wish Willy wasn't bottled up; of course he knows what it means. Well; if I wait, she'll explain it herself."

But many days were to pass before Helena made any effort to explain. And meantime Dr. Lavendar's mind was full of something else: old Benjamin Wright was running down-hill very rapidly.

In certain ways he seemed better; he could talk—and swear—quite fluently. "He sayed to me, this mawnin'," Simmons told Dr. Lavendar, "'Simmons, you freckled nigger,' he sayed, 'in the name of Lot's wife, who salted my porridge?' He spoke out just as plain!" Simmons detailed this achievement of the poor dulled tongue, with the pride of a mother repeating her baby's first word. Then he simpered with a little vanity of his own: "He was always one to notice my freckles," he said.

Benjamin Wright, lying in his bed with his hat on noticed other things than Simmons's freckles, and spoke of them, too, quite distinctly. "My boy, S-Sam, is a good boy. He comes up every day. Well, Lav-Lavendar, sometimes I think I was—at fault?"

"I know you were, Benjamin. Have you told him so?"

"Gad-a-mercy! N-no!" snarled the other. "He would be too puffed up. Won't do to make young people v-vain."

He "took notice," too, Simmons said, of the canaries; and he even rolled out, stammeringly, some of his favorite verses. But, in spite of all this, he was running down-hill; he knew it himself, and once he told Dr. Lavendar that this business of dying made a man narrow. "I th-think about it all the time," he complained. "Can't put my mind on anything else. It's damned narrowing."

Yet William King said to Dr. Lavendar that he thought that if the old man could be induced to talk of his grandson, he might rally. "He never speaks of him," the doctor said, "but I am sure he is brooding over him all the time. Once or twice I have referred to the boy, but he pretends not to hear me. He's using up all his strength to bear the idea that he is to blame, I wish I could tell him that he isn't," the doctor ended, sighing.

They had met in the hall as William was coming down-stairs and Dr. Lavendar going up. Simmons, who had been shuffling about with a decanter and hospitable suggestions, had disappeared into the dining- room.

"Well," said Dr. Lavendar, "why don't you tell him? Though in fact, perhaps he is to blame in some way that we don't know? You remember, he said he had 'angered the boy'?"

"No; that wasn't it," said William.

Dr. Lavendar looked at him with sudden attention. "Then what—" he began, but a lean, freckled shadow in the dining-room doorway, spoke up:

"Maybe he might 'a' made Marster Sam's Sam mad, suh, that night; maybe he might 'a'. But that weren't no reason," said Simmons, in a quivering voice, "for a boy to hit out and give his own grandfather a lick. No, suh; it warn't. An' call him a liar!" Dr. Lavendar and William King stared at each other and at the old man, in shocked dismay. "His grandfather used words, maybe, onc't in a while," Simmons mumbled on, "but they didn't mean no mo'n skim-milk. Don't I know? He's damned me for forty years, but he'll go to heaven all the same. The Lawd wouldn't hold it up agin' him. if a pore nigger wouldn't. If He would, I'd as lief go to hell with Mr. Benjamin as any man I know. Yes, suh, as I would with you yo'self, Dr. Lavendar. He was cream kind; yes, he was! One o' them pore white-trash boys at Morison's shanty Town, called me 'Ashcat' onc't; Mr. Wright he cotched him, and licked him with his own hands, suh! An' he was as kind to Marster Sam as if he was a baby. But Marster Sam hit him a lick. No, suh; it weren't right—" Simmons rubbed the cuff of his sleeve over his eyes, and the contents of the tilting decanter dribbled down the front of his spotted old coat.

"Simmons," said Dr. Lavendar, "what had they been quarrelling about?"

But Simmons said glibly, that 'fore the Lawd, he didn't know.

"He does know," said Dr. Lavendar, as the man again retired to his pantry. "But, after all, the subject of the quarrel doesn't make any difference. To think that the boy struck him! That must be a satisfaction to Benjamin."

"A satisfaction?" William repeated, bewildered.

But Dr. Lavendar did not explain. He went on up-stairs, and sat beside the very old man, listening to his muffled talk, and saying what he could of commonplace things. Once Benjamin Wright asked about Mrs. Richie:

"That female at the S-Stuffed Animal House-how is she? Poor cr- creeter; pretty creeter! Tell her—"

"What, Benjamin?"

"Nothing." And then abruptly, "It was my fault. I made him angry. Tell her."

He did not refer to her again; nor did he speak of the boy, except at the very end. The end came the week that David was staying at the Rectory; and perhaps Dr. Lavendar's pitying absorption in that dreary dying, made him give less thought to the pleasure as well as the perplexity of the child's presence; though certainly, when he got back from his daily visit at The Top, he found David a great comfort. Dr. Lavendar stopped twice that week to see Mrs. Richie, but each time she sent word that she was engaged, would he excuse her? "Engaged," in the sense of not wishing to see a neighbor, was a new word in Old Chester. Dr. Lavendar did not insist. He went on up the hill to that other house, where, also, there was a deep preoccupation which Benjamin Wright had called "narrowing"; but here he was not shut out. He always stopped to say a friendly word to Simmons, sniffling wretchedly about among the cages in the dining-room, and then went on up-stairs.

On this October afternoon the old servant sneaked up at his heels; and sliding into the room behind him as noiselessly as a shadow, settled down on his hunkers close to the bedside. Once he put up a lean yellow hand, and patted the bedclothes; but he made no more claim to attention than a dog might have done. Dr. Lavendar found his senior warden in the sick-room. Of late Samuel had been there every day; he had very little to say to his father, not from any lingering bitterness, but because, to poor Samuel, all seemed said—the boy was dead. When Dr. Lavendar came in he glanced at the bed, and then, with a start, at the heavy middle-aged figure sitting listlessly at the bedside. Samuel nodded solemnly.

"A matter of hours, William says. I shall not go home until it's over."

"Does he hear you?" said Dr. Lavendar, in a low voice, leaning over to look into the gray face.

"Oh, no;" said Samuel.

The dying man opened one eye and looked at his son. "How much you know!" he said, then closed it again.

"Are you comfortable, Benjamin?" Dr. Lavendar asked him. There was no reply.

Samuel's face reddened. "You can't tell when he hears," he said. It was then that Simmons put out his hand and patted the bedclothes over the old feet.

They sat there beside him for an hour before Benjamin Wright spoke again; then William King came in, and stood looking down at him.

"He'll just sleep away," he told the son.

"I hope he is prepared," said Samuel, and sighed. He turned his back on the big bed with the small figure sliding down and down towards the foot-board, and looked out of the window. The boy had not been prepared!

Suddenly, without opening his eyes, Benjamin Wright began:

"'Animula vagula blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Qua nunc abibis in loca?'

"What do you think, Lavendar?"

"It will return to God, who gave it," said Dr. Lavendar.

There was another silence; until he wakened to say, brightly, "Simmons, you freckled nigger, you'd better wring their necks, now, I guess."

"No, suh," came a murmur from the shadow on the floor, "I'm a-goin to take care of 'em fine. Yes, suh, I'll chop their eggs small; I sho'ly will."

The dying hand began to wander over the coverlet; his son took it, but was fretfully repulsed; then Dr. Lavendar made a sign, and Simmons laid his thin old hand on it, and Benjamin Wright gave a contented sigh. After a while he opened that one eye again, and looked at Dr. Lavendar; "Isn't it cus-customary on such occasions, to—admonish?" he said, peevishly; "you ain't doing your duty by me, Lavendar."

"You don't need admonition, Benjamin. You know what to do."

Silence again, and after a while a broken murmur: "'I here forget... cancel all grudge, repeal thee...'" Then distinctly and quietly he said: "Sam, will you forgive me?"

Samuel Wright nodded; he could not speak at first, and Simmons lifting his head, looked at him, fiercely; then he swallowed several times, and said, with ponderous dignity: "Certainly, father. Certainly." And Simmons fell back into the shadows.

"Of course," murmured Benjamin Wright, "if I g-get well, it needn't hold, you know."

After that he seemed to sleep a little, until, his eyes still closed, he said, "The boy slapped my face. So it's all right."

Samuel started up from his chair at the bedside, shocked and protesting.

"Gad-a-mercy!" said Benjamin Wright, fretfully, opening his eye and looking at him—"that makes us square! Don't you see?"

There was a long silence. Once Dr. Lavendar spoke to him, and once William King touched his wrist, but he seemed to sleep. Then abruptly, and quite clearly, he spoke:

"'Crito, I owe a cock to Aesculapius'.... Lavendar?"

"Yes, Benjamin?"

"The debt is paid. Hey? I got the receipt."

"He is wandering," said Samuel. "Father, what do you want?"

But he did not speak again.



CHAPTER XXXII

Helena had asked Dr. Lavendar to keep David, out of abject fear of William King. The doctor had granted her until Sunday to give him up without explanations; if she had not done so then, he must, he said doggedly, "tell." In sending the child to the Rectory she had not given him up; she had only declared a truce. She had tied Dr. King's hands and gained a breathing-space in which to decide what she must do; but she used to watch the hill road every morning, with scared eyes, lest he should stop on his way up to Benjamin Wright's to say that the truce was over. David came running joyously home two or three times, for more clothes, or to see the rabbits, or to hang about her neck and tell her of his journey. Upon one of these occasions, he mentioned casually that "Alice had gone travelling." Helena's heart stood still; then beat suffocatingly in her throat while she drew the story piecemeal from the child's lips.

"She said," David babbled, "that he didn't know you. An' she said—"

"And where was he—Mr. Pryor, all this time?" she demanded, breathlessly. She opened and shut her hands, and drew in her breath, wincing as if in physical pain; across all the days since that meeting of the Innocents, she felt his anger flaying her for the contretemps. It brought home to her, with an aching sense of finality the completeness of the break between them. But it did more than that. Even while she cringed with personal dismay, she was groping blindly towards a deeper and diviner despair: Those two young creatures were the cherubims at the east of the garden, bearing the sword that turned every way! By the unsparing light of that flashing blade the two sinners, standing outside, saw each other; but the one, at least, began to see something else: the glory of the garden upon which, thirteen years ago, she had turned her back! ...

Helena did not ask any more questions. David, lounging against her knee, chattered on, ending with a candid and uncomplimentary reference to Mr. Pryor; but she did not reprove him. When, having, as it were, displayed his sling and his bag of pebbles, he was ready to run joyously back to the other home, she kissed him silently and with a strange new consciousness of the everlasting difference between them. But that did not lessen her passionate determination that William King should never steal him from her! Yet how could she defeat her enemy?

A week passed, and still undecided, she wrote to Dr. Lavendar asking further hospitality for David: "I want to have him with me always, but just now I am a little uncertain whether I can do so, because I am going to leave Old Chester. I will come and ask you about it in a few days."

She took the note out to the stable to George and bade him carry it to the Rectory; as she went back to the empty house, she had a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Smith's jewel-like eyes gleaming redly upon her from the gloom of the rabbit-hutch, and a desolate longing for David made her hurry indoors. But there the silence, unbroken by the child's voice, was unendurable; it seemed to turn the confusion of her thoughts into actual noise. So she went out again to pace up and down the little brick paths between the box borders of the garden. The morning was still and warm; the frost of a sharp night had melted into threads of mist that beaded the edges of blackened leaves and glittered on the brown stems of withered annuals. Once she stopped to pull up some weed that showed itself still green and arrogant, spilling its seeds from yellowing pods among the frosted flowers; and once she picked, and put into the bosom of her dress, a little belated monthly rose, warm and pink at the heart, but with blighted outer petals. She found it impossible to pursue any one line of thought to its logical outcome; her mind flew like a shuttlecock between a dozen plans for William King's defeat. "Oh, I must decide on something!" she thought, desperately. But the futile morning passed without decision. After dinner she went resolutely into the parlor, and sitting down on her little low chair, pressed her fingers over her eyes to shut out any possible distractions. "Now," she said, "I will make up my mind."

A bluebottle fly buzzing up and down the window dropped on the sill, then began to buzz again. Through the Venetian blinds the sunshine fell in bars across the carpet; she opened her eyes and watched its silent movement,—so intangible, so irresistible; the nearest line touched her foot; her skirt; climbed to her listless hands; out in the hall the clock slowly struck three; her thoughts blurred and ran together; her very fears seemed to sink into space and time and silence. The sunshine passed over her lap, resting warm upon her bosom; up and up, until, suddenly, like a hot finger, it touched her face. That roused her; she got up, sighing, and rubbing her eyes as if she had been asleep. No decision! ...

Suppose she should go down into the orchard? Away from the house, she might be better able to put her mind on it. She knew a spot where, hidden from curious eyes, she could lie at full length in the grass, warm on a western slope. David might have found her, but no one else would think of looking for her there.... When she sank down on the ground and clasped her hands under her head, her eyes were level with the late-blossoming grass that stirred a little in an unfelt breath of air; two frosted stalks of goldenrod, nodded and swung back and nodded again, between her and the sky. With absent intentness, she watched an ant creeping carefully to the top of a head of timothy, then jolting off at some jar she could not feel. The sun poured full upon her face; there was not a cloud anywhere in the unfathomable blue stillness. Thought seemed to drown in seas of light, and personality dwindled until her pain and fright did not seem to belong to her. She had to close her eyes to shut herself into her own dark consciousness:

How should she keep her child?

The simplicity of immediate flight she had, of course, long ago abandoned; it would only postpone the struggle with William King. That inflexible face of duty would hunt her down wherever she was, and take the child from her. No; there was but one thing to do: parry his threat of confessing to Dr. Lavendar that he had "made a mistake" in advising that David should be given to her, by a confession of her own, a confession which should admit the doctor's change of mind without mentioning its cause, and at the same time hold such promises for the future that the old minister would say that she might have David. Then she could turn upon her enemy with the triumphant declaration that she had forestalled him; that she had said exactly what he had threatened to say,—no more, no less. And yet the child was hers! But as she tried to plan how she should put it, the idea eluded her. She would tell Dr. Lavendar thus and so: but even as she marshalled her words, that scene in the waiting-room of the railroad station ached in her imagination. Alice's ignorance of her existence became an insult; what she was going to say to Dr. Lavendar turned into a denunciation of Lloyd Pryor; he was vile, and cruel, and contemptible! But these words stumbled, too. Back in her mind, common sense agreed to Lloyd's silence to his daughter; and, suddenly, to her amazement, she knew that she agreed, not only to the silence, but to his objection to marrying her. It would be an offence for her to live with Alice! Marriage, which would have quitted this new tormenting sense of responsibility and made her like other people, would not have lessened that offence. It came over her with still more acute surprise, that she had never felt this before. It was as if that fire of shame which had consumed her vanity the night she had confessed to William King, had brought illumination as well as burning. By its glare she saw that such a secret as she and Lloyd held between them would be intolerable in the presence of that young girl. Lloyd had felt it—here she tingled all over:—Lloyd was more sensitive than she! Ah, well; Alice was his own daughter, and he knew how almost fanatical she was about truth; so he was especially sensitive. But Dr. King? He had felt it about David: "whether you married this man or not would make no difference about David." She thought about this for awhile in heavy perplexity.

Then with a start she came back again to what she must say to Dr. Lavendar: "I will promise to bring David up just as he wishes; and I will tell him about my money; he doesn't know how rich I am; he will feel that he has no right to rob David of such a chance. And I will say that nobody could love him as I can." Love him! Had she not given up everything for him, sacrificed everything to keep him? For his sake she had not married! In this rush of self-approval she sat up, and looked blindly off over the orchard below her at the distant hills, blue and slumberous in the sunshine. Then she leaned her head in her hands and stared fixedly at a clump of clover, green still in the yellowing stubble.... She had chosen her child instead of a convention which, less than a month ago, she had so passionately desired; a month ago it seemed to her that, once married, she could do no more harm, have no more shame. Yet she had given all this up for David! ... Suddenly she spurred her mind back to that talk with Dr. Lavendar: she would promise—anything! And planning her promises, she sat there, gazing with intent, unseeing eyes at the clover, until the chilly twilight drove her into the house.

It was not until Saturday that she dared to go to the Rectory. It was early in the afternoon, just as the Collect Class was gathering in the dining-room. She had forgotten it, she told Mary, as she closed her umbrella on the door-step. "Can I wait in the study?" she asked, uncertainly;—there was time to go back! The task of telling part of the truth to this mild old man, whose eye was like a sword, suddenly daunted her. She would wait a few days.—she began to open her umbrella, her fingers blundering with haste,—but retreat was cut off: Dr. Lavendar, on his way to the dining-room, with Danny at his heels, saw her; she could not escape!

"Why, Mrs. Richie!" he said, smiling at her over his spectacles. "Hi, David, who do you suppose is here? Mrs. Richie!"

David came running out of the dining-room; "Did you bring my slag?" he demanded.

And she had to confess that she had not thought of it; "You didn't tell me you wanted it, dear," she defended herself, nervously.

"Oh, well," said David, "I'm coming home to-morrow, and I'll get it."

"Would you like to come home?" she could not help saying.

"I'd just as lieves," said David.

"Run back," Dr. Lavendar commanded, "and tell the children I'm coming in a minute. Tell Theophilus Bell not to play Indian under the table. Now, Mrs. Richie, what shall we do? Do you mind coming in and hearing them say their Collect? Or would you rather wait in the study? We shall be through in three-quarters of an hour. David shall bring you some jumbles and apples. I suppose you are going to carry him off?" Dr. Lavendar said, ruefully.

"Oh," she faltered in a sudden panic, "I will come some other time," but somehow or other, before she knew it, she was in the dining-room; very likely it was because she would not loosen the clasp of David's little warm careless hand, and so her reluctant feet followed him in his hurry to admonish Theophilus. When she entered, instant silence fell upon the children. Lydia Wright, stumbling through the catechism to Ellen Dale who held the prayer-book and prompted, let her voice trail off and her mouth remain open at the sight of a visitor; Theophilus Bell rubbed his sleeve over some chalk-marks on the blackboard;—"I am drawing a woman with an umbrella," he had announced, condescendingly; "I saw her coming up the path,"—but when he saw her sitting down by Dr. Lavendar, Theophilus skulked to his seat, and read his Collect ever with unheeding attention.

Then the business of the afternoon began, and Helena sat and listened to it. It was a scene which had repeated itself for two generations in Old Chester; the fathers and mothers of these little people had sat on these same narrow benches without backs, and looked at the blackboard where Dr. Lavendar wrote out the divisions of the Collect, and then looked at the sideboard, where stood a dish of apples and another of jumbles. They, too, had said their catechism, announcing, in singsong chorus that they heartily thanked their Heavenly Father that He had called them to this state of salvation; and Dr. Lavendar had asked one or another of them, as he now asked their children, "What meanest thou by this word Sacrament?" "What is the inward and spiritual grace?" That afternoon, when he swooped down on David, Helen squeezed her hands together with anxiety; did he know what was the inward and spiritual grace? Could he say it? She held her breath until he had sailed triumphantly through:

"A death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness," and so on. When he had finished, she looked proudly at Dr. Lavendar, who, to her astonishment, did not bestow a single word of praise!

"And yet," said Helena to herself, "he said it better than any of them, and he is the youngest!—David said it very well, didn't he?" she ventured, in a whisper.

Dr. Lavendar made no answer, but opened a book; on which there was a cheerful shuffling as the children jostled each other in their efforts to kneel down in the space between the benches; when all was still, Dr. Lavendar repeated the Collect. Helena dropped her face in her hands, and listened:

"Grant, we beseech Thee, merciful Lord, to Thy faithful people pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve Thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord."

"Amen!" said the children, joyfully; and, scrambling to their feet, looked politely at the sideboard. David, who played host on these occasions, made haste to poke the apples at Mrs. Richie, who could not help whispering to him to pull his collar straight; and she even pushed his hair back a little from his forehead. The sense of possession came over her like a wave, and with it a pang of terror that made her lips dry; at that moment she knew the taste of fear in her mouth. When Dr. Lavendar spoke to her, she was unable to reply.

"Well, now, Mrs. Richie," he said, "I expect these little people can eat their apples without us; can't you, chickabiddies?"

"Yes, sir!" said the children, in eager chorus, eying the apples.

"You and I will go into the study for a while," said Dr. Lavendar.

She followed him speechlessly...the time had come.

Dr. Lavendar, hospitable and fussy, drew up a horsehair-covered chair with ears on each side of the back, and bade her sit down; then he poked the fire, and put on a big lump of coal, and asked her if she was sure she was warm enough? "It's pretty chilly; we didn't have weather as cold as this in October when I was your age."

"Dr. Lavendar," said Helena;—and at the tremor in her voice he looked at her quickly, and then looked away;—"in regard to David—"

"Yes; I understand that you are not sure that you want to keep him?"

"Oh, no! I am sure. Entirely sure!" She paused, uncertain what to say next. Dr. Lavendar gave her no assistance. Her breath caught in an unsteady laugh. "You are not smoking, Dr. Lavendar! Do light your pipe. I am quite used to tobacco smoke, I assure you."

"No," said Dr. Lavendar, quietly; "I will not smoke now."

"In regard to David," she began; and gripped her hands tight together, for she saw with dismay that they were shaking. She had an instant of angry surprise at her own body. It was betraying her to the silent, watching old man on the other side of the fire. "I want him; but I mean to leave Old Chester. Would you be willing to let me take him away?"

"Why," said Dr. Lavendar, "we shall be very sorry to have you leave us; and, of course, I shall be sorry to lose David. Very sorry! I shall feel," said Dr. Lavendar, with a rueful chuckle, "as if I had lost a tooth! That is about as omnipresent sense of loss as a human critter can have. But I can't see that that is any reason for not letting you take him."

"You are very kind," she murmured.

"Where are you going, and when do you go?" he asked, easily; but he glanced at those shaking hands.

"I want to go next week. I—oh, Dr. Lavendar! I want David; I am sure nobody can do more for him than I can. Nobody can love him as I do! And I think he would be pretty homesick for me, too, if I did not take him. But—"

"Yes?"

She tried to smile; then spread her handkerchief on her knee, and folded it over and over with elaborate self-control. "Dr. King thinks—I ought not to have him. He says," she stopped; the effort to repeat William King's exact words drove the color out of her face. "He says he made a mistake in advising you to give David to me. He thinks—"

she caught her breath with a gasp;—"I am not to be trusted to—to bring him up." She trembled with relief; the worst was over. She had kept her promise, to the letter. Now she would begin to fight for her child: "You will let me have him? You will!—Please say you will, Dr. Lavendar!"

"Why does Dr. King think you are not to be trusted?" said Dr. Lavendar.

"Because," she said, gathering up all her courage, "he thinks that I— that David ought to be brought up by some one more—more religious, I suppose, than I am. I know I'm not very religious. Not as good as everybody in Old Chester; but I will bring him up just as you want me to! Any way at all you want me to. I will go to church regularly; truly I will, Dr. Lavendar; truly!"

Dr. Lavendar was silent. The lump of coal in the grate suddenly split and fell apart; there was a crackling leap of flames, and from between the bars a spurt of bubbling gas sent a whiff of acrid smoke puffing out into the room.

"You will let me have him, won't you? You said you would! If you take him away from me—"

"Well?"

She looked at him dumbly; her chin shook.

"The care of a child is sometimes a great burden; have you considered that?"

"Nothing would be a burden if I did it for David!"

"It might involve much sacrifice."

"I have sacrificed everything for him!" she burst out.

"What?"

"There was something," she said evasively, "that I wanted to do very much; something that would have made me—happier. But I couldn't if I kept David; so I gave it up."

Dr. Lavendar ruminated. "You wanted David the most?"

"Yes?" she said passionately.

"Then it was a choice, not a sacrifice, wasn't it, my dear? No doubt you would make sacrifices for him, only in this matter you chose what you wanted most, And your choice was for your own happiness I take it,—not his?"

She nodded doubtfully, baffled for a minute, and not quite understanding. Then she said, "But I would choose his happiness; I have done some things for him, truly I have. Oh, little things, I suppose you would call them; but I wasn't used to them and they seemed great to me. But I would choose his happiness, Dr, Lavendar. So you will let me keep him?"

"If you think you ought to have him, you may."

"No matter what Dr. King says?"

"No matter what Dr, King says. If you are sure that it is best for him to be with you, I, at least, shall not interfere."

Her relief was so great that the tears ran down her face. "It is best!"

"Best to be with you," Dr, Lavendar repeated thoughtfully; "Why, Mrs. Richie?"

"Why? Why because I want him so much, I have nothing in the whole world, Dr. Lavendar, but David. Nothing."

"Other folks might want him."

"But nobody can do as much for him as I can! I have a good deal of money."

"You mean you can feed him, and clothe him, and educate him? Well; I could do that myself. What else can you do?"

"What else?"

"Yes. One person can give him material care about as well as another. What else can you do?"

"Why—" she began, helplessly; "I don't think I know just what you mean?"

"My friend," said Dr. Lavendar, "are you a good woman?"

The shock of the question left her speechless. She tried to meet his eye; quailed, half rose: "I don't know what you mean! What right have you to ask me such a question—"

Dr, Lavendar waited.

"Perhaps I don't think about things, quite as you do. I am not religious; I told you that. I don't do things because of religion; I believe in—in reason, not in religion. I try to be good in—my way. I don't know that I've been what you would call 'good.'"

"What do I call 'good'?"

At which she burst out that people in Old Chester thought that people who did not live according to convention were not good. For her part, convention was the last thing she thought of. Indeed, she believed there was more wickedness in convention than out of it! "If I have done anything you would call wrong, it was because I couldn't help it; I never wanted to do wrong. I just wanted to be happy. I've tried to be charitable. And I've tried to be good—in my way; but not because I wanted to go to heaven, and all that. I—I don't believe in heaven," she ended with terrified flippancy.

"Perhaps not," said Dr. Lavendar sadly; "but, oh, my child, how you do believe in hell!"

She stared at him for one broken moment; then flung her arms out on the table beside her, and dropped her head upon them. Dr. Lavendar did not speak, There was a long silence, suddenly she turned upon him, her face quivering; "Yes! I do believe in hell. Because that is what life is! I've never had any happiness at all. Oh, it seemed so little a thing to ask—just to be happy Yes, I believe in hell."

Dr. Lavendar waited.

"If I've done what people say isn't right, it was only because I wanted to be happy; not because I wanted to do wrong. It was because of Love. You can't understand what that means! But Christ said that because a woman loved much, much was to be forgiven! Do you remember that?" she demanded hotly.

"Yes," said Dr, Lavendar; "but do you remember Who it was that she loved much? She loved Goodness, Mrs. Richie. Have you loved Goodness?"

"Oh, what is the use of talking about it?" she said passionately; "we won't agree. If it was all to do over again, perhaps I—But life was so dreadful! If you judge me, remember—"

"I do not judge you."

"—remember that everything has been against me. Everything! From the very beginning, I never had anything I wanted, I thought I was going to be happy, but each time I wasn't. Until I had David. And now you will take him. Oh, what a miserable failure life has been! I wish I could die. But it seems you can't even die when you want to!"

For a moment she covered her face with her hands. Then she said: "I suppose I might as well tell you. Mr. Pryor is not—.... After my baby died, I left my husband. Lloyd loved me, and I went to live with him."

"You went to live with your brother?" Dr. Lavendar repeated perplexed.

"He is not my brother."

There was silence for a full minute. Then Dr. Lavendar said quietly, "Go on."

She looked at him with hunted eyes. "Now, you will take David away. Why did you make me tell you?"

"It is better to tell me." He laid his old hand on hers, clenched upon the table at her side. The room was very still; once a coal fell from the grate, and once there was the soft brush of rain against the window,

"It's my whole life. I can't tell you my whole life, I didn't even want to be wicked; all I wanted was to be happy, And so I went to Lloyd. It didn't seem so very wrong. We didn't hurt anybody. His wife was dead.—As for Frederick, I have no regrets!" she ended fiercely.

The room had darkened in the rainy October twilight, and the fire was low; Dr. Lavendar could hardly see her quivering face.

"But now it's all over between Lloyd and me. I sha'n't see him ever any more. He would have married me, if I had been willing to give up David. But I was not willing."

"You thought it would make everything right if you married this man?"

"Right?" she repeated, surprised; "why, of course. At least I suppose that is what good people call right," she added dully.

"And you gave up doing right, to have David?"

She felt that she was trapped, and yet she could not understand why; "I sacrificed myself," she said confusedly.

"No," said Dr. Lavendar; "you sacrificed a conviction. A poor, false conviction, but such as it was, you threw it over to keep David."

She looked at him in terror; "It was just selfishness, you think?"

"Yes," said Dr. Lavendar.

"Perhaps it was," she admitted. "Oh, how frightful life is! To try to be happy, is to be bad."

"No, to try to be happy at the expense of other people, is to be bad."

"But I never did that! Lloyd's wife was dead;—Of course, if she had been alive"—Helena lifted her head with the curious pride of caste in sin which is so strongly felt by the woman who is a sinner;—"if she had been alive, I wouldn't have thought of such a thing. But nobody knew, so I never did any harm,"—then she quailed; "at least, I never meant to do any harm. So you can't say it was at anybody's expense."

"It was at everybody's expense. Marriage is what makes us civilized. If anybody injures marriage we all pay."

She was silent.

"If every dissatisfied wife should do what you did, could decent life go on? Wouldn't we all drop down a little nearer the animals?"

"Perhaps so," she said vaguely. But she was not following him. She had entered into this experience of sin, not by the door of reason, but of emotion; she could leave it only by the same door. The high appeal to individual renunciation for the good of the many, was entirely beyond her. Dr. Lavendar did not press it any further.

"Well, anyhow," she said dully, "I didn't get any happiness—whether it was at other people's expense or not. When David came, I thought, 'now I am going to be happy!' That was all I wanted: happiness. And now you will take him away."

"I have not said I would take him away."

She trembled so at that, that for an instant she could not speak. "Not take him?"

"Not if you think it is best for him to stay with you."

She began to pant with fear, "You mean something by that, I know you do I Oh, what do you mean? I cannot do him any harm!"

"Woman," said Dr. Lavendar solemnly, "can you do him any good?"

She cowered silently away from him.

"Can you teach him to tell the truth, you, who have lived a lie? Can you make him brave, you, who could not endure? Can you make him honorable, you, who have deceived us all? Can you make him unselfish, you, who have thought only of self? Can you teach him purity, you, who—"

"Stop! I cannot bear it."

"Tell me the truth: can you do him any good?"

That last solemn word fell into profound silence. There was not a sound in the still darkness of the study; and suddenly her soul was still, too ... the whirlwind of anger had died out; the shock of responsibility had subsided; the hiss of those flames of shame had ceased. She was in the centre of all the tumults, where lies the quiet mind of God. For a long time she did not speak. Then, by and by, her face hidden in her arms on the table, she said, in a whisper:

"No."

And after the fire, the still small Voice.



CHAPTER XXXIII

Dr. Lavendar looked at the bowed head; but he offered no comfort. When she said brokenly, "No; I can't have him. I can't have him," he assented; and there was silence again. It was broken by a small, cheerful voice:

"Mary says supper's ready. There's milk toast, an'—"

Dr. Lavendar went as quickly as he could to the door; when he opened it he stood between the little boy and Helena. "Tell Mary not to wait for me; but ask her to give you your supper."

"An' Mary says that in Ireland they call clover 'shamrocks'; an'—"

Dr. Lavendar gently closed the door. When he went back to his seat on the other side of the table, she said faintly, "That was—?"

"Yes," said Dr. Lavendar.

"Oh," she whispered. "I knew I would have to give him up. I knew I had no right to him."

"No; you had no right to him."

"But I loved him so! Oh, I thought, maybe, I would be—like other people, if I had him."

After a while, with long pauses between the sentences, she began to tell him. ...

"I never thought about goodness; or badness either. Only about Lloyd, and happiness. I thought I had a right to happiness. But I was angry at all the complacent married people; they were so satisfied with themselves! And yet all the time I wished Frederick would die so that I could be married. Oh, the time was so long!" She threw her arms up with a gesture of shuddering weariness; then clasped her hands between her knees, and staring at the floor, began to speak. Her words poured out, incoherent, contradictory, full of bewilderment and pain. "Yes; I wasn't very happy, except just at first. After a while I got so tired of Lloyd's selfishness. Oh—he was so selfish! I used to look at him sometimes, and almost hate him. He always took the most comfortable chair, and he cared so much about things to eat. And he got fat. And he didn't mind Frederick's living. I could see that. And I prayed that Frederick would die.—I suppose you think it was wicked to pray that?"

"Go on."

"It was only because I loved Lloyd so much. But he didn't die. And I began not to be happy. And then I thought Lloyd didn't want to talk to me about Alice. Alice is his daughter. It was three years ago I first noticed that. But I wasn't really sure until this summer. He didn't even like to show me her picture. That nearly killed me, Dr. Lavendar. And once, just lately, he told me her 'greatest charm was her innocence.' Oh, it was cruel in him to say that! How could he be so cruel!" she looked at him for sympathy; but he was silent. "But underneath, somehow, I understood; and that made me angry,—to understand. It was this summer that I began to be angry. And then I got so jealous: not of Alice, exactly; but of what she stood for. It was a kind of fright, because I couldn't go back and begin again. Do you know what I mean?"

"I know."

"Oh, Dr. Lavendar, it is so horrible! When I began to understand, it seemed like something broken—broken—broken! It could never be mended."

"No."

...Sometimes, as she went on he asked a question, and sometimes made a comment. The comment was always the same: when she spoke of marrying Frederick to get away from her bleak life with her grandmother, she said, "Oh, it was a mistake, a mistake!"

And he said, "It was a sin."

And again: "I thought Lloyd would make me happy; I just went to be happy; that was my second mistake."

"It was your second sin."

"You think I am a sinner," she said; "oh, Dr. Lavendar, I am not as bad as you think! I always expected to marry Lloyd. I am not like a— fallen woman."

"Why not?" said Dr. Lavendar.

She shrank back with a gesture of dismay. "I always expected to marry him!"

"It would have been just the same if you had married him."

"I don't understand you," she said faintly.

"From the beginning," he said, "you have thought only of self. You would not have been redeemed from self by gaining what would have made you more satisfied with yourself."

She thought about this for a few minutes in a heavy silence. "You mean, getting married would not have changed things, really?"

"It would have made the life you were living less harmful to your fellow creatures, perhaps; but it would have made no difference between you two."

"I thought I would be happier," she said.

"Happier!" said Dr. Lavendar; "what sort of happiness could there be in a marriage where the man could never respect the woman, and the woman could never trust the man!"

"I hadn't thought of it that way," she said slowly. And then she began again. ... Once Dr. Lavendar interrupted her to light the lamp, for the study was dark except for the wink of red coals in the grate; and once he checked her, and went into the dining-room to bring her a glass of wine and some food. She protested, but he had his way, and she ate and drank before going on with her story. When she told him, brokenly, of Sam Wright, Dr. Lavendar got up and walked the length of the study. But he made no comment—none was needed. When she ended, there was a long pause. Suddenly she clasped her hands on the top of her head, and bowed her forehead almost to her knees. She seemed to speak as if to herself:

"Not worthy; not worthy."... Then aloud; "I give him up," she said. And stretched out empty arms.

She rose, and began to feel about for her cloak that had fallen across the arm of her chair. But she was half blind with weeping, and Dr. Lavendar found it for her and gently put it over her shoulders.

"I will go away," she said, "but I may see him again, mayn't I? Just once more, to say good-by to him."

"Yes," he said.

"I'll send his little things down to you to-morrow, Dr. Lavendar. Oh,—his dear little things!"

"Very well."

He lighted a lantern for her, but made no offer to see her home, or to send his Mary along as an escort. Yet when he let her go away into the rainy darkness, he stood in the doorway a long while, looking after her. Then he went back to the study, to pace up and down, up and down. Twice he stopped and looked out of the window, and then at the clock. But each time he put the impulse aside. He must not interfere.

It was almost midnight before he took his lamp and went up-stairs; at David's door he hesitated, and then went in. The little boy was lying curled up like a puppy, his face almost hidden in his pillow, but his cheek glowing red under the soft thatch of hair. Dr. Lavendar, shading his lamp with one hand, looked down at him a long time. On the wall behind him and half-way across the ceiling, the old man's shadow loomed wavering and gigantic, and the light, flickering up on his face, deepened the lines of age and of other people's troubles. By and by he stooped down, and gently laid his old palm upon the little head.

When he lifted himself up his face was full of peace.



CHAPTER XXXIV

"William," said Dr. Lavendar, "you may tell me anything I ought to know about Mrs. Richie."

The doctor looked at him with a start, and a half-spoken question.

"Yes; she told me. But I want to ask you about the man. She didn't say much about him."

This was Sunday evening; David had gone to bed, and Danny had climbed up into Dr. Lavendar's chair, and been gently deposited on the hearth- rug. "No, Daniel; not to-night, sir. I've got to have my chair just this once." William had come in for his usual smoke, but he had been more than usually silent. When Dr. Lavendar gave his calm permission, the doctor's wretched perplexity of the past month could hardly find words. He said, first of all,

"David? Of course you will take him away. It will break her heart!"

"A broken heart is not such a bad thing, Willy. Our Heavenly Father does not despise it."

"Dr. Lavendar, why can't she keep him? She'll never see that scoundrel again!"

"Do you think a woman with such a story is fit to bring up a child, William?"

The doctor was silent.

"She thinks not, herself," said Dr. Lavendar.

"Does she?" William King said; and a minute afterwards fumbled in his coat tails for his pocket-handkerchief. "What is she going to do?" he asked huskily.

"She feels that she had better leave Old Chester."

"Do you think so, sir?"

Dr. Lavendar sighed. "I would like to have her here; I would like to take care of her, for a while. But I don't think she could stand it; on your account."

"My account!" William King pushed his chair back, and got on his feet; "Dr. Lavendar, I—I—"

"She would feel the embarrassment of your knowledge," said the old man.

Dr. King sat down. Then he said, "I am the last man to judge her."

"'Beginning at the eldest, even unto the last,'" murmured Dr. Lavendar. "Shame is a curious thing, William. It's like some of your medicines. The right amount cures. Too much kills. I've seen that with hard drinkers. Where a drunkard is a poor, uneducated fellow, shame gives him a good boost towards decency. But a man of education, William, a man of opportunity—if he wakes up to what he has been doing, shame gives him such a shove he is apt to go all round the circle, and come up just where he started! Shame is a blessed thing,— when you don't get too much of it. She would get too much of it here. But—" he stopped and smiled; "sin has done its divine work, I think."

"Sin?"

"Yes," said Dr. Lavendar, cheerfully; "have you ever noticed that every single human experience—except, perhaps, the stagnation of conceit; I haven't found anything hopeful in that yet; but maybe I shall some day!—but, except for conceit, I have never known any human experience of pain or sin that could not be the gate of heaven. Mind! I don't say that it always is; but it can be. Has that ever occurred to you?"

"Well, no," the doctor confessed; "I can't say that it has."

"Oh, you're young yet," Dr, Lavendar said encouragingly, "My boy, let me tell you that there are some good folks who don't begin to know their Heavenly Father, as the sinner does who climbed up to Him out of the gutter."

"A dangerous doctrine," William ruminated.

"Oh, I don't preach it," Dr. Lavendar said placidly "but I don't preach everything I know."

William was not following him. He said abruptly, "What are you going to do with David?"

"David is going to stay with me."

And William said again, "It will break her heart!"

"I hope so," said Dr. Lavendar solemnly, How he watched that poor heart, in the next few days! Every afternoon his shabby old buggy went tugging up the hill. Sometimes he found her walking restlessly about in the frosted garden; sometimes standing mutely at the long window in the parlor, looking for him; sometimes prostrate on her bed. When he took her hand—listless one day, fiercely despairing the next,—he would glance at her with a swift scrutiny that questioned, and then waited. The pity in his old eyes never dimmed their relentless keenness; they seemed to raid her face, sounding all the shallows in search of depths. For with his exultant faith in human nature, he believed that somewhere in the depths he should find God, It is only the pure in heart who can find Him in impurity, who can see, behind the murky veil of stained flesh, the very face of Christ declaring the possibilities of the flesh!—but this old man sought and knew that he should find Him. He waited and watched for many days, looking for that recognition of wrong-doing which breaks the heart by its revelation of goodness that might have been; for there is no true knowledge of sin, without a divine and redeeming knowledge of righteousness! So, as this old saint looked into the breaking heart, pity for the sinner who was base deepened into reverence for the child of God who might be noble. It is an easy matter to believe in the confident soul; but Dr. Lavendar believed in a soul that did not believe in itself!

It seemed to Helena that she had nothing to live for; that there was nothing to do except shiver back out of sight, and wait to die. For the time was not yet when she should know that her consciousness of sin might be the chased and fretted Cup from which she might drink the sacrament of life; when she should come to understand, with thanksgiving, that unless she had sinned, the holy wine might never have touched her lips!

In these almost daily talks with Dr. Lavendar, the question of the future was beaten out: it was a bleak enough prospect; it didn't matter, she said, where she went, or what became of her, she had spoiled her life, she said. "Yes," Dr. Lavendar agreed, "you've spoiled what you've had of it. But your Heavenly Father has the rest, in His hands, and He'll give it to you clean and sound. All you've got to do, is to keep it so, and forget the spoiled part." That was the only thing he insisted upon: no dwelling on the past!

"I wish I was one of the people who want to do things," she told him with a sort of wistful cynicism. "But I don't. I have no story-book desires. I don't want to go and nurse lepers!—but I will, if you want me to," she added with quick and touching simplicity.

Dr Lavendar smiled, and said that nursing lepers was too easy. He had suggested that she should live in a distant city;—he had agreed at once to her assertion that she could not stay in Old Chester. "I know some nice people there," he said; "Ellen Bailey lives there, she's Ellen Spangler now. You've heard me speak of her? Spangler is a parson; he's a good fellow, but the Lord denied him brains to any great extent. But Ellen is the salt of the earth. And she can laugh. You'll like her."

"But what will I do when I get there?"

"I think Ellen may find something to keep you busy," he said cheerfully; "and, meantime, I'll make a suggestion myself: study Hebrew."

"Hebrew!"

"Or Arabic; or Russian; it doesn't matter which, your mind needs exercise."

"When you said Hebrew, I thought you meant so I could read the Bible."

"Ho!" said Dr. Lavendar, "I think King James's version is good enough for you; or anybody else. And I wouldn't want you to wait until you can read backwards, to read your Bible. No; I only meant that you need something to break your mind on. Hebrew is as good as anything else."

She meditated on this for a while, "I begin to understand," she said with her hesitating smile; and Dr. Lavendar was mightily pleased, for he had not seen that smile of late.

Sometimes they talked about David, Mrs. Richie asking questions in a smothered voice; but she never begged for him. That part of her life was over. Dr. Lavendar sometimes brought the child with him when he and Goliath climbed the hill for that daily visit: but he always took him back again. Indeed, the Rectory was now definitely the little boy's home. Of course Old Chester knew that the Stuffed Animal House was to lose its tenant, and that David had gone to live with Dr. Lavendar. "I wonder why she doesn't take him with her?" said Old Chester; and called to say good-by and hint that Mrs. Richie must be sorry to leave the little boy behind her? Helena said briefly, yes, she was "sorry." And Old Chester went away no wiser than it came. William King, wise and miserable, did not call. His wife said that she would say good-by for him, if he was too busy to go up the hill.

"It seems to me you've been very busy lately," she told him; "I've hardly had a glimpse of you. I only hope it will show on your bills. It is very foolish, William, to take patients so far back in the country; I don't believe it pays, considering how much time it takes. But I'll tell Mrs. Richie you send your respects, and say good-by for you."

"You needn't mind," said the doctor.

Mrs. King went to make her adieux the very next day. Her manner was so cordial that Helena was faintly surprised; but, as Martha told Dr. Lavendar, cordiality did not mean the sacrifice of truth to any false idea of politeness.

"I didn't tell her I was sorry she was going," Martha said, standing by the roadside in the chill November wind, talking into the buggy, "because, to speak flatly and frankly, I am not. I don't consider that her example is very good for Old Chester, She is not a good housekeeper. I could tell you certain things—however, I won't, I never gossip. I just said, very kindly,' Good-by, Mrs. Richie. I hope you'll have a pleasant journey.' That was all. No insincere regrets. That's one thing about me, Dr. Lavendar, I may not be perfect, but I never say anything, just to be pleasant!"

"I've noticed that," said Dr. Lavendar; "G'on, Goliath."

And Martha, in great spirits, told her William at tea, that, though Dr. Lavendar was failing, she had to admit he could still see people's good qualities. "I told him I hadn't put on any airs of regret about Mrs. Richie, and he said he had always noticed my frankness."

William helped himself to gooseberry jam in silence.

"You do leave things so catacornered!" Martha observed, laying the thin silver spoon straight in the dish. "William, I never knew anybody so incapable as that woman. I asked her how she had packed her preserves for moving. She said she hadn't made any! Think of that, for a housekeeper. Oh, and I found out about that perfumery, I just asked her. It's nothing but ground orris!"

William said he would like a cup of tea.

"I can't make her out," Martha said, touching the teapot to make sure it was hot; "I've always said she wasn't her brother's equal, mentally. But you do expect a woman to have certain feminine qualities, now the idea of adopting a child, and then deserting him!"

"She hadn't adopted him," William said.

"It's the same thing; she took him, and now she gets tired of him, and won't keep him. She begins a thing, but she doesn't go on with it."

"I suppose it's better not to begin it?" William said. And there was an edge in his voice that caused Mrs. King to hold her tongue. "Martha," the doctor said, after a while and with evident effort, "can you give me an early breakfast to-morrow morning? I've got to go back into the country, and I want to make an early start,"

Helena Richie, too, meant to make an early start the next morning; it was the day that she was to leave Old Chester. The plan of going to the western city had gradually shaped itself, and while Dr. Lavendar was writing to those friends of his, and Helena corresponding with a real-estate agent, the packing-up at the Stuffed Animal House had proceeded. Now it was all done; Maggie and Sarah had had their wages, and several presents besides; the pony had been shipped from Mercer; the rabbits boxed and sent down to the Rectory; all was done;—except the saying good-by to David. But Helena told herself that she would not say good-by to him. She could not, she said. She would see him, but he should not know it was good-by. And so she asked Dr. Lavendar to send the child up to her the day before she was to go away;—by himself. "You'll trust him with me for an hour?" she said.

She meant to cuddle the child, and give him the "forty kisses" which, at last, he was ready to accept, and let him chatter of all his multitudinous interests. Then she would send him away, and begin her empty life. The page which had held a promise of joy, would be turned over; a new, dreary chapter, with no promise in it, would begin....

David came in the afternoon. He was a little late, and explained his tardiness by saying that he had found a toad, and tying a string around its waist, had tried to play horse with it, up the hill. "But he wouldn't drive," David said disgustedly; "maybe he was a lady toad; I don't know."

"Perhaps the poor toad didn't like to be driven," Helena suggested. David looked thoughtful. "David," she said, "I am going away. Will you write a little letter to me sometimes?"

"Maybe," said David. And slapped his pocket, in a great flurry; "Dr. Lavendar ga' me a letter for you!"

She glanced at it to see if it needed an answer, but it was only to ask her to stop at the Rectory before she left town the next morning.

"Tell Dr. Lavendar I will, darling," she said, and David nodded.

She was sitting before the parlor fire; the little boy was leaning against her knee braiding three blades of grass; he was deeply absorbed. Helena took his face between her hands, and looked at it; then, to hide the trembling of her lips, she hid them in his neck.

"You tickle!" said David, and wriggled out of her arms with chuckles of fun. "I'm making you a ring," he said.

She let him push the little grass circlet over her finger, and then closed her hand on it lest it should slip off. "You won't forget me, David, will you?"

"No," he said surprised; "I never forget anything. I remember everything the magician did. An' I remember when I was born."

"Oh, David!"

"I do. I remember my brother's candy horse. My brother—was—was, oh, seven or eight weeks older 'an me. Yes; I'll not forget you; not till I'm old. Not till I'm twenty, maybe. I guess I'll go now. We are going to have Jim Crow for dessert. Mary told me. You're prettier than Mary. Or Dr. Lavendar." This was a very long speech for David, and to make up for it he was silent for several minutes. He took her hand, and twisted the little grass ring round and round on her finger; and then, suddenly, his chin quivered. "I don't like you. You're going away," he said; he stamped his foot and threw himself against her knee in a paroxysm of tears. "I hate you!"

It was so unexpected, and so entirely unlike David, that Helena forgot her own pain in soothing him. And, indeed, when she had said she would send him some candy—"and a false-face?" David blubbered;—"yes, dear precious!" she promised;—he quite cheered up, and dragging at her hand, he went skipping along beside her out to the green gate in the hedge.

"I'll stop at the Rectory in the morning," she said, when she kissed him, bravely, in the twilight; "so I'll see you again, dear."

"'By!" said David. And he had gone.

She stood staring after him, fiercely brushing the tears away, because they dimmed the little joyous figure, trotting into the November dusk.

The morning broke, gray and cloudy. William King had had his early breakfast; of course he had! Rather than fail in a housekeeper's duty, Martha would have sat up all night. When the doctor started for that call out into the country, Helena was just getting into the stage at the Stuffed Animal House. Once, as the coach went jolting down the hill, she lowered the misted window and looked back—then sank into her seat and put her hands over her eyes. Just for a while, there had been a little happiness in that house.

They were half-way down the hill when Jonas drew in his horses so sharply that she made a quick effort to control herself; another passenger, she thought, shrinking into her corner.

"I'll only detain you a minute or two, Jonas." William King said from the roadside. Jinny was hitched to the fence, and at the doctor's signalling hand, the stage drew up, with rattling whiffletrees. Then he opened the door and got in; he sat down on the opposite seat.

"I wanted to say good-by to you," he said; "but, most of all, I wanted to tell you that I—I have the deepest regard for you. I want you to know that. I wanted to ask you if you would allow me to call myself your friend? I have seemed unkind, but—" he took her hand in both of his, and looked at her; his face twitched. "I implore you to believe me! I must not ask anything, or say anything, more than that. But I could not let you go away without asking your forgiveness—"

"My forgiveness!"

"—Without asking you to pardon me, and to believe that I—have nothing but—esteem; the most—the most—friendly esteem; you will believe that, won't you?"

"You are very good to me," she said brokenly.

He was holding her hand so hard in his, that she winced with pain; instantly his harsh grasp relaxed, and he looked down at the white hand lying in his, soft, and fragrant, and useless as a flower; he said something under his breath; then bent down and kissed it. When he lifted his head, his face was very pale. "God bless you. God always bless you. Good-by!" And he was on the road again, shutting the coach door sharply. "Go on, Jonas!" he said. And Jonas gathered up the reins.

Alone, she put her hands over her eyes again; the tumult of the moment left her breathless and broken. She had hated him because he would have robbed her of David; and then, when she robbed herself of David, she had almost forgotten him; but now, when the chill of the future was settling down upon her, to have him say he was her friend brought a sudden warmth about her heart. There seemed to be some value to life, after all.

She had told Jonas to stop at the Rectory, and Dr. Lavendar met her at the front door. He explained that he wanted to have a last look at her and make sure she was taking wraps enough for the long cold ride to Mercer. He reminded her that she was to write to him the minute she arrived, and tell him all about her journey, and Ellen Bailey,—"and Spangler, of course," Dr. Lavendar added hurriedly. Then he asked her if she would take a package with her?

"Yes, with pleasure," she said, looking vaguely out into the hall. But there was no sign of David. "Where is the package, Dr. Lavendar?"

"I told Mary to give it to Jonas," he said. There was a moment's pause, and she looked at him dumbly.

"David?"

"He isn't here," Dr. Lavendar said gently.

"Oh, Dr. Lavendar, tell him I love him! Will you tell him? Don't let him forget me! Oh, don't let him quite forget me."

"He won't forget you," Dr. Lavendar said. He took both her hands, and looked into her face. It was a long and solemn look, but it was no longer questioning; the joy that there is in the presence of the angels, is done with questioning.

"Helena," he said, "your Master came into the world as a little child. Receive Him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving."

She looked up at him, trembling, and without words; but he understood. A moment later he gave her his blessing; then he said cheerfully, "I must not keep you any longer; come!" With Danny at his heels, he walked beside her down the garden path to the coach. It had begun to rain and the leather curtains flapped sharply in the cold wind. Jonas had buttoned the big apron up in front of him, and it was already shining wet; the steaming horses were pounding restlessly in the mud.

She did not look about her. With unsteady hands she pulled her veil down; then she said faintly, "Good-by—" She hardly returned the friendly pressure of Dr. Lavendar's hand. She was so blinded by tears that she had stumbled into the stage before she saw the child, buttoned up to his ears in his first greatcoat, and bubbling over with excitement. Even when she did see him, she did not at first understand. She looked at him, and then at Dr. Lavendar, and then back at David, to whom it was all a delightful game which, the night before, Dr. Lavendar and he had got up between them. It served its purpose, for the child had no suspicion of anything unusual in the occasion.

"I'm the package!" said David joyously.

The stage went sagging and rumbling down the road. For a long minute Dr. Lavendar stood in the rain, looking after it. Then it turned the corner and was out of sight. He drew a long breath. David had gone!

A minute later he and Danny went back to the empty house.

THE END