Cousin Parnelia hastened up the path to the house. Sylvia followed with her father, at the last extremity of agitation and perplexity.

When Cousin Parnelia reached the dining-room table, she sat down by it, pushed the cloth to one side, and produced a fresh sheet of yellow paper from her shabby bag. "Put yourselves in a receptive frame of mind," she said in a glib, professional manner. Sylvia stiffened and tried to draw her father away, but he continued to stand by the table, staring at the blank sheet of paper with a strange, wild expression on his white face. He did not take his eyes from the paper. In a moment, he sat down suddenly, as though his knees had failed him.

There was a long silence, in which Sylvia could hear the roaring of the blood in her arteries. Cousin Parnelia put one deeply veined, shrunken old hand on planchette and the other over her eyes and waited, her wrinkled, commonplace old face assuming a solemn expression of importance. The clock ticked loudly.

Planchette began to write—at first in meaningless flourishes, then with occasional words, and finally Sylvia saw streaming away from the pencil the usual loose, scrawling handwriting. Several lines were written and then the pencil stopped abruptly. Sylvia standing near her father heard his breathing grow loud and saw in a panic that the veins on his temples were swollen.

Cousin Parnelia took her hand off planchette, put on her spectacles, read over what had been written, and gave it to Professor Marshall. Sylvia was in such a state of bewilderment that nothing her father could have done would have surprised her. She half expected to see him dash the paper in the old woman's face, half thought that any moment he would fall, choking with apoplexy.

What he did was to take the paper and try to hold it steadily enough to read. But his hand shook terribly.

"I will read it to you," said Cousin Parnelia, and she read aloud in her monotonous, illiterate voice: "'I am well and happy, dearest Elliott, and never far from you. When you call to me, I hear you. All is not yet clear, but I wish I could tell you more of the whole meaning. I am near you this moment. I wish that—' The message stopped there," explained Cousin Parnelia, laying down the paper.

Professor Marshall leaned over it, straining his eyes to the rude scrawls, passing his hand over his forehead as though to brush away a web. He broke out in a loud, high voice. "That is her handwriting.... Good God, her very handwriting—the way she writes Elliott—it is from her!" He snatched the paper up and took it to the window, stumbling over the chairs blindly as he went. As he held it up to the light, poring over it again, he began to weep, crying out his wife's name softly, the tears streaming down his unshaven cheeks. He came back to the table, and sank down before it, still sobbing, still murmuring incessantly, "Oh, Barbara—Barbara!" and laid his head on his outstretched arms.

"Let him cry!" whispered Cousin Parnelia sentimentally to Sylvia, drawing her away into the hall. A few moments later when they looked in, he had fallen asleep, his head turned to one side so that Sylvia saw his face, tear-stained and exhausted, but utterly relaxed and at peace, like that of a little child in sleep. Crushed in one hand was the yellow sheet of paper covered with coarse, wavering marks.



CHAPTER XLV

"That our soul may swim We sink our heart down, bubbling, under wave"

The two sisters, their pale faces grave in the shadow of their wide hats, were on their knees with trowels in a border of their mother's garden. Judith had been giving a report of Lawrence's condition, and Sylvia was just finishing an account of what had happened at home, when the gate in the osage-orange hedge clicked, and a blue-uniformed boy came whistling up the path. He made an inquiry as to names, and handed Sylvia an envelope. She opened it, read silently, "Am starting for America and you at once. Felix." She stood looking at the paper for a moment, her face quite unmoved from its quiet sadness. The boy asked, "Any answer?"

"No," she said decisively, shaking her head. "No answer."

As he lingered, lighting a cigarette, she put a question in her turn, "Anything to pay?"

"No," said the boy, putting the cigarette-box back in his pocket, "Nothing to pay." He produced a worn and greasy book, "Sign on this line," he said, and after she had signed, he went away down the path, whistling. The transaction was complete.

Sylvia looked after the retreating figure and then turned to Judith as though there had been no interruption. "... and you can see for yourself how little use I am to him now. Since he got Cousin Parnelia in the house, there's nothing anybody else could do for him. Even you couldn't, if you could leave Lawrence. Not for a while, anyhow. I suppose he'll come slowly out of this to be himself again ... but I'm not sure that he will. And for now, I actually believe that he'd be easier in his mind if we were both away. I never breathe a word of criticism about planchette, of course. But he knows. There's that much left of his old self. He knows how I must feel. He's really ever so much better too, you know. He's taken up his classes in the Summer School again. He said he had 'a message' from Mother that he was to go back to his work bravely; and the very next day he went over to the campus, and taught all his classes as though nothing had happened. Isn't it awfully, terribly touching to see how even such a poor, incoherent make-believe of a 'message' from Mother has more power to calm him than anything we could do with our whole hearts? But how can he! I can't understand it! I can't bear it, to come in on him and Cousin Parnelia, in their evenings, and see them bent over that grotesque planchette and have him look up at me so defiantly, as though he were just setting his teeth and saying he wouldn't care what I thought of him. He doesn't really care either. He doesn't think of anything but of having evening come when he can get another 'message' from Mother ... from Mother! Mother!"

"Well, perhaps it would be as well for us not to be here for a while," murmured Judith. There were deep dark rings under her eyes, as though she had slept badly for a long time. "Perhaps it may be better later on. I can take Lawrence back with me when I go to the hospital. I want to keep him near me of course, dear little Lawrence. My little boy! He'll be my life now. He'll be what I have to live for."

Something in the quality of her quiet voice sent a chill to Sylvia's heart. "Why, Judy dear, after you are married of course you and Arnold can keep Lawrence with you. That'll be the best for him, a real home, with you. Oh, Judy dear," she laid down her trowel, fighting hard against a curious sickness which rose within her. She tried to speak lightly. "Oh, Judy dear, when are you going to be married? Or don't you want to speak about it now, for a while? You never write long letters, I know—but your late ones haven't had any news in them! You positively haven't so much as mentioned Arnold's name lately."

As she spoke, she knew that she was voicing an uneasiness which had been an unacknowledged occupant of her mind for a long time. But she looked confidently to see one of Judith's concise, comprehensive statements make her dim apprehensions seem fantastic and far-fetched, as Judith always made any flight of the imagination appear. But nothing which Sylvia's imagination might have been able to conceive would have struck her such a blow as the fact which Judith now produced, in a dry, curt phrase: "I'm not going to be married."

Sylvia did not believe her ears. She looked up wildly as Judith rose from the ground, and advanced upon her sister with a stern, white face. Before she had finished speaking, she had said more than Sylvia had ever heard her say about a matter personal to her; but even so, her iron words were few. "Sylvia, I want to tell you about it, of course. I've got to. But I won't say a word, unless you can keep quiet, and not make a fuss. I couldn't stand that. I've got all I can stand as it is."

She stood by an apple-tree and now broke from it a small, leafy branch, which she held as she spoke. There was something shocking in the contrast between the steady rigor of her voice and the fury of her fingers as they tore and stripped and shredded the leaves. "Arnold is an incurable alcoholic," she said; "Dr. Rivedal has pronounced him hopeless. Dr. Charton and Dr. Pansard (they're the best specialists in that line) have had him under observation and they say the same thing. He's had three dreadful attacks lately. We ... none of their treatment does any good. It's been going on too long—from the time he was first sent away to school, at fourteen, alone! There was an inherited tendency, anyhow. Nobody took it seriously, that and—and the other things boys with too much money do. Apparently everybody thought it was just the way boys are—if anybody thought anything about it, except that it was a bother. He never had anybody, you know—never, never anybody who ..." her voice rose, threatened to break. She stopped, swallowed hard, and began again: "The trouble is he has no constitution left—nothing for a doctor to work with. It's not Arnold's fault. If he had come out to us, that time in Chicago when he wanted to—we—he could—with Mother to—" Her steady voice gave way abruptly. She cast the ravaged, leafless branch violently to the ground and stood looking down at it. There was not a fleck of color in her beautiful, stony face.

Sylvia concentrated all her will-power on an effort to speak as Judith would have her, quietly, without heroics; but when she broke her silence she found that she had no control of her voice. She tried to say, "But, Judith dear, if Arnold is like that—doesn't he need you more than ever? You are a nurse. How can you abandon him now!" But she could produce only a few, broken, inarticulate words in a choking voice before she was obliged to stop short, lest she burst out in the flood of horror which Judith had forbidden.

Broken and inarticulate as they were, Judith knew what was the meaning of those words. The corners of her mouth twitched uncontrollably. She bit her marble lower lip repeatedly before she could bring out the few short phrases which fell like clods on a coffin. "If I—if we—Arnold and I are in love with each other." She stopped, drew a painful breath, and said again: "Arnold and I are in love with each other. Do you know what that means? He is the only man I could not take care of—Arnold! If I should try, we would soon be married, or lovers. If we were married or lovers, we would soon have—" She had overestimated her strength. Even she was not strong enough to go on.

She sat down on the ground, put her long arms around her knees, and buried her face in them. She was not weeping. She sat as still as though carved in stone.

Sylvia herself was beyond tears. She sat looking down at the moist earth on the trowel she held, drying visibly in the hot sun, turning to dust, and falling away in a crumbling, impalpable powder. It was like seeing a picture of her heart. She thought of Arnold with an indignant, passionate pity—how could Judith—? But she was so close to Judith's suffering that she felt the dreadful rigidity of her body. The flat, dead tones of the man in the Pantheon were in her ears. It seemed to her that Life was an adventure perilous and awful beyond imagination. There was no force to cope with it, save absolute integrity. Everything else was a vain and foolish delusion, a two-edged sword which wounded the wielding hand.

She did not move closer to Judith, she did not put out her hand. Judith would not like that. She sat quite motionless, looking into black abysses of pain, of responsibilities not met, feeling press upon her the terrifying closeness of all human beings to all other human beings—there in the sun of June a cold sweat stood on her forehead....

But then she drew a long breath. Why, there was Austin! The anguished contraction of her heart relaxed. The warm blood flowed again through her veins. There was Austin!

She was rewarded for her effort to bring herself to Judith's ways, when presently her sister moved and reached out blindly for her hand. At this she opened her arms and took Judith in. No word was spoken. Their mother was there with them.

Sylvia looked out over the proud, dark head, now heavy on her bosom, and felt herself years older. She did not try to speak. She had nothing to say. There was nothing she could do, except to hold Judith and love her.

There was nothing, nothing left but love.



CHAPTER XLVI

A LONG TALK WITH ARNOLD

The tall, lean young man, sitting his galloping horse very slackly, riding fast with a recklessly loose rein, and staring with bloodshot eyes down at the dust of the road, gave an exclamation, brought the mare upon her haunches, and sprang down from the saddle. A woman, young, tall, grave, set like a pearl in her black mourning dress, stood up from the roadside brook and advanced to meet him. They looked at each other as people do who meet after death has passed by. They stammered vague words, their eyes brimming.

"I—she was always so good to me," said Arnold, his voice breaking and quavering as he wrung Sylvia's hand again and again. "I never knew—saw much of her, I know—but when I was a little boy, I used—I used to dream about her at night." His thin, sallow face flushed with his earnestness. "I don't believe—honestly, Sylvia, I don't believe her own children loved her any more than I did. I've thought so many times how different everything would have been if I'd—I don't suppose you remember, but years ago when you and she were in Chicago, I ran away from school to go out there, and ask if—"

Sylvia remembered, had thought of nothing else from the moment she had seen far down the road the horseman vainly fleeing the black beast on his crupper. She shook her head now, her hand at her throat, and motioned him to silence. "Don't! Don't!" she said urgently. "Yes, I remember. I remember."

There was a moment's silence, filled by the murmur of the little brook at their feet. The mare, which had been drinking deeply, now lifted her head, the water running from the corners of her mouth. She gave a deep breath of satisfaction, and began cropping the dense green grass which grew between the water and the road. Her master tossed the reins over the pommel and let her go. He began speaking again on a different note. "But, Sylvia, what in the world—here, can't we go up under those trees a few minutes and have a talk? I can keep my eye on the mare." As they took the few steps he asked again, "How ever does it happen that you're here at Lydford Junction of all awful holes?"

Sylvia took an abrupt resolution, sat down on the pine-needles, and said, very directly, "I am on my way to Austin Farm to see if Austin Page still wants to marry me." Her manner had the austere simplicity of one who has been moving in great and grave emotions.

Arnold spoke with an involuntary quickness: "But you've heard, haven't you, about his giving up all his Colorado ..."

Sylvia flushed a deep crimson and paid with a moment of bitter, shamed resentment for the other bygone moments of calculation. "Yes, yes, of course." She spoke with a stern impatience. "Did you suppose it was for his fortune that—" She paused and said humbly, "Of course, it's natural that you should think that of me."

Arnold attempted no self-exculpation. He sat down by her, his riding-crop across his knees. "Could you—do you feel like telling me about it?" he asked.

She nodded. It came to her like an inspiration that only if she opened her heart utterly to Arnold, could he open his sore heart to her. "There's not much to tell. I don't know where to begin. Perhaps there's too much to tell, after all, I didn't know what any of it meant till now. It's the strangest thing, Arnold, how little people know what is growing strong in their lives! I supposed all the time I only liked him because he was so rich. I thought it must be so. I thought that was the kind of girl I was. And then, besides, I'd—perhaps you didn't know how much I'd liked Felix Morrison."

Arnold nodded. "I sort of guessed so. You were awfully game, then, Sylvia. You're game now—it's awfully white to fall in love with a man because he's rich and then stick to him when he's—"

Sylvia waved her hand impatiently. "Oh, you don't understand. It's not because I think I ought to—Heavens, no! Let me try to tell you. Listen! When the news came, about this Colorado business—I was about crazy for a while. I just went to pieces. I knew I ought to answer his letter, but I couldn't. I see now, looking back, that I had just crumpled up under the weight of my weakness. I didn't know it then. I kept saying to myself that I was only putting off deciding till I could think more about it, but I know now that I had decided to give him up, never to see him again—Felix was there, you know—I'd decided to give Austin up because he wasn't rich any more. Did you know I was that base sort of a woman? Do you suppose he will ever be willing to take me back?—now after this long time? It's a month since I got his letter."

Arnold bent his riding-crop between his thin, nervous hands. "Are you sure now, Sylvia, are you sure now, dead sure?" he asked. "It would be pretty hard on Austin if you—afterwards—he's such a square, straight sort of a man, you ought to be awfully careful not to—"

Sylvia said quickly, her quiet voice vibrant, her face luminous: "Oh, Arnold, I could never tell you how sure I am. There just isn't anything else. Over there in Paris, I tried so hard to think about it—and I couldn't get anywhere at all. The more I tried, the baser I grew; the more I loved the things I'd have to give up, the more I hung on to them. Thinking didn't do a bit of good, though I almost killed myself thinking—thinking—All I'd done was to think out an ingenious, low, mean compromise to justify myself in giving him up. And then, after Judith's cablegram came, I started home—Arnold, what a journey that was!—and I found—I found Mother was gone, just gone away forever—and I found Father out of his head with sorrow—and Judith told me about—about her trouble. It was like going through a long black corridor. It seemed as though I'd never come out on the other side. But when I did—A door that I couldn't ever, ever break down—somehow it's been just quietly opened, and I've gone through it into the only place where it's worth living. It's the last thing Mother did for me—what nobody but Mother could have done. I don't want to go back. I couldn't if I wanted to. Those things don't matter to me now. I don't think they're wrong, the ease, the luxury, if you can have them without losing something finer. And I suppose some people's lives are arranged so they don't lose the finer. But mine wouldn't be. I see that now. And I don't care at all—it all seems so unimportant to me, what I was caring about, before. Nothing matters now but Austin. He is the only thing that has lived on for me. I'm down on my knees with thankfulness that he just exists, even if he can't forgive me—even if he doesn't care for me any more—even if I shouldn't ever see him again—even if he should die—he would be like Mother, he couldn't die, for me. He's there. I know what he is. Somehow everything's all right—because there's Austin."

She broke off, smiling palely and quietly at the man beside her. He raised his eyes to hers for an instant and then dropped them. Sylvia went on. "I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of this Colorado business. It may be that it was quixotic on Austin's part. Maybe it has upset business conditions out there a lot. It's too complicated to be sure about how anything, I suppose, is likely to affect an industrial society. But I'm sure about how it has affected the people who live in the world—it's a great golden deed that has enriched everybody—not just Austin's coal-miners, but everybody who had heard of it. The sky is higher because of it. Everybody has a new conception of the good that's possible. And then for me, it means that a man who sees an obligation nobody else sees and meets it—why, with such a man to help, anybody, even a weak fumbling person like me, can be sure of at least loyally trying to meet the debts life brings. It's awfully hard to know what they are, and to meet them—and it's too horrible if you don't."

She stopped, aware that the life of the man beside her was one of the unpaid debts so luridly present to her mind.

"Sylvia," said Arnold, hesitating, "Sylvia, all this sounds so—look here, are you sure you're in love with Austin?"

She looked at him, her eyes steady as stars. "Aren't there as many ways of being in love, as there are people?" she asked. "I don't know—I don't know if it's what everybody would call being in love—but—" She met his eyes, and unashamed, regally, opened her heart to him with a look. "I can't live without Austin," she said quickly, in a low tone.

He looked at her long, and turned away. "Oh yes, you're in love with him, all right!" he murmured finally, "and I don't believe that the Colorado business or any of the rest of what you're saying has much to do with anything. Austin's a live man and you're in love with him; and that's all there is to it. You're lucky!" He took out his handkerchief, and wiped his forehead and the back of his neck. Sylvia, looking at him more closely, was shocked to see how thin and haggard was his face. He asked now, "Did you ever think that maybe what Austin was thinking about when he chucked the money was what you'd say, how you'd take it? I should imagine," he added with a faint smile,' "that he is hard to please if he's not pretty well satisfied."

Sylvia was startled. "No. Why no," she said, "I thought I'd looked at every single side of it, but I never dreamed of that."

"Oh, I don't mean he did it for that! Lord, no! I suppose it's been in his mind for years. But afterwards, don't you suppose he thought ... he'd been run after for his money such a terrible lot, you know ... don't you suppose he thought he'd be sure of you one way or the other, about a million times surer than he could have been any other way; if you stuck by him, don't you see, with old Felix there with all his fascinations, plus Molly's money." He turned on her with a sudden confused wonder in his face. "God! What a time he took to do it! I hadn't realized all his nerve till this minute. He must have known what it meant, to leave you there with Felix ... to risk losing you as well as—Any other man would have tried to marry you first and then—! Well, what a dead-game sport he was! And all for a lot of dirty Polacks who'd never laid eyes on him!"

He took his riding-cap from his head and tossed it on the dried pine-needles. Sylvia noticed that his dry, thin hair was already receding from his parchment-like forehead. There were innumerable fine lines about his eyes. One eyelid twitched spasmodically at intervals. He looked ten years older than his age. He looked like a man who would fall like a rotten tree at the first breath of sickness.

He now faced around to her with a return to everyday matters. "See here, Sylvia, I've just got it through my head. Are you waiting here for that five-fifteen train to West Lydford and then are you planning to walk out to the Austin Farm? Great Scott! don't do that, in this heat. I'll just run back to the village and get a car and take you there in half an hour." He rose to his feet, but Sylvia sprang up quickly, catching at his arm in a panic. "No! no! Arnold, you don't understand. I haven't written Austin a word—he doesn't know I'm coming. At first in Paris I couldn't—I was so despicable—and then afterwards I couldn't either,—though it was all right then. There aren't any words. It's all too big, too deep to talk about. I didn't want to, either. I wanted to see him—to see if he still, if he wants me now. He could write anything. He'd feel he'd have to. How would I ever know but that it was only because he thought he ought to? I thought I would just go to him all by myself, without his knowing I was coming. I can tell—the first moment he looks at me I can tell—for all my life, I'll be sure, one way or the other. That first look, what's in him will show! He can't hide anything then, not even to be kind. I'll know! I'll know!"

Arnold sat down again with no comment. Evidently he understood. He leaned his head back against the rough bark of the pine, and closed his eyes. There was a painful look of excessive fatigue about his whole person. He glanced up and caught Sylvia's compassionate gaze on him. "I haven't been sleeping very well lately," he said very dryly. "It breaks a fellow up to lose sleep." Sylvia nodded. Evidently he was not minded to speak of his own troubles. He had not mentioned Judith.

She looked up thoughtfully at the well-remembered high line of the mountain against the sky. Her mother's girlhood eyes had looked at that high line. She fell into a brooding meditation, and presently, obeying one of her sure instincts, she sat down by Arnold, and began to talk to him about what she divined for the moment would most touch and move him; she began to talk about her mother. He was silent, his worn, sallow face impassive, but she knew he was listening.

She told one incident after another of her mother's life, incidents which, she told him, she had not noted at the time, incidents which were now windows in her own life, letting in the sunlight her mother loved so well. "All the time I was growing up, I was blind, I didn't see anything. I don't feel remorseful, I suppose that is the way children have to be. But I didn't see her. There were so many minor differences between us ... tastes, interests. I always said hatefully to myself that Mother didn't understand me. And it was true too. As if it matters! What if she didn't! She never talked morality to us, anyhow. She never talked much at all. She didn't need to. She was herself. No words would express that. She lived her life. And there it is now, there it always will be for me, food for me to live on. I thought she had died. But she has never been so living for me. She's part of me now, for always. And just because I see the meaning of her life, why, there's the meaning of mine as clear as morning. How can poor Father crave those 'messages' from her! Everything is a message from her. We've lived with her. We have her in our hearts. It's all brightness when I think of her. And I see by that brightness what's in my heart, and that's Austin ... Austin!" On the name, her voice rose, expanded, soared, wonderfully rang in the ensuing silence....

Arnold said slowly, without opening his eyes: "Yes, yes, I see. I see how it is all right with you and Austin. He's big enough for you, all of you. And Felix—he's not so bad either—but he has, after all, a yellow streak. Poor Felix!"

This brought up to Sylvia the recollection of the day, so short a time ago when she had sat on the ground thus, much as she now sat next to Arnold, and had felt Judith's body rigid and tense. There was nothing rigid about Arnold. He was relaxed in an exhausted passivity, a beaten man. Let what would, befall. He seemed beyond feeling. She knew that probably never again, so life goes, could they speak together thus, like disembodied spirits, freed for once from the blinding, entangling tragic web of self-consciousness. She wondered again if he would find it in his heart to speak to her of Judith. She remembered something else she had meant to ask him, if she could ever find words for her question; and she found that, in that hour of high seriousness, they came quite without effort. "Arnold, when I was in Paris, I met Professor Saunders. I ran across him by accident. He told me some dreadful things. I thought they couldn't all be true. But I wondered—"

Arnold opened his eyes and turned them on her. She saw again, as she had so many times, the honesty of them. They were bloodshot, yellowed, set deep in dark hollows; but it was a good gaze they gave. "Oh, don't take poor old Saunders too seriously. He went all to pieces in the end. He had a lot to say about Madrina, I suppose. I shouldn't pay much attention to it. Madrina's not such a bad lot as he makes her out. Madrina's all right if you don't want anything out of her. She's the way she is, that's all. It's not fair to blame her. We're all like that," he ended with a pregnant, explanatory phrase which fell with an immense significance on Sylvia's ear. "Madrina's all right when she's got what she wants."

The girl pondered in silence on this characterization. After a time Arnold roused himself to say again: "I mean she wouldn't go out of her way to hurt anybody, for anything. She's not the kind that enjoys seeing other folks squirm. Only she wants things the way she wants them. Don't let anything old Saunders said worry you. I suppose he laid all my worthlessness at Madrina's door too. He'd got into that way of thinking, sort of dotty on the subject anyhow. He was terribly hard hit, you know. I don't deny either that Madrina did keep him strung on hot wire for several years. I don't suppose it occurred to her that there was any reason why she shouldn't if he were fool enough. I never could see that he wasn't some to blame too. All he had to do—all they any of them ever had to do, was to get out and stay out. Madrina'd never lift a finger to hinder. Even Saunders, I guess, would have had to admit that Madrina always had plenty of dignity. And as for me, great Scott! what could you expect a woman like Madrina to do with a boy like me! She never liked me, for one thing; and then I always bored her almost more than she could stand. But she never showed her impatience, never once. She's really awfully good-natured in her way. She wanted to make me into a salon sort of person, somebody who'd talk at her teas—converse, don't you know. You see me, don't you! It was hard on her. If she'd had you, now—I always thought you were the only person in the world she ever really cared for. She does, you know. All this year you've been with her, she's seemed so different, more like a real woman. Maybe she's had her troubles too. Maybe she's been deathly lonely. Don't you go back on her too hard. Madrina's no vampire. That's just old Saunders' addled wits. She's one of the nicest people in the world to live with, if you don't need her for anything. And she really does care a lot for you, Sylvia. That time out in Chicago, when we were all kids, when I wanted to go to live with your mother, I remember that Madrina suggested to her (and Madrina would have done it in a minute, too)—she suggested that they change off, she take you to bring up and I go out to live with your mother," He stopped to look at the woman beside him. "I don't know about you, Sylvia, but I guess it would have made some difference in my life!"

Sylvia drew back, horrified that he was even in thought, even for a moment robbing her of her mother. "Oh, what I would have been—I can't bear to think of what kind of woman I would have been without my mother!" The idea was terrible to her. She shrank away from her aunt as never before in her life. The reminiscence brought an idea, evidently as deeply moving, into Arnold's mind. The words burst from him, "I might now be married to Judith!" He put his hands over his eyes and cast himself down among the pine-needles.

Sylvia spoke quickly lest she lose courage. "Arnold! Arnold! What are you going to do with yourself now? I'm so horribly anxious about you. I haven't dared speak before—"

He turned over and lay on his back, staring up into the dark green of the pine. "I'm going to drink myself to death as soon as I can," he said very quietly. "The doctors say it won't take long."

She looked at his wasted face and gave a shocked, pitying exclamation, thinking that it would be illness and not drink which was to come to his rescue soon.

He looked at her askance, with his bloodshot eyes. "Can you give me any single reason why I shouldn't?" he challenged her.

Sylvia, the modern, had no answer. She murmured weakly, "Why must any of us try to be decent?"

"That's for the rest of you," he said. "I'm counted out. The sooner I get myself out of the way, the better for everybody. That's what Judith thinks."

The bitterness of his last phrase was savage. Sylvia cried out against it. "Arnold! That's cruel of you! It's killing Judith!"

"She can't care for me," he said, with a deep, burning resentment. "She can't ever have cared a rap, or she wouldn't be able to—"

Sylvia would not allow him to go on. "You must not say such a thing, Arnold. You know Judith's only reason is—she feels if she—if she had children and they were—"

He interrupted her with an ugly hardness. "Oh, I know what her reason is, all right. It's the latest fad. Any magazine article can tell you all about it. And I don't take any stock in it, I tell you. It's just insanity to try to guess at every last obligation you may possibly have! You've got to live your life, and have some nerve about it! If Judith and I love each other, what is it to anybody else if we get married? Maybe we wouldn't have any children. Maybe they'd be all right—how could they be anything else with Judith for their mother? And anyhow, leave that to them! Let them take care of themselves! We've had to do it for ourselves! What the devil did my father do for me, I'd like to know, that I should die to keep my children unborn? My mother was a country girl from up here in the mountains. Since I've been staying here winters, I've met some of her people. Her aunt told me that my father was as drunk as a lord on his wedding night—What did he think of his son? Why should I think of mine?"

He was so evidently talking wildly, desperately, that Sylvia made no attempt to stop him, divining with an aching pity what lay under his dreadful words. But when he said again, "It's simply that Judith doesn't care enough about me to stick by me, now I'm down and out. She can't bear me in her narrow little good world!" Judith's sister could keep her silence no more.

"Look here, Arnold, I haven't meant to tell you, but I can't have you thinking that. Listen! You know Judith, how splendid and self-controlled she is. She went all through the sorrow of Mother's death without once breaking down, not once. But the night before I started to come here, in the middle of the night, I heard such a sound from Judith's room! It frightened me, so I could hardly get my breath! It was Judith crying, crying terribly, so that she couldn't keep it back any more. I never knew her to cry before. I didn't dare go into her room—Mother would—but I didn't dare. And yet I couldn't leave her there alone in such awful trouble. I stood by the door in the dark—oh, Arnold, I don't know how long—and heard her—When it began to be light she was quiet, and I went back to bed; and after a while I tiptoed in. She had gone to sleep at last. Arnold, there under her cheek was that old baseball cap of yours ... all wet, all wet with her tears, Judith's tears."

Before she had finished she was sorry she had spoken. Arnold's face was suffused with purple. He put his hand up to his collar and wrenched at it, clenched his fists, and finally, flinging his riding-crop far from him, hid his face in his hands and burst into tears. "Isn't it damnable!" he said over and over. "Isn't it damnable!"

Sylvia had nothing more to say. It seemed indeed damnable to her. She wondered again at Judith's invincible force of will. That alone was the obstacle—no, it was something back of Judith's will, something which even Arnold recognized; for now, to her astonishment, he looked up, his face smeared like a weeping child's, and said in a low tone, "You know, of course, that Judith's right."

The testimony was wrung out of him. But it came. The moment was one never to be forgotten.

Out of her passionate pity was born strength that was not to be denied. She took his hand in hers, his dry, sick man's hand. "Arnold, you asked me to give you a reason why you should get the best you can out of yourself. I'll give you a reason. Judith is a reason. Austin is a reason. I'm a reason. I am never going to let you go. Judith can't be the one to help you get through the best you can, even though it may not be so very well—poor, poor Judith, who would die to be able to help you! Mother wasn't allowed to. She wanted to, I see that now. But I can. I'm not a thousandth part as strong or as good as they; but if we hang together! All my life is going to be settled for me in a few hours. I don't know how it's going to be. But however it is, you will always be in my life. For as long as you live," she caught her breath at the realization of how little that phrase meant, "for as long as you live, you are going to be what you wanted to be, what you ought to have been, my brother—my mother's son."

He clung to her hand, he clung to it with such a grip that her fingers ached—and she blessed the pain for what it meant.



CHAPTER XLVII

"... AND ALL THE TRUMPETS SOUNDED!"

They had told her at the farm, the old man and the old woman who had looked so curiously at her, that Mr. Page had gone on up the wood-road towards the upper pasture. He liked to go there sometimes, they said, to look at the sunset from a big rock that stood in the edge of the white birch woods. They added, in extenuation of this, that of course somebody had to go up there anyhow, once in a while, to salt the sheep.

Sylvia had passed on, passed the great, square, many-chimneyed house, passed the old-fashioned garden, and struck into the wood-road beyond the bars. The sun was so low now, almost below the edge of the Notch, that the rays were level and long behind her. So she had walked, bathed in luminous gold at Versailles, on the day when Austin had first told her that he loved her, on the day she had told him the truth. From the first moment she had seen him how he had always brought out from her the truest and best, finer and truer than anything she had thought was in her, like a reflection from his own integrity. His eyes that day, what clear wells of loyalty and honor ... how her mother would have loved him! And that other day, when he said farewell and went away to his ordeal ... she closed her eyes for an instant, pierced with the recollection of his gaze on her! What was she, what poor thing transfigured to divinity, that such passion, such tenderness had been hers ... even for a moment ... even if now ...

She looked timidly up the green tunnel of the arching trees, fearing to see him at any moment. And yet how she hastened her steps towards where he was! The moments were too long till she should find her heart's home!

After a time, there came a moment of such terrible throbbing of the heart, such trembling, that she could not go on. She sat down on a rock beside the road and pressed her shaking hands on her cheeks. No, it was too awful. She had been insane to think of putting everything, her whole life, to the test of a moment's shock. She would go back. She would write him....

She looked up and saw her mother's gallant figure standing there before her. She smiled, and started on. Strange that she had thought her mother could be dead. Her first instinct had been right. Her mother, her mother could not die.

The road turned sharply to the left. She came out from the white birches. She was in the edge of the pasture, sweet-fern at her feet, a group of sheep raising startled heads to gaze at her, the sun's rim red on the horizon below her. And up there, the sunlight on his face, above her, stood Austin.

The sight of him was like a great burst of music in her heart, like a great flood of light. Her doubts, her uncertainties, they were gone out, as utterly as night goes before the sun. Her ears rang to a sound like singing voices. For a moment she did not feel the ground under her feet....

Austin looked down and saw her. He stood like a man in a dream.

And then he knew. He knew. And Sylvia knew. He gave a great cry of welcome which was to ring in her ears for all her life, like a benediction. He ran down to meet her, and took her in his arms.

THE END