A silence fell, as if every one must have time to recover from this trivial platitude. But it was a silence outrageously shattered by Miss Caroline, who said:—

"O dear! I've always considered Shakspere such an overrated man!"

The silence grew more intense, only Mrs. Potts emitting a slight but audible gasp. But swift looks flashed from each lady to her horrified sisters. Was it possible that the unfortunate woman had been in no condition to come among them?

"Oh, a greatly overrated man!" repeated Miss Caroline, terribly, "far too wordy—too fond of wretched puns—so much of his humor coarse and tiresome. By the way, have you ladies taken up Byron?"

The moment was charged, almost to explosion. A crisis impended, out of the very speechlessness of the gathering. Mrs. Potts was aghast in behalf of William Shakspere, and Marcella Eubanks was crimsoning at the blunt query about Byron, well knowing that he could be taken up by a lady only with the wariest caution, and that he would much better be let alone. The others were torn demoralizingly between these two extremes of distress.

But the situation was saved by the ready wit of Mrs. Judge Robinson.

"I think the hour has come for refreshments, Madam President!" she said urbanely, and the meeting was nervously adjourned. Under the animation thus induced an approximate equilibrium was restored. The ladies gulped down chicken salad, many of them using forks with black thread tied about them to show they were borrowed from Mrs. Eubanks. They drank lemonade from a fine glass pitcher that had come as a gratuitous mark of esteem from the tea merchant patronized by the hostess; and they congealed themselves pleasantly with vanilla ice-cream eaten from dishes of excellent pressed glass that had come one by one as the Robinson family consumed its baking powder.

But Miss Caroline would have been dense indeed had she not divined, even amid that informal babbling, that she was being viewed by the ladies of the Club with a shocked stupefaction.

Precisely what emotion this knowledge left with her I have never known. But I do know that before the meeting broke up, it had been agreed to hold the next one at the house of Miss Caroline herself. It may be that she suggested and urged this in pure desperation, wishing to regain a favor which she had felt unaccountably withdrawn; and it may be that the ladies accepted in a similar desperation, knowing not how to inform her that she was grossly ineligible for membership in a Home Study Club.

The intervening two weeks were filled with tales and talks of Miss Caroline's heresy. Excitement and adverse criticism were almost universally aroused. It was a scandal of proportions almost equal to that of her love for strong drink. About most writers one could be permitted to have an opinion. But it was not thought that one could properly have an opinion about Shakspere, and, so far as we knew, no one had ever before subjected him to this indignity. One might as well have an opinion about Virtue or the law of gravitation. An opinion of any sort was impossible. One favorable would be puny, futile, immodestly patronizing. An unfavorable opinion had heretofore not been within realms of the idlest speculation.

There were but two of us, I believe, who did not promptly condemn Miss Caroline's violence of speech—two men of varying parts. Westley Keyts frankly said he had never been able to "get into" Shakspere, and considered it, as a book for reading purposes, inferior to "Cudjo's Cave," which he had read three times. The minister, whose church Miss Caroline now patronized,—that term being chosen after some deliberation,—held up both his hands at the news and mildly exclaimed, "Well!" Then, after a pause, "Well, well!" And still again, after another pause, "Well, well, well!"

This was thought to be shifty and evasive—certainly not so outspoken as the town had a right to expect.

Solon Denney, though in his heart true to Shakspere, affected to be gleeful. A paragraph, mysterious to many, including Miss Caroline, appeared in the ensuing Argus:—

"An encounter long supposed by scientists to be a mere metaphysical abstraction of almost playful import has at last occurred in sober physics. The irresistible force has met up with the immovable body. We look for results next week."

I knew that Solon considered Miss Caroline to be an irresistible force. I was uncertain whether Shakspere or Mrs. Potts was meant by the immovable body. I knew that he held them in equal awe, and I knew that Mrs. Potts felt, in a way, responsible for Shakspere this far west of Boston, regarding any attack upon him as a personal affront to herself.

On the day of the next meeting the ladies of the Club gathered in the dingy and inelegant drawing-room of Miss Caroline. No vividly flowered carpet decked the floor; only a time-toned rug that left the outer edge of the floor untidily exposing its dull stain; no gilt and onyx table bore its sculptured fantasy by the busy Rogers. The mantel and shelves were bare of those fixed ornaments that should decorate the waste places of all true homes; there were no flint arrow-heads, no "specimens," no varnished pine cones, no "Rock of Ages," no waxen lilies, not even a china cup goldenly emblazoned with "Love the Giver," in German script. And there were no beautiful chairs with delicate gilded spindles—not an elegant and impracticable chair in the whole big room—not one chair which could not be occupied as comfortably as any common kitchen rocker. It was indeed a poor place; obviously the woman's best room, yet showing careless traces of almost daily use. To ladies who never opened their best rooms save to dust and air them on days when company was expected, and who would as soon have lounged in them informally as they would have desecrated a church, this laxity was heinous.

And ordinarily, in the best rooms of one another, the ladies became spontaneously, rigidly formal as they assembled, speaking in tones suitably stiff of the day's paper, or viewing with hushed esteem those art treasures that surrounded them.

But so difficult was it to attain this formality amid the homely surroundings of Miss Caroline that to-day they not only lounged with negligent ease in the big chairs and on the poor, broad sofas, but they talked familiarly of their household concerns quite as if they had been in one of their own second-best rooms on any common day.

On a table in one cool corner was a huge bowl of thin silver, whence issued a baffling fragrance. Discreet observation, as the throng gathered, revealed this to contain a large block of ice and a colored liquid in which floated cherries with slices of lemon and orange. A ladle of generous lines reposed in the bowl, and circling it on the table were many small cups.

There was a feeling of relief when these details had been ascertained. Fear had been felt that Miss Caroline might forget herself and offer them a glass of wine, or something worse, from a large black bottle; for Little Arcady believed, in its innocent remoteness, that the devil's stuff came in no other way than large black bottles. Miss Eubanks had made sure that the ladies wore their white ribbons. Marcella's own satin bow was larger than common, so that no one might mistake the principles of the heart beating beneath it.

But the cool big bowl with its harmless fruit restored confidence at once, and when Miss Caroline urged them to try Clem's punch they refrained not. The walk to the north end of town on a sultry afternoon had qualified them to receive its consolations, and they gathered gratefully about.

Marcella Eubanks quaffed the first beaker, a trifle timorously, it is true, for the word "punch" had stirred within her a vague memory of sinister associations. Sometime she had read a tale in which one Howard Melville had gone to the great city and wrecked a career of much promise by accepting a glass of something from the hands of a beautiful but thoughtless girl, pampered child of the banker with whom he had secured a position. For a dread moment Marcella seemed to recall that the fatal draught was named "punch." But after a tentative sip of the compound at hand, she decided that it must have been something else—doubtless "a glass of sparkling wine." For this punch before her was palpably of a babe's innocence. Indeed it tasted rather like an inferior lemonade. But it was cold, and Marcella tossed off a second cup of it. She could make better lemonade herself, and she murmured slightingly of the stuff to Aunt Delia McCormick.

"It wants more lemons and more sugar," said Marcella, firmly. Aunt Delia pressed back the white satin bow on her bosom in order to manage her second glass with entire safety.

"I don't know, Marcella," she said in a dreamy undertone, after draining the cup to its cherry. "I don't know—it does seem to take hold, for all it tastes so trifling."

As each lady arrived she was led to the punch-bowl. When the last one had been taught the way to that cool nook, there was a pleasant hum of voices in the room. There was still an undercurrent of difference as to the punch's merit—other than mere coolness; though Miss Eubanks now agreed with Aunt Delia that it possessed virtues not to be discerned in the first careless draught. The conversation continued to be general, to the immense delight of the hostess, for she had dreaded the ordeal of that formal opening, with its minutes of the last meeting; and she had dared even to hope that the day's paper might, by tactful management, be averted.

She waxed more daringly hopeful when Clem came to refill the punch-bowl. She felt that she owed much to the heat of the day, which was insuring the thirst of the arrivals. The punch and general conversation seemed to suffice them even after their first thirst had been allayed. She began to wonder if the ladies were not a more unbending and genial lot than she had once suspected.

A considerable group of them now chatted vivaciously about the replenished bowl, including Madam the President, who had arrived very thirsty indeed, and who was now, between sips, accounting for the singular favor which the Adams family had always found in the sight of God and the people of Massachusetts. She seemed to be prevailed over, not without difficulty, by Aunt Delia, who related her failure to learn from Clem the ingredients of his acceptable punch. This was not surprising, for Clem was either never able or never willing to tell how he made anything whatever. Of this punch Aunt Delia had been able to wheedle from him only that it contained "some little fixin's." Insistent questioning did develop, further, that "cold tea" was one of these; but cold tea did not make plain its recondite potencies—did not explain why a beverage so unassuming to the taste should inspire one with a wish to partake of it continuously.

"We might get him to make a barrel of it for the Sunday-school picnic," said Marcella, brightly, over her fourth cup. "If it contains only a little tea, perhaps the effect upon the children would not be deleterious."

"We'll try it," said Aunt Delia, reaching for the ladle at sight of empty cups in the hands of Mrs. Judge Robinson and Mrs. Westley Keyts. "I'll furnish the cherries and the sugar and the tea."

How it came about was never quite understood by the ladies, but the true and formal note of a Ladies' Home Study Club was never once struck that afternoon. Madam the President did not call the meeting to order, the minutes of the last meeting are unread to this day, and a motion to adjourn never became necessary.

It had been thought wisest to keep entirely away from poetry at this meeting, and the paper for the day, to have been read by Marcella Eubanks, was "The Pathos of Charles Dickens." Marcella had taken unusual pains in its preparation, bringing with her two volumes of the author from which to read at the right moment the deaths of Little Nell and Paul Dombey. She had practised these until she could make her voice quaver effectively, and she had looked forward to a genuine ovation when she sat down.



If it is clearly understood, then, that no one thought of calling for the paper, that even its proud author felt the hours gliding by without any poignant regret, it should be seen that the occasion had strangely come to be one of pure and joyous relaxation, with never an instructive or cultured or studious moment.

There was talk of domestic concerns, sprightly town gossip, mirth, wit, and anecdotes. Aunt Delia McCormick told her parrot story, which was risque, even when no gentlemen were present, for the parrot said "damn it!" in the course of his surprisingly human repartee under difficulties.

Mrs. Westley Keyts, the bars being down, thereupon began another parrot story. But Miss Eubanks, who had observed that all parrot stories have "damn" in them, suddenly conceived that matters had gone far enough in that direction. Affecting not to have heard Mrs. Keyts's opening of "A returned missionary made a gift of a parrot to two elderly maiden ladies—" Marcella led the would-be anecdotist to the punch-bowl, and, under the cover of operations there, spoke to her in an undertone. Mrs. Keyts said that the thing had been printed right out on the funny page of "Hearth and Home," but over the cup of punch that Marcella pressed upon her, she consented to forego it on account of the minister's wife being present.

There were other anecdotes, however; not of a parrot character, but chiefly of funny sayings of the little ones at home. Mrs. Judge Robinson, with the artistic mendacity of your true raconteur, accredited to her own four-year-old a speech about the stars being holes in the floor of heaven, although it was said of this gem in "Harper's Drawer," where she had read it, that "the following good one comes to us from a lady subscriber in the well-known city of X——."

It could not be recalled afterwards how, from this harmless exchange, they had come to be listening to passages from the adventurous life of Childe Harold, read crisply by their hostess. Still less could the ladies later comprehend how some of their number had been guilty of innuendos—or worse—against the well-known Bard of Avon. Yet, so it was.

Miss Caroline herself had refrained from abusing him—had seemed to have forgotten him, indeed; but, as she read Byron to them, their hearts opened to her—rushed out, indeed, with a friendly wholeness that demanded something more than mere cordial applause of her favorite poet. Some intimation of a sympathy with her view of the other poet came to seem not ungraceful. During one of the reader's pauses to impress upon them the splendors of the Byronic imagery, and eke its human heart-warmth, good Aunt Delia, with defiant looks about the circle, broke in with:—

"I shouldn't wonder if Shakspere has been made too much over."

Mrs. Keyts stepped loyally into the breach thus effected.

"Westley thinks Shakspere isn't such an awful good book," she said, feeling her way, "though it seems to me it has some very interesting and excellent pieces in it."

"Shakspere is ver-ry uneven," remarked Mrs. Judge Robinson, in a tone of dignified concession.

"There is always a word to be said on either side of these matters—there is undeniably room for controversy." Thus Mrs. Potts, in her best manner of authority, from the punch-bowl.

"Let the dead rest!" gently murmured Miss Eubanks, from her dreamy corner of the biggest sofa. Her inflection was archly significant. One had to suspect that Shakspere, alive and a fair target for dispraise, might have learned something to his advantage if not to his delight.

Miss Caroline was both surprised and gratified. At the previous meeting she had detected no sign of this concurring sentiment. She plunged again into Byron with renewed enthusiasm.

The afternoon came to a glorious end, and the ladies departed with many expressions of rejoicing. They had found Miss Caroline so charming that several of them were torn with fresh pity and brought to the verge of tears when they thought of her furniture.

Marcella Eubanks did cry on the way home and had to put down her green barege veil. But that was for thinking of poor little Paul Dombey. She was mourning him as a personal loss. Also must she have adored the genius of a master who could thus move her from a calm that was constitutional with every known Eubanks.



CHAPTER XVIII

IN WHICH THE GAME WAS PLAYED

The next Argus said of Miss Caroline's afternoon that "the ladies present one and all report a most enjoyable time." There was another mysterious paragraph, too, farther down the column of "locals," which proclaimed that "The immovable body has at last been struck by the irresistible force and has failed to live up to its reputation. It moved and moved so you could see it move. Another bubble exploded! We live in a sensational age."

Now, while it is true that the ladies, "one and all," had spoken with entire enthusiasm of their afternoon at the unpretentious home of my neighbor, I, nevertheless, deemed it vital to hold plain speech with that impulsive woman immediately. I saw, indeed, that I should have acted after the incident of the mint juleps.

Solon Denney, who had experienced the hospitality of Miss Caroline, and who could speak from a wider knowledge than our minister or the ladies of the town, had once said:—

"Those mint juleps are simple, honest things. They taste injurious from the start. But that punch—it's hypocritical. It steals into your brain as a little child steals its rosebud hand into yours, beguiling you with prattle; but afterwards—well, if I had the choice, I'd rather be chloroformed and struck sharply with an axe. I'd be my old self again sooner." Whereupon he would have written a guarded piece for the paper about this had I not dissuaded him. But I saw that I must at once have with Miss Caroline what in a later day came to be called "a heart-to-heart talk"; and I forthwith summoned what valor I could for the ordeal.

"I never dreamed—I never suspected—how should I?" she murmured pathetically, after my opening speech of a few simple but telling phrases. She listened in genuine horror while I gave the reasons why she might justly regard the call of our minister and her entertainment of the Club as nothing short of adventures—adventures which she had survived scathless not but by the favor of an indulgent Providence.

"So that is what those little white satin bows mean?" she asked, and I said that it most emphatically was.

"I suspected it might be some kind of mourning for babies—a local custom, you know, though it did seem queer. What can they think of me?"

"They don't know what to think now," I said, "and if you are wise, you will never let them know."

"The Colonel was proud of that punch," she mused.

"I dare say he had reasons," I answered grimly.

"Especially after Cousin Looshe Peavey came to spend Christmas with us one time. The Colonel had always considered Cousin Looshe rather arrogant about this punch, and it may have been a special brew. I know that Cousin had an immense respect for it after he was able—that is—afterwards—"

"I can easily believe it."

"Cherry brandy—Jamaica rum—pint of Madeira—gill of port—a bit of cordial—some sherry—I forget if there's anything else."

I grasped the chair in which I sat.

"Heaven forbid!" I cried; "and don't tell me, anyway—I'm reeling now."

"But of course there are lemons and oranges and cherries and tea and quantities of ice to weaken it—"

"The whole frozen polar sea itself couldn't weaken that mixture of elemental forces. See to it," I went on sternly, "that you remember only the innocent parts of it if you are ever asked for the recipe." She actually cowered.

"Also as to mint juleps—remember that you have forgotten, if you ever knew how they are made."

"Dear, dear—and our Bishop did enjoy his mint julep so!"

"That's different," I said; "they were probably raised together."

"And that afternoon, I thought something of the sort was necessary; do you know, they seemed rather cold to me at that other meeting—and of course there wasn't enough of it to hurt them."

"Your intentions were amiable, I concede, but your carelessness was criminal—nothing short of it. You laid the train for a scandal that would have shaken Slocum County to its remotest outlying cornfield, and even made itself felt over this whole sovereign state."

I was gratified to see that she shuddered.

"I shall never learn," she pleaded; "their life is so different."

"Let them at least live it out to its natural end, such as it is," I urged.

Hereupon, confessing herself unnerved, Miss Caroline led me to the dining room, and in a glass of Madeira from a cask forwarded by Second-cousin Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C.S.A., she pledged herself to preserve the decencies as these had been codified in Little Arcady by the Sons and Daughters of Temperance. For my part I drank to her continuance in the wondrous favor of Heaven.

Thereafter, I am bound to say, Miss Caroline conducted herself with a discretion that was admirable. Upon more than one occasion I was made to notice this. One of them was at an evening entertainment at the Eubanks home that autumn, to which it was my privilege to escort her. "A large and brilliant company was present," to quote from a competent authority, and the refreshments were "recherche," to quote again, this being, I believe, the first of our social functions at which Japanese paper napkins were handed around. Eustace Eubanks entertained "one and all" by exhibiting and describing lantern views of important scenes in the Holy Land; Marcella sang "Comin' Thro' the Rye" with such iron restraint that the most fastidious among us could have found no cause for offence, and Eustace sang an innocent song of war and bloodshed and death. All went well until Eustace, being pressed for more, ventured a drinking song. Whether this had been censored by his household I have never learned. Perhaps there had been demurs—there were almost certain to have been; and possibly Eustace had held out for the thing because of the rare opportunity it afforded for the exercise of his lowest tones. Perhaps it had been deemed wise to indulge him in this, lest in rebellion he break all bonds of propriety and revert to the "Bedouin Love Song." At any rate he sang "Drinking," a song that lauds the wine-cup as chiefest of godless joys, and terminating in "drinking" thrice reiterated, of which each individual one finishes so much lower than it begins that the last one seems to expire in the bottomless pit.

Many of those present appeared to enjoy this song. Even Marcella Eubanks seemed for once to have soared above mere principle into the unmoral realm of "Art for Art's sake." But it falls to be said, and I say it with a pride which I think should not excite cavil, that Miss Caroline frowned splendidly from the first moment that the song's true character was revealed. She superbly evinced uneasiness, moreover, when the thing was done, as if to say, "One can't tell what may occur in a place where that is permitted!" And her performance was not observed by myself alone. Marcella saw it and sped to her brother, who, after listening to hurried words from her, dashed into "The Lost Chord" with a swift and desperate fervor, as if to allay all alarm in the mind of this sensitive guest. Eustace was at heart as earnestly well meaning as any Eubanks that ever lived, and his vagaries in song were attributable solely to a trusting nature capriciously endowed with a dash of the artistic temperament. It was only a dash, however. Beyond doubt, had his family but known, he could have sung the "Bedouin Love Song," and been none the worse for it.

If Miss Caroline's eloquent pantomime at this time aroused a suspicion that she had been maligned, as to her habits of drink, her behavior on a subsequent evening, when Mrs. Judge Robinson entertained, left no one to doubt it. There was music, too, on this occasion—described elsewhere as "a gala occasion"—after Eustace had concluded his part of the entertainment and gotten his lantern out of the way,—music by a quartet consisting of Messrs. Fancett and Eubanks, first and second bass, and Messrs. Updyke and G. Brown, first and second tenor. In excellent accord these tenors and basses, so blameless in their living, lifted up their voices and sang they "would that the wavelets of ocean were wavelets of sparkling champagne!" It was a blithe and rippling morceau if one could forget the well-nigh cosmic depravity of it; but Miss Caroline, it appeared, was not able to forget. She confided as much to Marcella Eubanks and Aunt Delia McCormick, intimating that while she was doubly desirous to be pleased because of her position as an outsider, she was, nevertheless, a silly old woman, encrusted with prejudice, and she could not deny that she found this song suggestive. Her eyes glistened when she said it, and Marcella felt like pinning a white ribbon to her then and there.

Escorting Miss Caroline to her home that night, I listened to her account of this colloquy and found myself wishing that matters had been different. It seemed to me that I must ultimately become the victim of a romantic passion for her, and I told her as much when we parted.

Gossip, the yellow-tongued dragon, had been tracked to its lair and done to death, or at least that one of its heads had been smitten off which babbled slander of Miss Caroline.

Thenceforth she and I were free to think upon other matters. And there were these other matters in both our lives.

As to most of them we did not hold speech together. Our intimacy as yet lay quite within a circle so charmed that it might not be entered by things too personal to either of us. By a kind of tacit treaty we brought thither none but those affairs which invited a not too serious tone. Our late common life had provided an abundance of these, and they had been hailed by my friend with an unfailing levity which the widow of J. Rodney Potts, for one, would have found it impossible to condone. "I am a light old woman," she had said to me; "I laugh at the world even when I fear it most." There was a desperate sprite of banter in her eye when she made this confession, a sprite that leaped forth to be gay when I shrived her. But, though we sacredly observed all mirthful conventions in our dallying, I knew that Miss Caroline had more than enough to ponder of matters weighty. I knew that she was likely to have regretted a too-ready sharing of Clem's easy enthusiasm over industrial conditions in the North.

Clem believed by instinct not only that the evil thereof is sufficient unto the day, but that the incidental good sufficeth also. His quality of faith would have seemed a pointed rebuke to the common run of believers in a Providence that watches and sends. Confronted by the spectre of present want he could exorcise it neatly by the device of beholding, in a contrary vision, future limitless pullets of a marketable immaturity, or endless acres of garden produce ripe and ready to sell. Moreover, his experience with "gold money" was as yet insufficient to acquaint him with its truly volatile character. All sums greater than a hundred dollars were blessedly alike to him—equally prodigious. Two hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands sent the same rays of light through the spectrum of his poetic mind, and a bank was an institution of such abiding grace that, having once established a connection with it, one possessed forever a stout prop in time of need. I was sure indeed that Miss Caroline had defined these limitations of Clem as a financier. It was one of those enjoyable topics which we had been free to discuss. That she had discovered how lamentably his resources had been reduced by freight tolls on her furniture I could only infer. But I knew, at least, that she was aware of the blistering, rainless summer that had laid Clem's high hopes of a garden in dust and cut off half his revenue. Plainly, Miss Caroline had more than enough of matters fit to engage her graver moments.

For my own part I, too, had matters to dwell upon of an equal gravity in their own poor way; though perhaps, too, I could not have defined them as understandingly as I did the perplexities of my neighbor.

Happily the feat need not be attempted; I had the game, in which troubles may be played away at least beyond the necessity for analyzing them—the game which requires two decks and is to be played alone—the most efficacious of those devices for the solitary which cards afford.

I had been made acquainted with its scheme and with some of its cruder virtues by a certain illustrious soldier whom I was once much thrown with. He confessed to me that he played it before a battle to inspire him with coolness, and after a battle to learn wise behavior under victory or defeat, as it might have been.

I was persuaded to learn more of it. I played the thing at first, to be sure, as I have noticed that novices always do, with a mind so bent upon "getting it" that I was insensible of its curative and refining agencies.

"You haven't the secret yet," said my mentor, who watched me as I won for the first time, and was moved to warn me by my unconcealed pride in this achievement. "After you've played it a few years, you'll learn that the value of it lies chiefly in losing. You'll try like the devil to win, of course, but you'll learn not to wish for it. To win is nothing but an endless piling up of the right cards, beginning with the ace and ending with the king, and it only means more shuffling for next time. But every time you lose you will learn things about everything."

It was even as he said,—it took me years to learn this true merit of the game; and still, as he had said, I learned much from it of life.

There is a fine moment at the last shuffling of the cards, a moment when free will and fatalism are indistinguishably merged.

I am ready to lay down eight cards in a horizontal row off my double deck. Who will say that the precise number of shuffles I have given to it was preordained?

"I do," exclaimed an obliging fatalist. "The sequence of every one of those cards was determined when we were yet star-dust."

I bring confusion to him by performing half a dozen other shuffles. I am thus far the master of my unborn game—another last shuffle to prove it, though I shuffle clumsily enough.

I glance disdainfully at the fatalist whom I have refuted, and prepare again to lay down the first row of cards. But the fellow comes back with, "Those last shuffles were also determined, as was this challenge—"

"Very well!" and I prepare for still another rearrangement. But here I reflect that this could be endless and not at all interesting.

I dismiss the fatalist as a quibbler and play on. Now there is no dispute, unless there be other quibblers. Fixed is the order in which the cards shall fall, eight at a time. There is pure fatalism. But in the movings after each eight are dealt, I shall consciously choose and judge, which is pure free will—or an imitation of it sufficiently colorable to satisfy any, but quibblers. There, for me, is the fatalism of body, the free will of soul. Of these I learn when I play the game.

Now my first eight cards are down in a horizontal row. There are two kings among them, which is auspicious, for kings must be placed sometime at the top. There is a red queen, also auspicious, to be placed on one of the black kings. There is an ace of diamonds and its deuce. Good, again! The ace is placed above the row, beginning a row of aces to be placed there as fast as they fall, and the deuce is placed atop of it, for in that row the suits will be built up, each in its kind. In the lower rows the suits are to be built down and crossed, as when I played the red queen on the black king, so that only the top of his crowned head can be seen. Then I play a red eight on a black nine and a black seven on the red eight. I am now left most fortunately with five spaces when I deal off my second row of eight,—five spaces into which, it may be, a king or two shall happily fall.

The game usually becomes intense after the third eight cards are played. By that time a choice must be made. Shall this black six or the other be played on the red seven? One must be wise, for either will release important cards.

The game has started so well that it promises to play out too easily—which is one of its tricks. Presently a deuce will be covered by a king for which no space is ready, a dark queen will be buried under a succession of smaller cards, crowding along with apparent carelessness, but relentlessly. Now a space is opened for the king that covers the deuce, but the king has meantime been covered by an insignificant but unmanageable four-spot, and cannot be reached. The game is not so absurdly easy as it promised to be. Still it may be won by clever playing. There follow eight cards that prove to be immovable, and the issue is almost in doubt. Now the last eight cards are down, and the game is suddenly seen to be lost. One small other shuffle might have won it; if that tray of spades had fallen one place to the right or left, the thing would now be easy; if it were a deuce or a four, the thing were easy. One spot on the card has brought ruin. The game has foiled us with its own peculiar cleverness.

But then, we learn to expect failure; and, most important of all, we learn to succeed while failing. We learn to see our cards fall wretchedly without a tremor. We learn to take small gains that offer, and to watch unmoved while splendid chances come to naught. We learn to live life and to waste no energy in vain wishing that we had shuffled differently. We learn even to marvel admiringly at the unobtrusive cunning which thwarts us of our dream's own—to wonder that cards ever should come right for any player in that maze of chances and faulty judgments. And we learn, above all, to brush the things together without loss of time and to play a new hand with the same old hope.

As I studied the cards, making sure of my defeat—one must be most careful to do that; a way is sometimes to be found—it was not strange that I fell to thinking of the face on my neighbor's wall.

I had mused often upon it since that first night. It seemed, curiously enough, to be a face that had long been mistily afloat in my shut eyes, a girl's face that had a trick of blending from time to time with the face of another I had better reason to know. Unaccountably they had come and gone, one followed by the other. Of that last new face in my vision I could make nothing, save that some one seemed to have painted it over there in the other house. How I had come by my own mind copy of it was a mystery to me beyond solution.

I played the game again to still this perplexity which had a way of seizing me at odd moments. It is an especially good game for a man who has had to believe that life will always beat him.



CHAPTER XIX

A WORTHLESS BLACK HOUND

After an autumn speciously benign came our season of cold and snow. It proved to be a season of unwonted severity, every weather expert in town, from Uncle William McCormick, who had kept a diary record for thirty years, to Grandma Steck, who had foretold its coming from a goose-bone, agreeing that the cold was most unusual. The editor of the Argus not only spoke of "Nature's snowy mantle," but coined another happy phrase about Little Arcady being "locked in the icy embrace of winter." This was admitted to be accurately literal, in spite of its poetic daring.

Miss Caroline confessed homesickness to me after the first heavy snow. She spoke as lightly of it as she should have done, but I could see that her own land pulled at her heart with every blast that shook her casements. No longer, however, was there even a second-cousin whose hospitality she was free to claim, for Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C.S.A., now slept with his fathers in far-off Virginia, leaving behind him only traditions and a little old sherry. The former Miss Caroline had always shared with him, and a cask of the latter he bequeathed to her with his love. And the valley being now void of her kin, she was doubly an exile.

Such new desolation as she must have felt was masked under jesting dispraise of our execrable Northern climate. Surely a land permitted to congeal so utterly had forfeited the grace of its Maker.

Clem's lack of executive genius also earned a meed of my neighbor's disparagement. He was a worthless, trifling "boy," an idling dreamer, an irresponsible, inconsequent visionary, in whose baseless fancies it was astounding that a woman of her years should fatuously place reliance.

I must confess that I was more than once guilty of irritation when Miss Caroline spoke thus slightingly of her "boy"—of one who had been unable to view himself as other than her personal property. Again and again it seemed to me that, fine little creature that she was, her tone toward Clem lacked the right feeling. I should not have demanded gratitude precisely; at least no bald expression of it. But a manner of speech denoting, if not wording, a recognition of his unswerving loyalty would have accorded better with the estimate I had otherwise formed of her character. The absence of any tone or word that even one so devoted as I could construe to her advantage was puzzling in the extreme.

Still, feeling toward her as I did, I was compelled to excuse her as best I might by attributing her hardness to an evil system now happily abolished. But the nerves in my lost arm seemed to tingle with a secret satisfaction when I thought of Clem's empty reward for his life-work and remembered that I had helped, though ever so little, to free him and his kind from a bond so unfortunate for each of the parties to it.

The winter deepened about us, chill and bleak and ravaging. The smoke from our chimneys went up in tall columns that lost themselves in the gray sky. The snow shut us in, and presently the wind lay in wait to blast us when we dared the drifts.

Yet Miss Caroline throve, despite her nostalgia. She was even jaunty in her recital of the weather's minor hardships. To its rigors she brought a front of resolute gayety. A new stove graced the parlor, a stove with the proud nickeled title of "Frost King"; a title seen to be deserved when Clem had it properly gorged with dry wood. Within its tropic radiations Miss Caroline bloomed and was hale of being, like some hardy perennial.

Of Clem, nothing but hardiness was to be anticipated. He had been toughened by four other of our winters, all said to have been unusual for severity. And yet it was Clem, curiously enough, and not Miss Caroline, who found the season most trying. True, he had to be abroad most of the time, procuring sustenance for the insatiable "Frost King," or performing labor for other people by which Miss Caroline should preserve her independence; but it was not supposed that a creature of his sort could be subject to weaknesses natural enough to a superior race.

I believe this was his own view of the matter; for when he admitted to me one morning that he had "took cold in the chest," his manner was one of deprecating confusion, and he swore me against betrayal of his lapse to Miss Caroline.

She discovered his guilt for herself, however, after a few days, from his very annoying cough. She taxed him with it so sturdily that efforts at deception availed him not. His tale that the snow sifted into his "bref-place" and "tickled it" was pitifully unconvincing, for his cough was deeper than Eustace Eubanks's proudest note in the drinking song.

"He's a worthless thing," said Miss Caroline, telling me of his fault, and I said he was indeed—that he hadn't served me four years without my finding that out. I added that he was undoubtedly shamming, but that at the same time it might be as well to take a few simple precautions. Miss Caroline said that of course he was shamming, in order to get out of work, and that she would soon drive that nonsense out of his head if she had to wear the black wretch out to do it. She added that she was about tired of his nonsense.

It may be known that I have heretofore lost no opportunity to foist all faults of understanding upon the heads of my fellow-townsmen. And I should have liked to keep my record clear in that matter; but it would be uncandid to pretend, even at this late day, that I have ever divined the precise relationship that exists between Miss Caroline and her slave. I may know a bit more of its intricacies than does Little Arcady at large, but not enough to permit that certain thrill of superior discernment which I have so often been able to enjoy in Slocum County.

Each of the two, considered alone, is fairly comprehensible. But taken together, there is something between them which must always baffle me—something which I cannot believe to have been at all typical of the relation between owner and slave, else many of the facts noted by our discerning and impartial investigators were either imperfectly observed or unintelligently reported.

Up to a certain point my own studies of this slave-holder aligned perfectly with the information which we of the North had been at such pains to gather. And I tried to hold Miss Caroline blameless, remembering that she had been long schooled to the inhumanity of it.

I resolved, nevertheless, to take Clem under my own roof—there was a small unused room almost directly under it—the moment Miss Caroline's impatience with him should move her to the extremes foretold by her abusive fashion of speech. I would not see even a negro turned out in the coldest of winters for no better reason than that he was sick and useless, though I planned to intervene delicately, so as not to affront my neighbor. For my heart was still hers, despite this hardness, for which I saw that she must not be blamed.

As I had feared, Clem's cough became more obtrusive, and with this Miss Caroline's irritation deepened toward him. She declared that his trifling, no-account nature made him all but impossible.

Then one morning—one to be distinguished by its cold even among many unusual mornings—there was no Clem to light my fires and to scent my snug dining room with unparalleled coffee. This brought it definitely home to me that the situation had become grave. I dressed with what speed I could and hurried to Miss Caroline's door. The time had come when I should probably have to do something.

My neighbor met me and said that Clem had meanly decided to remain in bed for the day. I searched her face for some sign of consideration as she said this, but I was disappointed. She seemed to feel only a fierce disgust for his foolishness.

"But you may go up and look at the black good-for-nothing if you like," she said, grudgingly enough I thought.

I climbed the brief flight of stairs. I knew that Clem had not refused to get up without reasons that seemed sufficient to him. In a narrow bed in one of the doll-house rooms he lay coughing.

"So you can't get up this morning?" I asked.

"Yes, seh, Mahstah Majah, Ah was a-gittin' up, but Ah was fohced to cough raght smahtly an' Miss Cahline she yehs it an' she awdeh me back to baid, seh. Then Ah calls out to huh that Ah ain't go'n' a' have no sech foolishness in this yeh place, an' so she stahts to come up, which fohces me to retiah huhiedly. Then she stands theh at th' head of th' staihs an' she faulted me—yes, seh—she threaten me, Mahstah Majah, an' she tek mah clothes away, an' so on an' so fothe. Then Ah huhd huh a' mekin' th' fiah an' then she brung this yeh cawfee an' she done mek it that foolish that Ah can't tech it. Yes, seh, she plumb ruined that theh cawfee, that's what she done!"

His tone was peevish. Clem himself was not talking as I thought would have been becoming in him. And there was a definite issue of veracity between him and his mistress. I went down again, for the room was cold.

"He has some fever," I said.

"He is a lazy black hound," said Miss Caroline.

"He says you ordered him to stay in bed—threatened him and hid his clothes."

"Oh, never fear but what that fellow will always have an excuse!" she retorted shortly.

Observing that she had a day's supply of wood at hand, I left, not a little annoyed at both of them. I missed my coffee.

When I knocked at the door that evening, no one came to admit me. I went in, hearing Clem's voice in truculent protest from a large room on the first floor which had been called the room of Little Miss. I went to the door of this room.

Clem and his bed were there. We had two physicians in Little Arcady, Old Doc and Young Doc. Young Doc was now present measuring powders into little papers which he folded neatly, while Miss Caroline stood at hand, cowering but stubborn under Clem's violence.

"Miss Cahline, yo' suttinly old enough t' know betteh'n that. Ah do wish yo' Paw was about th' house—he maghty quickly put yo'-all in yo' place. Now Ah tole yo' Ah ain't go'n' a' have none o' this yeh Doctah foolishness. Yo' not go'n' a' stravagate all that theh gole money on sech crazy doin's an' mek us be indigent in ouah ole aige. What Ah want with a Doctah? Hanh! Anseh me that! Yo'-all jes' git me a little bit calamus an' some catnip, an' Ah do all th' doctahin' tha's advisable." All this he brought out with difficulty, for his breathing was by no means free.

"He's up to his tricks," said Miss Caroline, contemptuously, to me. Then, to Clem, seeming to draw courage from my presence, "You be quiet, there, you lazy, black good-for-nothing, or I'll get some one here to wear you out!" And Clem was again the vanquished.

"Pneumonia," said Young Doc. "Bad," he added as we stepped into the drawing-room. "Take lots of care."

I thought it as well that Young Doc had come. Old Doc, though well liked, boasted that all any man of his profession needed, really, were calomel and a good knife. Young Doc had always seemed to be subtler. Anyway, he was of a later generation. I learned that Old Doc had scorned to make the call, believing that a "nigger" could not suffer from anything but yellow fever or cracked shins. For this reason he became genuinely interested in Clem's case as it was later reported to him by Young Doc.

To the rest of Little Arcady the case was also of interest. Sympathy had heretofore been with Clem, because Miss Caroline paid him no wages, and was believed to take what he earned from other people.

Now, however, an important number of persons veered—in wonder if not in absolute sympathy. That the woman should watch and nurse the black fellow, apparently with perfect single-heartedness, was not to be squared with any known laws of human association. "Nursing a nigger in her own house with her own hands," was the fashion of describing this untoward spectacle. It was like taking a sick horse into your house, and making play that it was human. The already puzzled town was further mystified, and it is probable that Miss Caroline fell a little in public esteem. Her course was not thought to be edifying. She could have sent Clem to the county poor farm, where he would have been seen to, after a fashion good enough for one of his color, by the proper authorities.

My own bewilderment was at first hardly less than the town's. Had Miss Caroline suddenly changed her manner toward Clem, showing regret, however belated, for her previous abuse of him, I should have understood. That would have been a simple case of awakened sensibility. But she continued to disparage him to his face and to me. She was venomous—scurrilous in her abuse. Yet only with the greatest difficulty could I persuade her to let me share the watch that must be kept over him. She called him an infamous black wretch, in tones befitting her words, but I could not get her to leave him even so long as her own health demanded.

There came nights, however, as the disease ran its course, when she had to give up from sheer lack of force. Then she permitted me to watch, though even at these times she often broke from sleep to come and be assured that the worthless black hound had not changed for the worse.

One dim, early morning, when she thought I had gone, after my night's watch, I returned softly to the half-opened door with a forgotten injunction about the medicines. All night Clem had babbled languidly of many things, of "a hunded thousan' hatchin' aigs," and "a thousan' brillion dollahs," of "Mahstah Jere" and "Little Miss," of a visiting Cousin Peavey whom he had been obliged to "whup" for his repeated misdemeanors; and darkly and often had he whispered, so low I could scarcely hear it, of an enemy that was entering the room with a fell design. "Tha' he is—he go'n' a' sprinkle snake-dust in mah boots—tha' he is—watch out!"

He still maundered weakly as I reached the door, but it was not this that detained me at its threshold. It was Miss Caroline, who had actually knelt at his side. At first I thought she wept over one of his blue-black hands, which she clung eagerly to with both her own. Then I saw that there seemed to be no tears—yet silently, almost impassively, she gave me a sense of hopeless grief that I thought no outburst of weeping could have done.

I wondered wildly then if her fashion of speech for Clem might not mask some real affection for him. But this was unsatisfying. On the spot I gave up all wondering forever about Miss Caroline. I have ever since constrained myself to accept her without question, even in situations of difficulty. There is so much vain knowledge.

That day, too, was the bad day when news came that Little Miss had been stricken with the same dread pneumonia. When she told me this, Miss Caroline had a look in her eyes that I suspect must often have been there in the first half of the sixties. It was calm enough, but there was a resistance in it that promised to be unbreakable. And to my never-ending wonder she seemed still to be more concerned about Clem than about her daughter.

"Will you go to her?" I asked.

She smiled. "That could hardly be afforded just now."

"You could manage it, I think. Clem has some money due from me."

"Even so, I couldn't leave Clem. My daughter will be cared for, but Clem wouldn't have anybody. We'll fight it out on this line, Major."

I now saw that continuous questioning about Miss Caroline would bring one in time to madness, and I was glad of my resolve never again to indulge in this unprofitable occupation.

But even pneumonia has its defeats. Young Doc surprised Old Doc again; for the latter, once convinced that an African could suffer so civilized an affliction as pneumonia, had declined to believe that he could ever "throw it off," and had disclosed good reasons why he could not to an attentive group at the City Drug Store.

Yet after a night when Miss Caroline had refused to let me watch, she met me at the door as Young Doc was leaving. She was wearied but chipper, though there was an unsteady little lift in her voice as she said:—

"That lazy black wretch is going to get well!"

"It's about time," I said grimly. "I've been in a bad way without him. Indeed I'm very glad to hear you say so."

Her eyes twinkled approval upon me, I thought.

"You've behaved excellently, Major. Really, I am glad that we left you that other arm." This was almost in her old manner, though her eyes seemed a little dimmed by her excitement. Then, with a sudden return to the patient:—

"I wonder if you would be good enough to go in and swear at Clem. He's perfectly rational now, and it will hearten him wonderfully. He's dreadfully mortified because he's been sick so long. And it needs a man, you know, really. I'll close the door for you. Do it hard! Call him a damned black hound, if you please, and ask him what he means by it!"

I hurried in, for Miss Caroline's eyes were threatening to betray her.



CHAPTER XX

IN WHICH SOMETHING MUST BE DONE

Clem's prolonged convalescence was a trial to his militant spirit. The month or more of curious weakness in his body, always before so stout, left him with a fear that he had been "pah'lyzed in th' frame." Moreover, there were troubles less intimately personal to him, but not less harassing to the household.

There was Little Miss, who was making a fight like Clem's own in a Baltimore hospital. Each day I bore to Miss Caroline a telegram detailing the progress of her daughter, though it had cost me time and trouble to convince my correspondent that he was not to skimp such encouragement as might be his to offer, merely to comprise it within ten words. There were three days, it is true, when ten words were more than enough in which to be non-committal. And there was a day that came upon the heels of these when the profits of the telegraph company must have been unusual, for only two words came instead of ten—"Recovery doubtful." This might as well have been left unsent, for I tore it up and assured the waiting pair that no news was good news. They tried eagerly to believe this aphorism, which has the authority of age, but which I suspect was coined originally from despair.

The next day's bulletin read "Temperature still up, but making a strong fight." Stupid it was, when these were but eight words, not to have added two more, such as, "Very hopeful." I induced our telegraph operator to rectify this oversight, and felt repaid for my trouble when I showed the message. That last touch seemed to have been needed. Of course Little Miss would make a strong fight. Miss Caroline and Clem both knew that. But they had known other strong fights to be none the less hopeless, and they were grateful for those last two words of qualification.

There were four other days when the report seemed to need judicious editing, and in this I did not prove remiss. As the telegraph company remained indifferent, I could see that no harm was done. For at last came a bulletin of seventeen words which left us assured that Little Miss had conquered. Henceforth we could receive the things without that stifling dread, that eager fearfulness of the eyes to read all the words in one glance. Leisurely could we learn that Little Miss was getting back her strength, and Miss Caroline and I could laugh at Clem's fear that she also would find herself "pah'lyzed in th' frame."

After that Miss Caroline and I were free to consider another matter, weighty enough with pneumonia out of the running. This was a matter of ways and means—of sheer, downright money.

When Clem, in the first days of his sickness, had warned Miss Caroline that she would not be let to waste "all that gold money," his lofty reference, as a matter of cold figures, was to a sum less than nine dollars. I forget the precise amount, but that is near enough—nine dollars, in round numbers. And the winter had been an expensive one.

At the lowest time of doubt, when Miss Caroline had affairs of extreme gravity to face, I had spoken to her incidentally of money that I owed to Clem for services performed, and I had, in fact, paid several instalments of the debt as money seemed to be needed.

When Clem's recovery was assured and I urged Miss Caroline to go to Little Miss, she asked me bluntly what sum I had owed Clem. I felt obliged to confess that it was not more than two hundred dollars.

This must have surprised Miss Caroline as much as it rejoiced her, for she took up the matter with Clem, and in so clumsy a fashion that he, perhaps owing to his enfeebled condition, witlessly made a confession at variance with mine, and with an effect of candor that moved his questioner to take his word rather than that of an officer and a gentleman. Of course this was not at all like Clem. In referring to sums of money due him he had ever been wont to chant them with a bard-like inflation that recognized only sums of a vague but immense rotundity. I had never known him to be thus prosaic, and I suspected that Miss Caroline had, in a sudden impulse of doubt, terrified him into being so brutally explicit.

Whence fell a coldness between Miss Caroline and me, for the discrepancy between Clem's confession and mine was not slight. Even my mutterings about interest having accumulated were put down as the desperate resource of embarrassment. Miss Caroline did not even dignify them with her notice, and the coldness increased.

Yet, while it was a true coldness, it was distinguished by a certain alien quality of warmth, for Miss Caroline, though now on guard against any mere vulgar benevolence of mine, talked to me frankly, as she had never done before, about her situation.

First, it was impossible to think of going to her daughter. There were debts in the town; Clem would be unable to work for many weeks; and not only had Little Miss's contribution from her small wage now failed, but she herself had incurred debts and would be without money to pay them.

My neighbor depicted the gravity of this situation with a spirit that taxed my powers of admiration,—powers not slight, I may explain; for had they not already been developed beyond the ordinary by this same woman? Not even was she downcast in my presence. In fine, she was superbly Miss Caroline to me. If I saw that to herself she was an ill-fated old woman, perversely surviving a wreck with which she should have gone down, alone in a land that seemed unkind because it did not understand, and in desperate straits for the commonest stuff in the world,—why, that was no matter to be opened between us. We affected with mild philosophy to study a situation that not only did not require study but scarcely permitted it by candid souls. But we affected to agree that something must be done, which sounded very well indeed.

As a sign that she bore me no malice it was promised that I might hire a man to plant Clem's garden that spring, with the understanding that I should thus acquire an equity in its product. This seemed to be in the line of that something that must be done, and Miss Caroline and I made much of it, to avoid the situation's more embarrassing aspects.

"If I could only sell something," said my neighbor, with a vacant look about the room—a look of humorous disparagement. "The silver is good, but there's hardly enough of it to pay one of those debts—and I've nothing else but Clem. But if I tried to sell him," she added brightly, "it would only bring on trouble again with your Northern President. I know just how it would be."

We parted on this jest. Miss Caroline, I believe, went to be scolded by Clem for her trifling ways, while I sought out Solon Denney.

When something must be done, I seem never to know what it shall be. I believe Solon is often quite as uncertain, but he will never confess this, so that talk with him under such circumstances stimulates if it does not sustain.

I put Miss Caroline's difficulties before him. As any common catalogue of troubles will not provoke Solon from a happy unconcern which is temperamental, I spared no details in my recital, and I observed at length that my listener was truly aroused to the bad way in which Miss Caroline found herself. He sat forward in his chair, rested one elbow upon his untidy desk, and for several moments of silence jabbed an inky pen rhythmically into the largest rutabaga ever grown in Slocum County. At last he sat back and gazed upon me distantly from inspired eyes. Then, with his characteristic enthusiasm, he exclaimed:—

"Something will have to be done!"

"Wonderful!" I murmured. "Here I've worried over the thing for two months, studied it in court, studied it in my office, studied it in bed—and couldn't make a thing out of it. All at once I am guided to a welling fount of wisdom, and the thing is solved in a flash. Solon, you dazzle me! Denney forever!"

"Now, don't be funny, Calvin—I mean, don't try to be—" but I arose to go.

"You've solved it, Solon. Something must be done. There's the difference between intuition and mere clumsy ratiocination. In another month I might have found this out for myself, but you divine it instantly. You're a clairvoyant. Now I'm going to find Billy Durgin. You've done the heavy work—you've discovered that something must be done. What we need now, I suppose, is a bright young detective to tell us what it is."

But Solon interrupted soothingly. "There, there, something must be done, and, of course, I'll do it."

"What will you do?"

Even then I think he did not know.

"We must use common sense in these matters," he said, to gain time, and narrowed his gaze for an interval of study. At last he drove the pen viciously to its hilt in the rutabaga, and almost shouted:—

"I'll go to see Mrs. Potts!"

Before I could again express my enthusiasm, reawakened by the felicitous adequacy of this device, he had seized his hat and was clattering noisily down the stairway.

Two hours later Solon bustled into my own office, whither I had fled to forget his manifest incompetence. His hat was well back, and he seemed to be inflated with secrecy. I remembered it was thus he had impressed me just previous to the coup that had relieved us of Potts. I knew at once that he was going to be mysterious with me.

"I am not to say a word to any one," I began, merely to show him that I was not dense.

He paused, apparently on the point of telling me as much. I saw that I had read him aright.

"I am merely to be quiet and trust everything to you," I continued.

"Oh, well,—if you—"

"One moment—let me take a few more words out of your mouth. You are not certain, I am to remember, that anything will come of it, but you think something will. You think you may say that much. But I am again to remember not to talk about it. There! That's it, isn't it?"

He was entirely serious.

"Well, that's practically it. But I don't mind hinting a little, in strict confidence." He dropped into a chair, sitting earnestly forward.

"You see, Cal, I remembered a little remark Mrs. Potts once made. I believe it was the day after Mrs. Lansdale entertained the ladies' club last summer—I remember she was complaining of a headache—"

"I never knew Mrs. Potts to make a little remark," I said. I was not to be trifled with. Solon grinned.

"Well, perhaps this one wasn't so very little, only I never thought of it again until this morning. It was about Mrs. Lansdale's furniture."

"Indeed," I said in cold disinterest, having designed to be told more.

"Well, Mrs. Potts thinks there may be something in it."

His effort was to seem significant, but those things are apt to fail with me.

"Oh, I see. Well, that's a good idea, Solon, but you and Mrs. Potts are slow. Billy Durgin had the same idea last summer while the furniture was being unloaded. He took a good look at some of those old pieces, and he confided to me in strict secrecy that there were probably missing wills and rolls of banknotes hidden away in them. It seems that they're the kind that have secret drawers. Billy knows a case where a man touched a spring and found thirty thousand dollars in a secret drawer, 'and from there,' as Billy says, 'he fled to Australia.' So you can see it's been thought of. Of course I've never spoken of it, because I promised Billy not to,—but there's nothing in it."

"Bosh!" said Solon.

"Of course it's bosh. I could have told Billy that, but some way I always feel tender about his illusions. You may be sure I've learned enough of the Lansdale family to know that no member of it ever hid any real money—money that would spend—and there hasn't been a will missing for at least six generations."

"Bosh again!" said Solon. "It isn't secret drawers!"

"No? What then?"

"Well,—it's worse—and more of it."

"Is that all you have to say?" I asked as he stood up.

"Well, that's all I can say now. We must use common sense in these matters. But—Mrs. Potts has written!" With this cryptic utterance he stalked out.

There had been little need to caution me to secrecy. I was not tempted to speak. Had I known any debtor of Miss Caroline's who would have taken "Mrs. Potts has written" in payment of his account, it might have been otherwise.



CHAPTER XXI

LITTLE ARCADY IS GRIEVOUSLY SHAKEN

Mrs. Potts had written. I had Solon's word for it; but that which followed the writing will not cease within this generation or the next to be an affair of the most baffling mystery to our town folk. Me, also, it amazed; though my emotion was chiefly concerned with those gracious effects which the gods continued to manage from that apparently meaningless sojourn of J. Rodney Potts among us.

Superficially it was a thing of utter fortuity. Actually it was a masterpiece of cunning calculation, a thing which clear-visioned persons might see to bristle with intention on every side.

Years after that innocent encounter between an adventurous negro and an amiable human derelict in the streets of a far city,—those two atoms shaken into contact while the gods affected to be engaged with weightier matters,—the cultured widow of that derelict recalled the name of a gentleman in the East who was accustomed to buy tall clocks and fiddle-backed chairs, in her native New England, paying prices therefor to make one, in that conservative locality, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, almost.

Such was the cleverly devised circumstance that now intervened between my neighbor and an indigence distressing to think about. It was as if, in the game, a red four which one had neglected to "play up" should actually permit victory after an intricate series of disasters, by providing a temporary resting-place for a black trey, otherwise fatally obstructive, causing the player to marvel afresh at that last fateful but apparently chance shuffle.

A week after Mrs. Potts had written, the gentleman who received her letter registered as "Hyman Cohen, New York, N.Y.," at the City Hotel. From his manner of speech when he inquired for the Lansdale home it was seen that he seemed to be a German.

When Miss Caroline received him a little later, he asked abruptly about furniture, and she, in some astonishment, showed him what she had, even to that crowded into dark rooms and out of use.

He examined it carelessly and remarked that it was the worst lot that he had ever seen.

This did not surprise Miss Caroline in the least, though she thought the gentleman's candor exceptional. Little Arcady's opinion, which she knew to tally with his, had always come to her more circuitously.

The strange gentleman then asked Miss Caroline, not too urbanely, if she had expected him to come all the way from New York to look at such cheap stuff. Miss Caroline assured him quite honestly that she had expected nothing of the sort, and intimated that her regret for his coming surpassed his own, even if it must remain more obscurely worded. She indicated that the interview was at an end.

The strange gentleman arose also, but as Clem was about to close the door after him, he offered Miss Caroline one hundred and fifty dollars for "the lot," observing again that it was worthless stuff, but that in "this business" a man had to take chances. Miss Caroline declined to notice this, having found that there was something in the gentleman's manner which she did not like, and he went down the path revealing annoyance in the shrug of his shoulders and the sidewise tilt of his head.

To Mrs. Lansdale's unaffected regret, and amazement as well, the gentleman returned the following morning to say that he was about to leave for New York, but that he would actually pay one hundred and seventy-eight dollars for the stuff. This was at least twenty-two dollars more than it could possibly be worth, but the gentleman had an unfortunate passion for such things. Miss Caroline bowed, and called Clem as she left the room.

The gentleman returned the morning of the third day to close the deal. He said he had missed his train on the previous day, and being a superstitious man he regarded that as an augury of evil. Nevertheless he had resolved to take the stuff even at a price that was ruinous. He unfolded two hundred dollars in the presence of Clem, and wished to know if he might send a wagon at once. Clem brought back word from Miss Caroline, who had declined to appear, that the strange gentleman would oblige her by ceasing his remarkable intrusions. Whereupon the gentleman had said: "Oh, very well! Then I go!"

But he went no farther than the City Hotel; and here one may note a further contrivance of indirection on the part of our attending Fates.

From the evening train of that day the 'bus brought another strange gentleman, of an Eastern manner, but somewhat neater of dress than the first one and speaking with an accent much less obtrusive. This gentleman wrote "James Walsingham Price, N.Y.," on the register, called for a room with a bath, ordered "coffee and rolls" to be sent there at eight-thirty the next morning, and then asked to see the "dinner card."

After mine host, Jake Kilburn, had been made to understand what "dinner card" meant, he made Mr. James Walsingham Price understand that there was no dinner card. This being clear at last, the newcomer said: "Oh, very well! Then just give my order to the head-waiter, will you—there's a good chap—a cup of consomme, a bit of fish, a bird of some sort, broiled, I fancy,—er—potatoes au gratin, a green salad of some kind,—serve that with the bird,—a piece of Camembert, if it's in good condition, any entremet you have and a demi-tasse. I'll mix the salad dressing myself, tell him,—oh, yes—and a pint of Chambertin if you've something you can recommend."

Billy Durgin, scrutinizing the newcomer in a professional way, told me afterwards that Jake Kilburn "batted his eyes" during this strange speech and replied to it, "like a man coming to"—"supper in twenty minutes," after which he pounded a bell furiously and then himself showed his new and puzzling guest to a room—but not a room "with a bath," be it understood, for a most excellent reason.

Billy Durgin was excited half an hour later by noting the behavior of the first strange gentleman from the East as his eyes fell upon this second. He threw both hands into the air, where they engaged in rapid horizontal shakings from his pliant wrists, and in hushed gutturals exclaimed, "My God, my God!" in his own fashion of speech, which was reproduced admirably for me by my informant. Billy was thus confirmed in his earlier belief that the first strange gentleman was a house-breaker badly wanted somewhere, and he now surmised that the newcomer must be a detective on his trail. But a close watch on their meeting, a little later in the evening, seemed to contradict this engaging hypothesis. The second stranger emerged from the dining room, where he had been served with supper, and as he shut the door of that banqueting hall, Billy, standing by, heard him, too, call upon his Maker. He called only once, but it was in a voice so full of feeling as to make Billy suspect that he was remembering something unpleasant.

At this point the newcomer had glanced up to behold the first strange gentleman, and Billy held his breath, expecting to witness a sensational capture. To his unspeakable disgust the supposed sleuth grinned affably at his supposed quarry and said: "Ah, Hyman! Is the stuff any good?"

"How did you find it out?" asked the first strange gentleman.

The other smiled winningly. "Why, I dropped into your place the other day, and that beautiful daughter-in-law of yours mentioned incidentally where you'd gone and what for. She's a good soul, Hyman, bright, and as chatty as she can be."

"Ach! That Malke! She goes back right off to De Lancey Street, where she belongs," said the first stranger, plainly irritated.

"How did you find the stuff, Hyman?"

"Have you et your supper yet?"

"Yes—'tisn't Kosher, is it? How did you find the stuff?"

"No, it ain't Kosher—nothing ain't Kosher!"

"It's a devilish sight worse, though. How did you find the stuff, Hyman?"

The one called Hyman here seemed to despair of putting off this query.

"No good! No good!—not a decent piece in the lot! I pledge you my word as a gentleman I wouldn't pay the freight on it to Fourth Avenue!" Billy remarked that the gentleman said "pletch" for pledge and "afanoo" for avenue.

The second stranger, hearing this, at once became strangely cheerful and insisted upon shaking hands with the first one.

"Fine, Hyman, fine! I'm delighted to hear you say so. Your words lift a load of doubt from my mind. It came to me in there just now that I might be incurring that supper for nothing but my sins!"

"Have your choke," said Hyman, a little bitterly.

"I have, Hyman, I have had my 'choke'!" said James Walsingham Price, with a glance of disrelish toward the dining room.

It seemed clear to Billy Durgin, who reported this interview to me in a manner of able realism, that these men were both crooks of the first water.

Billy at once polished his star and cleaned and oiled his new 32-caliber "bull-dog." The promise of work ahead for the right man loomed more brightly than ever before in his exciting career.

While I discussed with Miss Caroline, that evening, the unpleasant mystery of her late caller, there came a note from him by messenger. He offered six hundred and twenty-one dollars for her furniture, the sum being written in large letters, so that it had the effect of being shouted from the page. He further expressed a wish to close the deal within the half hour, as he must leave town on the night train.

Had Miss Caroline been alone, she might have fallen. Even I was staggered, but not beyond recovery. The messenger bore back, at my suggestion, a refusal of the offer and a further refusal to consider any more offers that evening. There was indicated a need for calm daylight consideration, and a face-to-face meeting with this variable Mr. Cohen.

"But he leaves on the night train," said Miss Caroline. "It may be our last chance, and six hundred dollars is—"

"He only says he leaves," I responded. "And for three days, at least, Mr. Cohen seems to have been grossly misinformed about his own movements. Perhaps he's deceived himself again."

At eight o'clock the following morning Clem served my breakfast for the first time since his illness, and I approached it with thanksgiving for his recovery.

A knock at the door took him from me just as he had poured the first cup of real coffee I had seen for nearly three months. He came back with the card of one James Walsingham Price, whom I did not know; whereas I did know the coffee.

"Fetch him here," I said. "He can't expect me to leave this coffee, whoever he is."

Into my dining room was then ushered a tall, smartly dressed, smooth-faced man of perhaps middle age, with yellowish hair compactly plastered to his head. He became, I thought, suddenly alert as he crossed my threshold. I arose to greet him.

"This is—" I had to glance at the card.

"Yes—and you're Major Blake? I regret to disturb you, Major,"—here his glance rested blankly upon the rich golden-brown surface of Clem's omelette, and it seemed to me that the thread of his intention was broken for an instant by a fit of absentmindedness. He resumed his speech only after an appreciable pause, as if the omelette had reminded him of something.

"The hour is untimely, but I'm told that you're a friend of a Mrs. Lansdale, who has some pieces of Colonial furniture she wishes to let go. I wondered, you know, if you'd be good enough to introduce me. I rather thought some such formality might be advisable—I understand that a shark named Cohen has already approached her."

Even as he spoke I recalled that Mr. Cohen's face, in profile, might provoke the vision of a shark to a person of lively imagination.

"I shall be glad," I said, "to present you to Mrs. Lansdale."

Again had my caller's glance trailed across the breakfast table, where the omelette, the muffins, and the coffee-urn waited. The glance was politely unnoting, but in it there yet lurked, far back, the unmistakable quality of a caress. In an instant I remembered, and, with a pang of sympathy, I became his hungered brother.

"By the way, Mr. Price, are you staying at the City Hotel?"

"The man said it was the only place, you know."

"You had breakfast there this morning?" He bowed his assent eloquently, I thought.

"Then by all means sit down and have breakfast."

"Oh, really, no—by no means—I assure you I'd a capital breakfast—"

"Clem!"

Clem placed a chair, into which Mr. Price dropped without loss of time, though protesting with polished vehemence against the imposition.

His eyes shone, nevertheless, as Clem set a cup of coffee at his elbow and brought a plate.

"May I ask when you arrived?" I questioned.

"Only last evening."

"Then you dined at the City Hotel?"

"Major Blake, I will be honest with you—I did!"

"Clem, another omelette, quick—but first fetch some oranges, then put on a lot more of that Virginia ham and mix up some waffles, too. Hurry along!"

"Really, you are very good, Major."

"Not that," I answered modestly; "I've merely eaten at the City Hotel." But I doubt if he heard, for he lovingly inhaled the aroma of his coffee with half-shut eyes.

"I am delighted to have met you," he said. "If ever you come to New York—" He tore himself from the omelette long enough to scribble the name of a club on the card by my plate.

"I rarely crave more than coffee and a roll in the morning," he continued, after the second omelette, the ham, the waffles, and more coffee had been consumed. "I fancy it's your bracing air."

I fancied it was only the City Hotel, but I did not revert to that.

When at last Mr. Price lighted a cigar which I had procured at an immense distance from Slocum County, he spoke of furniture, also of Cohen.

Beheld through the romantic mist of after-breakfast, Cohen was, perhaps, not wholly a shark; at least not more than any dealer in old furniture. Really, they were almost forced to be sharks. It was not in the nature of the business that they should lead honest lives. Mere collectors—of which class my guest was—were bad enough. Still, if you could catch a collector in one of his human moments—

He blew forth the smoke of my cigar with a relish so poignant that I suspected he had already tried one of Jake Kilburn's best, the kind concerning which Jake feels it considerate to warn purchasers that they are "five cents, straight" and not six for a quarter. I saw that if the collector before me were subject to human moments, he must be suffering one now. So, while he smoked, I told him freely of Miss Caroline, of her furniture and her plight.

He commended the tale.

"One of the best I ever heard," he declared. "Only, if you'll pardon me, it sounds too good to be true. It sounds, indeed, like a 'plant,'—fine old Southern family, impoverished by war—faithful body-servant—old Colonial mansion despoiled of its heirlooms—rare opportunities for the collector. Really, Major, you should see some of the stuff that was landed on me when I began, years ago, with a story almost as good. Reproductions, every piece of it, with as fine an imitation of worm-eaten backs as you could ever wish to see."

I had never wished to see any worm-eaten backs whatever, but I sought to betray regret that I had not encountered this surpassing lot of them.

"Of course," he continued, "you will understand that I am speaking now as a hardened collector, whose life is beset with pitfalls and with gins—not as a starved wretch to the saver of his life."

"You shall see the stuff," I said.

"Oh, by all means, and the quicker the better. Cohen is waiting at the hotel for me now—at the foot of the front stairway, and he may suspect any minute that I was mean enough to slink down the back stairs and out through an alley. In fact, I'm rather excited at the prospect of seeing that furniture—Cohen condemned it so bitterly."

"He sent an offer of six hundred dollars for it last night," I said. Hereupon my guest became truly excited.

"He did—six hundred—Cohen did? I don't wish to be rude, old chap, but would you mind hastening? That is more eloquent than all your story."

For half an hour, notwithstanding his eagerness, Mr. James Walsingham Price succumbed to the manner of Miss Caroline. Noting the lack of compunction with which she played upon him before my very eyes, I divined that the late Colonel Lansdale had not found the need of pistols entirely done away with even by the sacrament of marriage.

Not until Clem announced "Mr. Cohen" did the self-confessed collector cease to be a man.

"Not at home," said Miss Caroline, crisply. Price grinned with appreciation and fell to examining the furniture in strange ways.

It was a busy day for him, but I could see that he found it enjoyable, and strangely was it borne in upon me that Miss Caroline's ancient stuff was in some sense desirable.

More than once did Price permit some sign of emotion to be read in his face—as when the sixth chair of a certain set was at last found supporting a water-pail in the kitchen. The house was not large, but it was crowded, and Price was frankly surprised at the number of things it held.

At six o'clock he went to dine with me, Miss Caroline having told him that I was authorized to act for her on any proposal he might have to make.

"You have saved me again," he said warmly, in the midst of Clem's dinner. "I assure you, Major, that hotel is infamous. I'm surprised, you know, that something isn't done about it by the authorities."

I had to confess that the City Hotel was very highly regarded by most of our citizens.

Again, after a brief interval of stupefaction, did James Walsingham Price call upon his Maker. "And yet," he murmured, "we are spending millions annually to impose mere theology upon savages far less benighted. Think for a moment what a tithe of that money would do for these poor people. Take the matter of green salads alone—to say nothing of soups—don't you have so simple a thing as lettuce here?"

"We do," I said, "but it's regarded as a trifle. They put vinegar and sugar on it and cut it up with their knives."

My guest shuddered.

"I dare say it's hopeless, but I shall always be glad to remember that you exist away from your City Hotel."

Thus did we reach the coffee and some cognac which the late L.Q. Peavey had gifted me with by the hands of his estimable kinswoman.

"And now to business," said my guest. His whimsical gray eyes had become studious and detached from our surroundings. He had a generous mouth, which he seemed habitually to sew up in a close-drawn seam, but this would suddenly and pleasantly rip in moments of forgetfulness. Being the collector at this moment, the mouth was tightly stitched.

"Let me begin this way," he said. "There are exactly six pieces in that house that will prevent my being honest so long as they are not mine. I am not unmindful of your succor, Major. I'll prove that to you if you look me up in town,—send me a wire and a room shall be waiting for you,—and I am enraptured by that small and lively brown lady. Nevertheless I shall remain a collector and, humanly speaking, an ingrate, a wolf, a caitiff, until those six articles are mine. Make them mine, and for the remainder of that stuff you shall have the benefit of an experience that has been of incredible cost. Accept my figure, and I promise you as man to man to de-Cohenize myself utterly."

"They are yours," I said—"what are they and what is the figure? Clem—Mr. Price's glass."

"There—you disarm me. One bit of haggling or hesitation might have hardened me even now; the serpent within me would have lifted its head and struck. But you have saved yourself—and very well for that! The articles are those six ball-and-claw-foot chairs with violin backs. I will pay fifty dollars apiece for those. Remember—it is the voice of Cohen. The chairs are worth more—some day they'll fetch twice that; but, really, I must throw a sop to that collector-Cerberus within me. He's entitled to something. He had the wit to fetch me here."

"The chairs are yours," I said, wondering if I had not mistaken his offer, but determining not to betray this.

"A little memorandum of sale, if you please—and I'll give you my check. That larger sideboard would also have stood in the way, but those glass handles aren't the originals."

The formality was soon despatched, and my curious friend became truly human.

"Now, Blake, this is from the grateful wretch whose life you have not only saved but enriched. Well, there's an excellent lot of stuff there. I've got the pick, from a collector's standpoint—though not from a money valuation. I can't tell what it will bring, but enough to put our youngish old friend easy for some time to come. You box it up, as much as she wants to let go, and send it to the Empire Auction Rooms—here's the card. They're plain auction-room people, you understand,—wouldn't hesitate to rob you in a genteel, auction way,—but I'll be there and see that they don't. Some of those other pieces I may want, but I'll take a bidding chance on them like a man, and I'll watch the whole thing through and see that it's straight."

Billy Durgin told me that Cohen and James Walsingham Price left on the night train going East. Billy noticed that Cohen seemed morose, and heard him exclaim something that sounded like "Goniff!" under his breath, as Price turned away from him after a brief chat.

For Little Arcady the appalling wonder was still to dawn. Load after load of the despised furniture went into freight-cars, until the home of Miss Caroline was only comfortably furnished. This was sensational enough—that the things should be thought worth shipping about the country with freights so high.

But after a few weeks came tales that atrophied belief—tales corroborated by a printed catalogue and by certain deposits of money in our bank to the account of Miss Caroline. That six wretched chairs, plain to ugliness, had sold for three hundred dollars spread consternation. The plain old sideboard for a hundred and ten dollars only fed the flames. But there had been sold what the catalogue described as "A Colonial sofa with carved dolphin arms, winged claw feet, and carved back" for two hundred and ten dollars, and after that the emotions aroused in Little Arcady were difficult to classify. Upon that very sofa most of the ladies of Little Arcady had sat to pity Miss Caroline for being "lumbered" with it. Again, a "Colonial highboy, hooded," recalled as an especially awkward thing, and "five mahogany side chairs" had gone for three hundred and eighty dollars. A "Heppelwhite mahogany armchair," remembered for its faded red satin, had veritably brought one hundred and sixty dollars; and a carved rosewood screen, said to be of Empire design, but a shabby thing, had sold astonishingly for ninety dollars. A "Hogarth chair-back settee" for two hundred and ten dollars, and "four Hogarth side chairs" for three hundred and fifteen dollars only darkened our visions still further. Some of us had known that Hogarth was an artist, but not that he had found time from his drawing to make furniture. Of Heppelwhite we had heard not at all, although twelve arm-chairs said to be his had been by some one thought to be worth around seven hundred dollars. Nor of any Sheraton did we know, though one of his sideboards and a "pair of Sheraton knife urns" fetched the incredible sum of five hundred and fifty dollars. Chippendale was another name unfamiliar in Slocum County, but Chippendale, it seemed, had once made a wing book-case which was now worth two hundred and forty dollars of some enthusiast's money. After that a Chippendale settee for a hundred and forty dollars and an "Empire table with 1830 base" for ninety-three dollars seemed the merest trifles of this insane outbreak.

The amount netted by the late owner of these things was reported with various exaggerations, which I never saw any good reason to correct. As I have said, the thing was, and promises to remain forever in Little Arcady, a phenomenon to be explained by no known natural laws. For a long time our ladies were too aghast even to marvel at it intelligibly. When Aunt Delia McCormick in my hearing said, "Well, now, what a world this is!" and Mrs. Westley Keyts answered, "That's very true!" I knew they referred to the Lansdale furniture. It was typical of the prevailing stupefaction.

"It seems that a collector may be a gentleman," said Miss Caroline, "but Mr. Cohen wasn't even a collector!"

Then I told her the considerable sum now to her credit. She drew a long breath and said, "Now!" and Clem, who stood by, almost cried, "Now, Little Miss!"



The Book of LITTLE MISS



CHAPTER XXII

THE TIME OF DREAMS

I had Clem to myself for a time. Little Miss, it seemed, was not yet rugged enough for travel into the far Little Country. Nor was she at once to be convinced that she might safely leave her work. I suspect that she had found cause in the past to rank her mother with Clem as a weigher and disburser of moneys. I noticed that she chose to accept Miss Caroline's earliest letters about their good fortune with a sort of half-tolerant attention, as an elder listens to the wonder-tales of an imaginative child, or as I had long listened to Clem's own dreamy-eyed recital of the profits already his from "brillions" of chickens not yet come even to the egg-stage of their careers.

Not until Miss Caroline had ceased from large and beauteous phrases about "the great good fortune that has befallen us in the strangest manner"—not until she descended to actual, dumfounding figures with powerful little dollar-marks back of them, did her daughter seem to permit herself the sweet alarms of hope. Even in that moment she did not forget that she knew her own mother, for she took the precaution to elicit a confirmatory letter from her mother's attorney, under guise of thanking him for the friendly interest he had "ever manifested" in the welfare of the Lansdales.

It occurred to me that Little Miss had been endowed, either by nature or experience, with a marked distrust of mere seemings. The impression conveyed to me by her unenthusiastic though skilfully polite letter was of one who had formed the habit of doubting beyond her years. These I judged to be twenty-eight or thereabouts, while her powers of restraint under provocation to believe savored of more years than even her mother could claim. I had myself been compelled to note the value of negative views, save in that inner and lonely world where I abode of nights and Sundays; I, too, had proved the wisdom of much doubting as to actual, literal events; but Little Miss was making me think of myself as almost raw-and-twenty credulous. In a lawyer's letter of formal conciseness, devoid of humanities, maintaining to the end an atmosphere of unemotional fact and figure that descended not even to conventional felicitations upon the result, I therefore acquainted Little Miss with the situation. So nearly perfect was this letter that it caused her to refer to me, in a later communication to Miss Caroline, as "your dry-and-dusty counting-machine of a lawyer, who doubtless considers the multiplication table as a cycle of sonnets." That, after I had merely determined to meet her palpable needs and had signed myself her obedient servant!

But I had convinced her. She admitted as much in words almost joyous, so that Miss Caroline went to be with her—to fetch her when she should be strong enough for the adventure of travel.

There were three weeks of my neighbor's absence—three weeks in which Clem "cleaned house", polished the battered silver, "neated" the rooms, and tried to arrange the remaining furniture so that it would look like a great deal of furniture indeed; three weeks in which Little Arcady again decked itself with June garlands and seemed not, at first glance, to belie its rather pretentious name; three weeks when I studied a calendar which impassively averred that I was thirty-five, a mirror which added weight to that testimony, and the game which taught me with some freshness at each failure that the greater game it symbolizes is not meant to be won—only to be played forever with as eager a zest, as daring a hope, as if victory were sure.

The season at hand found me in sore need of this teaching. It was then that errant impulse counselled rebellion against the decrees of calendar and looking-glass. If vatted wine in dark cellars turns in its bed and mutters seethingly at this time, in a mysterious, intuitive sympathy with the blossoming grape, a man free and above ground, with eyes to behold that miracle, may hardly hope to escape an answering thrill to its call.

Wherefore I played the game diligently, torn by the need of its higher lessons. And at last I was well instructed by it, as all may be who approach it thus, above a trivial lust for winning.

Two of us played in that provocative June. One was myself, alert for auspicious falls of the cards, yet stoical and undepressed when a deal promising to be almost too easy for interest was suddenly blocked by some trifling card. Thus was I schooled to expectations of a wise shallowness, not so deep but that they might be overrun by the moderate flow of human happiness. Thus one learned to expect little under much wanting, and to find his most certain profit in observing the freshness of those devices which left him frustrated. Jim, the other player of us, chased gluttonous robins on the lawn, ever with an indifferent success, but with as undimmed a faith, as fatuous a certainty, as the earliest of gods could have wished to see. And between us we achieved a conviction that the greater game is worth playing, even when one has discovered its terrific percentage of failures.

I was not unpleased to be alone during this period of discipline when my soul was perforce purged of its troublesome ferments. It was well that my neighbor should have gone where she might distract me never so little.

For it was at the season when Nature brews the irresistible philter. Always, I resolved to forego it like a man; always, like a man, I was overborne by the ancient longing, the formless "heimweh" that haunts the hearts of the unmated, and which in my own case made short work of stoic resolutions. And, since the game had taught me that yielding—where opposition is fated to avail not—is graceful in proportion to its readiness, I surrendered as quietly as might be.

One woman face had been wholly mine for hidden cherishing through all the years. A woman face, be it understood, not the face of a woman. At first it had been that; but with the years it had lost the lines that made it but that one. Imperceptibly, it had taken on an alien, vague softness that but increased its charm while diminishing its power to hurt.

It brought me now only a pensive pleasure and no feeling more acute. It was my ashes of roses, the music of my first love, its poignancies softened by time and memory into an ineffable, faint melody; it was the moon that drenched my bygone youth with wonder-light—a dream-face, exquisite as running water, unfolding flowers and those other sweets that poets try in vain to entangle in the meshes of word and rhythm.

This was the face my fancy brought to go with me into every June garden of familiar surprises. All of which meant that I was a poor thing of clay and many dolors, who still perversely made himself believe that somewhere between him and God was the one woman, breathing and conscious, perhaps even longing. More plainly, it meant that I was a man whose gift for self-fooling promised ably to survive his hair. Gravitation would presently pull down my shoulders, my face would flaunt "the wrinkled spoils of age", my voice would waver ominously, and I should forfeit the dignities befitting even this decay by still playing childish games of belief with some foolish dog. I would be a village "character" of the sort that is justly said to "dodder." And the judicious would shun observation by me, or, if it befell them, would affect an intense preoccupation lest I halt and dodder to them of a past unromantically barren.

There were moments in which I made no doubt of all this. But I fought them off as foolishly as did Jim his own intervals of clear seeing. Sometimes in a half doze he breathes a long, almost human sigh of perfect and despairing comprehension, as if the whole dead weight of his race's history flashed upon him; as if the woful failure of his species to achieve anything worth while, and the daily futilities of himself as an individual dog were suddenly revealed. In such instants he knows, perhaps, that there is little reward in being a dog, unless you cheat yourself by believing more than the facts warrant. But presently he is up to dash at a bird, with a fine forgetfulness, quite as startled by the trick of flight as in his first days. And I, envying him his gift of credulity, weakly strive for it.

As I have said, I had noted that in these free dreamings of mine the painted face above my neighbor's mantel seemed to have had a place long before I looked upon its actual lines. This perplexed me not a little; that the face should seem to have been familiar before I had seen it—the portrait, that it should have blended with and then almost replaced another's, so that now the woman face I saw was eloquent of two, though fittingly harmonized in itself. Must I lay to the philter's magic this audacious notion; that the face of Little Miss had tangibly come to me in some night of the mind? Sober, I was loath to commit this absurdity; but breasting drunkenly that tide of dreams, it ceased to be absurd.