"Nearly eighty."

The elevator going up stopped in response to a signal from Fowler. He extended his hand. "Well, good-day," said Fowler. "I am glad we chanced to meet."

"Well, it is a small world," replied Carroll, smiling. "The chances for meeting are much better than they would be, say, in Mars."

"Much better, and for hearing, also. Good-day."

"Good-day."

Carroll saw the elevator with its open sides of filigree iron, ascending, and the expression upon Fowler's calm, handsome face, gazing backward at him, was unmistakable. It was even mocking.

Carroll touched the electric button of one of the downward elevators, and was soon carried rapidly down to the street door. He felt, as he gained the street, that he would rather starve to death than ask a favor of Fowler. He did not ask for pity, or even sympathy, in his downfall, but he did ask for recognition of it as a common accident that might befall mankind, and a consequent passing by with at least the toleration of indifference from those not actively concerned in it; but in this man's face had been something like exultation, even gloating, Carroll thought to himself, as he went down the street, in the childish way that Eddy might have done, with a sort of wonder, reflecting that he never in his life, that he could remember, had done Fowler, even indirectly, a bad turn. He might easily have been totally indifferent to his misfortunes, to his failings, but why should they have pleased him?

Carroll walked rapidly along the street until he reached Broadway again. It was a strange day; a sort of snow-fog was abroad. The air was dense and white. Now and then a mist of sleet fell, and the sidewalks were horribly treacherous. The children enjoyed it, and there were many boys and a few girls with tossing hair sliding along with cries of merriment.

Carroll thought of Eddy as one little fellow, who did not look unlike him, fairly slid into his arms.

"Look out, my boy," Carroll said, good-humoredly, keeping him from falling, and the little fellow raised his cap with a charming blush and a "Beg your pardon, sir." A miserable home-sickness for them came over Carroll as he passed on. He longed for the sight of his boy, or his wife and Anna. He had grown, in a manner, accustomed to Ina being away. There is something about marriage and the absence it causes that brings one into the state of acquiescence concerning death. But he longed for the others, and he thought of his poor little Charlotte at home all day, and her loneliness. He looked at his watch, and realized that he must hurry if he caught the train which would take him to Banbridge at six o'clock. He had one more place on his list, and that was far up-town. He crossed to the Elevated station and boarded the first up-town train. What he was about to do was, in a way, so monstrous, taking into consideration his antecedents, his bringing-up, and all his forebears, that it had to his mind the grotesqueness of a gargoyle on his house of life. He was now going to apply for the last position on his list, that of a coachman for a gentleman, presumably of wealth, in Harlem. The name was quite unknown to him. It was German. He thought to himself in all probability the owner was Jewish. This was absolutely his last venture. He chose this as he would choose anything in preference to the one which was always within reach. As the train sped along he fell to thinking of himself in this position for which he was about to apply. He imagined himself in livery sitting with a pair of sleek bays well in hand. He reflected that at least he could do his work well. He wondered idly about the questions he would be asked. He considered suddenly that he must have a reference for a place of this sort, and he tore a leaf out of his note-book, took out his stylo-graphic pen, and scribbled a reference, signing his own name. He reflected, as he did so, that it was odd that he, who had employed so many doubtful methods to gain financial ends, should feel an inward qualm at the proceeding. Still, he was somewhat amused at the thought that Mr. A. Baumstein might write to him at Banbridge, and he should in that case reply, repeating his own list of qualification for the place. He wondered if they would ask if he were married, if they would prefer him married, if he drank, if he would be forbidden to smoke in the stables. He considered all the questions which he should be likely to ask himself, in a similar case. He got a curious feeling as if he were having an experience like Alice in Wonderland, as if he were in reality going in at the back of his own experiences, gaining the further side of his moon. He began to be almost impatient to reach his station and see the outcome of it all. Strangely enough, he never reflected on the good advice which the young woman that morning had given him as to the undesirable gentility of his general appearance. He never considered that as a drawback. When he reached his station he got off the train, went down the stairs, crossed the avenue, and up a block to the next street. When he found the number of which he was in search he hesitated a second. He wondered at what door he should apply. It manifestly could not be the front door. He therefore went farther down the street and gained the one running parallel, by which means he could reach the rear entrance of the house. It had no basement entrance under the front door. It was a new building, and quite pretentious, the most pretentious of a new and pretentious block. He traversed the small back yard, bending his stately head under a grove of servants' clothes which were swinging whitely from a net-work of lines, and knocked on the door. His knock was answered by a woman, presumably a cook, and she looked like a Swede. Unaccountably to him, she started back with a look of alarm and nearly closed the door, and inquired in good English, with a little accent, what he wanted. Carroll raised his hat and explained.

"I saw an advertisement for a coachman," he said, briefly, "and I have come to apply for the place if it is not already filled."

To his utter amazement the door was closed violently in his face, and he distinctly heard the bolt shot. He was completely at a loss to account for such a proceeding. He remained standing, staring at the blank front of the door, and a light flashed across the room inside and caused him to look at the windows. The light had been carried into a room at the back, but he saw in the pale dimness of the kitchen a group of women and one boy, and they were all staring out at him. Then the boy started on a run across the room, and he heard a door slam. Carroll waited. He could not imagine what it was all about, and a feeling of desperation was coming over him. It seemed to him that he must find something to do, that he could not go home again. The position of coachman began to seem desirable to him. Charlotte need not know what he was doing; no one need know. He had resolved to give another name, and he would soon find another position. This would be a makeshift. In this he could at least keep himself to himself. He need associate with nothing except the horses, and they were likely to be thorough-breds. It would not, after all, be half so bad as some other things—guiding superb horses through the streets and waiting at doors for his employers. To his mind, a coachman—that is, a City coachman—wears always more or less of a mask of stiff attention to duty. He could hide behind this mask. In reality, Carroll was almost at the end of his strength. His pride had suddenly become a forgotten thing. He was wretchedly worn out, and, in fact, he was hungry, almost famished. He had eaten very little lately, and poor Charlotte, in truth, knew little about cookery. He, in reality, became for the time what in once sense he was impersonating. He became a coachman in dire need of a job. Therefore he waited. He reflected, while he waited, that if they did not hurry he would miss his train and Charlotte would worry. In case he secured the position she would certainly have to join the others in Kentucky; there would be no other way, for he would be obliged to remain in the City over night.

All at once the door before him was swung violently open and a gentleman stood there. Carroll felt at once that he was Mr. A. Baumstein.

"What do you want, sir?" inquired the gentleman, and his tone was distinctly hostile, although he looked like a well-bred man, and it seemed puzzling that he thus received an answer to his application.

"I saw your advertisement, sir—" Carroll began.

"My advertisement for what, pray?" repeated Mr. Baumstein.

"For a coachman," replied Carroll, "and I thought if you had not already secured one—"

"Clear out, or I will call a policeman!" thundered Mr. Baumstein, and again the door was slammed in his face.

Carroll then understood. A gentleman who would have been presentable at the Waldorf-Astoria, at a gentleman's area door applying for a position as coachman, was highly suspicious. He understood readily how he would have looked at the matter had the cases been reversed. He made his way out of the little yard, dodging the fluttering banners of servants' clothes, and was conscious that his progress was anxiously watched by peering eyes at the windows. He reflected that undoubtedly that house would be doubly bolted and barred that night, and he would not be surprised if a special policeman were summoned, in view of the great probability that he was a gentleman burglar spying out the land before he descended upon it in search of the spoons and diamonds. Somehow the fancy tickled him to that extent that he felt almost as hysterical as a woman. He laughed aloud, and two men whom he met just then turned round and looked at him suspiciously.

"Dopey, I guess," one said, audibly, to the other.

It was now in Carroll's mind to gain the Elevated as soon as possible, and hurry down-town to his ferry and catch his train. He consulted his watch, and saw that he had just about time, if there were no delays. As he replaced his watch he remembered that he had, besides his railroad book, very little money, only a little silver. The helplessness of a cripple came over him. He recalled seeing a man who had lost both his legs shuffling along on the sidewalk, with the stumps bound with leather, carrying a little tray of lead-pencils which nobody seemed to buy. He felt like that cripple. A man living to-day in the heart of civilization, where money is in reality legs and wings and hands, is nothing more than a torso without it, he thought. He felt mutilated, unspeakably humiliated. It seemed more out of his ability to get any honest employment than it had ever done before. A number of laborers with their dinner-satchels, and their pickaxes over their shoulders, passed him. They looked at him, as they passed, with gloomy hostility. It was as if they accused him of having something which of a right belonged to them. He fell to wondering how he would figure in their ranks. He was no longer a very young man. However, his muscles were still good and supple; it really seemed to him that he might dig or pick away at rocks, as he had seen men doing in that apparently aimless and hopeless and never-ending fashion. He thought in such a case he should have to join the union, and he really wondered if they would admit him, if he pawned his clothes and should buy some poorer ones. He decided, passing himself before himself in mental review, that he might be treated by the leaders of a labor union very much as he had just been treated by Mr. Baumstein at his area door. He also decided that men like those who had just met him regard him with even worse suspicion and disfavor. He remembered stories he had read of gentlemen, of students, voluntarily joining the ranks of labor for the sake of information, but it seemed somehow impossible when it was attempted in earnest. Decidedly, his appearance was against him. He had the misfortune to look too much like a man who did not need to dig to easily obtain, in labor's parlance, a job to dig. Yet, while he thought of it, such was the man's desperation, his rage against his odds of life, that it seemed to him that a purely physical attack on the earth, to which he was fastened by some indissoluble laws of nature which he could not grasp, would be a welcome relief. He felt that with a heavy pick in his hand he could strike savagely at the concrete rock, the ribs of the earth, and almost enjoy himself. He felt that it would be like an attack, although a futile and antlike one, at creation itself. All this he thought idly, walking, even hurrying, along the slippery pavement through the pale, sleety mist. He walked as rapidly as he could, some of the time slipping, and recovering himself with a long slide. He came to a block of new stone houses, divided from another by a small space taken up by a little, old-fashioned, wooded structure that might have been with propriety in Banbridge. He noticed this, and the thought came to him that possibly it was the property of some ancient and opinionated mortal who was either holding it for higher prices or for the sake of some attachment or grudge. And just as he reached it he saw coming from the opposite direction his old book-keeper, William Allbright. Allbright, moving with a due regard to the dangerous state of the pavement, had still an alacrity of movement rather unusual to him. As he came nearer it was plain to see that his soberly outlined face, long and clean-shaven, was elated by something. He started when he recognized Carroll, and stopped. Carroll felt, meeting him a sensation of self-respect like a tonic. Here was at least one man to whom he owed nothing, whom he had not injured. He held out his hand.

"How do you do, Mr. Allbright?" he said.

"Quite well, thank you, Mr. Carroll," replied Allbright, then his delight, which makes a child of most men, could not be restrained. "I have just secured a very good position in a wholesale tea-house—Allen, Day & Co.," he said.

"That is good," said Carroll, echoing the other's enthusiasm. He really felt a leap of joy in his soul because of the other's good-fortune. He felt that in some way he himself needed to be congratulated for his good-fortune, that he had been instrumental in securing it. His face lit up. "I am delighted, Mr. Allbright," he repeated.

"Yes, it is a very good thing for me," said Allbright, simply. "I was beginning to get a little discouraged. I had saved a little, but I did not like to spend it all, and I have my sister to take care of."

"I am very glad," Carroll said, still again.

Allbright then looked at him with a little attention, pushing, as it were, his own self, intensified by joy, aside. "You are not looking very well, Mr. Carroll," he said, deferentially, and yet with a kindly concern.

"I am very well," said Carroll. Then he pulled out his watch again, and Allbright noticed quickly that it was a dollar watch. He remembered his suspicion. "I must hurry if I am to get my train," said Carroll. "You live here, Mr. Allbright?"

"Yes. I have lived here for twenty years."

"Well, I am very glad to hear of your good-fortune. Good-day, Mr. Allbright."

Carroll had not advanced three paces from Allbright before his feet glissaded on the thin glare of the pavement, he tried to recover himself, and came down heavily, striking his head; then he knew no more for some time.



Chapter XXXVII

Charlotte had expected her father home at a little after six o'clock that night. That was the train on which he usually arrived lately. She had not the least idea what he was doing in the City. She supposed he was in the office as he had been hitherto. She never inquired. With all the girl's love for her father, she had a decided respect. She was old-fashioned in her ways of never interfering or even asking for information concerning a man's business affairs.

Charlotte went down to the station to meet her father, as she was fond of doing. She had her dinner all ready. It was pretty bad, but she was innocently unaware of it. In fact, she had much faith in it. She had a soup which resembled greatly a flour paste, and that was in its covered tureen on the range-shelf, keeping hot and growing thicker. She had cooked a cheap cut of beef from a recipe in the cook-book, and that was drying up by the side of the soup. Poor Charlotte had no procrastination, but rather the failing of "Haste makes waste" of the old proverb. She had her cheap cut of beef all cooked at three o'clock in the afternoon, and also the potatoes, and the accompanying turnips. Salad at that time of the year she could not encompass in any form, but she had a singular and shrunken pudding on the range-shelf beside the other things. She set the coffee-pot well back where it would only boil gently, and the table was really beautifully laid. The child's cheeks were feverishly flushed with the haste she had made and her pride in her achievements. She had swept and dusted a good deal that day, also, and all the books and bric-a-brac were in charming arrangement. She felt the honest delight of an artist as she looked about her house, and she said to herself that she was not at all tired. She also said that she was not at all hungry, even if she had only eaten a cracker for luncheon and little besides for breakfast. She realized a faintness at her stomach, and told herself that she must be getting indigestion. Her little stock of money was very nearly gone. She had even begun to have a very few things charged again at Anderson's. Sometimes her father brought home a little money, but she understood well enough that their financial circumstances were wellnigh desperate. However, she had an enormous faith in her father that went far to buoy her up. While she felt the most intense compassion for him that he should be so hard pressed, it never occurred to her that it could be due to any fault or lack of ability in him, and she had, in reality, no doubt whatever of his final recovery of their sinking fortunes. She wrote her mother that papa was going to the City every day, that they were getting on very well, and while they had not yet a maid, she thought it better to wait until they were perfectly satisfied before engaging one. The letters she had received at first from Mrs. Carroll had been childishly amazed and reproachful, although acquiescent. Her aunt had written her more seriously and with great affection. She told her to send for her at once if she needed her, and she would come.

Charlotte, going down the street towards the station that night, expected a letter by the five-o'clock train. She reached the post-office, which was near the station, at a quarter before six, and she found, as she anticipated, letters. There were several for her father, which she thought, accusingly towards the writers, were bills. It was odd that Charlotte, while not really morally perverted, and while she admitted the right of people to be paid, did not admit the right of any one to annoy her father by presenting his bill. She looked at the letters, and, remembering the wretched expression on her father's face on receiving some the night before, it actually entered into her mind to tear these letters up and never let him see them at all. But she put them in her little bag, and opened her own letters and stood in the office to read them. The train was not due for fifteen minutes yet, and was very likely to be late. She had letters from her mother, Ina, and aunt. They all told of the life they were leading there, and expressed hope that she and her father were well, and there was a great deal of love. It was all the usual thing, for they wrote every day. There were also letters from them all for Carroll. The Carroll family, when absent from one another, were all good correspondents, with the exception of Carroll. There was even a little letter from Eddy, which had been missent, because he had spelled Banbridge like two words—Ban Bridge.

Charlotte read her letters, smiling over them, standing aloof by the window. The post-office was fast thinning out. There had been the customary crowd there at the arrival of the mail—the pushing and shrieking children and the heavily shuffling loungers—all people who never by any possibility got any letters, but who found a certain excitement in frequenting the office at such times. Just as Charlotte finished her last letter and replaced it in the envelope, Anderson came in for his mail. He did not notice her, but went directly to his box, which had a lock, opened it, and took out a pile of letters. Charlotte stood looking at him. He looked very good and very handsome to her. She thought to herself how very much better-looking he was than Ina's husband. There was something about the manly squareness of his shoulders, as he stood with his back towards her, examining his letters, which made her tremble a little, she could not have told why. Suddenly he looked up and saw her, and she felt that the color flashed over her face, and was ashamed and angry. "Why should I do so?" she asked herself. She made a curt, stiff little bow in response to Anderson's greeting, and he passed her going out of the office with his letters. Then she felt distressed.

"I need not have been rude because I was such a little idiot as to blush when a man looked at me," she told herself. "It was not his fault. He has always been lovely to us." She reviewed in her mind just her appearance when she had given him that stiff little bow, and she felt almost like crying with vexation. "Of course he does not care how I bow to him," she thought, and somehow that thought seemed to give her additional distress, "but, all the same, I should have been at least polite, for he is very much a gentleman. I think he is much better bred, and he certainly knows much more than Ina's husband, even if he does only keep a grocery store; but then army officers are not supposed to know much except how to fight."

The heavy jar of a passing freight train made her look at the post-office clock, and with her usual promptness, although it was fully seven minutes before the train was due, even if it were on time, and she was only about one minute's walk from the station, she reflected that she must start at once if she were to meet her father. So she stowed away her letters in her little bag, and fairly ran across the icy slope between the office and the station. She saw, as she hurried along, a child tumble down, and watched him jump up and run off to make sure he was not hurt. When she reached the station she did not go in the waiting-room, which seemed close and stuffy, but remained out on the platform. The sun had set, but the western sky, which was visible from that point, was a clear expanse of rose and violet. Charlotte stood looking at it, and for a minute she was able to find that standing-point outside her own little life and affairs which exists for the soul. She did not think any more of the money troubles, of her bowing so stiffly to Mr. Anderson. She forgot not only her petty worries, but her petty triumphs and pleasures. She forgot even the exceeding becomingness of a new way in which she had dressed her hair. She forgot her coat, which she had herself trimmed with fur taken from an old one of her mother's, and in which her heart delighted. She forgot her supreme dinner warming on the range-shelf at home. She forgot the joy she would soon have in seeing her father alight from the train. The little, young, untrained creature saw and knew for the moment only the eternal that which was and is and shall be, and which the sunset symbolized. Her young face had a rapt expression looking at it.

"Dandy sunset, ain't it?" said a voice at her ear. She looked and saw Bessy Van Dorn, her large, blooming face, rosy with the cold, smiling at her from under a mass of tossing black plumes on a picture-hat. The girl was really superb in a long, fur-lined coat. She had driven in a sleigh to the station, and she expected Frank Eastman on the train, and was, with the most innocent and ignorant boldness in the world, planning to drive him home, although she was not engaged to him and he was not expecting her. Her face, turning from the wonderful after-glow of the sunset to Charlotte's, had also something of the same rapt expression in spite of her words.

"Yes, it is beautiful," replied Charlotte, but rather coldly. She was a friendly little soul, but she did not naturally care for girls of Bessy Van Dorn's particular type. She was herself too fine and small before such a mass of inflorescence.

"It's cold," said Bessy Van Dorn, further, "but, land, I like it! Have you been sleigh-riding?"

"No, I haven't," replied Charlotte.

"Oh, I forgot," said Bessy.

Charlotte knew what she had forgot—that the horses had gone for debt—and she reddened, but the other girl's voice was honest.

"I'd like to take you sometime," said Bessy.

"Thank you," said Charlotte.

"I'd offer to take you home to-night," said Bessy, "but I've arranged to take somebody else."

"Thank you. I could not go, anyway," said Charlotte. "I am down to meet my father."

"Oh!" said Bessy. "Well, then you couldn't. A sleigh ain't quite wide enough for three, unless one of 'em is your best young man," she giggled. Charlotte felt ashamed.

"My father is," she said, sternly. She fairly turned her back on Bessy Van Dorn, but she did not notice it, for the train was audible in the distance, and Bessy began calculating her distance from the car in which Frank Eastman usually rode, that she might be sure not to miss him.

Charlotte stood on the platform, and also ran along by the side of the train scanning anxiously the men who alighted. To her great astonishment, her father was not among them. She could scarcely believe it when the train went slowly past the station and her father had not got off.

Bessy Van Dorn, driving Frank Eastman in her sleigh, with the fringe of fur tails dangling over the back, looked around at Charlotte slowly retreating from the station. "Why, her father didn't come!" said she.

"Whose father?" asked young Eastman. He looked admiringly and even lovingly at the girl, and yet in a slightly scornful and shamed fashion. He hated to think of what some of the men he knew would say about her meeting him at the station.

"Why, that poor little Charlotte Carroll's!" said Bessy. "Say," she added, after a second's hesitation.

"What?" asked young Eastman.

"I've a good mind to ask her to ride. We're goin' her way. You don't mind?"

"Not a bit," said young Eastman, but he did think uncomfortably of Ina's sister seeing him with Bessy Van Dorn.

Bessie promptly stopped. They had not yet made the turn from the station to the main road, and Charlotte was just behind them.

"Say," she called out, "get in here. I'll take you home—just as soon as not."

"Thank you," replied Charlotte. "I have an errand. I am not going home just yet."

"All right," replied Bessy, touching her horse. "I'd just as soon have taken you as not, if you'd been going home."

"Thank you," Charlotte said, again.

"I declare, she looked as if she was just ready to cry," said Bessy to Eastman, as they drove up the street.

She was quite right. Charlotte was horribly frightened by her father's non-arrival on the train. He had never come on a later train than that since the others had gone. The thought of returning alone to her solitary home was more than she could bear. She remembered that there was another train a half-hour later, and she resolved to remain down for that. She thought that she would go to Mr. Anderson's store and purchase some cereal for breakfast, that she might have that charged. She was conscious, but she tried to stifle the consciousness, of a hope that Mr. Anderson would be there, and she might tell him that her father had not arrived on that train, and he would reassure her. But Mr. Anderson had naturally gone straight home from the post-office to supper. Charlotte ordered her cereal, and also a few eggs. Then she went back to the station. It was nearly twenty minutes before the train was due. She walked up and down the platform, which extended east and west. The new moon was just rising, a slender crescent of light, and off one upper horn burned a great star. It was a wonderful night, cold, with a calmness and hush of all the winds of heaven which was like the hush of peace itself. Charlotte noticed everything, the calm night and the crescent moon, but she came between herself and her own knowledge of it. Her mind was fixed upon the train and the terrible possibility that her father might not arrive on that. It seemed to her that if he did not arrive on that it was simply beyond bearing. The possibility was too terrible to be contemplated with reason, and yet she could not have told just why she was in such a panic of fear. A thousand things might happen to keep any business-man in the City later than he had expected. He had often been so kept while the others were home; but now she was alone, and she felt that he would certainly come unless something most serious had detained him. Charlotte had naturally a somewhat pessimistic turn of mind, and her imagination was active. She imagined many things; she even imagined the actual cause of Carroll's detention, among others, that he had slipped on the ice and injured himself. The falling of the boy on her way to the six-o'clock train had directly swerved her fancy in that direction. But she imagined everything. That was only one of many casualties. The train was a little late. She stood staring down the track at the unswerving signal-lights, watching for the head-light of the locomotive, and it seemed to her quite certain that there had been an accident on that train. A thought struck her, and she went into the waiting-room and asked the ticket-agent if the train was very late. The agent was quite a young man, and he looked at her with a covert masculine coquettishness as he replied, but she was oblivious of that. All she thought of was that, if there had been an accident on the line and the train was late on that account, he would surely be apt to know. Her heart was beating so fast that she trembled; but he said ten minutes, and said nothing about an accident, and she was reassured. She turned to go, after thanking him, and he volunteered further information.

"There is a freight ahead delaying the train," he said.

"Oh, thank you," replied Charlotte. Then she went out on the platform again and watched for the head-light of the locomotive, staring down the track past the twinkle of the signal-lights. Suddenly it flashed into sight far off, but she saw it. She waited. Soon she heard the train. A gateman crossed the tracks from the in-station, padlocking the gates carefully after him. A baggage-master drew a trunk to the edge of the platform. A few passengers came out of the waiting-room.

Charlotte waited, and the train came majestically around the curve below the station. She moved along as it came up, keeping her eyes on the cars. She seemed to have eyes with facets like a cut diamond. It was really as if she saw all the car doors at once. But she moved with a strange stiffness, and could not feel her hands nor feet; her heart beat so fast and thick that it shook her like the pulse of an engine. She moved along, and she saw every passenger who alighted. Then the train steamed out of the station with slowly gathering speed, and her father had not come on it.

Charlotte, when she actually realized the fact, the possibility of which had seemed incredible, gained a little strength. It was like the endurance of disaster which is sometimes more feasible than the contemplation of it. She thought at once what to do. In the event of her father having been delayed by some unforeseen business he would surely telegraph. She at once crossed the slope from the station and went to Andrew Drake's drug-store, where the telegraph-office was. She asked if a telegram had come for her, if one had been sent to the house. When the boy in charge answered no, she felt as if she had received a stunning blow. She had then no doubt whatever that something had happened to her father, some accident. The boy, who was young and pleasant-faced, watched her with a vague sympathy. In a moment she recovered herself. He might have sent a telegram which had not arrived. It might come any moment. The boy directly had the same thought. "The minute the telegram comes I'll get it up to you," he said, earnestly. "I expect Mr. Drake back every minute, and I can leave."

"Thank you," said Charlotte.

It was an hour and a half before the next train. She went out of the store and walked miserably along the street to her deserted home.



Chapter XXXVIII

There is, to a human being of Charlotte Carroll's type, something unutterably terrifying about entering, especially at nightfall, an entirely empty house. The worst of it is it does not seem to be empty. In reality, the emptiness of it is the last thing which is comprehended. It is full to overflowing with terrors, with spiritual entities which are much more palpable, when one is in a certain mood, than actual physical presences. Charlotte approaching the house, saw, first, glimmers of light on the windows, which were merely reflections ostensibly from the electric light in the street, not so ostensibly from other lights.

"Oh, there is some one in there," Charlotte thought to herself, and again that horrible, pulsing, vibrating motion of her heart overcame her. "Who is there?" she asked herself. She remembered that terrible tramp whom she had seen asleep in the woods that day. He might have been riding on some freight-train which had stopped at Banbridge, and stolen across and entered the vacant house. She stood still, staring at the cold glimmers on the windows. Then gradually she became convinced that they were merely reflections which she saw. Aside from her imagination, Charlotte was not entirely devoid of a certain bravery, or, rather, of a certain reason which came to her rescue. "What a little goose I am!" she told herself. "Those are only reflections. They are the reflections of the light in the street." As she studied it more closely she saw that the light, being intercepted by the branches of the trees on the lawn, swaying in a light wind, produced some of the strange effects at the windows which had seemed like people moving back and forth in the rooms. Then all at once she saw another glimmer of light on the front window of her father's room which she could not account for at all. She moved in front of a long, fan-shaped ray cast by the electric light in the street, and, looking at the window, the reflection was still there. She could not account for that at all, unless it was produced by a light from a house window—which was probably the case. At all events, it disquieted her. Still, she overcame her disinclination to enter the house because of that. She reasoned from analogy. "All the other lights are reflections," she told herself, "and of course that must be." However, the main cause of her terror remained: the unfounded, world-old conviction of presences behind closed doors, the almost impossibility for a very imaginative person to conceive of an entirely empty room or house—that is, empty of sentient life. She had hidden the front-door key under the mat before the front door; she had lived long enough in the country to acquire that absurdly innocent habit. She groped for it, thought for a second, with a gasp of horror, that it was not there. Then she felt it with her gloved hand, fitted it in the lock, opened the door, and went in, and the inner darkness smote her like a hostile crowd.

It was actually to the child as if she were passing through a thick group of mysterious, inimical things concealed by the darkness. It was as if she heard whispers of conspiracy; it was even as if she smelled odors of strange garments and bodies. Every sense in her was on the alert. She even tasted something bitter in her mouth. It was all absurd. She reiterated in her ears that it was all absurd, but she had now passed the point wherein reason can support. She had come through an unusually active imagination into the unknown quantities and sequences of life. She put out her hands and groped her way through the darkness of the hall, and the fear lest she should touch some one, some terrible thing, was as bad as the reality could have been. She knew best where to find matches in the dining-room, so she went through the hall, with a sort of mad rush in spite of her blindness, and she gained the dining-room and felt along the shelf for a little hammered-brass bowl where matches were usually kept. In it she felt only two. The mantel-shelf was the old-fashioned marble monstrosity, the perpetuation of a false taste in domestic architecture, but it was excellent as to its facilities for scratching matches. She rubbed one of the two matches under the shelf on the rough surface, but it did not ignite. It evidently was a half-burned match. She took the other. It seemed to her that if that failed her, if she had to grope about the kitchen for more in this thick blackness—for even the street-light did not reach this room—she should die. She rubbed the last match against the marble, and it blazed directly. She shielded it carefully with her hand from the door draught, and succeeded in lighting a candle in one of a pair of brass candlesticks which stood on the shelf. She then held the flaring light aloft and looked fearfully around the room. Everything was as usual, but, strangely enough, it did not reassure her. The solitariness continued to hold terrible possibilities for her as well as the darkness, and with the light also returned what had been for a few minutes in abeyance before her purely selfish fear, the anxiety over her father. She moved about the house with the candle, going from room to room. It seemed to her that she could not remain one minute if she did not do so. Every time before entering a room she felt sure that it was occupied. Every time after leaving it she felt sure that something unknown was left there. She went into the kitchen, and saw her miserable little dinner drying up in the shelf of the range, and then for the first time self-pity asserted itself. She sat down and sobbed and sobbed.

"There, I got that nice dinner, that beautiful dinner," she said to herself, quite aloud in a pitiful wail like a baby's, "and perhaps poor papa will never even taste it. Oh dear! Oh dear!"

She rocked herself back and forth in the kitchen-chair, weeping. She had set the candle on the table, and a draught of wind from some unknown quarter struck it and the strangest lights and shadows flared and flickered over the room and ceiling. Presently, Charlotte, looking at them, became diverted again from her grief. She looked about fearfully. Then she made a tremendous effort, rose, and lighted a lamp. With that the room was not so frightful, yet it was still not normal. The familiar homely articles of furniture assumed strange appearances. She saw something on the range, a little object which filled her with such unreasoning horror that it was almost sheer insanity. It was simply because she could not for the moment imagine what the little object, which had nothing in the least frightful about it, could be. Finally she rose and looked, and it was only a little iron spoon which she must have dropped there. She removed it, but still the horror was over her. She lifted the cover from the dish of meat, and again the tears came.

"Poor papa! poor papa!" she said.

Then she carried the lamp into the dining-room, and went into the parlor. She had made herself quite satisfied that there was in reality nothing menacing in the house except her own fears. She would sit beside one of the front windows in the parlor, in the dark, in order that she might not be seen, and she would watch for her father, and she would also watch for any one who might approach the house with any harmful intent.

Charlotte curled herself up in a large chair beside the window which commanded the best view of the grounds and the drive. With the light of the young moon there was really no possibility that anything could approach unseen by her, unless by way of the fields from the back. But that she did not think of. Her mind became again concentrated upon her father and the possibility of either his return on the next train or a telegram explaining his absence. She knew that the next train from New York was due in Banbridge at a few minutes after eight. She had no time-table, but she remembered Major Arms arriving once, and she was quite certain that the train was due at eight-seventeen. It might, of course, be late. She reflected, with a sense of solid comfort, that the trains were rather more apt to be late than not. She need not give up hope of her father's arriving on this train until even nine o'clock, for besides the possibility of the lateness there was also that of his walking rather than taking a carriage from the station. In fact, he would probably walk, since he was still in Samson Rawdy's debt. She might allow at least twenty minutes for the walk from the station. She might allow more even than that. She sat at the window, and waited, peering out. There was a singular half-dusk rather than half-light from the new moon. The moon itself was not visible from where she sat, for the window faced north, but she could see over everything the sweet influence of it. There was no snow on the lawn, which was a dry crisp of frost-killed grass, as flat as if swept by a broom, and here and there were the faintest patches and mottles of silver from this moon, aside from a broad gleam of the garish light from the street-lamp. The bushes and trees showed lines of silver. The moon was so young that the stars were quite brilliant. Taking all the lights together—the electric light in the street, the new moon, and the stars—the lawn was quite visible, and even, because the leaves were now all gone from the trees, the road for quite a distance beyond. Charlotte had a considerable vista in which to watch for her father. The time passed incredibly in this watching. She had upon her such a fear and even premonition that he might not come, that the minutes passed with the horrible swiftness that they pass for a criminal awaiting execution. The first time she slipped out in the dining-room—with a last look at the lawn and road, to be sure that he would not be there in the mean time—to see what time it was by the clock on the shelf, she was amazed. It was already eight o'clock. She had not dreamed it was more than half-past seven. She crept back to her place by the parlor window, with the feeling that much of her time of reprieve had passed, and that she was so much the nearer the certainty of tribulation. Instead of impatience she had rather the desire to defer approaching disaster. While she watched, she had less and less hope that her father would come on that train, and yet she kept her heart alive by picturing her rapture when she should see his tall, dark figure enter the lawn path, when she should run and unlock and unbar the door and throw her arms around his neck. She made up her mind that she should not confess to him what a panic she had been in because of his non-arrival. She planned how she would run and set the dinner, in which she still believed, on the table, and how hungry he would be for it. She was quite sure that her poor father did not in these days provide himself with sumptuous lunches in the city. But all the time she reared these air-castles, she saw for a certainty the dark sky of her trouble through them. For some premonition, or a much modified form of prophecy, the rudimentary expression of a divine sense in reality exists. It existed in Charlotte watching for her father at the window, and yet so bound up was she in the probabilities and present sequences of things that she still watched. Now and then she made sure that she saw her father turn from the road into the lawn, but the figure, to her horror, would remain standing still in one place. It was simply a slender spruce which had seemed to start out of a corner of the night with a semblance of life. Now and then she actually did see a figure coming up the road, approaching the entrance to the lawn, and her heart leaped up with joy. She watched for it to enter, but that was the end. Whoever it was, it had passed the house and gone farther up the road. Those were the cruellest moments of any—the momentary revival of hope and then the dashing it to the ground. By-and-by her eyes, strained with such watching, began to actually deceive her. She saw, as she thought, shadows, approach and enter the house. Several times she ran to the door and opened it, and no one was there.

After she had gone out in the dining-room and seen that it was eight-seventeen, the time when the train was due in Banbridge, she watched for the train. She knew that she could hear the rush of the train after it left the station; she could even catch a glimpse of the rosy fire of the locomotive through the trees, since the track was elevated. She therefore watched for that, but it was very late. That was unmistakably a great solace for her. She actually had a prayerful mood of thankfulness for the lateness of the train. It was that much longer that she need not give up hope. There was a few minutes that she felt quite easy. Suddenly she remembered how foolish she had been to watch for her father, anyway, before she heard the arrival of the train. She realized that her head was overstrained, her reason failing her. "How could papa come before the train?" she asked herself. But after a few minutes her fears reasserted themselves. She watched for something inimical to appear crossing the lawn instead of her father. And then she heard a train, and she felt faint, but in a second she became aware that it was a long freight. No passenger-train ever moved thus with the veritable chu-chu of the children, the heavy panting of two engines. Then after that she started again, for she heard a train, but it was as if she had been let fall by some wanton hand from a cruel height, for that train was clearly a fast express which did not stop at Banbridge. Then she heard a faint rumble of another freight on the Lehigh Valley road. Then at last came the train for which she had been looking, the train on which her father might come, the train on which he surely would come unless some terrible thing had happened. She heard distinctly, with her sharpened ears, the stop of the train at the station, the letting off of steam. She heard the engine-bell. She heard it resume its advance with slowly gathering motion. She saw a rosy flash of fire in the distance from the engine. Then she waited for carriage-wheels, or for the sight of her father coming up the road. It was quite soon that she heard carriage-wheels on the frozen ground, and she ran to the door and opened it, but the carriage passed. Samson Rawdy was taking home the next neighbor. "It will take papa considerably longer if he walks," she told herself, and she locked the door and returned to her station at the window. She saw again a dark figure approaching on the road outside, and she thought with a great throb of joy that he had surely come, but the figure did not enter the grounds. She allowed twenty-five minutes for him to walk from the station. She said to herself if, when twenty-five minutes had elapsed, he had not come, she should certainly know that he had not come on that train. She did not dare look at the clock, but after a while, when she did so, she found it was twenty-seven minutes after eight. Still that clock often gained. She ran out in the kitchen and looked at the clock there, but that had stopped at half-past seven. It was very seldom that anybody remembered to wind up the kitchen-clock since Marie went. Her own little watch was at the jeweller's in New Sanderson for repairs. She had nothing to depend on except the dining-room clock, which, to her great comfort, so often gained. She decided that she might wait until ten minutes of nine by that clock before she gave up hope, but the next time she went trembling out to look at it it was only three minutes before nine. Then it occurred to her that her father might easily have had an errand at one of the stores before coming home. The post-office would be closed; she had no hope for that, but he might have had some business. She thought that she might allow until half-past nine before she entirely gave up her father having come on the eight-seventeen train. It was then that she began running out on the lawn to the entrance of the drive to watch for him. She put a Roman blanket, which was kept on the divan in the den, over her head, and she continually ran out across the lawn, and stood close to a tree, staring down the road for some sign of her father. Curiously enough, she was not nearly so terrified out-of-doors as in the house. The strain of returning to that vacant house was much worse for her than going across the lawn in the lonely night. She watched and watched, and at last when she returned to the house and looked at the dining-room clock, it was half-past nine, and she completely gave up all hope of her father having come on that train.

A species of stupor, of terror and anxiety, seemed to overcome her. She sat by the parlor window, still staring out from mere force of habit. She knew that the next and last train that night was not due until one-thirty, presumably nearly two o'clock. She knew that there was not the slightest chance of her father's coming until then, but her mind now centred on the telegram. It did seem as if there must be a telegram, at least. All at once a figure appeared in the road and swiftly turned into the drive. She thought at once that the boy in the drug-store was bringing the telegram; still, she resolved not to open the door until she was sure who it was. She peered closely from the window, and it was unmistakably the drug-store boy who emerged from the tree shadows and came up on the stoop. She ran to the door and unfastened it, not waiting for him to ring. She held out her trembling little hand for the telegram, but he kept his at his side. He looked at her, grinning half-sympathetically, half-sheepishly. He was an overgrown boy, perhaps three years younger than she, whom a pretty girl overwhelmed with an enormous self-consciousness and admiration.

"Where is it?" asked Charlotte, impatiently.

"I 'ain't got nothing'," said the boy.

"Then why—"

"I was going home from the store, and I thought I'd jest stop an' let you know there wa'n't no telegrams yet. It wa'n't much out of my way."

Charlotte gasped.

"I thought it might be a relief to your mind to know," said the boy. "I thought you might be watchin'. I saw your father didn't come on that other train. I was up at the station on an errand."

"Thank you," said Charlotte, feebly.

The boy lingered a second with bashful eyes on her face, then he said again that he thought he would just stop in and let her know. He was going down the path, and she was just closing the door, when he called back that she might have a telegram if her father sent it by the postal-telegraph system.

"You won't get none from our place after now," he said, "for Mr. Drake won't bring up none so late; but if your father sends that way, you could get one, mebbe."

"Thank you," replied Charlotte, and the boy went away.

When Charlotte re-entered the house and locked the door, a loneliness which was like a positive chill struck over her. It was much worse now since she had been in communication with another human being.

"If he had only been a girl I would have gone down on my knees to him to stay all night with me," she thought.

She tried to think if there was anybody in Banbridge whom she could ask to stay with her, but she could think of none. She thought of Marie, but she did not even know where she was. There was no woman whom she could call upon. She resumed her seat beside the window. She did not dream of going to bed. She had now to watch for the possible postal telegram; it would not be time for the last train for hours yet. She had the telegraph-messenger and some possible marauder to watch for. She kept her eyes glued to the expanse of the lawn and small stretch of road visible between the leafless trees. Now and then a carriage passed; very seldom a walking shadow. She always started at the sight of these, thinking the telegram might be about to arrive. If the telegram should arrive she expected fully that it would be of some terrible import. A thought struck her, something that she might do. If her father was injured, if she were to be sent for from the City, she resolved that she would have everything in readiness for instant departure. There was a train which Banbridge flagged after the arrival of the last train from New York. She lit a lamp, went up-stairs, and packed a little travelling-bag with necessaries, and made some changes in her dress, and felt a certain relief in so doing. She had very little money, and a book with two or three railroad tickets. She felt that she could start at a moment's notice should the telegram arrive. All the time she was packing she was listening for the door-bell. It became quite firmly fixed in her mind what the telegram would be: that her father was terribly injured and had been carried to a hospital, that she should at once go to the hospital. It sometimes occurred to her that he might be even dead, but that idea did not so take hold on her fancy as the other.

She left the lamp burning up-stairs, thinking suddenly that it would be well to have the house present the appearance of being well inhabited. She took her hat and coat and her little travelling-bag, and she went back to the place by the parlor window and stared out at the lawn again. It was growing very late. Soon it would be time for her to watch for the last train. It really seemed to the girl an incredible supposition of disaster that that train could pass by and her father not appear, and that in the face of her morbid and pessimistic conclusions. She was a mass of inconsistencies, of incoherencies. She at once despaired and hoped with a hope that was conviction. At last, when she saw by the clock that it only wanted a few minutes before the time when the last train was due, her spirits arose as if winged. She even went out in the kitchen and examined the wretched dinner to make sure it was still hot. She put more coal on the range. The house was growing very cold, and she knew that the furnace fire needed attention, but she absolutely dared not go down cellar alone at that time. They had very little coal, also, and had been in the habit of letting the furnace fire die down at night. She put on her coat when she returned from the kitchen, and sat again by the window. She felt now an absolute certainty that her father would arrive on this train. She felt that it was monstrous to assume that her father would not come home all night and leave her alone with no message. She felt even quite radiantly happy sitting there. She said to herself what a little goose she had been. Even a noise made by some coal falling in the kitchen-range failed to startle her. She now hoped that the train would not be late, and it was, in fact, very nearly on time. Then she watched for her father with not the slightest doubt that he would come. It had come to that pass that her credulity as to disaster had failed her. It was simply out of her power to credit the possibility of his not coming on this train when he had sent no telegram. She knew that there would be no carriage at the station at that hour, unless he had telegraphed for one from New York, and she questioned, in the state of their finances, if he would do that. She was therefore sure of seeing his figure appear, coming, with the stately stride which she knew so well, into view on the road below the lawn.

She allowed twenty-five minutes for his appearance after she had seen the train pass. She knew nothing could detain him in the village at that time of night, and she was sure he would come within that time. She looked at the dining-room clock and found that she had, if she allowed that twenty-five minutes, just fifteen minutes to wait. She sat shrugged up in her little fur-trimmed coat, for the house was growing very cold, and stared intently at the pale glimmer of the road. After the twenty-five minutes had passed, she went out in the dining-room and looked at the clock. The time was more than passed; there was no doubt. Her father had not come. The panic seized her.

She was now dashed from the heights of hope, and the shock was double. She realized that her father had not come, would not come that night; that she would probably have no telegram. She realized that she was all alone in the house. Now again unreasoning fear as well as the anxiety for her father seized her. Again the conviction of the awful population of the empty rooms was upon her. She sat down again by the window, and she tried to make her reasoning powers reassert themselves.

"If anything comes this way, I shall see it in time, and I can run out the back door and across to the neighbors," she told herself. "If anything comes in the back way, I shall hear and have time to run out the front door; and I know there is nothing in the house." But she could not reassure herself, since what terrified her, and even temporarily unbalanced her, was fear itself.

Fear multiplied, growing upon itself, spreading out new tentacles with every throb of her imagination, filling the whole house. All her life she had thought what a frightful thing it would be if ever she were left alone by herself in a house, all night; and now worse than that had come to pass, for she was not alone; the house was peopled by fear and the creatures of fear. She heard noises constantly that she could not account for, and she also saw things which she could not account for. Again the small and trivial, acutely stinging horror of some ordinary object in a new and awful guise possessed her. She was almost paralyzed at the sudden glimpse of something on the divan across the room. It was a long time before she could possibly totter to investigate, and ascertain it was one of her own gloves. But it did not strike her as at all funny. There was still something frightful to her about the glove. She went back to the window, and soon she distinctly heard a noise up-stairs, and then a shadow crossed the ceiling. A new horror seized her—a horror of herself. She felt that in another moment she might herself become a very part and substance of the fear that was oppressing her. She had an imagination of jumping up, of running about and screaming, of breaking something. Then with that clutch at life and reason which is life itself, which all dying and despairing things have at the last, she thought again that there must be somebody, somebody in the whole place to whom she could turn, somebody who would help her, who would pity her. She had heretofore only thought of the possibility of somebody who would come and stay with her; it now occurred to her that she herself might be the one to go, and that she might escape from this house of fear. It was suddenly to her as to a prisoner who realizes that all the time his prison doors have been unbarred.

"What am I staying here for in this awful house by myself?" she suddenly thought. When that idea came to her, the idea of escape, the action of her mind became involuntary. There was only one to whom she could run for aid. She remembered so vividly that the experience seemed to repeat itself, her terror of the tramp in the woods, and how she had seen Anderson. She sprang up. It became sure to her that she must get away from that house, that she must not remain. The imaginative girl, whom anxiety and want of food had weakened, as well as fear, was fairly at the point of madness, or that hysteria which is the border-land of it. She distinctly heard herself laugh as she ran out of the room and out of the house. Her head was bare, but she did not think of that. She had on her coat which she had worn because of the coldness of the house. She fled across the lawn to the street. Once on the road, she was saner, she felt only the natural impulse of flight of any hunted thing. She fled down the road past the quiet village houses, in which the people slept in their beds. The electric lights were out, the moon was low. It was quite dark. Nobody except herself was abroad in the night. A great pity for herself, a pity that she might have felt for a little lonely child out by herself at night, when everybody else was safe in their homes, came over her. She sobbed as she ran; she even sobbed quite loudly. She did not feel so afraid, as wild for somebody to take her in and comfort her. She ran down the main street and turned up the one on which the Andersons lived. When she reached the house it was quite dark, except for a very faint glimmer in one of the upper front rooms. It was from the little night-lamp which Mrs. Anderson always kept burning. The sight of that light seemed to give Charlotte strength to get up the steps. She had run so weakly that all the way she had a thought of the terraces of steps leading to the Anderson house, if she could climb them. She went up the steps, and then she pressed hard the electric button on the door; she also raised the superfluous old brass knocker which Mrs. Anderson cherished because it was a relic from her husband's time; then she clanged that. Then she sank down on the step in front of the door.



Chapter XXXIX

Almost at once a light flashed from an upper window in response to Charlotte's knock and ring. Anderson himself had been in New York that night with Henry Edgecomb to the theatre. A celebrated play was on, in which a celebrated actress figured, and the two had taken one of their rather infrequent excursions. Consequently, Anderson had not been in the house more than an hour, and during that hour had been writing some letters which he wished to get off in the early mail. His room was at the back of the house, a long room extending nearly the whole width, consequently his own brightly shining light had not been visible to Charlotte coming up the street.

As he was not undressed, he lost no time in opening his door and entering with his lamp the front hall. As he did so his mother's door opened, and her delicate, alarmed old face, frilled with white cambric, appeared.

"Oh, who is it at this time of night, do you suppose, Randolph?" she whispered.

"I don't know, mother dear; don't be frightened."

But she came quite out in her white night draperies, which made her appear singularly massive. "Oh, do you suppose there are burglars in the store?" she said.

"No. Don't worry, mother."

"Do you suppose it is fire?"

"No; there is no alarm."

"Randolph, you won't open the door until you have asked who it is. Promise me."

"It is nobody to be afraid of, mother."

"Promise me."

"It is probably Henry come back for something. Harriet may have locked him out, and he forgotten his night-key." That was actually what had flashed through Randolph's mind when he heard the knock and ring.

"Well, I shouldn't wonder if it was," said Mrs. Anderson, in a relieved tone.

"Go back to bed, mother, or you will catch your death of cold."

"But you will ask?"

"Yes, yes."

Anderson hurried down-stairs, and in consideration of his mother's listening ears of alarm, he did call out, "Who is there?" at the same time unlocking the door. It was manifest to his masculine intelligence, unhampered by nerves, that no one with evil intent would thus strive to enter a house with a clang of knocker and peal of bell. He, therefore, having set the lamp on the hall-table, at once unlocked the door, and Charlotte pulled herself to her feet and her little, pretty, woe-begone face, in which was a new look for him and herself, confronted him. Anderson did not say a word. He somehow—he never remembered how—laid hold of the little thing, and she was in the house, in the sitting-room, and in his arms, clinging to him.

"Papa didn't come. Papa didn't come home," she sobbed, but so softly that Mrs. Anderson, who was listening, did not hear.

Anderson laid his cheek down against the girl's soft, wet one, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if he had been used to so doing ever since he could remember anything. There was no strangeness for either of them in it. He patted her poor little head, which felt cold from the frosty night air.

"There, there, dear," he said.

"He didn't come home," she repeated, piteously, against his breast, and it was almost as if she were accusing him because of it.

"Poor little girl!"

"Not on the last train. Papa didn't come on the last train, and—there was no telegram, and I—I was all alone in the house, and—and—I came." She sobbed convulsively.

Anderson kissed her cheek softly, he continued to smooth the little, dark, damp head. "You did quite right," he whispered—"quite right, dear. You are safe now. Don't!"

"Papa!"

"Oh, some business detained him in the City."

"What has happened to papa?" demanded Charlotte, in a shrill voice, and it was again as if she were unconsciously accusing Anderson. When a heart becomes confident of love, it is filled with wonder at any evil mischance permitted, and accuses love, even the love of God. "What has happened to papa? Where is he?" she demanded again. And it was then that Mrs. Anderson, unseen by either of them, stood in the doorway with an enormous purple-flowered wrapper surging over her nightgown.

"Hush, dear!" whispered Anderson. "I am sure nothing has happened."

"Why are you sure?"

"If anything had happened I should have heard of it. I came out on the last train myself. If there had been an accident I should certainly have heard."

"Would you?"

"I surely should have. Don't, dear. Your father has just been detained by business."

"Then why didn't papa telegraph?"

"He did not get it in the office in season. The office closes at half-past eight," said Anderson, lying cheerfully.

"Does it?"

"Of course! There is nothing for you to worry about. Now I'll tell you what we will do. My mother is awake. I will speak to her, and you must go straight to bed, and go to sleep, and in the morning your father will be along on the first train. He must have been as much worried as you."

"Poor papa," said Charlotte.

"So you were all alone in the house, and you came down here all alone at this time," said Anderson, in a tone which his mother had never heard. But it was then that she spoke.

"Didn't her father come home?" she asked.

When the girl turned like a flash and saw her she seemed to realize for the first time that she had been, and was, doing something out of the wonted. A great, burning blush surged all over her. She shrank away from the man who held her. She cowered before the other woman.

"No, papa didn't come," she stammered, "and—I didn't know what to do, and I came here."

"You did quite right, you precious child," said Mrs. Anderson, suddenly, in a voice of the tenderest authority. She held out her arms and Charlotte fled to them. Mrs. Anderson looked over the girl's head at her son with the oddest and most inexplicable reproach. "You go up and see if the heat is turned on in that little room out of mine," she commanded, "and then you go into the kitchen and see if you can't find the milk, and set some on the stove to warm. You can pour a little hot water in it to hurry it. If the fire isn't good, open the dampers. And, Randolph, you get my hot-water bag out of my bed, and fill it from the tea-kettle—that water will be hotter than the bath-room, this time of night—and you bring it right up; be as quick as you can." Then all in the same breath she was comforting Charlotte. "Your father is all right, dear child. Don't you worry one mite—not one mite. I remember once, when I was a girl, my father didn't come home, and mother and I were almost crazy, and he came in laughing the next morning. He had lost his last train because there was a block on account of the ice. The river was frozen over. There is nothing for you to worry about. Now come right up-stairs and go to bed. There is a little room out of mine, as warm as toast, and you won't be a bit afraid. There you were all alone in that great house, you poor, blessed child."

Charlotte sobbed, but now with a certain comfort.

"I should have been so afraid, I should have lost my senses, all alone in a house at your age," said Mrs. Anderson, all the time gently impelling the girl along with her. "Of course there is nothing to be afraid of, but one imagines things; and you came here all alone at this time of the night!"

"Yes," responded Charlotte, with a gasp of the intensest self-pity, sure of an echo.

Randolph ran up-stairs before his mother and Charlotte and snatched the hot-water bottle out of his mother's bed, and was out the opposite door, which connected with the back stairs leading to the kitchen. As he went out he heard his mother say: "All that way alone this time of night, you poor, precious child!" and Charlotte's little, piteous, yet comforted sob in response, exactly as a hurt baby might respond to commiserations. He felt his own knees tremble as he went down-stairs, carrying the hot-water bottle, which had always struck him as a rather absurd article, to be regarded with the concessions which a man should make to the little, foolish devices for the comfort of a softer and slighter sex. He hunted up the milk in the ice-box, and warmed it with solicitude in a china cup, which, luckily, did not break. The fire was still very good, and the water in the tea-kettle quite boiling. It was not long before he knocked at his mother's door, bearing the water-bottle dangling on one wrist, and carrying the cup of milk. His mother opened the door just wide enough to receive the articles.

"Is the milk hot?" she asked.

Randolph meekly replied that it had almost boiled.

"The water-bottle is hot, too," said his mother, in a satisfied tone. "She is undressed. I got one of my nightgowns for her, and it is quite warm in the little room. Now I am going to take this in to her, and make her drink the milk, and I hope she will get to sleep."

"I hope she will," replied Randolph, in a sort of dazed fashion, and there was a foolish radiance over his face, and he did not meet his mother's eyes.

"I'm coming into your room a minute, after I see to her," said his mother, and if the man had been a child the tone would have sounded ominous.

"All right, mother," replied Anderson. He crossed the hall to his room lined with books, with the narrow couch. It hardly seemed like a bedroom, and indeed he spent much of his time, when not at the store, there. He resumed his seat in the well-worn easy-chair beside his hearth, upon which smouldered a fire, and waited. He still felt dazed. He had that doubt of his own identity which comes to us at times, and which is primeval under stress of a great surprise. The old nursery rhyme of the old woman who had her petticoats clipped and was not sure of herself, has a truth in it which dates from the beginning of things. Anderson, sitting precisely as he had been sitting before in the same chair by the same hearth—he had even taken up the same book in which he had thought to read a chapter after his letters were finished, before retiring—was as completely removed from his former state as if he had been translated into another planet. He looked around the long room, which had a dark, rich coloring from the backs of old books, and some dark red hangings, and even that had a curious appearance of unsubstantiality to him. Or was it substantiality. Suddenly it seemed to him that heretofore he had seen it all through a glass, and now with his natural eyes. He had attained a height a nature whence the prospect is untrammelled by imaginations and shows in the clear light of reality. He thought of the girl whom his mother was coddling, tucking into bed as if she were a baby, and such a wave of tenderness and protection came over him that he felt newly vivified by it. It was as if his very soul put forth arms and wings of love and defence.

"The dear little girl!" he thought to himself—"the dear little girl!"

The thought that she was safe under his roof, away from all fancied and real terror, filled him with such a joy that he could scarcely contain it. He imagined her nestling in that warm little bed out of his mother's room, and the satisfaction that he might have felt had she been his child instead of his sweetheart, filled him with pure delight. He tried to imagine her terrors, her young-girl terrors, alone in that house, her panic running alone through the night streets, and he even magnified it through inability to understand it. He said to himself that she might have almost gone mad, and again that sublime joy, that immense sense of the protection and tenderness of love, filled his soul, which seemed to put forth wings. Then the door opened and his mother entered softly, slipping through in her voluminous, purple-flowered draperies, with glimpses of white frills and large padding feet in purple-knitted slippers. She still wore her frilled nightcap, and her face confronted him from the white setting with a curious severity. Her hair was put up on crimping-pins, and her high forehead gave her a rather intellectual and stern appearance, and she looked much older.

Randolph rose. "Sit down, mother," he said.

"No; I am not going to stop a minute. I am going back to her. She seemed real quiet, and I think she'll go to sleep, but if she should wake up and find herself alone she might be frightened."

Mrs. Anderson spoke as if of a baby in arms.

"Yes, she might; she has had a terrible shock," Anderson said, in what he essayed to render a natural tone.

"Terrible shock! I should think she had, poor child!" said Mrs. Anderson, and she seemed to reproach him.

"It was a long way for her to come alone," said Anderson, as if he were trying to excuse himself.

"I should think it was. It's a good mile, and that wasn't the worst of it. Worrying about her father, and all alone in the house! I was always scared to death alone in a house, and I know what it means." She still seemed reproachful.

"She must have been frightened."

"I should rather think she would have been." Suddenly his mother's face regarding his took on a different expression; it became shrewd and confidential. "Do you suppose her father has taken this way of—?" she said.

"No," answered Randolph, emphatically.

"You don't?"

"No, I do not. I don't know the man very well, and I don't suppose his record is to be altogether justified, but, if I know anything, he would no more go voluntarily and leave that child alone all night to worry over him than I would."

"Then you think something has happened to him?"

"I am afraid so."

"Do you think there has been an accident?"

"I don't know, mother."

His mother continued to look at him shrewdly. "Do you suppose he has got into any trouble?" she asked, bluntly.

"I don't know, mother."

Then Mrs. Anderson's face suddenly resumed its old, reproachful expression. "Well, I don't care if there has," said she. She whispered, but her voice was intense. "I don't care if there has. I don't care if he is in state-prison. That child has got to caring about you, and you ought to—"

Anderson turned and looked at his mother, and her severe face softened and paled. He looked to her at that moment more like his father than himself. He was accusing her.

"Mother, do you think, if she cares, that I would ever desert her, any more than father would have deserted you?" he demanded.

It was her turn to excuse herself. "I know you are honorable, Randolph," she said, "but I saw when I came in, and I don't see how you have seen enough of her to have it happen; but I know girls, and I can see how she feels, and I didn't know but you might think if her father—"

"What difference do you think her father makes to me, mother?" asked Anderson.



Chapter XL

When Carroll came to himself that night after his fall, his first conscious motion was for his dollar watch. He was in William Allbright's bed. There were only two sleeping-apartments in the little tenement. William was seated beside him, watching him with his faithful, serious face; there was also a physician, keenly observant, still closer to the injured man's head; and the sister, Allbright's sister, was visible in the next room, seated in a chair which commanded a good view of the bed. It was Allbright who had rescued Carroll from the station-house; for when he did not rise, the usual crowd, who directly attribute all failures to recover one's self from a manifestly inappropriate recumbent position, had collected, and several policemen were on the scene.

"I know this gentleman," Allbright said, in his rather humble, still half-respectful, voice, which carried conviction. "I know this gentleman. I have been a book-keeper in his office. He slipped on the ice. I saw him fall. He is not drunk."

One of the policemen, who had been long in the vicinity and knew Allbright, as from the heights of the law one might know an unimportant and unoffending citizen, responded.

"All right," he said, laconically. "Hospital?"

"Guess he's hurted pretty bad," remarked another policeman, who was a handsome athlete.

"Hospital?" inquired the first, who was a man of few words, of Allbright.

"I guess we'd better have him taken to my house. It's right here," replied Allbright. "Then we'll call in Dr. Wilson and see how much is the matter with him. Maybe he's only stunned. The hospital is apt to be a long siege, and if there isn't any need of it—"

"His house is right here," said the first policeman to the second, with a stage aside.

"All right," said the second.

A boy pulled Allbright by the sleeve. "Say, I'll go for the doc," he cried, eagerly. He was enjoying the situation keenly.

"Well," replied Allbright, "be quick about it. Tell him there's a man badly hurt at my house."

The boy sped like a rocket, and three more with him. They all yelled as they ran. They were street gamins of the better class, and were both sympathetic and entertained. They lived in a tenement-house near Allbright, and knew him quite well by sight.

Meantime the two policemen carried Carroll the short distance to William Allbright's house. He was quite unconscious, and it was an undertaking of considerable difficulty to carry him up the stairs, since the Allbrights lived in the second story.

The clerk in the department store, and his mother, who lived on the first floor, came to their door in undress and offered their hospitality, but Mr. Allbright declined their aid.

"No," he said. "I know him. It is Mr. Carroll. He had better be taken up to my rooms."

When at last they laid the unconscious man on Allbright's bed, which his sister, pale, and yet with a collectedness under such surprising circumstances which spoke well for her, had opened, the policeman who was not an athlete, and was, in fact, too stout, wiped his forehead and said, "Gee."

The other remained looking at the injured man soberly.

"Guess he's hurted pretty bad," he remarked again.

"You bet," said the first. "Gee!"

Allbright's sister came with the camphor-bottle, which she kept in a sort of folk-lore fashion, as her mother had used to do in the country. Allbright brought the whiskey, of which he kept a small supply in the house in case of dire need, and stood over Carroll with that and a teaspoon, with a vague idea of trying to insinuate a few drops into his mouth.

The two policemen clamped heavily down-stairs, agreeing that they would remain until the doctor came, and see if it was to be the hospital after all.

"Guess he's hurted pretty bad," remarked the handsome policeman for the third time.

The doctor came quickly, almost on a run. He lived within a block, and had not a large practice. He was attended by a large throng of boys, for the three had served as a nucleus for many more. He turned around to them with an imperative gesture as he entered the house door.

"Now you scatter," said he. He was a fair man, but he had at once an appeal of good-fellowship and a certain force of character. Besides, there were the two policemen hovering near. The boys withdrew and remained watching in the dark shadows cast by an opposite house. In case the injured man was carried to the hospital, and the ambulance should come, they could not afford to miss that. They had not so many pleasures in life.

The doctor mounted the stairs; he had been there before, for Allbright's sister was more or less of an invalid, and he at once abetted Allbright's purpose of the few drops of stimulant on the teaspoon, which the patient swallowed with a pathetic, gulping passiveness like a baby's.

"He swallows all right," remarked Allbright's sister, in an agitated voice. She stood aloof, waving the camphor-bottle; her eyes were dilated, and her face had a pale, gaping look.

"You go out in the other room and stay there," said the doctor to her, with the authority which a hysterical woman defers to and adores.

Allbright's sister was a very good woman, but she had sometimes imagined, then directly driven the imagination from her with a spiritual scourge like a monk of old, what might have happened if the doctor were not already married.

Carroll's forehead was dripping with camphor, and there was danger should he open his eyes. The doctor wiped the pale forehead gently and spoke to him.

"Well, you had quite a hard fall, sir," he said, in a loud, cheerful voice, and directly Carroll answered, like a somnambulist:

"Yes, quite a fall."

Then he seemed to lapse again into unconsciousness. The doctor and Allbright remained working over him, but it was within fifteen minutes before the time when the last train for Banbridge was due to leave New York that he made the first absolutely conscious motion.

"He is feeling for his watch," said Allbright, in an agitated whisper. His wits were sharpened with regard to Carroll's watch. Carroll's coat and vest had been removed, and were hanging over a chair. Allbright at once got the dollar watch from its pocket and carried it over to the sick man. "Here is your watch, Mr. Carroll," he said, and his voice was full of both respectful and tender inflections.

A sob was distinctly heard from Allbright's sister out in the sitting-room. The woman from down-stairs, the department clerk's mother, was now with her.

"He wants to see if his watch is safe, poor man," said she, in a tearful voice, and Allbright's sister whimpered again.

"It's a wonder some of them kids didn't swipe it," said the down-stairs woman, and Allbright's sister was conscious of a distinct thrill of disgust in the midst of her excitement and pity. She was of a superior sort to the down-stairs woman, and she often told her brother she could not get used to folks using such language.

Poor Carroll was looking dimly at his watch, and Allbright at once divined that he could not distinguish the time without his eye-glasses. He therefore leaned over him—his own spectacles were on his nose—and told him the time.

"It's almost seventeen minutes past twelve, Mr. Carroll," he said.

Carroll made a movement to rise, then subsided with a groan. "Where am I?" he inquired, feebly, with a bewildered stare around the strange room. Directly opposite him hung a large crayon portrait of Allbright's father, a handsome man with a reverend beard like a prophet, and his eyes became riveted upon that.

"You are in my house, Mr. Carroll," said Allbright, with a tender, caressing motion of his hand towards him, like a woman.

"You had a fall on the ice, Mr. Carroll," said the physician, in a tone of soothing explanation, "but you will soon be as good as new."

"How far up-town?" inquired Carroll, still gazing at the portrait, which had an odd hardness of outline, and appeared almost as if carved out of wood.

"You are at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street," replied Allbright. "You are at my house, Mr. Carroll. You fell right out here, and I had you carried in here."

Carroll tried again to rise, and made a despairing gasp. "Oh, my God!" he said. "I have lost the last train out. There isn't time to get down to the ferry, and there is that poor child all alone there, and she won't know—"

"You can send a telegram," suggested the doctor. "Now, Mr. Carroll, don't get excited."

"She will be all right," said Allbright.

"What is it?" asked the down-stairs woman, coming to the door.

"His daughter is all alone in the house, I guess, and he's worried about her," explained Allbright.

"There ain't nothin' goin' to eat her, if she is, is there?" inquired the down-stairs woman.

"I'll run with a telegram," said Allbright, eagerly, to the doctor.

But at that moment Carroll lapsed into unconsciousness. The excitement had been too much for him. He lay as if asleep.

"Where does he live?" asked the doctor, of Allbright.

"I don't know exactly. Somewhere out on the Pennsylvania Railroad."

"You don't know?" repeated the doctor, with a faint accent of surprise.

Allbright shook his head.

"You were book-keeper in his office?"

"Yes, but I haven't been there for some time. I never asked any questions."

The doctor turned and looked at Carroll. Then he went out of the room, with Allbright following, and gave him some directions. He asked for a glass two-thirds full of water and poured some dark drops into it.

"The minute he gets conscious again give him a spoonful of this," he said, "and you had better sit beside him and watch him." Then he turned to Allbright's sister, who was trembling from head to foot with a nervous chill. "You take a dose of that whiskey your brother gave him," he said, jerking his shoulder towards the inner room, "then go to bed, and don't worry your head about him."

"Oh, doctor, he isn't going to die here?"

"Die here? No, nor nowhere else for one while. There is nothing the matter with the man except he bumped his head rather too hard for comfort."

"How long is he likely to be here on their hands?" inquired the down-stairs woman.

"He will be able to go home in the morning, I think," said the doctor.

"Oh, doctor, you aren't going to go away and leave us with a strange man as sick as he is?" asked Allbright's sister, hysterically. She shook so that she could scarcely speak.

"You won't have to worry half so much over a strange man as you would over one you know," replied the doctor, jocosely, "and he is not very sick. He will be all right soon. Now you take some of your brother's medicine and go to bed, for I have six cases to visit to-night before I go home, and I don't want another."

Allbright's sister bridled with an odd, inexplicable pride. She did not like to be a burden on her brother, nor make trouble, but there was a certain satisfaction in having the down-stairs woman, who, she had always suspected, rather made light of her ailments, hear for herself that she was undoubtedly delicate. Even the minor and apparently paradoxical pretensions of life are dear to their possessors in lieu of others.

"Very well. I suppose I've got to mind the doctor," she replied, and even smiled foolishly and blushed.

The doctor turned to Allbright.

"I think he will be all right in the morning," he said; "a bit light-headed, of course, but all right. However, don't let him go home before noon, on your life. I will look in in the morning before he goes." And then he turned to Allbright's sister. "On second thought, I will let you make a good big bowl of that gruel of yours before you go to bed," he said; "then he can take it in the course of the night if he is able; and beat him up some eggs in the morning."

"I'll make the gruel if she ain't able," said the down-stairs woman, in a tone vibrating between kindness and scorn.

"Thank you. I am quite able to make it," said Allbright's sister, and she was full of small triumph and persistency. Yes, she would make the gruel, even if she was so very delicate that she ought to go at once to bed. It was quite evident that she thought that the down-stairs woman could not make gruel good enough for that man in there, anyway.

"Well, I guess I'll go," said the down-stairs woman, "as long as I don't seem to be of any use. If there was anything I could do, I'd stay." And she went.

"The idea of her coming up here and trying to find out what was going on!" Allbright's sister said to her brother as she was getting the meal ready for the gruel. "I never saw such a curious woman."

"If we hadn't got so attached to the place we would move," said Allbright, who was leaving his patient momentarily, to change his shoes for slippers.

"I know it," said the sister, "but I can't help feeling attached to the place, we have lived here so long; and there is that beautiful cherry-tree out in the yard, and everything."

"That is so," said Allbright.

"I am glad Mr. Carroll didn't have to be carried to a hospital."

"I suppose he would have been if I had not happened to be right on the spot," said Allbright, reflectively, to his sister.

"You think he'll be all right in the morning, don't you?"

"Oh yes, the doctor said so!"

Outside, the watching boys in the shadow of the church disappointedly vanished, cheated of their small and grewsome excitement, when they saw the doctor quietly walk towards his house and realized that there was to be no ambulance and no hospital.

"Gee! I've had knocks harder 'n that, and never said nothin' about it," said one boy as he scurried away with the others towards his home in the high tenement-house.



Chapter XLI

It was quite early the next morning when Charlotte received the telegram that her father had had a fall on the ice, was not badly injured, and would be home on the noon train. Anderson had gone very early to the telegraph-office. It was being ticked off in Andrew Drake's drug-store when he inquired, and the boy viewed him with intense curiosity when he took the message, but did not dare ask any questions. Anderson hurried home with it to Charlotte, who was not yet up. Mrs. Anderson had insisted upon her having her breakfast in bed, and she had yielded readily. In fact, she was both too confused and too ashamed to see Anderson. She dreaded seeing him. She was as simple as a child, and she reasoned simply.

"He held me in his arms and kissed me last night, the way Major Arms would have done with Ina," she told herself, "and of course I suppose I must be engaged to him; but I don't know what he must think of me for coming here the way I did. It was almost as if I asked him first." She wondered if Mrs. Anderson had seen. But Mrs. Anderson's manner to her was of such complete and caressing motherliness that she could not have much fear of her. In reality, the older woman, who had an active imagination, was slightly jealous, in view of future possibilities.

"I wonder if they will think they ought to sit by themselves evenings," she reflected. She looked at the girl's slight grace in the bed, and the little, dark head sunken in the pillow, and she wondered how in the world the mother of a girl like that could stay one minute in Kentucky and leave her. "She must be a pretty woman!" she thought to herself. Already she hated the other mother-in-law, and she felt almost a maternal right to the girl. She recalled what she had seen the night before, and thrills of tender reminiscence came over her. "Randolph will make just such a good husband as his father," she thought to herself, and then she rather resented his superior right over the girl, as she might have done if it had not been a question of her own son, and Charlotte had been her own daughter. She loved her as she loved the daughter she had never had. She stroked her hair softly as it curled over the pillow.

"You have such pretty hair, dear," she said, with positive pride. The little, flushed face looked up at her.

Charlotte had just finished her breakfast. Anderson had brought the telegram and gone, and the two were alone. It was arranged that Charlotte was to get up in an hour, and that Mrs. Anderson was to go home with her in one of Samson Rawdy's coaches.

"We will take my maid, and she can get the furnace fire started," she said, "and help about the dinner."

"I had such a nice dinner all ready last night," Charlotte said, "and I am afraid it must be spoiled now."

"Never mind. We will get another," said Mrs. Anderson.

Both Anderson and his mother had succeeded in quieting Charlotte's lingering fears concerning her father.

"He probably got stunned," Anderson said; "and he cannot be very bad or he would not be coming home on the noon train." He was talking to Charlotte from his mother's room, with the door ajar.

There was something conclusive in Anderson's voice which reassured Charlotte.

"My son would not say so unless he thought so," said Mrs. Anderson. "He never says a thing he does not mean." She spoke with a double meaning which Charlotte wholly missed. It had not occurred to her that Mr. Anderson would have taken her in his arms last night and kissed her and comforted her, if he had not been thoroughly in earnest and in love with her. She supposed, of course, he wished to marry her. All that troubled her was her own course in practically proposing to him. Presently, after she and Mrs. Anderson were alone together, she tried to say something about this to the other woman.