She laughed again with sheer delight, like a child, and ran to the corner and got the cotton umbrella and placed it in the old man's hand. As he reached the door, she called after him: "Wait!" and went to him and knelt before him, and, with the humblest, proudest grace in the world, turned up his trousers to keep them from the mud. Ross Schofield had never considered Mr. Fisbee a particularly sacred sort of person, but he did from that moment. The old man made some timid protest, at his daughter's action, But she answered; "The great ladies used to buckle the Chevalier Bayard's spurs for him, and you're a great deal nicer than the Chev——You haven't any rubbers! I don't believe any of you have any rubbers!" And not until both Fisbee and Mr. Schofield had promised to purchase overshoes at once, and in the meantime not to step in any puddles, would she let her father depart upon his errand. He crossed the Square with the strangest, jauntiest step ever seen in Plattville. Solomon Tibbs had a warm argument with Miss Selina as to his identity. Miss Selina maintaining that the figure under the big umbrella—only the legs and coat-tails were visible to them—was that of a stranger, probably an Englishman.

In the "Herald" office the editor turned, smiling, to the paper's remaining vassal. "Mr. Schofield, I heard some talk in Rouen of an oil company that had been formed to prospect for kerosene in Carlow County. Do you know anything about it?"

Ross, surfeited with honor, terror, and possessed by a sweet distress at finding himself tete-a-tete with the lady, looked at the wall and replied:

"Oh, it's that Eph Watts's foolishness."

"Do you know if they have begun to dig for it yet?"

"Ma'am?" said Ross.

"Have they begun the diggings yet?"

"No, ma'am; I think not. They've got a contrapshun fixed up about three mile south. I don't reckon they've begun yet, hardly; they're gittin' the machinery in place. I heard Eph say they'd begin to bore—dig, I mean, ma'am, I meant to say dig——" He stopped, utterly confused and unhappy; and she understood his manly purpose, and knew him for a gentleman whom she liked.

"You mustn't be too much surprised," she said; "but in spite of my ignorance about such things, I mean to devote a good deal of space to the oil company; it may come to be of great importance to Carlow. We won't go into it in to-morrow's paper, beyond an item or so; but do you think you could possibly find Mr. Watts and ask him for some information as to their progress, and if it would be too much trouble for him to call here some time to-morrow afternoon, or the day after? I want him to give me an interview if he will. Tell him, please, he will very greatly oblige us."

"Oh, he'll come all right," answered her companion, quickly. "I'll take Tibbs's buggy and go down there right off. Eph won't lose no time gittin' here!" And with this encouraging assurance he was flying forth, when he, like the others, was detained by her solicitous care. She was a born mother. He protested that in the buggy he would be perfectly sheltered; besides, there wasn't another umbrella about the place; he liked to get wet, anyway; had always loved rain. The end of it was that he went away in a sort of tremor, wearing her rain-cloak over his shoulders, which garment, as it covered its owner completely when she wore it, hung almost to his knees. He darted around a corner; and there, breathing deeply, tenderly removed it; then, borrowing paper and cord at a neighboring store, wrapped it neatly, and stole back to the printing-office on the ground floor of the "Herald" building, and left the package in charge of Bud Tipworthy, mysteriously charging him to care for it as for his own life, and not to open it, but if the lady so much as set one foot out of doors before his return, to hand it to her with the message: "He borrowed another off J. Hankins."

Left alone, the lady went to the desk and stood for a time looking gravely at Harkless's chair. She touched it gently, as she had touched it once before that morning, and then she spoke to it as if he were sitting there, and as she would not have spoken, had he been sitting there.

"You didn't want gratitude, did you?" she whispered, with sad lips.

Soon she smiled at the blue ribbons, patted the chair gaily on the back, and, seizing upon pencil and pad, dashed into her work with rare energy. She bent low over the desk, her pencil moving rapidly, and, except for a momentary interruption from Mr. Tipworthy, she seemed not to pause for breath; certainly her pencil did not. She had covered many sheets when her father returned; and, as he came in softly, not to disturb her, she was so deeply engrossed she did not hear him; nor did she look up when Parker entered, but pursued the formulation of her fast-flying ideas with the same single purpose and abandon; so the two men sat and waited while their chieftainess wrote absorbedly. At last she glanced up and made a little startled exclamation at seeing them there, and then gave them cheery greeting. Each placed several scribbled sheets before her, and she, having first assured herself that Fisbee had bought his overshoes, and having expressed a fear that Mr. Parker had found her umbrella too small, as he looked damp (and indeed he was damp), cried praises on their notes and offered the reporters great applause.

"It is all so splendid!" she cried. "How could you do it so quickly? And in the rain, too! This is exactly what we need. I've done most of the things I mentioned, I think, and made a draught of some plans for hereafter. And about that man's coming out for Congress, I must tell you it is my greatest hope that he will. We can let it go until he does, and then——But doesn't it seem to you that it would be a good notion for the 'Herald' to have a woman's page—'For Feminine Readers,' or, 'Of Interest to Women'—once a week?"

"A woman's page!" exclaimed Fisbee. "I could never have thought of that, could you, Mr. Parker?"

"And now," she continued, "I think that when I've gone over what I've written and beat it into better shape I shall be ready for something to eat. Isn't it almost time for luncheon?"

This simple, and surely natural, inquiry had a singular, devastating effect upon her hearers. They looked upon each other with fallen jaws and complete stupefaction. The old man began to grow pale, and Parker glared about him with a wild eye. Fortunately, the editor was too busy at her work to notice their agitation; she applied herself to making alterations here and there, sometimes frowningly crossing out whole lines and even paragraphs, sometimes smiling and beaming at the writing; and, as she bent earnestly over the paper, against the darkness of the rainy day, the glamour about her fair hair was like a light in the room. To the minds of her two companions, this lustre was a gentle but unbearable accusation; and each dreaded the moment when her Work should be finished, with a great dread. There was a small "store-room" adjoining the office, and presently Mr. Parker, sweating at the brow, walked in there. The old man gave him a look of despairing reproach, but in a moment the foreman's voice was heard: "Oh, Mr. Fisbee, can you step here a second?"

"Yes, indeed!" was Fisbee's reply; and he fled guiltily into the "store-room," and Parker closed the door. They stood knee-deep in the clutter and lumber, facing each other abjectly.

"Well, we're both done, anyway, Mr. Fisbee," remarked the foreman.

"Indubitably, Mr. Parker," the old man answered; "it is too true."

"Never to think a blame thing about dinner for her!" Parker continued, remorsefully. "And her a lady that can turn off copy like a rotary snowplough in a Dakota blizzard! Did you see the sheets she's piled up on that desk?"

"There is no cafe—nothing—in Plattville, that could prepare food worthy of her," groaned Fisbee. "Nothing!"

"And we never thought of it. Never made a single arrangement. Never struck us she didn't live on keeping us dry and being good, I guess."

"How can I go there and tell her that?"

"Lord!"

"She cannot go to the hotel——"

"Well, I guess not! It ain't fit for her. Lum's table is hard enough on a strong man. Landis doesn't know a good cake from a Fiji missionary pudding. I don't expect pie is much her style, and, besides, the Palace Hotel pies—well!—the boss was a mighty uncomplaining man, but I used to notice his articles on field drainage got kind of sour and low-spirited when they'd been having more than the regular allowance of pie for dinner. She can't go there anyway; it's no use; it's after two o'clock, and the dining-room shuts off at one. I wonder what kind of cake she likes best."

"I don't know," said the perplexed Fisbee. "If we ask her—"

"If we could sort of get it out of her diplomatically, we could telegraph to Rouen for a good one."

"Ha!" said the other, brightening up. "You try it, Mr. Parker. I fear I have not much skill in diplomacy, but if you——"

The compositor's mouth drooped at the corners, and he interrupted gloomily: "But it wouldn't get here till to-morrow."

"True; it would not."

They fell into a despondent reverie, with their chins in their bosoms. There came a cheerful voice from the next room, but to them it brought no cheer; in their ears it sounded weak from the need of food and faint with piteous reproach.

"Father, aren't you coming to have luncheon with me?"

"Mr. Parker, what are we to do?" whispered the old man, hoarsely.

"Is it too far to take her to Briscoes'?"

"In the rain?"

"Take her with you to Tibbs's."

"Their noon meal is long since over; and their larder is not—is not—extensive."

"Father!" called the girl. She was stirring; they could hear her moving about the room.

"You've got to go in and tell her," said the foreman, desperately, and together they stumbled into the room. A small table at one end of it was laid with a snowy cloth and there was a fragrance of tea, and, amidst various dainties, one caught a glimpse of cold chicken and lettuce leaves. Fisbee stopped, dumfounded, but the foreman, after stammeringly declining an invitation to partake, alleging that his own meal awaited, sped down to the printing-room, and seized upon Bud Tipworthy with a heavy hand.

"Where did all that come from, up there?"

"Leave go me! What 'all that'?"

"All that tea and chicken and salad and wafers—all kinds of things; sardines, for all I know!"

"They come in Briscoes' buckboard while you was gone. Briscoes sent 'em in a basket; I took 'em up and she set the basket under the table. You'd seen it if you'd 'a' looked. Quit that!" And it was unjust to cuff the perfectly innocent and mystified Bud, and worse not to tell him what the punishment was for.

Before the day was over, system had been introduced, and the "Herald" was running on it: and all that warm, rainy afternoon, the editor and Fisbee worked in the editorial rooms, Parker and Bud and Mr. Schofield (after his return with the items and a courteous message from Ephraim Watts) bent over the forms downstairs, and Uncle Xenophon was cleaning the store-room and scrubbing the floor.

An extraordinary number of errands took the various members of the printing force up to see the editor-in-chief, literally to see the editor-in-chief; it was hard to believe that the presence had not flown—hard to keep believing, without the repeated testimony of sight, that the dingy room upstairs was actually the setting for their jewel; and a jewel they swore she was. The printers came down chuckling and gurgling after each interview; it was partly the thought that she belonged to the "Herald," their paper. Once Ross, as he cut down one of the temporarily distended advertisements, looked up and caught the foreman giggling to himself.

"What in the name of common-sense you laughin' at, Cale?" he asked.

"What are you laughing at?" rejoined the other.

"I dunno!"

The day wore on, wet and dreary outside, but all within the "Herald's" bosom was snug and busy and murmurous with the healthy thrum of life and prosperity renewed. Toward six o'clock, system accomplished, the new guiding-spirit was deliberating on a policy as Harkless would conceive a policy, were he there, when Minnie Briscoe ran joyously up the stairs, plunged into the room, waterproofed and radiant, and caught her friend in her eager arms, and put an end to policy for that day.

But policy and labor did not end at twilight every day; there were evenings, as in the time of Harkless, when lamps shone from the upper windows of the "Herald" building. For the little editor worked hard, and sometimes she worked late; she always worked early. She made some mistakes at first, and one or two blunders which she took more seriously than any one else did. But she found a remedy for all such results of her inexperience, and she developed experience. She set at her task with the energy of her youthfulness and no limit to her ambition, and she felt that Harkless had prepared the way for a wide expansion of the paper's interests; wider than he knew. She had a belief that there were possibilities for a country newspaper, and she brought a fresh point of view to operate in a situation where Harkless had fallen, perhaps, too much in the rut; and she watched every chance with a keen eye and looked ahead of her with clear foresight. What she waited and yearned for and dreaded, was the time when a copy of the new "Herald" should be placed in the trembling hands of the man who lay in the Rouen hospital. Then, she felt, if he, unaware of her identity, should place everything in her hands unreservedly, that would be a tribute to her work—and how hard she would labor to deserve it! After a time, she began to realize that, as his representative and the editor of the "Herald," she had become a factor in district politics. It took her breath—but with a gasp of delight, for there was something she wanted to do.

Above all, she brought a light heart to her work. One evening in the latter part of that first week of the new regime, Parker perceived Bud Tipworthy standing in the doorway of the printing-room, beckoning him silently to come without.

"What's the matter, Buddie?"

"Listen. She's singin' over her work."

Parker stepped outside. On the pavement, people had stopped to listen; they stood in the shadow, looking up with parted lips at the open, lighted Windows, whence came a clear, soft, reaching voice, lifted in song; now it swelled louder, unconsciously; now its volume was more slender and it melted liquidly into the night; again, it trembled and rose and dwelt in the ear, strong and pure; and, hearing it, you sighed with unknown longings. It was the "Angels' Serenade."

Bud Tipworthy's sister, Cynthia, was with him, and Parker saw that she turned from the window and that she was crying, quietly; she put her hand on the boy's shoulder and patted it with a forlorn gesture which, to the foreman's eye, was as graceful as it was sad. He moved closer to Bud and his big hand fell on Cynthia's brother's other shoulder, as he realized that red hair could look pretty sometimes; and he wondered why the editor's singing made Cynthy cry; and at the same time he decided to be mighty good to Bud henceforth. The spell of night and song was on him; that and something more; for it is a strange, inexplicable fact that the most practical chief ever known to the "Herald" had a singularly sentimental influence over her subordinates, from the moment of her arrival. Under Harkless's domination there had been no more steadfast bachelors in Carlow than Ross Schofield and Caleb Parker, and, like timorous youths in a graveyard, daring and mocking the ghosts in order to assuage their own fears, they had so jibed and jeered at the married state that there was talk of urging the minister to preach at them; but now let it be recorded that at the moment Caleb laid his hand on Bud's other shoulder, his associate, Mr. Schofield, was enjoying a walk in the far end of town with a widow, and it is not to be doubted that Mr. Tipworthy's heart, also, was no longer in his possession, though, as it was after eight o'clock, the damsel of his desire had probably long since retired to her couch.

For some faint light on the cause of these spells, we must turn to a comment made by the invaluable Mr. Martin some time afterward. Referring to the lady to whose voice he was now listening in silence (which shows how great the enthralling of her voice was), he said: "When you saw her, or heard her, or managed to be around, any, where she was, why, if you couldn't git up no hope of marryin' her, you wanted to marry somebody."

Mr. Lige Willetts, riding idly by, drew rein in front of the lighted windows, and listened with the others. Presently he leaned from his horse and whispered to a man near him:

"I know that song."

"Do you?" whispered the other.

"Yes; he and I heard her sing it, the night he was shot."

"So!"

"Yes, sir. It's by Beethoven."

"Is it?"

"It's a seraphic song," continued Lige.

"No!" exclaimed his friend; then, shaking his head, he sighed: "Well, it's mighty sweet."

The song was suddenly woven into laughter in the unseen chamber, and the lights in the windows went out, and a small lady and a tall lady and a thin old man, all three laughing and talking happily, came down and drove off in the Briscoe buckboard. The little crowd dispersed quietly; Lige Willetts plucked to his horse and cantered away to overtake the buckboard; William Todd took his courage between his teeth, and, the song ringing in his ears, made a desperate resolve to call upon Miss Bardlock that evening, in spite of its being a week day, and Caleb Parker gently and stammeringly asked Cynthia if she would wait till he shut up the shop, and let him walk home with her and Bud.

Soon the Square was quiet as before, and there was naught but peace under the big stars of July.

That day the news had come that Harkless, after weeks of alternate improvement and relapse, hazardously lingering in the borderland of shadows, had passed the crucial point and was convalescent. His recovery was assured. But from their first word of him, from the message that he was found and was alive, none of the people of Carlow had really doubted it. They are simple country people, and they know that God is good.



CHAPTER XV. NETTLES

Two men who have been comrades and classmates at the Alma Mater of John Harkless and Tom Meredith; two who have belonged to the same dub and roomed in the same entry; who have pooled their clothes and money in a common stock for either to draw on; who have shared the fortunes of athletic war, triumphing together, sometimes with an intense triumphancy; two men who were once boys getting hazed together, hazing in no unkindly fashion in their turn, always helping each other to stuff brains the night before an examination and to blow away the suffocating statistics like foam the night after; singing, wrestling, dancing, laughing, succeeding together, through the four kindest years of life; two such brave companions, meeting in the after years, are touchingly tender and caressive of each other, but the tenderness takes the shy, United States form of insulting epithets, and the caresses are blows. If John Harkless had been in health, uninjured and prosperous, Tom Meredith could no more have thrown himself on his knees beside him and called him "old friend" than he could have danced on the slack-wire.

One day they thought the patient sleeping; the nurse fanned him softly, and Meredith had stolen in and was sitting by the cot. One of Harkless's eyes had been freed of the bandage, and, when Tom came in, it was closed; but, by and by, Meredith became aware that the unbandaged eye had opened and that it was suffused with a pathetic moisture; yet it twinkled with a comprehending light, and John knew that it was his old Tom Meredith who was sitting beside him, with the air of having sat there very often before. But this bald, middle-aged young man, not without elegance, yet a prosperous burgher for all that—was this the slim, rollicking broth of a boy whose thick auburn hair used to make one streak of flame as he spun around the bases on a home run? Without doubt it was the stupendous fact, wrought by the alchemy of seven years.

For, though seven years be a mere breath in the memories of the old, it is a long transfiguration to him whose first youth is passing, and who finds unsolicited additions accruing to some parts of his being and strange deprivations in others, and upon whom the unhappy realization begins to be borne in, that his is no particular case, and that he of all the world is not to be spared, but, like his forbears, must inevitably wriggle in the disguising crucible of time. And, though men accept it with apparently patient humor, the first realization that people do grow old, and that they do it before they have had time to be young, is apt to come like a shock.

Perhaps not even in the interminable months of Carlow had Harkless realized the length of seven years so keenly as he did when he beheld his old friend at his bedside. How men may be warped apart in seven years, especially in the seven years between twenty-three and thirty! At the latter age you may return to the inseparable of seven years before and speak not the same language; you find no heartiness to carry on with each other after half an hour. Not so these classmates, who had known each other to the bone.

Ah, yes, it was Tom Meredith, the same lad, in spite of his masquerade of flesh; and Helen was right: Tom had not forgotten.

"It's the old horse-thief!" John murmured, tremulously.

"You go plumb to thunder," answered Meredith between gulps.

When he was well enough, they had long talks; and at other times Harkless lay by the window, and breathed deep of the fresh air, while Meredith attended to his correspondence for him, and read the papers to him. But there was one phenomenon of literature the convalescent insisted upon observing for himself, and which he went over again and again, to the detriment of his single unswathed eye, and this was the Carlow "Herald."

The first letter he had read to him was one from Fisbee stating that the crippled forces left in charge had found themselves almost distraught in their efforts to carry on the paper (as their chief might conclude for himself on perusal of the issues of the first fortnight of his absence), and they had made bold to avail themselves of the services of a young relative of the writer's from a distant city—a capable journalist, who had no other employment for the present, and who had accepted the responsibilities of the "Herald" temporarily. There followed a note from Parker, announcing that Mr. Fisbee's relative was a bird, and was the kind to make the "Herald" hum. They hoped Mr. Harkless would approve of their bespeaking the new hand on the sheet; the paper must have suspended otherwise. Harkless, almost overcome by his surprise that Fisbee possessed a relative, dictated a hearty and grateful indorsement of their action, and, soon after, received a typewritten rejoinder, somewhat complicated in the reading, because of the numerous type errors and their corrections. The missive was signed "H. Fisbee," in a strapping masculine hand that suggested six feet of enterprise and muscle spattering ink on its shirt sleeves.

John groaned and fretted over the writhings of the "Herald's" headless fortnight, but, perusing the issues produced under the domination of H. Fisbee, he started now and then, and chuckled at some shrewd felicities of management, or stared, puzzled, over an oddity, but came to a feeling of vast relief; and, when the question of H. Fisbee's salary was settled and the tenancy assured, he sank into a repose of mind. H. Fisbee might be an eccentric fellow, but he knew his business, and, apparently, he knew something of other business as well, for he wrote at length concerning the Carlow oil fields, urging Harkless to take shares in Mr. Watts's company while the stock was very low, two wells having been sunk without satisfactory results. H. Fisbee explained with exceeding technicality his reasons for believing that the third well would strike oil.

But with his ease of mind regarding the "Herald," Harkless found himself possessed by apathy. He fretted no longer to get back to Plattville. With the prospect of return it seemed an emptiness glared at him from hollow sockets, and the thought of the dreary routine he must follow when he went back gave him the same faint nausea he had felt the evening after the circus. And, though it was partly the long sweat of anguish which had benumbed him, his apathy was pierced, at times, by a bodily horror of the scene of his struggle. At night he faced the grotesque masks of the Cross-Roads men and the brutal odds again; over and over he felt the blows, and clapped his hand to where the close fire of Bob Skillett's pistol burned his body.

And, except for the release from pain, he rejoiced less and less in his recovery. He remembered a tedious sickness of his childhood and how beautiful he had thought the world, when he began to get well, how electric the open air blowing in at the window, how green the smile of earth, and how glorious to live and see the open day again. He had none of that feeling now. No pretty vision came again near his bed, and he beheld his convalescence as a mistake. He had come to a jumping-off place in his life—why had they not let him jump? What was there left but the weary plod, plod, and dust of years?

He could have gone back to Carlow in better spirit if it had not been for the few dazzling hours of companionship which had transformed it to a paradise, but, gone, left a desert. She, by the sight of her, had made him wish to live, and now, that he saw her no more, she made him wish to die. How little she had cared for him, since she told him she did not care, when he had not meant to ask her. He was weary, and at last he longed to find the line of least resistance and follow it; he had done hard things for a long time, but now he wanted to do something easy. Under the new genius—who was already urging that the paper should be made a daily—the "Herald" could get along without him; and the "White-Caps" would bother Carlow no longer; and he thought that Kedge Halloway, an honest man, if a dull one, was sure to be renominated for Congress at the district convention which was to meet at Plattville in September—these were his responsibilities, and they did not fret him. Everything was all right. There was only one thought which thrilled him: his impression that she had come to the hospital to see him was not a delusion; she had really been there—as a humane, Christian person, he said to himself. One day he told Meredith of his vision, and Tom explained that it was no conjuration of fever.

"But I thought she'd gone abroad," said Harkless, staring.

"They had planned to," answered his friend. "They gave it up for some reason. Uncle Henry decided that he wasn't strong enough for the trip, or something."

"Then—is she—is she here?"

"No; Helen is never here in summer. When she came back from Plattville, she went north, somewhere, to join people she had promised, I think." Meredith had as yet no inkling or suspicion that his adopted cousin had returned to Plattville. What he told Harkless was what his aunt had told him, and he accepted it as the truth.

Mrs. Sherwood (for she was both Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood) had always considered Fisbee an enigmatic rascal, and she regarded Helen's defection to him in the light of a family scandal to be hushed up, as well as a scalding pain to be borne. Some day the unkind girl-errant would "return to her wisdom and her duty"; meanwhile, the less known about it the better.

Meredith talked very little to Harkless of his cousin, beyond lightly commenting on the pleasure and oddity of their meeting, and telling him of her friendly anxiety about his recovery; he said she had perfect confidence from the first that he would recover. Harkless had said a word or two in his delirium and a word or two out of it, and these, with once a sudden brow of suffering, and a difference Meredith felt in Helen's manner when they stood together by the sick man's bedside, had given the young man a strong impression, partly intuitive, that in spite of the short time the two had known each other, something had happened between them at Plattville, and he ventured a guess which was not far from the truth. Altogether, the thing was fairly plain—a sad lover is not so hard to read—and Meredith was sorry, for they were the two people he liked best on earth.

The young man carried his gay presence daily to the hospital, where Harkless now lay in a pleasant room of his own, and he tried to keep his friend cheery, which was an easy matter on the surface, for the journalist turned ever a mask of jokes upon him; but it was not hard for one who liked him as Meredith did to see through to the melancholy underneath. After his one reference to Helen, John was entirely silent of her, and Meredith came to feel that both would be embarrassed if occasion should rise and even her name again be mentioned between them.

He did not speak of his family connection with Mr. Fisbee to the invalid, for, although the connection was distant, the old man was, in a way, the family skeleton, and Meredith had a strong sense of the decency of reserve in such a matter. There was one thing Fisbee's shame had made the old man unable not to suppress when he told Parker his story; the wraith of a torrid palate had pursued him from his youth, and the days of drink and despair from which Harkless had saved him were not the first in his life. Meredith wondered as much as did Harkless where Fisbee had picked up the journalistic "young relative" who signed his extremely business-like missives in such a thundering hand. It was evident that the old man was grateful to his patron, but it did not occur to Meredith that Fisbee's daughter might have an even stronger sense of gratitude, one so strong that she could give all her young strength to work for the man who had been good to her father.

There came a day in August when Meredith took the convalescent from the hospital in a victoria, and installed him in his own home. Harkless's clothes hung on his big frame limply; however, there was a drift of light in his eyes as they drove slowly through the pretty streets of Rouen. The bandages and splints and drugs and swathings were all gone now, and his sole task was to gather strength. The thin face was sallow no longer; it was the color of evening shadows; indeed he lay among the cushions seemingly no more than a gaunt shadow of the late afternoon, looking old and gray and weary. They rolled along abusing each other, John sometimes gratefully threatening his friend with violence.

The victoria passed a stone house with wide lawns and an inhospitable air of wealth and importunate rank; over the sward two peacocks swung, ambulating like caravals in a green sea; and one expected a fine lady to come smiling and glittering from the door. Oddly enough, though he had never seen the place before, it struck Harkless with a sense of familiarity. "Who lives there?" he asked abruptly.

"Who lives there? On the left? Why that—that is the Sherwood place," Meredith answered, in a tone which sounded as if he were not quite sure of it, but inclined to think his information correct. Harkless relapsed into silence.

Meredith's home was a few blocks further up the same street; a capacious house in the Western fashion of the Seventies. In front, on the lawn, there was a fountain with a leaping play of water; maples and shrubbery were everywhere; and here and there stood a stiff sentinel of Lombardy poplar. It was all cool and incongruous and comfortable; and, on the porch, sheltered from publicity by a multitude of palms and flowering plants, a white-jacketed negro appeared with a noble smile and a more important tray, whereon tinkled bedewed glasses and a crystal pitcher, against whose sides the ice clinked sweetly. There was a complement of straws.

When they had helped him to an easy chair on the porch, Harkless whistled luxuriously. "Ah, my bachelor!" he exclaimed, as he selected a straw.

"'Who would fardels bear?'" rejoined Mr. Meredith. Then came to the other a recollection of an auburn-haired ball player on whom the third strike had once been called while his eyes wandered tenderly to the grandstand, where the prettiest girl of that commencement week was sitting.

"Have you forgot the 'Indian Princess'?" he asked.

"You're a dull old person," Tom laughed. "Haven't you discovered that 'tis they who forget us? And why shouldn't they? Do we remember well?—anybody except just us two, I mean, of course."

"I've a notion we do, sometimes."

The other set his glass on the tray, and lit his cigarette. "Yes; when we're unsuccessful. Then I think we do."

"That may be true."

"Of course it is. If a lady wishes to make an impression on me that is worth making, let her let me make none on her."

"You think it is always our vanity?"

"Analyze it as your revered Thomas does and you shall reach the same conclusion. Let a girl reject you and—" Meredith broke off, cursing himself inwardly, and, rising, cried gaily: "What profiteth it a man if he gain the whole wisdom in regard to women and loseth not his own heart? And neither of us is lacking a heart—though it may be; one can't tell, one's self; one has to find out about that from some girl. At least, I'm rather sure of mine; it's difficult to give a tobacco-heart away; it's drugged on the market. I'm going to bring out the dogs; I'm spending the summer at home just to give them daily exercise."

This explanation of his continued presence in Rouen struck John as quite as plausible as Meredith's more seriously alleged reasons for not joining his mother and sister, at Winter Harbor. (He possessed a mother, and, as he explained, he had also sisters to satiety, in point of numbers.) Harkless knew that Tom had stayed to look after him; and he thought there never was so poor a peg as himself whereon to hang the warm mantle of such a friendship. He knew that other mantles of affection and kindliness hung on that self-same peg, for he had been moved by the letters and visits from Carlow people, and he had heard the story of their descent upon the hospital, and of the march on the Cross-Roads. Many a good fellow, too, had come to see him during his better days—from Judge Briscoe, openly tender and solicitous, to the embarrassed William Todd, who fiddled at his hat and explained that, being as he was in town on business (a palpable fiction) he thought he'd look in to see if "they was any word would wish to be sent down to our city." The good will the sick man had from every one touched him, and made him feel unworthy, and he could see nothing he had done to deserve it. Mr. Meredith could (and would not—openly, at least) have explained to him that it made not a great deal of difference what he did; it was what people thought he was.

His host helped him upstairs after dinner, and showed him the room prepared for his occupancy. Harkless sank, sighing with weakness, into a deep chair, and Meredith went to a window-seat and stretched himself out for a smoke and chat.

"Doesn't it beat your time," he said, cheerily, "to think of what's become of all the old boys? They turn up so differently from what we expected, when they turn up at all. We sized them up all right so far as character goes, I fancy, but we couldn't size up the chances of life. Take poor old Pickle Haines: who'd have dreamed Pickle would shoot himself over a bankruptcy? I dare say that wasn't all of it—might have been cherchez la femme, don't you think? What do you make of Pickle's case, John?"

There was no answer. Harkless's chair was directly in front of the mantel-piece, and upon the carved wooden shelf, amongst tobacco-jars and little curios, cotillion favors and the like, there were scattered a number of photographs. One of these was that of a girl who looked straight out at you from a filigree frame; there was hardly a corner of the room where you could have stood without her clear, serious eyes seeming to rest upon yours.

"Cherchez la femme?" repeated Tom, puffing unconsciously. "Pickle was a good fellow, but he had the deuce of an eye for a girl. Do you remember—" He stopped short, and saw the man and the photograph looking at each other. Too late, he unhappily remembered that he had meant, and forgotten, to take that photograph out of the room before he brought Harkless in. Now he would have to leave it; and Helen Sherwood was not the sort of girl, even in a flat presentment, to be continually thrown in the face of a man who had lost her. And it always went hard, Tom reflected, with men who stretched vain hands to Helen, only to lose her. But there was one, he thought, whose outstretched hands might not prove so vain. Why couldn't she have cared for John Harkless? Deuce take the girl, did she want to marry an emperor? He looked at Harkless, and pitied him with an almost tearful compassion. A feverish color dwelt in the convalescent's cheek; the apathy that had dulled his eyes was there no longer; instead, they burned with a steady fire. The image returned his unwavering gaze with inscrutable kindness.

"You heard that Pickle shot himself, didn't you?" Meredith asked. There was no answer; John did not hear him.

"Do you know that poor Jeny Haines killed himself, last March?" Tom said sharply.

There was only silence in the room. Meredith got up and rattled some tongs in the empty fireplace, but the other did not move or notice him in any way.

Meredith set the tongs down, and went quietly out of the room, leaving his friend to that mysterious interview.

When he came back, after a remorseful cigarette in the yard, Harkless was still sitting, motionless, looking up at the photograph above the mantel-piece.



They drove abroad every day, at first in the victoria, and, as Harkless's strength began to come back, in a knock-about cart of Tom's, a light trail of blue smoke floating back wherever the two friends passed. And though the country editor grew stronger in the pleasant, open city, Meredith felt that his apathy and listlessness only deepened, and he suspected that, in Harkless's own room, where the photograph reigned, the languor departed for the time, making way for a destructive fire. Judge Briscoe, paying a second visit to Rouen, told Tom, in an aside, that their friend did not seem to be the same man. He was altered and aged beyond belief, the old gentleman whispered sadly.

Meredith decided that his guest needed enlivening—something to take him out of himself; he must be stirred up to rub against people once more. And therefore, one night he made a little company for him: two or three apparently betrothed very young couples, for whom it was rather dull, after they had looked their fill of Harkless (it appeared that every one was curious to see him); and three or four married young couples, for whom the entertainment seemed rather diverting in an absent-minded way (they had the air of remembering that they had forgotten the baby); and three or four bachelors, who seemed contented in any place where they were allowed to smoke; and one widower, whose manner indicated that any occasion whatever was gay enough for him; and four or five young women, who (Meredith explained to John) were of their host's age, and had been "left over" out of the set he grew up with; and for these the modest party took on a hilarious and chipper character. "It is these girls that have let the men go by because they didn't see any good enough; they're the jolly souls!" the one widower remarked, confidentially. "They've been at it a long while, and they know how, and they're light-hearted as robins. They have more fun than people who have responsibilities."

All of these lively demoiselles fluttered about Harkless with commiserative pleasantries, and, in spite of his protestations, made him recline in the biggest and deepest chair on the porch, where they surfeited him with kindness and grouped about him with extra cushions and tenderness for a man who had been injured. No one mentioned the fact that he had been hurt; it was not spoken of, though they wished mightily he would tell them the story they had read luridly in the public prints. They were very good to him. One of them, in particular, a handsome, dark, kind-eyed girl, constituted herself at once his cicerone in Rouen gossip and his waiting-maid. She sat by him, and saw that his needs (and his not-needs, too) were supplied and oversupplied; she could not let him move, and anticipated his least wish, though he was now amply able to help himself; and she fanned him as if he were a dying consumptive.

They sat on Meredith's big porch in the late twilight and ate a substantial refection, and when this was finished, a buzz of nonsense rose from all quarters, except the remote corners where the youthful affianced ones had defensively stationed themselves behind a rampart of plants. They, having eaten, had naught to do, and were only waiting a decent hour for departure. Laughing voices passed up and down the street, and mingled with the rhythmic plashing of Meredith's fountain, and, beyond the shrubberies and fence, one caught glimpses of the light dresses of women moving to and fro, and of people sitting bareheaded on neighboring lawns to enjoy the twilight. Now and then would pass, with pipe and dog, the beflanneled figure of an undergraduate, home for vacation, or a trio of youths in knickerbockers, or a band of young girls, or both trio and band together; and from a cross street, near by, came the calls and laughter of romping children and the pulsating whirr of a lawn-mower: This sound Harkless remarked as a ceaseless accompaniment to life in Rouen; even in the middle of the night there was always some unfortunate, cutting grass.

When the daylight was all gone, and the stars had crept out, strolling negroes patrolled the sidewalks, thrumming mandolins and guitars, and others came and went, singing, making the night Venetian. The untrained, joyous voices, chording eerily in their sweet, racial minors, came on the air, sometimes from far away. But there swung out a chorus from fresh, Aryan throats, in the house south of Meredith's:

"Where, oh where, are the grave old Seniors? Safe, now, in the wide, wide world!"

"Doesn't that thrill you, boy?" said Meredith, joining the group about Harkless's chair. "Those fellows are Sophomores, class of heaven knows what. Aren't you feeling a fossil. Father Abraham?"

A banjo chattered on the lawn to the north, and soon a mixed chorus of girls and boys sang from there:

"O, 'Arriet, I'm waiting, waiting alone out 'ere."

Then a piano across the street sounded the dearthful harmonies of Chopin's Funeral March.

"You may take your choice," remarked Meredith, flicking a spark over the rail in the ash of his cigar, "Chopping or Chevalier."

"Chopin, my friend," said the lady who had attached herself to Harkless. She tapped Tom's shoulder with her fan and smiled, graciously corrective.

"Thank you, Miss Hinsdale," he answered, gratefully. "And as I, perhaps, had better say, since otherwise there might be a pause and I am the host, we have a wide selection. In addition to what is provided at present, I predict that within the next ten minutes a talented girl who lives two doors south will favor us with the Pilgrims' Chorus, piano arrangement, break down in the middle, and drift, into 'Rastus on Parade,' while a double quartette of middle-aged colored gentlemen under our Jim will make choral offering in our own back yard."

"My dear Tom," exclaimed Miss Hinsdale, "you forget Wetherford Swift!"

"I could stand it all," put forth the widower, "if it were not for Wetherford Swift."

"When is Miss Sherwood coming home?" asked one of the ladies. "Why does she stay away and leave him to his sufferings?"

"Us to his sufferings," substituted a bachelor. "He is just beginning; listen."

Through all the other sounds of music, there penetrated from an unseen source, a sawish, scraped, vibration of catgut, pathetic, insistent, painstaking, and painful beyond belief.

"He is in a terrible way to-night," said the widower.

Miss Hinsdale laughed. "Worse every night. The violinist is young Wetherford Swift," she explained to Harkless. "He is very much in love, and it doesn't agree with him. He used to be such a pleasant boy, but last winter he went quite mad over Helen Sherwood, Mr. Meredith's cousin, our beauty, you know—I am so sorry she isn't here; you'd be interested in meeting her, I'm sure—and he took up the violin."

"It is said that his family took up chloroform at the same time," said the widower.

"His music is a barometer," continued the lady, "and by it the neighborhood nightly observes whether Miss Sherwood has been nice to him or not."

"It is always exceedingly plaintive," explained another.

"Except once," rejoined Miss Hinsdale. "He played jigs when she came home from somewhere or other, in June."

"It was Tosti's 'Let Me Die,' the very next evening," remarked the widower.

"Ah," said one of the bachelors, "but his joy was sadder for us than his misery. Hear him now."

"I think he means it for 'What's this dull town to me,'" observed another, with some rancor. "I would willingly make the town sufficiently exciting for him—"

"If there were not an ordinance against the hurling of missiles," finished the widower.

The piano executing the funeral march ceased to execute, discomfited by the persistent and overpowering violin; the banjo and the coster-songs were given over; even the collegians' music was defeated; and the neighborhood was forced to listen to the dauntless fiddle, but not without protest, for there came an indignant, spoken chorus from the quarter whence the college songs had issued: "Ya-a-ay! Wetherford, put it away! She'll come back!" The violin played on.

"We all know each other here, you see, Mr. Harkless," Miss Hinsdale smiled benignantly.

"They didn't bother Mr. Wetherford Swift," said the widower. "Not that time. Do you hear him?—'Could ye come back to me, Douglas'?"

"Oh, but it isn't absence that is killing him and his friends," cried one of the young women. "It is Brainard Macauley."

"That is a mistake," said Tom Meredith, as easily as he could. "There goes Jim's double quartette. Listen, and you will hear them try to——"

But the lady who had mentioned Brainard Macauley cried indignantly: "You try to change the subject the moment it threatens to be interesting. They were together everywhere until the day she went away; they danced and 'sat out' together through the whole of one country-club party; they drove every afternoon; they took long walks, and he was at the Sherwoods' every evening of her last week in town. 'That is a mistake!'"

"I'm afraid it looks rather bleak for Wetherford," said the widower. "I went up to the 'Journal' office on business, one day, and there sat Miss Sherwood in Macauley's inner temple, chatting with a reporter, while Brainard finished some work."

"Helen is eccentric," said the former speaker, "but she's not quite that eccentric, unless they were engaged. It is well understood that they will announce it in the fall."

Miss Hinsdale kindly explained to Harkless that Brainard Macauley was the editor of the "Rouen Morning Journal"—"a very distinguished young man, not over twenty-eight, and perfectly wonderful." Already a power to be accounted with in national politics, he was "really a tremendous success," and sure to go far; "one of those delicate-looking men, who are yet so strong you know they won't let the lightning hurt you." It really looked as if Helen Sherwood (whom Harkless really ought to meet) had actually been caught in the toils at tet, those toils wherein so many luckless youths had lain enmeshed for her sake. He must meet Mr. Macauley, too, the most interesting man in Rouen. After her little portrait of him, didn't Mr. Harkless agree that it looked really pretty dull for Miss Sherwood's other lovers?

Mr. Harkless smiled, and agreed that it did indeed. She felt a thrill of compassion for him, and her subsequent description of the pathos of his smile was luminous. She said it was natural that a man who had been through so much suffering from those horrible "White-Cappers" should have a smile that struck into your heart like a knife.

Despite all that Meredith could do, and after his notorious effort to shift the subject he could do very little, the light prattle ran on about Helen Sherwood and Brainard Macauley. Tom abused himself for his wild notion of cheering his visitor with these people who had no talk, and who, if they drifted out of commonplace froth, had no medium to float them unless they sailed the currents, of local personality, and he mentally upbraided them for a set of gossiping ninnies. They conducted a conversation (if it could be dignified by a name) of which no stranger could possibly partake, and which, by a hideous coincidence, was making his friend writhe, figuratively speaking, for Harkless sat like a fixed shadow. He uttered scarcely a word the whole evening, though Meredith knew that his guests would talk about him enthusiastically, the next day, none the less. The journalist's silence was enforced by the topics; but what expression and manner the light allowed them to see was friendly and receptive, as though he listened to brilliant suggestions. He had a nice courtesy, and Miss Hinsdale felt continually that she was cleverer than usual this evening, and no one took his silence to be churlish, though they all innocently wondered why he did not talk more; however, it was probable that a man who had been so interestingly and terribly shot would be rather silent for a time afterward.

That night, when Harkless had gone to bed Meredith sat late by his own window calling himself names. He became aware of a rhomboidal patch of yellow light on a wall of foliage without, and saw that it came from his friend's window. After dubious consideration, he knocked softly on the door.

"Come."

He went in. Harkless was in bed, and laughed faintly as Meredith entered. "I—I'm fearing you'll have to let me settle your gas bill, Tom. I'm not like I used to be, quite. I find—since—since that business, I can't sleep without a light. I rather get the—the horrors in the dark."

Incoherently, Meredith made a compassionate exclamation and turned to go, and, as he left the room, his eye fell upon the mantel-piece. The position of the photographs had been altered, and the picture of the girl who looked straight out at you was gone. The mere rim of it was visible behind the image of an old gentleman with a sardonic mouth.

An hour later, Tom came back, and spoke through the closed door. "Boy, don't you think you can get to sleep now?"

"Yes, Tom. It's all right. You get to bed. Nothing troubles me."

Meredith spent the next day in great tribulation and perplexity; he felt that something had to be done, but what to do he did not know. He still believed that a "stirring-up" was what Harkless needed—not the species of "stirring-up" that had taken place last night, but a diversion which would divert. As they sat at dinner, a suggestion came to him and he determined to follow it. He was called to the telephone, and a voice strange to his ear murmured in a tone of polite deference: "A lady wishes to know if Mr. Meredith and his visitor intend being present at the country-club this evening."

He had received the same inquiry from Miss Hinsdale on her departure the previous evening, and had answered vaguely; hence he now rejoined:

"You are quite an expert ventriloquist, but you do not deceive me."

"I beg your pardon, sir," creaked the small articulation.

"This is Miss Hinsdale, isn't it?"

"No, sir. The lady wishes to know if you will kindly answer her question."

"Tell her, yes." He hung up the receiver, and returned to the table. "Some of Clara Hinsdale's play," he explained. "You made a devastating impression on her, boy; you were wise enough not to talk any, and she foolishly thought you were as interesting as you looked. We're going out to a country-club dance. It's given for the devotees who stay here all summer and swear Rouen is always cool; and nobody dances but me and the very young ones. It won't be so bad; you can smoke anywhere, and there are little tables. We'll go."

"Thank you, Tom, you're so good to think of it, but——"

"But what?"

"Would you mind going alone? I find it very pleasant sitting on your veranda, or I'll get a book."

"Very well, if you don't want to go, I don't. I haven't had a dance for three months and I'm still addicted to it. But of course——"

"I think I'd like to go." Harkless acquiesced at once, with a cheerful voice and a lifeless eye, and the good Tom felt unaccountably mean in persisting.

They drove out into the country through mists like lakes, and found themselves part of a procession of twinkling carriage-lights, and cigar sparks shining above open vehicles, winding along the levels like a canoe fete on the water. In the entrance hall of the club-house they encountered Miss Hinsdale, very handsome, large, and dark, elaborately beaming and bending toward them warmly.

"Who do you think is here?" she said.

"Gomez?" ventured Meredith.

"Helen Sherwood!" she cried. "Go and present Mr. Harkless before Brainard Macauley takes her away to some corner."



CHAPTER XVI. PRETTY MARQUISE

The two friends walked through a sort of opera-bouffe to find her; music playing, a swaying crowd, bright lights, bright eyes, pretty women, a glimpse of dancers footing it over a polished floor in a room beyond—a hundred colors flashing and changing, as the groups shifted, before the eye could take in the composition of the picture. A sudden thrill of exhilaration rioted in John's pulses, and he trembled like a child before the gay disclosure of a Christmas tree. Meredith swore to himself that he would not have known him for the man of five minutes agone. Two small, bright red spots glowed in his cheeks; he held himself erect with head thrown back and shoulders squared, and the idolizing Tom thought he looked as a king ought to look at the acme of power and dominion. Miss Hinsdale's word in the hallway was the geniuses touch: a bent, gray man of years—a word—and behold the Great John Harkless, the youth of elder days ripened to his prime of wisdom and strength! People made way for them and whispered as they passed. It had been years since John Harkless had been in the midst of a crowd of butterfly people; everything seemed unreal, or like a ball in a play; presently the curtain would fall and close the lights and laughter from his view, leaving only the echo of music. It was like a kaleidoscope for color: the bouquets of crimson or white or pink or purple; the profusion of pretty dresses, the brilliant, tender fabrics, and the handsome, foreshortened faces thrown back over white shoulders in laughter; glossy raven hair and fair tresses moving in quick salutations; and the whole gay shimmer of festal tints and rich artificialities set off against the brave green of out-doors, for the walls were solidly adorned with forest branches, with, here and there amongst them, a blood-red droop of beech leaves, stabbed in autumn's first skirmish with summer. The night was cool, and the air full of flower smells, while harp, violin, and 'cello sent a waltz-throb through it all.

They looked rapidly through several rooms and failed to find her indoors, and they went outside, not exchanging a word, and though Harkless was a little lame, Tom barely kept up with his long stride. On the verandas there were fairy lamps and colored incandescents over little tables, where people sat chatting. She was not there. Beyond was a terrace, where a myriad of Oriental lanterns outlined themselves clearly in fantastically shaped planes of scarlet and orange and green against the blue darkness. Many couples and groups were scattered over the terrace, and the young men paused on the steps, looking swiftly from group to group. She was not there.

"We haven't looked in the dancing-room," said Tom, looking at his companion rather sorrowfully. John turned quickly and they reentered the house.

He had parted from her in the blackness of storm with only the flicker of lightning to show her to him, but it was in a blaze of lights that he saw her again. The dance was just ended, and she stood in a wide doorway, half surrounded by pretty girls and young men, who were greeting her. He had one full look at her. She was leaning to them all, her arms full of flowers, and she seemed the radiant centre of all the light and gaiety of the place. Even Meredith stopped short and exclaimed upon her; for one never got used to her; and he remembered that whenever he saw her after absence the sense of her beauty rushed over him anew. And he believed the feeling on this occasion was keener than ever before, for she was prettier than he had ever seen her.

"No wonder!" he cried; but Harkless did not understand. As they pressed forward, Meredith perceived that they were only two more radii of a circle of youths, sprung from every direction as the waltz ended, bearing down upon the common focus to secure the next dance. Harkless saw nothing but that she stood there before him. He feared a little that every one might notice how he was trembling, and he was glad of the many voices that kept them from hearing his heart knock against his ribs. She saw him coming toward her, and nodded to him pleasantly, in just the fashion in which she was bowing to half a dozen others, and at that a pang of hot pain went through him like an arrow—an arrow poisoned with cordial, casual friendliness.

She extended her hand to him and gave him a smile that chilled him—it, was so conventionally courteous and poised so nicely in the manner of society. He went hot and cold fast enough then, for not less pleasantly in that manner did she exclaim: "I am very glad to see you, Mr. Harkless, so extremely glad! And so delighted to find you looking strong again! Do tell me about all our friends in Plattville. I should like to have a little chat with you some time. So good of you to find me in this melee."

And with that she turned from the poor fellow to Meredith. "How do you do. Cousin Tom? I've saved the next dance for you." Then she distributed words here and there and everywhere, amongst the circle about her—pretty Marquise with a vengeance! "No, Mr. Swift, I shall not make a card; you must come at the beginning of a dance if you want one. I cannot promise the next; it is quite impossible. No, I did not go as far north as Mackinac. How do you do, Mr. Burlingame?—Yes, quite an age;—no, not the next, I am afraid; nor the next;—I'm not keeping a card. Good evening, Mr. Baird. No, not the next. Oh, thank you, Miss Hinsdale!—No, Mr. Swift, it is quite impossible—I'm so sorry. Cousin, the music is commencing; this is ours."

As she took Meredith's arm, she handed her flowers to a gentleman beside her with the slightest glance at the recipient; and the gesture and look made her partner heartsick for his friend; it was so easy and natural and with the air of habit, and had so much of the manner with which a woman hands things to a man who partakes of her inner confidences. Tom knew that Harkless divined the gesture, as well as the identity of the gentleman. They started away, but she paused, and turned to the latter. "Mr. Macauley, you must meet Mr. Harkless. We leave him in your care, and you must see that he meets all the pretty girls—you are used to being nice to distinguished strangers, you know."

Tom put his arm about her, and whirled her away, and Harkless felt as if a soft hand had dealt him blow after blow in the face. Was this lady of little baffling forms and small cold graces the girl who had been his kind comrade, the girl who stood with him by the blue tent-pole, she who had run to him to save his life, she who walked at his side along the pike? The contrast of these homely scenes made him laugh grimly. Was this she who had wept before him—was it she who had been redolent of kindness so fragrantly natural and true—was it she who said she "loved all these people very much, in spite of having known them only two days"?

He cried out upon himself for a fool. What was he in her eyes but a man who had needed to be told that she did not love him! Had he not better—and more courteously to her—have avoided the meeting which was necessarily an embarrassment to her? But no; he must rush like a Mohawk till he found her and forced her to rebuff him, to veil her kindness in little manners, to remind him that he put himself in the character of a rejected importunate. She had punished him enough, perhaps a little too cruelly enough, in leaving him with the man to whom she handed bouquets as a matter of course. And this man was one whose success had long been a trumpet at his ear, blaring loudly of his own failure in the same career.

It had been several years since he first heard of the young editor of the Rouen "Journal," and nowadays almost everybody knew about Brainard Macauley. Outwardly, he was of no unusual type: an American of affairs; slight, easy, yet alert; relaxed, yet sharp; neat, regular, strong; a quizzical eye, a business chin, an ambitious head with soft, straight hair outlining a square brow; and though he was "of a type," he was not commonplace, and one knew at once that he would make a rattling fight to arrive where he was going.

It appeared that he had heard of Harkless, as well as the Carlow editor of him. They had a few moments of shop, and he talked to Harkless as a brother craftsman, without the offense of graciousness, and spoke of his pleasure in the meeting and of his relief at Harkless's recovery, for, aside from the mere human feeling, the party needed him in Carlow—even if he did not always prove himself "quite a vehement partisan." Macauley laughed. "But I'm not doing my duty," he said presently; "I was to present you to the pretty ones only, I believe. Will you designate your preferred fashion of beauty? We serve all styles."

"Thank you," the other answered, hurriedly. "I met a number last night—quite a number, indeed." He had seen them only in dim lights, however, and except Miss Hinsdale and the widower, had not the faintest recognition of any of them, and he cut them all, except those two, one after the other, before the evening was over; and this was a strange thing for a politician to do; but he did it with such an innocent eye that they remembered the dark porch and forgave him.

"Shall we watch the dancing, then?" asked Macauley. Harkless was already watching part of it.

"If you will. I have not seen this sort for more than five years."

"It is always a treat, I think, and a constant proof that the older school of English caricaturists didn't overdraw."

"Yes; one realizes they couldn't."

Harkless remembered Tom Meredith's fine accomplishment of dancing; he had been the most famous dancer of college days, and it was in the dancer that John best saw his old friend again as he had known him, the light lad of the active toe. Other couples flickered about the one John watched, couples that plodded, couples that bobbed, couples that galloped, couples that slid, but the cousins alone passed across the glistening reflections as lightly as October leaves blown over the forest floor. In the midst of people who danced with fixed, glassy eyes, or who frowned with determination to do their duty or to die, and seemed to expect the latter, or who were pale with the apprehension of collision, or who made visible their anxiety to breathe through the nose and look pleased at the same time, these two floated and smiled easily upon life. Three or four steep steps made the portly and cigarette-smoking Meredith pant like an old man, but a dance was a cooling draught to him. As for the little Marquise—when she danced, she danced away with all those luckless hearts that were not hers already. The orchestra launched the jubilant measures of the deux-temps with a torrent of vivacity, and the girl's rhythmic flight answered like a sail taking the breeze.

There was one heart she had long since won which answered her every movement. Flushed, rapturous, eyes sparkling, cheeks aglow, the small head weaving through the throng like a golden shuttle—ah, did she know how adorable she was! Was Tom right: is it the attainable unattainable to one man and given to some other that leaves a deeper mark upon him than success? At all events the unattainable was now like a hot sting in the heart, but yet a sting more precious than a balm. The voice of Brainard Macauley broke in:

"A white brow and a long lash, a flushing cheek and a soft eye, a voice that laughs and breaks and ripples in the middle of a word, a girl you could put in your hat, Mr. Harkless—and there you have a strong man prone! But I congratulate you on the manner your subordinates operate the 'Herald' during your absence. I understand you are making it a daily."

Macauley was staring at him quizzically, and Harkless, puzzled, but without resentment of the other's whimsey, could only decide that the editor of the Rouen "Journal" was an exceedingly odd young man. All at once he found Meredith and the girl herself beside him; they had stopped before the dance was finished. He had the impulse to guard himself from new blows as a boy throws up his elbow to ward a buffet, and, although he could not ward with his elbow, for his heart was on his sleeve—where he began to believe that Macauley had seen it—he remembered that he could smile with as much intentional mechanism as any wornout rounder of afternoons. He stepped aside for her, and she saw what she had known but had not seen before, for the thickness of the crowd, and this was that he limped and leaned upon his stick.

"Do let me thank you," he said, with a louder echo of her manner of greeting him, a little earlier. "It has been such a pleasure to watch you dance. It is really charming to meet you here. If I return to Plattville I shall surely remember to tell Miss Briscoe."

At this she surprised him with a sudden, clear look in the eyes, so reproachful, so deep, so sad, that he started. She took her flowers from Macauley, who had the air of understanding the significance of such ceremonies very well, and saying, "Shan't we all go out on the terrace?" placed her arm in Harkless's, and conducted him (and not the others) to the most secluded corner of the terrace, a nook illumined by one Japanese lantern; to which spot it was his belief that he led her. She sank into a chair, with the look of the girl who had stood by the blue tent-pole. He could only stare at her, amazed by her abrupt change to this dazzling, if reproachful, kindness, confused by his good fortune.

"'If you go back to Plattville!'" she said in a low voice. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know. I've been dull lately, and I thought I might go somewhere else." Caught in a witchery no lack of possession could dispel, and which the prospect of loss made only stronger while it lasted, he took little thought of what he said; little thought of anything but of the gladness it was to be with her again.

"'Somewhere else?' Where?"

"Anywhere."

"Have you no sense of responsibility? What is to become of your paper?"

"The 'Herald'? Oh, it will potter along, I think."

"But what has become of it in your absence, already? Has it not deteriorated very much?"

"No," he said; "it's better than it ever was before."

"What!" she cried, with a little gasp.

"You're so astounded at my modesty?"

"But please tell me what you mean," she said quickly. "What happened to it?"

"Isn't the 'Herald' rather a dull subject? I'll tell you how well Judge Briscoe looked when he came to see me; or, rather, tell me of your summer in the north."

"No," she answered earnestly. "Don't you remember my telling you that I am interested in newspaper work?"

"I have even heard so from others," he said, with an instant of dryness.

"Please tell me about the 'Herald'?"

"It is very simple. Your friend, Mr. Fisbee, found a substitute, a relative six feet high with his coat off, a traction engine for energy and a limited mail for speed. He writes me letters on a type writer suffering from an impediment in its speech; and in brief, he is an enterprising idiot with a mania for work-baskets."

Her face was in the shadow.

"You say the—idiot—is enterprising?" she inquired.

"Far more enterprising and far less idiot than I. They are looking for oil down there, and when he came he knew less about oil than a kindergarten babe, and spoke of 'boring for kerosene' in his first letter to me; but he knows it all now, and writes long and convincing geological arguments. If a well comes in, he is prepared to get out an extra! Perhaps you may understand what that means in Plattville, with the 'Herald's' numerous forces. I owe him everything, even the shares in the oil company, which he has persuaded me to take. And he is going to dare to make the 'Herald' a daily. Do you remember asking me why I had never done that? It seemed rather a venture to try to compete with the Rouen papers in offering State and foreign news, but this young Gulliver has tacked onto the Associated Press, and means to print a quarto—that's eight pages, you know—once a week, Saturday, and a double sheet, four pages, on other mornings. The daily venture begins next Monday."

"Will it succeed?"

"Oh, no!" he laughed.

"You think not?" Her interest in this dull business struck him as astonishing, and yet in character with her as he had known her in Plattville. Then he wondered unhappily if she thought that talking of the "Herald" and learning things about the working of a country newspaper would help her to understand Brainard Macauley.

"Why have you let him go on with it?" she asked. "I suppose you have encouraged him?"

"Oh, yes, I encouraged him. The creature's recklessness fascinated me. A dare-devil like that is always charming.'"

"You think there is no chance for the creature's succeeding with the daily?"

"None," he replied indifferently.

"You mentioned work-baskets, I think?"

He laughed again. "I believe him to be the original wooden-nutmeg man. Once a week he produces a 'Woman's Page,' wherein he presents to the Carlow female public three methods for making currant jelly, three receipts for the concoction of salads, and directs the ladies how to manufacture a pretty work-basket out of odd scraps in twenty minutes. The astonishing part of it is that he has not yet been mobbed by the women who have followed his directions."

"So you think the daily is a mistake and that your enterprising idiot should be mobbed? Why?" She seemed to be taking him very seriously.

"I think he may be—for his 'Woman's Page.'"

"It is all wrong, you think?"

"What could a Yankee six-footer cousin of old Fisbee's know about currant jelly and work-baskets?"

"You know about currant jelly and work-baskets yourself?"

"Heaven defend the right, I do not!"

"You are sure he is six feet?"

"You should see his signature; that leaves no doubt. And, also, his ability denotes his stature."

"You believe that ability is in proportion to height, do you not?" There was a dangerous luring in her tone.

His memory recalled to him that he was treading on undermined ground, so he hastened to say: "In inverse proportion."

"Then your substitute is a failure. I see," she said, slowly.

What muffled illumination there was in their nook fell upon his face; her back was toward it, so that she was only an outline to him, and he would have been startled and touched to the quick, could he have known that her lip quivered and her eyes filled with tears as she spoke the last words. He was happy as he had not been since his short June day; it was enough to be with her again. Nothing, not even Brainard Macauley, could dull his delight. And, besides, for a few minutes he had forgotten Brainard Macauley. What more could man ask than to sit in the gloom with her, to know that he was near her again for a little while, and to talk about anything—if he talked at all? Nonsense and idle exaggeration about young Fisbee would do as well as another thing.

"The young gentleman is an exception," he returned. "I told you I owed everything to him; my gratitude will not allow me to admit that his ability is less than his stature. He suggested my purchase of a quantity of Mr. Watts's oil stock when it was knocked flat on its back by two wells turning out dry; but if Mr. Watts's third well comes in, and young Fisbee has convinced me that it will, and if my Midas's extra booms the stock and the boom develops, I shall oppose the income tax. Poor old Plattville will be full of strangers and speculators, and the 'Herald' will advocate vast improvements to impress the investor's eye. Stagnation and picturesqueness will flee together; it is the history of the Indiana town. Already the 'Herald' is clamoring with Schofields' Henry—you remember the bell-ringer?—for Main Street to be asphalted. It will all come. The only trouble with young Fisbee is that he has too much ability."

"And yet the daily will not succeed?"

"No. That's too big a jump, unless my young man's expressions on the tariff command a wide sale amongst curio-hunters."

"Then he is quite a fool about political matters?"

"Far from it; he is highly ingenious. His editorials are often the subtlest cups of flattery I ever sipped, many of them showing assiduous study of old files to master the method and notions of his eagle-eyed predecessor. But the tariff seems to have got him. He is a very masculine person, except for this one feminine quality, for, if I may say it without ungallantry, there is a legend that no woman has ever understood the tariff. Young Fisbee must be an extremely travelled person, because the custom-house people have made an impression upon him which no few encounters with them could explain, and he conceives the tariff to be a law which discommodes a lady who has been purchasing gloves in Paris. He thinks smuggling the great evil of the present tariff system; it is such a temptation, so insidious a break-down of moral fibre. His views must edify Carlow."

She gave a quick, stifled cry. "Oh! there isn't a word of truth in what you say! Not a word! I did not think you could be so cruel!"

He bent forward, peering at her in astonishment.

"Cruel!"

"You know it is a hateful distortion—an exaggeration!" she exclaimed passionately. "No man living could have so little sense as you say he has. The tariff is perfectly plain to any child. When you were in Plattville you weren't like this—I didn't know you were unkind!"

"I—I don't understand, please——"

"Miss Hinsdale has been talking—raving—to me about you! You may not know it—though I suppose you do—but you made a conquest last night. It seems a little hard on the poor young man who is at work for you in Plattville, doing his best for you, plodding on through the hot days, and doing all he knows how, while you sit listening to music in the evenings with Clara Hinsdale, and make a mock of his work and his trying to please you——"

"But I didn't mention him to Miss Hinsdale. In fact, I didn't mention anything to Miss Hinsdale. What have I done? The young man is making his living by his work—and my living, too, for that matter. It only seems to me that his tariff editorials are rather humorous."

She laughed suddenly—ringingly. "Of course they are! How should I know? Immensely humorous! And the good creature knows nothing beyond smuggling and the custom-house and chalk marks? Why, even I—ha, ha, ha!—even I—should have known better than that. What a little fool your enterprising idiot must be!—with his work-baskets and currant jelly and his trying to make the 'Herald' a daily!—It will be a ludicrous failure, of course. No doubt he thought he was being quite wise, and was pleased over his tariff editorials—his funny, funny editorials—his best—to please you! Ha, ha, ha! How immensely funny!"

"Do you know him?" he asked abruptly.

"I have not the honor of the gentleman's acquaintance. Ah," she rejoined bitterly, "I see what you mean; it is the old accusation, is it? I am a woman, and I 'sound the personal note.' I could not resent a cruelty for the sake of a man I do not know. But let it go. My resentment is personal, after all, since it is against a man I do know—you!"

He leaned toward her because he could not help it. "I'd rather have resentment from you than nothing."

"Then I will give you nothing," she answered quickly.

"You flout me!" he cried. "That is better than resentment."

"I hate you most, I think," she said with a tremulousness he did not perceive, "when you say you do not care to go back to Plattville."

"Did I say it?"

"It is in every word, and it is true; you don't care to go back there."

"Yes, it is true; I don't."

"You want to leave the place where you do good; to leave those people who love you, who were ready to die to avenge your hurt!" she exclaimed vehemently. "Oh, I say that is shameful!"

"Yes, I know," he returned gravely. "I am ashamed."

"Don't say that!" she cried. "Don't say you are ashamed of it. Do you suppose I do not understand the dreariness it has been for you? Don't you know that I see it is a horror to you, that it brings back your struggle with those beasts in the dark, and revivifies all your suffering, merely to think of it?" Her turns and sudden contradictions left him tangled in a maze; he could not follow, but must sit helpless to keep pace with her, while the sheer happiness of being with her tingled through his veins. She rose and took a step aside, then spoke again: "Well, since you want to leave Carlow, you shall; since you do not wish to return, you need not.—Are you laughing at me?" She leaned toward him, and looked at him steadily, with her face close to his. He was not laughing; his eyes shone with a deep fire; in that nearness he hardly comprehended what she said. "Thank you for not laughing," she whispered, and leaned back from him. "I suppose you think my promises are quite wild, and they are. I do not know what I was talking about, or what I meant, any better than you do. You may understand some day. It is all—I mean that it hurts one to hear you say you do not care for Carlow." She turned away. "Come."

"Where?"

"It is my turn to conclude the interview. You remember, the last time it was you who—" She broke off, shuddering, and covered her face with her hands. "Ah, that!" she exclaimed. "I did not think—I did not mean to speak of that miserable, miserable night. And I to be harsh with you for not caring to go back to Carlow!"

"Your harshness," he laughed. "A waft of eider."

"We must go," she said. He did not move, but sat staring at her like a thirsty man drinking. With an impulsive and pretty gesture she reached out her hand to him. Her little, white glove trembled in the night before his eyes, and his heart leaped to meet its sudden sweet generosity; his thin fingers closed over it as he rose, and then that hand he had likened to a white butterfly lay warm and light and quiet in his own. And as they had so often stood together in their short day and their two nights of the moon, so now again they stood with a serenading silence between them. A plaintive waltz-refrain from the house ran through the blue woof of starlit air as a sad-colored thread through the tapestry of night; they heard the mellow croon of the 'cello and the silver plaints of violins, the chiming harp, and the triangle bells, all woven into a minor strain of dance-music that beat gently upon their ears with such suggestion of the past, that, as by some witchcraft of hearing, they listened to music made for lovers dancing, and lovers listening, a hundred years ago.

"I care for only one thing in this world," he said, tremulously. "Have I lost it? I didn't mean to ask you, that last night, although you answered. Have I no chance? Is it still the same? Do I come too late?"

The butterfly fluttered in his hand and then away.

She drew back and looked at him a moment.

"There is one thing you must always understand," she said gently, "and that is that a woman can be grateful. I give you all the gratitude there is in me, and I think I have a great deal; it is all yours. Will you always remember that?"

"Gratitude? What can there—"

"You do not understand now, but some day you will. I ask you to remember that my every act and thought which bore reference to you—and there have been many—came from the purest gratitude. Although you do not see it now, will you promise to believe it?"

"Yes," he said simply.

"For the rest—" She paused. "For the rest—I do not love you."

He bowed his head and did not lift it.

"Do you understand?" she asked.

"I understand," he answered, quietly.

She looked at him long, and then, suddenly, her hand to her heart, gave a little, pitying, tender cry and moved toward him. At this he raised his head and smiled sadly. "No; don't you mind," he said. "It's all right. I was such a cad the other time I needed to be told; I was so entirely silly about it, I couldn't face the others to tell them good-night, and I left you out there to go in to them alone. I didn't realize, for my manners were all gone. I'd lived in a kind of stupor, I think, for a long time; then being with you was like a dream, and the sudden waking was too much for me. I've been ashamed often, since, in thinking of it—and I was well punished for not taking you in. I thought only of myself, and I behaved like a whining, unbalanced boy. But I had whined from the moment I met you, because I was sickly with egoism and loneliness and self-pity. I'm keeping you from the dancing. Won't you let me take you back to the house?"

A commanding and querulous contralto voice was heard behind them, and a dim, majestic figure appeared under the Japanese lantern.

"Helen?"

The girl turned quickly. "Yes, mamma."

"May I ask you to return to the club-house for supper with me? Your father has been very much worried about you. We have all been looking for you."

"Mamma, this is Mr. Harkless."

"How do you do?" The lady murmured this much so far under her breath that the words might have been mistaken for anything else—most plausibly, perhaps, for, "Who cares if it is?"—nor further did she acknowledge John's profound inclination. Frigidity and complaint of ill-usage made a glamour in every fold of her expensive garments; she was large and troubled and severe. A second figure emerged from behind her and bowed with the suave dignity that belonged to Brainard Macauley. "Mr. Macauley has asked to sit at our table," Mrs. Sherwood said to Helen. "May I beg you to come at once? Your father is holding places for us."

"Certainly," she answered. "I will follow you with Mr. Harkless."

"I think Mr. Harkless will excuse you," said the elder lady. "He has an engagement. Mr. Meredith has been looking everywhere for him to take Miss Hinsdale out to supper."

"Good-night, Miss Sherwood," said John in a cheerful voice. "I thank you for sitting out the dance with me."

"Good-night," she said, and gave him her hand. "I'm so sorry I shan't see you again; I am only in Rouen for this evening, or I should ask you to come to see me. I am leaving to-morrow morning. Good-night.—Yes, mamma."

The three figures went toward the bright lights of the club-house. She was leaning on Macauley's arm and chatting gaily, smiling up at him brightly. John watched her till she was lost in the throng on the veranda. There, in the lights, where waiters were arranging little tables, every one was talking and moving about, noisily, good-humored and happy. There was a flourish of violins, and then the orchestra swung into a rampant march that pranced like uncurbed cavalry; it stirred the blood of old men with militant bugle calls and blast of horns; it might have heralded the chariot of a flamboyant war god rioting out of sunrise, plumed with youth. Some quite young men on the veranda made as if they were restive horses champing at the bit and heading a procession, and, from a group near by, loud laughter pealed.

John Harkless lifted to his face the hand that had held hers; there was the faint perfume of her glove. He kissed his own hand. Then he put that hand and the other to his forehead, and sank into her chair.