"I'll get over the wall and see if there is any trouble with them," I said and I suited my actions to my words. I suppose in the dark I forgot that cows have horns and that I had never even been introduced to one before, for with the greatest confidence and sympathy I walked up near the large black mass that was the cow mother, with a very small and wavering body pressed close at her side.

"Did you call me, Mother Cow?" I asked softly.

The question was taken from my lips as Pan came out of the darkness behind her and took me into his arms.

"Yes, she called you. I didn't think I'd see you. I was just going to leave her for you and go my way; but trust women for secret communication," he said as my arm slipped around his bare throat.

"Not see me?" I questioned.

"I never wanted to see you again until I came for you, Woman. I didn't think I could stand it—to put you out of my arms again. I can't take you with me to-night. I came miles out of my way to bring her to you, and I've hurried them both cruelly. The calf is only two days old, but you do need her badly to feed the chickens. Milk-fed chickens show a gain of thirty per cent. over others. You can churn and get all the butter you need and feed them the buttermilk."

"Do you suppose I can learn to milk and churn her?" I asked as I shrank a bit closer in his arms from this new responsibility.

"Milk her and churn the milk," laughed Pan as he bent my head forward on his arm, set his teeth in the back of my neck, and shook me like Peckerwood Pup shakes the gray kitten when I'm not looking.

"Will you show me in the morning?"

"Woman, I have to run ten miles through the forest before daybreak, and I don't know when I can come back to you. I know I ought to tell you things, but I—I just can't. I demand of life that I be allowed to come for you and take you into the woods with only your Romney bundle. Will you be here ready for me when I come, and keep the bundle tied up?"

"Yes," I answered as I drew his head down and pressed it to my breast, hoping that he might hear the chant on my heartstrings. I think he did hear.

"I am thy child. I am thy mate. Come!"

he made response, as he slipped from my arms and away into the darkness, leaving me alone with only the mother now for company. She licked my arm with a warm, rough tongue, and I came back into my own body and led her to the barn and supper.

There are two kinds of love, the cultivated kind that bores into a woman's heart through silk and laces in a hot-house atmosphere and brings about all kinds of enervating reactions until operated upon by marriage; the other kind a field woman breathes into her lungs and it gets into her circulation and starts up the most awful and productive activity. I've had both kinds. I moped for months over Gale Beacon, and made him and Matthew and father completely unhappy, lost ten pounds, and was sent to a rest-cure for temper. The next morning after Adam gave me the cow and calf and passionate embraces out in the orchard I began to work like six women, and what I did to Elmnest not ten women could have accomplished in as many days.

I weeded the whole garden and I picked three bushels of our first peas, tied up sixty bunches of very young beets with long, tough orchard grass, treated fifty bunches of slender onions the same way, half a dozen of each to the bunch, and helped Bud Corn-tassel load a two-horse wagon with them and everything eatable he could get out of Aunt Mary's garden. Then I got up at two o'clock in the night and fed the mules so Bud could start at half-past two in order to be in the market at Hayesville long before the break of day, so as to sell the truck at the very top of the market to the earliest greengrocers. I gave Bud coffee and bread and butter and drove the team down to the gate while he went ahead to open it. I stood up while I drove, too, because Bud had not had room to put a seat in for himself and expected to stand up all the way to town. Talk about Mordkin and Pavlova! To stand up and drive a team hitched to a jolt-wagon over boulders and roots requires leg muscles! I hope I will be able to restrain myself from driving the team into market some day, but I am not sure I can. With the eggs and the "truck" Bud brought back sixteen dollars, eleven of which were mine. I bought a peck of green peas for myself from myself and ate most of them for dinner by way of blowing in some of the money. Then the chant on my heartstrings speeded me up to white-washing all the chicken paraphernalia on the place, and I dropped corn behind Rufus' plow for a whole day, even if it was to produce food for the swine. I went to bed at night literally on time with the chickens. I could only stay awake to kneel and reach out the arms of prayer and enfold Pan to my heart for a very few seconds before I vaulted into the four-poster and tumbled into the depths of sleep.

My activities were not in any way limited by the stone walls that surround Elmnest, but they spread over entire Riverfield, which had very nearly quit the pursuit of agriculture and gone madly into a social adventure. Everybody was getting ready for the trip into the capital city to answer the governor's invitation, and clothing of every color, texture, and sex was being manufactured by the bolt. For every garment manufactured I was sponsor.

"I sure am glad you have come down, Nancy," said Mrs. Addcock, with almost a moan; "that Mamie there won't let me turn up the hem of her dress without you, though I say what is a hem to a woman who has set in six pairs of sleeves since day before yesterday!"

"I want shoe-tops and Ma wants ankles," sniffed Mamie Addcock. "Polly Beesley wears shoe-tops and she's seventeen and goes to the city to dance. And Miss Bess' and yours are shoe-tops, too."

"Now you see what it is to raise a child to be led into sin and vanity," said Mrs. Addcock, looking at me reproachfully from her seat upon the floor at the feet of the worldly Mamie.

"I'll turn up the hem just right, Mrs. Addcock, while you get the collars on little Sammie's and Willie's shirts," I said soothingly as I sank down beside her at Mamie's feet.

"I had to cut Sammie's shirt with a tail to tuck in, all on account of that Mr. Matthew Berry's telling him that shirt and pants ought to do business together. And there's Willie's jeans pants got to have pockets for the knife that Mr. Owen gave him. I just can't keep up with these city notions of my children with five of 'em and a weak back." As she grumbled Mrs. Addcock rose slowly from her lowly position to her feet.

"I'll make Willie's trousers, Mrs. Addcock, this afternoon, if he'll come and help me feed and bed everything at Elmnest," I offered, with my mouth full of pins.

"No, child, but thank you for your willing heart. Mrs. Spain told me how you made Ezra's pants so one leg of him came while the other went, and I guess a mother is the only one to get the legs of her own offspring to match. I'll work it out myself now that Miss Mamie is attended to."

"But now I know how to trouser boys normally. I turned Joe Tillett out in perfect proportion as well as in strong jeans," I answered, without the least offense at finding my first efforts as a tailor thus becoming the subject of kindly village gossip.

"Well, I hope this junket will turn out as Mary Beesley expects, with enjoyment for everybody. However, I'm going to risk my back with Mr. Silas' mules rather than with that Bessie Rutherford's wheels that are not critter-drawn. I only hope she don't spill all my children, that I've had such a time getting here on earth, back into Kingdom Come."

"Would you rather go in my carriage with Mrs. Tillett, and let me go with Bess to hold in the children?" I asked with unconcealed eagerness.

"No, I don't believe so," answered Mrs. Addcock, cannily. "Sallie Tillett is having her dress made buttoned up in the back, and she has been in the habit of feeding the baby whenever he cries for it, though he can 'most stand alone. She is going to depend on you and a bag of biscuit to manage him through the show, and I'd rather not take your place."

"No; perhaps you would enjoy it more behind Uncle Silas and the mules," I answered cheerily, feeling perfectly capable of handling Baby Tillett and his bag of biscuits, because the memory of the times his little head with its tow fuzz had cuddled down on my linen smock, when I had carried him back and forth for long visits in the barn to the Peckerwood Pup so his mother could have a little vacation from his society, accelerated the movement of the chant on the cardiac instrument in my breast. "He stays hours and hours with me in a basket in the barn and is perfectly satisfied with the biscuits."

"All the same I told Sallie I could make that dress by another pattern, and you'd better sit with him a good distance during the show," said Mrs. Addcock, as I finished shoe-topping Mamie and picked up my pink-lined white sunbonnet, which had been a present from Mrs. Addcock herself and was astonishingly frilly and coquettish emanating from such a source, and began to depart.

"I'll take him on the other side of the auditorium," I answered, with respect for advice that I knew must be good through experience.

And thus that pink and white, cooing, obstreperously hungry baby was made an instrument of cruel fate and—

"Come over and see the little cap I've made Bennie so as to do you honor," called rosy Mrs. Tillett as I went down the street towards the grocery.

"I ain't got but six more yards of gingham to sew up for the two littlest," Mrs. Spain called cheerily as she looked past a whirring sewing-machine out through a window that was wreathed with a cinnamon rose-vine in full bloom.

"Want any help?" I called from the gate, which was flanked on both sides by blooming lilacs.

"No; you go on down to the store. Mr. Silas have brought out ten suits of clothes for the men to pick from, and they are a-waiting for your taste. Persuade Joe Spain to get that purple mixed. I do love gay colors, and it'll go with my pink foulard."

The scenes into which I entered in the post-office-bank-grocery was comedy in form, but serious in interpretation. The counter was piled high with men's garments of every color that is bestowed upon woolen cloth in the dyers' vats. Uncle Silas stood behind it with his glasses at a rampant angle on his nose, and Aunt Mary stood in the center of a shuffling, embarrassed, harassed group of farmers in overalls. Before her stood Bud, attired in a light gray suit of aggressively new clothes, and she was using him hard as a dummy upon which to illustrate her vigorous and persuasive remarks.

"Now, I am glad you have come down, honeybunch," she exclaimed at sight of me. "Here's a bale of clothes and a bale of men, and nobody can seem to match 'em up suitable. I have at last got Bud Beesley here into a dead match for his beauty, if I do say it of my own son. Just look at him!" As she spoke she stood off from him and folded her plump hands across her wide waist in motherly rapture.

And Bud, with his violet eyes and yellow shock, was beautiful in the "custom-made," fifteen-dollar gray cheviot, despite his red ears. All the Harpeth Valley farmer folk have French Cavalier, English gentle, and Irish good blood in them, with mighty little else and, as in the case of Bud and Polly Corn-tassel, when clothed in garments of the world, it comes to the surface with startling effect. Bud could have put on a gray slouch hat with either a crimson or an orange band and walked into any good Eastern college fraternity or club he might have chosen.

"Shoo, Mother," said Bud as he turned around for my admiration, not surfeited with that of his mother.

"I only hope some town girl won't catch him like your mother did William," said Aunt Mary, with a laugh that ended in a little sigh that only I heard. Somehow I will feel psychically akin to Bud and Polly.



"Town girls are all movie-struck and don't want a man if a butter-paddle goes along with him," said Bud, with a laugh that was echoed from the overalled group.

"Yes, but Miss Nancy here has outsold any woman in Riverfield for cash on eggs and chickens before May first," said Mr. Spain as he picked up a gray purple coat from the top of the pile on the counter.

"She'll marry and go away in a big car, too," said Bud, as he looked down and flecked an imaginary speck from the sleeve of his new coat. Something in his voice made me determine to introduce Belle Proctor's little sixteen-year-old sister to Bud in the near future. The kiddie spends half her time away from school in Bess's conservatory with Mr. G. Bird's non-resident family, and I think it will do her good to come out in the field and play with Bud. She is frail and too slight.

"Say, Miss Nancy, what do you think of this here purple to set me off?" asked Mr. Spain, as he held up the garment of his wife's desire. "Betty says it'll match out her dimity, and I 'low to match Betty as long as I can."

"It'll be the very thing, Mr. Spain," I said, as I controlled my horror at the flaring-colored coat and reminded myself that harmony of domestic relations is greater than any harmony of art.

"Now, pick your coats and slip 'em on, all of you, so Nancy can judge you," commanded the general. In a very short time each man had got out of his overall jumper and into his heart's desire.

A stalwart, comely, clean-eyed group of American men they were as they stood on parade, clothed for the most part in seemly raiment, chosen with Uncle Silas's quiet taste, except in the case of Mr. Spain, where he had let his experience of the past lead his taste.

"Please, dear God, don't let them ever have to be put into khaki," I prayed with a quick breath, for I knew, though they did not seem to recognize the fact, that this rally of the rural districts in the city hall was a part of the great program of preparedness that America was having forced upon her. I knew that the speech of the governor would be about the State militia and I knew that Evan Baldwin would talk to them about the mobilization of their stocks and crops. Quick tears flooded across my eyes, and I stretched out my hands to them.

"You all look good to me," I faltered in some of Matthew's language, because I couldn't think of anything else to say but the prayer in my heart, and I didn't want to repeat that to them.

"Now, you have all passed your city examinations, so you can get back to work. Remember, that day after to-morrow is the junket, and one day won't be any too much to bank up your fires to run until you come back," said Aunt Mary in the way of dismissal.

"Talk about vanity in women folks? The first peacock hatched out was of the male persuasion," she remarked as we stood at the emporium door and watched the men dispersing, their bundles under their arms, each one making direct for his own front door. "Every woman in Riverfield will have to put down needle and fry-pan and butter-paddle to feed them so plum full of compliments that they'll strut for a week. Bless my heart, honeybunch, we have all got to turn around twice in each track to get ready, and as I'm pretty hefty I must begin right now." With this remark, Aunt Mary departed from the back door to her house on the hill and sent me out the front to Elmnest opposite.

"I thought that there was some reason why Pan and I both chose to wear Roycroft clothes. Mr. and Mrs. Spain are in love after eight children," I remarked to myself happily. "I am in agony in any shoes Pan doesn't make. I wonder if any woman ever before was as much in love with a man about whom she knew so little—and so much as I do about Adam."

"I don't want to know about him—I want to love him," I answered myself as I walked up the long elm avenue. Afterwards I recalled those words to myself, and they were bitter instead of sweet.



CHAPTER X

Friday, the twenty-first of April, I shall always remember as the busiest day of my life, for, as Aunt Mary had said, it takes time to bank fires enough to keep a farm alive a whole half day even if it is not running. I did all my usual work with my small folk, and then I measured and poured out in different receptacles their existence for the last half of the next day. After breakfast on Saturday I finally decided upon Uncle Cradd as the most trustworthy person of the three ancients, one of whom I was obliged to depend upon for substitution. Rufus, I felt sure, would compromise by feeding every ration to the hogs, and I knew that he could persuade father to do likewise, but Uncle Cradd, I felt, would bring moral force to bear upon the situation.

"Now, Uncle Cradd, here are all the different feeds in different buckets, each plainly marked with the time to give it. Please, oh, please, don't let father lead you off into Egypt or China and forget them," I said as I led him to the barn and showed him the mobilization of buckets that I had shut up in one of the empty bins.

"Why not just empty it all out on the ground in front of the barn, Nancy, my dear, and let them all feed together in friendly fashion. I am afraid you take these pretty whims of yours too seriously," he said as he beamed affectionately at me over his large glasses.

"Because Peckerwood Pup would eat up the Leghorn babies, and it would be extermination to some and survival to the most unfit," I answered in despair. "Oh, won't you please do it by the directions?"

"I will, my child, I will," answered Uncle Cradd, as he saw that I was about to become tearful. "I will come and sit right here in the barn with my book."

"Oh, if you only will, Uncle Cradd, they will remind you when they are hungry. Mr. G. Bird will come and peck at you when it is time to feed his family, and the lambs and Mrs. Ewe will lick you, and Peckerwood Pup will chew you, so you can't forget them," I exclaimed in relief.

"That will be the exact plan for action, Nancy. You can always depend upon me for any of the small attentions that please you, my dear."

"I can depend on the fur and feathers and wool tribes better than I can on you, old dear," I said to myself, while I beamed on him with a dutiful, "Thank you, sir."

Then as Bud Corn-tassel had arrived to begin to hitch up the moth-eaten steeds to the ark, I ascended to my room to shed my farmer smocks, for the first time since my incarnation into them, and attire myself for the world again. The only garb of fashion I possessed, having sold myself out completely on my retirement, was the very stylish, dull-blue tailor suit in which I had traveled out the Riverfield ribbon almost three months before. But as that had been mid-February, it was of spring manufacture, and I supposed would still be able to hold its own.

"It's perfectly beautiful, but it feels tight and hampering," I said as I descended to enter the coach Bud had driven around to the front door.

"Will you give me a guarantee that you aren't just a dream lady I'll lose again in the city, Miss Nancy?" asked Bud, as he handed me into the Grandmother Craddock coach with great ceremony. Gale Beacon couldn't have done any better on such short notice.

"I'll be in smocks at feeding-time in the morning, Bud, just as you will be in overalls," I answered laughingly.

"My, but you are a sight!" said Mrs. Tillett, as she handed up Baby Tillett to me, with such a beaming countenance that I knew she meant a complimentary construction to be placed upon her words. "Now, just take up them little girls and set 'em down easy, Mr. Bud, on account of their ruffles, and ram the boys in between to hold 'em steady. Now, boys, if you muss up the girls I'll make every one of you wear your shoes all day to-morrow to teach you manners. Go on, Mr. Bud."

Thus nicely packed away, we started on down the Riverfield ribbon at the head of the procession, followed by Uncle Silas driving Aunt Mary's rockaway, with his beautiful, dappled, shining, gray mules hitched to it, and beside him sat Mrs. Addcock in serene confidence in being driven by a man who could drive a bank and a post-office and a grocery. Mamie and Gertie Spain were spread out carefully on the back seat, with only one small masculine Spain for a wedge. The Buford buggy, all spick and span from its first spring washing and polishing, came next, with Mr. and Mrs. Buford cuddling together on the narrow seat. They were a bride and groom of very little over a year's standing, and the blue-blanketed bundle that the bride carried in her arms was no reason, in Mr. Buford's mind, why he shouldn't drive with one hand while he held a steadying and affectionate arm around them both. Buford Junior was less than a month old, but why shouldn't he begin to adventure out in the big world? Parson and Mrs. Henderson came next, he with snow-white flowing beard, and she, beside him, in a gray bonnet with a pink rose, while beside her sat his mother, Granny Henderson, now past eighty, but with a purple pansy nestled in her waterwaves.

Others followed, and the remainder waited on the steps of the emporium, with Aunt Mary and Polly, for Matthew and Bess to come for them. It was hard for them to realize that the powerful engines in both cars would take them into town in little over an hour, when the journey as they before had made it had always consumed six, and they were becoming impatient even before we left. So when we met Bess and Matthew half an hour later down the Riverfield ribbon, I hurried them back. I afterwards learned that they had had to persuade Mrs. Spain to reclothe herself in the pink foulard, because she had decided that they were not coming and had gone back to work.

In reality I didn't draw a perfectly free breath until I saw the entire population of Riverfield seated in advantageous seats on the middle aisle in the town hall at six-thirty, and beginning to get out their lunch-baskets to feed themselves and the kiddies before the opening of the convocation at eight o'clock.

According to the advice of Mrs. Addcock and Mrs. Tillett herself, I had taken a stuffed egg, a chicken wing, and a slice of jelly-cake for my own supper, along with Baby Tillett's bag of hard biscuits, over on a side aisle, and from that vantage-point I could see the whole party.

"They are lovely—the loveliest of all, mine are," I said to myself as I surveyed them proudly and compared them with other lunching delegations, which I knew to be from Providence and Hillsboro and Cloverbend.

Baby Tillett crowed a proud assent as he stuck a biscuit in his mouth and looked at the lights with the greatest pleasure. I took off his new cap with its two blue bows over the ears, unbuttoned his little pique coat, which I had almost entirely built myself, and which was of excellent cut, and settled down to dine with him in contentment.

Then it happened that I was so weary from the day of excitement that I had hardly finished my supper before I snuggled Baby Tillett closer in my arms, as I felt him grow limp very suddenly, and with him I drifted off into a nap. I was sitting in a corner seat, but I don't yet see how I slept as I did and cuddled him too unless it was just the force of natural maternal gravitation that held my arms firmly around him, but the first thing I knew I opened my eyes on the whole hall full of people, who were wildly applauding the governor as he stepped forward on the platform. Hurriedly straightening my drooping head and looking guiltily around to see if I had been caught napping, I discovered Matthew Berry at my side in a broad chuckle, and I immediately suspected his stalwart right arm of being that force of gravitation.

"He's dead to the world; let him lie across your knees and listen to the governor's heroics of introduction to Baldwin," said Matthew as he settled the limp baby across my lap with his bobbing head on my arm. And he adjusted his own arm less conspicuously along the seat at my back.

"I was up at four," I whispered, as the applause died away and the governor began to speak.

The Governor of the State of Harpeth is a good and substantial man, who was himself born out on Paradise Ridge, and he had called in all of his people from their fields to talk to them about a problem so serious that the world of men, who had hitherto considered themselves as competent to guide the great national ship of state through peaceful waters, had been impelled to turn and call to council the men from the plows and reapers, to add their wisdom in deciding the best methods of safeguarding the nation. His speech was a thoughtful presentation of the different methods of preparedness which the whole of America was weighing in the balance. He explained the army policy, the Congressional policy, and then that of the State guard, and he asked them to weigh the facts well so that if it should come to the vote of the people of the nation, they would vote with instructed wisdom.

There was a strained gravity on all the listening faces, and I could see some of the women in the groups of farmer folk draw nearer against the shoulders of the men, who all sat with their arms along the back of the seats as Matthew sat beside me. Young Mrs. Buford held the precious, limp, blue bundle much closer in her arms, and hid her head on the broad shoulder next her own, but on Mrs. Spain's comely face I saw a light beginning to dawn as she proudly surveyed the four sturdy sons with shining faces who flanked her and Mr. Spain.

"And now," said the governor, "I have asked you here to-night to introduce formally to you one of the great sons of Old Harpeth, who has come back from the world, with his wealth and honors and wisdom and science, into his own valley, to show us how to make the plowshare support the machine-gun with such power that the world will respect its silence more than any explosion. A year or more ago he came home and asked me for his commission, and since then he has lived among you so as to become your friend, in hopes that he might be your chosen leader in this food mobilization. Gentlemen and ladies of the Harpeth Valley, I present to you Mr. Evan Baldwin, who will speak to you to-night on the 'Plowshare and the Machine-gun.' Friends, Evan Adam Baldwin."

For a second there was expectant silence, and then from the back of the platform from behind a group of State officials stepped—my Pan!

For a long second the whole hall full of people held their breath in a tense uncertainty, because it was hard to believe in the broadcloth and fine linen in which he was clothed, but the brilliant hair, the ruffling crests, and the mocking, eery smile made them all certain by the second breath, which they gave forth in one long masculine hurrah mingled with a feminine echo of delight. For several long minutes it would not be stilled as he stood and smiled down on them all and mocked them with his laugh mingling with theirs.

Finally Aunt Mary, the general, could stand it no longer, and forgetful of her Saint Paul, she arose with all the dignity of her two hundred pounds and raised her hand.

"All be still, neighbors, and let Adam tell us the same things he's been saying for these many months, and then we'll let him shuck his fine clothes and come on home in my rockaway with us."

"No, with us!" fairly yelled Cloverbend in unison of protest with Providence.

"Thank you, Aunt Mary," said Pan in the fluty tenderness with which he had always addressed her. "The governor doesn't know it, but I can't make a speech to you to-night. I am going to catch that ten o'clock train for Argentina, to get some wheat secrets for all of us, and I want all of you to begin right away to plow good and deep so you'll be ready for me when I get back in a few months. We'll have to inoculate the land before we sow. Only here are just one or two things I will say to you before I have to start."

For about ten minutes Adam stood there before those farmer folk and, with his fluty voice and the fire glow in his eyes, led them up upon a high mountain of imagination and showed them the distant land into which he could lead them, which, when they arrived, they would find to be their own.

The baby on my lap stirred, and I lifted him against my throbbing breast as I listened to this gospel of a new earth, which might be made into the outposts of a new Heaven, in which man would nourish his weaker brother into a strength equal to his own, so that no man or nation would have to fight for existence or a place in the sun. Then while we all sat breathless from his magic, Pan vanished and left us to be sent home rejoicing by the governor.

Sent home rejoicing? Suddenly I realized that when Evan Adam Baldwin had gone, my Pan had also vanished without a word to me. What did it mean? His eyes hadn't found me sitting apart from my delegation with another woman's baby in my arms. Would there be a word for me in the morning?

"In Baldwin emerges the new American," said Matthew, with a light in his face I had never seen before, as we all rose to go.

"Do you blame every woman in the world for being mad about him when you saw that look in his eyes when he held out his hands and chanted that food plea to us? I'm glad he doesn't beckon to me, or I am afraid Owen Murray and Madam Felicia would be disappointed about that June decision of mine," said Bess as she and Owen helped Bud pack the Tilletts and me into the ark for our return trip.

"Will there be word for me in the morning?" the old wheels rattled all the way out the Riverfield ribbon, and I thought an old owl hooted the question at me from a dead tree beside the road, while I felt also that a mocking-bird sang it from a thicket of dogwood in ghostly bloom opposite. "Will there be word in the morning?"

The next morning I awoke with the same question making a new motive in the chant on my heartstrings.

"Uncle Cradd will bring his letter when he comes back from the post-office, and I know he'll send a message to you, Mr. G. Bird," I said happily, as I watered and fed and caressed and joyed in the entire barn family. "I hate him for being what he is and treating me this way, but I love him still more," I confided to Mrs. Ewe as I gave her an extra handful of wheat out of the blouse-pocket which I kept filled for Mr. G. Bird from pure partiality.

Uncle Cradd did not bring a letter from the post-office for me. The blow in the apple orchard and the purple plumes on the lilac bushes looked less brilliant in hue, but the tune on my heartstrings kept up a note of pure bravado. I weeded the garden all afternoon, but stopped early, fed early, and went up-stairs to my room before the last sunset glow had faded off the dormer windows. Opening my old mahogany chest, I took out a bundle I had made up the day after the advent of Mother Cow and the calf, spread it out on the bed, and looked it over.

In it was an incredible amount of lingerie, made of crepe de chine and lace, folded tightly and tied with a ribbon into a package not over a foot square. A comb and a brush of old ivory, which had set in its back a small mirror held in by a silver band, which father had purchased in Florence for me under a museum guaranty as a genuine Cellini work of art, were wrapped in a silk case, and a toothbrush and soap had occupied their respective oil-silk cases along with a tube of tooth paste and one of cold cream. Two pairs of soft, but strong, tan cotton stockings were tucked underneath the ribbon confining the lingerie, and a small prayer-book with both mine and my mother's name in it completed the—I hadn't exactly liked to call it a trousseau. It was all tied up in one of Adam's Romney handkerchiefs, which he had washed out one day in the spring branch and left hanging on a hickory sapling to dry, and which I had appropriated because I loved its riot of faded colors.

"It is just about the size of his," I had said to myself as I had tied up its corners that day after my love adventure in the orchard under the chaperonage of Mother Cow, and I had laughed as I imagined Pan's face when he discovered that I had been so entirely unfemininely subservient to his command about light traveling. Suddenly I swept the bundle together and back in the chest, while a note of genuine fear swept into the song in my heart.

"He'll write from New Orleans—he doesn't sail until to-morrow," I whispered as I quieted the discord and went down to prayers.

"I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul:"

intoned Uncle Cradd, and somehow the tumult in my heart was stilled for the night, and I could as usual take Pan into my prayer arms and ask God to keep him safe. I wonder how many women would really pray if there weren't men in the world to furnish them the theme!

Also I wonder how it is possible for me to write about that following first week of May when I had to feel the chant die out of my heart and still live and help a lot of other live creatures, both people and animals, to go on breathing also.

Each day Uncle Cradd failed to bring me a letter from the post-office, and after a week I ceased to look for one. I knew that Evan Adam Baldwin was on the high seas and that if he had not written before he sailed he never intended to write. My common sense kindly and plainly spoke this truth to my aching heart: Pan had been simply having a word adventure with me in character.



CHAPTER XI

The beginning of the twentieth century has witnessed many startling inventions, reforms, evolutions, and revolutions, but mankind generally is not aware that the most remarkable result of many combined new forces is a woman whose intellect can go on functioning at the same time that her heart is aching with either requited or unrequited love. Just ten days after I had been jilted, instead of lying in a darkened room in hysterics, I went into a light corner of the barn, sat down on an upturned seed-bucket, took my farm-book on my knee, wet my pencil between my lips, and began to figure up the account between Evan Adam Baldwin and myself. First, I sat still for a long second and tried to set a price on myself the hour before I had first encountered him out on the Riverfield ribbon on the day I had made my entry into rural life. And think as hard as I could I couldn't think up a single thing I had done worth while to my race; so I had to write a great cipher against myself. Then in another column I set down the word "assets," and after it I wrote, "The Golden Bird and family, eight hundred dollars." Then I thought intently back into the past and into the haircloth trunk and wrote, "Clothes, one hundred and fifty dollars."

Then I sat for another long time and looked out the door to the Paradise Ridge across the Harpeth Valley, after which I smoothed the page, dated it, and again began to take stock of myself and the business. I listed the original investment of Mr. G. Bird and the ladies Leghorn, one of which was at that moment picking wheat from my pocket, on through their fifty progeny, for which I had established a price of twenty dollars per head, through the two lambkins I had bought from Rufus for ten dollars, Mother Cow and the calf, the hundred and fifty pearls in the incubators, half of which I had sold to Owen and Bess and ten of which I had sold to a real chicken dealer who knew Mr. G. Bird's pedigree and had come all the way from Georgia to buy them. The whole inventory, including the wheat I had paid Matthew for and the improvements I had made on the barn, or rather Adam had made, also including the prospects in the garden, amounted to eighteen hundred dollars. Then I thought still longer and finally after my own name wrote one hundred and fifty dollars' worth of "education." The total was nineteen hundred and fifty dollars, thus making a profit on my investments of about eight hundred dollars. After this calculation I sat and chewed the pencil a long time, then turned a fresh page, wrote, "Evan Adam Baldwin," on the one side, "Profit" in the middle, and a large cipher opposite.

Then I closed the book forever with such decision that the Leghorn lady and Mrs. Ewe, who was helping her explore me, both jumped, and I rose to my feet.

"I got eight hundred and fifty dollars out of the deal, and Evan Adam Baldwin only got a few mediocre and amateur kisses, which he shared with me, for all his hard labor in plowing and tilling and restoring Elmnest and me to the point of being of value in the scheme of things. I got the best of that deal and why should I sulk?" I said to myself in a firm and even tone of voice. I didn't.

If I had worked like a couple of women when speeded up by a weird chant on my heartstrings, which I now recognized was just a part of the system used in my reorganization, I worked like five when my heart became perfectly dead and silent. I got out of my bed the very minute that the first gleam of consciousness came into my mind, before I could have a second to think about anything unprofitable, plunged into the old brass-bound cedar tub of cold water, which I had carried up from the spring in a bucket that matched it the night before, got into my corduroys and smock, and was out in the barn and at work before it would seem possible for a woman to more than open her eyes of understanding upon the world. All day long I weeded and hoed and harvested and fed and cleaned and marketed that farm until I fell dead between the posts of the old bed at night.

I didn't pray. I knew God would understand.

And through it all there was Matthew! The first week or two he remonstrated with me; then when he saw that I was possessed by the demon of work he just rolled up his sleeves, collected Polly and Bud, and helped. He promoted his best clerk in the office to a junior partnership, refused several important cases, bought the hundred-acre forest which joins Elmnest, which Aunt Mary had had in her family for generations, and which had been considered as waste land after the cedars had been cut off, and began to restore it. He never bothered me once in a sentimental way, and when he brought the plans of his house over on the knoll opposite Elmnest, Polly helped me enthuse and criticize them, and he went away seemingly content. His and Polly's Rhode Island Reds were rivaling my Leghorns in productiveness, and all of Riverfield seemed to have gone chicken mad. Mr. Spain traded a prize hog for a cock, and twelve black Minorca hens, and Mr. Buford brought the bride two settings of gray "Rocks" to start a college education for the bundle.

"Do you know what the whole kit and biling is so busy about?" said Aunt Mary as she surveyed with pride a new hen-house that Bud had just finished, in which I saw the trap nests over which she had disputed with the commissioner of agriculture. "They were just woke up by that speech of Adam's, and they are getting ready to show him what Riverfield can do when he gets back. When did you say you expect him, honeybunch?"

"I don't," I answered quietly.

"Why, I thought Silas said you did," she answered absent-mindedly. "Now, you can have Bud, but not for keeps, because as I borned him I think I am entitled to work him." We all laughed as Bud and I betook ourselves and a large farm-basket full of late cabbage plants across to Elmnest.

"Miss Ann, please ma'am, make mother let me go to town to-night with Mr. Matthew and stay with Miss Bess. All her linen chest has come, and I want to see it," Polly Corn-tassel waylaid us and pleaded. I went back and laid the case before her mother.

"Well, I suppose it won't hurt her if all this marriage and giving in marriage don't get into her head. I aim to keep and work her at least two years longer to pay my trouble with her teething back," agreed Aunt Mary. "When did you say the wedding was going to be?"

"June tenth," I answered.

"I heard that Mr. Owen Murray talking to Mr. Spain about his wooded piece of land over by the big spring the other night. Looks like you are a pot of honey, sure enough, child, that draws all your friends to settle around you."

"No, it's the back-to-the-land vogue, and this is the most beautiful part of the Harpeth Valley," I answered as I again began to depart with Bud and the cabbage plants.

"Adam told me one night that he was going to prove that the Garden of Eden was located right here. It was when your locusts were in full bloom and I asked him if he had run down Eve anywhere. Are you sure you don't know when he'll come back to see us all?" Aunt Mary's blue eyes danced with merriment.

"No," I answered, and went hastily back to Bud and left her muttering to herself, "Well, Silas did say—"

All afternoon I stolidly planted the gray-green young cabbage sprouts behind Bud's hoe and refused even to think about Bess's wedding-chest. But at sunset I saw I must go into town to her dinner for the announcement of her wedding, and wear one of my dresses that I had sold and then borrowed back from her—or have a serious crisis in our friendship. I hadn't strength for that, and I had hoped that the fun of it all would make noise enough to wake some kind of echo in my very silent interior, but it didn't, though there was a positive uproar when Owen brought the whole Bird collateral family, who now have wings and tails and pin feathers, into the dining-room and put them in the rose bed in the middle of the table so as to hear his oratorical effort as expectant bridegroom.

"Why is it, Matt, that you have heart enough to drive me like mad out here in the dark and not make me say a word?" I asked him as he brought me home in the after-midnight hush.

"You've trained my heart into silence, Ann," he answered gently.

"No!" I exclaimed, for I couldn't bear the thought of Matthew's big heart being silent too. Just then Polly, who had gone to sleep on the back seat, fell off and had to be rescued. We put her out at home in a wilted condition from pure good times, and then Matthew took me on up to Elmnest. An old moon was making the world look as if mostly composed of black shadows, and Matthew walked at my side out to the barn to see if all was quiet and well.

"Why, what's the matter?" I exclaimed as I ran to the side of the shed in which Mrs. Ewe and the lambs resided. "Strike your cigar-lighter quick, Matt."

As Matthew shed a tiny light from a silver tube upon the situation, I sank to my knees with a cry. There upon the grass lay one of my lambkins, and red blood was oozing from its woolly white throat. As I lifted it on my arm, its little body gave a shudder and then lay so still that I knew it was dead. Mother Ewe stood near in the shadow and gave a plaintive bleat as she came to my side.

"Oh," I sobbed as I looked up at Matthew, "it's dead. What did it?"

"A dog," answered Matthew, as he knelt beside me and laid the tiny dead lamb back on the ground.

"Not Peckerwood Pup!" I exclaimed.

"No, she's too young; some stray," answered Matthew as he look savagely around into the shadows.

"It's the littlest one, and she licked my hand the last thing before I left. I can't bear it all, Matthew—this is too much for me," I said, and I sobbed into my hands as I sank down into a heap against the side of the bereaved sheep mother, who was still uttering her plaintive moans of question.

I say now and I shall always maintain that the most wonderful tenderness in the world is that with which a man who had known a woman all his life, who has grown with her growth, has shared her laughter and her tears, and knows her to her last feminine foible or strength, takes her into his arms. Matthew crouched down upon the grass beside me and gathered me against his breast, away from the dreadful monster-inhabited shadows, and made me feel that a new day could dawn upon the world. I think from the way I huddled to his strength that he knew that I had given up the fight and that his hour was at hand.

"Do you want me now, Ann?" he asked me; gently as he pressed his cheek against my hair.

"If you want me, take me and help me find that dog to-morrow," I answered as I again reached out my hand and put it for the last time on the pathetic little woolly head. I couldn't hold back the sob.

"Go in the house to bed, dear, for you are completely worn out. I'll bury the lamb and look for any traces that may help us to find the savage," said Matthew as he drew me to my feet and with quiet authority led me to the back door and opened it for me. For a second I let him take me again into his strong arms, but I wilted there and I simply could not raise my lips to his. The first time I remember kissing Matthew Berry was at his own tenth birthday party, and he had dropped a handkerchief behind me that I had failed to see as all of the budding flower and chivalry of Hayesville stood in a ring in his mother's drawing-room.

"Dear old Matt," I murmured to myself as I again fell dead between the posts of the ancestral bed.

The next morning I awoke to a new world—or rather I turned straight about and went back into my own proper scheme of existence. At the crack of dawn I wakened and set my muscles for the spring from my pillows, then I stretched my arms, yawned, snuggled my cheek into those same pillows, and deliberately went to sleep, covering up my head with the old embroidered counter-pane to shut out from my ears a clarion crow from beyond my windows. When I next became conscious old Rufus' woolly head was peering anxiously into my room door, and I judged from the length of the shadows that the sun cast from the windows that it must be after ten o'clock.

"Am you sick?" he inquired with belligerent solicitude.

"No, Rufus, and I'm going back to sleep. Call me in time to have dinner with father and Uncle Cradd," I answered as I again burrowed into the pillows.

"I give that there rooster and family a bucket of feed," said Rufus begrudgingly, and he stood as if waiting to be praised for thus burying the hatchet that he had been mentally brandishing over the neck of the enemy.

I made no response, but stretched my tired limbs out between the silky old sheets and again lost consciousness.

The next time I became intelligent it was when Polly's soft arm was slid under my neck and her red lips applied to my cheek.

"Miss Ann, are you ill?" she questioned frantically. "Mr. Matthew and I have been here for hours and have fed and attended to everything. He made me come up because he was afraid you might be dead."

"I am, Polly, and now watch me come back to life," I said as I sat up and blinked at the sun coming in through the western window, thus proclaiming the time as full afternoon.

"We found Mr. G. Bird and all of the other—" Polly was beginning to say when I cut her short.

"Polly, dear, please go tell Matthew to ride down to the bank and telephone Bess that I'm coming in to stay a week with her and to invite Belle and Owen and the rest to dinner. By the time he gets back I'll be ready to go." As I spoke I threw the sheet from me and started to arise, take up my life, and walk.

"But who'll attend to the chickens and—" Polly fairly gasped.

"I don't know and I don't care, and if you want to go in to dinner with us, Polly, you had better hurry on, for you'll have to beg your mother hard," I said, and at the suggestion Polly fairly flew.

I don't exactly know what Polly told Matthew about me, but his face was a study as I descended elegantly clad and ready to go to town with him.

"Good, dear!" he said as I raised my lips to his and gave him a second edition of that ring-around-rosy kiss. "I knew you would wear yourself out. I have telephoned Owen to motor out that young Belgian that Baldwin got down to run my farm, and he'll take charge of everything while you rest."

"I don't care whether he comes or not," I said as I walked towards the library door to say good-by to my parent twins, who hardly noticed me at all on account of a knotty disagreement in some old Greek text they were digging over.

"Well, you needn't worry about—" Matthew was continuing to say, with the deepest uncertainty in his face and voice.

"I won't," I answered. "Did Bess say she could get enough people together to dance to-night?"

"We'll all go out to the country club and have a great fling," said Matthew, with the soothing tone of voice that one would use to a friend temporarily mentally deranged. "Hope Mother Corn-tassel lets Polly go."

"There she is waiting at the gate for us with her frills in a bundle. Swoop her up, Matt, and fly for fear she is getting off without Aunt Mary's seeing her. Aunt Mary is so bent on keeping Polly's milking hand in."

"That young Belgian says he's a good milker, and you needn't worry about—"

"I won't," I again answered Matthew, and there was snap enough in my eyes and voice to make him whistle under his breath as he literally swooped up Polly, and they both had the good sense to begin to talk about town affairs and leave unmentioned all rural matters.

Half-way into town Matthew swapped me for his Belgian in Owen's car, and Polly and I went on in with Owen and Bess, while Matthew returned out the Riverfield ribbon to install the rescuer of Elmnest.

"Oh, Ann, this is delicious," said Bess as she came back with me to cuddle me and ask questions. "But what are—"

"Bess," I said, looking her straight in the face with determination, "I am going to marry Matt two days before you marry Owen, though he doesn't know it yet, and if you talk about Elmnest to me I'll go and stay with Belle this week."

"How perfectly lovely, and how tired you are, poor dear!" Bess congratulated and exclaimed all in the same breath, then imparted both my announcement and my injunction to Owen on the front seat. I didn't look at Polly while Owen was laughing and exclaiming, but when I did she looked queer and quiet; however, I didn't let that at all affect the nice crisp crust that had hardened on me overnight. And I must say that if Corn-tassel wasn't happy that evening surrounded by the edition of masculine society that Matt had so carefully expurgated for her, she ought to have been.

By that time I had told Matthew about his approaching marriage, accepted his bear-hug of joy, delivered before Bess and Polly and Owen and Belle, and I had been congratulated and received back into the bosom of my friends with great joy and hilarity.

"Now I can take care of you forever and ever, Ann," whispered Matthew in his good-night, with his lips against my ear. And there in his strong, sustaining arms, even though limp with fatigue, I knew I never did, could, or would, love anybody like I loved him. I don't really suppose I did hear Polly sob on her pillow beside mine, where she had insisted on reposing. She must have been all right, for she was gone out into the rural district with Matthew before I was awake the next morning.

After Annette had served mine and Bess's chocolate in Bess's bedroom we settled down to the real seriousness of trousseau talk, which lasted for many long hours.

"Now if I sell you back all the things of yours I haven't worn for two hundred and fifty dollars that will leave you over three hundred in the bank to get a few wash frocks and hats and things to last you until you are enough married to Matthew to use his money freely," said Bess after about an hour of discussion and admiration of her own half-finished trousseau.

"Yes; I should say those things would be worth about two hundred and fifty dollars now that they are third-hand," I answered Bess's excited eyes, giving her a look of well-crusted affection, for there are not many women in the world, with unlimited command of the material that Bess has, who would not have offered me a spiritual hurt by trying to give me back my thousand dollars' worth of old clothes which she had not needed in the first place when she bought them.

"Now, that's all settled, and we'll begin to stretch that three hundred dollars to its limit. We won't care if things do tear, just so they look smart until you and Matthew get to New York. Matthew won't be the first bridegroom to go into raptures over a thirty-nine-cent bargain silk made up by a sixty-dollar dressmaker. I'm giving Owen a few deceptions in that line myself. That gray and purple tissue splits if you look at it, and I got it all for three dollars. Felicia made it up mostly with glue, I think, and I will be a dream in it—a dream that dissolves easily. Let's go shopping." As she thus led me into the maze of dishonest trousseau-buying, Bess began to ring for Annette.

Of course most women in the world will refuse to admit that shopping can arouse them from any kind of deadness that the sex is heir to, but a few frank ones, like myself, for instance, will say such to be the case. For three weeks I gave myself up to a perfect debauch of clothes, and ended off each day's spree by dancing myself into a state of exhaustion. Everybody in Hayesville wanted to give Bess and me parties, and most of them did, that is, as many as we could get in at the rate of three a day between dressmakers and milliners and other clothing engagements. Owen got perfectly furious and exhausted, but Matthew kept in an angelic frame of mind through it all. I think the long days with Polly out in the open helped him a lot, though at times I detected a worried expression on the faces of them both, and I felt sure that they were dying to tell me that it had been a case of the razor from Rufus' shoe between him and the Belgian or that the oil was of the grade that explodes incubators, but I gave them no encouragement and only inquired casually from time to time if the parental twins were alive. Polly even tried me out with a bunch of roses, which I knew came from the old musk clump in the corner of the garden which I had seen rebudded, but I thanked her coldly and immediately gave them to Belle's mother. I saw Matthew comforting her in the distance, and his face was tenderly anxious about me all the rest of the evening.

"Dear, are we going to be—be married in town at a church?" Matthew inquired timidly one afternoon as he drove me home from a devastated hat shop on the avenue, in which Bess and I had been spending the day.

"No, Matt dear, at Elmnest," I answered kindly, as a bride, no matter how worn out, ought to answer a groom, though Bess says that a groom ought to expect to be snapped every time he speaks for ten days before the wedding. "As long as I have got a home that contains two masculine parents I will have to be married in it. I'll go out the morning of the wedding, and you and Polly fix everything and invite everybody in Riverfield, but just the few people here in town you think we ought to have, not more than a dozen. Have it at five o'clock." I thought then that I fixed that hour because everybody would hate it because of the heat and uncertainty as to style of clothes.

"All right, dear," answered Matthew, carefully, as if handling conversational eggs.

"Miss Ann, where do you want us to fix the wedding—er—bell and altar?" Polly ventured to ask timidly a few days later.

"The parlor, of course, Polly. I hate that room, and it is as far from the barn as possible. Now don't bother me any more about it," I snapped, and sent her flying to Matthew in consternation. Later I saw them poring over the last June-bride number of "The Woman's Review," and I surmised the kind of a wedding I was in for. That day I tried on a combination of tull, lace, and embroidery at Felicia's that tried my soul as well as my body.

"It's no worse than any other wedding-dress I ever saw; take it off quick, Madame," I snapped as crossly as I dared at the poor old lady, who had gowned me from the cradle to the—I was about to say grave.

"Eh, la la, mais, you are tres deficile—difficult," she murmured reproachfully.

"Any more so than Bess?" I demanded.

"Non, perhaps non," she answered, with a French shrug.

With beautiful tact Matthew fussed with his throttle, which I couldn't see stuck at all, the entire time he was driving me home, and left me with a careful embrace and also with relief in his face that I hadn't exploded over him. Owen is not like that to Bess; he just pours gas on her explosions and fans the resulting flame until it is put out by tears in his arms.

"Let's never get married at the same time any more, Ann," groaned Bess as Annette tried to put us both to bed that night before we fell dead on her hands.

"Don't speak to me!" was my answer as nearly as I can remember.

"I'll be glad to get Bess away from your influence," raged Owen at me the next day when I very nearly stepped on one of the little chickens that he was having run in and out from the conservatory.

"You'll want to bring her back in a week if both your tempers don't improve," was my cutting reply as this time I lifted another of his small pets with the toe of my slipper and literally flung it across the room.

"Great guns!" exploded Owen, as he retreated into the conservatory and shut the door.

The next night was the sixth of June and the night of my wedding eve. All Bess's bridesmaids and groomsmen were dining with her to rehearse her wedding and to have a sort of farewell bat with Matthew and me.

"What about your and Ann's wedding to Matthew, Miss Polly?" I heard Cale Johnson ask Polly as she and Matthew were untangling a bolt of wide, white-satin ribbon that I had tangled. "All the show to be of rustics?"

"Nobody but Polly is going to stand by us," said Matthew, looking cautiously around to see if I was listening. "Ann doesn't believe in making much fuss over a wedding."

"I didn't know I was to be in it until Miss Bess took me to be fitted—oh, it is a dream of a dress, isn't it, Mr. Matthew?" said Polly, with her enthusiasm also tempered by a glance in my direction.

"It sure is," answered Matthew, with the greatest approval, as he regarded Polly with parental pride.

"Well, I'm glad I'm invited to see it," said Cale as he glanced at Polly tenderly. "I mean to be at the wedding, Matt," he added politely. Cale was to be best man with Polly as maid of honor at Bess's wedding, and he had been standing and sitting close at Polly's side for more than ten days.

"Let's try it all over again, everybody," called Bess's wearied voice, interrupting Polly's enthusiastic description of ruffles.

The wedding day was a nightmare. Annette and the housemaid and Bess and a girl from Madame Felicia's packed up three trunks full of my clothes and sent them all to the station.

"I wish I never had to see them again," I said viciously under my breath as the expressmen carried out the last trunk.

"Now, dear, in these two suitcases are your wedding things and your going-away gown. Your dress is in the long box and we will send them all out early in the morning in my car. Matthew will drive us out as soon as we can get ready," Bess had said the night before, as she sank on my bed and spread out with fatigue.



CHAPTER XII

The next morning it took Annette until ten o'clock and a shower of tears to get Bess and me to sit up and take our coffee. She said the decorators were downstairs beginning on Bess's wedding decorations and that the sun was shining on my wedding-day.

"Well, I wish it had delayed itself a couple of hours. I'm too sleepy to get married," I grumbled as I sat up to take the tray of coffee on my knees.

"Owen is a darling," I heard Bess murmur from her bed, which was against the wall and mine as our rooms opened into each other. I also heard a rustle of paper and smelled the perfume of flowers.

"This is for Mademoiselle from Monsieur Berry," said Annette, as she triumphantly produced a white box tied with white ribbons that lay in the center of a bunch of wild field-roses.

"Take it away and let me drink my coffee," I said, and I could see Annette's French eyes snap as she laid down the offering from Matthew and went to attend upon Bess.

"Dear Matt," I murmured when I had consumed the coffee and discovered the long string of gorgeous pearls in the white box. "Come on, Bess, let's begin to get married and be done with it," I called to her as I wearily arose. "What time did Polly say she and Matthew had decided to marry me?" I asked as I went into my bath.

"Five o'clock, and it's almost twelve now," answered Bess in a voice of panic as I heard things begin to fly into place in her room.

Despite the superhuman efforts and patience of Annette and two housemaids, directed from below by Owen and Judge Rutherford, it was half-past two o'clock before I was ready to descend to the car in which Matthew had been sitting, patiently waiting in the sunshine of his wedding day for almost two hours.

"Plenty of time," he said cheerily, as I sank into the seat beside him, and Bess and Owen climbed in behind us. Owen's chauffeur took Judge Rutherford in Owen's car, and Annette perched her prim self on the front seat beside the wheel.

"Oh, Matt, there is nobody in the world like you," I said as I cast myself on his patience and imperturbability and also the strength of his broad shoulder next mine. I could positively hear Bess and Owen's joy over this bride-like manifestation, which the wind took back to them as we went sailing out of town towards the Riverfield ribbon.

And to their further joy I put my cheek down against Matthew's throttle arm and closed my eyes so that I did not see anything of the twenty-mile progression out to Elmnest. I only opened them when we arrived in Riverfield at about half after three o'clock.

Was the village out to greet me? It was not. Every front door was closed, and every front shutter shut, and I might have felt that some dire disapproval was being expressed of me and my wedding if I had not seen smoke fairly belching from every kitchen chimney, and if I hadn't known that each house was filled with the splash of vigorous tubbing for which the kitchen stoves and wash boilers were supplying the hot water.

"Bet at least ten pounds of soap has gone up in lather," said Matthew as he turned and explained the situation to Bess and Owen after I had explained it to him.

At the door of Elmnest stood Polly in a gingham dress, but with both ends of her person in bridal array, from the white satin bows on the looped up plats to the white silk stockings and satin slippers, greeting us with relief and enthusiasm. Beside her stood Aunt Mary and the parent twins, also Bud, in the gray suit with a rose in his button-hole.

Matthew handed me out and into their respective embraces, while he also gave Polly a bundle of dry-goods from which I could see white satin ribbon bursting.

"Everything is ready," she confided to him.

"I knew it would be, Corn-tassel," he answered, with an expression of affectionate confidence and pride.

Then from the embrace of Uncle Cradd I walked straight through the back door towards the barn, leaving both Bess and Annette in a state of wild remonstrance, with the wedding paraphernalia all being carried up the stairs by Bud and Rufus. Looking neither to the right nor to the left, I made my way to the barn-door and then stopped still—dead still.

It was no longer my barn—it was merely the entrance to a model poultry farm that spread out acres and acres of model houses and runs behind it. Chickens, both white and red, were clucking and working in all the pens, and nowhere among them could I see the Golden Bird.

"I hope he's dead, too," I said as I turned on my heel and, without a word, walked back to the house and up to my room, past Polly and Matthew, who stood at the barn-door, their faces pale with anxiety.

When I considered that I had been able for months to clothe myself with decency and leave my room in less than fifteen minutes, I could not see why time dragged so for me when being clothed by Annette and Aunt Mary. True, Aunt Mary paused to sniff into her handkerchief every few minutes or to listen to Annette's French raptures as she laid upon me each foolish garment up unto the long swath of heathenish tulle she was beginning to arrange when an interruption occurred in the shape of Rufus, who put his head in the door and mysteriously summoned Polly, who had come in to exhibit her silk muslin frills, in which she was the incarnation of young love's dream.

"You are beautiful, darling," I had just said, with the first warmth in my voice I had felt for many days, when Rufus appeared and Polly departed to leave Annette and Aunt Mary to the task of the tulle and orange-blossoms. They took their time, and it was only five minutes to five when Bess came in to get her procession all marshalled.

"Come down the back steps, darling, and let's all cool off on the back porch," she advised. "It is terribly hot up here under the roof, and Polly and Matthew say they have decided to come in from the back door so everybody will have a better view of you. How beautiful you are!"

As directed, I descended and stood spread out like a white peacock on the back porch.

"Now call Matthew and Polly," Bess directed Annette.

For several minutes we waited.

"Monsieur Berry is not here," finally reported Annette, with fine dramatic effect of her outspread hands.

"Tell Owen to find him," commanded Bess. "It is five minutes late now, and they must make that seven-twenty New York train. Hurry!"

Annette departed while Aunt Mary came to the back door and looked out questioningly.

"Great guns, Bess, where is Matt?" demanded Owen as he came around the house with his eyes and hair wild.

"Where is Polly? she'll know!" I answered tranquilly.

"I searched Mademoiselle Polly, and she is also not here," answered Annette, again running down the back stairs. From the long parlor and hall came an excited buzz, and Aunt Mary came out upon the back porch entirely this time.

"Every one of you go and look for them and leave me here quiet if you don't want me to have a brain storm," I said positively. "They have probably gone to feed the chickens."

Not risking me to make good my threat, Bess and Annette and Aunt Mary and Owen and Bud disappeared in as many different directions. They left me standing alone out on the old porch, along the eaves of which rioted a rose, literally covered with small pink blossoms that kept throwing generous gusts of rosy petals down upon my tulle and lace and the bouquet of exotics I held in my hand. Across the valley the skyline of Paradise Ridge seemed to be holding down huge rosy clouds that were trying to bubble up beyond it.

Suddenly I drew aside the tulle from my face, dropped my bouquet, and stretched out my arms to the sunset.

"I will lift up mine eyes to the hills—Oh, Pan!" I said in a soft agony of supplication as I felt the crust around me begin a cosmic upheaval.

"Well, this looks like a Romney bundle and my woman to follow into the woods. You know I won't have this kind of a wedding," suddenly fluted a stormy voice from the other side of the rose vine as Pan came up to the bottom of the steps.

"Why—why," I began to say, and then stopped, because the storm was still bursting over my head from Pan, who was attired in his usual Roycroft costume and had in one hand the Romney bundle and in the other the usual white bundle of herbs. Also as usual he was guiltless of a hat, and the crests were unusually long and ruffled.

"You look foolish, and I won't marry you that way. Go straight up-stairs and put on real clothes, get your bundle, and come on. I want to eat supper over on Sky Rock, and it is seven miles, and you'll have to cook it. I'm hungry," he stormed still more furiously.

"Everybody is inside waiting, and it's not your—"

"Well, tell 'em all to come out in the open. I won't take a mate in a house, even if it has to be done with this foolish paper," he continued to rage as he sought in the bandana bundle and produced an official document with a red tape on it. "You go and put on your clothes, and I'll break up this foolishness and get 'em in the yard."

"But wait—you don't understand. You—"

"You've got all the rest of your life to explain disobeying me like this when I expressly wrote you just what I wanted you to—" Pan went on with his raging. At this juncture Uncle Cradd appeared at the back door in mild excitement.

"Nancy, my child, our friends are growing impatient, and is there anything the—"

But here he was interrupted by a clamor of voices that fairly poured its volume around the corner of the house. In two seconds it explained itself by its very appearance. First came Matthew, walking slowly, and in his arms he carried a soaked bundle which he held to his breast as tenderly, I was sure, as young Mrs. Buford was holding the blue bundle in the parlor, and two long plaits hung down over his arm. From between him and the bundle there came a feeble squawking and fluttering of wings. From them all poured rivulets of water, and mingled with the squawks were weak gurgles. As I looked, Matthew stopped and lifted the bundle closer on his breast, disclosing its identity as that of Polly, and buried his face in the soaked hair while they all stood dripping together as the rest of us stood perfectly silent and still.

"That fool Henri let the Golden Bird get away, and he flew across the river and fell in a tangle of undergrowth. Rufus called Polly, and she plunged right in after him. Her dress caught on the same snag and God, Ann, they were being sucked under just as I got to them. She's still unconscious." In some ways as unconscious as was the Corn-tassel, Matthew began to press hot kisses on the face under his chin which brought forth a feeble choke.

"Lay her down on the porch, and I'll show you how to empty her lungs, Berry," said Adam, laying down his bundle and taking charge of the situation, as all the rest, even capable Aunt Mary, still stood helpless before the catastrophe. Reluctantly, Matthew obeyed.

"Uncle Cradd, go in the house and tell them all what has happened, and ask them all to come out on the cool of the lawn until we can have the wedding. It will be in just a few minutes, tell them," I said, with the brain that had taken the incubator eggs to bed with Bess and me beginning to act rapidly. "Let me speak to you just a second, Matt," I said, and drew the dazed and dripping bridegroom to one side.

"Matthew," I said very quietly and slowly so that I would not have to repeat the words, "I'm not going to marry you at all, but I'm going to marry Evan Baldwin. I'll tell you all about it when I come back from my honeymoon with him. You help me put it through and then stay right here and look after Polly. She may suffer terribly from shock."

"Oh, God, Ann, my heart turned over in my breast and kicked when I saw her sink, and for a minute I couldn't find her," Matthew said as he gave a dripping shudder that shook some of the water off him and on my tulle. To the announcement of the loss of a bride he gave no heed at all, for at that moment, as Pan lifted the drenched bundle across his knees and patted it, a faint voice moaned out Matthew's name, and he flew to receive the revived Polly in his arms.

"Now, hold her that way until I am sure I have established complete respiration," commanded Pan. "You women begin to take these wet rags off of her. Get two blankets." At which command the rest of the bridal party flew to work in different directions and I with them. Bess and I arrived in my room at the same moment, and she seized the two blankets I drew from the chest and departed without waiting for words. As I drew out the blankets, something else rolled to the floor, and I saw it was my Romney bundle, packed weeks before my death.

Its suggestion was not to be denied. I stopped just where I was, and in two minutes my strong hands ripped that tulle and lace and chiffon from my back without waiting to undo hooks and eyes. In another three minutes I was into a pair of the tan cotton stockings and the flat shoes, which Pan had made me that rainy day in the barn, had on my corduroys and a linen smock, and was running down to my wedding with wings of the wind.

When I reached the back porch I found Polly sitting up on the floor, with Matthew's arms around her, and the entire wedding-party standing beside the back steps, looking on and ejaculating with thankfulness. Old Parson Henderson stood near, beaming down benedictions for the rescue, and I decided that they were all in a daze in which anything could be put over on them.

"Here's my bundle and me," I whispered to Pan, as he stood regarding the young recovered squaw proudly. "Hand the license to Parson Hendricks. I'll make him go on and marry us and get away before anybody puts me back into tulle."

"As Polly is all right now we'll have the wedding, for it's getting late, and we want to get across to the Paradise Ridge to camp," said Adam, with the fluty command in his voice which always gets attention and obedience. As he spoke he put down his bundle, gave Parson Hendricks the document, and drew me beside him. I kept my bundle in my hand and stood with my other in his.

"Why, I didn't know that—" the old parson began to splutter while a murmur of surprise and question began to arise among the hitherto hypnotized wedding-guests. Judge Rutherford stood apart with the twin parents showing them some book treasure he had unearthed for father, and I don't think that either one of my natural guardians was at my wedding except in body.

At the critical moment dear old Matt did rise to the occasion, as did Polly also, with a crimson glow coming into her drenched cheeks, pallid only a second before, and a light like sunrise on a violet bank coming into her eyes.

"She's always intended to marry Baldwin. I knew all about it. Go on!" Matthew commanded, as he supported Polly in her blankets on wobbly bare feet.

During the resuscitation of Polly, Owen Murray, true to his new passion for the Leghorn family, had been reviving Mr. G. Bird and now with regard for decorum, he set him quietly upon his feet. Did the Golden Bird run like a coward from the scene of the catastrophe of his making? He did not. He deliberately stretched his wings, gave a mighty crow, and walked over and began to peck in my smock-pockets at corn that had lain there many long weeks for him.

"Go on, Parson," commanded Pan again, impatiently, and then standing together in the fading sunlight, Pan, Mr. G. Bird, and I were married.

Did Pan allow me to stay and make satisfactory explanations of my conduct to my friends and enjoy the wedding festivities so carefully copied out of the "Review" by Polly and Matthew? He did not. Immediately after the ceremony he picked up his two bundles and turned to all of our assembled friends.

"We'll be back in a few weeks, and then I'll show you what I learned in Argentina. We have to hurry now to get across the valley. Some of the fine sheep over at Plunkett's are down with foot rash, and I want to be there by noon. Luck to you all." With these words Pan led me around the corner of the house, through the old garden, and out into the woods, Mr. G. Bird still following at the smock-pocket.

"We'll have to go back and lock him up; he'll follow me," I said, as I paused and took the Golden Bird's proud head in my hand and let him peck at a dull gold circle on my third finger, which, I am sure, Pan himself had hammered out of a nugget for me.

"No, let's take him. I want to show him over at Plunkett's and then in Providence and Hillsboro, to grade up their poultry. I doubt if there's his equal in America," answered Pan as he went on ahead of me to break the undergrowth into which he was leading me underneath the huge old trees.

"I didn't write you to let that fool Belgian prune the whole place like that," Pan remarked as we paused at old Tilting Rock and looked down upon the orderly and repaired Elmnest in the sunset glow.

"Write?" I murmured weakly, while my mind accused Uncle Cradd, and rightly too, as I learned later after a search in his pockets.

"Wasn't any use sending any letter after that New Orleans one, because I traveled on the return trip all the way myself. Still you did pretty well to get the wedding and all ready at the hour I set, even if you did make that awful flummery mistake. I'll forgive you even that after I get over the shock of seeing you look that way."

"The hour you set?" I again murmured a weak question.

"I thought of writing you to get ready by nine o'clock in the morning, but I knew I'd have to stop in Hayesville for that bit of red tape, so I said five o'clock and had to hustle to make it. I knew you'd be ready. Now you'll have to travel, for we have five miles to go and it takes the pot two hours to simmer. Are you hungry?"

I hadn't the strength to answer. I had just enough to pad along behind at his heels with Mr. G. Bird at mine. However, as I padded, I suddenly felt return that strength of ten women which I had put from me the morning I fled from the empty Elmnest, and I knew that it had come upon me to abide.

I needed every bit of the energy of ten ordinary women to keep up with Pan's commands, as I helped him make camp beside a cool spring that bubbled out of a rock in a little cove that was swung high up on the side of Paradise Ridge. I washed the bundle of greens he had brought to the wedding and set them to simmer with the inevitable black walnut kernels in a pot that he produced from under a log in the edge of the woods, along with a couple of earthen bowls like the ones he kept secreted in the spring-house at Elmnest.

"Got 'em all over ten States," he answered, as I questioned him with delight at the presence of our old friends. Then while I crouched and stirred, he took his long knife out, cut great armfuls of cedar boughs, threw them in a shadow at the foot of a tall old oak, and with a bundle of sticks swept upon them a great pile of dry leaves into the form of a huge nest. The golden glow was just fading as I lifted the pot and poured his portion in his bowl, then mine in the other, while he cut the black loaf he had taken from his bundle into hunks with his knife. It was after seven o'clock, and the crescent moon hung low by the ridge, waiting for the sun to take its complete departure before setting in for its night's joy-ride up the sky. It was eight before Pan finished his slow browsing in his bowl and came over to crouch with me out on the ledge of rock that overlooked the world below us. Clusters of lights in nests of gray smoke were dotted around over the valley, and I knew the nearest one was Riverfield; indeed I could see a bunch of lights a little way apart from the rest, and I felt sure that they were lighting the remaining revelers at my wedding-feast at Elmnest. The Golden Bird had gone sensibly to roost on one of the low limits of the old oak, and he reminded me of the white blur of Polly's wedding bell, which I had caught a glimpse of as I ran through the hall at Elmnest.

"I am thy child," crooned Pan, with a new note to his chant that immediately started on my heartstrings. "And I'm tired," he added as he stretched himself on the rock beside me, laid his head on my breast, and nuzzled his lips into my bare throat.

"I'm going to lift the crests and look at the tips of your ears, Pan," I said as I held him tight.

"Better not," he mocked me.

I did, and the tips were—I never intend to tell.

The lights were twinkling out in the valley one by one, and the young moon made the purple blackness below us only faintly luminous when Pan drew me closer and then into the very edge of the world itself, and pointed down into the soft darkness.

"We are all like that, we natives of this great land—asleep in the midst of a silvery mist, while the rest of the world is in the blaze of hell. We've got to wake up and take them to our breast, to nourish and warm and save them. There'll be just you and I and a few others to call the rest of our people until they hear and value and work," he said as he settled me against him so that the twain chants of our heartstrings became one.

"I'll follow you through the woods and help you call, Adam," I said softly, with my lips under the red crest nearest to me.

"And I'll bring you back here to nest and stay with you until your young are on their feet, with their eyes open," Pan crooned against my lips. "Dear God, what a force unit one woman and one man can create!"

THE END

* * * * *

THE FIREFLY OF FRANCE

By MARION POLK ANGELLOTTI

This is not a story of laughter or tears, of shock or depression. It has no manufactured gloom. It preaches no reform. It has not a single social problem around which the characters move and argue and agonize. No reader need lie awake at night wondering what the author meant; all she intends to convey goes over the top with the first sight of the printed words. The story invites the reader to be thrilled, and dares him (or her) to weep.

Briefly, "The Firefly of France" is in the manner of the romance—in the manner of Dumas, of Walter Scott. It is a story of love, mystery, danger, and daring. It opens in the gorgeous St. Ives Hotel in New York and ends behind the Allied lines in France. The story gets on its way on the first page, and the interest is continuous and increasing until the last page. And it is all beautifully done.

The Philadelphia Record says: "No more absorbing romance of the war has been written than 'The Firefly of France.' In a sprightly, spontaneous way the author tells a story that is pregnant with the heroic spirit of the day. There is a blending of mystery, adventure, love and high endeavor that will charm every reader."

12mo, 363 pages Illustrated by Grant T. Reynard Price $1.40

At All Bookstores Published by

THE NEW CENTURY CO.

353 Fourth Avenue New York City

* * * * *

FILM FOLK

"Close-ups" of the Men, Women and Children who make the "Movies."

By ROB WAGNER

A book of humor and entertaining facts. It is a sort of Los Angeles Canterbury Tales wherein appears the stories, told in the first person, of the handsome film actor whose beauty is fatal to his comfort; of the child wonder; the studio mother; the camera man, who "shoots the films"; the scenario writer; the "extra" man and woman, whose numbers are as the sands of the sea; the publicity man, who "rings the bells," etc., etc.

All the stories are located in or near Los Angeles, a section more densely populated with makers of "movies" than any other section on earth. The author lives there, he has been in sympathetic contact with these votaries of this new art since its beginning, and his statements are entirely trustworthy.

"Film Folk" is not a series of actual biographies of individuals; the author in each case presents an actor, a director or one of the other characters for the sake of concreteness and to carry out the story-form, and he contrives to set forth in the course of the book the entire movie-making world. The reader gets a clear idea of how the films are made and he is immensely entertained with the accounts of the manners and customs of the inhabitants of the vast movie villages—manners and customs unique in many respects.

The stories are told in a style as easy to read as the author is good-humored.

8vo, 356 pages Illustrated from photographs Price $2.00

At All Bookstores Published by

THE CENTURY CO.

353 Fourth Avenue New York City

THE END