"Because I shan't."

"That's no reason. You must have some sort of a reason. You can have no really valid objection to Timothy, Arethusa. He is quite handsome, and very likeable. I am devoted to him, myself."

Miss Asenath felt quite like answering for Arethusa that this last statement was most irrelevant, but she refrained. There was really no use in adding the slightest fuel to flames already sufficiently high.

"You speak of the land being plaited in and out," continued Miss Eliza, looking sternly over her glasses. "That was a most foolish remark. Such a thing could never be, and you know it. I do not want you to marry Timothy for his land, of course. I merely mention its situation as next to what will some day be your own as making the alliance just that much more desirable. For heaven knows what will happen to the Farm when you do get it, if you haven't some sensible man to take care of it for you! But there are other things about Timothy that would make him a husband any girl could be proud of. There are plenty of them in this very County would jump at the chance you've had."

"They're very welcome to him!"

Arethusa thought it best not to say this too loud, but unfortunately Miss Eliza heard.

"I'm ashamed of you, Arethusa, if you're not ashamed of yourself. It's throwing away the opportunity of a life-time. I wish I was young, and in your shoes. Have you refused him lately?"

No answer from Arethusa. She picked at the soft blue fleece of Miss Asenath's comfort until she had collected quite a little pile of down, which she made into a ball and put as carefully to one side as if she intended it for some future use. Miss Asenath watched her sympathetically. If it would have done the slightest good she would have entered the breach, but when Miss Eliza reached the stage of her argument of pointblank questions, it meant pursuit to the bitter end.

Miss Letitia was not so wise. She had made three attempts to catch the loop of the same stitch in her crocheting, and failed each time, in her excitement. This was a most unusual performance for her. Her crochet needle poised in mid-air.

"Sister," she pleaded, "please. I wouldn't ask the child such a personal question, if I were you. Please!"

"Please what, 'Titia?" Miss Eliza was distracted for the fraction of a moment to Miss Letitia. "Why do you sit there saying, 'Please,' in that silly way? I will ask my niece Arethusa anything I wish. When I was young we were supposed to answer all the questions of our elders, personal or not, as you call them. Arethusa!"

When Miss Eliza spoke of "my niece Arethusa," it meant business. The poor niece turned desperately, and just in time to receive the broadside of a still more emphatic, "Arethusa!"

"Yes, I have, Aunt 'Liza. Timothy has asked me to marry him every summer since I was five years old, and in between times too, and I've said, 'No,' every single time. And if he keeps on asking me until I'm five hundred years old, I'll still keep on saying, 'no!' I shall never, never, marry Timothy!"

She left her refuge of the couch and started toward the door.

"I did not hear you asking permission to leave the room, Arethusa, and I do wish you would not exaggerate so violently. It is simply telling falsehoods. You told two in that one sentence. You know perfectly well Timothy hasn't been asking you to marry him since he was nine—a child of that age doesn't think of marriage. And you also know just as well as I do that you'll not live to be five hundred, it's absurd to make such statements. Come back here, Arethusa? Now what is your real reason for acting this way whenever I speak to you of Timothy. I want to know? You know just how your Aunt 'Titia and I and your Aunt 'Senath feel about it. Why do you persist in going against our wishes?"

Arethusa gazed wildly around the room. She seemed to hunt on walls and floor an answer to the uncompromisingly plain question. Close to the door she was poised like some wild bird arrested in its flight. One glance that included Miss Asenath and Miss Letitia absolved them both from participation in the scheme so clear to Miss Eliza's heart.

"I don't love Timothy," she said, at last, desperately.

"Nonsense!"

"But I don't!"

"Bah!... Love!" Miss Eliza was thoroughly disgusted. "What do you want to be so mawkish and sentimental for? Just like your father! You like Timothy, don't you? Then that's quite enough."

"But I couldn't marry anybody I didn't love." The persecuted one edged a little bit of a way nearer to the door.

"You don't know any thing about it," declared Miss Eliza, flatly. "What you call love is just pure silly!"

"Well," Arethusa despairingly presented her final bit of reasoning, "I hate Timothy! I think it's the very ugliest name I ever heard. I could never be happy married to anybody called 'Timothy'."

Miss Eliza sniffed. The girl was getting more and more foolish! "That certainly means nothing!"

"I always thought 'Timothy' was a good name," came softly from Miss Asenath. "I always liked 'Timothy' very much myself."

Arethusa melted suddenly. She remembered.

How could she have been so cruel as to say such a thing and hurt dear Aunt 'Senath's feelings? With a rush she was across the room and both strong young arms had clasped the frail figure of the best-loved aunt closely to her.

"Oh, Aunt 'Senath, Aunt 'Senath!" she sobbed, wildly penitent. "I was a beast! I didn't think! Your Timothy was a lovely name!"

It sounded a trifle illogical and inconsistent, but Miss Asenath seemed to understand perfectly. She whispered her forgiveness to the weeping Arethusa, who could only squeeze her and murmur incoherent avowals of her lack of intent to be unkind. To be unkind to Aunt 'Titia was bad enough, but to be unkind to Aunt 'Senath! It was the last word in perfidy.

"It all depends on what we think of the person, what we may think of the name, Arethusa, dear," said Miss Asenath. "I know you didn't mean it."

And Arethusa wept some more, scalding tears of still another sort of penitence: Aunt 'Senath was such a darling! The back of Miss Asenath's woolly white wrapper was rapidly getting damper and damper.

Such scenes as the one just past generally ended in just this way, with Arethusa's tears; and the tears nearly always cleared the air. Miss Eliza took up the Christian Observer once more, and Miss Letitia resumed her rosy crocheting, after raveling out almost a whole row which she had put in as wrong as was possible.

"If I were you, Arethusa," remarked Miss Eliza drily, after awhile, looking up from her magazine to bend her sharp glance on the pair on the sofa, "I would not crush my aunt into jelly in order to show her your sorrow at being so thoughtless and unfeeling. And you will make her quite ill; very likely it will bring on one of her bad headaches, if you carry on much longer that way."

Miss Asenath's headaches were periods of much anxiety for all the family, with the great suffering they brought the gentle invalid. Arethusa drew away from the couch abruptly. She felt suddenly overwhelmed with her inability ever to do the right thing; a feeling which Miss Eliza was quite often successful in arousing in her niece.

Miss Asenath offered her own cobwebby handkerchief to dry Arethusa's reddened eyes. Then she asked Miss Eliza if she would not be good enough to read aloud to them for awhile. Miss Asenath had some of the makings of a diplomat.

None of the roomful of women would really listen, for Miss Letitia would be far too intent on counting stitches, and Miss Asenath would dream, and to Arethusa, Miss Eliza's choice of reading matter was anything but interesting; but Miss Eliza herself would be made beatific. She considered herself somewhat gifted as an elocutionist; during her course at the old Freeport Seminary, now so long ago, she had had the most lady-like of instruction. She prided herself on her ability to put "expression" into her reading. Thus would amiability be especially restored in her quarter, and poor, persecuted Arethusa might have a little while in which to attain some degree of calmness once more.

So Miss Asenath patted the place at her side invitingly. Arethusa cuddled up very close; Miss Eliza went back to the beginning of her article, having read a paragraph or two; and peace began to reign with the very first word of the reading aloud.

When Miss Eliza's voice, with all the proper inflections, had followed the various whys and wherefores of the death of Servetus to a triumphant conclusion, she was a different person. All the sharpness aroused by Arethusa's seeming scorn of Timothy had disappeared. She was even ready to say, when her niece stooped to kiss her good-night, that she was sorry if she had made her unhappy in her manner of discussing Timothy, and Timothy's matrimonial possibilities; and this was a very great concession for Miss Eliza.

"But you are making a great big mistake, Arethusa," she could not help adding, "every way, in not taking Timothy while you can."

Yet it was amiably said, and did not cause the slightest excitement.

Which goes but to prove more surely that Miss Asenath seemed to have missed her calling.



CHAPTER VII

"That was such a pretty girl that just went past us, Ross."

Elinor Worthington's smiling glance followed the girl far down the deck.

For the creature was so deliciously young, everything about her; her slenderness; the joyful way she swung when she walked; even the cut of her clothes spelled youth. And she was undeniably pretty, with eyes like bits of blue sky and quantities of silky, corn-colored hair. Her mouth was almost too large, but even that could not spoil the essential prettiness of her. She was laughing at her escort, with glowing upturned face, as they swept past Elinor and Ross in their quiet corner, and her laugh displayed an unusually straight row of the whitest teeth imaginable.

"Was she?" Ross seemed most indifferent. "I didn't notice her. I never look at other women when you're around, my dear."

Elinor laughed. "You goose!" But 'way deep down in her heart she couldn't help feeling a bit flattered.

It was just past tea-time on the big home-coming liner, and it might seem as if all of its voyagers were taking an afternoon stroll. There was only one more day—to-morrow—left of the voyage before Boston Harbor, and everyone was full of the repressed excitement and restlessness of getting home. The decks were alive with couples and single folk, passing and repassing in both directions; some very briskly in real constitutionals, and some much more leisurely as though merely for the occupation of movement.

But Ross felt very lazy. He had buried himself deep in his steamer-chair and refused to budge an inch when Elinor had suggested that they might join that strolling throng.

"I'm a married man now," he said, "and I don't have to worry about exercising to keep my figure. Besides, I had much rather sit here in the corner and hold your hand under the rug."

So Elinor had humored him about the sitting still, and arranged a fat pillow under his head the way he liked it best; but she had no intention of permitting that even so newly married a couple as themselves should be seen holding hands in broad daylight on a crowded deck. Whereat, Ross pretended to sulk; he tilted his cap far down over his eyes; thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets and sprawled full-length in his chair. Though instead of conveying to the passers-by any idea of displeasure, with anything or anybody, his attitude only succeeded in picturing lazy comfort.

Arethusa would hardly have known this Ross Worthington reclining so easefully in the steamer-chair as the original of her beloved photograph. She might have recognized the eyes, keen and bright in their glance as ever, and with the same debonair smiling; but the wavy dark hair was clipped as closely as the hair of any other male biped and had greyed a trifle just at the temples. He was less like a novelist's creation, and more like the men Arethusa had known in the flesh, in his appearance, certainly. For this older Ross Worthington had discarded Italian military capes and Byronic collars and flowing ties for more conventional attire. He was as commonplace and ordinary as to clothing, in every respect, as any other man on that huge steamship.

But Elinor Worthington would have attracted attention almost anywhere, and more than one of the pedestrians had given her a second glance of surreptitious admiration as they passed her. She was rather a wonderful looking person. Ross's raptures had not been altogether exaggeration. She had a world of soft white hair, pure white it was, worn simply coiled around a beautifully shaped head; its elderly color in strange and attractive contrast to the smooth youthfulness of her lovely skin. Her eyes were brown, a warm, dark brown, under long dark lashes and slightly arched dark eyebrows; and the tiny gleam of unmistakable fun that lurked in their quiet depths was again a contrast to the almost classical severity of finely cut features, straight nose, and delicately chiseled mouth, and cleanly rounded chin. And she was as graceful in her slender tallness as the girl she had admired—this woman of forty or more. It was small wonder that Ross had declared he loved to look at her.

Here in this corner with her husband, Elinor Worthington was all herself. She glowed like a rose, with none of the little stiffness in her manner she so often unfortunately showed to strangers and which only the discerning few correctly named as shyness. To the majority of people she was likely to seem cold, almost distant.

"What are you thinking about? You look so serious and far away," Ross remarked after an interval of silence.

He believed in the power of the spoken word. It was not given him to remain quiet for long. He might have managed it with the communion of a hand-clasp; but without, it was impossible.

Just then the pretty girl and her escort passed by them again. Elinor's brown eyes watched the pair this second time until they had turned the corner of the deck.

"That girl," she said, half wistfully, "she is so delicious and young. I can't help wishing she were mine. There is something too utterly adorable about a young girl."

"She seems merely silly to me," Ross replied. "I don't see anything particularly interesting or unusual about her that should make you want to own her, or any other callow young thing her age. However, if you say she is adorable, I suppose she is.... Merciful Heavens!!"

"Ross Worthington!"

"And I never thought of her, I'll swear, until this very moment!" he muttered.

"Thought of who?"

"The child."

"What child? Ross, will you kindly make one remark that is intelligible? What on earth are you talking about? Or who?"

"My child." He turned his face to hers, ruefully smiling. "Heaven knows what you'll think of me! But.... But, Elinor, I'll swear I never thought of her until this very moment!"

His wife very nearly went over backwards.

She had thought she was getting used to Ross, and had been sure she was quite prepared for anything he might do or say that smacked of the unusual, which seemed to be one of his peculiar gifts; but this far surpassed anything yet. She had known him very well for nearly three years and while he had once, long ago, told her of a previous marriage, he had never mentioned the existence of a child; or intimated in any way that there were any ties to have drawn him to America.

But that gleam of fun was not in her brown eyes for nothing, and so she laughed. And it was such a merry peal of unrestrained mirth that Ross rose, deeply offended.

"There is nothing at all ludicrous in this, I assure you, Elinor. It's quite serious!"

"I am quite ready to believe it is. But, Ross, I.... Please think for just a moment. I can't help laughing. It is rather funny!"

Then he smiled himself. One of his greatest charms was the ability to view his own performances, as it were, from a detached perspective.

"You're quite right there, I'll have to admit. To leave you in ignorance of any family, and suddenly, after months and years of such ignorance, produce a daughter!"

"You say a daughter? Are there," Elinor's eyes danced mischievously, "are there any sons you have concealed at home, in case I should admire a passing small boy? Are you going to spend the rest of your life thus immediately granting my idle wishes?"

"No, I'm afraid I've done my very best. I'm no genie of the lamp, although it does look a bit like it."

"Then sit down and tell me all about her," she patted his empty chair invitingly. "Begin at the very beginning and tell me everything you can about your daughter."

Ross obediently draped himself once more in the steamer-chair. But he buried his chin deep in his hands and sat staring long without speaking, across the slowly rising and falling rail, at the sea.

His own disclosure had been, as much, if not more, of a shock to himself as it had been to Elinor. He had not thought very definitely of Arethusa in weeks, or even months; and now, suddenly with the chance passing of another young female creature, and his wife's admiration of her, his daughter's personality had intruded itself as one which must be reckoned with, and taken somewhat into his calculations. For the first time he realized that he had not been considering his child at all, in any plans he had made for the future; and the thought was a bit disturbing.

"What is her name?" prompted Elinor.

"Arethusa."

"Arethusa!"

"Yes. I know it's a most awful mouthful. But her mother named her," his voice softened, "her own name was Matilda; and she had always disliked it so." How long the time had been since he had thought of the mother, either! Once more he stared across the rail, out at the sunlit sea.

Elinor laid her hand gently on his arm for just a moment; a fleeting caress of sympathy for his sobered mood.

"Ross, dear," her speaking voice was unusually beautiful, as soft and clear as a bell, but it had never sounded more like low music than just now. "Ross, would you tell me something about her? Arethusa's mother, I mean. But if you'd rather not.... I've no sort of wish to arouse any memories which might hurt; but I can't help feeling, dear, that I would like to know something about her. I've never asked you before, because it seemed impertinent; but I really do not mean it at all in that sense."

"I know," he answered slowly. "But it was all so long ago, Elinor, there is nothing left to hurt. It seems sometimes now as if I had dreamed every bit of it. She was a slip of a thing; just a girl."

It had not been very long, his first cycle of love.

It was just a little more than two years from the summer day he had first met her, with her cornflower eyes as blue as the ribbons on the muslin dress she wore, and her dainty tininess, until that summer day when he had turned away from a low mound in the country cemetery, with hot rebellion in his heart that the one had been taken and the other left.

He had not wanted to go to that country party. With all a city boy's superiority he had yawned at the suggestion; then decided to go just to watch "the rubes"; and there he had found her, and his visit to the distant cousin had assumed a new significance. After they were married, he had wanted to take her away with him, but she had clung to her own home; and so he had stayed with her on the Redfield Farm, making lazy efforts to learn a trade that had no sort of attraction for him, just because she wished it.

But after she was gone, the farming had lost its excuse for being, and the tiny baby daughter, who cried when he picked her up, and who only wanted to eat and sleep, had no real power to hold him where she was. He wandered restlessly about the country-side, trying to find some place where the mother's personality had never been; and then one day he had announced to Miss Eliza that he was going abroad, to work at something congenial where no memories made it hard for him to stay. He had not intended to remain very long, a year or two perhaps. But Ross followed the line of least resistance nearly always, and the friends he had made and the life he had lived had proved attractive; little by little the ties that had bound him to the Farm had slackened, until he hardly felt them at all.

Time had done what his first hot, youthful grief would never have admitted that it could do, and had faded the glowing colors in the pictures of that chapter in his life; and it was now, as he had said, almost like something dreamed.

"Then she died just after Arethusa was born?"

Ross nodded.

"That was an odd name to give her, dear; 'Arethusa'! Was she named for anyone?"

"No, just because her mother liked it. I was a great goose in those days, with large ideas of the necessity for the revival of Grecian 'pure beauty,' as I called it. Heaven knows where I got the phrase! I had just graduated from college that June before I met her and I had a lot of stuff I had taken to the country with me. Then I sent for more. I used to devour volumes about vase paintings, and classical ideals, and I read worlds of it aloud to her. Miss Eliza used to think it was atheistic, I'm quite sure. She didn't say so, but she wouldn't let me read my mythology in the house at least, aloud. Matilda and I had to go down to the Branch, so we wouldn't be heard. It was from Bulfinch, I believe, she got the story of the fountain nymph that seemed to appeal to her so strangely. And I was quite willing to saddle my daughter with it; it was like taking a firm stand for my ideas. They were hardly ideals." He sighed.

"You poor babies!" said Elinor softly, to herself.

"What did you do with the little girl, Ross?"

"Her great-aunts kept her. The same women, Miss Eliza and Miss Letitia Redfield, that had raised her mother. Matilda's mother was their sister. Miss Asenath, the third aunt, is a cripple. You must know her some day, Elinor. She is 'pure beauty' and pure everything else. And what a friend she was to me when I needed her!"

"How old would she be?"

"Who, Miss Asenath? About seventy."

"No, of course not, dear goose! Arethusa."

"Oh, I don't know. Eighteen, I suppose. Yes, just about."

Elinor looked for a moment as if she did not believe what she had heard him say.

"Ross Worthington!"

"I'm all attention."

"Am I to understand that you actually haven't seen that child for eighteen whole years!"

"You are."

"Why, Ross!"

"Well, I told you why I didn't go back home just at first, Elinor. A scrap of an infant who seemed to thoroughly dislike the sound of my voice, for as I remember it, she howled vociferously every time I went near her, was not much attraction. And then I just put off going back and kept putting it off, year after year. Now do you still wonder"—suddenly whimsical—"that I could forget all about her?"

"I never wonder at anything you do, Ross," replied his wife. Her tone was grave. "I gave that up a long time ago. But I would call your behaviour, in this instance, heartless; if I didn't know you well enough to know you wouldn't really be consciously harsh to a fly."

"Heartless!" he echoed.

"Yes, heartless!" she repeated firmly. "Your own child! And eighteen whole years! Oh, Ross!"

"But she's been well taken care of," he protested, though somewhat feebly.

"Very probably she has. But you're her father. I verily believe, Ross Worthington," she added suddenly, "that you haven't even told her you were going to be married!"

The pendulum of Ross's moods swung very rapidly, as rapidly as ever that of his daughter. The little softness aroused by the thought of Arethusa's mother had passed, and now his eyes were full of unmistakable fun.

"No," he replied, "I will have to confess that I haven't. I didn't think she would be very much interested. And 'Where ignorance is bliss,' you know."

"Ross!"

"Oh, come now, Elinor, do make some allowances! You ought to be feeling flattered, instead of getting all up in the air about it. It shows such a complete absorption in you, I think. But I did mean to write, if it will make you feel any less convinced that I'm a hardened wretch with no natural affections. I've really never seen her, in a sense, and writing to a person you've never seen is.... Don't look so stern, Woman, I do write her often. I'll have you to know my daughter and I are very good friends."

"How often?" pursued Elinor, remorselessly.

"Once or twice, or maybe three times a year. I never make a point of counting letters with anyone. It seems so terribly small!"

Elinor shook her head helplessly. "Oh, Ross, Ross," she sighed. "Thank heaven, there's only one of you!"

"Yes," he answered, very placidly. "Thank heaven! I was never in the least ambitious to be a twin!"

And now it was the wife's turn to stare out at the sea and think of Arethusa.

She was even more vexed with Ross for this dreadful neglect of his daughter than she had shown him. Elinor had a very high ideal of parenthood. Her own happy childhood, with a father and mother who had included her as the third in all their pleasures and even in every day commonplaces, as naturally as they had included themselves, had given her no hazy picture of what a very beautiful thing such a relation could be. She could not understand how Ross could take the idea of his fatherhood so very indifferently. Surely he must love his child!

When Elinor loved, she gave royally of herself. If she spoiled the objects of her affection a bit, along with this giving, it was not a sort of spoiling that hurt. So now her heart went straight across the miles that still separated them and found Arethusa. That she was Ross's daughter was reason enough by itself, thought Ross's wife, to love her, had not the story of that blue-eyed girl who had died so long ago, also drawn Elinor's heart to the motherless baby the girl had left. And the motherless baby was grown!

Elinor could not help wondering how Arethusa would feel about her father's re-marriage; she was bound to have some ideas on such a subject. It was cruel of Ross to leave her so long in ignorance. He had been married over a month; six whole weeks in fact. He should have written to the Farm as soon as his marriage was a settled fact. But he would not have been Ross if he had. A slight smile flitted across Elinor's face at this thought of the consistency of the whole performance.

She felt as if it had devolved upon her to make all of this neglect up to Arethusa, and to love down the resentment, if there was any at all. And so she could not know the girl a moment too soon.

"Ross, what were you going to do about Arethusa? Did you think of going down to see her when we got home?"

"I haven't had time to think very much about any of it yet. I had left her out of things altogether until just this afternoon, by forgetting about her. Why?"

"Well, then," Elinor's voice trembled slightly, "please let me write and ask her to come and see us, in Lewisburg. Away from the aunts. So we can get acquainted by ourselves. And.... And then.... Ross ... if she likes us, we can keep her with us and make three in the family."

"Does any one wonder," he murmured, apparently to the world at large, "that I love this woman as much as I do? Elinor, dearest, it is very plain to me that I am going to be very jealous of my own daughter."

"Do be serious, Ross."

"I am, never was more so in my life."

"You mean.... I may write her to come? You ought to write to her too," she was as eager as any girl. "And I shall send her the money for the trip. It will be my first gift to my new daughter."

"No," said Ross, very decidedly, to the end of this speech, "I can't let you do that."

And all the eagerness died out of Elinor's face.

"Oh, Ross, now please don't spoil it all by being a mule," she pleaded. "We have so many of these disagreeable arguments about money, and it is so very foolish! Why can't I send Arethusa a little check without your behaving so!"

"Because I won't have you, that's why. Arethusa isn't your incumbrance, in any way. She's my daughter, and I'm not such a pauper that I can't manage to support her, for I most certainly did not marry you to have you caring for my various relatives. You write your letter, and I'll enclose the check."

"You haven't been treating her very much as if she were your daughter." The gentle Elinor could not help saying this and saying it quite sharply.

She so rarely let her temper slip for even the fraction of a moment, but Ross was always so horrid and obstinate about this question of money. He never seemed to realize her side of it; that one of the greatest joys of its possession was what she could do for him and others that she loved by means of it. To say that she should not have the very simple pleasure of sending a trifle of her abundance to Arethusa, was almost too much! The little thought had caused such a glow when it had come.

"I shall do just what I please with my own money," she continued, "and send every bit of it to Arethusa if I wish. You have no earthly right to forbid me any natural use of it."

But this money of his wife's was a thing about which Ross Worthington was almost foolishly sensitive. The fact that Elinor's monetary possession far exceeded his had kept him a great many months from asking her to marry him, when the most casual observer might have read his secret with the greatest ease. So enormous was the discrepancy between their quotas of this world's good that more than one spiteful minded person had intimated it had had something to do with his choice. He knew this only too well, and the thought rankled. Elinor had so much; she could do so much; she could do so much more for herself than he could ever do for her that it was a great sore spot. They were to live in Elinor's house; ride about in Elinor's expensive automobile; be waited upon like royalty, as he phrased it, by Elinor's servants; they were even now, after a lengthy argument about it, traveling home with Elinor's wealth in a far more luxurious manner than he had ever been able to travel on his own money.

The most foolish sort of false pride considered this offer to send a check to Arethusa a sort of finishing straw. He would keep all expenditure for his daughter strictly for himself.

"I wish you would! I wish you would send it all to somebody! I wish to goodness you didn't have a cent of the money!" He rose, his jaw set savagely, and turned away. "I didn't marry you for it, though from the way you spend it on me I'm not at all surprised that a great many people say I did!"

And he was off down the deck in an almost blind rage. Arethusa's temper came not so much from the fact that her hair was red, as right straight from her father.

Elinor stared after him, too hurt to want to follow him, or to try to call him back. They had had many a heated discussion as to which portion of the expense she was to bear and what was to be left for him, but none had gone so far; never degenerated into as real a quarrel as this.

But Ross was too tempestuously moody to remain angry long. It needed only one turn of the deck for him to be back at her feet, ready to humble himself in the dirt in the abjectness of his apology.

The outcome of it was that Ross himself wrote a letter to enclose Elinor's check, that letter Arethusa had kissed under the hollow tree. It required much persuasion on the part of his wife to keep him from describing the whole affair in detail, how abominably he had acted about the check, and how badly he had made her feel. It would make his abasement more complete and lasting in effect, he said, if some one else were to know about it. Ross, like Arethusa, did nothing by halves.

Yet Miss Eliza unwittingly disappointed Elinor's eagerness to see Arethusa, by announcing that Arethusa could not come until the fall. It was far more of a disappointment to his wife than it was to Ross. Ross was very happy with things just as they were.

Elinor made a room ready for the girl to be her very own, when doing over the rest of her house; and she put into it all the love and little personal touches that Arethusa's own mother might have given it.

"She might not be," she said, thoughtfully considering when selecting the wall-paper, "a pink or blue person at all. Ross doesn't know the color of her eyes or hair or anything that he ought to. He's been woefully remiss as a parent. White might perhaps be safest."

Which choice was surely most fortunate.

So white with a silky, silvery stripe was chosen for the walls of the big, sunny room with its rows of windows on two sides which had been set aside as Arethusa's. It was a white ground with garlands of flowers in soft pastel shades near the ceiling. And green, a soft, dull green, was chosen for the side curtains of those sunny windows, and for the sofa cushions and the upholstery on the window seats and the "squshy" chairs. The largest pieces of furniture were of a satiny brown walnut combined with cane. There was a green rug, the color of the moss in Arethusa's own beloved woods and so soft and thick that her feet would sink deep into it, for the floor. Then Elinor put a long, soft sofa at the foot of the bed, and Arethusa's room was ready for her coming.

The bath-room adjoining, which was also to belong to the daughter of the house, was white, shiny tile from floor to ceiling, and it contained every conceivable device known to the mind of a modern plumber that makes for comfort in a bath-room. Could Elinor have but glimpsed the high-backed tin tub in which Arethusa had bathed all of her life at the Farm!

"You've done too much," was Ross's comment, when Elinor showed him this nest, "and spent a fortune besides, on my child. When...."

"Our child," interrupted Elinor gently, "I thought we had settled that once for all. Please, Ross, don't be eternally dragging in the cost of things.... I didn't bring you up here for that.... But tell me if you think Arethusa will like it."

"Like it! Ye gods! Think of the Farm! And the woman asks if Arethusa will like it!"

But Arethusa's actual coming was postponed by Miss Eliza for various reasons several times. The correspondence on this subject was all between her and Elinor, for Miss Eliza wrote a stilted, old-fashioned hand, not easy to read, which Ross's impatience refused to take the time to decipher.

First, it was hard finding suitable company for Arethusa,—no date could be fixed until that was settled; and then Miss Letitia had a little spell of illness and the making of the clothes was interrupted; and so on. But the last postponement, until late October, was the Worthingtons' own fault. It was far too hot in Lewisburg that September, so off they scurried to the seashore before Arethusa was nearly ready to join them.

"Just like Ross Worthington," said Miss Eliza, grimly, when the letter telling of this move reached the Farm. "He just can't stay put. I reckon the Lord didn't make the place where he'd be happy long at a time."



CHAPTER VIII

Arethusa sat on a big, smooth stone at the edge of the Branch, under the low-drooping willow tree that leaned far over those clear waters, and absent-mindedly flipped at the water with a long switch broken from the tree. Under the stone it was cool shadow and the rocks on the bottom of the Branch gleamed invitingly green. Something like a fresh-water seaweed moved slowly back and forth, as Arethusa stirred the water above it. But for all its inviting appearance, it was treacherously slimy. It would have been hard for even nimble-footed Arethusa to keep her balance on those rocks. A tiny snake darted out from under the big stone and shot across to the other side; Arethusa leaned far over to watch it.

"A baby snake," she exclaimed delightedly. "I wonder if there're any more!" Then she poked farther back under the stone, but no more appeared. It was probably the only child in its family, thought Arethusa. It was rather late for baby snakes.

She straightened up once more and resumed her absent-minded switching at the water. Farther out, where the shadow of the weeping willow did not reach, the sunlight shone with dazzling brightness on the water, and the hundreds of little drops that flew off the end of Arethusa's switch gleamed like tiny diamonds as they fell back into the Branch.

It was a terrifically hot day.

The September sun blazed away so fiercely that the whole landscape drooped under it. Even Arethusa, whose enthusiasm no amount of ordinary heat had the power to lessen, felt wilted.

But despite the heat, work on her outfit for the Visit did not slacken. Miss Letitia and Miss Eliza were sewing away for dear life. Even Arethusa herself had been pressed into service. Miss Eliza believed in being ready for your occasions; rather ready with a long waiting, than not be ready. She would have the simple wardrobe finished and all carefully packed days before it was time to leave so there would be no flurry at the last moment; Miss Eliza hated flurry.

But Arethusa did not sew with ease. What little she knew of that art had been acquired with painful effort. And with the heat and her uncontrollable excitement when she considered what this work was for, the sewing had stuck to her hands so badly this morning, and the thread had knotted with such diabolic persistency, that Miss Asenath had taken it all away from her and suggested that she run outside for awhile. She was, however, to remain within easy calling distance of the house, so she had come down here to the willow tree at the Branch.

It was just a little over a month now until Arethusa was actually to go. She had counted the days on the calendar until October twenty-fifth and then multiplied them by twenty-four. And every night, with puckered brow and moistened pencil and great care so that no smallest mistake should be made in so important a subtraction, she subtracted twenty-four more from those hours still remaining. The number of figures on the slip of yellow paper stuck in the mirror of her bureau had increased as the size of the remainder decreased with each passing day. This method of showing the flight of time appealed to her very strongly. It made it seem as if so much more had been covered every day when she subtracted twenty-four from the larger number of hours, than if she simply took one away from the number of days.

She lay back on the big stone and clasped her hands under her head, smiling up into the willow branches as if she saw something there which pleased her exceedingly. And so did any contemplation of the limitless possibilities for happiness before her in the Visit bring just such a smile to curve her lips. A few sweat-bees buzzed half-heartedly about her head, but Arethusa did not even trouble to brush them away. It was too hot for any more exertion than was absolutely necessary.

Miss Johnson, Arethusa's fox terrier, sat right beside her mistress, with her small red tongue hanging out at one side of her mouth, and panting as if her small heart would burst through her ribs.

Miss Johnson had been the gift of Timothy, who owned her mother. But it had needed all his blandishments to induce Miss Eliza to allow Arethusa to have the little dog, for Miss Eliza cared nothing whatever for dogs of any kind or size or degree, either far or near. And once Timothy's cajolements had carried his point, and Miss Johnson had taken up her abode at the Farm, she had been hedged about with restrictions. She was never permitted to set foot inside the sacred precincts of the house, or even on either porch, or to go near the flower garden; and she knew it quite as well as anybody. Experience still remains the best of teachers. When Miss Eliza appeared on her horizon, Miss Johnson would put what was left of her tail between her legs and scuttle for cover. She was a wise little dog, and did not have to be told who wielded brooms and slapped.

But out in the open, her disposition was much less humble. She and Arethusa were boon companions; her mistress had the whole of that small heart which thumped so violently. One of her paws rested on a dumpy, round stick which she had selected as a good plaything, and she gave a short, sharp bark of frantic appeal when she saw Arethusa lie down on the stone.

It was never too hot for Miss John to play at chasing sticks; her energy never flagged in the least, even though it might seem that she would pant herself to death the very next moment.

Arethusa raised her head to one elbow to look very reproachfully at Miss Johnson.

"I told you twice it was too hot, Miss Johnson."

Miss Johnson barked. There were almost words in that bark, it was so entreating.

"Yes, 'tis. There's nothing you can say will make me think it isn't, and it's very bad for you to run in the heat."

Another bark.

"No, I'm not going to throw it for you. I've told you so over and over. Besides, you ought not to want to run with an old stick when I'm going away so soon. You ought to be glad to sit with me while you can."

But Miss Johnson believed in snatching at the pleasures of the present rather than in preparation for the sorrows of the future. She sat up quite straight and begged beseechingly. Her tiny fore-paws were so irresistible in their appealing waving that Arethusa relented.

"But just this once, only," she warned, as she sat up and reached for the stick.

Miss Johnson jumped about, with excitement at the highest tension; and her mistress lifted that round bit of wood high above her head and threw it with a swing which had far more grace than aim, and all the force she could muster.

And it hit Timothy, stealing up quietly to surprise her, square between the eyes.

"Suffering cats, Arethusa!"

Timothy grabbed Miss Johnson's plaything and continued its flight so very far away that the poor little dog could not find it at all, although she searched most diligently for it for a long, long time.

Arethusa almost jumped off the big stone into the Branch.

"Why don't you look where you're throwing things occasionally! You nearly put my eyes out!" There was a fast growing red spot on his nose; Timothy rubbed it ruefully.

"Served you quite right if I had! How could I know you were sneaking there!" Then Arethusa turned her back to Timothy, and she turned it with a movement of the greatest dignity. "I thought I told you last night," she added, "not to come to see me any more, ever."

Timothy was silent for a moment.... "I didn't think you really meant it," he said, miserably.

"Well, I did."

Arethusa's back looked decidedly inhospitable; there was an uncompromising rigidity about the way she stared straight before her. Even the long rope of red hair seemed to have become suddenly as stiff as the rest of her. It was not an attitude in a hostess conductive to easy conversation, or to make one's thoughts flow smoothly.

Miss Johnson flew about, hunting for her stick, every now and then coming back to Timothy with frantic little questioning yelps; but Timothy, ordinarily such a friend of hers, paid no sort of attention. He had eyes only for Arethusa. It was hard for Miss Johnson to understand.

Finally, Timothy flung himself down on the ground at the side of the big stone. "Do you mind if I stay, Arethusa?"

"Suit yourself," she replied, indifferently. "It's not on my land. But it seems to me you have an awful lot of time to loaf around for anybody who calls himself a farmer." There was scorn in Arethusa's tone.

"I came over here just especially to tell you I was sorry. I saw you from the hemp-field and came."

"You better go on back to the hemp-field then," said Arethusa, "now that you've said it."

Timothy gathered a handful of small stones lying near him and began to idly skip them one by one across the Branch. It was an accomplishment which Arethusa deeply envied him: her stones invariably fell in without skipping. Yet she made no move to show him that she saw how beautifully every single stone that Timothy skipped sped across the top of the water to the other side. Miss Johnson came and sat down between them, worn out in her vain search for her stick, and she panted and gazed inquiringly from one to the other of her playmates, so unusually silent.

"I don't see why," said Timothy suddenly, "that you want to act this way, Arethusa. I've said I was sorry. That ought to be quite enough; and ... and.... Anyway, I don't see why one kiss should make you so mad."

"Oh, you don't?" replied Arethusa, very sarcastically.

Life had seemed a gloomy affair to Timothy since the day he had realized that Arethusa was actually going on this Visit. He did not want her to go, to put it very plainly. Not that he thought she would not have a good time; he thought she would have a good time; in fact, he thought she would have far too good a time, his verbal expression to Arethusa of the contrary idea, notwithstanding. Timothy had made more than one visit to Lewisburg; he was well acquainted with the variety of its attractions. He could not help but vision the oceans of beings of the opposite sex it was inevitable she should meet, and he saw in these meetings his own eclipse as a suitor.

Timothy's Ardent Wish for Arethusa and himself was identical with Miss Asenath's Secret Hope and Miss Eliza's Openly Expressed Desire. And Arethusa had not exaggerated in the least, to Miss Eliza, the number of his proposals. He had been proposing to her every summer with worthy persistence since he was nine or ten, childish though those first proposals may have been; and sometimes twice a summer.

Ever since that time when she had made the first appeal to his chivalry when he had met her, a chubby little scrap of only three scant summers, wandering off down the Pike, every little footfall taking her farther and farther away from the Farm, and she had raised her eyes, brimming over with tears in their wonderful tangle of black lashes, and said, with a tiny catch in her voice, "I'm losted. Tate me home, Boy!"; and he, with the superior knowledge of location which seven years gives over three, had led her safely back to Miss Eliza—ever since that long-past day, Arethusa had made up the most of Timothy's world. They had played together all through childhood and boyhood and girlhood, and quarreled violently and much over their play, and then made up with commendable immediacy; Timothy was the nearest approach to a brother Arethusa had ever known. But Timothy's feeling for Arethusa had ever been, and especially these last few years, more than a brother's love. It was the clean whole-hearted affection which a boy gives to the one girl in the world who seems to him superior to other girls. Even when Timothy had gone away to a neighboring town to college, his allegiance had never for a moment been shaken; in all those four long years he had never seen a single maiden, among the many he had met, who came anywhere near Arethusa in his estimation.

Timothy had had some dim idea that it might be quite wise to get her safely promised to himself before she went away. The last point-blank refusal she had made him, earlier in this summer, had not left him altogether disheartened. He knew Arethusa was given to moods. Then, too, persistence often wins the reluctant; dripping water wears away a stone. There are a great many aphorisms dealing directly with such a state of mind as Timothy's.

So the evening just before this hot September morning, he had dressed himself in his very best and strolled over to the Farm, fully determined on a definite course of action.

He had made his formal proposal for Arethusa's hand to Arethusa herself, as they sat side by side on the top step of the worn stone steps to the front porch. But she had laughed at him, so derisively, that Timothy, goaded into rashness by the laughter, had kissed her with a resounding smack. Then he had been slapped by the indignant Arethusa until his check stung with the pain, sent straight home and told never to come back again as long as he lived.

And he had wondered, as he cut across the fields, a chastened and a sadder Timothy under the friendly stars which winked so sympathetically, and rubbing his still stinging cheek as he walked, if there would ever be anybody who would understand Arethusa. He didn't. He could recall occasions when he had kissed her and had not been slapped.

Now Miss Eliza had unfortunately heard the conversation and the kiss and the slap and the dismissal of Timothy, from inside the sitting-room; and she had called Arethusa into her after the rejected suitor had fled and outdone even herself in the quality of her scolding. She had gone so far as to make a threat of such a truly horrible nature that it had turned Arethusa absolutely cold with the fear that she might really carry it out.

Arethusa had every right to be very angry with Timothy.

Timothy gathered him another little heap of stones, and one by one, with a perfect mastery of the art, skipped those all across the water. But he did it very gloomily, with no apparent pleasure, hardly as if conscious of what he were doing. And Arethusa continued to stare straight before her as if she had found new and unexpected beauties in a familiar landscape.

"I hate for us to be mad," said Timothy after awhile, making another attempt to break the hostile little silence.

"So do I," replied Arethusa non-committally.

Timothy brightened.

"But I expect to be mad at you as long as I live," she continued, and Timothy lapsed into gloom once more, "when you act the way you do. I don't see why you want to be always bothering me about marrying you; unless Aunt 'Liza puts you up to it. I don't want to marry you, Timothy; and I'll never change my mind about it. You needn't ask me again, ever. I want to be very good friends with you, because you're the very oldest friend I've got, but we can't be friends if you're going to be so silly and sentimental all the time. I hate sentimental people!"

Had Timothy's sense of humor not deserted him absolutely, he must have laughed at this; as it was, he took it very seriously.

Just then came a faint, "Ar——ee—thu——sa!" from the direction of the house, and Arethusa rose quickly to answer the call.

"Oh, I forgot," Timothy rolled over. "Miss 'Titia called to me from the house as I came by to tell you she was ready for you."

"Why didn't you tell me then, an hour ago? You've been here a half hour at least and haven't said a word about it!"

"I forgot," replied Timothy humbly, thoroughly ground to the earth by that speech of Arethusa's with its "I'll be a sister to you" tone.

"That's evident. She probably thinks I'm lost or something by this time. If you weren't so busy always seeing how you can annoy me, you might remember when people give you messages to deliver!" Arethusa swept majestically off, bending her head to escape the low-growing willow branches, and Timothy watched her miserably. But she had gone only about six or seven paces when she turned and came back to him, "And Timothy," she announced, as sternly as Miss Eliza herself might have spoken, "if you ever even try to kiss me again, like you did last night, I'll do something worse to you than just slap. I'll ... I'll ... It's ... I don't like to be kissed."

"But you used to kiss me," Timothy sat upright, here was his alibi and a chance to defend himself.

"I know I did, but we were babies. That was ages ago, and it's very, very different. Grown girls don't kiss grown men. It's not nice. It's.... It's just like poor white trash!"

And with last stroke of annihilation, Arethusa departed for the house and Miss Letitia and her fitting, with Miss Johnson trotting at her heels, leaving Timothy in abject abandonment to misery under the willow tree.



CHAPTER IX

Miss Eliza eyed Arethusa over her glasses with stern displeasure. She dropped her sewing into her lap and prepared to take the delinquent one to task.

"Where have you been all this time? Your Aunt 'Titia's been ready and waiting for you a half hour at least."

"Oh, Sister, not quite that long." Miss Letitia's deprecatory accents made an attempt (and it could always be only an attempt) to stem the tide of Miss Eliza's severity. "It's not been more than fifteen minutes, I'm sure."

"Your aunt has been ready and waiting for you a half hour at least!" repeated Miss Eliza, firmly. "Didn't you understand from her message that she wanted you? And I had to call you, myself, finally."

"Well, I didn't get any message.... Timothy didn't tell me she wanted me, so how was I to know? I came right straight away when I heard you."

"You've been quarreling with Timothy again!"

"I have not!"

And at Arethusa's irritable tone, Miss Asenath looked up, startled. It was so decided a contradiction, and not one of the household ever contradicted Miss Eliza. This gentlest one was a trifle the most discerning of the sisters, and she wondered if any other chapters to last night's incident had been added under the willow tree.

"Don't you speak to me in that manner, Arethusa," Miss Eliza was surprised almost into a mildness of reproof.

"I didn't mean to be impertinent, Aunt 'Liza," faltered the culprit.

She was a wee bit frightened at her own temerity after that emphatic contradiction had burst forth. But anger at Timothy had over-ridden discretion, with that question concerning him and Miss Eliza's obvious inclination to side with him; last night's events were still clear in Arethusa's mind, and Miss Eliza had been most unfair in her viewpoint on that occasion. There still rankled, with both aunt and niece, a little of the bitterness then aroused.

"You are getting," remarked Miss Eliza grimly, "absolutely incomprehensible to me. Ever since that letter came from your father, you have been utterly demoralised. I've half a mind to...."

Miss Letitia hastily held up the dress to be slipped on. She felt it was undoubtedly the moment, the moment sometimes called psychological, at which to introduce a counter-irritant.

It was the dark blue silk dress that Arethusa had been sure she would have. It was as beautifully made as all Miss Letitia's garments were, but very plain; only lightened at throat and wrists with the simplest white collar and cuffs. Arethusa was very grateful to Miss Letitia for having made it. She expressed her gratitude by an all-enveloping hug which ruffled the small portion of Miss Letitia's hair remaining comparatively smooth until this moment. But she did wish, most decidedly, that it was not quite so plain.

Miss Letitia smoothed the folds in the skirt and put a pin in one place in the hem where she believed it hung a little bit long.

"Do you think," she enquired anxiously of Miss Eliza, "that it hangs all right in other places, Sister?"

"If Arethusa would stop spinning around like a top long enough for me to get a good look at it, I might be able to tell you something about it," replied Miss Eliza, severely.

Arethusa straightened up like a drum major and began turning very slowly, as slowly as it was possible and keep her balance at the same time, and Miss Eliza viewed the lower edge of the garment critically from all sides.

"Yes," was her crisp verdict, "I may say I think it hangs even everywhere.... But just that one place."

Miss Letitia breathed a deep sigh of relief. Arethusa echoed the sigh. They dreaded equally the task of hanging a skirt (when it had not hung right at first) with Miss Eliza's accurate eyes fixed upon the operation.

"That is a very pretty dress. Sister 'Titia," remarked Miss Asenath. She had quite a point of vantage on her couch; all fitting processes were visible in an entirety. "Don't you think so, Arethusa?"

Arethusa agreed with fervency.

"You'd better thank your Aunt 'Titia then," from Miss Eliza.

"She did, Sister," interposed Miss Letitia hastily. "She already did!"

"I didn't hear her."

"Well, she gave me a lovely hug, and we both know what that means, don't we, 'Thusa dearie?"

"Hum ... ph!" from Miss Eliza.

Arethusa took the blue silk dress off very carefully and handed it back to Miss Letitia for the finishing touches.

She stood straight and tall before them for just a moment, and tilted back her head and yawned, stretching her round arms high above her in a glorious relaxation.

Then she looked down at that exceedingly dark, blue silk dress with dissatisfaction. Then she looked at Miss Letitia bending her grey head far over it and putting in innumerable and almost invisible stitches very carefully, just for Arethusa: her round, cherubic little mouth puckering into happy smiles about something known only to herself as she worked.

Arethusa's warm heart smote her.

She swooped down upon Miss Letitia and hugged her with violence to make up for that moment of inward dissatisfaction with Miss Letitia's loving work. Miss Letitia's glasses were knocked off in the sudden swoop and fell into her lap. She looked most surprised at this unexpected proceeding, though highly gratified, as she retrieved the glasses. Had she asked Miss Asenath about it, Miss Asenath could probably have told her just what had been passing through Arethusa's mind. Miss Asenath had been watching Arethusa. She was never tired of watching her, in every smallest thing the girl did, with loving eyes that took keen delight in her youth and life and vivid coloring.

Arethusa gazed around at the many garments in various stages that were strewn about the room; every single one of them was hers. All the plain white cotton under-things, one or two of them with puffings or a bit of "thread" lace whipped around their edges, as a concession to the unusualness of this occasion; the few simple shirtwaists, trimmed with neat tucking; the "medium lisle" stockings Miss Eliza was marking in pairs after a method of her own invention; the plain dark suit that Miss Letitia had completed only that morning, and which Miss Asenath's frail fingers were even at this moment engaged in further finishing with a braid-binding all around the skirt to save the hem; the new hat which Arethusa had tried on for them with the finished suit to see how well they went together, and which was lying now on top of the piano; and the silk dress in Miss Letitia's lap: it was all hers. But there was nothing frivolous in the array, nothing at all light in color, save perhaps the underclothes and the shirtwaists; there was not one purely decorative or "frilly" garment such as the heart of girlhood loves. It was a wardrobe, without doubt, entirely of Miss Eliza's choosing.

"Aunt 'Liza," Arethusa knelt down by that lady's chair and put her glowing face very close to her aunt's; her tone was most wheedling. "Aunt 'Liza, is there any of my money left?"

"There is," declared Miss Eliza, with satisfaction. "There is. I've saved your step-mother quite a tidy bit of what she sent. It's too bad if Ross has married a woman with extravagant tastes just like his own; too bad! But it would seem as if he had. All that money for just one girl! Put your dress on again, child, you oughtn't to sit around that way. Yes, you're going to have quite a sum to take back to your step-mother."

Arethusa wished that Miss Eliza would not say "step-mother" with just such an emphasis. It made her seem so undesirable a relative to have acquired, Miss Eliza's way of saying the name. And Arethusa did not choose to think of Elinor as anything undesirable. She was nothing that was not perfect. She was certainly nothing that deserved to be distinguished by such a term of reproach as that "step-mother." Practising saying "Mother" very softly to herself, Arethusa had come to regard Elinor that way, without the sign of a "step."

She ignored the injunction to put on her dress and leaned coaxingly nearer to Miss Eliza, whose habitually stern expression softened involuntarily. But how could she help it, with that glowing face wheedling so close to her own? Miss Eliza, after all, was not wood or iron.

"Then please, Aunt 'Liza, let me have another dress?"

"What do you want with another dress, 'Thusa?" Miss Eliza sounded almost indulgent. "This silk one makes three new ones, counting your suit."

"I know," Arethusa said, a trifle apologetically, as if she knew it was a strange request. "I know, but I want a Party Dress. I want," and she hurried on with the expression of her want in desperate haste lest she be stopped before she had finished, "I want a Green Dress?"

"A green dress! Mercy on us! With your hair! Why, Arethusa Worthington!" Miss Eliza was plainly horrified.

But Arethusa Worthington nodded, most hopefully.

"Nonsense! A person with hair as red as yours can't wear green! Of all wild ideas!"

"I think she might look lovely in a soft shade of green," put in Miss Asenath's sweet voice. "And so why can't she have a green party dress, Sister? If she wants one and there's plenty of money left?"

Then Arethusa looked still more hopefully at Miss Eliza, for sometimes Miss Asenath's gentle vote prevailed; but this time it was not so to be. Miss Eliza bit off her thread with as much decision as ever Atropos dares use in cutting hers.

"You always did care a lot too much about color, 'Senath," she said, though not in the least unkindly; no one was ever unkind to Miss Asenath, "and Arethusa is just like you. But as for getting her a green dress to wear with that red head of hers, why it would be a waste, and a perfectly sinful waste, of money, because I know her step-mother wouldn't let her wear it. She would think I was crazy besides."

Both Arethusa and Miss Asenath were quite inclined to disagree with her. Miss Asenath was wise enough to know that she could say nothing further to change the decision; and she communicated to Arethusa, with a shake of her head, that she was not to attempt it, either ... for the latter's mouth had plainly opened for speech. Be it said to her everlasting credit, that she struggled hard with this disappointment, and turned away to put on her dress without any other plea.

"Your Aunt 'Titia and I," continued Miss Eliza, (she had not seen this bit of by-play) "had about decided to get you a white dress. We thought that if it weren't of too sheer material, you might wear it to entertainments there in the city—because I suppose you'll be invited to some—even if it is cold weather, without having to take off your underwear, which is always dangerous in winter."

"I don't want an old, thick, white dress...." began Arethusa, rebelliously, but a chorus of "Arethusas" interrupted her.

It was very gentle from Miss Asenath; very plaintive from Miss Letitia, who was dreading another tilt; and very, very stern from Miss Eliza, who added, "If your Aunt 'Titia is good enough to make you a white dress, you ought to be very grateful, instead of acting as you do! I doubt the wisdom of your having one at all, myself, I must say. A white dress in the winter-time! When I was a girl, I would have thought that a great deal to have!"

But Arethusa failed to be properly impressed. Her dislike of the idea of the white dress showed so plainly in her ever-changing face, that Miss Asenath silently held out her hand and Arethusa flew to that haven, her couch.

"I wouldn't worry, dear, about my dress," whispered Miss Asenath. She sometimes just could not help consoling the girl, even if it was in direct opposition to Miss Eliza, when things seemed to be too thoroughly disappointing. "You know your Aunt 'Titia will make it just as pretty as she possibly can. I think green is lovely with red hair, myself, even though Sister 'Liza doesn't seem to, but white is lovely with it also. And your mother may get you some other things, very probably; don't you remember that it said 'immediate needs' in the letter? And if that means what I imagine it does, you may find yourself with two party dresses when you thought you were only going to have one. And," ended Miss Asenath, smiling, "she may feel about colors just as you and I do. I think somehow she will!"

Arethusa smiled back. It was a pleasing prospect held out by Aunt 'Senath, so she took heart and hope immediately.

Miss Eliza bent her glasses upon the two conspirators on the sofa.

"Don't you be telling Arethusa she would look nice in green, 'Senath, because you know very well she wouldn't. In my day," this severely directed at Arethusa herself, "so much wasn't done for girls that they forgot how to be grateful. Nowadays, they want the whole earth and a ring around it, into the bargain. The more you give 'em, the more they want. A green dress for Arethusa! Who on earth would have thought of such a thing but you! If your hair wasn't quite so red, you wouldn't be so limited in your choice of colors. A green dress! That's Ross Worthington all over again. Wild ideas; nothing like anybody sensible would think of ever having or doing! A green dress with your fiery red hair!"

Arethusa could not help but feel that this apostrophe to her hair was going rather far. Miss Letitia and Miss Asenath had much the same feeling. But Miss Letitia dared only look her sympathy, and Miss Asenath felt it best to express hers by one of her loving little pats.

Then Miss Eliza happened to glance at the tall marble clock. She immediately put her work down. "You may finish these stockings, Arethusa, if you think you can keep your mind on it long enough. But just as I was doing them though; mind! It's time for me to go show Blish about fixing that sore place on the black cow's back. He was to be up at four."

With Miss Eliza's departure harmony reigned supreme, and Arethusa's tongue loosened. Over the marking of her stockings, she chattered happily to Miss Asenath and Miss Letitia. Very often, when Miss Eliza was present, her rather dry reception of her niece's enthusiastic presentation of ideas had a somewhat quenching effect upon the real flow of conversation.

"Did you leave Timothy down at the Branch?" queried Miss Asenath, after awhile.

"Oh, I reckon he went on home," Arethusa answered carelessly.

She could be thus casual in her answers to Miss Asenath, for with her no subject had pursuit unto a bitter end.

Miss Letitia finished the hem of the blue dress and laid the garment carefully over the back of a chair. Then she reached over and took Arethusa's pile of stockings away from her.

"Suppose, dearie," she suggested, "you practise a bit now. You don't play that piece yet as well as you ought, and your father used to be a great lover of music. He will want to hear you play."

Arethusa rose obediently and went to the piano; twirled the squeaking stool to a lower height, and settled herself, elbows properly rigid and head upright. Miss Letitia was her music teacher.

In fact, all of her education, domestic and academic and purely ornamental, as Miss Eliza termed the music, had been gained at home. Instruction in the "principal branches," again Miss Eliza's name, had been received mostly from Miss Asenath. Geography she had taught her niece with the aid of the same faded globe that had fixed the shape of the world and the location of its hemispheres and continents and principal countries in her own mind. If the boundaries of any of those countries had changed since the globe was made; if new land had been discovered; if any hitherto obscure cities had sprung into size and prominence during the sixty years or more that the globe had stood in the corner of the square hall: it had made no sort of difference in the geography lessons. Arethusa had learned history, from ancient history books with almost obliterated names on the fly-leaves. But it had been rather a biased version of the period connected with the Civil War which she had learned, for Miss Eliza was very bitter about those years of her country's existence. Her only brother, and her twin, had been killed fighting for the Confederacy. Miss Eliza seemed to be unable to believe that he had been killed in battle, however, for she always spoke of him as "murdered" by the Yankees. So Arethusa's ideas of events connected with this time was hardly very favorably inclined towards the Northern side. Miss Asenath was very shaky in arithmetic; therefore, her pupil had not got into higher mathematics. She had paused in her figuring somewhere about the beginning of long division, but even where she had paused she could not be said to be very steadily fixed.

The musical part of this education belonged to just about the same date as the part which Miss Asenath had supervised. For all the pieces Arethusa had learned "by heart," which was the only way to learn music properly so as to be able to give pleasure to others, were pieces which Miss Letitia herself had practised with painstaking care for expression over fifty years ago. Both musicians were quite proficient in mazurkas and polkas and old-fashioned reels and ballads, and let us not forget to mention variations of every conceivable variety, for Miss Letitia possessed a whole book of variations, and it was quite a thick book.

Just at present, Arethusa was busily engaged in committing to memory "The Babbling Brook."

But her brook did not babble just precisely as Miss Letitia's did. There was something far more fantastic and wild about the runs the younger musician made on the tinkling square piano; runs which Miss Letitia considered were not at all in keeping with the character of the music she was playing. Effort had been expended by both to bring Arethusa's brook to the state of really flowing as a brook should flow; but it seemed so far to be hopeless.

Arethusa played it through once and Miss Letitia kept time for her with a threaded needle.

"No, dearie," she shook her head, "you don't get it at all. You play just a bit too fast sometimes, and not quite fast enough others."

So it was played all over again from the beginning by the pupil; but still it was no better. Miss Letitia looked troubled.

"I just don't see how I can make you do it differently."

Miss Asenath liked Arethusa's way of playing this particular piece and she did not want it changed.

"Perhaps," she suggested gently, "the child is tired. It's been a very hot day, and it's very hard to do anything just right on such a day. It seems to take all the life out of one."

Miss Letitia agreed. "It does so. Well, she can learn it the right way before she leaves. There's plenty of time still."

"Play something else for us, dear," said Miss Asenath. "Play some of the ballads."

Arethusa turned again to the piano and filled the room with the soft sounds of "Auld Robin Gray" and "The Low-backed Car" and "Annie Laurie."

Under cover of the music Timothy slipped in and found a chair close to Miss Asenath. He had been spending a very miserable time down by the Branch. And he would never have come near the house had he not heard the piano, for Timothy loved music intensely and he could never resist following its sound. If Arethusa was still angry with him, he had no intention of bothering her again; he only wanted to be allowed to listen.

Miss Eliza came back to the sitting-room and settled once more to her sewing. Miss Asenath closed her eyes and gave herself over to dreaming. It was her book of ballads, and she had used to, long ago, play them softly in just such twilights for another Timothy. Miss Letitia's busy fingers worked away and her head nodded time.

The late summer evening with its myriads of sounds and that feeling of restless settling down for the night that it always seems to have in the country, slowly deepened into darkness and Arethusa still played on. Perhaps her execution was not of the best and her fingering may have been questionable; but she seemed to feel some of the real spirit of the quaint old tunes she played and she put a soft expression into them that was far more to her circle of listeners than brilliant execution or perfect fingering. None of them could have found the smallest fault: the music spoke to each one of them in that way each one most wanted.

So she played on softly until Mandy came, announcing supper.

Timothy must stay, Miss Eliza insisted. But Timothy declined, even though Arethusa, with rather strange cordiality considering what she had said at the Branch, joined her voice to Miss Eliza's. The music had spoken to Arethusa herself, to soften. Timothy's mood, however, was not inclined for conversation on general topics, and at Miss Eliza's supper-table one nearly always conversed on general topics.



CHAPTER X

The only persons at the Farm who did not go to the station to see Arethusa off for her Trip were Miss Asenath and Nathan. Even Mandy went, on the front seat of the surrey with Blish.

Nathan was Mandy's better half, a darkey of a deeply religious nature. He considered a town, everything in it, and everything connected with it, snares of the Evil One to lead men astray. Although in his youth, and up almost until early middle age, he had been the terror of the county seat the Saturday nights he had been paid off, he had "gotten religion" along about the time of his marriage to Mandy, and now nothing on earth could take him anywhere near any of his former haunts. He had even refused to drive Miss Eliza to town when on one or two occasions his services had been required. And he was the only human being on record who had ever opposed her thus successfully.

But it happened most fortunately in this case, this feeling of his about town, for he could remain with Miss Asenath and Mandy could go to the station with Arethusa. Otherwise, she might have had to stay at home, and this would almost have broken her heart.

Timothy and Timothy's mother and his aunt, who made her home with them, also drove the six miles 'cross country to the little town of Vandalia where Arethusa was to take the train, to bid her good-bye. They were already present when the Farm delegation arrived, as early as it was when they came, for Timothy wanted as many as possible of these last moments with Arethusa. His mother had been sure it was far too soon to start when Timothy called her, but she suffered from a chronic inability to oppose any of his wishes, even by suggestion, so she had left her housewifely counting of preserves and pickles without a word of complaint to go with him.

Miss Letitia became a little tearful in her leave-taking.

"Letting the dear child go off all alone by herself this way for the very first time!"

For in spite of Miss Eliza's decided and oft loudly expressed disinclination to have her do so, to Arethusa's unbounded delight, she was actually going alone.

Thanks to that flight of Elinor and Ross to the seashore, the State Fair had been only a memory for more than a month. But diligent search by Miss Eliza, in the way of inquiries at church and when in town, had discovered a friend who was going to Lewisburg later in the Fall to shop, and who would be more than glad to take the girl under her wing. Then almost at the very last moment this promised company was forced to abandon her trip and Arethusa was left high and dry. The fate of her Visit trembled in the balance for a few days. Miss Eliza was strongly inclined to postpone the whole affair until she could arrange things to go with her niece herself, but she finally gave in to the pleading that Arethusa was entirely ready. Why should she wear the first freshness off her outfit before she made this Visit?

But if she was going alone, she was going fully-equipped so far as advice was concerned. Miss Eliza had spent several conscientious hours of instruction and counsel. Arethusa had been told a dozen times over just what she was to do, and that she was to leave the train only when it stopped for the very last time to stay, without going on. The terminus of the line was Lewisburg.

"And if you sit there a half an hour, you make sure," said Miss Eliza, firmly.

A great many people, added she, especially young people, get lost by leaving trains at wrong stations.

Miss Letitia contributed her quota also, though it was more in actual preparation for contingencies that might arise than advice. Arethusa's name and address had been sewed in everything she had on, "in case of accident." Miss Letitia had had a dream one night of an unidentified body lying by a railroad track after a wreck. She dreamed the body to be Arethusa's. Then she had read, very often, of folks whose sense of their own identity had been taken from them most completely by a blow on the head; this also had happened in wrecks. Should there be a wreck and the dream come true, or the other horrible thing happen, in either case they would never know what became of Arethusa. The thought harrowed Miss Letitia. Fortunately, she had only dreamed the dream the one time, so there was not quite so much danger of it being fulfilled. Had she dreamed it three nights, Arethusa should never have gone a step on this trip. But even had the other dreadful thing occurred, it would have been the most careless searcher who would have failed to discover just who Arethusa was and where she belonged, after Miss Letitia had finished her labeling, in slanting, old-fashioned letters on neatly bound-down squares of white linen.

The traveller carried a small packet of baking-soda, tucked into a corner of her satchel by the long-sighted Miss Letitia, "in case of car-sickness." There was nothing so good for nausea as soda.

Arethusa wore the dark blue suit Miss Letitia had made her, with its plain, full gathered skirt, all lined for better warmth, and its double-breasted coat, trimmed with the buttons from one of her great-grandfather's broadcloth suits. Her traveling waist was pongee.

"Pongee is the best material to travel in that I know of," said Miss Eliza. "It never shows the least bit of soil."

It was buttoned modestly to her throat, ending in a straight line, neither high nor low which would have been most trying to nearly everyone, but above which Arethusa's flower face rose as lovely as ever. Her hat was a plain round felt trimmed with two really beautiful turkey feathers that Miss Eliza had been saving carefully since the winter previous. Arethusa had never had a feather on a hat before (only ribbons, the year round), and she considered these feathers the height of elegance. Her hair was fixed on the top of her head for the very first time in her life, a graduation from the long red plait just for this glorious Visit. Her feeling about that heavy, unbecomingly arranged roll, and the hairpins which held it in place, was an indescribable mixture of pride and elation and satisfaction.

Clutched tightly in one white, cotton-gloved hand was Mandy's contribution, a small, neatly tied-up box of lunch. Her extra money was in a little bag on a string around her neck, where Miss Eliza had also deposited the trunk check. There was only the tiniest possible amount of change in her purse. She carried a hand-satchel so ancient in appearance that it might have been the forerunner of all hand-satchels, and her trunk was a wee round-topped affair of red leather with a canvas cover. It was a trunk which had been last viewed by the public when Miss Eliza and Miss Letitia attended the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Miss Eliza was not one to expend money for anything, when what she already had was still perfectly good, albeit a trifle out of date.

Miss Eliza scorned to show her feelings as did Miss Letitia when she told Arethusa good-bye. Consequently, she was even gruffer than usual as she adjured the departing one not to make a fool of herself.

Mandy wept openly. Putting her head into a lion's mouth held no more unknown terrors for Mandy than the making of a journey.

And Timothy prepared to wring Arethusa's hand almost off when it was his turn to say farewell; he thought it was the most expression of his affectionate unhappiness at seeing her leave them that would be permitted him. But she held her face up to him in the most natural manner to be kissed, just as she had held it up to Miss Eliza and Miss Letitia and his mother; so Timothy, after a brief moment of hesitation and remembrance of what Arethusa had said so emphatically about kissing, took what the gods were offering and imprinted a very modest salute on the sweet, upturned face.

Arethusa was so excited that she scarcely heard all of Miss Eliza's last instructions, and she bade some of her party adieu more than once. Timothy claimed the privilege of helping her on the train and escorting her into the coach, and he deposited her satchel on a seat he turned over to face her so she would be sure to have plenty of room.

She chattered away, these last few precious moments, as merrily as if Timothy were companioning the adventure of this trip to Lewisburg, but he found no tongue to reply. It is true that he was not allowed very much chance, but even if he had been, there was no heart in him for talk. Timothy was finding the actual reality of parting with Arethusa for heaven-only-knew-how-long-a-time, far worse than its anticipation, as bad as that had been.

The conductor called, "All a—bo-ard!"

And in sudden, desperate utterance of a wild little wish. Timothy leaned close to Arethusa.

"Kiss me good-bye again, Arethusa," he coaxed, all his young heart in his blue eyes. "Please!"

Arethusa stared at him, frankly amazed at such a remarkable request.

"What's the matter with you, Timothy Jarvis? Kiss you good-bye? Why, the very idea! And what on earth do you mean by 'again'?"

For she was completely unaware that in her excitement she had given Timothy that kiss.

His spirits went clear to zero, but fortune spared him the necessity of a reply, for the conductor called another raucous signal, and the train began to move. Timothy had barely time to save himself from being carried off.

Arethusa stuck her head out of the car window, regardless of one of Miss Eliza's very last and most positive instructions, and waved and waved to the ones she had left behind on the Vandalia platform, and she kept on waving long after they had become mere indistinguishable specks as the train gathered speed.

Then she settled back against the luxury of her dusty red-plush seat with a soft little sigh.

The swift motion of the train was most exhilarating, for every single click of the car-wheels meant a turn which brought her just that much nearer to her father and Elinor and the wonderful Visit.

After a while, when her agitation had begun to subside a trifle, Arethusa began to remember a few of the multitude of directions Miss Eliza had given that were most important to be carried out without fail. She removed her hat with care and reached down into the ancient travelling bag and brought forth a piece of manila paper in which she wrapped it, to save its newness from flying cinders. She took off her coat and folded it, lining outside, and hung it over the arm of the opposite seat and rolled her white cotton gloves into a neat little ball and put them and her purse down into her bag.

Then she drew "The Dove in the Eagles' Nest" out of that capacious receptacle (Miss Asenath had advised bringing something to read and Arethusa had not read this particular romance for a very long while), propped herself primly way over in the corner of her seat and prepared to do just as she had been told.

But she was far too excited to do much more than just open her book. The fortunes of Christina and her two sons in the free city of Ulm, as so graphically portrayed by Miss Charlotte Yonge, could generally transport Arethusa far from the everyday events of her own world into the actual Middle Ages that was the scene of their happening; but to-day.... They seemed to have lost a lot of this power; she could hardly keep her eyes on the book.