It was on one of these occasions that Blair, watching that long ripple on the ceiling, suddenly saw the sunshine sparkle on Elizabeth's hair, and his spoon paused midway to his lips. "Oh, say, isn't Elizabeth's hair nice?" he said.

David turned and looked at it. "I've seen lots of girls with hair like that," he said; but he sighed, and scratched his left ankle with his right foot. Blair, smiling to himself, put out a hesitating finger and touched a shimmering curl; upon which Elizabeth ducked and laughed, and dancing over to the old tin pan of a piano pounded out "Shoo Fly" with one finger. Blair, watching the lovely color in her cheek, said in honest delight: "When your face gets red like that, you are awfully good-looking, Elizabeth."

"Good-looking"; that was a new idea to the four friends. Nannie gaped; Elizabeth giggled; David "got red" on his own account, and muttered under his breath, "Tell that to the marines!" But into Blair's face had come, suddenly, a new expression; his eyes smiled vaguely; he came sidling over to Elizabeth and stood beside her, sighing deeply: "Elizabeth, you are an awful nice girl."

Elizabeth shrieked with laughter. "Listen to Blair—he's spoony!"

Instantly Blair was angry; "spooniness" vanished in a flash; he did not speak for fully five minutes. Just as they started home, however, he came out of his glumness to remember Miss White. "I'm going to take Cherry-pie some ice-cream," he said; and all the way back he was so absorbed in trying—unsuccessfully—to keep the pallid pink contents of the mussy paper box from dripping on his clothes that he was able to forget Elizabeth's rudeness. But childhood, for all four of them, ended that afternoon.

When vacation was over, and they were back in the harness again, both boys forgot that first tremulous clutch at the garments of life; in fact, like all wholesome boys of fifteen or sixteen, they thought "girls" a bore. It was not until the next long vacation that the old, happy, squabbling relationship began to be tinged with a new consciousness. It was the elemental instinct, the everlasting human impulse. The boys, hobbledehoys, both of them, grew shy and turned red at unexpected moments. The girls developed a certain condescension of manner, which was very confusing and irritating to the boys. Elizabeth, as unaware of herself as the bud that has not opened to the bee, sighed a good deal, and repeated poetry to any one who would listen to her. She said boys were awfully rough, and their boots had a disagreeable smell, "I shall never get married," said Elizabeth; "I hate boys." Nannie did not hate anybody, but she thought she would rather be a missionary than marry;—"though I'm afraid I'd be afraid of the savages," she confessed, timorously.

David and Blair were confidential to each other about girls in general, and Elizabeth in particular; they said she was terribly stand-offish. "Oh, well, she's a girl," said David; "what can you expect?"

"She's darned good-looking," Blair blurted out. And David said, with some annoyance, "What's that amount to?" He said that, for his part, he didn't mean to fool around after girls. "But I'm older than you, Blair; you'll feel that way when you get to be my age; it's only when a man is very young that he bothers with 'em."

"That's so," said Blair, gloomily. "Well, I never expect to marry." Blair was very gloomy just then; he had come home from school the embodiment of discontent. He was old enough now to suffer agonies of mortification because of his mother's occupation. "The idea of a lady running an Iron Works!" he said to David, who tried rather half-heartedly to comfort him; David was complacently sure that his mother wouldn't run an Iron Works! "I hate the whole caboodle," Blair said, angrily. It was his old shrinking from "ugliness." And everything at home was ugly;—the great old house in the midst of Maitland's Shantytown; the darkness and grime of it; the smell of soot in the halls; Harris's slatternly ways; his mother's big, beautiful, dirty fingers. "When she sneezes," Blair said, grinding his teeth, "I could—swear! She takes the roof off." He grew hot with shame when Mrs. Richie, whom he admired profoundly, came to take supper with his mother at the office table with its odds and ends of china. (As the old Canton dinner service had broken and fire- cracked, Harris had replenished the shelves of the china-closet according to his own taste limited by Mrs. Maitland's economic orders.) Blair found everything hideous, or vulgar, or uncomfortable, and he said so to Nannie with a violence that betrayed real suffering. For it is suffering when the young creature finds itself ashamed of father or mother. Instinctively the child is proud of the parent, and if youth is wounded in its tenderest point, its sense of conventionality—for nothing is as conventional as adolescence—that natural instinct is headed off, and of course there is suffering. Mrs. Maitland, living in her mixture of squalor and dignity, had no time to consider such abstractions. As for there being anything unwomanly in her occupation, such an idea never entered her head. To Sarah Maitland, no work which it was a woman's duty to do could be unwomanly; she was incapable of consciously aping masculinity, but to earn her living and heap up a fortune for her son, was, to her way of thinking, just the plain common sense of duty. But more than that, the heart in her bosom would have proved her sex to her; how she loved to knit the pink socks for dimpled little feet! how she winced when her son seemed to shrink from her; how jealous she was still of that goose Molly,—who had been another man's wife for as many years as Herbert Maitland had been in his grave. But Blair saw none of these things that might have told him that his mother was a very woman. Instead, his conventionality was insulted at every turn; his love of beauty was outraged. As a result a wall was slowly built between the mother and son, a wall whose foundations had been laid when the little boy had pointed his finger at her and said "uggy."

Mrs. Maitland was, of course, perfectly unconscious of her son's hot misery; she was so happy at having him at home again that she could not see that he was unhappy at being at home. She was pathetically eager to please him. Her theory—if in her absorbed life she could be said to have a theory—was that Blair should have everything he wanted, so that he should the sooner be a man. Money, she thought, would give him everything. She herself wanted nothing money could give, except food and shelter; the only use she had for money was to make more money; but she realized that other people, especially young men, like the things it would buy. Twice during that particular vacation, for no cause except to gratify herself, she gave her son a wickedly large check; and once, when Nannie told her that he wanted to pay for some painting lessons, though she demurred just for a moment, she paid the bill so that his own spending-money should not be diminished.

"What on earth does a man who is going to run an Iron Works want with painting lessons?" she said to the entreating sister. But even while she made her grumbling protest, she wrote a check.

As for Blair, he took the money, as he took everything else that she gave him of opportunity and happiness, and said, "Thank you, mother; you are awfully good"; but he shut his eyes when he kissed her. He was blind to the love, the yearning, the outstretched hands of motherhood,—not because he was cruel, or hard, or mean; but because he was young, and delighted in beauty.

Of course his wretchedness lessened after a fortnight or so— habit does much to reconcile us to unpleasantness; besides that, his painting was an interest, and his voice began to be a delight to him; he used to sing a good deal, making Nannie play his accompaniments, and sometimes his mother, working in the dining- room, would pause a moment, with lifted head, and listen and half smile—then fall to work again furiously.

But the real solace to his misery and irritation came to him—a boy still in years—in the sudden realization of Elizabeth!



CHAPTER IV

"I am going to have a party," Blair told Nannie; "I've invited David and Elizabeth, and four fellows; and you can ask four girls."

Nannie quaked. "Do you mean to have them come to supper?"

"You can call it 'supper'; I call it dinner."

"I'm afraid Mamma won't like it; it will disturb the table."

"I'm not going to have it in that hole of a dining-room; I'm going to have it in the parlor. Harris says he can manage perfectly well. We'll hang a curtain across the arch and have the table in the back parlor."

"But Harris can't wait on us in there, and on Mamma in the dining-room," Nannie objected.

"We shall have our dinner at seven, after Harris has given mother her supper on that beautiful table of hers."

"But—" said Nannie.

"You tell her about it," Blair coaxed; "she'll take anything from you."

Nannie yielded. Instructed by Blair, she hinted his purpose to Mrs. Maitland, who to her surprise consented amiably enough.

"I've no objections. And the back parlor is a very sensible arrangement. It would be a nuisance to have you in here; I don't like to have things moved. Now clear out! Clear out! I must go to work." A week later she issued her orders: "Mr. Ferguson, I'll be obliged if you'll come to supper to-morrow night. Blair has some kind of a bee in his bonnet about having a party. Of course it's nonsense, but I suppose that's to be expected at his age."

Robert Ferguson demurred. "The boy doesn't want me; he has asked a dozen young people."

Mrs. Maitland lifted one eyebrow. "I didn't hear about the dozen young people; I thought it was only two or three besides David and Elizabeth; however, I don't mind. I'll go the whole hog. He can have a dozen, if he wants to. As for his not wanting you, what has that got to do with it? I want you. It's my house, and my table; and I'll ask who I please. I've asked Mrs. Richie," she ended, and gave him a quick look.

"Well," her superintendent said, indifferently, "I'll come; but it's hard on Blair." When he went home that night, he summoned Miss White. "I hope you have arranged to have Elizabeth look properly for Blair's party? Don't let her be vain about it, but have her look right." And on the night of the great occasion, just before they started for Mrs. Maitland's, he called his niece into his library, and knocking off his glasses, looked her over with grudging eyes: "Don't get your head turned, Elizabeth. Remember, it isn't fine feathers that make fine birds," he said; and never knew that he was proud of her!

Elizabeth, bubbling with laughter, holding her skirt out in small, white-gloved hands, made three dancing steps, dipped him a great courtesy, then ran to him, and before he knew it, caught him round the neck and kissed him. "You dear, darling, precious uncle!" she said.

Mr. Ferguson, breathless, put his hand up to his cheek, as if the unwonted touch had left some soft, fresh warmth behind it.

Elizabeth did not wait to see the pleased and startled gesture she gathered up her fluffy tarlatan skirt, dashed out into the garden, through the green gate in the wall, and bursting into the house next door, stood in the hall and called up-stairs: "David! Come! Hurry! Quick!" She was stamping her foot with excitement.

David, who had had a perspiring and angry quarter of an hour with his first white tie, came out of his room and looked over the banisters, both hands at his throat. "Hello! What on earth is the matter?"

"David—see!" she said, and stood, quivering and radiant, all her whiteness billowing about her.

"See what?" David said, patiently.

"A long dress!"

"A what?" said David; then looking down at her, turning and twisting and preening herself in the dark hall like some shining white bird, he burst into a shout of laughter.

Elizabeth's face reddened. "I don't see anything to laugh at."

"You look like a little girl dressed up!"

"Little girl? I don't see much 'little girl' about it; I'm nearly sixteen." She gathered her skirt over her arm again, and retreated with angry dignity.

As for David, he went back to try a new tie; but his eyes were dreamy. "George! she's a daisy," he said to himself.

When, the day before, Mrs. Richie had told her son that she had been invited to Blair's party, he was delighted. David had learned several things at school besides his prayers, some of which caused Mrs. Richie, like most mothers of boys, to give much time to her prayers. But as a result, perhaps of prayers as well as of education, and in spite of Mr. Ferguson's misgivings as to the wisdom of trusting a boy to a "good woman," he was turning out an honest young cub, of few words, defective sense of humor, and rather clumsy manners. But under his speechlessness and awkwardness, David was sufficiently sophisticated to be immensely proud of his pretty mother; only a laborious sense of propriety and the shyness of his sex and years kept him from, as he expressed it, "blowing about her." He blew now, however, a little, when she said she was going to the party: "Blair'll be awfully set up to have you come. You know he's terribly mashed on you. He thinks you are about the best thing going. Materna, now you dress up awfully, won't you? I want you to take the shine out of everybody else. I'm going to wear my dress suit," he encouraged her. "Why, say!" he interrupted himself, "that's funny—Blair didn't tell me he had asked you."

"Mrs. Maitland asked me."

"Mrs. Maitland!" David said, aghast; "Materna, you don't suppose she's coming, do you?"

"I'm sure I hope so, considering she invited me."

"Great Casar's ghost!" said David, thoughtfully; and added, under his breath, "I'm betting on his not expecting her. Poor Blair!"

Blair had need of sympathy. His plan for a "dinner" had encountered difficulties, and he had had moments of racking indecision; but when, on the toss of a penny, 'heads' declared for carrying the thing through, he held to his purpose with a perseverance that was amusingly like his mother's large and unshakable obstinacies. He had endless talks with Harris as to food; and with painstaking regard for artistic effect and as far as he understood it, for convention, he worked out every detail of service and arrangement. His first effort was to make the room beautiful; so the crimson curtains were drawn across the windows, and the cut-glass chandeliers in both rooms emerged glittering from their brown paper-muslin bags. The table was rather overloaded with large pieces of silver which Blair had found in the big silver-chest in the garret; among them was a huge center ornament, called in those days an epergne—an extraordinary arrangement of prickly silver leaves and red glass cups which were supposed to be flowers. It was black with disuse, and Blair made Harris work over it until the poor fellow protested that he had rubbed the skin off his thumb—but the pointed leaves of the great silver thistle sparkled like diamonds. Blair was charmingly considerate of old Harris so long as it required no sacrifice on his own part, but he did not relinquish a single piece of silver because of that thumb. With his large allowance, it was easy to put flowers everywhere—the most expensive that the season afforded. When he ordered them, he bought at the same time a great bunch of orchids for Miss White. "I can't invite her," he decided, reluctantly; "but her feelings won't be hurt if I send her some flowers." As for the menu, he charged the things he wanted to his mother's meager account at the grocery-store. When he produced his list of delicacies, things unknown on that office-dining-room table, the amazed grocer said to himself, "Well, at last I guess that trade is going to amount to something! Why, damn it," he confided to his bookkeeper afterward, "I been sendin' things up to that there house for seventeen years, and the whole bill ain't amounted to shucks. That woman could buy and sell me twenty times over. Twenty times? A hundred times! And I give you my word she eats like a day- laborer. Listen to this"—and he rattled off Blair's order. "She'll fall down dead when she sees them things; she don't even know how to spell 'em!"

Blair had never seen a table properly appointed for a dinner- party; but Harris had recollections of more elaborate and elegant days, a recollection, indeed, of one occasion when he had waited at a policemen's ball; and he laid down the law so dogmatically that Blair assented to every suggestion. The result was a humorous compound of Harris's standards and Blair's aspirations; but the boy, coming in to look at the table before the arrival of his guests, was perfectly satisfied.

"It's fine, Harris, isn't it?" he said. "Now, light up all the burners on both chandeliers. Harris, give a rub to that thistle leaf, will you? It's sort of dull." Harris looked at his swollen thumb. "Aw', now, Mr. Blair," he began. "Did you hear what I said?" Blair said, icily—and the leaf was polished! Blair looked at it critically, then laughed and tossed the old man a dollar. "There's some sticking-plaster for you. And Harris, look here: those things—the finger-bowls; don't go and get mixed up on 'em, will you? They come last." Harris put his thumb in his mouth; "I never seen dishes like that," he mumbled doubtfully; "the police didn't have 'em."

"It's the fashion," Blair explained; "Mrs. Richie has them, and I've seen them at swell hotels. Most people don't eat in an office," he ended, with a curl of his handsome lip.

It was while he was fussing about, whistling or singing, altering the angle of a spoon here or the position of a wine-glass there, that his mother came in. She had put on her Sunday black silk, and she had even added a lace collar and a shell cameo pin; she was knitting busily, the ball of pink worsted tucked under one arm. There was a sort of grim amusement, tempered by patience, in her face. To have supper at seven o'clock, and call it "dinner"; to load the table with more food than anybody could eat, and much of it stuff that didn't give the stomach any honest work to do— "like that truck," she said, pointing an amused knitting-needle at the olives—was nonsense. But Blair was young; he would get over his foolishness when he got into business. Meantime, let him be foolish! "I suppose he thinks he's the grand high cockalorum!" she told herself, chuckling. Aloud she said, with rough jocosity:

"What in the world is the good of all those flowers? A supper table is a place for food, not fiddle-faddle!"

Blair reddened sharply. "There are people," he began, in that voice of restrained irritation which is veiled by sarcastic politeness—"there are people, my dear mother, who think of something else than filling their stomachs." Mrs. Maitland's eye had left the dinner table, and was raking her son from head to foot. He was very handsome, this sixteen-year-old boy, standing tall and graceful in his new clothes, which, indeed, he wore easily, in spite of his excitement at their newness.

"Well!" she said, sweeping him with a glance. Her face glowed; "I wish his father could have lived to see him," she thought; she put out her hand and touched his shoulder. "Turn round here till I look at you! Well, well! I suppose you're enjoying those togs you've got on?" Her voice was suddenly raucous with pride; if she had known how, she would have kissed him. Instead she said, with loud cheerfulness: "Well, my son, which is the head of the table? Where am I to sit?"

"Mother!" Blair said. He turned quite white. He went over to the improvised serving-table, and picked up a fork with a trembling hand; put it down again, and turned to look at her. Yes; she was all dressed up! He groaned under his breath. The tears actually stood in his eyes. "I thought," he said, and stopped to clear his voice, "I didn't know—"

"What's the matter with you?" Mrs. Maitland asked, looking at him over her spectacles.

"I didn't suppose you would be willing to come," Blair said, miserably.

"Oh, I don't mind," she said, kindly; "I'll stick it out for an hour."

Blair ground his teeth. Harris, pulling on a very large pair of white cotton gloves—thus did he live up to the standards of the policemen's ball—came shuffling across the hall, and his aghast expression when he caught sight of Mrs. Maitland was a faint consolation to the despairing boy.

"Here! Harris! have you got places enough?" Mrs. Maitland said. "Blair, have you counted noses? Mrs. Richie's coming, and Mr. Ferguson."

"Mrs. Richie!" In spite of his despair, Blair had an elated moment. He was devoted to David's mother, and there was some consolation in the fact that she would see that he knew how to do things decently! Then his anger burst out. "I didn't ask Mrs. Richie," he said, his voice trembling.

"What time is supper?" his mother interrupted, "I'm getting hungry!" She took her place at the head of the table, sitting a little sidewise, with one foot round the leg of her chair; she looked about impatiently, striking the table softly with her open hand—a hand always beautiful, and to-night clean. "What nonsense to have it so late!"

"It isn't supper," Blair said; "it's dinner; and—" But at that moment the door-bell saved the situation. Harris, stumbling with agitation, had retreated to his pantry, so Mrs. Maitland motioned to Blair. "Run and open the door for your friends," she said, kindly.

Blair did not "run," but he went; and if he could have killed those first-comers with a glance, he would have done so. As for Mrs. Maitland, still glowing with this new experience of taking part in her son's pleasure, she tramped into the front room to say how do you do and shake hands with two very shy young men, who were plainly awed by her presence. As the others came in, it was she who received them, standing on the hearth-rug, her back to the empty fireplace which Blair had filled with roses, all ready to welcome the timid youngsters, who in reply to her loud greetings stammered the commonplaces of the occasion.

"How are you, Elizabeth? What! a long dress? Well, well, you are getting to be a big girl! How are you, David? And so you have a swallowtail, too? Glad to see you, Mrs. Richie. Who's this? Harry Knight? Well, Harry, you are quite a big boy. I knew your stepmother when she was Molly Wharton, and not half your age."

Harry, who had a sense of humor, was able to laugh, but David was red with wrath, and Elizabeth tossed her head. As for Blair, he grew paler and paler.

Yet the dreadful dinner went off fairly smoothly. Mrs. Maitland sat down before anybody else. "Come, good people, come!" she said, and began her rapid "Bless, O Lord," while the rest of the company were still drawing up their chairs. "Amen, soup, Mrs. Richie?" she said, heartily. The ladling out of the soup was an outlet for her energy; and as Harris's ideals put all the dishes on the table at once, she was kept busy carving or helping, or, with the hospitable insistence of her generation, urging her guests to eat. Blair sat at the other end of the table in black silence. Once he looked at Mrs. Richie with an agonized gratitude in his beautiful eyes, like the gratitude of a hurt puppy lapping a friendly and helping hand; for Mrs. Richie, with the gentlest tact, tried to help him by ignoring him and talking to the young people about her. Elizabeth, too, endeavored to do her part by assuming (with furtive glances at David) a languid, young-lady- like manner, which would have made Blair chuckle at any less terrible moment. Even Mr. Ferguson, although still a little dazed by that encounter with his niece, came to the rescue—for the situation was, of course, patent—and talked to Mrs. Maitland; which, poor Blair thought, "at least shut her up"!

Mrs. Maitland was, of course perfectly unconscious that any one could wish to shut her up; she did not feel anything unusual in the atmosphere, and she was astonishingly patient with all the stuff and nonsense. Once she did strike the call-bell, which she had bidden Harris to bring from the office table, and say, loudly: "Make haste, Harris! Make haste! What is all this delay?" The delay was Harris's agitated endeavor to refresh his memory about "them basins."

"Is it now?" he whispered to Blair, furtively rubbing his thumb on the shiny seam of his trousers. Blair, looking a little sick, whispered back:

"Oh, throw 'em out of the window."

"Aw', now, Mr. Blair," poor Harris protested, "I clean forgot; is it with these here tomatoes, or with the dessert?"

"Go to the devil!" Blair said, under his breath. And the finger- bowls appeared with the salad.

"What's this nonsense?" Mrs. Maitland demanded; then, realizing Blair's effort, she picked up a finger-bowl and looked at it, cocking an amused eyebrow. "Well, Blair," she said, with loud good nature, "we are putting on airs!"

Blair pretended not to hear. For the whole of that appalling experience he had nothing to say—even to Elizabeth, sitting beside him in the new white dress, the spun silk of her brown hair shimmering in the amazing glitter of the great cut-glass chandelier. The other young people, glancing with alarmed eyes now at Blair, and now at his mother, followed their host's example of silence. Mrs. Maitland, however, did her duty as she saw it; she asked condescending questions as to "how you children amuse yourselves," and she made her crude jokes at everybody's expense, with side remarks to Robert Ferguson about their families: "That Knight boy is Molly Wharton's stepson; he looks like his father. Old Knight is an elder in The First Church; he hands round the hat for other people to put their money in—never gives anything himself. I always call his wife 'goose Molly.' ... Is that young Clayton, Tom Clayton's son? He looks as if he had some gumption; Tom was always Mr. Doestick's friend. ... I suppose you know that that West boy's grandmother wasn't sure who his grandfather was? ... Mrs. Richie's a pretty woman, Friend Ferguson; where are your eyes!" ...

When it was over, that terrible thirty minutes—for Mrs. Maitland drove Harris at full speed through all Blair's elaborations—it was Mrs. Richie who came to the rescue.

"Mrs. Maitland," she said, "sha'n't you and I and Mr. Ferguson go and talk in your room, and leave the young people to amuse themselves?" And Mrs. Maitland's quick agreement showed how relieved she was to get through with all the "nonsense."

When their elders had left them, the "young people" drew a long breath and looked at one another. Nannie, almost in tears, tried to make some whispered explanation to Blair. but he turned his back on her. David, with a carefully blase air, said, "Bully dinner, old man." Blair gave him a look, and David subsided. When the guests began a chatter of relief, Blair still stood apart in burning silence. He wished he need never see or speak to any of them again. He hated them all; he hated—But he did not finish this, even in his thoughts.

When the others had recovered their spirits, and Nannie had begun to play on the piano, and somebody had suggested that they should all sing—"And then let's dance!" cried Elizabeth—Blair disappeared. Out in the hall, standing with clenched hands in the dim light, he said to himself he wished they would all clear out! "I am sick of the whole darned business; I wish they'd clear out!"

It was there that Elizabeth found him. She had forgotten her displeasure at David, and was wildly happy; but she had missed Blair, and had come, in a dancing whirl of excitement, to find him. "What are you doing? Come right back to the parlor!"

Blair, turning, saw the smooth cheek, pink as the curve of a shell, the soft hair's bronze sheen, the amber darkness of the happy eyes. "Oh, Elizabeth!" he said, and actually sobbed.

"Blair! What is the matter?"

"It was disgusting, the whole thing."

"What was disgusting?"

"That awful dinner—"

"Awful? You are perfectly crazy! It was lovely! What are you talking about?" In her dismayed defense of her first social function, she put her hands on his arm and shook it. "Why! It is the first dinner I ever went to in all my life; and look: six- button gloves! What do you think of that? Uncle told Cherry-pie I could have whatever was proper, and I got these lovely gloves. They are awfully fashionable!" She pulled one glove up, not only to get its utmost length, but also to cover that scar which her fierce little teeth had made so long ago. "Oh, Blair, it really was a perfectly beautiful dinner," she said, earnestly.

She was so close to him that it seemed as if the color on her cheek burned against his, and he could smell the rose in her brown hair. "Oh, Elizabeth," he said, panting, "you are an angel!"

"It was simply lovely!" she declared. In her excitement she did not notice that new word. Blair trembled; he could not speak. "Come right straight back!" Elizabeth said; "please! Everybody will have a perfectly splendid time, if you'll just come back. We want you to sing. Please!" The long, sweet corners of her eyes implored him.

"Elizabeth," Blair whispered, "I—I love you."

Elizabeth caught her breath; then the exquisite color streamed over her face. "Oh!" she said faintly, and swerved away from him. Blair came a step nearer. They were both silent. Elizabeth put her hand over her lips, and stared at him with half-frightened eyes. Then Blair:

"Do you care, a little, Elizabeth?"

"We must go back to the parlor," she said, breathing quickly.

"Elizabeth, do you?"

"Oh—Blair!"

"Please, Elizabeth," Blair said; and putting his arms round her very gently, he kissed her cheek.

Elizabeth looked at him speechlessly; then, with a lovely movement, came nestling against him. A minute later they drew apart; the girl's face was quivering with light and mystery, the young man's face was amazed. Then amazement changed to triumph, and triumph to power, and power to something else, something that made Elizabeth shrink and utter a little cry. In an instant he caught her violently to him and kissed her—kissed the scar on her upraised, fending arm, then her neck, her eyes, her mouth, holding her so that she cried out and struggled; and as he let her go, she burst out crying. "Oh—oh—oh—" she said; and darting from him, ran up-stairs, stumbling on the unaccustomed length of her skirt and catching at the banisters to keep from falling. But at the head of the stairs she paused; the tears had burned off in flashing excitement. She hesitated; it seemed as if she would turn and come back to him. But when he made a motion to bound up after her, she smiled and fled, and he heard the door of Nannie's room bang and the key turn in the lock.

Blair Maitland stood looking after her; in that one hot instant boyishness had been swept out of his face.



CHAPTER V

"They have all suddenly grown up!" Mrs. Richie said, disconsolately. She had left the "party" early, without waiting for her carriage, because Mrs. Maitland's impatient glances at her desk had been an unmistakable dismissal.

"I will walk home with you," Robert Ferguson said.

"Aren't you going to wait for Elizabeth?"

"David will bring her home."

"He'll be only too glad of the chance; how pretty she was to- night! You must have been very proud of her."

"Not in the least. Beauty isn't a thing to be proud of. Quite the contrary."

Mrs. Richie laughed: "You are hopeless, Mr. Ferguson! What is a girl for, if not to be sweet and pretty and charming? And Elizabeth is all three."

"I would rather have her good."

"But prettiness doesn't interfere with goodness! And Elizabeth is a dear, good child."

"I hope she is," he said

"You know she is," she declared.

"Well, she has her good points," he admitted; and put his hand up to his lean cheek as if he still felt the flower-like touch of Elizabeth's lips.

"But they have all grown up," Mrs. Richie said. "Mr. Ferguson, David wants to smoke! What shall I do?"

"Good heavens! hasn't he smoked by this time?" said Robert Ferguson, horrified. "You'll ruin that boy yet!"

"Oh, when he was a little boy, there was one awful day, when—" Mrs. Richie shuddered at the remembrance; "but now he wants to really smoke, you know."

"He's seventeen," Mr. Ferguson said, severely. "I should think you might cut the apron-strings by this time."

"You seem very anxious about apron-strings for David," she retorted with some spirit. "I notice you never show any anxiety about Blair."

At which her landlord laughed loudly: "I should say not! He's been brought up by a man—practically." Then he added with some generosity, "But I'm not sure that an apron-string or two might not have been a good thing for Blair."

Mrs. Richie accepted the amend good-naturedly. "My tall David is very nice, even if he does want to smoke. But I've lost my boy."

"He'll be a boy," Robert Ferguson said, "until he makes an ass of himself by falling in love. Then, in one minute, he'll turn into a man. I—" he paused, and laughed: "I was twenty, just out of college, when I made an ass of myself over a girl who was as vain as a peacock. Well, she was beautiful; I admit that."

"You were very young," Mrs. Richie said gravely; the emotion behind his careless words was obvious. They walked along in silence for several minutes. Then he said, contemptuously:

"She threw me over. Good riddance, of course."

"If she was capable of treating you badly, of course it was well to have her do so—in time," she agreed; "but I suppose those things cut deep with a boy," she added gently. She had a maternal instinct to put out a comforting hand, and say "never mind." Poor man! because, when he was twenty a girl had jilted him, he was still, at over forty, defending a sensitive heart by an armor of surliness. "Won't you come in?" she said, when they reached her door; she smiled at him, with her pleasant leaf-brown eyes,—eyes which were less sad, he thought, than when she first came to Mercer. ("Getting over her husband's death, I suppose," he said to himself. "Well, she has looked mournful longer than most widows!")

He followed her into the house silently, and, sitting down on her little sofa, took a cigar out of his pocket. He began to bite off the end absently, then remembered to say, "May I smoke?"

The room was cool and full of the fragrance of white lilies. Mr. Ferguson had planted a whole row of lilies against the southern wall of Mrs. Richie's garden. "Such things are attractive to tenants; I find it improves my property," he had explained to her, when she found him grubbing, unasked, in her back yard. He looked now, approvingly at the jug of lilies that had replaced the grate in the fireplace; but Mrs. Richie looked at the clock. She was tired, and sometimes her good neighbor stayed very late.

"Poor Blair!" she said. "I'm afraid his dinner was rather a disappointment. What charming manners he has," she added, meditatively; "I think it is very remarkable, considering—"

Mr. Ferguson knocked off his glasses. "Mrs. Maitland's manners may not be as—as fine-ladyish as some people's, I grant you," he said, "but I can tell you, she has more brains in her little finger than—"

"Than I have in my whole body?" Mrs. Richie interrupted gaily; "I know just what you were going to say."

"No, I wasn't," he defended himself; but he laughed and stopped barking.

"It is what you thought," she said; "but let me tell you, I admire Mrs. Maitland just as much as you do."

"No, you don't, because you can't," he said crossly; but he smiled. He could not help forgiving Mrs. Richie, even when she did not seem to appreciate Mrs. Maitland—the one subject on which the two neighbors fell out. But after the smile he sighed, and apparently forgot Mrs. Maitland. He scratched a match, held it absently until it scorched his fingers; blew it out, and tossed it into the lilies; Mrs. Richie winced, but Mr. Ferguson did not notice her; he leaned forward, his hands between his knees, the unlighted cigar in his fingers: "Yes; she threw me over."

For a wild moment Mrs. Richie thought he meant Mrs. Maitland; then she remembered. "It was very hard for you," she said vaguely.

"And Elizabeth's mother," he went on, "my brother Arthur's wife, left him. He never got over the despair of it. He—killed himself."

Mrs. Richie's vagueness was all gone. "Mr. Ferguson!"

"She was bad—all through."

"Oh, no!" Helena Richie said faintly.

"She left him, for another man. Just as the girl I believed in left me. I would have doubted my God, Mrs. Richie, before I could have doubted that girl. And when she jilted me, I suppose I did doubt Him for a while. At any rate, I doubted everybody else. I do still, more or less."

Mrs. Richie was silent.

"We two brothers—the same thing happened to both of us! It was worse for him than for me; I escaped, as you might say, and I learned a valuable lesson; I have never built on anybody. Life doesn't play the same trick on me twice. But Arthur was different. He was of softer stuff. You'd have liked my brother Arthur. Yes; he was too good to her—that was the trouble. If he had beaten her once or twice, I don't believe she would have behaved as she did. Imagine leaving a good husband, a devoted husband—"

"What I can't imagine," Helena Richie said, in a low voice, "is leaving a living child. That seems to me impossible."

"The man married her after Arthur—died," he went on; "I guess she paid the piper in her life with him! I hope she did. Oh, well; she's dead now; I mustn't talk about her. But Elizabeth has her blood in her; and she is pretty, just as she was. She looks like her, sometimes. There—now you know. Now you understand why I worry so about her. I used to wish she would die before she grew up. I tried to do my duty to her, but I hoped she would die. Yet she seems to be a good little thing. Yes, I'm pretty sure she is a good little thing. To-night, before we went to the dinner, she—she behaved very prettily. But if I saw her mother in her, I would—God knows what I would do! But except for this fussing about clothes, she seems all right. You know she wanted a locket once? But you think that is only natural to a girl? Not a vanity that I need to be anxious about? Her mother was vain—a shallow, selfish theatrical creature!" He looked at her with worried eyes. "I am dreadfully anxious, sometimes," he said simply.

"There's nothing to be anxious about," she said, in a smothered voice, "nothing at all."

"Of course I'm fond of her," he confessed, "but I am never sure of her."

"You ought to be sure of her," Mrs. Richie said; "her little vanities—why, it is just natural for a girl to want pretty dresses! But to think—Poor little Elizabeth!" She hid her face in her hands; "and poor bad mother," she said, in a whisper.

"Don't pity her! She was not the one to pity. It was Arthur who—" He left the sentence unfinished; his face quivered.

"Oh," she cried, "you are all wrong. She is the one to pity, I don't care how selfish and shallow she was! As for your brother, he just died. What was dying, compared to living? Oh, you don't understand. Poor bad women! You might at least be sorry for them. How can you be so hard?"

"I suppose I am hard," he said, half wonderingly, but very meekly; "when a good woman can pity Dora—that was her name; who am I to judge her? I'll try not to be so hard," he promised.

He had risen. Mrs. Richie tried to speak, but stopped and caught her breath at the bang of the front door.

"It's David!" she said, in a terrified voice. Her face was very pale, so pale that David, coming abruptly into the room, stood still in his tracks, aghast.

"Why, Materna! What's up? Mother, something is the matter!"

"It's my fault, David," Robert Ferguson said, abashed. "I was telling your mother a—a sad story. Mrs. Richie, I didn't realize it would pain you. Your mother is a very kind woman, David; she's been sympathizing with other people's troubles."

David, looking at him resentfully, came and stood beside her, with an aggressively protecting manner. "I don't see why she need bother about other people's troubles. Say, Materna, I—I wouldn't feel badly. Mr. Ferguson, I—you—" he blustered; he was very much perturbed.

The fact was David was not in an amiable humor; Elizabeth had been very queer all the way home. "High and mighty!" David said to himself; treating him as if he were a little boy, and she a young lady! "And I'm seventeen—the idea of her putting on such airs!" And now here was her uncle making his mother low-spirited. "Materna, I wouldn't bother," he comforted her.

Mrs. Richie put a soothing hand on his arm. "Never mind," she said; she was still pale, "Yes, it was a sad story. But I thank you for telling me, Mr. Ferguson."

He tried awkwardly to apologize for having distressed her, and then took himself off. When he opened his own door, even before he closed it again, he called out, "Miss White!"

"Yes, sir?" said the little governess, peering rabbit-like from the parlor.

"Miss White, I've been thinking; I'm going to buy Elizabeth a piece of jewelry; a locket, I think. You can tell her so. Mrs. Richie says she's quite sure she isn't really vain in wanting such things."

"I have been at my post, sir, since Elizabeth was three years old," Miss White said with spirit, "and I have frequently told you that she was not vain. I'll go and tell her what you say, immejetly!"

But when Cherry-pie went to carry the great news she found Elizabeth's door locked.

"What? Uncle is going to give me a locket?" Elizabeth called out in answer to her knock. "Oh, joy! Splendid!"

"Let me in, and I'll tell you what he said," Miss White called back.

"No! I can't!" cried the joyous young voice. "I'm busy!"

She was busy; she was holding a lamp above her head, and looking at herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Her hair was down, tumbling in a shining mass over her shoulders, her eyes were like stars, her cheeks rose-red. She was turning her white neck from side to side, throwing her head backward, looking at herself through half-shut eyes; her mouth was scarlet. "Blair is in love with me!" she said to herself. She felt his last kiss still on her mouth; she felt it until it seemed as if her lip bled.

"David Richie needn't talk about 'little girls' any more. I'm engaged!" She put the lamp down on the mantelpiece, shook her mane of hair back over her bare shoulders, and then, her hands on her hips, her short petticoat ruffling about her knees, she began to dance. "Somebody is in love with me!

"'Oh, isn't it joyful, joyful, joyful—'"



CHAPTER VI

When the company had gone,—"I thought they never would go!" Nannie said—she rushed at her brother. "Blair!"

The boy flung up his head proudly. "She told you, did she?"

"You're engaged!" cried Nannie, ecstatically.

Blair started. "Why!" he said. "So I am! I never thought of it." And when he got his breath, the radiant darkness of his eyes sparkled into laughter. "Yes, I'm engaged!" He put his hands into his pockets and strutted the length of the room; a minute later he stopped beside the piano and struck a triumphant chord; then he sat down and began to play uproariously, singing to a crashing accompaniment:

"'... lived a miner, a forty-niner, With his daughter Clementine! Oh my darling, oh my darling—'"

—the riotous, beautiful voice rang on, the sound overflowing through the long rooms, across the hall, even into the dining- room. Harris, wiping dishes in the pantry, stopped, tea-towel in hand, and listened; Sarah Maitland, at her desk, lifted her head, and the pen slipped from her fingers. Blair, spinning around on the piano-stool, caught his sister about her waist in a hug that made her squeak. Then they both shrieked with laughter.

"But Blair!" Nannie said, getting her breath; "shall you tell Mamma to-night?"

Blair's face dropped. "I guess I won't tell anybody yet," he faltered; "oh, that awful dinner!"

As the mortification of an hour ago surged back upon him, he added to the fear of telling his mother a resentment that would retaliate by secrecy. "I won't tell her at all," he decided; "and don't you, either."

"I!" said Nannie. "Well, I should think not. Gracious!"

But though Blair did not tell his mother, he could not keep the great news to himself; he saw David the next afternoon, and overflowed.

David took it with a gasp of silence, as if he had been suddenly hit below the belt; then in a low voice he said, "You— kissed her. Did she kiss you?"

Blair nodded. He held his head high, balancing it a little from side to side; his lips were thrust out, his eyes shone. He was standing with his feet well apart, his hands deep in his pockets; he laughed, reddening to his forehead, but he was not embarrassed. For once David's old look of silent, friendly admiration did not answer him; instead there was half-bewildered dismay. David wanted to protest that it wasn't—well, it wasn't fair. He did not say it; and in not saying it he ceased to be a boy.

"I suppose it was when you and she went off after dinner? You needn't have been so darned quiet about it! What's the good of being so—mum about everything? Why didn't you come back and tell? You're not ashamed of it, are you?"

"A man doesn't tell a thing like that," Blair said scornfully.

"Well!" David snorted, "I suppose some time you'll be married?"

Blair nodded again. "Right off."

"Huh!" said David; "your mother won't let you. You are only sixteen. Don't be an ass."

"I'll be seventeen next May."

"Seventeen! What's seventeen? I'm pretty near eighteen, and I haven't thought of being married;—at least to anybody in particular."

"You couldn't," Blair said coldly; "you haven't got the cash."

David chewed this bitter fact in silence; then he said, "I thought you and Elizabeth were kind of off at dinner. You didn't talk to each other at all. I thought you were both huffy; and instead of that—" David paused.

"That damned dinner!" Blair said, dropping his love-affair for his grievance. Blair's toga virilis, assumed in that hot moment in the hall, was profanity of sorts. "David, I'm going to clear out. I can't stand this sort of thing. I'll go and live at a hotel till I go to college; I'll—"

"Thought you were going to get married?" David interrupted him viciously.

Blair looked at him, and suddenly understood,—David was jealous! "Gorry!" he said blankly. He was honestly dismayed. "Look here," he began, "I didn't know that you—"

"I don't know what you're talking about," David broke in contemptuously; "if you think I care, one way or the other, you're mistaken. It's nothing to me. 'By"; and he turned on his heel.

It was a hot July afternoon; the sun-baked street along which they had been walking was deep with black dust and full of the clamor of traffic. Four big gray Flemish horses, straining against their breastplates, were hauling a dray loaded with clattering iron rods; the sound, familiar enough to any Mercer boy, seemed to David at that moment intolerable. "I'll get out of this cursed noise," he said to himself, and turned down a narrow street toward the river. It occurred to him that he would go over the covered bridge, and maybe stop and get a tumbler of ice-cream at Mrs. Todd's. Then he would strike out into the country and take a walk; he had nothing else to do. This vacation business wasn't all it was cracked up to be; a man had better fun at school; he was sick of Mercer, anyhow.

He had reached Mrs. Todd's saloon by that time, and through the white palings of the fence he had glimpses of happy couples sitting at marble-topped tables among the marigolds and coreopsis, taking slow, delicious spoonfuls of ice-cream, and gazing at each other with languishing eyes. David felt a qualm of disgust; for the first time in his life he had no desire for ice- cream. A boy like Blair might find it pleasant to eat ice-cream with a lot of fellows and girls out in the garden of a toll- house, with people looking in through the palings; but he had outgrown such things. The idea of Blair, at his age, talking about being in love! Blair didn't know what love meant. And as for Elizabeth, how could she fall in love with Blair? He was two months younger than she, to begin with. "No woman ought to marry a man younger than she is," David said; he himself, he reflected, was much older than Elizabeth. That was how it ought to be. The girl should always be younger than the fellow. And anyway, Blair wasn't the kind of man for a girl like Elizabeth to marry. "He wouldn't understand her. Elizabeth goes off at half- cock sometimes, and Blair wouldn't know how to handle her. I understand her, perfectly. Besides that, he's too selfish. A woman ought not to marry a selfish man," said David. However, it made no difference to him whom she married. If Elizabeth liked that sort of thing, if she found Blair—who was only a baby anyhow—the kind of man she could love, why then he was disappointed in Elizabeth. That was all. He was not jealous, or anything like that; he was just disappointed; he was sorry that Elizabeth was that kind of girl. "Very, very sorry," David said to himself; and his eyes stung.... (Ah, well; one may smile; but the pangs are real enough to the calf! The trouble with us is we have forgotten our own pangs, so we doubt his.) ... Yes, David was sorry; but the whole darned business was nothing to him, because, unlike Blair, he was not a boy, and he could not waste time over women; he had his future to think of. In fact, he felt that to make the most of himself he must never marry.

Then suddenly these bitter forecastings ceased. He had come upon some boys who were throwing stones at the dust-grimed windows of an unused foundry shed. Along the roof of the big, gaunt building, dilapidated and deserted, was a vast line of lights that had long been a target for every boy who could pick up a pebble. Glass lay in splinters on the slope of sheet-iron below the sashes, and one could look in through yawning holes at silent, shadowy spaces that had once roared with light from swinging ladles and flowing cupolas; but there were a few whole panes left yet. At the sound of crashing glass, David, being a human boy, stopped and looked on, at first with his hands in his pockets; then he picked up a stone himself. A minute later he was yelling and smashing with the rest of them; but when he had broken a couple of lights, curiously enough, desire failed; he felt a sudden distaste for breaking windows,—and for everything else! It was a sort of spiritual nausea, and life was black and bitter on his tongue. He was conscious of an actual sinking below his breast-bone. "I'm probably coming down with brain fever," he told himself; and he had a happy moment of thinking how wretched everybody would be when he died. Elizabeth would be very wretched! David felt a wave of comfort, and on the impulse of expected death, he turned toward home again.... However, if he should by any chance recover, marriage was not for him. It occurred to him that this would be a bitter surprise to Elizabeth, whose engagement would of course be broken as soon as she heard of his illness; and again he felt happier. No, he would never marry. He would give his life to his profession—it had long ago been decided that David was to be a doctor. But it would be a lonely life. He looked ahead and saw himself a great physician—no common doctor, like that old Doctor King who came sometimes to see his mother; but a great man, dying nobly in some awful epidemic. When Elizabeth heard of his magnificent courage, she'd feel pretty badly. Rather different from Blair. How much finer than to be merely looking forward to a lot of money that somebody else had made! But perhaps that was why Elizabeth liked Blair; because he was going to have money? And yet, how could she compare Blair with,—well, any fellow who meant to work his own way? Here David touched bottom abruptly. "How can a fellow take money he hasn't earned?" he said to himself. David's feeling about independence was unusual in a boy of his years, and it was not altogether admirable; it was, in fact, one of those qualities that is a virtue, unless it becomes a vice.

When he was half-way across the bridge, he stopped to look down at the slow, turbid river rolling below him. He stood there a long time, leaning on the hand-rail. On the dun surface a sheen of oil gathered, and spread, and gathered again. He could hear the wash of the current, and in the railing under his hand he felt the old wooden structure thrill and quiver in the constant surge of water against the pier below him. The sun, a blood-red disk, was slipping into the deepening haze, and on either side of the river the city was darkening into dusk. All along the shore lights were pricking out of the twilight and sending wavering shafts down into the water. The coiling smoke from furnace chimneys lay level and almost motionless in the still air; sometimes it was shot with sparks, or showed, on its bellying black curves, red gleams from hidden fires below.

David, staring at the river with absent, angry eyes, stopped his miserable thoughts to watch a steamboat coming down the current. Its smoke-stacks were folded back for passing under the bridge, and its great paddlewheel scarcely moved except to get steerageway. It was pushing a dozen rafts, all lashed together into a spreading sheet. The smell of the fresh planks pierced the acrid odor of soot that was settling down with the night mists. On one of the rafts was a shanty of newly sawed pine boards; it had no windows, but it was evidently a home, for a stove-pipe came through its roof, and there was a woman sitting in its little doorway, nursing her baby. David, looking down, saw the downy head, and a little crumpled fist lying on the white, bare breast. The woman, looking up as they floated below him, caught his eye, and drew her blue cotton dress across her bosom. David suddenly put his hand over his lips to hide their quiver. The abrupt tears were on his cheeks. "Oh—Elizabeth!" he said. The revolt, the anger, the jealousy, were all gone. He sobbed under his breath. He had forgotten that he had said it made no difference to him,—"not the slightest difference." It did make a difference! All the difference in the world.... "Oh, Elizabeth!"... The barges had slid farther and farther under the bridge; the woman and the child were out of sight; the steamboat with its folded smoke-stacks slid after them, leaving a wake of rocking, yellow foam; the water splashed loudly against the piers. It was nearly dark there on the footpath, and quite deserted. David put his head down on his arms on the railing and stood motionless for a long moment.

When he reached home, he found his mother in the twilight, in the little garden behind the house. David, standing behind her, said carelessly, "I have some news for you, Materna."

"Yes?" she said, absorbed in pinching back her lemon verbena.

"Blair is—is spoony over Elizabeth. Here, I'll snip that thing for you."

Mrs. Richie faced him in amazement. "What! Why, but they are both children, and—" she stopped, and looked at him. "Oh— David!" she said.

And the boy, forgetting the spying windows of the opposite houses, dropped his head on her shoulder. "Materna—Materna," he said, in a stifled voice.



CHAPTER VII

Nobody except David took the childish love-affair very seriously, not even the principals—especially not Elizabeth. . . .

David did not see her for a day or two, except out of the corner of his eye when, during the new and still secret rite of shaving— for David was willing to shed his blood to prove that he was a man—he looked out of his bedroom window and saw her down in the garden helping her uncle feed his pigeons. He did not want to see her. He was younger than his years, this honest-eyed, inexpressive fellow of seventeen, but for all his youth he was hard hit. He grew abruptly older that first week; he didn't sleep well; he even looked a little pale under his freckles, and his mother worried over his appetite. When she asked him what was the matter, he said, listlessly, "Nothing." They were very intimate friends these two, but that moment on the bridge marked the beginning of the period—known to all mothers of sons—of the boy's temporary retreat into himself. . . . When a day or two later David saw Elizabeth, or rather when she, picking a bunch of heliotrope in her garden, saw him through the open door in the wall, and called to him to come "right over! as fast as your legs can carry you!"—he was, she thought, "very queer." He came in answer to the summons, but he had nothing to say. She, however, was bubbling over with talk. She took his hand, and, running with him into the arbor, pulled him down on the seat beside her.

"David! Where on earth have you been all this time? David, have you heard?"

"I suppose you mean—about you and Blair?" he said. He did not look at her, but he watched a pencil of sunshine, piercing the leaves overhead, faintly gilding the bunches of green grapes that had a film of soot on their greenness, and then creeping down to rest on the heliotrope in her lap.

"Yes!" said Elizabeth. "Isn't it the most exciting thing you ever heard? David, I want to show you something." She peered out through the leaves to make sure that they were unobserved. "It's a terrific secret!" she said, her eyes dancing. Her fingers were at her throat, fumbling with the fastening of her dress, which caught, and had to be pulled open with a jerk; then she drew half-way from her young bosom a ring hanging on a black silk thread. She bent forward a little, so that he might see it. "I keep it down in there so Cherry-pie won't know," she whispered. "Look!"

David looked—and looked away.

Elizabeth, with a blissful sigh, dropped the ring back again into the warm whiteness of that secret place. "Isn't it perfectly lovely? It's my engagement ring! I'm so excited!"

David was silent.

"Why, David Richie! You don't care a bit!"

"Why, yes, I do," he said. He took a grape from a bunch beside him, rubbed the soot off on his trousers, and ate it; then blinked wryly. "Gorry, that's sour."

"You—don't—like—my engagement!" Elizabeth declared slowly. Reproachful tears stood in her eyes; she fastened her dress with indignant fingers. "I think you are perfectly horrid not to be sympathetic. It's very important to a girl to get engaged and have a ring."

"It's very pretty," David managed to say.

"Pretty? I should say it was pretty! It cost fifty dollars! Blair said so. David, what on earth is the matter! Don't you like me being engaged?"

"Oh, it's all right," he evaded. He shut his eyes, which were still watering from that sour grape, but even with closed eyes he saw again that soft place where Blair's ring hung, warm and secret; the pain below his own breast-bone was very bad for a minute, and the hot fragrance of the heliotrope seemed overpowering. He swallowed hard, then looked at one of Mr. Ferguson's pigeons, walking almost into the arbor. The pigeon stopped, hesitated, cocked a ruby eye on the two humans on the wooden seat, and fluttered back into the sunny garden.

"Why, you mind!" Elizabeth said, aghast.

"Oh, it's nothing to me," David managed to say; "course, I don't care. Only I didn't know you liked Blair so much; so it was a—a surprise," he said miserably.

Elizabeth's consternation was beyond words. There was a perceptible moment before she could find anything to say. "Why, I never dreamed you'd mind! David, truly, I like you best of any boy I know;—only, of course now, being engaged to Blair, I have to like him best?"

"Yes that's so," David admitted.

"Truly, I like you dreadfully, David. If I'd supposed you'd mind— But, oh, David, it's so interesting to be engaged. I really can't stop. I'd have to give him back my ring!" she said in an agonized voice. She pressed her hand against her breast, and poor David's eyes followed the ardent gesture.

"It's all right," he said with a gulp.

Elizabeth was ready to cry; she dropped her head on his shoulder and began to bemoan herself. "Why on earth didn't you say something? How could I know? How stupid you are, David! If I'd known you minded, I'd just as lief have been engaged to—" Elizabeth stopped short. She sat up very straight, and put her hand to the neck of her dress to make sure it was fastened. At that moment a new sense was born in her; for the first time since they had known each other, her straightforward eyes—the sexless eyes of a child—faltered, and refused to meet David's. "I think maybe Cherry-pie wants me now," she said shyly, and slipped away, leaving David mournfully eating green grapes in the arbor. This was the last time that Elizabeth, uninvited, put her head on a boy's shoulder.

A week later she confided to Miss White the great fact of her engagement; but she was not so excited about it by that time. For one thing, she had received her uncle's present of a locket, so the ring was not her only piece of jewelry; and besides that, since her talk with David, being "engaged" had seemed less interesting. However, Miss White felt it her duty to drop a hint of what had happened to Mr. Ferguson: had it struck him that perhaps Blair Maitland was—was thinking about Elizabeth?

"Thinking what about her?" Mr. Ferguson said, lifting his head from his papers with a fretted look.

"Why," said Miss White, "as I am always at my post, sir, I have opportunities for observing; in fact, I shouldn't wonder if they were—attached." Cherry-pie would have felt that a more definite word was indelicate. "Of course I don't exactly know it," said Miss White, faithful to Elizabeth's confidence, "but I recall that when I was a young lady, young gentlemen did become attached—to other young ladies."

"Love-making? At her age? I won't have it!" said Robert Ferguson. The old, apprehensive look darkened in his face; his feeling for the child was so strangely shadowed by his fear that "Life would play another trick on him," and Elizabeth would disappoint him some way, that he could not take Cherry-pie's information with any appreciation of its humor. "Send her to me," he said.

"Mr. Ferguson," poor old Miss White ventured, "if I might suggest, it would be well to be very kind, because—"

"Kind?" said Robert Ferguson, astonished; he gave an angry thrust at the black ribbon of his glasses that brought them tumbling from his nose. "Was I unkind? I will see her in the library after supper."

Miss White nibbled at him speechlessly. "If he is severe with her, I don't know what she won't do," she said to herself.

But Mr. Ferguson did not mean to be severe. When Elizabeth presented herself in his library, the interview began calmly enough. Her uncle was brief and to the point, but he was not unkind. She and Blair were too young to be engaged,—"Don't think of it again," he commanded.

Elizabeth looked tearful, but she did not resent his dictum;— David's lack of sympathy had been very dampening to romance. It was just at the end that the gunpowder flared.

"Now, remember, I don't want you to be foolish Elizabeth."

"I don't think being in love is foolish, Uncle."

"Love! What do you know about love? You are nothing but a silly little girl."

"I don't think I'm very little; and Blair is in love with me."

"Blair is as young and as foolish as you are. Even if you were older, I wouldn't allow it. He is selfish and irresponsible, and— "

"I think," interrupted Elizabeth, "that you are very mean to abuse Blair behind his back. It isn't fair." Her uncle was perfectly dumfounded; then he went into harsh reproof. Elizabeth grew whiter and whiter and the dimple in her cheek lengthened into a long, hairline. "I wish I didn't live with you. I wish my mother were alive. She would be good to me!"

"Your mother?" said Robert Ferguson; his involuntary grunt of cynical amusement touched the child like a whip. Her fury was appalling. She screamed at him that she hated him! She loved her mother! She was going to marry Blair the minute she was grown up! Then she whirled out of the room, almost knocking over poor old Miss White, whose "post" had been anxiously near the key-hole.

Up-stairs, her rage scared her governess nearly to death: "My lamb! You'll get overheated, and take cold. When I was a young lady, it was thought unrefined to speak so—emphatically. And your dear uncle didn't mean to be severe; he—"

'"Dear uncle'?" said Elizabeth, "dear devil! He hurt my feelings. He made fun of my mother!" As she spoke, she leaped at a photograph of Robert Ferguson which stood on her bureau, and, doubling her hand, struck the thin glass with all her force. It splintered, and the blood spurted from her cut knuckles on to her uncle's face.

Miss White began to cry. "Oh, my dear, my dear, try to control yourself, or you'll do something dreadful some day!" Cherry-pie's efforts to check Elizabeth's temper were like the protesting twitterings of a sparrow in a thunder-storm. When she reproved her now, the furious little creature, wincing and trying to check the bleeding with her handkerchief, did not even take the trouble to reply. Later, of course, the inevitable moment of penitence came; but it was not because she had lost her temper; loss of temper was always a trifling matter to Elizabeth; it was because she had been disrespectful to her uncle's picture. That night, when all the household was in bed, she slipped down-stairs, candle in hand, to the library. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of herself; she took it out of the frame, tore it into little bits, stamped on it, grinding her heel down on her own young face; then she took off the locket Mr. Ferguson had given her,—a most simple affair of pearls and turquoise; kissed it with passion, and looked about her: where should it be offered up? The ashes in the fireplace? No; the house-maid would find it there. Then she had an inspiration—the deep well of her uncle's battered old inkstand! Oh, to blacken the pearls, to stain the heavenly blue of the turquoise! It was almost too frightful. But it was right. She had hurt his feelings by saying she wished she didn't have to live with him, and she had insulted his dear, dear, dear picture! So, with a tearful hiccup, she dropped the locket into the ink-pot that stood between the feet of a spattered bronze Socrates, and watched it sink into a black and terrible grave. "I'm glad not to have it," she said, and felt that she had squared matters with her conscience.

As for Robert Ferguson, he did not notice that the photograph had disappeared, nor did he plunge his pen deep enough to find a pearl, nor understand the significance of the bound-up hand, but the old worry about her came back again. Her mother had defended her own wicked love-affair, with all the violence of a selfish woman; and in his panic of apprehension, poor little Elizabeth's defense of Blair seemed to be of the same nature. He was so worried over it that he was moved to do a very unwise thing. He would, he said to himself, put Mrs. Maitland on her guard about this nonsense between the two children.

The next morning when he went into her office at the Works, he found the place humming with business. As he entered he met a foreman, just taking his departure with, so to speak, his tail between his legs. The man was scarlet to his forehead under the lash of his employer's tongue. It had been administered in the inner room; but the door was open into the large office, and as Mrs. Maitland had not seen fit to modulate her voice, the clerks and some messenger-boys and a couple of traveling-men had had the benefit of it. Ferguson, reporting at that open door, was bidden curtly to come in and sit down. "I'll see you presently," she said, and burst out into the large office. Instantly the roomful of people, lounging about waiting their turn, came to attention. She rushed in among them like a gale, whirling away the straws and chaff before her, and leaving only the things that were worth while. She snapped a yellow envelope from a boy's hand, and even while she was ripping it open with a big forefinger, she was reading the card of an astonished traveling-man: "No, sir; no, sir; your bid was one-half of one per cent, over Heintz. Your people been customers so long that they thought that I—? I never mix business and friendship!" She stood still long enough to run her eye over the drawing of a patent, and toss it back to the would-be inventor. "No, I don't care to take it up with you. Cast it for you? Certainly. I'll cast anything for anybody"; and the man found his blueprint in his hand before he could begin his explanation. "What? Johnson wants to know where to get the new housing to replace the one that broke yesterday? Tell Johnson that's what I pay him to decide. I have no time to do his business for him—my own is all I can attend to! Mr. Ferguson!" she called out, as she came banging back into the private office, "what about that ore that came in yesterday?" She sat down at her desk and listened intently to a somewhat intricate statement involving manufacturing matters dependent upon the quality of certain shipments of ore. Then, abruptly she gave her orders.

Robert Ferguson, making notes as rapidly as he could, smiled with satisfaction at the power of it all. It was as ruthless and as admirable as a force of nature. She would not pause, this woman, for flesh and blood; she was as impersonal as one of her own great shears that would bite off a "bloom" or a man's head with equal precision, and in doing so would be fulfilling the law of its being. Assuredly she would stop Blair's puppy-love in short order!

Business over, Sarah Maitland leaned back in her chair and laughed. "Did you hear me blowing Dale up? I guess he'll stay put for a while now! But I'm afraid I was angry," she confessed sheepishly; "and there is nothing on earth so foolish as to be angry at a fool."

"There is nothing on earth so irritating as a fool," he said.

"Yes, but it's absurd to waste your temper on 'em. I always say to myself, 'Sarah Maitland, if he had your brains, he'd have your job.' That generally keeps me cool; but I'm afraid I shall never learn to suffer Mr. Doestick's friends, gladly. Read your Bible, and you'll know where that comes from! I tell you, friend Ferguson, you ought to thank God every day that you weren't born a fool; and so ought I. Well what can I do for you?"

"I am bothered about Elizabeth and Blair."

She looked at him blankly for a moment. "Elizabeth? Blair? What about Elizabeth and Blair?"

"It appears," Robert Ferguson said, and shoved the door shut with his foot, "it appears that there has been some love-making."

"Love-making?" she repeated, bewildered.

"Blair has been talking to Elizabeth," he explained. "I believe they call themselves engaged."

Mrs. Maitland flung her head back with a loud laugh. At the shock of such a sound in such a place, one of the clerks in the other room spun round on his stool, and Mrs. Maitland, catching sight of him through the glass partition, broke the laugh off in the middle. "Well, upon my word!" she said.

"Of course it's all nonsense, but it must be stopped."

"Why?" said Mrs. Maitland. And her superintendent felt a jar of astonishment.

"They are children."

"Blair is sixteen," his mother said thoughtfully; "if he thinks he is in love with Elizabeth, it will help to make a man of him. Furthermore, I'd rather have him make love than make pictures;— that is his last fancy," she said, frowning. "I don't know how he comes by it. Of course, my husband did paint sometimes, I admit; but he never wanted to make a business of it. He was no fool, I can tell you, if he did make pictures!"

Robert Ferguson said dryly that he didn't think she need worry about Blair. "He has neither industry nor humility," he said, "and you can't be an artist without both of 'em. But as for this love business, they are children!"

Mrs. Maitland was not listening. "To be in love will be steadying him while he's at college. If he sticks to Elizabeth till he graduates, I sha'n't object."

"I shall object."

But she did not notice his protest.

"She has more temper than is quite comfortable," she ruminated; "but, after all, to a young man being engaged is like having a dog; one dog does as well as another; one girl does as well as another. And it isn't as if Blair had to consider whether his wife would be a 'good manager,' as they say; he'll have enough to waste, if he wants to. He'll have more than he knows what to do with!" There was a little proud bridling of her head. She, who had never wasted a cent in her life, had made it possible for her boy to be as wasteful as he pleased. "Yes," she said, with the quick decision which was so characteristic of her, "yes, he can have her."

"No, he can't," said Elizabeth's uncle.

"What?" she said, in frank surprise.

"Blair will have too much money. Inherited wealth is the biggest handicap a man can have."

"Too much money?" she chuckled; "your bearings are getting hot, ain't they? Come, come! I'm not so sure you need thank God. How can a man have too much money? That's nonsense!" She banged her hand down on the call-bell on her desk. "Evans! Bring me the drawings for those channels."

"I tell you I won't have it," Robert Ferguson repeated.

"I mean the blue-prints!" Mrs. Maitland commanded loudly; "you have no sense, Evans!" Ferguson got up; she had a way of not hearing when she was spoken to that made a man hot along his backbone. Robert Ferguson was hot, but he meant to have the last word; he paused at the door and looked back.

"I shall not allow it."

"Good-day, Mr. Ferguson," said his employer, deep in the blue- prints.



CHAPTER VIII

Elizabeth's uncle need not have concerned himself so seriously about the affairs of Elizabeth's heart. The very next day the rift between the lovers began:

"What on earth have you done to your hand?" asked Blair.

"I cut it. I was angry at Uncle, and broke his picture, and—"

Blair shouted with laughter. "Oh, Elizabeth, what a goose you are! That's just the way you used to bite your arm when you were mad. You always did cut off your nose to spite your face! Where is your locket?"

"None of your business!" said Elizabeth savagely. It was easy to be savage with Blair, because David's lack of interest in her affairs had taken the zest out of "being engaged" in the most surprising way. But she had no intention of not being engaged! Romance was too flattering to self-love to be relinquished; nevertheless, after the first week or two she lapsed easily, in moments of forgetfulness, into the old matter-of-fact squabbling and the healthy unreasonableness natural to lifelong acquaintance. The only difference was that now, when she and Blair squabbled, they made up again in new ways; Blair, with gusts of what Elizabeth, annoyed and a little disgusted, called "silliness"; Elizabeth, with strange, half-scared, wholly joyous moments of conscious power. But the "making-up" was far less personal than the fallings-out; these, at least, meant individual antagonisms, whereas the reconciliations were something larger than the girl and boy—something which bore them on its current as a river bears straws upon its breast. But they played with that mighty current as thoughtlessly as all young creatures play with it. Elizabeth used to take her engagement ring from the silk thread about her neck, and, putting it on her finger, dance up and down her room, her right hand on her hip, her left stretched out before her so that she could see the sparkle of the tiny diamond on her third finger. "I'm engaged!" she would sing to herself.

"'Oh, isn't it joyful, joyful, joyful!'

"Blair's in love with me!" The words were so glorious that she rarely remembered to add, "I'm in love with Blair." The fact was, Blair was merely a necessary appendage to the joy of being engaged. When he irritated her by what she called "silliness," she was often frankly disagreeable to him.

As for Blair, he, too, had his ups and downs. He swaggered, and threw his shoulders back, and cast appraising eyes on women generally, and thought deeply on marriage. But of Elizabeth he thought very little. Because she was a girl, she bored him quite as often as he bored her. It was because she was a woman that there came those moments when he offended her; and in those moments she had but little personality to him. In fact, their love-affair, so far as they understood it, apart from its elemental impulses which they did not understand, was as much of a play to them as the apple-tree housekeeping had been.

So Mr. Ferguson might have spared himself the unpleasant interview with Blair's mother. He recognized this himself before long, and was even able to relax into a difficult smile when Mrs. Richie ventured a mild pleasantry on the subject. For Mrs. Richie had spoken to Blair, and understood the situation so well that she could venture a pleasantry. She had sounded him one evening in the darkness of her narrow garden.

David was not at home, and Blair was glad of the chance to wait for him—so long as Mrs. Richie let him lounge on the grass at her feet. His adoration of David's mother, begun in his childhood, had strengthened with his years; perhaps because she was all that his own mother was not.

"Blair," she said, "of course you and I both realize that Elizabeth is only a child, and you are entirely too wise to talk seriously about being engaged to her. She is far too young for that sort of thing. Of course you understand that?"

And Blair, feeling as though the sword of manhood had been laid on his shoulder, and instantly forgetting the smaller pride of being "engaged," said in a very mature voice, "Oh, certainly I understand,"

If, in the dusk of stars and fireflies, with the fragrance of white stocks blossoming near the stone bench that circled the old hawthorn-tree in the middle of the garden—if at that moment Mrs. Richie had demanded Elizabeth's head upon a charger, Blair would have rejoiced to offer it. But this serene and gentle woman was far too wise to wring any promise from the boy, although, indeed, she had no opportunity, for at that moment Mr. Ferguson knocked on the green door between the two gardens and asked if he might come in and smoke his cigar in his neighbor's garden. "I'll smoke the aphids off your rose-bushes," he offered. "You are very careless about your roses!"

"A 'bad tenant'?" said Mrs. Richie, smiling. And poor Blair picked himself up, and went sulkily off.

But Mrs. Richie's flattering assumption that Blair and she looked at things in the same way, and David's apparent indifference to Elizabeth's emotions, made the childish love-affair wholesomely commonplace on both sides. By mid-September it was obvious that the prospect of college was attractive to Blair, and that the moment of parting would not be tragic to Elizabeth. The romance did not come to a recognized end, however, until a day or two before Blair started East. The four friends, and Miss White, had gone out to Mrs. Todd's, where David had stood treat, and after their tumblers of pink and brown and white ice-cream had been emptied, and Mrs. Todd had made her usual joke about "good- looking couples," they had taken two skiffs for a slow drift down the river to Willis's.

When they were rowing home again, the skiffs at first kept abreast, but gradually, in spite of Miss White's desire to be "at her post," and David's entire willingness to hold back, Blair and Elizabeth appropriately fell behind, with only a little shaggy dog, which Elizabeth had lately acquired, to play propriety. In the yellow September afternoon the river ran placidly between the hills and low-lying meadows; here and there, high on a wooded hillside, a maple flamed among the greenness of the walnuts and locusts, or the chestnuts showed the bronze beginnings of autumn. Ahead of them the sunshine had melted into an umber haze, which in the direction of Mercer deepened into a smudge of black. Elizabeth was twisting her left hand about to get different lights on her ring, which she had managed to slip on her finger when Cherry-pie was not looking. Blair, with absent eyes, was singing under his breath:

"'Oh! I came to a river, an' I couldn't get across; Sing "Polly-wolly-doodle" all the day! An' I jumped upon a nigger, an' I thought he was a hoss; Sing Polly-wolly—'

"Horrid old hole, Mercer," he broke off, resting on his oars and letting the boat slip back on the current.

"I like Mercer!" Elizabeth said, ceasing to admire the ring. "Since you've come home from boarding-school you don't like anything but the East." She began to stroke her puppy's head violently. Blair was silent; he was looking at a willow dipping its swaying finger-tips in the water.

"Blair! why don't you answer me?"

Blair, plainly bored, said, "Well, I don't like hideousness and dirt."

"David likes Mercer."

"I bet Mrs. Richie doesn't," Blair murmured, and began to row lazily.

"Oh, Mrs. Richie!" cried Elizabeth; "you think whatever she thinks is about perfect."

"Well, isn't it?"

Elizabeth's lip hardened. "I suppose you think she's perfect too?"

"I do," Blair said.

"She thinks I'm dreadful because, sometimes, I—get provoked," Elizabeth said angrily.

"Well, you are," Blair agreed calmly.

"If I am so wicked, I wonder you want to be engaged to me!"

"Can't I like anybody but you?" Blair said, and yawned.

"You can like everybody, for all I care," she retorted. Blair whistled, upon which Elizabeth became absorbed in petting her dog, kissing him ardently between his eyes.

"I hate to see a girl kiss a dog," Blair observed;

"'Sing Polly-wolly-doo—'"

"Don't look, then," said Elizabeth, and kissed Bobby again.

Blair sighed, and gave up his song. Bobby, obviously uncomfortable, scrambled out of Elizabeth's lap and began to stretch himself on the uncertain floor of the skiff.

"Lie down!" Blair commanded, and poked the little creature, not ungently, with his foot. Bobby yelped, gave a flying nip at his ankle, and retreated to the shelter of his mistress's skirts. "Confound that dog!" cried Blair.

"You are a horrid boy!" she said, consoling her puppy with frantic caresses. "I'm glad he bit you!"

Blair, rubbing his ankle, said he'd like to throw the little wretch overboard.

Well, of course, Elizabeth being Elizabeth, the result was inevitable. The next instant the ring lay sparkling in the bottom of the boat. "I break my engagement! Take your old ring! You are a cruel, wicked boy, and I hate you—so there!" "I must say I don't see why you should expect me to enjoy being bitten," Blair said hotly. "Well, all right; throw me over, if you want to. I shall never trust a woman again as long as I live!" He began to row fiercely. "I only hope that darned pup isn't going mad."

"I hope he is going mad," said Elizabeth, trembling all over, "and I hope you'll go mad, too. Put me on shore this instant!"

"Considering the current, I fear you will have to endure my society for several instants," Blair said.

"I'd rather be drowned!" she cried furiously, and as she spoke, even before he could raise his hand to stop her, with Bobby in her arms she sprang lightly over the side of the boat into the water. There was a terrific splash—but, alas! Elizabeth, in preferring death to Blair's society, had not calculated upon the September shallows, and even before the horrified boy could drop his oars and spring to her assistance, she was on her feet, standing knee-deep in the muddy current.

The water completely extinguished the fires of wrath. In the hubbub that followed, the ejaculations and outcries, Nannie's tears, Miss White's terrified scolding, Blair's protestations to David that it wasn't his fault—through it all, Elizabeth, wading ashore, was silent. Only at the landing of the toll-house, when poor distracted Cherry-pie bade the boys get a carriage, did she speak:

"I won't go in a carriage. I am going to walk home."

"My lamb! you'll take cold! You mustn't!"

"You look like the deuce," Blair told her anxiously; and David blurted out, "Elizabeth, you can't walk home; you're a perfect object!" Elizabeth, through the mud trickling over her eyes, flashed a look at him:

"That's why I'm going to walk!" And walk she did—across the bridge, along the street, a dripping little figure stared at by passers-by, and followed by the faithful but embarrassed four— by five, indeed, for Blair had fished Bobby out of the water, and even stopped, once in a while when no one was looking, to give the maker of all this trouble a furtive and apologetic pat. At Elizabeth's door, in a very scared frame of mind lest Mr. Ferguson should come out and catch him, Blair attempted to apologize.

"Don't be silly," Elizabeth said, muddy and shivering, but just; "it wasn't your fault. But we're not engaged any more." And that was the end of the love-story!

Elizabeth told Cherry-pie that she had "broken with Blair Maitland forever!" Miss White, when she went to make her report of the dreadful event to Mr. Ferguson, added that she felt assured the young people had got over their foolishness. Elizabeth's uncle, telling the story of the ducking to David's horrified mother, said that he was greatly relieved to know that Elizabeth had come to her senses.

But with all the "tellings" that buzzed between the three households, nobody thought of telling Mrs. Maitland. Why should they? Who would connect this woman of iron and toil and sweat, of noise and motion, with the sentimentalities of two children? She had to find it out for herself.

At breakfast on the morning of the day Blair was to start East, his mother, looking over the top of her newspaper at him, said abruptly:

"Blair, I have something to say to you before you go. Be at my office at the Works at ten-fifteen." She looked at him amiably, then pushed back her chair. "Nannie! Get my bonnet. Come! Hurry! I'm late!"

Nannie, running, brought the bonnet, a bunch of rusty black crepe, with strings frayed with many tyings. "Oh, Mamma," she said softly, "do let me get you a new bonnet?"

But Mrs. Maitland was not listening. "Harris!" she called loudly, "tell Watson to have those roller figures for me at eleven. And I want the linen tracing—Bates will know what I mean—at noon without fail. Nannie, see that there's boiled cabbage for dinner."

A moment later the door banged behind her. The abrupt silence was like a blow. Nannie and Harris caught their breaths; it was as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the air; there was a minute before any one breathed freely. Then Blair flung up his arms in a wordless protest; he actually winced with pain. He glanced around the unlovely room; at the table, with its ledgers and clutter of unmatched china—old Canton, and heavy white earthenware, and odd cups and saucers with splashing decorations which had pleased Harris's eye; at the files of newspapers on the sideboard, the grimy walls, the untidy fireplace. "Thank Heaven! I'm going off to-day. I wish I need never come back," he said.

"Oh, Blair, that is a dreadful thing to say!"

"It may be dreadful, but that's the way I feel. I can't help my feelings, can I? The further mother and I are apart, the better we love each other. Well! I suppose I've got to go and see her bossing a lot of men, instead of sitting at home, like a lady;— and I'll get a dreadful blowing up. Of course she knows about the engagement now, thanks to Elizabeth's craziness."

"I don't believe she knows anything about it," Nannie tried to encourage him.

"Oh, you bet old Ferguson has told her," Blair said, gloomily. "Say, Nannie, if Elizabeth doesn't look out she'll get into awful hot water one of these days with her devil of a temper—and she'll get other people into it, too," he ended resentfully. Blair hated hot water, as he hated everything that was unbeautiful. "Mother is going to take my head off, of course," he said.

But Sarah Maitland, entirely ignorant of what had happened, had no such intention; she had gone over to her office in a glow of personal pleasure that warmed up the details of business. She intended to take Blair that morning through the Works,—not as he had often gone before, tagging after her, a frightened child, a reluctant boy—but as the prince, formally looking over the kingdom into which he was so soon to come! He was in love: therefore he would wish to be married; therefore he would be impatient to get to work! It was all a matter of logical and satisfactory deduction. How many times in this hot summer, when very literally she was earning her son's bread by the sweat of her brow, had she looked at Elizabeth and Blair, and found enjoyment in these deductions! Nobody would have imagined it, but the big, ungainly woman dreamed! Dreamed of her boy, of his business success, of his love, of his wife,—and, who knows? perhaps those grimy pink baby socks began to mean something more personal than the missionary barrel. It was her purpose, on this particular morning, to tell him, after they had gone through the Works, just where, when he graduated, he was to begin. Not at the bottom!—that was Ferguson's idea. "He ought to start at the bottom, if he is ever to get to the top," Ferguson had barked. No, Blair need not start at the bottom; he could begin pretty well up at the top; and he should have a salary. What an incentive that would be! First she would tell him that now, when he was going to college, she meant to increase his allowance; then she would tell him about the salary he would have when he got to work. How happy he would be! For a boy to be in love, and have all the pocket-money he wanted, and a great business to look forward to; to have work—work! the finest thing in the world!— all ready to his hand,—what more could a human being desire? At the office, she swept through the morning business with a speed that took her people off their feet. Once or twice she glanced at the clock; Blair was always unpunctual. "He'll get that knocked out of him when he gets into business," she thought, grimly.

It was eleven before he came loitering across the Yards. His mother, lifting her head for a moment from her desk, and glancing impatiently out of the dirt-begrimed office window, saw him coming, and caught the gleam of his patent-leather shoes as he skirted a puddle just outside the door. "Well, Master Blair," she said to herself, flinging down her pen, "you'll forget those pretty boots when you get to walking around your Works!"

Blair, dawdling through the outer office, found his way to her sanctum, and sat down in a chair beside her desk. He glanced at her shrinkingly, and looked away. Her bonnet was crooked; her hair was hanging in wisps at the back of her neck; her short skirt showed the big, broad-soled foot twisted round the leg of her chair. Blair saw the muddy sole of that shoe, and half closed his eyes. Then remembering Elizabeth, he felt a little sick; "she's going to row about it!" he thought, and quailed.

"You're late," she said; then, without stopping for his excuses, she proceeded with the business in hand. "I'm going to increase your allowance."

Blair sat up in astonishment.

"I mean while you're at college. After that I shall stop the allowance entirely, and you will go to work. You will go on a salary, like any other man." Her mouth clicked shut in a tight line of satisfaction.

The color flew into Blair's face. "Why!" he said. "You are awfully good, Mother. Really, I—"

"I know all about this business of your engagement to Elizabeth," Mrs. Maitland broke in, "though you didn't see fit to tell me about it yourself." There was something in her voice that would have betrayed her to any other hearer; but Blair, who was sensitive to Mrs. Richie's slightest wish, and careful of old Cherry-pie's comfort, and generously thoughtful even of Harris— Blair, absorbed in his own apprehensions, heard no pain in his mother's voice. "I know all about it," Mrs. Maitland went on. "I won't have you call yourselves engaged until you are out of college, of course. But I have no objection to your looking forward to being engaged, and married, too. It's a good thing for a young man to expect to be married; keeps him clean."

Blair was struck dumb. Evidently, though she did not know what had happened, she did know that he had been engaged. Yet she was not going to take his head off! Instead she was going to increase his allowance because, apparently, she approved of him!

"So I want to tell you," she went on, "though you have not seen fit to tell me anything, that I'm willing you should marry Elizabeth, as soon as you can support her. And you can do that as soon as you graduate, because, as I say, when you are in the Works, I shall pay you"—her iron face lighted—"I shall pay you a salary! a good salary."

More money! Blair laughed with satisfaction; the prospect soothed the sting of Elizabeth's "meanness"—which was what he called it, when he did not remember to name it, darkly, "faithlessness." He was so comforted that he had, for the first time in his life, an impulse to confide in his mother; "Elizabeth got provoked at me"— there was a boyish demand for sympathy in his tone; "and—"

But Mrs. Maitland interrupted him. "Come along," she said, chuckling. She got up, pulled her bonnet straight, and gave her son a jocose thrust in the ribs that made him jump. "I can't waste time over lovers' quarrels. Patch it up! patch it up! You can afford to, you know, before you get married. You'll get your innings later, my boy!" Still chuckling at her own joke, she slammed down the top of her desk and tramped into the outer office.

Blair turned scarlet with anger. The personal familiarity extinguished his little friendly impulse to blurt out his trouble with Elizabeth, as completely as a gust of wind puts out a scarcely lighted candle. He got up, his teeth set, his hands clenched in his pockets, and followed his mother through the Yards—vast, hideous wastes, scorching in the September heats, full of endless rows of pig, piles of scrap, acres, it seemed to Blair, of slag. The screeching clamor of the place reeked with the smell of rust and rubbish and sour earth, and the air was vibrant with the clatter of the "buggies" on the narrow-gauge tracks that ran in a tangled network from one furnace to another. Blair, trudging along behind his mother, cringing at the ugliness of everything about him, did not dare to speak; he still felt that dig in the ribs, and was so angry he could not have controlled his voice.

Mrs. Maitland walked through her Iron Works as some women walk through a garden:—lovingly. She talked to her son rapidly; this was so and so; there was such and such a department; in that new shed she meant to put the draftsmen; over there the timekeeper;— she paused. Blair had left her, and was standing in an open doorway of the foundry, watching, breathlessly, a jibcrane bearing a great ladle full of tons of liquid metal that shimmered above its white-hot expanse with the shifting blue flames of escaping gas. Seething and bubbling, the molten iron slopped in a flashing film over the side of the caldron, every drop, as it struck the black earth, rebounding in a thousand exploding points of fire. Above the swaying ladle, far up in the glooms under the roof, the shadows were pierced by the lurching dazzle of arc- lamps; but when the ladle tipped, and with a crackling roar the stream of metal flowed into a mold, the sizzling violet gleam of the lamps was abruptly extinguished by the intolerable glare of light.

"Oh," Blair said breathlessly, "how wonderful!"

"It is wonderful," his mother said. "Thomas, here, can move the lever that tips the ladle with his two fingers—and out comes the iron as neatly as cream out of a jug!"

Blair was so entirely absorbed in the fierce magnificence of light, and in the glowing torsos of the molders, planted as they were against the profound shadows of the foundry, that when she said, "Come on!" he did not hear her. Mrs. Maitland, standing with her hands on her hips, her feet well apart, held her head high; she was intensely gratified by his interest. "If his father had only lived to see him!" she said to herself. In her pride, she almost swaggered; she nodded, chuckling, to the molder at her elbow: