"Don't touch that place!" she cried; Blair, amused and cynical, laughed under his breath.

"I see; this is the hallowed spot where you made our friend a happy man?"

"We'll turn back now, please," Elizabeth said, suddenly trembling. She had reached the climax of her anger, and the reaction was like the shock of dropping from a dizzy height. During the walk home she scarcely spoke. When he left her at her uncle's door, she was almost rude. "Goodnight. No; I'm busy. I'd rather you didn't come in." In her own room, without waiting to take off her things, she ran to her desk; she did not even pause to sit down, but bent over, and wrote, sobbing under her breath:

"DAVID: I am just as false as I can be. I ridiculed you to Blair. I lied and lied and lied—because I was angry. I hated you for a little while. I am low, and vulgar, and a blasphemer. I told him about the bridge. You see how vile I am? But don't—don't give me up, David. Only—understand just how base I am, and then, if you possibly can, keep on loving me. E.

"P. S. I am not worth loving."

* * * * *

When David read that poor little letter, his face quivered for an instant, then he smiled. "Materna," he said—they were sitting at supper; "Materna, she certainly is perfect!"

His mother laughed, and put out her hand. But he shook his head. "Not even you!" he said.

When he went to see Elizabeth that evening, he found her curiously broken. "David, how could I do it? I made fun of you! Do you understand? Yes; I truly did. Oh, how vile I am! And I knew I was vile all the time; that's the queer part of it. But I piled it on! And all the time it seemed as if I was just bleeding to death inside. But I kept on doing it. I loved being false. I loved to blacken myself." She drew away from him, shivering. "No; don't touch me; don't kiss me; I am not worthy. Oh, David, throw me over! Don't marry me, I am not fit—" And as he caught her in his arms, she said, her voice smothered against his breast, "You see, you didn't come in at Nannie's. And it looked as if—as if you didn't care. It was humiliating, David. And last night you didn't bring me the book, or even send any message; and that was sort of careless. Yes, I really think you were a little horrid, David. So I was hurt, I suppose, to start with; and you know, when I am hurt—Oh, yes; it was silly; but—"

He kissed her again, and laughed. "It was silly, dear."

"Well, but listen: I am not excusing myself for this afternoon, but I do want you to understand how it started. I was provoked at your not explaining to me why you go away a whole month earlier than you need; I think any girl would be a little provoked, David. And then, on top of it, you let Blair and Nannie see that you didn't care to walk home with me, and—"

"But good gracious!" said David, amused and tender, "I thought you didn't want me! And it would have been rather absurd to hang round, if I wasn't wanted."

"Oh," she cried, sharply, lifting her wet face from his breast, "don't you see? I want you to be absurd! Can't you understand how a girl feels?" She stopped, and sighed. "After all, why should you show Nannie and Blair that you care? Why should you wait? I am not worth caring for, or waiting for, anywhere, any time! Oh, David, my temper—my dreadful temper!"

He lifted her trembling hand and kissed the scar on her left wrist silently.

"I ought not to see you to-night, just to punish myself," she said brokenly. "You don't know how crazy I was when I was talking to Blair. I was crazy! Oh, why, when I was a child, didn't they make me control my temper? I suppose I'm like—my mother," she ended in a whisper. "And I can't change, now; I'm too old."

David smiled. "You are terribly old," he said. Like everybody else, save Mrs. Richie, David accepted Elizabeth's temper as a matter of course. "She doesn't mean anything by it," her little world had always said; and put up with the inconvenience of her furies, with the patience of people who were themselves incapable of the irrationalities of temper. "Oh, you are a hardened sinner," David mocked.

"You do forgive me?" she whispered.

At that he was grave. "There is nothing I wouldn't forgive, Elizabeth."

"But I have stabbed you?"

"Yes; a little; but I am yours to stab."

Her eyes filled. "Oh, it is so wonderful, that you go on loving me, David!"

"You go on loving me," he rallied her; "in spite of my dullness and slowness, and all that."

But Elizabeth was not listening. "Sometimes it frightens me to get so angry," she said, with a somber look. "It was just the same when I was a little girl; do you remember the time I cut off my hair? I think you had hurt my feelings; I forget now what you had done. I was always having my feelings hurt! Of course I was awfully silly. It was a relief then to spoil my body, by cutting off my hair. This afternoon it was a relief to put mud on my soul."

He looked at her, trying to find words tender enough to heal the wounds she had torn in her own heart; not finding them, he was silent.

"Oh, we must face it," she said; "you must face it. I am not a good girl; I am not the kind of girl you ought to marry, I'm perfectly sure your mother thinks so. She thinks a person with a temper can't love people."

"I'll not go away in March!" David interrupted her passionately;— of course it might be pleasanter for Materna to get away from old Ferguson; but what is a man's mother, compared with his girl! Elizabeth's pain was intolerable to him. "I won't leave you a day before I have to!"

For a moment her wet eyes smiled. "Indeed you shall; I may be wicked—oh, I am! but I am not really an idiot. Only, David, don't take things so for granted, dear; and don't be so awfully sensible, David."



CHAPTER XIV

When the door closed behind Blair and Elizabeth, Nannie set out to do that "best," which her brother had demanded of her. She went at once into the dining-room; but before she could speak, her stepmother called out to her:

"Here! Nannie! You are just the person I want—Watson's late again, and I'm in a hurry. Just take these letters and sign them 'S. Maitland per N. M.' They must be posted before five. Sit down there at the table."

Nannie could not sign letters and talk at the same time. She got pen and ink and began to write her stepmother's name, over and over, slowly, like a little careful machine: "S. Maitland," "S. Maitland." In her desire to please she discarded her own neat script, and reproduced with surprising exactness the rough signature which she knew so well. But all the while her anxious thoughts were with her brother. She wished he had not rushed off with Elizabeth. If he had only come himself into the detested dining-room, his mother would have bidden him sign the letters; he might have read them and talked them over with her, and that would have pleased her. Nannie herself had no ambition to read them; her eye caught occasional phrases: "Shears for—," "new converter," etc., etc. The words meant nothing to Nannie, bending her blond head and writing like a machine, "S. Maitland," "S. Maitland," . . .

"Mamma," she began, dipping her pen into the ink, "Blair has bought a rather expensive—"

Mrs. Maitland came over to the table and picked up the letters. "That's all. Now clear out, clear out! I've got a lot to do!" Then her eye fell on one of the signatures, and she gave her grunt of a laugh. "If you hadn't put 'Per N. M.,' I shouldn't have known that I hadn't signed 'em myself ... Nannie."

"Yes, Mamma?"

"Is Blair going to be at home to supper?"

"I think not. But he said he would be in this evening. And he wanted me to—to ask—"

"Well, perhaps I'll come over to your parlor to see him, if I get through with my work. I believe he goes East again to-morrow?"

"Yes," Nannie said. Mrs. Maitland, at her desk, had begun to write. Nannie wavered for a minute, then, with a despairing look at the back of her stepmother's head, slipped away to her own part of the house. "I'll tell her at supper," she promised herself. But in her own room, as she dressed for tea, panic fell upon her. She began to walk nervously about; once she stopped, and leaning her forehead against the window, looked absently into the dusk. At the end of the cinder path, the vast pile of the foundry rose black against the fading sky; on the left the open arches of the cast-house of the furnace glowed with molten iron that was running into pigs on the wide stretch of sand. The spur track was banked with desolate wastes of slag and rubbish; beyond them, like an enfolding arm, was the river, dark in the darkening twilight. From under half-shut dampers flat sheets of sapphire and orange flame roared out in rhythmical pulsations, and above them was the pillar of smoke shot through with flying billions of sparks; back of this monstrous and ordered confusion was the solemn circling line of hills. It was all hideous and fierce, yet in the clear winter dusk it had a beauty of its own that held Nannie Maitland, even though she was too accustomed to it to be conscious of its details. As she stared out at it with troubled eyes, there was a knock at her door; before she could say "Come in," her stepmother entered.

"Here!" Mrs. Maitland said, "just fix this waist, will you? I can't seem to—to make it look right." There was a dull flush on her cheek, and she spoke in cross confusion. "Haven't you got a piece of lace, or something; I don't care what. This black dress seems—" she broke off and glanced into the mirror; she was embarrassed, but doggedly determined. "Make me look—somehow," she said.

Nannie, assenting, and rummaging in her bureau drawer, had a flash of understanding. "She's dressing up for Blair!" She took out a piece of lace, and laid it about the gaunt shoulders; then tucked the front of the dress in, and brought the lace down on each side. The soft old thread seemed as inappropriate as it would have been if laid on a scarcely cooled steel "bloom."

"Well, pin it, can't you?" Mrs. Maitland said sharply; "haven't you got some kind of a brooch?" Nannie silently produced a little amethyst pin.

"It doesn't just suit the dress, I'm afraid," she ventured.

But Mrs. Maitland looked in the glass complacently. "Nonsense!" she said, and tramped out of the room. In the hall she threw back,"—bliged."

"Oh, poor Mamma!" Nannie said. Her sympathy was hardly more than a sense of relief; if her mother was dressing up for Blair, she must be more than usually good-natured. "I'll tell her at supper," Nannie decided, with a lift of courage.

But at supper, in the disorderly dining-room, with the farther end of the table piled with ledgers, Mrs. Maitland was more unapproachable than ever. When Nannie asked a timid question about the evening, she either did not hear, or she affected not to. At any rate, she vouchsafed no answer. Her face was still red, and she seemed to hide behind her evening paper. To Nannie's gentle dullness this was no betrayal; it merely meant that Mrs. Maitland was cross again, and her heart sank within her. But somehow she gathered up her courage:

"You won't forget to come into the parlor, Mamma? Blair wants to talk to you about something that—that—"

"I've got some writing to do. If I get through I'll come. Now clear out, clear out; I'm too busy to chatter."

Nannie cleared out. She had no choice. She went over to her vast, melancholy parlor, into which it seemed as if the fog had penetrated, to await Blair. In her restless apprehension she sat down at the piano, but after the first bar or two her hands dropped idly on the keys. Then she got up and looked aimlessly about. "I'd better finish that landscape," she said, and went over to her drawing-board. She stood there for a minute, fingering a lead pencil; her nerves were tense, and yet, as she reminded herself, it was foolish to be frightened. His mother loved Blair; she would do anything in the world for him—Nannie thought of the lace; yes, anything! Blair was only a little extravagant. And what did his extravagance matter? his mother was so very rich! But oh, why did they always clash so? Then she heard the sound of Blair's key in the lock.

"Well, Nancy!" he said gaily, "she's a charmer."

"Who?" said Nannie, bewildered; "Oh, you mean Elizabeth?"

"Yes; but there's a lot of gunpowder lying round loose, isn't there? She was out with David, I suppose because he didn't show up. In fact, she was so mad she was perfectly stunning. Nancy! I think I'll stick it out here for two or three days; Elizabeth is mighty good fun, and David is in town; we might renew our youth, we four; what do you say? Well!" he ended, coming back to his own affairs, "what did mother say?"

"Oh, Blair, I couldn't!"

"What! you haven't told her?"

"Blair dear, I did my best; but she simply never gave me a chance. Indeed, I tried, but I couldn't. She wouldn't let me open my lips in the afternoon, and at supper she read the paper every minute—Harris will tell you."

Blair Maitland whistled. "Well, I'll tell her myself. It was really to spare her that I wanted you to do it. I always rile her, somehow, poor dear mother. Nannie, this house reeks of cabbage! Does she live on it?" Blair threw up his arms with a wordless gesture of disgust.

"I'm so sorry," Nannie said; "but don't tell her you don't like it."

The door across the hall opened, and there was a heavy step. The brother and sister looked at each other.

"Blair, be nice!" Nannie entreated; her soft eyes under the meekly parted blond hair were very anxious.

He did not need the caution; whenever he was with his mother, the mere instinct of self-preservation made him anxious to "be nice." As Mrs. Maitland had her instinct of self-preservation, too, there had been, in the last year, very few quarrels. Instead there was, on his part, an exaggerated politeness, and on her part, a pathetic effort to be agreeable. The result was, of course, entire absence of spontaneity in both of them.

Mrs. Maitland, her knitting in her hands, came tramping into the parlor; the piece of thread lace was pushed awry, but there had been further preparation for the occasion: at first her son and daughter did not know what the change was; then suddenly both recognized it, and exchanged an astonished glance.

"Mother!" cried Blair incredulously, "earrings!"

The dull color on the high cheek-bones deepened; she smiled sheepishly. "Yes; I saw 'em in my bureau drawer, and put 'em on. Haven't worn 'em for years; but Blair, here, likes pretty things." (Her son, under his breath, groaned: "pretty!") "So you are off tomorrow, Blair?" she said, politely; she ran her hand along the yellowing bone needles, and the big ball of pink worsted rolled softly down on to the floor. As she glanced at him over her steel-rimmed spectacles, her eyes softened as an eagle's might when looking at her young. "I wish his father could see him," she thought. "Next time you come home," she said, "it will be to go to work!"

"Yes," Blair said, smiling industriously.

"Pity you have to study this summer; I'd like to have you in the office now."

"Yes; I'm awfully sorry," he said with charming courtesy, "but I feel I ought to brush up on one or two subjects, and I can do it better abroad than here. I'm going to paint a little, too. I'll be very busy all summer."

"Why don't you paint our new foundry?" said Mrs. Maitland. She laughed with successful cheerfulness; Blair liked jokes, and this, she thought, complacently, was a joke. "Well, I shall manage to keep busy, too!" she said.

"I suppose so," Blair agreed.

He was lounging on the arm of Nannie's chair, and felt his sleeve plucked softly. "Now," said Nannie.

But Blair was not ready. "You are always busy," he said; "I wish I had your habit of industry."

Mrs. Maitland's smile faded. "I wish you had."

"Oh, well, you've got industry enough for this family," Blair declared. But the flattery did not penetrate.

"Too much, maybe," she said grimly; then remembered, and began to "entertain" again: "I had a compliment to-day."

Blair, with ardent interest, said, "Really?"

"That man Dolliver in our office—you remember Dolliver?" Blair nodded. "He happened to say he never knew such an honest man as old Henry B. Knight. Remember old Mr. Knight?" She paused, her eyes narrowed into a laugh. "He married Molly Wharton. I always called her 'goose Molly.' She used to make eyes at your father; but she couldn't get him—though she tried to hard enough, by telling him, so I heard, that the 'only feminine thing about me was my petticoats.' A very coarse remark, in my judgment; and as for being feminine,—when you were born, I thought of inviting her to come and look at you so she could see what a baby was like! She never had any children. Well, old Knight was elder of the Second Church. Remember?"

"Oh yes," Blair said vaguely.

"Dolliver said Knight once lost a trade by telling the truth, 'when he might have kept his mouth shut'—that was Dolliver's way of putting it. 'Well,' I said, 'I hope you think that our Works are just as honestly conducted as the Knight Mills'; fact was, I knew a thing or two about Henry B. And what do you suppose Dolliver said? 'Oh, yes,' he said, 'you are honest, Mrs. Maitland, but you ain't damn-fool honest.'" She laughed loudly, and her son laughed too, this time in genuine amusement; but Nannie looked prim, at which Mrs. Maitland glanced at Blair, and there was a sympathetic twinkle between them which for the moment put them both really at ease. "I got on to a good thing last week," she said, still trying to amuse him, but now there was reality in her voice.

"Do tell me about it," Blair said, politely.

"You know Kraas? He is the man that's had a bee in his bonnet for the last ten years about a newfangled idea for making castings of steel. He brought me his plans once, but I told him they were no good. But last month he asked me to make some castings for him to go on his contrivance. Of course I did; we cast anything for anybody—provided they can pay for it. Well, Kraas tried it in our foundry; no good, just as I said; the metal was full of flaws. But it occurred to me to experiment with his idea on my own hook. I melted my pig, and poured it into his converter thing; but I added some silvery pig I had on the Yard, made when No. 1 blew in, and the castings were as sound as a nut! Kraas never thought of that." She twitched her pink worsted and gave her grunt of a laugh. "Master Kraas hasn't any caveat, and he can't get one on that idea, so of course I can go ahead."

"Oh, Mamma, how clever you are!" Nannie murmured, admiringly.

"Clever?" said Blair; Nannie shook his arm gently, and he recollected himself. "Well, I suppose business is like love and war. All's fair in business."

Mrs. Maitland was silent. Then she said: "Business is war. But— fair? It is a perfectly legal thing to do."

"Oh, legal, yes," her son agreed significantly; the thin ice of politeness was beginning to crack. It was the old situation over again; he was repelled by unloveliness; this time it was the unloveliness of shrewdness. For a moment his disgust made him quite natural. "It is legal enough, I suppose," he said coldly.

Mrs. Maitland did not lift her head, but with her eyes fixed on her needles, she suddenly stopped knitting. Nannie quivered.

"Mamma," she burst in, "Blair wanted to tell you about something very beautiful that he has found, and—" Her brother pinched her, and her voice trailed into silence.

"Found something beautiful? I'd like to hear of his finding something useful!" The ice cracked a little more. "As for your mother's honesty, Blair, if you had waited a minute, I'd have told you that as soon as I found the idea was practical I handed it over to Kraas. I'm damn-fool honest, I suppose." But this time she did not laugh at her joke. Blair was instant with apologies; he had not meant—he had not intended—"Of course you would do the square thing," he declared.

"But you thought I wouldn't," she said. And while he was making polite exclamations, she changed the subject for something safer. She still tried to entertain him, but now she spoke wearily. "What do you suppose I read in the paper to-night? Some man in New York—named Maitland, curiously enough; 'picked up' an old master—that's how the paper put it; for $5,000. It appears it was considered 'cheap'! It was 14x18 inches. Inches, mind you, not feet! Well, Mr. Doestick's friends are not all dead yet. Sorry anybody of our name should do such a thing."

Nannie turned white enough to faint.

"Allow me to say," said Blair, tensely, "that an 'old master' might be cheap at five times that price!"

"I wouldn't give five thousand dollars for the greatest picture that was ever painted," his mother announced. Then, without an instant's warning, her face puckered into a furious sneeze. "God bless us!" she said, and blew her nose loudly. Blair jumped.

"I would give all I have in the world!" he said.

"Well," his mother said, ramming her grimy handkerchief into her pocket, "if it cost all you have in the world, it would certainly be cheap; for, so far as I know, you haven't anything." Alas! the ice had given way entirely.

Blair pushed Nannie's hand from his arm, and getting up, walked over to the marble-topped centre-table; he stood there slowly turning over the pages of The Poetesses of America, in rigid determination to hold his tongue. Mrs. Maitland's eyebrow began to rise; her fingers tightened on her hurrying needles until the nails were white. Nannie, looking from one to the other, trembled with apprehension. Then she made an excuse to take Blair to the other end of the room.

"Come and look at my drawing," she said; and added under her breath: "Don't tell her!"

Blair shook his head. "I've got to, somehow." But when he came back and stood in front of his mother, his hands in his pockets, his shoulder lounging against the mantelpiece, he was apparently his careless self again. "Well," he said, gaily, "if I haven't anything of my own, it's your fault; you've been too generous to me!"

The knitting-needles flagged; Nannie drew a long breath.

"Yes, you are too good to me," he said; "and you work so hard! Why do you work like a—a man?" There was an uncontrollable quiver of disgust in his voice.

His mother smiled, with a quick bridling of her head—he was complimenting her! The soreness from his thrust about legality vanished. "Yes; I do work hard. I reckon there's no man in the iron business who can get more pork for his shilling than I can!"

Blair cast an agonized look at Nannie; then set himself to his task again—in rather a roundabout way: "Why don't you spend some of your money on yourself, Mother, instead of on me?"

"There's nothing I want."

"But there are so many things you could have!"

"I have everything I need," said Mrs. Maitland; "a roof, a bed, a chair, and food to eat. As for all this truck that people spend their money on, what use is it? that's what I want to know! What's it worth?"

Blair put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a small beautifully carved jade box; he took off the lid delicately, and shook a scarab into the palm of his hand. "I'll tell you what that is worth," he said, holding the dull-blue oval between his thumb and finger; then he mentioned a sum that made Nannie exclaim. His mother put down her knitting, and taking the bit of eternity in her fingers, looked at it silently. "Do you wonder I got that box, which is a treasure in itself, to hold such a treasure?" Blair exulted.

Mrs. Maitland, handing the scarab back, began to knit furiously. "That's what it's worth," he said; he was holding the scarab in his palm with a sort of tenderness; his eyes caressed it. "But it isn't what I paid. The collector was hard up, and I made him knock off twenty-five per cent, of the price."

"Hah!" said Mrs. Maitland; "well; I suppose 'all's fair in love and collections'?"

"What's unfair in that?" Blair said, sharply; "I buy in the cheapest market. You do that yourself, my dear mother." When Blair said "my dear mother," he was farthest from filial affection. "Besides," he said, with strained self-control, "besides, I'm like you, I'm not 'damn-fool honest'!"

"Oh, I didn't say you weren't honest. Only, if I was going to take advantage of anybody, I'd do it for something more important than a blue china beetle." "The trouble with you, Mother, is that you don't see anything but those hideous Works of yours!" her son burst out.

"If I did, you couldn't pay for your china beetles. Beetles? You couldn't pay for the breeches you're sitting in!"

"Oh, Mamma! oh, Blair!" sighed poor Nannie.

There was a violent silence. Suddenly Mrs. Maitland brought the flat of her hand furiously down on the table; then, without a word, got on her feet, pulled at the ball of pink worsted which had run behind a chair and caught under the caster; her jerk broke the thread. The next moment the parlor door banged behind her.

Nannie burst out crying. Blair opened and closed his lips, speechless with rage.

"What—what made her so angry?" Nannie said, catching her breath. "Was it the beetle?"

"Don't call it that ridiculous name! I'll have to borrow the $5,000. And where the devil I'll get it I don't know. Nannie, 'goose Molly' wasn't an entire fool, after all!"

"Blair!" his sister protested, horrified. But Blair was too angry to be ashamed of himself. He could not see that his mother's anger was only the other side of her love. In Sarah Maitland, not only maternity, but pride, the peculiar pride engendered in her by her immense business—pride and maternity together, demanded such high things of her son! Not finding them, the pain of disappointment broke into violent expression. Indeed, had this charming fellow, handsome, selfish, sweet-hearted, been some other woman's son, she would have been far more patient with him. Her very love made her abominable to him. She was furiously angry when she left him there in Nannie's parlor; all the same he did not have to borrow the $5,000.

The next morning Sarah Maitland sent for her superintendent. "Mr. Ferguson," she said—they were in her private office, and the door was shut; "Mr. Ferguson, I think—but I don't know—I think Blair has been making an idiot of himself again. I saw in the paper that somebody called Maitland had been throwing money away on a picture. I don't know what it was, and I don't want to know. It was 14x18 inches; not feet. That was enough for me. Why, Ferguson, those big pictures in my parlor (I bought them when I was going to be married; a woman is sort of foolish then; I wouldn't do such a thing now), those four pictures are 4x6 feet each; and they cost me $400; $100 apiece. But this New York man has paid $5,000 for one picture 14x18 inches! If it was Blair— and it came over me last night, all of a sudden, that it was; he hasn't got any $5,000 to pay for it. I don't want to go into the matter with him; we don't get along on such subjects. But I want you to ask him about it; maybe he'll speak out to you, man fashion. If this 'Maitland' is just a fool of our name so much the better; but if it is Blair, I've got to help him out, I suppose. I want you to settle the thing for me. I—can't." Her voice broke on the last word; she coughed and cleared her throat before she could speak distinctly. "I haven't the time," she said.

Robert Ferguson listened, frowning. "You'll give him money to spend in ways you don't approve of?"

She nodded sullenly. "I have to."

"You don't have to!" he broke out; "for God's sake, Mrs. Maitland, stop!"

"What do you mean, sir?"

"I mean . . . this isn't my business, but I can't see you—Mrs. Maitland, if I get to talking on this subject, we'll quarrel."

The glare of anger in her face died out. She leaned back in her chair and looked at him. "I won't quarrel with you. Go on. Say what you think. I won't say I'll take your advice, but I'll listen to it."

"It's what I have always told you. You are squeezing the life out of Blair by giving him money. You've always done it, because it was the easy thing to do. Let up on him! Give him a chance. Let him earn his money, or go without. Talk about making him independent—you've made him as dependent as a baby! I don't know my Bible as well as you do, but there is a verse somewhere— something about 'fullness of bread and abundance of idleness.' That's what's the trouble with Blair. 'Fullness of bread and abundance of idleness.'"

"But he's been at college; he couldn't work while he was at college," she said, with honest bewilderment.

"Of course he couldn't. But why did you let him dawdle round at college, pretending to special, for a year after he graduated? Of course he won't work so long as he doesn't have to. The boy wouldn't be human if he did! You never made him feel he had to get through and to go to work. You've given him everything he wanted, and you've exacted nothing in return; not scholarship, nor even decent behavior. He's gambled, and gone after women, and bought everything on earth he wanted—the only thing he knows how to do is to spend money! He has never done a hand's turn of work in his life. He is just as much a dead beat as any beggar who gets his living out of other people's pockets. That he gets it out of your pocket doesn't alter that; that he doesn't wear rags and knock at back doors doesn't alter it. He's a dead beat! Any man is, who takes and doesn't give anything in return. It's queer you can't see that, Mrs. Maitland."

She was silent.

"Why, look here: I've heard you say, many a time, that the best part of your life was when you had to work hardest. Isn't that so?" She nodded. "Then why in thunder won't you let Blair work? Let him work, or go without!"

Again she did not speak.

"For Heaven's sake, give him a chance, before it's too late!"

Mrs. Maitland got up, and stood with her back to him, looking out of the smoke-grimed window. Presently she turned round. "Well, what would you do now—supposing he did buy the picture?"

"Tell him that he has overdrawn his allowance, and that if he wants the picture he must earn the money to pay for it. Say you'll advance it, if instead of going to Europe this summer he'll stay at home and go to work. Of course he can't earn five thousand dollars. I doubt if he can earn five thousand cents! But make up a job—just for this once; and help him out. I don't believe in made-up jobs, on principle; but they're better than nothing. If he won't work, darn the picture! It can be resold."

She blew her lips out in a bubbling sigh, and began to bite her forefinger. Robert Ferguson had said his say. He gathered his papers together and got on his feet.

"Mr. Ferguson ..." He waited, his hand on the knob.

"Yes?"

"'Bliged to you. But for the present—"

"Very well," Robert Ferguson said shortly.

"Just put through the business of the picture. Hereafter—"

Ferguson shrugged his shoulders.



CHAPTER XV

After his first spasm of angry disgust, when he declared he would go East the next morning, Blair's fancy for "hanging round Mercer" hardened into purpose; but he did not "hang round" his mother's house. "The hotel is pretty bad," he told Nannie, "but it's better than this." So he took the most expensive suite in the big, dark old River House that in those days was Mercer's best hotel. Its blackened facade and the Doric columns of its entrance gave it a certain exterior dignity; and its interior comfort, combined with the reviving associations of youth, lengthened Blair's two or three days to a week, then to a fortnight.

The day after that distressing interview with his mother, he went gaily round to Mrs. Richie's to pound David on the back, and say "Congratulations, old fellow! Why in thunder," he complained, "didn't I come back before? You've cut me out, you villain!"

David grinned.

"'Before the devil could come back, The angel had the inside track,'"

he admitted.

"Well, if you'll take my advice, you won't be too angelic," Blair said a little dryly. "She always had a touch of the other thing in her, you know."

"You think I'd better cultivate a few vices?" David inquired amiably; "I'm obliged for an example, anyhow!"

But Blair did not keep up the chaffing. The atmosphere of Mrs. Richie's house dominated him as completely as when he was a boy. He looked at her serene face, her simple, feminine parlor, the books and flowers and pictures,—and thought of his mother and his mother's house. Then, somehow, he was ashamed of his thoughts, because this dear lady said in her gentle way:

"How happy your mother must be to have you at home again, Blair. You won't rush right off and leave us, will you?"

"Well," he hesitated, "of course I don't want to"—he was surprised at the ring of truth in his voice; "but I am going to paint this summer. I am going to be in one of the studios in Paris."

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said simply. And Blair had an instant of uncertainty, although a moment before his "painting" had seemed to him necessary, because it facilitated another summer away from home; and after the interview with his mother's general manager, a summer away from home was more than ever desirable.

Mr. Ferguson had handed over the five thousand dollars, and then freed his mind. Blair listened. He heard that he was a sucker, that he was a poor stick, that he wasn't fit to black his mother's boots. "They need it," he said, chuckling; and Robert Ferguson nearly burst with anger!

Yet when the check was on its way to New York, and the picture had been shipped to Mercer, Blair still lingered at the River House. The idea of "renewing their youth" had appealed to all four friends. In the next two or three weeks they were constantly together at either one house or the other, or at some outside rendezvous arranged by Blair—a drive down to Willis's, a theater party and supper, a moonlight walk. Once David suggested "ice- cream at Mrs. Todd's." But this fell through; Blair said that even his sentimentality could not face the blue paper roses, and when David urged that the blue paper roses were part of the fun, Blair said, "Well, I'll match you for it. All important decisions ought to be left to chance, to avoid the burden of responsibility!" A pitched penny favored Blair, and Mrs. Todd did not see the 'handsome couples.' It was at the end of the first week, when they were all dining with Mrs. Richie—the evening meal was beginning to be called dinner nowadays in Mercer; that Mrs. Richie's soft eyes, which took duty and energy and ability so sweetly and trustingly for granted,—Mrs. Richie's believing eyes did for Blair what Robert Ferguson's vociferating truthfulness had not been able to accomplish. It was after dinner, and she and Blair had gone into the little plant-room, where the air was sweet with hyacinths and the moist greenness of ferns.

"Blair," she said, putting her soft hand on his arm; "I want to say something. You won't mind?"

"Mind anything _you say? I should think not!"

"It is only that I want you to know that, when the time comes, I shall think it very fine in you, with your tastes and temperament, to buckle down at the Works. I shall admire you very much then, Blair."

He gave her a droll look. "Alas, dear Mrs. Richie," he began; but she interrupted him.

"Your mother will be so proud and happy when you get to work; and I wanted you to know that I, too—"

He took her hand from his arm and lifted it to his lips; there was a courtliness about Blair, and a certain gravity, which at moments gave him positive distinction. "If there is any good in me," he said, "you would bring it out." Then he smiled. "But probably there isn't any."

"Nonsense!" she cried, and hesitated; he saw that her leaf-brown eyes were wet. "You must make your life worth while, Blair. You must! It would be such a dreadful failure if you didn't do anything but enjoy yourself." He was keenly touched. He did not kiss her hand again; he just put his arm around her, as David might have done, and gave her a hug. "Mrs. Richie! I—I will brace up!"

"You are a dear fellow," she said, and kissed him. Then they went back to the other three, to find Elizabeth in a gale of teasing merriment because, she said,. David was so "terribly talkative"!

"He has sat there like a bump on a log for fifteen minutes," she complained. "Say something, dummy!" she commanded.

David only chuckled, and pulled Blair into a corner to talk. "You girls keep on your own side; don't interrupt serious conversation," he said. "Blair, I want to ask you—" And in a minute the two young men were deep in their own affairs. It was amusing to see how quickly all four of them fell back into the comfortable commonplace of old friendship, the men roaring over some college reminiscences, and the two girls grumbling at being left out. "Really," said Mrs. Richie, "I should think none of you were more than fifteen!"

That night, when he took his sister home, Blair was very silent. Her little trickle of talk about David and Elizabeth was apparently unheard. As they turned into their own street, the full moon, just rising out of the river mists, suddenly flooded the waste-lands beyond the Works; the gaunt outlines of the Foundry were touched with ethereal silver, and the Maitland house, looming up in a great black mass, made a gulf of shadow that drowned the dooryard and spread half-way across the squalid street. Beyond the shadow, Shantytown, in the quiet splendor of the moon, seemed as intangible as a dream.

"Beautiful!" Blair said, involuntarily. He stood for a silent moment, drinking the beauty like wine, perhaps it was the exhilaration of it that made him say abruptly: "Perhaps I'll not go abroad. Perhaps I'll pitch in."

Nannie fairly jumped with astonishment. "Blair! You mean to go into the Works? This summer? Oh, how pleased Mamma would be! It would be perfectly splendid. Oh!" Nannie gave his arm a speechless squeeze.

"If I do, it will be because Mrs. Richie bolstered me up. Of course I would hate it like the devil; but perhaps it's the decent thing to do? Oh, well; don't say anything about it. I haven't made up my mind—this is an awful place!" he said, with a shiver, looking across at Shantytown and remembering what was hidden under the glamor of the moon. "The smell of it! Democracy is well enough, Nancy—until you smell it."

"But you could live at the hotel," Nannie reminded him, as he pulled out his latch-key.

"You bet I would," her brother said, laughing. "My dear, not even your society could reconcile me to the slums. But I don't know whether I can screw myself up to the Works, anyhow. David won't be in town, and that would be a nuisance. Well, I'll think it over; but if I do stay, I tell you what it is!—you two girls will have to make things mighty agreeable, or I'll clear out."

He did think it over; but Blair had never been taught the one regal word of life, he had never learned to say "I ought." Therefore it needed more talks with Mrs. Richie, more days with Elizabeth—David, confound him! wouldn't come, because he had to pack, but Nannie tagged on behind; it needed the "bolstering up" of much approval on the part of the onlookers, and much self- approval, too, before the screwing-up process reached a point where he went into his mother's office in the Works and told her that if she was ready to take him on, he was ready to go to work.

Mrs. Maitland was absolutely dumb with happiness. He wanted to go to work! He asked to be taken on! "What do you say now, friend Ferguson?" she jeered; "you thought he was going to play at his painting for another year, and you wanted me to put his nose to the grindstone, and make him earn the money to pay for that fool picture. Isn't it better to have him come to it of his own accord? I'd pay for ten pictures, if they made him want to go to work. As for his painting, it will be his father over again. My husband had his fancies about it, too, but he gave it all up when he married me; marriage always gives a man common sense,— marriage and business. That's how it's going to be with Blair," she ended complacently. "Blair has brains; I've always said so."

Robert Ferguson did not deny the brains, but he was as astonished as she.

"I believe," he challenged Mrs. Richie, "you put him up to it? You always could wind that boy round your finger."

"I did talk to him," she confessed; it was their last interview, for she and David were starting East that night, and Mr. Ferguson had come in to say good-by. "I talked to him—a little. Mrs. Maitland's disappointment about him went to my heart. Besides, I am very fond of Blair; there is a great deal of good in him. You are prejudiced."

"No I'm not. I admit that as his mother says, 'he's no fool'; but that only makes his dilly-dallying so much the worse. Still, I believe that if she were to lose all her money, and he were to fall very much in love and be refused, he might amount to something. But it would need both things to make a man of him."

Robert Ferguson sighed, and Mrs. Richie left the subject of the curative effect of unsuccessful love, with nervous haste. "I am going to charge Elizabeth and Nannie to do all they can to make it pleasant for him, so that he won't find the Works too terrible," she said. At which reflection upon the Works, Mr. Ferguson barked so fiercely that she felt quite at ease with him. But his barking did not prevent her from telling the girls that business would be very hard for Blair, and they must cheer him up: "Do try to amuse him! You know it is going to be very stupid for him in Mercer."

Nannie, of course, needed no urging; as for Elizabeth, she was a little contemptuous. Oh yes; she would do what she could, she said. "Of course, I'm awfully fond of Blair, but—"

The fact was, she was contrasting in her own mind the man who had to be "amused" to keep him at his work, with David—"working himself to death!" she told Nannie, proudly. And Nannie, quick to feel the slur in her words, said:

"Yes, but it is quite different with Blair. Blair doesn't have to do anything, you know."

Still, thanks to Mrs. Richie, he was at least going to pretend to do something. And so, at a ridiculously high salary, he entered, as he told Elizabeth humorously, "upon his career." The only thing he did to make life more tolerable for himself was to live in the hotel instead of in his mother's house. But it was characteristic of him that he left the wonderful old canvas—the "fourteen by eighteen inch" picture, hanging on the wall in Nannie's parlor. "You ought to have something fit for a civilized eye to rest upon," he told her, "and I can see it when I come to see you." If his permanent departure for the River House wounded his mother, she made no protest; she only lifted a pleased eyebrow when he dropped in to supper, which, she noticed, he was apt to do whenever Elizabeth happened to take tea with Nannie. When he did come, Sarah Maitland used to look about the dining- room table, with its thick earthenware dishes—the last of the old Canton service had found its way to the ash-barrel; she used to glance at the three young people with warm satisfaction. "Like old times!" she would say kindly; "only needs David to make it complete."

Mrs. Maitland was sixty-two that spring, but there was no stoop of the big shoulders, no sign of that settling and shrinking that age brings. She was at the full tide of her vigor, and her happiness in having her son beside her in the passion of her life, which was second only to her passion for him, showed itself in clumsy efforts to flaunt her contentment before her world. Every morning, with varying unpunctuality, Blair came into her office at the Works where she had had a desk placed for him. He was present, because she insisted that he should be, at the regular conferences which she held with the heads of departments. She made a pretense of asking his advice, which was as amusing to Mr. Ferguson and the under-superintendents as it was tiresome to Blair. For after his first exhilaration in responding to Mrs. Richie's high belief in him, the mere doing of duty began gradually to pall. Her belief helped him through the first four or five months, then the whole thing became a bore. His work was ludicrously perfunctory, and his listlessness when in the office was apparent to everybody. At the bottom of her heart, Sarah Maitland must have known that it was all a farce. Blair was worth nothing to the business; his only relation to it was the weekly drawing of an unearned "salary." Perhaps if Mrs. Richie had been in Mercer, to make again and again the appeal of confident expectation, that little feeble sense of duty which had started him upon his "career," might have struck a root down through feeling, into the rock-bed of character. But as it was, not even the girls' obedience to her order, "to amuse Blair," made up for the withdrawal of her own sustaining inspiration.

But at least Nannie and Elizabeth kept him fairly contented out of business hours; and so long as he was contented, things were smooth between him and his mother. There was, as Blair expressed it, "only one rumpus" that whole summer, and it was a very mild one, caused by the fact that he did not go to church. On those hot July Sunday mornings, his mother in black silk, and Nannie in thin lawn, sat in the family pew, fanning themselves, and waiting; Nannie, constantly turning to look down the aisle; Sarah Maitland intent for a familiar step and a hand upon the little baize-lined door of the pew. The "rumpus" came when, on the third Sunday, Blair was called to account.

It was after supper, in the hot dusk in Nannie's parlor; Elizabeth was there, and the two girls, in white dresses, were fanning themselves languidly; Blair, at the piano, was playing the Largo, with much feeling. The windows were open. It was too warm for lamps, and the room was lighted only by the occasional roar of flames, breaking fan-like from the tops of the stacks in the Yards. Suddenly, in the midst of their idle talk, Mrs. Maitland came in; she paused for a moment before the dark oblong of canvas on the wall beside the door. Of course, in the half- light, the little dim Mother of God—immortal maternity!—could scarcely be seen.

"Umph," she said, "a dirty piece of canvas, at about twenty dollars a square inch!" No one spoke. "Let's see;" she calculated;—"ore is $10 a ton; 20 tons to a car; say one locomotive hauls 25 cars. Well, there you have it: a trainload of iron ore, to pay for this!" she snapped a thumb and finger against the canvas. Blair jumped—then ran his right hand up the keyboard in a furious arpeggio. But he said nothing. Mrs. Maitland, moving away from the picture, blew out her lips in a loud sigh. "Well," she said; "tastes differ, as the old woman said when she kissed her cow."

Still no one spoke, but Elizabeth rose to offer her a chair. "No," she said, coming over and resting an elbow on the mantelpiece, "I won't sit down. I'm going in a minute."

As she stood there, unrest spread about her as rings from a falling stone spread on the surface of a pool. Blair yawned, and got up from the piano; Elizabeth fidgeted; Nannie began to talk nervously.

"Blair," said his mother, her strident voice over-riding the girls' chatter, "why don't you come to church?"

His answer was perfectly unevasive and entirely good-natured. "Well, for one thing, I don't believe the things the church teaches."

"What do you believe?" she demanded. And he answered carelessly, that really, he hardly knew.

It was, of course, the old difference of the generations; but it was more marked because these two generations had never spoken the same language, therefore quiet, sympathetic disagreement was impossible. It was impossible, too, because the actual fact was that neither her belief nor his disbelief were integral to their lives. Her creed was a barbarous anthropomorphism, which had created an offended and puerile god—a god of foreign missions and arid church-going and eternal damnation. The fear of her god (such as he was) would, no doubt, have protected her against certain physical temptations, to which, as it happened, her temperament never inclined; but he had never safeguarded her from the temptation of cutthroat competition, or even of business shrewdness which her lawyer showed her how to make legal. Blair, on the contrary, had long ago discarded the naive brutalities of Presbyterianism; church-going bored him, and he was not interested in saving souls in Africa. But, like most of us—like his mother, in fact, he had a god of his own, a god who might have safeguarded him against certain intellectual temptations; cheating at cards, or telling the truth, if the truth would compromise a woman. But as he had no desire to cheat at cards, and the women whom he might have compromised did not need to be lied about, his god was of as little practical value to him as his mother's was to her. So they were neither of them speaking of realities when Mrs. Maitland said: "What do you believe? What have you got instead of God?"

"Honor," Blair said promptly. "What do you mean by honor?" she said, impatiently.

"Well," her son reflected, "there are things a man simply can't do; that's all. And that's honor, don't you know. Of course, religion is supposed to keep you from doing things, too. But there's this difference: religion, if you pick pockets—I speak metaphorically; threatens you with hell. Honor threatens you with yourself." As he spoke he frowned, as if a disagreeable idea had occurred to him.

His mother frowned, too. That hell and a man's self might be the same thing had never struck Sarah Maitland. She did not understand what he meant, and feeling herself at a disadvantage, retaliated with the reproof she might have administered to a boy of fifteen: "You don't know what you are talking about!"

The man of twenty-five laughed lazily. "Your religion is very amusing, my dear mother."

Her face darkened. She took her elbow from the mantelpiece, and seemed uncertain what to do. Blair sprang to open the door, but she made an irritated gesture. "I know how to open doors," she said. She threw a brief "good-night" to Elizabeth, and turned a cheek to Nannie for the kiss that had fallen there, soft as a little feather, in all the nights of all the years they had lived together. "'Night, Blair," she said shortly; then hesitated, her hand on the door-knob. There was an instant when the command "Go to church!" trembled upon her lips, but it was not spoken. "I advise you," she said roughly, "to get over your conceit, and try to get some religion into you. Your father and your grandfather didn't think they could get along without it; they went to church! But you evidently think you are so much better than they were that you can stay away,"

The door slammed behind her. Blair whistled. "Poor dear mother!" he sighed; and turned round to listen to the two girls. "Can you be ready to start on the first?" Elizabeth was asking Nannie, evidently trying to cover up the awkwardness of that angry exit.

"Start where?" Blair asked.

"Why, East! You know. I told you ages ago," Nannie explained. "Elizabeth and I are going to stay with Mrs. Richie at the seashore."

"You never said a word about it," Blair said disgustedly. His annoyance knew no disguise. "I call it pretty shabby for you two to go off! What's going to happen to me?"

"Business, Blair, business!" Elizabeth mocked. But Nannie was plainly conscience-stricken. "I'll not go, if you'd rather I didn't, Blair."

"Nonsense!" her brother said shortly, "of course you must go, but—" He did not finish his thought, whatever it was; he went back to the piano and began to drum idly. His face was sharply annoyed. That definition of his god which he had made to his mother, had aroused a nameless uneasiness. It occurred to him that perhaps he was "picking a pocket," in finding such emphatic satisfaction in Elizabeth's society. Now, abruptly, at the news of her approaching absence, the uneasiness sharpened into faintly recognizable outlines.

He struck a jarring chord on the piano, and told himself not to be a fool. "She's mighty good fun. Of course I shall miss her or any other girl, in this Godforsaken hole! That's all it amounts to. Anyhow, she's dead in love with David." Sitting there in the hot dusk, listening to the voices of the girls, Blair felt suddenly irritated with David. "Darn him, why does he go off and leave her in this way? Not but what it is all right so far as I am concerned; only—" Then, wordlessly, his god must have accused him, for he winced. "I am not, not in the least!" he said. The denial confessed him to himself, and there was an angry bang of discordant octaves. The two girls called out in dismay.

"Oh, do stop!" Elizabeth said. Blair got up from the piano-stool and came over to them silently. His thoughts were in clamoring confusion. "I am not," he said again to himself. "I like her, but that's all." There was a look of actual panic on his lazily charming face. He glanced at Elizabeth, who, her head on Nannie's shoulder, was humming softly: "'Oh, won't it be joyful—joyful-joyful—'" and clenched his hands.

He was very silent as he walked home with her that night. When they reached her door, Elizabeth looked up at the closed shutters of Mrs. Richie's house, and sighed. "How dreary a closed house looks!" she said. "I almost wish Uncle would rent it, but he won't. I think he is keeping it for Mrs. Richie to live in when David and I settle down in Philadelphia."

Blair was apparently not interested in Mrs. Richie's future. "I wish," he said, "that I'd gone to Europe this summer."

"Well, that's polite, considering that Nannie and I have spent our time making it agreeable for you."

"I stayed in Mercer because I thought I'd like a summer with Nannie," he defended himself; he was just turning away at the foot of the steps, but he stopped and called back: "with Nannie- and you."

Elizabeth, from the open door, looked after him with frank astonishment. "How long since Nannie and I have been so much appreciated?"

"I think I began to appreciate you a good while ago, Elizabeth," he said, significantly; but she did not hear him. "Perhaps it's just as well she's going," he told himself, as he went slowly back to the hotel. "Not that I'm smitten; but I might be. I can see that I might be, if I should let myself go." But he was confident that allegiance to his god would keep him from ever letting himself go.

The girls went East that week, and when they did, Blair took no more meals in the office-dining-room.

It was a very happy time that the inland girls spent with Mrs. Richie, in her small house on the Jersey shore. It happened that neither of them had ever seen the ocean, and their first glimpse of it was a great experience. Added to that was the experience, new to both of them, of daily companionship with a serene nature. Mrs. Richie was always a little remote, a little inclined to keep people at arm's-length; there were undercurrents of sadness in her talk, and she was perhaps rather absorbed in her own supreme affair, maternal love. Also, her calm outlook upon heavenly horizons made the affairs of the girls seem sometimes disconcertingly small, and to realize the smallness of one's affairs is in itself an experience to youth. But in spite of the ultimate reserves they felt in her, Mrs. Richie was sympathetic, and full of soft gaieties, with endless patience for people and events. Elizabeth's old uneasy dislike of her had long since yielded to the fact that she was David's mother, and so must be, and in theory was, loved. But the love was really only a faint awe at what she still called "perfection"; and during the two months of living under the same roof with her, Elizabeth felt at times a resentful consciousness that Mrs. Richie was afraid of that ungovernable temper, which, the girl used to say, impatiently, "never hurts anybody but myself!" Like most high- tempered people, Elizabeth, though penitent and more or less mortified by her outbursts of fury, was always a little astonished when any one took them seriously; and Mrs. Richie took them very seriously.

Nannie, being far simpler than Elizabeth, was less impressed by Mrs. Richie than by her surroundings;—the ocean, the whole gamut of marine sights and happenings; Mrs. Richie's housekeeping; the delicate food and serving (what would Harris have thought of that table!)-all these things, as well as David's fortnightly visits, and Elizabeth's ardors and gay coldnesses, were delights to Nannie. Both girls had an absorbingly good time, and when the last day of the last week finally arrived, and Mr. Robert Ferguson appeared to escort them home, they were both of them distinctly doleful.

"Every perfect thing stops!" Elizabeth sighed to David. They had left the porch, and gone down on to the sands flooded with moonlight and silence. The evening was very still and warm, and the full blue pour of the moon made everything softly unreal, except the glittering path of light crossing the breathing, black expanse of water. David had hesitated when she had suggested leaving the others and coming down here by themselves,—then he had looked at Nannie, sitting between Robert Ferguson and his mother, and seemed to reassure himself; but he was careful to choose a place on the beach where he could keep an eye on the porch. He was talking to Elizabeth in his anxious way, about his work, and how soon his income would be large enough for them to marry. "The minus sign expresses it now," he said; "I could kick myself when I think that, at twenty-six, my mother has to pay my washwoman!" Their engagement had continued to accentuate the difference in the development of these two; David's manhood was more and more of the mind; Elizabeth's womanhood was most exquisitely of the body. When he spoke of his shame in being supported by his mother, she leaned her cheek on his shoulder, careless of the three spectators on the porch, and said softly, "David, I love you so that I would like to scrub floors for you." He laughed; "I wouldn't like to have you scrub floors, thank you! Why in thunder don't I get ahead faster," he sighed. Then he told her that the older men in the profession were "so darned mean, even the big fellows, 'way up," that they kept on practising when they could just as well sit back on their hind legs and do nothing, and give the younger men a chance.

"They are nothing but money-grabbers," Elizabeth agreed, burning with indignation at all successful physicians. "But David, we can live on very little. Corn-beef is very cheap, Cherry-pie says. So's liver."

Up on the porch the conversation was quite as practical as it was down by the moonlit water:

"Elizabeth is to have a little bit of money handed over to her on her next birthday," Mr. Ferguson was saying; then he twitched the black ribbon of his glasses and brought them tumbling from his nose; "it's an inheritance from her father."

"Oh, how exciting!" said Nannie. "Will it make it possible for them to be married any sooner?"

"They can't marry on the interest on it," he said, with his meager laugh; "it's only a nest-egg."

Mrs. Richie sighed. "Well, of course they must be prudent, but I am sorry to have them wait. It will be some time before David's practice is enough for them to marry on. He is so funny in planning their housekeeping expenses," she said, with that mother-laugh of mockery and love. "You should hear the economies they propose!" And she told him some of them. "They make endless calculations as to how little they can possibly live on. You would never suppose they could be so ignorant as to the cost of things! Of course I enlighten them when they deign to consult me. I do wish David would let me give him enough to get married on," she ended, a little impatiently.

"I think he's right not to," Robert Ferguson said.

"David is so queer about money," Nannie commented; and rose, saying she wanted to go indoors to the lamplight and her book.

"Pity Blair hasn't some of David's 'queerness,'" Mr. Ferguson barked, when she had vanished into the house.

Mrs. Richie looked after her uneasily, missing her protecting presence. But in Mr. Ferguson's matter-of-fact talk he seemed just the same harsh, kind, unsentimental neighbor of the last seventeen years; "he's forgotten his foolishness," she thought, and resigned herself, comfortably, to Nannie's absence. "Does Elizabeth know about the legacy?" she asked.

"No, she hasn't an idea of it. I was bound that the expectation of money shouldn't spoil her."

"Well," she jeered at him, "I do hope you are satisfied now, that she is not spoiled by money or anything else! How afraid you were to let yourself really love the child—poor little Elizabeth!"

"I had reason," he insisted doggedly. "Life had played a trick on me once, and I made up my mind not to build on anybody again, until I was sure of them." Then, without looking at her, he said, as if following out some line of thought, "I hope you have come to feel that you will marry me, Mrs. Richie?"

"Oh!" she said, in dismay.

"I don't see why you can't make up your mind to it," he continued, frowning; "I know"—he stopped, and put on his glasses carefully with both hands—"I know I am a bear, but—"

"You are not!"

"Don't interrupt. I am. But not at heart. Listen to me, at my age, talking about 'hearts'!" They both laughed, and then Mr. Ferguson gave a snort of impatience. "Look at those two youngsters down there, engaged to be married, and swearing by the moon that nobody ever loved as they do. How absurd it is! A man has to be fifty before he knows enough about love to get married."

"Nonsense!"

"I cannot take youth seriously," he ruminated; "its behavior, yes; that may be serious enough! Youth is always firing the Ephesian dome; but youth itself, and its opinions, always seem to me a little ridiculous. Yet those two infants seem to think that they have discovered love! Well," he interrupted himself, in sudden somber memory, "I felt that way once myself. And yet now, I know—"

Mrs. Richie said hurriedly something about its being too damp for Elizabeth on the sand. "Do call them in!"

He laughed. "No; you don't need 'em. I won't say any more—to- night."

"Here they come!" Mrs. Richie said in a relieved voice.

A minute before, David, looking up at the porch, and discovering Nannie's absence, had said, "Let's go in." "Oh, must we?" Elizabeth said, reluctantly. "I'd so much rather sit down here and have you kiss me." But she came, perforce, for David, in his anxiety not to leave his mother alone with Mr. Ferguson, was already halfway up the beach.

"Do tell Elizabeth about the money now," Mrs. Richie said.

"I will," said Robert Ferguson; but added, under his breath, "I sha'n't give up, you know." Mrs. Richie was careful not to hear him.

"Elizabeth!" she said, eagerly. "Your uncle has some news for you." And Mr. Ferguson told his niece briefly, that on her birthday in December she would come into possession of some money left her by her father.

"Don't get up your expectations, it's not much," he said, charily, "but it's something to start on."

"Oh, Uncle! how splendid!" she said, and caught David's hand in both of hers. "David!"—her face was radiantly unconscious of the presence of the others: "perhaps we needn't wait two years?"

"I'm afraid it won't make much difference." David spoke rather grimly; "I must be able to buy your shoestrings myself, you know, before we can be married."

Elizabeth dropped his hand, and the dimple straightened in her cheek.

Mrs. Richie smiled at her. "Young people have to be prudent, dear child."

"How much money shall I have, Uncle?" Elizabeth asked coldly.

He told her. "Not a fortune; but David needn't worry about your shoestrings."

"Yes, I will," he broke in, with a laugh. "She'll have to go barefoot, if I can't get 'em for her!"

Elizabeth exclaimed, with angry impatience, and Robert Ferguson, chuckling, struck him lightly on the shoulder. "Look out you don't fall over backward trying to stand up straight!" he said.

The possibility of an earlier wedding-day was not referred to again. The next morning they all went up to town together in the train, and Elizabeth, who had recovered from her momentary displeasure, did no more than cast glowing looks at David— lovely, melting looks of delicate passion, as virginal as an opening lily—looks that said, "I wish we did not have to wait!" For her part, she would have been glad "to go barefoot," if only they might the sooner tread the path of life together.

When they got into Mercer, late in the evening, who should meet them at the station but Blair. Robert Ferguson, with obvious relief, immediately handed his charges over to the young man with a hurried explanation that he must see some one on business before going to his own house. "Take the girls home, will you, Blair?" Blair said that that was what he was there for. His method of taking them home was to put Nannie into one carriage, and get into another with Elizabeth, who, a little surprised, asked where Nannie was.

"It would delay you to go round to our house first," Blair explained. "You forget we live in the slums. And Nannie's in a hurry, so I sent her directly home. She doesn't mind going by herself, you know. Look here, you two girls have been away an abominably long time! I've been terribly lonely—without Nannie."

He had indeed been lonely "without Nannie." In these empty, meaningless weeks at the Works, Blair Maitland had suddenly stumbled against the negations of life. Hitherto, he had known only the easy and delightful assents of Fate; this was his first experience with the inexorable No. A week after the girls went East, he admitted to himself that, had David been out of the way, he would undoubtedly have fallen in love with Elizabeth. "As it is, of course I haven't," he declared. Night after night in those next weeks, as he idled moodily about Mercer's streets, or, lounging across the bridge, leaned on the handrail and watched the ashes from his cigar flicker down into the unseen current below, he said the same thing: "I am not in love with her, and I sha'n't allow myself to be. I won't let it go any farther. But David is no man for a girl like Elizabeth to marry." Then he would fall to thinking just what kind of man Elizabeth ought to marry. Such reflections proved, so he assured himself, how entirely he knew that she belonged to David. Sometimes he wondered sullenly whether he had not better leave Mercer before she came back? Perhaps it was his god who made this suggestion; if so, he did not recognize a divine voice. He always decided against such a course. It would be cowardly, he told himself, to keep away from Elizabeth. "I will see her when she gets home, just as usual. To stay away might make her think that I was— afraid. And I am not in the least, because I am not in love with her, and I shall not allow myself to be." He was perfectly sure of himself, and perfectly sincere, too; what lover has ever understood that love has nothing to do with volition!

Now, alone with her in the old depot carriage, his sureness permitted him to say, significantly,

"I have been terribly lonely—without Nannie.''

"I thought you were absorbed in business cares,'' she told him drolly. "How do you like business, Blair, really?''

"Loathe it,'' he said succinctly. "Elizabeth, come and take dinner with us to-morrow evening?''

"Oh, Nannie's had enough of me. She's been with me for nearly two months.''

"I haven't been with you for two months. Be a good girl, and do some missionary work. Slumming is the fashion, you know. Come and cheer me up. It's been fiendishly stupid without you.''

She laughed at his sincerely gloomy voice.

"Come,'' he urged; "we'll have dinner in the back parlor. Do you remember that awful dinner-party?'' He laughed as he spoke, but—being 'sure';—in the darkness of the shabby hack he looked at her intently. . . . Oh, if David were only out of the way!

"Remember it? I should think I did!'' There was no telltale flicker on her smooth cheek; even in the gloom of the carriage he could see that the dark amber of her eyes brimmed over with amusement, and the dimple deepened entrancingly. "How could I forget it? Didn't I wear my first long dress to that dinner- party—oh, and my six-button gloves?''

"I—'' said Blair, and paused. "I remember other things than the gloves and long dress, Elizabeth.'' (Why shouldn't he say as much as that? He was certain of himself, and David was certain of her, so why not speak of what it gave him a rapturous pang to remember?)

But at his words the color whipped into her cheek; her clear brows drew together into a slight frown. "How is your mother, Blair?'' she said coldly. "Oh, very well. Can you imagine Mother anything but well? The heat has nearly killed me, but Mother is iron."

"She's perfectly wonderful!"

"Yes; wonderful woman," he agreed carelessly. "Elizabeth, promise you'll come to-morrow evening?"

"Cherry-pie would think it was horrid in me not to stay with her, when I've been away so long."

"I think it's horrid in you not to stay with me."

She laughed; then sighed. "David is working awfully hard, Blair."

"Darn David!" he retorted, laughing. "So am I, if that's any reason for your giving a man your society."

"You! You couldn't work hard to save your life."

"I could, if I had somebody to work for, as David has."

"You'd better get somebody," she said gaily.

"I don't want any second-bests," he declared.

"Donkey!" Elizabeth said good-naturedly. But she was a little surprised, for whatever else Blair was, he was not stupid—and such talk is always stupid. That it had its root in anything deeper than chaffing never occurred to her. They were at her own door by this time, and Blair, helping her out of the carriage, looked into her face, and his veins ran hot.

The next morning, when he went to see Nannie, he was absorbed and irritable. "Girls are queer," he told her; "they marry all kinds of men. But I'll tell you one thing: David is the last man for a girl like Elizabeth. He is perfectly incapable of understanding her."

That was the first day that he did not assure himself that he "was not in love."



CHAPTER XVII

That autumn, with its heats and brown fogs and sharp frosts, was the happiest time in Sarah Maitland's life—the happiest time, at least, since those brief months of marriage;—Blair was in the Business! "If only his father could see him!" she used to say to herself. Of course, she had moments of disappointment; once or twice moments of anger, even; and once, at any rate, she had a moment of fright. She had summoned her son peremptorily to go with her to watch a certain experiment. Blair appeared, shrinking, bored, absent-minded, nearly an hour later than the time she had set. That put her in a bad humor to start with; but as they were crossing the Yards, her irritation suddenly deepened into dismay: Blair, his lip drooping with disgust at the sights and sounds about him, his hands in his pockets, was lounging along behind her, and she, realizing that he was not at her side, stopped and looked back. He was standing still, looking up, his eyes radiant, his lips parted with delight.

"What is it?" she called. He did not hear her; he stood there, gazing at three white butterflies that were zigzagging into a patch of pale blue sky. How they had come into this black and clamorous spot, why they had left their fields of goldenrod and asters farther down the river, who can say? But here they were, darting up and up, crossing, dipping, dancing in the smoky sunshine that flooded thinly the noisy squalor of the Yards. Blair, looking at them, said, under his breath, in pure delight, "Yes, just like the high notes. A flight of violin notes!"

"Blair!" came the impatient voice; "what's the matter with you?"

"Nothing, nothing."

"I was just going to tell you that a high silicon pig—"

"My dear mother," he interrupted wearily, "there is something else in the world than pig. I saw three butterflies—"

"Butterflies!"

She stood in the cinder pathway in absolute consternation. Was her son a fool? For a moment she was so startled that she was not even angry. "Come on," she said soberly; and they went into the Works in silence.

That evening, when he dropped into supper, she watched him closely, and by and by her face lightened a little. Of course, to stop and gape up into the air was silly; but certainly he was talking intelligently enough now,—though it was only to Elizabeth Ferguson, who happened to be taking supper with them. Yes, he did not look like a fool. "He has brains," she said to herself, frowning, "but why doesn't he use 'em?" She sighed, and called out loudly, "Harris! Corn-beef!" But as she hacked off a slab of boiled meat, she wondered why on earth Nannie asked Elizabeth to tea so often, and especially why she asked her on those evenings when Blair happened to be at home. "Elizabeth is such a little blatherskite," she reflected, good- naturedly, "the boy doesn't get a chance to talk to me!" Then it occurred to her that perhaps he came because Elizabeth came? for it was evident that she amused him. Well, Sarah Maitland had no objection. To secure her son for her dingy supper table she was willing to put up with Elizabeth or any other girl. But certainly Nannie invited her very often. "I'll come in to-night, if you'll invite Elizabeth," Blair would bribe her. And Nannie, like Mrs. Maitland herself, would have invited anybody to gain an hour of her brother's company.

Those four weeks had committed Blair Maitland to his first real passion. He was violently in love, and now he acknowledged it. The moment had come when his denials became absurd, even to himself, so he no longer said he did not love her; he merely said he would never let her know he loved her. "If she doesn't know it, I am square with David," he argued. Curiously enough, when he said "David," he always thought of David's mother. He was profoundly unhappy, and yet exhilarated—there is always exhilaration in the aching melancholy of hopeless love; but somewhere, back in his mind, there was probably the habit of hope. He had always had everything he wanted, so why should not fate be kind now?—of course without any questionable step on his part. "I will never tell her," he assured himself; the words stabbed him, but he meant them. He only wished, irrationally enough, that Mrs. Richie might know how agonizingly honorable he was.

Elizabeth herself did not know it; she had not the slightest idea that he was in love with her. There were probably two reasons for an unconsciousness which was certainly rather unusual, for a woman almost always knows. Some tentacles of the soul seem brushed by the brutalities of the material fact, and she knows and retreats—or advances. Elizabeth did not know, and so did not retreat. Perhaps one reason for her naive stupidity was the commonplaceness of her relations with Blair. She had known him all her life, and except for that one childish playing at love, which, if she ever remembered it, seemed to her entirely funny, she had never thought of him in any other way than as "Nannie's brother"; and Nannie was, for all practical purposes, her sister. Another reason was her entire absorption in her own love-affair. Ever since she had learned of the little legacy, the ardent thought had lurked in her mind that it might, somehow, in spite of David's absurd theories about shoestrings, hasten her marriage. "With all this money, why on earth should we wait?" she fretted to Nannie.

"My dear! you couldn't live on the interest of it!"

"I don't know why not," Elizabeth said, wilfully.

"Goose!" Nannie said, much amused. "No; the only thing you could do would be to live on your principal. Why don't you do that?"

Elizabeth looked suddenly thoughtful. When she went home she repeated Nannie's careless words to Miss White, who nibbled doubtfully, and said she never heard of such a thing. But after that, for days, they talked of household economies, and with Cherry-pie's help Elizabeth managed to pare down those estimates which had so diverted her uncle and Mrs. Richie. With such practical preoccupations no wonder she was unconscious of the change in Blair. Suddenly, like a stone flung through the darkness at a comfortably lighted domestic window, she saw, with a crash of fright, a new and unknown Blair, a man who was a complete and dreadful stranger.

It was dusk; she had come in to see Nannie and talk over that illuminating suggestion: why not live on the principal? But Nannie was not at home, so Elizabeth sat down in the firelight in the parlor to wait for her. She sat there, smiling to herself, eager to tell Nannie that she had argued Cherry-pie into admitting that the plan of "living on the principal" was at least feasible; and also that she had sounded her uncle, and believed that if she and David and Cherry-pie attacked him, all together, they could make him consent!—"But of course David will simply have to insist," she thought, a little apprehensively, "for Uncle Robert is so awfully sensible." Then she began to plan just how she must tell David of this brilliant idea, and make him understand that they need not wait; "as soon as he really understands it, he won't listen to any 'prudence' from Uncle!" she said, her eyes crinkling into a laugh. But how should she make him understand? She must admit at once (because he was so silly and practical) that, of course, the interest on her money would not support them. Then she must show him her figures—David was always crazy about figures! Well, she had them; she had brought them with her to show Nannie; they proved conclusively that she and David could live on her capital for at least two years. It would certainly last as long as that, perhaps even for two years and a half! When they had exhausted it, why, then, David's income from his profession would be large enough; large enough even if—she blushed nobly, sitting there alone looking into the fire; "even if!" Thinking this all out, absorbed and joyous, a little jealous because this practical idea had come to Nannie and not to her, she did not hear Blair enter. He stood beside her a moment in silence before she was aware of his presence. Then she looked up with a start, and leaning back in her chair, the firelight in her face, smiled at him: "Where's Nannie?"

"I don't know. Church, I think. But I am glad of it. I would rather—see you alone." His voice trembled.

He had come in, in all the unrest of misery; he had said to himself that he was going to "tell Nannie, anyhow." The impulse to "tell" had become almost a physical necessity, and when he came into the room, the whole unhappy, hopeless business was hot on his lips. The mere unexpectedness of finding her here, alone, was like a touch against that precariously balanced sense of honor, which was his god, and had so far kept him, as he expressed it to himself, "square with David."

To Elizabeth, sitting there in friendly idleness by the fire, the thrill in his voice was like some palpable touch against her breast. Without knowing why, she put her hand up, as if warding something off. She was bewildered; her heart began to beat violently. Instantly, at the sight of the lovely, startled face, the rein broke. He forgot David, he forgot his god, with whom he had been juggling words for the last two months, he forgot everything, except the single, eternal, primitive purpose: there was the woman he wanted. And all his life, if he had wanted anything, he had had it. With a stifled cry, he caught her hand: "Elizabeth—I love you!"

"Stop!" she said, outraged and astounded; "stop this instant!"

"I must speak to you."

"You shall not speak to me!" She was on her feet, trying with trembling fingers to put on her hat.

"Elizabeth, wait!" he panted, "wait; listen—I must speak—" And before she knew it, he had caught her in his arms, and she felt his breath on her mouth. She pushed him from her, gasping almost, and looking at him in anger and horror.

"How dare you?"

"Listen; only one minute!"

"I will not listen one second. Let me out of this room—out of this house!"

"Elizabeth, forgive me! I am mad!"

"You are mad. I will never forgive you. Stand aside. Open the door."

"Elizabeth, I love you! I love you! Won't you listen—?"

But she had gone, flaming with anger and humiliation.

When Nannie came in an hour later, her brother was sitting with his head bowed in his hands. The room was quite dark; the fire had died down. The fire of passion had died down, too, leaving only shame and misery and despair. His eyes, hidden in his bent arms, were wet; he was shaken to the depths of his being. For the first time in his life he had come against a thwarted desire. The education that should have been spread over his whole twenty-five years, an education that would have taught him how to meet the negations of life, of duty, of pity even, burst upon him now in one shattering moment. He had broken his law, his own law; and, mercifully, his law was breaking him. When he rose to his feet as his sister came into the room, he staggered under the shock of such concentrated education.

"Blair! What is it?" she said, catching his arm.

"Nothing. Nothing. I've been a fool. Let me go."

"But tell me! I'm frightened. Blair!"

"It's nothing, I tell you. Nannie! Will she ever look at me again? Oh no, no; she will never forgive me! Why was I such a fool?"

"What are you talking about?" poor Nannie said. It came into her head that he had suddenly gone out of his senses.

Blair sank down again in a heap on his chair.

"I've been a damned fool. I'm in love with Elizabeth, and—and I told her so."



CHAPTER XVIII

Of course, with that scene in the parlor, all the intimacies of youth were broken short off; although between the two girls some sort of relationship was patched up. Nannie, thrown suddenly into the whirlpool of her brother's emotions, was almost beside herself with distress; she was nearly twenty-eight years old, but this was her first contact with the primitive realities of life. With that contact,—which made her turn away her horrified, virginal eyes; was the misery of knowing that Blair was suffering. She was ready to annihilate David, had such a thing been possible, to give her brother what he wanted. As David could not be made non-existent, she did her best to comfort Blair by trying to make Elizabeth forgive him. The very next day she came to plead that Blair might come himself to ask for pardon. Elizabeth would not listen:

"Please don't speak of it."

"But Elizabeth—"

"I am perfectly furious, and I am very disgusted. I never want to see Blair again!"

At which Blair's sister lifted her head.

"Of course, he ought not to have spoken to you, but I think you forget that he loved you long before David did."

"Nonsense!" Elizabeth cried out impatiently.

But Nannie's tears touched her. "Nannie, I can't see him, and I won't; but I'll come and see you when he is not there." At which Nannie flared again.

"If you are angry at my brother, and can't forgive just a momentary, a passing feeling,—which, after all, Elizabeth, is a compliment; at least everybody says it's a compliment to have a man say he loves you—"

"Not if you're engaged to another man!" Elizabeth burst in, scarlet to her temples.

"Blair loved you before David thought of you."

"Now, Nannie, don't be silly."

"If you can't overlook it, because of our old friendship, you will have to drop me, too, Elizabeth."

Nannie was so pitiful and trembling that Elizabeth put her arms around her. "I'll never drop you, dear old Nannie!"

So, as far as the two girls were concerned, the habit of affection persisted; but Mrs. Maitland was not annoyed by having Elizabeth present when Blair came to supper.

Blair did not come to supper very often now; he did not come to the Works. "Is your brother sick?" Sarah Maitland asked her stepdaughter three or four days later. "He hasn't been at his desk since Monday. What's the matter with him?"

"He is worried about something, Mamma."

"Worried? What on earth has he got to worry him?" she grunted. In her own worry she had come across the hall to speak to Nannie, and find out, if she could, something about Blair. As she turned to go back to the dining-room, a little more uneasy than when she came in, her eye fell on that picture which Blair had left, a small oasis in the desert of Nannie's parlor, and with her hand on the door-knob she paused to look at it. The sun was lying on the dark oblong, and in those illuminated depths maternity was glowing like a jewel. Sarah Maitland saw no art, but she saw divine things. She bent forward and looked deep into the picture; suddenly her eyes smiled until her whole face softened. "Why, look at his little foot," she said, under her breath; "she's holding it in her hand!" She was silent for a moment; then she spoke as if to herself: "When Blair was as big as that, I bought him a pair of green morocco slippers. I don't suppose you remember them, Nannie? They buttoned round the ankle; they had white china buttons. He used to try to pick the buttons off." She smiled again vaguely; then blinked as if awakening from a dream, and blew a long bubbling sigh through her closed lips; "I can't imagine why he doesn't come to the office!"

In the dining-room, as she took up her pen, she frowned. "Debt again?" she asked herself. But when, absorbed and irritable, Blair came into her office at the Works, and sat down at his desk to write endless letters that he tore up as soon as they were written, she did not ask for any explanation. She merely told Robert Ferguson to tell the bookkeeper to make a change in the pay-roll. "I'm going to raise Blair's salary," she said. Money was the only panacea Mrs. Maitland knew anything about.

That next fortnight left its marks on Blair Maitland. People who have always had what they want, have a sort of irrational certainty of continuing to have what they want. It makes them a little unhumanly young. Blair's face, which had been as irresponsible as a young faun's, suddenly showed those scars of thwarted desire which mean age. There was actual agony in his sweet, shallow eyes, and with it the half-resentful astonishment of one who, being unaccustomed to suffering, does not know how to bear it. He grew very silent; he was very pale; in his pain he turned to his sister with an openness of emotion which frightened and shamed her; he had no self-control and no dignity.

"I must see her. I must, I must! Go and ask her to see me for a moment. I've disgusted her"—Nannie blushed; "but I'll make her forgive me." Sometimes he burst out in rages at David: "What does he know about love? What kind of a man is he for Elizabeth? She's a girl now, but if he gets her, God help him when she wakes up, a woman! Not that I mean to try to get her. Understand that. Nothing is farther from my mind than that. She belongs to him; I play fair. I don't pretend to be a saint, but I play fair. I don't cut in, when the man's my friend. No; I just want to see her and ask her to forgive me. That's all. Nannie, for God's sake ask her if she won't see me, just for five minutes!"

He quivered with despair. Twice he went himself to Mr. Ferguson's house. The first time Miss White welcomed him warmly, and scuttled up-stairs saying she would "tell Elizabeth." She came down again, very soberly. "Elizabeth is busy, Blair, and she says she can't see you." The next time he called he was told at the door that "Miss Elizabeth asks to be excused." Then he wrote to her: "All I ask is that you shall see me, so that I can implore you to pardon me."

Elizabeth tore the letter up and threw it into the fire. But she softened a little. "Poor Blair," she said to herself, "but of course I shall never forgive him."

She had not told David what Blair had done. "He would be furious," she thought. "I'll tell him later—when we are married"; at the word, the warm, beautiful wave of young love rose in her heart; "later, when I belong to him, I will tell him everything!" She would tell him everything just as she would give him everything; not that she had much to give him—only herself and her little money. That blessed money, on which he and she could live for two years,—she was going to give him that! For she and Nannie and Cherry-pie had decided that if the money were his, by a gift, then David, who was perfectly crazy and noble about independence, would feel that he and Elizabeth were living on his money, not hers. It was an artless and very feminine distinction, but serious enough to the three women who were all so young—Elizabeth, in fact, being the oldest, and Cherry-pie, at sixty-three, the youngest. And not only had they discovered this way of overcoming David's scruples about a shorter engagement, but Elizabeth had had another inspiration: why not be married on the very day that the money came into her possession? "Oh, splendid!" said Nannie; but she spoke with an effort, remembering Blair. A little timidly, Elizabeth had told her uncle of this wonderful plan about the money. He snorted with amusement at her way of whipping the devil round the stump by a "gift" to David; but after a rather startled moment, although he would not commit himself to a date, he was inclined to think an earlier marriage practicable. We are selfish creatures at best, all of us: Elizabeth's way of being happy herself opened a possibility of happiness for her uncle. "Mrs. Richie can't make David an excuse for saying 'no,' if the boy gets a home of his own," he thought; and added to himself, "of course, when the child's money is used up, I'll help them out." But to his niece he only barked warningly: "Well, let's hear what David has to say; he has some sense."

"Do you think there's much doubt as to what he'll say?" Elizabeth said; and the dimple deepened so entrancingly that Robert Ferguson gave her a meager kiss. After securing this somewhat tentative consent, Elizabeth and Cherry-pie decided that the next thing to do was to "make David write to uncle, and simply insist that the wedding shall be next month!" Her plan was very simple: when David came to Mercer to spend her birthday, he should receive, at the same moment, her money and herself.

That future time of sacramental giving and of complete taking was in her thoughts with tenderness and shame and glory, as it is in the thought of every woman who loves and forgets herself. Yes, he could have her now; but he must take her money! That was the price he had to pay—the taking of her money. That it would be a high price to a man with his peculiarly intense feeling about independence, Elizabeth knew; but he would be willing to pay it! Elizabeth could not doubt that. No price could be too high, he loved her so! She shivered with happiness at the thought of how he loved her; some soft impulse of passion made her lift her round wrist,—that bitten wrist! to her mouth, and kiss it, hard. David had kissed it, many times! Yes; she was his if he would pay the price! She was going to tell him so, and then wait, glowing, and shrinking, and eager, for him to come and "take her."

It was so true, so limpid, this noble flame that burned in her, that she almost forgot Blair's behavior; the only thing she thought of was her plan, and the difficulty of putting it into the cold limits of pen and ink! But with much joyous underlining of important words she did succeed in stating it to him. She told him, not only the practical details, but with a lovely, untrammelled outpouring of her soul which was sacrificial, she told him that she wanted to be his wife. She had no reserves; it was an elemental moment, and the matter of what is called modesty had no place in her ardent purity. It rarely has a place in organic impulses. In connection with death, or birth, or love, modesty is only a rather puerile self-consciousness. So Elizabeth, who had never been self-conscious in her life, told David, with perfect simplicity, that she "wanted to be married." She said she had "worked the money part of it out," and according to her latest estimate of how much, or rather how little, they could live on, it was possible. "You will say, we haven't even as much as this," she wrote, after she had stated what seemed to be the minimum income; then, triumphantly: "we have! the money Uncle is going to give me on my birthday! If we live on it, instead of hoarding it up, it will last at least two years! I've talked to Uncle about it, and I'm pretty sure he will consent; but you'd better write and urge him,—just insist!" Then she approached the really difficult matter of making David agree to live on money that was not his. She admitted that she knew how he felt on such matters. "And you are all wrong," she declared candidly, "wrong, and a goose. But, so long as you do feel so, why, you needn't any longer. For I am going to give the money to you. It is to be yours, not mine. You can't refuse to use the money that is yours, that comes to you as a 'gift'? It will be as much yours as if somebody left it to you in their will, and you can burn it up, if you want to!" And when "business" had been written out, her heart spoke: